The lift glides to a halt at the penthouse suite on the 13th floor. A butler leads the way along a panelled corridor and into a spacious, glass-walled living-room. Lord Archer is standing in a rhombus of sunlight, his back to the glinting spires of Westminster. He raises his right hand, palm flat, and barks: ‘Stop!’
My first thought is that he has gone mad. Actually nuts. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but he used to be a policeman, spent five months in the Met before resigning in 1960. Now – clearly – the pressure of keeping this chapter of his life quiet has got to him.  He has regressed. Thinks he’s back on point duty.
I remain frozen to the spot. Archer continues to halt the oncoming traffic. He is riding the moment, enjoying the confusion and embarrassment playing across my face. The situation is too weird. Slowly, his Lordship closes all his fingers except for the index. This he tilts 180 degrees until it points to the bathroom scales at his feet.
Now I understand what the pantomime is about. He has remembered a passing conversation we had when we met here, at his London home, three months ago. I asked him how he had lost two stone in six months. He told me he went to his gym at seven every morning and worked out for 80 minutes. During the day he followed ‘Jeffrey’s food-combining chart’. He sent me away with my own laminated ‘Jeffrey’s food-combining chart’. I stuck it to the fridge, tried it for an hour, gave up. I now realise he thinks I’ve asked to see him a second time because I want to show him I’ve lost weight. Oh dear. I want to interview him again because, last time, I learnt a lot about his plans should he be elected London’s first Mayor in May 2000 – enforce bus lanes, a commissioner for dirt, free milk to schoolchildren and so on – and very little about what sort of a person he is, or thinks he is, and why he believes we can trust him.
Still cringing, I decline his offer to stand on the scales and we repair to the squashy cream-coloured sofas that surround a book-laden coffee-table in the corner of the room. Though I’m sure he does the scales routine with everyone he puts on his diet, I feel oddly flattered he has remembered, as I’m sure I’m supposed to. I also feel grateful for the glimpse he has given me of the bully beneath the bluff surface. ‘Wimp!’ he says in a schoolmaster’s voice as he gives me a mock stern look over his half-moon spectacles. ‘Don’t look so smug!’
Jeffrey Archer is obsessed with physical fitness. He’s a sturdy, puff-chested 5ft 9in and though, at 59, there is something of the shocked sparrow about his looks – the bird recovering from moult – he has a strong nose, wide mouth and a firm jawline that is emphasised by a crew cut. But it wasn’t always thus.
At Wellington School, Somerset, he was bullied for being a weed: nicknamed ‘The Pune’, he was the one the other boys held over the lavatory while it was being flushed. Everything changed when Hal Kenny, his PE master, encouraged him to take up body-building and become an athlete. After leaving school, Archer became a PE teacher himself. He was good at it. Turned his pupils into champions. But he was notorious for his bullying tactics. When I ask him if he thinks he is a bully he smirks impishly and answers in a booming but croaky staccato. ‘Yes. Yes. But it’s just enthusiasm, isn’t it? I wake up wanting to do things. And want to encourage others to do the same.’
No one could ever accuse Archer of lacking enthusiasm. Or initiative. Or self-belief. Or nerve… He quivers with the stuff. Not only did he transform himself from a playground weed to a first-class athlete – an Oxford blue who represented his country at the 200 metres – as a student in the early Sixties he helped raise £500,000 for Oxfam by cajoling the Beatles, Harold Macmillan and President Johnson into endorsing his appeal. In the early Seventies a bad investment in a Canadian company, Aquablast, left him nearly bankrupt. He had to resign his seat in Parliament but, instead of sulking, he decided to pay off his £427,727 overdraft by writing novels. He wrote ten. And even though reviews of them have included the phrases ‘a true stinker’, ‘grindingly predictable’, and ‘flatulent banality’, he has sold, he claims, 120 million copies of them worldwide – and earned himself an estimated £60 million.
The trouble is, there is so much else Archer can be accused of. He lacks judgement, he’s vainglorious, he’s a fantasist – or rather, as his wife Mary put it, he has ‘a gift for inaccurate précis’. Everything about him smacks of invention. His whole manner is phoney. He’s like a Donald Sinden of the political world, an actor so actorish he makes your teeth grind. Chief among his accusers is Michael Crick who, in 1995, wrote a biography of Archer called Stranger than Fiction. The book sheds light on the mysteries surrounding Archer’s academic record, his father (a convicted fraudster and bigamist who died in 1956), and all the Archer imbroglios, from the libellous allegations made against him in 1986 (concerning the prostitute Monica Coghlan) to the accusations in 1994 of insider dealing in Anglia Television shares.
Although Archer is obviously insensitive enough to keep bouncing back when life slaps him down, it must have been painful for him to have his private life researched so meticulously and exposed so publicly.  After all, as Mary Archer once noted: ‘He’s not as thick-skinned as people think. Criticism does get to him. He takes it personally and it hurts him.’
Candidates for the job of Mayor of London will have to convince voters they are honest, trustworthy and above reproach. To do this they will have to reconcile themselves to having their private lives scrutinised by the press. Archer says he feels psychologically prepared for the sniggering Private Eye lampoons and the Paxman interrogations that lie ahead. ‘Well, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t.’ Still. Must be horrible having chaps like Crick pore over every aspect of your past? ‘Horrible feeling? Hadn’t really though of it in those terms. I mean… [pause] that’s the way he makes his money. If you want to represent people on the public stage, you have to face that.’
When I ask Jeffrey Archer why he thinks people should have confidence in him, given his reputation, he gives a politician’s answer. ‘The reason I have worked so hard in the past two years on policy is to show people how seriously I’m taking it. To show I’m not being casual about it. That I’m not taking it lightly. I’m not standing for Mayor because I need a job. I don’t. I want to make a difference, otherwise I wouldn’t be bothering. It would be easier to write another novel.’
He seems to accept, though, that he has an image problem. ‘I am very aware of . . .’ he trails off again. ‘Well, Michael Howard is a good example. I don’t know of a better friend when you are in trouble. I don’t know a nicer man with a more delightful wife. And yet he has a different public image and it’s not fair.’
You have to wonder why Archer wants to subject himself to the torment of press scrutiny when he could so easily retire and enjoy his millions, his fame, his 17th-century vicarage in Grantchester. The obvious answer is that he craves power. Also, as he himself has said in the past, he feels he has been a failure. He wants to be more than just an amusing footnote in the history of the Tory Party. He managed to be a close friend – court jester – to both Margaret Thatcher and John Major. But he never advanced further than deputy chairman of the party, a post he held from September 1985 to November 1986, when the Monica Coghlan story broke.
But is there also a streak of masochism behind his willingness to run the press gauntlet? Those who are bullied often convince themselves they deserve to be. This theory would be consistent with the strong attraction Archer feels toward intimidating women. He worships Margaret Thatcher. And Mary, the chemistry don he married 33 years ago, is famed not only for her fragrance but also for being what the librettist Kit Hesketh-Harvey describes as ‘a fantasy of most Englishmen… It’s that idea of ice in the loins.’
Last summer, as a pre-emptive strike against his critics, Archer wrote an article for the London Evening Standard in which he offered explanations for the extraordinary puzzles surrounding his career. ‘Yes, I was young once, and, yes, I have made a number of mistakes in my life,’ he wrote. ‘I’m neither genius nor saint.’ He acknowledged that his father didn’t win the DCM, as he had previously thought, and that his grandfather was never Lord Mayor of Bristol.
Archer used to boast that he was the youngest GLC councillor in 1967 – and the youngest MP when elected in 1969 – because, he explained in the article, he thought at the time that he was. He did walk out of a shop in Toronto in 1975 without paying for two suits – but only because he had wandered into another shop through an interconnecting passage. On the subject of the Anglia Television shares he bought for his friend Broosk Saib just days before an agreed take-over bid, he claims he did not receive information from his wife, a director of Anglia. There was an investigation. He wasn’t charged.
The answers he gives in the article prompt other questions. Why was Archer dealing in Anglia shares on behalf of a friend who was used to buying his own shares through a stockbroker? I’ve been told by Anthony Gordon-Lennox, Archer’s press adviser, that his Lordship is not prepared to comment on the Anglia shares story or on the recent scandal concerning his offspring. Archer has two sons: William, 27, a theatre producer, and James, 24, who was sacked from an investment bank for allegedly trying to manipulate the price of shares in a Swedish company.
Gordon-Lennox didn’t say anything about Archer’s academic record being off-limits, though. It might seem a trivial issue but, as Michael Crick has argued, we might all do better in life if we went around boasting of false degrees. Archer claimed to have a degree from an American University when he didn’t. On his marriage certificate he was described as a ‘research graduate’ when he wasn’t. He did go to Oxford (to do a one-year diploma in education at a teacher training college affiliated to Brasenose College) but he did not take any A-levels. The archives at both Dover College, where Archer taught PE from 1961 to 1963, and Oxford University show that he had three. In his Evening Standard article he wrote: ‘I did not obtain any A-levels. Nor did I mislead Oxford University in telling them that I had.’ So how did this false impression arise? Archer blinks. A rictus. A look of pain in his eyes. ‘No, I did answer that and, forgive me, I’m not going over it again. I made a decision to answer all those things in one go. I want to be Mayor. I’m doing 19 hours a day, working flat out. By all means read the Crick book and make your own judgement.’
William Archer, aka ‘William Grimwood’, died aged 80 when Jeffrey was 15. In an interview before the Crick revelations, Archer said he went to pieces when his father died, mucked up his exams, felt life unfair.  Now, when I ask what effect his father’s death had on him, he says: ‘That’s 43 years ago so I don’t remember it vividly in that sense.’ Pause. The smile is frozen on his face. ‘My mother was the strong influence on my life. Still alive, God bless her, 86 years old. Saw her last weekend. She’s still in fighting form.’ He doesn’t think his mother, Lola, spoilt him as compensation for losing his father. ‘Hope not. Probably… I adore my mother. Very special lady. I suppose I would have stayed down in Weston-super-Mare if I had been that spoilt.’ Lola wrote a weekly column for her local paper which featured her scampish son ‘Tuppence’. Jeffrey doesn’t think his being put in the spotlight in this way had any impact on his emotional development. ‘I wasn’t aware of it, to be honest. I don’t think at nine I had a clue.’
The phone rings. LBC radio wants to do a two-minute interview, live, about the ‘rolling manifesto’ he is launching today. Archer excuses himself and barrels up a marble staircase to his mezzanine study. As I listen to him on the phone – ‘Yes. It is the most exciting challenge…’ – I cast an eye around the room. A sculpture here, a Monet there, a metallic Gothic chandelier over the dining table, and, on the occasional table beside me, a framed black-and-white photograph of the young Jeffrey in running kit crossing a finishing line first.
Archer seems to have three main tactics for becoming Mayor: behave as if the job is his already; promise that if he’s elected he won’t write any more novels; wear Londoners down with his keenness so that they’ll make him Mayor just to shut him up. Even the Tory grandees behind the ‘Anyone But Archer’ whispering campaign seem to be buckling under the Archer onslaught. They depict him as a ghastly overgrown schoolboy whose graceless, barrow-boy persona offends the propriety of the party. Yet Archer is tipped to win the Tory nomination for Mayor in the autumn. He will, of course, be insufferably bossy and pompous if he goes on to win the election. But even his enemies would have to concede he will probably get things done.
Baron Archer of Weston-Super-Mare, of Mark in the County of Somerset, as he chose to style himself when he was created a Life Peer in 1992, thinks there is a mayor-shaped hole in his life. It is the job he was born to do. But he wants to become the Mayor of London so badly, one worries how he will cope if his main rival, Ken Livingstone, pips him to the post. Archer hasn’t thought about losing, he says, because he’s sure he’s going to win. When I point out he was also sure the Tories were going to win the last election, he laughs and rocks back in his seat. ‘You’ve caught me out there! But I had to say that. We knew we were going to lose. What shocked us was the scale. We honestly thought it would be 70 seats at most.’
An almost palpable air of frustration hangs around Jeffrey Archer. He’s like a spermatozoid, constantly, frantically, selfishly swimming but not getting anywhere. He tells me he is easily bored and feels unfulfilled. When I suggest that it must be dreadful being him – because even if he did become Mayor the goalposts would only move again and the gnawing discontent would return to his soul – he nods gravely.  ‘Yes. I’ll want to be captain of the England cricket team. I’m among that group of human beings who feel they have never achieved anything. One of my great heroes is Thomas Jefferson and he has written on his gravestone: “President… of the University of West Virginia.”‘
Rather grandly, Archer says he admires Jefferson for his intellect and Nelson for his physical courage. ‘Would I be courageous if the enemy was coming towards me? Could I handle it? I don’t know.’ It’s strange, but even when he’s being sincere he sounds fake.
Four years ago Archer did, he says, stare death in the face. ‘I nearly killed the whole family. I was driving down the centre lane at 70mph in a brand new BMW. It turned two circles and went into a ditch. The police found a nail that big [he holds his hands six inches apart] in the tyre. All I remember is that for 30 seconds both boys went silent wondering what was going to happen.’
If the crash had been fatal, would Archer have died a happy man? ‘Am I happy? Not really. But who is?’ He says his money doesn’t really bring him happiness – he’s not even sure how much he’s worth, not that interested. Even being the best-selling novelist in Britain doesn’t seem to give him that much satisfaction.
‘I know I’m no Graham Greene,’ he says, rolling his ‘r’s. ‘I know my limitations. Do I feel being a novelist is a proper job for a grown man? That’s what Mary is always saying to me. Well, it’s not a crime to entertain people.’ He derives more pleasure, he says, from the auctioneering work he does for charity. He raised £3.2 million last year – he writes the figure down on a Post-it pad for me – and when he reflects whether he has been a good person in this life he concludes: ‘I think I’ve put in more than I’ve taken out.’
He says he has no regrets, that it is pointless looking back. ‘When I make mistakes I never feel sorry for myself. I might feel cross. I might think, silly fool. But even when I lost all my money – which was the worst time of my life – I tried to be positive. I hated being in debt. Hated it. Other than illness, it’s the worst thing in the world. When you see a bill come through the letterbox and you know you can’t pay it. I never want that again. I couldn’t see a way out… Did I feel suicidal? No, I was too young. At 34 I knew I was young enough to dust myself down and start again.’
Mary Archer once said, ‘Life with Jeffrey is never dull,’ and this, perhaps, is his saving grace. He is a colourful character in a monochrome political landscape. He has other virtues. According to his friends, he has a generous nature. And he has good entrepreneurial instincts. Margaret Thatcher once described him as the ‘extrovert’s extrovert’. Today, though, there is none of the bluster and bumptiousness you would normally associate with him. He seems reserved.
The intelligentsia can never forgive him his Mr Toad-like resilience and popularity. He’s a rabble rouser, a middle brow, a vulgarian. He has said that he will make an excellent Mayor of London precisely because he is vulgar. But when I ask him about this statement, he recants. Says he meant it as a tease. Perhaps it will take another 20 years before everyone gets the joke and finds him loveable enough to be declared a living national treasure. For the moment, for many, there is still something a little too weird about Jeffrey Archer.
He has a vulnerable side, though, and I see it when, the interview over, an old friend of his drops in for tea. He has known Michael Hogan, a farmer, since they were at Oxford together. He greets him warmly and then, as he walks with me to the lift, Archer whispers, ‘You know, Nigel, that man is one of only three people in the world I trust – my wife, and my friend Adrian Metcalfe being the other two. He’s such a fine man.  Such a fine man. When I nearly went bankrupt he gave me £10,000, half his savings, to bail me out. A dear, dear man.’ His eyes go rheumy at the memory and he stares at the lift doors, lost momentarily in his thoughts. They open. I step in. Just as they are closing, he snaps back into character and shouts: ‘And lose some weight!’
