The changing faces of Ivan

Ivan Massow's career strongly recalls Groucho Marx's maxim about not wanting to join any club that would have him as a member.

Massow's fame has, after all, largely been built on belonging to institutions to which he is dazzlingly ill-suited. A potential Conservative mayor of London, he outed himself as a gay rights campaigner just as the Tories were steaming themselves up over Section 28. As chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, he came to the conclusion that conceptual art, which the gallery had always championed, was mostly "pretentious, selfindulgent, craftless tat". Today, in his current political home, the Labour party, he is easily distinguishable by the hunting togs he wears at weekends as whipperin of his local hunt. How they must love him.

Nothing becomes Massow's membership of these outfits so much as his leaving of them. He defected from the Conservatives in August 2000 declaring them "intolerant and just plain nasty", although only a year earlier he had predicted that the party was so "tolerant" it was likely to produce Britain's first openly gay prime minister. His sacking from the ICA in February, after he wrote in the New Statesman that it had morphed "into a pillar of the shock establishment", made even bigger headlines, and last week, in another apparent snub to the ICA's director, Philip Dodd, he announced he was setting up a rival outfit called the ICC, the Institute of Contemporary Culture. To be fair, he is actually still a Labour party member, but, predictably, things are not going well. Massow has the unusual distinction of having been excluded from its own Social Exclusion Unit.

We discuss his position as the insider's outsider - or, perhaps, outsider's insider - at his smartly furnished insurance brokers' office in Covent Garden, from where, in the early Nineties, he made millions of pink pounds at a time when other insurance companies were reluctant to consider gay clients. Comparisons with Groucho Marx, I quickly realise, can be binned. He is outspoken and humorous but no wit or raconteur, actually rather inarticulate in a Bransony way. Nor is there anything zany about him. Dressed in respectable suit and open-necked shirt, he is ridiculously good-looking, the most beautiful man, I think, I have interviewed in five years, although his life proves that beauty is no safeguard against romantic disaster. Having belatedly come out at the age of 19, he first believed he was incapable of forming relationships and then unexpectedly fell madly in love with a manic depressive, James Knight, who killed himself five years ago.

I start off by saying that I assume he had been unhappy at the ICA and that his "craftless tat" article was a form of public resignation. He says I am wrong. He loved the job.

"The ICA is there to be cutting edge, to showcase tomorrow today, to constantly question established orthodoxies, not to become its own orthodoxy. It's there to evolve and, hopefully, be one step ahead of everything else. That is a given. I am almost embarrassed to say something so obvious. So I was actually quite surprised that Philip Dodd responded so bizarrely to an article that had actually passed through the press department. They thought it was great."

In his telling, Massow was fired not for his views, nor for how he expressed them, although he concedes his language was inflammatory, and certainly not for any alleged failings as a money-raiser - which was the scuttlebutt of the time - but because he usurped a jealous director's role as spokesman, an issue which had arisen before because of the media's love affair with Massow.

If this is true, you can only wonder at Massow's naivety. Why did he not check, rather than assume, the press office had first approved the piece with Dodd? Even after its publication, however, he seems to have been complacent about its consequences, jokily sending Dodd a toy gun so the board could "dispatch" him "cleanly and humanely". In the event, leaving the ICA proved "upsetting" and "destabilising", but he took comfort from the "thousands" of letters of support he received from ICA members.

His period in the Tory limelight traces the same arc of enthusiasm and disappointment. Although he was chairman of his local Young Conservatives in Brighton when he was 14, his re-emergence as a Tory really came in 1999 when The Daily Telegraph tipped him as a mayoral challenger to Jeffrey Archer. In The Spectator, Massow responded with an article entitled "Why I, a homosexual, want to be a Tory MP". For a while, he found himself in synch with William Hague's inclusive vision of a modern Conservative party, but when Hague became "desperate" and toughened up his rhetoric to please the Right, Massow gave up on him.

Why didn't he stay and fight? "Lots of people have said that, but I was getting nowhere. Resigning clarified my position. Anyway, I couldn't care whether I belong to a party or not. I'm not there for social reasons."

But he was Lady Thatcher's official escort at the 1999 party conference? "That just appealed to my sense of kitsch. Even though most gay men and women blame her for Section 28, they still admire her as a drag idol."

