Allan Massie: Johnson interview overstepped the mark

BORIS Johnson, mayor of London, would like to be prime minister. I don’t think there’s any doubt of that.

So would lots of other people, of course, and some of them have a better chance than Boris. Perhaps it’s more interesting to ask if BBC interviewer Eddie Mair who savaged Boris on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday was making a bid to take over that programme himself, re-billing it the Eddie Mair Show, or perhaps to supplant Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. If either of these is his ambition, he may be closer to achieving it than Boris is to getting the keys of No10 Downing Street.

Stanley Johnson, Boris’s father and a former MEP himself, has taken to the columns of the Sun to defend his boy and has called Mair’s interview a disgraceful piece of journalism. Does Dad’s appearance in these columns mean that Rupert Murdoch is backing Boris for PM? Perhaps, perhaps not. It may just be the Sun stirring things up in its best style. Or having a go at the BBC. Par for the course, really. Boris himself has, sensibly, taken a relaxed view of it all – in public anyway. But his response has been on the lines of good robust interview, took me by surprise, thought I was there to speak about London housing; still, journalists should have a go at politicians, we’re fair game – that sort of thing. This is called “damage limitation”.

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The charges of bad behaviour Mair directed at Johnson had been aired before. Fabricating a quote when he was a young journalist on the Times, an action which lost him his job; allegedly lying to then Tory leader Michael Howard, when asked if he was having an affair with journalist Petronella Wyatt, Boris being a junior shadow minister and Howard afraid that another Tory sex scandal might be about to get headlines; and, the most unpleasant of them, apparently promising to give university friend, fraudster Darius Guppy, the address of a journalist Guppy wanted to beat up. If any promise was made, Boris never fulfilled it – which, as more than one of his old journalist colleagues have told me, is characteristic of Boris’s way with promises.

In the first two cases, Boris’s behaviour might be judged to have been self-serving, though he might quite reasonably claim that in allegedly lying to Howard, he was also protecting Ms Wyatt’s honour and reputation. One might also wonder whether Howard was right to put the question.

Be that as it may, the accusations Mair dredged up may be thought to show Boris behaving badly. This was fair journalism, even though the interview would have been much more damning if the charges had been more recent instead of going back 22 years in two of the cases, and eight or nine in the other, and if they hadn’t already been well-publicised. Indeed, they may all be considered to be past their sell-by date. Alastair Darling was, if I remember rightly, a Trotskyite in his youth, but few would hold that error of judgment against him now.

Mair, however, went further. He asked Johnson if he wasn’t really a rather “nasty piece of work”. Now you may think this is the case, but it was an extraordinary question for a reputable interviewer to put to a politician, let alone one who has twice won a popular election as mayor of London. Would Mair have asked this question of Johnson’s predecessor, Ken Livingstone? I have my doubts. Yet, there are many who have just that opinion of Livingstone.

That wasn’t all. Mair then said, “even your friend, Conrad Black, a convicted fraudster, even he says he doesn’t trust you completely”. (Black was the proprietor of the Spectator when Johnson edited it, also of the Daily Telegraph, for which Johnson has long written a column.) This wasn’t a question, merely a statement by the interviewer. Fair enough? Perhaps not; it wouldn’t be difficult to find someone ready to express distrust of any politician to whom he or she had once been close. I daresay you might even – shock! horror! – happen upon one or two disillusioned members of the SNP who don’t completely trust Alex Salmond.

People may be happy to see politicians put in the pillory. Even members of the League Against Cruel Sports may enjoy the sight. But there are limits and there are ethics, and I think Mair overstepped the former and ignored the latter. I, myself, have no high opinion of Boris Johnson, but how is anyone expected to respond to the charge that he is a rather nasty piece of work? If you deny it, you sound either defensive or complacent. If you let it pass, people think you have no answer.

Is this to be the way BBC interviews are to be conducted? Will it be thought fine for a journalist to make the same sort of observation – because it wasn’t really a question – in conversation with a female politician, to suggest to, say, Theresa May, Yvette Cooper or Nicola Sturgeon that she is “a nasty piece of work”? I rather think there would be squawks of indignation, and it would be no good for the journalist to say he was only expressing his opinion, even if he added that his opinion was supported by evidence culled from long-ago misdemeanours.

Very few people would like to see a return to the days when politicians were treated with deference, when a journalist might ask a minister if he had anything to say on a question and be satisfied if the answer was “not today, thank you”. We expect, and like, to see politicians put on the spot, and you may think it fair that one who is such a glutton for publicity as Boris Johnson should be given a particularly hard time, even though nothing that Mair brought up against him related to his work as mayor. Nobody is going to form a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Politicians. Yet sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and all that. If Mair-style interviews are to be the way of the future, it’s surely open house on anyone.

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There is another thing. Politicians are not held in high esteem. (Nor, of course, are journalists.) But regarding them with contempt and insulting them openly is not good for democracy. Democracy is like civil society. For it to function requires a degree of restraint, even of hypocrisy; good manners, certainly.

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