A Life in Questions. Jeremy Paxman
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to ruin someone else.
Dad then decided that the future lay in launderettes, and eventually built up an empire of six, in various Midland towns. Who knows where it might have ended, if houses had continued to be built without a place to install washing machines?
Cambridge turned out to be everything I had dared to hope it might be – a beautiful, bountiful feast from which you could pick anything you wanted to taste. No one told you what to do, and the only expectation was that you found something interesting to say or write.
During a speech just before he took his party down to defeat in the 1987 general election, the Labour leader Neil Kinnock made a resounding declaration asking why he was ‘the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university’. It was typical Kinnock bluster, and probably true. Had I known my own family’s history over a thousand generations, I could almost certainly have made the same claim – but then, so could most of the population: post-war Britain saw an enormous expansion of higher education. Since there was no family memory of university I was forced to rely upon what Dad had gleaned from political and other memoirs. The advice he passed on was that I should join all the main political clubs. My direct experience of mainstream politics had been restricted to listening to the local Conservative MP, Gerald Nabarro, a dodgy-looking bombast who had once arrived to talk to the school sixth form wearing an enormous handlebar moustache and a noisy Prince of Wales check double-breasted suit. In the years I spent studying political life after university I concluded that every politician needed a spectrum of qualities, at one end of which lay noble altruism, and at the other naked egotism. In Nabarro the latter was enormously well developed – his contribution to British political culture was the possession of a fleet of cars with the licence plates ‘NAB 1’, ‘NAB 2’ and so on. He had even successfully claimed in court that witnesses who had seen him at the wheel of NAB 1 as it went the wrong way around a Hampshire roundabout had mistaken his (female, unmoustached) secretary for him.
There was no way I could bring myself to think of becoming a member of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, which was full of braying young people who probably wore tweed pyjamas. The Liberals seemed wet, well-meaning but irrelevant. So I only joined the Labour Club. An hour’s exposure to the scheming and malevolence of the sort of people who took it seriously ensured that I never went to another meeting. For reasons unknown, I then tried to take up with a drama club. My sole acting experience at school had been a walk-on part in Under Milk Wood, when my entire performance consisted of crossing my hands on my chest and intoning, ‘I am Evans the Death.’ Since drama at Cambridge was dominated by people who would go on to direct feature films or run television and theatre companies, I was rejected by every drama society. The Mummers even thought I was unqualified to paint scenery.
I went through the motions of joining the Union Society, where people who fancied themselves as future orators engaged in point-scoring debates on subjects they didn’t really care about, but I couldn’t take it seriously, and was frightened by the strutting self-confidence and ambition on show. I spoke there once, appallingly. The terrifying Arianna Stassinopoulos – later to marry and divorce a bisexual Texan millionaire, and after that to make the revolutionary discovery that if you don’t pay many of your contributors you can run a pretty profitable online media business (the Huffington Post, named after the discarded Texan), earned herself the title ‘the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus’ by becoming President of the Union. The BBC judged this sufficiently significant to make a documentary about it. In one scene the Great Greek was filmed reaching out from her bed to pick up a telephone, gushing, ‘Oh, hello, Lord Longford! How nice of you to call.’ At the time she was probably the only student in Cambridge with a phone in her college bedroom.
Sometime in my first term I wandered into the offices of the university newspaper, Varsity, in a dreary brick building next to the public lavatories where Magdalene Bridge crosses the river Cam. Inside was a large room divided into cubicles by unpainted plywood partitions. Two more solid partitions separated off an editor’s office and a ‘boardroom’ – not that the board met more than once a term, and no one was quite sure who was on it anyway. In each of the cubicles was a big typewriter and mountains of cheap paper. Ashtrays overflowed on every surface not already occupied by a cup holding cold coffee. The floor was covered in balls of scrunched-up paper. (It wasn’t that there were no wastepaper baskets, just that they were usually brimming over – periodically someone would clamber inside one of them and trample the contents down, as if treading grapes.) You could have wandered into an am-dram production of the reporters’ room in The Front Page.
In our own way we took ourselves quite as seriously as the putative politicians and theatre people, and were consequently more than slightly ridiculous. I started off by reporting what we took to be news, had an inglorious spell on the diary (I wasn’t social enough), and wrote columns of absurd portentousness (‘If you don’t mind my saying so,’ said Dr Gregory, an engineering fellow at St Catharine’s, ‘I think you’re just playing with words.’ He was right).
In my last year I was elected editor, and succumbed to many of the usual tropes to try to improve circulation, like sending out questionnaires about people’s sex lives. According to an unfriendly witness, I spent much of my tenure sitting in the editor’s office wearing an army-surplus-store overcoat and exclaiming, ‘Where are all the clever people? I’m surrounded by turds.’ The truth was that there were lots of clever people. Veronica Crichton, who went on to become the Labour Party’s most trusted media adviser, sat in the news editor’s chair. Christopher Frayling, later to become Rector of the Royal College of Art, smuggled endless reviews of Sergio Leone films – possibly the same one – into the paper each week (his interest in the oeuvre of Clint Eastwood was no passing phase: when he was awarded a knighthood years later, he chose as his motto a Latin translation of ‘Go ahead, punk, make my day’). Peter Robinson, the circulation manager (he stuck up occasional posters) became a professor in computing. And Richard Higginson, who reviewed music and ran a gossip column named, for reasons which doubtless seemed smart at the time, ‘Olla Podrida’, was ordained and taught theology. There was a strong sports team, dominated by figures like Steve Tongue, who later founded the first football fanzine, and Stan Hey, who also made a career as a national sports journalist and learned the folly of owning a racehorse. David Randall graduated to become (in his words) the ‘shooting-fish-in-a-barrel columnist at the Independent’. Alan Stewart, killed by a landmine explosion while covering fighting in southern Sudan for Thames Television fifteen years later, wafted around, bringing a dash of glamour to the newsroom. Tony Wilson, best known as the founder of the Hacienda nightclub, Factory Records and the ‘Madchester’ music scene, sat in the office claiming he had just finished his latest essay on Restoration poetry with the words ‘Rochester tried to fuck history. But in the end, history fucked him.’ When I showed a photograph of the male-dominated Varsity editorial team to a Newsnight colleague thirty years later, her only comment was, ‘How on earth did any of you get a girlfriend?’
The paper was a venerable institution, with venerable debts. In the early 1960s whoever then made up the editorial board decided to ape the Sunday Times’s decision to create a free colour magazine, and to plaster its front cover with photos of Jean Shrimpton wearing Mary Quant dresses. The main colour summoned by the Varsity magazine was a deep red running through the accounts – even ten years later we remained in hock to the printers. The paper was still printed on hot-metal machines, and each weekly journey to Peterborough to see the thing through the presses ran the risk of being the last.
Then came another existential threat, in the form of a free newspaper, Stop Press. This was the invention of the newly formed Cambridge Students’ Union, which was nothing to do with the debating club, but wanted to become the sort of place which existed in the non-Oxbridge universities as a focus for student social life and politics – because the university was an association of colleges, no such institution existed in Cambridge. Charles Clarke, the future Labour Home Secretary, somehow managed to get himself made president of this vestigial organisation, and then to be paid to spend a sabbatical year running the thing. A newspaper would give the student union a virtual existence. Everyone said that Stop Press, the freesheet it produced, would put the paid-for Varsity out of business. We contacted all our advertisers, offered