PENELOPE Mortimer, who has written 11 novels, a bitchy biography of the Queen Mother, two volumes of autobiography, had six children by four men, been sexually abused by her father, attempted suicide and had lung cancer, is frightened she’ll be remembered only as the ex-wife of the creator of Rumpole, that “Ex-Wife of John Mortimer” may be engraved on her tombstone. And she resents that.

On the phone Penelope has been fierce and lugubrious. So it’s a surprise to meet a trendy 76-year-old in jeans, cardigan and cowboy boots, smoking with teenage fervour and chuckling with throaty disdain in her semi in Cricklewood.

And to find a cheerful house with conservatory, brochure for a red Mazda sports car she yearns to buy, grandchildren’s toys, and a garden (her passion) which she opens to the public.

Is Penelope going to be like Rebecca in her novel The Handyman? ‘That’s the only time I’ve ever described myself,’ she says. Penelope, who is thin and has a timorous face, pauses. ‘She’s anti-social, impatient, intolerant, always has black fingernails and grubby jeans, is impossible to live with, and a bad mother with a heart of pure mush.’ Her timidity is apparent when she speaks, her humour a defence.

Penelope contracted lung cancer in 1992. She says sardonically that she’s had ‘only half’ a lung removed. ‘I was useless for months. I just sat and felt sorry for myself. I kept hearing a little voice saying, ‘Of course she was never the same after that …” She started smoking heroically again four months later.

Does she fear death? ‘Not in the slightest, no, I’m rather in favour of it.’ But she fears dying. ‘One dreads the relentlessness of getting older and going gaga.”

Her father was an eccentric parson who lost his faith and once wrote for the parish magazine in defence of the Soviet persecution of the Church. And her faith? ‘I have no conventional religious faith. Just a sort of nudging feeling that there is more than is known.’

We talk about the second volume of her autobiography, About Time Too. ‘Now before we begin, don’t concentrate on my marriage.’ She gags, mockingly. The book is exquisitely well written and sometimes horribly witty, but doesn’t help people forget her 23-year marriage.

In it Mortimer emerges as heartless and compulsively unfaithful, regarding his wife’s grief over his infidelities with dispassionate bewilderment. It came out in hardback a year ago and she sent John a copy. She has heard nothing back. ‘If John doesn’t like something, he pretends it doesn’t exist.’ Does she regret having written it? ‘Sometimes.’ It is searingly honest and she felt exposed.

SHE writes about giving birth without chloroform in a storm. ‘I got it into my head that I would give birth without anaesthetic. It was very unpleasant.’ She chronicles having an abortion and being sterilised. ‘At the time I felt hopeful. Only the circumstances afterwards (that John had been having an affair while she was pregnant) made it seem a mistake.’ She records her overdose suicide attempt. ‘Why do people try to commit suicide? Do they really? Or is it just a big gesture?’ she says, with a smoky cough. ‘Insofar as I understood what I was doing I wanted to kill myself. I was out of my mind. I didn’t think of anything except how miserable I was and there seemed to be no alternative.’

She would have left six children. ‘That’s what is so difficult to understand now. At the time nothing occurred to me except that I couldn’t go on.’ She felt ‘ashamed’ when she awoke in hospital.

She had ECT. ‘I can find nothing in favour of it.’ Her voice rises. ‘My attitude to life can’t be altered by a few electric shocks or pills.’ And she documents her visits to psychiatrists. Was that helpful? ‘It was someone to talk to.’

Penelope is an obsessive. She writes even of John as an ‘addiction’. ‘Everything I do, I do obsessively. If I’m working, I work 14 hours a day. If I’m gardening, I garden 14 hours a day.’ How does she account for her compulsive personality? ‘God knows. Running away from unhappiness? Running to what you think of as happiness? I think it’s to do with fear. Fear that if you let up for one minute, the whole thing will disintegrate.’ There is a poignant description in the book of when she was on a US publicity tour: ‘I sat on my bed for most of the night, more frightened than I had ever been in my life.’

HAS she ever thought she was mad? ‘Once or twice it has occurred to me. I don’t really know what that means. I suppose doolally, going berserk, talking gibberish, bedlam mad. Sometimes I think I’m going round the twist.’ She writes to keep her sanity. ‘Well, a different sort of lunacy.’ Her difficulties stem from a fraught childhood. She was sent to seven different schools. ‘I never got further than fractions!’ And she had a mother whose only maternal feelings were expressed in a belief in regular meals and ghosts. ‘She was incredibly damaging, but with the best possible motives. She took my life over.’

Her mother was frigid and her father transferred his sexual attentions to Penelope. ‘Until recently I scoffed at the idea of it having affected me emotionally more than just feeling contempt.’ When she was 17, her father attempted to rape her. ‘He clumsily tried that once. Otherwise it was just messing around and petting.

“It wasn’t so much what he did, which is what any dirty old man will do, it was the shame he felt that really affected me. I mean I knew Daddy shouldn’t do this, so I despised him, which later made me always look out for the weakness in men and feel contempt for them.’

She told ‘maybe a couple’ of schoolfriends. Did she feel it was her fault? ‘Certainly not. All the time I was a child it wasn’t my fault. Maybe the last occasion, when I was about 16, it was my fault. I think it probably was. By that time I knew what he was after and my behaviour was, as it was to every man in those days, flirty. Maybe he took that as … I don’t know …’

DINAH Sheridan, star of Genevieve, The Railway Children and mother of Conservative Party chairman Jeremy Hanley, has lunched with Noel Coward, stayed with Sir John Gielgud, once had a stroke and was baptised aged 41. She’s also had both hips replaced, married four times, lost her three day- old child, had a nervous breakdown, addressed the Tory faithful and met nearly all the Royal family.

We’re talking in her Kensington flat, with two glamorous paintings of herself in the drawing room. Aubrey Ison, 78, her husband since 1992, is next door. Dinah, 74, wears a colourful Indian waistcoat, trousers and gold House of Commons pendant. Jeremy gave her a silver portcullis when he became an MP. When she married Aubrey, on her birthday, he gave her the gold one. Dinah declines to be photographed, maintaining graciously that she’s past it. (A month-old decision, this.) She produces a picture of her marriage to Aubrey, with Jeremy towering beside them. ‘We’re the two dwarves,’ says Dinah, with whistlingly perfect upper class enunciation.

Dinah has grey roller wavy hair, neatly plucked eyebrows and discreet makeup on a kindly face. She seems younger than her age, only occasionally forgetful, and is keen still to work. But her fingers are knarled with arthritis. She takes pain killers daily. ‘If I didn’t, I couldn’t get out of bed.’

She tried naturopathy. ‘No meat, fish or fowl. I became a walking soya hotpot.’ Then she had two hip replacements. ‘Surgeons say they’re second only to amputations. They’ve got to get your leg off before they can put anything in.’ Afterwards, she objected to the crutches. ‘I felt like a pissed spider. I kept falling over all my ‘legs’.’

