Tethered to the small basket of red roses on the kitchen countertop is a red balloon – helium-filled, heart-shaped – with the words ‘I love you’ written across it in silver letters. It’s a cameo of kitsch, a miniature masterpiece of sentimentality, yet it is both as dense and delicate in meaning as a haiku. If you had to summarise Tony Parsons, the best-selling novelist and Mirror columnist, in one symbol, it would be hard to improve on this. He has bought it for Yuriko, his wife, because she has just heard that her mother has cancer. It is mid-morning in Islington. Sunshine stripes the room through a half-open blind. Perhaps on purpose, the balloon has not been hidden from this visitor’s view.
Tony Parsons, who is 47, met Yuriko, a 32-year-old Japanese translator, in a London sushi bar. They married in 1992 and her influence is apparent in the minimalist decor of their house; you pad across its wooden floors in your stockinged feet, after leaving your shoes at the door. It is evident in Parsons’s new novel One for My Baby, too, part of which is set in Hong Kong. Yuriko was also the inspiration for Gina, the wife who walks out on her unfaithful husband Harry, and four-year-old son Pat, in Parsons’s novel Man and Boy (1999). Or at least she inspired Gina’s dialogue. That character was also based on Charlotte, a Dutch women Parsons went out with – until she found out he was also sleeping with her au pair. To add to the confusion between fiction and reality, Harry is based on Parsons himself: Harry has to bring up his four-year-old son on his own, while struggling to come to terms with unemployment and the slow death from cancer of his father. Parsons had to bring up his five-year-old son, Bobby, on his own, after his first wife, the journalist Julie Burchill, left him in 1984. Parsons’s father died from lung cancer in 1987.
‘Nothing has the emotional clout of a true story,’ Parsons says with a nasal, Essex-Cockney accent. ‘So I do harvest my own life a bit, yeah.’ His wide mouth stretches into a grin. ‘I went off the rails when my dad died and I binged on women. Men are like dogs in their sexual promiscuity. I really hurt Charlotte and she was wonderful and beautiful. There are consequences for what you do and I didn’t think about them.’ In his novel, Parsons managed to make both Gina and Harry sympathetic characters and, as a consequence, it became what is known in publishing circles as ‘chick-friendly’ – a useful thing to be, given than women buy two-thirds of all books. But it was also guy-friendly – Jeremy Paxman said it made him cry – as well as middlebrow in tone and style (as one reviewer noted, Parsons combines ‘a broadsheet mind with a tabloid tongue’).
The book became a publishing phenomenon: it spent months on the bestseller list, sold a million copies and was named Book of the Year at this year’s National Book Awards. It was Parson’s fifth novel – the others, potboilers about tennis and pop, stiffed badly – and so, as he puts it, it made him a 25-year overnight success story. We are in the basement of his house now, in the study: shelves of books, a Nordic ski machine, an iMac, kung fu gloves and head shields, a bust of Mao, a piano and, stuck to the wall, at least 50 scrawled upon Post-It notes. Parsons is not a tall man but he is wiry and fit-looking, with Gary Oldman features – lupine, angular – and eyes which he describes as small and squinty. I am in a low armchair, he is in a higher one opposite me, sitting cross-legged: another Orientalism perhaps, master and pupil. One has the impression that even Parsons’s spontaneous acts are premeditated.
He is friendly and polite but also focused and intense. There is a stillness to him, despite what he is about to say. ‘Yeah, I am emotional. I am emotional. Sentimental, you know. But I try to keep a lid on it. I keep a lid on it.’ A conversational tic becomes apparent; he repeats his sentences, as though ruminating on them for his own satisfaction. (The trope is evident in his writing, too – an echo of his hero Hemingway perhaps, or just a bad habit picked up from his red-top journalism.) Surely it’s the sentimentality that sells? ‘It does. I don’t keep a lid on it in my fiction. Readers, women especially, like the relationship between the father and son in Man and Boy. Somebody wrote that it’s very refreshing to see a man call his child “darling”, and I thought, “Why? Is that unusual? Doesn’t everyone call their child ‘darling’?” My son and I have always been, I mean, if we meet each other now we kiss, you know, we kiss each other.’
In some ways, Parsons seems to want to play the unreconstructed male eager to prove his proletarian credentials, in others he wants to be the sensitive New Man in touch with his emotions. Presumably when he wasn’t engaged in bouts of manly wrestling with his father and son he was constantly telling them he loved them? ‘I only did it once with my dad, I only told him through tears when he was dying. You can’t do it in moments of calm and health and tranquillity, you need the crisis to do it. There was kind of an unspoken love between us. I think if we were hugging and weeping over each other every Sunday afternoon, it wouldn’t have worked. I’m all for a bit of manly restraint. I think it gives the moments when you express your emotions more power, more honesty. So I’m all for that, I’m all for that.’
There are black-and-white photographs of his parents around the room: his mother being cheered by colleagues on her final day as a dinner lady, his father in the uniform of a Royal Navy commando. Before becoming a greengrocer and moving from the Old Kent Road to Romford in Essex, his father had been a war hero – he won the Distinguished Service Medal fighting on the island of Elba just after D-Day, and one side of his body was left a mass of scar tissue. ‘Dad didn’t talk about the War,’ Parsons says. ‘He was very much a carpet slippers, Morecombe and Wise, rose garden man. But he was a killer, you know, a trained killer. I do feel that nothing I can do with my life can measure up to what he did in the War, nothing.’
According to its author, Man and Boy had wide appeal because readers saw their own lives in it. ‘They come up to me and say it reminds them of their dad or child, you know, or it made them pick up the phone and call the wife.’ Parsons’s mother died of cancer in 1999. Ever prepared to harvest the details of his life in the name of art, he has fictionalised her death in One for My Baby. He also wrote a column about her in the Mirror the day after she died. The headline was: GOODBYE MUM AND THANKS FOR TEACHING ME THE MEANING OF LOVE. Does he think now that column was a little mawkish? ‘If I had written it today, it would have been different, but it had a great impact at the time. I got literally hundreds of letters. Selfishly, it made things easier for me: a writer makes sense of the world by writing about it. I don’t think it was mawkish and sentimental so much as hysterical with emotion. The iMac was covered in tears when I wrote it.’
When your parents die, Parsons believes, there’s nobody standing between you and the stars. ‘It really does feel as momentous as that. At the risk of sounding like a song from The Lion King, it made me appreciate the cycle of life for the first time. I could see my son getting older, you know, becoming a young man. Suddenly he was six inches taller than me, staying out all night and chasing girls and getting up to God knows what. At the same time, my mum was struggling with a pleural… she had a pleural tumour in the lining of her lung. I could see a parent dying and a child growing and I just felt right in the middle. I felt complete.’
An only child, Tony Parsons describes his relationship with his son Bobby, now 21, as brotherly. ‘We talk about women and drugs but Bobby won’t let me dance in his presence. That would be just too embarrassing for him.’ They also talk about football (Bobby used to play for the Brighton youth team) as well as marriage. ‘Typically for one raised by divorced parents, Bobby is wary of getting married himself, he wants to do it once and once only.’ Parsons would like to have more children, he adds: ‘I didn’t want to while Bobby was growing up because I didn’t want him to think he was second best, you know, from the marriage that didn’t work out. I’m starting to feel quite broody now. I coo over babies in the street.’
After leaving Barstable grammar school in 1972 with five O-levels, Tony Parsons went to work at the Gordon’s Gin distillery in Islington. ‘I hated it,’ he says. ‘I regret not going to university because I think I’d have been able to sleep with a lot of women there, you know. The gin factory was quite barren, crumpet-wise. It’s good for the Tony Parsons brand to be able to say I did that job for four years, but I’d much rather have been jumping on the bones of some sensitive girl from the Shires.’ Hemingway might have approved of the machismo. He would also have been impressed by the fact that, in his spare time, the young Parsons wrote a novel, The Kids. This proved to be a useful calling card when the venerable popular music paper New Musical Express, noticing a shift in taste in 1976, advertised for ‘hip young gunslingers’ – journalists to cover the emerging punk movement. There were 5,000 applicants.
‘Kids was crap, it was juvenilia, but it got me the job on the NME and away from the gin distillery. You had to send a sample of your work and I just chucked in my book. Of course they didn’t even open it. They didn’t even open it.’ The second hip young gunslingers to be hired was  Julie Burchill, a 16-year-old from Bristol. They were given a desk together. In her autobiography, I Knew I Was Right, Burchill describes how, when they first met, Parsons held out his hand to shake. ‘What do you want me to do with that?’ Burchill said, ‘Bite it?’ ‘He looked at me curiously, turned away casually, then turned back, picked me up and sat me high on top of a filing cabinet without drawing breath. I stared at him, amazed. Then we started laughing and didn’t stop for years. I liked Tony Parsons a whole lot. More than I liked anyone in my life. He was bellicose and self-dramatising to a ridiculous extent… He was immaculately working-class, just like me. No room for doubt or insinuations or lower-middle wankiness here… The punk bands hung around him slack-jawed and starry-eyed. The Sex Pistols and the Clash vied for his attention, for his eyes only.’
Heady days. Just as every Liverpudlian aged between 56 and 62 claims to have seen the Beatles perform at the Cavern, so every Londoner aged between 16 and 21 in 1976 supposedly saw the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club. Parsons doesn’t have to exaggerate his claim to musical history. ‘I saw a lot of the Pistols,’ he says. ‘They were my mates really, my drinking companions. I was sort of their ambassador on the Anarchy tour. I was thinking about this the other day when I got caught up in the May Day riots, which weren’t really riots. I just happened to be at King’s Cross when the hippy tribes were gathering first thing in the morning, and I would have cheerfully applauded if the police had cracked open their heads there and then. Then I thought, God, take a look at yourself. We’re two years away from the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, and for the Silver Jubilee I was floating down the Thames with the Sex Pistols, sharing a gramme of amphetamine sulphate with Johnny Rotten; being shoved around by the police. A lot of people got a really good hiding that day on the Thames. A lot of arrests. I thought, how could I have changed sides so completely?’
Perhaps it isn’t so out of character. There has always been a conservative side to Tony Parsons. Promiscuity and puritanism have been the warring hag-riders of his sexuality. In his Mirror columns he is something of a Paul Johnson figure, starting out as a youthful left-winger and ending up on the right; being able to supply fiery indignation and demagoguery on demand. He combines sentimentality about the War with a taste for anarchy, and ruthless ambition with the caution of one who has had to manage his career sensibly because he has the responsibility of bringing up a son on his own. He stopped taking drugs in his mid-twenties, never injected heroin (he had a fear the needle would snap off in his arm), and didn’t enjoy cocaine. ‘Coke was like an old man’s drug, I always preferred speed. I’ve always had like a cold, pragmatic chip in my heart that would prevent me from, you know, going all the way, losing control.’
Also – the ultimate non-punk, conservative gesture – he got married. ‘Julie and I were friends straight away, we slept with each other quite quickly and then we kind of went our separate ways for ages, 18 months, something like that, when I was sleeping with practically everybody.’ He proposed marriage shortly after punching a fellow journalist whom he suspected of sleeping with ‘his’ Julie. She was 18, they had a son and moved to a bungalow in Billericay. One fateful night, Parsons went to give a talk at the University of East Anglia and ended up sleeping with a student. She wrote to Burchill, telling all. Tony remembers Julie receiving the letter, looking up at him and just ‘staring and staring’.
The marriage soon ended. After leaving the NME, the careers of Burchill and Parsons ran on parallel tracks, with each alternately falling behind or steaming ahead of the other. Parsons languished for a long time. ‘The Eighties were tough for me. I really struggled, struggled to pay bills, once ended up in court for non-payment.’ Eventually, having long since shed his bondage trousers for sharp suits, he reinvented himself as a style expert for men’s magazines such as GQ and Arena. By the Nineties he was writing a column for the Daily Telegraph and appearing as a chin-stroking arts pundit on BBC2’s Late Review, a Cockney autodidact on a regular panel that included the journalist Allison Pearson and the poet Tom Paulin. Burchill’s career, meanwhile, flourished in the Eighties. She sold a million copies of her novel Ambition, adopted the ideologically tricky stance of being a Thatcherite Communist, and became one of the highest paid women on Fleet Street. She then fell from grace for a few years, put on weight, did enough cocaine, as she put it, to stun the entire Colombian armed forces, and reinvented herself impressively in a weekly Guardian.
The two have become pantomime media foes. Burchill will sometimes write about Shorty, as she calls her ex-husband, in her column. Example: ‘I bought Man and Boy the other day and can honestly report that it is not in any way autobiographical. The errant mother is slender, beautiful and decent while the long-suffering hero Harry is attractive to women, good in the sack and has all his own hair. So that rules me and Parsons right out.’ Do they really never speak? ‘No,’ Parsons says. ‘We don’t see each other, we don’t see each other. We haven’t done since we split up in 1984. So for me it’s odd that she writes a column, essentially she writes a column about me. She should think about me a little less. People think it was a very bitter divorce. It wasn’t. The bitterness came later. The fact that she had no contact with our son when he was growing up, not even a birthday card, a Christmas card, is to me unforgivable. I will never forgive it. That time can’t be, that time can’t be got back. You can’t recover that time.’
It could be argued that if Parsons hadn’t been unfaithful to Burchill he couldn’t have written the book that has made him a household name, and she wouldn’t have run off and married another man, Cosmo Landesman, before declaring herself bisexual and becoming a professional cynic on the subject of men and marriage. ‘Maybe, yeah, maybe. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was, you know, the cause of her horrific weight. It hadn’t occurred to me. I see it from the perspective of a father and to me it’s not this amusing media feud. I mean, I don’t hate Julie. I just have no respect for her. She’s a cruel, stupid coward. A very low form of life.’ So the animosity isn’t just a media pose? ‘There’s no in-joke. To me it was a cause of hurt and frustration that there was no contact between her and my son when he was growing up. I can’t take her seriously. One minute she’s a lesbian, the next she is heterosexual. It’s just laughable.’ Is there no curiosity left? Wouldn’t he like to meet her just once to talk about the old days? ‘I think she writes about me all the time because it is her way of having a relationship with me. She’s obsessed with me. She’s become my stalker, and makes us seem closer than we are. We haven’t seen each other since 1984. It would be like meeting up with someone from school. We would have nothing to talk about.’
They could discuss his age. Burchill claims he lies about it, that he is really 49. ‘What is the point in lying about his age,’ she wrote in The Spectator last year. ‘After all, Sean Connery is a sex symbol at 78. Mr Parsons with his cheeky grin and interesting hairline shouldn’t be so hard on himself. ‘Well, I’m 47,’ Parsons says flatly. ‘I don’t know why she… She’s kind of a sad human being. I mean, I don’t even recognise her in pictures any more. She was 17 when I met her, she’s whatever she is now, 55 or something. I think it rankles with her that my appearance has hardly changed. That rankles, you know. That fucks her off, I should look older.’
Success, of course, is the most effective form of revenge. Now that Parsons has not only just signed a million-dollar deal in New York for the American paperback rights to Man and Boy, but also the film rights to Miramax for another million, his revenge seems to be taking on a Jacobean complexion. He doesn’t think he is materialistic – he drives an old Audi – but he enjoys being able to afford to turn left when he boards a plane. But success is also realised ambition; so perhaps he felt less motivated when he was writing One for My Baby than he did Man and Boy? ‘It would be ridiculous to expect any other book that I might write to be bigger than Man and Boy. But they’ll spend a fortune on marketing the new one. They’ll be advertising it all over the Tube for months, there will be, like, wall-to-wall, you know, wall-to-wall marketing. When they want a book to be a hit, almost inevitably it is. I’ll be disappointed if it isn’t a number-one best-seller.’
Boris Johnson, a neighbour, persuaded Parsons to share the secret of his success with the readers of The Spectator last year. The author explained that while he was writing Man and Boy, he, his agent and editor had ‘countless discussions about every theme, every chapter, every line. We made sure that each and every scene in the book was played in exactly the right key.’ Fiction by committee? Didn’t he worry that readers would find his candour offputting? ‘The books weren’t written by committee, but I do take good advice wherever I can get it,’ Parsons now says. ‘F Scott Fitzgerald had an editor and Hemingway had an editor and if they weren’t too good to have one then I’m certainly not.’ He wrote four drafts of his latest novel. ‘I went away with Nick Sayers [his editor at HarperCollins] for a weekend and we asked ourselves two questions: is it too much like Man and Boy? Or not enough like it?’
Private Eye recently suggested another reason for Parsons’s success. It described him as ‘the unchallenged heir to Jeffrey Archer as the book world’s most unembarrassable self-promoter’. Does Private Eye have a point? ‘OK, OK. A few years ago I was called a media whore, but I’ve met a few working girls in my life and I’ve never met one of them who says no as often as I do. I’m more a Doris Day figure in the media.’ Nevertheless, the chaste Tony Parsons has an un-Doris-like tendency to talk of himself as a brand and, fraudulent though it may seem for him to keep up his professional Essex Man persona despite spending most of his life working as a media pundit in the metropolis, he does understand the value of having a strong image to market. ‘I don’t know why I never lost my accent,’ he says with a shrug. ‘I remember when I first turned up in Essex from Dagenham as part of the Cockney diaspora, one of my teachers said he’s a bright boy but he sounds like the Artful Dodger, so maybe he should have elocution lessons. My dad just laughed at the idea. He didn’t think I should pretend to be something I’m not.’
The cycle of conversation has brought us back to the subject of his father. Tony Parsons still feels inadequate as a man compared to him, he still craves his father’s approval and he says it takes the gloss off his current success to know that his father isn’t alive to witness it. In Parsons’s bathroom I’d seen a bottle of Old Spice aftershave –  didn’t know they still made that. ‘It’s an old bottle,’ he says. ‘It reminds me of my dad. I often find myself sneaking a sniff of it.

