Now spool forward a few decades. Another room full of prefects, in this case the general Committee of the Garrick Club. They are considering the proposition that one J. Paxman should be admitted as a member of their hallowed society. There is dissent on the matter, it seems. One member has written that the candidate is ‘rather full of himself’. Others opine that he has shown insufficient appreciation of his elders and betters. A bag is passed round. Four black balls are dropped into it. Paxman’s application is rejected. Apparently he still hasn’t learned to respect those he doesn’t respect.

This incessant insubordination also troubles the prefects over at the BBC, where Paxman has become part of the institutional furniture. The Head Boy, one J. Birt, is regularly incensed by his star interviewer’s excesses - though he has always been careful not to say so to his face. Once, at a newspaper lunch to mark his appointment as Deputy Director-General, Birt regaled the assembled company with his plans for sorting out certain ‘sneering’ BBC interviewers. Not surprisingly, given his image, Paxman’s name was mentioned. The paper duly reported Birt’s sentiments the following Sunday. On the Monday, Paxman was charmed to receive a hand-written note from the Head Boy assuring him that the comments reported in the Observer were, of course, not directed at him. Later that week, one of the hacks who had been present at the lunch ran into Paxman and asked how he was getting on with his new boss. ‘Well’, he said, ‘I had a very nice note from him – the first I’ve ever had from anyone Up There’.

The prospects of a beautiful friendship between Paxman and Birt were never great, for the two men stand at opposite ends of the journalistic spectrum. Birt is famous for his detestation of journalists who ‘pick at the scabs’ of society. Like Walter Lippman, he sees the function of journalism as explaining to the average citizen the complexities of social and political issues. Modern society is very complicated, Lippman argued. Its problems are not amenable to simplistic analysis or righteous posturing. Decisions have to be made by experts. The role of journalism is that of ‘engineering the consent’ of the governed to whatever those in authority have, in their wisdom, decided to do.

Paxman comes from an entirely different tradition – what one might call the urological school of journalism. ‘Having read H.L. Mencken’s opinion that the correct relationship of a journalist to a politician was that of a dog to a lamppost’, he once said, ‘there was really only one career open to me’. He has been cocking a leg at the political establishment ever since. He is widely (though wrongly) believed to be the rudest man on television. His languid posture and angular features are interpreted by some as a whole-body sneer. The impression of a hectoring bully is rounded off by endless repetition of his alleged interrogative philosophy. ‘I am always asking myself’, he once said, ‘why is this lying bastard lying to me’.

This robust attitude is what terrifies the BBC high command, with its pathological attentiveness to the sensitivities of politicians. During the Thatcher/Major years, it was Paxman’s abrasive handling of Tory bigwigs which caused Birt & Co to change their underpants twice a day. The Tories didn’t like it much either. Paxman once fed Norman Lamont the (scripted) question: ‘Do you enjoy being Chancellor?’ Yes, Lamont replied, he did enjoy being Chancellor. ‘Will you miss it, then?’ shot back Paxo, unscripted. The Chancellor never knew what hit him. Now that the Tories have self-destructed, the BBC is worried by Paxman’s insouciant scepticism about New Labour. When Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s press secretary, recently attacked ‘Newsnight’ Paxman responded that ‘his remarks are, to use his own sophisticated term in Lobby briefings, "crap" – that’s C.R.A.P.’.

There are occasions when Paxman’s unshakeable incredulity trips him up. One thinks, for example, of the time when the Health Minister, Alan Milburn, saw him off over the vexed question of rationing in the NHS. But in general it is Paxman’s refusal to be overawed by the rich and powerful which is precisely what makes him the most popular interviewer on television. And not just among liberal intellectuals either: during the last General Election a readers’ poll in the Sun nominated him as the man they would most like to chair a debate between the three party leaders. Tabloid readers recognise – even if the BBC Prefecture does not – that over the last twenty years British politicians have become more adept not only at spin-doctoring and evasion but also at barefaced lying. And when they find an interviewer who is willing to ask a particularly slimy Home Secretary [italics] fourteen [unitalics] times whether he had over-ruled the director general of the prison service, they like what they see.

