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

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

It’s as if Nicholas Parsons has been fired into a pinball machine. As he bustles from one flowerbed to another, bouncing up a hillside here, ricocheting down into a secluded dell there, the bunch of flowers he is collecting grows in size – I can almost hear the bells registering the score. There is another sound in the mind’s ear: the theme tune from the Benny Hill Show, the reedy one which accompanies the speeded-up chase sequences. Inevitable really, this. Nicholas Parsons used to be Benny Hill’s straight man, and once this fact has been absorbed it does tend to haunt the imagination.
There are, too, actual noises disturbing the otherwise tranquil pastureland of the Cotswolds: a distant tractor; the raucous squawks from the rooks nesting in the gangly trees around Parsons’s mid-19th-century lodge; and that crisp and precisely modulated voice so familiar to Radio 4 listeners. It seems strangely disembodied as Parsons bends to pluck another stem: ‘Hello there,’ he shouts over his shoulder. ‘Be with you in a minute.’
My hilarious retort – ‘What? Just a minute!’ – falls flat as Parsons is too far away to hear it, crunching off across his gravelled drive toward another unsuspecting cluster of flowers.
It is one of those trippy English mornings when the colours are so vivid they seem to vibrate: the lime green of the leaf jigs against the pastel blue of the sky, and the glowing yellow of the blooms clashes spectacularly with the bright red of the Parsons v-neck jumper.
Although he is not actually wearing a cravat, the grey polo-neck under the red jumper, the tight grey flannels and the brown suede brogues with toecaps darkened by the dew, all suggest that Parsons is the cravat-wearing type. Probably a driving-glove man, too. It goes with his being tall, trim and dapper; with his wavy silvering hair and unlined pink skin and quite exhausting aura of sprightliness.
He has a distracted air about him, though, and a nervy, anxious way of talking. This becomes apparent when he launches, unsolicited, into a justification of why he still chooses to work at his age. One has a right to go on enjoying one’s success toward the end of one’s career if one had to struggle for success when one was starting out. That’s the flavour of it. Lots of ‘ones’ involved.
As we enter the house, Mrs Parsons – Annie – is just leaving to go shopping. She, warm and cheerful of disposition, follows us back in to make coffee. The couple were married in the Caribbean three years ago. Both had previously been divorced. Both have grown-up children. She, however, is quite a bit younger than he, 20 years maybe. Exactly how much younger is a bit of a mystery, as Parsons is notoriously absent-minded when it comes to his age. It’s 74ish, though he has been known to be about seven years shy of the real figure.
He has a justification for this, too: why should one be judged on one’s age, when one is clearly still young enough to do well all the things one does. It’s a good point. In his inimitable, graceful style – and without hesitation, repetition or deviation – Parsons has been chairing Just a Minute for 30 years now, and the programme is still one of the most popular on Radio 4. He still tours with his one-man comedy show, as well as the more serious show he wrote based on the life of Edward Lear. He still wears fishnets and stilettos when he compres for the Rocky Horror Show. And he still plays the Dame in panto. He is even about to star in a film, though he’s superstitious about elaborating on this until it happens.
But the forgetfulness about his exact date of birth sits oddly with the phenomenal powers of memory he has, though he says so himself, cultivated over the years. He has done this as a way of compensating for his dyslexia. As he sits to attention on a sofa, arms straight by his sides, he explains that, since he was five, following a visit to the circus, he has been driven by a desire to perform and, more importantly, to express himself. He didn’t speak until he was two and a half, and when at last he did, it was with a terrible stutter. He has learnt to control this through breathing techniques and has never suffered from it when performing – though he does succumb to a short bout of it as we talk. Curiously, it happens when he is talking about his stutter.
Such obvious drawbacks to being a performer were cited by his parents when they tried to discourage him from taking to the stage. But there was also a degree of snobbery involved. Nicholas Parsons was born and raised in genteel Grantham, Lincolnshire, where his father, Paul, was a doctor with a rural practice. Lord Brownlow and Alderman Roberts were among the patients, and Dr Parsons almost certainly delivered the baby Margaret. And, as Nicholas’s nanny was good friends with the future Lady Thatcher’s nanny, the two children surely looked across at each other in their prams from time to time.
The Parsons family moved to London when Nicholas was ten and, at his new school, St Paul’s, he was soon nicknamed Shirley – after announcing that he wanted to be a child film star. But then, aged 17, he took an apprenticeship at a pump and turbine firm on the Clyde bank, before going on to read for a degree in engineering at Glasgow University, which he did not complete. All the while he was doing semi-professional acting jobs in his spare time. In 1945 he joined the Merchant Navy, but collapsed with pleurisy and was deemed unfit for action. Discharged after six months in hospital, he was then able to concentrate on his acting career. By the Fifties he had appeared on stage in the West End and on screen in minor roles, but mostly it was cabaret and, as he puts it, ‘wet, bloody juvenile leads’. It was not until 1960 when he appeared on television playing the upper-class foil to the comedian Arthur Haynes’s working man that he found stardom.
‘My parents did everything they could to stop me being an actor,’ Parsons recalls with an imperious look down his imperious nose. ‘They thought the life of an actor was decadent and indecent and full of sexual perversion. I once told my mother that she was being illogical because she loved Dame Edith Evans and Leslie Howard. I asked her if she thought they were like that and she said, ‘No. But isn’t it a pity that they have to work with people who are?’ I took the job on the Clyde to please my parents. It was tough and demanding, and I found myself working with some really rough diamonds. They used to send me up because I talked ‘like thet’ – but in the end they accepted me because I was a good mimic and I was able to take off the foreman with the loose dentures. Having had those five years on Clyde bank I have never been able to take myself too seriously.’
Oh no? Another legacy of his childhood struggle with dyslexia is that he has to order his thoughts in a strictly linear way. When he is asked a question that is lateral to the subject being discussed, he simply postpones answering it. ‘I’ve got one of those logical minds which means that once I’ve started on a line of thought I have to finish it,’ he explains, as if it is the Northern Irish Peace Talks he is discoursing upon. ‘Shall we finish the childhood background? I found my dyslexia left me with a good memory. I didn’t need to refer to my diaries or my scrapbook for dates or names when I was writing my autobiography.’
He can remember every detail from his time at prep school, he says. ‘It was a Dickensian place. Tenterton Hall, Hendon. Truly horrendous and miserable. It’s now been pulled down. It was very disciplined and insensitive. The ogre of the place was the matron who was just so utterly – well, I want to use the same word again and my training on Just a Minute is stopping me – but she was so insensitive. Dressed in the full regalia of a matron in the war. Forbidding. Mrs Blanch. Ruled the dormitories with a rod of iron. And because I suffered from migraine attacks I had to have certain foods. She was a cow. She slippered me and – it doesn’t really work to tell it like this, but it’s a good anecdote in my one-man show, where I do all the voices – she was obsessed with little boys’ bowels, and believed that as long as they opened every morning a boy would remain healthy. She would line us up and ask us about our movements for that day and if they weren’t up to scratch she would administer syrup of figs or castor oil.’
Inevitably, Parsons adds, when he started seeing a Freudian psychiatrist in the Fifties, the bowel theme was seized upon. At this point, in the sitting-room, two grandfather clocks start chiming in unison, either side of me. One of his great passions in life is assembling or repairing them. Anything mechanical will do, in fact. The room has a cosily cluttered feel to it: horse-brasses, corn dollies, silver heart-shaped picture-frames, hunting prints, and copper kettles full of acorns.
The room and its homely touches remind you why the appeal of Nicholas Parsons is so enduring, and why his career in comedy has had a renaissance, especially on the university circuit. Contrary to his claims, though, he doesn’t really go in for self-parody. He is the eternal straight man, the ingénu lost outside his own world. If we thought he was in on the joke, it wouldn’t be funny any more. He once played to an audience of just four, for the full 90 minutes of his one-man show. ‘Of course, we all crave the reaction of an audience as compensation for a perceived lack of affection in our private lives,’ he says. ‘I think all of us have insecurities about which we are seeking reassurance from our audience. I’ve been a straight man to more living and dead comics than anyone else. I have seen the desire to go out and hear that audience reaction and the distress when it doesn’t occur.’
Intellectual insecurity seems to be Parsons’s biggest problem. He is keen to point out that he was Rector of St Andrews University, for instance, and that he was awarded an honorary doctorate. This insecurity really comes to light, though, when he is talking about Kenneth Williams, for many years the petulant, flamboyant, quixotic star turn of Just a Minute. ‘Kenneth liked to show off his erudition,’ Parsons says.
‘It’s something I understand actually, because here was a chap who had a great gift for entertainment and enjoyed making people laugh but who found that people in this country are suspicious of those who have that gift. They always want to put labels on you and I find it irritating. I’ve been described variously as a light comedian, a game-show host, a voice-over man, a variety artist, a West End actor, and yet I’m all these things. It’s rather dogged me and only now, at my age, have I been accepted as an all-rounder. Kenneth found he enjoyed the arts and literature later in life and started to educate himself. He enjoyed making the Carry On films, but I don’t think he was proud of them. When I do my Edward Lear show you could say that it’s a cultured show. When I was in Ireland doing it – and I don’t say this out of conceit – but this man came up to me afterwards and said he thought I was a closet intellectual. He said this because he recognised I have aspirations to give vent to a more intellectual side.’
A raw nerve is touched when it is mentioned that the successful quiz show Sale of the Century, which was broadcast ‘live from Norwich’, is the thing for which he is best remembered. After all, it did run for 14 years and in 1976 had the highest viewing figures of anything on television. It even inspired a legendary piece of graffiti in letters six feet tall on a London bridge: NICHOLAS PARSONS IS THE OPIUM OF THE MASSES. As the unctuous host with the fixed smile, Parsons had to ask questions such as, ‘What shouldn’t you do if you live in a glass house?’ A typical prize was a washing-machine.
‘I’m not most famous for that,’ Parsons now says. ‘It’s only because it ran for so many years that it lingers in the memory. The people who have seen me doing a Stephen Sondheim in the West End remember me more for that. Sale of the Century was not a way of life. It was just a good job that paid a good salary, and subsidised a lot of other things I was doing at the time.’
Another exposed nerve is touched when Parsons is asked whether his late father – whom he describes as a distant, cerebral Victorian figure who had difficulty in communicating his emotions – was proud of his son’s fame as a quiz master. ‘I’m sure my father would have been proud if I had succeeded in a more cultural area. It was difficult for him to give out affection. When he was dying from Parkinson’s disease in hospital, he became very weak and his mind began to wander. Then he suddenly said, ‘Sale of the Century is on.’ And he was right. We watched it and he said, ‘I always thought it was very clever the way you speeded up at the end of the show and built up all that excitement and drama.’ I knew he had occasionally watched the show but here he was on his death-bed paying me this beautiful compliment, and I was very touched and moved. I said, ‘Thank you, Dad, that’s very sweet of you. I think you should have a nice sleep now.’ I went out for a few minutes and when I came back I kissed him on the forehead and realised he had gone into his death sleep.’
At the memory of this, Nicholas Parsons falters and tears well up in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says with a trembling smile when he recovers. ‘This is the actor in me. Our emotions are very close to the surface.’
The clocks chime in unison again, I swallow the lump in my throat and change the subject back to his love of fixing mechanical things. We do not dwell upon it for too long before Parsons jumps to his feet and asks if I would like to come outside to see the barn he has converted into an office. He has a collection of photographs of himself posing with his celebrity chums there. Would I like to see them?
Of course, I would.

The air of madness in Michael Holroyd’s study is so charmingly baroque it must be contrived. Every surface is strewn with papers; two wicker armchairs have come to rest, like driftwood, near the desk; there is a sock by a table leg; and, among the clutter on the polished floorboards, a couple of cardboard boxes contain a handful of birth certificates, property deeds and albums of sepia-toned photographs. These are his family relics, the meagre detritus of three generations of turbulence and wilful eccentricity. As the sum of source material for Holroyd’s next book, the first draft of which he aims to complete this week, the contents of these boxes look unpromising. The caption under one Victorian group portrait doesn’t even name the sitters, just the dog: Spot. This is why the book is part autobiography, part saga about the declining fortunes of Holroyd’s once wealthy, tea plantation-owning family, and part investigative journalism.
The contrast with the subjects of Holroyd’s previous endeavours – especially the biographies of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw – could not be greater. These three lives, consisting of nine volumes in total, represent 37 years of the author’s own life – if you include the past few years, spent abridging them to just three volumes (to be published next week, for the first time, as a complete set in paperback). For each, the research material came not so much in a brace of cardboard boxes as a fleet of skips.
During the 17 years, for instance, that Holroyd worked on his monumental, five-volume life of Shaw, the floorboards in this book-lined study at the top of his Ladbroke Grove house creaked under the weight of Shavian letters, manuscripts and diaries. Open a cupboard or drawer, manhandle a desk or chair and there would have been an avalanche of dog-eared prefaces, pamphlets and plays. The bearded superman wrote ten letters every day, more than 50 plays, and filled 40 volumes with his collected works (and more with his uncollected writings). With his shorthand and his secretaries, GBS could write in a day more words than Holroyd could read in a day.
The sheaves of paper scattered around Holroyd’s portable typewriter today relate mostly to the various literary committees he sits on in order to get himself out of the house. ‘I could stay closeted in this chaotic room quite amiably if I wasn’t forced to go out,’ he says. And while there is still an atmosphere of musty neglect in the room, which has you brushing away imaginary cobwebs before you sit down, there is no sense of Shaw’s presence any more, the vast archive having been returned to the various universities and literary estates from which it came.
Having the Shaw papers lying around the place was an important part of the writing process, apparently. By handling them, noting the crossings out, even smelling the mildew on them, Holroyd believes he established a sense of intimacy with his subject. ‘When it comes to my own family there is very little to go on,’ says Holroyd with a sigh. ‘Things were suppressed. The waters of oblivion quickly closed over the family scandals.’ The secrecy had a lot to do with his father being a bankrupt, with his parents having notched up five marriages between them and with the shame they felt in being unable to bring up their son – the boy Michael was raised in an atmosphere of glum gentility by his paternal grandparents in Maidenhead, Berkshire.
‘But I’m discovering new clues about them every day,’ Holroyd adds. ‘A will might have a bit of narrative. A trip to Somerset House might provide some embers that you can blow on to get a flame going. And I do have a degree of latitude because I know the tones of voice, the habitual phrases, the mannerisms.’ Hesitation. Thoughtful pursing of the lips. ‘This book is autobiographical only to the extent that I appear as echoes and reflections of what went on. I remember, for instance, overhearing my grandfather groaning, ‘What are we going to do about the boy!’ But the irony was that, with time, it was me asking the question, ‘What am I do with my father, with my aunt?”