Does a knighthood compromise your journalistic integrity? Sir Trevor McDonald doesn’t lose sleep over the question. But he does have nightmares that the bongs are beginning on News at Ten and he’s stuck in a taxi, clawing at the seats. Nigel Farndale meets him

She says that she is bored, anxious and lonely; also that she is lazy, a slattern and a food addict who ‘will eat all the children’s Maltesers’. Yet she is described by others as ‘every thinking man’s fantasy and every thinking woman’s nightmare’. Nigel Farndale meets the paradoxical Nigella Lawson

ACCORDING to the ‘Malleus Malificarum’, a 15th-century tract on diabolism, the devil may one day come among us in female form. A raven-haired succubus, that sort of thing. To watch Nigella Lawson – dark-eyed, pouty, bosomy Nigella – filming the second series of her cookery programme from her basement kitchen in Hammersmith in early April, is to be reminded of this she-devil theory.

Already she has tempted me with a mid-afternoon bowl of sticky toffee pudding topped with double cream. Now she is offering pork crackling from a tray. Nigella – a brand name so potent these days it has made the surname extraneous – takes a piece herself and crunches loudly. ‘Mmm. Go on,’ she entreats in a dusky, well-modulated voice. ‘The fat is so good for your skin.’ She is 41 and her skin is like alabaster. But this may also be because she wears Factor 15 sun lotion every day and never sunbathes.

There can be few sights as poignant as that of an Irish poet struggling to find the right word on a slate-grey afternoon in London. And not any old Irish poet, the Irish poet: Seamus Heaney, ‘Seamus Famous’ as he is known in his native County Derry. From the top-floor boardroom of his publisher, Faber & Faber, the 61-year-old Nobel Laureate, former professor of poetry at both Oxford and Harvard, and three times winner of the Whitbread prize, looks out through narrow, puffy eyes over the rooftops of Queen Square. He runs thick, long-nailed fingers through his white, scarecrow hair. He purses his corrugated lips. ‘No,’ he says softly. ‘No, I can’t think of the word, but “embarrassment” is not it…’
We have been talking about his relationship with his father, Patrick, who with his wife, Margaret, raised nine children in a three-room thatched farmstead in Mossbawn, County Derry, Northern Ireland. Over the years, Patrick Heaney, who died in 1986, has been the subject of many of his son’s poems. In ‘Follower’, from his first collection in 1966, Heaney wrote: ‘I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,/Fell sometimes on the polished sod;/ Sometimes he rode me on his back/Dipping and rising to his plod./I wanted to grow up and plough,/ To close one eye, stiffen my arm./All I ever did was follow/In his broad shadow round the farm.’ And in one of his best known poems, ‘Digging’, Heaney describes how naturally and expertly his father and grandfather handled a spade. The final stanzas read: ‘The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap/Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge/Through living roots awaken in my head./But I’ve no spade to follow men like them./Between my finger and my thumb/The squat pen rests./I’ll dig with it.’
One of Seamus Heaney’s earliest memories is of his father returning home without his hat and going to bed. He had nearly drowned after his horse reared up and his cart overturned on a riverbank. ‘The strangest thing was seeing my father without his hat,’ Heaney says with a heavy Irish lilt. ‘There was a sense of awe about it and about him going to bed – a farmer going to bed in the afternoon! A world-shaking event! That’s an eternal image, for me. Some of those things are ready-made poetry. You don’t touch them. As far as possible you don’t touch them. Let them happen. Don’t interfere.’ Heaney’s father left school at 14; what did he make of his precocious and gifted son winning a scholarship to a boarding-school at 11, followed in 1961 by a first-class degree in English from Queen’s University of Belfast? ‘I don’t know, I think he regarded it as a mystery. I suspect it would not have been his thing. I mean, he didn’t devalue it, he wasn’t afraid of it, or against it, he watched it happen – as he did the oddity of me publishing a book and himself being in it. That must have been a curiosity. We didn’t quite deal with that, we didn’t even discuss it. No way of discussing it.’
Was his father embarrassed by it? ‘No,’ he says softly. ‘No, I can’t think of the word, but “embarrassment” is not it… “Embarrass” would be too laxative a word. Not embarrassed. What would be the word?’ Long pause. ‘I think he ended up pleased. Pleased that I had defined something for myself. He knew everything about cattle, that was what he had defined for himself. I went with him to markets, fairs and so on and saw he had an area of expertise. He could know the weight of a beast to within a few pounds. So… Pleased.’ And proud? ‘I guess at the end, yeah. But he wouldn’t have gone so far as to proclaim it!’ Seamus Heaney has a compact smile that he deploys with such regularity – it’s there at the end of nearly every sentence – it is more like a facial tic. But here it blooms into a laugh, and when Seamus Heaney – a big, friendly bear of a man – laughs, you find yourself laughing with him. ‘No, he wouldn’t go that far now!’
He never tried to teach his father about poetry, so he could share his son’s pleasure in it. ‘The other way around, if anything. I would enjoy the masquerade that he had never read a line.’ He laughs again. ‘We are creatures of many capacities and you can live on a thousand levels without dishonesty.’ So what did they talk about, father and son? ‘The way he indicated equality, at easeness, was to talk about my mother. To worry about her. It was a way of treating you as a grown-up, as somebody that he confided in. There wasn’t that much substantial exchange but there was a good bit of silent assignation between us.’ In one Heaney poem, the hands of his dead father reappear as ‘two ferrets,/Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field’. Did he feel haunted by his father? Was there unfinished business between them, something left unsaid when he died? ‘Plenty left unsaid, but nothing left un-understood, I don’t think. I’m never sure what place content has in poetry, you know, personal information, but there’s actually a poem at the end of the book [his new collection, Electric Light] called “Seeing the Sick”. I was glad to see him at the end. I suppose everybody has their persona, and his parents had died when he was young and he had been brought up by uncles, in a kind of gruff, male, unyielding household without women in it. But in the end, the last three or four weeks, he wasn’t wary any more. That iron mask of his, as it were, came off. And there was something of his own shyness and bewilderment of the world that came off, too.’
Seamus Heaney has a public persona that is distinct from his private one, too. He has spoken of himself as being Seamus Heaney and ‘Seamus Heaney’. ‘The person in inverted commas is a composite identity that begins to stalk you. It has to be, I suppose. I mean, I have to be myself somewhere other than in interviews! And while I think you should be as truthful as possible, obviously that shouldn’t be to the point of gormlessness.’
The need to have a public persona is unusual for a post-War poet, as most have lived lives of impecunious obscurity. A few, such as Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, became literary superstars, but not many have become bestsellers, as Seamus Heaney did with his translation of Beowulf. Beowulf even made him poet of choice for Jerry Hall, one of the judges who awarded him the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1999. ‘If there has been an element of self-invention, I don’t think it is a necessarily exploitative thing,’ he says. ‘Every spontaneous response is an act of invention, isn’t it? And I think the longer you’re around, the more you’re aware of the layering of these things. I think a cut-out develops, you know? The figure called SH, or whatever. And you’re a moving plasma somewhere in the middle of that outline.’
I wonder whether this duel identity has evolved because even he finds his childhood in rural Derry a little too rich, romantically speaking, a little too twee and perfect for a poet. Has he almost stopped believing it himself? ‘Well, there is that factor, yes. I mean, “He was born on a farm in County Derry, one of nine children,” you know. Instead of, “He was actually the only son of a stockbroker from north Belfast and his parents were secret supporters of the Unionist party.”‘ He laughs. ‘But the fact remains, I am the eldest of what were nine, there are now eight. And I have brothers who are schoolteachers and sisters married to solicitors. But then I also have a brother who drives a lorry, and a brother who’s a farmer. And to the extent that I always had that, I was in two worlds, really. And I was lucky in having that background. It sounds so corny and pious, but it has to be said, it’s true.’
There were few books in the Heaney household, but the poetic sensibilities of the young Seamus were nourished by the sprung rhythms of the BBC Shipping Forecast and the poetry of the Roman Catholic litany. Heaney describes his childhood as a ‘den-life’ more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world. ‘I think that if you grew up on your own ground, even if it’s a small farm, and you can see where your neighbours are and where the horizon is, it feels like the world is settled. It was actually medieval almost, with the beasts and the smells. You felt you were born, culturally speaking, 400 or 500 years ago, you know? The world that I grew up in was romantic – lamplight, fires, horses, wells. It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingled with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other.’
And yet, in a poem called ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ – political advice his mother gave him as a child – Heaney describes the ‘famous/Northern reticence, the tight gag of place/And times.’ His family was ‘watchful, sly and preoccupied with not speaking’, or rather with being unable to speak out. Words are dangerous in a riven community, Heaney explains, just saying your name opens the door to a wave of ancient hatreds and allegiances. Though he was born in Northern Ireland, Seamus Heaney doesn’t consider himself to be British. Indeed when he was included in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982), he dropped a peevish line to its editors, Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison: ‘Be advised, my passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised/To toast the Queen.’
Early in his career, Heaney dabbled in barricade versification, writing a mocking ballad about the policing of the civil rights demonstrations and a song about Bloody Sunday. Though he was involved in some of the marches, he recoiled from the notion of any simple enlistment. As a public figure, he was criticised by both sides for being too detached from the Troubles, neither overtly condemning violence, nor condoning it. In 1972 he and his wife and three children left Northern Ireland for the Republic. In addition to a house in Dublin he bought a cottage in Wicklow, 45 minutes’ drive from the capital, and it is here that he does his writing. The place had, and still has, no telephone lines. ‘When I go there I feel gathered and safe and under cover.’ It was here, in 1975, that he wrote the critically acclaimed and (unusually for a collection of poetry) best-selling North. In his autobiography Gerry Adams describes how he once avoided being arrested by British troops by hiding his face behind a copy of North. The book was attacked by Unionists for going too far – in comparing ancient Irish tribalism with contemporary sectarianism – and by Republicans for not going far enough. But both criticisms failed to see that the book had subtly turned a public debate into a private one.
The poet and critic James Fenton remarked, ‘With North, Heaney found a way of being an honest man with a troubled conscience. He didn’t take sides in the external confrontation but reported an internal one.’ In 1994, after the first ceasefire was announced, Heaney said he felt 25 years younger, but also angry at the 25 years of loss. ‘I can see that the Loyalist thing, the bitterness, the danger of that backlash is always possible,’ he now says of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. ‘But I refuse to let myself believe that anything like the IRA campaign can ever start again. It’s risky, though, because the problem with the IRA is that you’re dealing with theology rather than politics. It’s a metaphysical republic to which they are dedicated. And they are entrapped in vows.’ Pause. ‘So they have to lose… to put it another way, they have to lose their faith before it’s…’ He checks himself and smiles. ‘But that’s a Catholic problem.’
Heaney once said that his language and sensibility are yearning to admit of a religious or a transcendent dimension. ‘But then there’s the reality: there’s no heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised and no personal God.’ Does he still think of himself as a Roman Catholic, though? ‘I think so. But you reconsider it all the time, I guess. I think that our capacity to dwell in two or three minds in religious matters is immense. And right into my early twenties I went to Mass. But, of course, I was also a student of literature at the time, seeking coherence in not practising religion – there was an imperative to secularise myself and put the test on all this stuff. Then, in my fifties, I attended my first death beds – my mother’s and my father’s – and I found it an utterly simple and utterly mysterious thing to watch. Life goes, spirit goes, whatever, and abstract words that had previously had an ephemeral flimsiness to them were no longer abstractions.’
So he found the rigid structure that Roman Catholicism offers a comfort? ‘Catholicism gives you a set of precision instruments. If you were to look at it, as it were, as a novelist, you could see it as a very bad thing, you know – authoritarian, repressive. But for a young lyric poet it is good to see the whole cosmos ashimmer with God and to know you, a pinpoint of plasma, are part of It, He, whatever. There is a sense every volition that passes through you is registered. That you are accountable. That every action and secret thought is known out there on the rim of eternity. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s good for a young poet to have that sense of owning the whole space, the whole time, and being owned by it.’
As his confidence in religion ebbed, Heaney’s belief in the value of work flowed. As a young man, he considered being a poet as much a vocation as being a priest. He still refers to his job as a calling and tells me, ‘My life has been made meaningful by the visitation of poetry.’ But given what his father and grandfather did for a living – hard, sweaty labour – does he feel poetry is a proper job for a man? ‘Gradually, over the past 40 years, I’ve been justifying it to myself as a proper job, yes. I mean, obviously, in the place where I grew up the word “work”, whether noun or verb, entailed physical labour, usually. And the thought that the able-bodied, eldest son of the house could sit, on a sunny day, in a room upstairs with a book and a pen, while the rest were in the hayfield, turning the hay, seemed like I was absconding from work. But, you know, I didn’t sit, I worked there. I also like to think that in the Irish tradition there is always the sense of writing as labour. It’s actually called “scribal bother” in Ireland. But maybe you’re right, maybe that is why I always kept teaching, to have a proper job and a steady income. I didn’t travel on the creative writing ticket, so to speak. I got energy from working hard at the job and a kind of perverse pride in saying I marked 600 scripts every summer.’
Heaney was first inspired to try writing poetry by reading Gerard Manley Hopkins at school, and tried it again later when he came under the spell of TS Eliot and Emily Dickinson at university. But it was only when he read a poem by Ted Hughes called ‘View of a Pig’ that he realised material from his own life was a relevant subject. In 1966 he was commissioned by Faber & Faber to write a whole collection, after a couple of his poems were spotted in the New Statesman. Heaney was thrilled, not only because it was – and is – almost unheard of for a publisher to approach a poet, but because he knew that in joining the Faber list he would be part of a line of succession which included Eliot, Auden and Ted Hughes. ‘When I began to write poems I felt a great excitement,’ he says. ‘Certainly when I wrote “Digging” I felt that, whatever it means to call something a poem, that must be it, because I felt it touched base, I hit the bottom of myself, something had moved. I still retain a certain awe of the word “poet”, yes. I mean, it still has an archaic force to it. I don’t want to be coy but, as a word, for me, it hasn’t been robbed of its faintly sacred aura.’
When Heaney first began to publish poetry in university magazines he did so under a Latin pseudonym, Incertus – ‘not sure’. He later wrote a poem about his pen name. ‘I went disguised in it, pronouncing it with a soft church-Latin c, tagging it under my efforts like a damp fuse. Uncertain. A shy soul fretting and all that. Expert obeisance.’ It wasn’t until North was published that he felt he had earned the right to call himself a poet – as well as the money to give up teaching for a while. ‘I finally thought, “OK that’s fine, you’ve paid your way, now proceed.”‘ So as a young man he never introduced himself as a poet at parties? Never used it as a chat-up line? ‘No. I don’t know, I don’t know, err…’ Laughter. He met his wife, Marie Devlin, at a university undergraduate dinner. ‘Somebody thought we should meet, she was with somebody else. We got on very well and I walked her home, in the days of demure activity, and I arranged to meet her again – that week.’ So it was love at first sight? ‘Well, excited – the words “in love” panic me but I guess I must have been, yeah. Then we were on the conveyor belt of the engagement ring, the marriage, the children.’
The couple have two sons and a daughter. Did he write Marie any slushy love poems then that he would prefer the literary world not to see now? ‘There are poems like that in university magazines, yes.’ He chuckles at the memory. ‘But it was a heady, risky moment and, as they say, falling in love and starting to write poetry go together quite often. There’s an element of desperation at that stage of your life, a need for focus, a sense that you have flared into yourself. Poetry is an orgasmic fulfilment that lasts for a second or two and then you have to do it again. Yes, there was a sense of refreshment and love there but I’m kind of shy of talking about it. Things that are too close like that should almost be kept.’ Heaney has much to say on the subject of not saying much. ‘Once again, to go back to my family life, silence was valued, speech was almost a devaluing of the thing; if you could speak too accurately, it became suspect.’ Long pause. ‘It was to do with my father who was either archaic or aristocratic, whatever you want to call it, but there was a code, and you knew the code or you didn’t. If you knew how to conduct yourself properly, you didn’t talk too much about yourself and your feelings.’
This seems an odd sentiment coming from a poet whose stock in trade is emotion. But I suspect that Heaney’s reluctance to analyse himself, other than in his often autobiographical poetry, is the same as that of the novelist Martin Amis, who fears that self-analysis – and for that matter psychoanalysis – will make the spell of creativity evaporate. Heaney is a self-effacing man. He was on holiday in Greece when it was announced that he had won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, and, when he flew back to Dublin to be met off the plane by a cheering crowd and the Irish prime minister, he looked bewildered. The citation declared that Heaney’s work had ‘a lyrical beauty and an ethical depth, which exalts everyday miracles and the living past’.
I first began to read and enjoy Seamus Heaney’s work when I was 17, an age when, as he puts it, ‘there’s an element of desperation’ when you fall in love every five minutes and are especially susceptible to the intoxicating power of poetry. North was one of my A-level set texts. When I found my yellowing, dog-eared copy on my bookshelf, I discovered that I had annotated it with the words ‘dense syllabic lines, gnarled textures, hallucinatory audibility of images’. I don’t think those observations were mine, but they do seem to get to the nub of his genius. People who have never seen a tool handle grown satiny from it own natural polish, heard a spade slicing through peat, or a leather football skittering musically across frozen ground, feel as if they have after reading Heaney. Regressing to my gauche, sixth-form self, and mildly disconcerted by meeting a living writer I had studied alongside so many dead ones – Shakespeare, Eliot and Hardy – I ask him to sign my antique copy of North. ‘Ah, now this is the genuine article,’ he says holding it up to the light. ‘This, I think, has been read.’

