Marr: Pay comment 'stupid'

At the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, he amused an audience who asked whether journalists were overpaid by telling them that he probably was. He then went on to say that he had never quite understood "why reading an autocue, however adeptly, earns you quite as much money".

But in today's interview he told Raymond Snoddy: "I have a natural tendency to burble on at length. I am a show-off. Everybody in television is a show-off and I like people to respond to pirouetting sentences. It was a stupid thing to say."

However, he says he has no regrets about making comments that MPs should learn to speak "fluent human", criticising their inability to speak "crisply, clearly, vividly".