How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S3, Ep2 How to Fail: Chris Patten

Episode Date: January 9, 2019

This week, my guest is the former politician Chris Patten. It's almost easier to list the high-powered offices of state he hasn't occupied than the ones he has. Patten was the 28th governor of Hong Kong, the former Chairman of the BBC, the current Chancellor of Oxford University. For 13 years, he was the Conservative MP for Bath before losing his seat in the 1992 election - one of the incidences of failure he discusses on this episode. At 74, Patten has published seven books, gained a peerage, fathered three children and has eight grandchildren. You might not think he knows much about failure, but in this revealing and unexpectedly moving interview, he talks about what it's like to lose a seat and have your life changed overnight, as well as how he coped with the aftermath of his tenure at the BBC (where he presided over the Jimmy Savile scandal). We also discuss his faith, his love for his wife (and his wish that he had married her earlier), his natural inclination towards gloominess (and what he does to 'snap out of it') and his, as yet futile, search for the perfect breakfast muesli. How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Chris Sharp and sponsored by 4th Estate Books First Confession: A Sort of Memoir by Chris Patten is out now, published by Allen Lane. Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayChris Sharp @chrissharpaudio4th Estate Books @4thEstateBooks      Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better.

I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. This week on How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, my guest is Chris Patton, or to give him his full title, Baron Patton of Barnes. He was also the 28th Governor of Hong Kong, the former Chairman of the BBC, and is currently the Chancellor of Oxford University. More importantly for me, he is the beloved, loving and generous father of one of my closest friends. But his professional life started as a desk officer at the Conservative Party Research Department, before being elected the Tory MP for Bath in 1979.

It was a seat he would hold for 13 years. As the last governor of Hong Kong before its hand over to China in 1997, Patton was given an official Chinese name, Pang Ding Hong, which meant calm, joyous, healthy and stable. He was also given a somewhat less flattering nickname, Fat Pang. After a stint as European Commissioner, Patton became chairman of the BBC Trust, presiding over one of the most notorious episodes in the corporation's history, when the late children's TV presenter Jimmy Savile was unmasked as a paedophile and rapist. How did we let it happen, Patton asked at the time, and could someone like this con us all again? This, then, is a man who has experienced the slings and arrows of a political career

and who has occupied some of the most esteemed offices of state. And yet, he says, my life has been paved with failures. Chris, I don't believe that your life has been paved with failures, but this is what you wrote to me in an email. with failures. Chris, I don't believe that your life has been paid for the failures, but this is what you wrote to me in an email. Well, I'm well known for, as my wife says, somebody who doesn't believe in the notion that the glass is either half full or half empty. She says I'm somebody who believes that glass is three quarters empty. I can normally find a reason for looking on the gloomy side. And when I make speeches these days, one or two sensible people say they're the only sensible, rational responses to go away and take an overdose.

So maybe I've overdone it because I've been very lucky, actually. I've had a very happy life, but not without failure. But I've come to recognise that failure is usually a reason not for going back to the pavilion and sulking but for actually carrying on. Well we've just had a rather funny chat because prior to recording these podcasts my producer Chris often asks guests what they had for breakfast and we both discovered that we're perpetually disappointed by muesli and we're on a constant ceaseless quest to find the perfect neoplatonic ideal of muesli, and we still haven't done it yet.

So we've failed even to have a proper breakfast. I know, but I had a really proper breakfast last week in Frankfurt because I think German bread is the best in the world. And I had wonderful brown bread in my hotel, but no muesli. I did have some rather inadequate yoghurt. The worst thing, I've just been in Japan and I love Japan food. The one thing I can't take is a traditional Japanese breakfast. There are all sorts of things sort of moving mysteriously

around in the goo, which I'm not quite sure about. And I don't like tofu either. I mean, a lot of people, I bet you like tofu. It's sort of a millennial thing, I reckon. I don't like tofu. But if you can find out for me the best muesli these days, I'll be off to White Rose or Sainsbury or wherever. Did you always want to be a politician? No, it was really an accident. And it really surprised people when it happened. And when I did it, I'd had no interest in politics at all at university, except a slight feeling that Harold Wilson wasn't a terribly good thing. Most of my friends were traditionally on the left and we were all I guess in due course pushed onto the left by

