Andrew Marr

Andrew Marr
In black tie at the 2009 BAFTA awards
Born	Andrew William Stevenson Marr (1959-07-31) 31 July 1959 Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Occupation(s)	Journalist, presenter, political commentator
Notable credit(s)	BBC News The Andrew Marr Show
Spouse	Jackie Ashley ​ (m. 1987)​
Children	Son and 2 daughters

Andrew William Stevenson Marr (born 31 July 1959) is a British journalist and political commentator. He edited The Independent for two years until May 1998, and was political editor of BBC News from 2000 until 2005.

He began hosting a political programme Sunday AM, now called The Andrew Marr Show, on Sunday mornings on BBC One from September 2005. Marr also hosts the BBC Radio 4 programme Start the Week. In 2007 he presented a political history of post-war Britain on BBC Two, Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain, followed by a prequel in 2009 - Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain focusing on the period between 1901 and 1945.

Early life

Marr was born on 31 July 1959 in Glasgow, Scotland to Donald and Valerie Marr and was educated in Scotland at the High School of Dundee, Craigflower School and at Loretto, an independent school in Musselburgh, East Lothian. He went on to study English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

He was once a member of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory. At Cambridge, Marr says he was a "raving leftie", and he acquired the nickname '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. 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. 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 the impressionists use ridiculously long plastic arms when portraying him. He also became known and widely praised for his ability to describe the background to 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 who tended to see politics was as the preserve of a remote, largely male and middle aged Westminster clique.

Among his personal 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. Marr was criticised for some of his on air statements during this period. John Pilger claimed that Marr "rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said, had promised 'to take Baghdad without a bloodbath'" during the second Iraq war in March 2003. Pilger has attacked Marr further over an interview with Tony Blair in which Blair was promoting his memoirs. Pilger is critical towards Marr for not questioning Blair on whether he had colluded with George Bush to invade Iraq and for not bringing up the legality of the invasion.

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. Unsold copies of the book of the series, a best seller, were recalled in March 2009 by publishers Macmillan when legal action was taken over false claims that domestic violence campaigner Erin Pizzey had been a member of The Angry Brigade terrorist group. According to her own account, in a Guardian interview in 2001, Pizzey had been present at a meeting when they discussed their intention of bombing Biba, a fashion store, and threatened to report their activities to the police. Marr's book was republished with the error removed.

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 a three-part television series shown after Newsnight on BBC Two from 31 January to 2 February 2000. He has also written several articles for the British political magazine Prospect.

In 2008, he presented the prime time 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 played a small role as himself in a Doctor Who episode, "World War Three"; reporting Slitheen entering 10 Downing Street, he was noted as himself in the credits. His latest programme, broadcast in Autumn 2009, is a six-part BBC Two television series on British politics in the first half of the 20th century Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain.

In September 2009 on the Sunday before the Labour Party conference in Brighton, Marr interviewed Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Towards the end of the interview, Marr told Brown he wanted to ask about:

Something everybody has been talking about in the Westminster village... A lot of people in this country use prescription painkillers and pills to help them get through. Are you one of them?

The Prime Minister responded: "No. I think this is the sort of questioning which is all too often entering the lexicon of British politics." Marr was later heavily criticised by Labour politicians, the media and fellow political journalists for what was described as a vague question which relied on its source being a singular entry on a political blog. In later interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, John Ward, the author of the Not Born Yesterday blog, admitted that he has no proof to back up the claim.

Politics

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".

In the Daily Telegraph he claimed to be a libertarian when discussing his conflicting views on smoking bans. However, writing in The Guardian, he said "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. The police are first in line to be burdened further, but a new Race Relations Act will impose the will of the state on millions of other lives too."

In October 2006 the Daily Mail claimed that 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."

Marr spoke at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on 10 October 2010 about political blogging. He claimed that "[a] lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people." Some bloggers suggested that Marr should invest in a mirror.

Other work

Marr has helped support the Sense-National Deafblind and Rubella Association, and was the face of a Sense direct marketing appeal. He has also been involved with the charity Common Purpose UK.

Personal 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 and two daughters.

Super-injunction

On 28 June 2008, Richard Ingrams reported in The Independent that Marr had obtained a High Court injunction preventing disclosure in the media of "private" information. An order - a so-called "super-injunction" - was also granted preventing the reporting of the injunction. The injunction was not mentioned in the UK media until Private Eye commented on it.

On 26 April 2011, following legal action by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, an interview with Marr was published in the Daily Mail, in which he revealed that the super-injunction had covered the reporting of an extra-marital affair with a female journalist. Marr said that he had believed that a child of the journalist was his, but had learned through a DNA test that it was not. He commented: "I did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists. Am I embarrassed by it? Yes. Am I uneasy about it? Yes. But at the time there was a crisis in my marriage and I believed there was a young child involved. I also had my own family to think about, and I believed this story was nobody else's business." Hislop had filed a court challenge earlier in April 2011, and described the super-injunction as "pretty rank".

Awards

In 1995 he was named Columnist of the Year at both the What the Papers Say Awards and 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 has received two British Academy Television Awards: the Richard Dimbleby Award at the 2004 ceremony and the award for Best Specialist Factual Programme (for his History of Modern Britain) at the 2008 ceremony.

Marr and his wife were both awarded honorary doctorates from Staffordshire University in July 2009.

External links

• Press Office — Andrew Marr — BBC biography
• 'Marr quits as BBC political chief' — BBC News'
• TV is less up itself than newspapers — The Guardian
• Transcript - The Big Idea - BBC, 1996