John Humphrys, the so-called rottweiler of Radio 4, is in fact a pussycat.
This would have been more of a surprise if I were one of the six million-odd
regular listeners of the Today programme, where Humphrys has honed
his interrupting skills with filibustering politicians over the past 21
years, but since I can think of nothing less soothing than starting my day
with the soundtrack of argumentative discourse on governmental policy, this
is not the case.
Journalists tend to be the most unrewarding interviewees and in some respects
Humphrys is no exception. He is more careful than the most circumspect
politician, super-alert to the possibility that he might be tripped up by a
trick question into revealing more than is good for him. I had no idea, for
instance, that his job would make him quite so paranoid about discussing
politics in any shape or form – which is a bit like interviewing Peter Hall
and discovering that he will not comment on the future of theatre.
This means that we cannot talk about the rise of the New Tories other than in
the blandest terms: “It’s exactly what happened in 1997, isn’t it? It’s the
political wheel turning. It’s what happens. Whether it will continue…” Do
you think it will? “Well, I wouldn’t like to offer a judgment about that. I
can’t because I’m making a political judgment. I can’t. I really can’t. Do
you see? I know it’s silly of me. It isn’t silly of me. No, it’s sensible.”
Not for the first time, I have the sense that he is arguing with himself. “I
know it’s boring.” It is a bit boring. “I’m sorry, but I can’t honestly say
to you, ‘Yes, I think David Cameron is going to smash Gordon Brown at
the next election.’” What he will say is: “We’ve had 13 years effectively of
New Labour ascendancy – only 11 years in power, admittedly [he includes the
last two years of Major’s reign] – but it will be 15 years by the time, if
Brown is thrown out at the next election.” Which will be? “My guess is May
2010 but...” Are you good at such predictions? “Hopeless. Almost always get
it wrong – hopeless.”
This “I’m hopeless” refrain is another surprise. I’ve never come across a man
who puts himself down so frequently in a series of pre-emptive strikes
against himself, and I had rather thought, but this was before our meeting,
that Humphrys might suffer from a certain smug self-regard.
Referring to a live interview he did with Tracey Emin – who apparently told
him that he was the rudest man she had ever met – he said, “I – with
brilliant, startling originality – suggested to her that maybe she hadn’t
won [the Turner prize] because it was an unmade bed and, you know, with the
vast depth and knowledge that I have of art, was this hard?” They met again
on Have I Got News for You when Humphrys was presenter – “I wasn’t very
good. Well, they didn’t ask me back which proved I wasn’t very good. It was
good fun but I was nervous. I was all right but I don’t have that… I
don’t have the Boris [magic?]…” Another unfinished sentence. He doesn’t get
to see the programme very often, he says, because (with his 3.30am wake-up
call for Today) it’s too late for him.
We have a long verbal ramble around the tricky task of interviewing
politicians. Why Humphrys continues to be essential listening for many
journalists – and the reason why he is so popular with listeners generally –
is that he simply will not allow politicians to waffle on without answering
his questions. The alternative to not interrupting them would be to allow
them to use their alloted slot to get their point across unchallenged. What
is interesting is that Humphrys himself is a bit of a waffler.
His conversation is peppered with “Here’s another little digression” and “I’ll
answer your question in a minute”. At one point I’m exasperated
enough to interrupt The Great Interrupter himself: “Where is this going,
John?” And several minutes later (bewildered): “I’m getting
a bit… I don’t know where we’re going with this…” “I know. I know,” he says,
then, “That’s not my fault, that’s your fault – you’re the interviewer,”
which is a fair point, but then my rottweiler skills are clearly no match
for his.
The point Humphrys seems to want to get across is that he has been unfairly
cast as an aggressive interviewer. When he started out he admits that this
was true: “I suppose I thought, ‘I’ve got to make a name for myself and
prove that I’m tougher than anybody else.’” He still winces when I mention
an interview with John Hume, then leader of SDLP, in 1993, which
commentators described as particularly bullying. “It’s hard to bully John
Hume because he’s a very tough guy and bright but, yeah, that was bad. I was
trying to make a name for myself and I was showing off. The audience has an
immense sense of fairness, spotted it instantly and quite rightly ripped me
apart.”
He goes on to say: “There is a great myth, I think, about interviewing – and
you’d expect me to say this, I know, and it’s a bit self-serving and the
rest of it, given the kind of interviewer that I am seen to be – which is
that if you were only a bit nicer to politicians and treat them with, give
them...They will tell you all kinds of things they didn’t intend to say.
That I think is absolute tosh because the kind of people that are likely to
be interviewed, the ones in Cabinet or whatever, are very, very bright by
and large, and know when they come on exactly what it is they want to say.
“And if you looked at every serious political interview I’d done over the past
21 years, a handful of those would have been pretty devastating for the
politician, a handful will have resulted in utter demolition of the
interviewer, and most of them will have been neither – which is a very
ungrabby answer from your point of view, but it’s honestly the way it is.”
He says that learning about policies is secondary and that his primary mission
is to leave the listener with a bit more insight into the character of the
politician. There are plenty of political commentators who know far more
than he does about what’s going on in Westminster. Humphrys has always
maintained an outsider’s distance from those particular corridors but, “even
if I do an interview that is information-light – where you don’t learn
anything that will make a front-page splash on your newspaper the following
morning – if I’ve done my job properly you will still have learnt something
because what I try to do is get under the skin of the politician.”
In a chatty telephone conversation we had before meeting up, Humphrys
mentioned a smart party he’d once attended with a girlfriend he was
trying to impress. The host was David Frost, who welcomed him like a
long-lost friend – although they had never met – asking about his two
grown-up children by name. This was useful for gaining kudos points with his
date, but what intrigued Humphrys was that Frost had been similarly briefed
to greet every guest as he worked the room. Part of him was clearly
impressed by such conscientious schmoozing but, I suspect, a greater part of
him rather despised it. Certainly, he seems to have a bit of a thing about
Frost since he has beefed about the man’s interviewing technique many times
over the years.
