n Newsnight the last-minute interview is not so unusual, but Madonna cut it pretty fine. We had been trying for months, both for Newsnight and for a new BBC4 interview series, then 10 days ago her “people” got in touch and 24 hours later confirmed that she would do the interview in New York.

We dealt with Liz Rosenberg, her charming and savvy longtime confidante at Warner Bros, and the only condition was that they would control the location and the look (not the questions). You think we chose that backdrop of billowing silk and candelabra? The fact was that on the day of our filming, Madonna was also conducting a series of US interviews to promote her new children’s book, and the backdrop that so amazed everyone was designed rather like the book illustrations. When I saw it I realised that the art director at Warner Bros didn’t really have Newsnight in mind.

Why did she agree to talk to us? I think that with all the flak flying about her adoption of baby David from Malawi, she had to account for herself to the audience in the country where she lives — Rosenberg said as much — and the rumour going around Newsnight, completely unsubstantiated of course, is that her stepmother-in-law Shireen Ritchie, former chairwoman of the Kensington and Chelsea Conservative Association, had counselled Madonna to do it. If that was the case, I owe you a large Martini, Shireen Ritchie.

For the preparation, as well as ploughing through the usual cuttings files, my guided missile was James, my 14-year-old son who is living proof that Madonna appeals across two generations. We watched bits of the documentary from the tour before this one, I’m Going to Tell You a Secret, just to refresh my memory — it seems to play regularly in our house.

Like everyone else, I had been following the story of how Madonna flew out to Malawi and was apparently able to “choose” her child and fly him back to Britain in a matter of days. I spoke to a woman in Scotland who works with a number of different agencies in Malawi and knows the country and its culture well. One of the points she made was that it would be almost unheard of for a man to raise his children, so it was not particularly surprising to find a baby like David in an orphanage.

She also pointed out that Malawi is an overwhelmingly Christian country (not least as a result of David Livingstone’s missionary zeal) and how would Madonna’s plans for an orphanage based on the tenets of Kabbalah operate in the community? That evening my husband Alan pitched in, drawing my attention to an article in The Herald earlier in the week which featured Joyce Dean, once a Christian aid worker in Malawi, who has been trying to adopt an orphan girl there for the past two years. Her story is the story of others, frustrated and upset by the apparently arbitrary adoption rules in Malawi.

I made copious notes and put them in my bag ready for the flight the next day. I knew Madonna was taking this interview very seriously. After the children’s book interviews, she changed out of casual jeans and into a sober black outfit, hugely stylish of course. She was open and friendly and I was struck by the fact that somehow she cut a rather lonely figure.

The irony is that she created “Madonna” out of Louise Ciccone, a bright girl who could have graduated from the University of Michigan and disappeared into America, and has reinvented herself time and again to keep herself in the public gaze. Perhaps this is the first time in her life when she would rather it were otherwise.

She had done her homework on me, too. She said she had watched other interviews I had done. Her tense response to my opening assertion — that the reason the furore over the adoption had knocked her for six was that she was used to being in control — told me that we were off to an intense engagement. “I’m a detail orientated person and I like to have things my way but I can assure you I don’t often have things my way,” she said. (Well, just to be flip for a moment — she got the set her way.) When we started to talk about Malawi she reminded me that Guy Ritchie had spent a lot of time in Africa since childhood and it suddenly struck me that her husband might have had a lot more to do with this than I had first thought. But despite her denial, I think her desire to get her own way did extend to getting David Banda out of the orphanage as quickly as possible — yes, for the best of motives when she saw how ill he was (she talked about him having the worst nappy rash she’d ever seen, an oddly motherly detail in our surreal surroundings), but in a way that was bound to create controversy.

I think another problem lies in the continuing contradictions over David Banda’s family circumstances. Madonna still insists that his father Yohane Banda never visited the orphanage, nor was there a grandmother in the picture. She said, “If somebody had said to me, ‘Oh, his dad comes every week or his granny visits on a regular basis and he is well looked after’, I would not even have given it another thought, but there were many conditions that actually made me worried for his life.”

That does not accord with some of the more serious and detailed reports in the press. But it seems pretty clear that Yohane Banda did give his agreement to the adoption, so does it matter? Perhaps if and when Madonna comes to a further adoption — and she talks more about that in the BBC4 interview next week, it will matter. She also reveals where she would adopt next time.

The most stinging assertion is that she chose the baby as a “fashion accessory”, picking him out from a film shot at the orphanage, much as she might peruse a clutch of designer handbags and say “I want that one”. Clearly there were many children she could have chosen, most of whom — without living parents — might have saved her from some of the controversy that has dogged her every step in recent days.

She says that she felt a “connection” to David straight away: “But I have to say just because I felt that connection to David, I went there knowing there were no guarantees. When you adopt a child from an orphanage, when you do it the way that I did it, a lot of times you just say, I want to adopt a child, I want to help this child . . . I want to give this child a life.

“But you don’t know a lot of the details . . . I didn’t know whether he had an extended family or not and I went there saying to myself, well I don’t know if David is the child I'm going to adopt . . . All I know is I want to help a child.”

I think she has probably downplayed the role that Kabbalah will have in the ethos of the orphanage she is planning to build and she looked surprised when I pointed out that Malawi is mainly Christian. In the interview to be shown next week (last week’s Newsnight was just a sliver of our conversation) she says: “You can study Kabbalah and be a Christian. In fact part of the Raising Malawi project was to bring seven teachers who are extremely Christian — schoolteachers — from Malawi to Los Angeles and they went through a teacher’s training course to teach children Spirituality for Kids and they lived in Los Angeles for three months.

“Then they went back and there were members of the community who were reticent — what is that? What is Kabbalah? What are you going to be teaching the children? But the teachers all said to me, we feel like better Christians since we’ve come back from Los Angeles. So all it’s done is enhanced their own spiritual belief system.”

When I told her about Dean’s plight and said that it accorded with the experience of others, she responded, “I would love to help them, and in fact what I would like to do is get the adoption laws changed.” When we had finished I gave her assistant the article about Dean, and for me it will be a measure of Madonna’s sincerity whether or not she keeps her word.

I also talked to Madonna about women who wear the veil — “There is a section in my show where I deal with that. Where I have a girl in a burqa who’s dancing and she’s a caged bird and she eventually takes her veil off and emerges from the cage” — and how she is planning to reinvent herself yet again.

Afterwards she agreed to some cross- charity pollination. I said that I would auction a signed copy of The English Roses for funds for Malawi, if she would sign one that I could auction at the same event to raise money for Maggie’s Centres, a cancer charity which I support. It seemed like a good deal. As we were leaving, the acres of pink gauze were being lowered and packed away and Madonna, quietly and without any fuss, went to speak to some waiting children and read them a story.







Madonna Talks to Kirsty Wark, next Sunday at 9pm on BBC4