Dinah has always enjoyed a close relationship with her children (her daughter is Jenny Hanley, former Magpie presenter). She and Aubrey returned recently from a holiday in Cyprus with Jeremy and his wife, Verna. ‘Jeremy once did a political speech and someone asked him to enlarge upon the worries of his job,’ says Dinah. ‘‘None,’ Jeremy replied. ‘My only real worry is my mother. She has 15 suitors and only one is unmarried.” Dinah, in turn, backs her son politically. ‘I canvass with him when he asks. I just stand on street corners and get soaking wet while he says, ‘Meet my mother,’ and they all say, ‘I know your face.” She canvassed in Brixton. ‘He walked the soles off his shoe and was sopping wet. I ran behind trying to get him to buy new ones. I was much more worried about my son’s feet than his getting into parliament.’

At Jeremy’s request, she addressed some of the Tory faithful at Brighton the night before the bomb. ‘I’m always terrified standing up and speaking. But I’ll always do it.’ Recently during Question Time, Frank Haynes, labour MP, roared that he’d be far happier to see Jeremy sitting there if he had half the beauty of his beloved mother. Frank then delivered a Dinah eulogy. Later Richard Luce summoned Frank to his office, in which Jeremy had hidden Dinah. ‘Frank went red with delight. No fan has ever been sweeter. He just melted.’

Dinah has just finished her autobiography. (‘I’m a typical Virgo. Highly critical, methodical, dogmatic, tidy, artistic and with a dogged determination to finish things.’) ‘I’m terribly anxious that I shouldn’t hurt or shock anybody,’ she says. ‘I feel frightened by what I’ve written. I know Jeremy is apprehensive.’She’ll let Jeremy alter her book. Dinah has many a tale to tell. In 1990 she was invited to talk at a Savoy ladies’ luncheon. After Dinah accepted, (‘Jeremy said, ‘I’ll help you with your speech”) the organisers informed her she’d be speaking after Willy Whitelaw, for 40 minutes, in front of 600 people with Princess Margaret as the guest of honour. ‘How the hell do I get out of this?’ she wrote back. The day dawned. ‘I bet you’re nervous now,’ said Princess Margaret, addressing Dinah in the receiving line. ‘I’m thinking of ducking out, M’aam,’ replied Dinah.

Once she stayed a week with Sir John Gielgud in Buckinghamshire. ‘Every day he’d appear at breakfast in a different dressing gown, twirl and say, ‘Do you like this one?” says Dinah. ‘One day he said he had a terrible confession. ‘This is the same dressing gown as Monday. I have five gowns not six.”

Above all, she’s also purged herself of husbands past in her book. ‘I’ve had a very strange life. Whenever I’ve married, I’ve married for life. But things have gone desperately wrong.’

Dinah’s first marriage was to actor Jimmy Hanley. ‘I’d adored him since the age of 12. My mother tried to point out his irresponsible ways.’ She smiles wanly.‘I just could’t manage.’ She lost a child before Jeremy was born and when the marriage broke up, Jimmy took the children and she had to work to raise the money to win them back in court.

Her second marriage was to Sir John Davis, chairman of the Rank Organisation. ‘I didn’t know the man I married. He was an incredible double character. Soon after we married, I discovered the existence of two other wives. ‘Wives numbers two and four’, he called them. He’d only told me about one and three.’ She hung on for the sake of her children. But Sir John was a physical and emotional bully who drove her to a breakdown.

During this period she was baptised and confirmed. ‘At the time I felt in need of it.’ And her breakdown? ‘I thought I’d broken my neck, I couldn’t move it. I went to a clinic for six weeks. I told the doctor I wanted to see a psychiatrist. All I wanted was to stay in the clinic.’ The doctor told her she didn’t require psychiatric help.

The true facts of their divorce didn’t emerge until years later – that Sir John was a sadist who liked dressing in women’s clothes and carried a whip. ‘He didn’t dress up,’ she says, sharply. She looks forlorn. Was he a sadist? ‘That’s not completely wrong.’

Next came the late Jack Merivale, actor. ‘Darling, adorable Jack.’ Two years into the relationship, he developed a kidney disease which required dialysis three times a week. She cared for him for 21 years, on a machine in the next room. ‘After 16 years of looking after him, I had what they call ‘good God high’ blood pressure. I’d had a tiny stroke.’

They remained unmarried for 18 years, because the accountant deemed it advantageous tax- wise. ‘One day Jack suddenly said, ‘This is silly, we’re both OAPs. Write and ask your accountant if we can get married.” The accountant replied in the affirmative. ‘Jack called Jeremy and said, ‘Your mother and I are thinking of getting married.’ ‘Oh,’ Jeremy replied, ‘I wouldn’t rush into anything if I were you.”

Now Dinah is married to Aubrey, a retired Californian businessman. ‘I hate the idea of being labelled as someone who’s had four husbands.’ They’d known each other for 21 years. ‘He and his late wife Liz stayed in the house opposite when they were in London.’ This marriage, says Dinah, is marvellous and fun.

JONATHAN Aitken’s wife, Lolitzia, was meditating for a week in an isolated Buddhist retreat when her husband rang to break the news of his promotion to the Cabinet. Lolitzia, a Swiss heiress and one of London’s most important society hostesses, was with pilgrims on Holy Island reportedly sleeping in a traditional wooden box designed to keep the body’s energies flowing. This wasn’t how we’d imagined the wife of Jonathan, newly appointed chief secretary to the Treasury, former TV-am big wig, biographer of Nixon and financier. But, speaking for the first time, Lolitzia says she spends up to two months a year looking for her spiritual ‘essence’. How does Jonathan regard these trips? ‘Maybe deep down he thinks I’m a bit cranky. But everyone has the right to be.’ She laughs. ‘I didn’t sleep in a box on Holy Island. I’m worried I’ll seem to be really wacko.’

She is hardly a traditional parliamentary wife. ‘Everybody knows I’m a really thick political wife. It’s a big joke. I don’t understand politics.’ When she’s seated next to the political Great and Good she asks them about their emotional motivations. ‘Tell me more, tell me more,’ she will giggle. Lolitzia began her quest for enlightenment 10 years ago. ‘I started returning from parties feeling something was lacking. I came home and my heart felt empty,’ she says. Initially she went to China and sought out some Chi Chuan spiritual masters. ‘I spent time with them and saw different realities. I saw them melt metal with their fingers.’

Next a friend told her about Charlie Tom, a Red Indian medicine man who lives ‘somewhere’ on a holy mountain in Oregon. Lolitzia flew to the States and simply drove to the mountains. ‘Suddenly I saw some Indians. I just walked up to them and said, ‘Hullo, I’m from London. Do you know Charlie Tom?’ One looked at me, amazed, and said he was Charlie’s cousin.’ She hoots with laughter.

The Indians invited her to an ‘extraordinary’ spiritual purification ceremony. ‘They build a tent of wet blankets, pray around it, put stones on the fire until they become very hot, throw on herbs and water and sing ancient songs. Then you dip in the cold river. I felt terrific afterwards.’ She made the next of her solo trips to see the Dalai Lama in India. ‘I had long chats with him about the essence of mind. He is pure love. He liked me for being funny,’ she says, characteristically exploding with mirth. ‘He likes to giggle. I get credit for being spiritual. But I’m just a great giggler.’

