It’s not just ducks and overweight people who waddle. As Charlie  Higson – 5ft 10in of solid but unfleshy television personality – heads towards me across the floor of an Indian restaurant in Soho, I see he does it, too: feet splayed, hips forward as though bearing the weight of a pot belly, arms flat against sides. The 41-year-old comedian, producer, novelist and one-time pop star is wearing an open-neck shirt, moleskin suit and black, Michael Caine glasses.
If this is a disguise, it works: you would never recognise the face. Yet the shuffling gait reminds you of someone: Ralph, the tragi-comic landowner that Higson plays in the catchphrase-based comedy programme The Fast Show (the awkward one who is unable to express his feelings toward his Irish gamekeeper and odd job man, Ted, played by Paul Whitehouse).
‘Unlike Paul, I never get recognised in the street,’ Higson says in a thin, neutral voice as he sits down and studies the menu. ‘It’s because I like hiding behind wigs and false beards. I wear a different one for each character I play. Maybe I’ve just got bland features.’ But there’s more to his anonymity than that. His presence evokes Arthur C Clarke’s description of the monolithic slab at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
It’s as if Higson, too, is made of some transparent material which is not easy to see except when the rising sun glints on its edges. He absorbs light and has a cold, hard surface. Not only do you not recognise him from the various characters he plays in The Fast Show – among them Colin Hunt the office joker, and Swiss Toni the boastful car salesman – you don’t recognise him in any of them either. This doesn’t apply to other comic actors, I point out. You always know instantly when it is Paul Whitehouse or Harry Enfield beneath the make-up.
‘That’s because they have star quality,’ Higson says softly. ‘Like Peter Sellers. They are always recognisable however clever the character. I hide behind my characters. The people I do tend to put on a big front to cover up a deep-seated inadequacy and an inability to cope with things. I’m a very shy person. I’m probably quite close to Colin Hunt – shy and lonely. Colin has invented this persona for himself in an attempt to be accepted and make friends. And underneath it you know he has no friends and no life. Swiss Toni is actually having a nervous breakdown underneath the bravado about cars and women. He’s trying to cling on to things by being a “character”.’
At first this seems an odd analogy. Charlie Higson has got a life. As we order a mixed starter for two and a bottle of wine, for instance, he tells me that he has to be careful not to drink too much because he never knows what his parental duties in the evening will entail.
He met his wife, Vicky, a freelance graphic designer, through university friends, but he can’t quite remember when they got married – ‘Going on 15 years now.’ They have three sons – Frank, Jim and Sid. The youngest is one, the oldest seven. ‘I love playing with them,’ he says. ‘Any excuse to play with soldiers and guns, really. On one level I was dreading the third child coming because there was such a gap – the middle one is five – and we’d just got our lives sorted out. But actually it’s been fun.’
As he goes on to talk about his own childhood – most of which was spent on his own, in his bedroom, fantasising and writing stories – it becomes apparent what Higson means when he says he’s a bit of a Colin Hunt. He and his three brothers (two older, one younger) grew up near Sevenoaks in Kent, where they were also educated (privately). Their father was an accountant who commuted into London every day.
Charlie Higson remembers feeling embarrassed when he watched that Monty Python sketch about the accountant who wants to be a lion tamer. ‘That totally did for accountants,’ he says. ‘And I shared the view that accountants were dull and what they did was boring. My father was part of this middle-class establishment that everyone takes the piss out of. Occasionally there was that feeling of hating your parents for giving you a comfortable upbringing. Finding your parents embarrassing is an important part of growing up, though, and I hope I shall prove to be an embarrassment to my children.’
But this alone does not explain why he sees himself as a shy and lonely Colin Hunt; why he hints at an emptiness inside himself. Something frozen. Like his character Ralph – the one he says he finds easiest to play – he is emotionally repressed and introverted. And after he has spoken for a few minutes more about his embarrassingly comfortable and dull upbringing, he reveals a more obvious cause of emotional atrophy. His mother died, of cancer, when he was 18. ‘But if I’d been a young teenager the loss would have been much worse,’ he adds matter-of-factly. ‘My youngest brother was certainly hit much harder than the rest of us. I was sort of at that age when I was about to leave home anyway. Then again, when you are 18 you can start treating your parents as human beings and so I regret not getting to know my mother as a friend. And I do sometimes catch myself wishing she was still around to see what became of me.’
He now thinks that he didn’t mourn enough at the time of her death. ‘But am I like this because I’m shutting emotions down and being deliberately hard-hearted and cold, or is it that I just don’t care enough? I don’t know. I cry at the drop of a hat in cinemas but I don’t find it easy to cry in real life. I didn’t cry much when my mother died. I guess I live in a fictional world. I’m far too unemotional.’
Not long after his mother’s death, his father met an Englishwoman who had been married to a Hawaiian, and moved first to Hawaii, then to Seattle. ‘As a teenager I’d think, “Wouldn’t it be great if my parents disappeared and I could just do what I like?” But when it actually happens it doesn’t seem so exciting. My father just wanted to get away, change his life. Everything he had assumed would happen in his life just sort of stopped. I suppose he was disillusioned.’
Higson blocked out his mother’s death, he says, and with his father gone he was cut adrift. ‘It meant I could reinvent myself. I felt there were no pressures on me. Did it make me harder? I don’t think so. I think your personality is fixed from an early age. It must have affected me on a number of levels, but I’m not sure how. I’m more aware of my own mortality, I guess, and I probably feel more protective toward my children, but I’m not bitter about it. I’ve never felt the need to analyse it or see a psychiatrist.’ The comedian grins, reads something written on the back of his hand, and crunches on a popadum before adding: ‘But if my life falls apart and I do have a breakdown, then that is the time to look into it.’
Higson is often accused of being arrogant. Certainly this is how he comes across when interviewed on television. Yet having met him I now suspect that this is more an over-compensation for his natural shyness.  It’s almost as if, conscious that he will present himself as conceited, he does so unconsciously as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Away from the cameras he seems reserved, intelligent and self-deprecating. And so far he hasn’t played the monster of ego.
And he couldn’t have been less like a former singer in an Indie band. I notice his ear has a hole in it – but no earring – a legacy, perhaps, of the days when he wore a blue mohican and went by the name of Switch. He formed his first band, The Right-Handed Lovers, when he went to the University of East Anglia in 1977 to study English and American literature. It was there that he met Paul Whitehouse, who became the band’s guitarist before being sent down for not doing any course work.  After UEA, Higson formed a new band – sans Whitehouse – and called it, rather vaingloriously, the Higsons. In 1981 their first single, ‘I Don’t Want To Live With the Monkeys’, went to number one in the Indie charts, but this turned out to be a peak. The band did three tours of America, made two albums, drifted for a few years and split up in 1987.
‘I knew I wasn’t 100 per cent committed to being a rock star,’ Higson now reflects sheepishly. ‘Sadly, to be a successful one you have to believe you are this amazing person. It’s an ego trip. You have to be unembarrassable. You have to feel important, feel you deserve to be worshipped by the audience. We were too self-conscious. Trying to be too ironic.’ I ask if, while it lasted, the rock life was all cocaine, groupies and throwing television sets out of windows?  ‘No, I was a bit stupid on that front. During the whole period I was in a steady relationship. But it would have been difficult anyway because there was a strange gang mentality with the rest of the band, the amount of stick you got for going off with someone was so bad it just wasn’t worth it.’
The band split up for the usual reasons. ‘We slipped into petty jealousies and rivalries. It was awful. I’m not a good singer. I’m a terrible singer. But I was a reasonably good front man, good at entertaining the crowd. And the resentment I got from the drummer was quite ferocious really. Drums take a lot of skill to play so the drummer would ask, “Why are they always talking to Charlie in interviews? Why don’t they want to talk to me?”‘
Throughout his flirtation with the world of pop, Charlie Higson remained friends with Paul Whitehouse, who had moved to London and taken a job as a clerk for the Environmental Health Department in Hackney. In the early Eighties Whitehouse had met Harry Enfield through an old school friend. Higson and Enfield (a milkman at the time) moved into a squat around the corner from Whitehouse. During the day, as the band wound down, Whitehouse and Higson earned a living as a plasterer and decorator team. At night, in the pub, they helped Enfield develop comedy characters, two of which became Stavros the kebab shop owner and Loadsamoney the plasterer.
It was Harry Enfield who hit the big time first and, in 1988, when he began to enjoy huge success on television, Whitehouse and Higson gave up plastering and, with the help of an an Enterprise Allowance Scheme, launched themselves as comedy writers. With Enfield, they co-wrote Harry Enfield’s Television Programme from 1990 to 1992. But while Whitehouse and Enfield are still friends, relations between Higson and Enfield became pretty frosty. ‘That was an interesting time,’ Higson says through a wintry smile.
‘Harry is an incredibly talented person and you could see he was always going to do well because he was so driven. I was grateful to be a leech on his back for a while but then that became difficult because I wanted to do things more on my own. Tension grew between us because I like quite a degree of control and so does he. Things came to a head, a clash of egos and we both went our separate ways. You don’t end up doing what I do for a living unless you have a big ego.’
Or unless you are truly consumed by ambition. Higson plays computer games to shut out his thoughts sometimes, that or gardening. Is it because he’s a worrier? Does he sleep well at night? ‘When you have young children you don’t normally have the luxury of not being able to sleep,’ he answers. ‘I don’t worry but I do go to bed with all these thoughts and ideas churning round my head so I do have to work out ways to block them.’ In his profession there is no long-term security, he says. And comedy is a young person’s game.  This is why he divides his time between television work and writing novels. He has published four so far, detective thrillers that are dark, violent and pornographic.
‘When I’m writing I’m in a different world,’ he says.  ‘I get stick from my wife for it because I get so distracted thinking about something I’m working on I become very bad about talking to people at dinner-parties. I listen but I don’t speak much. And she is constantly telling me off. I get lost in my thoughts, filtering everything in terms of how I can use it creatively. And that can be a bit sad sometimes because you think, “I should be participating in life more. I shouldn’t be ignoring people.”‘
Charlie Higson describes himself as being ‘happy to the point of smugness’. But he adds that he is at his happiest when he is on his own. He finds it difficult to relax. When he’s on holiday he feels twitchy. And if for some reason he was ever prevented from working he thinks he would have a nervous breakdown.
One of his older brothers is a professor in humanities at UEA, the other runs an engineering firm in Somerset. In light of these worthy career options, I ask Higson if he ever questions whether writing comedy is a proper job for a grown man. Does he wonder whether his father, the middle-class accountant whom he still sees a couple of times a year, approves of what he does for a living?  ‘Is it trivial you mean? Well…’ Pause. Laugh. ‘At the risk of sounding pompous and arrogant, you are giving pleasure to a lot of people… But I know what you mean. At the moment I’m in post-production with something and I’ve had to spend a lot of time in the dubbing stage designing the perfect fart and working out exactly where to place it. And I sometimes stand back and think, “What the hell am I doing? Is this a job for a grown man?”‘
The something he is working on is a remake of the Seventies series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), six hour-long films to be screened on BBC1 later this year, starring Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer – and Hopkirk’s one power is that he can blow things. In one of the episodes he discovers he can also affect things through the power of flatulence. When he has finished producing this, Higson is planning a reunion of The Fast Show team for a one-off special. After we’ve been talking for a few minutes more, Higson confides, with a note of sadness in his voice, that The Fast Show is the first thing he’s done which his father has felt proud of.
‘Finally, finally!’ he says, hunching his shoulders. ‘I mean, my father hated everything I did before. He hated the fact that I was in the band, that his son was up there being embarrassing. Caterwauling. He won’t let anyone else read my books, he finds them pornographic and too black. He appreciates the fact I’ve written them and that they do quite well, you know, but he won’t recommend them to anyone. And he found the Harry Enfield show coarse and embarrassing, things like the Old Gits and the Slobs. He just thought it ugly and unpleasant. He would switch over and say, “I don’t think we want to watch this.”‘ He pauses and chuckles to himself. ‘My dad’s not as bad as Harry’s, though. Harry’s dad is an appalling man. Scary. He has the gall to re-invent himself and get a whole new career on television purely as “Harry’s Dad”, and then spend his whole time slagging Harry off! I just think, “You two-faced git!” That said, Harry’s dad is responsible for 90 per cent of Harry’s humour.’
Higson and Whitehouse write 70 per cent of The Fast Show’s material, the other cast members come up with the rest. Although Higson describes Whitehouse as his ‘best mate’, he adds that they could not be more different in terms of personality. ‘What I admire about Paul is his instant popularity. He’s friendly and gregarious. He improvises and sings constantly. I’m not a funny man. I’m the quiet one in the backroom. But I’m less of a worrier than him. And he’s not desperately ambitious. He lacks confidence in going into areas he hasn’t tried before, like film. He doesn’t want any more fame or money than he’s already got. He thinks he’ll never come up with anything better than The Fast Show. I’m a bit more restless.’
Although Higson may indeed be the opposite of many of the qualities he ascribes to Whitehouse – he may, in other words, be overly ambitious and acquisitive – I suspect he is just as much of a worrier. Just as insecure, in that he suffers from a professional ennui that probably stems from a lack of parental approval – and though Higson cuts quite a languid and amiable figure, he becomes visibly exercised on the subject of Christians whose ‘ludicrous’ belief in an afterlife he holds in contempt. Lately though he has found himself ‘wondering what it is all for’.
He doesn’t think he has necessarily been driven by a secret need to please his father. ‘But since turning 40 I have become conscious of being here for a finite period and having to leave my mark.  What I plan to do next is make a film but that can take three or four years and people are only interested in young film-makers these days, not in middle-aged ones. And I keep thinking, “What will future generations make of me?” Perhaps that is why my children are so important to me. You live on through them. That’s the afterlife. I just hope I don’t fuck up. And I might. Because when you start making films it can take you away from home. Not a nice thought. Yet the other side thinks, “I won’t feel fulfilled if I don’t do it and I’ll just resent the children for holding me back.”‘
The comedian, novelist and producer has been brooding upon how easy it would be to slip into a mid-life crisis – he and Paul Whitehouse have even based a comedy character on someone who does just this. ‘I thought, “What if we become one of those men who in mid-life ditch their family and start dressing like a young person? Fuck!” And then I thought, “Yeah, but you might end up banging a gorgeous 19-year-old girl, so who cares!” Every bloke has to address that one sooner or later because there is such a strong onus on sex and youth and desirability. I’m 41 now and it’s that thing of asking yourself, “Will I never again have sex with a gorgeous 19-year-old girl?” Half of you thinks that and the other half thinks, “Thank God I don’t have the pressure to do that any more.” In the end you just hope you don’t make a fool of yourself. Don’t fuck everything up. That you can keep a shred of dignity. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’      With this, our Renaissance man checks his watch, pulls a mock-worried face and scrapes back his chair. He apologises if he has been a bore, asks me not to read too much into the father thing and waddles trimly out of the restaurant to merge anonymously with the human traffic of Soho.

Possibly the greatest, certainly the most famous scientific thinker since Einstein is sitting in his motorised wheelchair grinning at me. ‘Look behind the door,’ Professor Stephen Hawking says in his computer-generated, Dalek-like voice. I look. There’s a framed black-and-white photograph hanging there, which shows him in the foreground and Marilyn Monroe leaning against a Cadillac in the background. I smile. The superimposition is funny and subtle. Perhaps the professor has just had it done and wants to show everyone. But I suspect he doesn’t want to get drawn into a long conversation about it; it’s just his way of saying hello and breaking the ice.
All Hawking’s conversations are long, even his short ones. He raises his eyebrows for ‘yes’, winks his left eye for ‘no’, but for the most part communicates via a voice synthesiser at the rate of 15 to 20 words a minute. He suffers from motor neurone disease, a rare condition which degenerates the central nervous system and leads to a wasting of the muscles. It does not affect the brain or the senses. Hawking was first diagnosed with it when he was 21, at which age he was told he had a life expectancy of two to three years. He is now 57.
He has cheated death, but his body is paralysed – apart from a little movement in his twisted fingers. He doesn’t type with these so much as apply pressure to two pads, one in each hand, in order to select letters, words and phrases from an index on his computer monitor. He scrolls up and down the screen constantly, at great speed. But, inevitably, the writing process is agonisingly slow. Only when he has constructed the whole sentence or paragraph on screen does he activate his robotic voice to speak it. As a definition of Hell, it would be hard to improve upon the perversity of this predicament: a man with a freakishly quick, brilliant and creative mind condemned forever to articulate his thoughts at the speed of an imbecile.
We’ve no time for small talk then. I have come here – to Cambridge University’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, where Hawking holds the professorial chair once held by Isaac Newton – on the turn of the millennium to ask him what he thinks the future has in store for the human race.
If the world’s population continues to grow at its present rate – doubling every 40 years – there isn’t going to be enough room for us all on Earth by the year 2600. So will we, I ask, be able to spread out to other planets? His hands go into action. The only sounds in the room are the clicking of the pressure pads and the whirring of the computer. The electronic voice delivers the answer five minutes later. ‘We shall probably manage a manned or, should I say, personned, flight to Mars in the next century,’ Hawking says. ‘But Earth is by far the most favoured planet in the solar system. Mars is small, cold and without much atmosphere, and the other planets are quite unsuitable for human beings. We either have to learn to live in space stations or travel to the next star. We won’t do that in the next century.’
I ask Hawking how fast we will be able to travel on our journey to the next star. Pause. Answer: ‘I’m afraid that however clever we may become we will never be able to travel faster than light. If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time. We have not seen any tourists from the future. That means that travel to other stars is going to be a slow and tedious business, using rockets rather than warp drives. A 100,000-year round trip to the centre of the galaxy. In that time the human race will have changed beyond all recognition, if it hasn’t wiped itself out.’
Even though there is ice on the ground outside and a bitingly cold wind blowing in over the Fens, Hawking has his window open; his assistant, Chris, has explained to me that this is because the professor thinks better when he’s cold. I try to stop my teeth from chattering as I ask whether we humans will keep on changing, or will we eventually reach an ultimate level of development and knowledge? Click click click. ‘In the next 100 years, or even in the next 20, we may discover a complete theory of the basic laws of the universe (the so-called Theory of Everything in which quantum theory is unified with Einstein’s theory of general relativity), but there will be no limit to the complexity of the biological or electronic systems we can build under these laws.’
I’m just about to ask a supplementary question when the hands start up again. A few minutes pass before Hawking adds: ‘By far the most complex systems we have are our own bodies. There haven’t been any significant changes in human DNA in the past 10,000 years. But soon we will be able to increase the complexity of our internal record, our DNA, without having to wait for the slow process of biological evolution.’
The professor’s predictions – especially his thoughts on improving the human body – seem all the more poignant when you listen to him deliver them in person. Time is even more relative than usual in his company; it actually seems to slow down during those long pauses between my questions and his answers. My interview lasts for four hours, with breaks when a nurse comes in and I’m asked to leave the room. Since the professor had an operation on his oesophagus early last year, the problem he had with food getting into his lungs has been reduced, but he still needs regular suction.
I don’t, however, have to leave his room when the nurse comes in to spoon-feed him with an assortment of pills. These are taken with sips of tea which is mostly spilled onto the bib that the nurse ties around his neck. Hawking has thick lips, parchment-smooth skin and a schoolboy fringe, which his nurse parts to one side for him. While all this is going on, the professor patiently continues working the pressure-pads in his hands to compose sentences and paragraphs on his computer screen.
I ask if developing improved humans won’t cause great social and political problems with respect to unimproved humans? ‘I’m not advocating human genetic engineering,’ Hawking replies metallically. ‘I’m just saying it’s likely to happen and we should consider how to deal with it.’
When engaged in conversation with Stephen Hawking none of the usual laws of social interaction apply. After the first few minutes of being with him, however, the long pauses no longer seem awkward. Apart from his big, disarming smile and his expressive eyes – ‘twinkling’ seems the most apt, if hackneyed, description of them – there is no body language to help interpret his words. But the monotone voice does give his utterances an amused, deadpan quality (the voice goes up and down in tone quite musically, but the emphasis it gives to certain words is not necessarily a reflection of their importance in the sentence). Thus, when asked if electronic complexity will go on for ever, or whether there will be a natural limit, his eyes twinkle, his hands do their frenetic work, and 10 minutes later the voice delivers what sounds like a dry comeback.
‘On the biological side, the limit of human intelligence up to now has been set by the size of the human brain that will pass through the birth canal,’ Hawking says. ‘Having watched my three children being born, I know how difficult it is to get the head out. But in the next 100 years I expect we will learn how to grow babies outside the human body so this limitation will be removed. But ultimately, increases in the size of the human brain through genetic engineering will come up against the problem that the chemical messages responsible for our mental activity are relatively slow-moving – so further increases in the complexity of the brain will be at the expense of speed. We can be quick-witted or very intelligent, but not both.’
It’s time to ask the big one: will we make contact with aliens in the next millennium? Hawking smiles. His fingers click the pressure-pads. The answer comes seven minutes later. ‘The human race has been in its present form for only the past two million years out of the 15 billion or so since the Big Bang. So even if life developed in other stellar systems, the chances of catching it at a recognisably human stage are very small. Any alien life we encounter will be much more primitive or much more advanced than us. And if it’s more advanced, why hasn’t it spread through the galaxy and visited Earth? It could be that there is an advanced race out there which is aware of our existence but is leaving us to stew in our own primitive juices. However, I doubt they would be so considerate to a lower life form. There is a sick joke that the reason we have not been contacted by extra-terrestrials is that when a civilisation reaches our stage of development it becomes unstable and destroys itself.’
