DECLUTTERING, or the act of chucking stuff out, made it all the way to the top tier of the Scottish Government yesterday when Nicola Sturgeon embraced her inner Marie Kondo and for once delivered a reshuffle worth noting.

It was not a huge clear out, but some old faces departed, and in what was a case of reducing, reusing and recycling in action, John Swinney was bounced out of education and put in charge of post-Covid recovery. He also stays as Deputy First Minister.

The First Minister may have missed a trick there. There was another worthy candidate for the job of being her deputy. Here was a contender of such merit that some might even see him in the job of First Minister one day.

Intelligent, well-educated, ferociously hard-working, 40 years experience in politics at the highest levels, and a household name to boot. The name is Marr, Andrew Marr. Perhaps you have heard of him?

Before Tim Davie, the BBC director general, falls into a faint, it should be pointed out that Marr has expressed no such wish for a job in Scottish politics. Or in UK politics. Nor has he a desire to sit next to Jackie Weaver on Handforth parish council.

But what he has raised is the possibility of a life beyond the BBC and its strict rules on impartiality. A chance to finally express his political views without fear of losing his job.

The revelation came when Marr was being interviewed by Ruth Wishart at Glasgow’s Aye Write book festival last week. Did he ever feel the urge to “come out of the closet” on his politics, his fellow broadcaster asked. “Yes, absolutely,” said Marr.

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While there were many privileges of working at the BBC, he explained, the biggest single frustration was not being able to speak in your own voice.

“What I could safely say,” he added, “is that I think we are going to go through a period of politics – the next ten or 20 years – much more turbulent and much more interesting and testing and challenging than anything we have seen in the last ten years, which have been big enough.

"It will be very, very hard for people like me to carry on being completely neutral and completely sotto voce all the way through that. At some point, I want to get out and use my own voice again.”

Turbulent, testing, challenging times? That suggests he sees Scottish independence and the break up of the UK on the cards. Wouldn’t you like to know where he stands on that score?

Marr did not say what his political views were on independence, the rise of China, climate change, or any other matter, merely that he had them, which was enough to set gums flapping among the commentariat.

The response by some to his Aye Write declaration could be summed up as, “Aye, right Andy. As if we don’t know exactly where you are coming from.” Do we, though? And does it matter if he is red, blue, yellow or some other political stripe?

Marr would make a fascinating study of a certain type of Scottishness. He has spoken in the past of growing up in a conservative Scottish Presbyterian family with “a patriotic military heritage”, which suggests a streak of unionism. But he was firmly on the left in his youth and he worked for the Independent and the Observer before joining the BBC. So, Labour then?

Does his pride in being Scottish hint at a nationalist streak? He has described his views as “watery middle of the road”. Lib Dem maybe?

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The right think he is left, the left think he is right, and as for viewers in Scotland, don’t get them started. All told, Marr appears to be doing a good job of keeping viewers guessing about his political views. Which is as it should be. So why the fuss over impartiality?

Though an apparently simple concept, impartiality has a tendency to tie some people, many of them in BBC management, up in knots. It is about being fair and unbiased, but does that have to mean not expressing a view at all?

What a strange and dull broadcast world it would be if interviewers acted only as umpires, there to keep the conversational ball going back and forth. Never testing a view. Never putting the case for the other side. Never, in short, treating viewers and journalists as grown-ups able to take a wider perspective on impartiality. How very Reithian and patronising.

There is another way, one that mixes news and views, that actively welcomes opinions as a way of reflecting all sides of a debate. What began in the US is now set to come here with GB News, led by chairman and presenter Andrew Neil. Launching soon (end of May according to one Sunday paper), the new channel has been inevitably dubbed “Britain’s Fox News”, much to the annoyance of Neil who says GB News, like the BBC and others, will have to comply with the same Ofcom rules on impartiality.

Opinion-heavy news is a style many like, judging by the success of some speech radio stations and the viewing figures clocked up by Piers Morgan before his GMB walkout. Whether they want an entire TV channel is something else. One person’s spirited debate is another’s migraine-inducing shoutfest.

Among the list of BBC folk heading to GB News you are highly unlikely to see the name of A Marr. He might want to ditch the neutrality and use his own voice again, but he knows that is for the future.

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For now, he would be mad to leave the BBC. There are many privileges that go with working for Auntie, as he has acknowledged. Foremost among them in his case is a very nice salary, with the opportunity for lucrative gigs on the side. Since BBC viewers pay his wages via the licence fee, and have no choice in doing so if they want to keep watching, they have a right to see their opinions fairly reflected, or at the very least not disparaged. Impartiality it is, then.

In any case, he may find that expressing his own views, even taking a more active role in politics, is not as satisfying or enjoyable as he thinks it might be. Once he is in the rough and tumble of the opinion game he may long for the relative peace and quiet of impartiality.

And finally, as they say on the other side, heaven spare us from another journalist being lost to politics. Look what happened with Boris Johnson.

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