The Lanesborough, Hyde Park Corner, SW1; 020 7333 7254
Mon-Sun, lunch noon-2.30pm, dinner 7pm-11pm

5 stars: Founding Father; 4 stars: Father Christmas; 3 stars: Father Time; 2 stars: Fathers for Justice; 1 stars: Absent father

Washington. Named for a taciturn soldier-farmer with wooden teeth. George stands out from all the other perpetrators of an independent America, not just because he was 6ft 2in and had breasts that could flatten a regiment of Pomeranian grenadiers, but because he was the only one you would have made any excuse not to have sat next to at dinner. Here at the edge of the western world, in the last corner of the 18th century, they produced and combined a band of the most eternally attractive, imaginative, humane, interesting, amusing and talented men who ever lived anywhere. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Tom Paine. It’s one of those miraculously bright glories of humanity, a sudden, unexpected burst of brilliance – then in the middle of the blooms, there’s the thistle of Washington.

Aloof, grand, stiff and dull: an odd choice for a general, and odder still for a premier president, but a fitting one to name this capital. It is a civic truth that all purpose-built administrative centres are big pinstripe pants. Canberra, Ottawa, Pretoria, BrasÍlia, Abuja, Islamabad – none of them worth the bus ticket. They don’t lack lustre; they lack lust. It is a truth that power doesn’t corrupt; it pontificates. And goes to bed at 9.30pm. Washington is a bizarre place, a seething black service city without industry or state’s protection, with a weird, white mausoleum heart, and Georgetown, a patrician enclave that’s a bit like Brighton and a bit like the chintzy bits of Sydney. The seat of government is a long, self-imposing, hubristic strip of robber-baron parthenons, built, oxymoronically, like banks and temples. It’s Las Vegas for wonks.

This must have been what provincial European cities felt like 50 years after the Romans abandoned their empire; the people you see hurrying from the ministries, frotting their BlackBerrys or effortfully jogging through the dogwoods and cherry trees, have no connection to the species that imagined and built this place.

At the western end of the pale city is the Lincoln Memorial, a titanic statue of one of the ugliest but most attractive and admirable politicians. On the walls is carved the Gettysburg Address, delivered on a battlefield that would not be morbidly overtaken in the profligacy of death until the first world war. And opposite it, a speech unfamiliar to schoolboys: Lincoln’s second inaugural address. It’s a lump of writing that makes you shiver with admiration. Clear and elegant, portentous and humane, simple but with decorative flourishes that make the sense memorable, it’s sad and hopeful, spiritual and practical. I’m not going to quote bits; go and look it up, and, when you’ve read it, never again allow those glib, entitled sneers about the way Americans speak English. Cross your lips.

I was in Washington to hear another president speak, at the annual correspondents’ dinner, an affair of mesmerisingly shabby awfulness and bowel-melting hospitality, held in the hideous corporate basement of a Hilton hotel that smelt of a thousand begging galas. This is one of Washington’s big nights out. Out with the president were Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and most of the cabinet. A smattering of television stars and a few foreigners, including me and Geoff Hoon. Pamela Anderson was at the table behind me. A line of pathetically grinning lobbyists queued up to say how much they enjoyed her work. She motioned for each to look at her tits. “Don’t look at the face; forget the eye contact. You’re only here for a moment: concentrate on the breasts,” she appeared to be saying.

What’s really astonishing is how awkward, lumpy and wholly unfanciable Washington’s white natives are. Every woman appears to have shouted “Bueller, make me a frock out of the shower curtains”, and there’s not a single hairdresser within a day’s drive who will touch honky locks. Someone whispered to me that Washington was Hollywood for ugly people. It’s not that they don’t care because their minds are on higher things, it’s that they care hugely but have no idea where to start. Most of them have no idea where their arses start; they have no idea where Asia starts. These are people who think that home security begins at the Bosphorus and that metallic-blue eye shadow is enough.

Bush plainly loathes the press – what’s not to loathe? – and he hates being here in a dinner jacket. His speech was a sort of best man’s thing, written by a committee of bored misogynists who prefer lap dancers to brides, a sticky collection of ancient jibes and jests crudely cudgelled to fit the occasion, delivered with all the aplomb and conviction of a pork butcher toasting the health and happiness of a collective of vegans.

Politicians who are concerned with their legacies might consider what it is they have said in their tenure that might fittingly be engraved in marble without embarrassment or irony. Bush leaves the world stage a smaller man than when he arrived, in every respect his father’s son, a man who said nothing that could be scratched onto a bus shelter. America taught us all that great deeds start with great ideas, and great ideas begin with great sentences. But not only do fine words butter parsnips, they can open the wilderness, construct the modern world, make Dylan lyrics and Simpsons scripts. They can move mountains, free slaves and bake cheesecake. Or, of course, they can just pathetically mimic all those things and fall like death’s dandruff onto shrugged shoulders.

The Lanesborough is a grand, Georgianish building on Hyde Park Corner, opposite Apsley House. The hotel, in the nature of grand hotels, which get bored with everything except the words “new”, “unique” and “exclusive”, has remade its restaurant into Apsleys. This building used to be St George’s Hospital, and I can’t help thinking about how many people have died in the rooms, screaming in agony. I almost asked at reception if the collective death toll was greater than that at Gettysburg. They should put it in their brochure. The restaurant has been remodelled from a mad Victorian conservatory into a grey, depressed space of timid modernity and muddy light.

The Blonde and I took Christoph and Katrine Henckel, a fine pair of Germans whose aesthetic sensibilities are as well oiled and accurately deadly as matched Mausers. We were sat under a piece of modern art that must have been commissioned by the square metre. The food is Italian, of the sort that’s rarely seen in Italy: chic, decorative, refined and dextrous. It’s Lombard food made in the French mode, like Maurice Chevalier singing Puccini. Not a kindness to either or to the audience. The menu is a good mix of fur, feather and fin, but everything tasted as if it had wasted too long doing its make-up: overcooked, overwrought and overseasoned.

The real problem, in this virtually empty room, was the service. Our table was overwhelmed with knickknacks – there was never going to be enough room for the food. There’s never going to be enough room for the food, I said authoritatively. Someone should have thought of this. Someone should have said, this is a restaurant, where’s the food going to go? And they should have said it before the customers arrived. We were inundated by waiters gingerly rearranging the table furniture, like medical students removing perineum sutures. Finally, the plates were jammed in like an early Julian Schnabel. And it was impossible to get a flunky to clear them. Plates grew cold, congealed, decomposed, composted, sprouted, flowered and fruited into whole new dishes before some apologetic Latin could be bribed into taking them away. It’s all very expensive. I don’t normally deal with wine, but Christoph told me that the bottle he ordered was twice the price of the same thing at Riva, in Barnes. Altogether, Apsleys is exactly what I’d expect from an opulent grand hotel in central London catering to rich tourists – sadly.

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