BATH, ENGLAND
JANUARY 17, 2026

STRANGER: Christine Hamilton
LOCATION: The Boathouse, Newbridge Road, Bath, England
THEME: Reinventing and reaching contentment after scandal

When someone famous dies, it’s often easy to predict the first line of their obituary. Orson Welles was inevitably going to be named as the genius writer-director-actor of “Citizen Kane.” Others are reduced to a single phrase, a single role, a single moment.

For Neil Hamilton, a former British member of Parliament, and his wife Christine, I suspect their first line — that incident, many know the one — is already written. It comes up, inevitably, during my lunch with Christine. But it doesn’t deserve to kick off the story.

What does deserve to start is this: decades after the news cameras moved on, she remains quick-witted, assured and a delight to be around: someone who turned scandal into panto, bankruptcy into “I’m a Celebrity” triumph and notoriety into something like contentment.

When I ask how she’d describe herself, she laughs and says “a happily retired old bag.”

We’re having lunch at The Boathouse, a pub in Bath. It wasn’t our first location; we had planned to meet at a restaurant nearer the Hamiltons’ home in Chippenham. But the joys of English train transfers and delays mean I would be hours late. What follows is pure Christine: care, humor and a blunt “pull yourself together” efficiency.

“Oh dear oh dear oh dear – that’s all I can say!” she texts. Then she takes charge, driving over 30 minutes to collect me at Bath station. It’s like getting picked up by your favorite aunt, she’s instantly chatty, relaxed and warm – even when lightly scolding me for sending unclear messages on whether Neil was invited to join the lunch interview (he was, but didn’t think so).

So it’s just Christine and me at a table in a quiet corner of The Boathouse. It’s a cozy pub on the River Avon, all exposed brick, hardwood floors and muted yellow paint.

“Right, we have lift off!” she says. “Dear oh dear, I need a drink.”

And so we order libations to start – a Frosty Bakewell cherry-flavored cocktail for me, a glass of dry white wine for her. They’ll take a good long while to arrive, something that tests Christine’s patience and sadly is a harbinger of quite frankly shoddy service throughout.

I try to use reading the menu to pivot to Christine’s popular appearance on television show “Celebrity Masterchef” in 2010 (she was a finalist, part of her successful rebuilding of her public persona). But she quickly turns the topic to me. “Tell me about yourself,” she says, peppering my response with endless follow-up questions. Just who’s being interviewed here?

Thirty minutes pass, and I’ve shared a fair amount with her – plenty of personal stories I’ll keep between us. It seems to put her a tad more at ease, although she’s friendly from the outset, her mini-interview of me helps, I feel, to create a more relaxed atmosphere.

“Cheers,” she says as our drinks finally arrive.

“Glad we could finally make it happen,” I reply, noting that our interview has, for various reasons, been scheduled and rescheduled for at least two years running.

“Well, we haven’t got through lunch yet, you never know what might happen. There’ll be a fire alarm and we’ll have to abandon the building.”

Although the service at the Boathouse is questionable at best, we agree the food is tremendous. Christine praises her risotto of chestnut and shiitake mushrooms, roasted celeriac, plant-based hard cheese, sherry vinegar and crispy sage.

I enjoy a hearty pie of steak and Tanglefoot (a type of ale) served with creamy mashed potatoes, braised red cabbage and Badger Beer gravy. Delicious.

As we eat, it’s my turn to ask some questions, starting easy: Describe your typical day.

“There isn’t one, really,” she says. It’s just weeks since Christmas and the Hamiltons playing host to family at their 16th century country house Bradfield Manor. Christine’s brother and wife have three children who love to visit the estate. “If you ask them what’s their favorite place in the world, they will say, ‘Bradfield, because Father Christmas knows we’ll be there,’” she says, fond of the recent guests. “That makes it all worthwhile.”

With the festive season behind her, it’s back to a schedule of the occasional video-link appearances on the BBC and GB News as a much-sought-after talking head, travel, cooking and still the occasional skirmish in the public eye – this time over a solar farm.

There’s an ongoing fight between some residents of Hullavington, near Bradfield Manor, and the developers of a planned 180-acre solar farm. Concerns have been raised about the project’s scope, inadequate planning for construction and more. But once the Hamiltons got involved to protest, suddenly the narrative became fixated on them.

“The British Battleaxe goes to war!” yelled one headline, referencing a moniker the press gave Christine years ago. Another focused on Neil’s time as an MP to tell the solar story, and couldn’t resist detouring in the third paragraph to dwell on his one-time scandal in the 1990s.

