A letter staked through the heart of the dying film director Theo van Gogh began: “Open letter to Hirsi Ali.” So the men in black detailed to protect today’s special guest were bound to be twitchy.

Still, presidents have turned up in smaller motorcades than this. An advance team has already interrogated and frisked your interviewer, even dismantling the tape recorder in search of bombs. Tension crackles through the damp Dutch air as walkie-talkie chatter intensifies: “She’s arrived!” shouts a spook.

In Ayaan Hirsi Ali sweeps, as beautiful as she is reputedly brilliant, surrounded by a medium-sized army of minders.

Strife, you see, is Ali’s constant companion. She is Europe’s most vociferous opponent of radical Islam, who wrote the script of Submission, a film about Muslim mistreatment of women, which led to van Gogh’s murder. There is nothing like a former believer to scorn a religion. She has called it “backward” and attacked the Prophet’s alleged penchant for underage sex.

Her zeal made her a Dutch MP, international talk-show darling and one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. But it also made her many enemies. After a recent documentary accused Somali-born Ali of lying to gain asylum in Holland in 1992, the Dutch home secretary sent her a letter informing her she “never has been a Dutch citizen”. A refugee for the second time in her 36 years, she is resigning from the Dutch parliament and moving to America.

Van Gogh’s murderer promised Ali “torture and agony”. So, I suggest at our secret rendezvous in the Hague, surely those evil prayers have been answered.

“He wanted me to burn in hell,” she manages to smile. “What I am going through is at an emotional level.” Initially, she insists she had already decided to quit Holland. Later, finally lowering her guard, she explains how deep those emotions are.

“I hadn’t realised how sentimentally attached I had become to being Dutch,” she says, gazing into a garden of drenched tulips. “For the first time since Theo died, I cried. I knew politics was tough but this felt like a kick in the belly.”

This from one intimately acquainted with pain: as a child she suffered clitoral circumcision; aged 23 she absconded to Holland to avoid an arranged marriage. She has not seen her family since reaching Holland, where she worked as a cleaner before attending university and crawling through the political snake-pit.

Even before Submission — which projected words from the Koran onto the backs of naked women — Ali had bodyguards, but the hysteria grew so intense neighbours won a court order to evict her. Her presence, they claimed, infringed their human rights as she was a security risk. Oh, and she was murdering property prices. Well, her flat boasted bulletproof glass, panic buttons and live-in bodyguards. It must be weird finding secret service agents in the shower.

“Weird, and difficult,” she laughs. “But at least you don’t worry about your life. I am close to the bodyguards, in a businesslike way. During peaks in publicity I have to be particularly careful — I can’t even go to the supermarket.”

Any celebrity will tell you fame has a price, but the price Ali has paid is exorbitant. With her long neck, long nose and even longer legs (Peter Crouch with grace), it is easy to see why the media have embraced her. Does she regret using her glamour to quite such potent effect?

“I wasn’t aware of it,” she almost whispers, stroking a pearl earring. “The Somali idea of beauty is so different. I certainly didn’t grow up feeling beautiful.” If she has achieved anything, she says, it is that now when she appears on Newsnight she is taken sufficiently seriously for Jeremy Paxman to be rude. “At first the feeling was you can’t really grill a black woman. Now I am treated normally.”