Then she was in the Caribbean when a book about whirling dervishes ‘fell’ on top of her. This led her to Istanbul where, shyly, she asked her hotel manager where she could find dervishes. ‘I whirl myself,’ he said, ‘and you must come.’ Lolitzia grabs her third cigarette, her serenity currently reliant on Marlboro. ‘I watched 10 of them whirl and whirl, bringing in divine energies.’

We’re talking in her Queen Anne terrace home – Churchill’s old house and scene of grand parties – with a dining room that could fit the Cabinet and drawing room the Government. Lolitzia – candid, ebullient but frosty when questions are too intrusive – sits talking on the edge of a table she designed. She speaks with a slightly guttural accent.

SHE’S wearing a girlish floral dress, flat shoes and clip in her hair. She has poise, friendly body language and an open youthful face, which she says radiates spirituality. ‘I’m not into face-lifts. A lot of spiritual practices are beautifying and rejuvenating.’ She’s ‘still attached’ to her vanity and won’t even divulge her age.

So would she put her money where her mouth is and discard worldly possessions? ‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ she says, sipping the strong coffee brought by her housekeeper. ‘The important thing is that you aren’t attached. I like to think that if things go wrong I could lead a simple life in a little cottage.’

Lolitzia was born in Belgrade, left aged five, and became Swiss. She had a happy childhood but was an only child. (‘I still need to be alone. I can easily go for 10 days in the country without talking to anyone.’) She studied economics, gained a masters from Lausanne university, and was then given an import-export business by her financier father. ‘Soon I started a clothes factory employing 60 people. I made a lot of money by the time I was 23. I was successful and full of ambition.’

And she was social. ‘I was very glamorous, always tarted up in couture, over-made-up and over-jewelled,’ she says. ‘It was terribly important to me to look right and be asked to the right parties, to impress people with how wonderful I was. It was insecurity. All these drives that make us want to be rich and powerful come from that hole in the heart.’

Then she met Jonathan at a friend’s, and they went out to dinner and Annabel’s. On this first date, on the dance floor, Lolitzia said to him: ‘You’re the man I’m going to marry.’ How did she know? ‘I just felt it. I just knew.’ But it took her three years. ‘I frightened him!’ They’ve now been married 16 years.

Jonathan was the Commons Don Juan, linked with women from Lady Antonia Fraser to Lady Charlotte Curzon. ‘Some people use sex to make themselves feel better. Jonathan was a love addict. I think any sort of compulsive behaviour is a cry for help.’ He had an affair with Carol Thatcher while Lolitzia was dating him. ‘I saw it as the battle lost, but not the war.’ At one stage it was reported that Jonathan nearly married Carol. ‘It never occurred to me as a possibility. I knew he would marry me.’

Shortly after Lolitzia married, she nearly died from a blood clot near her heart when pregnant. Then she was bedridden for six months before giving birth to twins – one seriously ill – who were put in an incubator for a month. Later Lolitzia had a third child by Caesarean section. ‘Now I think these problems are tests to make us stronger.’

She continued to be wildly social and had a card index of 1,000 top names in London categorised under diplomats, politicians, writers and so on. For her parties she would select evenly from the sections and send out formal invitations. But her marriage didn’t ‘fix’ her (‘I’d always liked glamorous men because I thought they would make me feel better’) and her lifestyle palled.

‘People get it very wrong when they think ‘if only I was rich I’d be happy’,’ she says. ‘You always need a bigger fix to be happy. Being a socialite became routine for me. That’s when I started looking at the soul.’

It would be too easy to mock her as a spiritual bore and sneeringly dismiss what she does as New Age claptrap, the indulgences of a rich, bored hausfrau. But she’s a sensitive, happy person – enthusiastic, praying for people who are nasty to her, philosophising about love and compassion and simply seeking to fill a void.

But what if the Cabinet new boy emerges as a powerful Tory politician? Won’t she then be a political liability? ‘I think Jonathan fears that sometimes, yes.’ The great giggler breathes in more tranquillity and another Marlboro.

ON Sunday the chocolate heir and former television chief Peter Cadbury, 76, was burgled. It was the most recent in a series of burglaries in his village near Basingstoke. He stormed that the Tories had lost his support. He demanded a crackdown on law and order, thundering that the Tories wouldn’t otherwise regain his backing.

He clamoured about young tearaways being sent on safari at the taxpayers’ expense. He got on his soapbox to the Press. That the raiders had only stolen two motorbikes (belonging to his sons) and some garden tools didn’t deter him. Nor did the thought that he’s only contributed £500 to the Conservatives this year, and only £1,000 from time to time in the last 45 years. The Cad, as he’s affectionately known, is not averse to creating a stink.

In 1986, for example, he was set to take legal action against Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles for using automatic guns to frighten the pigeons from his farmland. Peter wanted him to silence the guns. In 1993 Peter started roaring that another neighbour was using manure on his land. It stank so much he reckoned it was human sewage. ‘It was,’ says Peter, smugly. ‘The man from the Thames Water Board came round to apologise.’ We’re talking in his elegant Georgian home with squash court-sized hall, indoor pool, antique bronzes and rolling garden. His third wife, Janie, is accompanied by a great dane apparently crossed with a pony, and two lesser hounds. Janie, who sells Cabouchon jewellery at aristocratic Tupperware-style parties, married The Cad after he split with Jennifer d’Abo, boss of florists Moyses Stevens and former head of £20 million stationery chain Rymans.

The heinous crime of which Peter was victim was the ‘final straw’. The Tories should have been warned. A year ago Peter wrote complaining to his local Conservative chairman, then met up with his local MP. ‘I was fed up with the way the country was being run,’ says Peter, pucker voiced. ‘The Government’s appalling policy on law and order, wrecking of the economy by Maastricht and terrible Prime Ministerial vascillations.’

Peter was a great Maggie supporter. ‘She was also a personal friend of mine.’ And what does he think of Major? ‘An absolute disaster.’ Does he think that by withdrawing his support, ministers will take notice? ‘I’d love Major to read your article and think, ‘My God, this is serious, I must resign and take the Home Secretary with me,” he laughs. Otherwise Blair will get Peter’s vote. ‘The Labour Party is no longer trying to squeeze the rich until the pips squeak.’

Peter, fit and bronzed, wears a pale blue jumper and Gucci loafers. He looks cantankerous. But the former swashbuckling entrepreneur known for his mercurial temperament seems uncomfortable with himself and addresses most of his comments to the floor.

He has not been a lifelong Conservative. In 1945, he stood as Liberal candidate for Stroud, netting a third of the votes. ‘When asked whether I’d like to stand, I replied, ‘Yes, which party? It doesn’t matter to me,” he says. ‘I thought it would be a good mental exercise to stand. ‘I went to the adoption meeting and someone enquired whether I was in favour of the disestablishment of the Church of England. I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. At the end of the meeting I said, ‘Those are my views. If you don’t like them, they can easily be changed.’ I was very unpopular in the area for a bit because I did my canvassing in a Bentley. It was the only car I had.’

The son of the late Sir Egbert Cadbury, Peter was “brought up to play cricket’. (‘Father was a wonderful man who single-handedly shot down two Zeppelins in the 14-18 war.”) He was taught by his father to fly ‘as a boy’, and gained his licence when he was just 17. He went to Leighton Park school, a Quaker establishment founded by his grandfather, then to Trinity, Cambridge.

