An extraordinary thing about Jim Naughtie, if his has been the main voice of the morning for your entire adult life, is that he’s very softly spoken. It’s the audio equivalent of discovering how short Tom Cruise is. In the chintzy lounge of a central London hotel, I could hear almost every other conversation above his, and came away with the image of a man whose journalistic ideal wasn’t the combat of the Today programme but something much more 1930s; restraint, subtlety, the soft power of creating hush by whispering. The only tangible nostalgia he expresses for old school Fleet Street is that “in a newspaper office now, if you brought in a bottle of gin, you’d be escorted to the front door! In the 1970s, let alone the 1960s …”

We mutually consider this tragedy for a moment; it is the only regret he voices out loud, but I often got the sense that he missed a different kind of news, one in which courtesy and accuracy mattered more and immediacy and trenchancy less. And he is possessed by a genuine and universal romance for the business of news. “In our game, it’s all about: ‘She seemed slightly off, she went home with him,’ trading information, being endlessly interested. We don’t have to have it explained to us why other people are interesting. When I was at university, they used to call me Telegraph Sam. Gossip is another word for it, but I do like to think it’s of a higher grade than that.”

Naughtie presented his final Today programme in December last year, although he stresses “the umbilical cord is still there. The editor of Today is still my line manager.” He now does long-form reports, mainly from the US and from Holyrood, but we are here to discuss his second novel, Paris Spring, a spy yarn, cinematically told, set in the early months of 1968, when the US civil rights movement, anti-communist sentiment in the Eastern bloc and erudite Parisian anti-establishment protest coincided to create a vision of global unrest, before the word “global” packed a political punch.

“Of course,” he says, “I was 16 and in the middle of rural Scotland at the time. If you were my age, then, it was amazing to see that cusp they were all on. But, as I say,” he continues, anxious, it sounds, that I will think he’s older than he is, which he needn’t have been, because I have Google: “I was pretty distant. We weren’t digging up the cobblestones in Aberdeen.” No, the appeal of the era is not as a tangential memoir, but rather, for the fact that “everybody knew instinctively that in that period, there was a changing of the guard, in all sorts of ways. There was a moment between 66 and 69 when, for better or for worse, there really was a change. Somebody sent me a picture that showed the students in Aberdeen in late 66 and 67 in tweed jackets, wearing brogues and ties. Two years later, they all had long hair. So, what would it have been like to have been 37, to have had commitments to an old order, and to see these changes? It’s not as if anybody knew what it would lead to. Nothing, or something different? What do you do? You’re in the system, you’re very decent, you believe in what you’re doing, you’re perfectly comfortable with it, but then, suddenly, you have to ask, is it better to make sure that nothing changes, that it’s all fine, or are you in the business of change?” He checks himself immediately. “This is not a journalist’s report dressed up as fiction. It just needs to be a story. Novels are novels and fiction is fiction, and I can’t bear political novels.”

He is determined to root his fiction in the page-turner tradition, and charts his influences, across any genre, in a constellation of people who knew, above all, how to make the clock tick. “Why is Puccini a brilliant writer of opera? As someone once said, because he knows how long it takes for somebody to walk from one side of the stage to the other.” Then, later, “Len Deighton said: ‘You’ve got a maximum of seven people whose minds you can see into. The rest of them you can’t get behind. It’s the sort of thing that you would never know until you tried it.” He has a horror of pretension. “This isn’t a meditation on modern life, for God’s sake, it’s a story; all I want to do is to get people to turn the next page.” But writing has unravelled that for him a bit. “I used to think it was very twee when you’d interview an author and ask about a character: ‘What’s he or she going to do next?’, and they’d say: ‘Oh, they haven’t told me yet.’ But sadly there’s a truth in it. You have to let them speak.”

And there is meditation on life here, in that underlying question, especially the way he frames it, which would be just as applicable to a news anchor in the early 21st century as it would have been to a spy in the 60s: after a long period of pretty smug normalcy came these waves of tumult. “Just look at politics now. You could end up with, a year from now, Britain out of the European Union, Donald Trump president of the United States, Scotland has left the union …” “Boris Johnson as prime minister?” “No comment.”

Precisely: in turbulent times, where does a person with a nose for a scrap, but a duty to the establishment, stand? It is easily answered on one level, since he is still very much of the BBC, with a duty of “neutrality … And I have no problem with it. If you start to wave a flag over your head, that’s ridiculous. It doesn’t mean you can’t observe and you can’t analyse and you can’t be sharp. But what you can’t be is crudely partisan. Of course I have views. But if I was somebody who wanted to share them, I would have become somebody shouting on LBC [Radio]. That’s not my game.”

He has not written this book in order to ventriloquise an allegiance on to another era – either to stasis or to change – that he cannot for contractual reasons state in the present. But there does seem to be something very personal about its fundamental dilemma: what to embrace politically and what to shun, and how those decisions are made. “You’ve got the natural journalistic instinct, observing these events, thinking, ‘I’ll tell the story, and they’ll read what I say and know I’m right.’ And on the other hand, you’ve got the obligation to make sure that nothing happens. It’s a curious position to be in.” Of course he’s talking about the characters in the novel, but it also sounds like the BBC all over.

A deeply held commitment to public service broadcasting is enticing to hear expressed since, with that duty of neutrality, it is often the only opinion these deeply opinionated people will say out loud. “Nobody wants a police state. But when broadcasting has no duty of neutrality – you can see it in America – what you get is a complete explosion. Now people on both sides think that it has produced Donald Trump, and not just Trump, but the levels of anger. That lack of impartiality stops the system from working.”

All of that said, between 1968 and 2016, obviously Naughtie has seen a lot of news and can recall plenty of other times that felt as momentous as these, “where things that were previously unimaginable are happening every day. It’s a bit like 1991, you’d wake up and it would say, ‘the Bulgarian communist party has dissolved itself’. The next day, the Hungarian party had done the same” (it is piquant and a bit droll to transcribe this on the day that the prime minister of Iceland has resigned over tax avoidance, Corbyn is calling for Cameron to resign, and LBC is asking, should Corbyn resign for asking Cameron to resign?). “And then you look now, and one day it’s 34 people dead in Brussels, the next day … when things are spinning out of control, the place for sane commentary keeps people on track, doesn’t let them go off on wild tangents.”

There’s one final, ridiculous, gossipy thing I need cleared up before we can lay to rest public service broadcasting: in 2001, those days when everything was mellow and nothing mattered, the rumour was that Naughtie and John Humphrys hated one another, that they were locked in a co-dependent dyad of resentment, like [the 1962 film] Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, only male and on the radio. I was actually in the middle of writing a piece about it for another publication – with no evidence, no quotes, nothing on the record at all, but hey, I was young – when the twin towers were destroyed, and everybody was suddenly too serious to need to know. He is happy to lay this to rest: “That is not true. It’s crap. It’s absolute bollocks. John and I are different characters, obviously, but that is serious bollocks. Look, there’s nothing like being with somebody at 4 o’ clock in the morning to test a friendship. But absolutely not, we’ve never had a row, we’ve never complained. We’re an odd couple in that sense.” He stops abruptly. “Are you wondering why I’m wearing makeup?” I really wasn’t. “It’s because I just did a TV interview.” It’s as if our diversion on the Today years led us back to what journalism was all about: comradeship, discretion, clear-eyed analysis, discovery, curiosity, an evolved world, maybe a bit boho; but one where men don’t squabble and they don’t wear makeup.