The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times

Paxman is scathing about his father’s social pretensions and evolving accent as he leaves the navy and tries, falteringly, to rise in the world. Keith resents his wife’s family wealth, which pays for Jeremy, his two brothers and little sister to attend private schools. He becomes a typewriter salesman then ascends to manage factories across the Midlands. The family home grows to a country house and Keith adopts brass-buttoned blazers, a monocle and plus-fours. Paxman sees him as a try-hard and a phoney who once introduced his son to his golf-club friends as “one of those homosexual communists from the BBC”.

Moreover, the family’s social standing is precarious: middle class “by our fingernails”. Jeremy never feels at ease at Malvern College “with the boys who genuinely belong to the professional classes”, and a sense of not truly belonging and a bad case of impostor syndrome have never left him.

Later, when Labour nationalises the steel industry, his father quits and is transformed into a comedy huckster, buying cosmetics from a company called Holiday Magic in a pyramid scheme, then a chain of laundrettes. Finally, Keith reappears at the end of the book, as a coda, having moved to Australia and broken contact with his family. Paxman goes over to find him but the encounter is so vaguely explained, we don’t learn if his mother had been divorced or had died. It is as if Paxman, having started to exhume this painful matter, finds it too difficult to finish.

I ask what lasting effect his father had on his life. “There comes a point, about the age of 40, when you have to stop saying how you are is a consequence of how you were brought up. And particularly when you are 66, it is pathetic to say, ‘I am as I am because of things that happened in my childhood.’

“I understand what you’re digging for. I’m just …” I’m not digging — I’m asking about your memoir. “Yes, you are digging.” It’s my job to dig. “Well, you just said, ‘I’m not digging.’ Make up your mind.”

Wouldn’t you ask, in my position?

“Well, I might.” Eventually, Paxman says quietly, “I will not be portrayed as a ‘poor little me’ figure.”

The “homosexual communist” remark, he says, was “an example of wardroom humour”. But it stuck with you? “Oh, I remember it vividly, where it happened.”

Did your father ever say he was proud of you? “I expect so …”

Did you feel he was proud?

“It wasn’t a terribly … It wasn’t that sort of close, intimate relationship. But I do understand that if I answer your question saying, ‘Oh, I never felt he was proud of me,’ I know how you will write that. I’m like the boy in the jam factory who didn’t eat jam because he knew what went into it.”

When his father left, Paxman was about 24, a BBC trainee. He does not report whether his departure was expected or sudden. “I don’t recall. I wasn’t at home.”

Didn’t you all wonder over time why he didn’t come back? “No.”

He sees his siblings from time to time — his brother Giles was British ambassador to Spain — but they aren’t terribly close. “If we don’t see people very often … Intimacy is the consequence of familiarity, isn’t it?” He assumes his parents divorced, because his father eventually remarried in New Zealand and his stepmother brought Keith’s ashes to scatter in England. When I wonder how his father’s example influenced his own parenting he is instantly angry, accusing me of asking about his children. Which I wouldn’t dare. Then he says, “I think everyone is scared to some extent of becoming their parents and I suppose that would have been the case. The family relationships, I find they don’t resonate happily to me.”

Paxman’s mother, however, barely features in the book, except as quietly running the household. He doesn’t even note when she died.

“Both my parents are dead,” he says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “It’s strange, death, isn’t it? However old you are, when you’ve finally lost both parents, there is a feeling of being orphaned. And I think it’s very cruel that all the very vibrant memories I have of my mother are now intertwined with the memory of how she looked at the point of death.” Was he there? “Yes, the skin kind of collapses on to the skull and you recognise the person, but you don’t recognise them. They’ve clearly passed from one state of being to another … I remember when she was young and she had this luxurious black hair which she kept pinned back in a bun. And she had three boys within three and half years or something. And boys are quite difficult …”

I ask how old his mother was when she died.

“I’m ashamed to say I cannot tell you.”

After his father had been gone for more than a decade, sending only curt Christmas cards, Paxman went to Australia to find him.

