Cliff James says Peter Ball, the former Bishop of Lewes and of Gloucester, had a ‘terrible power’ over those he abused

This feature first appeared in The Sunday Times

Cliff James decided to speak out after his friend Neil Todd committed suicide. In 2012 Sussex police had reopened a historic investigation into Peter Ball, the former Bishop of Lewes and of Gloucester and the most senior Church of England figure to face claims of child abuse. Todd, who like James had been abused by Ball as a teenager in the early 1990s, killed himself shortly after Ball was arrested.

“He never had closure,” says James, speaking publicly for the first time. “He never got over it. And he might have if only the church had investigated things properly at the time and not tried to cover everything up.”

Last week 83-year-old Ball changed his plea at the last minute and admitted to offences against 18 teenagers and young men between 1977 and 1992. Under a deal struck with prosecutors to avoid a trial, he will not face charges for the two most serious counts against two boys aged 12 or 13 and 15.

The extent to which the Church of England attempted to protect itself from scrutiny and scandal over the case can now be reported. It has emerged that when Todd first told police about the abuse in 1993, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, sought assurances from the Crown Prosecution Service that Ball would escape with a caution.

“That was unforgivable. Carey should be ashamed,” says James. The late Bishop of Chichester, Eric Kemp, reportedly told Ball to “stop inviting young men” to his house. But when Kemp wrote his memoirs, he described the boys who spoke out about their abuse as “mischief-makers”.

“Like Carey, Kemp’s job as a Christian was to protect the vulnerable,” says James.

“But they only wanted to protect powerful people in the church.”

James was 17 in 1991 when he learnt of an unofficial “youth scheme” developed by Ball, a close friend of the Prince of Wales. The “bishop’s young men” spent a year living with the cleric, doing chores and quasi-monastic work in his opulent house in East Sussex.

“I thought if I became a monk then nobody would ask me when I was going to get married,” says James, who knew he was gay but was too ashamed to act on his feelings. His father attended National Front marches, sometimes taking his son with him.

Ball’s scheme seemed the perfect way out. The bishop, who enjoyed wearing a medieval monastic habit, had taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity. James says he lived by none of them: “Ball was an abuser and hypocrite.”

James could not have known that the bishop had engineered his programme to molest dozens of young people. He says he had concerns as early as the first interview, when Ball told him that he would have to have cold showers every morning, supervised by the bishop. “He wouldn’t give way on that,” says James. “I’d never been naked in front of another person and it really scared me.”

But Ball promised him that he might one day become a saint if he did as he was told. The showers duly took place and gradually, says James, the “mind games and manipulation” increased, leading to beatings, always under the guise of religion, and increasingly sexual demands.

“He told me that Christ was humiliated in the Garden of Gethsemane and that entering into the same suffering would bring me closer to God,” says James.

“I would offer to kneel and pray naked in thorns and nettles instead of doing anything sexual with the bishop, but it was never enough. He had a terrible power over all of us.”

After months of abuse James confronted Ball: “He physically recoiled from me: I think he was terrified I might speak to someone. He said he was worried about it all getting into the papers and he kept saying that everything had been consensual.”

Ball promised he would never behave like that again. But shortly after James left the scheme, Todd joined it. “He suffered even worse before he went to the police,” says James.

The disgraced Ball went to live in a large house in Somerset lent to him by Prince Charles. He continued working in the church until 2010 and read the homily at the funeral of the father of Camilla Parker Bowles in 2006.

In the aftermath of his ordeal James abandoned religion and later worked for the British Humanist Association. Surprisingly, he does not want to see Ball imprisoned at the sentencing next month.

“What would it achieve?” he asks. “He’s a frail old man. No one is entirely bad or good: he just had a screwed-up sexuality that was enmeshed in religion. I’m moving forwards now — I just regret that Neil will never have that chance.”

‘Harry’ in London, wearing the uniform of his Kurdish militia

This feature first appeared in The Sunday Times

The fireworks sounded like gunfire. “I froze,” says a man who has asked to be called “Harry”. “I felt no fear, just a surge of adrenaline. There was nothing I wanted more that moment than to be back in Syria, fighting with my friends.”

The 28-year-old had recently returned to Britain after spending six months on the front line against Isis. Revolted by the group’s barbarism, and exasperated with what he sees as the British government’s inadequate response to the threat, he left a comfortable job last December to join the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia.

Softly spoken and passionate about the Kurdish cause, Harry had no military training and his parents believed he was miles from the fighting.

“I was on the phone to my mother one day and heard a mortar whistling overhead,” says the former public schoolboy. “I quickly said, ‘I’m running out of signal, I’ll talk to you soon,’ and hung up before it exploded. Whenever I spoke to them, even on the front line, I’d chat as if I was going down the shops.”

Allowing himself to be captured, he says, was never an option: “Isis would torture me, cut off my head and film it for propaganda.” So he always carried grenades.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this because it will upset my family,” he says, sitting in the tiny London house he shares with his brothers.

“I promised myself that if I was shot in the spine, say, and unable to walk, with the Islamic State coming to capture me, I would shout, ‘Please don’t hurt me, I’m an American.’ I would let them get close, then pull the pin and kill us all.”

That sounds a bit Rambo-ish, but Harry comes across as modest and intellectual. He has stood as a Tory councillor and was working in finance until last year. He wears glasses and a Sloaney blue shirt
until the photographer makes him
put on his uniform.

Tweeting under the nom de guerre Macer Gifford, Harry is one of perhaps 100 westerners who have gone to fight Isis in Syria and Iraq.

In his tabur — or unit — of 40 soldiers of both sexes, he fought alongside Americans, Canadians, Germans and Portuguese as well as Kurds, but also says he met people from Ireland, France, Australia, New Zealand, Greece and Estonia.

Most are ex-military and perhaps not all are as motivated as Harry by Kurdish politics and notions of good and evil. Some of them just really like fighting. Against them are massed the 20,000 or so foreign militants who have joined the self-proclaimed caliphate and the might of the richest terrorist group on earth.

This time last year he was working as a currency broker, with a job lined up at a leading bank in the City.

“I was sitting at my desk,” says Harry, “watching Isis’s videos and realising that my government was failing to do anything, reading what these people were doing to the Yazidis, learning about the sex slaves, the butchery.

“I saw there was no possibility of negotiating. You had to use force.”

He had a girlfriend and planned to
buy a flat. But the relationship ended: “She was determined to make me
stay — it was one of the sacrifices
I had to make.”

Harry considered working for a charity, but then learnt that the YPG was calling for foreign volunteers. He contacted the group on Facebook and within a few weeks was on a plane to Istanbul. Someone brought him to a safe house and then smuggled him
into Syria on New Year’s Eve. After a fortnight’s training, he was posted to the front line.

“I’m not a soldier, but I believed I could support the Kurds fighting for peace and democracy, and then raise awareness back home,” he says. “Our government needs to do so much more for these people — we could win this war without a single British boot on the ground.”

Harry says he took part in at least a dozen gun battles, across two big operations, with the result that an area of Syria the size of Wales was liberated from Isis control. He claims to have seen more than 1,000 Isis fighters killed as well as many of his friends, including the Briton Konstandinos Erik Scurfield; Harry shook Scurfield’s hand the day before he died.

A television crew of former British soldiers filmed one bloody battle and their gripping footage helps to corroborate his story. One night, Harry’s tabur attacked a village called Tel Nasri. He found himself pinned down in a field, bullets flying over his head.

“I could hear Isis fighters gleefully yelling,” he says. “They knew they were going to kill dozens of us. I was firing back but they were coming from the front and on both sides. I’ve never been closer to death.

“Then they brought out a tank, and the fire slackened just enough for us to run away. They were jeering, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. It was humiliating.

“A couple of weeks later, though, we retook the village, and I finally managed to get some body armour.”

Harry appears to have acquitted himself well in battle and says he was promoted to lead a group of foreigners that included former American marines.

“I’m possibly more of a diplomat than the average soldier,” he says. “A lot of Kurds grew to like me.”

His parents learnt the truth only when he returned. “They believe in the Kurdish cause as much as I do. I hope they’re proud. But of course they worry, and I don’t think they’ll ever completely forgive me.”

He was questioned at home by counterterrorism police and could in theory have faced prosecution for travelling to Syria. But for now, the British security services appear to be quietly ignoring volunteers such as Harry.

Many people, I say to him, would argue that Britons can’t fly off to fight in whatever war they fancy. If you want to fight for your country and its values then join the army.

“The army is stuck in barracks in the UK,” he says. “They are desperate to fight.”

Whether they do so or not is a political decision, I say, adding that it has to be, because only then can the British people help to determine actions taken in their name.

“But the government is simply avoiding the Middle East,” he replies. “Cameron is more concerned with domestic politics. The Islamic State is exceptional: I would never take up arms against any other country or fight in any other conflict.

“This is not a Syrian civil war, it’s not even a religious war — it’s a war against fascism.”

He says he plans to return to Syria within months, and he seems unconcerned at the prospect of becoming a target at home before he goes.

“These people deal in fear,” he says. “You can’t give in to that. It’ll be hard for them to find me, and I let my photograph be published only because it helps get the message across.

“Anyone who comes into my house is going to receive a very hard time.”

On November 25, 2010, six months into government, David Cameron assembled a large group of journalists and commentators in the Treasury for a speech on national happiness. Flanking the prime minister was John Helliwell, a Canadian economist who has previously exhorted policy makers to sing, claiming a scientific justification, If You’re Happy and You Know it, Clap Your Hands at the start of meetings. David Halpern, the author of this intriguing book on a “quiet revolution” working through British politics, reveals that he stopped Helliwell from asking Cameron to croon just hours before the speech. “I apologise to posterity for this YouTube sensation that never was,” he writes.

Halpern is the director of Cameron’s elite Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) — also known as the Nudge Unit — which has brought an understanding of psychology to policy-making, communication with the electorate and, it turns out, the government’s ability to increase our contentment. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge (2009) outlined the theory: Halpern details its application in British politics.

Nudging, which recognises that humans are nowhere near as rational as traditional economic models have assumed, appears to have been a success of modern government. Few predicted this. As Halpern, a former Cambridge psychologist and sociologist, says: “It was a high-risk programme: a small team; a new idea [and] a crazy challenge”: to deliver at least a tenfold return within two years. Expecting or willing it to fail were “parliament; the 70,000 civil servants around Whitehall; 450,000 civil servants across the UK, 5m public servants; and of course the media and public”. Worse, one of its key supporters was Steve Hilton, Cameron’s controversial “blue-sky guru” and a man with enemies in cabinet and the civil service.

However, Halpern claims that nudging has, among other things, led to tens of millions of pounds in tax being collected that would have otherwise remained unpaid. The secret was for HMRC to change the wording of its letters so that recipients were told most people in their area had already paid. This affected what Halpern calls the “social” aspect of our subconscious, which means that, generally, we aim to follow our neighbours. He claims that the rewording led to a 16% increase in payment, at negligible cost.

Interestingly, people with the largest 1% of unpaid tax bills (those owing at least £30,000 a year) were most likely to pay after reading: “Not paying tax means we all lose out on vital public services like the NHS, roads and schools.” Realising that their contribution could pay for a teacher or nurse’s salary seems to have jolted the rich into getting out their chequebooks.

