Cretinism

It's less glamorous than being a sociopath, but there's a part of my mind that just doesn't work properly. I'm not a person to go around feeling sorry about what I've done. It's not in me. I can't do it; Julie Burchill, Britain's most venomous journalist, has written a novel for teenagers about a lesbian relationship. Peter Ross meets the poison pen diva for lunch to discuss sex, drugs and being a Christian, and why her great ambition these days is to be, well, nice

I KNEW, before I had been in Brighton one hour, that interviewing Julie Burchill was not going to be murder. I had come expecting tantrums and, if not tiaras, then at least Tia Maria. Journalists grow pale when recalling their tour of Julie, like foreign correspondents telling tales of near-death in strange lands. Even her press officer had hinted at the possibility of a strop. She was being interviewed by Elle Girl in the morning, he said, and the experience might leave her in need of a stiff drink before meeting me. Great, I thought, just what I need - Julie Burchill half-cut and in a full-on huff. But, in the end, she was, well, nice, which is not a word I'd ever thought I'd use to describe a woman who walked out on two husbands and two sons, who announces that, "Anybody who appears in the Harry Potter films should be shot on principle", and who has been Britain's most venomous journalist for almost 30 years. But, as we shall see, niceness is a virtue that Burchill has learned to love.

We meet in Brighton, her home since abdicating from the London media scene in 1995. Seated in the bar of the Hotel du Vin, she is flanked by her press officer Justin Somper and her best friend Nadia Petrovic, a buxom blonde in her early 40s.

It's half-past-twelve in the afternoon. Burchill is drinking vodka martinis. She is dressed in black, save for pink boots and a shocking pink bag, from which dangles the emblem of the Greek Communist Party. Thanks to a combination of two different diet pills, she has lost three-and-a-half stones in 12 months, dropping so many dress sizes so quickly that her abdomen must have vertigo. In 1984, George Orwell wrote about the Junior Anti-Sex League; Burchill looks like she might chair the Brighton branch of the Senior Pro-Sex League.

Drinks are ordered, my cleft chin is discussed ("If you was English, you'd be a poof!") and Burchill wastes no time in telling me why she has resigned from The Guardian after five years and gone to write a column for The Times. "They did something very rude," she explains in her West Country, cider-and-helium squeak. "Instead of offering me money to stay, they offered me a sofa. That very much offended me, and I couldn't work out why. Then I realised that it was because I was a woman of working-class origin, and they thought I sat on my fat ass all day, on the freakin' sofa, eating chocolates and yelling at The Jerry Springer Show. Which Nadia knows I do, but only in the morning." She pauses. "And in the afternoon I yell at Montel Williams. Anyway, I resented that because they wouldn't offer a sofa to Polly Toynbee or Simon Hoggart or any other ponce who works for them."

So she decamped to The Times, and has been writing for them since the start of the year. She has also written Sugar Rush, a novel for teenagers about two 15-year-old girls who become lovers, which Channel 4 plans to adapt for television. "The world wasn't exactly holding its breath for a new book from me," she says. "Ambition, my first novel, sold a million, but after that they did worse and worse and worse, and towards the end I couldn't get arrested." So an adult novel was off the agenda, but the idea of a book for teens had a different attraction; it would only be half the word count.

This appealed to Burchill's inner bovine.

She claims to be extremely lazy. "I'm not being nasty," she says, "but if I could write for partially sighted children that would be my ideal because the print would be really big."

In the end, she banged the book out in "ten afternoons after a good lunch", but thoroughly enjoyed writing it, and even delivered thousands more words than were required. Most of the sex was edited out, leaving Sugar Rush a fairly refined read, despite its 'Warning: explicit content' sticker. "There was a tiny bit of sex in it, with an electric toothbrush," she says, "and I was glad it was taken out because, if I look at it objectively, I find the spectre of a 45- year-old woman writing about kids having sex quite disgusting. It looks like you're perving over them, and, honestly, I don't perv over anyone but Gordon Brown."

She finds the Chancellor quite the hotty, and loves "the fact that you can be a man who looks like that, a man built for sex, and all you care about is politics."

