Paul Flather

Paul Flather interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 9th January 2019

0:05:11 Born in Essex in 1954 although my childhood was really in India. My mother actually flew over to give birth in a nursing home in England, I think to underscore that I would have an English antecedent from my father who was English. I have never been back to the nursing home in Chelmsford - and I'm not sure it still exists. On my ancestry, I don't know a lot about my father's side, so will focus on my mother's side: she had a very distinguished great-grandfather, who was, at various times, the leading engineer in the British Raj. I often speak about his wonderful buildings all over Pakistan, because the family was based in Lahore. Lahore, like Lucknow, was one of those cities that mixed Hindu and Muslim culture in a very open , didactic, inter-cultural way, and was one of the great cities of the world. The British commissioned him to build famous buildings, schools, colleges. He built Aitchison College - he wasn't the architect, but a great designer [engineer] and madly keen on the British. His name was Ganga Ram and for his great skills he was eventually knighted. He rose to such prominence that Curzon, then Governor General and later Chancellor of Oxford, wrote to the East India Company board in Britain to suggest that he should be the Engineer-General. After much deliberation, they said they could see that he had all the qualifications except one: he has brown skin and so can't be appointed. He promptly resigned, set up his own practice, and went on to create a lift irrigation system, copied from a system he had spotted at a Gloucestershire agricultural fair which he visited in the 1880s. Eventually it ended up irrigating much of the Punjab, now the ‘bread-basket of India’. So, he was really a very famous son of India. He sat on the Royal Commission of Agriculture in the 1920s. He's incredibly loved and critically, and most famously, he decided at a certain point in his mid-seventies to give away his fortune: he set up a college for women, a technical college, a school, a charity for child widows, because often people were married as children, and when their child-partner died, a girl's family had to get rid of her because she was a burden. He was a wonderful character and from that antecedent came a whole bunch of very interesting children.

My grandfather was very interesting; he was a kind of businessman who was very close to Nehru. My family was displaced in 1947 in Partition; because we were the leading Hindu family in Lahore - my mother was eleven at that time - waiting to hear which side of the border Lahore would be drawn, and eventually, at the last minute, Lahore was put into Pakistan. They still had an idea that they could stay but then the house was surrounded, servants were murdered, and my mother and grandmother were rushed to the airport to go to America, where her brother was studying. The rest of the family piled into three trucks, which had been lent by the chief of police: they grabbed a few things including some silver forks and drive helter-skelter to Delhi, where the family regrouped. I have still got some of the forks, which is why I mentioned that. So the family carried on, and my grandfather eventually became the Indian ‘Ambassador’ [or Chief Consul] to Brazil. After the British left, there was no Indian Foreign Office. All the other offices of Government could in a sense transmute under Indian management with Indian objectives; the Foreign Office had to be created from scratch and they needed ambassadors. My grandfather took my mother, aged fourteen, with him because my grandmother was a devout Hindu and would not leave India. My mother had an amazing time; they went to Rio in Brazil and Argentina, where my mother was educated; she became friendly with Eva Peron and developed an enormously strong sense of confidence. Eventually, when she came back to India, she found the other girls in school just too boring – ‘they hadn't lived, been to parties, can't talk to men’ - so she opted to study in Britain. It was during these studies that she met my father.

6:28:20 I should have known my grandfather, but by the time I came back to India as a young man he was already elderly and had dementia. So, I did meet him a few times, but never got to know him which was very sad. On my father's side it is complicated as I lost track with him when my parents separated. So, the story is a little bit muddled. Basically, his family lived in the East End, I should think lower middle-class, [perhaps] slightly racist and confused about the lady that he married, and I don't really know any of them. I have met one or two through his recent funeral ….; I met a few of his brothers and sisters but don't really have any sense of antecedent at all from that side. I don't know what my paternal grandfather did for a living; I met my grandmother who was very judgemental and strict, but I can't give a full answer on that.

8:01:06 My mother came to London to do a law degree at University College; there she met a very handsome man who was to become my father. He had had a very topsy-turvy life, because he was evacuated during the war to Gloucestershire; at the end of the war the boys at his school were all lined up and gradually their relatives came to collect them; this was done over a 5-6 day period, so that each day 50-100 boys left. By the end there were 7-8 boys left whose parents had not come, and the authorities were getting a little agitated. The boys did a bunk and made their way down to London, living rough to some extent, and he eventually knocked on the door of his mother's house to find that she had an entirely new family: he told me that when she saw him she shut the door, indicating that he should go away. Eventually he found a flat around the corner, and some time later went to the house but she had moved again, I think to Bristol; he tracked her down again when he was fifteen or sixteen; he opted to go into the army but applied to be an officer. He entered as an infantryman but his application to be an officer was processed elsewhere, and they couldn't find him ! Eventually the bits of paper joined up and he was taken down to Sandhurst where he apparently excelled, and was particularly good with horses. He was promoted, found himself in Germany in 1952. He was always looking to improve himself and went to see the head of the regiment and asked how he could get his next promotion to Captain and was told that he must suggest a role. He found that there was a Turkish contingent which the British were managing, but only one person in the British Army in Germany could speak Turkish. He said that he would like to learn Turkish and was sent back to London, to S.O.A.S. I think, to learn Turkish. It was then that he met my mother.

He was apparently very dashing and she was very good-looking, but she was from a well-to-do family that had expectations that she would marry according to their match-making. Eventually she married my father and by all accounts no one from his family came to the wedding, but possibly her father came. It was a marriage that went against both codes, based on love. I was born, and there were a few ups and downs, but eventually my childhood was in Delhi for my first 6-7 years, although I think I was a little time in Germany and also Switzerland. I think I went straight after birth to Delhi but then there was a spell when my father was based back in Germany; I think the first words I learnt were German and the first thing I liked was the muesli of the region !

13:30:15 I went to what I think was a British primary school in Delhi; I enjoyed it and often led games in the playground. Then my father, who had a French name [Paul de Bernier] and had a great sense of roots and dynasty, sent me to a French-medium school. I didn't know any French, and basically I think I lost a year and was very unhappy. I know I spent a lot of time looking out of the window and had to learn the degrees of self-discipline and survival, which possibly stood me in good-stead later on in life. My mother kept going back to Britain to continue her studies. They were both very strong characters and so I think their relationship was troubled. Eventually my mother sent me to prep school in Britain; I have a memory of going by ship through the Suez Canal; I can remember standing on the front and wondering how we were going to get through, as it was so crowded with ships. It was in 1961 or 1962 that I arrived in Britain, but had no sense that I had arrived at a permanent home ! 1962 was my first winter which was abnormally cold. We started living in Earls Court, in a bedsit single room with my brother, myself and my mother. We were really quite poor and we had to manage: every day I had to sweep the carpet with a brush to keep the small space we lived in, clean;. I went to a local primary school which I think was called Fox's; then eventually my mother went back to India after putting me into a boarding prep school in Hastings.

I spent six years there and it became my universe in a way; it was the beginning of my becoming a British gent or human being. I couldn't read or write at that time because of my slightly negligent, disruptive, previous education. So, I was bottom of the bottom form; it was a bit of a struggle and I was the only brown boy;, It was very cold. I had gone to Gorringes and got my tuck-box and trunk, was dropped off there and that very sad parting that one does, trying to be brave, and then my mother went. She not only left me there, but went back to India for a year and I was seven and a half, and I can see those days as if it was yesterday. You just battle through, and kids are very resilient; a lot of nasty things happened which you don't tell anybody but you battle through.