Stephen Hawking has 10 nurses who each do three 10-hour shifts a week. He rises at 7.45am, has physiotherapy, arrives for work at his department at about 11.30am, goes home – five minutes away in the grounds of an all-female college – at about 7pm and is bathed and put to bed by midnight. A nurse turns him over during the night. According to one of the nurses I met, he is a pussycat to work for, always puts people at their ease, rarely complains and hates to be pitied or patronised. One of his friends, the physicist David Schramm, says that he is also an incorrigible flirt: a party animal who likes to dance in his wheelchair. His daughter Lucy says he has an amazing capacity to push those around him to the very edge of physical and mental collapse, while smiling to himself.
Hawking is well known for his sense of humour – he likes joking about the American accent his voice synthesiser has given him and about his appearances as himself in his two favourite American (‘which isn’t saying much’) programmes, Star Trek and The Simpsons. His intolerance towards fools is also well documented. There are stories of how he runs over the feet of people who annoy him – and he once went to full throttle and rammed a car that was blocking his ramp. When asked if it is true that he uses his wheelchair as a weapon he will reply: ‘That’s a malicious rumour. I’ll run over anyone who repeats it.’
The intermittent nature of our conversation gives me a good chance to study his room. There is a karaoke machine on the floor and a Marilyn Monroe calendar by the door. There’s a Homer Simpson clock on the wall and, next to a row of Russian dolls on a shelf, a Homer Simpson card that says: ‘Every time I learn something new it pushes some old stuff out of my brain.’ There is a sticker on the door saying: ‘Quiet Please The Boss is Asleep’ – it’s all junior common room humour, c. 1973; the professor frozen in time. Also on the shelves there are photographs of Hawking’s children and grandchild. He has said that the thing he regretted most about being paralysed was not being able to play with his children when they were young. His daughter tells a rather touching story of how, as a treat at meal-times, he used to make her laugh by wiggling his ears.
There are also scores of books on the shelves with titles such as The Left Hand of Creation, Quantum Gravity, Black Holes in Two Dimensions and Particle Cosmology. But I can’t see a copy of the phenomenally successful A Brief History of Time, which Hawking wrote in 1988. In it he attempted to explain to a general readership his theory of how the universe began. And even though few people have been able to get beyond the first dozen or so pages, it was translated into 65 languages and became one of the biggest selling non-fiction books of all time.
It must have made him very rich indeed. Certainly it has made him famous enough to command fees of about £50,000 for a single public lecture in America and the Far East, and £100,000 for appearing in television advertisements for Specsavers. In all, his commercial endeavours are thought to be worth more than £1 million a year.
We normally associate being rich and successful with living a life of luxury – but what, I ask him, does wealth and success mean to him? ‘I may be successful in my work,’ he says through his machine. ‘But I’m hardly rich on the scale of people in the City. To lead a reasonably normal life, I need a lot of nursing care – and I won’t get that on the NHS. I would be stuck in a home without a computer or much individual attention and I probably wouldn’t survive long. So it has been very important to earn enough to pay for my care both now and in the future.’
In 1995 Stephen Hawking married his nurse, Elaine, the former wife of the man who invented his voice synthesiser. It was the same year he divorced Jane, his first wife and the mother of his three children. Stephen had met Jane at a New Year’s Eve party in 1962, just as his illness was beginning to take its toll, and he married her three years later. Last year she wrote an autobiography, a damning account of her life with Hawking. In it she alludes rather cruelly to the complicated nature of the couple’s sex life; she also describes herself as a ‘drudge’ and her husband as ‘a masterly puppeteer’ sometimes made despotic by the combination of public adulation and an illness that left him as helpless as an infant.
She received little thanks for devoting her life to caring for him, she wrote, and often came close to suicide. In the early 1990s when it was obvious their marriage had broken down, she had a discreet affair with a Cambridge choir-master who eventually moved into the Hawking household, apparently with Stephen’s tacit understanding. But a 24-hour nursing team also moved in and Jane accused them of dressing provocatively and trying to manipulate her husband emotionally.
Although Professor Hawking does not comment on his first marriage, claiming never to have read Jane’s book, he does reflect that: ‘There are aspects of my celebrity I don’t like, but it would be hypocritical to complain. I can generally ignore it by going off to think in 11 dimensions.’
Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, 300 years to the day after the death of his hero, Galileo. He was brought up in St Albans and was in many ways a normal, clumsy, inky-fingered child – except that he used to make fireworks and cannibalise television and radio sets to build computers, before computers had really been invented. He also had handwriting that was so bad it was unreadable and a stutter that he inherited from his father, a medical researcher described by one family friend as a disconcerting eccentric with below-average charm.
At Oxford, Stephen Hawking never attended lectures, soon realised he was intellectually superior to his tutors and grew bored with life. He took a first in Physics, but only after a viva revealed his genius for problem-solving and his contempt for course work. It has sometimes been suggested that had it not been for his illness Hawking might not have focused his mind and gone on to make the contribution to science that he did. It galvanised him and forced him to solve problems not on a blackboard but geometrically and pictorially in his head – in 11 dimensions.
It is tempting to read much into the paradox of his condition: a pure mind wandering the universe while trapped in a wasted body. Like Milton’s blindness or Beethoven’s deafness, it seems at once heroic, tragic and romantic. But Hawking dismisses the description. ‘I have never felt myself as a perfect soul living in an imperfect body. Although I may take pride in my intelligence, I have to accept that the disability is also part of me.’
Yet if we have souls, his is surely a romantic one. He loves listening to Wagner. And he refers to his longing to discover, through physics and cosmology, the mind of God. His friends say he sometimes feels a crushing sense of loneliness – even though he rarely experiences the luxury of being on his own. I ask him if he has any recurring dreams. ‘I think I dream a lot, but normally I don’t remember what I dream. One dream I do remember is being in a hot-air balloon. For me the balloon is a symbol of hope. I first had the dream at my lowest point when I caught pneumonia and had to have a tracheotomy operation that removed my power of speech.’
That was in 1985. His condition then was so bad that his first wife was asked to give her permission to switch off his life support machine. She refused. Presumably Hawking didn’t expect that he would still be around to see in the new millennium? ‘No.’ he says. ‘But now I would be disappointed if I didn’t live long enough to be sure that there was indeed a picture into which everything fitted.’
I’ve heard Professor Hawking described as many things: a bloody-minded genius, a witty manipulator, a prima donna. But what three words would he use to describe himself? There is a long pause before that unemotional computerised voice penetrates the icy Cambridge air: ‘Determined, optimistic and . . . I can’t think of a third. My wife would say stubborn and out of touch with reality.’ I leave as I came in four hours earlier, with a smile on my face.
 

In the outer morning room of a gentlemen’s club in Pall Mall, a tall, languid figure stoops over a table. The day’s papers are fanned out in front of him. As he browses, he purses his lips and nods to himself.
I can’t believe it, I say as I walk over and join him. He hasn’t made it on to a single front page.
‘I know,’ he says with a soft, joyless laugh. ‘It’s been three whole days now. It’s like being in cold turkey.’
Ah yes, that headline in last Sunday’s News of the World: RAT HEWITT 3-IN-A-BED AND A RABBIT FUR GLOVE. And all the headlines over the past four weeks excoriating him for writing his memoirs about his affair with Diana, Princess of Wales. It must be interesting being James Hewitt. I indicate a couple of armchairs in the corner, under a portrait of a glowering First World War general. The 41-year-old former Life Guards officer tucks his furled umbrella under one arm and saunters towards them. ‘So,’ he says. ‘You planning a hatchet job?’
Well, it is traditional isn’t it?
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ he sighs. ‘People are frightened of going off on another tack. It’s easier just to repeat the usual crap. And I suppose papers that have written badly of me in the past can’t suddenly turn round and write nice things.’
As you would expect, he pronounces yes ‘yah’, off ‘orf’, room ‘rum’ – and he peppers his speech with words like golly, chap, and ghastly. He has an occasional stammer and his delivery is gentle, slow and ponderous, in the manner of one suffering shellshock. It soon becomes apparent, though, that this tone is not that of the bewildered or traumatised but of the blithely complacent.
James Hewitt sinks low into his chair. He is wearing a dark double-breasted suit and as he unbuttons it – revealing felt braces – he grimaces jokily and mouths the words ‘Got a bit of a hangover.’ He bumped into Marco Pierre White for the first time last night and the chef had insisted on buying him drinks. Such is Hewitt’s insouciant charm. But strangers also seek his company because they find him morbidly fascinating. After all, it’s not every day you meet The Most Hated Man in Britain. This is what the tabloids dubbed James Hewitt. The Daily Mirror even invited its readers to attempt a citizen’s arrest under the Treason Act, should they ever encounter him. A few weeks ago someone did accost him in the street with the words ‘Oy James!’ As he turned around to see who was shouting at him the shouter added: ‘You’re an arsehole!’ He must get that quite a lot. ‘You know,’ Hewitt says, ‘I’m not hated or thrown out of restaurants or treated differently from anyone else. On the contrary, sometimes people give me the better table in a restaurant or upgrade me on an airline. I mean, these are stupid little examples but if you believe what you read in the papers then I am shunned by the whole of society.’
He checks his slicked back, strawberry blond hair with a hand. ‘It’s true,’ he continues. ‘I do get recognised in the street. Great deal of nudging with elbows after I’ve gone past. You know, “Did you see who that was?” But I’ve never been spat at or abused or shouted at.’ Pause. ‘Once, actually, in Ebury Street, but they were drunk and they would have shouted at anyone. Nevertheless, it still affects you. I would be insensitive to say it’s water off a duck’s back. But I think it affects my family and friends more.’
He still has friends, then?
‘Well, you see, there you are being affected by what you read in the tabloids. Yes, I do. I have a very strong intimate circle of friends. Real friends who stick with you through thick and thin.’
Can he give me their names and phone numbers for character references?
‘You want to contact them? Yes. They will probably be cagey unless I tell them you are calling. Rupert Mackenzie-Hill, who was in the Gulf War with me. Great friend. Um. Francis Showering. Mark Macauley. Um. Um.  Paulie Andrews. Simon Nunes. I think, for a lot of people, friendship goes untested. There have been a few friends who I thought were friends who haven’t spoken to me for a long time. Army. I suppose they see themselves as being caught between two loyalties and they see their career as more important, which is fine. I can think of one who still asks after my health when he sees my mother. So I haven’t really made any enemies or at least none who are man enough to come forward and tell me they are. Apart from Piers Morgan [editor of the Mirror]. But I shouldn’t think he’s got the balls to come up to me face to face.’
Hewitt smoothes his silk tie and draws his leg up defensively, so that his right ankle is resting on his left knee. His black brogues glint with fresh polish. He seems composed today but I have heard about his bouts of depression and heavy drinking: has he ever feared for his mental health?
‘Some people would suggest I have completely broken down. It’s difficult. I do try and keep a balanced view and a sense of humour. You would think from reading the tabloids that I would have been shot by now on the streets of London. The mob would have come and taken me away. The reality is very different. I’ve never been refused anything by anybody. Never been ostracised.’
Is it a myth, then, that his local hunt returned his membership cheque?
‘No. That’s not a myth. That is true.’
So there is an example of his getting the cold shoulder.
‘All right, yes. And I am no longer a member of the Life Guards Officers Club, the Life Guards Association, the Cavalry and Guards Club or the Special Forces Club. In fact, I don’t have a club any more. There is an arsehole called Christopher Doyley who became a lieutenant-colonel in the Life Guards – I don’t think I’d have him as my corporal. He’s the sort of person who wears nylon breeches, you know. He caused my cheque to be returned from the South Devon hunt, which used to be quite a good pack. But the Eggesford, the Mid-Devon, the Taunton Vale and one or two other packs wrote to me and said you are welcome to hunt with us. So I sort of lost one and gained five. Actually, I don’t hunt much now. Had to sell my horse.’
James Hewitt is an amiable fellow with an unexpectedly dry sense of humour, but he is also pathetic. He bemoans his notoriety yet seeks to make a living from it. And his motto seems to be once bitten, twice…  bitten. The recent spate of hostile press coverage about him has been prompted by the news that he plans to publish his memoirs, Love and War this week, shortly after the second anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Yet he refers to his decision to collaborate on an earlier book, Princess in Love, written by Anna Pasternak five years ago, as the biggest mistake of his life.
It presented the story of his affair with the princess as a Mills & Boon romance. He was paid an advance for it, something which he repeatedly denied at the time, but now admits. The initial print run of 75,000 copies sold out in a day and the front page of the Guardian carried the headline ROYALS MADE LAUGHING STOCK. Hewitt went into hiding in France with his mother. Over the next few days he went for lone walks in the woods, always feeling sick. He contemplated suicide. And, as his shotgun was back in England, he decided to buy a hose pipe and gas himself using the exhaust of his car. But when the time came he couldn’t go through with it – because he couldn’t stand the thought of hurting his mother.
What on earth has possessed Hewitt to put himself through it all again? Can he really be so naive as to imagine his second book will be better received than his first? ‘I didn’t really want to write it,’ he tells me. ‘And by choice I wouldn’t have because I’m too lazy. But I decided to do it when my letters were stolen from my house by Piers Morgan. I decided to say something rather than say nothing. Put the record straight. Because I tried to say nothing and they wrote about me anyway. Mostly untruths.’
In March last year James Hewitt’s then fiancée, Anna Ferretti, broke into his safe in his house in Devon and stole 62 love letters written by Diana, Princess of Wales, to Hewitt. She tried to sell them to the Mirror – which has admitted it egged her on – but they handed them over to Kensington Palace and Ferretti was subsequently arrested but not charged. The Mirror claimed that Hewitt was planning to sell the letters. Hewitt denied this, though acknowledged that he had been offered millions of dollars for them in the past. Kensington Palace officials tried to keep the letters but Hewitt threatened to take them to court and, after months of legal negotiations, he was finally given his property back.
There has been speculation that Love and War includes extracts from the Princess of Wales’s love letters. It doesn’t – although they are paraphrased on occasion. It is a self-justifying book, full of bitterness and paranoid theories that the Army, the press, the police and the Palace were all conspiring against Hewitt. It is not, contrary to rumour, a particularly vulgar book, though there are odd details about the time the major and the princess spent together at Highgrove, Kensington Palace and Hewitt’s mother’s house in Devon that will raise eyebrows – if only because they reveal that the couple were able to conduct a fairly open and normal relationship, in spite of the princess’s high public profile. He would buy her chocolates and cuddly toys. They would regularly watch EastEnders together.
Large sections of the book are devoted to Hewitt’s memories of the Gulf War. He was mentioned in dispatches, got so close to the enemy he was able to lob grenades into their trenches. The squadron of 14 tanks he commanded advanced 300 kilometres, attacked ten positions, killed or wounded 1,000 Iraqis and destroyed more that 40 tanks and armoured vehicles. He had a good war, didn’t he?
‘Yes, I did have a good war. Did well. Not me personally but my squadron.’
Diana, Princess of Wales, wrote more than 120 letters to Hewitt during the build-up to the Gulf War, sometimes as many as three a day. Hewitt sent many of them home to his mother, but he burnt others, with the rest of his identifying documents, on the eve of the attack. He feared then that he might be killed in action. Now he sometimes wishes he had been. ‘There is something noble and romantic about dying in war, serving your country. It’s an easy way out. I was prepared to die. Many of us out there were expecting to. I think sometimes you acquit yourself better if you are not worried about being killed.’
This is an officer and a gentleman speaking. But because Hewitt tries too hard in presenting himself as such, wearing cravats that look absurdly out of place in the modern age, he has become a parody of one – and journalists have cast him as that most old-fashioned of scoundrels, the cad. He is, is he not, a cad?
‘Or a love rat.’
Or, indeed, a love rat. It’s good joke, but then cad as a term of abuse is a bit playful, isn’t it?
‘True, I don’t think the word cad is particularly vicious. I’ve got to learn to live with it. I think I can.’ Is he familiar with the dictionary definition?
‘Cad? I haven’t really analysed it. Actually. Strange that, isn’t it? Cad? Cad? I think it is a bit of a derogatory term – more than just a joke.’
A cad is someone who behaves dishonourably.
‘Is it? I don’t think I’m dishonourable. At all.’
Has he ever felt shame?
‘Yes. About my life and the heartache I’ve brought on my family. But it’s not a lasting shame. Yes, when I analyse the whole situation, I suppose it is a bit shameful. It’s not what I would have wished.’
Wouldn’t his problems have been alleviated and his public image improved if he had just thrown up his hands and said, ‘Mea culpa. I’m a sinner. I ask for forgiveness?’
‘I think that’s what I’ve done.’ Pause. ‘I’m not saying I am without sin, for heaven’s sake. But there are more important things in life than writing about me. I’ve made mistakes but I am not in any way mean or vindictive or horrid at all. I think quite the contrary, actually. Take this book, I don’t think it can be described as salacious or tittle-tattle.’
But he must have known that whatever he wrote he was going to be criticised?
‘Yes, I could have written about Andy Pandy and the rubbish the tabloids came out with would have been the same. I mean, the Sunday Express had “Cruel Hewitt claimed to be father figure of the boys.” I don’t think I’ve suggested that ever. And it was going on and on about the ghastliness of writing about the book and yet there they were reporting it. And if I say nothing they write more. So I am in a no-win situation here.’
Presumably the father-figure story arises because in the book he describes reading bedtime stories to the two princes, as well as having pillow fights with them. ‘Yes, perhaps. But it depends how you put things. I never claimed to be a father figure. I played with them, swam with them, taught them to ride.’
So what does he think is behind this idea that he is the most hated man in Britain? ‘I think, OK. Um. Let me get my mind behind that. I’ve become a hate figure and I haven’t been able to defend myself so it has just gone on and on and they are not going to stop. Um. So it isn’t exactly a risky business for an editor. It was, for instance, risky for them to attack Diana. There is a need for people out there to have someone to throw darts at. And, well, holding out over this last barrage has been quite difficult, really. I would prefer to be in Iraq, I have to say.’
Why does he face it? Why not disappear to South America, grow a beard, change his name by deed-poll? ‘Because I don’t want to run away. I want to fight and succeed here. And then it’s my own choice to disappear if I want to… It would be quite nice to find a country that isn’t attacking and jealous and hypocritical. But I am not going to run away. I have done nothing wrong. That is the whole point. You would think I had done something worse than a child-killer. I’m sure if I was part of an ethnic minority they wouldn’t be allowed to do what they are doing. But instead it’s open season on me and has been for a long time. I don’t mean to sound whingey. But I think I’ve been in the dock without my defence counsel having spoken and so I’m doing that now – that is one reason why I have done the book.’
Another reason is that he is going to profit from it.
‘I think people understand that if an author writes a book he gets paid for doing so. I mean, why not? People say it’s despicable that he is profiting from his book but if they stand back and think about it they should think, “Well, why shouldn’t he?”‘
One reason is that Diana, Princess of Wales, probably wouldn’t have wanted him to write this book. And another is that she is no longer around to defend herself against the suggestions he makes in it.
‘I’m sure she would be absolutely thrilled with it,’ Hewitt counters. ‘Absolutely thrilled. To put across a more accurate, the accurate version. I don’t think my book says one nasty word about her. I think it’s honest, it doesn’t make her out to be a saint. But I believe she was a good person inside and I think that comes across. And I don’t think it will hurt her boys in any way at all.’
But if he was going to write it, wouldn’t it have been better to wait ten or 20 years – give it historical distance?
‘Yes, I did think about that but I thought. Um.’ Pause. ‘Everyone would have forgotten about me then, hopefully, and so it would be stupid then to rake up trouble for myself all over again. But then, balanced against that, I didn’t want to go to my grave with tabloid headlines engraved on my headstone, you know?’
James Hewitt believes that, right from the start of his affair with Diana, there was an understanding in Palace circles that Charles had Camilla therefore it was all right for Diana to have him. Doesn’t he wish now that he had been more like Camilla in other ways, that he had remained silent and enigmatic?
‘Yes, um, yes… I think Camilla is brilliant. She has had a very bad press, like me. She’s very nice. I don’t think she’s an evil woman at all. I think she’s wonderful for him and they should get married – don’t see why they shouldn’t – it’s a load of bloody poppycock, really. She has been supported hugely by Charles, which makes a difference. I mean, had Diana not asked me to speak to the press, you know. I would still have been kicked out of the Army – probably – but at least I would be in another job now. I have to work.’ He shoots his cuffs and looks away. ‘I never wanted to speak to the press at all. In fact I hate being in a situation where I am a public figure. I never wanted that. I would have become an actor or an MP or singer if I had wanted that. I never wanted anything other than to be a soldier and to serve my country.’ He knits his freckled brow. ‘I was really asked to talk to the press by Diana. That was where it all started. The downward turn. In 1993.’
She wanted him to clear the air?
‘No, she wanted me to lie about the depth of our relationship. Which I did. But it didn’t work.’
He means by saying that it wasn’t physical?
‘Yes. But people tapped telephones and were aware. It was fatuous to do what I did because people wouldn’t believe it. It would have been far better to say nothing. But Diana was about to be divorced and I suppose it would have been unhelpful for her to be seen to be having an extramarital affair. So I did it and it was the cause of my downfall. But the story had first appeared in the News of the World when I was in the Gulf. So to suggest that I kissed and told was wholly inaccurate. It was more a damage limitation exercise that turned badly wrong… Anyway, I think it must be borne in mind that both Diana and Charles spoke to people before I did.’
So what about Anna Pasternak? He gave an interview to her for the Daily Express and then she came back with an idea for a book? Or was it his idea?
