After weeks of delicate negotiation with his diary secretary, an hour is found in Henry Kissinger’s schedule. Then his 97-year-old mother, who he believes was responsible for everything he achieved in his life, dies. The interview is postponed. And now, a fortnight later, it looks as if it’s going to be put back again.
My appointment has already been changed from 11am to 11.30am, and as I sit in my room, walking distance from Dr Kissinger’s office on Park Avenue, I flick through the television channels and wait for another call. CNN is broadcasting live from Baghdad, and Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi foreign minister, is denouncing Kissinger for saying that the US and British forces should concentrate on trying to kill Saddam. An air-raid siren wails in the background.
‘There can’t be a crisis next week,’ Kissinger joked in 1970. ‘My schedule is already full.’ That was the week Syria invaded Jordan, the Soviets based a nuclear-armed submarine in Cuban waters, the CIA planned to destabilise Chile, and the Viet Cong tabled a new peace plan. These days, when there’s an international crisis, Kissinger doesn’t have to deal with it, just comment on it. The media want to know his reaction to everything, from the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to the arrest of Pinochet.
My phone doesn’t ring, so I set off to meet him. His office suite is on the 26th floor of a steel-and-glass building. There is no sign on the door, just a young female receptionist behind a Plexiglass window. I hear the old bruiser before I see him: that unmistakable Teutonic rumble, gravel churned in a cement mixer: ‘Tell them I have zero flexibility. I have to be out of the studio by 6.45. Got that?’ One of his assistants is trying to keep up with him as he pads from office to office, crossing the corridor in front of me several times.
He is much shorter than you expect, but just as well cushioned. He walks past me, croaks, ‘Hello,’ and disappears into another room. The crinkly hair is still there, silver now. The face is like a walnut: sallow, lined and liver-spotted. The eyelids are heavy, the lower lip droops. The glasses are thick and so is the accent, which is puzzling. Although Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in Fürth, Bavaria, in 1923, he has lived in New York, as Henry A Kissinger, since he was 15. (With his family – mother, father and younger brother – he emigrated in 1938, to escape Nazi persecution.)
I’m shown into his office, an L-shaped corner where the shelves are decked with about 40 signed photographs of world leaders: everyone from Sadat and Lady Thatcher, to Pope John Paul II and Gorbachev. Some of the prints are so ancient the colour has drained out of them. There is a painting of an American bald eagle and – very Dr Strangelove – a globe.
It is 23 years since Kissinger left high office, yet he still has an aura of power. When Richard Nixon appointed him National Security Advisor in 1969 and Secretary of State in 1973 (an office he continued to hold, under Gerald Ford, until 1977), the Cold War was at its height. As the politician ostensibly in charge of US defence and foreign policy, Kissinger was pretty much the most powerful man in the world.
Kissinger’s power was unlike anyone else’s in history. It was constructed around his personality, for one thing: his notoriously short fuse; his disarming wit; his Machiavellian skills of diplomacy; his ruthlessly analytical mind. It was also related to the preciousness of his time. When told he had to have an emergency triple by-pass operation in 1982, he negotiated with his doctors to see if he could find time for it and concluded he was booked solidly for the next three months. (They overruled, and rushed him in that week.)
Though he’s an old man now – 75 – Kissinger is still regarded as a statesman whose opinions on international relations should be listened to by princes, prime ministers and presidents. When Tony Blair goes on official visits to the States, he includes breakfast with Kissinger in his itinerary. The chairmen of multinational companies, such as American Express and Revlon, listen to him, too. Indeed, they pay Kissinger Associates Inc, the consultancy firm he set up in 1982, millions of dollars each year to brief them on world affairs. And Kissinger still acts the part. He still has an impossibly full diary; he still flies in private jets with an entourage of assistants and bodyguards; and he and Nancy – the tall sophisticate he married in 1974 – are still pictured in the society pages, partying with Hollywood stars, oil tycoons and European royals.
Outside on Park Avenue I can hear an eerie echo of the Baghdad siren: the whooping sound of an NYPD patrol car. I try to gather my thoughts, but now I hear a pneumatic drill rattling against the pavement as well, and the keywords associated with Kissinger jangle in my head like an abstract poem: shuttle diplomacy, Vietnam, détente, SALT treaty, covert operations, Mao, wiretaps, B52s, Brezhnev, geopolitics, war crimes, paranoia, Cambodia, balance of power, power the great aphrodisiac. Power. Five more minutes pass before Dr Kissinger bustles in, undoes his blue suit jacket and sits down. ‘Is that damn thing on?’ he says in an android monotone, pointing to a tape recorder which one of his staff has set up next to mine on the glass coffee table. ‘I tell you. I have no technical skills whatsoever.’ He almost allows himself a smile at this.
Kissinger thinks that history is a constantly evolving subject, on which there can be no definitive take. ‘In the late Seventies and Eighties, for example, the Vietnam protest generation was still very active. A few months ago I was giving a talk at Yale University and, in the students’ minds, I’m not sure if they knew whether the Vietnam War came before or after the Spanish American War. That’s exaggerated, but the Vietnam War was not their concern.’
Kissinger’s own formative experiences do not really feature in the three vast volumes of his memoirs. He doesn’t like talking about himself. He minimises, for instance, the significance of his traumatic childhood and his Jewish heritage – he’s not a practising Jew – and describes his upbringing as typical middle-class German. Even though he was banned as a child from playing soccer with non-Jewish boys (a game he loved then and is still fanatical about), he has said that he wasn’t consciously unhappy – and not acutely aware of what was going on in Germany during his childhood.
Yet when he arrived in New York in 1938 – and went to work in a shaving brush factory during the day while continuing his studies at night school – his discovery that he did not have to cross the street to avoid being beaten up by non-Jewish boys made him long to become an American citizen. He did not come to think of himself as a true American, though, until he joined the US Army as a private in 1943. He proved a valiant soldier at the Battle of the Bulge, volunteering for a small detachment that fought a delaying action when the Germans launched their counter-attack after D-day. (Later, as a sergeant in counter-intelligence, he won a Bronze Star.) When, on a visit to Germany, the Bonn government announced that Kissinger might visit some of his relatives, he intoned darkly, ‘My relatives are soap.’ (At least 13 of them were sent to the gas chambers.) Walter Isaacson, one of his biographers, believes that nearly all Kissinger’s personality traits – his philosophical pessimism, his confidence coexisting with his insecurities, his vanity with his vulnerability and his arrogance with his craving for approval – can be traced to the Holocaust.
