The first thing that strikes you about Lou Dobbs is how pink he is. For an hour each evening, CNN’s star anchorman scourges corporate America for making ”war on the middle class” and for conniving with mass illegal immigration - chiefly from Mexico. With segments entitled ”Homeland insecurity” and ”Broken borders”, the 61-year-old former business journalist has reinvented himself as the angry spokesman of America’s put-upon middle class. Lou Dobbs Tonight has a leading audience share.

We arrange to meet at Dobbs’s favourite haunt: the distinctly upper-crust Grill Room at the Four Seasons in mid-town Manhattan. As Dobbs arrives - wearing a suit and immaculately coiffured - and greets me warmly, I have the mischievous thought that, with a complexion this pink, US border patrol would not require night vision to spot him making a nocturnal dash from Mexico. I keep my thought to myself. Humour and illegal alien bashing probably don’t blend well.

After we have taken our seats, Julian Niccolini, the restaurant’s Italian co-owner, wanders over and says he would be delighted if Mr Dobbs could peruse his restaurant’s new menu. We each take one. It is written entirely in Spanish. Dobbs looks mildly dyspeptic for a moment as he strains to decipher it, then realises it’s a joke. I notice a small posse of giggling restaurant staff has gathered a few feet away to observe his reaction, which is good-natured. Before Dobbs had arrived, Niccolini told me: ”We need people like Dobbs who can stand up and tell America the truth.” Having handed back the fake menu, Dobbs wags a finger at Niccolini, and eventually we manage to order from the English language menus.

Yet for all his righteous populism on the TV screen (which, if possible, makes him look even pinker), in the flesh Dobbs proves a genial lunch companion. He asks almost as many questions of me as I of him. When we fixed up the lunch on the phone, Dobbs said: ”The Financial Times has printed many uncomplimentary things about me.” I assured him that I was not planning a hatchet job. ”Doesn’t matter if you do,” he replied. ”It’s all clean, harmless fun.”

In the introduction to his latest book (a serious mouthful) - War on the Middle Class: How the Government, Big Business, and Special Interest Groups are Waging War on the American Dream and How to Fight Back - Dobbs quotes a colleague of mine as having called him ”the high priest of demotic sensationalism”. Others, particularly Hispanic immigrant groups, have accused Dobbs of being a xenophobe and even a racist. But the impression I take away from our lunch is that Dobbs’s on-screen persona is not entirely authentic - it seems to me more of a smart career move in these days of high-ratings opinion journalism rather than an expression of his deep-rooted beliefs.

I ask him what caused him to switch from being the affable and relatively unopinionated presenter of CNN’s Moneyline in the late 1990s to becoming the angry man of TV. Dobbs answers me between sips of lobster bisque, while I pick my way through organic beet salad. He traces his journey carefully: ”Certainly 9/11 was a fundamental change for all of us,” he says. ”Like most people who live and work in New York, I had friends who died. It was a very personal experience.” But what really jolted him out of his complacency, he says, was the revelation (a few weeks before the terrorist attacks) of gross fraud at Enron. Other corporate scandals followed as the hangover from the late 1990s dotcom-driven boom set in.

As is his wont, Dobbs strays into overstatement. ”I don’t think most Americans realise [Enron] was the greatest corruption in our history. There is a great deal that corporate America has to answer for... corporate America has lost its conscience.”

It is a rallying cry that has found echo across the US. In the mid-term congressional elections last November, large numbers of victorious Democratic party candidates campaigned on something resembling a Lou Dobbs platform - lacerating multinational companies for outsourcing US jobs to China and blaming free trade for middle America’s woes. They have been dubbed ”Lou Dobbs Democrats”.

”If you talk to CEOs today, they don’t know how in hell they are going to get a return out of China - and, if they do, how they are going to repatriate the capital,” Dobbs says. ”They talk about productivity and efficiency, but in fact these are code words for cheap labour. The effect is to put our middle class, which is the foundation of this country, in direct competition with the cheapest labour in the world. It is a perspective I can’t comprehend.”

