John Mortimer
John died in 2009. I was asked by his family to give the eulogy at his funeral in the parish church in Turville Heath, where he'd been born and lived for eighty-five years.
It was said by another national treasure, Alan Bennett, that Philip Larkin's waking nightmare was of thousands of schoolchildren massed in the Albert Hall chanting in unison: 'They fuck you up your mum and dad.' Alan's gloss on this was that, if your parents didn't fuck you up and you wanted to become a writer, then they'd have fucked you up good and proper.
The formula worked in John's case: his father diverted him from being a writer to becoming a barrister and unintentionally left him a great legacy: the law became his subject. The other indispensable legacy-a paradoxical one-was that while his father passed on a love of poetry, he withheld his own love. John didn't mimic this deficiency: in all his memoirs he showed an undiminished love of his father-and of his own children-and it's a remarkable homage to his father that John went out of the world in the same house that he was brought up in.
As a lawyer-as in life-John was unjudgemental: his sympathies were instinctively with the defendant. The only case he turned down was an assistant hangman who had committed murder-the idea of defending a man who was licensed by the state to kill criminals was beyond the limit of his tolerance. But his reputation for defending the indefensible-whether they were murderers or alleged pornographers-added to his allure as a buccaneering renaissance man who wrote plays and novels in his time away from the Bar. For John the law was an English pageant full of tales of people who had been undone by greed, or poverty, or passion, or folly, and it was always for him underscored by a belief in justice and in liberty.
I never tired of hearing John's anecdotes and he never tired of telling them: the woman who was giving evidence in a case in which she'd been sexually harassed but was too shy to say out loud what had been said to her, so a note was passed round the court ending up with a dozing woman jury member, who was jolted awake by her male neighbour. The note read: 'I would like to fuck you.' The judge asked the woman to hand the note to the clerk. 'Merely personal, my lord,' said the woman and pocketed it. Then there was the camp judge who kept a Paddington Bear that sat beside him in his official car and on the bench when he was in court; and the woman who fell downstairs and sued her sons because she saw her husband in the hallway having his genitals devoured by the dogs-the sons having discovered him drunk and asleep in the hallway, had opened his flies and put a piece of liver there; and the prie-dieu in Norman St John-Stevas's bathroom; and much, much more. These stories had the status of folk myths, which John would tell and retell in his melodious, feline, light-tenor voice-quiet so that you had to attend carefully-performed with an actor's flair for spontaneity and timing.
When John finished a story he'd laugh-his laugh was more of a chortle than a chuckle-then he'd segue seamlessly into an observation about something like the decline of liberty and the Labour Party: 'They're awful,' he'd say, 'awful.' The laugh became increasingly husky and wheezy over the years but laughter remained John's default mode-a way both of putting troubles at a distance and of celebrating the fact that, as he said, 'Death's finality makes life seem absurd.'
I first got to know John as a more than casual acquaintance when, as an adoring father, he stood outside St Paul's School for Girls dropping off Emily at the gates as I did the same with my daughter, Lucy. I don't imagine that either teenage girl was particularly pleased at the time to be seen with their fathers, but I was hugely grateful to be able to chat to John and discover the man behind the public persona.
If you only knew John as a raffishly dapper wit in a three-piece suit with a silk handkerchief in his top pocket entertaining an array of admiring women aged from eight to eighty, you might have believed that he was a dilettante, an irresistible flaneur with a private income. The truth is, of course, that he worked enormously hard-every day of every year. On holiday with John you could never get up early enough to be up before he was at work. From sunrise he would be sitting outside under a tree with a pen and a pad of lined A4 on his lap. The house would wake hours later and John would write on until a late breakfast and an early glass of champagne, happy to hear the voices of women in the house; happier still if they were talking about him.
As a journalist he was a dogged and industrious pro. Like a barrister dutifully following the cab-rank principle, he never knowingly refused a commission. When Princess Diana died he was asked by the Daily Mail-not his natural constituency-to do a piece for them. He went to Kensington Palace and approached a mourner: 'Go away,' she said, 'I don't want to talk to the paparazzi.'