He was ‘very close’ to his parents and brother. But when Peter was 23 years old, his brother was killed in an accident on his 21st birthday. ‘He walked in his sleep and fell out of a window at home,’ he says, wringing his fingers. ‘My mother was by herself with him in the house in Somerset. It was terrible.’ (Years later, his father died a week before his 50th wedding anniversary. ‘It was awful. My mother felt life wasn’t worth living without him and died a year later.’) WHEN his brother died, Peter was serving as an experimental test pilot. ‘We flew the first Meteor. I had a lot of crashes. We were trying to break the sound barrier.’ His six colleagues were killed over a period of time during the war. It must have taken a lot of courage to continue when his friends were dying. ‘It was very worrying.’ He coughs defensively.

‘One day I handed the Meteor to John, a colleague, to take over. I went home. Half an hour later the police called and said a Meteor had sprayed itself over the golf course.’ He coughs more. ‘All they found of him was one shoe, no body, nothing. It’s extraordinary how bodies disintegrate at 500 miles an hour.’

After the war, Peter returned to finish his finals and was called to the Bar in 1946. ‘Not being unduly modest, I think I was very successful. But there was no real possibility of making any real money.’ In 1954 he bought the Keith Prowse group for £75,000. ‘I borrowed the money from my father. I didn’t have any.’ It went public in 1959, valued at £1million. Then he set up Tyne Tees Television. ‘I learned how much money there was in television so decided I’d rather like my own television company. I went down to the West Country with a copy of Who’s Who and a map, collected 200 shareholders, applied for a licence and started Westward Television in 1959.’ He was deposed from the now defunct Westward Television in a boardroom debacle in 1980 and then purged himself of boardroom demons by writing a 200,000-word autobiography too libellous to print. In between all this, he married three times and begat five children. Is he a difficult person to live with? He looks heavenwards. ‘I don’t think I readily accept other people’s opinions if they differ from mine.’ Why did his marriage to Jennifer d’Abo break up? ‘Because we were both entrepreneurs and she was better than I was. It hurt my pride.’

Peter made me laugh. But he’s never hidden his spleen under a bushel. Although he supports many charities, they’re mostly animal ones. Recently he adopted a gorilla in Rwanda. ‘Animals are more deserving and more pathetic than humans, quite honestly.’

IN APRIL her Putney home was gutted by fire and her furniture and possessions burned. In June she was burgled and her jewellery stolen. Then her best friend died. In July she was car-jacked and her £5,000 watch robbed; 24 hours later, she bumped into the gang who stole it. Former Page Three model Jilly Johnson, who has spoken before only about her watch theft, admits reluctantly that she’s had a run of bad luck.

We meet in The Harbour Club, tennis haunt for Princess Diana. As we walk past the bar, six pairs of male eyes, too young to remember Jilly topless in The Sun in the Seventies, follow this bronzed 40-year-old in a slashed white tunic dress with flowing blonde hair.

Jilly has brassy good looks, a big beak, an Australian twang (she lived there until she was 12) and that immediate antipodean friendliness. ‘I’m Australian in the way I’m not overly fond of wearing clothes,’ says Jilly, laughing generously. She loves to laugh at herself.

On 6 April she drove home at 5pm and was shocked to see her three-bedroom semi on fire. ‘Clouds of smoke were pouring out of the windows. I raced in,’ she says. ‘The hall was fine, I could get in, but upstairs was totally in flames.’

There had been an electrical fault and the fire had engulfed everything. ‘Anything that wasn’t destroyed was smoke damaged. I didn’t have any clothes left at all. The fire traumatised me,’ she says, with characteristic strong eye contact. She’s too upset to estimate the damage. She was renting while house hunting and wasn’t insured. She moved out and has stayed with friends since. Then her hosts were burgled. ‘All my earrings were stolen.’ Again, Jilly was uninsured. Next her closest friend died. ‘I really can’t talk about that. It wouldn’t be right.’ Then 18 days ago, a mugger yanked her by the hair and wrenched off her watch while she was stuck in a Bayswater traffic jam.

Astonishingly, Jilly was in a taxi a day later and spotted her assailant in the street. ‘I thought I was being paranoid. I’d been looking at every man I saw,’ she says. ‘I thought, ‘This is too much of a coincidence.’ Then I realised he was with the gang he’d been with when he attacked me. I got the taxi to follow them and called the detective.’

THE youths were already known to the police and a man has now been charged with stealing Jilly’s watch.

‘I’m not the sort who has the vapours and gets hysterics. I’m not a wimp. But I’ve felt very nervous since that someone will break into the flat to shut me up. Yesterday a man stepped off the kerb to walk past and I leapt from my car seat.’ Her arms are still bruised and today she carries a watch attached to her wicker basket.

Jilly, the daughter of a shop fitter, became a household name when she was just 16. ‘I’d been a simple provincial girl at a comprehensive in Surrey where I was an academic desert. Suddenly I was thrust into this wild life of private jet and yacht travel, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll. I found it scary. I felt out of control.’ She remains endearingly insecure about her looks. ‘I don’t believe I’m attractive.’

Aged 19, she married property developer Brian Johnson. ‘I was searching for security.’ They divorced three years later. ‘I was far too young and we just grew apart.’ She dabbled with drugs but is wary of saying so lest she be stitched up with screaming headlines. ‘I tried pot and the odd line of coke. But I never became really involved. I always had my daughter, Lucy (now 18), to look after.’ She was also linked with zillions of famous men. Was she really that raunchy? She giggles. ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’ Jilly was rumoured to have had affairs with Ryan O’Neal and Rod Stewart. ‘Ryan targeted me and was pretty difficult to dissuade. He chased me round and round a hotel room. It was so funny, I wish there’d been a camera. Finally I managed to get him to leave.’ And Rod? ‘Doesn’t every blonde with long legs get associated with Rod? I had two dates with him. He’s not my cup of tea. He’s an acquired taste,’ she says, going cross-eyed. More recently she stepped out with Eric Clapton, while he was still married to Patti Boyd. ‘Eric’s a very dear friend, I love him. But I didn’t meet him until after Patti and I never slept with him.’

But Jilly did go out with Chris Carajohn, a crook jailed in 1987 for financing his smart lifestyle with clients’ investments. ‘People told me he was dangerous which was like a red rag to a bull. I’m a desperately lousy judge of character when it comes to men.’

Much of Jilly’s love life is tabloid fabrication and the lesbianism, threesomes and gay sado-masochism in her novel Double Exposure are fictional. ‘My daughter read it and said, ‘Mummy, you’re incorrigible. Where do you get all this stuff from?” Her personal life has been ‘tempestuous’. But she’s been without a partner for a year. ‘I feel so much stronger. I’ve grown up. I don’t need a man right now.’

These days she’s ‘under house arrest’, writing her second novel. ‘All about … er, I don’t want to talk about it. I might change my mind again.’ She’s left behind modelling, pelvic-thrust dancing, singing hits, staying on a sealed floor at the Tokyo Hilton, and crumpet acting in which she was cast always with a Swedish accent and stilettos. She’s keen to reinvent herself. She doesn’t want to talk about her breasts. ‘The plastic surgery I had was a pointless superficial thing to have done. I just want to have more depth now. These questions make me seem so bimboid.’

