The Times, November 01, 2008
- Ginny Dougary

Born in Greece, educated at Cambridge and now the queen of Capitol Hill: Arianna Huffington’s superblog has made her one of the most influential political commentators in America

Vince Bucci

There’s a perfect Arianna moment during our long interview in the heat of the Los Angeles summer, when I ask her whether she’s seen Swing Vote, a highly topical film that had just opened in America, starring and bankrolled by Kevin Costner. “Yes,” she says. “I am in it…” Pause. “I play myself.”

Well, of course she does. In a film whose central premise is that the outcome of a US presidential election hangs on the vote of one “ordinary American” – that most sought-after coupling of words in this charged real election – the extraordinary Arianna Huffington with her hugely influential political blog (key postings by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton), The Huffington Post, aka HuffPo, practically commands a cameo role.

There are a number of reasons why I laugh out loud. La Huff’s slightly huffy (forgive the pun but it happens to be true) presumption that, surely, I should already be aware of her small but significant part; her insouciance about the obviousness of her role as a player in Hollywood; the whole slightly nutty reality TV idea of it is funny. It’s just too much, don’t you agree? Probably not, judging by Arianna’s blank response: “I thought that was why you were mentioning it.”

Our day together started chaotically. I arrived bang on time at Huffington’s home, a Mediterranean old-style villa in the swish Bel-Air borders of Brentwood, which once boasted Hollywood royals Gary Cooper, Clark Gable and Joan Crawford as residents, and latterly O.J. Simpson. The photo shoot was supposed to have finished but had not even started, which offered the opportunity for a longish perusal of the property.

The somewhat madhouse atmosphere, full of keen interns declaring their work is “awesome”, is amplified by a singsong woman’s voice on an endless loop – the Velvet Underground, it turns out, by way of the Juno soundtrack: “I’m sticking with you, ’cos I’m made out of glue, Anything that you might do, I’m gonna do too.”

Beyond the impeccably green collection of Prius cars (or Prii, as Huffington tells me her daughters call them), the front door opens into a vast hallway which would be perfect for the high-powered networking gatherings that were once considered, but no longer, to be Huffington’s central raison d’être. The French windows open out to an extended courtyard with steps leading down to a swimming pool and cabana, flanked by guest houses with wings for the various members of Arianna’s extended family – her late mother, Elli, used to live with her, and her younger sister, Agapi, 56, still does – whom she describes as her “tribe”.

A large dining-room table is covered in platters of fresh fruit and plates of honey-oozing baklava – Arianna has inherited her mother’s hospitality gene – which are intermittently snarfed by the great traffic of people passing through the house. Lempicka lookalikes are on the walls, and a blue portrait by Françoise Gilot; Arianna insists that it was Picasso who copied his ex-wife during his Blue Period, rather than the other way round. There are many, many photographs – almost all of family but also one of Barack Obama who seems, at first glance, to be stroking Arianna’s neck in a gesture of infinite tenderness, while she gazes at him. When I bring this to her attention, Arianna says he was merely gesticulating (which is clearer on close inspection), and then she points out her 19-year-old daughter, Christina, in the background.

Half an hour passes, and Arianna appears, trim in black, only to disappear again, stripping off her shirt to reveal her bra as she jogs up the sweeping staircase. Hair recoiffed, a change of clothes for the last lot of photos, poised on a column of her dozen books, ranging from her early biographies on Picasso and Maria Callas to her recent self-helpish bestseller, On Becoming Fearless, via the political – Right is Wrong, with the longest subtitle: How the lunatic fringe hijacked America, shredded the Constitution, and made us all less safe (and what you need to know to end the madness).

Finally, La Huff has done posing and sits to talk by my side at the giant table. Among the flurry of interruptions and disturbances, there is a sense of contained stillness and calm about her, as well as an unusual quality of simultaneous engagement and detachment. I wonder whether this is a result of so many years of New Age training or because she sometimes doesn’t quite catch the nuance of a question or maybe it’s just a technique for remaining unflappable. I had caught Arianna being grilled by Paxman on Newsnight a week before we met, and his incredulous eyebrow and withering tone didn’t faze her in the least. If anything, she got the better of him.

At 58, she still has the looks of a woman who might flick her burnished mane but she does not. In fact, there is something strikingly unanimated about her. The only tic Arianna seems to have is to knock on the table whenever she says “touch wood”, which is her response to anything from her hope that America is well and truly ready for change to her younger daughter overcoming anorexia.

She is the coolest warm person I have ever met, with a tepid social laugh and a constant refrain that many of her natural inclinations are to do with her “Greek peasant” stock. There are certain contexts where this works: her shrugged-off explanation for the youthful glow of her unstretched skin, and some which make her sound rather less empathic.

When we talk about Isabella’s anorexia, for instance, which she wrote about (with her daughter’s permission) in Fearless, I ask her whether she has ever suffered from anything similar: “No, it’s not a Greek peasant girl disease,” she says. “I always consider myself from Greek peasant stock, I don’t know if I am or not, but I feel I have this earthiness and there’s a sense of perspective that food is precious and I don’t suffer from all these diseases of civilisation.” One takes her point, but I wonder how helpful this robust distaste for modern-day afflictions might have been when her 11-year-old daughter, now 17, was suffering.

Since her intention is to create the first internet newspaper, rather than a mere political blog – the liberal Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com) is the most talked about of these – I ask her baldly whether she thinks that America really is unracist enough to vote in a black President. “I don’t think that’s the issue at all. Sure, there’s residual racism but it’s marginal and nobody expects Obama or anyone else to be elected unanimously.

“What happens in elections, unfortunately, is that fear-mongering works. That’s what happened in American politics in ’04; there’s no earthly reason why George Bush would have been re-elected after it had been proven that there were no WMD, after it had been proven that we had tortured people in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and despite all that he was.”

The fear factor prompted Arianna to write three posts dispensing her advice to Obama. She doesn’t hold with my reinterpetation that one of her lines is that it’s important for her candidate not to dilute his position – to become Obama-lite – and shift to the centre. “It’s not about moving to the centre in the sense of abandoning any particular progressive position; that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s about not being true to yourself.

“When you’re not seen as being true to yourself, then you’re not the leader who can unite a country and bring about real solutions. You are another pawn who listens to the polling data which has been proved so completely wrong again and again. So he must not surrender to the siren songs of consultants, pollsters and caution. He must follow his own drama and create a new consensus around what needs to be done. That’s leadership.”

There is strong evidence that negative campaigning, however unpleasant, works but Arianna’s view is that what Obama’s team needs to do, instead, is concentrate on galvanising the great abstaining swaths of the electorate, rather than focus on the unreliable whims of the swinging voter. “I’m saying don’t fight with John McCain over them – the oscillating ones who are most easily fearmongered. Run a campaign which is predicated on expanding the electorate: the almost 50 per cent, over 83 million Americans, who did not vote in the ’04 election. If he can get five per cent of these millions who did not vote, then he’s there… and I absolutely think it’s the likely outcome.”

There has been much comment about how the democratising power of the internet has shaped this election and transformed the nature of those in the future. Arianna, as one might expect, is enthralled by the potential of using the internet as a tool to reach out to so many people: “That is what is great about now; you can just keep giving great speeches that go on YouTube which people download. Obama’s speech on race – which was a great speech – has been downloaded in its entirety millions of times.

“And, by the way, this idea that John McCain and so many people in the media are contemptuous of eloquence! Rhetoric has always been a part of great leadership, whether it is Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill or Nelson Mandela being able to move hearts and minds through words. I mean, how else does change happen?”

She, of course, has been famously open to change, having swung from being a darling of the right – at Cambridge, where she was President of the Union, a conservative commentator when she was the girlfriend of Times columnist the late Bernard Levin, courting the neo-con likes of Newt Gingrich when she moved to the States, promoting the political career of her ex-husband, the Republican oil scion Michael Huffington, who came out as a bisexual after their marriage ended – to a most outspoken champion of the liberal left.

It’s the sort of journey, one imagines, that has left numbers of her former friends and allies feeling betrayed. But Arianna points out that her core values have always been liberal: “Even during my Republican interregnum, I was always pro gay rights, pro choice and pro gun control. So if you take these three major social issues in American politics, I have always been progressive and I haven’t changed. The only change which has been fundamental is my understanding of the role of government.”

It is she, indeed, who feels let down by her former political soul mates who have changed – in particular, John McCain. Coming from a culture that venerates age, Arianna would never use the age card against him but says: “The problem with McCain is not his chronological age, it’s the age of his ideas: his views on gay marriage or Iraq or what we should do with the economy.

“He has given up all his core beliefs which had to do with ‘the agents of intolerance’, which is what he had called the religious right – and now he’s kissing their rings. On taxation, he had voted twice against George Bush’s tax cuts, and now he wants to make them permanent. On immigration, he had a very sensible bill but now he’s saying he will vote against his own bill. Torture was the ultimate surrender. This hero who has been tortured, voted against a bill that would have banned the CIA from using torture.

“So that has been his Faustian bargain and that is why he sounds so discombobulated because he has no compass. He goes wherever they need him. It’s really sad and I don’t mean that just as a phrase. This is a really noble man who’s fallen.”

The Sarah Palin curiosity show was not yet in play when we spoke but Arianna subsequently made her views plain on HuffPo, where she posts an editorial four times a week. (She still writes her weekly syndicated newspaper column for the Tribune group.) After watching the vice-presidential debate – as a member of the audience, naturally – she wrote about Palin coming across as an “over-wound-up doll, sporting a pasted-on smile that never varied, except when she winked”. She was also alarmed by the extent to which the neo-cons, her own former political bedmates, had been apparently grooming the moose-queen behind the scenes.

In one of my e-mailed questions for a last-minute update, I asked Arianna whether she considered Palin had done less or more for women by coming this far, and was impressed by the thoughtfulness and speed with which she replied. “In one way,” she said, “she’s been a throwback – relying on a flirty charm rather than knowledge, intelligence, insight. But her candidacy has been good in that it proved that just being female is not enough to attract women voters. Indeed, Palin has fared particularly poorly with women – especially women under 50.

“When the dust settles, I believe Palin will be remembered as a disastrous – and ridiculously risky – selection for McCain to have made. And she’ll go on to do what she seems to like to do best: perform. I think she’ll become the wildly popular host of a TV reality show.”

Arianna chose not to support Hillary in the primaries principally because of her position on the war. But her disappointment with the Clinton regime goes deeper: “The attempt to reform healthcare was the last bold position of the Clinton administration. Yet the Nineties was a very prosperous, good time in America; a time that we could have come together for a great collective purpose.

“To come together and try to reform healthcare again. It’s, like, you don’t give up the first time. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, ‘Well, Lyndon Johnson said we don’t have the vote. So, OK, let’s move on’! When was reform ever easy?”

So why should we attach any importance to the opinions of a self-declared, if extensively reinvented, Greek peasant girl? La Huff is hardly a household name in this country although older readers may remember her as Arianna Stassinopoulos. But, now more than ever, she is undoubtedly a big deal in America (making Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2006) – where she moved first to New York with her mother in 1980 at 30, realising after an intense 9-year relationship that she had no future with her mentor and first big love, Bernard Levin, 22 years her senior.

