JO CORRE spent much of his childhood in a dustbin. Jo, 27, is the son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, the punk poseur who managed the Sex Pistols. The first time Jo jumped into a dustbin was with his brother Ben, to retrieve the toys Malcolm had thrown away because he wouldn’t tidy his room. ‘Once we’d discovered this place where you found loads of other stuff as well, we were, like, always in the dustbins,’ says Jo. ‘Most parents wouldn’t let their children play with us because we were really dirty.’

Jo’s parents never married (‘If anyone thinks they’re worse off because their parents aren’t married, they’re mad’) and Ben was sent to live with his father, Derek Westwood. Jo went to nine schools until he left home, aged 16. ‘I was sent to boarding schools from the age of five because my parents didn’t have any money. They’d put me in schools like Dean Grange or Bellon House for a couple of terms then come in the middle of the night and take me away so that they never paid the fees.’

Malcolm refused ever to let Jo call him ‘Dad’. (Malcolm hardly saw his own mother until he was a grown man, shared his grandmother’s bed until he was 10 and was raised without a sense of family.) ‘I remember calling him Dad once when I was five and he told me my father was the milkman. So I started calling the milkman Dad, until I realised that was wrong too.’ Malcolm also insisted Jo have the surname Corre, Malcolm’s mother’s maiden name.

We’re sitting on a roll of carpet above Agent Provocateur, the Soho lingerie shop Jo and his girfriend and business partner Serena Rees opened last week. They sell Vivienne’s prostitutes’ shoes with 12-inch heels, balcony corset tops with granny knickers and bunny cages and a £900 brass chastity belt. Serena offers us Nipple of Venus chocolates then goes off to ‘nail varnish Diane’s nipples because they don’t show enough.’ Diane is a shapely mannequin in the window in football net stockings.

Jo wears an olive cord suit, banker’s shirt, wannabe beard, long sideburns and a face of Vivienne intensity. He has a missing tooth (‘it fell out when it got rotten’), dirty nails and an ear pierced seven times. He speaks to the wall in a grating voice, and drops his aitches. But he has a genial disposition although he claims to have a ferocious temper. We return to the subject of his childhood. His parents believed in allowing him his independence. When he was eight and Ben just 12, they set off alone on their bikes to see their grandparents. The brothers lived in London. Their grandparents lived in Devon. And the journey took a week. ‘We stayed in youth hostels and tents. We had these really shit kids’ bikes with one gear, piled high with all this heavy stuff.’ Didn’t their mother think it dangerous? ‘No, it was an adventure. I mean like Mum always said if anyone tries to mess around with you, scream and make a fuss and don’t go quietly.

‘Anyway, we were looking for somewhere to pitch our tent in the middle of the night and the police went past. They saw these two young boys with all this stuff and thought we were runaways. They called our grandparents, then let us put our tent in the back of the police station.”

Two years later, he went to the South of France with a 10-year-old friend. ‘After four days, we were only quarter of the way to Paris. We couldn’t make it, so turned around and went to Boulogne and made a hut out of driftwood on Boulogne beach and stayed there for three-and-a-half weeks.’

HE STARTED working, aged 16, as a market trader, moved into dispatch riding then worked with his mother for nine years. Nowadays Jo lives in a rented Pimlico house with Serena and four others and spends his free time getting ‘completely smashed. But not drugs. I did a bit of pot from when I was about 12 and bits and bobs here and there when I used to go out seven nights a week.’

Jo is fiercely protective of his mother. Vivienne, who wears six-inch platform heels and peroxide pin curls while chainsmoking Gitanes, is the sort of parent who would mortify most offspring. ‘I was never embarrassed by her.’ He’s enthusiastic about her having a toyboy second husband, 25 years her junior. ‘It’s brilliant. Until recently Vivienne’s mother had one 40 years her junior.’

And sympathetic towards Vivienne turning up, aged 50, at Kensington Palace in a see-through dress. ‘She didn’t intend to. She wore a dress that she thought was beautiful and when you put camera flash on it, it went transparent. The same thing happened when they caught her at Buckingham Palace with no knickers on.’

But Jo scarcely sees Malcolm. He once paid for Jo to go on a school skiing trip, but insisted he read a book on the Sex Pistols first. ‘The day before I was due to go skiing, he wouldn’t let me go because I hadn’t read the bloody boring book.’

In the late Sixties, Malcolm and three friends dressed up as Father Christmas and went to Selfridges toy department where the store’s Father Christmas was already working. ‘They went through the department giving toys to all the kids. The staff were tearing around trying to find out which was the real Father Christmas. When the assistants tried to take back the toys, the mothers yelled, ‘How dare you, Father Christmas gave it to him’.’ His parents like to shock the stuffy English.

STUART Carroll, 42, was head of litigation and a senior partner at Nabarro Nathanson, a leading London law firm. He ran major cases of commercial litigation – acting for disputing governments and sports and entertainments personalities. He earned a salary in the hundreds of thousands. ‘More,’ says Stuart, ‘than a chief executive of a publicly quoted company earns.’ And there he was in the glossy corporate brochure – looking serious, professional, highly motivated and dangling his glasses authoritatively. But now he’s ‘taking off’ the rest of his life. He has stopped working – forever. ‘I hated the English winters, going to work in the dark and coming home in the gloom. So I’m living on an island where the climate makes me feel alive.’

What does he say when people ask him what he does? ‘That I enjoy myself,’ he answers, sitting by his villa poolside on St Bart’s. ‘Then they ask me what I do, and I say that I live on a Caribbean island, snorkel, swim, read and lie in the sun for 12 months of the year.’ Will he never work again? ‘I think there’s a very good chance.’

Before leaving his job in March, he had been working 12-16 hour days, six days a week, jockeying between London and New York.

‘I was wishing my life away by working and being frustrated that I couldn’t do other things because I didn’t have time, or because I used work as an excuse for not doing them. I spent my time saying ‘I can’t do this, I’m too tired and I’ve got busy meetings next week’.’

