Paxman - The Political Animal

An Anatomy

JEREMY PAXMAN

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First published by Michael Joseph 2002

Published in Penguin Books 2003

This edition published 2007

Copyright Jeremy Paxman, 2002

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford, for permission to quote from the letters of Clement Attlee, and to Secker & Warburg for extracts from Lucille Iremongers The Fiery Chariot.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Any error or omission will be made good in subsequent editions.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193750-2

Pour encourager les autres

Imagine the scene. A school speech day. In the hall, row after row of school blazers, their occupants caught in a maelstrom of hope and hormones, acne and apprehension. Behind them, their parents, aunts, uncles and a few bored younger brothers and sisters. On the stage, the headmaster and the chairman of the governors listen approvingly as the visiting speaker, one of the biggest names in British politics, reaches the climax of his address.

Sad to think, he says, that in the days of Winston Churchill and Theodore [sic] Roosevelt, people didnt consider service was a dirty word. And loving your country was taken for granted. The man speaks with passion; he loves this sort of audience. He tears off his frameless glasses and peers down into the ranks of teenagers. I hope, he roars at them, I see in this audience a future Prime Minister. I hope I see future cabinet ministers. I hope in this audience I see young people who will stand up and say I want to serve my country and not have others around them sniggering and laughing because they dont understand service and they dont love their country.

It has the feel of a performance which has been given many times before, with overdramatic pauses and studied rhetorical flourishes: he is a rotten actor. This is ironic, since his whole life has been an act, based on a script he has written himself, which has given him a seat in the House of Commons, considerable wealth, deputy chairmanship of one of the biggest parties in British politics, a place in the House of Lords and the endorsement of his current party leader, who describes him as a figure of probity and integrity. This audience, like most of those he addresses, long ago suspended any disbelief. He has another trope. I get five or six calls a day asking me to go on television. You know what I do? I say no to all of them. Why should I go on television to be beaten up by some ill-mannered lout whos never given any public service? Do you know what I say, ladies and gentlemen? and here he stabs the air with his finger I say when that interviewer stands for office, when he gives some public service, then Ill interview him.

He pauses, waiting for the applause. It always comes. His stage irritation seems to reflect a real frustration that those in what he calls public service (he means politicians, rather than nurses, teachers or people who raise money to relieve world poverty) are denied the respect they deserve, sneered at, laughed at, or unkindest of all ignored by the British people, who seem at best indifferent to the charms or importance of politics. The louts in the television studios have all the fun and none of the responsibility. Fewer and fewer people bother even to vote.

The speaker seems genuinely to care about the state of public life in Britain. I care too. In an ideal world, of course, we wouldnt have any politicians at all. As Tom Paine remarked in the eighteenth century, Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil. Politicians exist because we disagree. All societies need to decide how to protect themselves, how to organize themselves, how to share out their resources and the alternative to force of argument is force of fists. The creation of politics is, therefore, a proof of civilization. So, although the existence of politics may be a mark of human frailty, politics itself matters. And it matters that politics is practised by good people. As in most walks of life, people go into the trade with a variety of motives, some noble, some vain. Most seem to be genuinely convinced they can make the world a better place. Some of them have done so. A small number genuinely deserve to be called great. I do not believe they are all scoundrels.

I set out in this book to answer a number of simple questions. Where do these politicians come from? Why do they do it? Why do we seem to be so disenchanted with them? And why does the experience of politics nearly always end in disillusion? This book is not really the story of the achievements of Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries they write their own memoirs, some of which I have drawn upon. Nor is it about local politics, which has become a sorry shadow of its former self. It is about the experience of politics on the biggest stage available to the ambitious young man or woman, in the Houses of Parliament. It is about how the actors in this theatre get where they want to be and about what the experience does to them. Perhaps, if we can answer these questions, we can begin to understand why the rest of us feel as we do about them.

By the time I had finished the manuscript of this book, the speech-day orator had embarked on the latest chapter of his career of public service. Jeffrey Archer was serving four years in prison for perjury.

My first encounter with one of this curious tribe came at school. I must have been about seventeen when the local MP was invited to speak to the sixth form. More likely, he invited himself: politicians like to speak to local schools because they know that todays sixth-formers are tomorrows voters.

I thought he was mad. Not in a foaming-at-the-mouth, baying-at-the-moon way, of course. Just very, very peculiar. He wore a loud suit in a Prince of Wales check, a blue shirt with a white collar, and a carnation in his buttonhole. He may even have had a bow tie as well. This was no more than you might expect to find draped around one of the flashier bookies at Epsom racecourse. But what stood out, what positively shrieked look at me!, was his moustache. This vast expanse of hair (he was bald on the top of his head) spread out from his upper lip and across his cheeks like two bushes from