‘The Prime Minister is coming to Oxford tomorrow on an unannounced visit! He’s not giving any interviews to the media in London or in Oxford for the whole day; but Number Ten just rang me and said the PM had a spare half hour and asked if BBC Radio Oxford would like a chat. Bill you’re our Primer Ministerial man. Can you do it?”

It was my day off. I deserved a rest, not some high pressure appeal to duty. The last time this happened was 4.00am on 31st August, 1997 when I got a call from the then BBC editor. “Diana and Dodi are dead… in a Paris tunnel… an accident. We need you here at 9.00.”

This was not in that league. But I could tell from the sound of his voice that our local head of the BBC was about to wet himself so I thought I would help him out. “Count me in…”

He also counted in what seemed like half the BBC and half of Downing Street. When I arrived for the interview at 11.00 o’clock, I discovered Gordon Brown had arrived even earlier. Fifty people were jammed into my small studio, the size of a normal kitchen in a two up-two down Headington terrace. Usually just my guest and I occupy that space and it’s about the right size; but this day we had the Number Ten press secretary, political advisors, photographers, the BBC political editor, news correspondents and reporters, camera characters, light and sound engineers, and, get this, someone to do make-up – not mine. When I walked to the appointed place, I felt like I was going to an execution – mine. No one looked at me. It’s as though they were thinking: Very Poor Man, you are. It’s the PM! What are you going to say to him? You are a local radio presenter; he’s the leader of the country – are you up to it? Will he eat you for lunch?

It was pure theatre, or maybe more like a Quentin Tarentino film, you know those back room scenes where social misfits are plotting to decapitate someone…else. Except it wasn’t dark and disturbing. The atmosphere was buzzing with excitement and electricity. This was a party and yet there was still an ‘edge’ to it.

I was half expecting a waiter to come in and serve cocktails and calm down this networking fever that had infected my studio. The air was thick with hair spray, after shave and DKNY. They exuded the vibe of a social tribe that ‘belonged’ there. They had earned it. These people knew they were the elite and this was their territory for the moment. I thought they were all a bit over the top and tried to say so, but nobody was listening. With two minutes to go before we were live on air in Oxfordshire presenting a programme that was going to be streamed on Radio Four and on Five Live, I had to do something…what? How do you shut up 50 people, strike up a relationship with the Prime Minister and give him a flavour of what this interview is all about in, now, one hundred seconds.

I coughed into a cacophony of sounds made by people who didn’t give a damn. So I clapped eyes on Gordon Brown and began to address him in a low voice that rose with deliberate intent to the point where I could stick in the rapier when no one would notice until too late.

“Prime Minister, during my interviews, I like to look people straight in the eyes and I gather you have had a spot of bother with one of yours, so which one is the good one?”

There was a collective intake of breath, 49 people in unison, and then they fell silent. One person exhaled in laughter. The PM and I were “on side”.

I began politely and asked why he was in Oxford, but quickly latched onto the hot topic of the day. This was in November 2008 and bankers’ bonuses were in the news, especially the payments to one known as ‘Fred the Shred’, the head of the Royal Bank of Scotland who had been given a £2.7 million tax free lump sum and a £17 million pension pot yielding £55,000 per year when he resigned one month before the bank started to collapse losing £24.1 billion in one year. Fred refused to give his bonus back even though the government suggested this was the proper thing for him to do. I put a direct question to the PM. “Here you have a man effectively putting two fingers up to the Government. When you wake up in the morning and stand in front of the shaving mirror, do you ever ask the face you see there whether or not he’s impotent?”

We locked horns over his battles with Tony Blair, the allegations of his fear of David Cameron and whether or not he had really been a ‘prudent’ Chancellor. The Prime Minister wasn’t offended or irritated but replied in a considered and involved manner.

Throughout the entire interview Gordon Brown came across as a man of intelligence, charm and warmth. That wasn’t the way I had seen him on TV and in general the media didn’t present him in that light; so I wasn’t expecting the PM to grab my imagination and engage my emotions. But I came away with a view that this was a man who didn’t have all the answers, was still struggling, but was answering the questions with integrity.