HE HAS never married and has no dependents. ‘I’ve always been guilty of putting work first – to the detriment of relationships. But I’ve had relationships that have lasted a few years.’ So he decided to up and off. ‘I thought ‘I’ve got to do it when I’m young enough to keep my options open’. This isn’t a mid-life crisis and it’ll be harder to make changes as I get older. I’ve still got time to make mistakes and fall flat on my face.’ He called together the four most senior partners in the firm – with whom he had worked for 12 years – and told them he’d decided to resign. ‘I said ‘I want to live in the place I want to live in and do all the things I want to do while I’m young’.’ The partners were dumbstruck. ‘There was a great deal of shock. They didn’t want me to go and asked me to think about it.’ Stuart didn’t need to think. He sold his three-bedroom Victorian house in Richmond and decided to live off the capital and its interest. He didn’t have a car. And he didn’t mind leaving his friends. In fact, he thought he’d probably see more of them in the Caribbean. So as soon as he had completed his notice period, he jumped on a plane.

He is 6ft and work-out lean. He has the face of a hard-nosed litigator, and one that is also enquiring, intellectual and kind. He wears expensive clothes – Paul Smith, Armani and St Laurent – which now dangle disconsolately in his villa cupboards alongside his new daily clothes – swimming trunks. He’s even-tempered, reserved and solitary.

He was brought up in London’s East End. His mother was a teacher, his father an accountant. Stuart went to a comprehensive. ‘It was awful. I didn’t start learning until I was 19 when I went to Tottenham Technical College for a year to do A-levels.’ Then he did a University of London law degree. He has a first-class mind. ‘I did the Law Society professional exams on my own. I couldn’t see any point in wasting time travelling to and from Lancaster Gate when I was living in Hackney. So I borrowed the course notes off a friend who had attended – and I passed and he failed.’ AGED just 23, he went into the law and became a partner at the unusually young age of 28.

These days he lives in a huge rented villa with a maid and swimming pool overlooking the ocean. Every day he visits the patisserie, then swims, snorkels and lies on a beach with white sand, turquoise water and reefs. Then he’ll sit in a cafe, sip cafe au lait and read Emma, Wuthering Heights, Ivanhoe or Pride and Prejudice. ‘I want to read all the classics I never read at school.’

His arduous morning is followed by a lunch of fresh local fish and an afternoon of sitting under a palm tree dangling his feet in glistening water or snoozing in the gazebo. He also draws, paints, learns French, does a strenuous form of yoga (‘hanging off walls and so on’) sees friends, travels and learns the lambada. When he tires of the island, he’ll move elsewhere. ‘I feel much better about myself,’ he says, ‘I’m living a more worthwhile and rounded life. I don’t have any regrets and I feel I’m going forward.’ But he is unemployed. Does he feel a loss of identity or self worth? ‘Not at all; I’ve never been worried about status.’

SIR Richard Rogers, architect of Lloyd’s headquarters and the new Channel 4 building, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, has been an international force for more than two decades. Right now, I feel as though I’ve been waiting almost that long to see him.

I turn up at the appointed second because he can spare exactly an hour. Then I spend most of that hour in reception while Richard phones intermittently to say he’ll be ‘just another five minutes’. ‘You weren’t on time,’ says a former employee, incredulously. ‘He’s never on time.’ The Richard Rogers partnership is run on egalitarian principles. The receptionist apologises that she thought I was an Evening Standard motorcycle courier. She says to help myself to coffee, muffins and Mother’s Pride from the kitchen. Everybody does. A nice touch, but not quite the River Cafe, which is across the yard and owned by Richard’s wife, Ruthie. Architects in black polo necks and close-cropped hair moonwalk through reception, where architectural models in Perspex cases hang from the ceiling on stylish metal refrigerator-style shelves.

Richard appears, finally, boyishly pulling a contrite face and wearing bright pink Nehru shirt over Indian patriarch’s tummy, with yellow socks. He’s suntanned, has the eyes and beak of a convivial eagle, grins with perfect teeth and winks a lot.

‘What,’ I snap, ‘were you doing that was so important?’ He was dictating a speech. Didn’t want to make his secretary wait – we can still speak for an hour, he’ll just be an hour late for his next appointment. He laughs. It’s impossible to remain cross. He’s charming, good-humoured, warm and sexually charismatic.

But when we talk, he sits as far from me as he can without necessitating radio contact and leaves the door open. It’s difficult to decipher what he says sometimes, because he gobbles the ends of his sentences, a legacy of his dyslexia. ‘Often I blank out words,’ he explains. ‘I used to be self-conscious. Now I have lots of nice people who cover up my inabilities.’

His practice has been selected to transform the South Bank. Some entrants suggested planting a few trees or tinkering with the existing signposts. But Richard proposed covering the complex in a steel and glass umbrella, linking the present structures and providing a temperate climate. One critic called it the cultural equivalent of a Center Parc with a Bognor Regis atmosphere. What does he plan for the homeless? ‘Maybe we can build them floating hostels.’

He is a pioneer with a vision for London. In 1986, at the Royal Academy, he envisaged rebuilding most of the metropolis – demolishing Hungerford Bridge and Charing Cross Station, putting a monorail across the Thames to link Waterloo with Trafalgar Square and building a series of floating museums.

Now he sees a London throttled by traffic, blighted by decay and robbed of vitality in commercial ghettos, and has a blueprint for a linear park from Parliament Square to Blackfriars Bridge with traffic in a Thames‘Chunnel”, more public places and more mass transport. Richard is a vintage Krug socialist. He believes strongly in the importance of social programmes, chairs the National Tenants’ Resource Centre (leadership training for the‘forgotten people, the one-in-four in Britain who live in state housing’), rides a bicycle, drives a BMW and lives in a grand house. Is he bothered about being a champagne socialist? ‘Only in that I have to do more work to make more champagne for everybody.’ ‘But aren’t you a republican? Shouldn’t you have turned down your knighthood?’ ‘Yes. I can’t even use the excuse that my mother wanted me to take it because I called her and she said, ‘What the hell do you want to be knighted for?” He laughs uproariously.

Richard runs his office on semi co-operative lines. (He likes to make his home and work life seamless,’ says one employee, ‘We celebrate about 80 birthdays a year in the office. Doesn’t everybody?’) The highest-earning partners draw salaries only six times that of the lowest-paid architect, and nearly half the profits are donated to charity. Family visits are encouraged, workaholism discouraged. ‘This is a community,’ says Richard. ‘The restaurant and my partner’s house are over there. The point is to get an intensity of communication.’

