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It was my friend from Newcastle, Nick Evans, who told me that there was a researcher’s job going at London Weekend Television on Weekend World, ITV’s prestigious but little watched current affairs show that was broadcast on Sunday lunchtimes. Nick had left Newcastle soon after me to become a researcher on Weekend World and had rapidly been promoted to become a producer. He told me if I applied for the job he would make sure the least I got was an interview; as I was unemployed at the time I didn’t take much persuading.

I was interviewed by a whole range of people on the programme, including one who was very much against me. At that time Jane Hewland was a senior producer who was later to become Head of Features and Current Affairs at LWT. Today she runs a successful independent production company, Hewland International, which makes a lot of programmes for BSkyB. After meeting me, Jane decided I wasn’t the right sort for LWT, although I only discovered this years later when, as Director of Programmes at LWT, I got access to my old file, and was able to read what Jane initially thought about me. By then Jane was working for me, so I included her comments about me in the speech I made at her leaving party. She’s never forgiven me. I have her original report framed and hanging in my office. She said of me:

He was so glib, fast talking and sure of himself and so contemptuous of all the TV people he has met so far I fear we would never be able to break his spirit and bring him to see the light as we see it. I think he would just turn out to be a pain in the arse, get disgruntled with us and leave.

At the final interview for the Weekend World job I had been told by Nick Evans that the most important person on the Board was John Birt, who was then head of Features and Current Affairs and was all powerful. At the interview I thought I did pretty well, answering most of the questions intelligently, and getting a few laughs at the same time. In particular John Birt laughed quite a lot – or so I thought.

I discovered afterwards that I had muddled up the people on the Board and that the man who was laughing was actually Barry Cox, the head of Current Affairs. The only person on the Board I didn’t take to was the person to my left, who kept asking me really awkward questions and didn’t laugh once. When Nick Evans called to ask me how I had got on I described this man to him and discovered it had been John Birt.

I didn’t get the job on Weekend World, but I must have done all right because I was asked to apply for another LWT job as a reporter on their regional current affairs programme, called The London Programme. I went in to meet the editor, Julian Norridge, and we ended up talking about the Cuban revolution, the subject of my thesis at university three years earlier. Quite what Cuba had to do with London I had no idea, but I got the job.

Suddenly one of the blackest periods in my life was over: I had got the job in television I’d always dreamed of having. There are three periods of my life that had a profound influence on me, on my career, and on the way I think. The first was the three years I spent at York University. The second was about to begin – the six years from 1977 to 1983 that I spent in the current affairs department at LWT. The third wouldn’t come until 1989, when I went to the Harvard Business School.

When I joined LWT in the autumn of 1977 it was a really exciting place. The company had won its ITV franchise in 1968. After a disastrous start, when it nearly went broke, it had recovered and was looking for ways to ensure it got its franchise renewed by the Independent Broadcasting Authority in 1980. The Current Affairs and Features Department under John Birt was expanding fast. Weekend World had introduced a new, more intellectual form of current affairs on British television, and two well-funded local programmes had changed regional programming. The first was the London Weekend Show, a programme for teenagers presented by Janet Street-Porter. The second was the programme I was joining, The London Programme.

The LWT style of journalism had been pioneered by John Birt, who had developed the whole approach when editing Weekend World. Many in television, then and now, have mocked his philosophy, but I would defend it to this day. What John argued was that understanding the issue or story was more important than necessarily getting the right pictures, and that if you couldn’t get the pictures it didn’t mean you had to abandon the whole programme. But the approach went further. Birt argued that demonstrating there was a problem wasn’t enough: you also had to explain what could be done about it. His thesis, known as ‘The Bias Against Understanding’, was first outlined in an article written by Birt and Peter Jay in The Times in 1975. What this analytical approach to television current affairs meant was that, first, you were able to tackle difficult subjects that weren’t necessarily televisual, and, second, you couldn’t get away with just saying that something was an outrage: you had to show that there was something the policy makers could do about it.

The programme I joined, The London Programme, had been the idea of Barry Cox when he was a producer at Granada. He’d had the idea of producing a weekly, well-resourced current affairs programme, in the style of World in Action but only about London stories and London issues, and taken it to John Birt. I joined for the third series.

