INTERVIEW:Fresh from writing a book on the impact ruling the British Empire had on the British, broadcaster Jeremy Paxman is both intrigued and worried by questions of national identity, he tells MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
SITTING IN A restaurant eating fish and chips, away from the high security surrounding the Conservative party’s conference in Manchester, Jeremy Paxman is slightly weary. He does not like conferences. “Conference season is not my ideal world. I always feel rather like the one non-believer at a gathering of Moonies. They are almost always really kind and civil, so it is not a personal animus or anything like that.
“I just feel slightly awkward, but then I have always felt awkward. I have never felt that I belonged anywhere,” says the Newsnight presenter, staring, as he says it, into the middle-distance. A long, but not uncomfortable silence follows.
For Paxman, the shadows cast by history on Britain are long, and often dark: “You walk into tomorrow from yesterday. I merely think that we should know what happened yesterday because it has made so much of today.” His latest book, Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British, is the latest in a series of works where he has probed the history of the British and, most particularly, the English, often seeming to decry the Britain of today compared with its imperial past.
For most in Britain, the country’s imperial past is largely ignored, bar a passing knowledge of slavery’s abolition: “What irritated me is that people just don’t think that this is a subject worth discussing any more; that it was unashamedly bad.
“There were many bad things, yes, there were. Of course there were. And there were some things that were done that were rather noble, but to pretend that you can somehow pass judgment on the whole thing as being unalloyed good, or bad and that, therefore, there is no need to think about it is what irritated me in the first place.
“Once you begin to know, you begin to understand, don’t you? I suppose we might be less baffled about our relationship with Europe if we understood more about the past of our relations with Europe.”
Like most journalists, the 61-year-old is a difficult interviewee. “Christ, do you want me to go on and on, and on?” he says, with a sigh, “What are the consequences of not grappling with it? I think that there is a readiness just to be embarrassed about it. And I don’t think embarrassment is really a terribly helpful emotion: a clear-eyed confronting of what was done by our country in the name of its citizens of the time would, I think, start to make us think about those things that are done in our name now, and why they are done in our time now.”
Although Newsnight is an intensely political programme, Paxman seems somewhat jaded of the entire business, particularly in today’s ultra-controlled environment, where politicians resolutely stay on message.
“I didn’t do any British politics until I was well into my 30s after I had done quite a lot of foreign reporting and so I think I tended to look at British politics slightly differently. When I first started covering it, and I wouldn’t say that it was my main interest in life even now; it was still dominated by people who had done something else, who had done something in the war.
“People like Denis Healey, or Peter Carrington. Substantial figures, who knew something about the human condition, because they had slept by their tanks during the war with blokes from all sorts of backgrounds.
“They were a very, very different breed to what we get now, who are essentially required to strike an attitude at 21, or 22 and never deviate from it and then they’ll get a try-out at an unwinnable seat and so it goes.”
Paid to question, Paxman, who has presented Newsnight since 1989, listens well to the ones put to him, enthusiastically offering declarations of, “Oh, I see”, or “That’s interesting” to the ones that strike home, but leaving the impression that others have not quite got to the core of the matter.
Asked if the succession of worldly-wise military veterans by youthful apparatchiks matters, he stops. Silence reigns, while he tucks into some Icelandic cod – he checked when he ordered – before he replies: “Does it? Well, I don’t know.
“Are we any worse off? Britain is essentially a very law-abiding country compared to many of our so-called partners in Europe and it is basically an honest country, but perhaps we have an exaggerated regard for the law and an exaggerated disregard for government.
“That is why you don’t call elections lightly in this country. People don’t like being expected to do something with these damn politicians. We are quite a political country but, on the whole,” he pauses again, “we make of it a ridiculous business.
“We say to them, ‘Make us an unrealisable promise.’ So they offer an unrealisable promise and when it turns out to be unrealisable,” and here, he indulges in the Paxmanesque drawl loved, or hated by viewers, “we say, ‘Well, you can go away, so we’ll give somebody else a go.’
“This is the basic idiocy in democracy everywhere, but in this country – I can’t prove this, it is an intuitive feeling – the less government that is in our lives, the better. You could say that that is a very Tory position, but I don’t think it is. I think it is common to all parties.
“The Labour Party, obviously, has a greater belief in government, the Lib Dems have a greater belief in European government, but I think the preoccupation on the whole to just leave us alone is quite a strong feeling,” he says, before returning to his plate.
