Interview: Jeremy Paxman, journalist and broadcaster

Though he’s been accused of being anti-Scottish, even having a rat named after him, Jeremy Paxman wants to bury the hatchet, and says he likes to bait the Scots because we rise to it so easily

‘MIND your own business” says Jeremy Paxman. It is 21 minutes into his interview with The Scotsman and I’ve already provoked The Scowl™. Viewers of Newsnight will be well aware of The Scowl™ and its skilled deployment against obfuscating ministers, cringing clerics and anyone who doesn’t bloody well give him a straight answer right now. The reason for The Scowl™ and a swift demarcation of what is, and what is most certainly not, my business is the question of his salary. I had asked if, as part of the current round of cuts at the BBC, he had been asked to take a pay cut?

We are each sitting on a sofa, separated by a low coffee table in a secluded corner of the Malmaison Hotel in Manchester which is decorated in black with glowing red fabric, like a Singapore bordello. This is rather appropriate as we are here to discuss his new book, Empire: What Ruling The World Did To The British, which does, in fact, give a rather comprehensive account of what the British got up to in such places. But let’s put concubines and the sexual Olympics of Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) behind us and get back to The Scowl™ which Paxman then followed up with The Dig™.

“It has actually already been in the papers months ago. If you had done your research you would know, so you can go and look it up,” which was all uttered with a kind of sneery threat but then softened dramatically with a laugh. It is true that I had spent my time actually reading his 350-page work. So, for instance I could tell you that it was a Glasgow company that invented instant coffee, Camp Coffee, which had a large dose of chicory mixed in, but not, despite my sheaf of printouts, the fact that his salary was trimmed by 20 per cent from £1 million to £800,000. Yes, I looked it up. (Oh, and that covers Newsnight and University Challenge.) And shame on you, dear reader, for being interested, in what is patently not, as Mr Paxman made clear, your business.

Still, at least he is honest and forthright and, surprisingly good fun. In fact, Jeremy Paxman, who is 61, the eldest of four children, and whose father was a naval officer, really doesn’t want you to know anything about him. The newspaper clippings say he has three children with his partner, Elizabeth Ann Clough, a BBC producer. Try getting him to open up on anything beyond work is a war of verbal attrition almost on a par with his 1997 attempts to get Michael Howard to answer a straight question.

On whether or not he has had bouts of depression or been maudlin: “Yes.”

Aha.

“But I don’t want to talk about my private life. I’m very happy to have a private conversation about it. I don’t want to come over all Coriolanus – ‘to show them my unaching scars’ – I just think it is so open to misinterpretation that I should really shut up about it. I don’t have to go down a mine, so I think, ‘Belt up.’

Oh.

“Not you. Me.”

On where he goes fishing in Scotland: “I don’t think I’m going to tell you. I have kept a quite rigorous division between what one does publicly and what one does privately.” He will concede that he has fished “lots of places” in Scotland and that it is “heaven… even with the midges”

Not even who he would most like to interview: “I don’t really want to play this game.”

Oh, go on.

“The problem with that question is I could give you an off- the-top-of-my-head, arbitrary reaction, ‘Gosh it would be interesting to interview the Pope,’ It would be interesting to interview the Pope, but I would not like to interview the Pope exclusive of any other person.” He does, however, point out that he has not yet interviewed presidents Obama or Sarkozy, nor Sarah Palin.

He is, however, rather keen to talk about his new book, which is a spin-off from his new high-profile series soon to be broadcast on BBC One. Empire is a slickly written, pacy hike across the British empire which attempts to explain how our once vast rule over chunks of the Earth created the United Kingdom as it is today. Britain’s willingness to engage in foreign wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan is directly tied to our attitude to empire, as is our generosity in charitable aid. (When I say: “Yes, we punch above our weight.” Paxman says: “I hate that phrase, don’t you?” Leading me to concede it is not, perhaps, the best choice of words when discussing the provision of help and succour.)

