"I remember Bush as a kind of a butt-boy for the smart people. This was in the late 1970s, when he was in his drunken-fool period. He couldn't handle liquor. He knew who I was, at that time, because I had a reputation as a writer. I knew he was part of the Bush dynasty. But he was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing. He had no humour. He was insignificant in every way and consequently I didn't pay much attention to him. But when he passed out in my bathtub," Thompson adds, "then I noticed him. I'd been in another room, talking to the bright people. I had to have him taken away."

"It is just incredible to me," Thompson goes on, taking a slug of Glenfiddich straight from the bottle, "that Bush ever got into Yale. Well, actually, it isn't. Some are enrolled at birth, practically. He was one. There will be others. He is an average farm hand."

Compared to these Nazis we have in the White House now, Richard Nixon was a liberal. And that's saying something, when I think what I wrote in his obituary."

(His Rolling Stone piece, from June 1994, departed from the benevolent tone favoured by most Nixon obituarists. Under the headline "Notes on the Passing Of An American Monster", Thompson described him as "a liar, a quitter and a bastard; a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal"

"I never thought," Thompson says, "that I would ever see a president worse than Richard Nixon. But he is the worst president in American history, this one. Because he is the dumbest. And because he has destroyed, in four years, what it took two centuries to build up. He has taken this country from a prosperous nation at peace to a dead-broke nation at war. We are losing this stupid, fraudulent war in Iraq and every nation in the world despises us, except for a handful of corrupt Brits, like that simpering little whore, Tony Blair."