The battleaxe of York
Despite the series of scandals that cost her husband his political career, Christine Hamilton has reinvented herself as both a media butterfly and self-proclimed battleaxe. Heidi Blake talks to York’s most infamous graduate about married life, civil war re-enactment weekends and getting a 2.1 without doing any work.
It’s hard to imagine Christine Hamilton, the media’s most notorious and entertaining battleaxe, arriving at Goodricke College as a lowly fresher in 1968, but she assures me that she hasn’t changed since then. “I still feel absolutely a student. I haven’t grown up at all. Growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional and I’ve ticked the box not to bother.”
At this point, Christine calls the conversation to a temporary halt. “Neil!” she barks. “Neil, don’t stick that there! Move it up a bit. Up there!” I’m not entirely sure what is taking place on the other end of the telephone (the mind boggles) but I’m amused to hear my interviewee’s famously domineering persona playing itself out so genuinely behind the scenes. As a woman whose life has been repeatedly blighted by the ramifications of her husband’s political misdemeanours, I say she has every right to be bossy.
Neil and Christine Hamilton have felt the backlash of life in the public eye like few else. They weathered one of the fiercest political storms of the nineties after Mohammed Al Fayed accused Neil (then MP for Tatton) of accepting cash for tabling parliamentary questions, and suffered a further public battering in 2001 when they were falsely accused of rape in a blaze of press coverage. Incredibly, the couple have transformed notoriety into celebrity: they now appear regularly on television and radio, are both published authors and recently made their debut on the Edinburgh fringe.
We just had a little local difficulty with an Egyptian grocer and then later with a Grimsby gold digger
Christine graduated from York in 1971 with a 2:1 (“not bad for no work”) in Sociology, a course which she describes modestly as “a soft option”. She tells me how, under-whelmed by her degree, she quickly turned her attention elsewhere. “I was manically social. I got into politics, which was a big mistake, of course. I went to the societies mart at the beginning of term, and I bumped into the Chairman of the Conservatives, and before I knew where I was, I was the social secretary organising all the social events. The other thing I did a lot was Sealed Knot – a Civil War organisation. At weekends we’d go off to Marlston Moor and Littlecote House and camp in tents and re-enact the battles. It was an absolute hoot. I must have been bonkers, but there you go. The Racecourse was a popular haunt, too, and we used to spend long days out and about, walking and pubbing and just generally being young. So what with the Conservatives and Sealed Knot and boyfriends etcetera, I was very busy.”
Intrigued by the mention of early boyfriends by a woman who seems never to have left her husband’s side in living memory, I implore her to elaborate. “Well, of course I met Neil while I was at York, but before that I’d fallen madly in love with a young Greek called George who wasn’t at the University. He was a total pick up in a coffee bar in Stonegate, I can remember it well. Mmm. Quite glorious. Absolutely.” She loses focus momentarily at this point, but just manages to pull herself back from the brink of vocal lust and continue with the anecdote. “He just came across and offered me a lift because I had heavy shopping bags. He said he was going in the same direction as me, and I said “but you don’t know where I’m going” and he said “but I do, I’ve watched you”. Oh it was wonderful. He was a lovely romance. Sex on legs really, but there we go. Then I met Neil in September ’69 when I went to a Conservative conference at Swinton castle, near Rippon.”
Personally, I prefer the sound of George, but she seems happy with her choice. “It was absolutely marvellous. I mean, heavens alive, David Davis was there, and Andrew Neil; David Mellor and Ann Widdecombe. The course of history might have been different it Neil had fallen for Ann Widdecombe! Or indeed if I’d fallen for one of the others. I looked at Neil across a crowded room and I thought ‘that’ll do for the weekend’. And here we are. We were 18 then, and now we’re 57. For about three years we courted long distance because he wasn’t at York, and then when I went to work at the House of Commons as soon as I left York, he was doing the second of what became three degrees, and London life was opening up, so I dumped him. But I sowed my wild oats for a bit, and then we got back together on the 17th February 1978. So I have a long-standing love-affair with the whole of Yorkshire for many, many reasons.”
