Encountering Michael Foot

I met the veteran British Labour politician, Michael Foot, who died last week at the age of 96, twice, with a spread of twenty years between the two occasions.  The first time I met him was in the Autumn of 1979 a few months after the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher had come to power that May.  He was 66 at the time and had broken his ankle.  I remember hobbling up to the urinal next to the one I was using.  I engaged him as best I could while we washed our hands.  He was speaking at a talk on 'Forty Years On' from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, something he had witnessed as an MP and in 1940 had written 'Guilty Men' attacking the appeasers of Hitler. Interestingly he wrote it under the Classical pseudonym Cato and later wrote another book under the name Cassius.  In some ways I feel an affinity with him in terms of the need to protect your private life and especially those you love, when making political points.

The thing about Foot which I was to witness that day was though at times his speeches wandered, they were always engaging and full of life.  He was able to quote extensively and was very adept at using people's own words against them.  On the day of his death I listened to the speech he made in 1979 (in those days there was only radio coverage not television coverage) at the time of the vote of no-confidence in the Labour government of James Callaghan; it was played on the Parliament channel.  It was both funny and poignant in the ideas and challenges it laid out.  I cannot remember when I last enjoyed a political speech so much.

I met Michael Foot again when he was launching 'Dr. Strangelove, I Presume' (1999).  He was standing in Bloomsbury waiting to be collected.  I had seen him at a bus stop in the Charing Cross Road a couple of years earlier.  Despite his age (86 in 1999), he seemed full of energy.  I had once met his doctor who outlined how he walked vigorously across Hampstead Heath.  He had been rejected from volunteering for the army for the Second World War on the grounds of his asthma and he seemed to wear thick glasses all his life.  One might have thought in his late 80s he was going to slow down, but as it turned out he had another entire decade of life ahead of him. 

Anyway, again I had encountered Foot on his way to an event that I was actually attending myself.  I took the opportunity to approach him and recounted how we had met twenty years earlier, though of course he would not have remembered.  The world seemed incredibly different to 1979 to me and I got a bit of a sense of how the full expanse of his life appeared.  The event was a small scale thing and had a kind of collegiate atmosphere.  Some of the audience seemed to presume that his age was making him forgetful and this seemed to be the case when he did not respond to one question.  The same question was asked again and very honestly, he said that he had not responded to it earlier, though he had taken in on board fully, because he had no answer for it.  It was clear that his mind was as sharp as ever.

Michael Foot was an easy focus for ridicule, something that really haunted him when he was leader of the Labour Party, 1980-83.  He was ridiculed for appearing at the Cenotaph in a duffel coat as if it was offensive.  However, in my eyes, it was practical for a man of his age (Thatcher was 54 when she came to office) standing around in November and to some degree the extent of the ridicule suggests that he was still seen as a challenge by the Conservatives.  In her first term of office Thatcher was not as secure as people now assume.  There was uncertainty even within her own party about the direction she was going in, certainly away from the policies of Edward Heath towards an anti-European Community (ironically something she shared in common with Foot), far more pro-America and certainly pro-nuclear policy, backed by New Right monetarist economic policies which were wrecking so much of British industry.  If it had not been for the Falklands Conflict of 1982 and the populist chauvinism that that threw up she would have found it far harder at the 1983 election than she did.  Politics had turned very nasty as seen by the comedian Kenny Everett's (1944-95) call to a baying Conservative crowd to 'kick away Michael Foot's stick!'.  Foot had used a stick to walk since a car accident in 1963.

