As he rises from the BBC Breakfast News sofa and disconnects his mike, Jamie Oliver looks suddenly tired. It’s partly to do with the bags under his eyes, partly with his tousled hair and unshaven chin. They give the impression that he left the house in a hurry, that he doesn’t have enough time, that he is running on empty.

He was talking about his latest campaign – to persuade the public to buy British pork, because our welfare standards are so much higher than those in the rest of the EU – and now, as I walk with him back to his dressing room, he slips back into character: becomes more animated, bantering, blokey. Bish, bash, bosh.

It is 10 years since he first appeared on our screens as The Naked Chef and now, at the still tender age of 33, he is the head of a multi-million pound business empire: the Jamie restaurant chains, the Jamie TV shows, the Jamie books, the new magazine (called Jamie), the Jamie cookery schools, even the Jamie video game. And the Jamie brand is global, with his shows being broadcast in 106 countries. He had to turn down a request to cook for Obama’s inauguration because of an earlier commitment.

As if all this wasn’t enough, he has an image to protect – Vespa-riding, organic veg-box buying, and a father of two (with a third on the way). It must be exhausting being him, I say. Does he ever have duvet days? “Not during the week, they come at the weekends. But even then Jools forces me out. She runs a pretty tight ship and doesn’t like looking at her husband in bed. And if she can’t wake me up, it will be the kids sent in to jump on my goolies – that quick jump with the knee pointed down. That usually wakes me up.”

As well as being a global brand, Jamie Oliver is also a formidable political lobbyist, his most dramatic and successful campaign being that to improve the quality of school meals. Not only did he raise public awareness, he persuaded the Government to pledge to spend £280 million on his scheme – out with the Turkey Twizzlers, in with the fruit and veg. Tony Blair acknowledged the change in policy was Oliver’s doing.

Since then, animal welfare has become his main cause. After his programme last year, which exposed the conditions in which battery hens were kept, chicken welfare improved almost overnight. And sales of free-range chickens trebled.

Now, he has turned his attention to pork. With a programme to be broadcast this Thursday, the supermarkets are in a panic, worried that they won’t be able to meet the extra demand for British pork. The power of brand Jamie, eh?

“I know, I know,” he says. “It’s bizarre. I’ve become a professional s—stirrer. But I think if you credit audiences with being able to take the truth, then they will change their shopping habits. I know we’re in a recession, but it only costs an extra 3p per rasher of bacon to buy British. At the moment, 80 per cent of the bacon we eat in this country comes from Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany where they still keep sows in these inhumane stalls. The welfare standards on British farms are so much higher. Our pigs get treated decently. It’s something to be proud of. For Christ’s sake, look for the Union Jack when you buy pork or bacon.”

As the face of Sainsbury’s, Jamie Oliver experienced a conflict of interest last year. When he criticised the supermarket for failing to appear at a public debate about chicken farming, they were not amused. He later wrote an open letter apologising to its staff. Yet with this programme, he is at it again. You almost feel sorry for Sainsbury’s having such a rogue ambassador.

“I know,” he says with his lopsided grin. “But I try to avoid doing what I’m told or what is suggested. Sainsbury’s probably do worry about what I’m going to do next. They get a bit of a bing in this new programme because I think even the good supermarkets are guilty of some misleading labelling. Sainsbury’s was way less guilty than others. Some were guilty of really naughty labelling, using images that were provocative [he means evocative] of the English countryside. The interesting thing is that the day after these programmes go out, the supermarkets see a big difference in sales. So they sit up and take notice. Cash is king.”

Not that the British public always does his bidding straight away. After his school dinners campaign, a group of mothers in Rotherham were filmed passing burgers through the school railings to their children. Those pictures, I ask, did he take them personally? “Well, that happened about six months later, and it was certainly made to look as if it were a response to me. But Julie, one of the mothers, told me later that she didn’t even know who I was, so that couldn’t have been it. Still, it was good in a way, that image, because it did sum up everything I was trying to say. It helped my cause.” It emerged that some of the mothers had never boiled a pan of water or peeled a carrot; that they lived on kebabs and crisps.

So what did Jamie Oliver do for his next campaign? He made a programme called Jamie’s Ministry of Food and featured those same Rotherham mothers, with him heading north to try to teach them how to cook. “Obesity caused by unhealthy eating has become a health epidemic,” he says. “And what we saw in Rotherham was a snapshot of England today. It was a metaphor for every town in this country. You could say I live in a bubble in London, so Ministry of Food was really about me saying that, after 10 years, I felt I was largely preaching to the converted. Rotherham was about persuading people who would never watch a food show to change their eating habits and learn a new life skill.”

Even so, his stock fell last autumn when Ministry of Food was broadcast. “All the coverage in the papers was about me swearing. I even had my mother telling me off. But I don’t think I swore more than on School Dinners. And no one complained on the night of the broadcast. It was because it was the same week as the Jonathan Ross thing. There will always be a number of people who are offended by swearing, but I do think people get a bit holier-than-thou about it. I guess every three years or so, the press feels it has to kick my a—.”

Why does he suppose that is? “I must be Marmite to them. Even if you breathe you offend them.”

As one journalist noted recently, it’s not that you love Jamie Oliver or hate him – it’s that you love him and hate him at the same time. You can hate his mockney banter, yet love his recipes; hate his matey Sainsbury’s ads, yet love his school-meals crusade, and so on.

“I get a bit of stick about the magazine,” he says, “about how egotistical it is.” (There are 27 pictures of him in the launch edition.) “But it is providing a lot of much-needed work for writers and photographers.”

He began diversifying because, he says, he was feeling frustrated with his life. “The frustration was to do with being brought up in a family where money was a private thing. You didn’t talk about it. We were embarrassed about money and then my life had become very public and everyone knew exactly how much money I was making through publishing. You know, when you sell 20 million books, people notice. Even the two times when the media hated me and tried to get the public to hate me, the books went on selling.”

It is usually reported that he is worth £25 million, but he claims that he doesn’t know how much he is worth. “Do you know, I haven’t a clue. You could probably find out from your economics expert on the Telegraph better than I could. There’s certainly not a lot of dough sitting in the bank.

“This recession feels a bit like when my Dad advised me not to do Fifteen [his chain of restaurants staffed by local underprivileged youths]. You see, he has never earned an easy pound in the industry [Oliver’s father, Trevor, is an Essex pub landlord], and he thought I was doing this soft, cuddly, do-gooding thing. But I was on a different journey. I was feeling guilty about my sudden wealth. There are now four Fifteens.

“It’s the same now with the recession. Everyone is advising me to slow down and pull in the reins, but I’m not listening to them. We’re opening five restaurants this year. We’ve got people queuing up every night. You just have to get your pricing structure right. I don’t think it all has to be doom and gloom.”

So he’s going to spend his way out of this recession? “When I’ve earned cash, I’ve never put it in the bank or sat there looking at it. I’ve always invested it. Invested in people. Ten years ago, I had no one. Now I have 100 people in my office and 500 across the restaurants. And by the end of this year, it will be 5,500. We want to make a dent in some of those people made redundant by Woolworths.”

Blimey. Jamie saves our bacon again. Is he difficult to work with? “I think the people I work with think I’m a bit of a lunatic. They can’t read me. I keep getting approached by think tanks wanting advice because they think I’m strategically driven or that I really know about marketing, but I only do things that feel right. You can’t bottle that.”

Hitler said he made his strategic decisions as if sleepwalking – can he relate to that? Oliver laughs. ‘That’s a f—ing tough comparison! When I’ve done stuff wrong, I’ve always known it was going to be wrong, and when I’ve done it right I’ve always known it was right. I’m not academically bright, so the things I do are based on touch, smell, and what feels right. Gut feelings.”

He clicks his fingers in three directions; left, right and straight up. “I’m like that.”

There is an etiquette to meeting a Hollywood star for breakfast. Certain do’s and don’t. Do be on time. Don’t be late. That’s about it, really… Unless the Hollywood star is Kevin Bacon. Here you have some latitude, as I discover when I arrive a little late for breakfast with him because my train has broken down. My grovelling apologies are met with a friendly: ‘Hey, no worries, man. It happens. What you going to have? Think I’m going for the vegetarian with poached egg and wheat toast.’

He looks like he could do with a square meal. He is a knife thin 5ft 11in, and the black shirt he is wearing open down to his ribs makes him look hungry and lupine, an impression compounded by the tufty whiskers on his chin. The depth of his voice, meanwhile, seems to belong to a heavier man. Though there is something cold about his looks — he has a crooked smile, angular cheekbones, an upturned nose and deep-set blue eyes that seem chilly — his manner is warm.

His nice guyness is legendary in Hollywood. Actually, he is a legend in Hollywood, full stop — the 50-year-old actor who has a connection with just about every film that has been made and ever will be made. This phenomenon — his being the centre of Hollywood gravity — was turned into the popular Internet game, book and board game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It challenges players to link other actors to Bacon in six films or fewer. The ‘Bacon number’ of an actor or actress is the number of degrees of separation he or she has from Bacon. The higher the Bacon number, the farther away from Kevin Bacon the actor is. For example, John Wayne has a Bacon number of two: Wayne was in The Longest Day with Robert Wagner, Wagner was in Wild Things with Bacon.

At first Bacon was suspicious that it was a joke at his expense, that it showed he was too promiscuous as an actor — he has been in more than 50 films — and that, while not unattractive, he wasn’t matinee idol handsome enough to be the leading man.’

But his niceness prevailed. He went along with it. Set up a charitable foundation on the back of it. Now, when I ask him whether it has been a blessing or a curse, he says: ‘I don’t think it’s been a good thing for my career. I thought it was going to go away a long time ago but it’s still there. It’s so random that it should be me. The name “Kevin Bacon” sounds a little like “separation”, that’s all it is. With me in it, it is silly and fun. Take me out of it and the idea of connectivity is kind of beautiful. A powerful, small world idea that says that whatever you or I are doing will effect other people down the road for good or ill.’

The British actor Michael Sheen, who played Tony Blair in the Queen, now has a Bacon number of one. In the film Frost/Nixon, written by Peter Morgan, he plays David Frost. Bacon plays Nixon’s chief of staff, Colonel Jack Brennan, an ex marine who guides Nixon through the strategy of the 1977 David Frost/Richard Nixon interviews. For the actor, this film represents another collaboration with director Ron Howard, having starred in his 1995 film Apollo 13.  ‘I was really enthusiastic to come back and work with him again.’  Bacon says. ‘He joins a very short list of directors who’ve actually hired me twice.’

Frost was an unlikely choice as the man to do the first interview with the disgraced former President. ‘I think Nixon’s men thought Frost would be a safe bet,’ Bacon says, splashing Tabasco on his eggs. ‘To me the movie has a boxing element to it. You have a young upstart who gets in the ring with the hardened champion. No one thinks he is going to make it to the third round and they have their coaches, their teams. They went to great lengths to negotiate how the interview would go, what the terms were, what was off limits. My character was in Nixon’s camp anticipating questions, giving moral support. Nixon was fascinated by the armed services, especially the marines. There was a side to him that wished he was cut from that cloth. He was raised as a Quaker and had a different mind set.’

Bacon, who met Jack Brennan as part of his research, says he always gets on well with military types. He has played several, and was especially convincing as a cold-blooded marine in A Few Good Men. I ask if he has ever wondered whether he could have cut it in the Army. ‘I don’t have the right mentality. I was raised to feel disdain for the military. Raised in a liberal household during the Vietnam War. My mother was a political activist and was horrified when she saw me playing with guns. She was very progressive that way. I don’t think I could cut it in the Army but, hey, it was never going to arise. I’m an actor. I play marines. I’ve had them say “you could do it” and I say ‘“trust me, I could not”. I don’t think I have the marine mentality.’ He gesticulates with his fork, conducting the conversation with it. ‘But I don’t question my manliness. That’s not something I struggle with. One of the fun things about being an actor is that you can put yourself in situations where you test yourself. We all have fantasies about kicking someone’s ass, or shooting guns or going down raging rivers. Those are some aspects of being a man. You have to be able to do that stuff. I always try and do my own fight scenes rather than use stunt guys.’

For Apollo 13 he certainly tested himself physically. ‘We shot up there in zero G. Got a sense of what it was like. They took us up in this KC137 airplane over the Gulf of Mexico. You climb straight up then dive. Your stomach as you go over the top… Man. The centrifugal force throws you up and then the gravitation pulls you down. We did 40 runs and when I got down again I kissed the ground. Ron then said, “Why don’t we shoot the movie up there?” And I said “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Then he said: ‘You don’t have to go. Absolutely no pressure. If you don’t want to go, you don’t have to go. Tom’s gonna go. Gary’s gonna go. Bill’s gonna go. I’m gonna go.” After that I had to say yes.’

I like watching that film with my sons, I say, because it teaches them, well, how to be men. How to have grace under pressure. ‘I know what you mean, you can be manly without having to kill someone or beat someone up.’

Bacon married the actress Kyra Sedgwick 20 years ago. They have two children, a boy now 19, and a girl 16. Did he watch Apollo 13 with his son? ‘To be honest I never watch my old movies. If they come on television I will flick on. I’ve no idea whether my son has watched Apollo 13. We never talk about films. I’m pretty sure they’ve never seen Footloose.’

Ah yes, Footloose. Another blessing and curse. It was the summer blockbuster of 1984 and it haunts him still. The story of a city boy who moves to a bible-belt backwater where dancing is banned, it was notable not only for it’s dancing but also its massively moussed hair and jackets with the sleeves pushed up. After that film he was more or less forced to give up dancing in public: If they went to a club, the DJ would eventually play “Footloose” and people would form a circle around him clapping their hands expectantly. Once, during the US Open, he was spotted in the crowd and Footloose duly came on the PA system. He has always played guitar and is to this day in a band The Bacon Brothers — his older brother Michael being the other frontman. They have released three albums but inevitably, when they play a gig, someone will shout out: ‘Do “Footloose”‘. Though it is not one of their songs, they usually oblige.

After Footloose, Bacon seemed to be a paid up member of the ‘Bratpack’ of 80s stars who included Tom Cruise, Christian Slater and his friend Sean Penn. It was assumed he would have his pick of leading roles. A string of box office flops followed and, in the early 1990, just after he turned 30, he was standing with his pregnant wife on the corner of 86th Street and Broadway when he had a panic attack and collapsed on the sidewalk. His mother had been diagnosed with cancer, he was in Tremors, a movie about underground worms, and as he said later ‘my career felt like it was completely in the shitter’.

After the panic attack it was time to reappraise. His agent reminded him of how he had played edgy roles on the New York stage – junkies, male prostitutes. She told him they should look for something small, something character driven. Oliver Stone was casting JFK. Bacon’s transformation into the swaggering gay hustler Willie O’ Keefe in that film was mercurial. And while he may not have had many lines, what he did say was memorable. “You don’t know shit Mr Garrison,” he told Kevin Costner’s character, “‘cos you ain’t never bin fucked in the ass.”

After this he was in great demand as a character actor. The hits followed: Sleepers, Murder in the First, The River Wild, Mystic River and Hollow Man.

All the while he was living in New York rather than Hollywood and his children were kept at arm’s length from the movie industry. ‘Their idea of us is as parents not film actors. We’re the people who tell them to clean up the room. Make pancakes on a Sunday.’

And walk around the house naked? ‘Not any more.’

Why did he stop doing that? ‘I’ve haven’t done that since…’ His sideways grin. ‘In fact I don’t think I’ve ever done that. It’s just one of those stories.’

Norman Mailer said that once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists, so perhaps that is it. Even so, Bacon was once quoted as saying: ‘There’s something therapeutic about nudity. Clothing is one of the external things about a character. Take away the Gucci or Levis and we’re all the same. But not when the nanny is around. I will with my wife and kids.’

The only time his children think of him as an actor, he says, is: ‘When I have to pack up my bags from time to time.  The idea of them watching us pretend to be other people is not that attractive. I guess in Hollywood all their friends’ parents would be connected with the film industry because it is a one-industry town but that is not true of New York. None of their friend’s parents are actors.’

I ask what his friends in New York do for a living. ‘I have friends who are musicians, one is a painter, one is a screenwriter. I know actors but it’s not like I hang out with them, so my kids don’t either.’