As a writer he didn't become adjectival-one doesn't speak of Mortimer-esque events-but one does speak of a Rumpole moment, and the character of Rumpole-John's alter ego who embodied the apparent oxymoron of a loveable lawyer-is an enduring monument to his talent. All his work-his plays and novels as much as his journalism-were in his own distinctive voice: witty, lucid, louche and sometimes ruefully acerbic-never less than when writing about those politicians he grew to despise.
John was very sensitive to criticism, doubtful always of his reputation. He needed attention and approbation-a legacy of his parents' failure to give him either, perhaps-and he always received praise as if the sun had just come out from behind a cloud, beaming owlishly with unaffected joy. He thrived on an audience, and their applause was no less essential than the champagne that followed it.
He was often called a 'champagne socialist'-it's one of those resentfully dismissive slurs, like 'chattering classes' and 'luvvies', that seek to make you believe that holding serious ideas about politics is incompatible with having a good time. It's true that John loved champagne more than socialism, and true too that he wasn't powerfully influenced by socialist principle or Marxist ideology. I never heard him urge state ownership or the retention of Clause Four or wholesale redistribution of wealth, but I did hear him talk admiringly of Bevan and Attlee. And Barbara Castle was a heroine of his, whom I met once at lunch in Turville Heath. She asked me if I was a right-wing spy. Then she went on to tell me that she didn't trust Tony Blair an inch.
John was unafraid to take on politicians with whom he disagreed either in public or in private, but he was always ready to be disabused of his prejudices by finding an unexpected humanity in an opponent. 'How could you like that man?' Penny would challenge; 'I speak as I find,' John would shrug in his defence, unjudgemental to the last.
John believed in social justice, human rights, freedom of speech and civil liberties, untrammelled by political correctness and doctrinaire purity, and if there were any 'ist' that could be attached to him it would be 'anarchist'. Having been an enthusiastic supporter of New Labour with the New Dawn in 1997, it didn't take long for his enthusiasm to curdle. He abhorred the threat to do away with juries in fraud cases, the introduction of ID cards, the lies over Iraq, the collusion in rendition and torture, the attempt to introduce forty-two-day pre-charge detention, the lethargy in improving the prison system.
In this matter he was an active advocate for penal reform as President of the Howard League. I was more aware of his work as the Chairman of the Royal Court Theatre and a board member of the National Theatre, where he tipped me off at my first meeting that there was an extremely pompous board member who had a habit of saying at board meetings: 'If I may. through the Chair.' John said he thought the man was eager to penetrate the Chairman.
As Chairman of the Royal Court, John was diffident but effective, giving the impression of a lack of strategy while being quite sure that he knew what to do. He once asked me casually in the back of a taxi if I thought Stephen Daldry would be a good idea to run the Royal Court. 'It'd be fun, wouldn't it?' John said, fun being his highest criterion for any activity. Some years later, when we were on holiday in Spain rather than Tuscany, John told us all that he was uncertain about who they should appoint as Stephen's successor; so we bought John a plant from a gypsy in the market that had to be soaked in water and could then answer your questions about the future. 'Ah,' said John, 'Why didn't I think of that before?'
John loved women. He loved women as he loved champagne and smoked salmon, Shakespeare and Byron, going to the opera and walking in his garden: women were part of the good things of life. But he loved women for themselves as much as for what they gave him-which was mostly adoration qualified by exasperation. He loved women not so much for his self-regard or self-satisfaction but because he was genuinely curious about how fifty per cent of the world thought and felt-a fifty per cent who were often ignored, abused and exploited.
He claimed to be a lazy man driven by guilt, but I think it was more that, as a lonely only child, he needed constant acknowledgement of his existence. So performance was at the centre of his life as an author, as a lawyer, and as an actor in Mortimer's...
