The close friend I never really knew

I have just read an extraordinary new book. It’s by a close and old pal whom I’d count as one of my best friends. He was my lodger in London for ten years. His book is autobiographical. And I now realise I never knew him at all.

In Don’t Ask Me About My Dad, Tom Mitchelson charts a life story that is entirely strange to me, and shocking. And yet the weird thing is that I know many of the people in it – or thought I did. His late father, Austin, who helped launch the Sunday Sport, I met and thought a likeable if flaky chap, and good company. He turns out to have been the most appalling wife-beater, liar, drunkard and debtor. His mother, whom I’d also met and who struck me as a kindly soul but a sort of ‘someone else’s mum’ character, turns out to have been the victim of a monster, in and out of women’s refuges, and someone of almost heroic fortitude.

And Tom himself, whom two years ago I would have described as a funny, sociable, laidback chap with hardly a care in the world, emerges as a tormented man, witness to terrible scenes at home, seriously sexually molested by a ghastly schoolteacher who had spotted a 13-year-old boy’s longing for a protector and mentor. Haunted and fascinated by the ability to shape-shift that this living hell had taught him, Tom turned it to advantage as a Daily Mail columnist specialising in working undercover: a confidence trickster, really. ‘I had spent the years constructing myself. I felt I was a good piece of work.’

But to the book in a moment. I first met Tom when he was an A-level student in the audience of an Any Questions? recording; he wrote to me after university, interested in journalism.