Shooting from the lip

THE man named Irritant of the Year in the 1993 'What the Papers Say' awards has an irritation of his own this May afternoon: a tickly cough. 'Excuse me,' says Richard Littlejohn, rubbing his throat. 'I can't seem to get rid of it.' He is also blinking his small, bluey-green eyes a lot, but that may be because he has just walked in off the sunlit streets of Soho, crossed the uneven floor of the Academy, a snug literary club with a Dickensian atmosphere, and removed his sunglasses. He now takes off his jacket to reveal a navy blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt and pale hairless arms, coughs again and takes a sip of chilled Beaujolais.

We start talking about Auberon Waugh, who founded the Academy Club in 1988 and who used to profess admiration for Richard Littlejohn, referring fondly to him as 'my opposite number on the Sun'. 'What was it Bron said?' Littlejohn asks in his trademark Essex geezer voice. 'The role of the journalist is really only to "tickle things up a bit". I agree with that. Our job is not to do good and change the world but to sit at the back, throw bottles and make a nuisance of ourselves.'

Does he always believe what he writes? The 47-year-old columnist, broadcaster, and, as of this week, novelist, grins, looks over his shoulder and says out of the corner of his mouth: 'I believe everything I write at the time I write it. I do find column-writing cathartic. If I didn't have my columns, I would be roaming the streets with a Kalashnikov, firing at random. There is a real anger there. I don't fake it. It's like a friend once said to me, "I wish I could be as certain about anything as you are about everything."'

Our man has a chance to demonstrate his certainty twice a week in his Sun column, and every Saturday night on his phone-in programme about football for BBC Radio 5. Today is Tuesday, the day the Sun flies Ronnie Biggs home to Britain, and in his column Littlejohn has written a pungent satire about the return of the 'bandit' Mandelson: 'The notorious prisoner of Rio had been at large and now just wanted to be able to walk into a chip shop in Hartlepool and order a pint of traditional avocado dip.' Bandit? Bandit? Oh, I get it. Arse bandit. Subtle stuff, Richard. 'Look. You'd call a woman an old slapper. I refuse to be bound by the constraints of the politically correct. I don't recognise their grammar. If it's funny, it's funny. Mandelson is a huge figure of fun. He would like everyone to think he's Machiavelli but actually he's Iago played by Kenneth Williams.'

So as long as something is considered funny, then, you can go as far as you like - as far, say, as Bernard Manning? 'Well, I've written monstering Bernard Manning. It's on record. People only read me selectively to support their own prejudice that I am a racist homophobe. I am not.'

As far as I can tell, Richard Littlejohn's position is this: he is tolerant toward homosexuals - indeed he regularly uses the old 'some of my best friends are gay' chestnut - but hostile to gay extremists. When Peter Tatchell attacked the Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, Littlejohn wrote that Tatchell 'should have been dragged from Canterbury Cathedral and clubbed like a baby seal' for his cowardice. He takes a similar view on race issues. 'I don't hate Bernie Grant because he is a black,' he once said in an interview. 'I hate him because he is a cunt.'

To be fair - something which Littlejohn tries to avoid, if he can help it - he did read the eulogy at the memorial service of his friend the (gay) theatre critic Jack Tinker, and he did pay for a full-page advertisement in the Sun backing Trevor Phillips, a black candidate for mayor of London. 'I don't often write about race,' he now says, 'because all sorts of people crawl out of the woodwork and think you are on their side. They think if I criticise the Commission for Racial Equality I am criticising blacks. Well, I'm not. So I don't want them sending me their British National Party letters and leaflets. I'm not interested. And I don't want them reading my column. I despise them. They can fuck right off.'

Angry, see? But is it real anger or merely the fudged-up anger of the highly paid controversialist who panders to prejudice; of the funny thug, that great British comedy institution? I think he enjoys the fact that you are never sure whether he really is Alf Garnett or not; whether his is the authentic voice of the working man or a knowing post-modern parody of it. Does he ever worry that some of his ten million readers may miss the irony in his columns? 'I never write down to people,' he says. 'I don't believe in lowest common denominators.'

