Lunch with the FT: Andrew Roberts

As I approach the reception desk at Wiltons Restaurant in Jermyn Street, London, the man behind the counter smiles unctuously and says – “Good afternoon, your highness.” I have heard that the service at Wiltons – an aristocratic watering hole in London’s West End – is excellent but this seems a little excessive. However, after a moment, I realise that the maitre d’ is looking over my shoulder and addressing a bearded gentleman in a grey suit.

Still mulling over this incident, I am swept through the restaurant, past a table where the many-chinned Nicholas Soames, a Tory MP and grandson of Winston Churchill, is already tucking into his lunch. At the back of the restaurant, seated on a green, velvet banquette is Andrew Roberts, sipping ruminatively on a glass of champagne. Roberts is a historian and a connoisseur of the upper reaches of British society, so I ask him whom he thinks the royal visitor might be. “It can’t have been a member of the British royal family,” he says expertly, “or they would have called him ‘your royal highness’. Possibly a Greek.”

The waiter brings me a glass of champagne, murmuring “complimentary”, as he places it on the table. I am about to have an attack of journalistic ethics about whether the FT can accept such gifts when Roberts puts me at my ease by pointing out that the free champagne is being dished out in his honour, not mine.

Roberts is not the kind of historian who hides away in libraries and senior common rooms. He takes an unapologetic pleasure in mixing with the high-and-mighty. What could be more natural for a historian, he argues, than to rub shoulders with the British aristocracy – the descendants of the characters who populate his books.

“I’m the only person I know,” he says, “who doesn’t mind admitting he’s a snob. If I take pleasure of the lineage of somebody else’s family, what harm does that do to anybody?”

His choice of Wiltons fits the picture. “It’s like a club”, he explains, “I met three people I know just walking through the restaurant. And I have so many happy memories associated with this place. I remember going to a private dinner with Princess Diana and Jimmy Goldsmith, in the back room there, just a month before she died. When I walked out with Lady Di, the photographers’ flash-lights were so bright that it could have been midday.”

Yet, while he is clearly a man who enjoys a party, Roberts has also found the time and the self-discipline to write big and serious books. His award-winning biography of Lord Salisbury, a prime minister of the late 19th century who presided over the British Empire at its peak, is widely recognised as a significant work of history. His shorter books on Napoleon, Wellington, Churchill and Hitler have done well. He is a regular commentator on modern politics – and is bracing himself to appear on BBC television’s Question Time, a topical debate programme, later in the week. “Do you know,” he recalls with a mixture of shock and pride, “once when I appeared on Question Time, a woman from the audience spat on me, as I got down from the stage. I think I must have said something massively snobbish.”

His latest tome, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, has just been published – and is being read in high places. George W. Bush recently told journalists that he was reading the book. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the book should find favour in the White House since it is an unapologetic celebration of the American century. Roberts also argues that modern America’s hegemony is simply a continuation of the British imperial epoch. “In the future”, he writes, “no one will bother to make a distinction between the British empire-led and the American Republic-led periods of English speaking dominance between the late 18th and 21st centuries.”

I am about to challenge him on this when the waiter comes into view. “My fiancée warned me on no account to let the bill go over £200,” he muses, “in case I come across as an impoverished hack who is desperate to have a decent lunch at somebody else’s expense. Give me some guidance – do you think your editor would let us have the Chablis?” At £56 a bottle, the Chablis is indeed one of the cheaper bottles on the wine list. I express my disappointment, not at the price but at the fact that an apostle of the English-speaking world has chosen a French wine. “I don’t think this is an occasion for New Zealand chardonnay,” he replies firmly. As for the food, Roberts orders a crab salad and scallops. I order the crab salad and – just to be different – a lobster omelette.

With as much delicacy as I can muster, I suggest that some people might dismiss his new book as simply the work of a nostalgic British imperialist who has decided to comfort himself by clinging to the coat-tails of the Americans. Do the Americans even really care much about the “special relationship” with Britain?

