Pizzas galore!

The questions were posed within the warm and friendly setting of Mrs Palin’s Anchorage office by Fox News's Greta Van Susteran — a former lawyer whose horsy, pearl-necklace-and-turtleneck-sweater form of conservatism seems to belong in a different universe to that of Mrs Palin, with her 'hot mom' outfits, her champion snowmobiler husband, and her fondness for semi-automatic weaponry.

Mrs Palin took the opportunity to deny outright the stories about her ordering $150,000 of designer clothes from Saks Fifth Avenue or Neiman Marcus, saying: "I don’t think I’ve ever set foot in one of those stores."

Likewise, she denied ever being ignorant of the members of NAFTA, or the fact that Africa is a continent.

"Why would someone try to wack ya like that?" asked Ms Van Susteran, gruffly. "I don’t know," replied Palin, before adding, as if for clarification, "I don’t know all that inside baseball stuff at the top echelon of the way campaigns are run."

Surprisingly, Mrs Palin didn't shy away from talk about 'Twelve'. Asked if she'd run, the answer was essentially yes, with the qualifier being that she’d do it only if God told her to. "Faith is a very big part of my life and putting my life in my Creator’s hands — this is what I always do," she said. "I’m like, 'okay, God, if there is an open for me somewhere' — this is what I always pray — I’m like, 'don’t let me miss the open door, show me where the open door is, even if it’s just cracked up a little bit, maybe I’ll plough right on through that, maybe prematurely plough through it, but don’t let me miss an open door.'"

At the end of the interview, Ms Van Susteran joined Mrs Palin in the kitchen of her Wasilla home.

As the former vice-presidential candidate prepared what appeared to be moose sausages, she explained how Mr McCain had first approached her to be his running-mate while she was perusing giant cabbages at the Alaska State Fair one lunchtime. Strangely, Mrs Palin didn’t tell her husband the news until late that night, after he had returned from work. A few days later, Barack Obama himself called to congratulate her on getting the job.

"It was great," recalled Mrs Palin, almost blushing. "He was cool, too. He was, like, ‘good luck... [lowers voice] but not that much luck!' He did. He was funny."

The tenderness of the moment was ruined only by the knowledge that a few days before, Mrs Palin had been calling the very same person a terrorist sympathiser and a socialist.

But just as she did when U-turning on her infamous Bridge to Nowhere project, Mrs Palin is presumably banking on the fact that Americans' memories can be mercifully short.

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