Defending

SIR John Mortimer takes a sip of champagne and laughs his famously wheezy laugh, like an antiquated accordion brought out of retirement for one last performance.

Mortimer has been elevated to that curious and perhaps uniquely British status, National Treasure. This position requires no formal qualifications beyond antiquity and a willingness to amuse and provoke in equal measure. A culture obsessed with youth may not afford old age the respect that was once its automatic due, but there remains a willingness in Britain to revere its grand old men and (occasionally) women.

Mortimer, like Tony Benn, falls into the category of the great survivor, and the affection in which he is held is perhaps in some respects a reward for simply hanging in there and continuing to play the game. There’s a danger that such affection can carry with it a whiff of condescension. Benn, for instance, is markedly more popular now that there is no danger of him running the country, but Mortimer seems comfortable with the role and is more amused than anything else that other people continue to take such an interest in him.

For years now he has been travelling the country with his one-man show, Mortimer’s Miscellany, a gentle evening of anecdotes and readings from favourite authors. Now, there’s the publication of a new collection of Rumpole stories to look forward to, which dispels fears that Rumpole had finally hung up his wig for good. Not so, and thousands of fathers across the country can doubtless look forward to unwrapping the latest volume on Christmas Day. "When you get old there’s not much else to do." says Mortimer. "I’m too old for love affairs and I can’t play golf so I might as well work. Of course," he adds with a small, slightly rueful smile, "I also have a large number of people to support in the style to which they have become accustomed."

When he’s not on the road or being brought to London, Mortimer spends mornings in his house in the Chilterns, writing by longhand. It’s only in the afternoons that he sometimes becomes restless and begins to brood. Like most authors, he writes because he can’t think of anything else to do, or resist the compulsion to put pen to paper. In any case, Rumpole allows Mortimer an outlet for expressing his own opinions. "I like Rumpole and I think he’s needed. It’s a much more effective way of saying these things. I always remember A Christmas Carol - not that I aspire to be Dickens - but he was going to give a lecture about poor children in London but then decided to write it as A Christmas Carol, which was far more effective."

The Rumpole stories are, in effect, a series of liberal morality tales. Beneath the surface of Rumpole’s battles with his superiors at work, with vindictive judges and his even more terrifying wife Hilda (She Who Must Be Obeyed), lies a despair with the current tenor of debate on law and order in Britain. Above all, Rumpole, like his creator, believes in decency and the importance of leading a quiet but compassionate life. Mortimer admits that his own liberalism enjoys the privileges of wealth, but Rumpole’s own concern is with the apparent determination of politicians at Westminster to erode ancient (and hard-won) legal rights.

His third volume of autobiography, The Summer of a Doormouse (subtitled ‘A Year of Growing Old Dangerously’) was a bravura account of how to revel in old age and make the most of infirmity. It is prefaced by two quotations that seem to illustrate Mortimer’s own philosophy. The first is from Byron’s journals: "When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a doormouse." The second, from Hemingway’s account of 1920s life in Paris, A Moveable Feast, is: "They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure." An individual life is a small thing, which must be seized and relished in equal measure. Above all, however, it is not a matter of life and death.

Yet Mortimer’s belief that "the best moment of a writer’s life is to go into a theatre and hear an audience laugh at something you’ve written" and his delight in seeing minor absurdities at every turn, should not be confused with an absence of seriousness. He may tell jokes to shrug off awkward questions and use humour as a protective shell, and he may play the part of the jovial old buffer splendidly, but there is a contrariness about Mortimer and a simmering anger beneath the surface of this champagne socialist (a term he coined). He echoes GK Chesterton’s lines, "Smile at us, pass us but do not quite forget, for we are the quiet people of England who have not spoken yet."

When we meet at the Royal Court Theatre in London - where he used to be the chairman of the board and was instrumental in raising the millions necessary to refurbish it - he is flushed with excitement from his presence on the Countryside Alliance’s Liberty and Livelihood march through the capital the previous day. "I was meant to be leading the wheelchair parade," he chortles, sipping his second glass of champagne, "but the other wheelchair people were very competitive and kept wanting to get into the lead." For a moment he seems more like an excited schoolboy on his first visit to the big city than an outspoken critic of the government who will turn 80 next year.

