Forget Jacko: this is the ultimate celebrity interview

In the light of the Benn/Bashir style of searching interview that surfaced this last week, permitting no lie to go undetected, and no sophistry to pass unchallenged – let the interviewee be a child-molesting dictator with retroussé nostrils, or a much-loved black albino singer/dancer who gasses his own people – it occurs to me that readers of this column might wish to peruse an interview I conducted many years ago, as a primary school project, with Adolf Hitler.

It is, I think, after the passage of so many years and the misunderstandings which those years have spawned, worth paying tribute to Herr Hitler and his team. They offered me, at all times, the completest co-operation, never putting up obstacles to my method of pitiless interrogation, never shying from questions of however personal a nature, and allowing me free access to such sensitive sites as the Berlin Zoo, where I was honoured to accompany the Führer on one of his frequent visits to the gorilla, and where, I might add, I did not see a single gas chamber.

Here, anyway, the transcript. Beginning, so as not to tire you with the preliminaries of protocol, with the gorilla.

HJ: I noticed this morning, Reichskanzler, that your spirits seemed to lighten the moment you saw him.

AH: Saw who?

HJ: The gorilla.

AH: Ah, Goering the Gorilla, you're talking about. Is that funny or is that funny? But all joking aside, you are right. An Aryan person in a cage, as the philosopher Nietzsche said, puts all heaven in a rage; but a gorilla, that is something different. If we can lock away the gorilla in our society, the future will be bright, nicht wahr?

HJ: Who is the gorilla in society?

AH: Who do you think? Whoever is deformed, animalistic, greedy, alien, and a menace to our civilisation.

HJ: What is your attitude to Jews, Führer?

AH: I love them.

HJ: Homosexuals?

AH: Listen, if I had plans to exterminate homosexuals, or gypsies, or Jews come to that, and I believed in those plans, I wouldn't be ashamed to admit it. Therefore I would like to tell you and everyone else in your country, that I have no such plans.

HJ: So you are not exterminating homosexuals, gypsies and Jews?

AH: I didn't say that.

HJ: Can I steer you now to the more important issue of your moustache. Is it natural? I ask because I have seen photographs of you as a baby, and you didn't have one then.

AH: People change. I wasn't Reichskanzler or Oberbefehlshaber der Werhmacht when I was a baby either.

HJ: But you did have a similar haircut?

AH: I have never been able to do anything with my hair. Have you seen my art collection?

HJ: I know you are a great lover of art. I have been with you when you are collecting it. Wonderful, I must say, to see the freedom with which people give your their paintings from their walls.

AH: It touches me no less.

HJ: Who is your favourite artist?

AH: Tutankhamun.

HJ: Was he not a pharaoh, Führer?

AH: Of course he wasn't. You've heard of Van Gogh's Sunflowers? I've got Tutankhamun's Tomb. It's so beautiful. All that gold. I would like him to make me one of those gold tombs.

HJ: You are not afraid of death?

AH: The question you should ask is whether death's afraid of me.

HJ: So you categorically deny that you have undergone plastic surgery?

AH: This is the media again, isn't it? They blow everything out of proportion. I partition Czechoslovakia and they accuse me of having plastic surgery. I make a little excursion into the oilfields of Kuwait and they call me a paedophile.

HJ: But you did hold a baby out over the balcony of the Reichstag...

AH: He was Jewish, and a gypsy, and a homosexual, and a Kurd.

HJ: Did that mean you had to drop him?

AH: It was an accident. And don't forget he had a string bag over his head and felt nothing. I love babies. They remind me of the baby in myself. Ask the ones who sleep in my bed.

HJ: Can I come now to Mein Kampf. Three years at the top of the charts...

AH: Four. And would have stayed there longer but for Kaputt mit the Wind and Auf Wiedersehen, Mr Chips.

HJ: And yet you haven't had a hit since. There are those who are saying you're losing it.

AH: Who? The tabloids again? How do they think I've got time for writing when I've got half a million Marsh Arabs to drain?

HJ: So you admit that?

AH: Slip of the tongue. I meant train.

HJ: Back to the question of your popularity with the young...

AH: You've been with me on the streets, you've seen the crowds. A million at Nuremberg and that doesn't include their babies.

HJ: Then why were you hectoring them, Führer?

AH: They like it. In your time here you must have observed happy children everywhere doing my shout, bulging their eyes, saluting, screaming, heiling. Der Totentanz, I think they call it, the rascals. How do you say that in English?

HJ: The Deathwalk.

AH: Exactly. They even have competitions. Eva's judging one right now.

HJ: Another question which has been raised, in the matter of weapons of mass destruction...

AH: Yes.

HJ: Do you have any?

AH: Is the Pope a Catholic?

HJ: Is that a no?

AH: Yes.

HJ: That's good enough for me, Herr Chancellor.