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?

MANDY Smith, former wife of Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, would like to become a barrister. They are, she says, the ones up there doing it. She wants also to ‘do more journalism’ and interview Princess Diana. ‘She’s Cancer and Charles is Scorpion (sic),’ explains television presenter Mandy, ‘and I’m Cancer and Bill’s Scorpion.’ She is keen to dispel the bimbo image, has dyed her blonde hair to thinking woman’s chestnut and talked her life story into a book, It’s All Over Now.

Mandy’s mother Patsy, half a century old and in leggings, answered the door with an accommodating manner and the face of a victim. The house is obsessively spotless, with frou-frou curtains, Fantasia video, two Yorkshire terriers and 90ft garden. A silent pectoral type stands in the kitchen: Pat Van Den Hauwe, Mandy’s husband and Millwall footballer. Mandy is running late, upstairs.

She was 13 and lived on a council estate when Bill, 47, seduced her. ‘It was like I was much older, not a 13-year-old in little socks and school skirt,’ she says. It was a shocking pre-pubescent affair which led to her marriage at 19 and divorce at 21. After the marriage, she wasted to 5 1/2 stone and was close to death.

Now 23, she looks exceedingly pretty even in a track-suit and with seriously medallioned sunglasses for a hairband. She has a tan, healthy figure, big chestnut eyes framed with charcoal make-up and Cartlandesque lashes, veneers on her teeth and French-polished nails so long they could hold up a picture. But she has smelly breath. She ate millet and soya milk for breakfast.

She has pulled herself back from the brink, partly with religion. She was raised a Catholic and her book is dedicated to, among others, ‘the dear Lord God above’. ‘Yeah, He’s important to me,’ says Mandy, who speaks with a lazy norf London accent and drops her aitches.

‘I don’t think He gets enough recognition for what he does. Look at all the lovely animals you can have.’ She prays ‘up to 10 times a day,’ normally for 10 minutes. ‘I don’t even realise I’m doing it. Sometimes I’m watching telly and, if it isn’t interesting, I’ll go into a trance for 10 minutes and chat to God.’

What is her concept of the Almighty? ‘He’s a busy person, but always finds a bit of time to talk to you when you need it. If He can’t, He’s got all these angels and saints. Saint Antony is always helping me out. I have a quick chat with him an hour before I go out. I say, ‘St Antony, you around? I’m going into town, need to park and you know what it’s like’.’ She always finds a space. It may, she says, be coincidence.

We’re sitting in Mandy’s white conservatory. She shares her Muswell Hill home with Pat and her sister Nicola. Patsy has moved out but works here, as Mandy’s agent. A year ago, Patsy broke up with Stephen Wyman, 33, reportedly at Mandy’s wedding. Mandy becomes cagey. Then lets slip that they’re back together.

‘When Bill found out, he wouldn’t talk to Stephen,’ she says. ‘He sacked him from work about six months ago and said, ‘If you go out with Patsy, I don’t want to see you.’ He was going to take Stephen out of his will.’ Now Bill and Stephen are reconciled and Stephen (‘he’s very clever’) works for his father, typing his next volume of autobiography.

How did Mandy feel when her mother started a romance with Stephen eight years ago? ‘It was like, ‘Oh God mum, how could you? He’s so young, he’s Bill’s son and what will people think?’ But before she went out with a man who drank a lot and lived with his mother.’

Isn’t there something unnerving about such a rivalrous, competitive mother stepping on her patch? ‘Oh no, no. We’re not like that at all.’ How does Mandy feel about Bill being so horrid about possibly becoming her step-grandfather? ‘I’d ask him for pocket money,’ she jokes, ‘a blank cheque.’

BILL gave Mandy a settlement of £580,000. ‘Take off the house and lawyers’ bills, and I was left with £50,000 which went on a tax bill. If I wanted money I’d have stayed with him.’

But why did her mother ‘sell’ her 13-year-old daughter? ‘She was really ill at the time and thought she was going to die – we didn’t know what of…’ (Mandy’s temper rises) ‘and he looked after me.’ Wasn’t it because he was a rich celebrity? ‘No, no. We weren’t impressed by people.’ Why didn’t Mandy help the police press child abuse charges? ‘I felt partly to blame, like it was my fault as well,’ she says, with the classic guilt of an abuse victim. ‘I fell in love with Bill. I wasn’t a little sex temptress. But I’d feel too guilty getting someone charged for sex abuse.’ Unsurprisingly, Mandy’s marriage to Pat hasn’t run smoothly. ‘I didn’t talk to Pat when we met because he was so shy. Now there can be a bit of a clash, two sensitive souls together. He becomes paranoid and aggressive,’ says Mandy.