17:43:20 There were teachers that I remember. There was a wonderful teacher called Mr Robson, I never got to know his first name, and he became my sort of father-figure: one sat on his lap and he would tell you stories and reassured you, which nowadays could be open to misinterpretation ? There was a very good English teacher who influenced me and a very good maths teacher who taught me chess. As I began to blossom, I learnt to read and gradually moved up the scale as everything was measured there. I became one of the best in the class and got promoted up the classes. I remember on Friday afternoons we used to have music appreciation, a double lesson where you listened to 'The Toy Symphony' or Saint-Saëns or something like that. I couldn't understand it at all when I started but after four or five weeks it was something that you really looked forward to. I remember Mrs Conval who was the teacher of the bottom classes, read us a history of the Trojan Wars, probably the [Roger] Lancelyn Green version. We went to the playground and I suggested we all picked characters and fought with swords and things; and we didn't know what would happen to our character each week, but we would come out and re-enact the thing. One of my friends picked Achilles and I got left with Odysseus, which I liked because it was an odd word. Of course, Odysseus then turns out to be the most interesting ! That was a wonderful introduction to Western education and thinking; I got into sport and found that a great way to develop friends and also to release energy. I have terrible eyesight, I'm very short-sighted, an inherited condition which can't be cured, and not fully helped by glasses as it is a muscle disease. I hadn't realized, almost to my thirties and forties, the scale of what I wasn't seeing. I was thinking that I could see the same as everybody else. I knew that I had to sit at the front of the class and sometimes had to copy stuff from other people, but of course it had an enormous impact on my sport which I was mad keen on. Somehow I managed to play very good football and was in the first team for three years; rugby was also fine - we started playing rugby when we were eight - but I played scrum-half which meant that I was always close to the ball. Cricket was increasingly a problem and I solved it by being a bowler because I knew where the wicket was; but in the field it got increasingly scary and I would just hope the ball didn't come close to me ! I tried to bat and occasionally would hit a four but it was by accident, and everybody would say ‘well done’, but I wouldn't tell them the truth. The problem has never been cured - I can see you but my mind looks at your shape and clothes; I get a sort of video snap of you and then it goes, and I can't see expressions very well and that was a problem.

22:26:05 The school was called Hurst Court, and it became an old-peoples home soon after we left [1968] , and I think that has now closed totally. We were there in 1966, so the Latin master, in his wisdom, decided that we should make a film about the Battle of Hastings. We were all asked in the holidays to make a costume and since I was the darkest boy in the school I was obviously going to be a Saxon peasant. But that seemed rather boring, because you got killed and had to lie in a ditch. So, I told my mother that I was a Norman archer: she didn't actually make me a bow which was a bit stingy, so I made myself one out of garden twine and a bamboo stick and had the archers' equipment; when we went back. Mr Nash-Williams, the Latin master called all the archers together, looked at me and asked if I was sure I was an archer, but let me in ! Each scene had eight boys in it, but we pretended by shooting two or three times that there were a lot more. My bow never worked, and the arrow just dropped to the ground, so not only was I not an official archer, because of my looks, but I also mucked up the scene with the really bad shooting !

24:04:12 This school took me from seven and a half to thirteen. Gradually I became one of the smarter boys in the school; my parents had, by then, put me down for a posh Public School - Rugby - so one didn't do the 11+ but Common Entrance, and I was expected to do well. At Rugby, I learnt a lot, gained a lot; again the survival techniques which you learn in these schools - the older you get the more your realize that you learnt them in these places. The old Matthew Arnold values I think had dissipated a bit, nevertheless from Rugby, and then Balliol, I do very much see myself within the public service mould. I can't stop doing things that I classify as ‘for the public’. I have never worked for money and only ever done things that I thought interesting and valuable: that must have come from somewhere ? I had a fantastically influential history teacher there, in fact two; the head of the History department was called Alan Lee. The housemaster of my house, which was called Kilbracken, was Warwick Hele, also a history teacher. I just loved history; I can remember the first book which blew my mind; it was a book on the origins of the English Civil War by Lawrence Stone,the whole notion of the Civil War, what people were fighting about, just captured my imagination, and we had to read this and then write an essay. I remember feeling pure pleasure writing the essay. When I had to do my Latin unseen that was work and it was absolutely horrendous (although in my first Latin exam I got 101% for some reason because they had asked 102 questions assuming that someone would get two wrong, but it was easy; this was when I was ten, but by the time I was 13 or 14) I was really struggling. But history just came along, and saved me and I am very grateful to those two masters because they gave me confidence and opened up a whole vista for me. I became very good at economics. I can't quite explain that ! I was also very good at maths and that was probably from that maths teacher [Mr Hall] who taught me chess. He taught me at the age of nine and I became the best player at that age and stayed until I was 13. There was some sort of mechanical ability in my brain (some Indian gene or whatever?) which kept me going. So, although I was never a brilliant mathematician and could never have done it at university, I was well above average. Economics somehow brought some of that in though economics is not a science, it's open for all kinds of interpretations, but I loved it and started to read 'The Economist', which I still do, wrote for it a bit later on, and that was a great subject for me.

28:17:00 Games continued at Rugby, but I had to give up cricket because I couldn't see the ball; I used to play tennis but had to give that up as it was too fast. There was a game called racquets and when you were a new boy at Rugby you had to play every game in the first few weeks of every term: partly they were assessing it and partly giving you a chance to see what you would enjoy. Racquets is like squash on a long court but with a kind of golf ball equivalent; I couldn't see the ball at all and if it had hit you on the head you were knocked out. I don't know how I survived that, it was pure luck. But I loved squash because I could see that ball. I played fives, but it was instinctive. What I really got involved in was athletics; that was something that I could control. I became a middle-distance runner and depended on my drive and self-discipline; my house was right on the edge of the school campus so I could just get out of the house and run down the hill - called the Barby Road Hill - and just go into the fields and just run privately, pretending I had done no training ! Anyone who studied books was despised; I would sometimes read at night with a torch, but you had to pretend not to be doing it; you always had to pretend you hadn't done your prep, pretend you hadn't studied, pretend that you got everything wrong because otherwise you were ‘a gut’ and that was a really bad term of abuse. If you were a sports-person you were a hero; so you actually had to hide, and I think this goes into this English sense of anti-intellectualism; one always hears about Scotland or Wales or the French admiring their thinkers and intellectuals. That was the thing I most disliked about Rugby School; it was very sad, and I'm not sure that anyone could have done anything about it, but the currency was sport, a degree of laddishness, bonhomie, and a sort of faux idleness; if you were an idle layabout who somehow got through, then you were popular; but if you were seen as a hard-worker, that was really ‘anti-social’ !