‘Why don’t you live in a commune?’ He laughs. ‘I already have a piazza in my house. My five boys bring back their girlfriends and we live in a pretty public way. Most people buy barns and turn them into houses, I bought a house and turned it into a barn!’

Richard was born in Florence of an Anglo-Italian family – ‘soft, loving, undisciplined’. When he was six the family fled Fascism and came to England. Richard was an outsider. ‘It wasn’t good to be an Italian then … maybe that’s the reason I’m so anti-institutional.’

He didn’t learn to read or write until he was 12. ‘In those days dyslexia didn’t exist. No one could understand how, having said the Lord’s Prayer hundreds of times, I still couldn’t remember it. I was so psychologically mixed up – I didn’t know whether I was happy or unhappy.’ He was bullied and left school without any qualifications.

Aged 29, he married Su. They were together 14 years. What went wrong? ‘I fell in love with Ruthie.’ How did he break it to Su? ‘With all the usual difficulties of saying, ‘I’m having an affair with somebody else’.’ His voice tails off, losing its usual buoyancy. This is difficult to fathom because he says he had a close, rewarding relationship with Su. ‘That’s like saying, ‘How can you, when you’ve had a really good meal, come home and have another piece of chocolate?’

‘So you’re not monogamous?’ ‘I didn’t say that.’

Richard is now very ‘locked into Ruthie. We’re very much in love’. After their first child, Ruthie was unable to have more. They decided to adopt. ‘We thought the baby was a girl. But when the call comes, it’s like giving birth – Ruthie says – and you want the baby desperately. The second he was in our arms we bonded.’ Thus they gained their fifth boy. ‘We never met the parents, but I don’t mind if he wants to seek them out.’

Ruthie and Richard proposed once to write a book together called Sex, Food and Architecture, which he considers to be the crucial things in life. Which is the most important? ‘That order sounds pretty good to me.’ He hoots hilariously again.

ON CHRISTMAS Day last year 10-year-old Elizabeth was sexually assaulted by a family friend. Her assailant, Barry, 50, was convicted after a week-long case which ended on 30 September. He’s now on bail, awaiting sentencing on 21 October. Elizabeth, meanwhile, cries inconsolably in her bedroom with the Phil Collins poster; often she won’t sleep in her own bed or close her eyes all night. She has an IQ of 168, but recently flunked her exams. She goes to the lavatory 50 times a day and, at night, walks along the corridor in her flannel pyjamas, clutching her soft toy rabbit, and spends three hours in the bathroom. Her father thinks she’s trying to wash away her dirty feelings.

Her father, Malcolm (all names have been changed), who lives on his invalidity pension, is sitting in their south London Cartlandesque sitting room – all turquoise and pink with shells on the shelves, a tea cup to mark his silver wedding anniversary to Constance, fluffy candyfloss carpet and fairy lights twinkling in the buds of the pink silk chrysanthemums. Any minute now you expect to see Father Christmas.

Instead, Malcolm, in jeans and T-shirt, with a face that betrays months of anguish, speaks in the clipped voice of restrained anger. He talks of the horror of the day his only child was molested. He’s angry and lashes out about the ‘awful’ counselling they’ve all received, the ‘terrible court ordeal’ for his child and the strain on his marriage.

ELIZABETH is special to her parents who thought they couldn’t conceive. She is also a gifted child. ‘By just 14 months she knew all her colours, not just red, white and blue, but aquamarine, turquoise and khaki. At 19 months she had learned the alphabet and, shortly afterwards, started reading newspapers. She’d say things like, ‘Oh look, Margaret Thatcher is on the front page’.’ Elizabeth was nationally acclaimed.

Last Christmas the family stayed with Barry’s family. They’d become friends after meeting in Spain when Elizabeth was a year old and Malcolm was recuperating from breaking his back. ‘Barry had two children by his first marriage and seemed funny and charming,” remembers Malcolm.

On Christmas Day, the families played party games. Then Elizabeth accompanied Barry to look at his computer. ‘When I went upstairs shortly afterwards,’ says Malcolm, ‘her mother said, ‘Tell Daddy what you’ve just told me’. Elizabeth told how Barry had played with her private parts. He’d pulled down her knickers and tights, kissed her on the neck and made her sit on his lap. He wasn’t drunk and it lasted a few minutes. All while we were in the next room.’ Malcolm’s voice rises.

Malcolm, in his confusion, decided he didn’t want to upset Barry’s family and would speak to him quietly next morning. In addition, Malcolm was mugged savagely five years ago and has difficulty driving at night. He rationalised that he couldn’t leave until daylight.

Next morning Constance confronted Barry. ‘She told him he’d sexually molested our child. He didn’t deny it and said, ‘Let’s talk about it after Christmas’.’ Malcolm and Constance then approached the Child Protection Unit (CPU). ‘They advised us, initially, to let Elizabeth get over it. She was taking exams. But she completely freaked, and did nothing but cry.’ On 14 January the CPU took statements. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) thought there wasn’t a case, because of lack of evidence (although the police fought for it). Then they saw the video that Elizabeth had made in the CPU. A St Mary’s Hospital paediatrician advised that a medical examination would create further trauma, so she didn’t have one.” Barry was arrested in March and bailed. The night before the court case, Elizabeth said: ‘It’s dark outside, Daddy, I want to go out there and tell you something.” She told him how she’d been digitally penetrated. ‘She didn’t say that on video in front of the police officers, a man and a woman. She was too scared and embarrassed.”

Elizabeth, once an outgoing child, has become disturbed and clingy. “But we can’t cuddle her now. She pushes us away.’

AND the events of the past few months have tested her parents’ marriage. ‘You scream at each other, have sleepless nights and can’t see justice being done. Your daughter is up every two minutes to the loo and your wife is blaming you for not smacking that man on the nose.’

On police advice the family had counselling. ‘Elizabeth wasn’t allowed to talk about the incident because then they could have said we’d manipulated her. It’s been useless for us too. One night Elizabeth was sobbing until 5am and we called Childline who suggested we give her a sedative. When we told the counsellor, she said, ‘Why on earth did you ring them?” In court, standard procedures were followed. ‘I never want it to happen to another family and, please God, not to us again. She was taken early in the morning so we couldn’t talk to her, and put in a separate room. What my child had to endure for a day under cross-examination and video evidence was horrendous. We were told the defence would be lenient, but it wasn’t. The woman barrister put Elizabeth through the ordeal of saying it had never happened.’