Paxman has become a national figure. His iconic status owes something to the fact that his rise to prominence coincided with the sleaze-ridden twilight of Thatcherism. There have been times in the last few years when ‘Newsnight’ and its celebrated anchorman seemed to constitute the de-facto Official Opposition. And although nobody is more sceptical than Paxman about the importance of television (he once described it as ‘a medium of incandescent superficiality’), he takes very seriously his responsibility to ask the kinds of questions that ordinary voters would like to ask and politicians never want to answer.

He gives the impression of a man who is not entirely at ease with his fame. At any rate, he does not glory in it like, say, Robert Kilroy-Silk does. Interviewers who seek to pry into his private life are generally repulsed. (He is married to a talented television producer, Elizabeth Clough, with whom he has three young children.) Those who know him describe a liberal, humane and courteous man who is prone to doubt, depression and a mild yearning for religious faith. He has a passion for angling and writes elegantly about it, much to the annoyance of animal rights fanatics. He spent his formative journalistic years as a roving reporter covering Northern Ireland and wars in Third World countries – ‘the sort of places’, he recalled, where conscientious research consists of reading the relevant back-issue on ‘Time’ magazine on the plane’.

Depressed by witnessing so much misery, he returned to Britain and wrote a couple of rather good books - one about Latin America, the other about the British Establishment, with its legions of adult versions of the chaps who beat him at school. He also co-authored (with his close friend Robert Harris) an impassioned book about the secret history of germ warfare. He is currently on leave from the BBC, finishing a book about the English and their identity problems.

Until recently, it looked as though Paxman’s career had levelled out. The Tories had withered away, consumed by their own xenophobic hatreds. New Labour had arrived and was enjoying the longest honeymoon period in living memory. There were changes in the BBC hierarchy, new faces on ‘Newsnight’, new editors in key posts. The Birtist reconstruction/destruction of the BBC continued apace. Paxman was offered the job of hosting ‘University Challenge’ and – to the surprise of some, who thought it beneath his talents – took it. Seeing him in such a menial role is like coming upon a former Derby winner working as a pit pony.

Then ITV decided it needed to upgrade its factual programming with a UK version of the American CBS current affairs show, ’60 Minutes’. The format requires a big-name presenter. One of the two companies bidding for the contract proposed Paxman for the role. (The other bidders proposed ITN’s Trevor McDonald.) Since media correspondents like nothing better than a horse-race, Paxman was suddenly all over the papers again – at which point alarm bells clearly started ringing at the BBC. The thought of losing Paxo to ITV was unconscionable to the High Command. He may be a son of a bitch, they reasoned, but he ought to be our son of a bitch. So an Offer was concocted. Large wads of money were brandished about. Paxman would continue as Newsnight’s anchorman. And, as a clincher, he was offered Melvyn ‘Lord’ Bragg’s old job of hosting ‘Start the Week’, Radio 4’s attempt at highbrow programming. The deal was done. ‘I am thrilled to continue with Newsnight’, said Paxman in a robotic statement to the Press Association. ‘Of course I thought of moving elsewhere but there is nowhere else on television which presents the same opportunity day in, day out to get to grips with current events’.

So that’s all right then? Not quite. There are already rumblings about whether Paxman has the background to make a distinctive impression on ‘Start the Week’, the chattering classes’ favourite gabfest. Even those who (unfairly) disparaged Melvyn Bragg as ‘a cerebrally-challenged intellectual’ had to concede that he stamped the programme in his own image. The running order often reflected, for example, its host’s romantic view of science and scientists. But what are Paxman’s interests beyond his well-known passion for fishing (he is the Angling Editor of Esquire magazine and has edited a nice collection of essays on the subject)? What does he stand for? Is he just a general-purpose pugilist? What is his ‘hinterland’, to use Dennis Healey’s celebrated phrase?

Hanging over him also is the fact that television is a voracious monster which always eats its children. The pages of ‘Hello!’ are littered with the shrivelled husks of those who made it big in the media and then discovered they didn’t know what to do with their lives. To survive as the person he clearly wants to be, Paxman has to solve two problems which beset every television star.

One is how to stop becoming a caricature of himself. Or, to put it another way, when Rory Bremner starts getting laughs from doing Jeremy Paxman, how does Paxman avoid the temptation to play ‘Paxman’ too?