Nudging’s other successes include: 100,000 additional organ donors signing up to the national register each year; 20% more people considering changing energy provider, increasing the efficiency of the privatised market; a doubling in the number of army applicants; and more than 5m British workers saving for a pension. The key has often been to “remove friction”: it turns out that people will have their homes insulated if it comes with loft-clearance, irrespective of cost. Subsidies and tax-break proved insufficient: the hassle mattered more than the money.

Nudging, it seems, is here to stay. The BIT employs many more people than it did five years ago, and a sceptical public and press have been largely convinced. But as a century of economics-based policy-making is reconsidered, a new question surfaces. Where else are we and our leaders getting human nature wrong?

Silvio Berlusconi and Tony and Cherie Blair, Sardinia, 2004

David Cameron on a Cornish beach

The Milibeard

Putin descending into the Black Sea

The image that may best distil Tony Blair shows him grinning beside Silvio Berlusconi in 2004. The then Italian prime minister had invited Blair to his 68-room Sardinian bunga-bunga palace, which features a manmade volcano and is reportedly being sold to Saudi Arabia’s royal family for £350m.

Berlusconi held an estival party at which a fireworks display scribbled “Viva Tony!” in the night sky; the Blairs “clapped enthusiastically” at the sight. Cherie Booth, a leading human rights lawyer, later said it was her best-ever holiday. In subsequent years, further summer photographs emerged of TB strumming his guitar at Cliff Richard’s Barbadian villa: all utterly Blair.

The holiday snaps of semi-naked world leaders betray the true identities of the politicians. Invariably they amplify what we had already suspected: Angela Merkel hiking Teutonically through Italy; Obama and family promenading photogenically in the Hawaiian surf; Nicolas Sarkozy on Cap Nègre, stretched and de-lovehandled by photo-editing software: you could have predicted all of them.

Once a year, from behind the trust-me summit suits and shirts, emerge the wobbling moobs, outy belly buttons and weirdly shaped nipples of the political elite. Which brings us to Vladimir Putin, who has turned his holiday snaps into a uniquely smug and homoerotic version of the round-robin Christmas letter.

This year Dr Evil boarded a bathyscaph to examine an ancient shipwreck in the Black Sea off freshly annexed Crimea. His previous photo ops have included tranquillising a siberian or amur tiger in a nature reserve (“borrowed” from a zoo hundreds of miles away and later said to have died in the ordeal), piloting a hang-glider to encourage cranes to fly south, extinguishing wildfires and, most memorably, riding a horse while shirtless.

“The terrible thing is that Putin does all this physical stuff, but when he stands next to the other world leaders he looks like a shrimp,” says the commentator Peter York.

“Cameron might seem a bit silly or podgy on the beach, but he doesn’t take anything like the same level of risk.”

Ah, yes. This year our prime minister couldn’t munch a small cylinder of easyJet paprika Pringles without being filmed by a fellow passenger, Ashleigh, 16. (“I found the experience humbling,” she revealed.) Like most Conservatives, the chillaxer-in-chief often does well from holiday photos: both the staged “Dos cervezas, por favor” ones and the less forgiving telephoto shots.

Two years ago Cameron even managed to change publicly into his swimming trunks by using a deft towel-as-makeshift-beach-hut manoeuvre and looking relatively patrician throughout.

“Semi-upper-class people like him have quite a bit of confidence about that sort of thing,” claims York.

Labour leaders, however, often struggle. Gordon “Arctic Monkeys” Brown was simply lost during the parliamentary recess. When photographers arrived to record the then prime minister’s Suffolk “holiday” of 2008, they found that his solitary concession to leisure had been to swap his dark jacket for a beige one. Neil Kinnock couldn’t walk along a beach without falling into the sea.

Fraught with questions of class and personality, leaders’ holiday pictures can easily destroy them. And they are politically fraught: when The Sun ran its notorious “Bumdestag” headline beside a swimming-pool shot of Merkel, it prompted a minor diplomatic row. These pictures are supremely difficult to spin, which is why American politicians — typically more comfortable in their evenly bronzed skin — are better at the photo ops than British ones.

George W Bush, for example, hauling cedarwood at his Texas ranch, Hillary Clinton papped while reading a book on a Caribbean beach, Obama fist-bumping on the golf course — each exudes a certain stylish continuity. The unspoken holiday photo ambition of all American legislators is to exude the easy glamour of JFK on a yacht with Jackie.

This year saw a late entry from Ed Miliband, who emerged for a selfie at Brisbane airport sporting a Jeremy Corbyn-esque “milibeard”. This should be removed at once: the last thing voters want to see in a politician’s summer photo is any hair in the wrong places.

This first appeared in the Culture section of The Sunday Times

In the early days of the internet, security was barely a concern. Today, more than 3bn people are online and that vast space is becoming less and less safe. The central message of this alarming book is that “our dependence on computers is growing faster than our ability to forestall attackers”.

Edward Lucas, a senior editor at The Economist, makes a convincing case that hacking will become increasingly common, not least thanks to the expanding “internet of things”. Fridges and televisions have already, it turns out, sent nearly 1m spam emails. Last year’s attack on Sony Pictures, which saw at least five films leaked, plus the personal information of almost 50,000 current and former employees, might merely be a taste of what is coming.

Lucas highlights the widening disparity between security measures in the real world and their piecemeal equivalents online. Criminals take up to 20% of the $3 trillion online economy: if a physical industry were being exploited like this, there would be uproar. “In all other walks of life we trade off freedom, security and convenience,” Lucas writes. “Our dealings with computers and networks should be no different.”

This book will thus delight the intelligence agencies, plaudits from whom bedeck the jacket. Those who champion the internet’s lawlessness, for noble or nefarious purposes, will not relish its call for constraint.

Spot the difference

This feature first appeared in The Sunday Times

It’s all thanks to a torso. When Aidan Turner stripped to his brown breeches and scythed a Cornish field in the television series Poldark, he prompted a flurry on social media. Rippling of abdomen, tufty of chest hair, baby-oiled and mahogany, flashing his big bendy knife on a stick, Turner double-handedly sparked a scything revival.

Last week it was suggested that Prince Charles, too, has considered scything à la Poldark. (The prince was in Romania, admiring the burly men there who still swoosh them through the fields.)

And a couple of weeks ago more than 50 people, bored with ride-ons and Victas, travelled to Walthamstow Marshes to learn how to scythe. This is near Hackney, east London, one of the most ethnically diverse places in Britain, and the enthusiasts reportedly included young families, Germans, Indians, passing Poles (often expert scythers) — and, most curiously, bearded urban hipsters.

And so I find myself in a Berkshire meadow, barefoot, green-shorted, moobishly un-Poldarkian, trying not to amputate my feet.

“Do it right and it’s like tai chi,” moos Clive Leeke, professional scyther and “countryside conservation contractor”.

“Bend your legs and twist your upper body. That actor feller was doing it all wrong. The blade never goes above the waist. Scything is gentle, rhythmic, relaxing — not hacking angrily at the grass.” Leeke twirls in elegant semi-circles; the clover falls. I step back.

Beth Tilston is another scything expert. “I’ll happily teach you,” she said when I called her, “although I’m 39 weeks pregnant.” I undertook a mental risk assessment and declined.

Are you going to teach your baby to scythe, I asked.

“Ooh, not before it’s five years old.”

Tilston added that you should properly scythe barefoot. So when I meet Leeke, I fling my shoes off and immediately stand on a nettle.

Leeke learnt to scythe seven years ago after a man who imports the tools told him that demand had surged. Until late 2010 almost nobody typed “scything” into Google. Then suddenly plenty of people did, with spikes whenever Poldark was on or gardening programmes got excited about it. Several local authorities have now abandoned strimmers for scythes. The blade is cheap, lasts a lifetime, and is more accurate and nimble than a lawnmower, less expensive to maintain and almost silent.

But not entirely so. When I at last find the knack, after much soily, hopeless slashing, it’s the sound that hypnotises. Drawing a scythe true through the grass, its whetted blade glinting upwards, makes a delightfully tinny whoosh. The muggy summer air grows thick with chlorophyll and the scent of hay. The act turns meditative.

I learn with some surprise that it’s actually quite hard to chop your own feet off. Hand injuries are most common, caused when people “peen” or sharpen the blade. And other people are more at risk. “You could easily take someone else’s foot,” Leeke hoots, “although I haven’t seen it happen yet.”

Perhaps the best thing about the scythe is the way that it works alongside nature instead of against it. Since the 1930s Britain has lost 97% of its wildflower meadows: this is thought to be one of the main reasons bee populations have collapsed. The meadows have typically been replaced by intensive, often monocrop farms, with the result that 60% of native British wildlife species are now in decline and one in 10 is heading towards extinction. Scything, because it cuts grass longer than a strimmer, is kinder to tim’rous beasties.

Anyway, this is the scythe’s continent. Africans wield the machete, which is better for high grasses and jungle; in Asia they swish the disc-slipping sickle. To pull an English scythe — curvier and heavier than its counterpart across the Channel — is to feel a tactile connection to the agricultural history of these islands, to farm and sward and tepid cowpat squishing between the toes.

We are discovering as a society that many of the things we snatched for convenience and modernity are inferior to traditional methods and tools. Anyone can shunt a lawnmower or flick the switch on a microwave. Scything, like cooking, is a skill — and when you start, you usually fail. Ability confers satisfaction.

It had been only a few hours. But when I returned to the city I could still smell the sour English grass on my lightly muddied feet. My shoulders ached in contentment and I realised what the hipsters had discovered: the strange and fleeting peace you feel when you go to mow a meadow.

The Bridget Jones director Beeban Kidron wants children to have more rights online

This feature first appeared in The Sunday Times

What was the worst thing you did or said as a teenager? Does the memory make you blanch? Then how would you feel if its details pinged to the top of the search list whenever someone Googled your name?

Young people are sharing more and more of their lives online — and what happens on the internet tends to stay there. Every terrible haircut, rash opinion, venomous snippet of cyberbullying, sext, “nood” or lovelorn letter to Zayn Malik remains accessible in the misnamed cloud. For ever.

Wouldn’t it be great, some people wonder, if we could wipe away these embarrassments, or even (as one Minnesota dentist is presumably wishing) delete ourselves from the internet altogether? The 20-year-old SNP MP Mhairi Black once tweeted she “f****** hates” Celtic football club and, on another occasion, revealed she had “woken up beside half a can of Tennent’s … I call that a night”.

The chance to send toe-curlers such as these down the memory-hole is at the heart of iRights, five new guidelines for the digital world, pioneered by the cross-bench peer and Bridget Jones director Beeban Kidron. The initiative has been endorsed by the government, business leaders and children’s charities.

“I’m a middle-aged baroness with a bee in her bonnet,” says Kidron. She points out the inconsistency between real-world rules to protect young people — TV watersheds, film certificates, sex-shop licences — and the “Wild West” of the internet.

“We need,” she says, “a culture that delivers online what we already deliver offline. You wouldn’t chuck an 11-year-old into the street saying, ‘Go on, off to school’ without showing them where the zebra crossing was.”

As well as the right to delete or edit any digital content you have created, the iRights would allow children to know who owns their data; protect young people from “illegal practices” online; support them when they “disengage” from the net; and teach them to harness the technology.