Malcolm complained to Sir Thomas Bingham, Master of the Rolls, who acknowledged the distress to which victims are subjected. ‘But it is essential,’ he wrote, ‘that a defendant should have a fair opportunity to advance any defence he may have, within the limits of propriety.’ On 30 September, Barry was convicted and bailed. ‘We feel dreadful,’ says Malcolm. ‘The police had told us the judge would almost certainly have passed a custodial sentence for reports and that Barry would be put in prison awaiting sentence.’

So what does Malcolm want to happen to Barry? ‘The judge,’ wrote Sir Thomas, ‘will face a difficult task in deciding on the correct sentence and you may feel that it is not as severe as you would wish.’

LAST week I had to have emergency treatment for chronic back sprain. After two days of intensive therapy I managed the five-minute walk to my car in a record 20 minutes, desperate to be driven to my physio. Sadly the car was gone.

It had been left in a Kensington and Chelsea residents’ parking bay, sporting its £70 residents’ permit, parked directly underneath a sign which said parking would be restricted three days hence. Fearing the worst, I called the car pound. My vehicle had indeed been towed away and the council intended to charge me £135 for its day’s bed and board.

I rang Kensington town hall, requesting that my car, which had been legally parked and illegally towed, be returned. It wasn’t my fault that they couldn’t read the date on their own prohibition sign. And I needed the car because of my bad back.

I was put through to Miss Williams. Miss Williams couldn’t authorise the car’s return and transferred me to Miss Shew. Miss Shew suggested Mr Wilson. Mr Wilson wasn’t there. The mayor’s secretary suggested Mr Davis. Miss Birch said better speak to Mr Yates. Mr Yates was in a meeting.

Eventually Mr Yates, Parking Enforcement Manager, rang and said there had been a sign farther up the road from my car indicating that parking was restricted the day my car was left. There was no way he would authorise its return. Mr Yates disagreed that two contradictory signs in one bay were an indication of council incompetence.

Graciously he conceded that if I paid the £105 removal fee plus the £30 ticket, I could collect my vehicle and fill in a formal representations form to request the council to refund my money. I was as incensed as when the council sent a note offering parking spaces under the town hall for residents who were going on holiday and didn’t want their cars towed away – for £35 a week.

DESMOND GUINNESS – scion of the brewery clan, friend of Mick Jagger and Paul Getty, author of Dublin, A Grand Tour and founder of the Irish Georgian Society – really wanted a Palladian house with rococo plasterwork in England. He scoured the countryside, was gazumped on a haunted house which is now the home of Prince Michael of Kent, and ended up with Leixlip, one of the first castles built by the Normans in Ireland.

In 1958, Desmond and his first wife, the late Princess Marie-Gabrielle of Urach-Wurtemberg, moved into Leixlip with 540 books, a mattress and a gun. The couple were known as part of the jeunesse dore. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ says Desmond, a gentle charmer in a Fair Isle waistcoat, who has the bluest blue eyes, wispy white hair and a seductive voice. ‘We were interested in architecture, engravers and silversmiths.’ But he loves beautiful women, doesn’t he? ‘Mmm, I certainly do.’ (Reflective pause.) ‘Well, that’s a conversation stopper.’

The castle had mod cons like windows with stone mullions (added in the 17th century) and 19th century battlements. When the couple moved in, it had baths, but they were in the fields being used as water troughs, and wiring so unsafe the electricity board refused to reconnect the power. But the interior had been elegantly remodelled in Georgian times.

They set about decorating it and buying at country sales. Desmond bid 10 shillings for an unremarkable kitchen table in one crowded auction. ‘It turned out to be the most amazing carved Irish mahogany with a black marble top and has since appeared in several publications.’

Desmond now lives in Leixlip with Penny, his wife of 10 years and a former lover of Lucian Freud; Eileen, his cook of 31 years, who is ever ready for impromptu dinners for 40; and the ghost of a multi-headed hound whose heads appear at the windows. ‘I’ve often undone the shutters thinking I’m going to meet him. I will one day, I’m sure.’ Desmond’s son Patrick and daughter Marina, who has three children by different fathers, live nearby. The day of our interview the castle has been taken over by Michael York, Jacqueline Bisset, Edward Fox and a film crew working on September. ‘The house is pretending to be a dour Scottish castle.’ Workers are busy repainting the ‘set’. And a coach of Americans are coming for a slide show on Irish architecture. ‘They wanted to know what to wear … can you imagine?’

We’re talking in Desmond’s favourite room, the sitting room, in the castellated 14th century tower with its 4ft-thick walls. There are invitations from the Ambassador of Italy and Marianne Faithfull and samples of Pierre Frey material scattered on the table.

It’s the only room light enough to read in without electric lights and the wooden stove burns in here all winter. Like all castles it’s draughty. One guest who called for more blankets in the night was given a pile that included a flag. He woke up frozen, draped in the flag, and thought he’d died. The radiators in this room are hidden in whiskey barrels. Charmingly tatty and unmatching curtains at the windows do their best to keep out the cold.

Desmond affects, amusingly, not to know how many rooms there are. ‘I’m not really sure. But there are 11 bathrooms,’ he says. The hall, paved with terracotta tiles and white flagstones, is being painted yellow by the film people. The dining room is navy with a jolly chinoiserie tapestry and jasmine growing up the 1765 Gothic revival windows. ‘We used to light the candles in here and Marianne Faithfull, a great, great friend who lives next door (five miles away), used to sing in front of the fireplace. She was such a dazzling beauty. You couldn’t possibly resist her.’

The library has an 18th century gilded plaster frieze and French engravings pasted on the walls. Nearby is the drawing room with its Irish mahogany table carved with shells, Savonnerie carpet and Newbridge dolls’ house. William Acton’s drawings of the Mitford sisters adorn the walls. But today it’s full of packing cases and film people.