the Vietnam War and responses to the Vietnam War. So I didn't want to go into politics. I played a lot of games. I acted. I wrote reviews. I edited a satirical magazine called Mesopotamia, which at the time we thought was rightfully funny. I looked at some old copies recently and found it difficult to find anything to laugh at. But I remember one cover which we impregnated with perfume. I still got a copy and I sniffed it the other day and it smelled foul. So I don't know what we'd put into the cover. Did you have to spray every cover individually? Well it was said to be impregnated in the gloss that went on the cover but you know it was very difficult to tell and I don't think it sold any more copies. The one thing that used to happen with this magazine Mesopotamia was we would be regularly closed down

by the proctors for some frightful joke or bit of even then political incorrectness. I did a lot of reviews, a travelling review in the summer which I wrote with a number of friends, and we would fairly regularly get banned by public schools we'd been to. I remember when we went to Shrewsbury and there was a headmaster called Donald or Arnold or Ronald Wright. We started with a very, what we thought was a very smart chorus, The Boys Loved Us, which began,

I'm Arnold, Ronald, Donald, and I'm right, right, right. And the boys, oh, that was a frightful scream. He didn't, and neither did any of the other governors who were present. So we were sort of banned

from ever going back there again. If you can, by the way, hear any barking on this podcast, it is not our rumbling stomachs from our lack of muesli. It is Chris's delightful dog, Bobby, who's been banished to the kitchen. Yes, otherwise he'd be actually all over us and we wouldn't be able to get a word in Edways. He'd just bark all the time.

You wrote something very, very funny in your memoir about how people who had happy childhoods should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties. Did you have a happy childhood? I had a very happy childhood. I was brought up in a rather slightly dreary West London suburb. I better not mention the name now in case I get sued by the council, on the arterial roads out of London. My dad had been a professional musician but was a music publisher after the war. My mum had been a wonderfully

glamorous and fell in love with him. And unfortunately, her parents found that she was falling in love with a, not just an Irish drummer in a band, but a Catholic Irish drummer in a band. He was the grandson of Irish potato famine immigrants. So my great grandfather was born in 1829, I think, in a similar part of Ireland to the one that John McGarhan grew up in and has written about in that wonderful memoir he wrote. So I had a very, not grand, a very lower middle class, middle... My mother would have hated to hear the word lower added to middle, a middle class background.

When I read that I'm a Tory grandee, I always smile. My mum would have loved it, my mum would have loved it, my dad would have found it very amusing, but extremely happy. I had one sister who's a bit older than me, who's still one of my best friends, and it was wonderful. I went to, on a scholarship from a primary school to what was then a direct grant school, sort of half state, half independent, and then on a scholarship from there to Balliol which I got when I was 16. I hadn't realized the Irish strain to your ancestry and I wonder if you feel that Irish sense of storytelling and an appreciation of performance

and whimsy it sounds like you did if you acted at Oxford. I think I do. I hope I do. I went on earlier this year on a big Sebastian Barry jag. I think he's the most wonderful novelist. And I find reading his novels, all of which touch on different aspects of Irish history over the last 100, 150 years, have a particular resonance as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I do look back on my period as well, I was a minister in Northern Ireland with considerable happiness. It's a beautiful country, though that doesn't justify the fact that people have murdered one another in industrial quantities. But I do have a strong sense of being culturally Irish. When I was a commissioner in Brussels, I think I used to be regarded as the

third or the second Irish commissioner after the real one. One of the failures that you have outlined to me is when you lost your seat in Bath in 1992 after being the local MP there for 13 years. And part of the reason I'm so keen to have a politician on this podcast is to understand what that is like at the moment that it happens when you're standing at the electoral count and the numbers come in. It wasn't quite as bad as you might have expected because I'd always thought it was going to happen. Indeed I'd told John Major who was then Prime Minister a few days before I'd given him a list of what would happen in the election, of who'd win, who'd lose. And I came to my seat last. And he thought I was just being miserable Chris and overdoing it. But it was very difficult. The thing I felt most when I lost,

to be honest, was huge sympathy for Lavender and my kids. Lavender had to do a huge amount of the campaigning in Bath because I was having to run the national campaign and I would get there every day, but I was in and out the whole time. And I felt really, really sorry for them. They were angrier, I think, than I was because it was a pretty nasty campaign. People have the impression that I don't want to make, why not, a party political pipe. People always have the impression that, I don't want to make, why not, a party political pipe. People always have the impression that liberals are incredibly gentle, nice, sort of vegan politically. It's not remotely true.

