Ian Brunskill - The Times Companion to 2017 - The best writing from The Times

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”.