Neil Kinnock made a very important point last week about Foot's role in keeping the Labour Party alive during the dark days of the Thatcher regime.  The tendency among many Labour supporters in 1979 and beyond was to become more radical and move over to revolutionary politics.  This threatened to remove the Labour Party from the mainstream of British politics, and as we know from the extreme left and extreme right parties, let alone people like the Green Party, such a location means not having representation in the UK parliament.  Thatcher stated that she wanted to move towards a political system like that of the USA with two parties that were pretty close together around a rather right-wing 'centre' and in a television interview said she wanted to see the end of Socialist and semi-Socialist parties (a way she had characterised the Liberal Party on another occasion).  A more radical Labour Party would possibly have allowed her to do that.  However, given the fact that we have the kind of political pattern that Thatcher wished for, circulating around the Thatcherite Consensus with Labour and the Conservatives so close, perhaps the purging of the extremists under Kinnock after he became leader in 1983 might suggest that it meant moving to what Thatcher desired.

Foot's integrity and willingness to embrace challenging, if not utterly radical policies, meant he could not be beaten down by extremists like Militant Tendency, within his own party.  While Labour now might be shorn of true radicalism it is intact and in fact that might be Foot's greatest legacy.  The creation of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) including disgruntled right-wing Labour MPs in 1981, showed the risks of fragmentation for the Labour Party.  Even if Labour managed to lose the argument for reforming policies the party did not shatter in the way it had after 1931 condemning it to impotence for a decade or the way the Liberal Party did after 1922 leaving it feeble for the rest of the 20th century.  Becoming a number of small differently shaded left-wing parties would have meant no hope for anyone opposed to Thatcher.  Kinnock had a party to take over even if it had to lose a lot of what he and Foot had stood for before it could come back to power, or, perhaps not, given the irregularities of the 1992 election.

Foot was particularly condemned in the 1980s for supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament.  He did this because he had long believed in the immorality of nuclear weapons, but of course there would have been a real economic benefit for the UK if it had given up on nuclear weapons in the 1980s.  The Trident nuclear weapons cost £1 billion per year to keep and the estimated total is £97 billion by the time they will have been scrapped.  To replace them will costs £130 billion.  These are sums which make bailing out the banks look pretty minor.  The Polaris system, that preceded Trident, which the UK bought for £300 million in 1962 (worth around £6 billion at today's values) .  If this money had gone into hospitals or transport or education or power generation, Britain would be in a very different situation to where it is today.  We know that the fear of a Soviet invasion was constantly falsified and certainly from the 1970s onwards the USSR would have found it impossible to invade West Germany even if they had wanted to.  The Soviets had minimal concern about the UK and yet we had to cripple our economy for the sake of a fantasy, making lots of US arms manufacturers very rich in the meantime.  Even President General Dwight Eisenhower (president 1953-61) spoke of the 'military-industrial complex' that was so influential in the USA and clearly in the UK too.  British jobs were not created by the regular purchase of US nuclear weapons.  The current Labour government does not support the abolition of the UK's nuclear weapons, only the SNP (Scottish Nationalist Party) backs such a policy even though the Cold War has been over for twenty years.
In many ways, however, Foot represented an older generation of politician.  He was probably out of date even in the 1960s when Labour prime minister Harold Wilson had adopted his pipe and raincoat as his trade marks for the television era.  Foot appeared as he was, an ordinary old man of the kind you might see in the post office.  However, the public want someone with a certain style than marks them out from the ordinary; John Major only really succeeded by being painfully ordinary.  For Foot it would always be ideas and good policies that would mark out a politician but the public no longer felt that, for them style was now more important than substance.

Foot was more of the style of the Gladstone era in which long speeches which showed the erudite knowledge of the speaker were the norm and were a kind of entertainment and education as well as stirring.  In the sound bite age, his wandering speeches could not be easily 'chunked' for the short attention span viewers.  His legacy fed into Neil Kinnock, his successor as leader of the Labour Party, who though far younger (41 when he became Labour leader in 1983) did not shake off the lengthy expositions that Foot had favoured.  These men were right, politics is not simple and simplifying it makes policies have a tendency to error.  However, after the 1970s British society was 'tired of politics' and no-one can be bothered to listen to policy outlined, they would rather have emotionally swaying chunks of information that they can be certain are 'true' without analysing them at all.

Foot held fast to the deeply held views he had.  He was not a pragmatist as that would have been to betray his views.  He was a republican (seeking abolition of the monarchy) and was ardently opposed to nuclear weapons at a time when they had been made to seem 'vital' for Britain despite their huge expense and the hazard they presented.  Similarly he believed in a mixed economy, i.e. with state-run and privately-run businesses, which ironically in the era of the enduring Thatcherite consensus fostered by Tony Blair, we have ended back with.  Yet, the 1980s were seemingly all about 'free enterprise', well in fact not really free, just enterprise for the privileged and the already wealthy.  Whilst millions were losing their jobs this fantasy of a society where ordinary people could be rich was sold very successfully to too many voters.  Foot could not have lied to the public that way.  Providing opportunity for all is costly but is morally right.  In that respect, Foot can be seen as contributing to a humanist morality (he was an atheist) something which seems very at odds in the current UK where we have a choice between selfish, (in effect immoral), behaviour fostered by the right and the left seemingly to adhere to a sense that only faiths can supply morality, especially fostered by the Blairite New Labour, though more muted under Gordon Brown.

Michael Foot was a living reminder of a different, moral-based, intellectually-engaging form of politics which we seem so far away from these days even though the extremities of Thatcherism have been curtailed (for now).  One has to admire someone of such ability and conviction and I feel proud that I was able to meet and talk with him on two occasions.

What is the Problem with an Elected House of Lords?

Back in 1997 before the Labour Party was elected to power for the first time in the UK in 18 years there was much in their policy documents about their policies for constitutional reform. For a country that has had some form of democracy for a quite a long time, though only universal suffrage since 1948, the UK actually is not a very democratic country. Putting aside the fact that so much policy is made by the ultra-rich in UK society, in fact even at a base level it does not really count as a democracy. Like so many other countries in the World we have a bicameral system of parliament but the upper house, the House of Lords, is totally unelected and is made up of people, predominantly men, who have inherited their position in parliament, alongside 24 bishops from the Church of England, no other church, and then people who have been appointed for life by some politician in the past few decades. You could argue that this all frees them from political influence and that their age means that they can bring experience to the job, but the key problem for me, and for the Labour Party of 1997 is that they are all unelected.

Eleven years on, nothing has changed. There were attempts to reduce the number of inherited peers (as the lords and ladies are termed generically) or reduce their voting rights, but even that has not really come about. In 1999 the number of hereditary peers was reduced from 700 to 92, which is an improvement, but the house is still full of appointed rather than elected people. As you probably know, it is suspected that Labour, for some reason will lose the 2009/10 election, primarily because with the departure of Tony Blair they have stopped pandering to the ultra-rich as much as they used to, and money and influence turned all the media against the Brown government, even though their rivals, the Conservatives, lack any policies and seem content to simply have power handed to them. We actually might be moving into an era of policy-free politics. However much I loath Margaret Thatcher and how she totally wrecked the UK (to give her the state funeral she is now requesting would be a travesty) no-one could say she lack policies. So, in this environment, the slowly grinding steps to try to reform the House of Lords are now facing opposition from within Labour itself, because they think it may upset the electorate even further. Given that most Labour MPs think they will lose anyway, why are they bothered? I can tell you why, it is because the House of Lords is the most exclusive club in the World and even the majority of Socialists of the past were happy to become lords or ladies. Partly, I imagine, because it meant they could keep sticking their noses into politics for the rest of their lives. Full credit to Tony Benn for giving up the peerage he inherited in the mid-1960s and refusing one in his own right, though he is the one man I think this country still needs in parliament.