It was Lord Weidenfeld, the publisher, who had advised her to befriend the wives not the husbands of the powerbroking set on the Upper East Side, arming her with a list of contacts. He had encouraged her to write the Callas biography, which was serialised by Harold Evans, then editor of The Sunday Times, husband of Tina Brown, who has recently launched her own internet venture in America, The Daily Beast; they all remain the best of friends, wheels within wheels.

I had said to Arianna that while I did not wish, personally, to be bamboozled by her legendary charm – “No chance of that!” she had said rather sharply – nonetheless it was interesting how she had set about cultivating friendships with such powerful and influential women, and with such stunning success. (Ann Getty, who not only found her a husband but paid for the wedding in 1986 which, by most accounts, stretched even her own customary extravagance; Barbara Walters was a bridesmaid.)

“There was no five-year plan,” she says. “And there isn’t one now. So many of the good things I have in my life were the result of coincidence… of things that came to me. For instance, the Maria Callas was a tiny book, with a much smaller advance than the Picasso, but Harry Evans got into a bidding war with The Observer and paid more money than any previous serialisation, which was what made the book. All those things I did not cause. [The subsequent kerfuffle about a now settled plagiarism charge only served to swell the sales.]

“So the idea that you charm your way into great things happening to you would be untrue and it would also not be good advice to anyone who is listening. I feel that the only advice I can give in terms of quote unquote ‘charm’ is that if you really like people and genuinely care to know more about them, it’s just a great way to go through life.”

During her Manhattan years, Arianna became a fixture on the social scene and was written about in not always flattering terms which tend to get recycled, being memorable if cruel, in profiles such as this. My favourite is the one about her being the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus. We have a slightly surreal moment competing to remember the cleverest Arianna put-downs. “There are some good lines,” she agrees. “Do you know the one Henry Kissinger said about our wedding?” (That it had everything but “an Aztec sacrificial fire dance”.)

Just as I’m thinking this bland equanimity is almost too good to be true, she makes a spirited rejoinder: “Henry Kissinger was out as much as I was, and I didn’t hear anybody calling him a socialite! There were many men around at those same dinners – as much if not more so than I was – but you’ve never heard those adjectives attributed to men. Never.”

Did the comments bother her at the time and do they still? “At the time, they did, yes, but if at 58, I still minded those things I would really worry about myself because it would mean I was completely missing out on the point of life.” And the point of life is…? “The point of life is freedom,” she says. “And the more free we are, the less we care about what other people think of us.”

Earlier, I had asked Arianna whether she could imagine dying for anything she believed in. “Yes, yes,” she says. “Definitely I would die for my children. There’s a lot I believe in, but we have to be more concrete otherwise we sound a little bit melodramatic.”

I explain that I’m asking because both her parents put their lives at risk, driven by their beliefs. “Ultimately it has to do with big words and big values, and with me of all the big values, it would be truth – but then what is the concrete manifestation of that big value?”

OK, say somebody tried to make you write propaganda? “That would be a very good example, yes. To lie about something which would inevitably put people at risk.” Does she consider herself to be physically courageous? “I’m not in the athletic sense of scaling mountains or anything like that. [She is a keen hiker, however.] But I think I’m courageous in terms of challenging the conventional wisdom… of speaking truth to power. Actually, I don’t even consider it courageous.”

Her mother, Elli, worked for the Red Cross in her early twenties during the Greek Civil War and was up in the mountains hiding Jewish teenagers. One night they found themselves surrounded by German soldiers demanding that they surrender the Jews. Elli, who apparently spoke many languages, all self-taught, “in an accent stronger than mine”, her daughter says, came forward and boldly told them in fluent German, “We have no Jews here, put your guns down,” and, remarkably, they did. “She said it with such authority and she was really fearless, all her life and fearless for us, too, which is why I took that name for the book from her. She was definitely the foundation of everything for me… but that’s another story.”

Constantine Stassinopoulos, her journalist father, edited a Resistance newspaper during the occupation, and was caught by the Germans and sent to a concentration camp. After the liberation, while regaining his strength in a sanatorium, he met Elli who was recovering from TB and coming to terms with the sad news that she could not have children as a result. The two had an affair, whereupon she promptly fell pregnant and was fully prepared to bring the baby up on her own. “Yes,” Arianna says rather proudly, “I was a lovechild.” Eventually there was a wedding, with Elli “and her substantial belly”, but Constantine’s idea of marriage, when his wife complained about his endless affairs, was, “You should not interfere with my private life.” It was a sense of entitlement, his daughter explains, “‘I survived and life owes me.’”

It was Michael Huffington who persuaded Arianna’s father to write a book about his experiences, and paid for it to be published and translated: “They were really close, even though my father did not speak English, and it was beautiful to see these two people who did not have a common language but still had this incredible bond.”

The Stassinopouloses split up when Arianna was 11 and Agapi was 9, although they never divorced and died within months of each other in 2000. Elli sounds like a wonderful character, padding around the Upper East Side apartment in a fur coat and bare feet, smoking cigars. Her idea of a humdinging party was inviting the plumbers and handymen to mingle with the statesmen and bankers. “She had no sense of hierarchy and could not have an impersonal relationship. If you went shopping with her, she would engage with the shop assistant. Not to be nice or because she wanted something; it’s just the way she was.

“She never dyed her hair or wore make-up, she was just totally real. I’m not advocating that, I’m just saying what a role model she was,” Arianna says.

The other way she influenced her daughter was her interest in spiritual matters and alternative ways of thinking. Long before it was mainstream, Elli was practising yoga and meditation and sent her daughter off at 16 to study comparative religions in Calcutta. (The following year, mother and daughters moved to London so that Arianna could pursue her dream of going to Cambridge, where she was awarded an exhibition to read economics at Girton.)

“She was completely grounded in reality but at the same time understood that there is more to life than this material reality. She would quote Socrates who said, ‘Practise death daily’, not in a morbid sense but in a sense of bringing perspective into your life,” Arianna says. “It’s stunning, when you think about it, that we live life as though we’re never going to die when the one absolute reality – whether you’re an agnostic, an atheist or a believer, whether it’s tomorrow or in 30 years – is that we’re all going to die, right?”

There was a period in the mid to late Seventies, in the UK as well as the States, when self-discovery became the buzzword. You could take your pick from est (whose guru, Werner Ehrhardt, was one of La Huff’s boyfriends), Insight, Exegisis and the latterly disgraced Bhagwan Rajneesh with his followers in their flame-coloured clothes; Arianna enthusiastically did and, indeed, only recently participated in an Insight seminar in Los Angeles. She says these accelerated therapy sessions – and, perhaps, California was always going to be her spiritual home – have helped her to realise that: “It wasn’t enough for my life to be about me and my children and my work, it had to be something about being connected with a larger story, the story of our time.”

I can still recall the shock of seeing a drawing of the towering intellect Bernard Levin dressed in a tutu, illustrating an article by a playwright, Snoo Wilson, who had seen him thus transformed at one such course. Arianna also remembers it and the publication it appeared in, Time Out. While Levin may have been her teacher in so many ways, it was she who was responsible (and blamed) for encouraging him to explore the instant therapy route. So was he wearing a tutu and if so why? “He was in Jungian analysis and it was his way of illustrating his feminine side,” she says. “It was the side of him that he felt he had suppressed. For him, it was really about breaking taboos to do with tenderness and intimacy, all the problems that he had with intimacy and relationships.” Did he find it helpful? “It was Insight and, yes, he found it incredibly helpful.”

It was this problem that, despite young Arianna’s best efforts, led to the break-up. Although it is long ago in her past, when she talks about the pain of that rejection, falteringly rather than in her easy eloquent flow, it still seems sad and smartingly real. “He was so committed to our relationship – that was what was so hard,” she says. “It wasn’t that he didn’t want the relationship to last for ever, he just didn’t want to have children. Obviously I would say his own childhood… well, he had a lot of problems and he desperately wanted to break down those barriers to intimacy – emotional intimacy – but he couldn’t, he had such a hard time.”

On Levin’s death in 2004, after a long descent into Alzheimer’s, Arianna wrote a moving piece in which she recalled the way he would retreat into himself when faced with confrontation. “Yes, and for me it was always to engage,” she says. “It was very hard because I was very much in love with him so, you know, it was painful when he would withdraw.

“But although it did feel like an incredible rejection, and it was very painful, which was what made me decide to move to New York, it taught me a lot about the mystery of life. Because when I look back, everything that’s happened in my life happened, in a way, as a result of that rejection. My children, The Huffington Post, my whole life here would not have happened – so that is how I see it, however painful and hard it may have seemed at the time.”

She is, understandably, less open about the failure of her marriage. Arianna was seen by her critics – who were legion – to have been harnessing her own social and political ambitions when she worked so indefatigably to promote her husband’s career. In 1988, when Michael was deputy assistant secretary of defence for negotiations policy under the Reagan administration, the Huffingtons moved from Washington DC to Santa Barbara, California, where he ran for and won a seat in Congress. In 1994, he spent almost $30 million of his own money – a record for a non-presidential campaign at the time – but lost in the general election by 1.9 per cent of the vote to Dianne Feinstein. Three years later, the couple separated and in 1998, Michael Huffington disclosed his sexuality in an interview in Esquire. In 2003, when Arianna stood as an independent candidate to be governor of California (later withdrawing), her ex-husband – who remains a staunch Republican – chose to endorse her opponent, the present governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There is a bit of a cloud around how much or how little Arianna knew about Michael’s sexuality when they married. She has said, in the past, that she wasn’t aware of his inclinations. For his part, he states things very clearly in a recent New Yorker piece: “In December 1985… I sat down with her and told her that I had dated women and men so that she would be aware of it. I didn’t think it fair not to mention my bisexuality… And the good news was that it was not an issue for her.” He is now a film producer whose projects include We’re All Angels, about a gay Christian pop singer combo, and earlier this year, Bi the Way, a documentary on bisexuality.

There were a lot of ups and downs in the divorce years, Arianna says, but they’ve come through it as friends. They have weathered storms before, after all, when they lost their first born baby, a son they named Alexander Roy. Arianna says that she and her daughters often wonder what he would have been like: “He’d be 21 now and we have this thing that he wouldn’t be intellectual like the two girls; he’d be at college on some jock scholarship and intimidated by his really brilliant sisters, you know!”

Michael lives in Boston now but only the other evening came round for dinner. “He’s a very good father and we were determined to put our children first,” she says. “So we’ve always had birthdays and Christmas together, just the four of us – and at times it was harder for the two of us – but it’s reached a point where it’s very natural.”

Their daughters, she says, “are very resolved about their father’s decision to come out and they’ve dealt with it. I should never have discussed it when I did and it was really my mistake but he and I have agreed, for the sake of the children, it’s not something that anyone can benefit from, going back and forth on that.”

Later, when I’m wondering how the couple could bear to have been mixing with the neo-cons and their toxic homophobic hatred, Arianna counters: “But there have always been pro gay rights Republicans. That’s just one of the many contradictions in the party.