In addition, Pat’s ex resents Mandy seeing their daughter. ‘Er, um, well Pat left her for me. I’m sorry, I’m not going to take the blame. It was his choice. I don’t know the woman. But she’s said a few stupid things on the phone to Pat about me. Like ‘I don’t want my child going over to that house’.’

Did Mandy believe her marriage vows to be for life? ‘I thought ‘I just hope it lasts’, but you have to be realistic. Who knows if it’ll last forever, for a year or two?’ Bill was unfaithful; how does she know that Pat is faithful? ‘Well, Bill wrote it down in his diary and Pat doesn’t keep a diary.’ Sex with Pat, she insists, is now all right. ‘I feel a bit more normal.’

Mandy has been helped by therapy. ‘Years ago a fan wrote recommending this woman. I thought ‘don’t bother’. Then one day when I was really desperate, I phoned her.’ Mandy went twice weekly for six months. ‘I felt better that it wasn’t a journalist I was speaking to. We talked about sex, feelings and my Dad leaving when I was three. He was a gambler and used to spend all the money.’

Mandy has also improved physically. She reckons she suffered from premenstrual syndrome (a hormonal imbalance) and allergies. ‘I was ill from 11 years old, but really bad in 1988 when I was in the Cromwell Hospital for six months,’ she says. ‘My self-esteem went down. Now I can get up and go out on my own every day. I used to need someone with me constantly. I always felt ill and faint. I thought I was going to die.’

She eats three tofu-style meals a day, plus starchy snacks, and spends ‘at least two hours’ in the gym daily. ‘If I can’t go to the gym during the day, I try to go at night.’ Her food faddishness and compulsive exercising sound like anorexia. ‘In my doctor’s and my eyes, it’s PMS. I know many doctors thought I was just anorexic and a crank trying to hide it.’ She’s spent £20,000 on doctors in the last two years ‘on a Chinese herbalist, acupuncturist, doctor, counselling’. The court awarded her £100,000 for medical fees.

ANGELA Rippon hides her feelings cleverly. She controls her face and emotions as if she’s on screen. She’s professionally nice, like a Tory lady at a fund-raising garden fete, talks becomingly, looks squeaky clean, drinks mint tea and smiles vocationally.

But she becomes visibly flustered about sex in her broken 22-year marriage. And laughs with thespian disregard when denying her alleged love affair with the former husband of the Princess Royal, Captain Mark Phillips. We meet in the fashionable Halcyon hotel because Angela refuses to allow journalists into the privacy of her home. She’s well known for refusing to answer questions, saying it’s personal. She introduces herself with a deliberately strong handshake, direct eye contact and green room friendliness. She’s shorter and smaller off camera, neat in pink and white check linen jacket and what she’d probably call slacks.

She looks youthful, 49 years old, with the famous arched eyebrows, square face, lovely eyes, clear complexion and sensibly fluffed up hair; an image befitting the Angel of her name. But there’s something unauthentic about her voice. Perhaps a repressed anger beneath the extreme niceness? Angela was a big celebrity in the days before Hello! made everybody one. She became the first woman BBC newsreader in 1976, revealed her legs when she danced out from behind the newsreader’s desk on Morecambe and Wise, presented television coverage of Crufts, shimmered across the ballroom floor compering Come Dancing, appeared on intellectually deep-frozen quiz shows like What’s My Line and grilled politicians on LBC.

In 1990 it was reported that she was Britain’s best-paid female media star. That she’d signed a £100,000-a-year contract with LBC. ‘I wasn’t earning anything like that,’ she says now. ‘People have always thought of a figure, doubled it and added a couple of noughts where my salary is concerned.’

Last week Angela quit her job at LBC, 24 hours after learning that she wouldn’t be required by London Radio when it takes over from franchise-loser LBC in October. (She’d already lost her morning news programme under the former LBC management.) She attributes this to her strong association with the old station and her high profile with LBC. ‘I’ve won four awards in the last four years,’ says Angela, speaking restrainedly.