Yet there are other sides to Kissinger’s character which can’t be squared with this. His deadpan sense of humour for one: ‘The illegal we do immediately,’ he once joked. ‘The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.’ When he had his heart attack, he quipped, ‘Well, at least it proves I do have a heart.’ According to students of Kissinger, he cultivated a self-deprecating sense of humour when he entered politics. It was intended to defuse jealousy and counter his natural gravitas and arrogance. ‘I have never met a man with greater powers of seduction,’ recalled Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Kissinger first took office.
Kissinger’s charm and powers of flattery weren’t deployed on political colleagues only. ‘Power is the great aphrodisiac,’ he said just before a 1972 poll of Playboy Bunnies voted him ‘the man I would most like to go out with on a date’. And in between his divorce from Ann Fleischer (a New York book-keeper with whom he had two children, David and Elizabeth) and his marriage 24 years ago to Nancy Maginnes (a socialite WASP who worked as Nelson Rockefeller’s researcher), rumours about the Hollywood starlets Kissinger escorted (Jill St John, Candice Bergen and Judy Brown among them) were legion.
But one of the abiding public perceptions of Henry Kissinger is that he was paranoid and secretive. In 1975, discussing civil unrest in East Timor, he told his aides: ‘You have a responsibility to recognise that we are living in a revolutionary situation, everything on paper will be used against me.’ He had enemies: liberals hated his hawkish views on Vietnam; right-wingers distrusted his dovish policies of dŽtente with the Russians and rapprochement with the Chinese; former White House colleagues resented his surviving the Watergate scandal. One of them, John Mitchell, Attorney-General from 1969-72, called Kissinger ‘an egocentric maniac’. Kissinger’s reply could not have been drier: ‘At Harvard it took me ten years to achieve an environment of total hostility. Here I’ve done it in 20 months.’
At a press conference in Salzburg in 1974, Kissinger brooded on the possibility of resigning: he was sick of the stories about his involvement in wiretaps, in destabilising the democratically-elected government of Chile and organising the secret bombing of neutral Cambodia. He had been identified, he said, as someone who cared more about stabilising the balance of power than about moral issues. ‘I would rather like to think that when the record is written, it may be remembered that perhaps some lives were saved and perhaps some mothers can rest more at ease. But I leave that to history.’
When Nixon resigned, Kissinger consoled him with the comment that history would judge him more kindly than did his contemporaries. Nixon countered that it depended who wrote the history. ‘I don’t know whether people questioned Nixon’s leadership at the time so much as his character and some of his actions,’ Kissinger tells me. ‘But I think there has been a much more positive assessment of him.’ Kissinger is comfortable with historical perspectives. After graduating from Harvard in 1950, aged 27, he took an MA two years later and his PhD two years after that. From then until he entered government in 1969, he was a professor of politics.
His senior thesis is still talked about at Harvard. Because of its sheer bulk, 383 pages, it prompted the ‘Kissinger rule’ which limited future students to writing to one third that length. (Judging by the size of his memoirs, over-writing has been a recurrent problem.) The subject of his thesis was ‘the meaning of history’, and even his professors found it pretty impenetrable. It took on all the great thinkers and poets from Kant and Spinoza to Homer and Milton, and its themes ran from morality and freedom to revolution and bureaucracy. At one point he declared that Descartes’s cogito ergo sum was not really necessary. The pursuit of peace, he concluded, is a constant balancing act which lacks larger philosophical meaning. Oh, and life is suffering, and birth involves death.
As a scholar, Kissinger considered the meaning of history. As a politician, he was involved in the making of it. Although he wasn’t involved in the Watergate break-in or cover-up, he surely acquiesced in the attitude that led to it. The atmosphere of paranoia which characterised the Nixon years began in 1969, when Kissinger asked J Edgar Hoover, the FBI director, to authorise taps on William Beecher, a journalist on the New York Times. Beecher had written an account of the secret bombing of Viet Cong supply dumps in Cambodia that year. A furious Kissinger wanted to find out who had leaked the story. I ask Kissinger if he has ever felt that people were plotting against him. ‘No. I don’t feel there were plots against me.’ The guttural voice vibrates the sofa. ‘I feel there were points of view which were very hostile to my point of view. But I don’t consider that a plot. More continual harassment.’
In 1973, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating peace with honour for both sides in Vietnam. His critics claim that the terms he brokered were not substantially different from those on offer in 1969. With the benefit of hindsight, would he have acted differently over Vietnam? ‘You have to separate it into components. I served in an administration which had inherited the war – so when we came in we found 550,000 troops engaged. Our predecessors had just agreed to stop the bombing, which is a very American approach to negotiations: improve the atmosphere for negotiations by removing some of the pressures that ought to make the other side more willing to negotiate. I think, in retrospect, our predecessors undertook more than the country would ever have been prepared to support. And they had not understood how big an effort it would have been to establish a democratic, independent government in Indochina, by military force.’
He thought it was going to be easy? ‘Well, at the time I was not involved in the decision to go in. But I might have supported it. Secondly, if we did go in, we needed to go in with a strategy that would win. But to go in with a strategy of attrition – which is the American style of fighting a war, and which was totally unsuitable for a guerrilla war – was a big mistake. Then came the period where I did share a major responsibility for policy making and the question became: how do we extricate ourselves from Vietnam? I thought that a compromise solution in which we showed that we had heard our domestic critics but that we would not sacrifice people who had worked with us, would permit us to separate the military and political issues. If we could negotiate a ceasefire, the political evolution would take care of itself. But how to achieve this? I did not appreciate that for the North Vietnamese side a compromise was tantamount to a defeat. They couldn’t accept that the war was about anything other than who controlled the power. So the negotiations became much more complex than I thought they would. Secondly – those who were actively involved in the American protest movement didn’t really want a compromise, they wanted to see an American defeat.’
He’s still very much the poker-faced pedagogue. Indeed, an interview with Kissinger can seem a bit like taking dictation from late-period Henry James: dense yet precise passages of thought, bulging with sub-clauses and rhetorical questions, delivered in a ponderous, flat bass which reaches impossible depths – hundreds of leagues below the surface of normal speech. The best you can do is clarify: does he mean that the anti-war protesters wanted to see America humiliated? ‘For good reasons, from their point of view. They thought that the war was really an exercise in American self-aggrandisement and overreaching, and that unless we were taught a terrible lesson we would go on doing it again and again.’
