How we met: Peter Bottomley and Auberon Waugh

Auberon Waugh, 53, is the editor of the Literary Review and writes for the Spectator and Daily Telegraph. He has written many books, and in 1979 stood in Devon North for the Dog Lovers Party. He has four children. His clubs: the Beefsteak and the Academy.

Peter Bottomley, 48, is the Conservative MP for Eltham. He has worked in Employment and Northern Ireland and was a minister at the Department of Transport between 1986-89. He is married to Virginia Bottomley and has three children. He is a regular contributor to the Literary Review and a stalwart member of the Academy.

AUBERON WAUGH: My early relations with Peter Bottomley were somewhat overshadowed by the fact that he was the minister for roads and in charge of the fascist clampdown on people who live in the country and drive cars. The reason for this fervour of his - he announced when we later came to meet - was a piece I'd written for the Spectator about the death of a sister. So it's very symmetrical, the story of our relationship: he read this and wept quietly to himself and went out burning with ardour to transform the world and abolish road accidents, and in the course of doing that made an extreme nuisance of himself. Suddenly there was this reign of terror; the country was being asked to change its drinking habits for the sake of one fanatic's sentimental feelings about an article in the Spectator.

I attacked him in print with, I think, almost greater savagery than I've attacked anyone, except possibly Shirley Williams. That is rather the form of political journalism in England: you don't go for the issues, you go for the personalities. I'd been attacking him viciously for about 18 months when, in 1988, I attended a Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch, and for a practical joke they'd put us next to each other. Well, I found him not only an engagingly eccentric person as I'd expected, but also warm-hearted and witty and amusing. Another thing I couldn't help noticing: the lunch was sponsored by a whisky firm and we were all given little miniatures of this particular whisky. A lot of people didn't take theirs, and when he left Peter was stuffing his pockets with everybody else's little bottles, which I thought was very endearing. I did check he was going away chauffeur-driven of course. These bloody ministers all do.

Thereafter our relationship was still not as warm as it has become since, but it was cordial and friendly. In the course of my cruel treatment, I'd rather turned him into a joke figure and he did rather live up to it. Then, poor man, for his sins, he was sent to Northern Ireland and out of my sights. Some other fascist extremist was put into that job and so Peter was no longer under attack.

When we were doing the Christmas 1992 issue of the Literary Review, which was the 'Spleen' issue, I approached him to write a piece, and he jumped at it and, bless him, he's been sending in reviews, under his own and other names, at the rate of about three a week ever since. He's joined the club downstairs, the Academy, which he's taken to like a duck to water; he's a very popular member. He comes bouncing in about twice a week now. He's an odd person - he's always sending notes to people and suddenly calling and you can never be certain he won't drop into this office any minute. Nobody's safe.

He's a terribly good friend really. He's always deluging us with ideas, stunts to get the magazine better known - telling us to send off copies to the Privy Council or the head of Virgin or whatever. We're far too busy, though - he needs an entire ministry of servants to carry out his ideas. I think he sees the magazine rather as his life's mission - he's been taken off road safety and puts the same passion and loyalty into the Literary Review. He's a terribly clever man, but most of his ideas are jolly mad. I think he's forgotten them as soon as they're out of his mouth. His conversation generally doesn't always have much relevance to anything else, which makes it rather easy to forget. I don't know that he listens much to other people; he's always pursuing his own ideas and bursting out with illogical additions to the last thought. I've never seen him the worse - though it would be impossible to be the worse - for drink. I mean he's very odd anyway, that's the truth, so one doesn't really know. I think he sees this place as a home away from home, an escape from the House of Commons. There must be an awful lot of bores there. And of course the club is terribly cheap. You can get a double whisky for under a pound.

PETER BOTTOMLEY: I first got to know Auberon Waugh indirectly through his father's letters, which I read in Harare in 1980. Evelyn Waugh, writing to Daphne, Lady Acton, described his sense of relief that Auberon survived his national service. He was shot several times in the stomach; he has some terrible war wounds. Not many people know that.

We then, I suppose, move on to 1986 - 15 September 1986 - when Auberon Waugh wrote an article in the Spectator called 'Another Voice', and the first paragraph of that is the best elegy I've read in modern times. It describes his feelings or reactions to the death of his sister. He ended the article by saying only a fool would inquire into the cause of the crash that killed her.

As it happened, only three weeks before, I had been given the job of being the fool who was supposed to inquire into why it was that we were killing 500 to 600 people a year on our roads. I decided that if there were relatively easy ways of cutting the casualties, that would be a sensible way of spending my time at the Department of Transport. Over the next three and a half years I helped to cut the casualty rate - in relation to distance travelled - by about 40 per cent. I think Auberon Waugh deserves a large part of the credit for that.

We met for the first time at the Spectator lunch, in the days when they used to invite people like me to their lunches, and just as they thought it would be good fun to put Norman Tebbit next to David Young, they were amused to place Auberon Waugh and me side by side. In previous months, Mr Waugh had been, shall we say, 'paying attention' to the sort of things I was doing. In fact, there was a time when I said to someone I would sue them if they went on defaming me, and they said I couldn't do that, because I hadn't sued Mr Waugh.

Anyway, Auberon Waugh and I got on very well during lunch, though at the end some sneak went up and told him that I'd put a sticker on his back saying 'Don't get a ban; get a bus'.

Then our ways parted a bit, until one day I was waiting to say hello to the American ambassador somewhere, and the woman next to me in the queue was Miriam Gross, the literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph. She said she was asking people to write 150 words on the person they would write a biography about if they were going to write a biography, and I said I'd do Mr Waugh. I rang and warned him - he didn't seem to mind - and wrote my 150 words. I praised him for his contribution to cutting casualties and I paid tribute to his constant campaign against drunkenness. He spends his time recommending higher-priced wines - at least, higher-priced than most of my constituents can afford. And we all know the higher the price, the less people drink.

And then, I think before he saw these damaging remarks, he asked if I would like to contribute to his December issue of the Literary Review - the finest magazine produced in Soho. He wanted someone to write on an 'Outrage', something I felt strongly about, and because I'm a vitriolic supporter of a return to basics, to reasoning and rationality, I sent him a few words on that, which he very kindly published.

Since then, I've decided that when I get to 50 I'm going to become a motorcyclist, if I can find a motorcyle with leg protectors; I'm going to become an intellectual, and if I can't become an intellectual I'm going to become a literary pseud. Writing for the Literary Review and being a member of the Academy club makes me feel I'm on my way.

The more I see of Auberon Waugh's editorial empire, the more I admire him. It takes a gift of genius to run a magazine and organise a club with no visible means of support. It's the kind of entrepreneurship that I think is to be recommended to those who govern us. I also admire someone who can write nearly as many words each week as Libby Purves, and all, I understand, so that he can renew the windows in his ancestral home.

We don't really meet outside the walls of 51 Beak Street, W1. He did allow me to come and play bridge with his friends once, but they all turned out to be psychiatrists. I wondered then whether he doesn't think I'm totally insane and this is his social service. So when people say to him, 'What good have you done?' he can say 'I've helped Peter Bottomley though his expansion of career opportunities.'

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