He reckons his perspective on life changed as soon as he had children. ‘Yeah that is the moment when you step out of yourself. My whole world evolves around them. I have accepted work I might not have wanted to do because I wanted to provide for them. You have to keep your family together. It is a responsibility. With a boy you work so hard because you know they have to have the right stuff to get out in the world and take the slings and arrows. It’s so bittersweet because you’re happy to see them take on the world, but it is sad when they need you less and less. You have to let go and they are going to have to learn about rejection. Rejection from a girlfriend. Rejection after a job interview. You want to warn them but you can’t.’

He speaks with feeling on this subject. He has been nominated for everything from Screen Actors Guild Awards and Golden Globes but an Oscar nomination always eluded him. His biggest indignity was being removed from the poster of Mystic River, while co-stars Sean Penn and Tim Robbins won Oscars.

The way he and his wife raise their children is different from the way they were raised. He rolls his wedding ring distractedly on his finger as he speaks of this. ‘I am so much closer to my kids than I was to my parents. Not in an overbearing, too involved, step over the boundaries way, but we talk about things. Spend time together. Enjoy each other’s company. My son plays guitar in a band. He hands down never wanted to be an actor. My daughter is still trying to figure out what she wants to do. My wife and I have pounded the table so hard about their not being actors that I think the only reason they would now do it would be out of rebellion. They have had so many years hearing my wife and I talk about the rejection involved. The heartache. Both of us, as well as we’ve done, felt we didn’t want them to be subjected to that. In retrospect I could probably have been a little less adamant.’

His son looks nothing like him, he says. ‘He’s big, dark haired, taller. Not like me, a skinny runt. He could take me down in a second. He has no desire to be famous whereas I had a strong desire to be famous.’

Er, why? ‘I grew up in Philadelphia, a big city but also provincial. It feels like a small town. My father was the head of the city planning division and had wide, sweeping ideas. Kind of he turned it into a platform for urban renewal and became famous in Philadelphia. Not wealthy but famous. He was on the cover of Time Magazine. I saw that and whether it was nature or nurture I don’t know, but I knew I wanted to be more famous than him. I knew I wanted to kick his ass. We got on OK but I had to beat him.’

What would Freud have made of that, does he suppose? ‘I don’t know. Was it Oedipal, you mean? I don’t know. But I do know I always craved love and attention. There was always a side of me that wanted to perform. That feeling of walking into a room and wanting everyone to look at me. I was the youngest of six and was trying to get attention.’

His parent’s didn’t pay him enough attention, he reckons. ‘Not as much attention as I pay my children. They were always supportive of what I did, but they were busy people. Every night they would be out at meetings.’

He doesn’t think he is like his father in terms of personality. ‘I’d like to think I’m not as self-obsessed. He was super self-involved in a way that I don’t think I am, even in this ego driven profession.’

His father never took the young Kevin to the movies and he wasn’t a movie fan until his late teens. ‘Part of the reason was that it hurt me to not be in the movie. It was killing me that I wasn’t in it. I was hungry. I would go home and want to act it out.’

By the time he was nine, all his five siblings had left home. At 17, he did too, skipping college to go to New York and study drama at The Circle in the Square with a view to becoming a film star. So which was the movie that converted him? ‘Midnight Cowboy. I saw that and thought yeah that’s what I want to do, that kind of acting, in that kind of film.’

He says that the dramatic ups and downs of his career have taught him that if he is to feel fulfilled he has to take three things out of the equation. The first is the size of his part. The second is the size of the budget. And the third is the size of his salary. Once you get rid of those things, your possibilities exponentially explode. You get to work with the directors who matter. You get to make movies like The Woodsman.

In that 2004 film, which he produced, he plays Walter, a reformed child abuser, out on parole. The tension in the film comes from the potential for abuse, as Walter struggles to control his proclivity. Bacon’s performance is immensely sympathetic. ‘Of course paedophilia happens way more than we hear about or talk about,’ he says now. ‘Because so much is ambiguous.’

What made his performance more arresting was his apparent normality. ‘Yeah I wasn’t drooling or hiding in the bushes. For me the first thing people do is call them monster. I’ve done it myself. “Monster. Monster.” The more frightening reality is that they might not be a monster. No horns. Just regular guys sitting in this restaurant, or on the bus, or in church and we are unable to identify them and that, to me, is so much more frightening.’

Kevin Bacon believes we all have darkness in our souls — anger, unhealthy sexual drives and violence — but we also have innate goodness. On balance, he tries to be a good person, he says. He tries to be positive too. ‘If you have a bad morning, it doesn’t mean you have to have a bad afternoon.’

 

There is, you sense, a discontent at the core of Michael Palin, one that gnaws away at him with steady purpose. It’s not to do with his manner, which is as amiable as you would expect. Indeed, when I tell him what my editor emailed — ‘God, I love her’ — in response to my email saying ‘Am interviewing Palin today’, he laughs vigorously. Says he gets that a lot and that during the US election he found it disconcerting to see headlines such ‘Palin’s daughter pregnant’. As his weathered and handsome face is carved with smile creases, you suspect laughter comes easily to him. So no, it’s not that.

Nor is it to do with him looking a little uncomfortable today because we have asked him to wear a jacket and tie, or rather The Reform Club, where we want to photograph him, requires that he wear a jacket and tie (he keeps touching his collar as he talks). This was the Club from which he began his first travel documentary twenty years ago, you see. Around the World in Eighty Days followed the route taken by the fictional Phileas Fogg, who also set out from the Club, and led to ‘a television series which stands as an unparalleled tribute to man’s ability to make life difficult for himself’.

Palin also ended that first series here amid the Club’s marbled columns and galleried arcades, or at least he tried to. ‘I came back in triumph with two hours to spare and they wouldn’t let me in because they had a function on, which I suppose was fair enough. Clubs are not there to get people in; they are there to keep people out. We had to take a spontaneous decision: do we pretend I got in, walk up to the door and cut there, or do we acknowledge what happened? As I was shagged out, I opted for the latter, a little piece to camera that worked wonders for us. The perfect ending. People love to see things go wrong.’

A few weeks ago, Palin relived the most memorable episode from that series, the one where he spent a week sleeping on the deck of a dhow as he hitched a lift from Dubai to Bombay (his lavatory was a box suspended over the stern). His researchers somehow tracked down the 18-man Indian crew that took him over in 1988 and his reunion with them is the subject of a new chapter in an anniversary edition of the book published next week. ‘There is a scene on the dhow where I am wary about being me because I think me being me will be dull,’ he recalls now. ‘I was kind of acting the role of Phileas Fogg, the old Victorian fogey, and then I got ill and just said so to camera. Said how lousy I felt and that I wanted to go home. It was a turning point because after that I could just be myself.’

And so a genre was invented… Around the world in 80 days became around the world in 20 years — with Pole to Pole, Sahara and Himalayas being among the variations on the original theme. Rating were enormous, as high as 12.5 million at times, which was unheard of for a travel programme. The books that accompanied the various BBC series sold in their millions, and continue to sell.

This popularity seems to have been down to a number of factors. 1) Palin was a former Python and everyone loves the Pythons. 2) He had a pleasing way with words, describing camels, for example, as ‘sinking down like collapsible tables’. 3) It was also to do with his sweetness of character, an obvious decency, likability and good humour that came across whenever he was in extremis, as for example when he discovered the Peruvian brew he was sipping was made from old women’s spittle. Such was the sense that viewers had of him being the ideal travelling companion, even The Dalai Lama, one of his fans, joked that he would like to be reincarnated as Michael Palin’s assistant.

In light of all this — what Palin has called his ‘ruthless niceness’ — there is an incident I want to ask him about which seems uncharacteristically cold and out of character. It concerns his wife Helen whom he met on holiday in Suffolk when he was 15, she 16, and married in 1966, eight years later, after he graduated from Oxford. When Palin was in Borneo filming Full Circle, he received a message to ring home. Helen had been diagnosed with a brain tumour and was about to have an emergency operation. He didn’t rush back. Does this surprise him in retrospect? ‘It was Helen who talked me out of coming back on the next available flight. She was very practical and sensible. She said, “I’m having the operation in four days. By the time you get back here it will probably be over. The doctor says it is a benign tumour. I’d rather you carry on.’ She was probably stressed at the thought I would be stressed.’

Must have been quite a poignant goodbye at the end of that phone call though. ‘It was very tough but she had the hardest job because there I was saying what a wonderful time I had just had up country with the head-hunters and she had to explain about the tumour and then talk me down from my shock. I spoke to the surgeon before and after the operation.’

Did he appreciate her more after that scare; find their time together more precious? ‘I was hugely relieved that she had got through it and was proud of the way she had dealt with it. I don’t think it changed our relationship. I think we felt we had made the right decision. Nothing more that could be said.’

Helen Palin trained as a teacher but in mid life became a bereavement counsellor, and Michael Palin is no stranger to bereavement. His older sister Angela killed herself in 1987 at the age of 52, leaving a husband and three grown children. Palin found the suicide hard to come to terms with and blamed his father’s withering criticisms of her as a child (she longed to be an actress but encountered only paternal scorn). Two years later he was with his friend and fellow Python Graham Chapman when he died of cancer. And when his friend George Harrison died in 2001 he said he felt as if a part of him had ‘closed down’. Given these bereavements and his response to them, I ask why his wife decided to become a bereavement counselling. ‘I don’t know, I think a friend of hers said if you have time on your hands and are good at talking to people you should do it. She keeps it quite. Doesn’t like it becoming public knowledge because when people come to her she wants them to come to their anonymous counsellor for that week, not Mrs Michael Palin.’

Fair enough. She must be a good listener because according to John Cheese Palin is a good talker: ‘“Yap, yap, yap”, he goes, all day long and through the night… and then, when everyone else has gone to bed, he writes a diary.’ Palin gives his room-filling laugh when I remind him of this Cleese quote. ‘Put it this way, there were no silent Pythons. We all had a lot to say and one person who has a lot to say notices when another person who has a lot to say interrupts them. John talks an awful lot. Doesn’t like to be interrupted… It’s true, though, I am a chatterbox. Can’t help it. I get enthusiastic about things. John and I were on holiday in Spain and I became obsessed with doors — leather and brass — and by the end he was pleading with me to shut up about the doors.’

Making travel documentaries was, of course, the second half of an already illustrious career. The first half could not have gone any better either. He was in the comedy equivalent of the Beatles, after all. In fact the Beatles, along with Pink Floyd and The Who, became not only fans but also friends. ‘Yes I was quite surprised by this extraordinary link between Python and the rock music world. Our comedy appeared to be provocative and mischievous and I suppose the rock bands identified with that spirit. I remember hearing very early on that Paul McCartney would always stop recording when Python was on so that he could watch it. We thought that was terrific.’

In his diaries, Palin gives a sense of how the Pythons behaved like rock stars, in terms of their competing egos at least and their demands for first class travel and special chefs when on location. ‘We were and we weren’t,’ he says now.  ‘In America our fans would wait outside hotels for us. A small band of very enthusiastic women. There was also the whole subculture of Python fans who were mainly college kids. If you do comedy you have to see the absurdity of adulation. We weren’t like rock stars in the sense of playing big stadiums, though I think we would have quite liked to have been. I suppose we did do the Hollywood Bowl but it wasn’t like we were going on stage every night and performing the dead parrot sketch. Our work was done on film and television.’

He writes in his diary about how he smoked grass in his Python days, but did he also do the harder drugs his rock stars friends were doing? ‘No I didn’t really. Not sure why that should be. Partly because Helen and I had been married ten years by the mid Seventies. We had three children and that kept my feet firmly on the ground. We drank a lot of wine. I was aware we were drinking a lot and didn’t want to end up like Graham [an alcoholic who would go on binges with Keith Moon]. I didn’t want to reach a point where I couldn’t function. Sometimes I could see Graham being loud and objectionable and I knew it wasn’t like him. I thought, I don’t want to be transformed by drink like that. I’m not very good at that drink/drugs thing anyway because beyond a certain point I become catatonic. It doesn’t make me witty or better company, just leaves me with a headache. I think it’s in my character. I’m fairly straight.’

When he says his three children kept his feet on the ground at this time, was it that he was trying to be a better role model to them than his father had been to him? ‘Yes, I wanted to set an example. I love the children and watching them grow up, and going to school plays, and taking them on family holidays was very important for me. I think because I was away a lot, travelling to the States four times a year, it made me feel the importance of coming home. It’s only when you go away that you realise what home means to you.’

His own father had been a frustrated man who had felt himself a failure. Cursed by a terrible stammer, he had never achieved the success he expected from having been to Shrewsbury and Cambridge. Palin used to shrink away with embarrassment when he brought friends home and he says he longed for his father to be like any other father. ‘He hadn’t imagined that he would end up a minor manager in a Sheffield steel works and I think he wanted to hang on to the old structures as much as he could. So even though he couldn’t really afford to do it, it was very important for him to send me away to boarding school. He wasn’t lacking in humour or emotion but he kept a lot in reserve. He saw acting as a terrible waste of my education and potential.’

Palin’s hero is the rugged Ernest Hemingway and, tellingly, the central character in Palin’s novel Hemingway’s Chair adopts the writer as the father figure he never had. Palin senior had one thing in common with Hemingway, a very quick temper. Palin junior recognises that he probably overcompensates for this by being nice to everyone. When filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the director asked him to crawl through the mud for a seventh time, and he had a little outburst. The other Pythons were so surprised they all stood up and clapped.

Palin went to Shrewsbury, too. Why didn’t he want to continue the family tradition and send his own children there? ‘Well I had been happy at Shrewsbury but my wife was certain she didn’t want to send her boys away to school. I suppose we might have had some discussion about sending them to a private school in London, but it was the Seventies. We all thought public schools were going to disappear. We felt politically that it was the right thing to send them to state schools. I’ve no regrets, but I do discuss it with my children sometimes and ask them if they ever wished they had gone away to public school and they all have said there is a certain confidence that people who have been to public schools have. It’s because you have a top-of-the pile mentality. But there were drawbacks. I can remember after Shrewsbury feeling a certain awkwardness when meeting people further down the social scale. A very English thing. How do you talk to people who live on council estates? I thought, I don’t want my children to have that barrier.’

So. This gnawing discontent. I reckon it is to do with a feeling he has that he has never left his mark, not properly. Never really done anything worthwhile. Never quite caught his own attention. Ultimately, it seems to be connected to the long shadow cast over his life by his father. Though Palin has been outrageously successful in two careers, he still hears a nagging voice — his father’s presumably — which tells him he has never had a proper job. Is that the case? ‘All the time, oh yes. Forty years without a proper job. What have I done with my life? What are my qualifications? I can make people laugh. I can talk to people. I can do a piece to camera without falling over. But these are not great talents. I should have learned something. I should have learned languages.’

He feels shallow? ‘I feel fortunate that I am able to do what I feel I want to do, but I’m not sure it amounts to much. I look at people like David Attenborough and think he doesn’t just travel, he is an expert in his field. He knows a lot about his subject. What do I know a lot about? How to make people laugh? Well that’s not much. Always the pupil never the professor.’

Has he considered pursuing the sort of academic life his fellow Oxford man and Python Terry Jones pursues? ‘I think I am too much a jack-of-all-trades. You’ve got to put in the time. Terry is very knowledgeable about medieval history. He has written serious books about Chaucer. There was never anything where I had that expertise. That focus. No equivalent. I think it is a character flaw.’

So he never had a clear idea of what he wanted to do? ‘I still don’t and I’m 65.’ In 1977, Palin recorded in his diary: ‘I don’t really want to do comedy all my life.’ So he proved himself as an actor instead, starring in two of the best British films of the 1980s, A Private Function and A Fish Called Wanda. Then he reinvented himself as a travel documentary maker. Now he says: ‘It is a question of what you are. What am I? Am I just me doing things? I don’t want to be a television celebrity. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not a  bad actor, but I’m not a great actor. I’m not a bad television presenter, but I’m not a great television presenter. They are all thing I know I can do, but I don’t know where the point is where I can say, “I’ve done that” and can walk away.’

