In Rome the souvenir shops reproduce Gina Lollobrigida’s face on keyrings, pens and mugs, even now. They are movie stills, mostly, from the 1950s and 60s, a time when she was as much an Italian icon as the Vespa — Gina the bare-foot gypsy girl, Gina the wasp-waisted trapeze artist, Gina the coquettish queen of Sheba. And on the Appian Way, the Roman road leading out of the capital, there is a shrine to her. It is a three-storey pink villa she bought in 1954, with high walls, an electronic gate and sprawling lawns populated with statues, peacocks and lemon trees. Her house.

A maid answers the door and leads me inside to where she is waiting, standing straight spined on a mosaic floor surrounded by vases, old masters, and sculptures. At 81, she is still unmistakable — the red dress, the dark eyes beneath thick mascara, the big, auburn ‘tossed salad’ hair. (So much of a trademark did this hairstyle become, the Italians named a type of curly lettuce after her, the lollo.)

I say the house is a shrine to Gina Lollobigida because there are marble sculptures of her everywhere, ones she has made. As a sculptress she represented Italy in the 1992 Expo in Seville and in 2003 there was an exhibition of her work at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. (It is quite sentimental and kitschy, it has to be said, and has been compared to Jeff Koon’s ‘only without the irony’.) There are her awards here too, including the lifetime achievement award she was given last autumn by the National Italian American Foundation. And there is an entire wall of photographs of her with, well, everyone: Fidel Castro, Henry Kissinger, Indira Gandhi, Salvador Dali, Vladimir Putin, Mick Jagger… And Marilyn Monroe (‘Marilyn told me she didn’t sleep the night before she was photographed with me,’ she says, speaking English with a thick Italian accent, ‘because she was so afraid, so in awe.’) Also some of her leading men, such as Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra and Yul Brynner.

One of her most popular films was Come September (1961). Her co-star in that was Rock Hudson. He’s on this wall too. Was she surprised when she subsequently heard he was gay? ‘I tell you, he was not gay! He changed. He was normal. He was adorable. He was one of the person I had most joy to work with.’

She leads the way through to a sitting room dominated by a baby grand piano — as well as more vases and marble cherubs — and here she perches on a velvet sofa. I ask if she ever fell in love with her leading men. ‘I liked directors and cameramen more; actors were like my sisters because we would gossip and we were in the same profession. One exception was Yul Brynner. When we kissed in Solomon & Sheba we lost our heads and we couldn’t stop. The director says, “stop!” but we continued and we were very embarrassing. But it is something that can happen in life. You can get physical and get carried away. We didn’t hit it off at first but something happened on the love scenes. It never normally happens in the movies because it is so technical.’

Did the men she slept with consider her a trophy? ‘No, I was the one who choose all the time. I knew what I wanted. And if they didn’t want me that made me worse. I was like a man, seducing them. I was very independent. I was not waiting for someone to choose me. Obviously, at that time I could have who I wanted.’

It was reported last year that she was considering marrying her long term partner, a Spanish estate agent 34 years her junior, was that true? ‘Yes, I changed my mind though. That is what women do.’

She did get married once, to a Yugoslavian doctor. That was in 1949, just before her movie career took over. They had one son, in 1957, and divorced in 1971. In 1956, meanwhile, when she was featured on the cover of Time magazine, Humphrey Bogard was quoted as saying that ‘Gina made Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple.’ That cover is now one of thousands she has collected over the years. ‘I have 6,000 with my face on. I stopped collecting after that.’ Yet she claims she does not like to be photographed. ‘I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t like being photographed. Behind the camera, I am a different person.’

She gave up acting in favour of photography and sculpture back in the 1970s, and she shows me some of the giant black and white prints of Fidel Castro she is preparing for a major retrospective of her work in Rome this June. ‘Castro trusted completely me. He was like a child. Not aware of the camera.  That was in 1974. He was more anxious to see me than I was to see him. He was very private. He took me to see his brother Raul and Raul was angry saying: “Oh because Gina is here, now you come to see me! It was been five years, Fidel!’

Her photographs of Paul Newman will also feature in the exhibition. ‘It was quite funny Paul said, “OK you can photograph me in the sauna on one condition, that you come in the sauna with me and you are also naked.” So I said yes because I had worked out a way to cut the photograph so that it only showed my shoulder. I thought I could make it decent. But my agent said, “You are 50, you are crazy to do that!” And so we decided to do it in winter in his home near New York instead. There was a little river and he broke the ice and then, wearing just his little pants, he went down through the ice and even put his head under the water. Someone else might have died. He just came up smiling. And then I had an interesting photograph with his blue eyes. He had a very masculine beauty.’ Pause. ‘He was faithful to his wife.’

Gina Lollobrigida has the most robust ego I have ever encountered (and I have encountered Julie Burchill). Her anecdotes usually end with someone telling her how beautiful and talented she is. Vainglorious, yes, but perhaps only because this is what people expect of her, of a diva, of a legend. And she is sweet with it, funny and mischievous too, rolling her eyes suggestively. She is, above all, a good storyteller with some good stories to tell. ‘I am like an icon,’ she says, ‘a legend and even now if I go to the most remote place in the world they recognise me. Yet at the same time I am very unknown because they don’t know the real me, they just know an idea of me from the movies. Some people when they see that I also do the sculptures and the photography they think it is too much. It disturb them. They think this successful, beautiful woman shouldn’t have to do anything else. They think the beautiful woman shouldn’t have a brain. In the end my name worked against me as a photographer and sculptress because people were jealous that I was also to do other things so well. If it had been Mrs So-and-So then my photography could have been recognised for how good it is.’

She grew up in Subiaco, a medieval hilltop town not far from Rome, the second of four daughters. Her father was a carpenter. Hers was a strict catholic upbringing. ‘The priest where I was born was more important than the mayor. We could not have sex before marriage. Even when I was singing for the soldiers that was thought too much. I couldn’t even wear the trousers.’ She used to get about on a donkey, an image she made famous in her first big feature film, Luigi Comencini’s Bread, Love and Dreams (1953).

She says she became an actress by mistake. ‘I had won a scholarship to study art and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Art in Rome and wanted to continue with that, but then I was spotted in the street and asked to be an extra. They paid me 12000 lire, about 12 dollars. I bought a coat and an umbrella and I couldn’t sleep that night because I was so happy, and I remember when I bought my first diamond necklace I could sleep because it didn’t mean as much to me as that umbrella. After that they asked me to be in another film. I said no thank you because I wanted to be an artist not an actress and after ten days they came back and they persuaded my mother instead. I said OK I’ll do it, but only if you pay me one million lire. I thought this would make them stop and go away, but they said yes.’

How did her husband feel about being married to a sex symbol? ‘ I wanted him to be jealous but he wasn’t, he was Yugoslavian, you see, not Italian. Perhaps he just pretended he wasn’t jealous. Anyway, an Italian man would not have been able to hide his jealousy. Howard Hughes was the jealous one. When he saw me in the movie that I got one million lire for he wanted me so badly that he had me flown out to Hollywood. I stayed there two months and a half and saw him every day. He gave me the use of a chauffer driven car and when I wasn’t with him he would have his secretary keep an eye on me. He was very possessive. And secretive. He wanted to marry me but I was already married and divorce was not possible for me. It was not in my head. For me at that time marriage was forever. But he was so persistent. He probably wanted me more because he couldn’t have me. He didn’t stop wanting me for 13 years. He was the most persistent man in my life. He wasn’t used to a girl who didn’t care about money like me. The difficulty for me was that he was too rich. I didn’t like the imbalance.’

I ask about the crowds who used to mob her at Cannes and New York. ‘When I did the New York premiere of Bread, Love and Dreams there were 1,000 photographers waiting for me at the airport. The flashbulbs. It was unbelievable. the photographers were so excited to get me. One photographer even managed to bring along a donkey. In New York! Do you imagine! It was even more crazy when I went to see Peron. There 60,000 people were waiting for me at the airport.’

Did the adulation go to her head? ‘No, it was more that I was afraid that someone would be killed. Big crowds are dangerous. I never got used to the popularity. I didn’t like the publicity, but you had to do it. The first time I went to a theatre in Buenos Aires there were 30 arrested, nine wounded, that is frightening. Another time I went to open a casino with Peron on a private train and we couldn’t get off because there were so many people and the train had to go one kilometre back so as we could get out. There were 700 bodyguards, but the trouble was they wanted to see me as well so that caused trouble.’

I ask about her most controversial film, The Dolls (1965) in which she appeared to be naked during a love scene, a cinematic first in Italy. She claimed she wore a flesh coloured body stocking. Nevertheless, she and the director were charged with an offence to public decency. Both were given a two month suspended sentence. ‘We wanted to make a point, not only the director but the actors. The scene was nothing compared to what you see today in the movies but it was considered too sexy, then. Too daring. Movies today go too far. They are not subtle. I like a gentle suggestion rather than something vulgar. The imagination is the most erotic tool.’

What does she make of actresses today who have plastic surgery and breast implants? ‘I think if they feel better about themselves after the surgery that is their business. For me it would be the opposite because being with a man, if instead of touching you he touch a piece of silicone that would be disturbing. The real trouble with actress today is they all look alike. You don’t know what is real, what is silicon. In my day we were different one from the other. And we were natural, our breasts were natural.’

Stories of her feuds with other sex symbols were legendary. Whenever she was in the same room as Anita Ekberg or Sophia Loren, for example, the hisses could be heard all over Italy. When I ask about this she gives me a steady look. ‘No, I had no rivals because I was number one all over Europe. To be the rival of Gina Lollobrigida was a fashion. Everyone claim they were my rival but it was silly because I was the symbol of Italy. I was an icon. I was Gina Lollobrigida.’

‘Vulgar, self-pitying, greedy’ – impressions of Cherie Blair weren’t exactly sympathetic during her time as the Prime Minister’s wife. But two years after she left Downing Street, the human rights lawyer is frank, funny and (whisper it) quite charming

From the moment she enters the room, Cherie Blair manages to wrong-foot me. We are meeting at the chambers in London where she works as a QC specialising in human rights law and, as she shakes hands, she stands way too close, invading my personal space like a one-woman Barbarian horde. Then she says, while still pumping my hand and smiling up at me, ‘I read your columns, including the stuff you sometimes write about me!’

Argh! For the next 10 minutes I cannot concentrate, trying to recall what I might have written about her over the past decade or so. Was it anything rude? Did I refer to her as Cruella de Vil, as journalists lazily do? Compare her smile to a Scalextric track, perhaps? Oh God… You have to admire the tactic, though.

I also find her perky manner disconcerting. By way of preparation I’ve been watching footage of this 54-year-old mother of four being interviewed on television, and she often comes across as edgy and cold. Yet in person there is a lightness and warmth to her, her sentences punctuated with laughter. I’ve been told by the third party who set this interview up that I am not to ask about the expenses scandal or the fate of Gordon Brown – because she won’t be able to comment on either – but it soon becomes obvious that she will answer pretty much any question I ask.

I have also been reading Speaking For Myself, her best-selling memoir. Some reviewers gave her a kicking, calling her vulgar, self-pitying, grasping, cringeworthy and so on. One amusingly suggested she should take out an injunction against herself, or perhaps sue herself for libel. But this is to be expected. Few people have been as divisive and unpopular in recent years as Cherie Blair. A Radio 4 poll even voted her the person listeners would most like to see deported.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on her. My devoutly Catholic mother-in-law, for example, is not keen, mainly because Cherie claims to be devoutly Catholic, too, despite the very non-Catholic revelation in her book that she used contraception, or rather forgot her ‘contraceptive equipment’ when they visited Balmoral (and lo, unto them, a baby was born nine months later).

My mother isn’t that keen either, come to think of it. Like many people who used to ride to hounds – including the Princess Royal – she blames Mrs Blair for the hunting ban, or at least for forcing her husband’s hand on the issue (Mrs B, as she was known in Downing Street, claims this wasn’t the case, by the way).

Being neither a Catholic nor a subscriber to Horse & Hound, I read her memoirs with an open mind and was surprised by how funny they were. She has fine comic timing and does a nice line in self-deprecation, describing herself as looking like ‘the mad woman from the attic’, for example, in that photograph where she opened the door in her nightie – ‘with my hair like a bird’s nest, and bleary-eyed’. And her account of how Tony proposed to her while she was on her knees cleaning a loo is hilarious. ‘I know,’ she says when I mention this. ‘So romantic. Him standing, me on my knees scrubbing the toilet, then after that, the wretched man said: “Let’s not tell anyone yet, let’s keep it to ourselves!”‘

Plenty of reviewers loved the book though and, on the cover of the paperback, published this month, there is a quote that reads: ‘Charming, frank and funny.’ And that is about right.

We are meeting on the Thursday of the European elections. Downing Street is in turmoil. Gordon Brown is a gibbering wreck. There is speculation he might not survive until the weekend. On a day like today, I suggest, when the body politic is pumping with adrenaline, she must miss being at the heart of things. ‘Not really. Been there, done that, got the scars on my back. It’s quite nice being a spectator again, rather than the subject of a spectator sport.’

Presumably she doesn’t miss things like the press scrutiny of her finances – the £100,000 fee she was paid for a lecture tour of Australia in 2005, on behalf of a charity, for example. ‘Rather naively, I thought because it raised $250,000 for charity it was a good thing, but the press didn’t think so. I’ll never do that again. You learn by your mistakes.’

Did she consider paying her fee back? ‘No, I didn’t. The caterer was paid. The comic was paid. I was paid. Together we made a lot of money for the charity. In England I speak all the time for charities without asking for a fee. But I had gone all the way over to Australia and spent a week away from my children and my work, whereas I wouldn’t have to do that for a speaking engagement in Manchester.’

Long before the current expenses scandal, Cherie Blair was involved in an expenses dust up of her own: whether she should pay for André, her personal hairdresser, out of her own money, or whether he was a legitimate government expense. ‘In the end I did pay for him, but I couldn’t have done my duty as the wife of the PM without him or someone like him.’

So, can she empathise with MPs who feel their expenses are justified? ‘I think – what can I say about the expenses row? – not much other than I am glad I am no longer involved in that world. There is now an impression that MPs are out for what they can get, which usually isn’t the case. Our MPs are not crooks and it is wrong that people should think they are. I think there is a real danger now of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.’