It is difficult to explain how exciting working on a programme like that was for me at that time. It was intellectually satisfying compared to the other jobs I had had since leaving York. You had six weeks to make a single half-hour film about a particular issue, which meant you had four weeks to research it. In that time you could get to know a subject well. You were helped because you were from ‘television’, so you could get access to the experts in the field you were examining: television opens doors. But the real challenge was to understand the subject. In many ways it was more like being at university than being in the media. In those days people joked about the LWT current affairs department being ‘Balliol on Thames’, a place where programme makers spent weeks constructing theses and made programmes that no one except other programme makers, MPs, and Whitehall mandarins watched. It also kept up the tradition of the long summer vacation when the current affairs department would empty for weeks on end.

My first ever television programme was a story I had discovered while working in community relations and was about landlords harassing tenants. This was followed by one about the chances of London flooding, and here I had an amazing piece of luck. The programme was made to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the great London flood of 1952. The Thames barrier was then being built and the programme asked what the chance was of London being flooded again before it was finished.

Three days after the programme was broadcast in the autumn of 1977 there was a surge tide, with the wind in the right direction, and London was inches from being under water. The Labour Government of the day was terrified and asked LWT to repeat the programme so that people would understand the danger and what they should do if the worst happened. Michael Grade, then the Director of Programmes at LWT, repeated it at 10.30 p.m. on the Friday night and we got an enormous rating, the largest for any London Programme that series.

I read recently that, according to some academic study or other, people born in May, like me, are the luckiest, and it’s certainly been true in my case. My old managing director at LWT, Brian Tesler, once told me he would invest in any company I ran – not because I was brilliant, but because I had ‘the luck’ on my side. Most things I touched worked. When I was at TV-am in 1984 the astrologer Marjorie Orr did my chart and told me I could expect twenty wonderful years when all would go right. The trouble was, the twenty years ended in 2004. I must ask her some time if it was just coincidence that I was fired from the BBC the very moment the twenty years was up.

I had a pretty good first year at LWT and, at the end of it, was asked to join Weekend World as junior producer, progressing during the year to become a full producer. The programme I was most proud of while at Weekend World was one I made on the European Common Agricultural Policy, a system that only about six people in the world seemed to understand. I became the seventh and tried to explain it to the nation on this intellectual programme by telling a joke.

I told the story of a German cow. We saw it milked and then followed the cow’s milk to the dairy, where it was made into powdered milk. The powdered milk was then bought by the EEC intervention board, who stored it in enormous sheds as part of the EEC milk mountain. Eventually it was sold back to the same farmer to be fed to the same cow who had produced the milk in the first place. When I finished the programme I was convinced that the Common Agricultural Policy was doomed. It was so inefficient and made so little economic sense. How wrong I was. It’s still going strong today, costing the average family of four in Britain something like £1,000 a year.

My year on Weekend World was not a happy time – not because of the work, but because of what happened in my private life. On getting a job in television I had thrown myself into it full time and in the process my marriage fell apart. Christine felt neglected and found another life without me. It was without doubt the worst time of my life, culminating in my sitting in the office one day trying to work with tears rolling down my face. I am forever grateful to a lovely PA called Julie Shaw, who, seeing how distressed I was, came up to me and said ‘Why don’t we go for a walk?’ I also went in to see the editor of Weekend World, the brilliant but mad David Cox, and told him I needed a few days off because my marriage was collapsing. He just looked up and said, ‘So is mine.’

Ever since then I’ve always tried either to talk or write to the people working for me when their life is in crisis because of a marriage break-down, a family tragedy, or some other major problem. A small gesture from the boss at a time of crisis can really mean something. I also learnt from that time onwards how important it was to keep a decent balance between work and the rest of your life, although I haven’t always managed to achieve it. These were the days in television when you weren’t seen as a ‘proper’ producer if you didn’t sleep on the cutting room floor and ignore the rest of your life. It was complete nonsense.

In later years, when people came to see me and said their marriage was breaking down, I always told them to try again. Marriages and relationships inevitably go through difficult times, but sometimes they recover. And I’ve always insisted people take their holidays despite whatever crisis might be happening at work, because holidays matter in family life. I’ve only ever had to cancel two, the first when Granada launched a takeover bid for LWT in late 1993 and the other in the summer of 2003 after Dr Kelly committed suicide.

