MAJOR Bruce Shand, father of Camilla Parker Bowles, is giving his first ever interview. The man who brought up the mistress of the future King of England is talking about marriage, sexual promiscuity, his children, the upper classes, the Queen, the effect of Camillagate on his family, his extraordinary upbringing and being a prisoner of war.

He’s sitting in the conservatory in his home, a former rectory opposite Plumpton race course. It was here that the beleagured Camilla was raised. It has a croquet lawn, beautifully tended English country garden and traditionally decorated rooms filled with antiques.

Shand, 76, is handsome and charming. He has the bronzed and furrowed face of a keen gardener and a cheery smile. He talks with old fashioned pronunciation, often ending his sentences with an upper class snort, what? He’s dressed in moleskins, toning socks and mocassins. Unlike Camilla, who cares little for her appearance, the 6′ 3′ Major looks as if he has walked out of a Ralph Lauren advertisment.

After the publication in January of the Camillagate tapes, it was alleged that he tried to ban Camilla from seeing Prince Charles.(Friends say that the Prince and Camilla have not seen each other since before Christmas for fear of further rocking the Monarchy; that their love is on hold.) It is said he thinks his daughter’s life has been ruined by the Prince. Certainly the affect on her health was visible and the pressure on the family intolerable.

He has said he won’t discuss his daughter. But how does he feel about sexual permissiveness? ‘It’s a pity that the ties of marriage have been so destroyed by it.’What has been the affect of the scandal on his life? ‘Let’s just say highly intrusive.’ Has it been difficult for him? ‘We all survive, what?’ What does he think about the damage done to the Monarchy? ‘I mustn’t say anything about that. You’re very good at putting the knife in the oyster shell.’

Has the country gone to the dogs? ‘There’s been a tremendous deterioration of conduct and respect.’ Does he have regrets? ‘Life is full of regrets. I’d better not say more. I might say something indiscreet,’ he says, typically laughing uproariously. He once worked for the Queen and is a master of discretion.

He spent 16 years in the Queen’s Household, as Clerk of the Cheque and Adjutant of the Yeoman of the Guard. ‘We were always dressed for the Battle of Waterloo.’ His most arduous duty was to carry the standard on State occasions. Once, cramped for room when he was required to lower the Standard to the Queen as she passed through the Royal Gallery he managed to hook the handbag of a French visitor on its butt end. ‘That was dramatic, what? The Queen was very amused by the whole thing.’

We talk then about his extraordinary upbringing. ‘My father had four wives,’ he says. ‘We had a very strange relationship. I never even saw him until I was 38 – apart from at my grandfather’s funeral when I was 18. I don’t think I’d ever have seen him, had my wife not said that the children should meet their grandfather.’

Shand was the only child of his father’s first marriage, raised partly by his mother and stepfather in America, and by his grandparents. ‘My father left my mother when I was very young. Very much later he married Elseth Howe’s mother. There were 17 years between us and I never even saw Elspeth until she was 16.’

Shand married Rosalind, the debutante daughter of Baron Ashcombe, in 1946. They had three children. His other daughter, Annabel Elliott?? sp??has an antiques shop. His explorer son, Mark Shand, wrote Travels on My Elephant.‘Because of my disruptive childhood, I was very keen to see that my own children had an even run. They all had an agreeable time.’ He is close to his offspring and happy with the way they’ve grown up. ‘I’m very proud of them all.’

Were there any particular difficulties in bringing them up? ‘I don’t think we had any more problems than anyone else. They’ve always been quite chatty. There haven’t been any inhibitions in their upbringing that I know of.’

We talk then about his war. Shand, who wrote Previous Engagements, a lively account of his war, has a distinguished army record. He was a second lieutenant in the Royal Lancers and won the MC and Bar for obtaining valuable information about the enemy on patrol. ‘But at grievous cost. Two officers and men were killed… In Belgium I saw a party of lunatics, escorted from an asylum by splendid nuns, being shot by German aeroplanes… We often went three nights without sleep. You began to feel a brick floor was the most seductive place in the world. ‘

He was in the eighth army in 1942 when he was wounded and taken prisoner of war for two years, after the Battle of Alamein. ‘Rather a dreary performance.’ (He has that upper class habit of underplaying things.)‘I ran into a group of German vehicles. Only distinction was that it was said to be Rommel’s HQ,’ he says, roaring with laughter. ‘I got hit in the face (he has the scar beneath his eye) and the leg. The agony came later.’ Is he brave? ‘Don’t think so. There’s no point getting in a flap on these occasions, what?’

He journied in lorries and trains diverted by partisans and blown up lines, sailed from Derna to German occupied Piraeus in a hospital ship that had been the Czar’s Black Sea Yacht and ended up in a Russian hospital. ‘A cynical french doctor said to me, ‘if you don’t get enough food your wounds won’t heal and you’ll probably die.’ A cheerful gallic approach to life, what?’

He went to Spangenberg, a prisoner of war camp. He says gleefully that his Rugby schooldays prepared him for the ‘tedious’ experience. He’d never return. ‘I’ve always found Germans an incredibly depressing, humourless, dull people.’

After the war, he became a partner in a Mayfair wine merchant. But he would have liked to have been a publisher. His grandfather wrote an abstruse book on psychology, called The Foundations of Character. Has he read it? ‘Ach no. I think I’d be hard pushed to, what?’ But Shand edited ‘One Young Soldier, the memoirs of a cavalry man’ (out last month) about his friend the late Tim Bishop, brother of Molly Bishop/Lady Scott, Britain’s grandest society portraitist.

Despite the early knocks to his constitution, he appears robust and spritely. ‘I survive! The health centre nurse the other day said she wanted to talk about the delicate question of drink. As far as I can see, a ‘unit’ is an invisible thing! When I told her what I drank, she said, ‘Terribly sorry, you’re a heavy drinker.’ I’m very glad to be in distinguished company!’ His emotional warmth is surprising in one of his background. He is a also a humourous, honourable, immensely likeable man. ‘A sweet and decent man,’ remarks Nigel Dempster.

HE THINKS he’s Pooh Bear. That’s who Jonathan Watts, head of history at Benenden, one of the most famous gels’ schools in the country and alma mater to the Princess Royal, identifies with in literature. This means he’s solid, reliable and vulnerable. But not, of course, a bear of little brain who is gullible and gets things wrong. Now Watts is to break a 70-year-old tradition to become the school’s first male ‘housemistress’. The 43-year-old bachelor will take charge of 50 girls aged 11 to 16.

Benenden old girls range from the Princess Royal (‘We’re pleased when old girls do well,’ giggles Watts) to the BBC’s head of radio, Liz Forgan, and Baroness Ryder. It’s a £3,910-a-term establishment where they play lacrosse, have midnight feasts and parental Range Rovers disgorge tuck boxes and well-groomed ambitious young things for the tutelage of the indefatigably cheerful headmistress Gillian duCharme. Once comprised of daughters of the Empire, it is now full of daughters of solicitors, barristers and judges. The girls who normally parade in tatty jumpers and tights with holes in them are on holiday. Watts is sitting in the engraved-wood 19th century staff room where a 17th century dandy with cake-doily collar looks down from the wall.

Watts is chunky with receding hair, the look of a royal private detective, labrador enthusiasm combined with robustness, ingenuous charm and trustworthy voice. He’s keen on school dinners (particularly puddings) and school hols. He talks a lot, as do all teachers. He also has that actorly enunciation and projection that teachers go in for.

He’s wearing a suit, white shirt, squishy-soled shoes and rebellious tie. Before he arrived at the school five years ago, a friend said to him: ‘You’d better not wear a suit or grow a moustache or you’ll be mistaken for a housemistress.’

So is it true that the girls have nicknamed him ‘Sausage’ (on account of his generous girth) as reported in The Daily Telegraph? ‘No. They made that up. The girls tend to call us by our surnames, as if we were second undergardeners,’ he jokes. When the girls read the newspaper moniker they became protective. ‘Now you mustn’t get a complex and become anorexic,’ they said.

