Living life to the Max: Sir Max Hastings on war reporting, his personal battles and Scottish politics

Max Hastings - with another bestseller on his hands - is enjoying life so much that he has even given up his once beloved cigars in order to extend it. But, discovers Stephen McGinty, the former war correspondent has had battles of his own to overcome

AS a child Max Hastings shot the television set. While, many years later, his mother, Anne Scott-James, a formidable beauty and editor of Harpers magazine appeared on Desert Island Discs and claimed her son had become overexcited while watching a western, Hastings, a stickler for facts, insisted the shooting took place during an episode of Perry Mason. The gun had been liberated from his father, Macdonald Hastings, a writer and adventurer’s extensive armoury - young Max had previously emptied a Luger into the garden seat - and it had accidentally gone off as he pushed in the ammunition clip and snapped the gun at the screen. “I remember as if it were yesterday the spectacle of the TV disappearing in a sudden eruption of smoke and a cascade of glass with much tinkling and clatter.”

Over the years there will have been many viewers of Newsnight and Question Time who, when greeted by Sir Max Hastings, in his pin-stripe suit, hawk nose and even more hawkish views, would wish to reach for a loaded Luger and replicate his childhood mishap. Margaret Thatcher, for one, who reportedly never forgave him for sacking her daughter, Carol Thatcher, during his long tenure as editor of The Daily Telegraph, or his fellow war correspondents who watched as he grabbed the glory during the Falklands war by becoming the first man into Port Stanley. “You’re not a popular bunny,” his agent, Michael Sissons, once told him over lunch and yet in recent weeks he has become exceedingly popular indeed.

All Hell Let Loose: The World At War 1939-1945, Sir Max Hastings’ single-volume history of the Second World War is flying off the shelves and climbing the national bestseller list, propelled by reviews that read like love letters. This is his ninth book (of 22 in total) which focuses on the Second World War but is unique in focusing not on the lofty peaks of strategy, politicians and commanders, but on the consequences of their actions for the ordinary men and women in rubble-strewn streets across the globe. Men such as Private William Tsuchida, who was in Patton’s army and wrote to his parents: “What a mess this whole business is. My mind is one confused conglomeration of incidents, the basic fears of night and the waiting for daylight. The rest of it I would just as soon forget because it is so rotten…what it amounts to is you wonder whether you should eat now or later and hope you have a dry place to sleep tonight and hope that casualties will slow down. Everything is hope, hope.”

Woven through the 747 pages are the thoughts of ship’s cooks and wireless operators, farmers and housewives and typists and black marketeers. For Hastings, who rises each morning at 6am and can comfortably bang out 6,000 words on a good day, the book is the culmination of 35 years of mining archives and chiseling out memories from those who remember first hand the horrors. So 72 years after the war began, why are readers still fascinated by the subject? Sitting in his cramped, book-lined study, at his old-fashioned Victorian desk, Sir Max begins to explain:

“When I started writing about this period 35 years ago with Bomber Command, I would never have guessed in a million years that I would still be writing books about this period and getting on the best-seller list in the 21st century. I think the explanation is that this was the greatest event in history. It was the most terrible event in history. So nobody can say: ‘Why are we wasting time on trivia?’ This was something enormous and overwhelming. Secondly: It was one of the very rare moments in history when we are sure we were on the right side. We were. I have tried to explain in the book that a lot of people’s attitudes in different countries was quite mixed about the war and that Churchill and Roosevelt did not have all the best tunes, but despite saying that, one must never be in any doubt, that if the allies had not won the consequence for the world would have been that much more terrible. “It is one thing we can say with certainty. There has been so many wars since 1945 where it was very doubtful that we were on the side of the angels and so we look back at this time when western democracies were pitted against indisputable evil and, of course, as I also point out in the book, a great tragedy for hundreds of millions of people that in order to defeat the tyranny of Hitler we had to ally ourselves with the tyranny of Stalin and the third reason that people continue to be fascinated is that we have never suffered serious hardship and privations.

“Most of us know how incredibly lucky and privileged we are, even now when the world is tottering on the brink of economic troubles more serious than we have ever known in our lifetime, but we know we are fantastically lucky. We do not have to risk our lives and are not in danger of starvation. We are very privileged people and we know it. It is because we are so privileged that we are fascinated to read about the experiences of people who went through this dreadful times. We ask ourselves: could we have done it? It is very hard to say.”

Born in the last months of the Second World War to difficult parents and raised, like Winston Churchill, by his nanny, Sir Max Hastings has spent his life chasing success and enviously coveting what others had and he lacked, everything from maternal love to a large country estate. “The only thing lacking between us was love,” he wrote of his relationship with his mother, who, even in her 90s, was still putting him down. When he was knighted, she asked if his friend, Roy Jenkins, fixed it for him. Yet, at an age when he can collect his pension, he has found great happiness with his second wife, Penny, whom he romanced as a young man, only to see her marry Michael Grade, and a literary career that grows ever more lucrative.