Thankfully, Christine and I had not had children so our break-up was relatively uncomplicated. We simply split what we owned and went our own ways. Some years later, when we were both with other people and Christine wanted to get married again, we discovered that, due to a mistake of our own making, we weren’t actually divorced. We both had to turn up in court to affirm that we no longer wanted to be married to each other – a very odd experience. We hadn’t seen each other for some years and it was like meeting someone you were at university with, rather than meeting your ex-wife.

Much later, more than twenty years after we had split up and when I was Director-General of the BBC, the Mail on Sunday went in search of Christine with the obvious intent of getting her to dish the dirt on me. They found her at her home in Yorkshire, but when she said there was no animosity between us and that, although we no longer saw each other, we were still fond of one another, the reporter gave up and went back to London. No story there.

At the end of my year on Weekend World Nick Evans and I were asked to become a team to run The London Programme. He would be the editor and, after just two years in television, I would be his deputy. We had two small adjoining offices, the states of which reflected our differing personalities. His was always neat and tidy, with a completely clear desk at the end of the day. Mine was always a tip, with piles of paper everywhere. My problem was that I really wanted a desk like his but could never quite achieve it; so on the nights when I was working late and he’d gone home, I used to sneak into his office and work at his desk. It was bliss.

Nick and his wife Jenny were great friends to me during this time. As anyone knows who has got divorced, or has seen a long-term relationship split up, these are times when the emotional swings are enormous. The highs are higher but the lows are much lower. Nick and Jenny helped me through so many of the low times. Sadly, much later, their own marriage split up as well and Nick has recently remarried.

Running a weekly current affairs show with one of your best friends was a lot of fun. What I discovered was the importance, in a creative business, of people with good ideas. In my relatively brief time in television I had always worked on stories that I had found myself, or on issue-based programmes I had suggested, so I had always assumed most producers worked on their own ideas. When I became an editor I discovered it wasn’t true. There are brilliant producers who have few ideas themselves, but they can take an idea and make it into an outstanding programme.

What I discovered in the two years I was doing that job was that people with good ideas are worth their weight in gold. I discovered later that the same applies in business. When I was at the Harvard Business School some years later, one of the professors came up with a great description of this when he said ‘Man can live for three weeks without food, four days without water and five minutes without oxygen; but some men can live a lifetime without a good idea.’

The point is that in programme making you can screw up a good idea and make a bad programme, but you can never make a good programme out of a lousy idea. Whenever I’ve talked to people coming new into television I’ve always told them that you can learn the process of making programmes relatively easily; what really matters is the originality and quality of your ideas.

Nick and I ran The London Programme for two years. We had a good team with us and tried to make it a fun and exciting place to work. As always, we made some good programmes and some bad ones. The hardest job of being a programme editor is having to ‘save’ a programme – to try to turn a potentially disastrous programme into one that is at least average. I always remember Nick trying to do this with a programme on local government finance. The end product was totally incomprehensible, but at least Nick had made it look stylish: a week earlier it had both been incomprehensible and looked terrible. It is exactly the same in news. Producing a programme on a good news day is ten times easier than when there is nothing happening. The latter is the test of a good editor, as I was to discover later at TV-am.

In January 1982 LWT began another ten years as the weekend ITV broadcaster in London, which was good news for the company, although the renewal of the franchise wasn’t unexpected. LWT’s only challenger was from a consortium led by quizmaster Hughie Green. Even better news was that, instead of taking over – as usual – from Thames Television at 7 p.m. on Friday nights, LWT would in future start at 5.30. LWT had another hour and a half to fill each weekend, and another hour and a half’s worth of advertising to sell.

I was given the job of filling some of that extra time – the hour between six and seven every Friday night. After just four years in television I was given my own programme. I was to be the editor of what became a mould-breaking programme called The Six O’Clock Show, which was due to launch in January 1982. It was only called that because we didn’t have a name to put on the door of the office when we first brought the team together in September 1981. In the next three months we came up with about twenty different names and put them all forward to Michael Grade, LWT’s Director of Programmes at the time, for him to choose. In the end he chose the name on the door. The name of programmes doesn’t really matter; it’s the content that is important. Who in their right mind would call a situation comedy about a couple of wide boys from East London Only Fools and Horses, and yet it is one of the great television comedies of all time.

