‘Yeah, definitely I would.” Saira Khan, the 35-year-old star of The Apprentice, the reality TV show, wants to be prime minister. “I would like to see an Asian woman in power. You see, you have to aim high in life.” If she can’t be top dog, she says, she would settle for a lesser role as an adviser. Her portfolio? “Muslim affairs . . . As a modern British Asian woman I don’t see how I am represented in government.”

Viewers of the hit show in which would-be entrepreneurs compete for a £100,000-a-year job — a new series starts this week — will remember her as the gobby, motor-mouthed one. “More terrifying than the Daleks,” commented one reviewer. As Khan ran roughshod over the other contestants and their feelings, she seemed to have emerged from the womb with power shoulder pads.

In the event she was pipped to first place. Many people thought she had been robbed. When she met the singer Julian Lennon on holiday recently he told her he had been glued to every episode. Losing was a “miscarriage of justice”, he said. “Like watching the OJ Simpson trial.”

A year on from the show, she has a new book, Push for Success, out next month, and a television series, Temper Your Temper, to be shown in the autumn. “It’s about anger management,” she says. “It’s to help people negotiate and to deal with confrontation.”

This from Khan? Has the woman gone soft? Admittedly her harsh style is toning down. Last year’s heavy glasses have given way to contact lenses and today’s outfit is all about displaying a softer wrap-dress silhouette and two inches of power cleavage.

Her latest objective is all about less confrontation, more moderation, a word we don’t readily associate with her. Over the past weeks she has watched the Muslim demonstrations following the publication of the Muhammad cartoons with mounting horror.

Seeing marches turn ugly, mullahs pronouncing and embassies blazing, precipitated a personal crisis: “As a person who wants to live here, in a tolerant country as a British Muslim, I couldn’t understand the hatred that some people have.”

At the same time Abu Hamza, the preacher from Finsbury Park mosque, was jailed for seven years for inciting murder and race hate. “I want to say to people like him, ‘Why are you living in the West? Why don’t you go and live in Saudi Arabia?’

“Being a Muslim in Britain is different from being a Muslim in other countries. I am all for peaceful demonstration. If you live in this country there are democratic ways to behave. If you don’t like it, then go and live in a Muslim country.”

Khan believes there is an urgent need for mainstream Islam to speak out. Ever the businesswoman, she would “build a new brand”. Our images of Muslims are skewed, she argues.

On one hand we see the mad mullahs who represent fundamentalists; the other the moderates such as Sir Iqbal Sacranie, leader of the Muslim Council of Britain. But both, and we’re talking broad brush here, are swarthy old men with beards. “We need to rebrand Islam and present a different face. The Muslim council is very important as an organisation but I’m not sure that it means a lot to young British Asians.”

She wants high-profile Muslims such as Imran Khan and the boxer Amir Khan to join forces with her in raising the profile of those who keep the faith — but not too vehemently. Some of them may pray regularly, attend the mosque, forswear pork, but do touch alcohol.

“People like Tony Blair should seek out role models like me who appeal to the majority of people to head up a taskforce. I want British Muslims to be the examples for moderates all around the world.

“I want that group to include women and a cross-section of the Muslim community, not just middle-aged men in beards who were not even born in this country.”