Transparent and inflatable, Eddie Izzard’s sofa is not so much a piece of household furniture as a plaything in a crche. It’s a bouncy sofa. A comedy sofa. One that makes rubbery squeaking noises whenever you move. I’ve been invited to sit on it by the enigmatic blonde who answered the door, explained that ‘Eddie is running late’ and then left. As I’m waiting, I try to work out a technique for rising from the sofa with dignity. There isn’t one – you’re either pitched violently towards the floor or wobbled sideways – so I move to the inflatable armchair opposite. It envelopes me. And with arms forced up and forward looking like a no-necked sleepwalker, I take in the interior with eye movements only. The walls are painted silver. The phone is in the shape of Mae West’s lips. There is a guitar, a packet of Rizla papers and a curtain of beads on strings hanging from the doorway through to the kitchen. All as you’d expect really.
Inky afternoon rain is sluicing down in Soho and Eddie Izzard, the 35-year-old comedian who looks 25 and acts 15, emerges from it bedraggled and drenched. He has a few day’s stubble on his face but no make up. His normally tousled and fluffy Meg Ryan haircut is lying flat and lank against his scalp, roots defiantly exposed. While I’m still struggling to rise, he slips off his leather trenchcoat, gives it a shake and lopes across the room to proffer a hand in greeting.
You have to be careful how you press the flesh with Izzard. He hates – no, hates is too strong a word for this amiable man – he isn’t particularly fond of those crusher handshakes, the ones you’re never expecting and that etiquette dictates you’re not allowed to react to. Izzard thinks that the world’s hand-crushers should be taught a lesson – whenever you encounter one, you should either scream or collapse silently to the floor, getting a friend to point out to the horrified crusher that you suffer from ‘hand-squeezy death’.
Apparently satisfied that my shake is equidistant between firm and limp, Izzard flops on the sofa, dangles his black spiky-heeled boots over the end and talks about the party Tony Blair threw at Number 10 this summer [1997] for his coolest, grooviest supporters. Izzard, the hippest pussy-cat with the shiniest PVC trousers of them all, was there. And to prove it, the next day, the Daily Telegraph ran a picture of him arriving. The deliriously terse caption under it read, TRANSVESTIT: IZZARD. And, human nature being what it is, one can only assume that this haiku-like summary of a complicated life will appear on his gravestone as well.
That there is more to Izzard than his transvestism – and his gift for reducing his clucking audiences to jelly – is the point he’s trying to make by taking on more serious roles (having already played three on stage, Edward II among them). Then, again, even as he tells you this, you can’t help but smiles. ‘Yeah. Well,’ he says, languorously contorting his vowels, ‘I can do both comedy and serious. I’ve got spare energy. It’s some sort of “I’ll show you” thing. Not wanting to be pigeonholed. Because then you become a pigeon. And even pigeons don’t want to be all put in the same hole. They want to be, er, um …’ He pursues this feathery theme for perhaps 20 seconds, grinds to one of his familiar ‘mumble, rumble, scrumble’ halts and then grins impishly.
‘Hey!’, he blurts, as if just struck by an Archimedean revelation. ‘Don’t you think these sofas are great? You can just sort of slide off them.’ He just sort of slides off the sofa, springs back up on his stacked heels, sits and just sort of slides of it again.
Watching his performance – the uninhabited, hyperactive child at play – reassures you that, for all his aspirations as a serious actor, Izzard means it when he says he will never be able to give up live comedy. He clearly derives far too much pleasure from making himself laugh. And for us as well as him the real appeal of his comedy lies not in the subtlety and sophistication of his allusions but in its exuberant, sniggering puerility, his cheerful cartoon land of talking animals and pre-teenage innocence, his ability to talk to the child in us all when he says that people who consume too much calcium should tell their doctors they feel ‘all cheesy-bony’.
But what might otherwise be just endearingly childish flights of fancy are rendered irresistible by Izzard’s appearance: with his footballer’s legs, sturdy body and square head he looks like a giant toddler, or a seven-year-old who has found an unguarded bottle of steroids. As it happens, the comedian remembers his wild, seven-year-old self vividly. ‘He was a very bad loser,’ Izzard says with a thoughtful scratch of his stubbly chin. ‘Always throwing tantrums. Tennis rackets through windows. Ridiculously competitive. But my dad was a live-and-let-live kind of guy and I suppose eventually I got on board with that.’
Izzard grew up in Bexhill-on-Sea which, he admits, doesn’t sound all that exotic but – as he was born in the Yemen, is descended from Huguenots in the French Pyrenees, has one grandfather who was a shepherd, another who was a bus driver, and a German grandmother – he feels that exotic has been taken care of. His father aspired to a ‘middle-class sort of thing’ and became an accountant with British Petroleum, sending Eddie and his brother to a minor provincial boarding school where pupils were taught to vote Tory. Although his father gave him ‘space to take risks’, he also impressed upon his son the motto ‘be happy, but preferably as an accountant’. The young Izzard flew various flags of convenience, such as Civil Engineering and Accountancy, but, eventually, after dropping out of a degree in Maths and Financial Accounting at Sheffield University, he came clean with his father and spent the second half of the Eighties as a street performer in London and Edinburgh.
Upon reflection, the comedian sees his father’s reluctance to put pressure on him to get a proper job as having a lot to do with the bond the two struck when Eddie’s mother, a nurse, died of cancer. He was six and he says he cried continually until he was 11, and after that he never really cried again. The fact he was sent off to boarding school may well have had something to do with it. ‘The only way to survive being a boarder is to get rid of your emotions, basically,’ he says with a shrug. ‘The whole atmosphere is geared towards convincing you you have to be a captain of industry. That you have to run things. They don’t say, ‘You’ve all got to go away and become transvestites’. They wouldn’t even say the word. People never say the word. They would say instead, ‘he’s one of those’.’
Remembering the caption TRANSVESTIT: IZZARD, I have been trying to avoid the subject. But it’s not just because it pigeonholes him, it’s because, well, it feels like we’ve heard a little too much from Eddie Izzard over the years on his right to express himself through his clothing. That Izzard feels the need to bring it up himself, though – and in such an abrupt and clumsy way – seems to point to some lack of resolution in his own feelings towards being ‘one of those’. And judging by the say he equates his being a transvestite – rather than his being a comedian – with other people’s sense of themselves as lawyers, doctors or teachers, his urge to cross-dress seems to have become the skeleton on which he has fleshed out his whole self-identity.
Although he may describe himself as being two lesbians trapped – but cohabiting happily – in a man’s body, Izzard actually takes his heterosexual brand of transvestism most seriously. At one point there was rumour of a steady girlfriend, Vanessa Jones, the beautiful daughter of the Bishop of Sodor and Man, but at the moment Izzard says, ‘I’m kinda loose. Which is fun. At some point I’ll settle down, but not tonight.’
He wears lipstick and skirts, he says, because it makes him feel comfortable. ‘I don’t choose to look this way. It’s a built-in thing that tells me to head down this direction.’ And he isn’t particularly fond of the expression ‘women’s clothes’ because, he says, they are his clothes. He has bought them, not borrowed them.
Even when he talks about being ‘TV’ – his preferred expression – as part of his stand-up routine, he does so only to make a serious underlying point. The ‘dick-head men’ on the building sites who shout out ‘bloke in a dress’ when they see him coming, and continue shouting it as he walks past, should, he believes, show more respect for other people’s inclinations. They should, as his father taught him, live and let live. Does it follow, then, that Izzard should also show some tolerance for those people, even the dick-head men, who simply find it odd that a bloke should want to wear a dress?
‘Oh yeah,’ he says, with a slurring, public-school delivery. ‘I totally understand it. Perhaps they feel threatened by it. Perhaps they are suppressing a desire to do the same. But I think basically there are those people who hate themselves and those who feel good about themselves. If you feel good about yourself, you have to take the risk of giving out positive energy in the hope that people who hate themselves will give something positive back. I wanted to like myself. I didn’t want to be a coward. I wanted to be able to walk down the street as a TV and, if I got beaten up, I wanted to be able to stay on my feet and afterwards take them to court. I wanted to be the person who wasn’t scared.’
Earlier this year, Izzard did get into a fight, in Cambridge. And he did stand his ground and, for the first time since he was 12, he did exchange blows. Afterwards he went to court and the man who fought him was fined £370. Like many people who have taken strength from facing their fears, though, Izzard seems to have become addicted to the scary challenges he sets himself. Almost masochistically, he defies his fear of drying up on stage by improvising much of his material (when I ask him how much, he gives me a look you would give a village idiot and says, ‘Er, exactly 72 per cent’). But he takes his therapy further. He does gigs in Reykjavik just to see if his sense of humour can cross cultural barriers. He is a passionate pro-European who speaks French and German (and Latin) but not fluently. That doesn’t stop him testing his courage, though, by doing his Paris gigs in French. And, though he can fill London theatres almost indefinitely, he likes to do gigs in Bexhill-on-Sea, scene of his most humiliating and painful adolescent moment, because, he says, it helps him put ‘a large ghost in pink lipstick to rest.’
When he was 15, he was caught stealing make-up from the Bexhill-on-Sea branch of Boots. Thinking he might get asked awkward questions if he bought some lipstick he hid it under a loaf of brown sliced bread instead and walked out. That way, he says, no-one would know – apart from the police and the judiciary system. He was let off with a warning from the chief constable which, in his fevered imagination, became: ‘That eye-shadow is never going to work with that lipstick. You want more russet colours. That’s light blue, that is. A death colour for an eye shadow. No-one could get away with wearing that…’
That Izzard keeps stressing the ‘whatever else I might be, a coward I am not’ point is curious. It’s a manly aspiration. And he reinforces it constantly by slipping into the high-testosterone language of the rugged, outdoor type. He will tell you that he was a fanatical footballer at school: ‘You know. First 11. Right half. Played 13. Won one. Lost one. My main thing was football. And make-up.’ Then, talking over his shoulder a few minutes later as he makes some fresh coffee, it’s: ‘I wanted to be in the Army, you know. I really did. The only reason I was put off is that they always eat potatoes. Remember those films? ‘Stephens! You’re on potato duty! Peel those potatoes!’ But I love the climbing trees and jumping over rocks side of soldiering. Invading counties and the shooting people dead stuff I skip over.’
He pauses for a second to emit a thoughtful, sighing ‘Yeah’ and then he’s off again, telling you about his time in the Scouts, and giving vent to a deliriously juvenile stream of consciousness. ‘We had this Scout master who was an incredibly energetic organised and listy type person, and he drove around in an MG and came from Mars really. Or Kenya. We were 11 guinea-pig kids to him and we did everything. Going down waterfalls, and lead mines and potholes. Outward boundy-type things. Loved that. Want to get back into all that.’
In fits and starts, Izzard chatters away on these masculine topics for a good 20 minutes. He does so charmingly, amusingly and largely unprompted, unspooling anecdotes in the same free-form style that he adopts on stage. He is dyslexic, which may account in part for his babblingly rhythmic speech patterns, padding out hesitations with ‘dum-di-dums’ or ‘bingy-bongy, dingly-danglys’ when he can’t find the right phrase. Then again, it could be that, with all that febrile energy and those highly charged hormones, he is simply too impatient to wait until the right word comes along.
He doesn’t agree, though, that he possesses any unconscious urge to prove that he has all the normal red-blooded aspirations. ‘Do I find I need to mention them? Well, not really. Because it’s not very hip to say you wanted to be in the Army.’ It is a refreshingly unpretentious answer to a pretentious question and it reminds you that Izzard’s comic persona does not hide – as those of Tony Hancock, John Cleese and Stephen Fry did and do – an introspective, self-punishing and melancholic alter ego. But that’s not to say Izzard cannot relate to the comedic tradition of looking to childhood for certain blame associations. He talks, for instance, of the links between his craving for an audience’s approval and his mother’s death. ‘There really are,’ he says. ‘It’s the strongest thing. I love that rush of endorphin off the audience. It’s an affection fix, which I analyse back to my mother dying. A lot of people think the TV thing is linked to that, too. But it’s not. I knew I was TV before she died. I haven’t really sorted out my feelings towards my mother though. Never had therapy. There’s still emotion there.’
What his transvestism did give him, of course, was a ready explanation – an excuse – for the times when he felt unpopular. And he took this safety mechanism further with the theory that ‘people won’t reject you if you appear not to give a damn whether they reject you or not’, As his confidence in his own popularity has grown, however, his appearance has become more compromised and ‘acceptable’. When, in the early Nineties, he first came out as a transvestite on stage, his look was, by his own estimation, frumpy. Now he has acquired a much more sophisticated and androgynous look; shiny black PVC trousers, burnt orange velvet frockcoat, spiky stilettos and a swagger that reminds you of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. It suggests that what he has really come out as is not a cross-dresser but a narcissist.
‘Oh yeah,’ he says. ‘But it depends how you define narcissism. I found by looking in the mirror that my posture was terrible. I was all bent over. Now I’ve corrected all that by doing Pilates and stuff.’ He demonstrates straightening his back. ‘Because I wasn’t caring what I looked like-because comedy is a mind/speed thing and I thought it doesn’t matter what you look like – but it’s better if you get the whole visual thing working.’ Pause. Scrunching of eyes in attempt to pick up thread again. ‘What were we talking about?’
The psychoanalyst Heinz Kobut says that for a healthy self to develop, to gain balance and cohesion, the infant needs to feel affirmed, recognised and appreciated, especially when he displays himself. If those needs are unsatisfied, mirror-gazing in adulthood is a belated attempt to obtain the reassurance that he’s there, whole and in one piece.
We were talking about narcissism, Eddie.
‘Yeah, narcissism,’ Izzard says. ‘I feel more confident when I look kicking. I started out in Jesus sandals and combat trousers. They had lots of pockets that I couldn’t help stuffing full of things. It made me look like a weird hamster whose jaw had slipped. The Italians have the right idea. Lots of pockets. But sew them up because if you put things in them it will ruin the line of the suit.’ He stands up and runs his hands over his hips to demonstrate what he means by the line of a suit. The interview continued in this vein for three hours, filling up two C90 audio tapes. When, a few weeks later, I came to transcribe them, I discovered that one of the tapes, the first, had gone missing. I searched everywhere for it, accused everyone, but eventually consoled myself with a remark that Mother Teresa made to Sir Cliff Richard after he returned from recording an interview with her only to find the tape was blank: ‘God must have had a reason for not wanting the tape to be heard.’
Perhaps I was going to misquote Izzard and he was going to sue the Sunday Telegraph for libel. Perhaps it was destiny. Karma. A Zen thing. And, come to think of it, these were some of the things Izzard talked about on the missing tape. He’s a big believer in being ‘centred’, he told me. It’s something that practising yoga has taught him. It’s what enables him to Flow rather than Struggle, to feel his way through one of his elastic, improvised stories on stage, rather than worry about where it is going or whether it is about to snap.
I suppose I could have asked Izzard to go over the areas covered in the missing tape. He is, after all, extremely accommodating and friendly and he loves to natter. On stage he will meander from subject to subject, occasionally giggling at his own jokes. He will doodle and embroider with words, spinning shambolic webs around random thoughts and surreal juxtapositions. He will give you a rush of cerebral vertigo one moment and grind to a standstill the next. ‘I’ve forgotten what I was saying,’ he will say typically, with a smile of such innocence it must have been calculated to beguile.
His comedy washes over you, sweeps you along in its undercurrent and afterwards, when you come up for air, it leaves you feeling almost melancholic as you try to recall quite what it was he said that made you laugh so much. When I tried to describe this post-performance tristesse to Izzard, he gave me a hurt look. When the lights come on after a show, I said, digging myself deeper, you feel sort of deflated, leaden and unfunny. He described a figure of eight with his head, half nodding it and half shaking it in a pantomime of wounded confusion.
And that’s the main reason you can’t do justice to Izzard in a written profile, and why it doesn’t really matter about the missing tape. He’s an inspired mime artist. He can conjure up a queue of murderers at a petrol station simply by walking backwards and giving occasional flicks of his hips and a shrug of his shoulder.
He demonstrates it to me now. If you have one imaginary character talking to another, you have to spin yourself a full 180 degrees to face them. As he swivels back and forth, one character standing behind and above the other, his inflatable soft squeaks against the seat of his black denim jeans.
Beneath all the garrulous vagueness there is a certain cunning, a certain technique, then. Off stage, too. He produces his own videos. He gives exclusive interviews to rival papers. He stands in for Paul Merton on a whole series of Have I Got News For You and then insists that he never does television. Like a child who has learned how to get his own way with adults, Izzard is a skilled manipulator.
And, however random and rambling his routines may seem, they always come to a neat full circle. As the interview draws to a close, we find ourselves back on the subject of Bexhill-on-Sea. I ask if he thinks the town will ever put up a statue to its most famous son.  ‘No,’ he says, widening his eyes. ‘You must never have that. Because pigeons will poo on it. Pigeons understand the vanity of humans. They say, “Oh here’s another trophy to a human ego.” And they never poo round statues, they poo on them. No matter how high the pedestal is. That’s the pigeon’s job in life…’ And so on.