The relationship leaves politicians in a bind: “George Osborne [in his speech to the conference] tried to get the word ‘optimistic’ into his speech. He crowbarred it in, but that’s what these guys are good at: offering a sense of hope that there will be a better tomorrow, there can be a better tomorrow,” he says, meandering once more into silence.
“I merely think that we should know what happened yesterday because it has made so much of today. Having an ambition for tomorrow is what makes us believe in politics, politicians and whatever formula they are trying to pitch to us at the time.”
He returns frequently to the influence of history on today: “I am very intrigued by this question of national identity and slightly troubled by it and that is the connecting theme between all of the books.”
Asked if it is possible to live without harm in an ahistorical society, unconcerned with, or uninterested in the past, Paxman stops, incredulous that the concept could even be imagined. “Only a fool would do so,” he declares, sounding just for a moment like his television image.
“Can you imagine an ahistorical Ireland? What little I as an outsider knows of how Ireland functions, I can’t imagine how it would work,” he goes on, diverting down a detour about the influence of American TV on children, before returning to the subject.
“Maybe I am wrong about this, maybe the ahistorical thing is interesting, because one of the things that made the war, the conflict in Northern Ireland unsustainable was, I think, young people increasingly wanted to lead the sort of lives that they saw young people leading elsewhere, particularly elsewhere in Europe, so these ancient, ancestral conflicts were something that they didn’t want to be part of.
“Is that ahistorical? I suppose it is. Perhaps, therefore, it is a good thing,” says Paxman, a veteran of some of the worst days of The Troubles from his days as a young reporter in Belfast, following an earlier stint with local radio in Brighton.
“Is that ahistorical?” he stops again, “I am just thinking aloud . . . No, no, it doesn’t really wash. I mean why are the Germans behaving as they are behaving over the Euro crisis? I don’t think you can understand that unless you understand a little of the history of Germany with the rest of Europe. Why was the European Union formed in the first place? I don’t think that you can understand that without understanding Franco-German anxieties.
“It is good to have hope, but I am not sure that it is at all helpful in the hoping business to pretend that history didn’t happen. It has profound consequences on us now, however long ago,” he says, sighing in a way that is deeply sad.
Unlike many in the British media, Paxman is interested, to a degree, at least, in Ireland, though he is a little affronted by an inference that the British role in Ireland is not more heavily covered in the book: “There’s lots of stuff in that book about Ireland, there’s loads of stuff on Ireland,” he says, his voice rising mock-theatrically. The waitress nearby raises her head, intrigued.
Seizing on a fluffed question about Ireland being England’s first colony, he goes on: “Well, I think the Welsh would have a view on that. Ha, ha, or, indeed, the French. I am sorry you feel that. In fact, I specifically say, didn’t I, that it was the first overseas colony?
“I know that this is not the way that the British government has prevented the conflict, The Troubles, or whatever we are going to call it, but it strikes me as being an imperial issue and I don’t really understand how it can be seen as anything other than that.”
In the opening page of Empire, Paxman describes the Troubles as “a war”: “As far as I could see when I was there, and I accept that this is not the view in 2011, most people in the South at the time tried to pretend that it wasn’t happening.”
The questions prompt a memory of covering a Sinn Féin-organised march on the British Embassy during the 1981 hunger-strikes: “Somewhere down by, down by, what’s it called, oh, yes, the RDS, somewhere down there the gardaí decided that they would stop it. There were a lot of women and children at the front and behind them there were a lot of hard-men who had come down from West Belfast with lorries and all sorts of things. And the guards had got this line across the road and I thought, This is going to get a bit nasty.
“So I knocked on someone’s door and said, ‘Can I come in and watch what happens?’ I went upstairs and watched out the window. The guards put up with it for a bit,” he goes on, telling of the first attempts to bring flowers to the embassy’s gates.
“Then, there came this pressure from behind as more and more protesters came and the peaceful demonstrators were soon thrust out of the way and then the rocks started coming. I was watching as people were tearing down the garden wall of this house for use as missiles.
“The guards took these missiles raining down on them for a little while and then clambered over the barriers and started cracking a few skulls. And I heard – it was not that far away – this guard as he truncheoned this guy, saying, ‘Go back home and don’t come down here again’, as he went, bam, bam, bam. That seemed to me to be a not uncommon reaction in the South.”
