Nicholas Soames: No bread, no booze — he’s lost half his bulk but none of his bite

He is aware that Twitter is a public forum? “Of course, but it’s terribly funny,” he says, giving a wolfish grin, and “like all people, I laugh tremendously at my own jokes.”

This week Winston Churchill’s grandson will have served 33 years in the House of Commons. He has twice been a minister, but most of his career has been spent as a backbencher. In recent months “Fatty Soames”, bon viveur and lover of the long lunch, has changed beyond recognition. Most obviously, he is half the size.

This is something of a touchy subject (see the Ipso adjudication on page 2) but Soames’s weight loss has been so dramatic that he fills only a third of his suit, which encases his slimmed-down frame like a navy blue coffin.

He says he “paid a lot of money” to go and see “a very grand lady” who was an expert. “She said: ‘Have you paid your money?’ And I said: ‘Yes’. And she said: ‘Well, I’m going to tell you how to lose weight: you’ve got to stop eating — at least you’ve got to eat a lot less.’ So, you know, I did it.”

Since the start of the year he has cut out bread, sugar and cream. He hasn’t had “a drop of booze” since January. “Actually, that’s not strictly true, I mean I haven’t had a gin and tonic or vodka or whatever. I had a tiny sip of wine the other night — just to taste it,” he says. He has replaced alcohol with Angostura bitters and slimline tonic, which is “a very good drink”, and apart from a nasty run-in with “tasteless cardboard called tofu” it hasn’t been at all bad.

The biggest surprise about meeting Soames is finding that I like him quite a lot. He is the stuff of Westminster legend. There are stories about endless lunches and obnoxious quips. He used to shout, “Mine’s a gin and tonic, Giovanni” at the former ship’s steward John Prescott. In 2005 he was voted the most sexist MP in the Commons, owing to a boorish tendency to make cupping gestures at the female politicians opposite him.

He sounded, frankly, like a bit of an arse. But today he is genial and charming. At one point he catches me staring at a picture of him smiling madly in a field of apples and he gamely explains each of the keepsakes in his office. “It goes grouse, apples, General de Gaulle,” he says, pointing at a picture of his father, a former ambassador to France, shaking hands with the country’s late president.

“Then there is a charming pig, a gift from the pig farmers’ association, and to your right is a couple of wild partridges — one of my great loves.” Shooting them? “Well,” he says, “trying to get more of them and then shooting them.”

Does he still think the Tories worry too much about recruiting “women and gays” to the party? “Oh, I’ve completely jumped ship on all that. I can’t think what possessed me. I think I was irritated by it, without realising how powerful it was as a thing in people’s lives. It wasn’t in my life or of it. I’ve changed my mind completely. I’ve changed my mind about lots of things in life.”

Soames still thoroughly enjoys being an MP. He spends Monday to Friday in London and weekends in his constituency with his second wife, Serena (he has three children). He still wakes at five, listens to “something ghastly” until the Today programme starts at six and reads every newspaper.

It is the Brexiteers who are really feeling his new reserves of energy: “They’re frightfully cross; it’s a cross campaign, a tremendously negative Nein, nein, nein campaign,” he sighs, “and this is not a cross nation — it is an optimistic country.”

The referendum is the one subject about which he is deadly serious. He was set to retire at the last election but “decided not to go because this was clearly going to come up” and, he says, swivelling his chair to face the Commons: “It is the single most important issue Britain has faced for decades.” And it has come about because of “frankly feckless, pretty cowardly politicians for generations who have failed to deal with Europe”.

The benefit of being “an old foxhound who is about to be put out to pasture” is that he’s now free to say what he thinks, which is that Britain should remain in Europe because of a shared history and a sense of duty. “This country does not leave — we stay and fix it,” he says.

“I’m not under any delusion that anybody will listen to what I’ve got to say but it’s a recognisable voice, as it were, and there are some big beasts stamping around this jungle.” Not least “Boris and the Gover [Michael Gove]”, who are both good friends of his. He has butted heads with Johnson already when the London mayor brought up the subject of the Churchill bust in the Oval Office ahead of President Barack Obama’s visit.

“I was incensed by Boris on the grounds of abusing, I mean,” — he catches himself — “involving my grandfather in a political argument” (a trick he isn’t averse to using himself). He thought it was “entirely horrible” and said so to his face.

The two have now “kissed and made up”, Soames sighs. “I have known Boris for years and it’s a terrible thing to have to say, but I don’t believe that Boris is an ‘outer’. He never was an ‘outer’. He’s decided to do it and I think it was a very difficult decision for him.”

A tactical one? “I don’t want to be beastly about Boris but to me it’s a very perplexing decision. I think it will go wrong for him, yes.”

Soames, I’m surprised to find, is the only person who has anything sensible to say about the saga of Obama and the disappearing Churchill bust. “I think people are incredibly arrogant. Why should Obama have a head of my grandfather? It’s not obligatory. I have a head of my grandfather, two of them, but he was my grandfather — I’m very proud of him,” he says. “I think it’s much more appropriate, frankly, that President Obama feels he would want a statue of Martin Luther King.”

Politicians, he feels, should be able to adapt, which is why the trolls who say “my grandfather would be turning in his grave” annoy him so much. “My grandfather changed his views all the time as any grown-up thinking person does. I cannot believe Churchill wouldn’t look out over the world today and say to himself: ‘Is this a sensible thing for Britain to do?’ And I absolutely know he wouldn’t have thought it was sensible.”

It’s clear that Soames doesn’t really want to give up politics. He has told the constituency that he is “probably” retiring at the next election, but in case he has a new lease of life “can always uncross my fingers behind my back”.

What would he do away from parliament? “That’s the problem,” he sighs. “I’m very happy and fulfilled in this job. It makes people sick when they read it in the paper, but I think being a member of parliament is a hell of a thing to be able to do. I just think the House has probably had enough of me.”

I can’t believe that’s true; but it would give him more time to terrorise people on Twitter.

@rosiekinchen