Witnessing Elton John greet his burly, unshaven manservant with a peck on the cheek and a fruity ‘How are you, dear?’ was more than I had any right to expect. But then he sat on his piano stool, placed his fingers on the keyboard, and sang half a dozen of his most memorable ballads – all with the jutted jaw and the grimace of emotion directed at me, his one-man audience. Now, as he shows every sign of laying on one of his celebrated tantrums as well, I get the feeling he’s just spoiling me.
The pedal of the electric piano is sticking. He stops playing. He scowls. He pouts. ‘Look!’ he finally snaps at a young assistant. ‘It’s no good. It’s doing it all the time.’ In his eagerness to put it right, the assistant dives feet first between the black legs of the piano and begins tinkering around with its wires. He’s given half an hour to fix it, while everyone else breaks for a cold lunch of jambon, fromage and French bread.
We are in Nice, the town where Elton John has just bought a fourth home – a £5-million pink palace on a wooded hill, within waving distance of his neighbour, Joan Collins. A surprise really, given that a couple of years ago, during the most exciting tantrum ever captured on film, John swore he would never come back to the south of France, ever again, ever. It was after a female fan had shouted, ‘Yoo-hoo!’ at him while he was playing tennis on a hotel court. ‘It pissed me off,’ he seethed as he ordered his private jet to fly him away from the Riviera. ‘I take my tennis seriously. I don’t like people waving at me.’
Now, as we sit in the dressing room of a hall where he is rehearsing for his autumn tour, he says with a shrug and a lopsided grin, ‘Typical me. All mouth and no trousers.’ Spread over the dressing table is a cloth which, judging by its colourful rococo swirls, probably has a Versace label on it somewhere. Above this there’s a mirror, framed by small lightbulbs. It reflects a 50-year-old pop star wearing white Bermuda shorts, Nike trainers and a baggy blue T-shirt with the word Agassi – or rather issagA – emblazoned across it. On the bridge of his nose sits a pair of blue, rectangular glasses with slits so narrow they make his eyes look reptilian. In his right earlobe there’s a Theo Fennell cross, studded with diamonds. The round, unlined face beneath the expensive chestnut fringe is that of a debauched cherub.
The interview has been granted with the request that it will focus on ‘the music’. It’s not to dwell upon what Simon Prytherch, his publicity manager, has described as ‘the lifestyle, you know, going to parties and wearing Versace’. It will, I’ve been told, last exactly one hour and Prytherch will sit in on it. That is still to come. The half-hour we snatch while the piano is being repaired is an unexpected prelude. And it doesn’t bode well, because for its duration, Elton John is edgy, cold and suspicious – as he has every right to be. He talks too quickly, loudly and impatiently. He gulps at the words and interrupts questions before they’ve been fully asked. When he can’t be bothered to complete a thought he says, ‘Blah, blah, blah’.
There’s still a hint of the Cockney inflection he acquired as a child growing up in suburban Pinner. But there’s no sign of the cheeky chappie with the wide, gap-toothed smile that we, as a grateful nation, know and treasure from early photographs. As he’s talking, one of the outbursts recorded in Tantrums and Tiaras, the unflattering yet oddly endearing documentary filmed off and on throughout 1995 by Elton John’s long-term partner, 34-year-old David Furnish, keeps echoing bullyingly around my head. ‘Not another fucking interview,’ John hisses to the camera. ‘I don’t know how Mrs Jagger does it.’
One reason ‘Mrs’ Jagger – and ‘Miss’ John – do it is because it publicises their records. And, despite already having sold more than 150 million of them and having a back catalogue so enormous it makes him the highest annual earner in the British music industry, Elton John’s appetite for writing hit songs has yet to be sated. ‘The music business,’ he says, lapsing into mid-Atlantic, ‘fascinates the shit outta me. If I hadn’t been a performer, I would’ve been happy working in a small CD store sharing a small flat with David. As long as I’ve got someone to come home to who loves me. Very picket fence.’
And all Barbara Cartland ever wanted was a quiet life of rural simplicity. Elton John’s record-store fantasy may sound bogus, but the point is well taken. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about the charts and, as is the wont of all self-respecting 50-year-olds, he will always rush to his local store and buy the latest Prodigy album, Chemical Brothers single, whatever, on the day that it’s released. Indeed, such is his interest in the rock pantheon – and his own status within it – that he will agree to interviews, despite his claim to be tired of talking about himself.
It could be, though, that this reticence stems from the crushingly low sense of self-esteem from which he periodically suffers. It’s to do with the way he looks and the way he wants to look – this, after all, is the man who once described himself as being ‘physically and spiritually ugly, a slob, a pig’. It’s also because, bored as he is with himself and his excessive lifestyle, he doesn’t believe anyone else can find them subjects of interest either.
The bonus half-hour up, it’s back to the rehearsals. Perhaps conscious of an air of tension, Simon Prytherch whispers: ‘In private, you know, Elton can be very witty. He has a really black sense of humour. I think it’s just that he learned it pays to be less flippant and more guarded in interviews.’ With the piano pedal now fixed, however, the atmosphere is becoming more relaxed and frivolous. During ‘Benny and the Jets’, John slips into a jazz improvisation. For ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’, he leans back precariously on his piano stool, sliding his legs forward and knitting his brow in a caricature of keen emotion. He moves on to a slow song from the new album – ‘Long Way from Happiness’ – and, just as I’m about to get out the lighter and wave it slowly above my head, he breaks the spell by slipping into ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’, played off-key, Les Dawson-style.
His mood has changed and, homework done for the day, there’s almost a skip in his plimsoled step as we return to the dressing room. ‘Come the second half of the rehearsal, I was really getting into it and enjoying it,’ he says. ‘First half, it wasn’t there.’ And as the designated one hour that follows stretches into two, the real reason emerges why guidelines have to be laid down for the interviews Elton John professes to loathe: it’s to save him from his own candour. Like many people who’ve undergone therapy – and many who haven’t – Elton John actually loves talking about himself. More than that, he enjoys confessing, purging, and getting everything out into the open.
Try though I do to stick to the subject of ‘the music’, John insists on bringing up all the juicy details of his life that none of us are really interested in – much: you know, the drink and drugs hell; the homosexuality; the suicidal tendencies; the traumatic childhood; the self-loathing; the fits of black despair; the rotting cavity in his life that can’t be filled by fawning sycophants. Blah, blah, blah.
Within arm’s reach of John’s chair there’s a bowl filled with chunks of nougat. He helps himself to several pieces, talking as he chews, and washes them down with slugs from a can of Diet Coke. There are half a dozen of these to hand, chilling in – very rock and roll – a silver icebucket. Elton John only tipples soft drinks these days. And since he ‘faced his demons’ seven years ago, in a drink and drugs rehabilitation clinic in Chicago, the only Coke he takes is the diet kind that comes in a can. So addicted was he to cocaine that he would sometimes have it flown in to wherever he was staying and, even when he suffered seizures from it, he would only wait about ten minutes between snorting lines.
His compulsions though, as he readily concedes, were not restricted to drink and drugs. In his time he’s been addicted to Sainsbury’s cockles, Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice-cream, and porcelain – especially porcelain. Elton John’s therapist Beechy Colclough once said of him: ‘He’s a totally obsessive, compulsive person. He was born an addict. If it hadn’t been the alcohol, it would have been the drugs. If it hadn’t been the drugs, it would have been the food. If it hadn’t been the food, it would have been the relationships. If it hadn’t been the relationships it would have been the shopping. And, you know what? I think he’s got all five.’
Nowadays John’s main addiction – apart from shopping – is to being honest about himself. Honesty. Honesty. Honesty. He repeats this word as though it were a mantra. ‘One of the good things about growing older is that you become more honest with yourself,’ he will sigh as he pushes his glasses straight with a thick forefinger. ‘I’ve realised that I’ve spent a lot of my life with people I didn’t really care for.’ Five minutes later, bobbing up and down in his chair: ‘I know what I like and what I don’t like and I’m more prepared to say so. More honest with myself.’ Later still, accompanied by a bitter guffaw: ‘My grandmother was incredibly forthright. I’d rather be surrounded by that kind of honesty than by sycophancy.’ Liam Gallagher pops Ecstasy. Elton John takes Honesty. He’s mad for it. And it’s easy to imagine how seductive a drug Honesty can be to one who, in his past addictions, admits to having lived a life of deceit: the Queen Mother of Rock who in private was, at his own estimation, ‘a nasty, vicious drunk’; shy Reg Dwight pretending to be the extrovert Elton John; the balding man playing at being hirsute; the homosexual who married a woman, Renate Blauel, in 1984 – only to divorce her three years later.
‘Tantrums and Tiaras’ was, of course, the biggest Honesty trip an addict could take. John says it taught him a lot about himself: about how abysmally he could behave on the road, how pampered he was, how harrowing life was for the people around him. ‘I looked at myself and thought, “She’s an absolute cow,”‘ he says. ‘I had to laugh. I was just impossible. Like Zaza from La Cage aux Folles.’
This, of course, is exactly how the rest of us enjoy seeing him – because, let’s be frank, as a hard-core rock and roller, Elton John was never terribly convincing. He dressed in funny costumes and monster specs, pulled silly faces and sung hummable, middle-of-the-road songs. What he became instead, though, was something much more original: the apotheosis of excess. John, sadly, seems to be unable to revel in this accolade; rather, he offers a 12-stage analysis of it.
His main fear, he says, relapsing into therapy-speak, was of confrontation. It was a condition that could be traced back to his childhood. ‘My parents used to argue a lot when I was young,’ he says, defensively drawing up the ankle of one unhairy leg to rest on the knee of the other. ‘I would lock myself in my bedroom. My father would come home and there would be a row. I expected it. And lived in fear of it.’ As a consequence, he was not surprised when his mother told him that his late father, who was in the RAF, didn’t like him very much and would have ‘a little dig’ whenever he could.
Reg Dwight was a child prodigy: at three he could hear a piece of music and then play it on the piano; at 11 he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music; in his early twenties he composed the music for hits such as ‘Daniel’ and ‘Your Song’ in ten minutes flat. Given this, and the admission by Reg Dwight’s grown-up alter ego, Elton John, that he’s still a mummy’s boy, it would be reasonable to assume that he was a bit spoilt as a child – by his doting mother, at least – and that he always got his way when he stamped his foot. And this would explain why, in later life, he was capable of complaining about the colour of his private jet, or of walking out of a hotel suite simply because he didn’t like the flowers.
It would also follow that what Stanley Dwight, the father, might really have felt toward the repressed, pampered and freakishly gifted son was not anger but jealousy. To this day, the film Field of Dreams, about a father and son relationship, makes Elton John cry. ‘I missed getting close to my father and I think my father missed getting close to me,’ he reflects, examining his nails. ‘Even though we saw each other when I became famous, it was always awkward. We just didn’t connect.’ But fear of confrontation was not the only legacy from the singer’s youth. Partly because he believed he was plain, overweight and, at 5ft 8in, short, he was afraid that he would never be ‘accepted’, destined always to be lonely and unloved. This belief led to another fear: of showing his feelings, particularly of affection. The irony that he was, nevertheless, able to manipulate his audience’s feelings by singing lyrics borrowed from Bernie Taupin’s heart is not lost on him. ‘I wasn’t a good communicator,’ he says, resting his chin on his chest and fixing me with a stare over the top of his glasses. ‘That’s why I’ve never been able to write my own lyrics. I had to communicate my feelings through my melodies. I could never do it in conversation. I thought that’s what cocaine did for me but it didn’t. It made me talk – but I was talking rubbish.’
Such was John’s emotional discordance, he began to suspect he was incapable of feeling anything, ever again. He has lost many friends to the Aids virus (and considers himself lucky to have emerged HIV-negative himself after his early years of promiscuity). And although he has devoted a lot of energy to the Elton John Aids Foundation he says he was never able to cry about the deaths he had seen. ‘I don’t think I had any feelings when I first went to treatment [for drink and drugs]. They said, “How do you feel?” and I said, “I don’t know, I haven’t felt for years.” My feelings have always been suppressed. Buried for so long it was like having to get them out of the icebox and defrost them.’
But, for all his progress on the thawing front, Elton John still feels awkward about accepting affection, even from Furnish, whom he describes as the love of his life. ‘Before David, I would “Eltonize” everyone I went out with,’ he says. ‘They would come out on their conveyor-belt and be forced to give up their lives and come everywhere with me. And then, of course, their self-worth became nothing. Blah, blah, blah.’ Given these insecurities, it was brave – martyrish, even – of John to leave the queenie tantrum scenes in Furnish’s documentary. Then again, they were very therapeutic for him. Instead of lying on a couch for half an hour, he had a self-flagellating programme made about his life which took a year to film. And he may think that this overdose of Honesty represents a new departure in his life – but, surely, he has always had therapy on a scale as grand as this? Want to feel loved? Fill a rock stadium full of surrogate suitors whom you don’t have to get too close to. Afraid people will snigger at you? Make yourself a laughing stock by wearing a piece of embroidery on your head so intricate it can be compared to the Bayeux Tapestry. Short? Wear outrageous stack heels that draw attention to your height. Myopic? Wear absurd spectacles. Want to justify your feelings of self-disgust? Buy Watford Football Club and suffer the ritual humiliation of 10,000 away fans chanting hurtful songs at you: ‘He’s bald! He’s queer! He takes it up the rear! Elton John! Elton John!’
Actually, John doesn’t find the football songs humiliating. They make him chuckle. And this is what saves him from being unbearable. He he can really laugh at himself. To ‘know then thyself’ is perhaps the most that any of us can ever hope to achieve. To the extent that, ultimately, Elton John doesn’t take himself too seriously, it can be assumed that he knows himself very well indeed. He doubtless thinks it’s pretty amusing that he ended up conforming utterly to the stereotype of the mother’s boy and only child who turns out to be a homosexual with a retentive personality. He has thousands of CDs, for instance, that have to be kept in alphabetical order. When John and an earlier partner checked into the Chicago clinic, each had to write down all the things that they thought were wrong with the other. His partner wrote: ‘He is addicted to cocaine. He is an alcoholic. He is bulimic. He has terrible fits of rage.’ John wrote: ‘He doesn’t tidy up his CDs.’
Elton John loves jokes at his own expense. His favourite description of himself was that he was like Bet Lynch storming around with a leopardskin coat on. And in the chapel he had built at his Windsor mansion in memory of his beloved ‘Nan’, there are gold-leafed, swan-necked pediments inscribed with the words Eltono es Bueno, under his coat of arms. He can be disarmingly dry, too, in his self-deprecation, always getting in there first with the glittery toecap. When he saw the cover of the song ‘Live Like Horses’, which showed him standing alongside Pavarotti, he murmured, ‘Eat like horses, more like.’
In the starry dressing-room upstairs, Elton John has pulled the ring on three cans of Coke. He’s wandered over to the window and commented on the fine weather. He’s made me feel jumpy by shouting ‘Uugh?’, like grandmothers do, whenever he hasn’t heard a question. He’s excused himself to go to the loo. And he’s made me laugh by slipping into a camp Kenneth Williams impersonation as he describes how people react bitterly to Lottery winners: ‘Oooh, you’ve got all this now, you won’t want to know me.’ And he’s told me what he thinks are people’s criticisms of his capricious nature and his impulsive materialism. ‘I’m an excessive person,’ he says with a shrug. ‘You’ve seen all the pictures. You’ve heard all the stories.’
Far from feeling guilty about his indulgences, John finds them a comfort. ‘I just love collecting beautiful things. I love the workmanship and I’m much more knowledgeable about them than I used to be. Now I don’t buy in bulk. I know where every single thing is in every single house.’
Downstairs, Bob Halley, the burly, unshaven Cockney whom Elton John had earlier greeted with a kiss, has ambled over to say hello. For 23 years Halley has been John’s loyal personal assistant, a job that has involved being chauffeur, the target for Coke bottles thrown in anger, and dresser during the glam-rock days – when the star was panicking before a concert, Halley would have to squeeze his boss into his Donald Duck outfit with the words, ‘Get a grip.’ And once asked if he thought Elton John’s records would always sell, Halley said flatly, ‘No. Load of old crap, aren’t they?’ John, who was standing by his side, nearly burst out of his suit laughing. When I question Halley about his bantering relationship with the man who pays his wages, he gives a laconic grin and scratches his stomach. ‘Yeah, I think he likes me because I don’t suck up to him. We have the same sense of humour. It’s my job to bring him back to earth.’
Bob Halley is the Fool to Elton John’s King Lear. He is the deadpan jester licensed to insult and jolly his boss out of his evil moods. Joan Collins has Christopher Biggins. Elton has Bob. But the analogies with a royal court don’t end there. Two of the most poignant photographs taken this year have featured our Elton John. One shows him trapped by self-parody and shamelessly divorced from reality as he arrives for his 50th birthday party at the Hammersmith Palais. He turned up in a removal van on a hydraulic platform, resplendent in a £50,000 costume, an ostrich-feather train and a three-and-a-half foot tall wig – topped with a silver galleon.
The other – altogether more chilling – image was splashed over the front page of the Mirror under the headline ‘Healing Hands’. It shows Diana, Princess of Wales, the Queen of England manquee,  consoling a weeping pop star at the memorial service held in Milan Cathedral for his close friend of 20 years, Gianni Versace. The pictures showed his ugly duckling reality crashing into a fantasy world filled with beautiful porcelain and smelling of fresh flowers. It also showed the extent to which the lines between royalty and rock aristocracy have become disturbingly blurred.
Today, according to both the star and the publicist, Elton John is trying to shed the personality he has created for himself – the ‘going to parties and wearing Versace’ image. In the old days, he says, he used to go to the opening of everything. Now unless it’s an Elton John Aids Foundation event or a friend who needs support he won’t go to anything. ‘I can’t be bothered. All that flashbulb scene. Such a rigmarole. You see the same old bloody people. Quite honestly, I’m more interested in looking at catalogues of porcelain now.’ Remembering the three-and-a-half foot tall wig, ‘Oh yeah?; is all you can think. But thank goodness. We love our bejewelled, exotically plumaged, all-new, honest Elton. We love the splendid ‘rubbish’ he still spouts, even without cocaine. And we love the fact that, fortunately, he hasn’t quite been able to shake off the acquisitiveness.
Thought to be worth at least £150 million and with houses and mansions in Windsor, London, Atlanta and Nice, John will buy an extra Rolls-Royce Corniche on a whim, employ Sir Roy Strong to design his Italianate garden, and travel with a wardrobe of 30 suits, 40 jackets and six drawers of designer spectacles. The reputation for conspicuous materialism has stuck. And it’s not so much that it detracts from ‘the music’ as that it has become inextricably linked with it.
The interview over, the tape recorder switched off, Elton John talks excidedly about the latest purchase for his new palace of excess in Nice. A spaniel puppy. He didn’t intend to buy it but, last night, when his Alsatian puppies arrived and he went to the pet shop to buy beds for them, he just couldn’t resist. ‘I love doggies,’ he laughs. ‘I just love them.’
In response to this article Elton John’s publicist, Simon Prytherch of John Reid Enterprises Ltd, wrote to the Sunday Telegraph: ‘We felt it necessary to register our outrage at the interview with Elton John… Some of the article is accurate, some funny and some quite insightful but our frustration and anger is at the misrepresentation – it is simply not the feature we agreed to do nor does the piece reflect the conversation that took place. Both Elton and myself feel very hurt and let down.’
A week after this interview apeared in 1997, Elton John sang his re-written version of Candle in the Wind at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales and it became the biggest selling single of all time.
He has since been knighted, had a pace maker fitted and taken his manager, John Reid, to court after discovering that £20 million had disappeared from his estate. At the trial it emerged that Sir Elton had once run up a florists bill of £293,000, during a £40 million 20-month spending spree.

