JO CORRE spent much of his childhood in a dustbin. Jo, 27, is the son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the punk poseur who managed the Sex Pistols. The first time Jo jumped into a dustbin was with his brother Ben, to retrieve the toys Malcolm had thrown away because he wouldn’t tidy his room. ‘Once we’d discovered this place where you found loads of other stuff as well, we were, like, always in the dustbins,’ says Jo. ‘Most parents wouldn’t let their children play with us because we were really dirty.’

Jo’s parents never married (‘If anyone thinks they’re worse off because their parents aren’t married, they’re mad’) and Ben was sent to live with his father, Derek Westwood. Jo went to nine schools until he left home, aged 16. ‘I was sent to boarding schools from the age of five because my parents didn’t have any money. They’d put me in schools like Dean Grange or Bellon House for a couple of terms then come in the middle of the night and take me away so that they never paid the fees.’

Malcolm refused ever to let Jo call him ‘Dad’. (Malcolm hardly saw his own mother until he was a grown man, shared his grandmother’s bed until he was 10 and was raised without a sense of family.) ‘I remember calling him Dad once when I was five and he told me my father was the milkman. So I started calling the milkman Dad, until I realised that was wrong too.’ Malcolm also insisted Jo have the surname Corre, Malcolm’s mother’s maiden name.

We’re sitting on a roll of carpet above Agent Provocateur, the Soho lingerie shop Jo and his girfriend and business partner Serena Rees opened last week. They sell Vivienne’s prostitutes’ shoes with 12-inch heels, balcony corset tops with granny knickers and bunny cages and a £900 brass chastity belt. Serena offers us Nipple of Venus chocolates then goes off to ‘nail varnish Diane’s nipples because they don’t show enough.’ Diane is a shapely mannequin in the window in football net stockings.

Jo wears an olive cord suit, banker’s shirt, wannabe beard, long sideburns and a face of Vivienne intensity. He has a missing tooth (‘it fell out when it got rotten’), dirty nails and an ear pierced seven times. He speaks to the wall in a grating voice, and drops his aitches. But he has a genial disposition although he claims to have a ferocious temper. We return to the subject of his childhood. His parents believed in allowing him his independence. When he was eight and Ben just 12, they set off alone on their bikes to see their grandparents. The brothers lived in London. Their grandparents lived in Devon. And the journey took a week. ‘We stayed in youth hostels and tents. We had these really shit kids’ bikes with one gear, piled high with all this heavy stuff.’ Didn’t their mother think it dangerous? ‘No, it was an adventure. I mean like Mum always said if anyone tries to mess around with you, scream and make a fuss and don’t go quietly.

‘Anyway, we were looking for somewhere to pitch our tent in the middle of the night and the police went past. They saw these two young boys with all this stuff and thought we were runaways. They called our grandparents, then let us put our tent in the back of the police station.”

Two years later, he went to the South of France with a 10-year-old friend. ‘After four days, we were only quarter of the way to Paris. We couldn’t make it, so turned around and went to Boulogne and made a hut out of driftwood on Boulogne beach and stayed there for three-and-a-half weeks.’

HE STARTED working, aged 16, as a market trader, moved into dispatch riding then worked with his mother for nine years. Nowadays Jo lives in a rented Pimlico house with Serena and four others and spends his free time getting ‘completely smashed. But not drugs. I did a bit of pot from when I was about 12 and bits and bobs here and there when I used to go out seven nights a week.’

Jo is fiercely protective of his mother. Vivienne, who wears six-inch platform heels and peroxide pin curls while chainsmoking Gitanes, is the sort of parent who would mortify most offspring. ‘I was never embarrassed by her.’ He’s enthusiastic about her having a toyboy second husband, 25 years her junior. ‘It’s brilliant. Until recently Vivienne’s mother had one 40 years her junior.’

And sympathetic towards Vivienne turning up, aged 50, at Kensington Palace in a see-through dress. ‘She didn’t intend to. She wore a dress that she thought was beautiful and when you put camera flash on it, it went transparent. The same thing happened when they caught her at Buckingham Palace with no knickers on.’

But Jo scarcely sees Malcolm. He once paid for Jo to go on a school skiing trip, but insisted he read a book on the Sex Pistols first. ‘The day before I was due to go skiing, he wouldn’t let me go because I hadn’t read the bloody boring book.’

In the late Sixties, Malcolm and three friends dressed up as Father Christmas and went to Selfridges toy department where the store’s Father Christmas was already working. ‘They went through the department giving toys to all the kids. The staff were tearing around trying to find out which was the real Father Christmas. When the assistants tried to take back the toys, the mothers yelled, ‘How dare you, Father Christmas gave it to him’.’ His parents like to shock the stuffy English.

Big is beautiful for comedy actress Miriam Margolyes. Failure certainly does not frighten her and success means having another helping of smoked salmon

SUCCESS means never having to say you’re hungry, according to Miriam Margolyes. ‘I get nervous when food is taken away from from me,’ she says, firmly preventing the waiter from clearing the table. The 51-year-old comedy actress has risen in the last few years via voice-overs and BT commercials, her one-woman show Dickens’ Women and a truckful of character roles in films and television to become one of the most sought-after character thespians in the business.