The book, to be published early next year, will be called Basil Street Blues, after the street in London where Holroyd was conceived, where his mother modelled and where his father – who happened to be called Basil – had a business importing Lalique glass. As well as his memories and a handful of photographs to go on, Holroyd also has his own reflection in the mirror for inspiration. ‘You become the people who are missing,’ he says. Today Holroyd sits in a rumpled blue matelot jumper, half-rimmed spectacles on a cord around his neck and slippers embroidered with an anonymous coat of arms. He coils his legs each around the other, as if making himself smaller – and there is something of the chameleon about him, as if he is blending with his surroundings to avoid detection. His dusty brown hair is dishevelled, as though he has just risen from one of the siestas he lists as his recreation in Who’s Who (the English, as No‘l Coward noted, may detest a siesta – but Holroyd, born in London in 1935, is part Irish and half-Swedish, so he can nap whenever he likes). Holroyd’s downturned eyes, though small, tired-looking and watery, seem kindly and wise. His facial expressions, too, have a certain crinkly warmth. Occasionally they are accompanied by a gentle wheezy chortle. For he is very much a chortler – giving him the aspect of one of those avuncular bumbling characters you come across in Dickens.
As Holroyd rises from one of the wicker chairs, it complains with a creak. He rummages around in the nearest box, produces a photograph of his mother, Ulla, considers it for a moment and hands it over. Her face is handsome, her expression blank. ‘Blankly Swedish,’ Holroyd agrees. ‘She was an eyeful. She knew how to enjoy herself.’ An extrovert, multilingual au pair with a penchant for parties, she was only 19 when she gave birth to her son and rather resented the intrusion. Holroyd’s most vivid memory of his mother is of seeing her dancing on the table after dinner, champagne in hand, talking in tongues. By then she was 37, he a shy, self-conscious and painfully embarrassed 17.
Holroyd’s parents, who were unable even to agree on the exact date their son was born – his mother swore it was 27 August, his father said the 29th – divorced in 1944. ‘They would marry from time to time and hardly a holiday went by when I wasn’t supplied with a new step-parent or stepbrother and stepsister,’ Holroyd recalls with the studied nonchalance of the raconteur. ‘As my mother was Swedish, and I had a stepmother who was French and a stepfather who was Hungarian, I was considered an object of curiosity at school.’ He would try to drain himself of interest, keep quiet, make himself as inconspicuous as possible. ‘My childhood wasn’t as exotic as it sounded because I would often find myself in countries where I didn’t speak the language or understand the culture. This would just make me feel lonely.’
His father was a proud man who couldn’t cope with the shame of losing the fortune left to him by his own father, a major-general who had served in India and been given a tea plantation as a reward for action in the Mutiny. Holroyd recalls an almost tangible sense of nervousness in the family home. ‘Whenever someone knocked on the door we wouldn’t answer it. We absolutely froze.’ He gives the wheezy chortle. ‘Anything that came, a telegram or whatever, would, we now believed, be bad news. We had become pessimists. But what we dreaded most was people’s sympathy.’ He recalls playing tennis on a court belonging to a woman his aunt had known in better times. ‘We would creep up to the court, hiding behind trees so we wouldn’t be seen from the big house and offered hospitality.’
Despite his father’s bankruptcy, money was found to send Michael to Eton. ‘It was ridiculous. I now discover we had a double mortgage on the house and my father had gone to my stepfather, who we’d never met before, and asked him to pay for some of the school fees. He never mentioned it.’ Father and son were never especially close, and the only time words of reconciliation were uttered between them was when Basil was so old and deaf Michael had to bellow them out – which rather ruined the effect.
After an unimpressive career at school, Michael Holroyd was coerced by his father into training as a lawyer and articled to a depressing office on the bus route between Dedworth and Gravesend. Here, Holroyd discovered a talent for amiable inertia and the dullness of the job was only broken on two occasions: the time he was shot at while serving a writ, and the day he was accidentally locked into a butcher’s fridge.
In 1955 National Service offered Holroyd a means of escape from the legal profession but, because of his enthusiasm for inactivity, he was reluctant to seize it: in his medical he claimed everything from water on the knee to bow-legs and an allergy to Elastoplast. Disaster.  He was graded ‘3’, ensuring not exemption but two years in the Pioneer Corps, digging field latrines. He appealed for clemency and was re-graded ‘1’.
In the army, he says, he learnt the art of partially eclipsing himself, not going missing exactly but always going unseen. He would strut around with an expression of the sternest vacancy so that it became difficult to focus on him. No one was even sure what his name was. He was once standing in the middle of his barracks when a sergeant looked in, said ‘No one here,’ and left. Holroyd considered it a triumph. Eventually someone came across his records and noticed his mother was a native of Sweden, a neutral country. He was confined to barracks for several weeks, before drifting back into anonymity.
Holroyd grins at the memory. Perhaps more than he realises, he is given to using comedy as a way of diffusing – denying even – the family situations he recalls. ‘In retrospect humiliating events can seem funny,’ he says. ‘Especially when it comes to my family. There is a tragi-comic theme to my parents. I mean, we were ridiculous.’
One consequence of his unorthodox, displaced upbringing is that, as an adult, he seems excessively driven by a need to be liked. We all are to an extent, but his urge is so powerful it has won him a reputation for niceness that even Michael Palin would find unpalatable. After several hours’ conversation, I came away with an impression of bluff geniality. But if you weren’t in the right mood for it, his manner could seem ingratiating and emollient, his stories overly polished and a little smug. Indeed, his wife, the novelist Margaret Drabble, once said to him on an airplane that looked like it was about to be hijacked, ‘Please don’t try to disarm them with your British Council lecture, dear.’
In his biographies Michael Holroyd has always striven to feel sympathetic toward his subjects, but not sentimental. He is, he says, aware of the dangers of reducing painful episodes in his own life to twee jokes.  ‘I’m trying to guard against it. Some scenes do get to me. Once I was standing over my aunt’s bed shouting at her. Not very pleasant. She was paralysed and yet refused to leave her huge five-bedroom house, which she, we, couldn’t afford to keep, and move into a smaller flat adapted for a disabled person. I felt stressed. I felt angry. But my aunt’s position was that she would rather die in one place than live in another. It was an impossible situation. But I was forced to make her move.’
In his teens and early twenties, Holroyd was, he says, in a permanent state of apprehension. He turned to writing biographies so that he could escape into other people’s lives. ‘I think it was a way of dealing with it. He wrote his first biography, of the writer and critic Hugh Kingsmill, at the age of 23. His two-volume life of Strachey was published to acclaim in 1967 and 1968, and his equally successful Augustus John in 1974 and 1975.  Shaw was published between 1988 and 1992.
And as Holroyd played a part in the posthumous reputations of Strachey, John and Shaw, so they have played a part in his actual life. Like a method biographer, getting under the skin, Holroyd became infected with many of the ailments Strachey described in his plaintive correspondence – faulty digestion, apathy and self-loathing. He also found himself becoming more liberal, dry and bohemian in outlook the more he came under Strachey’s spell. Being pathologically nice and well-mannered, he secretly wished he were more brittle and rude, like Strachey. Being shy with women as a young man (he says he could never speak when his beautiful 19-year-old half-sister was in the room), he wished he were more sexually confident, like the swashbuckling, womanising John. When Holroyd researched John, he found himself becoming more hedonistic, cheerful and visually aware as well as more flirtatious. Shaw made him more confident and politically robust.
Holroyd himself would disapprove of such reductionism. Then again, his own conclusions can seem too neat at times: the defining characteristic of Shaw, he argues, was that he was governed by the child within. John’s was that he tried to kill his intellect through alcohol because it tortured him; Strachey’s that his acid wit and misanthropy stemmed from his homosexuality. When it was published in the Sixties, Lytton Strachey broke new ground – and caused a scandal – in its detailed and dispassionate account of Strachey’s sexual proclivities in particular and those of the Bloomsbury Group in general. Perhaps what shocked the Establishment most was that its author seemed to empathise.
‘Of course I’d been to public school and so had some knowledge of homosexuality as a way of life. It had very much been in the atmosphere and there had been rumours and frissons and there may have been the odd expulsion. I think we all had innocent crushes. I certainly had one. The point about being invisible as a biographer is that you don’t intrude or obtrude in the text: ticking people off for this, commending them for that. You have to go with the current of energy. Homosexuality was extremely important to Strachey. I found it difficult at the start to get into step with him. Took about a year of reading his letters and diaries.’
Not that Holroyd became too sympathetic. He is resolutely, if shyly at first, heterosexual. ‘Having been in all these male-dominated institutions I found dating agony. I was very glad when the Sixties got going and a lot of women became ‘manisers’ and said, ‘For God’s sake, take some initiative.’ I made up for lost time. With one exception I don’t think anyone got hurt. On the whole I’ve stayed friends with people I’ve been involved with.’ When asked how many times he fell in love he says, ‘a good six or more.’ Several days later he rings to correct this figure to three or four: ‘Sorry to be pedantic about this, let’s say three and a half.’
In 1982, Holroyd gave driving lessons to his friend, the novelist Margaret Drabble, and these became a form of courtship which resulted in an unconventional marriage. For 13 years they were known as the couple who lived apart to stay together. Her home was in Hampstead, his in the bottom half of the five-storey house off Ladbroke Grove. ‘We found ingenious ways of getting to each other’s houses by car, shaving a couple of minutes off here and there.’
Drabble said they were so polite and so hated using the phone that they would write each other postcards saying, ‘Would you be free for dinner tomorrow?’ When the top half of Holroyd’s house came on the market, it so happened Drabble had just finished her Oxford Companion to English Literature as well as her biography of Angus Wilson. ‘There seemed no point in her rattling around on her own in her house. This’ – he spreads his hands – ‘is really two offices and a home. Can you hear her now?’ Silence. ‘And Maggie can’t hear me.’
It is quite a double act; a my-wife-next-door sitcom. It is Drabble, a brisk Yorkshirewoman with a pageboy haircut, who answers the front door when you arrive – because her book-lined study is on the ground floor. She hands you over to Holroyd who is hovering at the top of the first flight of stairs and then melts back into the shadows of her study. Before marrying Holroyd, Drabble was married for 15 years to the actor Clive Swift with whom she had three children. Holroyd gets on well with them and says he has no regrets about not having children of his own. ‘It wasn’t something I planned. It’s not something that worried me. I’m not against children. I don’t go around Heroding. My creative energies have gone into my books and maybe I would be less affected by reviews if I had three children squabbling around my ankles. Do I fear death more because I don’t have the sort of immortality provided by children? Maybe. But it may also be because my mother and grandfather both had terrible, protracted deaths. I try not to think about death. The curtain will go down, I tell myself, and everything will be all right. I see my biographical work as offering a chance to retrieve a little from death. Giving the people I write about a chance to carry on.’
Michael Holroyd’s muscular, wry and elegantly written biographies give him a pretty good claim on literary immortality. It is possible that the definitive Shaw has yet to be written, but probable that any future biographer who feels tempted to try writing it will first sleep on it, wake to a balmy spring morning filled with the song of skylarks and say to himself, ‘Oh sod it, life’s too short.’
And this is probably why, despite his best efforts to seem self-effacing, vague and socially inept, Michael Holroyd is actually rather pleased with himself. But there are chinks in his armour of self-satisfaction. What if, in devoting his own life to studying – indeed vicariously living – the lives of others, Holroyd wakes up one morning with the horrible feeling that he might have somehow neglected to live his own? Is this why he has now turned the pen on himself? ‘It’s true, when writing Shaw I worried desperately that my life was disappearing. I kept lying to myself about how long it would take. And I was worried that I was making a complete ass of myself. Am I, I wondered, running this marathon having taken a wrong turn somewhere? I sometimes had to tear up 50 pages because it didn’t lead anywhere. I worried that I might die before it was finished; that the house and with it the only copy of the manuscript might go up in flames.’
An even more uncomfortable thought occurs. On his deathbed, Holroyd might suddenly come round to the view, held by some, that biography is fundamentally immoral, and that biographers – people Oscar Wilde called the bodysnatchers of literature – have no right to the intimate secrets of someone else’s life. How would Holroyd himself like it if he knew someone would be poring over his personal effects once he was gone? ‘I wouldn’t like it one bit. I wouldn’t wish a biography of me to be written while I was alive. I discriminate between the rights of the living and the dead – that is my ethical position as a biographer and I can’t exclude myself from it. When we’re living we need all our sentimentalities, our evasions, our half-truths and our white lies, to get through life. My family certainly did. I do. When we are dead different rules apply. You can sometimes ask the dead to contribute a little more to the living world than when they were alive – because they will no longer be hurt. It’s funny, you can sometimes find out more about someone’s life than they themselves knew. You read the lovers’ diaries that they never saw and you find out why love affairs really ended.’
The death of his parents left a gaping hole in Holroyd’s life. So did the completion of the final volume of Shaw. It’s safe to assume the collected works published next week will, too. The autobiography he is writing is, he acknowledges with a sanguine smile, an attempt to plug these gaps. He makes light of it. But metaphysical terror lies behind the affable weariness in his smile. And if the air of charming madness in his study seems contrived, the sense of mortal panic in his eyes does not.

Perhaps it’s the pain that blurs and distorts Matt Le Blanc’s appearance. Perhaps it’s the painkillers. Either way, he’s pretty much unrecognisable as he slouches into the dimly lit bar in Beverly Hills. No big entrance, no swagger, no boyish grin in camera-conscious three-quarter profile. Instead, that firm jaw-line is diffused by a week’s stubble, and the leather jacket he’s wearing makes his shoulders look rounded, his physique stocky. I squint uncertainly and give him one of those vague hand signals that can be turned into a stretch and a yawn if identity proves mistaken. He sits down at my table, orders a Stoli with soda and lime, sinks it and signals the waiter over for a second one. He’s just come from the gym, he explains in a voice so soft and low against the background chatter, I have to lip-read to get the gist. He dislocated his shoulder while doing laterals. ‘If you move a millimetre, it kills you,’ he mouths slowly. ‘The pain is so bad you get light-headed.’
It’s the eighth time this has happened since his shoulder bone first parted company with its socket during a rehearsal for Friends. Matthew Perry collided with Matt Le Blanc when – as Chandler and Joey – they were racing to occupy the same chair. For the following half a dozen episodes, while Le Blanc was in a sling, the injury had to be incorporated into the script.
