“Who’s Elvis,” I used to ask, at banking? And they’d say: “Well, in development, it’s the World Bank, it’s Jim Wolfensohn, it’s the people running the International Monetary Fund.”

It’s Robert Rubin, who was the treasury secretary of the United States, his signature was on every dollar; it’s Paul Volcker, who was the legendary chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Alan Greenspan of his age. So I used to go and meet them.

It wasn’t enough just to talk to President Clinton. Oddly enough, Bill Clinton’s staff used to call him Elvis anyway.

You went from friend of Bill Clinton to flashing a peace sign in a photo op with George W Bush.

I was in a photo with President Bush because he’d put $10 billion over three years on the table in a breakthrough increase in foreign assistance called the Millennium Challenge. I had just got back from accompanying the president as he announced this at the Inter-American Development Bank.

I kept my face straight as we passed the press corps, but the peace sign was pretty funny. He thought so, too. Keeping his face straight, he whispered, “There goes a front page somewhere: Irish rock star with the Toxic Texan.”

I think the swagger and the cowboy boots come with some humour. He is a funny guy. Even on the way to the bank he was taking the piss. The bulletproof motorcade is speeding through the streets of the capital with people waving at the leader of the free world, and him waving back.

I say: “You’re pretty popular here!”

He goes: “It wasn’t always so . . .” — Oh really? — “Yeah. When I first came to this town, people used to wave at me with one finger. Now, they found another three fingers and a thumb.”

So you liked this man?

Yes. As a man, I believed him when he said he was moved to also do something about the Aids pandemic. I believed him. Listen, I couldn’t come from a more different place, politically, socially, geographically. I had to make a leap of faith to sit there. He didn’t have to have me there at all. But you don’t have to be harmonious on everything — just one thing — to get along with someone.

Harry Belafonte, one of my great heroes, an old-school leftist, told me a story about Bobby Kennedy, which changed my life — indeed, pointed me in the direction I am going now politically.

Harry remembered a meeting with Martin Luther King when the civil rights movement had hit a wall in the early Sixties: “I tell you it was a depressing moment when Bobby Kennedy was made attorney-general. It was a very bad day for the civil rights movement.

“Bobby Kennedy was Irish. Those Irish were real racists; they didn’t like the black man. They were just one step above the black man on the social ladder, and they made us feel it. They were all the police, they were the people who broke our balls on a daily basis.

“Bobby at that time was famously not interested in the civil rights movement. We knew we were in deep trouble. We were crestfallen, in despair, talking to Martin, moaning and groaning about the turn of events, when Dr King slammed his hand down and ordered us to stop the bitchin’.

“‘Enough of this,’ he said. ‘Is there nobody here who’s got something good to say about Bobby Kennedy?’