Kissinger says he didn’t really feel anger towards the protesters. ‘At that time, I felt really more disappointed because, in contrast to Nixon, who treated the protesters as enemies, I considered them former colleagues. So I thought, foolishly, for some time, that there was some misunderstanding and we could find some common ground. And I was frustrated by that.’
When I ask if he would still have sanctioned the secret bombing of Cambodia if he had his time again, he sits forward in his seat, clasps his hands together and pauses. ‘You know, some day, someone will write an accurate account of the so-called “secret bombing of Cambodia”.’
So what is the accurate account? ‘There were four Vietnamese divisions on the border in territory from which they had expelled the Cambodian population. They would come into Vietnam, kill Americans and then withdraw into those sanctuaries. Within a week of Nixon coming into office, the North Vietnamese started an offensive – so they couldn’t have been provoked by anything we did. It caused 400 dead a week. After suffering 1,500 casualties, President Nixon decided he was going to bomb the sanctuaries – and that was the so-called “secret bombings”. What we thought we would do is bomb them, receive a protest about it [from the Cambodians], then ask for a UN investigation which would discover these supply dumps. They never protested. Nor was it all that secret. In May, three months after the bombing started, the Cambodian leader Prince Sihanouk said: “I read all these press reports about the bombing of my country by B52s, I don’t know anything about it because I only know about what happens in regions where Cambodians are living. There are no Cambodians living in the areas that are being bombed.” He invited Nixon to visit him in Phnom Penh. These are incontrovertible facts. And we briefed key congressional leaders. Now, would I still do it? Yes, though I probably wouldn’t keep it secret. Although that, primarily, wasn’t my decision.’
Fritz Kraemer, who became something of a mentor to Kissinger in the US Army, once said of him that he has an inner ear for the music of history. And this could explain his gift for seeing the big picture in geopolitical terms: anticipating how a relatively minor conflict in one part of the world might have major consequences  in another. I ask Kissinger if he thinks that it is possible to make a connection – as the author William Shawcross does – between the rise to power of Pol Pot in 1975 and the US bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1973?
‘Total nonsense. It’s the same as saying the German extermination of the Jews was caused by the British bombing of Germany. It makes about as much sense. There were no Cambodians in the bombed area, the only alternative to Pol Pot doing what he did was to let the North Vietnamese take over the country first. But that was an option we didn’t have because that would have led to the collapse of South Vietnam. And Pol Pot’s genocide was beyond our imagination.’
A writer from The Nation, an American magazine, recently told Kissinger that, after the bombing of Iraq, he thought the term ‘war criminal’ could be applied to the current president. ‘Mr Clinton does not have the strength of character to be a war criminal,’ Kissinger replied. I ask him now how he feels about accusations that he himself is a war criminal because of the bombing of Cambodia?
‘Why is it a war crime to bomb people who are killing your military units? In what way is that a war crime, even theoretically? There are many interpretations of the Vietnam War with which I violently disagree. At this point I am beyond anger. But what I felt 20 years ago…’ He trails off again. ‘But I concur that some agreed definition of what a war crime is is desperately needed. Before the law becomes an instrument of political warfare.’
In the New Year edition of the New Yorker there is a page anticipating the headlines for 1999. One reads: ‘Henry Kissinger is detained in Quebec on request of Cambodian prosecutor.’ I was told by one of his assistants just before the interview began that Dr Kissinger did not want to comment on the Pinochet affair. We do touch on it, however. He thinks that Britain has made a big mistake in detaining the former Chilean dictator. So what does he think the agreed definition of a war crime should be? ‘Certainly what Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin did in their camps: go after innocent civilians. That would be a war crime. Where you execute prisoners. I think the major categories are definable, where you get into trouble is at the margins.’
So someone like Slobodan Milosevic would come under that definition? ‘Yes. To the extent that he engaged in mass extermination of civilians. But it is very easy to sit in London or New York and proclaim about war crimes when you don’t know the whole context in which they occurred. There are many crimes which should be judged by the people of the country in which they occurred. When you internationalise them you create a new concept.’
Two months ago, a report in the Independent claimed that Kissinger was about to come under attack as the Clinton administration released documents intended to help Spain’s case against General Pinochet. It speculated that, because these documents might implicate Kissinger in the coup which helped Pinochet to power, they may end in an international law suit against him. Kissinger has said in the past that there is no truth in this claim. He hadn’t even heard of Pinochet when the Chilean dictator came to power. But the report is a telling example of how Kissinger still makes news. Only two weeks ago there was a story in the Guardian which claimed there was new evidence to prove that, during the Cold War, Kissinger had traded intelligence secrets with the Chinese. Kissinger seems destined to go on playing the bogeyman for some years to come.
Does anything make him cry? ‘Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination [the Israeli Prime Minister was killed in 1995]. In addition to being a close colleague, he was a dear personal friend of mine. I thought I understood him quite well. I knew his thinking well. I don’t think I’ve ever shown emotion on television – but I did on that occasion.’ Kissinger is not one to give into his emotions normally, then? ‘No, I’m fairly disciplined.’
This may be a trait he inherited from his father, Louis, a teacher who died in 1982 at the age of 95. The son remembers his father as being unhappy, but too disciplined to inflict his emotions on others. ‘The deaths of your parents change your life, from a purely technical point of view. When those who knew you as a baby are gone, you know you are on your own and you are next in line.’ Did their deaths make him contemplate his own mortality? ‘Well, my father’s coincided with my open-heart surgery. These two things together concentrated my mind.’ And when he reflected upon his life, did he conclude he had been a good man? ‘Now look, I tell you, I live in a Freudian age but I don’t go through the Freudian absorption with my inner being. I have tried to do in each situation the best I thought I could do. And I tried to be very analytical. But I do not go around in self-flagellation later saying, for God’s sake, if I could only live my life again I would do this differently. It may be a weakness. And there may be things I should have done differently – but not at the chief junctures of my life.’
