Clarissa Dickson Wright, one half of the Two Fat Ladies and a former alcoholic, is more likely to carry a shotgun than a handbag. But, as Nigel Farndale discovers, she still cries easily

There is a bluntness to Clarissa Dickson Wright, which disarms as much as it disconcerts. She never “dislikes” things, she “hates” them: her father, oil seed rape, the welfare state. Gordon Brown is “that foul man”. And if you compliment her on the cheerfulness of her shirt, she will say dismissively: “It makes me look like a sofa.” Hesitate when trying to think of a polite way to refer to her weight, and she will finish your sentence for you: “You mean fat?”

It seems to be a form of defence, this confrontational style. But also perhaps a sign of her impatience with those she considers foolish, which is just about everybody. She has an alpha brain and a low and steady voice, with a delivery that is clipped and typical of her class. Her father was the Queen Mother’s surgeon, and she moved in aristocratic circles as a child. She still does, actually. As one of the most high-profile champions of field sports in the country, she is the darling of the landed gentry.

Her lack of compromise on this subject is reflected in the photograph on the jacket of her new book, Rifling Through My Drawers. She is carrying a shotgun and wearing plus fours. The book is a collection of anecdotes and political opinions, rather than a sequel to her best-selling memoir Spilling the Beans.

The beans she spilled in that book included an account of how her alcoholic father beat her as a child and how she, as a result, became such an alcoholic herself that she squandered her inheritance – the equivalent of around £15 million today – and would pretty much sleep with any man who would buy her a drink. She has been sober for 22 years now (she is 62), but seems to wear her past on her face: the broken veins, the unplucked hairs, the pale blue eyes that have out-stared the world. Complex and as tough as old boots, yes; one of life’s victims, no.

We are reminiscing about Jennifer Paterson, the other half of the BBC’s former Two Fat Ladies cookery show, whom I knew a little. “Jennifer was deeply eccentric,” she says. “Always positive. Spent a lot of time singing, which would drive me nuts. Her great joy was to try and stick in my brain some Noël Coward tune or other, and the minute it became unstuck she would sense it and start singing it again.”

They had a devoted following. Any groupies? “I don’t have the figure for it, but I remember when Jennifer and I were in Australia, I used to get left notes with people’s room numbers saying, ‘Come and see me.’ Jennifer thought this terribly funny. No one left them for her. Perhaps they thought I was more racy. I never took them up on it, but I did used to look through the crowd and think ‘Oooh, which one?'”

When Paterson died in 1999, anti-hunt protesters shouted at Dickson Wright: “One dead Fat Lady, one to go.” “It was the most awful thing because it wasn’t long after Jennifer died. I usually pay no attention to the bloody antis because they are so awful, but I thought that was plain vicious. Clearly they are sick people.”

She has received numerous death threats since. “They only stopped sending the written ones when I said on television that I was going to have an exhibition of them to raise money for the campaign for hunting. Special Branch have taken away the most unpleasant ones for their files. I remember at a book-signing the antis came and sprayed us with red paint and the queue was fantastic about it. They asked if they could have the books with the red paint on. And in Norwich, they mobbed us because the police cordon hadn’t worked. I just put my head down and went for the taxi. The antis were bouncing on the roof when we got in.”

Does she ever feel like retaliating? I mean, what if she was down a dark ally with one of them and she had a baseball bat in her hand? “Oh, I wouldn’t need a baseball bat. I once had two people attempt to mug me and they both ended up in intensive care. I can handle myself. The reason one doesn’t retaliate is that one doesn’t want to stoop to their level.”

