'It is difficult to imagine the reform of British society without the abolition of the public schools, starting with Eton... I am afraid, when I'm dictator of England, I shall do it'

'When I'm accused of sweetening the end of a story, it is that I just haven't the heart to leave it as black as it is'

John Le Carré is a man of extraordinary quiet. He stands quietly, speaks quietly, and lives in a quiet place. His house is in a part of north London I thought I knew well, but I found it in a secluded square I had never entered before, with a large central garden. When his wife Jane opened the door he was standing well behind her, and so saw me before I saw him. When we shook hands, and he introduced himself by his real name of David Cornwell -and while I was still taking in how big he was - I mumbled something about the square.

'You went into it?' he said. Yes, I had been early, and had sussed it out, as I suppose he has learned people do, walking behind the cover of the tall bushes and approaching the house indirectly, quite the wrong way to arrive unnoticed.

He offered coffee, and then Jane, his second wife, left us alone in a sitting room full of light and with lovely old rugs on the floor. We sat at opposite ends of a long sofa. I shall now put in something which came up later, to establish it straight away. As far back as 1963, when he had published The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, newspapers were ringing him in Hamburg, where he was political consul, and then and for many years he would ritually deny any connection with the secret service. But could we now agree he served in it? 'Yes, it would be coy to deny it. I was first in MI5 (the security service) and then in MI6(espionage). But just what I did, that I never talk about. One just can't'

Well, Somerset Maugham had been a spy, hadn't he? 'That's right. Greene had done it. Compton Mackenzie had done it.' We will come to his Mackenzie anecdote later. But first we talked about his early days and his family. David Cornwell, whom I shall from now on call Le Carré, was born in Poole. His paternal grandfather was a stonemason who became successively a builder, a lay preacher, quite seriously rich, and then mayor of the ancient borough of Poole. Le Carré's father, Ronald Cornwell, was a chancer and an adventurer, and his mother ran off when her son was five. Whereupon he was dumped on his uncle Alec Glassey, who lived in a big spidery house at Branksome Park, much the grandest part of Poole and Bournemouth, near whose boundaries it lay.

Glassey had been Liberal MP for East Dorset 1929-31, was a magistrate, and became chief commissioner of theCongregational Union, 'a very big beef on that scene'. No newspapers were allowed on Sundays. Hymns were played on a pedal harmonium. Glassey had inherited great wealth from the potteries round Poole, but believed his family should work. An aunt worked at Sainsbury's. Le Carré's uncle John was a chemist, a boxer and a lay preacher. Another uncle worked for the Post Office and was seen up telegraph poles.

I happen to come from Poole, and mentioned that my grandmother used to run a pub there called the Black Horse, with sawdust on the floor. 'Oh, we would never have entered. They'd all taken the pledge. But my grandmother would allow medicinal sherry.'

Le Carré's father is the Rick of A Perfect Spy, a high-living confidence trickster who went to jail. 'And terrible rumours used to creep through,' said Le Carré, 'that my father had got a racehorse, or several racehorses; and he loathed news of his lifestyle to reach my grandmother, because it interfered with his plans to relieve her of her money.' (Laughter.)

Le Carré and his brother knew about this because they would be whisked off to Newbury tosee the horses run, though they didn't know the really black stuff, about the people cheated and stung, until much later. But Alec Glassey, JP, was righteously affronted. 'By the time I was 10 or 11 he'd given up father completely. He thought we were creatures of the devil. Oh, he really did. He thought that a rotten tree could not bring forth good fruit. He spoke like that.'

Le Carré was sent to prep school and then to Sherborne. His father moved to Chalfont StGiles, in Buckinghamshire, where he gave great lavish parties. 'Amazing people came. Huge gardens, marquees, Maurice Winnick and his orchestra who played at every deb dance, and lots of pretty girls from the nightclubs. He always laid on the chicks. That was always a great lure. The lovelies.'

