More on the Prime Minister's official poodle

Andrew Marr, you have lost the last vestige of credibility. Your "interview" with Gordon Brown was a journalistic disgrace but I see that your political bias has been questioned before...

Media analysts David Edwards and David Cromwell, in their book "Guardians of Power", cite this statement by Marr on BBC news in 2003, after the coalition invasion of Iraq, as evidence of Marr's bias:

"I don't think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he's somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion, or focus groups, or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result."[5]


The same critics also presented comments written by Marr in The Observer newspaper in 1999 as evidence of Marr's lack of impartiality during the Kosovan crisis :

"Having said that I thought it was disastrous to start with, and I do, I want to put the Macbeth option: which is that we're so steeped in blood we should go further. If we really believe Milosevic is this bad, dangerous and destabilising figure we must ratchet this up much further. We should now be saying that we intend to put in ground troops. I don't believe this stuff about the Serbian army being an undefeatable, extraordinary, superhuman group.".[6]


Whilst writing his column in The Observer newspaper, Marr expressed a number of political views. In 1999, Marr defended the implementation of the Race Relations Act after the Stephen Lawrence enquiry stating :

"And the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain 'natural' beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off." [7]


In October 2006 Andrew Marr said: "The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It's a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias."[10]


5. David Edwards and David Cromwell. Guardians of Power. p.53
6. David Edwards and David Cromwell. Guardians of Power. p.71
7. Marr, Andrew. "Poor? Stupid? Racist? Then don't listen to a pampered white liberal like me?", The Observer, 1999-02-28.
10. Walters, Simon. "We are biased, admit the stars of BBC News", Daily Mail, 2006-10-21.