Angela says that the parting was not acrimonious. Yet a London Radio spokesman was last week quoted as saying: ‘What need is there on radio for former TV personalities?’ Does she take these knocks personally? ‘You can’t,’ she replies. ‘You can’t buckle under every time someone says: ‘Thank you, we don’t want to employ you’. You’d end up destroyed and a hollow shell. You’d jump in a hole and never be seen again.’

Angela the celebrity has been toughing it out for the last 20 years. Her job loss is her third such major blow. As soon as TV-am got its licence, the BBC eased Angela out of her newsreading job. ‘I was called in on a Wednesday and told ‘don’t come in on Monday’. At the time you feel quite hurt, but you can’t make people employ you.’ Then two months after she started at TV-am, as one of the Famous Five who helped launch it, she was sacked ignominiously. ‘That was horrendous. I’d never want to live through that again.’

Her most recent demise marks the end of an era. ‘When I started in television 27 years ago, there was very little I could do without getting into the Press,’ she admits. ‘Now I’m not in that spotlight or rarefied goldfish bowl quite as often or long. Celebrity has become diluted. It takes the heat off you.’ Now she’ll continue her television series about The Entertainers – interviews with Mike Yarwood and suchlike – and finish a Remembrance Day special for Radio 2.

Angela was the only child of an engineer and china shop manageress. ‘I was a tom-boy, not at all rebellious as a teenager and being an only child made me self-sufficient, but my friends are very important.’ She was raised in a small council house (“a normal working-class family’) in the suburbs of Plymouth. She went to grammar school, gained nine O-levels and left, aged 17, a term before she was due to take A-levels. ‘There was an opportunity to work on a newspaper. The job was there, so I took it.’

She met Christopher Dare, her first serious boyfriend and a car parts dealer, when she was 17 at a YMCA dance. In 1990 their marriage ended but they’ve not yet divorced. ‘There are all sorts of complications.’ She won’t reveal them. Why did they break up? ‘Oh we just grew apart.’ What changed after 22 years? ‘Oh, lots of things.’

Christopher has a new partner, Angela doesn’t. Angela says they’re still good friends and talk weekly. ‘I still dine alone with my husband.’ She’s never met his new partner, she says, with an edge to her voice. Angela, who wears her engagement ring, is losing her composure.

Why did they never have children? ‘We just never had them.’ Because they didn’t want them? ‘Because it never happened.’ They tried and wanted them? She chokes on her tea. ‘We had a perfectly normal married life, but it just never happened.’ Did they have tests and so on? ‘No, we just compensated in other ways, by being busy and getting on with our lives.’ Did she feel unfulfilled or distressed? ‘No.’

What then of the rumour of an affair with Captain Mark Phillips? ‘It was a load of cobblers. I was simply writing his biography. He laughed it off and Princess Anne just said, ‘Oh, don’t take any notice,’ when the gossip started.’ Would she have liked to have had an affair with him? ‘It simply never crossed my mind.’

Now Angela can interview herself. ‘What is the most important question you could ask yourself?’ I ask, lamely. Angela ums and ahs. ‘Um,’ she says. ‘What makes me tick? The thing that makes me tick is that I enjoy what I do.’ I’m bored. Maybe she’s too private, too bland or too nice. ‘How would you get yourself talking about something you’ve never spoken about publicly before?’ I enquire. ‘What’s the most interesting personal question you would ask yourself?’

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.’

ON THE phone Sir Antony Buck says he wants to be paid for talking to me. No chance! So he taunts that he may sell his story elsewhere.

He sounds like a conceited thespian, with the comic tones of a Hermoine Gingold, says a mid-morning interview would be gruellingly early and eventually demands nothing more than copies of The Sun and Daily Telegraph so he doesn’t have to go out.

Sir Antony, 65, the distinguished former Tory MP and navy minister, talks about his sex life, his 34-year marriage to Judy and his infidelities; of meeting the notorious Bienvenida Perez-Blanco when he was 61 and she 33 (‘Any chance of a Buck?’ was one memorable headline) and marrying three weeks later; and of his most recent marriage to Tamara Norashkaryan, the Russian tourist who turned up on his doorstep bearing a press cutting about him.

We meet at Sir Antony’s rented Kennington flat. Tamara ‘dislikes publicity’ and has gone out. But today Bienvenida has revealed in The Sun that she was a £1,000-a-night prostitute. ‘I don’t think Bienvenida was a hooker. Darling, I know her better than you,’ says Sir Antony, later. ‘She’s just behaving irrationally.’

