I should be able to sue for deprivation of literary royalties because I had such a happy childhood. I was extremely happy at school, had a loving family who probably spoilt me a bit. My dad was never as successful as my mum would have liked him to be but he was a dear and kind and lovable man. I never had any angst about what I was going to do with my life. I felt I was on railway lines, which were taking me wherever exams led. You did exams, you did well, then you did the next lot.
I won a scholarship to what used to be called a direct-grant school, which was half grammar school, half independent school and paid for by the local council and scholarships. I am a good example of the way social mobility can work in our country. And I would like to see it work better and faster, for people who are let down by the education system and in particular for women. I have had a very lucky life but not a privileged life, except that it has been a privilege to do some of the jobs that I have done.
Brexit is the worst political error made in this country in my lifetime
The most exciting thing was the election of President Kennedy. He was such a fresh personality and was sufficiently young to have some appeal to even people of my age. But I wasn’t particularly interested in politics. I was rather suspicious of people that were. Those suspicions made me pretty middle of the road in my attitudes. I never believed in a socialist system and didn’t believe the world could all be explained by an ideological commitment to market economics.
Communism or capitalism…
I would tell my younger self to learn another language – it makes your life more fulfilled. I made a terrible mistake when I got a scholarship into university very young. I could have taken a year off and learned Italian or Spanish, or gone around the world. Instead I stayed at school in order to be captain of everything. Young people today will live 20 years longer than my generation and you need an awful lot of interests to make life as worthwhile as possible.
I grew up in a world split between rival ideologies. Communism or capitalism, America or the Soviet Union. After the collapse of communist authoritarianism in Europe, people thought we had seen the triumph of liberal democracy. Instead people began to identify with extreme views of their own identity – as Serbs or Croats, as Sunni or Shia, with Islam or Christianity. The best way to explain that is with our complicated identities. I’m from Irish potato famine stock, Catholic, lower-middle class, a scholarship boy, a moderate Conservative, pro-Europe, America-phile – at least for America at its best.
My younger self would have been as surprised as all my friends about my career. I was the first of my family to go to university and no one would have expected me to end up as Chancellor of Oxford University after a series of extraordinary public service jobs. At university I acted, edited a satirical magazine, wrote reviews – but nothing political. Howard Marks was the most successful and probably best known of my contemporaries. Without going into whether what he got up to was good or bad, he was a very amiable and cheerful guy. Who knew where his life would lead him?