She has just finished filming with Martin Scorsese (‘I was terrified because I admire him so much’) and worked with Jonathan Kaplan playing the mother in Ed and his Dead Mother, in which she plays a resurrected corpse who runs around killing people with a chainsaw. All of which means she has spent most of her time in Los Angeles, where she also recorded the BBC radio version of Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I. Just released on cassette, it has proved a stunning success.

‘I’m absolutely gobsmacked – it’s between Elton John and Patsy Cline in the pop charts. The royal family come out of it extremely well, except for Prince Philip. The point of the book is that it shows up what Thatcher has done to our nation. And I am all in favour of exposing that bitch.’ It’s 15 years since she recorded the porn tape Sexy Sonia: Leaves From My Schoolgirl Diary – ‘no repeat fees there and I had to do all my own sound effects’ – though there is scant sign that she has become ‘respectable’. It is largely her wicked sense of humour, as well as her size, that has made her such a favourite on the other side of the pond.

‘You can be whatever you want in LA and I try to steer a course between the Yiddisher Momma and the Venice Beach Girl – Shelley Winters and Jane Fonda. I would say on the whole Shelley Winters wins.’

Not that she has any intentions of adopting Californian lifestyles or fads. ‘I never had any plastic surgery and don’t intend to, though I might dye my hair. I don’t believe in all this New Age nonsense. They’re very frightened over there. They’re very frightened of failure and fat. And I’m afraid of neither.’

Meanwhile, she has another tour of Dickens’ Women in Australia and a new theatre project that she won’t discuss because she is ‘superstitious’. ‘I’m on a winning streak at the moment and enjoying every minute of it. Every bit of smoked salmon tastes as brilliant as the last. And that’s what success is, isn’t it?’ she laughs. ‘Smoked salmon every day.’

STUART Carroll, 42, was head of litigation and a senior partner at Nabarro Nathanson, a leading London law firm. He ran major cases of commercial litigation – acting for disputing governments and sports and entertainments personalities. He earned a salary in the hundreds of thousands. ‘More,’ says Stuart, ‘than a chief executive of a publicly quoted company earns.’ And there he was in the glossy corporate brochure – looking serious, professional, highly motivated and dangling his glasses authoritatively. But now he’s ‘taking off’ the rest of his life. He has stopped working – forever. ‘I hated the English winters, going to work in the dark and coming home in the gloom. So I’m living on an island where the climate makes me feel alive.’

What does he say when people ask him what he does? ‘That I enjoy myself,’ he answers, sitting by his villa poolside on St Bart’s. ‘Then they ask me what I do, and I say that I live on a Caribbean island, snorkel, swim, read and lie in the sun for 12 months of the year.’ Will he never work again? ‘I think there’s a very good chance.’

Before leaving his job in March, he had been working 12-16 hour days, six days a week, jockeying between London and New York.

‘I was wishing my life away by working and being frustrated that I couldn’t do other things because I didn’t have time, or because I used work as an excuse for not doing them. I spent my time saying ‘I can’t do this, I’m too tired and I’ve got busy meetings next week’.’

HE HAS never married and has no dependents. ‘I’ve always been guilty of putting work first – to the detriment of relationships. But I’ve had relationships that have lasted a few years.’ So he decided to up and off. ‘I thought ‘I’ve got to do it when I’m young enough to keep my options open’. This isn’t a mid-life crisis and it’ll be harder to make changes as I get older. I’ve still got time to make mistakes and fall flat on my face.’ He called together the four most senior partners in the firm – with whom he had worked for 12 years – and told them he’d decided to resign. ‘I said ‘I want to live in the place I want to live in and do all the things I want to do while I’m young’.’ The partners were dumbstruck. ‘There was a great deal of shock. They didn’t want me to go and asked me to think about it.’ Stuart didn’t need to think. He sold his three-bedroom Victorian house in Richmond and decided to live off the capital and its interest. He didn’t have a car. And he didn’t mind leaving his friends. In fact, he thought he’d probably see more of them in the Caribbean. So as soon as he had completed his notice period, he jumped on a plane.

He is 6ft and work-out lean. He has the face of a hard-nosed litigator, and one that is also enquiring, intellectual and kind. He wears expensive clothes – Paul Smith, Armani and St Laurent – which now dangle disconsolately in his villa cupboards alongside his new daily clothes – swimming trunks. He’s even-tempered, reserved and solitary.

He was brought up in London’s East End. His mother was a teacher, his father an accountant. Stuart went to a comprehensive. ‘It was awful. I didn’t start learning until I was 19 when I went to Tottenham Technical College for a year to do A-levels.’ Then he did a University of London law degree. He has a first-class mind. ‘I did the Law Society professional exams on my own. I couldn’t see any point in wasting time travelling to and from Lancaster Gate when I was living in Hackney. So I borrowed the course notes off a friend who had attended – and I passed and he failed.’ AGED just 23, he went into the law and became a partner at the unusually young age of 28.

These days he lives in a huge rented villa with a maid and swimming pool overlooking the ocean. Every day he visits the patisserie, then swims, snorkels and lies on a beach with white sand, turquoise water and reefs. Then he’ll sit in a cafe, sip cafe au lait and read Emma, Wuthering Heights, Ivanhoe or Pride and Prejudice. ‘I want to read all the classics I never read at school.’

