Gyles Brandreth

I recently found copies of various magazines I edited from 1990-2002. It's a bit self indulgent but each Sunday for the next few weeks I'm posting some of the many interviews I did during that period. Subjects included Tony Benn, Ken Clarke and Michael Winner (already posted), publisher Felix Dennis and John Bercow. See Something for the weekend.

In the summer of 2002 I interviewed Gyles Brandreth for The Politico, a short-lived magazine I founded with Iain Dale who was the owner and MD of Politico's Bookshop in Westminster. Writer, broadcaster, former MP and all round good egg, Brandreth was and is a familiar figure on British TV. 'Breaking the Code', published after he left parliament, is one of the best political diaries of all time. I interviewed him to help promote his subsequent book, 'Brief Encounters: Meetings with remarkable people'.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER

“On the whole I say no to being interviewed and my advice to you would be, don’t be interviewed or, if you must be interviewed, be interviewed by me.”

Gyles Brandreth – politician, writer, journalist and, by his own admission, a “soft interviewer” – has a mischievous twinkle in his eye. He is however deadly serious. When his entertaining compilation Brief Encounters: Meetings With Remarkable People first appeared he gave just one interview, to the Independent, and that was only to please his publisher.

The truth is that for all his charm and engaging bonhomie (which he assures me is not an act – he really is like this all the time), Brandreth is not the easiest person to interrogate. To begin with, he simply won’t stop talking.

Twenty minutes into our initial meeting he is still answering my first question. Ninety minutes into our second encounter (I am interviewing him for two magazines) I have almost exhausted my list but it’s been a struggle. Brandreth is no fool and I suspect that his verbosity hides a determination to tell me only what he wants me to hear.

Best known in many households for the colourful jumpers he wore on breakfast television in the 1980s, this former president of the Oxford Union has enjoyed a career that could best be described as eclectic. Today, after 30 years in theatre, television, politics and business (he famously founded a teddy bear museum in Stratford), his is editor-at-large at the Sunday Telegraph where he specialises in interviewing a certain type of VIP. Or, as he cheerily puts it, “I don’t do television personalities. Prime ministers, princes, potentates is what I do.”

The challenge of an interview, says Brandreth, is to get as close to the person as possible in the brief time that is available. “If you are sent to interview somebody you have a licence, almost within moments, to say ‘How did you feel about your mother?’ or ‘Where did your marriage go wrong?’ so you are catapulted almost at once into an intimate relationship.

“Some people of course don’t want that. When I interviewed Vanessa Redgrave we just sat there with her holding my hand. Whatever question I asked she never answered. She just gazed at me and squeezed my hand and repeated my name. So there are some people who simply won’t answer your questions and I rather admire that, but on the whole the situation allows you to be intimate instantly.”

The best interviews, he says, are a kind of heightened experience. “So often with senior people, particularly politicians, there are scores of people in the room. But when I went to interview Archbishop Tutu, who probably is my favourite subject, I arrived in Cape Town, drove through the shanty towns to this quite genteel suburb, and found him all alone.

“I was hardly in the kitchen and suddenly he was holding my hand and praying for us to have a blessing on our conversation. Then his grandchildren and family turned up and it became intimate and lovely.”

Sometimes, he admits, it can be intimate and embarrassing. Perhaps the most remarkable interview in Brief Encounters concerns Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, the first chairman of English Heritage, who finally opened his heart about a long forgotten scandal, 45 years ago, in which he was charged with a variety of homosexual offences and sent to prison for a year.

“It was the first time he said he had talked about it. So here we were sitting in the garden and literally, as we sat down and I asked my first question, there were tears. He wasn’t just crying. He was blubbing. The tears were splashing on to the salmon on the plate.”

Homosexuals, I observe, feature quite prominently in Brief Encounters. Brandreth is clearly at ease in ‘theatrical’ company. On one occasion, as interviewer and interviewee get progressively drunk, he even flirts – hilariously – with the renowned heterosexual Lord Snowdon who finally says to his interrogator, “I take it you had homosexual experiences at school? And after?”

Brandreth’s reply isn’t recorded. Why not? “You’ve got to remember who the star of the show is supposed to be. If people are reading an interview with Lord Snowdon or Desmond Tutu or Christopher Robin or Tony Blair they are reading it because they are interested in that person. You should reveal enough of yourself to make it a real experience, but the spotlight is on the subject not on you.”

He is also wary of being exploitative. “When I interviewed Sarah, Duchess of York, she was sitting there with tears in her eyes. Her PA came in and said, ‘What the hell have you done to her?’ Of course people are vulnerable so you are slightly torn. You want them to be revealing but you need to protect them, sometimes from themselves.”

Alan Wicker, the doyen of TV presenters, once told him that the best interviewers say nothing. “You ask a question and then keep your mouth shut. That’s a weakness with me. I should do that for longer and I don’t. If they don’t reply I try and help them out.

“I am a soft interviewer in the sense that I do not go in with hostility in my heart and difficult questions on my lap. Essentially I want to reveal to the general reader what a person is like and you do that best by being conversational and easy with people.”

Is there anyone still on his wish list? “Obviously you want to interview the people that nobody else has interviewed, like the Pope, but my experience is that it’s the unexpected who often give you the best interviews because heroic people are not necessarily wonderful talkers. I have met Nelson Mandela but as Desmond Tutu said to me, ‘Oh Nelson, he can be so boring!’ meaning as a speaker not as a human being.”

However the book for which Brandreth will ultimately be remembered is Breaking The Code. Having kept a diary since the age of ten it was always going to be difficult to resist publishing a record of the period when, as MP for Chester, he joined the whips’ office in the last, much maligned Tory government.

More traditional colleagues were outraged that anyone could take the whips’ implied oath of confidentiality and break it. “Some were not amused, others were incandescent, and there will be one or two who will never speak to me again. I squared it with my conscience because I didn’t reveal any personal secrets. I mean, if you are a whip you do get to hear about people’s marriages, their drinking problems, nervous breakdowns etc, and I didn’t reveal details of those.”

What he revealed, he says, was the way the political process worked in the 1990s. “Now, happily, there are university courses where the book is prescribed so I think time has healed that wound and I have been forgiven.”

In my book (yet to be written) there’s nothing to forgive. With his rapier wit and desire for less government (a subject worthy of a separate article), it’s just a pity that Brandreth will never fulfill his real ambition – to be prime minister. Still, there are worse things to be doing than interviewing the great and the (not so) good. Believe me, I know.

I'm pleased to say that unlike others I have interviewed (Tony Benn, Michael Winner, Felix Dennis), Gyles Brandreth is alive and well and continues to entertain us on TV (The One Show), radio (Just A Minute) and Twitter. He is currently appearing on Celebrity Gogglebox.