The word greedy is often applied to her; is that fair? ‘No, because personally I don’t think I am all that greedy. Like everyone, I am formed by my background and mine was, well, we didn’t have a lot of money. I didn’t live in a cardboard box but I did live in a place where at the end of the week the money was gone.’ That was in Crosby, Liverpool. Her father, the hard-drinking, serially adulterous actor Tony Booth, was absent for most of her formative years, and she was raised by her grandmother and mother, a RADA-trained actress who worked in a fish and chip shop to make ends meet.

‘That must have affected my own anxieties about money, about paying the bills. We knew that when we left Number 10 we had no house to move to because we had sold ours in 1997. Sometimes I used to say to Tony, “We could be out of here tomorrow and it could be me, you and four children with nowhere to go”.’

Now they have bought a house in London (for which they paid £3.5m) and another in Buckinghamshire (£5.75m). Tony Blair has consultancies with investment banks thought to be worth £2.5m and he is also thought to have earned around £2m from speaking engagements, as well as £4.6m for a book deal. In addition to her salary as a QC, Cherie Blair was reportedly paid around £1m for her book. Are all her money worries over now? ‘I’m in a fortunate position now, but do I still worry in the back of my mind that it could all be gone tomorrow? Yes.’

She was the original WAG (Women Against Gordon) and complained about the way he was constantly ‘rattling the keys’ to Number 10. Does she now think that her former neighbour should have been careful what he wished for? She laughs. ‘There is this whole image about my relationship with Gordon being… Look, he has many good qualities and it was not wrong of him to have wanted to be prime minister – most politicians do, and why shouldn’t they? It’s just that as Tony’s wife, when Gordon’s ambition got… when he became impatient, I was on Tony’s side.’

Hence Tony Blair’s quote that there was no danger of his wife running off with the man next door? ‘Yes, I think that was quite observant of him.’ And the reason why, when Gordon said in his conference speech that it had been a privilege to work with Tony, she said: ‘That’s a lie’? ‘I didn’t say that, I didn’t! The trouble is, everyone thinks I might have said it.’ But she did think it? ‘I might have thought it, but even I’m not so stupid as to say it.’

Well if she didn’t say it then, she has now. We are on the subject of her gaffes and they seem odd for someone with an alpha brain. Upon leaving school, she studied law at the LSE, going on to gain the highest bar examination marks of any student in the country in her year. There are, it seems, two Cheries; the smart lawyer and the not-so-smart embarrassing politician’s wife. They even have different names – Cherie Booth and Cherie Blair.

She does indeed talk of a disjunction between her life as a high-flying QC, a world in which she feels comfortable and in control, and her former life as a prime minster’s wife, less sure of herself, more prone to gaffes. ‘The thing is, I knew the decisions I was making in the legal world would only affect me. In the political world, if I made a gaffe Tony took the consequences, and it is always worse to hurt the ones you love than hurt yourself.’

Is it true he would sometimes bury his head in his hands and say, ‘For goodness’ sake woman!’ ‘He does say that, you know, quite a lot. But he kind of only half means it. He’ll have a rant and get it out of his system. He is not one to hold grudges. We’re both optimists.’ She reckons one of the reasons
he loves her is that she is so unpredictable. ‘I hope so, otherwise he wouldn’t have stuck around for
so long.’

Any advice for Sarah Brown? ‘Be there for your husband. But she doesn’t need my advice. She’s done a lot better than me in the press.’

And Samantha Cameron? ‘Exactly the same. In the end, it’s about having someone to share it with, which Ted Heath didn’t have. Even now Margaret Thatcher gets confused and looks for Denis.’ She describes her tempestuous relationship with Alastair Campbell as a ‘double act’. He went ballistic over what became known as ‘Cheriegate’, the time she bought two flats in Bristol at a discount, with the help of the fraudster Peter Foster.

‘Yes, that was not one of the high points of our relationship. I’m very fond of Alastair. He was extraordinarily loyal to Tony. But he was slightly prone to barging in without knocking. And I think he felt the pressure towards the end, especially when he became part of the story. What he was trying to protect me from was what he fell victim to himself.’

Does she now resent the way Campbell bullied her into doing her emotional mea culpa speech about Cheriegate on the evening news? ‘I don’t… I don’t think I was bullied. The trouble was, Tony had insisted I tell him what had happened in terms of my contact with Peter Foster and he would pass on what I said to Alastair… Today Tony has a Blackberry but when he was PM he… He had a computer on his desk but never turned it on. So when I said I’d had an email from Foster, it didn’t really mean much to him.

When we left Downing Street in 2007, I said to Tony: “We’re going to sit down and I’m going to show you how to use a Blackberry.” And now the kids say, “Mum, he’s never off that ruddy thing, why did you teach him how to use it?” ‘

Speaking of equipment, I tell her my Catholic mother-in-law was somewhat surprised by her admission that she used contraception. ‘I suppose it was the Catholic in me that meant I couldn’t bring myself to go into any more detail.’

But surely the term raised more questions than it answered. ‘Some people have speculated that it might have been a wooden shelf to put between us in bed… But part of me said that because, though I like to think of myself as a good Catholic, I couldn’t have had the career I had without contraception. The fact is, even in Spain, France and Italy there must be a lot of Catholics who bend the rules.’

So is she going to solve the mystery of what the equipment was? ‘Nooo! Certainly not. You can probably guess anyway.’ A cap? She covers her ears and laughs. ‘I’m not saying anything!’

Here is another mystery. As a couple, their friendship with the Clintons is easy to understand, all four are left-leaning lawyers. But the Bushes? What was that about? ‘It’s not really that baffling because one of the main job descriptions of the British prime minster is to get on with the American president. Whatever the domestic policies, on foreign policy Tony and George saw eye to eye. That said, I talked about policy and politics with the Clintons in a way I never did with George and Laura. Most of the time I talked to the Bushes about the things we did have in common, like having children the same age. We have stayed friendly with them.’

OK. Time to authenticate some tall tales. Is it true that when Bill Clinton came to Chequers she was worried he would try and get off with Carole Caplin – the masseuse, one time soft porn model and New Age ‘therapist’ – who was walking around in her stretched leotard? Another laugh. ‘I just think Bill is one of those men who appreciated… feminine company.’

Why did she trust Caplin when she was so obviously flaky, what with her crystals and her ‘toxin showers’ and everything? ‘I don’t think my judgement… I shouldn’t have bought those flats [Foster was Caplin’s boyfriend] because even to this day they are not worth what the Daily Mail claimed they were worth.’

What does she make of Lord Levy’s insinuation in his memoirs that Tony was the father of Carole’s baby? ‘I think that’s a load of old rubbish, frankly.’

Is it true that Cherie and Tony rolled round in mud as part of a rebirthing ritual while on holiday in Mexico? ‘That’s a load of old rubbish, too.’ Really? ‘It wasn’t rebirthing. We went to Mexico and we thought we would try some treatments and one of them was the Mayan equivalent of the sauna.’

And it involved mud? ‘No, actually. Did it involve mud? I can’t remember. Don’t think so. Although you get all sorts of things these days, don’t you. Seaweed wraps and so on. I don’t think that one was about mud, particularly.’

Is it true that her husband has a pact with the Queen never to watch the film The Queen? ‘That’s my understanding. I don’t know whether the Queen has watched it but I’m pretty sure Tony hasn’t. I watched it on my own on a plane. My daughter Kathryn was miffed because they didn’t get a red-haired actress to play her. And I wish I was as thin as the actress who played me. And I hate Michael Sheen as Tony. Doesn’t do it for me at all. Tony is six foot and quite broad shouldered and Michael isn’t six foot and isn’t strapping and doesn’t have that physical presence.’

Is Mrs Blair a monarchist? ‘I am a great fan of the Queen. I miss her.’ That was not what I asked. Is she a monarchist? A knowing smile. ‘I’m a huge fan of the Queen.’

When she left Downing Street she shouted at the waiting press: ‘I won’t miss you!’ She describes in her book how her husband cringed, telling her through clenched teeth: ‘For God’s sake, you’re supposed to be dignified, you’re supposed to be gracious.’ Obviously she doesn’t miss the press, but what about Number 10?

‘The big difference with our life today is that Tony is constantly travelling to the Middle East and America. The irony is that we saw more of him when he was PM. Leo would pop down and see him, sometimes he would pop up for lunch. But, you know, today Tony is working at home so we just had lunch together.’

Their eldest two children have graduated from Bristol and Oxford and are now working. Kathryn is around the corner from here at King’s College, London, and has just finished her second year exams. Leo is eight and Mrs Blair now says she is aware of being one of the oldest mothers in the playground. ‘Sometimes I think I’m older than some of the grandmothers, frankly.’

Time to go. Cherie Blair has, indeed, been charming, frank and funny. I can only think it is to do with the freedom of being out of what she calls the goldfish bowl. Her happiness must also be a little to do with Gordon Brown’s unhappiness. She would have to be inhuman, I say, not to allow herself a chuckle about the pickle Gordon has got himself in.

‘Well you forget that I am a Labour Party animal. I joined the party at 16. We have our Labour poster out today. This is the government that I think deserves to be re-elected. So there is not much joy in seeing the turmoil at the moment.’ ‘Not much’. She is a lawyer who chooses her words carefully.

She stands close again to shake hands and, as she is leaving, turns and asks me a question. ‘Your Catholic mother-in-law doesn’t approve of contraception, but what about your Catholic wife?’ Damn she’s good. Wrong-footed again.

Elvis Costello is a doting father, friend to presidents and writer of ‘proper’ love songs – but he’s still got the same old fire…

On a roof terrace overlooking Manhattan, an awning flaps lazily in the breeze. The man sitting underneath it is wearing sunglasses, as well he might given that a) the afternoon sun is unforgiving, even in the shade, and b) he is a rock star. Well, rock star up to a point. At 54, Elvis Costello is still leaping from genre to genre like a young pond frog spoilt for choice with waterlilies.

Having produced hit after New Wave hit in the late Seventies with his band The Attractions, he turned a little bit country in the early Eighties. After that came, in no particular order, recordings of jazz, swing and opera, as well as his innovative work with the Brodsky Quartet, a collaboration that is still going strong after 17 years.

Now he is back with Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, an album of bluegrass and traditional American country music, recorded in Nashville. It’s a beguiling collection. Appeals to the heart and the head. And lyrically it reminds you why Costello has been described as Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan – reminds you, indeed, why Dylan wanted to tour with him and why songwriters as great as Burt Bacharach and Paul McCartney have queued up to collaborate with him.

But this said, he is still a bona fide rock star and today he is dressed like one, in his black suit, black shirt and black tie – and his purple fedora and matching socks. The sunglasses could not be more rock star, in fact, big as they are with silver frames that contrast with his gingery sideburns and ’tache.

In conversation he is expansive and articulate, but easily sidetracked. And it is disconcerting talking to a man with whom you cannot make eye contact. ‘These?’ he says touching them. ‘I’m blind without them. They have prescription lenses in. Anyway, trust me, you don’t want to see what’s underneath them. I’ve only had three hours’ sleep.’

He and his wife, the multimillion-record-selling jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall, live mostly in Vancouver with their twin boys who are two-and-a-half years old. Is the lack of sleep because of them? ‘No, I’m just an early riser and yesterday I flew in from the West Coast so I’m still on West Coast time.’ His son from an earlier marriage – he’s been married three times – is 34. How is he finding being a father again at his age? ‘Wonderful. Being a father at any age is wonderful.’

Who do the twins take after? ‘Thankfully their mother. Light hair and light eyes. I see temperamental things that might be like me. They travel a lot for young children. They’ve just crossed the Canadian prairies on a tour bus with us and they will be here in New York in a few hours, and then my wife is going to Europe to do some television shows, so they will stay here with me while she does that. I have help of course, but it’s great. We can sit and watch football or read The Hungry Caterpillar.’

Anyway, the point is, the twins have been listening to music since before they were born, and I ask Costello if he sings to them now. ‘No, and I don’t think they are all that keen on my songs. It’s Randy Newman they love because he wrote Toy Story. They know the score so they can say what action is happening when. Randy must have a great trick there to imprint that music in children that young.’

The twins, he tells me, by the way, think he looks like Mr Potato Head, or at least that the drawing of him on the sleeve of his new album does. For his own part, he describes himself as a combination of Cheeta, the elderly chimp from the Tarzan movies, and Liza Minnelli. ‘The dynamism of Liza,’ he adds, ‘with the hairiness and long arms of Cheeta.’

Oh, and another aside while we are at it; he was born Declan Patrick MacManus in London in 1954, the year Elvis cut his first record, and he has had his stage name since 1977, the year Elvis Presley died (the Costello part was taken from his great grandmother).

But back to his music. Does his 34-year-old son like it? He smiles a rare, gap-toothed smile. ‘You’d have to ask him. I think so yeah, but I can’t speak for him. I can speak for my wife because we are both musicians, so of course we influence each other in our musical choices, but as for him, I can’t really say. Up to a certain age you can say our life together is beautiful but then the child becomes a separate person with his own identity. I love them all and am proud of them all. And I often don’t feel deserving of the love I get back from them.’

His relationship with his own parents seems to have been equally healthy, even after their divorce in 1972. It was a musical family. His mother sold records, his father was a successful big-band singer and his grandfather a trumpeter, working the cruise ships. Does he ever look in the mirror now and ‘see’ his father looking back? ‘I see both my parents. My dad in some respect but also my mother. I look like both of them. I think we made some of the same choices. They worked hard to make sure I had a decent standard of living. And I’ve worked hard, every single day since I left school. I think I have a protestant work ethic.

‘Never sleep in the day. My mother doesn’t enjoy great health and I sometimes hear my dad’s voice in my own saying to her, “You should take a nap during the day”, but she won’t. I’m a bit like that. I haven’t taken a holiday in 16 years.’

In his case the not wanting to sleep during the day is to do with his insomnia. That said, he now points to a couple of sun loungers on the other side of the roof terrace and suggests that we could always go and have a lie down on them and carry on the interview there ‘side by side, like Eric and Ernie’. Elvis Costello, it seems, is in a playful mood. This isn’t always the case. He has a reputation as a serious man – serious about music, serious about politics, serious about the subject of Elvis Costello.

This is reflected in his physical paradox – he manages to convey an air of slovenly nonchalance and tightly coiled energy. And it occurs to me that his reputation for reticence and being difficult may be something to do with his manner and voice. He is a mumbler. As it competes with the breeze, the traffic and the sirens below, his voice becomes so whispery, I worry it won’t pick up on my tape. He shields the recorder with his hat. ‘See? The hat has two purposes, shields my head and shields your mic.’