Watts is to become mother hen at Marshall House in September. He characterises Marshall girls as ‘independent, good organisers who get on with life and don’t get very emotional about things’. When Marshall girls win a coveted trophy there is ‘desultory applause’. Macmillan’s grandchildren, Lord and Lady Stockton’s daughters, are going there. Watts hopes to enthuse his charges with his passion for the double bass. He won’t parade round the dormitories (‘If I do, I’ll send a little girl ahead of me like a miner with a canary,’ he has said) or showers. But will he become a pin-up? Will the girls fancy him? ‘Oh come off it,’ he says, sitting with one foot on top of the other. ‘A balding, overweight school teacher!’ Unfortunately the former master who was a ‘crush’, a 24-year-old Jason Donovanish tanned classics teacher, left to become a rock star. So at Benenden now, ‘crushing’ often involves younger girls swapping gifts with older ones.

And how will this surrogate father deal with girly problems like premenstrual tension and pregnancy? ‘I have a full-time matron. But I’m totally unshockable. Beryl Reid said if someone were to tell her they were having an affair with a goat, her reply would be that she hoped it had nice eyes.’ And if a pupil came to Watts to say she was having an affair with a goat? ‘I’d probably ask to meet the goat and say, ‘I hope it’s clean.’ ‘ Unlike most people, Watts is genuinely fond of teenagers. ‘I like the things that infuriate other people, the faddishness. I lose track of the acned Australian pin-ups who appear on dorm walls. Often I get a little girl to give me a lesson in what’s going on. My bedtime reading is occasionally Just 17. You have to be able to empathise at this level.

‘You should be able to devote lots of time to drinking squash and eating inordinate numbers of chocolate biscuits. Then when something goes wrong they feel they can come to you. Many girls prefer to talk to a man (30 per cent of the Benenden staff are male). It also helps to remember what it was like when you were 15.’ What was it like? ‘I can’t remember . . . Well, it was a period of great self-doubt and uncertainty.’

His own education spanned local authority grammar school, choral scholar at Oxford and research work at York University where he produced one of the world’s many unwritten doctoral theses. ‘It sits in cardboard boxes at home. I’m not sure civilisation has lost much by its lack of information on English painting between 1390 and 1450. Occasionally I look at it and can’t understand it.’

Watts is of solid academic stock. His father is a retired primary school head, and his sister a slide librarian at Exeter University. Formerly head of history at two independent boys’ schools, Watts was appointed at Benenden after a 45-minute interview and tour of the grounds, 240 acres of Kent countryside. ‘The question which floored me completely was, ‘Why in five years time will we be pleased to have employed you?’ With a naturally English sense of masculine modesty, I refused to answer.’ (On being pressed, he said something about academic excellence and enthusiasm.) He treats women in egalitarian fashion. ‘I don’t think of them as feeble creatures who should be doing flower arranging.’ But he has mostly taught in boys’ schools. ‘Female students work harder, are more cautious, keener to get things right and don’t take risks,’ he concludes. ‘They tend to see what’s bad rather than good. They’ll come out of exams saying, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t know that,’ whereas boys will say, ‘Marvellous question on Henry VII.’ When you point out that it was on Henry VIII, they’ll say, ‘Oh what’s a number between friends?’’

TALKING to the TV presenter Sarah Dunant is like speaking to her on television when you’re at home. She protects herself from questions with a glass screen, runs the show and you have the feeling that your only control is to switch her off.

The big difference is that in life she’s smaller than on television. Indeed, this self-dubbed Alan Ladd of arts programmes quips that she’s often shot standing on a box. The other difference is that when you talk to her with a cup of coffee rather than an autocue, she doesn’t wear her screen-sized strawberry-frame spectacles.

Dunant, former Kaleidoscope producer and sometime presenter of Woman’s Hour, is a presenter of the cultural magazine programme The Late Show. This week she publishes her third thriller, Fatlands. It is a snappy, Chandleresque novel which charts the further progress of Hannah Wolfe, her independent, feminist private detective from Birth Marks.

The book will be serialised on Woman’s Hour. ‘I read the last one, but didn’t do it well enough,’ says Dunant. ‘I couldn’t get a babysitter so my child was in the studio eating meringue. At the end of episode nine you can hear the crunching.’

Dunant, 42, has curly brown hair, a pinched face and talks with her hands and broadcasterly emphasis. (‘It’s quite clear,’ she says, ‘that I’m not a sex symbol and My Face is Not My Fortune.’) She wears Designer Oxfam – gold day shoes with thick black tights – like her heroine; and she lives in Tufnell Park, like her heroine. We’re talking in her garden, where organic frisee lettuces and cauliflowers grow. Her heroine, on the other hand, only dreams of an alternative lifestyle.

So how many men has she slept with? Eighteen? And mostly SLBA? (Sexual Liberation Before Aids.) That’s a question her heroine gets asked – and answers. ‘You’ll have to ask Hannah.’ Dunant dodges the question. ‘She’s a character. She ain’t me.’

But are there parallels between a female private detective and a television presenter? She laughs. ‘They both get scared. I still get frightened when the green light goes on before big discussions that I’ll let people get away with things and won’t ask the tougher questions because I won’t think quickly enough.’ Is that because she’s not clever enough? ‘No. Thinking on your feet is a different kind of intelligence.’

Dunant is dubbed bossy, brainy, the new Joan Bakewell, the thinking man’s crumpet. She is compared to Cliff Richard and called Brains, after the Thunderbirds character. ‘In the supermarket I’m never mistaken for Cliff. Cliff, however, is always being approached . . .’

She has an acerbic wit but is not a warm personality and comes across as tough, slightly arch and self-satisfied. ‘Occasionally I get over-confident and have a loss of perspective and humility,’ she admits.

She used to drop out. Post-Cambridge University she went to Japan and worked as a hostess in a nightclub. ‘It was severely innocent. But it’s not very nice to sell your company.’

In 1978 she left Kaleidoscope and went to Bogota where she got involved in a drug trafficking network. ‘I met and hung out with a lot of people who were in the cocaine trade. It was the time before the Mafia and Columbian cartels moved in, when there were a lot of independent American operators.’ Did she take drugs? ‘We all did, though many of my generation wouldn’t admit it now. I’ve had very happy times on drugs. I don’t mean ‘happy’ as in ‘out of my skull’, but interesting, creative times.’ She says she wouldn’t take dope nowadays. ‘It doesn’t fit into my lifestyle any more.’ The last time she dropped out was when she went to India, aged 31. A colleague says she was a driven personality when she went, but returned transformed. Was it a life-changing experience? ‘I’ve now been there seven times, including with my kids,’ she replies. ‘But I didn’t turn into John Lennon.’

She gained a sense of perspective. ‘This, the centre of the universe, felt like a very small part. Things other than money are important there . . . But I’ve had more penetrating existential discussions with my five-year-old about God than I’ve had time to have with myself over the last decade.’

Dunant has lived with her ‘partner’, Ian Willcox, for 10 years. ‘I refuse to talk about my private life.’ Why did they never marry? ‘No reason to. It’s never been an issue.’ Willcox runs an independent radio production company. Do they compete professionally or otherwise? ‘No, we do different things. He’s one of those rare men who gets tremendous satisfaction from the home, children and cooking.’ Willcox does the cooking.

Dunant is earnest about women’s issues. She has, to her chagrin, been called a trendy feminist. ‘That’s a lazy insult. It presupposes opportunism and that you only feel those things because everybody else does.’ She is a committed feminist who fights for equality between the sexes in all areas, particularly since Zoe (five) and Georgia (two) were born. ‘I keep wondering whether because they’re little girls some things will be closed to them.’

SIR Nicholas Fairbairn would once have liked 24,000 wives, like a man he heard of in Saudi Arabia. The flamboyant politician is back from his deathbed with a vengeance, firing off letters to the newspapers about our parlous times and talking about sex, his marital infidelities, the deaths of two of his children, and the ghosts in his castle.

While almost everyone welcomes the recovery of the former Solicitor-General for Scotland, it may prove unfortunate for his parliamentary colleagues that Fairbairn is devoting his new-found energies to completing the second volume of his autobiography. ‘There will be lots of descriptions of Members of Parliament,’ he says. ‘Like that stuck-up little prick with pin eyes . . .’

This week he returns to work after a month off with a serious bout of viral hepatitis, for which he was hospitalised for 10 days. He has lost one and a half stone and won’t be able to drink alcohol again.

‘I suppose I’ve had enough in the first part of my life for the whole of it,’ he says, in a frail voice. ‘I have drunk a bottle of whisky or vodka in a day. But I wouldn’t say that was regular manifestation.’

