Miller attacks ‘money-hungry’ Blairs

Doctor, broadcaster and opera director Jonathan Miller has used an interview in the Times, marking the occasion of his 75th birthday next Tuesday, to have a go at Tony and Cherie Blair.

Reminded by interviewer Alan Franks of his description of Margaret Thatcher's voice as "a perfumed fart", Miller said: "Oh yes, I'd forgotten that". Franks expected a good old-fashioned liberal bashing of Tory philistinism to follow, but instead Miller turned his attention to the later occupants of Number 10, the Blairs.

"Well, I have a deep disdain for them. I couldn't bear that grinning, money-hungry, beaming, Cliff Richard-loving, Berlusconi-adoring, guitar-playing twat. I suppose I would say that, at the risk of being inoffensive. No, it's that beaming Christianity and that frightful wife with a mouth on a zip-fastener right round to the back of her head. And both of them obsessed with being wealthy.

"And he got us into this disastrous war with Iraq because he had consulted with God. Like Bush. Well, anyone who claims to do something on the basis of a personal relationship to a non-existent deity..."

Franks also passes on an anecdote from an upcoming biography of Miller, In Two Minds, by the drama critic Kate Bassett.

It's a story told by Jonathan and Rachel Miller's middle son, William, about the time he and his father came out of the Renoir Cinema in London's Bloomsbury district to find a woman yelling that she'd been mugged.

"Miller senior sets off in hot pursuit of two violent-looking boys, followed by a gaggle of Bloomsbury cinephiles. Jonathan, in the lead, is waving a bread palette over his head and shouting: 'Stop, you little shits!' A man puffing along next to him says: 'We once met at Susan Sontag's.' Miller briefly interrupts his rage to say. 'Oh really, how fascinating,' before effing and blinding on after the boys.

"They stop, turn round and brandish a baseball bat. There is terror on everyone's face apart from Miller's and he starts making come-on-then gestures at the boys. William pulls him back by the coat. Jonathan calls him a coward and doesn't forgive him for a week."

Asked by Franks whether he feels any particular regrets when he surveys the past three quarters of a century, Miller says: "Certain personal things that I don't want to go in to... unkindnesses or whatever."

♦ Sky Arts is to mark Jonathan Miller's birthday with two programmes called 'Absolute Rubbish' starting at 7.0 pm on Sunday, to be followed at 8.0 pm by his production of 'La Bohème'