Matthew Freud: I was married to a Murdoch, now I’m with a Goldsmith – my therapist was like, really?

Matthew Freud: ‘I have the best kind of power – soft’ – Chris Floyd

Matthew Freud has a question he likes to ask before deciding whether to work with anybody. ‘It’s a sort of trick,’ he says, with a shrug. Freud simply has people choose which of these they consider most important: money, fame, power. ‘Really, I’m asking, “What do you think will make people love you?”’ It is, he insists, just a get-to-know-you exercise. There is no right or wrong answer. But agreeing with his own instincts probably helps.

Often the conversation takes place in his central London office. Today, though, Freud is ensconced in a sheepskin armchair, somewhere around the central belt of a gargantuan, modern art-filled first-floor reception room within Burford Priory, the Grade I listed Jacobean manor he owns in the Cotswolds. He takes a tiny sip of Guinness. Sarah Vaughan’s ‘Mighty Lonesome Feeling’ plays through speakers high up in the stucco ceiling.

‘People who say fame probably grew up in a quite narcissistic environment where they weren’t seen for some reason: someone else in the household was hogging the airtime. People who say money tended to grow up in a pretty transactional environment, where everything was negotiated. And the most interesting people who say power probably had a bit of darkness. Either they felt powerless growing up, or wished they had power to stop something.’

Psychoanalysis by Freud. Well, a Freud. I think I know what comes next. He gestures to me. ‘So, what would you choose?’ Money, I think immediately. ‘Power,’ I say instead. Freud nods with understanding. Him too? He nods again. And does he have it? ‘I have the best kind of power – soft,’ he says. ‘What I like about soft power is that you cannot abuse it. It’s influence. You can only use it for something that’s not self-interested, or everyone goes, “F**k off.”’

Freud is now a man of 60, but presents like a boy a fifth of that age: zip-up hoodie, skinny trousers, Nike Air Jordans, easy snigger, restless energy. When he entered the working world, some 40 years ago, he followed an informal family rule to avoid any industry already claimed – and likely dominated – by another Freud. That ruled out psychology (Sigmund, his great-grandfather), politics and broadcasting (Clement, his father), figurative portraiture (Lucian, his uncle), broadcast journalism (Emma, his sister), fashion design (Bella, his cousin), and novel writing (Esther, another cousin).

Matthew Freud with Oscar in front of Charles the First by Jean-Michel Basquiat, from Bull’s art collection – Chris Floyd

So he chose public relations, setting up Freud Communications in London in 1985. ‘A year later,’ he sighs, ‘somebody told me a relative of mine, Edward Bernays, basically invented PR.’ It’s safe to say it worked out, though. By the 1990s Freud’s had become one of the most powerful agencies in the world, amplifying the messages and straightening out the reputations of anybody who’d accept its advance invoice. Quickly, the firm had an enviable black book. In turn, its founder became just about the best-connected man on earth.

‘Somebody once said that the worst thing someone can ever say to you is, “You should call Matthew Freud,”’ Freud says. ‘It meant that things had really gone awry. It’s a weird thing to be a kind of reputational emergency service. You get some f**king odd calls.’ Reception at the company offices must have seen it all. ‘There’s actually a cheekily designed private entrance where you can just drive in, come up in an elevator, go down a private corridor and end up right in my office.’ Ah, like a Bond villain? ‘It comes with the territory.’

Freud pictured in 1989, four years after he set up Freud Communications – Paul Grover

Between his family, his work and his second marriage – to Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert (after 13 years, they divorced in 2014) – Freud accrued almost more soft power than he knew what to do with. He is firm friends with both Tony Blair and David Cameron, notably facilitating the latter’s schmooze to his then father-in-law’s yacht in 2008. He is involved in politics, the arts, tech, philanthropy, environmentalism and probably every other industry or cause you can think of, tangentially or otherwise. He knows any celebrity worth knowing, and more secrets than MI5’s in-house priest. But he will insist all these things are overstated.