He’s wearing a tartan suit he designed, has mad tufts of hair, looks much older than his 59 years and rolls his eyes and scratches his head when he talks. He is brilliant, provocative, contrived and self-admiring. Sir Nicholas has conquered trauma in his life. Two of his five children died in infancy, one in 1964 and the other just a year later. ‘I was driving to see my mother-in-law with Elizabeth, my first wife,’ he says, clasping his hands tightly and talking heavily. ‘The twins, Charlotte and Micheline, were asleep in their carry cots in the back. They were four months old. ‘Leakage from the exhaust was drawn into the back of the mini van. Maybe there was a draught or the back doors didn’t really fit. Micheline was on the exhaust side and when Elizabeth went to get her, she was dead. She’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning. She’d just been christened the week before.’

Edward, his only son, died the following year of cardiac problems. He was just two days old.

What effect did these deaths have on him? ‘They gave me a fundamental emotional shock and depth and insight into the transience of life,’ replies Sir Nicholas, the son of the famed psychoanalyst William Fairbairn. ‘But I didn’t need bloody counselling! The idea that there is a safety net and 64 nannies to dust you down every time the sun goes behind a cloud is ridiculous. I just drew on reserve strengths to get over it. I also think religion is absolute bunk.’

He’s talking in the magnificent 13th century Fordell Castle in Fife, which he bought as a ruin for £100 in 1960. It has a trick staircase for shooting enemies into the downstairs loo, a chapel, ice house and ghosts. Lady Petrodie, who was hanged as a witch, ‘pulls the bed clothes off any female sleeping in the Rose Room’. The other ghost is a monk whom Sir Nicholas hears walking on the gravel at night. Sam, or Owl, as he calls his wife Suzanne, pops her head round the door.

Sir Nicholas’s favourite topics are women and sex. He married Elizabeth, daughter of the 13th Baron Reay, in 1962.

‘She hated gardens and resented my spending money on the garden or house. So there was constant friction . . . I had innumerable lovers. God knows how many.’ He believes that sexual fidelity is rare and monogamy in marriage a facile rule.

He met his second wife, Suzanne, when she came to him to get a recommendation for a divorce lawyer. ‘A friend said, ‘I have a friend who is in trouble, would you see what you can do?’ And that was it!’ He married her in 1983 in the chapel in his baronial home, wearing oyster-coloured Indian tunics that he’d designed. He describes the marriage as ‘buzzing bliss. We do absolutely everything together. She has blossomed since she came 10 years ago. She gardens, paints, arranges flowers – not that she arranged any of these. I do the flowers’.

Did they choose not to have children? ‘Well I would have made a positive decision not to, but Sam was already snicked. Her fallopian tubes, you know. It’s not death that is the problem in the world but birth.’

And what of his marital indiscretions? ‘That is not a matter that matters, nor a matter I want discussed,’ he says, raising his voice. But he has in the past talked about being unfaithful. ‘I’m not saying that.’ He also denies the story of a former girlfriend who allegedly tried to hang herself from the lamppost outside his London home. ‘It was a complete fabrication by that shit . . .’ he says, naming a past Cabinet minister. ‘I caught him out in a bit of lechery and adultery, double crossing his wife and mistress and offering to marry someone he had no intention of marrying.’

Sir Nicholas first became aware of his incredible sex appeal at seven, lost his virginity at 16 and thinks his sexual energy will burn ‘for ever’. He holds that the release of tension which comes from orgasm and sneezing is essential to sanity. So what makes him sexually attractive to women? ‘I think because I’m interesting.’

What makes him a good lover? ‘Well, I’ve never seen anybody else making love, but it appears that I give ecstatic satisfaction, which is the point of the exercise.’

Sir Nicholas was himself the unwanted result of an unintended conception. His parents were spectacularly ill-matched and his mother, a painter and musician, was lonely and rejected. He was deprived of emotional closeness. ‘My parents were very distant figures. I felt very isolated, but learned independence, developed my own thinking and read a lot.’ He was brought up by his ‘beloved’ nanny. Did he love her more than his mother? ‘Oh yes,’ he says, emphatically.

He was dumped in boarding school at seven and was beaten consistently. Did he feel unlovable? ‘I don’t feel in the least unlovable. I knew I was unloved. Perhaps that was why I unconsciously developed humour, wit and intelligence to get attention.’ (He says his own children are ‘happy little women’. Charlotte, 29, is ‘married to the conductor of the LSO’; Anna-Karina, 27, is ‘a secretary who designs jewellery’; and Francesca, 25, ‘a nomad’.) Sir Nicholas fears the destruction of individuality. But he need not worry. He is expressive, eccentric, creative and convinced of his enormous talent.He loves reading, painting, gardening and writing poetry. His paintings are reasonably accomplished, his limericks hilarious and his poems are of the ‘Oh there is a time in May/When hearts are free/And night is day’ variety.

Is he superior to the run of mankind? ‘I’m different. I’m a one-off and special.’

I am dining with Jonathan Meades. The restaurant critic, presenter of Abroad in Britain, and now author of Pompey – the fattest and most scatological novel in recent memory – has a fearsome reputation. ‘He’s detached from the human race and would be just as happy to meet Dennis Nilsen at a dinner party as Mother Teresa,’ says a rival food critic. ‘He enjoys poking about in the nasty bits of pigs’ guts and people’s lives,’ comments another. ‘He borrows an intimidatory technique from Brando, of staring and pretending to be deaf.’

Meades, 46, is known for wearing black, a fedora hat and National Health tinted spectacles. But he arrives in purple tie and suede shoes with accommodating manner. He’s also renowned for his arcane vocabulary (it’s likely that the OED takes its lead from him) and uses words like eldritch, mansarded, naphthalic and salchows.

He’s currently making a film about vertigo for a new series, Further Abroad. ‘I suffered so badly from vertigo once that I had to crawl back along Clifton suspension bridge.’ And one about pigs. ‘The good thing about pigs is that they can be your best friend and you can eat them as well.’ His book, Pompey, is populated with people like a loopy paraplegic ex-comedian, a firework-maker and his four children by different mothers: one sees his father eaten by a crocodile in the Congo, one is a porn star, another brings an Aids-like disease to Europe as a result of eating a pygmy.

Does Meades aim to shock and repulse? ‘These things don’t seem that abnormal to me. I revel in them. Maybe it’s a question of the ancient truism that your subject chooses you . . .’ Does that make him a revolting person? ‘No. I’m absolutely charming, like a little old lady out of Muriel Spark.’ Not a psychopath? ‘I regard myself as an absolute paragon of normality. One does, doesn’t one?’

He’s renowned for his prodigious appetite. It is said that when he dines, the waiters queue up on the pavement to serve him. And he ‘probably’ drinks too much, becoming boorish. So will he eat black pudding or entrails en croute? He belies his offal reputation, choosing only a little goose liver and guinea fowl and mineral water. ‘I quite like dead guinea fowl.’ Would he eat people? The pianist tinkles in the background. ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t eat dog. I loathe dogs. To eat something is a way of cherishing it. Of keeping it inside and paying it some sort of posthumous compliment.’ He laughs. ‘My idea of a good dog is one that’s just been run over.’

A lot of things prompt anger in Meades. ‘Traffic, Esther Rantzen, dog shit, Michael Parkinson. Normal things which any sentient civilised person would be provoked to anger by.’ He hates conformity, ditherers, pseuds, the stupid and drab. ‘I hate provincial GPs. I hate the provincial professional classes. I can’t say I hate the working classes in toto but . . .’ He toys with his puree of peas, goose liver, tagliatelle and truffles. ‘I enjoy hating. It gives me pleasure. It’s like a carousel of misanthropy which is fuelled by new hates all the time.’

Meades lives in Kilburn, where he reads eclectically. Twice married, he has four daughters, including 12-year-old twins. He doesn’t want any boys. ‘They’re extremely aggressive and very alarming. Backward compared to girls and very unsubtle.’

His first marriage lasted three years. ‘I don’t have any comments about relationships. They either come off or they don’t,’ he says camply. He remarks that his campness is a form of irony.

He was brought up in Wiltshire and went to Salisbury Cathedral School and various crammers. ‘I walked out of school at 16. It was too illiberal. I had to go to chapel all the time.’