Sir Antony wears longish hair, a grubby navy cardigan and has an unlit cigar in his mouth. His hands shake and he’s absent minded, asking four times how I take coffee. He breathes raspily and has a smoker’s cough. ‘I don’t cough,’ he says, after one outbreak. His tiny drawing room has grimy whitewashed walls, fake flowers and a collection of silver Lucifer boxes, red ministerial box and a picture of his hero, Winston Churchill. Since Sir Antony shot to notoriety – when Bienvenida, who had an affair with Chief of Defence Staff Sir Peter Harding while she was married to Sir Antony and then colluded in Sir Peter’s entrapment by a newspaper – we’ve been treated to a glut of increasingly preposterous and sordid stories. Sir Antony, for example, introduced Bienvenida to Judge Harkess; and then she introduced the family to public relations man Max Clifford to help them purge themselves publicly of their torrid ‘Alan Clark’s sex coven’ scandal. But last week Sir Antony won the award for vainglorious behaviour when he went on television to talk about his new-found happiness and to take ‘custody’ of his beloved King Charles spaniels while wives numbers two and three kissed and Tamara stormed off saying she’d leave for ever because she heard Sir Antony call Bienvenida ‘darling’.

Why on earth has Sir Antony encouraged the chronicling of these absurd goings on? ‘You can’t stop the publicity when photographers and reporters are stacked up outside the house.’ But did he have to take charge of his dogs on camera? ‘Well I’ve got to go out.’ He maintains that years in politics taught him that it’s best to co-operate with the Press. Isn’t his publicity-seeking simply excessive vanity? ‘What’s it got to do with vanity?’ he stumbles. ‘I don’t want this.’

HE claims he hasn’t made money from the stories. ‘Darling, I’ve made nothing.’ But last week he spoke to Max Clifford. What did the king of kiss ‘n’ tell suggest? ‘That’s a matter for me and him.’ Suffice to say that it was Sir Antony who approached Max.

Sir Antony fits the Max mould. He talks enthusiastically about his sex life. ‘I’m not a sex maniac,’ he says. ‘I’m a perfectly normal heterosexual with healthy urges. I’ll have sex until I stop feeling like it. Some men continue into their 80s.’ Is he a good lover? ‘I’m average. Never had any complaints.’ Well, what of Bienvenida’s allegation that he took two years to consummate their marriage? ‘Absolute nonsense. We consummated it at once.’ The younger son of an agricultural merchant (father) and founder member (mother) of The Royal College of Nursing, he joined the army and served in Berlin during the blockade. Next he went to Cambridge, where he read history and law and was chairman of Cambridge University Conservative Association and college captain of swimming. ‘I got a first-class degree in my first year, second in my second and third in my third. It wasn’t the rake’s progress.’

In 1961 he became MP for Colchester, holding the seat for 30 years. He’s particularly proud of his time as navy minister. (He has discussed the Bienvenida revelations with his political friend Sir Geoffrey Howe. ‘I don’t ask his advice.’) His first marriage ended in divorce after three decades. ‘Judy fell in love with somebody else. The strains of political life didn’t help,’ he says, leaning forward on his tatty sofa. Was he faithful? ‘For a very long time, yes.’ Did his infidelity contribute to their break up? ‘She wasn’t keen to come to London, so one got lonely.’ Now they rarely communicate. (They have a daughter, Louisa, sometime radio presenter. The recent revelations have also put a strain on his relationship with her.) Sir Antony’s downfall has also been financial. ‘I have very little money.’ He lived with Judy in a Georgian house with a swimming pool, but sold it when the marriage dissolved. Later Bienvenida took a ‘substantial’ sum; he refuses to disclose the figure. ‘I might claw it back, but you can’t get blood out of a stone. I have very little money.’

WE come thus to Bienvenida. He deems her revelations ‘sad and sordid’, but doesn’t regret the relationship. ‘I don’t know why we married so quickly. Mutual attraction, I suppose.’ Was she attracted to his title, charm or good looks? ‘I’m not particularly any of those things. We just got on and had a rapport.’ He denies her claim that he abused her physically. ‘The only time was when she attacked me. It was in self-defence after she’d had too much to drink.’

