He ate breakfast every day beside his late wife’s tomb… and told friends his life was over. Then a friendship of 30 years took an unexpected twist – and changed Maurice Saatchi’s life…

Orgasm is the provocative title of Lord Saatchi’s latest book and I find myself almost having to shout it to be heard over the clatter and bustle of a busy House of Lords tearoom.

There is a brief moment of near farce when I imagine venerable heads turning; jaws dropping, ears pricked for some revelation.

‘It’s a word that’s rarely used and when it is, it makes people feel uncomfortable,’ he agrees. ‘They shift slightly in their chair. It’s interesting. We talk about sex. But even in a world that is so open and transparent, orgasm has a surprising effect on people.’

Maurice Saatchi is an advertising man to his core. He and his brother Charles famously ushered in 18 years of Thatcherism with their 1979 ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ dole queue poster. They orchestrated successive triumphant Tory election campaigns. He knows the value of a beguiling word, an incendiary image.

But his book, it emerges, is not about physical ecstasy at all. ‘There’s no sex in it. It is a series of essays about what I call orgasms of the mind, perhaps eureka moments.’

This allows us to segue neatly into the exquisite moment of revelation, 18 months ago in Harry’s Bar – the exclusive Mayfair restaurant – where Saatchi, 78, realised he was falling in love, after 12 years of mourning his beloved wife Josephine Hart, with their old friend Lynn Forester de Rothschild.

Saatchi’s grief, after acclaimed writer Josephine died, aged 69, from an aggressive and merciless form of ovarian cancer, was all-consuming. It seemed the pall of sadness that enveloped him would never lift.

But today love has transformed him. He sits in the tearoom, immaculately tailored, sockless and elegantly shod in his handmade evening shoes, radiating pure joy. ‘Congratulations on your wedding my Lord,’ smiles a waitress. ‘Thank you!’ he beams.

Have I stumbled on a scoop? Has he remarried with such quiet discretion that word has not slipped out beyond the Palace of Westminster?

‘Oh no, I think she meant, “Congratulations on your new love life”,’ he clarifies – because he is, very palpably, in love.

It shows in his smile, in the hint of mischief in his eye; in his confident bearing. The contrast with the man I first met in 2013, two years after Josephine’s death, is utterly extraordinary.

Then he had paused our chat twice when tears threatened to overcome him. He would not concede that he would ever emerge from mourning.

He ate breakfast every day beside his late wife’s tomb in a bluebell wood beyond a lake at Old Hall, his West Sussex estate, talking to her as he always had. ‘But now there are no answers,’ he told me then, his voice trailing into sobs.

He kept 14 wardrobes full of her clothes. Even the Post-It notes she sent him – all 1,600 of them – were framed; a vast art work covering the wall of her study.

‘My life is over,’ he told me then. ‘Coming to terms. Moving on. They are expressions of betrayal and unforgivable selfishness. They mean the lover has abandoned the loved.’

So it seemed Maurice Saatchi would grieve in perpetuity.

Today, however, he has finally shrugged off the shroud that had engulfed him since Josephine’s premature death in June 2011, and done what he then thought was unthinkable. He has moved on.

Lynn, 70, the source of his happiness, is the widow of British-born financier Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, scion of the banking dynasty, who died two years ago, aged 91. The two couples – Lynn and Evelyn; Josephine and Maurice – had been great friends and today Lord Saatchi marvels at the alchemy that transformed that friendship into love.

‘For 30 years Lynn and I had a completely platonic friendship. Then, when Josephine died, we’d meet as friends. When Evelyn died we’d meet as a widow and widower. So how did that spark happen?’ he muses. ‘It’s inexplicable, a mystery. Neither of us planned it.

‘We were at Harry’s Bar having a fabulous meal. You can call it luck or divine intervention, but we were both very aware that something had changed.

‘It happened in a split second, in the eyes. In terms of physical events, nothing actually happened that night, but we were still aware that something dramatic had taken place. It was very exciting. It’s still very exciting.’