She doesn’t regret her past. ‘Going topless is just a laugh. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.’ But she can’t fathom heavy questions about self-respect or female exploitation.

DID she really never worry at the idea of men ogling and arousing themselves over photographs of her? ‘I can’t believe men … Maybe I’m just being naive – I mean does that kind of thing turn men into rapists? I think it’s just a bit of tittivation (sic) and a British constitution (sic).’ In her nervous agitation, she produces perfect malapropisms.

LAST week I had to have emergency treatment for chronic back sprain. After two days of intensive therapy I managed the five-minute walk to my car in a record 20 minutes, desperate to be driven to my physio. Sadly the car was gone.

It had been left in a Kensington and Chelsea residents’ parking bay, sporting its £70 residents’ permit, parked directly underneath a sign which said parking would be restricted three days hence. Fearing the worst, I called the car pound. My vehicle had indeed been towed away and the council intended to charge me £135 for its day’s bed and board.

I rang Kensington town hall, requesting that my car, which had been legally parked and illegally towed, be returned. It wasn’t my fault that they couldn’t read the date on their own prohibition sign. And I needed the car because of my bad back.

I was put through to Miss Williams. Miss Williams couldn’t authorise the car’s return and transferred me to Miss Shew. Miss Shew suggested Mr Wilson. Mr Wilson wasn’t there. The mayor’s secretary suggested Mr Davis. Miss Birch said better speak to Mr Yates. Mr Yates was in a meeting.

Eventually Mr Yates, Parking Enforcement Manager, rang and said there had been a sign farther up the road from my car indicating that parking was restricted the day my car was left. There was no way he would authorise its return. Mr Yates disagreed that two contradictory signs in one bay were an indication of council incompetence.

Graciously he conceded that if I paid the £105 removal fee plus the £30 ticket, I could collect my vehicle and fill in a formal representations form to request the council to refund my money. I was as incensed as when the council sent a note offering parking spaces under the town hall for residents who were going on holiday and didn’t want their cars towed away – for £35 a week.

DESMOND GUINNESS – scion of the brewery clan, friend of Mick Jagger and Paul Getty, author of Dublin, A Grand Tour and founder of the Irish Georgian Society – really wanted a Palladian house with rococo plasterwork in England. He scoured the countryside, was gazumped on a haunted house which is now the home of Prince Michael of Kent, and ended up with Leixlip, one of the first castles built by the Normans in Ireland.

In 1958, Desmond and his first wife, the late Princess Marie-Gabrielle of Urach-Wurtemberg, moved into Leixlip with 540 books, a mattress and a gun. The couple were known as part of the jeunesse dore. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ says Desmond, a gentle charmer in a Fair Isle waistcoat, who has the bluest blue eyes, wispy white hair and a seductive voice. ‘We were interested in architecture, engravers and silversmiths.’ But he loves beautiful women, doesn’t he? ‘Mmm, I certainly do.’ (Reflective pause.) ‘Well, that’s a conversation stopper.’

The castle had mod cons like windows with stone mullions (added in the 17th century) and 19th century battlements. When the couple moved in, it had baths, but they were in the fields being used as water troughs, and wiring so unsafe the electricity board refused to reconnect the power. But the interior had been elegantly remodelled in Georgian times.

They set about decorating it and buying at country sales. Desmond bid 10 shillings for an unremarkable kitchen table in one crowded auction. ‘It turned out to be the most amazing carved Irish mahogany with a black marble top and has since appeared in several publications.’

Desmond now lives in Leixlip with Penny, his wife of 10 years and a former lover of Lucian Freud; Eileen, his cook of 31 years, who is ever ready for impromptu dinners for 40; and the ghost of a multi-headed hound whose heads appear at the windows. ‘I’ve often undone the shutters thinking I’m going to meet him. I will one day, I’m sure.’ Desmond’s son Patrick and daughter Marina, who has three children by different fathers, live nearby. The day of our interview the castle has been taken over by Michael York, Jacqueline Bisset, Edward Fox and a film crew working on September. ‘The house is pretending to be a dour Scottish castle.’ Workers are busy repainting the ‘set’. And a coach of Americans are coming for a slide show on Irish architecture. ‘They wanted to know what to wear … can you imagine?’

We’re talking in Desmond’s favourite room, the sitting room, in the castellated 14th century tower with its 4ft-thick walls. There are invitations from the Ambassador of Italy and Marianne Faithfull and samples of Pierre Frey material scattered on the table.

It’s the only room light enough to read in without electric lights and the wooden stove burns in here all winter. Like all castles it’s draughty. One guest who called for more blankets in the night was given a pile that included a flag. He woke up frozen, draped in the flag, and thought he’d died. The radiators in this room are hidden in whiskey barrels. Charmingly tatty and unmatching curtains at the windows do their best to keep out the cold.

Desmond affects, amusingly, not to know how many rooms there are. ‘I’m not really sure. But there are 11 bathrooms,’ he says. The hall, paved with terracotta tiles and white flagstones, is being painted yellow by the film people. The dining room is navy with a jolly chinoiserie tapestry and jasmine growing up the 1765 Gothic revival windows. ‘We used to light the candles in here and Marianne Faithfull, a great, great friend who lives next door (five miles away), used to sing in front of the fireplace. She was such a dazzling beauty. You couldn’t possibly resist her.’

The library has an 18th century gilded plaster frieze and French engravings pasted on the walls. Nearby is the drawing room with its Irish mahogany table carved with shells, Savonnerie carpet and Newbridge dolls’ house. William Acton’s drawings of the Mitford sisters adorn the walls. But today it’s full of packing cases and film people.

Upstairs is the chapel. ‘We’ve never prayed in it. It’s never been anything but a passageway for us.’ It has a little pony cart in it in which Marina used to drive as a child. ‘One day I went to an antiques shop and saw it. I thought it looked familiar. It used to live in the stables and had been stolen.’

Under the window in the room known as King John’s bedroom, there’s a copper Victorian bath tub in which Mick Jagger photographed Jerry Hall. The pictures were stolen and later appeared in a British newspaper. ‘My idea,’ says Desmond, ‘had been to hide the tub in the armoire, so people could take a bath in the cupboard.’ The room has a four-poster state bed from Stowe and white lines chalked on the floor from when it was used as a squash court. The Guinnesses’ bedroom is cosy, with a portrait of his mother. ‘By John.’ (Augustus, that is.) His mother is, of course, Diana Mitford who was once married to Sir Oswald Mosley. Beyond this, there’s yet another guest bedroom, hidden away, with French scenic wallpaper of 1822 with views of Italy. ‘They used to sell this wallpaper by saying, ‘Teach your children geography without leaving the home.” There appears to be a different book by a Mitford or Guinness by every bed.

It is at Leixlip that they have an annual Georgian cricket match. And where, as a girl, when Marina wanted to join a travelling circus, Desmond invited a circus to pitch its tents on his land. Whereupon a dromedary embarked on an intimate relationship with their cow.

