Nancy Dell'Olio: Sven asked if I was having an affair with Tony Blair

Nancy Dell’Olio sums it up, in uncharacteristically ­sombre terms. ‘This is the match of life, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘We always use football terms, but it’s the only way to say it.’

We are talking, of course, about the love of her life and the fact that his life is now in its final stages.

Sven-Goran Eriksson, former England ­manager (and, let’s be honest, former Mr Nancy Dell’Olio) announced this week that he has terminal pancreatic cancer and has a year, at most, to live.

Some of the women in his famously tangled life might not seem to care that much (another lover, Ulrika Jonsson, sniffed yesterday that he was ‘not a decent person’) but Nancy was always a very different soul. Her heart was always on her sleeve, even when it was intact. ‘I am devastated,’ she tells me. ‘In the past four years I have lost so many people who were important to me — my father, my first ­husband. Just last year my mother died.

‘And now Sven. Life can be so cruel, and this is a terrible way to start the year. I just don’t know how you cope with a diagnosis like that.’

She knew he had cancer. They have not been on friendly terms since their much-publicised split in 2007, but they had both agreed to work on a TV project in Sweden and there had been some communication through an intermediary.

‘I knew he had cancer, but not that it was so advanced, not that it was terminal. That came as a shock,’ she tells me. Also a shock that he — famously private; the dour to her ­dramatic — would go public in such a way.

‘I guess that says very much about how ­serious it is,’ she says. ‘He would not go public unless …

‘Obviously, you cannot tell how you will deal with it. It will change a person. I think it is good that he is facing this with strength. And Sven is a fighter. He will fight this, and he has the discipline and the determination to do so. I know it.’

She says she wishes she were more ­religious so she could put in a word with God. ‘People who have faith. I admire them. But I do believe in miracles.’

Nancy, 62, is in her beloved Italy when we speak. She moved to Puglia last year to be closer to her mother Antonia, who died at the grand old age of 90. She still seems quite shaken.

‘It wasn’t cancer with her. She had been quite well, quite independent, until a few issues with her heart and her leg. But you are never ready to lose someone you love, are you?

‘We knew it was coming to the end. I sat with her the night before. She still insisted I put on her face cream. In fact, she told me I needed to buy her a new bottle. Then I went to bed. The next morning my brother went to wake her, and she was gone.’

Obviously, she won’t be nursing Sven, but will she see him?

‘I don’t know. I would like to. ­However things end, when you share love and passion for someone, it doesn’t go away. You might have to — how do I say this — put it in a box for a while.

‘And I don’t love him in the way I did love him. That changes. But there is still an affection there. He was a huge part of my life, and I was of his.’

Whatever water went under the bridge (and when it comes to this couple’s fiery relationship we were talking widespread flood alerts), Nancy and Sven were one of the most iconic couples in modern ­British history. No mean feat, given neither are British.

He was the ice-cool Swede in charge of our national football team. She was the flamboyant Italian on his arm, mostly draped in fur, sequins, feathers — or, more ­commonly, all of them together. She was the more to his less, the warmth to his chill.

He would doubtless sum up their relationship in different terms, but Nancy is, well, Nancy about it.

‘We changed history,’ she says. ‘I was the First Lady of Football. That had never been a thing before, and it hasn’t been since. Those are good memories.’

I start off this interview almost weeping with her, such is her sadness about her four years of pain, but before long (because she can’t help it) she has me in fits of laughter about the madness of her life with Sven.

Her favourite part was the globe-trotting. The glamour!

‘We both loved travel. I loved to meet more people. He liked to meet less people. But … ’

The fondest (and wildest) memory is of seeing in the New Year of 2006 on a remote island in Mozambique.

‘It was a new resort, which had only opened over Christmas. It was so remote, a nightmare getting there — plane, then helicopter. But there were only about 20 guests, including Nelson Mandela and his wife Graca Machel and us. So we had dinner with Mandela. He was losing it a ­little, then, but oh my, he was still so charismatic and magnetic. I will never forget that.’

Then there was that moment, where she arrived in Downing Street in 2002 dressed in a plunging red rhinestone-encrusted catsuit and jacket. It remains a defining image, not just of the woman but of an entire era.

Poor Sven didn’t like it one bit (‘next morning, when the photographs were of me, he said: “Are you happy?”, but it was not my fault’).