At first, as we sit and talk, the actor is subdued and earnest, fixing me unblinkingly with eyes that seem 96 per cent pupil, four per cent iris. This keeps distracting my eyes from their lip-reading duties and, as a consequence, our conversation becomes stilted. The thought bubbles above Le Blanc’s head are reading: ‘Jeez…stuck with…goddam English stuffed shirt…keeps looking from my eyes to my mouth like a moron…’
He orders another vodka. Along with the five Advils he’s already taken, this relaxes him enough to bare a broad smile that features teeth so impossibly white and even I find myself involuntarily covering my own mouth with my hand as I smile back. To compound this, I’m veering between feelings of paranoia that I’m the dullest person he’s ever met, and, as I get better at deciphering his mumbled words, mounting panic that it might be the other way round.
Without the sharp, deadpan one-liners the Friends scriptwriters put into his mouth, Le Blanc has all the social buoyancy and grace of a seal out of water. Still cute, still in possession of the big, sleepy brown eyes but now clumsy and inelegant with it. I order another beer. Telepathically, we have agreed that the best way for both of us to survive this evening is to get steadily drunk.
Later at the restaurant, we are led to a table in the middle of the room and Le Blanc requests that we be moved to one in the corner where he can have his back to the other diners. ‘I used to enjoy eating out,’ he says, and then loses the train of thought. He munches on a bread stick and furrows his brow as he studies the menu for about 40 minutes. ‘Yeah, I used to enjoy people-watching,’ he says, suddenly returning to his subject and making me jump. ‘Now I can’t do that any more because people just end up watching me, do you know what I mean?’
I’m about to tell him I know exactly what he means because, the previous year, I had sat a few tables away from him and the rest of the cast from Friends, in a restaurant not far from here and – ha ha ha – I hadn’t been able to take my eyes off them. Luckily I don’t get the chance before he adds, ‘And I hate that. No, I don’t hate that, because it has made me financially comfortable. New house and car for mom and a new smile on my face. It’s made me feel like Elvis.’ He says that he is not very good at ‘this whole celebrity thing’. You can see why: jealous men are want to approach him in bars and punch him for no reason. And he is constantly harassed by predatory women. ‘It’s not that it makes you feel vulnerable. Just unreal. Being stared at all the time. There was this one girl, 13 or 14-years-old, and she just gaped at me, then started shaking. I freaked out because I didn’t know what to do. I felt really guilty because it was like she was so overwhelmed she didn’t know how to react. The trouble is, people have an imaginary relationship with you, especially when they see you on television. It’s more intimate than the cinema. You see in their house and often they are watching you in bed, you know?’
Although in recent years Matt Le Blanc’s name has been romantically linked with his manager, Camile Cerio, Goldie Hawn’s then 16-year-old daughter, Kate Hudson; porn star Jenn Jameson; Playboy model Tonya Poole; Minnie Driver; Jennifer Aniston and Amanda de Cadenet, the actor doesn’t have a steady girlfriend at the moment. ‘Now I’m 30, though, I suppose I’m thinking about marriage,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I think, yeah, that’s what I want – but you can’t look for it. It’s got to find you. I saw this girl one time on the freeway and she saw me and we both pulled over and ended up going out for a year.’
Not all his assignations are so charming. When dining at a Hollywood restaurant with some caddish companions, he took a female admirer off to the washroom after being introduced to her just 15 minutes earlier. He came back to his table grinning and soaking up the laddish applause and then all but ignored his latest conquest for the rest of the evening before leaving without saying goodbye to her.
‘It’s difficult with girlfriends,’ he says ploddingly, in his barely audible bass, ‘because I will go to a premiere and when I get home she asks, “What’s the matter?” and I say, “I just signed a hundred autographs” and she doesn’t know how I feel about that. That’s why a lot of actors end up going out with actresses. I don’t know what she wants me to say, “I’m a freak?” My shoulder hurts, I feel mortal. Yet I have people screaming at me and I think, “What’s real and what’s not real?”’
A fine example of this state of unreality could be witnessed on a visit he made to London in April. He was with the cast of Friends, filming an hour-long special which included a chance meeting with the Duchess of York. Friends-mania ensued, with British fans following the cast everywhere, waiting at the airport, and camping outside their hotel.
Refreshingly, Le Blanc is under no illusion that he is adored by his female fans simply for his acting ability. His foppish black hair, bee-strung lips and wing-mirror cheekbones also enter into the equation. Much to his chagrin, the same features seem to appeal to men, too – which is why this high-testosterone, all-American heterosexual has become a gay icon. A photo of him even appeared on the cover of Spartacus: International Gay Guide for Men. He went to court to stop further copies being printed. It has since become a collector’s item.
This said, there is no denying his gifts as a comic actor. His timing and delivery are good. But his theorising about them is less so. In an eerie echo of the sort of cool and opaque self-analysis you would associate with his new best friend the Dunchess of York, he says of his acting technique that it’s really just a matter of thinking of himself as a dozen eggs. To do Friends he takes eggs two, four, six and eight. To do something different, maybe he would use eggs one, three, seven, nine and twelve.
Presumably for his first starring role in a $90 million Hollywood film, he has utilised eggs five, ten and eleven. In Lost in Space, which opens this summer and co-stars William Hurt, he plays the hero, a clever, ruthless engineer who saves the spaceship from the on-board psychopath, played by Gary Oldman. He says that he is surprised to find himself being cast in such a major film, alongside such distinguished actors, but he can at least relate to Gary Oldman in terms of his wild, hard-drinking life as well as the hardship of his upbringing. Matt Le Blanc was an only child brought up by his divorced mother, Pat Grossman, who worked in a factory making circuit boards. The young Matt knew that his father had gone to Vietnam but had been too frightened to ask his mother whether or not he had been killed there – because she made it clear she did not want to talk about him. ‘Ours was a blue-collar, Italian-American household in Newton, Massachusetts,’ he says. ‘I met my father when I was eight. Ran down the stairs and there was this guy wearing army fatigues with long hair. He looked like Jesus Christ and I could see Le Blanc on his shirt. But he never came home to stay and my mother remarried. Am I in touch with him? Yes and no. It’s a sore issue though, and I don’t really want to talk about it. The way I am is because of my mom, not my dad. She was there always, always, always.’
Le Blanc’s first job was a paper round, then he stacked shelves in a convenience store and worked in a burger bar. He had, he says, no real ambitions. He enrolled on a construction and technology course only to drop out of it soon after. He never studied at drama school but was spotted one day in the street by a woman and asked to try modelling. This lead to him appearing in a series of high-profile TV commercials for Heinz ketchup, Coca Cola and, most notably, as the Levi’s 501 man. His attempts to get into acting were less smooth. He spent a year in New York looking for work and even had to sell his furniture to pay for food. ‘I kept looking at other actors and saying, ‘What’s he got that I ain’t got? Some fancy drama-school diploma? I know I will never be the best actor in the world. But then, I don’t see it as a race to the top.’ Eventually he landed some small parts in soaps and sitcoms, and then in 1994 came the big one, Friends, which soon went to number one in the ratings in Britain and America.
While most American television comedies are pitiful and cringe-making, over the years a handful have been outstandingly well-honed: M+A+S+H, Taxi, Cheers and Frasier. Friends, with its crisp metropolitan humour, is in this category. And as the self-obsessed, dim-witted but amiable womaniser Joey Trebbiani, Matt le Blanc gets some corking lines. ‘Do you know what blows my mind?’ he’ll muse. ‘Women can see their breasts any time they want. How they get any work done is beyond me.’ Or when giving advice on dating he will say, ‘Why do you have to break up with her? Be a man and just stop phoning.’
In terms of delivery, of course, it helps that in real life Matt Le Blanc himself seems to be a self-obsessed, dim-witted but amiable womaniser. I had heard reports of his reputation as being the moody one among the cast of Friends and of his prima donna-ish behaviour, but there is none of that this evening, and when the conversation turns to his favourite pastime – snowboarding – he seems positively animated. Any dangerous sport will do, in fact. He collects fast cars and motorbikes and says, ‘I’m an adrenaline junkie. Love speed. I ski-dived – ski-dove? – as well. It’s like banging your head against a wall just because it feels so good when you stop.’ He pauses, ‘God, I’ve had a brain failure, where was I going with that thought? Oh, here we go; afterwards it’s so life-affirming. ‘Oh man, you think. I’m still alive. Wow!”
The restaurant is on the ground floor of the Four Seasons, the hotel where my wife and I are staying. She has declined my suggestion that she join us for a drink after dinner because she thinks Le Blanc will think that she, like every red-blooded female, must be desperate to meet him – and she does not carry out her threat to approach us at the bar, pretend not to know me, turn her back on Le Blanc and chat me up. We are joined instead after dinner, by a female friend of Le Blanc, who is also a friend of Kirstie Alley, and by one of his snowboarding chums – who has the obligatory permatan, dazzling white teeth and chiselled jaw. A lissom young woman with dyed blond hair and a spray-on skirt approaches and introduces herself to Le Blanc. He says hello rather curtly and then turns back to his friend to continue their analysis of a recent snowboard jump they have done. Another woman, almost identical, approaches and says that she cannot believe it is him and that if she had known he would be here tonight she would have worn more make-up. Ignored she goes away and another, with long black hair this time, approaches, giggles flirtatiously, and says she is called Melody or Misty, or one of those Californian names. She hangs around for a few seconds, ignoring Le Blanc’s peeved expressions, and says that she is sitting at a table in the corner if he fancies company later. Over the next hour or so about half a dozen more long-limbed women do the same thing.
Good grief.
In January, a law was passed in California banning smoking in restaurants and bars. Le Blanc and his chum head for the French windows that lead out on to a garden to have a smoke. Two skeletal pouting blondes appear from nowhere and make for the door with such indecent haste that the fronds on a nearby rubber plant bend over in their slipstream. I watch their body language as they ask Le Blanc for a light. It’s not subtle. I assume that this is the last I will see of the actor. But small talk over, cigarettes stubbed out, he and his friend mosey back over. I ask what he thought of the girls who had followed him out. He shakes his head wearily and sighs, ‘They’re not exactly rocket scientists.’
Well, I suppose by his standards the night is young. They are about to head off to hear a guitarist they know play in a nearby club. Kirstie Alley is going to be there, apparently. I’m welcome to join them, to discuss the latest developments in Space Shuttle heat-shield technology, presumably. I thank them awfully, yawn conspicuously, look at my watch and, like a goddam English stuffed shirt decline.

The surprise is that, in certain countries, Steven Spielberg gets mobbed whenever he’s spotted stepping out of a car or emerging from a hotel. Hair ruffled matily, congratulatory pats on back, autograph books thrust under nose. Not in Britain, obviously.  Because we’re a dignified and reserved people. But in certain countries. Mobbed.
Now, as Spielberg is the most successful film-maker in history – name credit on eight of the 15 biggest blockbusters – mobbing might be precisely what you would expect. Crowds do tend to behave embarrassingly when a celebrity is in their midst. But what this fails to take into account is the strange truth that 51-year-old Steven Spielberg is almost completely anonymous to behold.
I spent an hour studying him at close quarters as we talked about anti-Semitism and his childhood neuroses. He struck me as likeable man, unassuming and thoughtful. But at the end of that time I came away with only vague impressions of what he actually looked like. An Open University lecturer in physics, circa 1981, is about the best comparison I can offer. I’m confident there was a greying, neatly clipped beard involved. Oval-shaped, metal-framed glasses almost certainly came into it. And – I’m really just guessing about this – jeans and trainers may have been worn. But beyond that? Thomas Keneally once described him as having a face like a map of Poland, with stuck-on lips. And Martin Amis once mistook him for a Coke-machine fixer.
As to height, I’d say not especially tall. But this may just be because I’ve read somewhere that he is 5ft 8in. His body language is a bit defensive maybe, hunched shoulders, hands clasped between knees. And voice? I’ve no recollection whatsoever of what he sounded like. Even playing back my interview tape doesn’t really help. Perhaps it’s just that other famous directors contrive somehow to stand out from the crowd – Alfred Hitchcock had his droopy face and signature tune, Orson Welles his chipmunk cheeks, cloak and fedora, Woody Allen his thick glasses and adopted step-daughter – but with Spielberg you just look right past him.
When I arrive on a drizzling February morning at the log-cabin-effect Hollywood building where Spielberg works, I am led along corridors lined with the milestones of his career – a Jurassic Park dinosaur here, Jaws and Indiana Jones memorabilia there – and am left to wait in a room around which I immediately begin to snoop. A wooden beam. The thick impasto of a landscape painting. A russet-coloured kilim. A Steven Spielberg. A black upright piano. A framed ET storyboard. . . See? Rewind. Fourth item. While my back has been turned, Spielberg has insinuated himself into the room and is standing in the corner as unobtrusively as it is possible for a person to stand, short of not actually being in the room at all. ‘Ah,’ I say. Closely followed by a more reflective ‘Oh.’
The conversation picks up a bit after this and it soon emerges that Spielberg extends his views on the importance of being ordinary and anonymous in appearance to the details of his domestic life. It’s 10am and he has been up since six. ‘I have two school drops,’ he says. ‘The first is at seven, then I make breakfast for everyone and take the other three kids at eight. Life is not worth living if you can’t do car pool.’
Steven Spielberg and his second wife, actress Kate Capshaw, have seven children, of various provenance, who scamper about their light and airy $12-million second home in Pacific Palisades, California. Max, Spielberg’s oldest ‘biological’ child – as they say on the West Coast – was born in 1985. Two more recent additions to the family are adopted African-Americans – Theo, nine, and Mikaela George, two – and their father has just arranged a special screening for them of his latest film, Amistad, which is about the slave trade. ‘I really wanted my children to know about this story,’ the director says. ‘I was with them when they saw the film and my nine-year-old, Theo, who is black, felt a lot of compassion for Cinqué [the leader of the African captives] and really wanted to see him get back to Africa, to his wife. It made him appreciate the impact that slavery had on this country and on Africa as well.  But the other kids thought there wasn’t enough action in the film. Too much talk!’
The intention, he adds, is for the overall composition of the film to resemble a still-life tableau, so that nothing distracts from the power of the set speeches. There are, however, some shocking and dramatic scenes woven in as well – notably when we see the Africans being whipped, starved and chained together in the cargo hold of the slave ship. As with the more graphic scenes in the multi-Oscar-winning Schindler’s List, the modest idea behind this, according to the director, is to force vast audiences to confront the full horror of the crimes of history in order to avoid repeating them.
The film has been criticised for presenting the history of the abolitionist movement from a rather self-congratulatory white perspective. ‘I don’t see it that way,’ Spielberg says after a pause. ‘I felt everyone had to share in the pride of an American Supreme Court which, except for one dissenting vote, turned these Africans back to the freedom they were born with. I felt a wave of patriotism at that. Amistad is really about the beginning of the moral conscience of America.’
