Marr: I ingested various chemicals in the 80s
ANDREW Marr has admitted he ‘ingested various chemicals’ in punk clubs as a young man.
The BBC journalist said that the ‘naughtiest thing’ he’d ever done was in the early 1980s when he went clubbing in London.
however the 57-year-old did not specify which ‘chemicals’ he took.
‘I’ve certainly ingested various chemicals that I shouldn’t have done when I was a young man going to punk clubs in London in the early 1980s, I was misbehaving very badly there,’ he said while speaking at the China exchange last night. ‘That’s about as far as far as I’m going to go.’ The journalist also spoke about breaking into broadcast after years working for newspapers, adding: ‘I always thought that I looked so odd that I had no future on television at all.’
Speaking about Theresa May during the event, he said she had often tried to dodge appearing on his BBC1 show in the past by claiming she went to church on Sundays.
he added that the fact she was ‘cripplingly shy’ may have cost her the general election.
‘When Theresa May was home secretary we had been trying to bully her to come into the studio for a long time,’ he said. ‘She said she went to church and wouldn’t do it.’ Marr has three children with the journalist Jackie Ashley, but their marriage has been rocked by scandals, including a longrunning affair which he sought to conceal via a court gagging order.
In a separate incident, he was photographed kissing a colleague outside a bar in 2012.
Marr’s extramarital relationship, which ended in 2003, was common knowledge at Westminster and within the BBC, where he was political editor at the time. he believed he had fathered a child with the woman but a DNA test later confirmed he was not the father.
he eventually came clean about the affair in a 2011 interview in the Daily Mail, where he said he was ‘embarrassed’ about the injunction, adding: ‘I did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists.’
When Marr nearly died after suffering a stroke in 2013, Miss Ashley, 62, took nine months’ leave to care for him after he was left partly paralysed.
The broadcaster said in February that his relationship with his wife became ‘warmer’ following his stroke.
‘I was misbehaving very badly’