THE opera singer Fiona O’Neill was eight weeks pregnant when she was driving on the M1 at 70 miles an hour and was hit by a Portuguese lorry. She was lifted into the air in her car, which then spun around before hurtling across the motorway, hitting a concrete block and landing 200 yards up an embankment.

This happened on 5 May when Fiona – who has sung at private parties for John Major and the Prince of Wales and became a household name when she stripped naked for the television film of the musical Vampyr – was on her way to perform as Madame Butterfly.

The lorry driver, in a left-hand drive, had moved lane without seeing her. ‘It was horrendous,’ recalls Fiona. ‘I remember being hit then flying like an aeroplane up an embankment, spinning and floating for what seemed like hours … I kept thinking, ‘You must keep calm because of the baby and how are they going to find someone to sing tonight?”

When Fiona landed, she noted a police car driving past in the other direction. ‘I was told later that I was so far off the M1 that the police thought I was working for the council.’ The bottom of her Vauxhall Cavalier had been ripped off.

The ambulance arrived rapidly, after she’d started having a severe asthma attack. ‘The ambulance man was trying to put an oxygen mask on me while a policeman was trying to breath-test me. The ambulance man told him, ‘You must be joking.” She was taken to Northampton General Hospital where she received treatment for a broken rib, whiplash and terrible shock. Astonishingly, she didn’t lose her baby. (Though even today she suffers migraines, sleeps too much and shakes when driving.) The next night, she performed. ‘I don’t know how I did it. My husband drove me there and I just did it. I knew I had to get going again.’ A week later, she received a bill for £20.65 for the ambulance journey – ‘I never knew you had to pay for emergency services’ – and £123.38 from the company that towed away her car.

Fiona, 35, speaks tremulously with a slight northern accent, has big green eyes, cascading hair and wears a Monsoon shirt and jodhpurs. She has sung with the English National Opera, Scottish Opera, d’Oyle Carte, been an operagram and done promotion work. ‘The whole of Opera North came through Heathrow’s Terminal Two when I was there in a maid’s uniform saying, ‘If you buy two items of duty free …” Last summer she sang at a private party in Hampshire for Prince Charles, when she was suffering from bronchial asthma. Afterwards she met the prince. ‘Oh, you were the one who sang those very high notes,’ he remarked.

FIONA hit the headlines first in 1992 when she starred in Vampyr and took her clothes off with tenor Philip Salmon for a duet in a pool. (‘A trill a minute. Watch her warble. Madame Gutterfly,’ said the tabloids.) She felt uncomfortable about the nude scenes. ‘The only way I managed was by pretending my head was the only bit that belonged to me. You just don’t look down. There are always bits of you you don’t want to see, like your thighs.’ It was particularly difficult for her because she’s an ex-convent schoolgirl, imbued with inhibitions. ‘Their idea of sex education was to say, ‘Don’t bath when you have a period,’ and, ‘You must never look at yourself in the mirror.” She is very unpromiscuous, a loner, and didn’t lose her virginity until she was 23. ‘Maybe I’m frightened of relationships. But I think I’m a closet romantic, into soppy novels and stuff.’ Before transmission, she became excruciatingly embarrassed. ‘Suddenly you realise your neighbours and the man in the pub are going to see you with no clothes on.’ She watched herself. ‘A bit like going to your own first night.’ Afterwards, she received only a few lewd comments and her mother rang. ‘She said, ‘I told you, you’ve not been eating enough.” Fiona married this year, on 29 April, a year after first setting eyes on her husband, set designer Roger Kiff. ‘I met Roger on a train, the 6.19 from London Bridge to New Cross Gate. He was sitting reading The Guardian. I thought he looked nice, wearing black.’ British Rail kept making them change platform to get back on the same train. ‘He started an ‘Oh, bloody British Rail’ sort of conversation.’

When they arrived, they stood talking for 20 minutes. By coincidence, he was building a set for the National Theatre and Fiona was working there in Baby Doll. And he lived round the corner from her. ‘A week later we went out, two weeks later he moved in with me, and a month later he proposed.’ They gave themselves time to be sure of their feelings. Then they married in Lewisham register office. ‘I wanted it to be just us and the dog, and we got permission for the dog. Then our parents seemed miserable. So we invited close family.’

When she was 18, Fiona became anorexic. How did she get through it? ‘By doing nothing about it. Everybody pretended it wasn’t happening.’ Then she started to eat continuously. ‘I put on masses of weight and went up to size 16. We just pretended it was normal.’ Still she’s conscious of her weight. ‘In the mirror I always see myself as big.’ Nowadays her compulsiveness manifests itself differently. ‘I’m a workaholic.’

RANDOM drugs tests are to be carried out on about 12,000 prisoners a year to combat the growing narcotics problem in jails.

It’s estimated that nearly half the inmates of British prisons take self-prescribed medication (heroin, LSD, cannabis and the like) while detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. That’s a prison population of 49,000 in England and Wales alone. So the forthcoming tests should provide enough material and statistics for Prison Service paper shufflers to write off an entire rainforest.

But aren’t they locking the cell after the criminal has bolted? Isn’t this approach comparable to giving HIV tests and forgetting about condoms and safe-sex education? Can it really be effective to discipline a hopeless junkie whose test proves positive?

Many prisoners are inside due to their addiction, rather than because they are inherently criminal. Addicts deal in drugs or steal to support their habit, commit crimes of violence when drunk or stoned, and up to half of all property crime (the cost of which has soared to £4 billion a year) is drug-related.

The Addictive Diseases Trust, a pioneering charity, is fighting successfully against spiralling crime by treating prison inmates for substance abuse. The ADT programme – the first to establish itself full-time in a penal institution, Downview Prison, Surrey – has rehabilitated a third of those it has treated. Remove people from the cycle of addiction and prison and many will cease to reoffend.

The drug tests cost £12 each – which is partly why they haven’t been used before on a wide scale in prisons – and the number of notified addicts has risen fivefold since 1982.

By contrast, £1,500 is required to put an inmate through the ADT programme. So it wouldn’t be logical to press the Prison Service to provide statutory funding.

After all, it only costs £23,000 a year to keep someone in prison. I’M THE only journalist ever to have met Michael Jackson privately in over a decade, unless you count Oprah Winfrey. I spent several hours with him last year. Just after the beleaguered star cut short his world tour and admitted an addiction to pain killers. At the time, the world’s journalists were searching the globe for him and The Sun was offering £10,000 for a sighting or photograph.

Jackson arrived heavily disguised in a red satin face mask and was driven in a Toyota Previa with clear glass windows and children in it. I was prevented, both then and now, from writing about our meeting, professionally the hardest thing I’ve ever had to bear. A number of legal and personal constraints impeded me from so doing, and I awaited an interview which has not yet transpired. (In my memoirs he’ll appear in heavily camouflaged form, wearing a blue silk face mask.) He didn’t strike me as the marrying type. But last week it was reported that he wed Lisa Marie Presley. Surely the papers missed something out. That Elvis was there.

The exposure of my inflexible friend SINCE I was given a piggy, I’ve banked with National Westminster. Unquestioningly, I queued and phoned my branch and held the line for so long my mum could have baked a souffl. This year they improved and gave me a personal account manager, so I had someone dealing with my individual requirements. One to one service which concentrated the mind wonderfully on the cheque books that never arrived.

