He may have a large head, but at least it is a film actor’s large head, one that casting directors and cameramen favour. The ‘he’ I refer to is Jake Gyllenhaal, pronounced ‘Jill-en-hall’. The favouritism is to do with the body-to-head ratio: think Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman; big heads, small and compact bodies. True, at 6ft 2in, Gyllenhaal is taller than the average film star, but tall actors can have that golden ratio, too. Look at Rupert Everett and Hugh Grant.

Anyway, I mention this because I am on a low and squashy sofa, while Gyllenhaal is managing to sprawl, somehow, on a high and upright chair. The man is almost horizontal, with his neck disappearing into his shoulders and his long legs foreshortened in front of him, in front of me. From this viewpoint, I can appreciate that his body-to-head ratio is golden indeed.

He is golden in another respect. At 26 he has become one of the biggest names in Hollywood. As he himself jokes, he has gone in a short space of time from having directors say, ‘Who is Jake Gyllenhaal?’ to ‘Get me Jake Gyllenhaal’ to ‘Get me someone who looks like Jake Gyllenhaal.’

In the past eight years he has starred in 14 films, but the one that put him on the radar was the strange and possibly deep, possibly meaningless Donnie Darko in 2001. Three years later he had a more conventional box office hit with The Day After Tomorrow, about the apocalyptic effects of global warming. But it is on the three films he made in 2005 that his reputation rests: Proof, about a maths genius played by Gwyneth Paltrow; Jarhead, Sam Mendes’s film about marines kicking their heels while waiting for the first Gulf war to start; and Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s lyrical epic about the relationship between two gay cowboys. Gyllenhaal received an Oscar nomination for that one. Gravity disguised as lightness of manner: that is what critics have identified as the secret of his mesmerising screen presence. Like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, they say, he knows how to emote without words.

In person his manner seems easy, his voice gentle with dark undercurrents. Gyllenhaal’s eyes are blue, and big like a cow’s, his nose is solid-looking and he has a full and sculpted mouth which turns up at the corners. He is talking about how, despite being born there, he is not really a Hollywood person. ‘I just don’t really buy it. But I do buy London, because there is an appreciation of growth here.’

Having no idea what he means by the phrase ‘appreciation of growth’, and suspecting he doesn’t either – he is bright and articulate, was educated at Columbia University indeed, but he does occasionally slip into actor-speak – I ask him about another growth, the one on his face. ‘This?’ he says stroking a neatly clipped Edwardian beard that is dark auburn in colour and at odds with the sloppy, crewneck jumper and T-shirt ensemble he is wearing. ‘I grew it for The Brothers, a Jim Sheridan film.’

Oh, I thought it might be to play the president of Iran.

‘You saw that?’ he says with a laugh. ‘Yeah, right, supposedly he looks like me.’ He refers to his cameo in a recent Saturday Night Live sketch: it was a rap song called I Ran. One of the lyrics was about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being like ‘a hairy Jake Gyllenhaal.’

He still gets recognised, even with the beard. ‘There is a certain type of fan who will recognise you no matter what disguise you wear. But, hey, I have a grey spot right here.’ He points to his beard.

‘Maybe when I’ve got grey all over no one will recognise me. My sister has a grey spot there,’ he points to his head. ‘Maybe it’s something genetic.’

His sister is the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, who made her name in Secretary. Must have been weird for him to watch that one, I say, especially the erotically charged scenes in which his sister is stripped and spanked by her boss. ‘Well it wasn’t necessarily erotic for me,’ he says.

I compliment him on his use of the word ‘necessarily’. ‘Thank you. It’s funny, when she was first going for auditions everyone was telling her she wasn’t sexy, not sexual. I remember her buying some skimpy cut-off dress for one audition and it just wasn’t her. Now she is treated as a sex object. Go figure.’

His sister appeared with him in Donnie Darko; are they competitive? ‘I think I was for a time – there was some sibling rivalry – but then we both realised it was a bit dumb. We grew out of it.’

He can afford to be magnanimous because his is the career that has gone through the roof. His parents are also in the film industry – his father is a director, his mother a scriptwriter (she was Oscar nominated for Running on Empty) – but, successful though they are, he has left them behind, too. Meal times at home must be a nightmare. ‘I do get taken down a lot at home. Put in my place. I’m the little brother.’

Thanks to this background, though, he says he is fluent in the language of film, like someone growing up in France is fluent in French. Also he grew up watching his parents go through periods where they were getting awards and enjoying success and then, bang, one bad film and a strange kind of gloom would descend on the household.

His new film won’t be that ‘one bad one’ for him. Rendition is not only thought-provoking and compelling; it also has an ingenious narrative twist which I won’t spoil for you, and which I am not sure I can explain anyway (it is to do with a time shift). Gyllenhaal plays a CIA agent who has to oversee the interrogation and torture of a Muslim terrorist suspect – not in America but in the unnamed country to which the suspect has been flown in what is euphemistically known as ‘extraordinary rendition’. The film explores the moral ambiguities of this policy.

‘You may be torturing an innocent man,’ Gyllenhaal says. ‘On the other hand you may be torturing a guilty man and the information you elicit from him could save the lives of 5,000 innocent civilians.

‘That is the moral dilemma faced by my character in the film. That said, I think for CIA people in those circumstances, moral imperatives do not come into play. They leave that for the philosophers. All they care about is what is working and what isn’t working. Practicality wins over morality. Extraordinary rendition is intended to protect. Sadly, as a policy, it has been over-used and misused.’

Considering what happened to the country singers the Dixie Chicks when they spoke out about the Iraq war, is he worried he is going to get hate-mail accusing him of being treasonous and unpatriotic? ‘I have gotten the usual accusations that this is lefty propaganda. In my opinion I feel like there is not much despargy, dispari, sorry?…’

‘Thank you. That’s going to look good in print: “The guy can’t even say disparity.” I flew in yesterday and my tongue is still on American time. I can see that in America people see this huge disparity between Left and Right, but actually they are more alike than different. If you criticise extraordinary rendition, or Guantanamo, or Abu Ghraib, that doesn’t make you a lefty, that makes you a humanitarian.’

Does he feel ashamed to be an American? ‘Well, it’s complicated, isn’t it? There is a lot of fear in America at the moment and some of it is justified. I wouldn’t want to lay it all on one political leader.’

Spoken like a politician, or at least a politically engaged Hollywood actor who campaigned for the Democrats in the 2004 American election, appeared in ‘Rock the Vote’ advertising and is talked about as the next George Clooney, or God forbid, Sean Penn.

It’s not unheard of for an actor to become a politician in America, I note: is that a career move he has considered? ‘I think it is a sad time when actors become politicians and politicians become actors, but actually the two roles do overlap. I don’t want to run for office, though I am an active member of the Civil Liberties Union. I believe in the First Amendment. I believe the right to free speech is inalienable and that we put that freedom in jeopardy when we throw out due process with rendition. Personally, I would say extraordinary rendition is not morally ambiguous. It is wrong.’

I can see the headlines now, I say. ‘Hollywood liberal thinks torture is wrong shock!’ He has the good grace to laugh. ‘You can say I’m in favour of it if you like. That might be quite funny. Say I tried to torture you during the interview. Say Jake was torturing me with his boring comments.’

He adds that he knows how annoying it can be when actors start lecturing people about politics. ‘I don’t think audiences need to know my political beliefs to appreciate this film. Nor do they need to know who I am dating. It’s not important.’

I haven’t asked who he is dating, but since he raised the subject, he did make some intriguingly ambiguous comments about his sexual orientation at the time Brokeback Mountain came out. A broad grin spreads across his face and he covers his head with his hands. ‘I know, I know.’ He is single at the moment. For several years he had an on-off affair with Kirsten Dunst. And yet?…

I quote something he said about homosexuality: ‘I don’t think I’d be afraid of it if it happened.’ What on earth did he mean by that? ‘Nothing like that has ever happened to me. I live in a different world. What I was trying to say was why leave out possibilities in my life? It wasn’t meant to be provocative.’

So let’s get it on the record: is he saying he is open to persuasion? ‘No, I am not open to persuasion myself, but the idea of homosexuality is acceptable to me. I grew up in a city where half the people I know are gay. Both of my godfathers are gay.’

Paul Newman is gay! He laughs again. ‘No, he’s my celebrity godfather.’ What’s a celebrity godfather? ‘That’s the godfather that the media give you. He’s a close friend of my family. He taught me to drive. I have literal godfathers and celebrity godfathers.’

I see. And Jamie Lee Curtis, is she a celebrity godmother or a literal godmother? ‘Both. That’s why it is confusing growing up in Hollywood.’

OK, having established that he is not bisexual, was he being quite calculating when he allowed people to think he was? ‘It was meant as a way of saying it was important for Heath [Ledger, his co-star in Brokeback Mountain] and I to have the movie exist as the movie, but also to have people know it was two straight actors playing those parts.’

I think I follow. The chemistry and tension wouldn’t have worked as well if two gay actors had been playing those roles, and because they were both straight it made their sexual awkwardness more convincing, more like it might be for two cowboys. ‘Exactly. Here are these two lonely people who find themselves through love. Love has no bounds and these two people found a connection in this massive, lonely landscape of Wyoming.’

Presumably he got nasty letters from homophobes.

‘Determining what was nasty and what was nice was always going to be hard for me with that movie. But yes, I got an insight into homophobia that I wouldn’t normally have encountered.’

Given that he first tasted fame as an 11-year-old when he played Billy Crystal’s son in City Slickers, how come he didn’t go off the rails in his teens like other child stars, Macaulay Culkin, say, or Drew Barrymore? ‘My parents kept my feet on the ground. They had me turn down roles so that I could concentrate on school work.’

They also made him spend the day of his bar mitzvah volunteering at a homeless shelter so that he would appreciate how privileged he was. And yet he feels he did have to struggle to get his parents’ attention, because they were so immersed in their work. One of the reasons he wanted to act, he says, was to command their interest and ‘be a part of their world’.

Something about Gyllenhaal’s intense yet dreamy and deadpan stare suits him to playing mentally disturbed characters, such as Donnie Darko. And according to Robert Downey Jr, who co-starred with him in the serial killer film Zodiac earlier this year, ‘he’s nice all right, but he’s also wet, dark and wild’.

That darker side emerged during the filming of Jarhead. A playful fight with his co-star Brian Geraghty suddenly became serious. ‘Something happened and I just started hitting Brian,’ he said at the time. On another occasion he was filming a scene in which he was to hold down a fellow actor and throttle him. The choking actor had to hit Gyllenhaal in the face to make him let go. What’s with this aggression? ‘Yeah there is that side. That is a part of me. Part of me would like to know what I would be like in battle. Have my courage tested. Would I be an altruist or a coward? Would I run away or engage? The engaging is what I would want of myself.’

So he feels frustrated? ‘No, I would just love to test myself. I loved the marines. I shaved my head for Jarhead and both my parents were, like, F—! I came back from the boot camp and they were terrified.’

His aggression in that film, he adds, was more about a search for authenticity. ‘I like the process of digging for that truth. I try to pay attention to my emotions during the day, bring them to my work. I have sometimes read in a script that my character cries, but not everyone cries when they are unhappy. That’s not how people always grieve.’

When he experiences genuine emotions in his own life – anger, grief, love – do they feel less authentic because he has had to fake them in films? ‘Hmm. Have I devalued the currency? I tell you, when I fall in love in real life it has felt nothing like I have acted it in the movies.’

Recalling the rumours about him and Reese Witherspoon, his co-star in Rendition, I say: just don’t fall in love with your co-star on screen, eh? ‘Yeah, well?…’ He laughs. ‘I haven’t had many opportunities.’

He must find it difficult persuading women to go to bed with him. ‘I don’t think of myself as good-looking. Not at all. When I was a kid I had these huge glasses. I once went to a fancy dress as a Crest toothpaste tube with these huge glasses stuck on. That is how I see myself most of the time. A Crest toothpaste tube with bad eyesight.’

And on that surreal note, it is time to bid the wet, dark and wild Jake Gyllenhaal goodbye. ‘Be nice to me,’ he says with a grin as he stands up and stretches. ‘Actually, I don’t know why I said that. You can write whatever you like, just spell my name right.’

This is Malcolm McLaren as he likes to see himself: the Left Bank bohemian, the unappreciated maverick, the exile nursing a glass of chilled pinot noir as he sits in his favourite bistro on the Boulevard St Germain, not far from his appartement. He even, towards the end of this paragraph, compares himself to Oscar Wilde. ‘I first came to Paris to lick my wounds at the end of the Seventies,’ he says, over-enunciating his vowels in a fluty voice that is part estuary geezer, part high duchess. ‘It was after I’d been taken to court by the Sex Pistols because they claimed I had mismanaged them. I had mismanaged them, of course. I was in the business of mismanagement. But I soon realised that Parisians love anyone the English hate. I felt like Oscar Wilde must have felt when he became an exile here. The main difference being that I had zillions of girlfriends.’

The main difference? Clearly we are in the presence of a healthy ego here. The walls of the bistro, incidentally, are hung with giant mirrors that angle away from the wall at the top, so that diners can contemplate themselves. And above the cash register there is a small black and white photograph of Picasso, who was also a regular here. Wilde, Picasso, McLaren. It soon becomes apparent that my dining companion would have no hesitation in mentioning those three names in the same breath.

‘We’re just in the process of moving at the moment,’ he adds. ‘From the 9th to 8th arrondissement. We had a bit of a clear-out. My big Knoll desk was bought at auction by Nicolas Sarkozy. We had to move because we needed a better concierge, one who would deal with packages and be discreet.’ The ‘we’ refers to Young Kim, his 34-year-old Korean-American partner (a graduate of Yale University who is now a fashion historian). ‘This will be my fifth appartement because although Parisians in general love me, I always seem to have trouble with my immediate neighbours. Any bit of noise or rowdiness and they want to complain to the police and put a petition in the town hall. Before you know it you are being taken to court by the landlord of the building. I’ve had that twice. And if you put up the black flag and say ”f— you” then they make your life even more miserable.’

At 61, McLaren’s hair is no longer auburn and wiry, but neatly cropped and frosting at the temples. He is wearing a sensible blue shirt – although it does have a gravy stain on the front – and as he talks he rolls up one sleeve only, the other remaining stubbornly buttoned down. It is as if he only half means business today. He has, he confides, got a stinking hangover. To combat it he orders, in passable French, a beetroot salad, one which leaves his tongue red. ‘I sooo needed to eat something,’ he says, with a roll of his eyes. He holds his knife like a pen and, as he talks, which he does for three hours without flagging – talk, talk, talk – he holds his fork limply, his wrist loose, conducting with it. Perhaps it is all part of the aesthete look he seems to be cultivating: Brian Sewell meets Dame Edith Evans. He is the consummate chameleon, after all.

After his heady days managing the Sex Pistols (and later Bow Wow Wow), McLaren reinvented himself as a pioneer of scratch and hip-hop, having hit singles with Buffalo Gals and a techno version of Madam Butterfly. But after that, nothing. Well, nothing much. With the composer Yanni he arranged The Flower Duet to accompany the BA commercials. He ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of London in 1999. He produced a film, Fast Food Nation, that did quite well at the box office last year. Oh, and he has appeared in a reality show set in a remote village in Scotland. It was due to air this autumn but may now be shelved because another of the contestants, Mike Reid, has since died.

The plot was this: three ‘celebrities’ competed to win the title Baron of Gardenstown, which the TV company had bought. McLaren was the obligatory awkward cuss, something of a tradition on reality shows since John Lydon (Johnny Rotten as was) appeared in I’m a Celebrity?… Get me Out of Here! It ended, fairly inevitably, with McLaren being hounded out of the village by the angry locals he had insulted. ‘You never saw such deformed, awful looking creatures,’ he says now. ‘It was an absolutely sorrowful place. Never, ever go to Scotland if you can help it.’

Not one to brood on past failures, McLaren is now planning to put on a Broadway musical. He also fancies himself as an artist. He has, indeed, persuaded a gallery in New York to put on an exhibition of his work later this month. But McLaren being McLaren, he has, at the time of writing, yet to come up with any exhibits. ‘In the art world I am a sought-after creature,’ he says haughtily. ‘To participate in whatever, to endorse whatever.’ It turns out he is also a consultant on the board of Phillips, the contemporary art auctioneers.