Much of Kissinger’s diplomatic success was attributed to his skills as a flatterer. ‘No, no,’ he says now when I ask if this was true. ‘Look, they say I was engaged in flattery and telling everyone what they wanted to hear – but I had extraordinarily close relations with Sadat, Mao, Brezhnev, all the European leaders, many Latin American leaders, can one do that with flattery alone? If it were that simple, everyone would do it. I would like to think it’s because  I really tried to understand as deeply as I could how each side perceived its problem. And I usually began the negotiation by telling each side exactly what I was after, so that they could interpret what I was going to do.’
Does the world seem a safer place to him now than when he was in government? ‘From the point of view of nuclear danger, infinitely safer; from the point of view of structure, more chaotic. In those days you had a Cold War; you had basic criteria of what would benefit one side or the other. Today you have a very amorphous situation. What exactly is Nato supposed to do? What do we want in Bosnia, or Asia, or the Middle East, in the long term? Moreover, you have the economic organisation and the political organisation of the world at variance to each other. The economic is global, the political regional. So all these forces are moving simultaneously at a time when the quality of the political leaders is declining – because they are too absorbed with getting re-elected.’
He checks  his watch. If we want to take pictures, we’ll have to end here. The portraits taken, Kissinger flatters shamelessly. He congratulates the photographer on the way he works, then turns to me and says: ‘And great questions.’ Bet he says that to all the interviewers.
This appeared in January 1999. In 2001, on a trip to France, Henry Kissinger was invited by the French legal authorities to answer allegations that he had been involved in crimes against humanity. He declined.

The drive to Louth in Lincolnshire has taken me five hours. I’ve come to interview Graham Fellows – comedian, actor, one-hit wonder – but it isn’t going well. His mind keeps wandering. As do his legs. He lives in a rambling old house – a former veterinary surgery – and seems unable to stay in the same room for more than five minutes. As he lopes distractedly from his ping-pong room to his kitchen, his mongrel dog, Molly, follows him. His seven-year-old daughter, Alice, who is off school because she has a cough, follows the dog.
An egg-timer rings, and Fellows wanders off to collect his other daughter from school. He won’t be long, he says. Would I mind babysitting for a while? Alice offers me a mince-pie and leads me over to the window to show me three brown hens pottering around the garden. These, she says, are named after her father’s three sisters: Lorna, Sally and Clare. Two of the sisters are older than Daddy; Clare is younger, and is married to Ainsley Harriot, the television chef.
We move to the drawing-room. I sit on the sofa, and Molly ambles over to lie across me. Molly is three, Alice points out. And she is a cross between a Labrador and a sheepdog. There is a lodger in the house called Rachel who works with difficult children and she, too, has a dog, called Pye. Alice spells it out for me: p-y-e. She now starts bringing me class photographs from her school, Kidgate Primary. ‘That’s Mrs Hall. That’s me. This is our teacher, Mr Bean. I’m in class 2H and that stands for Mrs Haughton’s class in year two. This is my sister Suzannah (s-u-z-a-n-n-a-h). She’s five and was born in a swimming-pool. My mummy is called Kathryn and she is a teacher. That’s Daddy’s mummy on the wall.’ She points to a black-and-white photograph. ‘She died ten and a half years ago. You can tell it’s an old fashioned picture because of the colours.’
Alice plays ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano for me and talks over her shoulder: ‘I once listened to one of Daddy’s shows, but not all of it, because it was my bathtime. My favourite television programme is Cow and Chicken.’
In the world of Graham Fellows – as in that of his comic alter ego, John Shuttleworth – all is not quite as it seems; the axis is at a slight tilt. It is appropriate that part of this interview should be conducted not with Fellows but with his seven-year-old daughter; and that this part should be the most coherent.
As the 39-year-old comedian points out, such success as he has enjoyed has been soundly based on failure. As a 19-year-old drama student at Manchester Polytechnic, he created the anorak-wearing punk-rocker Jilted John. His one hit – with its memorable chorus ‘Gordon is a moron/Gordon is a mo-o-ron’ – reached number four in the charts. He can still remember the three acts that kept him from the number one slot: 10 cc with ‘Dreadlock Holiday’, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John with ‘You’re the One That I Want’, and Boney M with ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’. Jilted John was once the prize in a tabloid competition. The girl who won got to have a fish-and-chip supper with him in Leeds.
For the next 15 years, Fellows was partially successful as an out-of-work actor – his record of failure being broken briefly when he was cast in a bit part on Coronation Street. After this, he become an out-of-work musician, only to botch things by landing himself a recording contract in the late Eighties. To defuse the formality of the signing ceremony, the producer played some of the awful demo tapes sent in over the years. Inspired, Fellows recorded similar demos for his own amusement and began sending them in, anonymously, to the producer, who guessed who was behind them and insisted that Fellows forget about his serious song-writing and take up comedy instead.
So it was that ‘John Shuttleworth – versatile singer/ songwriter’ was born. Shuttleworth, a 56-year-old Yorkshireman, used to work demonstrating audio equipment for Comet, but now – dressed in his trademark turtleneck, leather car-coat and National Health glasses – he tours the northern cabaret circuit with his Yamaha organ. His dream is to persuade Norway to perform his love song ‘Pigeons in Flight (I Wanna See You Tonight)’ as its Eurovision Song Contest entry.
What Fellows tries to do with Shuttleworth, he says, is celebrate the mundane by showing it in relief. He is good at this, having Mike Leigh’s ear for naturalistic dialogue, and Alan Bennett’s for folksy pedantry. John Shuttleworth never just eats a chocolate, for instance: he has a Wagon Wheel from the vending machine at the swimming-baths. He goes on mini-breaks, shops in garden centres and eats in carveries. Shuttleworth, explains Fellows, doesn’t realise he is funny. He would never understand, for instance, why Jarvis Cocker and Reeves and Mortimer are his most devoted fans.
While John Shuttleworth has proved a hit with theatre audiences, as well as with Radio 4 listeners (he has a half-hour show on the station), his series for BBC2 (500 Bus Stops) and his one-off television special (Europigeon) were, according to Fellows, both pretty hopeless. And, consistent with his pattern of partial success, when Fellows (as John Shuttleworth) was nominated for a Perrier Comedy Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1992 he found himself up against Steve Coogan (as Alan Partridge). Fellows has never quite achieved the transition from comedy cult to commercial success, partly because he hates to play the publicity game. He says he’s often asked to appear on such programmes as the Des O’Connor Show, but just can’t bring himself to do them.
