Gyles Brandreth’s Diary

Like Harold Macmillan, my hero, I go to bed with a Trollope

All my life, I have been making friends with characters I have met in books.

When I was very small, I spent hours chatting with the Saucepan Man from Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. As a teenager, I read Henry Fielding’s great picaresque novel Joseph Andrews, and came to regard Joseph’s goodhearted travelling companion, Parson Adams, almost as a father.

And now, embarking on my eighth decade and finding myself reading his diaries for the first time, I have made a new best friend – and quite an unlikely one: the former prime minister Harold Macmillan.

I met him once. In the late 1960s, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford (I know I should say, ‘When I was a student at uni’, but I am trying to use the language of the period), I was invited to a tea party at which Supermac (then the University’s Chancellor) was guest of honour. When I arrived, the great man was already there, seated by the fireplace. Our host instructed me to go over and introduce myself. I did as I was told and found the 75-year-old elder statesman with his eyes closed, fast asleep.

After 20 minutes, Macmillan stirred, smiled at me endearingly, allowed me to help him to his feet and tottered on his way, saying no more to me then than ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’.

Now, 50 years on, I am getting to know the man and I am loving him. I am discovering him through Volume One of his diaries, The Cabinet Years 1950-1957. He is my kind of political hero: ambitious, pragmatic, liberal-minded and generoushearted. He works hard and he plays hard. He finds all the time he needs for shooting and even more for reading. He can gobble up three or four major works of history in a weekend. When exhausted – which is quite often – he retreats to bed with a Trollope. ( Doctor Thorne is his favourite – mine now, too.)

Because he is so much my senior, I don’t expect any personal gossip. He does not mention his wife Dorothy’s long affair with his parliamentary colleague Bob Boothby, but his many grandchildren are clearly the delight of his life. He gives me exactly what I want in the friendship of an older man of distinction: he treats me as if I were his equal and opens the window onto a world I wish I’d known.

He has just been telling me about the day he had lunch at Buck’s Club with Winston Churchill, still Prime Minister, aged 80, in 1954: ‘A dozen oysters; cream soup; chicken pie; vanilla and strawberry ice. Moselle and brandy washed this down. I’m afraid I could not manage the soup or the ice-cream.’

The other day, for the first time in years, I went to the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square.

It was a good experience. There’s a large, inviting bar in the basement; a small theatre bookshop on the first floor; and upstairs, in the studio space, I saw three young actresses (no, I’m not going to say ‘three female actors’) in a dazzling piece of new writing by Miriam Battye called Scenes with girls. It has all the fizz and contemporaneity of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the play that in 1956 made the Royal Court famous.

Battye’s play is a well-constructed post-coming-of-age drama about a trio of 24-year-olds, so there is plenty of talk of sex and much bad language. It’s thought-provoking, but not disturbing. The only disturbing element of the whole experience was the email from the theatre that arrived on the morning of my visit. Under the heading ‘Emotive Content’, I was advised, ‘We generally avoid giving too much away before you see the performance. However, if there are certain themes that you know would cause you extreme distress and you’d like to speak to one of the Royal Court team to find out more before your visit, you can call us.’ Well-intentioned, I know, but a tad worrying, too. If you are going to avoid extreme distress you are never going to be able to see King Lear.

Quite a few funerals so far this year (that’s life), and doubtless there are more to come, but for funeral arrival of the year the palm already goes to the actor, director, raconteur and motorbike enthusiast Nicky Henson. At his own request, his coffin arrived at Mortlake Crematorium in a motorcycle sidecar. We cheered so loudly that the sidecar was obliged to take a second lap of honour before the funeral could begin. Nicky could lift your spirits right to the end.

Gyles is touring his Break a Leg! oneman show until July. Details at www.gylesbrandreth.net/2020-tour