Andrew Marr’s bad-tempered exchange with Shami Chakrabarti

Faiza Shaheen (Why did Marr lose it with Chakrabarti? Fear of change, 20 November) seems to suggest that Andrew Marr’s irritated response to Shami Chakrabarti was all about her being a woman and a woman of colour. Perhaps it was just a human response to the absurd suggestion that, because he was trying with difficulty to obtain clarity from her on the Labour party’s less than clear stance on the issue of a people’s vote, he was not a democrat.

To put this in the same category as Andrew Neil and Piers Morgan, with their reprehensible recent (and not so recent) utterances, is ridiculous and very unfair.
Penny Muir
London

• I read Faiza Shaheen’s column with interest and agreement. It does seem to be a strategy now for well-known interviewers to come over somewhat aggressively. I always believed Andrew Marr to be the apotheosis of a good interviewer, but this bad-tempered exchange was beneath him. I contrasted his modus operandi with Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday and her technique, still incisive but without the quickfire interrogation implemented by others. These grandees could learn a lesson from the women in this instance.
Judith Daniels
Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

• While Andrew Marr was probably expressing the intense frustration many feel at Labour’s inability to counter the Tories’ destructive Brexit project, I suspect he was still inwardly seething at his failure earlier to control Kwasi Kwarteng’s political rant, masquerading as a review of the Sunday papers. Coming on the heels of Marr’s much-ridiculed confrontation with Arron Banks, it surely points to the need to rethink our Sunday morning viewing.
George Young Mulvagh
Glasgow

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