‘No, she approached me. She said I approached her and begged her to do it which is wholly inaccurate and very naughty of her. Um. In fact I tried to stop her from doing it in the end, when I saw the way it was going…  I didn’t really have anything to do with it. I’ve never read the book.’
Come off it, I say. He must have. It would be inhuman to be so lacking in curiosity.      ‘Well, it’s partly so I can say I have never read it. Stand back from it. I’m not curious at all. I know the true story is in my book. Anyway, I hear the Pasternak book is not very well written. Have you read it?’
I, er, dipped into it yesterday actually.
Hewitt laughs. ‘You can admit to reading it, you know!’
Well, I found it pretty hard to get beyond the first few pages, to be honest – her arms ached for him, their eyes met etc.
‘Yes. Ridiculous.’
When Diana, Princess of Wales, did her Panorama interview in 1995 and said of Hewitt, ‘Yes I adored him. Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down,’ she was obviously referring to the Pasternak book. Yet Hewitt maintains that she was referring to his decision in 1989 to accept a posting to Germany, rather than stay at the Knightsbridge barracks where he could be near to her. ‘I don’t think she was bothered by the book, to be honest,’ Hewitt tells me. ‘I think she was more bothered by the effect that it had. Really. She was quite clever in the way that she used people and I do think she used me. Um. That interview was well-rehearsed and well-orchestrated and worked rather well. I mean she wasn’t asked about any of the other chaps in her life. She was able to say I let her down and she didn’t expand on it. And the interviewer didn’t ask her to. It just served its purpose. She admitted that she had been unfaithful to her husband and then she immediately turned the sympathy back on herself by suggesting I let her down.’
So when the princess said those actual words, well, the rest of us were on the edges of our seats, what must it have been like for him? How did he feel? Flattered or devastated?
‘Both really. Flattered that she admitted she loved me. I mean I’d have preferred not to have been mentioned at all. I mean, why not Will Carling or whoever else? Um. The interviewer had agreed not to ask about him, of course. Just about someone who could be used… It was a heart-racing moment. I was in Devon and the whole place lit up. Blinding white light. Five minutes after the programme finished. They were waiting on the hillside outside my house. There was a fucking great light the size of that mirror.’ He nods at an 8ft by 12ft mirror above the fireplace in the room. ‘An enormous searchlight of the kind anti-aircraft gunners used in the Second World War. A dozen television cameras were trained on the house like snipers – I was under siege in my own house and it was more than a week before I went out.’
Unorthodox though it is to say it, I don’t think James Hewitt qualifies as a proper cad. Whether it is because he is just amoral or too thick I can’t say, but he simply doesn’t appear to understand why he has been vilified. And a true cad would. A true cad would instinctively know that a gentleman doesn’t talk about a woman with whom he has been intimate – but callously do it anyway.
I don’t think Hewitt knows why he shouldn’t do it. In Hewitt’s world he thinks Diana, Princess of Wales, used him and then failed to support him when he needed help. When their relationship began she was feeling trapped in a loveless marriage. She was suffering from bulimia and low self-esteem. According to Hewitt, she believed that British Intelligence officers had arranged the motorcycle accident that killed her bodyguard Barry Mannakee. And Hewitt rebuilt her confidence, gave her the approval she craved and then, when she felt she was back in control of her life, she dropped him.
And he thinks the main reason men hate him is that they envy him for having slept with the Princess of Wales. Also, he may go through the motions of saying he feels guilty and depressed about what he has done – because he thinks that is what people want to hear – but I don’t think he understands why it is bad form to profit from revealing secrets about your lover. His view seems to be that others have made money from their memories of the princess, so why shouldn’t he? Is that about the strength of it?
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m not prepared to pass the buck and say because they’ve done it, why can’t I? I mean, it would be a bit like saying, they have murdered so why shouldn’t I? I haven’t kissed and told. I’ve never gone out deliberately to make money. I’ve gone out to try and redress the balance and in doing so have been paid. Now I’m hardly likely to say, “No, that’s all right, you keep the money.” You know, to say I don’t want the money. I mean, I have to live.’
What sort of money are we talking about?
‘I think I’ve lost a lot more than I have been paid. In almost every respect, actually.’      He means emotionally, I mean in terms of his bank balance.
‘I don’t know how much I’ve been paid. And I don’t think necessarily that that is important.’
£1 million. Does that sound about right?
‘Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Not at all.’
The investigation revealed that he had been paid £150,000 for tabloid interviews; £100,000 for the Daily Express serialisation..
‘Nope. Nope.’ The Pasternak book, £100,000 plus… ‘Nope.’  £600,000 for the serialisation of his memoirs…
‘Nope.’
£600,000 for the serialisation of his memoirs…
‘Well I haven’t been paid that, so you can scrub that right off. And also you have to deduct the £70,000 it has cost me in legal terms. To be advised on libel cases. And also to get my property back, the letters stolen by Piers Morgan and handed to Kensington Palace – eventually – after he had copied them and made use of them. Ask him how much he has made from Diana…’
But I suppose…
‘That’s his job, is it?’
No, but he was never the lover of Diana, Princess of Wales. He was never in love with her, nor ever had that love reciprocated.
‘Um. I don’t know. There seems to be some kind of hang-up about that. I have no easy answer. I have explained my actions… You know I’m not a man of huge means. I haven’t got a job. I’ve tried to get one. Tried to do it but haven’t been allowed to. I’ve tried to shut up and disappear. But it doesn’t work and I’m not prepared to be slandered any more. I’m prepared to fight, right or wrong, live or die. I don’t mind if I am told to go and shoot myself in a library after this book has been read, at least I’ll have had my say.’
Hmm. The smoke-filled room, the revolver, the bottle of Scotch. We are in the realm of the Boy’s Own comic again. Hewitt says that when he began his affair with the Princess of Wales, he looked up the definition of treason in an encyclopaedia. It said that to violate the consort of the monarch’s eldest son and heir was an act of treason. What did it feel like for Hewitt, a cavalry officer, to know he was a traitor? ‘At the time it just seemed like any man and any woman in a relationship that’s gone wrong. I thought of it like that really. I mean, Charles and Diana were just individuals, fellow human beings. One was so involved. But when you stand back from it, and look from a distance – and one should probably do that more often than one does – um, it’s only in that sense that it had far-reaching effects. No other personal thoughts. I like the chap actually [Prince Charles]. I think he’s all right. I think he’s been much maligned as well.’
James Hewitt has met Prince Charles on numerous occasions, at social gatherings and on the polo field, before, during and after his affair with the princess.  He says the prince has always been civil and friendly to him. ‘Quite clearly he [Prince Charles] knew about our affair while it was happening. Although at the time one didn’t necessarily think about that, or rationalise to what extent people would know. Again, foolishly, I suppose. Of course the Establishment knew… The bottom line is that, yes, I have been ill-advised and naive and sometimes very foolish in the past but I haven’t been treacherous or evil… I wonder what he [Prince Charles] felt when he was seeing Camilla, knowing she was a brother officer’s wife? I think it [treason and adultery] does matter. I think it mattered terribly to me. But then there was a young lady who needed help and I thought that was more important.’
One of the reasons we all found it so hard to believe that both the Prince and Princess of Wales were having extramarital affairs so soon after their marriage was that theirs seemed to be a fairytale wedding, the most dramatic in history, and we all witnessed it on television. Could they really have been that cynical? James Hewitt now says that the princess once told him she was having doubts even as she walked up the aisle. ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he says. ‘I never wanted them to break up. I thought they made an ideal couple, whatever that means. I don’t think it was calculated on his [Princes Charles’s] part. I think he might have wanted to give it a try. I think, actually, he is quite a good man. And clearly he knew about me but he just didn’t react. What was he meant to say? You bounder! You cad! Meet me at dawn with pistols. He was perfectly civil. Very well mannered. Someone suggested I shouldn’t play against him in that post-Gulf War polo match but Charles said I should. Probably wanted to hit me on the field or something. But why should he? He was having an affair. He wasn’t in love with his wife. His wife was being made happy by me, what’s wrong with that? Actually, what is wrong with that?’
And Hewitt was being made happy by Diana. But is he happy now?
‘No, I am not happy. No. No. Not yet. But I’m ever the optimist… I suppose winning the case over the letters made me feel… Well, actually, why should I have felt vindicated and happy just about getting my property back?’
We’re back on to the letters. One of them said, ‘Please can you burn my letters after reading them now, in case they get into the wrong hands.’ Hewitt thinks the significant word is ‘now’, as in ‘from now on’ and not including all the correspondence of the past five years. Yet according to the journalist Richard Kay, who was something of a confidant – and propagandist – to the Princess of Wales, Hewitt once assured Diana that his mother had burnt all the letters. Not believing him, she set off to drive down to Devon to try to persuade Hewitt to destroy the letters – then changed her mind. According to Simone Simmonds, the princess’s spiritual advisor, she was even prepared to buy the letters from Hewitt. Whatever actually happened it remains a mystery why Hewitt doesn’t just spare himself a lot of humiliation and burn them now. ‘I might have burnt them,’ he says when I put this to him.
Well has he?
‘It was a matter of principle that I should get them back. No one came to me from the Palace or from the Spencer family and spoke to me sensibly, man to man, about them. And no one has about this book. They have probably read it now anyway. I should think they have sent a spy in to the printers. They really behaved disgracefully over the theft of the letters.’
Before they would hand the letters back to him, Kensington Palace officials wanted Hewitt to sign a form saying that they should be destroyed after his death. Correct? ‘I wanted my property back. I don’t know why people can’t understand that. Then I would make a choice whether to burn them or paper my loo with them or wear them as a hat or keep them locked in a bank vault.’
So are they in bank vault at the moment? ‘I don’t know where they are. My solicitor has taken care of them. I have not had them alone since they were returned to me. Because when Piers Morgan sells his copies of them, he won’t be able to blame them on me.’
Again, wouldn’t it be a good idea for Hewitt to just burn them now and make a press statement to that effect? ‘What? For the sake of it being a good idea? I think it would be irresponsible of me to burn them. I would probably like to, but in 70 years time they will be important historical documents. They are wonderful letters. There is nothing horrible in any of them. You know, there’s nothing like “Wasn’t it fantastic when you bent me over the sofa,” there’s nothing like that in it.’ He chuckles at his own coarseness. ‘Not that I ever did that!’
But Diana wanted you to burn them?
‘I did burn many, in the war.’
Because she was afraid they would fall into enemy hands rather than because she thought you would try to sell them?
‘Has she said any different?’
Does he think that the princess’s romantic nature was fired by the notion that her lover was at war and might not return and that she had to declare her love for him in letters before he died?
‘Probably. We were deeply in love at one stage.’
Was the love equal on both sides?
‘Yes but probably not at the same time. Occasionally, yes. It was very difficult. It was always tense. It was a very difficult situation. But, yes, it was mutual.’
Did he ever fall out of love? Long pause. Only the ticking of a clock on the mantelpiece disturbs the silence.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
James Hewitt was introduced to the Princess of Wales in 1986. He was 28, she 25. She said she felt nervous about riding horses after falling off one as a child. He offered to give her lessons to rebuild her confidence. She accepted. This meeting occurred at a drinks party given by Hazel West, wife of Lt-Colonel George West, the Assistant-Comptroller in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. At the time, Hewitt thought it odd that he, an ordinary soldier, should be invited to drink with senior courtiers. He now believes that the introduction had been planned because he, a single handsome Guards officer, would be the ideal person to keep the princess quiet. Does he now wish he had never gone to that party?
‘My life probably would have been easier. And I probably would still be in the Army. But it did happen, you know. And I did all that I did for the right reasons. Regret is a funny word and I think that, you know, the ride was worth the fall.’
So he still regards Diana as the love of his life?
‘Yes. Yes. Yah. We had a very special relationship and they can’t take that away. Um.’
His mobile phone rings. ‘Is that mine?’ he asks, patting his jacket. ‘Hello.’ he says ‘Are you? It was in my pocket. No, Victoria… It’s in Pall Mall… No, that piece about the glove puppet, you mean?… Anyway. I’ll call you later.’
I ask Hewitt if anyone has ever told him he sounds just like Prince Charles? ‘I can’t help that,’ he says with a gentle laugh. ‘It’s not meant. I have been told that.  My publisher says I should go on television without a tie and jacket. But I can’t bring myself to. It’s not what I do.’
Does he ever actually wear cravats or is that just an ugly rumour? ‘I don’t think I’ve ever worn a cravat in the proper sense – things that come out like this.’ He holds his hand several inches in front of his neck. ‘I saw someone wearing one in Zermatt and the poor chap looked like a complete idiot. I do wear a handkerchief around my neck when I am skiing.’
James Hewitt was in Spain on business when he heard the news that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car crash. Did he go into shock? ‘No, not immediately, I don’t think. I went into a state of suspended animation for four or five days once I got home. Bit numbed. Bit glued to the television, really.’
Did he cry?
‘No, not a lot. I cried. But I don’t really cry a lot.’
He bottles things up?
‘Yes. Totally unhealthy. I should see a shrink.’
Has he ever?
‘No, why should I burden anyone else with my problems?  I look on it as, well, I wouldn’t have been much of an officer if every time there had been a problem I had run off to a shrink. One copes and moves on.’
What did he make of the public reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales?
‘Mob rule, really. Cringe-making. I think it wasn’t a particularly dignified spectacle. A lot of people trying to blame other people. A lot of back-pedalling by the tabloids who had the previous week vilified her. So hypocritical. A few days later calling her a saint. Ridiculous. Swung the other way far too much. Like Kipling’s line: “If you can treat these two impostors the same.” I try and do that. There was a piece in the Evening Standard two days ago by a chap called Wilson which compared me to Rupert Brooke – I love Brooke, I love that line “In the corner of a foreign field there is a part of England” [sic] – and at the end of the article it said, “Hewitt can be called many unkind names, but he is surely not a predator. Like Rupert Brooke, he is a beautiful man whom women adore.” I mean, that’s as fatuous and extreme as calling me a cad rat bastard. You are very good or bloody awful. It means nothing. Two impostors.’
So really we must conclude from that that he has been cursed with good looks.
‘How sweet of you!’
But it’s been his downfall?
‘I don’t think I’m good-looking. I really don’t. I don’t see that at all.’
I have been told by someone who knows Hewitt socially that when he is in a bar beautiful women he has never met before come up to him and give him their phone numbers. He must be aware of the effect he has on women?
He laughs. ‘Hmm. Yes. Perhaps. I just like to joke about it. If they do find me attractive, I think it is wonderful because I love women.’
Is there a current girlfriend?
‘I have a friend with whom I am particularly friendly and close – but I don’t have a proper girlfriend because I don’t want to have to put whoever I am going out with through all that I am going through at the moment. When I am in a relationship I give quite a lot and feel guilty if I don’t give – and I’m not in a position to give at the moment, emotionally.’      How many times has he been in love?
Another chuckle. ‘Every time I see a pretty girl! Um. Probably, deeply in love, two or three times. I have had a lot of girlfriends and I do like women, I have to say.’
Has he kept count?
‘Um. No. Um. And if I had, I wouldn’t tell you because you would ask me how many. I don’t see it as a tally, marking a swastika on the side of your Spitfire. It’s just part of the passage of life; having quick flings or longer affairs. I’ve never lived with anybody.’ He checks his watch. Lunchtime. ‘Do they do a good Bloody Mary here? Should we have one? I’m a wee bit hungover from last night.’
We order and, as we wait for the drinks to arrive, Hewitt tells me that he is ‘paranoid’ now that whenever he goes out with a woman she will kiss and tell afterwards – ‘the anxiety normally comes on a Saturday night when I don’t sleep at all, wondering whether another girl has spoken.’
Does he find that women want to sleep with him because they know he slept with Diana, Princess of Wales? ‘I suppose so. Curiosity. I hope not. But I can’t really flatter myself that it’s for any other reason. Probably. But not knowingly.’
James Hewitt was given £40,000 in redundancy money when he left the Life Guards and he still receives a pension from the Army of £500 a month. He had been in the Army for 17 years before being made redundant in 1993. He reached the rank of acting major but was never made full major because he failed his promotion exams, twice, by one per cent – something which he considers to be part of the Establishment conspiracy against him. He has made two attempts to set up his own business since leaving the Army – establishing a riding school and a golf course – and both have failed. No one will employ him. Not least, he says, because he is only good at two things, horses and sex. What would be his dream job?
Long pause. Wide grin. ‘A journalist.’
Wherever James Hewitt ends up living, it is safe to assume that his mother, Shirley, won’t be far away. He is the archetypal mummy’s boy. They do everything together and she, clearly, adores him. He, equally clearly, can’t understand why the rest of the world doesn’t share his mother’s adoration. He was 25 when his mother divorced his father, John (a captain in the Royal Marines who used to punch the young James in the stomach when he got maths homework answers wrong). How did that affect him?
‘Didn’t really. Saw it coming. There were huge tensions for years. But even inevitable situations surprise you. But it didn’t affect me. Had no one to blame for my shortcomings but myself.’
It may be one of the reasons he has never married, though. He claims, and again we only have his word for it, that he and the Princess of Wales planned to get married. How far did the plans go?
‘Not far. If the timing had been different…’
According to Hewitt the couple selected a thatched Devon longhouse to live in, from the property pages of Country Life – and the princess said she would buy it anonymously. But they wouldn’t have been able to live a normal life together, would they?
‘What? And I have now? No, I could quite easily have seen that scenario work out… But she was a royalist and wanted her son to succeed to the throne. I suppose she could see the alternative which was less attractive. But, you see, when we were having an affair the mere idea of divorce was not something you could contemplate. There was no way out, other than Charles being killed in an accident – something which, incidentally, Diana had predicted for her by a Tarot reader. It nearly came true with the skiing accident. Instead it was poor old Hugh Lindsay.’
I ask Hewitt about the cartoon the Princess of Wales kept on her lavatory wall of a pile of manure swarming with flies. The caption read: ‘What’s that smell? Must be James Hewitt.’ How does that square with his view that she didn’t really mind his being behind the Pasternak book? Does he think she came to…
‘Hate me? No, I don’t think so. Hadn’t really thought of that, actually. I would hope that she didn’t. I don’t think it rubs with the Diana I knew. No, I don’t think she was capable of hate. She had a wicked sense of humour. We would speak on the phone as recently as a few months before her death and I asked her how her love life was and she said she was going to shock the world and run off with a big fat black man. It was nearly true!’  Does Hewitt think the princess went out with Dodi as revenge against the Royal Family?
‘Well, it was very in your face. I suppose if they had wanted to conduct a private affair she could have done it with him – because his money would have allowed them to. But I think she had become much more in control of herself, she said, “Take it or leave it.” Whether they would have got married I don’t know, difficult one that. I don’t think so. Apparently Dodi was a very nice chap. Apart from being a cokehead.’
Does James Hewitt ever fantasise about what might have been with the princess?
‘No. I don’t really dream much. I just want to face up to things. Get this book out and draw a line under the whole thing. Forget the last ten years of my life. I like the idea of doing what that man did in that wonderful film. You know, white suit, he goes away, comes back as one of the wealthiest men, and gets the girl. What’s it called?’
The Great Gatsby?
‘The Great Gatsby. Go away and build a rubber plantation somewhere and then come back. My favourite film.’
I thought that would be The Four Feathers.
‘Yes, another great film, The Four Feathers. I hope I can get a few of mine taken back.’
We part company with this guileless comment still hanging in the air. As I walk out on to Pall Mall I find I can’t shake off a melancholic image of James Hewitt 20 years from now – still wearing his cravats that aren’t cravats; still roaming around the bars of Knightsbridge and Kensington telling the story of his affair to anyone who will buy him a drink; still playing the cad and making self-deprecating jokes about having his name on the gate, about being horsewhipped, about being blackballed from all the gentlemen’s clubs. But all the while still hoping that, one day, his good name will be cleared and he will be able to give his white feathers back.
A year later, in the company of a couple of prosititutes, and while suffering from depression, James Hewitt got drunk and drove at high speed along the route in Paris taken by Princess Diana’s car just before it crashed. He was conducting an experiment, he said, to prove the crash wasn’t an accident.

My idea of living dangerously is staying up until 2.30am watching television and drinking whiskey when I know I have to drive to Wiltshire next morning for a wedding. Marc Almond’s idea is to jump on a plane to New York, consume a wheelbarrow-full of LSD, heroin, crystal meths, Quaaludes, opium, mescalin, Ecstasy and cocaine, and then spend a week crawling from one S&M club to another, before bursting into tears and making his mascara run.
Concerted self-abuse of this sort takes its toll. The 42-year-old pop star attributes his liver damage, blackouts, panic attacks and mood swings to his hedonistic lifestyle. And he found the chronic memory loss a distinct drawback when it came to writing his memoirs. There is a period which began in 1981 with Soft Cell’s number one single ‘Tainted Love’  and lasted for about five years that he can only recall through a haze of hallucination – it was, he explains, a nightmarish blur of events, places and faces.
‘My 12-year addiction to benzodiazepine [sleeping pills] didn’t help either,’  he adds in a confidingly camp but stentorian tone. ‘I can never remember anyone’s name. An hour after meeting someone, I’ve forgotten it. The memory loss is all part of my stammering and dyslexia, too. I get my mords wixed up.’  A peel of nervy loud laughter at this. ‘Luckily, I have an obsession with keeping lists, notebooks and diaries, so they helped with the chronology of the book – getting things in the right context.’
