Gyles Brandreth shares his memories of Northern Ireland

In preparation for his forthcoming event Gyles Brandreth recently spoke to the Belfast Telegraph about his memories of Northern Ireland.

Gyles Brandreth is talking about his surprisingly long association with Northern Ireland and the anecdotes and revelations come thick and fast: his encounters with the Rev Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams; why those who thought Prince Philip disliked meeting Martin McGuinness were wrong.

No matter that we are chatting early on a Sunday morning as he is being driven to Canterbury to perform his ‘Can’t Stop Talking!!!’ hit show, the broadcaster, royal biographer, former MP and raconteur is on sparkling form. “I’m a Belfast groupie!” he declares. “I love it!”

At 75, Brandreth is a national treasure: he’s witty, often self-deprecatingly so, entertaining and very knowledgeable yet wears his learning lightly, which makes him a popular fixture on TV shows like This Morning, The One Show, Pointless and, previously, Countdown.

Indeed, he filmed the quiz show Catchword, in Belfast in the Eighties “with Paul Smith who is from Northern Ireland and went on to make his fortune with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” — he pauses for comic effect, before delivering the punchline — “but I was his first big show. Google it — there are pictures of me wearing my jumpers with letters on the front!”.

“I was a student at Oxford University and had spoken at a televised debate with Ian Paisley and Norman St John-Stevas, a high-profile Catholic. I can’t remember the theme, but because of Dr Paisley’s presence it ended up quite heated and exciting, and afterwards I was invited to Belfast to take part in a television programme. This was at the start of the Troubles and — can you imagine! — they called this programme, Flashpoint.

“Anyway, I went over to Belfast and met Dr Paisley again. I got to know him quite well when I was an MP. He was a firebrand in public but more charming and easy-going person privately, and of course he mellowed over the years.”

Brandreth was an MP from 1992-97, serving in John Major’s government and says loyally of the ex-PM: “The work he did towards reconciliation in Northern Ireland is sometimes overlooked, he worked really hard and effectively.”

Based in the Whips’ Office, he got to know the Northern Ireland MPs. “I remember meeting Gerry Adams in the House of Commons even though he didn’t take his seat. I was introduced to him by Jeremy Corbyn. He was friendly — absolutely so. But then you often find people are very different when you meet them personally.”

Which brings us to Brandreth’s astonishing friendships with the late Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh. He knew them for half a century, regularly meeting at public events and in private, and his intimate biographies of them are packed with genuine insight — and gossipy detail.

He had extensive conversations with the Duke; indeed it was because of him that Brandreth became a frequent visitor to Northern Ireland. “I was chairman of the National Playing Fields Association, which was the late Duke of Edinburgh’s pet charity, building playing fields and playgrounds. We raised money and built those in Northern Ireland.”

Brandreth is adamant that speculation the Duke had not wanted to meet Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in 2012 is ill-founded.

Many commentators thought that Philip, unable to forgive the IRA murder of his beloved uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten in Mullaghmore, Co Sligo, in 1979, deliberately kept his distance when the Queen shared that historic first handshake with the then Deputy First Minister.

“No, that’s wrong,” says Brandreth. “I think it’s partly to do with his manner that people got that impression. The Queen was very conscious of her role in the peace process and she was there to do the job, to draw the line, as it were, just as later when she went to Dublin and spoke in Gaelic. That was absolutely what she had to do. He was letting her take the lead on that.”

“The Duke of Edinburgh would have been there in attendance. He would not have wanted in any sense to have stepped out of turn.”

“For 70 years, he always turned up on the right day in the right uniform. He always kept his step behind her and was almost fierce in protecting her, saying to photographers, ‘Out of the way, people want to see the Queen’.”

The loss of Mountbatten who had been a guardian figure to him since his youth was a huge blow to the Duke, says Brandreth, but “The Queen and the Duke were absolute realists, total realists”.

He continues: “The Duke — as he occasionally pointed out — was more royal than the Queen. He was descended on both sides from kings and queens, kaisers and emperors. His grandfather, George I of Greece, had been assassinated, they had cousins in Russia who were murdered…

“They walked with history and were aware of all that, but they kept themselves going by just keeping going, and by an outward view of life, they were very positive people — look up, look out, look to the future.