What angers me most is the feeble excuses which are being put forward to delay reform of the House of Lords and they show a stunningly patronising attitude to our friends and allies not only in the EU but also North America. The team supposedly leading the reform headed by Jack Straw and Lady Corston, argue reform now would be 'a knee-jerk reaction', how slow are your responses if it takes 11 years to react? In fact it is more than that as Labour was thinking along these lines back as early as 1994 and even before that. I met in the 1990s who had researched Labour's attempts in the 1970s to reform the House of Lords, so 30 years is a very slow 'jerk'. The really feeble response is that there might be split legitimacy in parliament if there was an elected upper house. I could understand this fear if nowhere else in the World had a bicameral system with both houses elected, but since Japan abolished its House of Peers at the end of the Second World War, not democratic country has an unelected second house. The Americans have had one now for over 200 years. In neighbouring countries notably France, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, have elected upper houses. The Norway, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Greece, all the Balkan states except Bosnia, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine have unicameral systems, so are entirely elected. Of course we could go unicameral, but if we insist on bicameral there are scores of successful examples across Europe and the English-speaking world: Canada, South Africa, India, Australia, only New Zealand is unicameral.

Straw whines that if proportional representation was used for the upper house then members there could claim greater legitimacy to hold their seat than many of those in the lower house, the House of Commons. Well, whose fault is that? Labour was very eager to have proportional representation when it was losing during the 1980s and 1990s and then when they came to power they forgot all about it. If they had introduced it when they said, we would not now be in that situation. The other issue is that there are loads of models of an elected upper house. The nearest, i.e. the Republic of Ireland, the only state to share a land border with the UK, has an indirectly elected upper house, Seanad Éireann is chosen by electoral colleges. The trouble is a lack of imagination on the part of the reformers. The UK could move first to an indirect model before a directly elected model, if they wanted, but even those charged with looking at reform seem stunningly ignorant of the different models available. I suppose it is the typical British thing, that as the 'mother of democracy' we have nothing to learn from ignorant foreigners who have instability leading to dictatorship. Of course this neglects how for over 60 years so many European models have worked well in securing political stability in times of upheaval. The British feel they must find a uniquely British model and given how many varieties are already in existence this leaves little to choose from. Straw's whining is pathetic. They should ask him to pay back any salary he has received from doing this work as clearly he has done less research than you and I can achieve through a Google search or a visit to Wikipedia.

The other problem is that many upper houses are based on a territorial pattern, examples include the states of the USA represented in the Senate and Germany with the Bundesrat. Belgium, Canada, India, Russia, Switzerland are other examples. Of course this would seem a good way forward now that Scotland, Wales and to some extent Northern Ireland are gaining more autonomy. However, again, despite their promises in 1997, regional assemblies for England where 83% of the UK population live, have been stillborn. Partly this is because regional identity is weak and in some areas it is on historic lines, in others on modern things like unitary authorities and these all come in different shapes and sizes. However, the other issue is that the British public do not like 'government' and feel they have no ability to shape it so they simply resist it as an extra level of bureaucracy. Thus, the parallel policy of having large geographical areas from which English senators could be elected itself has failed. A lot of this stems from the fact that so many British people are ignorant of their political system, they love historic models and would probably prefer simply the Queen in power advised by her housecarls, they have felt powerless for so many decades now too and so when reform comes about there is no engagement. Consequently the UK will struggle on with its truncated democracy, which clearly favours, rather than challenges, those who have power. Our upper house will remain an exclusive club rather than a strong tool of democracy.

Encountering Minor Celebrities

I guess my mind must be overly active at the moment and seemingly has a need to dump out all these quirky things that have been floating around in it for many years, like the Aeneid-Jimmy Ruffin parallels posting. Over the years I have 'encountered' quite a few minor celebrities, people from television and movies and some politicians. Generally I never talk to them but typically am in the same space as them for a while and get to see the extent to which they are or are not like how they appear on television and to some extent how much they look like ordinary people. Of course, often they are trying to appear like ordinary people anyway. I am not one of these people who runs up and asks for autographs or even engages the person in conversation, but I suppose I cannot shake off my curiosity with celebrities as people rather than as celebrities. Yet, it is the fact of them being celebrities that marks them out to my attention among the mass of other people I pass. This is just a list of those people I have encountered who could be called celebrities and an explanation of where I met them. The when is generally more vague, but I will give it a shot.