On the wall of William Hague’s office in Smith Square hangs a large oil painting of some friendly-looking sheep. It’s by Mackenzie Thorpe, a Yorkshire artist who found national fame in 1998 when the Hagues reproduced one of his canvases on their Christmas card. ‘Everyone psychoanalysed the dark clouds in it,’ Hague recalls with that weirdly hypnotic loud-quiet, long-short, flat-vowelled speech pattern of his. ‘They said it meant I was depressed. But I think if you like something you have to stick with it, which is why we used a Mackenzie Thorpe the following year, and the year after that, too.’
So, I ask, is he planning on taking a Mackenzie Thorpe with him to hang on the wall at Number Ten? ‘Of course!’ He stands back to study the painting through gently narrowed eyes. ‘That one, in fact’. Broad, tight-lipped grin. ‘I told Mackenzie we would move that one.’
William Hague’s manner is brisk but genial. He looks trim and, as everyone notes when they meet him for the first time, he is much taller than caricaturists depict him. (Let the record show: the distance from the top of his balding head – he has his hair razor-cut every ten days – to his size 9 shoes is 5ft 11in.) He’s wearing a bespoke dark blue suit, a pager on his belt and a wedding ring. His cufflinks, a present from his wife, Ffion, picture an outline of the British Isles. (And Ffion really did buy them, unlike the pound-sign pendant, a ‘love gift’, which William bought for Ffion – with a little help from his press secretary, Amanda Platell.)
It is Thursday morning. Late February. I hold up the front page of the day’s Times. The headline reads ‘Hague engulfed in poll gloom’. A Mori poll has revealed that, with a 20 per cent lead, Labour enjoys as commanding a position in the polls as it did before its election victory in May 1997, while confidence in Hague among Tory voters has fallen to its lowest level for nearly a year. Any normal person would be gnawing away at the carpet by now, or at least gibbering quietly to himself in the corner. Isn’t that what he feels like doing? ‘Certainly not!’ Hague says with a short laugh. ‘I wouldn’t even waste two seconds contemplating that headline.’ Serious face. ‘We know from being out and around the country that things are not as bad as they were during the last election, when there was a great hostility to our party. So an opinion poll that says they are as bad isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. We know we are the underdogs, but we knew that on 2 May 1997. The difference now is that people are interested once more in what we are saying. And there is a lot of disillusionment with the Labour Party which wasn’t there before. There’s a feeling that Labour has failed to deliver.’
I suppose doggedness and preternatural calm in the face of adversity are what we have come to expect from Hague. But while it was impressive at first, now there is something unsettling about it. Is it a Zen thing? As a young man he used to practise transcendental meditation. Has he taken it up again on the quiet? ‘No. I don’t have time really. I haven’t forgotten how to do it. But, er, I do other things. Judo, which keeps you on an even keel. Three sessions a week. I’m going to have a session after this conversation.’ Would it help if I asked a really irritating question to get him fired up before his bout? ‘Thanks! But actually it’s only if you keep balanced and your temper even that you win in judo. Getting angry or over-excited doesn’t get you anywhere, and being defeatist means you are easily defeated. There’s a parallel there with politics.’
Thursday afternoon. Loughborough college, in deepest Leicestershire. A fine drizzle. Hague is due to address a gathering of Tory Party activists, but his chauffeur-driven Rover (it comes with the job) is held up in traffic. Ffion Hague will not be putting in an appearance on this occasion (her husband has joked that he no longer takes her with him on campuses since a survey revealed that she was the politician’s wife most students would like to sleep with), but his friend, judo partner and private secretary Sebastian Coe will be there. Indeed the former Tory MP, Olympic gold medallist and now peer of the realm is always, always there. Seb is the Sancho Panza to William’s Don Quixote, the Jiminy Cricket to William’s Pinocchio, the Grommit to William’s Wallace.
An advance party of Tory activists waits by the hall entrance, checking hair, adjusting ties. As Hague strides with springy step towards them, they cheer and surge forward. Most of the party workers – average age 60, ladies in hats and tweed, men with red faces, feral eyebrows and regimental blazer badges – are waiting in a large student union bar inside. They nibble sausage rolls and vol-au-vents and sip glasses of warm wine, but the wait has been longer than expected and they have grown restless. When a man with a Union Jack tie announces that William will be with them shortly but that he has to do a few interviews with the local media first, there are groans. ‘Please be patient,’ the Union Jack adds. ‘We are trying to win an election here, after all.’
Hague doesn’t seem to suffer from the petty vanities I’ve noticed other politicians are prone to: he doesn’t bother with face powder or check himself in a mirror as he sits down for a five-minute television interview. There’s no hair to check, of course, and this, contrary to what trichologists would have society believe, might give him a sense of security about his appearance. His hair loss simply doesn’t bother him. It started thinning when he was 17. ‘It makes life very simple actually. You could be giving a TV interview in a howling gale and it no longer matters.’ If only in this respect, Blair has the bigger problem.
Two local newspaper reporters and a radio interviewer are waiting outside for their turn. A young woman from the Loughborough Echo asks what Hague thinks should be done about the problem of phone masts in Leicestershire. Without missing a beat, he comes up with an answer about the need for better consultation. He has been briefed – briefly – on the local issues but, still, the omniscience expected of politicians is staggering. The next question is about a local textile manufacturer. But even this is preferable to the killer question asked by a local radio reporter. ‘Neil Kinnock’s main problem was that, for all his strengths, people simply couldn’t see him as a future Prime Minister. He lacked the physical charisma. The star quality. The same is being said of you, Mr Hague. How does that make you feel?’ Hague grins. ‘Well, they also said that of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.’ Satisfied with this answer the reporter says, ‘I know this sounds a bit sad, but can I have my photograph taken with you?’
Sitting a few feet away, Sebastian Coe interjects, ‘There’s nothing sad in wanting to have your photograph taken with the future Prime Minister!’ The reporter produces a camera but, to his obvious embarrassment, it doesn’t work. Hague tells him not to worry and asks one of his press officers to find someone who can take a photograph and send it on.
One of the organisers pops her head around the door and says, ‘Roger has been doing a warm-up, but they are getting pretty steamed up in there.’ Hague claps his hands. ‘Right then, let’s get on with it.’ There is a big cheer as he enters. He stands in front of a blue screen displaying the Conservative torch logo, behind a lectern emblazoned with COMMON SENSE FOR LEICESTERSHIRE – a curious plea that makes you wonder what erratic behaviour Leicestershire has been guilty of lately. Hague apologises for being late, and raises a laugh with a tried and tested line – ‘I asked Tony Blair the other day when he planned to have a referendum and he said, “Within two years.” I was asked later if I was surprised. “I was,” I said. “But not nearly as surprised as the Cabinet.”’
He is soon in his stride, chopping the side of one hand against the palm of the other: ‘… I want to give people their country back… save the pound… stealth tax… political correctness… common sense… beating crime… marriage is the bedrock of our society.’
Political commentators agree that Hague is probably the most naturally talented orator to have led the Tories since Churchill. One can see why his grand rhetorical manner plays well in the House of Commons and why Blair so often seems to be left floundering after their encounters in Prime Minister’s question time. But as Hague addresses the party faithful in Loughborough, there is an unfamiliar edginess to his mocking tone. ‘This Government is the most hypocritical, pompous, cynical lot of people I have ever come across… When I saw Mandelson sitting next to Blair on the front bench the other day I thought, “One down, one to go.”‘
Three years ago, Hague was quoted in this newspaper as having said that Blair had ‘personal strengths’ and that he enjoyed gossiping with him. Has he since grown to hate the Labour leader? ‘I’ve lost respect for him over time. We have cordial relations whenever we need to discuss things about Northern Ireland or national security. But he is essentially a fraud. He doesn’t hesitate to say the opposite of the truth and twist every fact and attribute to other people motives and policies that they don’t have. That is quite a low standard of debate.’
The speech over, the party activists suitably galvanised, Hague works his way around the room, shaking hands, signing autographs, having his photograph taken next to candidates for the local council elections. I overhear a woman say, ‘Taller than you think, isn’t he?’ A man with a pound sign in his lapel says: ‘Isn’t that Seb Coe over by the door?’ It is. When I wander over to join Coe he says, ‘I’ve just remembered I was once kicked out of this bar when I was a student.’ (Drunken revelries, apparently. These Tories never pass up a chance to show that their formative years were ‘normal’.) Coe checks his watch. Time for the next engagement: a black-tie dinner hosted by Leicestershire Chamber of Commerce.
Thursday evening. Jarvis Grand Hotel, Leicester. We are in Keith Vaz’s constituency. There are several hundred guests, Labour supporters as well as Conservative, and Hague, the guest speaker, is sitting next to the President of the Chamber, at the top table. A fire alarm goes off halfway through the dinner. The MC tells everyone to stay seated. When he returns to announce a false alarm, Hague says: ‘It was just Keith Vaz trying to gatecrash.’
It is sometimes said that if Hague ever left politics he could do worse than try a career as a stand-up comedian. He opens his speech with a joke at his host’s expense, comparing a president to a parrot. He pauses to ride the laugh, then he recalls how, three years ago, the Sun pictured him on its front page as a dead parrot. More laughter. This prompts him to list his favourite political headlines, among them SEWAGE CRISIS – HEATH TO STEP IN! and HOME SECRETARY TO ACT ON PORN VIDEOS. The political tub-thumping follows. The Government is only out to help those who don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t drive, don’t have a mortgage and don’t want to get married. ‘But the only people I know like that are in the Cabinet.’ Boom-boom.
Friday morning, 9.15. I hold up a copy of the day’s Mirror. The front page pictures Hague, mouth turned down, next to the headline ‘COME ON TONY, PUT HIM OUT OF HIS MISERY. CALL THE ELECTION NOW’. Hague’s white helicopter lands on a racecourse at Wolverhampton. His Rover is waiting, as are children wearing the Wolverhampton junior team football strip. They present him with an orange Wolverhampton scarf. He declines the offer to take part in a Blair-style photo opportunity, heading the ball.
Next stop, a meeting about pensions at the town’s Age Concern office. On the wall is a notice: personal alarms available here £7.20. Above an empty shelf there is another sign which reads BOOK RUMMAGE, SEE A BOOK YOU LIKE AND MAKE US A DONATION (MINIMUM DONATION 20 PENCE). Hague nods as he listens to the grievances of the 20 or so pensioners who are sitting before him. On the street outside, an old woman walks past, returns and presses her face up against the window to see what all the fuss is about.
Amid flurries of snow, the helicopter next lands on the racecourse at Worcester. A taxi takes Hague and his party to the high street where blue-and-white KEEP THE POUND balloons are tethered to a stand. Local party workers carry KEEP THE POUND umbrellas and hand out KEEP THE POUND leaflets and mouse mats to passers-by. By the time Hague barrels over, wearing a brown waxed jacket, a sizeable crowd has formed and a cheer goes up as he jumps on to a table and grabs hold of a microphone. ‘I was listening to Tony Blair in the House of Commons the other day, and I could tell he wasn’t telling the truth because his lips were moving… ‘
‘He looks better in real life,’ a woman in a headscarf whispers to a farmer in a flat cap. A man with mutton chops says, ‘Isn’t that Seb Coe over there?’ There is a very English heckle from a tattooed youth at the back of the crowd: ‘Fascist!’ he shouts from behind his hand, then he dips out of sight and walks over to the other side of the crowd where, turning his back on the crowd, he gives a half-hearted boo. A middle-aged matriarch, presumably an example of the fabled ‘Worcester Woman’ who decides elections, tells me, ‘These politicians only bother to come round here when there’s an election. It’s the Queen I’m looking forward to. She’s coming next week.’
Earlier I’d asked Hague if he thought the people he met at these rallies were honest with him, or did they just tell him what he wanted to hear? ‘One of the great things about this country,’ he said with that distinctive crack in his voice, ‘is that wherever you go, people will tell you exactly what they think of you. Certainly my constituents do. I got a letter from one, which read, “I hope you can take some constructive criticisms on your speech. It was rubbish!” Very straightforward! I don’t sit at Central Office only being told good news or what I want to hear.’
After the rally, Hague mingles with the crowd, shaking hands and answering questions. He is then ushered into a small room in a nearby hotel. Local journalists stand in the corridor outside, waiting for their five minutes each. The local Tory candidate quickly briefs Hague on recent flooding in Worcester and the closure of a hospital in Kidderminster. A BBC Hereford & Worcester reporter asks Hague if he will be attempting to win the vote of Worcester Woman. ‘We want to appeal to Worcester people in general, men and women.’ Hague gives the same answer to the next two reporters, who ask the same question. A cheerful young man from the Worcester Evening News asks, ‘Would you be looking to put a hospital back in Kidderminster?’ Hague answers and the young man says, ‘Lovely. Now, can you give me a comment on foxhunting?… Lovely. And a comment on the flooding please… Lovely.’
Before the last reporter comes in, Hague asks Coe about developments in the first foot-and-mouth case, details of which emerged the previous day. He nods gravely as he hears the likely source is a Northumberland farm. Back at what they call the ‘War Room’ in London, Tim Yeo, the shadow agriculture spokesman, is about to make a statement to the Press Association about compensation for farmers. Hague issues instructions for Yeo to wait until after the Government’s press conference on the subject, which is due to take place in half an hour.
The Tory leader’s feeling at this stage is that there should be cross-party unity. As this crisis is being analysed, a woman from a local newspaper is ushered in. She asks Hague what he thinks of Worcester Woman. Lunch consists of sandwiches on the helicopter as Hague flies up to his constituency – Richmond, in North Yorkshire. He’ll be attending a local branch pie and pea supper there on Saturday night, but the rest of the weekend will be devoted to working on the Conservative Party manifesto – and going for his traditional Sunday walk with Ffion in Swaledale, where he says he feels much closer to God than he does in church.
‘On weekdays, I make sure I have private time with Ffion set aside,’ he tells me, ‘while preserving Sundays as a special day. We probably do quite a lot of work, but we do it at home and we get out for those walks.’ His Sunday is marred, though, by a report in one newspaper which claims that a year ago he was so depressed and disillusioned by splits and rows within his party that he considered resigning. Apparently, he confided this to his three lieutenants, one being Sebastian Coe. I ask Coe if the story is true. ‘It’s absolute rubbish,’ he says.
William Hague celebrated his 40th birthday early, so that it wouldn’t interfere with his election campaigning. He blew out the candles on his cake, watched by Ffion and 100 friends and family at a North Yorkshire hotel. His constituency staff presented him with a broom to ‘sweep away Labour’. On his actual birthday, 26 March, he and Ffion will probably go out for supper together at a pub. I ask him if he regards his 40th birthday as a time for taking stock of his life? He smiles. ‘Very worrying isn’t it? I think it will be a time of intense activity. I don’t feel any older.’
The strange thing about Hague’s age is that he was going on 36 when he was 16 – the age he made his precocious speech at the 1977 Tory Party Conference. ‘It’s all right for yew,’ he said in his flat Yorkshire accent, grinning at Margaret Thatcher from beneath his blond fringe, ‘half of yew won’t be here in 30 or 40 years time, but I will be, and I want to be free.’
Laughter always seems to be just below the surface of William Hague. When he says something that amuses him, he punctuates his sentence with an almost inaudible snuffle – mm – the suppression of a laugh, a hint of satisfaction at what he is saying. When I put it to him that, though he regularly implies that he now hates that speech, he loves it really, he says: ‘Mm. No, I don’t hate it. I suppose I am quite proud of it. It’s a fun thing to recall. It wasn’t my intention to put myself on the map, I just thought I would get up and say what I thought and people would clap politely. Whatever I do in life, if I die at 90, people will still say, “He was the chap who gave that speech 74 years ago.” Mm.’
William Hague was born and raised in South Yorkshire in a suburb of Rotherham, where his family owned a lemonade factory, Hague’s Soft Drinks. He boarded at Ripon Grammar School, briefly – but felt homesick and ran away. His mother wanted him to return but his father relented and sent young William to the local comprehensive. By the age of 14, William had memorised every Parliamentary constituency, the name of its MP and the majority. Did he grow up a little too quickly? ‘It’s funny, but I feel in some senses I’ve got younger as I’ve got older. I now do more sport and I enjoy music more than I’ve ever done before, jazz mostly. But, in answer to your question, I think it was demonstrated by my friends who were interviewed for that Channel 4 documentary that I had a proper childhood. At school we had a great social mix, so it wasn’t a protected childhood in any way. My family is not like that. They think you should get to know the world, learn to look after yourself.’
That documentary, Just William… and Ffion, which was screened last autumn, also revealed Hague’s love of chocolate cake, the fact that he is colour-blind, and his father’s passion for go-karting around the garden. It was an endearing portrait of a straight-talking if mildly eccentric family. Although William’s father describes himself as ‘one of the hang ’em and flog ’em brigade’, he comes across as an amiable character, and William’s mother adds that the family was never really politically minded.
I ask Hague if he ever turns to his father for advice? ‘No. Then again, I usually don’t have to ask his opinion because I already know it.’ Coe, sitting within earshot, laughs at this and adds, ‘You don’t have to turn to William’s father for advice, he just gives it. In fact, it’s hard to stop him!’ William grins, ‘My father doesn’t expect me to act on his opinions, though. In fact he’d be horrified if I went out and did the things he suggests.’
The documentary also introduced Hague’s three older sisters to the world. Not only are they quick to criticise any signs of conceit in their brother but one revealed that her nickname for him was ‘Tory pig’. ‘That is what they are really like!’ William says when I ask him about them. He smiles, exposing his small, gappy teeth. ‘One gets mocked by sisters, but I’ve given them my fair share of mockery, too. Actually they are quite supportive.’
Is there a traditional Yorkshire reserve in his family, or are they all in touch with their emotions? ‘It depends what you mean. We don’t burst into tears every five minutes. But we are open. One of the reasons there are no grudges in our family is that if we are going to have an argument we have one.’
Who was the more dominant figure in the Hague household, his mother or father? ‘Neither, really. They are a great combination. Their expectations were never too high. I never felt under pressure and I never felt the need to win their approval. No one in my family – including my sisters – had been to university before me and that wasn’t a problem.’ Not only did Hague win a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, he achieved the treble of being President of the Conservative Association and the Oxford Union, as well as taking a first in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. His contemporaries there recall that he was a bit gauche but in his element when debating. As a student he combined reactionary beliefs (bring back the birch, and even the stocks) with progressive ones (a belief in an equal age of consent for homosexuals). After graduating, Hague worked as a management consultant for five years before his political career took off. He became an MP at 27, a minister at 31, and leader of the Tory Party at 36.
Hague has criticised Tony Blair for reinventing himself. Surely the same could be said of him. There is the urbane, metropolitan, liberal Hague, and the professional Northerner and skinhead who talks tough on asylum and drinks 14 pints. Which is closer to the truth? ‘Neither really. People always try to pigeonhole me but I’m just who I am. I don’t pretend to be anything different, and things I’ve said on law and order and on European issues would not be a surprise to anyone who has been following what I’ve been saying for years. I think it’s important to be tough. And I don’t think I’ve ever claimed to be metropolitan! I’m from Yorkshire!’
Wednesday Evening. An ambassadors’ reception at the Pimlico home of Richard Spring, MP. It isn’t quite the Ferrero Rocher occasion its title would suggest. Francis Maude, the shadow foreign affairs spokesman, is co-hosting a ‘thank-you drinks’ for the dozen or so ambassadors who have helped him on his trips abroad in the past couple of years. It’s a suits and wine occasion, rather than black tie and champagne. Hague comes straight from the House of Commons, where he has been listening to John Prescott’s statement on the day’s train crash at Selby. He apologises for being late and explains that Selby is on the border of his constituency, so the crash was of particular concern to him. The ambassadors, who form a circle around him, are keen to quiz him about Europe.
He says a few words of thanks and promises not to keep them from the Spain-England football match, which is just about to start. ‘It’s only a friendly,’ one of the ambassadors shouts from the back. ‘That’s what you think!’ Hague replies. Everyone laughs. From here, Hague is driven to a reception at the Albemarle Gallery, just off Piccadilly, where there is a Conservative Party fund-raising art exhibition. En route he collects Ffion from her office; when they arrive, they are greeted by a blinding wall of flashbulbs. Ffion, all blonde, Welsh and smiley, is wearing loopy gold earrings, a grey polo-neck, and a black frock coat.
As I make a mental note of this, I recall something Hague once said: ‘It’s funny, we often go to places, political events, where I know people are going to pay far more attention to what Ffion is wearing than to what I’m saying. But that’s OK. Because I would, too. And I like it. Because she is beautiful. She is fantastic.’ And she is, of course, the Conservatives’ not-so-secret weapon. The schoolboy Hague once declared that he wouldn’t get engaged until he became a Cabinet minister, and he was true to his word.
He met Ffion Jenkins, the Oxford-educated daughter of the chief executive of the Arts Council of Wales, on his first day as Secretary of State for Wales. She was his private secretary. Her nickname, he learnt, was ‘Jolly’. He proposed to Jolly in the Black Bull at Malton, North Yorkshire, and now sightseers go to see the table there. After mingling at the reception for a respectable time, William and Ffion slip away with Seb and Nicola Coe to a nearby jazz club. Nice.
Like his newfound interest in sport, Hague’s interest in jazz – Miles Davis and Scott Hamilton are his favourites – is presumably inspired by Coe, who is something of a jazz expert. Either way, it’s an improvement on Meat Loaf. I ask Hague if he feels transported when he listens to jazz. Is it a balm for his nerves? ‘I listen to jazz to enjoy myself,’ he says, ‘not to burst into tears.’
Hague is easy company, he’s self-effacing, too, but the main impression one gets is that, as he puts it, he enjoys himself and doesn’t seem to take political brickbats personally. As he once said, ‘People have to be able to poke fun at politicians. You can’t be over-sensitive. You have to have a sense of the ridiculous.’ Some might see this as a weakness. Indeed, Blair has dismissed Hague as ‘good at jokes, no good at policy’. Certainly I think Hague uses humour to deflect crises. But I also saw his sober and statesmanlike side, not to mention the determination and ambition lurking beneath his sanguine personality.
Blair has also attempted to portray Hague as a weird and freakish leader of a dysfunctional racist sect. I think this characterisation misses the point. An eccentric, as defined by the neuropsychologist Dr David Weeks, is a highly intelligent person who is exceptionally healthy and remarkably free from stress. He is, moreover, single-minded, affable, self-possessed and blithely indifferent to criticism. And this, as a definition of Hague, seems much closer to the mark. He hasn’t always been sure-footed as a leader – the reversals of policy, the decision to back Jeffrey Archer for Mayor of London, wearing a Hague baseball cap while going down a water ride at a theme park – but he has shown an ability to think on his feet and a decisiveness that his predecessor lacked.
I ask Hague how he would describe himself. ‘Determined. Strong views. I’m combative. Happy to have a fight. Don’t run away from a fight.’ He has no insecurities, he adds. Doesn’t feel vulnerable. Is he introspective? ‘No, I don’t brood on difficulties. I don’t have regrets.’ So he doesn’t regret, for instance, backing Jeffrey Archer?
‘Obviously I wish we had done that differently. But, no, I don’t brood on that. I can’t do anything about it now, unless one day Jeffrey Archer wants to run for Mayor of London again, in which case I shall know what to do.’ Everyone I talk to about Hague seems to have a different take on him. But one characterisation on which all can agree is that he is unflappable. There is a stillness to him.
He is, as the modern jargon has it, centred. Is this, I ask him, just for public consumption? Does he fly into rages in private? ‘No, I don’t think any of my staff have seen me fly into a rage. I am naturally like this. But I also think to get the best out of people the man at the top has to have an even temperament and an optimistic outlook. There is good news and bad good news. And, actually, when you sit down at the end of the day, the world isn’t that different from how it was at the beginning. Mm.’
The Conservatives lost the 2001 general election. After announcing his decision to resign as leader, a few hours after the extent of Tony Blair’s landslide victory became apparent, Hague went back inside Central Office to thank his campaign workers. He had tears in his eyes.

