KEY POINTS:
Lord Ashcroft, the man who gave the money to get back our war medals, has been on the radio and the TV this week saying "dastardly" in relation to the crims who did the deed.
I have never heard anyone actually say this and he said it, to
my delight, early on. He has now given a further sum, up to $200,000 on top of the original $200,000 because he would love to see the medal-knicking crims caught. "Because this particular crime, I think, is dastardly."
What a fantastic word! I said. "I was going to ask you to say it."
"Yeah, okay," he said, "you've got it."
He is happy to talk about the Victoria Cross until after the cows come home because he has been besotted with the award since he was a boy. His father was a young officer on one of the first Normandy landings and was eventually persuaded to tell the story his son is telling me today.
It is of "the actual smell of vomit, the metaphorical smell of fear, the pinging of the machine guns ... his colonel killed by his side ... So that made me say "wow" and many fathers could have related that story, but this was my father."
That was the beginning of his fascination with the concept of bravery, and the VC, and then in his teens he read that somebody had bought a VC.
"And I thought, `Now, that would be absolutely fantastic'. I thought if you actually owned a VC you could put the initials after your name. So Michael Ashcroft VC sounded incredible, until a teacher destroyed that particular myth."
But the fascination remained and he now has the largest collection of VCs in the world. And now here he is, being treated like a hero himself. "Treated like a lord!" he says, and he is joking, but why shouldn't he be?
He's not one of those obsessive collectors who go and look at the medals in the night. "No, I don't creep down at three in the morning, disturbing no one and well, you might put a little spotlight on. No, sadly I don't fit that particular caricature." He is not some military nut, either. He last held a gun "in my youth, for a bird shoot or something", but when his people in London were asked by the New Zealand SAS, "Would Lord Ashcroft like to use the range?" they told the SAS, `Lord Ashcroft loves to shoot things up'. They were taking the piss." Still, he got our own lovely VC winner Willie Apiata as his instructor and it "was great fun". You could see from the look on his face that this was almost as exciting as seeing his first VC.
I had been told we had 45 minutes but, as we already know, he is a very generous sort of lord. He gave me an hour, although quite a bit of this was used with what he would call my silly questions and by his not answering these questions and then our arguing, amicably, about his not answering.
I had reluctantly to agree not to include a joke he made to a journalist years ago which caused him a huge amount of embarrassment. I said I would be surprised to hear that he was so easily embarrassed but he wouldn't shift and, unless I agreed, he wasn't going to go any further. He is, he says, persistent and so, I say, am I. "And I've noticed, Michele. I realise to deal with you, that you have to return that persistence otherwise you'd become intimidating." Oh, what a flatterer.
He loved almost every minute but I can see that he can be very steely indeed. This is presumably why he is such a successful businessman. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt and sneakers. I don't know what I thought he'd be wearing, something lordy presumably. I said, "I must say you don't look very lordy. You also don't look like someone who's got 900 million quid."
"Well," he said, "I can only take that as a compliment." He's not a toff. He's a self-made man who made a lot, initially from cleaning companies and now from ADT, "the world's largest electronic security company". Which is why he's got 900 million quid. "So they say."
He had flown up from Wellington the night before in his private jet after a "boys' night out" with the big wigs from defence and the police and got to bed at 4am. He looks remarkably sprightly (he's 62) for it, but then he is as tough as old toenails. When he had his quadruple heart-bypass in 2001 he told people - presumably not his wife and kids - that he was going on a safari, scheduled the operation for a Friday so he could recuperate over the weekend and was back fundraising for the Conservative Party, from his hospital bed, on the Monday.
He told people his weight loss was the result of food poisoning. He didn't tell me any of this. I read it in his book, Dirty Politics, Dirty Times, which is about his libel fight with the Times, and his battles with New Labour. He gave me this book, at the end, and his other book, Victoria Cross Heroes, at the beginning. He said he'd sign the VC book for me, "before I go. Unless you're mean to me".
He never gives interviews in Britain because "I'm quite happy not to. I don't see a particular purpose or reason and I don't particularly like answering some of the questions, which are: why are you successful? Because I feel that whatever answer you give, you can never accurately reflect how you feel. Or a journalist will change it to what its meaning isn't."
This is why he won't let me put his joke in. Although I tried to win that one, it was never going to happen. I think he rather enjoyed the wrangle, although he undoubtedly enjoyed the win as much. He told me earlier, when I asked for an insight into his character, that he was reluctant to give one. "In fact, I'd go even further. I wouldn't do that because that can then be misinterpreted and you know how you guys love to cut and paste ..."
I would be far too frightened to do any such thing given that he's litigious. "Not at all," he said, grinning, "not at all. I'm a pussycat." I said I didn't believe this for one minute and he said, "I bet you say that to all the boys".
You can see why he might get himself in trouble. I assume I can quote one of the jokes from his book without him sending me a bomb - which he said he would send if I wrote horrible things.
So I'll risk repeating what he said to Princess Diana the first time they met, when she was talking about how her husband got criticised for almost everything. Who, at the end of the day, would want his job? she asked. To which he replied ... "I certainly wouldn't, ma'am, with the possible exception of between midnight and 6am." He can only blame himself for that one.
The one thing you are strictly forbidden to ask is where he lives. So of course I asked and of course he wouldn't tell me. "Move on," he said. I tried it a number of ways but he just kept saying "move on". He had already said he could keep up the pregnant pause for as long as I could. I asked if he got angry about being referred to as a tax exile, which is what the question about where he does or doesn't live is all about, and he ticked me off again. He has dual nationality between Britain and Belize.
He is a former treasurer of the Conservative Party and now a deputy chairman. I am allowed to ask some questions about politics: what a deputy chairman does, for example. He does all the polling and market research and is in charge of the strategy and organisation of the marginal seats. By 2005, when he published his book, he had donated around 3 million to the Conservatives and more in loans. He is, I venture, something of a controversial character in Britain.
There is his peerage and the tax status and the enormous amounts of money he's given to the Tories.
He says, "I always wonder what controversial means. There's an old saying: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man attempts to make the world change to him. Ergo, progress can only be made by the unreasonable."
It has been written that his influence cannot be underestimated. What did he think about that? "I have no idea," he said. This is another silly question. I am supposed to put in about how he used to own a company here called Crothalls, which employed thousands, but I'm not going to let him win 'em all.
I ask him whether the nickname given to him by David Cameron's senior allies is really Blofeld, after one of Ian Fleming's super villains. I think he quite likes that, although he said that to say he took it as a compliment would be going a bit far because Blofeld was "an evil bastard". He certainly took an inordinate amount of pleasure out of calling me Mrs Blofeld.
We agreed to say: "Well met." And he wrote something very sweet in the book and his new thing is saving whales so I suppose I must concede that he can be a bit of a pussy cat after all.