“Michael was always pro gay rights when he was a Republican congressman and now. He’s involved with this group called the Log Cabin Republicans and they’re gay Republicans advocating gay rights within the Republican party.”

Arianna says she is single at the moment, “but I am very open to having a boyfriend and falling in love again although I’m not looking for it.” I ask her whether she would like to remarry and she says, quite revealingly: “I think it’s very unlikely. I feel marriage was for me about having my children and right now, again I’m not ruling it out, but I definitely don’t see it on the horizon.”

In the meantime, there’s more than enough to occupy her time with her new baby The Huffington Post, which goes from strength to strength. In last week’s e-mail she tells me that it has seen “remarkable growth” this year, “with 19.5 million unique visitors in September, the highest number ever for the site and October will be even higher”. This is all double Dutch to me but I do note the New Yorker’s reference in mid-October to its importance as a liberal foil to the Drudge Report and that in February “according to Nielsen Online, it drew 3.7 million unique visitors surpassing Drudge for the first time” and that in August, the site logged 5.1 million unique visitors. So, yes, “remarkable growth” sounds pretty accurate.

Arianna chose not to answer my questions about profitability or valuation (the latest estimation was a sale price of $200 million), other than to point out that she has not invested any of her own money in the project, only her time. But she did tell me that, “We are not consistently making a profit. There are profitable months and not profitable months, depending on the combination of expenses and advertising we bring in.” She and her partner, Kenneth Lerer, a former AOL executive, who launched The Huffington Post in 2005 have already set up a Chicago office, and Arianna – never known for the limitations of her vision – seems set for global domination: “Ideally we want to expand around the world.”

She’s very glad to see that her “great friend” Tina Brown is “diving into the internet” and she doesn’t appear to be at all bothered by the competition: “The more sites there are offering smart, compelling content, the more people will get their news, opinion and entertainment online. That’s good for all of us.”

When I asked where she will be on election night and with whom, she replied, “I will be with our Huffington Post team, covering the results second by second!” On a second e-mail, she added that her younger daughter would be with her, as the older one has just started at Yale: “I’m on my way right now to my first parents’ weekend!”

My final late question was, knowing how sceptical she is about the veracity of the polls: are you more or less confident that Obama will be the next President than you were in the summer? “More,” she wrote. “In tough times, we need someone with a steady hand on the tiller. By that measure, Obama has been the clear winner. He’s been centred where McCain was scattered. Forceful where McCain was forced. Presidential where McCain was petulant.”

And her sign-off was pure Arianna: “Of course, at heart, I’m still a superstitious Greek peasant girl, so I’m not counting my chickens – or my lambs – yet.”

The Times, October 25, 2008
- Ginny Dougary

You don’t just eat at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck restaurant, you have a whole sensory experience. Ginny Dougary drops by his laboratory to talk the science and psychology of food, families and uncontrollable fury

For those of us afflicted with vivid imaginations, it can be disturbing to hang out with Heston Blumenthal. Odd thoughts cross your mind such as what would it be like to be served a life-sized head of the chef-owner of the Fat Duck. First: you and your fellow diners would be invited to insert earphones connected to iPods which would play barnyard sounds of contented chickens clucking. A waiter would waft a distilled essence of something suitably earthy: fresh hay, say, laced with something borderline unpleasant to stimulate the senses. You would then be presented with a silver spoon and instructed to tap the patron’s bald pate which would crack open to reveal a rich brew of truffled brains, which you may or may not find delicious depending on how easily you could overcome your conditioned resistance to cannibalism.

This tasting menu special came to me on the back of a highly unusual voyage of discovery that managed to eclipse even the extremely high standards set by the usual Fat Duck experience.

The punishing brief was to spend a day with Heston, half of which would be devoted to eating the 17-odd (in both senses) courses on his legendary menu, accompanied by my elder son, Tom, who had previously picked the Fat Duck as the restaurant at which to celebrate his 18th birthday. The thinking behind this mission was that there is something about the chef’s experimental approach to food, with his test tubes and lab, that is particularly appealing to rather clever adolescent boys. Tom was clearly up for the challenge, with his pronouncement that “Heston is really safe” (ie, “cool”) and that he was “totally psyched” about the whole prospect.

The first person we see by the narrow road that curves through Bray is the man himself, in his white chef’s jacket, nursing a broken hand from a recent cricket injury. This, so his wife Zanna tells him, is someone’s message that her husband should be spending more time at home with his family. Not much chance of that, however, with a hefty book to promote (The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, a compendium of his life’s work), a television series in production, a new menu to create for the Fat Duck, as well as an intriguing commission to transform the Little Chef motorway chain into an altogether different dining experience (also to be filmed for Channel 4). There is something fitting about this last project given Heston’s parents’ admirably – if true – left-field decision to name their son after a service station near Heathrow.

He is every bit as friendly and blokey as his television persona, with no immediate signs of the rather more complicated personality that emerges in our interview. We chat about Feast, the first of his Channel 4 commitments (he defected from the BBC earlier this year), which is proving to be quite time-consuming. The idea behind it is to recreate various dishes and experiences from different periods in history, and we will get a chance to sample some of these works-in-progress in his “laboratory”.

Tom is riveted by one that is recorded in the new book, which is spectacular, but not in a good way. This involves plucking the feathers of a chicken while it is still alive – not so dissimilar to a Brazilian perhaps – then somehow lulling it to sleep (presuming it has not already passed out in shock), whereupon it is placed on a giant platter surrounded by his fellow fowl who have already been roasted. The poor creature’s rude awakening apparently comes as the host starts carving, and the pièce de résistance – oh what japes – is to watch the bald, freaked-out chicken run amok down the table. Heston wishes the Channel 4 production team had never got wind of this particular blast from the past since they keep badgering him to stage a re-enactment. We agree that he should hold firm.

The lab is no longer in the garden shed behind the restaurant where Heston and his team conducted the experiments that led to the creation of his first astonishing taste-sensations: the nitro green tea and lime mousse in 2001, for instance. He bought a neighbouring pub, the Hinds Head, principally because it came with a house – formerly used for staff accommodation and now containing an overspill kitchen, various offices and the new laboratory. As it turns out, the pub has been a great hit, too, with its more conventional (and affordable) bangers and mash and steak and chips, allowing him the freedom to be ever more recondite in fine-tuning the menu of his flagship restaurant.

We meet the lab team and the head chef-technician, Kyle Connaughton, arms covered in tattoos, who is not given to small talk. On the main table there are bowls filled with chopped truffles and pomegranate seeds and a sort of home-made Rice Krispie concoction, as well as the aforementioned dishes for the TV series. Heston, who has two or three tasting sessions here a week, reappears and tells us about one of his many collaborations.

It is important here to stress, perhaps, that although his ability to cook has been internationally recognised (three Michelin stars for the Fat Duck, and voted best restaurant in the world), Heston is also an inventor, a pioneer, alchemist, teacher and explorer, as well as being fascinated by history and psychology, science and the arts. He may be something additional for which we have not yet created a word, since he is pushing all sorts of boundaries in his curiosity to see where this might lead. All of which could make him sound a bit annoying – particularly in England where we don’t like to be in awe of individual virtuosity – which is where his natural, unassuming manner comes in handy.

He is continuing his Odorama investigations, which have already gone down well, as I remember from our first visit, with his introduction of a sort of bosky woodland smell to accompany one of the starters of oak moss and truffle toast. Now he’s working with a guy to produce a blast of campfire smoke, a vanilla-scented cloud intended to summon the memory of an old-fashioned sweet shop, and the fresh hazelnut blissfulness of a newborn baby’s head. He produces a vial of the final one but, alas, it has curdled and (rather spookily) replicates that precise tang of regurgitated breast milk that I last smelt coming at regular intervals from someone standing not very far… happily, a veil of discretion descends.

We join the tasting team for Frog Blancmange, a Heston tweak of a Tudor recipe: a beautiful vast wooden bowl, with a giant water lily settled on a bright green resin, a puddle of some kind of white cream, the Rice-Krispied frog legs rising up like little spears, and a scattering of rosy pomegranate seeds. The maestro is not happy with the cream-cheesiness of the taste and says it needs more work.

Then Blackbirds in a Pie, which after six weeks on the job is declared to be perfect. The question is: will Channel 4 release four-and-twenty blackbirds (probably not) when the pie is cut. Next come a Roman dish of doormice (sausagemeat) that still leaves a lot to be desired, a Victorian edible garden (to be served with the smell of grass and the sound of a lawn mower), and an incredibly complicated business that combines Mock Turtle soup with the Mad Hatter’s tea party, involving templates of a fob-watch encasing an intense broth, wrapped in gold leaf, which dissolves in the teacup when boiling water is added, so that the heady black liquid is flecked with specks of gold, which is simply the accompaniment for another dish which… well, you get the general idea.

Our time in the lab is over and it’s off to the restaurant for lunch. I’m wondering how the menu, as well as the whole drama of the event, will stand up to a second tasting, particularly only a couple of years after the last visit. I loved it the first time round but had looked upon it as a once-in-a-lifetime treat – rather like a visit to another planet, say – and not just because it’s so expensive. What was striking then was that despite the number of courses, the portions were mercifully small so we left the restaurant feeling rejuvenated rather than torpidly overstuffed.

The food was as delicious as ever but I had to fight the urge to ask the waiters to skip the introductions, which were perhaps necessarily elaborate the first time but redundant on a second visit. We both loved the Sound of the Sea, the dish Heston says is his pride and joy. Conches are deposited on the table into which iPods are secreted and as you push the plugs into your ears, you hear the rhythmic crash of waves and the intermittent cry of a seagull. Before you even taste what’s on the plate, you are instantly transported into some childhood seaside resort of long-distant memory with your parents placing a shell to your ear. It’s the oddest, intense feeling suddenly to be driven into your own private, interior world while you are in a most public place. Heston recently tried this out in a dining room full of captains of industry and they were all reduced to being little boys.

There are other mind tricks, an integral part of the Heston experience, which is a lot to do with perception and breaking habitual ways of thinking. I seemed to remember not liking the salmon poached in licorice gel because I loathe licorice (although love fennel) – and the idea of the combination was pretty unappetising. This time round, at any rate, it was delectable but it could be that it was on the first occasion, too, only the unappealing concept is what lingers rather than the actual taste.

Four and a half hours later, we finally emerge from the Fat Duck, waddling after all the wine pairings and extra dishes Heston has had the kitchen serve us. (Tom declared the new puddings, in particular, to be “totally bad-ass”.) No time to digest, however, as it’s straight into the interview. Since Heston has worked with so many different scientists from Bristol University, Oxford, Nottingham and Reading – where he was awarded an honorary degree – I wonder whether he has any regrets about not going to university himself. He was a studious grammar-school boy, with six O levels, who devoted his Friday nights to homework but became “distracted” in the sixth form and left school with one A level in art.

Heston mentions his father, who studied architecture and did a furniture restoration course, but did not go to university or encourage his son in that direction. The difficulty is being forced to make a decision at too young an age, Heston says looking at Tom, and he thinks now that he would have liked to have studied psychology or history.

