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I've been watching these and I've found them completely fascinating. The main problem I've had with them is that I can't determine whether Paxman is giving some an easier time than others or whether they're just dealing with it better. I watched the Liberal Democrat one on Monday and I came out of it thinking that Paxman had gone too far on a number of occasions. But the more I thought about it afterwards, the less I was sure that this was the case. Maybe he just walked into it. I can't tell. On the other hand, the questions he was asking were certainly loaded, over-simplistic in places and on occasion of the "do you still beat your wife" kind. The first one, then, lowered my estimation of both Jeremy Paxman and the Liberal Democracts.
I watched Blair on Wednesday and frankly I was pretty impressed - Paxman went at him like a cougar and also was slightly over melodramatic in terms of heavy sighs and rhetoric, but Blair managed to pull the whole thing around. Whatever you think of him, the man has political chops - he got angry at times and he fought hard to state that whatever you thought of his decisions, that he'd done it for honourable reasons. I came out of it more convinced of that than when I came in, but with the same nagging feeling that maybe this was more of a performance than a true display of inner feeling.
Howard I thought was the most evidently slimy and political of the lot, roaming around the edges, answering questions with rhetoric and avoiding question after question. It was, however, terrifyingly effective. He was the first of the three I think to make Paxman look unreasonable in his questioning and I think the most skilled and elegant politician of the three. Unfortunately, I disagree with almost everything he stands for. I couldn't tell whether or not he was getting an easy deal though. It certainly seemed less interrogatory than Blair and Kennedy. What did anyone else think? |
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