I’m a politics free zone, I won’t talk about it, I won’t speak to political groups. I absolutely refuse.
Intrigued by this alien world of Conservative conferences in castles, I ask her what it was like to be a Tory as a student in the sixties: “I was very odd being a Tory in those days, because at the end of the sixties the streets worldwide were an ocean of protest. Paris was full of barricades and tear gas, and people rampaged around the city: the sons and daughters of the privileged shoulder to shoulder with the poor, etcetera. It was the same the world over: anti-Vietnam demonstrations and goodness knows what. Students were revolting against authority, and it was a very left wing time, so one was regarded as a rather odd fish by the other students.”
Despite the political zeal of her student days, Christine insists that she has now left the political world firmly behind her. “I’m a politics free zone, I won’t talk about it, I won’t speak to political groups. I absolutely refuse. Because politics is so divisive and confrontational, and I’ve been there, done that, and we’re in the business of cheering people up now. We freely pop ourselves in the entertainment category. And why not? It’s fun, and it’s not boring. In the old days of party politics it really mattered which side you were on, because there were things to be fought over. Now, Thatcher’s won. I mean Blair is just Thatcher mark two. The only big issues don’t divide the parties from one another. So I just don’t think politics is as interesting as it used to be. I’m so glad we’ve left the artificial world of Westminster for the madcap world of media and entertainment. It’s wonderful.”
There is something suspiciously bright and breezy about her tone, and I wonder whether she is being a touch disingenuous in this apparent wholesale rejection of politics for minor celebrity. I ask her if there’s anything about life in the public eye which she finds trying, but she remains upbeat. “The motto really should be that if you don’t want it to end up on the front page of the Sun, don’t do it. When people complain, it’s like the captain of a ship complaining about the sea. Don’t go to sea if you don’t like the storms. If you make your living in the public eye, which is what I do, life is public.”
Surely, though, the false accusations of rape that were levelled against her and her husband in 2001 by Nadine Milroy-Sloan, a 28-year old trainee college lecturer from Grimsby who employed Max Clifford to act on her behalf, were fairly harrowing as a by-product of public life? “That was very frightening. It’s not funny being arrested for five hours. At one point I got a little bit emotional, because not only were we arrested and questioned and all that sort of business, but our house up in Cheshire was searched by the police. I had to ring my mother from the police station with somebody standing over me while I did it to tell her that I’d been arrested for rape and would she mind popping round to our house (she was 87 by then) and letting the police in because if she didn’t they had a warrant and they would break the door down. They took all our computers, they went through every door, every cupboard, the fridge, the oven, under the bed. It was unbelievable. And at the same time another 6 were searching our flat. It was an entire invasion of our life. Oh, don’t even go there, it makes me hot under the collar even to think about it.”
This is the first time during our conversation that Christine has seemed genuinely perturbed; outside of her comfort zone. I ask her whether these public trials have taken any toll on her relationship with Neil, and how they deal with such things as a couple. “We always try and make sure that whichever one is the least down at any one time is responsible for bringing the other one back up again. So we make sure we don’t both have massive dips at the same time. But no, it wasn’t easy. It didn’t effect our relationship in any way, but there were times when we just felt like it just was the pair of us against the entire world, and that’s just not nice.
“The thing is, our problems are all very public – everyone knows what they are and I’m sure if we have any more everyone will know about those too, but at the same time that we were going through that, other people were having the most tremendous difficulties – far worse; divorces and terminal illness and dreadful things. So we just had what I describe as a little local difficulty with an Egyptian grocer and then later with a Grimsby gold digger.”
You get these boring old people saying ‘Oh, heavens alive, used to be a government minister and look at him now.’ Well, you know, so what? Look at half the government ministers really; who would you rather spend an evening with?
