Paxman asks some tough questions about an age when we ruled the world

JEREMY Paxman says he had an itch he needed to scratch. That itch was curiosity about Britain’s imperial history, its origins, its rights and wrongs, and its lasting effects on Britain now that empire is a distant memory but for a few dots in the ocean.

He feels our education system is badly flawed in failing to teach children about empire as a discrete subject, so that a generation will grow up unaware of the global power that Britain once was thanks to individuals who explored the world motivated variously by curiosity, greed, the desire to spread religious faith or to compete with the European neighbours in co-opting great swathes of foreign land and perhaps “civilising” their inhabitants.

“I grew up with an older generation for whom Empire had been a present reality,” he says. “During my formative years (he was born in Leeds in 1950, before the family shipped out to Worcestershire) the Empire was disappearing. By the time I was grown up it was gone, apart from odd spasms like the Falklands and the hand-back of Hong Kong. I got frustrated with the fact that there seems to be a received wisdom that it was an unalloyed bad thing and that, due to some half-baked moral judgement, there was no longer any point in discussing it.

“There were many things about Empire that were bad and others that were quite admirable, but you can’t really understand who and where we are now without understanding where we’ve been.” Hence his book Empire – What Ruling the World Did to the British, a colourful and well-told chronological gallop through our haphazard imperial history, trailing a BBC series due to run some time next year.

In interviewing Jeremy Paxman you have, it seems, to submit to the question being questioned, any adjective being sniffed and snapped at for whiffs of underlying assumption, and the occasional gasp of surprise that such simpleton thoughts could even cross your mind.

The good and evil of Empire can’t be slotted into some double-entry ledger, he says; it’s all far more complex than simply saying it was all bad or a very good thing. His journey through imperialism hasn’t given him any conclusion, but it has made him better informed. He wasn’t attempting to pass judgement.

He says he loves a good yarn, and British imperialism is full of characters, from the fortune-seeking Clive of India, to the “half-cracked General Gordon”, “the most sabre-toothed of all empire builders” Cecil Rhodes and the monstrous Kitchener. There were some truly sadistic men among the British colonists, and there were many “good eggs” among ordinary administrators.

In summary he says: “The British empire had begin with a series of pounces. Then it marched. Next it swaggered. Finally, after wandering aimlessly for a while, it slunk away.” You have to admit the language is superb.

“I can’t see any sense in which promotion of the rule of law, of democracy, roads, railways, telegraphs, schools, hospitals and pharmacies was a bad thing. As against that one has to accept that there was a terrible ruthlessness about the prosecution of empire. Rebellions were ruthlessly suppressed often in a very hideous way. In the early days of empire, slavery was a very bad thing, but then you have the fact that large numbers of people were freed as a consequence of British and European action.”

He says one of the thorniest legacies is the fact that we have a sense of somehow being connected with the rest of the world but disconnected from the rest of Europe. Empire affected our education system profoundly – being built on the playing fields of our public schools. “I think the fact that we live in a United Kingdom is not entirely a consequence of empire but was partly caused by it because, following the Scots’ failed attempts at empire and bankruptcy they then joined forces with the English. The fact that so much of the world speaks English... there are dozens and dozens of consequences, including the change to the genetic make-up of the people of this country as a result of post-war immigration.”

On the day we meet in Yorkshire the BBC has announced 2,000 job losses, and all programmes and departments are to cut budgets by 16 per cent – although Newsnight, which Paxman has presented for 22 years, will not be hit so hard. He hasn’t heard the details, so isn’t able to discuss it. But, when it comes to the licence fee he says: “It can only be justified by (the quality of) what it’s spent on. As a funding mechanism it begins to look pretty old-fashioned now. No-one as far as I am aware has come up with a better mechanism, but they’re going to have to do so.”

He says the standard of Newsnight varies depending on the quality of films and the guests available. The programme’s average audience of 717,000 surges during huge stories like phone hacking, and it takes a hit on Thursdays when the same audience is also interested in Question Time on BBC1.

He says he still gets a great buzz out of Newsnight, even if things occasionally get out of hand, as they did the other week, when pundit Peter Oborne repeatedly called a Eurocrat an idiot, leading the man in Brussels to walk out.

It didn’t help that said interviewee had no sense of humour, says Paxman; nor did it help (in my view) that Paxo repeated the word. “Do I consider it a failure? Absolutely. It is mere vulgar abuse calling someone an idiot, and when they don’t take it in the spirit of jest it doesn’t help matters. That’s what happens in a live discussion.”

In his other best-known TV role, he may occasionally smite University Challenge students with one of those looks, but he says he admires the contestants.

“Sometimes a withering look is deserved when they get a ridiculous score, but generally they know a great deal, and the reason I like it so much is that it gives the lie to this caricature of students as being ignorant, and slovenly. A lot of them know amazing things... and the wearing of learning lightly is an attractive quality.”

Empire – What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman is published by Viking, £25. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk

Hear Jeremy Paxman in conversation, at yorkshirepost.co.uk/booksoutloud.