Upstairs is the chapel. ‘We’ve never prayed in it. It’s never been anything but a passageway for us.’ It has a little pony cart in it in which Marina used to drive as a child. ‘One day I went to an antiques shop and saw it. I thought it looked familiar. It used to live in the stables and had been stolen.’

Under the window in the room known as King John’s bedroom, there’s a copper Victorian bath tub in which Mick Jagger photographed Jerry Hall. The pictures were stolen and later appeared in a British newspaper. ‘My idea,’ says Desmond, ‘had been to hide the tub in the armoire, so people could take a bath in the cupboard.’ The room has a four-poster state bed from Stowe and white lines chalked on the floor from when it was used as a squash court. The Guinnesses’ bedroom is cosy, with a portrait of his mother. ‘By John.’ (Augustus, that is.) His mother is, of course, Diana Mitford who was once married to Sir Oswald Mosley. Beyond this, there’s yet another guest bedroom, hidden away, with French scenic wallpaper of 1822 with views of Italy. ‘They used to sell this wallpaper by saying, ‘Teach your children geography without leaving the home.” There appears to be a different book by a Mitford or Guinness by every bed.

It is at Leixlip that they have an annual Georgian cricket match. And where, as a girl, when Marina wanted to join a travelling circus, Desmond invited a circus to pitch its tents on his land. Whereupon a dromedary embarked on an intimate relationship with their cow.

THE opera singer Fiona O’Neill was eight weeks pregnant when she was driving on the M1 at 70 miles an hour and was hit by a Portuguese lorry. She was lifted into the air in her car, which then spun around before hurtling across the motorway, hitting a concrete block and landing 200 yards up an embankment.

This happened on 5 May when Fiona – who has sung at private parties for John Major and the Prince of Wales and became a household name when she stripped naked for the television film of the musical Vampyr – was on her way to perform as Madame Butterfly.

The lorry driver, in a left-hand drive, had moved lane without seeing her. ‘It was horrendous,’ recalls Fiona. ‘I remember being hit then flying like an aeroplane up an embankment, spinning and floating for what seemed like hours … I kept thinking, ‘You must keep calm because of the baby and how are they going to find someone to sing tonight?”

When Fiona landed, she noted a police car driving past in the other direction. ‘I was told later that I was so far off the M1 that the police thought I was working for the council.’ The bottom of her Vauxhall Cavalier had been ripped off.

The ambulance arrived rapidly, after she’d started having a severe asthma attack. ‘The ambulance man was trying to put an oxygen mask on me while a policeman was trying to breath-test me. The ambulance man told him, ‘You must be joking.” She was taken to Northampton General Hospital where she received treatment for a broken rib, whiplash and terrible shock. Astonishingly, she didn’t lose her baby. (Though even today she suffers migraines, sleeps too much and shakes when driving.) The next night, she performed. ‘I don’t know how I did it. My husband drove me there and I just did it. I knew I had to get going again.’ A week later, she received a bill for £20.65 for the ambulance journey – ‘I never knew you had to pay for emergency services’ – and £123.38 from the company that towed away her car.

Fiona, 35, speaks tremulously with a slight northern accent, has big green eyes, cascading hair and wears a Monsoon shirt and jodhpurs. She has sung with the English National Opera, Scottish Opera, d’Oyle Carte, been an operagram and done promotion work. ‘The whole of Opera North came through Heathrow’s Terminal Two when I was there in a maid’s uniform saying, ‘If you buy two items of duty free …” Last summer she sang at a private party in Hampshire for Prince Charles, when she was suffering from bronchial asthma. Afterwards she met the prince. ‘Oh, you were the one who sang those very high notes,’ he remarked.

FIONA hit the headlines first in 1992 when she starred in Vampyr and took her clothes off with tenor Philip Salmon for a duet in a pool. (‘A trill a minute. Watch her warble. Madame Gutterfly,’ said the tabloids.) She felt uncomfortable about the nude scenes. ‘The only way I managed was by pretending my head was the only bit that belonged to me. You just don’t look down. There are always bits of you you don’t want to see, like your thighs.’ It was particularly difficult for her because she’s an ex-convent schoolgirl, imbued with inhibitions. ‘Their idea of sex education was to say, ‘Don’t bath when you have a period,’ and, ‘You must never look at yourself in the mirror.” She is very unpromiscuous, a loner, and didn’t lose her virginity until she was 23. ‘Maybe I’m frightened of relationships. But I think I’m a closet romantic, into soppy novels and stuff.’ Before transmission, she became excruciatingly embarrassed. ‘Suddenly you realise your neighbours and the man in the pub are going to see you with no clothes on.’ She watched herself. ‘A bit like going to your own first night.’ Afterwards, she received only a few lewd comments and her mother rang. ‘She said, ‘I told you, you’ve not been eating enough.” Fiona married this year, on 29 April, a year after first setting eyes on her husband, set designer Roger Kiff. ‘I met Roger on a train, the 6.19 from London Bridge to New Cross Gate. He was sitting reading The Guardian. I thought he looked nice, wearing black.’ British Rail kept making them change platform to get back on the same train. ‘He started an ‘Oh, bloody British Rail’ sort of conversation.’

When they arrived, they stood talking for 20 minutes. By coincidence, he was building a set for the National Theatre and Fiona was working there in Baby Doll. And he lived round the corner from her. ‘A week later we went out, two weeks later he moved in with me, and a month later he proposed.’ They gave themselves time to be sure of their feelings. Then they married in Lewisham register office. ‘I wanted it to be just us and the dog, and we got permission for the dog. Then our parents seemed miserable. So we invited close family.’

When she was 18, Fiona became anorexic. How did she get through it? ‘By doing nothing about it. Everybody pretended it wasn’t happening.’ Then she started to eat continuously. ‘I put on masses of weight and went up to size 16. We just pretended it was normal.’ Still she’s conscious of her weight. ‘In the mirror I always see myself as big.’ Nowadays her compulsiveness manifests itself differently. ‘I’m a workaholic.’

RANDOM drugs tests are to be carried out on about 12,000 prisoners a year to combat the growing narcotics problem in jails.

It’s estimated that nearly half the inmates of British prisons take self-prescribed medication (heroin, LSD, cannabis and the like) while detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. That’s a prison population of 49,000 in England and Wales alone. So the forthcoming tests should provide enough material and statistics for Prison Service paper shufflers to write off an entire rainforest.