Warm, clubbable, avuncular, human – these are some of the adjectives that can be applied to the left-wing barrister John Mortimer. They don’t canter to mind, however, when attempting to describe that other high-profile left-wing silk – and champion of the Bradford Twelve, Bridgewater Four and five of the Birmingham Six – Michael Mansfield QC.
It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find oneself sitting upstairs at the chambers which Mansfield founded 13 years ago in London’s Took Street – at a symbolic arm’s length from the Inns of Court – listening to the man brooding upon the dream he had last night. In it, Mansfield is running to catch a train which is to take him to a conference – held in a canteen – but the suitcase he is carrying slows him down. He misses the train and decides to walk there. Everyone else is moving faster than he, and the gravel in the pathway is getting deeper – until it’s like ploughing through thick snow. The briefcase is getting heavier and heavier, he’s going to miss the conference…
It’s all in there: vulnerability, insecurity, the desire to please, the urge toward nonconformity (according to arcane ritual, barristers shouldn’t carry briefcases). And the canteen touch is masterful. It’s almost as if someone had whispered in Mansfield’s ear that it’s endearingly human to have anxiety dreams – that they show there’s more to you than the cold detachment of your public persona – and so he’s rather chuffed about being able to deliver an archetypal example. All right, so the dream is work-related, which makes it rather less revelatory about the inner man than one would have hoped. But it’s still a good dream, by any standards, and it has taken two hours of ruthless cross-examination to coax it out of him.
That’s not strictly true. Interviewing the radical conscience of the Bar does not really involve much in the way of hard questioning. Point a tape-recorder at him is like turning on a tap. And, while Mansfield spouts, you’re at liberty to have an out-of-body experience if you want – a wander over to the window, perhaps, to watch the comings and goings of the young, multi-racial, red-brick-university-educated barristers who gravitate instinctively toward Mansfield’s democratically run chambers like spermatozoa to an ovum. Every half-hour or so, you have to return your body to flip the tape over and brush away the cobwebs that have formed on the upper slopes of your motionless mouth. But otherwise the room is yours to snoop around in as you will.
The monologue seems well-rehearsed – the official version of the rise and rise of Michael Mansfield – but a rather clever oratorical device is assumed to keep it from sounding stale. Although Mansfield has a firm, confident drawl well used to carrying across courtrooms, he puts an unreal emphasis on arbitrarily selected words, as if running on weak batteries that can only occasionally muster a power surge.
Thus, when he’s telling you, unprompted, about the incident that inspired him to become a barrister, he will say: ‘My mother, who was the most law-abiding person you could ever meet, was wrongly arrested for  parking too close to a pedestrian crossing. She fought it and won because, in true Perry Mason style, there was a surprise witness. My father. He had been sitting in the car. The policeman hadn’t noticed him. That was it for the boys in blue because, even when she gave her version, they wouldn’t back off. They just stood up there in court and lied.’
Occasionally, Mansfield will vary the lurching pace of his speech with an impersonation you suspect has been honed down and polished by many years of crowd-pleasing at Islington dinner-parties. When discussing the iniquities of land-mines, for instance, he will offer a passable Nicholas Soames: ‘Of course we can all see limbs blown orf. But that’s missing the point.’ And when explaining how, in the bad old days of the Sixties and Seventies, confessions used to be regarded as the best kind of evidence, he will tuck his thumbs under his lapels and assume the voice of a doddering old judge: ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what better evidence can there be than the words coming from the lips of the defendant himself? Can you imagine why anyone would want to confess to such a heinous crime?’
While all this is going on, you are given a chance to study his unconventionally handsome face. At 55, Mansfield looks how you imagine Sylvester Stallone will look when he’s 65: bulging eyes, hooded above and bagged below, the loose skin of one who has lost weight, a nose that looks like it might have taken a useful left hook at some juncture, and a bouffant of greying hair that trespasses over the collar at the back. The body language is magnificent. Most of the time Mansfield assumes a Paxman-esque slouch, with the occasional forward shift to rest his chin on a veiny hand. What he never does, however, is make eye contact.
This is a technique of his in court. While speaking, he will close his eyes as if reading from an autocue on the inside of his lids. For the party of the second part it feels like sensory deprivation; after two hours of this isolation treatment, I would have confessed to anything.
Research has shown that given the right circumstances, almost anyone will confess to something they haven’t done. Can Mansfield imagine a situation where he would be forced to confess? ‘I suppose I can really, if pressure were put,’ he says. ‘If you were in Nigeria, say, and you’d been questioned for seven days, the isolation and uncertainty would probably get to you.’
This is why Mansfield believes no prosecution should be allowed based solely on an uncorroborated confession. On the shelves in his office there are ranks of red, yellow and green lever-arch files which support this argument, for they chronicle those cases of miscarriage of justice which Mansfield has made his name fighting. One file reveals how he claimed that two West Midlands police officers had forged one defendant’s signature on a fake statement in order to persuade another to confess to the killing of Carl Bridgewater. In February this year, three of the Bridgewater Four were released on bail, after serving 18 years in prison (the fourth, Patrick Molloy, died in prison in 1981). Three weeks ago they were acquitted.
These files, these cases, are what inform Mansfield’s call for sweeping reforms of the judiciary, the police, and the Crown Prosecution Service. In 1993, following one of the cases – Mansfield’s successful appeal on behalf of five of the Birmingham Six – it looked as if he might get his way. However, the  Royal Commission on Criminal Justice – set up in response to that trial – did not offer the reforms for which he had been campaigning. Indeed, much to his chagrin, it was the Commission which took up the idea of restricting the right to trial by jury – something the then Home Secretary Michael Howard eagerly encouraged – as quid pro quo for its overall support for the maintenance of the right to silence, something which Howard had been against.
Mansfield believes that both rights are sacrosanct. It was with no little irony therefore that in another high-profile case earlier this year Mansfield found himself questioning men who took advantage of their right to remain silent with a sneer. He was representing the family of the murdered black teenager, Stephen Lawrence. The collapse of the inquest meant that a video of the white defendants and their friends, which was secretly shot by the police, was never shown to a jury. In the film, recorded by a camera and microphone hidden in a plug socket, one of the accused men was seen brandishing a knife and boasting to a group of white youths of his desire to maim and kill black people. It made for sickening – and for Mansfield frustrating – viewing. Again three weeks ago, however, Jack Straw announced that there was to be a wide-ranging inquiry into the death of Lawrence. It is a testament to Mansfield’s ubiquity that the announcement was made the day after the acquittal of the Bridgewater Four.
Now that Michael Howard is yesterday’s man – and liberal-minded, anti-Establishment barristers everywhere have been deprived of their bogeyman – you would imagine it is time for the outsider Mansfield to come in from the cold. After all, New Labour is awash with lawyer types sympathetic to the Mansfield mission to overturn every unsafe conviction: there is the prince of champagne socialists himself, John Mortimer; there’s the new Lord Chancellor and friend and mentor to Tony Blair, Lord Irvine of Lairg; and, of course, there’s the Prime Minister’s wife herself, Cherie Booth QC. Surely the Establishment ground has shifted enough for even Mansfield to feel comfortable with it? Not quite. During the election,  Mansfield’s chambers raised £1,250 in support of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party for a candidate to stand against Jack Straw in Blackburn. Although Mansfield himself has always voted Labour, on 1 May this year [1997] he hummed and hah’d and was tempted to put his cross against the more radical Lib Dem candidate’s name. In the end he stuck with Labour and now concedes that he is cautiously impressed with Jack Straw’s record so far.
‘But he’s on the same pitch as Howard,’ he qualifies. ‘Jack Straw’s playing the same kind of game with the same kind of balls. The politicians have a unspoken club and it needs someone from outside to force them to look at the British legal system anew. I have always avoided organisations. They corrupt people and bring with them power structures and jealousies and you find yourself not talking about the issue but going over the minutes. I suppose, in this respect, I’m an anarchist.’
There are other ways to describe this man. When you canvass opinion about him, certain words recur. Ambitious is one. Vain another. Arrogant and chippy also crop up more than once. Fellow barristers are wont to sigh heavily at the mention of his name (although, tellingly, they usually go on to speak of his achievements, and his integrity, in tones of  begrudging admiration). His trouble, as far as the Bar goes, is that he’s not ‘one of us’. Instead of being flamboyant and urbane in court – as barristers tend to be – he doggedly nibbles away at a subject. He will frame his arguments in a systematic, rhetorical, almost proddingly forensic way: abruptly make a point, ask bullyingly if witness, judge and jury agree with it, give it a mental tick and then develop the next phase. Sir Frederick Lawton, the former Lord Justice of Appeal, accused him of obstinate behaviour that exasperated the court. ‘Not a congenial advocate,’ he once sniffed of Mansfield. ‘It never does your client any good.’
On a personal level the suspicion seems to be that he is too good to be true, and too, well, smug about being it: all that liberal posturing, the riding to work on a bike, the vegetarianism, the holidays in the spiritual home of New Labour, Italy – it’s just too much to stomach.
His domestic image isn’t so polished, however. In 1992, he parted from Melian Bordes, his first wife, and five children, then married Yvette Vanson, a TV producer, with whom he has a son. Although the second marriage is going smoothly now, 18 months ago there were reports of an extramarital affair. Mansfield says it caused a great deal of distress and  anxiety for which he is deeply sorry. So there you go.
Professionally, the resentment probably stems from Mansfield’s ability to combine a hectic career at the Bar with his second job as a media lawyer who writes for newspapers and pops up every week as a panellist on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze. The most unforgivable things about Mansfield are that he doesn’t seem to mind what people think of him and, worse, that he somehow manages to wriggle out of the right-on civil-rights lawyer pigeonhole. He can’t disguise the sneer in his voice when he talks about politicians, for instance, but when you ask if there are any that he does actually admire and respect he will say Tony Benn, which is what you expect, and Ted Heath, which isn’t. In addition to all this, the man has the gall to have a hinterland: he plays the drums – jazz mostly – well enough to have been in a band at one time and, for the past year, he has been taking piano lessons to boot. His father, a railway controller at King’s Cross, died unexpectedly from cancer at the age of 62, before he had a chance to get to know his teenage son well. He did, however, have time to teach him the drums and encourage him to take piano lessons from a teacher who, bizarrely, always wore white gloves and galoshes. The trouble was, the young Mickey Mansfield objected to being taught Strauss instead of Duke Ellington. In an act of petulance, he took a kitchen knife and stabbed the middle C wire on the piano at his home.
Some might say this wistful side of Mansfield’s nature has continued into adulthood. One legacy from his childhood which definitely has is his romanticism. As an eight-year-old he was obsessed with The Defenders, an American TV courtroom drama from the Fifties. ‘The heroes, a father and son duo, nearly always lost their cases,’ Mansfield recalls. ‘But they did it with great style. It was the struggle for justice that excited me. Unlike in real-life courtroom dramas, the stories always had a clean beginning, middle and end.’
He doesn’t believe, though, that this formative influence led him to glamorise in his adult imagination the role of the barrister as noble righter of wrongs – even if he has given his own authorised version a neat beginning, with the incident in which his wronged mother fought the law and won. ‘I don’t see it as a particularly glamorous job,’ he says. ‘But I do see it as providing an avenue of justice for someone who is vulnerable who wouldn’t otherwise have access. When I joined I suppose I was in the vanguard of a new approach. At the time you weren’t meant to identify with the client. You were meant to stand back and be objective, like a surgeon. But I believe you should have feelings. That helps you relate to a client.’
Evidence of the romanticism of his childhood – his image of the lawyer as the man in the white hat who comes to the rescue of the underdog – surfaces when you ask him which case he is most proud to have been associated with. ‘It would have to be the defence of the Orgreave miners – ordinary working men striking to save their community – in 1984. They stood their ground.’ During the trial, Mansfield went with his family to live in Yorkshire on a farm overlooking the Orgreave mine – he had to be there for the trial, but he also regarded it as a chance to see first-hand the social effects of deprivation. Method defending, Daniel Day-Lewis would call it. ‘It made me think there was another England I had never seen before,’ he says in a rather unguarded confession of class ignorance. ‘Families would have sold all their furniture and have nothing much to live on apart from charity. Yet I would come out of their houses thinking, “My God, they gave me more than I gave them.” Amazing courage.’
Mansfield often refers to courage. It’s what politicians need, it’s what judges lack, and it’s what Mansfield believes he’s got in taking on the Establishment. After all, it’s what enables him to empathise with his downtrodden clients. But doesn’t getting too close, being too sympathetic, ever cloud his judgement? ‘No,’ he says. ‘The passion makes sure that you keep your eye on the real issues that are behind the case. You have to start thinking as the defendant might think and this helps you put questions you might otherwise not have thought of.’
He says he is often moved to tears in private – ‘especially when there is a conviction of one for whom I have fought very hard. I suppose the way I deal with it is by channelling it into anger,’ he says. ‘I’ve always felt anger is the most important emotion. It keeps me going. It’s like when I didn’t get into university, anger made me want to do something about it.’
After Highgate School, Mansfield did go to Keele University to study philosophy –  but only because he refused to accept his initial rejection and turned up unexpectedly on the admission tutor’s doorstep. The tutor was so impressed by his determination, he offered him a place. Mansfield was called to the Bar at the not-very-progressive Grey’s Inn, in 1967, but not before he had doggedly retaken his Bar exams after first failing them.
Sometimes, he says, he can find himself shaking with anger. ‘Anger can help you focus. Give you clarity. It can also give you courage, well, maybe bravado is a better word. Sometimes you get to the stage, in a case where you think I must find something else.’ He clenches his fist. ‘There has to be an inner truth. I do find it gives me a feeling of where the weakness in the case really is. You begin to spot when you are reading statements that there is something funny going on here. This doesn’t fit. This doesn’t flow. This isn’t working. Something is missing from all these statements.’
It tells us much about Mansfield that his anger is invariably directed at the evil Mr Bumble of the Establishment rather than at the Oliver Twist of the accused: even when his personal involvement in a case is more than emotional. In 1973, in the first major case of terrorist explosions on the mainland, he defended the Price sisters – after one of their Old Bailey bombs blew up his own car. Its burnt-out shell was towed to his house in Hampstead. In the small hours of the following morning, Mansfield came downstairs, dressed only in underpants, to answer the door to two policemen who had terrible news for him: his car had been vandalised. ‘No,’ he replied with a yawn and a scratch as he turned to go back to bed, ‘it was blown up.’
He was also mugged once, only to find himself apologising for the mugger afterwards, arguing that he was probably a victim of his environment with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Does he ever worry that John Major might have been right when he said that we should condemn a little more and understand a little less?
‘Well, fundamentally, I have a positive view of the people,’ he says. ‘Not necessarily politicians – but ordinary people. The people who sit on juries. Because we are living in an ever more materialistic and polarised society, where there is an ever greater concentration of wealth in fewer hands, I think you can never have enough understanding for those vulnerable people who live in poverty.’
It is a shamelessly, refreshingly idealistic answer. And his idealism is symptomatic of his youthful outlook. In middle age, he may now suffer from work-related anxiety dreams. But in his heart, Mansfield is the boy who never grew up. In his daydreams he is still sitting in front of his parents’ television, watching The Defenders lose their cases romantically, heroically, and with great style.
This appeared in 1997. In 2001 Michael Mansfield unsuccessfully defended Barry George, the man convicted of the murder of Jill Dando. He did, though, come up with the quote of the trial when he declared that ‘the prosecution case is hanging by the merest thread.’

Frederick Forsyth’s two terriers hadn’t run off on that cloudless June morning, many rabbits who later died would have stayed alive, and the world would have taken a different course. But the Jack Russells of War are a law unto themselves.
The scent of a small, burrowing, plant-eating mammal is to them as is the smell of kippers to an airport security guard…
Scholars of Forsyth style will have guessed by now where this homage is heading. The clue is in the word ‘kippers’. Semtex-H, the most popular of all the RDX plastic explosives derivatives, has always been a Czech product and under Communism was made completely free of odour. This is why it became the terrorists’ favourite device.
When he came to power in 1989, the Czech president, Vaclav Havel, acceded to a Western request to change the formula and add a particularly foul odour to make the stuff detectable in transit. The odour was similar to rotten fish, more specifically to kippers.
Such technical minutiae is the stuff of which Forsyth fiction is made – and the author will lovingly introduce it on the flimsiest of narrative pretexts. Conversely, he has little truck with characterisation and will always try to get the beastly business over as briskly as possible.
If he were introducing himself in this interview, for instance, he would write: For a 58-year-old, Frederick Forsyth is in good shape. He is tanned and wiry-haired. He is also a best-selling author who has just published Icon, his latest -“and last” – paperback thriller. The book tells the story of a genocidal rightwing fanatic who wants to save Russia from social collapse by setting himself up as an icon who would unite the people.
Today, however, right-wing fanatics are the last thing on the author’s mind – today his Jack Russells have gone missing. “Got everyone out looking for them,” he barks. “Blasted things.” Forsyth lives with his second wife and two teenage sons in a 26-room Queen Anne manor house set in 175 acres of rolling Hertfordshire farmland in the south of England.
For some reason, the sight of the wistaria that creeps up the weathered red bricks of this house and the dazzling white picket-fence that surrounds it, seem incongruous. It’s all too effeminate and genteel – not at all the anonymous greystone building halfway up St. James’ Street in London in which nearly all Forsyth characters have their clandestine meetings and in which, somehow, you imagine the rugged author himself will live. Because of the ramrod bearing he seems to have in photographs, you also expect the author to be taller, less round-shouldered and, at the very least, to be wearing a cravat. Instead he is wearing faded jeans – even if pressed – and ox-blood loafers which, though well polished, have tassels. At least the famous cigarette holder is here, next to the full ashtray, on top of a copy of The Daily Telegraph.
Missing dogs apart, it has been a stressful day for Forsyth. He has just returned from London where he’s been delivering an impromptu televised address to the people of Switzerland. As the unofficial, self-appointed world spokesman for the cause of anti-Eurofederalism, Forsyth feels it his duty to take part in such things.
He’d been asked to do this programme because the producers had seen an interview with him on a German channel. That in turn had been prompted by the controversial open letter he wrote in April to the magazine Der Spiegel, in which he compared Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s obsession with a single European currency to the “road to madness” that led to the Holocaust.
Forsyth stuffs into his cigarette holder the first of ten Rothmans that he is to smoke in the two hours that follow. It’s the chain-smoking that accounts for the wheezy chuckle – “hhum hhum” – which concludes most of his good-natured tirades.
At 17 he went off to study Spanish in Spain only to train as a matador instead – an unusual departure for the son of Kentish shopkeepers. At 19, instead of going to university, he gained his wings and became the youngest pilot in the RAF before leaving to join Reuters.
It was as a journalist that, one night in 1963, he nearly started World War 111 when he stumbled across a column of Russian tanks and missile carriers clattering around the streets of East Berlin. He had transmitted a panicky invasion alert back to London which led to President Lyndon Johnson and British Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home being woken up for an emergency conference.
Then someone realised it was just a rehearsal for a May Day parade. A few years later, disillusioned with journalism, Forsyth decided to try his hand at writing novels. The nine bestsellers that followed sold 50 million copies in more than 30 languages and yielded five films including The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War and The Fourth Protocol.
By now he had decided that he hated writing. Was bored with it. Never wanted to go near his typewriter again. But, in l990, he was forced out of early retirement when he lost millions – sorry, mills – through financial adviser and one-time friend Roger Levitt who later admitted to fraudulent dealing and was banned by the courts from being a company director. The two-book deal Forsyth signed shortly afterwards was reportedly worth £9 million.
In one book he predicted the election of Thatcher, in another the fall of the Shah of Iran. Twenty-five years after he described, in The Odessa File, how the Nazis had stored stolen Jewish gold in Swiss banks, the story has come true and made headline news.
He correctly guessed the outcome of the 1992 British election to within one point and wrote down the number and put it in a sealed envelope to be opened after the vote. Like all good Forsyth characters, Forsyth himself is, if not irrationally suspicious, certainly well disposed to conspiracy theories. He is, he says, lowering his voice and leaning forward in his chair, deeply concerned about the draconian style of the Blair government. “(Harold) Wilson was bad enough,” he says. “He would say his backbenchers were allowed to bark but not bite. Within a couple of months, though, Blair has shown himself to be much more paranoid about criticism in the ranks. They are literally not allowed to lunch with journalists without permission. That is unprecedented. There is a mighty computer, Excalibur, which racks up every quote an MP makes and every foible going back to childhood. That’s open government? I haven’t seen anything like this since East Berlin in the Sixties.”
The comment makes you nervously scan the room for sharp objects. Even so, you find yourself asking the sage what should be done? Should MI5 start bugging Downing Street as it did in Wilson’s day?
“No. I think it’ll be the other way round,” Forsyth says, warming to his theme. “At the height of the Cold War you had an MI5 whose very job was to protect this nation from the infiltration of Soviet agents. Wilson had put together a kitchen cabinet because he thought it was the only place that wasn’t bugged. Some of that cabinet was bizarre…” Forsyth stops in mid-flow and looks toward the door. Sandy – slim, blonde and pretty – is standing motionless, framed in the open doorway. “We’ve found the dogs,” she says, taking off her sunglasses. “David found them in the tractor, at the bottom of the field.”
“Stupid idiots,” Forsyth says under his breath, trying to hide the look of relief playing across his face. So he is a bit of softie at heart, then? “No. Hhum hhum. Knew they would be around somewhere. Probably found a cool patch under an oak. Stupid idiots.”
“Knew they would be around somewhere. Probably found a cool patch under an oak. Stupid idiots,” says Forsyth.

