Sandie Shaw is wriggling and giggling. Now she’s sitting cross-legged. Now there’s the laugh that hits the ceiling. And more wriggles. And lots of funny voices. If you didn’t know she hated the song, you might say she was acting like a bit of a Puppet on a String. But she’s just recorded an interview with Jonathan Ross, and she seems to be quite high. Grace, her lovely-looking and, at 20, her eldest child, has just left us. (‘Yummy Mummy’ is what her children call her.) ‘Grace is really beautiful, not just physically but mentally and spiritually. We relate very much to the child in each other as well as the woman.’

Sandie Shaw came back after an absence of more than 15 years-‘my black hole, I call it. I don’t know the exact dates’. She ‘retired’ at 24, pregnant and with 17 hits behind her. Always Something There to Remind Me… This is the girl who came from Dagenham and whose first job was with the Ford motor company, training to be a computer operator. She who finished her marriage to dress designer and television presenter Jeff Banks in poverty and went to work in a restaurant in Soho where, once Warhol’s guest, she found herself waiting on him. ‘I didn’t feel ashamed. I loved it. It was such fun.’

Sandie Shaw is clear-complexioned and bright-eyed (penetrating blue and ‘blind as a bat’), with curly lashes, rich brown hair, little-girl dimples, architectural cheekbones, and what is probably a willowy figure beneath the billowing pink T-shirt. Grace’s mum, in other words. She’s wearing lurid-fluorescent, even-green Ozbek leggings and the trademark bare feet are shod with lime running shoes. ‘I might be sophisticated from the neck up, but from the neck down . . .’

The eternally youthful 44-year-old (on being asked, she says she’s about my age; I’m 31) who has just published The World at My Feet takes a sip of her white-wine spritzer.

She left singing so prematurely ‘because I’d buggered up my career’. She was, she reckons, slipping artistically and soaring commercially. ‘I’d done some really great stuff-and then I was talked into doing this crappy song Puppet on a String and entering the Eurovision Song Contest. I didn’t know what a feminist was then because they didn’t exist. But instinctively I knew it offended my sensibilities.’

She walked off live German TV when they played it. (‘I don’t want to wallow in nostalgia, it’s so negative. It’s valuable to look in your wing mirrors from time to time, just to know where you’ve come from. But you shouldn’t drive like that, without consulting the road ahead.’) ‘There were hits after that, but nothing I enjoyed.’ The turning point, she says, was this bloody song where they kept changing the lyrics and it was in Italian. ‘I went and hid in the gazebo in the garden and covered myself in hay and waited till everyone went away.’

Any fool, she reckoned, could get up and sing. But the book reveals she was looking for an inner conviction, having spent years ‘winning publicly and losing privately’. Her self-confidence is fragile. She’s known what it is like to ‘descend into the pit, to live in the dark, airless basement, to be traumatised by pain, to be paralysed by fear . . . sometimes life kept hitting me so hard that I would crawl around on all fours unable to stand up. For days I hid under the smoked-glass table top, curled up foetus-like’. Grace-who held her mother’s hand at the births of her next two children-would pass her her meals, sometimes forcing her to chant. Did these Dark Ages continue throughout her ‘retirement’? All through her marriage to Jeff Banks? ‘Oh no. That sounds awful. But that whole time (10, 15, 20 years, she doesn’t know which) I lost my direction, my self-esteem, my money and I lost a baby. I’d lost just about everything you can lose. And look at me now.’ (Giggle giggle and she’s putting on silly voices again.) ‘I needed to get away from everything. I had no respect for myself as a woman, artist, human being, person of talent . . .’

So why did she write the book? ‘Cos I was in kind of a unique situation. I realised I was getting these kind of parallels of everything I had lived in the past and not done quite right. So I thought I’d resolve it in this new situation. Every day seemed like a second chance-every relationship I had, my re-emergence. It was all a kind of reliving of something.’ Meet Sixties Person. Mrs Time Warp herself. She who used to ride a tricycle and, it is said, breast-feed in interviews. She who, along with Jean Shrimpton, Mary Quant and Twiggy, was the inspiration for a generation; a household name in Europe and the pin-up of every mod astride a Lambretta. ‘I think I’m a very Nineties person. I really do. The things I carry from the Sixties are really right on. Things like being spontaneous, really connecting with the whole, the universal-consciousness thing, the peace initiative. But I think I’m always in the eye of the hurricane. I’m always in the middle of what’s happening.’

But don’t ask who it is inside the hurricane. We’re not allowed to grasp her essence. You see, we can fuse (her words) at a particular time, but we can’t capture her. She changes from moment to moment, and it’s like we can’t read her personality-just pick up (still her words) certain nuances and atmospheres. ‘It’s just like I’m so multi-textured. I mean that’s what’s so great about people.’

Her mother, in The Sunday Times in 1965, described her as ‘quiet, reticent . . . she was quite a lonely child. She used to like her own company . . . I’ve tried to teach her to be good and believe in God’. Which brings us onto her Buddhism. Sandie Shaw is another singer-Cat Stevens, Cliff Richard, Aretha Franklin-with the religious impulse. A dedicated Buddhist who works as a district leader for central London for the Nichiren Shoshu brand of Buddhism-Tina Turner, Lynn Franks, Herbie Hancock-she chants daily. (Nam nyoho renge dyo . . .) It improves the tonal quality of her voice as well as giving her an inner calm, balance and happiness. ‘It makes the quality of my life fantastic.’ She started in 1977 and has gone on record as saying she has been able to change everything she doesn’t like about herself. But as to what she didn’t like . . . well, that sort of thing changes from moment to moment.

But why? ‘I’m quite prone to lose my confidence. And I understand now more what triggers it. No, I won’t tell you. That’s between me and me. But I think people are unique and each person’s karma is so theirs.’ What sort of childhood did she have? ‘Some of it was happy, some of it wasn’t. You can’t grasp someone’s personality in a moment . . .’

Why did her first marriage go wrong? (She is now married to Palace Pictures film millionaire Nik Powell who proposed on their first date and married her in the Buddhist Centre.) ‘I don’t think that particularly matters. I think what is important is why my second marriage is succeeding.’

