THE behind-the-scenes feuding and backbiting of the Booker prize — involving former judges such as Joanna Lumley, Malcolm Muggeridge and Philip Larkin — is to be laid bare with the opening of the literary contest’s official archive.

More than 30 years of letters and minutes of judges’ meetings reveal rows such as when Larkin turned down chairmanship of the 1977 Booker panel because he did not want to wear the obligatory black tie for the presentation. He relented when it was agreed he could wear a green dinner jacket instead.

The archive, which has been handed to Oxford Brookes University for opening next year, also tells the story of the infighting behind awards such as the prize to Keri Hulme for The Bone People, condemned by Lumley, one of the judges, as “quite indefensible”.

It also discloses details of famous spats and moments of high dudgeon involving authors such as Salman Rushdie and Anthony Burgess. The Booker — this year’s will be awarded on Tuesday — is noted not just for being the country’s most prestigious literary prize, but also the one that has produced the most rows.

In the prize’s third year in 1971, when V S Naipaul won, Muggeridge was one of the judges. The author and journalist stood down because none of the 50 contending books appealed. His resignation letter says: “It will be a long time before I open another contemporary novel, if I ever do. But I am grateful for having been forced to take account of these samples of today’s fiction.”

Lumley, best known as Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous, could not be present at the final judging meeting in 1985 which chose Hulme, a New Zealander. Instead, she sent a note to the chairman, Norman St John- Stevas, who served as the Tory arts minister from 1979-81, about The Bone People.

“This is over my dead body stuff,” wrote Lumley. “I cannot bring myself to applaud any of it. It’s poetry and whimsical. Its subject matter is quite indefensible. We cannot have a book on child battering carrying off the gold.”

St John-Stevas, now a peer, also thought that the book was “rubbish” and even threatened not to read it.

Other judges to resign have included Nicholas Mosley, the author and son of the Fascist leader Oswald. He pulled out when he failed to have Alan Massie’s novel The Sins of the Father included on the shortlist of six in 1991.

Three years later Rabbi Julia Neuberger wished she had resigned before the choice of James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late, as winner. She said how “annoyed she was that that crap won”.

Minutes for that year also show the dithering of the chairman, Professor John Bayley. Just 15 minutes before the judges were due to arrive at the Booker dinner, there was a consensus that Alan Hollinghurst had won for The Folding Star. Bayley then said he wanted another vote, which went to a different author.

Just a couple of minutes before the final deadline, Bayley called for another vote, which chose Kelman.

The minutes show how Michael Foot, chairman in 1988, was accused of backing Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses because he was a Labour member. Rushdie lost.

The archives also relate the prima donna-ish behaviour of Anthony Burgess in 1980, who said he would only attend the Booker dinner if told in advance he had won. He waited at the Savoy hotel in London for the call of congratulation.

It never came. William Golding won for Rites of Passage.

The bookies’ favourite for Tuesday is Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. After the result it will probably be said that the judges had been unanimous. Yet when the papers for Booker 2003 eventually go to the Oxford Brookes archive, they may tell a different story.

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