What do you do if you have spent 30 years as near to the centre of power as you can be without actually being at it; 30 years of listening, talking, testing; of building up a store of insights and character assessments, grudges and anecdotes, all of which are verboten in serious reporting and particularly in the highest reaches of the BBC? And if you have the added issue of no longer being able to travel much, or hunt down facts in libraries with ease? Well, you write a novel, of course.
In Head of State, Andrew Marr’s first attempt at fiction, the glee of sudden freedom is palpable; apparently, when he was writing it – dictating it to a computer programme, in fact, as the stroke that hinders his travel also made his left hand unusable – his family could hear him “laughing at my own jokes downstairs, which is terrible but true”. The story is set in 2017, largely in 10 Downing Street (it will be launched at No 10, with a party hosted by the Camerons), a few days before an in-out referendum on Europe. Charles (or at least a very Charles-like figure) is on the throne, a woman leads the US, Jo Johnson (Conservative MP and younger brother of Boris) is chancellor, and the prime minister, who has struck a deal with Germany “for a looser, more market-friendly EU”, is campaigning to stay in the eurozone, while his erstwhile home secretary leads the no campaign. And then, as they say, disaster strikes – and must, with much farcical ingenuity, be hidden.
Head of State works on several levels. First, as a serviceable thriller, then as a primer on how politics and journalism really function. As fiction, this doesn’t always come off; you can clearly hear Marr’s own voice, explaining, sideswiping, but the comments are often so pleasingly tart it doesn’t matter too much. The novel is also a vehicle for much insiderish fun: drive-by shootings at the editor of the New Statesman Jason Cowley (who becomes a type of car, “slick, tinny, and noisy”); Private Eye editor Ian Hislop (who, given that he went to court to reveal a super-injunction Marr had used to hide his affair with another political journalist, gets nicer treatment than one might expect), is “earnestly and very solemnly working his way through a huge cream cake”. Then there’s historian Dominic Sandbrook. “I think you should forgive your enemies,” says Marr, “but not forget them. I’ve had some very bad reviews in my time and that’s fine. Dominic wrote a review of one of my books which I thought was totally dishonest and I thought, ‘You so and so, I’ll get you for that.’ And I have.” A big laugh.
Finally, there are all the knowing literary references: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Ealing comedy, Michael Frayn, Andrew Marvell; there are quotes from everyone from war reporter Nick Tomalin to Shakespeare’s Tempest – a potentially bathetic game for a novel that has the two clunkiest opening sentences I’ve seen for a long time, but on the whole he gets away with it. It’s “the kind of book that I would enjoy reading,” says Marr. “I’ve thought about writing novels in the past, and I’ve always been blocked by the fact that I’m not particularly deep or wise or anything else – and what really helped to unblock it was [the idea that] you can write a light, frothy entertainment that’s got a certain tone, and if you hold the tone all the way through, you’ve got a book.”
On tape, later, Marr’s own tone – authoritative, quick, clear, offering just enough to obscure what he doesn’t want to give away – is the same as always, but it is striking how different he seems in person from the familiar figure on the TV news, gesticulating enthusiastically in front of the palace of Westminster, riding waves of complex and entertaining metaphors. He is shorter than I had thought, stockier and more forceful, a kind of listing pugilist – an impression offset by a distinct austerity, a distance; a sadness and tiredness that shades the skin around his eyes.
Behind him, in the first-floor kitchen of his home in Primrose Hill, London, a Warhol of Grace Kelly looks on impassively. Marr, who is married to journalist Jackie Ashley moved here after the stroke, because the commute from East Sheen, in suburban London, became too much. There are books on the shelves, pictures on the walls – paintings by his hero Gillian Ayres, his own landscapes (he is an accomplished artist who has also written a book on drawing) and, next to his desk, sketches of his children – but it still feels recently moved into. One room is devoted to exercise: every week Marr does three hours with a neuro-physiotherapist, two hours with a physical trainer and two or three hours on his own. He and his wife have been campaigning for better physiotherapy services for stroke victims who cannot afford to go private; the number 10 reception is in aid of a neuro-physiotherapy charity that has helped him. A battered copy of The Successful Stroke Survivor is propped up on the windowsill.
So the struggle to return to a kind of normal is evident – but so are the pride and chutzpah; the drive and ego that presumably help to keep a difficult show on the road. Although he could not return to his previous routine in which he spent Friday and Saturday preparing for his Sunday-morning interview show on BBC1, then crammed, reading multiple books, for Radio 4’s Start the Week on Monday, then boarded a long-haul flight to film BBC1’s Andrew Marr’s History of the World, Marr was back presenting his Sunday-morning show only nine months after his stroke in January 2013. On Sunday he will interview Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling in Edinburgh.
