Publishing salaries of the BBC’s highest-paid talent will prove 'uncomfortable', Andrew Marr says

Plans to publish the salaries of the BBC’s highest-paid talent will prove “uncomfortable” for them all, broadcaster Andrew Marr has said.

Marr, who admitted he is “well paid”, suggested an imminent report sharing BBC stars’ pay with the nation would be embarrassing, claiming that in his case it would reveal only that he was not as “overpaid” as his rivals on broadcast channels.

The BBC talent pay disclosure, set out in the new Royal Charter, requires the corporation to report on the names of all senior executives and staff paid more than £150,000 from the licence fee, set out in pay bands.

Critics have called the report a “poacher’s charter”, with stars left furious it will expose their personal finances to the world. Executives, too, have been unhappy, fearing it will spell out exactly the financial offer rivals need to make to steal their best-loved broadcasters.

In 2011, it was claimed Marr was paid £600,000 by the BBC in an alleged “mix up” with post in the BBC pigeon holes saw his pay slip leak.

Speaking at the China Exchange on Friday night, Andrew Marr said of the plans to formally spell out pay: "It's uncomfortable for all of us.

“I'm well paid but I'm much less overpaid, perhaps, than people working for rival organisations who won't go through this process.”

Asked to confirm reports of his high salary, he said a suggested figure of £580,000 was “not true”, with the real pay packet “much less than that”.

But, he said ruefully, the public would soon know the precise amount anyway.

Last year, director-general Lord Hall said of the plans: "The BBC operates in a competitive market and this will not make it easier for the BBC to retain the talent the public love."

Rona Fairhead, former chair of the BBC Trust, said the move was not "in the long-term interests of licence fee payers".

In a discussion about his life and career, Marr also made some candid disclosures about his younger years, as well as giving his insight into modern politics.

Asked about the naughtiest thing he had done, inspired by Theresa May’s now-famous “wheat field” admission, he told an audience: “I've certainly ingested various chemicals that I shouldn't have done when I as a young man going to punk clubs in London in the early 1980s and misbehaving very badly there.

"That's about as far as I'm going to go." On Mrs May, the Prime Minister, herself, he said: “I think she is a perfectly decent serious hard working woman who is almost cripplingly shy. Very unusual in public life.

"I think she finds meeting a room of people she hasn't known before, without a set series of questions and answers, almost intolerable.

"That was why, I think to everyone's surprise, she was quite such a bad campaigner. It wasn't entirely that she refuses to answer questions or that she hates answering questions or that she can't answer questions. Indeed in a small group she can be warm and humane, cry and hug people, in the way Jeremy Corbyn does so effectively in public.

"She just hates it, she absolutely hates it. To that extent she's a very old-fashioned politician and the world for better or worse doesn't like that kind of reticence any more."

Pondering the challenge faced by the Conservatives now, he added: “One of the most interesting things about the last election campaign was how the left, and in particular the Corbynite, Momentum left, used memes and jokes and little films on social media to devastating effect.

“And there is almost nobody on the Conservative side who has the faintest clue what to do about this. They’re really worried about it.”

Marr, who currently has an art exhibition of his paintings as well as his broadcasting work, confirmed his next project would see him write a second novel inspired by recent politics. His first was based on the EU referendum.

“The second novel, you’ll have to wait and see, is about a very left wing Labour Prime Minister,” he said. “And about a plot by Tony Blair [and friends] to get rid of him. They realise they know how to run the country but no-one will ever listen to them again after the Iraq War.

“They realise the only way to get back into control is to produce, as it were, genetically modified MPs. In other words, to select the next generation of ultra Blairite MPs.

“Teach them everything about how to get up the greasy pole as fast as possible, how to get selected, how to get elected, how to get on the key committees and so forth.

“The story is about two of those super MPs put in to get rid of the Jeremy Corbyn figure.”