Fellows’s predicament can best be summed up in a line from a Bob Dylan song: ‘There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.’ His character, meanwhile, can best be defined by recasting his own lyrics: ‘Graham Fellows is like Manchester, he has strange ways.’
When he returns from the school run, he makes a lemon-curd sandwich for Suzannah and takes me into his makeshift studio. It’s like a Yamaha organ graveyard. Aged keyboards are propped against all four soundproofed walls. The floor is carpeted with electrical cables and yards of quarter-inch tape, unspooled and tangled like brown spaghetti. There is a multi-track tape recorder, several full ashtrays and dirty coffee mugs, a mastering machine and hundreds of DAT tapes.
‘I don’t know what I’m doing half the time and I wish I had a script. This last series of Shuttleworth completely did my head in. These voices in my headphones. In my head.’ Fellows is feeling edgy and paranoid. He says he hasn’t slept for 38 hours. He rubs his face and adds, in his unhurried northern burr, that he is also feeling numb and disorientated. He has what he describes as a period face – dimpled chin, insomniac eyes and a dirty-blond fringe. On the strength of these features, his ambition is to be cast in a television period drama: an angry medieval peasant in an episode of Cadfael, perhaps.
He hasn’t slept because he’s been up all night editing the latest episode of Radio Shuttleworth (‘serving the Sheffield region, and a little bit further even’, as its jingle goes) which is due to be broadcast on Radio 4 at 6.30 this evening. It’s not that it’s a topical comedy show, just that its creator is a perfectionist who can’t resist making last-minute changes and so produces it later and later each week. Today, he has sent the recording of the show to Broadcasting House in a car. A friend happened to be driving to London, and anyway Fellows doesn’t trust the technology that would allow him to transmit the programme ‘down the wire’. His producers at the BBC will just have to hope the traffic isn’t too bad.
As he waits to hear if the tape has arrived in time, Fellows experiments with a Latin rhythm on the keyboard. Then a techno sound. Then a harp, and a steel drum, then a country-and-western slide guitar. He slips into the lugubrious, pancake-flat vowels of John Shuttleworth: ‘It seems simple, single finger playing, but you’ve still got to know which finger to put down.’ Molly walks in and starts barking. Alice follows and starts singing. Fellows finds a switch which produces the sound of a rap singer saying, ‘Peace’. He hits it several times and looks delighted. ‘Oof! Very good sentiment, that.’
Although he is not married, Fellows refers to Kathryn as his wife. Petite and dark, she arrives home and asks him if he got his programme away on time. When he says he is still waiting for the BBC to ring, she says: ‘Couldn’t they just use one of your old programmes?’ He gives me a look which says: my wife doesn’t understand me.
A few hours have passed, a phone call has confirmed that the tape arrived in London and Fellows, now in a much jollier cast of mind, is on his second pint. We are sitting in the Masons, a pub he likes because it reminds him of a waiting-room in a railway station. He enjoys watching the locals. ‘Here’s Norman,’ he whispers, ‘the travel agent. In a moment he will turn round and say hello.’ Norman does so. ‘Hello, Norman,’ Fellows replies and then adds in a whisper again. ‘See? One big happy family, Louth.’ The estate agent tells me that he has just been listening to Fellows’s programme on the radio. He adds that Louth is home to another celebrity, Barbara Dixon.
As Fellows gives a running commentary about the lives of the people in the pub, it becomes clear that he regards them as extras in the film of his life – which probably has the working title The In-Joke. I realise from the enigmatic half-smile that he has decided I, too, should have a cameo for the day. ‘The drama there is in every single moment of your life…’ he trails off wistfully. ‘I love watching characters like John Shuttleworth. Steady, practical older men who sit on their emotions but want to embrace life at the same time.’
Before this theme can be explored, he’s off on another tangent. After his mother’s death in 1987, Fellows says, he became clinically depressed – convinced that his life was futile. He saw a psychotherapist, and decided to become a milkman with Express Dairies. ‘I waxed lyrical in the interview about how I wanted to serve the community. They turned me down. I was really offended. So I applied to another dairy instead.’
Graham Fellows enjoyed the milkman’s life at first. ‘It was the golden age of milk delivery because it was just before people started buying from supermarkets. I went on a week-long course with 40 other prospective milkmen and we had to sit in front of a man with a baton who pointed at a blackboard and said things like, ‘Red top is the homo, got that? Homogenised. What’s the fat content of semi-skimmed? You there, at the back.’
His days as a milkman weren’t an unqualified success. He took to drinking the milk and, because he was never given his own regular round, he couldn’t strike up a rapport with the customers. ‘My money was 50 quid short each week because some of the regulars had some fiddle going which I could never work out. They would dock it from my wages.’ Hmmm.
It is difficult to get a hold of where Fellows’s comic personae end and he begins. With a straight face he will tell you things about himself which sound plausible enough at the time, but afterwards you wonder if he was indulging in self-parody. Jilted John wasn’t his first brush with fame, for instance. As an infant, Fellows won a pretty baby photograph competition. The prize was a fridge. He had an advantage over the other entrants because his father was an ‘incorporated photographer’. That, at least, is what the nameplate outside the family home in Sheffield said.
‘I often wondered what it meant but it was only when my father retired that I thought to ask him. It simply meant that he was self-employed – but he thought it sounded more impressive. He sort of pottered along, my dad. He was a bit weird because nothing really touched him. He could watch news coverage of some horrific disaster and be completely unmoved by it. As though he were a Martian. I’m a bit like that. An observer rather than a participant. Disengaged.’ His father is still alive, and Fellows says when he rings he never asks directly how he is. ‘He will say something like, “How are those hinges I put up on that door?”‘ His father’s main pleasure in life now, says Fellows, is naturism. He has a caravan in the East Midlands which he goes to with his new girlfriend, Graham’s old English teacher.
Really? Fellows doesn’t explain why, but he adds that his grandfather used to go to auctions and come away with a thousand bars of Fry’s Chocolate Cream or 500 bottles of Camp Coffee. These he would give to the young Graham to sell to the other children at school. ‘I was a bit of a bully at infant school,’ Fellows recalls. ‘Nasty. I used to extort ginger biscuits from the other children. I was demoted from the Cubs, from being a sixer to nothing. For bullying. My position became untenable. I had to leave.’
