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Niall Ferguson

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

 

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

Wilful controversialist: the financial historian and columnist Niall Ferguson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

J.

James Blunt

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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.