31:18:23 Religion did play a part. I think in India I can remember that my grandmother was a very devout Hindu, so I used to watch her do her puja prayers in the morning. I remember that she took great pleasure in me and I often ‘ran away’ from troubles to her house and used to get a wonderful meal. But if I went into her kitchen with shoes on, she would throw the food away; you couldn't have leather in her kitchen ! It is a little extreme, and I think it absurd. But that made me think about religion: on Tuesdays we went to the Hanuman temple, which was great fun because you got little sweets and a tika on your head, lots of noise and garlands and so on. So, I had that aspect of Hinduism without really getting into the depths of it. When I came to England, I couldn't read but I had to go to chapel, to church, we had prayers every morning. So, again, this survivalism: I can remember taking my hymn book and seeing how many pages people had turned, and turning the right number, holding the book very close, so nobody could see if I'd got the wrong page, and just mouthing. I always stood up and sat down at the wrong time, but after a few months I began to be sharper; so I was quite ‘in there’, and got interested. We read St Paul's Gospel on Sunday nights after tea, which was always very early at prep school. We used to sit in Big School and the headmaster used to take us through each of the letters, and I really got intrigued; I was also intrigued partly because it was my name ! So, when I got to Rugby, I had an openness to Christianity, particularly to Jesus. I was incredibly impressed by Jesus, his teachings and his life and his example; I wrestled with this quite a lot; I can remember going up to see the Chaplain, who was called Pierssené, a very nice man, very welcoming, who often had boys around for tea. Food is a big currency when you are in these schools, so anyone who offers a cake is good- if you played in a match you got cakes so it was a very good reason to be in a sports' team. I went to see Mr Pierssené and his wife and talked about Christianity quite a lot: I said I can't believe in this, I admire the guy but I can't believe in it, and I got the most enormous intellectual trick. He said to me there was no way you will really understand it unless you believe; what you've got to do is ‘to believe’ wholeheartedly and then you'll see the fellowship and the whole point of the exercise. I wrestled with this, and decided that I would do it. So, for two years I was quite an enthusiastic Christian.

Eventually when I left school, before I came to Oxford, I had this year in India, and that is when I swapped Christianity for Marxism really. I thought it was a trick, because in a way the answer to my question was to suspend it and enter into the belief; there wasn't a kind of rational or appropriate answer. At the time, I didn't think it was a trick, but I thought it was puzzling, and I'm grateful in a way because it was an important experience. There is a certain degree of spirituality which has remained with me, and still the admiration for Jesus. The spirituality is ... I'm more of a Humanist, but I'm willing to accept notions of love, the idea of a deeper set of emotions, a sort of commonality between human beings. I'm not a Buddhist, though I might have been if I had been truer to those beliefs, but reason and rationalism also are quite strong in me; I suppose I'm more of a liberal than anything else, so I'm open to ideas. I am not going to be a Dawkins but I can see some of his arguments, where religion has been a huge negative influence on certain people.

37:05:00 During my childhood I was a passionate collector of stamps which went on until I was about thirteen of fourteen, when it petered out; cigarette cards; a wonderful passion for board games. I loved every single board game; famously, we loved a game called 'Diplomacy' which was a First World War game which takes between six and twelve hours to play ! Every dinner party that my mother and step-father had, and they were very good entertainers with very interesting people coming to the house, we'd always set up the board game and as the first people came in, my brother and I used to trick them into playing. The games would start about 7 pm and finish at 1 am, and my mother would be horrendously cross, because her supper had been hijacked, I won't say wrecked, because it was often Indian food which you could keep warm. People who became famous judges, journalists and so on, busy playing and arguing, and, of course, it was a wonderful excuse for us not to go to bed early as we wanted to finish the game;

I followed sport absolutely religiously and still do. We lived in Earls Court and then we moved to Chelsea; I actually got swept into my first game at Chelsea by the crowd by accident. I love crowds and am not scared by them; I like to see what people are doing and why is there a crowd, whether it's a demonstration, or a queue in Russia or a football crowd; because I was quite small I got swept under the turnstile and came back terribly proud and of course my mother was absolutely horrified, but I have been a Chelsea supporter since I was seven and a half. I love music and did play the piano very actively until I was about twelve or thirteen, til I went to Rugby. Then I found I wasn't going to be good enough and also it clashed with sport: if you did music lessons then it affected your rugby. I got into the Rugby 1st XV for a couple of matches, and that was much more important in the social calendar. My present musical tastes are eclectic as I love jazz, great favourites like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young; my key period is the late sixties and seventies. I do like new singers but I find I'm not very good at constantly replenishing my stock as there is always so much more to listen to, and that was my sound-track when I was growing up; and reading poetry and so on. I do like Classical music: my step-father introduced me to Beethoven who became a hero, both as a human and through his music. I can remember at the age of twelve just listening to every single symphony many times over, just lying on my back in the sitting room and just marvelling at it. We were asked at Rugby to come back with little talks which we had to present to the class and I chose to give one on Beethoven. Later on I became involved with the Willcocks family - I married David Willcock's daughter - so I've got a great love for choral music through Anne, my wife, and through going to many exciting concerts that David had conducted. I think the St Matthew’s Passion will be the record that I keep on 'Desert Island Discs' ! My musical taste has been widened enormously as I also love Indian music: if I don't listen to Indian music for a month then I'm unfulfilled. We have a way of voicing satisfaction when there is a beautiful turn in the Rag;. So, I am eclectic; I do listen to music when I'm working but not all the time. I also listen to Radio 4 quite a bit; when I am actually creating, writing new stuff, I tend to listen to music, but sometimes I want to actually listen to music and then I need to do it without doing anything else

43:22:19 At school I was a fag, had to bring coffee and polish shoes, take dirty kit and so on, and there was a lot of bullying. I think I was in the last group of people who were beaten by Prefects. We had a lot of beating at my prep school; in fact when I was first beaten when I was about eight and it was simply for talking after lights-out and entertaining some of the other kids. A lot of us were crying the first year and I sometimes told funny stories in dorm: what was amazing was that the next morning I was a hero ! Here I was being told I had done something awful and wrong, yet the next morning the ‘cool kids’ were being my friends - very odd. Beating was abolished at Rugby as I was going through the ranks; I have never liked authority so I developed a quite rebellious streak; I can't put my finger on what it was, but maybe that I hated the bullying. I remember there were some of us who were bullied, and when we became prefects were astonished at the fact that people who had been bullied started bullying; for me it was clear as mud - and I am not trying to claim that I was particularly special in this - that if that was something you hadn't enjoyed, why would you repeat it ? We had something at my previous school; if you were naughty, the prefects would make you learn ten dates - I still know a lot of dates and am quite grateful for that ! - or you could do an hour of gardening, and gardening was quite good because you could grow things that you could eat which was terribly important !

At Rugby, there was a lot of ‘teasing’: to be honest there were times when I would walk into a room and they would immediately tell a racist joke. That was quite shocking because I didn't really know why I was being ostracised from time to time; the whole notion of race came to me quite slowly and late, probably when I was thirteen. I became a prefect but was, I think, quite gentle; I was asked to do some things that I didn't approve of; I didn't mind being the monitor at night, checking that everyone is going to bed and keeping a sense of order; we had agreed that there would be a house council, and the housemaster, who I did admire, whom I mentioned in terms of history, reneged on it. I remember saying to another couple of prefects that we should resign; we lined up and I went in and I took off my special tie and put it on his desk and went out again and the other boys weren't there ! So, I ended up on my own, but I felt fine. There was only one term left so for that term I was not a prefect;. There was a current affairs society which I was active in, and that was popular: we were privileged to have top quality speakers; I can remember looking forward to the sessions. We had a very good library; interestingly it didn't have any Marx in it, and when I came up to Balliol I was asked to read something and I hadn't read Marx, but a lot of the other boys had. So, I have left a complete set of Marx's works in my will to the Rugby library - I don't know if they will accept it ! They actually had a list of 100 great books and you would have thought that he might have been included ? I also published an independent magazine: we had an official magazine, which was quite irritating and simply listed results and so on. I didn't think mine would last, but it was irreverent, was critical. I went up to the Headmaster, because we were told we had to get permission and I asked him for £20 towards it. I had gone round the local shops - we used to be able to buy things there with little tickets which the housemaster used to sign, and there were many funny stories such as someone getting a ticket to buy "one tractor" just to see whether he was paying attention, and he asked the next boy if it was for "one haystack"?! So, he actually remembered. I had got all these little adverts from shops so I had £50 - I remember I had to get £100 to print three editions - and the Headmaster said he would give my £20, but would have to check everything that went in. I told him that was not the point of the magazine so I had to refuse his £20. I called the magazine 'Flop' because I thought it would flop. But it continued for two years after I had left. There were little moments of opposition: I can remember the tree that the Queen planted 400 years after the founding of Rugby was ‘cut down’ (attacked) in protest against officialdom/authority.