Blimey. Angst. Delivered with firm-jawed cheerfulness. He has done documentaries on subjects other that travel, notably on painting and, most recently, a moving Time Watch about the last day of the First World War. But you have to wonder why he doesn’t feel he can say ‘I’ve done that’ and walk away. Surely his record-breaking book sales alone are enough achievement for one lifetime? ‘There again, I never feel secure. You are only as good as your last book. I mean my Himalayas book might have sold, I don’t know, something like 600,000 to a million in hardback but my last one New Europe was different, it sold about 250,000 to 300,000 in hardback. You can’t take the euphoria too seriously.’

That sound you can hear up and down the country is authors falling off their chairs in astonishment. A good, healthy sale for a hardback is 5000 copies. If it sells 10,000 that is enough to get you onto the bestseller list. I ask about his motivation again. He can’t need the money. ‘These days, who knows? The people at Lehman Brothers thought they were comfortable. I’m fairly cautious with money so I’m fine but…’

Palin doesn’t play the stock market. Doesn’t understand people who change cars and houses all the time. Still lives in the three railway workers’ cottages, run together like carriages, in Gospel Oak that he has lived in for more than 30 years. He is, he says, ‘no good at extravagance’.

I ask whether he fills his days with work, even though he doesn’t need the money, as a way of avoiding melancholy. ‘I have good and bad days. I could happily spend my days swanning around galleries enjoying slowing down, not rushing at it, long lunches, but I would have to have something to keep me going, some project.’

The current project is the second volume of the diaries he has kept since 1969. The first covered ‘the Python years’ up to 1979. To him the exercise of keeping a diary is about proving to himself he has not wasted a day. He refers to his diary writing habit as a ‘tenacious parasite’. ‘It’s nerdy of me to keep a diary, I know. I do it to remind myself not to waste time. You hear of people giving up weeks where not very much happened. But I don’t want to be oppressed by time either. I want to spend time with my family and friends. What I don’t want to be is public property.’

He says he hates the invasion of privacy that comes with fame. Wants to watch the world. Doesn’t want the world to be watching him. Occasionally, though, when he says this, his wife gets exasperated and says, ‘Well, don’t sign up for a 10-part series when the camera is following you around the world if you don’t want to be recognised!’ ‘

Clearly Palin has paradise syndrome, the name given to a psychological condition which gives the sufferer a sense of dissatisfaction, even though he may have achieved his ambitions. The question is why. Why does he feel hollow and unfulfilled? I think it is partly our fault, the fault of his adoring public. We project a lot onto Michael Palin, turn him into a loveable national institution he doesn’t feel he is or deserves to be. He cannot understand why he is so popular because, paradoxically, while we all like him, he doesn’t seem to like himself all that much. Indeed he finds himself dull company — this business of ‘me being me’ — and says he has a low boredom threshold. His tragedy, then, is that while much of his high-achieving life has been lived in compensation for the life of his low-achieving father, he seems to have ended up just as frustrated. Well, perhaps not a tragedy. A pity.

 

Although Rush Limbaugh doesn’t actually work from a bunker, he does have a bunker mentality. His studio is on the third floor of a (purposefully) anonymous building 100 yards off the white sands of Palm Beach, Florida, and about a mile from his gated mansion (the one next to Chuck Norris’s). Along with the Gulfstream jet (cost: $54 million), fleet of sports cars and eight-year contract, worth $400 million, this mansion is his reward for being the most listened-to talk-radio host in America, a title he has held for 20 years.

But it is also his compensation. Professional Right-wing controversialists do tend to upset people, and Limbaugh has had his share of death threats. He has also had his quota of criticism from the media, or the liberal media, as he tends to call it. He hates interviews and has rarely given any, though he does have a soft spot for this newspaper, because it was once owned by his sometime friend and neighbour Conrad Black (currently serving a 6½-year jail sentence for fraud; Limbaugh wrote a letter to the judge attesting to Lord Black’s good character).

The ‘drive-by media’, as Limbaugh also calls it, came down to Florida looking for him when he insulted Michael J. Fox a couple of years ago – by saying the actor was hamming up his Parkinson’s disease for political gain after he appeared in an appeal for embryonic stem-cell research. They came back a few months later when Limbaugh was arrested for ‘doctor shopping’ painkiller prescriptions; that is, persuading several doctors to give him overlapping ones. He pleaded not guilty and cut a deal; the charges were dismissed after 18 months on condition that he continue rehabilitation and treatment with a therapist. The press staked out his mansion on both occasions, but never found his studio on this palm-fringed boulevard. You wouldn’t know it was here.

He calls it his ‘Southern Command’, having spent most of his career broadcasting from New York, and describes it on air as ‘heavily fortified’, yet when you travel up in a lift and step into a glass and leather reception area, there isn’t even a receptionist, let alone a security guard, just several white locked doors and a CCTV camera that follows you. One of the doors buzzes. I am expected.

On the walls of the corridor there is evidence of Limbaugh’s considerable power and influence, and his friends in high places. Here a framed picture of him with George Bush. Here one of him with Donald Rumsfeld. Here he is with Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan.

There is a humidor – Limbaugh is a connoisseur of cigars – and a bust of Churchill. There is also a bust of Beethoven, which has a plaque reading: ‘A genius who produced masterpieces without hearing.’

Limbaugh became almost completely deaf at the age of 50, but is able to hear callers now thanks to a cochlear implant – an electronic device which stimulates nerves in the inner ear. It explains his way with a monologue, which actually is a dialogue with himself. But even if he could hear, he probably wouldn’t listen. Rush Limbaugh is a talker, not a listener. He keeps it up for three hours at a stretch, five days a week from noon until three. There are commercial breaks and phone-ins, but mostly it is him delivering homilies on politics and current affairs, extemporaneously. His fluency is breathtaking.

Some 20 million Americans tune in to hear it on 600 stations across what he calls ‘this fruited land’. And he says he’s not retiring until everyone agrees with him.

He is on air now – I can hear him over the speakers – ‘Welcome back, this is Rush Limbaugh, your shining light, the doctor of democracy, the all-knowing, all-sensing, all-caring Maha Rushie…’ I get slightly lost as I’m looking for the control booth and end up in his private washroom. There are several big black polo shirts on hangers and, in his medicine cabinet, cold remedies and bottles of Listerine and Drakkar aftershave, but no painkillers. That ship has sailed, it seems.

For the next two hours I sit behind a glass panel and watch him perform. Though it is radio, his is a physical performance. He raises his arms and shakes them in mock frustration. He takes his glasses off and pinches the bridge of his nose. He drums his fingers, as you can sometimes hear on air. Though he doesn’t use notes he does have some papers on his desk which he taps as a form of punctuation, and sometimes he will crumple them up in disgust, another sound effect.

In the corner of his studio he has a standard bearing a silky Stars and Stripes. Behind his desk, there is a neon replica of his signature. At 57, he is looking fitter than he has done for a long time, having shed a hundredweight (he weighed 23 stone at one point).

His hair is slicked back and he is dressed in a black polo shirt and deck shoes without socks. There is a rolling musicality to his voice.

His tone is warm and confidential. He has the rhetorician’s habit of repeating himself three times in three different ways.

Today, as usual, he is riffing about Barack Obama – ‘the Lord Messiah, the merciful, the acting President…’ – whom he dislikes intensely.

When Former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a few days ago that he would be breaking with his party to vote for Obama, Limbaugh said it was only because he was black. Groan. He was being insulting, of course, on many levels, to both men, but at least he was being consistent with the Limbaugh world view, the view of the fabled ‘angry white man’. Indeed, it would have seemed hypocritical of him to start making compromises on the grounds of sensitivity at this stage in his career.

Besides, he doesn’t go easier on the McCain camp. He described the Republican candidate as a phony conservative and, when Sarah Palin first appeared, dismissed her as ‘some babe McCain met at a convention’. He has come round to Palin since then, saying that she ‘kicked Biden’s butt’ in that vice-presidential debate. His politics are closer to hers than McCain’s. And ultimately he would rather have McCain for all his faults than Obama. ‘McCain’s right,’ he said on air recently. ‘We do have them right where we want them because they think it’s over.’ Note the ‘We’. Limbaugh does not pretend to be impartial.

Inside the control booth there is a staff of three: Jim, a sound engineer wearing headphones; Dawn, a stenographer with long blonde hair (who sends Limbaugh real-time transcripts of on-air phone-ins), and his long-time producer Bo Snerdly, a tall, well-cushioned Afro-American with an affable manner, a flat cap on backwards and spectacles dangling from a cord around his neck.

Limbaugh does not have sidekicks with him on air, but he does keep up a running conversation with Snerdly, who is almost as Right wing as he is. They banter via an internal talk-back circuit. Snerdly has his own twice-weekly spot on air in which he introduces himself as an ‘African-American-in-good-standing-and-certified-black-enough-to-criticise-Obamaguy.’ It is a deliberately insensate but amusing take on the race issue in this election. What Left-wingers, or ‘Rush-deniers’, as he calls them, don’t get about the self-aggrandising Limbaugh is that he is first and foremost a satirist: funny, self-mocking and entertaining. He couldn’t have held his audience for 20 years if he was only nasty, bigoted and extremely Right wing.

The broadcast over, I join Limbaugh in the studio and ask if he ever has off days when he’s not in the mood. Though he can hear, thanks to the acoustics in here, he stares straight at me, lip-reading. ‘I have days where I feel I’ve left half my brain at home and I’m not functioning 100 per cent, but I don’t think the audience would ever know it, and there’s never a day I don’t want to do it. I prep it, but I don’t think about it until it starts. At noon today I had no idea what the first thing was I was going to say until about 20 seconds into the theme music. It’s improv. Stream of consciousness. That little pressure improves my performance. I do my best, most expansive thinking when I am speaking. I get on a roll.’

He surely does. Limbaugh is always a factor in American elections.

When the Republicans won the House of Representatives in 1994 for only the second time in 50 years, they made Limbaugh an honorary member of Congress. If by some fluke the Republicans win this time, in contradiction of the polls, will that be partly down to Limbaugh?

‘That’s so hard to measure,’ he says.

He’s being falsely modest and possibly disingenuous. One of his biggest successes in this election cycle was Operation Chaos, a radio campaign designed to encourage Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton and prolong internecine fighting among Democrats. Karl Rove, ‘the President’s brain’, reckons it helped tilt Texas for Clinton. She herself said as much the day after the vote: ‘Be careful what you wish for, Rush.’ Berkeley is doing a course study on it.

‘I came up with Operation Chaos because we were facing a Republican primary that was over, with most of my audience dissatisfied with the choice. My audience wasn’t up. Excited. Jazzed. I figured we had many more months of the liberal media salivating over the Democratic primaries on the cable networks and that that could be divisive. I don’t want Obama to be President, he would be a disaster, but I do want him to be bloodied up politically, be forced to acquit himself to a political audience that isn’t sycophantic. Someone had to do it.’

But Obama is the Democratic presidential candidate now and I wonder whether the race issue makes Limbaugh nervous. After all, at a White House correspondents’ dinner during the Clinton administration, the President joked that Limbaugh had stood up for Attorney-General Janet Reno, but he ‘only did it because she was attacked by a black guy’.

(The ‘black guy’ being Representative John Conyers.) Limbaugh was in the audience, and he was livid. He demanded, and received, a White House apology. ‘There is nothing worse than being branded a racist,’ he said afterwards.

On the race issue now, he reckons he has nothing to feel nervous about. ‘Obama’s people are trying to silence any criticism of him by implying it would be perceived as racist. It’s a form of intimidation but I’m not going to be intimidated by them.’

Until 1988, when Limbaugh more or less invented the talk-radio format as a political tool, the liberal media in America had a monopoly, he reckons. ‘The reason my show was successful was that so many people with a conservative viewpoint did not think it was being reflected in the media. I validate what they already think.’ He reckons he is not always preaching to the choir, though. ‘We get Democrats. Calls from people who disagree with me all the time. Last week I had a call from a woman in Dallas who said I was causing her high blood pressure because she couldn’t stop herself listening to my show. The doctor told her to stop and she wouldn’t.’

His audience is now 12 times the circulation of The New York Times, he tells me. ‘And you can add up CNN, MSNBC and Fox, and my audience is 20 times that. They have no pretence of objectivity. They are activists now and they make no bones about it. CNN, MSNBC and Fox all opinionise. Like I do. They acknowledge this, and so it has become a battle between the two medias. The liberal media see this Obama candidacy as historic because race is a big deal to them. They think this country committed Original Sin. I actually believe that most of their support for Obama is that they are creaming in their jeans about the historical nature of the campaign. They want to be a part of it. They want to make it happen. They want a stake in it. They want to be able to say they did it if Obama wins.’

Well, he is going to win, isn’t he? ‘No. I don’t see it, Nigel. I think he’s been dead in the water since the primaries. He is going to need to be up 10 to 12 points to win by three or four. Don’t forget that Hillary winning was a foregone conclusion, too. If the polls had been right it would have been Giuliani versus Hillary. That’s why polls a year out are worthless. Obama is going around as the acting President. It’s off-putting. Unionised blue-collar Democrats didn’t vote for him, they voted for Hillary.’

Wasn’t that to do with race? ‘No… well it might be to a certain degree, but there was never any substance to his speeches, just soaring rhetoric. That guy can say nothing better than anyone I have ever heard say nothing.’ He drums his fingers. ‘My take on this is that we are all Americans and I am sick and tired of hyphenated Americans. Afro-American, Hispanic-Americans.

‘I am truly colour blind and I wish everyone else was. We Balkanise when we say only women can represent women in Congress and only Jews can represent Jews and only blacks can represent blacks. It’s bullshit. We all want the same things. Prosperity and a decent education for our kids. Treating this country like it is stuck 50 years ago is bullshit; we have made more progress than anyone over this. Get over it. If Obama says stupid things I’m not going to say they are not stupid because he’s black. He’s running for President, for God’s sake. It’s the Left who has been racist by agonising about whether he is black enough. Is he authentic enough? Does he have a civil rights record? For me he’s a liberal. That is reason enough to oppose him.’

Limbaugh thinks there is a war going on between people like him who want small, efficient government and people who want a powerful state that decides who gets what. ‘And they use hoaxes like global warming to advance their agenda of higher taxation and bigger government.’

Oh dear. You don’t have to agree with his red-meat views to find them insightful. They represent, after all, the authentic voice of conservative, and neo-conservative, America. But there is one issue about which I think he is dangerously wrong. Global warming. After all, I point out, 98 per cent of the world’s leading scientists in this area don’t think global warming is a hoax.

He stares at me. ‘Nigel, man-made global warming is a 100 per cent, full-fledged, undeniable hoax.’

That’s his opinion. ‘No, it’s not even arguable in terms of science.’

Of course it is, I say, and he’s being deliberately provocative to say it isn’t. ‘We don’t have the power to make cold weather warm. We can’t make warm weather cold. We can’t produce rain clouds. We can’t steer hurricanes, we can’t produce diddly squat and the idea that only advanced democracies are doing this with their automobiles is absurd.

Global warming is a religion. It has what all religions have which is faith, because no one can prove their religion. It has a Garden of Eden element, destruction brought by humanity then redemption for our sins by paying higher taxes and getting rid of our cars and planes.’

Does part of him go after a subject like that just to wind people up?

‘No, I believe it. I hate people who feel rather than think. Most people feel they don’t matter. When they are told they can save the planet, well, that gives their lives meaning. These stupid ribbons – breast cancer, Aids awareness, they say – “I care more than you.” ‘ He drums his fingers on the table again.

Limbaugh doesn’t give the impression of having doubts, but does he?

Does he have long nights of the soul? ‘I’d only have those if I had lied, made something up that I don’t really believe, for an illicit motive. I won’t be deliberately provocative just to get people to listen.’

Was there a point at which he decided he would have to thicken his skin if he was going to last in talk radio – not take insults personally, I mean? ‘Insults are badges of honour. There is nothing anyone can say that would offend me. Prior to doing this show no one hated me. No one thought I was a racist, sexist or homophobic bigot.

No one thought I was a hate-monger. I was not raised to be hated. I was raised to be loved. Within six months I was getting death threats.’

For all his claimed equanimity, there is a residual paranoia, vulnerability and vanity that floats around Rush Limbaugh like a toxic cloud. He hates being photographed, for example, because: ‘They are going to try to get the most embarrassing or unflattering shot of you they can.’ They. Always they. These dark forces out to get him. I ask about the insecurities that lay behind his dependency on painkillers.