But try as he might to branch out into other art forms, it is the Sex Pistols for which he will be remembered. The band just won’t go away. They have, indeed, just announced a concert to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of Never Mind the Bollocks, one of the most influential albums in rock history. Original members John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock will play at the Brixton Academy in London on 8 November.

When I ask McLaren what words he thinks will appear in the opening paragraphs of his obituaries, he doesn’t say ‘manager’ and ‘Sex Pistols’, although this is clearly what he has in mind. ‘I would have thought “skulduggery”, “charlatan”, “svengali”. Or maybe: “The man responsible for turning British culture into a cheap marketing gimmick.” ‘ And a man obsessed by his own self-image, I suggest.

‘Completely. I have always loved the idea of being someone who can disappear, of never having an identity. It was probably due to my dysfunctional childhood.’ He delights in recounting the picaresque details of his upbringing in Stoke Newington, north London. His father left when he was two, so he was raised by his grandmother, Rose Corre Isaacs, who promptly turned him against his parents and his siblings. She was the eccentric daughter of wealthy Portuguese Sephardic Jews (they were diamond dealers). McLaren was still sharing his grandmother’s bed – at her insistence – when he was 14. ‘She lived for chaos and discomfort,’ McLaren says. ‘She was very possessive and wouldn’t let me have anything to do with girls. But if I was causing mayhem at school, that was OK.’ Sorry to trade in stereotypes, but given how domineering his mother figure was, does he wonder how he managed to turn out straight? ‘Sometimes. I don’t know. Most people think I’m gay.’

He talks at length about the art schools that played such a significant role in the counterculture of the 1960s. He attended several and fell under the spell of the French Situationists,who promoted absurdist and provocative actions as a way of enacting social change. ‘I went from one art school to another, being chucked out, changing my name, getting another grant. They were all geared towards thinking that it was better to be a noble failure than a vulgar success. It meant you were not afraid to break rules. You wanted an adventure not a career. We saw ourselves as romantics in the tradition of Byron, Keats and Blake.’

After running out of art schools in 1971, McLaren moved into a London house that was pretty much a commune. It was there he met Vivienne Westwood. ‘She was a complete autodidact going on and on about…’ He adopts a northern accent ‘…”culture”. I always found her very annoying.’

Not that annoying – they had a child together. ‘Yes, well sometimes when you are annoyed by people it becomes attractive and stimulating. The house was full of American draft-dodgers and she would walk around it completely naked. Naturally, being young – I was only 17 – my testosterone meant I couldn’t help but be attracted to her body. I found myself in bed with her one night and lost my virginity to her and suddenly she handed me the bill. She was pregnant, and what was I going to do about it? I went to my rich grandmother who gave me the money for Vivienne to have an abortion. Vivienne took the money and spent it on a cashmere twinset instead.’

Did he have no moral qualms at all about an abortion? ‘Not really.’

Does it not make him shudder to know that that foetus turned into a sentient being, a grown man who has gone on to have children of his own? ‘I know, I know, it probably should make me shudder but it doesn’t. It makes me confused. At the time there was nothing about me that suggested I could take on the mantle of fatherhood. I had come from a strange non-parental background, the idea of children was… Well, I was barely 18.’

Their son, Joe Corre (named after McLaren’s grandmother), is now a successful entrepreneur, co-founder of the lingerie chain Agent Provocateur. Father and son are not close. Does he ever wonder what Joe must think when he reads about how his father wanted him aborted? ‘I don’t think he had to read about it. That well has already been truly poisoned. Hell hath no fury like a woman scored. Dear Vivienne.’

But it must mess with his head. ‘Oh, I was upset for a while but…’

No, not his head – Joe’s. ‘Unquestionably it turned him into a raving psychotic. Unquestionably.’

McLaren remembers turning up at the hospital in the snow a few days after Joe was born. ‘The nurse was extremely rude. She said: “What took you so long? Are you a long distance lorry driver?” I thought, f— you.’

Did he feel any fatherly instincts at all? ‘Not really. I was lost in that terrain. I’d been brought up to destroy families.’

But he and Vivienne did have a stab at being normal parents, for a while. ‘We never really had sex again after Joe was born, but we did live together. We became this odd couple. Most of my art student friends didn’t like Vivienne, I think maybe because they were jealous of her. They didn’t want to share me. I was this strange creature who didn’t show any sexuality, one way or the other, so they felt possessive of me. I went into depression for a while, then decided to make myself a blue lamé suit, copying Elvis, and I got Vivienne to help me. That was the big change. I realised she was a gifted seamstress.’

Joe was dispatched to a series of boarding schools, freeing his parents to pursue their unconventional business. Together Malcolm and Vivienne opened a clothes shop on the King’s Road which eventually became Sex, the store that pioneered the punk look of bondage trousers, ripped T-shirts and spiked dog collars. ‘We decided we needed mannequins to model our clothes and that was when we invented the Sex Pistols, with Johnny doing his audition there in the shop.’

Although McLaren protests that he was a mismanager, actually he proved to be inspired. The band had played only a few small gigs before being signed (with a large advance) by EMI in 1976. After a notorious appearance on Bill Grundy’s early evening television show – in which they swore live on air – the Pistols were fired by EMI and then signed to A&M Records for another large advance. That contract lasted a week – the record company got cold feet after the band went on a drunken rampage, smashing up the A&M headquarters. It was then that the young (and brave) Richard Branson signed them up to Virgin, for another huge advance. To celebrate, McLaren organised a boat trip down the Thames so that the Pistols could perform ‘God Save The Queen’ outside the Houses of Parliament (‘the fascist regime’), on the day The Queen (‘she ain’t no human being’) was celebrating her silver jubilee. The boat was raided by police and McLaren was arrested – in another blaze of publicity. When the band split up the following year, amid the inevitable stories of heroin abuse, murder and destruction, McLaren kept the rights to Never Mind the Bollocks. John Lydon took him to court in 1987 and won the rights back. McLaren and Lydon have refused to speak to each other since. It is safe to assume that McLaren’s name won’t be on the VIP list for the anniversary concert.

‘I thought the fashion was much more important than the music,’ McLaren says of the Sex Pistols now. ‘Punk was the sound of that fashion.’ It seems a contrary thing to say, but then he is a contrarian, and the band was his baby – so I ask about the fashion, specifically the swastika T-shirt that Sid Vicious always wore, at McLaren’s behest. In retrospect does he consider it to have been a gratuitous and sick provocation? ‘Not at all.’ Does he think he could get away with it today? ‘Probably not, but back then we were still on the tip of Sixties libertarianism.’

I suppose what I am getting at is that, well, he was Jewish. Didn’t he find the swastika repulsive? ‘Not at all. I didn’t give a damn about all that. I thought it was just great.’ He didn’t give a damn about the Holocaust? ‘Look, sometimes a younger generation doesn’t want to inherit the history of an older generation, so we wanted to appropriate the swastika for ourselves. We wanted to have a clean slate. We decided that we liked certain icons from the past and wanted to reinvent them. We were trying to mix pop culture with politics and art.’

On the subject of politics, I say, the thing I always found confusing about punk as a movement was that you had bands such as the Clash wearing Rock Against Racism badges at the same time as the Sex Pistols were wearing swastikas. ‘Well, the Rock Against Racism I was never interested in. I thought that was too naff. It didn’t annoy people enough. I wanted to be childish; I wanted to be everything society might hate. The idea of sounding sensible or serious was abhorrent to me. I was the ultimate mismanager because I was looking for ways to create chaos. The Sex Pistols were young and ignorant. They didn’t have the political references, they have to be forgiven for that. But what they did have was raw energy. All the energy of Never Mind the Bollocks was about desire for change. We wanted to create an artistic movement that would be like a political revolution. We wanted anarchy. It’s easy to forget how grim things were in the 1970s: the oil crisis, the three-day week, hyper-inflation, unemployment, no wonder there was disaffection.’

Now look at them. John Lydon said recently he quite likes The Queen, after all. Richard Branson is a knight of the realm. Vivienne Westwood has not only had her own retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, she is also a Dame of the British Empire. Even McLaren’s son has been offered a knighthood (he turned it down in protest about the war in Iraq – having learned a thing or two from his father and mother about self-publicity). Would McLaren turn down a knighthood, if one were offered? Tellingly, he doesn’t say no. What he does say is: ‘The thought of the English Establishment ever coming to terms with its culture of deception…’ He trails off. ‘England deceives itself. It is a nation of liars.’

So, yes or no? ‘I can see why Vivienne accepted hers. She is a true capitalist. She would have loved to design for The Queen. She takes herself very seriously and is very stubborn. You are either with her or against her, in her view. She hates being laughed at. She can come across as radical, but she is extremely reactionary.’ McLaren rarely sees Westwood these days, although her name is the one he mentions when asked if he’s ever really loved a woman, apart from his eccentric grandmother.

When I suggest that he could always make a donation to the Labour Party, he laughs and says he prefers David Cameron to Gordon Brown because ‘I’ve had my fill of Scotsmen.’ I suggest to him that, deep down, he has the exile’s craving to be accepted by the country that he thinks rejected him. ‘Actually I don’t, but the English will have to accept one day that punk is their most valuable contribution to 20th-century art and culture. They will see it is as being as fundamental as the invention of the motor car, as impactful as any painting by Picasso. They will have to accept that punk was sexier than sex itself – and that it changed lives. Everyone from the bank manager, to Ken Livingstone or Damien Hirst has to acknowledge that punk is the ultimate measurement of cool and is the only way to sell things.’

Bank mangers? ‘Banks use the Never Mind the Bollocks cut-up ransom-letter typography in their advertisements.’

True. So he sees punk as his legacy to the world? ‘People are beginning to learn the truth about punk, and how instrumental I was in the development of it. That will change the way people will think of me. That will be in the obituaries. As barbaric a culture as it is, the English Establishment is coming to terms with the fact that punk was the best thing that ever happened to it. It wouldn’t be the country it is today without punk.’

Hmm. It sounds as if he is taking politics seriously, after all. But what, I ask, was the lasting political message of punk. Cash from Chaos? If so, isn’t that rather shallow? ‘I think it is very hard for artists to have political convictions. That is why I use art as my raison d’etre, not politics. It is the only way I can get on with myself.’

He’ll be telling me he has some moral fibre next. He laughs. ‘No, I have no moral fibre, at all. Codes of behaviour simply trap you.’

He must have some, I suggest. I mean, he wouldn’t, say, murder someone, would he? ‘No, I suppose not, not even Vivienne Westwood when she was annoying me. I’ve come close, but no. I wouldn’t think myself worthy enough to kill someone. Even if they needed to be killed. I wouldn’t have been the best man to do it.’

Not worthy enough. This doesn’t sound like the Malcolm McLaren we know and hate – the braggart whom John Lydon once called the most evil man in the world. It seems he is more complex and self-aware than he is given credit for being. Indeed, when his girlfriend – slightly built and stylish and in black clothes – arrives to meet him, he more or less admits that he is too selfish to entertain the idea of more children. ‘I am enough for Young to look after. The older I get the more brat-ish I become.’

They divide their time between France and America. ‘I’ve lived a restless life,’ he reflects. ‘I can never settle anywhere.’

Strangely, after three hours in his company, I find it hard to decide whether McLaren is likeable or not. Certainly he is entertaining. There is something pantomimic about the man. He is an engaging raconteur with a range of comedy voices – impersonations of Italians, plodding northerners and a sneery whine for Johnny Rotten. And he is endearingly childlike and buoyant in his enthusiasm for new ideas, constantly trying to understand a world in which he has always feels himself a misfit. But he can also be a bore, not knowing when to stop, or not bothering to stop. He likes to stick to the past; is less sure of the present. I suspect he knows all this, but, in punk tradition, he don’t care.

On one level he is the eternal hustler, still wanting to big himself up after all these years. But there is pathos here, too. He cynically claims all he was ever interested in was ripping people off and making money. But when I ask whether all his various business dealings have left him a wealthy man he looks uncomfortable and, for the first time, unsure of himself. ‘I don’t know what you mean by wealth. If by wealth you mean being able to do exactly what you want then yes, I am wealthy. I pretty much do what I like.’

I take that as a no. So, on his own terms, does he feel he has been a failure? He falls silent for the first time in three, long-winded hours as he considers this. ‘A magnificent failure,’ he says, eventually. ‘I am the walking, talking magnificent failure.’ He shrugs. ‘The ultimate poseur. So maybe I don’t need to do anything else in life. Maybe that is enough. What do you think?’ There is a smile in his voice as he asks.

For the third time in five minutes, as we sit drinking coffee under an awning in Brick Lane, London, Helen McCrory and I are interrupted by the same man. That he is the owner of the café doesn’t make him less distracting. This time he wants to show us his new mobile phone. He disappears again only to reappear with two mugs of mint tea we haven’t ordered. He wants us to try them. See what we think. He disappears again and re-emerges to tell us that, though we can continue sitting outside, he is going to have to close the café down for ten minutes because there are ‘some nutters around’. The actress and I give each other the sideways glance. When he returns it is with a family photograph he wants to show us. The photograph shown, he potters back inside the café and, out of the corner of her mouth, McCrory says: ‘Quite high-maintenance, isn’t he?’
Her sense of humour is pleasingly dry. When she found out she was pregnant two years ago she delayed her wedding to the father, the tall and brooding actor Damian Lewis, because she said she would rather walk down the aisle ‘skinny and drunk than fat and sober’. But she didn’t get round to it then, and is now fat and sober again. Well, not fat exactly, but she does have a noticeable bump. This time, this pregnancy, she decided not to wait. In fact, when I meet her, barely two weeks have passed since she got married. Shouldn’t she still be on her honeymoon? ‘I did have a honeymoon. It lasted an evening. It was very short, but very lovely. We got married in the Kensington and Chelsea registry office, then walked down the King’s Road and had lunch in a nice restaurant around the corner with 11 people. A very romantic day.’
 
The couple had met when playing lovers in a 2004 production of Five Gold Rings at the Almeida. The play suffered vicious reviews but, as ever, McCrory was singled out for her ‘electrifying’ performance. Her career is littered with award wins and spans an extraordinary dramatic range (she has played everything from Margaret Peel in the comedy Lucky Jim to Anna Karenina). But, though she is lauded as one of the best Chekhovian actresses of her generation, and is a fine interpreter of Ibsen and Shakespeare — her Lady Macbeth made one critic write, ‘I wish Shakespeare had written her more scenes’– she is probably best known for playing opposite Sienna Miller in As You Like It at the height of the Jude Law nanny scandal, and for Cherie Blair in The Queen (2006), the film for which Helen Mirren won an Oscar. She captured not only the slightly scurrying walk and the adoring gazes up at her husband but also the feistiness. The way she backed out of her audience with the Queen was a masterclass in repressed sarcasm. ‘Cherie cricks her neck because she feels defensive and vulnerable,’ McCrory says. ‘It’s also because she feels she has to smile constantly, an odd mix of awkwardness and confidence.’ McCrory demonstrates the contracted neck and the letterbox smile. ‘When she cricks her neck like this you realise that she is trying to keep things in. She often has tension down her arms because she wants to react physically to what is going on. It’s all about repression. I found some footage of Cherie before Tony Blair became an MP and she was a different person: so direct, the opposite of simpering. It was clear she was the more politically committed and driven of the two, so I tried to capture some of that as well.’
Has she bumped into Mrs Blair since making The Queen? ‘No, she must have seen it. I hope she wasn’t offended. When I first read the script [by Peter Morgan] I thought we were in a broad comedy, and I was horrified when I saw the rest of the cast being subtle in their interpretations. Stephen [Frears, the director] kept shouting ‘Less, Helen, less!’ All my Norman Wisdom moments were taken out. I tell you, I was robbed.’
 