Backlit by milky sunshine, sitting at an awkward angle, Lord Tebbit looks brittle and frail. This is not what you expect. The former Conservative Party chairman, who will be 70 next month, has been called many things: Michael Foot dubbed him ‘a semi house-trained polecat’; Margaret Thatcher considered him her ‘lightning conductor’; the Tory mayoral candidate Steve Norris dismissed him as ‘a racist and a homophobe’. But frail? Perhaps it’s to do with his hair. Usually, he manages to look bald and serious at the same time. Now though, his remaining strands at the back are almost collar-length – stiff, vertical, ghosting in the light. It is mid-morning. We are drinking coffee in the library of a Pall Mall club, and Norman Tebbit is wearing his Eurosceptic convictions on the lapel of his tweed jacket – a gold pound sign. Somehow, his clothes – Tattersall shirt, no-nonsense brown trousers and sturdy brown shoes – don’t suit his look, which is that of a grey-skinned Pilgrim Father. But they do give an indication of what he will be doing in a few hours’ time: shooting in Norfolk.
‘I was sitting in the car this morning grumbling gently to my driver about how full my diary is this week,’ Tebbit says in a thin monotone. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t complain. Indeed, I should be pleased as I approach my 70th birthday that I’m still able to earn a living [as a media pundit and businessman]. I can’t remember how many times I’ve retired, or been retired, now. I am reminded of my age, though, when I’m not feeling well. I had a rather tatty start to last year…’ By ‘tatty’ he means he came down with flu, which developed into pneumonia, which lead to a heart condition bad enough to see him hospitalised. ‘It’s as much as I can do to lift a bag of cartridges at the moment, and I’m limping a bit because I tweaked rather heftily an old scar from Brighton…’ He refers, of course, to the IRA bomb which in the early hours of 12 October 1984 ripped through the Grand Hotel in Brighton, scene of the Tory party conference. He and his wife Margaret, a former nurse, fell four storeys into the debris. They held hands as they waited to be rescued, bleeding and buried alive, convinced they were going to die. Eventually the television cameras recorded Norman Tebbit emerging from the rubble as in a dusty pietˆ, his feet bare. The damage to Margaret’s spine left her paralysed from her neck down. She has a full-time carer, but her husband still gets up twice in the night to turn her over, so that she doesn’t get bed sores. ‘The limp reminds me I’m mortal,’ Tebbit says with a gaunt smile. ‘My younger son the other day was suggesting we should buy a shoot between us. “It’s a long term project,” he said. And I said, “Have you thought, I might not be too interested in the long term?”‘
It’s safe to assume that Norman Tebbit never suggested buying a shoot with his own father, Leonard, a sometime jeweller and pawnbroker from Ponders End, Middlesex. As we all know, when times were hard Len ‘got on his bike’ to look for work – and found it, among other places, in an abattoir, a pub and on a factory floor. But he preferred playing snooker to working, and Norman, who joined the Young Conservatives at the age of 15, resented his father’s lack of ambition.
Given what he once described as his narrow, dull and impoverished background, did the young Norman ever imagine a day would come when he would be a peer of the realm, heading up to Norfolk for a day’s shooting? A flicker of a grin again. ‘Not really. But someone asked me recently – silly question – “If you had become Prime Minister, what would have been the most important difference between you and your predecessor in the Tory party?” And I said, “I would have been the first Tory prime minister to have been photographed on a grouse moor since Alec Douglas-Home.”‘ He gives a wheezy laugh, so faint it is almost a snuffle.
It’s not such a silly question. Norman Tebbit won Epping, his first parliamentary seat, in 1970. He then held Chingford from 1974 to 1992. He was Secretary of State for Employment and, later, Trade and Industry and, by 1984, was considered the heir apparent to Margaret Thatcher. But after the Brighton bomb he seemed to lose his momentum; though he went on to become Tory party chairman and was generally credited with organising the Tory victory in the 1987 general election, Mrs Thatcher lost confidence in him and, as was her way, let it be known. When she was toppled in 1990, many senior Conservatives on the right of the party tried to persuade Tebbit to stand against John Major. Privately, he still broods on his regret that he didn’t.
‘I chose not to contest it. Perhaps that was a mistake, because either I would have been successful or I would have lost the ’92 election and been replaced – and a Labour government led by Kinnock would not have lasted long; we certainly wouldn’t be talking about a second Labour term. Tony Blair owes me a lot.’ The tight smile. ‘Without me – the way I reformed the trade unions so that he was able to be elected as leader of the Labour Party – without me, he wouldn’t be in Number Ten today. He’s never thanked me. But politics is an ungrateful business.’
It certainly is. The self-appointed guardian of the Thatcherite legacy has recently been waging war against his own party, or at least those members of it who favour a more progressive approach to social issues. In particular, it seems Tebbit has made it his mission to nobble Michael Portillo. In recent months he has attacked the shadow chancellor’s ‘touchy-feely pink pound policies’. ‘I could never quite make him out,’ he said recently. ‘Remember his great SAS speech? “Who Dares Wins”. It made my toes curl it was so singularly inappropriate.’
Not a fan then. So is he worried that, if the Tories lose the next election, Michael Portillo will challenge William Hague for the leadership?  ‘I don’t think there is any chance of the Tory party electing Portillo, because I think he has undergone some sort of emotional trauma which has left him less effective than he was. It has lost him a great deal of support in the Conservative Party.’
Given what we know of Lord Tebbit’s attitude toward gays, or ‘raving queers’ as he is wont to call them, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that his views on Portillo might have been coloured by ‘that admission’.  What is it with Tebbit and homosexuals? Why does he hate them so? ‘I wouldn’t actively seek out someone as a companion on the basis that I was looking for a homosexual,’ he replies, rather bafflingly. ‘But one of the most able organisers in my time at Central Office was homosexual, and I entrusted him with a lot of work because he was very good at it. We got on extremely well together. He was an officer in the TA, and I had no hesitation in accepting an invitation from him to go to the regimental dinner as his guest. On the other hand, he would never have been seen on a Gay Pride march.’
After leaving school at 16, Norman Tebbit worked as a journalist on the Financial Times for a couple of years before National Service in the RAF. Being tidy minded, he says, he loved the ritualistic precision folding of blankets and laying out of kit. Was he also seduced by the camp humour of the Ents Corps? He can see where this is going. ‘I don’t think we had any gays on our squadron. We had an irreverent sense of humour about everything, pranks and so on. It was characteristic of people in that occupation.’
One of the arguments for lowering the age of consent for homosexuals to 16 is that there is evidence of a homosexual gene. Where does Norman Tebbit stand on this nature-nuture debate? ‘There is a great deal of shading, not a clear line down the middle. But I object to the exposure of vulnerable youngsters to predatory older people. We all know there is bit of homosexual experience that goes on between boys in adolescence. Not unusual.’
Did he ever go through a homosexual phase? ‘No.’ Not even a brief flirtation? ‘No, I had the good fortune to go to a mixed grammar school, and I discovered there that there was something called “girls”. We were not adventurous by today’s standards, but we were aware of girls and were taught the facts of life in a mixed biology class. Thoroughly healthy, in my view.’
Would he accept that two gay men can be in love with one another? ‘Oh yes. Of course. We’ve all known some, haven’t we? There can be deep bonds of affection between heterosexuals of the same sex, too. I wouldn’t want to prosecute it or put up a barrier against it. It has always happened and it always will happen, but it is a deviation from the norm and shouldn’t be treated as if it were the norm.’
Lord Tebbit swears by the principles of economic liberalism; can he not see that social liberalism is a logical extension of this? ‘To argue that it is right to say that you should have an open market in potatoes and an open market in sex is to not know the difference between a sack of potatoes and the sexual act.’ That’s more like it – the sort of comeback you expect from a polecat. Tebbit believes that the silent majority in this country still thinks as he thinks, and that the much-discussed ‘new mood’ of tolerance, inclusiveness and emotionalism is just a myth.
He seems such a cold-blooded man: I find myself wondering whether this is partly a defence mechanism against the isolation and repression he felt as a child, and the traumas he experienced as an adult. When the Second World War started, he and his elder brother Arthur were evacuated briefly to Wales. ‘I cannot remember saying goodbye to my parents – I suppose we must have done but we were an unemotional family and I doubt if there were tears.’ He didn’t have an easy relationship with his parents, he says, his father especially, and he escaped from their ‘drab and grey world’ by voraciously reading PG Wodehouse and HG Wells.
Did he grow up too quickly? ‘I was a serious child but then I suppose it was a serious time to be growing up. I was taught to be in control of my emotions. You didn’t make a fuss. My father was in the trenches. He didn’t talk about it, didn’t make a fuss, and I never asked him about it. I wasn’t close to him. I suppose it affected the way I brought my children up. I was much closer to them than my father was to me. Because of my life as an airline pilot [for BOAC from 1953-1970] I was either not there or completely there. And so I was much more involved with them.’
The Tebbits married in 1956, and had three children. ‘After the birth of our younger son, William, my wife became desperately ill and for some months, it felt like years, I was his mother. No experience is wholly bad as long as you survive. It led me to a greater sympathy with women who batter babies. I can understand why a woman after childbirth, an emotional time, faced with several children could pick up the baby and, not meaning to hurt it, shake it and say, “Go to sleep, you little bugger, go to sleep!” I can understand that.’ Margaret Tebbit was suffering from a depressive illness, referred to glancingly but touchingly in Norman Tebbit’s autobiography Upwardly Mobile (1988): ‘She was acutely ill, and a potential danger both to herself and the baby. Even now the memory of seeing her personality disintegrating is more painful than any other experience I have undergone. It is hard to describe one’s emotions at seeing the person with whom one has been so close becoming a stranger.’ Her depression recurred periodically until the Seventies.
Having been brought up to be self-contained and unemotional, it must have been difficult for Tebbit to cope with the erratic mood swings of his wife. ‘I think, I know, there are occasions where one is driven to tears. But that doesn’t make the case for being loose in one’s emotional control. Not that I am always good at controlling my emotions. I do get terribly angry at times. Never over big issues. Usually when I know in my heart that it is me to blame for the cock up. On the other hand, when disasters happen, I take it rather calmly. Everyone gets frightened, but the difference between fear and panic is loss of control.’
He gives me an example. He trained as a jet pilot with the RAF and lived for the ‘sheer animal thrill’ of flying at high speed. One day during take-off in a Meteor something went wrong and he found himself trapped in his cockpit, his oxygen mask full of blood, and the plane, which was full of fuel, on fire. He assumed he was going to die but, instead of panicking he considered his options, and eventually found a way to break the glass and scramble free before passing out. ‘It made me stronger in a way. I’m no longer afraid of dying. We are all going to die sooner or later and these things just give you balance and judgement in how you use the extra time you’re given. When you have cheated death twice, you can’t bear to waste time. Just because you are in control of your emotions doesn’t mean you can’t be passionate, he adds. He says he used to find speaking at party conferences addictive because of the adrenaline rush. Certainly, he always seemed to take pleasure from his sarcastic performances in the House of Commons. He appeared to have more than his share of that negative emotion, hate. He disagrees. ‘I don’t think you need hate to have a killer instinct in the electoral process. Tony Blair seems to hate Conservatives. It comes through strongly in his comments about the “forces of conservatism” – in which he bundled me in with the IRA, something which I found distasteful, to put it mildly. I think that hate will cost him dear in the end. You need passion but not hate, because that is indeed a negative emotion, one that springs from fear.’
During the War, Tebbit’s house was damaged by a V1 rocket. When the Germans started using V2s the young Norman became fatalistic, because he could not hear them coming. I ask whether his subsequent brushes with death made him question his fatalism: should he take more responsibility for the choices he made? Had he not given up his life as an airline pilot to become a politician, for instance, his wife wouldn’t have been disabled. ‘And if my aunt had got wheels she would be a tea trolley, but she ain’t and she isn’t,’ he says. ‘What would my life have been like if I hadn’t gone into politics? Well I might have been killed in an airline accident. I might have encountered a long lost aunt in Australia who left me a fortune. It is never a worthwhile use of mental energy to play that game. I did what I did and what happened happened.’
He may not be introspective but does he brood upon his political legacy? Had he retired from public life after standing down as an MP in the ’92 election, he would have been remembered as a formidable performer at the despatch box, as the man who took on the mighty trade unions and won, as a diehard Eurosceptic and as the brilliant tactician who masterminded one of the most successful Tory election campaigns ever fought. Yet now the things most people associate him with are his intolerance towards gays and, because of his ‘cricket team test’ – which held that members of an ethnic minority could not be considered English unless they supported the English cricket team – his controversial views on race relations. Even his own party has turned on him over these issues: in 1997 William Hague said that if Tebbit didn’t want to be part of the team he should ‘get off the field’.
‘Making myself unpopular has never worried me,’ he says, crooking his hands stiffly in his lap. ‘Chasing popularity is like chasing happiness, a self-defeating process. It always eludes you. So I’ve always said what I believed, and thought, to hell with the consequences. I don’t think the country will be a better place if it becomes illegal for a 16-year-old girl to go out with two dogs rabbiting, but legal for her to be buggered by a dirty man old enough to be a member of the Cabinet. And I don’t think many people, if put into a room where they were told what they said would never be repeated outside, would claim that the United Kingdom is easier to govern or is a better place following the enormously large-scale immigration we have had in recent years. I find it very curious now that I am the one who is campaigning for those of immigrant stock to be encouraged to integrate into the mainstream and that it is the race relations industry which is supporting a policy of apartheid. Multiculturalism is a soft word for cultural apartheid. It causes more damage than ethnic unity. Man is a social animal but he is also a pack animal, and a pack has to have common rules and a hierarchy and territory. The pack can’t function effectively with two sets of rules, one set for dark coloured dogs and one set for light coloured. It just won’t work. Muslim countries, not least the Saudi Arabians, always respect me because I have stood up for their rights to run their country their way.’
He is in his stride now, though his neutral tone of voice has not changed: he found Greg Dyke’s comment about the BBC being ‘hideously white’ infuriating. ‘I can only think that if I had observed of members of the Equal Opportunities Commission that it was “hideously black” that it would have caused rather more furore on the Left. It is utterly stupid to call for quotas. If you start playing this quota game for the BBC, or the Army, or the police, it becomes absurd. People should be treated on their merit. Are we going to have a quota for Jewish goalkeepers? If we had quotas for the Cabinet, there should only be two Scotsmen at the most, and half a homosexual.’
Dogs? Packs? Jewish goalkeepers? These don’t seem like sophisticated arguments, but I suppose Tebbit has always prided himself on being unsophisticated, the norm, the common man. He is a hard man to get the measure of because, though he is tactless and completely lacking in public warmth and self doubt, he is also principled, lucid and fearless, unusual qualities for a politician in a democracy. Remorseless and homophobic he may be, but he is incredibly kind and thoughtful to his wife – and these internal and external characteristics don’t quite gel. Theirs is an unusual and deep relationship, with sacrifices on both sides. He pushes her wheelchair, reads to her and helps cut up her food when they go out to dinner. The only chore he hated doing was putting on her lipstick for her, but now she has some use of her hands she is able to do it herself. She, in turn, is philosophical about her injuries – ‘I refuse to keep a diary, refuse to look back,’ she has said. Though he resigned from the Cabinet in 1987, Tebbit was later tempted to return when Margaret Thatcher offered him the education portfolio. ‘But I’d promised my wife that I would quit the front bench. I would have had little time for her and she would have been lonely.’
He checks his watch. ‘Now I really must be getting on my way to Norfolk,’ he says tonelessly. I accompany him across the creaky floor of the library and, slowly, down the stairs to the coat rack where he collects his shooting jacket. His chauffeur will be doing the driving. Does Lord Tebbit still have police protection as well as a driver?  ‘No,’ he says with a wintry smile. ‘I’m not important enough to shoot any more.’

