‘I’m a great believer in the long-form political interview where you can explore at length, not in soundbites, the real policy decisions that politicians are making,” said Lord Tony Hall on Tuesday, as he prepares to depart as BBC director general. He went on to criticise interviewers who try to catch politicians out, concluding that it militates against nuance and contributes to our toxic political atmosphere.
It is a familiar debate: do you favour Jeremy Paxman’s rottweiler, Cathy Newman’s velociraptor, Andrew Neil’s Godzilla, Evan Davis’s kindly-but-impartial shrink or Andrew Marr’s tough start but no follow-up? People who love Paxman say that he holds politicians to account. That was true in the exact moment it happened – with Michael Howard in 1997 – since it paraded the Tory politician’s evasiveness. At the same time, it set the bar for all media training since. The bridge manoeuvre – take a word from the question and use it to pivot to a different question that you then answer – originated in this moment of shame and nobody has ever been had in precisely that way again.
There is still considerable mileage, however, in questions about numbers – “How much will it cost?”, “How long will it take?”, “How does 19,000 plus 10,000 add up to 50,000?” – the kind of interrogation by which Nick Ferrari memorably undid Natalie Bennett when she was leader of the Green party in 2015. And who can forget Susanna Reid wrong-footing Matt Hancock during the last election campaign (handy reminder: Hancock’s party did not lose the last election and Bennett’s party was never intending to win in 2015. So let’s keep in perspective how effective “Gotcha” is).
However, Hall’s counterpoint, which dismisses the hostile interrogation and paints a sympathetic ear as inherently more sophisticated, misunderstands the process so completely that I think it must be deliberate, and be, in essence, a veiled call to respect the overlords. Analysis in 2016 found that politicians give an explicit, direct answer to a question only 46% of the time. Theresa May set a staggering low of 14%, which nevertheless must beat Boris Johnson’s “chuntering” (as Marr put it). The prime minister rarely answers anything, and apparently no longer intends to, as he and his ministers avoid probing current affairs shows altogether. This is the urgent business of the BBC and all other news outlets. Baked into their entire understanding of balance, fairness and the effective scrutiny of power is the assumption that all politicians actively seek the chance to put their case in a possibly biased but basically honest way. That assumption is now wrong. Interviewers need to figure out how to prosecute their remit in this new reality, and fast. The nice jailer/nasty jailer debate is so last century.