Presumably, being actors, she and Lewis didn’t get nervous about the exchange of vows and the speeches at their wedding? She rolls her eyes in mock incredulity. ‘That’s right, actors and actresses have sensitivity bludgeoned out of them at birth. We are that rare combination of vanity and self-obsession.’ She gives a short laugh and dunks and re-dunks her bag of herbal tea in her cup. Actually — at least today — vanity is not something she can be accused of. She is not wearing make-up and, in defiance of the hot weather, is wearing a heavy, shocking-pink coat-cum-jacket. As she is also wearing flip-flops, I’m guessing the coat was the nearest thing to hand as she was leaving the house in a hurry. While McCrory is not tall — only 5ft 3in — she does have considerable presence: dark hair and equally dark and expressive eyes. She also has a disarming way of pronouncing the letter R as W, ever so slightly, a trait I have never noticed in her performances.
‘Actually, I don’t know about Damian,’ she continues, ‘but I do get nervous, especially when speaking in public without a script. I had to present the prizes for an under-12s poetry-reading once. I was performing in three plays at the Olivier Theatre, back to back, 17 hours with no nerves whatsoever, but I stood up to say a few words and my voice wavered and I became self-conscious.’
How curious. Why does she suppose that is? ‘Well, my trouble is I make no connection between myself and what I do on stage or in front of a camera, so when I am being myself I get very, very nervous and take tranquillisers.’ As she says this it occurs to me that her relentless jokiness today may be to do with nerves, too. So did she fluff any lines at her wedding? ‘No, but it did make me nervous, even though there were only a handful of people there, because Damian and I are very private people. I think I would have found it hard to do it in front of a lot of other people.’
 
They had a ban on children at their wedding, a ban that included their own daughter. ‘She came for the meal instead. It was more a matter of not wanting babies there. You see, the way I figured it, it always looks bad if you start staring daggers at a screaming baby. It gives the wrong signal to your future in-laws. Besides, I wouldn’t want to be distracted, because they were the most serious vows I had ever exchanged.’
A church wedding was ruled out because it would have felt hypocritical. ‘When we told people we were getting married in a registry some said, ‘Why not a church?’ and we thought, ‘Hello? When have you ever seen us in a church?’ I would have felt hypocritical saying I meant the bit about staying together but not the bit about the Holy Spirit.’ She sounds unusually earnest for a moment, but her droll side cannot be suppressed for long. ‘That said, an atheist who gets married in a church does have a get-out clause. You are practically not married. You can say, ‘Ah yes, because I meant that bit, but obviously didn’t mean that bit, that means the whole contract is invalidated.’’
Does being married to someone who does the same job make for rivalry? ‘It gives you a shorthand about your job — makes it easier to relate. Also, you know the realities. Some people think acting is all about laughing as you sip champagne from a slipper at a premiere. But actually most of it is unglamorous.’
Unusually, McCrory is an actress — she doesn’t use the PC term actor — who manages to avoid sounding pretentious when talking about her trade. Perhaps it is to do with being pregnant, but she talks about her latest role — as Victoria in Frankenstein — in a frivolous way. In this gritty two-hour ITV drama she plays a scientist who is conducting controversial work in the field of stem-cell research and biotechnology in an attempt to cure her dying son. ‘I play a stem-cell researcher who is obviously meant to be a female Dr Frankenstein.’ Again McCrory says, ‘I thought it would work best if I played it as a broad farce. I see it as a look at the funny side of electricity and stem-cell research. It wasn’t easy but we managed to find the humour.’
 
Actually, there isn’t a laugh in it. They filmed on location near Dungeness nuclear power station — all grey seas and pebble beaches — while she was in the early stages of her pregnancy. ‘Do you think that was wise?’ she asks rhetorically. She imagines the news stories: ‘And eight months later her own Frankenstein’s monster arrived. …’
Despite the repeated dunking of her herbal tea bag, she seems far from being your stereotypical neurotic actress. She blames her parents. ‘They were always very encouraging. I never felt unloved. They gave me great stability. I think that is why I am so relaxed as a parent myself; they gave me a great blueprint. Besides, parenthood is only a seven-day-a-week job and apparently in 18 years you can stop worrying so much. I’ll have a nice nap and a shandy then.’
Her father, a Scotsman, was a Foreign Office diplomat, which meant that McCrory had a peripatetic childhood, moving between postings in Cameroon, Tanzania, Norway and France. She has described her younger self as ‘a Mowgli’ and still bears a scar from the day she was chased by a rhino and split her chin on a tree. To give her stability she was sent to board at an English school, and later turned down a place at Oxford to go to drama college in London. ‘Coming here to board taught me a lot,’ she says. ‘I learnt that in England as soon as you open your mouth you are judged. In Italy it is all about your shoes.’
She also remembers learning the meaning of patriotism from her father. ‘When I was in my teens I was dragged along to some function with him in Brussels and when the national anthem struck up I rolled my eyes and sat down. He took me to one side and said, ‘Never do that again. The man standing next to us is the head of the SAS. His friends die for Queen and country, so show some respect.’ It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten.’ To this day, she reckons, her perspective on the world comes from her parents, who are still alive. ‘Because we moved around a lot when I was a child, my sense of home and belonging was with people rather than places. My whole identity was grounded in my parents and brother and sister. I don’t think having a daughter altered me enormously in that respect.’
She and Damian Lewis live with their daughter, Manon, who is now nearly two, in Tufnell Park, north London, near to their friend Sienna Miller — or rather they will when they return from Los Angeles in the New Year. Lewis is working on a film there. ‘So we’re going to have the baby out there in November,’ she says. ‘Should be interesting. LA is a city that makes you wash your hands before you go to the supermarket; just imagine how clean the hospitals will be. I’ll have to find out how soon I can bring the baby back on a plane. Is there a minimum age? I don’t want its ears to explode.’
As well as the ITV drama, McCrory was also working on Flashbacks Of A Fool, a film in which she co-stars with Daniel Craig, six months into her pregnancy. But she is planning to take five months’ maternity leave after giving birth. ‘Then I’m going to be doing another Ibsen at the Almeida in April. They delayed it for me.’ Sadly for her they didn’t also delay the filming of Harry Potter V. ‘I was supposed to appear in that but they couldn’t get the insurance because I was pregnant.’ The part went to Helena Bonham Carter instead. ‘They said I can be in the next one, though,’ she adds. Dare I ask which role? Pause. Grin. ‘I play the old Harry, who is 72 and on steroids.’

Like a patient in a dentist’s waiting room, a patient regretting the neglect of his gums, Jim Broadbent sits on the sofa and stares at his shoes. I have been warned by his publicist that he is ‘painfully shy but friendly when he warms up’, and that’s about right. On the rare occasions he makes eye contact, it is with a rictus smile, as if friendliness for him requires physical rather than mental effort, as if he has to remind his knobbly face that smiling is the way to signal warmth. It is the awkward manner of his speech that most clearly betrays his introversion, though. He stutters slightly and punctuates his sentences with a soft, nervy chuckle that makes his words melt away like butter on crumpets. They are desultory, these sentences, and full of old-fashioned turns of phrase. Many remain unfinished.

It does occur to me that he could be acting all this. He is a great actor, after all, an Oscar-winning actor indeed. He often plays sweet, gentle, lugubrious types, such as Bridget Jones’s father, or John Bayley, the academic who looked on in helpless anguish as his wife, Iris Murdoch, succumbed to Alzheimer’s, or Lord Longford – he may have been given a bald pate and prosthetic nose to play that role, but the sympathy for Myra Hindley seemed to be all his. People who know Broadbent privately say that this is what he is like away from the cameras. Yet in front of them he will as often play loud extroverts, such as the bombastic ringmaster in Moulin Rouge! (a role for which he won a Bafta) or the bumptious nightclub owner in Little Voice, or the corrupt police officer in Hot Fuzz. Some might call it versatility, but Broadbent has another theory as to why he is capable of such extremes, and we shall come to this.

Curiously, in his latest film, an adaptation of Blake Morrison’s best-selling memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father?, he somehow combines the two. The character he plays, Blake’s father, is a GP in the Yorkshire Dales. He is embarrassing, overbearing and boorish, but also capable of great tenderness and pathos. Already this is being talked of as an Oscar-winning performance. The scenes in which he lies in bed dying from cancer and tries to communicate with his angry son, played by Colin Firth, could not be more emotionally charged and affecting.

When I ask him what his relationship with his own father was like – Roy Broadbent was a furniture maker who died of cancer when Jim was 23 – he crunches slowly on a shortbread biscuit before answering. ‘M-m-my father was a Yorkshireman who moved to Lincolnshire in the war. He was like Blake’s father in some ways. Almost an exact contemporary. He would come down to see me in London and fix things around the house. He was always the black sheep of his family, a conscientious objector.’ (During the war the family had gone to live in a bohemian, anti-war commune in rural Lincolnshire. His mother, Dee, became a sculptor.)

Broadbent felt some sympathy with Blake’s father, then, even though he was an unsympathetic character. ‘I think some people felt I was too sympathetic to play Arthur. I disagree, obviously. I think I can be unpleasant.’

There is still the trace of Lincolnshire in his vowels, which is surprising given that he has lived in London for most of his adult life. He also dresses like a countryman, in anonymous greens and browns, as if trying to camouflage himself, deflect attention, fade into the background.

The death scenes in his new film, I note, really bring home the dribbling, incontinent ugliness of dying. ‘It helped that when we filmed those scenes it was with a small crew in a real house.’ He frowns. ‘Was it? Just trying to think if there was a studio involved But it was certainly a small set. Quite claustrophobic.’

Did those scenes require a sacrifice of vanity on his part? ‘Well that is always the first to go, vanity. Can’t hang on to vanity as an actor. It’s one of the paradoxes, really, that to be an actor you have to have a big enough ego to want people to look at you, but ultimately you can’t be vain. I reckon I did remember when my father died at home after a year-long illness when he was about the age I am now 58 I was touring around the North in my first job and was able to get home at weekends and was at home when he actually died I remember watching him and’

And? ‘And so I brought some of that to the role.’

Did he find it painful, reliving those moments with his dying father? He blinks. Tears are welling up in his eyes, tears that catch the light, eyes that still stare at shoes. ‘I found it upsetting to read the book, and the script, that was when it all came back to me. But not as much not so much when I was doing it. You just try and remember how it was.’

Did he have any unfinished business with his own father, things that needed to be said, as Blake does in the book? ‘I was quite young, 23, I think, so there was an awful lot I hadn’t worked out. Ten years later there would have been a lot I wanted to ask him talk about.’

I ask if his father had worried about him becoming an actor – it’s not the most secure profession in the world, after all. ‘No, he was encouraging. He had huge confidence. In fact, it had been him who had suggested I go to drama school in the first.’

Broadbent had attended Leighton Park, a Quaker school in Reading, before taking a place at art school. He left that to transfer to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. A tutor at his college described him as strange-looking and predicted that he wouldn’t find work until he was in his forties. Following his graduation in 1972, he worked as an assistant stage manager at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, and while he was waiting for acting work to come, he joined the Ugly modelling agency (although he never landed a job because, as he puts it, ‘Perhaps I wasn’t ugly enough’). After that he co-founded the brilliant and eccentric National Theatre of Brent, a two-man troupe. Then came work with the (real) National Theatre and, finally, film stardom in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet.

Does it make him sad to think that his father never knew how successful his son went on to become? ‘I think he was quite the doting father. Unlike Blake’s father, mine would praise me constantly, unwarrantedly. He did say as he was dying that he regretted not knowing how it would end for us, what was going to happen to us all.’ His eyes well up with tears again and he blinks them away. ‘It was an unfinished narrative. He didn’t mind his own story ending But’

I ask whether tears come easily to him when he is acting. ‘Actually no. I’m always impressed when women can summon up real tears. I can never do that. I have to use that fake stuff.’

Away from acting, does he find it easy to cry? ‘I don’t know when I last cried but I do choke up easily. Usually documentaries about bravery get to me. I can be choked up on a cheesy documentary, not even a good one, one where my emotions are being deliberately manipulated.’

His mother died of Alzheimer’s in 1995. ‘Mmm, mmm, much later than my father. I was around for that, too. A few hours before and a few hours after. It was 18 months of deterioration. A year in a nursing home. She was older, so it wasn’t as heartbreaking as it might have been. Some people die of Alzheimer’s quite young.’

It was this experience that coloured his Oscar-winning performance in Iris. He relived his mother’s death for that; now he is reliving his father’s in his latest film: why does he suppose he is drawn to roles that evoke painful memories? ‘I’m not sure I suppose with Iris it was partly about wanting to draw public attention to this little-understood disease. The film was appreciated by the Alzheimer’s charities. When my mother died there was much less information about it. I remember when my mother got it we were searching for information and help and couldn’t find any really.’

Do his parents still cast a shadow on his life? ‘I had exactly twice as much time with my mother as my father, so it was spread out? so I didn’t have a feeling of being orphaned It is not like when both your parents go together and you are suddenly on your own. With Alzheimer’s, as well, the person becomes a stranger before they die: that separation happens earlier. The person you know goes quite early on in the course of the disease. You lose the shared memories and the conversations you normally have in a relationship.’

Some men find it almost liberating when their father, the moral arbiter of their formative years, dies. Was that the case with him? Did he, say, get an urge to appear in Hair fully naked? He gives the gentle chuckle. ‘No, he would have been up for all that. I’d never felt constrained by him. My father was “small l” liberal.’

Are they temperamentally similar, father and son? ‘Not really, personality wise I do think about him a lot, probably as you get older and get closer to the age it all becomes a bit more relevant than it was when I was 23. I sometimes catch his reflection in the mirror, especially when the hair goes. The driving mirror. The corner of the face. The glasses. A little bit of that. Some of his qualities I wish I had. Others I’m pleased I didn’t have.’

Silence again, followed by a chuckle. Qualities such as? ‘Wouldn’t know really. Quite contradictory. Someone once told me I was waif-like. Can’t see it myself. Perhaps when I was younger. I don’t think about myself too much. Not that interested. I think I’m quite boring.’

Surely when he was younger he must have been curious about himself? ‘A little bit, I would ask: What am I about? What am I going to be? But I’m not so bothered now. It’s set. No need to fret about it.’

Given his obvious shyness, for him to have chosen a profession where he would get on stage and draw attention to himself does seem a little perverse. ‘Yes, I don’t understand it. There is a split in my personality because sometimes I can be loud in person as well as on stage.’

He believes he may have taken on the personality of his twin sister, who died at birth. Her personality sits alongside his own, he reckons, giving him a split one. And this explains why he can be anxious one day and a risk-taker the next. It also explains how he can be an extrovert as an actor – veering between caricature and naturalism, between strength and vulnerability – and yet still be an introvert in his private life.

I wonder whether this split might also have helped him cope with rejection early on in his career. ‘I gave myself a 10-year plan. I thought that after drama school, if it didn’t seem to be going anywhere after 10 years, I would rethink it. It does make you insecure, acting. There were some really talented people with wit and style at drama school who couldn’t hack the insecurity from the word go. But if you stay with it for a few years you learn to handle the insecurity and the rejection. You can’t be too fragile. You have to be a bit tough about it

‘When people ask my advice and say, “My son or daughter is thinking about going into acting but can’t make up his or her mind”, I say, “If you have any doubts don’t do it.” You have to be completely driven and have no option. It is a form of madness, actually.’

For all his seriousness as an actor now – and the demand for him in Hollywood; he will be appearing in the latest Indiana Jones movie next – he started out as a comic actor. ‘I think what I was trying to do was spread the net wide. Different directors see me in different ways. Anyway, a lot of that stuff in theatre, the National Theatre of Brent stuff, mostly went unnoticed because not many people go to the theatre compared with television.’

I ask whether, when he was at drama school, he ever saw himself as the handsome lead in Hollywood films. ‘Every actor would think that at some stage. It’s part of the wanting to do the job. I wasn’t one of dozens of handsome young men after the one role for the handsome young man, though. I was never up for that. I was always part of an odder group of character actors. I wasn’t impatient.’

He never considered himself good-looking. ‘Not really, no probably quite a poor self-image actually, until I got used to myself Yeah,? wouldn’t have thought?#x0027;

He says that he doesn’t see the films he appears in more than he has to. ‘If I haven’t seen a film for a long time, though, and it’s a comedy, and I’m being funny, I do laugh at what I’m doing, as if it’s another person up there’

He has written his own screenplays, most notably the black comedy A Sense of History, directed by Mike Leigh. What about an autobiography? Is he planning one? ‘I’ve got my title for it, but I’ll never write it.’

And that title is? ‘My Grandmother was a Snowball.’