“I was astonished by his lack of curiosity. I mean, there were grandchildren he’d never seen, spouses he’d never met. It seemed as if we were part of a life he’d put behind him.”

Was it the journalist in him who wanted to go, or the questing son?

“Both of those things, I think. I wanted to see if he was all right and I was slightly concerned in case I was becoming him.” It is the most revealing thing he’s said in an hour. And I recall a childhood incident he describes of his sister finding their father sobbing on the bathroom floor. “I didn’t want to feel I was living my life as he lived his life … I think he was actually a vulnerable man and he probably thought cutting himself off was the only way to survive.”

Paxman refers to his depression (“I spent several years seeing a therapist, and several more on antidepressants,” he says in his foreword) in several brief incidents. When he was studying at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, friends recall him standing on a bridge saying, “It is completely and utterly meaningless, isn’t it?” then going to the pub. Aged 35, after stints in Belfast during the Troubles and as a war reporter in Zimbabwe and Lebanon, and having lost three good friends, he suffered insomnia and nightmares: “I didn’t exactly have a breakdown. But it was pretty like one.”

He has refused to talk about it before. “I don’t see any reason to be ashamed of saying I’ve suffered depression, as have a vast number of people. What I’m really not willing to do is try to appear as a victim.” As when discussing his father, Paxman’s greatest fear is of appearing to whine or look pitiful and weak.

Has he learnt anything during his years of treatment he’d care to pass on?

“The great thing is that unless we are all finished, the sun’s going to come up tomorrow. It’s always worst in the middle of the night, and what seems insurmountable at 3am, at 8am looks completely different. The critical thing they teach you doing CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] is there is another way of looking at things. I would really like to learn that skill.”

Did CBT help him?

“I don’t think I was conscientious enough. But that is the key question: when everything seems black and shrouded in gloom and there seems no way out, is there another way of looking at it? Though,” he adds quietly, “if you’re in the grip of really serious depression, that’s almost impossible.”

Before I meet Paxman, I call several senior Newsnight colleagues who say many warm things. He is not a sulking prima donna: although intolerant of mediocrity, he would voice his view, then get on with the job. Nor is he a bully who “punches down”; he was patient with junior staff and, says one female executive, “was more receptive to women’s voices in the newsroom than most men in the Nineties”. But it is his complexity that instils loyalty. “Why he is a great broadcaster, not just a good one, is because beneath that outer shell of suave sophistication, there is an inner vulnerability.” This, points out another former colleague, explains his sensitivity when interviewing Terry Pratchett about facing death or the MP John Woodcock about his own mental illness.

In his memoir, Paxman expresses regret about his crueller questions to Gordon Brown (“Why does no one like you?”) and asking Charles Kennedy, “Why does everyone say of you, ‘I hope he’s sober’?” He believes his famous monstering of hapless junior treasury minister Chloe Smith was needed to bring the government to account, but asking, “Are you incompetent?” was “unanswerable and unkind”.

The media, he says, can only accommodate one idea of a person. “I know that I will always be Mr Rude or whatever,” he says. “But I know that’s not me. It’s a small part of any human being.” Yet that impenetrable outer shell, his air of not caring what anyone thought of him, created jeopardy. When you switched on Newsnight and saw Paxman was presenting, nothing seemed unsayable. And his jaded, nihilistic belief that fame, TV, politics, indeed much of human activity, is basically meaningless can be a useful mindset when dealing with the powerful. “The most striking thing about some of them,” he writes of establishment luminaries, “is how unimpressive they all are.”

The problem with Paxman is this default position — “You’re all lying fools” — solidified into a shtick. He quotes Alan Bennett on irony, the English amniotic fluid “washing away guilt and purpose and responsibility. Joking but not joking. Caring but not caring. Serious but not serious.” It encapsulates his father’s cruel wardroom humour, his own supercilious sneer.

At times he sounds high-handed, especially when discussing peers. Newsreaders, Jon Snow aside, are failed actors, not proper journalists. Nicholas Witchell is a “rather buttoned-up reporter who had written a book about the Loch Ness monster”. He says producers cried of one excitable broadcaster, “Stick a fresh battery in the news bunny.” (Is this Huw Edwards? “I have no comment to make.”)

