Andrew Marr

Andrew William Stevenson Marr (born 31 July 1959, Glasgow) is a Scottish 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 then began hosting a political programme called Sunday AM (now The Andrew Marr Show) on Sunday mornings on BBC One from September 2005 onwards. In 2007 he presented a political history of post-war Britain on BBC Two, Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain.

Early life

Andrew Marr was born and educated in Scotland at the High School of Dundee, Craigflower School and at Loretto, an independent private boarding school in Musselburgh, East Lothian. 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'.

Newspaper career

Marr joined The Scotsman as a trainee and junior business reporter in 1981. He became a parliamentary correspondent for the newspaper in 1984, moving to London at this time, and then a political correspondent in 1986. During this period, Marr met the political journalist Anthony Bevins, who became Marr's mentor and close friend. Bevins was responsible for Marr's first appointment at The Independent as a member of the newspaper's launch staff.

Marr left shortly afterwards, and joined The Economist, where he contributed the weekly "Bagehot" political column and ultimately became the magazine's political editor in 1988. Marr has remarked that his time at The Economist "changed me quite a lot" and "made me question a lot of my assumptions".

Marr returned to The Independent as the newspaper's political editor in 1992, and became its editor in 1996. His period as editor coincided with a particularly turbulent time at the paper. Faced with price cutting by the Murdoch-owned Times, sales had begun to decline, and Marr made two attempts to arrest the slide. He made 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. This tinkering ultimately proved disastrous. 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 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 whereby 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 was first launched accepted 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.

At the BBC

Marr wrote as a columnist for The Daily Express and The Observer before being appointed BBC political editor in May 2000, which made 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, as sent up in the comedy impersonation programme Dead Ringers where they use ridiculously long plastic arms when portraying him. 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 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.

During his time as political editor Marr assumed various presentational roles, and announced in 2005 that following the 2005 General Election, he would step down as Political Editor to spend more time with his family. He was replaced as Political Editor by Nick Robinson. In September 2005, he moved to a new role presenting the BBC's Sunday morning flagship news programme Sunday AM, known as The Andrew Marr Show since September 2007; the slot was previously filled with Breakfast with Frost and hosted by Sir David Frost. Marr also hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme Start the Week.

In May and June 2007, the BBC broadcast Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain. He presented the five one-hour documentaries, and chronicled the history of Britain from 1945 to 2007. Simultaneously, Macmillan published the book of the series, written by Marr, under the same title. Unsold copies of the book, a best seller, were recalled in March 2009 when legal action was taken against the book for falsely stating that domestic violence campaigner Erin Pizzey had been a member of The Angry Brigade terrorist group.

Marr has written several books on politics and journalism, notably state-of-the-nation reflection The Day Britain Died (2000) 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 – 2 February 2000. He has also written several articles for the British political magazine Prospect.

In 2008, he presented the primetime BBC One series Britain From Above. The following year, he contributed a three-part series called Darwin's Dangerous Idea to the BBC Darwin Season, celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his theory of evolution. He is currently working on a new series on British politics in the first half of the twentieth century.

Politics and bias

Marr has written about the need to remain impartial and "studiously neutral" whilst delivering news reports and "convey fact, and nothing more". Marr responded to criticism as "pernicious anti-journalism". 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."

In his 2007 TV history of Britain he showed this sequence of himself and described it as an example of people being "carried away", perhaps an acceptance of the criticism discussed above.

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.".

In the Daily Telegraph he described himself as a "libertarian" when discussing his conflicting views on smoking bans. There have been claims that he is a closet Labour supporter; however, others, such as the conservative Andrew Neil, have stated his journalism to be perfectly objective.

In October 2006 Andrew Marr said: "The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation 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."

Private life

Family

Marr lives in East Sheen, London, with his wife, the political journalist Jackie Ashley of The Guardian, whom he married in August 1987 in Surrey. She is a daughter of the Labour Life Peer, Lord Ashley of Stoke. The couple have a son, Harry Cameron (born Camden, London, 1989) and two daughters, both born in Hammersmith, London: Isabel Claire (born 1991) and Emily Catherine (born 1994). He is also the father of a child by Alice Miles, a journalist at The Times, with whom he had an affair while married to Jackie Ashley of The Guardian. He tried to surpress media coverage of this affair, but it was revealed by the Guido Fawkes political blog.

Legal issues

It was revealed in The Independent on 27 June 2008 by Richard Ingrams, that Marr has gained a high court injunction preventing disclosure in the press of "private information". Unusually, permission had also been granted for the existence of the injunction not to be mentioned, and it was indeed not mentioned until Private Eye commented on it.

In 2009, Marr's publisher, Macmillan Publishers, was successfully sued for libel by activist Erin Pizzey after his book A History of Modern Britain claimed she had once been part of the militant group Angry Brigade. According to her own account, Pizzey had been thrown out of the group for threatening to report their activities to the police when they discussed their intention of bombing Biba, a lively fashion store. The publisher also recalled and destroyed the offending version of the book, and republished it with the error removed.

Awards

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.

He was considered for honorary membership of The Coterie for 2007. Marr received the Richard Dimbleby Award at the Bafta Television Awards in 2004 and the award for Best Specialist Factual Programme at the 2008 Bafta Television Awards .

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
• Transcript - The Big Idea - BBC, 1996

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