Recycling centre

Happy Easter.

Just finished ‘Odd Boy Out’, Gyles Brandreth’s hugely enjoyable autobiography published last year.

Readers of his published diaries will find many of the recycled stories familiar but most are good enough to bear repetition.

I won’t review it because you can read reviews in The Times and Daily Mail but if, like me, you like and admire this ‘pompous’ (his word) polarising figure, I would certainly recommend it.

Inevitably there is a huge amount of name-dropping but why not? I’d do the same if I’d had a similar life and met the same number of famous people.

Unfortunately, while Brandreth claims to have met “everybody” when he was at Oxford, the only ‘famous’ person I met at university was ITN newsreader Sandy Gall who I interviewed shortly after he was elected rector of the university (Aberdeen not Oxford).

And while Brandreth has actually met and spoken to the Queen, the closest I ever got was standing across the road behind a crush barrier when she visited Aberdeen during her Silver Jubilee tour of 1977.

Leaving aside the name-dropping and irrepressible good humour, Odd Boy Out ends with an elegy to the author’s father - to whom the book is effectively dedicated - that is actually quite moving.

What’s also moving - and this has been noted before - is that Brandreth clearly doesn’t believe he has fulfilled either his potential or the personal goals that once included the ambition to be prime minister.

I’m sorry he might feel that way because by most people’s standards he has led a remarkably full and successful life and is still going strong well into his Seventies.

More important perhaps is the fact that those who know him seem to genuinely like him and ‘he brightens every room he enters’ (Craig Brown, Daily Mail).

Anyway, if I may be permitted to do my own bit of recycling (not to mention name-dropping), here’s my Gyles Brandreth story that I first posted in 2010:

A few months ago I published on this blog an interview I did with Brandreth in 2003. What I didn't mention was that we did the interview in two parts - the first over coffee at the Langham Hotel opposite Broadcasting House in London, the second prior to his (then) Sunday afternoon programme on LBC.

After the interview Gyles invited me to join him on the programme. It was a round table format and it was all going rather well when he took me by surprise by asking his guests (there were four of us) to name the best film we had seen in recent weeks.

Needless to say my fellow guests all recommended art house movies that I had never heard of, let alone seen. When it came to my turn I was beginning to panic. In the previous two months I had only seen one film. I couldn't lie, especially as we had to explain our choice.

“Best film?" I muttered. "Hmmm, well, Gyles, that would have to be Monsters Inc."

I could sense the other guests staring at me with incredulity. Gyles, to his credit, listened politely to my explanation (“My children liked it”) before seamlessly moving the discussion on.

But I was never asked back.

The interview referred to above was actually the second time I had met him. The first time was a decade earlier. In 1992, shortly after Brandreth became an MP, I interviewed him for Capital Account, a magazine for chartered accountants.

Before entering Parliament the MP for Chester been involved in a number of businesses including a teddy bear museum in Stratford-upon-Avon and a 'Royal Britain' exhibition at the Barbican in London. The latter was a costly failure but, as I have written before, that made it more interesting than his many more successful projects.

However, unlike Brandreth, who seems to have kept everything - letters, articles, ticket stubs - in a huge personal archive, I’ve thrown away most of my ‘stuff’ and I no longer have a copy of that feature, but I do have a copy of the subsequent interview, published a decade later.

So, if you’ll forgive me, here it is again. Click here.

PS. There are a lot of references to smoking in ‘Odd Boy Out’.

This is partly because Brandreth’s father and many of his theatrical acquaintances were smokers, although Gyles himself never acquired the habit.

In fact I think he quietly disapproves of smoking but he doesn’t say so in his autobiography because he is fundamentally a tolerant liberal at heart.

Years ago he politely declined an invitation to give an after dinner speech at a Forest event but I think it was genuinely that he was just too busy.

Either that or we couldn’t afford him!

PPS. Looking forward to seeing Judi Dench In Conversation with Gyles Brandreth at the Gielgud Theatre in London on June 26.