Burchill was raised in Bristol as a Stalinist, and still has a bust of Lenin on her mantelpiece (she also has five dolls lined up in the kitchen, one for each abortion). Her father, Bill, was a trade union organiser. Her own politics are confusing; she has always been an odd mixture of Karl and Groucho Marx - she is enormously attracted to Soviet collectivism, but would never want to join any club that would have her as a member. What is clear, and this is something she shares with her first husband, the writer Tony Parsons, is that she has an absolute fetish for the working class from whence she came.

In her autobiography, I Knew I Was Right, she writes that "at her best, the young working-class woman is perhaps the ultimate evolutionary point of the human species, whether we are looking for beauty, sensitivity or compassion." You get a real sense of this view in Sugar Rush, in which one character, Maria Sweet, is a kind of prole Aphrodite.

"Maybe you idealise the first sort of people you fall in love with," she says, when I ask about this, "and with me it was either dogs or working-class girls. As you know, I left my background when I was 17 and went to London [to work for the New Musical Express], and was surrounded by the most amazing amount of middle-class ponces ever known to man. What a selection. I've never thought about it before, actually, but maybe that is what this book came from - I was taken away from my friend's love before I had time to become disillusioned with it. That's the way that you stop loving things - you are with them long enough to go off them."

I am just about to ask how this relates to her first two marriages, and to her brand new one, when she announces that she wants a drink.

"Do you want me to order it?" asks Nadia.

"Yes please, babe."

Burchill turns back to me and starts explaining that she is already planning a second teen novel, Becoming Music, about a girl who can transform herself into a song and influence the mood of people around her. "If I want to make myself cry, I only have to think of the opening bars to certain songs," she boasts, already welling up. "Don't make me do it!"

She cries very easily, and comes very close when talking about her last year at The Guardian; she was reported to the Crown Prosecution Service three times for anti-Irish and anti-Muslim comments in her column, and claims that a group of people at the newspaper had hoped she would be arrested for inciting racial hatred. "I felt so much anger towards my colleagues," she says. "They're so middle class they'd never come across foreign people in any capacity except domestic servants. They don't know what it's like to grow up in a racist community." She witnessed violent racism first-hand in Bristol, she says, and found it abhorrent. She says her experiences have left her more aware than most of the complex realities of race relations.

JUSTIN sidles over to the table. "Do you mind us interrupting for photographs?" "No," says Burchill, "let's do them now." She prefers to have her picture taken before lunch, as afterwards she is drunk and grouchy with photographers. "You talk to Nadia. She'll tell you anything about me."

They have been friends for six years. Nadia was working for a cleaning firm and was sent round chez Burchill. "I didn't know who she was," she says. "She was very strange. She was quite reclusive, almost timid, but there was something dramatic about her. I was fascinated with her, really." Burchill poached Nadia to clean solely for her, and they have become very close, almost sisters. It is odd, though, an employee paid to clean up her mess also being a friend. The balance of power is clearly in Burchill's favour, but you might argue that this is just a formalisation of the sort of relationship she has with everyone in her life - ultimately, she is in charge, and whether or not she is actually paying your wages, to be her friend is to be, to some degree, in her service.

Nadia certainly seems aware of this. "Julie has been very honest and said to me that there's a shelf-life for everything and there's a shelf-life for friends. I've often thought, 'When's my time going to come?'"

Photos over, we move through to the restaurant. Burchill and I are on a separate table from the others. She gestures toward the olive oil. "Isn't your first thought when you see a bottle on a table, 'Can I drink it?'"

I ask whether she likes the idea that in writing a book for teens she is influencing minds more impressionable than those who read her columns. "If my book has any influence on young girls," she laughs, "it will be to make them go out and get pregnant by the first man they meet." She glances at the menu, wrinkles her nose. "Ooh, imagine eating dandelions."

