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.
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