Er, right. Yep. Good title. ‘That was her maiden name.’

Has he kept a diary? ‘No, but er’ The wheezy laugh. ‘I get so bored. What I did I’m too self-conscious. I would always assume I wouldthat people would read it one day and I couldn’t bear that because I would think it was so badly written.’

So he does have a certain vanity, after all, I say. Intellectual vanity. He glances up from his shoes and gives a grin that is shy, lopsided, apologetic. ‘I’m a contradiction.’

‘I suppose I am very aware that I am not academic at all, that university was never an option. I suppose I’ve got a what’s the word thing.’

Complex? ‘Complex about not being intellectual.’

So how did he overcome that complex to play an intellectual in Iris? ‘I think I might be intelligent but not clever. I didn’t have the A-levels.’

He was expelled for drinking, he adds in his monotonal way. ‘But only after A-levels. I was told I had to leave immediately after sitting my A-levels, which wasn’t a great hardship. Except I didn’t get to do the leavers’ play.’

I’m sure that he has been asked back to his school as the conquering hero many times since. ‘No, I haven’t actually. I must be down on the list: Expelled.’

On the wall of shame, I suggest, with a skull and crossbones by his name. The foggy chuckle again. I ask what the Quaker element of his school meant to him.

‘It was semi-progressive. No corporal punishment or cadet corps, because it was pacifist. Very little uniform. There was a blazer if you wanted one. There was no dogma or hierarchy. ?And we had Quaker meetings in the school hall where you sat in silence.’

It occurs to me that the silences he drifts into to this day may have taken root at school and that he carries them around with him like a comfort blanket. Could that be it? ‘I don’t mind silence And they were very nice people, the Quakers. If I was ever to go back to religion I would likely go to the Quakers first. I never did have it, really, though. I was at that school because my parents were pacifists, not Quakers.’

So what does he think happens to you when you die?

‘Absolutely nothing. I’m with Arthur Morrison on that one.’

Does the prospect of his own inevitable death frighten him? ‘I don’t think it does. I don’t fret about it. I think it was partly to do with seeing my father go. It didn’t frighten him. Upset him a bit but not I think if you are an atheist, what’s there to be frightened of? But I don’t want to die yet.’

What about his own death-bed scene (many years from now, I hope)? Will he want his two stepsons there? ‘Yes, I think so. I am as a father to them. Twenty-five years now.’

In 1983 he met Anastasia Lewis, a theatre designer and textile artist who was mother to two sons. The couple married five years later. Did he ever wonder what it would be like having his own biological children? ‘My wife didn’t want to go down that route and for various reasons that was fine by me. I wasn’t going to say, all right, I’m off, I’ll find someone else. It was obviously never of driving importance to me because on some level I would seek out someone who would provide that but I’m terribly close to my stepsons and their young ones.’

Another legacy of his having to sit in silence at school may be his patience on set. With his mild manner, the opposite of temperamental, he has a reputation for being easy to work with. The tedium of film sets, meanwhile, the sitting around for hours waiting for your next scene, never bothers him. He retreats into himself. He whittles gargoyles from wood; his hobby.

He likes working with directors such as Mike Leigh and Woody Allen (he starred in Bullets over Broadway) who don’t go in for much shouting. ‘Good directors like actors and enjoy what actors bring in terms of improvisation,’ he says. ‘Woody and Mike are different in that with Mike you do all the improvisation in the rehearsal before the script is finalised, whereas with Woody he asks you to improvise away from the finished script. Make it sound natural and real. But there are more similarities than not between them.’

Both directors are known for their melancholy; is that something he can identify with? ‘Melancholic is as far as it goes. I don’t get depressed. Enjoyable melancholy. I don’t know what real depression is.’

In terms of his career, Broadbent doesn’t have much to be depressed about. He is one of Britain’s most recognisable actors and has won more awards and critical acclaim than seems decent. He was offered an OBE a few years ago but turned it down. Such is his diffidence. (Although that was also partly on the grounds that he didn’t think the militarism of the British Empire was something that should be celebrated – his father’s pacifism coming out.)

Given all these achievements, all these laurels to rest on, what motivates him to keep going? ‘I live in London but I’ve had a cottage in Lincolnshire for 17 years and we’ve just got a slightly bigger place there. So it would be nice to get that right. And I can imagine taking a sabbatical for a year and then just extending it.

‘I don’t like to do work that doesn’t appeal to me. I’m often cast as people older than myself so I’m sure there will always be work. But in not wanting to repeat myself I find there are more and more jobs I don’t want to do.’

He takes another bite of his shortbread biscuit and crunches on it slowly. ‘And that’s about it really.’

Like a formation of geese ahead of an approaching cold front, an entourage arrives. It includes several hefty bodyguards with wires coiling from their ears and sunglasses shielding their eyes. Minutes later there is indeed a change in the atmosphere; a crackle of static. Perhaps this time 50 Cent really has entered the building.

But I have been here before. It began several months ago when I was asked if I would like to interview Curtis Jackson III, better known as the gangsta rapper 50 Cent. Which interviewer wouldn’t? He has texture, as they say. His (single) mother, a crack dealer from the New York ghetto of Queens, was murdered when he was eight. His grandparents did their best to raise him, along with eight other children, but at 12 he became a crack dealer himself, and was so good at it he was soon making $3000 a day. In 1994, at the age of 19, he was caught and sentenced to nine years in prison. He served three and, upon being released, did a demo of the rap songs he had been writing on the walls of his cell. He sent them to Jam Master Jay (the man behind Run DMC) who liked them, became his mentor and taught him how to count bars, write choruses and structure songs. 50 Cent had just signed a deal with Columbia in 2000 when he was shot nine times by a rival gang and left for dead. He survived, but when his assailant was found dead soon after, and Jam Master Jay was shot dead as part of the same feud, Columbia took fright and dropped him. The rapper Eminem was not so faint hearted. He signed him up and, in 2003, 50 Cent brought out Get Rich or Die Tryin’, a hip-hop album that became the biggest seller in the America charts that year. By the time his follow up album was released, he had become the first artist since The Beatles to have four songs in the top 10 of Billboard’s singles chart— he had, moreover, joined his friend Madonna as one of the highest earners in music. His new album, Curtis, is also expected to break records when it is released next month. But nowadays he earns more than $50 million a year without even bringing out a record, thanks to the cross-branding business empire he has built up: as well as a 50 Cent record label, there is a 50 Cent clothing line, a 50 Cent publishing arm, a 50 Cent film company, a 50 Cent condom range, a 50 Cent sports watch line (diamond-encrusted, of course), a 50 Cent PlayStation game, and a bottled vitamin water line (Formula 50). Forbes magazine has described him as a “masterful brand-builder and a shrewd businessman.”

Anyway, I was to meet him in Berlin at the weekend. At the eleventh hour, the venue and time changed: it would be the following week, at his 52-room mansion in Connecticut. There I was to have some ‘hang time’ with him, whatever that is. That trip was postponed, too. It would now be in LA the following Wednesday. The night before I was due to fly, it was postponed again, for a week. This routine happened twice more. It became almost amusing, a weekly game, an exercise in morbid fascination. As his people were paying for the flights — not normal practise, but the situation had become too weird to say no — there seemed no harm in playing along, and, the week after that, I actually reached the airport without the usual postponement call. The plane took off. Still no call. I checked my messages when I touched down. Confidence was high: 50 Cent had arrived in LA that day for a concert that would be broadcast on the web. I waited backstage to meet him. His heavies began to appear. There was a change in the temperature. The crackle of static. Then mobile phones started ringing and faces started dropping. There was a rumour that 50 Cent had cancelled. It turned out to be true. An executive from his record label took me out to dinner that night and assured me that Fifty, as everyone calls him, was normally very professional about these things. No one knew why he had cancelled the concert. There were hints that he might have been taken ill. As I had another story to do, I stayed in town — but still he didn’t show.

I’m reflecting on this runaround as I sit waiting in a London studio a month later. Then Fifty nonchalantly ambles in wearing his own brand of baseball cap and a large diamond encrusted cross around his neck. He slumps on the sofa in front of me and gives a toothy grin. ‘Wass up?’ he says.

I was going to ask him the same thing. What was up, in LA? What happened? ‘Right, LA. How was your trip out there?’

I’ve had better. ‘Right, right. It was the new album. It was due for release then but it wasn’t how I wanted it. I had to go back and work on it. I’m very hands on. I’m fine with failing but only if it’s my fault. I don’t like putting my life into other people’s hands.’
Hmm. Q Magazine has dubbed him Dead Man Walking because of the various death threats that are regularly made against him — he made a lot of enemies in his drug dealing days and still does with his ‘diss wars’. Much of his notoriety in the music business concerned the fights he picked with his fellow rappers, deliberately starting feuds by insulting them in his songs. The list is long but his biggest feuds have been with Ja Rule, The Game, and the wealthiest rapper cum entrepreneur of them all, P Diddy. It’s a dangerous game — his mentor Jam Master Jay was shot dead as part of a rap feud — and the bulletproof vest Fifty wears and the bulletproof car he drives (a Humvee, naturally) are not just for show. How safe does he feel today? ‘Pretty safe. As safe as I’ll ever be. Do you feel safe? You’ve got terrorist attacks going on here in London.’
And on that subject I ask him how his flight was, bearing in mind that a couple of years ago he and his 18-strong entourage were held up for five hours by security coming into Heathrow. ‘It wasn’t difficult for me this time because I flew private.’
That must help. ‘Yeah, early on I had real hassle at the airport. But after several trip to London they more relaxed about it. My bodyguards don’t carry guns in the UK, only in the US. Trouble is, the security men go on perception. Because of the content of the lyrics they felt I would cause trouble, so they had that worked out even before I touched down.’
Ah yes, the lyrics. Some are witty, some quite poetic others are, well, nigga this, mothafucka that, ‘let loose wit dis uzi’ the other. So, I ask, would it be fair to say that Fifty glamorises gun violence? He speaks heavily and chewily, in a slightly lisping and slurring voice that is still rooted in the ghetto. I’ll not attempt a phonetic version of it here, but suffice to say he drops letters, swallows words and his vocabulary is unwieldy — ‘finances’ for money, ‘terminology’ for words, ‘altercation’ for fight, a bit like a policeman taking the stand in court. ‘There is a difference between glamorising violence and creating a work of art that entertains on some level,’ he says. ‘Hip-hop is a mirror. What I write is a reflection of the environment I grew up in.  What I do is reporting. I think it is clear to everyone that I am no longer living that life I describe, but I use terminology that they would actually use in that environment, so that people there can relate to it. People say I should take out the cursing and I say “sure, I’ll change my standards if society changes its standards”.’
A change of tack. Does it worry him that the young people who buy his albums might feel inspired to go around shooting people afterwards? ‘Anyone who could be influenced by music would have to be so distorted they could be influenced by pretty much anything,’ he says, adjusting his baseball cap as he catches his reflection in a mirror behind my head. ‘The kid that become violent because he listen to music is already crazy. People who can’t separate entertainment and reality are not mentally normal.’
So people who act violently after listening to his lyrics were going to act violently anyway? ‘Exactly.’
But that can’t be true, can it? These things must have an influence. If someone listens to one of his records again and again they will get pumped up by it, feel aggressive. ‘That would also relate to film.’
People don’t watch films over and over again though. ‘Yeah but sound and picture has to be more impressionable that sound on its own, doesn’t it? If you have a rapper come on and tell you he is going shoot someone that seems to upset people more than if a film-maker comes on and actually shows you someone being shot. It’s double standards. It’s simple math.’

Why does he suppose people are drawn to that which frightens them? ‘I think death in itself is entertaining to humans. I believe that because it is everyone fate. I’m going to die, you going to die, everyone is going to die. You see someone in a life-threatening situation and it is entertaining.’

Entertaining? Unlike most of us, Fifty has stared death in the face. He says he knew for certain he was about to die. What did that last moment feel like? ‘I think you can remember pain a lot better than you can remember joy. I think pain leaves a bigger impression. We can smile watching a sitcom but the painful points in our life stand out like scars. I physically actually have scars from that altercation.’ He holds a finger to his cheek. ‘See this little dimple. It’s cute. I believe God meant to give me it as a baby but gave it to me a few years late.’

When he was shot, Fifty suffered wounds to his legs, chest and calf. His hip was also shattered. The skin on his right hand is still puckered by the impact of another bullet. The bullet that smashed through his jaw and lodged in his tongue left him with a curved scar, still visible near his mouth. It makes it look as if he’s smiling to himself. Did he know anything about it at the time? ‘It happened so fast that I didn’t even get a chance to shoot back… I thought shit, somebody shot me in the face. It burns. I was awake on the way to the hospital and then I went under anaesthetic. Only when I woke up did the pain really start. At the time I didn’t think about the number of times I’d been shot I just thought physically I survived.’

What about mentally; does he have nightmares about it? ‘Not nightmares. A little bit of paranoia. After I was shot I would be more aware of what was going on around me. More alert.’

Has he ever had therapy? ‘No, it would have been traumatic if I wasn’t from the background I’m from. It happened all the time there. It feels like the norm. On some level, and this crazy, it pretty much happens all the time where I’m from. Not being shot nine times necessarily, but being shot. If it isn’t a friend of yours or someone you know you tend not to notice or think about it much. You can’t feel that physical pain for them anyway.’

Does that make him emotionally frozen? ‘I am insensitive on some levels. I can be selfish. At some point I will make choices based on what I want rather than what is right for everyone else.’

Tell me about it. His mouth broadens, flashing a set of bright pearly teeth, gritted tightly together. ‘I guess that is what allowed me to continue believing I would be a success when others couldn’t see why. I run on my own energy. When you orphaned you have no choice but to do that.  Me, I’m like one in a billion. There’s not going to be another 50 Cent. They’ll get to half of the movie, they just won’t get to this part.’

He refers to the movie that was made about his life and in which he starred. It was directed by Jim Sheridan, the director of the Oscar winning My Left Foot. It offers chilling insights into the world of the crack dealer. Does he feel any guilt about his previous life? ‘No.’

Why not? ‘If I was conscious of having any other options at that stage in my life I would have chosen those options. I just thought of my mom buying nice things for me with the money she made from crack and I thought I could do the same. That was my reference. Her friends had nice cars, nice jewellery, things that said luxury and success, and they acquired them in short periods of time.’

His boastfulness and selfishness is almost understandable in this cold and unforgiving context. I ask if material rewards still matter to him? ‘There’s a point where you exceed your own expectation. But ambition is part of my character. I don’t believe I’m at where I’m at by accident. It’s not for money but for what it feels like to be successful. You know what money is? It’s freedom. It’s freedom to say I’m going to get on a plane tonight instead of tomorrow because I’ve got one waiting.’He recently expressed an interest in buying the imposing Debenham House in London as part of his property portfolio. According to some accounts the agents were a little patronising at first, pointing out that it was on the market for £40 million. His business manager pointed out in turn that that wouldn’t make too much of a dent in his budget. Does he know how much he is worth? ‘I’ll be the first hip-hop artist worth a billion dollars. I know how much money I have in different places. I understand about branding and synergy.’

The comment reminds me that the phrase Get Rich or Die Tryin’ is nothing if not a bling version of the American dream. Perhaps we should not be surprised that Fifty’s sympathies, unlike those of nearly everyone else in the music industry, are Republican. If his felony convictions did not prevent him from voting, he claims that he would vote for Bush. He has performed for the troops in Iraq and has called the President: ‘Incredible . . . a gangsta. I want to meet George Bush, just shake his hand and tell him how much of me I see in him.’

It would be a memorable encounter. And Fifty does know how to dress for the occasion. He wore an Armani suits and tie recently for a photo op in which he held hands with the Duchess of York. ‘She’s a sweetheart,’ he tells me. ‘She came back to my dressing room afterwards and we talked for a while. It was for a good cause.’ But he normally wears what he is wearing today: baggy T-shirt and jeans, trainers with the laces undone, a baseball cap which he keeps adjusting constantly to get the right angle. Certainly there is vanity there, and egomania. Like Caesar he refers to himself in the third person. But he can seem two-dimensional. His worldview was shaped by money and machismo, and success has not significantly changed that. ‘Most people from my background end up incarcerated or killed, like my mom. There were things that happened in my life prior to my being able to make a decision that altered me. When my mom had me she was 15 years old. She didn’t see being on welfare as an option. She substitute finances for time, but every time I seen her it was like Christmas because she always bought something nice for me. So I associated every thing good in life with my mom and when she died everything became bad. I was angry with the world. It was fucked up for me. It wasn’t until my son came into my life that I realised I could accept the repercussion for that life style. He changed my direction from selling drugs to writing music.’

