Andrew Marr

Andrew William Stevenson Marr (born 31 July 1959)[1] is a Scottish journalist and presenter for radio and television. Beginning his career as a political commentator, he subsequently edited The Independent newspaper (1996–1998) and was political editor of BBC News (2000–2005). He began hosting a political programme—Sunday AM, now called The Andrew Marr Show—on Sunday mornings on BBC One from September 2005. In 2002, Marr took over as host of BBC Radio 4's long-running Start the Week Monday morning discussion programme.

Andrew Marr
Marr in 2014
Born	Andrew William Stevenson Marr 31 July 1959 Glasgow, Scotland
Nationality	Scottish, British
Education	Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Occupation	Journalist Television presenter Political commentator
Notable credit(s)	BBC News The Andrew Marr Show
Title	Political Editor of BBC News (2000—2005)
Spouse(s)	Jackie Ashley ​ (m. 1987)​ [1]
Children	3

In 2007, he presented Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain, a BBC Two documentary series on the political history of post-war Britain, which was followed by a prequel in 2009, Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain, focusing on the period between 1901 and 1945. In 2010, he presented a series, Andrew Marr's Megacities (the title distinguishes it from another Megacities series), examining the life, development and challenges of some of the largest cities in the world.

In early 2012, he presented The Diamond Queen, a three-part series about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.[2] In late September 2012, Marr began presenting Andrew Marr's History of the World, a series examining the history of human civilisation.

Following a stroke in January 2013, Marr was in hospital for two months. He returned to presenting The Andrew Marr Show on 1 September 2013.[3]

Early life

Marr was born in Glasgow, Scotland[4] to Donald Marr, an investment trust manager, and his wife Valerie. Regarding his upbringing, he has said: "My family are religious and go to church... [a]nd I went to church as a boy".[5] Marr was educated in Scotland at Craigflower Preparatory School, the independent High School of Dundee; and at Loretto School,[1] also an independent school in Musselburgh, East Lothian, where he was a member of Pinkie House and a prefect.[6] He went to read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a first class honours degree.[4][7]

Regarding his political affiliations, he was formerly a Maoist and a member of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, a left-wing pressure group founded by Labour Party members, now known as the Alliance for Workers' Liberty. At Cambridge, Marr says he was a "raving leftie" who handed out copies of Mao Zedong's Little Red Book and he acquired the nickname "Red Andy".[8][9][10]

Newspaper career

Marr joined The Scotsman as a trainee and junior business reporter in 1981. In 1984, he moved to London where he became a parliamentary correspondent for the newspaper, and then a political correspondent in 1986. Marr met the political journalist Anthony Bevins, who became his mentor and close friend. Bevins was responsible for Marr's first appointment at The Independent as a member of the newspaper's launch staff, also in 1986.

Marr left shortly afterwards, and joined The Economist, where he contributed to 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".[11]

Marr returned to The Independent as the newspaper's political editor in 1992, and became its editor in 1996 during 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 grouped together by subject matter, rather than according to strict news value. This tinkering ultimately proved disastrous. With a limited advertising budget, the re-launch struggled for attention, then was mocked for reinterpreting its original marketing slogan 'It Is – Are You' to read 'It's changed – have you?'.

At the beginning of 1998, Marr was sacked, according to one version of events, for having refused to reduce the newspaper's production staff to just five subeditors.[12] According to Nick Cohen's account, the sacking was due to the intervention of Alastair Campbell, director of communications for Tony Blair. Campbell had demanded that David Montgomery, the paper's publisher, fire Marr over an article in which he had compared Blair with his predecessor John Major. This article had followed an earlier one by Blair published in The Sun, in which Blair had written: "On the day we remember the legend that St George slayed a dragon to protect England, some will argue that there is another dragon to be slayed: Europe." Marr's response asserted that Blair had spoken in bad faith, opportunistically championing Europe to pro-EU audiences while criticising it to anti-EU ones; and that the phrase "some will argue" was Blair's disingenuous rhetorical ruse to distance himself from the xenophobic appeal that he himself was making.[13]

Three months later, Marr returned to The Independent. Tony O'Reilly had increased his stake in the paper and bought out owners, the 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.[12]

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 last time in May 1998.[14]

Marr was then a columnist for the Daily Express and The Observer. Marr presented a three-part television series shown on BBC Two from 31 January to 2 February 2000 after Newsnight. A state-of-the-nation reflection, The Day Britain Died (2000) also had an accompanying book. Among Marr's other publications is My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism (2004).