I point out that there is much cheaper labour available in Africa, which gets practically no foreign investment. I also argue that the US economy’s move from manufacturing to services was a natural transition at this stage in its economic maturity. I even, somewhat vainly, try to appeal to history. Had not the British poured investment into mid-19th century America - the great emerging market of its day?

But Dobbs appears uninterested in my points, and doesn’t engage with them. By now we are on our main courses, mine a Dover sole with spinach, and for Dobbs a chicken pot pie - ”a good country boy’s lunch,” he says. Then something peculiar happens. Dobbs has a falling out with the English language. He argues that economists and policymakers mislead Americans into believing they have no choice but to follow the open economy model.

”It is a libertarian fallacy,” Dobbs says. ”I happen to be a believer in determinism - it is folly to believe that free enterprise frees us from thinking about the consequences of our actions.” Presuming I have misheard, I ask Dobbs what he had meant by ”determinism”. I have always understood it to mean the opposite of free will. Dobbs clearly hasn’t.

”Well, I don’t want to be too much of a smart ass about it,” Dobbs says affably. ”But there are a lot of people in this country right now who don’t understand what determinism is. It means taking responsibility to look towards the future, to determine what kind of future you want and to pursue policies that will achieve them. We cannot leave ourselves to the fatalism of these poseurs who call themselves free traders.”

I decide to check again. So by ”determinism” you mean ”free will”? ”Yes,” says Dobbs, ”that’s why we went to all the trouble of freeing this country.”

That settled, I move the conversation on to immigration. Dobbs looks relieved - immigration being his favourite subject. According to the US government, there are roughly 12 million ”undocumented workers” living in the US - and a further million cross the southern border every year. Dobbs is the public face of the mostly Republican campaign to throw illegal aliens out of the country and build a wall along the 2,000 mile US-Mexico border to keep the new ones out. I had always assumed that what motivated him was a cultural - and particularly linguistic - chauvinism dressed up in the language of economic populism. Apparently I was wrong.

I tell Dobbs that I have been trying all morning to get an awful Sting song out of my head: ”I’m an alien, I’m a legal alien, I’m an Englishman in New York.” Mercifully, Dobbs has never heard of the song. But he goes to some length to disabuse me of the charge of xenophobia that he suspects is lurking beneath my questions. ”The tradition goes back to the massive immigration that we had in the late 19th century,” he says. ”They were brought here by invitation, legally, and the Statue of Liberty is right next to Ellis Island. I happen to believe in immigration. There is no country that comes close second in the level of diversity or of lawful immigration that the US attracts. I embrace it. And if we want to double the level of legal immigration, let’s do so.”

What he cannot accept, Dobbs continues, is corporate America’s implicit sponsorship of illegal labour as a way of driving down the wages of legitimate American workers. Nor, spoof menus aside, does he have any fears about a competition between Spanish and English to become the dominant language in the US. ”It just doesn’t matter to me if America has one language or not,” he says. ”What matters is whether immigrants are committed to this nation. Do they fly one flag in their heart?”

And what were his ancestral origins, I ask. ”Don’t know and don’t much care to either,” Dobbs says. ”For all I know they could have been knaves or saints. It just doesn’t interest me.” Fair enough. But how does he square his anti-corporate views with the fact that he works for a company owned by Time Warner? Dobbs is unfazed.

He sidesteps the question. ”Time Warner is a wonderful employer. What I’m doing now is more rewarding than at any time since I was a police and fire reporter just beginning my career. I love the freedom to deal with issues. Nobody interferes with my job.”

We have belatedly finished our main courses - or, at least, I have. Dobbs has barely touched his chicken pie. I suggest he order a dessert to make up for his dud main course. He declines, saying he has quite enough weight on his body to survive the afternoon.

We finish with a brief tussle about who should pay the bill - I prevail. ”Feel free to write what you like,” says Dobbs, as we shake hands. ”I won’t take it personally.”

Edward Luce is the FT’s Washington bureau chief.

The Grill Room at the Four Seasons, New York

1 x lobster bisque

1 x organic beet salad

1 x chicken pot pie

1 x Dover sole

1 x bottle sparkling mineral water

1 x cranberry juice and soda

Total: $175.42