Jeremy Paxman: the honourable hitman

Is he still tough enough? Has he lost his punch? Paxo, that is, not Blair. The 'Newsnight' interview was as revealing of the inquisitor as of his prey

Jeremy Paxman once said of one of his standard nine-minute Newsnight interviews that "you really have no choice but to go for the jugular at the start. In a longer, more

discursive interview you can go at the subject from two or three ends."

Last week Paxman conducted the longest interview in Newsnight history, his hour-plus session with the Prime Minister resulting in three nights' worth of TV that had the BBC2 current affairs programme congratulating itself. But when it was all over, it was impossible to separate the question of Mr Blair's performance from that of Paxman himself. Had television's most intimidating interviewer found the route – discursive or otherwise – to the PM's jugular?

Opinion was divided. The Daily Telegraph, seeing in Paxman an undeclared ally of New Labour, accused him of weakness. "The fact is that Paxman did not lay a glove." It suggested that he might have been sent along by The Guardian, which for its part felt equally let down, declaring that "Blair had won". Other disappointed critics found their own metaphors, which one might summarise by saying that Paxman grilled but he did not skewer. If Michael Howard, when he was a Tory home secretary, was worthy of being asked the same question by Paxman 14 times, then wasn't the Prime Minister's evasiveness deserving of equally unyielding treatment?

That, say other observers, is to miss the point. The interviews were never about point-scoring or even about "getting a story". They had to be seen in a different tradition – that of the big, sweep-of-history interview which is how we think of, say, David Frost's celebrated 1970s encounters with the former US president Richard Nixon. "Outside election campaigns, you just don't get chances like this to talk to prime ministers," one former Newsnight man explains. "And even then you wouldn't get something as wide-ranging as Paxman had with Blair. It was a tremendous coup. The BBC will want this to be regarded as a historic document, to be referred to for years to come."

As it was, there was enough in Blair's comments on the euro, Stephen Byers, his relationship with George Bush, his overall philosophy and other topics to keep the newspaper front pages in business for most of the week. And to those who felt that Blair's refusal to be drawn on some particularly tricky subjects – such as Richard Desmond's donation to the Labour Party – was as revealing as anything he actually said, there was a grandeur about Paxman's restraint that was even more impressive than the attitude he has so often struck as an intellectual bully.

''The style was very different from the caricature of what makes a Paxman interview," says Jon Barton, a former deputy editor of Newsnight and former editor of Today. "Some of the papers' reviewers haven't understood quite how tough a forensic operation this was. People were expecting a punch-up, but you won't get that with a man of Blair's sophistication. It was important that Paxman remained calm. Each question had such a clear sense of purpose, and each follow-up question had such a tight relation to Blair's answers. As a listener, Paxman is in a class of his own."

To another leading political observer, "it was almost as if Paxman was the senior figure". For the author Robert Harris, a close friend of Paxman's, the interview "marked another stage in the evolution of TV as a more important forum than Parliament", adding that Paxman has been doing the job for so many years that he is "a sort of institution".

Jon Barton thinks the interview came about because in the last six months the Government has had "a major re-evaluation of its approach to the media". Coinciding with that, it appears, has been a re-evaluation on Paxman's part of what he does as well. Upset by the reaction to a now notorious interview he conducted with the then Tory leader William Hague during last year's general election campaign, Paxman has taken heed of those in the BBC who someone close to the programme says have told him to go easy on the mercilessness.

At 52, Paxman can be forgiven for having mellowed, and career moves in recent years show someone anxious not to be defined purely as a hitman, however elegantly he may carry out his lethal duties. He turned down various offers before accepting the chance to chair University Challenge, where he plays up the scorn and exasperation in a way that amuses rather than offends. But as chairman of Radio 4's Start the Week, which falls somewhere between his two other roles, the harshness seems sometimes misplaced.

"The strange thing about Jeremy is that here he is at the very top, and yet there's always been a sense that he should be doing something more important," says one old friend. "It's not that he undervalues what he does. But he has an ambivalent attitude to everything. There is about him a sense of dissatisfaction. He's always been a very doomy character." Others who know him speak of an insecurity which not even his success as an author has calmed, and say he is highly sensitive to doubts that arise over the future of Newsnight. He finds solace in fly-fishing.

A middle-class upbringing in the Midlands – Malvern College followed by Cambridge – led straight to a career in TV, his early years spent as a reporter. He was in Northern Ireland and Central America. He had a spell as a presenter on Breakfast TV and joined Newsnight at a time when its spirit was embodied in the eccentric figure of Peter Snow. It wasn't long before the focus switched to Paxman, whose surface smoothness masked a mordant way with a question.

Paxman became something of a sex symbol, and in his private life it was a while before he settled down. But when he did, it was with someone he had been out with years earlier and, according to one friend, "had always held a torch for". She is Elizabeth Clough, who is Editor of Religion at Channel 4, and they have a teenage daughter and two younger twins, a boy and a girl. They live in the Oxfordshire village of Turville, where the presence of John Mortimer and other media figures has created a reputation that makes more established locals uneasy. It is there that Paxman expresses his philanthropic side. He is a leading light in the Turville Valley School, which runs holidays for inner- city children.

The uncertain response Blair gave Paxman when, in the final part of the interview, the question of religious belief came up, in some ways echoed Paxman's own experience, which he talked about in a rare interview in 1997. Describing how he had "just lost it" after returning to church worship a few years earlier, Paxman said he still went to church once a month and "would still like to believe. I really would".

As for his political beliefs, they too remain a mystery. He believes passionately in openness and accountability, reflected in the zeal with which he will seek to prise answers out of recalcitrant MPs. An old friend says there was a time when Paxman was considering trying to become an MP, but he told an interviewer that he contemplated it only as far as realising that he "couldn't do it – buy the whole package, be tactfully polite when your conscience tells you not to".

Paxman may just have to settle for being the best at what he is now. David Dimbleby is perhaps the only other broadcaster who might have been accorded the type of interview that Blair gave Paxman, and at 63 he is reckoned to be not far off retirement. That would leave a vacancy for Elder Statesman, though on past form Paxman would probably find something to trouble him even in that.