This interview appeared in April 1999. Lord Archer became the Tory candidate for mayor that autumn, only to withdraw, and cause huge, some would say irreparable, damage to the credibility of William Hague, the Tory leader who had backed his nomination. Unable to wrestle with his conscience any longer, Archer’s former friend Ted Francis came forward to accuse the novelist of asking him to provide a false alibi for his 1987 libel action against the Star. In 2000 Archer wrote and starred in a play called The Accused, loosely based on the case. In 2001, just before his trial for perjury opened, Monica Coghlan, the prostitute at the centre of the libel case was killed in a car crash. At the trial he declined to take the stand. His wife Mary did. ‘I think,’ she said when asked about her marriage, ‘we explored the further reaches of “for better or worse”.’ Archer’s mother died the day before the verdict was given. He was found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison.

The whole point about a politician like Tam Dalyell, if you face the thing squarely, is that he lives, plays, breathes, eats and sleeps politics. So, to encounter his shambling figure in corridors other than those of the Palace of Westminster would be an aberration, a perversion of nature, an unsettler of the spirit. This, at least, is what I try to convince myself as I stare dumbly at the phone I have just put down. The conversation has gone like this:
Tam Dalyell, in a low, even voice: ‘Tam Dalyell here.’
Me: ‘Ah, yes, thanks for returning my call. I was wondering if I could tempt you into being the subject of an interview in the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. What I had in m…’
TD: ‘Can you come over to the Commons and do it now?’
Me, noting that my watch says it’s 8.45am: ‘Well, I hadn’t really. . .’
TD: ‘What about tomorrow morning at 8.30?’
Me: ‘I was thinking more along the lines of doing something at the old Dalyell ancestral home in Scotland. Ha ha ha.’
TD: ‘We could, but not for a few weeks.’
Me: ‘A few weeks wouldn’t be a problem.’
TD: ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at 8.30 then.’
The Binns, his 17th-century pile overlooking the Firth of Forth, is supposed to be quite something. According to a colleague of mine who once stayed there, it has turrets, peacocks and portraits of General ‘Bluidy Tam’ Dalyell (1615-1685), and his son, the first ‘Sir Tam’, scowling down from the walls. Of course, it also has an atmosphere of gloomy, Spartan discomfort, as provided by the 10th Baronet and current occupant, in keeping with his Old Labour pneuma.
But this must be taken on trust. For when I meet him at the appointed hour of 8.30, the Old Etonian warhorse who has been Labour MP for Linlithgow (formerly West Lothian) since 1962 is sitting in a high-backed chair, under the portraits of Balfour and Bonar Law, in the Chess Room of the House of Commons.  Though he says so himself, Tam Dalyell is a pretty nifty player. Indeed, the last visitor he faced across a chessboard in this room was Garry Kasparov, against whom he played a safe gambit. But this is small talk and, famously, Dalyell is not much given to it. Has to be at the Scottish Office for a meeting at ten, he says. Let’s crack on. Where do I want to start?
Well. Actually. The Scottish Office seems as good a place as any. The battle against the Devolution Bill is all but lost; having had its second reading, it is now going through its committee stage before the third reading, and looks set to reach the statute books before the summer recess. For this debate Dalyell has kept his powder dry. ‘I want to be on my feet for the entire proceedings,’ he intones darkly. ‘In the Speaker’s notebook, those who have already spoken tend to go down the list and so I have been saving myself.’
Dalyell is renowned for his quixotic pursuit of lost causes.  Indeed, his ability to ask 50 terse supplementary questions on the same subject often invites groans when he rises to speak in the Commons chamber. It will be recalled that it was he who, years after the General Belgrano was sunk, continued to badger Mrs Thatcher about whether it was sailing west or nor’-nor’-east at the time it went down. He was the one who relentlessly supported the Libyans whom he believed to be wrongly accused of the Lockerbie bombing. And it was to Tenacious Tam that Saddam Hussein looked for help, as an intermediary to lift sanctions in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
But it’s the thorny issue of whether power should be devolved to Scotland which has preoccupied most of the man’s waking thoughts for the past 20 years. During the 1977 devolution debate, Dalyell asked variations of the same question a staggering 190 times. The gist of it was: ‘Why is it possible for me to vote on, say, housing matters in Blackburn, Lancashire, but not on housing matters in Blackburn, West Lothian?’ Exasperated at hearing it asked so often, Enoch Powell noted dryly that the House was seized of the point, the penny had dropped, and so, for the convenience of all, let it be henceforth given the sobriquet ‘the West Lothian Question’.  And so it was.
‘Devolution is a motorway to a separate state, without an exit,’ Dalyell now says. ‘If that is what people want, they are entitled to vote accordingly. But it will open a Pandora’s Box. For one thing, it will lead to a resurgence of English nationalism. Now some might think this healthy. If you live in Prague wouldn’t you say that Czech nationalism was healthy?  Yet the relations between the Czech Republic and Slovakia get sourer and sourer. It won’t be so different here. When there are differences about resources and money, things will get difficult.’
The only light in the Chess Room is natural and soft, washing in from a leaded window which has a view over the brackish waters of the Thames. The right half of Dalyell’s long, jowly face is cast in shadow, the chiaroscuro emphasised by the dark Pugin panelling beyond it. The left half is topped by thick strands of wavy hair worn in the upturned ice-cream-cone style favoured by Douglas Hurd. Thick, owlish glasses magnify an eye that gleams with the light of intelligence. And there is something about the awkward construction of the jaw on this side of his face that seems to bear testimony to a lifetime of gnawing, gnawing and gnawing again at indigestible political conundrums.
Stuffed as he is with serious purpose, striving as he always does to do the square thing by one and all, Dalyell has become, over the years, a gentleman lacking in the softer emotions. He doesn’t chuckle much. But when he does his whole face creases up and his tongue lolls out of the left side of his mouth. It is a disarming, even charming, trait which seems to morph him, for a delightful instant, into Quentin Hogg.
Dalyell’s natural mode of speech shifts from low and deliberate to conspiratorial and distracted, and is often accompanied by furtive glances over your shoulder and his.  This is not so surprising, considering that he has nearly always been out in the cold politically and, as recently as last autumn, was threatened with deselection over his opposition to the Scottish Bill. But he’s never been one for bowing to pressure and, demoralising though it must be for the Labour whips, there are no inducements or entreaties with which his loyalty can be bought. He’s an old friend of Peter Mandelson, for instance, but it didn’t stop him calling the Minister without Portfolio’s claim that devolution would strengthen Scotland’s position in the United Kingdom ‘utterly preposterous’ and ‘silly’. This, of course, is why Dalyell has never advanced beyond the first unpaid rung of the ministerial ladder – Michael Foot appointed him Labour’s science spokesman in 1980, only to dismiss him two years later after he voted against the Falklands War. Dalyell is 65 now and in all probability he will not stand as an MP again in the next election.
When Tam Dalyell retires, it will be as a strangely successful failure who was one of the most feared, admired and mocked parliamentarians of his generation. He writes obituaries for the Independent, but says he has never been tempted to have a go at his own. Doubtless though, when it is written, it will refer to his having been the last of the great cussed aristocratic MPs in alliance with the proletariat. He will be characterised as a courteous, self-righteous, humourless, free spirit who had a reputation for being a bit cuckoo but also, so self-evidently, a Good Thing. It will conclude that he added to the gaiety of the nation, in an inimitably dour sort of way, but also became its conscience.
Dalyell accepts that, in terms of career advancement, the price for being a crusading politician has been high. ‘Of course it has,’ he says. ‘But, honestly, cross my heart, I never had any prime ministerial ambitions. It would be dishonest, though, to tell you I wouldn’t have dearly loved to have been a minister. Years ago it would have been Northern Ireland – so that I could get British troops out. Now it would be the DTI, with responsibility for science and technology [he has been a weekly columnist for New Scientist for 31 years].  Now, I’m not criticising Tony here because he took the decision that, with the exception of Glenda Jackson, who has just turned 60, he would have nobody in his Cabinet over 60.’ When asked if he thinks this ageist, he gives one of those Francis Urquhart arches of the eyebrow which says, ‘You might think that…’
‘As far as I’m concerned, there is no personal animosity between myself and my colleagues,’ he continues. ‘As it happens, I didn’t vote for Tony Blair. He knows this. I voted for John Prescott. But I get on perfectly well with Blair. Only the other week my wife and I were invited to lunch at Number 10.’  Forget the West Lothian Question; the Eric Morecambe Question is begged. What does he think of the Blair show so far? ‘Hmm. Interesting. I mean he’s got to realise that it’s a parliamentary democracy. My reservation is that he might become too presidential. I’m not criticising. Yet. My worry is that you mustn’t downgrade the Party too much because you will need it, especially in adversity… I thought the Question Time business was high-handed. On the other hand I thought the crucial decision to give the Bank of England its independence was bloody good… Rebranding? Well, I’m ancient Labour. I don’t like branding full stop. It’s no good expecting people to come to Britain to see what a modern society we are. The truth is, people go on holiday for other things. To see heritage. My wife and I went on a 17-day bus tour of Iran last year. Quite bluntly, on holiday you don’t go and see the innovations proclaimed by the Islamic Republic. I went to see the ancient sites.’
Tam Dalyell’s fascination with and expertise on the Middle East dates back to his childhood. In the Thirties his father was the British Resident in Bahrain. ‘Dad was a tough, gentle pillar of Anglo-Indian society,’ he says. ‘He was quite old when I was born, 45, and I was treated as an adult from an early age.’ As an only child, Tam was sent first to Harecroft Hall school in Cumbria, where most of the boys were children of the scientists who worked on the atom bomb programme, and then to Eton. ‘I was also treated as an adult at Eton because at that time it was a very sombre place. It was 1945 and they had taken a hell of a hammering in the war. Many of the masters there had stayed on and some of them were pretty shattered by the losses of their former pupils.’
He’s not sure if this means that he missed out on childhood. ‘There was very little frivolity,’ he reflects. When asked if this has shaped his character, given his reputation as a serious cove, he does the Quentin Hogg chuckle and says, ‘A serious cove. I can’t deny it.’
After Eton, he went up to to read maths at King’s College, Cambridge but two years’ National Service in Germany interrupted this and, when he returned, he decided to change to history – because ‘I was never a budding Einstein’ – and, amazingly, became president of the Cambridge University Conservative Association. School-teaching followed university but there may have been fleeting thoughts of a career in the Army. He had, after all, been a trooper in the Royal Scots Greys, now the Scots Dragoon Guards, the regiment founded in the 1660s by his ancestor Bluidy Tam (whose other claims to historical celebrity included opposing Cromwell in battle, escaping from the Tower of London, and introducing the thumbscrew to Britain).
‘I rather enjoyed my time in the Army,’ Dalyell says, ‘which was perverse of me because I was the despair of every sergeant-major. I waddled. I was very clumsy and only years later, four years ago in fact, did I discover why. I had a hip operation and the surgeon said you have a much longer left leg than right leg.’ He still has a shuffling gait to this day – and still manages to look mildly scruffy in his trademark grey flannel suit, comfortable shoes and ill-fitting navy blue mac. But there was more to his inclusion in the awkward squad than his appearance. ‘I got across people quite badly. I suppose it was partly my own fault. No one is perfect. But I also had alongside me in G Squadron some bloody-minded, awkward contemporaries.’ That’s rich. But there was also the little matter of his losing a Jeep. ‘That was much exaggerated,’ he says. ‘It’s easy to do on Salisbury Plain.’
The Suez Crisis marked his conversion to socialism. But given his obvious affection for the Army – today he is wearing the regimental tie of the Scots Dragoon Guards – it might be supposed that he would have shown, over the intervening years, more sympathy for the armed forces than he has. When it is suggested that he has a reputation for being critical of the services his face darkens. The comment touches an exposed nerve.
‘I have not been involved in criticism of the services,’ he says in an calm and level timbre. ‘I have good relations with my old regiment. Indeed, last summer they invited me to stay with them in Bosnia for a few days. They made me an honorary officer of the mess five years ago. On certain matters, though, I have been high-profile in criticising the actions of politicians in relationship to the services.’  He lists them. First there was his criticism of the Anglo-French Variable Geometry Aircraft. ‘What were we doing starting an expensive programme when the Americans were so far ahead with their F1-11? Absurd.’ Then came the Borneo War. ‘But not a word of criticism about the people who were fighting it. I just thought it would lead to another Vietnam in Asia.’ Next he locked horns with Denis Healey, the then Minister of Defence. ‘The campaign I am proudest of is the saving of Aldabra, an ecologically fragile coral atoll in the Indian Ocean. The Army wanted to desecrate it by building an airstrip on it.’ The Falklands came next. ‘With the arguable exception of the Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Lewin, I never made any criticism of servicemen whatsoever. I just thought the quarrel between two states there was like two bald men fighting over a comb.’
Finally there was the Gulf War. His father, he explains crisply, had worked under Sir Percy Cox, the great imperial proconsul in the Gulf. He knew how, in a bad temper, Cox had drawn a line in the sand to create the state of Kuwait.  ‘Depending on how you look at it,’ Dalyell says, ‘Kuwait is the 19th bloody state of Iraq. I’m not saying the Iraqis should have invaded but there are two sides to the story and the Kuwaitis were extremely provocative. My colleagues say I am naive but if you start a war like this you have to look at the outcome. There was no way that the coalition could have gone on to occupy Baghdad.’
Like Ted Heath before the Gulf War, after it Dalyell went to negotiate with Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister, in 1994. ‘But I wasn’t the creature of Saddam Hussein,’ he protests. ‘I did not tell John Smith before I went to Baghdad. His reaction was, “I’m glad you went. Thank God you didn’t tell me!” He chuckles at this memory. ‘When I came back, a number of rather silly Tories attacked me. But I immediately went to see Douglas Hurd and told him what had happened and his attitude was that I had every right to go – so lay off. I had a soul mate in Ted Heath. I have a soul mate in him in many ways. We always gossip, depending what mood he’s in.’
As was only to be expected – the man is nothing if not consistent – Dalyell was just about the only MP in the House brave enough to fly in the face of public opinion and present the case against bombing Iraq in February. His arguments were politely, ruthlessly terse and were directed on to their target, usually Robin Cook, with the clinical precision of a smart bomb. ‘Are we clear about what would happen if a missile hit a stockpile of nerve gas?’ was one. ‘A million Iranians died in the Iran-Iraq war yet Iran does not want to see a UN attack on Iraq, even though they are the neighbours the attack is supposed to protect: has anyone wondered why?’ was the gist of another, the answer being that the Iranians don’t want their region polluted. Anthrax spores carry on the wind. When asked what on earth he would do to resolve the situation, he answers that we should send a minister to Baghdad. ‘Frankly, I would at least try lifting sanctions by stages, because that might let loose all sorts of forces in Iraq that wished to change the regime… Sanctions strengthen Saddam, rather than weaken him. They allow him to blame anything that goes wrong on the wicked West.’
Taking part in the Commons debate on Iraq in February he pointed out, ‘I am one of comparatively few – a dwindling number of honourable members who have actually worn the Queen’s uniform, done gunnery and experienced the smell of cordite. Perhaps we are a bit less relaxed about unleashing war than those who have never been in a military situation.’ He was one of 25 MPs who voted against military action, compared to 493 ayes. The peaceful outcome later brokered by Kofi Annan gives him little satisfaction, however. ‘I think we’re not out of the woods yet,’ he says. ‘I suspect Madeleine Albright is looking for another excuse to strike. . . I was dismayed by the Labour Party’s enthusiasm for military action, but I can’t say I was surprised.’
Given the current disarray of the official opposition, some commentators believe it is down to Left-leaning elder statesmen such as Tam Dalyell, Gerald Kauffman, Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn to stiffen the prime ministerial sinews and provide the checks and balances that this Government, with its awesome majority, will doubtless need. Dalyell says he will be playing his cards carefully, though.
He voted with the Government on single mothers, for instance.  ‘I don’t think one should rebel on more than one subject at a time,’ he says, ‘because then you’re not taken seriously…  A sense of humour carries a terrible price. It takes so much skill and it is a tremendous temptation to be drawn into playing the fool.’