Kidron decided to set out the iRights after making a 2012 documentary called InRealLife. For its opening scene, two 15-year-old boys described what they enjoyed in online porn. The words they used could not be printed in this newspaper: it was a conversation that brought home to some people how explicit porn had become and how easy it was to find.

She then embarked on a three-year tour of schools in Britain and around the world, during which, she claims, hundreds of young people told her about the negative impact that technology was having on their lives. “Perhaps their biggest anxiety online is the need to respond to everything,” she says. “It’s rude not to reply, but replying can then take over. Girls struggle with the representation of women and everything is sexualised. One young man said to me, ‘We’re just rats in the lab of Google.’”

The notion of the internet as lawless and ungovernable may indeed be on the wane. Last week, David Cameron announced more plans to restrict access to online pornography. In future, he said, porn sites hosted in Britain would need to have effective age-verification measures or face closure. (Britain hosts 7% of the world’s porn sites. There are no plans to enact similar legislation in America or Holland, which together host 86%.)

Some people have expressed doubts about the feasibility of implementing the first iRight. Tweets are retweeted; pictures are copied; a screenshot takes only an instant. Taking these down is difficult.

A 2011 study from the University of California, Berkeley found that 84% of 18- to 24-year-olds wanted the “right to be forgotten” enshrined in legislation. The EU law on the subject, which allows people to challenge unflattering articles, has been criticised amid concerns over free speech. Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, called it “deeply immoral”, while Index on Censorship said the ruling was “akin to marching into a library and forcing it to pulp books”.

Kidron insists that the “right to be forgotten” is different from what she is advocating — the right to delete data you have published yourself. She says it is easy to delete your content on Facebook but admits that Twitter, which is designed to disseminate information widely, would be a more difficult case.

After we met, I thought about the 15-year-olds in her film, who spoke so brazenly about their tastes in porn. What if they decided in a few years’ time that they regretted what they said and wanted to erase it? That is not an option to them; their children may one day watch the interview.

The YouTuber and BBC Radio 1 presenter Dan Howell, who at 24 has millions of online subscribers, told his audience recently it was important to “own” your digital past, not to shy away from it, and to accept it as part of who you were.

Until Google endorses the iRights, Kidron may find it difficult to enshrine an effective “right to remove”. But she is working with developers and hopes to shape the next WhatsApp or Facebook so it better serves the interests and welfare of young people. “There’s only one thing we know for sure,” she says. “Empires fall. So it’s worth investing in the future.”

Julie Nicholson says she will never get over her grief for Jenny (Julian Andrews)

Tuesday will mark a decade since four Islamists detonated homemade bombs on the London transport system, murdering 52 people and injuring more than 700. Julie Nicholson, whose 24-year-old daughter Jenny died at Edgware Road station while travelling to work, wrote a fraught and fluent book about the atrocity, Song for Jenny, which has just been adapted into a film starring Emily Watson.

Nicholson, who was a vicar in Bristol at the time of the attack, has agreed to discuss life after 7/7 in a restaurant near Tavistock Square, the scene of the final bombing. The anniversary weighs on the encounter. Nicholson speaks with priestly, measured warmth but barely touches her food or glass of white wine.

We are conditioned to look for redemption in tragedy, but neither the book nor its film suggests any. I wish I could write that Nicholson has somehow recovered — she hates the phrase “moved on” — but her life remains overshadowed and enveloped by bereavement.

On July 7, she says, “the staff at Edgware Road will secure an area for the families, put out fresh flowers and try to make everything as quiet as a busy Tube station can be”. She is looking forward to seeing, among other people, the man who found and covered Jenny’s body. “It preserved her dignity,” she says. “For me and our family that was an enormous gift.”

The victims’ families, she says, are “a club that nobody wants to be a member of”. Nicholson has grown close to Hazel Webb, whose daughter Laura died on the same train as Jenny.

“We’re part of a sisterhood: our friendship goes beyond what happened. There are some things we would only say to each other: the common bond of what it is to lose a child and to know that a part of you has gone with them.”

The murder upturned everything in Nicholson’s life. She admits with candour that she struggled to be a mother to her other children, Lizzie and Thomas. “Not only did they lose a sister,” she says, “but they lost their parents to grief.” The children were “knocked off course” by the attack: Thomas, at 27, has only recently started university.

Nicholson quit the priesthood a few months after the bombings, saying later she was “too hurt to carry out its functions . . . I could not have stood in front of a young couple and married them without thinking: you should be my daughter”.

Does she still pray? “It depends what you mean. I sometimes stand at the window gazing out with my thoughts — is that praying? But do I kneel down every morning and say, ‘God, hear my prayers’? No.”

Her marriage, too, ended soon after. Although both the film and the book imply that it was already struggling, Jenny’s death seems to have catalysed its collapse: “When something like that happens, it’s make or break — and for us it was break. I think there are statistics that show the number of marriages that survive something like this. I don’t believe many do.”

Has she had a relationship since? “My relationships have been about rebuilding and reconstructing my life and my energies have gone into renewing my relationship with Lizzie and Thomas. I’m not closed off to the idea, but I don’t feel the need to seek it out.”

I am left with the sense that in many ways Nicholson’s own life stopped that day. Faith, career and marriage all ended soon afterwards and for years after the bombings she would take the train from Bristol to London, travel to Edgware Road Tube station and stare into the tunnel where her daughter died.

She says she will never forgive Mohammad Sidique Khan, her daughter’s killer. How does she feel when she sees a picture of him today?

“There’s a moment in the film when Emily Watson, as me, throws a bottle of wine at the television screen when his face appears on it. I feel that I could still throw that wine.”

Early in our conversation, while discussing her writing and what it has brought her, I clumsily use the word “catharsis”. Nicholson interrupts: “I wouldn’t call it that. After catharsis there is a sense of renewal and I don’t feel renewed. I’m still grieving deeply. I will be until I take my last breath.”

James Fenton has run a prawn farm in the Philippines and been kidnapped by the IRA (Francesco Guidicini)

Two weeks ago, when James Fenton received the PEN Pinter prize for championing free speech, the judges said he had “spoken truth to power, forcefully, fearlessly and beautifully”.

They were right, but it’s hard to square those adverbs with the shy and rumpled figure hunched before me in a south London beer garden. He has a claim to be the best living English poet and the successor to WH Auden, but Fenton barely makes eye contact for the first half-hour of our interview. He only relaxes a little after drinking most of his second double gin and tonic. (“Fever-Tree, eh? Not seen that before.”)

Several questions — on Isis, why he gave away his TV, who he is having dinner with that evening and how often he sees his old friend Martin Amis, now that both live in New York — he dodges or nervously rebuffs. He talks so slowly and quietly that when I listen to my recording of our conversation, I have to speed it up and raise the volume to levels that would make most speakers unintelligible.

“Ah, that domed and sapient head!” wrote Christopher Hitchens, and Fenton’s baldness is indeed striking and headmasterly; the lisp and wonky British teeth confer a curious vulnerability. It takes an effort of will to recall what a swashbuckling life he has led. Now 66, he was raised by two aunts, having effectively lost both parents by his teens (mother died; clergyman father ran away with another woman). At Oxford, he shared a house with Hitchens and won the Newdigate prize for poetry, then they both worked for the New Statesman, where Amis was literary editor.

As a foreign correspondent in the lyrical mode, he rode the first North Vietnamese tank through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon and pilfered Imelda Marcos’s monogrammed towels in Manila. He lost “a lot of money” running a prawn farm in the Philippines and was kidnapped by the IRA in Belfast. His nine captors apparently voted on whether to shoot him — the vote was 5-4 against. For years, he was this paper’s theatre critic; meanwhile he wrote slim, sporadic volumes of mesmerising poetry.

Fenton scorns the 200 writers, including Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Joyce Carol Oates, who rebuked PEN, the writers’ association, in April for honouring the Parisian magazine Charlie Hebdo, at whose offices 12 people were killed by Islamist fanatics in January.

“I saw Martin [Amis] at the ceremony. He agreed that it was clear: if PEN hadn’t supported Charlie Hebdo you’d wonder what on earth PEN was for. I had less than sympathy for the position that the magazine was puerile — it had a right to be.”

He is in London to attend a workshop on an adaptation of Don Quixote he has written for the Royal Shakespeare Company. A cruel book, I say. “Oh yes,” he says. “Have you read Nabokov’s lectures on it? Very good fun. But [he] compares the number of combats Don Quixote wins to the number he loses and makes it about even.”

Poets aren’t meant to be rich; this one is. Fenton was once commissioned to write a libretto for Les Misérables, and though he never finished it, the deal he signed granted him 0.5% of box-office receipts, which have so far exceeded £1.5bn. He earned enough to buy a huge run-down property outside Oxford — Ian McEwan nicknamed it “Scene-of-the-Crime Farm” and said it was somewhere that “a body might be found in an advanced state of decomposition”. Fenton became an obsessive and extravagant gardener, filling its acres with rare orchids and at least 250 varieties of rose.

Yet he and his partner, the writer Darryl Pinckney, moved to New York five years ago “at my insistence”, Fenton says. They have been gradually renovating a mansion in Harlem, one of the biggest in Manhattan and originally built for the Arm & Hammer mogul John Dwight. What do the Harlem locals make of a mixed-race gay relationship, I ask.

“Well, at the end of our street there’s a crazy church that puts up signs saying: ‘Get the sodomites out,’ ” he says. “You might think that’s somewhat offensive, but I’ve never felt threatened by it.”

He and Pinckney have faced “back talk” and “mumblings”, he says, “but not necessarily from African-Americans. It might well come from a West Indian.”

What do they say? He pauses and then whispers: “Oh, you know: ‘Faggots go home. You’re not welcome here.’ But it’s not the general attitude — America has changed.” He wouldn’t walk down the street holding hands with Pinckney, because, “We’ve been together for 25 years. That demonstrative behaviour might have occurred before, but not today.”

He say they will marry for “legal reasons: tax, property and so on”, but not for love. “It’s a generational thing. We both felt that we belonged to a kind of bohemia, and that thoroughly bourgeois settling-down was not what we signed up for.”

I say it’s interesting that many in his set — Hitchens, Amis, Salman Rushdie — left for America but continue to comment on Englishness from abroad.

“It’s true we did, but for different reasons. Christopher wanted to be Alexander Cockburn [the Scottish-born journalist and gadfly of The Nation magazine]. He found exactly that kind of fame. Martin’s wife is American. Salman had his reasons.”

By the time he died in 2011, Hitchens was one of the world’s most famous atheists. “I had probably been one for longer and in a more considered way than he had,” says Fenton, and laughs. “It was very real to Christopher when he discovered that his mother had been Jewish and that therefore he was too. It had an explicatory significance: he’d always had a recurring dream about Judaism. If someone told me my mother had been Jewish I’d think it was interesting, but it wouldn’t change me.”

Fenton is getting nervous and fidgety by now, and the interview ends on a strange note. I mention that I was reading Auden that morning and rediscovered The Platonic Blow — his most explicit gay poem. Fenton looks terrified.

“My goodness, where were you reading that?” he cries. Online, I say. “Yes, well, it’s the sort of thing that is found online,” he sniffs. “I guess I’m not too happy about it — it was a rather peculiar thing to have done. Anyway, I’m not going to start criticising Auden. Where’s the photographer?” He arrives as if on cue and this brilliant man seems relieved that our time is up.