His whispery speaking voice is in contrast to his singing voice, which has extraordinary range and power. We had originally been scheduled to do this interview when he was over on a visit to London, but then he decided he would have to rest his voice that afternoon and when I heard the concert at the Barbican that evening, I could see why.

‘You do have to be a bit careful with your voice,’ he says now. ‘It is an instrument. I think when you know the songs, your voice works around them, finds the slots with more ease, but you need to know how to pace yourself because we were doing 10 new arrangements in that show. I try to find the character for each song and I wasn’t sure how much vocal stamina it would take to follow one from the other. It seemed to hold out OK.’

The Barbican audience that night was warm, with many standing ovations; he was in a friendly mood, too, with much good humoured banter. Was this, I ask, a case of him making amends for the comment he made in 2005 that, in effect, he had fallen out of love with England? ‘I don’t care if I ever play in England again,’ he said at the time.‘I don’t get along with it. We lost touch. I don’t dig it. They don’t dig me.’ He shakes his head.

‘That was a mischievous sub-editor taking a quote out of context. I was opening for Bob Dylan and was just coming off stage and I was saying that, compared to America, I feel like I don’t connect any more in Britain. My mother rang up and said: “Did you say you hate England?” You can scour that interview and you won’t find that quote. Then the broadsheets pitched in with arts page editorials about what it all meant. I mean, if I’d known that was all I had to do to get publicity I would have said goodbye to England earlier.’

It’s not the first time he’s been taken out of context. At the end of the Seventies, details of a drunken argument in a Holiday Inn in Ohio were leaked. Having apparently described the soul legend James Brown as ‘a jiveass nigger’, and Ray Charles as ‘a blind, ignorant nigger,’ he woke up with a hangover and called a press conference in New York to apologise.

‘I said some stupid things and can’t blame anyone but myself,’ he says now. ‘I hope I have made amends now and anyone who has followed my career will know I am not racist and cannot doubt my respect and admiration for black singers. But the English thing I didn’t even say. I don’t know whether any one noticed, but I haven’t been in England for 20 years. I moved to Ireland 20 years ago and now I am mainly in Vancouver. But ultimately…’ A shrug. ‘I didn’t get into this business to be loved.’

But loved he is. Besides T Bone Burnett, Elvis Costello has worked with, among others, Bacharach, Brian Eno, McCartney. It’s often said he’s the Kevin Bacon of the music world, connected to everyone and everyone connected through him. ‘I don’t feel I went looking for them, though. Most of the major collaborations came to me. I didn’t go knocking on Paul McCartney’s door.’

Sounds like a cue for a Wings song. ‘Exactly. It’s funny but with Wings, Paul didn’t refer to the musical language of the Beatles at all, he wouldn’t even make passing reference to their harmonic cadences, what he did instead was create another highly original sound. But by the time our collaboration occurred I thought his reluctance to refer to the Beatles was perverse, because everyone else was ripping the Beatles off.’

And as McCartney once said, ‘I think I can do Paul McCartney better than Noel Gallagher can do Paul McCartney’. He nods. ‘Well Noel is deluded about a lot of things, most obviously that he is a songwriter at all. That he even brackets himself in the same sentence as Paul is laughable. You have to keep these boys in line! None of us are Irving Berlin or Burt Bacharach, you know. I sat at the side of the stage recently watching Burt sing Alfie and it was magical.’

He had been a member of the Beatles fan club as a child, so working with McCartney must have been daunting enough, but to work with Bacharach must have been… well, what? ‘We worked section-by-section, phrase-by-phrase, both composing, answering one another, it was a fairly extraordinary thing for him to allow me to do – after all, he doesn’t exactly need to collaborate at this stage in his career.

‘It’s probably what appealed to him. Having a dialogue in music. With him it was a case of finding the lyrics that would confer the meaning of the music that was already in the song. It was so vivid to me.’

Yet this is not the collaboration of which he is most proud – that would be his work with the country singer George Jones. ‘In 1981 I had not a writer’s block exactly but an impasse because I had done five albums and I felt I was no longer saying what I was feeling, so I used other people’s songs and that became the country album Almost Blue.’

To his fans, was that like Dylan going electric? ‘I don’t think it was that big a deal. We joked about it and put on the album – “Warning! This album contains country and western music and may offend narrow-minded listeners.” I didn’t have people heckling but even if they had at least that would have shown they cared.’

He sips his coffee. In his youth he was a legendary drinker. It is just coffee these days. No hard liquor. Did it get in the way? ‘Not so much that really, I just drank my share and it was enough.’

But is it true he split from the Attractions because of arguments fuelled by drugs and alcohol? ‘We just had our time, I think. We thought, “let’s go and do some other things independently.” In the end we were copying ourselves. Self parody. Other people were doing it just as well as us.’

There is something endearingly Eeyorish about Elvis Costello. At one point I find myself in the bizarre position of defending one of his songs, to him – Every Day I Write the Book. ‘It was OK,’ he says begrudgingly. OK! I say. It was the soundtrack to the summer of 1983! ‘I like singing it now, but I don’t much care for the record.’

So the layers of personal meaning and association that the listener brings to it count for nothing? ‘That is to confuse quality with nostalgia. Certain songs have indisputable quality such as I’m Gonna Make You Love Me by the Temptations. Objectively that is a great record with five great vocal performances on it. But the records that were the hits were not always the best songs, they were just the ones the labels put out which caught the mood of the time.’

He even manages to downplay Barack Obama’s request that he be the bandleader at his inauguration. ‘I’ve not met him. My wife has and says he’s very charming. He sent his regards to me, which was nice of him. You’d think he would have too much on his plate to bother with a pop singer.’

The Clintons were fans, too, naming their daughter after the Elvis Costello song (I Don’t Want to Go To) Chelsea. ‘I think Bill is more a fan of my wife,’ he says. Even so, last year, Costello hosted Spectacle, a chat show series on Channel 4, and proved an able interviewer, his skills honed from standing in for David Letterman.

Guests ranged from Lou Reed, Smokey Robinson, Herbie Hancock, Elton John and Tony Bennett… to Bill Clinton. ‘That Bill took an hour out of his time when his wife was running for president to come on was good of him. That was only the second interview I did. It was bad enough trying to remember the technical stuff, like which camera to look at, without having to think of coherent questions.’

Another week featured what was probably the last television performance by the Police before they disbanded, again. ‘With them it was a case of let’s have some banter with these three guys who after tomorrow night are probably not going to see each other again for a very long time. I had been on the road with them and knew there had been this begrudging tolerance of each other.’

Costello was known as an acerbic songwriter in his early years, as well as a thorny personality. I ask what he makes of the perception that he was an angry young man who mellowed. ‘I don’t think there is any mileage in that. I just think it is a safe thing to say. A safe guess. Mellow about what?’ One thinks of the energy of his early music. Oliver’s Army. Pump it Up.

‘You saw that concert at Barbican, there was a lot of energy in that. A 23 year-old couldn’t have done that.’

What about the anger of the lyrics of Tramp the Dirt Down, in which he looked forward to the death of Baroness Thatcher. ‘Well that was much later. To people who say I have lost the fire of some of my early commentary, I say there are many ways to express things. Shipbuilding is not a ranting song, it is melancholy.

‘The River in Reverse, the song I wrote about [Hurricane] Katrina, wasn’t a pious song, that was an angry song about the lack of care for the victims.’

Besides, often his songs were about love and betrayal. Of The Crooked Line, one of the songs on his new album, he says that it is the first time he has written about fidelity in an unironic way. ‘I think when I was younger I was not very good at writing love songs that didn’t have a twist. You know, Smokey Robinson writes the heartfelt songs, whereas it was my job to write the songs about weakness and failure in love.’

He says it took a long time to admit that it was love with Krall, not just musical empathy. He believed they could be friends and collaborators. ‘Then something happens that you can’t control and I’ve never felt better in my life.’

So The Crooked Line is about finding love and happiness after two unsuccessful marriages? ‘Actually, it was written for someone else to sing. Imagining a much longer relationship to reach a peaceful place. If I was going to write something that personal it would be in the song, I wouldn’t need to explain it. Maybe none of my songs are directly from my own life.’ Note the ‘maybe’. Costello is always careful in his use of words.

Forget the ‘X-Files’: Gillian Anderson, one-time ‘world’s sexiest woman’, is about to tackle Ibsen in a new West End production of ‘A Doll’s House’

The first surprise is Gillian Anderson’s accent. I have heard about how she can slip from English to American as effortlessly as silk runs through fingers. Indeed, by way of research, I have watched her being interviewed by Jay Leno (for whom she adopted an American accent) and Michael Parkinson (an English one). I even know how and why she does this – she lived here until she was 11, moved there until she was 35, then, five years ago, came back to live here. Still, nothing quite prepares you for sitting opposite FBI Special Agent Scully and hearing the head girl of Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

The second surprise is how insouciant and unguarded she is. She has a light and breathy laugh, more a catch in her voice, and a friendly and confiding manner, again in contrast to the humourless and sceptical Scully. This guilelessness is also unexpected because her relationship with the press has not always been cordial – the paparazzi in LA used to ram into her car deliberately so as she would have to get out and exchange insurance details. Yet here she is sitting in a London bar at eight o’clock at night telling me about where her 14-year-old daughter goes to school, how she has been enjoying taking the bus to rehearsals for her new play and, well, how she had to cajole her partner into having sex with her. No, really.

Also, I ought to describe her. She is much shorter than you imagine, 5ft 3in, and yet not short looking – in proportion, I mean. She has slightly sad, downturned eyes, a mole above her puffy top lip (one that they used to cover up on The X-Files) and a tattoo on the inner part of her wrist, Asian lettering that is something to do with yoga. With her long, blonde hair tumbling down against her black top (she is also wearing a black skirt and black calf-length boots which she tucks under herself as she sits) she looks immaculate – half a pint of velvety Guinness.

You would not guess she was a 40 year-old with three children, the youngest six months old. And yet she says other mothers in the park aren’t intimidated by her appearance so much as appalled at how scruffy she is. ‘They look at me like, “Doesn’t she have mirrors in her house?”’ Yeah, right. I should say something about her work, too, or rather her reinvention from the glamorous star of a hugely popular and long-running TV show about alien abduction to a highly respected stage and film actress. Although she returned to TV for her Bafta-nominated performance in the BBC’s Bleak House (and, if the rumours are true, will do so again as a villain in Doctor Who), she has also been discriminating in her choice of film roles, favouring the intelligent and stylish, such as A Cock and Bull Story and The Last King of Scotland, over the commercial (even if she did manage to slip in an X-Files movie last year).

The rehearsals, by the way, are for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, a new version that opens at the Donmar Warehouse later this month. Anderson plays the lead, Nora; a woman who leaves her husband and children after having her feminist consciousness raised (when first performed in 1879 it caused a great scandal). While Anderson cannot empathise with that aspect of the play, she says she does appreciate the feminist arguments and understands the emotional journey Nora takes. Also she does know what it is like to be patronised and objectified by men (as Nora is in her Doll’s House) and she knows, too, all about the responsibilities of motherhood.

Her first child was with her first husband. She divorced him, married someone else and divorced that one 16 months later. Her two youngest children are with her partner, the British businessman Mark Griffiths (he made his fortune working in the private parking and wheel-clamping business). Earlier tonight she was having a battle of wills with her two-and-a-half-year-old son Oscar, who didn’t want to eat his supper. And thanks to her six-month-old son Felix, she was, as usual, up at 5.30am this morning.

‘He wakes three times in the night and once I’ve settled him, it is more or less time to get breakfast ready for Oscar. I used to do yoga a lot but I don’t seem to have time anymore. You would think that I could work in an hour somewhere, but I can’t. I don’t want to eat into the time I spend with the children. Then I have to be out of the house by 9.15 to get to rehearsals for 10.’ A pause. ‘When I start work on a play I do behave as if I’m about to fall off the side of earth. Sometimes my heart stops. It’s absolutely terrifying. It’s a big play and I’m in every scene but one.’

She keeps her energy levels up by taking a nap at lunchtime, she says. ‘I used to find it impossible to sleep during the day but… I’ve never done a play with little ones before. I did film very soon after my first child, 10 days, after a c-section, five days after coming home from the hospital. It seems crazy but at the time I thought, “OK this is my penance for having got pregnant when they had invested so much in the show and me”.’

That was in 1994 when The X-Files had only just completed its first season. She thinks if it hadn’t been for the chemistry between her and her co-star David Duchovny (who played Agent Mulder) she would have been sacked. ‘They would have loved to have punished me but they realised there was steam picking up. I thought they were overreacting but now I see it from their perspective. I would have been bloody p—ed if I had been them and had cast a girl, against my better judgement, who got pregnant after the first season.’

They got the green light for the play a year last February. ‘I had decided I wanted to get pregnant in February… oh my God, I’d forgotten about this! I’d just got back from India and was going straight into filming The X-Files movie. I knew that I wanted to have the baby at a certain time because there was another film I wanted to do after that. Yeah, so the perfect time was February and…’ She puts her hand over her mouth. ‘I was bloody lucky, but I was also determined because I didn’t want to be too nauseous by the time we had finished filming The X-Files. And I’d worked out the amount of time it took me to get big last time.’

So she’s not a control freak then. ‘Oh dear, I am aren’t I?’ She laughs. ‘The first two weren’t planned.’

Did she and her partner synchronise diaries for when she was ovulating? ‘Not quite, but it is hard work when you decide to plan it. It can get very unromantic, especially when you are working 16-hour days. You get home at 3am and say, “OK, we have to do it now.” “But it’s three o’clock in the morning!” Then when you wake up it’s: “What? Again? Before I go to work? Oh no”.’

Having had a peripatetic childhood herself, with all the insecurities that come with that, does she worry about her children having the same? ‘I moved a lot for university and work. But I never thought it was a negative thing. I thought how lucky I was to have had formative years growing up in London. A lot of Americans never set foot outside America. It can be an inward-looking country.’

Gillian Anderson was born in Chicago and, on balance, she feels more American than British. ‘But even on the phone my accent will change. Part of me wishes I could control it, but I can’t. I just slip into one or the other. When I moved to the States I tried hard to cling on to my British accent because it made me different.’

