Peter Jay dies aged 87: How the cleverest man in England had the whole world at his feet… but blew it all over an affair with his children’s nanny

When he was 37, he was hailed in the Press as the ‘cleverest young man in England’ and even tipped by Time magazine as a future world leader. But Peter Jay’s career, though illustrious, never managed to evade the long shadow cast by his chaotic private life.

For while he became British ambassador to the US at just 40, and worked as a ‘bag man’ for fraudster Robert Maxwell before becoming the BBC’s Economics Editor, he’ll probably be best remembered for having an affair with his children’s wide-eyed nanny.

Jay, who died on Sunday aged 87, would later claim his marriage to Margaret, daughter of former Labor Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, had been over in all but name when he started an affair with Jane Tustian, 14 years his junior, in 1979. Indeed, many believe it was revenge for Margaret’s own dalliance with Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein.

The shy daughter of an Oxfordshire farmer (and one of 14 children), Jane had accompanied the Jays to Washington DC to look after their three children. She fell pregnant, she later said, the first time the ambassador had made love to her, and gave birth to a son. She’d had a brief relationship with the embassy chauffeur, however, and Jay refused to admit paternity.

When in 1984 Jane revealed the affair, it provided a long-awaited moment of schadenfreude for Jay’s many detractors, who considered him an entitled social climber with a taste for Rolex watches, yachts and attractive women.

Depending on one’s estimation of his abilities, Jay was either incredibly lucky in life – parachuting into a succession of cushy jobs because of his social connections – or astonishingly unlucky in having a glittering career cut short by the scandal of that indiscretion, ensuring that Jay’s name will always spring to mind whenever yet another celebrity or politician finds solace with the au pair.

Jay’s old boy network wasn’t Eton or Harrow but the highest rungs of the Labor Party. His father, Douglas, was a minister (and Notorious womaniser) and mother, Peggy, a Greater London Councillor. His father, later Lord Jay, earned notoriety for once intoning that the ‘Gentleman in Whitehall’ knew what was better for the public’s health and education than the public knew itself.

Born in 1937, Jay grew up in Hampstead, north London, and was educated at Winchester College, where he was head boy.

At Oxford, he got a First, was president of the Union and met his wife Margaret. Their marriage two years later in 1961 in the House of Commons crypt was seen as something of a dynasty union within the Labor Party.

After a spell at the Treasury, Jay was recruited in 1967 as Economics Editor of The Times by William Rees-Mogg, father of former Tory MP Jacob, who said ‘it was the best decision I ever made as an editor’. Others complained Jay’s articles were unreadable.

In 1976, his father-in-law gained the keys to No 10. When, the following year, Jim Callaghan’s government appointed Jay as Britain’s ambassador to the US, many were appalled by what they saw as jaw-dropping nepotism. Given he had been appointed to the top job in diplomacy without any diplomatic experience, it proved a tricky charge to shake off. Jay would later claim to have been so astonished by the job offer – from his old chum David Owen, the Foreign Secretary – that he fell off his chair. He felt, though, that he was the man to take it on.

His reputation for intellectual superciliousness had even crossed the Atlantic, with the Washington Post running the headline: ‘Here comes Peter Jay, Britain’s brilliant and insufferable new ambassador.’ After Margaret Thatcher entered No 10 in 1979, Jay was removed from his Washington posting. Yet during the Jays’ brief sojourn in the US, he was not the only one to have strayed from his marriage vows. Margaret Jay had her own affair, with Carl Bernstein, one of the two Washington Post reporters who exposed the Watergate scandal.

Bernstein’s then wife, Nora Ephron, would later write Heartburn, a fictionalized retelling of her husband’s affair, which was turned into a 1986 film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

Ephron recalled meeting Jay in a Washington DC bar to discuss the affair. Ephron burst into tears, and asked: ‘Isn’t this awful?’

Jay agreed, saying: ‘Yes. What is happening to this country?’

Ephron was stunned, recalling: ‘Such a classic Brit. So repressed. He could never be personal.’

Jay While later insisted that relationships were what mattered most to him, many considered him a cold fish, seeing life – as one put it – as ‘one big chess game’.

Perhaps that explains his denial that he was the father of his nanny’s son, Nicholas, born in 1980. Instead, he agreed to give Jane $2,000, become Nicholas’s godfather and had them live with the Jay family when they returned to Britain. His wife remained unsure of the child’s parentage.

Nicholas was just 11 months old when the Jays’ marriage fell apart, though he and his mother stayed on with Peter as Jane became his housekeeper. But in late 1983, Jay’s new girlfriend – Lizzie Spender, daughter of poet Sir Stephen – moved in and Jane moved out.

‘I detest being on my own,’ said Jay of his need for female company. ‘When I found myself on my own, I was very active in filling that void in one way or another – not… in ways which were very grown-up.’

Facing life as a single mother, Jane went public, determined to prove Jay was Nicholas’s father. A court case and blood tests settled the matter in 1984 and a judge ordered Jay to increase the maintenance – £36 a week, according to Jane – he’d been paying.

Nicholas later complained that Jay made little attempt to make him, raised in a council house and educated at a comprehensive, feel comfortable with his expensively educated siblings. ‘It’s all a bit of a chore for him, I think,’ Nicholas said of his occasional reunions with his father. ‘All my dad cares about is his reputation.’

That reputation would suffer a further body blow after – having been ousted as chief executive of ITV’s breakfast program TV-am – he began working for Robert Maxwell in 1986. Maxwell appeared to have recruited him principally to show him off to bigwigs, addressing him as ‘Mr Ambassador’. Jay in turn described his fraudster boss as ‘heroically romantic’.

Quite what he did for Maxwell wasn’t clear – Jay said he was his ‘chief of staff’ but insiders sniggered that he was ‘head of paperclips and car parking’. Among other humiliations, Maxwell would ring him in the middle of the night to ask him the time.

It might have been an ignominious career finale but again Jay’s social connections came to his rescue. In 1990, a year after he left Maxwell, he landed another plum job – and another row over nepotism – when he became BBC Economics and Business Editor, thanks to deputy director-general John Birt, an old friend from his London Weekend Television days.

Colleagues whispered Jay was impossibly grand and indeed, despite a rumored six-figure salary, he rarely deigned to appear on screen. Given his insistence on sometimes wearing shorts paired with lace-up shoes on camera, horrifying his producers, this reluctance may have been just as well.

Jay spent so little time at the BBC that calls were often put straight through to the Garrick Club, or his home in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which he shared with second wife, garden furniture designer Emma Thornton. Sixteen years his junior, he had married her in 1986 as soon as his divorce came through. They had three children, bringing his grand total to seven.

Jay himself was first to admit that his life hadn’t exactly lived up to the world-shaking forecasts.

‘What I have done is so completely disjointed and lacking in direction that I call it “no career”,’ he said in a 2000 interview. Although he’d leave the BBC a year later, he added: ‘Retirement isn’t an option. I am grotesquely incompetent and naive about money, and am not rich. Basically, money bores me.’

Not the wisest admission for a BBC Economics Editor on a large salary but, then, Peter Jay was often not nearly so clever as everyone assumed.