The distracted years – which Heston dismisses as being the usual “bloke stuff” – also coincided with his discovery of gastronomy when his parents took their sixteen-year-old son to a three-star Michelin restaurant in Provence. It was, as he writes in The Big Fat Duck Cookbook, “love at first sight. I fell in love with cooking and the idea of being a chef.” Most of his spare time back home was devoted to poring over the Guide Michelin and Gault Millau, “cross-referencing three stars against high marks out of twenty… with the focused intensity of a cipher-breaker”.

Another obsession was martial arts: karate until he was 16, then into full-contact kick-boxing to which he devoted 20 hours a week. This was when Heston first became aware that he had a problem controlling his anger, and that exercise helped: “There were a load of Wycombe hard nuts down there [in Buckinghamshire, where the family had moved from London], potentially quite dangerous people but I was the youngest person and the moment they saw I wanted to learn, they took me under their wing and it was a really great feeling of camaraderie.”

Before we move on to his anger, I ask him whether he has ever suffered from a lack of confidence. “I have had big confidence issues, really big,” he says. “Although I wouldn’t say I had a serious lack of confidence now, I would certainly say that fear of failure was always a bigger driving force than the will to succeed.”

It was becoming a parent himself that prompted Heston to look back on his own childhood to search for clues about his character flaws. Two years ago, a back operation forced him to abandon the restaurant for a time and recuperate at home. “My wife had bought a Christmas tree and I’m standing there doing the decorations and my son [Jack], who was 13 at the time, said, ‘This is great, Dad, it’s the first time you’ve been here to do this with us.’

“My initial reaction was, ‘Ahhhhhhh,’ and then I thought, ‘Hang on a second, what he’s really saying is, “You haven’t done this before,”’ which gave me a big lump in my throat. This goes back to the confidence issue. From that moment, I started thinking a lot more about my upbringing which on the surface was a great childhood. But it’s amazing how your actions – even when you think they’re fine – can be subconsciously damaging.”

So what was it, growing up, that dented his confidence? “What is interesting, you might disagree with me on this,” Heston addresses Tom, “is your parents will always be your parents. Even if you’re 50 [Heston is 42], you are still their son and you still seek recognition and support and approval and compliments from them. It’s the most powerful source of compliment you can get.

“I realised I had this thing a couple of years ago – got the three Michelin stars, got the honorary degree, got the OBE, got the best restaurant in the world, and the doctorate from Bristol, and the one from Reading, got entered into the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry, when the only other two people were Nobel prizewinners…” all of this said at a gallop as though he is a bit embarrassed about listing his laurels, “…and these things were amazing, absolutely amazing, and yet my old man could say something like, ‘They mentioned so-and-so in the papers and not you – why have they got a thing against you?’

“And I’m thinking, actually, all those amazing things that happened have just disappeared. You think it’s not going to affect you but it does, even though you know they’re saying it to be protec-tive… It’s things like that and the Christmas tree… And I had a really, really bad – ah – temper and I fought really, really hard to control it, and then there’s this thing that only happened two weeks ago…”

He proceeds to tell a story about a bloke outside his house – “and we live in a nice road in Marlow now”, he adds – who was screaming at his wife or girlfriend “really aggressively” and Zanna and the three children are out in the garden, running after the chickens and the screaming is getting worse – “He’s going really mad” – and his wife, he continues, said to the kids: “‘Oh my God, imagine being married to that!’ and Jack turned round and said, ‘You were.’ Zanna came into the kitchen and said, ‘You’ll never guess what Jack’s just said.’ And that was just out of the blue.”

It was Zanna who insisted that Heston do something about his temper before something truly dreadful happened: “It was just getting worse and worse and worse. It’s a long story but she probably stopped me being jailed twice – actually pulled me back – an incident with a shotgun… an incident with a bottle…

“It was awful but it’s easier to talk about now because I’ve absolutely dealt with it. But it went on for five or six years. What was dangerous was the aggression was going down and the more cold, calculated feeling was getting stronger. It was an uncontrollable feeling and when it starts to feel…” he pauses, “…good… when that feeling starts to feel really good, it’s not good news. What’s bizarre is there’s a difference between being aggressive and starting to feel good about anger and violence. Zanna read about cranial osteopathy and it just gave me the impetus, although it might have been psychosomatic, to do something about it.”

It all started when Heston was a teenager and someone provoked him at a bar, and then leading up to the restaurant, “It was a situation where I had bitten off more than I could chew and I wasn’t in control.” I ask him, with some trepidation, whether he’d ever wanted to kill anyone. “Ughhh… yessss,” he says. But you haven’t, have you? “No, no, no,” which is a relief.

He says that he was a “very aggressive fighter” – probably an intimidating one, I imagine, with his muscular bulk and all those martial arts skills – and also suffered from really bad road rage. As it happens, the previous night, Tom had shown me a clip on his computer of Heston talking about a car-ramming incident on Griff Rhys-Jones’s two-parter on anger, Losing It, but it was the chef who brought up the subject, not me.

When I ask him why he thinks he was so angry, he pauses and says: “I don’t know. I have asked a lot of questions [and seen a therapist and faith healer]. I’d like to do some work on it and I did work on it because I haven’t raised my voice for years but I still don’t know why.” He’s particularly proud that the kitchen – where there are 43 chefs to an average of 42 diners – is a far cry from the notoriously abusive hellholes of some of his confrères. “Now, there’s no shouting, no screaming and no tantrums.” One of the many waiters who served us did say, however, that genial as he found the boss, he certainly wouldn’t want be on the wrong side of him.

Tom takes over for a bit and the conversation shifts into the more arcane territory of synaesthetic responses… much chat about learned associations, the effects of a crunch versus sizzle on the palate, the way a sound can stimulate other senses, and so on. As a music student, my son is interested in whether Heston has thought about working with composers and, of course, Mr Collaboration is already planning an event with David Coulter, Damon Albarn’s music supervisor on the opera Monkey: Journey to the West.

Back on the domestic front, I wonder how Heston’s wife has handled this long journey from sharing her life with an obsessive self-taught foodie – after the briefest of stints, Blumenthal famously turned down the offer to be an apprentice at Raymond Blanc’s Manoir aux Quat’Saisons (two Michelin stars) – to being married to a world-famous chef. He speaks of her in the warmest and most generous way – as well he might – saying that, “In the whole time since the restaurant opened and the build-up as well, she has literally never moaned about the time I’ve spent at work.”

For 15 years, Zanna has “reared”, as Heston first puts it before correcting himself, “brought up” their family more or less as a single parent. He attended his first parents’ evening at his children’s school during that back-break, and put up with being ribbed by the teachers when he attended his first carol service that same year. When I ask him whether he ever socialises, he says: “Errrrrr… probably a couple of times a year. Even my son says, ‘Dad, you’re sad – because all you do is work and don’t go out.’”

There was a time when his wife was lonely but Heston says that she’s well past that stage. There are consequences, of course, as he discovered when he spent time at home this year writing his book in the evenings. “It was like walking into somebody else’s family,” he says. “They had their own routine of homework, dinner, getting ready for school and, with the exception of my son, all of them love watching EastEnders. So I would stand and watch this whole routine which exists without me.” Did it make you feel unwanted? “At first it did, yeah.” Did you talk to your wife about it? “Not at first. I kept quiet about it and then I said, ‘Look…’” She’s not resentful of you? “Not at all. She’s always been really, really supportive.”

When the news came through about the third Michelin star, Heston was in Spain conducting a demonstration at a symposium. The Fat Duck was on the verge of financial disaster – something Heston had kept from his wife. That night, fairly typically, there were bookings for only two tables. “Another week and we would completely have run out of money,” he says. “I couldn’t even pay the wages. I remember calling her with the news, and her screaming, just screaming at the other end of the telephone, with joy.”

Heston flew back from Spain straight into Friday night service, and got home at about midnight. “I walked into the living room and Zanna had cut out the front page of The Times – Harold Shipman was in the margin…” a splutter of laughter, “…and that was in a frame with three balloons blown up and gold stars and cards, which made me shed a tear. My family were all asleep. I poured myself a glass of wine and just sat there, and there are very, very few times when I wake up and smell the roses and I don’t know if I said it at the time, but I thought, ‘It’s all been worth it.’”

Since then, the restaurant has gone from strength to strength and last year, for the first time, Heston ploughed money into his own family, buying “quite a big house”, rather than back into the business. I wonder if he’s anxious about the effect of the credit crunch on the Fat Duck. “It’s funny, well, actually not funny, that I’ve had years of real financial struggle – all because I was pursuing my own selfish wont to make the restaurant better and better and better – and for the last two years, touch wood, everything’s started to, you know…

“But people have had hunger issues for years and years, so what we’re talking about is the credit crunch affecting people who already have money, and hopefully we will continue through it. So here’s a restaurant that costs 130 quid for a menu but that’s the price because that’s what it costs to produce that food. A car manufacturer will still be selling their new cars for the price of a new car.”

What is clear, as he told his son, Jack, when he accused his father of being “sad”, is that in the past 14 years, he’s got into the car to drive home, exhausted, drained and stressed, maybe, “But I’ve only once got into the car in the morning thinking, ‘I don’t wanna go to work,’ and I think that’s a really lucky thing.”

As we pack our bags to go, Heston tells us that his wife has started an Open University course this week. The subject? Psychology. I ask him why he’s smiling. “Oh, I was just thinking that I might make quite a good case study for her.”

The Big Fat Duck Cookbook by Heston Blumenthal is published by Bloomsbury and is available from BooksFirst priced £90 (RRP £100), free p&p on 0870 160 8080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

The Times, July 5, 2008
- Ginny Dougary

In a frank interview, the famed writer talks about motherhood, Catholicism, her parents and soulmate Harold Pinter

Lady Antonia Fraser adjusts her pearls, gazes out of the french windows opening out to the garden, and tells me to f*** awf. This, five minutes into our interview, comes straight after her waving a two-fingered salute at Private Eye.

I had inadvertently mentioned the satirical magazine, so thought I might as well ask her whether she had forgiven the chaps yet for nicknaming her Lady Magnesia Freelove – ooooh, about four decades ago, when London was swinging in every sense of the word. Her first response was as measured and dignified as her demeanour: “I’ll tell you what, Ginny, I decided that as I was campaigning for a free press, I couldn’t object. But I, too, was free and I never read Private Eye again – because I have the freedom not to read it.”

She went on to say that she does read all her reviews: “I take the criticism, you know. I’m interested by it. Of course, I’d much rather have a favourable than an unfavourable review and I mind what the public thinks of my books and I mind what the critics think, you know, historians, but as to what Private Eye thinks, well…” and then came the surprising V-sign.

Did she do that before she met Harold Pinter? “No, he’s been a very bad influence on me.” I tell her about an interview I did with the late Alan Clark when, on a tour of Saltwood Castle, he greeted a magisterial portrait of his father, Kenneth “Civilisation” Clark, with the same disrespectful gesture. “How frightfully funny!” Lady Antonia, 75, says. Does she often use the F-word, I ask. “No. That’s why I put my fingers up.” Has she ever used it? “Yes.” Can I hear you say it? “Well, I don’t want to look at you. Erm…” and then she gamely obliges. But why did she feel that she had to avert her gaze? “Well, I thought it would be so rude to look at someone and say it,” she says, and offers me another cup of coffee.