But presumably by then she was getting noticed for her looks? Wasn’t that difference enough? ‘Not in my teens. I was either a nerd or… I never thought about clothes until I was 15, when I dyed my hair and wore pointy red shoes to be different. I was never the pretty girl. I was always somewhere at the back.’

So when did she start to feel confident about her looks? ‘It took until the sixth season of The X-Files, when a new hair person came on and said, “Are you sure you want to look like that?” and I said, “What’s wrong with it?” She said I think we need to straighten your hair, you look dowdy. The pastel suits. The plaid suits, the horrible hairstyles. It had never occurred to me. To go from that to the cover of magazines made no sense to me. In my twenties and thirties I just kept thinking “I am really pulling the wool over people’s eyes. When am I going to be found out? I’m not good enough”. All that self-depreciating stuff. I remember a cover shoot for Jane magazine, feeling such low self-esteem, so much self criticism that I wasn’t able to get out of myself and join in. Last year I came across that photo shoot and saw this really pretty young girl with short hair who was toned and thin and I know I was thinking I was too fat at the time, tormenting myself. And yet there were these lovely pictures. I thought “how much time have I wasted in my life beating myself up about how I look?”’

In 1996, she did a cover shoot for FHM which proved to be something of a landmark in the lad’s mag market. The editor came up with the idea of having a cerebral woman posing provocatively on the cover. Sales broke all records and the approach has been much imitated since. When I tell her about this ‘Gillian Anderson factor’ it is news to her. ‘Really? But now I’m 40 that is nice to hear. I remember doing that first interview for FHM – I was in Vancouver wearing flannel pyjamas with cowboys on them. My hair was messy and I didn’t feel sexy at all. I felt exhausted, my daughter was downstairs and there I was being told I was a sex object. I laughed out loud. It’s an odd one. I can see the funny side of it now but part of me, the feminist side, did worry about how I could justify it.

‘In my younger years I was very naïve. I did a lot of shoots. I probably shouldn’t have because they were embarrassing or in bad taste. It took me a long time to be able to step back and say “that didn’t feel right inside. I didn’t realise I had the choice”.’ The year of that first FHM shoot the magazine’s readers voted her ‘World’s Sexiest Woman’. But this also led to insecurity and a need for reassurance. ‘I was always being asked why I got that job? Fox Television wanted a buxom, leggy blonde and they got me. I never thought about it till this minute, but it must have added to this feeling of being found out.’

I ask about the time she dug her heels in when she discovered the salary of her male co-star on The X-Files was twice hers. ‘It made sense at the beginning because he had been cast first and had a body of work already whereas I was plucked from obscurity. Also I was being paid more money than my parents or I had ever seen in our lives. [Her father worked in the film industry on the production and editing side.] So I felt very lucky, then after three years I was like, “Know what? This isn’t working for me anymore”. I made a stand and the gap in our pay closed. Was it sexism? Maybe. It’s like the way we were directed by the studios, I was to walk behind him, never side by side. I mean, that is f—ing priceless when I think about it now. When we would get out the car and walk towards the house I would have to be behind him, even though I had equal dialogue.’

She also says now that she feels she didn’t allow herself to enjoy her fame as much as she should have done. ‘For the first five years of the series we were up filming in Vancouver and I was hardly ever in LA. I didn’t really know anyone. The first year, I married a Canadian and had a child. If things had happened differently I might have gone to the fashionable parties in LA, might have ended up with a different life. But I didn’t, I ended up with a responsible life very quickly, and my only priority when I wasn’t working was to make time to be with my child. I got hugely controlling and hugely anal. All my spare time was spent either exercising, painting our house, or being with my child.’

Was the time she spent with her daughter relaxing? ‘No, it was pretty intense. Whenever we were together my brain was going at a thousand miles an hour in other directions. It trained me to be vigilant with my down time. I still have a hard time with it… Everyone in my life…’ She trails off. ‘It’s a joke. I have to work hard to be relaxed.’

Might there be aspects of her character that would make her difficult to live with, even if it weren’t for the demands of her work? ‘Oh, oh I see, I’m sure, yes, I can’t pin it all on work, yeah, I could make a huge list of things that make me difficult to live with.’

She has described herself as an angry teenager, one who pierced her nose, had a Mohican haircut, and was voted ‘Most Likely To Be Arrested’ by her classmates at high school. It was prompted by the move back to the US, which left her feeling lonely and the odd one out. It also created an abiding sense of impermanence, as though nothing in life was dependable. She began seeing a therapist around that time and has continued seeing them off and on all her life. ‘Yeah I still see a therapist. Not as regularly as I used to, but yeah. I find it essential to have someone out there who is not interested in saying the right thing, someone who is blunt and honest with me about their perception of my behaviour. Otherwise I’d just rely on my own opinion of myself, or what my partner said, and that would be too close to home, especially if he said things that were painful to hear.’

She thinks her anxieties are rooted in her childhood. ‘There are patterns in my life, aspects of my personality that are still there and were there as a child, my mother always said I was single-minded. There was no compromise with me, she felt powerless as a parent.’

Meaning? ‘I don’t think I ever needed parental approval. I want to do this NOW and I am going to do it. My mum says she didn’t know where I got this attitude from, this idea that I could do anything I set my mind to. Now I am more aware of my own fallibility. When I was 16 I directed a play and I wanted to do everything, from the lighting to designing the programme. Now I have taken a play on and I am scared s—less. I tell myself everything will be OK then my brain will start asking “but what if it’s not OK? What if you go blank on stage? After all, I am 40. Will the lines still be there? What if my memory goes?” I have anxiety dreams where I show up for the first night of a play and I haven’t been at any of the rehearsals. I feel like I’m not prepared enough.’

Blimey. But fair enough. She has experienced panic attacks during performances, and once nearly had to walk off the stage at the Royal Court. Yet she seems to be drawn to that which frightens her the most. Rather daffily, she now hunts around for some wood to touch because she has said she thinks the play will be OK. ‘F—! There has got to be some wood I can tap… Some wood… Tap.’ Her hands flap like trapped birds until she finds a wooden window ledge. ‘Sorry,’ she says, looking relieved. ‘Tapping wood is a big deal for me.’

How would he like to die? What’s happening with The Men From The Pru? And why is he wearing pyjamas in a graveyard? Our greatest comedy misery-guts reveals all

As well as being a protection from the unsettling glare of his fame, the Giorgio Armani sunglasses Ricky Gervais wears are a concession, a hint at his status as the British comedian, writer and director who went to America and came back with an armful of Emmys, Golden Globes and Hollywood contracts. But at least he is not wearing them indoors. We are wandering through a dappled churchyard not far from his house (and his office) in Hampstead, and the sun is shining.

Gervais couldn’t be accused of dressing like a star, though. Tramp would be closer to the mark – a 47-year-old tramp who hasn’t shaved for days and is wearing trainers, a cord coat and what looks like a pair of the pyjamas they give you when you fly long haul in first class.

At the mention of these I get to hear the manic Gervais laugh that is familiar to fans of his podcasts. ‘They are pyjamas! But I got them from M&S. I do wear the ones with the v-neck that you get on airlines. I walk around the house in them looking like William Shatner as he is now, not how he was in Star Trek. I always choose what to wear based on how soft and comfortable the clothes are. There’s no point killing yourself.’

When we come to a bench which has a slat missing on one side, Gervais half-heartedly offers me the good side, but having just listened to him explain how important comfort is to him, I insist on taking the bad. He quickly agrees, on condition that I mention that he offered.

We sit down and contemplate the gravestones, some gothic, some lichen covered, some at strange angles, thanks to subsidence. Shelley would have approved. He was never far from a graveyard. Nothing he liked better than a memento mori.

On the subject of which, there is a photograph of Gervais taken years ago when he was the epicene singer in a new romantic band. Does he contemplate that photograph now and weep for his lost youth? ‘No, but whenever it is brought out I do groan, not because I’m embarrassed at how I looked then but about how I look now. I had great cheekbones then. I removed all the mirrors from my house in about 1990.’

Gervais likes this graveyard, but not out of religious sentiment. Indeed he is a patron of the National Secular Society. ‘I feel angry that I even have to say I am atheist. The alternative is so ludicrous to me. I don’t want to dignify the idea of religion by saying that. The burden of proof should be on their side, not mine. I feel like saying to Richard Dawkins: “Don’t bother. Not worth it.” I know there is no God more than I know anything else in this world.’

Gervais became an atheist at the age of eight when Bob, his older brother by 11 years, asked him why he believed in God. ‘My mother went “Bob!” and that was it. I knew she was hiding something and he was telling the truth. My tool to understanding throughout my life has been non-verbal communication, observing the minutia of human behaviour. It’s in my acting and my writing and that was where it began.’

I ask if he is familiar with an Arthur Miller quote about mankind’s craving for immortality – that it is as futile as scratching your name on a cube of ice on a hot July afternoon. ‘No, but I like that. I would like The Office to be still considered good in 20 years’ time, but after I’m dead I don’t care. I don’t care what it says on my gravestone.’

How will the papers report his death, does he suppose? ‘It depends how I die. I might have won an Oscar and found the cure for Aids but if I die by slipping and landing on a giant spike, the headline will be “Man Dies From Spike Up A—.”‘ He’s laughing again now, as am I. ‘The awful thing will be the funeral when people who haven’t read the papers ask how I died and when they are told they will get the giggles.’

Gervais met his partner, Jane Fallon, when they were at University College, London. They decided not to have children but to concentrate on their careers instead (she is a television producer and a novelist).

I ask what he makes of the idea that there is a form of immortality in passing on your DNA. ‘That’s just scratching your name in a cube of ice in a very cold country,’ he says. ‘It’s not real immortality. There are loads of reasons why people have children. You think it will be nice and good and worth the hassle. But in human terms, procreation hasn’t been about propagating the species for years. We’re safe. The human race is good.

‘So I don’t think the genetic legacy idea works. I don’t think people on their deathbeds go: “At least half my DNA is still walking around.” They say: “Can you remove this spike from my a—, please. Say it went through my head and it happened while I was saving a child from a burning building. And it wasn’t even my child”.’

Gervais stretches out on the bench. There is a chinking sound of coins falling on the ground. ‘My money has fallen out! Now you’re going to see me scrabbling around in an undignified way in case it’s a pound. If it’s 20p I’ll leave it. That’s the problem with wearing pyjamas.’ He gives up looking. ‘Karl says you’re alright, by the way. That’s high praise from him. That’s like getting six out of 10 from a teacher who never normally gives more than three.’

Karl is Karl Pilkington and two and a half years ago I became the first journalist in the world to interview him. I don’t imagine he has done many interviews since because he is a man completely lacking in ambition and, as Gervais regularly points out, he is ‘f—ing lazy’. Pilkington acts as a deadpan muse to Gervais and his writing partner Steve Merchant. The three do podcasts together, the most listened to podcasts in podcast history, and lately they have been bringing out a series of downloadable audiobooks, too, called The Ricky Gervais Guide to…

So far they have done guides to the arts, medicine, natural history and philosophy, clocking up around three million sales per episode. The latest, available from next week, is The Ricky Gervais Guide to… The English. Later, when I email Karl to tell him how it went with Gervais, he replies: ‘People always say he’s nice but that’s cos he doesn’t try squeezing your head.’

‘Me and Steve treat Karl like an experiment,’ he says now. ‘We’re a couple of chancers going around 19th-century America with a thing in a cage.’

For all the abuse Gervais directs at Pilkington, he loves him really and the two talk on the phone several times a day. In fact, if you want to know the real Ricky Gervais you could do worse than see him through the strange prism of Karl Pilkington. ‘Karl is a lovely man with unexpected talents such as dancing, editing and illustrating. He’s an idiot savant who will make you see a subject in a way you have never seen it before. He’s a friend first and foremost, but, well I know how to work him, get the best out of him. He’s the funniest bloke I know, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally.’

On the podcasts, Pilkington will say something so unexpected Gervais will lose his breath as he giggles like a hyena and says: ‘I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!’ Pilkington, he reckons, inhabits a cartoon world. ‘He doesn’t have a malicious bone in his body. Completely unpretentious. Pretension is a concept that doesn’t exist in his world. He’s not comfortable when things go right. It’s like he feels guilty about the audio books doing so well because he doesn’t consider them a proper job. He goes down to Kent and does painting and decorating as well because that feels more like real work. He feels guilty about how easy the podcasts are. I’ve gone through the same thing, to an extent.’

There is nothing Pilkington wants, he adds. ‘And I’m a bit like that. I didn’t want fame and neither does he. And we are both creatures of habit. The only difference between us is formal education. I’m not ambitious in the sense that I will be prepared to compromise to get an extra million viewers. It’s like if they say there is a red carpet event I should attend because it will help the film I refuse to go. They are saying the wrong thing to me. They are always saying the wrong thing.’

Who ‘they’ are is not clear but you suspect it is uncreative people, administrators, conformists. Gervais doesn’t seem to hang out with other celebrities much. He prefers staying in watching television to going out. But Pilkington reckons there is more to it than that. He doesn’t use the word ‘misanthrope’, but that is what he means. He points to the fact that Gervais can’t bear hearing people chewing, for example. ‘I don’t know whether it’s a phobia or a neurosis,’ Gervais now says, ‘but it’s often justified. The sound of traffic, mating geese, thunderstorms, no problem. But if there is someone next door with their telly on too loud I want to go around and kill them.’

As for his other flaws, Gervais admits he has the attention span of a toddler and can be grumpy, too. ‘When it comes to creativity I’m ready for war. I’ll square up if someone says they have “notes” on something I’ve written. Steve will say: “Calm down, Rick, calm down.” He’s a very calm person. When Steve was 23 he was 52.’

They met in 1997 when Gervais was presenting a radio show on the music station Xfm. He needed an assistant and hired Merchant, a man 13 years younger than him, and a foot taller. Gervais would make Merchant laugh with a character he called Seedy Boss. One day Merchant filmed him for fun and, after that, they began writing a comedy around the character.

The BBC commissioned a pilot and, in 2001, it broadcast the first episode of The Office, with Seedy Boss now called David Brent. A new genre was born, the comedy of embarrassment, and… we know the rest. The Office has now been shown in 70 countries worldwide and has been remade eight times, the latest being the Israeli version. India is also planning a version and Gervais and Merchant think they might be hands on with that one, executive producing it as they did for the US version.

