'Get out there and fight'

Everything about Ian Botham was huge - his size, of course, his power with the bat, his stamina with the ball, his gob, his self-belief, his charity work, and his unfeasible capacity for drink. Today his baggy shirt fails to disguise that Ian "Beefy" Botham at 51 is bigger and beefier than ever.

As he approaches, 14 years into his retirement, I half expect to see him looking at the heavens and twirling windmills with his bat. Nobody walked out with such intent: he was not just going to flay the opposition, he was going to smite nations.

Botham has just published a new autobiography. This time, he says, it is for real, the full confessional. "It's quite honest, quite brutal, quite truthful about myself." Brutal is the key word. He is almost as tough on himself as he was on the Aussies in his prime. He portrays himself as selfish, unquestioning, dogmatic, irascible, confrontational, overly sociable, overly solitary, an absent father and a negligent husband. Head On reads like a 400-page apology and belated love letter to his wife Kath.

Botham nods. "Absolutely. And to the family. That's exactly what it is. What I'm trying to say is 'Okay, it hasn't always been a bed of roses, but it's 30-odd years and we are still here together and stronger than ever.' That is the most important thing." The selfishness is painfully revealed in the details - for example, when he gets called up for his Test debut, he does not bother telling Kath, just goes out drinking. She eventually finds out from his parents.

We are driving from Battersea, where he has done a photo shoot, to a hotel in central London, where he has more interviews lined up. As usual with Botham, everything is happening at hyper-speed. I ask him what Kath thinks of the book. "She was quite surprised by how honest I've been, that I was prepared to go out on that limb. She said she enjoyed reading it."

So to the record-straightening. Yes, he admits that he partied just as hard as he played, possibly harder. Yes, it is true that he was impetuous and quick on the draw with his fists (not least when the former Australian captain Ian Chappell was insulting the English). At the same time, he says the wildness was exaggerated. Not even he could have achieved all he did if he had constantly been drunk or stoned. "When d'you think I played cricket? These are the questions I used to put to them. You keep telling me I'm doing all this all night and all day long, well how come I've got 383 Test wickets, how come I've got over 5000 runs? When did all this happen? Then they have to say, 'Well, this is what we're told.' Bunch of lemmings." Botham has always been suspicious of the press.

What about his reputation as a womaniser? "Incapable," he says with Bothamesque eloquence. No, he says, he did not have that alleged affair with Miss Barbados, let alone break the bed. When he did stray, he says it was only the once and after he had retired. The book is most moving when he describes how his two-year affair with an Australian waitress almost cost him his marriage and the love of his children. (He writes that his son, the former rugby player Liam, "told me that, if he hadn't been holding the baby at the time, he would have flattened me", while his daughter Sarah refused to speak to him for a long time afterwards.)

Is he surprised that Kath is still with him? "No, because that's another thing people don't know. And, if you read the book, you'll see it's a very strong bond, one that goes through my children, my grandchildren, and everyone who knows us will tell you how strong it is. Yeah, I walked the tightrope on more than one occasion but at the end of the day we're there and we battled through and we're stronger now than we've ever been."

Has there ever been a man quite so appropriately named as Beefy Botham? "B" words instantly come to mind when you think of him - boorish, brazen, belligerent, and of course, brilliant. As a child, he says, he knew he was destined to play cricket at the highest level. At 13 the careers advisor asked what he was going to do with life. Back then he was no different - brimming with certainties. His first goal was to make a living from cricket. "Then when you cross that little bridge, you want to go on. But you can only do that if you make sacrifices and the sacrifices mean you have to have that village mentality - I am going to be king of the castle, and the castle just gets bigger and bigger. So suddenly I go from village green to national stadium to international stadium and every time there is a bigger challenge, and to achieve that you have to be selfish, you have to have tunnel vision, you have to have determination, you have to have strong will power. And above all else, you have to have a very, very understanding wife, which is the point I try to make, because without Kath it wouldn't have happened."

Have any great sportsmen not had that selfishness? "No." He mentions two of his greatest influences and two of the most focused players in the history of the game. "It did me the world of good, growing up under the captaincy of Brian Close. And also Viv Richards." He talks with such admiration of the fearless Close who became a punchbag for West Indies in his mid-40s and would play on undeterred with blood dripping through his laces from a four-inch gash on his shin. As for Richards, he simply refers to him as his buddy and brother.

"Viv and I, you probably wouldn't meet two stronger-willed people. Who would think two guys in a condemned flat could, 25 to 30 years down the line, both end up with as high an honour as you can get? Amazing." He is so proud of what they have achieved - how two anti-establishment, working-class kids forced their way through the social hierarchies and became the new establishment.

Botham has always been a curious mix - eager to tackle the great and not-so-good about their snobberies and prejudices, yet sharing many of their traditional values. Two days after we meet, Botham is due to be knighted by the Queen and he says it will be the greatest day of his life. What does it feel like when people call him Sir Ian? "Very nice. Very proud. I'm very much a royalist. So yeah, all those republicans - I'd give them some time to get out of the country, then start hanging them at traitor's gate." I think he is joking but am not sure.