We are sitting in the living room of the house in Holland Park that has been home to Fraser for most of her adulthood. Like her rich and varied life, there is an impression of colour and profusion: walls covered in paintings, flowers tumbling out of vases, every inch of a coffee table layered with handsome books on opera, which she describes as her passion. She is wearing a smart navy dress and has debutante deportment, knees clamped tight at right angles to her feet, which are clad in black patent leather court shoes. This is where she lived with her first husband, Sir Hugh Fraser, the Catholic Conservative MP whom she married in 1956 at the age of 23, and, six children later, divorced in 1977. Two years earlier, the Frasers and their guest Caroline Kennedy narrowly escaped being blown up by an IRA bomb which had been secreted under the MP’s Jaguar. Their neighbour, Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, was killed when he spotted something suspicious under the car while walking his dogs.

This was the same year, 1975, that Lady A had her coup de foudre with the playwright Harold Pinter while he was still married to the actress Vivien Merchant. The next year, her anthology Love Letters was published with its dedication “for Harold”. In her introduction she wrote: ‘It is obvious… that I am on the side of love letters… Anyone can write a love letter and almost everybody has – one should beware those who boast of never having fallen in love, there is either something missing somewhere or else the boaster is subtly begging to be roused from his or her frozen state of inanition.”

This reads like a clarion call to lovers. During her research, she wrote: “My friends were not slow to suggest the great love letters of fiction, whereas I should have much preferred them to turn out their own.” Fraser has always maintained that her intimate approach to historical biography – did such and such a king visit his mistress’s bed or vice versa – revealed a great deal about the character of her subjects as well as the period.

I had rather hoped that this might mean she would be relaxed about talking about her own ancient history in this respect, the list of admirers detailed in the Daily Mail all those years ago, but she says: “I am making no comment on that. I have never confirmed or denied.” But why have they (Jonathan Aitken, ex-King Constantine of Greece, Rupert Lycett-Green, Lord Lambton and Robert Stephens, who confirmed an affair in his autobiography) been written about with such authority? “You tell me. But what I would point out is you will not find one statement from me on the subject.” Does she think it is unseemly to talk about it, even at this remove, or that married women shouldn’t take lovers… “None of your business,” she says, firmly but without a trace of froideur.

In my research, I came across a gem of an article written by Aitken in 1969, the year of Fraser’s first biography, Mary Queen of Scots, which was a publishing phenomenon. He sounds mildly irritated: “Antonia Fraser rather defensively likes to mention the interviews she has turned down. Some cynical observers might think she has turned them down only because she had difficulty fitting them into her schedule.” But then beguiled: “Lady Antonia turns out to be a sort of Lady Madonna of the tennis courts. Clad in a plain white miniskirt, with a glory of golden hair tumbling over her shoulders, and beautiful Botticelli-like features, she looks about half the 36 years she claims on the book’s dust jacket.”

Wherever this attraction may or may not have led, the two have remained close in the intervening decades. She describes him as “a very kind person who takes a lot of trouble… I’m sure there are lots of people in the world who nobody knows about who’ve been helped by Jonathan.” She talks about her grandson – one of an incredible 17 grandchildren – Thomas, son of Benji, who is at Harrow where Aitken gave a talk about literacy in prisons and prison reforms: “Thomas went up to him and introduced himself and Jonathan took infinite trouble to talk to him about his grandfather, Hugh, whom of course he never knew.”

I wonder whether she found her old friend much changed after his seven-month spell in prison. “He came to lunch after he came out and he was incredibly thin, of course. Very, very thin,” Fraser recalls. “Yes, I think he has changed. He would say that he’s seen the light. I don’t know what language he uses but…” He’s embraced religion? “Really embraced it, believes strongly. And this is what saved him in adversity. I think it’s wonderful to be saved by something spiritual.”

This talk of prisons and spiritual succour takes us into Fraser’s own fascinating family and, in particular, her father Lord Longford, who died in 2001 at the age of 95; 14 months later, in October, her mother, the writer Elizabeth Longford, died at 96. In November, the next month, Myra Hindley – the child murderer on whose behalf Lord Longford had campaigned – also died, at 60, of a chest infection.

What were her views of Hindley? “I never met her. I want to make that quite clear. Didn’t want to meet her. Wasn’t asked to meet her. I think that I admired my father for his position that no one is beyond redemption, very much. But the children were the same age as my oldest children so

I could never really read about it and if I did, I felt too unhappy. I did think, ‘Why shouldn’t she be parolled after 35 years, just logically, you know, she cannot be a danger.’ On the other hand, a bit of me thought about the wretched parents. So I just didn’t want to be involved in either position.” But did she talk to him about her? “No. Didn’t want to.”

As she says, the Pinters’ shelves are full of books stuffed with horrific details of the torture of prisoners and human rights travesties – indeed, it could be argued that her husband is almost as famous for his political anger, these days, as for his plays – so it is not as though Fraser’s sensibilities are too delicate to dwell on unpleasantness, complicated or otherwise. But, equally, there was something so viscerally horrible about the Brady-Hindley cases that one can understand her reluctance to form any sort of connection with the murderers. Her father once tried to read her the letters Brady had written to him about his daughter’s Mary Queen of Scots. “And I said, ‘Stop there! I’ve no interest in what Ian Brady thinks of Mary Queen of Scots.’”

The eldest of the Longfords’ eight children – Antonia’s sister, Catherine, the baby girl of the family, was killed in a car crash at the age of 23 in 1969 – Fraser is still protective of her father, who became a somewhat lampooned caricature of an eccentric, with his anti-pornography stance (he was nicknamed Lord Porn) and the public unease about his championing of Myra Hindley. “I liked talking to my father very much and we had a lot in common,” she says. “We were both fascinated by history and politics and oratory and as I say, I admired his principles. But the nitty-gritty of prison visiting wasn’t for me.” (Rachel Billington, her writer sibling, has taken up their father’s prison mantle and still contributes to Inside Time, the only national newspaper for prisoners, which she helped found in 1990.)

The one position Lord Longford took that caused his whole family to blanch was his intolerance of gays. “The funniest moment was when my father got up in the House of Lords – it was the homosexual debate, Clause 28 – and he said, ‘I am proud to say that none of my grandchildren is homosexual,’” Fraser recalls. “And one of my children [they range between 40 and 50 now] rang up and said, ‘I’ve a good mind to come out of the closet,’ not that the child was in it, you know, but, ‘I’ve a good mind to declare myself as gay… I found that so irritating.’” Did they give him a hard time over it? “No, not really. They loved him.”

Reading about her family background, one can quite see how impossible it would be for any of the offspring to lead average lives. Her father, Frank Pakenham, was a peer four times over – three baronies (Pakenham, Longford and Silchester) and one earldom (Longford). After the predictable trajectory of Eton and Oxford, Longford (the seventh earl of) became a don at Christ Church, where he met and fell in love with Elizabeth Harman, a bewitchingly attractive undergraduate, described as the Zuleika Dobson of her day.

Fraser’s maternal grandparents were Unitarians – a non-conformist faith with a strong emphasis on social reform (notable followers include Charles Dickens, Beatrix Potter and Elizabeth Gaskell). Her mother was a great niece of the Tory radical Joseph Chamberlain and a first cousin once removed of the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. (Harriet Harman is Elizabeth Longford’s niece.) “All of that was very important to us,” Fraser says. “I had cousins my age I could stay with in Birmingham where my grandfather – N. Bishop Harman – was a very distinguished doctor and secretary of the BMA. He was also a lay preacher and I remember his great, thundering, terrific sermons – sort of Reverend Ian Paisley [I’m also thinking of Pinter’s lambasting oratorical style]. Many years later, when I came to write about Cromwell, I started to think about my grandfather again. Various people said, ‘How can a Catholic write about Cromwell?’ And I said, ‘I have no Catholic blood. My father was Protestant Church of Ireland and my mother was Unitarian up to the age of 20, when she abandoned it.’”

It wasn’t until she was in her thirties that Fraser discovered that her father had suffered a nervous breakdown when she was a child. In the earliest cuttings, before she was aware of this, the writer referred to him being a gentle but rather shadowy presence in the home, with her mother by far the more vivid character. This makes rather more sense in hindsight. She remembers reading in the newspapers that he had announced that he’d had a breakdown, “and I said to my mother, ‘But that’s not true, he just had very bad flu.’ And she said, ‘No, he had a breakdown in the Army,’ which he insisted on going into very bravely… because he was 35.” And not cut out for it? “No, but because his father was a war hero who died at Galipolli…” So he had to live up to that? “Yes, and then he was saved by the Catholic faith.” She says that on his prison visits he would read from the New Testament and took it very literally: “I’ve got one of his huge-print bibles – he was pretty well blind – and he’d marked things on all the pages.” She can’t be sure but she thinks it was Evelyn Waugh who converted him. “They were good friends and certainly became much closer after my father became a Catholic.”

There were other conversions, too. Elizabeth Longford became a committed socialist in the early Thirties when she was a Workers Education Association lecturer in Stoke-on-Trent and witnessed the reality of ordinary people’s lives. It was she who persuaded her husband to leave his job at Conservative Central Office and switch political allegiances. He went on to become a junior minister in the Labour government from 1945-1951 and was a cabinet minister under Harold Wilson from 1964-68. His wife had her own political aspirations but finally abandoned them in 1950 after fighting the general election unsuccessfully as Labour candidate for Oxford. Antonia used to joke about, “Mummy’s red mac for canvassing and grey fur coats for everything else.” To which her mother’s reply was: “If I could have found a red fur coat, I would have worn it.” Elizabeth went on to write her own acclaimed historical biographies in her late fifties on Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington and in 1986, at the age of 80, she published her memoirs, The Pebbled Shore.

Her daughter, who kindly gave me a copy as a parting gift, wrote a foreword to The Pebbled Shore in 2004. In it she makes the observation that her mother’s life demonstrates that, “The problems of what is now called ‘having it all’ are nothing new. They are on the contrary endemic in the life of a woman who is intelligent, ambitious and idealistic as well as being a loving mother and wife.” She also writes disarmingly that she never witnessed in her mother “the ratty solipsist behaviour of the working-mother-at-home – ‘Don’t interrupt me, I’m a genius’ – with which I undoubtedly greeted my own children.”

In 1946, six years after Lord Longford’s Catholic conversion, Elizabeth followed suit. In the epilogue to her memoirs, she makes it clear that her faith gave her support and “saved me from asking the terrible questions, ‘Why? Why her? Why me?’ when her youngest daughter was killed”.

Antonia became a Catholic in her teens. I wonder what sort of imprint her faith has made on her own life, expecting her to talk about the way it has guided or nourished her, but she talks about its effect on her writing: “All my books have a very strong theme, one way or another, of religious faith. People to whom their faith was important for good or bad. My book about Louis XIV is really stressing that although he philandered for the world, at the same time his mother was very religious and her example haunted him. He wanted to be saved. Literally, salvation. I think he always wanted to get back to someone like his mother… devout, you know.”