Driving towards Tring on a drizzly morning with the radio tuned to 828 Medium Wave is like travelling back in time. On the M25 the signal is still too faint and crackly to make out that sonorous, diluted Mancunian voice once so familiar. Then, as you turn off at Junction 20, it really starts comin’ atcha through the windscreen wipers: ‘But just to get serious for a moment, folks. Let’s not forget that the police do a really great job…’ It ebbs again, lost to the atmospheric hiss as the four-wheeled time-machine enters a cleavage hewn through what must be the only hill in Hertfordshire. On the other side, the signal surges back across the ether, down the years, and washes over you like a warm, runny, Medium Wave of nostalgia.
Dave Lee Travis is taking a call from a woman who has a dog that can talk, or at least growl the sort of ‘hello’ sound made by tracheostomy patients with voice boxes. ‘You must be mad!’ Lee Travis splutters. ‘What’s the dog called?’ The woman who must be mad is also laughing now. ‘Buddy,’ she says. ‘I’ve got two. Buddy and Olly.’ The old pro, now giggling, pauses just long enough to wipe away a tear. ‘That’s okay. I have two cats called Flap and Mandu! Oh dear. I’d better play the next track. This is Fleetwood Mac.’
Of course it is. The track is a paradigm of the sort of mouldie oldie that the 52-year-old Lee Travis plays every morning on his Classic Gold show. This programme, in DLT-speak, ‘comes atcha through the cornflakes’ if you live in the Reading area (or Bristol or Carlisle or any of the dozen or so other regions to which the show is networked). He wasn’t always a ‘Radio Mould’ man, though. In the halcyon days of Radio 1 – the Seventies and early Eighties – Lee Travis bestrode the airwaves like a bell-bottomed colossus, pumping out a billion megawatts of p-p-p-power! to his nine million ‘completely bonkers’ listeners.
As I wait round the back of the Rose and Crown in Tring, chewing over the significance of this fall from grace, I don’t notice immediately the dark blue Ford Scorpio that has pulled up a few yards away. Then I see the door swing open and a fleshy, hairless hand, framed by a chunky gold bracelet, emerge to beckon me over.
Once inside the Ford, I can’t help noticing the air: a robust brand of freshener is at work on it. The second thing I notice is that the generous size of the driver’s pale, moon face is exaggerated by a chiaroscuro of salt-and-pepper whiskers and that famous mane of hair which, in 1980, moved the National Hairdressers’ Federation to name Dave Lee Travis Head of the Year. As we stop at some traffic lights five minutes later, Lee Travis turns and eyes me suspiciously through the tinted lenses of his glasses. ‘So what’s this interview about, then?’ he says. It’s a fair question. It’s partly, I suppose, about that lost generation of ‘completely bonkers’ DLT listeners out there in radioland.
The listeners were the sorts of people who had those bonkers dayglo cards which said ‘you don’t have to be mad to work here – but it helps!’ pinned above their bonkers desks. People who want everyone to think them endearingly bonkers usually do so because they fear they will be otherwise thought dull, something which they suspect they probably are. Pinning the card above the desk was like buying an off-the-peg personality. So was listening to DLT.
For DLT was bonkers, too. Or rather he was ‘zany’, an altogether more self-conscious proposition best summed up by his choice of car – a Pontiac Trans-Am called the Flying Banana – and by his gravelly voiced jingle offering ‘close encounters of the hairy kind’. But there was more to it than zaniness. Like those other Radio 1 jocks whose names – Batesie, Noelie, Readie, Wrightie – always ended in a chummy vowel, DLT-ie was an egomaniac. Treated like a rock star by his fans, he felt obliged to behave like one. Until things turned sour.
It’s now four years since Lee Travis made his melodramatic resignation from Radio 1. ‘There are changes being made here which go against my principles,’ he had intoned gravely, live on air. And not since Geoffrey Howe stood up in the House of Commons in 1990 to declare that ‘The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for too long’ had a resignation speech resonated across the land, caused jitters on the stock market, made everyone chuckle.
The comparisons with political life do not end there. Enoch Powell once observed that all parliamentary careers end in failure. The same can be said of a DJ’s working life. Indeed, theirs is one of the few professions where long years of faithful service – 26 in Lee Travis’s case – more or less guarantee the sack. But if, as the saying ought to go, old DJs never die, they only change format, what becomes of their bouncy-castle-sized egos? Do they die of malnutrition?
‘So what’s this interview about, then?’ Lee Travis has asked. The ‘what happens to giant inflatable egos?’ answer seems too rude – so reassuring things about the nation’s interest in him being sempiternal are muttered instead. Satisfied with this, Lee Travis starts talking in general terms about how the country is going to the dogs – but you just know he is thinking about Radio 1. ‘I feel strongly about the fact that people are paring everything down to the bone,’ he says. ‘In every walk of life. It’s sad that good people who have a feel for a job are replaced by youngsters because they’re cheaper.’
Lee Travis often starts his sentences with ‘I feel strongly about’; and years of having people in radioland listen to his opinions has left him assuming that if he feels strongly about something everyone else will, too.
It also means that he now no longer needs a second person present when having a conversation. His monologue about good people being replaced by youngsters lasts until we reach the 250-year-old farmhouse in Hertfordshire where he lives with Marianne, the Swedish blonde he married 26 years ago.
The outside of the house is painted ochre which complements the black leaded windows. A couple of sheep are grazing in a paddock and, in the garden, waddling around a rusting seed drill, are a dozen Indian runner ducks. Because Lee Travis feels he is too old to look after them properly, he no longer keeps the pot-bellied pigs he was wont to talk about on air. ‘I remember one listener writing in to say that no one wanted to hear about my stupid farm and that I should remember that not everyone could afford one,’ Lee Travis recalls as he brings the car to a halt and opens the door only to have it whipped from his hand by a gust of wind. There is a loud crunch as the metal on the door axis buckles and this is followed by an equally loud ‘Bollocks!’ from DLT.
‘Where was I?’ he says, running a finger over the paintwork. ‘That’s right. This letter. It was venomous. And I was really annoyed because it wasn’t signed. So I went on air and said, ‘To the man who wrote this letter, you didn’t give me a chance to reply. Will you phone in?’ He did and we had a long conversation. He went away happy.’
You can see why. Lee Travis has an earthy, engaging manner and a quality – decency? lack of pretension? – which can probably be best defined as blokishness. Perhaps it is something to do with his being called Dave. (Try and imagine him being called David. It just doesn’t work.) Or maybe it’s the quaint words and phrases he uses. He’ll say things like ‘not firing on all cylinders’, ‘you pilchard’, ‘hitherto’, and ‘the old grey matter’. Possibly the best illustration of this Factor X comes when the burglar alarm goes off with a nerve-jangling whoop (there is a maintenance man testing it). It prompts Lee Travis to say how paranoid he is about anything happening to his wife. ‘It’s not your professional thief that worries me,’ he says, every inch the bloke in the pub. ‘It’s the amateur because he might be armed with a knife and might use it on Marianne. If any thief comes in while I’m here, I’ll do anything to put him on the ground. I get annoyed very easily and when I do I get strength from somewhere.’
It reveals the bluffness that always set Lee Travis apart from the other Radio 1 jocks. Not for him the mawkish sentimentality of a Simon Bates or the relentless, smirking fatuity of a Noel Edmonds. And, unlike other jocks, he never spoke with an exclamation mark after every word, that grammatical equivalent to canned laughter. Instead there was always something excitingly dark, bullying and edgy bubbling underneath his warm affability. Here, you felt, was a DJ who’d give you a good kicking if you crossed him. And, indeed, he was prone to losing his temper or, if he got worked up about a subject, launching into a long tirade about it. On one occasion, when he felt compelled to put the nation off its breakfast by delivering an impromptu lecture, in gory detail, about the evils of seal culling, it nearly cost him his job.
‘I have a reputation for diving in feet first when I feel strongly about things,’ he now says with a shrug. ‘Being outspoken. But as far as I’m concerned the boss of the station always has the last word. Nowadays, if someone says something really outrageous people say, “This will be good for ratings.” There is a very obvious example of this, and I think that was probably plotted from day one.’ He is referring to Chris Evans, the DJ who briefly staunched the haemorrhage of Radio 1 listeners before leaving the BBC under a cloud in January.
‘I think Chris Evans is a very talented guy on television,’ Lee Travis says. ‘I just never felt he was right on the radio. He did what was expected of Channel 4 late at night on a national radio breakfast show at seven in the morning. I mean two guys in the toilet peeing and telling dirty jokes, followed by a quiz in which nine-year-old kids win prizes for getting the wrong answers, just isn’t on.’
Lee Travis adds that when he meets people who haven’t heard him since he left Radio 1 they always say, ‘Oh it all went wrong when they fired you, you know.’ This makes him wince because, he says, he wasn’t fired. That came later when he broke his contract – which he intended to honour for the few months it had left to run – by talking to the press. Lee Travis decided to sever his connection because he thought it was a mistake to replace old DJs with young ones, because it would mean abandoning listeners aged 25 to 45. The station’s version of events is different: Lee Travis had become a dinosaur and a Luddite who wanted to play album tracks all the time instead of chart music, and he would have been pushed anyway if he hadn’t jumped. Either way he claims he’s not bitter: ‘It’s just that I knew Radio 1 was going to collapse and it did. [Today Radio 1 has half as many listeners as in Lee Travis’s heyday.] The same way I know that, in five years’ time, we’re going to come full circle and want real broadcasters again, instead of kids who save you money in the short term. Radio 1 will have to get back the people who know how far they can and should go. People who can go into a studio, which has a live microphone and, when all the other equipment stops working, talk for two hours and entertain people without having to resort to swearing.’
Lee Travis’s two labradors, Spike and Sam, wander in to the room for a pat and, as he obliges, he warms to his theme. ‘Knowing how far you can push things, what things you cannot say on air, takes experience. Barriers of decency are coming down. Anything sexual or involving bad language will make the press nowadays.’ This moral indignation does not sit comfortably with the Lee Travis sense of humour – he keeps a collection of books on the theme of farting in his downstairs loo – nor with the series of photographs he once took of Page Three Stunnas for the Sun. But this does not necessarily make him a hypocrite. Though he swears freely in private, he never does on air. And though he is probably a long way from being a feminist, this seems more to do with his passive conservatism than any sense of active political antagonism.
Lee Travis seems instead to be a victim of his emotions. When he says, for instance, that he doesn’t have children himself but if he did he’d want to be able to walk with them in the park without worrying, he almost shakes with passion. ‘I feel strongly about the law and the way criminals are given better treatment than their victims,’ he says. ‘I want someone to stand in front of me and explain why we can’t list the names and addresses of all the paedophiles that they’ve got.’
This tendency to break off from the usual stream of inane DJ chat ‘just to get serious for a moment folks’, was so savagely and wittily satirised by Harry Enfield, it seems mean to dwell on it. Equally, though, you get the feeling that Dave Lee Travis will not feel comfortable until the subject of Dave ‘Nicey’ Nice is out of the way. ‘Was it hurtful?’ Lee Travis repeats. ‘Well, that question had to be in there, didn’t it? No. You’re fair game. You have to see the funny side. It was a funny period. Not arf! We were all there wearing medallions and flared trousers. I never want anyone to think I take myself seriously. I’m not a brain surgeon, after all. I’m a bloody disc-jockey. But it didn’t matter to me as Smashie and Nicey were based on Alan Freeman and Tony Blackburn.’
There is some evidence to the contrary. What about that one-off ‘popumentary’ in which a bitter Dave ‘Nicey’ Nice reflected upon his career as he walked about his farm? In it, Nicey recalled his first break on pirate radio (Lee Travis, too, began on Radio Caroline); his hitmungous single ‘I’m a Rocking Crackers Pilchard’ (Lee Travis’s novelty band, Laurie Lingo and the Dipsticks, had a hit with a song called ‘Convoy’); his tobacco industry award for Pipeman of the Year (Lee Travis won it in 1982); and, finally, the hatred Dave Nice has felt for young people ever since being ousted from FAB FM.
And then there is the way Nice jokes constantly about the fragile state of his own interlobular region. Lee Travis, too, will say: ‘What has kept me semi-sane – I’m not sure that I am – is that everyone deals with me as a friend in the home. There is an ego trip. I love people to come up and greet me with a ‘Hiya, Dave, how y’doin’?’ but it’s not a fame trip like a pop star. I’ve never had that hot and cold of being in and out of favour. I’ve always just been warm. Although there was a period in the Seventies when DJs were almost pop stars, that was just a silly phase we were going through. Sounds like a pop song, doesn’t it?’ He sings a bar and then adds: ’10CC: “I’m Not In Love”.’
By any standards, though, Lee Travis is pretty much a popular cultural icon; and not just in Britain. For 20 years he has presented A Jolly Good Show for the World Service. It gets the biggest mailbag in Bush House, including one letter that arrived on Lee Travis’s desk from India, simply addressed to ‘DLT, England’.
Marianne breezes in, wearing jeans and big green pully, and places a tray of cheese sandwiches on the table. Speaking in a Swedish accent which, fascinatingly, incorporates flattened Northern vowels she has picked up from her husband, Marianne explains that she turned DLT into a vegetarian, persuaded him to give up his pipe, and is now lobbying him to have a wind turbine installed on the farm. ‘I’ve given up watching Top of the Pops, too,’ Lee Travis chips in. ‘It drives me potty. I prefer to listen to Radio 4 these days.

