SEVEN DAYS INTERVIEW THE INQUISITION

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Oct 8, 2006 | by Stephen Phelan

HEguards against discussing his own politics because the appearance of vociferous objectivity has become a job requirement.

He was a half-hearted member of the Labour Society at St Catherine's College, Cambridge, but the wealth he has accumulated since, from his combined salaries for Newsnight and University Challenge (seven-figure sums have been guessed at by tabloids and denied by Paxman) and bestselling non-fiction books such as The English and The Political Animal, hasn't made him noticably conservative. And, while Paxman himself can seem ubiquitous, he keeps his wife and three children effectively invisible.

He is not, though, particularly evasive. At one point during the afternoon he shapes his hands into separate aircraft to illustrate the dynamics of a Newsnight interview.

"Here is the journalist with a set of questions - here is the authority figure, not necessarily concerned with answering those questions. Sometimes they will meet, and you'll get a satisfactory result. Often, they will just pass each other. It can happen that one is off the pace, disorganised, insufficiently prepared or rigorous, gets the wrong end of the stick, and you go home thinking you made a real mess of it. But that's how it is, and nobody dies as a consequence of my making a bad judgement." Paxman seems to be emphasising that he is not, ever, the authority figure in that transaction, and it irritates him when others treat him like some self-appointed king of the fourth estate.

The only non-answer he gives today is when asked if he actually, personally likes princes Charles and Phillip, whom he visited at Sandringham, by invitation, while researching the new book. "Look, " he says, "the question of whether we like or dislike these individuals is neither here nor there." Paxman's conviction that his work "matters" in itself, even while he and everyone else in the media are, as people, "incandescently insignificant" also makes him reluctant to accept that the book will probably sell on the strength of his name alone.

"Oh I don't know whether that's true - I hope that people read it for the same reasons I wrote it. If they're honest, they'll admit to asking the same questions that began to trouble me. Royalty has always been with us, but why? And should it continue? Curiosity is my single greatest driving element. I don't know why I became a journalist, other than to say that I like finding things out." He's also proud, though, of the jokes he makes in On Royalty. "Monarchy is an incredibly fecund field when you look at it. What a catalogue of eccentrics, ha ha." The reminder that he can laugh, like the admission that he feels nervous before every interview ("If you're not, then you won't be anywhere near the top of your game when the red light comes on") makes you wonder what kind of schism there may be between screen persona and actual personality. Paxman himself raises the subject of his tearful outburst on Who Do You Think You Are? , when he learned that his Glaswegian great-grandmother Mary McKay was denied poor relief for bearing illegitimate children, whom she raised, along with his grandmother, in an east end tenement.