Lynn Barber has had two life stages populated almost entirely by women: her girls’ school in 1950s Twickenham, and her Finsbury Park playgroup days as a young mother in the 1970s. At 80, she is entering a third. She has been to five funerals in the last year. There is nothing – nothing – unexpectedly good about being 80, she says, sparking up in the window of her Highgate home. On the mantelpiece is a string of colourful cards from her birthday party in May – a strange do, because it was also a launch for her new book about artists, and publishers mingled with grandchildren. Across the ceiling of her yellow front room, a tiny figure of Jesus in a loincloth balances on a tightrope – “Circus Christ,” Barber says, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world – by the artist Nancy Fouts. There is a self-portrait by her late husband David Cardiff, who took early retirement to paint in 1996 and died of leukaemia seven years later. And there are some colourful abstracts by Gillian Ayres: “The top one is the really good one. Then, when I said I was bored with it, she gave me that lower one. Though it’s still not as good as the top one.”
Barber’s latest book, A Little Art Education, is the story of her love affair with art:in half a century as a journalist, she enjoyed interviewing artists most. “They are very free, on the whole,” she says. “Unbothered by their public image. They want people to like their work, they want museums to buy it, they like to be taken seriously, but I don’t think they had any desire for celebrity status, really – up until the YBAs.” One of the most celebrity-seeking of those, Tracey Emin, did become a close friend: “The great thing with Tracey is you really can just say what you think,” she reflects. “Although there was one time in Venice when she talked for three hours about herself, and I wish I’d said then, ‘You’re boring me,’ because that would have shut her up, I think.”
Emin tells me that Barber is “dedicated to her art – to the point where she is ruthless. A difficult, cantankerous, red-wine-swilling, chain-smoking radical.” In their first interview, Barber asked Emin whether she could draw: one criticism often levelled at her is that she can’t. “And not knowing she was an ornithologist, I drew her a small bird from my imagination. She chirped, ‘Ooh, a woodsparrow!’ That sealed our relationship.” Only once has Barber entered an interview wanting to be liked: by another YBA, Sarah Lucas. She admires the “seemingly effortless way” Lucas throws out ideas. “We went to the Cologne Art Fair one November and she had this theory that if you had gloves and a hat, you didn’t need a coat. It’s just not true…”
Throughout her career, she shied away from interviewing women as much as possible. She says she generally found it harder to put the boot in, with the exception of Marianne Faithfull (“trussed like a chicken in Vivienne Westwood with her boobs hanging out”) and Harriet Harman (“Let’s start with ‘thick’…”). Barber observed that Hilary Mantel was generally kinder to men than to women in her novels – after describing her as a gerbil: “soft and plump and fluffy… This animal bites.” Around men, Barber always felt at ease: “In the early years I was always happier interviewing an older man, and if it became a bit combative, I was happy with that, because of my relationship with my father. I’m very comfortable with men shouting at me.”
Drawn to the loud, the brash and the seemingly transparent, Barber loved Boris Johnson – was “totally purring with delight” – until he denied his affair with Petronella Wyatt in 2004. “It sort of seeped out, didn’t it, his unblushing way of lying?” In a later piece about Johnson’s mayoralty, he told her: “The terrible truth, Lynn, is that the buffoon stuff clings to you like a burr.” If Barber was, as she once put it, “a sort of delegate for the reader”, she mirrored a growing consciousness as to what Johnson really was; she remarked on his 12-hour days back then: “Yet he was so slack, wasn’t he, as PM – he didn’t take briefings, he didn’t remember anything…” She saw the appeal of Nigel Farage in 2013, “although I don’t know if I’d see that again”. In a piece for the Sunday Times, “The fruitcake who found his voice”, Farage claimed he had no intention of being in politics when he was 60. So what does she think happened? “People often say what they’ll be doing at 60 or 80 and then it all doesn’t happen,” she says. “When Biden became president, he was clear he was only there for one term.”
Did she have an idea of what she’d be at 80?
“Dead, was what I always assumed.”
Barber is not particularly political. She liked Rishi Sunak: “Honest and hard-working, and, yeah, civilised. What’s not to like?” She welcomes Keir Starmer as an end to populism: “Boring’s what they should be.” She reviewed Tom Baldwin’s biography of the Prime Minister recently and was alive to the small details many would skip over. Each of the four Starmer children was given a dog for their tenth birthday: that’s Lake District holidays with four children, four dogs and a mother in a wheelchair being pushed up the hills. Your childhood is what makes you, Barber says: so many interviewees think it’s safe territory. “If you can picture someone as a child, then you’re halfway to understanding them. You get odd anomalies – like people who have been very fat as a child, and now aren’t at all… People’s idea of whether they’re attractive or unattractive stems from childhood, and can be completely wrong.”
Barber is in one sense a product of her time: a symbol of postwar social mobility, she was, like Joan Bakewell, given elocution lessons by parents new to the middle classes. Though sexually liberated, she naturally put being a wife and a mother first, and didn’t start her Fleet Street career till her late-thirties, when she took a job at the Sunday Express. She may have lived through an age of four-hour liquid lunches; may have done her research not via Google, but the vast archive of hand-snipped press cuttings compiled by Hans and Edda Tasiemka in Golders Green; may have been blissfully free from the pressure of “clicks” for most of her professional life. Yet Barber is not just a journalist from another age: there is no one like her at all. The idea of a print “celebrity interviewer” didn’t exist before her; no one who came after is a household name in the same way. When she wrote her life story in 2008, she had a second life, as An Education became an Oscar-winning film launching the career of Carey Mulligan. The interviews – herself at the centre – “chuntered on” for years.