My earliest memory of encountering a celebrity is of seeing Richard Beckinsale (1947-79) with his daughter Samantha Beckinsale (born 1966). He was famous for appearing in the sitcoms 'Porridge' and 'Rising Damp' and she would later appear in various less successful sitcoms and in the firefighter drama 'London's Burning'. I remember a girl in our group (we were standing at the entrance to Woking swimming pool built in 1973) running to get his autograph. Until recently I assumed it was Kate Beckinsale (born 1973), Samantha's half-sister I had seen, but I now know she would have been too young.

In 1979 I stood next to Michael Foot (born 1913) [died 2010] in a public toilet in Guildford in Surrey. He was a Labour MP at the time and became leader of the Labour Party 1980-83. I ran into him again in the late 1990s in Bloomsbury and again on Charing Cross Road. Other politicians I went on to meet included Edward Heath (1916-2005) the former Conservative Prime Minister in Stepney in 1995 (he was an absolutely huge man physically), James Callaghan (1912-2005) former Labour Prime Minister in Bloomsbury in 1996. Tony Banks (1943-2006), Labour MP for Stratford, in Mile End, just down the road from his constituency. Tony Benn (born 1925) [Died 2014] I met in Mile End in the mid-1990s and in Bedford in the mid-2000s (he comes over as an incredibly honest man and has a supportive interest in everyone who talks to him, especially children). William Waldegrave (born 1946) a former Conservative minister 1990-7 once sat down next to me in a cafe in London. He came across far less of the silly public schoolboy he appeared in the media at the time and I discussed his policies to grant easier access to government documents, which he had done in the early 1990s. I am not certain of the date but it was sometime between 1995-8, I guess after 1997 when he was out of office and free to sit in cafes.

I also met Alan Clark (1928-99), a Conservative MP renowned for his sexual exploits, driving a Citroen DS and being a diarist. He was very tall and like myself had gone to the wrong venue to hear his talk, probably in 1996-7, we were both in Mile End and were supposed to be in Bloomsbury. I went there by tube, he by car and I got there ahead of him to tell the assembled audience that he was on his way. He was a character probably 200 years too late, you could really have seen him as a Georgian rake. At the other end of the spectrum, though with a similar rather rogueish demeanour was George Galloway (born 1954), former controversial Labour MP and then MP for the Respect Party. I met him in 2003 in Shepherd's Bush around the time of the Iraq War. He comes across rather light-hearted and was a fool to appear on the 'Big Brother' series, but in real life you detect his sincerity and the passion of his beliefs. This came out strongly when he saw down that US committee that was effectively putting him on trial, but probably because the media dislike him, this serious side is minimised when you see him in the media, but comes out immediately when you meet the man face-to-face. I sat at the table in a restaurant next to Chancellor Helmut Kohl (born 1930) [Died 2017] in 1985 in Bad Hersfeld in West Germany, he was helping an elderly woman, maybe a relative, with her lunch. Kohl, of course, was as huge as he appears on the television, rather dwarfing the small restaurant.

It was in a cafe, in Hampstead this time, that I met Sylvester McCoy (born 1943; real name I found out was Percy James Patrick Kent-Smith) who is probably most renowned for being the 7th Doctor Who in the long-running series. He looked smaller than on the television and seemed very pensive so I did not disturb him. I had almost run over the 5th Doctor Who, Peter Davison (born 1951) also famous for his role as Tristan Farnon in 'All Creatures Great and Small' in the 1970s. He was also in 'Campion' in the late 1980s and has had a second wind appearing as 'The Last Detective' and 'At Home with the Braithwaites' in the 2000s. He stepped out right in front of me whilst I was cycling through Woking (where he lived in his youth) in about 1984. I encountered the 6th Doctor Who, Colin Baker (born 1943) in Blackpool last October which I suppose is suitable because that is where the Doctor Who museum is housed. I have also spoken with Sophie Aldred (born 1962) who played the 7th Doctor's assistant Ace; she looks about 15 years younger than she actually is, incredibly well preserved, and at the same time saw Kenny Baker (born 1934) [Died 2016] the man who was inside R2D2 in the 'Star Wars' movies, he too looks far younger than 74.


