Paxmanic

In Competition No. 2851 you were invited to mark Jeremy Paxman’s departure from Newsnight by supplying an extract from an interview with a politician or statesman in which the interviewer doggedly but unsuccessfully attempts to get a straight answer to a straight question. There’s space only to announce that the winners take £30 and W.J. Webster nabs £35 for his entry, which features a slippery Boris Johnson.

I. Would you like to replace David Cameron as Prime Minister?

B.J. With whom? Good grief, man, there’s no vacancy and I’m no kingmaker.
I. Nor a potential rival?

B.J. He is my leader and I think of myself as his fidus Achates. I stroll pleasantly in the cool of his shadow.
I. But if he were for some reason…

B.J. ‘If’ is a word that translates us into an imaginary world. I prefer to deal in bracing reality.
I. In reality, then, would you hope to be Prime Minister?

B.J. Every foot-soldier, they say, has a field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack. That thought spurs us all to hope.
I. So you think you are equipped for the job?

B.J. Patently, I have shown myself ‘capax imperii’, end quote. But the party is buzzing with highly capable people, all of us wholly intent on landing a whopping Conservative majority in the general election.
W.J. Webster
 
Paxman: King Herod, did you order the Massacre of the Innocents?

Herod: Look, drawing conclusions of any kind from localised trends in demographic data is extremely unwise.
Paxman: But you had every child under the age of two slaughtered, didn’t you?

Herod: Inflammatory language is deeply unhelpful in any discussion of pre- to post- mortem transition events.
Paxman: Nevertheless, you had those kids killed, right?

Herod: Jeremy, you can dispute accounts of recent events all day. That’s a privilege I, as an autocrat, neither have nor can allow.
Paxman: But you exercised the power to issue death warrants against infants?

Herod: Early-years development has become a much-contested policy area, but I am confident this administration will deliver considerable savings imminently.