There was pain to kill, after all, and it wasn’t physical. ‘That’s all in the past,’ he says. ‘Done. The rehab was in Arizona. A spartan place called The Meadows. Not one of these half-assed places for celebrities. It was five weeks and I really got into it. Very educational for me to learn about myself. It was inspiring. I can’t imagine taking a pain pill now. It holds no attraction. I haven’t had a relapse or craving since then. I had to talk to a therapist for 18 months afterwards. Never done that before. Thought it bunk. Actually that helped.’

Born into a family of lawyers, Limbaugh obtained his radio licence at the age of 15 and began Dj-ing on a local radio station. One insecurity that dates back to that time is that he was wounded by his father’s disapproval of his chosen profession. He was also miserable when his father insisted he attend college. Under protest, he enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University, where he lasted a year before dropping out. After that he was fired six times by radio stations and other employers. It was a wobbly start and, as a defence mechanism, he seems to have acquired an ultra-confident alter ego.

Nevertheless, he tells me that when he’s at home, when he can drop his public guard, he can feel flat. ‘Mentally, I’m zapped after this show every day. I don’t do anything for three hours. I go read a novel or play golf. I won’t speak a word because I don’t use the phone. Sure I can get melancholy.’

I never had him figured as an emotional man. Isn’t his whole shtick that you have to think not feel? ‘Don’t cry easily. Get close to crying then I stop it. A movie or a book will get me misty-eyed. It’s always happy ending good stuff that gets me crying, not bad stuff.’

‘Last time?’ Long pause. ‘Last time was when my little cat died. Five years old. Had a stroke. I had two cats and this one had the personality and almost humanlike behaviour. Pets are like sports: you think you can invest a lot in them without consequences.’

And like wives. He has been married three times, though he hasn’t had any children. He met his current girlfriend, a West Palm Beach events planner, last year. When I ask about the ups and downs in his personal relationships he hesitates again. ‘I would find myself very difficult to live with because I am totally self-contained and resent having to do things I don’t want to do. Now I can choose. When I’m put in a position where I don’t want to be there, I make sure everyone else is miserable.’

That’s some confession, even for a thick-skinned man. He seems to know himself well, knows he can be selfish and that he cuts quite a lonely figure – just him and his remaining cat rattling around in that big house. He also knows he is easily bored. ‘I don’t have guests on my show because I don’t care what other people think,’ he tells me. ‘Most guests are boring.’ But it’s not only others he is bored with, it is also, perhaps, himself. This may be what explains his recklessness, his bravado, his determination to say the unsayable. And perhaps it also explains why he never misses a beat, until you draw him out about himself – how he is difficult to live with, how he cried when his cat died, how, to his surprise, he found it helpful talking to a therapist. Only then does he hesitate. As we part he bets me a cigar from Desmond Sautter’s of Mayfair that Obama won’t win. I’d better go and choose one.

When there are no cameras around, Ian Hislop wears black-rimmed glasses rather than contact lenses. And in between series of Have I Got News For You he sometimes grows a full-set beard – Naval in style and grey in colour. There is a difference, then, between his public and private identity.

There is also a connection, symbolised by the poppy he wears in the lapel of his pinstriped suit as he sits behind his cluttered desk at the Private Eye office in Soho. Though he is best known as a satirist, he has a serious side. He makes documentaries about the First World War. When he wears a poppy it is not in a spirit of post-modern irony, it is with pride.

Today, as on most Sundays, you will find Hislop in his local church in Sissinghurst, Kent.

“They do a traditional Remembrance Day service,” he says. “Reading out the names of villagers who were killed in the Great War. Laying wreathes. I find it incredibly moving. You can’t understand Twenties England until you appreciate it was under a cloud of mourning. Nearly everyone was grieving.”

It is history that has become the abiding passion of Hislop’s middle years (he’s 48). Tomorrow the latest episode of Not Forgotten, his poignant and understated series looking at the stories behind the names on First World War memorials, is about the Conscientious Objectors, or “conchies” as they were popularly – but not affectionately – known. Often Methodists or Quakers, they took the commandment Thou Shall Not Kill to mean Thou Shall Not Kill Ever, Under Any Circumstances.

Ninety years on, Hislop asks whether these conchies were “cowards and shirkers” or whether they were courageous in their refusal to fight. “Some 16,000 men applied for exemption when conscription was introduced in 1916,” he says.

“Most of the ones trying it on soon gave it up. They went before a tribunal where they would be asked: ‘What would you do if a German was going to kill your mother?’ Most buckled at that point and enlisted. The ones who held out despite the intimidation were incredibly brave in their way. Their single-mindedness was extraordinary.”

One of the leading conchies was a lay preacher who asked in a sermon “Would Jesus bayonet a German?” The congregation took the view that, on balance, he probably would. The religious aspect intrigued Hislop because his grandfather, who fought at Passchendaele, was a Presbyterian lay preacher who believed in the Augustine idea of justifiable wars.

“The C of E wasn’t the limp and liberal institution it is today,” he says. “It was much more muscular. Some of the sermons by the likes of Bishop Winnington-Ingram were blood-curdling. I found a sermon my grandfather gave after the war and it was clear that he believed it was his Christian duty to fight. It had been a testing moment for him to go over the top. He had been tried and, to his relief, had not been found wanting. I can imagine his attitude to the conchies would have fallen short of admiration.”

We reflect upon Samuel Johnson’s line that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. “Men of our generation feel that keenly. We have not had to test our courage and prove ourselves as men.”

He imagines that, as a young man in 1914, he’d have taken the King’s shilling. “I’d have been in the rush of public schoolboys who felt they had to. What I hadn’t appreciated until now is that there are other ways to test your courage. When the conchies were being knocked around in a cell, the easy thing would have been to give in.”

In one case conscientious objection meant two brothers being ostracised by their father, a lieutenant colonel. Father-son relationships are the core of male identity in war, Hislop reckons. Famously, Kipling nearly died from grief after the son he encouraged to join up was killed in action. Hislop took his son and daughter to where their great-grandfather fought in Flanders – something he couldn’t do with his own father, a civil engineer, who died of cancer when Hislop was 12.

I ask who his role models were in his father’s absence. “I had a wonderful English teacher who became a friend. Probably he fulfilled that role. And the old blokes at the Eye are my substitute fathers: Ingrams, Booker, Fantoni. I like making films about old people because they are repositories of amazing stories that they tell well. And they’re incredibly good telly.” Pause. “Which no one else thinks!”

He doesn’t have many memories of his father. What would he ask him if he walked through the door right now? “Oh, everything really. Someone wrote to me who had seen my father open a swimming pool in Saudi. He cut the ribbon and then dived in in his suit and sunglasses. I was also shown a photograph of him leading a conga at the Hilton in Hong Kong. When I saw that I thought: ‘This I didn’t know about you.’ I have my own son now and it makes you realise what you lost and what you can give back.”

What sort of values does he want his son to have? “At the moment there is a Ross and Brand culture of not growing up to be a man, of remaining a lad into your 50s. That would have been alien to our grandfathers’ generation. They wanted to join the world. They weren’t afraid of being judgmental. That’s what I’d like to encourage in my son.”

An editor of Private Eye encouraging his son to be judgmental: who’d have thought it? “I know, can you imagine? You can’t run a paper like this unless you accept that there are moral differences.”

Tellingly, what Hislop admires most about the conchies was their moral certitude, the way they saw the world in black and white terms. He does that, too. And in doing so he sets himself up to be judged by others. “I know. It makes you a prude and a smug moralist. Ghastly.”

It usually falls to Hislop to take to task the rogues they occasionally have on Have I Got News For You. One such was Piers Morgan, then editor of The Mirror. Morgan was so aggrieved he ordered his reporters to dig up dirt on Hislop. They couldn’t find any.

Are we to assume that Hislop is whiter than white, then? “I remember [Richard] Ingrams saying to me when I became editor of the Eye: ‘It is incumbent on you not to shag the secretaries or put your hand in the till’. I took that to heart.”

Hislop is well-placed to comment on the Brand/Ross debacle, being a BBC man involved in what can be an edgy comedy programme. Come on, I say, be judgmental. He rolls his eyes. “This episode has forced everyone to question what being edgy actually means. I think it should mean making points that people don’t necessarily agree with, or want to hear, but doing it in a way that makes them think. What Ross and Brand did does not strike me as edgy. The best comedy is where you attack the strong, not the weak.”

To get the measure of Ian Hislop, you need look no further than the magazine he edits: part funny, part serious, highly judgmental and quite moralistic. For his own part he describes himself as “easily bored”.

And, according to his friend and colleague Francis Wheen, he is more sentimental and tactile than you would imagine. “But the most decadent thing I’ve seen Ian do is fall asleep at the table without taking his contact lenses out.”

The middle-aged man who answers the glass door could be anyone, though the fact that Boy George has owned this house on a hill in Hampstead for the past 16 years does narrow the possibilities. And it definitely is his house because on the gate posts, as you wait to be buzzed in, you see fans have scrawled messages to him in felt-tip – some are fresh, some faded.

Japanese tourists especially used to track him down here. He thinks they bribed taxi drivers to show them where he lived, then they would wait with their cameras. ‘I’m thinking of putting up a plaque,’ he says. ‘Boy George lives here. Go away.’

He also has a house in Ibiza, and had an apartment in New York, until his unpleasant experience there a couple of years ago, which we shall come to. He moved back to London after that, but not before he had this house ‘exorcised and blessed’. The place has gothic turrets, around which you half expect bats to be circling. Come to think of it, what with his shaved head, there is something of the Uncle Fester about the man himself. There is a blue Star of David tattooed on it, with a pink lotus blossom on the base of his skull. He has luminous pale eyes, wears no make-up and is dressed in a black hoodie and sweatpants – a Buddha in a tracksuit.

Even as a svelte youth playing on his androgynous looks, he had the suggestion of a double chin, one which he used to disguise with shadowy make-up. Now, at 47, he seems comfortable with himself, but different… different from the man who was once one of the most recognisable people in the Western world, after Diana, Princess of Wales and the Pope. So different that it is possible not to recognise him at all, as Italian police discovered a couple of days before my visit.

‘I lost my passport when I was in Italy and because I didn’t have a driving licence I had to show my credit cards, and when they still wouldn’t accept who I was, I had to do the Boy George thing, which I rarely do. I had to say, “I’m Boy George”, then they let me go. They clocked I had nail varnish on and that caused great hilarity.

‘You’d think people would get over it, but they never do. Look,’ he holds out nails that are chipped and varnished black. ‘It isn’t even proper nail varnish. It’s scuppered and butch. It’s manly nail varnish. In a way, it is reassuring, like police sirens.’

The varnish helped convince the Italian police that he was Boy George? ‘I suppose so. Anyway, they let me go, which was a relief. Thought it was going to be pasta for a week.’

He still does nice lines like that. Indeed, they trip off his tongue relentlessly. He talks quickly and breathily – wheezily, actually, because he suffers from asthma. On the subject of which, he couldn’t have eaten pasta for a week, because he is on a special no-wheat diet. No sugar, either. The asthma doesn’t stop him smoking, though. ‘When you smoke as a singer you lose a few octaves, but you gain something as well. Pure jazz, my voice.’

In a curious way, his voice is more recognisable than he is these days. The cadence is still vaguely East End, still archly camp, or camply arch, and it is still punctuated with laughter – albeit the laughter of habit rather than mirth. He always laughed like that when interviewed on television, but I never realised until now that it was a nervy, defensive laugh. Perhaps it has become so over time.

Boy George was just 19 when he found fame as the singer of Culture Club. The reggae-influenced New Romantic band released their first record in 1982 and went on to sell more than 50 million, notching up seven British and nine American Top 10 hits, and going to No 1 in both countries with Karma Chameleon. Boy George played upon his androgyny not only in the way he dressed – the beaded hair, the geisha make-up, the big hats – but also in what he said. When talk-show host Russell Harty asked if he was keen on sex, he said he’d sooner have a cup of tea.

Actually, he was very much gay, as well Harty knew, and when he did officially come out in America, two years later, he had to wear a bulletproof vest because of the death threats – with admirable insouciance, he worried that it made him ‘look chunky’. Examples of his self-indulgence were legion, but perhaps the most rock-star-ish was his insistence on flying the opposite way around the world to the rest of his band for a show in Japan – because it was better ‘nine ki’ energy.

Despite this better energy, the band split up in 1986 and Boy George checked into rehab for his heroin addiction. Some solo success followed, both as a singer-songwriter and as a club DJ. But his biggest come-back was his autobiographical musical, Taboo, which did well in the West End, and not so well on Broadway. He also launched his own designer clothing label (B-Rude) and wrote a memoir, Take it Like a Man.

He has just started a new tour, his first in 10 years, but it may be cut short depending on what happens next month. George O’Dowd, to use his real name, is due to stand trial in November after being accused of falsely imprisoning a 28-year-old Norwegian male escort and chaining him to a radiator in his former flat in London. O’Dowd pleaded not guilty to the charge in February and was released on bail. He faces a possible 15 years in jail. ‘I would love to be able to talk about the trial but I can’t,’ he says now. ‘I’ll talk to you about it afterwards because there is a lot I would like to say.’

Is he apprehensive? ‘No. I’ll think about it when it happens. You wouldn’t want to think of me spending all these weeks panicking in anticipation. It would be so bad for me.’

He says his spirits are kept high by the fans who come to his concerts, as well as by the people he bumps into in the street. Some may consider his behaviour seedy, but there seems to be a deep-seated affection for him as well. ‘People are funny in England. They will cheerfully shout out, “Hey, George, I hear you got nicked again, you’re a one!” Sometimes it can be annoying, but usually it makes me laugh. In America, no one says anything. They are too embarrassed to bring it up.’

This latest charge follows his arrest and trial in New York. In 2005, O’Dowd falsely reported a break-in at his Manhattan flat – and police officers who responded found 13 grams of cocaine there, allegedly, but their over-eagerness to search without a warrant ruled out the possibility of drugs charges. He was found guilty of wasting police time and a judge made him sweep the New York streets on a five-day community-service order. O’Dowd called it ‘media service’ because of the paparazzi frenzy that followed. With his state-issue orange vest, he wore Capri pants and shoes without socks. It was meant to be a humiliation, but O’Dowd reckoned his working-class background meant it wasn’t. ‘My mum was a cleaner, my dad was a builder,’ he shouted across to the scrum of reporters, as he got to work with his brush. ‘Know what I mean?’

Does he take drugs now? ‘Never, ever, ever do drugs again and I don’t drink either. My job of giving the police something to do is over.’

How long since he took them? ‘It’s been a long time. Telling you exact days and months is only helpful to me, not you. I can say that now and mean it, because I’m in a good place. But there was a time when I could have said it knowing I didn’t mean it.’

A curious distinction. Drugs brought him pleasure to begin with, presumably, but if he had his time again would he take that first line, that first needle? ‘If I had known what a dreary old road it would be? Never. And if I can stop anyone else starting on that road, I will. Time is precious and drugs waste time. I think Amy Winehouse is going to realise that soon. Hers is the most played-out drug addiction in rock’n’roll history. Like a living soap opera. But pain makes a wonderful sound. Her terrible vulnerability is touching. So raw and effortless, not even pushing the notes. From a singer’s point of view that’s scary. You notice she is hitting these rich notes without trying, tossing them away like a handbag.’ Pause. ‘And I love her hair-do.’

He’s sort of talking about himself, of course. And on the subject of soap operas, why did he agree to be filmed for The Madness of Boy George, an unflattering Channel 4 documentary a couple of years ago? ‘They pursued me until I surrendered. It was dreadful. A piece of trash. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever, ever done.’ He laughs at his own exaggeration. ‘No, it’s not. Of course there have been much worse things I have done, and will no doubt do, but as a piece of television it was lazy; trying to turn me into a headline.’

They didn’t have to try too hard. ‘You mean because I was doing the community service when they were making it? Yes, but why did they have to go on about that?’

Well, it was a bizarre episode, even by his own standards. ‘As much as other people might like to cling on to it, it’s over. Done. It means nothing to me, Oh Vienna.’

So he didn’t learn anything about himself from that experience? ‘I learnt that I don’t like getting up at 6.30 in the morning and that Chinese people chop vegetables really small, which makes them hard to pick up off the pavement.’