Even by the standards of her impressive family, Fraser seemed destined to cut a dash. Her mother once said, “She dazzled us all since the moment she could speak.” At eight, she went to Dragon School in Oxford – one of 40 girls to 400 boys – where she was “intensely happy” and played rugby (on the wing) for the school team. Her next school, a C of E girls boarder, was not a success: “I was really a boy, you know,” she says. “I was way ahead of everybody in work and way behind emotionally and nobody wanted to walk with me.”

From there, she moved to a Catholic convent, St Mary’s at Ascot, and was intensely happy again: “I found the world of nuns frightfully interesting,” she says. It was that world that Fraser drew on for the first of her nine Jemima Shore mysteries, Quiet as a Nun, in 1977. She arrived a Protestant in 1946 but the next year, as her letters home revealed – full of the brio of adolescent righteousness – she had converted with a vengeance: “I often wonder why there was ever a Reformation… I feel like rushing out into the streets and just telling people what utter fools they are not to be Catholics.”

Fraser is quite unabashed about being an intellectual snob: “I always brighten up when it turns out that somebody is very clever or got a frightfully good degree because I was brought up in a university town and my father, to his dying day, always knew who got a first and who hadn’t.” His daughter fell into the second category, having spent her time at Oxford – where she was at Lady Margaret Hall, like her mother – doing nothing but enjoy herself, “after having worked very, very hard up till then”, and gained a reputation for being “radiant and eccentric” with a penchant for cigars.

During the early years of her first marriage, there were occasional signs of that independent, tomboy spirit – she took flying lessons in 1963, when her fourth child was born, and the following year went on an adventurous expedition with her brother Thomas, the third writer of the Pakenham pack, riding on mules through Ethiopia. “All my life I had secretly wanted to be the first white woman to tread somewhere or other. Anywhere,” Fraser wrote in one of her lively dispatches for the Evening Standard.

It was a good time to leave her children, she says. Her husband was in London and they had a wonderful carer. Hugh presumably was too preoccupied with his political career to be much of a hands-on father? “He was extremely busy, but he was terrific,” Fraser says. “For instance, he always took the children to school in the morning, and what a bonus that was.” His ex-wife was at his side when he died of lung disease in 1984, four years after she married Pinter. A few years ago, Fraser described him to Andrew Billen as “a very fine person, rather detached, but a very fine person”. It is tempting to ask whether it was that detachment that prompted Fraser to seek engagement in other areas of her life.

But she is under strict instructions from her children not to talk about the break-up of their parents’ marriage, as she informed me at the outset: “They just don’t like it, you know, and why should they really?” What she does say is that she certainly didn’t go into the marriage thinking that it was possible that it would end. Divorce, she says, “was sort of unheard of. Of course, you feel more than a taint of failure. You feel a failure – well, you are a failure. You have failed, you know. But that’s all I have to say on the subject.”

Fraser, like most fully rounded human beings, is an intriguing combination of strength and vulnerability. For someone who is known as quite a beauty, she has always been unsure of her looks and still is judging by her anxiety about being photographed. In 1969, she said: “I’m very insecure in my appearance. I love it when someone says at a party, ‘You look terribly pretty,’ and I believe it.” When I ask her about this, she says: “As a teenager, people would say, ‘What lovely skin Antonia has,’ and then their voice dotted away.

“But I was terrifically helped by the Sixties and the emergence of people like Julie Christie. Although if you know Julie Christie, as we do, I mean she’s a wonderful miniature Venus – nothing miniature about me – but there’s a sort of resemblance and suddenly my looks came into fashion.”

That “nothing miniature about me” is telling. My mother was a tall stunner, like Fraser, and also had a shoe size which matched her statuesque physique. I remember her excitement when Mary Queen of Scots came out and how it inspired her to study history and become a Blue Badge Guide. Fraser is gratified to hear this but less happy when I mention my mother’s other source of glee. I tell Fraser that I think she felt quite a kinship when Vivien Merchant said that bitchy thing about you being able to wear Harold’s shoes: “I don’t go that way, Ginny,” she says hastily.

She doesn’t go that way partly, one suspects, because as she made abundantly clear in print, the previous Mrs Pinter never reconciled herself to the break-up of her marriage, which must have played a factor in her unhappy alcoholic death at the age of 53. Pinter and their son remain estranged. As Fraser would doubtless say, why should she be expected to talk about such private, hurtful matters to a stranger. But there is also something almost quaintly old-fashioned about her reticence which is at odds with our confessional culture.

Other femmes serieuses certainly do not feel the same compunction. Marjorie Wallace, the admirable chief executive of SANE and former Sunday Times journalist, has apparently incurred Lord Snowdon’s displeasure by talking about their long affair. And Joan Bakewell wrote about her seven-year affair with Pinter – which started at the beginning of her marriage to Michael Bakewell, a BBC head of plays, and lasted through her second pregnancy – in her autobiography The Centre of the Bed in 2003. But Pinter had already opened that door – in a betrayal of his own, it could be argued – by using their affair as the basis of his 1978 play Betrayal. At the time, it was assumed that the woman at the heart of the affair was Antonia Fraser, but the truth emerged in Michael Billington’s biography of Pinter, which the playwright read before publication, in 1996.

Fraser has kept diaries through all her tumultuous decades. She refers to them when talking about V.S. Naipaul’s late wife, Pat, who was an old Oxford friend and helped her do the “donkey research” for Fraser’s anthology of Scottish Love Poems published in 1974. (She was absolutely “charmed”, she said, to discover at a recent Sunday lunch at Chequers that Gordon Brown had been at the launch party when he was a student at Edinburgh. “Now I know that he is very literary and intelligent and knows his stuff.”)

These diaries would be a biographer’s dream – with such a cast of illustrious characters and Fraser’s sharp observations, not to mention her insights about her own various tangles and predicaments. But she says that she very rarely looks at the diaries unless she has to check something and when she does she finds them all too interesting, “which is why I don’t read them. I don’t want to start. I’m still living my life.”

All this time, the invisible presence of Harold Pinter – her soul mate for almost half her life – has been weaving in and out of our dialogue. It is striking how often Fraser references him, in the way that those who are newly smitten want to steer the conversation back to the object of their affection. Or that the recently bereaved draw comfort from talking about their departed loved one.

When we talk about her marching against the Iraq war, she reminds me that Harold spoke. I mention Norman Lamont’s rather moving address at Benazir Bhutto’s memorial service, and she smiles: “Well, of course, Norman and Harold crossed swords over Chile and Pinochet.” Early on, when we were discussing love letters, I asked her whether she had received many good ones: “Wonderful letters from Harold but very few because we were always together. The quality of his love is in the poems he’s written to me. Nowadays he writes poetry; he feels he’s written enough plays.” Nine years ago, Fraser was offered counselling after a pair of white-masked men threatened to kill her with a crowbar if she didn’t hand over her jewellery, “but I said, ‘No,’ because I had Harold”. Is he good in a situation like that? “Very good. Absolutely.” Was he angry? “No. His priority was me. Anger wasn’t going to help me.”

She seems genuinely mystifed by her husband’s reputation for being angry. “I don’t see that side of him,” she says. Isn’t he always telling people to f*** off ? (There is a great photograph of the couple, reproduced on page 23, when they were first together, with Pinter waving his two fingers and Fraser, fabulous in a fur-trimmed coat, half-smiling as she looks down.) “Is he? Well, not to me anyway. You know, the press writes that someone is angry and then everything they do is angry. If you saw him do his Nobel speech on television, you have to ask yourself, is this man – in the most public thing that he’ll ever do – is he angry or passionate? And if he is angry, what is he angry about?

“I mean, Harold has very strong views. I like that. I have very strong views, too. We mostly agree politically but not entirely.” (She is more critical of Cuba and its treatment of dissidents and gays than her husband.) Do you argue much? “Not really. I’m not a very quarrelsome person – or that’s my story, anyway.”

What has been the secret of their long and happy marriage? “I find Harold a very interesting person, which is not surprising. And I suspect he finds me interesting. And one of the nice things about him is that it’s impossible to predict who he will take a fancy to and who he won’t. Also, we’re both writers but we write absolutely, totally differently. I can’t think of two more different things than the plays of Harold Pinter and the historical biographies of Antonia Fraser. So there is absolutely no competition. Harold is not competitive, except in cricket, anyway.

“At the same time, Harold knows exactly what it’s like being a writer – the ups and downs, the failures, the successes – and that’s probably the bedrock. And I love the theatre, of course.” When she was on the Evening Standard panel, before she knew Pinter, she voted unsuccessfully for Old Times to win. What was it that she liked so much about his plays? “I’m not a dramatic critic so I find it difficult to say. I only know that I liked the plays before I met the playwright.” I try to prompt her to be more specific: “They’re powerful. Poetic in parts. Very funny in other parts.”

Billington, who of course is a critic, when asked what makes Pinter tick, wrote: “I believe that memory is almost the key to Pinter’s whole work as an artist. He is plagued and haunted by the whole notion of memory and by the idea that as we go through daily life we are occupied by our memory of past events, past emotional circumstances and they can break through at any moment.”

I’m sure some people would find it surprising that with their very different backgrounds (Pinter is the son of a Jewish East End tailor), they have forged such a deep connection. “That’s such baloney. It’s ridiculous. What background? We were both sophisticated enough – Harold was in his mid-forties and I was in my early forties. It didn’t matter where we came from, it mattered where we were going.”

Pinter will be 78 this October and has been battling ill health. I ask how he is faring now. “Ginny, I’m very superstitious,” Fraser says. “You know, he’s got so many things wrong with him and yet he’s surviving. I don’t want to say he’s fine and by the time this comes out, he’s back in hospital. He had cancer, and then he had a very rare auto-immune blood disease, and then he had some interior troubles.”

I wonder whether she found her love changing as her husband became ill. She used to speak so proudly of his robust health and vigour on the tennis courts. “I think that everybody – if their partner is ill – naturally becomes more protective and I certainly don’t think, ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’”

The couple still seem to lead an enviably active cultural life but Fraser can’t quite bring herself to see Vanessa Redgrave’s performance in A Year of Magical Thinking, the adaptation of Joan Didion’s book about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. “I think I’d find it too harrowing,” she says, “having been through so many fears.”

She has only just read Sheila Hancock’s book, The Two of Us, because the actress is in The Birthday Party round the corner from her London home. “I ducked the book at the time – because John Thaw died of oesophageal cancer, which is what Harold had – while Harold was having chemo but then I read it and thought it marvellous. It’s about much more than dying, really. It’s about love.”

The doorbell rings and Fraser says we must stop. She has an important engagement with one of her many family members: lunch followed by the theatre. Before I go, I feel I must ask her about Nigella and the rise of the Domestic Goddess. Lady A has always been rather admirably undomestic. She loathes cooking and shopping and womanly duties. Of course she knows Nigella, but then she seems to know everyone. So what does she think of this recent phenomenon?

“Isn’t it fascinating?” she says. “I’m amused by it, actually.” So do you eat ready meals whenever possible? “Yes, of course,” Fraser smiles, ready to break another taboo. “Doesn’t everybody?”