So why did she re-emerge into the public eye? (‘Did I let Nik know I was going out?’ she writes about her thoughts on her first tour. ‘Have I left the kids something to eat? Did I leave the washing on?’) ‘I was dragged out of my shell by lots of people who said I was wonderful. And they said it often enough for me to start believing it a bit.’ Right at this moment, perhaps she is.

Then I was talked into doing the Eurovision Song Contest… it offended my sensibilities

‘How did you get on with the Queen, Mr President, and what did you think of Windsor Palace?’ Lech Walesa thought for a moment and replied: ‘Windsor is very nice. But I’d move a few things round a bit if I lived there. The light was too far away from the bed and the bed was so big I could hardly find my wife in it.’

A few days before Walesa lost his wife in a Windsor bed, Neil Kinnock had Glenys to dine with the Queen, a meeting which prompted a much-quoted exchange between him and John Major across the Commons debating chamber. What actually goes on at Windsor Castle? The mix of guests is intriguing (the Kinnocks dined with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Home Secretary and Sir Paul and Lady Fox) and the etiquette virtually unknown outside the walls. Such little jaunts are known in The Household (when it comes to the Castle nearly every other word has a capital letter) as a ‘dine and sleep’. If this sounds like ‘wash and go’ or ‘bed and breakfast’, it is not intentional.

WC is the plum invite, the thing to go to. Obviously better than a lunch at Buckingham Palace, it is also rated by those who have been there much better than Balmoral which is a glorified camping holiday (hamburgers on spits and so on). But very few people are getting invited at the moment because of the rewiring at WC. Even One’s Family Christmas for 30 has had to decamp. It is, however, during April, Ascot in June or the Windsor Horse Show that invitations get extended. Gatherings at WC are the most formal and the Queen tends to be at her most relaxed during Ascot when she knows everyone who’s staying there.

Instructions on how to get to WC, what time to arrive and the code of dress are furnished. And a lady-in-waiting will answer questions about tips (yes, do) clothes (black tie; but ankle-grazing Scotch House rather than Thierry Mugler. HM is not a wild dresser) etc etc. What do I say to the Queen? is the one that can make the most hardened socialite go weak at the knees. Apparently anything goes-as long as it’s not in any way contentious or controversial. Something like ‘How are your horses?’ will usually do. The way to behave when receiving royal hospitality is subtle and arcane. Call her Mam (like ‘mum’) and curtsy or bow on first clapping eyes on Her. Thereafter the scraping and bowing ceremony is repeated only before going to bed and on first seeing the Royals in the morning.

One notable recalls how, years ago, Prime Minister Harold Wilson kept all the other guests up half the night drinking balloons of brandy. HM had retired to bed hours ago. The poor Canadian Ambassador was dead on his feet, but stayed up into the early hours. It wouldn’t, you see, have been etiquette to leave before the British Prime Minister. Generally, however, one doesn’t get drunk with the Queen.

Lady Longford remembers a friend having her plunge bra removed from her room at WC, rendering her earth-bound in her glamorous gown until she tore her other bra into a new model. The Countess says that sort of thing happens all the time in houses where there are servants. The brisk ladies of The Household are not famed for having their fingers on the pulse of fashion. They do understand, however, that during Ascot week, ladies wear a bowl of fruit and veg on their heads.

WC is just up the M4 and within spitting distance of Heathrow Airport, from whence the roar of over-flying jumbos can be heard every three minutes during the day. (After the nervous exhaustion of the shindig, a ghost is likely the only thing to awaken the overnight guest who will probably not notice any shift in the medieval foundations either.) A place of muscular towers and serried battlements, going through the gate to WC is a bit like entering an up-market housing estate-on which Liz, there since the age of 26, is the oldest resident. The place is full of tenants like military knights, the dean and cannon and lots of chaps in funny outfits. In addition, the shrubs tend to reveal assorted cranks, Fleet Street types-and former members of the Thames Valley police force keeping a close eye on the sleeping arrangements. The Queen has her own self-contained apartment where she can rustle up bacon and eggs or try on a tiara and sash with a tracksuit in peace.

There’s a swimming pool too. One of the guests found the Queen’s bikini top-yes, she wears one in private-and light-heartedly tried it on. A man, he was. HM caught him cavorting. She definitely saw the funny side of the proceedings. But the offending article was rapidly removed and replaced in the Royal Ladies Changing Room.

The main guest gets a suite in, say, The Lancaster Tower. WC notepaper-and loo paper-is provided, but there are no bath robes or giveaway shower caps. While Countess Spencer whacks stamps on the envelopes in her guest rooms, our dear Queen is known to make a little saving in this department. State rooms are hangar-sized and of concussing splendour-mostly the handiwork of George IV and his chappies-in various forms of neo-Gothic, souped-up and florid. And the Grand Reception Room is dazzling. George IV and the Duke of Wellington types glower from the walls, and the place is awash with Van Dycks, Canalettos, Stubbs’, Holbeins and old-master drawings.

Bedrooms are pretty standard decor-tapestries, glowing wood, richly wrought ceilings and suchlike. The Woman of the Bedchamber, it must be understood, is a lady-in-waiting. A quick peek round the door will reveal endless pages and footmen wandering around wearing livery. Like all old-fashioned bedrooms, bathrooms are rarely en suite and they skimp on the heating and have endless huge chests of drawers. Bedrooms also tend to be a good 15 minutes from where the food is served. And if one brings a nanny or lady’s maid (these days few do), she’ll be another 20-minute walk away. It’s well known that Princess Michael wasn’t impressed with the nursery arrangements for the dreadful Freddie. And the maids’ rooms are primitive and spartan.

Queen Victoria used to forbid people to smoke. One Archbishop of Canterbury was caught puffing up his chimney. Things these days are much more relaxed. There’s a story that the whole Royal Family drank from finger bowls on observing some African dignitary doing so. But this is probably not true. It is, however, all right to eat one’s salad with fingers, as Mrs Tebbit found.