Whether his views on humour extend to his domestic life is not clear. He, a Presbyterian, has been married to Kathleen Wheatley, the Catholic daughter of a prominent Scottish Labour Lord, for 34 years. It was love, more or less, at first sight when they met in the lobby of the House of Commons: she was with a party of visiting research students from Cambridge and he was given the task of showing them around. He says, rather touchingly, that the secret of their matrimonial longevity, in a profession with such a dodgy track record, is simply love and friendship. ‘My wife is my chum and my friend. I’ve been very lucky. Tolerant is an understatement. The things she has had to put up with when I get my teeth into a campaign!’ Family friends describe Kathleen as long-suffering. She, good-naturedly, goes along with this view. The couple have a son and a daughter and she once commented that when her husband was in London and a child had measles, ‘it would not disturb his train of thought’.
She takes his eccentricities in her stride, too. He eats apples in their entirety, pips and core included, and even finishes other people’s when he sees them being left. His favourite pastime is digging up potatoes; it used to be bee-keeping until he got a stiff dressing-down for missing a vote in the House because his bees had swarmed. His wife also shares the common view that her husband is a bit obsessive.  ‘She tells me if she thinks I’m wrong,’ he says. ‘She has very strong opinions. But obsessiveness? Yes. I will confess to it.  If a cause is worth taking up, it is worth seeing through properly. Doggedness I would also confess to. The term I don’t like is “maverick”. How can I be one when I was the first Scot for 40 years to be elected to the constituency section of the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party?’
He does not add, perhaps because it goes without saying, that he was chucked off the NEC after only a year’s tenure because of his un-Leftish support for Europe and nuclear power. As a politician he has been called many things – ‘out of his tiny
Chinese mind’ by Denis Healey, a ‘chump’ by Jim Callaghan –  and most descriptions of him have featured a well-known phrase including the words ‘the’ ‘in’ and ‘pain’. When asked why he thinks it is that, over the years, he seems none the less to have won the grudging respect of friend and enemy alike, he pauses to reflect for a moment. ‘I just don’t indulge in name-calling, I suppose. And I would like to think that I am the second-best-mannered man in the House of Commons. The man with the most beautiful manners is Tony Benn.’
I notice a small, black device on the window ledge. Hmm. Speaking of Tony Benn, doesn’t he always place a tape-recorder next to that of the journalist interviewing him? Has Tam Dalyell, the great conspiracy theorist, one-time confidant of Dick Crossman and the paranoid Harold Wilson, been recording this conversation? He follows my gaze, reaches for the device and clicks it on. It’s a radio, tuned to Radio 4. It’s time for the Scottish Office meeting and, with beautiful manners, Dalyell asks if I intend to return to my office by taxi. Good. Would I mind awfully if I dropped him off on the way? Splendid. Most kind.
This appeared in March 1998. In 2001, Tam Dalyell took over from his soul-mate Ted Heath as Father of the House.

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

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

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

On the seventh floor of the Café Royale in central London, in a room unheated despite the wintry night air outside, a door creaks open. A callow youth in overalls stands hesitantly, framed in the doorway, chair in hand. He takes in the long mahogany table and the tape recorder that rests upon it. He looks at the back of Des Lynam’s head, at the silvery collar-length hair, then at me. The BBC’s sports anchor turns in his chair and gives him a quizzical arch of his eyebrow.
‘I. Chairs. Move. Told to,’ the youth says, suddenly tongue-tied. Lynam raises the neatly trimmed eyebrow another notch, no more than an eighth of an inch. The youth looks helpless and uncertain. When Lynam gives him another 16th, he backs out. ‘Later. Sorry. I. Come back.’
Des Lynam is the coolest person in the world. Fact. His producer on Match of the Day could be singing, ‘I’m the firestarter, twisted firestarter’ into his earphone while an escaped ostrich skitters unhindered around the studio, and not a flicker of emotion would cross the man’s face. He can wear a cravat, advertise Miracle-Gro on television, model sports casuals for the Freeman mail-order catalogue and still seem cool. He can even make a moustache look cool.
The only thing about which Des Lynam, 56, is not cool is his privacy. He hates being photographed. Loathes talking about himself. Indeed, according to his agent, this is only the third feature-length newspaper interview he’s given in his long career, and the first for which he hasn’t had proper copy approval, or at least a chance to correct errors and spellings. (Not that he didn’t request it. But, hey, when you’ve got an album of poetry readings to plug in time for the Christmas market, sometimes you have to take chances.)
His twitchiness is understandable. In September the News of the World ran a front-page story under the headline DIRTY DES! It concerned the kiss-and-tell confessions of ‘jilted Laura Ewing’, a 48-year-old widow who lived in Chiswick next door to ‘six-times-a-night Des’. Errant politicians could learn much from the calm and dignified way in which Lynam handled the situation. He issued a short statement in which he admitted cheating on Rosemary Diamond, his partner of 17 years, and added that he had made an error of judgement. The story fizzled out like a mildewed firework.
Traditionally, when there is an awkward subject about which a celebrity expects to be asked, the best policy is to get it out of the way as soon as possible and then everyone can relax. After we have been talking for perhaps ten minutes another tactic suggests itself: be a coward and don’t ask it at all. This approach doesn’t work. Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Lynam feels the need to allude to the story himself, several times. So embarrassing. We are talking about war, death and patriotism, and I say I can’t imagine him panicking under fire, what with his relaxed demeanour in the studio. I mean, if he was at Rorke’s Drift he would be the sergeant gently reprimanding the terrified private for not having his top button done up as the Zulu hordes charged: ‘Remember you’re in the British Harmy, lad.’ Lynam is not so sure. Although he can understand that his on-screen composure might give this impression, he says that this is only because no one really knows his private persona, ‘Except when it’s paraded across the gutter press.’
Aggh! ‘But we’re not here to talk about that,’ I say too quickly. ‘Ha ha ha, we’re here to talk about the poems.’ Up to this point Lynam has been sitting rather stiffly, arms folded, sizing me up through narrowed eyes. He has seemed monochrome. Not cosy. He removes his glasses, folds them and slips them under his grey tweed jacket, feeling several times for a breast pocket on his button-collar shirt which is not there. He places them on the table, stretches out in his chair and props his head up on one hand, his elbow resting on the next chair along. The change of mood is palpable. The temperature in the room even seems to rise a little.
Another convention of the interview is that the plug – for the new novel, film, record, whatever – should be dispensed with quickly so that the celebrity can get on with talking revealingly about him or herself. In this instance, though, it would mean leaving a rich seam of self-revelation untapped. Lynam is, he says, very, very shy. Always has been. Doesn’t like to talk about himself. But he loves talking about poetry.
He has recorded 22 of his favourite poems to orchestral accompaniment on an album, Time To Stand and Stare, released this week on the BBC Music label. The idea for it came from this year’s World Cup. The final item in the BBC’s last programme from Paris was a reading by Lynam of Kipling’s ‘If’, with appropriate footballing highlights cut on film to match the words. The BBC was inundated with requests for it. Most of the poems Lynam has chosen are, frankly, maudlin. ‘Lot of Betjeman and Kipling,’ he says in a low even timbre. ‘Sad. Sure. But I don’t think you buy something like this to cheer yourself up. I hope it’s a bit thought-provoking. Stimulate people’s moods or whatever.’
This is Lynam as he would like to present himself to the world: a serious man, with texture, shading and just a touch of ennui. He never went to university, something he bitterly regrets, and this may have left him feeling frustrated intellectually. He could have gone – he got three A levels: English, French and Art – but he didn’t want to be a financial burden on his parents (his father was a mental health worker, his mother a nurse). Instead he sat his Chartered Insurance Institute exams at Brighton Business College and went to work for Cornhill Insurance. Did that for eight years, had the company car, the preferential mortgage and everything, but gave it all up in 1967 for an insecure freelance job in local radio. He moved to BBC radio two years later and there he remained for almost a decade before sidling into his present role as grand old man of BBC television sports – despite countless offers to move to ITV Sports for more money. Des is a great believer in loyalty.
Now it seems, like Rory Bremner, who longs to play Hamlet, Lynam suffers from gravitas syndrome. This is a condition which can strike popular entertainers quite suddenly. They go to bed feeling at ease with themselves then wake up next morning convinced that it is not enough for them to be brilliant at what they do: they have to be taken seriously as well.
Lynam is having none of this theory. ‘No. I came to this poetry thing by accident. It wasn’t a conscious decision to say, “I’m a bit brighter than they think I am. There’s a bit more depth than people think.”‘ Fair enough. But your favourite poems, Des, they’re so morbid. All about death. ‘Every day I think about dying,’ is one line he reads from a poem by Roger McGough. ‘He looked so wise but now I do not like to think of maggots in his eyes,’ is another, from Betjeman’s ‘On a Portrait of a Deaf Man’. It all points to a gloomy disposition. ‘I guess there is a melancholic side, otherwise I wouldn’t like these poems or be able to read them, but I’m not prone to depression. Not a manic-depressive type at all. Glums. Sure. Like everyone else. Good days and bad. But generally my spirits are sailing high. On an even keel. Emotionally steady.’
The delivery is just as laconic and homely as it is on television: pronouns and definite articles stripped away to make the speaker unobtrusive. He is doing that thing with his eyebrows too. Now I am just waiting for him to say, ‘Tell you what,’ and refer to his being ‘popular with the ladies’.
Rory Bremner, who features a lugubrious Lynam in his repertoire, says that Des is very aware of how to play Des. Lynam was always a good impressionist. In the Seventies he co-wrote a comedy show on Radio 2, How Lunchtime Is it?, in which he impersonated Harold Wilson and Ted Heath. And here today, in this cold room, you sense he is indeed playing Des, this character he steps into when performing.
‘I think I’m the same on as off,’ Lynam protests when asked if this is the case. ‘Pretty much the same sort of animal. I’m not Mr OK here and Mr Ruthless there. But I can be bad-tempered. And I’m not as confident as I seem on television. Actually, I’m shy. My best friends, male friends, would never know my problems. Keep my problems to myself. I talk to the lady in my life about them though. Problems between us even. We’re pretty frank and open with each other. Don’t hide too much…’
Aggh! Change the subject. Although Lynam finds he can sometimes be moved to tears by poetry, he normally keeps his emotions in check when listening to music or watching films. ‘Cinema is usually cold emotion and I keep a little distance from that. Some films, though, give me self-realisation. The Deer Hunter when the boys are being forced to play Russian roulette and are being thrown in the cage with the rats swimming round. I know I would crack. I couldn’t cope. The idea that you could die on a whim.’
Time To Stand and Stare includes a poem, ‘The Silly Isles’, which Lynam himself wrote in 1982. It’s a protest poem about the Falklands War. ‘I wouldn’t want to demean the efforts of the British servicemen,’ Lynam says with typical even-handedness. ‘They did what they considered to be their duty. But I also felt for the Argentinians who were killed. A conscript army.’ He recites: ‘Politicians without their guile,/army hawks without a smile . . .’ I feel more could have been done to avoid that war. I’ve only written a handful of poems. Listen,’ he laughs softly, ‘I haven’t got delusions of adequacy about it, even. It was the idea of the producer to put it in. Am I patriotic? Think I am. Up to a point. A questioning patriot. Wouldn’t be in my nature to just do as I’m told.’
Desmond Michael Lynam was born at Ennis, County Clare, on 17 September, 1942. His parents had moved to England from Ireland before the war, to look for work, but his mother had gone back there after his father was posted to India to serve in the Army Medical Corps. Desmond was three before he met his father for the first time. He was six when the family left Ireland again and moved to Brighton. ‘I had a very broad West Ireland accent,’ he recalls. ‘When we first lived in Brighton our neighbours couldn’t understand a word I said. It was kind of a laugh.’
He doesn’t think he made a conscious effort to lose his accent – and reinvent himself – just because people laughed at him. ‘But there was one incident where the teacher said, “Draw a line,” and I drew a little creature with four legs and a mane. I must have been stupid. Got a smack on the back of the hand. I suppose in my subconscious I thought I’d better get rid of this accent.’
Lynam’s shyness first became apparent when, as a 14-year-old, he was asked to read out loud in the classroom. ‘They would have to pull it out of me. I had lots of opinions but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by expressing them. There’s still a reluctance to stand up and say a few words off the top of my head. The other day I was asked to do it and it was fine but I felt really nervous about it. Strangely.’
The paradox of a shy person choosing a profession in which he has to perform in public is not lost on him. He doesn’t think the career move was a deliberate attempt to face his fears, though. Nor does he think that if, in a parallel universe somewhere, there is another Des Lynam who remained an insurance salesman, he would be any different from the Des Lynam who became a television personality. ‘I think I’d have done it well. Probably made more money. I was an inspector. Partly sales. Partly doing surveys of buildings and all that thing. Technical stuff. Had to train for it. You know, people say, “Oh, he was a door-to-door salesman.” Well, I certainly wasn’t that. My bit of pride in my past profession comes out there. It was certainly more than that…’
Des Lynam and Rose Diamond, a 50-year-old interior designer, have a second home on the Sussex coast. There is nothing Lynam likes better than to walk along the sand there in winter, early in the morning, when the tide is out, contemplating the crashing waves and the seabirds wheeling and screeching overhead. ‘I am quite happy being alone with my thoughts there. Get some of my better ones.’ Brooding upon his own mortality, no doubt. ‘Yes, I think about death a lot. Horrifying. When you get to my age you find you are losing friends more and more. I’m very conscious about it and about making the most of each day. It’s an abyss.’
Although he was brought up a Roman Catholic and has recently taken to visiting a retired Monsignor to discuss matters spiritual and temporal, Lynam’s faith was badly shaken by the deaths of his parents. He felt disappointed because his prayers were unanswered and now, he says, the only real religious feeling he has left is a sense of Catholic guilt. His mother, Gertrude, died from a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 54. ‘It was a sudden thing,’ Lynam says, clicking his fingers. ‘The artery just burst. She didn’t die straight away. Hung on for a month. My father and I went to see her every day and we kept telling each other that she was looking better. We were desperate to believe it. Clinging to it. I thought I shall never worry about anything ever again because nothing can ever be as bad as this. I guess that feeling lasted two weeks. Mundane things come flooding back.’
His father, Edward, died from bowel cancer seven years later, in 1976. ‘We thought it was going to be a pretty straightforward operation. I wasn’t told enough. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t get the surgeon up against a wall to tell me everything. I felt alone in the world after he died because I was recently divorced and had no siblings. Well, I had a sister, but she died in infancy from meningitis. Anyway,’ he leans forward and rests his chin on his fist, ‘we mustn’t get too sombre.’
His nine-year marriage to Susan Skinner, a beautician, broke up in 1974. The couple are still on good terms and have a son, Patrick, who is now 28. Lynam’s name was romantically linked to a number of other women before he met Rose, but one friendship in particular was to come back to haunt him in 1995. The headline in the Sun read: TV DES BEDDED SEX SWAP BOND GIRL. Caroline Cossey, a former Bond girl also known as Tula, who used to be a man called Barry, claimed she had a two-year affair with the broadcaster. With characteristic insouciance Lynam commented at the time, ‘I found her very attractive. As any man would. But I don’t ever remember making love.’ The raised eyebrow that accompanied this added, ‘And if you had sex with a 6ft transsexual, you would remember it.’
Another poem on Lynam’s CD is Humbert Wolfe’s ‘Over the Fire’ (1930): ‘You cannot hope/to bribe or twist,/thank God! the/British journalist./But, seeing what/the man will do/unbribed, there’s/no occasion to.’ Bloody journalists, eh Des? You must have mixed feelings about us. ‘I have. The broadsheet press has been very kind to me down the years. But the invasion of one’s privacy by the tabloids is hard to bear. I’m not a Cabinet minister. I don’t decide how much tax you should pay. I’m a hack on the television. And apparently that makes me fair game to be plastered all over the papers if there is a hiccup in my private life. It is hurtful and difficult. The recent story was a very private matter involving three people. No one else.’