The conversation turns to drugs. I had the impression that she had given up cocaine when she absconded to Brighton with her lover, the columnist Charlotte Raven, but this turns out not to be the case. "That'd be like moving to Brighton to give up being gay," she snorts. Coke is now an occasional thing for her, and in any case she has always preferred speed, even asking, sotto voce, if I have any. "When you get to a certain tax bracket, nobody's selling speed any more," she laments, "and suddenly you've got to buy coke." This, she says, is like being forced to wear gold earrings when you secretly yearn for the kind that make your lobes green.

When she first moved to Brighton, leaving behind her second husband, the critic Cosmo Landesman and nine-year-old Jack, for whom she subsequently fought and lost a custody case, she was taking so much coke that it was actually starting to make her feel tired. This was a disaster for a naturally idle person who had always used drugs as a way of getting work done, so she decided to take it only infrequently, and thus enjoy it again.

All this talk has caught Justin's attention. He leans over from an adjacent table and reminds Burchill that she is here to talk about the book.

"But Justin," she says, "you knew I wasn't going to be Lynne Truss. You can't send me out and expect me to be totally well behaved."

Suffice to say that she is enjoying something of a second honeymoon with cocaine, which is funny because, as we speak, she is actually on honeymoon, sort of. This interview is taking place on the one-week anniversary of her marriage to Daniel Raven, 13 years her junior, and brother of former squeeze Charlotte. He works for a computer-programming company, and they have been a couple for nine years. Why, I ask, did she decide to marry again? "Because nine years looks really sweet, but if you are together for ten years and don't get married, you look mad. You look like you're waiting for someone better to come along."

But in her columns she has railed against marriage, calling it a licence to kill. Has she changed her mind about all that?

"I've got nothing against marriage," she says, "just against my husbands."

This is disingenuous. In I Knew I Was Right she wrote that she didn't want to divorce Landesman because it would mean marrying Raven, then within five to ten years she would get bored, and break it off, and she didn't want to hurt him like that. "That's terrible!" she says, when I remind her of this. "God, I'm so stupid! No, I won't get bored with this one. I'm happy in this one. He's the first good person I've been married to. I'm going to copy him, I'm going to be like him. That's what I'm going to do."

She is attracted to men she wishes to emulate. "My first husband was confident, and I wanted to be confident," she says. "My second husband was Jewish, and I wanted to be a Jew. My third one, he's just really nice, and I guess I want to be really nice. That's my tragic, pathetic ambition in my old age - just to be a nice person."

What is it about Daniel's niceness that she aspires to? "He's the only man, other than my father, who I've never seen lose his temper. There's no malice to Daniel. He seems 'appropriate'. He seems absolutely appropriate for the way that a 21st-Century adult human being should behave. When you're young and a rebel, the last word you want anybody to use about you is 'nice'. You think anything's better than being nice. Being evil is better than being nice. Daniel's the first person I have ever met who has made me look at them and think being nice must be the greatest adventure in the world. Maybe it's me growing up, or just him making niceness look so ... nice." She giggles. "I'm embarrassed saying it. I don't like people who gush over their spouses but he's the first person who's made me feel that way."

I ask if they are going to have children. She blows a raspberry. "At my age! That's positively obscene, dear!"

It's possible. "I don't want any. No way. No, no, no. That's not for me."

She doesn't get on with Robert, now 25, from her marriage to Parsons, but she and 18-year- old Jack seem to have a good relationship. Would she like to have had a daughter? "No, because I would have brought her up just like me, and she would have been a horrible girl."

It's pretty clear that the Ravens (she loves that her married name is Julie Raven) are not the nuclear family type. They don't even share a home. "We've been so happy for nine years that I'm just very worried about the whole business of the domestic thing," she explains. "But we live very near and we see each other six nights a week. We're just very happy the way we are. We have a bargain that the first one who ruins their health, the other one will move in and look after them." She grins. "Daniel will go first. Bad stomach."

Burchill used to say that she was a sociopath, meaning that she lacked certain human attributes, namely empathy and guilt. This "little something missing" allowed her to walk out of two family homes without a backward glance, but it is also what has made her such a fearless writer at the NME, Face, Sunday Times, Mail on Sunday, Express, Guardian and The Times. Anyway, she now disavows the term sociopath, and claims to have "a kind of moral cretinism. It's not a nice thing to say, God knows, about anybody, and it's less glamorous than being a sociopath, but there's a part of my mind that just doesn't work properly. I'm not a person to go around feeling sorry about what I've done. It's not in me. I can't do it."

