The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times. Ian Brunskill

week than low-income parents. By the age of three a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words at home than one from a professional family.

      It matters. How children perform in tests when they are three and a half is a strong predictor of how well they do at school years later. The best way to predict a person’s social position at the age of 19 is attainment at 16, which in turn is best foretold by attainment at 11. And you can tell who is going to do well at 11 simply by looking up who did well at seven. A meritocracy would therefore withdraw resources from the later years of life and spend earlier in the life cycle. The only government member I recall taking this seriously is a little-remembered person by the name of Andrea Leadsom.

      The regime in Young’s Rise Of The Meritocracy collapses when the government takes the children of the poor into care to ensure equality of opportunity. Every politician wants the soft version of meritocracy in which the poor do well but nobody suffers. It’s a fantasy and that is why the pertinent response to Mrs May is not hysteria about a return to the 1950s but simply this: is that all you’ve got?

JEREMY PAXMAN: ‘I’M NOT ASHAMED TO SAY I’VE SUFFERED DEPRESSION’

       Interview by Janice Turner

      SEPTEMBER 24 2016

      JEREMY PAXMAN relished “war-gaming” interviews, a former Newsnight producer tells me: debating the research, plotting manoeuvres, setting bear traps into which ministers would tumble. So how do you war-game a man who knows all the moves? After his famous question about whether he prayed with George W Bush, Tony Blair cavilled at his intrusiveness and Paxo threw up his hands in faux innocence: “But prime minister, I’m just trying to work out what kind of chap you are.”

      What kind of a chap is Paxman, beneath the suits, the elaborate disdain, the position in our culture — vacant since he left Newsnight two years ago — as the scary tutor/imposing father who sees through our dissembling and flaws? His memoir, A Life in Questions, abounds with great hack yarns about Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Dalai Lama, war reporting, political scuffles and BBC crises, yet personal detail is sketchy. He has declared his three children and partner, Elizabeth Clough, absolutely out of bounds. Indeed, no girlfriend gets more than a single line. While Paxo the man — what he feels, whom he loves — emerges rarely and fleetingly from his carapace of high snark.

      So in 300-plus pages we glean that he sits on the toilet shooting squirrels out of the bathroom window, he’s happiest fishing and (thanks to an anecdote about Orthodox Jews) that he is uncircumcised. Yet those who know him well speak of a complicated man roiling with self-doubt who “struggles with existence”. Ask about his father, they say, whose approval he sought in vain. Ask about his depression. Ask Paxman if he is happy.

      We meet at Galvin La Chapelle in east London and I have bagged us a table alone on the mezzanine high above the shiny City lunch crowd. Paxman is late, caught in cross-town traffic from his Notting Hill flat where he lives three days a week rather than commute from his family home near Henley, Oxfordshire. I watch him walk very slowly up the stairs. He wore out his knee running, is considering replacement surgery and is clearly in pain. (Later, when I see him wincing and offer to carry his suit bag, he splutters and tells me to f *** off.) Otherwise he looks splendid for 66: lean apart from a slight bay-window belly; thick, almost white hair; fine skin with that rich man’s holiday burnish. His azure linen jacket with elaborate stitching is very natty.

      Old age, however, seems much on his mind and appears to revolt him. His most recent headlines were for blasting the magazine Mature Times for its stairlift ads and portrayal of people his age as “on the verge of incontinence, idiocy and peevish valetudinarianism”. (He has a rather Alan Partridge-esque vocabulary, calling party conferences the “gallimaufry of our democracy”.) I note that his memoir is rather ageist: he refers to “whiffy old wrinklies” and tells an unkind story about John Gielgud needing help to go to the loo. He writes that old people who don’t pay “direct” taxes (ie aren’t working) shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

      Does he use his free bus pass? The eyebrows shoot up.

      “I don’t have one.”

      Why not?

      “Because I’m still earning and I’m very happy if people want to give you a discount because you’re over a certain age. But I’ve just done four weeks filming a series about rivers. The week after next I’m in Washington. Why should I expect others to pay my Tube fare?”

      Why do you believe you should be allowed to vote but people who’ve retired from jobs you can’t do in old age — roofers, say — should not?

      “I did not say that!”

      You said no representation without taxation.

      “Yes. And there will come a point of course when no one asks me to do anything. It happens to all of us.”

      So in the meantime you should be allowed to vote but they shouldn’t?

      “Sometimes, life is like that, Janice. Unfair.”

      For the first 20 minutes, after Paxo has ordered “heritage tomato” salad (scorn about what “heritage” means), mutton (scorn about how much “lamb” is really mutton) and a glass of white wine (which he believes doesn’t count as real booze), the interview comprises me asking a question and him knocking it down. It feels like a bizarre stress dream in which I’m on Newsnight playing Jeremy Paxman while the real Jeremy Paxman harrumphs and sneers. He calls me (humorously, maybe …) “a silly woman”, accuses me of misquoting him, tells me to “cast a more artful fly” and, as if abrading dim University Challenge contestants, cries, “Oh, come on!”

      How the hell, I think, am I going to ask about his father? In the book, Keith Paxman is a puzzle, a shape-shifter, a domineering presence but also an invisible man, whom his son has clearly spent his whole life trying to fathom. Jeremy, his eldest child, was born near Leeds while Keith, a naval officer, was away at sea, and screamed when introduced to him. “Relations between us never really improved much.” His father had a vile temper and beat him for any perceived insubordination with sticks, shoes, cricket stumps or his bare hand. “Did I love my father?” he writes. “My feelings ranged from resentment to passionate hatred.”

      Paxman is scathing about his father’s social pretensions and evolving accent as he leaves the navy and tries, falteringly, to rise in the world. Keith resents his wife’s family wealth, which pays for Jeremy, his two brothers and little sister to attend private schools. He becomes a typewriter salesman then ascends to manage factories across the Midlands. The family home grows to a country house and Keith adopts brass-buttoned blazers, a monocle and plus-fours. Paxman sees him as a try-hard and a phoney who once introduced his son to his golf-club friends as “one of those homosexual communists from the BBC”.

      Moreover, the family’s social standing is precarious: middle class “by our fingernails”. Jeremy never feels at ease at Malvern College “with the boys who genuinely belong to the professional classes”, and a sense of not truly belonging and a bad case of impostor syndrome have never left him.

      Later, when Labour nationalises the steel industry, his father quits and is transformed into a comedy huckster, buying cosmetics from a company called Holiday Magic in a pyramid scheme, then a chain of laundrettes. Finally, Keith reappears at the end of the book, as a coda, having moved to Australia and broken contact with his family. Paxman goes over to find him but the encounter is so vaguely explained, we don’t learn if his mother had been divorced or had died. It is as if Paxman, having started to exhume this painful matter, finds it too difficult to finish.

      I ask what lasting effect his father had on his life. “There comes a point, about the age of 40, when you have to stop saying how you are is a consequence of how you were brought up. And particularly when you are 66, it is pathetic to say, ‘I am as I am because of things that happened in my childhood.’

      “I