You wonder if that story can be true, as you wonder about some of the more picaresque moments in her memoir. Her sister, with whom she has fallen out, has accused her of exaggerating her accounts of being beaten by her father. Still, her image of herself as a scrapper is revealing. Did she inherit her temper from her father? “Since I stopped drinking, it is a different sort of temper to his, but they don’t call me Krakatoa for nothing. I have an explosive temper which goes up and down. Everyone is left shuddering in the wake of it, and a minute later, when I’m calm again, I’m wondering why everyone is looking at me nervously. I suppose that’s why I never get depressed. Depression is the reverse side of anger. Anger internalised.” She cries easily though, she adds, “but not deeply. Trooping the Colour or Remembrance Sunday will make me cry, or a soppy film. I cry from sentiment and anger, that is all.”

And she is not afraid of dying. “I would be quite happy to go to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland come the time. The thing is, if you are the sort of alcoholic that I was, death becomes an old friend. You never know which bottle is going to kill you and you stop being afraid of it.”

She felt no guilt about betraying her father in her memoirs. “I realised during recovery that if I could not forgive my father then I could never forgive myself, because I had become so like him in my drinking. Thank God I never had children to terrorise. I told the counsellor this and they did the gestalt [a therapy that uses role-play to resolve past conflicts]. I was so angry that they took all the furniture out of the room, apart from the chair I was sitting on.

“With the gestalt you try and summon up the image of the person you want to talk to. I could see my father there quite clearly, as if a photograph of him was projected on the back wall. To my amazement I said: ‘You poor, silly idiot, all we really wanted was to love you and have you love us.’ Where the f— did that come from? Excuse my French. After that, I burst into tears. I didn’t love him because there was nothing there to love.”

She became a barrister to spite her father – he hated lawyers – and at 21, having already graduated from UCL, she became the youngest woman ever to be called to the bar. A few years later she was disbarred because of her drinking. Earlier this month, Dickson Wright drew upon her legal background when she pleaded guilty to hare-coursing. Had she wanted to play the martyr?

“I don’t think an absolute discharge counts as martyrdom, my dear. But I would gladly go to prison for my convictions. It would be nice and peaceful and I could write a prison cookbook.”

I tell her that while I am in favour of a repeal of the ban on fox-hunting, I feel less comfortable about hare-coursing, in part because the pest-control argument doesn’t hold. It seems to be just about pleasure.

“Oh dearie me, what a puritan you must be. But they do need controlling, actually. Bear in mind that a hare eats 40lbs of vegetation a week. Death in the countryside is different to death in the town; it is part of the way of life. Farmers love and care for their livestock, then send them off for slaughter. All field-sports people are doing is turning an inevitable necessity into a pleasure. If the animal is going to be killed anyway, why not take pleasure in it? But I can see that is a matter of personal choice. Have you ever been hare-coursing?” I shake my head. “Then you can’t pass judgment on it.”

That can’t be right, surely. You can disapprove of homicide without having witnessed a murder. “Some murders are justified. If I had killed my father I would have been justified because of the way he behaved. But I don’t anthropomorphise. I don’t equate human life to animal life.”

It strikes me that the difference between Dickson Wright’s public and private personas is her serious-mindedness. Does she regret the way she deliberately made herself a figure of fun by agreeing to the title Two Fat Ladies? “No, because if you can make people laugh you can win arguments. I discovered that when I was a barrister. On the last big countryside march there was such good humour. A very British trait. There was also a sense of passion and resolve. As Chesterton said: ‘We are the people of England and we haven’t spoken yet.e_SSRq” She dabs her eyes. “Sorry, that poem always makes me cry …”

Her face clears. “That was an enjoyable chat,” she says. “I dare say when I read the article I shall hate you forever.”

J.

James Blunt

It could be the homes around the world; his military bearing; or that he’s our biggest musical export since Elton. For whatever reason, being called annoying, a philanderer or – worse – middle class doesn’t exactly keep James Hillier Blount awake at night. Nigel Farndale met him

It’s not the sight of the groupies that haunts me, but the sound, or rather the absence of sound, as they ghost past us on their way up the stairs to the dressing-room. It takes me a moment to figure out that the reason they aren’t talking to each other is that they don’t know each other. One of the band members, the keyboard player, I think, has picked them from the audience on the basis of their looks. Half-a-dozen of them, all in their late teens and early twenties, and all, surprisingly, in pretty frocks, as if they were going to a Sunday school meeting. They have been separated from their friends like lambs weaned from their mothers. The silence of the lambs.

