How many rottweilers can you fit in a Mini? Just the one by the look of it if we’re talking proper old Issigonis mini Mini, not new BMW big Mini, and the rottweiler in question is Jeremy Paxman (1.91m tall).
He’s had to crumple himself in and twist a bit sideways, to the left, then he steers one-handed mostly. Yes, I remember that (I used to have a mini Mini, I’m also 1.91m); my left leg had to go on the passenger side on the motorway, or else I’d get cramp. Jeremy is not on the motorway, but nipping about London, to My Generation by The Who. Hats off, incidentally, to whoever managed to get him into a Mini in the first place. Not from a squeezing-in point of view but from an old-dog-new-tricks point of view; you can almost hear him muttering, curmudgeonly, “stupid bloody stunts” (unless it wasn’t stunts) to the poor director.
So anyway, why the Mini? Because he’s gone back to 1965 to tell the story of the end of another old dog (British bull variety) in Churchill: The Nation’s Farewell (BBC1).
Jeremy indicates, then turns left, which is the opposite of what he did on leaving Newsnight, of course, when he outed himself as a Tory. Plenty of respect for his subject you would imagine then, politically as well as in the way everyone respects him – saviour of the nation, good at speeches, fighting on beaches, dogged, bulldog etc. No one ever called Winston Churchill Roosevelt’s poodle.
And you can see it, this genuine affection for his subject. At Chartwell, Churchill’s family home in Kent, for example, when Paxman stands staring at a resolute portrait of the great man hanging over a roaring fireplace, like St Paul’s during the blitz … well, maybe a bit like that. And again on the green at nearby Westerham, when he looks the statue in the eye, respectfully, not aggressively.
There is a relaxed mellowness about Paxman that you didn’t see/don’t see much on Newsnight/University Challenge. The way he looks, even, with a stripy scarf tied loosely, almost carelessly, round his neck. No puppy perhaps, but a likable mutt maybe.
And he remembers not to be too rude, to be civil even, to the people he speaks to, which he hasn’t always done. I don’t mean politicians, obviously, and students, who are fair game; toys to be bitten hard into, locked on to, shaken viciously from side to side. But civilians – old Churchill relatives, archivists, curators, pallbearers, a pair of lovely old trumpeters who played, hauntingly, from the gallery of St Paul’s at the big man’s state funeral half a century ago.
Not that Jeremy forgets himself totally as a journalist – this is not fawning hagiography. Times change: is Churchill any longer a great national hero or is he irrelevant, he asks. Churchill doesn’t mean anything much to young people, he suggests to Boris the biographer (plus mayor and Winston wannabe).
As for the cranes on the Thames, which dipped their jibs so poignantly when the coffin was taken on its final journey upriver aboard the launch Havengore, there was nothing spontaneous or respectful about it, explains John, former docker and union man. The crane operators were brought in especially, on a Saturday, and paid to dip their jibs. Churchill was no friend of the workers, he says. And Paxman won’t let personal politics or admiration get in the way of a story. You can take the newshound out of the kennel …
While we’re on something of a canine theme, there are more of them – dogs – about. Boris, obviously, a walking, talking shaggy dog story. Yellow labrador I’d say, but don’t be fooled by a lab’s old-school bumbly English charm; they’re hungry, always, never know when enough is enough. He might have made it to Madame Tussauds, but that’s not the prize he’s got his eye on.
Then that infuriating insurance dog from the advert. Apparently that’s who young people think of first when you say Churchill to them. Shocking, no? And the black dog of depression, which prompted Winston to flee on holiday with family and friends and about which Jeremy might know a thing or two, though he doesn’t talk about it. And finally, and more happily, Rufus 1 and Rufus 2, Churchill’s actual poodles, who were so adored by their master that he wanted to be buried next to them at Chartwell, next to the croquet lawn. Until he changed his mind.