I'd always prefer a tough Labour candidate. The liberals could be pretty nasty. I had in that campaign an agent who'd been outed by a paper for being president of Gay West. And the liberals used that, for example, mercilessly. But I really lost because I'd had the hospital pass. I'd had three delirious years, wonderful years as Minister for Overseas Development, traveling around the world, giving your money away in good causes. And then I was brought back because I was thought to be good on green

issues, and the Greens had just done well in some European elections. I was brought back to be Secretary of State for the Environment. The government was getting a hell of a pasting on environmental and on local government tax issues, and found myself inheriting the poll tax, which is like becoming health minister at the time the black death arrives in in 14th century england i mean it was an absolute nightmare and there was no way we could wriggle out of it and it was particularly savage in the way it dealt with my constituency particularly an aspect of it which i went boy with called the business rate so the combination of that and the fact that my majority always depended on the balance between

the liberals and Labour in my constituency. And while my own share of the vote stayed about the same, in 1992 when I lost, the Labour vote had absolutely collapsed and gone one of the first big examples of tactical voting to the liberals. But was it pleasant? No. I think it was Adlai Stevenson who asked after he'd lost a presidential election for the second time, great man, and was asked how it felt. He said, well, I feel like a little boy who stubbed his toe on the bottom of the bed. I'm too old to cry, but it's too painful to laugh. And I think that was about right. And is it true that everything is stripped away from you quite rapidly, all the ministerial privileges, all the private drivers, your House of Commons pass?

Oh, sure. I mean, that's automatic. And it also happened in another way when I hadn't lost a seat, but when I came back having been governor of Hong Kong for five years with Daimlers and Rolls Royces and yachts and so on, we had those ceremonies in Hong Kong, and I came back and was in the taxi queue at Heathrow with my family. I always say the British Empire actually finished at Terminal 3 or whatever it was there. Were you recognised in the taxi queue?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure. What did people say? They were slightly surprised. I remember somebody saying, oh, I thought they sent cars for people like you. But as a minister, there's an untrue story, anecdote, about a minister who, after he'd lost his seat, the next day gets into the back of the car

and waits for it to drive off. And, of course, there's no chauffeur or anything. It's all gone. I think I was left in Bath, not much wanting to go back there. I mean, I'd had some wonderful friends and some people who'd worked for me very hard. Indeed, before, three or four years before I lost my seat, I'd been asked, because people could see that it was slipping away from us,

and it had been suggested I went and stood as candidate in a next- door seat, one of the seats next door where the MP was standing down. People do it all the time. I thought it was the most slippery sort of carpet packing. And I didn't know how I would ever be able to look at the people who'd worked for me in the face again. It seemed to me to be a woeful thing. A lot of people thought that showed how unprofessional I was. But I really, I really couldn't have done it, I don't think. But I left Bath with quite a few fond memories, but with quite a lot of grumpiness inside as well. There was a particular sort of liberal voter there, I'm sure they've all gone now, who, Wine Society, beautiful Georgian house, couldn't bear to bring themselves to vote Conservative,

but just hoped the Conservatives would still win the election in order to save them from Labour tax policies. And that always struck me as being pretty unsavoury. But anyway, I remembered, I got a wonderful letter just after I'd left from somebody who I'd helped some years before in Bath, whose son went to school and was discovered to be dyslexic, or at least nobody would accept dyslexia in those days. We'd worked away at it and eventually got the local education authority to change its mind and he'd gone to a special school or a school where they recognised his dyslexia.