He has a close relationship with his 10 year old son? “Yeah he’s my partner. He’s my inspiration. It’s unfortunate that me and his mom don’t have a good relationship. We don’t communicate so well.’
But he loves his son? ‘Absolutely.’

I only ask because the theme of his autobiography is that love is dangerous because it will get you killed. ‘When you living in that lifestyle it can literally get you killed because the people who love you will hurt you and say “I’m sorry” afterwards. But someone who has fear of you won’t do those things to you. Whether it’s the physically repercussion they fear or just you, as a person.’
What about women; does he find it easy to fall in love with them? ‘That different. Loving a woman  is loving another person. With my son it’s like loving myself. He’s a purer version of me. He hasn’t been exposed to the things that altered my character.’ He pauses. He is now staring directly at his reflection. Past me. ‘No, that’s not exactly true. He saw me in the hospital after I was shot so he has that in his head but outside of that nothing bad. If you talk to my son I’m like a superhero to him because he can remember us having no finances, all being in the basement sleeping in a single room.’ His son now attends a private school. Is he a strict father? ‘You know, his mom runs his life right now. But I’ll allow him to listen to my music because he knows it is just entertainment. He knows what the difference between me and what is being said on my records is. If you were worried about my lyrics you should also be worried about what your kid watching on television. Same with magazines. I look in you magazines and I see women topless and it’s great. But in the States they consider it soft pornography. They have a whole  different vibe over there. The Bible belt.’

Which brings us neatly to the subject of feminism; you suspect The Female Eunuch is not in his top ten favourite books. ‘The guys who have more finances have better things around them, including better looking women,’ he explains. ‘He can be the ugliest guy but if he has a nice car he will have a nice woman by his side because away from his physical attributes financial security is attractive. The women they struggling like we struggling.’

So all woman are gold diggers? ‘Yeah. And not just from my perspective. I’ve generally experience it and this is why women say you gotta have a J-O-B if you wanna be with me. They want someone who can help them. The man career is the more important in the relationship. It’s a fact. The man gets promoted ahead of the women in the workplace, the statistics show that. And the most successful men have the most stable marriages.’

So is that where he will end up, is there a Mrs Cent in the wings? ‘Well hopefully I won’t have to be married more than one time.’
Is he in a relationship right now? ‘No, I’m as free as a bird.’

If his videos are anything to go — gyrating, semi naked women are a recurring theme — he must enjoy that freedom. He grins.

‘There a lot going on. A lot of temptation. With the videos it’s like this: when you want to sell a magazine to a woman who do you put on the cover? A woman. When you want to sell a magazine to a man who do you put on the cover? A woman, with less clothes on.’

I wonder if he is in touch with his feminine side. He says he doesn’t display emotions, that he has learned to suppress them, that anger is one of his most ‘comfortable feelings’. But is he able to cry. ‘Yeah.’ About? ‘Normal stuff. Don’t think I’m not human. I’ve been in tough situations but what I’ve experienced isn’t normal. A regular person might feel comfortable to start crying, I don’t. The times it does happen there might not be an obvious reason for it. It might be when I’m off a bit. Bit low.’
What makes him feel vulnerable? Anything? ‘Too much information out there ‘bout me. You know like not insecure exactly but I have things I wouldn’t want other people to know.’

Like he has a Barbie doll collection at home? ‘I don’t have a barby doll collection at home.’

Like what then? He is now addressing his reflection completely, trying his cap at different angles. ‘I don’t know, like seeing my mother kissing another woman when I was little boy. At six years old you don’t understand what is happening when you see you mommy with another woman. I didn’t see them in the sexual act. Just kissing. It only seemed confusing later.’

If he took his eyes off his own reflection for a second he would see my eyebrows are arching in surprise at his candour. Feeling oddly emboldened now by the prospect of some Freudian revelation, I find myself asking how old he was when he lost his virginity. ‘I was young.’ How young? ‘I can’t say.’ Oh come on. He looks at me and grins. ‘I was young. I was 12. It was with a  grown woman. A 29 year old.’

So at the age of 12 he was effectively a man, earning a living and having sex? ‘It wasn’t quite like that. I was at my friend’s house and my friend had his sister there and I was big for a kid — 150 lbs — like a small man, and it happened. Unfortunately it didn’t happen again for a long time so I had to use my hand a lot.’

His chubbiness as a child seems hard to believe when you see him now with his pumped up muscles. His is a bodybuilder’s torso composed of spheres and illustrated with a tapestry of tattoos, one of them spelling out his son’s name, Marquise. He never had a father figure himself, has he ever wondered what his father was like? ‘I never met my father and have no interest in where he is. He could have helped me. He could have influenced me before I made mistakes. I’m not curious to know what he looks like. I know I look like my mom. I got photos of my mom. Big teeth like me. She had a big smile like me.’
Useful weapon that smile, I suggest, more useful than a gun. ‘My smile has got me a long way in life. It disarms people. They have a threatening impression otherwise.’

And not without reason. ‘Well if someone puts me in a position where my back is against the wall they going to find out where I come from. My past is my shadow. Everywhere I go, it goes with me.’ And on that poetic note we part company and I am left thinking that the wait, the extraordinary wait to meet 50 Cent, was worth it.

Imran Khan: ‘A Muslim is a Muslim: the terms extremist and moderate apply only to a man’s political views, not to his religious beliefs’

Sixty years ago this week, a British lawyer drew a line across a map and created a country, Pakistan. Nearly a million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were killed in the civil unrest that followed. In a broader sense, it could be argued, the world is still living with the consequences. Certainly, Britain’s relationship with this increasingly fundamentalist Muslim state has become uneasy in recent years: almost all Islamists charged with terrorism here have had links there.

But a strong bond also exists between the two countries, and no one symbolises it better than Imran Khan, the cricket legend and playboy turned politician. Not only was he educated here, at Oxford, but his ex-wife, Jemima, the daughter of the billionaire Sir James Goldsmith, is British. Although he lives in Pakistan, he visits England regularly, partly because he is the chancellor of Bradford University, partly to see his two sons, Sulaiman, 10, and Qasim, seven.

His dress code reflects this dual life. Today, as he sits on a sofa in Jemima Khan’s house in Chelsea, framed by panther prints and oriental mirrors, he is looking lean and urbane in a silk tie and black suit. In Pakistan he wears traditional Muslim dress, the shalwar-kameez. He seems as good a person as any to ask what it all means, this anniversary of Partition.

Before I can, Sulaiman and Qasim distract me, starting to play cricket with a windball in the long kitchen-cum-dining-room behind us. They look useful, so perhaps this is the place to start. Who would Khan like them to play for, England or Pakistan?

“Well it’s early days but, of course, I would love them to play for Pakistan. I would like them to live with me in Pakistan, too. But that will be their choice in later life. At the moment, they are with their mother. They are being raised as Muslims. They are bicultural. The boys spend their holidays with me.”

Khan says he takes their bedtime stories from the Koran. “Always, always. And much to my ex-wife’s consternation, I still sleep with them in my bed. A favourite thing is talking to them in bed until we fall asleep, all three of us. The moral stories my mother used to tell me in bed have stayed with me all my life and I want it to be the same for the boys. Right and wrong, stories from the Koran. They are part of their identity.”

Which brings us to the anniversary.

“Pakistan had a traumatic birth because the British left in such haste,” Khan says in a low and measured voice. “Most of us blamed Mountbatten. He rushed it. As a result, the Kashmiri question wasn’t resolved and there has been animosity with our neighbour India ever since.

“Another result was that the state became obsessed with its own survival. Security became the first priority. The emphasis was on armed forces. That was where the arms race began: the race to get nuclear weapons.

“And we became a client state, relying on US aid, rather than being non-aligned like India. It left us with the problem of militancy. The mujahideen, on the Pakistan border with Afghanistan, was actually trained by the CIA during the Cold War. Ronald Reagan said the mujahideen leaders reminded him of the Founding Fathers of America. Now America calls them terrorists.

“The legacy of all this is the war on terror, which many in Pakistan see as a war on Islam, that is why there is no shortage of recruits there.”

I suggest that many in the West cannot understand why Pakistan cannot hunt down the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters hiding on its border. Khan sighs. “No one in the West understands that the tribal region of Pakistan has always been an independent entity. They have never been conquered. Every man is a warrior and carries a gun. It is the most difficult terrain. Even a superpower like the British Empire could not control that area. They had to bribe the tribes. To think that Pakistan’s army, which begs and borrows for its survival, could control it is naive.”

What about the posters of bin Laden everywhere on display there, couldn’t they at least be taken down?

“They would go back up, because it is like a football match. Either you are on one side or the other. Once the Pakistan army started this operation at the behest of the US, the whole border area rose up against them. And the US has bombed the area killing many tribesmen – so anyone who opposes the US becomes a hero.

“That is where the war on terror has been so misguided. It has benefited the people who caused 9/11. And it has made Musharraf look even more like a puppet of America.”

I ask what he makes of the fact that the July 7 suicide bombers were all British Muslims who had become radicalised after visits to Pakistan.

“People don’t understand that this war on terror is not a religious issue, it is a political issue,” he says. “I heard John Reid lecturing Pakistani families, telling mothers not to allow their children to get radicalised in mosques. That is the most bizarre thing. It’s like this Cambridge conference of moderate Muslims – there is no point to it. They are not going to have any impact. A Muslim is a Muslim: the terms extremist and moderate apply only to a man’s political views, not to his religious beliefs.”

But Khan does have a theory as to why British Muslims become radicalised in this country.

“The impression I get from talking to British Muslims is that the problem of radicalisation in Britain is a lot to do with Islamophobia. They think it is increasing and is tinged with racism. In those areas in the north of England where Islamophobia and racism is worse, that is where there is more likelihood of Muslims joining a radical Islamic movement. It has compounded the problem. That is what makes it different from the radicalisation that goes on in Pakistan.”

As a former Pakistan captain – and, with 3,807 Test runs and 362 Test wickets, one of the finest all-rounders the game has ever known – Khan understands better than most how important cricket is to the Pakistani sense of identity. Last year, the pitch invasion at Headingley by British-born Pakistani fans was seen by some as a graphic illustration of the Tebbit test. Is that how Khan saw it?

“Ah yes,” he says with a gentle laugh, “the Tebbit test. How bizarre. But should Scotsmen support England? What about British-born Jews who feel upset when Israel is attacked? Sometimes people have these affiliations, they are not something to be worried about. After a period of time, these affiliations weaken and you feel more like a member of a society. But if you keep going on about it and talking about the cricket test, you push people back to their origins. Pakistanis who grow up in the US are much more assimilated.”

I wonder whether his countrymen frown upon the way he assimilates whenever he is visiting Britain.

“Not really. I have been branded as being part of a Jewish lobby, and Musharraf has accused me of aligning myself with fundamentalists because I voted against him. They don’t know how to place me.”

By Jewish lobby he means Jemima, presumably?

Did his marriage compromise his political career?

“They would have found some other issue to hit me with if it hadn’t been that. They couldn’t attack me for being corrupt, so they attacked me through Jemima saying she was part of the Zionist conspiracy because her father was a Jewish multi-millionaire. It put a strain on our marriage – and a cross-cultural marriage was never going to be easy anyway.”

Divorced in 2004, after nine years of marriage, Jemima and Imran remain on good terms. He hated the divorce.

“The last thing I wanted was for my boys to grow up without me.”

Another strain was his political ambition. He is praised for his work for the poor. He founded a £12 million cancer hospital in Lahore, and plans a second hospital and a university. But he is mocked for having groupies (many female) more than a party machine. He is the leader of the moderate Pakistan Justice Party, Tehreek-e-Insaaf, whose profile has risen amid all the recent political instability and the rumours that President Musharraf is on the verge of declaring a state of emergency.

Khan has been meeting Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister now in exile in London. With Benazir Bhutto, the head of the Pakistan’s People’s Party, they are calling for an end to the “dictatorship” of President Musharraf before next year’s general election. Khan says he has never doubted that he will one day lead his country.

“I am ready to become a power in Pakistani politics, not necessarily in power. I only want to be in power if I have a clear majority. Both elections I have fought I had an easy option of joining the established government. But I wouldn’t want to be in a coalition because you have to compromise too much. Musharraf said he would like me as his prime minister. But if you are serious about politics you cannot be associated with corruption or a military dictator.”

But Pakistan is still a democracy, isn’t it? “No, you can’t call Pakistan a democracy. Actually, it is worse than an out-and-out dictatorship because this dictator tries to legitimise himself by dismantling state institutions, like an independent powerful judiciary and an election commission – he has to rig the election – he introduced a controlled assembly, prime minister and media. But a country needs these institutions to function properly. You can’t have one man running a country.

“I want Pakistan to be a welfare state and a genuine democracy with a rule of law and an independent judiciary. To implement this agenda you have to take on all the vested interests that want to stop it happening. You make enemies. I have enemies in Pakistan.”

It is time for him to fly back there. He says goodbye to his boys – with big hugs and fond ruffles of their hair – and we talk in the car to the airport. “Saying goodbye to the boys is the hardest part,” he says, subdued. “I miss them so much when I’m not with them.”

Three men in suits are sitting by the window in a pizza restaurant near Earls Court. ‘Hey,’ they say excitedly, as they look out on to the street,’ there’s Evan Davis.’ Not: ‘Hey, there’s that bloke off Dragons’ Den,’ or ‘Hey, there’s the BBC’s economics editor.’

The recognition is telling. A strange cult of personality has grown up around the man. Private Eye advertises Evan Davis T-shirts, there is a popular Evan Davis blog called Evanomics, and he is number 49 on the ‘pink list’ – a list of the top 101 most influential gay men and women published annually by a Sunday newspaper.

More significantly, Evan Davis knows our new Prime Minister well, which is a claim few can make.

The men in the pizza place are right, by the way. It is indeed Davis pacing up and down outside, talking into a mobile, looking tall and lean in a pinstripe suit – distinctive, too, with his razor-cut hair.

He is wearing a heavy silver chain around his neck, under his open-collared shirt. The only other visible jewellery is on his fingers: chunky silver rings. I have arranged to meet him around the corner at his top-floor flat, but not for another 10 minutes – because he has also arranged to let in a man who has come to give him a quote for tiling his bathroom.

I pass the tile man on the stairs. I also pass a muscular torso; it is life-sized and silver, modelled on a Greek sculpture.

‘Ev’, as his mother calls him, shares this flat with his partner of five years, Guillaume, a landscape architect, but their sitting-room is not so much Greek as Spartan.

Two plain sofas. Plain ochre walls. A large black fireplace, a television in the corner and a couple of books: Oscar Wilde and Edmund White. The only unexpected feature is a plastic globe of the sort that might be found in a school.

I tell him about the men in the pizza place. ‘Well, the thing that has made a big difference is Dragons’ Den (the hit BBC2 show in which would-be entrepreneurs pitch ideas at would-be investors), which is a departure into entertainment television.

‘That significantly raised my profile. Most people who stop me say, “You’re that bloke from Dragons’ Den”, which is a bit depressing when you have worked for 10 years in news. It’s the only thing I’ve touched that sells itself. Even with news you have to sell it a bit. You have to explain why the viewer should care.’

His right arm snakes up and wraps elastically around the back of his head, so that his hand is clamped onto the left side of his neck, not so much an act of contortion as of shyness. ‘It’s funny. The producers of Dragons’ Den asked my advice on who should present it, and I said you should find someone without too much personality, because you don’t want to distract from the dragons, and two weeks later they came back and said, “Do you want to be the presenter?” I suppose I should be insulted.’

Actually, Davis does have plenty of personality: a crinkly charm and puppyish effervescence that belies his 45 years. An endearing wonkiness, too: his eyes list slightly and he has an off-centre smile.