In person Richard Littlejohn is matey, blokey and good humoured. In print he is dangerous, acerbic and unpredictable: the naughty, slightly deranged boy you goad into swearing at the teacher, so you can laugh when he gets into trouble. Politically, I would guess, he is a libertarian, a meritocrat, a hater of authority and a conservative radical rather than a reactionary. But you categorise him at your risk. He thought Margaret Thatcher was 'a necessary evil' in the early Eighties but that she 'went bonkers' in 1987 when she won her third term and lost touch with popular opinion. He thinks the death penalty 'demeans us all'. He has only voted Tory once, in 1992, but then he felt guilty about it and wrote of John Major: 'There is apparently no limit to the PM's stupidity and lack of judgement.' Editors admire him for his rabble-rousing volatility. And not just editors of the Sun, but of The Spectator, where he has occasionally written, and of the Daily Mail, where he had an award-winning (and slightly less loutish than usual) column from 1994 to 1998. Even some of his natural enemies have a soft spot for him. Ken Livingstone, a regular guest on the chatshow Littlejohn hosted on LBC in the early Nineties, describes him as 'a traditional right-wing Labour populist'. Littlejohn was censured for that show by the Radio Authority when he dismissed the Royal Family as 'a tax-evading bunch of adulterers', adding in glib contradiction of his views on hanging that 'I'm no royalist: I'd string 'em all up tomorrow.'

Littlejohn was born in Ilford, Essex, in 1954; he has a sister, who is four years younger than him. Their mother worked as a school secretary, their father, who died in 1995, 'started off as a copper then went to work on the railways, then for Perkins engines and finally moved to the States with my mother when I was 21.' That was also the year that Richard married Wendy, a trim blonde cookery teacher, the same age as him. How did they meet? 'As you do, locally. . . I've no idea whether it was love at first sight.' The couple have two children, William, who is at college, and Georgina, who, he says vaguely, 'works in the media'. 'My parents had a stable marriage, as Wendy and I have. But I don't play on family values. I don't condemn other people for living their lives however they want to. What I object to is when others decide there is only one true path. Incentives to be a single mother and disincentives to get married.'

He doesn't like talking about his family in interviews because he has had 'so many death threats and fit-ups in the past'. 'You have a responsibility to keep your family life private. I see public figures like Esther Rantzen talking about their children and I think, "This will come back and haunt you." I never consciously wrote about Norma Major or Denis Thatcher because they didn't invite the attention. But the Wicked Witch [Cherie Blair], well, she's fair game. And that goes for Damien the baby, too, because they keep exploiting him. Once he's old enough to know, I'll drop it.'

Littlejohn contracted the journalism bug at an early age. 'I can remember school holidays, aged nine and ten, writing my own newspapers on my mum's typewriter. I've always been fascinated by men with trilbies and press tickets in their hatbands.' His marks in the 11-plus were the highest for his year and he won a scholarship to Oundle public school, but he turned this down because he found out the school didn't play football. He went to a grammar school instead. 'My teachers were surprised about the scholarship offer because they thought I was a trouble-maker. I'm glad I didn't take it up because I wouldn't be who I am now - and I am happy with who I am. I think my parents were hugely disappointed, though. My mum's dad was a railwayman and my granddad was a docker and they would have been thrilled if I had gone on from public school to Oxbridge or whatever.'

He has, he adds, good friends who went to Oxford and Cambridge. 'I left school at 16, and so occasionally I'll be made aware of that. There will be conversations about an academic specific which I can't join in. So it seems a closed world to me. But I haven't got a chip on my shoulder about it. My parents taught me not to be ashamed of who I am. Besides, while they were in the groves of academe I was on the picket line at Longbridge or in Fleet Street, writing about the miners' strike, and I wouldn't have swapped those experiences for anything.'

Littlejohn became a journalist at the age of 16 in 1971, working on local papers in the Midlands and East Anglia. 'I cut my teeth politically during the three-day week when I was working as an industrial correspondent on the Birmingham Evening Mail. My first job there was to mind a phone box outside Longbridge for the senior industrial correspondent. There were no mobile phones, of course, and if you couldn't get access to a phone there was no story. I would stand in the box keeping the line open to the office until he came out of the strike meeting, or whatever, to file his report.'

Contrary to Fleet Street folklore, it was not Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of the Sun, who 'invented' Richard Littlejohn as a brand, but the late John Leese, who was the editor of the London Evening Standard in the mid- to late-Eighties. 'It was no longer the time for covering industry, so John suggested I should become a gentleman journalist. I joined the staff of the Standard as a feature and leader writer and he asked me to write a column one day to fill in for Hunter Davies, who was on holiday. They never told me to stop. Hunter and I have giggled about it a lot since - I did him out of a job. John said he kept me on as a columnist because I sounded like me and not someone else. A lot of people just do pastiches of other people's columns.'