Lynam believes that the Press Complaints Commission is completely toothless. ‘The piece written about me broke all its guidelines. There’s a difference between public interest and the public being interested.’ He sighs heavily. ‘Clearly I am biased. But what is terribly unfair is that they only give one side of the story. And if someone is paid for their story it’s going to be embellished. Let’s be honest. Then if you give your side it just continues. It runs and runs. Another front page. No way out. The other option is to take it to law. Well, some of it is libellous, a lot if it isn’t, therefore you’ve got no real case and you might end up losing your house. I’m not depressed about it, just a bit fed up. I hope you’re not going to go too heavy on this aspect. I don’t want people to think I’m griping.’
He looks directly at me. It’s a penetrating look which says there is little point in trying to dissemble. It is telling how Lynam seeks to direct the course of this interview. It is consistent with the reputation he enjoys at the BBC of being a bit of a control freak, and, presumably, is why he doesn’t like to confide in his friends about his problems because this would mean compromising the control he attempts to impose on his private life.
In terms of his public persona, seeking to correct the presumption that he was a door-to-door insurance salesman, as well as the stereotype that he must be a sports bore who has no sensitivity toward literature, may be other examples of this need to control. The thing over which we have least control, of course, is death – his favourite subject – which is perhaps why the arbitrariness of Russian roulette is for him the ultimate horror. As for the discomfort he feels at having his private life discussed in the tabloids, this probably has as much to do with shyness as misplaced vanity. Dishy Des, as the tabloids dub him, is a victim of his own ‘popularity with the ladies’.
Mrs Merton called him a Tom Cruise for the menopausal woman. And in My Summer with Des, a television comedy about the Euro 96 tournament, one character says: ‘I’m trying hard not to like Des Lynam. It’s a form of mental exercise.’ Such is the price of being an institution. He admits that he is conscious of the effect he has on women and that he does sometime deploy his roguish eyebrows without quarter. ‘There is a tiny bit of ham in me. I do use it. A bit of a twinkle, or an eyebrow. I know when I’m being a bit naughty.’
He also has a naughty sense of humour. When he and Jimmy Hill were reminiscing about the 1966 World Cup final, Hill said, ‘I was employed even then by the BBC – though in a very minor capacity, of course.’ Without missing a beat Lynam said, ‘You’re still in a minor capacity, Jimmy.’
Yet Lynam is never flippant about football. And, unlike other anchors, he seldom overdramatises or resorts to clichŽ. Rather, in his mulling, deadpan style, he brings a welcome sense of perspective to our national obsession. To him it is simply glorious trivia. It is a source of regret that he was never a professional player himself. But if he could have his time again he would much rather come back as a comedy writer, specifically as John Sullivan, writer of Only Fools and Horses. Lynam used to fiddle about with satire, he says. Always threatened to do more, but was too lazy. What about his poetry reading, though? Wouldn’t he have liked to have been an actor?
‘No. Could never have been one.’
But, be honest, isn’t he acting now, in this cold room on the seventh floor? ‘Bit.’
Des Lynam defected to ITV the following year.
 

The thought that there may be a real-life Nigel Dempster out there somewhere seems preposterous. Scary even. It’s because he’s been doing what he does for so long: 35 years. His name has entered the language as a synonym for gossip and because he has become the mould into which every aspiring social diarist is poured, he now looks like a parody of himself: steeped in the social angst, chippiness and sulphur of others. Indeed, when Norman Lamont, the former Chancellor, was introduced to Dempster at a Christmas party he looked confused and said: ‘I didn’t believe you really existed.’  Further suspicion is aroused by Auberon Waugh’s claim that he created ‘Nigel Dempster’ in the Seventies, when the two men worked together on Private Eye. It is a matter of public record that Nigel Dempster was born in India in 1941; his father was Australian. But when in 1976 Private Eye named him the Greatest Living Englishman at its annual awards, it was only half a joke. Waugh admired, he later said, Dempster’s sense of  ‘innocent mischief’ and added that the diarist wasn’t a cruel man who enjoyed confronting people with their wickedness but rather a true journalist who felt the need to prick pomposity.’
As I take the lift to the third floor of Northcliffe House, the Kensington High Street home of Associated Newspapers, and walk along the corridor to his office, I am almost prepared to believe that  ‘Nigel Dempster’ is an elaborate hoax. But there he is, grey single-breasted jacket on the back of his swivel chair, tie on but top button undone, shooting his monogrammed gold cuff-links before extending his hand in greeting. Or rather, as he quickly points out, he is not really here.  ‘Nigel Dempster’ is in Melbourne. Covering the races. He missed his plane and so one of his stringers is out there being him instead.
Dempster’s thinning hair is greyer than it is in photographs but he still looks like Mr Rigsby in a tight-fitting suit, an Ealing Comedy spiv with a five o’clock shadow, oleaginous and yet dapper. There is something effeminate about Dempster’s fine features which combined with his lips (cruel, moist and pursed) and eyes (intense and dark, dark brown) serves to disconcert. His looks are saturnine and vampish. But at 57 he is pretty trim and healthy: the result of a rigorous if slightly camp daily regime. Today as every day the alarm-clock at his Chelsea home went off just before seven. He had a breakfast of half a pink grapefruit and weak Earl Grey tea and then took his five Pekinese dogs for a walk in Hyde Park. Next came a game of squash at his club, the Royal Automobile in Pall Mall, and now, at noon, he has just arrived at his office.  On a normal day Dempster would be following up his usual stories about druggy marquises and philandering dukes for an hour or so before heading off for lunch at Harry’s Bar or Langan’s. Here he would meet one of his regular informants  – who include Lord Lichfield, Michael Cole and Lord Archer  – and polish off two or three bottles of chablis. At 3.30 he would return to his desk, instruct his secretary to wake him should the editor be spotted heading in his direction, have a short snooze and then wake up in a foul temper to begin swearing at his staff and writing his copy.
It is the stuff of Fleet Street legend. It makes Dempster a character: one of the old school who, for all his hard drinking and brawling, nevertheless brings in the scoops. And, although Dempster is prone to boast about them, the list of his exclusives is long and impressive. He claims credit for being the first to write about Harold Wilson’s resignation, the engagement of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, and Princess Diana’s bulimia.
The trouble is, say his detractors, he is now past his prime and, like Margaret Thatcher and Dave Lee Travis before him, just doesn’t know when to bow out gracefully. What’s more, the detractors continue, the Daily Mail would like to get someone else to write his column, while keeping his name, which still has pulling power with the readers.
For a gossip columnist to fall foul of rumour in this way is the ultimate indignity. Even so, a series of events do lend weight to the speculation. His troubles began in 1995, when he allegedly threw a copy of Who’s Who at Kate Sissons, one of his assistants. She sued for constructive dismissal and the Mail paid her £12,000 in an out-of-court settlement. In 1996 Dempsters, a glossy gossip magazine named after him and for which he was the contributing editor, closed after only two issues. Earlier this year Dempster was stopped for suspected speeding after drinking two pints of orange juice which he claimed his 19-year-old daughter Louisa had spiked with vodka for a party. He refused to do a blood test, citing a horror of needles, and was given a fine and a 12-month ban from driving, suspended on appeal.
This summer Adam Helliker, Dempster’s loyal deputy of 17 years, left to become Mandrake, the Sunday Telegraph’s diarist. Dempster took it badly and accused him of being  ‘fucking disloyal’. He then landed a left hook and Helliker needed medical treatment for a badly bruised jaw and a split lip.
Sir David English, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, and Lord Rothermere, its owner, then died within months of each other – and Dempster lost his two most powerful protectors. Now, in another indignity, the Daily Mail has reportedly cut short its serialisation of Dempster’s People. a book which looks back over the 25 years he’s been writing his Daily Mail gossip column. The Daily Mail, which is said to have paid £75,000 for it, will not confirm this, saying instead that these things are a moveable feast.
Dempster looks edgy as he sits behind a desk strewn with cuttings files and transparencies. His body language as he talks is defensive: arms folded tightly over his chest. His voice is calm though, measured and opaque, and his eyes never waver from making contact. Presumably for my benefit he looks over my shoulder to where his secretary is sitting by the door and says:  ‘Darling, any word from Fayed’s people yet?’ I oblige him by giving the questioning lift of the eyebrows.  ‘Oh, I’m suing him about a profile he ran of me in Punch [a title revived by Fayed].’
The eyebrows go up again. ‘In this job you are a sort of historian which is why facts are sacrosanct. And the thing I notice when people write about me is just how inaccurate they are. I just hope we don’t do the same disservice to our subjects. I mean, last week I spent an hour and a half just trying to find out whether you spelt someone’s name with an “s” or a “c”.’ And the article in Punch?
‘They said I had received a warning letter from my editor and I would be sacked by Christmas. Two things wrong there: I’d just signed a new two-year contract; I have never had a letter from my editor other than one of congratulation. Fayed’s going to catch it straight in the nostril. There’s no way out. We’re going to see the whites of his eyes, if he’s got any. I’m not putting up with that crap any longer.’
Waugh’s words about pricking pomposity float back. You would think that Dempster of all people  – having worked on both Private Eye and Punch in his time  – would realise that the best policy is to treat it all as a big game. Laugh it off.
‘On the contrary. If someone deliberately sets out to cause mischief, then they should be deliberately attacked in return. Who cares if Punch only goes to a few thousand people  – some of them are in this building. The other fantasy in the piece was that I earn £1,000 a day for my column. I wish, I wish, I wish. This year the Daily Mail isn’t even my main source of income.’
A rather endearing aspect of Nigel Dempster’s character becomes apparent. He doesn’t say the magnanimous things you are supposed to say when you’re being criticised. He’s not thick-skinned, he says. He really, really resents the bad reviews his latest book has received, especially one in the Sunday Telegraph by  ‘Annie bloody Chisholm’. They make him angry.
‘Someone once said I spend the dark hours scheming about the downfall of my enemies and I think that is probably right. You don’t realise who your enemies are until something dreadful happens and then all these people jump out of the woodwork and start bashing you.’  As there are no empty meeting rooms anywhere in the whole of Northcliffe House  – apparently  – we are chatting in an office which Dempster shares with his four female assistants. As we talk, they sit silently around us, hard at work at their computers. He tells me that the thing that would hurt him most would be if he found out that the  ‘girls in the office’ hated him. ‘That would be devastating.’
Another reason he sleeps badly is that he worries about the modest form of the three racehorses he owns. There is, however, no evidence of a sleep-disturbing guilty conscience. ‘Nooo. The worst a diarist can do is ruin someone’s breakfast. It’s after the event. I mean, children in schools, Prince William etc, they know what’s happened long before Princess Diana knocks on the door and says, “Guess what’s going to be in the paper tomorrow?”‘ He pats his head with one hand and rocks back in his chair as he contemplates the church spire his office overlooks. ‘Lord Snowdon has the right attitude. Least said, soonest mended. He is believed to have an illegitimate child. His wife has just left him. Never said a word. But he accepts that these things are going to be commented on. And when you meet him he is perfectly sweet.’
A young lawyer has appeared and is hovering by the door. Christopher Moran, a property tycoon, is suing Dempster for contempt of court. Dempster hands the lawyer some photocopies and explains that Moran is a good example of the sort of person who uses the press to promote himself and then complains about intrusion when his marriage is in trouble. (A few days later, Dempster is fined £1,000 and the Daily Mail £10,000). Although Dempster once quipped that he prevented more adultery than the Archbishop of Canterbury, he does not see himself as a moral arbiter. His true feelings are reflected in another of his jokes: that there is a holiday in his heart whenever he discovers another marriage break-up.
Then again, he insists that the tone of moral outrage in his column is not feigned. He finds the behaviour of politicians who lie to the public or leave their wives for their secretaries nauseating. And he wishes people in public office still had the decency to feel shame, as they did in the first two-thirds of this century.  ‘This is why, in my position, you always have to behave yourself and not be a hypocrite.’ He smiles toothily.  ‘Apart from anything else the hours are so onerous one can’t get up to any mischief. But if I was caught leaving the equivalent of Madame Claude or the Stork Room with five bimbos on my arms by Mr Rick Sky of the Sun I would deserve it.’
A female former colleague of the diarist described him to me as a lonely, maudlin figure who is uncomfortable in his skin. Dempster and his second wife, Lady Camilla Godolphin Osborne, daughter of the Duke of Leeds, lead largely separate lives  – she has her own house in Ham. Because his wife has a title, and his first wife, Emma de Bendern, was the daughter of a count, it is sometimes said of Dempster that he is a parvenu who has broken the diaris’s code by becoming part of the world he writes about. He doesn’t see it that way.
‘We are outsiders. The number of people who split up and dive in opposite directions when they see me approaching is legion.’ He presses his fingertips together pensively and his blue signet ring catches the light. His nails are neatly manicured, apart from the one on his little finger which is very very long. ‘My wife’s a Communist,’ he says.  ‘She didn’t get called “Commie Camilla” for nothing. Went to Newcastle University where I don’t think anyone understood a word she said. And vice versa. Her mother was a lifelong Labour supporter. Any of it rub off on me? No, not really. Home is one thing and work another.’
It is tempting to suppose that Commie Camilla might have married a gossip columnist as an act of rebellion against her aristocratic background. Dempster’s first wife  – they divorced in 1974 after three years of marriage  – was also a free spirit.  ‘Just been widowed again,’ Dempster says. ‘The husband she married twice has died of cancer. At his 50th birthday I stood up and made a speech which said, “My first wife has gone back to her husband and the even better news is it’s not me.”‘ They separated, he adds, because they were too young when they married.
Dempster is unsure where his values  – a highly developed sense of social propriety but little in the way of personal conscience  – originate. His father, Eric, who was managing director of the Indian Copper Corporation, and remained married for 60 years, died 15 years ago; he did not believe in God. His wife, Angela, Dempster’s mother, is nearly 90 and is a believer. Dempster has two older sisters who, because of the War, were brought up separately from him. He was not close to his father  – a distant, disciplinarian figure who was 50 when his son was born. ‘He never knew how to react to children,’ Nigel Dempster recalls. ‘He was a dear man but a total stranger. He was so old when he came to sports days all the 30-year-old fathers would be playing cricket and my father would be scorer.’
Dempster, like his father, lacks religious faith. He recalls that Kerry Packer, an Australian media tycoon who survived after having been pronounced dead after a heart attack in 1990, once told him,  ‘Son, there’s nothing on the other side.’ ‘It doesn ‘t fill me with mortal fear,’ Dempster says. ‘Sometimes I think death can’t come too quickly. To think that I’ve got another 25 years. I’ve been here an awfully long time. There’s nothing left. I’ve done it all. Short of going to Bali. I really do think 70 is an old age. Like with Macmillan. He was so old, all his contemporaries had died. Or like the Queen Mother. My wife,’ he continues, with the diarist ‘s precision,  ‘whose father was the Queen Mother’s brother-in-law, was desperate to meet her before she died and was surprised how she couldn’t remember whether my wife’s father or grandfather had been her brother-in-law.’
The phone rings.  ‘Excuse me,’ Dempster says. ‘This might be my man from Melbourne. Pissed . . . Hello? Yes, yes. I know her. A very famous name. Her daughter was murdered. Sorry, her son was going out with the girl who was murdered by . . . Her husband . . . Exactly. Lived in South Kensington…’
I take a sip of tea and cast an eye around the room. On the pillar behind Dempster’s desk there is a poster of his Spitting Image puppet: as Private Eye’s  ‘Grovel’ columnist, with monocle, white scarf and topper. The shelves are bulging under the weight of dog-eared old copies of Who’s Who. On the walls around his desk are colour photographs of racehorses and black-and-white photographs of himself: at the races; sticking pins in a voodoo doll; standing next to a naked woman who is holding a snake. He hangs up. ‘Sorry about that. It’s midnight in Melbourne but they’ve been up since seven. You listen to these people and think, “Thank God I don ‘t drink.”‘
I splutter into my cup. What? ‘It’s my month off. November, December and January I don’t drink.’ December?  ‘Well, the first two weeks. Any time I have a medical they always say I’m fine, so what the hell.’