He went on, he says, to breed fancy mice for competitions in Yorkshire; for much of the rest of his leisure time he would tape his voice and play it back at odd speeds. At comprehensive school he became introspective but discovered a talent for fighting. ‘I was best fighter in school. No, second best. Kevin Scott was best. His dad used to beat him daily with a belt. I’m a shy bully. That’s why I only feel confident after a couple of pints. And why I can only perform when I’m hiding behind a character.’
Because Fellows’s mother was a marriage guidance counsellor, she was always asking him how he felt about things, trying to analyse him. The trouble was that she, like his father, was emotionally repressed. And this was why Graham didn’t feel particularly close to her. ‘She died of liver cancer, which is a horrible way to go because you shrivel up and go yellow. It was the first big death in our family and we weren’t very open about it. I certainly didn’t talk to her about her dying. Kept saying, “You’ll pull through, mother,” so it meant I didn’t get to say goodbye. I was playing my guitar and singing to her when she died: “Golden slumbers kiss your eye”.’
Here, I think, he is being earnest. But when he adds that the pain of his mother’s death was rendered worse because it followed two months after the death of his dog, a Great Dane, I’m thrown into doubt again.
Fellows’s manager, Richard Bucknall, tells me that his client has a morbid fascination with cemeteries. He wanted to buy a house alongside one, but Kathryn put her foot down. The humour of some of the Shuttleworth songs is certainly very black: the chorus to one jaunty tune is, ‘My wife died in 1970/ Peacefully in her sleep/Though she’s just a distant memory/Occasional tears I weep.’
When I go to buy the next round, Fellows talks into my tape-recorder. He records a little flight of fancy – I discover later – about my being a keen fellwalker and a DIY enthusiast. He suggests we go on for a curry, because he doesn’t get many visitors from London and he wants to make the most of me. When I protest that I have a five-hour drive back, he goes to the pay phone and orders a takeaway to collect on his way home.
But he can’t bear to let me go away hungry. Just as I am leaving he asks: ‘Do you keep chickens?’ I shake my head, he disappears back into the kitchen and reappears carrying an egg for me to take back. It is carefully wrapped in clingfilm.

There are two ways of proving that time is relative. You can either measure the speed of light in a vacuum, as Einstein did, or you can place a dog and a politician in a restaurant and observe how the three entities age differently. In the space-time continuum, one dog year is the equivalent to seven human years. A seven-year-old dog, therefore, is considered old. But a restaurant which can manage to stay open for just two human years is also considered old – just as a young man is, the moment he becomes an MP. This is what Harold Wilson was getting at when he said a week is a long time in politics.
Take Lord Owen, for instance. Were he to live to 105, mourners would still shake their heads at his funeral and say, ‘Could have sworn he was older.’ That’s what being a foreign secretary at the age of 38 does for you. Even now we think of him as an ermine-gowned elder statesman, a wraith from a lost generation, a lonely shadow in the political wilderness – and he’s only 60.
Lord Owen reflects upon this, surveying the grey and choppy waters of the Thames from an upright wooden chair in his drawing-room. His wide mouth spreads into a thin smile. Dimples appear. ‘Politically, I’m 75 to 80,’ he says. ‘I’m going to the funeral services of the Callaghan government.’
He has just returned from one of his regular business trips to Moscow where Middlesex Holdings, the company of which he has been chairman since 1995, has interests in the steel industry. When the conversation turns from this to his memories of an earlier visit to Russia, at the height of the Cold War, I shiver involuntarily. Owen is so ancient, politically, he can reminisce about signing a treaty (intended to prevent the accidental outbreak of nuclear war) under the steady eye of Comrade Brezhnev. Brezhnev! ‘The Kremlinologists in the West asked me to give a surreptitious medical assessment of him. He had developed a speech defect and they wanted me to try to work out if he had had a stroke, or if he had cancer of the larynx.’
Nowadays there is something of the stuffed osprey about Owen’s looks (feathery eyebrows form a severe ‘V’ above a beaky nose), and he is not as intimidatingly handsome as once he was (less the young Frank Sinatra, more the older Stanley Baxter). The hair that he always seemed to be caught combing off-camera is still thick, but now he complains that whenever he washes it he finds clumps in the sink afterwards – ‘I’m moulting!’
Although Owen still constructs his sentences with ornate precision – ‘up with this we will not put’ is a favourite phrase – he also still sounds rather bored and disdainful when talking. Not that we hear much from him these days. He speaks once or twice a year on international affairs in the House of Lords, but since the end of his three-year term as EU peace negotiator to Bosnia in 1995, he has eschewed the spotlight. Now, though, he has found a cause for which he is prepared to come in from the cold. He thinks it will be a mistake for Britain to join the single currency – and he’s leading a campaign to explain why. The Eurosceptics are delighted: Owen is not Conservative, not anti-Europe (in fact very pro), and not widely felt to be bonkers.
‘A small group of us from different backgrounds and age groups are going through a very interesting exercise at the moment. We’re trying to work out a common text to set out the arguments against the single currency. We’re doing two versions: one short and populist, the other longer and more elitist. The simple version is proving much harder to write.’ Owen’s message is that it’s fine for the British people to vote for currency union as long as they are made fully aware that this will probably end up as political union, that is, a single social welfare and tax system, as well as a single defence and foreign policy. But politicians in Britain who want a United States of Europe are, he believes, operating by stealth, denying this is their ambition while edging constantly towards it.
It could be argued, though, that Owen has made far too many enemies in his political life to be of benefit to any cause he espouses. Left-wingers have hated him ever since he, along with Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers – the Gang of Four – left the Labour Party in 1981 to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP). They objected to Michael Foot’s policy to disarm unilaterally, renationalise, tax heavily and leave the EEC, and Owen hoped his new centrist party would ‘break the mould of British politics’. (The SDP’s statement of principles became known as the Limehouse Declaration, for ever placing Owen as its leader in the minds of the general public.)
Although polls showed that, at its peak, 50 per cent of the population supported the SDP, the 1983 election proved a disappointment, and the 1987 election, in which ‘the two Davids’, Owen and Steel, formed an uncomfortable alliance, was even worse. Steel, then leader of the Liberal Party, proposed merger; Owen resisted. The other members of the Gang of Four and most members of the SDP chose merger and formed the Social and Liberal Democratic Party, but Owen stayed firm. The rump SDP suffered an eerily prolonged death. It was finally wound up after the Monster Raving Loony Party out-polled it in the 1990 Bootle by-election.