And now his own column has in turn become almost a parody of itself: loud, sarcastic, anarchic. He does have a knack for summing people and situations up, though. He once dismissed Neil Kinnock with the line: 'Nice chap. Thick as a post.' Of Alan Clark, he said, 'We are talking about a man who would make love to the hole in the ozone layer.' More recently, when Phoenix the calf was saved, Littlejohn wrote a column ridiculing Tony Blair. The illustration for the piece showed Blair holding a gun to the calf's head. The caption read: vote labour or the calf gets it!

Isn't it dangerous for democracy to mock constantly those who govern us? 'No, it's essential for democracy. Labour especially have far too many cheerleaders, sycophants and spin doctors. People go on about the power of the press but it is the politicians who fuck people's lives up.' Littlejohn scratches his nose.

'The Guardianistas monster me now because I'm ripping the arse out of the Labour Party, but not so long ago I was giving it to the Tories. The politicians insult our intelligence on a daily basis. I think anything that exposes these people to the harsh glare of ridicule has got to be worth it. Excuse me. . .' He coughs repeatedly, trying to clear his throat.

Sometimes Littlejohn's scattergun approach wounds innocent bystanders. Tim Yeo, the former Tory minister who resigned after having an affair, was just about the only member of that Cabinet who never made pronouncements on family values. He wasn't a hypocrite, yet Littlejohn wrote of him: 'They can sleep with sheep as far as I'm concerned but I don't want them running the farmyard. And if they are going to sleep with sheep, they really shouldn't lecture the rest of us on the evils of bestiality.' Wasn't that unfair? 'Yeah I know, but if you lie down with dogs, you get fleas. I think all politicians are fair game.' Even so, there is something disquieting about Littlejohn's recklessness. Anthony Daniels wrote in this paper in a review of You Couldn't Make It Up, a collection of Littlejohn's columns: 'Richard Littlejohn is often brilliantly funny. . . but not only does he never mention foreigners in any but a derogatory way - when he is far too intelligent a man really to believe that we have nothing to learn from any of them - but when he writes of the Germans and the Japanese as having taken our cars and electronics industries he is pandering to the kind of stupid, ignorant, sentimental, self-pitying xenophobia which is the root of all fascism, and which is an obstacle to genuine self improvement.'

According to his bête noire, the Guardian, Littlejohn was paid a salary of £800,000 in 1997 in a deal which included hosting a television programme for Sky, as well as writing his column. This must have made him the highest-paid journalist in the country. Isn't his life now far removed from that of a Sun reader, who might be on, say, £15,000 a year? 'Of course it is. But I've worked for £15,000 a year and struggled to pay mortgages. There is no good me pretending that I'm still the man on the Clapham shopper-hopper. I'm older, more affluent, but my views are basically the same. I'm still hungry. I still get angry. I do keep in touch. I do my Radio 5 show each week, for instance, where I talk to football fans. And when I go to watch Spurs, people come up to me and talk to me all the time. People relate to what I do, and if they didn't they wouldn't read me or listen to me. News International is not a charity. I get hundreds of emails and letters a week. Most of the readers are like me, liberals who hate militancy and the institutionalised anti-racism of the CRE.'

Richard Littlejohn is about to find out how he relates to another audience, the book-buying public. According to the blurb on the back of To Hell in a Handcart, 'Richard Littlejohn exposes the madness of modern Britain in a thrill-packed roller coaster ride of a novel.' 'It's not going to win a Booker Prize,' he says, topping up his wineglass. 'I haven't written a novel for the literary establishment. I've written it for middle England. I suppose it's like Bonfire of the Vanities meets Minder. But I have no idea whether it's any good or not. I'm expecting it to be slaughtered by lots of people who probably won't read it. But who gives a fuck? I believe if you dish it out you have to take it. I think Bron [Waugh] was right in that you need enemies. They define you more than your friends do. If I could get the Guardian to write "racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic trash" about it I would put it on the cover as a recommendation.'

The novel is about bogus asylum seekers, the iniquities of liberal lawyers, shock jocks and Mickey French, an ex-policeman who is attacked in his own home and forced to defend himself. 'It was partly prompted by what happened to Tony Martin, the Norfolk farmer. Martin was made into a monster by the law. I think we have a duty to defend our own property. You are supposed to write about what you know, and Mickey is a retired cop I know - and there's a bit of me in the shock jock. As for the asylum thing, there is still enough of the old Isle of Wight hippie in me to believe in no passports and no borders, but I've spoken to a lot of coppers and people in the immigration service and I've discovered that there is a deliberate attempt to quash debate on this subject.'

