WHITE: “Let me first answer your last interruption.”

Grumpy Humpy should bow out.
Michael White
British Journalism Review June 2006 vol. 17 no. 2 21-26
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Humphrys takes this hectoring stance to the borders of self-caricature:

• John Humphrys:“Why are you telling me lies, minister?”
• Hapless Minister: “John, I am not telling you...”
• JH:“Will you stop prevaricating...”
• HM:“Let me try and answer your...”
• JH:“Don’t interrupt when I’m interrupting.”

I exaggerate, but not much. Little wonder that some politicians, such as David Cameron, now attempt to play these tactics to their own advantage, appealing to the listener for fair play:

“Let me first answer your last interruption.”

Part of what goads the interrogating classes, of course, is either spin – the propensity of a Blair or, especially, Brown to ignore the question and keep bulldozing on with the message – or bland or evasive answers.

But who encouraged politicians to behave this tedious way?

A  media for whom every nuance of policy difference within a party is whipped up into a major split. We all do it, but we are not all, like the BBC is, licence-funded.

Marsh (now moved on to start the BBC’s new College of post-Torquemada Journalism) has been accused by headbangers at the New Statesman and elsewhere of emasculating the programme’s inquisitorial and pro-active journalism in the post-Hutton era. Not during the half-hour chunks I hear, he hasn’t; not while farmer Humphrys draws breath over the radio gate.

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