Andrew Marr

Andrew William Stevenson Marr (born 31 July 1959) is a British journalist and broadcaster.

Marr was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on 31 July 1959 to Donald Marr, an investment trust manager, and his wife Valerie.

Regarding his upbringing, he has said: "My family are religious and go to church... [a]nd I went to church as a boy".

His father was an elder in the local Church of Scotland, in Longforgan, which Marr grew up in.

Marr was educated in Scotland at Craigflower Preparatory School, the independent High School of Dundee; and at Loretto School, also a private school in Musselburgh, East Lothian, where he was a member of Pinkie House and a prefect.

He went to read English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, graduating with a first class honours degree.

Regarding his political affiliations, he was formerly a Maoist and a member of the Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, a left-wing pressure group founded by Labour Party members, now known as the Alliance for Workers' Liberty.

His interest in Mao Zedong began as early as age eleven, when he gave fellow Craigflower School students copies of the Little Red Book that he had requested and received from the Chinese embassy.

His affinity for Maoism continued into his time at Cambridge, where Marr says he was a "raving leftie" who acquired the nickname "Red Andy".

Marr joined The Scotsman as a trainee and junior business reporter in 1981.

In 1984, he moved to London where he became a parliamentary correspondent for the newspaper, and then a political correspondent in 1986.

Marr met the political journalist Anthony Bevins, who became his mentor and close friend.

Bevins was responsible for Marr's first appointment at The Independent as a member of the newspaper's launch staff, also in 1986.

Marr left shortly afterwards, and joined The Economist, where he contributed to the weekly "Bagehot" political column and ultimately became the magazine's political editor in 1988.

Marr has remarked that his time at The Economist "changed me quite a lot" and "made me question a lot of my assumptions".

Marr returned to The Independent as the newspaper's political editor in 1992, and became its editor in 1996 during a particularly turbulent time at the paper.

Faced with price cutting by the Murdoch-owned Times, sales had begun to decline, and Marr made two attempts to arrest the slide.

Beginning his career as a political commentator, he subsequently edited The Independent newspaper from 1996 to 1998 and was political editor of BBC News from 2000 to 2005.

He made use of bold 'poster-style' front pages, and then in 1996 radically re-designed the paper along a mainland European model, with Gill Sans headline fonts, and stories being grouped together by subject matter, rather than according to strict news value.

This tinkering ultimately proved disastrous.

With a limited advertising budget, the re-launch struggled for attention, then was mocked for reinterpreting its original marketing slogan 'It Is – Are You' to read 'It's changed – have you?'.

At the beginning of 1998, Marr was sacked, according to one version of events, for having refused to reduce the newspaper's production staff to just five subeditors.

According to Nick Cohen's account, the sacking was due to the intervention of Alastair Campbell, director of communications for Tony Blair.

Campbell had demanded that David Montgomery, the paper's publisher, fire Marr over an article in which he had compared Blair with his predecessor John Major.

This article had followed an earlier one by Blair published in The Sun, in which Blair had written: "On the day we remember the legend that St George slayed a dragon to protect England, some will argue that there is another dragon to be slayed: Europe."

Marr's response asserted that Blair had spoken in bad faith, opportunistically championing Europe to pro-EU audiences while criticising it to anti-EU ones; and that the phrase "some will argue" was Blair's disingenuous rhetorical ruse to distance himself from the xenophobic appeal that he himself was making.

Three months later, Marr returned to The Independent.

Tony O'Reilly had increased his stake in the paper and bought out owners, the Mirror Group.

O'Reilly, who had a high regard for Marr, asked him to collaborate as co-editor with Rosie Boycott, in an arrangement whereby Marr would edit the comment pages, and Boycott would have overall control of the news pages.

Many pundits predicted the arrangement would not last and two months later, Boycott left to replace Richard Addis as editor of the Daily Express.

Marr was sole editor again, but only for one week.

Simon Kelner, who had worked on the paper when it was first launched, accepted the editorship and asked Marr to stay on as a political columnist.

In 2002, Marr took over as host of BBC Radio 4's long-running Start the Week Monday morning discussion programme.

He began hosting a political programme—Sunday AM, later called The Andrew Marr Show—on Sunday mornings on BBC One in September 2005.

In 2007, he presented Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain, a BBC Two documentary series on the political history of post-war Britain, which was followed by a prequel in 2009, Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain, focusing on the period between 1901 and 1945.

In September 2012, Marr began presenting Andrew Marr's History of the World, a series examining the history of human civilisation.

Following a stroke in January 2013, Marr was in hospital for two months.

He returned to presenting The Andrew Marr Show in September 2013.

Marr left the BBC in December 2021.

In March 2022, he started his first show, called Tonight with Andrew Marr, on LBC.