The musty air of Manchester’s Portico Library has just been pricked, incongruously, with the sharp smell of vinegar. It is wafting off the plate of fish and chips with peas that Tony Booth, father-in-law to the prime minister-in-waiting, is busy polishing off. The domed and pillared interior of this timeworn library, it should be explained, doubles as a sort of gentlemen’s club and, as a member, and a gentleman, the 65-year-old comic actor is entitled to dine here. Today’s menu is his favourite. It goes with the working-class, Old Labour, unreconstructed-and-proud-of-it image he has of himself. (The peas should be mushy, of course, but you can’t have everything).
Behind him, the walls are lined with 18th-century history books that have been darkened by soot from the gas lamps that once lit the room. Many of the volumes are held together by ribbons, their paper brittle, their leather bindings worn. A bit like old Boothie, really. For with his pallid, parchment-dry skin and his shock of white hair – in stark contrast to the black polo-shirt he wears buttoned up to the neck – the reformed hell-raiser looks like a wraith who has haunted this shadowy room for centuries.
In between forkfuls of chips, Booth explains why he, personally, would never want to be a politician. Once, when staying with the Blairs, he answered the phone, only to be harangued by an irate constituent who demanded to know who he was. The Blairs came back just in time to hear Booth explaining to the caller that he was the butler. ‘My son-in-law had a sense of humour failure about it,’ Booth recalls with a wheezy laugh. By all accounts, Labour’s po-faced spin doctors are taking a similarly dim view of Booth’s offers to help out with their campaign. Perhaps some of them are old enough to remember the 1964 General Election, when the Labour Party staged a rally at Wembley and invited Booth to offer his services. He caused a scene. George Brown announced to the rally that he’d managed to secure a seat for his brother, Ron. At this, Booth shouted: ‘Nepotism!’ Other comrades on the platform hissed at him to be quiet but he continued: ‘This party is against nepotism!’ And many in the audience took up the cry.
Sadly, thanks to the chief election strategist Peter Mandelson – the man who, according to inaccurate legend, once confused mushy peas with guacamole – Labour rallies are more stage-managed these days. But even so, it would seem a shame to gag Tony Booth. It would also be a tactical mistake, because, if deployed with care, The Tony Booth could prove to be a ‘secret weapon’, deadlier even than The Norma Major. He is, after all, a man of deep political conviction. And, though low and breathy, his voice has a grittiness and resonance to it that makes everything he says seem as if it comes from the heart – an actor’s trick, it may be, but even the appearance of genuine feeling would do much to restore credibility in the traditional Labour working-class heartlands.
Rogues, after all, don’t come much more lovable. The man could have stepped straight off the pages of an 18th-century picaresque novel. Indeed, read Labour of Love – an updated version of his memoirs which he is, rather mischievously, publishing this week, during the closing rounds of the election campaign – and you will be reminded of Fielding’s Tom Jones. The comparison may not work stylistically – the Booth sentence is an unruly beast – but in terms of the harum-scarum adventures and sexual escapades of their heroes, the two books read as one.
The sub-title of Booth’s book is ‘The amazing life of Tony’s Blair’s famous father-in-law’ and, for once, the blurb seems justified. Even before he became famous as the ‘Scouse git’, Alf Garnett’s acerbic, left-wing son-in-law in the television sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, Booth was well known as a hard-drinking, bed-hopping bounder. During the Fifties and Sixties he crossed paths with everyone who was anyone: he had a brush with the infamous Richardson gang; was propositioned late at night in a back street by the Tory Foreign Secretary John Selwyn-Lloyd; and, after taking part in a CND demonstration, spent a night in a cell with John Osborne and Bertrand Russell. Inevitably, our hedonistic hero fell in with the Wild Bunch, that gang of Swinging Sixties carousers and womanisers which included Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Richard Harris.
Generally, Booth rampaged through that era like a twister, leaving behind him a trail of abandoned lovers and children (among them, the young Cherie and her sister Lyndsey, the daughters of his first wife Gale whom he left when the girls were aged seven and five respectively). ‘Life has been one long ad lib, really,’ he now reflects. ‘But I don’t suppose I’d do anything differently if I had my time again. My 18-year-old self wouldn’t take advice from me anyway.’
If you watched the episodes of Till Death Us Do Part which were recently repeated on the BBC, you would have noticed a recurring gesture Booth has: a sort of exaggerated shrug that undulates down his arms and rolls off his hands. He still does it when he wants to avoid answering a question. And now, of course, there are also other, more ageing tics and traits. When he is talking quickly, Booth punctuates his speech with one of two flourishes, either ‘Noo, noo, noo noo’ or ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’ In more considered moments, he will come over all conspiratorial, leaning forward in his chair, the better to fix you with his bulging, watery eyes, and speaking in a low whisper, pausing occasionally to look over his shoulder as if to check that no one is listening.
All in all, there is something beguilingly cosy about having a chat with Tony Booth. He is at once an ancient mariner and a Baron Munchausen. Perhaps it is just that all old men become your grandfather in the end, but you do want to listen to him and you do want to believe what he says. Like all grandfathers, he refers to the War at every turn. ‘When we defended this country we got our pride back. What has happened to that spirit since then? We should be at war with poverty now…’ And at times his conservatism could be that of a crusty brigadier living in a big draughty house in Kent: he decries the Americanisms creeping into the language and says that acting is not as much fun as it used to be: ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes. We fooled around but bloody hell we got it done on time! Now everything is run by accountants..’ Et cetera.
Some of the episodes Booth relates are the stuff of pure farce. He grimaces as he recalls the time he was caught in bed with Peter Finch’s girlfriend. Finch came back unexpectedly and Booth had to scramble out on to the balcony – ‘It’s 2.30 in the morning, I’m ankle-deep in snow, freezing cold and naked.’ As he describes his journey back to his own flat – down drainpipes, over spiked railings, neighbours screaming, police sirens wailing – he shifts in his seat. ‘I’m trying to seek a comfortable position,’ he grins as he arches his back and stretches out his legs. ‘That’s why I’m sprawling. Not piles.’
When it is suggested that his life story would make a good film and that the part of Tony Booth could be played by, say, Chris Evans (who, although charmless, is the wild man of his generation, a northerner and a Labour supporter), Booth shudders. ‘Chris Evans’s politics are neither here nor there. There are plenty of people in the Labour Party with whom I would not like to share the same platform. I won’t name names, but let’s just say…’ he moves closer, ‘I don’t like them.’
You assume he means modernisers. Booth, after all, was recently accused by his own union, Equity, of being a political dinosaur. ‘Put it like this,’ he says. ‘The Yuppies are turning their back on the Yuppiedom. The rats are coming back on board. We must be nearing port.’ When pressed, it emerges that Booth is not so much a dinosaur as a Luddite who doesn’t share his son-in-law’s vision of a brave new world in which we all carry laptops. ‘The worst thing that has happened to society, to all of us, has been the invention of the silicon chip,’ he rasps.
Booth’s tradional socialist values were inspired in part by the time his father was injured while working in the hold of a ship. A derrick swung and smashed his pelvis, back, one arm and one leg. For three weeks everyone assumed his father would die. Thoughtfully, the shipping company stopped his wages. They even docked him half a day’s pay for the work he missed after the accident. The only source of income the family had was from Tony’s paper round and what his mother earned charring. It is a shocking, almost Dickensian story of brutal bosses abusing downtrodden workers – but, thanks to the unions, we no longer live in such unenlightened times. Indeed, thanks to the unions, haven’t the workers actually turned the tables and abused the bosses.
Booth thumps the desk indignantly. ‘Noo, noo, noo, noo! For a thousand years, you and yours – Telegraph types – have been abusing your power in the most appalling fashion. You kept us enslaved all that time and you have the bloody nerve to say the unions abused their power for five years, maybe ten? Isn’t that a fair exchange? In the areas of great, great crimes committed by one side against the other, my God, you are so far ahead of us!’
Passion, it’s called. And it makes a refreshing change from the honeyed words that are churned out by the Mandelson PR machine. It also reminds you that old Boothie hasn’t mellowed a bit; that this was the lad who, when invited by Harold Wilson to a reception at Number 10, disgraced himself gloriously by getting drunk, making disparaging remarks about the Cabinet, and then demanding that the guest of honour, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, go and refill his champagne glass for him. The performance got a laugh from Mary Wilson but earned a hissed rebuke from Harry Secombe: ‘For God’s sake, boy, don’t make a show of the profession in Number 10’.
Perhaps it is fear that Booth might do the same again that inclines the New Labour spin doctors to still his voice. And perhaps it is an awareness of this fear that prompts Booth to say that Labour politicans should never lose their sense of humour, even if someone jokes that they have a butler. ‘As for Tony, or my son-in-law, or the leader of the Labour Party, I’m not sure how I should refer to him in front of you, he is very funny in private. He will always put you at ease and is very at ease with himself. Above all, he’s a family man and, because his kids come running into the room and raise hell when he is preparing to make a speech, this helps him keep his feet on the ground.’ Presumably, rampaging father-in-laws have a similar effect.
Booth is certainly in little danger of taking himself, or his profession, too seriously – as an actor, he once ruined a scene opposite John Wayne because he kept getting the giggles: ‘I just kept looking at the Duke and thinking, “What’s with that terrible wig?”’ But there is also a darker, almost pathological side to Booth’s sense of fun. It stems, one suspects, from the amazing good fortune that marked his early life. As an idle 18-year-old, for example, he wangled the cushiest posting ever offered to a National Serviceman )Paris, in a luxury hotel, with no one to report to and nothing to do but act as a tour guide to ‘promiscuous’ American women). From then on, he was always in the right place at the right time to land roles in the theatre, even though he never really thought he had much acting talent. And whatever life-threatening scrapes his sexual profligacy landed him in he always escaped by the skin of his teeth.
He always got away with it. And getting away with it can take its toll psychologically. An urge towards self-destruction seemed to take over, perhaps because, as Ruskolnikov discovers in Crime and Punishment, criminals secretly want to be caught. Booth became even more reckless, had three lovers on the go at the same time and drank too much (he once even moved the polite and gentle Una Stubbs, his co-star in Till Death Us Do Part, to say to him: ‘Sober, you’re a lovely fellow, but drunk you’re a severe pain in the arse.’)
In 1979, Booth was finally granted the nemesis he demanded as his right. Like a doomed character in a Greek tragedy, he staggered home from the pub one night to find his girlfriend had locked him out. With the help of a couple of equally drunk soldiers he had met that evening, he attempted to smoke her out by setting light to a 25-gallon drum of paraffin. He blew himself up and suffered burns so horrific that he spent much of that following year delirious with pain in hospital. ‘One foot swelled up to size 18, the other 15,’ he recalls. ‘The skin on my legs had little elasticity, so I could hardly bend them. To put my underpants on, I had to swing them round and round before trying to lasso one of my enormous feet!’ His hands still bear the scars and, as he demonstrates the lasso technique, they rustle like dry leaves.
The fire proved to be both a peripeteia and a catharsis. He stopped drinking, did a degree in History at Manchester University and, even though until that point he had been a Roman Catholic blissfully unhindered by guilt, tried to enter a monastery. ‘I threw myself on the mercy of Holy Mother Church,’ he says shrugging. ‘And she kicked my arse.’
A pot of tea that Booth has ordered arrives and he slips into grandfather mode again, complaining that nowadays if you take white sugar they only give you a half spoon because they assume its bad for you, that he doesn’t know what the world’s coming to, et cetera. He is now as addicted to tea as he once was to alcohol. ‘I had a lot of help stopping drinking in that I was comatose for a long time,’ he says. ‘I dried out. Now I always say to anyone with a drink problem, “Look, if I could give it up, anyone could.”’ As he lights up a cigarette he reflects that his drinking was probably caused by unhappiness, which in turn stemmed from a feeling of being unloved. ‘There was a wonderful old saying of my grandmother’s: “When poverty comes through the door, love flies out the window.” And it’s true. Poverty makes love very difficult.’
Although he has had three wives and two long-term partners, the love of Booth’s life was probably Pat Phoenix, the former Coronation Street star. This was the woman he first fell in love with as a young man and then went out with again when he was in his fifties. She was also the woman he nursed through cancer and married shortly before her death in 1986. ‘You never get over something as painful as that,’ he says. Pause. ‘But you do eventually learn not to always have it at the forefront of your mind. The brain adapts and tells you that its good to cry but better to move on. Her memory is still alive, but you can mention her name to me now and I can say, “That’s fine.” But there was a time when I couldn’t even bear to look at a photo of her.’
Perhaps it was this (rather than the callousness and greed of which he was accused at the time) that lay behind his decision to auction off his Pat Phoenix memorabilia, including photo albums, for £60,000, three years after the actress died. Then again, he probably did need the money – he’s twice been declared bankrupt. And the uncharitable might say, though he has a reputation for generosity, the profit motive lies behind his tactless decision to launch his bawdy autobiography at a time when all eyes are focused on his son-in-law.
Yet this, one suspects, is to misunderstand Booth’s nature. For despite his wealth of experience, Tony Booth is an innocent. He probably thinks he really can do something to help Tony Blair’s election campaign. And, contrary to what some have suggested, Booth would hate to think he was an embarrassment to his daughter and son-in-law. He does, after all, know what it’s like to find parents cringe-making. When he appeared in his first play he told his family they could come but only on the condition that they went straight into the theatre without talking to anyone, and then went home without coming to the stage door. He felt ashamed of himself afterwards.
Cherie Booth has probably allowed herself the odd cringe, too. It might be that her father makes the odd tacky remark (‘I don’t think my daughter’s mind is usually occupied with clothes,’ he once said when asked about her glittering career as a QC. ‘She’s too involved with her briefs!’) but she always seems prepared to forgive him (when he was in hospital she visited him every week, for instance, and she was at his side last year to comfort him when his third marriage, to an American public relations consultant, broke down). There is, doubtless, a lot to forgive. But she also has things to be grateful for. It was Booth who inspired Cherie’s early belief in socialism (when she stood as a Labour candidate for Thanet North in 1983 there were three Tories behind her on the platform: Booth, Blair and Benn). It was also her father’s contacts in the Labour Party which helped steer her husband towards a career in politics: Blair had his first glimpse of the interior of Westminster after Booth advised him to meet Tom Pendry, a Labour MP. It was an epiphanous moment for the young barrister – and it convinced him that politics, rather than the law, was his natural calling.
It is Booth, too, whom Cherie has to thank for her wilfully eccentric name. Was it chosen out of mischief one evening after too many cherry brandies had been sunk? Was it perhaps some rather sentimental reference to a romantic weekend in Paris? No, it was much more straightforward than that: Booth was on tour in Wales, with Gale, and the couple stayed with a woman who had a beautiful daughter called Cherie.
There is something else for which Cherie has cause to be thankful. She says it is comforting to be able to tell her own children that she knows how difficult it is growing up with a famous father. And, for their part, Blair’s children say they adore Booth’s company because he makes them laugh. (Their mother also makes them laugh, with the affectionate and convincing impression she does of her errant father).
Booth has seven daughters and when you ask him if he is proud of Cherie he says diplomatically, ‘Of course, I’m so proud of everything my kids do. They’re all terrific.’ For all his faults, his children seem to think the same of him. He’s not sure why everyone always forgives him in the end but he acknowledges that it may be to do with his happy-go-lucky nature and the confidence he acquired from being brought up in a predominantly female environment. ‘Having been brought up and surrounded by women for most of my life, I tend to ignore the dangers,’ he says with a sigh. ‘Much as your mother and sisters and daughters might resent you, they are not actually going to kill you for what you’ve done.’
Although Tony Booth has been forced to face reality in certain areas of his life – he will say of his wild youth, for instance, that, ‘I had far more lust than good sense’ – he has always managed to combine this with a stubborn streak of naivety, which, as with his literary alter ego Tom Jones, accounts for his heroic lack of inhibitions. Booth has enough self-awareness to recognise that there is some truth in this. ‘I never think I’m na•ve at the time but on reflection I usually realise I have been.’ Thoughtful pause. ‘In the main, women have forgiven me because they see I am na•ve, basically. And they accept that in the end.
Naivety is probably what has helped Booth survive both the high jinks and the tragedies in his life. He now drives a Fiat Tipo with a disabled sticker on it and lives alone in a cluttered terraced house in the Derbyshire village of Broadbottom. Although he has a picturesque valley to look out on to, he says he doesn’t get out much nor does he walk much because of the injuries that still afflict his legs and feet. Nowadays, he says, rather than getting depressed, he sits, thinks, watches television and writes on the computer in a room that he has converted into a study.
It is here that he plans to watch the election results on television in the early hours of 2 May. When asked how he will feel if his son-in-law becomes the youngest prime minister this century, he scribbles down his phone number: ‘Promise to call me the day after the election and I’ll tell you: You may hear “I’m sorry. The undertaker is just taking him out. The excitement was too much.”’

The high-ceilinged rooms of the Pall Mall club are lined with statues: an alabaster Venus here, a bronze Mercury there, a Lord Castlereagh in the Smoking Room and, in the library, framed by a large window, an AN Wilson. Or so you could be forgiven for thinking, for the novelist, biographer and journalist is perched, perfectly still, on an antique mahogany reading chair, looking like a victim of hit-and-run cryosurgeons, or at least of hairdressers who make too free with their lacquer.

Andrew Wilson is dressed as demurely as you would expect, in a bird’s-eye pattern three-piece suit, striped shirt, and checked tie. But the <i>tableau vivant</i> of which he is the centre could not be more blatant in its symbolism. Here is the gentleman of letters, it says. The Epicurean. The Thinker. All it needs to complete the effect is a little dust, a few cobwebs. Eventually, without moving his lips or looking round to see who has just entered the room, the monument speaks: ‘I’m keeping still.’

When you notice the wooden box-camera that’s pointing at him from a tripod in the middle of the room, it becomes apparent why. Except that there is no one manning the lens. The photographer has disappeared for the moment behind a bookcase, to check his light meter or load his film. And it seems that the sitter has deemed it courteous to hold his pose — exactly — until he returns. Maybe Wilson is just doing it because he finds it amusing. Such is his insouciance, it’s difficult to tell.

The photographs over, Wilson repairs to an upright leather sofa at the other side of the library, stretches out his legs and feigns surprise that his latest book, <i>Paul: the Mind of the Apostle</i>, is causing such a rumpus. It isn’t due to be published until next week — in time for Easter —  yet already it has got everyone chattering feverishly, not least  because of the public spat it has prompted between its author and a leading Pauline scholar, the Very Revd Tom Wright, Dean of Lichfield. So indignant did the Dean feel after reading an early proof of Wilson’s book that he rushed into print his own version of the life of Saint Paul. The two men have since become an entertaining double act on radio current affairs programmes, each attempting to discredit and patronise the other.

The main difference of opinion is over the claim Wilson makes in his book that Jesus Christ was not a Christian at all, and that he  had no intention of founding a religion. Rather, Jesus was a very minor Galilean exorcist, no more significant than dozens of other similar prophets who caused trouble for the Romans. The faith that bears his name, Wilson contends, was invented by the religious genius and visionary Paul of Tarsus. It was Paul’s brilliant mythologising of Jesus as Christ that ensured the immortality of his name, not some piece of magic in which a dead body was said to have come back to life.

Wilson speaks of the Dean with haughty disdain. ‘At first,’ he says, ‘I was inclined to dismiss this fellow Wright as a cheeky person whose books sell only a fraction of my own and who merely wants to attract publicity for himself on the coat tails of my book. Then I realised that there was something very sad about him.’

This sadness, Wilson believes, lies in the blinkered predictability of Wright’s position — his babyish defence of the literal truth of the miraculous. ‘I don’t know why he bothers,’ Wilson intones lugubriously as he lights up a cigarette. ‘No one with an open mind could believe it. That’s what is so extraordinary. He wants to tell us that Jesus really did rise from the tomb, that he really did walk on water and that his body really did whizz up in the air like a rocket after the Resurrection.’ He almost dares you to disagree with him.

The way in which Wilson rides out the various storms he has provoked over the years reminds you of the description of Bridey in <i>Brideshead Revisted</i>: as someone who emanates little magnetic waves of social uneasiness, creating a pool about himself in which he floats with log-like calm. Wilson’s taste for provocation was acquired when he was at Rugby. He wrote an article in the school magazine which called for public schools to be banned — not surprisingly, it excited the interest of the tabloid press. Since then our man has been to controversy what Eric Cantona is to football: God’s gift. Who can forget the time he ungallantly betrayed the confidences — though trivial in their way — of the Queen Mother by writing a profile of her in <i>The Spectator</i> based on a dinner-party conversation; or the time he interviewed a confused Lord Denning and printed remarks he made on the Guildford Four which were never intended for public consumption? More recently, in 1992, Wilson caused a stir with his bestselling biography of Jesus, in which he portrayed Christ as a married, cantankerous, gluttonous soak.

Wilson is the first to admit that he is on fertile ground when it comes to knocking the new era of Anglicanism. Surely, for all their goofy protestations of love, joyfulness and understanding, today’s evangelicals actually display much less tolerance than their predecessors? Wilson nods sagely and says: ‘Violent intolerance.’ This is a conversational quirk of his. When you make a point he agrees with, he repeats it. If you say ‘Mandelson is all powerful,’ he will repeat: ‘All powerful,’ as if ruminating on it. His voice is thin and, although his elegantly rounded Oxford English is crisp, his delivery is languid. Quite often he will pause between sentences, as though distracted. And every now and then he will purse his lips as if trying to suppress a smile. This just serves to exaggerate his supercilious air. It also makes him inscrutable. When he tells you, for instance, that he is surprised by the controversy his new book has caused, it is hard to tell whether he is being disingenuous. Still, his friends say he adores being the centre of attention, and that he himself once said he would hang upside down from a hot-air balloon naked if it would yield column inches.

Whether they are intended to or not, biographies often reveal a great deal about the biographer. Wilson has written seven biographies in all (as well as 16 novels) and they have been revelatory in varying degrees. In his life of CS Lewis, for instance, Wilson assumed that it must have been impossible for Lewis to live in the same house as his friend, a woman, without sleeping with her. Questioned about his motives for writing the Saint Paul book, be agrees that there is probably an element of self-examination involved —  ‘of wanting to look back to a time when I was perfectly pious and I wanted to know what was going on.’  When the point is pressed, though — when it is suggested that a better understanding of the author’s nature should help us to appreciate his psychological analysis of Paul  — Wilson is not so sure. ‘I’m not being cagey, but I find it difficult to understand why exploring my psyche would help you understand this book. It might. It might not. My being imaginative doesn’t mean I’m indulging in autobiography when I write about Saint Paul. I don’t think we are very similar characters for one thing.’

No? Saint Paul was famous for his inconsistencies and for changing his mind — he is, after all, the most famous convert in history. Of Wilson, one of his friends says this: ‘I like Andrew, but he can never keep to the same belief for two minutes together.’ Wilson happily concedes that this is true. ‘All minds are prone to change,’ he says. ‘I change mine about everything, 100 times a day. After the apocalypse Paul was very dogged. He had a profound belief in his visions. I’m an oblique person, not single-minded at all. I chop and change.’

