Besides I'd been very happy there for as long as my main point of contact was Peter Wright. "I was finding myself ever more uncomfortable with the way it goes for the emotional jugular all the time I was younger and more idealistic then There were a few things I didn't get. I'm not saying I get it all now, but I get slightly more of it. I think rather pompously I felt the Mail was leading people to chunter. The Daily Mail know they've got a hit when it makes you raise your eyes and go 'What is the world coming to!' And I used to think 'Poor old readers. Why can't we give them some more happiness?' Rather pompously, I began to see myself as potentially being a sort of pied piper - I began to think it was my job to protect the readers from all this..."So far, so very hippie But there were political and practical considerations too "Back then I did have stronger political views I'm a liberal I've always been somewhere to the left of centre The Daily Mail used to annoy me. They cared that I wrote a good column and wanted to keep printing it because I'd built a close relationship with a lot of their readers." But what made him want to dump the Mail, which had by all accounts treated him well?A pause as he relights his pipe.
And it does still, but I've had to develop a thick skin about it. From there he jumped ship to the Daily Mail in 1992, where he stayed for seven years. Then - despite being offered £1m golden handcuffs - he quit for the Daily Express, where Rosie Boycott had just become editor, taking the paper sharply to the left. In the process he savaged the Mail as "a newspaper dedicated to the subtle propagation of bigotry" - words he would be forced to eat four years later when he returned to the fold, a prodigal son, somehow reconciled to the paper's politics.The Daily Mail is wondrously pragmatic, something I didn't appreciate at the time," he says "They are really interested in selling newspapers They didn't care about my views. Publicists for prickly Hollywood stars, deluded It Girls or jittery soap actors make such demands.
But media-savvy newspaper astrologers with 20 years' experience? He didn't get it, of course. But the request did make me wonder whether he's something of a control freak. Perhaps he feels he's been skewered by an interviewer before. Or maybe it was simply a clever ruse to embarrass me into being nicer to him in print.