Niall Ferguson is a maverick Oxford don who is far too young, successful and right-wing to enjoy the unanimous approval of his colleagues. He talks to Nigel Farndale about ‘the warfare state’, his new book, and why an advance of £600,000 is no big deal

AMONG the hundreds of history books which line the shelves of Niall Ferguson’s study there is a copy of Edward Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. As my eye lingers on it, a favourite quotation comes to mind: ‘Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?’ I repeat the 1st Duke of Gloucester’s observation now, substituting ‘Professor Ferguson’ for ‘Mr Gibbon’.

Wilful controversialist: the financial historian and columnist Niall Ferguson

Ferguson runs a hand through his dark floppy hair and smiles thinly. ‘What can I say? Sorry! I do feel slightly apologetic about it. I suppose prolificacy will soon be a treatable condition.’ Since he published his first door-stopper in 1995 – about hyperinflation in Weimar Germany – there’s been no stopping Niall Ferguson, Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford University. In 1998 he even managed to bring two damned, thick, square books out in the same year – a history of the House of Rothschild, The World’s Banker (1,300 pages), and The Pity of War (623 pages), a bestseller in which he argued that the Great War was England’s fault.

His latest, published on 22 February, is called The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World 1700-2000 (532 pages) and it isn’t even part of a £600,000 three-book deal he struck with his publisher three years ago (after sacking his agent), but rather ‘a little extra one I slipped in’.

His fellow academics, living in scholarly poverty, must grind their teeth when they hear of his hefty advances. ‘Of course, the impressiveness of the deal depends on how quickly you think a person can write three books,’ Ferguson says with the rolling ‘r’s and sinewy cadences of one born and raised in a genteel part of Glasgow. ‘Naive people imagine that authors get their entire advances on signing the contract, whereas the reality is rather different. There is the small matter of delivering the books. And the period of time involved looks like taking me well into middle age.’

For this is another thing which must cause resentment in the academy: Niall Ferguson is only 36. And, worse, he cuts a Byronic figure. Today he is looking well scrubbed, lean and dandiacal in his olive-green corduroy suit, silk tie and polished black Oxfords. One former student recalls seeing a swathe of students – male and female – swoon as Ferguson did his stuff behind the lectern. Yet ask him to describe himself and he will look tortured and say: ‘Oh, I don’t know, six foot tall but with a stoop, nasty green eyes, and a potato face, which is why my family call me King Edward.’ So an attractively self-deprecating manner is another reason to resent him.

Then there is his record as a wilful controversialist. In The Pity of War, for instance, Ferguson rejected the ‘lions led by donkeys’ view of the First World War and argued that the blame for the horrific death toll should lie with the politicians: Britain should have maintained its neutrality and allowed the Germans to win a limited continental war because its war aims in 1914 were modest. ‘There is something of the clever-silly about his over-determined contrarianism’ the historian RW Johnson wrote in the London Review of Books.

But what seems most to irk his fellow academics is his reputation as a ‘dial-a-don’. His academic career began conventionally enough. While in his final year at the Glasgow Academy, a no-nonsense grammar school, he won a scholarship to Magdalen, where he went on to take a first in history. But then he chose Norman Stone, a right-wing, hard-drinking historian and media don as supervisor for his doctorate on the German economy from 1914 to 1924.

The two men became friends, and Ferguson took to meeting Stone in a bar at 11 in the morning to read Nietzsche over pints of Guinness, ostensibly to improve his German. Shortly after this he acquired another of Stone’s appetites: for writing ‘why-oh-why’ columns in the tabloid press. He carried on writing these during his year as a research fellow at Christ Church and his two years as a fellow and lecturer at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where Sacha Baron Cohen (the comedian Ali G) was one of his students.

Ferguson returned to Oxford in 1992 to take up a post he still holds, that of Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Jesus College. His spacious, elegantly furnished study overlooks the quadrangle. It has mullioned windows, a fireplace lined with Russian dolls, and an antique desk with an overflowing in-tray, a laptop and a photograph of his three children – aged seven, five and one – and his wife, Sue Douglas, a former editor of the Sunday Express, now a consultant for Condé Nast and the Barclay Brothers, and celebrated as the supposed muse for the heroine of Julie Burchill’s Eighties bestseller Ambition.

It is late afternoon on a cloudless winter’s day, and the gloom is gathering around us. I ask how he met his wife. It was in 1987, he says, when she was associate editor of a tabloid newspaper and he, after being recruited by the paper’s editor, became one of her contributors. ‘At first she was horrified to have this spotty, emaciated, apparently unworldly type foist upon her,’ he says. She can’t have been that horrified because she soon insisted that a by-line photograph be used to accompany Ferguson’s columns. As he was writing under the pseudonym Alec Campbell, to protect his academic reputation, he put on a pair of thick glasses to disguise himself. Wasn’t be being a bit paranoid? ‘It would have been academic death if people found out I was writing for the Mail. But I was an impecunious graduate and had to keep myself afloat financially.’

Thanks in part to the £500,000 advance he is rumoured to have been given by the Rothschilds to write his history of their bank, Ferguson is no longer impecunious. But he still likes to keep his fingers inky with the odd newspaper column and this is perhaps why some dons dismiss Ferguson’s published work as ‘mere journalism’.

There may be other factors: believing that access to Oxbridge lecturers shouldn’t be restricted to a few hundred students, Ferguson gave an unconventional lecture – ‘Why the World Wars Were Won’ – just before Christmas. It was, and still is, on www.boxmind.com, a ‘webucation’ centre on the internet, where it has had 3.2 million hits. Doubtless this will seen by traditional academics as further evidence that Ferguson is a shameless populist. But he’s not the first media don to have his academic credibility questioned: Roger Scruton and David Starkey are so disillusioned with the academic world that they have given up teaching altogether.

‘I think I’ll keep teaching,’ Ferguson says in his low, steady voice, ‘because I find it stimulating to engage with agile and brilliant young minds. There are times when you curse it because you are marking essays at 2am. But, on the whole, I would miss it. As to the other point, well, Norman Stone and AJP Taylor were maligned because of their journalism, too. It was used to disparage all their work, as if this public engagement somehow devalued their scholarship. Yet there are few historians living today who have written books as good as theirs. It’s just silly to think history should be an obscure priestly activity. I mean, the great saving of the subject is that it is popular – despite what historians do to it. Someone described The Pity of War as a coffee-table book and I thought, “What kind of a coffee table does this man have? One with reinforced steel legs?”‘

When I ask why academic life is so poisonous, Ferguson adopts a gravelly American voice and quotes Henry Kissinger: ‘Because the stakes are so low.’ The problem with academic history, he adds, is that a lot of it is considered inaccessible, especially in the case of his own specialist area, financial history. Ferguson has followed Norman Stone’s advice and based his historical research on number crunching – a painstaking process of detailing economic figures with a little help, it is said, from paid research assistants (another reason why more traditionally-minded dons roll their eyes at the mention of his name).

This is the subject of The Cash Nexus. ‘Our lives are still dominated by the institutions of the warfare state,’ he says. ‘Partly because we live in a demilitarised era, we have forgotten that all our institutions, from the Bank of England to the stock market and income tax – the framework in which we live our lives – had their origins in wars.’ The book is characteristically polemical: America should foster imperialist ambitions if it wants to realise its full global potential; war has been the principal engine of financial innovation; dictators might be better at managing certain economies than democratically elected leaders.

In its analytical boldness, The Cash Nexus reminds you of The Pity of War, a book in which Ferguson calculated the economic cost of killing and reached the illiberal conclusion that, in most armies, soldiers went on fighting in horrific conditions because they had acquired a taste for shooting people or because they were afraid that, if they surrendered, they would be shot.

Generally, the book was well received, and sold more than 100,000 copies. But some of the negative reviews focused on Ferguson’s desire to attack every accepted interpretation of the Great War. Similar accusations – that he is controversial for the sake of it – may well be levelled at The Cash Nexus. Isn’t his ‘What if?’ approach just a parlour game?

‘There is a fundamental intellectual placidity about a lot of historical reasoning,’ Ferguson says, pressing his fingertips together and resting his chin on them. ‘The temptation is to portray events as inevitable, as the results of great, protracted historical processes – you know, like the Holocaust has its origins in the Lutheran Reformation – but my instinct is that alternative scenarios are real and are in people’s minds. Hitler didn’t know what was going to happen. We have this big problem as historians because we know the future, as it were. You meet resistance with the “What if?” approach because people like the story they know, the clear narrative that leads back from then to where we are now, and anything that subverts this elicits howls from the vested interests.’

The phone rings. ‘The answering machine will get it,’ Ferguson says wearily. ‘It’s an internal call. It will be someone asking about committees or stipends.’ Does he dislike college life? ‘On the contrary, with this tutor’s room I’m living out a fantasy I had as an undergraduate. I am essentially here in Oxford because it is the most decentralised, unhierarchical institution in the entire world. You are staggeringly free from a boss to pursue your own interests and teach them.’

He found Oxford ‘deeply intimidating’, though, when he first arrived there at the age of 17. ‘I was intimidated by the public school boys, the Etonians especially. I had none of their savoir-faire, their social confidence.’ So he wasn’t cocky? No feelings of intellectual superiority? He looks at me neutrally. ‘Well, yes, all Scotsmen have a superiority complex, and I think I did suffer from the middle-class Glaswegian notion that being clever gives you a social advantage in a place like this. But I was soon disabused of that and it took me a long time to overcome my misery and anxiety. In the end I retreated into the libraries.’