Nevertheless, she is keen to stop being a moral cretin, and her relationship with Daniel is a big part of that, as is her Christianity. I had read that her conversion came in the last few years, and wondered whether this was linked to the death of her parents - Bill in 1998, her mother, Bette, in 2000 - but she says no, she had her road-to-Damascus experience in her flat in Bloomsbury when she was just 26, but she kept quiet about it for years.

Raised as an atheist, she was sent to Sunday School only because her parents didn't like to have sex when she was in the house, but her father came from an Orange family, and despite not believing in God himself, brought her up to consider Catholicism one of the roots of evil in the world. Now she calls herself a Lutheran but doesn't attend services because the nearest church is in London, and she doesn't think Martin Luther would want her to travel for two hours on a Sunday.

This sounds flighty but she is serious about her faith - "I spent my wedding night arguing with my husband about theology" - and says she finds Lutheranism particularly attractive because of "its plainness, and its stress on ethics as opposed to morals. It doesn't reduce God to the role of censorious, curtain-twitching pervert as Catholicism does. And women are completely equal in terms of being called to serve. I once saw a documentary about a Swedish Lutheran priest who drove a red sports car and looked like Agnetha from Abba!"

She is outrageously Islamophobic, which I assumed was related to her Christianity, but in fact, she says it comes directly from her "philosemitism", her love of Jews, and that that stems from seeing images of the Nazi death camps in a magazine when she was nine.

She has trouble reconciling her relationship history, that "patchwork of mishap", with being a good Christian, so has decided God is only interested in the ethical and financial side of her life, "which means I give away a quarter of my income every year. I currently live on a bank loan, and I shouldn't, because I earn (pounds) 125,000 a year."

Does she pray? "Yes. I know I'm a proper Christian because I never pray for myself. You know what I do pray? For people I feel are lonely. I pray for them, and I get upset and start crying." However, she concedes, "Maybe that just means I'm an emotional mess and not a Christian at all."

The truth is that if God did start taking an interest in what goes on in Burchill's boudoir, he'd find it terribly confusing, and go back to simple stuff like designing duck-billed platypuses. Even she doesn't seem to have a handle on her own sexual history. Having told me that "My deep, dark secret is I've only slept with five people", she later says "well, between five and seven". And when I mention - in response to her insisting that she isn't bisexual - that Charlotte Raven wasn't the first woman she went to bed with, I actually have to remind her that in her autobiography she writes about Susan Murray, whom she met at the NME when she was 17. "Oh God, I forgot about that," she says. "It wasn't something that really registered with me. I was just lying there like a filleted cod and I didn't really do anything I don't really see it as sex."

Lunch over, she ambles off to the toilet, which gives me a moment of contemplation. Brighton suits her, and not just because, as she says, at the seaside there is a detachment from reality, and no sense of cause and effect. No, I think it suits her because she is like Pinkie from Graham Greene's Brighton Rock - a kind of wilfully wayward child-adult, an innocent who has worn the mask of malevolence so long that it has eaten into their face.

Later, back in the bar, sitting beneath a mural of famous Brighton residents in which she does not feature, I ask whether she might yet turn her hand to serious fiction. "I don't think I've got it in me, to tell you the honest truth," she says. "I live my life on the surface, which suits me when it comes to happiness, but I really think that a novelist, even a bad one, needs a certain level of self- examination that I don't have. Everything I've got is mine by design, and I wanted to not be able to examine myself or feel sad.

"Maybe a degree of melancholy would make me a better writer, but I wouldn't have had such a good time." She gets out her black American Express card, no credit limit, to pay for drinks. "They say the worst thing that can happen is getting your heart's desire, but f**k it, I think it feels pretty good."u Sugar Rush is published by Young Picador, priced (pounds) 9.99

Copyright SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.