Everyone – from old friends to slender acquaintances – has remarked on the astonishing change in him.

‘I did not realise, that for more than ten years I was just a shadow, so obviously unhappy. So many people have said, ‘Maurice, you’ve no idea how different you are now.’ And I know it.

‘Love really is the most powerful driver in life. It changes everything. It gives you self-confidence. You feel more able. If you can confide in a lover about anything without any sense of guilt or anxiety, it has the most tremendous effect.

‘It gives you empathy. You’re more concerned about what other people are feeling and thinking, less wrapped up in your own concerns and problems.

‘The absence of a lover leaves a tremendous gap in your life and I’d had that since Josephine died.’

I ask him if the relationship with Lynn is physically passionate. He blushes slightly; smiles and looks out across the rippling Thames: ‘Look at the river! Isn’t it beautiful and romantic!’ he prevaricates, smiling. ‘You have to ask that question, I know.’ He is gallant and kind. ‘But I have ducked it.’

‘You could say, “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment”,’ I suggest.

‘It’s a lovely relationship,’ he concludes, still beaming.

He and Lynn inhabit the world of the fabulously wealthy. Aside from his mock Tudor castle in West Sussex, he has a house in London’s Chelsea while she has homes in the US in New York, Martha’s Vineyard and Aspen as well as a place in London.

Will they consolidate? ‘Perhaps we’ll evolve over the years. We’ll see.’

And maybe they will actually marry? ‘I don’t think so. There is the question of age. We’re not in our 20s,’ he says.

When we meet this week they have just returned to London from New York where they had attended Lynn’s youngest granddaughter’s baptism. Both have two sons in their 30s: Maurice’s boys are Edward and Adam; the latter, Josephine’s son whom he had helped raise from the age of four. Lynn also has two sons, Jake and Ben.

Lynn’s granddaughters, aged four months, two and three, have clearly captured Saatchi’s heart. Do they have a pet name for him? ‘All right, I’ll tell you. It’s MoMo. You’re not going to put that in, are you?’ He pretends to be horrified.

His pride in Lynn is heart-warming. Although they stand at opposite ends of the political divide – she, a Democrat, is close friends with the Clintons; he is a committed Conservative – they both seek to lessen inequality by raising tax thresholds for the poorest.

As the founder of the Council for Inclusive Capitalism in the US, this is Lynn’s passionate mission.

There must, I imagine, have been moments when their views have clashed. He tells a story of a summer gathering last year, of the great and the good of US Democratic politics at Lynn’s home in Martha’s Vineyard.

‘I have never seen so many former presidents, vice presidents, attorney generals, senators and congressmen gathered in one place. It was as if the Democratic Convention was taking place at her house. ‘Lynn said to me: ‘There are no Republicans here, so don’t say Trump could be a good president.’ So I didn’t. I could have been lynched!’

And how does Lynn react to all the memorials to Josephine that speak so eloquently of his love for her? ‘She doesn’t mind at all. She understands completely because she knew Josephine very well and we were all such good friends for so many decades. Even the Post-It notes, she understands.’

He tells me the late author Edna O’Brien visited Old Hall and remarked: ‘You have created a beautiful shrine to Josephine,’ and that was before I had even built the library in her name,’ he says.

He still sets her place at the dinner table, but one of the rituals he insisted he would never relinquish – eating his breakfast of grapefruit cocktail each day at her tomb – he gave up after seven years.

‘During that time I’d driven 3,672 miles from the house to the far end of the lake to have my breakfast with her. It was a form of madness.’ He laughs. ‘One day I just stopped. I don’t remember why.

‘But I don’t think it’s possible to comprehend the scale of the damage that’s done when someone suffers a terrible loss unless you’ve experienced it, too.’

He has whittled down the 14 wardrobes of clothes to four, but still keeps the garments he considers Josephine’s most beautiful: ‘Disposing of them is difficult. I’m quite happy keeping them.’