50:27:09 My mother [Baroness Shreela Flather] is a remarkable woman. I don't remember being influenced so much by her in India, it was really my birth-father; we used to go on long walks and he used to teach me all the capitals of the world, and sometime he'd call me down for dinner parties and people would actually ask me to name a capital of a country. I had that aspect from my father, slightly military, slightly controlling, slightly authoritarian. My mother had been well brought up with lots of servants in a big house, but when she came to Britain there were just three of us in a small flat; she made sure that we learnt how to cook things, she taught us how to sew, how to put buttons on, how to crochet, how to iron, I would say it was kind of feminising. She taught us things that have really stood me in good stead and rounded out the kind of maleness of myself and my brother. She battled herself through life, through separation and divorce. She then remarried Gary [Gary Flather QC] who was a very good man, a lawyer, and we moved to a place called Bray, between Maidenhead and Windsor; he became a barrister and a QC and she started to get involved in local community work; because She spoke Urdu and Hindi, she then started to be a mouthpiece for local families that were now coming in the late 60s to Britain, who can't speak any English, and she fought for their rights in social settings, in hospitals, interpreting, and teaches a lot of the kids in school; a lot of them were illiterate - twelve, thirteen, fourteen year-olds; some of them had come on bullock carts to the airport, flown to Britain and are sitting living in houses. There was a lot of work to do and she championed them; eventually she was encouraged to go into local government where she did well. She became the first Indian woman Mayor of Maidenhead and Windsor, met the Queen who was one of her citizens and didn't pay rates. Famously she went up to the Queen and chided her, saying that if she paid rates all the local financial problems would be solved: there could be two outcomes from this, one ‘off to the Tower with you’, two would be to rock back on her heels and share the joke, and the second outcome happened !! They became quite friendly, also with the Duke of Edinburgh; he put her on a committee on housing particularly to do with migrants and new communities, travelling around the country; she did very well and eventually she was put on a short list - she was a Conservative (though I don't think a natural Conservative (?), but in Maidenhead there were lots of Conservatives, a few Liberals but no Labour ) and eventually approved by Mrs Thatcher to go into the House of Lords.

Shreela Flather is a very feisty woman, she speaks her mind, she has achieved a lot for women in that she was the first non-white woman Mayor, the first Indian J.P., first Indian woman councillor, and, possibly, the first Indian woman in Parliament. She speaks her mind and is very well-known: we think she was the first sari-wearer in Parliament and they are always glamorous. She's a very striking figure and very friendly with everybody, whoever they are, which is something she has taught me. She has spoken her mind on many things, particularly on education, on race, on women and their rights and employment, and she is now saying things which I think no other public figure is saying in Britain, such as whether Muslims should be able to marry first cousins because that is causing a lot of birth deformity; she is challenging the notion that a lot of Muslim men have one official marriage but might have several other, unofficial, marriages, and because it is done in different ways nobody is going in to check that;. These are difficult things to talk about; also the cases of the [abused young] girls and Muslim men, which I also feel very strongly about. The fact that you are not allowed to talk about it as an issue related to either Pakistan culture or certain ways of behaving;, that prevents you getting to the bottom of the problem, and, therefore, to solutions. I admire her enormously for taking on such controversial issues and being able to speak. She can do that because she is a woman and because she comes from that wider culture, both India and Pakistan.
I have the problem of understanding who I am, and used to describe myself as ‘Indo-Saxon’, but am confused as to where the Pakistani bit comes in !
58:31:00 The gap year was enormously important to me; I ended up as I should have done back in India and was able to reconnect with both family and the culture, with food, smell, sound, and I had the most amazing eight months there; I went there as a fairly dedicated Christian, almost an evangelist; I left there more spiritual, slightly Marxist, much more confused; the highlight of it was spending three or four months working in on a drought-relief project in Rajasthan where I was the only Westerner that most of the villagers had ever met; I had very long hair; I had to dig wells in hugely high temperatures, above 40º C; it was so hot that the afternoons were simply spent lying on my back with a towel mopping sweat off me while the other villagers carried on digging; we actually dug by hand and some intrepid figure had to plant the dynamite and then climb up the rickety ladder, and we all ran away while it blew up, then we went down and excavated and removed the stone; and it was all because the villagers couldn't use a nearby well because that was a Brahmin well; that hadn't been made clear to me at the very beginning but when it did emerge of course it was quite a revelatory moment; I got extremely ill; there wasn't enough petrol to take me to hospital; I had amoebic dysentery and suffered greatly, but I was a fit young man so I could cope with that; but I remember that, and I remember just being aware of how different my life had been in Britain and how complicated and extraordinary the world was; that was a really vital moment, and leaving the village at the end was incredibly sad and moving; they threw a huge festival evening for me and in effect asked me to stay, gave me the privilege of being able to build a mud hut there and even to pick a bride from amongst some amazingly beautiful women; there was a serious moment when I was quite tempted by it; anyway, I went on my travels; I lived a bit like a hippy, often washed my clothes in rivers, ate from local dabhas (roadside cafes) , lived very frugally, and managed to go round much of India; another formative moment was arriving in Calcutta (Kolkota) at Howrah station, and just standing on the station and seeing a sea of humanity, and realizing that some people lived their whole life on the station; they were actually born there, tried to make a living, begging food, and finding ways of surviving, selling combs or whatever; these sorts of moments are enormously explanatory [i.e. revelatory] to you, but I came back to Britain quite changed, and obviously being away from the family I had got a degree of independence, a degree of self-confidence, I didn't know what I wanted to do but I think I was a much more rounded and thoughtful figure; in fact I had so enjoyed it that I didn't want to come back to Oxford; my parents had to arrange for the family to ambush me and insist that I came back, and if I really wanted to be a guru or a yoga specialist. I could always come back afterwards; of course, afterwards one is completely changed; I did go and had the privilege of going to Balliol College, and that was the great experience of my life; I was taught by some wonderful tutors; Steven Lukes was probably my mentor, he taught me every year and I ended up in my last year with a room above his; I learnt so much from him and he brought out a more nuanced radicalism in me, although I did become a [political] Marxist as was fashionable amongst more of the Balliol students then; we indulged in occupations and we campaigned Against the Quota [to allocate more places to women students] to allow more women in - this was in the middle 1970s; we always harked back to the late sixties because we felt miffed that we had missed them, so we were a bit of a manqué generation; we had two famous occupations and in the second one I was one of six or eight ringleaders to be arrested despite the University promising that if we left no one would be; I resisted arrest and so I was beaten up by the police and taken into a cell; of course when I was released I had become a kind of hero which affected my reputation and standing for the rest of my time in Oxford; I was reading PPE and Stephen Lukes taught me politics and sociology and I did social theory with him; another great influence on my was Alan Montefiore the philosopher, and I am now working with him on his so-called Philosophy Forum [now The Forum for Philsopohy] which he has set up at the L.S.E.; Christopher Hill was the Master and welcomed me in; I was very close to him and so full of respect, and loved his books which of course I had read as a young history 'A' level student. So, it was an absolute privilege to be there; in fact one of the outcomes of all our protests was that I became, I think, the first Oxford student to sit on a College Governing Body: I ended up sitting next to Christopher Hill every Wednesday afternoon, and he and I would exchange glances during the two to three hour meetings, and he would lean over and ask if I was ‘still so keen to be on the committee ?’ because a lot of it was, obviously, just routine stuff ! He was a great influence, and so was his successor, Sir Anthony Kenny, who, when I came back to do my D.Phil many years later,