Treacherously, the Radio Times, a BBC publication, once compared him to Sid the Sloth in the animated film Ice Age. ‘He has the same weird, long rubbery neck, the same jutting mini ears, the same range of facial expressions.’

It is, nevertheless, a fine-looking and friendly face, which may explain why it seems to have become the face of the BBC lately.

In addition to the 10 O’Clock News and Dragons’ Den, Davis also appears on Have I Got News For You and works for Radio 4, hosting the Saturday evening business discussion show The Bottom Line, as well as presenting documentary series on anything from comprehensive schools to the housing market.

But his ubiquity is not just about his face or his personality: he is an economics guru with a first in PPE from Oxford and a masters degree from Harvard – and before becoming a broadcaster he worked as an economist for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is brainy, in a word.

And he combines this braininess with an enviable gift for explaining complicated economic issues in a lucid, breezy and intelligible way, without sounding patronising. People who don’t really understand economics listen to his reports on the news and think they do – and they often stop him in the street to pick his brains.

‘People keep asking me if there is going to be a housing crash,’ he says. ‘What is going to happen to interest rates? Should I fix? But they never say: tell us more about the migration statistics. I sometimes, out of devilment, get tempted to whisper something like, “All I’m saying is, buy bottled water”, and give a significant wink.

‘As a rule, though, economists tend not to give advice. My whole pitch is to make people aware of the uncertainties in life. That is the only sensible line an economist can take.

‘You have to decide in relation to your circumstances what the risks are. What interest rates can you handle? What terrifies you? Should you be insuring yourself? Generally, I would say, if your mortgage is small relative to your income, I wouldn’t bother fixing, and vice versa.’

His accessible approach, he says, is partly to do with recognising that a television audience includes hugely different ability levels. This is in contrast to his predecessor Peter Jay, who once ticked off a Times sub-editor who complained that his economics column was unintelligible. ‘I am writing for three people in England,’ he said loftily, ‘and you are not one of them.’ (The three were two Treasury mandarins and the Governor of the Bank of England.)

‘Peter was an inspiration to me,’ Davis says. ‘When I was doing my economics A-level it was at the time when monetarists and Keynesians were battling it out, and he made great sense to me. I see myself as doing what Peter did, only in a more populist way.’

By dumbing down? ‘One newspaper said we had been trained to wave our arms around. Such nonsense. They don’t even tell us what to wear.

‘I think people would be amazed how little training we get before going in front of camera. It’s amazing I’m allowed on. So many egregious nervous tics and looks. I don’t agree with that argument in relation to me. It’s television, for goodness’ sake. You have to compete for attention. It has to be engaging. I never have economically literate people criticise my economics for being dumbed down.’

Does he ever worry that his steer might affect the markets? He gives a gentle, rippling laugh. ‘I’ve never moved markets. There is a natural caution about giving people economic news in such a stark way that it can move markets.

‘The only occasion when I have seriously thought “Oh goodness, this might have an affect on the very thing we are reporting” was after Hurricane Katrina. There were petrol refinery shortages. I did wonder then how I was going to report that without starting a rush for the petrol pumps that would leave the country gridlocked.’

He clearly doesn’t suffer from maths anxiety. ‘I do a bit, actually. I live in perpetual terror of my brain freezing and of being caught out like Stephen Byers on Five Live.’

Six times nine, I say. Silence. ‘It’s absolutely happened! Um … It’s 54.’

It was a cruel question because 54 was the answer Byers, the then school minister, gave to the question: what is eight times seven?

‘Funnily enough, I …I’m not great with numbers, and use fewer than my colleagues. I know what the numbers are doing, but that is different. And, actually, exact numbers don’t matter very much.

‘The correct economist’s answer to your question is “about 50”. If you are looking for the precision of “Is it 53 or 55?”, who cares? The important thing is that it is not 10 and it is not 100. Getting the order of magnitude right is more important.’

See what I mean? I had never thought of numbers – and the economy – like that before. I suggest that this is what makes him such a reassuring figure as a broadcaster.

‘Not everyone likes me. I get a lot of people who disagree with me, not hate mail exactly. They think quite a few of us at the BBC are smug, Blairite, patronising, London-based. The truth is, of all the criticisms, the London one is most valid.’

Speaking of Blair, before he left Downing Street he said the economy had never been better. Was he right? ‘I … I think that would be a simple way of putting it. You can’t discount the possibility that the economy will go bad. It’s uncertainty again. I’m afraid you can’t get away from uncertainty.

‘But, regardless of what may be about to happen, I would say we have had a pretty good run for the past 10 years. Not perhaps as good as the Government says, but pretty good.

‘Not that it’s the Government wot done it, necessarily. World circumstances also favoured us. Societies that consume a lot and have been able to borrow money to buy cheap imports have done well.’

Does he vote Labour? ‘I don’t have any political allegiance now, though I was a member of the SDP at university.’ He grins again. ‘The Eurosceptics often criticise me, saying I am biased towards the euro. I’m not, because I genuinely don’t know how I would vote on it if there were a referendum tomorrow. The conspiracy they see at the BBC is quite beyond the capabilities of BBC management to organise.’

Davis has had a ringside seat for the Gordon Brown chancellorship; is the man a Stalinist? ‘I probably know him better than most, but I don’t know what kind of Prime Minister he will make, that will depend on his instincts, reactions and priorities, not his personality.

‘I haven’t seen him having a tantrum, I … no, I haven’t. I will say what everyone says, which is that he is nicer in private than in the media. I’m not a fan of his interview style. He comes across as more wooden than he is.’

Davis’s parents are from South Africa. They emigrated here a few months before he was born. His father was an electronics engineer and became a reader at the University of Surrey.

He has two older brothers, one who works in the City, the other who runs his own business. He went to a comprehensive. ‘I wasn’t the brightest child and it helped me having parents who were nurturing. I came home with careers leaflets about how to become a police constable and my parents were slightly angst-ridden about whether the school was pushing me enough.’

And now look at him: number 49 in the pink list. Laughter is always just below his surface, and he has the good grace to laugh at this. ‘I did see that list. I was amused by it.’

But here we enter tricky territory. Evan Davis doesn’t mind talking about his private life to me in private, but he is reluctant to do so in print. As he puts it, if he answers one question it invites the next.

Anyway. Here goes. When did he come out? ‘I went to the States and came back and thought I’d better tell my parents. That was the hardest bit. I don’t think they knew. They have been 100 per cent supportive. They like Guillaume and he likes them. Having a landscape architect who knows about plants makes for easy in-law relations.’

He tells me about how he told his brother first, saying ‘I have something to tell you, can you guess what it is?’ And the brother guessed correctly, adding that that is the way he should tell their parents, too.

He decided to do it after Christmas lunch. They didn’t guess, so the brother who already knew pretended to guess for them. At this point, his other brother cracked a good joke, which, alas, Evan would rather I didn’t repeat here.

As a landscape architect, I suggest, Guillaume must hanker for broad acres rather than a roof terrace in Earls Court. ‘Well, we have a place in France together. He’s French. We made the strategic decision about whether to upgrade this flat or buy a place in France where houses are cheaper, and I think it is the best decision we ever made. It is nice for him to be able to have some space to plant things.’

Is a marriage in prospect? He purses his lips. ‘This is all the personal stuff which is verboten, I’m afraid.’

He stretches out on the sofa and looks at the ceiling. ‘We’re happy as we are. But I’ll let you know.’ A grin. ‘I would say that I think those who thought gay marriage would undermine heterosexual marriage have been proved wrong.’

The couple go jogging together along the Thames and Evan ran the London marathon this year in a time of 4 hours 17 minutes. ‘Running is a great way to lift your spirits,’ he says. He gets depressed otherwise? ‘I have sullen moments, not great periods of melancholy. I get anxious. I have short-term stress. A good relationship has helped, seeing eye to eye. We are programmed for companionship.

‘Because Guillaume and I are not in competition at work, it works well.’ His reticence about his private life is understandable. As economics editor of the BBC, he needs to have gravitas and he may well have been asked to tone things down a bit after it emerged that his nickname is Tinsel Tits. His nipples are pierced, you see, and he is said to have a Prince Albert in the trouser department. He will neither confirm nor deny it, sensibly enough, and wryly avoids the question by describing himself as ‘a man of mystery’.

‘I don’t want tattoos and body-piercing to be the dominant thing in interviews,’ he says. ‘I know the world tends to be interested in these things, but I find it better to lie low on them. Gay men tend to live different lives to other people and it would take the tabloids a nanosecond to find out all sorts of horrible things, so it’s better not to make a big deal about it.

‘I’m not embarrassed about it. On a one-to-one basis I am happy to talk to you about it. But I would like to keep it contained.’ Perhaps it adds to his cult status, I suggest. Perhaps viewers of the 10 O’Clock News tune in to try to work out what is under his shirt. ‘Perhaps,’ he says.

I agree to mention all this only in passing at the end, on condition that he pose for our photograph with his shirt off. He is laughing again, rocking back and forth on the sofa. ‘That would spoil everything.’

He wants to remain an enigma? ‘I don’t want to be an enigma, that’s the annoying thing.’ He shakes his head. ‘Actually, I am so superficial, the more you question me, the more you will realise that I am exactly like I am on the telly. There is no more to me than that.’

Perhaps it’s because rehearsals haven’t been going so well — ‘It’s been one of those “two steps back” mornings’, Anne-Marie Duff says as she sits shivering in a warm breeze that gusts over the rooftop terrace at the National Theatre. Perhaps it’s because she’s insecure. She self-consciously tugs her sleeves over her wrists, flicks her blonde hair, plays with the tiny silver heart around her neck. This despite —  or because of — the close ups of her strong-boned face that can be seen all over London on a poster advertising George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. ‘They do make you self-conscious, the posters. They concentrate the mind. Make you realise there is no going back.’
Either way, there is a tautness to the 36-year-old actress today. A fragility, too. She is 5ft 3in tall with thin, pallid skin and large, hooded eyes under mobile, questioning brows. Her voice is unexpectedly light too, floating like thistle down. It seems contrary to her reputation, as she is an arresting actress who likes to take on muscular roles. As one of her directors said of her: ‘She throws herself at parts as if bruising herself on them.’ And this, after all, is not the first time her face has been on posters all over town: the same thing happened when she starred as Elizabeth I in the BBC’s epic The Virgin Queen. With her shaved eyebrows, bleached eyelashes and white make up, she looked ethereal on those billboards: haunting and haunted,  her vanity suspended, an actor of high seriousness. When I ask if she considers herself to be beautiful she snorts derisively, as if the suggestion were peculiar. ‘Of course not. Definitely not.’
Yet plays are sold on her face. ‘Look, I’m not a model, that’s not who I am. I’m all right looking. I’m good looking enough. But I will never be cast as Helen of Troy in a huge, multi-million dollar movie because that’s not who I am — and it’s probably a good thing because I get to play more interesting roles, such as Elizabeth I or Saint Joan.’ She shakes her head and grins. ‘OK I’d love to play a big old glamour puss in designer clothes but those offers don’t come knocking. I get the virgins and the slappers. I don’t seem to have a middle ground.’ She is laughing now. ‘Madonna Whore at your service!’
By slappers she presumably means Fiona Gallagher, the blackly comic character she played in Paul Abbott’s Channel 4 series Shameless. She was the big-hearted, hot-tempered elder sister who kept the dysfunctional family on the Manchester sink estate together, picking up after her wayward siblings and her alcoholic father. Duff left after the second series, but the memory of her pink velour tracksuit and bulky gold earrings lives on. James McAvoy played her on-screen boyfriend, and her off-screen one. In real life they got married last year. He has since been the co-star of the Oscar-winning Last King of Scotland and is currently on location starring opposite Keira Knightly in an adaptation of Ian Mcewan’s Atonement.
The couple have made a pact not to talk about one another in public, and though Duff gives a wide and artless smile when he is mentioned, her nostrils also flare slightly in indignation. She tells me how she loathes the public’s prurient interest in the private lives of celebrities. Not that she considers herself a celebrity, she is quick to add. Actually ‘repulsive’ is the word she uses. ‘I find it repulsive. It’s to do with good manners. I don’t think it is polite to go around telling everyone your business. It’s quite old fashioned of me but I really don’t see what purpose it serves, other than self-indulgence. I mean really, who cares?’
Well, the millions of people who read magazines such as Heat, Closer and Glamour, I imagine. ‘Yes they do, but they shouldn’t because it’s the equivalent of school bullying, you know, finger pointing, look at her. I saw a woman on the Tube the other day suited and booted ready for the office and reading one of these stupid cellulite magazines, staring like an animal at someone famous with spots and I just thought: Woman, what are you doing? What, really, is that doing for you, short of making you paranoid about getting a spot? What is that doing to you as a human being?’
Maybe, I suggest, this phenomena is just payback for years of ordinary women being made to feel inadequate when looking at airbrushed pictures of impossibly glamorous and confident stars. ‘So stars have to be humiliated because readers of cellulite mags feel inadequate? They are reassured when they see people aren’t perfect? Well that’s fine, but it’s cruel.’
A good point well made. She is articulate, this Anne-Marie Duff, and more friendly than this exchange suggests. More hand-on-knee-tactile too, oddly enough. ‘I suppose my view is: If I’m not respectful of my private life, why should anyone else be? The heart is a fragile muscle, you have to take care of it.’
So is she saying she herself would never read gossip about other actors? ‘I suppose I’m nosy in that I love to hear a good old bit of gossip: “Is she really sleeping with him?” But not too much because it kills the mystique. Anyway, as actors you are often in a position where you know who is sleeping with who and you just say…’ she shrugs. ‘“Really?”… We know what actors and actresses are like.’
We do indeed, I say, a bohemian profession if ever there was. ‘Yeah, it’s odd spending hours together with strangers and you have these instant relationships. Three year relationships are compressed into three months, which is why film sets are such sexually charged places. Another thing that puts pressure on your relationships at home is being apart so much. That’s why so many actors go out with people in the profession. Because they understand. You are able to say to your partner: “That’s the deal breaker. This is what I do. If you cannot live with that then it’s over.”’
Sex scenes, I say, snogging colleagues you might only just have met, how weird is that? ‘Yeah but you don’t really love em, and you are probably thinking about someone you really love. It’s just a job. It doesn’t mean anything away from acting. It’s just story telling. And trust me you sometimes have to kiss people and fall in love with people you would really rather cross the road to avoid. That’s the truth of it. There are no blurred boundaries generally.’
There may have been other famous Queen Elizabeths — Glenda Jackson, Cate Blanchett, Helen Mirren — but Duff was the first to play a monarch who cried as hard as she fought. Sustaining that intensity of emotion despite the inevitable distractions and retakes on set, was that all down to cold discipline? ‘What you are forgetting is that most of the time actors don’t have the opportunity to flex their muscles. They might be able to flex three. We all want to be doing everything. When you are playing characters like that it is a opportunity to flex. Halleluiah. Let me be in all day every day to really engage with a character properly and engage with the full spectrum of emotions. Most of the time you might come on and say (she adopts a cockney accent):  ‘Excuse me, serge’. You’re not taxed. Being taxed is what you dream about at 14.’
Is it? Blimey.Duff and her brother grew up on an estate in Hayes, a suburb of west London. Her father was a painter and decorator, her mother a former athlete who, as a young woman in Ireland, harboured desires to go professional. ‘My family are Irish. Great story tellers. My dad would always sing at a party.’ Anne-Marie was a shy child. She went to a  comprehensive and then to London’s Central School of Drama. She worked as a waitress while studying but was, she says, ‘hopelessly clumsy’.  ‘I have no idea where the desire to act came from. No one in my family went to the theatre — too expensive for one thing. And elitist. We didn’t watch trashy TV though. I think that helped. And there were always books around, and we were always encouraged to read. But I don’t know why I started reading Chekhov and Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen. I just did.’
The comment suggests a lack of curiosity about herself. After all, her literary preferences as a schoolgirl indicate not only a romantic spirit but also a keen intellect that needed nourishment. Surely the romance of the actor’s life would have had obvious appeal to that schoolgirl, for all that it made her feel insecure as an adult. ‘It’s true, acting does make you feel vulnerable, even though I’m one of the few who seems to be in constant work. Most of my college friends are hardly ever in work.’
That must put a strain on friendships. ‘Sometimes you are made to feel…’ She trails off. “Well, you are aware of the injustice of it. But I’m not twenty-one. I’ve done my time. And the whole notion of what makes a good actor is so subjective. A matter of taste. I myself can look at someone and say: “I know they are a really, really, lovely actor, but they don’t turn me on.” That’s part of it, too.’
Another strain, I suppose, is that actors are always being held up to public scrutiny, always running the risk of a duff review.
‘I’ve had lots of those.’
I look blank and say I must have missed them.
She spells it out for me. ‘Duff?… Anne-Marie Duff?’
Ah. Good one.
‘But of course I’ve had plenty of bad reviews. I don’t read reviews. Fuck em. They only make you self-conscious. If you go to a party and twelve people say you look great, you must have lost weight, but one person asks if you’ve been eating all the pies…‘ she prods my stomach as she says this. ‘Who are you going to believe?’
The pie person, Miss.
‘Right.’
Although she describes herself as ‘a bit of a Pollyanna, overly buoyant and annoyingly sanguine’ she does admit to occasional moments of melancholy. ‘After Virgin Queen I didn’t work for a year and I felt very wee. Very frozen. I think it was a consequence  of having to have so much confidence for three months. I felt like I had to be “on” the whole time. I had to be engaged with so many different personalities. I was knackered mental and physically. You’ve been breathing out, and breathing out, and breathing out.’
In some ways Anne-Marie Duff is your typical, lovable neurotic actress. Certainly she has her share of self-doubt. ‘The best moment was being told I had landed the role of Saint Joan at the National. Then it was downhill. The anxiety sets in. Am I up to it?’ And when asked whether, given her passion for literature, she has tried writing she says: ‘No, it’s hopeless because I’m such a self critic I never get started. Dreadful, delete. Dreadful, delete.’ And she tells me she dreads coming across as a ‘pretentious wanker’ when talking about acting. But she is more thoughtful than most, more inscrutable, more serious about her work. Interestingly, when pressed about why she is so guarded about her private life she admits it is partly because she feels she needs to be anonymous in her roles, so that audiences see Elizabeth I or Saint Joan, not Anne-Marie Duff. ‘That’s another reason for keeping your front door shut. If you know the actress playing Hedda Gabler has just split up from her husband you will think it is the actress crying, rather than her character.’
She finishes the sandwich she has been eating. Her lunchtime break is almost over. Just time to ask about her private passion, fell walking. ‘I mostly do it in the Lake District,’ she says. ’But I was in Patagonia not long ago and that was… It keeps you young. And it’s good to get grubby.’ That said, she is obsessed with having clean hair and always has shampoo and conditioner handy, ‘even if I’m halfway up a mountain.’ She sounds like she can look after herself, I say. ‘I’m good at lighting fires. And on that note I ought to get back to rehearsals.’
It’s another good joke. Get it? Joan of Arc? Fires?
As she is leaving she looks down over the Thames and says: ‘There’s often a guy playing Bob Marley loudly down there…’ She smiles wistfully. ‘It’s funny, I used to go out with a guy who…’ She remembers my tape recorder, shakes her head and says firmly, ‘No, I can’t say.’

