Let's have no more offensive attacks on Andrew
Neil. He is obviously the right man for Newsnight
STEPHEN GLOVER
0 ver the years this column has not always been sympathetic towards Andrew Neil (aka Brill° Pad). It declined to celebrate his 11-year editorship of the Sunday Times. It has occasionally questioned his record as chief honcho of the Barclay brothers newspaper empire. It has even teased him in his role as Rector of St Andrews University and as prospective mentor to Prince William.
Nor has Mr Neil been uniformly well-disposed towards this column. I seem to remember a summer's evening not so long ago, when the bees buzzed drowsily and the long shadows stretched across the garden. The telephone rang. It was Mr Neil, haranguing me for some alleged misdemeanour and threatening, as I recall, never to speak to me again.
But never let it be said that this column burnishes its old resentments. In the matter of Andrew Neil and BBC2's Newsnight there is no doubt where truth and justice lie. The BBC is looking for someone to replace Newsnight's Jeremy Vine, who is taking over the Jimmy Young prog on Radio Two. Various names are in the frame, one of them being Andrew Neil's. Last week he was given a try-out and performed more than creditably, boosting the audience to 1.3 million which, according to whose account you believe, is between 150.000 and 400,000 more viewers than you might expect on an August evening.
However, the odds are said not to be on Mr Neil being chosen. The favourite is someone called Gavin Ester, who could easily be a slightly botched clone of Jeremy Vine. Mr Esler is the main anchor on BBC News 24 which, according to a government report leaked this week, has an average audience of 80,000 and an annual budget of £50 million, which works out at £625 per viewer. That, of course, is not Mr Esler's fault but, without wishing to be rude, one can't help feeling that although he is obviously a tremendously able reporter, he may not be the best person in the world to tear into politicians on Newsnight.
The BBC likes Mr Esler, partly because be is one of their own, partly because he looks good on television. It does not hugely like the less photogenic Mr Neil, though he has anchored BBC2's late-night political programme Despatch Box, which sadly is destined for the chop. The reasoning seems to be that Brillo Pad is known to be right wing. If he were left-wing, there would be much less of a problem. Kirsty Wark, another Newsnight presenter, is a bit of a leftie. Jeremy Paxman is widely supposed to be so, though Private Eye alleged many years ago, without ever being contradicted, that he was on the Tory party's candidates' list during the 1970s, and he recently confided to the editor of this magazine that he was in favour of hanging. Nonetheless, Paxo has repackaged himself as a leftie, which you more or less have to do if you wish to be a senior presenter on the BBC.
This explains why down at Television Centre executives have been sticking pins into Mr Neil's effigy. Meanwhile he has been subjected to a torrent of abuse, particularly in the left-wing press. This is what Jim Shelley wrote in the Daily Mirror on Tuesday of this week: 'Andrew Neil auditioned for the prestigious job of presenting Newsnight looking like a bug-eyed, weirdwigged, pock-marked, jowly-faced baked bean stuffed into a suit: an oily toad with a Shredded Wheat on his head. If he gets the job he may have to start using the Crimewatch sign-off: "And remember, don't have nightmares."' I confess that the corners of my mouth may have trembled when I read this, but it was of course outrageous and gratuitously offensive. Our man may not be a oil painting, but that is surely beside the point.
Anyone who watches Despatch Box can confirm that Brill° is a first-rate presenter. Whatever his politics may be — and he seems to be a slightly crazed libertarian with absolutely no affection for the Tory party — they are never evident in his questioning. He is absolutely even-handed, and tough without being nihilistic or cruel, as Paxo sometimes is. You get the sense, when listening to Andrew Neil, that the political process matters a great deal to him, and that he has an enormous knowledge of its workings. His television manner is perfectly acceptable. In fact, I would say that he has a rather jolly, benign presence while being at the same time authoritative.
As it happens, Newsnight stands in need of a fillip. Kirsty's eye does not seem to be exactly on the ball. Paxo appears a bit sad and depressed and seems as a result to be getting nastier — witness his recent assault on the Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy. The programme has lost some of its political sharpness since Mark Mardell moved on. Feeling under pressure from Greg Dyke, who wants to make politics more accessible, it is increasingly resorting to Janet-and-John special effects. Brill° would be a new broom. But the BBC is frightened of him, partly because he does not look like a matinee idol, more because he is, when all is said and done, a serious figure, and most of all because he has not signed up to the leftie stuff. That's the world we live in now. We can only hope that there is some free spirit within the BBC with a voice that counts who will speak up for him.
As I write, the missing schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman have not been found. Am I alone in disliking what, in the dog days of August, has become a rather grotesque media show? The press is partly at fault for whetting our appetites with every extra intimate detail. In offering a reward of il million, thereby encouraging all kinds of greedy cranks to climb out of the woodwork and clog the telephone lines, the Daily Express has behaved in a particularly egregious manner. But the coverage of the television networks is the most offensive.
I appreciate that witnesses are more likely to come forward if the media focus on the story, but we have gone far beyond the kind of coverage that might be justified by such a consideration. The camera pokes its nose everywhere — into the faces of the anxious parents, and of policemen and policewomen who sometimes seem to enjoy being in the limelight a bit too much. Television has such an inexhaustible appetite for pictures that it ends up creating elements of the story. Would there have been a church service in Soham if the media had not needed the pictures? Are the parents of Holly and Jessica regular churchgoers?
Television makes news. Its need for the right picture is so great that in extremis it will even make them up. In his new book News from No Man's Land the sainted John Simpson admits to fabricating a crowd scene in Saudi Arabia. He says that his translator persuaded drinkers in a tea house to mill about in the street. His justification is that they were not doing anything they might not normally do. But surely the point is that they would not have been doing what they did had it not been for the camera.
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