"Have You Asked About Laser Assisted Hatching?" The notice hangs over the leather sofa, between the marble busts and overlarge arrangement of dried flowers. Tasselled curtains frame a mighty stone fireplace in which flickers a fake fire. All is the quiet of soft furnishings.
Then into this calm scuttles our protagonist, a small silver-haired gentleman, with baby-pink puffy skin that seems as if it has never seen the sun. He is dressed in what could be his old school uniform - a red striped tie, maroon sweater and permacrease trousers - and waves a blue spotted handkerchief. "Can I be of assistance to you?" he begs, his leather-gloved hands hovering eagerly over my hugely pregnant belly. Then, sensing my alarm and presuming it's to do with the gloves, he adds, "I have some rubber ones as well."
The great advantage, he explains, is that he - Professor Ian Craft - is one of the few obstetricians who do their own epidurals: "I could do yours." I hope he's joking. I am here, after all, as a journalist, even if a heavily pregnant one. "Natural conception?" he asks. "Well ..." I stutter.
The small crowd in the waiting room are stony-faced. There's the infertile patient with her sister, whose hand she is holding tightly, as if to prevent her tumbling from the soft leather sofa. There's the egg donor with her mother, both extremely overweight. And there's the professor, who hurries me through to a larger room next door, with rather nice flock wallpaper, where a bench is lined with a row of fearsome-looking instruments, all metal, all sharp. If it wasn't for the Assisted Hatching notice, we could be characters from a real-life game of Cluedo, and one of these sinister, shiny instruments could be the murder weapon.
But, despite appearances, this is not the set for an Agatha Christie mystery. It's the London Fertility Centre in Harley Street, where life is created, not destroyed. This room, the professor explains, is where the eggs are removed. The fat woman will be coming in here soon.
We scurry back into the waiting room, where the small cast of characters has now been joined by a doctor dressed entirely in surgeon's greens, whom the infertile woman is hugging. Our return is so the professor can flick through the pages of today's Daily Mail, which lies on the central carved table, searching for any mention of his name.
The Mail has had a bit of a thing about the professor since 1997, when he treated Britain's oldest mother, Elizabeth Buttle, who gave birth at 60 after lying about her age. Last year his clinic knowingly treated 56-year-old Lynne Bezant with donor eggs, making her Britain's oldest mother of twins. The donor has now claimed in the Mail that she requested that her eggs went to a younger woman, and is threatening to sue. Behind almost every controversial case concerning reproductive technology emerges the name of Professor Craft.
Unlike his rivals in the profession, he remains remarkably hands-on. He boasts that he performed 168 embryo transfers last year. In the hush of his clinic, under his bird-like blue eyes, the untreatable are treated. The lepers of the infertility world come to be warmed by the fire in his waiting room. For here, things happen that other clinics refuse to contemplate.
This is the philosophy of reproduction according to Professor Craft. On surrogacy: "When you are born without a uterus and you sometimes haven't got a vagina, or you've only got the bottom one third of it ... they're not freaks. Just the pack of cards they had was slightly different from normal. They could reproduce very successfully from surrogacy." On implanting multiple embryos: "If a woman had got six embryos, and she's 41, I'd be prepared to put them in. The chance of her having triplets is not zero, but almost zero. But she's more likely to have the only child she can ever have." On sex selection: "I cannot see that it would terribly unbalance society. If one day a high-street pharmacist found a kit which effectively allowed only the male semen to be used, is this government going to ban it?"
We have walked across the road, to his mews, as the professor cannot sit still; his body and brain flutter around his small home. "I think I'm a sympathetic person to women. I think they have much more of a cross to bear in life than men, right? If men had to menstruate, civilisation would have stopped, it would have stopped. ... I tend to get passionate inside. Whether it's about music, opera, birdwatching, you know. That's me. I'm passionate about things. I stand up for principles ... Now going back to your question about number of embryos ..." "Well ..." I say, and again get no further.
Sixty-three-year-old Ian Logan Craft is ripe for amateur psychoanalysis, and everyone has their pet theory as to why Crafty, as those in the profession call him, is as he is. One insider puts it down to his failing the 11-plus; since then, he has been determined to prove himself. Another said he is driven by a need to impress his father, a Barclays bank official and devout Methodist who died two years ago. So here's my lowly attempt at dissecting the professor's thought processes: he's lonely.
The professor lives by himself in uncontrolled clutter, having separated from his wife Jackie six years ago. But, as all lonely people, he is determined to prove he isn't lonely at all. In fact, I will be amazed at how full of friendship and activity his life is. He shows me photos of his two grandchildren, propped up next to those of the first triplets born through IVF 17 years ago - a Craft production. Among the chaos of his home, every invitation he has ever received is on display. He takes down a card from a friend and reads it to me, to demonstrate how loved he is. It is three years old.
He's a joiner. He belongs to The Zoological Society, the RNLI, English Heritage and the Walpole Society, and is a Patron of British Art at Tate Britain. But when I ask him what it means to be a patron, he's not sure. "I like artistic things. I'm a life member of Durham Cathedral. I'm trying at the moment to help the Deaf Blind Association. I go to Glyndebourne because I love music. I went to the proms 43 times last year. I've seen the Tempest twice. I'm going out tonight. There's a symphony written for me. In fact, there's a picture of a human embryo on the front of the CD." I note that the piles of junk mail are all opened. A less lonely person would put them straight in the bin. This paper clutter makes him feel as if he's in demand.
I have other evidence to support my theory. He wanted me to like him. In fact, he desperately wanted me to like him. He was determined to put his best side forward. "I just want to make people happy. I've always loved that old Scottish song, 'If I can help someone as I'm passing along, my life will not be in vain.' " But my analysis is confounded by the simple fact that he does so much to affront others. He doesn't set out to win friends and influence people; he knowingly sets out to offend. Despite his high success rate, he has no supporters in the small world of reproductive technology.
Most regard him as a hurdle towards wider acceptance of new techniques. He goes too far, they say, leading to legislation being enacted to prevent his kind of extreme practices. If he didn't do what he did, then there would not be the caution towards assisted conception that exists today.
But there is another way of looking at it. Once the tabloids have splashed on a 56-year-old having twins, they cannot retell the tale. If, next month, a 52-year-old has twins, it's no longer news. The reproductive goalposts have shifted. Professor Craft sets the pace and others trot along behind. Without his risk-taking, we would still all be suspicious of even simple IVF on a 30-year-old. During the debate over the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, a move to limit treatment to married couples was defeated by a single vote.
Already the professor is late for his next patient, for whom he is probably their best and last chance. But he doesn't want to leave me. I try to extricate myself by going to the toilet, but he follows me in. "I'm just very innovative. You pay a price for being a pioneer," he says as I wash my hands.
By the time I'm back at my desk, there's an email waiting. "Dear Dea, It was good to see you this morning ... If you want me to come and put the epidural in, please call ... it was good to talk. Yours sincerely, Professor Ian Craft, FRCS, FRCOG."