I became very close to. I loved going to the lectures of Alan Ryan and Ronnie Dworkin. Although I read one Finals paper on Marxism and was also one of the first students to do a [Finals] paper on the History of Economics, which was on Smith, Marx and Ricardo, I was really being prepared as a non-Marxist, as a [Liberal] socialist, but the tutors were exceptionally tolerant in listening to our views and just nudging us along, opening up boxes and posing questions; it took me many years, perhaps ten years before I realized how beautifully I had been taught; I am delighted to say that most of my tutors have remained very close friends of mine, came to my wedding and so on. It really was a kind of a thrill, at that period, and also to be at Balliol. I can't say that I understood how important Balliol was as a college until I got there, when I realized that I could not have been anywhere else. It was the place where everybody came: we had a wonderful students' tea at 4pm and everyone met then. I was on the JCR committee and one of my responsibilities was food, and I was in charge of what was called "midnight raiding": at about 11.30pm we used to open up the student [Junior Common Room pantry] bar and used to lay out sandwiches with all kinds of spreads, and everybody who had got a little bit peckish would come and we'd have a wonderful evening session as well. Finals I was quite nervous about. I was expected to do well but I had seen a couple of friends of mine take a year off; my reports were very promising, but ‘practising more politics than studying it’ kind of thing. I asked for a year off and was refused; that was a terrible shock and I almost had a miniature breakdown; but I knuckled down and I got a very good First. So, the tutors again were absolutely right. I thought about doing a PhD which I definitely wanted to do, but was told that academe wasn't in good shape, and should go off and do something else. I managed to get one of these very competitive traineeships at the BBC, but before I got there I was awarded a travel scholarship to the United States.

Travel has been a wonderful part of my life, a thrilling revelatory experience; I had six months in the States, all paid for, and I managed to get to some 40 states. It was funded by an eccentric figure who had been at Balliol and had loved the experience and had become very rich as a director of Coca Cola, and left money to send a number of students, selected by the College for their contributions to College life to travel to the States. It was called the Coolidge Scheme. Highlights included camping in Kansas next to people who'd led the Woodstock Festival and were protesting against the Republicans, but also having a ticket to the Convention, so having to creep out at dawn, change into the only clean clothes I had in my rucksack, and hot-footing it into the Convention and then creeping back into the camp at night and shouting protest songs. So, I had some wonderful experiences and met many interesting people including a senior figure in the Carter campaign who I stayed with for a week. Then I ended up back in Washington on [Presidential] election night in the White House next to the Ford family. Obviously, when they lost, people started to cry and it was amazing to see mascara running, and these wonderful elegant figures with their crumpled suits !

So, I had a wonderful experiences, came back and found that my traineeship had not been kept open as I had thought, but given to somebody else. I could have reapplied but it would have taken a lot of skill to win it again; so I became an art critic, not knowing much about art, but there was a gap there; tutored; and eventually went up to Sheffield to work for United Newspapers as a trainee - the Yorkshire Post and Sheffield Telegraph; it was a terrific thing to do as I had a lot more freedom and I wanted to write. It was quite a militant time; the NUJ (National Union of Journalists) was very militant: salaries, particularly in the regions, were very low; there were three strikes within the first two years of my time there. This was Thatcher time, and one of my scoops was to interview a very young Arthur Scargill about things like climate change. We didn't really realize how significant it all was: he was pro coal but anti nuclear. I had many experiences and became the Sheffield Telegraph's foreign correspondent and wrote a weekly column; I could go and cover any features; I wrote about Northern Soul (dance music), Dutch elm disease, it was extremely liberating and exciting. I made a lot of mistakes, but that was all part of the learning process.

Eventually I left slightly early and got a job with BBC TV. But I really wanted to be a writer, and wrote a couple of articles for The Times which were published, and I was spotted by the editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement who asked me to join the paper. This was during the troubles and the papers had to close for a while; they reopened and I joined as a features correspondent and social science correspondent, so I had four years in the old Times before Murdoch, with these linotype print machines which were amazing to watch; they said they took printers some nine years to learn how to do it, in other words more than a doctor, and that's why they needed to be paid so well ! I covered social science, which was actually very much under attack by Keith Joseph (Secretary of State for Education). I actually did three long interviews with him which were published; the headlines were interesting; the big article in the Times was "Mad Monk on the loose" [Mad Monk or Philosopher-King ?], and the headline in the New Statesman, the cover piece, was "Philistine let loose on Campus". So, you could see how they twisted the [albeit very different takes]. But I loved journalism. And I got involved with dissident movements, and had a lot of opportunities to write about my experiences, helping dissidents and smuggling "samizdat" [tiny banned manuscripts] and so on, which was again through my Balliol connections because they had been invited to give lectures and been expelled, and they set up a foundation which would send academics regularly to give lectures in places like Rumania, Poland, and, above all, the Czechoslovak Republic; I got involved in that, gave a lecture on Gandhi at the special request of Vaclav Havel, which apparently influenced him. So, I was really enjoying it and could write really long, 2000-word pieces, which you can't really do very much in journalism; but again when you talk to someone about an article and they hadn't read it, it just becomes frustrating. So, I thought I ought to try and write something decent; I managed to get an [ESRC] State grant to go back to do a Ph.D at Balliol, (a D.Phil at Oxford), with some of my old tutors; that was on Indian politics. It seemed to be sensible to work on that for various obvious reasons, and also would allow me to go back to India and do further research and investigation: the big question, I think, was why has there never been a revolution in India as there has been in Russia or China ? How did their modernization occur and why does their political system allow adjustment and a degree of gradualism ? That is what I looked at in terms of elite formation - what I call "accommodationism" - and co-option. I had a lot of fun, interviewed a lot of great figures, and went to a lot of libraries; I met the Gandhi family and actually interviewed Mrs Gandhi in 1980 when I was a journalist; I said I came from The Telegraph and they said that I should have the first exclusive interview, in front of the BBC and CNN; what they didn't know was that it was the Sheffield Telegraph and not the Daily Telegraph; I didn't correct them !

