One evening in late May, I received a phone call from a number I didn’t recognise. There came a low, menacing growl from a man with a Birmingham accent: “You’re a bullshitter, Patrick Maguire.” There followed a brief silence, then I realised it was Robert Kilroy-Silk. He seemed affronted to be recognised. “How did you know?”
It has been a decade since Kilroy left public life, apparently for good, after what seemed to have been a brief and disastrous second career in politics. In January 2004 he had been sacked as host of Kilroy, the BBC daytime chat-show that, over the course of 17 years, had made a millionaire media celebrity out of a maverick former Labour MP.
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