Feature: This Barber doesn’t do small talk

Above: Lynn Barber Now Inset: Lynn Barber in her teens

Published: 25 November, 2010
By MATTHEW LEWIN 

Lynn Barber is a notoriously prickly interviewer, but her abrasive style is just a means of getting to the awkward and embarrassing details as quickly as possible. 

THERE are people who have been interviewed by Lynn Barber and threatened to kill her if they ever see her again. There are others whom she would be very uncomfortable finding herself alone with in a lift.

But Lynn, 66, who now works for the Sunday Times, takes it all in her stride. 

“I’m not a soft touch as an interviewer, that’s for sure,” she told the Lifelines audience at Burgh House.

“The trouble is that people tend to remember the hatchet jobs for years and years, whereas I often write quite favourable interviews. I think people like it when I’m being bitchy and they are disappointed when I’m not.

“Sometimes my editor rings to ask how an interview went. And if I say I rather liked the person, I can hear this sigh of disappointment.”

The death threat came from conceptual artists Jake and Dinos Chapman because Lynn had the temerity to make a connection between Dinos’s deformed hand and the deformed mannequins of children that they were exhibiting at the Royal Academy.

She also didn’t get on with Marianne Faithfull. 

“Yes, she was disappointing,” Lynn recalled. “She was so diva-ish and she kept me waiting for five hours, and just every­thing was horrible. She would probably scratch my eyes out if she saw me again.”

Lynn took a dislike to Harriet Harman: “She was just so self-important. I was amazed when she told me: ‘Single mothers know I’m on their side.’ 

“I told her single mothers don’t even know who the Prime Minister is, and the idea that they are sitting there in their tower blocks thinking: ‘Harriet Harman’s in charge and everything’s going to be all right,’ was bizarre. I asked her: ‘Have you ever met a real person in your life?’”

What makes a good interviewer? 

“You have to be really curious about people and I think that is something I’ve got,” according to Lynn.

“I think one of my strengths is that I am a woman, that I have no class loyalties either way, and also because I’m used to rudeness  and shouting.

“Some people see me as this middle-aged pussycat, and they are sometimes surprised at how tough I can be.”

But much of the Burgh House discussion was about the extraordinary two-year period of her life when she was a teenager and had an affair with a thief and a conman – which was the subject of a recent film, An Education, written by Nick Hornby, which was based on her life.

“It still seems strange to me,” Lynn explained. “This stranger, much older than me, picked me up in a flash car when I was 16 and I started to go out with him.

“But what was really odd about it was that my parents were totally keen on this idea, and having previously pressured me to study hard and go for the Oxford entrance exams, they were now saying things like ‘Oh, he wants to take you to Paris for the weekend? Off you go.’

“I sort of think that it was what is now called grooming. He put a lot of effort into charming my parents – more effort than into charming me. 

“He gave them a really thrilling time, and suddenly they were terribly keen that I should marry him and not go to Oxford.”

But when things started getting serious, Lynn discovered that he was already married and had a child.

For two years she failed to ask him important questions, and now she makes her living asking people tough questions. Were these two things connected?

“Certainly. I was far too naïve, too trusting, too willing to take people at face value. And I think that as a result of that nasty shock I am now the opposite – too suspicious, too untrusting, and I question people’s motives all the time.

“So I think that as an interviewer the conman event has probably stood me in good stead, but in real life, as a person, I don’t think it has been very good at all.”

After the affair Lynn did manage to get to Oxford, where she read English – after which she went to work on Penthouse magazine.

“I realised when I left Oxford that I had precisely two sellable skills,” she recalled. “One was shorthand and typing – which I knew was not much fun – and I could write. So I chose writing.”

And because she didn’t want to go through the hoops of two years in the provinces training on a local paper, she looked for a job in a non-unionised place, and thought Penthouse would be fun.

“I was incredibly lucky in timing, in that  it was then a tiny magazine with a staff of about four or five, and it was expanding the whole time I was there. I kept being given new responsibilities – and I learned an awful lot.”

During this period  she also wrote two sex books: How to Improve Your Man in Bed, and The Single Woman’s Sex Book.

“Well, I was also freelancing for women’s magazines, writing stuff about the sexual revolution, things like: ‘Should you live with him before you get married?’ Or ‘What happens about contraception?’ 

“I wrote an article called How to Improve Your Man in Bed which got incredible feedback, and we were swamped with letters from readers. Then a publisher asked if I wanted to do a book and I had to dream up some stuff to put in it.

“What it was really based on was the research by Masters and Johnston – serious research into male and female sexuality, so partly it was just translating this rather dry stuff into laymen’s terms.

“It had struck me that people like me who had been to Oxford were very used to the idea  that if you didn’t know something, you learned about it. If you were going to live in Russia you learned Russian. So if you are going to have sex with someone, you had to learn about sex. This idea that you are supposed to know it all instinctively was alien  to me.”

After taking some time off to have two daughters, Lynn returned to journalism, initially with the Sunday Express and the Independent on Sunday and for many years with The Observer before moving to the Sunday Times a few years ago.

Does she ever find confrontation uncomfortable?

“Thanks to my training with my father, people shouting at me is water off a duck’s back. In fact I feel quite cosy in those circumstances. The worst they can do is shout at me or tell me to get out, so it holds no terrors.

“I don’t find it uncomfortable at all. I think the whole thing with interviews is to try and get as quickly as you can to some sort of core emotion.

“It’s the opposite of polite conversation where you might be trying to keep it all ticking over smoothly. What you’re trying to do in an interview is get rid of the ticking over smoothly and start having quite awkward, embarrassing conversations, so I quite welcome these outbursts. 

“All the time I’m thinking: Ooh, great material!”