Like Margaret Thatcher, the Secretary of State for International Development has read only heavily edited cuttings. Her staff weed out the worst of the vitriol.
Her second tactic is to escape by taking exercise She swims. Each morning for seven days now she has swum the best part of half a mile.Ms Short freely acknowledges that her reference to “golden elephants” was unfortunate and offensive. She claims that the phrase was never intended for repetition in public. But last week it was her turn to cry foul, and she was fuming at briefings for journalists by other government departments, at the nefarious activities of spindoctors, and at the forces within the Foreign Office which, she says, want to destroy her department.This is not a baptism of fire, she says: “It is a further immersion in the black art of spindoctoring. “Everybody who worked with him was conscious of working with a great mind.”.

Clare Short, who is no stranger to controversy, has adopted two tactics to deal with the volcanic explosion of criticism following her imprudent suggestion that Montserrat’s politicians are so irresponsible that they would soon be asking for “golden elephants”

The first is to stop reading newspapers. He was a single-minded, determined person.”It seems little has changed in the 20 years since then. “It was the first time I had met him in his disabled state,” Filkin recalls. “But he quickly put me at ease.” Both men found Hawking, who has an electric wheelchair, a remarkable TV performer “He always hit his marks,” says Martin. He was an enthusiastic, determined cox – determined that we should row harder.

“Stephen and I were undergraduates together at Cambridge,” he says “We were in the rowing club Well, I rowed and he coxed. “He didn’t want to do anything about being a brilliant mind in a crippled body,” says David Filkin, the producer. Martin agrees: “He was keen that it should be about his ideas, rather than being a biography.”It was not the first meeting for Filkin and Professor Hawking. Professor Hawking, holder of the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge, insisted on sanctioning all the detailed scripts. “But for this series to succeed, we have to get people to watch it.”Getting the scripts and the science right required lengthy consultations. “Why haven’t we been visited by aliens or tourists from the future?” he says tersely. “Of course, some people would claim we have been visited, and that’s what UFOs are.

But I think any such contact would be much more obvious and probably very nasty.”The team producing the six, hour-long programmes travelled to 60 locations around the Earth and used computer graphics to take the viewer beyond the normal confines, in an attempt to expand the book’s dense explanations.They hope the programmes will do for the history of the universe what Lord Clarke’s Civilization series did for the history of humans.”For the book to be a public success people don’t need to read it, just to buy it,” says director Philip Martin. But he also squashes two of the favourite ideas of science fiction – time travel and friendly aliens.Although many theorists now talk seriously about using “wormholes” formed by microscopic black holes to travel in time, Professor Hawking is dubious. The story spans billions of years, from the beginning of the universe to the ways in which it might end – though Professor Hawking says: “A few years ago when I was giving a lecture I was asked not to mention the end of the universe in case it depressed the stock market.”
He does assure viewers that any cataclysm is a few billion years away at least. But later on the descent they began to worry over whether they would get paid – their patron, Douglas, was dead – and even suggested a ruse to add to their notoriety. The “murder charge” flowed from a memorandum in which he observed that “men who could view the loss of their fellow creatures with such commercial feelings as these, might not, possibly, be ill pleased if I also slipped”. Whymper, in fact, paid Old Peter a record Sfr120 and his son Sfr80.Lyall’s encyclopaedic work is likely to reheat a mountaineering controversy that has never really grown cold since the day the rope broke 132 years ago.The First Descent of the Matterhorn, by Alan Lyall, Gomer Press, Llandyssul, Ceredigion SA44 4BQ, pounds 45.. Salvation is at hand for those who thought that they would never finish – or start – Stephen Hawking’s bestseller A Brief History of Time.