An only child, his father was a Crawford biscuits salesman and his mother a teacher. ‘Most of my friends had parents who were much younger. I envied them quite a lot.’ His mother was 37 when he was born. ‘My childhood wasn’t particularly happy or unhappy. I was very much left to my own devices. I was at quite a loose end most of the time.’

He was trained at Rada in the Sixties. Naturally he landed a role as a deaf-mute child murderer in a film that never got made. He liked acting but despised the luvvies. ‘I dislike theatre because it’s so boring.’ What sort of actor would he have made? ‘I was good at simpletons and psychopaths. I dare say I could have broadened my range to include upper-class bastards.’ This, he says, has nothing to do with identification.

Meades doesn’t expect anything from life. ‘I’m completely nihilistic and don’t believe in anything. I don’t even expect a certain degree of material well-being.’ The death of his father and split with his long-standing girlfriend when he was 32 affected his attitudes profoundly. ‘You become brutally insensitive.’ He’s taken the line from Joe Orton and doesn’t really believe it of himself.

‘I think it’s mad to expect happiness,’ he continues, in lachrymose tone. ‘It’s nice when it happens, but counting on it is a ludicrous presumption. I remember when I was 17 and cycled from school with two litres of cider to Cothay, a medieval house in Somerset. I was happy that particular day. That’s 29 years ago,’ he says, deadpan. ‘One’s been happy since for brief moments.’

In his writing, he refuses to give moral assurances. ‘I don’t have any great hope for the future. I don’t think things get better.’ He puffs on his Marlboro. ‘I think we’re in a state of original sin. We’re born imperfect and remain that way.’ He doesn’t believe in redemption for anything except perhaps overeating.

He’s heavy-weight, very clever and with a timidity hidden beneath the act. Perhaps the Meades beneath the fedora and scatological misanthropy is just a nice middle-class boy?

Imagine the sound of Approaching Menace music, the inquisitorial spotlight, the camera zooming in, the terrified man sitting in the famous black leather chair, the nervous flinching and twitch of the mouth . . . this afternoon we have polymath Magnus Magnusson in the hot seat with 45 minutes on The Life and Reign of Magnus Magnusson, Mastermind quizmaster.

This is the beginning of the first, nail-biting round. ‘How about a bottle of medium white wine?’ asks Magnus, showing his virtues as questionmaster. ‘Oh, do we have to?’ squeaks his producer. They then do battle for the title (of ‘dry’ or ‘medium’). ‘Medium dry!’ says Magnus, showing a talent for compromise. Beep beep beep. That brings us to the end of this fast, furious and high-scoring round.

Magnus, you’re a writer, broadcaster, scholar and chairman of the Scottish National Heritage Board. You have an honorary knighthood for your service to National Heritage, but as an Icelander you can’t be called ‘Sir’. You’re not allowed questions on orthopaedic bone cement in hip replacements or routes to anywhere in mainland Britain from Letchworth by road, but you can be quizzed on anything from notable British poisoners to the life cycle of the honey bee. Your chosen specialist subject? ‘Icelandic sagas or the history of Lindisfarne.’

Right. You’re 63. Are you going to retire as Mastermind quizmaster? ‘Mastermind has lasted 21 years. I see no reason why it shouldn’t last until 25.’ He clears his throat defensively. ‘The game depends on speed. If I did get slower, I think I’d like to be put mercifully out to pasture.’ Correct. How long have you been married to Mamie? ‘Thirty-eight years, 10 months.’ That’s astonishing and unusual, isn’t it? ‘It’s not unusual,’ he says, frostily. ‘More people remain married than don’t get married.’ What’s the secret of marital longevity? ‘Marrying someone nice.’ What else? Pass. What has he learned from his marriage? ‘That it would be much too tedious to separate.’ What else? Pass.

He’s a kind, soft man with gravitas and dignity. But he’s initially prickly and shirty if a question is any more intrusive than ‘What’s the monetary unit of Japan?’. He’s also pedagogic.

He sports a blue/green jacket, green tie with an otter on it (‘from the island of Isla which I visit quite a lot because we have a goose problem . . .’) and blue eyes. His hair is silver and he trims his eyebrows. ‘It’s genetic. My father needed a topiarist to deal with his.’ He sticks a pencil in his pipe, rakes the tobacco, lights it, never smokes it and looks like a pre-Socratic philosopher.

Back to the quiz. Tell us some funny stories about Mastermind, about a contestant passing on all the questions, for instance. ‘That’s not funny. That’s tragic,’ he says, stormy-faced with frightening intensity. ‘Our job is to bring out the best in people. There was one woman who sang her last answer.’ Correct.

You missed out the laboratory technician who was disqualified because she entered twice, first as Mrs Denyer, her first husband’s name. ‘Oh yes,’ says Magnus, nodding. ‘She didn’t think she was doing anything wrong. She felt she was a different person having had a bad marriage, remarried, changed her hair and reconstructed herself.’ Correct.

Instead of the crisp tones and fast delivery seen on television, he speaks in a soothing broadcasterly Scottish burr. He’s also the sort to pronounce correctly any Japanese, Swahili or Gujarati words. Why is the programme so popular? ‘We’re trying to celebrate what the human noddle can do . . . and at home you compete, shout answers at the screen and think, I got one quicker than those brilliant little bastards! I always think that when I watch University Challenge and see those hideously, formidably brilliant little sods!’ Correct.

How would you define Mastermind contestants? ‘They’re people who like taking part in quizzes. I also think they’re crazy. You’ve got to be a wee bit potty to go in for Mastermind. I wouldn’t for all the tea in China.’ Why? ‘You’re putting your pride on the block. By applying, you’re implying you have a certain good conceit of yourself and there’s a danger that you’ll come a cropper.’ Correct.

Who is the questionmaster’s questionmaster? ‘My ideal quizmaster is Bamber Gascoigne, the king, the best ever,’ he answers with conviction. ‘If I were as good as him, I’d reckon I’d done a pretty good job with Mastermind.’ Are you not as good as him? ‘Of course not. Nobody is. He’s miles above everyone.’ Do you know your subjects? ‘On the night,’ he laughs. ‘Then I know all the possible answers to all the questions.’ Correct. If you were given six months to live, what would you do? ‘I’d carry on doing what I’m doing now. I hope I wouldn’t be thrown into a flat spin by it. I think I would cultivate my garden a bit more.’ Do you want that quote in French? ‘Ah, you know your Voltaire.’

How would you describe yourself? ‘As an ordinary guy who got notoriety through doing parlour games on television.’ Beep beep beep. Let us glance at the scores. Magnus, you’ve scored 50 points and several marital passes. It’s easy to play games. But Magnus has had tragedy in his life. Siggie, his 11-year-old son, was killed in 1973 as he jumped off a bus on his way home from school. ‘It’s curious,’ he says, softly, ‘but in a perverse way his death brought us all closer together and made us even stronger as a family. We’d taken for granted that we were all immortal and happy, and that things only happened to other people. You realise then you can’t take happiness for granted. That you have to work at it and help create it. His loss was a grievous and shattering blow.

‘I remember him a bit like Keats’s Grecian Urn. He was just on the threshold of puberty. He’d started worrying about whether he should kiss a girl in his class. The night before he died, he came and sat on my knee and said, ‘Dad, do you think it’s OK if I kiss her?’ I said, ‘Of course’, and he ran off to play.

‘We often wonder what path he would have taken. He’d have been 31 now. He’d probably have gone into broadcasting.’ His four children are in broadcasting. Magnus smiles and shrugs his shoulders. One is left with the impression of a gentle gentleman with great intellectual curiosity. * The Mastermind final is on 16 May.

Hello, good afternoon and welcome back, as someone might say. Welcome to Sir David Frost OBE returning after more than 20 years to a live studio audience with The Frost Programme. But Frost off the box is a hard man to penetrate. He seems to be stage-managed.

Unusually for a newspaper photograph, he insists on being made up and appears with puffed-up hair, foundation and lip-liner. Even the management of that time-warp restaurant Odin’s protests there is only one table he’ll sit at.

This is the 54-year-old co-creator of That Was The Week That Was – television producer, author, joint founder of LWT and TV-am, and famed interviewer of Richard Nixon, the late Shah of Iran, five prime ministers, six American presidents and assorted royals. The one-man conglomerate, as he was once described, has ink on his fingers, teeth that look like they need a dentist and television screen spectacles that magnify his eyes so that it is hard to gauge his responses.

How would Frost interview Frost?

