Michael Sissons
Brilliant literary agent who was a founder of the Countryside Alliance and the Groucho Club
MICHAEL SISSONS, who has died aged 83, was a leading literary agent known for fighting hard on behalf of his clients; he was equally pugnacious when battling the animal rights lobby or Tony Blair’s government over the right to hunt.
He was not easy to pigeonhole. Tall, portly, rubicund and ebullient, Sissons, who lived on a 120-acre farm near Oxford and rode to hounds into old age, was often caricatured as somebody who had stepped from the pages of Surtees. But he was also one of the founders of the Groucho Club, the Soho establishment favoured by the metropolitan elite.
He was a long-serving member of the committee of MCC and one of the loudest of the rather desperate voices enjoining the club to move with the times. Although he was the go-to agent for senior Conservative politicians writing their memoirs, his own politics were Left of centre.
In nearly 60 years as an agent he worked for one firm, AD Peters, of which he became chairman and managing director in 1973. In 1988 he oversaw its merger with the film and theatrical agency Fraser and Dunlop, after which it was renamed Peters, Fraser and Dunlop (PFD). After stepping down as chairman in 1999, in 2001 he was the driving force behind the deal that saw it become part of the sports and entertainment conglomerate CSS Stellar.
To Sissons’s great regret his colleagues did not share his enthusiasm for the new owners, and in 2007 he found himself the only literary agent remaining at the firm after the others, led by his longserving colleague Pat Kavanagh, departed en masse to found a new agency, United Agents.
It was a tribute to Sissons’s skill that, despite these periodic ructions, his clients remained loyal to him. “I have total faith in Michael Sissons,” declared Margaret Drabble, when PFD was sold. “I don’t really understand what has happened, but I am sure my interests will be looked after.”
Sissons also represented Margaret Drabble’s sister AS Byatt, who recalled him celebrating her Booker Prize win in 1991 with an all-night party at which he improvised a blues number “in a surprisingly gravelly voice”. He also had a sharp eye for more commercial fiction: when the journalist Gerald Seymour sent him the manuscript of his first thriller, Harry’s Game, on spec, Sissons sent him a crate of champagne, stating that the book would be a bestseller; he was right.
Sissons’s real passion, however, was history. He represented Simon Schama, for whom he secured a record-breaking £3 million book and television deal in 2002, and Max Hastings, whose success Sissons declared to be particularly admirable because he had “made such a hash” of his education.
His political clients included Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Paddy Ashdown, but he was particularly favoured by the big beasts of the Conservative Party. After taking on Sir Edward Heath in the 1990s he finally coaxed the former prime minister’s long-promised autobiography from him, and also represented Nigel Lawson (as the author of both memoirs and dieting guides), Kenneth Baker, Michael Heseltine and William and Ffion Hague.
He enjoyed a particularly fruitful relationship with Alan Clark, and after his death persuaded his widow Jane that his early diaries should be published. He also steered Louise Bagshawe (the future Tory MP Louise Mensch) to success as a writer of “bonkbusters”.
Sissons was careful in choosing clients, however, and in 2002 revealed that he had turned down the manuscript of a thriller by the Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith because it was too bad to publish. The book was later taken on by another agent and published to universal derision.
He sold Chris Patten’s memoir of his years as governor of Hong Kong to Harpercollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and after the firm dropped the book Sissons went to the media to point out that Murdoch had been worried that his Chinese business interests might be affected by Patten’s criticisms of the Chinese government. Murdoch was forced to make a public apology to Patten, which included a sour aside about Sissons’s exploitation of the affair for publicity. In the press Sissons was a frequent and acerbic commentator on the publishing industry, which he saw as both unbusinesslike and unimaginative.
He was always seeking new ways to improve the lot of his clients. In 1978 he founded the Association of Authors’ Agents, which his fellow agent Giles Gordon claimed had been founded principally to stop its members from stealing each other’s clients. Despite his eminence and somewhat patrician air, Sissons was highly approachable, and would offer practical help and advice to aspiring authors even if he had chosen not to represent them.
In 1993 he made a memorable defence of hunting on Radio 4’s The
Moral Maze, declaring that “if you have been hunting, it is quite clear that the fox is in control of the agenda”. The same year he complained in The
Daily Telegraph that extremist animal rights activists had “infiltrated” the council of the RSPCA; with the help of the newspaper’s lawyers he saw off subsequent threats of legal action, but also received threats against his life. Keen on new technology, he enjoyed claiming to be one of the first people to receive a death threat by email.
In 1995 he founded the Countryside Movement, later absorbed into the Countryside Alliance, and in 2001 he edited a collection of essays, A
Countryside for All, commissioned by the Social Market Foundation, the Left-wing think tank, which dropped the book when they discovered it to be excoriatingly critical of the Blair government’s rural policies.
In 2003 Sissons made one of the few calls to civil disobedience ever to be published in the Telegraph, calling for a hunting ban to be met with “a wide spectrum of action … highly disruptive to appropriate targets”; he was met with an enthusiastic response on the Letters page. In the run-up to the introduction of the Hunting Act 2004 he lectured around the country, although he missed some key events after being kicked by a horse while out with the Old Berks Hunt.
The son of Captain TEB Sissons and his wife Marjorie (née Shepherd), Thomas Michael Beswick Sissons was born on October 13 1934 in Hull, where the family paintmaking business, Sissons Brothers, had been established in the 18th century. Michael seemed destined to go into the family firm, but his father and grandfather were both killed early in the Second World War and the business was already rudderless by the time the factory was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1941.
He was educated at Winchester College and did National Service with the 13th/18th Royal Hussars before reading History at Exeter College, Oxford, where he was editor of Cherwell. He lectured in History at Tulane University in New Orleans for a year and on his return tried his hand at journalism, but found his métier when, in 1959, he went to work for AD Peters, a German immigrant who had founded his eponymous literary agency in 1924. Sissons took over the business shortly before Peters’s death in 1973.
In 1985 Sissons and a group of like-minded friends – including his fellow agent Ed Victor and the publishers Carmen Callil and Liz Calder – founded the Groucho Club as an alternative to the traditional London gentlemen’s club. In 2004 his daughter Maia and her fiancé were the first people to be married at the Groucho.
Sissons was a reforming chairman of MCC’S marketing and public affairs sub-committee in the 1990s, persuading the club to open the Long Room at Lord’s to the public and lobbying the membership to allow women to join, an ambition finally achieved in 1998.
He continued to work at PFD – which CSS Stellar sold to a consortium chaired by the journalist Andrew Neil in 2008 – to the end of his life. He spent much of his time latterly inveighing against Brexit, and earlier this year wrote to The Times denouncing Boris Johnson as a “gassy fraud”.
Michael Sissons married first, in 1960, Nicola Ann Fowler, with whom he had a son and a daughter; they divorced in 1974 and later that year he married, secondly, Ilze Kadegis, the former wife of the celebrity drug smuggler Howard Marks. Shortly after their divorce in 1992 he married his third wife, Serena Palmer, who survives him with the son and daughter of his first marriage and two daughters of his second.