Mortimer, a one-boy communist cell at Harrow, despairs of Labour’s record in government. "You can’t tell the difference between Michael Howard and Jack Straw or David Blunkett. It’s all such nonsense. It’s so sad that nobody seems to realise that prisons don’t cure anything." The government’s determination to limit the right to trial by jury and its illiberal determination to eliminate fox-hunting strike him as being profoundly uncivilised. Rumpole will play his part, however small, in combating the former, but as for the latter, well, "Maybe it needs President Bush to put on a pink jacket and go hunting, because Tony Blair will do anything Bush tells him." He hopes that the sight of 400,000 marchers parading through the capital will make the government think again, but cannot quite pretend he is optimistic that it will. He would not have thought it possible that a Labour government could follow a Tory ministry that abolished the right to silence and make it look liberal.

Yet despite his liberalism, which if not exactly old-fashioned is certainly out of keeping with the spirit of the time, Mortimer is not blind to the realities of political life. In The Sound of Trumpets, published in 1998, he aims a telling sideswipe at the number of rock stars, actors and other celebrity supporters who so welcomed Labour’s victory the previous year, only to find themselves disappointed by the new government’s inability or disinclination to remove every Thatcherite stain from the statute book.

In the book, Terry Flitton, a new Labour candidate par excellence, damns his lover with this withering lesson in political home truths: "You want the best of every possible world. You want to congratulate yourself on being a Socialist. An unselfish friend of the poor. And the oppressed. And the bloody skint. You want to stand up for the workers’ rights without being a worker at all. And you’re all for high taxes while you don’t have to pay for them. So you can feel proud of your unselfish, noble, Socialist fight at the barricades, just so long as there aren’t any barricades to fight at. You want all the excitement and noble feeling of being a left-wing heroine without having to get yourself elected and get into power and actually do anything. And above all... you want to patronise those of us who have to compromise and manoeuvre and even perhaps lie a little to get to where we can change things, can make them better. And then you want to lie back on the pillows and light another fag and call us corrupt s**ts for not carrying out the high-minded, glorious, unworkable ideals you find so bloody comforting." The satire is wounding and Mortimer could almost be addressing himself, but it’s hard not to imagine Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell nodding their heads in agreement.

However pleased he may be when the likes of PD James proclaims magisterially that "Rumpole, like Jeeves and Sherlock Holmes, is immortal" (and frankly, who could resist such flattery?), Mortimer’s own writing, although it contains more than a nod to Wodehouse, is on a lesser plane. Rumpole is an amiable old cove, and Mortimer’s books are perfect comfort reading - undemanding, but as nourishing as a gutsy soup on a numbingly cold winter’s day. Nor should that be seen as damning with faint praise, since the art of mastering light, comic writing is as rare as it is easily under-appreciated. Mortimer’s Rumpole stories are constructed with an ease and simplicity that artfully hides the skill involved.

In that respect, Mortimer is a craftsman as much as an artist. His father was a divorce lawyer, a rather good one with a theatrical flair, and Sir John inherited his love for argument and performance. He first wanted to be an actor, "then when I was about 14 or 15 I sold a story to someone and I thought, yes, I want to be a writer. Being a barrister was like those girls who have waitressing jobs until they become film stars." (Although without the same kind of casting couch.)

"The main thing that links them all together, which is very important, is that they all call for an act of the imagination. It obviously calls for an act of the imagination to read a novel or see a play, but if you’re talking to a jury they’ve got to be able to imagine how they would feel if they were the person involved that particular night at home or in the pub or whatever the particular circumstances are. You’ve got to be able to persuade them to transport themselves into those people at that time to see how they would act - which is not a trick of advocacy but a creative way of coming to a just decision, really. You’ve also got to tell a jury a simple story that keeps their attention, just as a novelist wants his readers to keep turning over the pages."