Konika Dhar (Ray Wells)

A ghosted interview with Konika Dhar, whose brother, born Siddharta, recently fled Britain to join Isis. This feature first appeared in The Sunday Times

Last week a jihadist living under the self-proclaimed Islamic State published a 46-page “brief guide” to the region. He described the food, weather and transport there, as well as his narrow escapes from missile attacks and drone strikes. The writer finished with a promise to “spill blood” in London, Paris and Washington: his aim was to encourage English-speaking Muslims to join the “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq.

The name on the cover is Abu Rumaysah al Britani. But I will always know that man as my older brother, Sid. I am horrified by the violence he espouses today. You may have seen a photograph he tweeted last November in which he was holding his newborn son in his left arm and wielding a Kalashnikov rifle in his right.

I cannot begin to describe the mixture of horror and shock I felt when I saw that image on my phone. Until that moment our family had no idea that Sid had fled Britain, where he had been known to the security services, and gone to live under the barbarism and savagery of Isis.

I keep wondering where this snake has come from: to me, Sid is still a teddy bear. In my happiest memories he isn’t a Muslim at all. I cherish the recollection of sitting with him on the living-room floor at our family home in north London one Christmas. Sid must have been about 14 and my sister and I had painted each of his nails a different colour. I remember him looking at his fingers and laughing. “Now I see why girls like to get their nails done,” he said. I am now 28 and Sid is three years older: the memory feels like a lifetime ago.

Our parents were born in India and came to Britain when they were children. We respected our Hindu heritage and observed its traditions, but we were not extremely religious. Sid, whose full name is Siddhartha, was a good basketball player and supported Arsenal football club. He listened to Linkin Park and Nirvana.

Then, when Sid was 16, our father died at the age of 46. I’ve wondered sometimes if what happened later could have been partly because he lacked a male role model after Dad died. Sid had a wide group of friends from different backgrounds, but he began seeing more of one Muslim friend in particular. Mizanur Rahman was the son of Muslim Bangladeshi immigrants; Sid had known him since childhood.

I later learnt that Rahman would say things to my brother such as: “We can die at any time. There is no point in delaying converting. Only Muslims can go to paradise.” I believe he put pressure on my brother to convert to Islam.

The process was so gradual. It crept up on all of us until it seemed impossible to stop. Slowly, Sid changed his appearance. He grew a beard and began dressing differently. One by one, he stopped seeing his non-Muslim friends and then even those Muslim ones who were not sufficiently devout.

Siddharta Dhar, aka Abu Rumaysah al-Britani, poses with his newborn son in Isis-controlled Syria

We only knew for sure that he had converted when our mother received a telephone call one day in 2002. Sid, then 19, had been arrested at a pro-Palestinian demonstration. When Mum picked him up from the police station he told her that he was now a Muslim and had taken the name Saif al-Islam, which means “sword of Islam”. But he assured her that he wasn’t involved in radical religion. We were worried about the arrest, of course, but we were a liberal family. Why shouldn’t Sid become a Muslim if he wanted to?

Soon his religion seemed to take over his life. When we were younger, Sid would sometimes tease me for not wearing trendy-enough clothes. After he converted, he became obsessed with telling me to dress more modestly. It happened so often that eventually I stopped listening. He upset my mother terribly by refusing to eat her food. His greatest wish, he told us, was that we would convert to Islam. The worst moment was when he told us that our father was in hell because he had died a non-Muslim.

I hoped that becoming a father himself might change Sid — and it seemed to at first. He had married a Muslim named Aisha in 2006 and they had their first child, Rumaysah, two years later. Abu Rumaysah means “father of Rumaysah”: I only learnt about Sid’s new name when I saw that picture last November.

I know it sounds strange but none of us knew how radical he had become. He virtually stopped coming to see us. He told us almost nothing of what he was doing and we had no idea whom he was seeing or what groups he might have been a member of.

After I saw the picture and realised that he had gone to Syria, I searched his new name online. I discovered that the internet was full of videos of him, that he had appeared on Channel 4, Al Jazeera, the BBC and networks promoting radical Islamist views. He had been arrested several times and was a known associate of the radical cleric Anjem Choudary.

One video I found online had been broadcast shortly after the beheading of James Foley in Syria last year. The American network CBS featured “Abu Rumaysah” in a news story about Islamism in London. Sid told the female presenter that he wanted to see sharia established in the UK and that adulterers should be stoned to death and he ordered her to cover up just as he had previously told me, my sister and our mother to wear the burqa.

The video showed him “patrolling” an east London park with two associates at night-time, telling people off for drinking alcohol and other supposedly un-Islamic activities.

I just couldn’t believe what I saw. He looked and sounded completely different. I realised that in cutting himself off from our family, he had been leading a double life for years.

Last September Sid was arrested with eight other people as part of an investigation into a banned group named al-Muhajiroun. I now know this was his sixth arrest in the past few years. One of his bail conditions was that he surrender his passport to the authorities, but he never did that. Instead, within 24 hours, Sid took his four children and pregnant wife on a ferry to Calais and then flew from France to Turkey. He must have then crossed over the border into Syria.

My mother has received a short message from him confirming that he is living in Islamic State and saying that he is happy, but otherwise we have heard nothing from him. Some people might say that I and my family were somehow to blame for Sid’s departure. But he had shut himself away from us and become almost impossible to speak to. After his conversion he told us next to nothing about his life.

I used to be a bubbly, outgoing person: this experience has left me feeling isolated from other people. I always feel I have to explain Sid’s actions to them. And I feel terribly guilty. The same thoughts echo round my mind: whether I or someone else could have intervened, talked to Sid and tried to make him see reason. He made it so difficult for any of us to speak to him but I wish I had been firmer with him. I will never stop blaming myself for what has happened.

What I want to say to my brother is this: the person I see in that photograph and those videos is not really you. You never took my advice when we were children, but please take it today. Live peacefully.

As told to Oliver Thring

Danny Boyle (Paul Cooper)

This interview first appeared in The Sunday Times

How did Danny Boyle do it? How did the short, wiry, Yoda-faced son of a “hardcore socialist” Irish labourer and hairdresser, who grew up on a toof Lancastrian council estate and avoided entering the seminary by a cassock’s tassel, become a giant of Hollywood, an Oscar winner, a millionaire maybe hundreds of times over and arguably Britain’s greatest living director?

“Well,” says the 58-year-old, sitting in an empty cinema, “I’m not shoowah.” The accent remains as dense as parkin: in every respect Boyle has kept himself blissfully un-Americanised. His manner is intense, taut: he uses an actor’s tricks of volume and movement to draw you in.

“I haven’t really broken Hollywood. Ridley Scott came from a similar background to me and he can make whatever he wants using huge money, the whole system.”

This committed leftie, who refused a knighthood after exultantly staging the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, makes a concerted effort not to seem aloof. “I’m delighted not to own a yacht, nor wish to own one,” he proles.

He still lives in an edgy bit of east London and although he never discusses his personal life in interviews, he had a relationship with the actress Rosario Dawson. (It was said to have ended badly: they reportedly didn’t speak to each other during the junket for his 2013 film, Trance.) He has three twentysomething children with the casting director Gail Stevens.

You don’t really seem to have a Hollywood ego, I say to him. He looks at me with quizzical suspicion. Or at least, I add, you manage to suppress it.

“That’s more accurate.”

And, charismatic and likeable though he surely is, I do catch glimpses of a masked braggadocio during our meeting at Home, a striking new contemporary arts centre in Manchester, of which Boyle is patron. (The venue is billed as the north’s answer to the Barbican and thoroughly confuses taxi drivers.)

When I say to Boyle that the Olympics ceremony — almost universally celebrated for having nailed the contradictory quiddities of being British — had made him a household name, he shoots me a look of dented pride mingled with irritation. Well, I backtrack, of course you were famous before. The glare relaxes.

Who cares, though? He could easily get away with being an arrogant jerk. You’ll have known his name at least since Trainspotting, the electrifying masterpiece that emerged at the fag-end of the Major government and epitomised “Cool Britannia”. It was one of the most successful British films of the 1990s and has aged superbly.

Boyle’s other blockbusters include the dystopian zombie flick 28 Days Later, with its unforgettable shots of a harried and deserted London; Slumdog Millionaire, for which he won an Academy award for best director; and 127 Hours, about an American climber who had to hack off his own arm with a penknife to save his life.

“All my films,” he has said, “are about someone facing impossible odds and overcoming them.” I tell him that, tritely and reductively, this could be his own story. “I knew there was that implication when I first said it,” he says.

“A journalist spotted that link between my films and I thought, f****** hell. Sometimes you watch them and say: mate, you’ve made the same film with different clothes.”

Last week the first teaser emerged for his next movie, a characteristically brooding biopic of Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder. Boyle came to direct it with Universal Studios after David Fincher and Sony had handed it to them.

We know this thanks to last year’s Sony email hack. That was allegedly orchestrated by the North Korean regime after Sony released The Interview, a tawdry, unfunny satire about the leader, Kim Jong-un.

In leaked correspondence two Sony executives had bemoaned the time and money being diverted away from the film Steve Jobs and onto Angelina Jolie (a “minimally talented spoilt brat”) and her movie Cleopatra, which they dismissed as a “$180m ego-bath”. Boyle guffaws when I mention this.

“Ego is an important part of creativity,” he says. “You’re always trying to control it — yours and other people’s.”

He is also planning a Trainspotting sequel named Porno. But to make it he had to be reconciled with Ewan McGregor who had played Trainspotting’s lead junkie, Mark Renton.

They fell out after Boyle promised McGregor the starring role in his 2000 film The Beach, an adaptation of Alex Garland’s yarn about gap-year backpackers taking drugs and loafing in Thailand. In fact he was secretly talking to Leonardo DiCaprio about the same part and ended up casting the Titanic star. McGregor didn’t speak to him for years.

“We needed forgiveness,” says Boyle, “but I don’t know if we deserved it or not. I learnt that lesson directly.”

The model for Porno, he says, is the BBC television series Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?. “That was truly magnificent,” he says. “It illustrated what had happened to Britain socially; the growth of the middle classes.”

It’s a telling observation: Boyle says he has never abandoned his left-wing beliefs or voted for any party except Labour. Despite the hammering that socialism has just suffered in Britain, he retains the dogged optimism of the committed left.

I suspect he is more New Labour than Old: he says “huge progress” was made under Tony Blair and that the future of the party is “not about returning” to the past. “As a dramatist” — he quivers with excitement — “you look at the Miliband story and say: that’s not over.”

So David will be back? “Yeah.”

You’re a republican, I say. Was it hard to bury those convictions when you were directing the Queen for the opening ceremony? “I took that job on behalf of everyone,” he says.

“It wasn’t a private manifesto. I needed to be mindful of the things people respect here — and people respect the Queen. I’m not sure the institution will ultimately survive, but under her tutelage it has bound the country together.”

Would you like to see it end when she dies? “An inevitable part of democracy is that some outdated institutions — the House of Lords is one, the monarchy is another — come under threat. How long it takes I don’t know.”

He wanted to weave the BBC into the Olympics ceremony as the thing that, along with the NHS, “uniquely defines us as a country. But we couldn’t because it was broadcasting the event. It’s independent and incredibly powerful; it holds governments to account and is vital to our democracy.”

