Interview with Sydney-born Lord May, who will give the 2007 Lowy lecture in November ...

"Australia is hugely attractive because it is a largely classless society, although Britain is much more classless than it used to be. America has much more class structure than Britain; it’s just based on money. It’s better to live in a place where everyone genuinely feels as good as everybody else."

“I was born in Waverley in 1936. My father was Henry May, or Harry, and my mother Kathleen’s maiden name was McCredie. I never really knew my father. He was a patent law and insurance barrister. Gough Whitlam once told me my father was the only person at the Sydney Bar brighter than him.

But my father became an alcoholic, for which my mother had no tolerance. When I was seven she left my father, taking my younger brother Tom and myself to live with her parents in Woollahra, and divorced him. She worked from home making hats, and we grew up in genteel poverty.

On rare occasions we saw my father for dinner. He had a sad life: if you hired him for a case, his chance of turning up was about 50-50. This just wasn’t a person who was part of our lives. But he lived into his 80s.

I loved puzzles and games. I was dux in my final year at Sydney Boys High. My chemistry teacher, Lenny Basser, was brilliantly creative. I went to Sydney University to become a chemical engineer, and did extraordinarily well at exams, which were kind of a game. Harry Messel, who had come to run the physics department, chased after me; he was a Canadian-born physicist working with his mates on the hot topic of superconductivity. They were having such fun, so I did my PhD in theoretical physics.

At 23 I began learning French to leave Sydney with my thesis supervisor, Robbie Schafroth, who had gained a foundation physics chair at the University of Geneva. But in August 1959, Schafroth was flying with his wife to the outback in a small plane, which crashed. Overnight, my thesis supervisor was dead, and I was rather thrown. He was a person I had hugely admired, and my first encounter with mortality. I was keen to get away from Sydney.

I went to Harvard in Massachusetts to do a post-doctorate, where I met my future wife Judith on a blind double date, just before her 18th birthday. I was 24. She had come from New York and was studying political science. We came back to Sydney and got married in a registry office in the summer of 1962, and built a house in Lane Cove. We stayed for 10 years, and our daughter, Naomi – “Nome” because that was how she pronounced her name as a little girl – was born in 1966.

I accidentally blundered into ecology at a romantic phase of the subject. As a professor in theoretical physics at Sydney University I was drawn to Charles Birch, the main figure for founding social responsibility in science in Australia, who wrote to his friends at Princeton, New Jersey and said, ‘You ought to talk to this physicist.’ So in 1972 I met and spoke with Robert MacArthur at Princeton, a famous ecologist in his early 40s who had just learned he had renal cancer, who within an hour and a half told me: ‘I’m going to be dead soon, and I’m looking for my successor. Would you like to have my job?’

I don’t think I’d have ever had the energy to move if it hadn’t been for Judith’s urging, because in some ways I am a lazy person. Nome has always been very independent; I remember a day or so after we arrived at Princeton, this little seven-year-old walking up and down the neighbours’ houses, knocking and saying: ‘Hello, we’ve just arrived. Do you have any children?’ I became professor of zoology there for 16 years.

I was later chief scientific adviser to the British Government, from 1995 to 2000, so I was involved with both John Major and Tony Blair. John Major was an extraordinarily able man. Tony Blair was also extremely impressive. Meeting him with two or three others was just like having a coffee in a seminar here at Oxford University, where I am now. People would say, ‘No, Tony, you haven’t understood’; we were colleagues working together without excessive deference, just as it should be.

I was appointed a non-party political peer in the British Parliament in 2001, and sponsored a debate on climate change in the House of Lords in 2005. [Lord May confirms he told Britain’s Independent that President Bush was a “modern-day Nero over climate change, fiddling while the world burns”, but won’t elaborate.]

Judy and I live in a house at Oxford and do a lot of walking on weekends; we very much like the south-west coast around Cornwall and Devon. I miss my old friends in Sydney, the liveliness, the Wollemi National Park where you can discover pines people assumed extinct for 100 million years. We’ve been back to Sydney almost every year.

Australia is hugely attractive because it is a largely classless society, although Britain is much more classless than it used to be. America has much more class structure than Britain; it’s just based on money. It’s better to live in a place where everyone genuinely feels as good as everybody else.”