Dempster went to Sherborne School in Dorset where he is remembered for his long fingernails in the scrum.  ‘I think one had an urge to misbehave. We used to wear boaters and had to tip them to prefects. I worked out that if you cut the top off, you only needed to tip the brim, leaving the top on your head. Automatic beating. I was always being beaten  – for walking with my hands in my pockets or for treading on certain forbidden patches of grass, whatever. Of course it hurt but the secret was not to show it. To be the most beaten boy in the school required an enormous amount of chutzpah.’
When he left school at 16, however, he had no particular ambitions and took a job as a porter at the Westminster Hospital. He then became a vacuum-cleaner salesman before drifting into the City to work as a broker at Lloyd’s of London. ‘I wouldn’t have been happy staying in the City, because it was just like boarding-school where I had been from the age of six. ‘His first job in journalism came in 1963 as an assistant on the Daily Express  ‘William Hickey’ column.
‘Diary writing was considered a dirty profession in the Sixties,’ he says. ‘It was traditionally a job for grammar-school boys. You know, Us and Them. You had to mix in the same pubs – and people were drinkers. Very much frowned on these days.’ Evenings would often end in fisticuffs and certain journalists established the reputations that would remain with them for the rest of their careers. ‘People like their enemies or heroes to be slightly larger than life,’ Dempster adds with a nostalgic chuckle.
Now better-known to regular readers of Private Eye’s  ‘Street of Shame’ column as Pratt-Dumpster, Dempster does not think that he has ever slipped into self-parody.  ‘Not really. We are so isolated here. I don ‘t know whether it is better to be ignored by Private Eye or not because when they write about you it is nothing but fantasy. Peter McKay [a fellow Daily Mail journalist] said, “It’s just Ingram’s and Hislop’s way of keeping close to you. Trying to hug you.” I said, “I’d rather those creepy crawlies kept away from me.”‘
The phone rings again.  ‘Chalky, how are you?… I’m all right. Sort of dealing with life, as they say. What are you up to?… Was he wearing his titfer?… OK, my boy… I might catch up with you…’
The tone is hearty. And the rather haunted and vulnerable figure that has been presented so far steps aside for a moment. It reminds you that Dempster has a reputation as a great raconteur and that his natural milieu is not an office, pre-lunch, in one of his dry months, but propping up a bar. But even without a couple of drinks inside him, Dempster’s prejudices shine through. He refers to Mountbatten as Mountbottom and one duke as being  ‘queer as a ninepin’. In his book he describes black people as  ‘coloured’,  ‘dusky’ or  ‘not of English origin’.
The book has its comic moments. ‘”Writs are the Oscars of my profession,”‘ I once famously told an interviewer,’ writes Dempster. And even Craig Brown couldn’t improve on this for inadvertent self-parody:  ‘It was misplaced revenge, but served only to add to my mystique.’ Dempster also has a happy knack of summing a person up with a one- or two-word description, such as  ‘badger-haired politician Norman Lamont’ or  ‘gap-tooth Lothario David Mellor’. When asked what adjective he would put before his own name he says  ‘energetic’. When I point out that he is usually described as being charming, he smiles suspiciously and proffers a rather attenuated name-drop. ‘Charming? Well, I went to a prep school where the headmaster was Sophie Rees-Jones’s grandfather and he used to tell us to open gates for everyone and call everyone “Sir” and I don’t think anything has changed.’
Although Dempster has been overheard to say on the telephone, ‘Do you know who I am? My wife’s father was the Queen Mother’s brother-in law,’ and although he once said that John Major was not accepted in society because he had not been invited to a dance at Chatsworth given by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, he doesn’t think that the word  ‘snob’ applies to him. ‘No, never. Never once. Just ask any of them in here. A snob is someone who holds titles in esteem and I’ve never done that. On the Express we had to write about titled people because Beaverbrook wouldn’t allow you to write about anyone who wasn’t.’ Paul Callan, Dempster’s original mentor at the Express, remembers him as being the most insecure person he had ever met. ‘Insecure?’ Dempster repeats. ‘I don’t think so. One is insecure about one’s job but then one has always been insecure about one’s job.’
Emotional then? As in ’emotional diarist Nigel Dempster?’
‘I’ve never cried. Doesn’t feature. Maybe as a child when I was whacked, but that was the last time. Only Continentals show their emotions.’ Upon reflection he considers that he does feel emotional about his dogs. ‘The unfortunate thing about dogs is that, as Sir Walter Scott said, unless you are old you are going to outlive them. We’ve just buried one, which was a tremendous sadness. Sad because they are such trusting creatures. They can’t forage for themselves. ‘
Those who find it difficult to relate to people are said to find it easier to express their feelings to animals. Bullies, goes the theory, are especially prone to transference of affection in this way. It is time to clear up those stories: is Dempster a bully in the office?
‘I don’t think I am, actually. There was a girl here who got something hopelessly wrong which she could have got right by looking in Who’s Who so I grabbed a copy and banged it on her desk to the left of her. The legend now is that I threw a copy of Debrett’s at her. Hardly likely. Every other girl in the office will tell you the same story.’
And the drink-driving?
‘Clearly I am an innocent person. I drove into work this morning. It’s not just a matter of having clever solicitors. It’s just the way things are. Other people don’t contest these things because they don’t have the time or the money. I have both.’
Lady Archer once questioned whether being a gossip columnist was a suitable occupation for a grown man. Nigel Dempster is wont to quote Søren Kierkegaard on the subject.  ‘All life,’ the philosopher said in 1851,  ‘will soon be gossip.’ Today, though, he justifies his lifetime’s work with the disarming  – and redeeming  – comment:  ‘I think I’ve added to the gaiety of nations.’
His tragedy is that he has become everything he ever wanted to be  – a Fleet Street legend  – and this in a way makes him redundant. It’s a shame that he can’t bear being teased. And a pity that he feels such a great sense of injustice. Where once he was magnificently arch and supercilious, now he just seems twitchy and paranoid.
‘When you are at the top of your profession, such as it is, and when you are doing something well you have to keep doing it,’ he says when the retirement question is posed. ‘Every day. It’s not like making Citizen Kane, where you can rest on your laurels. You have to keep on making Citizen Kane every day. It’s Cambodia Year Zero right now.’
‘The girls’  – as well as  ‘darling’, the secretary  – have all departed for lunch. The lawyer who has been analysing the contempt of court papers is clearing his throat restlessly.
I am at the door when Dempster calls me back, apparently exercised by the question of his posterity. He intends to have a Viking funeral, he says, like Beaverbrook. On the Thames. And when he and his longboat go up in flames  ‘everything’ will go up with him.

The chairman is running late. Half an hour. His PA has been popping her head around the door every ten minutes to convey his apologies. The sound of him barking out orders carries through the walls and, alongside me on the squeaky leather sofa in the corridor, I sense the spectral presence of employees past: broken and wretched minions summoned here to squirm a while before finding out if they’re to be sacked. There is a chill in the air and, to the imagination, the cough of a nearby secretary becomes a hollow groan; the tapping of a keyboard mutates into the rattling of a chain.
It must be quite something, being mythologised – even if it is as a foul-tempered bully who could kill rats with his teeth and think nothing of impaling 500 work-shy personnel on pikes before breakfast. For one thing, it must be a hoot watching the way strangers react to you. And it must be so good to know that, thanks to the negative expectations they must harbour, their first impressions of you are bound to be positive.
Sir Jocelyn Stevens, the 66-year-old chairman of English Heritage, certainly revels in this reputation. And when you meet him he does indeed confound your presumptions by being all backslapping heartiness and bonhomie. He is a tall, barrel-chested man with smooth, pink skin that looks freshly scrubbed. There is a manly cleft in his chin and his nose is broken, a constant reminder of the Public Schools’ Boxing Championship final he lost in 1949.
The next thing you notice about him is that he is wearing a watch on each wrist. And with his thick white hair and blustering, distracted manner this eccentricity morphs him momentarily into the hopelessly late but time-obsessed White Rabbit. You are taken further through the looking-glass when Sir Jocelyn ushers you into his office on the fourth floor of an imposing Thirties-style building in Savile Row. There is a wooden dog the size of a pony next to his desk. It is the sort of object which your instincts scream at you to ignore in the hope that it will go away (a reaction psychologists call perceptual defence).
For the first 40 minutes my side of the conversation goes like this: ‘I’d like to start by…’; ‘Yes I see but…’; ‘Wouldn’t it be…’; ‘You say that but surely…’ Sir Jocelyn does not brook interruption – just shouts you down – and when you do manage to lob in a question he sighs impatiently, gulps air, and fidgets until you’ve done asking it. Although his delivery is clipped and plummy, he slurs odd words and, in his eagerness to crack on with the next thought, he doesn’t always finish his sentences. He has no volume control, emphasises words erratically and punctuates his monologues every so often with a friendly, snuffling laugh.
At the moment, he says, his mind is focused on the grand unveiling of the Albert Memorial by the Queen. As he warms to this theme it becomes clear that Sir Jocelyn considers himself to be a living embodiment of the Victorian spirit. He is half-right. He does get on and do things; and he is sentimental. He often catches himself weeping when he listens to military bands. And recently, when he visited a community of immigrants who were living in a formerly derelict Victorian square in Brixton, he felt moved to tears. Thanks to a conservation scheme he had introduced, they had formed a square committee. ‘The civic pride they had. You wouldn’t believe it!  Absolutely splendid people. Newly arrived from the Caribbean. They laughed and laughed and laughed. And afterwards they did this tin-drum song about Queen Victoria.’
But the image he is stuck with is that of the free-marketeering, union-bashing, archetypal Thatcherite. While it is true that Margaret Thatcher admired the Victorians for their enterprise and their family values, she had no time for their liberal paternalism. And neither does Sir Jocelyn. Though he says so himself, his career has been all about saving great institutions – Queen magazine, the Evening Standard, the Express, the Royal College of Art and, since 1992, English Heritage – by making them more efficient and commercially viable, for which read clearing them of the dead wood. He knows he has made a lot of enemies doing this, but he says he doesn’t mind. ‘Not at all. I think you have to make enemies. England is in a funny state at the moment; a lot of people who talk a lot and not many who do a lot.’
In order to make English Heritage work, Sir Jocelyn offered voluntary redundancy to 700 members of staff.  But being ruthless in the name of efficiency is one thing. Appearing to take pleasure in humiliating people who work for you, or whom you are about to sack, is quite another. According to clause 384, subsection ii, of the Journalist’s Code of Conduct, there are certain stories about Sir Jocelyn’s ferocious temper tantrums which must appear in any article pertaining to his life and times. So let us dispense with them: (1) The time he got so angry with a fashion writer he threw her typewriter out of a fourth-floor window.(2) The time he got so angry he snipped a telephone wire with a pair of scissors in order to cut a caller off. (3) The time he got so angry he sacked a secretary over the Tannoy. (4) The time he got so angry he roared to someone: ‘Get out of this office! And what do you mean by bringing this ghastly little man with you?’ (The ghastly little man was a highly regarded City surveyor who was hunchbacked from having had polio as a child.)
‘Most of the stories that you hear are true,’ Sir Jocelyn says with a shrug. ‘But in a long working life, which is now 40 years, people only remember…’ The sentence is unfinished. ‘I mean, the lady with the typewriter is now dead. So often printed. Very boring.  They’re things I can’t escape now because they’re in every cutting. It doesn’t allow one to mature very much. And people do exaggerate. I was once called before the Permanent Secretary because they were worried about morale at English Heritage and Peter Brooke said in my defence, “You don’t know him as well as I do. When he was at the Royal College of Art he once sacked 19 professors in an afternoon. It was wonderful!” Sir Jocelyn gives a wheezy chuckle at the recollection of this. ‘Well, that was an exaggeration. You see it was only 11. And they were all useless.’
It seems a bit rich that Sir Jocelyn, the arch self-publicist who will gladly dress up and act the clown for a photo opportunity, should complain that he is a prisoner of his cuttings, even if he does add, ‘I suppose it hasn’t hurt me. People tend to ring me up to ask me to do things because they know I will get them done.’ He is obviously pretty thrilled with himself and with his belligerent public image. This, after all, is a man who once wrote to a paper to complain that it had libelled him by describing him as charming. Only someone who is sure he can charm if he wants to would joke about that. But it does reveal a curious paradox. On the one hand you have to assume, given his spectacular rudeness, that Sir Jocelyn is someone who genuinely doesn’t care what people think about him. On the other, he cared enough about his image to go around every newspaper library removing any cuttings file about himself (in the days before cuttings could be called up on computer).
‘I’ve never confessed to that before!’ he says with a snorting laugh. ‘Terrible of me, really. But I wanted to be able to start again, otherwise anything you’ve done in the past is constantly repeated.’ It makes you wonder what dark secrets from his past he wanted to erase. Was he worried that people would find out about his two musically gifted brothers, Shakin’ and Cat, the ones he kept locked in the attic at home? More likely he wanted to play down his image as a Sixties dandy and playboy because it undermined his Eighties reputation as a fire-breathing monster who gets things done.
On his 21st birthday he came into his inheritance – £750,000 – left him by his mother, whose family had made its fortune in newspapers, owning the Evening Standard in the Twenties and Picture Post in the Fifties. He immediately bought himself an Aston Martin and wrote it off the same day. On his 25th birthday he bought himself the ailing Queen magazine, and called in his chums Marc Boxer and Tony Snowdon. When bored with that, he says, he sold it off to a man who happened to be sitting at the next table at Claridges.
Vain enough to reinvent himself, then, and reportedly to storm around his office shouting and slamming doors whenever a hostile profile is written about him in a newspaper. That is, whenever a profile is written about him in a newspaper. Yet, whenever there is a new milestone in his career to commemorate, he always agrees to be interviewed about it. It could be that he’s a glutton for punishment or an optimist. Or maybe it’s that all he really cares about is getting attention in whatever form, and by whatever means, including screaming for it petulantly like a baby. The obvious Freudian reading of this is that he craves the attention he never received from his father, the late Major Greville Stewart-Stevens. When his mother, Betty, went into labour with him there were dangerous complications. The child lived but she died a few days later. His father, Jocelyn believes, never got over the death, blaming it on the Roman Catholicism of his wife’s family, and always regarded his son as the murderer of his wife.
As a small child, Jocelyn was sent to live in his own flat, off Baker Street in central London, with his own nanny, priest, cook and maid. He was driven around Hyde Park every day by his own chauffeur in his own Rolls-Royce. His father lived in another house and, when he remarried four years later, Jocelyn went to live with his stepfamily in Scotland. Although his stepsisters claim that Jocelyn exaggerates this rejection, it is clear that the boy never felt close to his father. After Eton, he did his National Service in the Rifle Brigade. Though he won the Sword of Honour, his father declined to come to the passing-out parade.
Sir Jocelyn Stevens does not see a connection with his unorthodox upbringing and the need he feels today to always get his own way. He does not believe he was spoilt. ‘I don’t think so. Not particularly. I don’t think it’s about getting your own way because quite often you win by going someone else’s way. I don’t work alone.’ Given the privileges he was born to, it would have been understandable if Sir Jocelyn had opted for a life of idle luxury. Instead he became a workaholic, regularly putting in 14 hours a day, and in 1979 this took its toll on his marriage of 23 years, to Jane Sheffield, Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret.
He has been with his present partner, Vivien Duffield, for 18 years. With an estimated fortune of £45 million inherited from her father Sir Charles Clore, she is one of the richest women in Britain. And with her own assertive and unembarrassable manner she is said to be more than a match for Sir Jocelyn. When kept waiting in reception for him once when he was managing director of Express Newspapers she sent a message saying if he did not come down immediately she would buy the paper and fire him. The couple divide their time between houses in London, Hampshire, Scotland, Geneva and Gstaad, and are famous for their extravagant parties.
You have to wonder, then, where Sir Jocelyn gets his motivation to carry on working as fanatically as he does. ‘It’s just that I have always been very determined and have always hated losing. Very bad losers, my family.’ He is not sure why this is. ‘One is born that way or not. I don’t think it happens.’ Not nurture then? ‘No. I don’t think so. Although it may have had something to do with being brought up in the War, quite a tough upbringing.’
