I find it hard to remember. I do remember that the term I was President of the Union, I did keep all the invitations you got and that you were asked because of who you were. And I think that, you know, there were hundreds of them. People’s parties who didn’t know you very well and all the rest of it.

Friends? Well, I found the Union provided most of my friends, I suppose. I remain, after 50 years, a friend of Michael Heseltine’s despite our difference of politics, but I’m quite, you know, favourable disposed towards Michael and was a very keen supporter that he should become Prime Minister. Not within the party, clearly, but I was excited by the fact that he might become Prime Minister in 1990 when he ran against Thatcher. I remain a close friend of Jeremy Isaacs of the Royal Opera House and Channel Four. There were other two... two or three friends I retained from Christ Church. There’s a... Charles Williams, who sits in the House of Lords, Lord Williams of Elvel, who was at Christ Church with me and was captain of cricket. There’s a boy called Robyn Porteus, now a portly gentleman, who went into stockbroking. And I think eventually became Bursar of a Cambridge College. I see him. I don’t see an enormous number of people. Of course, when you get to my age, a lot of your friends have died. There was a boy at school with me whom I liked, a great friend of mine called John King Farlough but he died untimely from cancer, I suppose ten years ago now. But I did keep up with him a bit though he lived in Canada as a professor somewhere so I didn’t see all that much of him. And I’m just trying to think… oh, there were members of the Labour Club, I think, that I remain friends with, who I knew. Some of those have died. A nice boy called Alec Grant, who was a lawyer, became, I think, a Master of the Queen’s Bench or something. I used to see him. But I saw him partly because he was The Observer lawyer and, therefore, when I arrived on The Observer I found this old Oxford contemporary, actually the, sort of, barrister who came in on Friday nights and Saturdays and read all the copy. So that may have had something to do with that.

I don’t have a host of friends, no. I suppose that when I was at Oxford, I did see a lot of people. I obviously went to a lot of committee meetings and that kind of thing at the Labour Club and went to editorial conferences of Isis and the rest of it but I hadn’t kept up with that number of people, though I’ve kept up oddly enough with more people I was at Oxford with than I was at school with, where I hardly know anyone anymore.