Send in the Clune

JACKIE CLUNE’s arms are empty - and they’re just aching to be filled, for it’s the first time she has spent a night away from her baby daughter since her birth nine months ago. She does, however, have hundreds of images on her digital camera of Saoirse - "it’s a Countdown conundrum, a b***** to pronounce, and Irish for freedom," she says. So we ooh and aah for a while over the blonde, cornflower blue-eyed infant, who is indeed a little picture.

"She is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen, certainly since my own son, Jack," announced Clune’s bosom buddy, columnist and author Julie Burchill.

Praise indeed. Former EastEnders actor Clune - she was drippy Barry’s girlfriend - is in Edinburgh on a flying visit to publicise her one-woman Fringe show, Julie Burchill is Away, in which Clune stars as the spiky controversialist she calls "the queen of spleen". Her performance, which I saw in London during the play’s original run in 2002, is spookily accurate, capturing the very essence of the woman who has made it her mission in life to épater les bourgeois.

Reluctantly, Clune pops the camera into her Louis Vuitton handbag; otherwise, she sighs, we’ll just spend the next hour or so drooling over her delectable daughter. Instead, we talk in the New Town hotel where she will be spending her lonely evening bereft of her baby girl. "As if!" she exclaims with a wicked grin. "I’ll be out having several cocktails." Over the mushroom risotto with green grapes, however, I invite her to ponder the fact that there’s nowt so queer as folk who change their minds - and their sexuality.

For the 39-year-old, with the direct, denim-blue gaze and laconic manner, is the "gobby, opinionated lesbian funny-girl," who went straight with a gay guy (Tim Fountain, author of Julie Burchill is Away), embarked upon "a mammoth shagathon" with droves of blokes, and then fell head-over-heels in love with a hunky former firefighter, turned actor - Richard Hannant, who is so good-looking he’s known as Richard Handsome by Clune’s girlfriends. She settled down with him in connubial bliss and she had his baby.

After many, well-publicised years as a dyke icon, Clune was deemed to have let the Sapphic sisterhood down. Indeed, in Boy Crazy, the show she brought to Edinburgh two years ago, she launched into her routine by declaring: "I was a lesbian for 12 years but I’ve been cured. I’ve been to aversion therapy, I’ve watched 16 episodes of Prisoner: Cell Block H, seven Ladies’ Wimbledon finals and a K D Lang concert back to back." Some of her gay women friends were like Queen Victoria - not amused. Some even stopped talking to her altogether. Meanwhile, the gossip columnists became ever more "abusive and vindictive".

If Clune had not been the sort of woman who wears heels and candyfloss-pink raincoats that match her Vespa scooter, she would have had to don combat gear and a hard hat to dodge the flak. She was named Most Disappointing Lesbian of the Year by a magazine for gay women and pronounced "a traitor" to the gay cause - charges she dismissed with characteristic flippancy. However, in a thoughtful magazine article a year ago, she wrote: "Part of me finds it hilarious, especially the Most Disappointing Lesbian accolade, and it amuses me greatly that there is still this school playground mentality in some sections of the gay ‘community’, this adolescent gang whiff about lesbian politics."

Now, though, Clune admits she feels guilty about her reverse coming out. Running both hands through her hair, she confesses: "You know, I’ve never admitted this before, but there’s a part of me that feels really, really guilty about it all. Sure, I still think, ‘Oh f*** off! I am not your statuette.’ My life’s a bit more complicated than that. Somebody recently e-mailed me - as my friend! - to tell me that there had been a really nasty, vicious piece about me in the Pink Paper. You know, the gay community is really blinkered. They are oddly narrow-minded considering the amount of prejudice gay people face." Nonetheless, she says, she’s aware that she "had it coming". Clune sighs heavily: "I’ve hurt and upset a lot of people, and I regret that. It was never my intention to be dismissive of lesbians or gay men, although I did snipe at some of the more extreme sections of the lesbian community. For instance, when I first decided to be a lesbian in the late ’80s, the pressures were enormous. You couldn’t wear lipstick and I found that ridiculous. I said loudly and often that I was glad things had changed, but some sections of the gay community got really upset with me. They said I was ignoring the battles they had fought."

Only last week, Clune says, she discussed the whole affair with Julie Burchill - who famously left her husband for a younger woman and then fell in love with a younger man - and her pal told her: "You must never apologise. It gives them too much focus if you start saying you’re sorry."

"My intention, though, was always to start a debate about the whole issue of sexuality not being fixed," says Clune. "The fact that I’ve moved around must mean that other people have, too. I think that’s really interesting. When I started seeing men it was for a laugh, a holiday, then I fell in love and we had Saoirse. But I’m very much aware that some sections of the gay community are still very angry with me." With a shrug of her shoulders, she adds: "I honestly can’t help the fact that I fell for this deeply sensitive, very caring man and that we’re really happy together. Why should I apologise for that?"

So how is motherhood? "It was quite strange at first," Clune replies, slowly swirling white wine around in her glass. "When Saoirse was about two weeks old I started taking her everywhere with me, because I was breastfeeding and working. I don’t have a nanny since I don’t have loads of money and the idea of leaving her with a babysitter seems weird to me anyway. I think it’s a working-class thing: I once had a cleaner, but only for two hours. I had to sack her because I couldn’t cope with the guilt.

