• My guest this week is Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, and like all things French, and all people French, he’s a complex personality. He’s a Leftist who works in a Right-wing government, he opposed his boss (President Nicolas Sarkozy), who then handpicked him for the job of a foreign minister, he’s a Leftist who supported the war in Iraq and is one of the few French people to do so, and he’s been called a caviar-and-champagne socialist but has gone around the world, helping refugees, victims of war. Wonderful to have you on Walk the Talk, minister.

Good to see you. Well, I have been asked to be member of this government but not to renounce, or change my mind on, the country. I believe I am still a socialist, that’s all. But I’m working with President Sarkozy and I think what we’ve achieved, especially him, in seven months, is not so bad.

• Balancing the contradictions, you could be a character straight out of Indian politics.

Well, yes. But I am still an activist, I am not a professional, I am not a politician in the very serious sense of the word. I am using not my ability but my knowledge of the rest of the world to be useful to my country. And I’m still on the way to peace, on the way to understanding people who don’t look like us, that’s all.

• Absolutely. So when you say activist, are you referring to your ideological beliefs or to what you have done throughout you life? You set up Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders and went around the world helping victims of conflict and took very interesting positions on conflicts for four decades, starting with Biafra.

... contd.