But aren’t they locking the cell after the criminal has bolted? Isn’t this approach comparable to giving HIV tests and forgetting about condoms and safe-sex education? Can it really be effective to discipline a hopeless junkie whose test proves positive?

Many prisoners are inside due to their addiction, rather than because they are inherently criminal. Addicts deal in drugs or steal to support their habit, commit crimes of violence when drunk or stoned, and up to half of all property crime (the cost of which has soared to £4 billion a year) is drug-related.

The Addictive Diseases Trust, a pioneering charity, is fighting successfully against spiralling crime by treating prison inmates for substance abuse. The ADT programme – the first to establish itself full-time in a penal institution, Downview Prison, Surrey – has rehabilitated a third of those it has treated. Remove people from the cycle of addiction and prison and many will cease to reoffend.

The drug tests cost £12 each – which is partly why they haven’t been used before on a wide scale in prisons – and the number of notified addicts has risen fivefold since 1982.

By contrast, £1,500 is required to put an inmate through the ADT programme. So it wouldn’t be logical to press the Prison Service to provide statutory funding.

After all, it only costs £23,000 a year to keep someone in prison. I’M THE only journalist ever to have met Michael Jackson privately in over a decade, unless you count Oprah Winfrey. I spent several hours with him last year. Just after the beleaguered star cut short his world tour and admitted an addiction to pain killers. At the time, the world’s journalists were searching the globe for him and The Sun was offering £10,000 for a sighting or photograph.

Jackson arrived heavily disguised in a red satin face mask and was driven in a Toyota Previa with clear glass windows and children in it. I was prevented, both then and now, from writing about our meeting, professionally the hardest thing I’ve ever had to bear. A number of legal and personal constraints impeded me from so doing, and I awaited an interview which has not yet transpired. (In my memoirs he’ll appear in heavily camouflaged form, wearing a blue silk face mask.) He didn’t strike me as the marrying type. But last week it was reported that he wed Lisa Marie Presley. Surely the papers missed something out. That Elvis was there.

The exposure of my inflexible friend SINCE I was given a piggy, I’ve banked with National Westminster. Unquestioningly, I queued and phoned my branch and held the line for so long my mum could have baked a souffl. This year they improved and gave me a personal account manager, so I had someone dealing with my individual requirements. One to one service which concentrated the mind wonderfully on the cheque books that never arrived.

Recently, I received a customer service questionnaire asking about my experience of Nat West over the last six months. The bank sends 132,000 of these to a random selection every month, and 20 per cent respond. I’m not normally one to fill in holiday competitions, coupons and finish the ditties on the packet of Persil, but I did it.

I considered it at length. Mulled such options as “The branch has made no effort to provide enough staff to satisfy demand” and “More often than not they’ve made a mistake” and “Have you had to give all the details to more than one person before they found someone who could answer your question properly?”

Then I moved my account to The Royal Bank of Scotland.

Care but no attention HOSPITAL authorities were only alerted to the disappearance of a pensioner who had offered himself as a guinea pig for medical students in a Manchester hospital when his relatives became worried. He was discovered on 9 July in the hospital lavatory, dead. He’d been there for 19 hours, and his grief-stricken family are calling for an inquiry.

Equally tragic is the tale of a man who last year went to Bart’s for his heart-outpatients appointment. He signed in and was dispatched along the corridor to see his consultant. He never arrived, and nobody noticed. Two weeks later he was discovered, decomposing in the gents.

Fortunately, all is not gloomy. I have a friend who is a renal specialist in a major London hospital. Returning to work after a short holiday, he made a brisk walk round the wards. Then he discovered a cheerful chap in stripy pyjamas lying on a trolley in the corridor.

My friend asked him how he was. The gentleman pulled the blankets up under his chin, but said he felt all right. My friend, noticing something amiss, enquired whether he’d completed the admission procedure. The man replied that he thought so. ‘I have been here a week,’ he replied. Overpriced facilities Bargain hunter: Betty Boothroyd IMISSED the redoubtable Betty Boothroyd, who opened the Harrods sale, and I ended up standing mournfully outside what rank among the world’s most expensive lavatories. Or luxury ladies’ washrooms, in Fayedspeak. The lavatories cost £250,000: each cistern and bowl was over £10,000, the room is fitted with £40,000-worth of Italian marble and you wave your hand in front of an infra-red sensor at the basin to turn on the water. Entry costs £1. This buys a swipe card which operates the electronic sensor to the inner sanctum. (Harrods card? That’ll do nicely.) About 300,000 people went to the top people’s store on the first day of the sale. All the women I saw shrieked in disbelief and headed off for a free pee round the corner. Only 400 could afford to spend more than a penny.

Who said the recession was lifting?

THIS week the stickers and banners have gone up all over London. Sales season is upon us. But, before you brave the glossy shops of Knightsbridge and Bond Street and pick up that discounted silk shirt or cut-price designer frock you couldn’t previously have afforded without a second mortgage, beware.

My own sorry saga began when I bought two suits and a cotton polo in the last Guy Laroche sale. At £760, including £40 for initial alterations, this was a high price for a couple of outfits. But many of us happily fork out under the pressure tactics of designer boutique sales assistants for slashed-price, end-of-season clothes with pre-sale price tags suggesting the garments are sewn with 18 carat gold. My mistake was not to pay so much, but to pay so much for clothes that I could not immediately walk away wearing. One suit needed just the buttons to be moved. A job executed perfectly. However, the £312 brown suit, a Herms-style riding jacket and skirt, needed more work. On 11 January Michelle Cuiec, the manageress, agreed that with a little nip and tuck for £20, the skirt would be more to my taste. Their delightful tailor pinned it.

When I returned to Bond Street to collect it, the skirt had been shortened, but not tapered as I’d asked. So they did it again. When I went back at the end of February, it still wasn’t done as I wanted. They did it yet again. Sometimes they made me pay for the alterations, sometimes they were free.

Once the skirt was changed, the jacket appeared proportionally too big. Being neither a professional seamstress nor fashion vendeuse, I’d have been grateful for prior notice of this simple aesthetic snare. Now the jacket badly required alteration. I made yet another trek to Bond Street on 12 March, complaining only a little.