His arduous morning is followed by a lunch of fresh local fish and an afternoon of sitting under a palm tree dangling his feet in glistening water or snoozing in the gazebo. He also draws, paints, learns French, does a strenuous form of yoga (‘hanging off walls and so on’) sees friends, travels and learns the lambada. When he tires of the island, he’ll move elsewhere. ‘I feel much better about myself,’ he says, ‘I’m living a more worthwhile and rounded life. I don’t have any regrets and I feel I’m going forward.’ But he is unemployed. Does he feel a loss of identity or self worth? ‘Not at all; I’ve never been worried about status.’

STEPHANIE Cole collects relations. She discovered her twin cousins when she was 11, her father when she was 21 and her half-sister when she was 38. As if this weren’t extraordinary enough, she was also expelled from school for throwing a book at her Latin teacher, once suffered so badly from agoraphobia she couldn’t walk to the shops, and became a Buddhist. We meet in her north London flat. Stephanie, tall with a massive jaw, piercing blue eyes and stern headmistress’s face and clothes, spits out her gum, makes a cup of instant coffee with dried skimmed milk, shoos away her cats and talks in a deep, self-assured, direct voice. She is an intense, likeably formidable and surprisingly unsmiling woman.

Stephanie is 53. In her latest role as Betty, in A Passionate Woman, she plays a 52-year-old who, before her son’s wedding, reflects on her own marriage and impending old age, and sees a wasted life. ‘I empathise with her,’ says Stephanie. ‘I’ve sometimes taken stock and lost confidence.’ Stephanie recalls her life. Her parents, wartime lovers, parted before she was born. She was brought up by her impecunious middle-class mother and great-aunt, and sent, aged five, to boarding school.

When Stephanie was 11, her mother located Stephanie’s twin cousins in a bleak children’s home in Wales and adopted them. ‘The home was horrific,’ she recalls, ‘a couple of bare rooms with a lot of tiny children sitting around.’

Stephanie, aged 15, was expelled from Clifton High School for Girls. ‘For constant insubordination. The Latin mistress laughed when I said I wanted to be an actress. So I picked up a Latin dictionary and threw it at her. Sadly I missed.’ She left school, learned shorthand, and went to Bristol Old Vic drama school.

Aged 21, she decided to meet her father for the first time. ‘We corresponded then met outside the stage door, hugged, then he said, ‘Shall we have lunch?’. I was painfully shy and he was very private. But he told me I had a half-sister.’ She thinks she might have seen him again. Curiously, she doesn’t remember.

Stephanie married Henry Marshall, a writer and theatrical fight director, in 1973. She became pregnant quickly, lost the baby at five months, then became pregnant again with Emma (now a 21-year-old stage manager). ‘I stopped working and had terrible post-natal depression. I got awful panic attacks, agoraphobia and claustrophobia. The agoraphobia got so bad I couldn’t even go to Sainsbury’s – just the local shop because I could rush home. If I went to the theatre, I had to sit at the end of the row so I could get out. The panic attacks were horrendous. Your heart goes very fast, you stop being able to breathe and you get terribly dizzy and sometimes lose consciousness.’ The doctor prescribed valium. Stephanie learned auto hypnosis.

Then when she was 38, her adopted brother Peter, 28, was diagnosed as schizophrenic. ‘His behaviour had always been appalling. He’d destroy all his possessions, neglect himself, become withdrawn, and would think the television was talking to him,’ says Stephanie, who is patron of the National Schizophrenia Fellowship.

Stephanie felt spiritually empty and became a Buddhist. After five years she returned to her Christian roots, often going to Quaker meetings. On her mantelpiece she has two Hindu gods, a buddha, Christ and native Indian religious artefacts.

IN 1982, an axe handle was dropped accidentally on her head during a performance of the farce Noises Off. Consequently, she suffers from tinnitus, a constant ringing in her ears.

Then six years ago Stephanie’s marriage broke down. ‘We’d been arguing constantly and had grown further and further apart.’

Her difficulties were helped by being in analysis. Finally she spent seven years on the couch. ‘I thought the breakdown was all my fault,’ she says. ‘I came to realise it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. I explored my lovely side and the areas where I’m vulnerable, stupid, unpleasant and malicious.’

Things looked up in 1989, when Stephanie traced her half-sister through Ariel Bruce, who specialises in finding people. ‘I rang her when she was going through the dustbin. Ariel had told her I was an actress – and my sister had been to the theatre the night before and was scavenging for the programme, just in case.’ The siblings met at Gatwick airport, laughed, cried, compared life stories, realised how alike they were and became friends. ‘She lives in the States now and we talk once a week.’ Before I go, Stephanie tells me one last story. About how she set off four years ago on a mercy mission to Romania, co-driving a lorry of medical supplies. ‘The big end went, the clutch went and then the gearbox went. We were stranded and had to fly home.’ The tale is typical.

SIR Richard Rogers, architect of Lloyd’s headquarters and the new Channel 4 building, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, has been an international force for more than two decades. Right now, I feel as though I’ve been waiting almost that long to see him.

