What a Mayor: Stringfellow

There's something rather oddly likeable about Peter Stringfellow. For the entire four hours I am with him - because goodness, this man can talk - I try to pin it down. Is it his rather endearing brown eyes and crumpled face? "I've had a facelift," he chortles, "so it shouldn't be crumpled. Maybe my eyes need a bit of fine-tuning. But they're my best feature. Mind you, I'm not going to Leslie Ash's surgeon. Look at her lips!" Or maybe it's the fact he's so gossipy. He knows everybody because most of them have, at one point or another, passed through the doors of his eponymous nightclub.

He is a tad upset today because he was hoping Jack Nicholson was going to pop in after the premiëre of About Schmidt. "He's not coming over," says Stringfellow, his little eyes drooping. He's met pretty much everyone else, though. The walls of his office are heaving with black-and-white photographs of legends such as Ginger Rogers, Diana Dors, Rod Stewart, Roger Daltry, John Entwistle, Hugh Grant and Robert Downey Jnr.

"I'll tell you," says Stringfellow, looking at a photograph of Elizabeth Hurley, "lots of women go out of their way to get pregnant by a rich man." And then he chortles again. "I'm going to get into trouble, aren't I?"

Peter Stringfellow loves getting into trouble. His entire life has trouble stamped all over it. For a start, he was solely responsible for bringing lap dancing into this country when, in 1996, he installed long-legged, half-nude, pole-rotating lovelies in Stringfellows. Then, a year ago, he applied for a full nudity licence and got it. Now he wants to overthrow Westminster Council's "no touching" policy.

"I'm not saying there should be touching per se," he says. "But what if a dancer accidentally brushes up against the man's thigh while she's dancing or something? I could be closed down."

But it's the slippery slope, isn't it? For all his protestations, surely it's a ploy to get more punters into the club?

Stringfellow's teddy-bear eyes widen. "It's not that," he says, apparently horrified. "They do that in Birmingham. You can do anything there, the full works and everything, and I'd never have that in my club. My girls are dancers, not prostitutes."

Well, this man is a walking, talking anachronism. Yes, he says he knows some women find his club offensive, but no, he doesn't really think there's anything wrong with it. "The men love coming here," he says. Of course they do, I say. "It's very beautiful," he says. "The women's bodies here are amazing and they dance just for you." Yes, but that's because it's paid for. "Why shouldn't men pay for it?" he says.

But doesn't that make it a form of prostitution - the money, the nudity, all that thrusting and wiggling and bending over to show the most intimate part of the body?

"I don't like to see it that way," says Stringfellow. "You'd love it here." I tell him I used to go there when I was about 18. "Did I chat you up?" he asks merrily. No, I say, you didn't. "Ooh, sorry," he says, "heh, heh heh."

Yet for a man who runs a strip club and consistently dates women much younger than himself, he is surprisingly prudish. He says the club has more rules than the council. "We would make the rule 'no touching of a sexual nature',î he says, "and our girls are not allowed to fraternise.

"We have a strict no drugs policy. We do get gays at the club. I always ask, 'Are there any gays here?' and then I tell the girls not to dance for them as it gets embarrassing. But we don't get many.

In the main, the people who do come are businessmen taking clients out and, at the weekend, the "out of townies", as Stringfellow calls them. He has male dancers - around six - on a Saturday night compared to 50 female ones. "But I tell our female guests 'no rowdy behaviour'. If they've got feathers or such like with them then I won't let them in. It's a respectable club."

The men, of course, don't take their underwear off. "Hypocritical I know," says Stringfellow, "but there you go." Well, he's a happy hypocrite. He hates porn. "Quite disgusting," he says. He thinks girls should stop all this ladette business, as it doesn't suit them. "All this drinking and shagging around. Girls don't want to do that, do they? It doesn't help them. Girls are romantic. But it'll all fade away soon." And he thinks all drugs should be legalised. If I wanted to shoot up heroin, I would. It's not the law that stops people. So let's be adult and deal with it."

He's got solutions to everything - homelessness, overcrowded hospitals, immigration, tax problems. If he wasn't so busy running his club, he says, he'd think about standing for Mayor. "What would be the first thing I'd do? Stop this no touching policy. Heh heh heh. And shut down all those other clubs that bring Stringfellows into disrepute."

He's referring to places like Spearmint Rhino, where things are a lot more, shall we say, on show than they are at Stringfellows. "I'm not getting into a war of words," he says, "but clubs like that don't help the business at all."

Peter Stringfellow is his business. Not only is the club named after him, as were all his ill-fated clubs in the States that had to close in the early Nineties because of the recession, but he is in there every single night. He says it doesn't get boring, although I'm sure it must do. "Only a woman would ask me that question," he says.

