What are you looking for in a political biography?

I’m looking for history presented in an exciting way. I think writing history about people is a good way of making it palatable. We are all spoilt nowadays, we want everything to be easily digestible and most of these biographies are just that. The authors have taken trouble to appeal to a particular audience.

Well, let’s start with your first book, Edward Heath by Philip Ziegler, which is all about the political drama of the 1970s.

I worked for Ted Heath for nearly eight years so I knew him well and I admired him and I liked him, so that is why I selected this book. I also know Philip Ziegler quite well, so I was interested to see what he made of Ted Heath who really isn’t an easy subject, because he has the reputation of being bad-tempered and churlish. But there was another side to him that doesn’t usually come out and I think Philip has brought that out quite successfully.

What was the other side?

The other side was that he had a strong sense of humour – he made people laugh. He was very generous in certain ways. He was generous with his time and people enjoyed working for him. He had a certain magnetism and people were attracted to him. Other people were repelled and that’s the problem.

Why?

Because he was brusque. If you were a lady sitting next to him at dinner at some big Tory dinner you couldn’t be sure that he would actually converse with you. He might just stare at his plate or eat his supper without giving you much of a conversation. When I worked for him this was one of our problems. We had to encourage him to be nice and forthcoming and chatty which didn’t come easily to him because he was by nature rather reserved.

And he wasn’t much of a fan of Margaret Thatcher, was he?

He wasn’t, no. He behaved worse to her than she did to him. He thought it was wrong of her to put herself forward in 1975.

Because she was a woman?

Not because she was a woman, but because he thought she wasn’t up to the job and he never changed his mind.

Your next book, Supermac by D R Thorpe, is all about Harold Macmillan.

Harold Macmillan was the Conservative Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963. And the title of the book is taken from the Vicky cartoons of Harold Macmillan in his prime. He did for a time give the impression that he was in charge of everything. He was unflappable and was not thrown off his balance by anything. But, actually, those who worked for him knew that wasn’t true. There were things that threw him off his balance. He had a strain of pessimism in him which meant that he always saw the worst of a situation and that threw him. He appeared to be languid and very self-contained but there were strong emotions bubbling away below the surface.

And he had an interesting background. His father-in-law was a duke and yet he was a crofter’s great-grandson.

Absolutely. He was an actor and he played the parts in turn. Sometimes he was a grandee and sometimes he prided himself on being, as you say, a crofter’s great-grandson. So he was very popular for a time but then things went wrong. We had the Profumo scandal in 1963 and he wasn’t at ease with the younger generation. He didn’t understand the world in which Profumo and Christine Keeler lived. He was not at his best and he didn’t handle that with his usual mastery. 

He was one of the few people who stood up to Churchill and told him it was time to go.

Yes, he did do that. He didn’t lack courage. He was wounded in the First World War. But the business of being an actor really prevailed. For example, he lived for a long time after he resigned and he played at being a very, very old man and he had affectations and ways of speaking which were brilliantly satirised in the TV programme That Was The Week That Was. And he played different parts, as an actor does.

Your next choice is Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon, 1897-1977, which is also written by D R Thorpe. 

D R Thorpe is a good example of something that British writers are good at, which is writing the story of history and the story of their times through the lives of particular individuals. I think we have got a string of authors now who are really producing very good work and I would include myself in that category. I thoroughly enjoyed writing the life of Peel and I am now enjoying writing the life of Disraeli and trying to make them palatable and interesting to people who don’t study history. 

It’s all about getting the human interest story, isn’t it?

Yes it is. And with this book, Eden, it is a straightforward biography. It doesn’t gloss over the bad sides of him as a person. Eden had a bad temper and he was vain. But he was also an extremely skilful diplomat. He was Foreign Secretary when I joined the Foreign Service in 1952 and we admired him very much. He knew about negotiation. He knew how to get the best out of a situation and then in the end, of course, he became Prime Minister and he threw it all away.