Clive James - Personal Life

Personal Life

James is married to Prue Shaw, an academic in modern languages specialising in Italian and medieval romance philology. The couple have two daughters, Claerwen (a painter), and Lucinda (a civil servant). James divides his time between a converted warehouse flat in London and a house in Cambridge. He has a policy of not talking about his family publicly.

After the death of his friend Diana, Princess of Wales, James wrote a piece for The New Yorker entitled "I Wish I'd Never Met Her", recording his overwhelming grief. Since then he has declined to comment about their friendship.

While a detractor of communism and socialism for their tendency towards totalitarianism, James still identifies himself with the left, endorsing some of the features sometimes observed under socialism, such as a planned economy and state-owned media, and eschewing the free market and privatisation associated with capitalism. In a 2006 interview in The Sunday Times, James states of himself: "I was brought up on the proletarian left, and I remain there. The fair go for the workers is fundamental, and I don't believe the free market has a mind".

In a speech given in 1991, he criticised privatisation: "The idea that Britain's broadcasting system—for all its drawbacks one of the country's greatest institutions—was bound to be improved by being subjected to the conditions of a free market: there was no difficulty in recognising that notion as politically illiterate. But for some reason people did have difficulty in realising that it was economically illiterate too".

Overall, James identifies as a liberal social democrat. He strongly supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, saying in 2007 that "the war only lasted a few days" and that the continuing conflict in Iraq was "the Iraq peace." He has also written that it was "official policy to rape a woman in front of her family" during Saddam Hussein's regime and that women have enjoyed more rights since the invasion.

James has been noted for expressing views sympathetic to climate change scepticism.

James is currently a Patron of the Burma Campaign UK an organisation that campaigns for human rights and democracy in Burma.

Describing religions as "advertising agencies for a product that doesn't exist," James is an atheist and sees this as the default, obvious position.

James is able to read, with varying fluency, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and Japanese. A tango enthusiast, he has travelled to Buenos Aires for dance lessons and has a dance floor in his house which allows him to practise.

A former heavy drinker and smoker, who recorded in North Face of Soho his habit of filling a hubcap ashtray daily, James now drinks only socially and stopped smoking in 2005. He admitted smoking 80 cigarettes a day for a number of years.

In April 2011, after media speculation that he had suffered kidney failure, James confirmed that he was suffering from B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and had been under treatment for 15 months at Addenbrooke's Hospital. In an interview with BBC Radio 4 in June 2012, James admitted that the disease "had beaten him" and that he was "near the end". He revealed that he was also diagnosed with lung disease and kidney failure in 2010.

In April 2012, Channel Nine's A Current Affair ran an item in which Leanne Edelsten claimed she had an eight-year affair with Clive James.