His account of how he was offered the job of saving English Heritage is telling. He was in Scotland cleaning leaves out of the gutter when Michael Heseltine rang. ‘There was a thunderstorm and I was soaked to the skin and took ages to come to the phone. He asked me what on earth I’d been doing and when I told him I’d been cleaning the gutter because the house was leaking all over he said, ‘Very appropriate to the job I am about to offer you: chairman of English Heritage.’ I said I didn’t know much about English Heritage except that I hated it and he said, ‘Got it!’ They wanted a fox in the chicken coop.’
It is obvious why Michael Heseltine admires Sir Jocelyn. They are both protected by the same armour of the deliberate philistine. In his new history of the Tory Party, Alan Clark describes Heseltine’s aggression and vanity; he also refers to his unpredictability, cunning and low intellect. There are other parallels. Both are self-parodying, single-minded and ruthless in their pursuit of power. Both are electrifying orators. Both love it when they are the victim of satirists or cartoonists. Heseltine tried to buy his Spitting Image puppet. Sir Jocelyn has on his office wall several large cartoons which depict him as a tyrant. All the staff I talked to referred to Stevens as ‘The Chairman,’ presumably at his insistence. Heseltine liked to be called ‘The President’ (of the Board of Trade) instead of the more usual ‘Minister’ (for Trade and Industry).
Above all, both men are as hyperactive as children. You can see Sir Jocelyn getting more and more excited as he talks. He is sitting in an armchair which whizzes around on its rollers as he rocks back and forth. The mental image of one of those toy cars which you wind up by chaffing its back wheels against the carpet is irresistible. Any moment now I fear he may stop rocking and the armchair will scoot off to the other side of the room.
Even on brief acquaintance it is obvious that Sir Jocelyn is a force of nature: that this is why no one has ever dared to stand up to him and why he assumes he will always be forgiven for his obnoxious behaviour. He could never be accused of being a dull conformist and this – along with his vitality and brio – is his saving chracteristic. He seems civil enough to me, jolly in fact; perhaps, dare one say it, even a little charming in his way. But having never witnessed him become incandescent with rage, I have no claim to objectivity. That’s not to say I haven’t heard first-hand accounts of his tantrums, though, including one occasion when he was overheard on a street corner screaming into his mobile phone at his chauffeur who was late in picking him up: ‘You are a worthless fucking worm.’
Mercurial, then; and volatile. And quite the Dominatrix. But it is difficult to gauge whether his bluff manner and irrepressible enthusiasm conceals extreme cleverness or bestial stupidity. Although everyone thinks of Sir Jocelyn as an arch Tory, Tony Blair was happy to see him re-appointed as chairman of English Heritage for another three years, which suggests that Sir Jocelyn has good political instincts. It is clear from listening to him that his passion for conserving England’s heritage is genuine. He believes that a nation which doesn’t care about its past has no future. ‘I am an old-fashioned patriot,’ Sir Jocelyn says. ‘Always been. Love this country. Hugely proud of it.’
The trouble is when I ask him whether he would have been equally committed and enthusiastic if Michael Heseltine had rung and asked him to save a football club instead of English Heritage, he says, ‘Yes. Anything.’ For him it is not the cause that is really important, it is the not losing. He’s competitive; not a good sport. ‘Yes. One is in competition with oneself, in a way. One is not racing against someone else’s monument. It’s inbuilt. I can’t bear people who don’t finish a job. You have to overcome the carpet of bureaucracy in England. If you look at the people who succeed in beating it, it is usually impatient people.’ He means angry people. ‘Well anger, I am afraid, is sometimes the only way to get things done.’
It is comments like this which make you suspect that the anger may sometimes be an act. ‘Well, now it’s mostly controlled,’ Sir Jocelyn admits. ‘It wasn’t before. I was quite proficient in the martial arts and I would get physically angry. Even now if someone rammed into the back of my car I would get out and shout, ‘You fucker!’ at whoever did it. It’s a sudden thing. But I have no instinct to throw my weight around any more. One is helped by one’s growing reputation when one arrives at a new job. When I arrived at the RCA, a lot of resignations were already waiting on my desk. These were professors who hadn’t been working. Turning up and getting paid for nothing. They knew they wouldn’t last. They knew that when I arrived here, too.’ He springs from his chair, marches across the room and peels off a sheet of paper that someone has Sellotaped anonymously to the back of his door. ‘Terribly funny, this,’ he says as he hands it to me. Written in black felt-tip pen are the words: ‘We must create an environment where everyone knows and feels that a failure to fulfil orders means death.’
What seems to worry people most about Sir Jocelyn is that he might be a genuine sadist, that he really does enjoy being a bully. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No pleasure. But I do get annoyed. If one is harsh on people, it certainly isn’t with juniors. Most famous example, I suppose, was when Miss Page, now chief executive of the Dome, was stolen from us by the hapless Stephen Dorrell. I was so angry that he hadn’t bothered to tell me that I stormed round, crashed my way in and said, “Right, that’s it. I work like a bloody dog. I expect to be treated civilly.” Someone should have rung and told me. I was angry because it offended my code of trust. He had made a massive breach. I said, “I’m attacking you for bad manners and I will not sit down again in your company, to remind myself of what a shit you are.” So for a month when everyone was sitting down in meetings I would be standing up. It is eccentric but it had an enormous effect. He knows I don’t fear anybody. I’ve never been frightened of anything.’
To overcome your fears in adversity means you have courage.  To have no fears in the first place means you are just or odd. Does Sir Jocelyn acknowledge that there is something a little inhuman about his fearlessness?  ‘It does sometimes puzzle me. In the military I was never frightened. Not at all afraid of dying. Maybe something is missing. I’ve never been to a psychiatrist. Never felt the need to. It’s just the way one sees things. It’s just…’
Frenetic people who throw themselves into their work sometimes do so because they dread being left alone with their own thoughts – for fear of discovering that they are the empty vessels who make most noise. Anything that will distract them from contemplating their inner life will do. ‘No, I don’t have a fear of that,’ Sir Jocelyn says, twiddling one arm of his half-rimmed spectacles. ‘I just want to win. I have obsessions. I’m a perfectionist. That is the curse. It means one is permanently unhappy.’
Another curse seems to be that he always feel bored and restless as soon as things start running smoothly. Like a successful wartime prime minister, he feels disconnected and aimless in peacetime. His feeling of permanent unhappiness, though, is a surprising admission. You’d think he might feel just a teeny bit fulfilled from time to time. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be content because there is always something to do. I mean, as exciting.’
All this is not to suggest that his life has been without its black days. As a young man he got into Trinity College, Cambridge, on the strength of his rowing prowess, only to be sent down for bunking off during term time to go skiing – and sending his tutor a postcard from the Swiss Alps saying, ‘Wish you were here.’ He was sacked from the Express in 1981 when he attempted a management buy out. He had four children, two boys and two girls. One of them, Rupert, was disabled with palsy and died at the age of 22 in 1989.  When another, Pandora, became a drug addict, Sir Jocelyn broke into her squat, carried her out, checked her into a rehab clinic and then had her dealer hunted down and arrested.
‘Oh, you can’t help but get depressed some times,’ he says blithely. ‘God, I feel low some times. But my first reaction is not to take things personally or give up but to pick myself up and start again.’ But if you are thick-skinned enough to keep bouncing back, does that not make you shallow? Sir Jocelyn pinches the bridge of his nose. ‘I’m not that thick-skinned. One does have bad moments but not very often. One has been very lucky. Come and have a look at this.’ He jumps up again and shows me two giant rectangular photographs of Stonehenge; one shows the site with a road, one with it airbrushed out. ‘See how much better it looks.’
He looks at the watch first on his right hand, then on his left, he really must get on and finish proof reading his report on Stonehenge right now.  The nagging question still has to be asked. Why two watches? It turns out this is the first day Sir Jocelyn has worn both. He is trying out an old one, which he doesn’t trust. The only other person he’s ever known to wear two was Lord Mountbatten. Sir Jocelyn was being driven by him one day in his Land Rover when he made the mistake of asking the time as they were approaching a gate. He mimes Lord Mountbatten taking both hands off the steering wheel to check his watches. ‘Crashed right into the bloody thing!’
He roars with laughter, slaps me on the back and sends me tottering unsteadily into the pony-sized wooden dog which I have been trying so desperately to ignore.

If Bob Monkhouse had bludgeoned his own mother to death with an entrenching tool, calmly burnt down an orphanage and then experimented openly with cannibalism during a Royal Variety Performance, it is doubtful whether the poor chap’s critics could have come up with stronger words of disapprobation than those they have already levelled at him over the years. ‘Despicable’, ‘slimy’ and ‘chilling’ are typical examples.
While it is a pretty serious crime to spend a lifetime irritating people in the name of light entertainment, surely Monkhouse never deserved to be roughed up quite as excessively as he has been in the past – or indeed, despite his recent rehabilitation as a hero of comedy, as he still sometimes is today. He’s an old man now. He probably wears carpet slippers. Being cruel to him just doesn’t seem funny any more.
When I meet him on an overcast late summer afternoon at his l6th-century redbrick farmhouse in rural Bedfordshire, he is still licking his wounds from a mauling he had received a few days earlier. ‘His delivery is like being touched up by a Moonie encyclopaedia salesman,’ wrote AA Gill. ‘Every mannerism drips insincerity and smarm. It’s like having margarine massaged into your hair. No, it’s like wearing marzipan socks.’ Gill added that he hopes he is never introduced to Bob Monkhouse in person for fear of finding him terribly nice, amusing and thoughtful. ‘A loathing of his every syllable and nuance is one of the cornerstones of my critical edifice,’ Gill continued. ‘If I ever found I liked him, my world would collapse.’
Inevitably, when you come face to face with Monkhouse you do find him terribly nice, amusing and thoughtful. That is his tragedy. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone who needs to be liked quite as much as this man. Nor, with the obvious exception of Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare, anyone quite so effortlessly capable of rendering his or her public persona unlovable. On stage, Monkhouse has some of the sharpest lines you’ll ever hear: ‘They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. They’re not laughing now.’ Or, ‘I’m a hard man to ignore. But well worth the effort.’ Or, ‘I’d like to die like my father, peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like his passengers.’ But he just seems to try too hard when he’s telling them. He shoots his cuffs, smiles and chews too much. His quick-fire patter is too polished and hammy. At home, by contrast, he speaks slowly and croakily in a subdued and wistful voice. He seems languid, gentle and relaxed – not at all repulsive. That distinctive mole on the chin is still there, as is the permanently arched eyebrow. But instead of a dinner-jacket he wears an embroidered beach shirt, its tails untucked, its buttons undone to reveal the sort of tanned, leathery chest you would expect a 70-year-old show-business personality to have.
‘The irritant factor is still there,’ Monkhouse says with a sigh, as he leans toward me across a wrought-iron garden table. ‘In full. Apparently. I don’t get upset about bad reviews from intelligent writers. What I hate is people like AA Gill who attack me personally and who are blisteringly unpleasant. I inhabit that persona he rejects – and it hurts. In the same way that someone refusing to shake your hand is hurtful. And, anyway, he misses the point when he complains that I am insincere. When did I ever say I was offering sincerity? I’m not coming out and saying, “I really mean that, folks.” I’m not offering exhortations to be brave or patriotic or spiritually uplifted. The only thing I’m sincere about is that I sincerely want you to laugh.’
It would take Lake Windermere dropped from the sky to dampen Monkhouse’s enthusiasm for making people laugh. Writing jokes is a compulsion for him. Throw any topical subject his way and, instantaneously, he will be able to turn it into a one-liner. His photographic memory helps. As Harry Thompson, producer of Have I Got News for You, has said, his skill is that he knows so many old jokes he can manufacture a new one for any situation using the component parts of others. But going to the grave obsessively thinking up jokes is one thing, attempting to perform them as you go is another. Monkhouse says he used to find it depressing when old heroes of his didn’t know when to retire. ‘I would see Flanagan and Allen trying to cavort on stage when they were clearly close to their dotage. The lower eyelid had fallen from the eye.  Their timing was out. It was painful to watch. But now I’m 70 I can understand why they did it. They had nothing to fall back on. The joy I still get from confecting comedy is extreme.’
Every profession has terrifyingly ambitious types unfettered by obvious natural ability who, nevertheless, rise by virtue of their persistence and self-belief. Journalism is full of them. The Royal Navy had Lord Mountbatten, who was so mediocre and accident-prone that the Admiralty had to keep promoting him to get him out of its way. I suspect that Bob Monkhouse is the comedy world’s equivalent. That’s not to say he isn’t an inspired gag writer. Nor to deny that he is probably the world’s leading expert on the techniques of comedy, as is clear from reading his autobiography Crying with Laughter. It is full of self-deprecating anecdotes, salacious gossip and analysis of comic technique. At one time or another Monkhouse has worked with nearly all the big names in post-War comedy, so he is uniquely placed to dissect their work.
Sitting in his garden, the soothing bill and coo of woodpigeons in the background, Monkhouse becomes animated. He strips jokes down to show me how they work. He explains the principles of timing, ‘the rule of three’, and the Arthur Askey ‘check step’ you should take before delivering your ‘topper’. Clearly, when it comes to tinkering around under the bonnet of comedy with the, um, monkey-wrench of laughter, he is a master mechanic. The trouble is, on stage, he’s never learned to make it look as if he isn’t – in the way that, say, the apparently rambling, vague and amateurish Eddie Izzard does. Even Monkhouse seems to know this in his heart. ‘I actually can’t watch myself on television,’ he says. ‘Yesterday I tried to sit through a tape of a new “best of” compilation that they are making. But I couldn’t watch this man.’ So why has he gone on punishing himself – and AA Gill – for so many years? Given that his parents assumed he could never make a decent living from his profession, it might be that in the early years he was driven by a need to prove them wrong and – an almost impossible feat, this – win their approval.
Growing up in Beckenham, Kent, the closest young Robert came to his father – ‘a prematurely balding chartered accountant who had a habitual dislike of people’ – was when he was struck by him so hard he had to go to hospital to be stitched. The blow had been provoked by Robert accidentally dropping his towel while stepping out of the tin bath in front of the fire. His mother was told that he had fallen off his bike and, for a while, Robert and his father were ‘co-conspirators, sharing a male secret, allied in a lie that only we knew about’.
His relationship with his mother was much less comfortable. When the 21-year-old Bob married against her wishes she didn’t speak to him again until he was 41. Prove his parents wrong Monkhouse most certainly did. He left Dulwich College in London at the age of 17 and immediately started writing gags for such music-hall turns as Arthur Askey, Jimmy Edwards and Max Miller. National Service interrupted his budding career but he used it to his advantage by conning his way into a job at the BBC – he duped an army psychiatrist into signing a letter requesting an audition on the grounds that it would be the only cure for Corporal Monkhouse’s delusional psychosis. By the late Forties and early Fifties Monkhouse was appearing in his own television and radio comedy programmes as well as writing material for just about every big star, from Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
In 1958, he starred in Carry On Sergeant, the first Carry On film, and would have gone on to take the Jim Dale and Roy Castle roles in subsequent films had he not been offered three times as much money to play the lead in Dentist in the Chair (1959), something which seemed sensible at the time but which he now regrets. His career flagged in the mid-Sixties only to take off again in 1967 with The Golden Shot, which at its peak had 16 million viewers. Monkhouse went through a bad patch again in 1972, when he was sacked from the programme for taking a bribe (a photography book and a Wilkinson Sword razor). He has always been an obsessive collector – or rather hoarder – of things, from stamps to tins of food and old films. This obsession brought him to his lowest point: he was arrested in 1978 for conspiracy to defraud film companies by illegally importing films for his private collection (he was subsequently cleared of all charges).
In the Eighties, Monkhouse hosted a string of game shows but by then he had become lumped in the public imagination with Jimmy Tarbuck, Frank Carson and Jim Davidson, the old school of unreconstructed and unfunny television stars. ‘I thought I’d had my day,’ he says, shaking his head at the memory. ‘My career had slowed down. They’d cancelled The 64 Million Dollar Question and Bob’s Your Uncle. There was nothing for me at the BBC. It depressed me. Briefly.’ Then in 1993, against everyone’s advice, he was interviewed for Radio 4’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, and everything changed. He cut a sympathetic figure. He was asked to write an autobiography; it became a bestseller. He appeared on Have I Got News for You, presented himself as a dry and poker-faced wit, and stole the show. Stephen Fry said how much he had always admired him, and his reinvention was complete.