I mention that the new culture secretary, John Whittingdale, has said that the licence fee is “worse than a poll tax” because everyone pays the same. “It’s a bit like universal child benefit,” says Boyle. “These things have an invisible bond that helps to connect us as a society.”

I suspect he is a master at getting his own way. His autocratic effervescence must be tremendous fun to work with but hell to come up against. He says he had to be “vile” to the corporate bodies, committees and grey management people he met when he was crafting his vision for the Olympics ceremony.

“A friend of mine on the panel would look at me during the meetings. I knew he was thinking: Danny, what have you become? I would say terrible stuff to them.”

Such as what? He looks at me through his nerdy spectacles, lowers his voice, slowly points a finger and whispers: “ ‘We are doing it this way. We are dedicated to our vision of how to do this. This is how it’s going to happen.’ You used whatever techniques you needed to make it clear to them.”

So that’s how he did it.

Paris Hilton

This feature originally appeared in the Sunday Times

Paris Hilton’s people are “really protective”, which is why, several days in advance, they insist on knowing the “exact questions” I’m hoping to ask her during our allotted 10-minute interview at the Hotel Café Royal in London. This meeting eventually lasts less than eight minutes before it ends with the terrified screech of a publicist.

Hilton is the celebutante, hotel heiress, DJ and pop singer who owed her first flourish of notoriety to a sex tape featuring her and a vindictive ex-boyfriend. She promoted herself with a trailblazing enthusiasm, part-inventing a new kind of reality fame on a television show called The Simple Life.

The 34-year-old has been gossip-column mulch since she was 18: caught drink driving, filmed taking drugs and briefly imprisoned. In recent years, to use her idiosyncratic terminology, her fragrances have “done insane”; she may be the most successful perfumer in the world and claims to have sold more than $2bn (£1.3bn) worth of pong.

But her celebrity, I suspect, is fading. To use one measure, Kim Kardashian, Hilton’s former “closet arranger”, now has more than seven times her mentor’s followers on Instagram. If you want to see how briefly flickers the candle of fame, type “Paris Hilton” into Google Trends and observe the brutal arithmetic of the world losing interest.

The day before we meet, Hilton was at a Superdrug in a Liverpool “leisure complex” promoting her 18th fragrance, the Paris Hilton Limited Anniversary Edition eau de parfum. (Two squirts in the office and choking workers abandoned their chairs.) One woman connected to it admitted to me that she would “never” use the stuff because it’s “far too sweet . . . like candy”.

Before I can enter the ballroom in which Hilton has been installed, I’m told to wait first upstairs, then downstairs, then upstairs again, for a total of an hour or so, until finally an angry-looking woman in a green dress marches out to snap that there “won’t be time” for me to ask my question about how celebrity has changed over the years, or whether Hilton is concerned about becoming less famous as time goes on, or about the response to her latest single, a synthy, squawky number called High Off My Love. (One week after appearing on her YouTube channel, this had 18,000 views.)

“Legal issues” also mean Hilton won’t discuss her younger brother Conrad’s epic transatlantic tantrum last year, during which the likeable 20-year-old spent 10 hours allegedly threatening to murder members of a British Airways cabin crew, smoking joints and screaming that he would “f****** own anyone on this flight. They are f****** peasants.”

Deep breath, then. The Pompadour ballroom is a cavern of rococo fakery, fussing with people. There are laptops and TV lights and clipboards, and I eventually spot Hilton at a table surrounded by publicists, media managers and who-knows-who-else, apparently rehearsing her answers to my questions.

Finally she catwalks over, stilettoed legs scissoring in front of each other. She is wearing a white jacket, hair-bleach, lots of make-up and blue contact lenses over her naturally brown eyes. She looks like a bizarre Barbie cyborg. Everyone in the room stops what they’re doing to watch.

Hello, I’m Oliver, I say. She pinches two of my fingertips: “Hi Oliver.”

What briefly ensues could not be termed a conversation. I ask scripted questions; Hilton recites ready-made answers.

These typically resemble the gushiest Instagram captions and include authentic phrases such as “you only live once” and “living life to the fullest”. Everything is “amazing” and Hilton is “proud”. Her English dialect might be Valley Platitude.

Four minutes in I ask an unvetoed pleasantry about her pets and she says: “I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have them. Just laying with them in bed, they just make me so happy.”

You sleep with them? “Um, I sleep with like three or four of them sometimes.”

Dogs and monkeys? “Just dogs. My monkeys are at my ranch.”

At this, one of the tables barks: “Oliver — stick to the questions, please.”

How do you feel towards Kim Kardashian today, I ask. “Kim and I have been friends since we were little girls. I’m so happy for her. She has a beautiful family. She’s doing incredibly well, I’m so incredibly proud of her.”

Do you think she might have eclipsed you? “We’re both killing it.”

So you’re on level pegging? “Yeah.”

Time is running out so I think, sod it, and say: your brother Conrad has had a difficult time recently. What did you say to him after his outburst on that plane?

The room visibly trembles and a publicist shrieks: “She can’t comment on legal issues!” Hilton, still coolly monotonous, says: “I can’t comment on legal issues but my brother and I are very close. I love him so much and he’s a good kid.”

Has he been misunderstood? “Thank you very much for the interview!” yells the publicist.

“He’s a good boy,” concludes Hilton.

And that’s it. Near Piccadilly, rubbing his hands under the glare of the Circus lights, is a lone paparazzo. I ask him if he’s waiting for Paris. “Paris?” he says. “What are you talking about?”

Jonny Benjamin on Waterloo Bridge

When Jonny Benjamin decided to kill himself by jumping from Waterloo Bridge on January 14, 2008, he chose it because of the view.

“This was always my favourite place in London,” he says, late on a sunny afternoon, staring out towards the South Bank.

“I used to come here in my mid-teens and just stand, admiring the view. It seemed like the right place to end it all.”

That morning seven years ago, Benjamin had run away from the hospital he had been admitted to a few weeks before, where he had been given a diagnosis of schizo- affective disorder, a combination of severe schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

“I was in total despair,” he says. “I’d never heard of anyone recovering from schizophrenia. I thought I would never be able to have a career or raise a family.” None of his immediate relations — middle class, Jewish, from the comfortable northwest London district of Stanmore — had a history of mental illness.

“I’d been hearing a voice in my head since I was about 10,” he tells me. “At first it was friendly; it would remind me that I needed to do my maths homework, stuff like that. I was a bit of an outsider at school and it felt like a friend. I thought it might be an angel.” When Benjamin was 16 he was prescribed the powerful acne drug Roaccutane, which has been linked to psychiatric problems such as suicidal thoughts and schizophrenia.

Soon afterwards he developed depression. “And the voice changed,” he says. “It would torment me. It would tell me to do things like move a glass or a book, and that if I didn’t obey, my parents would be killed in a car crash. I would have to ring my mother and check that she was OK.” He thought that everyone heard a voice, just that his was horrible; he became convinced that it was the devil speaking to him.

A conflict between his homosexuality and his Judaism worsened his depression. He came to believe he was living in a version of The Truman Show, the 1998 film in which the protagonist, played by Jim Carrey, is unaware everyone around him is an actor, that hidden cameras follow him everywhere and his life is broadcast to millions.

Benjamin was admitted to hospital after a serious psychotic episode during his final year at university. On a freezing, rainy Monday three weeks later, Benjamin lied to his psychiatrist, saying he was feeling better, and left, planning to kill himself.

“I didn’t leave a note,” he says. “I’d tried to go home two days before and was having panic attacks. It was utter desperation.” He dumped his hoodie in a bin as he walked from the Tube station. It was rush hour: no one from the flowing crowd at first approached him as he stood on the ledge, staring into the water, getting ready to jump.

Then someone behind him said: “Please don’t do this.” He ignored it, but the man continued: “Let’s go for a coffee. You and me. We can talk this over. You don’t have to do this.”

Benjamin turned to the stranger, a young man apparently on his way to work, and muttered something in reply. They spoke for about half an hour — “It’s so hazy, I hardly remember any of it,” says Benjamin — before the man persuaded him to come down and the waiting police took Benjamin to hospital.

Perhaps you heard what happened next. Six years later, enjoying far better mental health, Benjamin launched a campaign to “find Mike”, the name he gave to the man who saved his life. It became a global news story. Nick Clegg, Stephen Fry and countless other public figures and celebrities tweeted or otherwise expressed support.

His search for and reunion with “Mike”, who turned out to be a 31-year-old personal trainer named Neil Laybourn, is the subject of a moving documentary that will be broadcast tomorrow night.

The reunion takes place above a pub: Benjamin and Laybourn speak for hours and become so absorbed in conversation they forget to order drinks. “We’re so close now,” says Benjamin, “that we’ve almost forgotten the reason we met.”

The story could have ended happily there, but after finishing the film towards the end of last year, Benjamin underwent a bad relapse and spent the next months in and out of hospital.

“I was constantly thinking about suicide,” he tells me, “but this time I recognised the warning signs.” He went back on medication and now takes different drugs to treat psychosis, anxiety and depression. They have severe side-effects and, he says, “they’ve not really kicked in yet. I’m hoping they will soon.” The voice still comes and goes, but he has learnt how to stop it from mastering him.

We sit in a cafe near the river, where Benjamin sips orange juice and discusses the horrors of his condition with frank dispassion. “I’ve accepted that this diagnosis is going to be lifelong,” he says, “but I’ve already seen that things can get better and I recognise the positives it brings me: sensitivity, attentiveness to others.” Now working in TV production, Benjamin is in talks to have the story made into a Hollywood film. He has also become a mental health campaigner, using his popular YouTube channel to call for better funding for mental health services, to remind viewers that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50, and to normalise his disorder by recounting his struggles with it.

“Neither I nor my peers at school were told anything about mental health,” he says. “Do you know that people who need to be seen by a psychiatrist often find that the hospitals are full, so the police have to lock them in cells?”

To hear someone discuss mental illness so openly is to recognise the poisonous absurdity of its stigma. And it is brave. Now 28, Benjamin lives with his consistently supportive parents. He says he has never had a “proper relationship — just the odd little thing. Everyone gets paranoid sometimes, but for me it can completely control my thoughts. I worry: what is this person really thinking? Do they truly like me?”

If his mental health holds, Benjamin could be the perfect person to explain illnesses such as his to a wider population, and especially to young people. His telegenic empathy and his gentle self-deprecation will make him a fitting spokesman, and he has that telly spark that all directors want — authenticity.

Whether he manages this will depend in part on circumstances he can never control. But I really hope he makes it, I think to myself, as I watch him walk back across the bridge to have his picture taken in the golden Waterloo sunset.

The Stranger on the Bridge is on Channel 4 at 9pm tomorrow.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or feelings, please call the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90

This feature originally appeared in the Sunday Times

(Marilyn Kingwall)

‘Don’t kid yourself, my dear,” Angela Lansbury scolds down the phone at me from her suite at the Rosewood hotel. (This is a beautiful Edwardian building in central London, only 11 years older than the dame herself, gutted to a bland internationalism by its Texan owners. She has aged better.) “Let me tell you something. Everybody has plastic surgery. I haven’t done it for a number of years, but in the early days — good heavens, yes.”

I mention another famous British actress of Lansbury’s generation, who has always rejected the allegation that she has any familiarity with scalpel or needle.

