Personal Life
Paxman lives with his partner Elizabeth Ann Clough in Stonor, southeast Oxfordshire. They have three children: Jessica, and twins Victoria and Jack. He supports Leeds United and he also enjoys fly fishing in his leisure time. He is vice-chairman of the Wild Trout Trust conservation charity. He is also a patron of the charity Sustrans.
When, in his twenties, Paxman unsuccessfully applied for the vacant editorship of the venerable Labour-supporting weekly The New Statesman, he said he considered himself a socialist. He had previously stood as a Communist candidate in school elections. More recently, he has been described as "the archetypal floating voter", and Jon Snow once said that Paxman's greatest strength was being "not very political". Paxman himself has stated:
I do understand we have to have a government, and I do firmly believe in democracy. So it's not true to say I'm not a political person. I am a political person. But I'm not a party political person. I don't believe there is a monopoly of wisdom in any one party. I suppose as one gets older - I would have described it at the age of 21 as the process of selling out, but another way of looking at it is to say, actually, the world is not a very simple place, and that as you get older simple-minded solutions seem less attractive.
He has periodically suffered from depression. It has recently been wrongly asserted that he attended Charterhouse School. Paxman has denied these claims.
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