1:15:01:21 What I did, because I was quite mature in the sense that I was a little bit older, was that I had a different supervisor for each year: I had Bill Weinstein, the political scientist, to set the framework; I then had Steven Lukes who advised me about power and the sociology of it; I then had someone called Gopal Krishna who helped me with the Indian elements of it; then I ended up with Anthony Heath, Professor of Sociology and famous statistician, who helped me do cluster analysis with some of my interviews. So, I was very privileged, and I suppose the last few years were with Anthony Heath trying to put it together. I managed to squeak it in just before the deadline ! Not long after I started the D.Phil two things happened: one was that I was quite heavily involved with London Labour Party politics, and I got more and more involved with the GLC (Greater London Council) which was taking a very strong stand against Mrs Thatcher; then I got elected to the ILEA, which had been saved, when the GLC was abolished, by Keith Joseph no less. So, it was a one-theme election and I became Chair of the influential post-school and Further and Higher Education Committee; a marvellous experience; the budget was something like £350,000,000 a year; I looked after 18 adult institutes, 5 polytechnics, sitting on the Boards, [20+ Further Education Colleges] and something like 4,000 youth projects. So, I was unpaid and lost my grant partly because of that, partly because of marriage, but I had a magnificent office in the middle of London, in the old GLC building, and was able to do quite a lot of things; I helped start various foundation courses for migrants to get them on the road to studying in colleges and universities; we promoted parent governorships in schools; we gave something like 10-15% of the budget of polytechnics from us to do local community work, related to communities and skills training. When the polytechnics became independent, I think they didn't realise that they would suddenly lose a huge chunk of their income !

With all that my studies were shunted a little bit, but I managed to complete my D.Phil on the last day of the seven years that you are allowed,. ‘after I was abolished’ ! On the ILEA, we had a sign which listed the number of Unemployed in London on the building within eyesight of Mrs Thatcher's room. I think we were one of the last oppositional blocks to Mrs Thatcher after the Labour Party had collapsed, the Church had been defeated, after academe had suffered, so I think it was reasonable opposition, democratic opposition. I think I was one of the sensible ones, often under attack within my own party.

Soon after we were abolished, I thought I would get my D.Phil finished and think of an academic or political career. But I got a phone call from George Soros and was invited to breakfast with him; I remember that breakfast very well, it was one of the best scrambled eggs I've ever had ! In the middle of that he asked if I would like to be in charge of the new university that he wanted to set up in Central Europe, which became the Central European University. Of course, I was never going to say no, but I did point out that I had a D.Phil which was overdue: I said I would work half-time for him until it was finished, and then work full-time; but it would never have been possible, and within a week I was working full-time for him; I did ask him for a file or papers with a proposal, anything that I could work from, and he said there was nothing ! I asked what was his vision of how long I had before getting it started, and he said that he wanted “students in as soon as possible”, and he would like it to start by next Autumn. We managed to get 200 students starting in September 1991 in Prague; it was only possible because my first visit to Prague to stay in the former Prime Minister's house, which had been sequestrated by the new Civic Forum Movement, was with Vaclav Havel, the President. Then we agreed the building and obviously we had very deep pockets. Normally, one has ideas and maybe a space and a vision, but never the money. This was the opposite: we had the money, we had the vision, but not the logistics; the vision was a university that would allow a part of Europe - Central Europe in those days - which had been ‘frozen’, prevented from having a flourishing bed of ideas, to, in a sense, ‘catch up’, be proud of an institution equivalent to the best in the West, of its own, a place that would draw students from all round the region, including Russia, and allow them to go on to serious major study. I was the head of it and it was quite exhausting, with lots to do; even at one stage carrying $15,000 in cash because that was as efficient a way to get money in, in those days, as any. I also taught, gave some talks and tutoring; I remember asking a student why she had written some facts which didn't seem to touch on the topic we were discussing in her essay. She said that where she had been taught, every paragraph had to have two facts in. I said that they ought to be relevant, and she said that they just thought they had to put facts in ! Often they only read one or two books in a field; one student had only read Sorokin in sociology; no one in the West had hardly heard of Sorokin, but that was her ‘bible’, because it happened to be the book that she could take out of the library. So, there were some interesting experiences

1:23:13:18 Recruiting Ernest Gellner was one of my big successes:we wanted a number of figures that could give us status and influence, and establish our reputation. I knew Ernest through my journalism days: I used to sit with him in the L.S.E. and we used to gossip. We would sit at a table at the edge of the main dining room; in the middle was Ralf Dahrendorf [then Director]. Ernest used to say that “there was King John with his Barons!” - he was a mischievous figure, great fun. He often talked about his childhood in Prague; we thought of him, but he thought of us. He was very proud that he had had four different professorships - in Oxford, L.S.E., Cambridge and the Central European University - and each was with a different title ! Anyway, it was a delight to have him there and we spent many evenings talking and drinking and walking. He was an important figure, and his wife, Susan.

Working with George Soros was amazing. He would turn up and we would collect him from the airport, and you could just write off the next 36 hours, even 72 hours of your time, because he slept very little, meetings with him would just go on until he felt the business was done. He loved meeting new people; he had to meet ‘new people’ every day ! Certainly, for two or three years, I think I was very close to him when we were setting up the project. I even packed his suitcases for him, we travelled together; he often didn't carry money, so that was quite amusing in Europe; I think he still owes me quite a bit, not big [much] in any special sense; of course ! Through him I met so many interesting people; Bronislaw Geremek in Warsaw, a major figure who became their Foreign Minister, and [Stefan] Amsterdamski [later head of the Polish Academy of Sciences] and so on; and all the key figures in Prague, including someone, who became a bit of a nemesis, which was Vaclav Klaus. He actually succeeded Vaclav Haval; Havel was a very shy, gentle man, almost better in print than face-to-face, but I had some very moving times with him. Klaus was much more direct and didn't take well to Soros, and eventually asked us to pay for the [CEU] building. Soros felt that was an ungrateful act since he was investing, initially $15,000,000 a year, but probably by then $20 or $25 m. So, eventually the University had to be closed in Prague and moved to Budapest, his (Soros’s) beloved Budapest, even though he was treated badly, even in the 1990s and more so, now. So, my last acts were actually winding the university down and that was when I felt it was time to move on. That was in 1993-4, so that by 1994 I had been invited to apply for a job at Oxford as head of International External Affairs there; I worked closely with Sir Richard Southwood, the Vice-Chancellor whom I admired enormously; he was on the Central University Senate and I'd got to know him, and he was involved from the beginning. He wanted me to apply; they had a very big list of applications for a new, exciting, post. However I managed to get that, so there was a natural transfer from Prague back to Oxford.