Before I get ahead of myself another British actor who stepped out in front of my bicycle was Nigel Havers (born 1949); this was in Oxford in 1992-3. He is a quintessential British actor as shown in series like 'A Horseman Riding By' and 'The Gentleman Thief', I liked him in 'Sleepers' (1991) in which he played a Soviet agent facing up to the end of the Cold War. Also known from being in the movies 'Chariots of Fire' (1981) and 'A Passage to India' (1984) and 'Empire of the Sun' (1987). Slightly further up the same road on another occasion while cycling, I came across the author Michael Moorcock (born 1939), someone I really admire, who, I think, had just emerged from a restaurant. In Oxford, on the station in fact, in about 1993 I met Freddie Jones (born 1927) [Died 2019], a British actor who has been appearing in movies and television series since the late 1960s and internationally is probably best known for 'Firefox' (1982), 'Dune' (1984) and 'Wild At Heart' (1990); he played The Earl in the 'Neverwhere' series (1996). In 1993 he appeared in the Jeremy Brett fronted series 'The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes' in the story called 'The Last Vampyre'. He had appeared earlier in the same series at the stage of 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' in a story called 'Wisteria Lodge' so was the only actor to appear in more than one role in the series.


Some areas, especially in London, are good for meeting minor celebrities. A television actress I also encountered in Hampstead, was Samantha Janus (born 1972). She seems to have not been out of work at all in the 2000s appearing in numerous drama series and most latterly in the soap opera 'Eastenders'. She looked identical to how she appears on television. In almost exactly the same place, on another occasion, I encountered Stephen Greif (born 1944) who though born in Hertfordshire and his ancestors were from Hungary, Poland and Lithuania has often portrayed people of Mediterranean background [P.P. he recently played a French UN negotiator in 'Spooks']. He has been appearing on stage and television since 1970 and seems to be constantly working. His deep, rich voice has meant work in adverts and voiceovers and I came to know his voice well through playing 'Medieval Total War' and 'Medieval II Total War' as he has a suitable voice for medieval characters especially the Italian and Greek factions. Also in Hampstead I encountered Peter Barkworth (1929-2006) there in about 1999, unsurprising as I was standing outside his house having it pointed out as part of a walking tour of the area I was part of at the time.  He happened to come out of this front door to find a group of us there.  He appeared in various television series such as 'Telford's Change' in the mid-1980s but I remember him best as one of the British traitors in 'Where Eagles Dare' (1968).


Another area is Kew. Here I met local resident Ray Brooks (born 1939) who featured prominently in my youth as the narrator of the children's series 'Mr. Benn' and in the movie in the Doctor Who film 'Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD' (1966), his role in that movie as David a resistance leader was a role I aspired to in my youth. He was in numerous television series in the 1960s right up to the 2000s, having left 'Eastenders' this year. His greatest television success was in 'Big Deal' (1984-6) in which he starred. I also encountered Oliver Ford Davis (born 1939) who has been appearing in television series since 1972 (including 'A Very British Coup') and is probably best known for 'Kavanagh QC' (1995-9) and appearing in 'Star Wars - The Phantom Menace' (1999); 'Star Wars - Attack of the Clones' (2002) and 'Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith' (2005). Again he looked just as he does on the movies.