Today, sitting under a bust of Harold Macmillan in a publisher’s office in Chelsea, Marc Almond looks out of place. He is 5ft 6in, with a wiry physique – his own description is that he looks like a nose on a stick – and, as you would expect, he is wearing black clothes, black sideburns and black eyeliner. Tattoos run the length of both sinewy arms, and creep up his neck like tendrils from under his T-shirt collar. On one finger there is a heavy silver ring in the shape of a skull. There are chunks of metal in his nose and his ears, too – and there appears to be a little glittering something on his front tooth. He has had cosmetic surgery to remove the bags from under his eyes. It is midday. We were supposed to meet at 11am but a panicky Almond realised at the last minute that that meant having to do something in the morning – and he simply can’t do anything before lunchtime. He’s cheerful, and funny, hyperactive if anything. To keep his stutter in check he speaks in a torrent – words tumbling out breathlessly – and he repeats himself to maintain the rhythm of his sentences. As I listen to his cautionary tale of rock-and-roll excess I grip the sides of my chair and try not to look too startled.
He first got a taste for shocking people in 1979, when completing a degree course in performance art at Leeds Polytechnic. For one exam show he sat at a mirror, naked except for black boots and a swastika thong, and shaved half his body. He then smashed the mirror and, with a shard, cut himself, drawing blood. For the climax he lay face down on a large mirror and simulated sex. All he remembers about this now is that the mirror was very cold.   Around this time, the beginning of the New Romantic movement, Almond met the synthesiser player Dave Ball and formed Soft Cell. Their first appearance on Top of the Pops caused, as the saying goes, the BBC switchboard to jam – ‘I look back on those early performances and I even embarrass and shock myself in a way, they are so kind of, “Please love me, please love me”, and I’m trying so hard. I can imagine why it would have got people’s backs up – too much eyeliner, too much leather, too fey, too mincy.’
Nevertheless, ‘Tainted Love’  sold more than a million copies in Britain. It was also a number one all over Europe, and in America it was in the charts longer than any other record in history – and so gained a place in the Guinness Book of Records, replacing Bill Haley’ s ‘Rock Around the Clock’. Ball and Almond received no publishing royalties for the single, however, because it was a cover version. ‘We were so naive,’  Almond says with a raucous laugh, ‘we put a cover on the B-side as well. If we had used one of our own songs on the B-side, we could have shared the royalties 50/50! Instead we lost around £1.7 million.’
Even so, the first half of the Eighties were extremely lucrative for Britain’ s first ‘synth duo’. They had a succession of hits and Almond developed an addiction to spending money: £500,000 on drugs alone. He bought a Mercedes convertible on a whim as he passed a car showroom – even though he can’t drive. On another occasion, while recording in Bavaria, he developed a craving for sushi and, unable to find a sushi restaurant nearby, flew back to London for the night – ‘When you have to have sushi you have to have it.’  Accountants were despatched to devise saving schemes that would prevent Almond getting his hands on his money. ‘Then one day came the terrifying realisation that the money was coming in faster than I could spend it. The addict with an endless supply of money can remain indefinitely in denial.’
Through the haze Almond recalls that around this time he was groped by George Melly at a party; Rowan Atkinson did a sketch about him on Not the Nine O’ clock News; on a night out with his friend Molly Parkin he drunkenly tried to seduce the boxer John Conteh; Madonna stayed at his bedsit in London; and, in New York, Andy Warhol invited him to his studio, the Factory. They filmed each other. ‘It was Polaroids and Super 8s at 50 paces, a strange stand-off.’ Almond’s recording history after Soft Cell split up in 1984 has been chequered. He would announce his retirement in a petulant fury – on one occasion storming into the offices of Record Mirror to bull-whip a journalist who had been critical of him – only to retract the announcement next day.
Over the years his distinctively off-key voice mellowed and improved. He signed to half a dozen record labels, reinventing himself variously as a Latin, jazz or R&B artist, a torch singer and even a Vegas crooner. There have been hits, notably a couple of duets (with Jimmy Somerville for ‘I Feel Love’  in 1985 and Gene Pitney for ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of my Heart’  in 1989) and ‘The Days of Pearly Spencer’  in 1992. But his sexual promiscuity and drug-taking got worse and he took to hanging out with underworld figures: criminals, prostitutes and gun-carrying drug dealers.
Then in 1993, he confides, something happened which forced him to change his way of life. Two acquaintances tried to throw him from a sixth-floor balcony window. A neighbour intervened and the police arrived to find Almond mutilated and unconscious on the floor. Instead of pressing charges for attempted murder he decided it was time to check himself into a drug rehabilitation clinic, the Promis Recovery Centre, just outside Canterbury. The therapy included a regime of rising at 6.45am to scrub floors, followed by hours of intensive group therapy.
‘My life started collapsing in the mid-Nineties,’ Almond recalls. ‘I didn’t know why I had been taking the drugs. Someone had to point it out to me. I had been in this selfish, self-absorbed world and all I knew was that I had to keep taking them and spending money and having love affairs and moving house and changing record company. Each time I realised there was something horribly wrong with each new situation – me.’  He stutters as he says this, and he pronounces Rs as Ws. In conversation he peppers his vocabulary with psycho-babble in that way people who have been through therapy do: lots of self-analysis about being damaged, having low self-esteem, needing affirmation, craving attention, confusing sex for love. ‘I did see a psychiatrist,’  he explains helpfully. ‘ But I was bored by it, quite frankly, because I have an attention span of about two seconds.’ More likely, the psychiatrist, faced with the bewildering array of traumas associated with Almond’s childhood, didn’t know where to start and had a nervous breakdown.
Peter Marc Sinclair Almond was born in 1957 in Southport. He moved constantly from house to house and school to school around the north-west of England and, wherever he ended up, he was bullied – often chased by gangs of boys chanting the word ‘queer’  at him, before catching him and beating him up. He was a sickly child afflicted by asthma, bronchitis and pleurisy. To avoid being attacked in the playground he learned to hyperventilate and black out. His nickname was Pwune. His father, an unemployed former Army officer and salesman, was an alcoholic who would sometimes slap his son. The laziness down the right side of Almond’s face is, he claims, caused by his father hitting him with a telephone. ‘I hated him,’  the singer now says, matter of factly. ‘Haven’t seen him for years and there is no chance of a reconciliation. He saw me as the source of his shortcomings and failures. There was always an edginess. A dark anger behind his eyes as secretive as those bottles he hid away.’
The 12-year-old Almond was a bed-wetter by night and a shoplifter by day. When his parents divorced in 1972, Marc and his younger sister Julia were overjoyed – not least because, says Almond, their father had, allegedly, just found their savings and spent the money on alcohol. One day his father stormed into his school and demanded to know from the teacher if his 13-year-old son was a homosexual. He was, as it happened, but the teacher didn’t know that. Although Marc Almond says he wanted to like girls – and he actually lost his virginity that year to a ‘big-boned, galumphing, sweaty girl called Hilary’  – he was always drawn to boys.
Almond left school with two O-levels, talked his way on to an art college course and promptly had a nervous breakdown. He tried to commit suicide by throwing himself off a balcony – someone grabbed him – and he was sectioned for a month at Ormskirk Mental Hospital. ‘Oh, I cried and cried and realised I had been bottling up tears for years,’  he says. ‘I’m still like that to an extent. I become introverted, keep all the feelings back and end up exploding.’
Given his emotional scars, it is amazing that Almond coped as well as he did with the sudden fame and fortune that was heaped on him as a 24-year-old. And though he barely coped at all, at least he didn’t kill himself through a drug overdose, a sexually transmitted disease or, in one of those fits of romantic anguish that pop stars are prone to, a suicide attempt. He came close, of course, and he says now that he feels a shiver when he realises quite how close. I tell him that he makes me feel as though I’ve lead a very dull life indeed.
‘Pop is very disposable by nature and so are pop stars,’  he says with an uneven grin. ‘We are put on pedestals so people can watch us being damaged on everyone else’s behalf. And the record companies encourage us to be excessive. You are told to go to the parties and take the drugs because you have to get into the gossip columns. Then you become a liability. You don’t turn up for your TV performances. You’re brought before the chairman of the record company to have your wrists slapped.’
Clearly his relationship with his father was not an easy one but does Marc Almond now consider that he might owe some of his success to this same relationship – in that he was desperate to prove his father wrong?  ‘Definitely, that’s the double-edged thing. He gave me my weaknesses but also my strengths. Success is revenge. Sometimes you have to use your bitterness – as long as it doesn’t consume you it can give you a feeling of being alive, it gives you an edge. I always felt he hated me. He blamed his own problems on his sensitive, effeminate son. But if success meant having to go through my childhood again, I wouldn’t want to have it.’
Since he spent most of his schooldays hiding from his father and running away from bullies, why does he think he had a need to draw attention to himself by performing on stage? Was it masochism? ‘I’m a shy extrovert, but I think that’s quite common, isn’t it?  On stage I say, “I’m here to give you songs and you’re here to give me waves of love over the footlights and the sooner we can give each other these things the sooner we can all go home.” It’s that reaffirmation thing. Every time I go on stage I have to overcome a fear. It hangs over me like a black cloud beforehand.  I’m sick and nervous – until I put on the make-up, you know, the mask, and I become this monster called Marc Almond.’
Even so, he recognises that some of his psychological problems stem from his inability to differentiate between his public and private personas. ‘It does get confused and you do start to become this other person. Out of guilt. Because you don’t want to disappoint people. It’s a silly camp old idea but I don’t want to let the public down. I’m aware that I’ve become a gay institution and so when I go out I have to put on this Marc Almond drag. But the flamboyant glittery image is sometimes hard for me to reconcile with the person I am at home – unshaven, in my slippers, watching Coronation Street, with a microwaved dinner on my lap.’
As a child he had always craved approval but when he got it as an adult, he could never accept it. ‘I think it was guilt. I felt an impostor, a fake, a phoney. I felt it was all so false. I couldn’t understand why everyone was making a fuss over me. I’m not worthy. I felt out of control of my own life, you know, completely. That I wasn’t in control. Self-loathing clung to me like rust. The worse thing was that I had to lie about my sexuality. My record company was saying you must invent a girlfriend. In the early Eighties if you said you were gay, it was a career destroyer. Pop stars were never really openly gay. It was always that bisexuality thing. A cop out.’
His homosexuality has been a mixed blessing. He has happy memories: nights at the London night-club Heaven, for instance, when Freddie Mercury would pick him up and carry him over his shoulder on to the dance floor. But he has also had to endure being spat at and punched in the face by strangers. Until his twenties he was very confused about his sexuality. ‘I was attracted to anyone who would pay any attention to me, or anyone who would show me love. Love had to be sex. But I never felt comfortable with my homosexuality. I couldn’t be open about it. Even now I’m only 95 per cent sure. I think homosexuality is genetic but there are still doubts.’
In the late Eighties, Almond took to visiting female prostitutes. ‘It was all part of that adventure thing,’  he says. ‘It had to be done. I also felt because I was singing about this life – all the cigarettes and neon and satin sheets and regret – I ought to immerse myself in it. I did like it and it became another addiction for a while.’ There are people who want to be spokesmen for gay issues, he adds, but he has never wanted to be one of them. ‘I would like to think there is much more to me than a sexuality. People don’t say “the heterosexual artiste Rod Stewart”, do they?’
Almond doesn’t get attacked in the street as much as he used to. ‘It’s changed now because everyone becomes mainstream in the end, even me. It doesn’t matter how rebellious you were, whether you were John Lydon [Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols] or whatever, you know, you become cuddly. Occasionally I’ll hear, “Marc Almond you queer bastard,” and someone will spit at me, and I will shout, “Well, actually, it’s Mark Almond millionaire queer bastard, if you don’ t mind.”‘ That said, does he feel guilty that he might have lead people astray, that, as a public figure, he set a bad example? ‘The one thing I felt uncomfortable with was having a young teenybopper audience. I thought of Soft Cell as a dark, arty band. I never set out to write for kids. I did try to keep things secret but, ultimately, if you are an adult, you have to take responsibility for your own actions.’
Analysis of Marc Almond’s character is problematic, in that, once you have digested the things he says about himself you struggle for anything more insightful to add. By his own estimation he is an emotionally immature, chippy, bitchy, self-pitying neurotic who is addicted to everything, frustrated, self-flagellating, self-destructive and narcissistic. Oh, and he says he always sounds pompous and gets out of his depth whenever he tries to be intellectual.
The therapy-speak and self-loathing may well all be part of the tortured drama-queen act, but few of us can claim to be as self-aware – and honest – as Marc Almond is. And he is at his most endearing when he is sending himself up. He describes, for instance, phoning Smash Hits one day and screaming at them for putting his photograph in between Clare Grogan’s and Adam Ant’s, adding, ‘Well, wouldn’t you?’  And his observation about group sex deserves including in a book of quotations: ‘I’ve never been one for threesomes. Inevitably someone ends up making the tea, and knowing my luck it would be me.’ It seems a fitting epitaph.

I think Oxford University’s Professor of the Public Understanding of Science has gone into shock – traumatic hysteria, to judge by his frozen features. But he has only himself to blame. He shouldn’t go around popularising science in the way that he does. It was only a matter of time before someone like me, a bona fide member of the public, would turn up at his house and try to explain his own theories to him – using, with unjustified confidence, words such as ‘biomorph’, ‘phenotype’ and ‘replicator’.
The professor blinks, then regains his composure. ‘Er, right,’ he says. ‘Something like that.’ I beam triumphantly. Mr Scott, my old biology teacher, would be proud. Prouder than he was when I failed my biology O-level, anyway.
Richard Dawkins and his wife Lalla Ward, an actress turned illustrator, live in a large, pale-brick house in Summertown, north Oxford. It has a gravelled drive and a bike parked outside its Gothic-arched front door, but it’s not exactly an ivory tower – too many wooden floors, kilims and Conran cushions for that. The atmosphere is quite rarefied, though. It is a cloudless, still afternoon, and the 58-year-old professor and I are sitting on white wrought-iron chairs at a white wrought-iron table near the swimming pool in his garden. As the sun creeps round the chimney on the house, I keep edging my chair around to avoid being dazzled. Dawkins has his back to the chimney and in the sunshine his unkempt greying hair gives him a halo.
He is a handsome man, with an angular profile, hooded eyes and tufty eyebrows that make him look like a bird of prey. There is a couple of days’ stubble on his face, which he maybe thinks will help him avoid the description that journalists tend to give of him; that he has the fussy fragile air of a devout and unworldly curate – an amusing observation because, as well as being a world expert on Darwinian evolution theory, Dawkins is also one of the world’s best known and most combative atheists.
Today he still looks like a clergyman, if an unshaven clergyman, with fear and suspicion in his eyes. I think he is thinking that I might be some species of stalker. A deranged fan, maybe. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told him I’d read all six of his books. Or tried to prove it by quoting from them. Or told him I’d been going around quoting them to anyone who would listen.
But I couldn’t – can’t – help it. The man is quotable. He has four entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. ‘They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence; they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.’ That’s one of them, from his first bestseller, The Selfish Gene (1976). ‘However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.’ That’s another, from The Blind Watchmaker (1986). My favourite, from Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), hasn’t made it into the Dictionary yet: ‘If you wanted to make a flying animal, you wouldn’t start with a hippo.’ (The wings would have to be so big the mass of muscle needed to power them would be too heavy for the wings to lift – but it’s funnier the way Dawkins puts it.)
Perhaps I’m being overly sensitive and he’s neither in shock nor frightened. Perhaps he always speaks slowly and deliberately, giving short, precise answers that end abruptly and leave you stumbling to fill the cold and scaly silence with another question. It’s not that his manner is severe or impolite. Indeed he makes free with a boyish smile that exposes charmingly wonky teeth. It’s just that he looks either uncomfortable or bored, it is tricky to say which. Perhaps reserved is the word. I ask him if he is shy. ‘Not really,’ he says in a gentle alto, as thin and elusive as water. ‘No, I wouldn’t put it that way.’ A wood pigeon coos in the background.
Certainly, I press on, he is animated and passionate when lecturing or broadcasting. Is that because he adopts a more flamboyant persona for such activities?  ‘I don’t get nervous. But I only like to talk on subjects I know about. That is why I never do Any Questions. It would be intensely painful. I don’t enjoy debate. I don’t think the adversarial approach is a good way to get at the truth.’ He looks away distractedly. A plane drones overhead.
The thing is, I continue, the mildness and reticence don’t square with his muscular prose style. He writes beautifully, lyrically, but in his books he often comes across as coolly disdainful and arrogant, irritated even. He has feuds with fellow academics, especially American ones, over the correct interpretation of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. He dismisses those who don’t agree with him as being ignorant and lazy. ‘Darwinism is not a theory of random chance,’ he writes testily. ‘It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. Why, I wonder, is it so hard for even sophisticated scientists to grasp this simple point?’
In print, his most spectacular clash, conducted in The Spectator in 1994, has been with Paul Johnson, the Catholic historian and journalist. Dawkins wrote that he finds Johnson’s framework of belief ‘ignominious, contemptible and retarded’. Johnson challenged the professor to a public debate on religion and when Dawkins refused – on the grounds that he didn’t see why he should involve himself in a publicity stunt for Johnson’s new book – the journalist called him a ‘yellow-bellied prima donna’.
In person, the Dawkins brittleness becomes apparent whenever you try to persuade him to talk about himself. It seems the only way to draw him out is to appeal to his scientific instincts: dress up personal questions requiring a subjective answer as objective, scholarly ones. He has been married three times, for instance. But to reach this topic I have to go via the question of morality in a Godless universe. Evolution, according to Dawkins’s best-known theory, operates at the level of the gene rather than the individual, and we are nothing more than selfish machines blindly programmed to preserve our DNA. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is no design, no purpose, no evil and no good – nothing but pitiless indifference. But if this is the case, I ask him, why do we sometimes behave altruistically, morally? We alone on earth can rebel against the selfish replicators, he answers, we alone are free agents who can learn to be good.
Can he give me an example? Has he learned to be good?  ‘I have many weaknesses,’ he says earnestly, twiddling with the arm of his glasses. ‘I’ve probably caused some unhappiness, but it’s never been willing and wanton. I’m extremely soft-hearted and, I think, kind-natured and perhaps some of the unhappiness I have caused has been from being too kind, foolishly so.’
Does he mean he has caused unhappiness by not being decisive enough, by avoiding confrontation in, say, his marriages? ‘Yes, I don’t want to go into detail but I think it’s possible to cause unhappiness by being unwilling to face up to the fact that it’s not possible to be kind to everyone all the time.’ And kindness is something we have to work at? It doesn’t come naturally? ‘Well, yes, as a biologist I would say there is a sense in which that is true.’
To find out about his childhood you have to go via his first brush with Darwinism. It wasn’t exactly an epiphany. ‘Not as much as it should have been. I was a bit sceptical and somehow it didn’t seem to be quite enough to explain all the beauty and the complexity of life. I didn’t really appreciate how powerful the theory is or the fact that it’s the only theory we’ve got. Above all, I didn’t appreciate the enormous amount of time available for evolution to take place – it is this that the human mind has most difficulty grasping.’
He was 16 at the time. Yet from birth Dawkins had been exposed to nature red in tooth and claw. He was born in Nairobi in 1941 and educated at Oundle School. His father, a colonial civil servant stationed in what was then Nyasa – now Malawi – returned to England when he inherited the family farm in Oxfordshire. ‘I have happy memories of Africa,’ Dawkins says. ‘Flowers, butterflies, colours, smells, but nothing terribly coherent because we came back here when I was eight.’ His parents are still alive, and their grandson – by Dawkins’s younger sister – is running the farm. It is mixed – dairy, pigs and arable – and growing up there young Richard came to regard death and sex as an everyday matter of fact.
‘It was always assumed I would take over the farm. I would help out driving tractors. But I don’t think I did much hand-wringing when I decided to enter academia instead.’ He took a first at Balliol College, Oxford, followed by a DPhil and a DSc. Before his return to Oxford to take up a fellowship at New College – and later to become the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science – he spent a few years lecturing at Berkeley, California. It was the time of the Vietnam protests and, though he took part in them, he now says he feels a bit embarrassed for having done so. His time in America also made him aware of the lobbying power of the Bible Belt, which last month celebrated the banning of evolutionary theory from schools in the state of Kansas.
Charles Darwin was considered controversial in his day, with politicians debating whether they were on the side of the apes or the angels. Dawkins provokes controversy because he goes further than Darwin. He calls theologians ‘bigoted enemies of knowledge’. He describes the Pope as a dangerous, world-damaging dictator. The concept of God, according to Dawkins, is like a virus, passed from person to person. In one sense, he says, he is surprised to find himself a controversial figure for promoting his ‘selfish gene’ interpretation of evolution theory, more than a century after Darwin. ‘But it’s only in the United States, where there are a lot of fundamentalists. I think it is insulting to Christians in this country to suggest that they are creationists. But on the other hand it has to be said there is still an enormous ignorance of Darwinism here. When you think it is the explanation for our existence and the existence of all life and that it is not difficult to understand – really rather simple, compared to quantum mechanics – it seems absurd that it is one of the last things you are taught in school.’
Dawkins describes Oundle as a conventional Anglican boarding school, and he was confirmed at 13. ‘I’ve got a lot of time for the Church of England,’ he says. ‘I mean, it’s like village cricket. I’ve got a soft spot for it as an English institution. But evolution should be one of the first things you learn at school. It should be something inspiring and exciting for children to remember for the rest of their lives and what do they get instead? Sacred hearts and incense. Shallow, empty religion.’