Does that make him shallow? ‘Oh God, you’re really trying hard, aren’t you? No, there is nothing remotely shallow about me: I could probably talk for hours about my community service, but it means nothing. Nothing. It was only five days. I don’t know whether that makes me shallow, or enlightened and Buddha-like.’

Well, he’s Buddha like in one respect. He even seems to have a shrine to himself in the house: two shelves of curiosities including two wooden name plates: one that reads George O’Dowd, the other, Boy George. We are sitting in his high-ceilinged kitchen, which has stairs leading up to a balcony.

On one wall there is a giant mirror, on another a stencil painting saying, ‘F— you. Hate you.’ There is also a photograph of David Bowie, a crucifix, an assortment of candles and a gothic-looking throne-like chair, whose arm rests are fashioned in the shape of two large phalluses. ‘They were made for me,’ he says when I do a double-take. On another shelf are books about Andy Warhol, Marc Bolan and Oscar Wilde.

It may sound unlikely, but there is something Wildeian about Boy George. He is known for his bons mots, after all – at one point he says to me,’Honesty is a curse. It will get you charged every time,’ which is pure Wilde – but also, like Wilde, and every hero of a Greek tragedy, he seems to have been the author of his own downfall.

He shakes his head when I put this to him. ‘If I sweep the streets that does not mean my life is totally tragic. It’s not who I am and it doesn’t take away from the fact that I sold millions of records. I know the media don’t get that and it frustrates the hell out of me. I think I’m generous because I don’t have a blanket attitude to the media, despite what it has done to me and what it continues to do to me.’

Blimey. Get arrested. Blame the media. ‘I’m not blaming the media for that. What I mean is… I’m letting you into my home. I’m not saying there are any questions you can’t ask me. Try asking Madonna or Sting some of the questions you have asked me, and someone will step in and tell you you can’t. Interviewing me is a luxury and you should appreciate it. I’m an intelligent man. I’m exciting company. You can analyse me all you like, but please do a good job. Don’t be boring.’

Blimey again. And OK, I’ll try. He comes across in print as being pricklier than he is in person. Actually, he is likeable and funny, once you get past the nervous tension and the drama queeniness. But he seems to have little equilibrium, no shame, and no self-control. What he does have is self-pity, self-destructive impulses and delusions of grandeur. He can seem wounded and spoilt, but also, at times, worldly wise. And he is an odd mix of vanity and self-loathing.

Does he feel like a victim? ‘For other people it may look like I was built up to be knocked down, but actually I don’t have that kind of perspective. I was sweeping, now I’m not sweeping. I suppose on the last day I did try to keep my orange jerkin as a souvenir. It was a weird experience and…’ He laughs. ‘Now you are making me think about it!’

But it sounds as if he’s not the sort of person who has regrets. ‘Know what? I have loads. But lately, I’ve been thinking I don’t have to be that person and behave in that way. I’ve never noticed this before in 47 years.’

How has he not? ‘Because there has been too much hairspray in the way. You don’t notice because even when your life is dysfunctional you think that’s normality.’

I begin a sentence about the fame he enjoyed, or endured, in the 1980s, a time when he was one of the most recognisable people on the planet… But he cuts me off… ‘What do you mean “was”? I still am and always will be. Your talking about me as if I’m not here gets on my nerves. I’m here, in your presence!’

Then he redeems himself. ‘I sound like Gloria Swanson, don’t I? Look, no one can take any of that stuff away from me because it’s mine. I’ve learnt to appreciate what I have. My life is amazing. Being Boy George, putting on a hat and make-up, is amazing. And easy. Being George O’Dowd is the f—ing battle. I still moan as much as I always did, but I stop myself now. When things are kicking off, I can tell myself, “You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to be nasty, you don’t have to be an a—h—.”‘

I mention that he seems to have a lot of anger just below his surface. ‘I come from a family that explodes. Mine is the great exploding family.’

Does he enjoy exploding? ‘Actually, I don’t. I don’t find it therapeutic. I’ve come to realise that when I snap at people they get hurt. When you care about someone… which is the difference. I care if it is someone in my family. When it’s someone from the record company it doesn’t mater if I shout, Yahhhbllagghh!!! at them.’

Record company executives don’t have feelings? Or is it more that he doesn’t care if they do? Isn’t that a little selfish? ‘You’re trying to narrow me down to a headline aren’t you? Yes Boy George was selfish, but he’s not now. I was a b——, but I recovered.

‘I need to go out and perform to the people who always forgive me for everything I do and that is the Great British public, God bless them. I go out there and feel so lucky. They still sing along with my songs.

‘To be honest, when I started this tour, I thought: “Who is going to want to come and see me after all this time?” But when you get to Norwich and Newcastle, I mean, all these weird people come along to see you, all these old ladies who dance and sing along to Karma Chameleon and shout [he adopts a Geordie accent], “I f—ing love you George.” In Northampton, there were all these stage-door hangers-on and they were my mum’s age; it was really sweet and really funny. I’ve become Barry Manilow!’

He can laugh at himself, and that is his redeeming feature. As well as being a builder, his father, Jerry, was a boxer, one who used to beat up his wife. By wearing make-up as a teenager, George was rejecting his father’s masculinity, clearly. But he may also have begun wearing black lipstick to get his father’s attention (he was one of six children, after all).

He still craves attention, which may partly explain his almost Tourette’s-like tendency to insult people. ‘It sounds like a name-drop, but Elton John rang me up the other day and it was really exciting,’ he says. ‘Elton John has my number! I had a barney with him a couple of years ago and I loved the fact that I had pissed him off [he had called him a ‘humourless grand old dame’]. I can’t believe I’ve registered with him. He was fuming, “I’m going to kill that Boy George!”‘ A result.

Does he fall in love easily? ‘I fall in lust easily, but I don’t think I’ve ever been in love. I look back and think was that love? But I’ve never been in that stage where I think I don’t want anyone else.’

According to his memoirs, his longest relationship was with Jon Moss, the drummer of Culture Club, who is now married with children. He wrote the band’s first hit Do You Really Want to Hurt Me about Moss. (Actually, it was the other way round. Boy George would throw bottles at Moss and once broke his fingers.) I ask if Moss was the love of his life. ‘I thought so but, with hindsight, I’m not sure he was. He was certainly the great drama of my life, but I’m not sure I love him more than I love my mother. No, I definitely love my mother more. Was it love? I cried. He punched me. There was music.’

Was he ever beaten up because he was gay? ‘By my own brothers. By kids at school, every day from the age of six they would shout “poof” at me. School was a hellhole.’

Did he ever fight back? ‘I can fight but I don’t like fighting. You scratch your nails.’

What about ‘muscle Marys’ such as Rupert Everett: gay men who work out? ‘I’m much tougher than Rupert Everett. I could knock him out in five seconds. Muscled men are the most scared because they are building a wall. We are the only culture who identifies with our persecutors, gay men trying to act straight. The toughest ones are the drag queens. They are the suffragettes. They are the warriors. You ain’t a man till you’ve walked in heels.’

John, his business partner, arrives for a meeting and George asks him if he will do him a favour and go out and get a packet of cigarettes.

‘You’re vile,’ George says.

A few minutes later the buzzer sounds again. It is someone called Lady Pat, a man, who is also expected at the meeting. ‘Do you smoke?’ George asks before buzzing him in.

‘No’

‘I hate you’

For the record, I didn’t make Courtney Love cry. She made herself cry, every time she mentioned Frances, her 15-year-old daughter from her marriage to Kurt Cobain, the frontman of the grunge band Nirvana. As she raised the subject four times over the course of two hours, this meant she cried four times: real, eye-dabbing, make-up running, sniffy-nosed tears. But this is to come. For now, if anything, it is she who is bringing me close to tears with her Buddhist chanting. I have to endure 15 minutes of it before the interview can get under way. We are in her hotel suite, one of London’s most exclusive. She is in the adjoining bedroom, chanting loudly. I am sitting waiting for her on a sofa surrounded by unruly piles of magazines, a guitar in a case, two full ashtrays, burning joss sticks, property details for a £4 million house she is looking at in Notting Hill, and racks of her clothes — Givenchy, mostly, as Love is the new muse for that label.

A gong sounds, the chanting stops and she appears smiling in a skimpy black nightie and no make up. There is a  longhaired man with her.  ‘This is my friend David,’ she says. ‘We’re chanting. Obviously. But he is so much better at explaining it that me.’ She disappears to get changed, leaving me with her guru. As he is explaining what the chanting means I reflect on the living (despite the odds) legend that is Courtney Love. This is a woman who seems to have  teetered on the edge of mayhem all her life — the heroin addiction, the air rage incidents, the tabloid headlines, the custody battles, the jail sentences, the star fucking, the millions made, the millions lost, the rehab — but she has never been boring. Or predicable. And although she was often described as the Yoko Ono to Cobain’s John Lennon, she was always a rock star in her own right. Indeed, immediately after her husband killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head in 1994, she embarked on a tour with her band Hole which, according to John Peel, verged on the heroic. ‘Swaying wildly and with lipstick smeared on her face, hands and, I think, her back, the singer would have drawn whistles of astonishment in Bedlam,’ he wrote.

Back in the hotel room, ten minutes have passed and the guru is coming to the end of his explanation. ‘I tend to chant with Courtney for two or three hours a day,’ he says. ‘A lot of celebrity Buddhists don’t like to put in the time. But she loves to chant.’

No kidding. It may make for inner harmony for her but for me the chanting adds to the sense of chaos in the hotel suite. But then there is always a sense of chaos when Courtney is in town, which is why she has been banned from staying at two of London’s finest hotels (on both occasions it was to do with fire alarms being set off). When she reappears she is doing pretend karate chops, I think because she is wearing a Vivienne Westwood outfit that looks as if it came from the props department of Kill Bill. It is a black corset affair with leggings, shoulder pads and buckles — I am staring at a particularly strange looking buckle when I realise it is the  shop security tag still attached. As she talks she keeps adjusting her bra to try and get comfortable. She also tries to work out what to do with a rogue cord that dangles between her legs, gives up and instead gathers her long, bottle blonde hair over one shoulder — and teases two strands of her fringe down so that they hang dangerously over her eyes.

Courtney Love is 43 and in fine shape. Thanks to Madonna’s macrobiotic nutritionist, she is back to a size 10. But her weight yo-yos — ‘You have to be thin all the time to make it as an actress,’ she says, ‘but my rock weight is 20 or 30 more lbs than my film weight.’ She juggles the two careers. ‘Performing on stage is like great sex,’ she tells me. ‘Of course you want to be known for giving the best blow job in town but you also want to get yours, too.’ She has a new album out in the spring and various film projects in the pipeline, trying to regain some of the form she last lost since her Golden Globe nominated role in The People vs. Larry Flynt and her equally good performance in Man on the Moon opposite Jim Carrey. Actually, it’s three careers if you include the fashion thing: ‘Givenchy is like me,’ she says. ‘A legendary brand which has had its ups and downs.’

She lights up a cigarette and holds it between two straight, long fingers with nails varnished vampy black. Although her eyes are large, green and — because slightly divergent — slightly mesmerising, it is her pouty mouth that arrests the attention. She begins applying lipstick with a paintbrush as she is talking. And boy can she talk. She has a big mouth in every sense. A ‘big dirty rock mouth,’ as it was once memorably described

I have to say, I like her instantly. I like her goofy grin. I like the crack in her husky voice. I like the fact that she is funny, chatty, animated, boastful, open, vulnerable, namedropping and unselfconscious. She is also flirty, jiggling her eyebrows up and down when she wants me to look at something on her laptop — some art she is buying.     Our opening exchanges goes something like this. ‘Did you like David?’ He seemed very nice. ‘I share him with Orlando Bloom.’ And how does feel after a chanting session? ‘Sometimes really aggressive. Sometimes really energised and ready for a fight.’ I see. Does her chanting fill a vacuum left by heroin? ‘I didn’t have an addiction when I was 24, which was when I started chanting. I try to focus on gratitude when I chant, because it kills anxiety and depression dead. I play tapes of gratitude in my head. Occasionally though, a negative thoughts sneaks through. Lately I’ve been getting weird visions of Vince Vaughn running around naked in an executioner’s mask.’

While one must not make light of mental health issues — especially in relation to someone who has been in and out of therapy all her life — the journalistic devil on my shoulder does whisper into my ear at this point, thank goodness she’s still bonkers. Does she ever fear for her sanity, I ask?  ‘I am naturally pretty paranoid,’ she says. ‘And I have a right to be.’

Because? ‘Mostly it is about money. What has caused problems for me is not understanding money. I had it and I had it stolen. I’ve had to rebuild it. It is a powerful thing. It has killed people in my life, the force of greed and covetousness. It has hurt me. I was embezzled.’

An estimated $20 million of her money was siphoned off in a case that is still being investigated by the FBI. Does she mean the royalties from Nirvana? ‘Not just the royalties from Nirvana, it is all the money I have made, too. I’m not a slice of baloney myself. I’ve sold nine million records.’ It’s true, it’s true. She was known for her grungy guitar playing, as well as for the way she would stage-dive into the crowd wearing charity-shop dresses and no knickers. Her biggest hit ‘Celebrity Skin’ still stands up, in my opinion. ‘The last money thing is from 98 to 04 when my assets were frozen,’ she continues. ‘I had everything stolen and so did my daughter, and that is upsetting.’

And so the sobbing starts. When she has composed herself I note that she is clearly very protective about her daughter. ‘She is 15 now. That’s a difficult age. She slept with me for the first time in a long time last night.’ She starts to well up again. ‘Sorry, I hate getting emotional. We get on well most of the time but teenagers are hard. Being a single mother is hard.’

Love’s own childhood had no stability whatsoever. A Juvenile System report detailed the eight different institutions where she was held in care between 1978 and 1980. Her case folder bore the phrase: ‘Parents’ whereabouts unknown’. Aged 16, she became a stripper.

Does she consciously avoid repeating the mistakes her own parents made? ‘Oh my God, so much. We went to Trudie and Sting’s the other night because Trudie has a daughter who is Franny’s age, but it was hard. For one thing they were going to see Control and I wanted to show Francis that she could go out in London without a nanny or a bodyguard, so they went by themselves. I wanted to get her a cake because it is the first time she has gone anywhere on her own. She came back so disturbed because — Daaa! — I forgot what the movie was about [the death of the lead singer of Joy Division]. Anyway Sting was there and he was reading his book and there were all their other kids there who had a mom and a dad, and Franny felt the odd one out.’ She wipes her tears. ‘I’m sorry. I just want things to be good for her but she’s a lot like me and a lot like her dad. I think she got the best of both of us, so there’s that.’

Good cheekbones, I imagine. ‘Yeah she is a very good-looking girl. I don’t want to put her in a burqa. But I want to protect her from your tabloid press. I can take it but she…’ Love trails off for a moment. ‘It happens to me when I get papped in the UK, in the car. It’s like Diana! Diana! Diana! You can’t see anything because of the flashbulbs. At least I know how it works now. According to the tabs I’m dating Pete Docherty and we went to a Wetherspoons. Yeah, I get the joke. Fuck off. I hardly know Pete Docherty. I’ve talked to him once on the phone about rehab, because I’m a good rehab guide. Rehab worked for me because the judge ordered me to do 90 days, not 28. It was in a house doing one-to-one cognitive therapy, all 12 steps. It’s a really good invention, the 12 steps. They gave me this sheet with all these negative attributes — paranoid, self-centred and so on — and told me to circle the ones that applied to me. Man there were a lot of circles on mine. It was like an inventory. Then I had to write these damn letters to people I had fucked over. Trouble was, my memory was so fucked from the heroin I couldn’t remember who I had fucked over.’

No one at all? ‘Well some things came back to me. I had to apologise to some guy I’d called a cunt. And when I was telling this to my friend Chris Rock he said, “You should apologise to me, too.” I said why? He said: “I remember getting 56 texts from you one morning.” I was like: what? He said: “I read some of them out on stage and, believe me, you kept a lot of brothers and sisters sober.”

