Simon Sebag Montefiore: ‘Tara was unpredictable and flamboyant, it’s a tragic time’

The past few months have been unsettling for Simon Sebag Montefiore. The toffy historian-turned-swashbuckling novelist has been signing lucrative television and film deals for almost every book he has ever written, while mourning his wife Santa’s younger sister, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who died suddenly of peritonitis in February. “What can I say? We miss her and can’t believe she’s gone. I can’t believe I’m not going to hear her voice on the phone ringing up any more,” says Sebag, as everyone calls him. We’re having coffee at his regular haunt, The Ivy in Kensington, just a stone’s throw from his home, and he’s talking for the first time about the death of the former It-girl and how he and Santa were the first to get the call.

Tara was 45 and had given up her rackety lifestyle. She was not unwell and did not have a brain tumour, as some reports suggested. “She was fragile, but then she was always fragile,” Sebag explains. “She lived fast and furiously. She was on TV, she sang songs, wrote books and columns, and had an exciting romantic life...” he pauses and smiles, “...she was this amazingly turbulent, tempestuous, unpredictable, flamboyant, often hilarious, often heart-breaking presence in our lives. Now it’s like the vanishing of some extraordinary castle on a hill that’s always been there. So it’s been a really tough, tragic, sad and surreal time, but we’re just coming out of it now.”

Sebag and Santa, now 51 and 47, who are both prolific and commercially successful writers in their own right — he of epic histories, she of romantic sagas — found solace working together on the second in a planned series of four children’s books called The Royal Rabbits of London.

Billed as The Hobbit-meets-Watership Down, the first instalment came out in October and film rights have already been snapped up by 20th Century Fox, “who want it to be the new Ice Age”. Are there any named stars yet, isn’t one of the rabbits called Clooney? “Yah, he’s a very chic, dapper, grey-haired rabbit. It would be great to have Clooney doing Clooney, yah, yah,” Sebag nods and laughs. So there’s a hint.

Meanwhile, Sebag’s biography of the sexually rapacious Catherine the Great and her lover, Prince Potemkin, is being developed by Angelina Jolie, “who’s going to play Catherine”, while Lionsgate is turning his history of Jerusalem into a multi-episode TV drama, “like Game of Thrones”.

Sebag adds that his book about Young Stalin (2007) has been bought, though not yet cast, and “needs to be played by someone very handsome and quite satanic — Zayn Malik is supposed to look like Stalin”, another hint, while The Romanovs, published last year, has been bought for another TV drama.

Sebag rattles this all off with the same fluent ebullience that made him such a hit as the urbane yet scholarly, floppy linen-suited narrator on those history documentaries about Byzantium and Jerusalem for the BBC. There’s a restlessness about him too - Santa has called him “exhaustingly Tiggerish” - as well as a sense of mischief. His book launch of The Romanovs, held in the ballroom at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and attended by ‘le tout’ literary London, became almost as debauched as the ill-fated Russian dynasty, with some guests falling flat on their faces after guzzling too many margaritas. “It was in honour of the Romanovs’ terrible trajectory. I enjoy tequila, which has a strange effect on people and makes parties more fun than warm white wine,” Sebag roars with laughter.

Is it true that duchesses got so drunk they forgot to take home their handbags? “Yes, there were all sorts of people doing amazing things, having sex with people they weren’t meant to be having sex with, in the cloakroom — it was very entertaining,” Sebag chortles. How on earth does he know? “The woman in the cloakroom told me.”

This week sees the launch of his new novel, Red Sky at Noon, which continues his long love affair with Russia. Part of his Moscow trilogy, plotwise it falls between One Night in Winter and Sashenka, although it can be read as a standalone novel. Set in 1942, the adventure about a buccaneering Jewish soldier called Benya Golden joining a penal battalion of Cossacks to fight the Nazis “is actually a western set on the eastern front that pays homage to my heroes, Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy, with plenty of love, adultery, marriage and children”.

The first two books have sold 100,000 copies and have done especially well in Russia, much to Sebag’s surprise. “You’d think they’d hate some English person writing about Russia, but they love it.”

Naturally, he would love to interview President Putin, whom he calls “an original 21st-century statesman channelling the traditions of Romanovs and the Stalinists.” He finds Putin’s effect on Trump particularly compelling. “Trump wants to be the first American tsar. With his hero worship of Putin, his admiration for the apparent omnipotence of the Kremlin, schoolboyish crush on Putin’s gangster swagger and his contempt for democracy, Trump wants to rule with his family, taking decisions purely because he’s right about everything like a tsar. But he’s no match for Putin. Somebody who’s made it in reality TV versus someone who’s survived in the Kremlin for 20 years? He’ll be eaten alive.”

The testimony of ex-FBI director James Comey highlights what he calls “the greatest triumph of Russian espionage in history — they have somehow provoked a schism between an American President and his security agencies. Every Russian emperor from Peter the Great to Stalin and Putin knows a leader and his security agencies must never be parted. His safety depends on their slavish devotion.”

Sebag’s fascination with Russia began after he gave up investment banking, which “I hated and was very bad at”, to become a foreign correspondent during the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early Nineties, writing for The New York Times and The Spectator. “I was driving across Georgia with a warlord and his bodyguards riding shotgun with their Kalashnikovs in a convoy of Mercedes and Land Rovers. The guy put on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon on a cassette, which they played on loudspeakers as we raced across the mountains and I remember thinking ‘this sure beats respectable life in England’.”

So does the respectably married “balding Jewish writer” (his words) and father of two — a son, 14, and a daughter, 16 — miss those glory buccaneering days now? “Yes. It was amazing to see history being made and really, it was the inspiration for writing about Benya Golden and the cavalry on the Russian steppes.”

Red Sky at Noon is published today (Century, £16.99)