In fact, the book explains how after the disaster of the Darien scheme, Scotland benefited from the union ,with Scots becoming “the most effective builders of the British Empire”. Between 1850 and 1939, one-third of colonial governors were said to have been Scots. He also explains how it was Church of Scotland schools in Malawi that educated those who then went on to fight for their freedom. He gives as an example the Reverend John Chilembwe, who appears on banknotes in Malawi as the nation’s first freedom fighter. Paxman writes: “Chilembwe is the only Christian minister I have heard of who not only sanctioned the killing of a man (a local white estate manager, William Jervis Livingstone, in 1915) but then preached his Sunday sermon with his victim’s head displayed on a pole beside him.”

Paxman believes that if it was the British Empire that helped to create the idea of the United Kingdom, it is little wonder that in its absence there is an increasing questioning on the entity’s current role. “I do not find it surprising in the slightest that with the empire gone increasingly the union looks a very different type of promise. I think you can say that the end of empire spawned Alex Salmond to a large degree.”

Will the UK survive? “It would be very funny, if the Pitcairn Island remained part of the United Kingdom and Scotland didn’t, but I don’t know. I think it is a bit of a mug’s game – crystal-ball gazing. I can see arguments that would see either the continuation or dissolution of the union look attractive and so one can kind of guess how the arguments will be made when we get to this fabled referendum so I think but to predict the outcome is just silly, isn’t?”

There is, however, one issue he is keen to get across, which is his strong affection for Scotland: “I love Scotland”. To some this may seem strange given the fact that he: dismissed Robert Burns as “sentimental doggerel”; once complained that Britain lived under a “sort of Scottish Raj”; and that the Scots had a “chip on their shoulder”. The baiting of Scots appears to be a source of pleasure to him.

“The great thing about the Scots is that you are so easy to wind up. I don’t know why, but well, I’m very keen on fishing, and its just like that, every time I say anything there is an eagerness to take offence, it is just like casting a fly over a trout. With absolute certainty, however badly you present the fly, up will come the trout and take it.

“The most egregious example is that I was asked several years ago to write a new introduction to the Chambers Dictionary. There was one sentence, part of one sentence in which I referred to Burns and said that often to me it was ‘doggerel’ or words to that effect. One sentence, or part of one sentence, in an introduction to a dictionary and you and your colleagues are immediately, ‘God hear he goes again.’”

When I tell him that staff at the Burns National Birthplace Museum have now named a digital rat, which appears on a computer display illustrating the poverty of the time, “Jeremy”, he appears to be delighted: “I am really honoured. I am truly honoured to have a rat named after me.”

At the time of “Burns-gate”, Alex Salmond, called him a “gowk”, which means imbecile, but Paxman, who is also the author of The Political Animal, an anatomy of the political character is an ardent admirer of Scotland’s First Minister: “I like Alex, I must say. He is very funny. There was a time when I wrote the book about the English and Penguin had fixed up a debate or a public interview in Edinburgh and it was just a book event and Alex was to be talking at it and I have never known anything like it – I was getting phone calls from Scottish journalists as if it was a Mike Tyson-style heavyweight punch-up and he was completely charming. Very affable, but it is an indication of the same thing to sniff out offence.”

“But you play up to it.”

“Oh, it’s too much fun. But I was not being intentionally insulting. I do think that some of Burns output was doggerel. Now doubtless some people would say, ‘You are returning to the scene of the crime,’ but I don’t care. Some of it is terrific. The sentiment of A Man’s A Man is wonderful, but he has produced doggerel as well as some rather affecting verse.”

The fact that Paxman has “form” means that he has, at times, been “convicted” of a crime he did not commit, such as when he referred to Dr John Reid, the former health secretary, as an “attack dog’.

“Yes,” he says, “but I was talking about his deployment by the Labour Party, to defend policy.”

“He thought you were referring to him barking in Glaswegian.”

“Yes. Then his special adviser, I think, called me a ‘west-London wanker’. It was a good bit of name-calling that.”

Yet since Paxman appeared on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? and wept over the fate of his grandmother, who was from the east end of Glasgow and rejected for poor relief, he has been seen in a different light by the public. Last weekend, when he was in Manchester for the Conservative Party conference, he was approached by a burly Scot. “A real, solidly built Glaswegian came up to me and I thought this bloke was going to hit me. He just went, ‘East End boy’ in broad Glaswegian accent. I was really thrilled.”

• Empire: What Ruling The World Did To The British by Jeremy Paxman is published by Viking, priced £25.