You are led to dinner by HM, and the seating arrangement very properly goes boy-girl-boy-girl. All this takes place on a great long table in somewhere like the Waterloo Chamber which is not where the battle was fought, although it has a size that suggests it could have been.

The Queen and Prince Philip will often sit in the centre of the table, opposite one another. Forests of flowers preclude having to make eye contact or conversation with the person opposite. These marvellous huge bowls of flora have been home grown and arranged by people who have had to clamber onto the-at that stage felt-covered-tables to do so. This is not generally done during dinner.

Food tends towards the Dover sole and peas variety. Simple and good is the way it is described by those who have savoured it. Fruit and veg come from the Home Farm. The wines are all served by white-gloved men. Mam talks to the person on her left during one course and the person on her right during another. It is advisable to follow suit, otherwise you end up nattering to the Countess of Hoo Ha’s hairdo during the sorbet.

After dinner, the Queen does a guided tour around the State Apartments, ending up in the Royal Library. Like the head girl of a boarding school, she expects people to pay attention. And the Royal Library goes to a lot of trouble to find out what the guests are interested in.

Michael Foot, something of a bibliophile, was amazed to see The Household didn’t just read Dick Francis. And the Library doesn’t just keep books. They have all sorts of curiosities like Henry VIII’s cricket bat, the flying gloves that Prince Andrew used during the Falklands and the diary that Elizabeth kept of the Coronation. Depending on your interest, you’ll arrive in the Library and find a cricket bat or an illuminated manuscript in the display cabinet.

HM loves to hear jokes, (maybe something to do with being partly Scottish). ‘What do you get when Batman and Robin are run over? Answer: Flatman and Ribbon.’ That was the one that made Her Majesty roar with laughter.

She likes to provide some entertainment-and even during the house parties of Ascot week there will be some kind of drawing-room reading or string quartet on offer. The Queen also sometimes shows films. But probably not King Ralph.

Cool, self-assured, forthright former waitress, clerk and receptionist who was born in New Zealand. Devout, unimaginative housewife who was convicted in 1981 of murdering her nine-week-old baby Azaria by cutting her throat with a pair of nail scissors at Ayers Rock. Hard, unsympathetic, little bitty lady who was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour. Unflinching author of Through My Eyes, a direct and detailed account of her conviction and subsequent exoneration, phenomenally recalled in 768 pages. This is the image of the lady who went from housewife to household word. Enter Lindy Chamberlain, 42: Logical Lindy as she was known in prison, or Lindy Gulla (which means ‘good one’) to the Aboriginal girls. ‘It meant that I was all right and wasn’t going to put them down because of their colour or because they couldn’t read or talk properly.’

Former prisoner 2958 looks like a smart secretary in her neat make-up, patent shoes, sheer tights, black skirt and striped shirt.

‘I’d wear shoestring straps, bare shoulders, very light clothes-Stubbies (shorts), thongs (flip-flops), boob tubes. I wore a sun frock for the first inquest.’ She speaks in a light and clipped antipodean accent, very Neighbours-ish, emphatic, high, but full of apparent self-assurance. She steamrollers interruptions-and my attempts to tell her she’s going off the point-pressing on determinedly with what she is saying, even when the questions are about something else, although the interview can only be short owing to her schedule.

She’s insistent on giving a history of her wardrobe, relating it mostly to her various court appearances. She is very much the one in control. Her look turns out, curiously, to have been moulded by the Press-after constant criticism, comments, admonishments ‘not to wear anything too busy or provocative’, photographers saying wear this or that. She’s very professional and has packaged herself nicely into a very saleable commodity.

‘I have a designer friend, Jean Bas, who dresses me for my interviews.’ She borrows the clothes and gives them back afterwards. ‘So it gives the impression you’re rich when you’re not.’

She charges for interviews, apart from when she’s launching a book. Exonerated but not compensated, she needs money. ‘All that publicity has meant I can’t get a job.’ It is the newspapers and television stations who have made money out of her plight.

She has been described as tough, unsympathetic and not showing enough emotion for a mother who had lost a child to a dingo.

‘I suppose my face in repose is fairly straight. It’s fairly severe when I’m not smiling. When you have 1500 cameras around you, jurors and hostile people looking at you, your face goes stiff. I tried to keep as neutral a face as possible. And then it looked severe.’ And now? ‘Well, yeah, this is it.’ (She’s smiling.) One of the things that went against her was her apparent passive acceptance of her loss. ‘An English response, misunderstood by the emotional Greeks and Italians in Australia . . . and when you believe in something after death, it doesn’t affect you so much. You don’t have a cold, hard feeling of nothing being left.’

People just saw a hard-nosed murdering bitch (her words) when they saw her. But she is a private person, guarded even, who doesn’t show her true feelings to strangers.

She has brown hair, brown eyes and has put on two stone while writing the book-which weighs almost as much. She laughs at the latter notion. She laughs easily and also has a sense of the ridiculous, which comes out in her book.

So how would she describe herself? ‘I’m normally about seven stone. I’m only five feet one inch and people think because I’m on TV that I’m taller. They always go, ‘Ooh, you’re tiny’.’

Does that make her strive more? ‘Oh no, I think nice things come in small parcels-otherwise, diamonds would come the size of Ayers Rock.’ She comes over as cool, very self-composed with a perkiness.

She has sad eyes that have seen a lot. Meryl Streep went further and said she had eyes like the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. ‘I don’t know.’ (Laughs.) ‘I’ve never been in one of those.’

While she was in the prison next to an abattoir, kept awake at night by the sound of pigs being slaughtered, she worked on the drains and did cementing without gloves. How resilient! ‘With my bare hands. It’s really good hand cream.’

Suffering from flu, your interviewer repeats a question. ‘I told you that in my last answer,’ she says sharply. She knows how to keep a person on her toes. So how would she describe herself in terms of character? ‘Now in what way is that question different from the last one?’ she retorts in a chilly tone. What a hard time she gives! (Too intimidating to dare ask her about her sexuality. On simply enquiring about her relationship with her husband, one gets a frosty: ‘No comment.’) ‘Well, you have to be specific. I have a very accurate attention to detail. I’m fairly tidy, fastidious, too meticulous. I’ve always relied on memory-my book is from memory-and in court they’d say you can’t possibly have that good a memory.