‘Aahhhaa,’ he says, as if pricked with a pin. ‘I’d be . . . interested to quiz . . . myself (cavernous pauses) . . . about why I get such a buzz from doing a lot of work. Getting to the roots, which I suspect are partly to do with my parents and Methodist upbringing, and that magical quantity, adrenaline.’

What technique would he use to make himself reveal the real David Frost? ‘Make myself forget I was interviewing myself and just have a conversation. That’s the key to a good interview.’

Frost should also ask Frost why his trousers are frayed. ‘Aahhhaa. Very observant of you. They were made a fraction too long.’

Whether he’s sold out and gone soft by accepting a knighthood and doing Hello!-style interviews. ‘I don’t know whether there is an Establishment any more, or whether the Establishment has joined me!’

About his salary. ‘Before not answering your question, you could guess $1 million a year or some nice meaningless figure.’

Whether he still has the stomach for confrontational Sixties-style interviews. ‘Yes.’

Why his friends are all movers and shakers and famous. ‘Dunno. Why not?’ (Laughs.) Why he works so hard at being liked. ‘Dunno that I work particularly hard.’

What he dislikes about himself. ‘As Ned Sherrin said, ‘David always learns from his mistakes without admitting he’s made any’.’

Why he’s driven so frenzied by the pursuit of fame and work. ‘People talk about the terrible pressures of fame. The pressures of failure would be a bloody sight worse.’

Then he should move on to romance. He is happily married to the former Lady Carina Fitzalan Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. Before their 1983 wedding, was he unlucky in love?

‘I rarely talk about my private life.’ He had high-profile affairs – and was twice dumped virtually at the altar – and a 17-month marriage to Peter Sellers’s widow, Lynne Frederick.

‘Jeanette Scott was my first really serious girlfriend. I was 15 when I saw her first screen kiss in Now And Forever. I leched after her like mad. When our relationship came to an end in 1965, it was a real shock to the system.’ But all his girlfriends were ‘terrific’ and ‘wonderful’. And Lynne?

‘We ought to have kept it as a terrific affair.’ What went wrong? ‘We got married.’ And marriage now? ‘I’m incredibly lucky to have played the field and then to have fallen in love more than I’d ever fallen in love and to have three children.’ He became a father at the age of 44 and now rates family and work a ‘joint priority’.

Next Frost should ask Frost that age-old Frost question of whether he believes in God or knows there’s a God. ‘I’m nearly in the second category,’ he replies. ‘I’ve never varied from being in the first.’ He says grace before meals, goes to church once a week and prays almost daily. What does he pray for? ‘To be at my best, most thoughtful, caring, cheerful and awake to the potentialities of any situation for the best.’

Frost is more relaxed live on television than live in person. But he still talks in the famous inebriated voice with moist lips, flickering ironic smile and head thrown back for that car engine warming-up laugh. He fiddles, rubs his hands, crunches paper, moves back, moves forward, holds on to the chair.

‘I don’t think it’s nerves. I’m waiting for the photographer to go so that I can have a cigar.’ He thinks Lew Grade has copyright on that shot. Jack (as in Frost), as he was known, had an ordinary, secure childhood, although money was tight. His Methodist minister father earned £350 a year. ‘My parents wrought financial miracles. We had a joint, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, every week.’ He was 14 years junior to his youngest sister and thus effectively bought up as an only child. He has never confessed any unpleasant childhood memories. What would he tell a shrink? ‘I’d bore him to death with how happy my parents were, and he’d despair!’ Ask Frost to press Frost and he recalls his woodwork master punishing him with a steel ruler. He whacks his hands in a graphic demonstration and winces. ‘I can still feel the agony.’

We’re now sitting in a taxi, Frost famously clock crunching, en route to a board meeting. He flatters, asks questions, expatiates, is unthreatening, solid and jocular; the sort of person you would want as an uncle. Does he believe in Heaven? ‘Yes. One day we will all be submitted to the ultimate interview. Goodness knows what the interviewing style will be.’ Like his? ‘I don’t know. I think it will be a no-nonsense interview.’ Before then Frost should inform Frost that what you see is what you get.

Former hairdresser Barbara Harmer yesterday became the first woman to pilot Concorde. A convent-educated Action Woman, she qualified on Sunday and is now the most senior woman on the British Airways flying staff. We talk over breakfast in a tin can 29,000 feet off the ground, her ‘natural environment’.

She flew Concorde (under supervision) for the first time last year. It’s known to be a slippery, demanding beast. ‘When you apply the power, you feel a nudge in your back and it goes off down the runway like a scalded cat. You can’t believe the acceleration.’

She wasn’t scared and doesn’t worry about emergency landings over New York, hijackers or wings dropping off. She’s pragmatic about the dozen or so occasions when she’s had passengers on board and found one missing but with his bag in the hold. And about the three times she’s had engine failure during her 11 years of licensed flying.

‘On one flight to Jersey, there was lots of noise, the aircraft rolled violently and all the passengers were screaming in the back,’ she says. ‘The engine had completely disintegrated and blown itself apart.’ She shut the engine down and came back into Gatwick where all the emergency services were waiting. ‘Your mind is so full of where you’re going to go and talking to ground control that you don’t have time to think about how you feel.’ She’s never had more than her pride hurt in a plane. Things were fine when she flew Eric Clapton, and dandy with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, Lord David Owen and even Sarah Brightman. But Baroness Thatcher, ouch. ‘She was travelling under an assumed name in Concorde back from New York in February. My landing at Heathrow was my worst ever. I thought, ‘I hope they don’t tell her it’s a female at the controls. I’d hate her to think we can’t cope’.’ A carton of orange juice, Danish pastry and broken plastic cup dripping tea arrive.

Harmer has an open face, bright eyes and toothy smile. She wears a red drummer boy’s jacket, girly pleated skirt and the heady smell of Opium scent. She is positive, determined and has a dirty laugh. She claims she’s 40 years old – but is, in fact, only 39. ‘I’m practising getting used to the big four-o.’

She’s unmarried but has a design engineer boyfriend. He lives in Teddington and she lives near Bognor Regis. This is geographically close for Ms Biggles. ‘I used to commute to Anchorage in Alaska where I had a boyfriend. I took 22 flights in three years.’

She’s an extraordinary woman. She works out in the gym three times a week, skis (and has the tan to prove it), sails (racing in the Solent on a 32ft yacht), cycles in the summer (does the London to Brighton ride, 60 miles in three-and-a-quarter hours, and this year wants to do the 100-mile centenary ride) and plays tennis. At one time she played golf, but says it takes too long. She also drives a sports car. ‘I used to break the speed limit. But since flying, I’ve learned to slow down.’

Another amazing thing about her is that she left school aged 15 but has 11 O-levels and four A-levels. She was educated privately at a convent. (‘If the nuns had known I was going to be a pilot they’d have said, ‘Don’t be so ridiculous’. I suppose the discipline was helpful.’) And she was ‘a rebel’ at school. ‘I just didn’t work.’

When she took her A-levels, she was working as an air-traffic control assistant at Gatwick. ‘I just ordered the syllabuses from the examining boards, bought the recommended texts and looked at past papers. I did it all by myself, with no tuition.’ (After our meeting she’s addressing a Manchester school at a seminar on women at work.) Her father was a commercial artist, her mother a haberdasher and she was the youngest of four girls. Two of her sisters are now unexceptionally married with children, but the other is a missionary in the States for born-again Christians. Harmer was brought up in Essex and wanted to work with horses, but her parents said there was no money in four-legged creatures, so she went into hairdressing for six years.

She flew for the first time on Boxing Day in 1975, in a two-seater Cessna. ‘It was only the second time I’d ever been in a plane. I was 24 years old and I’d never even left England before.’ She found it exhilarating and frightening. ‘I liked driving. Flying is similar to driving or sailing, just a different mode of transport.’

She didn’t go on a course, but simply built up the requisite 700 flying hours while still beavering as that A-level-studying air-traffic-control assistant. ‘I’m what they call a self-improver. I paid for myself.’ It cost £15,000 to be a self-improver, and she borrowed £10,000 from the bank. In 1982 she passed her exams and started working as a pilot. Fast forward to 1992. It is, she says, the dream of every pilot to fly Concorde and speed through the air at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. Her training took six months and cost £100,000. This time she wasn’t a self-improver, and Lord King picked up the tab. She now earns £37,000 and is ambitious to become a captain for £60,000.