Extras, their follow up to The Office, explored the world of a bit-part actor, Andy Millman. It managed to be just as funny and even more moving, yet could not have been more different in approach – a testament to their confidence as writers. Now they are working on a film together, set in Seventies Reading and involving the aspirational yet ultimately frustrated lives of men working in insurance, one of whom will be played by Ralph Fiennes. It was to have been called The Men From the Pru but the real men from the Pru read the script and decided that, er, on balance they didn’t want their company name used in the title. Gervais now wants to call it Cemetery Junction after a place in Reading, but Merchant has doubts, saying he thinks it sounds too depressing.

Meanwhile, Gervais has just finished This Side of the Truth, a film he has written, directed and starred in, and which is due for release in September. The cast list reads like a Who’s Who of US comedy talent: Tina Fey, Jason Bateman, Jeffrey Tambor, Christopher Guest… Such is his control freakery he has the final edit – the only other directors who get away with this are Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino – and the film will not be tested on audiences.

Although he starred in last autumn’s box office hit Ghost Town, Gervais did not consider that film ‘his baby’ because someone else wrote it, albeit with Gervais in mind. ‘This one is definitely my baby,’ he says. ‘It’s set in a world where humans haven’t evolved the gene for lying. I play a loser, and when I discover I can lie it becomes like a superpower.’

A couple walk past and do a double take when they see Gervais. ‘Round here people tend not to bother me,’ he says. ‘When I’m in the sticks, it’s a bit hairier. People behave as if an alien has landed. First time people started looking at me I didn’t know what they were looking at, then I remembered, “Oh yeah, I’m on the telly.”

‘The first time I was asked for my autograph I said: “Really?” and they looked hurt, like I had insulted them. Now I’m more polite. But my dread is missing a train because someone wants an autograph and I don’t want them to think I am being rude. I can’t even send my soup back now. Before I would have sent it back for being too cold but now I have to be gracious. It’s exhausting.’ He grins his fangy grin to show he’s joking. ‘It’s like I had to offer you the nice seat. And now I have to pretend that I don’t mind I’ve lost that pound coin that might only be 20p. I’m going to come back after you’ve gone and have a proper look for it.’

What do people normally shout when they see him then? ‘Well I don’t have a catchphrase so what they tend to do is the David Brent robot dance instead. What I don’t like is when people take sly pictures without asking. It’s just a matter of politeness. I don’t mind if they ask.’

What about if they were to take a photograph of him when he was out jogging? ‘I don’t care. What are they going to say? That I look fat and sweaty? I’m a comedian running. I’m not a model. What bothers me is intrusion. It would give me the creeps if someone went through my rubbish, and actually my shutters are always down to avoid long lenses. I live in a giant panic room.’

If he met his 20-year-old self right now, would he find him gauche and embarrassing? ‘I would. He was cocky. I’ve got less cocky as I’ve got older. But that 20-year-old me was only cocky because he found everything too easy. He felt sorry for kids who weren’t as clever as him. He played his cleverness down. Up until about 25, I prided myself on getting the best mark possible without trying.’

Being seen not to try, of course, gets to the heart of Englishness. So does the class system. Gervais grew up on a council estate in Reading. His father was a labourer. ‘I think class is more significant than race or sex,’ he says. ‘To this day, in a room full of overprivileged Oxbridge graduates I feel them giving me a sideways look.’

Meaning? ‘Perhaps I’m being paranoid but I do feel that they are saying: “We know… We know that eventually you are going to let yourself down. Eventually you are going to make a faux pas at this dinner party.e_SDRq’ That’s awful. ‘I don’t care. I quite like it because I’m not going to make the faux pas at this dinner party unless I mean to – you know, using the wrong knife deliberately.’

This paranoia surprises me because I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone with an ego as healthy as his – anyone less insecure, I mean. But then perhaps there is a pattern here. When I interviewed Stephen Merchant a couple of years ago he told me: ‘Ricky has an incredible memory and a natural intelligence but is happy for people to think he is an oik from Reading.’ He also said that Gervais didn’t realise his background was working class until he went to UCL to read philosophy.

‘That’s true,’ Gervais now says. ‘I don’t think we even had a middle-class teacher at my school. I could read as well as I can now at three. I lost that art at the age of four. Got bored. I had better things to do. At the age of five I would be outside all the time turning over leaves to find a stag beetle.’

Did his father advise him not to become a labourer? ‘No, I always knew I would move away from home at 18 and go to university and everything would be all right. Blind optimism.’ A Candide figure, perhaps. But it was Mike Leigh, not Voltaire, who was the biggest influence on his formative years. ‘I remember seeing Abigail’s Party when I was 14. I loved it but hated it at the same time, because the mockery of working class aspiration was a mockery of my family. I’m a snob when it matters. Snobbery can be a shot at excellence. But if someone mocks people for breaches in etiquette, I hate that.’

I ask Gervais about his relationship with Merchant, who, though younger, seems to be the more mature of the two, or at least the less frivolous. ‘It’s us against the world. You have to be complete fascists when it comes to art. There is no room for democracy. We don’t want anyone else’s opinion. I don’t know about Steve but I do this for the fun, for the creative process, not to see my fat face on the telly. It’s about bringing something into the world. All my DNA is in the work that I’ve done.’ He stops. Shakes his head. Looks worried. ‘I ended on a pretentious note. I’d been doing well until then. F—ing hell. I also said we ended and that sounds rude, like I’m cutting the interview off… So now I’m worried about two things. I’ve been pretentious and I’ve been rude. F—! And now I’ve sworn again.’

As you enter Professor James Lovelock’s whitewashed cottage on the border of Devon and Cornwall, you see a contraption on a stand, a small box with a few curved wires. It’s an invention of his, one that should be in a museum. He used it to alert the world — via Margaret Thatcher —  to the dangers of CFCs, specifically the damage they were doing to the ozone. In the next room there is a photograph of him with the Queen, on the day she made him a Companion of Honour (honour is the word, there are only ever 65 people entitled to use the letters CH after their name). And beyond this is his study, sprawling with wires and cables. He writes his elegant prose in here, a series of bestselling books. But this is also where he likes to keep his inventor’s hand in, working on projects for the Ministry of Defence, the sort of gadgets Q makes for Bond. Back in 1954, he invented the microwave oven but, not being that interested in money, left it to others to realise its commercial value. He had another discovery to preoccupy his agile mind — a theory so radical and lyrical it would one day lead to his name being mentioned in the same breath as Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, one of our greatest, and most controversial, living scientists.  We shall come to that.

There is also a model of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket in here, the one that Lovelock will be flying to space in later this year, shortly after his ninetieth birthday — the ‘ultimate upgrade’ he calls it. The trip will be a sort of present from Branson — who credits Lovelock with inspiring him to pledge billions of dollars to fight global warming. Lovelock is not worried about the dangers. ‘If I die, I die,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Doesn’t bother me. I’ve had a long life and it would be a good way for a scientist to go.’

His training has involved going in a G-force simulator. Three Gs so far, rather than the full six he will experience with vertical take off. His doctors have advised against it, not least because he once had a heart bypass. ‘The centrifuge beats any fairground ride,’ he says. ‘Great fun.’

I’m not sure his wife Sandy, an American 30 years his junior, is quite so nonchalant about his trip into space. She is protective of him, making sure he wraps up warm when we go outside, for example. They met at a science conference when he was 69, (shortly before his first wife, and the mother of his four children, died after a long illness). ‘The age difference did not occur to us,’ she says, speaking with a warm, St Louis accent. ‘When you are in love you are in love.’

Certainly, Lovelock does not look his age. He has a full head of silver hair, a glint in his eye and a strong and rolling voice, albeit one with a slight lisp. When we sit down for lunch, homemade vegetable soup, he says: ‘This soup is the secret to my longevity. I have it almost every day.’ If he looks fit, it as nothing to his mental agility. In conversation, he never hesitates or has to search for a word.

‘I imagine Sir Richard’s medical and legal advisors are assailing him,’ he says, ‘warning him of the adverse publicity if I drop dead in the spacecraft. But I’ll be fine. They keep making me take all sorts of tests to see if I am still alive. There was a funny one I had to do in St Louis a few months ago. They injected me with three millicuries of thallium-201, which is a gamma-emitting isotope, then got me to ride a bicycle and did a scan of my heart to see if it was working properly. It was fun watching the scan on the screen to see if the ventricles were contracting properly, expelling all the blood they should. The medical team were all cheering because it was working so well. What they would expect for someone much younger than me. So they have no excuse not to let me go up on medical grounds.’

He grins. ‘To be honest I am so carried away with the thought of doing this trip, I don’t care about the consequences. When I was young I was daft enough to do rock climbing in plimsolls, without ropes. I had some scares but I’m glad I did it. I’ll be the same before this flight. I’ll be scared but I’ll be glad I did it. It will be important, this chance to see the earth before the ice caps vanish. It will be an important moment for me personally.’

This is something of an understatement. Lovelock has spent a lifetime contemplating our gently spinning, green and blue planet — its beauty, its poise, its apparent luminosity in the blackness of space. Even before the first colour photographs of it were taken —  40 years ago this summer, when Neil Armstrong took his one small step for a man — he was able to ‘see’ it with his mind’s eye, and understand it, in all its spherical glory.

In 1968, his neighbour, the novelist William Golding, helped him with come up with a poetic name for his theory that the earth and all the living plants and creatures upon it are inextricably bound together, interacting in complex ways to ensure that the environment can sustain life. While walking with Lovelock to the village pub one day, Golding suggested calling it ‘Gaia’, after the Greek goddess of Earth.

‘Bit of luck,’ the professor says. ‘Living next to door to a man like that. Who would be interested in the theory if I had stuck with its original name, Earth System Science?’

According to Gaia theory, ours is a living planet, the only one we know of in the universe, and the human beings upon it are transitory and irrelevant to its survival — though not to their own survival, if they go on over-heating the planet with the Co2 emissions they cause. Lovelock’s belief in Gaia was reinforced by research showing that, even though the energy reaching the Earth from the Sun had increased during a certain period, the temperature and chemical makeup of the atmosphere remained unchanged. The only explanation, he decided, was that the Earth was a self-regulating system that had found a way to preserve its equilibrium. The organisms on Earth had kept their environment stable. This seemed to be Gaia in action.

The hippies loved it. The idea of Gaia caught the imagination of academics everywhere, too. It prompted John Gray, professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, to describe Lovelock as ‘the most important and original scientific thinker in the world today.’ What appealed, of course, was its metaphorical potency, Gaia seemed to be giving us a subtle lesson in the physiology of a planet. Was he aware of the poetic power of his metaphor right from the start? ‘No, my first feelings about it were “Oh yes, that’s a nice word.” I have a bit of poet in me, I suppose, and I like words with a ring to them and an interesting provenance. But I was shocked by the way the American scientific community went berserk. They thought it was dreadful usage. Still do.’

Because it is too whimsical? ‘They call it trying to mix myth with science. It was all nonsense, they said, because it was too much of a threat to their comfortable way of living. You see science has sold its soul to the politicians. It has got so bad nowadays, the wooliness of political argument about Green issues. And the Greens themselves have becomes so fanatical. I feel the Green attacks on the airlines particularly half baked; all this stuff about carbon footprints is hogwash. Greens can be such Nazis.’

Um, isn’t that rather an unfair comparison? ‘Not really. Compared with the amount of fuel we use just keeping ourselves warm, the amount you use per year flying is trivial.’

But surely it’s not just the fuel used, it’s what jumbo jets do to the atmosphere. ‘They hardly do anything to the atmosphere. I suppose the jet contrails might be harmful but it depends where they are produced. In some areas it will produce warming, in others cooling. There is a lot of argument still among geophysicists about what effect it has. The way I look at it, if you add together the CO2 produced by the nearly seven billion people in the world, and their livestock, it is ten times the amount of CO2 produced by all the airline travel in the sky. So if you want to improve your carbon footprint, hold your breath. The number of people is the problem, and it’s all happened so fast. When I was born the world population was two billion. In my lifetime that figure has more than trebled.’

He has a solution to this which is chracteristically unexpected. ‘If women were more empowered around the world there would be fewer children. The chief increase in population occurs in the Third World because there the women have so little power. If there were more women politicians around the world there would be a natural curb to population growth.’

I ask if he ever catches himself straying into misanthropy when he contemplates these global issues. ‘I suppose so. I think there is a lot of misanthropy in all of us. Think of that song “if you were the only girl in the world and I was the only boy.” I’m a little agoraphobic and can’t think of anything worse than a crowd. I’m a non-joiner.’

Is that a mark of eccentricity? ‘You would know, not me.’

Eccentric means outside the circle. There is something in his character to which that applies, the way he is always thinking outside conventional wisdom. ‘Possibly, but it is not a deliberate act of thought. It comes naturally. I tend to see in more dimensions than most people, I suppose. I used to get cross with your profession because they always referred to me as a maverick. A maverick really is an outsider. The village idiot. As far as science goes I am far from being a maverick. I belong to all these important societies, and didn’t join them, they elected me.’

Is he a contrarian then? ‘Not for the fun of it.’

According to Dr David Weeks, a clinical neurophysiologist at Royal Edinburgh Hospital, an eccentric tends to be intelligent, curious, outspoken, unmotivated by greed, dogged and healthy. Eccentrics don’t know they are eccentric, moreover. They think their abnormal behaviour is perfectly normal. Because they are not concerned about conforming, they are naturally much less prone to stress. And because of their humour and happiness, they tend to live longer. This definition seems to apply to the inscrutable Lovelock in spades. He is entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd. Though he is a Fellow of the Royal Society and has worked for NASA, Shell, MI5 and various universities, he has always preferred to plough his own lonely furrow, funding his research with his 40 or so patents and the various prizes he wins. Eccentrics tend to be only children, as Lovelock was. Brought up by a grandmother, he saw the world as ‘very cosy and comfortable’.

At school he made his own working short-wave radio receiver from scraps of wire, jam jars and pencils. Later he would make his own explosives with which to blow up obstructions on local footpaths. He grew up with Quaker principles, and became a conscientious objector in the Second World War. I suspect he enjoys being a member of the awkward squad.