* * *

Antonia Fraser will be speaking at the Buxton Festival on July 11 (0845 1272190; www.buxtonfestival.co.uk). Cromwell: Our Chief of Men (Phoenix, £11.99) will be reissued on July 24

The Times, June 28, 2008
- Ginny Dougary

As well known for his epic drug taking as his iconic tales, Irvine Welsh seems now to be embracing middle age. But as he unveils his new novel, Ginny Dougary finds life in the old punk yet

The good news is that Irvine Welsh, having been obliged to give the subject some thought, does not believe that all men are potential paedophiles. What he does find interesting is that advertising and the mainstream media pander to a perceived tendency in men to respond to images of females captured on the cusp of puberty.

Welsh is the Scottish writer who shot to fame in 1993 with his first novel, Trainspotting, a surprising, not least to himself, massive worldwide bestseller about a group of Edinburgh junkies mostly written in dialect. The arresting opening line – “The sweat wis lashing ofay Sick Boy; he wis trembling” – has been quoted so often it has become youth culture’s equivalent of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, but the book was also celebrated by the likes of such august critics and academics as John Carey, emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford University. Three years later, Trainspotting was made into a film directed by Danny Boyle, launching Ewan McGregor’s career and further boosting the author’s.

Novels have been released since then, some with short titles: Ecstasy, Filth, Glue, Porno; others with a few more words, among them The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs and If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work. The new novel reverts to the school of short titles – Crime – and deals with large themes of retribution, redemption, abuse and male anxiety, seen through the horrid prism of paedophilia.

The central character, Ray Lennox, is a Scottish cop who has had a breakdown while on the trail of a serial killer of female children. In the course of his investigation, interviewing relatives of the latest disappeared girl, Britney (named, doubtless, after the singer who dressed up as a schoolgirl for her first hit song), he experiences the full weight of his colleagues’ disapproval of the chain-smoking single mother and the assumption that she must be partly to blame.

This whole subject (including the blame-the-mother syndrome) is discomfitingly topical – from Portugal, with the vanishing of Madeleine McCann, to Goa (the murder of 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling) and the ongoing morbid fascination with the Austrian captivity cases of Natascha Kampusch and Elisabeth Fritzl.

The obvious question is whether Welsh found himself besieged by inappropriate thoughts when researching the book. “In order to write something like this, you have to feel pretty confident in your own sexuality and be in an almost unimpeachable state as regards that because if you didn’t, I don’t think you could physically go through that kind of journey,” he says. “One of the things I wouldn’t do is any research at all on the internet because I have no interest in getting into paedophiles’ websites. The idea was quite sickening to me. There’s so much shady stuff in my life in other ways that I had to be content that there was nothing of that sort in my inner workings.”

Welsh was helped by police officers and social workers in the States who briefed him on how organised paedophile rings work. He also read a great number of academic and clinical psychology texts and spoke to survivors of childhood sexual abuse.

The narrative switches from the unravelling of the Britney case in Edinburgh to Miami Beach, where the cop is on holiday with his fiancé trying to wean himself off anti-depressants. Behind this haunting are hints of something murky in Lennox’s past. Unable to heal himself in the sunshine, Lennox, a recovering addict, demolishes himself in a bar, is picked up by a pair of predatory women, goes on a cocaine binge and flees with a ten-year-old girl (the daughter of one of the women) who has been the prey of a paedophile ring.

Welsh is not comfortable with the idea that he has become some sort of instant expert on paedophilia and, indeed, the more he delved into the subject, the less clear cut it became to him. “The currents of sexuality run deep and they’re very confused. Advertising, for instance, seems implicitly to believe that there is this kind of paedophile locked in the male sexuality – the way that very, very young women are made to look even younger. Some kids seem highly sexualised from an early age and they obviously need to be protected from themselves. What is really disturbing about paedophiles is the God-like status they assume… the calculation, the long-term grooming, the idea that it’s society that is at fault and therefore they can break the rules.”

One surprise for him was how very differently people respond to abuse. “Some women can have experienced something quite minor – ‘I was touched up by my uncle’ – and it can absolutely devastate and wreck their lives. And there are other people who were kidnapped as children, serially raped and cult stuff like that and yet they seem to be coping and functioning quite well.” Here one thinks of Natascha Kampusch, who was held captive in a tiny space from the age of 10 to 18 and seems mystifyingly self-composed to many commentators. She, in turn, is angered by the idea that she must play the victim to validate other people’s expectations. “What we don’t know is how much not talking about it or repressing it is as much a coping mechanism as talking about it,” Welsh says.

He had started writing a good six months before the McCann case but after the news broke he felt unable to continue for a while: “It was just so kind of big and so horrible and obviously, like everybody else, I was distressed. I thought, ‘Should I really be writing about this?’ But the reason why I went back to it is that the story is very different and the initial draft was looking at why the guy [Lennox] is the way he is. And how when you read about a paedophile case, everybody starts seeing paedophiles everywhere – and also how appropriate is it, anyway, for adults to be around kids they have no relationship to?”

The initial catalyst for the book was something that had taken place in the writer’s own life – when a friend of 20-odd years’ standing broke down and wept in a pub, saying that he’d been abused by a close family member that Welsh and his friends all knew. “Within our Scottish working-class male culture, we were singularly unequipped to deal with it,” he says. “Our first reaction was wanting to kill the abuser, basically. But there was also a kind of loathing for this guy – not so much the fact that he might have brought it on himself but that he had involved us in this thing. So I wanted to work out these ideas of compassion and rehabilitation and retribution and what happens when you keep something to yourself for so long.”

We meet in Dublin, where Welsh has been principally based for the past four years. (He also has homes in Edinburgh, Chicago and Miami.) He has picked the venue, the café of the Irish Film Institute, which is thronging with groovy young folk. He is wearing a suit – as instructed for the photographs – but it is not one of those sharply tailored black designer numbers. If anything, he looks more like a middle-aged bank manager than someone on the cutting edge of counter-culture, where part of him still firmly wishes to reside. The first impression is of someone solemn, reserved and modest, with gentle manners but lacking a certain joie de vivre. The latter, it turns out, can be partly put down to jet lag (he has recently flown in from a wedding party in New York) and a prolonged hangover.

The cocaine binge in the new novel one can safely assume is written with the knowledge of experience. Indeed, there is a fight involving an overturned television and a smashed table which had a familiar ring. In previous newspaper stories, there are a number of references to Welsh getting belligerent in a pub and a friend’s flat – both involving karaoke – and him completely trashing both places.

“Yeah, nothing’s wasted,” he grins when I point out the similarities. Why, I wonder, does karaoke bring this out in him? “I think it’s this desperate need for attention but at the same time hating it in myself and trying to resist it. I’ve never liked people who are brash and I’ve always been fighting that in myself.”

This tension between repression and, shall we say, excessive ebullience is particularly pronounced in the Scots, Welsh thinks, and the older he has become, the more his dour tendencies have come to the fore. He calls it his Dewar (as in the late First Minister for Scotland) streak: “Donald Dewar on acid, that’s me.”

The other streak still runs strong in him. Even relatively recently, there was a drink and drugs binge which almost did your head in just reading about it. As part of one New Year’s Eve revelries, he consumed intoxicating substances that were so extreme in their variety and quantity that it seems almost miraculous that he survived such a gruelling recreational marathon. The list included: malt whisky, champagne, magic mushrooms, base speed and crack cocaine. When I ask him about this, he says: “The kind of quality control rationale thing goes right out of your head. You get into such a state that you’ll put anything in: ‘Just give me some of that, and I’ll take it.’”

He appears to have had a passing flirtation with crack cocaine and talks about visiting a crack house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. “Yeah, it was quite interesting,” he says, ever the observational participant. “I was there with a bunch of guys from Stoke-on-Trent – I’d just met them – and there was an altercation and shots were fired and it was the first time that I’d been so close to gunfire.” Did it frighten him? “It didn’t at the time because I was pretty wasted but it did afterwards.”

There has always been a dance between hard work and hedonism for Welsh. In his early twenties, he was a junkie himself, but only for 18 months before he managed to go cold turkey. Inevitably, perhaps, some of the die-hard drug addicts he knew accused him of being a heroin novice and of exploiting their experience for his own betterment. Most of the junkies he knew then are now dead, but he is still friendly with a couple of survivors who lead reasonably normal lives.

The bare bones of Welsh’s biography are well known: born in a tenement home in Leith, moved to the new-build estates in Muirhouse, where drug-taking later became rife. Left school at 16, completed a City & Guilds course in electrical engineering, fixed televisions and may or may not have blown one up accidentally. Arrived in London in the late Seventies, lived in a squat and became part of the junk and punk scene, playing in the bands the Pubic Lice and Stairway 13. Worked for Hackney Council and studied computing, became a minor property developer in the Eighties, buying studio flats in North London, doing them up and selling them for a profit, then (to quote his website) “cleaning up his act” and “finding a nice lassie and settling doon”. This, I take it, is Anne (Antsy), to whom Trainspotting was dedicated and who was his first wife for around 20 years; these details are flimsy because he has chosen not to make them public.

The couple returned to Edinburgh, where he worked for the city council’s housing department and studied at Heriot Watt Uni-versity, writing his thesis on equal opportunities for women. (He still talks about the “patriarchal society” and feminists’ “self-empowerment”.) Encouraged by the rave scene and loosened up by Ecstasy, he worked on a draft of the novel that became Trainspotting and sold a million copies in the UK alone, and was translated into 30 languages including Hebrew and Arabic. In August 1995, he gave up his day job to concentrate on writing full time. Ten years later, he married for the second time to a young American woman, Elizabeth Quinn, who at 26 is almost half his age.

The point about this curriculum vitae is that even in Welsh’s wildest years, the extreme behaviour was balanced by pragmatism: the work-orientated training schemes, nine-to-five jobs with local authorities where colleagues consistently described him as solid and reliable, the serious-minded thesis. There is also something almost Zelig-like about him being at the centre – or, perhaps, more edgily, just off the centre – of the Zeitgeist, in punk bands at the height of punk, seguing into a property developer during the “greed is good” Eighties, and a fully paid-up member of the Ecstasy-fuelled clubbing scene in the Nineties. Perhaps this constant reinvention explains his hang-up about ageing; the anxiety that the onset of middle age might ban him from being embraced by whatever scene is happening.

He says that he never believed he would still be alive at 50 – which he will be this September. Some time ago, there was a story doing the rounds that he had been born a number of years earlier than 1958 and Welsh was so rattled by it that he resorted to taking his passport along to interviews to prove to journalists that he had not been massaging the truth. Wasn’t this a bit uncool?

“I don’t know why but I’ve always been sensitive and touchy about it,” he says. “The dramatic thing for me was being 30 – when I was still doing loads of Ecstasy and cocaine and drinking – so everything since then has been a kind of bonus. I’ve always believed that it’s very much a young society, and that line that you can’t trust anybody over 30, you know, the older I get the more I believe it.”

