Chapter 30

No more random interviews, I decided. Just Esther, of course, and maybe one that the BBC’s Religious Affairs department had spoken to me about—half an hour, one to one, face to face, non-confrontational interviews about those who had had life-changing experiences and the moral and ethical issues involved. Everything else had to go. And I wanted to see no new people. I was retreating in on myself. It was horrible. I phoned Esther.

‘What a complete hatchet job.’

‘No, not a complete hatchet job, just a hatchet job. I wouldn’t let Mary Riddell over my threshold.’

‘I rather wish I hadn’t.’

‘Look, don’t go taking to strange writers without running them past me first.’

But it isn’t that easy to turn off the media. I received another call from the reporter of the tabloid who had been so interested in the Godparents.

She phoned to say she had been buying water locally and that someone had told her Esther Rantzen was one of the Godparents. ‘Did you think that choosing a high profile person like Esther with her connections to Childline to be a Godparent would help you get residence for the babies?’ I could, of course, have answered simply ‘no’ and should have done. Instead, I repeated that we had known each other for years.

Within the hour Esther phoned me with a list of questions they had given her, inviting her to justify surrogacy, my sons, me and her status as ‘patron’ (sic) of Childline. We discussed the line to take.

‘It’s a private matter. To say anything is likely to give the story legs.’

‘OK, I’ll say the same.’

A while later she told me she had answered the questions and, as she had been libelled by that publication twelve years earlier, had insisted that her answers be taped. I would have to learn from her.

The article was a long time coming. On 11 November, it appeared over two inside pages. Once again almost every ‘fact’ was wrong. There was none of the rhetorical questioning of the Mail that had carried a certain believability with it. This was pure fiction. Here readers were instructed how to react. The babies were to be christened in their ‘costly gowns’. The Mail’s Mothercare clothing had been promoted to ‘designer-label clothes’. A photo-shoot was described at which ‘Ian was reluctant to kiss or cuddle the boys... and seemed uncertain how to hold them.’ Nonsense! Kissing and cuddling was what I did best. In fact, no photo-shot had happened and the picture that adorned the article was one of my own copied from the Mail. Such are the ways of some of the press.

It all just added to the remarkable picture the writer was painting. I had become ‘TV Esther’s Tycoon Pal’. There was ‘shock’ expressed that she was to be godmother. The source of the shock was unspecified. That was the only part that had not already been reported with generally more accuracy in other papers and, no doubt, the reason this freelance writer’s work was finally given the light of day.

Readers were invited to contact a ‘Triplet Hotline’ at the paper with their views. My poised fingers twitched with anticipation at doing just that. What was the point? I had already been hung out to dry.

David Mellor, former MP and Minister fallen from grace because of a sex scandal, weighed in as well in his ‘Man of the People’ column, decrying ‘designer babies for spoilt millionaires’. By that time, my father was unable to do anything for himself. From washing and shaving him to doing up his buttons to wiping his bottom and changing his incontinence pad while at the same time helping feed and change the babies, ‘spoilt’ was not an adjective that sprang to my mind.