1:27:49:10 That was an interesting job; I think I had six different departments to run; I had the Alumni Office, the Media office, the International Committee and Affairs, the Publications, the Events, and also something called Community and Government. One of the jobs that came out to be quite serious, and you must have felt this in Cambridge, was the Labour Party attack on the Oxbridge fee income; Oxbridge students were paid something like 1.4 units of money compared to the average of 1 for other universities. I was very involved because of my Labour Party contacts, because I knew David Blunkett [Sec of State for Education) quite well, I think I managed to play quite a significant role in tempering that down, pointing out the importance of Oxford and Cambridge: the fee was reduced but it was then compensated in other ways in terms of special buildings allowances, special research allowances, and so on; I think Oxford and Cambridge didn't actually lose money but it was repackaged. What I did with Blunkett was to get him to take part in the first admissions video; we were doing a lot of access work, and I helped persuade Peter Lampl to set up some Summer Schools in Oxford, and we set up the first video on admissions which was taken to State school, encouraging them to apply to Oxford - Cambridge perhaps did the same - and it was wonderful to have the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, actually on the video; so that was quite a useful softening. Big scandals during this time were the Business School, we had a big row over setting it up; of course, Cambridge already had its flourishing business school; Oxford's was funded by Mr Wafiq Said, and one of my first responsibilities, despatched by Sir Peter North, who was then the Vice-Chancellor, a wonderfully twinkly man, but put under a lot of pressure in the building of the business school. He said I had to go and talk to Mr Said about the sources of his money. I had a meeting with him, actually in his club in Mayfair, with marmalade sandwiches and cake, more English than anyone could imagine ! It was a very warm conversation, in which he promised that his money was not from ‘bad sources. I reported this back to the Vice-Chancellor, and I think they cleared it through the Ethics Committee, so we had his money. So, there were many different aspects to this job and I was often a bit of a trouble-shooter for the Vice-Chancellor, going up to Parliament, dealing with Mr Said, it was very interesting times !

1:13:34:02 [Sir] Keith Thomas was President of Corpus when I became a Fellow of Corpus [Christi College]; I spent six very happy years there, and I thought that he was the most marvellous President. He was tough; sometimes Governing Body was a bit like a tutorial; I enjoyed it. I discovered later, when Keith retired after eleven years, that some of my colleagues had not always enjoyed it and some of them were claiming ‘to breathe fresh air’ ? I don't think that's very fair: I think Keith transformed the College, and actually it's quite clear that when new rules about appointing professors [whether you could actually apply to be a professor, called the Recognition Exercise, came in, Corpus quickly proved itself and got the most professorships of any college even though it was a small college; I think that is a testimony to Keith, who was involved in every academic appointment, ensuring that the very brightest were recruited. It was an extremely able and successful college, and great fun. I was quite close to Brian Harrison who ran the Dictionary [of National Biography] eventually and wrote very interestingly about British politics. I think Brian and Keith might have been my closest friends there.

I am very grateful to Keith because he included me in a lot of things; they had this very good system of appointing different Fellows as Visitors in charge of different aspects of college life: so I was a Visitor in charge of Silver, and learnt all about the marvellous silver collection that Corpus had. It was all laid out one day in the dining room and I had to inspect it all; not being an expert I was guided by the College expert. I pointed out various dents and we checked one or two missing items, and these were all busily dealt with. Another year I was Visitor for Buildings; again I am not an expert, but I pointed out a nasty stain in the Chapel ceiling; I was told it had been there for a while, so I asked for it to be investigated. They put a ladder up, and they found someone had chucked a wellington boot up there and had blocked up a place where water was gathering ! It was actually extremely helpful that I had done that as it might had caused untold damage in the long run.

I was actually on the University Council because of my particular responsibilities for External Relations. Along with the Registrar and the Secretary of the Council, we were the three officers that attended. I did that for more than four years. Keith Thomas didn't speak very often but when he did there was an audible silence in the room; I would say that he was very much the conscience of the University; when it seemed to be digging itself into a hole and becoming a little bit too mercenary, he would help claw it back. The other great figure on the Council, who also had a very powerful voice I think, was Ralf Dahrendorf; he was the Warden of St Anthony's and I got to know him through my journalism at the L.S.E.an absolutely astounding figure, and of course a major figure in all the developments in Central and East Europe in the eighties, and then in the period when they were being brought back into Europe; although, with his amazing contributions to German life, he was so dedicated to Britain and so in thrall to the way we did our politics

1:36:20:06 After that job I went on to work with George Weidenfeld and I was incredibly impressed by him, but he could be very sharp. He was the publisher, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. I suppose when I say wonderful, these are people I admire, and I'm not recalling some of the figures that I did not admire !George was a kind of live wire, always setting up new bodies, an impresario figure; although he came to Britain in the forties as a refugee, and actually got involved in helping the war effort at Caversham, I think, because of his languages. He then went to work in the founding of Israel, and he was a little bit too pro-Israel for my liking, so we did actually disagree on that, and eventually we just agreed to disagree. He was very concerned that the UK was drifting away from Europe, particularly during the latter part of Mrs Thatcher's premiership. He wanted to set up some kind of club that would promote intellectual discussion and links across Europe; that is what became the Europaeum, a suitable Latin word, and it was a club built up of universities. I was quite involved in that while I worked in Oxford as Director of International Affairs, but we weren't quite sure what to do with it; we knew it was a good idea and that lots of people were supporting it and welcoming it and giving it money, but it had no kind of focus. So, when I finished my five-year stint as the Director of International Affairs, very exhausting, very unloved - people in bureaucracy in Oxford (I don't know if its the same in Cambridge) are often undervalued, and there is always some person who you think you admire who suggests it would be better if you didn't exist and there were more professors, even though you have worked sixty hour weeks, protecting the University's reputation).

So, I was content to leave that and then got involved with George, building the Europaeum up. He was the founder of it and brought in the early money and had all the connections; there were times when he was quite sharp and tough-minded, but, to me, he was avuncular. In his room, he was surrounded by portraits of Popes and masses of books, all of which he helped publish. He published the biographies of all the famous twentieth-century figures. He had literary salons in his flat in Chelsea on the Embankment, and I was privileged to go to a number of them; you'd go to dinner and find yourself sitting next to Lord Rogers, Claire Tomlin or Umberto Eco, it was kind of a privilege, and being a small fish it was quite entertaining and enriching. (I never kept diaries though I always meant to !) I did ask him about the Popes and he said he was fascinated by them because they had no money, no army, and yet they had enormous power; he used to read biographies of the Popes and study how they had influence. I suppose in a way that was a little bit like him; he didn't have much money himself, although he occasionally married women who were not on the bread line; he didn't have any armies but he had power through his personality, through his ideas, and he would enrich occasions, whether it was a tea party or a dinner, and he would always be fizzing and promoting and proposing things. Actually, if you look back at his life, he set up so many different institutes, organizations and networks; he set up something called AMERUS - America, Europe and Russia - tripartite meetings of elite decision-makers, meeting once a year in each of the three continents, to discuss how to share ideas, and the Europaeum, and his Club of Three - Britain, Germany and France meeting, diplomats, power-brokers, politicians, bankers. He was very close to bankers obviously as he needed them for funding his many projects.

Victor Rothschild I always admired; I got to know him when I was a journalist because he was appointed as the chairman of the inquiry into the future of the Social Science Research Council; Keith Joseph had decided that sociology, particularly, but maybe humanities more generally, was too left-wing. He admired economists particularly, but found economists here at Cambridge were generally too Keynesian. He liked Patrick Minford up in Liverpool who was a bit more monetarist and different, and there is something to be said for a degree of diversity in ideas; anyway he was convinced it was all a big Marxist plot, and he set up this inquiry, ostensibly to abolish the Social Science Research Council, and he appointed Victor Rothschild to chair it. Michael Posner was the Chairman of the SSRC and I got to know him quite well; I went to interview Victor Rothschild, and apparently he didn't like journalists but somehow we got on. I did a profile of him, and in the profile I happened to mention that he felt his greatest achievement was hitting 54 not out in a school match, and he was so thrilled that somebody had actually mentioned this in print that he and I became quite good friends and he was able to give me the inside track. I wrote a series of five very long articles about this inquiry, the biases and so on, and eventually Victor Rothschild came out with the conclusion that the SSRC should be saved, but maybe the name should be changed ! What happened in the end was that it was called the Economic and Social Science Research Council. He was an amazing man, anything he wrote would be as sparse as possible. He had this excellent secretary and he used to write his letters and notes on thirds of a foolscap sheet, so you couldn't write more than a paragraph, and he would edit and edit, removing words until it was as sparse as possible and then he would send it.