Welsh’s binges, he says, are getting smaller as the distances between them get bigger. “Before, I could spend all night clubbing and I’d get in and just hit the word processor and start writing, but I can’t do that now,” he says. “And my main buzz now is my work, basically. I love working.” This is not to say that the struggle is over: “These two things are always vying. If you’re out on the tear, you think, ‘This is fantastic. This is the way I want to live my life for ever.’ Then you think, ‘I’m feeling rough. I shouldn’t do this. I’m wasting my life. I should be achieving things and making a name for myself.’ Then when you start doing that, you think, ‘This is great. I’m getting recognition and I’m enjoying this but it’s a really boring life.’ You oscillate between these two states of mind and I do this all the time.

“Even this weekend in New York – the first mad one I’ve had in a while – the aftermath was like muscular dystrophy: achey and your skin’s crawling and you’re lethargic and everything’s too much trouble, and I hate feeling like that. You make that calculation: the older you are, the less time you’ve got and you don’t want to spend what’s left of it feeling like that.”

Quite apart from the abstinence that came with the two marathons he has run (his body still looks gym-honed), he tends not to drink at all during the winter months because it makes him depressed. But come the spring and summer, that all changes: “I love margaritas, red wine [he writes a wine column in a magazine but he’s temporarily forgotten its name], anything, really.” His favourite part of drinking, anyway, is the sense of relief when you emerge from a hangover: “You just want to get pissed again because the sense of intoxication you get when your head gets cleared and your body is purified is so great.”

By now, Welsh is quite different from that rather uptight initial version of himself. When I say that I had been wondering what it would take to get him to smile, he grins and pats my knee and says, “Oh, stop it,” in a kind of indulgent, “Aw shucks, you’re naughty but nice” way. Do you feel I’m teasing you? “Yes,” he says. He has, it turns out, a ready but rather unusual bark of a laugh – his chin juts out, and the sound escapes from the corner of his thin strip of mouth, a bit like an old-fashioned ventriloquist’s dummy.

He is staring at my hair in such a strange way that it prompts me to ask whether he’s spotted something I should be worrying about. “I’m fascinated by it, actually, particularly that cascading bit at the front,” he says. “I like the different kaleidoscope colours in it.” (I should point out that this does not appear to be a drug-fuelled observation and that he has been drinking nothing stronger than tap water and green tea.) Since he has no crowning glory at all,

I wonder whether he misses it. “That’s probably why 30 was such a bad time for me,” he says. “It was going before that but I’d always had quite bad hair.” Now this is fascinating. So what was his hair like? “Kind of weird. It was black and stuck up in inappropriate tufts all over the place, and I’d always go to the toilet and apply lots of water and smooth them down. But I couldn’t have it over any length at all – so I always had a skinhead or a sort of semi-skinhead. And when it started to recede, I just started shaving it off basically so I kind of wouldn’t notice it going.”

The new Mrs Welsh is a brunette, apparently. How do you like marriage second time round? “It’s absolutely fantastic, really great.” After a year of courtship, they moved in together and got married a year after that. I josh him about being a dirty old tutor, getting off with one of his creative writing students (he was teaching a course at the University of Chicago). “That’s another myth,” he says, in an equally relaxed way. “A lot of people assume she was one of my students but she was a waitress. It’s a mother complex, really. My mother was a waitress and so I only date waitresses, like.”

I wonder whether Betsy, as Irvine says he calls her (I’m not sure he isn’t teasing me at this point), is a pure-living gal. This is greeted with a whoop of incredulous laughter. “She’s got that thing that she wants to go for it and I’m, like, ‘Oh, I’ve done that sooohhh many times.’” Well, if you will marry someone so much younger, there’s obviously a lot of catching up to do. “The converse of that,” he counters, “is that it keeps you young as well, hopefully.”

The spectre that always seemed to horrify Welsh was the idea that he might one day be somehow shoehorned into becoming Suburban Man. He is thrilled to have gone the express route from working class to upper middle class, which is where he places himself now, bypassing the ignominy of “the bourgeois thing”. After travelling first class to his various homes, he now flies economy: “Just because I’m a Scot, and at three and a half grand I’d always be thinking, ‘God, how many bottles of whisky could I buy for that?’”

Nonetheless, my big revelation is that Welsh is now a Domestic God: he goes to B&Q! He cooks! He puts up shelves! He has zero tolerance of mice! Mind you, being Irvine Welsh, his version of all the above still has a strong whiff of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. He has his Black & Decker drill and he insists on putting up shelves and painting them even if it kills him: “I’m a bit of a bastard because there may be loads of holes in the walls where I’ve drilled and my hands are all cut to ribbons and there’s paint spattered all over me but I still have to go to the bitter end.

“It’s the same with cooking, and with all the cookbooks around there’s no excuse for anybody not to cook. I like the idea of having people around and cooking a nice meal and I start off all enthusiastic and I spend three fucking hours doing it and I’ve broken a dozen plates and burnt my hand…”

If Irvine is a Ramsayian home cook (“I don’t trust all that Jamie Oliver touchy-feely,” he says), Betsy is definitely in the school of Nigella: “She’ll go all transcendental and have a glass of wine as she’s doing it and it’s almost like meditation. But for me it’s definitely a struggle.”

He is still resolutely anti having children and is relieved that his wife is as allergic to the idea as him, “which is good since, whatever you say, it has to be the woman’s choice”. When he was younger he felt that children would inhibit the kind of lifestyle he wanted to lead, and now he’s too old for that malarkey.

What he witnesses among the parents he knows (he is also an uncle) is that they say, “‘This is great, it’s the best thing that has ever happened.’ But you see them completely eroded by it at the same time. This tremendous debilitating effect and the lack of a personal life they have. I mean, who wants to be getting up at three o’clock in the morning? It’s like, you know, I want to be getting in at that time!”

In 2002 Welsh wrote a powerful piece about his trips to Sudan and Afghanistan as part of Unicef’s campaign for the rights of children, encouraged by his friend, the Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan, who had been quietly working behind the scenes with the organisation. His words were admirably direct and cut to the chase: “We have to ask ourselves how healthy it is to say: ‘OK, so my £100 a year means they save six lives but if it were used effectively it would save seven, so therefore I’m not going to give anything.’”

On the personal front, he wrote: “What I saw and felt will never, ever leave me, and what I feel has fundamentally changed me in ways I could never begin to define.”

I wonder whether this experience had not altered his feelings about children. “I don’t want to see kids die or suffering or being tampered with but that’s very different from saying you want to be responsible for kids yourself,” he says.

“One of the great things about Unicef and the other organisations that work with children is that it’s a bit like boarding schools – you can contribute without having the responsibility of having to be involved on a day-to-day basis.”

What would be ideal, I suggest, is for him to fast-forward to being a grandparent. “If someone else could take them home at the end of the day or you could stick them in the freezer and bring them out when you… Ahh, this is getting a bit like child abuse again…”

Welsh’s bright eyes are beginning to glaze over. Tomorrow he has an early flight to Mauritius where he is being put up for a week in a luxury hotel with five other judges, including writers Tim Lott, Joanne Harris and Simon Armitage, who will be picking the winner of a best love story competition. The BBC will be there filming and Welsh thinks they’re going for a sort of literary Big Brother. For his sake, I hope there isn’t a karaoke machine on the premises.

* * *

To order Crime by Irvine Welsh, published by Vintage on July 3, for £17.09, free p&p (RRP £18.99), call BooksFirst on 0870 1608080; timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst.

The Times - May 12 2007
- Ginny Dougary

Once famous for his barbed dissection of tacky TV, Clive James all the while was living a life of the mind. Our correspondent meets a modern polymath as he unveils his 40-year cultural odyssey on Times Online

Photo: Mark Harrison

Australians, in my experience, however deeply transplanted, still crave the cerulean skies and bright light of their birthplace ­ which is why it is unexpected to find Clive James, on the sunniest of English spring mornings, in a curtain-drawn lair of such impenetrable gloom that the atmosphere seems to fizz with electricity from all the wattage. Or, perhaps, that’s just the effect of his personality.

His London pad is in a converted warehouse near Tower Bridge. It’s wine-bar territory rather than the sort of coffee-house bohemia that is his preferred habitat but that’s precisely why James chose it ­ all the easier for him to guard his anonymity and get on with the serious business of writing and, ah, tango dancing.

Most of the walls are covered with thousands of books: old Penguin novels with their classic orange and white design, and titles covering every subject that could conceivably prick the curiosity of their owner’s magpie mind. (This is a man who, after all, has painstakingly acquired at least six languages, including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Japanese, in order to read certain books in the original.) There are also paintings by his artist daughter, Claerwen, many photographs of beautiful women, including his wife, various objects from his travels and “Postcard from…” television programmes, and a loo full of Schiele-like nudes.

We sit at a dining-room table in the hall on high-backed Mackintosh chairs (only repro, James assures me) and get stuck in. His new book, Cultural Amnesia, is an 800-page whopper, which has taken him four years to write and all his life to collate. The subtitle is Notes in the Margin of My Time, and although there are many different figures in it, both well-known and obscure, the one that weaves through them all is the author himself.

This is Culture with both a large and a small C as befits the man who dubbed himself a premature post-modernist: “Hard to say, isn’t it?” he says, “Crazy name! Crazy guy!” ­ so under M, you will find Thomas Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain Mann, preceded by Michael Miami Vice, Manhunter Mann, sandwiched by Norman Mailer and Mao Zedong. American talk-show host Dick Cavett, Coco Chanel and Tony Curtis are given equal billing to Cocteau, Camus and Chesterton.

Several times in our interview ­ when we talk about lust, for instance, or sensitivity to criticism (neither of them foreign to James) ­ he directs me to one or other essay in his book. Ernesto Sábato, an Argentinian writer ­ “take this down”, James dictates, spelling out his name ­ is quoted: “Only a thick skin can defend itself, and the characteristic of an artist is an extreme delicacy of skin”, which prompts our cultural guide to ponder how the statement might apply to himself ­ “If I had my time again, I would never react publicly to criticism, no matter how unjustified.”

A page or two on, and he’s into the tango ­ “a sad thought, dancing” (coined, not by Sábato ­ we learn ­ but by a vernacular poet, Enrique Santos Discépolo, in the Thirties; the book is full of such snippets of what James is proud to call useless knowledge) ­ and he’s off again: “Undoubtedly it was the sight of old goats with pretty young women in their arms that helped draw me into the tango world, a man in winter longing for a touch of spring”, and on through a dazzling and sometimes beautiful series of seemingly unconnected connections ­ like a jazz riff, the notes scattering and cohering ­ to his conclusion: “A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.” There is more along the lines of this Old Man Winter refrain, prompted only partially by my first question. In the introduction to the book, James suggests that such a colossal work ­ based on four decades of jottings and notes ­ was something he had planned to write towards the end of his life.

So is the publication of Cultural Amnesia accompanied by the sound of a bell ominously tolling? “I’ve been feeling towards the end of my life-ish since I was about 24,” he wheezes and laughs. “I used to have some very bad habits including drinking, and I thought I’ll never last at this rate, especially at the rate I smoked. I always feel like I’m living on borrowed time… So I do feel this is the last round-up,” his voice taking on that ironic Jamesian swoop, “but as my friend P. J. O’Rourke has already warned me, I can overdo this last-ditch stuff. You can’t spend 20 years sa