Paxman’s secret lover... his researcher 30 years younger
The grand inquisitor splits from the mother of his children for a books editor 30 years his junior – in echo of own father’s walk-out
HE HAS described her as the perfect researcher, ‘bright, resourceful, cheerful and indefatigable’. And as the new partner of Jeremy Paxman, she will doubtless need all those qualities, and more.
Today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Paxman, Britain’s famously grumpy inquisitor-in-chief, has left his partner of 34 years and is now living instead with a Canadian-born books editor nearly 30 years his junior.
Thirty-seven-year-old Jillian Taylor, a divorcee, has worked alongside the author and presenter on two of his best sellers, including Great Britain’s Great War – and earned effusive praise from the author in the process.
For the past three decades Paxman has been the partner of Elizabeth Clough, mother of his three children and a talented TV producer in her own right.
It is thought they parted in November, although the news was only confirmed on Friday night in a brief statement from his agent, saying: ‘Jeremy Paxman and his partner separated last year. They retain a mutual respect for each other and a deep love for their children.’
However Elizabeth, 64, is said to be privately devastated by the collapse of the relationship.
The couple first met when both were working for the BBC.
The former Newsnight presenter is no stranger to family breakdown, having endured a fractured upbringing as a child. Indeed in leaving his partner at the age of 66, he is following in the footsteps of his own father, Keith, who abandoned Paxman’s mother and his four children when he was in his 50s to find a new life, and eventually new romance, in New Zealand and Australia.
Paxman’s relationship with a frequently absent father forms a central part of last year’s autobiography, A Life In Questions – unlike Miss Clough who, as was noted at the time, is largely absent from its pages.
It is believed that Miss Taylor now shares Paxman’s pied-a-terre, a £1.5 million West London apartment in a six-storey block. Although apparently at home last night, Paxman was not taking questions.
It was of course posing them, and the manner in which he did so, that made him famous. For more than two decades, between 1989 and 2014, he was one of the most prominent and best paid figures on British television, known for his acerbic, often aggressive interviews with politicians and, on occasion, for his histrionic facepulling at the answers he received.
Educated at Malvern College and Cambridge, where he studied English, he is also the author of numerous books of popular history including The English, Friends In High Places and The Political Animal.
And it was while working on these that he found himself alongside Miss Taylor. Their professional relationship stretches back at least seven years to 2010, when she helped him write the best selling Empire: What Ruling The World Did To The British.
Employed as a researcher and editorial assistant at publisher Penguin, Miss Taylor is described in the acknowledgements as ‘conscientious, imaginative and astonishingly industrious’.
The pair were photographed together in a London street in 2011, around the time that Empire was published. The blonde also worked on Paxman’s next historical book, Great Britain’s Great War, which came out in 2013. Describing itself as ‘the entire story of the war in one gripping narrative from the point of view of the British people’, it was widely praised and accompanied a major four-part BBC series.
Paxman took a similarly glowing view of his researcher, this time writing even more effusively: ‘Most of all I thank Jillian Taylor, whose Stakhanovite capacity for research continues to amaze. I had no soon asked a question than she had answered it.
‘She is probably the perfect researcher – bright, resourceful, cheerful and indefatigable.’
In May 2015 it was announced that Miss Taylor was being promoted from her official role as an editorial assistant at Penguin to take up a position as an editor with one of the company’s offshoots, Michael Joseph, which specialises in women’s lifestyle books.
Last night a friend of Miss Taylor described Paxman as ‘a lucky man’. ‘Jillian is bright, bubbly and affectionate with a good sense of humour.’
It is not known whether the personal relationship with Miss Taylor began before Paxman’s separation from his partner Miss Clough, but no doubt she and others will be asking questions.
The circumstances of Miss Taylor’s divorce – and whether Paxman was involved – are also not known.
However, this is not the first time he has been caught up in rumours of an affair. In 1998, it was reported that he had betrayed Miss Clough for several months with Joanna Cecil, a 36-yearold television executive.
At the time Paxman refused to discuss the claims, although Joanna Cecil told a newspaper: ‘I did have a relationship with Jeremy.’
Pub landlord David Cecil, whom she went on to marry, confirmed it, too, saying: ‘It lasted just a few months. It’s nothing. They were never an item but it was a relationship of sorts.’
Miss Clough, Paxman’s former partner, had given up her highly-paid role producing the BBC’s ethics programme The Big Questions in 2011 after it was moved from London to Glasgow – choosing, it is understood, to put her family first.
Yesterday she was at the family home – a sprawling multi-millionpound farmhouse near Henley-onThames. Dressed in a jumper, she appeared out of sorts, comforted by one of her two daughters in between making phone calls.
She commented only that she did not wish to say anything about the breakdown of her relationship, adding: ‘What’s the point?’
Paxman has always been reluctant
‘She’s imaginative and astonishingly industrious’
to discuss his family arrangements, bringing up children Jessica, 26, and twins Jack and Victoria, 19, away from the public gaze. He has, though, been a good deal more open about himself, particularly in his autobiography – acknowledging, for example, a long battle with depression. ‘I have spent several years seeing a therapist, and several more on antidepressants,’ he wrote, adding: ‘I don’t see any reason to be ashamed of saying I’ve suffered depression.’
His mid-30s had been particularly difficult. After periods of war reporting in Zimbabwe and Lebanon, and in Belfast during the Troubles, he developed insomnia and, if he did sleep, had nightmares.
He later described the episode as not exactly a breakdown, but ‘pretty like one’.
Often satirised for a gloomy, take on life, Paxman has seemed more irascible than ever in recent years, even turning on TV colleagues.
He wrote off all newsreaders – other than Channel Four’s Jon Snow – as failed actors and dismissing veteran BBC royal correspondent Nicholas Witchell as a ‘rather buttoned-up reporter who has written a book about the Loch Ness Monster’.
When A Life In Questions was published last year, he conceded that ‘family relationships don’t resonate happily with me’.
Indeed, it emerged that he has endured a difficult childhood. ‘Did I love my father?’ Paxman asks himself in the book. ‘My feelings ranged from resentment to passionate hatred.’
As a toddler introduced to a father fresh home from the sea, he recalls screaming at the unknown face.
‘Relations between us never really improved much,’ he continues, describing a man who beat him with sticks, shoes, cricket stumps or his bare hands. Although later, he came to forgive his father for the violence.
Paxman is the eldest of four; the others being Giles, a former British ambassador to Spain; James, a conservationist; and Jenny, a retired BBC producer and barrister.
It was when Jeremy was in his early 20s – much like his own children today – that Keith left them, their mother and Britain behind for a new life and, in time, a new woman, Celia.
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday last year, Celia Paxman suggested that Keith’s marriage had broken down well before he left the family.
It had been Celia who rang Jeremy in March 2010 to break the news to him that his father had died after a three-week stay in hospital.
He had been too ill to fulfil his dream of returning to Britain to be surrounded by his family. But not before Jeremy had flown half way around the world to seek him out one last time. Today, the echoes from half a century ago must seem very loud indeed.
In his memoir, Paxman writes that he had travelled thousands of miles to find his father because ‘I wanted to see him and I was slightly concerned in case I was becoming him’. And in one respect at least, that concern seems justified.
‘Not ashamed of saying I’ve suffered depression’