“We tried to take a back seat on all this because once the media gets an eye on the Hamiltons, it becomes about us, and who cares about them? Who cares if their house value is reduced? Who cares about their environment? And we didn’t want that. But it’s creeping in,” says Christine. “And there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Not strictly true – there is one thing they can do: fight. And so Christine and Neil have been arm-in-arm taking on their detractors in this latest situation. It’s an enduring, and endearing, partnership that started all the way back in the 1960s.

The couple, both 76 years old, first met in 1968 at a student political conference. “It was a kind of thunderbolt across the roof” when they first locked eyes, she says – even if Neil at the time was sporting “enormous mutton chop whiskers” that it’s clear Christine doesn’t miss.

They started dating but Neil was mostly away pursuing degrees (he’s got them in economics, politics and law) while Christine was in London. Age 21, she got a job in the House of Commons. “I wanted to be an MP, so I thought let’s go and see what it’s all about,” she says.

“I had a ball, frightfully important people like MPs were inviting me out for dinner. I thought, what is the point in having a boyfriend a day’s journey way? So I dumped him. Poor Neil. He was horrified because he was standing to be chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students and he needed a bird on his arm, but suddenly he hadn’t got one.”

She recalls the story with a cheeky grin, before adding, “Do you know, I think it’s the best thing I did. We both did whatever we did, those are the lost years, we don’t talk about them. If we hadn’t spent that time apart, we might not still be together now.”

How come? “Well, we got other people out of our system and grew up a bit. After spending several years apart in their twenties, the couple reunited when they were both 29, and married in 1983. “And, you know, it works. We’re lucky. We’ve been married now for a long time. We’ve been going out for way over half a century, but we’ve been married for 43 years.”

She jests about her husband – when I jokingly ask her to list his flaws, she replies, “He drives me round the bend, how long have you got?” – but is just as quick to praise his positive characteristics. “He’s a very, very kind person; nobody believes that, they just think they know him from that they read. But he’s an incredible person, I just love him.”

One supporting anecdote is the time in 1992 Neil got a broken nose defending his friend former MP Harvey Proctor from a homophobic attack in the latter’s shirt-making shop.

Neil was first elected to Parliament in March 1983 and over the following years worked his way up the ranks of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s government. Christine became Neil’s secretary. It seems they’ve been a partnership in every sense, personal and professional, even in more challenging times. That includes a victorious libel case against the BBC in the 1980s over allegations about his right-wing views.

“We always tried to make sure that when one of us was down, the other one was able to pull back. We had to make sure,” she says.

If this was dinner with both of them, I’d quiz Neil about his politics (I’m upfront with Christine that mine are quite opposite to his, this doesn’t faze her or make her less engaging). Instead, my focus for this unplanned one-on-one is Christine.

She was quite content with her role, until 1997. So let’s talk about what happened. Think back to even before the Blur and Oasis’ chart rivalry. The iPhone wasn’t yet a thought in Steve Jobs’ bald head. Nineteen ninety-seven. Writing it out makes it feel even farther back.

Neil – by then the government’s minister for corporate affairs – was in the middle of what became known as the “cash for questions” scandal, alleged to have been one of two MPs that took bribes in exchange for asking parliamentary questions and doing other work for Mohamed Al-Fayed, the late owner of the landmark department store Harrods.

BBC journalist Martin Bell decided to challenge Neil in that year’s election, touting himself as an “anti-sleaze” candidate who would only serve one term. During the campaign, the media scrum caught an interaction between the Hamiltons and Bell. Christine vigorously defended her husband, though if you watch the recording it’s a civilized, spirited back-and-forth. “But I was called battleaxe, the wife from hell, a monster,” she says. “The war correspondent John Sweeney said to describe me as Lady Macbeth was to insult Lady Macbeth.”

Bell won the election, so overnight the Hamiltons were both out of work. They pursued libel cases against both The Guardian newspaper, which in 1994 first published the cash-for-questions allegations, and against Al-Fayed for remarks he made in a television interview about the scandal. They settled the first case and lost the second – and the latter’s costs, over £3 million, forced the couple into bankruptcy in 2001, and they had to sell their home.

Nearly 30 years have passed since then, which feels like plenty of time to stop embalming the Hamiltons in moralistic amber. A lot can happen in three decades. Yet, as the solar farm stories show, journalists write about the couple as if time didn’t move on.

That likely means the first line, or part, of Neil’s and Christine’s obituaries may already be written, something she thinks about from time to time. “It may not be the first line,” she says, then adds, “But of course it will. Unless we both die together, one of us is going to read the other one’s obituary. And it will be very hurtful. But what can we do? We just have to accept it. If you rail against it, it’s a waste of time. It’s going to happen.”