In her memoirs, Lady Castle reflected the view of many when she described Owen as arrogant. Lord Jenkins compared him to the upas-tree, which destroys life around it. Lord Healey called him Lord Owen of Split and added: ‘The good fairy gave him thick dark locks, matinŽe idol features and a frightening intellect. Unfortunately the bad fairy also made him a shit.’
Conservatives, on the other hand, have always had a soft spot for Owen, not least because he did so much to keep them in power in the Eighties. Margaret Thatcher, it is said, admired his pro-Nato, pro-market views so much she wanted to offer him a Cabinet post – but he couldn’t bring himself to become a Tory. Major was also a fan, giving Owen a peerage when he left the House of Commons in 1992. He had planned to offer Owen the Governorship of Hong Kong as well – until Chris Patten lost his seat in the election that year.
The right-wing historian Andrew Roberts is another who sticks up for Lord Owen. He wrote recently that Owen’s vanity and ego are probably no greater than many other men of his talents, but they are perceived as gargantuan. Owen thinks he knows why this perception might have arisen. ‘Well, if you break away from a large political party you make yourself a lot of enemies. And if you say what you think, unvarnished, you cause yourself problems. You should never ignore criticism, though. There is always some truth behind it.’
Lord Callaghan recalls in his memoirs that Owen went as white as a sheet when asked if he wanted to be Foreign Secretary (after the sudden death of Tony Crosland). In the two years Owen did the job, he proved to be reasonably successful – forestalling the Argentine invasion of the Falklands and paving the way for Rhodesian independence.
For several years Owen had a recurring dream that he was operating on patients before he was properly qualified as a doctor. An obvious interpretation of this would be that he was suffering impostor syndrome at being promoted so young in politics. He doesn’t agree. Instead he takes the Freudian view that the dream was reassuring, because when he woke up from it he would realise that, in reality, he was qualified. ‘I had been in politics for quite a while – 11 years – and I’d already had two ministerial jobs – Navy, and Health. I suppose it’s an arrogant thing to say, but I wasn’t daunted on my first day as I went up in that slow lift to my room in the Foreign Office. I was at the peak of my powers in terms of intellect and energy and drive.’
You suspect he doesn’t mean that he has been in decline ever since, but it is still a strangely sad and disturbing comment. In his own memoirs (Time To Declare, 1991), Owen reveals that his natural self-confidence had been dented slightly while at Bradfield, his school in Berkshire. He wasn’t especially happy there and was teased ‘in a most unpleasant way’. His nickname was Dahlia, after his initials (David Anthony Llewellyn Owen), but he used to fight those who called him by it and, he solemnly writes, he never went through a homosexual phase.
His time studying medicine at Cambridge University was more rewarding, not least because he fell in love and discovered a passion for reading and writing poetry, something he still devotes much time to today. Indeed, he says one of things he is most proud of is editing Seven Ages, an anthology of poetry published in 1992. After graduating, he worked for six years as a neurologist and psychiatrist at St Thomas’s Hospital, Westminster, before becoming Labour MP for Plymouth Sutton in 1966.
His political epiphany had come some years earlier when he heard Harold Macmillan’s claim that Britain had never had it so good. Owen looked around him, found that he couldn’t agree and decided it was time to become a Labour supporter. But, tellingly, he wrote in his notebook that year: ‘There comes a time for action and taking one particular side whilst realising that no one side will ever answer to one’s every wish.’
Owen was born in Plympton, South Devon, on 2 July 1938, but most of his childhood was spent in Wales. While his father was away fighting in the War, he and his older sister went to live with his grandfather, a Welsh vicar. Although David Owen followed his father, John, into the medical profession, his mother, Molly, a Devon county councillor, was the dominating influence. She taught him that self-doubt was a sign of weakness. ‘I had the sort of mother who, if I came second in class, would say, “Why didn’t you come first?” If you made the cricket team, she would ask, “Why weren’t you made captain?” In a very nice way she assumed there was no such thing as a pinnacle of achievement. Also, I think it’s true to say that I lived dangerously in politics because I knew I could always go back to medicine if my political career came to an end.’
The Owen we watched on the news in the Eighties always looked peeved. Today he seems to have mellowed. He’s less crotchety. He doesn’t seem to be taking himself so seriously. When our photographer asks him to sit in a gloomy corner of the room he gives a running commentary: ‘I get it. This is the dark, saturnine Owen. Aged Heathcliffe. Decaying. The last hurrah…  I know what you lot get up to. Are you trying to get me to look like Oskar Lafontaine?’
It’s a delightfully off-beam assumption, which says much about the insular life that politicians lead: after all, who in this country knows what the German finance minister looks like? But Owen now seems more at ease with himself, and he even seems to have developed a sense of mischief. When asked what he thinks of Cool Britannia he sticks his finger down his throat and makes a retching noise. He dismisses the Observer as being pathetic and unreadable because of its slavish devotion to the Government. And he thinks Paddy Ashdown is making a complete arse of himself by toadying to Blair in the hope of being offered a job in the Cabinet or a seat on the European Commission.
Lord Owen enjoys, he says, the freedom of being a crossbencher – and when he adds that he now calls himself an Independent Social Democrat, he does so with a rueful grin. ‘I don’t want to be dragged into day-to-day political events,’ he says. ‘I want to ring-fence the single currency as the only political issue I’m involved in. I like having my distance and my independence. I’m in that rather rare position of having nothing more I want out of life: no job, no patronage.’
It sounds as if the doctor is coming down with tedium vitae. ‘No, I feel very content. I’ve always been happy. I’ve not lived an anguished life.’ Anyone who remembers his leadership of the SDP might find this an odd statement. ‘I have no resentment about the SDP,’ Owen now says, before going on to prove that he clearly does. ‘I think it’s a pity that people couldn’t have had more confidence in it. And I think it was a tragic shame that we lost our newness by linking ourselves too closely to the Liberals. But I haven’t had one moment of wanting to return to the House of Commons.’ He left it in 1992 and says his only real regret is that he didn’t leave on the Sunday after the 1987 election. ‘I probably did make a mistake. I should have said: “Fine. You go on and merge.” It’s just I knew merger would fail.’