And he noticed the lovelies? 'Oh very much. By the time I was 12, 14 - those legs right up to their necks.'

In 1948 his father entertained the famous Australian touring team - Bradman, Hassett, Miller,Toshack, the great ones. As he described this, Le Carré mimicked Hassett, drunk as a lord, doing a striptease on a kitchen table. 'When I was a child of five, I had no thingamy and I had no whatnot.' His mimicry of the Australian accent was perfect. Later, he took off Joseph Conrad, the head of M16, Alec Guinness, the British ambassadors in Bonn and at the United Nations and Harold Macmillan and an awful American girl from Vassar.

But what about Bradman? 'The friendship struck up between Bradman and Gordon Richards in my father's house was wonderful to observe. They both carried their hands in the way pugilists do almost, very forward of the body. You suddenly realised that whatever they had done in life they would have been marvellous at it. Both were completely in control. Never drank or ate anything they didn't want. Never wasted a word. Really great men, I thought.'

Then, said Le Carré, round the edges of his father's court would be the equivalents of the shady politicians of the present day, the fringe operators on the edge of life. 'And one or two rather frightened senior civil servants, who'd been drawn in because my father always wanted things like concessions to build runways at airports. Huge dinner parties had to be laid on and compromising relationships encouraged.'

And 1948 was also the year he left Sherborne and went to Bern. Was that to perfect his German? He said it was to get away from 11 non-stop years of boarding school. 'I was sick of it. Also, the disproportion between this muscular Christian school and the crazy lifestyle at home became unbridgeable. I went to a neutral country almost as a refugee in my own mind.'

The principal character of many Le Carré novels is George Smiley, German scholar, linguist, humanist, spy, and then spymaster. He sometimes feels more at home in German than in English. Did Le Carré feel the same? 'I do sometimes. I certainly did. It was an escape. An Englishman is branded on his tongue, it is said. And all of a sudden you get a new kind of democracy in another language.'

I remarked that Enoch Powell, who is a fine linguist, had said that in German he found expression almost for another and different part of himself. 'Well, I think that's true, yes. You can say sonorous things in German that people are not embarrassed by. You can deal in concepts and abstracts. To know German well and to read Conrad is to know a completely different Conrad, because you know the allusions. He spoke like this.' Here followed the voice of Conrad - a rounded, Germanic English.

Le Carré did his National Service, and went to Oxford to read modern languages. He was up for two years until his father suffered a spectacular bankruptcy, couldn't pay, and wouldn't accept a grant from Buckinghamshire. So Le Carré had to go down, with no prospect of returning. He married his first wife and taught at Millfield for a year as a prep school master, at £8 a week. Then his college, Lincoln, lent him the money to come back. He thinks that was splendid, what colleges are for. When he got a First he could not have been happier, for his college's sake.

Then, the Rector of Lincoln College being on good terms with the headmaster of Eton, he was taken on to teach languages, at £11 a week. 'So I had two years at the top, teaching at Eton, which was for a non-Etonian extraordinary. Are you an Etonian?'

No, but I imagined it must be a formidable school. 'Yes. It is also difficult to imagine the reform of British society without the abolition of the public schools, starting with Eton.'

I hoped he did not propose that. 'I am afraid, when I'm dictator of England, I shall do it. 'Here he praised the French system of lycées, which produced a different élite which was at least trained, intelligent, and democratically appointed. Well, I said, I sent my nine-year-old son to the French lycee in London, and very good it was. Le Carré named the school which both his youngest son and a grandson had attended. I looked at him. 'So,' he said, 'like all good hypocrites I've sent my children to public school. But I just wish it was not there.'