Wilson thinks one of the reasons he changes his mind so often is that he is easily bored. This is why he always reads ten books at once, dipping in and out of them rather than reading one from start to finish. There is another reason why he keeps changing his mind: he can always see the argument against a belief as soon as he’s entertained it. He denies, though, that this means he is too clever for his own good. ‘No. I don’t think it’s cleverness,’ he says with that pursed-lip smile. ‘I’m just a flibbertigibbet.’

Another thing Wilson has in common with Saint Paul is an appreciation of the advantages of re-inventing oneself from time to time, indeed of founding a movement in one’s own image. Wilson himself has been mythologised so effectively in the media, that profiles of him now almost have to conform to a genre. As well as mentioning his reputation for controversy and prolificacy (someone once joked that AN Wilson must be the collective pen-name for a group of writers — six women and two men — operating out of a warehouse in Epping), they always have to allude to the famous photograph of him riding a bicycle with a basket on the front, while wearing a waistcoat and trilby. It was this that made him a young fogey icon.

‘I’m not young any more,’ says Wilson, now 46. ‘But I’m still a fogey. It wasn’t conscious at all. In fact — a good example of vanity this — I didn’t like it in the least when it started. Hated it. Hated it. I know it was ridiculous to mind. It’s just I didn’t like to be labelled. It’s rather like Saint Paul not meaning to have found Christianity when he started out. I didn’t mean to found the fogey movement. It just happened. One is as one is. It was all the fault of that photographer who took a photo of me in that silly hat, looking like Douglas Hogg riding a bicycle.’

Another central component of AN Wilson mythology is his early — and somewhat chequered — career within the Church. After Oxford, he drifted into a seminary for a year, probably to spite his father who had renounced religion. He went on to work as a lecturer at Oxford, became a high-profile, High Church Anglican, and then flirted with Catholicism, only to reject both around the time that his first marriage, to a lecturer ten years his senior, collapsed (he is now married to an art historian ten years his junior). That religious period, he believes, now gives him an advantage when debating with fundamentalists such as the Dean of Lichfield. ‘I know where the idea is coming from. He’s not a totally alien being. Although, of course, I wasn’t Low Church like he is. And I never had that evangelical certainty. I was always an honest doubter. More a Betjeman type of believer.’

Another important strand of the Wilson myth is the subtle way he combines his latent republicanism with his High Tory values and his occasional bouts of believing that we must all vote Labour. At the moment he says he hasn’t completely made up his mind for whom he wants to vote in the General Election. ‘I might vote for Mr Major, as no one else seems to want to,’ he says with a grin. ‘One hates to follow the majority.’

And then, of course, there is the freakishly high intellect. While writing his biography of Tolstoy, Wilson learned Russian in six months so that he could read all the major fiction in the language. And it is said that he only ever thinks about what he is going to write as he is writing it, sometimes at the incredible rate of 7,000 words a day.

Given that such a large chunk of Wilson’s life is devoted to novel-writing — and given that he goes at it all at such a pace — it would be understandable if, in his imagination, the world of fiction occasionally collided with the world of fact. There have, indeed, been some notable examples of real people identifying themselves in his novels. Lady Lucinda Lambton felt so moved when she recognised passages from her life in his book <i>Who Was Oswald Fish?,</i> she went up to  Wilson at a party and slapped his face.

It might be, too, that because he is a novelist, Wilson sometimes believes the world is actually populated with fictional characters, and so it doesn’t really matter if you upset them. ‘I’m very silly to think my acts don’t have consequences,’ he once said, after being sacked from <i>The Spectator</i> for changing a contributor’s copy — in order to turn a compliment to Clive James into an insult. But this tendency to blur myth and reality gives Wilson a distinct advantage when, for example, analysing Saint Paul’s complex psyche and his motives for inventing Christianity.

‘The trouble now is,’ Wilson says, ‘in a post-Enlightenment world we make all these distinctions between things that actually took place and things we have only imagined, whereas in the ancient world people did things mythologically: Did they really believe in Hercules? Some didn’t. Of course the Resurrection is not an historical fact. It’s a statement of faith that only makes sense in this very, very peculiar messianic Jewish tradition. Suppose I were to die tomorrow and the staff of the <i>Evening Standard</i> [where he is a weekly columnist] formed some curious belief that I was going to come back on the clouds. That would just be bizarre. It wouldn’t relate to anything.’

Perhaps not, but it would be delightful to behold. Is it, one wonders, Wilson’s capacity to imagine what it was like to see the world in mythological terms that allows him to live with the myths that have built up around his own life? To reconcile his reputation for being polite and affable in person but spikey in print? To dismiss Marina Warner as a charlatan and a bore, or compare AS Byatt to a blue balloon, or say things like: ‘If we were being snobbish, we should feel bound to say that Mrs Thatcher is irredeemably common.’? Richard Ingrams once told Wilson that he could always earn his living in journalism because everyone finds him so irritating. ‘I don’t quite see it myself,’ Wilson now says. ‘Nice if it’s true. I’m not savage now, though. I have been unkind in the past and I have regretted it.’

It is telling that he compares himself to a bully at school who feels guilty when he has made someone cry. ‘It’s not a cruel streak, just childishness,’ he says. ‘Of course one goes too far sometimes. But I don’t think it’s any deep-seated sadism.’ Like most bullies, he admits, he is sensitive to criticism himself. ‘One is touchy about one’s appearance. Obviously, if one looks perfectly ghastly, one would prefer others not to say so. There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s why I feel sorry that I’ve joined in the mockery of poor Ann Widdecombe. She could maybe improve her hair but there’s not much she can really do. She does look like Ann Widdecombe — which is pretty bad luck really!’

He can’t resist chuckling to himself as he says this — and it reminds you that, behind the withering put-downs and the brittle satire, there lies simply a sense of mischief. Who else but AN Wilson would have dared say what we would all like to say to Princess Margaret — and get away with it? At a dinner party, it may be remembered, the Princess said to him that she couldn’t recall which luxury she had chosen on <i>Desert Island Discs</i>. Wilson replied: ‘I believe it was one of your regiments, Ma’am.’

The thing about AN Wilson is that, for all the po-faced intellectual posturing, he is surprisingly, cheerily straightforward. For someone so obsessed with grand theological debate, he is disarmingly free of internal metaphysical struggle. The  prospect of his own death, for instance, does not appear to fill him with a particular sense of panic. As for why this is, he says he’s really not sure. After all, he knew Philip Larkin when he was alive and so can appreciate more than most the extent to which some people dread extinction. ‘Horrible being him. When Larkin talked about it he just shook, as Dr Johnson did. Absolute terror. Johnson was such an intelligent man yet he was profoundly melancholic — just the sort of psyche which is naturally religious. I’m lucky. I’m that very rare thing: a happy person. I’ve no reason to be anything else. Nice parents, nice brother and sister, nice children, nice wives.’

The interview nearly over, it will soon be time for the celestial choir to sing the hallelujah chorus and for the saintly AN Wilson to ascent back to the clouds on which he arrived — or, failing that, to pedal back to his house in North London. In a pastiche of fogeydom, he now orders a pot of tea and anchovies on toast. As he pours, it seems an appropriate moment to ask him to explain a puzzling comment he once made about the collapse of the House of Windsor being tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.

‘Do you know,’ Wilson chuckles, ‘I haven’t the slightest recollection. Sorry about that.’

The aromatic whiff of a log fire and the sound of shoes crunching up a gravelled drive are all that disturb the drizzly Saturday afternoon air in this secluded, woody enclave of Berkshire. It is growing dark and the glow from the sturdy Thirties redbrick house is welcoming, So, too, is the trim, fine-featured chatelaine with the twinset and silver-blonde bob who appears in the porch and opens the front door before there is need of a knock.
‘I think there’s one toasted tea cake left,’ Gail Redwood says as she leads the way past a row of waxed jackets, around her husband’s furry, clown-size reindeer-head slippers (a novelty Christmas present), and on into the drawing room. ‘And there should still be a tolerable cup of tea in the pot.’
As PG Wodehouse might have said, if not actually disconcerting, this scene of charming domesticity is far from being concerting. For a question mark hangs over it like a bruised cloud: why on earth are the Redwoods inviting a journalist – a journalist, for goodness sake – into their gracious home for a rare and privileged glimpse of their soft furnishings? After all, the Majors never allow anyone within 100 yards of their log fire in Huntingdon; the Blairs do, but only as far as the office at the back of their house in Sedgefield. The answer is obvious; and even more so when the 45-year-old Right Honourable Member for Wokingham – and leader of the Eurosceptic Tory right, since his challenge to John Major a couple of years ago – heaves into view.
He is looking casual (in slightly faded blue cords, open-neck shirt and woolly, speckled, cream pullover) and relaxed – or at least trying to look relaxed, because he has a gangly body and at first, as he stands by the fire, its language seems a little self-conscious. Perhaps to give his hands something to do, he turns and throws a log on to the fire, making it spit and crackle. More likely, though, he does this in order to offer a glimpse of the human face of a politician who has suffered more than most from accusations of appearing too cold, too logical, too, well, extraterrestrial – for, as we know, ETs don’t throw logs on fires.
The face on offer, then, is the one he would like us some day to be watching on our television sets before we tuck into our roast beef and Yorkshire puddings of a Sunday: the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, at home, in a jumper, by a fire, reacting to the latest Blair outrage. John Redwood doesn’t say this, of course, but then he doesn’t need to. The remark he does open with, however, suggests that he may still have some ground to cover on the road to looking more human, more ordinary, more of the people. Above the copper fireplace, framed by the dark wood panelling of the wall, is a painting of Elizabeth I. When asked about it, Mrs Redwood makes a topical joke: ‘Now, she was the original Spice Girl!’ And we all laugh. But when Mr Redwood takes up the theme – ‘Yes. Made a fortune from the Spice Islands!’ – the room falls silent, a gust of wind picks up outside and from somewhere in the far distance comes the melancholy sound of a dog howling.
The comment is just too brainy, too literal-minded, too academic. And it reminds you that, from the collar up, John Redwood stands alone. This is the man who, cursed with a First in History from Oxford, made matters worse by becoming a Prize Fellow of All Souls at the age of 21 and, worse still, by dashing of a doctorate in Philosophy in the evenings (while working during the day as a merchant banker). This is the man who, at 32, was appointed head of Mrs Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit and, in an idle moment, worked out how to return Britain’s nationalised industries back to the private sector. This is the man who, in order to relax, plays chess with two computers, one he knows he can beat, one he is sure he can’t.
And as if the bulging forehead isn’t enough to live down, John Redwood has also acquired, along the way, a reputation for being socially awkward – even socially unaware, to the degree that he cannot spot a political minefield when it’s staring him in the face. On that fateful Monday morning in June 1995, for instance, when Redwood launched his impromptu leadership bid, the Crazy Gang, as represented by Tony Marlow (wearing his loud striped blazer) and Teresa Gorman (goggle-eyed in her fluorescent green dress), managed to insert themselves into Redwood’s overcrowded press briefing. In the confusion – and social awkwardness – of the media scrum that ensued, the maladroit Redwood allowed himself to be photographed in front of Gorman and Marlow. The flashbulbs popped and the damage to his credibility was done.
But perhaps getting into awkward places is something inhabitants of Planet Redwood do simply for their own amusement. For in the drawing room there is a long blue sofa, which seats four people, and I find myself hovering near to the end seat. As Redwood invites me to sit down, he sits down, too, in the next space. Almost touching, and with our backs deep in the upholstery, we talk for a while without making eye contact, staring at our knees instead, like two strangers on a bus. After a few minutes, I perch on the edge of my seat, swivelling round to face him, and he – gratefully, I suspect – half-turns round to do the same, one ankle tucked under the opposite knee, his head propped up on his hand. Gail Redwood comes over and tactfully occupies the acre of space at the other end of the sofa.
At close quarters, John Redwood’s speaking voice is measured and subdued, in contrast to the laugh he occasionally emits – haha! – which is short and strong. But there are none of the erratic shifts of pitch that characterised the voice we so memorably heard in his leadership press conferences. As one writer put it: ‘The man has an unreal use of volume and emphasis, which he unleashes on words! without warning. He speaks like a man trying to stop himself falling asleep.’ Mock him though they might, even Redwood’s political enemies would not deny that he is an honourable man, loyal to his party. But when John Major challenged him, and others, to ‘put up or shut up’ he says he found himself left with no option but to resign. ‘I took that comment to mean that the views I had been expressing continuously in private were no longer acceptable. I thought, “Well, I can’t live with this. I can’t work in a Cabinet where I’m not allowed to say that VAT on fuel is wrong or that we’re not allowed to make up our own minds on a single currency.” People were saying I was radical or risky and yet I was the one sticking to traditional Conservative values and, indeed, to our 1992 manifesto pledges.’
But ‘risky’ is not the adjective most used about Redwood in his leadership campaign: ‘scary’ was. Indeed, his cold intellect – along with his inscrutable, lupine features and quizzical eyebrows – earned him the nickname Vulcan, after the home planet of the emotionally challenged Star Trek hero, Mr Spock. At first, Redwood says endearingly, he didn’t understand the joke, then a friend explained it to him and he found it funny. But to this day there still seems to be some confusion in Redwood’s mind as to who Vulcans are and what they stand for. Thus:
Mr Redwood – ‘I took it to mean that they didn’t have any dirt on me and, because to err is human, I couldn’t have come from this planet, but from another one. It was a backhanded compliment.’
Mrs Redwood (perhaps thinking about dead sheep or Welsh windbags): ‘There are a lot worse things you can say about a politician!’
Mr Redwood: ‘Yes, I don’t think staying cool under pressure, keeping a clear head, is a fault in one who might be called upon to lead. Of course you have to understand how people feel about things as well. It was very mischievous of some journalists to suggest I don’t have passions and feelings. I do have a sentimental side. I can be moved by classical music, for instance, although not to tears.’
Mrs Redwood: ‘No, it’s films that make John weep! He was in floods when we watched Shadowlands and The Remains of the Day!’
Mr Redwood checks his side parting with his hand, folds him arms, hunches his shoulders, and mumbles a few words of admiration for Sir Anthony Hopkins before taking the passion theme down a less personal route: ‘I feel very passionately about the need to preserve a self-governing democracy in this country…’ Alongside the sofa is a grandfather clock which the Redwoods commissioned, complete with a carved acorn, the symbol of Wokingham, on top. As Redwood’s patriotic theme is developed, the grandfather clock announces that it is five o’clock and in so doing reveals itself to have the same arrangement of chimes as Big Ben.
‘… and British identity is related to our lives together as a very successful people that has always been on the right side…’ Ding-dong-ding-dong! Dong-ding-dong-ding! ‘… a people that has always gone to war to resist tyranny. British identity is related to one sovereign…’ Bong! ‘… one church…’ Bong! ‘… one parliament…’ Bong! ‘… one set of laws…’ Bong! ‘… and the English language…’ Bong!
That’s Vulcan humour for you – or so it would be nice to think, for Redwood, with the insouciance of the comic, gives no hint as to whether he is aware of the chimes that so affectingly accompany his speech. A more glaring example of Vulcan behaviour emerged on the Thursday that John Major resigned as leader. Westminster and Fleet Street went into a frenzy trying to find out whether Redwood would stand against him. For four days Redwood exhibited disturbingly alien cool: not bothering to answer his phone; nonchalantly choosing instead to play village cricket. Had the man no nervous system? ‘Although I felt calm,’ he now says, ‘I agonised and agonised and agonised for those four days – apart from during the cricket match on the Sunday when I could switch off completely and enjoy the game – I went strawberry-picking on the Saturday, but they didn’t spot me! Haha! I didn’t make up my mind until I spoke to the Prime Minister on the Monday morning – he didn’t seem to want to talk very much and I thought it was a time that maybe a conversation would have been a good idea.’
The Vulcan nickname, of course, owes much to his dogged love of logic. From 1973 to 1987, for instance, he worked in the City, first at Flemings, then at Rothschilds, places where employees often stay late regardless of whether they have deals to do. ‘I used to work very hard,’ Redwood remembers. ‘I concentrated, got my work done and left at 5.30pm on the dot because that’s what my contract said. Yet colleagues used to criticise me for it.’ He doesn’t seem to see why. Any more than he sees the inadequacy of his answer to the unoriginal but morally imperative question about his support for capital punishment: hypothetically, would he be prepared to pull the lever himself Although the answer he gives doesn’t actually start with a ‘But that’s illogical, Captain’ it is, nevertheless, a response Spock would be proud of. ‘I have no intention of applying to be a public hangman. I can see no circumstances in which I would have to do it or be expected to do it.’ Try again. Surely, given his academic training, he can offer a sophisticated justification of the death penalty on moral or utilitarian grounds? ‘Can I? My main reason for supporting capital punishment is that most of my electors do.’ And again. Just because a lot of people believe something, doesn’t make it right. ‘No. But then it doesn’t conflict with my view.’
Sometimes, though, a Vulcan’s logical mind can get to the heart of an issue more efficiently than can the woolly, obfuscatory mind of an Earthling. Redwood, for instance, was the first to start referring to the innocuous sounding ‘single currency’ as the ‘abolition of the pound’, a phrase which has since entered the language and which, with its brutal clarity, brought home to a lot of people what a single currency actually means. Again, for many people, Redwood put his finger on the exact cause of the Church of England’s current malaise when he said that it seemed embarrassed about its spiritual and moral role in the community. By contrast, John – and Gail – Redwood are anything but embarrassed about their enthusiasm for Christian family values. ‘You can’t trust people who say they believe in family values if they are doing the opposite at home,’ Mrs Redwood says in a soft level voice. ‘It would be so crass, so hypocritical.’
The couple met in the first week of their first term at Oxford and, although Gail Redwood says she doesn’t think it was love at first sight, she does add, with a wry tilt of the head, ‘Oh, I suppose it was fairly soon after.’ Mrs Redwood is refreshingly scornful of the expectation that a politician’s wife, even one who qualified as a barrister, should be seen but not heard at Conservative Party functions: ‘Nothing worse than being introduced to people who make superficial conversation with you because they think you won’t have anything interesting to say,’ she says with a peeved arch of the eyebrow. Even so, she is – and John Redwood must know she is – a ‘secret weapon’ to rival even the Prime Minister’s wife. For she combines the down-to-earth modesty and charm of a Norma Major – she will say, for instance, that she never has time to think about clothes and isn’t even sure where the clothes she is wearing came from – with the high-powered career of a Cherie Blair (Gail is company secretary of British Airways, as well as being a mother to Catherine and Richard, the couple’s two teenage children).
Drifting across the hall from Redwood’s study is the sound of a television showing highlights from the Scotland v Wales rugby match. We are still sitting on the blue sofa and, as he pops into the study to hear the final score, I cajole him into admitting who he wants to win. With disarming honesty he says: ‘Oh, I don’t really care now that I’m no longer Secretary of State for Wales.’ Then, pulling himself together, he adds: ‘Oh, I suppose Wales!’ A chance to examine the bookshelves in Redwood’s study reveals few surprises: lots of history books, half a dozen video tapes of Commons debates, the odd book on wildlife and butterflies and countless volumes with titles so dull they swim before the eyes, blurring into one big, bedtime read from Hell: Inflation; Nationalised Industries; Privatisation: Theory and Practice; Foreign Exchange Rates…
Apart from a small Welsh coat of arms hanging up in an alcove, there is little evidence of John Redwood’s time in the Principality. Dafydd Wigley, president of Plaid Cymru, once said that Redwood ‘went down like a rat sandwich in Wales’. Presumably the feeling was mutual, given reports that Redwood only stayed one night in Wales during the first five months of his office, preferring instead to commute back to Berkshire. (He said at the time that he was the first politician to be criticised for wanting to sleep with his own wife – a pretty good and pretty human joke.)
But perhaps the real reason Redwood has so few tokens of Wales is that they remind him of the buttock-clenching moment he was caught on camera trying and failing to mouth the words to the Welsh national anthem. Although he was considered to have been a firm but fair Welsh Secretary, even his best friends could not claim that he ever really empathised with the Welsh people. ‘The reason they said that was that I had no time for Welsh nationalism and I didn’t learn the language,’ Redwood says when this is put to him. ‘I took a decision at the beginning that I was not going to have time to learn it to a high enough standard – and there is nothing worse than an Englishman wrecking the language. It was better to be honest.’ Even so, Eric Howells, Tory chairman in Wales, once observed that Redwood has trouble relating to ordinary people. ‘Well that is wrong,’ Redwood tells me. ‘I see myself as coming from the marketplace.’
While it is true that his father was an accounts clerk and his mother a shop manageress, there is something a bit patrician about Redwood’s manner. It is almost as if he, like Coriolanus, is secretly contemptuous of the many-headed multitude, as if his nature is too noble for the world. He doesn’t see it this way, though. Indeed, he prides himself on his patriotic, Euro-bashing, hang-’em-high populism (‘What’s wrong with having popular views?’ he says. ‘I’m a democrat, for Heaven’s sake!’) But doesn’t he empathise with Coriolanus just a little bit? ‘No!’ Redwood laughs. ‘I did learn some of my politics from Coriolanus. And Macbeth. But I could never be Coriolanus. He is far too certain. I want to shake him and say, “Who the hell do you think you are? Get down there, boy, and talk to the people.”‘ The thought is interrupted as Joe, the Redwoods’ well-fed cat, ambles over for a stroke.
The grandfather clock chimes 7.30pm and the Redwoods show me the corner of the drawing room they have devoted to watercolours of Oxford. In another corner there is a tape and CD collection which mostly features the sort of classical recordings that move John Redwood (though not to tears). There are quite a few middle-of-the-road tapes – Kate Bush, Elton John, Neil Diamond, Cliff Richard – and a rather alarming number of recordings of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. The most up-to-date album seems to be by Beverley Craven.
But there are no tapes by Lightning Seeds, which is surprising given that John Redwood once wrote an article for the Guardian in praise of them and other Britpop bands like Oasis, Blur and Supergrass. ‘For me to be writing about Britpop’, it began, ‘might seem about as likely as John Prescott writing an article on how much he appreciates the Latin verse of Virgil.’ Much to the chagrin of Lightning Seeds, Redwood went on to quote their lyrics (‘Everything’s blue now, oh lucky you… there’s nothing to lose’) saying that it was a message to Tories. The Guardian columnist Matthew Norman, who had suggested the article, made it his mission in life to discover the boundaries of Redwood’s Britpop knowledge. (Norman regularly rang him up to test him. And, even though Redwood lists one of his recreations as ‘not reading the Guardian’, and even though he knew he was being teased, he always played along, answering Norman’s pop trivia questions as best he could. Norman believes that, had he not pushed his luck too far one day by calling Redwood out of an important meeting just so that he could ask whether the Smurfs could ever recover from the defection of Father Abraham, Redwood might still be the Guardian’s youth culture correspondent to this day.)
A cynic would say that, of course, this is what you’d expect from a politician who’s trying to get elected: be human, not Vulcan; be normal, not desiccated; show you have a sense of humour, not that you are stuffed to the gills with serious purpose. A cynic would say that this is why he tells me he painted the ochre walls of his drawing room himself and that, since moving into the house three years ago, he has become quite handy at DIY. And that is why he says that, although he enjoys decorating, he prefers to unwind by chopping logs (like Gladstone, curiously enough). This is why he says he likes to do his own shopping at the supermarket and why, when the question that floored George Bush – Do you know the price of a pound of butter? – is tried on him, he has a ready answer. ‘No, I don’t because I don’t buy butter. I buy Olivio. See! I even know the brand name!’
But the cynic would be wrong. John Redwood really does seem to enjoy doing these things. He does have a hinterland. The jumper isn’t just for show. And, contrary to one’s expectations, he is quite wry. On one wall of the dining-room next door there are half a dozen large cartoons that chart the history of Redwood’s political career. One shows John Major as a weathervane dressed in lederhosen with Helmut Kohl as the menacing raincloud overhead. Two depict John Redwood naked: one, captioned LOVE LOCKED OUT, shows him standing forlornly in front of No 10; the other depicts him as The Thinker. ‘I don’t know why I always have to be naked in these,’ Redwood says. ‘I’m surprised they know what I look like without clothes on. As far as I know, it’s never been revealed.’ Again, not a bad joke.
Have these cartoons of a naked Redwood – a little vulnerable and innocent, perhaps, but with a certain moral purity and openness – got it right? He tells me that he believes he is not a calculating politician but one who acts on instinct. Perhaps the truth lies between the two: that he is a canny politician. After all, he did come away from the leadership challenge looking more courageous than Portillo and less treacherous than Heseltine (‘I wasn’t an assassin because John Major put his job on the line. He invited a contest. As soon as I lost, I went on TV and said, “I admit defeat, long live John Major.” You couldn’t do more than that. I think that the party was sympathetic to me because I had done all in my power to have a decent, honest contest.’)
And decent, honest contestants – like nice guys – often finish last, even if they lose romantically. On the opposite wall, above a mantelpiece with a bust of Beethoven on it, there is an exquisite oil painting on wood, dated 1756, which Gail Redwood inherited from her father, an auctioneer. The painting is of that other conservative young pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie. As a History scholar, Redwood will not need reminding what happened when, almost exactly 250 years ago, that ‘king o’er the water’ raised his standard. Will Bonnie Prince John be any more successful in wresting the Tory crown from the leader’s head? Perhaps it is too early to ask. The painting prompts another question, though: Do you suppose Bonnie Prince Charlie really was bonnie? Redwood’s answer couldn’t be cannier: ‘He was to those who believed in him!’
A few days after this interview appeared, just before the general election in 1997, a psychiatrist contacted me. ‘You may not have realised it,’ he wrote, ‘but your profile of John Redwood suggests that he has a number of characteristic which match those of Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. The literalism, the gangly body, the social awkwardness, the lack of eye contact, the dogged love of logic… It’s the same symptom which the US press is hinting at for Bill Gates. For those of high intelligence it is by no means disabling, and might indeed bring enormous advantage because of the single-mindedness it generates.