Dawkins has a gift for communicating ideas – and for conveying his own wonder at the complexity of nature. When you read his books you begin to notice the minutiae of nature around you, the staggeringly sophisticated feat of engineering that is a spider’s web, for instance. ‘Yes, and it is so easy to take these things for granted,’ he says. ‘You have to imagine you are opening your eyes and seeing for the first time. I’ve never had a mystical experience, but I wonder if when people claim they have, that is what has happened, the scales have fallen from the eyes, as though they have just been born, with the intellect of an adult.’ He has aesthetic experiences looking at great cathedrals or listening to classical music, and he thinks these may be what people confuse with religious experiences. ‘I also get it looking through a microscope,’ he adds. ‘I feel overwhelmed. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. And the more you understand about the natural world, the more beautiful it seems.’
He must get sick of being patronised by people who tell him he writes well, for a scientist. ‘It’s up to others to judge if some scientists can write well absolutely, or only well for a scientist,’ he says with a smile.  ‘Science is inherently poetic and awe-inspiring so you don’t need to colour your language – you just need to tell it honestly.’ In his latest book, Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins answers Keats’s question, ‘Do not all charms fly/At the mere touch of cold philosophy?’ with a robust, ‘No.’ He explains the workings of starlight, sound waves and rainbows, to prove that science should inspire rather than undermine the poetic imagination.
His gift for coming up with vivid metaphors has led some reviewers to label him the Tom Stoppard of science. But this is also to do with his good looks. I ask him if his handsome features and intelligence indicate that his ancestors were successfully selfish in their search for partners? He looks mortified. ‘Er, I don’t want to talk about myself but, in general, any animal is by definition the product of successful ancestors, um, in the Darwinian sense, and so any animal can look in the mirror and say that. But that is on a much longer time-scale. And it’s never occurred to me, personally, looking in the mirror. Er, I did recently find out a little about my family tree. Have you heard of the Balliol Rhymes? They are a collection of comic verse from the late 19th century. A dozen of my family were at Balliol and my great-great-great-uncle Clinton Edward Dawkins was there in the 1880s. The rhyme about him was, “Positivists ever talkin’/Such an epic as Dawkins/Creeds are out and Man is all/Spell him with a capital.” It’s not far off being appropriate to me. Except I would add animals to man. So maybe there is some hereditary influence there.’
Man and animals are all. And God is not dead because he never existed in the first place. I take a deep breath and attempt to summarise another of Dawkins’s arguments for him. For God to create the universe he would have to be hyper-intelligent. But intelligence only evolves over time. Is that about the strength of it? ‘It’s worse that that, the argument for God starts by assuming what it is attempting to explain – intelligence, complexity, it comes to the same thing – and so it explains nothing. God is a non-explanation. Whereas evolution by natural selection is an explanation. It really does start simply and become complex.’
And when he contemplates his own mortality in this Godless universe how does he feel? ‘I accept that this is all there is and that you have to live like hell while you can. I’m pretty calm about death. I don’t fear it. I just have this strong feeling that life is wonderful but finite and that we are immensely privileged to have it.’ He crosses his hairy legs – he is wearing shorts – and rocks back in his chair. ‘I used to think religion was a genuine comfort in death, but I’ve heard from hospital nurses who’ve said to my real surprise that the patients who really seem to be terrified of death are the Catholics. I don’t know why this is. Maybe they are doing a quick calculation of how good or bad they have been. But that is only anecdotal.’
There’s going to be no danger of him losing his nerve at the end? ‘No. I can safely say that.’ He has a teenage daughter, Juliet, from his second marriage. Does she represent a form of immortality for him? ‘Only for my genes, and that’s not really the same thing at all.’ Someone whose books go on being read achieves a kind of immortality, surely? ‘There’s a long way to go before we will know if this will happen in my case. But even that doesn’t compare with actually living forever. As Woody Allen said, “I don’t want to be immortal through my achievements, I want to be immortal through not dying.”‘
Is this evidence of a sense of humour? A former student of Dawkins has told me that the professor doesn’t really have one. He also told me that Dawkins is petulant and vain, and regurgitates the same themes formulaically in each book. I don’t know whether any of that is true, but I do sense that he has a bit of a persecution complex and is a little naive. He can’t really understand why Christians get upset with him simply for telling the truth as he sees it.
He also seems to have an almost inhuman lack of sentimentality. When his daughter was six he asked her why she thought there were flowers in the world. She said they were there to make the world pretty and to help the bees make honey for us. He was touched by this and sorry to have to tell her it wasn’t true: that flowers are in the world to copy their DNA.There is something quite comical about such pathological seriousness. I ask him if, given his loathing of all things superstitious – astrology, clairvoyance, fairytales – he felt the need to disabuse his six-year-old daughter of belief in Father Christmas? ‘Well, I did have a game with her in which we worked out how fast Father Christmas would have to travel to get round all the chimneys in the world in one night. I don’t think the realisation that it was impossible shook her too much.’
Richard Dawkins is getting fidgety. We have been talking for an hour and a half, and he is surreptitiously checking the time on his square-faced watch. The body language – knees drawn up to chest, hands behind head – could not be clearer. I ask if I can use his phone to order a taxi. He does it for me. When he returns he is carrying a new Dutch translation of Unweaving the Rainbow which has just arrived in the post. His wife Lalla pops outside to see if I want another cup of tea before I leave. She is the daughter of Viscount Bangor and the former wife of Tom Baker, with whom she appeared in Dr Who. She met Richard Dawkins at a surprise 40th birthday party for the novelist Douglas Adams. She was talking to Stephen Fry at the time, and when their eyes met it was, well, love at first sight.
His ordeal by interview over, Dawkins relaxes visibly. He tells me that he and his wife read poetry to each other. ‘Lalla reads so beautifully she can make me feel tearful. And when I read I can sometimes feel a catch in my voice. And I feel a bit embarrassed about it, try to conceal it. I don’t think I cry about things that happen in real life often – mainly because I am fortunate enough not to have anything much to cry about. It is more a kind of sentiment over the written word. Poetic language. I suppose it is a little embarrassing for a grown man to allow himself to cry over a book.’
Goodness. He’s finally talking about himself. Quick, quick. His world view has been described as a bleak and despairing one. Is he prone to melancholia? ‘Not at all. I have a wonderful life. Enjoy every minute of it. I love to see other people enjoy their life too. The myth of my having a pessimistic view of life comes from the way in which I express honestly the state of humanity in the universe – which can seem bleak if you set out with unrealistic expectations in the first place. I get worried and depressed about all the work I have to do. If I haven’t met a deadline or haven’t finished a book, I fret about it and wish I was more disciplined.’
Does he have a fragile ego, a need for reassurance? ‘I get hurt by criticism which is misguided and misinformed. The militant atheist label annoys me because it can only be said by someone who hasn’t read my books.’ Just time for one more question. His leisure hours. How are they spent? Recreational drugs? ‘No.’ The footie? A shake of the head. Singing round the piano? A smile at this. ‘Around the piano, yes, that’s a lovely thing to do. Haven’t done it for years. Singing around the piano.’
The door bell rings. The taxi is here. I leave the home of this man, who is in his way still fighting a Victorian battle, with the disconcertingly Victorian vision of him singing around the piano with his family.

Your first impressions upon entering Lord Weidenfeld’s stately Chelsea apartment are puzzling – but not contradictory. A butler greets you at the door and as he takes your coat you can’t help noticing the erotic art hanging on the wall. It is by Klimt. Of naked women. In lascivious poses. With pubic hair. The butler leads you from the hall to the airy, book-lined study, which looks more like the smoking room of a gentlemen’s club. There is an ornate marble fireplace with brass and leather fender, fresh flowers on the table and, from the window, a view over the Thames to the pagoda in Battersea Park. Your eye is drawn from this to the forbidding portraits from the 16th and 17th centuries. Of popes.
The man I am about to meet is defined by these unlikely contrasts – bohemia and grandeur, pornography and power. He is dignified, formal and courteous. Indeed, he has the courtly manners and discreet civility of an old-world Viennese gentleman – he even fought a duel once. He is also the man who published Lolita, which is still considered, even 40 years on, to be one of the most sexually corrupting novels in the English language. With his four marriages – and what he once described as his ‘casual infidelities’ – he is a famed seducer of women. He is also a legendary giver of parties, at which the likes of Henry Kissinger might be seen clinking champagne flutes with Bianca Jagger or Martin Amis.
Lord Weidenfeld is the next thing you notice in the room. Sitting in a reddy-brown leather armchair in the corner he is almost camouflaged. He wears a well-tailored brown suit with a brown patterned Herms tie, brown shoes and brown socks pulled well up over slim ankles and calves. His skin is sallow, liver-spotted in places and he has brown, rheumy, bulging eyes. It is 9.30 in the morning. He looks well breakfasted. Probably had brown bread. Silently he rises from his chair, bows his head slightly and proffers his hand. He is not tall but he has considerable presence. The cataract operation he had 24 hours earlier is dismissed with a shrug. ‘I had to wear an eye patch for an hour,’ he says in a precise yet softly lisping Austrian accent. ‘But I am fine now. Thank you. Would you care to sit down?’ He indicates an upright chair a good ten feet from his. I notice on the table next to him a copy of the day’s Die Welt, the German broadsheet, open at his regular column. The byline is Von Lord Weidenfeld.
It reminds you of the other contrasts in his life. He is a Jewish immigrant who escaped persecution by the Nazis only to be honoured in later life by the Germans for services to their reunification. He is a Zionist who specialises in Nazi memoirs and who is, in his own words, a walking card index of the Third Reich. His friends include Helmut Kohl, Placido Domingo and Pope John Paul II. He managed to be chief-of-staff to the first prime minister of Israel for a year, as well as a member of Harold Wilson’s kitchen cabinet, and even now, in his 80th year, he has the ear of Ehud Barak, the new prime minister of Israel, as well as a number of New Labour Cabinet ministers. Eyebrows were raised when, just after the 1997 election, Peter Mandelson left a Weidenfeld dinner party early to go to Downing Street. Sir Nico Henderson remarked: ‘Not even Kissinger or De Gaulle leaves one of Weidenfeld’s grand dinners before the end.’ Lord Weidenfeld will be 80 tomorrow. There will, of course, be a party. ‘My friends in Germany and Israel also want to do something,’ he says, leaning forward and causing the armchair leather to creak. ‘So it will be like a birthday season, I think. It coincides with the 50th birthday of the firm [Weidenfeld & Nicolson]. We celebrated our first list in 1949 at Brown’s Hotel, and I keep thinking of all the people who were there who are no longer with us. Members of the Bloomsbury Set and the Gargoyle Club. The politicians of the time. The anniversary will have many memories.’
When celebrations and eye operations allow, Lord Weidenfeld keeps a schedule that would exhaust a man half his age. Already this year he has made 40 foreign trips; giving lectures; organising conferences between senior politicians in his Club of Three – Britain, Germany and France – an initiative designed to build bridges between these countries; setting up meetings for another of his forums, the German-Jewish Dialogue; working on his project to link six of Europe’s most distinguished universities with Oxford, in order that they work together in the field of European affairs.
The importance he attaches to solving great problems by encouraging great men to sit down and discuss great ideas is admirable – it’s very Enlightenment, very 18th-century, very Voltaire – but it can also look, in a certain light, a bit like social climbing. Where does he find the energy? ‘Well, the extraordinary thing is this: if you have the right state of mind, travelling can be calming. Not at all tiring. Barring delays in airports, and traffic jams in the holiday season, a foreign trip that is well prepared allows plenty of time for leisure, theatre and talking to friends. And you have hours on a plane where you can read and think undisturbed.’ Given that he seems to spend half his time in the air, it is safe to assume he has no fear of flying. ‘No fear at all. I’ve always been fatalistic about accidents. During the War, I did most of my reading during air raids. I couldn’t be bothered to run for the shelter. It was not a question of bravery or virtue, it was sluggishness.’ He says he has no real fear of death. ‘Not really, but then I don’t like to face the question in a detailed way. And I suppose people my age should. But I plan and predict and every so often I think, good God, delivery of manuscript in 2007! That’s a long way off. Am I going to see it?’
Weidenfeld was born in Vienna in 1919, an only child, part of a Jewish rabbinical aristocracy that dated back centuries on his mother’s side. His boyhood was spent in the company of adults, reciting Ovid every evening and listening to Wagner. Max Weidenfeld, his father, was an insurance agent who yearned to be a classics don. Max was also a Don Quixote figure, according to his son, always painting glowing pictures of his son’s future. ‘Temperamentally I aligned myself with him, sharing my father’s sense of fantasy. I grew up in a sort of hall of mirrors.’ It was generally thought that his father had a long extra-marital liaison with a good-looking blonde. His mother suffered the triangular situation and never showed her feelings. George, or Arthur as he was then known, seems to have been unaffected by this, at least in his youth.
He began studying law at the University of Vienna and, concurrently, at the city’s diplomacy college. It was at university that he learnt his skills as a womaniser – from a medical student who had a clinical detachment, an attitude more heartless than callous, which both impressed and disturbed the young Arthur. It was also here that he fought a duel to establish his credentials as a gentleman. As was the protocol of his Zionist fraternity, he approached a Nazi student and told him his shoe-laces were undone. Realising it was a hoax, the Nazi accused him of impertinence and demanded that their seconds meet. They bowed at each other stiffly. The Nazi’s seconds refused to give Weidenfeld satisfaction because he was a non-Aryan, so he had to proceed to the next degree of insult. He sought out the Nazi while he was dining in public and called him a coward. The duel took place, Weidenfeld sustained a few minor cuts and the honour of his fraternity was served.
This took place a week before the Anschluss. Five months later, in August 1938, Weidenfeld fled, arriving in London, via Zurich and Paris, with a small suitcase and a postal order for 16 shillings and sixpence. ‘The taxi driver took me to the wrong address for the boarding house – because he had mistaken an “o” for an “a” – and I ended up at a palatial house in Belgrave Square. The butler came out, looked me up and down and said there must be some mistake. He looked at the address and said, [It’s Belgrove, my dear fellow, King’s Cross.” The house belonged to Sir Henry Channon [“Chips” Channon, the Conservative politician].’
Arthur Weidenfeld soon found himself a job at the BBC, first in the monitoring service, then as a diplomatic correspondent reporting – under the name George Weiden because it was considered easier on English ears – about occupied Europe. In the evenings he would sit in the Waldorf opposite the BBC, and study the English rich, learning their manners, such as always arriving three minutes late for an appointment. Soon, the young Weidenfeld was being invited to join them. Once, when asked to tea at the house of a well-known landed family, the hostess said insouciantly: ‘I hear you come from Germany. Did you know the Goerings?’ Amazed at her naivety, Weidenfeld muttered something about having lived in Vienna, while the Goerings were rather busy in Berlin.
When I ask what advice he would give his 19-year-old self if he met him now, Lord Weidenfeld looks up at the ceiling and says: ‘Well, if I could live my life a second time I probably couldn’t avoid making certain mistakes again. I would have liked to have had a more conventional, more tutored education, though. I had to do so much extra learning myself because I couldn’t finish my university studies in Vienna. I wish I had in those days a more omnivorous appetite for acquiring learning, as oppose to socialising. Intellectual curiosity brings enthusiasm. But I also avoided drudgery and my high entry point into publishing gave me opportunities to enter into friendships with great galleon figures of English intellectual life: Ayer, Toynbee, Spender, Berlin.’
In 1948, he co-founded the Weidenfeld & Nicolson publishing house and, although he sold his shares for several million pounds in 1991, he remains chairman of the company. He describes his business partner Nigel Nicolson – son of Harold – as a great believer in friendship and loyalty and a true English romantic, who was always much more interested in quality than financial success. Among their earliest books was one about the coal industry by a young graduate called Harold Wilson. They were also the first to publish Antonia Fraser and Margaret Drabble.
Although there was a residual anti-semitism in Britain at the time of his immigration here, Lord Weidenfeld recalls, it was fairly harmless. ‘There was a strong sympathy of the upper classes for Nazism but, with the exception of such excretions as Unity Mitford, it was mostly mild. There were people who went to the Olympic Games and liked the German manliness but it was partly unthinking and they did it to shock bourgeois consciousness.’
Even so, he found it fairly easy in England to fit in. His father, who was imprisoned by the Nazis for a year, found it more difficult to adapt. The escape from Austria of Max and Rosa Weidenfeld was arranged from England by their son. ‘There was a role reversal with my father but I don’t think he found it humiliating. It was more a subtle transformation so that I became the father and he the child. I became the head of the family, taking care of my parents who couldn’t find their way in an alien land.’
On his death-bed in 1967 Max Weidenfeld began a letter to his son but never finished it. It read: ‘Whatever I may have done or failed to do for you, at least I tried to give you a sunny youth… ‘ I ask Lord Weidenfeld if he feels he, like his father, has any unfinished business. ‘Oh, I have an enormous amount of unfinished business. But I hope that it will be finished by others. At the moment I am hyperactive, I constantly take on new things.’ I point out that, actually, I meant unfinished more in terms of his emotional life, you know, his, um, relationships. He pauses to reflect. There is much to reflect upon. In 1952, Weidenfeld married Jane Sieff, the niece of one of the founders of Marks & Spencer, and they soon had a daughter, Laura. Jane left him for another man in 1954 saying that George’s work had come between them and that she couldn’t stand, ‘another breakfast with Trevor-Roper’. In 1956 he married again, to the statuesque bohemian Barbara Skelton. He had fallen in love with her while she was still married to his friend, literary journalist Cyril Connolly. Skelton wrote in her diary that she was obsessed with Weidenfeld sexually, especially with his fleshy, extravagantly hirsute body. In his autobiography, Remembering My Good Friends (1994), Lord Weidenfeld recalls how, soon after they met, Skelton invited him over to breakfast. He found her wearing a fur-lined jacket over pyjamas. She ordered tea. It was brought. ‘The moment the waiter left the room our love affair began.’ Some love affair: on their honeymoon he put to her the suggestion that she should release him without financial obligation after three years. In her memoirs Skelton was unkind about Weidenfeld. She described him as a magnetic but trivial man solely devoted to worldly values. She found his obsession with his work chilling. ‘Gush gush,’ he would whisper as she lounged sulkily at the head of a star-studded dinner table. ‘You simply must be more gushing.’
Their conjugal life, Weidenfeld recalls in his memoirs, was a disaster from the outset. ‘To my horror, Barbara imported a cat to Chester Square and hired a drunken butler who left taking all my shirts with him.’ The marriage was soon dissolved and she returned to Connolly. Weidenfeld’s third marriage was to a wealthy American, Sandra Payson Meyer. She, too, couldn’t stand the parties every night. Finally, in 1992, he married Annabelle Whitestone, a tall, blonde English Valkyrie, 25 years his junior, who was previously the consort of an even older Jewish man, the late Polish pianist Artur Rubenstein. ‘I might have made wrong choices or persuaded others to make wrong choices,’ Lord Weidenfeld reflects. ‘I am incredibly fortunate now – having not been incredibly fortunate in former marriages – to have found someone with whom I am very happy and fulfilled. Without wishing to sound sentimental this is the culmination of my life. The happiest period. To a large extent through this relationship. And I have a very good relationship with my daughter and grandchildren. They give me an enormous amount of pleasure and virtually no pain. Various elements in my life have been harmonised and I have few regrets. I am content.’
One way in which Lord Weidenfeld feels his life has been harmonised concerns his Jewish identity. Though he is an agnostic, he regards the survival of the Jewish people as being the central leitmotif of his life – and the founding of the state of Israel as being the most important event in the 20th century. ‘We have now reached a tremendous turning point for two reasons. Anti-semitism has been deprived of its two roots, homelessness and Christicide. First, the Jewish state has been consolidated into a critical mass of six million people. This is an irreversible fact of life. It gives a refuge and a chance for Jews, wherever they may be,to have a passport. This means that the icon of the wandering Jew no longer exists. Second, this Pope has now said that anti-semitism is a sin. He has said that the Jew is the elder brother of the Church. He has absolved the Jew of responsibility for the death of Christ. So all that remains of anti-semitism is a mild form of secondary xenophobia.’
In his autobiography, Long Life, Nigel Nicolson writes that Weidenfeld loves England. ‘Although I came to think that his spiritual home was Israel or the United States… I still have to think which nation he is referring to when he says “we”.’ So where do Lord Weidenfeld’s loyalties lie? ‘I am preoccupied with ideas of multiple identity and multiple loyalty,’ he says. ‘I have spent most of my time, and I hope this doesn’t sound too pompous, on bridge-building operations between Christians and Jews, Jews and Germans. My loyalties are not divided. They are cohesive. I think of myself as a British European Jew.’
But, come the day, where would he like to be buried?  Surely it must be Israel? ‘As you know, I don’t think much about death.’ A smile. ‘I would be very happy to be buried there. If there is room on the Mount of Olives, certainly. But my answer can’t be emphatic because I haven’t really considered it.’ Weidenfeld is an incurable optimist. He believes we have to be positive about Europe, and especially about the Germans. He recently attacked a British journalist for writing, ‘Admit it, we all hate the Germans.’
But if he doesn’t hate the present generation of Germans, surely he must hate the Jew-hating generation that was in power in the Thirties and Forties? ‘I hated the Nazi regime,’ he says. ‘I never hated the German past or German culture. I never hated Richard Wagner. I feel very happy with the present and the last generation of Germans who, as Helmut Kohl put it, have the great mercy of late birth. But if I were a Freudian, I would say the British have an almost erotic relationship with the Germans. Underneath all the hatred, they mean a great deal to us. We need them.’