‘I used to be shy in public, but not any more. That’s the greatest change . . . I don’t let people walk over me. If I get the wrong change in a shop, I say so instead of walking away disgruntled. I don’t suffer fools any more, though I’ll still be polite to stupid people.

‘I don’t think there’s any call to be rude to people. And I think you should remember to treat people the way you want to be treated.’ And what sort of mother is she? ‘A fairly reasonable one. I think I’m pretty laid back. If the kids fall over, I don’t scream and panic. But I do see if they are really hurt . . . I like to keep them fairly tidy and neat. My kids and I have a lot of fun . . .’

She continues: ‘I’ve always been a very positive person. I like to get all the information in before making a decision and then I’ll stick to it’-she’s rather boring in her delivery-‘I’ve got the reputation of being fairly stubborn. But if I hadn’t been, I would never have got out of jail. ‘I didn’t see why I should admit to something I hadn’t done just for an extra bit of physical comfort-I would have had to live with my conscience.’ Certainly, she has endurance and spirit.

‘If I make a promise I keep it. I’ll do anything humanly possible to do it.’ She’s leaning forward, fiddling with her leg, cradling herself in her arms; it’s the only time in the meeting that there’s any flexibility in her body, though she becomes progressively softer as the interview proceeds. ‘I guess that’s another reason I got labelled as being hard. I’d do things that went against the tide, even things that got me into trouble with the screws. But I believe in honesty.’

So what does she think got her through all this? ‘Faith,’ she says, her eyes lighting up. (She is a Seventh-day Adventist.) And how does the image of a formerly convicted murderess sit with her now? ‘Well, it never really worried me because I knew I was innocent.’ Does she think she’s a bitter person? ‘No.’

She’s been described as strange, difficult, sneering, callous, mysterious . . . ‘Well, am I?’ (Laughs.) ‘The papers got sick having to come up with something new over 10 years and just put down whatever came into their heads.’

She presents herself as amazingly self-possessed and calm. Image or reality? ‘I think that’s my nature. If there’s a road crash, I’ll pull over, act quite calmly-then feel sick afterwards.’

And is she formidable? ‘No.’ (Laughs.) A friend who hadn’t seen her for 12 years recently came over. ‘After 10 minutes, she said, ‘Gee, you haven’t changed at all’.’

I’ve got the reputation of being fairly stubborn. But if I hadn’t been, I would never have got out of jail.

This week a commission of historians will deliver their verdict on the wartime conduct of Kurt Waldheim. For his most ardent supporter, his daughter Christa, there can be only one possible outcome.

‘IF I opened a paper tomorrow and read that my father had killed somebody, it wouldn’t throw me.’ The same woman later says: ‘It’s sometimes hard to keep your sanity and stop yourself going crazy.’ She is Dr Christa Karas-Waldheim, a 28-year-old law graduate and daughter of Dr Kurt Waldheim. The youngest of his three children by 11 years, she is the closest to her father and the most politically motivated.

Her relationship with her father is, she admits rather awkwardly, ‘abnormal’. She talks about him in romantic terms: ‘I always felt he understood me, never felt I couldn’t reach out. If he’s busy we can see each other at midnight.’ When she married last June – her husband is Austria’s most prominent young conservative politician – her father was not displaced. ‘I added his name to my married one because I feel very close to both of them.’ In Karas-Waldheim’s eyes, ‘Papi’, as she calls him, can do no wrong.

When her father decided to run for the Austrian Presidency in 1985 for the conservative People’s Party, after being rejected for a third term as Secretary-General of the United Nations, she left her job at the Austrian Academy of Science to campaign for him. ‘He cares about people and wants to help them. He was the best man for the job.’ Single-handedly and supported exclusively by donations, she enlisted thousands into her ‘people’s movement’. She would sleep four hours a night and speek up to eight times a day in different parts of the country, to crowds of sometimes 5,000 people. ‘I had never addressed more than 10 people before. It was terrifying.’

Then, in March 1986, three months before her father was eventually selected, what she wil only term the ‘smear campaign’ started. The World Jewish Congress (WJC) accused her father of being a member of the Nazi ‘browinshirts’ and later serving in a Wehrmacht unit where he must have been aware of the transporting of more than 40,000 Greek Jews to death camps during the Second World War.

His daughter says that the WJC’s ‘evidence’ came from socialist manipulators and that the allegations were ‘unfair weapons and lies’ employed by a frightened opposition.

Talking volubly and maintaining close eye-contact throughout, she constantly refers to her father as a victim and scapegoat. She was, she says, as astonished as her father by his opponents’ tactics.

The WJC claimed that Waldheim’s autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm, published in 1985, was factually incorrect, particularly in its omission of any reference to military service after 1941. He did see further military service – the issue is where and in what capacity. His daughter says that the only stories she had heard about the war years were things like her sister – who is 14 years her elder – being born on a mountain top when her mother fled after the Russian invassion of Vienna.

And her father? ‘He was just a poor soldier in uniform obeying orders. It wasn’t a nice time. He didn’t like to remember it.’

Last autumn the Austrian government published ‘The White Book’ to rebut the WJC allegations and explain Waldheim’s ‘missing years’. During them, Waldheim claims, he served as a translator, as an officer in German intelligence, continued his legal studies then worked as an interpreter and collator of military information. ‘That was a very boring time,’ his daughter says. ‘I can’t imagine that anyone will want to read it.

She believes that she established such a close relationship with her father through being the youngest in the family. ‘I was spoilt, being the baby. My mother is my best girlfriend.’ She grew up in New York during her father’s terms as ambassador and at the United Nations. (Lycee educated, she now speaks ‘Berlitz American’ with a singing Austrian accent.) Rather than isolate her from his hectic life, Waldheim would take her to cocktail and dinner parties, luncheons and on trips. Despite his unremarkable career in the UN – he is best remembered for his arid and ponderous style – Karas-Waldheim says: ‘I saw that he was respected by the whole world. I was so proud of him.’ She was a trained gold and silversmith; but when Waldheim told her that she should study law, she did.