The ‘us’ they are filing past is James Blunt and me. He has a bottle of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and not a hair in place – tousled just so, like a Renaissance painting of John the Baptist – but they don’t realise it’s him because he has changed out of the suit he was wearing on stage and is now in jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket, as well as a pink feather boa and star-shaped novelty sunglasses. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is the end of the day; we need to go back to the start, well, to the middle, when the seats are empty and the Texan sun is at its most unforgiving.

A barefoot and unshaven Blunt is wearing normal sunglasses and shorts as he plays his piano, strums his guitar and sings his plaintive songs into the microphone for the sound check, all the while looking out with his soulful eyes over an empty, open-air arena in Houston. At 5ft 7in, he’s not a tall man, but he has presence and an unaffected manner – a certain maturity, too, one that you wouldn’t normally associate with a pop star in the ascendant.

But then he is 34 and this is his second career, his first being as an officer in the Household Cavalry. He joined after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in sociology. He became a champion skier for the Army and not only saw active service in Kosovo, but also guarded the Queen Mother’s coffin when she was lying in state.

Tonight he will be supporting Sheryl Crow, though, since his second album ‘All the Lost Souls’ and the single from it, ‘1973’, went straight to number one in America, he is arguably the bigger act these days. Indeed, not since Elton John has there been a more successful British singer-songwriter in the States.

His first album, ‘Back to Bedlam’, also went to number one over here, as it did in 18 other countries, making it the biggest-selling album of the millennium. It even entered the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-selling album in one year. But it was his first single that really put him on the map. You’re Beautiful became the sound of that summer. It was everywhere, and still is – having become a favourite at weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. I even heard a brass band playing it at an agricultural show in the Yorkshire Dales this summer.

As well as millions of sales, James Blunt has won Brit awards, Ivor Novello awards, MTV awards and various Grammy nominations. In terms of credibility, he’s headlined at Glastonbury and won the respect of the world-weary music press. Yet not everyone loves him, as he points out when we get something to eat in the canteen area back stage.

‘After Back to Bedlam really started selling,’ he says, ‘there was this sudden aggression towards me in the UK, for whatever reason, and that focused my mind, made it clear to me what I was doing and why I wanted to do it. I write songs for myself. I don’t write them for you, or for anyone else, I write them because I have experiences that I need to process. I don’t have the answers all the time, but I do have lots of questions, and I express them in the songs I write.’

He is, I think, alluding to a poll last year of ‘the most annoying things in life’, which put him at number four, just behind cold-callers and queue-jumpers. ‘I haven’t met anyone who voted in the poll, have you?’ he says when I mention this. ‘That poll probably came from a website that was after some publicity. You and I could do the same poll very quickly right now and it would count as a poll. We could do one about annoying newspapers, for example. I promise the Sunday Telegraph wouldn’t be in my list. My parents take it.’

His father, a retired colonel in the Army Air Corps, manages his son’s finances. His mother arranged the purchase of his six-bedroom villa in Ibiza (he also has a chalet in Verbier and recently bought a place in Chelsea). ‘I’m not married,’ he says, ‘and so the support structure in my life is my parents. I’m closer to them now than I have ever been.’

He certainly isn’t married, as the photographs of him emerging from nightclubs with various high-profile women on his arm attest. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was probably the best known socialite, Jessica Sutta, of the Pussycat Dolls, the most glamorous. He also seems to be photographed regularly cavorting on beaches with bikini-clad models such as Petra Nemcova, whom he dated and then dumped – unceremonious dumping being his way of ending relationships, according to the tabloids. He once said he found himself in a swimming pool in LA with nine naked women. ‘I was the only bloke. It was the only time I wished my mates were there, purely to spectate. I had arrived. It was a moment.’