Eventually, the skirt fitted beautifully. But as soon as I sat down it creased hideously. It looked disgusting. I was told this was a problem with the material and, astonishingly, that I shouldn’t sit when I was wearing it. As for the jacket … It was altered. And collected. And returned. ‘I can’t believe this,’ I wailed in a letter to the manageress. ‘It has been altered and made far tighter than ever we agreed. It is now difficult even to move my arms.’ Michelle was indignant. She implied that the fault was mine and suggested I see her to sort out the problem.

As I stood in my strait-jacket, Michelle told me the fit was perfect. My movement was still restricted. I insisted it be altered again. When finished, it pinched under the arms, pulled across the back and was uncomfortable to wear unless unbuttoned. For the price, plus the alterations, I wanted a suit I could wear. Or a refund. ‘Since you were quite happy with the jacket in January,’ Michelle wrote in May, ‘I suggest we put it back as it was originally.’ Unbelievable! I was furious. Now, perhaps I made a mistake in requesting the work done. However, if sales staff are only too keen to suggest that with slight alteration a garment will be perfect, should they not also point out when alterations are unwise?

I am not the only one to have a sad story from the sales. Sandra Yarwood is an economics graduate and producer of Beg, a film snapped up for the Edinburgh film festival and showing soon in a cinema near you. But when she chose a Cerruti sale mix ‘n’ match jacket and long skirt reduced to £438, she lost her financial sense. Like many before her, her judgment left with the thought of a sale bargain.

‘The jacket fitted but the skirt was a size too small,’ says Sandra. ‘It was too tight, particularly around the hips.’ They didn’t have her size, but the assistant said it could be let out and the tailor agreed. So she paid for the suit, and £20 for alterations.

ON THE day it was meant to be ready, it wasn’t. ‘I was furious, but they delivered it free of charge a few days later.’ She tried it on. ‘It looked revolting. It was badly puckered at the seams. Typical woman, I blamed myself and thought, ‘I shouldn’t have bought it’.’

Cerruti had said it didn’t take responsibility for alterations. She decided to forget the matter. Then she thought: ‘It’s from Cerruti, not Boutique El Cheapo. I’ve never spent so much on a suit.’ Back to Bond Street. There the assistant agreed the skirt was ‘all wrong’ and returned it to the tailor. A few days later, Sandra collected it eagerly. All the tailor had done was iron it.

Cerruti sent it to another tailor. A month after she’d paid for it, Sandra collected it again. ‘They’d let it out at the hips. But it’s so narrow at the bottom that I could hardly walk in it,’ she says glumly. ‘It’s just not my size.’

The first time she wore it, it ripped badly. ‘Now I can just about move in it but it’s still highly uncomfortable.’ Surely the vendor should have pointed out these pitfalls before doing the work?

‘I felt it was my decision, and that it was an expensive lesson,’ she replies, ruefully. ‘But I won’t ever again buy anything that needs altering.’

IS TENNIS in terminal decline? At the goldfish bowl of the Stella Artois finals day at Queens Club, the smattering of rent-a-celebs watched the singles. Those with their eye on the ball were such notables as Roger Moore and his daughter Deborah, the ubiquitous Ivana Trump and on-off lover Riccardo Mazzuchelli, and Baroness Fiona Thyssen.

But then a funny thing happened. They repaired for tea with adman Frank Lowe, president of the Stella tournament, and many of them didn’t bother to go back to watch the doubles. Conspicuous by their presence were Stefanie Powers and her French husband Patrick de la Chenais, who returned to sit with his arm bleakly round her shoulder.

Here was hard as new ball evidence of the trouble with tennis. That the game is losing its audience, fans are bored, that its spectacle is being killed by champion introverts like Pete Sampras, PC Plod umpires and one-dimensional (the dimension is apathy) players who don’t rally and care about nothing but the upwardly mobile money prizes.

Gone are the days of controversial players like ‘Nasty’ Ilie Nastase who reduced umpires to stuttering wrecks and drew fans as much for his racquet as his racket. Who played a fine game and bought umbrellas on court, used his racquet as a cane, dropped his drawers and with today’s fines would have clocked about $10,000 a match.

LAST week he played a veterans’ tournament, The Hurlingham Seniors, at the eponymous club. He arrived exceedingly late, came in naked-eyed from the blazing sunshine, sat down in the dark club room and put on his Ray-Ban shades for the interview. He thinks today’s stars lack flash and panache. ‘I don’t want to take away from the players’ talent. But the way they play I don’t like,” he says, adjusting his sunglasses for optimum effect. The way the game is played by most of the players today has killed the spectators. The game is different and too physical. There are less rallies because they smash stronger, hit harder. And they play too much tennis. They get tired and can’t perform their best most of the time.

‘It’s also less fun. They have managers and sponsors which we didn’t – we just got on and played tennis and enjoyed it – and business pressures and sponsorship which mean they are not free to do what they want. Of course there are good tennis players, but they don’t have the personalities of champions. I hope in the future we’ll have more McEnroes and Connors. We have Agassi, but that’s not enough. But you can’t make personalities, they have to be born.’

Could he have beaten most of today’s stars with a wooden racquet? ‘I dunno. In my prime, I think yes.’

Some of Nasty’s thoughts are echoed by the ‘Rockhampton Rocket’, Rod Laver, the shy Australian who was a spectacularly aggressive player and one of the greatest in tennis history. ‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ he says, laughing. ‘I just enjoyed the game, played hard and had a prolonged career. These days a lot of players find they can’t because of disinterest, injuries or family situations.’

He doesn’t hold that there’s a ‘whole lot wrong with tennis’ but thinks Wimbledon spectators should be politely presented with a questionnaire asking: ‘What do you think is wrong with tennis and what are your suggestions for what could be done?’

‘I suspect many would answer that tennis just takes too long for the modern world. You can watch a match for four hours and think, ‘Gee nice tennis, but it’s just too long.”

Sitting under the flight-path skies of Hurlingham, he blames the ‘transition’ in tennis partly on technology. ‘When we were around, you couldn’t blast the ball with a wooden racquet.’