"What? Get bored of all those gorgeous naked bodies? Never." In many ways, he was born to be a club promoter. With his trademark steely grey footballer-meets-Eighties popstar mane and his endless clunking gold jewellery, complete with heavy dangly earring, he couldn't have been anything but.

With his capped teeth and ill-fitting suits, he's a cross between Ken Dodd and Peter Kay, or rather Peter Kay's impression of a northern club promoter. If Stringfellow hadn't been successful in London, it would be extremely easy to imagine him still in Sheffield running disco nights and doing a bit of bingo calling.

There is nothing slick about him at all. He thinks he's rather slick - he has perfectly manicured hands complete with clear polish - but he has never transcended being what he is: a working-class-boy-made-good.

He's been the butt of jokes for years. People laugh at his terrible hair and his choice of virtually prepubescent girlfriends. Everyone remembers the photograph of him in 1996, aged in his mid-fifties walking down the beach with his then girlfriend Helen Benoist, then 17, sporting his n' hers thongs. He's renowned for wearing animal-print suits and sleeping in black satin sheets.

Even more worryingly, he is famous for sleeping with thousands of women and demanding sex every day and twice on Sundays.

But it's all part of the fun of being Peter Stringfellow. He plays to the image, he says. "It hasn't really done me any harm and it's brought me many things. A yacht. A villa in Majorca." His wealth also helped his father, a steelworker, to retire. "But I think I was mistaken," he says. "I thought my father couldn't possibly want to remain in Sheffield slogging away but, of course, he had his mates and his life. When he had nothing to do but be at home, him and my mother argued all the time. I don't think people should marry for life."

He, of course, has been married (twice). He is currently very happy with his latest lovely girlfriend of the past four years. Lucy Carr is 26, blonde and from north Wales.

They met when she came to dance in Stringfellows, which is pretty much how he's met all of his female companions. Now she's his girlfriend she doesn't dance there any more. Again, there's this dichotomy between what he represents and what he actually is. Lucy Carr is a dancer but Stringfellow doesn't really want to go out with a girl who shows her shaven undercarriage to men for £20 a dance, so now she's a pop singer.

Deborah, the girlfriend before, went back to dancing at Stringfellows. That's the other amazing thing. Nearly all of Stringfellow's exes, including second wife Coral, to whom he was married for 26 years, work for him, as does Karen, his daughter from his first marriage. In a way, Lucy works for him too because she has been signed by his own record company.

"She's come in at number 28," he says of Lucy's single, Missing You. "She's very excited about it. She goes up and down the country touring and doing promotions and everything. Sometimes she does three performances a day. She loves it. I'm too old for all that. I'm not saying I'm Jack Nicholson but I can't do that much now."

The truth is, as much as he doesn't want to admit it, that at 62 Stringfellow is tired out. He tells me that one of his favourite things is to cook a lovely dinner, light up the candles in his antique candelabras, open a bottle of good red wine and have a proper grown-up, sit-down dinner in his beautiful dining room.

Do he and Lucy do that often? "Lucy doesn't like doing that really," he says. "She likes a TV dinner watching the soaps. And she doesn't drink," he says. "She thinks I'm a formative alcoholic!" It's the age gap, of course.

He likes to tell tales of the time he put his foot through Brian Jones's sitar when he was the warm-up man on Ready, Steady, Go. She probably thinks he's talking about Ready, Steady Cook. "I don't call it an age gap," he says. "It's an experience gap. Of course I'd like her to know all about the Rolling Stones but I don't want to take away her youth. I mustn't do that." Why doesn't he go out with someone nearer his own age? "In their 40s or something?" he says. "Why would I? I have female friends that age and I love them but I don't want to go out with them." Why not? "They're too old," he says simply.

But the most revealing thing about Stringfellow is his apartment above the office. He may purport to love being a man. He may claim that he has never, ever wanted to be a woman, but his flat is a revelation.

It's amazingly feminine. It's like a wonderful, plush, ebullient Victorian boudoir of a pampered but tasteful madame. The dining room is all red velvet and crystal chandeliers, as is the sitting room. On the ceiling there are beautiful hand-painted murals, including a copy of Botticelli's Venus. "Do you think she's too fat?" he asks.

"She's supposed to be like that," I say. "Hmm, fat," he says. He has antique books and decoupaged boxes decorated with old-fashioned teddy bears. He has three beautiful cats - Cecil, Eleanor and Bob. He obviously adores them. His bedroom does have a mirror above the antique brass bed, but there are no black satin sheets in sight. Instead, it's all white Egyptian cotton and tapestries. The last thing he shows me is the bathroom.

Ah. Well, maybe you can get enough of a good thing. It's dominated by a Jacuzzi with fake gold taps and, oh dear, yellow rubber ducks. "Lucy's?" I ask. "Lucy's," he says.