Although he doesn’t dignify his existence with a mention in the book, he was reportedly most unpleasant to Jeremy Vine, whom he saw as a threatening younger version of himself. In Vine’s memoirs, he recalls that if he left a mug or family photo in the newsroom they were removed secretly by Paxman. “Jeremy Vine has written his memoirs?” he spits out with disdain. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But you called him your “mini-me” and “the sorcerer’s apprentice” on air. Paxman huffs. “Did I? Good.”

What interests him now more than the TV ephemera of catching out politicians are the bigger questions. “Is there a purpose?” he says. “What do things mean? What is the right way to live? I would rather spend an evening talking about those than how to manage Vladimir Putin or reform the NHS. My great discovery in the past year or so is that news doesn’t really matter.” He doesn’t watch Newsnight — “It stops me having to tell people what I think of it.”

Since he left the programme he’s kept busy writing this memoir, a column for the Financial Times and making several TV series. Work, he finds, keeps the black dog at bay. Yet one question nags him: has he fulfilled his potential? “We all ought to ask ourselves that as we approach the finishing line. Could I have done something else? I haven’t got any great talents. Well, perhaps I could have put them to better purpose.”

Does this come from his father’s view that making things was more worthwhile than just reporting on them? “I think that’s a fair observation, and that is what I feel.”

The Conservative Party made a tentative approach about him being candidate for London mayor. But he says he’d make terrible lobby fodder. He sees himself as a maverick — “I’ve never been part of the establishment,” he insists — which seems at odds with his membership of the Garrick Club. He tells me, off the record, how it came to pass that, after initially being blackballed, he was allowed to join. But he is not naturally clubbable anyway, likes being alone or in his coterie of wealthy fishing mates including Robert Harris and Max Hastings.

We’re already late for the photoshoot and I’m pink in the face from the exertion of interview combat. At the end of a TV interrogation, Paxman always asked his subjects, “Happy enough?” Almost always they said yes. So I ask him.

“I’m going to say no,” he cries. “I shall say, ‘This is a disgrace!’”

But are you ever happy enough?

“I remember at school,” he recalls, “three of us talking about what to do. One chap wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. The third fellow said, ‘I don’t mind what I do, as long as I’m happy,’ and I remember saying, ‘What a ridiculously superficial ambition,’ and he just looked slightly gobsmacked.” Then, a few years ago, Paxman heard the man worked for the United Nations and wrote saying their conversation had haunted him all his life: “I want to apologise because you were right and I was wrong.” The man responded, “Very nice of you to write, but I’ve no recollection of this at all.”

His friends have called him an Eeyore: “It’s always damp in my part of the forest,” he says. “But who wants to be Tigger? Who wants to be happy?”

So we head for the photographer’s studio where Paxman surveys clothes brought in by the stylist (“Look at these ridiculous trousers!”) then reappears in his own dark suit, barely worn since he left Newsnight. Seeing him there, back in his old armour, standing legs astride, braced for battle, with ministers to slay, I feel that old tingle of late-night jeopardy. And I miss that fearless, melancholy knight.

BATACLAN: ONE YEAR ON

Adam Sage

OCTOBER 1 2016

“I CAN REMEMBER thinking, ‘This is not the right day for my death.’”

Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of Café Bonne Bière bar in Paris. It was just after 9.30pm on November 13, 2015, and the worst terror attack in modern French history was under way. Triomphe — a balding 57-year-old intellectual who has taught in Paris’s most prestigious university, worked in the upper echelons of the civil service and founded a think tank specialising in employment issues — had gone to Café Bonne Bière after a chance encounter with an American traveller.

They had just sat down and were about to order a drink when bullets ripped into the bar and into customers’ bodies from the pavement.

“I knew straightaway that I’d been hit. I realised it was serious. I lost an enormous amount of blood, the rescue services had not arrived, and I felt the strength leaving my body. I had time to think — and I can say this very calmly today — I had time to think about death.