Two helicopters curve along the Potomac River before rising up over the Lincoln Memorial, blotting the sky and strangling the conversation. ‘Hey George!’ Laurie David shouts as it becomes apparent that they are the presidential helicopters. ‘Watch the goddam film!’ The helicopters bank towards the White House, keeping formation. ‘He still claims not to have watched it,’ she says with a springy, Long Island accent and a throaty laugh. ‘I’m hoping his daughters will watch it and then persuade him to watch it too.’ She resumes eating her sushi with a fork. Laurie David is too busy for chopsticks.
The film she refers to is An Inconvenient Truth, the one she produced, the one which won the Oscar, the one which David Cameron has said should be shown in every school. The film was her idea; she approached the former Vice-President Al Gore about making it after she heard him give his famous slide presentation on Global Warming. Although she refers to herself as ‘a Jewish mother from Long Island’, her political clout extends far beyond the suburbs. Arguably, she is America’s foremost green campaigner. She has written a bestselling book, The Solution is You: Stop Global Warming – An Activist’s Guide. And, though a Democrat herself, she has teamed up with the Republican Senator John McCain to organise a virtual march on Washington — already they have almost a million signatures. She also persuaded Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor of California, to go green — along with half the stars in Hollywood. In terms of her networking powers in Hollywood, it doesn’t hurt that she is married to Larry David, the comedian who co-wrote Seinfeld, the biggest grossing sitcom of all time (he made more than $200 million from the syndication rights). But she could probably have done it on her own. She is a feisty woman, no question. And a driven one. And as her husband tells me when I meet him in Maryland the next day: ‘She is not an easy woman to say no to.’ But that is to come.
For now she and I are having lunch sitting outside a restaurant in Washington. Parked nearby is the stopglobalwarming.org bus she and Sheryl Crow have spend the past 10 days touring across the Deep South in, stopping to spread the word at colleges. David makes speeches, Crow plays her guitar and sings songs. ‘The bus runs on vegetable oil,’ she says, flicking back her shoulder length, coal black hair. ‘Bio diesel. Our driver said something to me yesterday, which made me think “yes”. He is a good old boy from Texas and he said that after listening to my speeches he had decided not to waste water by washing the whole bus. He’d just do the tyres. A bit of dirt wouldn’t hurt, he said. I thought yes, that’s it. That is the whole point right there.’
They have become quite a double act, David and Crow (whom I shall also meet the following day). ‘I never thought I’d end up with Sheryl. I didn’t know her a year ago. Now she is my best friend. She has taken a risk because being a rock star people might mock her for getting serious about this issue, but she feels she has to.’ David laughs when I ask if they do a duet. ‘Sheryl was horrified after the first show when she realised I was tone deaf. She handed me a tambourine at one point and immediately took it away again.’
She stares straight at you as she talks, unblinkingly, with grass green eyes. She is friendly and self deprecating but also passionate, animated and impatient. She can talk about global warming until, well, she tells me she can become a bore on the subject at dinner parties if she is not careful. ‘We like to socialise a lot in Hollywood and guests can get caught with me. I have to check myself. But when people ask me about global warming I can’t stop myself. It consumes me. It occupies my every waking thought. It’s the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning and the last thing at night.’
I am reminded of something Larry David wrote about her in the introduction to her book. When he first met her she was “a materialistic, narcissistic, superficial, bosomy woman from Long Island. She read People magazine, watched hours of mindless television, and shopped like there was no tomorrow. Finally, I had met someone as shallow as me.” Then he sensed something had begun to change. “She started peppering her conversation with words like ozone layer, sustainable forestry, and toxic runoff. I began to notice new people hanging around the house, people who were not in show business and wore a lot of tweed.”
When I mention this she says. ‘Yeah then look what he ended up with. I guess I always wanted to be a running a Hollywood studio but when your husband has the most successful comedy show on television where do you go from there. How do you compete?’
It is a telling comment. On some level she seems to be in competition with her husband. She was quite competitive as a child, she says, being the youngest of three sisters. Her campaigning side first manifested itself when she felt not enough people were buying the Beatles last album Let it Be so she cut out advert for it and went around pinning them to trees in mile radius around her house. . ‘They never thanked me!’ She was 10. Her background was conventional enough. Her father serviced swimming pools, she read magazine journalism at college and one of her first jobs was working in a car showroom. ‘Me selling cars! Ha! The irony!’ She later landed a job as a talent coordinator for the David Letterman show in New York. It was there she met Larry, although Letterman turned him down, which is now a source of some amusement to both of them. Four years later she left to start her own management company, representing comedians as well as comedy writers, but not Larry who she says is ‘unmanageable’.
So how did she get from there to here — from showbiz to green activism? ‘What really gave me a sense of urgency about this was when my first daughter was born [they have two aged 11 and 13]. I really started to worry, like I had this warning bell that went off inside me: Danger! Danger! I thought: What can I do? How can I use my contacts to do something about this? We have to warn people. It terrifies me. It should terrify everyone.’
She sure used her contacts. Not only did she produce the comedy special, Earth to America! which featured Tom Hanks, Will Ferrell, Steve Martin and Jack Black, she also began holding ‘eco salons’ with scientists as guest speakers. The Hollywood A  list attended, everyone from Leonardo di Cario and Cameron Diaz to Angelina Jolie. ‘I have a big house,’ David says with a shrug. ‘I use it to gather hundreds of people for eco-salons.’ When I ask whether the stop global warming campaign isn’t, well, you know, the latest fashionable cause she becomes a little defensive. ‘That’s good if it’s fashionable. We want it to be fashionable. But I am aware of the snarky comments: that in Hollywood we are just preaching to the converted. That was why I wanted to this bus tour with Sheryl through Middle America. Anyway you can’t say someone like Leonardo di Caprio is just following fashion. He bought the first hybrid way before they became fashionable.’ She refers to the Toyota Prius, a ‘hybrid car, part electrical part bio fuel. There is now a nine-month waiting list for them in Hollywood, thanks to her. ‘Yeah,’ she acknowledges with a laugh. ‘I ought to be on a percentage from Toyota.’  She made them fashionably partly by persuading her friends who produce TV shows to feature them. She got one on to 24, for example. And Larry drives one in the semi autobiographical comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm. Larry’s plays a curmudgeonly comedian with a tolerant wife. He is a semi-retired sitcom mogul who ambles through his inordinately comfortable life, routinely managing to annoy or infuriate everyone around him, including blind people and the mentally ill.
Cheryl Hines plays Larry’s ‘wife’ in the show. Although the TV wife is a green activist she spends her days gossiping with friends and worrying about her wardrobe. Laurie, by contrast, is far more focused on the fight.  “At first I demanded the actress playing me be a red head, so as people wouldn’t confuse us. But I settled for a blonde. People do still get confused though, on the school run, I mean. They assume the screen wife is based on me, but actually she is much nicer to Larry than I am.’ I imagine the episode in which Larry has a pubic hair stuck in his throat raised eyebrows. ‘Well, that’s what I’m talking about. There were comments  next day. The lunch moms at school all gave me funny looks.’
In another episode Larry reminds Cheryl of her promise that after 10 years of marriage she would reward his faithfulness by letting him sleep with another woman. Larry and Laurie had that conversation, but only as a joke. Is she sometimes shocked though about how far he takes his comedy? ‘I don’t think it’s a matter of him going too far, he just likes to explore ideas, test boundaries.’ Does the autobiographical element of the show make her feel self conscious at home? ‘I don’t think he is trying out material on me all the time, but he does keep a ratty little brown notebook and is constantly scribbling ideas in it.  Situations. Awkward social moments.
They sound like a nightmare couple to invite round: her boring on about global warming, him scribbling in his notebook. She laughs. ‘Yeah well. What can you do? You know, the big difference between our characters in the show is that he is quite shy in real life and I am much more confrontational that him. pull up alongside Hummer drivers on the highway and yell at them. , ‘Do you know what you’re driving? How many miles a gallon do you get in that?’ Then we get into an altercation and my husband’s horrified and begs me to change my last name back to my maiden name.”  “I am floored by what I just experienced with Karl Rove,” David said later. “I went over to him and said, I urge you to take a new look at global warming. He went zero to 100 with me. … I’ve never had anyone be so rude.”    Rove said: “She came over to insult me, and she succeeded.”
Also if he was sitting here now he would be telling you about the 45 minutes it took him to get from the airport, which routes he took, what the diversions were, how long he had to wait at the traffic lights. Me, I’d cover that stuff in 5 seconds.’
He sounds infuriating to live with. ‘Hey, I guess I’m no picnic.’ Because she is a tyrant about green living? ‘Well Larry does get the brunt of it. Him and the kids. I won’t let them take  long showers or run the water too much when they are brushing their teeth. I won’t let  them leave adapters plugs in or stand by lights on. Everyone has to use both sides of the paper for printing and faxing. We recycle obsessively. And since I get a lot of clothes dry-cleaned, I take a garment bag to the dry cleaner so I don’t waste the disposable plastic covers. We also use the old polysterene cups when we go to Starbucks —  25 billion polystyrene cups are thrown away each year. That’s crazy. We should complain. I’m getting very good at complaining.
low energy light bulbs? ‘In every room’
Solar panels. ‘We tried to have them fitted but they wouldn’t work with our house.
David into a hate figure for the American right. She was ranked 82 in the book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. She has been dubbed a ‘Gulfstream liberal’ for flying occasionally in a private jet. This is not about perfection. I don’t expect anybody else to be perfect either. That’s what hurts the environmental movement – holding people to a standard they cannot meet. That just pushes people away.”
What about using private jets though? ‘I try not to fly by private jet so much anymore. I have the frequent flier miles to prove it.
I’ve been reading the blogs I say. The abusive stuff? I no longer read the replies. You get people like Rush limburgh mocking Hollywood liberals..’ surely she must see he is trying to get a rise out of her. he’s only saying it to get a laugh. ‘I know I know I live with a comedian I know about comedy but what he says is just irresponsible and wrong.
Still the blogs show there are still a lot of global warming deniers out there. ‘yes there are but they are just clutching at straws. The game is up. We’ve nailed the argument. In fact there is no augment any more. When you have 2000 of the world’s leadings scientist in this field agreeing there is no argument. There was that programme you had in the UK and they found one or two scientists who disagreed but why were they given them air time. It’s irresponsible.
I tell her about the feature we ran in this paper by that arch Global warming denying Lord Monckton, that and the response it elicited the following week from Al Gore. She is aware of both. How does she explain the medieval warm period theory. ‘I think Al countered that most effectively in the film, when he argued that this’d been proven and anyway there has never been anything like the rise in recent years. the  deniers are just contrarianism. It’s a way of getting attention. You go against the orthodoxy. The  media is being irresponsible when it gives these people a voice. They should move on there has to be some culpability. You have to question why people are saying that. Some are grossly misinformed some people are being paid to misinform you. If you were sick and you went to 98 doctors who all told you were sick and had to get on medicine then you went to two doctors who maybe didn’t have a licence or weren’t peer reviewed and you said OK like who are you listening to. We have to reject that and get past it
Actually England is way ahead of us… the Stern report. That was the right message, get capitalists to sit up and take notice. I was talking to the head of American Express and he said he is on message now because it makes business sense do something now
`Surely she has won the argument, with Bush acknowledging Global Warming in his State of the Union address last January. ‘ yeah but he was only acknowledging it when is he going to do something about it. This is going to be his legacy, this and Iraq. Global warming is a big issue of national security. Look at New Orleans. How are future generations going to judge him for doing nothing on this?
We now face the most urgent challenge of our lifetime. We now have less than ten years to slow global warming down otherwise we set ourselves on course we will not be able to correct. 2000 leading scientists from 150 countries have reached this conclusion. Global warming is happening and it is happening faster than anyone anticipated. As things stand we are already guarantee two degrees of warming but we dare not go above that. The difference between one degree is a Popsicle frozen and a puddle on the floor… Last year was the hottest on record in the states. The winter was the hottest and you heard people saying hey I’m in Chicago and its January and its seventy degrees isn’t that great? Well it’s not going to be so great when its 110 in June. Global warming means extreme weather in both direction Ha Ha so cold out! so much for global warming. No. global warming means more extreme blizzards, tornadoes, and floods. Almost every day the evening news brings us another sever weather report, always record breaking. We are causing it. Hurricane Katrina is just a taste of what is to come if we don’t stop global warming. Nature ferocity knows no bounds
People are saying they hey it was cold today so much for your their but that its the point it is erratic weather. We will be getting the wrong whether at the wrong time of year and already people are noticing. I think the days of the same waring tree hugging environmentalist image is over. We are all environmentalist now. It effects us all people start noticing. You go skiing and there is no snow.
we are the biggest source of the problem doing the least about it — 25% of the world Co2 emission comes from America.
It was hard to get him to do stand-up for this he is very contrary he has walked out on audiences. You know if a barmaid talking. .. David’s onstage manner was almost wilfully uningratiating. He was intense and bespectacled, bald David has a lanky, wiry build and an athletic, slightly bowlegged walk. At 58  he is 10 years older than his wife. His cranium is long and sleek, surrounded by a fringe of curly whitish hair that is neatly trimmed, except for rampant sideburns.
an alumni of Maryland University he is persuaded to come on stage and sing the university song. He also does a turn. I see him back stage doing a zipper check. His zipper has broken. I realise what I do isn’t nearly so important as what she does. I’m not saving the planet or anything! Just trying to make people laugh. Nothing wrong with that. People like to laug
Larry says:the last five years I’ve been having to use recycled toilet paper and let me tell you, its no picnic. That recycled paper. It’s the kind of paper you’d find on a whaling vessel.
‘She won’t let me do is use too much water,’ he confirms. ‘If the shower is on for two minutes she will run in and flick the curtain open. “You’re done.” You’re wasting water. But I haven’t used condition yet. You don’t need to condition. Conditioning is over rated. But the worse thing is that I have had to sit through an inconvenient truth 14 times. I’ve been to screenings in Saudi Arabia. I mean I love Al Gore but enough is enough… His wife he says sees global warming in everything. Look honey the ice cream melted. …
Sheryl straps her acoustic guitar on: and sings a change will do you good. She plays ‘every day’s a winding road’ Laurie and I met six months ago and have been sleeping together for two weeks, across the aisle from each other. I thought lets get a tour bus and load it up with vegetable oil. They hand out light bulbs at the end. I’m trying to convince Laurie we should do this again in the fall when they are session. She is joking Everyone should limit themselves to one square of toilet tissue.
Sheryl: ‘I’m a worrier, I worry about things, although it’s a waste of energy. Laurie and I made a trip through new Orleans it was frighten ning to see what global warming can do. We have an opportunity here to slow everything down.
The mayor of new York is here, a friend
She comes off and says: ‘That’s the first time I did the dancing on stage. I dance on the side of eth stage every night’
I ask Sheryl if she is going to miss it. ‘I am, I really am. I’m trying to persuade Laurie to do it again in the Fall when parliament is in session. I’ve never been so mission orientated. Neither of us are making any money out of this by the way.’
Was she nervous about what people might say about another rock star with a message: ‘You know what I say to that? I don’t care. I feel like I represent the person who think I am so afraid is it too late to make a difference. I’ve been learning a lot about it. Having knowledge about this can be a burden but at least there is some let up when you realise there are things you can do.
I think all rock tours are going to go this way. Bio diesel buses. You can earn a green seal when your tour REM and Coldplay Coldplay has overset its tours and CDs by planting trees
The major of Newark and Gayle King is editor-at-large The Oprah Winfrey Show Magazine and is the best friend of Oprah Winfrey. Larry: Whenever you hear the word rich prick usually comes after it same with poor and schmuck
They are endlessly mocked for it.
I mention people are lining up to mock this? Rosie O’Donnell’s line was “Have you seen my a–?”
Then there’s the hypocrisy factor: The website www.thesmokinggun.com tracked down the contract for Crow’s concert tour, which demands, among other things, parking space for “three tractor trailers, four buses, six cars.”
She gets on the bus and she kisses me goodbye on both cheeks, a eco warrior certainly but still a little Hollywood.