Muslim scholars, Anglican bishops, touchy-feely party leaders – David Starkey will have a pop at them all. History’s loose cannon talk to Nigel Farndale

He’s a fastidious man, David Starkey. A silk handkerchief plumes from the breast pocket of his pinstripe suit as he arrives, punctually, for dinner at the Wolseley. Even when he was a full-time history don – teaching first at Cambridge then at the LSE – he was something of a dandy: ‘Academics tend to be drab,’ he says in his precise, emphatic way.

‘They rarely wash and can’t behave properly. I didn’t want to become part of that tribe of drabness.’ He is also wearing, canny as he is about the usefulness of branding, the tortoiseshell glasses and matching cornelian intaglio ring that have become his trademarks.

He tucks his napkin into his shirt and we clink glasses. We are trying a bottle of Chassagne Montrachet, from a region of France he likes to visit. Fastidious again, you see. Still, I’m surprised he is in a drinking mood.

Not worried about having to get up early tomorrow morning to record his television show? ‘No, no,’ he says. ‘I do the early morning call with my producers from my home. A video conference call. I sit there in my fluffy white dressing gown.’

It is a startling and improbable image. In terms of reputation, after all, Starkey is anything but fluffy. When he was a regular panellist on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze a decade ago, The Daily Mail dubbed him ‘The Rudest Man in Britain’ and he made the most of the accolade, recognising that it was publicity money could not buy.

He always manages to play up to that image in photographs, looking stern and schoolmasterly, his face a mask of serious purpose. But he toned down the rude side of his persona in 2000 when he evolved into ‘Britain’s best loved historian’ by simultaneously topping the bestseller lists and winning the television ratings war with his book and series Elizabeth I. The rudeness does still emerge from time to time, though.

Not long ago he lost his temper and verbally duffed up a Government minister on Question Time. ‘Don’t patronise me, you little twit,’ he said, spitting the words out.

But as we talk, a sentimental side of him emerges, a fluffiness that I haven’t seen in our previous encounters: about his father Robert, his boyfriend James, their chocolatecoloured labrador, Seal. We shall come to these.

The television show, a current affairs debate he hosts, goes out at 11 every night on More4 and is called Starkey’s Last Word. He pre-records it during the day and calls it ‘enjoyable nonsense’, a break from writing books to accompany his epic series Monarchy, which is now in its third year, and for which he was paid £2 million by Channel 4 in 2002.

He has an 18th-century manor house in Kent, in addition to his house in Highbury. It’s a far cry from the council house where he grew up in Cumbria, the only son of a factory worker and a cleaner. Would ‘shamelessly materialistic’ be a fair description? ‘I enjoy having money. I enjoy being able to buy nice things. I have no guilt about it.’

But he would still be obsessed with history even if he wasn’t paid to be. It animates and galvanises him. He is so passionate about it, indeed, he can barely contain himself – and he has the pedagogue’s gift of making others feel passionate about it, too.

His conceit is to humanise two-dimensional historical figures by recognising their base appetites and natures, showing that history is moulded by the whims of the powerful, be they clever or stupid, puritanical or perverted.

Take his specialist subject, Henry VIII. ‘He was very modern,’ he says. ‘He loved fame. He would have loved the fact that we are having this conversation about him 500 years on.’ Starkey is writing a big biography of Henry to mark, in 2009, the 500th anniversary of his accession – and it becomes apparent as he talks that his imagination is haunted by the homicidal king. ‘He is alive in my head when I write.

He is in the room with me. I often feel a sense of dictation when I am writing. I hear sentences and paragraphs.’

It becomes obvious, too, that for Starkey the past is constantly collapsing into the present. His allusions sweep back and forth. When he talks about the past, he does so in the present tense. ‘History is a narrative form,’ he says. ‘And the task of the historian is to make past and present talk to each other. I’m an interpreter. I look for meaning in history. I’m convinced, for example, that the big question of the next few decades is the relationship of religion and politics.’

This is the theme of his latest book, Monarchy – From the Middle Ages to Modernity. ‘We need to understand that this is at the centre of our own national experience. We were the first European country to produce an Islamic-style fusion of religion and politics. But equally, we were the first country that got out of it, with modernity. Hence the extraordinary flowering of late 17th-, early 18th-century England.’

I try to imagine his frustration at having to keep Henry VIII down to one chapter in his latest book. ‘OK,’ he says, slipping Caesar-like into the third person, ‘Starkey has written 680 pages on Henry’s wives [an earlier book], not to mention what he is going to write on Henry himself. But for me the excitement of doing the book and the TV series is that it forces me to look at Henry in perspective.

If you do that you see his true importance. He is the pivotal figure around which England turns. It becomes clear to me that although Henry was driven by a desire for a divorce, everyone working around him was driven by religion, just as much as any imam or mullah.’

But if the Enlightenment and modernity liberated us from the fusion of state and religion, won’t the same happen for Islam? ‘No. Islam is 600 years behind Christianity. In Islamic time it is 1400. We’re not supposed to call that time medieval. Well, darling, it is. The great difference is that Islam has never had a doctrine of separate church and state, whereas Christianity had it from the beginning: render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Islam destroys the institutions around it, Christianity works with them. The only example of a successful Islamic state is Turkey and that, thanks to Ataturk, is secular.’

Like a lot of atheists, Starkey can seem a little obsessed with religion. It is often the target for his magnificent scorn, most famously when he excoriated the Venerable George Austin, Archdeacon of York, on The Moral Maze. ‘Doesn’t he genuinely make you want to vomit?’ he asked his fellow panellists. ‘His fatness, his smugness, his absurdity.’

But when I ask him what he makes of Prince Charles’s desire to become Defender of Faiths, he surprises me by saying: ‘I don’t think the Prince is being naive. In the past I have tended to be a little dismissive about him, saying I couldn’t image a talking-to-plants eco-monarchy working. Suddenly, though, Charles looks very ahead for his time. I can imagine a situation where you had the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbi and the Ayatollah of Britain, if such a role were invented, all doing a little gig at the Coronation. It would be a deeply British compromise.

After all, the Church of England was only ever really about the English worshipping themselves: the regimental histories; the great dead. Go to Westminster Abbey and there is barely a cross in sight. If Islam were able to fit into that I would have no problem with it, but it would have to be a jolly different Islam to what we have at the moment. The ayatollah would have to lose his sense of exclusivity and become as fundamentally muddle-headed as the Archbishop of Canterbury, and I can’t see that happening.

‘Personally, I find the inclusiveness and uncertainty of the Church of England as horrible as the brittle, iron-edged certainties of Islam and I would much rather the chairman of the National Secular Society held up the Coronation sword. But I can’t see that happening.

Although I am an atheist, unlike a Richard Dawkins, I understand the importance of religious motive and, broadly, I am sympathetic to it – except when it is fused with the political, which is what Henry does, and which modern Islam wants to do, and also what Tony Blair and George Bush flirt with.’

So he appreciates the rituals of the Church of England? ‘Yes, I remember the horror of my father’s funeral in 1997. It was a Quaker funeral in which there was absolutely no ritual. No music. No reading. Nothing between you and the rawness of that emotion.’

But wasn’t that quite healthy? Cathartic, I mean? ‘It wasn’t for me. Why have a ceremony which is unmediated raw emotion?’ Surely they wouldn’t have minded if he had delivered a homily? ‘The fact is, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Me, eloquent, fluent me, couldn’t stand up and give a talk at my own father’s funeral.’

When I first met David Starkey his father was still alive, though nearly 90. He told me then that they used to talk on the phone every day. ‘Well, I had not known him well. He was a late discovery because my mother [who died in 1977] had dominated everything.

We became close. The whole relationship had taken on a new dimension because two years before he died, James and I had got together. My father had led a sheltered life, yet there he was at that age still capable of responding to new things.’

Starkey had come out as gay to his parents back in the early Seventies. His God-fearing mother had never forgiven him. But his father reserved judgment, it seems. Was it important for Starkey to get his father’s blessing about his relationship with James? ‘Not quite the word I would use,’ he says. ‘Put it in Latin. Call it a benediction then I might feel more comfortable. But yes, it was important to me.’

Given the theory that there may be a gay gene, did he ever wonder whether his father might have been bisexual? ‘It would have been unthinkable for me to discuss it with him. We could never talk about things like that.’

What about Starkey himself? As a young man did he assume he was heterosexual? ‘I didn’t assume anything. It was not an issue. As far as I was concerned it was a low priority at that age. It makes me sound like the most awful nerd, but I was only interested in getting a scholarship to Cambridge.’ (He did get it, and a First, then a PhD, then a fellowship.) ‘But yes it did take me a long time to realise what the emotions actually meant.’

He met James Brown, a publisher and designer, at the LSE. Starkey, who is 61, was a lecturer there at the time. Brown, who is 34, had been a student. When I ask Starkey if he had taught Brown he coughs and splutters jokily. ‘Good heavens no! I have rather high views on that kind of thing. James read economics and social policy then began working for the LSE Foundation.

I had a meeting with Howard, the foundation boss, at the university bar. He sent James on ahead to tell me he was running late. James and I got talking…We went out to dinner after that, nothing happened and I can still remember sitting in the back of the taxi looking back at this young man thinking: why I am going home alone and seeing this agreeable-looking young man clearly thinking the same? Something clicked. It was like Henry meeting Anne Boleyn.’

Not quite as much at stake though, I suggest. ‘Oh, stop being a spoilsport.’

As Starkey has been a patron of the Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality (Torche) since 1994, I ask him what he made of David Cameron’s ‘…and I don’t just mean between a man and woman’ conference speech. ‘It’s called gesture politics isn’t it?’ Starkey says. ‘My problem with Cameron is that I am not just a kind, sharing, nuzzly individual: I also care about my tax bills. I’m really boring. I like my Toryism with a bit of beef.’

In conversation, David Starkey has no restraint. And, as Michael Buerk, the chairman of The Moral Maze, noted in his autobiography, he is prone to ‘whinny at his own cleverness.’ But he is entertaining with it. And there are no awkward silences with Starkey. In the course of our four-hour conversation, in fact, the only time Starkey hesitates is when I ask him where he stands on civil partnerships.

‘Oh dear.’ Long pause. ‘Why the need for a public endorsement? I don’t see why. On the other hand, I think James would like to and I suspect in the end we will. I can appreciate all the legal reasons why marriage is practical in terms of the handover of property, it’s just… Another pause. ‘I’m wary of it. Matthew Parris and I have joked about this, saying: “We didn’t become gay to get married!”‘ He and James have been together for 12 years. ‘We have our ups and downs, like any couple. But we have become a part of each other. We have learned to live with each other’s foibles, and idiocies, and disgusting habits. It becomes like going upstairs and downstairs in a familiar house.’

Part of the familiar house is Seal, the labrador. ‘I’ve become so sentimental about him. I thought I was immune. Most dinners he gets the plate to lick. He uses his eyes like Princess Diana…’ Starkey demonstrates. ‘Totally manipulative. But his face is so beautiful I cannot resist. The big eyes, the softness, as he sprawls out in front of the fire. We have become a parody of English life.’

It sounds like a child substitute. ‘Not for me. A cuddle substitute, possibly.’

Starkey’s life may now be a parody of middle-class life, but his childhood was almost a stereotype of working-class misery. He has often spoken of his mother, Elsie, a domineering woman who was overly protective of him, in part because, as a child, he suffered from club feet, which after several painful operations were corrected. ‘My mother was suffocating but I owe her everything.

She was the divine discontent. She was the possibility I could get out.’ But he has rarely spoken about his father. ‘He was a sweet, gentle man,’ he now says, ‘but he hated what he did for a living and was prone to bouts of violence and temper, not a million miles from me in my earlier incarnation.’

At whom were the violence and temper directed? ‘Anything. Everything.’