Sir Antony doesn’t feel that Tamara, last seen in a fury on television, heralds more trouble. ‘There’s a stability in her and intellect.’ Doesn’t he find it suspect that she hunted him down after reading about him? ‘No, she saw a picture of me with the dogs and thought she’d like to meet the dogs.’ Sir Antony’s nemesis is shocking. He tries very hard to present an optimistic front. He looks uncomfortable when I ask whether he suffers from depression – ‘we all have periods of depression. But I’m not a depressive, I don’t get bitterly depressed’ – claiming he’s phlegmatic. He denies that his drinking habits are excessive. ‘Nonsense. I don’t drink three bottles a day. Just a bottle of wine a day. I’m not an alcoholic.’

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.

RICHARD Briers has plenty to be sad about. The star of The Good Life and Ever Decreasing Circles watched his mother die slowly over 12 years, diabetic, blind and with her leg amputated. And he stood by helplessly for a decade as his father perished painfully from lung cancer. Unsurprisingly, Richard, 60, who was brought up in genteel poverty and fears financial insecurity, dreads old age and dying.

He’s driven ‘through a monsoon’ to meet me and now we repair to his Bath Spa hotel bedroom. He jokes with the staff, signing his ‘autograph’ in the guest register, being infectiously funny, habitually saying ‘becosh’ and ‘sho’ in that Tony Bennish voice of his, twiddling his eyebrows when he’s rattled, rolling his own with Virginia tobacco and exuding bonhomie and charm. He looks like a country golfer in his tartan tie and casual trousers, but he has impossibly sad eyes.

He’s touring with Paul Eddington in Home, David Storey’s play about disillusionment, first produced at The Royal Court with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. ‘We play two old boys who can’t cope and live in a mental hospital,’ says Richard. ‘We’ve had terrible marital breakdowns and live in a fantasy world to protect ourselves from reality.’

There was an early production difficulty when Richard refused to work opposite actress Liz Smith because he thought her too old. So she was sacked six weeks after she was contracted (No More Mr Nice Guy, screamed a tabloid).

‘We had casting approval but the director went to Tokyo and forgot that,’ Richard replies, commenting for the first time. ‘She’s a super actress but wrong for the part. I wrote to her and said how very sorry I was that she wasn’t right and had been badly treated by me and I regretted the hurt caused.’ She didn’t write back.

Sadly, the health of Paul, his great friend and co-star, might now be a problem. He suffers from diabetes and a rare skin cancer. ‘It spreads, poor thing. I remember when we were doing a play 40 years ago he had this red thing on his stomach. Now it’s on his face. He has ultra-violet therapy, like going on a sun bed, so he looks as if he’s been in Malta on holiday for 10 years.’ Might Paul collapse as he did on stage last year? ‘He fell over once in a Pinter play because of his diabetes. He hadn’t eaten properly. He got up again immediately, so naturally everyone thought he was going to die.’ He speaks sardonically.

Richard knows much about diabetes. His only sibling, Jane, suffers. As did his late mother, Morna, who died in 1992. ‘It was terrible when my mother had her leg amputated and went blind. Bloody awful watching her deterioration, particularly dreadful the last two years. It was obscene the way her luck ran out.’ He’s a firm believer in luck and refers often to his own fortune.

Jane, an unlucky actress, moved home when she divorced to live with and tend her mother for 12 years. Richard visited weekly. ‘Poor old thing mother, couldn’t die, clung on and had a cruel, rotten life. She had that extraordinary bravery which only females have. I was lucky and didn’t sink because I was busy working and have a strong private life. I wasn’t broken up when she died because she was released from her suffering.’ Does he support euthanasia? He looks nonplussed. Would he have liked to have given her a pill to end her misery? ‘I couldn’t have, no. I’m too much of a coward.’ Dismissing any legal implications, could he have coped with it emotionally? ‘I suppose so, yes.’ Before his mother’s demise, he watched his father die 12 years ago. ‘He had a horrendous time towards the end.’ Richard says the family had been close. ‘I grew up in Raynes Park during the Blitz. Your family unites very tightly when you’re being bombed.’ Were they genuinely fond of one another or was it a closeness born of circumtances? ‘I think it was real. But we had our spats because we’re all highly strung.’ His father – ‘He had about 75 jobs, one as progress chaser for GEC’ – was feckless. Consequently, money was always tight. ‘When I was a child, things were run on the basis that if the rich uncle sent a fiver at Christmas, my father could go to the off-licence. He was a good-time guy.’ Richard’s education was erratic and he left school at 16 without taking any exams. An indication of emotional disturbance? ‘I just wasn’t interested, didn’t listen and loathed school.’

