Pizzas galore!

“Reason is being attacked, so sometimes it is rather good to show that the 300 years we spent looking at natural phenomena without judgment gave us everything we have; if you throw out reason you are throwing all that away.”

It is this lack of reason in the G8 protesters that frustrates him: “There are banners saying ‘No to greenhouse gases’. Well, hear, hear. But then they say ‘Let’s expand Africa’. Well quite, but that’s going to release a lot of greenhouse gases. Africans don’t want to live in the serenity of a William Morris utopia; they want a Mercedes-Benz. What Bob Geldof has almost said but it is very difficult to say is that Africa needs a middle class. It is the only continent that doesn’t have one.”

There is a change in Fry, a return of sorts to his public school boyhood filled, he recalls, “with Conservative fetes”. He was one of the most prominent celebrity endorsers that new Labour gained in its early days. Now he insists that he is not disillusioned but only because “I knew it would be a f*** up”.

“For a long time I thought (Labour) was at least steering in a direction that was mildly more agreeable than the other lot. Now I don’t think that is true. Although I’m not a Tory, I don’t have the contempt for them that a lot of people have. The Tories are kind of against political correctness and so am I.

“It is quite staggering now. You can’t film in a London studio without having to sign something and a floor manager giving a speech.” It is a familiar rant but then Fry reflects that while he would love the Tories to make this their crusade, they can’t because the world has grown infinitely complex.

“Even if they were to say they will fight the insurance companies, they would be fighting the pensions of our parents. There does not seem to be any coherent alternative to our society as is. And the Conservatives have no stomach for an ideological fight, only for internecine warfare.”

You could almost see Fry on the Tory benches, a sort of clever Nicholas Soames. You don’t think of Fry as fat because he is so tall but he is 17 stone, down from 21. The Atkins diet did not agree with him so he turned to Paul McKenna’s I Can Make You Thin and lost three stone in three weeks, even if it was “an embarrassing thing to have to buy”.

There seems to be a certain injustice that it is Hugh Laurie, not Fry, who is now one of the biggest television stars in America after appearing in the hit series House. Laurie was the Andrew Ridgeley to Fry’s George Michael. “He can play a sexy lead,” says Fry generously. “He is a good-looking man, more so perhaps than in his twenties. It is good for me because I feel no hint of rivalry. It is pure delight, except as godfather to his children it raises questions about whether he will take them to America for schooling.”

Fry had a recent stint in New York but was not happy. “It is one of the huge ironies that because we have a class system we do everything we can to overcome it. I remember Martin Gilliatt, the Queen Mother’s private secretary, who I bumped into in St James’s Street and he said, ‘You must meet Jeff, he looks after my rubbish’. And he was introducing me to his dustman.

“If you go to New York the ritziness is far greater. I could never get over the embarrassment of what I was meant to say to these white-gloved elevator attendants taking your shopping into your apartment. You are constantly surrounded by a servant class that just doesn’t exist here. They think we live in a Wodehousean world of Jeeves but they really do.”

Hasn’t Britain treated him shabbily, celebrating prize twits rather than his wit? “Well, I think we are rather better at it than other nations. You have to be deadly serious to attract the attention of the French thinking classes.”

We should take comedy more seriously because it eschews the abstract to smack us with the brute truth of life, he says, citing one of the best lines from Woody Allen, America’s great Jewish humorist: “He was asked if there was a god. He replied, ‘Not only is there no god, you can’t get a dry cleaner Saturdays’.” And Fry strides down the corridor, still chortling.