Spielberg does not conclude that there is a natural condition in man that inclines him toward the exploitation of others. ‘I’m a bit more optimistic than that,’ he says. ‘I always look on the bright side. I wasn’t being cynical when I made Amistad. I just feel man hasn’t evolved far enough. I mean, the Holocaust was only 54 years ago.’
Spielberg has a benign image. On the one hand, thanks to films like ET, he represents wholesome all-American family values. On the other, with films such as The Color Purple and Schindler’s List, he is seen as a liberal-minded humanitarian. When it became known that he was planning a film about the Holocaust the intelligentsia in America was appalled. They assumed that the archetypal Hollywood populist would be far too shallow to do justice to the subject. Taking a similar view, the World Jewish Congress objected to him filming on the site of Auschwitz – eventually he was allowed to film outside the gates.
He had, of course, set himself a seemingly impossible task and, in choosing to give an account of the Holocaust through a story which had a positive ending, he knew he was leaving himself open to charges of trivialisation. ‘I was aware of that,’ he now says. ‘And I was nervous about it. It did take me ten years to start work on Schindler’s List and part of that was due to my fear that I wasn’t going to be able to acquit myself in a manner that would bring anything less than shame to the memory of the Holocaust. I didn’t want to belittle or trivialise it. I worked hard not to soften it or make it easy to watch.  The film doesn’t have a positive ending. You know the victims will be ravaged with nightmares for the rest of their lives.’
‘For many survivors the nightmare began with liberation,’ Spielberg explains. ‘Because that was when they had a chance to assess their losses. When they were in Auschwitz or Treblinka they didn’t know for sure whether the rest of their families were dead.’ Twenty members of Spielberg’s family were murdered in the concentration camps. Both his parents’ parents were European Jews; his father’s side of the family coming from an area of Austria which is now a part of Poland, and his mother’s side from Odessa in the Ukraine. Spielberg thinks of himself as Jewish-American, he says.  But his Jewish identity was not really something that concerned him until he made Schindler’s List. Perhaps there was an element of denial in this. After all, as a child growing up in an affluent white neighbourhood of Cincinnati, he says, he encountered a lot of anti-Semitism. A gang of school-children once gathered outside his family home chanting, ‘The Spielbergs are dirty Jews.’ Classmates would cough the word Jew into their hands when they passed by him. One day he retaliated against his Jew-hating neighbours by smearing peanut butter on their windows.
His father, Arnold Spielberg, was a pioneering computer engineer and was always having to move house because of his work – from Ohio to New Jersey, then to Arizona and finally northern California. Wherever the family went they met racism, sometimes violent. At one point, the young Steven would have to be picked up from school by his parents every day, even though he was walking distance from home. At another, following regular anti-Semitic remarks about the size of his nose, he would attempt to stop it growing downward by tying it back with tape. ‘The nature of the anti-Semitism was always lack of education,’ he now reflects. ‘Not understanding what a Jew is. Anti-Semites invest a lot of ethnic, cultural stereotype and evil to something that scares them. Fear of my unknown. The effect it had on me was to turn me into a loner. It made me withdrawn and self-conscious and even turned me away from my family, who I was angry at for making me a Jew… I think I would have been a social reject anyway, even if I had been Protestant or Lutheran or Episcopalian. I would still have been introverted.’
For all his introversion, Steven Spielberg managed to be assertive at home. He has three younger sisters and, he admits, he would bully them, in part as a form of compensation for being bullied himself at school. After leaving school, he turned to films as a way of expressing himself and also as a form of escapism. Aged 21, he started loitering around the Universal Pictures lot and even squatted in an empty office until he got his amateur home movies seen by someone. They were deemed impressive enough for him to be offered a television contract – which meant him having to drop out of a degree in English at California State College. Folklore has it that he didn’t even stop to clean out his locker. He made Duel in 1971, and four years later made Jaws, the highest-grossing film of its time.
The chutzpah does not seem consistent with lack of self-esteem. Even so, to this day, Spielberg protests that he is basically very shy. ‘I work overtime to put up a faade to persuade people that I am not shy,’ he says. ‘I know how to break the ice better than I used to – but I still have a shaky stomach before I go to a party, even before I sit down for dinner with close friends. I’m always tongue-tied for the first ten minutes. Now, if I meet people for the first time who feel intimidated by me – and so don’t make eye contact – that makes me feel uncomfortable. Two people standing there who don’t know what to say to each other. That happens a lot.’
More incongruous still is the reputation shy Steven Spielberg has acquired for being ruthless with people who cross him – a producer who tried to take more credit that she deserved was summarily dropped, for instance. There were occasions, too, when in a fit of pique, the introverted director would storm off a film set. Perhaps it is more a matter of his overcompensating for what he perceives as being his social shortcomings. Then again, before he made Schindler’s List, Spielberg was often dismissed as an arch-manipulator of audience emotion, one who merely wallowed in maudlin sentimentality. He used never to read reviews of his work but claims now not to care unduly about what critics say of him. And while he believes part of his new found interest in history comes from an increasing awareness of his own mortality, paradoxically he says he is not concerned about his place in the history books. This doesn’t quite square with the liberal image-consciousness that inclines him to keep very quiet about the fact he has amassed a fine gun collection of old and new weapons. Nor does it explain the rumour that he has been buying up all the homes he lived in as a child with a view to turning them into Spielberg shrines, in the manner of Shakespeare’s birthplace.
‘I’m not that concerned about being remembered about my place in history,’ he says. ‘I don’t write my own epitaph every day. I was really satisfied with ET. It’s the most personal movie I ever made. The story of my childhood. I knew that even if I just carried on making sequels to Indiana Jones I would always have ET.’ ET, he points out, is less about a cute extraterrestrial coming to Earth, more about the nature of divorce in America. In the film, the boy’s parents are divorced and his father is always away from home. ET is his way of filling the void. For his part, Spielberg found his parents’ constant rowing and eventual divorce traumatic. He would stuff towels under the door to keep out the noise of their bickering. The house, he says, was pervaded with a sense of unhappiness.
His parents are still alive: his mother, Leah, remarried and now, aged 78, runs a kosher restaurant; his father married again last year, at the age of 80. Wearily Spielberg says that he didn’t really learn from his parents’ marital mistakes. His first marriage, to actress Amy Irving, ended in divorce, with Irving walking off with a $100-million settlement.  ‘My divorce?’ he says. ‘Yeah, I don’t really want to talk about that. It’s personal. But I think that, even though it sometimes strengthens the character, children from a divorced home are always damaged.’ According to Spielberg’s biographer Andrew Yule, the damage in the director’s case may have taken the form of a whole basket of neuroses – from nail-biting to phobias about insects, flying, the ocean, the dark, lifts, even of furniture with feet. ‘I’m no longer afraid of the dark,’ Spielberg now says. ‘Because that is where I screen my movies. But I’m still afraid of lifts. It’s a runaround sometimes.’ He emits a short laugh. ‘I have to go through so much hassle to take the stairs. I have to get people to unlock stairwells. Especially in Paris, where the lifts are so small. I walk ten floors to avoid them. Don’t know why it is. I’m not in analysis. Not an analysis kind of guy. I just have a fear of small spaces.’ He doesn’t think it’s to do with a fear of losing control, though, because he says he doesn’t mind driving in traffic where the actions of on-coming cars are unpredictable.
In terms of his career, though, whether it is because he is adept at controlling events or not, Spielberg has barely put a foot wrong. Will Amistad mark a departure from this phenomenal record? Spielberg claims to be concerned only that its message is put across, not that it makes a lot of money. But he doesn’t deny that much is riding on the film in terms of reputation: not least because it is the first Spielberg-directed production for Dreamworks, the Hollywood studio that he set up two years ago in partnership with music potentate David Geffen and former Disney chief Jeffrey Katzenberg. Some $2.7 billion has been invested in the company and it has been hailed as the first major studio to be founded in Hollywood since Charlie Chaplin helped set up United Artists in 1919. Its first feature – The Peacemaker – didn’t exactly break box-office records when it was released last autumn.
Richard Dreyfuss, star of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, once described Spielberg as a kid of 12 who decided to make movies – and is still 12. Spielberg is prescient enough to agree that he didn’t really mature as a film-maker until he made Schindler’s List. Whether he has retained any vestiges of childish self-aggrandising, shallowness and manipulation, though, is a matter for future historians to debate. After all, Spielberg is only 51.
This appeared in February 1998. Stephen Spielberg and Dreamworks went on to make the multi-Oscar-award-winning Saving Private Ryan, American Beauty and Gladiator. Spielberg was awarded a knighthood in 2000 and ran into trouble from LA planners after trying to built a five-storey stable for his wife’s horses.

The people of Argentina haven’t yet erected a statue in honour of Andy Summers, but it can only be a matter of time. The lad’s a folk hero to them; Eva Peron with an electric guitar and a broken nose. Indeed, he has just returned home after playing a string of concerts down there and still hasn’t quite got over the number of Argentinean men who came up wanting to touch him, kiss him on both cheeks and, curiously enough, stroke his jacket. Never women, just middle-aged men; with big moustaches.

Home for Lancashire-born Andy Summers is a spacious, orange- and-green coloured open-plan house in Santa Monica, California. He shares it with Kate, the woman he married (twice), their two young twins, Maurice and Anton, and their Chihuahua, Ren. It’s a two-minute walk from the beach and, though the sky is overcast on the morning of my visit, the breeze coming in off the Pacific is gentle and warm. Not that you’d know it from the way that Summers hunches his shoulders, turns up the collar on his black leather jacket and cups his hands around a steaming mug of Starbucks coffee as he sits out on his terrace.
Here, with a mock rueful shake of his head, he recalls the incident which made him a hero in Argentina. It was in 1981, just before the Falklands War. The Police, then the most commercially successful rock band in the world, were playing a concert in a theatre which looked more like a maximum security prison. Armed policemen were patrolling the aisles, tapping their batons into the palms of their hands and making sure that none of the fans in the audience got out of their seats. A young girl suddenly rushed toward the stage, only to be grabbed and beaten up by a hefty, moustachioed policeman. When Summers saw this, he crossed to the front of the stage and kicked the policeman square in the face. ‘I did this,’ he now says, standing up and miming playing a guitar while delivering a kick, ‘completely spontaneous and completely foolish. The crowd went wild. Rose as one. And Sting sidled over and said to me [he adopts a husky Sting voice]: ‘Er, I think they’re going to arrest you, Andy.’
Backstage, five plainclothes policemen came to see Summers. One grabbed him by the throat, pulled him off the ground and threw him against the lockers. The quivering Summers apologised, agreed to have his photograph taken for the local papers shaking hands with the injured policeman, and was released with a caution. His act of violence seems to have been wholly out of character  — to meet him, you can’t imagine a more equable, amiable fellow. But to the wildly romantic, oppressed youth of Argentina — mostly men who’re now middle-aged and wearing moustaches — Summers became an unlikely symbol of fortitude, rebellion and hope in the face of tyranny.
On the false idol front, it probably helps that Summers appears not to have aged a day since the mid-Eighties, when the Police broke up and the fickle spotlight of fame suddenly dimmed on him. At 55 (Heavens! And him a one-time punk, too!) he looks healthy and permatanned, with scarcely a wrinkle around his heavily lidded eyes. His mousy-coloured hair is no longer dyed blond, the trademark of his former band, but it’s still pretty spiky. Always looked young for his age, though, has Andy Summers.
He grew up in Bournemouth — where his late father ran a café  — and his first job after leaving school there was playing guitar during the intervals at the town’s jazz club. He was 17 but everyone thought he was 12. Perhaps it was something to do with his having inherited the genes that determine height from his mother. (She still lives in Bournemouth and has a phone call from her son most mornings — today she had been complaining about her brevity of stature and how, with each passing day, she seems to be shrinking ever more.) Then again, when the three members of the Police — Sting, Summers and the drummer Stewart Copeland — reformed briefly in 1992 for an impromptu version of ‘Message in a Bottle’ at Sting’s wedding, guests were astonished that the 50-year-old Summers still only looked about 30. Light-hearted speculation among guests about Summers having had a face-lift was inevitable — although, given Sting’s sensitivity at the time on the subject of plastic surgery, it’s doubtful whether anyone speculated in front of the host.
Perhaps guests expected Andy Summers to look more like the grey-faced but elegantly wasted Keith Richards.  After all, in the Sixties he did do his fair share of substance abuse  — when, that is, he wasn’t busy being a leading exponent of the creed of free love. This may come as a shock to those who equate their youth with the punk era, but snarling Andy Summers was in fact a hippie interloper who, in an earlier incarnation, was guilty of possessing shoulder-length hair and a purple cloak, experimenting with LSD after an encounter with the Animals, and jamming with Jimi Hendrix. Summers played lead; Hendrix, improbable though it may seem, played bass. ‘Can you believe it?’ Summers now says with another shake of his head. ‘Weird.’
Summers had made the move from genteel Bournemouth to Swinging London with his musician friend Zoot Money and together, in 1964, they formed the modestly successful Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band and soon replaced Georgie Fame as the resident group at the Flamingo Club in Soho. Summers has vague memories of knife fights next to the stage and crowds composed mostly of prostitutes and drug-dealers. The band eventually split up and the two friends left to form the psychedelic rock group Dantalian’s Chariot. Summers’s only reliable memory of this period was that he broke his nose in a car crash while touring in Yorkshire. In 1968 he left to join Soft Machine, a Dadaist band notorious for playing one riff called ‘We did it again’, which they did again and again for 30 minutes until the audience went into a trance, or the band was booed off stage. Later that year he joined Eric Burdon of the Animals to form the New Animals. This lasted for nine months — on the most memorable day of which Eric Burdon seduced Summers’s girlfriend, a model, while Summers was out of it, man, on acid.  One legacy of this period is the flower-power vocabulary that Summers is wont to slip into. He still calls money ‘bread’. He still says things like ‘this scene’ and, ‘I was really getting into a moment’ and ‘It was, like, really really heavy.’ At least when he catches himself he has the decency to look embarrassed and add, ‘That sounds American, doesn’t it?’
We have now moved through the main reception area, decked with canvases of colourful abstracts painted by Summers, to his study, the walls of which are lined with books, the surfaces scattered with records and CDs. But there are no glass cabinets in the house displaying what would now surely be an historically edifying collection of Summers’s hippie trouserings and shirtings. ‘I did keep one coat which was like a wizard’s outfit,’ he reflects, a Dorset inflection still discernible in his voice. ‘Velvet and gold. But I don’t know where it is now.’ His voice trails off.  Then, recovering his thoughts on the theme: ‘I think, yeah, there was a more reckless spirit then.’