Karas-Waldheim cannot admit even the possibility that her father could be guilty ‘He never gave me any reason not to trust him or think he was lying.’ The greatest proof for her, if she needed it, was that her father managed to keep ‘cool and smiling’ throughout his presidential campaign. ‘It’s very tough to constantly defend yourself over something that you didn’t do. And difficult to lie, or lie on someone’s behalf, for a long time. If his conscience were not 1,000 per cent clean, he would have cracked.’

I ask whether it is not every daughter’s duty to defent her father? ‘It’s not out of duty,’ she snaps. ‘It is the only thing you can do when you love someone who is being attacked and treated unjustly.’ Her mother, she says, is still ‘madly in love’ with the man she met when they were both studying for law degrees. ‘After 43 years of marriage she is still extremely in love with my father and she wants to help him.’

Has she ever thought, in her darkest moments, that her father might have been associated with murderers? She is as taken aback at the word as she is when I mention Kluas Barbie – ‘Barbie was guilty, so should be punished, even after all these years.’ Then ‘No,’ she says in answer to the question about her father. Even if ‘they’ find something, it will, she says, be a forgery or invention.

Hypothetically, if he were guilty, she would defend him. ‘Being a daughter, the most important thing would be to defend your father. My main concern would be to keep his spirits lifted.’ When I ask her what she will tell her children about their grandfather, she is ruffled. The fact that lies can get out of hand, is the gist of her reply.

Karas-Waldheim regards the WJC, who sowed the seeds of doubt about her father’s military career, as a ‘bunch of radicals’, ‘a small group of baddies’, interested in spreading hatred and yearning to achieve a high profile as Nazi hunters. ‘I don’t think they could give a damn about my father: they just want to defend their good reputation. Of course the WJC have approached me. I don’t want to do anything to do with them.’

She doesn’t think that the children of those Jews who were killed have the right to persecute her father. ‘Particularly since he has proved that he didn’t do anything wrong.’ Jews, she adds, were not the only victims in the war. ‘But the children of these victims are making an innocent victim of my father.’

Waldheim’s supposed misfortunes initially produced a rallying of support and waves of antisemitism in Austria. Karas-Waldheim says she is not antisemitic. She says she has Jewish friends – ‘as does my father’. She receives crank telephone calls and hate mail (her friends are amused at the rapidity with which she changes her telephone number). Has her father received threats? ‘I don’t know if he tells me everything,’ she says in a rare concession.

Waldheim remains on the Watchlist, barred from the US. ‘Who cares?’ she says. with a great deal of care. ‘I wish he weren’t. But I am sure they will soon take him off and apologize.’ The fact that Austria is isolated – his controversial visit to the Pope last June and his trip to Jordon broke a year-long diplomatic quarantine – is not something that she recognizes. ‘He didn’t become President to see the world,’ she says sitting in the government office in which she works out the logistics of Austria joining the EEC.

People, she adds, were not outraged by his audience with the Pope. ‘They were proud. They flew a few people in to be outraged.’ Whether or not Waldheim receives the Pope on the papal visit to Austria this June depends on the findings of Hans Kurz and the other historians investigating the president’s wartime activities. There is no question, according to his daughter, that Waldheim should step down. Wherever she goes with him, she says, they hear cheering. ‘He is the luckiest president. There has never been one that the Austrians have shown their approval of so much.’

Sue Smith first went shooting 20 years ago, when she was seven. Her father, a gun-smith, took her on a duck shoot. At 10, she was giver her first gun, ‘a 28-bore, the next size up from a 410’. She went pigeon shooting.

Then she started deer-stalking. ‘I got my first roebuck at 12,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a picture of it.’ In the following years she shot fallow deer, then red stags. Now she shoots pheasant and rabbits, too.

Smith, who works for a gunsmith as a professional gun finisher, is a crack shot. She is also anti those who are anti-blood sports, although she finds their views acceptable if they are vegetarians.

‘Most of them are just rent-a-gang, student recruits paid Pounds 15 a day to disrupt things.’

To those genuinely concerned about creatures’ suffering, she says: ‘An animal in an abattoir suffers far more because it knows it is going to be killed. When you stalk a deer, for instance, it doesn’t even know you are there.’ Occasionally, she concedes, a bird gets wounded. ‘But it is picked up instantly.’

She never feels upset about killing. ‘What? With the things I have to do as part of my work? Gutting rabits, skinning them, gralloching (gutting) deer and butchering them?’ Her father has started up an oven-ready enterprise.

She derives immense pleasure fom her sports. ‘I love being in the open air and getting exercise.’ Duck shooting is her favourite.

‘It’s the atmosphere out there on the marshes, when there are just three of you shooting in the dark. It’s freezing, and then you come back to a lovely fire.’ As far as pheasant shooting is concerned, she says: ‘It’s a bit naughty, but I suppose it is the thrill of seeing them drop from the sky.’

And rabbits? ‘You sit in clumps of grass or little hollows to get out of the wind and it’s fun because of the element of surprise.

Rosemary Cleverdon, the 49-year-old Joint master of the West Street Hunt, also enjoys the element of surprise. ‘We only get about one in every 25 foxes; they’re terribly crafty.

A former secretary in South Africa, she has been hunting for 15 years. ‘It’s exciting to see a pack work their way through a wood on the line of the fox. When they find a fox, the adrenalin gets going and the chase is rather fun.’ She says it gives her something to look forward to when everyone else is dreading winter.

The haunt takes out approximately 15 1/2 couples of hounds – ‘you talk about hounds in ‘couples’ and always take out an odd number’ – twice weekly from November to mid-March. In season, she probably dedicates about 25 hours a week to hunting.

