Imelda Marcos is spitting with rage. “This British musician, this Fatboy Slim,” she fumes, striding into her gold-covered sitting room. Big hair, red nails, halogen-green shoes, it’s all there. “I would prefer him not to make this musical of my life, but there is nothing I can do. I would rather do it myself. Show the people the real me, the real Imelda.” At 76, Imelda is known for such outbursts of emotion. Over the next five hours the former first lady of the Philippines certainly lets it all out.

First up, “They took my shoes!” she seethes as she recalls the night 20 years ago when political activists drove her and her husband out of the presidential palace and into exile. Famed for a lavish lifestyle thoroughly at odds with one of the poorest nations on earth, Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos were forced to abandon 3,000 pairs of her shoes, 50 suitcases stuffed with jewels, several bulletproof bras and a stunning collection of art.

“About 10 Canalettos! These are the only paintings left,” she says, gesturing to the Pissarro, the Picasso and the Gauguin on her walls. “The maid took one of my paintings and kept it in a slum area for five years during our exile. She had no roof! They sold the paintings, the silver, and now they want to sell the jewellery.”

Still, she is hardly poor. Despite 901 charges of corruption — they supposedly embezzled more than $30 billion — Imelda is down to her last billion. Her spacious condominium, on the 34th floor of an upmarket apartment block in a quiet part of Manila, is a tribute to the very expensive and the dirt cheap — beneath the Pissarro sits a 2ft Snoopy. There’s also a huge collection of 20-cent gold photo frames with pictures of her at the height of her power, flirting with Saddam Hussein, Chairman Mao and Fidel Castro and hobnobbing with the Queen.

“The night we left, there was the jewellery, but what did I take?” she continues. “Diapers, bottles and milk for my grandchildren. But I put some of the diamonds in the diapers, so they said, ‘The Marcoses (fled) with diamonds and diapers’.” She pauses. “Marcos died in a state of shock. He couldn’t believe it.”

Her mood soon turns more upbeat. “Can you believe I’m almost 77,” she says, sitting down on her gold Louis Quinze sofa. A white-jacketed attendant brings cold drinks: cola and water. “Someone said to me, ‘I thought you were dead. But you look beautiful’. Well, yeah, 50 years ago and 50lb ago I looked great. Cecil Beaton photographed me for four days, 18,000 shots.”

She gestures, lace handkerchief in one hand, a rosary in the other. “They ask me my beauty secret. There is no secret. I do all the wrong things. I eat a lot” — “She eats a lot, I can tell you,” interjects one of her staff.

“I don’t sleep at night, only two hours. I drink a lot. I don’t exercise but I have a lot of energy. I get up at five. I go to church. I see a beautiful flower, a beautiful lady, beautiful this, beautiful that, talk to hundreds of people, by the night-time, I have one million energies and I am ready to jet off.”

Imelda’s energy is legendary. She still carries out a punishing schedule of public engagements and a lot of effort goes into maintaining her look. At 5ft 8in she cuts a regal, square-shouldered presence and is covered in jewels. Immaculate in a bright purple suit, she has shunned her regular outfit of the terno, the traditional stiff-sleeved Filipino dress, in favour of a more Thatcherite get-up. Familiar touches include knee-length lacquered hair twisted in a bun, lashings of make-up, and the coral pink and white manicure that has stayed the same for 50 years.

A small Filipino flag is neatly pinned to her lapel. “I have a duty to dress up and be a star,” she continues. “I’ll spend two hours at it when I’m visiting the poor.” Her footwear, a pair of locally made court shoes, is a ready topic for conversation. But she’s having none of it.

“I have no fetish for shoes,” she bellows. “In fact, when I was in the palace most of my shoes were given to me by Filipino shoemakers. Anyway, the press exaggerated. They said it was 3,000. But in fact it was more like . . . er . . .” She grasps for a figure: “200. But I say: at least when they went into my closets they found shoes, not skeletons.” But old habits die hard. She has even got a slimmed-down collection here. In the corridor well over 200 pairs on huge racks cover an entire wall. The silver section alone is 15 pairs.

Imelda’s four-car convoy is a familiar sight around Manila, where she is often seen handing out cash. Despite her past, Imelda came a respectable sixth in the country’s presidential elections. The entire Marcos family is still extremely visible: her son Ferdinand “Bong-Bong” Jr is a governor in the north of the Philippines; her daughter Imee is a member of Congress; and another daughter, Irene, is a socialite. “I see them every day on television or in the newspapers,” she says, “or they’re calling.”

She has eight grandchildren, all boys — “these are my jewels”, she says, proudly pointing out their photographs. “This one, Sandro, attends Worth school in England, like his father. I am an Anglophile. All my children went to school in England.”