To call it a split personality would be to overstate the case, but there is a measure of contradiction pulsing through Yusuf Islam’s character. I see it when he arrives for a photographic shoot at Leighton House, near Holland Park in west London.

The gallery has been chosen as a setting because of its Arab hall – an appropriate backdrop for Britain’s best-known Muslim convert.

Although he was born in London 58 years ago – and raised in the city, too – it is Islam’s first visit here and, as he maunders around the hall, examining its Islamic tiles, he looks like an Eastern mystic: serene and greybearded in a kameez shirt, his hands forming a fig leaf behind his back; he is nodding to himself and silently mouthing translations of Arabic phrases he reads on the walls.

But when the shoot begins and he is asked to sit on the mosaic floor, he shakes his head. The temperature changes. He has become the veteran pop star once more, aware of his image, used to getting his own way. He doesn’t want to look ‘hunched up’, he says, holding up his hand to silence any objection.

The song You’re So Vain by his one-time girlfriend Carly Simon was said to have been written about him. Then again, it was said to have been written about a lot of Seventies rock stars. ‘Vanity was one of my problems,’ is all Yusuf Islam will say on the subject now.

He pointedly uses the past tense – was – to refer to the days when, under the name Cat Stevens, he sold more than 60 million albums, experimented with drugs, flew all the way to Washington just to get his teeth capped, and, in the memorable phrase of one of his associates,‘wasn’t exactly celibate’.

The present tense is for what happened after 1977, the year he turned his back on the music industry and the hedonism that came with it, renouncing both as sinful. He auctioned his guitars and gold records for Islamic charities.

He even wrote to his record company and asked it to stop selling his albums (it refused). More significantly, he changed his name and dedicated himself to founding Muslim schools in north London – four of them to date.

‘There is a cultural difference between what I represented as Cat Stevens and what I represent today as Yusuf Islam,’ he says carefully, with a trace of London in his vowels. He says everything with care and films himself saying it.

There is a small microphone strapped to his arm, its neon light glowing, and it is wirelessly linked to a video camera he has placed in the corner of the room. He seems earnest, sincere and defensive.

He has good reason to be. In 1989, he was quoted as saying that, according to a literal interpretation of the Koran, the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was understandable, sort of. A media storm broke and he claimed he was misquoted, or at least his meaning was wilfully misconstrued. He has recorded his every public utterance since.

His manager – with a new album, his first in 28 years, his career needs managing once more – comes in and says that his man doesn’t want to answer questions about Iraq, which might seem a little eccentric, given that Yusuf Islam is a pop star.

But I know what he means. Whether he likes it or not, Islam has been cast in the role of unofficial ambassador for Britain’s two million Muslims, and in recent years that has not been the easiest gig in the world.

On the CD box of his new album,‘An Other Cup’, his former stage name is, perhaps with some weariness, acknowledged on a sticker. He can’t get away from it, it seems.

But even if it wasn’t there, you would know straight away it was Cat Stevens you were listening to: a semitone lower, but the same folksy, fluid, easy-going vocals and acoustic guitar patterns – a patina familiar from songs such as Moonshadow, Father and Son, Peace Train, The First Cut is the Deepest and, that staple of school assemblies, Morning Has Broken.

Cat Stevens has a long and impressive back catalogue, so long and impressive that it has kept him in royalties for life. As with his name, the old songs just won’t go away.

On the morning I meet him he has just been told that Wild World (‘Oh, baby, baby it’s a…’ – that one) has re-entered the Top 40 because teenagers have been downloading it onto their iPods, the song having just featured on a youth television programme.

His Tea for the Tillerman, meanwhile, has re-entered the collective consciousness thanks to Ricky Gervais: he uses it as the theme tune to Extras.

The ‘why now after 28 years?’ question meets with a sweet answer. He and his wife, Fauzia Mubarak Ali, the daughter of a Surbiton accountant, have five children. One of them, his 21-year-old son Muhammad, brought a guitar into the house and started writing songs on it.

Islam had assumed that his religion frowned on music. ‘But my son helped me come to a better understanding of where music sits in Islamic culture and I found myself free to sing again.’

So there was no taboo about it, after all? ‘My son broke the taboo for me, because he had no hesitation in buying a guitar. He is a Muslim, too. It made me realise again that music helps us to share moments.’ He nods thoughtfully.

Islam had planned to make a one-off return to music in 1985: he was lined up to play at Live Aid but – tuh! – Elton John over-ran and he was squeezed out of the schedule. Had he not even been singing to himself in the shower in all that time?

‘No, no, no. I really walked away from the business. It was a statement in a way because I felt a kind of rejection from the media the moment I adopted a new name. They didn’t really want to know me. They wanted me to remain as I was. When I received a cold shoulder at this turning point in my life I felt: well, if you don’t love me then maybe I don’t love you.’

He didn’t love himself much either, presumably, given that he had changed his identity in such a profound way. ‘I got to the point, like many a pop star, when I thought the world rotated around me. Islam put me in a spot where I realised I had to bow to a higher power and simply dedicate myself to living properly. Without guidelines that is difficult to do.’

His conversion occurred after he nearly drowned off the coast of Malibu in 1976.A strong current was pulling him out to sea and, having no strength left, he said, ‘God, if you save me, I’ll work for you.’

At that moment, a wave came and he was saved. When I ask him how he was sure it was Allah who had answered his prayers and not the Christian God of his Catholic upbringing, he smiles and says, ‘There is only one God.’ He had been reading the Koran at the time.

A coach party of 25 people turns up at the gallery so we walk to a nearby café – and, as we do, Islam is recognised by a Muslim man who wants to shake his hand. He gets that a lot, he says. He always feels at home in cafés. His father ran one in Soho.

Born Steven Demetre Georgiou, he was the son of Stavros, a Greek- Cypriot, and Ingrid, a Swedish Baptist. When Steven was about eight years old, his parents separated, but both continued to run the restaurant and live above it.

Islam says he was forever trying, and failing, to reconcile them. His father was known as ‘Belos’ – The Mad One – because he had a short temper.

Was the appeal of Islam for him partly paternalistic? ‘Yeah, but there is a central dimension to Islam which a lot of people don’t see. They see the external, which can look paternalistic, but there is an internal perspective of knowing your Lord. I don’t think any prophet ever came except to connect people to the one Lord. Once you see there is only one Lord then you realise you are not the boss, you have to serve.’

You learn humility? ‘Humility. Exactly. Not often associated with pop stars. That is the character change I had to go through. For that reason, standing on stage in front of 40,000 people did not suit me.’

He didn’t enjoy the applause? ‘Some introverts overcome their problem by exhibiting themselves publicly. I think Jimi Hendrix was the same. He was a very shy person. Mmm. To know him, he was a very gentle speaker but his image required him to be a big personality.’

Cat Stevens toured with Hendrix in the late 1960s. Hendrix, indeed, had helped him overcome his stage fright – he gave him a pint of brandy mixed with port to drink every night before he went on.

Does he ever shake his head at the thought that he hung out with Hendrix and somehow survived? ‘Yes, well, that was one of the strange things. There was a lot of clubbing and drug-taking going on. But it gave me an insight: that whatever happened on the outside of showbusiness, there is an inner journey that you have to take as well.’

Or you end up dead? ‘There was a flurry of rock-star deaths at that time and their names all seemed to start with J: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin… then I went and chose Joseph as a name! Luckily it is the Arabic pronunciation, Yusuf. There was a time when I did wonder what was going on. I was a victim of it too, in a way, because I ended up in hospital for months with TB, in a convalescent home in the middle of Surrey. I had lost control. I was forced to step back and think.’

Fame and fortune had certainly come to Cat Stevens at a young age. He was only 18 when he had his first hit, Matthew and Son, in 1967. Did he feel like an impostor?

‘Suddenly, I was having to find my own identity while being put on a pedestal; people were forging my identity for me as I went along. I felt lost and unfulfilled. I didn’t know who to listen to. The only role models I had were other pop stars. And chart success is a fleeting delusion.’

All the songs on the new album are written by him, apart from one, a cover of the song made popular by Nina Simone and then The Animals: Don’t Let me be Misunderstood. ‘Yes, I do feel misunderstood and not just in the Muslim phase of life. It was partly my fault because I was looking for my identity. I was afraid of being misunderstood.’

Even before he became a Muslim, though, journalists found him heavy-going intellectually. He complained of being ‘misinterpreted’, but it may have been more a case of interviewers being baffled by his opaque pronouncements about everything from Maoism to UFOs.

He does tend to get a little tangled in his thoughts, and I have untangled him in places here. The biggest misunderstanding was over Salman Rushdie.

‘I was pretty green; I had no idea what kind of traps were being laid for me. Rushdie was never my subject. And people tried to make it my subject and I feel offended, deeply offended because of that… I just wanted to enlighten people as to what I had learnt from the Koran in my research; this as far as I could see was what the Koran had to say on the subject, but then I got tagged with something completely different.’

He was more than just misunderstood in 2000, when he was denied entry into Israel for allegedly making donations to Hamas, something that he strenuously denies and which was never proved. Four years later, he was en route to America when his name came up on a ‘no-fly’ list; the plane was diverted to Maine.

‘Wait a minute!’ he thought, as he sat in front of three FBI agents in the US immigration office. ‘Am I supposed to be the baddie?’ Yes, was the answer as far as the FBI was concerned. The following day, Yusuf Islam was deported back to Britain.

He still hasn’t been told why he was on a no-fly list, but he assumes there was a mix-up of names and identities. It provoked a small international controversy and led the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, to complain personally to the American Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations.

Powell responded by stating that the watch list was under review. Yusuf has since been allowed back into America.

It sounded like he was a victim of religious profiling, but does he blame people for feeling nervous when they see bearded Muslims on planes? ‘Even I get nervous when I see someone with a beard! If I don’t know who that person is. It’s true that some look a bit frightening. Some of these people, I know them, they look ferocious. The beard happens to give a masculine look, a more virile appearance, but what goes on behind it, well, I’m an example, if you listen to my music. Yes I had a beard as Cat Stevens but now I have grown wiser and my beard is longer.’

Is it true that American airport security personnel asked for his autograph? ‘So many people do, even Cherie Blair. I was in Downing Street with a number of Muslim delegates and scholars and she was so excited to meet me because my music had had an impact on her.’

What advice does he give on these occasions? ‘I would say the age of reason hasn’t ended and for every effect there is a cause. I suppose even for the Task Force Group who looked into what might have ignited 7/7, it comes down to a common agreement that foreign policy had an enormous amount to do with it.

‘It has nothing to do with ordinary Londoners in the street, it is to do with governmental attitudes abroad. We all suffer from that. The Government is suffering from that, too, because of a misinformed adventurous approach to security, when in fact security can be solved quite easily with a little more attention to the injustice to Muslims continually perpetrated around the world.’

As well as with the Prime Minister, he has also had meetings with Kofi Annan and Prince Charles. He doesn’t like being seen as a spokesman for British Muslims, but can he see why, given the current religious tensions, people might want to know his views?

‘A person like myself, who has been brought up in the West and lived most of my life aiming for the same goals that we all do in this society, and, having achieved them, discovered they were still not fulfilling and then finding Islam…’ The answer drifts away.

‘Because of the extremes that some people have gone to, on both sides, of wanting to start wars and polarise the world into two camps, and I think the natural instinct of humanity is to come to a balanced position after a while.’

Does he feel he has been a victim of Islamophobia? ‘Yes, exactly. What happened on the plane. Islamophobia affects me directly because Islam is my name, Yusuf Islam. Then came the bad news.’ He refers to 9/11.

‘That took over the headlines and allowed people to define Islam politically. They are using the wrong dictionary, the dictionary for Islam is a spiritual one, and it’s a harmonious one, a universal one.’

I suppose the trouble is that we didn’t really think about Islam much in the West until 9/11, when we were… He finishes my sentence: ‘Forced to think about it.’ Exactly, I say, and one thing we were forced to think about was where the loyalties of British Muslims lay.

‘I think the loyalty question for British Muslims doesn’t matter; being British doesn’t mean you can’t be a believer. I do find it very strange that it tends to be liberals who argue with you that you have no right to believe anything different from them.’

He laughs, a slow bubbling laugh. ‘To me, what I found in Islam was it contained scientific reason, along with spiritual reality. It is only when those things are distorted that people disagree.’

Does he feel his religion has been hijacked by extremists who don’t represent what he thinks? ‘There are extremists on both sides who are determined to create conflict, and so they have missed one of the great messages that Islam contained peace in its own name: salaam. Islam.

‘That is one of the first things I learnt as a Westerner. Oh my god, that’s interesting, didn’t I write a song called Peace Train? A Muslim roughly translated is someone who has made peace with God and who has learnt to live with others.’

The 7/7 suicide bombers described themselves as martyrs in their ‘martyrdom videos’. Does he think they were martyrs? ‘This is not my subject, but the Koran forbids the taking of your own life in clear, categorical terms.’

So they didn’t go to heaven? His tone changes at this question, takes on a harder edge.‘I’m not a judge, and neither are you! That is the wrong kind of question to ask someone who has a record of wanting peace.

I want to communicate that peace. I don’t want to be entangled in the confusion in your mind or other people’s minds about what Islam is. Let me speak clearly from my heart. Let me express myself through my music.’

Fair enough, Yusuf. Fair enough. Is it going to be another 28 years before his next album? A grin. ‘I believe I have a few more good songs in me yet.’