I turn up at the appointed second because he can spare exactly an hour. Then I spend most of that hour in reception while Richard phones intermittently to say he’ll be ‘just another five minutes’. ‘You weren’t on time,’ says a former employee, incredulously. ‘He’s never on time.’ The Richard Rogers partnership is run on egalitarian principles. The receptionist apologises that she thought I was an Evening Standard motorcycle courier. She says to help myself to coffee, muffins and Mother’s Pride from the kitchen. Everybody does. A nice touch, but not quite the River Cafe, which is across the yard and owned by Richard’s wife, Ruthie. Architects in black polo necks and close-cropped hair moonwalk through reception, where architectural models in Perspex cases hang from the ceiling on stylish metal refrigerator-style shelves.

Richard appears, finally, boyishly pulling a contrite face and wearing bright pink Nehru shirt over Indian patriarch’s tummy, with yellow socks. He’s suntanned, has the eyes and beak of a convivial eagle, grins with perfect teeth and winks a lot.

‘What,’ I snap, ‘were you doing that was so important?’ He was dictating a speech. Didn’t want to make his secretary wait – we can still speak for an hour, he’ll just be an hour late for his next appointment. He laughs. It’s impossible to remain cross. He’s charming, good-humoured, warm and sexually charismatic.

But when we talk, he sits as far from me as he can without necessitating radio contact and leaves the door open. It’s difficult to decipher what he says sometimes, because he gobbles the ends of his sentences, a legacy of his dyslexia. ‘Often I blank out words,’ he explains. ‘I used to be self-conscious. Now I have lots of nice people who cover up my inabilities.’

His practice has been selected to transform the South Bank. Some entrants suggested planting a few trees or tinkering with the existing signposts. But Richard proposed covering the complex in a steel and glass umbrella, linking the present structures and providing a temperate climate. One critic called it the cultural equivalent of a Center Parc with a Bognor Regis atmosphere. What does he plan for the homeless? ‘Maybe we can build them floating hostels.’

He is a pioneer with a vision for London. In 1986, at the Royal Academy, he envisaged rebuilding most of the metropolis – demolishing Hungerford Bridge and Charing Cross Station, putting a monorail across the Thames to link Waterloo with Trafalgar Square and building a series of floating museums.

Now he sees a London throttled by traffic, blighted by decay and robbed of vitality in commercial ghettos, and has a blueprint for a linear park from Parliament Square to Blackfriars Bridge with traffic in a Thames‘Chunnel”, more public places and more mass transport. Richard is a vintage Krug socialist. He believes strongly in the importance of social programmes, chairs the National Tenants’ Resource Centre (leadership training for the‘forgotten people, the one-in-four in Britain who live in state housing’), rides a bicycle, drives a BMW and lives in a grand house. Is he bothered about being a champagne socialist? ‘Only in that I have to do more work to make more champagne for everybody.’ ‘But aren’t you a republican? Shouldn’t you have turned down your knighthood?’ ‘Yes. I can’t even use the excuse that my mother wanted me to take it because I called her and she said, ‘What the hell do you want to be knighted for?” He laughs uproariously.

Richard runs his office on semi co-operative lines. (He likes to make his home and work life seamless,’ says one employee, ‘We celebrate about 80 birthdays a year in the office. Doesn’t everybody?’) The highest-earning partners draw salaries only six times that of the lowest-paid architect, and nearly half the profits are donated to charity. Family visits are encouraged, workaholism discouraged. ‘This is a community,’ says Richard. ‘The restaurant and my partner’s house are over there. The point is to get an intensity of communication.’

‘Why don’t you live in a commune?’ He laughs. ‘I already have a piazza in my house. My five boys bring back their girlfriends and we live in a pretty public way. Most people buy barns and turn them into houses, I bought a house and turned it into a barn!’

Richard was born in Florence of an Anglo-Italian family – ‘soft, loving, undisciplined’. When he was six the family fled Fascism and came to England. Richard was an outsider. ‘It wasn’t good to be an Italian then … maybe that’s the reason I’m so anti-institutional.’

He didn’t learn to read or write until he was 12. ‘In those days dyslexia didn’t exist. No one could understand how, having said the Lord’s Prayer hundreds of times, I still couldn’t remember it. I was so psychologically mixed up – I didn’t know whether I was happy or unhappy.’ He was bullied and left school without any qualifications.

Aged 29, he married Su. They were together 14 years. What went wrong? ‘I fell in love with Ruthie.’ How did he break it to Su? ‘With all the usual difficulties of saying, ‘I’m having an affair with somebody else’.’ His voice tails off, losing its usual buoyancy. This is difficult to fathom because he says he had a close, rewarding relationship with Su. ‘That’s like saying, ‘How can you, when you’ve had a really good meal, come home and have another piece of chocolate?’

‘So you’re not monogamous?’ ‘I didn’t say that.’

Richard is now very ‘locked into Ruthie. We’re very much in love’. After their first child, Ruthie was unable to have more. They decided to adopt. ‘We thought the baby was a girl. But when the call comes, it’s like giving birth – Ruthie says – and you want the baby desperately. The second he was in our arms we bonded.’ Thus they gained their fifth boy. ‘We never met the parents, but I don’t mind if he wants to seek them out.’

