It’s been three years since Jeremy Paxton left “Newsnight” on BBC Two, but his relentless interviewing style hasn’t gone anywhere. He took Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Conservative Party leader Theresa May to task on live television last night in what is known as “May v Corbyn Live: The Battle for No. 10,” which is a title that makes politics sound a lot cooler and more exciting than it actually is.
See, the 8 June general election is just over a week away now, and things are heating up in the fierce race between Corbyn and May, whose policies are dividing the nation as everyone prepares to vote (and tries to figure out which party they’re actually going to vote for since they all have pretty black-and-white pros and cons.
Paxman’s interviewing techniques could be seen by some as unprofessional, as in some cases, he wouldn’t let his interviewees speak and instead interrupted them and spoke over them.
The problem was Paxman loving the sound of his own voice, getting in the way of democracy
The thing is, the British people don’t have a huge decision to make regarding whether they approve of Jeremy Paxman, so the guy needs to shut up, save loving the sound of his own voice for his own time, and let the people who are more important than him who could be the Prime Minister of the country next month and whose parties are going to be on the ballot have their say. Paxman had questions that he intended to use to throw off both Corbyn and May.
He didn’t seem to have a political bias; he seemed to hate both of them. One thing he did do that was good was not allowing them to bend around his questions, which politicians are generally wont to do when questioned by journalists, and instead pressing them and pressing them for answers until he got them.
In the interview between the two Jeremies, Paxman took Corbyn to task with regards to a lot of issues.
First and foremost was his beliefs about nuclear disarmament. See, Jeremy Corbyn is a hippie and he doesn’t want the UK to have nuclear arms and if he had his way, he’d get rid of the Trident nuclear weapons program. But no one else in Labour agrees with this, and therefore it’s not in the Labour manifesto and a Labour government, if elected, will go ahead with renewing the Trident system.
Paxman sees this as a sign of weakness in Corbyn as a leader, but let’s be honest, it’s just democracy. We’re not electing a man, we’re electing a party, and that party has the good sense to keep Trident in place, just in case.
Paxman also laid into Theresa May, saying that leaders in European Union countries who are taking part in the Brexit process negotiations discussion might lose some respect for her based on her recent radical pivoting on policies and political stances and brand her a “blowhard who collapses at the first sign of gunfire.” A lot of people are calling this their favourite quote of the night; for some, it’s even their favourite quote of the whole election campaign, because people of the left-wing persuasion love insults against Theresa May.
Paxman couldn’t let Corbyn’s historical beliefs go
Yet again in an unrelenting style (ooh, edgy), Paxman kept coming back to Corbyn’s political ideologies and the ones he’s held either in the past and changed since then or held for a very long time and are therefore very important to him. He brought up Corbyn’s opposition to the British monarchy (another policy he was pushing that didn’t make it into the Labour Party’s manifesto), and the time he said that sending British troops to the Falklands was a “Tory plot.”
Also, Paxman told May that she had the “wrong answer to the biggest question in politics,” leaving it ambiguous for her to figure out what exactly he meant. She assumed Brexit and he confirmed it, asking if she still thought it was “a duff idea.”