I remember very well the conversation that led to Alexander Chancellor’s hiring as a Guardian Weekend columnist. Alan Rusbridger had recently been made editor of the paper, and he asked if I was planning any changes to the magazine, which I then edited. I wasn’t, particularly, but it didn’t seem terribly dynamic to say so. Alan was considered something of a Young Fogey (by me, anyway), so I thought I’d better say something Young Fogeyish. “I think we could do with a new columnist, someone with some gravitas, but fun. You know, like The Weasel in the Independent’s Saturday magazine.” (I did not think we could do with a new columnist of this type at all.)
To my smiling, nodding horror, Alan replied, “Why not have The Weasel himself? Alexander is a friend of mine. I’ll give you his number.” There was nothing else to do but brazen it out. (I really did admire The Weasel; I just preferred to admire him from afar.)
I called Alexander, who seemed thrilled. “That’s marvellous,” he said, or words to that effect. “You must take me for lunch to talk about it. I very much like the Ivy.”
I very much had never been to the Ivy, but a booking was duly made.
“I’ve definitely got the best view,” Alexander said, once we were seated, or words to that effect.
“Why so?” I asked in my best Young Fogey.
“I can watch Princess Diana having lunch with the director of the Royal Ballet without it even seeming like I’m looking. No. Don’t turn around.”
Cue much comfort food, much wine, and much mischievous and unprintable gossip about the royals. Flushed with this success, the first moment I could, I boasted of my glamorous lunch to a young writer to whom I was slavishly devoted.
“You never take me to the Ivy. I never get to gaze at Lady Di while eating rice pudding,” Andrew O’Hagan said, or words to that effect. Another booking at The Ivy was duly made.
That was the first lesson I learned from Alexander: never let the Young Writers who are happy with the place around the corner have the slightest inkling of the treatment the Old Writers demand as a right. (It has to be admitted that Alexander was, at that time, the perfectly youthful age that I am now. To me, he seemed like Methuselah.)
I wish I could say that first meeting with Alexander was the most glamorous. But, no. A couple of years later, on my first ever trip to New York, he introduced me to Lauren Bacall at a party. We chatted about the joys of having a gap between your front teeth. And politics.
The party was for Al Pacino, though in some weird bit of Hollywood-megastar-in-New-York etiquette, Pacino didn’t actually mingle. Instead, guests were taken to a back room, in small groups, so he could circulate in privacy, without moving. When our turn came to be summoned, intoxicated by Bacall and many Martinis, we waved the mingle valet away. “I couldn’t be happier than with the company I’m in already,” I said. “I can call this man Al any time I choose.” Or words to that effect.
Rude and graceless? Probably. Hilarious? We thought so at the time. Many obituarists have tried to capture the quality of Alexander’s laughter. I remember it as being like the feedback from those walkie-talkies kids used to have in the 70s, only 15 times louder. The first time I heard it, I thought the flying squad was about to mount a raid.
Surprisingly, because Alexander seemed so English, we had a lot in common; he spent much of his childhood in Lanarkshire, where I grew up. I was the daughter of an urban factory worker. He was the scion of a family who had been Lanarkshire lairds for centuries; their local seat was Biggar, where I’d gone with my family for days out. And I was the boss! Poetic justice! Class triumph!
“London’s big, but Biggar’s biggar,” Alexander and his brother John used to joke as children, and we liked to work this little catchphrase into conversation whenever we could. It captured perfectly the insistence of Lanarkshire that it was, despite ramshackle appearances, the Best.
Alexander was funny and clever, had a huge zest for the good things in life, and turned in perfect copy, week after week after week. He was oddly insecure about his career, though, perhaps because he had been sacked a couple of times from jobs he was doing with great brilliance.
“You’ll fire me in the end,” he once said to me, a bit pissed and uncharacteristically maudlin.
“Alexander, I will never fire you,” I promised.
A few years passed, and I got fired myself, in favour of some parvenue called Katharine Viner, whom no one ever heard of again. The only consolation was that at least I’d kept my promise to Alexander. He was a man to whom you always wanted to keep your promises, because that’s what he deserved.