At the BBC

Political editor

Marr was appointed BBC Political Editor in May 2000. Among his personal scoops as Political Editor were the second resignation of Peter Mandelson, and the interview in late 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 succeeded as political editor by Nick Robinson.

Programmes 2005–2009

Andrew Marr (left) meeting the former Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou in 2010

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;[15] the slot was previously filled by Breakfast with Frost and hosted by Sir David Frost. Marr also presented the BBC Radio 4 programme Start the Week until his illness in 2013, and has now returned as the programme's regular host.[16]

In May and June 2007, the BBC broadcast Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain. He presented the series of five one-hour documentaries chronicling 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.[17][18] 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.[19][20] Damages were paid to Pizzey and Marr's book was republished with the error removed.[21]

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.

Marr also made cameo appearances in the Doctor Who episodes "Aliens in London" and "World War Three".

BBC programmes since 2009

Andrew Marr (left) interviewing Vladimir Putin ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

In late 2009, BBC Two broadcast his six-part television series on British politics in the first half of the 20th century Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain.[22]

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,[23] the media and fellow political journalists for what was described as a vague question which relied on its source being a single entry on a political blog.[24] In a later interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, John Ward, the author of the Not Born Yesterday blog, stated that he had no proof to back up the claim.[25]

In early 2012, Marr presented a three-part TV series on BBC One looking at the life and reign of Queen Elizabeth II in the run-up to the main celebrations of her Diamond Jubilee.[26]

In 2012, Marr presented an eight-part series on BBC One entitled Andrew Marr's History of the World, in conjunction with the Open University.[27]

Following the death of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on 8 April 2013, Marr narrated a memorial documentary, Margaret Thatcher: Prime Minister.[28]

On an 8 April 2018, BBC Sunday news programme Marr said "lots of Palestinian kids" were killed by Israeli forces. Jonathan Sacerdoti complained that the statement was misleading and false. BBC management ruled that Marr breached editorial guidelines, that the statement lacked any evidence and "risked misleading audiences on a material point".[29]

Marr portrayed himself in the 2018 BBC series Bodyguard, interviewing Keeley Hawes' character Julie Montague, and wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian about his decision to do so.[30]

On 1 December 2019, Marr interviewed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and discussed Islamic terrorist Usman Khan, perpetrator of the 2019 London Bridge stabbing. Marr claimed the government had done nothing since 2010 to tighten the rules on sentencing for terrorist offences, implying that Johnson could have stopped Khan's early release. In reality, Johnson's government had lengthened the minimum early release, and in Khan's case any legislation would have need to be retrospective anyhow. The BBC Editorial Complaints Unit therefore found that Marr had misled viewers on two counts.[31]

Politics

Marr has written about the need to remain impartial and "studiously neutral" whilst delivering news reports and "convey fact, and nothing more".[32]

In The Daily Telegraph, in 2007, he said that he was a libertarian when discussing his conflicting views on smoking bans.[33] Writing in The Guardian in 1999, he defined himself as a "pampered white liberal" and said that:

... though teachers are the most effective anti-racist campaigners in the country, this means more than education in other religions it means a form of political education. Only people who understand the economic forces changing their world, threatening them but also creating new opportunities, have a chance of being immune to the old tribal chants. 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.[34]

At an October 2006, BBC seminar discussing impartiality, Marr highlighted alleged bias within the BBC. He stated: "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."[35][36]

In March 2014, Marr was criticised for allegedly expressing his own opinion on an independent Scotland's membership of the EU while interviewing Scottish politician Alex Salmond on BBC Television.[37]

In the New Statesman during 2015, Marr expressed the opinion that the new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may be electable and that Conservative leaders recognise this. Marr wrote, "Here and now, in 2015, we know diddly-squat." At that time Marr considered a Labour election victory under Corbyn unlikely.[38]

On the BBC's This Week on 16 May 2019, George Galloway said "I knew Andrew Marr when he was a Trotskyite selling Trotskyite newspapers to bewildered railwaymen outside King's Cross Station".[39]

Other work

Marr has helped support Sense, the National Deafblind and Rubella Association, and was the face of a Sense direct marketing appeal. He was President of the Galapagos Conservation Trust until 2013.[40] In 2007 and 2014, Marr supported the charity iDE UK in the BBC Radio 4 Appeal and subsequently became a patron.[41]

Personal life

Marr lives in Primrose Hill, north London,[42] with his wife, the political journalist Jackie Ashley of The Guardian, whom he married in August 1987 in Surrey.[7] She is a daughter of the Labour life peer, Lord Ashley of Stoke (1922–2012). The couple have a son and two daughters.[43]

On 8 January 2013, Marr was taken to hospital after suffering a stroke at home.[44] He left hospital on 3 March and said he hoped to return to work later in the year.[45] He appeared as a guest on The Andrew Marr Show on 14 April[46] and returned twice to interview David Miliband and the prime minister, David Cameron, before it was announced that he would return to presenting the show on 1 September 2013.