Ruthie and Richard proposed once to write a book together called Sex, Food and Architecture, which he considers to be the crucial things in life. Which is the most important? ‘That order sounds pretty good to me.’ He hoots hilariously again.

JIM Hutton was the ‘husband’ of the late Freddie Mercury for seven years before the legendary Queen singer died of Aids in 1991. Jim is talking about their ‘marriage’, being diagnosed as HIV positive four years ago, his book Mercury and Me, about watching Freddie die and being evicted from the £4 million mansion that Freddie left to his former lover Mary Austin – according to Jim, on condition that he could remain there.

Jim, who is nervous and uses his humour defensively, has bounded into the Hyde Park Hotel making jokes about putting the chandelier in his handbag. He has a rubicund face, moustache, angry eyes and receding black hair. Gone is the high clone look (white vest and jeans), replaced by a cheap looking tie and aquamarine jacket. He must have made an unlikely partner with the outrageous pop star. If you saw him in the street you’d imagine he was a suburban publican.

He and Freddie first met in a gay nightclub in 1983. ‘Freddie was slight and not the sort of man I found attractive,’ wrote Jim, a hairdresser living in a rented attic. Then he re-met ‘Freddie Thing’, as he called him, claiming not to have known who he was. Freddie promptly ravaged him. ‘When he got the urge for sex, there was no stopping him.’ Jim moved into Garden Lodge and became Freddie’s gardener.

Jim, with his Irish accent, recalls their relationship. ‘I wanted to give him a black eye a few times. But we gave each other love. We didn’t have fisticuffs, just verbal fights. Then he’d give me the silent treatment – the last time it lasted over a week.

‘The night before Valentine’s Day, we had a big fight – I don’t know why – and he was giving me the silent treatment. I got him three dozen blue moon roses. I took them to him in bed where he was with his cup of tea and two doughnuts – one for him and one for his cat, Delilah. He just grunted.’ They were, admits Jim, very different. ‘Freddie was sensitive, shy, had terrible mood swings and wanted his own way. I’m quiet and don’t have much of a character,’ Jim laughs, ‘unless you pour a few gallons of beer down me.’

He remembers happy times too. ‘Once in Germany Freddie jumped into my arms in broad daylight, in public, in a veg market of all places!’ He looks embarrassed.

Then came Live Aid, the first concert Jim had ever attended. ‘To see Freddie up there controlling that crowd … Tears welled up and the hairs on my neck stood on end.’ Did they ever actually marry? ‘Good God no. We weren’t that daft.’

Jim, the Irish Catholic son of a baker and seventh of 10 children, was brought up in a council house and left school aged 16. He claims he wasn’t impressed by Freddie, who generated over £1 billion worth of sales. ‘Freddie dealt with his fame simply. He’d give an audience his all and afterwards he’d usually go straight home and sit in front of the television.’ Jim claims he never saw any outrageous behaviour. ‘And we never discussed anything that had gone on before we met. Not previous boyfriends, childhood, nothing.’ And drugs? ‘He wasn’t snorting cocaine every night,’ says Jim, defensively. ‘He’d have gone bankrupt if he had.’

Then Freddie told him he had full blown Aids. Curiously they never mentioned the subject again. ‘It was his cross and he wanted to carry it the way he chose – without burdening me. If something came up on TV to do with Aids, we’d turn channels.’

Was Freddie ashamed of having contracted it? ‘No, just annoyed. He said ‘there’s such a stigma attached to this’.’

JIM then had a test in 1990 and found he was HIV positive. ‘When I heard, I just said ‘oh well’. That sounds flippant, but there’s nothing you can do. I didn’t tell Freddie, he had enough to deal with. I coped by going crazy in the garden, going haywire on weeding.’

Did he infect Freddie? ‘Who knows?’ Later Jim had a second test and Freddie heard the result. ‘He was lying on the couch and all he said was, ‘the bastards’.’

What was it like watching Freddie die? ‘Indescribable.’ In the book, Jim writes about the star’s deteriorating health, ending sexual relations, watching him suffer, Freddie’s last words (‘pee pee’) and how, as they lowered him back onto his bed, there was a deafening crack. ‘It sounded like one of his bones breaking … he screamed out in pain and went into a convulsion. When he died, I went into my bedroom, phoned my mother and cracked up. She couldn’t understand a word, I was crying so much.’ The funeral, Jim says, was a haze. ‘I kept saying, ‘He’s not really dead’.’ It was also the first time Mary, with whom Freddie had once lived for six years, snubbed Jim. ‘She said she didn’t want me in the first car.’ Afterwards he went home. ‘I picked up every video and CD of Freddie, played them for five hours a day for a week and cried.’

After Freddie’s death, Mary had Jim evicted abruptly from Garden Lodge. Was there jealousy between these two, Freddie’s ex-lovers? ‘I suppose if I were another woman I might have felt that. Mary loved Freddie, but, I’m sorry, Freddie didn’t reciprocate.’

Does he feel betrayed that Freddie only left him £500,000? ‘No, I feel betrayed by the people he left in charge of carrying out his wishes.’ Jim and Mary no longer talk.

