Who knew that eyebrows could be quite so critical? Ken Follett’s magnificent arches twitch and rise whenever I say something he doesn’t particularly like or agree with, which seems to be every time I open my mouth. A Leftie Follett may be, but his eyebrows are pure Norman Lamont.
It’s the smile that accompanies these movements that does it. Combined with the eyebrows, you are made to feel as if you are wasting his time. Which I suppose I am. I have had to move this interview due to a stomach bug, and I get the impression that the one-time darling of New Labour is put out. This afternoon the multi-millionaire catches a plane to Paris for the start of a three-month book tour, and I feel like an inconvenience to the man for whom the term “champagne socialism” was surely invented.
“Are you getting a private jet?” I ask, remembering a long-ago interview in which he mentioned a desire for one.
“No,” he says, raising the Follett follicles. “It’s one of the few things I can’t afford.”
What are the other things, I wonder?
“It’s hard to think of anything else,” he says, bluntly.
We meet at his office in Stevenage. His wife, Barbara (Ken and Barbie, ha!), was — until the small matter of the expenses scandal — the Labour MP here, stepping down before the last election, but not before repaying £32,976.
This is home, he says. Well, up to a point, I think. He also has a place in Antigua, and one in London, though he has long since sold the Cheyne Walk pad in which he used to host extravagant parties for the likes of Tony and Cherie in the early 1990s, before it all went sour (but more of that later). He’s also got rid of the place in Cape Town. I suppose that we are living in an age of austerity now, and Follett agrees that three homes is “plenty”.
Anyway, they have stayed in the constituency because “we’re pretty committed to Stevenage. We like it here, we’re part of the town’s life, and we’re still part of the Labour Party here.” Without wanting to come across as a crashing snob, Stevenage does not strike me as a place for people who hanker, realistically at least, after private jets.
In the cab over, the taxi driver bemoans the suicide rate, the lack of jobs, the fact that “all the employment seems to go to the Asians”. He doesn’t know where Ken’s office is — The Follett Office, as it is called — but we soon find it, on something resembling an industrial estate, alerted to its presence by the huge, gleaming Bentley parked outside, complete with personalised numberplate.
Big fish, small pond – I am minded of the character in Harry Enfield who likes to tell his downtrodden neighbours that he is “considerably richer than you”.
As Follett is a novelist, I had expected his office to be quite small. But this is my first mistake: Follett is not just a novelist, he is a multi-million-pound business. He employs a staff of 16 “for keeping track of the money”; it is estimated that he earns £12 million a year, though when I ask the actual amount I am met with an oddly modest but blunt “no, not that much”. (I wouldn’t quite mind the refusal to talk about money had he not earlier told me about the £100 bottles of Salon champagne that he liked to drink most nights.)
The other reason he needs the staff is to keep track of his many appointments. “I do these interviews all over the world,” he says, as if underlining my status as mere minion.
He wants Barbara to come and manage the business for a bit. Indeed, on her website she says that she will soon take up the position of “chief executive officer” there, which makes it sound as if she is going to run BP.
Anyway, the office is lined with copies of Follett’s novels — the thrillers and page-turners such as The Pillars of the Earth that sell millions across the globe. His biggest market is America (30 million copies so far), but the Germans are catching up. “It’s great that in the German language I’ve sold almost 30 million books. Isn’t that amazing?” He is right. It is.
Follett’s books are all so weighty that I think they could actually serve as pillars of the earth should it ever wobble off its axis. His latest, Fall of Giants, is almost 900 pages long, the first novel in a trilogy that will span the 20th century.
“It’s the most dramatic and violent era in the history of the human race, so that immediately makes it interesting to write about,” he says, sounding engaged for the first time. “But also, we have lived through it, it’s where we come from. Yet we don’t understand it. For example, I bet you don’t know why there was a First World War …”