He became hungry and ambitious. A workaholic who would rehearse a series by day, act a play at night and record a TV episode on Sundays for months on end. Now he says such driven feelings have dissipated and he denies a tabloid report that he suffered breakdowns. ‘If you don’t get frightened on first nights, you’re nuts.’ (‘I didn’t know you’d had nervous breakdowns, dear,’ said his mother, sweetly, after the article appeared.) He began acting four decades ago, playing Hamlet, ‘like a demented typewriter’, in the words of WA Darlington, The Daily Telegraph’s redoubtable critic. ‘I took 25 minutes off the running time. I was the only Hamlet in the world who gave the audience half an hour in the pub afterwards.’ Four years ago he returned to serious parts with Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, when Branagh cast him as King Lear. He’s only ever had two years out of work, never made it in films – ‘I’m hardly the film-star type. I did dreadful films and was dreadful in them’ – and doesn’t anticipate work drying up. ‘I can play great roles and grandfathers now. If I start losing my memory, I’ll do radio. If we really get past it, my wife (actress Ann Davies) and I are going to pool all our enormous resources and influence to get two small parts in The Archers.’ His next part is in Down to Earth, a sitcom by Esmonde and Larbey who wrote The Good Life. He plays a 60-year-old who falls from grace, losing a job in a banana republic and returning penniless to England. Richard fears nemesis. When we talk he says, often, what goes up must come down. ‘The worst thing for me is not not making money, but having it and losing it. The nightmare scenario would be Lloyd’s.’

WHEN Barbara Kaczmarowska Hamilton drew the Duchess of York, she discovered her sitter was an artist. First the Duchess photographed the initial sketch by Basha, as she’s known to her friends. Then the Duchess revealed that she daubs cityscapes, has a painting teacher, and hangs her work on the walls at Romenda Lodge. Basha had a quick private view of the Duchess’s watercolours and thought them exceedingly good.

Later they spoke to the director of the Accademia Italiana, and the Duchess was told that the Accademia wants to exhibit her work when she’s completed a few more paintings. ‘The Duchess doesn’t talk about her paintings because she doesn’t think they’re very good,’ says Basha enthusiastically, in her Polish accent.

Basha is the society portrait pasteller de nos jours and divides her working time between Palm Beach, Jamaica and London. Her sitters include Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Norman Parkinson, the Marchioness of Salisbury, Mohammed Al Fayed, the Sultan of Brunei, Denis and Carol Thatcher, the Marquess of Bath, Professor Norman Stone and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. Her finished subjects have enormous eyes with faraway looks in them, flattering cheekbones, swirly hair and romantic airs. Even Sir Clive Sinclair looks attractive.

RECENTLY Basha had an Accademia Italiana exhibition in which a study of the Duchess and a conversation piece with her daughters made the headlines. The newspapers claimed the Duchess intended to give the latter to her estranged husband to commemorate their first meeting at Royal Ascot nine years ago. ‘It’s not for Andrew,’ says Basha. ‘Why should she give it to him when she likes it?’ The paintings were a gift – normally she charges £3,500 a portrait – from Basha to the Duchess.

She often dashes her portraits off in two and half hours – ‘If I’m in a good mood, I’m all excited like a tiger …’ And she has a facility for likeness, according to fellow artist, the Marquess of Bath. ‘In Polish we have an expression for that. We say I have ‘monkey ability’.’ She’s a delightful, exuberant ingenue, and speaks in parentheses, her conversation darting everywhere excitedly. Life imitates art because she looks a decade younger than her 45 years, and she wears a classic pistachio suit, glasses and an antique gold link bracelet.

She had a subject who loved her portrait so much that she went to the bank, got out all her jewellery and told Basha to choose whatever she wanted. Basha selected the link bracelet.

We’re talking in her South Kensington studio where she comes three days a week and prefers her sitters to sit. There are gilt-framed portraits everywhere, pop music playing and a photograph signed ‘with all good wishes’ from Lady Thatcher on the mantelpiece. A jocular portrait of Norman Parkinson hangs in the bathroom. ‘I met him at a ball and in his jacket he had a silver book of photographs. I thought, ‘How funny, he’s a famous photographer and he’s still showing his work around and needing compliments.”