If his 17-year-old self were sitting beside him now, what differences would we notice? ‘My Glaswegian accent would have been stronger, not that I talked like Billy Connolly, but it would have been more obvious. I was unkempt then, too, by comparison. It took me a long time to work out how to dress properly. Although I’d got the Sex Pistols out of my system at school – the cropped hair, the ripped T-shirts – the Oxfam shop still beckoned.’ But a Sex Pistols approach to the life of the mind must have appealed, because he adds that to be a truly rebellious 17-year-old in the Oxford of the early Eighties you had to be a Thatcherite. ‘

Compared to today, when students are completely cynical and apathetic about politics, the university then was highly politicised, with everyone opposed to Thatcherism. Being a Thatcherite was the political equivalent of being a punk, a wonderful way to shock and outrage.’ He was working as a lecturer at Peterhouse on the day Margaret Thatcher was deposed. ‘We played every recorded version of the Siegfried funeral march. It seemed like a moment of supreme historic catastrophe; a strange mix of euphoria and depression, of going down on a luxury transatlantic liner.’

Niall Ferguson is the son of a medical doctor and the grandson of an anti-papist ironmonger who fought in the First World War. ‘I don’t think my father sees himself as Conservative, but on my mother’s side there was some Red Clyde Freethinking and Communism. I’m conservative in the Burkean sense of believing in institutions which have stood the test of time.’ What values does he take from his father? ‘Work, work and work. To the extent now that I feel guilty if I am not rising early every day and knuckling down to something. I suppose

I do it to win my father’s approval, quite consciously. I also inherited from him a belief in the importance of the family, as well as of a strange 19th-century morality which is anachronistic nowadays.’ Example? ‘Well, I find it immoral to waste money. I always fly economy when I’m doing lectures in the States, even when they offer to fly me Club.’ Really? ‘Well, actually,’ he laughs, ‘I have an overall budget for those trips, so I get to keep the difference!’ His Scottish austerity and prudence, he says, is ‘a constant source of conflict with my wife. She’s English and so doesn’t have my late Calvinist complexes.’ (Evidently they’ve reached some sort of compromise – they educate their children privately and live in a large 17th-century farmhouse about ten miles out of Oxford.)

In the shadowy study, the floorboards creak as Ferguson crosses the room to a cupboard where he keeps his drinks. He holds up a bottle of Scotch. ‘A present from a student.’ Tut-tut, bribery. ‘No,’ he says, pouring a couple of glasses. ‘I’m incorruptible? Although I do accept that the nature of the tutorial as a form is corrupting because, day after day, someone half your age is prepared to sit and listen to you lay down the law as though you were omnipotent. They may disagree, but they will rarely win an argument against you because you’ve read more and you know the techniques.’

Niall Ferguson has been described as the thinking woman’s crumpet. Do the impressionable young undergraduates ever develop crushes on him? ‘No, all I get is disrespect.’ So he’s never been tempted to play The History Man? ‘Do you mean, have I ever had inappropriate relations with my students? When I talked about moral values earlier, I was including sexual morality. I’m terribly, terribly leery of having anything other than an intellectual relationship with my students.’

He takes a sip and smiles. ‘Of course, everyone of your own generation says to you at some point, “I bet you have a good time with all those beautiful undergraduates.” It’s a standing joke, and the only answer I can think to give is, “You have no idea how completely sexless someone is in a tutorial.” The simple difficulty of having to talk for a succession of hours when you would rather be reading a book, or writing one, precludes all thoughts of sex.’

Maurice Cowling, the historian and Tory sage who was his mentor at Peterhouse, Cambridge, said Ferguson had a reputation there for ‘being vigorously and variously heterosexual’. Was he also successful with women as an undergraduate at Oxford? ‘No. I’ve never been successful with women. Marriage has been a safe haven for me from a series of humiliations and disappointments. That is why I am such an uxorious person.’

What does he do when he’s not being uxorious? He used to play double bass in a jazz quintet, he says, but now what he enjoys doing most is reading Harry Potter books to his children. ‘I’m very boring really. I have no social life and am no good at parties. I never know what to say to people. I just feel awkward.’ He doesn’t keep a diary, he says, because he is not interested enough in himself. ‘I’m not at all introspective and I actually find it very embarrassing talking about myself to you like this. I suffer from auto-repression.’

It may be that he continues to answer my questions out of politeness, but I suspect he is being a little disingenuous. Like his hero AJP Taylor, he is prone to self-dramatisation. Also, he seems at ease with himself, is a good mimic and raconteur and has clearly expended much thought on self-analysis. He says, for instance, that he overcame his fear of death the moment he published his first book. ‘Before then I would always dread getting on to a plane for fear that it would go down before I had had a chance to leave my mark, to get my ideas out of the filing cabinets and in between the covers of a book.’

And he says he likes to disappear into history in order to make himself invisible. ‘Studying history is a form of therapy for me because it helps me escape the tackiness of the modern age, the Madonna wedding, or whatever. I just step into my time machine. Being a historian is a form of mental illness, I suppose, because it means you are more interested in dead people than living.’

Well, yes: but his media life – and his wife’s – is the stuff of Madonna’s wedding. And though Ferguson may prefer the company of dead people, he can’t resist a scrap with the living. ‘When I’m accused of something I defend myself ferociously. My love of argument comes from growing up in Glasgow. You can’t walk into a pub there without hearing some aggressive dispute. I was shocked by how much less violent English arguments were. Englishmen see argument as a failure of manners, except in essays. In the Oxford essay there is a premium on paradox and on challenging the conventional wisdom.’

There is a buccaneering spirit in his journalism, but the authorial voice in his books is coldly analytical and unromantic. This, he says, is the opposite of what he is like in person. ‘I am completely at the mercy of my emotions. I am very sentimental about my family and am easily moved to tears by the poems of the First World War. I’m very susceptible to operatic sentiments, too. I can’t get through Tristan und Isolde or Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde without tears. I suffer from advanced romanticisms, which is another peculiarity of this 19th-century world I’m drawn to. I listen to romantic music in the way other people eat chocolates. I wish I could be a much cooler person, but I’m not.’

Ferguson is feeling apologetic again: for his romanticism, for his cleverness, for his commercial success, oh for everything. It’s a defence mechanism against his critics, I suspect. He doesn’t want to seem too good to be true; to inspire envy in others. That is why he needs to invent neuroses. And, to be fair, he does seem to have pulled off some of the psychological paradoxes of which he is so fond. He manages to combine a superiority complex and an affable manner with insecurity, angst and calculated diffidence, and to balance Calvinist austerity with the heightened emotionalism of the Romantics.

We are now sitting in a blue-edged darkness – confessional darkness, he calls it, draining his glass. ‘I think I should go home and purge myself,’ he says. As he walks me down the wooden stairs and across the quad to the college gate, he adds with a smile: ‘Too much solipsism is bad for the health.’

A plate of shortbread arrives, and Ronnie Corbett pauses for a second or two as he regards it out of the corner of his eye. He continues talking (or ‘blethering’ as he calls it) about High Hopes, his autobiography, but he’s still distracted by the shortbread, analysing it, surreptitiously passing judgement.
Corbett was born and raised in Edinburgh, the son of a master baker and confectioner, and one legacy of this is an inability to pass cake shops and bakeries without checking the glaze on the pastries or the moisture of the sweetmeats. He pauses again and, as he extends a hand to the plate, the chunky gold ring he is wearing glints in the morning sunlight. He takes a bite and nods. ‘Not bad. Mm. Maybe a bit underfired, as my dad would say. And a bit blond. I don’t mind the dusting of sugar and the crumbly texture, but I have to say it is very ‘short’ shortbread, if you know what I mean.’
The comedian flicks the crumbs off his butter-coloured, double-breasted suit, leans back and shoots his cuffs; his cufflinks are porcelain and have pictures of golfers on them. The ring on his finger, I now see, has a large ‘R’ on it. ‘When I bake bread or make cakes,’ he adds, his voice strong and sonorous, his cadence mildly Scottish, ‘I always think of my dad. I force myself to roll up my sleeves, put my apron on and make sure everything is done properly.’
His father, William Balfour Corbett, was a severe, strong-jawed Presbyterian who would park his car in a garage three miles from home so that he would have to walk there and back for it every day – good discipline. ‘I always wanted to impress him,’ Ronnie Corbett recalls. ‘But he was not the sort of person to ever show he was impressed.’
We are in the panelled library of Greywalls, East Lothian, a house by Lutyens which is now a hotel. Corbett has suggested we meet here because his house, which is next door, is full of guests: his two daughters, both in their early thirties, and his three grandchildren. He has another house in Croydon, Surrey, but the East Lothian one is where he and his wife Anne like to spend their summers – mainly because it overlooks the grand and ancient Muirfield golf course and, beyond that, the Firth of Forth. He’s very close to his daughters, then? ‘Yes, Emma lives in Caterham and Sophie lives in Streatham.’
No, I mean… I see from the grin playing across his asymmetrical features that he knows just what I meant.
Corbett will be 70 in December, but you wouldn’t guess it from his brisk and sprightly manner, his clear hazel eyes or his smooth tanned skin – though his hair is suspiciously dark. He dresses nattily: stripy, open-neck shirt, pink silk handkerchief in breast pocket, cornflower-blue socks. ‘One thing I learned from my Aunt Nell,’ he says, ‘is that because of my height it is really important for me to be immaculately neat and well turned out all the time.’ His aunt had to tailor his school uniform because his parents couldn’t find one small enough to fit. He recently found a group photograph from his time at the James Gillespie School for Boys. He is seated on a chair, fourth from the left in the front row, the only one whose feet do not touch the ground.
His father was 5ft 6in, so young Ronald wasn’t too concerned about his height, but by the age of 14, when the other boys in his school were into long trousers, he became slightly concerned. Aunt Nell paid two guineas for a course on How to Become Taller, which combined positive thinking with stretching exercises, but it didn’t work. Ronald Balfour Corbett grew to 5ft 1.5in, then stopped. He was never bullied at school, but his size did present problems when he started dating. ‘A little man and a taller lady is basically comic, so you have to have a lot of savoir-faire not to let it be so.’ At dancehalls he developed a way of working out a girl’s height before she stood up. ‘I still remember that walk across the floor towards the target, my courage draining away, as I imagined the mutterings of the girls – “He’s coming this way”.’
In 1965 Ronnie Corbett married Anne Hart, a glamorous 5ft 8in singer, and something of a West End star. Was she his first love? ‘There’d been girlfriends before then. Romances. There was a nurse whose name I cannot for the life of me remember. Isn’t that awful! I’ve got a feeling it was Sheila. But I never felt that I was all that… tasty. Not very confident.’ Those were more puritanical times. Did he believe in sex before marriage? ‘We certainly didn’t cohabit in those days as quickly as couples do now. Perhaps on a Friday night, you might stay over somewhere, and go home on Saturday, or even very early on Saturday morning. But I think sex before marriage was with caution and care.’
Presbyterianism was a big influence. ‘We were very serious church-goers, yes. College Street Church. We used to have a long walk there, every morning, 11 o’clock, then back home for lunch, or probably dinner as it was called then, and off again to the service in the evening. It was knocked down years ago, and I no longer attend church, actually.’ His Christian values didn’t prove a handicap in showbusiness. ‘I’ve not encountered much ruthlessness, actually. I was fortunate, really, that things just seemed to proceed in a gentle way. I mean, I was obviously manoeuvring and planning and thinking ahead.’
He certainly was. He had his first taste of the stage at 16, when he played the wicked aunt in a church youth club production of Babes in the Wood – ‘I really put everything into that wicked aunt, never had a female been so villainous.’ After that he would hang around the stage door of the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh and ‘escort’ the stars back to the Caledonia Hotel. ‘I had the autograph book with me as a pretext, and I suppose it was more a case of me tagging along beside them rather than escorting them, but they would usually let me blether away down the Lothian Road. They would listen to me telling them how I was going to be an actor, too. They never brushed me off and sometimes they gave me advice.’
Ambitious though he was, Corbett decided the theatre would have to wait. At 17, on leaving the Royal High School, Edinburgh, he took the Civil Service clerical officers’ exam, largely to stop his mother worrying about his future. He joined the Ministry of Agriculture in Edinburgh and dealt with the rationing of animal foodstuffs, but knew he wouldn’t have to do so for long because his National Service was coming up. His one worry was that he wouldn’t pass his medical because of his height. As it turned out, the RAF doctor rejected him because of the deviated septum in his nose. Corbett pleaded to be allowed to join. ‘I knew perfectly well that if I didn’t get in, people in the street would whisper, “It’s obvious why they didn’t accept him. You know, throw the small ones back in.'”
The doctor eventually relented, and Corbett was commissioned as a pilot officer, though he never actually flew. His CO suggested he wear the full ‘number one dress’ at all times so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a cadet. ‘It didn’t bother me. I suppose I quite liked the man. He probably thought, “I’ll save the boy some embarrassment.” It’s not easy to pick a tiny person and give him authority.’ After National Service, Corbett moved to London and supported himself as a barman in the Buckstone Club. All the actors and directors of the day would use the club, and Corbett would try to catch their eye. Eventually he was noticed and landed a job in a vaudeville show at the Stork Club in Streatham, but he was pelted with crusty Viennese rolls – ‘a cruel fate for a baker’s son’.
From there he graduated to Winston’s nightclub in the West End, where for five years he was Danny La Rue’s straight man. That world of camp theatrical glamour must have been intoxicating after his dour Scottish upbringing. ‘Yes it was. The public absolutely adored Dan. He looked fabulous as a man, and even more fabulous as a woman… The camp thing is very seductive. Naturally a lot of people came to see the shows who, you know, felt simpatico to him. I suppose he was a torchbearer, really, for the acceptability of being honestly, outwardly gay.’ Did Corbett identify with the camp world to the extent of questioning his own heterosexuality? ‘Er, no, but I’ve always been very easy with the gay world, deeply comfortable. I was brought up with it and I completely understand it, and it is not in any way suspicious or objectionable to me. I mean, one was brought up really feeling all the cleverest people in the business are gay. One thinks of Novello and Rattigan and Coward. And after working with Dan I felt part of their little corner.’
At this point in his career, Corbett says, he eradicated his Scottish accent, to avoid being typecast as the ‘the wee one in the kilt’. He didn’t want to be patronised, he says. He wanted to be suave. ‘I obviously know I am short, but I’ve always been the last person to be aware of it, and my style of work is like that: a short man acting and performing like somebody who’s a great deal taller. I don’t feel small. But yes, I was patronised. In those days, if you were little, you had to be a comedian like Norman Wisdom or Charlie Drake. Someone who was always being hit on the head or falling over. A sort of sizeism still exists in casting today. Even the smartest, most inventive directors still perceive people in terms of their size. If I say, “I rather fancy playing that part Nigel Havers plays,” there is no way that directors would see me playing it. They wouldn’t cast me as a viscount, for instance, even though there are plenty of short viscounts.’
To overcome prejudice, Ronnie Corbett has had to be more driven than other comic actors. His height might even have given him a competitive advantage. If he could live his life again, would he want to come back as a taller person? He frowns, takes a sip of coffee and looks away. ‘It may sound odd, but I don’t think I would want to be taller. Actually. I think it’s been the cornerstone, really, of what I’ve done. It has formed my personality. I may have changed the way I speak but I never became another person. I just slowly worked away at becoming for others the person I always saw myself as being.’
While working at Winston’s, Corbett made a pact with himself that if he hadn’t made it as a big-time entertainer by the age of 36 he would pack it in and ‘go into another part of the business, be an agent or manager or something’. By happy coincidence, in 1966 he was invited to join The Frost Report, which proved a lucky break, as his co-stars were John Cleese and Ronnie Barker, and the team also included future members of Monty Python. He cherishes the memory, but recalls a clash of cultures. The Ronnies had both spent 17 years learning how to be professional entertainers, always memorising their lines and arriving on time for rehearsals. The embryoic Pythons, fresh from Oxbridge, were very blasé.
‘They all came from privileged backgrounds,’ Corbett remembers. ‘John Cleese would always turn up late and unshaven in a taxi, looking flustered because he hadn’t learnt his lines. Graham Chapman and the others would sit around talking about how they were giving television a go for a couple of years before going back to medicine or law. They’d stumbled on entertainment as a by-product of their education, so it was a bit of a hobby, a bit of a plaything. I suppose Ronnie B and I were a bit resentful, but it did give us a sense of solidarity. Our shared attitudes made us very comfortable together.’
The Two Ronnies ran from 1971 to 1987, won an audience of 17 million (19 million for the Christmas specials) and became a national institution; the two comedians were appointed OBE in 1978. The format of the show was unvarying. It opened with them sitting side by side reading spoof news items (‘First, traffic news. A juggernaut carrying treacle has overturned on the M4. Drivers are asked to stick to the inside lane’). There were sketches, and a slot in which Ronnie Corbett, wearing his Lyle & Scott cardie, would sit in an old armchair and tell a shaggy-dog story. There was lots of cross dressing and ribald seaside humour and the show would always end with a musical number and the ritual exchange: ‘So it’s goodnight from me’, ‘And it’s goodnight from him’, ‘Goodnight’.
Barker was the dominant partner, not least because he wrote most of the shows, with the exception of Corbett’s rambling monologue (which was written by Spike Mullins). Corbett was the placid one who avoided confrontation. Why did he never try writing his own material? ‘I can fiddle about with things when I’m working, then come off and write them down. But I only ever want to perform other people’s material, really. I wouldn’t know how to start writing, and I suppose I’ve had a calmer life because of it.’
When The Two Ronnies were lampooned by Not the Nine O’Clock News, they knew the writing was on the wall. Ronnie Barker announced his retirement and went off to run an antique shop. Corbett still has dinner with him every so often, but the two were never that close. ‘We were friendly, but not friendly in the way that Eric [Morecambe] and Ernie [Wise] were,’ Corbett recalls. ‘Stress and high blood pressure had a lot to do with Ronnie B’s decision to retire. There’d been other comedians around who’d died younger than they should have done, like Tommy Cooper.’
Sorry, a sitcom in which Ronnie Corbett had starred for seven years, was axed by the BBC at the same time as The Two Ronnies came to an end. Corbett felt ‘a bit solitary for a while – prematurely pruned’. Everyone assumed that he would retire, too, and join his friends Tarbie and Brucie on the pro-celebrity golf circuit. Instead he hosted Small Talk, a dire programme on which children supplied 30 minutes of undiluted precocity. He has since redeemed himself slightly with appearances on The Ben Elton Show and a role in Fierce Creatures, John Cleese’s ill-fated follow-up to A Fish Called Wanda. But mostly the twilight years of his career have been devoted to after-dinner speaking, his one-man cabaret show, and pantomime.
He hasn’t given up hope that he will yet be cast in a serious drama. ‘Now that I no longer do The Two Ronnies, directors have forgotten that I’ve played a cockney or a viscount or a lord chancellor quite effectively in short episodes on the television. They don’t see that I’m back. Back again, fighting a little man’s battle to play a variety of parts.’
Ronnie Corbett’s father died of a heart attack at the age of 75, while playing a round of golf. His mother died in 1991 after suffering from Alzheimer’s. Now that Corbett is approaching 70, does he find himself brooding upon his mortality, wondering if he will die in the same manner his parents did? ‘Well I’m still quite agile, touch wood. I don’t have hip problems, heart problems, or anything like that. I’ll probably have a prostate problem first.’ He’s worked it all out, then? ‘Worked it out, yes,’ he chuckles. ‘I have no fear of getting old, or fear of going, really. My biggest worry is losing my mind, or my wife losing her mind. You know, Alzheimer’s or dysphasia. She can’t stop herself worrying about everything – everybody and everything. She’s always been like that. She gave up her career to bring up our daughters. Very protective. Since Andrew died.’
Andrew was their first child, born in 1966. ‘He died from a serious heart defect when he was six weeks old. I still think about him a lot. When you consider he would have been 34 now. You can’t believe how this tiny little soul really just didn’t survive. Now, of course, I suppose they might have done something about it, but the heart, the surgeon told me, was the size of a fingernail. We brought him home for a day, struggling, his colour changing, and we had to take him back to St George’s. It was really just… terrible. Terrible. ‘I still feel the odd tear coming to my eye. The same happens when I talk about Tom, my 11-year-old grandson. He’s dyslexic, bless his little soul… I do get emotional, and cry at odd times. Yet I have got a bit of a steely interior. I blow hot and cold, I think that’s it. I have a short temper. Quick to turn and quick to cry. I say it, I get it over and that’s it. All forgotten.’
It’s true. He had a spectacular wobbly recently when he refused to get in the brand new Renault Espace that GMTV had laid on to take him home after an appearance on the Lorraine Kelly day-time show, because it wasn’t a limo (one was provided). Ronnie Corbett can be admirably self-deprecating, jovial and self-aware, but he is also, it seems, fundamentally insecure. It is possible that he suffers from an inferiority complex which he disguises with comic bravado. He has a tendency to build himself up. ‘Yes,’ he will say. ‘I did two very very successful pantomimes around that time. Stanley Baxter and I played the Ugly Sisters’ or, ‘Actually, though I say so myself, I am a skilful mingler.’
The feeling of inferiority is partly social, you suspect. ‘No one ever said anything,’ he muses, ‘but there might be a feeling in the family that my mum’s side was just a little more genteel than my dad… I think I am class-conscious in the sense of liking things to be classy and elegant, as in high quality. I suppose I’ve always been interested in refinement. When I met Princess Margaret early in my career I felt I should raise my game a little.’ She asked how he had sprained his ankle. He didn’t want to say he had fallen going to the outside lavatory at his house in New Cross, so he said he had fallen off a horse. His friend Simon Parker-Bowles (former brother-in-law to Camilla), has acted as his social tutor, he says. ‘He’s a very kindly, very gracious person. Not at all snobby and I suppose he has given me a confidence boost.’
Until recently Corbett drove a Rolls-Royce, until ‘I decided it was nice to drive but no longer nice to be seen in.’ It is nearly lunchtime, dinnertime as it used to be called. ‘Excuse me,’ Corbett says rising from his chair. ‘I must go for a pee.’ That’ll be the start of his prostate problem. He laughs. ‘The prostate problem, yes.’
We meet again in the walled garden, designed by Jekyll. We can smell the sea from here and just about hear the pock of a golfball being struck on the 13th hole. Seagulls are crying overhead, and there are cabbage whites fluttering around the lavender borders. As we contemplate the distant Lammermuir Hills, I ask Ronnie Corbett if he still feels Scottish. He does, he says, in the way that Sean Connery, his old friend and Edinburgh contemporary (he used to date Corbett’s cousins), does. Is he involved in Scottish politics, as Connery is? ‘No, no, I’m not a Nationalist, I don’t really see the point of spending millions and millions… on a new…’
Did he attend the opening of the Scottish Parliament? Corbett squares his shoulder and shakes his head at the memory. ‘No I didn’t. I was a bit miffed that I wasn’t invited, actually. Bit put out… I’m not deeply liked by Scottish people in the way that Sean is.’ The pathos is unbearable. We part company with a hearty handshake and Ronnie Corbett strides off, barrel-chested, leaving me feeling that I’ve just said goodbye to a proud and dignified man who is still fighting, as he has always had to, a little man’s battle.