LWT in 1982 was a company with enormous confidence. It had won back its franchise and had a series of big hits on its hands. Cilia Black’s Surprise! Surprise! was hugely popular and that year it launched another entertainment show called Game for a Laugh, which became Britain’s Number One show in a matter of weeks. A new LWT drama called Dempsey and Makepeace became another big hit while Weekend World and The South Bank Show were there to prove that the company had an intellectual heart. Into this mix came The Six O’Clock Show.

The Six O’Clock Show broke the mould for a number of reasons. We were the first programme to use single-camera tape: up until then it had only been used for news. LWT had just got a union agreement allowing the company to use electronic news gathering (ENG) and we decided to see if we could use this new technology in an original and more creative way. We pre-planned every three- or four-minute item we were to shoot as if it were a thirty-minute documentary. We had a budget that people in television would dream about today, which meant we had a producer, a director, and a researcher on every short item. Because tape was so much cheaper than film, we shot masses of it on every item and only used a tiny proportion of it. As a result, we got some gems at times.

The aim of The Six O’Clock Show was to create a different feeling: that this was Friday night and Friday night was the beginning of the weekend. In fact, I wanted to call the show Thank God it’s Friday and commissioned research to demonstrate that the public wouldn’t be offended by the use of the word ‘God’ in this way. Unfortunately, the research showed exactly the opposite: it turned out that large numbers of people would be offended, so I had to drop the idea.

One of my complaints about most news and current affairs programmes is that they never deal with the good things in life, only problems and issues. If you had watched LWT’s regional output at that time you wouldn’t have known that anyone in London ever actually enjoyed living there. I decided The Six O‘Clock Show would counter that. Its aim would be to tell the funnier side of life in London, to put on the eccentrics, and to tell the sort of stories people told each other in the pub, in the shop, or at work – the stories that would never have found their way onto a news programme. My hunch was that these were the stories that people really wanted to hear.

For instance, we once found a small cutting in a local paper about an eccentric man who had spent ten years building a model of the Titanic out of matchsticks. When it was finally completed he had launched it on the pond on Wimbledon Common and, true to form, it had sunk on its maiden voyage. We decided that The Six O’Clock Show would raise the Titanic. We hired a frogman, put Janet Street-Porter into a rubber dinghy, and sent them, plus a camera crew, out to find the sunken model. Unfortunately, the pond was too shallow for our frogman to dive under the water so he could only walk up and down in his diving gear, with the boat’s proud owner telling him roughly where his pride and joy had sunk. Sadly, our diver found the boat by treading on it and the Titanic ended up being raised in two pieces.

We made three pilots for The Six O’Clock Show. All three were bad, but the final one was spectacularly awful. The problem was we had a monkey on the show that escaped in the studio and ended up swinging around on the lighting rig. The poor director, Danny Wiles, had no idea whether to use his cameras to follow the monkey or concentrate on what was left of the show. I was very keen to shoot the monkey, but not with the cameras. At the drinks party afterwards I was downcast. I could see my career as an editor disappearing even before it had started. I cheered up when one of the team, Tony Cohen, who was then a researcher but who became my alter ego for many years and now runs one of the world’s largest independent production companies, Fremantle Media, turned up with his wife Alison and their new-born baby.

After the drinks I was sitting with the show’s executive producer, Barry Cox, discussing what we could do to save it when I got an agitated phone call from Tony. He explained that he was at the hospital because the monkey, which he claimed had got drunk in hospitality, had scratched his baby and the doctors were demanding to see it. I told the story to Barry who then uttered the immortal words, ‘Did this happen on London Weekend property?’ All turned out OK in the end. We never found the monkey, but Tony’s son Ben suffered no unpleasant after-effects and is now a strapping, six-foot-tall 22-year-old.

Despite the pilots, and to everyone’s surprise, including mine, The Six O’Clock Show was a smash hit and became the most watched regional programme in Britain. One week we even got into the top ten programmes in London and were sent a case of champagne by the management. Looking back now I think its success was rooted in our ability to reflect the social, economic, and political changes that were happening in London at the time and talk about them in an entertaining way. It was a time when London was experiencing a massive change in social habits, when yuppies, cocktail bars, and crêperies were replacing traditional life in the working-class areas of the capital.

