‘My country first’

It’s not unusual for Kirsty Young’s castaways on Desert Island Discs to choose music that reminds them of people who are important to them. But Aung San Suu Kyi must surely have been the first politician-guest to ask her friends and family what she should take with her to that solitary isle, instead of carefully stage-managing her selection to present a particular view of herself. Who, for instance, would have expected to hear Tom Jones belting out ‘The Green Green Grass of Home’ on Sunday morning? But there he was, as cheesily sentimental as ever, chosen for Suu Kyi by her Burmese PA. She even confessed that she hadn’t listened to the song before the interview (which took place at her home in Naypyidaw) and said she had no idea whether she liked it or not.

Suu Kyi was a bit of a coup for Young (and Radio 4), consenting to take part in what is essentially a frivolous, celebrity-driven programme. As might have been expected, she gave us a very different kind of conversation from the usual flim-flam. Young kept trying to bring the interview back on track, by probing Suu Kyi about her time at university in Oxford in the early Sixties. ‘I can only guess,’ she simpered, at what was going on in those heady student days, all that drinking, smoking, carousing. ‘Were you very well behaved?’ she asked.

‘I was very well behaved,’ insisted Suu Kyi, with quiet dignity. Disappointed that Suu Kyi had nothing to confess, Young muttered, almost but not quite off-mike, ‘You’re not just saying that, are you?’

It was the strangest conjunction, this conversation between the ever-so-principled, always-serene Suu Kyi, and the keen-eyed, eager-for-a-headline journalist. ‘Looking at photographs [of Suu Kyi back then] you were like a Bond girl,’ Young persisted.