You can buy Andrew Marr, you know. For about five thousand quid, or £440 on a small scale. At Eames Fine Art in Bermondsey Street — yes, very on trend — he’s got an exhibition of his latest work, 100 Drawings and a Few Paintings. The paintings are bold in outline, strong on colour, childish in a good way. “That’s what Matisse said, isn’t it?,” he says. “Always try to see with the eyes of children.” So, if he had to psychoanalyse himself through his pictures, what would he see?
“It’s not really like that,” he says, “it’s more conscious. I’m really interested in colour combinations; the shape of the drawings comes second.” Well, if we’re looking at the colour, they look exuberant. “They are happy pictures, by and large,” he says. As for the drawings, they’re done in an odd way, drawing with a knife on white paper, so he can’t really see outlines until he’s coloured it all in, in pencil. “This is my invention, my contribution to world art.”
Being Andrew Marr, he’s had advice from the best: David Hockney — “I’m lucky enough to be a sort of friend” — advised him on what oil paints to buy (Michael Harding) and he knew the late great modernist Gillian Ayres slightly, a heroine of his. His paintings occupy the space between figurative art and abstraction. This is entirely a product of his stroke nine years ago, after which he found he couldn’t carry chairs and easels, and wouldn’t be able to pick up his kit if it got blown over in the open air.
He still walks stiffly, though you wouldn’t notice when he’s sitting and talking — and he is, as you’d expect, a very good talker. “I thought, ‘bugger this, another thing I can’t do’. Then I thought ‘hang on, I need to have a space I can control’. Then I thought, ‘actually, I can do what I’ve always wanted to and paint non-representationally or abstractly’,” he said. It’s a different aspect to the man from who set the news agenda for the nation every Sunday morning. Could he have been an artist instead of a journalist? “I nearly went to art college and I sometimes think I should have done, but I got there eventually.”
That job has now gone to Laura Kuenssberg. What would be his advice? Naturally he says she doesn’t need it, but “my advice to anyone taking on these roles is first of all be yourself, don’t try to be something you’re not; and always do the homework!” The job, he says “needs a lot of work in advance”. What made him give up the BBC was his sense that he couldn’t express his own views on things as freely as he wanted. He is a believer in BBC impartiality, on the basis that followers of Nigel Farage or Jeremy Corbyn have paid their licence fee just like anyone else and deserve an interviewer who takes their views seriously, but the effort at impartiality was a strain.
“My only point is that on a personal level, it becomes quite oppressive. You bore yourself after a while. You’re so used to self-censoring, even in a random conversation on the street. I wouldn’t sit in a pub and give forth… I’d always feel guilty. Yet I came into journalism to ruffle feathers and cause trouble and have fun. I thought ‘I’m in my early sixties; it’s time to go back to some of that’.”
So, he’s now a presenter on LBC — where he admires Jeremy Vine and Iain Dale — and a columnist on the New Statesman, which takes him, notebook in hand, back to the Commons. “That’s been great fun because I’m basically unplugged. I can say what I want. I can interview who I want and tell it as I see it.” So, what’s the difference between Andrew Marr plugged, and unplugged? He gives me an example.
“There was a moment when I was talking to John Glenn, the treasury secretary, about the Spring Statement. I said in my ‘BBC-plugged’ mode, ‘There are many people who look at what you’ve done to benefits, and will think that’s just cruel.’ And then I stopped and said, ‘I think what you’ve done to benefits given where inflation is, is just cruel.’ That’s it. I can literally say what I think. It’s still a shock for me to speak in that way.”
Who did he think was the most interesting among his interviewees? “Always the cleverest ones,” he says promptly. “Because they’re the ones who are listening very hard as you’re asking questions and trying properly to respond but often in an unexpected way.” He’s chary of identifying his favourites but he will say that he’s impressed by Jeremy Hunt and Tom Tugendhat on the Tory side, and Wes Streeting and Dr Rosena Allin-Khan for Labour.
One interviewee he was struck by was Vladimir Putin, whom he interviewed at the Sochi Olympics. He is, he says, “a very clever guy. It was a long time ago and I don’t know what’s happened to him since; a lot of people think that two years of self-isolation inside the Kremlin, with history books, has not done him a lot of good. He was able to absorb a huge amount of information in several languages and come back with a response. This was what I observed at the time”.
So what does he think is going to happen in Ukraine? “It looks, extraordinarily, as if the Ukrainians are pushing the Russians back,” he says, “something that no one ever thought. If that happens, if Ukraine wins this war, it’s going to be one of the great stories of human history in terms of a David and Goliath story.”
One beneficiary of the war is the Prime Minister. What of his chances now? “I’ll be honest,” he says. “Before the war started I thought he was a goner... because he’d lost the support of so much of the Tory Party… I just thought, he can’t carry on. He has had thus far quite a good war. It’s true that Britain supplied armaments and training before any other European countries, way before the war started. Which is why he deserves some credit… the Kremlin describes him as the number-one enemy.”
I buried my father in the same week as the Downing Street parties — there were just six of us. I don’t forget that
As for the influence of Russian oligarchs in London, he’s pragmatic. “Like everyone else I’m suspicious of the dirty Russian money sluicing around London,” he says. “I think there’s more to come in dealing with them, more to do. But I have to say, if the Russians were buying influence in London, they’ve been sold a pup and it hasn’t really worked for them.” They are quite useful consumers in, say, the art market, I observed.
As for Boris, he identifies his charisma, his effortless gift for communication as valuable qualities. But he doesn’t dismiss Partygate, which is back on the radar just now. “I do think that the Downing Street parties were shameful. I buried my father in the same week as one of those parties and there were six of us in a churchyard and I don’t forget that. I don’t think it’s a minor issue and the fact that the machine lied about it for so long really offends me. And I don’t think the war has completely cancelled everything out. He may be safe by now but I wouldn’t bet on it completely.”
His father’s death has left its mark. He was, he says, a man of the utmost integrity, an elder in the church in Scotland. Thus, Andrew Marr resembles Andrew Neil, another brilliant Scot, whose father was also a church elder. Alas, he doesn’t have his father’s religious faith, which he regrets, but the Bible reading in childhood has left its mark. “I myself am a grimly Calvinist materialist. It accounts for my cheery demeanour,” he says benignly.
In fact, he gives the impression of a man who is at ease with the world and himself. “I am a happy man,” he says, looking at his pictures. “A lucky man.”
Andrew Marr: 100 Drawings and a Few Paintings is on at Eames Fine Art until May 1