British Airways has 2,682 pilots, of whom 40 are female. It only started recruiting women pilots in 1987. What’s it like being the first woman to fly Concorde? ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever been first at anything. It’s mind-blowing,’ she says, perkily. Of course she’s endured lots of unrepeatable jokes about, er, women drivers. But she says there’s no discrimination. ‘Just much more pressure on you to be equal to – or better than – the boys.’

So is she as robustly confident as she appears? ‘Of course not,’ she laughs. ‘But this is my environment. I’m used to spending my time in an aeroplane.’ This is, by the way, a Shuttle en route to Manchester. Bet you thought we were in Concorde, didn’t you?

She had sex and showbiz parties in her Kensington home, was loved by Moors murderer Myra Hindley, kept a pet goose when she was a child, was tried at the Old Bailey, owned a Rolls-Royce, ran a call-girl agency for diplomats and aristocracy, was sent to prison where she wore a mink coat, appeared topless at a world premiere in Piccadilly, is a long-standing friend of Lord Bath, released a single with The Clash and was kept by a colonel. These are incidents from the life of Janie Jones (born Marion Mitchell). She was the little-known cabaret singer, and vocalist on the Sixties hit Witch’s Brew, who became the most talked about madam in town. She became infamous for her alleged involvement in the 1971 Payola scandal – accused of offering sexual favours to disc jockeys as an inducement to play her records, but found not guilty. And in 1973 she was sentenced to seven years for controlling prostitutes and attempting to pervert the course of justice by threatening violence to witnesses. She was dubbed ‘an evil woman’ by Judge Alan King-Hamilton but released on parole in 1977.

Now she has written a book, The Devil and Miss Jones. She hasn’t named Lord Y, the peer who made love to girls dressed as school children carrying teddy bears. But Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Cat Stevens and Roman Polanski all appear in her book . . .

She also writes about her former prison friend Myra Hindley (‘The Devil’ of the title). In prison, Hindley swore passionate love for Jones (‘revive me with your kisses,’ she wrote to Jones). ‘She fancied me rotten. She came over as a timid, little-girl-lost Princess Di type.’ Hindley fooled her that the Moors murders ‘were committed only by Ian Brady’, and Jones subsequently protested her innocence publicly.

Jones felt inspired to write the book following Hindley’s confession in 1987 about the whereabouts of Pauline Reade’s grave, because she realised that Hindley had conned her. ‘She’s very complicated, conniving, convincing and hypnotic. She should never be released,’ she says.

Jones is sitting in her Campden Hill Road house, scene of her sex parties with the infamous seven-foot bed and two-way mirror. The front window is stuffed with soft toys and dolls (odd). Eric, a bespectacled former county court clerk and one-time self-confessed slave who said in court that he was a virgin, opens the door. ‘Eric, coffee,’ shrieks Jones.

Jones once had 120 call girls (‘out-of-work actresses and models’) on her books. ‘A Lord would say to me, ‘I need 24 ladies to go out for dinner’,’ she says, straight-faced. ‘At my parties, stars had a free-for-all on the bed,’ she recalls in her Durham accent. ‘One disc jockey would lock the door and conduct an interview for a secretary.’

She maintains she was wrongly convicted, denying that she was paid. ‘A girl would visit a diplomat in Claridge’s. If she dropped her drawers or anything kinky, she’d arrange the money.’ It’s difficult to believe Jones did it, well, for love. ‘No it’s not. It’s just something I got inveigled into through my own stupidity.’ Was she ever a prostitute? ‘No.’ But she once went topless as a publicity stunt to a film premiere in Piccadilly. ‘I don’t crave attention. I got into these situations because I’m outrageous.’ Her sister joined in. ‘I said we’d steal the show with topless long dresses and a Rolls-Royce. We practised in the Edgware Road first and a passing car bumped into the one in front. I said to my sister, ‘Just imagine the top of the dress is there and think, what are all these idiots looking at?’ ‘ Jones always persuades herself that the Emperor has a lot of clothes on.

Jones is fiftysomething (‘39 for ever,’ she says, aggressively), plump and colourful in applique jumper and crushed-velvet skirt, with a rag-doll-painted face, Barbara Cartland lashes and peroxided hair. She has the tough voice of a survivor and a powerful, theatrical presence. She is unstable and inhabits a self-protective fantasy land. ‘It’s best sometimes to go off into your world of fantasy. I don’t like the world we live in. When I was in prison, I wasn’t in prison. The music was on and I was in a recording studio.’

Her prison experience was grim and she still has nightmares about it. ‘One girl burned herself alive in the hospital wing. I can still smell that burning flesh in my dreams. I was in a house full of murderesses who all had the needle because I had a date to get out.’

She also claims to have had psychic experiences in prison. There is an episode in the book when she asks God for a sign to indicate Hindley’s innocence: ‘She appeared to be coming off the bed, floating upwards, and she was surrounded by the most beautiful colours.’

She found many prisoners ‘evil, vile and jealous’ – and her mink coat was burned. ‘They gave me a hard time, but I earned their respect. I scrubbed the floors better than any, did the toilets out, never grumbled.’ And she is fascistic in her penal views. ‘When violent prisoners go to Holloway, they shouldn’t be kept in the new wing where they have toilets at their disposal. They’re there for punishment, not pleasure.’

Jones maintains she had a ‘very happy’ childhood. Her mother was in her late forties when she was born. ‘She went to the doctor with a pain in her stomach and he said, ‘I’ll be delivering that pain in a couple of hours’.’ Jones was the seventh child of a seventh child. Her father was a Durham miner, and they lived in a house with an outside lavatory. ‘He slogged himself to death to bring in money. He ruled with a rod of iron. His word was law.’ She says it was a God-fearing background.

Her parents were prudish and never even saw one another naked. ‘I had to wear knee-length knickers as a child. My mother was horrified when I started working, dancing in a G-string. My father always said men are after one thing and have no respect for women. I believe that too. I don’t trust men, full stop.’

She started working, aged 16, as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. She then moved to the Windmill Theatre where she did five shows a day. ‘But I would never appear naked.’ She says she was celibate for a long time. ‘I’ve never had any of this earth-moving stuff. I think sex is all a big pain and aggravation. At the parties I never joined in anything.’

She had one marriage. In 1968, she wed self-confessed former drug addict and songwriter John Christian-Dee (‘The Crank,’ she calls him). Within months things went wrong. ‘I didn’t want to marry him. It’s just he said if I didn’t, he wouldn’t get off the heroin.’ She then decided he was schizophrenic and aborted their twins.

In court, she boasted of the marriage proposals she’d turned down and the thousands she was offered by Arab princes and British aristocrats. ‘I’d go out for dinner and say, ‘No hididdlediddle, no rummagin’ merrily with me’. I had a power over men. The more I insulted them, the more they’d come back.’ So is Eric the lodger her slave? ‘No, never ever. He’d be the worst,’ she laughs. ‘But I’ve had some good slaves in my time.’

And how does she support herself now? ‘That,’ she screams, ‘is none of your bloody business.’

Bruce Oldfield, the handsome man once connected with Princess Diana, doesn’t sleep with men or women. He is celibate. He has always lived alone. He says he’s never had a close personal relationship. And he has always been a loner. ‘Frankly,’ he says, smoking frantically, ‘I’ve been on my own since I was 13.’

Bruce Oldfield, frock maker to the Princess of Wales, has had a career that rose like Marilyn Monroe’s dress over a hot-air grate, then plummeted to the ankles and is now rising, once again, thigh-high. After a decade of almost unrivalled success and empire building, he was on the edge of bankruptcy in 1990. But now Bruce is back, waving his pinking scissors triumphantly, designing only couture for around £1,400 a dress, and selling to the Sangsters, Charlotte Rampling and Jerry Hall.

He’s wearing an Armani jacket, washed-out Levis and buoyant expression. He’s 42 years old, six foot two and has a perfect physique.