Every week we did three or four stories like the Titanic item, stories about another side of London. Michael Aspel presented the show. He was not Michael Grade’s first choice – he wanted Terry Wogan to leave the BBC to do the show – but Michael turned out to be a great success. He was very witty and managed to stand above the chaos that was sometimes around him in the studio. The show sounded very London, with a cast of character reporters on the road and in the studio that included Janet Street-Porter, the former Mastermind winner and London cabbie Fred Housego, and the brilliant Danny Baker, all of whom had strong London accents. The team was completed by a small, wonderfully mad, rather posh man called Andy Price, who was an on-the-road reporter.

I decided that we should capitalize on Janet’s accent and turn her into a working-class heroine. The problem was that Janet wanted to be seen as being cultured. It was fine to begin with, but one evening, after she had spent all day shooting an item about pigeon fancying, she burst into my office to tell me she’d had enough of being covered in pigeon shit and didn’t want to be seen that way any more. She told me she wanted the audience to know she liked ‘fucking opera’, as she put it. I explained that that wasn’t her role, that Michael was the cultured one in the team. As a result, Janet decided to leave and we replaced her with Paula Yates.

In many ways it was the juxtaposition between Michael Aspel and Danny Baker that made the show work. One represented suave London of the Sixties and Seventies, the other uppity London of the Eighties. Remember, this was the London of Ken Livingstone ‘mark one’, when he was both dangerous and very funny and was hated by the Thatcher Government of the day. The Six O’Clock Show was also dangerous – and live. That’s why it worked. Things went wrong. One week Tony Cohen fixed up for part of the show to come live from the beach at Southend but he mixed up the tide tables and halfway through the show the tide came in and wrecked the whole thing. On another occasion a live outside link went completely wrong when it was invaded by a bunch of kids. It was only saved as a piece of television when Andy Price, who was presenting, lost his temper and picked up one of the kids and threw him across the street. This was live on television.

For me, The Six O’Clock Show was the first programme that was completely mine, and totally under my control. From running it I learnt much about teamwork and leadership. I learnt about encouraging everyone, from the most junior to the most senior, to be part of the team and come up with ideas, and about the importance of celebrating success – and mourning failure – together as a team. And I learnt how important the leader was to the team. These were all themes that I developed further over the next twenty years as I went on to run larger and larger groups of people. I also learnt how important it was constantly to push the system and to defy the rules, because that way you got a better end result. But taking on the rules at LWT meant fighting both the management and the unions.

These were the days when the unions ran television. Earlier in my time at LWT I had been the trade union representative for the producers and directors; in fact when I became Managing Director of the company in 1990 I had to renegotiate some of the ridiculous deals that I had won from the management when I was a union negotiator. I learned just how ridiculous the whole thing was when, on my first ever shoot at LWT, a man turned up driving a car with no one and nothing in it. I asked who he was and was told he was the electrician’s driver. So where was the electrician? I asked. I was told he liked to bring his own car as well so he could claim the mileage allowance on top of having a driver. In those days all the crews demanded expensive lunches every day in fairly upmarket restaurants. If they didn’t get them they made your life a misery as a researcher or a producer.

The LWT management were feeble when it came to standing up to the unions. When another friend, Andy Forrester, and I were the union negotiators for the producers and directors we demanded a 20 per cent wage increase. We nearly fell off our chairs when the management’s second offer was 18 per cent – we couldn’t get out of the room fast enough. We always called it the ‘pop-up toaster deal’ because on top of the 18 per cent we got everything else we had asked for, including company televisions and video recorders for all our members. We reckoned if we’d asked for a pop-up toaster we would have got that as well.

It is difficult to believe now, when there are so many outstanding women working in television, but in those days there was not a single woman director working in the Current Affairs and Features Department at LWT, and very few female producers. I was determined to break this and be the first to employ a female director. I had always been a strong supporter of the women’s movement and wanted to put my beliefs into practice.

I found a great director for The Six O’Clock Show called Vikki Barras, who went on to invent What Not to Wear for the BBC. She applied for the job of director and got it, but the union objected as she hadn’t got the right sort of union card. The LWT management immediately folded and agreed with the union that we couldn’t employ her. I thought they were gutless bastards and decided to fight.

I was on holiday in Aberdovey in West Wales at the time and was fully dressed in a wet suit and about to go windsurfing when the phone rang. It was Roy Van Gelder, LWT’s Director of Human Resources, who had called to tell me that the union had said ‘No’ to Vikki. Luckily Gavyn Waddell, the chairman of the shop stewards’ committee, was with Roy. Gavyn was the cleverest, most articulate trade unionist I have ever met. He was a natural leader of men and would have made a great senior manager. Like many of the union people at LWT he was also a hardline Tory and he eventually resigned from the union, the ACTT, when they gave money to support the 1984 miners’ strike.

