It is not easy being a duke, says Andrew Cavendish, the 11th Duke of Devonshire. It's not exactly a cakewalk, you know. "The thing about dukes," he cries, "is that they are thought, no doubt rightly, to be absolute damn fools. And if they are only damn fools without being absolute, people are rather surprised."
Now, come on. There must be some nice bits.
"It gets you a good table in restaurants, but you are regarded as a freak and a complete fool. And dukes can be unbearable, just like anyone else. Will you pour, my dear? No milk for me."
We are having tea in the Duke's rather dinky Mayfair home, one of those tall, thin London houses that creak heavily with history. He bought it from Anthony Eden in 1956; some time before that, it had belonged to Beau Brummel. In the hallway, a framed selection of casino chips hangs in fond reminder of the Duke's long-gone gambling days, and by the door to his sitting room, there are two handsome pencil sketches by Lucian Freud.
Earlier, the Duke had shown me his little green breakfast room opposite, which was as cold as a tomb on this sharp winter's day. How impressively frugal of the billionaire Duke - the family seat of Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, plus Lismore Castle in Ireland, Bolton Abbey, huge tracts of Eastbourne, two hotels, the London club Pratt's and the finest private collection of art in the country are only part of his haul - to turn off the heating in rooms not in use! And perhaps it was just the icy temperature, but it did feel a bit lonely in there; the table set with a jar of Cooper's Oxford marmalade, one solitary plate and a space cleared for the daily newspaper, which the 83-year-old Duke can now read only with the help of a powerful magnifying glass.
But what do I know of ducal customs and habits? Being virtually blind and unable to walk great distances, the D of D spends most of his time at Chatsworth with his wife, Deborah Mitford, and now comes to London and his beloved gentlemen's clubs only once a fortnight.
"Oh, I am a great club man," he says, with enthusiasm. "You see your friends there and you talk. And now ladies are allowed in, so you talk to them, too.
"The hall at Brookes's is one of my favourites; it is a very beautiful place for tea. I'm always stopping ladies going into the gentlemen's when I'm there and I don't mind it - but what I do mind is when they ask where the ladies' is? How on earth do they expect me to know that?"
In contrast to the chill of the breakfast room, the sitting room is heated to a tropical degree and furnished in throbbing shades of red. The Duke appears not to notice as the chocolate on our eclairs turns molten as he sits on his straight-backed chair, his elegant legs crossed and his trademark yellow socks on display - always worn because they are his racing colours. He looks tired and quite frail, but sounds just the opposite; vibrant, loud - and given to unexpected gusts of whimsy. "We Cavendishes are a dim, dull lot," he will suddenly cry.
He is beautifully dressed in a navy suit and loves his clothes - silk shirts in the city, flannel in the country - although he claims to find the sartorial rules of the land-owning gentry a bit of a bore.
"It is all rather ridiculous, isn't it? Perfectly absurd. Why shouldn't you wear brown shoes in the city if you want to? But that is the convention."
So do you wear them?
"Erk! Oh, no," he squeaks, in his horrified, aristocratic way. "I only wear brown shoes in the country."
Nevertheless, the Duke is remarkably unstuffy and he hates snobs and snobbery. "It is very unattractive. And the most unexpected people are snobs, don't you think?" he muses. He is very keen on football and thinks it "the most marvellous ice-breaker" when he has to meet, say, the mayor of Wolverhampton. "And if you know that Wolves have had a good win, then it is a good start.
"I say," he adds, indulging in another piece of impromptu cross-class banter. "What about that young fellow kicking the football boot at the other young fellow, hmm?"
Remarkable, I say.
"Indeed," he says. And then, after a pause: "Have you ever met Posh and Becks, my dear?"
No, but I would love to.
"So would I! So would I!" he cries. "I would love to meet them. He is a very talented player and she is obviously a very glamorous lady. Sadly, I haven't met any of the Spice Girls yet."
Surprisingly, he agrees with Tony Blair about abolishing peers - and he recently gave up on his attempt to be re-elected to the House of Lords following the death of Lord Oxfuird. "I'm not going to try - I wouldn't succeed. But I was serious about it because I missed it very much. I was there for years and I loved it."
He has now decided to become a patron of the UK Independence Party, but he thinks the Prime Minister is both brave and right on the potential war with Iraq. He is also the only major land-owning lord to support the right-to-roam Bill.
"Aren't my colleagues foolish? The right to roam - of course! If you are lucky enough to have these lovely places, other people should be made welcome there," he says. Although it is true to say that many of those who roam over Chatsworth pay either an £8 or £5 entry fee first. "And the people who come are lovely! I have a very nice sitting room which looks across the park, and to see these families picnicking in the grounds is a great joy. With a big garden like ours, you need people to give it scale."
Over recent years, his view from the gilded windows of Chatsworth and elsewhere has become dimmer as his sight fades, but he remains upbeat in the face of this infirmity. "So much better than being deaf. No music, no opera! Can you imagine?"