“I thought, ‘I am going to die.’ I would not say I was panicking just then, but I was not in a good way and I was afraid.”

Later on, in hospital, Triomphe discovered that he had been hit by three bullets. One stopped 2mm short of his intestine, another cut through his sciatic nerve and a third went through his arm. He tells the tale now with alacrity, almost amusement, as we sit in another bar near his Parisian home.

At the time, the ambulance crew was unsure whether he would pull through.

“I realised they were afraid that I would faint and at one point I really felt a sort of great tiredness, like I would slip into sleep. I realised I had to fight against that, and I made enormous efforts to not slip into that sleep.”

Outside there was chaos. The three jihadists who had attacked Café Bonne Bière had sprayed five other bars and restaurants with bullets. Minutes earlier three more had detonated suicide vests outside the national football stadium in the capital’s suburbs. A further three were in the process of slaying concert-goers during a gig by the US rock group Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan venue.

The French equivalent of the 999 line faced an avalanche of calls — more than 6,000 to the police alone. Operators struggled to work out who had been shot and where. Ambulance crews wondered whether they would be targeted while tending to the wounded. Police squads were sent to one location, then diverted to another. And journalists — me included — tried to work out what on earth was going on.

The newsdesk asked me to go the Stade de France when the first bomb went off. I ordered a taxi, then discovered that there was a siege at the Bataclan and told the driver to go there. I never reached it. Paris was in lockdown and a line of police blocked me a couple of hundred metres away.

I sat on a bench and interviewed a man whose son had been shot in the foot in a restaurant farther to the east — or that is what he had been told by his son’s friend, who had phoned him. Like me, he was stuck behind police lines watching columns of armoured vehicles rumble towards the scene of the shootings. Like me, he had no idea what to do.

For want of a better idea, I took the Parisian version of a Boris bike to cycle through streets deserted by everyone except armed officers. The Rue de Rivoli was eerily empty, the Marais devoid of life. Bars and clubs had closed, and been ordered to lock their customers inside. I got into one — the only place I could find with an internet connection at 1am — and ended up writing my dispatch amid inebriated nightclubbers struggling to comprehend what had happened.

We discovered the next morning that 130 people had died and 414 were hospitalised.

Now, with the first anniversary of the shootings and bombings approaching, I am going back over the events of that night, and they still seem as absurd and macabre as ever.

The people I interviewed for this article — the injured, the bereaved, the emergency service representatives — share anger and pain but also perplexity at the sheer senselessness, the incredible stupidity of it all. The attacks — and those that followed in Nice, where 86 people died on Bastille Day, and in Normandy, where a priest was murdered in his church — have propelled France into a disturbing new era. There is distrust and fear, and a widening gulf between the white majority and the Muslim minority.

Yet among the survivors I met, there was little expression of hatred for the Kalashnikov-wielding thugs who perpetrated the Paris shootings — more a sense of withering disdain. “Cretins” was how the father of one victim described them. Triomphe said they were pawns in a sinister game that they did not understand.

Ten months earlier, 17 people had been killed in attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish kosher store in Paris.

Parisians knew another massacre was likely. Islamic State had called on its followers to target the French because of their involvement in the Syrian bombing campaign and their perceived hostility to Islam. The movement had more jihadists from France in its ranks than from any other European country and many had returned from the war zone. Nevertheless, the attack, when it came, caught Paris by surprise.

“We heard loud noises but we didn’t pay any attention. We just said to ourselves, ‘They’re Americans, they are putting on a show, they’ve got out some bangers.’”

Sophie is among 1,500 people who experienced at first hand the blind callousness of Islamist fanaticism when it struck at the Bataclan during a concert. She is a 32-year-old rock music fan who works in a baby-sitting agency, and we meet in her studio flat, which is decorated according to her distinctive tastes. There are several model Tardises that bear witness to her passion for Doctor Who.

