'I probably have seven years left, if I'm lucky'

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11 April 2012

Men love Mariella Frostrup. She charms with her ready laugh and tomboy sexiness. Last week, at the launch of her second series of The Book Show on Sky Arts, she seduced veteran reporter John Simpson into revealing that he regretted dressing in a burka to cross into Afghanistan. Later in the series we'll see Alastair Campbell boast that Tony Blair begged him to take his old job back.

But Frostrup invests emotionally, too. On Thursday you'll see her reduced to tears by a passage about motherhood in Jeanette Winterson's new book, The Stone Gods. Winterson talks about how her own failed relationship with her adoptive mother fuels her writing: "You have to write through the wound," she tells Frostrup. "It skins over but it's not sound underneath. But if you can work from that place of pain ... then I think you can make something of value to other people."

It's a TV moment where shivers run up your spine. Frostrup tells me what a joy it is to interview writers after a career grilling monosyllabic rock stars. "Writers want to talk. They can't wait to tell you what they've been thinking. And because they've been in solitude, they've had some fairly decent thoughts."

Not only does she present the only programme on TV properly dedicated to books, Frostrup, 44, makes a revealing interviewee herself. Unlike many broadcasters who get snooty about their private lives, she tells it like it is.

Although happily married to humanrights lawyer Jason McCue, 37, she is not above the odd paranoid thought. "You think: 'Oh my God, when I'm 52, he's going to be 45 - he's going to leave me." Still, she muses, it will have been a nice chunk of security and happiness: "My children will be older so maybe it's not the worst thing."

For years we've seen her falling out of parties on the arm of Hugh Grant, Mick Jagger and George Clooney. But she's always been a feminist. As a mother of two, she knows how hard it is for women to balance work and motherhood. "Having a baby is a disaster for your career. I don't think there's any sympathy. I've had producers say 'Her breastfeeding doesn't work with our production schedule.'"

She knows all about being an older mother: she had her first baby, Molly, at 41 and Danny at 43. "My gynaecologist told me that I had a 0.000001 chance of conceiving. He almost laughed," she says, still visibly affronted. Although she turned out to be a textbook success, she's far from smug. "I'm so wary of seeming to be a poster woman for having babies post-40. It took us a year to have Molly."

And she is infuriated by people who lecture "selfish" women about their fertility. "I have never met a woman who said to me 'I'm putting it off because of my career,' but I've met countless women who say 'I can't find someone who wants to settle down,' or 'We're trying, but it's not working.' I've never met this so-called 'career bitch'. Men want children later but women can't rely on being able to. So I'm all for scientific advances and the help they can give people."

Frostrup can play the power blonde on the red carpet, but the rest of the time she is dressed down. She rarely wears make-up and gave up Botox after the first try. Two children in two years has taken a toll on both her body - "Naked, it's not pretty" - and on sex, conversation and sleep.

For years Mariella was the poster girl for the guilt-free single life. But she reveals that she was often a chronically bad picker when it came to men. "You know, I would go out with people who really didn't like me very much and then wonder why we weren't getting married! I'd go out with people who would say: 'See you at 8pm,' and then turn up three days later - and I'd be slightly grateful for the fact they'd remembered at all. I don't know if it's age but I went off that whole 'I can't breathe, I'm so tense' butterfly feeling. I don't find it romantic at all."

To break the pattern in 2001, she took a few months out leading hiking trips in Brazil as a glorified tour guide. "I wanted to see what it was like not to be me." She acted in The Vagina Monologues. Then she went on a charity trek to Nepal and met McCue (who represented the families of the 1998 Omagh bombing).

It was far from love at first sight. She thought he was "too blond and too full of himself ". He thought she was controlling. But on their return to London they met to go through some photographs and she realised with a shock how attractive she found him. Six months later they moved in together. "He just took up this space that I hadn't quite realised I had and filled it. And everything seemed like the natural next step." McCue gave up his warehouse apartment in Hoxton to join her in Notting Hill.

It's not all roses. "From the first minute, we bickered. We found each other intensely irritating but strangely compelling, and I think that's what keeps us together. We've just been on holiday with some friends and their daughter said to her mother, 'I thought Mariella and Jason didn't like each other.' But then she realised that's just the way we talk. We certainly don't harbour things, it's out the minute one of us thinks it."

I can testify to their chemistry: at a media party earlier this year they couldn't keep their hands off each other. Throughout dinner McCue was quite provocatively running his hand up and down her bare spine.

People think Mariella is posh because of her voice, but her journalist father was Scottish and her painter mother Norwegian. They moved to Ireland when she was six. Her parents split two years later and when she fell out with her mother's new boyfriend she went to live with her father, who was foreign editor of the Irish Times, as well as a book reviewer (it's in the blood).

He had a drink problem and died of a heart attack when she was 15. She fled with £15 to live in a squat in London and reinvented herself as a music PR. "I wasn't ambitious for the sake of it. I was ambitious to make a living."

It did affect her relationships: when you're the daughter of someone who is an addict it's common to look for people you can mend. At 18 she married pop musician Richard Jobson. They broke up when she was 21 and she became a bachelorette about town.

As well as The Book Show, she writes a weekly agony column. "I get letters from people who say 'I'm 40 and depressed because I know life is never going to change.' But actually you can change your life at any point. It may not be some huge Damascene revelation, but you have to be prepared to go halfway towards it."

I notice that she is sporting the latest must- have - a £ 950 Nancy bag designed by one Samantha Cameron. (This from a woman who is so close to the Labour social establishment that she's interviewed Gordon Brown twice, and counts his wife Sarah as a personal friend.) Surely the Smythson bag is politically off-message? "It's very nice that we get unified over handbags," she says with that trademark throaty laugh.

In fact, Frostrup is a big fan of the Tory first lady. "How dare they attack Samantha because she's a successful working woman? What's she supposed to do? Stop because David's ambitions have been realised? She's brilliant at her job. Despite having a family and a handicapped child, who she's amazing with, she turned that company around."

It's pure misogyny, she insists. "Why do we make male politicians feel that the only way we'll find their spouses acceptable is if they turn up like Stepford Wives and smile benignly at their husbands? We should be celebrating the fact that they don't conform to a ridiculous stereotype none of us believe in. Sorry, I'm getting a bit histrionic," Frostrup grins through a mouthful of chips. "But I am furious."

A furious Frostrup is a rather daunting sight. And yet the one person who she admits scares her is, bizarrely, four-year-old Molly. "The other day she said, 'Why don't you wear high heels when you go out?' And I said, 'Well I don't really wear them, Molly.' She looked at me completely aghast as if she'd swap me for any other mother."

But then Frostrup says she was just the same as a child: adults were a disappointment and she couldn't wait to do things for herself - "Now I see my daughter looking at me and longing for that, too."

A former comprehensive school girl, she is horrified to admit her children may go to private school. "Where I live, there's one good state school and I'm not in the catchment area. In my day, private school was for gormless, inbred idiots and now we're all thinking of sending our children there."

As for her career, she's bluntly realistic. "I've probably got seven years left if I'm really lucky. Look at Moira Stuart. If you can't be a news presenter at 52, you certainly can't be some giddy blonde about town."

The Book Show is on Thursdays at 7pm on Sky Arts, Channel 267.

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