Why are people so angry?
What are the roots of
our present fury?
The Cafe 2
John MacLeod on sectarianism
Conversations
in a
small town
Rear Window
6 May 1999
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A Grangemouth wedding (1)
This week’s banner
Reflections on the Clyde of the Squinty Bridge (the Clyde Arc)
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How can Andrew Marr
ever be taken
seriously again?
Kenneth Roy
Last weekend I thought about Andrew Marr quite a lot. This was unusual. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that, as a matter of routine policy, I try to avoid thinking about Andrew Marr at all. But he seemed to be inescapable on a visit to East Lothian.
In the lounge of the Marine Hotel, North Berwick, a man with an excellent view of the sea preferred to read Mr Marr’s history of modern Britain. After a few minutes, he got up and walked through to the bar, the book under his arm, prompting the speculation that Mr Marr is an author best approached with drink taken. I thought about him again as I passed his old boarding school, Loretto, on the outskirts of Musselburgh. I thought about him a third time on Sunday morning as I watched the silent images of an interview he was doing with the actor Hugh Laurie – silent because I had turned the volume off.
What I thought about him on the third occasion is easily transcribed. I thought exactly this: ‘A BBC journalist is interviewing an actor about nothing very much. It could just as well be the other way round. The actor might just as well be interviewing the BBC journalist about nothing very much. Both are celebrities. Between the two, there is essentially no difference’.
And now, two days later, I am thinking about Andrew Marr yet again. It seems that, not long ago, Private Eye informed Mr Marr that it intended to challenge an injunction he was awarded by the High Court in London in January 2008 to prevent details of his private life – a relationship with a fellow journalist – being published. It seems that, since that would have involved him in further legal action, he decided not to pursue the gagging order further. At that point the Daily Mail – against whom the injunction had been granted in the first place – contacted Mr Marr and he went public.
In an interview with the paper, Mr Marr says that injunctions of the kind he was granted have lost what he calls ‘a sense of proportion’ and that he did not ‘come into journalism to go around gagging journalists’. Both these statements are worth pausing over. If he did not enter journalism with the idea that he would one day seek to gag other journalists, why then did he seek to gag them and why did he go on gagging them for three years and four months? There is such an illogicality here that, if Mr Marr were being interviewed about it on some BBC current affairs programme – say, the Andrew Marr show – he could expect to be severely challenged about his apparent inconsistency. In a politician, the breed commonly interrogated by Mr Marr, the practice of saying one thing while doing another would invite journalistic ridicule.
‘One of the things I’ve learned,’ he told the Independent in the 2008 interview, ‘is that if you try to be a different person on TV than you are
in real life, the viewer knows there’s something not right’.
The earlier statement is equally remarkable. Mr Marr’s position appears to be that injunctions to such celebrities as actors and footballers are out of control. ‘Injuncting the entire universe seems to be going a bit far’, he told the Daily Mail – a reference to last week’s preposterous case in which a judge issued a gagging order applicable in theory anywhere in the world. Was this the turning point for Andrew Marr? Is it all right to injunct the entire country, but a bit off to injunct the entire universe? Had the entire universe not been injuncted, would he have gone on injuncting the entire country? Is it all right for Andrew Marr to injunct people, but not all right for others?
Let us be clear what breaking such an injunction may mean for a journalist. It may mean imprisonment. Had someone at any point in the last three years four months been brave enough to disobey the injunction granted to Andrew Marr, he or she would have risked going to jail. It is unlikely that Mr Marr was unaware of this as a very strong bet; Loretto boys live next door to Musselburgh racecourse, after all. Yet he went ahead anyway. Who did he think he was?
The answer becomes clear in an interview he gave to the newspaper he once edited, the Independent, in July 2008, where it is stated that ‘Marr counts himself a celeb these days’. Yet, in the same interview, the same Andrew Marr is found bemoaning the state of his profession – which he describes as ‘old-fashioned, meticulous, digging journalism’ – and deploring ‘the huge numbers of stories about the extent to which Gordon Brown is depressed, gloomy, not sleeping’. It was an interview exploring that hazardous territory, Moral High Ground, and declaring Mr Marr to be its ambassador.
The timing of the interview is, however, damaging on two counts. We now know that his self-proclaimed ‘mission to save serious journalism’ was published six months to the day after he was granted his High Court injunction – the existence of which, a piece of serious journalism in its own right, could not be published without the risk of imprisonment. And then, barely 14 months later, he conducted an interview with Gordon Brown on the eve of the 2009 Labour Party conference in which he suggested that the then prime minister was taking something to get him through the day. I have never forgotten the look of distaste on Mr Brown’s face. He replied to the effect that such questions had no place in serious journalism. But a doubt had been implanted in the public’s view of Gordon Brown. It is possible that his reputation never fully recovered.
The issue now is not Mr Brown’s reputation, but Mr Marr’s. ‘One of the things I’ve learned,’ he told the Independent in the 2008 interview, ‘is that if you try to be a different person on TV than you are in real life, the viewer knows there’s something not right’. Like many of his utterances about the threat to serious journalism and the nature of celebrity, this one has returned to bite him. Many will now be studying his book on the history of modern Britain for his views on the notorious secrecy of British society. Many will now be re-visiting editions of his programme to see how the issue of injunctions has been treated. The BBC will go on defending its man, but it is hard to see how he can ever be taken seriously again.