In name and in spirit, Gaia seemed to represent the opposite of rigid scientific enquiry. It advocates a ‘holistic’ view of the Earth, rather than the traditionally ‘reductionist’ breaking down of systems to their constituent components. No wonder the Prince of Wales is a fan. Last summer he invited Lovelock to ‘teach the teachers’ at his Education Summer School at Cambridge University. But that doesn’t stop Lovelock voicing his approval of GM food, one of the Prince’s bête noirs. The Greens don’t know quite what to make of him either. In some ways, as the father of Gaia, he is an environmental guru, a folk hero. In others he is the devil. His biggest thought crime, as far as the Green movement is concerned, is his enthusiasm for nuclear energy. He believes it is now our only hope in a  fight against global warming that may already be lost. All other options — biofuels, wind energy, solar heating and so on are a waste of time and money.

‘I’m not a religious person,’ he tells me, ‘but if I were I would say, look, nuclear energy is the energy of the universe. God has given it to us and what do you fools do with it? You use it as weapon. It could have resolved all your problems.’ He believes that when London is flooded around the middle of the next century and 10m people have to be relocated, that generation will be cursing us for burning fossil fuels. ‘They’ll be wondering why we were so stupid not to accept the beneficence of nuclear power.’ The real dangers to humanity and the ecosystems of the earth from nuclear power are almost negligible, he reckons. As for Chernobyl, ‘thirty-odd brave firemen died who needn’t have died but its general effect on the world population is almost negligible. All around Chernobyl, where people are not allowed to go because the ground is too radioactive, the wildlife thrives. It doesn’t care about radiation.’

But what shall we do with nuclear waste? ‘Stick it in some precious wilderness. If you wanted to preserve the biodiversity of a rainforest, bury nuclear waste in it to keep the developers out. The lifespan of the wild things might be shortened a bit, but the animals wouldn’t know, or care. Natural selection would take care of the mutations. Life would go on.’

Blimey. He also believes that if we must have cars, then they should be electric vehicles charged by nuclear power stations. ‘They’d have much less range than the present models and so they’d be much less nuisance.’

Though he is in no doubts that man-made global warming is a reality, possibly an irreversible one, he doesn’t agree with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consensus that the increase in temperatures will be smooth, slow and continuous. He thinks they will be more like a mountain, a concatenation of slopes, valleys, flat meadows, rock steps and precipices. We are in a brief chasm at the moment, for example, caused by the melting ice caps lowering the temperature of the Atlantic and temporarily stopping the Gulf Stream. ‘The problems is that climatologists base their projections on models, not observations and measurements. Actually the sea level is rising twice as fast as they estimate. This is shocking. Even the economists are doing better than that. And it is mad of politicians to try and make predictions about the climate 60 years from now. The models suggest that if you cut back CO2 by 80%, all will be well. But they cannot possibly know, based on modelling.’

In his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, he writes: ‘We do not seem to have the slightest understanding of the seriousness of our plight. Instead, before our thoughts were diverted by the global financial collapse, we seemed lost in an endless round of celebration and congratulation.’ For all this, his new book is less pessimistic than his last, The Revenge of Gaia, which rather shocked the world with its bleak, nothing-can-be-done, outlook. ‘I’m less pessimistic and more,’ he says. ‘We’re not clever enough to get out of this mess at all. But we are tough animals. We are going to survive because we, our generation, don’t represent the end point. We will go on evolving and hopefully, further down the line, people will evolve who are clever enough to tackle this thing.’

Does he feel frustrated by global warming deniers? ‘I’m not Dr Strangelovelock gloating at what is going to come, but it is going to come, I fear. What is the point of being cheerless though? My message is, if we are all doomed, enjoy it while you can. My memory of the War is that war is more exciting than peacetime. I suppose we are in the Phoney War now and the equivalent of building shelters in the garden for the coming blitz is putting up wind turbines. They won’t do much good. Other that the psychological benefit of feeling you are doing something.’

I can see that windfarms that blot the landscape are a mixed blessing, but what about at sea? ‘I have no objection to them putting them out at sea, if that is what Brown wants to do to create jobs, and keep the Germans happy, and improve his changes of getting a job at the EU when he retires. Good luck to him. But they are utterly pointless as a source of energy and not in the least Green because they all have to be backed up with coal-fired power stations. Blair was disgraceful on nuclear. Major was just as bad because he rescinded Thatcher’s instructions to renew the older nuclear power stations. She was pro nuclear because she was a scientist.’

Like Thatcher, Lovelock was a chemistry graduate. As a young man he was tempted by communism, but he later became a huge fan of the Iron Lady, especially when she embraced his theory about Ozone depletion (she was the one who fought for the global ban on CFCs in aerosols and fridges). ‘Margaret Thatcher and I got on like a house on fire. She really understood CFCs. We were so close, it was quite funny. But whenever I tried to talk about other issues such as the health service which I thought she was damaging she would say, “No, I only want to talk about the environment with you.” She could be very tough minded.’

His clash with Richard Dawkins, the author of the Selfish Gene, was not quite so amicable. Though you could argue that the Gaia Theory brings Darwinism home, replacing the shocking bleakness of its revelation of our animal ancestry with a living, breathing and ultimately consoling sense of our place in nature, Professor Dawkins hated the name. For him it reeked of unscientific New Ageism. He hated the concept too, arguing that, actually, our Goldilocks planet — not too hot, not too cold — manages life, not the other way around. A living Earth, moreover, would never have evolved by natural selection. ‘Well he’s been proved wrong now,’ Lovelock says. ‘He brought up the point that there can be no natural selection of things larger than the phenotype, but the latest theory is that, in the case of social insects, it is the nest that evolves, not the bees. Group selection is coming back.’ He grins again. ‘The neo-Darwinists were far too dogmatic. It was almost like Newton storming out and saying there is no such thing as relativity. That wouldn’t have been a very scientific way to behave. I suppose Dawkins couldn’t help it. He is a dogmatist. He can’t be an agnostic, he has to be an atheist. It’s his nature. But he was useful to me because he made me realise it wasn’t life that did the regulating, it was the whole system.’

In his ninetieth year he does not hold out much hope of being around long enough to see how the Gaia story continues — see if we really are doomed by global warming — but this, he says, does not frustrate him. ‘That would mean worrying about my own end point and I’m not worried about that. If you can stay healthy you can reach 90. So 100 is my next step. A long way away. No need to worry about that.’

He seems to have absolute certainty about Gaia Theory. Never a doubt. ‘Oh no, that’s the worst thing you can have. No scientist should have certainty about anything. I’m confident. There is a difference.’

At first I assume the references to ‘the Leader’ are meant as a joke at Harriet Harman’s expense. Westminster is buzzing with rumours that she is positioning herself for a coup against Gordon Brown and someone from her office has been sending me emails referring to ‘the Leader’ this, and ‘the Leader’ that. But Harman doesn’t do jokes. Her title is Leader of the House of Commons, so that is exactly how her staff refer to her.

She has other titles — Secretary of State for Equalities, Minister for Women, Lord Privy Seal, Deputy Leader (and Party Chair) of the Labour Party, and, since 1982, MP for Camberwell and Peckham, so her unofficial title ought to be Seven Jobs Harman. The gist of the emails, by the way, is that I am to be her shadow, have some access, get to know the real Harriet Harman. The day will begin at a primary school in her constituency, then we will travel together to her weekly surgery and after that there will be an interview in her office at the House of Commons before she returns home for the photographs. Whatever can it all mean?

It’s been a funny old week for her so far. She was standing in for Gordon Brown at Prime Minister’s Questions a couple of days ago. Acquitted herself well. Looked like she was enjoying it. And it emerged that she is the bookies’ favourite as next Labour leader, after the Tories win the election. But her popularity is not universal. Yvette Cooper, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, is being touted as a ‘stop-Harman’ candidate. And last night when it was announced at the end of Any Questions that Harman would be on the panel next week, the audience hissed. Hissed! And today, Friday, the Telegraph has ran an op ed piece by Jeff Randall which describes her as ‘monument to absurdity.’ Ouch.

So. It is 8.15am and as I approach the school I see two armed policemen. Yup, I think, the Harperson must be here already.  ‘No, no,’ she says when I bump into her approaching the school on foot from the other side. Those policemen are for The Home Secretary. Jacqui lives on that street.’ And we all now know what goes on behind those closed doors (and curtains) when Jacqui’s away. But the news of her husband’s viewing habits is yet to break. For now, Harman adds: ‘Of course I don’t have police protection.’ A touchy subject this, as we shall see.

Harman has come to meet some of the children availing themselves of what is called the Breakfast Club, a newish initiative. Working mothers can drop their children off at 8am and the children play games, have some breakfast, listen to music. Harman sits down at a tiny chair and asks a seven year old if he knows what an MP is. He does. ‘Well, I’m your MP. I work with the Prime Minster. I’m going to give you this leaflet to give to your mummy.’

She asks a group of three children what their mothers do — a social worker, a nurse and a teacher. It could almost be scripted. One child says he recognises Harman from the telly. Well, she is recognisable: white teeth, sharp nose, big eyes that are greeny blue (not blue as always reported). And she looks younger than her 58 years. Can it really be a quarter of a century ago that Alan Clark was asked who he thought was the more attractive, Edwina Currie or Harriett Harman, and replied: ‘Oh Harriet, of course. It’s simply a matter of class.’? (Her uncle was Lord Longford, you see. Her father was a Harley Street consultant. And she had a private education at St Paul’s Girl’s School.) She is wearing comfortable shoes today, rather than the stilettos she has been favouring lately, and she is carrying a bulging handbag that hangs open to reveal Kleenex, diaries, keys, ID cards, stuff. She goes off to another room to play one of the children at Connect Four. He beats her. Twice.

When she goes to meet the teachers in the staff room, the headmaster holds a door open for her and she doesn’t make a fuss about it (she once savaged a male civil servant for doing this). She has a slightly pigeon toed walk and when she isn’t using her tortoise shell glasses for reading, she rests them on her hair like a headband. After this she heads down to the school gate to greet parents arriving with their children. Quite a few recognise her and some know her and stop for a chat.
Afterwards she gives me a lift in her car, a Rover she shares with her sister. One of the CDs, I notice, is Jonny Cash. ‘Anything dodgy should be blamed on my sister,’ she says.

I imagine she is more an Arctic Monkeys person. ‘Gordon was quoted out of context about that.’

So ends the banter. When, at 9.30, we arrive at Peckham Town Hall, I actually hear her swear, but not convincingly — more like how a headgirl might swear, with an extra ‘bloody’ that spoils the rhythm. She is talking about how she wishes she could hold her surgeries in the open area rather than in a small adjoing room and adds that ‘it bloody pisses me off.’

Her constituency is 23% African diaspora, the highest percentage in the country. There are bout 20 people waiting. They are mostly immigration and housing cases. The first is a Nigerian woman who is facing a deportation order. Harman knows about her case and is prepared to write to the Home Office on her behalf. ‘God bless you,’ the woman says. The next is a man married to a British citizen who is also facing deportation. This time, Harman takes notes and asks him to sign a form giving her permission to check his police record. ‘We won’t help them if they are known to the police,’ she says to me out of the corner of her mouth. ‘That sends out the wrong message.’

As she is leaving, she says a matey ‘See ya!’ to the receptionist and it reminds me of something the political commentator Quentin Lettes wrote about her in 1998. While listening to her in the Commons he realised that she was trying to change her accent. She was dropping her aitches. It was suddenly Arriet Arman.
Back in the car she realises she has forgotten to have any breakfast and I ask how she keeps her energies levels up, what with her seven jobs. ‘I was very knackered when the kids were little,’ she says, ‘so not having young children at home means that things aren’t so demanding. But being the Leader of the House you are always arriving just as the cleaners are leaving. During the week it’s like being a pit pony, not seeing the outside world.’

She goes to the gym at the weekend, she adds, and gets seven hours sleep, rising at 6.30 and going to bed after Newsnight. ‘Oh you haven’t got a pass,’ she says chewing on her lower lip as we reach the Commons. ‘You might be lucky. I’m going to look confident.’ The policeman asks her to pop her bonnet but the lever is jammed. ‘Oh bugger it,’ she says under her breath. He waves her through.

The table in her office came from David Cameron’s office, apparently. There are few cosy touches — Pugin green wallpaper and a sword propped against a wall, something to do with the Commons swimming competition, it just ended up here. There is a bowl of fruit. I push it towards her, reminding her of her missed breakfast. She has a banana.

I couldn’t help noticing she wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest when we went around her constituency this morning. ‘Oh, that.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘The thing was, Charlotte, who you met, always takes photographs. That morning we were going out with the police and they routinely put a jacket on you. I suppose I could have refused to wear it, but if you are offered one you just put it on and then it went on the website and then the press got hold of it. And the next thing I know the Daily Mail are saying I’m afraid to go out in my own constituency. But I do surgeries every week. I’m outside school every week. I would never think of wearing one.’
When William Hague teased her about it at PMQs last year, she gave as good as she got. She said she wasn’t prepared to ‘take fashion advice from the man in the baseball cap’. Not bad, that. Still, this whole business of PMQs… I ask her why she thinks there is so much speculation at the moment that she wants Gordon Brown’s job.

‘Well I don’t think there should be and I’ve never done anything to fuel it. I promised when I was running for the deputy leadership that I would be a loyal and supportive deputy to Gordon Brown.’

That was in 2007, I point out, haven’t circumstances changed since then? Labour now has its lowest poll ratings since the 1980s. ‘No, I don’t think you can stand for election on one thing and then say circumstances have changed. I believe he is the best person we could be having for prime minster. I get the chance to see him very closely, work with him very closely, and the things he has argued for from the beginning of the recession …’ she lists the things Brown has done for the economy and when she finishes I ask if she can imagine any circumstances in which she might like to stand. ‘No, no, absolutely…’

If the job of prime minster became vacant, say? ‘There’s, there’s no, I’m absolutely campaigning for Labour to do well. You know it’s not for me to throw in the towel and start talking about when Cameron wins. I mean, I know Cameron thinks the next election is in the bag for the Tories, but we are determined to make that not the case. So just as I don’t go around speculating about who would be the next MP for Camberwell and Peckham if I was to fall under a bus… I mean it’s not appropriate; I am the MP there. Similarly it is not appropriate for anyone to say who is going to take over from Gordon Brown. Like with the flak jacket it is wending its way, but there is no basis in it, just as there was no basis in the flak jacket.’ I think I know what she means, then again Harman could never be accused of being articulate, with her ums and ars and false starts. ‘So don’t think there’s no smoke without a fire,’ she continues. ‘I used to think there was no smoke without a fire, but now I know differently.’