“Ha! Her? Please! I know her and she’s no fool.” She denies it, I say.

“Well, if she denies it and looks as good as she does, then God bless her.”

I loved Dame Angela instantly, not least from Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the video of which was worn to tissue when we were children; then I remembered she was astonishing in The Manchurian Candidate too. And, of course, she seems to be perpetually on television as Jessica Fletcher in repeats of Murder, She Wrote. Lansbury made millions from that programme which ran for 12 long and exhausting series. By the end she owned the company that produced it.

Best of Angela Lansbury
Last week she became one of the oldest recipients of an Olivier, the most prestigious award in British theatre, when she won best supporting actress for her performance as Madame Arcati, the loopy, heavily laced “clairvoyant” in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.

That had been her first appearance on a London stage in about 40 years and she almost broke down when she accepted what she tells me is a “jewel”: the statuette of “Sir Laurence, whom I had known and worked with”.

Of course she did. She is 89 and says that she has never considered retiring: “As a character actor you need energy. To take on another person’s physical attributes and play them fully needs huge amounts of energy. And I thank God I have that: if I’m not acting, I’m washing the dishes or polishing the floor.”

Where does this longevity come from, I ask.

“I take excruciatingly good care of my body,” she says. “And I don’t burn the candle at both ends” — briefest pause — “except for fun.”

She really is a character actor, too. With most of her older female acting contemporaries, people pay to see the woman: a popular celebrity who plays more or less the same part every time. A scan through Lansbury clips on YouTube shows how different dramatically — which is to say in the application of talent — she is in every role. (The clever, diligent, mischievous Jessica Fletcher, she tells me, was “the only part I ever played myself in”.)

One paradox of this talent is that Lansbury is probably less recognisable than, say, Judi Dench or Maggie Smith. Plus, as someone who knows her says: “She is modest. She said to me once: ‘I don’t think I really mean anything in London any more.’ Well, she came over to do a benefit concert for Aids, walked onstage at the Palladium and 2,200 people leapt to their feet. It showed her that she really did matter.”

In a long and conscientious career, Lansbury doesn’t seem to have taken anything for granted. Her first husband, a thespy Lord Alfred Douglas lookalike named Richard Cromwell, married her when she was 19 and he was 35. He had hoped to distract or convert himself from his homosexuality, but one morning less than a year into their marriage, she came downstairs to find a note: “I’m sorry darling, I can’t go on.” She filed for divorce, but they remained good friends until he died in 1960.

The great union of her life, of course, was with Peter Shaw. Their marriage lasted 53 years. He had been a vastly successful Hollywood agent and producer who abandoned everything to support her. When he died in 2003, Lansbury said it was like a “rift in time” — depression seemed to implode her. Then Emma Thompson rang and offered her a part as the villain Aunt Adelaide in Nanny McPhee and that, she later said, “pulled me out of the abyss”.

“Unquestionably, the hardest time in my life was the early 1970s,” she tells me. “So many disastrous things occurred. Two of our children were heavily involved with drugs.”

Anthony and Deirdre, who were in their teens, were using heroin with a prototypical Rich Kids of Instagram set gadding about the Malibu hills. Deirdre even became involved with the Manson family, the hypnotised harem led by the serial killer, racist and psychopath Charles Manson (now 80 years old and still in jail).

“We just had nothing to keep us in America,” Lansbury says. “So we upped sticks, as they say.”

They moved the family to a house near Cork in southern Ireland, where she and Peter rescued the children from their chaotic lives.

“They learnt things that they never would have had the opportunity to get into back in California,” she says.

“[They learnt] how to cook and garden. They got jobs as waiters and learnt what it’s like to earn a bit of a living — not that they had to.”

It worked: the children, now in their sixties, work respectively in the cinema and as a restaurateur. Lansbury, who says that her “homestead” is Los Angeles, seems genuinely thrilled to tell me the precise date of her granddaughter’s wedding in New York later this year.

Our time is up. “Sorry we had to do this under such hurried circumstances but you’ve dealt with it all terribly well,” she says.

“I’ll try and do my part now too for the rest of the day. That’s all I can hope to do, really — just keep up my end.”

Introducing Squid to Greg the shelf-builder

This feature originally appeared in the Sunday Times

Squid, who has a queer name for a dog, arrives at my flat with his South African owner and a strained expression, then urinates with visible relief on the photographer’s bag.

I’ve booked him through a website with the twee name BorrowMyDoggy, whose staff, as pressingly enthusiastic as the noisiest handbag chihuahuas, sign off their emails with “Best woofs”.

You may know about the service: thousands of people have joined it. If you like dogs but circumstances make it difficult for you to own one, this can assuage you. And if you have a dog but are going on holiday or need a regular babysitter for it, the system makes it easier.

In west London, where I live, “doggy daycare” is a tenner a day or more. Dog owners pay £45 a year to sign up to lend out Squids: even the borrowers are billed £10 annually.

Businesses such as this are surfacing constantly; so many that it hardly seems surprising you can use the internet to get a dog delivered to play with.

This strange new experiment, glibly named the “sharing economy” (it has a younger and flashier sibling, the “concierge economy”), is exploding the ways in which people formerly interacted with each other.

We are beyond supermarket wall-cards and newspaper small ads; Gumtree and Craigslist appear ancient.

The editor asked me to spend a week living through my phone, using it to organise as much of my life as possible. It turned to be an effortless delight, of course: ease is the triumph of this new world. But doing it in a relatively focused way also highlighted a couple of intriguing things about our society.

Greg the Dubliner arrives a few minutes after Squid. He’s a sculptor, really, he tells me, working in “digital 3D media”, but like many artists before him he gets by as an artisan.

He is here to put up some shelves: I booked him on TaskRabbit, a website that claims to make people “live smarter” by “outsourcing household errands and skilled tasks to trusted people in your community”. Greg charges £20 an hour plus expenses. When he arrives I congratulate him on his 97% approval rating.

“You start with 100%,” he mopes. “I kick myself for one bad job.”

I offer coffee, lemonade — or there’s beer? His Irish eyes flash, then narrow: “Is this going in your piece?”

Possibly.

“Er, lemonade is fine.”

People use TaskRabbit for almost anything; to find someone to wash their dishes, dispatch people to queue for an iPhone for them and (on one occasion) to scuba dive for lost keys in a lake.

The company whacks 20% onto whatever the customer is paying — a typically ferocious mark-up. But this is where all serious money seems to go nowadays: to a tiny number of men running websites in California. Buy something from one of Amazon’s UK “fulfilment centres” (aka warehouses)? Travel via taxi on British roads in an Uber car? Your transactions are with companies in the tax-friendly regimes of Luxembourg and Holland.

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s widely disliked and “bro-tastic” boss, built that company to a $40bn (£27bn) valuation in six aggressive years.

As someone recently wrote in a much-shared piece on a technology website: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”

It is a phenomenon; in American cities and, if the rumours are correct, in British ones soon, people are turning themselves into part-time taxi drivers by joining, via an app, a company called Lyft. You can rent out your parking space on JustPark and your home itself on Airbnb, find a cleaner on Homejoy and hire a drill or carpet-cleaning machine using Zilok.

Personal shopper apps are huge in the States; if you’re too lazy to buy your own soya milk, someone will bring it to your apartment for a couple of dollars without you even getting off the couch.

My godmother has broken her arm and is finding it hard to do things around the house. I download an app called Laundrapp, thumb in my card details and someone pulls up at her address that evening and collects a load of laundry. This is returned, beautifully pressed and folded, before 6pm the next day. (Cost: a punchy £25.50 for some sheets and a towel, plus £2.50 for one pillow case.)

The doorbell goes. Yesterday I gave a company called Enclothed my measurements online, clicked on photographs of men in various states of dress that I liked the look of and sat back plutocratically.

The delivery box contains a linen jacket, jeans, some chinos, shoes, shirts and a jumper, all from good-quality labels. They fit well, on the whole, and I would wear most of them.

You don’t have to keep any of the items; the company charges the shop price for what you want to hold on to and comes to collect the rejects. Many men don’t enjoy shopping for clothes; if I were richer I would use Enclothed a lot.

An enclosed letter from “your personal stylist” (no name) reads: “The longer we work together . . . the better each box will get.” This is true of almost everything in this new society where algorithms know us best.

The sharing and concierge economies appear different but are essentially the same. The internet — and smartphones in particular — has made it cheaper and more efficient to connect customers with goods and services.

Although one thing, technology, has made this possible, another has made it inevitable. Many people in western societies are no better off than they were before the 2008 crash.

Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, said last week the average Briton is earning £1,600 less than they were five years ago. An army of debt-laden graduates is struggling to find work. This new economy is probably keeping many of them off the dole.

I spoke to an Uber driver about the company. “At first it was great,” he said. “Good customers, lots of jobs. But last summer Uber suddenly dropped our prices by 15%.” He has no sickness pay, he added, and little stability.

Clutching his brackets, Greg says: “This is perfect for me. I can work when I want, turn it off when I want. I don’t have a boss; I can say no to anything. But it’s all a sideline for me — I’d feel differently if it was my career.”

What did I learn from this experiment? That technology has made it easier for any two humans to establish that they can trust each other and that this has made us more efficient.

Also, that the internet will continue to satisfy our yearning for instant gratification in almost every area. (Amazon does one-hour delivery on some goods in New York; and for those who want them there are probably apps for prostitutes and drugs.)

Most of all, though, I learnt that any worries about the position of workers within this matrix can be temporarily forgotten as you load your sturdy new shelves and stroke your borrowed dachshund.

This feature originally appeared in the Sunday Times

This feature originally appeared in the Sunday Times

Squid, who has a queer name for a dog, arrives at my flat with his South African owner and a strained expression, then urinates with visible relief on the photographer’s bag.

I’ve booked him through a website with the twee name BorrowMyDoggy, whose staff, as pressingly enthusiastic as the noisiest handbag chihuahuas, sign off their emails: “Best woofs.”

You may know about the service: thousands of people have joined it. If you like dogs but circumstances make it difficult for you to own one, this can assuage you. And if you have a dog but are going on holiday or need a regular babysitter for it, the system makes it easier.

In west London, where I live, “doggy daycare” is a tenner a day or more. Dog owners pay £45 a year to sign up to lend out Squids: even the borrowers are billed £10 annually. Businesses such as this are surfacing constantly; so many that it hardly seems surprising you can use the internet to get a dog delivered to play with.

This strange new experiment, glibly named the “sharing economy” (it has a younger and flashier sibling, the “concierge economy”), is exploding the ways in which people formerly interacted with each other. We are beyond supermarket wall-cards and newspaper small ads; Gumtree and Craigslist appear ancient.

The editor asked me to spend a week living through my phone, using it to organise as much of my life as possible. It turned to be an effortless delight, of course: ease is the triumph of this new world. But doing it in a relatively focused way also highlighted a couple of intriguing things about our society.

Greg the Dubliner arrives a few minutes after Squid. He’s a sculptor, really, he tells me, working in “digital 3D media”, but like many artists before him he gets by as an artisan. He is here to put up some shelves: I booked him on TaskRabbit, a website that claims to make people “live smarter” by “outsourcing household errands and skilled tasks to trusted people in your community”. Greg charges £20 an hour plus expenses. When he arrives I congratulate him on his 97% approval rating.

