Smash hit

Before long he was giving her $200 a month and keeping her in a flat. Nadira, who seems harder-nosed than a rhino, was simultaneously accepting $300 a month from an American whom she had promised to marry. But Murray talks about his womanising as if it were no more controversial than a fondness for bridge.

“I’ve always enjoyed wine, woman and song,” he says. “It was always part of my unconventional style. At heart I am just a fun-loving person. I always worked on the basis that if everybody knew about it, nobody could blackmail me.”

But not quite everybody knew about it. His wife Fiona, for one. “There were periods in our marriage where we had almost broken up because of past mistresses,” he says. “But I didn’t give her a running commentary on what I was doing of an evening. I didn’t tell her and she didn’t ask.”

But she clearly wasn’t happy. “She was very unhappy. My wife is a wonderful person and I behaved very badly to her. I hurt her badly. There are certain things I feel rather guilty about.”

Fiona told mutual friends that she had no idea about Murray’s behaviour in Uzbekistan until he told her about it. He, however, had simply presumed that she was looking the other way. “I used to come back at four in the morning and say I’d had a really difficult meeting, never thinking she would really believe that,” he says. “I thought it was a kind of charade we went through to keep our marriage together. Apparently, she really did believe it.”

In Foreign Office parlance, he was a cad. “Yes,” he says. “But this idea that you can’t point out an act of torture unless you are a saint is just bizarre. The Left in particular always looks for heroes and I became something of an iconic figure for a while.”

At the height of the publicity, he had “Harold Pinter on the phone, Noam Chomsky on Hotmail and David Hare in the kitchen.” Murray’s response was to disabuse those who wanted to fetishise him. “I’m actually a bad man who happens to have a limit beyond which I wouldn’t go,” he says. “The strange thing is that a lot of people who are very good men — who have never been unfaithful to their wives, always go to bed by ten and even go to church — didn’t have any trouble with the torture bit. That’s the thing I really don’t get.”

It’s easy to forget, amid the salacious details of Murray’s private life, just how hard his fall from grace has been. He was for a short time, Britain’s youngest ambassador and was in the top three in his year for the civil service exams.

“I had a reputation for being very bright, unorthodox, and able to get solutions but also rather ambitious and self-seeking,” he says. “I’d been promoted very quickly. The last thing on my mind when I arrived in Uzbekistan was having a fight with the Foreign Office.”

Right up until the end he says, he was given plenty of opportunities to back down, including the offer of another ambassadorship if he just quietly left Uzbekistan. “They were desperate to hush it up,” he says. “But by that time I felt so committed to the people of Uzbekistan and so outraged. I absolutely believed when I sent my memo that Jack Straw would agree with me and stop it. It seemed incredible that a Labour government would do otherwise. What I didn’t know then was that Straw had already met Sir Richard Dearlove and they had agreed that Britain would use information from torture in the context of the war on terror.”

His extraordinarily antiquated attitude to women is matched by an old-fashioned sense of honour. “I don’t see the point of doing this job if we’re not the good guys,” he says of the role of British diplomats. In the end he lost not only his career, his reputation and his marriage but also his home, health and, for a short time, his sanity. He came perilously close to jumping off a high building near his London flat. The thought of the anguish he would cause his two children stopped him. He also had Nadira to consider. They are still together despite the relationship’s unlikely genesis.

“In a way we’ve healed each other. We’re genuinely very happy.” But he has no illusions about her motives for the relationship in the early days. “The truth is that beautiful young women are usually attracted to beautiful young men as opposed to men who are fat, ageing and not pretty in the first-place. You’d have to have a lot of vanity not to realise that. I’ve been in Africa, Poland and Russia and the reason I was able to have this whole string of fabulous girls was because of economic disparity.”

It’s difficult to see where his future lies. As he says himself, nobody wants to employ a whistleblower. Loyalty is a virtue prized above all others in most organisations. A Scottish nationalist, his life-long dream is to design the foreign service for an independent Scotland. He would like to stand as an SNP candidate but his reputation would most likely preclude him.

Murray is a bright and charming man and you can’t help feeling sorry that his undoubted talent has drowned in a deluge of self-generated sordidness. What seems much sadder is that the plight of the torture victims of Uzbekistan has been submerged in the same sleaze.

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