‘My personal life just doesn’t exist. I have lots of friends, but I don’t sleep with anybody,’ he says, forcefully. ‘I simply don’t have mad urges to go to bed with people. I’m not a very sexual person, never have been. I don’t have any great desire to be involved with anybody, and though sex is quite good fun, sleeping around is counter-productive, unhealthy and unwise. ‘The longest time I ever went out with anyone was with Irene at Sheffield City College in 1969. That lasted maybe six months, four or three. I don’t remember. It was quite fiery and her parents didn’t like her going out with a black boy.’ He says he was in his teens and rebelled against that. He won’t reveal when he last slept with someone. Is he abstinent for fear of Aids? ‘Not really.’ (‘Lots of my close friends have died of Aids,’ he says later.) Is he more inclined to men or women? ‘It’s none of your business.’ Often expansive in his body language, he crosses his arms protectively.

Princess Diana was his most famous client, but hasn’t bought from him for three years. He still gets birthday and Christmas cards signed ‘Love, Diana’.

‘We had a very good relationship,’ he says. ‘I used to see her every couple of weeks at Kensington Palace or the shop, and we often met at lunches or dinners. She’s a strong personality. She’s tough, not a ninny. But I don’t think she’s conniving. I see her as somebody who would fight back, but not manipulate madly, and she’s compassionate.’

His business struggles were a ‘horror story, incredibly depressing’. The recession started, he was overstaffed, licensees (who manufactured goods under his name) were going bust, he had been expanding so his couture had suffered, and he was losing customers who were tightening their belts. (‘All those crisis meetings of ‘ooh we haven’t got enough money to pay the rent, let’s sell that chair’.’) He had to close his Fulham design studio, move to the small basement of his Beauchamp Place shop and shed his ready-to-wear. ‘I didn’t want to do any of it, but it was expedient. Otherwise my business would have gone to the wall. In 1990 I was advised to put the company into liquidation. I said ‘absolutely not’. That’s the easy way out. And, let’s face it, I’ve got nothing else. The company is my life.’ He had to move out of his grand Chelsea flat with its 25ft dining room to rented accommodation in Battersea.

‘I could have moved to a bedsit. I wouldn’t have liked it, but I’m resilient. You have to adapt. I don’t have encumbrances like wife or children, so it’s easier.’ Did he feel a failure? ‘I would have if I’d let the company go. I got a nagging feeling of self-doubt, but I wasn’t at the stage where I’d slash my wrists. I’m not the type.’

He’s jolly, charming and spunky, but his eyes often look angry. His father was a Jamaican boxer, and Bruce was a Barnardos boy, handed over by his white mother at birth and fostered by a dressmaker called Violet with four other multiracial foster children in a two-up two-down in Durham. He was returned, aged 13, to Barnardos after he shoplifted some sweets and comics.

Bruce dislikes the way he’s seen. ‘All this fat Barnardos boy makes good, rags to riches, poor, black, illegitimate child, syrupy shit.’ He’s actually expressive and eloquent, often changing his voice humorously in self-mockery, sharp-minded and sometimes arrogant. The word about town is what a down-to-earth, nice chap he is.

He has always been painted as unscarred by his childhood. ‘In fact, I had a very tenuous relationship with my foster parents,’ he says now. ‘They often said, ‘If you don’t behave yourself you’ll go back into the home’. And in Barnardos they said, ‘If you don’t behave yourself you’ll be made a ward of court or go to borstal’.’ He was bundled around like a parcel.

‘Maybe that made me insular and strong.’ Nobody is going to hurt him? Nobody is going to get that close? ‘Yeah.’

So what are his props? What does he rely on? He smokes for England, can work compulsively and always watches his weight, although he lost two stone during his troubles in 1990. ‘I need space,’ he replies. ‘And I have to go to The Peak gym, look out on London, completely empty my head, gaze into space and run. I come back relaxed. I live off my nerves. I have ulcers.’ He’s surprisingly affected by the moon. ‘I’m always more active on a full moon, or more lethargic. I always have a big swing in mood.’ (His recent show fell, luckily, at an auspicious stage in the lunar cycle. ‘It was a full moon. I knew things were boding well.’) And he’s keen on that modern religion, astrology. ‘I’m Cancer, which makes me creative, home-loving and moody. I also want a well-ordered life and like cooking.’

He doesn’t, however, believe in God. ‘I don’t even know if there’s anything out there. As I get older, I seek that kind of solace. But Barnardos pushed all ideas of believing out of my head with their compulsory prayers at every opportunity and church three times a day on Sunday.’ He lacks parental support and wouldn’t look for it. His foster mother died in 1974 and he has no desire to meet his natural parents, if they are still alive.

‘I’d probably feel some kind of rapport. It would be natural. I’d feel honour bound to be responsible towards her. I don’t want that kind of responsibility. I’d like to see them through a one-way mirror, like a line up!’

He brushes off anything that might hurt him, usually denying the darker side of his life.

‘I’ve turned rejection into a positive thing,’ he says. ‘You might think I’ve lost out with my apparent inability to make relationships. But I don’t feel lonely. I’m self-sufficient and happy not having to be selfless and think about what somebody close requires.’

Bruce has always been determined. ‘Determined not to accept what was doled out for me. When I was 16 in Barnardos, they used to say to me, ‘Who do you think you are? You think you’re so clever’. I was brought up not to expect much. But I couldn’t see why I shouldn’t achieve whatever I wanted. I don’t think I’ve ever been totally aware that I could fail.’

It has been a good decade for Mary Wesley. The best-selling author of The Camomile Lawn, who wrote her first book aged 70, has sold 1.5million books in paperback. ‘I’m always terrified when I’ve finished a book that it’ll be a disaster,’ she says. ‘I used to think, ‘What am I trying to do? I can’t write.’ Now I still think each book will be my last.’

Her books have been described as like Jane Austen with sex: witty and racy, they are well-mannered English novels about upper middle-class people with a workaday knowledge of adultery and illegitimacy. They line one shelf (including Japanese and Danish translations) in her cosy cottage in Totnes, Devon.

This week sees the publication in paperback of A Dubious Legacy (for which film discussions are under way), and Harnessing Peacocks will be on television this spring. ‘I’m really pleased with Harnessing Peacocks,’ she says emphatically. She advised the director and went on set for a couple of days – ‘terribly boring and repetitive’ – but once they were filming ‘wouldn’t have dreamed of interfering’.

Wesley, a spritely 80-year-old, is elegant in her favourite black cashmere jumper and trousers. She is weeny, with silver hair and a face that expresses strength and timidity. Seemingly brisk, tough and upper-class on the phone (it transpires she doesn’t like talking during ‘office’ hours), she now seems mischievous and her acerbic intelligence shines through. She is remarkable for her age.

‘People talk about me writing sexy books. They only say it because I’m old. Absolute tripe!’ she chuckles, sardonically. ‘People think sex is something you give up, but the instinct goes on.’ Inside, she says, she still feels about 30. ‘I had the menopause, which wasn’t particularly bad. I’d love to have sex now. But it isn’t there, so I exist without it. I think it’s very important. It makes you feel good, doesn’t it?’

She says she was educated by her lovers – having received no formal schooling, just 10 governesses in eight years. ‘I had clever, intellectual lovers who encouraged me to read,’ she says, belying her reputation for being secretive. ‘They were amazed at how ignorant I was. It was rather upsetting really.’ How many lovers has she had? ‘That’s rather a close question. I don’t think I should count them.’ She hoots with laughter. ‘I’m sure the few who are still alive would hate to be listed!’

She was faithful to Eric Siepmann, her second husband and ‘true love’ who died of Parkinson’s disease in 1970. ‘I still feel sad. I miss him the whole time.’ Would she ever like to have another man in her life? ‘When Eric died, I thought about it. But I realised I couldn’t go through that all again. We had 25 years together, and there was really nothing left to give. You put so much into a relationship. It was wonderful and anything else would seem a sham.’ She felt cleaved in half when he died. ‘It took a long time to adjust to living alone.’

The characters she writes about are now her company. ‘Rather a good sort of company,’ she laughs. ‘You can kill them off if they bore you.’ But she’s not lonely. ‘I’m solitary by nature.’ She protects her privacy savagely, sometimes going for five days without talking to anybody. ‘As a child, I would hide behind a tree to avoid speaking to somebody.’

Wesley has had a life that she could excavate endlessly for her fiction. Born Mary Wellesley, the daughter of a colonel, she is descended from the Duke of Wellington’s eldest brother and had a peripatetic, unhappy and solitary childhood, though she says she didn’t feel noticeably alone at the time. Did she feel loved? ‘No,’ she says, pensively. ‘I never felt loved by my mother and I hardly saw anything of my father. We were always moving house, so I never had any friends of my own generation, and I didn’t go to school. I was frightened of other girls – I always thought they were very sophisticated and confident.