Now Jim has a new ‘special relationship’ (nobody famous, this time). ‘I didn’t feel, ‘Oh I’ve got to wait a year after Freddie’s died before I can start playing the field again.’ But I don’t have sex any more (because of being HIV). I don’t miss it. I never was very highly charged sexually.’ Nor, he claims, does he think about getting full-blown Aids. ‘I’ve got to get on with life. I can’t just sit there moaning ‘how long have I got to live?’’

CLIFF RICHARD, the Nice Guy of Pop, is a man of hidden violence. A man who thinks he has the potential to commit any of the crimes he has ever read about. When he was young, he says, he might have been able to murder somebody. Sometimes he puts his hands under his bottom when people ask him questions, just to stop himself hitting them.

“I’ve sat on my hands at press conferences, trying to be the usual Nice Cliff Richard,” explains Cliff, “and when it’s over, I feel triumphant that I didn’t lam out at anyone. People start talking about your sexuality and whether you’re a homosexual (he says he’s not) and why you don’t sleep with so and so.” His voice rises stormily. “And they’re trotting me out as though I’m just a piece of something. Then I’ve been close to lashing out and hitting men.”

His envy spumes under the surface, too. “I envy other people’s success,’ he admits later. “I can’t help it. I try to control it now. But even so, I see other singers doing things and think, ‘I’m 10 times better than them’. Elton has made it in America and Clapton, too. But success there has eluded me.”

We’re talking because Cliff is celebrating 35 Top Five hits and 35 years of singing. He was, of course, meant to have been playing Heathcliff. “I was naive to think I could get it together in that short space of time, three years. Writing songs isn’t something you can do at the click of a finger.” Instead, he’s going on tour. “Some of the songs don’t have a great deal of depth. They’re just happy little songs.”

As we talk it becomes clear that the key to Cliff is self-control. Often he holds his chair as he talks. He controls his money tightly, overpowers confusing feelings with religious fervour and handles his image with metal gloves. He even curbs his ageing process and desire for food or sex. He seems sincere but self-deluded and naive.

Take money. Two weeks ago Cliff, who feigns to draw only £40 a week and is reputed to be worth £50 million, give or take, went shopping. “I found this absolutely fantastic shirt,” he says. “Then I saw its £910 price tag (Versace, natch). I said, ‘I’m really sorry, but if my mum knew this she’d kill me. I’m not buying it at this price’. And I walked out.’ Cliff, you see, respects his mum. He’s 54 and considers the impact of his behaviour on his dear mum. “She’s a very forceful person and I have to face her regularly.” And he never forgets his poverty-stricken childhood. “Why else would I be buying a second-hand Mercedes? Just because it’s £50,000 cheaper than a new one. I always have to justify everything.” In similar vein, he has been drunk “just twice” in his life. “I didn’t like being out of control.” And he has been on a strict diet for 35 years. “I eat one meal a day unless I’ve been to the gym. I always skip lunch. I think if I ate normally I would put on weight.”

Cliff, whose voice is thin and clean as well, is sitting in his office with honey, Aqua Libra and mineral water on the table. He has hair so lacquered it would stay in place in a wind tunnel, slightly tinted specs, St George’s Hill sun tan, a face as young as Joan Collins’s, and a body that is in pretty good shape for figure-hugging clothes. He’s dressed in relentlessly jazzy shirt, Star Trek badge and fawn shoes; the sort of gear you’d find in a provincial golf club at a Saturday evening social. Right now, it’s hard to tell which of us is the more absorbed with his image: me with my fierce 70-minute concentration or him with his three-decade one. He’s ‘not worried’ about getting old; just very concerned about being thus captured on film. “If I looked tired or old, I wouldn’t want to be photographed. I’m not against plastic surgery.” And what if the career of the Peter Pan of pop stopped? “If I was just a regular person who’d once had a career, I wouldn’t bother looking in the mirror so much.” HIS sex life has been equally narcissistic. He lost his virginity to Carol Costa, wife of Shadows guitarist Jet Harris, in a well-documented affair. But that was 30 years ago, and his last sexual experience. “Sex is not really my problem. Because I think I know all about it.” He laughs weakly. “I know how babies happen, if you know what I mean.” But why did he never sleep with anyone again? “I know how it all works. I don’t have to try it out all the time.”

He maintains that he doesn’t believe in sex before marriage. And that if he marries, his union will have a good chance of survival. ‘It’ll be new for us and we’ll have a greater respect for it. The evidence is that people who have slept around find it hard to have a one-to-one relationship.” But the evidence is that he finds it hard to have a relationship and it’s unlikely he’ll ever marry. “Well, you can speculate all you like about that.’ But isn’t it true that he fears commitment and wants to marry a woman like his mother? ‘Well, I would like to marry someone like my mum.”

Cliff was born in India of strict Christian parents. After Partition in 1947, his parents were forced to swap neo-colonial luxury for a council house in Hertfordshire. He grew up in spartan conditions, with the sitting-room furniture made from packing cases. His father, a dominant man, meted out corporal punishment. Once, Cliff came home saying he’d been beaten at school for something he hadn’t done. His father caned him again, saying he must have done something.