He thinks the court should be slowed down, the ball changed less frequently (‘so it gets heavier and softer’), the timing between points changed (‘to go back and get a towel after every second or third point is wrong’), ends changed after three games and a couple of months a year where points are not awarded.

He’s mindful of what he dubs the changing of the guard. ‘The new players don’t have charisma and haven’t learned to relate to the public as spectators.’ Fans may prefer the extravagant dramas of Agassi or the agonies of an air-punching Boris Becker. But the exuberant era of crotch-plucking Jimmy Connors and bad-mouthing superbrat John McEnroe has passed. ‘There’s huge prize money out there,’ says Laver. ‘So you can’t say, ‘I’m going to be the clown, the court jester and lose matches.’ That’s not going to get you into the draw next week.’

Indeed Laver is in awe of Sampras, despite his winning matches but not hearts. ‘People should be bowing at his feet. He’s such a great talent, so dedicated to the sport and playing his best tennis under pressure.’ COLUMNIST, tennis player and erstwhile match spectator Taki Theodoracopulos demurs. Now a veteran, Taki has played with ‘Emo’ Roy Emerson and Ken Rosewall, who was known as one of the greatest little men ever to play the game. ‘I make a point of not watching modern tennis or going anywhere near any tournaments,’ he retorts, from New York after a rough night on the town.

‘Life consists of trying not to watch the horror and behaviour of these complaining, whining humanoids. Everyone wants to see his fellow man make money. But this is too much. They make too much and try too little with tie breaks and the best of three. It’s bullshit compared with what it was.’ Larry Adler, mouth organist cum tennis opponent of Victor Lownes and Martin Amis, is equally scathing. ‘Players aren’t what they used to be. Jim Courier could walk through Piccadilly Circus without his baseball cap on and nobody would recognise him.’

Adler plays every day – ‘Cinderella tennis. I never get to the ball’ – except when he’s snowed off. Ten days ago he had an angioplasty heart operation, but was back on court two days later. And he was a fanatically keen spectator for a decade.

‘I used to sit just where the players walk on centre court at Wimbledon. They had practically to climb over me.’

LIONA is 12 and has never smiled. She is physically handicapped, doesn’t speak and doesn’t play. Then she was taken to Thorpe Park on an outing. Suddenly her classmates gathered round her excitedly. Liona was smiling. This was Kids Out, an event involving thousands of boys and girls, including 2,300 from London. As Liona gave her first smile, other disabled and deprived children elsewhere were at 100 similar events.

This was an annual day out for children with special needs, started in 1990, organised by Rotary clubs and Littlewoods and funded with money from race nights, raffles and bands to sponsorship.

Putney Rotary Club President Alan Davies talked 150 businessmen into taking the day off work to drive 300 local children, with police escorts and orange balloons, to Thorpe Park. And the Metropolitan Police provided the lunch boxes they have when they go on uptown demonstrations: egg or corned beef sandwich, juice, Twix and apple.

I meet Alan at 9am at Paddock School, Roehampton. A girl sits in a wheelchair, head dropped backwards. ‘You are a pretty girl,’ says headmistress Nora Evans, affectionately. Another child stops and hugs Nora and strokes her hair. ‘Smooth hair,’ she intones. ‘Yes, very smooth,’ replies Nora. The child is autistic and suffers obsessions, the latest for smooth hair.

‘Where’s your hearing aid? We’re going on a picnic today,’ a teacher tells a youngster, in sign language. The child jumps, exuberantly. Nearby another is strapped into a wheelchair, his tongue lolling and his wrists bound loosely together. His face lights up with pleasure at the news. Four classes, ages 7 to 16, with severe learning difficulties and profound and multiple disabilities are coming on Kids Out.

In the car park by the windmill on Wimbledon Common we meet the others. Hundreds of youngsters, blind children from Linden Lodge, and disadvantaged ones chattering animatedly. A Rotarian clown squawks amid the parked cars and the mayor of Wandsworth looks on with her chain of office over her raincoat.

Eleven-year-olds Paul and Cally are in our black Audi coupe when I return. ‘This yours?’ demands Paul, cheerfully. ‘Well I gotta tell yer, you’re sitting in the back.’ Then he plays happily with the electric windows. ‘Put your head in the window. I promise I won’t chop it off.’ Paul looks at my fiance, Adrian. ‘So who’s this Adrian? You love him? You been to bed with him?’

These boys are from Chartfield School, Putney, a school for maladjusted children. (A ‘delicate’ school, says one teacher.) Cally is sensitive, gentle featured and reticent about his illness. But Paul is bullish about being dyslexic and asthmatic.

Three schoolmates in another car chip in. One has cystic fibrosis, another severe learning difficulties. ‘I was bullied at school,’ says the third, dolefully.

PAUL sings ‘Hit the road, Jack,’ as we set off. I say he is a groovy guy. ‘I ain’t gay,’ he responds, heatedly. Do they want crisps and chocolate? ‘I don’t have colourings, I’m allergic,’ he says. For miles up the A3 we can see nothing but cars with purple streamers and Kids Out balloons. Cally says that he wants to be a doctor, to save people’s lives. ‘Don’t,’ implores Paul. ‘You’re too short and won’t be able to reach the bed.’ They discover Adrian works in a bank. ‘Why don’t you rob it? I won’t tell anyone,’ says Paul, waggishly. ‘That’s bad,’ says Cally.

All the children are let into Thorpe Park for free. Their £10 ticket charge is waived and adult helpers pay less than half price. Thorpe Park is buzzing with children in wheelchairs, walking unsteadily, running chaotically and beaming genially. We go rowing, sit in a spinning tea cup, hazard a dinghy on the Depth Charge daredevil water slide, eat from the Sweet Palace and watch virtual reality. They scream with the thrill and the fear. Then they stand mesmerised by two ducklings. The Rotarians began in Britain in 1911, solid citizens and prominent businessmen dedicated to worthy causes. Normally straight laced, they have a fuddy-duddy image. The battle over female membership lasted seven years in the States. But they raised £67 million to immunise children worldwide against polio. And now Paul and Cally are standing joshing in front of me. Paul says he wants to drive home in a BMW or Mercedes. A jolly Rotarian offers his, ‘clapped out Peugeot with bank burgling equipment in it.’ The children look gleeful.