With the other two Masters, she has to ‘draw covers’ (put the hounds into woods to try to find the fox) and decide where the hunt should go. She also has to obtain permission from the farmers, build a jump occasionally, organize fundraising events, visit the kennels, exercise her horses Mish and Dudley, and go to ‘masses of meetings.’

As Joint Master of the hunt, she maintains charge of the ‘field’ when they ‘move off’ (tells them where to go), and talks their way out of sticky situations if, for example, the hounds chase sheep or go into a garden.

She is not paid for her work; she pays a subscription to the hunt and contributes towards drinks at the meet. She estimates that a season’s hunting in her area costs at least Pounds 1,000.

‘A good coat costs about Pounds 800 and you pay aroung Pounds 250 for handmade leather boots,’ she adds.

The hunt expects to kill ’10 brace of foxes’ in a season. It is, she feels, the fairest and cleanest way to keep the animals down.

‘It’s a way of conservation – it is a service for the farmers – and the fox has an equal chance. Unlike shooting, you cannot just wound the animal.

‘Fortunately,’ she says, ‘we haven’t had too much trouble for the antis.’

Betty McKeever, an 86-year-old great grandmother and Master of the Blean beagles, says she had a ‘helluva’ time with them last season.

One of them – ‘some darned chap called Hey Ho or something’ – apparently gave them an awful ‘pasting’. In the subsequent chase, a policeman broke his ankle and had to be ‘carried off the field of battle.’ One day she was arrested.

As a matter of policy, she says she won’t allow ‘fisticuffs’. One of her fellow beaglers, she explains, disguises himself as a tree and watches out for people who squirt the hounds with acid.

Despite a recent hip replacement and failing eyesight, this season she has followed the hounds, walking for more than one and a half miles and has had a ‘rippling’ time.

McKeever’s mastership dates from 1909, when her father gave her some beagles. She has been in the parish almost all her life – she now lives in a part-13th century farmhouse with a pet bat.

As Master, she is responsible or the hounds’ upkeep. ‘I feed ’em on bibles (bullocks’ stomachs).’ They hunt from September – ‘as soon as we can get on the corn land’ – until March.

mcKeever has a huntsman and two or three amateur whips on a Saturday. On thursdays, a doctor, who is ‘supposed to be the best nuclear physicist in the world or something’, hunts the pack.

It is, says McKeever, an elderly or really young person’s sport. Three gentlemen in their seventies always go out with her.

She explains her enjoyment: ‘For a kick-off, you are in different country every time: Lovely woods, huge arable lands or marsh country.’ Beagling is very social, too, she says. On Boxing Day they meet at the Brewery, ‘all free drinks’.

If beagling is made illegal, she says firmly that she will move with her pack to Ireland. She doesn’t like killing anything unnecessarily but, she says, the hares damage fruit trees and are otherwise hunted by the fox, shot or snared.

‘I never feel guilty about killing them. I don’t think they think the way Beatrix Potter made out.’

If you have not heard of Una-Mary Parker yet, you soon will have. She is currently embroiled in scandals that involve sex, drugs, fraud and embezzlement, and last week she masterminded a hijack and broke down in tears after a friend took an overdose and died. ‘I have experienced some of these things,’ explains the charity queen-turned-novelist, ‘but 90 per cent come from my imagination. ‘ They occur, in fact, in her still unfinished second novel, Scandals (her first, Riches, is due out this summer).

Una-Mary Parker, 55, is named after her aunts Una and Mary. ‘My mother thought she was being clever – but neither of them left me a bean,’ she says in her baritone voice, laughing throatily.

Until this year, Parker was the ‘unrivalled’ organizer of charity balls. She spurns the tabloid label of society queen – ‘that conjures up visions of ladies in pearls, flowered hats and print frocks’ – preferring to be called an events organizer; ‘much more professional,’ she explains. She had been Tatler’s social diarist, attending as many as five fucntions a night and acquiring a contracts book that one imagines needed to be carried on wheels. ‘After 10 years on Tatler, I thought I would have a breakdown if I had to go to another cocktail party. ‘ But film premieres, dances, fashion shows and gala exhibitions for charity were another ball game.

Parker decided to ‘major on decor’ (ballrooms transformed into jungles and deserts), and to become a stickler for detailed organization. By the time Parker hung up her ballgown, she was arranging 19 major events a year, ‘practically each one attended by a member of the Royal Family’.

Such a blue-blooded coterie was familiar to Parker. She was a debutante who did the deb scene’, and had a coming out ball. ‘I came out in 1949 in court – at a drawing-room tea party in Buckingham Palace with the then King and Queen Elizabeth. ‘ Then she married her late husband, society photographer Archie Parker – and had ‘the traditional 1,200-guest wedding reception’.

Archie Parker left Lloyds to become a protrait photographer at a time when, Parker says, it wasn’t the done thing to leave the City to become a snapper. ‘We did all the royals at Windsor and some came to our Knightsbridge studio. ‘ they also photographed showbusiness personalities and celebrities (‘we spent a weekend with Somerset Maugham’).

Parker has no regrets about leaving her charity career. ‘I had gone as far as I could in 15 years, and writing had become an obsession for me. ‘ She ‘felt a bit shy and inhibited’ – understandably since she dubs her first novel, Riches, as being the Dynasty between the sheets. Nevertheless, she sent the half-written Riches – about the different ways enormous wealth affects people – to a New York agent. ‘She said it was terrific. ‘ Parker will not reveal how much money she’ll make, saying only that ‘there are a comfortable number of noughts involved’. Small wonder that she now intends to write a novel every 15 months.

This weekend a ‘chatathon’ will raise money for charity and reveal a new champion talker

Maria Meredith, aged 31, talks non-stop. Her loquaciousness, inspired by an occasional nod, runs smoothly from the subject of holidays to ironing, the media, children, cement and her kitchen fittings. She talks incessantly – she offers a marathon of words. One imagines her builder husband, like some enforced trainee Quaker, coping by placing insulation wadding either in his ears or mouth.

He concedes that he doesn’t talk much when his garrulous wife is around. When he is out, she soliloquizes to the cats: she says she started talking at 15 months and hasn’t stopped since; she is nicknamed ‘The Mouth’ at her work (as a food supervisor for Marks & Spencer).