For all his old man’s sweetness and his still youthful enthusiasm, impulsiveness and profligacy, Weidenfeld must have been, in his day, a pretty sharp operator. Nigel Nicolson notes: ‘He had greater resilience than me, an acuter mind, more daring… a gift for persuasion both in business and in friendship. In extremis he was a great fighter.’ Another friend describes to me Lord Weidenfeld’s incredible ability to look bored. ‘He sometimes has a look of utter tedium on his face and this makes people shrivel before him. But he is essentially a social animal. It doesn’t matter where he is, in a Vienna airport, a Manhattan apartment or the English countryside, his only landscape is human.’
A number of Weidenfeld’s achievements in business may have been facilitated, then, by his gift for manipulation – call it charm, call it social skill, call it conviviality. One friend recalls how, at his parties, he will grab you by both wrists as he talks intensely to you, then, the second he sees someone more interesting come in, he uses the grip to push you away, sending you spinning across the room. ‘Yet somehow,’ the friend adds affectionately, ‘one never minds.’
Weidenfeld really does know how to win you over, how to impress upon you his power and potency. It’s the erotic art and the papal portraits again. And, in what must now be self-parody, he really does offer just about everyone he meets a commission to write a book. It makes you wonder if there is a whole department at Weidenfeld & Nicolson devoted to fending off would-be authors that its chairman has recommended. Is the benign manner, the friendliness, something he can’t help then, or is it a more conscious affectation? ‘I like to be liked,’ Weidenfeld says. ‘A lot of people I have sneaking respect for don’t care, but I do. And it makes me a little vulnerable. But I also like to understand what is in the mind of a political opponent or a person who has done me wrong. At the same time I am consistent in people I disapprove of. Sometimes I show it, sometimes I don’t. There are certain people I would never have anything to do with, nor ever have. I’m not a great hater but I don’t approve of the Murdoch press. I think he has debased the British press. He has cheapened it and encouraged intolerance and prejudice.’
Lord Weidenfeld’s daughter, Laura, also speaks of his vulnerability. She says that all he really wants is acceptance. I would add that, for all his self-deprecation, he also makes himself vulnerable by wanting so desperately to be taken seriously. Not mocked, or thought trivial, or vain. Which is something of a paradox, really, because I suspect that part of his appeal with men has been that they find his earnestness endearing. How sweet, for instance, that he calls his autobiography Remembering My Good Friends. It’s a quote from Richard II. But unfortunately it sounds like one from Hello!. And with women, the attraction has been that, though he is clearly a survivor, they think him slightly hopeless: a brilliant man who needs looking after, who cannot drive a car, make coffee or work a video machine. They want to mother him.

The mother of three – mild -mannered, tall, greying Louise Brooks bob – is wondering whether she should really be telling me all this: about how she met her husband when they were both Trotskyite students at York University in the early Seventies; how they lived together before getting married in 1983; how they moved here, to this leafy suburb of Oxford, 15 years ago when their first child was born and she decided to give up her job as a solicitor; how they first became disillusioned with socialism after an ill-mannered IRA-supporter threatened to push her husband’s teeth down his throat at a Labour Party meeting. Is it wise? Perhaps not, but something’s got to kill the time. It’s a sticky hot day. No breeze. I am sitting nursing a lime cordial. Eve Ross Hitchens – she kept her maiden name as a middle name – is standing, rocking her three-month-old baby in her arms. We both check our watches surreptitiously. So far, her husband, the right-wing pundit Peter Hitchens, has been gone an hour – the Telegraph’s photographer took him off in search of a hillside with views over Oxford.
I crack my knuckles. Mrs Hitchens offers me another lime juice. We smile politely at each other and incline our wrists slightly to check the time, again. I try to imagine what it must be like being married to Peter Hitchens. He could hate for Britain. He hates Tony Blair. He hates John Major. He hates television. On his twice-weekly programme on Talk Radio, and in the pages of the Daily Express, where he has worked since 1977, Peter Hitchens never tires of conveying his hatred of the single currency and the promotion of homosexuality and single mothers. He wants to bring back hanging  – as well as the firm hand of the Establishment, Anglican values and a sense of pride in British history. Above all, he believes the victory of the liberal progressive Left in the Sixties left Britain in a moral vacuum – and that the only way we as a society can get ourselves out of it is by recognising the importance of the family. Which is sort of what John Major used to say. And Tony Blair still does.
Just imagine being married to Peter Hitchens, then. Imagine having your marriage held up as the socio-political ideal. How does Eve cope? ‘I don’t like to dwell on it too much,’ she says with an apprehensive smile. ‘I feel a bit superstitious about it actually  – in case our marriage suddenly falls apart. But you have to understand that my husband only says these things because he cares very passionately about them.’
The passion is not immediately apparent as Peter Hitchens returns – phew – and sits down on the sofa opposite. Nor is the expected severity. He seems calm, relaxed and, if anything, jovial. He has a toothy, boyish smile. And he lolls a bit, rather than sitting ramrod-backed. In conversation he doesn’t rant so much as express himself articulately with polite assertion in a tone only occasionally bordering on the indignant.
There is something quite intense about his manner and appearance, though  – the bristling Jack Russell, testing the air for a rabbit or a rat. He has a short back and sides, big intense eyes and big intense eyebrows to match. He wears a blue, open-neck shirt but no tie – which is surprising, given his belief that the rot set in when gentlemen stopped wearing them, at all times, even weekends.
We are having one of those enjoyable exchanges about the good old days that only people too young to remember them can have. Things were a damn sight better then. In the days before the country went to the dogs.  Oh yes. ‘If we had managed to combine the prosperity we have now with the moral structure and security and restraint and good behaviour which were commonplace 40 years ago, we would be much better off,’ Hitchens concludes in a rich, measured, World Service baritone. ‘People could think for themselves then. A lot of young people today are living dismal lives because their lives are empty of meaning and moral purpose…’ And so on.
I nod. He’s very persuasive. But so he should be. This, after all, is the theme of the book he has just written. The Abolition of Britain, published this week, is a full-length indictment of modern Britain and the profound changes which threaten its existence. It says so on the back cover. I might add that it is also carefully researched, thought-provoking and really rather lyrical. But there are some wrinkles. Surely the majority of the population must have been just as blandly conformist and unquestioning 40 years ago as they are today, certainly in the way they dressed and behaved? Hitchens folds his arms, shakes his head and sighs.
‘To imagine there was nothing wrong then would be absurd,’ he says. ‘Of course. Half the changes that happened in the Sixties happened because people were discontented. But they came up almost invariably with the wrong solutions. Comprehensive schools were not the answer to grammar schools. There was a completely unjustified loss of nerve by the ruling elite, a loss of confidence and pride. We had a very successful, peaceful, prosperous and civilised society, which quite a lot of other countries want to emulate.’
Hitchens looks as though he’s trying to suppress a smile as he says this, and it makes you wonder whether he can really be as angry as he wants you to believe he is. Doesn’t he ever catch himself slipping into character? ‘Yes of course. You are bound to. But it doesn’t mean you are being phoney. The willingness of people to accept the destruction of their own culture without complaint makes me genuinely angry. Not enough people realise something precious is being lost.’
Come off it, I find myself saying, things can’t be as bad as all that. ‘Oh but they are. Terrible, terrible. What will I be nostalgic about in 20 years’ time? Having glass in my window rather than corrugated iron? I think we are in a state of total social disintegration. People in the south-east who never visit their own country, who never see, as I have seen, a northern housing estate, just aren’t aware of how far things have gone.’
According to William Burroughs  – homosexual, heroin-addict, conservative – a paranoid person is someone who knows what is going on. I take a deep breath. It is time to mention the ‘p’ word. ‘Paranoid?’ Hitchens says. ‘Me? I object to the use of psychiatric terms in politics. You could say that it’s a good thing that there are people like me who worry more than other people  – who are more… you could say paranoid, you could say obsessive, I would say, “more sensitive to what is going on around them”.’
Hitchens knows that people might laugh at him. ‘But I don’t mind. It’s a defence. I remember when I was in the Industrial Correspondents’ Group I didn’t go along, well, to put it politely, fellow-travelling with the Left. I decided to cultivate the right wing of the Engineering Union instead. This was considered an act of great eccentricity and the word “bonkers” was used. People called me bonkers. Well, OK. Tough. Just because I’m not running with the pack. Journalists are pack animals. And they are fantastically incurious as well. They know what they want to find and they find it, and once you step outside that pack you can expect to be called names.’
Which of course is exactly what he wants because, for all his commitment to his beliefs, Hitchens recognises that he is partly driven by a spirit of competitiveness, a pure love of argument. ‘I suppose so, yes. I don’t like losing. And often in an argument I feel confident I can come out on top. I’m not trying to destroy the other person, just their argument. Some people enjoy drinking or driving very fast, some enjoy arguing. It is just as exhilarating.’
But when I suggest that he sometimes exaggerates his case to win an argument, I am given a glimpse of his darker, more bullying side. He glowers at me and asks that I give him some examples. Well, I say, comparing the liberal revolution in Britain to the Cultural Revolution in China. It is just too extreme. Much as they might have secretly liked to, the Labour Party has never paraded right-wing professors wearing dunce’s hats. They have never committed human rights abuses or censored the right-wing press or imprisoned, exiled or executed dissidents.
‘Is it too extreme a comparison?’ Hitchens asks. ‘How old are you, 34? Well I am 47 and I grew up in a Britain that has completely disappeared today. That is to say my father was a British naval officer and then he worked in private schools  – places where the country retained a lot of its pre-revolutionary characteristics. So I am older in experience than I am in years. I know an England that people in their sixties would have known. And it has changed utterly. And the revolutionaries have been quite vicious in the way that they have excluded those that haven’t agreed with them. They don’t kill, they don’t reduce to penury or chuck into cesspits, they just exclude. You don’t read Kierkegaard do you?’
Er . . .
‘No, neither do I. But he said the most effective revolutions are those that strip the essence but leave everything standing.’
Presumably Hitchens must have found out what he knows about Kierkegaard as a student studying philosophy and politics. ‘Pah! I read Trotsky at university. I spent most of my time going up to Scarborough to run a cell of Trotskyite workers in a coach station, that and selling the Socialist Worker at the docks.’
A Burmese cat ambles in and curls itself around my leg. The baby has started crying upstairs. There is no television in the sitting-room. There is, though, a framed Solidarity poster on the wall and a display of antique, East-European currencies. In the same display case there is an arrangement of press passes showing Peter Hitchens down the ages: from young, bearded and idealistic to middle-aged, clean-shaven and…  idealistic. They chronicle all the Reagan-Gorbachev summits. They also chart the five years Hitchens spent first as Moscow correspondent then Washington correspondent. There is also a photograph of his father, Commander Eric Hitchens, in uniform. It was taken in 1927.
Until an eye defect prevented him, Peter Hitchens had hoped to be a navy officer, too. Becoming a Trotskyite activist instead seems to have been an extreme alternative. But he doesn’t identify this as an act of rebellion against his father. ‘No. It was much more a feeling that I had been brought up for a world that no longer existed. That all the impulses that would have gone into a normal English patriotism and Anglican belief suddenly found they had no home to go to. I was seeking another loyalty.’
Nevertheless, he was a rebel at boarding school. He had a peripatetic childhood: born in Malta, prep school in Devon, schools in Chichester, Cambridge and Oxford. There were incessant rows about his appearance, especially his hair. He wasn’t sporting. And his chief problem was with school food. As a protest he would only eat breakfast. He also showed an early tendency toward pedantry. At one school, in Cambridge, he discovered that a line drawn on the school map of the town, showing the point beyond which pupils were not allowed to cross, did not reach to the top of the page  – so he would cycle up to where the line stopped and cross, legally, into the town from there.
On another occasion, when he was arrested for breaking into a government fall-out shelter, there was ‘a terrible scene. My diplomatic relations with the school and my parents broke down. I finished my education here in Oxford at the College of Further Education. I put myself back by a year. Made sure I would never get into Oxbridge. It was my own fault. If I’d been my parents, I wouldn’t have let me get away with it. I must have been a severe disappointment to them then.’
Both his parents are dead now. His father died 11 years ago, his mother 25 years  – just after he had graduated from York and started his first proper job on the Swindon Evening Advertiser. ‘My mother killed herself in rather distressing circumstances,’ he says bluntly. ‘I acknowledge it  – I have rather distressing feelings about it  – I don’t want to make a business of it here.’
His parents’ marriage had broken down after his mother, Yvonne, had had an affair with a defrocked vicar. The first report of her death was that she had been murdered in Athens. Christopher Hitchens, Peter’s elder brother by two and half years, flew down to Athens and found a suicide note addressed to him. He discovered from the hotel bill that his mother had been trying to phone him in London. Ten years later, it emerged that Yvonne was Jewish, and that she had wanted to keep this a secret from her (Protestant) family. This, of course, made the two sons Jewish, as well  – and the revelation came as something of a shock to the fervently Christian Peter.
Christopher, a militant atheist, is probably the most famous and certainly the most controversial British journalist working in America. He is as left-wing as his brother is right. In their public lives the sibling rivalry between the two is on an epic scale. Indeed, the scrapping Hitchens brothers have been described as the Liam and Noel Gallagher of political thought. But, really, if you think about it, they are very alike.
Admittedly, Peter is more dapper, leaner, cleaner-cut, brittle and repressed: Christopher is more shambling, tousle-haired, jowly, flamboyant and cool. And true, Peter stands for family values and goes to church every Sunday: Christopher is pleased to be known as a drunk and a wastrel. Martin Amis says that Christopher likes the smell of cordite and, according to Jonathan Raban, he has the manner of a lazy Balliol dandy, with the killer instinct of a pit bull terrier. The same applies to Peter. They are both controversialists. They are both contrary. They are both, as they used to say in the good old days, too clever by half.
Christopher manages to appear off-the-scale liberal yet is anti-abortion, he writes books attacking not only Mother Teresa but also Bill Clinton. Not for nothing is his collection of essays called For the Sake of Argument. If he is a right-wing Leftie, his brother is a left-wing Rightie. Peter shares the killer instinct, the love of humiliating his opponents in a debate. Except that his are the views of a York University student who found one faith  – Trotskyism  – and like so many (Paul Johnson springs to mind), dropped it in favour of another God.
And Peter, it seems, is incapable of adopting a world view lightly or with reservation. He has to immerse himself in it utterly, fanatically. ‘If it hadn’t been for the loss of the Trotskyite system of belief, my religious faith might not have come so quickly,’ he says. ‘Once you’ve had a world view you can’t cope without one. I don’t suffer from doubts. In terms of my faith I suffer from surprise that some people don’t believe. When people ask in shock if I believe in God, I say, “Well, don’t you?”‘
Christopher has said that the ugliness of his younger brother’s hack arguments on subjects such as the need for capital punishment makes him cringe. He adds that he admires Peter’s muscular prose, but qualifies this by saying that he sounds like Denis Thatcher without the sherry and jokes. The fundamental point of conflict between the brothers, though, is over religion. ‘Yes,’ Peter Hitchens nods. ‘I think so. Everything else flows from that. His socialism is his private religion and he spends an awful lot of time arguing with God. I mean, why write a book attacking Mother Teresa? The whole reason he finds her objectionable is that she thinks death is not the end and faith is important. And if you were confident that both these things were worthless propositions, it wouldn’t worry you, would it?’
Are they both role-playing? ‘Oh yes. Canada is all about not being the United States. Being Peter Hitchens is all about not being Christopher Hitchens. Of course it is. Brothers compete. We’ve been fighting since we were children. We have private jokes and we mock each other. But just because it’s a performance, doesn’t mean the difference isn’t genuine.’
The difference may be at a deeper level, too. Christopher Hitchens has said that he doesn’t know why his parents ever married. ‘My mother had charisma, father was a conservative, stodgy guy. She was a liberal. I take after her, my brother wants to be my old man.’ I’m sure Peter Hitchens may have wanted to be like his father, but I don’t think he was desperate for his father’s approval. On the contrary, he seems to have spent a career searching for disapproval from everyone  – everyone, that is, except his mischief-making brother whom, I think, he secretly, perversely wants to please. Peter needs Christopher to define him just as much as he needs a world view to conform to, be it Trotskyite or Anglican.
He has a vulnerable side, then. He agitates out of fear of being bored. He is, I think, an essentially decent but pessimistic and frustrated man with low self-esteem and, contrary to his claims, a hatred of being mocked.
In the 1997 election, for instance, Tony Blair teased:  ‘We have been very generous in allowing you a question. Please try to contain yourself, otherwise, if you are going to be bad, we may not call you again.’ Hitchens hated that.
‘I want to get beyond the ghettos of left- or right-wing opinion,’ Hitchens says, leaning forward on his sofa. ‘Be it in the Guardian, or on the BBC or in the Express. That is why I have written this book. Half the time I just think left-wingers are not listening to me because I’m a reactionary. They think nothing I say needs to be taken account of. Yet we share a lot of concerns. I actually prefer left-wing people to right-wing. But they won’t have me. They don’t want to hear.’
Alas, poor Peter. Always where he doesn’t want to be. On Talk Radio instead of Radio 4, which he is convinced has ostracised him since the invitations to contribute dried up a year ago. At York rather than Oxford. In agreement with Tony Blair over the importance of the family, rather than at loggerheads with him. A poor man’s Paul Johnson rather than the real thing. And, at what should be his moment in the sun  – the moment when the Left is in power and he, as a right-winger, can savage them with the joy of an opposition polemicist  – he finds himself being smiled at and patronised and trotted out by Talk Radio and the Daily Express as a tame reactionary. Alas poor Peter. Nice chap, though.
This appeared in the summer of 1999. The Abolition of Britain became a best seller. In 2000, when the pornographer Richard Desmond bought the Express Group, Peter Hitchens resigned in protest and went to work for the Mail on Sunday. During the 2001 election he was a regular on Radio 4.

Luminous white hair, dandruff on black polo neck, florid complexion, thick lips cracked and bruised, fingers stained yellow from smoking… The 64-year-old Cornishman drinking Rioja and chain-smoking Marlboro Lights at the table by the window is either a broken-veined pervert or a literary genius. As it happens, DM Thomas has been described as both – female critics tend to favour the former theme, male critics the latter. Actually, what he looks most like is the survivor of a bomb blast, emerging blinking and disorientated from the rubble, white with plaster dust.
It’s a rainy afternoon in Truro. The clouds outside the pub are black. We’re on our second bottle and Thomas is hunched forward, avoiding eye contact, telling me about the topic that preoccupies him at the moment – his wife Denise, who died at the age of 53 last October. ‘She had kidney cancer that went to her vertebrae,’ he says in a subdued, mildly Cornish burr. ‘Most people try to avoid thinking about death because there is nothing you can do about it. But when it happens to someone close to you, you can’t escape it. You know that half of you is dying and will die. You feel sorry for her but also for yourself because everything she knows about you dies with her.’
Donald Michael Thomas, DM Thomas to his readers, Don to his friends, has a first in English from Oxford. He began using his initials as a pen name when a contemporary at the university, another Donald Thomas, beat him into print with a collection of poetry. DM Thomas went on to publish six collections of verse, 12 novels, an autobiography, translations of Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova, and, last year, a 550-page life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn which AN Wilson described as the most impressive literary biography he had ever read. But it is for his third novel, The White Hotel, that DM Thomas is best known. When it was published in 1981 it became a surprise bestseller, first in America, then in this country, where it was short-listed for the Booker Prize. When the author heard that Salman Rushdie had won that year, his response was commendably honest:’Fuck!’
The commercial success of The White Hotel was – and, as it has never been out of print, still is – something of a mystery to the publishing world. Though it is considered a ‘difficult’ novel, it has sold more than two million copies. And like most of Thomas’s fiction, it is about his obsessions with Sigmund Freud, the Holocaust, dreams, myths and the sex-death parallel – grand, over-arching themes which have earned the author a reputation as the dirty old man of literature. Does DM Thomas like himself? He sighs. ‘Yes and no. What does Hamlet say? Neither terribly good nor terribly bad. I sometimes have monstrous ideas, but I don’t think I’m a monster.’
Feminist critics of The White Hotel disagree with this analysis. They consider one chapter in particular to be the work of a monster. Lisa Erdman, the clairvoyant opera-singing heroine of the novel, becomes a patient of Freud in the Vienna of the Twenties. Together they explore her sexual fantasies and her sense of impending catastrophe. Twenty years later, Lisa is among the multitude at the massacre of Babi Yar, the ravine near Kiev where 200,000 Jews, gypsies and Slavs were machine-gunned by the Nazis. The careful attention Freud pays to Lisa as an individual in the first half of the book is contrasted shockingly with the way the Nazis dehumanise her in the second. She ends her life on a pile of naked corpses as a soldier uses a bayonet to simulate sex with her.
Feminist critics have accused Thomas of fantasising about being that soldier. ‘People are afraid of what Freud had to say about the inner-self and sexuality,’ Thomas says when I put this to him. ‘They would rather explore things on sociological and political terms than confront their own demons. That scene was an exploration of the good and evil in every human consciousness. I have no desire to put a bayonet in a woman’s vagina. But I do want to try and understand the destructive and sadistic impulse that makes some other men want to.’
The White Hotel is a metaphorical place where all that is good and beautiful in the world coexists with all that is evil and brutal. In her recurring dream about it, Lisa longs to go there yet dreads it as well. ‘I’m willing to accept that I am a White Hotel,’ Thomas says. ‘We all are, if we are honest. Even Freud admitted he had good and evil impulses. But most of us can leave those impulses under the surface. I have never beaten or ill-treated a woman in my life, but I accept the world of fantasy where these things can happen. And perhaps it’s the people who don’t explore these impulses as an abstraction who are the most likely to act upon them in real life.’