“Also, the Queen’s mantra was ‘reconciliation without rancour’. She very rarely expressed views about any political things, but someone she did admire hugely was Nelson Mandela and that was because of his 27 years in prison yet he was able to emerge without rancour. That moved her.”

Brandreth also enjoys close links with the new King and Queen and is clearly well enough thought of to get away with the occasional indiscretion. No sooner has he told me that he is a trustee of The Queen’s Reading Room, a charity promoting the value of reading, and that it had a very successful book festival at Hampton Court Palace than he lets slip “They would like to do something similar in Northern Ireland next year”.

Anyone who enjoys Brandreth’s masterly turns on Radio 4’s Just a Minute where competitors talk on a subject for one minute ‘without hesitation, repetition or deviation’ will know he is superb on the first two counts but — happily for interviewers — less so on the third.

Soon he is straying onto another Camilla story — on the radio show he’d blurted out how, as a 16-year-old boarder at Bedales, he occasionally had tea at her grandparents’ house and once discovered her hiding in the garden, smoking Woodbines.

“By complete chance she was listening and then she bumped into my wife at a flower show at our church and said to her ‘Now look, tell Gyles, I don’t deny that I was smoking nor that I was in the bushes, but I do deny they were Woodbines’.”

Next, he segues into grilling me on how Charles and Camilla’s visits to Northern Ireland have been received before declaring: “She’s marvellous!”

Our conversation romps on to literary matters. His favourite modern poet is Belfast-born Derek Mahon, whose poem Everything Is Going to Be Alright became popular during the pandemic. Brandreth’s recital of it “went a bit viral but not quite as viral as a version Dame Judi Dench and I did of The Owl and the Pussycat, with our hands in suds. Reciting one verse took 40 seconds — the recommended time for hand washing — but then someone said we shouldn’t have been together. I said ‘we formed a bubble!’”

Brandreth was “lucky enough” to meet Seamus Heaney and is President of the Oscar Wilde Society. “What nobody has quite worked out is why all the best writers come from Ireland? Yeats, Joyce, Wilde, Sheridan, Beckett… what is it?”

He is looking forward to his first stay in Belfast’s Grand Central Hotel, which is close to the Linen Hall Library — “there is no more wonderful library in the whole world” — and recommends a visit to the Museum of Literature Ireland, in Dublin, which he recently visited with his wife, the author Michele Brown. “We know the Irish Republic well, my wife has family there.”

This, however, will be her first visit to Northern Ireland — “We are dipping my wife’s toe in the magic of Belfast and hope to tempt her back soon”.

We spoke after news broke of the alleged plot to kidnap his This Morning colleague Holly Willoughby, but before she quit the show. “It’s a grim world but we’re all sending a virtual hug. The lesson one always learns from the late Queen is ‘this too shall pass’.”

Father-of-three Brandreth’s energy is incredible. “My wife would say ‘busy fool’,” he demurs. “But a headmaster once told me ‘busy people are happy people’ and I’ve found that to be true.”

He is so gregarious and such fun that I’m struck by how he formed a longstanding friendship with the Duke of Edinburgh, whose public image was of a rather abrupt character.

“I think he just put up with me. There’s a great line of Napolean’s ‘If you want to understand a person you have to remember what the world was like in the year that person turned 21’. Prince Philip turned 21 in the year 1942; he was mentioned in despatches, he was absolutely of that generation, no-nonsense, stiff upper lip, get on with the job, don’t complain. He was a very kindly individual with a slightly gruff exterior.

“The last time I was at a fundraising event with him at Buckingham Palace, about 15 years ago, I was trying to make my speech and he kept barracking me ‘oh, we’ve heard all this before’, ‘get on with it man’, ‘oh goodness, that’s not funny, that’s not even true’.

“It’s a bit unfair that the Queen’s Consort barracks from you from the sidelines, but anyway… he could be a bit cantankerous as he got older, but he always went out of his way to raise a laugh.”

Quite the double act, I’d imagine.

Gyles Brandreth in conversation with Baroness Foster; Blethering with the Baroness, Oct 24, 7.30pm, Stormont Hotel, tickets £23, book on Eventbrite. Proceeds to Guide Dogs NI.