She was put up by the Treasury to explain why the government had been so implacably opposed to delaying the fuel duty rise on Monday but had reversed gear so rapidly on Tuesday. Chloe Smith feels the heat But Smith is not the first and certainly not the last to have felt the discomfort of being asked the same unanswerable question over and over again by Paxman. The most famous is Paxo's interview with Michael Howard in which he asked the then home secretary the same question 12 times over the dismissal of the governor of Parkhurst Prison, John Marriott. Paxman grills Howard Paxman puts Tony Blair in an awkward position (8 minutes 50 seconds) by listing pornographic publications in the same stable as the Express Newspaper (whose owner Blair said was a suitable party donor). Well that was a lot of hype about nothing. Not having a television I rarely get to see, or want to see, these so called stars of the small screen of which I include Paxman, but what I would say is that his interview with Howard was all very mild and even tempered whereas his interview with Chloe Smith was the rottweiler job. Why was that, was it because she is young and female, was it because Howard is of the same faith, was it because he felt intellectually inferior to Howard whereas he knew he could trample all over Smith. The man is an ars*hole as are virtually all of his lying interviewees.