The Times Companion to 2017 Read online

  So in 300-plus pages we glean that he sits on the toilet shooting squirrels out of the bathroom window, he’s happiest fishing and (thanks to an anecdote about Orthodox Jews) that he is uncircumcised. Yet those who know him well speak of a complicated man roiling with self-doubt who “struggles with existence”. Ask about his father, they say, whose approval he sought in vain. Ask about his depression. Ask Paxman if he is happy.

  We meet at Galvin La Chapelle in east London and I have bagged us a table alone on the mezzanine high above the shiny City lunch crowd. Paxman is late, caught in cross-town traffic from his Notting Hill flat where he lives three days a week rather than commute from his family home near Henley, Oxfordshire. I watch him walk very slowly up the stairs. He wore out his knee running, is considering replacement surgery and is clearly in pain. (Later, when I see him wincing and offer to carry his suit bag, he splutters and tells me to f *** off.) Otherwise he looks splendid for 66: lean apart from a slight bay-window belly; thick, almost white hair; fine skin with that rich man’s holiday burnish. His azure linen jacket with elaborate stitching is very natty.

  Old age, however, seems much on his mind and appears to revolt him. His most recent headlines were for blasting the magazine Mature Times for its stairlift ads and portrayal of people his age as “on the verge of incontinence, idiocy and peevish valetudinarianism”. (He has a rather Alan Partridge-esque vocabulary, calling party conferences the “gallimaufry of our democracy”.) I note that his memoir is rather ageist: he refers to “whiffy old wrinklies” and tells an unkind story about John Gielgud needing help to go to the loo. He writes that old people who don’t pay “direct” taxes (ie aren’t working) shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

  Does he use his free bus pass? The eyebrows shoot up.

  “I don’t have one.”

  Why not?

  “Because I’m still earning and I’m very happy if people want to give you a discount because you’re over a certain age. But I’ve just done four weeks filming a series about rivers. The week after next I’m in Washington. Why should I expect others to pay my Tube fare?”

  Why do you believe you should be allowed to vote but people who’ve retired from jobs you can’t do in old age — roofers, say — should not?

  “I did not say that!”

  You said no representation without taxation.

  “Yes. And there will come a point of course when no one asks me to do anything. It happens to all of us.”

  So in the meantime you should be allowed to vote but they shouldn’t?

  “Sometimes, life is like that, Janice. Unfair.”

  For the first 20 minutes, after Paxo has ordered “heritage tomato” salad (scorn about what “heritage” means), mutton (scorn about how much “lamb” is really mutton) and a glass of white wine (which he believes doesn’t count as real booze), the interview comprises me asking a question and him knocking it down. It feels like a bizarre stress dream in which I’m on Newsnight playing Jeremy Paxman while the real Jeremy Paxman harrumphs and sneers. He calls me (humorously, maybe …) “a silly woman”, accuses me of misquoting him, tells me to “cast a more artful fly” and, as if abrading dim University Challenge contestants, cries, “Oh, come on!”

  How the hell, I think, am I going to ask about his father? In the book, Keith Paxman is a puzzle, a shape-shifter, a domineering presence but also an invisible man, whom his son has clearly spent his whole life trying to fathom. Jeremy, his eldest child, was born near Leeds while Keith, a naval officer, was away at sea, and screamed when introduced to him. “Relations between us never really improved much.” His father had a vile temper and beat him for any perceived insubordination with sticks, shoes, cricket stumps or his bare hand. “Did I love my father?” he writes. “My feelings ranged from resentment to passionate hatred.”

  Paxman is scathing about his father’s social pretensions and evolving accent as he leaves the navy and tries, falteringly, to rise in the world. Keith resents his wife’s family wealth, which pays for Jeremy, his two brothers and little sister to attend private schools. He becomes a typewriter salesman then ascends to manage factories across the Midlands. The family home grows to a country house and Keith adopts brass-buttoned blazers, a monocle and plus-fours. Paxman sees him as a try-hard and a phoney who once introduced his son to his golf-club friends as “one of those homosexual communists from the BBC”.

  Moreover, the family’s social standing is precarious: middle class “by our fingernails”. Jeremy never feels at ease at Malvern College “with the boys who genuinely belong to the professional classes”, and a sense of not truly belonging and a bad case of impostor syndrome have never left him.

  Later, when Labour nationalises the steel industry, his father quits and is transformed into a comedy huckster, buying cosmetics from a company called Holiday Magic in a pyramid scheme, then a chain of laundrettes. Finally, Keith reappears at the end of the book, as a coda, having moved to Australia and broken contact with his family. Paxman goes over to find him but the encounter is so vaguely explained, we don’t learn if his mother had been divorced or had died. It is as if Paxman, having started to exhume this painful matter, finds it too difficult to finish.

  I ask what lasting effect his father had on his life. “There comes a point, about the age of 40, when you have to stop saying how you are is a consequence of how you were brought up. And particularly when you are 66, it is pathetic to say, ‘I am as I am because of things that happened in my childhood.’

  “I understand what you’re digging for. I’m just …” I’m not digging — I’m asking about your memoir. “Yes, you are digging.” It’s my job to dig. “Well, you just said, ‘I’m not digging.’ Make up your mind.”

