UR TV CAST

Nobody can remember if Julie herself first wore it, or some kindly profile writer saddled her with it. At all events, she’s carried it around for so long she now believes it’s hers: “As one who suffered from chronic shyness and a low boredom threshold, I simply can’t imagine that I could have ever had any kind of social life without [cocaine], let alone have reigned as Queen of the Groucho Club for a good part of the 80s and 90s,” she wrote last month in The Guardian.It was a curious claim, a combination of vainglory and pathos – as if a chronically shy pub regular were to claim to be “King of the Pig and Whistle” because he spent a lot of time drinking with other sozzled lifers. The Groucho is a pleasant, rather expensive bar and restaurant handily sited in the heart of Soho and usually reliably full of hacks, would-be screenwriters, TV people and glamorous women from glossy travel magazines. But it’s not a place you’ll hear blinding aperçus and antiphonal crackles of wit. Though it has round tables, it ain’t the Algonquin, any more than Ms Burchill is Dorothy Parker.Aaaanyway, the next week’s Independent on Sunday published a letter by one Deborah Bosley, who had been, she explained, “head waitress and, later, receptionist in the late 80s and 90s”.

The letter disagreed with Julie’s claim to have been Top Bitch at the Dean Street speakeasy. Far from Ms Burchill being a glamorous figure, holding court with fawning friends, she was remembered as “an uncomfortable and slightly desperate figure”, not to mention “a tubby woman in a scruffy blue raincoat”. Ms Bosley concluded, cattily, that “most of us were not so addled with coke that we can’t remember that Julie Burchill’s time at the Groucho Club was a simple matter of a fat bird in a blue mac sitting in the corner.”Well, obviously, that’s just asking for trouble. Bosley’s remark was the writerly equivalent of meeting Begbie, the psychopath in Trainspotting, and up-ending his pint of heavy over his head. A week later, Ms Burchill responded in The Independent on Sunday’s Letters page. She had no recollection of Ms Bosley, she said, but having checked Deborah’s credentials, she’d discovered that “this was a woman who reached the height of her professional life – in her thirties – as a waitress (sorry, ‘head’ waitress) and ended up shacking up with a man old enough to be her grandfather, with no other visible means of support.” Ooooh! Compared to “such a beautifully judged and, moreover, fully realised, life” Julie B could only “hang my head in shame”… It was like a self-made duchess peering down her lorgnettes at a chambermaid and asking: “Who is this mere gel? Is she in salaried employment?”Only a madman or someone weary of life would dream of interposing his slender frame between these warring Amazons.

Ms Bosley (known as “Big Debbie”) is blonde, six foot tall, broad of shoulder, capacious of bosom and, despite her lovely smile, as tough as nails. Ms Burchill is built on similarly generous lines and, despite her Minnie Mouse delivery and occasional forays into cheerfulness (one memorable piece last year explained that, since she herself spent life as happy as a cricket, Kate Moss and the other depressed Priory-bound celebrities must have some kind of attitude problem), displays a tolerance and capacity for forgiveness that reminds you of Ursula the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid. But when such women start calling each other under-achievers, you start to look at both more closely, and some odd correspondences start to appear.For Ms Bosley is rather more than an ex-Nippie gerontophile with a grudge against self-proclaimed club queens. She is, famously, the consort of Richard Ingrams, founder, ex-editor and éminence grise of Private Eye, in whose columns Ms Burchill has appeared a thousand times Like Ms Burchill, she has published autobiographical novels. Like Ms Burchill, she has been phenomenally keen on dangerous drugs – Ecstasy in her case rather than jazz talc. Like Ms Burchill, she is a townie who decamped for the country some years ago. Both are working-class “plain people” – her father was a builder from Surrey with a pronounced Del Boy accent, while Julie’s father worked in a Bristol distillery.

And, like Ms Burchill, who has famously abandoned two husbands, two children and one girlfriend in her time, she has a swashbucklingly unconventional approach to family life.She met Ingrams at the Groucho Club 10 years ago. She was married, in her early 20s, and was heading for America, to write The Rough Guide to San Francisco and nurse her husband Brett, who was dying of Aids (she hadn’t realised he was homosexual). At home, the 52-year-old Ingrams’ 30-year marriage to Mary was heading for the rocks. When she returned from the States, Debs and Richard fell in love; he moved her into his rose-covered cottage in Berkshire.Plucked out of Soho’s drugs hell, Deborah settled for a life of Aga-warmed domesticity. She wrote a novel, Let Me Count The Ways, about her husband’s demise and was briefly feted (Oldie editor’s Buxom Bint Can Actually Write!) on the literary circuit. But when she decided she wanted a baby, Ingrams couldn’t or wouldn’t oblige; so she left him in a fury, found herself another boyfriend, whose name is unknown, and became pregnant The baby was born in December 1997. As the story goes, Ingrams took one look at the kid and offered to accept Deborah back home, take care of her, and be a father figure to young Louis.Their story has everything: sex, drugs, class, race, infidelity, even snobbery (Ingrams’ great-grandfather was personal physician to Queen Victoria; Louis’ father is the son of a Black Panther activist) And now, it’s taken a wretched nosedive.