DM Thomas says he has always tried to be faithful to the truth in his writing, but in his private life, and that of his family, he admits he has engaged in ‘every colour of lie from white to grey to black’. As we shall see, his amatory career has been extraordinarily complex and he has been, at best, evasive about it. But the death of his wife has taught him that such deception is pointless. ‘Oh, what does it matter any more?’ he sighs. ‘Let’s get drunk. Ask me anything. I’ll try and be honest.’
And honest he is: about sex, drugs and infidelity. But such is his suicidal frankness and his clear vulnerability that you feel protective towards him. When he stubs a cigarette out, he taps it against the ashtray about 15 times in rapid succession.  Rat-tat-tat-tat. It is a compulsive gesture, agitated, wounded. He does this now and immediately lights another cigarette. He managed to stop smoking five years ago, he says, but the stress of watching his wife die made him start again. She was a smoker, too, and towards the end he would have to guide her hand to the ashtray.
Lately he says he has found it very easy to cry.  Although he has written a few poems, and has recently been commissioned to write a novella, he has had neither the energy nor the inclination to write fiction. ‘It’s been a struggle just surviving. I wrote a few poems about Denise tending the garden when she knew she wouldn’t complete it. They were a feeble attempt to pay tribute to someone who wasn’t known to the world at large.’
In the mid-Eighties Thomas suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to read or write for a year. He still suffers periodic bouts of depression. ‘It feels like a terminal illness, too,’ he explains. ‘It is almost as powerful as travelling with your wife on her road to death. I feel terrible for saying that – but in depression your life is totally without meaning.  Chaotic. Every moment is enormously painful. There are no parameters and you are convinced that every day until your death you are going to be miserable. I didn’t actively seek death. I lacked the energy to commit suicide. But I certainly felt it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t wake up.’
Living a life of deception may have contributed to his breakdown. At one stage he would divide his time between his first wife Maureen, with whom he had two children (Caitlin and Sean), and his second wife Denise, with whom he had one (Ross). Maureen and he grew up in the same tin-mining community near Redruth in Cornwall. They met while he was home on leave during his National Service and married in 1958, when he was 23 years old and still a student at Oxford. ‘At the time in Methodist Cornwall if you slept with someone, you married them,’ he says. ‘But I wasn’t mature enough for marriage and I’m sorry I put her through so much. Then again, I don’t really regret it because children came out of it – and I wouldn’t want to wish them away. Maureen and I both went through a long period of uneasy, unsatisfactory compromise, in which she knew about my mistress. To her infinite credit she said in her late forties: “I’ve had enough of this, I’m leaving.” We are still on friendly terms. When she remarried I felt relief. Then panic.’
After graduating in 1958, Thomas become a schoolteacher and then, in 1964, a lecturer at Hereford College of Education. He remained there until 1978, when it closed and he was made redundant. Instead of looking for another teaching post he decided to try and earn a living writing fiction. He met Denise, an engineer’s daughter, when she joined Hereford College as a student teacher in 1966.
‘Denise and I had a very unconventional marriage. It was all to do with a piece of paper. She wanted a child. She taught at a church school and in those days, the Seventies, it would have been a scandal to be a single mother. We decided to marry so that she could have a child and keep her job. It would be treated as a formal arrangement and, then, as soon as we could – three years is the minimum – we’d get a divorce.’
Ten years and one divorce from Denise later, he was back with her. The couple moved to Cornwall and began living together. When they discovered that Denise had cancer they went to see their solicitor to check what provisions the original divorce settlement had made for their son. ‘We were told that the divorce had never gone through. We had the decree nisi but someone at Hereford Crown Court had neglected to issue the decree absolute. We were unexpectedly still married after 24 years. We were flabbergasted. And glad. It was like fate had stepped in. Even Thomas Hardy wouldn’t have got away with such an improbable twist.’
Thomas says he has been haunted all his life by Freud, whose writing style he consciously imitated. He also seems to have taken inspiration from Freud’s promiscuity. In his autobiography, Memories and Hallucinations (1988), Thomas alludes to affairs he had during both marriages, as well as to his penchant for seducing big-thighed students. Did he suspect he would be an unfaithful husband right from the day he married? ‘No. I drifted into it. It was like I was in a dream state. I wanted to be loyal but I did feel, selfishly, that if I wanted to be a writer I would need more experience of life. But my being unfaithful was a contradiction because though I wanted self-fulfilment I also felt a root loyalty to look after my family.’
When in turn his mistress found out he was being unfaithful, she seems to have taken it in her stride. ‘I think Denise knew no one else would be a real threat to her. She led her own life and we understood each other.’ Thomas doesn’t think that his literary fame gives him a feeling of empowerment, a sense that normal moral codes don’t apply to him because he is an artist. ‘No. I sinned and accepted that I was a sinner.’
So much for his private life, in his professional life he has been labelled a devilish misogynist (by the Guardian). And one Observer reviewer has compared him to ‘some raddled seducer, tweaking his passive conquest with absent-minded fingers’. He plays up to the image to an extent. For a few years he ran an erotic writing course from his home – until the Modern Review sent a female journalist on it, under cover, to see if he would try and seduce her. She claims he did. He says he didn’t.
DM Thomas denies the misogyny charge. On the contrary, he says, he feels at home in a feminine psyche. When I ask if he is Lisa in The White Hotel in the same way that Flaubert is Madame Bovary he answers: ‘Yes, although I didn’t realise it at the time. It’s great fun writing as a woman because it is the unknown. It didn’t occur to me until years after I had written The White Hotel that the Don Giovanni poem at the beginning is a representation of my own turbulent sexuality. The extreme puzzlement, wonder and frustrated longing I felt as an adolescent. I think it is easier for men to write about women than for women to write about men because we’ve all been inside a woman – our mothers.’
Thomas recognises that he probably went through an androgynous phase. ‘Around puberty I became something of a hermaphrodite. I have a sister who is ten years older than me and I would wear her clothes sometimes. It felt liberating because I couldn’t get close to real girls at that age and yet I had a strong sexual instinct to turn myself into one. I’m sure my sister played a vital role in fostering my weird imagination.’
Don Thomas and his sister had a peripatetic childhood. Their grandfather was a carpenter who worked in the copper and tin mines around Redruth. Their father, Harold, would have done the same had the mines not been closed after the First World War. Instead, he travelled to California to construct film sets at 20th Century Fox, only to return to Cornwall during the Depression. When Thomas’s sister married an Australian serviceman and moved to Melbourne in 1949, he and the rest of the family followed. Thomas, his father and mother, lived there for two years before returning again to Cornwall.
‘I never got on with my brother-in-law,’ Thomas reflects. ‘I was in my early teens when we moved to Australia, and maybe there was some Oedipal jealousy there. I never went through a homosexual phase – although I did sleep with my father a lot from the age of seven to 14, because I was afraid of ghosts. My mother would be turfed out of bed. I definitely had Oedipal fantasies about her.’ When his father died in 1960 Donald took comfort by sleeping the night in the same bed as Maureen his wife and Amy his mother. When his mother died 15 years later it triggered an obsession with death, which was to become a recurring theme of his writing.
Thomas has always wanted to revisit the place where his family lived in California. But because a clairvoyant told him 20 years ago that he would die there, he has never dared go. Now that Robert Geisler and John Roberdeau, the producers of ‘The Thin Red Line’, are making The White Hotel into a film, he might have to. There have been several unsuccessful attempts in the past to bring the novel to the big screen. First DM Thomas wrote a screenplay, then two more screenwriters tried and failed before Dennis Potter had a go, which is the version being used.
At one stage David Lynch wanted to direct it. ‘Lynch thought the opera singer was too highbrow and so should be a trapeze artist instead. He also thought that his then girlfriend Isabella Rossellini should play the role. When she left him he went off the idea. I suppose because of my parents’ connection with Hollywood I shall enjoy going there,’ Thomas reflects.  ‘But I feel superstitious about dying there. The stress might bring on a heart attack at the premire. Actually, that might not be such a bad way to go. It would be terrifying – but what publicity for a film about clairvoyance!’
We leave the pub and head across Truro, up a hill to the converted coach house where Thomas has lived for the past 12 years. Currently in residence is Sean, Thomas’s 35-year-old son from his first marriage, a former heroin addict whose taste for S&M led to a rape charge (of which he was acquitted), in 1988. He is also a published novelist. We greet him briefly and then head upstairs to the study. The walls are lined with shelves carrying various editions of DM Thomas’s many books, including more than 20 translations of The White Hotel. The computer is switched on. There is a sculpture of a unicorn with a broken horn, a photograph of Denise and, above his desk, a painting of Akhmatova, the Russian poetess whom he says is his muse. Thomas lights up another cigarette and, shrouded in smoke, his eyebrow arched, he looks demonic. I ask him whether he has ever been tempted to experiment with drugs. He has had the odd joint, he says, but nothing stronger. ‘I know I have an addictive personality so I don’t want to risk heroin. But part of me would like to try it just once. If I knew I was going to die, I would try it.’
Perhaps when he goes to California? We are back on the subject of death. He is beginning to feel old. His body aches from sciatica. He has another drag from the cigarette he holds between blotchy fingers and, as he starts the process of stubbing it out 15 times, he tells me he has a religious consciousness but finds it difficult to accept the notion of an afterlife. ‘I hope there is one. I fear there isn’t. Denise and I talked about it when she was in the hospice and I tried to be more optimistic than I felt. When someone is desperate you put the best gloss on things.’
How should an artist die? Thomas tells me he once experienced the death of a novelist. William Golding used to live near Truro and the night before he died he had a party. ‘I stayed after the other guests left and his daughter brought out his two best bottles of wine. This upset William a bit and there was a certain tension. But then he suddenly told her he loved her. He looked out of the window and remarked upon how much he enjoyed living in this house. He squeezed his wife’s hand affectionately. I said goodnight, drove back seeing double, and he died of a heart attack half an hour later. That was a good way to go.’
Like William Golding, DM Thomas will probably be remembered for just one novel. He is philosophical about it. ‘Some writers can do it again and again and it’s wonderful. Others have to resign themselves to never producing anything as good again. At least I did it once. I didn’t get angst-ridden when later novels weren’t as commercially successful. The White Hotel is the novel with which I am most satisfied. I was almost in a dream state when I wrote it. It flowed automatically and needed little revision. It was the book where all my themes and obsessions found their absolute objective correlative.’
The phone rings and the answering machine clicks on. A young woman’s voice, well-spoken. ‘Hi, my darling. I’m at home. Call me when you get in. Bye, darling.’
The author and I exchange a glance.
‘Oh my God,’ DM Thomas says from behind a blue veil of smoke. ‘An unexpected intrusion of reality.’
Who was she?
‘A friend of mine. Yes. A friend.’ Silence. ‘Life has to go on.’ Silence. ‘Do you want to ask more about her?’
No. That’s all right.

It’s like wading across a river of warm, bubbling molasses, interviewing Sir David Frost. The current is tugging, part of you wants to drift with it, another part fears you might drown. The stuff of anxiety dreams, in other words.
Sir David is slouched on a sofa in his Kensington office, chewing on a fat Bolivar cigar and looking a bit spivvy in blazer, monogrammed gold cuff links and tasselled loafers. It’s a sticky June afternoon and shafts of sunlight are illuminating the wreaths of cigar smoke. Behind them, his skin looks grey. He has pouches under his eyes; thick square glasses; hangdog cheeks. He’s only just turned 60 – had a big, big party in April, with Prince Andrew, Stephen Fry and Andrew Lloyd Webber among the guests – but he probably wouldn’t get challenged if he asked for an OAP’s fare on a bus.
The broadcaster’s manner is as insouciant and amiable as you’d expect – but I’m trying hard, for reasons of objectivity, not to like him too much. After all, you have to be suspicious of someone who flatters with such apparent lack of guile and shame; who is so unflappable he appears not to have a functioning nervous system; who can begin his career satirising the patrician Establishment and glide unblushingly towards its close with a knighthood, a duke for a father-in-law and a day job presenting Through the Keyhole. But Sir David’s powers of seduction are preternatural. From the first matey, ‘Hello, Nigel, hello, come in, come in, super to meet you, great,’ the man has been enveloping me, literally and metaphorically, in his oleaginous charm. He hasn’t seemed insincere necessarily, just on autopilot, turning me into a guest on Breakfast with Frost, putting me at my ease. I’m pretty sure he extends an arm around my shoulder at one point. He definitely offers me a cigar. And though I don’t normally smoke, I find myself clipping the end off one and lighting it up. Such is the man’s voodoo.
We’re talking about his interviewing technique, the laid-back approach. A couple of years ago a Sunday Telegraph survey revealed that Sir David – together with Jimmy Young – is the inquisitor politicians fear and revere most. They know where they stand with the combative Jeremy Paxman and John Humphrys but with Frost they are made to feel they’re just having an off-the-record chat with a friend- he lulls them into a false sense of security and then bowls them a googly. In 1994, for example, Jeremy Hanley, the then Conservative Party chairman, was coaxed by Frost into dismissing a riot at a boxing match as mere ‘exuberance’ – in contradiction to the government’s get-tough policy on hooliganism – which ultimately cost Hanley his job.
In 1987 Neil Kinnock had dropped his guard when Frost asked if, as a unilateralist, he would be prepared to send ‘our boys’ into battle against an army equipped with short-range tactical nuclear weapons. Kinnock thought not, on the whole, because we could always put up resistance on the home front. The press seized on this as Kinnock calling for a latterday Dad’s Army. ‘That comment was dynamite,’ Frost recalls in his distinctively slurred and undulating register. ‘If a politician feels he is in a hostile and humourless environment, he goes on to the back foot and plays for time, never giving the interviewer an opening. But if you can make him feel relaxed, and you can ask a tough question in a civilised way, you get a more revealing answer. The late John Smith once told me I have a way of asking beguiling questions with potentially lethal consequences.’ Frost grins toothily. ‘I think I’d be happy to have that on my tombstone.’
Sir David Frost has interviewed the last six American presidents as well as the last half-dozen prime ministers. It’s as good a measure as any of his extraordinary longevity in the fickle world of television. On the walls around us are dozens of photographs of Frost through the ages: a ferrety young Frost with a young Prince Charles; a middle-aged, sideburned Frost with Richard Nixon; Frost as grey-haired elder statesman walking between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair across a lawn. The photographs remind you that Frost is the Widmerpool of broadcasting. He’s been everywhere, knows everyone, keeps on turning up and insinuating himself into the lives of the rich and powerful.
At the height of his fame in the Sixties, when a poll revealed he was one of the three best known people in Britain, alongside the Queen and Harold Wilson, David Frost enjoyed the same reputation for aggressive and fearless interrogation as Jeremy Paxman does today. He eviscerated Rupert Murdoch on the subject of pornography in an interview so hostile it is said to have contributed to the media tycoon’s decision not to live in this country. Frost also stood his ground against the formidable debating skills of Enoch Powell in an interview on the subject of racism. In 1967 he inspired the phrase ‘trial by television’ when he savaged Emil Savundra, the insurance swindler, shortly before he was convicted of fraud.
It must be galling, then, for Frost to find himself labelled these days as a pushover who has ‘gone soft’ and who isn’t taken seriously any more because he is far too chummy, socially, with the politicians he interviews. He doesn’t see it that way, of course. It is more a matter of his interviewing technique having developed over the years into something more subtle.  ‘With Savundra I really was angry, though,’ he drawls. ‘Because at the end of the programme he just sat back and said he had no legal or moral responsibility. So instead of waiting for the usual silhouette shot of the two of us during the closing credits, I just walked out. I thought, “I’m buggered if I’m going to stay with him, it would be completely false.”‘
I ask if there was a day when Sir David woke up and realised he had lost his youthful anger. ‘Anger? Well, I started out with That Was The Week That Was and then moved into interviewing. And we were not so much angry young men as exasperated young men. From Suez onwards. Exasperated with the ruling classes saying they were older and wiser than us. The attitude at the time was that all politicians do what they do for reasons of self-sacrifice and public service, rather than ambition or lust for power. And clearly this was nonsense. They needed to be scrutinised. That’s why TW3 touched a nerve. I don’t know whether it was the times that made TW3 or TW3 that made the times but the programme was absolutely at the heart of the social and political changes that went on in Sixties Britain. When Profumo resigned, it was game set and match to the satirists. But in terms of zeal for reform I don’t feel much different today from what I did then.’
David Paradine Frost has two sisters but, because they were born 14 and 16 years before him, he was raised, more or less, as an only child. He went to Gillingham and Wellingborough grammar schools before going up to Cambridge in 1958. He describes his background as lower middle class, his childhood as peripatetic. (His father, the Reverend WJ Paradine Frost, who died in 1968, was a Methodist minister who moved from a parish in Kent, where David was born, to one in Northamptonshire, where he spent his late teens.) Frost took his first job in television straight after graduating and, for two decades, he lived the life of a playboy. He was engaged twice – to the singer and actress Diahann Carroll and the American model Karen Graham, both of whom broke off the engagements.
In 1981 Frost married Peter Sellers’s widow, Lynne Frederick, only to divorce after 18 months. He finally found happiness when, in 1983, he married Lady Carina Fitzalan-Howard, daughter of the (Roman Catholic) Duke of Norfolk. The couple have three sons, Miles, 15, Wilfred, 13, and George, 12. The eldest goes to Eton (where the others will follow).The youngest had Diana, Princess of Wales, as a godmother. With his acceptance of a knighthood from John Major in 1993, Frost’s metamorphosis into an Establishment poodle was apparently complete. Yet as a scornful young satirist his favourite targets were the aristocrats who ran the Establishment. And it is tempting to think that the 20-year-old Frost would regard the 60-year-old Frost as a fit subject for mockery.
‘It’s an amusing point. The.’ Pause. ‘I think, um, I don’t think there really is an Establishment now. So I don’t really think I’ve joined it. I just don’t think it exists any more. I would also say that class doesn’t matter any more either, except perhaps for the placement at a hunt ball. But, oddly, I’ve been having second thoughts about this because of my involvement in the Nick Leeson film.’
This was going to be my next question but Sir David, clearly worried that half the time allotted for this interview has already elapsed without the subject of the film being raised, has jumped the gun. Rogue Trader, starring Ewan McGregor and produced by Sir David Frost, goes on general release this week. Its subject, Nick Leeson, goes on general release tomorrow.
It is a nerve-jangling film which portrays Leeson sympathetically – more a hubristic hero in a Greek tragedy than a pathological liar who caused the collapse of Barings bank in 1995. Sir David realised the film potential of Leeson’s story when he secured a world exclusive by interviewing him in a Frankfurt prison during Leeson’s ultimately unsuccessful fight against extradition to Singapore. Sir David put in the calls to the lawyers himself when he realised that a court ruling which allowed Edward Whitley, the co-writer of Leeson’s autobiography, access to Leeson could also be applied to television interviewers. Such opportunism shows that Frost’s journalistic instincts, and fixing skills, are still mercurial. (He arranged the only interview with the late Shah of Iran with similar good timing, as well as securing the first post-Watergate interview with Richard Nixon, when all the American networks were still dithering.)
‘Nick’s story taught me that class is still an issue in the City,’ reflects Sir David, talking with such alarming surges of volume and emphasis he sounds like he’s doing a crude impersonation of, well, himself. ‘I’m convinced that if he had been Nicholas Fotheringay-Leeson he would have been extradited to the UK and would, as a white-collar criminal, have served a two-year sentence in the Ernest Saunders Memorial Suite at Ford Open Prison. Instead, he was sentenced to six years in one of the toughest jails in the world. His wife divorced him. And he was diagnosed with cancer. He’s had an operation to remove his colon and part of his lower intestine and now he has a 70 per cent chance of surviving five years. If he had been back here, the cancer may have been diagnosed sooner.’
Sir David says he will visit Leeson when he is released – if Leeson wants visitors – and he hopes that Leeson will find the film cathartic rather than upsetting. When I ask if Leeson will profit financially from the film Frost gathers his thoughts, as though revving up on the starting block. ‘That, yes, you know, I mean… ‘He stubs out his cigar and bites the end off another one. ‘There’s no doubt… ‘ He strikes a long match and puffs on the cigar. ‘Leeson didn’t steal any money. And he still hasn’t paid his legal bills. So he gets. Um. There was a small option originally, after the interview, a fee for the first day of principal photography and then a percentage, less than five per cent, which will go straight to paying his legal fees. If the film makes a profit. Which only one in ten do.’
Like Leeson, Frost had a frugal upbringing and then, through his determination and business acumen he accumulated a fortune. (Frost has been described as a one-man conglomerate because not only was he the joint founder of LWT and TV-am, but also, as chairman of David Paradine Ltd, he has produced eight films, published numerous books and marketed himself as lecturer and host.) Unlike Leeson, Frost hasn’t necessarily felt comfortable with his wealth. According to Lord Wyatt’s posthumously published journals, Frost feels guilty about money and sees himself as a Wilsonian socialist. Can this be true?
‘Ah, yes, well, Woodrow Wyatt thought that because of something I said in an interview with Mrs Thatcher. I was saying that the National Health Service would be better if there was no private medicine, and she countered by saying, “But Mr Frost, you use private medicine!” I don’t know how she knew, or whether she was just guessing, but I then said, “Yes, and I feel guilty about it.”‘ Frost spreads his arms out along the back of the sofa and sinks deeper into its seat. ‘When you grow up in a frugal environment anything above frugal is a treat. Once you’ve got enough it doesn’t matter any more. How much is enough? That is the question. Not quite enough is agony. I rather like Roald Dahl’s idea that luxury is being able to wear a new shirt every day, before it’s been laundered, when it still has that silky quality.’