  Wouldn’t you ask, in my position?

  “Well, I might.” Eventually, Paxman says quietly, “I will not be portrayed as a ‘poor little me’ figure.”

  The “homosexual communist” remark, he says, was “an example of wardroom humour”. But it stuck with you? “Oh, I remember it vividly, where it happened.”

  Did your father ever say he was proud of you? “I expect so …”

  Did you feel he was proud?

  “It wasn’t a terribly … It wasn’t that sort of close, intimate relationship. But I do understand that if I answer your question saying, ‘Oh, I never felt he was proud of me,’ I know how you will write that. I’m like the boy in the jam factory who didn’t eat jam because he knew what went into it.”

  When his father left, Paxman was about 24, a BBC trainee. He does not report whether his departure was expected or sudden. “I don’t recall. I wasn’t at home.”

  Didn’t you all wonder over time why he didn’t come back? “No.”

  He sees his siblings from time to time — his brother Giles was British ambassador to Spain — but they aren’t terribly close. “If we don’t see people very often … Intimacy is the consequence of familiarity, isn’t it?” He assumes his parents divorced, because his father eventually remarried in New Zealand and his stepmother brought Keith’s ashes to scatter in England. When I wonder how his father’s example influenced his own parenting he is instantly angry, accusing me of asking about his children. Which I wouldn’t dare. Then he says, “I think everyone is scared to some extent of becoming their parents and I suppose that would have been the case. The family relationships, I find they don’t resonate happily to me.”

  Paxman’s mother, however, barely features in the book, except as quietly running the household. He doesn’t even note when she died.

  “Both my parents are dead,” he says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “It’s strange, death, isn’t it? However old you are, when you’ve finally lost both parents, there is a feeling of being orphaned. And I think it’s very cruel that all the very vibrant memories I have of my mother are now intertwined with the memory of how she looked at the point of death.” Was he there? “Yes, the skin kind of collapses on to the skull and you recognise the person, but you don’t recognise them.
They’ve clearly passed from one state of being to another … I remember when she was young and she had this luxurious black hair which she kept pinned back in a bun. And she had three boys within three and half years or something. And boys are quite difficult …”

  I ask how old his mother was when she died.

  “I’m ashamed to say I cannot tell you.”

  After his father had been gone for more than a decade, sending only curt Christmas cards, Paxman went to Australia to find him.

  “I was astonished by his lack of curiosity. I mean, there were grandchildren he’d never seen, spouses he’d never met. It seemed as if we were part of a life he’d put behind him.”

  Was it the journalist in him who wanted to go, or the questing son?

  “Both of those things, I think. I wanted to see if he was all right and I was slightly concerned in case I was becoming him.” It is the most revealing thing he’s said in an hour. And I recall a childhood incident he describes of his sister finding their father sobbing on the bathroom floor. “I didn’t want to feel I was living my life as he lived his life … I think he was actually a vulnerable man and he probably thought cutting himself off was the only way to survive.”

  Paxman refers to his depression (“I spent several years seeing a therapist, and several more on antidepressants,” he says in his foreword) in several brief incidents. When he was studying at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, friends recall him standing on a bridge saying, “It is completely and utterly meaningless, isn’t it?” then going to the pub. Aged 35, after stints in Belfast during the Troubles and as a war reporter in Zimbabwe and Lebanon, and having lost three good friends, he suffered insomnia and nightmares: “I didn’t exactly have a breakdown. But it was pretty like one.”

  He has refused to talk about it before. “I don’t see any reason to be ashamed of saying I’ve suffered depression, as have a vast number of people. What I’m really not willing to do is try to appear as a victim.” As when discussing his father, Paxman’s greatest fear is of appearing to whine or look pitiful and weak.

  Has he learnt anything during his years of treatment he’d care to pass on?

  “The great thing is that unless we are all finished, the sun’s going to come up tomorrow. It’s always worst in the middle of the night, and what seems insurmountable at 3am, at 8am looks completely different. The critical thing they teach you doing CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] is there is another way of looking at things. I would really like to learn that skill.”

  Did CBT help him?

  “I don’t think I was conscientious enough. But that is the key question: when everything seems black and shrouded in gloom and there seems no way out, is there another way of looking at it? Though,” he adds quietly, “if you’re in the grip of really serious depression, that’s almost impossible.”

  Before I meet Paxman, I call several senior Newsnight colleagues who say many warm things. He is not a sulking prima donna: although intolerant of mediocrity, he would voice his view, then get on with the job. Nor is he a bully who “punches down”; he was patient with junior staff and, says one female executive, “was more receptive to women’s voices in the newsroom than most men in the Nineties”. But it is his complexity that instils loyalty. “Why he is a great broadcaster, not just a good one, is because beneath that outer shell of suave sophistication, there is an inner vulnerability.” This, points out another former colleague, explains his sensitivity when interviewing Terry Pratchett about facing death or the MP John Woodcock about his own mental illness.