‘I think my drug of choice is control,’ he does concede. For a while, especially in the noughties, Freud earned a certain reputation of his own, best illustrated by his trophy cabinet of former nicknames: St Matthew of the Shadows, Matthew Fraud, Roland Rat in a Suit, Zelig. One former girlfriend once reviewed their relationship by simply saying, ‘It took a long time to lose the scent of brimstone.’

Freud was married to Elisabeth Murdoch for 13 years before they divorced in 2014 – Nick Harvey/WireImage

He definitely made enemies over the years (Hugh Grant once lamped him after Freud smeared chocolate cake down his shirt in a nightclub), but all this slightly baffles him these days. As well as being extremely good-natured and hospitable, today he thinks out loud so much I occasionally feel the urge to temper his introspection for his own sake. Twice he compares himself to Keyser Söze, the mysterious and ruthlessly influential crime lord from The Usual Suspects. He’s not quite sure how he ended up being viewed that way.

‘Physician, heal thyself…’ he mutters. ‘I know. How does somebody who’s meant to be good at reputation end up as Keyser Söze? As is probably evident from my highly questionable reputation, I don’t PR myself. Partly because I’m shy. I find being anywhere near the centre of attention incredibly uncomfortable.’ At his own parties, ‘you will find me in the corner, not being talked to.’

The exception, he says, was last year, when he and his friend the British artist and author Charlie Mackesy were nominated for an Academy Award for their adaptation of Mackesy’s book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. ‘Because I found it very funny and properly surreal. I thought, I can’t really hide on that one, and I worked f**king hard on it.’

They ended up winning the Oscar for best animated short film. I turn to a mantelpiece, where the unmistakable statuette stares back at us. Next to it is clearly a Bafta. And next to that, a slightly kitsch third trophy, in the form of a hand with its middle finger up. I wonder aloud what on earth Freud won an NME Award for. He grimaces a 
little. ‘That,’ he says, ‘is an Ai Weiwei art piece.’

With Charlie Mackesy at the Oscars last year, after winning the award for best animated short film – ABC/Disney General Entertainment Content

Ludicrously, Freud maintains he knows no one powerful these days, but if he exercises any muscle, it’s for what he calls being ‘a good social architect’. He enjoys curating space, then standing back and watching 
people get on.

‘I just hide in a corner and rather love that people are having interesting conversations, [which] stuff comes out of,’ he says.

‘My one trick is to have a convergence of rock stars and CEOs and politicians and artists, because they all assume it must be about someone else, so they all feel off-duty and have a great time. Most people of stature walk into a room and it’s about them, but if they’re given a space where they think it must be about someone else, everyone cancels each other out.’

That Gatsbyish social puppetry has tended to start and stop with parties – where Sting might share a sausage roll with Peter Mandelson, while Idris Elba has his ear chewed off by Damien Hirst – but he’s now created something altogether more permanent. Just over the road on the high street in Burford, the laughably pretty Cotswolds town Freud has lived in for 16 years, sits Bull, a boutique ‘retreat hotel’ he opened six months ago.

In some ways it has Freud written all over it: everywhere is filled with modern art – Hirsts, Banksys, Dalís, Basquiats and of course pieces by his relatives, not least his niece the ceramicist Martha Freud – and expensively appointed, but the idea is to offer a sanctuary. Each of the 18 rooms is so well put together, so chicly toeing the line between aspirational stealth wealth and cosiness, that they make even the other 5,814 high-end boutique hotels in the Cotswolds look like Fawlty Towers.

A ceramic lamp by Martha Freud in Bull – Chris Floyd

‘Hopefully Bull is an exercise in making people feel unthreatened: you’re able to just relax into a room, not having to worry about having the right thing to wear or how things work or not to get mud on the carpet,’ Freud says. He despises the ceremony of formality in that context. ‘It’s like on boats when they make you take your shoes off, [because] it being kept clean is more important.’ A pause. ‘Philip Green’s boat is quite funny. It’s just terrifying, the amount of white and mink…’

Touring the place, with Freud opening bedroom doors and trilling, ‘Housekeeping!’ in his best impression of a maid, it feels as if he has somehow achieved that trick: making an ultra luxurious environment simultaneously homely. The staff, mostly young and handsome locals in pristine French chore jackets, are friendly and helpful without being obsequious or boring.