‘I was probably a great disappointment to my parents. I didn’t grow up to be conventional in the way they wanted. They were much happier once I left the nest because my mother wanted my father to herself.’

Her first marriage was largely spurred by the desire to escape her family. It was short-lived. During the war she worked in intelligence, and for seven years during the Forties she lived ‘in sin’ with Eric, a journalist. Finally they married and when he died they were living impecuniously on social security. She started writing in her thirties, for herself, famously binning her efforts. She has three sons (two from the failed first marriage) and is a committed socialist.

Her childhood has left its legacy of self-doubt. She perceives herself as shy and hesitant. ‘I think I’m getting better. I’m not so frightened of people now. We all appear to have confidence, but inside we’re scared. I’m frightened of an invasion of privacy and perhaps afraid of being found out for not being what I appear to be. I’m pretending I’m Mary Wesley who writes these delightful books. But inside…’ She giggles. She adds that she’s afraid of being intimate.

Motherhood then. Did she, in turn, make a good mother? Or did she repeat her mother’s mistakes? She exhales deeply. ‘I fear I did make the same mistakes. I think life is repetitious. I don’t think I made a good mother. I should have been a much better one. My youngest son was 16 when his father died. I had no money at all, but perhaps I should have helped him more.’ She ‘adores’ her children, and once said she would die for them. Roger works for charities, Toby is a literary agent and Bill (begat by Eric) is trying to write film scripts. Would she have liked them to have achieved more? ‘I’m not ambitious for my children in that way,’ she says, a touch snappily. ‘I just want them to be happy.’

There is nothing, she says, to fear in old age. ‘It is stupid to put it off. It’s like death.’

She claims she can’t wait to find out about death, hoping it will be an interesting experience. ‘I believe there’s some form of existence after death for the spirit. I think we make our own hells when we die, we’ve created obstacles for ourselves.’

Does she think she’s led a good life? ‘Oh no,’ she says, hilariously. ‘I know I haven’t.’

When Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Peter Imbert had a heart attack two years ago, he realised there was a distinct possibility he might die. Journalists were waiting outside his hospital door firming up his obituary details, which he was determined not to give anyone the opportunity to publish. ‘I’ll make a bargain with you,’ he said, post-intensive care, ‘you show me my obituary, and I’ll talk to you.’ No interviews ensued. Sir Peter, 59, retires on Sunday after a distinguished and extremely hard-working career. He imagines his obituaries might have said that he’d endeavoured to change the face of policing. But now he’s talking in a rare way about everything from his neglect of his family, to his passion for his wife and his son stealing money.

He’s sitting in his massive New Scotland Yard office in suit, white shirt and vest. His manner is charming but he appears tired and has hamster cheeks. He wears his identity card, having recently been refused admission to a police conference by a Lancashire constable.

Sir Peter is known for negotiating with the IRA terrorists cornered for a week in the Balcombe Street siege in 1975. He was also involved with the Guildford Four, who were subsequently freed in 1989. (He took a confession from Hill, in connection with the Woolwich bombing, and interviewed Conlon after his Guildford conviction.) Shortly after their release, he was quoted as saying: ‘You’re probably hoping that I’m going to say that the freeing of the Guildford Four was one of my worst moments, because I was involved. But it wasn’t. I just hope it won’t taint such reputation as I might have.’

Reputation intact, surely it was one of the lowest points of his career, I ask? ‘You could consider that or any number of things,’ he says, quickly changing the subject.

During his five and a half years as Commissioner he’s achieved a lot of his aims (‘in partnership with 44,999 others’), but not as quickly as he’d have liked. He has turned the Met from a force into a courteous ‘service’. Now he’s been offered ‘one or two’ non-executive directorships, involvement with security firms and invitations to lecture and write a book. He will also be playing bad bridge, coarse golf and ‘boring’ people with talk about his grandchildren (as his Who’s Who entry testifies). His heart attack, he says, made a vast difference to his life. ‘The stresses and strains of this job are an enormous burden if you literally take them to heart. I think I did. I care about this job. It consumes my whole being.’

He wrings his hands and comes across as gentle, but there’s a steeliness in his eyes which seems at odds with his open, friendly manner. Known for being calm and approachable, he admits: ‘My toughness is hidden beneath that genial exterior.’

Before the heart attack, he worked 16 hours a day – now it’s 13. ‘The first week off was almost a luxury, if it hadn’t been for the worry of whether I was going to get over it. I didn’t really feel frightened that I was going to die, but I was concerned about the things that I hadn’t done. ‘I haven’t really been fair to my family and owed it to them to spend more time with them. I’ve not wholly succeeded in that. I also knew I needed to learn to delegate and share responsibilities.’ Although his lifestyle might have cost him his life, he believes it has been worth it and his family has been supportive.

He met his wife Iris (they have been married for 36 years) when he was on the beat in central London. ‘I first saw her when I looked through the window of the hospital in Great Ormond Street and saw these rather good-looking nurses. Coincidentally, I then met her at a police dancing class. I thought she was very desirable.’ He used to stop the traffic to allow her to cross the road.

Iris has provided ‘great stability’ in his life. She’s worked in jobs that have allowed her to move and support her husband according to his placements. ‘It’s been,’ he says, ‘a very satisfactory, fulfilling marriage.’

Communication and understanding are the secrets of their successful relationship. ‘One is also tempted to say ‘love’, but what does that mean? At first it’s very passionate and then it becomes part of that stability, of being able to discuss things and enjoy similar interests.

‘I used to think I was passionate, but my wife may disagree. I believe I’m a romantic, but she doesn’t think so. Occasionally I buy her flowers.’ HE WAS brought up with a strong work ethic. Born the fifth of seven children into a poor working-class family, Sir Peter was the son of a bankrupt farmer.

‘From an early age I knew I had to earn my living. To achieve anything in this life, you’ve got to work.’ Aged six, he helped collect pigs’ swill; aged seven, he weeded gardens and delivered newspapers. ‘I had to finish early on Sundays to go to church three times. My parents insisted … I can’t really remember having holidays as a boy.’

He was an energetic, inventive child, and a comic and hooligan – he was once caught by the local bobby three times in one afternoon for different bike offences. (He once visited Associated Newspapers for an executive lunch. Asked whether he’d like to see anything – like the news room – he declined, requesting instead to ride up and down in the glass lifts.) His family’s size taught him to get on with people. ‘I was at constant war with my siblings. I learned that you don’t win arguments by resorting to violence or aggression.’

He left school at the age of 16. ‘My parents couldn’t afford to go on feeding an extra mouth. I remember seeing my mother crying because she hadn’t got enough money to feed the family.’ He worked for £1 a week at the local town clerk’s office ‘hoping to become the youngest town clerk in the country’.

He regrets his lack of university education. ‘I went to evening classes to learn shorthand, Russian, French and German.’ He has an orderly mind, listens attentively, and chooses his words carefully. He’s a slick and cunning communicator.

So what of his own children? He has three and says he is very proud of them – ‘not because of what they’ve achieved, but for their independence of thought’ – and seems reasonably satisfied with his role as a father. His son markets security devices, one daughter is a health visitor, and the other is a fashion graduate who helps disadvantaged youths and does cleaning two days a week.

‘I think I made a loving father. I hope so. I wasn’t there as much as I could have been in their formative years. I was spending too much time sorting out other people’s problems on the anti-terrorist squad. I know my son needed his father at that time, and I wasn’t there enough. ‘At times I was firm. I disciplined by example. I did slap them, but I was only once close to giving my son physical admonishment – pushing him up into his bedroom and giving him a jolly good hiding.

‘He’d stolen some money from us and then refused to admit it. It couldn’t have been anyone else. It wasn’t that he’d done it, but the fact that he was prepared to let someone else take the blame. I became furious with him. He’d wanted to keep up with his peer group and buy cigarettes.’

AS A child Sir Peter thought of becoming an agricultural auctioneer, selling cows and sheep in a market; he also thought of being a stage conjurer and comedian. ‘Some people say I’ve achieved one of those. I’m not going to say which.’

He leaves his job with mixed feelings. ‘I’ll miss the camaraderie and being involved in high-level decisions.’ The motto he’s going to put on his coat of arms is ‘adversity to advantage’. It’s a measure of what he’s achieved.