Interesting, then, that he has collected books and paintings all his life, and still continues to do so, despite his failing sight. He spotted Lucian Freud's talent back in the Fifties and most of his family have had their portraits painted by him. Devonshire says that sitting for Freud was "as if a great searchlight had been thrown over you, you constantly felt under intense scrutiny".
But when asked how he felt when he first saw his Freud portrait, he is silent for some moments.
"Well he gave me a curious, great contusion here," he says, as his thin, white duke fingers flicker over his face. Then, he changes the subject. "I had all my family done. I am pretty good, but my two sisters are brilliant, my wife is very good and my mother is the best of them, I think. My son is quite good, too. Yes I did like my own, I thought he brought something out of me because he gets character as well as likeness. I am rather a worrier, and that comes out. He got that very well."
What do you worry about?
"My inadequacies. I worry even more about having far more than my fair share of good fortune. It is not right that anyone should be as lucky as I am. I can never begin to repay the good fortune I have received."
Andrew Cavendish was never meant to be a duke. His older brother William, Marquess of Hartington - who married JFK's sister Kathleen Kennedy - was killed in action in 1944 and Andrew reluctantly became the heir to the dukedom then. "My brother was a much better man than me. I never forget that I am here by proxy, it still makes me feel uneasy," he says. His best piece of luck, of course, was falling in love with Deborah - the youngest of the Mitford sisters - at a dinner party in 1938. She was famously beautiful - was he handsome? "No sir, no madam," he croaks.
They married and then, together, they faced the problems that ensued when his father died in 1950, leaving the estate with £7 million in death duties to pay - a fantastical sum in those days. They survived by selling off the best of the family treasures and using the Duchess's organisational and entrepreneurial skills ("She is quite bossy, but I like that in a woman") to turn Chatsworth into one of the country's most popular visitor attractions.
Meanwhile, the cheerful Duke was having difficult times of his own. He had a good war, although his excessive modesty - bad form to boast! - rather ridiculously impels him to tell you that he won his MC for "being cheerful". However, back on civvy street, there were moments here and there when he was in real danger of completely falling apart. He became addicted to gambling, but managed to stop more than 40 years ago by focusing on the senselessness of it all. "I woke up one morning, probably with a hangover, and thought: this is the most frightful waste of money. You could buy a picture with this money, give it to charity - God knows what you could do with it. So I stopped."
It took longer to give up drinking.
"It was difficult, but I am very glad I did it. I stopped 17 years ago, on doctor's orders, and I am very much better. It became quite evident that I was drinking too much. So I just said: 'Enough is enough', and I started taking a pill called Antabuse."
This is an alcohol abuse deterrent used to treat chronic alcoholics. George Best has Antabuse pellets sewn into his stomach; the Duke prefers to take one every morning when he wakes up.
"So if you drink any alcohol at all, you feel very ill. I still take one each day. Then, one is safe. So now, I neither smoke nor drink nor gamble. I think I have already outlived my shelf life, don't you?"
Neither does he chase after young women in the way he once notoriously did and he feels that the secret of his successful 62-year marriage to his wife is - no surprises here - forbearance.
"You have to learn tolerance. And in a successful marriage, you want to have both shared interests and separate interests," he says.
The Devonshires celebrate their anniversary in April and romantic old Andrew has already been down to his favourite jewellers in Burlington Arcade to purchase her gift. Of course, he won't say what it is, but he does admit to a "trite" fondness for jewelled hearts in diamonds and sapphires. Lucky Debo!
And shortly after I leave, she will drive him back to his beloved Chatsworth, where he grows 72 different varieties of crocus, the rare Chatsworth banana ("they taste just like any other banana") and an enormous amount of prize-winning camellias much admired by the day-trippers. "If I may be bossy enough to give you a good tip, my dear, it is that you can always tell a non-gardener by someone who smells a camellia. Because they don't smell."
The Duke thinks that Chatsworth will go down in history as "the home of a very dim family, nothing more", and scoffs at the notion that it will be notorious as the original trysting place for his friends Charles and Camilla, who met there when their romance was still a secret. Should they marry?
"I give you the most unsatisfactory reply; no comment," he says, "but she is very, very, very delightful. Very, very, very delightful. And he is perhaps not the best of communicators, but a very good man."
Our time is up. The Duke looks down at his shoes. He despairs that they are not nearly polished enough, although how can he see them? He stands up in all his yellow-socked, Posh-loving, crocus-growing glory and says goodbye. He is, in essence, the kind of man who is the only one to be shocked when he is described as eccentric.
"Me! I am the most conventional man you could imagine. Why should I be called eccentric? I am ordinary! And I really like to think that I am not quite the freak that people expect."
For publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page please phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or syndicat@telegraph.co.uk
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaKaVrMBwtMSao62gX2iAcXyVaW1ohZVisqSvxKerq6GTYpauecCnZKiqlJ67or7YZpuuo5VjtbW5yw%3D%3D