HIS defection to Labour was organised by the spin doctor Lance Price, who had previously smuggled Sean Woodward across the border. "I went over rather foolishly saying that I didn't want a peerage, that I was taking a moral stand. I got the feeling they did not quite believe I'd jump. They kept saying things like, 'You'd be very useful in the Lords', and I'd say, 'You don't have to say that, I'm going to do it anyway'."

But when he arrived, Millbank's sharp suits failed to follow through on the welcome. "The reason I got upset with the Labour party was that I actually only asked to work on the Social Exclusion Unit. I had chaired the Mind inquiry into mental health and social exclusion. I am really involved with the Samaritans. My partner died by committing suicide, and the cause of that was his mental illness. It is a really boring thing to ask to work on mental health. I thought, what harm can I do?"

But although Mo Mowlam expressed interest, his calls were not returned. "I popped in to see Alastair Campbell and said, 'This is a bit strange.' He said, 'Oh, I'll sort it out,' but it never was."

It is just possible, of course, that by this time people were thinking that Massow was not the gilt-edged commodity the early hype had advertised. His reputation largely rested on Massow Financial Services, which he started from a licensed squat in Camden Town in 1989 and turned into a major player. But by last autumn, the Massow brand was tarnished. The year before, tired of squabbling with his venture capitalist backers, he had sold his controlling interest to a company called Rainbow Finance. In October, Massow-Rainbow went bust. He was no longer an executive, but the ICA could not resist mentioning the failure in the press release announcing his sacking.

What had gone wrong? "It was just bad management really. There was no incentive scheme and too many managers. The management bill was more than the sales-staff bill. It was horrible, even though when I bought it from the receivers I actually managed to re-employ everybody who wanted to come back and I compensated them their back salaries."

All in all, I say, a difficult time. "But all the things you say were difficult - and certain things were disappointing - are just so minor, so unimportant compared to what happened with Jamie. I had no idea that you could feel upset like that. The possibility of it happening had always been mooted because he had self-harmed long before he met me, and was really honest with me about that in the first week. I said if it happened I could cope with it. I hadn't realised how deep my ability not to cope was.î James, posh, dilettante, a hairdresser, two years younger than Ivan, threw himself out of a window after a party where he had drunk ecstasy-laced punch. The coroner refused to deliver a suicide verdict and said the balance of his mind had probably been disturbed by the combination of the ecstasy and the Prozac he was on.

"It was a small comfort in a weird sort of way when the coroner said this wasn't a rational act. The difficulty with a suicide is asking, 'What could I have done or said that could have changed this? Is there any way I could have been more supportive?' But there was still the grief for someone you love, and then the final bit, which was the most difficult, the rejection. They haven't just left the world, they've left you. And you only want to be with them.î

He is now in a happy relationship with Nils Wager, a business partner a couple of years older than him, whom he met a few years ago in St Tropez. Nils lives off-shore in Ibiza and Paris. Massow has homes in Mayfair and Somerset. As if talking of a limited company, he says this relationship is "structured" quite differently from his with James.

I find myself formulating a slightly nebulous question about whether, at 34, he has a clear sense of himself. I ask not just because of his habit of joining unsympathetic organisations but because of his fractured childhood. Having survived an abusive father and stepfather, he was adopted by a middleaged bachelor, John Massow, at the age of 12. By teenage, therefore, he had had three surnames: Field, his birthname, his stepfather's name Mitchell, and Massow. He knows what I am getting at.

"It looks bad, doesn't it? But actually, my life feels very consistent. I feel I have been incredibly consistent all the way through: asked questions, spoken my mind, had beliefs, stuck to them, not allowed myself to be swayed by others. I feel my core is very, very tight."

Yet I also detect in Ivan an almost familial need to belong. He won't discuss it, but my guess is that he would not wave away an olive branch if the Tories proffered one. Far from wanting to boycott the ICA, he says he was hurt not to be invited to a recent dinner for the ICA 50, a fund-raising group he formed. The Institute of Contemporary Culture isn't actually intended as a rival to the ICA, he adds. It isn't, in fact, seeking premises next to it in The Mall; it's more a "virtual" art gallery. And it isn't really called the Institute of Contemporary Culture. That was just cheekiness. It is actually CultureTM.com.

Poor Ivan, he'd like nothing better than to return to the ICA, if only for a quiet cappuccino in its cafÈ. The trouble is that, when their initial crushes pass, people find Massow eminently black-ballable. Later I come across a diary item claiming he is searching Soho for premises for a new club. It's a pity, I think, that the name "Groucho's" has already been taken.