And everywhere you look is a piece of art worth more than your car. In fact, I have to ask Freud: is the art collection more valuable than the property itself? He stops to mull this over. ‘Than the original building? Definitely. Than the budget we set out for the refurbishment? Possibly. Than the eventual budget? Hmm, no.’

Much of Bull is designed specifically to encourage mixing with strangers – Chris Floyd

Bull (there’s no definite article, although even Freud will accidentally give it one) has four restaurants and two bars, as well as a whisky/poker cellar and, outside, a Guy Ritchie-designed Cashmere Caveman WildKitchen, for a spot of ‘barbecue theatre’. And whatever you eat, whether it’s a 10-course tasting menu from Hiro – the 10-seat omakase restaurant with a 90-million year-old fish fossil in it, where food is prepared by sushi master Hiromi Wada – or a smashed burger in the bar, where a Lucian Freud self-portrait looms and the toilets feature Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood, you’ll be doing it in the company of strangers. Though to update an old chestnut, there are no strangers here; only ultra-high-net-worth friends you haven’t made yet.

Communal eating, communal hanging out in the bougie corridor kitchenette, and lots of communal activities: the ‘retreat’ is not merely a lovely place to stay – guests integrate and engage with one another over anything from beekeeping to padel, flower arranging to a book club. It all takes place in buildings in and around Burford, most of which Freud seems to own.

You’re encouraged to choose something you’re not good at, let the expert teacher guide you, and then when you sit next to other guests at dinner that evening or breakfast the next morning, you might have something to talk about other than work and house prices.

‘You know, if you ever got sectioned or sent to the Priory, you might do book club, or ceramics, or beekeeping. A lot of the therapies are based on creativity. And it’s not because those things are therapeutic, it’s because group therapy is therapeutic. The antidote to addiction is human connection,’ Freud says. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic made his idea feel urgent. He bought The Bull, as the previous hotel was called, in 2020.

Freud opened Bull, a boutique ‘retreat hotel’, six months ago – Chris Floyd

‘This is not a serious attempt to address a really serious problem, but it’s definitely an experiment in trying to give people something that will make them feel good. It’s a bit like Charlie’s book – people feel a bit better after they read it. That was literally the point of it,’ he says. ‘It’s unclear whether there’s a business in it. Absolutely unclear.’

On the wander over to Burford Priory, we pass Freud’s Bentley. His licence is currently suspended for speeding, he admits. I’d read that happened years ago, when he was caught driving his Ferrari at 117 mph on the M5. ‘No, that was the last time I lost it.’ Of? ‘It might be three…’

Freud and his four siblings grew up in north London, with their parents, June Flewett, an actor who performed as Jill Raymond, and Clement Freud, the MP and broadcaster. (In 2016, seven years after his death, three women made public allegations of child sexual abuse and rape, leading to police investigations and prompting an apology from his widow.) The extended clan would spend weekends in the small coastal village of Walberswick in Suffolk, where the next generation still keep houses. Freud loved the countryside, and has ‘always been drawn to compounds’. He got his first subscription to Country Life aged 21: ‘It was like porn. Full of beautiful things you could never get your hands on.’

One of the bathrooms at Bull – Chris Floyd

In 1991 he married Caroline Hutton, with whom he had two sons, George (now 28, he has a tongue-scraper company, and with the arrival of Delphi in 2022, made Freud a grandfather) and Jonah (now 26, he’s opened a bookshop and bar called Reference Point in central London).