She gives chapter and verse on how it came about. The England team were to be guests at a reception hosted by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, but for logistical reasons Sven was to arrive with the team. Nancy would arrive alone, and be dropped at the front of No. 10.

She doesn’t reveal whether Sven knew she would be wearing scarlet, and how, but the rest is history.

‘I do remember walking in with Tony Blair, as if we were hosting it all. Cherie was somewhere in the background.’ She hoots.

‘Sven did once ask me if I was ­having an affair with Tony Blair, but this was because I said that if you were going to have an affair — and, yes, it happens — you should always move up rather than down.

‘Like in football, yes, go up a ­division. So I said I would only ever have an affair with the Prime Minister, or royalty. My targets were Tony Blair and Prince Charles.’

I pause for perhaps a second too long. ‘Joke,’ she says.

For the avoidance of doubt she did not have an affair with Tony Blair (did you have any affairs at all, Nancy, I ask her. ‘No,’ she says, quietly). But there is no doubt that she sees Sven’s very public 2002 dalliance with Ukrika Jonsson as evidence of him dabbling in the lower divisions.

‘In these things you are either very arrogant or very stupid. I think he was stupid rather than arrogant. He went with someone who wanted to use him for publicity.’

This possibly isn’t the time to delve too deep into the recesses of the Sven and Nancy relationship, but the astonishing thing is that she still seems to care very deeply about him, when he arguably treated her ­incredibly badly.

His autobiography depicted Nancy as a millstone around his neck. He bought another property just so he could escape her. ­Whatever her failings, this was ungallant and from a man who supposedly liked to keep his ­private life private, extraordinary.

She says she deliberately didn’t read that book, and is full of excuses for him today.

‘I think he loved me. Or he thought he loved me, but he was not as in love with who Nancy is. I’m quite a ­difficult … or rather, I am a big personality.

‘I’m not an ordinary person. He discovered that.’

He couldn’t cope with you?

‘No, he couldn’t cope with me.’

Since we have been talking about her parents — and how much she and her mother, who shared ­temperaments, would clash — I ask what they made of him.

‘Oh, when I left my first husband for Sven they were absolutely not happy.

‘My mother was very upset with me. She didn’t want me to live with him. She said “Take time”. But I was in love. And I had ­created this big tragedy for my husband, for Sven too. For the first year, I was not sure. It was not an easy time.’

On a wider level, her mother ‘did not approve of some of my life choices. And always, I thought I was right. You always do. But then, as you get older, you think your parents were right.’

Meaning your relationship with Sven was a mistake?

‘I probably made a mistake. We made a mistake — but it wasn’t a mistake at the time — and it was difficult to admit it because I had left my husband for him. I had caused a lot of pain. I needed to defend the decision I had made.’

Her parents did ‘come to love’ Sven, as she did and were ­devastated all over again when the relationship ended, after a string of his affairs.

Nancy has a penchant for giving history a very specific slant, but today she says she was the one to finally end it. ‘Sven did say we should try again. He wanted to give it another go.’

She has been open in the past about the fact that she never wanted to have children. There had been two abortions — never regretted — by the time she met Sven. She had ruled out ­children with Sven, too.

‘He wanted to. He wanted a daughter with me, but he knew my feelings.’

There was a pregnancy — swiftly followed by a miscarriage — ­during their decade together though.

‘When I discovered I was ­pregnant it was a shock. For a minute, I could have changed my mind (about having children) I think, but nature made the ­decision. Regrets? No, I don’t think so. It would have changed everything. It would have been one of those Sliding Doors things, but I never believed that you should have a child to save a relationship because it wouldn’t work.’

Nancy — who today is an ­ambassador for Puglia — did have a relationship with Sven’s children from his first marriage. Johan and Lina were, after all, in her life for a decade. She says she is glad they are there for their father now.

‘I did not keep in touch with them, no, but we were close, and I cannot imagine what they are going through.

‘But I can say that their father is a fighter and whatever he has got to face, he will face it, day by day.’

We return — of course, we do — to the football analogies. She ­wonders quite openly, and ­movingly, if Sven’s very public announcement about his cancer will create the same sort of magic that she ­witnessed, first-hand, when he walked into a ­football stadium.

‘I saw that — when you walk into a football stadium, and you get that energy from everyone there. It’s something you can feel, it spurs everyone on — players, ­managers, supporters. Maybe he will get it now. These energies can be magical, and give him even more strength in his fight.’