Now he says of the tabloid interest in his peripatetic love life: ‘Last week I went to my home in Ibiza and was photographed by the paparazzi in my swimming trunks with girls. What is the point of that? I’m not that bothered, but maybe the media should be concentrating more on global warming or the Russian invasion of Georgia.

‘Looking at me in my swimming trunks is not a great sight. It’s a waste of time. There generally is a long lens pointing at me wherever I go, these days. I’m comfortable with it. I appreciate how things work. But my record label said something about my always being photographed coming out of nightclubs and I thought, “But this is what I do. I was doing it before the second album came out, so what is different now? You didn’t tell me to stop then.” I’m not going to change my life because of these people. I don’t see why I should.’

His label also gets him to dye his grey hairs and be enigmatic about his love life, which is an old tactic dating back to the Beatles – they had to pretend they didn’t have wives and girlfriends so that fans could fantasise they were in with a chance.

Actually, at the time of going to press, Blunt seems to be going out again with one of his old flames, Verity Evetts, an Oxford-educated barrister. He has also stayed friendly with some of his other exes, the socialites at least. He told one – an ex who got married not long ago – that he doesn’t feel ‘centred’ at the moment and would like to get married as well. Then again, he also said that he never tires of singing You’re Beautiful night after night because it gets him laid night after night.

Either way, he tells me he has grown used to the idea that his mother will probably find out from the papers what he has been up to, and with whom, before he has had a chance to tell her. ‘And my [two] sisters are quick to email me about things in the papers, laughing their heads off. I get healthy, ritual abuse from them, and give it back myself.’

As we are talking, I can’t decide whether the way Blunt smiles all the time is disarming or disturbing. He’s like a victim of a religious cult, smiling at the beginning of the sentence and at the end. I guess he has a lot to smile about, but also I sense a great deal of insecurity to disguise.

Then, I’m distracted by the sight of Sheryl Crow playing table tennis across the room. She has been holding her adopted son in one arm as she bats with the other, and now, even more distractingly, she is heading straight for us. ‘Are we going to have one of our little conversations on stage again tonight, James?’ she says. ‘That flirting thing. I think it worked well last night.’

They discuss the duet they will sing – a cover of Cat Stevens’s The First Cut is the Deepest – then we both watch her shimmy away, her blonde curls bobbing. ‘She’s very down to earth,’ he says. ‘I’d met her a couple of times, which was why she asked me on this tour. We do end up playing a lot of table tennis on the road. We’ve done 117 shows so far this year, in 117 cities, and there are a lot of hours to fill in the day.’

As he sleeps on his tour bus with his band, one city tends to blur into another. When I joke that he is in Cincinnati now, he looks genuinely confused. ‘No, this is?… Oh, right. Actually, I always get the tour manager to say where we are just as I’m going on stage. I still managed to get it wrong the other night, saying “Hello Dallas” when I meant Austin. I’m surprised I got out alive.’

He is funny on the subjects of things that go wrong. ‘People are normally surprised by my show, which is more energetic than you might think. Jumping on the piano. Jumping out into the audience and running up and down the aisle high-fiving them. But going off the stage can be quite dangerous. I broke my finger once. My legs carried on when I jumped off, and I smacked down on the ground. The spotlight was on me, and when I got back to the piano I hit the wrong note and thought, “Why did I do that?” And I looked down and saw it was because my finger was broken, sticking out an angle. Look,’ he says holding it up. ‘It’s still crooked.’

On another occasion, in Chicago, he jumped 8ft off the stage. ‘When I began running to the audience, a security guard stuck his arm out and I thought, “Does he want a hug?” Then next thing I know he’s rugby-tackled me. He wouldn’t release me and I was screaming in his ear, “I’m the f—ing singer.” I had to wait for the other guards to pull him off.’