Does she still have memory lapses? ‘The other night I was at the V&A and got talking to Vivienne Westwood, Dame Vivienne, and I said “great to meet you, I’m a huge fan” and she said “we’ve met before. And we talked on the phone for three hours one time.” I had zero recollection of it. I said: “was I horrible? Was I boring?” She said, “No, I would have hung up on you if you had been. You were terribly amusing.” Can you smell that?’ I test the air. ‘Smells like weed.’ Not mine. ‘Not mine either. Must be coming from the airducts. Someone is having a smoke. What were we talking about?’

Her memory. ‘Yeah, I’m just going through my three and half years sober and I’m afraid I burned some of my memory cells out. A lot of Courtney stories end in a fire. Usually on a set. But hey. I’m not a bad person. There were massive gaps in my education: like you are not supposed to sleep with people who are married. I didn’t know what to be scared of. I’ve stepped over the line here and there in my romantic behaviour but I have always been pretty moral.’

And pretty consistent. She likes to stick to front men: the front men of The Smashing Pumpkins, The Lemonheads and Nine Inch Nails to name three. She has also been consistently, um, high spirited in her behaviour. Does she feel when she is in a public place that she has to live up to a public version of herself as a hell raiser? ‘No, no no. There is a disconnect  between who I am, and how I live, and how I am perceived. I used to play up to it a bit when I was on drugs because who cares: sex, drugs, rock and roll WAAAAH! I always seem to come number 2 to Keith Richards in lists of greatest hell raisers of all time. But if I was a guy I wouldn’t even be on the list! I didn’t know it was such a guy’s job. It’s like playing football in high heels and lipstick, no wonder it smears.’

Her appearance on Letterman is the stuff of You Tube legend. She talked hyperactively, wouldn’t leave and kept flashing her breasts. “That’s not art, that’s just me not being the greatest celebrity of all time. I’m not 19 any more so me standing on a Letterman’s desk is not as acceptable.’

An embarrassment threshold; does she have one? ‘God yes, I get embarrassed all the time. Are you crazy? I don’t like things that embarrass my kid… You’ve got me crying again.’

In 1992 Love admitted to Vanity Fair that she had used heroin while (unknowingly) pregnant. Afterwards she claimed that she had been misquoted. The LA County Department of Children’s Services nevertheless took the Cobains to court, claiming that the couple’s drug usage made them unfit parents. After months of legal wrangling, they were granted custody of their daughter. There have been other custody battles since. ‘I am a good mother and the proof is in the pudding,’ she says. ‘I would never, ever put Franny on television. I would never let her do press. She has been offered the lead in four features, and was offered a campaign for Hilfiger, and I tell her about these offers but she wants to be a political journalist anyway so… I don’t think any kid has been more wanted by both her parents and I don’t think any parents have ever wanted to fuck up less than we did.’

Some of the gaps in her memory must be good for her self-preservation, I suggest. ‘I don’t have a gap about Kurt.’

Does she go through guilt about his death, wandering if there was anything more she could have done to prevent him from killing himself? ‘It’s a horrible thing, but it is harder on a woman because widowers don’t get the blame for suicide and widows do. Imagine having to grieve in public. It almost prevents you from having your own grief. I went kooky bananas ten years later because I didn’t have a real association to my own grief. I didn’t do a bereavement group. I didn’t see a psychiatrist. I went on tour. Those shows were cathartic, but I was very defensive about what I would let out then. I was swaggering around all fucked up on pills but I wasn’t really telling the truth.’ She lights another cigarette. ‘Where were we? Yeah, my album. You’re going to love it.’

And that’s her. She is shameless. She is droll. She is a survivor, just, lurching from chronic insecurity to raging ego, self-belief and ambition. ‘I want to get to the grown up table once more and leave it with some grace,’ she says.        The smoke alarm goes off. She crosses the room to open the window. ‘It is going to do this for a moment then it will stop,’ she says, shouting above the noise. ‘I hate this hotel.’ On her way back she gets tangled up in the Vivienne Westwood cord dangling between her legs. ‘I wonder what this string is for? I’m not sure what it signifies. The Dame sent me a few nice pieces, but this one is just crazy.’ She looks in her packet for another cigarette. ‘Shit. Do you smoke?’ When I shake my head she picks up the phone. ‘Could you get two packs of Marlborough Lights as fast as possible please.’

And so the encounter ends as chaotically as it began.

 

It’s not the sight of the groupies that haunts me, but the sound, or rather the absence of sound, as they ghost past us on their way up the stairs to the dressing-room. It takes me a moment to figure out that the reason they aren’t talking to each other is that they don’t know each other. One of the band members, the keyboard player, I think, has picked them from the audience on the basis of their looks. Half-a-dozen of them, all in their late teens and early twenties, and all, surprisingly, in pretty frocks, as if they were going to a Sunday school meeting. They have been separated from their friends like lambs weaned from their mothers. The silence of the lambs.

The ‘us’ they are filing past is James Blunt and me. He has a bottle of beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and not a hair in place – tousled just so, like a Renaissance painting of John the Baptist – but they don’t realise it’s him because he has changed out of the suit he was wearing on stage and is now in jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket, as well as a pink feather boa and star-shaped novelty sunglasses. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is the end of the day; we need to go back to the start, well, to the middle, when the seats are empty and the Texan sun is at its most unforgiving.

A barefoot and unshaven Blunt is wearing normal sunglasses and shorts as he plays his piano, strums his guitar and sings his plaintive songs into the microphone for the sound check, all the while looking out with his soulful eyes over an empty, open-air arena in Houston. At 5ft 7in, he’s not a tall man, but he has presence and an unaffected manner – a certain maturity, too, one that you wouldn’t normally associate with a pop star in the ascendant.

But then he is 34 and this is his second career, his first being as an officer in the Household Cavalry. He joined after graduating from Bristol University with a degree in sociology. He became a champion skier for the Army and not only saw active service in Kosovo, but also guarded the Queen Mother’s coffin when she was lying in state.

Tonight he will be supporting Sheryl Crow, though, since his second album ‘All the Lost Souls’ and the single from it, ‘1973’, went straight to number one in America, he is arguably the bigger act these days. Indeed, not since Elton John has there been a more successful British singer-songwriter in the States.

His first album, ‘Back to Bedlam’, also went to number one over here, as it did in 18 other countries, making it the biggest-selling album of the millennium. It even entered the Guinness Book of Records as the fastest-selling album in one year. But it was his first single that really put him on the map. You’re Beautiful became the sound of that summer. It was everywhere, and still is – having become a favourite at weddings, funerals and bar mitzvahs. I even heard a brass band playing it at an agricultural show in the Yorkshire Dales this summer.

As well as millions of sales, James Blunt has won Brit awards, Ivor Novello awards, MTV awards and various Grammy nominations. In terms of credibility, he’s headlined at Glastonbury and won the respect of the world-weary music press. Yet not everyone loves him, as he points out when we get something to eat in the canteen area back stage.

‘After Back to Bedlam really started selling,’ he says, ‘there was this sudden aggression towards me in the UK, for whatever reason, and that focused my mind, made it clear to me what I was doing and why I wanted to do it. I write songs for myself. I don’t write them for you, or for anyone else, I write them because I have experiences that I need to process. I don’t have the answers all the time, but I do have lots of questions, and I express them in the songs I write.’

He is, I think, alluding to a poll last year of ‘the most annoying things in life’, which put him at number four, just behind cold-callers and queue-jumpers. ‘I haven’t met anyone who voted in the poll, have you?’ he says when I mention this. ‘That poll probably came from a website that was after some publicity. You and I could do the same poll very quickly right now and it would count as a poll. We could do one about annoying newspapers, for example. I promise the Sunday Telegraph wouldn’t be in my list. My parents take it.’

His father, a retired colonel in the Army Air Corps, manages his son’s finances. His mother arranged the purchase of his six-bedroom villa in Ibiza (he also has a chalet in Verbier and recently bought a place in Chelsea). ‘I’m not married,’ he says, ‘and so the support structure in my life is my parents. I’m closer to them now than I have ever been.’

He certainly isn’t married, as the photographs of him emerging from nightclubs with various high-profile women on his arm attest. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was probably the best known socialite, Jessica Sutta, of the Pussycat Dolls, the most glamorous. He also seems to be photographed regularly cavorting on beaches with bikini-clad models such as Petra Nemcova, whom he dated and then dumped – unceremonious dumping being his way of ending relationships, according to the tabloids. He once said he found himself in a swimming pool in LA with nine naked women. ‘I was the only bloke. It was the only time I wished my mates were there, purely to spectate. I had arrived. It was a moment.’

Now he says of the tabloid interest in his peripatetic love life: ‘Last week I went to my home in Ibiza and was photographed by the paparazzi in my swimming trunks with girls. What is the point of that? I’m not that bothered, but maybe the media should be concentrating more on global warming or the Russian invasion of Georgia.

‘Looking at me in my swimming trunks is not a great sight. It’s a waste of time. There generally is a long lens pointing at me wherever I go, these days. I’m comfortable with it. I appreciate how things work. But my record label said something about my always being photographed coming out of nightclubs and I thought, “But this is what I do. I was doing it before the second album came out, so what is different now? You didn’t tell me to stop then.” I’m not going to change my life because of these people. I don’t see why I should.’

His label also gets him to dye his grey hairs and be enigmatic about his love life, which is an old tactic dating back to the Beatles – they had to pretend they didn’t have wives and girlfriends so that fans could fantasise they were in with a chance.

Actually, at the time of going to press, Blunt seems to be going out again with one of his old flames, Verity Evetts, an Oxford-educated barrister. He has also stayed friendly with some of his other exes, the socialites at least. He told one – an ex who got married not long ago – that he doesn’t feel ‘centred’ at the moment and would like to get married as well. Then again, he also said that he never tires of singing You’re Beautiful night after night because it gets him laid night after night.

Either way, he tells me he has grown used to the idea that his mother will probably find out from the papers what he has been up to, and with whom, before he has had a chance to tell her. ‘And my [two] sisters are quick to email me about things in the papers, laughing their heads off. I get healthy, ritual abuse from them, and give it back myself.’

As we are talking, I can’t decide whether the way Blunt smiles all the time is disarming or disturbing. He’s like a victim of a religious cult, smiling at the beginning of the sentence and at the end. I guess he has a lot to smile about, but also I sense a great deal of insecurity to disguise.

Then, I’m distracted by the sight of Sheryl Crow playing table tennis across the room. She has been holding her adopted son in one arm as she bats with the other, and now, even more distractingly, she is heading straight for us. ‘Are we going to have one of our little conversations on stage again tonight, James?’ she says. ‘That flirting thing. I think it worked well last night.’

They discuss the duet they will sing – a cover of Cat Stevens’s The First Cut is the Deepest – then we both watch her shimmy away, her blonde curls bobbing. ‘She’s very down to earth,’ he says. ‘I’d met her a couple of times, which was why she asked me on this tour. We do end up playing a lot of table tennis on the road. We’ve done 117 shows so far this year, in 117 cities, and there are a lot of hours to fill in the day.’

As he sleeps on his tour bus with his band, one city tends to blur into another. When I joke that he is in Cincinnati now, he looks genuinely confused. ‘No, this is?… Oh, right. Actually, I always get the tour manager to say where we are just as I’m going on stage. I still managed to get it wrong the other night, saying “Hello Dallas” when I meant Austin. I’m surprised I got out alive.’

He is funny on the subjects of things that go wrong. ‘People are normally surprised by my show, which is more energetic than you might think. Jumping on the piano. Jumping out into the audience and running up and down the aisle high-fiving them. But going off the stage can be quite dangerous. I broke my finger once. My legs carried on when I jumped off, and I smacked down on the ground. The spotlight was on me, and when I got back to the piano I hit the wrong note and thought, “Why did I do that?” And I looked down and saw it was because my finger was broken, sticking out an angle. Look,’ he says holding it up. ‘It’s still crooked.’

On another occasion, in Chicago, he jumped 8ft off the stage. ‘When I began running to the audience, a security guard stuck his arm out and I thought, “Does he want a hug?” Then next thing I know he’s rugby-tackled me. He wouldn’t release me and I was screaming in his ear, “I’m the f—ing singer.” I had to wait for the other guards to pull him off.’

I would have thought Blunt’s training in unarmed combat would have helped. I presume he still works out. ‘No, never. Couldn’t handle it. Too boring. I am a hyperactive person though.’ He likes an adrenaline rush, as well, having recently bought an 1100cc Moto Guzzi V11 Sport motorbike. There’s also the skiing, which he still does, and the riding. Actually, he tells me, he never really liked horses before joining the Life Guards. So why did he join that particular regiment?

‘Well, it is a reconnaissance regiment.’ But they are all so tall in the Life Guards, did that not make him self-conscious? ‘Some are. The Foot Guards tend to be taller regiments, though. The Life Guards take a few shrimps, as well. Besides, they are on horses, so height isn’t so important. Also being in that regiment had the benefit of being in Knightsbridge. I got a chance to be in London and meet people in the music scene.’ And groupies, as it happens.

As he paraded up and down the Mall in plumed helmet and shiny breastplate, girls would stick their phone numbers down his knee-length boots. But it was his time in Kosovo that really made girls swoon. He used to strap his guitar to the outside of his tank, because there wasn’t room for it inside. He had learnt to play the violin at five, the piano at seven and the guitar at 14, while a pupil at Harrow.

He writes his songs on piano and guitar. ‘But mainly guitar because it is easier to carry around. It’s like a child messing around with a toy. If a tune comes to me I don’t record it instantly. I think if I remember it, then it must be worth remembering, and if I forget it, then it was forgettable.’

Does he have any anxiety dreams about forgetting lines or chords? ‘Not yet. Perhaps I will tonight. Perhaps you’ve jinxed me. But audiences aren’t judgmental, and if things go wrong and you can look them in the eye, that is fine. The only people who are judgmental are the journalists. I will be conscious of you being there in the audience judging me.’

Blimey. Sorry about that. Is it true he signs breasts? ‘Not that I remember. Not that I’m fussy what I sign. A lot of men started coming to the shows after I appeared on Top Gear last year. That was such fun. I spun the car five times. I thought I might as well make the most of it. I am competitive.’

He recorded one of the fastest laps, but I’m surprised blokes didn’t think him manly before that, given his tour of duty in Kosovo. ‘It’s because I sing songs that are heart-on-your-sleeve and therefore I must be overly emotional. Nothing I can do about it. I could pose more, but I am comfortable with my masculinity.’

He has said that his lyrics are autobiographical, in which case, are we to assume that the lyric on his new album, ‘I killed a man in a far away land’, means he killed a man in a far away land? I only ask because in the past he has said that he would never try to exploit what he went through, what he saw. ‘You should ask any soldier how many lives he has saved. How they do it is no one else’s business. What I took from my experience in Kosovo is that you are told from one day to the next who your enemy is and it keeps changing. That’s what is happening in Iraq, too. I believe in looking people in the eye, looking for the common humanity.’

He is a great believer in looking people in the eye. He will use the phrase again later and it seems to reveal a Christ complex, or a John the Baptist one. That direct and challenging stare of his. It would also explain the hair.

It is time for him do some photographs before he goes on stage and, endearingly, he says he is ‘not fussed’ about the grooming he is offered before they are taken.

On stage his features contort with passion when he sings. The big video screen goes in tight on his face. His voice is by turns soft and tremulous and forceful, but always high. Having seen him in concert once before, a couple of years ago, I notice the tone of his banter has changed.

‘Wow it’s hot tonight,’ he says now. ‘I’m surprised any of you are wearing any clothes. We could all take them off and get friendly.’ It is suggestive, designed to get the teenage girls in the audience screaming. Before he used to joke about his ‘girlie voice’ and taking helium to get it that way, and being ‘a bit wet’ and the ‘housewives’ favourite’. I think now he has realised that, actually, he is a proper musician, a popular one, too, and that he doesn’t need to apologise for it.

Afterwards, back in the dressing-room, he strips to the waist as he talks because he wants to take a shower before going back on to do his duet with Sheryl Crow. ‘Things got a bit hairy out there when I jumped into the crowd,’ he says. ‘Did you see that? Some thought it was some kind of sport to grab me.’

I watch his duet from the side of the stage and notice he whispers something in Sheryl Crow’s ear and then she starts running her hands over his trousers suggestively, patting them. Afterwards, I ask what he said. ‘”Is now a good time to ask for your phone number?” She was checking my pockets, pretending to look for a pen.’