It was at this point I asked him about his own membership of the secret service, and he said what I reported earlier. Then he came to Compton Mackenzie who had been station chief somewhere in what was then called the Levant, and later wrote several funny books about spying, one called Water on the Brain, and then an autobiography. This was suppressed and he went to prison. 'When I was in MI5,' said Le Carré, 'I could not resist one night as duty officer tiptoeing through the archives and getting out the file, and there's a wonderful correspondence between C, head of the secret service, and the director general, who's head of the security service, about this swine Mackenzie. And C says in his letter that one of the most outrageous things about Mackenzie in his book is that he (voice of DG here adopted)'has quoted symbols, some of which are still in use'.' (Laughter.)

But Le Carré's own spying days were now 30 years ago? 'More. And, contrary to the lurid imagination of some journalists, I haven't spied for anything or anyone for more than 30years. So it's a kind of fantasy life continued, if you will, which is after all what a lot of novel writing is.'

Oh yes, but continued. Because all that tradecraft was so authentic that it had to have been there, surely? 'It had to be there. That's right. The rest is conjecture. In The Night Manager (his most recent book) we have a secret service gone to the bad, or partly, and I'd be very surprised if that were not true, in this particular period of our history. We know the KGB salted away millions and probably billions of dollars. We know that our secret service has been very deeply involved in illegal arms dealing, and in paying out huge corruption money round the place. It wasn't unreasonable to conjecture that perhaps someone had been putting his fingers in the till. We would be the last to know.'

Le Carré then named what he called the really wicked scandals of BCCI, Polly Peck, the supergun affair, and the Savings and Loans (building societies) in America. He thought this was the bad end of an era in which we had been encouraged to believe that materialism could replace ethics. The Thatcher era had been like the Brezhnev era. It would be the stagnation and not the progress that we should remember.

Yet Thatcher herself, whatever you thought of her policies, was surely an honest woman? 'An honest and brilliant woman; no question. The only trouble with her was that she did not have her like with her anywhere.'

I suggested Keith Joseph and was starting to say Carrington and Biffen. 'Yes,' he said, 'but they all went to the wall.'

But I wanted to leave Thatcher for Le Carré, and mentioned that he had said, in a lecture at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, that he came from good bolting stock. His mother had bolted. He had bolted from Sherborne, and so on. That's right, he said, and took up the litany. He had bolted from Eton after two years, from his first marriage when he was 36, and from the secret service at 33. 'From the secret world, really, as soon as I was able. But that wasn't because I had it in for the secret world. I really had decided I did not like institutional life, and I wanted to be a freelance soul.'

Well, he had published two earlier books. But what if he had not written The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which became a bestseller and gave him the means to leave? 'I would have remained, I think. My sort of game plan was to do a book a year, and have that for pocket money, and do an honest day's work for the service at the same time. But I think they were getting a little troubled.' Yes; surely The Spy Who Came in From the Cold showed a cast of mind which was thoroughly sceptical? 'I would have thought subversive, but they seemed able to live with it. They were broadminded, you see. They were sweet.'

But he was writing, and has continued to write, about betrayal, betrayal, betrayal -institutional betrayal, personal betrayal. He had asked, hadn't he, at Johns Hopkins, whether there was any love that did not rest ultimately on delusion? 'Yes, well, in many ways my view of life is very black. And quite often when I'm accused of sweetening the end of a story, it is that I just haven't the heart to leave it as black as it really is.' At the end of The Night Manager he believes the gunrunner Roper would have shot the young man and his girl and thrown them overboard. But he let them live. He says it is because he has to show the triumph of humanity over evil in some way.

I said the Americans had really taken to his works. There were several critical biographies -here he said Jane had counted eight of them - and one academic author from Ohio, looking for deep meaning in the name of George Smiley, had discovered that St George was the patron saint of England and a dragon slayer: what about that? That, he said, was why he no longer read such books, or even reviews of his own books in the papers. 'I used to live by that stuff. I found that I cared too much. And I know that I'm on top of my form. I know who I am, and what I can and can't do. And I simply won't be swayed by those judgements. And the English hate a little too much, particularly if one's successful, and I simply won't accept that coin.'

