Lunching with Hillary Clinton is no routine affair. When I arrive at Washington’s sleek Park Hyatt hotel, the somewhat jittery manager steers me to a discreet side door to await her arrival. After several minutes of awkward small talk, it turns out Clinton already came through the front entrance and has been seated for some minutes. They whisk me past her secret service detail to a semi-enclosed dining area of the Blue Duck Tavern, the hotel’s Michelin-starred, locally sourced restaurant. Clinton is chatting with Nick Merrill, her longtime aide, who stayed on with her after she stepped down as secretary of state in 2013.
Our engagement has taken a while to germinate. Partly this is because Clinton is so often on the road. She has just come back from the UK, where she spoke at the Hay literary festival and met an American who helped to organise the Queen’s jubilee celebrations. “The team were so nervous,” she says. “But it went off without a hitch, right?” This encounter also took some coaxing because Clinton, to put it mildly, does not exactly adore the media. I point out that for all my columns criticising her ill-fated 2016 campaign, I never told her what to wear or when to smile — unsolicited advice in which many male pundits seemed to revel. “That puts you in a small minority,” she says, laughing. It is thus with studied indifference that I describe Clinton as wearing a trademark grey pantsuit and a substantial silver and pearl necklace. She seems to have no trouble smiling.
I consider it my goal to get Clinton to remove the mask she dons for interactions with people like me. Mutual friends say that in private she is funny and can be bitingly sarcastic. American media colleagues have a very different take on a woman with whom they have been feuding for decades.