ED MILIBAND looked only momentarily nonplussed a week ago today when the question came from Scots broadcaster Eddie Mair.

Mair, who was filling in for his fellow Scot Andrew Marr on Marr’s 9am Sunday show on BBC One, was asking Miliband about how he coped with his 2015 election defeat at then hands of David Cameron.

“How did you deal with it? Did you cry? … Were you depressed?” asked Mair, coolly, crisply, persistently. Miliband, to his credit, answered well.

The exchange gave rise to news headlines and instant social-media reaction, even if some observers did wonder aloud if they were watching an interview or a therapy session.

Throughout his career, Mair has shown himself to be an astute interviewer, quietly tenacious, and not one to suffer fools. Boris Johnson can testify to that: filling in for Mair four years ago, he made BoJo look uncomfortable when questioning him about a raft of issues that spoke to his integrity – or lack of it, depending on your point of view.

“What does that say about you, Boris Johnson?” Mair said. “Aren’t you in fact making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted?” Then came the kicker: “You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?” Eight little words that Johnson took a while to recover from. The then London mayor looked suitably abashed. As Mair’s former BBC colleague Robert Peston once noted of that “rather brilliant” interview: “I think his genius is to make people feel comfortable, and then lob in the incendiary.”

But 51-year-old Mair is also capable of interviews of great tact and sensitivity, as evidenced by his prolonged interviews over several months on his Radio 4 show, PM, with fellow presenter Steve Hewlett, on the subject of Hewlett’s cancer.

“Though Mair doesn’t speak much during the interviews, his tone is perfect”, wrote Miranda Sawyer in mid-February, shortly before Hewlett passed away. “He knows when to lift the mood with a joke, when to ask for detail. And Hewlett likes detail, and truth. The combination of the two men has made for gracious, realistic and very touching radio.”

As Hewlett told Sawyer: “I don’t think you often hear men talking about cancer. And Eddie has a way with words, and a manner that every now and again opens up a whole new vista.”

Mair is one of small army of Scots who left their native land to make their name in the London-based national media.

He is from Dundee, and his broadcast debut came when he was 14, courtesy of his school’s radio station. He began his career began on Radio Tay. Thirty years ago he switched to the BBC. He worked as a sub-editor on Radio Scotland and rose to present Reporting Scotland and Good Morning Scotland. His morning show, Eddie Mair Live, was awarded a Gold Sony Award for Best Breakfast Show.

In 1994, aged 28, he joined Radio 5 Live to anchor the station’s main lunchtime news programme. “His departure for London,” noted our sister paper, The Herald, “is regarded as a major loss for BBC Scotland, especially since the success of his iconoclastic morning show, Eddie Mair Live, which has been one of ratings hits of the new Radio Scotland schedules.”

By 1998 Mair was a regular host on Radio 4’s highly regarded 5pm news programme, PM. He launched Broadcasting House and Saturday PM, the former winning a bronze Sony award in 2000. In 2003 he became the lone voice on PM. Other awards have continued to come his way. His CV at the Beeb includes stints covering Newsnight and, as Boris Johnson knows only too well, The Andrew Marr Show.

On PM he is quietly authoritative but not without a mischievous streak. As the Guardian noted in 2013, Mair is “felt to be a private and complex person, who often takes the programme in more obscure or eccentric directions than some would like. Yet in return, he gets something close to devotion from his audience, who give excellent feedback on his performances”.

Mair has made PM more or less unmissable. It’s not just his handling of breaking news stories (the recent terror attack at Westminster, for example) or big political interviews; it’s also his dry, irreverent sense of humour. He is, as has been noted, a funny man.

A couple of years ago, quizzed by Robert Peston, a frequent contributor to PM before he decamped for ITV, Mair confirmed that he was a rather private person.

“If you mean I don’t do interviews, yes,” he said. “…I love doing radio, that’s my passion and what really interests me. Some of the hoopla that comes with doing this kind of work I just find a bit boring. It doesn’t interest me. I’m not really interested in other people’s private shenanigans.”

Peston also asked him about being gay. His family – his dad was a lorry driver, his mum a nurse – were always very supportive. “I found it easier than so many people have”, he told Peston.

Last summer Mair and another Scot, Desert Island Discs’ Kirsty Young, were voted the UK’s favourite radio voices in a Radio Times poll.

Mair’s worth has long been recognised by those who know about such things. Even in 1994, long before he arrived on PM, James Boyle, the then head of Radio Scotland, could observe that he was one of Britain’s “top broadcasters”. He has more than fulfilled the early promise he showed while working in Scotland.