ON the day Barack Obama is sworn in as president, Dana Perino will be jumping on a plane to Britain, free at last from the burden of being George W Bush’s White House press secretary. She has worn the job lightly and it will be a wrench to leave her boss.

“It’s probably not professional to say it, but in many ways he has been like a second father to me,” Perino said.

It was Bush who noticed her crying on the day he ducked a shoe on his farewell visit to Iraq and she was hit in the face by a swinging microphone.

“I was trying not to cry but it hurt so bad and I was scared. I thought the shoe was maybe a diversion for something else,” she recalled. She got a black eye for her pains. “I call it my ‘shoevenir’.”

Perino will be heading to Britain to see the children and twin grandchildren of her husband Peter MacMahon, a businessman known in Washington circles as “the Englishman”.

“He says, ‘On January 20, she’ll get her life back and I’ll get my wife back.’” The two-year-old twins, who live in Scotland, call her Granny America.

At 36, the glamorous Perino is young to be a “granny” but there are few more loyal defenders of the president. She will not be writing a kiss-and-tell memoir like Scott McClellan, a predecessor who turned on Bush.

“I’m just not like that,” she said. “I would never write a book at the expense of someone else. And that’s what he did.”

She shares Bush’s conviction that history will be kinder to him than his abysmal approval ratings suggest. “Hopefully I’ll live long enough,” she quipped. It has, at the very least, been a “consequential presidency” from the 9/11 attacks onwards.

Perino was at the historic White House meeting in September where Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, and Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chief, warned Bush that America could be facing a new Great Depression.

“With all the money in the world, we could not catch a break,” she said ruefully.

“That’s the way this presidency has been. He came in with a bang and he’s going to leave with a bang.”

She rattled off a list of crises that have afflicted the presidency since the Beijing Olympics in August, when Russia stormed into Georgia. “A lot of us thought the last months would be laidback and easy, going home at a decent time, being able to interview for jobs, a sort of relaxed atmosphere.”

Soon, it seemed that “every Sunday we had to make a major announcement that one of our banks was going to fail”. But life is winding down. In one of the last acts of Bush’s presidency, Tony Blair will receive the presidential medal of freedom on Tuesday – they remained friends, she said, and talked regularly about the Middle East.

Perino watched the election results with Bush and saw his reaction to the crowds at Grant Park in Chicago when Barack Obama won. “He was overcome with emotion when he saw how many people in America thought this day would never come,” she said.

“He wishes Barack Obama the very best. We have had by all accounts the most extensive and professional transition and I think that speaks a lot for him and the Obama team. They have been great fun to work with.”

It rankles, however, that Obama is getting an easier ride. “All of a sudden Europe is going to be more willing to take [Guantanamo] detainees?

“Hey, that would be great! We’ve been asking them to do it for years,” Perino said.

Then there are the $300 billion tax cuts in Obama’s stimulus package.

“Tax cuts!” she said. “For years, we’ve heard about how [Bush’s] tax cuts were devastating for the country. Now when we’re in a crisis what do they decide is the best way to help us get out of it? The very solution that we proposed in the first place.”

Did she think Obama would overturn a lot of Bush policies? “No,” she replied bluntly. “In the long run, what is there to overturn? We’re on the offence against terrorists. I can’t imagine that we’re going to go back to being on the defence.”

Iraq, she pointed out, “is ina much better place than a year ago. We are starting to bring our troops home and they will be able to continue that”.

In a final act of loyalty, she will head to South Africa, where she is planning to spend a few weeks with her husband as a volunteer for Bush’s antiAids programme. “I’ll do anything; I’ll paint walls. It will just be good to be there,” she said.

Perino has just one piece advice for her successor, Robert Gibbs, who will soon be the public face of the Obama administration. “Always take your wife’s phone calls – because you can get really wrapped up in this job.”

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