One last conversation with John Mortimer

Further to Colin Murphy's tribute for Prospect online to John Mortimer, who died at the end of last week, these are some of my own thoughts and recollections of one of the great writers, wits, liberal thinkers and free speech advocates of the last century.

I had the good fortune to meet John Mortimer on several occasions, but our second meeting, at Turville Heath—the house built by his father—in November 2007 will be one that I remember most fondly. At Turville, you knew you were seeing John in his favorite place: at home with his family. Penny, John's wife and the only woman in his life to really keep him in check, suggested that I come for Sunday lunch and interview John (as a sort of writer's desert). I leapt at the invitation. Previous experience had shown that an afternoon with the Mortimers guaranteed, if not hedonistic, then at least interesting conversation. Plus, as an interviewee, John was the human equivalent of the Hope Diamond—the sheer weight and multitude of his life stories beggared belief. So, with tape recorder and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé in tow, I went to grill one of the greatest litigators of the 20th century.

Both Penny and John were on excellent form and, despite a recent fall that had left him permanently wheelchair bound, John was loathe to keep still. We moved from kitchen to living room to study as John inquired about my work and family with genuine interest and concern. He would break off to point out books that I should read ("you must read Dickens, I just love him") and would pause as he had Penny scan his study's many shelves to get me out his own copy of In Character, a series of interviews he published in 1984 that saw him probe Mick Jagger, among others. His handwriting adorns the margins and I treasure the book, not only for its breadth of interviewees, but for the even-handed way John handled his subjects.  Always honest, he was a great lover of humanity, even when that humanity was far from attractive.

On women, he is perhaps most known for a love life that resembled a soap opera; he loved women, unquestionably. Getting into trouble was, often, unavoidable, although his charm meant that those he offended could do little in the end but forgive him. Halfway through our Sunday roast, Penny told me of the moment that Wendy Craig had sat at the very same table and revealed the existence of Ross, her and John's son from an affair that had taken place 43 years previously. A lesser marriage might have crumbled—and Penny told me how she was shocked, to put it mildly.  Yet there was no question of anything other than this newly-discovered adult son being brought into the family fold and adored.

John had another male love in his life, too: Rumpole. The character serves as a lasting portrait. John told me of the friendly companionship Rumpole gave him, and also of the splendid tool he was for poking fun at the ridiculousness we find ourselves in as we muddle along life: "I keep him alive principally because he is a great comment on whatever's going on in the world." Like Rumpole, John could never be accused of being impartial or of sitting on the fence. He gleefully talked politics, calling the Lib Dems "a load of wankers," although he was also critical of the modern incarnation of the Labour party, which seemed to him "a puzzle, a muddle: goodness knows what it is." He despaired, too, of Gordon Brown's attempts to define Britishness, decrying the stupidity of a government sticking a single label on a people whose beliefs were so varied: "Guardian readers in Islington are totally different to old retired colonel's living in Weston Super Mare. They might be [all British] by nationality, but all their sets of values are totally different."

Over his Vodka and milk mixer (he hadn't been eating much at the time), John would shift conversation from the war in Iraq to domestic social policy. He discussed the necessary limitations of government and the dangers that occur when our rights as citizens are infringed by rulers that he deemed despotic. Calorie displays on restaurant menus met with an especially caustic response: "It's of absolutely no concern in governance to tell people what to eat and what to drink, or how to keep healthy, or not to be fat. If someone wants to be fat then it's entirely their own affair. Anyway, fat people are rather historically effective. Winston Churchill was fat. Pavarotti was fat." Moreover, he irascibly concluded: "All the best people have been fat".

John was a voracious conversationalist but also a munificent listener. He was a wonderful writer, both of fiction, drama and beautifully honest memoirs. In answer as to whether he would consider another autobiographical installment, though, he was adamantly against the idea: "I think I've got everything off my chest I need to unload." He told me: "I have written about it all."