Andrew Marr

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Andrew Marr (born 31 July 1959, Glasgow, Scotland) is a British journalist and political commentator. He edited The Independent for two years, until May 1998, and was the political editor for the BBC from 2000 until 2005. He began hosting a new political programme called Sunday AM on Sunday mornings on BBC One from September 2005 onwards.

[edit] Early life

Andrew Marr was educated at the High School of Dundee, Craigflower School and at Loretto School, a famous independent boys' school in Musselburgh, East Lothian in Scotland. He went on to study English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

He was once a member of the socialist group Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory and reportedly a seller of its newspaper Socialist Organiser while at Cambridge, where he acquired the sobriquet of 'Red Andy'.

[edit] Media career

Marr joined The Scotsman as a junior business reporter in 1981, going on to become a parliamentary correspondent in 1984 and then a political correspondent in 1986. After a period as writer of the "Bagehot" uncredited weekly political column in The Economist, Marr returned to The Independent as Political Editor, eventually rising to the Editorship of the paper.

His editorship coincided with a particularly turbulent time at the paper. Faced with price cutting by the Murdoch owned Times, sales had been in decline, and Marr made two attempts to arrest the slide. He pioneered the use of bold 'poster-style' front pages, and then in 1996, radically re-designed the paper along a mainland European model, with Gill Sans headline fonts and stories being themed and grouped together, rather than according to strict news value. The limited advertising budget meant the paper's re-launch struggled to get noticed, and when it did, it was mocked for reinterpreting its original marketing slogan 'It Is - Are You' to read 'It's changed - have you?'. The response from some was that many existing readers had indeed changed - to The Guardian, and at the beginning of 1998, Marr was sacked after refusing to implement a further round of redundancies. Three months later, he returned to the Independent. Tony O'Reilly had increased his stake in the paper and bought out then-owners, Mirror Group. O'Reilly, who had a high regard for Marr, asked him to collaborate as co-editor with Rosie Boycott, in an arrangement where Marr would edit the comment pages, and Boycott would have overall control of the news pages. Many pundits predicted the arrangement would not last and two months later, Boycott left to replace Richard Addis as editor of the Daily Express. Marr was sole editor again, but only for one week. Simon Kelner, who had worked on the paper when it first started was offered the editorship, and asked Marr to stay on as a political columnist. Kelner was not Marr's 'cup of tea', Marr observed later and he left the paper for the final time in May 1998.

Marr wrote as a columnist for The Daily Express and The Observer, before gaining appointment as BBC political editor in May 2000, making him one of the best-known faces on British television. Like his predecessor-but-one John Cole and his famous herringbone overcoat, he soon developed a trademark style, characterised by much gesticulation and hand-waving. He also became known for, and was widely praised for, his ability to contextualise Westminster gossip and intrigue, and explain to viewers and listeners how it would affect their lives. A great believer in the view that 'politics matters', Marr championed the democratic process and saw it as part of his role as Political Editor of the BBC to help make politics meaningful and relevant for many people for whom politics was traditionally boring, dull and something that happened only in Westminster corridors with middle-aged men in suits.

Among his notable 'scoops' as Political Editor were the second resignation of Peter Mandelson, and the interview in the autumn of 2004 in which Tony Blair told him that he would not seek a fourth term as Prime Minister should he win the forthcoming general election.

There have been claims that he is a closet Labour supporter, others have stated his journalism to be perfectly objective.

During his time as political editor, Marr also assumed various presenting jobs, and announced in 2005 that following the 2005 General Election, he would step down as Political Editor to spend more time with his family. In September 2005, he moved to a new role presenting the BBC's Sunday morning flagship news programme, Sunday AM (previously called Breakfast with Frost and hosted by Sir David Frost). Marr also hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme Start the Week.

He was named Columnist of the Year 1995 and Columnist of the Year in the British Press Awards and received the Journalist Award in the Channel 4 Political Awards of 2001.