His only consolation, he adds with a smile, is that there is now a Social Democrat in Number Ten. ‘Blair is one. Absolutely. Totally. Did you know one of the names we considered calling the SDP was New Labour?’ He says he talks to the Prime Minister occasionally but doesn’t know him well. ‘I relate to him, though. I can see where he is going with most things. I’m not very often surprised. But he’s young. There’s a big age gap and that’s bound to affect things.’ He declined to endorse Tony Blair in the last election because that would have meant being disloyal to John Major, who had been very supportive to him during the Bosnian peace negotiations. When asked, though, if he thinks he was the catalyst for Tony Blair, Owen pauses for about ten seconds. ‘The French have a saying: “For all the ifs in the world you can put Paris in a bottle.” I believe that Labour would not have changed as much as it did had it not seen its own voters in their thousands voting for the dreaded SDP. I think the painful shock of that was essential.’
At least Owen can take credit for one election victory: Margaret Thatcher’s in 1987. ‘I think you can’t deny it. If a major party is split it makes the other party more likely to win. But I’m not at all ashamed of that. I don’t think Labour was fit to govern in ’83, ’87 or ’92. But I think they were by ’97.’
The patrician certainty with which he says this makes you gasp and it reminds you that, at heart, he is still the doctor who knows what’s best for the patient. ‘New Labour is a refreshing change,’ he continues. ‘It is so skilled at not taking unpopular positions. Blair has got values, you know. People say he has no ideology but that’s not true. He is a Christian socialist. He’s not without moorings.’
Owen’s own mooring is the Church of Wales. Growing up in the valleys, his mentor and best friend was his blind grandfather, the clergyman. But for all his belief in a Christian God, Owen feels there is a far wider spiritual horizon. ‘I think religion is a much more personal and private thing. The Church is just a structure.’ He and Debbie, his wife of 30 years, have three grown-up children, Tristan, Gareth and Lucy. Last summer, he took Gareth, a medical student, up Mount Athos. ‘It was where I had gone when I first qualified as a doctor. We had a fantastic time walking, and it was like a spiritual experience. Rising at four and coming to monasteries in the evening. I spent several hours in the night sitting in these stalls in the Greek Orthodox Church. I don’t think it matters which building you go to.’
Partly because of his faith, partly because of his medical background, Lord Owen is not afraid of death, he says, although he does have an irrational fear of woods – the dark spaces between trees. He doesn’t really believe in personal security, he adds. Even though he was obliged to have a bodyguard when he was foreign secretary, he refused to go ex-directory. He divides his time between two houses – a redbrick Victorian rectory in Wiltshire and the one he is sitting in now, in Limehouse – and both are still listed in the phone book. The closest he has come to death was during his time in former Yugoslavia. ‘My helicopter was always being shot at. But I’m very philosophical about it.’
As the conflict in Bosnia rumbles on, you could be forgiven for assuming that Owen was a failure as a peace envoy. But even his enemies couldn’t argue it was for want of his trying: for three years he shuttled from country to country, convened meeting upon meeting, implemented cease-fire after cease-fire. He blamed the failure of the 1993 Vance Owen Peace Plan (VOPP), made in collaboration with the American envoy Cyrus Vance, on America’s lack of commitment. Some commentators said he was just too tactless, though, that he shouldn’t have accused President Clinton of having an inadequate grasp of Balkan history. Others claimed that the VOPP actually encouraged the vicious Croat-Muslim conflict that followed. Still others praised Owen’s heroism and integrity.
‘Yugoslavia was bloody,’ Owen now reflects. ‘But I did feel, having taken a lot out of politics, I had to put something back. People were surprised at how patient I was. I think that quality is greater now than when I was foreign secretary. Had I been younger I would have probably resigned when the Americans ditched the Vance-Owen plan.’
When Owen looks back on his own career he does not feel he has wasted his potential. He has no regrets, for instance, about not being given the job of Governor of Hong Kong. ‘Bosnia was a much more manly job to be given,’ he says with a grin. ‘Besides, Debbie wasn’t keen on going to Hong Kong because it would have disrupted her literary agency.’ When he accepted the job of envoy to Bosnia, Private Eye ran a cover which showed him shaking hands with John Major. The bubble coming out of Major’s mouth said, ‘I’m afraid it’s a lost cause.’ The bubble coming out of Owen’s said, ‘I’m your man.’ Doesn’t he think the retention of sterling is also a lost cause now?
‘Well, I don’t know, is the answer,’ Owen says eventually. ‘I don’t think any of us can be sure. I want to make it clear to people that you can be strongly committed to the European Union without being an enthusiast for the euro.’ He thinks there is a danger that the single currency will be just as divisive an issue for New Labour as it was for the Conservatives. ‘I fought for our membership of the EU long enough, and welcome the Labour conversion, but they are blind to some of the problems. Blair shouldn’t use such defensive language. He should be more self-confident. We are the fifth largest economy in the world. He can afford to keep his options on the euro open.’
Owen has some advice for William Hague too. ‘He should be more ruthless, not less. [Lord] Cranbourne behaved like an absolute shit and Hague was right to sack him. Too many people knock Hague. I think he’s better than he’s given credit for. I like his sense of humour. The best thing he can do is be patient. Nothing is going to change for him unless the economy turns down or Blair makes a massive error. The Liberals are helping him by lining up with Labour.’
Lady Owen (Debbie) runs her successful literary agency from the ground floor of this house and, as we’ve been talking, the telephone has been ringing constantly.  Upstairs, the only evidence is the reading material on the wooden coffee table: the New York Review of Books and Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (hers presumably) alongside Britain’s Legacy to the Arabs by Anthony Parsons (his, you would imagine).
Debbie is American. Owen met her at a party in New York in 1968, fell in love immediately, and boldly asked her if she would show him round the city the next day. They were married within a few months. Touchingly, a number of the couple’s love letters are included in Owen’s autobiography. One of his ends: ‘Till then, if you’ve a clear sky in New York think of each one of the stars as being a kiss.’ He signs off another letter with the words: ‘I can’t see to write for my tears.’ I put it to him that all this soppy romanticism rather undermines his reputation as an even-tempered rationalist. ‘I can’t help it,’ he says. ‘I’m very Welsh, you see.’