"But I never imagined that I would feel like this about my baby. I thought I would be going, ‘Oh, God, just leave her with somebody,’ but I can’t. It’s not sentimental, it’s a kind of animal thing. This is my brood and she comes with me - to meetings, lunches, parties, book launches, whenever and wherever."

Saoirse was just six weeks old when she attended her first party at the swanky Savoy Hotel in London, says Clune, a self-confessed workaholic. "She’s always with me when I’m doing TV things and I do regular interviews on Radio 4 for Loose Ends, so she comes with me for those and Ned Sherrin dandles her on his knee. She’s met all sorts of amazing people. She’s such an easy baby. She smiles a lot and sleeps a lot. I’m not the most patient or maternal of people, anyway, so I don’t fuss or fluster over her. Friends keep saying in amazement, ‘You’re so cool about this motherhood thing,’ but I put that down to her. She’s a contented soul and she just is who she is."

Mind you, admits Clune, when she was pregnant she hoped that she was having a girl. "I kept thinking, ‘God, I won’t know what to do with a boy’. Yet we’d convinced ourselves I was having a boy, because my partner’s got twin daughters from his first marriage and there are two boys and two girls in my family. I thought, if I wish for a girl, it’ll be a boy, although we never wanted to know the sex in advance."

In any case, this was not a planned pregnancy. "Are you serious? I was horrified!" Clune exclaims, although she thinks she was probably playing roulette with her ovaries. "I was 37 and I remember wondering if I could still get pregnant, so obviously I decided subconsciously to see whether I could - and I did, straight away. When I did the pregnancy test I freaked out. My God! I couldn’t believe it."

However, there was never any question that she would not have the baby. "It took me a good few months to get my head round it, though." She was about 14 weeks gone when she broke the news over Sunday lunch to her Irish-Catholic parents, who had been quietly appalled by her lesbian lifestyle but had come to terms with it. "I said that Richard and I had something to tell them. They were speechless. My mum said, ‘Oh, I thought you were going to tell us you were getting married’. ‘God, no,’ I said, ‘I’m just having an illegitimate child, mother’. In fact, my parents were dead chuffed and proceeded to get completely plastered with Richard; I had to sit and watch them.

"My folks have got two grandchildren already from my two brothers, so although they are lovely, now that mum’s got a daughter with a baby it’s meant that she can interfere and be more hands-on."

Clune and her partner live less than 20 minutes away from her parents, in Essex, so Saoirse sees a great deal of her grandparents - and out comes the digital camera again so that I can see grandmother and granddaughter looking ecstatically happy together. "I’m really glad that my folks are around for Saoirse. They’re both in their seventies. I know my ‘lifestyle choices’ over the years baffled them. They once said they had had ‘to climb a mountain with me, but had come down the other side smiling’. I know, I know, my life of late has been pretty amazing. I’m just waiting to flog the movie rights, although perhaps I should sell them to myself, before someone else does it."

Oddly enough, says Clune, rearranging the salad leaves on her plate, she is aware that when she talks about what has happened in her life it sounds like a huge anecdote that she has just made up.

"You know, I decided to do this, then I decided to do that - like I’d planned it - but it really wasn’t like that. When I decided to become a lesbian, I really was one. I wasn’t just trying it out for a laugh. I wasn’t being a pretend lesbian, like those people who say they’re vegetarians but eat chicken. I was absolutely committed to the whole lifestyle, everything."

Gradually, though, she fell out of love with the idea. When she told her friend Graham Norton that she had gone straight, he said: "You lesbians are useless, aren’t you? You just can’t stick at it." But, says Clune, for her it was a realisation that all relationships, whether gay or straight, are problematic, "fraught with disappointments and misunderstandings and conflict". Three years ago she emerged from the very painful break-up of an affair with a woman. "I just said, very cavalierly, ‘Right, that’s it, I’ve finished with women, they’re just too much hard work’. Not that men aren’t!"

For six months she didn’t sleep with anyone, and she was nervous about embarking upon a straight relationship. "But I just jumped in," she says gleefully, "and I’m very glad I did." She met her partner, "a real northern bloke from Bolton", when he was fire officer on her one-woman show at the Arts Theatre in London. "It was very romantic," she says, looking dewy-eyed at the memory. "Richard came backstage after my show, ostensibly to tell me I wasn’t allowed to have my Scottie dog in the building. She was pregnant with puppies, so I said, ‘OK, you can buy me a drink’."

He told her she had a lovely singing voice, but he wasn’t sure about the rest of her show. "He thought it was a bit rude, but then I just stalked him. It took a while and I think that was the attraction, I was used to people going, ‘Oh yes’ when I hit on them. He’s so-ooo gorgeous, despite the fact that we disagree about almost everything politically. Currently, he’s working as a trucker; he really is Yorkie bar man."

We end lunch indulging in girl talk about other men we fancy. "Thank God," says Clune when I tell her I think that Gordon Ramsay’s a dish. "I really thought there was something wrong with me, but other girlfriends have said the same as you. He’s very alpha-male, isn’t he? Cor!" And, with a big, cheeky smile on her face, she heads off for a photo-call in the Scottish smir.

• Julie Burchill is Away, Assembly Rooms, George Street, Edinburgh, 6-30 August.