Although he was by then already writing, Mortimer himself gained fame in the 1960s and 1970s as a barrister, defending Richard Neville at the infamous Oz obscenity trial, over an issue of the magazine that depicted, among other things, Rupert Bear with an erection engaging in sexual activity. He laments the fact that Margaret Thatcher put an end to such trials, ridiculously outdated though they were, simply because he enjoyed them so much. Yet, again, the comedy he found at the Old Bailey masked a wider, more crusading purpose.

"When I told my father I wanted to be a writer, he said well maybe you might possibly be a writer but consider what a horrible life your wife will have because writers are always at home discussing their work and never leaving the house. You should get a job that gets you out of the house."

In the event, Mortimer’s first wife, Penelope, was a writer and successful novelist herself. It did not make for an entirely happy marriage. Both parties were unfaithful and Mortimer was an enthusiastic fornicator, with a raffish gleam in his eye and a charming wit. He admits he was not a great husband, but then nor was she an ideal wife, although he felt hurt by her autobiography.

As he has grown older, Mortimer has grown to value decency, kindness and being nice as cardinal virtues. He met his second wife, also called Penelope, when she was 23 and the pair have been together in the Chilterns and in Tuscany - or, as Mortimer labelled it, Chiantishire, ever since. Now he watches with evident pride the progress of his daughters, Emily and Rosie, the former a successful actress (who appeared in Notting Hill, Scream 3 and The 51st State), the latter a catwalk model.

His father, to whom he was exceptionally close, went blind, but continued to practise. Mortimer has inherited his father’s poor eyes. One eye went some years ago and the other doesn’t work properly either. His mind remains sharp, even if his body, in its ninth decade, is slowly coming apart. He needs to be helped down stairs and walking any distance is not a serious proposition. Yet Mortimer prefers to mock the indignities of infirmity, and perhaps even revels in them. A failing body, with its attendant litany of minor but comic humiliations, acts as a filter for the unimportant stuff, allowing him to concentrate on what really matters.

Mortimer belongs, I think, in the vanguard of the supporting cast, a second lieutenant rather than a leader himself. He’s too reticent to play the heroic lead and too aware of life’s absurdities to cast himself as a tragic figure. "I suppose my favourite characters are people like Kent and Horatio - decent, honourable, chaps who don’t make a fuss. I think the stoical person who receives very little praise is still the person you should aspire to emulate. They’re more important than heroes." If you can recognise and respect your limitations, life is likely to be a more comfortable experience.

Mortimer might not have been capable of writing Brideshead Revisited, but he could adapt it brilliantly for the television screen. That’s no small achievement in itself and in Rumpole and his other work he has created characters that will endure. No-one of sense can read a Mortimer story without finishing it feeling slightly more well-disposed to their fellow man.

Now, as he scribbles away at a new book summing up his views on life, as well as adapting Rumpole for radio and writing a television film about Benny Hill ("he had a rather sad life"), he can reflect on a life that has not been without its victories or consolations. He has been lucky, he says. This self-modesty could be maddening in someone else but Mortimer’s unfailing cheerfulness and wit are charming enough to halt any desire to reproach him. Although he professes not to care about how he is remembered, Mortimer will leave a substantial body of work behind. Three volumes of autobiography, three plays, essays, profiles, screenplays, novels and, of course, Rumpole.

His greatest regrets are of missed opportunities, but he has perhaps had fewer than many others. The principal problem with old age, he remarks, is that it doesn’t last long enough. But, having confronted and written about his own mortality with a limpid, elegiac elegance, Mortimer has conquered the anxiety that William Dunbar’s poem ‘Timor Mortis Conturbat Me’ with its litany of writers cruelly struck down by the Grim Reaper occasioned in him. Everything, he says, is perfectly fine.

In any case, he half-wheezes, half-chuckles, "Alan Bleasdale tells a story about a novelist friend who was sitting next to a girl who was reading his novel on the tube. He knew that in a few pages there would be a good joke so he sat there all the way to Cockfosters waiting for a laugh which, of course, never came." If he travelled by tube, Sir John would not, it is safe to say, need to wait too long for the laugh to come.

Rumpole and the Primrose Path is published on November 7, Viking, £16.99