The veteran political interviewer on how his stroke has changed him, interviewing Boris Johnson and what he thinks of the rumours Charles Moore could be the corporation’s new chairman
Andrew Marr is reading a new book by the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams – research for his Monday-morning radio show Start the Week – and about to eat a bacon roll when I arrive at the cafe near his home in Primrose Hill, north London. The photographer, an honourable man, has promised he will not do an Ed Miliband on Marr, who in any case eats his roll with great decorum. The cafe is part-owned by the writer Andrew O’Hagan, and its walls are decorated with framed covers of the London Review of Books. A few doors away is the house in which WB Yeats lived – a blue plaque commemorates the fact – and Sylvia Plath died. The book-loving Marr lives in the rarefied heart of literary London. Political journalism may be his profession, but art and literature are his life.
We are meeting to discuss his new book, Elizabethans, although the debate swirling around the future of the BBC in the face of a hostile government is never far from our minds. He describes Elizabethans as an “attitudinal history” of the past 70 years, told through the eyes of 60-plus individuals he has selected as exemplars of the age. Many of his subjects are unexpected: the actor Diana Dors, twinned with Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, with whom Dors appeared in a film; the union activist Jimmy Reid; the Monty Python comic Graham Chapman; the anti-permissive society campaigner Mary Whitehouse (who gets surprisingly sympathetic treatment), and the rightwing Tory politician Enoch Powell (ditto). It is rather like The Crown in book form: a stream of intriguing stories producing a mosaic that the reader, with expert steers from Marr, can glue together. There will eventually be a three-part TV series based on the book, but it seems to be stuck in the scheduling works at present.