“You start with 100%,” he mopes. “I kick myself for one bad job.”

I offer coffee, lemonade — or there’s beer? His Irish eyes flash, then narrow: “Is this going in your piece?”

Possibly.

“Er, lemonade is fine.”

People use TaskRabbit for almost anything; to find someone to wash their dishes, dispatch people to queue for an iPhone for them and (on one occasion) to scuba dive for lost keys in a lake.

The company whacks 20% onto whatever the customer is paying — a typically ferocious mark-up. But this is where all serious money seems to go nowadays: to a tiny number of men running websites in California. Buy something from one of Amazon’s UK “fulfilment centres” (aka warehouses)? Travel via taxi on British roads in an Uber car? Your transactions are with companies in the tax-friendly regimes of Luxembourg and Holland. Travis Kalanick, Uber’s widely disliked and “bro-tastic” boss, built that company to a $40bn (£27bn) valuation in six aggressive years. As someone recently wrote in a much-shared piece on a technology website: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”

It is a phenomenon; in American cities and, if the rumours are correct, in British ones soon, people are turning themselves into part-time taxi drivers by joining, via an app, a company called Lyft. You can rent out your parking space on JustPark and your home itself on Airbnb, find a cleaner on Homejoy and hire a drill or carpet-cleaning machine using Zilok. Personal shopper apps are huge in the States; if you’re too lazy to buy your own soya milk, someone will bring it to your apartment for a couple of dollars without you even getting off the couch.

My godmother has broken her arm and is finding it hard to do things around the house. I download an app called Laundrapp, thumb in my card details and someone pulls up at her address that evening and collects a load of laundry. This is returned, beautifully pressed and folded, before 6pm the next day. (Cost: a punchy £25.50 for some sheets and a towel, plus £2.50 for one pillow case.)

The doorbell goes. Yesterday I gave a company called Enclothed my measurements online, clicked on photographs of men in various states of dress that I liked the look of and sat back plutocratically. The delivery box contains a linen jacket, jeans, some chinos, shoes, shirts and a jumper, all from good-quality labels. They fit well, on the whole, and I would wear most of them. You don’t have to keep any of the items; the company charges the shop price for what you want to hold on to and comes to collect the rejects. Many men don’t enjoy shopping for clothes; if I were richer I would use Enclothed a lot.

An enclosed letter from “your personal stylist” (no name) reads: “The longer we work together . . . the better each box will get.” This is true of almost everything in this new society, where algorithms know us best.

The sharing and concierge economies appear different but are essentially the same. The internet — and smartphones in particular — has made it cheaper and more efficient to connect customers with goods and services. Although one thing, technology, has made this possible, another has made it inevitable. Many people in western societies are no better off than they were before the 2008 crash. Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secretary, said last week the average Briton is earning £1,600 less than they were five years ago. An army of debt-laden graduates is struggling to find work. This new economy is probably keeping many of them off the dole.

I spoke to an Uber driver about the company. “At first it was great,” he said. “Good customers, lots of jobs. But last summer Uber suddenly dropped our prices by 15%.” He has no sickness pay, he added, and little stability.

Clutching his brackets, Greg says: “This is perfect for me. I can work when I want, turn it off when I want. I don’t have a boss; I can say no to anything. But it’s all a sideline for me — I’d feel differently if it was my career.”

What did I learn from this experiment? That technology has made it easier for any two humans to establish that they can trust each other and that this has made us more efficient. Also, that the internet will continue to satisfy our yearning for instant gratification in almost every area. (Amazon does one-hour delivery on some goods in New York; and for those who want them there are probably apps for prostitutes and drugs.) Most of all, though, I learnt that any worries about the position of workers within this matrix can be temporarily forgotten as you load your sturdy new shelves and stroke your borrowed dachshund.

Click here to read at the Sunday Times

She turns out to be a fittingly bewildered Aberdonian named Johanna Basford. I meet her over dry club sandwiches in a windowless room at a hotel “business centre” next to Heathrow airport. Branding agents, publishers and others are forming a procession to see her: she has flown down for the day, she tells me: “And asked everyone to come to me. And when you sell a million books, you can demand cheeky things like that.”

The 31-year-old, who was a freelance illustrator on roughly the minimum wage a few years ago, has sold about 1.4m books since 2012, single-handedly inventing the most lucrative new genre in publishing.

Her pictures are whimsical, tricksy and trippy: swirling, 2D scapes of animals, trees, flowers, insects, houses and impossible gardens, with a rural aesthetic born of the environment in which she draws them. Basford works in an attic studio in the house she shares with her nine-month-old daughter and her husband James Watt, the co-founder of the fantastically successful and brash modern brewery BrewDog, which he launched with a £20,000 loan in 2008 and whipped to a turnover of £30m last year.

I was expecting to meet some lucky and clueless creative, but instead I get Karren Brady crossed with Emma Bridgwater. Basford, like her husband — they met at a fair for young entrepreneurs — is a canny self-promoter and shrewd businesswoman.

Her parents were marine biologists who ran a salmon and trout farm. After graduating from art school in 2005, she moved to London, interning in fashion studios and hating it. “It was all trend-led, I couldn’t put my own stamp on things,” she says. Then the 7/7 bombers struck on a Thursday morning and she “was on the Megabus home that night”.

“Besides,” she adds, “I can’t draw flowers when I’m surrounded by concrete.”

She started a business selling hand-painted wallpaper to “super-high-end hotels, private homes and clients like that”. But the margins were tight and she was reduced to “borrowing Pot Noodles off my mates”.

When the credit crunch hit she realised she was going to go bust, so wound everything down and started hawking herself as a freelance illustrator. She would take the bus to Edinburgh, Glasgow or, for 12 hours overnight, to London, attending meetings, building up her clients, and gradually proving herself to companies that included Nike, Starbucks and Sony.

The drawing that I coloured in

“People are so precious about their artwork,” she says. “It was always part of my marketing strategy to give stuff away.” She uploaded some desktop wallpapers to her website that people could download for free. A publisher liked them and called to ask if she would like to do a children’s colouring-in book. Basford said she would prefer to draw one for adults.

“There was a silence on the other end,” she says. “And then they let me go for it.” The print run of 16,000 sold out quickly: it appealed to a far wider range of people than anyone had predicted.

“I have Wall Street bankers, people in hospital recovering from strokes and other illnesses doing the books,” she says. “Psychologists and therapists tell me they give them to their patients. Teenagers do them to beat exam stress. Lots of people email me to say they’re using the books to get through a tough time.”

I sat down with one of her illustrations: a long, delicately wriggling branch creeping with flowers and ferns. Within minutes I was absorbed. There is a deep, meditative, industrious calm, only faintly childlike, to the act of colouring: a gentle pleasure in an engrossing but unintellectual task, where the only thing you have to think about is whether or not a petal should be blue. When I finished I felt a giddy, embarrassing and fleeting pride. I wanted to turn round and show my page to Mummy.

Today, across the planet, fully grown men and women are forming clubs where they meet to colour-in. Basford is huge in South Korea and in France, where roughly one in three people is on antidepressants.

Our society in many ways is increasingly and weirdly infantilised, from the phoney baby language of the internet (tweet, Google, selfie, cloud) to onesies and the unironic enjoyment of video games and children’s movies. I ask Basford whether adult colouring-in is just another gaga fad.

“Of course it’s only a trend,” says Basford. “The time will come when this doesn’t sell so well, when it’s tomorrow’s bespoke, handpainted wallpaper.”

Secret Garden and Enchanted Forest by Johanna Basford are published by Laurence King in paperback at £9.95

(Francesco Guidicini)

This interview originally appeared in the Sunday Times

There is a mystery to Peter Ackroyd that baffles his observers. How does the author — a plump and wheezing 65-year-old with a gammy leg, who continually forgets himself mid-sentence (“What was the question again?”) and attempts to say “indefatigability” four times during our meeting without success — manage and maintain a workload of such Alexandrian prolixity and scale?

He has burped out more than 30 books since the millennium, writing two or three at a time, and his commissions with publishers run until at least 2021.

“Thrrrrrrring,” he says, rolling the “r”, as he lets me into his well-proportioned office in Bloomsbury: a bare-walled, one-bed flat with towering windows overlooking one of the capital’s better-known Georgian squares. It’s a warm day, but three Dyson heaters blast over the carpet; students from a nearby college gambol outside.

“Where’s that name from — Hertfordshire? It sounds like something from Edith Wharton: ‘Meet my friend Thring.’ Actually,” he muses, settling his bottom a little more comfortably, “Mr Thring sounds better, more sedate.” I tell him that my surname has been an affliction at least since I was in primary school.

“Bwu-huh-huh-huh,” he gurgles. His face is pale and walrus-like (I expect he knows the word for that, odobenine), an effect increased by the clipped and yellowing moustache clinging to his wet lips. The jutting lower jaw reminds me vaguely of Churchill, as does the minor speech impediment — Rs have become Ws — and the impressive alcohol intake.

Ackroyd says he has cut the boozing down to “a bottle of wine a night, not much more . . . but it used to be about a bottle of whisky a night, as well as wine”.

The drinking has furnished many anecdotes: as the youngest literary editor of The Spectator magazine and a celebrated book luvvie, Ackroyd was reported to have challenged Martin Amis to arm-wrestling competitions, fallen asleep in Salman Rushdie’s lap, razed Christmas trees at publishers’ parties and been regularly carried, feet-first, from horrified salons (he tells me he does not remember much of this, which is unsurprising). A former schoolfriend, now a QC, said Ackroyd has always been “cripplingly shy”: alcohol seemingly helps to counter that.

The carousing never interfered with his monumental output. This includes at least 57 books, including a 1,200-page biography of Dickens for which he received an unprecedented £650,000 advance in 1990 (about £1.5m today), as well as his masterpiece: a similarly mega-selling “biography” of London, published in 2000. The completion of this resulted in a heart attack that left Ackroyd in a coma for a week.

These days he takes a taxi from his Knightsbridge flat, works on a novel in the morning and on his six-volume The History of England around lunchtime (he’s on the fifth instalment and a carefully annotated page headed “1833” lies on his desk ). In the afternoon he continues a biography or some other non-fiction. He eats only in restaurants: “Minor little places. Not the Ivy any more.”

Ackroyd’s mother and grandmother, resolute Catholics, raised him on a council estate in west London and he said he made “great efforts” to lose his Cockney accent once he went to Cambridge. He never met his father: when Graham Ackroyd, an artist, wrote to his flourishing son asking for help with his own writing efforts, the younger man did not reply. After a double first, a fellowship at Yale and a nine-year stint at The Spectator, Ackroyd began writing full time.

He was inspired to begin his newest book, a well- received biography of Alfred Hitchcock published last week, after discovering the director was “camp” and “really rather a screamer” with a “funny mincing step”, which Ackroyd demonstrates by walking his index and middle fingers along his desk in a prissy sort of fashion and doing a little pout. Might Hitchcock have been bisexual, I ask.

“Well, he said he had ‘poofy’ moments when he was reading Vogue. But if that qualified you as a homosexual, half the population would be condemned.”

Ackroyd himself seems to have had a difficult relationship with his sexuality. When he published his first book of love poems at the age of 22, he switched all the pronouns from “he” to “she” because, he says, he didn’t want to upset his family.