One of the interesting things about Head of State is how comfortable Marr is with the ways in which information can be extracted – by journalists from politicians, by politicians from journalists, by power-brokers from each other – with a mix of flattery and veiled threat, long memories and manipulation. Is that something he would say he also is good at? “Um … I’ve got quite a long memory,” he says. “I don’t normally go round threatening and flattering people – but – yes. A lot of how journalists try to get information out of people is extremely devious. And to be a good journalist you have to be devious. I mean, I got a big story at the time of the big Brown-Blair split over the euro by implying to Brown’s people at No 11 that I was being briefed by Blair’s people, and vice versa – and so both thought that the other side were briefing me and were pissed off about it, and therefore gave me more information than they might otherwise have done. It is ruthless, but you don’t get stories otherwise. And you do have to oil up to people. You have to ingratiate yourself with people and the crucial thing is that you then sometimes have to betray them.” His example, usefully far in the past, is “John Patten who, when he was in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, was a very good contact of mine. I liked his company a lot. And then he became an unsuccessful education secretary and I wrote a column that said that in fairly pungent terms and he could never forgive me. I think we’re friends again now, but I think I hurt him very deeply – that is the nature of political journalism. It is treacherous.”
And he is very dubious about how his trade has changed over the years. I wonder if, when he was reporting regularly – for the Scotsman, the Independent, the BBC – he ever chose not to broadcast a story, because of the hurt it would cause? “I was quite ruthless. If I thought it was a story I reported it. I don’t believe in going too deeply into people’s personal lives unless what’s going on is affecting their behaviour in power. Or unless there is some grotesque hypocrisy, but I try to steer away from that.” This was exactly what Hislop accused Marr of, when it came to the super-injunction. There have been other awkwardnesses: a couple of months ago he was caught on camera telling David Cameron to shut up (sorry, sorry, said the prime minister), and he annoyed a section of the yes-voting Scottish populace by saying to Salmond: “I think it would be quite hard to get back in [to the EU], I have to say.” “Is that an individual expression or is that an expression of the BBC?” Salmond shot back.
By this time next week the Scottish referendum will have been decided, and the yes campaign is doing well. “If I was going to be arrogant,” says Marr , “I would say that I have been predicting for well over a year that the vote would be extremely tight and that the yes campaign could well win it.” Marr is himself an expatriate Scot; his parents still live in the house in which he grew up outside Dundee. His father was a chartered accountant for the investment trusts set up to look after the cascade of money made by a few Dundee families in the jute trade; his mother studied at Cambridge, where she knew Sylvia Plath, but was thrown out for marrying his father, who was not a “university man” (she went on to study history at the Open University). His childhood was “small-c conservative, big-C conservative … very traditional, based around the church. I went to a very traditional school and was sent away to boarding school: a very old-fashioned Presbyterian Scottish country background.” Except for that fact that when he was about eight years old he “wrote to the Chinese embassy, and said I had decided to set up a branch of the Chinese communist party at my school. And they sent me a huge box of Little Red Books and China Reconstructs, which was their propaganda magazine.” He was “a raving lefty … until I came down to London, probably” – in 1984. Now he can’t say what he is, for fear of the BBC.
He still spends a lot of time in Scotland – “My family are all fiercely unionist,” he says, “and my friends are all fiercely yes, so I get both sides” – and is defensive about those at home who accuse him of not really being Scottish any more. “I don’t feel less Scottish being in London, and I wonder – I mean, I immerse myself in Scottish writing, Scottish culture, Scottish music – am I more or less Scots than someone in Scotland who’s never heard of Neil Gunn? I would say I’m at least as Scottish as they are.” He is watching the polls very closely, but is also mindful of the fact that “what the polls are not measuring at the moment is a very powerful voter-registration campaign on the council estates and the poorer parts of the big cities, being run by radical pro-independence groups. They are registering huge numbers of new yes voters so I think it’s probably even tighter than the polls suggest.”
On the yes side he is particularly interested in the “sense that ‘all we want is a slightly more social democratic, slightly fairer state and we can’t get that any longer from Westminster so we have no alternative.’ That is probably the most powerful yes campaign argument. What’s been going on in Scotland is, in a sense, a major populist revolt against Westminster, and if it can happen in Scotland it can happen elsewhere.” It needs, he believes, to be taken very seriously; it may need the great shock of losing Scotland for the point to definitively be made.
As for his own shock, in interviews after his stroke Marr spoke of the moment the nature of the blow dealt to his nervous system dawned on him: when one ambulance paramedic asked another: “Should we blue this one?”(use the lights and siren). “That made me feel childishly proud when they turned it on — as if I had passed a test.” I wonder about this – about, specifically, what drove him to work the insane hours that he believes triggered the stroke. Partly, he says, it is years of being a freelance journalist, grabbing all work available for fear there would be none tomorrow. But also: “Yes – there is something going on where I need to prove myself to some anonymous, dark-suited jury of bald-headed men in spectacles”.
Since his stroke he has talked of not having been “particularly nice” in the past, of having been obsessed with his public profile. Now he has resolved to spend more time with his family – he readily admits that his wife, who also had to care for her father, has shouldered an unfair proportion of the burden – to live more in the moment. Or at the very least, carve out an hour to walk down to the local pub, buy a pint of IPA, and “stare into the middle distance”. He makes it sound like yet another job to fit into the day, but one he rather relishes.
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