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.