Basha has captured Prince Michael as well. ‘I had an exhibition two years ago in the Polish Club and he saw a magazine picture of one of the portraits, of someone he knew,’ she says. ‘So he went off to the Polish Club by himself. Nobody recognised him, nobody said ‘hello’, nobody took his coat, that’s terribly funny, no? Then his secretary called me and said he needed a Masonic portrait. So they commissioned me to do him in Masonic clothes and he liked it so much that he sent it out printed on his Christmas cards.’ What was the Prince like to draw? ‘He has an exceptionally good face to paint, he’s like a Czar and very jolly and good humoured.’ Basha became a society portrait painter unintentionally. She was born in Sopot, went to the Academy of Art in Gdansk and left Poland when she was 24 to study in Venice.

‘It’s not a fantastic story about defecting and being tortured. I just left on holiday and didn’t return.’ In Italy she held an exhibition of her abstract paintings and one portrait. ‘Everybody came to the portrait and said, ‘Gosh, if you can paint like that, why do you do those?” NOWADAYS she doesn’t lead a socially strenuous life and is surprised to find herself in the newspapers. She married late, aged 37, to Ian Hamilton, whose great uncle was the general Sir Ian Hamilton of Gallipoli fame. She had her first child when she was 38 and they live in a 1950s house overlooking Watership Down where Ian, she says, is rich and Scottish, wears a cap, wellies, plants trees and doesn’t work. They spend much of the year in Jamaica where Ian’s family used to have sugar plantations. And they go to Palm Beach. ‘I hadn’t even heard of it before.’ She laughs and creases her nose. ‘In Poland, Palm Beach isn’t very popular.’

I look around the studio again. There hangs Sir Peregrine Worsthorne: ‘One of the most classical heads one can see nowadays and a picturesque character.’ And a picture of Rula Lenska: ‘Usually she hangs in the Polish Club. It’s nice that people can sit and have lunch under pictures of themselves.’

Nearby is a dashing one of the Marquess of Bath: ‘One of London’s most extraordinary characters.’ And one of the Duke of Kent: ‘I don’t think I got him quite right. He’s not someone you can easily get to know. He’s composed, closed and charming.’

It’s sad the walls don’t have ears. Basha says she’s like a shrink to her sitters. ‘I’m always surprised. It’s like an hour of truth,’ she explains. ‘They have big trust, tell me everything and then I forget. Often extremely personal things. A pose is like a marriage for life, it’s very psychological and special.’ Did the Duchess talk to her about her personal problems? ‘I can’t say anything.’ But Basha, who imagined the Duchess as a ‘crazy bully and careless character’ before she met her, found her a sensitive, wonderful and powerful personality.

WHEN Deborah Moggach’s partner of 10 years died in February, they stopped the film at the Empire Cinema. The paramedics leapt on him like athletes, attempted resuscitation, the theatre emptied in a flash, and the police cleared Leicester Square. He was the cartoonist Mel Calman and he had a fatal heart attack as somebody’s throat was being cut on screen. His death was no more extraordinary than the life of Deborah, 45, the popular novelist.

In 1981, Deborah agreed to have a baby for her infertile sister Alex, offering to borrow her man, Brian, for a few nights. Deborah said she didn’t fancy Brian and was doing it out of noblesse: this was reproduction not adultery. She thought artificial insemination too cold and official. But would Tony (now Deborah’s ex husband) be upset? Or Alex jealous? Or one of the lovers fall for the other? Deborah never found out because Alex and Brian separated; but she put her experiences into a novel, To Have And To Hold.

Or go back another decade. Then Debraless, as she was known, was at Bristol University: a middle-class gel living with a bus conductor, trying LSD and pot and visiting a shrink to talk about her rebellious penchant for rough trade. She’s always had a predilection for butchers’ boys, men covered in plaster and is, she says, the sort of woman who hyperventilates when she sees a skip.

We meet in her Camden Town home (colourful, surreal and messy) with Jocasta Innes splodge painted walls, a dinosaur skull in the sitting room (it turns out to be a hippo’s; she bought it for £4 when she was six) Penguin books and Ella Fitzgerald to Brahms tapes. Two characters converse in a Calman cartoon: “Do you realise we’re stuck in a frame we can’t sell.” Deborah offers wine and freshly ground coffee – her voice rich but tremulous – then poses revealingly for the photos in her shredded Indian chiffon skirt. She has forcible features, tumbling hair, ink writing on her wrists and smokes roll-ups. She laughs to hide her pain and is witty, observant and shrewd. Lovely.