Like Sir Paul McCartney and George Harrison, Summers is pretty scathing about the Beatles tribute band Oasis — dismissing Noel Gallagher as ‘George Formby with an electric guitar’. But, a fading rock star’s prerogative, he is equally unimpressed by the Sixties counter-culture today’s bands aspire to. ‘Now if you are a young musician starting out, it’s all been done. Everyone knows which drug has which effect. Whereas when we started out it was genuine experimentation.  Those that survived all have children and they’re warning, “Don’t mix this with that.” You know, a lot wiser.’
Summers has kept diary jottings all his adult life, which he thinks would be fun to turn into a book one day. The entries for the New Wave period are interesting, he says, but the real colour is from the Sixties. If ever he writes the book, one of the more colourful chapters will concern his experiences with groupies. Summers admits to sleeping with dozens of them — and one, Jenny Fabian, even wrote a bestselling book, Groupie, in which she records some of his exploits. He laughs when I ask why he thinks women fell for him in such profusion. ‘Well, when you’re debonair and handsome it helps,’ he says, framing his face with his hands. He bumped into Fabian again after a Police concert near Dublin. She was breeding greyhounds for a living.
Chance encounters happen to Andy Summers quite a lot.  And it’s not surprising really given that, like Woody Allen’s human chameleon character, Zelig, he appears to have insinuated himself into almost every pop tableau. Indeed, hours of harmless amusement could be harvested from playing the game Six Degrees of Separation with Summers’s musical career. He’s connected to just about every rock star you can think of, even if, in some cases, it’s three or four stages removed. He would get to Ringo Starr in two stages: Ringo co-starred with David Essex in That’ll Be the Day. Summers played guitar in David Essex’s band briefly in the mid-Seventies. David Soul? Two stages again. In the early Seventies, Summers shared a flat in California with Paul Michael Glaser, Soul’s co-star in Starsky and Hutch. Dana? Too easy. He once appeared as the Eurovision Song Contest winner’s backing musician on a television programme.
Understandably, the Museum of Rock which Bill Gates is founding will have a special section devoted to Andy Summers. He is, after all, an influential guitarist, with a sophisticated signature style which other musicians say they find almost impossible to copy. And yet, until the Police, Summers had never really made his mark. ‘My peers had been Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck,’ he says with a shrug. ‘That was the period I came from and I thought I was as good as everyone else but, for some reason, it had never really happened for me. I hadn’t been in the right band at the right time. So at the start of the Seventies I came to the States and dropped out.’
With five dollars in his pocket, he claims, he married an American singer, Robin Lane and, for three years, studied classical guitar at Northridge University in California. His marriage broke up and, in despond, he spent weeks at a time rarely bothering to get out of bed. He returned to England in 1973 and found work as guitarist for, yes, you haven’t guessed it, Neil Sedaka. In 1974, when Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones, Summers was tipped by the music press for the job — along with Ron Wood (who got it).  Finally, in 1977, fate gave Summers a soothing neck massage when he joined the Police.
‘Before I joined I went to see Sting and Stewart play and they were patently not a punk band,’ he says. ‘They sort of looked the part, but they weren’t coming off as authentic at all. But it didn’t matter because people gobbed on them anyway. I’ve probably got a picture of us backstage at the Marquee covered in spit.’ He leans back on his chair as he rummages around in the bookshelves behind him looking for the photograph. He can’t find it. For a year, he says, things were desperate. ‘We were putting up our own posters and spraying our own graffiti. So many times we ended up pushing the van because we ran out of petrol.’
Finally, one night in 1978, when the Police were supporting the comedy rock band Albertos y los Trios Paranoias at a concert in Bath, about a thousand punks turned up to see them. ‘The place erupted,’ Summers recalls. ‘Total mayhem. Girls throwing their knickers on stage. The poor Albertos were standing on the side of the stage with white faces muttering “Bastards!” That’s when we knew something was happening. I remember going home and telling Kate, ‘You wouldn’t believe it. A total riot.”’
Summers had married his second wife, Kate, an American psychology graduate, in 1973. They had their first baby, Layla, in 1978, were divorced in 1981, then remarried in 1985 and had the twins. Summers believed at the time that when you are on the road for a three-month stretch and women were throwing themselves at you, promiscuity was inevitable. Thus he had an unspoken agreement with his wife. ‘Pressures on marriage?’ Summers says. ‘Yeah, it was very difficult to hold all that together with Kate. We were never off the road. It had a happy ending though.  We remarried in LA. A fancy Buddhist wedding on our lawn. Sounds very Californian, doesn’t it?’ (Not the way he says it. ‘Boodist’. Then again, he’s not really a practising one.) ‘We just sort of knew this Boodist guy who did Boodist weddings,’ he adds.
A pergola of electric orange and red flowers runs from the front door of the house, alongside the lawn — where the family stand during LA earth-tremors — to the main reception area. Summers’s blond twins now walk up it with Jane, their nose-studded English nanny. They have been at a ‘sleepover’, and one of them, Anton Y, has somehow managed to rip his trousers from waistband to ankle. Summers’s children have a single initial instead of a middle name — Maurice X, Anton Y, and Layla Z — because he liked the idea of them being called XYZ, but couldn’t find names to fit.  Since the Police broke up, Summers has made eight solo albums, mostly mellow jazz and what music critics would call ‘ambient, textural rock’. One was titled XYZ, after his children’s middle initials.
With shy giggles and strong Californian accents, Beavis and Butthead, as their father now calls the twins, ask if they’re allowed to go on their bikes to get a pizza. When their father asks if they’ve ever been allowed to go on their own, they chorus, ‘Mommy lets us go. We’ve done it a million times.’ Summers calls their bluff and, after asking the nanny to prepare lunch for them, suggests we go to his favourite bar-and-grill on Venice Beach. It’s just around the corner from his studio — and he needs to pop in there afterwards to check on a leaky roof he’s having repaired. In his purring saloon car, a black Toyota Infiniti, Summers slips his sunglasses on and chuckles about how in his Police days he would travel everywhere by limo and the band even had its own plane. ‘In the end we were going around with 75 people on the tour — riggers, lighters, electricians — you become like the calm spot at the centre of the hurricane. There was a party every night after the gig. It was relentless. We decided we were either going to have to get fit or take more drugs to keep alive. We were on a downward cycle. Touring is killing.’
At the restaurant he bumps into a few of his friends, has a chat and orders steak and fries and a glass of red wine. He recalls further anecdotes from his touring days. At a Glasgow concert, police charged fans three times to prevent a riot. And Summers heard of one fan who tried to slash her wrists because she couldn’t get to meet the band. ‘Girls used to camp outside our houses,’ he says, adding with a philosophical grin, ‘actually, come to think of it, it was mostly Sting that got all that.’
Off-stage, the tension between Sting and Copeland became difficult to disguise. They regularly had fist fights, some of which Andy Summers would film on Copeland’s home movie camera. There was rivalry between all three band members, though, about things as petty as who should have the most prominent position in publicity photographs. That Summers and Copeland were receiving the same percentage of the royalties as Sting, who wrote all the songs, didn’t help matters. There were many reasons for the band to split, but it has entered pop folklore that it really happened because Summers, the peacemaker, could no longer keep the two huge, warring egos of Copeland and Sting apart.
The now clean-living, yoga-practising Sting says that, at the time, his personality was changed by the amount of cocaine he was taking. In his own words, he became depressed, paranoid and a complete bastard to be around. ‘Yeah,’ Summers says with a smile. ‘He always likes to paint that picture. I take it with a pinch of salt. He is who he is. Very talented, a brilliant musician, but, you know, he is Machiavellian. He calculates everything and is decisive, so I think he says and does what he needs to, to get to the next stage.’
When the Police disbanded, Sting threw himself into his solo career and environmental campaigning, Copeland wrote film scores and played polo, and Summers took up photography and painting. ‘I ended up back in London and it was like, “Now what?”’ he says. ‘It was a bit like walking off a cliff. Took me a while to take in the whole experience and process it, as Americans say. It was a couple of years before I could stand up and walk again.’
He and Sting still see each other every few months and, in recent years, each has guested on the other’s solo albums and turned up to perform the odd song at each other’s concerts. Copeland lives in LA, and he and Summers talk every week, especially since a rap reworking of ‘Every Breath You Take’ got to number one recently and the ‘Greatest Hits of Sting and the Police’ album came out in December. ‘The Police as a business goes on for ever,’ Summers says. ‘We quit while we were ahead. Then again I think there was still a lot of juice left in the band. I think what we should have done is gone out every three years and done gigs together but still had solo records. But that wasn’t to be. Trouble is, that’s all you’re ever known for. It’s hard to get beyond that — which is sort of what has happened to me,’ he laughs the mirthless laugh. ‘It’s a blessing and a curse.’
Summers’s new contemporary jazz album, ‘The Last Dance of Mr X’, is about to be released in Britain. It features his own compositions alongside a few covers including Charlie Mingus’s ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ and Thelonius Monk’s ‘We See’. It’s pretty subtle stuff and it’s had good reviews in America — but when he played tracks from it on tour there recently he found audiences still wanted him to include Police songs. He expects the same will happen when he tours Europe this spring. ‘When I play a Police song, the crowd goes wild,’ he says. ‘It’s a gesture. But you don’t have to spend a whole night doing it.’ Sting finds he has to do the same at his concerts. Inevitably, then, there is speculation that the band will get back together. ‘This seems a particularly hot moment to re-form,’ Summers says with as nonchalant a shrug as he can muster. ‘It would be great fun. It would have to be. We couldn’t go out there and be at each other’s throats again. So who knows? For Sting I think it would be a very good career move because he has nothing to prove now as a solo performer. Everyone knows he can do it. I think it would be a good healing process all round — that sounds very American, doesn’t it?’
Myth or not, it’s easy to believe that Summers was the one to patch things up in the band. He has an easy laugh and an affable, unassuming manner. Later, at his studio, he picks up one of the 90 guitars stacked around the soundproofed walls, sits down on a long sofa beside me and, eyes closed, plays — quite beautifully — a couple of the more wistful compositions from his new album. It’s an acoustic guitar and, from this close, I can hear that as he plays he emits a tiny snuffling sound to himself, a sort of involuntary sighing noise that comes from the back of his throat. Perhaps it’s a veteran’s trick, but he seems to get so absorbed in his playing that, when he stops, he looks slightly disoriented.
We walk up to the roof terrace of the studio, and Summers shows me where he has had to have leaks sealed. Rainwater had run right through to the recording equipment, two floors down. In the fading afternoon light we stand in companionable silence surveying the palm trees along Venice Beach. Stars and Stripes flap from flagpoles on the surrounding rooftops. ‘That’s Dudley Moore’s restaurant down there,’ Summers says, in a distant sort of way, pointing at a faded looking building across the street below us. ‘It’s funny, you know,’ he adds. ‘I’ve been introduced to him three times but he never seems to remember me.’ We fall into silent reverie again, our thoughts lost in contemplation of this strangely melancholic observation.

With a slow sideways glance I take in the silvering hair and craggy profile of the Yorkshireman sitting on my side of a round dining-table in the airy elegance of Bibendum in Chelsea. For several minutes I’ve been lost in my thoughts, imagining him propping up a bar in a working men’s club in Barnsley, and only vaguely listening to him on the theme of how t’ bloody presenters today don’t know they’re born, how you can’t find t’ bloody producers any more, and how t’ bloody guests aren’t up to much either.
I’ve been nodding distractedly, contributing in my head the odd ‘aye’ or ”appen, tha’s right’ whenever they’ve seemed appropriate. But now he’s talking about how there’s never been an interviewer to match old Parky. Now, he could ask a question. And listen to the answer. Knew the art of conversation, you see. A proper journalist. Not like these daft young buggers you get nowadays.
As he’s talking, I almost forget that the man is actually Michael Parkinson in person, and that he’s not wearing a donkey jacket and sipping Tetley’s but a blazer and Armani tie, and is sipping an agreeably crisp, perfectly chilled Premier Cru Chablis ’94.
The daydream is possibly only because of the way the 62-year-old puts you at ease by transporting you metaphysically to his home turf. As he talks, he leans toward you conspiratorially, inviting you to follow his eye in looking out over the other diners, as if it’s us against them, the rest of the world. And you find yourself agreeing with his things-aren’t-what-they-used-to-be prejudices; and laughing at his too-close-to-the-knuckle Bernard Manning impersonations; and glowing when he asks you about yourself and has the decency at least to sound as if he’s interested in your answer.
He makes you appreciate (in a manly, back-slapping, locker-room way, you understand) why television’s Mrs Merton was moved to break away from her prepared questions to him, chew her lip earnestly and blurt out, ‘Oh Parky, I think I love you.’ And this effect he has on people is the reason why 12 million viewers regularly watched the talk show he hosted from 1971 to 1982. It’s why his guests, lulled into a sense of intimacy despite the cameras, were always so keen to come back on, year after year (thereby, in the manner of Rembrandt, leaving behind a self-portrait of themselves growing old). And it’s why the long-awaited return of Parkinson, which begins a new, 20-week series in January, is being hailed as the television equivalent of Elvis Presley’s ‘Comeback Special’ in 1968.
But Parkinson’s relaxed, saloon-bar manner is only part of the appeal. The prospect of a glimpse of his dark underbelly is also what keeps you watching: the arrogance, the bluntness, the volatile nature that has our man weeping with laughter one moment and looking so angry he might grab a guest by the lapels the next. Over lunch he lays the coarse, bluff, speak-as-I-find Yorkshireman stuff on pretty thick – as you’d expect – but it’s only a slight exaggeration of what is really there. The word ‘bloody’ is used 14 times, ‘bugger’ eight (including two ‘daft buggers’) and ‘bollocks’ three. The easy and cynical explanation for why he does this – and the one he himself gives – is that being a professional northerner is how he makes his living. But he also does it, you suspect, because he genuinely does need to remind himself – and us – that he is Jack and Freda Parkinson’s lad, an only child who grew up in a council house in the Yorkshire pit village of Cudworth, near Barnsley. And his reasons for wanting to do this are altogether more Byzantine.
His father, who died in 1975, was one of 17 children. He went down the pit when he was 12 and, to discourage his son from doing the same, took him down in the Grimethorpe cage one Sunday. The sight of men working on their bellies in a three-foot-by-six seam, breathing in coal dust, terrified the young Michael Parkinson. When he mumbled that he didn’t fancy working there after all, his father, relieved, told him that if he ever changed his mind he’d kick his arse all the way home.
‘It was an awful bloody life,’ Parkinson says. ‘My father used to tip up and be given back half a crown a week from my mother. People talk about pressure today. I mean, you hear some frigging footballer complaining. Pressure? My father had to be up at four. You didn’t get paid till you reached the seam. You’d been walking for three bloody hours before you got there, then you’d spend the day on your hands and knees a mile underground.’