Marr has written several books on politics and journalism, notably The Day Britain Died (2000) — a state-of-the-nation reflection — and My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism (2004). The former was, in addition, a three-part television series; following Newsnight in the BBC2 schedules, 31 January 2000 – 2 February 2000. He has also written several articles for the British political magazine Prospect.

[edit] Statement on BBC bias

In October 2006 Andrew Marr said: "The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organization with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias."^[1]

[edit] Political views

Marr has written about the need to remain impartial and "studiously neutral" whilst delivering news reports and "convey fact, and nothing more".^[2] Despite this, critics who have analysed Marr's reports assert that Marr's reporting represents an "establishment mouthpiece". Marr responded to such criticisms as "pernicious anti-journalism".^[3] Media analysts David Edwards and David Cromwell, in their book "Guardians of Power", cite this statement by Marr on BBC news in 2003, after the coalition invasion of Iraq, as evidence of Marr's bias:

"I don't think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he's somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result."^[4]

The same critics also presented comments written by Marr in The Observer newspaper in 1999 as evidence of Marr's lack of impartiality during the Kosovan crisis :

"Having said that I thought it was disastrous to start with, and I do, I want to put the Macbeth option: which is that we're so steeped in blood we should go further. If we really believe Milosevic is this bad, dangerous and destabilising figure we must ratchet this up much further. We should now be saying that we intend to put in ground troops. I don't believe this stuff about the Serbian army being an undefeatable, extraordinary, superhuman group.".^[5]

Whilst writing his column in the Observer newspaper, Marr expressed a number of political views. In 1999, Marr defended the implementation of the Race Relations Act after the Stephen Lawrence enquiry stating :

"And the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain 'natural' beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off." ^[6]

In the Daily Telegraph he described himself as a "libertarian" when discussing his conflicting views on smoking bans.[1]

[edit] Family

Marr lives in West London with his wife, the political journalist Jackie Ashley, a daughter of the former Labour Member of Parliament, Jack Ashley, and the couple's three children.

[edit] Trivia

• He appeared as himself in the 2005 series of Doctor Who in the episodes "Aliens of London" and "World War Three", and episodes of The Amazing Mrs Pritchard.

• Andrew Marr is often mistaken for President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Marr recounts that he was once lost on his way to a briefing at the Kremlin and was spotted by two soldiers, but instead of being arrested for trespassing they looked alarmed and saluted him.

• He once jokingly wrote in a newspaper that he had no idea what to get his wife for Christmas, so was intending to buy her a burqa. Jackie Ashley responded by writing in to the paper to say that he would probably get her the wrong size anyway.

• When writing certain columns of the Daily Telegraph, he uses the pseudonym Mr. Snuffles, Andrew Marr's pet guinea pig. When writing in this form, he uses frequent misspellings and writes solely in lower-case.

• He claims to have read Tolstoy's War and Peace at least fifteen times.

• In one of his books Marr recounted an incident where he was approached by a man in a shop who said, "Here, you look just like that Andrew Marr... you poor bugger."^[7]

• Marr is one of many public figures alleged by conspiracy theorist David Icke to be a shape-shifting reptilian.

• Several comedy impersonation programmes, namely Dead Ringers, poke fun at his long arms by using ridiculously long plastic arms when portraying him.

• He was considered for honourary membership of The Coterie for 2007 (Martin Bright, New Statesman, 22-01-07).

• Marr was on the bottom of the nominations list for the 2004 Richard Dimbleby Award at the Bafta Television Awards (BAFTA 2004: New Ground, Russell Davies, pg. 80)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Press Office — Andrew Marr — BBC biography
• 'Marr quits as BBC political chief' — BBC News
• Off The Telly: The Day That Britain Died — A review of BBC2's The Day That Britain Died
• TV is less up itself than newspapers — The Guardian
• Biogs.com information
• Interview with Noam Chomsky - The Big Idea - BBC, 1996