Who is Andrew Marr kidding? We all know exactly what he thinks already

The  news that Andrew Marr is itching to free himself from the restraints of the BBC’s code of impartiality induces a wry smile; it might fairly be asked ‘who do you think you are kidding Andy?’  because while Mr Marr strives hard to stay neutral in his interviews  it has always been clear exactly where his sympathies lie. Andrew Marr was, is, and always will be a man-of-the-left. And like so many of his BBC colleagues the effort of maintaining the veneer of  even-handedness is proving burdensome.

Marr now joins a long list of senior and famous BBC journalists who have allowed themselves to open-up about  impartiality at the BBC. Think of John Humphrys, who on retirement from his perch as the senior presenter of the Today Programme,  acknowledged that the BBC, overall has a bias to the liberal-left; think of Jeremy Paxman, ex-Newsnight presenter, who said much the same. And now Andrew Marr has ventured into the same territory at a literary festival in Glasgow.  

Admittedly he takes a different line from Humphrys and Paxman – who both found the political correctness the BBC imposes on its output increasingly irksome as they  got older; quizzed about his political views Marr  went all coy ‘ I cannot tell you now because I would lose my job’ he said  - but it hardly takes  an investigator of Sherlock Holmes’ acuity to  figure out what those views really are. All you need to do is to look back over the known facts about his career to form the clearest of impressions.

At Cambridge University in the 1970s, he belonged to one of those  groupuscules so beloved  of the far-left ‘The Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory’  and was known as  ‘Red Andy’; he spent his leasure time fomenting revolution by distributing copies of Mao Tse-tung’s ‘Little Red Book’ . Leaving university he went into journalism first at the Scotsman, then as the political editor of  The Independent and finally that newspaper’s editor in 1996.  Throughout that time  the tone of his journalism was always consistent; he was antagonistic to the Tory Party,  sympathetic to the left generally and particularly  hostile to ‘Thatcherism’; his student days might have been long behind him but  those early revolutionary enthusiasms left their mark.

It was no great surprise when, in 2000, the BBC  decided that with this journalistic pedigree Marr was just the man to get what is probably still the most important job in British journalism – that of political editor at the BBC. But it caused some raised eyebrows at the time because there had been  an informal convention at the Corporation that when the country had a Labour government it was more seemly to have a journalist from the right take on the role and vice a versa when the Tories were in power. This makes sense from the BBC’s point of view because it allays  the suspicions of the Opposition . But in 2000  Blair was in his pomp and here was the BBC choosing a man whose sympathies clearly lay with the incumbent government.

I once had a conversation with the great Guardian political columnist Hugo Young just after Marr was appointed to the role; he wanted to know what journalists inside the Corporation made of this appointment (I was a BBC reporter at the time). I told him the view, insofar as I knew it, was that he was a good fit because his views were aligned so completely with the BBC’s own political culture. But Young, as scrupulous a journalist as one was ever likely to meet, felt it was unwise of the BBC to choose Marr. He acknowledged that Marr was a very good journalist who was perfectly suited to the role of political editor – just, maybe, not at that precise moment.

And one thing that must, in fairness, be said of Marr is that  he is a very clever, very well-informed journalist with a clear and elegant writing style and a courteous and penetrating interviewing technique. But now he has intimated that conforming to the BBC doctrine of impartiality is beginning to chafe and that he is yearning to be able to express himself more freely about political issues of the day. This will be a relief to us all as it will save us all the bother of having to parse his performances to divine his underlying political beliefs; not that this has been difficult.

For instance his many interviews, over the years, on the subject of Brexit could never have left anyone in any doubt whatsoever that here was a man who feels leaving the EU was – in that so-overused phrase – ‘an act of national self-harm’. Nor was there any doubt in my mind that Mr Marr was opposed to Donald Trump and all that he stood for and had no sympathy whatsoever with the insurgent proles  who put him in power. Mr Marr is clearly averse to anything in politics which smacks of ‘populism’; there is a pungent snobbery about the politics of the patrician left to which Mr Marr so clearly belongs.

A final point; the BBC’s journalism is founded on the creed of impartiality. According to that belief system the BBC will always maintain a perfect even-handed stance when reporting contentious issues. In theory this is a wonderful boon to the country and its politics but is is one that in recent years the Corporation has consistently, and disastrously,  failed to  deliver. And the reason it has failed to live up to the creed is because the overwhelming majority of BBC journalists and programme makers privately ‘dress left’ in their politics. Inevitably this sets up terrible personal conflicts for the journalists involved (how one’s heart bleeds!) who must pretend to be disinterested in subjects about which the feel passionately. 

Over his BBC career  Andrew Marr has striven, manfully, to achieve the gold-standard of impartiality, and has succeeded better than some of his BBC colleagues. But while the one-time Maoist student revolutionary might have moderated his views, as age and wisdom advanced, the years have clearly  not entirely quenched the fires of political enthusiasm. Let’s hope, for his sake, he finally feels able to break free of Auntie’s embrace and gets it all off his chest; and when he does stand by to be not at all surprised when his views turn out to be just what we knew them to be all along.