And she understands the game. Next week The Ex-Wives – about a boozy, sweaty, superannuated actor and his exes – appears in paperback and features Penny, a journalist: ‘From strangers she had extracted humiliating personal confessions…’ it reads.

Deborah writes lying on her bed, Pentel spilling on the counterpane, doodling naked women when it’s going badly. She’s adapting Moll Flanders for TV and writing a kidnap novel. But she’s found it hard to work since Mel died.

She fell in love with Mel when she walked into his larder and discovered he’d pencilled a face around every wall tack. They never married or lived together; she says she didn’t want to inflict her adolescent children on him, and loved the schizophrenic life of visiting him in Soho. ‘I’d come back in the morning wearing my high red heels and everybody would think I was a hooker. Then I’d change into my horrible baggy working trousers.’ Mel died when he was writing a radio play about a man who has a heart attack. Deborah’s only previous experience of death was years ago when she watched her grandmother die in bed. That didn’t really bother her. But Mel’s death was traumatic. His funeral was grim and freezing. Grief was a foreign country. ‘I couldn’t cope. I was always putting things in the wrong place, like keys in the washing machine. You’re not yourself. You’re ill. I felt raw and only wanted to eat nursery food, undemanding things like mashed potato and leek soup. I became terribly working class and wanted lots of roll-ups and sweet tea, which I hate. I was pole-axed by the loss. ‘I went through my answerphone tape hoping to hear him talking about normal things. But he wasn’t on it.’ She looks forlorn. ‘I miss the long conversation we had which lasted 10 years and was just interrupted from time to time.’

People, says Deborah, don’t realise it’s necessary to be much alone in grief, to think about the deceased. ‘The nearest equivalent is having a baby. When you give birth, you need to concentrate on the pain to get through it. With death, you need to be undistracted. You don’t want to go anywhere. Even crossing the street you feel vulnerable and naked.’ SHE says she didn’t turn to drink or tranquillisers. ‘I love drink but I’m not a great drunk.’ And she managed to write a poignant account of Mel’s death just days later. She feared it a terrible invasion, a cathartic plundering of his death. ‘But I’m glad I did it. I wanted to record this terrible moment from the front line.’

She feels ‘normal’ now. ‘The recovery process was revved up because we didn’t have any unfinished business. We didn’t have anything left which we hadn’t said,’ she says, shaking slightly. She can conceive of a relationship with another man. ‘I won’t find anybody like Mel. But I can imagine a future with somebody else.’

But she doesn’t see herself as sexually attractive. ‘I do if I’m tarted up. But underneath I’m a mess,’ she says, bringing her knees up foetally under her chin. ‘Often I feel that I’m a pretend woman and underneath I don’t really know how to do it, sex or being a woman, and that I’m going to get found out.’ She recognises that such self deprecation requires some self confidence and may simply be an elaborate self deception.

We talk then about her ex-husband, Tony, a publisher whom she left in 1985 for Mel. The divorce was traumatic and she lost weight badly. Now relations are friendly and he lives in the next street for the children’s sake. (Tom, 18, and Lottie, 17.) ‘You are parents until you die,’ she says. Deborah, third of four daughters of writer parents, is laissez faire with her offspring. How would she react if they took drugs? ‘I only took acid because it was the Sixties and to give myself street cred with my children,’ she says, unconvincingly. ‘I wouldn’t like them to, but everyone smokes pot. I don’t have strong feelings about that.’

Had Deborah had that surrogate baby, it might now be friends with her children. ‘I’ve never talked to them about it. But I’m terribly glad I didn’t do it,’ she says. ‘It would have opened a can of worms. One jumps into things in a flood of emotional warm feelings, generosity, sexual desire or whatever. But it would be fantastically difficult to see your child being brought up by somebody else.’

And what would it have been like to have slept with her sister’s boyfriend? ‘Technically it would have been adultery. But it’s when it gets to be adultery emotionally that it becomes interesting.’ Was it not a taboo? Something perilously close to incest? Perhaps an extreme manifestation of sibling rivalry? She replies with waffle. Deborah is normally searingly honest.

Her frankness, she admits, is a strategy to distract people from asking her things she doesn’t want to talk about…