JOHN LYDON HAS LONG displayed a fondness for the Quick Exit. In January 1978, as the Sex Pistols played the biggest concert of their career at San Franscisco’s Winterland Ballroom, Lydon decided it was time to quit. Their manager, Malcolm McLaren, had grand plans in mind: a trip to Brazil to shoot footage with Ronnie Biggs for a forthcoming movie, and an escalation of the band’s outlaw reputation.

In the US they were becoming little short of notorious, surely an ideal springboard for the next phase of their career. Lydon, however, believed that the planned meeting with Biggs was a tawdry stunt. More importantly, he scented the onset of stardom and the metamorphosis of the group from furious subversives to run-of-the-mill rockers. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” he asked his audience; he later reflected that the words were aimed principally at himself.

Such were the results of becoming an iconic rock’n’roller while affecting to despise rock’n’roll.

Lydon has been walking a similar line ever since. He claims to be eternally opposed to the cult of celebrity, yet enjoys the benefits it brings (he lives in LA, recently hosted his own cable TV show and is reportedly an expert skier). His trademark brand of sneering insolence only makes sense when he’s plunged into the kind of environment that he is always protesting about. “I despise stars,” he once spat. “They’re bullshit people.” That may be the case — but unfortunately, a) He is one, and b) He seems to have a pronounced appetite for their company.

His apparent relationship with his own home country is no less ambivalent. “In Britain,” he once told me, “everything new is hated and resented.” Of his adopted home country he said: “It’s a fantastic country. It’s new, it’s undiscovered, it’s undeveloped. They’re mad, but they have a great openness to new things.”

The trouble is, the pose of the happy expat doesn’t quite wash. Lydon has lived in California for 15 years, yet his accent seems more rooted in his native North London than ever. His approach to I’m a Celebrity was surely as British as could be imagined: snickering at his fellow contestants’ dreams of chocolate pudding, insisting that everyone pull their weight, and oozing something close to the Blitz spirit. Diane Modahl, despite her apparent lack of any human interest, was a Lydon favourite; Jordan, as if it needed mentioning, became his bête noire — and surely played some role in his departure. After all, he and the woman he angrily described as a “Page 3 blow-up balloon” were looking increasingly destined to share the programme’s dying hours in each other’s company.

A Sex Pistols associate from the late 1970s sums up his attitude well: “John’s unpredictable. He used to go through different sorts of moods. He liked drinking, and he liked rapping to people. Some people he’d totally ignore and just take the piss out of and put down, and other people he’d find interesting and go to great lengths to find out more about.”

Moreover, though he may have caused no end of fuss by using the “C” word about the Great British Public, his presence on I’m a Celebrity spoke volumes about his underlying wish to be loved by them. Can there be any doubt that, had he stuck it out and won, he would have basked in the affections of the country that the two-decade aftershocks of punk rock always seemed to have turned against him? Thinking about it, all these tensions are reflected in the eternal duality between Johnny Rotten and John Lydon — and the last week’s viewing proves that they were both present in the jungle. Tellingly, the show’s cast was split between a small handful of people (Ant, Dec, Ruddock) who called him John, and those (Lord Brocket, Kerry McFadden) who couldn’t separate him from his reputation and thereby addressed him as Johnny.

It was Lydon who revelled in Modahl reading him a letter from his wife, talked about his love of nature, got on surprisingly well with Jennie Bond and looked set to scoop first prize. Rotten, however, let his boot fly at the camera, referred to Jordan as “it”, resorted to the bluntest kind of Anglo-Saxon . . . and eventually strode out of camp.

My guess is that back at the hotel his furies have died down, the luxuries provided by his hosts have started to pall and John Lydon is starting once again to gain the upper hand. Regret is not the most punk rock of emotions, but with the sound and fury of his youth behind him it is surely starting to ooze into his being.

John Harris is the author of The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock (Fourth Estate).

1956

Born John Joseph Lydon on January 31. He attends a local Catholic school in North London where, he says, he “learnt hate and resentment”