Now we’re on the topic of that particular Egyptian grocer, I take the opportunity to ask if Christine still upholds Neil’s innocence of accepting cash for questions from Mr Al-Fayed. About this she is definite. “Yes. There were no brown envelopes, there was no cash for questions. I’ll tell you one thing. Once the Jury had found against Neil, the Inland Revenue special investigations force frankly had a duty, because if the jury were correct and Neil had received the money there was tax to pay. So we had a total investigation of all our financial affairs going back 20 years. Every credit card bill was checked, the whole lot, and our forensic accountants from the Inland Revenue were, I would have thought, rather more adept at finding financial evidence than a jury. At the end of the day they could find absolutely zero evidence of any money in any shape or form. We actually had a refund from the tax people, because we had overpaid.”
Does she feel angry about the way those events unfolded? “I don’t normally think about it, so I just get on with life. But yes I do, I feel extremely angry about a lot of things that happened. But in the famous words of John Lennon, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is the most extraordinary story. The whole Al-Fayed thing is odd. I mean, he’s a fairly odd character with a rather murky background – with the whole Diana business as well. But there we are.”
I ask if she feels that, after all they have been through, she and Neil have become figures of fun. At this, she audibly bristles, and I feel I have struck a nerve. “No. No, I don’t think we’re figures of fun. Our motto in life now is that as long as it’s legal, honest and faintly decent we’re up for it. I think we prefer to think of ourselves as good sports, and if people want to regard us as figures of fun then that’s their business. We don’t take ourselves seriously. We’re not stuck up old po-faced farts like you find all over the place. You get these boring old people saying ‘Oh, heavens alive, used to be a government minister and look at him now.’ Well, you know, so what? Look at half the government ministers really; who would you rather spend an evening with?”
There’s no doubt that Christine is a riotous entertainer, and it’s hard not to warm to her, but I find it difficult to forget her husband’s highly right-wing past. I ask her about Neil’s early involvement the Monday Club, a hard-line Conservative Group with links to Enoch Powell, which advocated the repatriation of ethnic groups and supported Apartheid. She won’t play ball. “That’s another slight myth. He was a member, but not actively involved.” In fact, Neil was elected to the executive council of the Monday Club in 1972. I ask her if she feels that Neil has mellowed politically since then. “Oh good heavens no! He’s probably got worse.”
So does he still advocate the repatriation of ethnic groups, as he did in his 1979 General Election campaign? “Not the way you’ve put it! I mean that sounds horrendous. If somebody wants to go, fine, but oh Lord no, he’s not involved in politics at all now.” She pauses for a moment “Although he is a member of UKIP. Oh gosh yes, absolutely. UKIP is the big issue.”
It nearly being time to leave Christine to “pop out to B and Q to buy some shower-heads”, I must ask the classic question. Where do she and Neil see themselves in 5 years time? “Hmm. Nobody knows where they’ll be in 5 years, and we perhaps less than most. We just don’t know what’s round the corner. More of the same, hopefully. What I’d really like to do is to have my own chat show. Since Edinburgh there’s been a nice resurgence of interest in us from production companies, and we’ve had some meetings with some very big ones. But we’ll see. I really don’t know.”
Is there any chance she’ll be popping back to York any time soon? “The trouble with going back is that it does make you feel really old. It fills you with happy memories, but also you think, ‘oh crumbs, where have all the years gone, what have I done with my life?’ There’s a touch of envy at all these lovely lithe young people swaning around, with their entire lives ahead of them to wreck. But I’m sure I’ll be back one day.”
York’s most famous alumni
Harry Enfield
Kevin the teenager and Paul Whitehouse’s best mate, the comedian, who advertised Dime Bars and Hula Hoops, was originally a member of Derwent College.
Adam Hart-Davis
The presenter of the What the Romans/Victorians/Tudors Did for Us series and Tomorrow’s World took a PhD in Organometallic Chemistry at York.
Oona King
The second black woman to be elected a member of Parliament, the former Bethnal Green and Bow MP studied Politics at York as a member of Vanbrugh College.