“I don’t remember it being an unhappy childhood. I can recall only that times were hard,” Cliff says. “My mum and I, when our feet were the same size, shared a pair of boots. If it was raining, either I went out or she did. Meals consisted of two slices of toast in a bowl of tea. But I don’t think of poverty as being synonymous with unhappiness.” He remembers being in a gang and stealing as a child. “It was a communal effort. We took money from a gardener’s coat and bought ice-creams with it.”

ON CHRISTMAS Day last year 10-year-old Elizabeth was sexually assaulted by a family friend. Her assailant, Barry, 50, was convicted after a week-long case which ended on 30 September. He’s now on bail, awaiting sentencing on 21 October. Elizabeth, meanwhile, cries inconsolably in her bedroom with the Phil Collins poster; often she won’t sleep in her own bed or close her eyes all night. She has an IQ of 168, but recently flunked her exams. She goes to the lavatory 50 times a day and, at night, walks along the corridor in her flannel pyjamas, clutching her soft toy rabbit, and spends three hours in the bathroom. Her father thinks she’s trying to wash away her dirty feelings.

Her father, Malcolm (all names have been changed), who lives on his invalidity pension, is sitting in their south London Cartlandesque sitting room – all turquoise and pink with shells on the shelves, a tea cup to mark his silver wedding anniversary to Constance, fluffy candyfloss carpet and fairy lights twinkling in the buds of the pink silk chrysanthemums. Any minute now you expect to see Father Christmas.

Instead, Malcolm, in jeans and T-shirt, with a face that betrays months of anguish, speaks in the clipped voice of restrained anger. He talks of the horror of the day his only child was molested. He’s angry and lashes out about the ‘awful’ counselling they’ve all received, the ‘terrible court ordeal’ for his child and the strain on his marriage.

ELIZABETH is special to her parents who thought they couldn’t conceive. She is also a gifted child. ‘By just 14 months she knew all her colours, not just red, white and blue, but aquamarine, turquoise and khaki. At 19 months she had learned the alphabet and, shortly afterwards, started reading newspapers. She’d say things like, ‘Oh look, Margaret Thatcher is on the front page’.’ Elizabeth was nationally acclaimed.

Last Christmas the family stayed with Barry’s family. They’d become friends after meeting in Spain when Elizabeth was a year old and Malcolm was recuperating from breaking his back. ‘Barry had two children by his first marriage and seemed funny and charming,” remembers Malcolm.

On Christmas Day, the families played party games. Then Elizabeth accompanied Barry to look at his computer. ‘When I went upstairs shortly afterwards,’ says Malcolm, ‘her mother said, ‘Tell Daddy what you’ve just told me’. Elizabeth told how Barry had played with her private parts. He’d pulled down her knickers and tights, kissed her on the neck and made her sit on his lap. He wasn’t drunk and it lasted a few minutes. All while we were in the next room.’ Malcolm’s voice rises.

Malcolm, in his confusion, decided he didn’t want to upset Barry’s family and would speak to him quietly next morning. In addition, Malcolm was mugged savagely five years ago and has difficulty driving at night. He rationalised that he couldn’t leave until daylight.

Next morning Constance confronted Barry. ‘She told him he’d sexually molested our child. He didn’t deny it and said, ‘Let’s talk about it after Christmas’.’ Malcolm and Constance then approached the Child Protection Unit (CPU). ‘They advised us, initially, to let Elizabeth get over it. She was taking exams. But she completely freaked, and did nothing but cry.’ On 14 January the CPU took statements. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) thought there wasn’t a case, because of lack of evidence (although the police fought for it). Then they saw the video that Elizabeth had made in the CPU. A St Mary’s Hospital paediatrician advised that a medical examination would create further trauma, so she didn’t have one.” Barry was arrested in March and bailed. The night before the court case, Elizabeth said: ‘It’s dark outside, Daddy, I want to go out there and tell you something.” She told him how she’d been digitally penetrated. ‘She didn’t say that on video in front of the police officers, a man and a woman. She was too scared and embarrassed.”

Elizabeth, once an outgoing child, has become disturbed and clingy. “But we can’t cuddle her now. She pushes us away.’

AND the events of the past few months have tested her parents’ marriage. ‘You scream at each other, have sleepless nights and can’t see justice being done. Your daughter is up every two minutes to the loo and your wife is blaming you for not smacking that man on the nose.’

On police advice the family had counselling. ‘Elizabeth wasn’t allowed to talk about the incident because then they could have said we’d manipulated her. It’s been useless for us too. One night Elizabeth was sobbing until 5am and we called Childline who suggested we give her a sedative. When we told the counsellor, she said, ‘Why on earth did you ring them?” In court, standard procedures were followed. ‘I never want it to happen to another family and, please God, not to us again. She was taken early in the morning so we couldn’t talk to her, and put in a separate room. What my child had to endure for a day under cross-examination and video evidence was horrendous. We were told the defence would be lenient, but it wasn’t. The woman barrister put Elizabeth through the ordeal of saying it had never happened.’

Malcolm complained to Sir Thomas Bingham, Master of the Rolls, who acknowledged the distress to which victims are subjected. ‘But it is essential,’ he wrote, ‘that a defendant should have a fair opportunity to advance any defence he may have, within the limits of propriety.’ On 30 September, Barry was convicted and bailed. ‘We feel dreadful,’ says Malcolm. ‘The police had told us the judge would almost certainly have passed a custodial sentence for reports and that Barry would be put in prison awaiting sentence.’