In vain would you search for Peter Jay in the soulless corridors of Television Centre, White City, west London. The 63-year-old economics and business editor of the BBC prefers to work from his farmhouse on the outskirts of Woodstock, Oxfordshire. As well he might. Blackbirds sing here. The air is sweet with pollen and freshly mown grass. Kindly morning sunlight bathes the flowering chestnuts and swelling fruit. It is a fitting place for a man of such obvious bottom, gravitas and destiny.
Jay’s career has been dazzling if curiously disjointed. His jobs and connections are embedded in the political history and liberal Establishment of the past 40 years: he’s the former son-in-law of Tony Blair’s predecessor as Labour prime minister (and therefore the ex-husband of Lady Jay, that scourge of hereditary privilege and Leader of the House of Lords); the retired ‘chief of staff’ of the deceased swindler Robert Maxwell; and, perhaps most bizarrely of all, a former Ambassador to the United States of America. Jay is undoubtedly a most superior person – a grandee, a member of the Garrick, in fact – and it would hardly be proper for him to spend his working hours among the light-industrial estates of White City. It is said that some of his colleagues at the BBC resent his absence from their midst. They point out that, over the past year, his appearances on the evening news have been about as rare as anoraks in Arabia, yet he still has his own office at White City (even if it is now used unofficially as a changing room for staff who cycle to work) and still, of course, draws a handsome salary.
When I arrive, Peter Jay is in the middle distance, wearing a checked shirt and a bright-red sleeveless jumper, feeding the carp in his pond. Literally a man of stature – a solidly built 6ft 4in – he looms towards me, past a hammock strung between two trees and, with loping gait, leads the way towards the tall barn he has converted into an office and broadcasting studio. One wall is filled from floor to rafters with books. The one opposite is divided in two by an upper deck. The lower half is devoted to framed political cartoons and a large photograph of Jay with the ‘Famous Five’ – Michael Parkinson, Anna Ford, Angela Rippon, David Frost and Robert Kee – the star presenters with whom he launched the ill-fated TV-am in 1983.
As we go upstairs, Jay stoops automatically to avoid the low beams. The upper deck is draped with red ensigns and Union Jacks, there are maritime maps in glass cases and dozens of photographs of Jay sailing the yachts that have been his lifelong passion. He sits down and, though he folds his arms, manages somehow to look as if he’s sprawling. Close up, his skin looks like parched earth; his big sleepy blue eyes are framed by pink lines and pouches, his thick lips fixed in a bland smile. In a recent issue of Private Eye, under the headline TV CELEBRITY CONNED FRIEND OUT OF THOUSANDS BY PRETENDING TO BE THE ECONOMICS EDITOR OF THE BBC, a spoof news story suggested that Jay made sure he renewed his contract with the BBC just before his good friend Sir John Birt retired as director general. What does Jay make of this ribbing?  ‘Ah, yes,’ he says placidly. ‘Me being paid a large salary to do nothing. It wasn’t to do with John Birt at all. And considering I’ve been working harder in the past two years than at any other time since leaving Washington, I think it’s ironic. But I love Private Eye and have always accepted that “Sir Peter Jaybotham, 69” is a fine figure of fun. Public figures should be abused. It is healthy and therapeutic.’
The thing he has been working so hard on over the past two years is Road to Riches, a six-part television series which begins next month. That and the weighty book, subtitled The Wealth of Man, which accompanies it. Together they tell the story of mankind’s economic progress, from hunter-gathering all the way to the Industrial Revolution and the Big Bang. ‘After sex,’ Jay says, ‘money is our second appetite. Understanding comes third. But, as Aristotle noted, you may want wine and women but you don’t want them ad infinitum. Only our appetite for money is limitless. Bill Gates is not much less motivated to make the next $100 billion than he was to make the first.’
And then, for the next 60 minutes or so, Peter Jay expounds his ‘cautiously pessimistic’ view of economic history, with easy reference to Aristophanes, Defoe, Malthus, Darwin and Keynes. It is a mistake to take a linear view, he tells me, there are always periods of stagnation and failure. Economies evolve in fits and starts, like a waltz, taking one step forward and two steps sideways. His enthusiasm for the subject is obvious, his knowledge encyclopaedic and, like an oil tanker, once he has set course, he takes some turning round. He’s also pedantic, given to qualifying his comments with ‘as it were’ and stuffing his sentences with sub-clauses.
When I ask if thoughts of mortality might have inspired this magnum opus, he laughs throatily. ‘Do you think I’m monument-building at this late stage in my life? Well, yes, I suppose so. Though I don’t want to seem portentous, a vice of which I am extremely capable. The series and the book were put to me by the BBC, so it wasn’t as if I was thrashing around for a place to build a monument. That said, the sentimental thought has gone through my mind that I have seven children and when their children ask, as it were, what did Grandfather do in the Great War, I shall be able to point to this book on the shelf.’
It is a telling admission. From childhood onwards, great things have been expected of Peter Jay. Yet he has flitted from career to career, never quite leaving his mark, never quite consolidating his hold on the glittering prizes. It didn’t help that his father, Douglas, was a hard act to follow. Lord Jay, as he became, had been a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and President of the Board of Trade in Harold Wilson’s cabinet. But Peter was never denied opportunities to succeed. From the Dragon School in Oxford, he went to Winchester (where he was Sen Co Prae, or Head of School) and from there, after doing his National Service in the Royal Navy, to Christ Church, Oxford. He was President of the Union, took a first in PPE, and soon afterwards married Margaret Callaghan, daughter of ‘Sunny Jim’, who was then Shadow Chancellor. In the same year (1961) Jay joined the Treasury as a civil servant, leaving in 1967 to become economics editor of The Times. He remained there for a  decade, combining the post with a five-year spell as presenter of Weekend World, the political television programme of the day, produced by none other than John Birt.
Then, in 1977, to universal derision, his father-in-law (by then Prime Minister) appointed him Ambassador to Washington. He stayed two years, but then Mrs Thatcher won the 1979 election, and he returned to Britain to work as a director of the Economist, before joining TV-am in 1983 as its founding chairman and chief executive. Three years later he made perhaps his oddest career move, becoming from 1986 to 1989 chief-of-staff (‘bagman’, as Private Eye put it) to Robert Maxwell, proprietor of the Daily Mirror. And in 1990 he began his present job at the BBC.
Why has he never settled down? Did he find the goalposts kept moving? ‘The truth is, my career is a chapter of accidents and I have been lucky that it has added up to a diverting and enjoyably random walk through life. Again, do stop me if I start sounding portentous, because it is a terrible vice, but from my schooldays onwards I was encouraged to view life as an obstacle race that one ran all the way to the grave. If you played cricket, you had to be selected for the first team. If you took exams, you had to come top. If you took a degree, you had to get a first. The thing to do was succeed. You didn’t examine why or whether you wanted to. That absurdity was aggravated because I worked jolly hard and so was good at the race. I had a privileged education, of course, and if I hadn’t benefited from it, it would have been disgraceful. But to me the satisfaction was in being able to tick things off my list. I say this in a mood of confession to what is a deplorable state of mind.’
After graduating, Peter Jay was awarded a research fellowship by Nuffield College, Oxford, after failing to follow his father in winning one at All Souls. He managed just one term of a DPhil on the philosophy of John Stuart Mill. ‘I realised I knew the answer to the question I had set myself. And I couldn’t stand the life. I asked myself, “What difference would it make if I didn’t get up tomorrow?” and the answer was, “None at all”. I realised I needed a framework, a full in-tray, a telephone that would ring and make demands of me. I am confessing here to another profound character flaw.’
He decided to join the Treasury. ‘The absurd thing was, I went there mainly because my father wanted me to be a civil servant. He had enjoyed it and thought it a secure job for me.’ Lord Jay died, aged 88, in 1996. His obituary noted that he recoiled from idleness and luxury. ‘He was a strong character,’ Jay says, shaking his head at the memory. ‘And he had obsessions. But I wouldn’t say “hero” was quite the right word. He was an inspirational teacher. Stimulating. I have a more vivid recollection of his childhood than I do of my own. We shared a huge number of jokes and references and I’d say we were close. But he wasn’t the sort of father who, as it were, changed the nappies.’
Jay is known for his short fuse and once ticked off a Times sub-editor who complained that his economics column was unintelligible. ‘I am writing for three people in England,’ he said loftily. ‘And you are not one of them.’ Apparently, the three were two Treasury mandarins and the Governor of the Bank of England. Did Jay always write for such a limited audience? ‘I was writing that particular article to a limited audience.’
If he joined the Treasury to win his father’s approval, did he leave it as an act of filial rebellion? ‘If it was, it was a pretty weedy act, because my father had also worked for The Times.’ It was perhaps inevitable that eventually Jay would try to follow his father into politics, and in 1970 he sought selection as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Islington South-West. ‘It was a farce,’ he recalls, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. ‘I didn’t even come close to being selected. But I made an important discovery about myself, that I absolutely didn’t want to be a politician. It wasn’t just sour grapes. All my life I had assumed as an unconscious inevitability that I would have to be one – in the end – then I began to notice I was doing everything possible to postpone the day. Becoming an MP ruins your family life and it’s ill rewarded. And I’m just not the committee-minded, consensus-building, wheeler-dealer type you need to be.’
Islington was not Jay’s first taste of failure. ‘The real failure for me,’ he recalls – and it seems to pain him still, ‘the thing that absolutely was a shock and which considerably changed my personality was when I failed to get an All Souls fellowship. I had been encouraged to expect it. It was like being poleaxed. I was stunned. That sounds incredibly arrogant, but then I was an incredibly arrogant person. Experiencing that early failure was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. Goodness, that sounds pompous!’
Though he claims to welcome the mockery of Private Eye, Jay does seem sensitive about his reputation for pomposity, constantly referring to it. If he was prone to arrogance as a young man, though, it seems forgivable. After all, in 1973, he was voted not just Financial Journalist of the Year but also Political Broadcaster of the Year. The next year he was voted Male Personality of the Year by the Royal Television Society. At the age of 37 he was tipped by Time magazine as a future world leader. On top of this, people started telling him that, as a television celebrity, he had sex appeal. How did he keep his feet on the ground? ‘Television, which I take seriously and think important, was never part of the obstacle race for me. Weekend World was fun and well paid, but I regarded it as a recreation, as naughty moonlighting from my Monday to Friday job on The Times. It was like going skiing all the time, I felt guilty about it. I don’t think I had much sex appeal as a presenter, or indeed as anything else but, anyway, it wasn’t the glamour that attracted me, it was the money. It helped me pay for boats. I could double my earnings by working weekends as well as weekdays. Besides, I loved doing two hours’ live studio work. It gave me a buzz. I loved, loved, loved doing it.’
What effect did his working a six-and-a-half day week have on his wife and three children? ‘It took a huge toll. It was a mistake and I regret it. I shouldn’t have done the television. I would come home on a Sunday after an adrenaline-pumping live broadcast and I would still be buzzing from it. I might have been, say, interviewing the Prime Minister, and I would have been feeling like David Beckham in the Cup Final. It’s intoxicating and, when it stops, the batteries are drained. You go home to a family who have not watched the programme because it was much too boring and you might as well have just come in from washing the car. The psychological demands of changing down to their gear were high. And I would have to find the physical energy to take a lively interest in what they were doing, rather than collapse. But they were the ones who paid the price for my absence, not me. I paid when I saw the effect it had on them.’
Behind him, on top of a bookshelf, is a blue leather briefcase emblazoned with the Diplomatic Service crest – a memento from his days in Washington. Had he seen that job as a chance to repair things with his family, make a new start? ‘Yes, in the sense that it was something we could do as a family, but no, in that the working demands were even greater. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. My favourite joke at the time was that they needed a younger man for that job. It was physically crushing. That you were living over the shop helped. Even though the working day began at 7am and continued with telegrams till 2am the next day, you came across your children all day, they were under your feet. And Margaret and I were able to do a lot more things together, which we hadn’t been able to do in London. I described her as my co-ambassador because her contribution was enormous. But by no means was it a kind of holiday.’
Was he shocked, or embarrassed at all, by the accusations of nepotism over his appointment to such a senior diplomatic post? ‘Of course, but once I overcame my shock at being asked by David Owen [then Foreign Secretary], I said I would have to talk to Jim first, because I knew it would cause immense political embarrassment. Jim said, “You let me worry about the politics.” So then I had to ask myself, “Can I go through the rest of my life living with the knowledge that I have turned down such an opportunity?” A friend of mine said I should think very hard about it for a millionth of a second and then say yes.’
Peter Jay’s time in Washington lives on in the memory of journalists. There was a satisfying element of French farce to the ambassadorial household. As a Sun headline put it: HOW THE  KNOW-ALL CAME A CROPPER! Margaret Jay had an affair with Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post journalist who, with Robert Woodward, uncovered the Watergate scandal, and Peter Jay had an affair with his children’s nanny, who bore him a son. The scandal inspired two novels – one by Susan Crosland, the other by Nora Ephron, Bernstein’s wife. (The Jays were divorced in 1986, and in the same year Peter married Emma Thornton, a garden-furniture designer 16 years his junior. They have three sons. What emotional toll did the break-up of his marriage take? ‘Huge is the one-word answer to your question. But I think wallowing in it or going on about it doesn’t help very much. It happens to millions of people and they all deal with it in their own way.’)
Oddly, Peter Jay seems to have few regrets about his association with Robert Maxwell, a man who had been declared unfit by the DTI to run a public company as long ago as 1971, and who went on to embezzle the Mirror’s pension funds. Why is he still so loyal? Is it that he doesn’t want to be seen as a dupe? ‘I did feel a loyalty to Maxwell, and a certain affection for him. He was larger than life, a pre-moral figure, a kind of woolly mammoth stalking through the primeval forests unaware of the kind of things other people fussed about as being  good or evil. But what he was not was a crook. Clearly in the last 18 months of his life, after I had gone, something happened which drove him to the most outrageous conduct, for which no possible extenuation can be given.’
When the job at the BBC was offered in 1990, Jay must have been hugely relieved. His life had come full circle, it seemed. A chance to pontificate to the nation once more, to win over middle-aged female viewers with his craggy, sea-saltish sex appeal, to let his grandchildren know what he did in the great battle of the ERM. He’s an economics editor again, with three young children. ‘There can be huge frustrations and lots of backbiting at the BBC,’ he reflects. ‘But it is a wonderful place to work. Now that this series is in the can, I’m intending to go back to my normal routine on the newsdesk. I hope I shall continue doing this for the foreseeable future. After all, Alistair Cooke still seems to be  doing OK.’
But Alistair Cooke, I want to say, is not an economist. Before I can do so, Emma Jay calls us from downstairs. Lunch is ready. Should we have it outside? Yes, Peter replies. ‘My heart always sinks when you say that,’ Emma says, ‘because it all needs carrying.’ ‘Oh, we’ll do that,’ Peter says blithely. By the time we join Emma outside, though, the garden table has been laden with vegetable flans, pies, salad, freshly baked bread, and two bottles of red wine. The afternoon heat is soporific. No wonder he has put up that hammock.