Freud and Hutton divorced nine years later, after which she became the second wife of Earl Spencer. By that time, he was already dreaming of one day owning a religious house of some kind. He had started collecting iconography in his mid-20s. ‘I genuinely don’t know why.’ We could try and analyse it, I say. ‘Knock yourself out.’ I suppose religion is sort of the ultimate control… Freud sighs. ‘Oh, God complex. Yes, that’s probably right.’

He and Elisabeth Murdoch married in 2001, uniting two great media families and creating a compound surname to strike fear into anyone. They have two
children, 23-year-old Charlie, a daughter, and Samson, 17, while Freud also has a younger daughter from a separate relationship.

Having grown up with a very famous father, he is acutely aware of not passing on anxieties about identity or the sense that anything is preordained. ‘As a parent, there’s not much you can do about other people denying them a Christian name, you have to just try and equip them to deal with the reality that notionally the most interesting thing about them is not them.’ Charlie has the Murdoch-Freud name. ‘That’s a horrible thing to do to someone. Here you go, love, wrestle with that one…’ he says, with an apologetic laugh. A musician, she just goes by ‘Tiarlie’ now. Freud is dizzyingly proud of all his children. With a knock on his wooden armrest, he’s ‘pleased to say they are turning out really good.’

With Elisabeth Murdoch at their wedding in 2001 – Alamy

Up the road, of course, is Chipping Norton. Though he huffs that in reality it is a vast, tri-county area he and half a dozen other media, politics and showbiz friends all live in, from Cirencester to Oxford, Freud is, or was, in the ‘set’ – especially during his marriage to Murdoch. She lives up the road now, where she’s building a mammoth compound of her own.

He voluntarily brings up Succession, which is more than partly inspired by the Murdochs. ‘I definitely spent three series explaining to people why I wasn’t Tom [Wambsgans, Matthew Macfadyen’s craven son-in-law to Brian Cox’s media magnate], and then for a minute at the end of the fourth season, I thought I might be Tom.’ He was sufficiently interested to watch on. Though at this point, with a waft of the hand, Freud goes off the record for a while. Suffice to say, it’s all terrific stuff.

Burford Priory is quiet today, but somewhere around is Freud’s partner of three years, the jewellery designer and horticulturist Sheherazade Goldsmith. ‘She was Zac’s wife, we have eight children [between us],’ Freud explains. It’s another big surname. ‘Yes, my therapist had quite a lot to say about that…’ What, that you never just date Jane Bloggs? ‘That two girlfriends after Elisabeth were quite big surnames, and quite substantive, monstrous patriarchal demons. [Jemima Khan, née Goldsmith is the other.] He [the therapist] was like, “Really? Just… straight back in?” It’s interesting, one assumes life is about free will, and then someone points out the patterns that seem to be repeating and repeating.’

With partner Sheherazade Goldsmith at a British Vogue And Tiffany & Co event in London last year – Dave Benett/Getty

Sheherazade did a lot of the interior design and renovations in the house, as well as adding her input to Bull. The beehives, cut-flower garden and kitchen replan were her ideas. She is a people person and a socialiser. Which is lucky, as Freud does not profess to be: ‘It dawned on me on one of the opening weekends [at Bull] that I’m one of the last people on earth who’d want to go and do a lot of communal eating and social interactions, because I’m genuinely not good at it,’ he says. But good hosting is soft power, really. Freud brightens. ‘That’s exactly what it is.’

He seems extremely happy and content here. Mellow, even. A fine advertisement for the Bull lifestyle. It’s funny, I tell him, when I told people I was going to write about Matthew Freud, they told me to watch out, because he could easily destroy me.

‘See, that’s the Keyser Söze thing,’ he sighs, a little crestfallen. ‘Like, how? My daughter occasionally calls up and goes, “I want you to end someone.” But I’ve never really understood the fear thing. There’s definitely people I’d like to destroy, loads of them, but I don’t know how you go about it. I’m not sure I can get a good piece in The Telegraph, let alone sack a journalist…’

Well, let’s not test that. Freud smiles, then sees off the rest of his Guinness. ‘Deal.’

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