So what does Malcolm want to happen to Barry? ‘The judge,’ wrote Sir Thomas, ‘will face a difficult task in deciding on the correct sentence and you may feel that it is not as severe as you would wish.’

AT AYTON Castle, Lady Christine de la Rue, in red jumper and jodhpurs and wearing dusters on her feet, is skating around what appears to be 27 miles of wooden hall floor. A polishing trick she picked up at the Pucci Palace in Florence. The fire is blazing, sandwiches are laid out on the grooms’ table in the hall – where they play ping pong and do Scottish reels – and Highland terriers scamper about.

The mistress of Ayton Castle, Berwickshire, is a colourful character with a past as dramatic as her castle.

She had a three-year love affair with Prince Michael of Kent. At the time, she was married to the late Sir Eric de la Rue, a man 36 years her senior, and the Prince was a bachelor. Christine, 53, talking for the first time about the relationship which ended in 1975, looks worried. Prince Michael is still a friend. And Christine is loath to jump on to the kiss-a-Royal-and-tell bandwagon.

This expert horsewoman and Captain of the Ayton Castle polo team laughs, remembering the Prince’s reaction when first she invited him to stay in Scotland. ‘I don’t like horsy people,’ he complained. ‘Their houses are so dirty.’ Now he rides with her. And her Gothic-revival schloss, where the Prince, Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia and Christopher Lee have stayed, is as spotless as a Zurich hospital.

Christine, a blonde Norwegian, lives with David Liddell-Grainger, the father of two of her children. She has been providing the Borders with society gossip for years, and has just finished writing what promises to be a compelling autobiography.

Her first marriage at the age of 19, to a Greek lawyer, was annulled after two years because of non-consummation.

‘I wasn’t in love with him,’ she says girlishly, with nervous speed. ‘I married to run away from my mother who told me I was ugly and stupid.’ With the approval of her next husband, the elderly Sir Eric, Christine scandalised local puritans by having a publicised affair with David, who was married to Anne, a cousin of the Queen. ‘Eric was spritely and a father figure but he wasn’t interested in sex after our son St George was born.’ She divided her time between the two men in what was seen – erroneously – to be a bizarre love triangle, and after Sir Eric had a mild stroke he moved into the castle with them. When Christine and David’s son David Henry was born, Sir Eric and David were at the christening.

Christine is not the hard-boiled woman oft portrayed. She’s special – delightful, shrewd, forthright and exuberantly energetic. The warmth of the castle reflects her personality.

FOLLOWING the Norman invasion, a formidable fortress was built at Ayton. When it burned down in 1836, James Gillespie Graham built the present turreted red monster which Henry Liddell, David’s grandfather, bought in 1888.

Until David was eight years old – when his father died and his mother shut up the castle – he lived here with 40 servants. It was used during the war as a girls’ school.

In the Fifties, David camped occasionally in the master bedroom, looked after by one Miss Denham. ‘She mended his long johns and cooked for him.’ After his grand marriage, with a reception at Windsor Castle, he took tons of his furniture out of storage (all had been stored easily in the castle drawing room, natch) and returned to live in the castle. David crammed his fine collection of Chippendale furniture and Staffordshire figurines alongside buys from country house sales.

When Christine moved in, the rooms were gloomy and pigeons roosted in the towers. ‘Ayton was mortgaged. No, I mean morgue-ish.’ For 12 years, Christine has been restoring the interior to its original baronial splendour. ‘David’s wife had put up dishcloth curtains.’ She has worked to a tight budget. ‘I’ve used remnant wallpaper and chosen colours to last 100 years. The dining-room round table cloths are made from old bedcovers.’ In 1990 they decided to take paying guests for £120 a night. The castle sleeps 25 comfortably and visitors can shoot and fish. They also open to the public on summer Sundays.

We do a quick tour of the castle, in less than an hour. When David is upstairs and Christine down, she rings him on her portable phone. ‘It caused great problems at the phone shop when I said I needed a model that worked inside six-foot walls.’ They probably receive long-distance bills. We speed through the dining room with its Adamesque wedding cake ceiling, table to seat an army and picture by society portraitist Barbara ‘Basha’ Hamilton. Into the drawing room which had a trampoline in it when David was young, was then turned into a shop selling cashmeres to visiting Americans, and finally decorated in 1985 for a Victor Edelstein charity dress show. Now it has overflowing bowls of hydrangeas, a grand piano and serious curtain poles. Into the library, with books piled high, family photographs and table set for a cosy dinner.

THEN a 10-minute walk to the family wing. ‘For when the revolution comes and 25 other families move in.’ Up to her second, or perhaps third sitting room where currently she’s hanging her ballgowns. ‘That’s a Victor (Edelstein), that’s Catherine (Walker).’ Into David Henry’s room with a bed for their other son Maximillian. ‘Max has his own room as well, but he likes to share.’ Off to Christine’s room with its 18th century Venetian wooden domed bed with silk hangings and cherub. Then along to her partner David’s masculine room with its single bed with two rifles by it and suitcases piled high.

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.