I would have thought Blunt’s training in unarmed combat would have helped. I presume he still works out. ‘No, never. Couldn’t handle it. Too boring. I am a hyperactive person though.’ He likes an adrenaline rush, as well, having recently bought an 1100cc Moto Guzzi V11 Sport motorbike. There’s also the skiing, which he still does, and the riding. Actually, he tells me, he never really liked horses before joining the Life Guards. So why did he join that particular regiment?

‘Well, it is a reconnaissance regiment.’ But they are all so tall in the Life Guards, did that not make him self-conscious? ‘Some are. The Foot Guards tend to be taller regiments, though. The Life Guards take a few shrimps, as well. Besides, they are on horses, so height isn’t so important. Also being in that regiment had the benefit of being in Knightsbridge. I got a chance to be in London and meet people in the music scene.’ And groupies, as it happens.

As he paraded up and down the Mall in plumed helmet and shiny breastplate, girls would stick their phone numbers down his knee-length boots. But it was his time in Kosovo that really made girls swoon. He used to strap his guitar to the outside of his tank, because there wasn’t room for it inside. He had learnt to play the violin at five, the piano at seven and the guitar at 14, while a pupil at Harrow.

He writes his songs on piano and guitar. ‘But mainly guitar because it is easier to carry around. It’s like a child messing around with a toy. If a tune comes to me I don’t record it instantly. I think if I remember it, then it must be worth remembering, and if I forget it, then it was forgettable.’

Does he have any anxiety dreams about forgetting lines or chords? ‘Not yet. Perhaps I will tonight. Perhaps you’ve jinxed me. But audiences aren’t judgmental, and if things go wrong and you can look them in the eye, that is fine. The only people who are judgmental are the journalists. I will be conscious of you being there in the audience judging me.’

Blimey. Sorry about that. Is it true he signs breasts? ‘Not that I remember. Not that I’m fussy what I sign. A lot of men started coming to the shows after I appeared on Top Gear last year. That was such fun. I spun the car five times. I thought I might as well make the most of it. I am competitive.’

He recorded one of the fastest laps, but I’m surprised blokes didn’t think him manly before that, given his tour of duty in Kosovo. ‘It’s because I sing songs that are heart-on-your-sleeve and therefore I must be overly emotional. Nothing I can do about it. I could pose more, but I am comfortable with my masculinity.’

He has said that his lyrics are autobiographical, in which case, are we to assume that the lyric on his new album, ‘I killed a man in a far away land’, means he killed a man in a far away land? I only ask because in the past he has said that he would never try to exploit what he went through, what he saw. ‘You should ask any soldier how many lives he has saved. How they do it is no one else’s business. What I took from my experience in Kosovo is that you are told from one day to the next who your enemy is and it keeps changing. That’s what is happening in Iraq, too. I believe in looking people in the eye, looking for the common humanity.’

He is a great believer in looking people in the eye. He will use the phrase again later and it seems to reveal a Christ complex, or a John the Baptist one. That direct and challenging stare of his. It would also explain the hair.

It is time for him do some photographs before he goes on stage and, endearingly, he says he is ‘not fussed’ about the grooming he is offered before they are taken.

On stage his features contort with passion when he sings. The big video screen goes in tight on his face. His voice is by turns soft and tremulous and forceful, but always high. Having seen him in concert once before, a couple of years ago, I notice the tone of his banter has changed.

‘Wow it’s hot tonight,’ he says now. ‘I’m surprised any of you are wearing any clothes. We could all take them off and get friendly.’ It is suggestive, designed to get the teenage girls in the audience screaming. Before he used to joke about his ‘girlie voice’ and taking helium to get it that way, and being ‘a bit wet’ and the ‘housewives’ favourite’. I think now he has realised that, actually, he is a proper musician, a popular one, too, and that he doesn’t need to apologise for it.

Afterwards, back in the dressing-room, he strips to the waist as he talks because he wants to take a shower before going back on to do his duet with Sheryl Crow. ‘Things got a bit hairy out there when I jumped into the crowd,’ he says. ‘Did you see that? Some thought it was some kind of sport to grab me.’

