ONE OF the snags of going on holiday with one’s high-powered girlfriends is that they suddenly split to run for Governor of California. Especially if it’s raining.

I am sitting with Arianna Huffington in the dining room at Ballymaloe House in Co Cork, debating with her kids and mine whether to explore the teashops of Bunratty or the rainswept cliffs of Ballycotton, when there’s another blast of the Tally Ho! overture from Arianna’s mobile. This time it’s Warren Beatty. The gist of his message: “Run Arianna, Run!” Perhaps it’s all a brilliant stunt, like Bunburying in The Importance of Being Earnest, so she can escape the Irish weather. As I start to consider this possibility there’s a cacophony of new calls — from political consultants, Hollywood activists, media pundits and, just when she had sat down again to enjoy the show-stopping summer pudding, an Hispanic labour leader who swears the fealty of all his members. Nope, it’s real. We’ve only been in Ireland for two days and Arianna is heading back to LA to throw her hat into the California recall ring.

The key to Warren Beatty as a political consultant is that he sees everything as a movie. Huffington versus Schwarzenegger? The Athenian Amazon versus the Austrian Atlas, big hair versus big biceps. Insurgent Greek versus Habsburgian Hulk. TV talker versus action star. The battle of the accents, a cartoon race between self-invented superaliens. Maybe he’s right. Except that since it became clear that the Democratic Governor, Gray Davis, was toast, and a moneybags Republican car-alarm mogul successfully financed a recall campaign, this race has been not so much a movie as an episode of American Idol.

Ultimately, even Arnold had his moment of doubt. Schwarzenegger’s sudden reticence was supposedly about “family issues”, ie, the unwillingness of his wife Maria Shriver — JFK’s prettiest niece — to keep reading about his rumoured romances. But I suspect that Arnold’s issues were more political than pulchritudinal. For Arnold, edging out 300 weirdos in the recall wouldn’t be about anything but his name ID as a movie star — and he wants full-on political acceptance. Anything less would fail to shove it up the nose of his hoity-toity Kennedy in-laws. As one Hollywood sage summed it up to me: “Going for the recall is like putting out a $10 million indie movie and hoping to do $50 million in grosses. As always, Arnold wants to make a $100 million picture and gross a billion.”

With or without Arnold as a foil for Arianna, I see no downside in her giving the race a whirl as an independent candidate. Her whole career has been one of fantastic reinvention. I’ve known her since she was the star of the Cambridge Union and I was a burgeoning hack at Oxford in the Seventies. I’ve enjoyed all her incarnations, from early protégé of Lord Weidenfeld and girlfriend of Bernard Levin to conqueror of New York society and Park Avenue hostess in big-shouldered suits, from inexplicable New Age disciple of self-fulfilment guru John-Roger to campaigning wife of Republican oil heir Michael Huffington (she helped him to blow $30 million on a failed race for California senator), from Washington right-wing saloniste to shrewdly self-deprecating comedienne divorcee on the talk-show circuit — right down to her unlikely role today as ecologically hip anti-SUV campaigner, folk heroine of radical political websites and author of the bestselling, corporate America-skewering Pigs at the Trough. In all the frenzy of these juggled identities she’s still a tactile mom, wrapping her adoring daughters in absent-minded embraces as she jabbers into her earpiece about campaign finance reform.

There’s no doubt that Arianna’s weird odyssey was always destined to settle her in California, capital of reinvention. She looks ten years younger than she did in New York and DC. The big hair has slimmed down and she has lost the Madame Secretary maquillage, too. Now she’s hot — a tall, striding, fiftysomething babe in designer jeans who hikes the Hollywood hills with entertainment power women.

At first, Arianna’s noisy switcheroo from Republican moll to left-of-centre firebrand was seen as the opportunistic move of a publicity-seeker, given the handsome terms of her divorce settlement from Huffington when he decided to come out as gay. But Arianna is genuinely smart. Liberated from Huffington (who made a sudden, unwelcome intrusion the other day when, in an act of competitive petulance designed to embarrass her, he announced that he too may be a candidate in the recall race), she spent the next seven years industriously writing columns. She won the hearts of TV producers by rescuing innumerable draggy cable TV talk shows with ballsy displays of intellectual flamethrowing. Now the Left has finally realised that it ought to be grateful to her. It badly needs entertaining spokespeople, and Arianna is articulate and funny and sexy.

Early yesterday morning Candidate Huffington unveiled her newest identity in a packed press conference at the grassroots South Central LA haven for needy teens, A Place Called Home. She has always been a dynamite speaker and this one was a barnburner.

“My Democratic friends say that this recall is a right-wing power grab; backed by those who want a backdoor way to overturn an election they lost.

“And you know what? Those friends are right. (But) however corrupt the parentage of the recall effort, it has given us an unprecedented opportunity to take back our political system — to reorder our policy priorities so that our public servants will finally, at long last, get back to serving the public.

“I am not running to aid and abet a right-wing coup. Indeed, I am running to prevent it. We must make sure that we don’t turn control of the state over to zealots who would bring us back to the Dark Ages on reproductive rights, gun control, gay rights and immigration policy, while selling off our precious natural resources to the highest bidder!” Arianna is up and running. You go, girlfriend.