Marr has described his religious views: "Am I religious? No. Do I believe in anything? No. I just don't have that bump." He also stated: "I'm an irreligious Calvinist".[5]

In May 2018, Marr went into hospital for an operation to deal with a malignant tumour on his kidney. He was expected to make a full recovery.[47]

Privacy injunction

On 28 June 2008, Richard Ingrams reported in The Independent that Marr had been granted a High Court "super-injunction" preventing disclosure in the media of "private" information, or the existence of the injunction. Private Eye had revealed the existence of the injunction earlier in the week, having successfully challenged the need for its existence to be kept secret.[48]

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.[49] Hislop had filed a court challenge earlier in April 2011, and described the super-injunction as "pretty rank".[50]

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.[51]

He was considered for honorary membership of The Coterie for 2007.[52] Marr has received two British Academy Television Awards: the Richard Dimbleby Award at the 2004 ceremony[53] and the award for Best Specialist Factual Programme (for his History of Modern Britain) at the 2008 ceremony.[54]

Marr was awarded an honorary doctorate from Staffordshire University in 2009.[55]

References

1. "Marr, Andrew William Stevenson, (born 31 July 1959), Presenter: Start The Week, Radio 4, since 2002; The Andrew Marr Show (formerly Sunday AM), BBC TV, since 2005". Who's Who. 2007. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.26659.
2. "The Diamond Queen". BBC Media Centre. BBC. Retrieved 17 February 2012.
3. "Andrew Marr to return to BBC Sunday show after stroke". BBC. 28 July 2013. Retrieved 28 July 2013.
4. "Meet Andrew Marr". BBC Online. 13 April 2008. Retrieved 22 November 2011.
5. McCrum, Robert (4 August 2013). "Andrew Marr, after the stroke: 'I'm going to be sweeter all round'". The Observer.
6. "Spring 1977; School Prefects". The Lorettonian. January 1978. p. 5. Retrieved 25 August 2017.
7. Grice, Elizabeth (12 May 2007). "The view from Marr". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 29 May 2018.
8. White, Michael. "Robinson poached from ITN as BBC name successor to Marr", The Guardian, 21 June 2005. Retrieved on 28 April 2007.
9. Politicians interview pundits: George Osborne and Andrew Marr, The Guardian, 26 September 2009
10. Hodgson, Caroline (6 October 2014). For the Love of Radio 4: An Unofficial Companion. Summersdale Publishers Limited. ISBN 9781783722549 – via Google Books.
11. Paul Vallely "Profile: Andrew Marr – On a roll: the BBC's all-action, 24-hour [...]", Archived 22 December 2007 at the Wayback Machine The Independent, 2 November 2002. Retrieved on 28 April 2006.
12. Cozens, Claire (3 September 2004). "Marr: tabloid Independent was my idea". The Guardian.
13. Nick Cohen Cruel Britannia: Reports on the Sinister and the Preposterous, London: Verso, 1999, p.154
14. Marr, Andrew (2005). My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism. London: Macmillan. p. 205. ISBN 978-0-330-41192-9.
15. Jones, Barney (26 September 2007). "What's in a name?". BBC News.
16. Ben Dowell "Andrew Marr to return to Radio 4's Start the Week next week ten months after his stroke", Radio Times, 4 November 2013
17. Jones, Sam; Kennedy, Maev (9 March 2009)."Marr book urgently withdrawn". The Guardian (London).
18. "Marr's best-seller is taken off the shelves for 'legal reasons'". The Scotsman. Edinburgh. 9 March 2009.
19. Rabinovitch, Dina (26 November 2001). "Domestic violence can't be a gender issue". The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 11 March 2009. Retrieved 20 March 2009. She was thrown out of the movement for informing on bombings by the Angry Brigade. 'I said that if you go on with this — they were discussing bombing Biba [the legendary department store in Kensington] – I'm going to call the police in, because I really don't believe in this'
20. "Campaigner accepts libel damages". BBC News. 1 April 2009. Archived from the original on 4 April 2009. Retrieved 1 April 2009.
21. Adams, Stephen (1 April 2009). "Andrew Marr's publisher pays 'significant' damages to women's campaigner". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 25 April 2010.