Fully dressed in my wet suit I demanded to talk to Gavyn. Everyone at LWT knew that, where the union was concerned, Gavyn was the person you had to get on side. After ten minutes’ discussion he agreed it was time we had a woman director and that he would withdraw the objection to my employing Vikki – which meant he would tell the activists in the union to back off. So when Vikki became our first woman director it was no thanks to the management.

In general the LWT management gave in to almost every demand from the unions. This was the company that, in the mid Seventies, paid a videotape engineer £150,000 a year, resulting in the joke ‘What’s the difference between an Arab oil sheikh and an LWT video engineer?’ Answer: ‘The engineer gets London weighting.’ And it was the same management who, in the ITV national strike in 1979, allowed us to picket inside the building in case it rained – no cold nights and braziers for us. As usual we won the strike when the ITV managements around Britain folded and we all went back to work with another large increase in our wages.

The television unions of those days stifled creativity and good programme making by their obsession with restrictive practices. I decided to take them on whenever I could. Sometimes I did it as an editor, and thus as part of the management; but on other occasions a few of us did it as members of the union. When the management decided that crews would have first-class travel on flights to the USA the programme makers reversed the policy at the union meeting. We argued that the effect would be no more foreign shoots, and that the losers would be the viewers.

On The Six O’Clock Show we were ‘advised’ by management not to do single-camera live links into the programme because, although the unions had agreed we could do them, the management feared they wouldn’t like it. Today these happen in almost every live programme, but in 1982 they were virtually unheard of. I did them from day one. Eventually the union demanded we had a floor manager on these shoots. I simply refused.

We were also told by the management that we had to have props people on location if we wanted to use any props at all. Again, we just ignored it. When we wanted a rubber boat for Janet to use on Wimbledon Common I sent a researcher out to buy one; and when we needed some golf balls sewn into the back of a pyjama jacket for an item on snoring, Tony Cohen persuaded his reluctant wife to do the job. We ignored the union’s rules whenever and wherever we could, and more often than not we got away with it. It was a lesson I have applied in every job I have had since. As I learnt later at Harvard Business School, ‘No one ever succeeded in an organization by following the rules.’

In the years since Christine and I had broken up I had, as a single man in his thirties in the television business, played the field quite a lot. But in my last year on The Six O’clock Show I had struck up a new relationship with the woman who had admired my decorating all those years earlier when Christine had brought her round to our flat in Wandsworth. The relationship was based on false pretences; because she’d seen me decorating she thought I was a handyman, whereas the truth was that this was the only time in my whole life I’d ever decorated a room. By then Sue had split from her husband and had taken her two children to live in Bradford upon Avon in Somerset. I began to go down for weekends after the show ended, and Sue and I quickly decided to set up home together.

I wanted Sue to come and live in Clapham, where I was then living, but an afternoon she spent wandering across Clapham Common soon put paid to that idea. The wonderful thing about the Common was that all of life was there – including people playing chess with enormous pieces, people with model boats, and lots of sportsmen. Unfortunately there were also a lot of drug dealers, pimps, and police and Sue absolutely refused to bring her children to live there. I think she was influenced by the fact that too many of her old clients as a probation officer lived nearby.

Instead we bought a house together further west in London, in Barnes. Matthew was five and Christine four when Sue and I set up home together, and overnight I became a family man – although like most people who haven’t had kids of their own I had no idea what it meant. I think Sue’s sister Anne summed it up best when she described visiting us as visiting Sue, her family, and her rather strange live-in lover. And then there was Jeff.

Jeff Wright, my old friend from my early newspaper days, had been living with me in Clapham when I sold up. He had nowhere else to go, and didn’t have a job at the time, so he came too. Our neighbours in Barnes must have wondered what sort of people had moved in next door. Sue always joked that between Jeff and me she had just about got one decent partner, although he wasn’t much good at decorating either.

Sue went back to work as a probation officer at Wandsworth Prison. She drove there early every morning, and I agreed to drop the kids at school before going into LWT on the train. My life as a family man was beginning to take shape. And then one day I got a phone call from a Conservative MP called Jonathan Aitken, and the world changed again.