Roberts reckons that they have woken up to its importance since 9/11. The fact that the English-speaking world – not just the British but the Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians as well – rallied to their cause while most of Europe hung back has convinced many Americans of the deep ties that bind “the English-speaking peoples”. Things are different in Britain, he acknowledges. “I’ve never known the country in such an anti-American mood.”

Roberts has taken a big risk with his latest book. It is always potentially hazardous when a historian leaves the safe path of biography and narrative history and embarks on a big, thematic work. And to tread deliberately in the footsteps of Churchill, who wrote a four-volume history of the “English-speaking peoples”, is – as Roberts cheerfully acknowledges – “absurdly hubristic”. But hubris is not something that worries him. This is a man who minted commemorative medals to mark his 40th birthday and handed them out to friends. “My girlfriend at the time thought I should check myself into a clinic,” he says. “But all I can say is that nobody sent one back.”

With the Iraq war increasingly looking like a debacle, it is not an easy time to be arguing that the fighting there is just the latest expression of a noble and indissoluble bond between English-speaking peoples – the natural successor to 20th-century wars against “Prussian militarism, then the Nazi-led Axis, then global Marxism-Leninism”.

The British reviews for Roberts’s latest book have been mostly lukewarm to
hostile. Alan Bennett, whose play The History Boys was recently turned into a film, has attacked Roberts as just the sort of “television historian” that he dislikes – the kind of man who will advance any argument, just to make a splash. Roberts is understandably irked by this. “You’ve known me for 24 years, Gideon,” he protests, “I’ve always been extremely rightwing.”

At this point, in the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I have indeed known Roberts for many years. Although we were never particularly close friends, we were undergraduates together at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, in the early 1980s – just the period when Alan Bennett’s fictional students were sitting their Oxbridge entrance exams. Caius was something of a history machine. Presided over by an extremely determined director of studies, Neil McKendrick, it gained a reputation for churning out famous historians – men such as Simon Schama, Harold James, Orlando Figes and Norman Stone (who taught Roberts).

Normally, you could tell the students who were going to go on to big things as historians. They were pale, intense types who never left the library. Roberts was not like that. Then, as now, he was a pink-faced, cheery soul, who liked a drink and a laugh and who seemed much more interested in student politics than writing essays. The only time I remember seeing him in the college library he was amusing the assembled company by reading aloud the salacious bits from Pepys’s diary. I obviously missed his studious side.

As Roberts points out, the early 1980s was one of those rare periods when it was actually fashionable for a student to be a rightwinger: “Do you know when I became head of the Cambridge Conservative association it had over 1,400 members,” he recalls. “I went to speak to the Tories at the LSE the other day – they have a membership of 10.” This news is relayed with another hearty laugh.

Roberts is not just a Tory, he is a Thatcherite – which makes this a particularly difficult time for him. The Tories seem to be reviving but only by repudiating Thatcherism – and, in particular, the Americophilia and Europhobia associated with Lady Thatcher. On the most recent anniversary of 9/11, “the Lady” was photographed arm-in-arm with Dick Cheney, the American vice-president. But David Cameron, the new Tory leader, chose the occasion to deliver a speech decrying the idea that Britain should have a “slavish” relationship with the US.

Naturally enough, the supremely well-connected Roberts is friendly with both parties. He is a trustee of the Thatcher archives and it was recently revealed in the newspapers that Cameron had swum to Roberts’s rescue on a holiday in 1995 after the eminent historian was attacked by a jellyfish. Some people remarked that Cameron had done well to distinguish between Roberts and the jellyfish. But, in spite of his friendship with Cameron, Roberts backed another, more rightwing, candidate for the Tory leadership.

It is nearly bill-paying time but Roberts suggests that we have a last glass of sweet wine. There is a Beaume de Venise on the wine list – which co-incidentally is the wine that Caius’s McKendrick always served to his students. It seems like the natural choice.

At a little after 3pm, we leave a rapidly-emptying Wiltons. Roberts announces that he is going home to sleep. I seem to recall that his hero – Churchill – was also a devotee of the afternoon nap. I am about to point this out to Roberts but I stop myself. I’m sure he knows.