His interest in Mao Zedong began as early as age eleven, when he gave fellow Craigflower School students copies of the Little Red Book that he had requested and received from the Chinese embassy.

Faced with price cutting by the Murdoch-owned Times, sales had begun to decline, and Marr made two attempts to arrest the slide.

He made use of bold 'poster-style' front pages, and then in 1996 radically re-designed the paper along a mainland European model, with Gill Sans headline fonts, and stories being grouped together by subject matter, rather than according to strict news value.

[citation needed] At the beginning of 1998, Marr was dismissed, according to one version of events, for having refused to reduce the newspaper's production staff to just five subeditors.

Campbell had demanded that David Montgomery, the paper's publisher, dismiss Marr over an article in which he had compared Blair with his predecessor John Major.

Simon Kelner, who had worked on the paper when it was first launched, accepted the editorship and asked Marr to stay on as a political columnist.

[citation needed] In April 2003, after Baghdad was captured by the invading forces during the Iraq War, Marr said on the BBC News at Ten: "It would be entirely ungracious, even for [Tony Blair's] critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result".

[21][better source needed] Marr announced in 2005 that following the 2005 general election, he would step down as political editor to spend more time with his family.

Unsold copies of the book of the series, a best-seller, were recalled in March 2009 by publishers Macmillan when legal action was taken over false claims that domestic violence campaigner Erin Pizzey had been a member of The Angry Brigade terrorist group.

[24][25] According to her own account, in a Guardian interview in 2001, Pizzey had been present at a meeting when they discussed their intention of bombing Biba, a fashion store, and threatened to report their activities to the police.

[30] In late 2009, BBC Two broadcast his six-part television series on British politics in the first half of the 20th century Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain.

[31] In September 2009 on the Sunday before the Labour Party conference in Brighton, Marr interviewed Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Towards the end of the interview, Marr told Brown he wanted to ask about: Something everybody has been talking about in the Westminster village... A lot of people in this country use prescription painkillers and pills to help them get through.

[33] In a later interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy of Channel 4 News, John Ward, the author of the Not Born Yesterday blog, stated that he had no proof to back up the claim.

[37] On an 8 April 2018, BBC Sunday news programme Marr said "lots of Palestinian kids" were killed by Israeli forces.

BBC management ruled that Marr breached editorial guidelines, that the statement lacked any evidence and "risked misleading audiences on a material point".

[38] Marr portrayed himself in the 2018 BBC series Bodyguard, interviewing Keeley Hawes' character Julie Montague, and wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian about his decision to do so.

[39] On 1 December 2019, Marr interviewed British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and discussed Islamic terrorist Usman Khan, perpetrator of the 2019 London Bridge stabbing.

Marr claimed the government had done nothing since 2010 to tighten the rules on sentencing for terrorist offences, implying that Johnson could have stopped Khan's early release.

In reality, Johnson's government had lengthened the minimum early release, and in Khan's case any legislation would have need to be retrospective anyhow.

[40] On 19 November 2021, Marr announced that he was leaving the BBC and joining Global in 2022 to host a new opinion programme on LBC called Tonight with Andrew Marr, host a new arts and interview programme on Classic FM, present a new weekly podcast on Global Player, and write a regular column for the LBC's website.

[41] Marr has written about the need to remain impartial and "studiously neutral" whilst delivering news reports and "convey fact, and nothing more".

Only people who understand the economic forces changing their world, threatening them but also creating new opportunities, have a chance of being immune to the old tribal chants.

[47]In March 2014, Marr was criticised for allegedly expressing his own opinion on an independent Scotland's membership of the EU while interviewing Scottish politician Alex Salmond on BBC Television.

[61] On 28 June 2008, Richard Ingrams reported in The Independent that Marr had been granted a High Court "super-injunction" preventing disclosure in the media of "private" information, or the existence of the injunction.

[62] On 26 April 2011, following legal action by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, an interview with Marr was published in the Daily Mail, in which he revealed that the super-injunction had covered the reporting of an extra-marital affair with a female journalist.