I say I find it hard to understand why right-wingers get so worked up about bogus asylum seekers, it seems such an abstract issue, but this may be because I've had no personal experience of it.

'Where do you live?' Littlejohn asks.

Clapham, I reply.

'Yeah, well go and walk through Wood Green or Tottenham, north-east London. I mean, honestly, go down the A10. There is so much aggressive begging that goes on at traffic lights there.' (Littlejohn lives in a terraced house in north London.)

No doubt the punishments of the damned will be visited on Richard Littlejohn come Judgement Day, but in one respect at least this archetypal Essex Man is also Ethics Man. 'There is a perception that I am confrontational, but it's only with politicians, never with the punters. I don't believe in pissing on your audience. That's why I really hate The Weakest Link, the way it humiliates the paying public. I think it will die a death in the United States. The novelty is already wearing off.' (In an encounter with Anne Robinson not long ago she said he was fatter than he looked on the television. He replied that she was older than she looked on television. 'We understood each other immediately!' he laughs.)

Actually, Richard Littlejohn is even ruder than Anne Robinson on the subject of his own appearance: he once said he looks like Michael Elphick before he gave up the drink. Not vain then? 'I've no idea. Probably. I can't watch myself on telly because I fixate on the end of my nose or a bead of sweat or a hair out of place. I said to Kelvin MacKenzie [who commissioned his talk show for Sky] "I've got to lose some weight before I do this." And he said, "Don't bother. No one is fucking watching you to see what you look like." That was a good piece of advice. Still, I prefer the wireless because on a Saturday night I sit there with a pint of Guinness and have a conversation. On telly the process gets in the way. It's more self-conscious and artificial.'

Like all bullies, Richard Littlejohn can be very sentimental, especially when he talks about the good old hard-drinking days of Fleet Street when, of course, all journalists wore trilbies with press tickets in them. Does his drinking ever get in the way of work? 'I drink too much, like most hacks. I do abstinence better than moderation. I won't drink for a week but once I start I'll have two or three bottles without thinking about it. I can work with a hangover. Often the cure is the column. I've written some of my most vitriolic stuff when I wake up with a pounding head. I think, "Some bastard is going to suffer for this!'''

Although he is asthmatic, he exercises regularly. 'I'm more health-conscious than I was, a sign of getting old.' He sleeps well, he says, and has only suffered depression once, when George Graham was made manager of Tottenham. 'We all have moods, you think you're doing better some days than others. But I don't have any of those "What's it all for?" days. I never go into the meaning of life. We're lucky to be alive: why go into the meaning of it?' He finds it easy to unwind on holiday. 'I relax if I know what's going on when I'm away. I'll spend a couple of months away in America, but the BBC news is coming out of my laptop. If I don't think I'm missing anything, I can relax.'

His blinking, I notice, has continued throughout our conversation. It wasn't because he had just taken his sunglasses off. It makes him seem anxious and vulnerable, as does his coughing. And, for all his bravado about the value of journalism and his nonchalance about the meaning of life, he eventually admits that his main motive for writing his novel was that: 'I hope it will have more permanence than my columns, which are tomorrow's chip paper. It isn't about raising my profile but about only getting one go.'

There may be another reason. He has always tried to emulate his friend and Fleet Street hero, Keith Waterhouse, who found early fame with his 1959 novel Billy Liar. 'I'm the apprentice to Keith's sorcerer. I love the man. He's the greatest writer of his generation. Why isn't he Sir Keith?'

Does Littlejohn expect a knighthood one day? 'Don't be daft. I've no desire to be honoured by the state. I only said that about Keith because it annoys me that they give knighthoods out to any only tosser but they won't honour a great man of letters like Keith.'

It seems odd that Richard Littlejohn, one of the most famous journalists in the country, doesn't have an entry in Who's Who. 'They keep sending me the form, but I throw it in the bin.' He grins. 'I know who I am. Besides, you flick through Who's Who and see some of the people who are listed in it and you think a better title for the book would be Who Gives a Fuck?' He drains his glass and roars with laughter, pleased with his joke. 'There's a good ending for your piece.'

• 'To Hell in a Handcart' by Richard Littlejohn (HarperCollins) is available from Telegraph Books Direct at £5.99, plus 99p postage. To order please call 0870 155 722