So, the Europaeum was an amazing experience for me because it allowed me to travel around Europe linking Oxford and the various leading European universities in each country, and my task there as it emerged was to bring brilliant young scholars together to discuss issues of common concern, and, in that process, in a sense making them feel more collectively European - but not in an uncritical way. We were never critically supportive of the European Union; I remember one great debate with Roy Jenkins whom I'd got to know because he was the Chancellor of Oxford and I used to travel with him as Director of External Affairs; I always remember his enormously long feet; for somebody who was really very serious-minded he liked a jolly jape; he used to make a lot of witticisms and sometimes he talked about himself in the third person, once he'd put on his hat as historian, very amusing. He had a debate with the future head of the European Union, an Italian [Professor Romano Prodi] , and they discussed What makes a European ?, were people born as Europeans, OR were they made Europeans ? They kind of disagreed, and Roy thought you are often born linked to your country, but, by your experience - and that was part of the Europaeum's mission - mixing with other Europeans, travelling, sharing ideas, you became more European. Those were interesting experiences for me, also watching the beginnings of our Euroscepticism emerge, though I never thought it would get to the level that it has now reached: in a sense it is a bit of a failure for our project. It was not our mission to stop it happening, of course, but it was to encourage Britain to feel more encompassed within Europe, a Voltaireian idea of a "The Republic of Letters" , where academics travel freely, share ideas, work together on joint research projects, and students mix;

I have got to know Jose Manuel Barroso [then President of the European Union] quite well and actually organized an amazing debate at the Oxford Union, which was deemed to be the most significant since the 1930s one about King and Country: on one side, I had Barroso and Nick Clegg saying that Britain and Europe were “better together” -that was the motion – and, on the other side, Nigel Farage and William Cash. Apparently people queued in the rain for more than six hours to get in - this was just before the referendum. The trouble is that with all this health and safety stuff the number of people who can get into the Oxford Union is so restricted, that I think they could only get 600 in when in previous times they'd have had 1000+ ! It was an electric moment, and of course the Remainers trounced the other side (about 500 to 100), but the Leavers did well in a university like Oxford. Of course, it [the vote] would be done on the debate, rather than what you previously felt.

1:49:00:00 Since then I've widened my interests; I left the Europeaum about a year ago, on the 25th anniversary, when we had an enormous dinner in Balliol hosted by Chris Patten, the Chancellor, who is on our board. We had Barroso and various other figures there; it was wonderful as it happened to be my old College as well, a lot of my tutors were there.. … So, it was a very nice moment of retirement. Since then, though I wanted to be quieter and spend more time reflecting, but I've ended up doing more things. One of the things I've got involved with is my interest in the Commonwealth which is really going back to my roots; I think I mentioned that when I was on the ILEA, I was the only Asian-origin member and found myself more and more speaking at meetings of ethnic minorities and blacks, and began to call myself an Indo-Saxon. I was in the Black Caucus (and if you are non-white you are black) but I thought it was more interesting to be an Indo-Saxon, and it made me reflect more on my roots and the Commonwealth.

Now, the Commonwealth I think is much less effective than it should be and I'm afraid that is down to relatively poor leadership, but also the world is split more into regional trading blocks than the sort of globalized links that the Commonwealth has; nevertheless there are a lot of shared values and histories, and I am one of those who believes that democracy can be a value that the Commonwealth can promote. So, working to abolish the death penalty in some of the Caribbean, is important, as is promoting egalitarian rights for women or LGBT in Africa. These are things we can usefully do, or even free media in places like Zimbabwe. I am involved in the journal of the Commonwealth which is called 'The Round Table' , from those original round table discussions from the turn of the century. I feel connected to that, but I also feel frustrated because it could be so much more influential, if played right. We do know that Macron is quite jealous of the Commonwealth because a couple of French States have joined the British Commonwealth, and he has now got a strategy to revive the Francophonie which isn't doing at all well, but I don't think the Commonwealth is as powerful or influential as it could be - although, strangely, if we hadn't been in this Brexit mess, Britain has held the Chairship [Chair-in-Office] having hosted the last summit; that is quite unusual because of the colonial link, Britain has to play a background role; but it has done it very well so it could be a chance to go forward. Much depends on India, and much depends on Modi; if India actually came in and played a role, as Nehru did. Nehru arguably saved the Commonwealth in the fifties by letting India join against the wishes of many of his Congress Party politicians. So, I am very involved in that.

I'm now Chairman of something called the Oxford Adam Von Trott Memorial Committee which builds relations between Germany and Britain through Adam's studying at Oxford, and the Germans have set up a foundation to match our foundation, so we are setting up scholarships, lectures, exchanges and workshops. I also run a foundation which brings Pakistani students to Cambridge and Oxford and have done that for 25 years; that again goes back to my roots as we originally came from Lahore, and the lady who left the money actually came and had tea with me saying she had come to make me the Chair. I said I was far too busy, but I am so glad I did it because it has been so rewarding just to see the pleasure of these students doing so well, but also having the chance to link back to Pakistan. I am also involved in youth work in London which goes back to my ILEA days, again something that I have been trying to leave for 30 years, but it is so rewarding; I am able to bring a team of members from the youth club - disadvantaged youngsters, mostly black, from single parent households - they come up and play a team from University College, Oxford, each year in a match; and to see the two cultures clashing, one a well-drilled team, and the other much better footballers but not playing very much as a team, shouting and all running after the ball; then in the bar afterwards to share a drink is a great experience

1:54:30:22 I met my future wife, Anne, at a dinner party with mutual friends; we got married after four years. Anne is the daughter of Sir David Willcocks who was a famous musician and Fellow of King's [College]; I remember, soon after meeting her, with my journalist hat on, I realized that he was the Director of the Royal College of Music and they were having a big event. So, I asked to be invited and hoped to get a story out of it: it was a big fundraiser. I think [Lord] Noel Annan was perhaps the Chairman, because he was involved. I went to interview David and discovered that he had a great penchant for soups and chocolate pudding, as that is what we had for lunch ! We got on very well and I'm not sure that he knew I was a suitor for his daughter. Soon after we got married in the Chapel in King's with the choir, and Anne's brother, Jonny, who is a conductor and composer, put a Tagore poem to music as our anthem. We had a wonderful celebration on the lawns just outside here; the College was closed off and we walked through to the Backs, Anne and I holding hands, Anne in a beautiful white dress and I in my morning dress, back to Grange Road, and had our wedding lunch there. Getting to know David over 30 years, playing cards with him, we were rivals in chess, playing frisby on the beach, doing his mazes which he always did on the beach, and obviously attending his wonderful concerts, especially his annual 'St Matthew Passion', has opened up a whole new range and vista for me in terms of music and British life, really. Then visiting with him some of the graveyards in Northern France, travelling in the Netherlands, and also the famous battle on Hill 112 which his Cornish Regiment was involved with and where he distinguished himself and went on to be awarded the Military Cross. So, it has been a privilege to know him; Anne and I have been very happy together for more than thirty years now -so, as they say, the best decision that one makes !