But Gordon Brown won’t have the job forever. There will come a point where he stands down. ‘But he’s only been doing it for a year and a half. So don’t take any notice of the bookies because they had me coming last in the deputy leadership election, describing me as an outsider and an also ran, so don’t take any notice of the bookies.’
That must have felt good, I say, winning, after all those years in the wilderness. ‘Oh!’ she punches the air. ‘What was so great was some terrible things had been written by… people were saying it was laughable that the Labour party would want to support me to be deputy leader, so to prove mean critics wrong I did have a moment to savour there.’

She joined the Cabinet as Social Security Secretary when Blair formed his first government in 1997, but was sacked just over a year later (her competence was questioned). ‘No one likes to be sacked,’ she says now, ‘but actually it was a good experience to be on the backbenches while we were in government. It gave me time to be on various committees, like the childcare commission.’

Yeah, right. How did her ego recover? ‘I was worried that I would be setting a bad example to my kids. Cocking things up and being a failure and then a very good friend said: “This is your chance to set the very best example to your kids.” If you have a knock back you don’t feel sorry for yourself and blame everyone else, you say, “Right, what do I do now?” You actually press on and that was the best advice. I decided there and then to…‘ she taps the table. ‘Not to become bitter and not become miserable. No one is interested in a moaner.’

Why does she think she is such a divisive figure in the Labour party? She blinks. ‘I, I, don’t think, I wouldn’t say, I think that, um, I don’t know, can I just have a think about what I think the premise to that question is? I don’t, er, I think that I do have some, you know…’ She taps the table again. ‘Trenchant views which… ruffle feathers. And, so for example, being, you know, a feminist in a parliament that was 97% men did not make you mainstream. I was very much on the margins.’
The most divisive thing was her choice of school for her three children. Though it was Labour policy to ban selection in schools she decided to send her eldest son across London to a grant-maintained Roman Catholic school and, a year later, her younger son to a non-Catholic selective grammar school in Kent. Blair stood by her, not least because he had done the same thing. What nobody in the Labour leadership expected was the intensity of the anger from the party’s own MPs. It was hypocritical of her, wasn’t it?

‘I’ve never discussed it and don’t discuss it because it involves the children. It’s no secret. People can make whatever judgement they want. And they do. But. I slightly balk at the idea of being a divisive figure because I want the party to be united. I can’t be that divisive because the majority of the party voted for me.’ She smiles tightly. ‘So I will swerve round that question.’

How would she describe herself? ‘Um, “cheerful” I think and I think I’m quite focused and hard working and I’m quite surprising to myself. I think I would never have thought I would be deputy leader of the party and in the Cabinet. I’m still taken aback when I get up in the morning and I’m a member of the cabinet!’ [One doesn’t imagine she is alone in this.] ‘That’s an amazing… I mean I have to double take and, er, that is an amazing thing. You know, er, some people feel they were born to be in the Cabinet whereas other people feel like imposters and blink.’

So she is a blinking imposter? ‘Yes. Will I be found out?’

What about some of the words other people use to describe her? Prickly, say? ‘Well, perhaps tenacious. Tenacity does annoy people. Irritatingly I’m not prepared to step back and say, “that’s all right.” I do have arguments.’ She nods thoughtfully. ‘I see what you mean now by “divisive”.’

Hectoring? ‘I think I am perhaps not sufficiently row averse. But it is usually about trying to make progress. It is not a row for the sake of it. But sometimes you do have to fight your corner. And you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. But as far as, what did you say? Hectoring? I certainly don’t mean to be.’

Abrasive? ‘These are just words for “horrible” aren’t they? I think my agenda is an embattled agenda that wants change. It’s not congenial to keep saying we haven’t done enough on equal pay or maternity leave.’

Does she have a thick skin? ‘I do, I think. Well you have to have a thick skin, because there’s no justice in it. It’s unfair but nothing that can be done. Sometimes people say I wouldn’t do what you do for all the tea in China and they look at me and I can see they are being sympathetic but actually to be able to represent a constituency and to be a part of a government that is struggling with a massive economic challenge trying to do everything you can to protect people in a difficult situation…’

So when she sees unfavourable headlines about herself, the shutters come down? ‘Obviously when you do something stupid like, I shouldn’t have taken that photograph of me in the flak jacket, but at the end of the day no one is perfect.’

Was it stupid to get involved in the Sir Fred Goodwin debate (when she went off message to say the Government would remove his £700,000-a-year pension, senior Labour figures accused her of chasing populist headlines in a bid to become leader). ‘No! I am totally against people vandalising his house. I think that’s terrible. But that bank is only still standing because of public money and he led it to the bring of disaster and I don’t think £700,000 can be called a pension when you are only 50. That’s severance pay. Reward for failure.’

Has she ever felt patronised for being perceived as attractive and glamorous: the big eyes, the stillettoes? ‘Oh, I feel patronised when people continuously say I am stupid because, basically, when I was a young women, there was an ethos that you shouldn’t be too clever because you’ll never get a husband, because no one wants a wife cleverer than him. So you start with don’t be too clever and you go straight over into being too thick. So I’ve either had “you’re too clever” or “you’re too thick” all my life. It’s very annoying to be described as stupid but I think there are a lot of people who get described as stupid and aren’t, and they probably recognise what is happening to me and think “that happens to me, too”. So erm, so I just, you know, so I feel that’s patronising.’

(For the record, she has a degree in politics from York University, trained as a solicitor and became a QC, so she can’t be that stupid.) Meanwhile, her fierce campaigning for women over the years has brought her unwanted attention from pro-father groups. It culminated in June last year, when two protesters from Fathers4Justice climbed on the roof of her home in Herne Hill, south London. She pulls a mock grimace when I remind her that she once joked that if she became PM ‘there aren’t enough airports in the country for all the men who would want to flee’. ‘Never a good idea to make jokes in parliament,’ she says now.
That reputation among men is presumably to do with her 1990 comment that: ‘It cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life’. It seems a bonkers thing to have said and, speaking as a father, a rather insulting thing, too. ‘I was probably talking in the context of domestic violence,’ she says. ‘I might well have been saying that there are some family lives where the father’s role might be quite a destructive one. Obviously, I think children do best if they have a close relationship with both parents. Of course they do. It’s been used as gender warfare which it wasn’t meant to be.’

Harman is married to Jack Dromey, Deputy General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union. What did he make of that comment? ‘Well, he supports the arguments for equality. There are a lot of women member in his trade union.’

He describes himself jokingly as Jack Harman, nee Dromey. They met on a picket line in 1977 and married in 1982 when she was pregnant and about to become and MP. It is sometimes said that they are the ideal New Labour couple: the one working class (his father was a road digger), the other middle. Harman once said that neither of them are frivolous people. They had always been ‘in the struggle’.

Is hers a right-on household? I mean, her children take her surname not his and I notice she isn’t wearing a wedding ring. ‘Well I think that, urm, weddings are much more fashionable now than they were in my day. Than, er…’ She blinks. Frowns. ‘I don’t know why I don’t wear a wedding ring. Are we a right-on household? Erm, politically correct? I don’t know. How would I know? What would be the measure of this? We’re partners.’
What’s the family conversation like over the breakfast cereals? ‘Well it is pretty much politics. Masses of newspapers. The Today programme is on. I guess, it’s, yeah, political. Very political.’

Who does most of the tidying round the house? ‘Jack does, but that’s not to do with, that’s just because some people like things to be tidier than others. But, you know, I do the gardening. I do the cooking. He does the shopping.’

Her relationship with her father, what was that like? ‘Good.’ Was he a Tory? ‘He was.’ So was her becoming a socialist an act of rebellion against him? ‘Not really because he wasn’t active politically. And my mum was progressive. A liberal. She didn’t work when we were little but qualified as a solicitor when we were in our teens.’
Who is the more posh between her and David Cameron? ‘Weeell… I’m now regarded as being so unbelievable posh that I’m about to ascend to the throne. I’m surprised I don’t have an amazing estate somewhere with a castle on it. I mean, it’s ridiculous. My background is middle class rather than landed gentry.’
But titled. ‘Well you know, but that’s my father’s sister, she married into a titled family, but so what? Alan Duncan, who is my opposite number, is very funny about this. He taunts me.’

Although we have been alone in the room, her press secretary has put a tape recorder on and this has just stopped. ‘Should I get Des to fiddle faddle the wotsit?’ she says. She has a go but gives up and hands it to me. As an interviewer, tape recorders are one of my few areas of expertise, so I am soon able to fiddle faddle her wotsit.
She was seven months pregnant when she first entered parliament; I ask if she felt guilty about being a working mother. ‘There’s a lot of guilt attached to being a mother full stop. I think the midwives thought it was good exercise for me running up and down stairs in block of flats campaigning and handing out leaflets.’
And here she still is, now one of the longest serving women MPs in the House. And she still seems to get a kick out of it. ‘There must be something wrong with me because I enjoy doing PMQs,’ she says, widening her eyes. ‘I realised either you are going to feel miserable and nervous or you can enjoy it so I thought, yeah, why not? Everyone thinks I’m going to be a big flop so there are no expectations to defeat. And it’s just a bunch of MPs. The House of Commons is not Helmand Province. It is demanding but ridiculous. Banked up on both sides. Gladiatorial.’
With William Hague as Maximus? ‘He’s very good at it, very clever at it. He’s very funny but I have to keep reminded myself not to laugh at his jokes because I’m supposed to be the victim of them.’

After Labour’s defeat in the Glasgow East by-election last year, Harman was reportedly overheard saying: ‘This is my moment.’ She denies it but it stuck and Mr Hague teased her about it the other day at PMQs: ‘Why don’t you step in? When Chamberlain lost his party’s confidence, Churchill stepped forward. When Eden crossed the Atlantic exhausted, Supermac came forward. This could be your moment.’
I have to say, if her intension in agreeing to this interview was to show her more human side, get away from her reputation for being a humourless automaton, it has sort of worked. She has pulled faces, rolled her eyes, laughed engagingly. A friskier more playful side has emerged — less the earnest, head down, brittle Harperson of folklore. And while she is still not exactly a ‘character’ in the way that Ann Widdecombe is, or Mo Mowlam was, no one can deny she has staying power. She has been a Bennite, a Kinnockite, a Smithite, a Blairite and now she is protesting too much that she is a Brownite. When I ask her where she stands, she adopts a northern accent and says with a laugh: ‘I’m LA-BOUR!’

Perhaps she does do jokes, after all. As we are walking back down to her car I ask what Gordon Brown is like behind closed doors. She gives a long-winded answer that is supportive, but the phrase that sticks in my mind is: ‘Well, I wouldn’t say he’s happy go lucky.’ Again, quite funny.
In the car once more, staring at her Jonny Cash CD, I ask her if she had a nickname at school. ‘No. Did you?’ What do her friends call her, then? ‘Some of them call me Hattie.’ She frowns for a moment as she considers this then concludes: ‘I suppose because Hattie Jacques was a Harriet.’

A former contender to the Tory crown – and eventually beaten by Iain Duncan Smith… – Michael Portillo has now turned his attention to fist-fighting

With his arms not so much folded as wrapped around himself, Michael Portillo looks as if he is being restrained by an invisible straitjacket. This turns out to be more about physical discomfort than defensiveness; a “dickie tummy”, as he calls it.

He has just returned from a research trip to Basra where he ate something he shouldn’t – and he is looking gaunt anyway, thanks to the diet he is on (“being fat” is what he dislikes most about his appearance). The man with the great political future behind him, as he likes to joke, dresses well, but his hunched posture spoils the lines of his finely tailored suit.

He was feeling similarly ill when he filmed an extraordinary scene in his latest documentary, Horizon: How Violent Are You? To find out if we all have an innate propensity for violence, he travelled to the Bolivian Andes to take part in the Tinku, a strange annual fighting ritual among villagers. Dressed in tribal costume and with coloured straps around his knuckles, he has a fist fight with a shortish man who looks old enough to be his father.

Portillo doesn’t appear to relish the confrontation – indeed, he looks rather appalled at the indignity of it – but he nevertheless gets stuck in and lands a couple of tasty punches. “I must say I wasn’t in the mood because I had altitude sickness. It was a revealing exercise, though, because I had never had a fist fight in my life and assumed I would not enjoy the experience.”

And he has a taste for it now? “I did get some satisfaction from knocking the man to the ground. I have always been a passive person, but it taught me something about myself – that I can be physically aggressive. I can be fairly aggressive speaking to people, but that is different.

“I’m not saying I now enjoy violence,” he continues. “For 55 years I haven’t, so that wasn’t going to change in five minutes of beating up some poor Bolivian fellow at 9,000 feet.”

The conclusion Portillo draws is that we all have a capacity to enjoy violence. “It’s to do with the release of dopamine – the same powerful chemical reaction that makes us enjoy sex. I spoke to a football hooligan who really got off on violence and had been addicted to it for that reason. He couldn’t wait for the next Saturday.”

While Portillo admits that he sometimes pouts, slams doors and thumps computers, the equivalent adrenalin rush for him is more likely to come from public speaking.

“People don’t understand it, but the most intense occasions in the House of Commons were the ones I enjoyed most. When events could go either way and you could find yourself out of a job by the end of the day; those were the times when you were most on a high. Tony Blair used to get a real buzz from emerging from difficulty unscathed.”

Portillo would be inhuman, I suggest, if he didn’t now look at David Cameron, the Tory prime minister-in-waiting, and think: that could have been me. “Yes, but I’m relaxed about that,” he says. “I know him very well and always thought him impressive. I’m pretty sure that when I first met him in 1991 I thought that Cameron might one day be leader of the Conservative Party.”

After Portillo? “I wasn’t as intent on being leader as people thought, actually. I felt other people were more intent on my behalf. When I stood for leader in 2001, I was feeling pretty disillusioned. I was flattered into it by colleagues.”

In the end he lost… to Iain Duncan Smith! Was that a humiliation too far? “I don’t think I’ve got a thick skin, but I’ve not felt particularly humiliated by the things which people think I would have felt humiliated by, such as losing my seat in 1997 and not being elected leader in 2001. In the second case, I felt relieved.”