And this kid had just got into Leeds University, I think it was, and she wrote to me to say how grateful she was. And that sort of thing made it all worthwhile, really. I suppose it's a strange thing when you are a public figure doing your job. So what I mean by that is that your losses and failures when they happen are often played out on the public stage not just when you lost your seat in Bath but I wonder how you feel about having left the BBC and how you deal with that on a personal level do you take those sort of slings and arrows personally you can't help but do that really the BBC was a bit different i mean first of all i was ill um

yeah yeah but but secondly i wasn't really chairman of the bbc i was chairman of the bbc trust the regulator and it was a terrible terrible position to be in because i was assumed to be able to make things happen and in fact wasn't actually in charge of the corporation at all, as we're still really being run by the Director General and a separate board. I found it particularly disappointing, because I love the BBC. I think public service broadcasting is one of the most important things about public life in this country. I think the fact that, what is it, 2 million people

listen to Melvin Bragg on Radio 4 every Thursday morning talking about quantum mechanics or the Silk Road or whatever, I think it's just something wonderful about this country. And I think its role as a public educator goes back to some of the best cultural and educational traditions in this country. And when you look at all the stuff about fake news, my God, we need the BBC.

So I have an almost romantic idea of the BBC. Indeed, I sometimes used to say, when I was the regulator, I sometimes used to say, I think I'm the only person left, including in the BBC, who really believes in public service broadcasting. You know, I inherited that awful Jimmy Savile scandal. And in particular, the question of whether or not the BBC had dropped a programme on Newsnight which exposed Jimmy Savile. We were appointing a new director general at the time

and we appointed a really nice guy who was even more roiled by the whole thing, a really fine man, and that disturbed me as well. But then we appointed Tony Hall, and he's a good chap. Were you bruised by it all, the public nature of...? No, not really. I performed a cordial loathing for one or two tabloids, and indeed others.

I always remember that remark of Tom Stoppard's. I haven't quite got it right, but when he said something like, I'm very much in favour of freedom of speech, it's just some of the newspapers I don't like. But some of their behaviour was pretty awful, and of course it was because at the same time we were going through all the rows about the way they'd behaved with hacking people's mobiles and so on, and it way of trying to keep the bbc in its box but it wasn't comfortable

but it was made more uncomfortable because because i wasn't very well and because nothing you did ever seemed to get you on the front foot i remember when i started i've got a freedom pass i am not as you would have observed, a millennial. It was the tofu and the vegan commenters that gave you away. So I said right at the outset, because there was a lot of fuss about BBC expenses and how much everybody at the BBC cost, and some of that was justified, incidentally. So I told them right at the outset that I wasn't going to have a car.

I'd take public transport. So there's a wonderful Londoner Cockney PA at BBC Trust she's absolutely wonderful woman wise smart funny and she said chairman she said well we've done that she said well chairman she said well I'll tell you this she said one of them will have it before before know where you are. And of course that's happened. One of the senior executives snapped up the car. I mean, I doubt whether any chairman's ever had lower expenses, but you never got any credit for it. I'm sorry, that sounds a little bit more bitter.

It was really nice to meet some of the people I did meet. I was particularly pleased to be able to do a bit to help the World Service and World Television, though I think we need to do a lot more for World Television. I don't really see any reason why there should be a domestic 24-hour news service and a World Television. I think they should be put together and then you'd have a real competitor for CNN. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago.

These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago, set in motion a chain of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, historian and host of a new chapter of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Join me and world-leading experts every week as we explore the incredible real-life history that inspires the locations, the characters, and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I don't know if you count your tenure at the BBC as a failure

because you haven't said that to me, but I wonder what you've learned from your professional failures. I think I learned from the BBC that sometimes your friends are right when they tell you not to do a job. On the whole, I hadn't taken much notice of them. I hadn't taken much notice of them when they told me not to go to Hong Kong. I hadn't taken much notice of them when they told me not to chair the commission that reorganized the police in Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement. I didn't take any notice later when I spent an extremely, extremely interesting year, year and a half chairing a committee which tried to reorganise the communications in the Vatican.

