• Are US-British relations much cooler under Gordon Brown than they were under Tony Blair?

I don’t accept the “cooler” description. Gordon is a different person, but he is passionate about the transatlantic relationship. He engaged deeply with President Bush at Camp David.

• At the party conference, you seemed keen to draw a line under the Blair foreign policy and make it very clear things were different now.

What I said was that 2007 is not 1997. There are different challenges. Global terrorism did not feature in the way it does now. Global inequality did not feature. Remember inequality between nations is falling and inequality between people is rising. Thirdly, climate change was not there as an issue.

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he shouldn’t be criticised for setting himself up as the leader of Europe, because if France doesn’t do it, who will?

There’s more than one leader of Europe, and a weak France makes it harder to have a strong Europe. No one country or one leader defines or runs Europe. In President Sarkozy, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Prime Minister Gordon Brown you have strong, practical, unblinkered leaders and that’s a very good thing. I think that the European-American relationship will benefit from that.

• When you look at Iran, North Korea and Burma the sanctions against them don’t seem to work. They get more isolated and the government seems to get more empowered. Should we be trying something different?

... contd.