Sarah Palin, a self-styled maverick who has expressed disdain for the intricacies of international diplomacy, is to walk into the lion’s den of the United Nations next week and meet world leaders – lots of them – for the first time.

In a nod to her image as an outsider Mrs Palin’s first action on the international stage since becoming the Republican vice-presidential nominee will be to heckle a foreign head of state. On Monday she will join an open-air demonstration against President Ahmadinejad of Iran across the street from the UN headquarters.

However, the Republican high command will mix this street-level theatre with some international pomp. Later the same day – the eve of the annual session of the UN General Assembly – Mrs Palin is expected to join John McCain at a cocktail party thrown by President Bush for visiting world leaders at the Waldorf Astoria hotel.

The guest list is controlled tightly so that Mrs Palin will not be embarrassed by any of the antiAmerican presidents attending the UN.

She could join the US delegation for the UN session on Tuesday, however, enabling her to enter the UN building and sit in the General Assembly hall to watch Mr Bush give his farewell speech to the organisation. That would put her in close proximity to other leaders who are speaking on the same day – including Mr Ahmadinejad and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua.

She is not, however, shying away from confrontation. The protest organised by American Jewish groups next week gives Mrs Palin a chance to court Jewish voters in key states such as Florida who are concerned about the threat that Iran poses to Israel.

Hillary Clinton was due to speak but pulled out when she learnt Mrs Palin would attend. The former Democratic presidential contender feared that a joint appearance would be seen as a tacit endorsement of the Republican’s candidacy at a time when Mrs Clinton was trying to persuade her supporters to back Barack Obama.

“Her attendance was news to us, and this was never billed to us as a partisan political event,” Philippe Reines, a Clinton spokesman, said.

The foreign policy credentials of Mrs Palin have come under fire from her Democrat opponents and the nation’s satirists ever since she admitted in her first television interview that she had never met a world leader.

On a recent comedy sketch onSaturday Night Live, a Palin impersonator boasted that her qualifications were that “I can see Russia from my house”.

She attempted to dismiss the record of her vice-presidential rival, Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Americans, she said, were not interested in “somebody’s big, fat résumé that shows decades in that Washington establishment where, ya, they’ve had opportunities to meet heads of state”.

Diplomats greeted the prospect of a Palin appearance with some merriment. Top UN officials make little secret of their preference for Barack Obama to win the White House in November because of his pro-UN views. Delegates noted that by crossing First Avenue into the UN Mrs Palin would be making a rare foray into international territory – adding one more trip outside America to her CV.

Room to protest

— A designated UN protest area is in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza near the New York headquarters

— The spiritual group Falun Gong simulated removing a woman’s organs, claiming that in China the organs of imprisoned practitioners were removed against their will

— Last year a former Miss Nepal protested against hunger in her country

— Other activists have dressed in orange jumpsuits, evoking those of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay

Source: Archives

Mrs Palin came under fresh pressure last night when hackers broke into the e-mail account she used as Alaska’s governor and posted several personal messages on the internet.

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