Andrew Marr

My Sunday job is to ask questions; but in this campaign there is a line of criticism of television interviewing which makes me pause. The rise of misnamed social media (mostly Twitter) makes it all too easy to clip and post ‘Gotcha!’ moments, when a politician appears to be gasping for air at a particularly pertinent question. Two or three such moments now win the wearisome accolade of ‘a car crash interview’. So (goes the criticism) interviewers are under increasing pressure to skew their shows that way — go for cheap shots, get them online, and hope they go viral. I admit it’s a temptation.

I am up on the far north-west coast of Scotland, where the weather is changing every five minutes under vast skies and huge seascapes. Go to the beach and look left, and it’s a sparkling Mediterranean scene, bright white sand and opalescent turquoise water, what you might call Rossini weather. Swivel your gaze right, and vast dark clouds tower up, obliterating mountain ranges — Bruckner weather. Me? Like Isabel Hardman, of this parish, I just walk straight into the sea and swim. The choppy water is certainly cold but the whole experience is elating, and good for clearing the head. Which is, of course, what we need this summer. August politics is changing faster than the August skies, and this autumn looks set to be the most politically dramatic in my lifetime.

After any major interview, I turn with great interest to discover from Twitter whether I am currently a sinister Marxist undermining the Tories; a foam-flecked believer in the hardest of hard Brexits; or a mildly outdated Blairite propagandist. Maybe, I’m all three. Or, just possibly, I ask the questions, rather than taking responsibility for the answers. Our job at the BBC is not to denounce, lampoon, deride or sneer at elected politicians but to ask them, politely, direct and relevant questions — pause — and let the viewers decide. The number of viewers watching the show suggests the majority understand this. But there’s no doubt that the vote to leave the EU has made many people in certain parts of British public life almost uncontrollably angry.

At Chequers last week to interview the Prime Minister, I hear some sad news of Churchill’s mouse. The story goes that the rather fine painting there by Rubens and Frans Snyders, illustrating Aesop’s fable of the lion and the mouse, was ‘touched up’ by Winston himself. During the war, staring at the painting, Churchill decided that the mouse was hard to see properly. Never a man for whom self-doubt was a crippling disability, he promptly picked up his paints and improved the rodent. That, at least, was the story put about by Harold Wilson. As I was waiting for Mrs May and her NHS figures, I was told the painting had long since gone away for restoration and had come back ‘with that awful rat cleaned off’.

It can be impossibly hard to concentrate on the intricacies of the Brexit negotiations. But over the past week, we have got a certain bracing clarity. There are two logical British positions. We mostly turn our backs on the EU way of doing things, and become a noticeably different country — less European, less regulated. That is where most Conservatives seem to be heading. Or we conclude that the economic risk is too big and stick close to the EU, ceding freedom to strike new trade deals in order to keep those nearer markets fully open. After his speech, that’s where Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is going. What is being squeezed is the notion of a middle way — frictionless access to EU markets and maximum ability to diverge.

Of all the villages of London, it seems to me, most of the time, that I live in the happiest: Primrose Hill, north of Regent’s Park, with its candy-coloured stucco houses, excellent cafés, friendly people, proper pubs and views over the capital which have film-makers daily kneeing each other in the groin — oh yes, and a good bookshop too. This can feel about as good as it gets. But that’s if you have some money. Just round the corner, virtually out of sight, is some of the worst deprivation in north London — huge poverty, so easy to look away from.

Who will be the next Tory leader? I keep asking the senior contenders over breakfast after the show or at those now notorious summer parties. And they all say the same thing: she will stay for a couple of years and then it will be somebody we haven’t thought of yet. It’s already too late, they say, for MPs in their 50s and 60s. Predicting politics these days is like juggling greased goldfish… but I pass this on for what it’s worth.

We are all drama queens, really, we political hacks; and so we were all thoroughly delighted by Theresa May’s Tuesday coup. I have long been arguing that we would have an election this year, and I had been beginning to feel lonely. But one big thing I got wrong: it had seemed to me in January that a Brexit election would shatter much party discipline, since the voters would be principally interested in where candidates stood on the Great Issue and both Tories and Labour were deeply divided about it. However, by framing the current contest in the way she has, May has deftly but brutally carved away the long and substantial tradition of Tory pro-EU politics. In this election, to be Tory is to support her uncompromising version of Brexit.