The fearsome interviewer talks about his new book on the British empire, his dismay at our culture of greed – and his sense of not belonging

How on earth do you interview Jeremy Paxman, the grand inquisitor, the most-feared interrogator of the age, once voted the fourth scariest person on television? I wonder whether to ask the same question 14 times; I worry about combining questions about his new book, called Empire, with those of a more personal nature; I consider not turning up.

I had met Paxman once before, one Sunday afternoon at a cricket match at a lovely ground near his home in the Chilterns. Even then, out for a walk with his children, he was terrifying. I was playing for an Observer XI, and he immediately spotted how few staff from that paper were in this team of ringers. "There's no one from the Observer here," he roared, before stomping off. My anxiety resides in the fact that the contempt that appears to drive Paxman's interviewing style is real. He is really angry about something, but what?

We are meeting during the Tory party conference in Manchester. The interview takes place before his curious encounter with Boris Johnson on Newsnight, but just after the great "Mr Idiot" spat, in which Daily Telegraph columnist Peter Oborne insulted a bespectacled EU bureaucrat and Paxman failed to protect the victim, who grew so tired of Oborne's boorishness that he took off his microphone and terminated the discussion. Another example of Paxman's decline, pronounced the Observer in a profile.

The lounge of the Midland hotel, where we have arranged to meet, is so crowded with Tory grandees and their floppy-haired advisers that we have to retire to a corridor and perch on a sofa. The interview thus takes place with our bodies at a strange angle to each other – a technique I notice he follows when he interviews Johnson. We agree that the best interviews are conversations, and it may be that he concludes that sitting side by side is more conducive to good conversation. Or perhaps he was talking to Johnson in a very small studio.

A conversation with Paxman will always have a bit of edge. As I tentatively produce my copy of Empire, he recalls an interview on local radio for one of his earlier books in which the presenter got the book out, cracked the spine – clearly for the first time – and said: "Well, Jeremy, what's it about?" Not a bad question, I suggest, for while I was up until 3am trying to gut the book, I can't claim it was the closest of readings. I'd be unlikely to get the starter for 10 on University Challenge.

So what is it about, and more to the point, why did he write it? "I've always been interested [in the British empire]," he says. "One's teachers all belonged to that generation who were imperialists, and the whole narrative throughout my adolescence was of countries leaving the empire. I find it extraordinary that this purpose which drove how we viewed the world is now considered to be something that has no effect upon us."

The book offers a more or less chronological history of four centuries of empire-building, with vignettes of key figures and incidents. "If you're a journalist, these stories are amazing," he says. There will be a TV series next year, but this time organised by theme: money, power, morality, sport, ideas of home. He is irked that the BBC isn't broadcasting the series to coincide with the book. "It's a mystery to me," he says. "The thing was delivered in July."

How does he view the imperialists; with admiration or loathing? "It's stupid to have a simple-minded view," he says. "There were appalling things that were done, and there were wonderful things. I know we're supposed to have only a simple-minded view of these things, but how one can object to someone whose motivation was to stop slavery, I don't know. Clearly, David Livingstone was an imperialist, but he was driven by the desire to stop slavery. Even a fruitcake like General Gordon had pronounced views about slavery, so I don't think the decision to write empire off and say, 'We don't need to consider this any more', will really wash."

He is fascinated by what we were then – until the first world war, the greatest global power – and what we are now, a middle-ranking power painfully working out our relationship with what he calls a "European would-be state". He believes the disparity between the two explains our desire to forget our imperial past. "The two things don't seem to gel, but my argument is that actually they do and one very often explains the other. We think we're special, and that is a good part of why we find the European project difficult."