Today, at 70, Monkhouse has never been more in demand: presenting the Lottery, hosting Wipeout, a daytime quiz show, and packing out theatres again as a stand-up. An armchair psychiatrist might devise a theory about how Monkhouse, a comedian who can’t stand watching himself, was driven masochistically by the need to win parental approval.  But this won’t quite wash. He seems to crave attention and admiration from everyone. And egomaniacs are often full of self-doubt. You can tell he’s only half-joking when he describes himself as a shallow, selfish, cowardly liar. ‘I’m aware of my own inadequacies but I’m not tortured by them,’ he says with a shrug. ‘I know that I’ve been a fool and made some stupid decisions in the past. As a performer I wish I had had a dark side. But tyranny was not within my compass. All I have is a perky mind. Not a mind of any depth. Which is another source of regret. I’m superficial. Skittering around on the surface all the time. I wish I had done a degree. Even sociology would have done.’
I had always thought the thing that set Bob Monkhouse apart from just about every other successful comedian you can think of was that he seemed so boringly sane and calculating. (Think how unbalanced Tony Hancock, Kenneth Williams and Benny Hill were. And look at John Cleese, Stephen Fry and Ken Dodd. Cuckoo to a man.) Now I’m not so sure. Neither is Monkhouse. ‘Am I mad?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know. It depends on your definition. Not mad. Just silly. And that’s probably been my saving grace. Being silly. That’s probably the nicest thing about me. I’m soppy, juvenile and I have a light heart. I’m desperately affected by emotions. But I have no angst.’
Another saving grace may be that he is too thick-skinned to develop a persecution complex or to wallow in melancholy. ‘Self-pity is as habit-forming, corrosive to the spirit and delusory as any narcotic,’ he believes. ‘You have to concentrate on its absurdity and mock it out of your mind.’ At school he had an obesity problem caused by a dodgy thyroid (it was later successfully treated). When he was mocked about it (‘Fatty Arbuckle’) he wouldn’t get upset, he’d just withdraw into his own world and draw cartoons. His work was published by the Beano and Dandy while he was a schoolboy.
He still sees things in simple cartoon terms. ‘It’s a lovely way to see the world. If you can get away with it.’ He says that he is constitutionally incapable of worry and that he nearly always feels happy. ‘And sometimes I wonder whether I shouldn’t shut up about it, because that might awaken a great deal of irritation and envy in itself.’ A sunny disposition can be a defence mechanism against pain, though – albeit a healthy form of denial. In the past, Monkhouse has been so repressed mentally, he has reacted to traumatic events physically. When his grandfather died, the ten-year-old Robert lost the ability to speak for three months and was afterwards left with a stutter. He and his first wife had four stillborn babies before Gary was born in 1951. Gary had cerebral palsy, and Monkhouse began suffering from blinding migraine attacks which continued until Gary died in 1992.
When his wife went into labour with their second child, Monkhouse was so apprehensive he developed a strange burping complaint and thought he was going to die.  (The baby was fine and the couple went on to have another healthy child and Bob stopped burping.) On one occasion while presenting The Golden Shot he broke down in tears as he read out a letter sent in by a blind elderly widow who needed £20 to replace her beloved radio, stolen by thieves. Later in the same show, someone made him laugh and this turned into a bout of uncontrollable giggling that lasted for more than half a minute.
Has he trained his agile brain to be shallow and his outlook to be permanently happy for fear of falling victim to the dark emotional forces he suppresses? ‘I had a great urge to be liked,’ he says. ‘I think I was absolutely two people. I was the child my parents expected me to be. Unemotional. But only because I suppressed that side of me. I became reserved. My mother saw all signs of emotion as being weak and despicable. Despicable. I would hear her speak of people who were loud or flamboyant, or who wept, with utter contempt. My father was the same: a joyless, lugubrious man. Eventually I escaped them and today I wish I could go back and embrace them and understand them and still be myself.’
He pauses and studies his fingers. ‘I think I invented a facade. I didn’t love the person I was. It wasn’t until my first marriage failed and I fell in love with Jackie and she with me that I actually began to like myself.’ Jackie had been his secretary for ten years before he married her in 1973. He describes her as being gregarious in ways which he is not, always on the phone and wanting to socialise. ‘She has a more realistic view of people than I do. She says, ‘He isn’t a very nice man; she’s a bitch,’ and I can never see it. I’m always looking at how people react to me, not how they are themselves. Selfishness takes some strange forms.’ Jackie is 62, tall and blonde with apple cheeks and impossibly white teeth which she flashes when she smiles. As we are talking in the garden, she shouts across from the kitchen, ‘Can I have a word, Bob?’ ‘Yes, darling,’ he says, immediately rising and heading over to where she is standing in the doorway. I overhear her saying, ‘And he was just so rude.’
When Monkhouse returns he is looking sheepish and explains that when our photographer arrived he had told him that it would be okay to have a look around the house for a suitable place to set up a shot, but that Jackie had found him upstairs in the bedroom. The photographer now emerges looking equally sheepish and begins looking for locations in the large garden instead. ‘He’s probably a genius,’ Bob says shaking his head as he watches our man disappear from view behind a weeping willow.
Because his parents argued all the time, Bob Monkhouse hates confrontation. In the 25 years he has been happily married he has only had three arguments with his wife. About the same thing. He cannot keep his side of the house tidy. He snores and so the couple have separate bedrooms in different wings; they also have a shared room in the middle. With disarming candour he tells me his sex life improved recently after he started taking Viagra. ‘It works after 40 minutes and lasts for about 90 minutes. I’ll give you one to try if you like, I’ve got them upstairs.’
He may now be a kind, fond and foolish 70-year-old who says he is at the age where happiness is finding his glasses soon enough to remember what it was he wanted them for. But he is still obsessed with sex, or ‘making love’, as he always calls it. His memoirs were notable for their embarrassing frankness on this subject and contained a gripping account of his five-hour romp with Diana Dors and his subsequent terror when her husband, a gangster figure, found out, produced a razor and threaten to ‘slit his eyeballs’. His encounter with a transsexual had an equally comic outcome: ‘It was like plunging your feet into an apple-pie bed.’
Compared with what his generation got up to, the young stars of today must seem like a pretty tame bunch. ‘Yes, my lot were at it all day long, as well as all night. They did it a lot more than the previous generation – they had all been too frightened of pregnancy. In my day syphilis had all but disappeared. There were various forms of reliable protection, condoms, the cap and so forth. I was fortunate with the timing. Just as I am fortunate with Viagra now.’ He adopts a serious face. ‘I was promiscuous. I think I did keep count. I could have said 137 at one point and virtually named them. But after a while it all seemed a bit vague. The press didn’t know about what went on then and wouldn’t have written about it if they did. Now, if I was on location in Manchester and I asked the porter to send a girl up to my room, the next day she would get £10,000 from the Sun for her story.’
Matter-of-factly he says of the serial adultery in his first marriage that he simply wasn’t happy being monogamous. ‘My first wife and I had only stayed together for Gary. He was the most important thing in my life for 40 years.’ Pause. ‘I miss him so much. If he were here, he would be contentedly drawing over there with his right foot and would look at you and put his toe up to say it was okay you being here because he liked the look of you. But after an hour he would come over and tap you on the shoulder because he would think you had been here long enough. He was a martinet. But he had the personality of a star. And he was knock-down handsome. I’ll show you a photo. But he could never speak nor hear nor stand or sit unaided. I would sit and talk to him for hours in that room there.’ He points to a downstairs window. ‘He couldn’t hear me but I felt I could confide everything to him. He loved it and he would hug me with his legs.’
Gary Monkhouse was brought up at home but when his condition worsened he became a resident at his choice of centres for the disabled. In 1992, just before he died, he expressed a fondness for another occupant, a young woman whose physical impairments were even greater than his own. Because the local clergy would not agree to conduct a wedding because they couldn’t be certain that both participants fully understood the undertaking, a church blessing was arranged instead. The Sunday Mirror ran a front-page story to the effect that Monkhouse, by not recognising the occasion as a real wedding, was denying the woman her proper status as a wife. When Monkhouse read it he burst into tears. A few weeks later the paper printed a front-page apology and retraction. ‘That was awful,’ Monkhouse says, averting his eyes. ‘I was horrified to see pictures inside which made Gary look disfigured and foolish. It upset me deeply and I felt utter contempt for the editor. I didn’t want Gary to see that bloody paper. Some stupid bastard showed it to him.’
Denis Norden describes reminiscing as the most fun an older person can have without actually having much fun. For Monkhouse it seems to be as haunting an experience as it is a pleasurable one. Half of his old show-business friends are now dead, he says. ‘Yet it’s funny, you know. I can see Bernie Winters walking around that house now as clearly as I can see you.’ His eye lingers on the ghost for an unnervingly long time before a twitch of his saturnine eyebrow brings me back into focus. ‘The other day I went to the phone to call Tony Hawes [a writer on The Des O’Connor Show]. He’s been dead two years. That wasn’t just forgetfulness. It was an overwhelming urge to share a piece of information with him. I can’t believe Tony’s not there.’
Not so long ago, Monkhouse had an intimation of his own eventual death. ‘I had a blip called a cerebral infarction where my face sort of slid south.’ He pulls a lopsided face. ‘It only lasted a week but I was sure I’d had a stroke.’ He went for a cat scan and when nothing showed up he asked if he had lost brain cells from alcohol abuse over the years. The doctor said he hadn’t and added that his liver was in perfect condition, too. Monkhouse still drinks a fair amount of wine and whisky and never suffers from hangovers. I tell him he’s a jammy bugger. ‘Exactly! I’ve never told anyone that before because I was afraid that would be the reaction I’d get.’
The inevitability of his own death does not frighten him, he says, it just makes him curious to know what it will be like.  ‘I don’t think there’s going to be anything there.’ If there is an afterlife and he is called to account, could Monkhouse say that he had been a good man in this life? ‘Oh, I think so.  An inoffensive one. I think so. I’ve never done anything deliberately mean. I stole when I was a teenager but nothing considerable. I’m harmless. I just tell jokes. I know I’ve irritated people but that’s more about them than it is about me.’
Friendly, he certainly is. Although I doubt he is as irrepressibly cheerful as he claims to be. Guileless is a word that could be applied. He will try to answer any question you ask, however personal. For one who earns his living in a profession fuelled by high-octane ego, he even exhibits surprising humility. On the directions to his house which he had faxed to me he had written ‘here are my directions’ and then crossed out the word ‘my’. And he is happier than most to regale you with stories which don’t reflect well. Eric Sykes, he says, always hated him. When they met recently, Sykes said, ‘I don’t know, Bob, my memory’s getting so bad. Can you remember why have I disliked you so much for all these years?’ Monkhouse said he had no idea. ‘No?’ Sykes shrugged. ‘Oh well, be bloody stupid to stop now.’
It is four o’clock, time for Monkhouse to take the Chinese remedy he hopes will cure him of his vitiligo, a skin condition which leaves his face and hands piebald, and which he covers up with masking make-up. The herbal cure is a sort of tea made of garden sweepings, he says. He has been taking it for six weeks, but it hasn’t worked yet. On my way out I pause to admire a large Monet hanging in the hall. Jackie appears and points out that it’s a fake. In their second home in Barbados they have a Picasso which is also a copy. Jackie makes light of having had a wobbly earlier about the photographer, ‘But I just don’t understand what he was doing snooping about up there. It’s so untidy.’ At the door, Bob Monkhouse says under his breath, ‘Please be kind.’ There is no laughter in his voice but I smile back at him. I should have said, ‘Be bloody stupid to start now.’ But the line doesn’t come to me until I am halfway back to London. And anyway it would probably have stuck in my throat.
In 2001 Bob Monkhouse’s estranged son, Simon, died of a heroin overdose in a guesthouse in Tailand. He was 46.

A river of orange water is tumbling hysterically down the steep sidestreets of Dharamsala, cleansing them of manure left by the sacred cows that roam free here. It’s also carrying off the empty drink cans and food wrappers discarded by the thousands of ‘spiritual tourists’ who trail up here each summer in the hope of ticking the exiled Dalai Lama off their lists of things to see.
Though this ramshackle town is perched on a spur high in the foothills of the Himalayas, and though it overlooks a plunging, verdant valley, its buildings – mostly small hotels topped with satellite dishes and souvenir shops selling Dalai Lama memorabilia – are fetid and ugly, especially during a late July deluge. Sodden monkeys, hairy young Western backpackers, and maroon-robed Tibetan monks alike shelter miserably under corrugated tin roofs and café awnings. The ferocious speed of the river, coloured by topsoil as it funnels down from the surrounding Dhauladar mountains, is confounding and hypnotic. The scene could be Biblical. An ominous purgation of a corrupt town.
Sitting in a low, elaborately carved wooden chair at one end of a long audience room is one of the 100,000 refugees to have settled in India since the Tibetan diaspora began 40 years ago. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, hasn’t given up hope that one day he will return to his homeland, or, at least, that one of his reincarnations will. Tibetan Buddhists tend to take the long view on these things. Over those years of exile, he says with a giggle so inappropriate it must be a nervous one, his mind has become hardened to stories of torture. ‘Every week I am meeting an increased number of Tibet refugee,’ he says in halting, guttural English. ‘In the past when innocent people, ragged and destitute, come and explain their own horrible experience to me, sometimes they crying, crying, crying, and I also feel very sad and tear comes. But I have become too familiar with these horrible stories and I feel less.’ He pats his heart. ‘I think it is like these generals who kill thousands, thousands, thousands, until they no longer have human feeling.’ He laughs again perhaps realising how off-beam his analogy sounds. ‘What I mean is, I think the Buddhist practice is very helpful in this. It also concerned with the nature of suffering. Our aim is salvation and liberation from negative emotion.’
The Dalai Lama has a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy. And, by rising at 3.30am, he fits in at least six hours of meditation during the day (in between studying scriptures, giving audiences, listening to the BBC World Service and attending to the daily business of his government-in-exile). But even the most complicated people have defining characteristics. His is this infectious, coruscating laugh. It is high-pitched and strangely incompatible with the deep and resonant timbre of his speaking voice. Given that he was taken away from his parents at the age of three, brought up in a monastery and then, at the age of seven, enthroned in a 1,000-room palace where he was worshipped as a god-king for 17 years before being forced to escape from his country disguised as a soldier, it would be understandable if the Dalai Lama’s laugh reflected a heightened awareness of the fundamental absurdity of life, the universe and everything.
Equally, because the laugh (hu, hu, hu!) emerges when he speaks of subjects that are painful to him, it could also be a sign of arrested development. After all, his abiding memories of what little childhood he experienced in his ‘golden cage’ were of loneliness and austerity. He found ways to amuse himself but, without other children to play with, it can’t have been easy for him to acquire those nuances of emotional expression which the rest of us learn by imitation and take for granted. It would be natural if he suffered from Peter Pan syndrome. And perhaps this is what lies behind the beguiling aura of cheerfulness for which he is known and adored around the world – private jokes arising from the internal conversations of one used to playing on his own.
The simplistic theme that runs through all his teachings – that human happiness is born of compassion, kindness and tolerance – compounds this impression of childlike innocence. So does his boyish grin and the dimples it forms in his cheeks. At 63 the Dalai Lama may now have heavy lines on his brow that, with his constantly raised eyebrows, make him look like he’s in a permanent state of surprise, and the stubble on the head he shaves once a week may be going grey, but he has the sprightly bearing of a man half his age. He doesn’t walk everywhere so much as bustle – nodding, bowing, gathering the folds of his much darned and patched maroon robes about him, adjusting its saffron-coloured facings over his right shoulder. And his stocky 5ft 9in frame, kept in shape by daily workouts on an exercise bike, is still animated when he sits down to talk – slapping his thigh, folding his bare, vaccination-scarred arms, and making sweeping gestures that rattle the beads on his left wrist.