Such conditions may seem like the stuff of Monty Python parody today, but it is sobering to hear someone who actually knew that life reflect upon it. Parkinson went back to Grimethorpe this summer and found the mine had been concreted over and half the shops boarded up. The trip left him with mixed feelings. Mining is a brutish way to earn a living, he says, and if other employment had been found for the community he wouldn’t mourn its passing. But he has warm memories of waiting outside the Working Men’s Institute for his father, listening to the ‘bloody marvellous’ singing inside. His watery blue eyes crease at the sides and his whiskery eyebrows do a tango as he goes on to recall his father’s distinctive laugh. ‘He would embarrass me in movies by laughing so loud he would be asked to leave by the manager.’
When asked whether he thinks his personality would have been the same if he had followed his father down the pit, Parkinson broods for a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ he concludes. ‘Never thought about it. I look at some of my friends, though, when I go back to Barnsley, and I think I wouldn’t have minded being them. They’re a bright lot. I’d have still voted the way I do. I’d have still thought the same about the MCC. I would still not have believed in the honours system. I’d have hated rudeness. And causing offence. All the fundamental things that I learned on my father’s knee would still be there.’
With a wry look around the restaurant, Parkinson muses that whenever he took his father to such a place he would never dare show him a menu with the prices on or let him see the bill. ‘But he wouldn’t be bothered by it. We were once in a place like this and he came out of the  toilet and said, “Ay up, there’s a lad in there who knows you.” And it turned out he’d been standing next to a stranger at the urinal and just came out and asked, “Do you know my lad, Michael Parkinson?” He was very proud. He used to love the fact that I would meet all these old birds he had fancied on the silver screen. I’ve just started dreaming about him, as it happens. Nice pleasant dreams, where he’s part of the family still. But the awful thing is, when I wake up it comes as a shock that he’s not alive.’
For the son, the family sin of pride seems to have evolved into an attitude to the effect that, however much those effete southerners tried to patronise him, he knew he was just as good as them, if not better. This would account for his stubborn refusal to go native. Despite the urbane media world Parkinson has inhabited for much of his adult life, he has never succumbed to liberal correctness. At one point he says the reason there hasn’t been a successful women talk-show host is that they find it difficult to unhook their corsets and let the cellulite out. Imagine his fellow professional northerner Melvyn Bragg saying that. Later, to illustrate why the timing of a joke is more important than its content, Parkinson repeats a Bernard Manning joke about racial minorities, knowing how provocative it will seem in print but not really caring. He then laughs so hard, while banging the table with the flat of his hand, that flecks of spittle appear at the corners of his mouth.
It is telling, too, that, despite living in the south for most of his life, Parkinson’s flat northern vowels have never really softened much. ‘I kept my accent because it was economically viable to do so,’ he says. ‘No sense in changing it. When I started at Granada TV in the Sixties everyone had a northern accent. It was the same time as the Beatles and all the northern playwrights and actors. Tom Courtenay. Albert Finney. People who spoke posh were trying to affect Yorkshire accents. Before that I would have been lucky to get a job as a doorman at the BBC. There was a new hierarchy. Jack was becoming as good as his master.’
Keeping the accent, then, seems to have required conscious effort. And the determination not to assimilate seems to have been fuelled by a very Yorkshire trait which southerners are wont to misinterpret as chippiness: a superiority complex. This reveals itself in the way that Parkinson refers to his famous guess by their surnames alone. Welles. Burton. Ali. Lennon. And in this he reminds you of Frank ‘Oi! No!’ Doberman, the thuggish Harry Enfield character who sits in a pub proving he’s just as good as the celebrities he rants about by refusing to use the first names they’re always known by – as in ‘Black’ rather than ‘Cilla Black’. At one stage, the similarity becomes too much for me and I nearly choke on my Chablis. ‘I’m a great admirer of Harris,’ Parkinson says of Rolf Harris. ‘He’s talented, energetic and kind. And I’m delighted that he is considered hip now. And he’s a great friend. But. There was one time when he came on to my show and…’ Your imagination finishes the sentence: Oi! Harris! No!
‘But if you’re asking would I have been different brought up in genteel Surbiton the answer would be yes. Very different indeed. Down here is still in my mind where the fat cats are. And it’s good to succeed and become a fat cat. Why not? I don’t trample on people. I’ve never been a jealous type. But I’m competitive and I have encountered snobbery about my background from people at the BBC.’
This reached its peak when Parkinson took over Desert Island Discs, from 1986 to 1988, after the death of Roy Plomley. ‘The fact that Plomley was the worst bloody interviewer in the world had nothing to do with it,’ he says. ‘The worst thing was that his widow began a one-woman campaign to preserve the memory of her husband and she started complaining, “What is this crude northern oik doing walking on my husband’s grave? The accent is too common.” I was too wily to respond then. But she was… nasty.’
He doesn’t need to say so directly, but Parkinson clearly believes he is the ‘best bloody interviewer in the world’ because of his background in journalism. After leaving Barnsley Grammar School at the age of 16 he began work as a reporter on the Yorkshire Evening Post. He soon made it down to Fleet Street, via the Manchester Guardian, and recalls how, callow and wide-eyed, he would sit at the back in pubs getting silently drunk as he listened to the big-name journalists he had hero-worshipped since childhood regale everyone at the crowded bar with their anecdotes. Since 1991 he has been writing a sports column for the Daily Telegraph. And even journalists not interested in sport would have to acknowledge that as an example of how to write vividly, evocatively and unpretentiously it takes some beating.
‘I find writing the most satisfying thing I do,’ he says. ‘I hate watching myself on television. And I never listen to a broadcast I’ve done on radio. But I always reread everything I’ve written. Over and over and over again. And every time I do I always say, “You daft bugger, why did you use that word there?” Sub-editors hate me. But in the end you’ve signed that document and it’s going to be around for ever. All that tomorrow’s chip-paper stuff is nonsense.’
With characteristic frankness he says the main reason he was tempted into television is that it pays so well. ‘I can earn more from one TV show, Antique Quiz, than I can in six months of writing that column. I’m not making a judgement. But that’s the proposition put to you. The reason I have stayed in newspapers anyway is because that’s what I am. My passport says journalist. I’m proud to be one. I know how to do it.’
That said, he believes one advantage which the television interview has over the newspaper one is that the viewers can make their own minds up. ‘They can sit there watching a guest and think, “You lying shit.”’ He thinks for instance that the many interviews he did with Kenneth Williams revealed the comedian’s true cold side. ‘I didn’t like Williams and he didn’t like me. And it showed. I wouldn’t be so rude as to say that if he was alive, but it’s true. Towards the end, we were like two sniffing dogs. The first time we met he wrote in his diary that I was a vulgar North Country nit. The trick was to get him with good company, like Maggie Smith, so that he would show off.’
With a characteristic lack of modesty, Parkinson goes on to admit that he was no slouch when it came to getting the best out of his female guest, too. The man who has been described as having the sexiest eyes in television says, ‘I used to flirt outrageously with Shirley Maclean and she with me. Outrageously. And with Raquel Welch.’
He says that if he worked in television in America he would have to  have plastic surgery, but you know he knows that he’s still in pretty good shape and still has that twinkle in his eye. He has been married for 18 years to Mary. They live at Bray, by the Thames in Berkshire, in the house where they brought up their three sons (now in their late twenties and early thirties, they work in publishing, radio and the food and beverage industry). Mary Parkinson once described how Michael would splash aftershave on his face, adjust his tie, wink at the mirror and say ‘By gum, you’re a handsome bugger, Parky.’ It was intended as a tease to his wife – who would retaliate that he was ‘a miserable bugger, more like’ – but it is, you suspect, what he really thinks.
In marriage, he says, you have to expect choppy water. ‘All this bollocks that you can live together without ever having a cross word. You  muddle through.’ He has said that whenever he rows with his wife he is always the first to make up. When his wife also took a job as a presenter on television, he said, he couldn’t help feeling a twinge of resentment. And there have been times when, like all journalists, he’s drunk too much and become maudlin, but on such occasions he has tended to explode and then feel remorseful immediately afterwards.
He chuckles when he’s asked how, at the height of his fame in the Seventies, he resisted carnal temptation. ‘I used to think of Barnsley football club,’ he says. He believes that if he had been younger when his talk show was running his fidelity might have been tested more than it was. ‘I would have had a far different lifestyle,’ he says. ‘Fame is a strange thing to deal with. No one tells you about it. You have to learn. It helped that I was in a stable marriage with three kids. I’d seen first-hand how people could be affected by fame. George Best. The Beatles. Elton John. I never went to druggy pop-star parties, though. And Mary came to all my shows, so did my father and mother.’
His mother, now 86, lives in a thatched cottage near Oxford, where she was born. He sees her regularly and says she is in ‘good nick’ (she delivered ‘meals on wheels’ until recently and served only one person older than herself). To help with the housekeeping she used to design knitwear and her son learned to type by having his mother dictate knitting patterns to him. ‘Knit two, tog, knit one, purl one,’ Parkinson says with a grin as he mimes tapping out the keys, his hands dappled in the silvery blond light from the large windows in the restaurant.
Parkinson is scathing about Channel Five’s Jack Docherty, the latest pretender to his throne. ‘His show looks like it’s been shot in a shoe cupboard,’ he says. ‘And he’s not a proper journalist. They always say so-and-so is going to be the next Parkinson, but how can they be when they don’t understand what I understand about the talk show? I’m not being arrogant here. It’s like expecting me to be the next Yehudi Menuhin when I can’t play a violin. Don’t be daft. It’s like Bernard Manning. Is he funny or is he not?’ He thumps the table for emphasis, suspending a fork momentarily in the air. ‘All that counts is whether I can interview, whether I can do my job. If I can’t, then go home.’
This appeared in December 1997. A few days later a letter arrived at the Sunday Telegraph: ‘In his interview with me Nigel Farndale quotes me as saying “I am the best bloody interviewer in the world”. This is news to me. I will give £1000 to charity if Mr Farndale can prove I said that or indeed anything remotely like it. For one thing I don’t regard interviewing as an Olympic event, but most importantly of all I am not that daft…. He has a lot of explaining to do.
I replied: ‘The article said ‘He doesn’t need to say so directly, but Parkinson clearly believes he is the best bloody interviewer in the world because of his background in journalism.’ This was intended as a light-hearted observation, picking up what Mr Parkinson said about Roy Plomley being “the worst bloody interviewer in the world.”‘

The transport minister opens the door, plucks the cigarette from her lips and says: ‘Be with you in a sec. I’m just on the phone to Cherie.’ As she hastens back to her desk she steps out of her shoes and hops on one stockinged foot while massaging the toes of the other. ‘You were saying?’ she croaks, cradling the phone between chin and shoulder. Her office is still cluttered with unpacked crates bulging with personal effects. These include what looks like the long black Cleopatra wig she wore on the 1971 Morecambe & Wise Christmas Special and the smooth golden head of an Oscar protruding decadently from an art nouveau flowerpot. Along one wall of the room there is a Louis XVI chaise-longue against which is propped a large, luminous painting by and of Gilbert & George in the nude. Next to this there is an ice bucket in which is chilling a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. Catching my eye, Glenda Jackson cups her hand over the receiver, nods at the bottle and mouths: ‘Be a love and open that would you? It’s been a hard day …’
No.
Of course it isn’t like this.
Power has neither corrupted nor mellowed the 61-year-old Labour MP for Hampstead and Highgate. Nor has it compromised here reputation for being cold, puritanical and, as she herself once put it, totally charmless. Her office is barren – no pictures, no fronds of green rubber plant, no homely touches. She is, by her own reckoning, not at all sentimental – and she can’t stand untidiness. The only shred of authenticity in this opening scene is that Glenda Jackson has had a hectic day. She rises at 6.30am every morning and its now a quarter to six in the evening, 45 minutes later than the time originally scheduled in her diary for this her final meeting of the day.
We are six floors up in Eland House, the gleaming new glass-and-steel-fronted building into which John Prescott’s merged departments of the Environment, Transport and the Regions moved this year [1997]. From this height you can appreciate that a remarkable number of rooftops around Victoria have flagpoles – which fly Union flags and cast long shadows in the low Autumn sun. When Jackson invited me to sit down she shivers, rubs the arms of her magenta-and-black dog-toothed jacket, and mutters, something about the new air-conditioning. ‘God, it’s so cold,’ she adds in that distinctively deep and flat voweled voice. ‘My blood has stopped circulating.’
She isn’t even smoking, which is a bit of a disappointment given that she is said to get through 40 Dunhill a day and there is a rather wonderful rumour doing the rounds that she has requested a special £4,000 air-recycling unit for her new hi-tech, smoke detecting office so that she can puff away at her desk rather than waste valuable ministerial time by trekking back and forth all day along the corridor to the smoking room.
Small talk about the smoking story is dismissed by the Minister with the word ‘allegedly’. Mention of the clean and shining new offices is given similarly short shrift: ‘Have you looked out of the window?’ she asks. There is a thick layer of grime on it. Tch! That’s London air pollution, I say with an ingratiating nod that leaves me more abruptly than planned onto the topic of traffic fumes.
‘Only today I was talking to someone about the inequities between providing company cars and season tickets for employees. One is regarded as a perk on which tax has to be paid, the other isn’t. I also raised the issue of employers offering interest-free loans for their employees to buy a bike and this guy said, ‘I’d buy them all bikes now if I thought that I wouldn’t be taxed for it.’
I raise the point that one of the advantages of being in opposition is that you can make extravagant demands based more on ideology than practicality. Once in power, funds have to be found to implement big ideas, and targets have to be set in order to establish whether they work. Given that the Government is still pretty much enjoying its honeymoon period, Jackson is surprisingly defensive about this truism. ‘You talk about targets,’ she says with a short, forced smile that scares rather than reassures. ‘But there can also be aims you can have. And it is important to have them, otherwise nothing is achieved, nothing develops, nothing is shown to work. That in itself is bad. But is also breeds a sense of helplessness.’
It has to be said, though, that Glenda Jackson does not sell well the Integrated Transport Strategy – or ITS as it is bound to be known. It would be ungracious to quote verbatim one of her statements on the subject – not least because, on the occasion we meet, she seems fraught and distracted. And, though I’ve never met her before, in comparison even with recent photographs, she seems weary, drawn and under-nourished. There is no passion in her delivery. Her answers seem stilted, repetitious and, at times, quite inarticulate. The way she can get tangled up in a subclause, by slipping in expressions such as ‘by virtue of’ or ‘which is a movable feast’ (three times in one answer alone), makes the syntax of her boss, John Prescott, seems positively lucid.