This week her chatting will make about pounds 220 for charity. The occasion, the LBC Chatathon on Saturday, will give her ample opportunity to talk her way to the title of Taylor’s Conversationalist of the Year, while raising money for the Association For Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus. (Each entrant has to talk friends out of at least pounds 100 worth of sponsorship).

Last year, the fifth year of the competition, 120 contestants, evenly divided between the sexes, entered. And Kate Holmes, a financial consultant, became the first woman to win the title. ‘Who says that women are born talkers?’ asks Sam Kirby, the organizer.

On the first day, competitors have 10 conversations of 50 minutes, changing topics and partners hourly. In the quarter-finals, the contestants will converse with celebrities, chosen for their gift of the gab: ironically, the organizers are remaining tight-lipped about who the celebrities are. The semi-fiinalists and finalists will then talk to each other for an hour. Judges Willie Rushton, Barry Cryer, Claire Rayner, Alan Coren, and Kate Holmes, will preside over each voluble contesting pair.

Last year the subjects ranged from ‘exploration’ – Meredith went into the battle of words with a combined attack ranging from pioneers to the Easter Islands, to he feline friends’ stubborn garden explorations – ‘to what makes news?’ This, Meredith explains, means ‘Royalty, disasters and pop stars’ bed hopping. ‘

The topics are announced at the beginning of the session, and the contestants – all aged over 18 – are awarded points for interest, wit, lucidity and cogency. ‘They are eliminated if they don’t keep up a cogent conversation,’ explains Kirby. Similarly, contestants are penalized for pauses, monolgues, swearing, unintelligability and for droning. Laughter will not be penalized unless unduly prolonged.

Men impose their wishes more. Meredith noted last year that they tend to get a point across in conversation by raising their voices. ‘They think the one with the loudest voice will win. ‘

Dr Sarah Hampson, lecturer in psychology at Birbeck College, University of London, agrees. ‘Men are much more experience at making forceful points verbally,’ she says. ‘The most obvious example is that men interrupt so frequently. ‘

Kate Holmes, 30 had never done any public speaking before she won the Chatathon last year. But, she says, she does a lot of talking in her job.

In last year’s Chatathon, she was astonished by the number of men who didn’t have conversation. ‘They had monologues, using the occasion to get on their soap boxes. They tend to assume they are right and have confidence in their views. Unfortunately, a lot of women talk trivia. ‘

As a judge, she says she will be looking primarily for politeness. ‘Bad manners are a killer to good conversation. The men tended to harp back to the same thing, whatever you were talking about, in order to get their point across. ‘ She will look for people who spark off the imagination of their partner. ‘That is when you are really communicating properly and exchanging ideas. ‘ And she will mark down for what she calls meanness. ‘Last year a lot of the men would intentionally choose subjects they thought you would not know a thing about. ‘ Holmes, however, felt at home. Who says that women aren’t born talkers?

Janet Morgan’s business is other people’s business techniques – and how to make them more effective

When Dr Janet Morgan talks, corporations and governments listen. ‘Vaguely 40’, she is described ‘rather grandly’ (no formal training) as a management consultant. ‘I am just asked in as myself, to notice things. ‘ In a recent edition of the BBC’s staff newspaper she wrote an article that showed exactly what she had noticed during her four-year stint as special adviser to the then director-general, Alasdair Milne.

The gist of it was that intelligent people frequently run round in circles tripping each other up. ‘People had started to feel paranoid and ground down. I told them to get on with the job and keep their nerve. ‘ She also suggested how they might go about it.

The BBC, she says, is implementing her master plan. ‘The ‘upward referral’ system, whereby difficult decisions are passed to superiors, has been disbanded; meetings have been halved; minutes are shorter; and people have been requested to take the ‘No Entry’ signs off their doors ‘and replace them with more friendly notices’.

Unfortunately, Morgan has not been there to see it all happen, having moved on to become adviser to the board at Granada Television.

She is a glowing example of her own belief that ‘women are good at thinking about lots of things at once’. Apart from exercising the theories of organization learnt as a political historian (she worked in the Cabinet Office and lectured in politics at Oxford University), she has also written a biography of Agatha Christie, edited the diaries of her former employer and mentor Dick Crossman and, according to her entry in Who’s Who, finds time to enjoy making ice-cream. Her tiny stature believes vast stamina and a towering intellect. She has only failed once – when, in 1966, she did not become the first woman president of the Oxford Union Society.

Despite her own dazzling ability to organize, she has no time for the theory that women, by the very nature of their many-stranded lives, are better managers than men. There are, she says, hopeless male managers and hopeless female ones.

‘The sort of woman one tends to see in a senior position is probably excellent or she wouldn’t have got there, because it has been such a hard struggle. So we tend to think of women as being somehow better at it. But really we are not comparing averages.

‘It’s not so much because it is a male-dominated structure that the BBC has got into this organizationally ossified state,’ she says. ‘It is because those who should have been thinking about the way the BBC runs as an organization have been too busy and distracted to do that. ‘

Morgan concedes that women are more inclined to realize that a problem cannot always be solved by the application of a theory pulled from a filing cabinet: ‘They are very good at making judgements by feeling and hunch. And anyone who has looked at how scientific discoveries are made realizes how important that is.

They are also adept at simultaneously thinking of several jobs and the baby at home – ‘they have lots of antennae out’ – and have terrific stamina. ‘All that stuff about women going barmy every three and a half weeks is rot. ‘ She is surprised, she says, by how feeble men can be.

On the down side, she refers to what she calls the Queen Bee syndrome: the type of woman who devours any competing female. She also says some women fail to make the most of themselves – ‘sometimes because they feel sorry for men’. Women also tend to feel guilty. ‘They carry other people as passengers and often feel it is not worth being insistent or making a fuss. ‘

Naturally, Morgan has conquered her own difficulties. She has never been on an assertiveness training course (‘Do you think I should?’ seems a disingenuous response). She admits she may be unable to reach high shelves – ‘but I can always get a ladder. ‘ Somehow, one feels there will always be a tall man standing nearby, or at least someone to pass her a ladder.

