VETERAN BBC presenter Andrew Marr has launched a fiercely critical attack on his former colleague Jeremy Paxman, branding the former Newsnight frontman a "tortured, angry individual".

 

Marr, 55, unleashed the broadside during a discussion on Paxman's grilling of Prime Minister David Cameron and Labour leader Ed Miliband for Channel 4 and Sky.

Speaking at the London School of Economics, Mr Marr said that the interviews were "not a good replacement" for head to head debates and that Paxman's aggressive style had let viewers down.

He said: "No disrespect to Jeremy Paxman, but it would have been a lot more interesting had it been head to head. Replacing that with a good 'Paxmaning' for both of them, while entertaining, was not a good replacement.

"There is the danger for all of us in the interviewer's chair to forget we are not the ones standing for election. And I thought that Ed Miliband did score when he said 'Jeremy, you;re important but you;re not that important'."

He added: "We don't need to be this kind of really, really aggressive opposition all the time."

Andrew Marr has spent a decade at the BBC, presenting the BBC's main Sunday current affairs and politics programme, The Andrew Marr show.