When I ask whether he ever looks at his own fame, wealth and achievements and wonders what it’s all for, in the end, given that you can’t take it with you and no one gets out alive, he just laughs. ‘I think I’m too much of a boring old Pollyanna for that. The church is half-full rather than half-empty. Yes, living is fatal. But I mean [sigh], I’ve been lucky. Incredibly lucky. Hardly any hiccups in my life and I feel grateful. And I have a Pollyanna-ish faith that my good luck will continue.’
Though he describes his mother, Mona, who died in 1991, as the more extrovert of his parents, it was his father who influenced him most. His nervelessness in front of the cameras he attributes to watching his father in the pulpit, his much parodied speech pattern to his father’s clear diction. There was no alcohol or swearing in the parental home, no Sunday newspapers or television, and his father, whom he describes as having had a quiet strength and wisdom, taught him that ‘the only gospel some men will read is the gospel according to you’. He also inherited a modicum of his father’s faith.
‘Yes, yes. My father would have liked me to become a minister but I didn’t really consider it, although I did become a lay preacher on the local Methodist circuit for a while in 1958. I don’t know how life after death works but I do feel the spirit lives on in some way. And I do believe you can plug into that force through meditation and prayer. That’s not to say I haven’t questioned my faith. I remember asking Billy Graham, “If your God is a God of love, surely he must let everyone into heaven in the end?” And Billy smiled and said, “God doesn’t have to do anything if he’s God.”‘
It is difficult to gauge whether there is any real depth to David Frost because, for all his affability and apparent candour, he precludes intimacy and has a tendency to deflect questions about his own beliefs and values by giving you examples drawn from other people’s lives, namely those of the countless celebrities he has interviewed over the years. It is almost as if he exists through his relationships with his guests or, rather, that he only really exists when he is on television. That for him is real life. It has often been noted of Frost that away from the cameras there is an eerie insubstantiality to him.
One guest on Frost’s show described to me how he got a strange sense that Frost wasn’t really in control, that he was just surfing on a giant wave that could break at any moment. You get that impression about him even when he isn’t on air. Perhaps it is just that, as the greatest living practitioner of the ephemeral and trivialising medium of television, everyone assumes there must be something vapid and shallow about Frost himself – and this assumption colours your perception when you meet him.
For all that, Frost seems benign. And no fool. Nor do I think he’s an arrogant man – pretty pleased with himself, a panjandrum possibly, but not arrogant. He is always relaxed, he says, is rarely ill and never suffers from jet-lag. He sleeps well at night – needing just six hours – and you suspect he is not much of a one for long dark nights of the soul. Certainly there was no mid-life crisis. ‘No, I had a fantastic party in California for my 40th birthday. Borrowed someone’s private ballroom and shared it with Rod Stewart who was getting married that day to Alana. We shared a cake, and there was no time for deep or dire thoughts.’
It would seem, then, that no time for deep and dire thoughts would make as good an epitaph for him as John Smith’s comment. That’s not to imply he doesn’t have a sentimental side. Late fatherhood, he says, changed his life, made him less selfish and made him appreciate that other people’s happiness can matter more than his own. But Frost has no political allegiance, and hasn’t voted since he was first allowed to as a young man.  And, really, you have to wonder whether he has ever been that interested in anything other than his own career.
It is tempting to assume that people who are unctuous and ingratiating must be insecure and desperate for approval. But I don’t think this applies in Sir David’s case. He is steeped to the gills in self-belief and just wants to give other people the opportunity – and pleasure – of liking him as much as he likes himself. One person upon whom Frost’s charms apparently failed to work was Peter Cook. The two were in the Cambridge Footlights together and contemporaries of theirs characterise their relationship as being that of Boswell to Johnson. Cook oozed brilliance and talent and let it all go to waste. Frost, with no obvious gifts apart from an ability to be in the right place at the right time, doggedly followed Cook around, sucking up to him and basking in his reflected glory before eventually usurping him.
At Peter Cook’s memorial service in 1995, Stephen Fry recalled an occasion when Frost rang Cook to invite him to dinner with Prince Andrew and his then fiancée Sarah Ferguson: ‘Big fans… Be super if you could make it. Wednesday the 12th.’ ‘Hang on, I’ll check my diary,’ said Cook, riffling through the pages. ‘Oh dear, I find I’m watching television that night.’ Alan Bennett recalled an even more withering comment. ‘The only thing that Peter ever regretted was saving David Frost from drowning.’
When I ask Frost what he thinks provoked the Peter Cook jibes he rolls cigar smoke around his mouth before answering wheezily, ‘The, I think, um. That great joke about regretting saving me from drowning I think was actually Alan Bennett’s joke. Bennett the great scriptwriter. When he said it at the memorial service I laughed along with everyone else. But it wouldn’t have come from Peter.’
Sir David has someone else waiting to see him in reception. ‘Well, Nigel, I could carry on gossiping all day. I really enjoy a good conversation. And it has been great to see you. But…’ I stub out my cigar, shake his hand and emerge blinking in the London sunshine, several miles downriver from where I started.

There are many reasons to feel queasy at the prospect of interviewing Geoffrey Boycott – but the most obvious are that he’s rude, obnoxious and, when he’s in a good mood, charmless. Such a pity he has to be morbidly fascinating as well. Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I approach Wakefield station. The clouds over the taxi rank are inky black. Boycott has insisted on being interviewed by a man. I’m a Yorkshireman as well, but this doesn’t necessarily mean I’m obsessed with cricket or proud that Boycott is the county mascot. As it happens, I do recall queueing for half an hour to get Geoffrey Boycott’s autograph (and Chris Old’s) when I was 12. And I did get goosebumps watching him score his 100th first-class century against Australia at Headingley in 1977. But that doesn’t mean anything. Call it denial if you like but I do not believe, as many people seem to, that this boorish, pantomime northerner is the archetypal Yorkshireman.
The conference hotel where we are to meet is a few miles from Boycott’s house. According to one chambermaid, this is where Boycott ‘brings his womenfolk’ (but she may have been pulling my leg). The demagogue himself arrives late – dressed in a pastel-blue jacket, fawn slacks and pale slip-on shoes which may well be snakeskin. He applies some Lipsyl and is soon telling the photographer to stop ‘arsing about’ and get on with it.  I cross myself and prepare for the interview that is to follow. At least I’ve got a panic button I can press if things get too ghastly. I can mention Margaret Moore, Boycott’s former girlfriend. If I do this, Boycott will walk out – or so I’ve been warned in a fax from his publicist. The 58-year-old former England batsman allegedly beat Moore up in an Antibes hotel room in 1996. In January last year a French court found him guilty of the charge, fined him £5,300 and gave him a three-month suspended sentence. He didn’t turn up for the trial, though he did deny the charge, adamantly. Indeed, he launched a bizarre charm offensive intended to show he wasn’t an aggressive man – then rather undermined the thing by losing his temper and saying to one reporter: ‘Shut oop, this is my press conference, not yours.’ Boycott appealed, attended the second trial last October, complained it was ‘all in bloody French’, and lost again.
I sit down on a low sofa. Boycott orders tea with honey and sits opposite me in a high, upright chair – barrel-chested, stiff-backed with his jacket buttons done up, looking down his nose. He has a mobile face: eyebrows that arch and dip; a recurring blink; a mouth so lopsided it’s as if he’s chewing his left cheek. He has mad, starey eyes, the sort you imagine Rasputin must have had. They are a cold, cobalt blue (but this is not, contrary to folklore, because he wears coloured contact lenses). There are no awkward silences when Boycott is on the subject of cricket. He rarely draws breath and when he runs out of things to say he just repeats himself. Loudly. Flat-voweledly. With a frankness that is exciting and dangerous. I find myself wondering if there is an element of self-parody to his manner. Mistake. ‘I don’t know what that means. Self-parody. I don’t have your words.’ I explain. ‘What are you going on about? I’m just being myself. I haven’t changed for anyone. I only know about creakit. I love it. Self-parody.’
Actually, he’s not as intimidating as you expect him to be. Over the next two and a half hours he reveals himself to be an animated storyteller and we have, to my surprise, a few laughs. But for Boycott there is little difference between a conversation and a contre-temps. And so we also have – again to my surprise – two full-blown arguments. These help me appreciate Boycott’s genius for making enemies. His worst feuds have been with his fellow Yorkshiremen, notably Fred Trueman, Brian Close and Ray Illingworth.  ‘I suppose it’s because Yorkshiremen are strong-minded and individualistic,’ Boycott says when I ask why this is.
Boycott is a private man, self-contained to the point of introversion. Before he appeared on In the Psychiatrist’s Chair in 1987 he told Dr Anthony Clare, ‘You’ll get nowt from me, Mister.’ After the programme, a gibbering Dr Clare said he had had to revise his opinion that no man is an island. I suspect, for all his protestations to the contrary, Boycott simply doesn’t care if he rubs people up the wrong way. He doesn’t crave approval. And surely even he would be able to curb his pathological rudeness if he did. It is clear, too, that he hates having to woo the media. And that he only attempts to because he loves making money. His main motive for trying so hard to clear his name last year was, I bet, that he wanted the BBC to renew his lucrative contract as a commentator. It didn’t.  (And Channel 4, which is taking over Test coverage this summer, has boycotted him too.)
This week, Boycott is trying to charm the media again because he has something to sell, a book on cricket called… Geoffrey Boycott on Cricket . In it he gives his version of the various spats he has been involved in over the years. With a characteristic lack of pretension, he tells me about his writing process: he records his thoughts on to tapes which he gives to his ghost writer, John Callaghan, ‘to be tarted up’. Geoffrey Boycott on Cricket is a self-serving book, of course, and could be subtitled ‘Everyone Else Is To Blame’. But it is also entertaining, especially in his account of the internecine warfare that followed his sacking from Yorkshire County Cricket Club in 1983. Does it occur to him that his own bloody-mindedness is the common denominator in all the feuds he writes about?
‘Of course it is me. It’s my character. But it’s their character, too. Take Fred Trueman. He started it. He was a hero of mine. As a cricketer he still is today. But as a person he went down in my estimation because when the club decided to dispense with my services he slagged me off. He couldn’t even bring himself to say I were a good player. He said, “If I get back on the committee I still won’t give Boycott a contract.” Well that was tantamount to saying, “Fuck you, then.” I’ve never spoken ill of Fred. He caused his own downfall, not me. He had to belittle me. I was hurt. He didn’t have to say I couldn’t bat. It was dirty tactics, that. But he didn’t convince the Yorkshire members. You can’t patronise them. They can think for themselves.’
Throughout his Test and county career Boycott has been criticised for being a slow, blocking and, because of all the people he’s run out, selfish batsman. Can’t he see there was some truth in this caricature? ‘Was Trueman trying to say that all those hundreds I got were just for me? Me, slow? Look in the record books.  Some innings I was slow but others…’ He leans forward and fixes me with his beady blue eyes. ‘Who got the fastest ever Gillette Cup innings? Eh? In’t final. Me. 1963. Still the biggest today. On an uncovered pitch. Wet. I could go through it…’ He does, his batting averages over his 25-year county and Test career, chapter and verse from Wisden. My hand hovers over the Margaret Moore button.
He’s a great one for facts and figures, our Geoffrey. He usually carries a bag around with him full of ‘papers’ – phone records, dates, lawyers’ letters – ammunition with which to settle arguments. A recurring theme of his book is that nearly everyone who has attacked him over the years has been motivated by financial greed. ‘We all knew Botham’s hand was on his wallet rather than his heart,’ he writes about Ian Botham’s decision to pull out of Boycott’s ill-fated ‘rebel tour’ of South Africa at the height of apartheid in 1982. ‘All he could see were the pound signs,’ Boycott writes in reference to Trueman’s offer a couple of years ago to end their feud and host a series of cricket lunches together. ‘Now with his eyes on the pound-note signs with regard to his book sales and newspaper serialisation…’ he writes of Henry Blofeld, the commentator who refused to sign a testimony last year to the effect that his former colleague, Boycott, did not have a violent nature. (Boycott believes Blofeld only refused because he wanted a controversial story to put in his autobiography.) Given that Boycott, a millionaire several times over, is notoriously stingy – former umpire Dickie Bird has a number of anecdotes on the subject – it seems reasonable to assume that he is judging everyone else by his own standards.
‘Assume? But I didn’t have a row with Botham about the South Africa tour. He decided to pull out because he got two [other] contracts for money. I don’t assume. It was a fact. Botham said that at the meeting. I have recorded everything that went on. How can I assume with Trueman when it’s a fact? I’ve got the papers. It’s you that’s wrong. Why do you assume? The lawyer has seen the papers. You can ring him up.’ He spells out the lawyer’s name for me before resuming his Pinteresque monologue. ‘Fred Trueman only wanted to work with me for the money. Fact. With Blofeld it was a fact that the Daily Mail only ran the extract about me. Nothing else in his book was interesting enough for them to pay for. I have the papers. I have it in black and white.  “Fred’s going to contact you.” I haven’t fucking spoken to him in ten years and he’s been slagging me off and now he wants the money. Fifty grand. I don’t know why you assume. I have the papers. I have the papers.  Believe me, I have the papers.’
It is telling that, when Boycott describes his old feuds, he slips into the present tense. He does it when he talks about his batting, too, even though he retired 13 years ago. I have a horrible feeling that I may have started a fresh feud by quoting Dickie Bird to him.
‘I am a wealthy man,’ Boycott says. ‘I think I’m far wealthier than any of those you mention. Very few people know me. Dickie doesn’t know me. He lives two miles away but he’s been to my house once. Once. I’m not that close to him. I’m a very private person. Things become folklore, legend, myth.’
So let’s set the record straight, then. He’d describe himself as a generous man, would he? ‘I don’t describe myself at all.’ I suppose that’s why he’s so fascinating to psychiatrists. ‘I don’t know why. I’m not so bothered about myself. Not fussed. Not interested. I get on with my life. Good times you enjoy. Bad times you can either crawl away and die or pick yourself up and get on with it.’ Bad times being when exactly? ‘I used to get really down when I got a nought. But you can’t mope about. You have to show character.’
According to folklore, legend, myth, Boycott used to put a towel over his head and cry whenever he got a duck. He cried inconsolably when he had to give up football because he needed glasses – he played for Leeds United under-18s. Does he think he’s attuned to his finer feelings, then? Does he find it easy to cry? ‘No, not easy. But if I did I wouldn’t show it. And I wouldn’t tell you. It’s a bit like a bowler. If he got me worried, I wouldn’t show it. If I felt depressed, I wouldn’t ignore it, I’d try and solve it. Christ, I get cross with people like anyone else. People who won’t pay up. People who do you a bad turn. Say one thing and do the bloody opposite. I don’t sit in a corner and weep and moan. I think there is a weakness in people who aren’t straight and fair. You need to get everything in writing because for every eight people that is good there are two buggers out there who are bad. I expect people to be straighter than they are.’ So he sees himself as a man of honour? ‘No, I’m not bloody perfect. But I like to think I’m pretty straight. I’ve never done bad things to people.  Haven’t stolen money or kicked anyone in the balls. I’ve just made judgements. Nothing I’m ashamed of.’
For all his lack of humility, there is an endearing naivety and vulnerability to Boycott. He seems genuinely baffled by his unpopularity. Does he have a persecution complex? ‘I don’t have your words but there is a saying in Yorkshire that you can’t do right for doing wrong. But I don’t have a complex. I don’t think I’m always right – even in my creakit commentary. Most times I keep my mouth shut – but you get to the stage where you’re sick of being pilloried. Blofeld did his book in the Mail and the only bit they ran were about me. Me!’
Boycott seems such a joyless man. Humourless. A real misery. Does he ever have fun? Is he happy? The cricketer exhales and shakes his head. ‘What’s contentment? What’s happiness? I’m living my life. I’m getting on. I’m picking myself up. I’m working in a game I love. Creakit.’ Life for Boycott is analogous to cricket in every particular. In a shift from Pinter pastiche to Becket he tells me: ‘Creakit mirrors life, if you think about it. Life, death and change in the middle.’ Certainly, no game is richer in symbolism than cricket. When a man is honest he is said to play with a straight bat, when dishonest his actions are just not cricket. For Boycott there is only one virtue worth having and that is being straight – it is far more important than being tactful. It’s the reason, I imagine, why so many of the newspaper reports about his court case last year took his side. He’s so eccentric and guileless, the logic goes, if he really had battered Margaret Moore he would admit it. He’s that perverse.
As it was, he seemed genuinely outraged at the suggestion. And, as he pointed out, indignantly, to anyone who would listen, there were other factors in his mitigation. He has no history of violence against women, indeed, if his monk-like batting style is anything to go by, he has preternatural self-control. Moore was £800,000 in debt. And before she took Boycott to court she had approached Max Clifford to see if he could get £2 million for her story. When Clifford declined to take her on as a client, she approached Boycott and offered to settle out of court for £1 million. (Fact. Boycott has the papers. Et cetera.)
I realise that I have inadvertently pressed the Moore button. How did he feel last year when nearly all his former friends and colleagues in the world of cricket declined to stand by him? ‘I felt sad that Blofeld let me down. I stuck by him when he were down on his luck. And I’m sick of Trueman attacking me. If he walked through the door now I’d say, “What have I ever done to you?” But he’d ignore me. The press was very fair to me, though. There are warts and all when people write about me and I don’t mind that. The only people who really let me down were the Sun.’ (The paper had promised to keep Boycott on as a columnist no matter what the verdict in the Moore trial. They reneged and Boycott is now suing them for breach of contract.)
Geoffrey Boycott’s bachelordom is complicated, to say the least. He lived with his mother until she died 22 years ago. He has had a relationship with Ann Wyatt for the past 40 years (they met when he was a clerk and she was a supervisor at the Ministry of Pensions in Barnsley). They started living together when he was 43, but she now spends most of her time in their second home in Dorset. He has also had a long-term relationship with Rachel Swinglehurst, the mother of his ten-year-old daughter, Emma. She lives a couple of miles away from him in Wakefield. He has had other long-standing relationships and, in his touring days, plenty of one-night stands. As became apparent in the French court last year, he inspires great loyalty in his ‘womenfolk’. Several turned up to speak in his defence. When I ask if he thinks this helped, he stares into the middle distance. ‘Aye, it showed that things didn’t square oop.’
Boycott’s cricketing nickname was Fiery because he was so remote and cold. Ann Wyatt’s nick-name was Fiery’s Mum because she was 12 years his senior. Is he attracted to mother figures? ‘No. My mother was my mother. I find I get on better with women than men though. In general. They are more decent. Men can let you down.’ Which of his women will he leave his millions to? ‘The people closest to me. Ann Wyatt. My daughter. People closest, Ann Wyatt. My daughter and her mother. People closest.’
Boycott himself was born into poverty. He and his two younger brothers grew up in a two up, two down in the Yorkshire colliery village of Fitzwilliam. Geoffrey went to Hemsworth Grammar and wishes he could have gone on to university. ‘But we couldn’t bloody afford it.’
His father, Thomas Wilfred Boycott, had a mining accident when Geoffrey was ten – and died 17 years later. He was in the middle of a match at the Oval on the day his father died, and to ‘show character’ Geoffrey went out to bat – scoring 70-odd – before going home for the funeral. ‘My father was 6ft 1in but walked with a stoop and a limp because his knees were crushed and his back was broken and his insides were mangled up. He was a ruined man.’
Growing up, Geoffrey Boycott didn’t see much of his father. He believes his values come from his mother, ‘She was quiet strong and determined. We were brought up properly. Clout round the earhole if you did owt wrong. But plenty of affection. She got arthritis 1968.  Six months after my father died. It was the shock that did it. She got cancer in 77, at the same time I got my 100th hundred. She was dead in a year. I saw her suffer. There was a hell of a vacuum when she died. But you deal with it. Just because you don’t sit in a corner crying doesn’t mean you don’t feel pain and hurt.’
In times of adversity Boycott takes no comfort from religion – although he does believe in Chinese horoscopes and spiritualism. ‘When you’re drowning you turn to anything. When Yorkshire sacked me I didn’t know what to do with myself. The medium said I would play for Yorkshire again. I thought she were crackers but she were right.’
Boycott is wanted on the phone in reception. There is a crooked Popeye grin playing across his face when he walks back across the foyer. He has just been told by Talk Radio that he has won the contract to commentate on the Cricket World Cup. I congratulate him and ask if he thinks his second career as a commentator has filled the void in his life left by cricket. ‘I felt a sadness when I stopped playing. Something had come to an end.  Something wonderful. I just thought, “This is it then.” It was 12 September 1986. I walked off the pitch and waited for the ground to clear. Then I wandered around on my own among all the newspapers and food wrappers and tin cans. It didn’t feel like a death exactly but I did think a part of my life was finished.’ But he has never picked up a bat since. ‘I wouldn’t even do it for the Queen of England. Not even the Queen of England.’
What about for a million pounds?
‘No. I’d just make a fool of myself. I have no intention of doing that. I have too much respect for the game. That would be taking the money for the fucking hell of it. I couldn’t live with myself. It would just be shit.’
He says goodbye and runs off across the car park, his shoulders hunched against the rain. As I watch him get into his silver BMW a child’s voice in my head whispers, ‘I’ve just met Boycott. The Geoffrey Boycott.’ Folklore, legend, myth.