Sex, lives and memoirs

'Yes, it was Sven Goran himself, and I sensed an understanding between us that would make at least a chapter in my book'

We are being so deluged with autobiographies at the moment that publishers can hardly remember a time when so many memoirs have come flooding out. In the last fortnight alone we have had life helpings of John Birt and Edwina Currie, Ulrika Jonsson and Mrs Michael Barrymore, the golfer Colin Montgomerie, not to mention Jeffrey Archer's diaries...

How can we possibly read all these? The answer, of course, is that we can't. Unless you wait for the mighty Independent computer to produce an up-to-date amalgam of all the current life stories...

Yes, today we start the serialisation of Our Story, the gripping composite memoirs of all the people you want to read about! And in the first exclusive extract, we learn how Jeffrey Archer's plan to modernise the BBC fell foul of Sven Goran Eriksson's mother's implacable desire to see Rio Ferdinand play a more attacking role.

"I have never had the best of luck with men. I fall in love too easily, and very often with the wrong man, so all too often I end up bruised and wounded. This happened to me when I first met John Birt. He was plain John Birt then. Well, he is plain John Birt now. But a man cannot help the looks he is born with, and there was something else intangible about John Birt that drew me to him, and I have often wondered what it was.

Perhaps it was his advantageous tax arrangements. Perhaps it was his resemblance to John Major. Perhaps, above all, it was the gentleness and charm with which he explained to me, on the first occasion we met, at a party given by Angus Deayton, that he had huge ambitions to change the management structure of the BBC.

'You see,' he told me, 'at the moment, anyone in the BBC can get a programme made if he or she has a good idea. It's a disaster. I need hardly tell you that the proper way to make a programme is to scrutinise it through market research, audience-testing and consumer variability. The BBC is vastly over-organised, so I plan to introduce three more levels of management. Look, here are some plans that Peter Jay and I have roughed out on the back of an envelope...'

Hungry, unbridled passionate talk like this can do something to a woman. I had no idea what he was on about, but his self-belief seemed very important to him. I wanted him to be important to me, too. So I was bitterly chagrined when we met again five minutes later and he couldn't remember who I was.

On another occasion, Michael came home very drunk with a man he had met in a bar. Michael went upstairs to sleep it off and I said to this stranger, 'You know, Michael hasn't made up his mind if he is gay or straight yet, and this stranger said, 'That's nothing – I myself can't decide which is the best position for Steve Gerrard yet'.

Yes, it was Sven Goran himself, and from the very beginning I sensed that there was an understanding between us that would make at least a chapter in my book.

So, it was no surprise to me when, just after he became Prime Minister and formed his first Cabinet, he found no room in it for me. Perhaps, deep down, he was ashamed of all that had passed between us. Perhaps he was just jealous of all that I had achieved at the BBC, for I had set out a clear management plan to turn the corporation round, and that is exactly what I had done, just in the nick of time.

Perhaps nobody else could have done what I did for the BBC. Perhaps someday people will realise that the British prison system is death to people like me who have expensive clothes and are also innocent. And perhaps, at the end of the day, the thing I came to dread most of all, at the end of the day, was the sound of Michael coming home drunk and not even recognising me.

'Ulrika!' he would say. 'No, it's Nancy! No, it's Edwina!'

Then he would burst into tears and say that he had never stolen anything from Princess Diana, and he had loved her, and they had been going to do a programme together, but the BBC was so slow-moving that by the time they had okayed the idea, she'd been dead for a year, and I suddenly realised that golf was not the most important thing in the world."

Tomorrow: Why Edwina Currie is not in John Birt's index, and the day Michael came home sober...