All politicians are, of course, trained in the art of not giving answers to questions you never asked. It’s just some are better at it than others. When you hear flannel from, say, Kenneth Clarke you want to believe it because it’s said with a mixture of cheery confidence and bluster. He’s a performer. Why then, you find yourself wondering, does Glenda Jackson not call upon some of her formidable powers as an actress to do the same? We know from one performance at least, ‘A Touch of Class’ (1973), that she can act flirty, personable and funny when she has to; why then does she not deploy a little of this to counter her apparently natural freezing manner?
The only answer that makes sense is that she overcompensates for the bohemian image of her first career. After all, as ‘Gudrun in Women in Love’  (1971), she seemed to capture the Dionysian spirit of the late Sixties, early Seventies. She symbolised all the hedonistic urges of which politicians are supposed to disapprove, in principle if not practice. But what’s the problem? Hers was a distinguished career. She was appointed CBE. It wasn’t as if she was a call girl or a game show host in her previous incarnation. She feels, you suspect, that her flamboyant past undermineds the authority of her dour present.
Her acting career, of course, is the prickly subject which dare not speak its name. There’s not much she enjoys in life, she has said. She’s not really the enjoying sort. But her life in acting is something she seems to have actively not enjoyed. She found it artificial and strained. Now she looks back on it with neither affection nor regret. And her two Oscars lurk unloved in a box somewhere at her sister’s house.
There is then a perverse, giddy pleasure to be had from daring yourself to ask about it. Will the eyes narrow and the lip curl as they did so chillingly in Elizabeth R? As an actress Glenda Jackson was unconventionally beautiful, and then only when she was playing the part of one who was angry. Hers was the dark, Promethean beauty of the mountain range that could be truly appreciated only by the sufferer of vertigo who forced himself to look down from its peak. My question, then, when it comes, is so cunningly obtuse it seems not to be about acting at all – the equivalent of lying on your back with just your head over the edge of the abyss, looking down at the plunging precipice through a mirror held at arm’s length. Ahem. If she had gone straight into politics from working at Boots, would she have been a different kind of politician?
(Glenda Jackson, it should be explained, is the eldest of four sisters brought up in the small seaside town of Hoylake on the Wirral. Her father, Harry, was a bricklayer, her mother, Joan cleaned houses. She left West Kirby Grammar School at 15 and, before getting involved in amateur dramatics and then going on to RADA, she worked for two years at Boots. On the laxative and bilious attacks counter.)
‘I honestly don’t know. I don’t know,’ she says without any sign of hostility. ‘I think people’s attitudes to me would be different.’ But presumably she learned some presentational skills and actorly tricks that have proved useful when performing in the House? ‘You say that but the most salutary lesson you learn if you are fortunate enough to act a lot is how, little you know and easy it is to act badly. And how hard it is to act well. Yes I suppose there are benefits. I’m not bowled over by the thought of having to speak in front of a room full of strangers. But then again I never considered acting a process of covering up. It was more a process of stripping away. I think the best drama aspires to be truthful and so does the best politics. I am not frightened by speaking in public. The thing people are most frightened of, after dying, is speaking in public.’
Glenda Jackson does have fears, she says of flying and of dentists. But she is not afraid of being alone. She was married at the age of 21 to Roy Hodges, a theatre director. They divorced in 1976 and then she lived for five years with a lighting engineer, Andrew Phillips. She now lives in Blackheath with her 28-year-old son Daniel Hodges, who worked for a while as her parliamentary researcher before taking a job with the Road Haulage Association.
‘I think we generate our own fears,’ Jackson says. ‘And sometimes they can be useful and sometimes they can be crippling. I used to worry when I didn’t get stage fright. You have a heightened awareness which you can trace to physiological things. But you have to be as ready as you can be. If you watch an athlete, I noticed this particularly in the Olympics, I found I could know who was going to win in the single events because the people who won, and we are talking about minuscule time differences between winning and coming second, but the person who a fraction of a second before the gun went off just let go. Some inner voice, and that is a process I can relate to. It’s not about becoming free of self-consciousness it’s just about, well, letting go. Harder to explain than to do.’
Despite recognising the need to let go, Jackson has said in the past that she feels the lack of a brain trained to work in a particular way. For her, she said, things are a really hard slog. Has this ever made her doubt her abilities as a politician?
‘Of course. It would be a sad day if you didn’t. Just think what you are as a constituency MP. To represent the needs of 68,000 people is a huge responsibility. Surely you have to do the best you can just in terms of the hope people invest in you. If being up to it can be achieved by dint of hard work and acknowledging you don’t know everything and having no pride about saying to people that you don’t know what they are talking about. The people around you are very good about helping you get on top of the information. And, of course, you are informed by the principles of your particular party….’
Her party has principles? ‘My absolute belief that this country is the best by virtue of its people is very clear to me, and as I said, one of the things I found most heinous under the Tories was the sheer waste of this country’s greatest natural resource. It’s people. Their energy. Their imagination.’
Jackson resents the idea that she has only been engaged in politics since she won her first seat in 1992. ‘I’ve always been a supporter and voter for the Labour Party. And I’d been asked to do thing by them because I had a high profile. When I was approached to become a prospective parliamentary candidate I was motivated by an overwhelming desire to get rid of Mrs Thatcher because she was trying to turn the country in which I was born, and which, please God, I will die, into a country I couldn’t identify with. And turn vices into virtues and virtues into vices. And I think this is probably a myth I’ve created for myself – because I don’t think the timing is right – but I’m convinced that it was hearing that speech about there being no such thing as society which made me so angry I walked into a post. But anything I could do, anything to get rid of that appalling, immoral philosophy and to get a Labour government.’
When she first started canvassing to become an MP, people would ask her for her autograph because she was a famous actress. Now that she is a government minister has she noticed a difference in the way people treat her? ‘To be honest,’ she says, ‘One of the big differences about becoming a Member of Parliament was that people can talk to you as a representative. You do have that. There is no pretence that you are not who you are. There is no blurring of who you are. There’s none of that, “Oh I expected Queen Elizabeth and then you arrived.” There’s none of that. So, no, people always speak their minds to me.’
This said, she says she is aware of her hard image and thinks it has a lot to do with her portrayal of Elizabeth R. But her reputation for being cold and frightening is unfair, she thinks, because she is not like that royal sourpuss in real life. She doesn’t believe she has ever experienced an uncontrollable passion, for instance. Although she does loose her temper, she doesn’t lose it often – and then only over some minor irritating thing that has come at the end of a lot of other minor irritating things.
An abrupt manner is often a defence against feelings of insecurity. At school she suffered badly from acne and was self-conscious about being overweight. She had, she says, no sense of herself being physically attractive in any way at all, either then or now. No wonder she didn’t enjoy the close scrutiny of the cameras when she became an actress. Ironically though, the social awkwardness, brittleness and discomfort she often brought top her screen roles were precisely the qualities that made her such a compelling, sultry, unpredictable actress to watch. And they are exactly the same qualities which limit her appeal as a politician. She has no bonhomie about her, and this makes the attempts by her Transport Press Office to turn her into Our Glenda look farcical (GLENDA LAUNCHES SAFELINE SCHEME IN SHEFFIELD ran a headline on a recent press release. Not Jackson. Glenda.)
Perhaps a more rewarding tack would be to play to the small minister’s transport strengths and cite the description Oliver Reed gave of his co-star: ‘Working with Glenda was like being run over by a Bedford truck.’ Or, perhaps, the one given by Les Dawson, that hers was the face that launched a thousand dredges.
In terms of appearance, then, the minister for transport (and shipping) seems to have overcompensated for the ephemeral image of her youth by becoming Labour’s answer to the gloriously uncompromised Ann Widdecombe. Even Barbara Follett MP, who was charged with giving New Labour MPs a makeover, couldn’t remove the whiff of carbolic that lingers about her. She has strong cheekbones, her mousy-auburn hair is cut in a severe Bauhaus style and there is something about the arrangement of her teeth that makes her smile look like a snarl. Last year when Glenda Jackson – wearing a suit with temperatures in the eighties and looking like she’d just sucked a lemon – did her photo-opportunity walk on the beaches of Benidorm, in order to tell startled British sunbathers why they couldn’t trust the Tories, Sir Tim Bell, the Tory PR guru, was tempted to run the picture of her as an advert saying: ‘New Labour: less style more substance.’
The small minister for transport finds such considerations trivialising. As well she should. She says she sees herself as female rather than feminine, which is something she equates with being ‘frilly and pink and frothy and lacy’. And she cannot understand the fuss always being made in the press about what Ffion Jenkins or Cherie Blair is wearing.
‘I wonder why we waste time worrying about it,’ she says. ‘It is actually an impediment to the work being done. It really acts as a bar to women achieving what women are capable of in virtue of their abilities. But again I don’t think it is serious. And I don’t think we should allow ourselves to be trapped into an agenda which is irrelevant. And why should women be trapped into not being attractive or not being interested in fashion or not being interested in those kind of things? Why should we be? That’s got nothing to do with images, be they powerful or weak, it’s got to do with the story of the day. It’s coming from a different angle. It’s a different kind of scenario. The whole thing about image and image-making is in itself an artificially created area, I believe, for another scenario as well.’
Even so, she did take part in the group photograph of what the tabloids dubbed ‘Blair’s Babes’. Presumably she agreed because, like her famous, goosepimply nude scenes, the plot demanded it. The Prime Minister didn’t feel the need to have a group photograph taken of himself with all his male MPs, but perhaps to raise this point is to miss a greater one. After all, as Glenda Jackson points out, the number of women MPs now elected to the House of Commons represents a brisk stride forward. ‘I think it’s wonderful,’ she says. ‘But I would like to see an equal gender split sitting on those benches. What are we now? 658 MPs? There are certainly not 329 women sitting there. But I think it has made a difference already in the atmosphere of the place. It can make a difference in the practical reality of the place.’
You can just imagine that atmosphere when the female (not feminine) Jackson is around. The real essence of her intimidatingly graceless manner was defined by a long-serving Hampstead party worker who said: ‘She can be very cold and hard work. Even by the standard of the Labour Party she hardly has a sense of humour.’ There is evidence of wryness, though. On her first day at Westminster, she says she kept getting lost but no matter where she walked she seemed to end up next to a statue of Winston Churchill. She names her chief pleasure as reading Hansard in bed. And she once laughed approvingly when she heard that her ex-husband had said of her: ‘If Glenda went into politics she’d be Prime Minister. If she went into crime she would be Jack The Ripper.’
It is now dark outside and Jackson leans forward, squints at a clock on the opposite wall and says; ‘It’s quarter to seven. We’ve got to make a move.’ As she walks over to her desk in the corner of her office a light comes on above it. ‘They are movement-sensitive to save energy,’ she explains. ‘Sometimes when I’m working late and sitting very still they turn off.’
It leaves a melancholy image lingering in the mind. Glenda Jackson sitting very still at her desk, long after everyone else has gone home. She is looking thoughtful, determined. Her pen is poised in her hand. Suddenly the lightbulb above her head dims and she is left in darkness – without even the orange glow of a cigarette for comfort.

Upstairs at Politico’s, a bookshop-cum-coffee house ten minutes’ stroll from Whitehall, Ken Livingstone is sitting with his back to a television set, cupping a chocolate-dusted mocha in his hands. On the screen behind him, Robin Cook is introducing a short film which recalls the highlights of the Labour Party conference in Brighton: the standing ovations, the scenes of Tony Blair glad-handing the adoring multitude, the shots of delegates holding their hair in place as they walk along the windswept promenade.
But something is missing. Someone, as they say in Argentina, has been disappeared. The most memorable and newsworthy image of that week – Livingstone beaming as he beat the Minister Without Portfolio for a place on the National Executive Committee – has not been included. When this is pointed out to him, Livingstone gives a short laugh as nasal as his voice, thoughtfully sips his coffee and says, ‘Well, there you go. Perhaps the camera mysteriously malfunctioned when it came round to me’.
The 52-year-old Member of Parliament for Brent East has learned to shrug off such snubs with amused detachment. Even when he was a member of the NEC last time around, his invitations to Party events would always be sent late deliberately so that he couldn’t attend. When he became an MP in 1987 he wasn’t allocated an office. And this year is the first since 1980 that the Member Non Grata has been called to speak at conference. ‘Each year I would sit there with my hand up waiting to be called,’ Livingstone says with a lazy roll of heavily-lidded eyes. ‘But I was always ignored, even when the debate was about me. My arm used to ache so much I decided the solution would be to strap a cardboard cutout of it to the back of my chair.’
Not since George Foreman reclaimed the world heavyweight title at the age of 45 has a comeback seemed so improbable. And so poetic – given that it was Peter Mandelson who went down to Livingstone’s Far Left hook. ‘I was given no warning when I was kicked off the NEC back in 1989,’ Livingstone mumbles in his Dalek monotone. ‘And Mandelson made it worse then by briefing everyone about what a momentous defeat it was for the Left. I did think when I saw him sitting there this time with that rictus grin on his face: “I know how you feel, Sunshine. I’ve been there.”’
If this latest development in Livingstone’s turbulent political career were made into a film, then the trailer would have to say: ‘He’s back. And this time it’s personal.’ Only it wouldn’t be an action film, it would be a situation comedy – because in those wilderness years Red Ken, scourge of the bourgeoisie, reinvented himself as Cuddly Ken, Good Old Ken, Ken the People’s Politician. He’s done panto. He’s cracked wisely on Radio 4 quiz shows. He’s appeared in television commercials for Red Leicester cheese. ‘The most odious man in Britain’, as the Sun once dubbed our Ken, has become a national monument lapped by waves of affection so warm and syrupy even the Queen Mother and Terry Wogan would find them a bit cloying.
And now that an opinion poll has named Livingstone (along with Richard Branson) the person Londoners would most like to see appointed major come the election planned for May 2000, it can only be a matter of time before Madame Tussaud’s blows the dust off the waxwork that was so ignominiously put into storage when the GLC was closed down by Margaret Thatcher in 1986. Obviously, Livingstone no longer wears a safari suit. And the comedy ‘Dave Spart’ moustache would have to come off (New Ken hasn’t worn it for two years: ‘I grew it when I was 22 in order to look older,’ he says dryly, ‘that is no longer a priority’) but the essential features haven’t changed much. He still has a round face, rosy complexion and eyes set wide apart like a cartoon of an extraterrestrial.
He still looks pretty scruffy: this afternoon he is carrying his books, pens, papers and damp swimming trunks around in a plastic carrier bag on which the handle has broken; he is wearing jeans, trainers and a blue and white checked lumberjack shirt. The only hint that he might have anything in common with the immaculately groomed, sharply suited clones that occupy the New Labour benches is the black bleeper with red rose insignia he is obliged to wear on his belt. ‘This?’ he sighs as he fingers it ruefully, in the manner of a prisoner revealing an electronic tag. ‘This means Mandelson can track me down any time, day or night.’