On the back of the front door Sophie has stuck tickets from countless concerts and films she has seen. But there have been hardly any additions since last November. Sophie and Léa, her friend, had found a vantage point on a platform at the back of the Bataclan and the band was playing Kiss the Devil, one of its hits, when Foued Mohamed-Aggad, 23, Ismael Omar Mostefai, 29, and Samy Amimour, 28, burst into the venue.

First came the noise. Then the confusion and panic.

“All of a sudden, I had a big pain in my leg, it was like I’d been hit with a hammer, and that’s when I realised what was happening,” says Sophie. “I turned my head and saw three people with guns in their hands who were shouting at us, who were shouting that they were doing this for Syria and for Iraq.”

The majority of the 90 people who died in the Bataclan were killed in the first 7 minutes, when the terrorists sprayed the crowd with bullets. That, probably, is when Sophie was hit.

Then, for a quarter of an hour, Mohamed-Aggad, Mostefai and Amimour walked through the crowd cowering on the floor and executed people, apparently at random.

Sophie saw them approach. “They were three metres from me, and then I was really, really frightened because when they made eye contact with someone, they shot them.

“I had a T-shirt with skeletons and tattoos on my arms and I was afraid they would see me, so I quickly put on my jumper and thought if they don’t see me, if I don’t exist, I’ll survive.”

Earlier — before the killings — a young man had caught her when she stumbled. Now he had been shot and was lying beside her. “I saw his chest stop moving — he was right next to me — and with Léa, we put him on us to protect ourselves.” The terrorists went past without noticing them under the now lifeless body.

At about 10pm, two local police officers entered the venue and shot dead Amimour. Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai fled upstairs, and silence descended upon the Bataclan. Sophie and Léa — and hundreds of other terrified rock fans — ran for the exit and carried on running until finally she sank to the ground by a door in Boulevard Voltaire.

“In fact, I was really hurting, but it was only when I saw the mass of flesh on my leg — it was absolutely horrible — that I realised I had been hit with a bullet. I smelt the smell of blood, and my shoe was full of blood,” says Sophie. Léa stopped a minicab and told the driver to head for the nearest hospital. Sophie had been hit twice, in the calf and the thigh, and was almost unconscious when she got there. She was bloodied, terrified, shocked — but alive.

At about the same time — 10.10pm — Chief Superintendent Christophe Molmy was entering the concert hall. Molmy, 47, is a tough cop — powerfully built, exuding understated authority and with a nose that looks like it has been flattened by a baseball bat. He heads the elite Parisian police Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) and is accustomed to arresting hardened gangsters.

Shoot-outs are his bread and butter. He had been involved in one two days before November 13 when kidnappers had got jumpy during a ransom handover. He recounts the incident as you or I might recount the breakdown of a photocopier in the office. An ordinary problem in an ordinary day’s work. The Bataclan was different: haunting, traumatic, life-changing, even for him.

Molmy had created a rapid intervention unit after the Charlie Hebdo killings: 15 men who take their guns and stun grenades home at night so they can scramble within minutes. Now they were picking their way across a mass of bodies in a silence interrupted only by the sound of phones ringing as relatives sought news of their loved ones. Some were dead, some injured, some too frightened to move.

“We were destabilised because we had the wounded pulling at our trousers and asking us to help them while we were advancing. The members of the team all have medical training and tried to do what they could, applying tourniquets and talking to people, but you advance nevertheless. If you don’t do things with method they do not work out well.”

His unit had to make the venue safe for medics, rescue workers and forensic scientists. Molmy had no idea if the terrorists were still there. Perhaps they had fled with the 900 or so spectators who had left with Sophie and Léa. Perhaps they had booby-trapped the hall.

The team took 50 minutes or so to check the ground floor as survivors emerged from the toilets, the cupboards, the electrical cabinets, the suspended ceilings where they had been sheltering. Each one had to be checked in case they had explosives strapped to their bodies — a common Islamic State tactic in Syria. None did.

But of Mohamed-Aggad or Mostefai there was not a trace. “There was no noise, no shots, nothing,” says Molmy. “I said to myself that they had probably left, but we advanced prudently just in case.”