Then Again

Having yesterday cited interviews in 2018 conducted by Andrew Neil as examples of journalism being too preoccupied with gotchas and not interested enough in helping the public to understand the true nature of things, I now present an object lesson by the same Andrew Neil in how to be a really good interviewer. 

On the latest online weekly programme put out by the Spectator magazine Neil decided to interview the father of the current Prime Minister of Britain (who is someone I am glad survived his bout with coronavirus but I wish, given his apparent lack of any leadership qualities, had since retired to recover his strength and look after his latest child). 

My initial reaction to the news that the Prime Minister's father was going to be interviewed was to groan. If there is a greater self-promoter in the Johnson family than the Prime Minister himself and his sister, it is Stanley, father of them all. However, Neil, simply by asking good, careful questions calmly, did a superb job of exposing Johnson senior's ignorance, lack of principle and pomposity, as well as the worrying flaws in the extreme environmental policies of his son's government, (policies that, one came to suspect over the course of the interview, are at least in part the result of lobbying from the frightful Stanley, a man who does not repudiate the worst excesses of Exctinction Rebellion - in other words Extinction Rebellion ideas are being incorporated in policy at the highest level in Britain today, which is just marvellous).  

For all Johnson Senior's conviction that the public is becoming aware of the costs of, for instance, the coming compulsory boiler conversions each household will endure and is totally in favour of it, it became evident in the interview that this issue alone is going to be enormously damaging for the budgets of individual householders - and in any case is possibly unfeasible. In Stanley Johnson's performance, moreover, the viewer was able to see exactly where the current Prime Minister's own waffly bombasticism comes from and to discover that, as so often, the British establishment all too easily overlooks issues of human rights, if its own domestic interests are at stake - in this case the abuses the public is being encouraged to minimise and overlook are those of the current Communist regime in China, one of the cruellest and most dangerous the world as ever seen, but meh:  

It is a service that Neil has done in this interview, but it is a worrying thing to watch, simply because I have no idea how Britain is to rid itself of zealous idiots who are committing their hapless voters to enormous expense - expense that is to be piled on the already astonishingly enormous expense caused by the strictest and most ineffective lockdowns the world has seen during this pandemic. There is no opposition to any of this. The only voices of dissent in the parliament are those who argue that, whatever is being done, it is not enough. My children live in Britain. I worry for them.