David Cassidy, the pop superstar who could not cope with fame, is back – on the West End stage, in Time. Caroline Phillips spoke to him

It is unnerving when one’s erstwhile teeny-bopper poster materializes and picks up a cup of coffee. But that is what happened when I met David Cassidy: former pop idol, former teenage Super Puppy, former superstar. He points out the difficulties of being lumbered with being a former Something. ‘Why don’t you just say: ‘David Cassidy, actor, comedian, man in search of his own identity?”

Cassidy is 36, going on 28. Still very small, he wears black jeans, a roll-neck sweater and his hair is dyed blond. Jet-lagged, having just flown in from America, he’s tried and tense. But he is still polite, with a ready sense of humour. He also seems neurotic and fragile. Early on, he asks ‘Am I being boring? Am I too guarded?’

Cassidy is in London to make his West End stage debut on April 13 as the Rock Star in Dave Clark’s musical, Time. In it, a bunch of singing humanoids are summoned up to the High Court of the Universe to defend and save Earth, which appears set on course for destruction. The only wit is supplied in the form of a massive hologram of Sir Laurence Oliver’s head. ‘I always wanted to work with Oliver’s head,’ says Cassidy. ‘At least I can tell my kids, if I ever have them, that I worked with part of Oliver. The best part, I might add. ‘

He will take over from the timeless Cliff Richard, the nation’s sweetheart, for a three-month run. ‘Cliff is an institution here. There’s a kinda ‘hands-off Cliff’ feeling. ‘ Why did he decide to take the part? ‘Because they offered me a lot of money. ‘

Cassidy immediately wrestles with his leg, attempting to put his foot in his mouth. Why does he say these things, he wonders? His real motive is that he considers the show a great challenge. ‘I want to be though of as an actor here – because I am. ‘ He has spent the past five years in theatre, both regional and Broadway.

From an acting family – his father was the late Jack Cassidy, his mother Evelyn Ward appeared in the Broadway production of South Pacific – Cassidy was, self-professedly, on the way to becoming a well-respected actor in the 1960s. Then came 1970 and The Partridge Family. He was cast, aged 19, as the 16-year-old dewyeyed son of a suburban family who had their own rock’n’roll band. His vulnerable look and pleasant light voice appealed to early teens.

The marketing men used David Cassidy to sell lunchboxes, bubble gum and toothpaste. He became the face on the back of cornflakes packets and one of the most screamed-at stars since Elvis. His earnings were conservatively estimated at pounds 100,000 a year.

He recalls: ‘I used to work seven days a week. From 7am-7pm shooting, then from 7.30pm to midnight recording. At weekends, I’d do concerts. ‘

At the height of his career a fan magazine alleged that super-clean Cassidy was a drug user: ‘They printed that about everybody, I’m not unique. Let’s clarify the issue: I do not, have not, don’t advocate them. ‘

He soon had wall-to-wall gold discs and kerb-to-kerb girls wherever he stayed. He can’t remember, but he thinks he has about 25 gold discs (‘I keep them in a box in the closet’). His first hit with The Partridge Family, ‘I Think I Love You’, sold more than five million copies. In his time, he has sold more than 30 million records. He was kissed goodnight, glossy lips on glossy prints, by as many girls. When Cassidy went out, it was under a blanket.

The boy who had been raised by his mother and grandparents in a small town in New Jersey, and went to church every week, lost his identity. ‘I had become something larger than life that I had not wanted or intended. I felt really lost. ‘

He became paranoid and a recluse, hiding from the hysteria. ‘I could not handle the way people dealt with me. People saw me in the street and couldn’t believe it; they wanted to touch and be close to that kind of success. ‘

He was no longer looked upon as a singer and actor who wanted to have ‘real honest’ relationships with people. ‘You talked to people and they didn’t see you: they saw the stuff around you – the magazine covers, all the screaming and the craziness, the television shows. ‘

He felt isolated. ‘Everyone wanted something from me – no sour grapes – but I was finding it hard to keep my sanity. I associated with the one or two people I felt comfortable with, or I stayed alone. ‘

He was, he admits, en route for ‘one helluva’ breakdown. ‘I didn’t know who I was any more, or how I got like that. But I believe the values that were instilled in me by my family saved my life when I was really lost. ‘

In 1975, Cassidy ‘retired’, at the age of 24. He bred thoroughbreds on his farm in Santa Barbara, near Los Angeles, avoided music, saw a therapist and married and divorced actress Kay Lenz. ‘It’s been kind of a metamorphosis,’ he explains.

He maintains he is now more happy emotionally; he has been married to the steeplechaser Meryl Tanz for three years. ‘I’m still pretty much of a longer. My wife lives on the farm and I spend a lot of time alone in LA. I’ve set a course towards simplifying my life. I no longer do things I don’t want to do or don’t need. I’m too old and bored with doing things that don’t make me happy. ‘

He runs five times a week and visits a gym. ‘It’s good for me mentally. I don’t do it because I’m trying to become Sylvester Stallone; it’s important at this time of my life to try and maintain whatever is left of it. ‘

Cassidy says he didn’t know what he was going to do with his life, until four years ago, when he made his comeback in the Broadway production of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In 1985, he returned to the top 10 with ‘The Last Kiss’. ‘That’s the only gold disc I keep out,’ he says.

‘It has taken me 15 years to come to what I really want to do,’ he says – be a respected working actor. He is working on the co-production of a film with one of his three half-brothers. ‘I want to be able to work and do all sorts of different things – maybe even join a rep company. I don’t just work for money, I don’t go where they pay me the most. ‘

In order to take up the role in Time he turned down the chance to appear in a play at the minimum Equity rate, but says he will chase that dream when he returns to the US. ‘If you ask me who I’d most like to be ..well, I’d really most like to be myself, and after that Jimmy Stewart. He’s the best American actor, both in serious and comic drama. ‘ Perhaps Cassidy keeps a poster of Stewart on his wall.