MEDIA STUDIES
Mr Marr has been a pundit too long to be trusted as an objective reporter
STEPHEN GLOVER
Would Boris Johnson, editor of this magazine, be a suitable political editor of the BBC? I don't believe so. His reportorial skills are not in question. I am sure that he would make every possible effort to be impartial. In fact, I doubt you could ever catch him out. If anything, he would lean over backwards to be nice to Labour. All the same, whenever you saw his happy face on television you couldn't help remembering where he came from. You would say to yourself, he does appear to be perfectly fair to Tony Blair, but he used to be a well- known Tory pundit, and perhaps he has some secret agenda we don't know about. No, Boris would not be suited to the job, as I imagine he would be the first to admit. He carries too much baggage.
The Johnson question was raised by the Daily Telegraph on Monday in a leader about the appointment of Andrew Marr as political editor of the BBC. The Telegraph thought that Mr Marr, who is a distin- guished New Labour pundit, should not have been given the job. His political alle- giances were too well-known. Why not Boris? was the paper's question, This was a rhetorical device since the leader-writer understood very well that Mr Johnson has as much chance of working in a serious capacity for the BBC as of being selected to play for England in Euro 2000. The Telegraph's point was that Greg Dyke's BBC is self-evidently biased in favour of New Labour. A Tory such as Mr Johnson would never have been appointed, yet here was the New Labourite agenda-setter Mr Marr being welcomed into the fold.
These sentiments, and possibly some simi- lar ones of my own in the Daily Mail, caused a mild kerfuffle on Mount Olympus. On Tuesday morning the great Hugo Young stirred, and peered through the thick cloud that separates his godly domain from the activities of ordinary mortals. His Guardian column saw no contradiction between the way the BBC had treated Mr Marr and the way it might treat Mr Johnson. Mr Man was an ideal choice, but Mr Johnson would be no choice at all, the reason being that he was a right-winger. In Mr Young's view, 'Most rightist commentators are polemicists above all else' and most of what they write 'is a long way from attempting to tease out the truth of what is happening'. In short, jour- nalists such as Mr Man — and, by implica- tion, Hugo Young himself — are dealers in truth, whereas Tory pundits are mere propa- gandists, and therefore unfitted to work in any capacity where fairness and objectivity are required.
We must be grateful for Mr Young's new ruling on the nature of truth. The long years padding about the slopes of Mount Olympus have paid off. We can now understand that when Mr Man, or, as it might be, Mr Young, says that the euro is a good thing or that devolution will hold the United Kingdom together, he is merely telling us the truth in a calm and balanced way. By contrast, when- ever right-wing columnists suggest that the euro is a bad thing or that devolution might lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom, they are indulging in crude polemic. How extremely foolish of us not to have grasped this distinction before.
It is all preposterous tosh, of course. Mr Man is not fit to be political editor of the BBC any more than Boris Johnson is. Both men are seekers after truth. But they have made their journalistic names by taking a piece of news and turning it into an argu- ment. That's what they do, that's what I do, and that's what Hugo Young does. It's not what Robin Oakley, the BBC's existing and prematurely cashiered political editor, does or has ever done. It's not what the best polit- ical editors of national newspapers do. They may have their political opinions — and they may be more left-wing than Mr Marr's or more right-wing than Mr Johnson's — but they keep them under wraps. They bring us a piece of news and they leave it at that.
I have no doubt that Mr Man will do his utmost to be impartial, as any of us in his sit- uation would. He may well succeed. He will offer us well-informed and penetrating reports. But I will never quite trust him as I would never quite trust Boris Johnson. Mr Man has been in the punditry game too long for me ever to be able to treat him as a straightforward reporter. He writes in the Observer that he will put his old self behind him, shove the pundit bit into the back of the wardrobe, but it is simply not possible to deny ourselves in such a way.
The BBC could have appointed as its political editor any one of a dozen top-class political reporters who do not have reputa- tions as pundits. Whether out of an almost careless preference for New Labour, or because respect for the old divisions between news and comment has broken down, the BBC alighted on Mr Man. If Mr Johnson had been chosen there would have been rioting in Parliament Square, and rightly so. What is depressing is that almost no one appears to think it was wrong to appoint Mr Man.
For some weeks my heart has gone out to Matthew Norman, the Guardian's diarist. Having ignored my existence throughout the several years of his tenure as diarist, he developed an almost obsessive interest in me. The turning point was my articles on Ronan Bennett, the writer and Irish Repub- lican sympathiser, whose partner is the Guardian's deputy editor. Alleged deficien- cies of mine which had not previously trou- bled Mr Norman suddenly featured in his diary on an almost daily basis. The reason for my heart-felt concern is that Mr Norman has been forced to make a little go a long way. He and his sidekick were even driven to ransacking a book I had written and another I had edited in order to find unflat- tering things to say about me. I naturally assumed that he was trying to please his edi- tor, Alan. Rusbridger, who had taken excep- tion to my articles about his friend Ronan Bennett, with whom he is collaborating on a television script. But there seems to be more to it than that. According to Monday's Times, Mr Rus- bridger is not the only member of the Guardian's editorial staff working alongside Mr Bennett. Mr Norman is reportedly writ- ing a West End farce with Mr Bennett 'in the tradition of Alan Ayckbourn and Ben Travers.' The subject of the play is said to be Tony Blair and his family, and the working title is 'No (More) Sex Please'. Mr Norman was quoted by the Times as saying that Nit' Mandelson will feature 'as a disembodied voice coming from the basement'. The play does not sound entirely friendly towards New Labour. When I first read this I naturally assumed, it was a spoof. Indeed, I still can't rid myself of the idea that it is. And yet the Times is the paper of record. If the story is true, Mr Ben- nett must be Promethean. I read somewhere that he is writing a musical set in jail. We already know that he is writing a script about GM foods with Mr Rusbridger. Now, if the Times is to be believed, he is also engaged on a creative project with Mr Norman. What next? Hugo Young and Ronan on the future of Ulster? The links Mr Bennett has with the Guardian grow more and more fascinating.
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