I took his point, but then said that the same man from Ohio had run down one Henri Le Carron, a British spy who had infiltrated American Fenians in the 19th century: what of that? Sweet, he said, and diligent; but when he invented Smiley he had never heard of the guy.

But could we take the name Le Carré? He had been obliged to adopt a pseudonym because the service could not permit a man to write under his own name. I believe he no longer knows where he got it from. I know how that can happen, but one can still cast about. Now to me, with my rough French, the word carré could mean 'square', or 'squared', or, of a man's character, 'straightforward'. That was all. But his French was infinitely better and subtler, so what could carré mean to him? He counted off the meanings. There was a numéero carré - in roulette. A bal carré was a masked dance in which the women could ask the mento dance rather than be asked. A parti carré was wife swapping. Or the word could describe a check suit.

So any one of those strands could have been present in his mind when he chose the name? He agreed, but then also said that if your name was spelt, say, N-g-a-i-o Marsh, then it was likely to be remembered. In the same way, a name with three pieces to it, like John Le Carré,was visually easy to remember. His publisher at the time had suggested something like Chuck Smith. 'I was smart enough,' he said, 'to choose something that had poster value.'

After a brief excursion during which Le Carré spoke in the voice of Alec Guinness, who played Smiley in the television series of Tinker Tailor, I asked about Anthony Burgess. A prejudice does not help an interviewer, but if he has one he should state it. For my money, LeCarré is the equal of any novelist now writing in English, and I reread him as often as I reread Scott Fitzgerald. I did not tell him this, as one Englishman wouldn't tell another, but I did ask him what he thought when Burgess, reviewing his autobiographical novel A Perfect Spy, wrote that Le Carré's talents cried out to be employed in the creation of a real novel.

Le Carre considered. Throughout nearly two hours together he listened to my questions with his eyes on me: then, when he replied, he would often be almost in profile. I remember that it is the same with Alec Guinness. At any rate, Le Carré said he knew this was a critical view that would hang like an albatross round his neck, for his whole life. 'But,' he said, 'the mainstream of my experience derives from my brief sojourn in the secret world and from my inescapable parentage. I am writing about what I know. I saw the (Berlin) Wall go up when I was 30 and I saw it come down when I was 60. I began to realise that I was doing what other people were not doing. I was chronicling my time, from a position of knowledge and sympathy. I lived the passion of my time. And if people tell me that I'm a genre writer, I can only reply that spying was the genre of the cold war... Someone said this (The Night Manager) was a romantic novel, and should get the romantic novel of the year award. If someone reads it for that, that's OK, too. You know, what I have is a huge constituency which clearly enjoys what I do, and I don't think I have compromised at all in order to reach it.'

As to the people of his novels, he thought a novelist explored the possibilities of his own character all the time. He sometimes thought he was setting up bits of himself against each other. 'Or would-be bits, too. I mean the sort of thugs... I could never behave like that, but there's a bit of me that would like to. I really am totally non-violent but I can get frightfully cross.' He later told me he had been taught to kill. That was standard. But he had never put it to the test.

Then somehow we went back 30 years to Le Carrée as first secretary in Bonn, with Macmillan as prime minister paying a visit to woo Adenauer into helping Britain join the Common Market, and failing. An embassy dinner. The ambassador (another impersonation)steadily drinking. Macmillan (again the voice well caught), having drunk half a bottle of kirsch, suddenly saying, 'Well, I see no hope. We're the chaps of whom our children will say, we brought the world to ruin.' Then, very late, Le Carré sees Macmillan to bed. 'And I followed the liver-spotted hand going up the embassy staircase, on the handrail. We got to the royal apartments where he was sleeping. He said, 'What did you say your name was, my dear fellow?' So I said, thinking knighthoods, promotions, what not, 'Cornwell. Cornwell, David Cornwell.' 'Cornhill,' he said, 'I'll bear that in mind, my dear chap'.'