The evening before a scheduled interview in India, Newsnight presenter Emily Maitlis bumped into former US President Bill Clinton in a hotel gift shop.
To avoid an awkward encounter, she hid beneath a shawl but could still see Bill perusing the shelves.
“He goes straight to the books and I’m like, ‘Of course, the cultured man, he’s gone to read about the Empire’,” she says of the encounter in 2014.
“I was looking and he picked up this book and I thought, ‘That doesn’t look like a history book’ and I looked closer.
“I realised he’d picked up a copy of the Kama Sutra. I was like, ‘OK, I think it might be time for a very swift exit’.”
Emily tells the anecdote, which features in her new book, Airhead, to Jonathan Ross on this Saturday’s show.
Meanwhile, current President Donald Trump’s small hands are often derided but Emily says he had a “macho, manly handshake” when they met six years ago.
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She was “quite surprised” – mainly that he took her hand at all.
“We’d heard about the germaphobia,” she says, adding she even asked about his supposed reluctance to shake.
“Not with you,” he said. “It’s them I don’t shake with.”
The businessman was referring, she claims, to the people in his lobby – “or the voters, as we now call them,” she adds.
“It was a weird introduction to this billionaire long before any of us realised he was going to have political intentions,” she tells Saturday’s show – on ITV at 9.15pm.