Recently, I received a customer service questionnaire asking about my experience of Nat West over the last six months. The bank sends 132,000 of these to a random selection every month, and 20 per cent respond. I’m not normally one to fill in holiday competitions, coupons and finish the ditties on the packet of Persil, but I did it.

I considered it at length. Mulled such options as “The branch has made no effort to provide enough staff to satisfy demand” and “More often than not they’ve made a mistake” and “Have you had to give all the details to more than one person before they found someone who could answer your question properly?”

Then I moved my account to The Royal Bank of Scotland.

Care but no attention HOSPITAL authorities were only alerted to the disappearance of a pensioner who had offered himself as a guinea pig for medical students in a Manchester hospital when his relatives became worried. He was discovered on 9 July in the hospital lavatory, dead. He’d been there for 19 hours, and his grief-stricken family are calling for an inquiry.

Equally tragic is the tale of a man who last year went to Bart’s for his heart-outpatients appointment. He signed in and was dispatched along the corridor to see his consultant. He never arrived, and nobody noticed. Two weeks later he was discovered, decomposing in the gents.

Fortunately, all is not gloomy. I have a friend who is a renal specialist in a major London hospital. Returning to work after a short holiday, he made a brisk walk round the wards. Then he discovered a cheerful chap in stripy pyjamas lying on a trolley in the corridor.

My friend asked him how he was. The gentleman pulled the blankets up under his chin, but said he felt all right. My friend, noticing something amiss, enquired whether he’d completed the admission procedure. The man replied that he thought so. ‘I have been here a week,’ he replied. Overpriced facilities Bargain hunter: Betty Boothroyd IMISSED the redoubtable Betty Boothroyd, who opened the Harrods sale, and I ended up standing mournfully outside what rank among the world’s most expensive lavatories. Or luxury ladies’ washrooms, in Fayedspeak. The lavatories cost £250,000: each cistern and bowl was over £10,000, the room is fitted with £40,000-worth of Italian marble and you wave your hand in front of an infra-red sensor at the basin to turn on the water. Entry costs £1. This buys a swipe card which operates the electronic sensor to the inner sanctum. (Harrods card? That’ll do nicely.) About 300,000 people went to the top people’s store on the first day of the sale. All the women I saw shrieked in disbelief and headed off for a free pee round the corner. Only 400 could afford to spend more than a penny.

Who said the recession was lifting?

MANDY Smith, former wife of Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, would like to become a barrister. They are, she says, the ones up there doing it. She wants also to ‘do more journalism’ and interview Princess Diana. ‘She’s Cancer and Charles is Scorpion (sic),’ explains television presenter Mandy, ‘and I’m Cancer and Bill’s Scorpion.’ She is keen to dispel the bimbo image, has dyed her blonde hair to thinking woman’s chestnut and talked her life story into a book, It’s All Over Now.

Mandy’s mother Patsy, half a century old and in leggings, answered the door with an accommodating manner and the face of a victim. The house is obsessively spotless, with frou-frou curtains, Fantasia video, two Yorkshire terriers and 90ft garden. A silent pectoral type stands in the kitchen: Pat Van Den Hauwe, Mandy’s husband and Millwall footballer. Mandy is running late, upstairs.

She was 13 and lived on a council estate when Bill, 47, seduced her. ‘It was like I was much older, not a 13-year-old in little socks and school skirt,’ she says. It was a shocking pre-pubescent affair which led to her marriage at 19 and divorce at 21. After the marriage, she wasted to 5 1/2 stone and was close to death.

Now 23, she looks exceedingly pretty even in a track-suit and with seriously medallioned sunglasses for a hairband. She has a tan, healthy figure, big chestnut eyes framed with charcoal make-up and Cartlandesque lashes, veneers on her teeth and French-polished nails so long they could hold up a picture. But she has smelly breath. She ate millet and soya milk for breakfast.

She has pulled herself back from the brink, partly with religion. She was raised a Catholic and her book is dedicated to, among others, ‘the dear Lord God above’. ‘Yeah, He’s important to me,’ says Mandy, who speaks with a lazy norf London accent and drops her aitches.

‘I don’t think He gets enough recognition for what he does. Look at all the lovely animals you can have.’ She prays ‘up to 10 times a day,’ normally for 10 minutes. ‘I don’t even realise I’m doing it. Sometimes I’m watching telly and, if it isn’t interesting, I’ll go into a trance for 10 minutes and chat to God.’

What is her concept of the Almighty? ‘He’s a busy person, but always finds a bit of time to talk to you when you need it. If He can’t, He’s got all these angels and saints. Saint Antony is always helping me out. I have a quick chat with him an hour before I go out. I say, ‘St Antony, you around? I’m going into town, need to park and you know what it’s like’.’ She always finds a space. It may, she says, be coincidence.

We’re sitting in Mandy’s white conservatory. She shares her Muswell Hill home with Pat and her sister Nicola. Patsy has moved out but works here, as Mandy’s agent. A year ago, Patsy broke up with Stephen Wyman, 33, reportedly at Mandy’s wedding. Mandy becomes cagey. Then lets slip that they’re back together.

‘When Bill found out, he wouldn’t talk to Stephen,’ she says. ‘He sacked him from work about six months ago and said, ‘If you go out with Patsy, I don’t want to see you.’ He was going to take Stephen out of his will.’ Now Bill and Stephen are reconciled and Stephen (‘he’s very clever’) works for his father, typing his next volume of autobiography.

How did Mandy feel when her mother started a romance with Stephen eight years ago? ‘It was like, ‘Oh God mum, how could you? He’s so young, he’s Bill’s son and what will people think?’ But before she went out with a man who drank a lot and lived with his mother.’

Isn’t there something unnerving about such a rivalrous, competitive mother stepping on her patch? ‘Oh no, no. We’re not like that at all.’ How does Mandy feel about Bill being so horrid about possibly becoming her step-grandfather? ‘I’d ask him for pocket money,’ she jokes, ‘a blank cheque.’

BILL gave Mandy a settlement of £580,000. ‘Take off the house and lawyers’ bills, and I was left with £50,000 which went on a tax bill. If I wanted money I’d have stayed with him.’

But why did her mother ‘sell’ her 13-year-old daughter? ‘She was really ill at the time and thought she was going to die – we didn’t know what of…’ (Mandy’s temper rises) ‘and he looked after me.’ Wasn’t it because he was a rich celebrity? ‘No, no. We weren’t impressed by people.’ Why didn’t Mandy help the police press child abuse charges? ‘I felt partly to blame, like it was my fault as well,’ she says, with the classic guilt of an abuse victim. ‘I fell in love with Bill. I wasn’t a little sex temptress. But I’d feel too guilty getting someone charged for sex abuse.’ Unsurprisingly, Mandy’s marriage to Pat hasn’t run smoothly. ‘I didn’t talk to Pat when we met because he was so shy. Now there can be a bit of a clash, two sensitive souls together. He becomes paranoid and aggressive,’ says Mandy.