I watch his duet from the side of the stage and notice he whispers something in Sheryl Crow’s ear and then she starts running her hands over his trousers suggestively, patting them. Afterwards, I ask what he said. ‘”Is now a good time to ask for your phone number?” She was checking my pockets, pretending to look for a pen.’

He shows me round the gold-coloured tour bus where he will be sleeping tonight as they drive to their next gig in Dallas. It is full of hi-tech equipment and is nicely air-conditioned but there isn’t much space in the bunks. ‘We do live in close proximity,’ he says. ‘Some of us stay up late. This is the crew end, they have to get up early.’

Where do the groupies go? ‘Never have groupies on here. Never. They’d only get in if we invited them in. But we’d only ever invite friends in.’

Does he sleep OK? I heard he has to take sleeping pills. ‘It is a bit of a rough sleep, but better than a hotel and taking planes all the time because you have to get to the airport two hours early, which is miserable. Then your flight gets delayed.’

He is drinking champagne from a plastic cup. ‘This is for your benefit,’ he says. ‘The tour management went out and bought a bottle of champagne because he thought I should be seen drinking it. Better for my image. Isn’t that sweet? Normally, we drink vodka and beer. In fact, I think I’d rather have a beer, now. Want one?’ He opens a well-stocked fridge then takes me to the back of the bus where there is some seating space. He has one small case which he pulls out from a cupboard. It continues a few pairs of socks, T-shirts and a spare pair of jeans. No photographs or mementos. ‘This is all I have for 14 months on the road,’ he says. ‘I’m not known for style.’

Does he know how much he is worth? ‘No I don’t, not very interested in it to be honest. I travel with hand luggage only. That is why I always seem to be wearing the same clothes in photographs. If a tabloid says my clothes aren’t fashionable or my hair looks stupid, I really don’t worry about it. Don’t have any hair gel.’

In London, he takes the Tube or the bus. He prefers pubs to restaurants. When he goes to Ibiza, he flies easyJet. Still, that’s at home. Presumably on the road he can afford to be more self-indulgent.

Another lyric that we can only assume is autobiographical is ‘I’ve taken a s—load of drugs’. It is. Though his only comment on the subject is that he has ‘a comfortable relationship with drugs’. His relationship with fame is less comfortable. Oscar Wilde said there were two forms of tragedy: not getting what you want, and getting it. Is that how it felt for him when he went to number one? ‘Actually, I don’t think I had been dreaming about it. Certainly, I hadn’t anticipated being so recognisable so quickly.

‘I do remember getting a phone call from the record company, who said both the single and the album have gone to number one, and thinking, “S—, this is not what I expected.” I hadn’t prepared myself for it. Number two is great. Number two is nice. I sensed then it would mean having to change from being a musician to being a celebrity and that that would be a change for the worse. Fame doesn’t affect me, but it does affect everyone else around me. As for celebrity, it is the worst invention of the modern world. Gossip columns treat your life as if it were a cartoon. Relationships reduced to cartoons.’

Although there are other public-school bands around at the moment – Radiohead, Coldplay – Blunt seems to have suffered more than most from a perception that he is too posh to be credible. His family name is Blount (and his middle name Hillier), but he changed it to Blunt to sound, well, blunter and more proletarian.

When he tells me he would nevertheless still send a son of his to Harrow – ‘I think I would. I think I would. Public schools make individuals rather than sheep’ – I ask what he makes of the mood change now that the old Etonian David Cameron has made it OK to be posh. ‘Is it? I must come back to Britain immediately. Is it really safe to come back?

‘It’s not a dirty word to be posh, people come up to me and no one gives a damn if I’m posh. It’s about having a normal conversation and looking people in the eye.’

We head back to the dressing-room where he puts on his feather boa and novelty sunglasses then we wander back downstairs to have a word with Sheryl Crow, who is signing autographs. This is the moment at which the keyboard player says: ‘This way to the good-time room girls’ and the silent groupies dutifully appear.