“Aside from explaining to all your readers how brilliant I am,” the Tory peer, former adman and close friend of Margaret Thatcher, Maurice Saatchi, says to me down the phone, “is there any other purpose you’ve got in mind?” I can tell I have my work cut out for me. “Do you want me to speak about the Conservative party?” he asks. I tell him yes, among other things. First, though, we’ve got to do the book spiel.
In Do Not Resuscitate, Saatchi, who is 76, imagines he has died of “sudden cardiac arrest” in the House of Lords and is waiting outside the pearly gates (a place “worse than Heathrow Airport”). Before a jury that includes JFK, Pablo Picasso, Marilyn Monroe and (of course) Thatcher, Saatchi is forced to defend his life’s record. He talks me through the show trial as though it really happened: “The prosecution did an excellent and brutal job of completely demolishing my entire life, but I did defend myself.” Is the suggestion here that he’s speaking to me from the afterlife? “No,” he says, “I was sent back to deliver this message.” Soon the fourth wall crumbles. “What I’d really like people to do with this book is to buy it,” he admits. “It’s only £20. I mean, that’s a bargain to know whether you’re going to heaven or hell.”