His partner of a quarter-century, an American dancer and model named Brian Kuhn, died of an Aids-related illness in 1994. Ackroyd had bought a “middle-ranking stately home” in Devon so Kuhn “had somewhere to die”, but he was able to spend hardly any time in it.

The author says he was “away — no, in London” when his lover died. “I knew it was going to happen, but not that night.” So Kuhn died alone, I say. Ackroyd pauses: “He had a dog.”

I tell him I had been doing some online research earlier that morning in the Yale archives, to which Ackroyd is donating all his papers. I found a photograph of him and Kuhn, taken in what looks like the English countryside during the summertime. Kuhn: tall, denim-jacketed, wavy-haired and grinning; Ackroyd, clambering over a fence behind him: awkward, rodentine, unimpeachably Old World.

He listens, open-mouthed, and then says slowly: “I don’t remember that little vignette.” When I tell him it’s freely available on the internet, he yelps as if he has been stabbed with a needle: “Ow! I hate the thought of it.”

Ackroyd has said that today he doesn’t have “any sex life . . . I’m sort of neutral . . . chaste”, and insists he has not had a physical or emotional relationship since Kuhn’s death. But someone who knows him tells me that the experience “poleaxed” the author.

“Absolutely not true,” says Ackroyd when I put this to him. But, I say, you do seem quite a solitary figure. “Do I?” he asks, wide-eyed.

Is that unfair? “I don’t think of myself as solitary. I mean, I talk to my waiter when I have dinner. I say ‘how do you do’ and ask what’s on the menu.”

Last month he took a holiday in Eastbourne, East Sussex. “That was very pleasant. I stayed in a hotel, the Grand, and then I sat on a bench on the promenade for five days.”

Not literally, I ask.

“Well, with breaks for meals and sleep. But otherwise I just sat and looked at the sea.”

With a glass of wine?

“What? Good lord no. If you wanted a treat you could go to the seaside chalet restaurant and order yourself a ham sandwich, but that was the limit of the luxury I allowed myself.”

He is half-joking and half-serious, I think. This kind of aloof eccentricity is always a performance, a dodge of some kind. To me, and probably to most, it sounds lonely and sad. But Ackroyd seems more than content: alone in Bloomsbury and Knightsbridge with his books and his view, emails to the two researchers he has employed for years, the odd call to his agent and a warm, toasted feeling every evening over a bottle or two.

For an introverted genius who is probably more comfortable in the past than the present, it may be perfect.

Our time is up and Ackroyd says with suspicion: “You didn’t take many notes.”

It’s all on tape, I say, adding: at least, I hope it is. He laughs.

“It doesn’t matter anyway. Write what you like. Make it all up — I don’t care.”

The dish ‘Orange Explosion’ at Funky Gourmet

This feature originally appeared in the Sunday Times

The feta cheese that wished to be a beetroot”. As names of dishes go, it was among the silliest I’d encountered outside Bray. Personifying the things you put in your mouth is rarely a good idea. The hopeful cheese turned out to be a fluffy purée sealed in purple beetroot jelly — a clever, grown-up Haribo. I was at Funky Gourmet, the daftest, most oddly brilliant restaurant in Athens. It also serves a sheep’s brain. The name? “The silence of the lamb”.

In straitened times, Greek restaurateurs have been updating the stodgy stalwarts of the national cuisine to establish something thrilling and new. Picture yourself as one of the two chef-owners of Funky Gourmet— Georgianna Hiliadaki and Nikos Roussos, who both spent time at El Bulli in Spain. You want to open a proper high-end restaurant, with a wine tome, a multi-course gastro-event menu and a staff-to-customer ratio akin to those Swiss schools that educate the children of plutocrats. How, with national unemployment at 26% and a national debt approaching double the GDP, can you make a restaurant like this survive? Answer: by keeping prices competitive by international standards (the 11-course tasting menu costs £75; funkygourmet.com), elbowing your way into the Michelin guide (the restaurant has two stars, one of only two in Greece to have achieved this) and, most important, offering something genuinely and distinctively different.

This is happening all over Athens. Graffiti daubs and streaks the buildings; architecture crumbles; taxi drivers gripe and gibber with a depressed, desperate monotony; and many of the people sleeping on the streets had jobs and businesses a couple of years ago. When I went, the election, in this uterus of democracy, was a few days away. Posters of grinning and tieless men flapped in the squares, megaphones blared and everyone I spoke to said Syriza was either going to solve the crisis or drive the country further to disaster.

Yet against this uncertain backdrop, dozens of clever food and drink businesses have been launched. Walking through the grotty Psyrri district, a scuffed but slowly gentrifying warren, I passed a hipster bike cafe called Handlebar, replete with bemetalled, bearded staff and plates of ironic kedgeree — and I thought, bloody hell, I came here to get away from Shoreditch.

Heteroclito is a gorgeous little wine bar, not far from the parliament. Abandon fears of acrid pine-needle retsina and factory-red mavrodaphne: many Greek wines, especially whites, are full of spunky character. Malagousia, a grape that almost became extinct 30 years ago, is now making some fantastic bottles, especially from central Greece. Here, it’s less than £4 a glass (heteroclito.gr).

I liked By the Glasseven more, a high-ceilinged Mediterranean wine bar that also serves food (dishes from £4.50; bytheglass.gr). Its gurgling Enolmatic vacuum machines keep bottles open and drinkable for weeks. In a chilly courtyard at 3pm, a female lounge singer rasped Tina Turner’s Private Dancer to tables of swaying and smoking customers.

The best new restaurant in town is Cookoovaya, an extraordinary canteenish collaboration between five of Athens’s leading chefs: one is an expert on the grill, another does puddings, and so on. The word means “owl”, and the joke is that a group of cooks working together in the same kitchen will foster wisdom — not lead to egos boiling over and seething tantrums. A plate of beef carpaccio with smoked eel, spinach roots and a hot, creamy horseradish dressing was one of the most dexterous and considered dishes I’ve had in ages (mains from £7.20; cookoovaya.gr).

The bars are clubbable and loud, full of young Europeans swilling vast Spanishy goblets of gin and tonic. At 42 — the number Douglas Adams said was the answer to everything — they infuse syrups and liqueurs with herbs such as rosemary and slug them into the cocktails (from £6; facebook.com/42bar). Thank God I’d asked the hotel front desk to scribble my address on a Post-it note.

The overall paradox — good Greek word, that — is that grim and punishing austerity has brought the best out of some Athenians, helping them to twist their city into new directions and attract fresh tourists. No doubt, as a Greek person, you would have put up with fewer new bars and restaurants in exchange for less debt and catastrophe. But for us visitors, glugging and munching under the Acropolis at sunset, the crisis has a delicious upside.

This interview originally appeared in the Sunday Times

In July, Ben Lecomte will squeeze into a wetsuit, walk into the sea near Tokyo and begin a steady front crawl. Six months later, he hopes that one million people will be standing by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to see him reach the shore. If he manages to swim 5,500 miles across the Pacific — having avoided sharks, jellyfish, 30ft waves, pollution, plastics, losing his support boat or simply giving up from exhaustion — he will surely have set one of the great endurance records of our species.

As far as I can work out, Lecomte is the only person ever to have planned swimming across the largest stretch of water on the planet.

Few people would even take the bid seriously were it not for the fact that Lecomte, a heavily accented Frenchman who has lived in Texas for decades, was the first person to swim across the Atlantic, in 1998. Now 47, with two children aged 14 and 8, he tells me that the long gap between swims was because “I had other priorities — to get married and be a dad. Now I’ve gone back to my passion.”

We meet in a gloomy box room, promisingly named Ocean, at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, west London. Lecomte is surprisingly small, with a pinched, fatless face, the kind one associates with the masochistically athletic. He speaks in a lugubrious murmur, with the measured formality of the mildly unhinged.

“Why?” is the monosyllable typically put to the zanies who want to rollerskate across Greenland or climb Everest without oxygen. Their answers tend to be platitudes: because it’s there; because I had to. Lecomte is marginally more considered.

“I want to change people’s mindsets,” he says. “These days, everyone uses petrol and plastic. It took a long time for us to make all the bad decisions that built that world. With the swim, I want to help people realise that we can go back to the state we had before.”

Thus, part of his route will take him through the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast gyre covering millions of square miles, where plastics, sludgy chemicals and other manmade grimnesses eddy, swirl and testify to the ugly impact of human beings on the planet.

In 1998 Lecomte decided to swim the Atlantic after his father died from colon cancer at 49. That gave the swimmer “ze keek in ze butt”, he says, “to jump in the water. If you don’t take the chance, you won’t have it again.” He spent 73 days at sea, swimming for about eight hours at a time, resting on his support boat, and beginning every morning where he left off. Near the Azores, with Lecomte increasingly suffering from exhaustion, his boat’s water system failed and he was forced to stop for a week before swimming to France. That led some people to conclude he hadn’t truly swum the Atlantic.

“My goal was never to set a record,” he says. “We could not proceed without a working water system, and if that hadn’t broken down I would have continued. When I was finished, I didn’t write a book, go on speaking tours or do any other engagements. It was a personal journey for me.”

After a couple of brief TV appearances, including on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Lecomte returned to a seemingly humdrum existence in the indoor-spa business. He quit that job two years ago to focus full-time on his Pacific attempt, and tells me he now lives “on a shoestring”.

“The roles have been reversed,” he says. “I swam the Atlantic to deal with the death of my father, but today I want to use my passion for the next generation. You and I are going to die, but the people who live after us will face the consequences of our decisions.”

The Pacific is laughably misnamed. Sharks will be a continuous and stalking presence on Lecomte’s journey, especially for the final 1,000 miles, in which he will traverse the migration area of the great white. His support boat is fitted with a rod that sends an electrical signal to which sharks are sensitive. Yet when Lecomte swam the Atlantic, a large great white circled him for five days.

“We have a net I can swim over if necessary,” he says, “so the sharks can’t swim up and attack me from beneath.” Jellyfish stung his face almost daily during the earlier crossing. Salt water chafes in a wetsuit; your armpits and neck grow especially raw and sore. The diet is miserable: about 8,000 calories a day from Spam, tinned vegetables, rice, pasta, soup and dehydrated ready-meals. No sugar, and nothing fresh, for six months.

The swells will be so high that Lecomte will often lose sight of his boat; he cannot swim too close in case he is bashed against it. What is it like, I ask, to be unable to see your boat and feel alone in the open ocean?

He pinches his thumb and forefinger together. “You feel zees beeg — which of course we are. But it is psychological. I know my boat is there. You might think you could not run a marathon now, but if somebody held a gun to your head and said, ‘Keep running, keep running’, you would finish. It is the same for me in the water.”

Anyone will be able to follow his journey thanks to GPS and live-streaming cameras. The support crew will consist of a captain and first mate, a medic, a marine biologist and a couple of people working on social media and filming a documentary. Unlike the basic snorkel Lecomte used 17 years ago, he will be wearing a full-face mask that will allow him to speak as well as breathe. He hopes to talk to supporters, schools, universities and the media while swimming.

The enterprise is obviously hootingly mad, but there is such an ardent intensity to Lecomte, I reckon he might achieve his goal. I ask him the question that first hit me when I heard about this bid — is he crazy?

“Of course,” he replies. “I don’t want to be like everybody else. I want to be on the margin. If you don’t live on the edge, you take up too much space.”