There’s something poetic about the sight of an old man chasing moths around a room cluttered with antique bronzes, glassware and sepia-coloured photographs. The man is Leslie Phillips, the room is on the ground floor of his Victorian house in Maida Vale, north London, the moths are… well, they’re just moths. Phillips claps his freckled hands together and opens them slowly to inspect. ‘Missed,’ he says gloomily. ‘This one’s a sod. I do hate moths.’
Even so, I can’t help feeling that the moths belong here among the rickety chairs, sooty paintings, and musty books stacked crookedly on shelves. They blend with the room’s faded brown-and-cream colour scheme, rather like the 76-year-old actor himself, in fact. It is often noted how pets come to resemble their owners; Leslie Phillips, with dust fairies swirling around him, has come to resemble this room. He’s at one with it. In harmony.
The cord shirt he wears is dark green, his hair is mousey, his smooth cheeks pink. But in the watery, mid-afternoon light, he looks quite frail and his hands shake a little, perhaps because he is just recovering from what he describes as ‘a week on the lav. Nasty tummy bug I picked up while doing a speech for the WI in Scarborough.’ The illness hasn’t affected that refined, warm English beer voice of his. It’s still unhurried, oaky and soothing. And it still makes his every utterance sound vaguely sarcastic. ‘It’s terribly distinctive,’ he says. ‘My voice is recognised as clearly as my face. When I phone, say, the electricity company, they always recognise my voice before I’ve said my name.’ He gets requests to record himself saying, ‘Hel-low,’ in that silky, suggestive way he has, for answering-machines. ‘For some reason it brings a smile to people’s faces,’ he says.
The voice does make it difficult to gauge when he is being serious. Take, for instance, the business of his obituary. He has, he tells me, been brooding on it a lot lately. Why? ‘A giant pie fell on my head a few weeks ago and it got me thinking. I mean, imagine the headlines. What an undignified way to go.’ Did he say pie? ‘Oh, it was a prop for a television programme. Left me with a stiff neck, but I didn’t make a fuss, much to the relief of the producers who clearly thought I was going to sue.’
What really bothers him is that, though he has made more than 100 films, the obituaries are bound to concentrate on the Carry Ons, those and the Doctors. And he only made three of each. He loathes talking about them; finds the way people associate him with them tedious; indeed, in the three hours I’m with him the closest he gets to mentioning the Carry On team is when he refers to ‘the group I was with’.
Frustrated at being typecast as the suave, Brylcreemed Lothario who arched his eyebrow and purred the words ‘ding-dong!’ whenever he saw a pretty nurse, Phillips took the decision at the beginning of the Eighties to accept no more broad comedy roles. ‘My friends, my agent, my bank manager all thought I was mad, because I was at the top of the tree in comedy, but I knew I wasn’t. There was an unnerving lull for a while, then I was offered a straight part in Peter Nichols’s Passion Play. That’s the role I’m most proud of playing. It changed everything for me. I wish the obituaries would lead on that.’ He stares out of the window. ‘But I don’t suppose they will.’
After Passion Play, Phillips was offered numerous stage roles in Shakespeare and Chekhov and, last year, he starred in his own one-man play, On the Whole Life’s Been Jolly Good, about the life and dalliances of a failed and ousted Tory MP (‘I was tremendous in that, a great success’). He says he has earned more from his theatre work than from film, but the change in direction also led to his being given roles in ‘serious’ films such as ‘Scandal’ (1988), ‘Empire of the Sun’ (1987) and ‘Out of Africa’ (1985). ‘The past 25 years have been the most rewarding for me. What goes on the tombstone might be…’ He trails off.
When asked why he continues to work, long after the national retirement age, Phillips says: ‘Work stops me feeling old. I don’t normally think of retirement but the other day a black guy got up for me on the Tube and offered me his seat and I thought, “Oh shit! I must look old. It’s happened.” But my memory still works for learning lines. The fear of fucking it up helps, too.’
A cat wanders into the room and he begins stroking it. Her name is Pushy, he says, and she is a 16-year-old feral, the only one left of nine he brought back from Spain. He has a 200-year-old farmhouse there which he has been restoring for years. At one point his neighbours in Spain were his friends Terry-Thomas and Denholm Elliot. Both dead now, of course, like most of his generation of comedy actors. Of his friends from that group, Ronnie Barker is the only one he still sees regularly. Smashing bloke. ‘I don’t fear death,’ he adds, ‘just illness and senility. But I do sometimes forget I’ve grown older. When I did Lord Lane [in the docu-drama The Birmingham Six] I went in for make-up and they said I didn’t need any, and I said, “But Lane was an old man!” I persuaded them to give me some eyebrows.’
The famous Leslie Phillips’s moustache is white now – distinguished, as the euphemism goes. One of his catchphrases, from a scene in which he looked at himself in a mirror as he put on aftershave, was ‘Oh, you gorgeous beast!’ Perhaps dishonestly, he says he never thought of himself as handsome. ‘I was never pretty. Pleasant-looking, that’s all. As I got older my face looked fuller and more secure-looking. I looked like I had more savoir-faire. I know some actors who can’t accept that when they grow old they have to give up the romantic leads. I often advise them not to reach for the toupee.’
There is another reason why Phillips won’t give up work. ‘I’m an actor who wants to earn a living. All my money went on educating my children, sending them to very good schools.’ He has four from his first marriage, a stepson from his second and 15 grandchildren. ‘Both my sons went to university, something I wish I could have done. One is a lawyer, the other a housemaster, they are both very successful, both lovely people. I was certainly marvellous with my children. Terrific.’
His being driven by a need to make money is understandable, given his background. Phillips was born in Tottenham, north London, in 1924. His father, Fred, worked for Main Gas Cookers and suffered from rheumatic fever, eventually dying from it, aged 41, when Leslie was nine. ‘That had a great impact. My father was a lovely man but he always seemed close to death. My mother was always having to look after him. She was my real role model.’
As there was no Social Security at the time, his mother, Cecilia, found it a struggle to bring up three children in the family home in Chingford, Essex, where the family moved. She took in sewing and, inspired by Leslie’s victory in a beautiful baby competition, decided to put her son on the stage to bring in extra money. She answered a small ad for child actors, which led to Leslie appearing, aged ten, in a touring production of Peter Pan with Anna Neagle. From the age of 14, he was on tour more or less permanently. Actors such as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Rex Harrison became his surrogate uncles. ‘They were my family. Very kind. They encouraged me to read books and educate myself.’
As most West End actors were called up when war broke out, the 15-year-old Leslie found himself in demand, and at 17 was appearing in two plays simultaneously. The following year it was his turn to be called up and, partly because he had lost his cockney accent and had learned, through elocution lessons, to talk with an upper-class voice, he was commissioned as an officer.
As part of his training he was shot at with live ammunition, an experience which left his nerves shattered. He was declared medically unfit for battle and put in charge of a base camp in Suffolk. ‘The Army was an education for me,’ he says. ‘It toughened me up.’ Not that the life of an actor in those days was soft, he adds rather defensively. ‘You learned to cope with illness. You had to be dead nearly before you took time off. Nowadays actors stay in bed if they have a sniffle. The one occasion I took a break was when I had a stomach haemorrhage. My former Army MO discovered it. He’s dead now, bless his heart. I told him I felt weak and had awful diarrhoea, and he asked me what colour it was and when I said, “Black,” he said, “You’re bleeding,” and rushed me to hospital for a blood transfusion. I’d been taking too many aspirin, apparently, for my backache. I’ve never touched them since.’
Contrary to his screen image as a rake, there have been only four women in Phillips’s life. The first was when he was 19 and serving in the Army. The second was when he was 24. Her name was Penny and, in 1948, they married. Their first child was stillborn. ‘It was ghastly,’ he says. ‘Very difficult to get over.’ The couple had four more children and then, in 1965, divorced after Leslie had an affair with John Mortimer’s stepdaughter Caroline.
He never really wanted to get divorced, he says, Penny divorced him. ‘I don’t really know why it happened. There were lots of factors. I was very fond of her and remained so. The story of why things go wrong is complicated. But it wasn’t a lack of love or care. Love is a very big word, isn’t it?’ He believes the divorce knocked Penny off balance. She wouldn’t let him see the children and would ring his home and leave the phone off the hook so that no one else could get through.
Leslie and Caroline were together for nine years, but, partly because she wanted a baby and he didn’t, they separated, and Leslie began seeing Angela, an actress 23 years his junior. (‘The image of me as a womaniser was misleading,’ he says distractedly, swiping after another passing moth. ‘I always got on with women but I didn’t really have them throwing themselves at me.’ He grins. ‘I much prefer being at home than in a nightclub. I do like my slippers.’)
In 1981 Penny had a stroke. She died 18 months later, in a fire at her nursing home. Phillips married Angela in 1982 and, for six difficult years, had to nurse her through clinical depression. Medication eventually worked and she is much better now. ‘I became withdrawn when Angela was ill because of the stress,’ he says. ‘But our sense of humour held us together.’
In whom did he confide about his various marital problems? ‘I didn’t really confide in my mother. We were close, she kept cuttings about me, but never really understood my business. I sometimes thought this was a pity. None of my family have ever come into the inner part of my life. They wouldn’t have been at ease there.’ And perhaps he wouldn’t have been at ease with them being there. Might he even have felt a twinge of embarrassment about them, having lost his cockney accent and reinvented himself as a toff? ‘I don’t think they felt betrayed. Distanced maybe. They realised it would be virtually impossible to make a career without “talking proper”. They admired me for it.’
In 1984 his mother, then aged 92, was mugged by three boys at a bus stop outside her home in Chingford. When she clung on to her handbag, they battered her with their fists. She was taken to hospital, never fully recovered and died nine months later. For months afterwards he scoured the streets of Chingford looking for the youths, going on the only description police had, that they were black and one of them had been wearing a yellow sweatshirt. ‘I still have strong feelings about that incident,’ he says with a slow blink of his pale blue eyes. ‘You can’t suppress things like that. But equally you have to carry on, you can’t dry up or commit suicide. My sister was closest to her. It ruined her life and she died of grief soon afterwards. They are buried near each other.’ Phillips claps his hands at another passing moth. ‘Oh bugger! Missed.’ The movement makes a strand of his hair flap out of place, over his ear. He smoothes it back.
Leslie Phillips is not an easy man to figure out. There is ennui behind the bonhomie. He describes himself as bossy, though more tolerant now than he was as a young man. His immodesty is Olympian, but self-aggrandisement is often a device people use to counter low self-esteem. When he tells me how good he has been as a father, it is really himself he is trying to convince, I suspect, as if he is still judging himself for the break-up with his first wife. ‘I don’t go to church very often,’ he says at one point, ‘but I’m very good. I’m a good person. I’m not horrible to people.’
Similarly, what comes across as boasting about his career as a serious actor is probably just anxiety that his early comedy work will overshadow it. The role he really wants to play, he says, is King Lear – Sir Antony Hopkins once promised to direct. ‘I don’t know whether I will get the chance now. I doubt it.’
He thinks his early comic roles were vulgar and undignified. He tells me he wanted to do more ‘classy’ roles. The word classy is revealing, especially as he goes on to say that he can’t stand it when people don’t speak clearly, with good diction. ‘Everyone I’ve been associated with romantically has been middle-class. They have been well-spoken.’
He reinvented himself, but he can’t escape the past. How cruel that, instead of being buried and forgotten, all those Carry On films are still being repeated, constantly, all around the world. And one thinks of all those terrible, scarring events from which Phillips can’t escape: the deaths of his father, his mother, his first wife, his first child.
The extent to which he still lives in the shadow of the past is illustrated most clearly, and touchingly, in his attitude to children. ‘I worry about seeing children at risk,’ he tells me. ‘Mothers not holding their children’s hands in traffic, or near the edge of a platform when the train is coming. I can’t stand it and have to intervene sometimes. I have to take the child’s hand myself because I get so terribly anxious.’
Here is a man, then, who can demonstrate a deep understanding of the fragility of life and yet, the next moment, be chuckling to himself as he swipes at another moth. Which is what he does now. It escapes him and flutters in my direction. I grab for it. Success. ‘Well done!’ he says, with the same intonation he used for the words ‘ding-dong!’ all those years ago.