He shows me round the gold-coloured tour bus where he will be sleeping tonight as they drive to their next gig in Dallas. It is full of hi-tech equipment and is nicely air-conditioned but there isn’t much space in the bunks. ‘We do live in close proximity,’ he says. ‘Some of us stay up late. This is the crew end, they have to get up early.’

Where do the groupies go? ‘Never have groupies on here. Never. They’d only get in if we invited them in. But we’d only ever invite friends in.’

Does he sleep OK? I heard he has to take sleeping pills. ‘It is a bit of a rough sleep, but better than a hotel and taking planes all the time because you have to get to the airport two hours early, which is miserable. Then your flight gets delayed.’

He is drinking champagne from a plastic cup. ‘This is for your benefit,’ he says. ‘The tour management went out and bought a bottle of champagne because he thought I should be seen drinking it. Better for my image. Isn’t that sweet? Normally, we drink vodka and beer. In fact, I think I’d rather have a beer, now. Want one?’ He opens a well-stocked fridge then takes me to the back of the bus where there is some seating space. He has one small case which he pulls out from a cupboard. It continues a few pairs of socks, T-shirts and a spare pair of jeans. No photographs or mementos. ‘This is all I have for 14 months on the road,’ he says. ‘I’m not known for style.’

Does he know how much he is worth? ‘No I don’t, not very interested in it to be honest. I travel with hand luggage only. That is why I always seem to be wearing the same clothes in photographs. If a tabloid says my clothes aren’t fashionable or my hair looks stupid, I really don’t worry about it. Don’t have any hair gel.’

In London, he takes the Tube or the bus. He prefers pubs to restaurants. When he goes to Ibiza, he flies easyJet. Still, that’s at home. Presumably on the road he can afford to be more self-indulgent.

Another lyric that we can only assume is autobiographical is ‘I’ve taken a s—load of drugs’. It is. Though his only comment on the subject is that he has ‘a comfortable relationship with drugs’. His relationship with fame is less comfortable. Oscar Wilde said there were two forms of tragedy: not getting what you want, and getting it. Is that how it felt for him when he went to number one? ‘Actually, I don’t think I had been dreaming about it. Certainly, I hadn’t anticipated being so recognisable so quickly.

‘I do remember getting a phone call from the record company, who said both the single and the album have gone to number one, and thinking, “S—, this is not what I expected.” I hadn’t prepared myself for it. Number two is great. Number two is nice. I sensed then it would mean having to change from being a musician to being a celebrity and that that would be a change for the worse. Fame doesn’t affect me, but it does affect everyone else around me. As for celebrity, it is the worst invention of the modern world. Gossip columns treat your life as if it were a cartoon. Relationships reduced to cartoons.’

Although there are other public-school bands around at the moment – Radiohead, Coldplay – Blunt seems to have suffered more than most from a perception that he is too posh to be credible. His family name is Blount (and his middle name Hillier), but he changed it to Blunt to sound, well, blunter and more proletarian.

When he tells me he would nevertheless still send a son of his to Harrow – ‘I think I would. I think I would. Public schools make individuals rather than sheep’ – I ask what he makes of the mood change now that the old Etonian David Cameron has made it OK to be posh. ‘Is it? I must come back to Britain immediately. Is it really safe to come back?

‘It’s not a dirty word to be posh, people come up to me and no one gives a damn if I’m posh. It’s about having a normal conversation and looking people in the eye.’

We head back to the dressing-room where he puts on his feather boa and novelty sunglasses then we wander back downstairs to have a word with Sheryl Crow, who is signing autographs. This is the moment at which the keyboard player says: ‘This way to the good-time room girls’ and the silent groupies dutifully appear.

I hear Kathleen Turner before I see her. She has a guttural, slurring voice that is several fathoms below the surface of normal female speech. As I sit waiting for her with my head in a book, this voice rolls up and out across the restaurant like a breaker. We are on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, around the corner from her apartment overlooking the Hudson River, and she has stopped to say hello to some friends on her way to my table. She has her back to me and I am filled with a sudden trepidation as I wait for her to turn. Her voice, as she herself has put it, is more recognisable than she is these days.

It seems a cruel fate to be frozen in the public memory as a lithe, icy-yet-smouldering, husky-voiced sex symbol in your mid-twenties, but that is what the 54-year-old Kathleen Turner has to contend with every day. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which she was considered cinematic Viagra in her day. She was even offered that draughty Sharon Stone role in Basic Instinct and turned it down on the grounds of it being too tacky. Certainly, it is no exaggeration to describe her as an icon of 1980s cinema, not least because Body Heat, her first film and first box-office hit, was made in 1981 and her last big hit, The War of the Roses, was made in 1989.

In Body Heat she played a cold-hearted femme fatal opposite William Hurt and delivered the unforgettable line, ‘You’re not too smart. I like that in a man.’ She was pretty chilling in her second film as well, The Man With Two Brains, and that was a comedy. A trilogy of rom-coms with Michael Douglas followed – Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile and The War of the Roses – and these made her one of the most bankable female stars in Hollywood.

There was an Oscar nomination for Peggy Sue Got Married and then her turn came as Jessica Rabbit, the cartoon figure she voiced in Who Framed Roger Rabbit – ‘I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.’ But then, in the 1990s, she seemed to disappear off the radar. There were sightings of her looking bloated and raddled; reports of her having become an alcoholic. She didn’t deny them. She thought them preferable to the truth.

She had succumbed to rheumatoid arthritis, a crippling auto-immune disease that affects the tissue in the joints, and the steroids she was taking for it were the cause of her changing appearance and making her look puffy – though the vodka she started drinking to kill the pain didn’t help. As things transpired, she did become an alcoholic and went into rehab in 2002.

But instead of becoming a recluse when she came out, she reinvented herself as a stage actress, an acclaimed one, both on Broadway and in the West End: first as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, then in an award-winning performance as Martha, the acerbic, hard-drinking faculty wife in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? After that, in 2006, she got a divorce and sat down to write an autobiography. There’s a lot to talk about, then. The woman has lived.

And here I am, sitting at a corner table in the restaurant, waiting for her to turn round. When she finally does, the air tightens. She gives a toss of the head and a smile exposing expensive American teeth – she had them fixed after the studios complained that, because she had spent part of her teenage years in London, she had ‘English teeth’.

When she sits down, I see she is wearing a silky Chinese jacket and no make-up. Her skin is not smooth and she has a low brow, with thick, dusty blonde hair that spills over her shoulders. For a moment, this adds to an impression that her features are somehow too small for her face, then they seem to come into focus and I realise that there always was something snubby about her look. Hers was an enigmatic beauty, neither obvious nor bland – chiselled from wood rather than sculpted from marble. And something about the way light catches her eyes, one hazel, one blue, as she tilts back her head makes her suddenly unmistakable.

‘Friends of mine,’ she growls with a backward look over her shoulder. ‘Like just about everyone around here, they work in the theatre.’ She has lived in the theatre district of New York for most of her adult life, eschewing Hollywood because she didn’t want to raise her daughter there. ‘Your engagement with the world is completely out of whack in LA. I mean, all their body-image problems. Once I had a daughter, there was no way in hell I was going to bring her up out there.’

She is quite unstarry in her habits, she tells me. Takes buses. Potters around the grocery store and the pharmacist. Chats to the garbage men she sees every morning on her way to the gym. They know about her numerous feet and knee operations and are used to seeing her with a cane or on crutches. ‘Yeah, this is my neighbourhood. Lived here for 16 years. Let’s eat. I’m hungry. I’m going to have steak tartare. Haven’t had much meat lately.’

I nearly choke on my drink. Though she didn’t mean it that way, it just sounds so, well?… What about alcohol? I ask. Has she had much of that lately? ‘Just back from a two-week vacation to the wine region of northern California. Rented a convertible. It was so nice not to have a schedule. I have friends in the vineyards there. So, yeah, sometimes I drink wine.

‘I know it is not approved behaviour but, the truth is, I haven’t had an incident for many years now. Hope I never do again. I know it is a serious danger, but I don’t have the pain that I had and don’t have the personal pressures that I had. What can I say? Alcohol is a powerful anaesthetic. It works! It works!’ She gives a raucous laugh then looks serious again. ‘It is so hard to explain to people that kind of chronic, endless pain that you can’t do anything to relieve – can’t sit, stand, lie, anything. It hurts from the inside out. It’s hard to explain what it does to your mind. You will take any escape. I went too far with the drinking but I don’t feel I have the need or the inclination to do that any more.

‘You know, RA is a very bad disease. Very difficult. You have a permanent low-level fluey feeling, a constant temperature and nausea.’ She raises her arms in the air, clenches her fists and shakes them. ‘You think, “Get the f— outta my body!”‘

She still feels angry about her disease, clearly. ‘My first feeling was relief that it had a name, because I thought I was dying from something nameless. Having a name for it gave me a point of attack. Honestly?…’ She sighs. ‘I was 37 years old when I was diagnosed and I thought, why should I expect to be incapacitated? It wasn’t as if I had done a stupid stunt that broke my neck – though, boy, I came close to that.

‘I suppose I felt a sense of helplessness. The day I was told, I went from the hospital to kindergarten for a meeting with my daughter’s teacher and looked at these little chairs and started crying because I knew there was no way I would be able to get into that chair. Anger certainly came along after that. Anger is never far from my sense of self. A core of anger has sustained me through many things. I become more articulate in an argument. I’m scary. When I go quiet, run!’

In her autobiography, Send Yourself Roses, she writes that she wants to apologise to anyone she was unpleasant to when she was drinking. In what ways unpleasant? ‘I’ve seen it in other families but not mine at all. We were never discourteous. Never have a tone of voice that was harsh. Then to hear it coming from my own mouth. It was like I was possessed. It was terrible. I was ashamed and shocked. Didn’t know I had it in me. Wrong!’

Her decision not to reveal the truth about her illness was one she took with her agent as well as her husband. The logic was that, in Hollywood at least, it is more acceptable for you to drink or do drugs than to be ill. Contracts are more likely to waive insurance for drink and drug addiction, than for serious illness. There was a precedent for this, after all. Michael J. Fox hid his Parkinson’s disease for years so that he could keep working.

Her illness, she says, sapped not only her strength but also her confidence. ‘And then there was the personal side, too,’ she says as her steak tartare arrives. ‘The sexual relationship is not pleasurable because it hurts to be touched. My husband was wonderfully patient and supportive, but I missed the sex. I missed it as being a part of me, part of my identity. I enjoy sex. I enjoy the hell out of it!’

How are things in that respect at the moment? ‘Boring. Not easy. It’s not so easy. I think many men are put off by, well, by me.’I suppose the name comes with some baggage. ‘Maybe. Maybe they don’t want to be part of this, have this responsibility, being photographed and appearing in public and having your life scrutinised. Maybe they are right to choose not to.’

There are scratches on the backs of her hands. ‘My cats have been at me,’ she says when she notices me noticing them. She lives alone these days, after being married for 22 years to Jay Weiss, a wealthy New York property developer. Their marriage had survived years of scrutiny, so what, I ask, was the reason for their split in the end? ‘I don’t think there is a simple explanation. I don’t think there ever is. I think we became too difficult for each other because our lives were going different ways. He wanted to be part of the public world less and less. He was tired of the publicity, and the travel, and being, as he would call it, “Mr Turner”.’

She reckons she and her husband are still great friends – just happier apart. At first she felt relieved to be on her own. ‘The peace of my own place, you know. I started painting rooms all these colours that he would have minded, one green, one terracotta… Then I started to grieve because I realised, “Nobody knows where I am right now.” Always, for 20-some years, Jay knew where I was.’

On the other hand, she felt she was ‘coming to a place where I was opening up more and I didn’t want my life to get smaller. My daily, child-rearing duties were over. Well, one hopes. At the moment I have my doubts.’ She laughs again, a room-filling laugh. Her daughter, Rachel, is a 20-year-old university student. ‘She’s a terrific kid but I am kind of hoping she will leave home soon.’

Her lowest moment came, she says, when she found herself crying in the bathroom, unable to squeeze moisturiser out of a bottle because she could no longer grip anything with her hands. Rachel was four at the time and said, ‘I can do that for you, Mommy.’

At one point, her daughter even had to feed her because she couldn’t hold a spoon. ‘You never want to look helpless in front of your child. It was hard not being able to play with her. She would say, “Come on, Mom, run!”, and years later, after many operations and much medication, Rachel and I were going somewhere and I ran with her across a road and she said, “Mom, you ran!” I suppose I never expected to again, having been told I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, you know. Instinctively, I would count the steps to the bus stop, just to brace myself for having to walk a distance.’

Turner is pretty good on the self-analysis, describing herself as ‘funny, smart, irreverent, silly, stubborn and demanding’. Her self-awareness even extends to admitting that her self-awareness is probably down to her having had the same therapist, a woman, for the past quarter of a century. ‘It’s preventive really. She’s a sounding board. My shrink has told me I have unresolved issues.’

Such as? ‘My father dying when he did. I was 17. A great time of transition in my life.’ Her father, a US diplomat, died suddenly of coronary thrombosis while on a posting to London. He was mowing the lawn at the time and she reckons he died angry with her, because they had had an argument. Her father hadn’t been keen on her becoming an actress, considering it one up from street-walking. ‘His death left me with an inherent insecurity that I would fight to hide. I would see others as being as flawed as I see myself. It’s one reason I wouldn’t be 20 again. Who needs to be hag-ridden like that? I wasn’t a happy 20-year-old.’

Really? She wouldn’t want to be 20 again? Everyone wants to be 20 again. ‘Not me. I’m so much better now, at my job, at caring and relating to be people, so much less self-involved. I’m a better person now. I was inexperienced, then. I wouldn’t deliberately damage someone, but I couldn’t see what could be done to protect someone either.’

The actress lost her virginity at 19 and found the experience ‘disappointing’ – but sex got better, and by the time she had returned to America and graduated with a degree in drama from the University of Maryland she was very comfortable about her sexuality, particularly her power over men. Famously, she once said: ‘You know how it is when you know you are really sexy? On nights when I feel great about myself, if I walk into a room and a man doesn’t look at me, he’s either dead or gay.’

Our waitress arrives, an actress in between jobs. That was what Turner was doing when she was cast in Body Heat, and she went back to waitressing while waiting for the film to be released. ‘For all I knew, it was going to be a flop and I needed to carry on paying the rent. But then, suddenly, Bill [Hurt] and I were hot.

‘Men were pursuing me all over the place. I went to a dinner party and Jack Nicholson was there and afterwards, when I got home, Jack was ringing saying: “How could you do that to me? You were my date.” I said, “I was your date? No one told me.” It was very odd but there was all this?… I didn’t know the rules, having not grown up in LA, thank God?… I felt hounded and hunted by men there. I thought after Body Heat I would never marry. Because who would want to take that on? When Jay said I was the woman for him, I said, “Are you crazy?”‘

Sitting in the Manhattan restaurant enjoying her meat she seems animated to the point of hyperactivity. She widens her eyes, tosses back her head, cackles manically. She even slips into Dick van Dyke English from time to time, for my benefit, and uses oddly old-fashioned phrases such as ‘Oh my stars and garters’ and ‘Heavens to Betsy’.

At one point I excuse myself and forget to turn my tape-recorder off only to find, when I later listen to it, that she hums to herself when alone. Actually, she does seem self-possessed and she is quite a one for bigging herself up, talking about her ‘range’ and how her films were ‘ground-breaking’ and how her ‘agent tells me offers to direct are pouring in’. Her relentless self-affirmation seems to mask vulnerability, though, as well as a certain sadness.

This autumn, she plans to return to the London stage in the new Edward Albee play, Me, Myself and I. She plays the mother. ‘I said to Edward, “It’s mother roles for me from now on.”‘ The playwright is a big fan of hers, having told her she looked like his idea of Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: ‘Strong and somewhat plain, and unpretentious, as though she had really lived.’

It’s not a bad description of Kathleen Turner either. She does, after all, do a nice line in self-parody, having played on her reputation as a gay icon by taking the part of Chandler’s transsexual father in Friends – ‘A woman playing a man playing a woman,’ she recalls with her deep and wheezy laugh that sounds like the last drop being squeezed from a tube of suntan lotion. Her memoirs reveal her to be unprecious about Hollywood, too.