Before I forget, another minor celebrity I ran into in Woking, Surrey, was Buster Merryfield most renowned for being Uncle Albert (1920-99) in the decade-spanning comedy series 'Only Fools and Horses', this was sometime probably 1983 (in fact it must have been much later as he only joined the series in 1984, but it could not have been later than 1987 that I saw him) when he was at the height of his success. Not far from there, in Weybridge, I met Bernard Cribbins (born 1928) [Died 2022] on a stall at a fete. He used to do adverts for the local fishing tackle shop on the radio in that area too. Cribbins has been working in the media since 1960 appearing in numerous movies, including 'Casino Royale' (1967), 'The Mouse on the Moon' (1962), with Peter Sellers in 'Two Way Stretch' (1960) and a couple of the Carry On movies. Notably he was also in 'Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD' alongside Ray Brooks. Cribbins returned to 'Doctor Who' appearing as Donna's grandfather in the 2007/08 season of the series. It would be interesting to also have Brooks back for an episode or two. In the television version of the Dalek Invasion story, the Doctor's granddaughter who was in her late teens stays on Earth in 2150 with the resistance leader. In the movie version she was only a small girl and goes off with her grandfather instead. Given recent references in the recent series to the Doctor's partner and creating a daughter, perhaps returning to visit his granddaughter would be an interesting twist.

London pubs can also be good locations for encountering celebrities if you get the right ones. I encountered Richard Harris (1930-2002) in a pub on the Mall the name of which I have forgotten, this must have been 1998. He was surrounded by young men no doubt in awe of his larger than life and drinking character. Harris had been a singer in the 1960s and 1970s and in movies since the 1950s, latterly best known for being Dumbledore in 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets' (2002). Also in the late 1990s I encountered Ewan McGregor (born 1971) and John Hannah (born 1962) together in an argument with a member of the public in 'The French House' in Soho. McGregor is famous for 'Trainspotting' (1995), 'Moulin Rouge' (2001), the Star Wars movies mentioned above and riding his motorbike all over the world; John Hannah for 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' (1994), 'The Mummy' movies and playing Inspector Rebus on television.

In Heal's the interior design store on Tottenham Court Road, I came across Marc Warren (born 1967), best known for his role in 'Hustle' (2004-) [ran until 2012] but was also in a particular episode of  'Doctor Who' in 2006 and was Mr. Teatime in the television adaptation of Terry Pratchett's 'Hogfather' (2006).  He seemed to be looking at beds.  Not far from there I met Ken Campbell (1941-2008), distinctive actor, playwright and comedian, walking down Charing Cross Road, not too surprising as he was appearing in a play there, probably his History of Comedy which was on in 2003. He was very much as he appeared on television, really full of life. A few streets from there on another occasion I think about 1998, Peter Stringfellow (born 1941), the nightclub owner and minor celebrity who still dresses and has the weird California beach haircut that he has long sported, as if he had been frozen in time as a minor 1980s pop singer. He looked as over-the-top grinning as he does on television. I must say he does seem genuinely happy with life, that aspect did not seem artificial. As he emerged alone, however, without any entourage, it did seem as if he had stepped through the wrong door on the way back from the toilet and had found himself inadvertently on the street rather than somewhere else in the building.

On trains out of Euston station I encountered Terry Christian (born 1963) one-time infamous television presenter of youth programme 'The Word' and now a radio presenter, he looked very well preserved, and given this was the early 2000s not much different to a decade before. At the same station catching the same train on another day I encountered Richard Griffiths (born 1947) [Died 2013] who was famously in 'Withnail and I' (1987) and has been in all but one of the Harry Potter films as Harry Potter's uncle, and had a successful television series in which he was the star, 'Pie in the Sky' (1994-7); he looked terribly sad which was a shame.