But the one before that, the BBC, a lot of people said, just look at the structure, it's impossible. But I didn't take any notice and they were actually right. What do you do when you're upset? How do you cope with it? I'm not a bundle of fun, to be honest. And I think it probably gets worse to some extent as you get older. I can normally find a reason to be gloomy or grumpy grumpy but may surprise people but it's true and my my wife and family snap me out of it i work very hard and they sometimes think which may be true that i i work too hard but i think i'd just collapse in a heap if i didn't i'm not um always a little ray of sunshine and i feel bad about that afterwards. I still go to confession,

which I started doing when I was seven. I don't go perhaps as often as I should. But it's rather disturbing that the thing I normally own up to is being too grumpy. What did you say when you went to confession at seven? Can you remember? I can't really, except that the format is much the same. Subsequently, I can remember thinking it was a slightly crazy format, because when you're seven, you have to think very hard to remember anything you've done wrong. But I now mix it up in my mind with all sorts of funny short stories about first confessions, including that one by Frank O'Connor, about the little boy who misses going to confession with the rest of

his class and has to go on his own and goes into the box and isn't quite sure what to do and sees a shelf and thinks that's to kneel on and fetches up with his knees opposite the priest's face when the priest turns around. It's very funny. It's a very well judged story. I went to one of my grandsons' first communion a couple of two, three years back, and I wondered in the church, there are lots of little kids going up to communion and having made their first confessions, and I just wondered how many of their parents still go to confession in the traditional way. I think there's quite a lot of feeling that it shouldn't necessarily be replaced, but it should be augmented, or there should be an alternative of an act of reconciliation, which people do publicly.

I think that'll come eventually, but it was brought in at the age of seven or so early in the 19th century by a Pope who thought it was the best way of getting hold of souls. A lot of people that I interview for this go to therapy, and it sounds to me as if confession is... No, not really. Confession is part of my tribal custom. I tell you what I feel, I feel that if one or two of my grandchildren are encouraged to do it, then I should bloody well do it too.

Maybe it does make me, from time to time, think about my inadequacies, most of which are in dealing with the people closest to me. I mean, I'm much nicer to people who aren't part of my family or immediate circle of friends, I think. I think I normally come over rather well to them and rather polite. I'm not saying I think I'm very bad company at home, but I do think that if I'm feeling gloomy about anything, it's the same with everybody.

It's those closest to you personally who get the rough end. Well, it brings us on to another failure that you outlined to me, which I think is my favourite failure that anyone has ever cited, which is that you left it too long to marry your wonderful wife, Lavender. Tell me what you mean by that. Well, as I mentioned earlier, I won all the prizes at school and went up to university. And I was quite a naive kid, I guess. I'd had girlfriends. I had a wonderfully pretty girlfriend who went on to be a very distinguished scientist in Africa.

She wasn't African. She was a biologist. And I remember we broke up because I couldn't remember the color of her eyes. And it seemed to me that nobody could be expected to remember the color of somebody's eyes when they were on the other end of the tennis bloody court. How long had you been seeing her for? Six, nine months. Oh, my gosh. That's terrible. Anyway, so I wasn't exactly an Italian Romeo.

Is there any other sort? So I went up to university. I had one or two girlfriends I had tea with or whatever. I remember one girl who was reading philosophy at St Anne's College, and I went to tea with her. And while she was outside making, doubtless, the Earl Grey tea, I was looking along her bookshelf and suddenly came across for the first time in my life Henry Miller's novels, Sexus, Plexus and Nexus,

and I was still looking through one of these with amazement when she came back with the Earl Grey. So I wasn't the most sophisticated of boys. And then I met Lavender, eventually my wife, at a party organised by one of my history tons. Young women were provided or produced from another college by his partner, actually I think his wife, who was the bursar at that college.

And Lavender I met. She was very different because Lavender was an orphan. Her father had been killed in the Normandy campaign just before the Battle of the Falaise Gap. And then her mother was killed in a car accident when she was 15, 16. So she was an orphan and really looking for and needing a bit of stability. And I wasn't big enough to provide it. We had quite a lot of fun.

We went to an extraordinary commem ball i remember at maudlin college when the band doing a gig they which they greatly resented because they had to come back from america from their first tour to do it the band was rolling stones and then i got a scholarship to go to america and i wrote to her and said you know i can't even remember exactly what i said to embarrass to try but basically rather sort of ambivalent letter saying you know, I can't even remember exactly what I said, to embarrass to try, but basically a rather sort of ambivalent letter saying, you know, how much I'd liked her and so on, but not wanting to commit myself. So I went away, and the next thing,

she fell in love with somebody else and got married to him on the day of the 1966 World Cup final. I can remember that much. And I never really thought that I would ever get married to anybody else in a funny way. Not in a funny way. In a beautiful way. And then that didn't work for her.

