Andrew Marr says he ‘feels 10 years younger since leaving the BBC’

An unleashed Andrew Marr has said he feels ’10 years younger’ since leaving the BBC after more than 20 years, as the veteran journalist took aim at the corporation’s strict impartiality rules.

Marr, who presented the BBC’s flagship Sunday politics show before leaving for LBC and the New Statesman this year, said that social media is making it ‘harder and harder’ to report politics for the broadcaster.

In an interview with Matt Forde’s Political Party podcast, he called the BBC’s impartiality rules ‘incredibly frustrating and ageing’ and took a pop at the corporation’s ’18 layers of grey-faced managers sitting on my shoulders the whole time’.

Marr, 62, also defended Laura Kuenssberg, saying that she had had ‘an absolutely miserable time’ as political editor – and had fought allegations that she was the ‘Prime Minister’s mouthpiece’.

‘Whatever you say gets analysed, ripped apart,’ he said, before adding: ‘I will always be pro-BBC’. 

Reflecting on his career as a whole, Marr said he was ‘too praising’ of Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq while BBC political editor, and called it his support of the war ‘biggest failure’ as a journalist.

Speaking of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which plunged Iraq and the Middle East into chaos, he said: ‘I think it was one of the greatest foreign affairs catastrophes in modern times’.

Undated BBC handout photo of Andrew Marr at the BBC

Explaining that he initially supported the invasion, he said he learned he was wrong about the WMD pretexts for war.

Marr then turned to the war in Ukraine, warning that he feared that many of the same mistakes could be replicated.

Suggesting that Britain could become embroiled in a protracted war with Russia, he hit out at Joe Biden’s recent calls for regime change in Moscow – calls which had to be rowed back by the White House.

And he also blasted Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’ sabre-rattling Mansions House speech in which she laid out British war aims, including the expulsion of Russia from all Ukrainian territory – including Russia-annexed Crimea and the Kremlin-backed breakaway regions.

But bizarrely, Marr revealed that he is most commonly mistaken for Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin. 

And elsewhere, the broadcaster poked fun at some of his more memorable interviews while at the BBC.

Recalling an interview with Jeremy Corbyn over the ex-Labour leader’s support for nuclear disarmament, he said: ‘He hasn’t thought it through. He never thought things through.’

On Boris Johnson, he said the Prime Minister ‘doesn’t really care what you ask him’ because he will rant about anything else – before adding: ‘There is almost no point in interviewing him’.

Since leaving the BBC, Marr has repeatedly seized the opportunity to speak his mind on a range of subjects.

In February this year, at the height of the Partygate drama engulfing Westminster, he tore into the Prime Minister, branding him an ‘alpha-male albino gorilla’ . 

Marr took aim at Johnson in his new role as political editor of the left-leaning New Statesman magazine.

Writing in the magazine he pointed out that that the Prime Minister was at parties in June 2020 he himself had suffered a bereavement, losing his father Donald.

‘I have found Johnson personally charming and amusing many times in the past. But at almost exactly the same time as he was hosting his parties in Downing Street, having a high old time lecturing the rest of us, I was burying my father,’ he wrote.

‘We did a good job for him – poems, a piper. But it was just a very few of us, standing outside in a churchyard in the wind: we were unable to hold our own service inside the church where he had been an elder for more than 50 years and he never had the proper send-off he richly deserved.’

Later in the article he said it is up to Tory backbenchers to decide if they have the ‘gut’ to get rid of the PM.

He wrote: ‘It’s easy to see why they would quail. Johnson is a formidable, alpha-male albino gorilla who will fight, fight and fight again to save the leader he loves (clue: he discovers him most mornings in the shaving mirror).’

And in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily Mail in January, he even let rip on the royals.  

As a biographer of the Queen, Marr said the monarchy faces an existential crisis when Charles III comes to the throne.

‘There is a sense that the whole issue of the future has not been discussed for a very long time, because the Queen is so admired and so revered,’ he said.

‘When that terrible day comes that the Queen is no longer with us, the country will go into a state of shock.

‘It will be like an ethical earthquake and I do not think it is fully understood or appreciated how this is going to be an absolutely massive moment in all our lives. 

‘It will shake the whole country in a way that will be hard to explain until we actually live through it.

‘I know the Prince of Wales has plans for reforming the monarchy; it appears Charles and William will orchestrate a clear out. 

‘It won’t be the same: the modern monarchy under Charles has to earn its place every day, every week and every month in people’s affections.

‘I’m sorry to say some members of the Royal Family have been behaving like free riders.

Marr said social media is making it ‘harder and harder’ to report politics for the BBC

‘They assume the monarchy – the institution itself – can never be questioned. But the reason it is not being questioned is because of the Queen herself.’

On immigration, he said: ‘This is going to be perhaps the single biggest political issue of the next 20 or 30 years. 

‘It is not because of anything Britain is, or isn’t, doing at the borders or even because of our poor relationship with France.

‘It’s due to climate change that millions upon millions of people are walking across parts of the Middle East and Africa towards Europe in search of a better life. And it’s going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.’

Asked about Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries’s announcement on freezing the BBC licence fee, Marr said: ‘She should be very, very careful – of Daleks,’ a reference to their tendency to ‘Exterminate! Exterminate!’ their enemies.

He also said that if he were director-general of the BBC, he would move the corporation to a subscription model.