What would Simon Cowell say? How Andrew Marr messed up
The City course sometimes feels like a journalistic version of the X Factor boot camp: industry mentors, tough challenges and some stiff competition. By this logic, Tuesday afternoons must be our equivalent of ITV’s live Saturday night showdowns (although perhaps with slightly less hairspray).
Every week, there is a special guest, and every week, the mentors are expecting the performance of a lifetime. At City, the special guest is an interviewee and the performers are three students, each assigned a specific topic and given 15 minutes to grill the guest. The catch is that all of this takes place in front of a 40-strong audience of eagle-eyed classmates and tutors, who then offer feedback that sits somewhere between advice and character assassination.
Just as Simon Cowell strutting around on stage singing “Baby One More Time” is something I don’t expect to see in my lifetime, our tutors happily admit they wouldn’t attempt our interviewing exercise “in a million years”. And unlike X Factor’s special guests, ours can’t get away with miming. Superintendent John Sutherland said that being interviewed by Ben, Katrina and Tommy (about gun crime, race and the Stockwell Enquiry respectively) felt like “taking all [his] A-levels at once”.
The Andrew Marr Show this morning made me wonder if Marr might benefit from spending a Tuesday or two with us. Marr was interviewing Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on, among other things, the arrest of Damien Green. Smith answered in obfuscated soundbites about the “sensitive and confidential” nature of Home Office work and the “operational independence” of the police. So far, so press release.
When Andrew met Jacqui: the Home Secretary on the Andrew Marr Show
But Marr pressed her: what about the allegations that Green was bugged? As Home Secretary, she would have had to sign a warrant for that to happen, wouldn’t she? Smith started to run out of soundbites. “Andrew… no,” she tried. Marr pressed her again. She hesitated again. “Home Secretaries don’t confirm or deny which warrants they have or haven’t signed,” she said. Marr tried again: “So you didn’t sign such a warrant?”. Smith got agitated. “We are getting totally into conspiracy theory territory here,” she said.
Smith was clearly uncomfortable with the line of questioning and starting to deviate from her mental script. As anyone who has spent a Tuesday afternoon at City would know, this is the point when interviews start to get interesting. But Marr gave up. “Okay, you didn’t sign such a warrant,” he said, and moved swiftly on.
What was that? Marr, if you’d done that at City, you would have been accosted by a lynch mob of trainees and tutors for a spectacularly wasted opportunity. He committed the cardinal sin of putting words into Smith’s mouth and handing her a rather convenient ‘Get out of jail free’ card. The summary of the interview on Politics Home now states that Smith said she did not sign a warrant. Actually, she consistently dodged the question. Marr somehow answered it for her.
I have watched Jacqui Smith’s media appearances with increasing interest since starting a specialism in Home Affairs at City this term, taught by BBC correspondent Danny Shaw. A few weeks ago, we visited the Home Office’s press office, which is the largest PR outfit of any Government department. Our guide told us about the behind-the-scenes processes involved in the launch of the identity card scheme, which included an awful lot of time spent “choosing what the Home Secretary should wear so she didn’t clash with the cards”. Time which, if this morning is anything to go by, would have been better spent improving Smith’s interview handling technique. She wasn’t so much taking her A-levels as struggling with her SATs.
But today’s failure, ultimately, was Marr’s. If he’s free on Tuesday afternoon, I’m sure he would be very welcome to pop into City. He might just learn a thing or two.
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Interesting view. She was definitely on the ropes wasn’t she, and I’m sure Paxman/Alan Gill would have finished her off.
My sense is that the reason Marr manages to get so many high profile guests on the show is they know it won’t get too messy. They get to put out the party line a bit, then he ruffles them up slightly, and everyone goes home relativey happy.
Either way I agree it would have been juicy to see him really digging in! I thought she put on a pretty awful performance, getting really arsey whenever he asked her anything tough
Oh Lara, don’t remind me about Tuesday! … and I’m not promising any less hairspray!
I love the phrase “So far, so press release”.