He had been married to Josephine for 27 years when doctors diagnosed primary peritoneal cancer. The only symptom of the disease was a mild tummy ache which, but for her husband’s insistence she saw a doctor, she would have ignored.

A scan and a brutally brief consultation followed: ‘It lasted two minutes. Josephine was finished off in three words: Malignant. Advanced. Inoperable. Each word was worse than the one before. The doctor described the situation accurately and correctly. There was nothing more to say. There still isn’t,’ he told me in 2013.

He recalls how the barbarism of chemotherapy, the vomiting, diarrhoea and weight loss; the debilitating weakness; were all borne with stoicism.

I wonder why, if the doctors’ prognosis was so bleak, if the drugs were ineffectual, his wife continued with these treatments? He gives the obvious answer: ‘Because they tell you, ‘there is always hope’ and ‘every case is different’. They are well-meant and kind sentiments and we took them to heart. You want to believe there will be a miracle.’

After her death, Lord Saatchi cast around for a constructive outlet for his raging sorrow and his Medical Innovation Act, ushered through the Lords as a private member’s bill, was enshrined in law in 2016. Today he calls it his ‘greatest achievement’.

It allows doctors to deflect from tried and tested medical regimes – which have failed to improve outcomes in gynaecological cancers for the past 40 years – and use new, innovative treatments, without risking litigation for failing to follow the standard pathways.

Safeguards are incorporated into the Act; reckless experimentation is outlawed while responsible new medical technology is encouraged: ‘The point is to change the law to shift the balance towards innovation and away from complacency and apathy.’

From the morass of his grief, it is quite astounding that he was able to finesse such ground-breaking new legislation. But we are not yet approaching a cure. ‘Don’t get cancer,’ he says gravely.

He looks back on other manifestations of his loss with affectionate self-indulgence, and when I remind him that he once said he’d hoped – had he died before Josephine – she would live like Dickens’ Miss Havisham, perpetually single and mourning her lost love – he smiles ruefully.

‘It’s so annoying that you have to remember my saying that. Hmmm. I think I was half-joking. I don’t think I could sustain that position any more.’

He is good at such gentle self-mockery and recalls how his old friend Bob Geldof, the singer and political activist, ribbed him mercilessly when he tried to become too weighty and tendentious about his new love.

‘I adopted a serious tone as if I was going to say something important,’ he says. ‘I declared: ‘I’m sure Josephine and Evelyn are looking down on us and approving this relationship.’

‘And Bob was really cruel and rude. He said it was ‘self-serving bulls***.’ He chuckles gently.

Despite the elite milieu in which they move, life with Lynn, he assures me, has its simple, accessible pleasures. They’re off to Sussex for the weekend where they’ll doubtless watch a film while eating supper.

‘I try to introduce her to the greatest masterpieces of all time,’ he says. He lists some of them: Citizen Kane (incomparable); the Manchurian Candidate. Seven Days In May.

‘We watch them on the sofa, eating dinner from little tables by the crackling log fire.’

And are there any movies Lynn loves that are new to him? ‘The Sound Of Music!’ he cries. ‘I’d never seen it before.’

Aside from this, she’s an elegant dancer: ‘She has tried to teach me, to very little effect. I’m terrible!’

I ask if he is romantic and it comes as no surprise at all when he says he is. He is a man of understated, old-fashioned courtesies and quiet charm.

As we tour the House of Lords, walking the lengths of its footstep-muffling carpets, he tells me: ‘Being able to express your love is very important.

‘I don’t feel inhibited about telling Lynn I love her. I also try to do things that are kind and thoughtful.

‘She gives a lot of speeches and writes articles for learned journals. I encourage her with that and want her to do well.

‘When people say, ‘You’ve no idea what a changed person you are,’ I think, ‘That’s what your lover is supposed to do, isn’t it?’

‘It’s impossible to see how we can achieve anything in life without the support of a friend and if that person is a lover, too, all the better.’

Orgasm by Maurice Saatchi (Eris, £84)