She has never had any kind of psychoanalysis, “though I rather regret it. I wasn’t ever very depressed or unhinged.” She analysed herself through her work. She recognised her dislike of fantasists, of which Faithfull was one, as rooted in the self-delusion of her actressy mother. Her parents’ social isolation made her a perpetual outsider; her distrust of others stemmed from Simon (not his real name), the “paedophile” groomer at the heart of An Education, with whom she’d had a two-year affair at school. Despite having built up her schooling as the most important thing in her life, her parents pushed her to get engaged: a betrayal that felt worse than his, when he turned out to be married already. That experience equipped her for a life scrutinising others, but without it, she once said, she would “probably have been a nicer person”. Barber speaks of a parental complex that never left her, a sullenness she fell into around them, even in her sixties.
“I got very fed up with my mother in old age. I was quite nasty to her, and it was really sad, because I used to drive down to see them, and all the way down, I’d think, ‘Just be nice to your mother; you only have to be nice to her for three hours and then you can come home again,’ and she’d say something within the first five minutes that would trigger it. I was a bitch of a daughter, I think.”
She has written about her parents with a cool ferocity that brings to mind Roald Dahl’s portrait of the Twits. But today she remembers something she left out. In his late senescence, at the Bramble Cottage nursing home in Brighton, her father would often be found naked. He was completely compos mentis at this point, and reasonably happy after a citalopram prescription – yet he was nude. “You know in King Lear, he takes his clothes off,” she says, taking a drag on her third cigarette. “If I come across anyone who knows about old people, I’ll ask if that’s a common thing; whether it’s particular to men, or whether women do it, too.”
Eleven years ago, Barber said that in old age, one turns into a sweet old biddy, or a wicked witch. “I’m definitely not a sweet old biddy,” she says now, “and woe betide anyone who mistakes me for one. But I don’t know about being a wicked witch, either. I’ve sort of accepted the idea that I’m old and frail, and I will now ask someone to take my arm when crossing the road, which I wouldn’t have done before. I do walk around in a doddering way, and if it’s raining, I do like to hang on to somebody’s arm.” She recently converted her 15-year-old grandson to Blondie.
In 2018, she was “sacked” from her job at the Sunday Times – or rather, her rolling contract was not renewed. “I had a new editor called Eleanor Mills,” she explains, “who I hate – I still stick pins in her wax doll – hate with a passion and despise… But she wanted Decca Aitkenhead, who’s very good. I don’t mind being junked in favour of Decca, who’s much more prolific than me. Financially, it was quite a big shock.”
Celebrity interviews don’t run very long now, she says: the standard has fallen. Men, as a rule, don’t make such good interviewers as women – “though Simon Hattenstone disproves that”. She still interviews for the Spectator: the historian David Starkey uncancelled himself in the course of their meeting last year; and she “loved” Dominic Cummings, who recalled Boris Johnson saying this about Carrie Symonds: “Omigod, you’re right, she’s driving me crackers. We’ve got to find her a job with lots of foreign travel.” For her entire career she has been desperate to interview Rupert Murdoch: “He wouldn’t waste his time.” And the most impressive person she ever interviewed was late-period Rudolf Nureyev, on an island in Lake Como. Nureyev had bought a desalination plant and, in his third or fourth language, explained to her in great detail exactly how it worked: “I’d interviewed quite a few ballet dancers before, and they’re only interested in ballet.”
One thing that makes Barber angry these days, she says, is men talking over women. “I hated dinner parties, because I was so often stuck between two men who talk across me as if I’m not there. Still happens.” Her instinctual, “well, obviously” kind of feminism seems to have started early, observing the mating rituals of adolescence: in order to snare boys, “we were taught to be clever at school and stupid outside”, she once pointed out. In the expectation that girls “put out” after a certain number of dates, they were taught to think like “high-class hookers, grudgingly doling out sexual favours in return for dosh”. At Oxford, she reversed things, identifying the one girl in halls who owned a diaphragm – it had to be booked up days in advance – and sleeping her way through 50 boys. Her first book, published in 1973 after a few years working in Penthouse magazine in her twenties, was a sex manual called How to Improve Your Man in Bed. There is a rather sweet chapter on impotence: how to outwit the disastrous thought processes that cause it in your man. And there is a chapter on oral sex: “By now, your man is technically performing cunnilingus. However, he is still not doing it very well and you may be disappointed that you enjoy it less than anticipated.”
The final chapter has a marked change of tone, explaining the benefits of threesomes, or “troilism” as she called it then: “The idea of going out together ‘prospecting’ for a suitable girl, and then inviting her home, makes for a delicious sort of liaisons dangereuses conspiracy. Happy hunting!” Barber later tells me by email, “Penthouse was always raving on about threesomes, so I tried them once or twice but never that keen. Lynn.”
She still writes a daily diary – “Fifty years. A page a day. You’ll be in it” – but she says it’s a very boring read. Neither of her daughters wants to take it on once she’s gone: she offered each of them her emerald engagement ring as a temptation – the same ring Alan Sugar told her they’d give her 500 quid for down Hatton Garden – but still, no interest: “They really, really don’t want them!” Barber recently met “a nice man called Irving Finkel”, the assistant keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script at the British Museum, who co-founded an archive called the Great Diary Project, and he expressed an interest. So that’s that. To Irving Finkel, Barber says, the Lynn Barber diaries will go.
[See also: Janet Frame’s asylum dreams]
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This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble