Politicians interview pundits: George Osborne and Andrew Marr

GO Right, well, Andrew, I was very kindly invited to your 50th birthday party and I met your family, and they struck me as the most down-to-earth, sensible people. Your father told me he was a Conservative.

AM My first political campaign was in the back of my mum's car, canvassing for what were called in my part of the world Unionists, but were, in fact, Tories.

GO So it was a complete act of rebellion to end up selling the Socialist Organiser at university.

AM Well, I never actually sold the Socialist Organiser. But I was a raving leftie.

GO So what was it? A pathetic teenage rebellion?

AM It was rather a good teenage rebellion, George [laughs]. I started when I was at prep school. I wrote off to the embassy of the Republic of China, who sent a whole lot of Little Red Books, which I passed around my school fellows.

GO Prep school?

AM Yeah…

GO I'm interested in people in public life who have been privately educated. In my job you get asked, because of the background you come from – I was privately educated – can you relate to people who don't have a similar background?

AM I think people relate to other people better or worse depending on their personality and their interest in other people. It's a matter of temperament rather than education.

GO You're obviously very interested in politics. Why would you not want to go into politics?

AM It never particularly appealed to me. I have got, although I can't talk about them, strong political views, but they don't fit into a party.

GO Presumably you find a party to vote for in elections?

AM Yeah. But not the same one all the time.

GO You know, I replaced a BBC journalist in parliament…

AM Well, you never say never.

GO I think I've got my story, haven't I? You just said, "Never say never", so that means you've at least thought about it?

AM Yeah, I need a party that's going to come round to my point of view.

GO You'd be an independent?

AM I'm contracted for a few more years yet doing what I'm doing. But one day, I certainly wouldn't rule it out.

GO What was your biggest journalistic mistake?

AM Well, many years ago, when Alan Clark was the junior trade minister, I and a colleague took him out for lunch. It was Christmas and I said the stupidest thing I've ever said: "Why don't you choose the wine, Alan?" We drank a great deal of wine that was so eye-wateringly, ball-crunchingly expensive that the two of us staggered out afterwards, talking about how we were possibly going to get this through on expenses. Now, what Alan Clark had been telling us was that he had absolutely no time for this nancy view of not selling arms or equipment to Saddam Hussein – who, he thought, on balance, was a good fellow, and more on our side than the bloody Iranians. He was chortling away about how they had got spare parts for lorries and all sorts of things through to Iraq. It was what came to be known as the Arms To Iraq affair…

GO So you're telling me…

AM I had the whole story… [Laughs.]

GO The combination of being drunk and wanting to fiddle your expenses made you miss this story… [Both laugh.]

AM I think that's a fair assessment.

GO The classic charge against the Westminster lobby is that, because you journalists talk privately to ministers, you know lots of things you don't tell the public.

AM I don't think there was anything of any substance that I knew for sure and didn't tell the public. The minute I found a senior cabinet minister who said to me, in an unguarded moment, very privately, that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, I went straight on to the 10 o'clock news and said, "Even the government has now ^­ accepted that they were wrong about all of that", and got that person into considerable trouble.

GO You brought up Iraq. Do you think the BBC was ill-treated by the Hutton report?

AM I absolutely do.

GO Do you think the BBC has recovered its journalistic confidence since then?

AM Yeah. I think the BBC as a corporation had an incredibly traumatic time, but I don't think it was felt by reporters on the front line.

GO The news output wasn't affected?

AM I think there was one story about a politician's heavy drinking which I was pretty sure about and wasn't used.

GO Charles Kennedy?

AM Yeah. It wasn't used on the day. Partly because his office had said it was absolutely untrue, and legal threats would follow. I think that was the only example I can remember.

GO If you look now at the future of the BBC, why is James Murdoch wrong? Again, stressing that this is not necessarily my view… [Laughs.]

AM Ah… how long have we got? Fundamentally, I think he's wrong about the BBC. Remove the BBC from the centre of journalism, allow some of those safeguards which have been in broadcasting to go to one side, and what will happen is that we will get much more biased reporting.

GO Doesn't the BBC crush new areas of media? This is an organisation which is cross-subsidising, so it's taking a 60-year-old lady and using her money to pay for an online news site that a 20-year-old might be watching. How many listeners of Radio 1 are paying their licence?

AM Actually, I think more people are paying it than ever before.

GO It's these detector vans doing their job… Have you ever been inside a BBC detector van?

AM I have never been inside a BBC detector van.

GO Have you ever seen one? Some people suspect they don't exist.

AM I think they're disguised as Foxton's estate agent Minis [Both laugh.]

GO Finally, I've discovered that you're a great painter…

AM A bad painter…

GO What are you painting at the moment?

AM I've just finished some landscapes of fields in Devon.

GO And what's on your iPod? Arctic Monkeys?

AM Muse…

GO Vera Lynn?

AM Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. Quite a lot of that. A bit of Van Morrison. A bit of Jarvis Cocker. And I've got quite a lot of Handel and Strauss arias, which are a bit strange to run to, but there you go.