It got personal. Chief among his detractors was Norman Tebbit, who told me around that time that Portillo made his “toes curl”. How rude was that? “Tebbit was rude, it’s true. He said the Tories should vote for a family man, and when I dropped out of the contest it had just been announced that Gordon Brown’s wife was expecting a baby; sadly, the one they lost. Gordon was Chancellor then and I was his shadow, so in my last appearance at the Dispatch Box I said: ‘Congratulations on your wife’s impending baby. I know Lord Tebbit will be thrilled.’ ”

Portillo and Carolyn, his wife of 26 years, do not have children. She is a headhunter for an international firm, a job that involves a fair amount of travelling. “When I was Minister of Defence she used to accompany me on foreign trips. I suppose that would be thought disgraceful now. Now, it is more often the case that I will go along as a spouse when she is the one on business trips. She didn’t come to Basra, because that was all flak jackets and helmets.”

Back home, umbrellas might seem more appropriate, for their marriage does seem to have weathered some storms. Four years ago, a client of Max Clifford’s claimed she had had an affair with Portillo and, though he declined to comment, Portillo did give an intriguing answer to a newspaper. Q: “To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?” A: “She knows who she is and why.” Q: “Which living person do you most despise, and why?” A: “She knows who she is

and why.”

And, in 1999, Portillo admitted in an interview that he had had homosexual experiences as a student. There was a certain awkwardness to his public persona before then; was that because he knew this subject would one day have to be confronted? “Well, yes. I chose the timing of it because I was fed up with the innuendo. Outrageous things were being said and printed, so I thought, when I get the opportunity I will put that record straight.” He laughs darkly. “This was not a brilliant decision.”

Because he didn’t need to? “Exactly.”

Just as Cameron decided he did not need to answer the question about whether he took cocaine as a student? “Well, there you go. Perhaps I helped show Cameron how to play these things.”

He does still miss politics. “To be in the media is to be in the wings. Being in politics is being on the stage. It is so exciting. If we’d had a happier time in that shadow Cabinet, I might have stayed. But I felt I had come back into a very poisonous atmosphere. William Hague’s staff had identified me as the enemy and made life very difficult for me from the beginning. It was tiresome.”

But surely he was always plotting against Hague? “No, I think that rumour was unjustified, though in the end things did get tit for tat. I still think William wanted to do to the party what Cameron has since done, but he lost his nerve.”

Portillo’s body language when he announced he was standing down suggested ennui. “Ennui is quite a good word for what I felt. I had grown tired of collective responsibility, not being able to speak my mind. Tired and bored. I also found it stressful and the occasional highs were no longer compensating for that stress. You need staying power and evidently I didn’t have it.”

And there was also, perhaps, a little self-loathing. The trait he most deplores in himself is, after all, self-satisfaction. And his greatest regret is his “who dares wins” speech to conference – he shivers with embarrassment whenever he recalls it. He has also talked about a certain stiffness in the way he holds himself and walks. “But I think I was worse when I was a politician. Whenever I was being Paxo‑ed, I always looked tense, sitting back in my chair.”

He adds that when he left politics and reinvented himself as a documentary-maker, he had to change his relationship with the lens. “The camera had become a thing to be feared. I always admired the ability of Blair and Cameron to look relaxed on camera when under pressure. I only found that level of comfort in front of the lens once I had left politics.”

Well, up to a point. In another experiment for his new documentary, Portillo is deprived of sleep for two days – kept awake by recordings of a crying baby and then forced to work a stressful shift in a busy kitchen to see if he will lose his temper. “Sleep deprivation over quite a short period of time can make you paranoid,” he says. “If it had gone on longer, it would have driven me to violence, I think. I was becoming very edgy and paranoid about the whole experiment and quite aggressive to the people, the programme-makers, who I saw as my tormentors. I felt persecuted.”

On the subject of paranoia, I wonder how he felt about having Max Clifford breathing down his neck all those years. It wasn’t paranoia, of course; the Tory-hating publicist really was out to get him. Was he aware of that at the time? “Not particularly.” He gives a rubbery smile that makes his eyes disappear; it doesn’t reassure so much as chill.

When I tell him about the time the publicist boasted to me about a “Portillo story” he would make public if Portillo became leader, he wraps his arms around himself again and says: “People like him like to say things like that.”

To big themselves up? A shrug. “I guess.”

When Julie Burchill opens the door to her studio flat, a short distance from the sea front in Hove, she is wearing sunglasses, a black top, a black skirt, black tights… and a white and blue foot brace. ‘This? David Beckham had one of these for his metatarsal injury. Mine is for something less glamorous called Charcot’s syndrome. I’ve had it on since Christmas and it comes off in May. I did apply for disability benefit but they said it wasn’t allowed. I wasn’t disabled enough. They must be frigging joking! But I can live with it. I suppose I never was the most active person in the world and I didn’t really need an excuse to sit on my sofa watching Frasier all afternoon. Nice to see you again, by the way.’

This is how she talks, in a rhetorical, breathless, stream-of-consciousness that is so rapid she sometimes runs herwordstogether. In interviews it is traditional to mention that she also has a West Country burr as well as a high, girly register, and that these come as a surprise, what with her writerly voice being so metropolitan and muscular. But, as she says, we’ve met before so I’m used to both. ‘It has meant I’ve had to stop going to the gym,’ she continues, ‘which I can live with. Then the gym burned down, which I took as a sign from the Lord. I have a step machine now. It’s over there.’

And so it is, near a china leopard with a pink feather boa around its neck. On the windowsill there is a Venetian mask and a sculpture of a horse head. On the walls there are a couple of oil paintings. The most expensive cost  £15,000 (she is never reluctant to talk about money, Julie Burchill. It’s a working class thing, she reckons). And dominating the room is a large Bang and Olufsen television. It’s not on Frasier at the moment but Jerry Springer. ‘I love him. I shouldn’t watch daytime television but I do. That cost £7,000. It tilts back. Look.’ She points a remote. The screen tilts.

She makes me a coffee, which is the closest she ever gets to cooking, and hands it to me in a mug with the words ‘Queen of Fucking Everything’ written across it. Since we last met she sold her house for one and a half million. ‘Gave about a quarter of it away, because I’m a Christian. There was one guy…’ She takes a cutting off the fridge about a man reunited with his dog from Iran. ‘He needed £4,000 so I gave him it. I’ve never had such a rush. It was great. Better than drugs. When you give more than you think you should… ‘ She sucks in air between gappy teeth… ‘It’s gorgeous. I was like a sailor on shore leave chucking it everywhere. My accountant told me I was going nuts and I wouldn’t have anything left.’ She holds up her wrist. ‘I’ve got a Rolex. My third one. It’s so flash of me. So working class. Every time I go up one I give my old one to a friend and tell them to sell it. Sarkozy said if you don’t own a Rolex by the age of 50 you are a failure. Actually, anyone who hasn’t given away two by the age of 50 is a failure. Can I buy you lunch? Trouble is, I don’t trust myself not to drink and I’ve got to present a prize to probation officers this afternoon. I can’t turn up drunk because I’ll only ask for drugs or something embarrassing. I’ve never presented a prize before. Got a little speech prepared. Do you want to hear how it starts? “Great to be here today. I’m assuming Zoe Ball and Norman Cook turned you down. I assume Nick Berry and that bloke who paints himself like a zebra and runs along the seafront have turned you down, too. I have no delusions about my place in the Brighton celebrity food chain.’

Surprisingly, given that she started her career as a music journalist and once said she had taken enough cocaine ‘to stun the entire Columbian armed forces’, she and Norman Cook, better known as Fat Boy Slim, don’t hang out together in Brighton. ‘No, but apparently he said his dream woman would have my mind and Kylie Minogue’s body, which was a trifle rude. But I can live with it.’

She does a coy gesture of closing her hands together on her knee and drawing her shoulders in. Under her dark glasses she might even be fluttering her eyelashes. I ask why she’s wearing them indoors. ‘They are prescription. Here, try them on.’ Wow. The room goes blurred. Powerful lenses. ‘I know, the only reason I married so many times was that I’m short sighted, everyone looked so good.’

One of her two sons from one of her three marriages is in a band and is practising his bass guitar in another room. When the music stops, a young man with dreadlocks and a ring through his lower lip wanders in. ‘Hi, man,’ he says. This is Jack, from her second marriage to the journalist Cosmo Landesman (who won the custody battle to raise him when he was young). Her first son was with her ‘starter husband’ Tony Parsons. She walked out on that one when he was three. Never even sent him birthday cards. Hasn’t seen him for years.

‘The trouble was, I realised that if I didn’t get married at an early age I would become a complete slapper. So I married the first person I slept with. God that was a mistake. Awful, awful man.’

Doesn’t she protest too much about Parsons. I mean, she did marry him. She must have loved him. ‘I liked him a great deal. I…’ For the first time she is lost for words. ‘Course I did, yeah, I wouldn’t marry someone I didn’t love, but it was the wrong sort of love. I loved him like a brother. He was like a brother who buys you flick knives. Second and third one I married for love. They’ve all been very good looking in their youth but poor old Tony looks like a sick old recess monkey now.’

Burchill had met Parsons on the New Musical Express when she was 17. That was in 1976, in time to cover the emerging punk movement. Ten years later, after writing a bestselling novel, Ambition, she took a job as a political columnist on the Sunday Times, delighting in praising Margaret Thatcher when it became unfashionable to do so. More recently she took a job at the Times — telling everyone she was on a footballer’s contract of £300,000 a year — but was ‘let go’ after two years. She announced to the world that she had ‘lost her mojo’ and was retiring to study a theology degree. For two years, as she puts it, she couldn’t get arrested. ‘Luckily my self esteem is so high I thought if I sit by a pool drinking cocktails they will start ringing again and so they did.’

Now, two years on, she is back writing the odd book, and weekly columns for the Sun. ‘I’ll work for anyone, apart from the Guardian. The other day they rang up and said: “Will you write an obituary of Jade Goody?” Icky. Women ain’t even dead yet. So I said, “I don’t want to soil the pages of the Guardian with my filth. I’m happy with my own kind on the Sun.”’

She could identify with Goody, a working class girl made (sort of) good. ‘I thought Jade was a big-hearted girl who made the best of her difficult life and was the victim of white, liberal, middle-class prejudice. She was in my programme on chavs. I though she got a raw deal over the Shilpa Shetty thing. That was a class war.’

Her parents were ‘Bill and Bette Burchill of Bristol’. Her mother was a feisty woman who had a job in a cardboard box factory and was forever jumping over backyard gardens to throttle her ex-best friends. Her father was more gentle, a communist trade union activist who worked for a distillery. ‘I wish you could have met my daddy, he was such a nice man.’ While she admits that her stubborn affection for communism may partly be emotional, she’s not exactly a Cameroon these days. ‘I don’t want a country run by old Etonians again. They had their chance. Inbred idiots. I don’t like posh people. They are not quite human.’

I see time has mellowed her. ‘I’ll tell you one thing my Christianity hasn’t helped me with. I’ve got bitchier. I sort of feel when I do voluntary week that it gives me a license to be bitchy about other people. A trade off. One of the main pleasures in life is being spiteful. I’m going to be 50 in July. Too old to change.’

I ask whether, because her journalism is so tied up with her personality, she takes criticism of her writing personally. ‘No, I was born without the vulnerability gene. When my parents died that was when I realised it, because it didn’t affect me much, even though I loved them. I’m not a soft person. Though I can be kind, even if I do have to work at it and overcome my natural cruelty. Seeking approval has always seemed like a wet thing to do. I’ve always thought it was attractive to be disliked and I’ve done quite well in that department. I shouldn’t say this, because it sounds kinky, but when I do get letters threatening me and calling me terrible names, it gives me a mild sexual frisson… I’ve done some cruel things and some terrible things — I’ve abandoned children — but I’ve never minded about what people called me because of it. Just couldn’t care less.’

Well, up to a point. It is said that no man is an island, but listening to Julie Burchill you do have to wonder. In some ways she is the least insecure person I have met, and yet she does seem to need reassurance that she is being amusing and/or bitchy. And I know she does care what people think about her because a few days later she emails me checking what she has said and sounding a little worried. She enjoyed out chat so much, she says, got so excited by it, that she got a little carried away and might have exaggerated one or two things. She is slightly more reticent about the subject of drugs these days, for example — on the record at least, because of the voluntary work she does.

These emails are to come, for now she is making me laugh by saying that ‘I think there was a biological imperative for to get me away from Bristol so that I didn’t inbreed.’ She is funny like that. Has a way with words. The humour is partly self-deprecating, partly self-approving. She finds herself funny. ‘I sometimes look at myself and have to laugh.’

In her new book, Not in My Name, a Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she writes amusingly about how she is a very off message type of fat girl: one who gladly – gluttonously – admits that at one point she ‘reached the mighty dress size of 22 solely through lack of discipline and love of pleasure’. And who, it must be said, tends to despise people – except those with actual medical conditions – who pretend that is often otherwise. She’s is now a 16. Other targets are anti-war protestors, Muslims, cyclists, feminists and gay friendly homophobes. One line that really made me laugh was: ‘At the end of the day, it’s hard to control what turns you on and so long as it doesn’t say ‘quack’ or ‘I’m five’, it’s a free world.’

Last time I saw her she told me that living with someone was the death of love. Soon afterwards she got married, to Daniel, the brother of Charlotte, with whom she had had a six-month lesbian affair. Er, what happened? ‘Yeah but I don’t live with Dan. He lives in his own place across the square. We got walkie-talkies. If my health really went I’d want him here looking after me. But I don’t think that will happen, if anything, he is unhealthier than me, even though he is younger. I think I ruined his health.’

In what way? ‘I run him ragged. He’s a proofreader now but when he had an office job he would go in looking rough and his colleagues would say he’s being Julied. A new verb. He was frailer than me to start with, but he’ll be alright. Maybe we’ve had a bit too much fun. Getting riotously drunk all the time. We drink an enormous amount. Trouble is, we like having friends round and I don’t want to go off my friends any more than I already have so I don’t want to see them sober. I’ve got lots of single friends, bless em, and they can be quite needy. They ask me clubbing but I don’t want to be the fat old bird at the disco so they tend to come here. Besides I can’t get out much because of this.’

She holds up her brace again and tells me she only realised how much her foot had deteriorated when she was taking two blind pensioners for a walk — her voluntary work — and one of them asked if she was leading them, or they were leading her. ‘The doctor had told me it was gout but that was a misdiagnosis so I was then told there was a 25% chance I would lose my foot. You don’t ever envisage yourself as an amputee. I was well scared. When I thought I was going to be an amputee I went on the net and typed in ‘hot amputees’ and there are loads of people out there who fancy them, so that wasn’t so bad.’