The historian who introduced David Cameron to Prince Charles

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10 April 2012

Simon Sebag Montefiore welcomes me into his Kensington home with the sunny air of a liberated man. He has just completed, over three obsessive, sleep-deprived years, a monumental 600-page biography of Jerusalem.

He barely saw his children, whose drawings are on his study walls ("Happy Hanukkah, Daddy!"), and his wife, the novelist Santa Sebag Montefiore (the elder, saner sister of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson), had to put up with him "sometimes never coming to bed, just writing all night". The result is a vast, gripping history, tumultuous and very bloody - but that's fine with Sebag, as he is known. "Readers love death."

"Jerusalem," he tells me proudly, "is full of all types of death - massacres, hangings, eviscerations, exploding scrotums " His previous books, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and Young Stalin, were also grisly yet erudite, drawing on astonishing Kremlin archive material that he managed to access after Putin enjoyed his revisionist history of Catherine the Great and Potemkin.

That avenue is now closed, sadly; the Stalin books did not go down well with Russia's reputation-conscious regime, as he discovered when he last went to Moscow and asked for his room back. "What room?" the archivist asked. "I knew I was out of favour, big time."

On his next visit, he was told that he could not access the archives as two security guards had got drunk and fallen into the lift shaft. "Which is so Russian, because everything in Russia is half-accident, half-conspiracy."

Still, the Stalin books established him, in just six years and at age 45, as one of our most popular historians, published in 35 languages. Not to mention the best connected: the Prince of Wales is a friend often described as Santa's "honorary godfather"; Kate Middleton attended his last book launch. "Such a nice girl." Is he going to the wedding? "Well, I'd love to, but I don't know if I'm invited." In 2006 he introduced the Prince of Wales and David Cameron by cooking dinner for them both at his house. "There was lots of talk, lots of laughter," he says, too discreet even to answer when I ask what they ate.

In writing Jerusalem he tried to look objectively at the most contested city in the world. "Both sides have impeccable claims, in the Jewish case well over 3,000 years and in the Arab since 638. Both sides need to stop denying each other's history. It's the only way we're going to get a peaceful Jerusalem." He saw a glimpse of what that would look like, aged seven.

"I visited with my family, and we went round with Teddy Kolleck [then mayor] and had lunch with Palestinian families whom he liked and respected and they liked him: his philosophy was that it is a Jewish city and also an Arab city. That was the tolerant, open city Jerusalem once was - and could be again."

Over tea, which he makes with honey, he cheerfully suggests no one will like his book, meaning it is not partisan. "None of the antagonists will fully approve. I've written what I think is the truth about every period of Jerusalem's history," he says. "I've criticised Israel, I've criticised the Palestinians, I've criticised Arab rule and Christian rule I think if everyone's a little bit unhappy with it then I've probably done it right."

Sebag describes himself as both an insider and outsider. He grew up near his present home in Kensington where his father Dr Stephen Sebag Montefiore combined psychiatry and general practice. He watched high-profile clients like Peter Sellers come and go - and Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. (They wrote a sketch about his father: Cook poses as a psychiatrist while Moore recounts his ever more terrible perversions, to which Cook replies only "Perfectly normal".)

"There were always fascinating dramas going on. People would have breakdowns and arrive in the middle of the night. To this day, I meet people and recognise their faces because they must have passed through the house. As a boy I always knew exactly what was going on but my mother used to say, 'If you ever breathe a word of this, your father is ruined!' So I learned how to keep secrets."

As a boy Sebag was one of the first to be diagnosed with dyslexia ("Perfectly normal," said his father, and sent him for remedial classes in Wimbledon). "It's gone now," he says, though his (huge) handwriting is so bad he can't read it himself. He won an Exhibition to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, but he was "a terrible disappointment" academically and didn't get a First. "I didn't do a day's work the whole time I was there. I don't know what came over me. I spent a lot of time just chatting. Terrible."

He's a sociable being and fascinating company, with an eye for diverting detail (in the Gibbonian footnotes of Jerusalem, for example, one learns that Herod the Great dyed his hair).

Sebag now sees close friends of his generation on the Tory front bench. He says he can't recall when or how he met them: "I've just always known them." He won't name names but friends include not just Cameron but George Osborne and his wife, Frances, and Michael Gove. "You think they're young because they're your contemporaries but in fact Gadaffi seized power at 29 and Baby Doc Duvalier was only 19" He admires the Coalition: "They're talented, honourable and radical, too - they've got to make these cuts and they're doing very well."

He wholeheartedly supports Gove's education reforms and thinks it "essential to bring back the reading of classics onto the curriculum". Even Burke? "Great literature is gripping. It's absurd it's not being taught. There's appalling ignorance out there." When he was on tour promoting Young Stalin, he was appalled to hear a sales assistant in the bookshop announce over the Tannoy: "Joseph Stalin is here signing books."
His committed faith (Santa converted to Judaism in order to marry him) is "the one part of my life I've never felt any doubt about".

"Jerusalem" is his family's motto, chosen by his great-uncle Sir Moses Montefiore when Queen Victoria knighted him in 1837, and Sebag wears his signet ring today.

Sir Moses was a wealthy speculator, banking partner of the Rothschilds and a philanthropist for Jewish rights internationally. Every Passover the Montefiores read aloud his account of how, in a storm at sea, Sir Moses pacified the waves by throwing overboard a piece of unleavened matzah.

Sebag thought him "rather a pious family saint" but during his research for Jerusalem he discovered that Sir Moses "was brave, a visionary" and also that he fathered, at 81, a child with a 16-year-old maidservant. "I began to revise my opinion of him." His maternal grandparents escaped from Tsarist persecution in a hay cart. "They came here with great hope and belief in England, and England has never failed them. We have flourished here. I don't have much sympathy with people whining constantly about small slights. You shouldn't be too sensitive."
He becomes intense, however, when I ask him if there has been a change in the climate towards Jews in this country due to Israeli activity in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. Yes - and he finds "deeply evil" the oft-aired comparison "of Israeli defence of its own security with the (actions of the) Nazis".

"I don't think for a moment that anyone who criticises Israel is an anti-Semite - I do it myself. However, a lot of the criticisms of Israel do derive from a new anti-Semitism which is extremely unpleasant. During the Israeli war in the Lebanon [2006] it really reached a fever pitch which was just absurd. To me, as a Jew but especially as a historian, any comparison of Israeli actions with those of the Nazis in the Second World War is iniquitous morally and factually. It's deeply evil and deeply anti-Semitic. It's using Jewish experience against the state of Israel, when there is no parallel in history for the Holocaust at all."

His book ends with a vivid description of "This Morning" in Jerusalem. He is "anguished" and "depressed" about many aspects of Israeli government: "All the appalling security issues and the prejudices and problems, which I go into in great detail in the book. They should never be harassing other people, pressurising them out of their homes and I hate that aspect; yet Israel is a democracy with the right to defend itself."

But he quite naturally sees the bright side too. "This last 40-odd years since 1967 is the first time in 3,000 years in Jerusalem that everyone can actually worship freely, including Muslims, including Jews." This week he launched his "big serious book with a big frivolous party, at Asprey". The guests of honour were his son Sasha, seven, and his daughter Lily Bathsheba, nine. "Bathsheba is, after all, Queen of Jerusalem."

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore was published yesterday (Weidenfeld, £25)

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