Once a quibble over the use of the word “partitionist” is put out of the way, Paxman accepts the existence of the concept in the Republic before continuing: “I was aware of it earlier, because one used to escape from Belfast to go down south for rugby matches, or just to have a bit of what seemed to be an amazingly cosmopolitan city compared with Belfast.
“The perspective that I had was that here was a sovereign state which saw this violence, this tension, this confusion – this festering issue in a place dominated by tribes who considered themselves to be utterly different – as being foreign,” he adds.
Like other British figures, Paxman is surprised to hear that Martin McGuinness’s presidential campaign is attracting such vehement opposition in some quarters in the Republic: “It is clearly better that people are not killing each other.” But is it not more significant than that? “Well, every event in history is to some degree sui generis, isn’t it? I don’t find it surprising that someone who once fought physically against an imperial power is now a politician.
“It has happened all over the place, so I don’t find it that astonishing, but it is interesting . . . As I say, it is better that people are not being killed. Given the history of Ireland and the history of Irish politics I think I can understand where [McGuinness’s opponents] are coming from.
“I find it to be a very strange position of having to defend Martin McGuinness. He can defend himself, but his whole life’s campaign has been to establish, or re-establish, as he would see it, a political integrity which ignores the Border.”
The conversation turns to Queen Elizabeth II’s visit to Ireland in May, one that still leaves the British terribly pleased that it went well, but slightly bemused by the warmth of the welcome afforded to her by the Irish. “I rest my case about historical ignorance, I think,” he pauses, “You and I understand why it was charged. Dublin Castle is a place that was freighted with a very difficult history, but most people in this country are . . . ” he says, but here the sentence trails off.
“It was very heavily covered in this country. There were lots of live events and attempts to explain with varying degrees of plausibility why things mattered, but the British I think were slightly baffled by it. They’re pleased, as you say, but slightly baffled.”
The focus on the lack of understanding among the British about their own history, bar an obsession, it seems often, with the Battle of Britain, provokes an almost child-like response from Paxman, who becomes lyrical for a moment about the Spitfire.
“A fantastic sound. There is nothing like the sound. To me, the sound of a Spitfire is the sound of freedom; I am rather romantic about that. The Battle of Britain does loom reasonably large in our lives but that is because of the way that we remember history as a succession of damned close-run things; scrapes which we somehow, rather surprisingly, survived [in the face of] a threatening greater force.
“So does it bulk large in our lives? I think 1940 is present in people’s memory, but it diminishes each year as it gets further and further away. What will replace it I don’t know, but I think the prism through which we see things does condition how we look at the overweening ambitions of the European Union, for example.
“That will be seen differently in Ireland where it is seen as an institution giving comfort and succour and an alternative identity to that which was previously available in an imperial or post-imperial context. I understand that.
“But the fact that we think of the Battle of Britain, Dunkirk, the Spanish Armada, these sorts of events . . . ,” he pauses again, “The ambitions of Europe have been nothing but trouble for Britain and I don’t find it surprising therefore that Eurocrats tend to be regarded with a healthy dose of scepticism.”
By now, the clock is ticking, leading Paxman to wonder if he has time to pop into the Manchester Art Gallery for the Ford Madox Ford exhibition before going back to join Newsnight’s production crew as they get the remainder of the programme together.
One interview has already been done, with Mayor of London, Boris Johnson – an interview, as it turned out, that led to Paxman sustaining subsequent heavy abuse. The pair giggled their way through much of it, with Johnson performing his usual pantomime routine.
Paxman cannot help but like Johnson, it seems: “We are going through a slightly uncolourful period. He’s a colourful figure, very funny. He’s a rarity. Would that there were more like him? TV is all about impressions.
“So much of it is, ‘What do I think about this person?’ There are damn all facts in this interview with Boris. He had one fact that he had been told by his staff that he had to get across, which had something to do, if I remember, with police numbers.
“Anyway, periodically, he would default to this fact like a drowning man clutching to a plank and recite it and having got it off his chest he would go on to do what he was really interested in. The public are not particularly interested in the fact.
“What they are interested in is, what is this bloke like? Is he funny? Does he make me feel happy? Would I trust him? Those are the questions. TV is an impressionistic medium,” says Paxman. Outside on the street, he ponders Ford Madox Ford once more, before deciding: “Oh, hell, why not?”
Empire: What Ruling The World Did To The Britishby Jeremy Paxman is published by Penguin Viking, £25