Following the election loss, the Hamiltons turned toward media, with appearances on a range of shows, including the satirical quiz “Have I Got News For You.”

They showed a willingness to poke fun at themselves, and Christine a natural ease with the limelight. She leaned in to the “British Battleaxe” image that the media had created, even writing “The Book of British Battleaxes” in 1999.

And then came 2001.

The Hamiltons agreed to film a BBC documentary with journalist Louis Theroux following their daily routine in their pivot to media careers. In the middle of filming, a new scandal broke – Nadine Milroy-Sloan accused the couple of an alleged rape. It was baffling to Christine, who knew she and Neil were innocent and were blindsided by the claim.

It was a stressful time, to understate things. “There were times when I felt I was being rushed toward the end of the Niagara falls, no way out except going over. It is the ultimate sink or swim,” she says. So how did they survive? “Because we were both in it together.”

Milroy-Sloan would soon be found to have invented the entire story, and was jailed in 2002 for making false accusations. The Hamiltons would later get calls from victims of false allegations. “After all our fiasco, a lot of people got in touch saying, they’ve been wrongly accused of all this and that and can you help us with all of this, so we put them in touch with various organizations and tried to help,” she says.

Calling back to the Harvey Proctor anecdote, Christine also says the Hamiltons’ gay friends were among their strongest supporters in those particularly trying times. “I think because they know what it’s like to be oppressed, to be reviled, and we’ve been right down there.”

The last strand of the tale takes place in 2005, when the Hamiltons successfully sued publicist Max Clifford for remarks he made around the time of the rape allegations implying that they must be true. They won financial damages from Clifford – “it paid the stamp duty on our house, thank you” – and a written apology letter, which is framed and takes pride of place in one of the toilets at the Hamiltons’ home, she notes with a laugh.

Another lavatory fixture is a framed letter from Al-Fayed banning the couple from Harrods, warning: “If you seek to enter Harrods for any reason whatsoever, it will be regarded as a matter of trespass, and if necessary the police will be called.”

Christine laughs as she says, “The only person to my knowledge who had one of those letters was the Duke of Edinburgh.” Why him? “Oh because the Duke killed Diana and Dodi,” she adds, a conspiratorial wink about Al-Fayed’s claims about the death of Princess Diana.

It’s clear that gallows humor must have helped her and Neil get through some of the more challenging times. “In a way suing the BBC in the 80s was our first great psychodrama, to use a current terminology. The cash-for-questions thing was our second, and the rape business was the third – and I hope to god it’s the last. I don’t know if I would have the strength to go through something like that now.”

Thinking back to that letter banning her from Harrods, the bankruptcy, and the need to reinvent through a career in the media, Christine says, “I sometimes think, thank you Mr. Fayed, if it hadn’t been for him, I would probably still be boring Mrs. MP.”

When did things change? “I can pinpoint that,” she says, citing her decision in 2002 to take part in the first series of ITV’s “I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!” featuring her and several other notable public figures living and doing tasks in the Australian outback. Viewers saw her natural personality and candor speaking about her and Neil’s trials over the years, and she proved immensely popular, placing third in the finale.

“People saw me as I really am, I’m quite fun and perfectly likable. And my stock in public eyes, instead of being down there” – she points to the floor, then up to the ceiling “went like that. And it was the best thing I’d ever done. Because it established me in the public’s mind as not this ghastly harridan that they’d read about, you know.”

The show firmly established what would become a thriving television career, including “Celebrity Masterchef” in 2010 and stage performances in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” as well as the Hamiltons producing their own show a few times at the Edinburgh Festival.

Christine in particular was fond of the “wonderful camaraderie” doing stage shows, although the couple have already likely trodden the boards for the last time.

As lunch winds down and we enjoy dessert – sorbet for me and ice cream for her – it appears that today, she and Neil live seemingly content lives. He does some legal work (and much to Christine’s chagrin uses the kitchen table instead of what she calls his “perfectly serviceable” office at home), she can be seen on various news programs and the like.

But she is “slowing up, I’ve got various health problems – osteoporosis, crumbling bones. I’ve got two broken vertebrae in my back. I’ve had 11 operations from the knee down. So life’s a bit more difficult than it used to be on that level, but I’m fine.”

After decades in the headlines, whether voluntarily or not, these days Christine finds the most joy in a quiet, unhurried morning when she can lie in bed with a cup of tea.

“I enjoy just being able to have a more relaxed life,” she says. “We’re very much out of the mainstream, and it’s wonderful.”