In the face of distressing testimony from his fellow refugees, perhaps his laughter is as good a defence as any against tears. The Dalai Lama listens because he recognises how important it is for torture victims to bear witness. Being believed is part of the healing process, especially when the crimes committed against you are unbelievable. Those who survived the Holocaust knew this. And while more than six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, more than a million Tibetans have suffered a similar fate since the Chinese invasion in 1950. The Dalai Lama pauses for a long time when he is asked how the genocide committed against his people compares to that against the Jews. ‘It is difficult,’ he says, searching for the right words. ‘In the Tibetan case, in late Fifties and early Sixties, entire communities of nomads would be destroyed. In 1959, in Lhasa, the Chinese shot Tibetan families from aeroplane with machine-guns. Systematic destruction in the name of liberation against the tyranny of the Dalai Lama! Hu, hu, hu! In Hitler’s case he was more honest. In concentration camps he made it clear he intended to exterminate the Jews. With the Chinese they called us their brothers! Big brother bullying little brother! Hu, hu, hu! Is less honest, I think.’
The cruelty and humiliation the Tibetans suffered at the hands of their Chinese liberators also bears comparison with that suffered by the Jews under the Nazis. Such is the reverence with which Tibetan Buddhists regard all living things, they will not even kill the mosquitoes which bite them – yet in the early years of Chinese occupation, Tibetan children would be forced to shoot their parents. Celibate monks and nuns would be made at gunpoint to have sex in public and use sacred scriptures as lavatory paper. According to an International Commission of Jurists report in 1959, dissenters were disembowelled, crucified or buried alive. To prevent them from shouting out ‘Long live the Dalai Lama’ on their way to execution they would have their tongues torn out with meat hooks. All but 13 of the country’s 6,000 monasteries were destroyed and in some cases slaughterhouses were sited in their place. More recently, eight million Chinese citizens have been relocated to Tibet. The six million Tibetans they now outnumber are discriminated against in jobs, housing and education.
It is illegal to speak Tibetan at public meetings and possession of a picture of the Dalai Lama is an imprisonable offence. Lhasa, the once sacred capital, now has 1,806 brothels as well as numerous gambling dens. The Tibetans who have remained there have been compared to American Indians left to get drunk on the reservations, quaint tourist attractions in a spiritual Disneyland.
‘Not much use to discuss these things now,’ the Dalai Lama says, distractedly blinking and scratching his nose. ‘Past is past. I don’t want them to be sitting in Peking and saying, “What is that Dalai Lama saying now? Causing trouble again!” No use. No use to antagonise. I am thinking of the future of Tibet. And with the Chinese population influx and their programme of Sinocisation, time is running out.’ In the past he has been denounced by the Chinese press variously as a thief, a murderer, a ‘wolf in monk’s clothing’, and a rapist who once provided sexual services for Mrs Gandhi and wore a rosary made from the bones of Tibetan serfs.
‘I am happy to reassure my Chinese brothers that we do not ask for separation,’ the Dalai Lama now says, leaning back and throwing his hands up in mock surrender. ‘I seek meaningful autonomy within China rather than independence for Tibet. We accept there are things the Chinese can handle better than us [such as foreign policy and the economy, explains his assistant], but they should accept there are things we are better at handling [education and the environment]. If they provide some of our basic requirements, we will remain with them. We know our spirituality does not feed our stomachs. We know we need material development. So the closer relation is very necessary. That way more trust can be built. And then, with the friendly atmosphere, certain point such as the human right issue, and issue of democracy and liberty,can be made firmly.’
Although he keeps reiterating that ‘past is past’, the sticking point for negotiation as far as the Dalai Lama is concerned seems to be his insistence that Tibet was once free. This isolated country was first ‘discovered’ by the British in 1904 when Colonel Younghusband led a peaceful expeditionary force. The British subsequently recognised Tibet as a fully sovereign state. When the Chinese invaded in 1950, they based their claim to the country on the marriage of the Chinese princess Wen-Ch’eng Kung-chu to the Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo in 641. The invasion occurred two years after Indian independence was declared, and the British, having lost influence and interest in the region, were not inclined to dispute China’s claim. Insult was added to the injury when, on an official visit to Britain in 1990, a year after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama was refused an audience with Margaret Thatcher, then Prime Minister. And two years ago, John Major declined to meet him in an official capacity for fear of offending the Chinese in the run-up to the handover of Hong Kong.
The ‘simple monk’, as the Dalai Lama describes himself with a slightly unbecoming hint of self-satisfaction, laughs when asked what line he thinks our Prime Minister should take with President Jiang on Tibet. ‘I think if I have message, I will write to him personally! It’s not something I should convey to a newspaper! But I’m quite sure the British Prime Minister will raise the issue of autonomy of Tibet and the issue of human rights in general. I think we have many supporters and sympathy among people of Britain but I appreciate that sometime it is difficult for a country’s leader to meet me. Britain is the only nation which really knows Tibet. Sometime I feel the British and the Western nations in general could have done more. But then. Mmm. Today’s unhappy experience not happen just suddenly. It had many causes. No point in blaming this nation or that nation. Ultimately we Tibetans must blame ourselves.’
If he seems forgiving to the British, it is as nothing to the understanding he shows toward the Chinese. When in the Fifties he had meetings with Chairman Mao he said he found the tyrant to be ‘spellbinding’, ‘sincere’ and ‘not deceitful’. For this charitable view, and for his recent adoption of a more moderate and conciliatory approach to the question of Tibetan independence, he has been criticised by certain extremist elements within the Tibetan community who find it hard to disguise their loathing of the Chinese and think that aggression should be met with aggression. When I ask the Dalai Lama if, just for a second, he has ever felt even so much as a twinge of hatred for his savage oppressors himself, he says: ‘Sometimes I have bad temper but true ill feeling almost never. If I want to work effectively for freedom and justice, it is best to do so without malice in my heart. Buddhist training of mind really helps in this. There are undoubtedly many good Chinese people who are aware of the true situation in Tibet. The Tibetans and Chinese have to live side by side. In order to live in harmony we have to practise non-violence and compassion. One Tibetan using gun would be more excuse for atrocities by Chinese. In the 1987 crisis when Chinese opened fire on Tibetans in Lhasa one Chinese soldier dropped his weapon and a Tibetan picked it up but instead of using it on the soldier he broke it in front of him. Smashed it on the ground. Isn’t that wonderful?’
He is keen to point out that all Tibetan monks feel this way, not just him. He has a friend, a monk, who spent 20 years in Chinese prisons and labour camps. When he was eventually able to join the Dalai Lama in exile he told him that there were only a few occasions when he really faced danger and those were when he was in danger of losing compassion for the Chinese. ‘Nice!’ the Dalai Lama chuckles. ‘A good monk who faced real danger. At least I did not have to face any real risk or danger of losing my life.’ He makes a chopping motion with his hand against the side of his neck. It’s not quite true. Improbably, the Chinese once tried to coerce the Dalai Lama’s eldest brother, also a monk, into assassinating him.
And he still has to be careful that what he eats isn’t poisoned. The Dalai Lama’s daily diet consists of hot water, porridge and tsampa (roasted barley flower) for breakfast and thupka (soup with noodles) and skabakleb (meat wrapped in bread) for lunch. Monks do not eat dinner. But, he says, he sometimes sneaks a snack while watching television in the evening. And then does a few extra prostrations to Buddha by way of absolution before going to bed. The Dalai Lama’s father died of poisoning in 1947 and was given a traditional Tibetan sky burial in which the body is left as carrion for the vultures. His mother, to whom he was very close towards the end of her life, died of a stroke in 1981. But, with his belief in reincarnation, he says he does not fear death or even dying.
‘In my Tibetan practice, there are eight different stages of dissolution of mind and body,’ he says. ‘I intend to practise altruism in life, dying and death. For example, if death comes today, I shall try to control it.’ He compares death to changing your clothes when they are old and torn. ‘How would I like to die? Hu, hu, hu! I do not want to die in crash. Not sudden death, because no time to practise. When time come I want to be able to wrap myself in yellow robe over like this and then sit and meditate.’ He demonstrates the position, eyes closed, hands resting in lap. ‘Some of my old friend here they do this. One or two hours before their death – even when they cannot sit by themselves they ask to have cushion put behind them to support themselves.’
When asked if he ever has any doubts that he will be reincarnated as the 15th Dalai Lama, and whether he really believes he is the reincarnation of each of the previous 13 Dalai Lamas, he says the answer is not simple. But given his experiences in this present life – and his Buddhist beliefs – he has no difficulty in accepting that he is spiritually connected to the 13 previous Dalai Lamas.
Before meeting the Dalai Lama I had been briefed on protocol by one of his personal assistants. Speak slowly and do not use complicated sentences, he said. He doesn’t particularly like talking in English to Englishmen because he feels embarrassed about his own ungrammatical usage. There’s no need to present him with a kata, the white silk offering scarf that Tibetans traditionally give each other, he prefers to just shake hands with Westerners. And do not bother with any of the other formalities that applied at the Tibetan court – always having to sit lower than him, never making eye contact or touching him, never leading the conversation or turning your back on him. He can’t be doing with all that nonsense.
Finally, please don’t ask him to explain how he was discovered to be the 14th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. He finds it boring to have to go over the story again and again but if you ask, he will feel obliged to give you every detail and his answer will take up most of the time you have with him. There was no need. I had mugged up on it already. When one Dalai Lama dies, his soul enters the body of a newborn boy. A regent Lama rules for a few years, then the search for a new Dalai Lama begins. All boys born from 49 days to two years after a Dalai Lama’s death are candidates for his reincarnation. The 14th Dalai Lama was born in Taktser, a small village in north-eastern Tibet on 6 July 1935, two years after the 13th died. Two crows came to perch on the windowsill as he was born – a traditional sign. His parents were peasants and he was one of 16 children, of whom seven survived. In Lhasa, the regent had a vision – of a small house with strangely shaped guttering near to a three-storey monastery with a gold and turquoise roof and a path running from it to a hill – and went in search of it. When they found the boy living there they mingled the 13th Dalai Lama’s personal possessions with an array of similar objects, laid them all out on a table and asked him to pick any objects he recognised. He unerringly selected the 13th Dalai Lama’s eating bowl, spectacles, pencil, walking stick and drum. He was also found to have the physical signs of a Dalai Lama: large tiger-stripe birthmarks on the legs; big ears.
He has never doubted that he is the Dalai Lama but as a teenager, he admits, he entertained misgivings about his vocation as a monk. ‘When I was young, especially in winter time when I was sitting with my tutor in meditation, in a cold dark room with rats, I would hear people returning from the fields at sunset singing happily and it would leave me with a sad feeling. Sometimes I had feeling I would be much happier if I was one of them. But I know I was meant to be a monk because in my dream sometimes I see a fight or a woman and I immediately think, ‘I am monk, I must not indulge.’ I never dream I am Dalai Lama, though.’
He is never troubled by sleepless nights, getting in a sound six hours. And generally he describes himself as being ‘definitely happy’ except on the odd occasions when he catches himself brooding upon the events of his earlier life in the Land of Snows, as Tibet is known.  ‘But do I ever feel depressed? No. Sometimes frustration. Sometimes feelings of hopelessness. That I have been a failure. But I say my favourite prayer and it always brings me fresh hope and fresh impetus.’ Has the Dalai Lama ever fallen in love? ‘With my close friends I feel a love which is not a genuine compassion,’ he says. ‘It is attachment. A sense of concern. It is biased. The genuine sense of compassion is unbiased. Have I ever felt sexual love? In my childhood before I was a fully trained monk I was often curious, I wonder what happened. But then I think by age of 15 or 16 I started more serious meditation practice, exploring the nature of suffering. For those who would normally seek to have children at that stage in their life would come worry and distraction. Life as a single person means liberty. Lay person may have more pleasure in short term but in long term monk has a mental state more steady.’
He believes sexual desire is like an itch. If you have one, it’s nice to scratch it. But it’s better to have no itch at all. If it is possible to be without that feeling, there is much peace. One of the great pleasures in the Dalai Lama’s life is mending broken watches and mechanical gadgets in general. Indeed, the one material indulgence he allows himself is the Rolex he always wears with the face on the underside of his wrist and which he is given to taking apart with a screwdriver every so often in order to tinker around with its mechanism. He describes himself wryly as ‘half-Marxist’ – the belief in equality side rather than the atheist side – and, like all monks, he obeys a vow of poverty. Like all the previous Dalai Lamas, he never handles money. This, he says, is just as well as he suspects he has a free-spending nature – ‘although I can be very stingy over small amounts’.
The self-deprecation does not seem to be affected and, for one who is held by his followers to be a living god, the human failings he admits to are surprisingly ordinary. He is prone to a bad temper. He would never harm a living creature, but has an irrational fear and loathing of caterpillars. He is aware of the faults others occasionally see in him: that he can be naive as a politician and that as a spiritual leader he sometimes lacks gravitas and trivialises his status (because he does things such as agree to be guest editor of the Christmas edition of French Vogue, appear as a guest on Wogan and attend frivolous Hollywood parties hosted by his film star friends Richard Gere and Harrison Ford).
He accepts these criticisms with humility, as you would expect. But he seems to be genuinely perplexed by the fuss people make over him. He says he cannot really understand the esteem in which he is held in the West. ‘I have done little to merit it, despite what some people might say. On a few occasions I have been publicly commended for my efforts on behalf of world peace. But I have done nothing, really nothing for world peace. The only thing I do for peace is talk about it a great deal.’ Also the fact that this year Hollywood has released two big-budget films – Martin Scorsese’s sumptuous epic Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet, which stars Brad Pitt – about his life does not, he says, mean much to him. He finds it amusing that he is the cause de jour in Hollywood but adds that he doesn’t make distinctions as to where support for Tibet might come from.
He has seen and liked it and is grateful for the international attention it has drawn to the plight of Tibet. But he has not yet got round to seeing and tells the story of the Dalai Lama’s friendship with Heinrich Harrer, the Austrian mountaineer who became a teacher to the young god-king. He says he did not know Harrer was an SS member at the time, the subject never arose, and now he says there is no point in his old friend trying to hide the truth because ‘past is past’.
The Dalai Lama collaborated on the script for both films and, to the chagrin of the producers, somehow gave the impression to each that they had exclusivity. At the moment he seems to be spreading his favours just as thinly in the world of publishing. He has written extensively on Buddhism and Eastern philosophy but this October Hodder & Stoughton will publish his first book on ethics for the general reader. Unfortunately it contains much of the same material as a book he is having published by Little, Brown next year. Little, Brown is now planning to sue the Dalai Lama over breach of contract.
In the airy audience room overlooking the valley the Dalai Lama blinks several times, gathers the folds of his robe together and stands up. He clicks his fingers and his protocol officer steps forward and hands him a white silk kata which the Dalai Lama then raises over my hands, brought together to form the namaste prayer sign, and drapes on my wrists. When I tell him I feel embarrassed now because I’d been told not to bother to bring a white offering scarf to present to him, he slaps me on the back and lets out a roar of laughter.
There is a golden Buddha at the other end of the room, in between two large scroll paintings. The Dalai Lama has almost reached it on his way out when he stops, turns on his heel, and bustles back toward me with a distracted look on his face. Patting my hand he says: ‘There is something very important I need to convey to you. Very important. Whether you a believer or non-believer. All human beings have same potential to increase compassion. This is where happiness lies.’
With this he grins, slaps me on the back again and bustles out. He crosses the large courtyard where he gives his public addresses, pauses briefly to inspect a delphinium in a tin pot and disappears from view along a path that leads beyond a row of bamboo and pine trees. The thin Himalayan air is pricked with the smell of incense, jasmine and honeysuckle. The rain has now stopped outside and the mist is lifting. Breathing deeply, I look up and inspect the skies for a rainbow – but there isn’t one yet. It is still oppressively humid and a roll of thunder, as melancholy as the growl of the Tibetan long horn, echoes around the mountains.