I don't want to go into that, but he walked out quite soon. I don't know why he really wanted to get married. He was also at Oxford. When we started seeing one another again a couple of years after that she phoned me up now by that stage I mean not only had I lost two or three years probably more

we got married in 1971 had our first daughter in 1973 but I suppose we'd have got married or could have got married earlier what it would have done which may or may not have been a good thing daughter in 1973, but I suppose we'd have got married or could have got married earlier. What it would have done, which may or may not have been a good thing, I don't think I'd have gone into politics if that had happened. Not because Lavender at that stage was somewhere to the left of me, but because I'd gone into a political job which wasn't a sort of, it didn't offer great prospects, unless you just went on in politics, which is a fairly uncertain profession.

But I'd also got a place at the BBC. I'd got one of their graduate traineeships, which I turned down, which they regarded as les majestés. But I think if I was getting married or if I was having a serious relationship, I would have probably taken that job because it gave a certain stability. relationship, I would have probably taken that job because it gave a certain stability. So maybe a benign consequence of my, the only one, not getting married earlier, was that I went into politics and had a lot of wonderful and interesting jobs. But I'd have probably been nice to have got married earlier when I'd have probably still had a reasonable career doing

something else. And what do you think the joy of having got married earlier would have been personally, just spending more time with Lavender? We've now been married, whatever is the gap between 71 and 20, 18, 29 plus 18 years. We'd have probably been married now by 50 years. 47 years. And our kids would all be, I I guess much the same and even older with even older grandchildren their life would have been different so I was even in a way very

lucky that Lavender went through the unhappiness of her first marriage which didn't work but you can't actually want something like that to happen so it was sad what color are her eyes oh come on not going through that i don't do eyes i can do i can do hair well lavender is an extraordinarily beautiful and wonderful woman do you feel that you i'm sorry, do you feel that you could have been half the man that you are without her support and her wisdom? No, it's what Ernie Bevan used to call a clitch. I mean, it's a bit of a cliche, but it's true. For example, she made most of the sacrifices. And I think that we still live in an age when that's largely true. It's not

as true as it was but I think there is still a lot of truth in it. I mean she chose to stay at home and bring up the kids but I don't think I was nearly as good a father as my son's-in-law are. I wasn't making very much money when I was director of the research department, which I was at the youngest ever. I got, I think, £9,500 a year or £10,000 a year. It was about the same when I became an MP. We didn't buy a new car until I was a cabinet minister. We were lucky because Lavender had been left a small bequest and she'd bought a flat with it. We kept on trading that up.

We were also lucky because an aunt of mine died and left me a small bequest with which we could buy a cottage just outside my constituency. I used to go there certainly three weekends a month, three weekends out of four. Lavender would probably come two, maybe sometimes three. I'd go down in the train on a Friday morning with my papers, reading my papers. She'd come down with kids in the back of the car yelling dog food for the weekend and then have to go off on Saturday night to a bloody coronation chicken wine and cheese party. I mean, is the life of politics. It wasn't much fun for her then. And then when I lost my seat

and didn't get one of the top jobs in politics, which otherwise I guess if John Major says in his memoirs I was going to be chanced for the Exchequer, so I was probably saved from that. But when I went off to Hong Kong, she'd gone back to the bar and was practicing at the family bar and I had to give all that up.

So she's made the sacrifices and she's also helped to keep me more or less sane. More or less. She's helped you occasionally to think of the glass as less than three quarters. Yes, and whenever I'm with my family, the thing I most enjoy is being with them. And we're very lucky because we were able,

when I sold a cottage in my constituency to buy a house in France, and it's big enough to accommodate. It's not grand, but it's very comfortable. It's big enough to accommodate the whole family. And they all come, they all love it. Plus hangers-on, including me. Plus hangers-on, plus dogs.