Burt Reynolds was ‘just nasty’, Steve Martin was ‘quite stiff and unfunny, when he wasn’t being funny on film.’ And Nicolas Cage she dismissed as a ‘self-involved egotist’, though she was obliged to apologise to him after he successfully sued her earlier this year for falsely characterising him as a drink-driver who once stole a chihuahua. So there is exaggeration there, as well as blunt honesty.

She reckons she is getting blunter with each passing year. As to her appearance, she says that it makes no sense for people to compare her to how she looked 25 years ago. ‘These people who do that didn’t stop growing or changing, so why would I look the same?’ She is quite right of course, but there does seem something almost wilful about the way she now checks her watch, takes out her lipstick and applies it unselfconsciously before popping it back in her handbag – I get the feeling she hadn’t worn make-up deliberately.

Anyway, she has another appointment downtown and, before she leaves, she slips her sunglasses on indoors, a little touch of Hollywood in New York.

First he took Manhattan… now Donald Trump wants to turn part of Scotland into a golf course. He’s already worth ‘about $10 billion’ but – in between barking orders to his secretary (and our interviewer) – he says he’s not motivated by money. Nigel Farndale almost believes him

The first surprise is that Donald Trump, a man who prides himself on his focus and discipline, does not have clear surfaces in his office high above Manhattan.

On the contrary, the place is cluttered with baseball bats, American football helmets, assorted trophies, silver spades propped against walls, and dozens of framed magazine covers stacked rather than hung. Evidence of a busy mind perhaps; or a short attention span.

‘This is Shaq O’Neal’s shoe,’ he says picking up what appears to be a shipping container from among the sports vests and baseballs laid out on a sofa. ‘Here, have a hold of it. It’s a monster, right? Size 22.

He took it off immediately after winning the NBA. And this is Tyson’s world heavyweight belt.’ He places a heavy, medallioned belt in my other hand.

‘The trouble is, I have nowhere to put these things. And all these.’ He gestures at the picture frames and then at the extravagant views from his windows, Central Park to the north, the Empire State Building to the south. ‘Don’t have enough wall space because of all these windows. When I have time I’ll get them hung up.’

It sounds improbable, this lack of space, given that we are standing on the 26th floor of the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, the most valuable piece of property in Manhattan, and one of the many skyscrapers around the world which this 62-year-old real-estate tycoon owns. But the lack of time rings true. His day starts at 5.30am, and he takes between five and 10 minutes for lunch, at his desk.

Though he is friendly enough, when he comes to the end of a sentence he has a habit of saying, ‘Go ahead’, as in, next question. Boy, is it unnerving.

The second surprise, by the way, is that he has shaken hands. I thought he hated that, to the point of obsessive compulsiveness. ‘Well, you look like a nice clean guy,’ he says. ‘What am I going to catch from you? It is a terrible custom that we all have.

But I guess it’s better than the hug. I had this guy came in a couple of weeks ago, and he says, “Hi Donald,” and shakes my hand, then gives me a hug, then sits down and starts coughing, and I say, “What’s wrong?”

And he says, “I have the worst cold.” So I say, “Excuse me,” and go off and wash my hands.’ Pause. ‘Go ahead.’

What about social kissing? ‘The triple is the worst. In France. One, two, three. The triple is crazy.’

Is that what he has to do with his one-time girlfriend, Carla Bruni? Or is it the kiss on the hand, now that she is the wife of the President of France?

‘Carla? It’s not awkward with her. She’s a terrific woman who is going to do France proud. She is already a great first lady. Is that what they call it over there? Has she taken you guys in England by storm? So different.’ Pause. ‘Go ahead.’

Scotland, I say as we sit down – him behind a vast polished desk cluttered with phones, cuttings and magazines, most of them featuring him on the cover; me opposite on a chair that is slightly lower than his.

A few weeks ago he landed his plane, a private Boeing 727 with the name Trump written in giant gold letters on the side, on the tiny Isle of Lewis, dwarfing anything else flying into or out of that airport.

He then spent precisely 97 seconds looking (for the first time) at the house where his mother was born and raised, all the while being photographed by the world’s media.

Then, with all the subtlety of a bulldozer, proceeded to give evidence to a public inquiry into a controversial £1 billion development he is planning to build at Balmedie, 13 miles north of Aberdeen, arguing that he was going to build ‘the greatest golf course in the world’ there, and there was no point in doing it ‘in a half-assed way’.

Environmental groups have balked at the proposal to build two golf courses, a five-star hotel, 1,000 holiday homes and 500 private houses on a three-mile stretch of coastline. They have argued that it could cause irreversible damage to a protected area of sand dunes.You certainly like to make an entrance, I say.

‘Well, you know all that publicity surrounding my visit is good for Scotland. I got calls from all over the world after that, from people wanting to invest there. It was on all the front pages. So many people have written about it. I have cuttings sent. Kelly!’

This is another thing he does. Mid-thought he will bark out his secretary’s name.

‘Can you bring in that pile of cuttings?’ Kelly appears and hands them over. He flicks through them. The headline on one is ‘Donald Grump’. I ask what it is about.

‘To be honest I don’t have time to read them. I wouldn’t get anything else done if I did. These are just the ones about Scotland. There are 33 other locations we’re working on. We’re doing great jobs around the world. Dubai.

China. India. Russia. Look here. Your FT. Right on the front page. I think that’s good for Scotland. I think it’s a positive. I think we made our case well. We have right on our side. Assuming we get the necessary approvals, I think it will be a great thing for Scotland.

There are very few opponents. I think they were very ineffective in the commission. I think we made our case well. Great thing for Scotland.’

This is another thing. He repeats his message several times in the same block of thought, treating discourse as an exercise in attrition. (Take these repetitions as read from now on.) He also bigs himself up all the time.

In fact, I don’t think I have met anyone less self-conscious or, with the possible exception of Don King, the boxing promoter, more puffed-up with self-belief. The funny thing is though, it suits him. He does it with a strange, almost cartoonish charm.

Trump has said that one of the things that attracted him to the site was that he had ‘never seen such an unspoilt and dramatic seaside landscape’. Which is precisely what makes it ‘the perfect setting’ for a six-storey hotel with customised boulevard. Does he appreciate the irony of that comment?

‘You will hardly even see the course,’ he says. ‘There are hundreds of courses built on SSSIs [Sites of Special Scientific Interest] in the UK. Tremendous number. It’s going to be beautiful, otherwise it wouldn’t be suitable.’

When we spoke, the inquiry was due to publish its conclusion any day. Whatever the outcome, this has been an unusual experience for Trump. Has his celebrity been a hindrance in this case, does he suppose? ‘I think it’s been both positive and negative. Positive in the sense that people know the work I do.’

His name is on everything: his buildings, his planes, even, according to legend, his bed. Did the use of his name as part of the brand start out as egotism?

‘It probably started right here in this building. Every company in the country wanted this site. It was and remains the best site in New York.

In my twenties I wasn’t naming buildings after myself, and then I bought the building rights for this site over Tiffany and had a choice of naming this building Trump Tower or Tiffany Tower, and a friend of mine who was streetwise said, ”When you change your name to Tiffany, then call it Tiffany Tower.” So I called it Trump Tower and it was a tremendous success.’

I have been trying not to stare at his famous brush-forward, comb-over hairstyle, the one that was once compared to a sunken apricot soufflé and which has been described by the New York Times as ‘an elaborate structure best left to an architecture critic’. As we are talking about branding and image, the question seems to be begged. For the love of God, man, why?

‘People always comment on it, but it’s not that bad and it is mine. Look,’ he lifts it up. ‘I mean, I get killed on it. I had an article where someone said it was a hairpiece, but you can see it isn’t.’ Does he use gel?

‘No, I use spray actually. I’ll comb it wet then spray it so it doesn’t get blown away by the wind. I’ve taken a lot of heat on the hair but, hey, it seems to work. Some people say, “Why don’t you comb it back?” but I don’t think NBC would be happy. They don’t want to take any chances.

‘Hey, Kelly! Can you bring in the figures from Nielsen?’

He is referring to the ratings for his US television show, The Apprentice, which he launched, along with the catchphrase ‘You’re Fired’.

‘There,’ he says, handing over the figures. ‘Didn’t even write them myself! When my show became a success I had all these people trying to copy it. Martha Stewart. Richard Branson.

They all failed. I really like Richard even though he tried to copy my show and failed. His show bombed whereas mine was the number one rated. The Apprentice has just been renewed for two more years.’

What about Sir Alan Sugar? Hasn’t his British version of The Apprentice done as well as Trump’s?

‘He does a good job over there. I chose him with [the producer] Mark Burnett. We have tried this format in lots of countries with different entrepreneurs and Alan has done it best.’

I heard there was tension between them, especially after Sir Alan described Trump as being ‘full of himself’ and ‘loud and garish’.

‘You mean early on? Well, if there was tension it was because he said he was going to top the rating in the United States, relatively speaking, and I said that was hard because I had the number one show. You want a Coke? Two Diet Cokes please, Kelly!’

The Washington Post once said that, ‘everything in Trump world is fabulous, or in first place, or better looking, or richer, or taller, or it has bigger breasts.’ Other papers have not been so kind, one arguing that with his taste for gilt and marble and overstatement, Trump has all the style and subtlety of a latterday Liberace.

There has been much speculation about how much he is worth. Manhattan seems to be his own personal Monopoly board, it’s true, but some of the properties associated with him around the world are not necessarily owned by him.

He sued Timothy O’Brien, a New York Times reporter, over TrumpNation, a book that claimed he was worth considerably less that he said he was.

Does he, I ask, know how much he is worth?

‘I may be worth approximately $10 billion.’

Presumably, the goalposts keep moving, I say, and he finds himself competing with other billionaires.

‘You keep going forward. I think if you love what you’re doing, that’s what you do. I have a choice. I could stay home and relax but I chose not to do that. If you like what you’re doing, you keep going forward.

By the way, I know plenty of very rich people who are not happy people. Money can be a negative. I know people who became unhappy after making their money. Equally I know people without much money who are very content. So it’s a mindset.’

Is he happy? ‘I think so. Content.’

Kelly’s voice comes over the intercom. ‘It’s Ivanka.’

Trump looks at me knowingly, and says, ‘The famous Ivanka.’ He presses the speaker button on his phone.

‘Hi, honey, I have a powerful man in my office, from The Sunday Telegraph.’

‘Is he treating you nicely? Am I gonna have to come up there?’

‘He’s gonna treat me nicely until I read the story, then I’m going to say, “That sonofabitch, I should have never wasted my time.” How you doing, honey?’

Father and daughter discuss diaries. Can she do London? He’s going to be in LA that day, etc. The famous Ivanka is his daughter by the equally famous Ivana; she of the blonde beehive who once said: ‘Don’t get mad, get everything.’

Their messy divorce in 1992 came after Ivana discovered Donald’s affair with American beauty queen Marla Maples, whom he went on to marry, and later divorce. He is now married to Melania Knauss, a former model from Slovenia 24 years his junior.

Ivanka works for the Trump Organisation, as do her two grown-up brothers. He puts the phone down.

‘That was about Dubai. Go ahead.’

We talk about how inheriting wealth can undermine children. ‘I think it can be tough, but it’s hard to not give them these things because they grew up in Mar-a-Lago [Palm Beach] or Trump Tower, so it’s easier said than done.

But you want to keep your children grounded, so mine work. Three out of five of them have come into the business – the others are too young – and they are doing a great job, Ivanka, Don and Eric. The fact they are working keeps them grounded.’

Does he assume most people are motivated by money?

‘I don’t think I’m motivated by money. I’m motivated by enjoyment. I do what I do well. If I was motivated only by money I would have stopped working.’

Trump himself was born into wealth, the son of property tycoon Fred Trump. After gaining an economics degree in 1968, he joined his father’s company and worked with him for five years. Would he have made it without his father’s fortune? ‘My father built in Brooklyn and Queens, and I learnt a lot from him in terms of how to negotiate. The biggest thing I learnt was that my father worked hard and was happy. I figured that is the way to be happy.’

A rare moment of reflection is upon us. When his father died 10 years ago, he says, it made him wonder what it was all for. ‘When you lose your parents you are an orphan all of a sudden, however old you are. It tells you that time is not something you can discount.

‘I had loving parents. My father always showed great confidence in me. Even before I was 20 he would send me out to do jobs. He praised me all the time. I’ve always had great success and it had a lot to do with that. If you sink your first 3ft putt, you know it’s going to go well for you for the rest of the round. So go ahead.’

I say the picture I have of him is of an optimist, a bullish one with a can-do spirit, but is there a melancholy or reflective side the public doesn’t see?

‘I think I have a lot of thoughtful moments, but I don’t think I’m always optimistic. I was the first to call the recession two years ago on CNN and NBC and everyone said I was kidding. That’s not an optimist. It’s a realist. I prepared very nicely and went to places that are booming.

Other people are in places that are dying. Either I was intelligent or lucky. I used to tell people not to take exploding mortgages because that’s what they do, explode in your face. You know, sub-prime. Two years ago I was saying don’t buy real estate because the price is too high. Now I am saying buy real estate because this is going to be a great time.’

During the property slump of the early Nineties, his business was a staggering $9.2 billion in debt. How did he deal with it? He called a meeting with his creditors and, after warmly welcoming them, pitched for more time to repay them. Within hours they were on side – but only on condition that Trump stopped spending like a man with unlimited resources.

Trump disagreed. Unless he behaved like a billionaire, how could he expect the business world to treat him like one? Within a year of this meeting, he had proved himself right. Not only was he able to repay the debt, but he was back in healthy profit.

In one of the 14 how-to-get-rich books he has published, he writes that a low point came when he passed a beggar on the street and realised ‘the beggar was worth $9.2 billion more than I was.’ How did he keep his nerve when he owed that amount?

‘Many people I knew were going bankrupt and I didn’t go bankrupt. I learnt a lot about myself. I learnt that I could handle pressure. I know a lot of people who are smart, but who can’t handle pressure, and they might as well not be smart.’

A man in a suit pops his head around the door and says: ‘Money’s in. Came in 2.30.’

‘Congratulations.’ ?Then to me: ‘Just did a big deal. Lot of money, and there were questions as to whether those involved would be able to come up with the money because it was agreed in better times, hundreds of millions. Go ahead.’

He talks about the successes in his public life a great deal, but what about the failures in his private life, namely that two of his marriages ended in divorce?

‘I find business a lot easier to understand than relationships,’ he says candidly. ‘I know some people who have a great relationship but can’t add two and two. Business for me is a natural thing. Relationships are not natural to me. I don’t blame myself.

I was married to two very good women before my third marriage but it was hard for them and unfair for them to compete against my business. It takes a lot of time. But look, there are lots of advantages too.’

Is he a difficult person to live with?

‘I think I am a very easy person to live with for the right woman. A person who gives you space. Takes the heat off. For the wrong kind of woman I am impossible. But the time-competition is tough for a woman. I don’t think it is easy being married to me, frankly.’

Does he have a strong sex drive? ‘Marla [his second wife] spoke about my sex drive but I didn’t. That’s all a personal thing. Generally speaking, I think a strong and successful person will have a stronger sex drive than someone who isn’t successful. History has proved that to be a fact, right?’

I presume this means he has no need of Viagra? He has big curling lips like Elvis and these now pucker as he mouths the word ‘No.’

His youngest child is two, he is 62. What’s it like being a father at that age?

‘I cope. I really like him, he’s a great kid with a great personality. I have a wife, Melania, who really takes care of the baby. She doesn’t put any pressure on me to do the things a lot of fathers have to do. She is totally content to really take care of that baby.’

We have been talking for an hour by this stage, and I can sense the time has come to wrap things up. He shakes my hand again. Afterwards, downstairs in the cool of the lobby, I feel slightly dazed.

He is exhausting company. Even here you can’t get away from his neurotic energy. The rose marble floors are teeming with tourists come to worship at this shrine to capitalism.

As souvenirs, they take away Donald Trump Signature Collection shirts, cufflinks and ties. For the budget-conscious there are baseball caps, key rings and mugs emblazoned with his name. In the gold-plated world of Donald Trump, it seems, everything is for sale and everything has a price… especially his name.