I saw some poets in the audience last night, which hasn’t happened before,” says Felix Dennis, 61, multimillionaire magazine publisher and latter-day poet, as he joins me in Sartoria, a smart restaurant on Savile Row. We are discussing Dennis’s third poetry tour of the UK, which had begun the evening before our lunch. At these shows he recites from his latest collection for an audience lured in with free entry and copious free wine. (Just so there’s no confusion, the shows are called Did I Mention the Free Wine?)

At the reading, Dennis had strode about the stage reciting poems and telling anecdotes, dressed mainly in various shades of mustard. The poets he spotted might only have been at the show to drink free wine and tut at this wealthy wannabe but their presence represents progress in Dennis’s eyes. “I think we’ve come to an armed truce now, where we’re not throwing rocks at each other any more,” he says with his flat London vowels. “The problem is that I’m a rich man – you’re just not supposed to be a poet.”