I ask if his own frustrations, when he was an impecunious academic away from the spotlight, were similar. ‘You are right. I was frustrated and I do love the spotlight. But a good lecture is a theatrical performance. The whole point of The History Boys is the way in which teaching and performance have a symbiotic relationship, which is both to their mutual advantage and disadvantage. The question is: is one using one’s histrionic skills to power learning or to vulgarise it?’ So which is he doing? ‘Probably a bit of both.’

Charlton Heston is pretty sure I’ll know the story, but tells it anyway. ‘It’s about – oh, nuts, who was that British actor in Room at the Top? Laurence Harvey – it’s about Laurence Harvey. When he was doing Romeo he called Olivier and said, “You must play The Chorus.” And Olivier said, “No.” And Harvey said, “Why not?” And Olivier said, “Because I’m too fucking grand.”‘
It’s as well I do know the story, for Heston has propped his crutches up against the table behind him and I have become distracted by the sight of them slowly sliding down. (Is it improper, I find myself wondering, to lean over a Hollywood legend to grab his falling crutches? It’s one of those questions upon which Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners offers no clear guidance.) There is a loud clatter as the crutches meet the floor. Without blinking or looking round, Heston growls: ‘All right. Stay there.’
Composed, in a word.
It’s nine o’clock in the morning – Heston can’t get out of the film actor’s habit of rising for 6.30am shoots – and we are sitting on a comfortable sofa in the stone and glass home he had built for himself on the ridge of a mountain in California, while he was away filming Ben-Hur in Italy 39 years ago. Below us is a swimming-pool, lined with poplars. Below that, 800 acres of forest. And below that, the rest of Beverly Hills. Most of the books that line the shelves that take up the whole of one wall are about Shakespeare. In the centre of the middle shelf there is a space cleared for a signed photograph of… yes, you haven’t guessed it: Prince Andrew (Heston is a great Anglophile, and an arch conservative. Indeed, he was one of the few Hollywood celebrities invited to Lady Thatcher’s 70th birthday party.)
On another wall there is a portrait of Laurence Olivier, his hero and friend. The reason he wanted to tell the Olivier anecdote was that he believes Olivier was too fucking grand to play minor roles in Shakespeare, while, he, Heston, is not. This is why he agreed to act in the comparatively modest role of the Player King in Kenneth Branagh’s full-length, four-hour Hamlet. While he was filming it at Shepperton Studios in London last year, Heston slipped on a step. ‘Didn’t even fall,’ he shrugs, his arms stretched out along the back of the sofa. ‘Just jarred down, and that really hurt. It wasn’t that I couldn’t work. They just had to prop me up between takes.’ Rather a come down, this; for such is the bruising toll that stunts have taken over the years that he has had to have a hip operation (which he had been putting off for fear of losing what mobility he had left). ‘I can really walk without those crutches,’ he now adds in a low voice like a sandbag slowly pummelling down a wooden staircase. ‘But I’m not supposed to for a week.’
Inevitably, it must be harder for Heston to accept the ageing process than it is for the rest of us (he’s 72). We have not climbed mountains as Moses, scaled scaffolding as Michelangelo, or been whipped as we rowed in galleys, our muscles oiled, wearing nothing but a loin cloth as Ben-Hur. In his day, the 6ft 3in Heston, with his broad shoulders and 45in chest, was an icon of virility, the great patriarch, a monumental presence on the screen. Indeed, our own Henry Cooper said of him: ‘That’s the only geezer I’ve met who makes me look like a poof.’ Now, partly because of a stoop, Heston has shrunk a couple of inches. He has a creaky, bow-legged walk and his grey flannel trousers have been let out at the back. His weathered face is still handsome, though. That famous wide mouth still shows about 48 shiny front teeth when he speaks; and he still has those sculpted cheekbones, that finely chiselled broken nose, that strong, flinty jaw, and those eyes that, though slightly watery and dimmed, are still a vivid blue. As for the hair… well, it fits.
Being immortalised on celluloid as a young demi-god must be the curse of the screen actor, mustn’t it? ‘Well, I’m certainly not going to be 30 again.’ Heston smiles, recognising that the question is a cue for the touching El Cid anecdote he relates in his autobiography. Again, he’s sure I’ll have read it but that I want to hear it from the Moose’s mouth regardless (Moose was his nickname when he was growing up in the Michigan backwoods. Now his friends call him Chuck. Except his wife who calls him Charlie. And his mother who called him Charlton. His staff call him Mr Heston.) Anyway: he has two (now grown-up) children, a son and a daughter, and when the daughter was eight, he (then 46) took her to see El Cid for the first time. Afterwards she wept and said: ‘Oh Daddy, you were so beautiful then.’ As he says this he emits a bass chuckle that makes the sofa tremble: ‘Well, I guess I still was beautiful then. But what are you gonna do? It happens to athletes. Happily, actors can go on working. Athletes just run into a wall.’
In his tennis pavilion, near the house, there is a life-size poster of Heston as El Cid. You can’t help wondering what goes through his mind when he contemplates it, especially in light of the story he goes on to tell. He was, he remembers, rehearsing in a production of Antony and Cleopatra that was just about to open at a Pittsburgh theatre. One dark winter night he went back to the theatre to check something on the stage and came across the huddled figure of the aged actress Lenore Ulric. Out of pity, she’d been given a job and cast – miscast – as Charmian, Cleopatra’s handmaiden. She knew, as everyone else in the cast knew, that she was too old for the part. Heston found her kneeling in front of a life-size painting of her younger self playing her most successful role, and crying like a lost child. ‘I slipped quietly out the stage door,’ he says, nodding his head in rueful sympathy.
There, thanks to the grace of the Old Testament God he sometimes plays, he hasn’t gone. Indeed, Heston says he has always kept his life in Perspective. ‘I did learn very early on that you shouldn’t take yourself as seriously as other people are prepared to take you,’ he says, compulsively patting his grey hair, presumably to prove it is real. ‘The main thing is the work. If they like it, it’s fine. If they don’t, well, what do they know?’ He keeps his feet on the ground by reminding himself of the Byzantine emperors who employed servants to stand behind them and whisper, ‘You, too, must die.’ It’s not that he suffers from Paradise Syndrome (a condition in which stars become hypochondriacs because their success has left them nothing to contemplate but ill health), but while he was filming Ben-Hur (in 1958) he was given to bouts of paranoia about dying young. They were triggered off by the sudden death that year of his fellow Hollywood star, Tyrone Power, who was only 45: ‘His death hung in my mind, resonating with my own mortality.’ Soon after, Heston hurt his hip in a fall – while trying to help Jesus carry his cross, as you do – and he felt sure he wasn’t going to make it to the end of the film.
Now he says he would like to die quickly – like Caesar, naturally – but not before he has had time to say some famous last words. This qualification is revealing. First, it shows how much Heston identifies with the heroic figures – kings, cardinals, generals, presidents – he has spent a career portraying on screen (‘One would like to hope that a tiny scrape of their greatness has rubbed off,’ is how he puts it). Second, it shows the extent to which the real world has collided in his imagination with the illusory world of the cinema. When this is put to him, he shrugs. ‘Unreal? I’ve been doing it for so long I feel at home with it. That’s normality.’ In his private twilight zone, he probably imagines there will be a camera rolling as he says his last words. After all, this is a man who once found himself talking to Tom Selleck at a bar and, seeing a shadow on Selleck’s face, though ‘Shit. I’m in his key-light.’
The anecdotage could go on, and on. It’s practised, perfect and charming. And, like much anecdotage, it serves instead of self-analysis. For it’s telling that Heston so often talks about his roles only in terms of how physically suited he was to play them. He doesn’t seem to believe that it is possible for an actor to play a character he does not identify with in these terms, just by acting. He says, for instance, that his height, deep voice and broken nose always precluded him from playing Hamlet: ‘Even when I was young enough it was never a part for me, I had the wrong persona.’
Try and imagine the big, strapping Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando or Daniel Day-Lewis being held back in this way and you will appreciate what an astonishing admission this is. The comment also shows, though, that Heston possesses an awareness of his own limitations. He probably knows he doesn’t have the subtlety to play Hamlet (although he does recite for me, quite stirringly, the ‘To be or not to be’ speech, as an illustration of how accessible ‘Old Will’s’ vocabulary is – only to ruin the effect by adding, ‘See? Not really very complicated stuff’). He once perceptively observed that some film directors actually consider intelligence in an actor a drawback. And, even more wryly, that: ‘Smoking a cigarette in a film can make you look cool and world-weary. Actually, I’ve learned to act determined and thoughtful. I can even throw in a dollop of anxious on top.’
Now, it may be that after many years of being gently ribbed by critics for his hamminess, he has learned to say such things to show he has a sense of irony. But I think not, for the first thing you notice about Heston is that he is neither precious nor pretentious but, rather, in possession of a lumbering sincerity. For example, when we discuss the dark, Freudian themes in Hamlet – sanity, guilt, self-doubt, shuffling off of mortal coils – I ask Heston if he couldn’t perhaps relate to the character of Hamlet by contemplating his own mortality. ‘No. Hamlet weighs up the advantages of killing Claudius as against killing himself. It has never crossed my mind to kill myself. Scots don’t do that [although Heston, somewhat provocatively, likes to refer to himself as a ‘Native American’, his mother’s side of the family was Scottish, and his father’s English]. They may think of killing someone else, though.’
Heston has played both Macbeth and Antony dozens of times, because he feels he looks the part. But what about King Lear? Now that Heston is of a certain age, surely he is perfect for the role? ‘As Olivier said, when you’re old enough to play Lear you’re not strong enough. Besides, I think you have to grow up with a role. I first played Macbeth when I was 14. I understand Macbeth. I understand Antony in both plays. But I don’t empathise with Lear. I just think, what is this idiot doing? Why is he doing this? A bit like Othello.’
Ay, as Hamlet would say, there’s the rub. Heston is probably the greatest epic hero Hollywood has ever produced. He has made more than 70 films and, alongside actors of the calibre of Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson, has performed in countless stage plays. He won an Oscar for best actor in a film which, to this day, still holds the record for most Oscars won (Ben-Hur, 11), and which, in the chariot race, includes one of the most dramatic action sequence ever filmed. Yet, at the media screening of Hamlet, the audience greeted Heston’s initial appearance with a titter.
Was this because he is so obviously wearing a syrup on his head? Was it because he starred in the Colbys (the Dynasty spin-off) as well as in dozens of mediocre films in which he was attacked by killer ants or taken prisoner by apes? Was it because, in recent years, he has been trying to lighten up his serious image by appearing on such programmes as The Dame Edna Experience and in such films as Wayne’s World? Or is it because he says he doesn’t take himself too seriously yet so obviously does, especially when it comes to his far right political opinions?
Certainly, it’s the seriousness factor – the lumbering sincerity factor – that lies behind the very public and very farcical feud Heston has been waging with the left-wing writer Gore Vidal over the past year. Vidal claims to have written a scene for Ben-Hur which, had it been in the final cut, would have explained the baffling rivalry between the Jewish Ben-Hur and his Roman rival Messala, played by Stephen Boyd: they had been teenage lovers and, when they meet again as adults, Messala wants to continue where they left off, but is spurned. Part of the reason Heston was so deeply rattled by this interpretation, I suspect, was that he identifies so strongly with the characters he plays. In some ways, the one he most resembles is Sir Thomas More (whom he played at London’s Savoy Theatre in 1987), a noble soul with the fatal flaw of innocence. Heston sees himself as – and surely is – the archetypal family man. That the straight and honourable hero he portrays in Ben-Hur might be considered homosexual is, for Heston, an abhorrent notion. And as if this were not bad enough, Vidal has rubbed salt into Heston’s whip welts by claiming that Boyd was allowed to know the homosexual subtext, but that the director decided not to let Heston in on it, for fear that he would fall apart. Vidal agreed, ‘awed by the thought of so much wood crashing to the ground.’
If Heston really didn’t take himself too seriously, he would have laughed the claim off. Instead, the naive, gentlemanly Heston decided to take on the street-fighting Vidal, describing him as ‘a tart, embittered man’ and firing off a letter of protest to the LA Times. When asked if he now has any regrets about rising to Vidal’s bait, Heston emits one of those bitter, mirthless laughs. ‘Poor Gore. Such…’ He trails off, remembers the Marquess of Queensbury rules, and recovers his air of resolution, superiority and dignity. ‘No. I don’t regret it because it’s so easy to discredit him. He is a member of the Screen Writer’s guild. If he wrote any of the script, he would have been given a credit for it. But he wasn’t. And how come he didn’t bring it up for 30 years? No. It puzzles me because Gore has a respectable reputation as an essayist and novelist. I don’t know why it’s suddenly so important to him.’
When I suggest that Vidal might conceivably have told the story out of mischief, Heston says: ‘Maybe. Or maybe he has a passion for me. Who knows? Maybe that’s the subtext!’ Now that’s a good joke, and the answer Heston should have given in the first place. But it still leaves you wondering: does Heston really get Vidal’s joke? Could it be that Heston is just so immune to malice and subterfuge, so decent, so, so solid, that Vidal’s point o’erthrows his noble mind by several inches? Or is it that he is smarting because he does get it and he is only too aware that the Olympian heroes he played in all those epics now seem crude, stylised and kitsch? Worse, he recognises that the point Vidal is making is that Heston – after years of playing characters who toss their heads, hold their chins high and leap from rock to rock in a leather thong – has, like the matinee idol Steve Reeves before him, become a gay icon.
Of course, Vidal’s joke only works, and wounds, because Heston is the all-American, gung-ho male. Politically, he is probably more reactionary and hawkish even than his good friend Ronald Reagan. Indeed, in America he is now almost as well known as a champion of the right to bear arms as he is for his acting. (He keeps about 40 firearms in his house, including a loaded one under his bed.) It was this reputation for rabid right-wingery that prompted the left-wing British journalist Christopher Hitchens to humiliate Heston on a live TV debate just before the Gulf War. Hitchens began by saying what an honour it was to be debating Middle Eastern politics with Moses himself. Then, suspecting that Heston was confusing Iraq with Iran, Hitchens challenged him to name the countries bordering Iraq. When Heston got them wrong, Hitchens said: ‘Before you support bombing a country off the map, perhaps you should pay it the compliment of finding out where it is.’ When Heston got angry at this, Hitchens retorted, ‘Keep your hairpiece on.’ Americans, Hitchens believes, still remember the debate because Heston was being so fatuous, complacent and self-satisfied. ‘But upon reflection,’ Hitchens tells me, ‘I feel a pang of regret because it was like humiliating your own father. To be fair to Heston, he has shown a sort of bovine courage over the years in the way that he has stuck to his convictions, even when it has meant alienating himself from the liberal Hollywood establishment.’
When asked why he thinks so many Hollywood actors are liberal, Heston says it is because they make their living from their emotions, being called upon to weep for someone about whom they care nothing by sheer technique – just like that old pro the Player King, in fact. Liberals, he believes, tend to be emotional (and therefore irrational) people. This seems a dangerous line to take, given the inevitable conclusion that, because Heston himself is anything but liberal, he must be an unemotional and therefore wooden actor. But, of course, he is emotional, although he would call it following his conscience, or his heart. In 1961, for instance, long before the civil rights movement had become a fashionable cause in Hollywood, Heston joined Martin Luther King on a protest march because, in his heart, he knew it was the right thing to do.
More recently, again because he knew that it was the right thing to do, Heston stood up to the black gangsta rap singer Ice-T in order to get his infamous record ‘Cop Killer’ banned (when Ice-T threatened to kill Heston, the actor just growled, ‘I’d like to see him try’). And even though he probably knew he would be ridiculed for missing the point, Heston criticised the violence in the films of Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. When people did indeed laugh and ask if he had not realised the films were black comedies, he just shrugged and said: ‘”Didn’t you get it?” is a devastating question. Cool people cannot bear ever not getting a joke.’
As if all this were not enough to be campaigning about, Heston is vehemently anti-abortion and opposed to feminists because he believes they are responsible for the break-up of the family. Feminists can’t be blamed, however, for the divorce of his own parents. ‘I was still a child,’ Heston recalls, ‘and the loss of my father affected me greatly. I dealt with it, but I became a solitary, private child.’ He says his parents’ divorce was a terrible, dark secret he never told anyone about, saying instead that his mother’s new husband was his father. This, he says, has left him shy to this day but he now has a public persona he can step into.
Perhaps it was the failure of his parents’ marriage that made him want to succeed so much with his own. He married Lydia, his college sweetheart, when he was 19 (after his first date, he tells me, he ran the three miles home along the dark streets shouting, ‘I love her, I love her,’ over and over again. ‘I did, too,’ he adds.) Almost uniquely among the grandees of Hollywood, the couple have remained happily married for 53 years. Again, unusually, they have lived in the same house for much of that time. Wife? House? Politics? Stick to your guns. That seems to be the Moose’s philosophy.
Lydia now appears for her morning swim. She is wearing a dressing gown, a bath hat and what looks like a facepack. ‘Hello,’ she says, waving cheerfully when she sees me. ‘Excuse my clown make-up. It’s just sunblock.’
It is time for Heston to make his way up to the tennis court where a photographer is waiting to take his picture. He is pretty nippy with his crutches. ‘Learned to handle them playing Long John Silver,’ he says over his shoulder. ‘Although that was only the one crutch.’
The outside of the house has a faded appearance, bleached by the years of intense sunlight. Alongside a faded brass chariot and horse in the yard there is a sandpit with the words ‘jack’s sandbox’ daubed on the side. Further along the road towards the pavilion there is a faded sign which reads: ‘Unauthorized visitors not welcome. Guard dog on duty. Proceed to house. Sound horn. Wait in car.’ Another faded sign, at the back of the pavilion, says in more friendly letters: ‘Do not enter this area. Santa and his elves are busy.’
All of this serves as a melancholic reminder that some of Heston’s fame has faded, too. Inside the pavilion there is an even more poignant symbol of this: a beautifully hand-stitched leather director’s chair with the name ‘Charlton Heston’ carved in it. While Heston waits outside for the shot to be set up, I run my fingers over the letters and think ‘The Charlton Heston used to sit in this chair. It should be in a museum. It must be worth a fortune to collectors of Hollywood memorabilia.’ I almost forget that the genuine article is standing only a few yards away.
Outside, the Charlton Heston is growing impatient waiting for the photographer to finish his light readings. He has only had to wait about two minutes but he has started looking theatrically at his watch, shaking his head and sucking in breath. You can tell he hates having his photograph taken or, at least, that after so many years in front of a camera, he is bored rigid by it. After another few seconds have been wasted, he announces that he has a dentist’s appointment in ten minutes. Root canal work. It has the desired effect. As the photographer’s young assistant nervously shows the Hollywood veteran where to sit he makes the mistake of warning him to watch out for the light cables. ‘One has seen cables before,’ Heston sighs under his breath. ‘One has seen cables.’
Once seated, Heston instinctively raises his chin, tosses his head and levels a look at the camera lens which is, yes, so fucking grand it gives you goosebumps.