Paxman has always been interested in national identity. Previous books have explored Englishness and royalty, and what is clear from them is that he sees the UK as a nation at sea – in a metaphorical, rather than a nautical, sense. "I do feel that," he agrees as I outline this thesis. "Don't you?" I suggest it is this sense of national drift – he calls it the "post-imperial hangover" – that underlies his air of restlessness. He has talked before of the privations of his parents' generation – his father was on the north Atlantic convoys – and of the fact that his generation has never been tested. He's had it too easy – remember him getting weepy when confronted on Who Do You Think You Are? with details of his grandparents' sufferings? I put it to him that he was born out of his time – that he would have preferred to be present during Britain's finest hour, rather than in the dog days since.

"I can see where that's going," he says with a laugh. Yet to some degree he accepts it. "Why are we in this mess, now facing the prospect of economic armageddon? It's because the prevailing characteristic has been greed, and it doesn't matter whether it's individuals living beyond their means or governments living beyond their means or people seeking to get rich quick. That has been the prevailing characteristic, and I find something a great deal more noble in a motivation that is less selfish and materialistic. There was a shared sense of endeavour [in the war], and I find that really rather admirable. My generation [he was born in 1950] have had it good, and I am really troubled by what we have done with it."

Does that frustration feed his interviewing style? Is that where the contempt – sometimes mistaken for insouciance – comes from? He answers this question in a roundabout way, saying he spent the early part of his TV career as a foreign correspondent, was never a political journalist or part of the lobby, so approached domestic politics when he joined Newsnight in 1989 "as one might approach some odd foreign tribe". His verdict on the Westminster tribe? "As time goes on, one gets increasingly conscious of historical background and the diminishing horizon. Short-termism just won't do, and so many of those snake oils that we seem to be offered are merely short-term."

He doesn't seem much taken with the current crop of politicians, or indeed with contemporary politics generally. The decision that because of budget cuts at the BBC this would be the last party conference to be covered live by Newsnight was announced after we met, but judging from his attitude he won't miss these annual gatherings. "They're not my favourite occasions. It's like being the one non-believer in a convention of Moonies. It's interesting, but profoundly disorientating. It doesn't matter whether it's Labour, Lib Dem or whatever, it is a tribe of people who are politically committed and think there is only one version of revealed truth. They've always been unusual, but they're now a real minority in society."

By now I'm feeling quite relaxed – Paxman is proving much more easy-going than I'd imagined – and I can try my other Big Idea. Which is that Paxman doesn't really like being a journalist, albeit a grand and extremely well-remunerated one. His younger brother Giles is Britain's ambassador in Spain. Wouldn't that be more his line too? "I'd have been an absolutely hopeless diplomat," he insists. "He was the clever one. He was very good at languages. I'm not particularly good at languages. The instincts of a diplomat and a journalist are very different: a journalist finds out something, he wants to pass something on. That's my natural instinct."

But isn't he frustrated at not being able to change society, to stop the drift of the past 50 years? Maybe he should have been a politician. "My problem was I didn't know which party would even have me. I don't really regret it, but you know that Dr Johnson remark: 'Every man thinks less of himself for not having been a soldier.' You could say that every man thinks less of himself for having become a journalist. My father always used to say: 'Why don't you get a proper job?'"

Does he still enjoy it? "I love it," he says. Did he see the Observer profile suggesting he was going downhill? "Yes, you turn the page and think, 'Oh God'." He says he didn't read it closely, but closely enough to notice it said he was at school at Charterhouse – a factoid added to his Wikipedia entry by an over-enthusiastic Old Carthusian. "It is slightly depressing that people recite this as fact," he says. "I have never set foot in the place." He went to Malvern College and then Cambridge, where he read English and edited Varsity.

But the serious point – he's done Newsnight for more than 20 years, budgets are being cut, why not pack it in, carry on doing University Challenge, write more books, rove around doing TV series? "I'm afraid I have a rather unhealthy appetite for the fight," he says. But isn't the programme in terminal decline? "My view about a programme that's on five nights a week is that it's like a newspaper: if two nights a week it's good, two nights a week it's pretty good and one night a week it's less than good, that's probably all that's ever going to happen. You're at the mercy of events, and you're lucky or unlucky in terms of who you get as guests and the sorts of films that are on offer. That's the nature of the beast."