In addition, Pat’s ex resents Mandy seeing their daughter. ‘Er, um, well Pat left her for me. I’m sorry, I’m not going to take the blame. It was his choice. I don’t know the woman. But she’s said a few stupid things on the phone to Pat about me. Like ‘I don’t want my child going over to that house’.’

Did Mandy believe her marriage vows to be for life? ‘I thought ‘I just hope it lasts’, but you have to be realistic. Who knows if it’ll last forever, for a year or two?’ Bill was unfaithful; how does she know that Pat is faithful? ‘Well, Bill wrote it down in his diary and Pat doesn’t keep a diary.’ Sex with Pat, she insists, is now all right. ‘I feel a bit more normal.’

Mandy has been helped by therapy. ‘Years ago a fan wrote recommending this woman. I thought ‘don’t bother’. Then one day when I was really desperate, I phoned her.’ Mandy went twice weekly for six months. ‘I felt better that it wasn’t a journalist I was speaking to. We talked about sex, feelings and my Dad leaving when I was three. He was a gambler and used to spend all the money.’

Mandy has also improved physically. She reckons she suffered from premenstrual syndrome (a hormonal imbalance) and allergies. ‘I was ill from 11 years old, but really bad in 1988 when I was in the Cromwell Hospital for six months,’ she says. ‘My self-esteem went down. Now I can get up and go out on my own every day. I used to need someone with me constantly. I always felt ill and faint. I thought I was going to die.’

She eats three tofu-style meals a day, plus starchy snacks, and spends ‘at least two hours’ in the gym daily. ‘If I can’t go to the gym during the day, I try to go at night.’ Her food faddishness and compulsive exercising sound like anorexia. ‘In my doctor’s and my eyes, it’s PMS. I know many doctors thought I was just anorexic and a crank trying to hide it.’ She’s spent £20,000 on doctors in the last two years ‘on a Chinese herbalist, acupuncturist, doctor, counselling’. The court awarded her £100,000 for medical fees.

ANGELA Rippon hides her feelings cleverly. She controls her face and emotions as if she’s on screen. She’s professionally nice, like a Tory lady at a fund-raising garden fete, talks becomingly, looks squeaky clean, drinks mint tea and smiles vocationally.

But she becomes visibly flustered about sex in her broken 22-year marriage. And laughs with thespian disregard when denying her alleged love affair with the former husband of the Princess Royal, Captain Mark Phillips. We meet in the fashionable Halcyon hotel because Angela refuses to allow journalists into the privacy of her home. She’s well known for refusing to answer questions, saying it’s personal. She introduces herself with a deliberately strong handshake, direct eye contact and green room friendliness. She’s shorter and smaller off camera, neat in pink and white check linen jacket and what she’d probably call slacks.

She looks youthful, 49 years old, with the famous arched eyebrows, square face, lovely eyes, clear complexion and sensibly fluffed up hair; an image befitting the Angel of her name. But there’s something unauthentic about her voice. Perhaps a repressed anger beneath the extreme niceness? Angela was a big celebrity in the days before Hello! made everybody one. She became the first woman BBC newsreader in 1976, revealed her legs when she danced out from behind the newsreader’s desk on Morecambe and Wise, presented television coverage of Crufts, shimmered across the ballroom floor compering Come Dancing, appeared on intellectually deep-frozen quiz shows like What’s My Line and grilled politicians on LBC.

In 1990 it was reported that she was Britain’s best-paid female media star. That she’d signed a £100,000-a-year contract with LBC. ‘I wasn’t earning anything like that,’ she says now. ‘People have always thought of a figure, doubled it and added a couple of noughts where my salary is concerned.’

Last week Angela quit her job at LBC, 24 hours after learning that she wouldn’t be required by London Radio when it takes over from franchise-loser LBC in October. (She’d already lost her morning news programme under the former LBC management.) She attributes this to her strong association with the old station and her high profile with LBC. ‘I’ve won four awards in the last four years,’ says Angela, speaking restrainedly.

Angela says that the parting was not acrimonious. Yet a London Radio spokesman was last week quoted as saying: ‘What need is there on radio for former TV personalities?’ Does she take these knocks personally? ‘You can’t,’ she replies. ‘You can’t buckle under every time someone says: ‘Thank you, we don’t want to employ you’. You’d end up destroyed and a hollow shell. You’d jump in a hole and never be seen again.’

Angela the celebrity has been toughing it out for the last 20 years. Her job loss is her third such major blow. As soon as TV-am got its licence, the BBC eased Angela out of her newsreading job. ‘I was called in on a Wednesday and told ‘don’t come in on Monday’. At the time you feel quite hurt, but you can’t make people employ you.’ Then two months after she started at TV-am, as one of the Famous Five who helped launch it, she was sacked ignominiously. ‘That was horrendous. I’d never want to live through that again.’

Her most recent demise marks the end of an era. ‘When I started in television 27 years ago, there was very little I could do without getting into the Press,’ she admits. ‘Now I’m not in that spotlight or rarefied goldfish bowl quite as often or long. Celebrity has become diluted. It takes the heat off you.’ Now she’ll continue her television series about The Entertainers – interviews with Mike Yarwood and suchlike – and finish a Remembrance Day special for Radio 2.

Angela was the only child of an engineer and china shop manageress. ‘I was a tom-boy, not at all rebellious as a teenager and being an only child made me self-sufficient, but my friends are very important.’ She was raised in a small council house (“a normal working-class family’) in the suburbs of Plymouth. She went to grammar school, gained nine O-levels and left, aged 17, a term before she was due to take A-levels. ‘There was an opportunity to work on a newspaper. The job was there, so I took it.’

She met Christopher Dare, her first serious boyfriend and a car parts dealer, when she was 17 at a YMCA dance. In 1990 their marriage ended but they’ve not yet divorced. ‘There are all sorts of complications.’ She won’t reveal them. Why did they break up? ‘Oh we just grew apart.’ What changed after 22 years? ‘Oh, lots of things.’

Christopher has a new partner, Angela doesn’t. Angela says they’re still good friends and talk weekly. ‘I still dine alone with my husband.’ She’s never met his new partner, she says, with an edge to her voice. Angela, who wears her engagement ring, is losing her composure.

Why did they never have children? ‘We just never had them.’ Because they didn’t want them? ‘Because it never happened.’ They tried and wanted them? She chokes on her tea. ‘We had a perfectly normal married life, but it just never happened.’ Did they have tests and so on? ‘No, we just compensated in other ways, by being busy and getting on with our lives.’ Did she feel unfulfilled or distressed? ‘No.’

What then of the rumour of an affair with Captain Mark Phillips? ‘It was a load of cobblers. I was simply writing his biography. He laughed it off and Princess Anne just said, ‘Oh, don’t take any notice,’ when the gossip started.’ Would she have liked to have had an affair with him? ‘It simply never crossed my mind.’

Now Angela can interview herself. ‘What is the most important question you could ask yourself?’ I ask, lamely. Angela ums and ahs. ‘Um,’ she says. ‘What makes me tick? The thing that makes me tick is that I enjoy what I do.’ I’m bored. Maybe she’s too private, too bland or too nice. ‘How would you get yourself talking about something you’ve never spoken about publicly before?’ I enquire. ‘What’s the most interesting personal question you would ask yourself?’