What is it now, dear?" The Baroness Thatcher has an unnerving gaze, horribly steady. I had found myself beside her for pudding. The dinner, which was rather grand, had been arranged at Mossimans in Belgravia. In a private room, Lord Ryder of Wensum, the former Tory Chief Whip, and his wife Caroline, were entertaining the former Prime Minister, her husband Sir Denis, Lord McAlpine, some Texans, and a tableful of friends.
It seemed a far cry from my younger days in Margaret Thatcher's office as the Leader of the Opposition's correspondence clerk. My immediate boss was her private secretary, a shy young man called Richard Ryder. My friend Caroline was his girlfriend - and Mrs Thatcher's secretary.
Those were happy, make-do days, working for a woman who within a year would be Prime Minister but whose office was a small, friendly, seat-of-the-pants operation.
And here we all were at Mossimans, 20 years later. Robert McAlpine had just been berating the guest of honour as only a friend can, for bawling out a party of visiting Chechnyans (this was before the war) because rebels in Chechnya were holding some British hostages. "You shouted at them for more than half an hour, Margaret - and they didn't speak English . . ."
"Those hostages are our people, Robert."
"Yes, Margaret, but it wasn't your Chechen visitors' fault. I don't think they had any influence over it. I don't think they knew where the hostages were. You did scold them for a long time, you know, and I think they found it quite bewildering because they'd been looking forward to meeting you. And the room was incredibly hot . . ."
"Our people, Robert. Our people."
McAlpine rested his case. The baroness never registers remorse, but you do know when the point's got through. I, whom Caroline placed next to her for the desert course, would never dare chide like this.
I was only ever below stairs. But she once knew me pretty well, regards me as erratic rather than unfriendly - a lightweight, a bit of a caution - and forgets nothing. She remembered as we spoke . . .
"What is it now, dear? You always have some wild scheme planned, Matthew, some glint in your eye, some bit of derring-do. What is it now?"
I described to her, as I described to readers of this column three years ago, my childhood obsession with a remote island between Africa and Australia, 2,000 miles from any mainland but Antarctica, which Captain Cook named Desolation Island but the French, who claimed it, call Kerguelen. As she tucked into her pudding, I waxed lyrical about the great mountains, the wild winds and the silver-grey light . . .
She put down her spoon, interrupting. "Yes, Matthew. I understand. I remember. You want to find some remote, desolate place, thousands of miles from anywhere, and struggle to get there.
"And you will. You'll go. You'll travel thousands and thousands of miles, and you'll get there. You always do. And you'll climb a mountain and stand all alone at the top and look at the Moon and the stars, and you'll say: 'Here I am all alone in a desolate place, looking at the Moon and the stars!'
"And it will be worth one newspaper article, or at the most two. And then you will have to come all the way home again. Well, take my advice, dear: don't bother. You can see the Moon and the stars from Spalding."
She was right. I haven't taken the least notice. On Sunday I leave for my Desolation Island.
It has taken a long time - years - to set this up. At the end of that Times piece I appealed for a modern-day Ferdinand and Isabella to finance the venture, for the venture is ambitious. Kerguelen lies about halfway from
Cape Town to Perth, some two thousand miles from each and four thousand miles south of India. The island is in the middle of the Roaring Forties, gales of incredible force and seas of some 35 metres described by the understated Admiralty Pilot for Antarctica as "phenomenal".
There is no way to fly there; and no airstrip. Because of the wind, even the insects have no wings. The French captain, Kerguelen, when he made the first sighting of the archipelago in 1772, found no way himself of landing. Four years later, on Christmas Day 1776, James Cook was more successful. There is still no harbour and the French Government vessel, Marion Dufresne, which provides the only link and supplies the small scientific station there, can call only three or four times a year, anchoring offshore and delivering by helicopter or dinghy.
It will be delivering me, in two weeks. With me will be Chris Rushton, my cameraman-director, and Nick Robertson, our sound man. Channel 4 has commissioned from an independent producer in Wales, Fulmar West, a documentary film of our expedition, for its To the Ends of the Earth series.
David Johnson, a British Airways pilot who read the column about Kerguelen and started work to make it all happen, is coming with us too. BA is helping: flying us to Mauritius, from where we take a short hop to the tropical French island of Réunion. There we board the Marion Dufresne and head south for Crozet Island, the mountainous seas of the Southern Ocean, and then Kerguelen.
I am afraid of the sea. I don't much like the sea. I get terribly seasick. I've seen pictures of dogs sliding across corridors on the Marion Dufresne. But a seafarer you must be to get there, and that has been a problem in more than the obvious way, for all the accounts I can find of the island are sailors' stories. Desolation Island has been seen always from the sea; painted and photographed from the sea; mapped from the sea. Accounts from dry land are almost always the accounts of those who have just landed and who must before long sail away again, their eye forever on the sea and the encroaching storm.
I wanted to go beyond that. I wanted to stop on the island. I wanted to be a landlubber there, turn my back to the sea like the colony of shipwrecked ship's cats which has established itself in one corner, and know this enormous, mysterious island (it is not far off the size of Cyprus) as its inhabitant.
But how to do this honestly, make it real while making a television documentary about it, and do so within a couple of weeks so that I could get back to The Times, and Parliament? We reached a compromise that would have had me spend as long as I could there before the Marion Dufresne returned - a week or two at most.
Leaving tomorrow, I would have been back within five weeks. The Editor of The Times, who has always backed this project, was reconciled.
Then, three weeks ago, everything fell apart. At a Paris meeting with my producer Will Parry, the French authorities insisted that five days on the island was the absolute maximum before the ship must sail - and I would have to share my shore-hop with a small party of French tourists.
That was the last straw. How could we pretend even to our viewers, let alone ourselves, that this was some kind of a personal sojourn, all the while fudging the fact that this was little more than a long weekend, and trying to keep the tourists out of shot?
Mr Parry said No: I must stay longer. The French said: "Well, the ship returns in August . . ." Parry said: "I'll ask him."
. . . And, here in Derbyshire, I heard myself saying Yes into the telephone as one might hear someone at whose response one could never have guessed. It was the same, 14 years ago, when I heard myself agreeing to take the Chiltern Hundreds, quit Parliament, and try my hand as a television interviewer. "Why is he saying that?" I wondered, astonished, but it was too late: I had said it.
The Territoire des terres Austral et Antarctiques Françaises have been very good about it. My Editor has been very good about it. My dear secretary, Eileen Wright, has dabbed her eyes and been very good about it, and told me not to venture into the fog alone, to take a minimum amount of film as one bit of rock looks very much like another, and to fill my Land Rover with petrol before leaving because it will cost more when I get back. Mum and Dad have concealed their worries and cheered me on. My llamas are, frankly, concerned.
In a few weeks I hope to be standing on the seashore at Desolation Island, my turbo-charged video-recorder on a rock near by, waving goodbye to David Johnson and the camera crew. And then four months, based at a depleted French scientific station, for the ship which brings me will take more than half of them home, for the imminent southern winter.
What shall I do? What will I need in the huts which are to be my base? What will I need if I am to go exploring? Almost as I write I am packing: books I've never read and always meant to, long-johns, acres of Gortex, CDs, a French grammar and dictionary, 15 kilos of Mars bars . . .
And no - before you ask - I shall not miss British politics, not at first, anyway. Tuesday's Budget, Millbank's doomed attempts to destroy Ken Livingstone, the local government elections in May . . .
Who cares? Stuff it. I'm off.