The trouble is, Livingstone doesn’t seem particularly at ease with the lovable Cuddly Ken role he has created for himself. He wishes it were an action film he was starring in, not a comedy, and that he was wearing combat boots, not slippers. When he tries to be diplomatic by playing down a ‘misleading’ report in the Guardian which describes Mandelson and him as two Rottweilers gnawing at each other’s genitals, you just know that, secretly, he is delighted by the analogy. Anything is better than the playful Labrador puppy image that seems to have stuck.
Personally, he blames his popularity on his newts. ‘Anyone who keeps pets is going to be popular. My newts are probably the most famous pets in Britain. After the royal corgis, of course.’ Newt-fancying has been a lifelong obsession for Ken. Endearingly, he remembers exactly what he was doing when he heard Kennedy was shot – he had just got back from the reptile shop. And he is at his happiest, he says, when pottering around the 90ft garden he has turned into a wildlife haven for his amphibious friends at his home (in the amusing London borough of Cricklewood, naturally). That newts are for ever associated in the British imagination with Gussie Fink-Nottle, PG Wodehouse’s charmingly woolly-headed creation, makes Livingstone’s pet of choice even more richly comic.
But there is also the man’s easy charm and deadpan, self-parodic sense of mischief to take into account when considering the adorable puppy factor. Livingstone describes himself as an ‘old Trot’ and will always start his speeches with the word ‘Comrades’ because, he says, he knows it will always get a laugh. And, in his temporary, box-filled office situated in a dingy, grey building far out in the uncharted backwaters of Whitehall, he answers the phone, looks across at me, and says: ‘I can’t talk now – I’m being interviewed by the class enemy.’
Another example: he left Tulse Hill Comprehensive School at 17 and spent 12 years as a technician looking after laboratory animals before training as a teacher. In John Major’s day, all this was dismissed with the line: ‘I have four O-levels, which fully qualifies me to be Prime Minister.’ And once, when he was accused of selling out by writing a column for the Sun, he said: ‘I spent five years boycotting all Murdoch papers. But I have to confess it seems not to have forced him into insolvency.’
A good quip, Livingstone believes, can help make a serious point more palatable. But, on the whole, a sense of humour is a disadvantage in politics. At one point, he refers to the Tories as being cold, unattractive human beings led by this strange… Then, remembering Tony Banks’ tasteless joke about abortion, he checks himself. ‘Having a reputation as a comedian has hurt old Banksy and it’s hurt me,’ he reflects. ‘It would be wrong, though, to try and be serious all the time if that is not in your nature. This was old Kinnock’s big mistake.’
Although Livingstone’s one-liners are spontaneous, there seems to be something slightly more calculating about the matey way he will refer to old Banksy, old Cookie, old Kinnock. The chumminess and cosiness is intended to disarm the listener so that when, in the next sentence, he will casually refer to ‘this Mandelsonian evil’, or whatever, you’ll hardly notice. Then you’ll do a double-take and try to read his face to check that he’s joking. A twitch of the mouth would suffice, or an ironic flick of the eyebrow. But his face is just as inscrutable as his scratchy Thames Estuary twang. His lips barely part when he talks and when they do, it is only at one corner of his mouth, like a wartime spiv trying to sell you contraband.
While his demeanour rarely changes, even when he talks about a subject that clearly upsets him, his tinnily adenoidal voice does. In August, his 82-year-old mother, Ethel, asked for a glass of sherry, drank it and then died peacefully in her sleep. As Livingstone talks about how she was still going out to the betting shop just ten days before, his speech becomes halting; a catch is discernible at the back of his throat. His mother wasn’t afraid of death, he says, because she had always been a spiritualist who could hear voices from beyond the grave. ‘For her, death was just a matter of meeting up with people,’ he shrugs. ‘A great sherry party in the sky.’
His mother had been a ‘speciality dancing act’ in a music hall. ‘Mum was able to do the splits up until two years ago,’ Livingstone recalls. ‘And she could still do kicks so that her toes would touch her forehead. Whenever I took her along to an Islington dinner party she would insist on doing the washing-up and the next thing I knew she’d be doing a handstand up against the wall.’ Although Ethel had kept her own house, in recent years she had been spending an increasing amount of time living with Ken and his long-term partner Kate Allen. But the mother had always been close to her son, especially as her husband, a merchant seaman, had been away at sea a lot when the young Ken was growing up in Streatham. In fact, Ken had known his housebound grandmother much better than his father. ‘My grandmother had her knee joint removed and couldn’t get around so I just sat there with her in that tiny flat playing with Plastecine,’ he says. ‘I suppose I learned the art of manipulation from her.’
Ken Livingstone is an atheist and a republican, but his spiritualist, Tory-voting mother could not have been more of a monarchist. When the Thames Barrier was opened in 1984 – with Livingstone officiating – she put on her feathered hat and insisted on travelling down on the barge with HM the Queen. ‘She and Prince Philip gossiped for the whole journey about horse racing,’ Livingstone recalls with what might pass for a wistful grimace. ‘When they reached us, Philip leaned over to me and said, “Your mother’s a lively old stick.” And I thought, ‘Oh gawd, what’s she been saying now?’ It turned out she’d been organising a group bet on the boat.’
It saddens Ken Livingstone that his mother missed his sensational return to favour at the conference a couple of weeks ago. ‘She revelled in all my triumphs and she would have taken the front page of the Guardian and pinned it to her wall.’ It’s to be presumed that Ethel didn’t revel quite so much in the times when her son was a national hate figure. But if she did, and she collected press cuttings from the early Eighties, she would certainly have had a bulging scrapbook.
The claims from his enemies that her son wasted £100 million a year on ‘Loony Left’ schemes during his five years in charge of the GLC would have taken up a few pages of it. And there would have been plenty of cuttings about him wanting to ban the ‘racist’ nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep from kindergartens; about him launching a £44,000 charter for gay and lesbian rights and paying tens of thousands to extreme minority groups; about him twinning London with Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, in recognition of the country’s Marxist struggle; and, of course, about him inviting Gerry Adams to appear at political rallies in London.
And, doubtless, there would’ve been a whole volume devoted to the press coverage given to Livingstone’s public prediction, eight days after the Poppy Day massacre at Enniskillen in 1987, that Gerry Adams and the IRA would eventually win. To this day he does not regret his comments. ‘What have I been shown to be right on? That you would have to negotiate with the IRA one day. But yes, the media was very hostile to me about that. Then again, it was also the year I was voted runner-up to the Pope in a BBC Man of the Year poll.’
Livingstone believes it’s a big mistake for politicians to want to be loved, as Mandelson does. ‘My popularity dipped with the Loony Leftie Baa Baa Black Sheep stuff,” he says. ‘But it bounced back again. Sometimes I would have 2,000 people chanting their support for me. But I knew it was very dangerous. I just thought, “How bizarre that anyone should be interested in anything I say when I know what an ill-educated little oik I really am.” The worst thing you can do as a politician is to believe it when the press says it likes you. I think the present media love-fest is really unhealthy for Blair.’
He thinks that interviewers are letting the Prime Minister get away with too much. ‘The media isn’t scrutinising us properly. If Lord Simon [the share-holding former chairman of BP turned New Labour minister] had been a Tory in the last government, he would have been driven out of public life. Even Thatcher had some checks. Blair doesn’t like a debate – which doesn’t do much for my career prospects… The test for Blair will come three years from now when things go wrong and your ghastly rag drives him into the dirt. Wilson never got over that. It really hurt him. Major got rattled about it as well. My view is I would like you to write nice things about me but if you don’t, I’m not going to change my ways. My view is: “Sod you, then”.’
This, of course, is Livingstone’s ultimate double bluff. He knows it doesn’t pay to have skeletons in the cupboard and so once appeared on television to talk matter-of-factly about the perils of having a mistress. (He was married for nine years before getting a divorce in 1982.) But, hardened though he may be to what the press says about him, he is still a politician, and he does still care what people think. He assumes, for instance, that I’ll have heard so me of the ‘laughable” rumours that are circulating about him. I haven’t – so he tells me about them himself. ‘There’s the old chestnut about me being buggered by six men in succession. Then there’s the story about me being a cocaine abuser. And did you hear the one that was doing the rounds about eight weeks ago? Someone from Millbank Tower phoned me to say that he had picked up a story from News of the World that I regularly visit a prostitute. I just laughed and thought, “How does a story like that start?”.’
Actually, Livingstone is pretty sure he knows where the stories come from: Conservative Central Office. ‘Someone thinks it would be funny to start a rumour and people believe it because they want to’. To prove his theory, he once conducted an experiment: he made up a rumour while waiting to appear on breakfast TV. ‘I said, “The trouble with Lamont now is that his cocaine habit is so bad he has to leave Cabinet meetings to go for a line.” Everyone in that room started saying: “Ooh yes, you can tell it just by looking at him.”’
Conservative Central Office isn’t the only malicious rumour factory, as far as Livingstone’s concerned. He believes MI5 has always conspired against him. In the weeks leading up to an election, for instance, it is traditional for the Labour Party to impose a gagging order on Comrade Ken. In 1992, he was even threatened with deselection unless he promised not to leave his constituency. In the run-up to the General Election this year, he was forbidden to give interviews unless authorised. ‘Within half an hour of my going into hiding, though, some bastard from the Telegraph office had tracked me down,’ he says. ‘I assume he was able to do this because there was a bug in my office. You really can get paranoid.’
Whatever the truth, it’s safe to assume that if MI5 had a file on Peter Mandelson, it would have a whole filing cabinet devoted to our Ken. ‘I think if Blair truly believes in open government, he should give every MP his file,’ Livingstone says. ‘I know there would be a lot of crap about me in mine and a lot of stuff that wasn’t in there that should be.’
It’s not impossible to imagine why, if it did, MI5 would have regarded Red Ken as a threat to national security at the height of the Cold War. But with the collapse of world Communism came a blurring of traditional political divisions. Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister because he seemed to be the most attractive Tory on offer at the time. Even Ken Livingstone is hard pushed to say what the traditional Left actually stands for now. ‘For most of my career the politics of Left and Right has been defined by where you stood on the Cold War between America and Russia. That’s all gone.’ The real split now, he says, is between the likes of him (full steam ahead on devolution, Europe, a stronger bill of rights, and proportional representation) and the Blairs, Browns and Mandelsons (who are, he says, dithering on these issues).
Perhaps there is another divide: between those who, like Mandelson, at least pretend they feel humility, and those who cannot ever admit that they might have misjudged a situation. Livingstone, for instance, once said Labour would be unelectable if it dropped unilateral disarmament. Er…? ‘We were shown to be right,’ Livingstone snaps testily. ‘We opposed spending £10 billion on Trident. We now have four nuclear submarines for which we have no conceivable use.’
We’ll take that as a no, then. But does he at least concede that the general perception is that the Cold War was won because the Warsaw Pact blinked first? ‘I’m not interested in what other people’s perception is,’ he says. ‘I’m just interested in whether my own intellectual position is coherent. A lot of my colleagues who used to be on the old hard Left of the party are now spouting all this waffle that you know they don’t believe. And that takes a terrible toll. Poor old David Blunkett decided he would play by the New Labour rules and he has never looked happy. He has no sense of fulfilment.’
In his small, nondescript office, Livingstone holds up, at arm’s length as though in fear of catching something unpleasant from it, a New Labour document which sets out the rules of conduct for  MPs. ‘It’s a bloody outrage,’ he says. ‘A reign of terror from the whips. Blair is just changing the rules as he goes along and surrounding himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear. Now, if you vote against the Party you are in breach of the rules. What is the point of electing MPs? I ask you.’
At least, he says, you can’t browbeat the Labour membership at home, which is why he’s been elected to the NEC. ‘If Mandelson had been elected, it would have been the final straw for many of us. Blair won every vote except the one that was the hardest to explain to the public. I mean, the spin they put on it was that Mandelson hadn’t consulted Blair before he stood. But is there anyone with an IQ over five who believes that? They are each other’s best friend.’
The New Labour Thought Police also forbid MPs to give interviews to the press without first gaining permission from Alastair Campbell, Tony  Blair’s chief press officer. Judging by the way Ken Livingstone describes Gordon Brown’s economic policy as being ‘bizarrely stupid’ it’s safe to assume that permission for this interview was neither sought nor given. Livingstone believes Brown’s policies are leading us into a recession which will reach its peak in the years 1999 and 2000. And he thinks Blair is giving Brown a free hand to do this so that he can wash his hands when things start to go wrong. ‘Brown hasn’t increased the taxes needed to cool the economy down,’ Livingstone says. ‘Instead he plans to abolish British industry by jacking up interest rates to the point where you can’t sell anything abroad.’
As he talks in his office, Livingstone keeps rummaging around in boxes and filing cabinets to produce graphs and charts that show why he thinks Britain is heading for one last downturn before it enters a period of global stability. He loads me down with copies of the ‘Socialist Economic Bulletin’, a database of independent economic analysis which he produces. Having come away with a U at O-level maths, I’m afraid my mind begins to wander at this point and I become distracted by a framed letter on the wall which describes Livingstone as an ’emerging world leader’. It is from Henry Kissinger. ‘Ah yes,’ Livingstone chuckles when he catches me reading it. ‘This is how the capitalists seduce you. What a load of nonsense.’
Yet Livingstone’s time as a world leader may still come. Assuming he or she has an independent budget, the Mayor of London will have an economy the size of Russia’s and an electorate of five million, which will make him or her the most presidential figure in British politics (even the Prime Minister only gets about 35,000 crosses against his name). If Livingstone gets the job – and with Jeffrey Archer way behind him in the opinion polls and Richard Branson declining to stand, he just might – he says he will sort out London’s traffic congestion and make sure museums and art galleries are free for everyone (to be paid for by a new airport tax).
Livingstone locks up his office for the day, carefully wrapping his keys in his hanky to stop them wearing his pockets, and ambles out into the autumn shadows playing across Whitehall. He has to get back to Cricklewood in time for Friends and, as he heads for the Tube, gusts of wind send leaves scurrying around his feet. Every policeman he passes greets him with a smile and bids him a friendly goodnight. Then, noticing some manure deposited on the road by a police horse, he stops for a moment and contemplates it. ‘I wish I had a bag for that,’ he mumbles. ‘I could really do with it for my roses.’ Red roses, presumably.
This appeared in the autumn of 1997. Despite Tony Blair’s Stakhanovite efforts to rig the mayoral election in 2000 – using an electoral college to put his man, Frank Dobson, in as the preferred New Labour candidate and then giving him access to the London membership database – Ken Livingstone won by a large majority, after going back on a promise not to stand as an independent candidate. His first words as mayor were a joke: ‘As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago…’