Yet he has endured his own share of suffering. In 1999, the eldest of his three children, Charles, aged 27, jumped to his death from the sixth floor of a hotel in southern China. He had previously said that each man, regardless of his success, still focuses on his regrets and when I ask what are his own, he replies: “If I was re-making my character again I suppose I would say I have been too violent in both my passions and my feuds. If I was a bit more temperate it would have helped me in my career. But generally I have been incredibly lucky and there is not a day that I don’t thank God for the things that have gone right for me.

“We had a terrible tragedy in my family. My eldest son died 11 years ago and that is something that you never for a day forget and whatever successes one has in other things there is always that sense of failure associated with what happened to my son, but on the other hand life must go on. You have to carry on. I said to my other children after his death that I was determined not to allow what happened to Charles to affect their own lives and I’ve tried to ensure that is so. It is always there though.

“Whatever other successes you have, you always have the memory of that one great tragedy. On the other hand one has to say is that as you get older - when I was young I always suffered terribly from jealousy. I was jealous of people who were cleverer or richer or better looking.We all get middle-aged we stop getting jealous because we know too much about other people’s lives. However fortunate people seem and however much they seem to have, my gosh, we all get to know too much about their tragedies.”

When not hunched over his Acer computer working on his next book, a history of the First World War, Sir Max is happiest in Scotland whose future he is monitoring with great interest. While a conservative, he is quite understanding of independence, not that he believes it will come to pass. “Scots will know there is no contradiction in being a proud Scot and proud of being British and part of this nation. But there is no magic that says that always needs to be the case. With Britain’s loss of empire and the fact that we are, these days, a diminished country in the world, I don’t think it is surprising that many Scots see less advantage to themselves of the union than they did 100 or 200 years ago.

“Yet one thing is for sure and that is that Scots have got to make their own choices and be allowed to go their own way. I don’t believe they will go for full independence, for economic reasons. The money just is not there. I do think there is a jolly good argument for Scottish home rule – in a way everyone has got the worst of both worlds because Scotland has devolution but not control of its own financial purse. I personally think that the way forward is for Scotland to have power of its own financial affairs and responsibility for them.”

He believes Scotland has wallowed too long in a “culture of victimhood” and he believes Alex Salmond needs to do more to increase private industry and reduce the nation’s dependency on the state for employment. “I think it is very bad news for Scotland that it has become so much of a dependency culture, dependent on state jobs. Alex Salmond is a brilliant politician, he has played his hand of cards with enormous skill, more skilfully than any other Scottish politician, but nonetheless, Salmond has made no attempt to help Scotland to break away from this dependency culture, of the state as the chief source of employment. That seems a tragedy for Scots, but I still believe passionately in the Scottish genius. There is a Scottish genius, although Scotland has had an unhappy half century or century since Britain’s industrial decline began and one can fully understand the bitterness of Scots about that, but there can be a Scottish revival if Scots are decently led. I have loved Scotland all my life and sometimes I feel the bitterness of the spurned lover when the Scots put the boot into us, but I think Scotland can have its day again.”

He is more doubtful, however, of the fate of the Scottish Conservatives and is not against the notion of changing their name. “The Scots have to make their own judgement about whether there is any possibility of a Conservative revival in Scotland, personally I am rather doubtful that there is, the brand is so tarnished in the eyes of most Scots that I’m very doubtful whether a party called the Conservative party in Scotland is going to come again.” However, for Sir Max Hastings, there is no question that his day is at hand. He’s so enjoying life that he has even given up his once beloved cigars in order to extend it even longer. Previously he chain-smoked them through his working day, but now typing is enjoyment enough. The sunlight of his golden years has even filtered through a book that catalogues the foulest of man’s inhumanity to man. Readers may well remember the staggering statistic that during each and every one of the 2,174 days of the Second World War an average of 27,000 people died, but they will also remember Bob Grafton, a 19-year-old gunner from east London, who wrote to his girlfriend Dot before being shipping to the Far East: “Darling, I know that you will wait for me. I swear that as long as we are apart I will never touch another woman either physically or mentally. Yours ever, with Love and Devotion so deep that the fires burn even in sleep, Bob.” Bob Grafton was captured by the Japanese in Sumatra and toiled on the Burma railway for four years, but survived and on his way home he wrote a second letter to Dot. “This I know, that it was you of the two of us who had the more difficult task. For I am a man (perhaps prematurely) and men must fight and women weep. So my share was no exception, yours was.” As Hasting writes: “Bob married Dot and they lived happily ever after.”

• All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945 by Max Hastings is published by Harper Press, priced £30.

• Sir Max Hastings will be delivering the annual Remembrance Day Lecture at Dundee University on Saturday 12 November.