It is generally agreed that David Cameron, this magazine’s candidate for the Conservative leadership, did a good job against Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last week. His skill was to bring out something which is more and more striking about national television political interviewing, particularly on the BBC — its sheer weirdness. I notice this myself when I broadcast for a foreign company — Irish radio, say, or an American channel — compared with doing it for the BBC big beasts. The underlying, courteous assumption behind the foreign interviews is that you are relatively truthful and the purpose is to elicit your views clearly on behalf of the listeners/viewers. With the BBC, the assumption is quite different: it is that you are automatically suspect, and that you have been asked on to be exposed or ridiculed. This applies with knobs on to interviews with politicians. Catching them out is seen as the only sport, and since this has become harder to do on policy issues, because they have learnt caution, you have to ambush them with surprising facts or, as Paxman did with Cameron, the semi-obscene names of cocktails. Paxo looked and sounded like an ageing voluptuary, so jaded with the ordinary dishes of the table or the customary habits of the bedroom that he must be supplied with something ever more exotic or kinky. The viewer, on the other hand, wants things straight. Clever of Cameron to play on this. BBC interviews are going to have to change.
Cameron was also clever in his answer to the God question. Paxman asked him, lip curling at the very idea, whether he talked to God. Cameron replied that he believed in God, that he went to church, more often than Christmas and Easter, though ‘perhaps not as much as I should’, but that he didn’t have ‘a direct line’ to the Almighty.
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