Matthew d’Ancona recalls a very odd meeting with the two men who have dared to take Dan Brown to court — and their spooky theory about the European Community
Much the strangest journalistic encounter I have ever had took place more than a decade ago at the Westminster restaurant known in those days as L’Amico. It was the sort of bistro that old-fashioned Tory MPs found congenial, serving traditional Italian fare, with nooks and crannies in which to plot.
The dinner in question took place in a private room, and the invitees were a motley right-of-centre bunch, gathered to give advice to two very unusual guests. And seeing the pair on the news every evening in the past few weeks has brought it all flooding back.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh have become familiar faces on our screens as they have pressed their claim in the High Court against Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code. Brown may not be right about Jesus, but he has more money than God. Baigent and Leigh believe that the plot of the blockbuster — which hinges on the claim that Christ married Mary Magdalene and founded a dynasty that survives to this day — is a straight lift from their own 1982 work of non-fiction, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Not surprisingly, they want to get their hands on some of Dan’s dosh. But all this was in the distant future on the night of our Westminster dinner.
The two men arrived with a conspiratorial flourish, suspicious as cats. Then, as now, they made an exceedingly odd couple. The bearded Leigh, wearing an ancient leather jacket, looked like a retired roadie for the Grateful Dead, Lemmy with a library card. Baigent, on the other hand, wore a suit and resembled a Wardour Street film distributor on his uppers. They were friendly but — how can one put this politely? — exuded the twitchy eccentric-ity of two men who don’t get out very much.
The assembled company included one or two guests who have gone on to become prominent Conservatives, and whose blushes I shall spare. Suffice it to say that we snapped our breadsticks nervously, wondering what these conspiracy theorists par excellence might want from us.
Very simple, as it turned out: for more than two decades Baigent and Leigh had been churning out books based on what they called ‘the most shattering secret of the last two thousand years’. In 1886 a French country priest named Fran