Sandi Toksvig: Nicely does it

She says all this with the usual wry delivery. Toksvig in person is much less trumpety than on screen: smaller, contained and with a more mixed, less RP accent — her upbringing in Denmark and New York more readily to the fore. Then again, quiet as she is, her tiny frame is encased in a large, garish orange hoodie with the words “Cougars Athletic” emblazoned across the front. She bought this for $10 in a pharmacy in a small Californian town called Half Moon Bay; she was in the area because, naturally, she had just done a TED talk in San Francisco.

“I always thought it was funny that it said ‘Cougars’,” chuckles Toksvig, 58, who is not, it must be said, a Cougar, or even a cougar: two years ago, she married Debbie, the therapist she has been with for 10 years. This oversized hoodie is almost on trend, I tell her. Toksvig, who has no truck with fashion or vanity of any kind (her zany QI outfits are chosen by her stylist, Sharon), shrugs this off. “Well, it’s totally by accident. I was cold.”

Common sense is a large part of Toksvig’s appeal, and this is particularly apparent in our interview, where she patiently chides me for my more hysterical notions. Isn’t it funny that people love QI so much, I ask her, in a world that seems to care less and less about facts? The OED’s word of the year is, after all, “post-truth”.

“I think that’s a big generalisation,” she frowns. “I think a lot of people care.” Yes, she says, she’s aware of the “whole ‘post-truth’ thing”, and finds it “slightly scary”, but adds: “All you can do in the face of that is carry on standing up and saying, please can we look at the facts? You can’t then decide, oh, that’s the world we now live in, and give up. I’m passionate about facts, but I’m passionate about their use.”

Still, I would have expected her to be a bit more scared: not so much for her work on QI, which really is water off a duck’s back, but for her other big project, the Women’s Equality Party, which she co-launched last year. Only days before we meet, it had its first political conference. Toksvig is beaming about this. “I had probably the most exciting three days of my professional life, just phenomenal, the energy, the respect, the affection, the determination, the enthusiasm...” (She is not its leader: that’s Sophie Walker.)

She says it will soon have 120 branches across the country and already has 165,000 members and supporters — “Which is way bigger than Ukip!” She might even go to New York soon, to launch the party there. (She wants it to be global.) But the world, and political discourse in particular, has grown a lot harsher in the past year. The competition is fiercer. How will she get her message across?

“In a way, it’s almost easier, because before, you had people saying, ‘Why do you need a Women’s Equality Party?’ And now you hear almost any sentence coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth and you go, oh, that’s why! Because misogyny is alive and well and moving into the White House.”

She goes on to slate the chancellor’s recent autumn statement: “The focus is on the big, rough stuff, big tarmacky things, instead of actually thinking about systemic change and infrastructure.” Yet don’t we have a female prime minister? “Yes, but darling, she’s on what is known as the glass cliff... Do you know about that? She’s been put in charge because the boys went, argh, what did we do? And they ran away as fast as the stab wounds in their backs will allow them.”

She thinks Theresa May is “a good woman, a nice woman”; in fact, they had lunch only last month. “But she is not focused at all on sorting out gender inequality. If she says things like ‘Brexit means Brexit’, which seriously doesn’t mean anything... coffee means coffee! My nose means my nose! It doesn’t mean anything. She has a lot on her plate.” (Sadly, I meet her before the PM announces her desire for a “red, white and blue Brexit”. Toksvig must have had a field day.)

I try to rephrase and say, how will you connect with voters who seem to need ever sharper soundbites? “The one place where men and women have equality is at the ballot box. That’s it. We’re absolutely equal in the ballot box. There’s a soundbite for you.” A small part of me thinks, well, not quite, but that’s another element of Toksvig’s appeal: her stout virtue. No dog-whistle politics for her. She can clearly sense my fears, though, because she puts me right.

“People are nice. My view of this country is that people are nice, and less prejudiced, less homophobic, less racist, than some would have you believe. I think it’s a nation of kind people, I really do. I love this country and I love the interactions I have with people.”

This attitude is part temperament (that relentless optimism), part context: her mother is British, but Toksvig only came to live here as a teenager, sent over from America (where her father, a famous Danish journalist, was working). It was a relationship she had to learn, and she has the passion of a convert. Funnily, though, she only became a British citizen in 2013.

“I just didn’t get round to it. I lead a ridiculously busy life. And it was my wife who said to me, you are passionate about politics, but you don’t vote here. What is wrong with you?” True — why? “I don’t know. I just didn’t get round to it!” Where did you vote? “I didn’t. Because Denmark doesn’t allow it. And I suddenly thought, it’s a bit silly. But I didn’t need a passport to feel British.” I’m a bit baffled it took her so long to vote, but she ploughs on, telling me that her father “believed in being a citizen of the world”. Considering another of May’s recent statements, I can’t help but cut in: citizens of the world don’t exist, do they?

“Well, that’s not true,” she tuts. “It’s perfectly possible to feel you could be comfortable anywhere. We travelled all our lives, and I think I could settle in any place. The world’s full of wonderful places.” Do you really feel that? “I do. As long as I wasn’t repressed, in which case I would have to jump up and down. I heard — I don’t know if it’s true, but I want it to be — that there’s a group of lesbians in Iran fighting for LGBT rights, called Lezbollah. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard!”