  In his memoir, Paxman expresses regret about his crueller questions to Gordon Brown (“Why does no one like you?”) and asking Charles Kennedy, “Why does everyone say of you, ‘I hope he’s sober’?” He believes his famous monstering of hapless junior treasury minister Chloe Smith was needed to bring the government to account, but asking, “Are you incompetent?” was “unanswerable and unkind”.

  The media, he says, can only accommodate one idea of a person. “I know that I will always be Mr Rude or whatever,” he says. “But I know that’s not me. It’s a small part of any human being.” Yet that impenetrable outer shell, his air of not caring what anyone thought of him, created jeopardy. When you switched on Newsnight and saw Paxman was presenting, nothing seemed unsayable. And his jaded, nihilistic belief that fame, TV, politics, indeed much of human activity, is basically meaningless can be a useful mindset when dealing with the powerful. “The most striking thing about some of them,” he writes of establishment luminaries, “is how unimpressive they all are.”

  The problem with Paxman is this default position — “You’re all lying fools” — solidified into a shtick. He quotes Alan Bennett on irony, the English amniotic fluid “washing away guilt and purpose and responsibility. Joking but not joking. Caring but not caring. Serious but not serious.” It encapsulates his father’s cruel wardroom humour, his own supercilious sneer.

  At times he sounds high-handed, especially when discussing peers. Newsreaders, Jon Snow aside, are failed actors, not proper journalists. Nicholas Witchell is a “rather buttoned-up reporter who had written a book about the Loch Ness monster”. He says producers cried of one excitable broadcaster, “Stick a fresh battery in the news bunny.” (Is this Huw Edwards? “I have no comment to make.”)

  Although he doesn’t dignify his existence with a mention in the book, he was reportedly most unpleasant to Jeremy Vine, whom he saw as a threatening younger version of himself. In Vine’s memoirs, he recalls that if he left a mug or family photo in the newsroom they were removed secretly by Paxman. “Jeremy Vine has written his memoirs?” he spits out with disdain. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But you called him your “mini-me” and “the sorcerer’s apprentice” on air. Paxman huffs. “Did I? Good.”

  What interests him now more than the TV ephemera of catching out politicians are the bigger questions. “Is there a purpose?” he says. “What do things mean? What is the right way to live? I would rather spend an evening talking about those than how to manage Vladimir Putin or reform the NHS. My great discovery in the past year or so is that news doesn’t really matter.” He doesn’t watch Newsnight — “It stops me having to tell people what I think of it.”

  Since he left the programme he’s kept busy writing this memoir, a column for the Financial Times and making several TV series. Work, he finds, keeps the black dog at bay. Yet one question nags him: has he fulfilled his potential? “We all ought to ask ourselves that as we approach the finishing line. Could I have done something else? I haven’t got any great talents. Well, perhaps I could have put them to better purpose.”

  Does this come from his father’s view that making things was more worthwhile than just reporting on them? “I think that’s a fair observation, and that is what I feel.”

  The Conservative Party made a tentative approach about him being candidate for London mayor. But he says he’d make terrible lobby fodder. He sees himself as a maverick — “I’ve never been part of the establishment,” he insists — which seems at odds with his membership of the Garrick Club. He tells me, off the record, how it came to pass that, after initially being blackballed, he was allowed to join. But he is not naturally clubbable anyway, likes being alone or in his coterie of wealthy fishing mates including Robert Harris and Max Hastings.

  We’re already late for the photoshoot and I’m pink in the face from the exertion of interview combat. At the end of a TV interrogation, Paxman always asked his subjects, “Happy enough?” Almost always they said yes. So I ask him.

  “I’m going to say no,” he cries. “I shall say, ‘This is a disgrace!’”

  But are you ever happy enough?

  “I remember at school,” he recalls, “three of us talking about what to do. One chap wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. The third fellow said, ‘I don’t mind what I do, as long as I’m happy,’ and I remember saying, ‘What a ridiculously superficial ambition,’ and he just looked slightly gobsmacked.”
Then, a few years ago, Paxman heard the man worked for the United Nations and wrote saying their conversation had haunted him all his life: “I want to apologise because you were right and I was wrong.” The man responded, “Very nice of you to write, but I’ve no recollection of this at all.”

  His friends have called him an Eeyore: “It’s always damp in my part of the forest,” he says. “But who wants to be Tigger? Who wants to be happy?”

  So we head for the photographer’s studio where Paxman surveys clothes brought in by the stylist (“Look at these ridiculous trousers!”) then reappears in his own dark suit, barely worn since he left Newsnight. Seeing him there, back in his old armour, standing legs astride, braced for battle, with ministers to slay, I feel that old tingle of late-night jeopardy. And I miss that fearless, melancholy knight.

  BATACLAN: ONE YEAR ON

  Adam Sage

  OCTOBER 1 2016

  “I CAN REMEMBER thinking, ‘This is not the right day for my death.’”

  Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of Café Bonne Bière bar in Paris. It was just after 9.30pm on November 13, 2015, and the worst terror attack in modern French history was under way. Triomphe — a balding 57-year-old intellectual who has taught in Paris’s most prestigious university, worked in the upper echelons of the civil service and founded a think tank specialising in employment issues — had gone to Café Bonne Bière after a chance encounter with an American traveller.