And this year my godson and his three boys, so we're always sort of a dozen at peak child or thereabouts. And it's just terrific that I've got such a loving and close family. I mean, it isn't ordained that your kids won't fall out and we'll get on very well together and will be best friends it's ordained that your sons-in-law will get on very well together all very different which they do so I'm really lucky like that but lavender holds it all together of course as we get older we become slightly eccentric as our children point out very gently from time to time and we become slightly more

anxious about things having been very laid back about travel and getting to planes or trains I've now become sort of obsessive about getting to things on time I plan ahead far too much my diary is always something I know off by heart months ahead, and that wasn't what life was like, but I think it's just a part of maybe getting older, and I just hope that we both keep our marbles as long as possible and know who we are. How do you feel about death, given your faith? I'm not morbid, but I do think about it and do talk about it.

And I think that I would find it very difficult to cope with the idea if I didn't believe there was an afterlife now. Why do I believe there's an afterlife? Partly because of the sort of argument which Jacques Maritain put forward. Life is so precious, yet we're so reckless about it. And that has always made me think that it's perhaps because deep down we know that it's not the end. Indeed, that's the chant at Christian funerals, as you know. I surprised people recently because Lavender thoroughly disapproves of me doing it. As Chancellor of Oxford, I have to occasionally go and give sermons. And I was giving a sermon in Magdalen College, and they're all beautiful. Well, they're all beautiful.mons. And I was giving a sermon in Magdalen College,

and they were beautiful. Well, they were all beautiful. Chapel. And the reading was one of Christ's earliest miracles. I think it was his third when he went off on mission in Galilee. And he raised the son of the widow of Nain. There's some wonderful paintings of it and pieces of sculpture of it in various places,

including one in the British Museum. Anyway, it encouraged me to preach a sermon about my views on the afterlife. And I think the assembled dons and students were slightly surprised. It's partly being a Christian, I suppose. You can go through all the motions of being a Christian the sort of tribal ones the aesthetic ones the cultural ones while not believing in the afterlife I've got several friends who were like that I'm not sure how many members of my family believe in an afterlife but I'd find it very difficult not to cope unless I. I don't spend the whole day thinking about it. I don't spend the whole day wondering what funeral hymns I want. But I do think about it a bit.

One thing that happens to you, I think, when you get older, you've got another 40 years to go before this happens to you, is that you wake up earlier in the morning. I lie there in bed sometimes. I'm finding no shortage of things to worry about, whether it's President Trump or Brexit or... Muesli. Muesli.

Whether we got the right yoghurt this week or about how many more summers I've got or Christmases I've got. I do think about that a bit. My dad, during the war, was on a convoy to the Middle East. He used to make the sign on his own forehead at night, you know, when everybody was wondering whether that night would bring a U-boat attack. And he used to do something which his father had done before him to him,

which is to trace I-N-R-I, the words on the cross, on his own forehead and say the prayer, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, preserve me from sudden and unprepared death. I did it so often when I was a child myself, and my parents used to do it to me, and occasionally I find myself doing it to a grandchild. It still means something to me. I don't know where to go from that because...

Well, I mean, cheerful. It was so beautiful. I don't even want to get onto your third failure because it was about a book that you published at the wrong kind of time. You were extolling the merits of globalization. That was vanity. I'd written three books before that, which had all been well received. I mean, one of them had sold particularly well as well partly because the Americans published it with a sticker on the front saying the book that Rupert Murdoch tried to stop. We'd sold a huge number of at least two of those books and I wrote what I thought was my best book and it came out in 2008 and it was very well reviewed but it was about globalization both the opportunities and the challenges and it

came out at exactly the wrong moment. I mean it was a bit like I guess writing a book about aircraft safety just after a plane crash I mean so I came to write the last one I wrote on identity and politics with some apprehension but it did all right that book was called what next wasn't it literally that was called what next and And it's the subject of one of my favourite stories, which says quite a lot about him too. And it comes back to what we've just been talking about, I suppose. I sent it to the Duke of Edinburgh, who at the time was the Chancellor of Cambridge, as I am of Oxford. He wrote me back a very nice handwritten letter thanking me for the book and saying what next question mark when you're my age there's only one answer we i mean you brought us back to death but in a comic way yes and i know

what is next for you is that there's a car waiting for you outside to go and talk to some real millennials i mean boys boys at a north london school chris patterson thank you so much you're a wonderful man i so appreciate you doing this for me. Even if you can't remember the colour of women's eyes, you have other qualities. Thank you so much.