Has he ever thought of going into politics? "I don't think that would be a very good idea. I'm too honest to be a politician. A few people have suggested it. Sponsors have come up to me and suggested it." What party would he bat for? "Well, I'm not going to get into politics but the best prime minister we've had in a long time is Maggie Thatcher. And sadly one that would have been a very great prime minister, and I hope he gets another chance, is William Hague. I think he's a very clever man."

We are sitting in the lounge of a bijou hotel. Botham orders peppermint tea. As soon as the interview becomes more formal, he becomes fidgety and a little impatient. Asked about his greatest achievements, he says there are so many milestones, where do you start? Eventually he settles for winning the Ashes in Australia. "Beating them in their own backyard is always a big moment." The England teams he played in had so many fine players - notably the three Gs (Gower, Gooch and Gatting) and Bob Willis.

It has been suggested that, for all their individual talents, they underachieved. After all they were blackwashed twice by West Indies. "Only by the best bloody team that's ever played cricket, the best team that's ever played cricket." He glares. "We didn't get blackwashed when I was captain. It was 1-0 and 2-0, just to put the record straight."

So is it a misconception that they underachieved? "I've never heard that conception." He names the West Indies team one by one, with awe. "That was the best side that ever played."

Botham, of course, was not the only great allrounder of his time. All the major Test-playing nations bar Australia had one in the 1970s and 1980s - Kapil Dev (India), Imran Khan (Pakistan) and Richard Hadlee (New Zealand). Botham says that as soon as he had finished a day's cricket, he would look to see how the others had done. "The rivalry was fierce and intense but that's how it should be. I don't know any other way to play sport. I don't know any other way of doing anything to be honest. Get out there and fight."

Did he think he was the best of the four? "I didn't think! If you look at figures, then I probably was." In terms of? "Runs, wickets, catches, 383 wickets. Where I win is 14 centuries. Win by quite a distance there." He pauses, to change his tune. "But that's not what it's about. All these figures, facts and figures. That's bullshit. Absolute bullshit." It's classic Botham bluster. After all, he was the one who brought up the figures. And, if we are being objective, wonderful cricketer though Botham was, Imran would perhaps emerge as the best allrounder, with averages of 37 with the bat and 22 with the ball.

Botham believes that one of the reasons he was subject to such tabloid scrutiny was because the British do not like winners. He guides me through a brief history of winners who have become unstuck or gone unappreciated. "We had the greatest golfer we ever produced, Nick Faldo, and they didn't leave him alone. We had Nigel Mansell who was the world champion and "Boring Brummy" the papers said. World champion mate! World champion! Stirling Moss, number of world championships? Oh, none. Strange that. Henry Cooper, world championships? Oh strange, none. Love him. Eddie the Eagle, master of nothing, hero. We have a tall-poppy syndrome." Back in his day, he says, sportsmen did not get media training or protection and were left to flounder.

But in the end the press could never truly savage Botham for one simple reason: the public loved him. The averages for the second half of his career do not bear comparison with the first half (the opposite of Imran) but he continued to believe he was the greatest. He did not transform just the England team, he did the same for the two county sides he gave the bulk of his career to - turning both Somerset and Worcestershire into winners. Even non-cricket fans loved Botham. When he finally retired, he did so in typical style - unzipping his trousers and running in to bowl to the Australian David Boon with his "meat and two veg" blowing in the wind. Since then he has continued to live at pretty much the same frantic pace. He transferred his voracious appetite for scoring runs and taking wickets to raising money for leukaemia with epic walks (£10m raised, and counting). He commentates around the world, writes books, advertises Shredded Wheat, and is almost as much in the public eye as he was 20 years ago. Does he ever play these days? "Never play, I've not played since the day I retired. And never will." Why not? "Why? If I wanted to play, I wouldn't have retired."

In the book he talks about how when things were not going well, he needed to escape, be by himself, relieve the pressure. Now he has stopped playing have those tensions disappeared? "No. I still like my own time, to go fishing, go to the river - the Spey, Tay or Tyne." For the first time he talks with real tenderness. "It might take me a morning to do 150 yards and I work my way down the river. I've got my Jack Russell sitting there who walks me yard by yard, and that's me at peace. And I need those times. I need my own time. Everybody does. And, if you're in the public eye, you probably need it more so."

Looking back, does he feel embarrassed or ashamed of anything he has done? "I've told you, nothing. I don't worry about it. I don't look back. Losers look back because they're looking why they lost. Winners go forward. Very simple." He looks me in the eye a little too severely for comfort.

It has been suggested that now Botham has his knighthood, he has softened. He seems as tough as ever. "I haven't softened I can assure you," he says, smiling. "There are a lot of things out there that really piss me off and I've got a long way to go yet. Lots of things in society are appalling." Such as? "Grannies getting beaten and raped for a fiver. Where do you want to start? Society is a mess. We're in a real mess at the moment and there needs to be some authority. Not just nabbing drivers doing 10 miles an hour, what about doing some real work, these rapes, gangs, drugs, sex offenders, you know. These bloody paedophiles. What is going on? There's no deterrent. Very simple, no deterrent." He pauses. No, he says, it is definitely not him who has gone soft. "Society's gone soft. Too many do-gooders out there and not enough doers."