But it surely has some work to do to get back to where it was? "What do you mean, 'where it was'?" he counters, dropping the bantering style for a moment. "The basic DNA of the programme is OK. It seems to me it's part of the national conversation, quite an active part of the national conversation judging by the emails we get." Ah, a chance to mention the "Mr Idiot" furore. Shouldn't he have stepped in to stop the insults earlier? "It's very easy to make these judgments if you're not sitting there in a live discussion," he says. "The first time he [Oborne] used the words 'Idiot in Brussels', my instinctive reaction was let's see if we can progress this with some humour, which is why I said 'Mr Idiot', hoping that he [EU economic affairs spokesman Amadeu Altafaj Tardio] might see the humorous side of it, but he did not. Then when Oborne repeated it two or three times, it just struck me as being completely gratuitous."

Paxman is not interviewing the PM during conference week. Is Cameron dodging him? "There is no constitutional requirement that people sit down and be interviewed by anyone. If they want to choose somewhere they'll get a soft soaping, well …" He never finishes this thought, so I try to finish it for him, suggesting that Cameron might feel more comfortable with the cakestand-owning Sarah Montague, who does the week's big setpiece interview on the Today programme. "You'll have to do better than that," he says with a laugh. "You'll really have to do better than that. Here's a hole. Why don't you jump into it?"

Paxman the person is, as one profiler remarked, opaque. He has a long-time partner, TV producer Elizabeth Clough, and three teenage children, but doesn't like to talk about his personal life. He has periodically suffered from depression, but refuses to discuss it. I take him to task for this, suggesting that someone who grills others ought himself be willing to be grilled. "It's a nice try, but I'm not going to do it," he says. "I don't want to talk about it, so there you are."

What he does own up to is a natural solitariness – his love of fishing may reflect that. "I've always felt myself to be an outsider," he says. "I've always felt awkward." That's a classic journalistic trope, I say. "Trope is not a kind word to use," he says with a vehemence that takes me by surprise. "I'm telling you this is something I genuinely always felt. Nowadays of course I know loads of people. If you're around long enough, you meet loads and loads of people, and if I go into a room now I can cope. But my abiding memory as a young person is feeling that one did not belong in any organisation, and that's not a comfortable place to be."

He is starting to get a bit restless, and eyes my wad of questions: "Christ, how long is this going on? If I were you, I'd skim through it." I mention God – he was very keen at one point, but then lost his faith. Is he seeking a purpose and failing to find it? "It's the only important question, isn't it?" he says. "What is the point? Is there one?" Maybe he should have been a theologian. "Have you ever read any theology?" he says with horror.

What does he want to do career-wise in the time that remains? He mocks the phrase. "There's a man with a scythe coming down the corridor," he says with that wheezy laugh. "I really enjoy the business of writing books. The days when it goes badly are like wading through treacle, but when it goes well it's like surfing a wave. What I want to do, inasmuch as I want to do anything, is go on satisfying my curiosity." And change the world a bit, I add, cleaving to my thesis. "You're trying to paint me as some kind of pilgrim or social reformer, but there is an alternative narrative. I love this country. I would never live anywhere else. I adore its countryside, and even now I admire its prevailing custom of civility."

The photographer arrives and soon George Osborne will be making his conference speech. My thesis has taken a bit of a knock, but I have to stop – the absurdity of trying to draw large conclusions from brief encounters on uncomfortable sofas. Is there anything else he wants to have taken into consideration before I pass sentence? Another wheezy laugh. "You write what you like, I'm sure you will." Thank you. Then I will suggest that he might have been happier as a 19th-century explorer charting the Congo than a 21st-century interviewer probing political pygmies. And that he would have been a pilgrim if he hadn't learned the art of being a TV personality.

{loadposition user38} source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/09/jeremy-paxman-felt-myself-outsider

source: http://www.europerank.com/lifestyle/celebrities/57143-jeremy-paxman-i-ve-always-felt-myself-to-be-an-outsider