On aeroplanes in 1985 I encountered pop group 'The Christians' flying to the Netherlands and in 2004 'Right Said Fred' flying to Berlin. I also walked beside Robert Smith (born 1959) of 'The Cure' in Belgium in the early 2000s. He was another person who is actually huge in all directions when you meet him in real life. His big hair adds to that. I ran into Victoria Beckham (born 1974) of The Spice Girls with her husband David Beckham (born 1975 - footballer) at Victoria railway station in about 1997 on a day when David was bunking training. They were the celebrities who most looked like celebrities with a ring of men in dark coats around them it was as if they had carved out a bit of the air and made it their private zone. This is in sharp contrast to the others I have mentioned who were all generally approachable and certainly seemed to be going about their business. Aside from David Beckham the only other sports person I encountered was Duncan Goodhew (born 1957), the British Olympic swimmer, who was next to me in a tube train carriage going through Angel, Islington.


There are a couple of authors, Mike Phillips I admire his thrillers set in London, I met him in 1991 in Norwich along with actor Brian Bovell (born 1959) who appeared in the dramatisation of Phillips's 'Blood Rights' (book 1989; drama 1990) and in 'Prospects' (1986) and loads of television series latterly 'The Bill' and 'Hollyoaks'. Both were unassuming men you could chat with easily and have a beer with. Jeff Noon (born 1957) author of British kind of cyberpunk/surreal novels I met in a London bookshop in the early 2000s. He was far more craggy than I expected but interesting to talk to and with a real glint of excitement of ideas in his eyes. Kim Stanley Robinson (born 1952), science fiction author, I met him in Milton Keynes (the branch of Ottakar's there is the best in the country for meeting authors) in 2002 promoting 'Years of Rice and Salt' an epic counter-factual novel about if more people were killed by the Black Death of the 14th century. Again very down to earth and interested in the people talking to him and alert to their knowledge.

I met Andrew Roberts (born 1963) the Conservative historian and author in 1994 and again about five years later. He is much smaller than he appears on the television. He seems to have an addiction to twiglets. Despite his political leanings, he is interesting to talk to, his manner would seem fitted better to the world of Winston Churchill who he has written about. He does find counter-factuals interesting and we had a discussion about where a ghetto would have been located in London if the Germans had invaded Britain in 1940/1, given at the time we were in the East End which had had a large Jewish population at the time. I also met Mark Thomas (born 1963) last year in Southampton, he is a comedian, author and increasingly a political activist. He has good things to say about Goths which is excellent and is really sincere and a relaxed guy to talk to and very funny, a unique man.


I encountered Queen Elizabeth II (born 1925) [Died 2022] twice on the same day in 1992 by accident as she was visiting Oxford and I went to the railway station to buy a ticket and she was arriving there and passed in arm's reach of me, and then I cycled back across town and she went through the complex traffic system so I was stopped outside Christchurch college and she went passed me again bestowing another wave and smile on me.


Other people who are not celebrities but I felt honoured to meet were the head of the British Red Cross who sat down next to me on a coach to Lincoln again in the late 1990s and a former paratrooper on a train to Euston who had been dropped on Sicily and at Arnhem as part of Operation Market Garden and had survived. I could have talked to him for days. I also met a man who had run with Sir Roger Bannister when he broke the four-minute mile in Oxford in 1954, that was in Oxford. I also met a man who had been captured in Hong Kong in 1941 and had spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp, but then had worked for 20 years in Japan. He really showed me what forgiveness was, and also, he pointed out, that you cannot blame a whole people for the atrocities of their leaders and their military; within any population there are good people. In 1996 in Whitechapel I also met three German men who had fought in the Spanish Civil War in the International Brigades. These people were all both ordinary and incredible at the same time and on reflection I would trade meeting a thousand celebrities for meeting such people.


For someone who is not a celebrity-seeker I do seem to run into quite a few. I imagine certainly now I have left London and even Milton Keynes that it will occur less. In my experience, most celebrities are pretty ordinary, usually smart and well turned out, either much older than you expect or exactly the same as you expect their appearance to be. Maybe celebrity in itself is a preserver or maybe they can just afford to buy products that keep them looking good. I am certainly stunned to have found Sophie Aldred is five years older than me, I imagined her far younger from her appearance.