22. Gibson, Owen (21 April 2008). "Comedies have the last laugh at Baftas". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 22 May 2008.
23. "Mandelson Slams 'PM On Painkillers' Rumour". Sky News. 28 September 2009. Archived from the original on 14 July 2012. Retrieved 11 October 2009.
24. Thompson, Damian (28 September 2009). "Gordon Brown and the pills: what was Andrew Marr thinking?". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 1 October 2009. Retrieved 11 October 2009.
25. Guru-Murthy, Krishnan (28 September 2009). "'Brown on pills' blogger admits he has no proof". Channel 4 News. Retrieved 26 September 2015.
26. "The Diamond Queen". BBC. 2012. Retrieved 16 October 2012.
27. "OU on the BBC: Andrew Marr's History of the World". Open University. 10 September 2012. Retrieved 16 October 2012.
28. Plunkett, John (9 April 2013). "Lady Thatcher TV tributes draw fewer than 3m viewers". The Guardian. London.
29. "BBC finds comment on Israel and Gaza was 'misleading' - Diaspora - Jerusalem Post". The Jerusalem Post. 24 June 2018. Retrieved 12 May 2019.
30. Marr, Andrew (30 August 2018). "Why I played myself interviewing Keeley Hawes in Bodyguard". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 May 2019.
31. The Andrew Marr Show, BBC One, 1 December 2019 | Contact the BBC
32. Marr, Andrew (2004). My Trade: A short history of British Journalism. Macmillan. p. 279.
33. Marr, Andrew (28 March 2007). "Britain could be in for some turbulent times". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 26 September 2015. I suppose what unites Scotland and the Underground is the smoking ban, which will reach the rest of England in July. It still seems vaguely unimaginable. As a libertarian who is an anti-smoker, I don't quite know what to think, except that as soon as the ban starts it is clearly my civic duty to get down the pub a lot more.
34. Marr, Andrew (28 February 1999). "Poor? Stupid? Racist? Then don't listen to a pampered white liberal like me". The Guardian. London.
35. Leonard, Tom (27 October 2006). "The BBC's commitment to bias is no laughing matter". The Daily Telegraph. London.
36. Douglas, Torin (18 June 2007). "Does the BBC have a bias problem?". BBC News.
37. "Andrew Marr accused of bias over Scottish independence". The Daily Telegraph. 16 March 2014. Retrieved 18 March 2014.
38. New Statesman (London) 17 September 2015 Between revolution and reform: the challenge facing Jeremy Corbyn
39. Bosotti, Aurora (17 May 2019). "Galloway laughs BBC interview with Farage BACKFIRING – 'Knew Marr when he was Trotskyite'". Express.co.uk. Retrieved 17 May 2019.
40. "Ambassadors – About Us". Galapagos Conservation Trust. Retrieved 30 July 2013.
41. Payne, Tom (28 January 2014). "Andrew Marr backs Golders Green charity helping world's poor as part of Radio 4 appeal". Hamhigh.co.uk. Retrieved 27 November 2018.
42. Charlotte Edwardes "Andrew Marr: 'I’m fighting for the rights of the Primrose Hill set'", London Evening Standard, 4 June 2015
43. Vallely, Paul (14 May 2005). "Andrew Marr: Relentless rise of Renaissance Man". The Independent. London. Retrieved 6 September 2010.
44. "BBC's Andrew Marr suffers stroke". BBC News. 9 January 2013. Retrieved 9 January 2013.
45. "Andrew Marr leaves hospital after stroke". BBC News. Retrieved 30 July 2013.
46. "Andrew Marr says he's lucky to be alive after stroke". BBC News. Retrieved 14 April 2013.
47. Andrew Marr to have kidney operation BBC
48. "Richard Ingrams' Week: You try challenging an editor armed with a writ". The Independent (London). 28 June 2008. Retrieved 29 June 2008.
49. "BBC's Andrew Marr 'embarrassed' by super-injunction". BBC News. 26 April 2011. Archived from the original on 26 April 2011. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
50. "Marr super-injunction 'pretty rank'". BBC News. 26 April 2011. Retrieved 26 April 2011.
51. "Panorama: Andrew Marr". BBC News Online. 24 September 2002. Retrieved 18 April 2010.
52. Martin Bright, New Statesman, 22 January 2007
53. "Meet Andrew Marr". BBC News Online. 3 May 2006. Retrieved 28 October 2009.
54. "Bafta TV Awards 2008: The winners". BBC News Online. 20 April 2008. Retrieved 18 April 2010.
55. "Andrew Marr". Staffordshire University. 2009. Retrieved 10 November 2019.

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
• Andrew Marr, Esq Authorised Biography, Debrett's People of Today
• Appearances on C-SPAN