Toksvig, of course, has fought plenty for LGBT rights in the past two decades; it’s odd to remember how much of a tumbleweed moment it was when she came out in 1994, when she was with her previous partner and their three small children. In these uncertain times, does she worry things might regress? “Yes, totally. We have to hang in there. I do absolutely worry about that. I worry about finding out that suddenly I’m not married — it was the most wonderful day for me. But it may be that we’ve gone too far in this country now.” Then again, she says, “we still get politicians who say that homosexuals change the weather”.

Toksvig is quite ecstatically married. “Seriously, it’s possible to love someone more every day.” She says Debbie is “so nice — nicer than me”, and she even makes this point twice, which suggests that either Debbie is a saint or Sandi is some kind of penitent. They met at a dinner party at Debbie’s, which Toksvig had invited herself along to as a plus-one. They met on the doorstep “and we shook hands — and we will both tell you, it was like being hit by lightning”. Yet they were both with other partners, so, over the next six years, they became very good friends. “At parties we used always to end up sitting, holding hands and talking.” She can maybe see my eyebrows rise, because she adds: “Not in a sexual way. I don’t know why, just holding hands and talking. And when we finally got together, it was like the most natural thing in the world.”

Since Debbie is so kind, I ask if that’s the most important trait in a spouse. Toksvig replies that a good relationship is like going scuba diving, where you “buddy up” with a partner, and the priority is always to make sure the other is OK. “I want her to be really happy. She wants me to be really happy. And together we are content, which is something I had never thought, when I was younger, that I was aiming for.” What were you looking for back then? Passion? “Oh, still that. Still that. I’m passionate about everything. Boringly passionate!”

Toksvig’s son and two daughters are young adults now. She talks about them often, and fondly. (One is a junior doctor working on Christmas Eve this year, missing Toksvig’s big annual celebration, and she adds a stern encomium about the treatment of young female doctors.) Luckily, they are all very funny themselves. What if she had had an unfunny child?

“Or a fascist — can you imagine? Or a rugby player. That wouldn’t sit right with me.” Really, no rugby players? “No, darling. Sport, it’s not my thing.” None at all? “No, darling. Look at me.” She explains that “the thing I don’t get about sport is that it’s the same thing every time. Somebody loses and somebody wins.” To which I suggest that sport can be a wonderful metaphor for life.

“No. You know when they do that thing when they shoot five goals at the end of the football?” The penalty shootout, yes. “Why don’t they just do that and skip the 90 minutes of running? It’s so irritating. They could all watch The Sound of Music and have a bit of a kick at the end. That would be way better.” She doesn’t see why we have to have so much sport on telly, so I ask what she would have in its place. “I don’t know,” she sighs. “I’m very interested in embroidery, but there’s been no programming that covers my interest.” She’d rather they spent the sports slot on the news explaining something more interesting: the background on Syria, or Glenda Jackson discussing her King Lear, or even “teach me how to pick a lock. There you go! I’d be interested.”

All in all, very Toksvig. We have been together barely an hour, but the rate of chatter has been so quick, it could have been twice as much. I ask her what she does with her downtime, if she has such a thing. “I exercise. I do a lot of craft. I have a loom.” She then starts saying that she “can’t just watch telly”, but catches herself just in time. “Apart from QI. A marvellous programme!”

CULTURE’S QI CHRISTMAS QUIZ
Q1 Who once nearly killed himself when trying to electrocute a turkey for Christmas dinner?
Thomas Edison; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Benjamin Franklin; Samuel Pepys

Q2 In which city did the Miracle of 1511 take place, when locals built more than 100 pornographic snowmen to protest against the government?
Brussels; Prague; Vienna; Hamburg

Q3 The composer James Lord Pierpont once wrote a song called We Conquer or Die. He also wrote which Christmas song?
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer; Jingle Bells; Silent Night; O Little Town of Bethlehem

Q4 In Catalonian nativity scenes, what is the Caganer traditionally doing?
Urinating; Defecating; Spitting; Having a nosebleed

Q5 Which film features a snow scene in which the fake snow was made from asbestos?
It’s A Wonderful Life; Miracle on 34th Street; Doctor Zhivago; The Wizard of Oz

Q6 Which of these dates back to ancient Rome?
Christmas crackers; Christmas baubles; Christmas stockings; Christmas jumpers

Q7 Which author once received a flatpack Swiss chalet as a Christmas present?
Charles Dickens; George Eliot; Hans Christian Andersen; Virginia Woolf

Q8 What was the Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang banned from taking into space?
Tinsel; Christmas pudding; A miniature nativity scene; Reindeer meat

Q9 In Japan, what will sleigh-pulling reindeer be delivering this year?
Fried chicken; Pizza; Turkey; Cake

Q10 From which country can you post a letter to Santa Claus using the postcode H0H 0H0?
Ireland; New Zealand; Canada; Norway

QI airs on Fridays on BBC2 at 10pm; the Christmas special is on Thursday.The book 1342 QI Facts to Leave You Flabbergasted is out now (Faber £10)

Answers: 1 Benjamin Franklin; 2 Brussels; 3 Jingle Bells; 4 Defecating; 5 The Wizard of Oz; 6 For Sigillaria, ancient Rome’s equivalent of Christmas, Romans exchanged gifts of ugly but warm jumpers; 7 Charles Dickens; 8 Reindeer meat; 9 Pizza (Domino’s pizza, to be precise); 10 Canada