World poverty has Bob back cursing

Bob Geldof lopes through the half-empty bar at Teatro, the achingly cool modern British restaurant and members' club on Shaftesbury Avenue, London. It's gloomy in the shuttered room and he doesn't take his Ray-Bans off until the photographer leaves.

He has come to talk about Third World debt, the obstinacy of finance ministers and the iniquities of the International Monetary Fund. But there is no doubt about it. Bob Geldof is still a rock star.

He doesn't like doing interviews. But having been inveigled into supporting the Jubilee 2000 debt relief campaign ("I had never heard of Jubilee 2000, but Bono kept ringing up and twatting on about it"), he is annoyed enough by the delays in the relief programme to do this one.

There is a brief interlude as we order. He chooses Belgian endive while mocking the pretensions of the menu "it is just as well it is Belgian, because if it was any other country, you know, I'm not sure ..." and black pudding.

Then we settle down to the interview. Actually, this is something of a misnomer. You don't really interview Bob Geldof.

You just mumble a question, or even a thought, or just a word at him, and out it comes, astonishingly long, eloquent streams of intricate rhetoric, interspersed with brutally concise conclusions slammed home word by word.

Apart from the famous Geldof expletives, which pepper every other sentence, it is like having lunch with a preacher.

What infuriates him is the thought that the debt relief campaign has been cheated by the participants' failure to deliver. The original promise to relieve the debt of 24 desperately poor countries by the end of 2000 is extremely unlikely to be fulfilled. Meanwhile the leaders of the Group of Eight rich countries have chosen to meet this month in Okinawa, a Japanese island surrounded by shark-infested waters.

"The moral argument has long been won. The intellectual argument has now been achieved. The institutional argument, that ain't working. Acknowledge the argument. Don't scurry off to an island. Deliver what you promised."

He has no illusions about what he has brought to the campaign. Why are you doing it? "So I can be used." Does it work? He shrugs. "You're here."

Nobody else has the same resonance. To everyone who remembers Band Aid and Live Aid in the 1980s, he is indelibly associated with the simple injunction: feed the world.

Since then he has gone through widely publicised traumas in his personal life after the break-up of his relationship with TV presenter Paula Yates, about which he will not talk, and has become a highly successful multimedia mogul. He built up the TV company Planet 24, sold his stake in it last year for £5 million sterling and branched off into online travel, mobile telephone technology and music production.

With brutal honesty, he says he is surprised about how effective the campaign has been. He is far less involved in the detail than he was with Band Aid, and is genuinely surprised when I mention that Jubilee 2000 is planning to wind up at the end of the year.

Jubilee 2000 is a global network of charities and churches which campaigns to cancel the debt of Third World countries. "I'm not even a member of Jubilee 2000. It would be a burden for them having me as a card-carrying member and equally burdensome for me because I would then feel responsible for some of the more ludicrous things I say."

He speaks almost lovingly of Bono, the lead singer with rock group U2. "He is a very kind man and a very good man and a very clever man" and says that when they go to meet prime ministers or presidents, the two of them do a bad-cop, good-cop routine.

"l lost patience with Jim Wolfensohn [president of the World Bank], but Bono was soft and persuasive and it works."

He knows enough to throw out soundbites, spiced with obscenities, to underline the deep absurdity of the situation. "Pokemon will make for Nintendo this year more than the combined debt of Niger and Rwanda. F***ing Pokemon!"

Or: "This is not new debt. It reflects compound interest since 1988. Compound interest since 1988! Fuck off!"

But his chief asset is clearly his tightly focused and easily roused sense of outrage. "Being a Paddy, I have a very short backstop to boredom. I discuss and then I get bored. I start listening to these intellectual arguments and I start to see the other guy's point of view. So I stop and say the absolute base argument, naive though it is: these guys can't pay."

He says it repeatedly. "Morally we can agree it's hideous. But pragmatically it is also a nonsense. It is simple. They can't pay. It is a cycle of grinding despair and of poverty, and" he takes a breath to hammer every word home "I don't want to look at it any more."

There is a pause. I can't think of a single thing to say in the face of this onslaught of absolute certainty. He softens. "Back to my black pudding."

Having smoked a foul-smelling cigar, and rejected the elaborate puddings on the menu, refusing to believe that the waitress can't get him strawberries and cream instead he says: "I am a pragmatist. I am interested in an argument that is posited with an end point that is achievable. Otherwise you create cynicism."

It is this urgent drive, combined with a lack of automatic respect for authority - though he talks wonderingly of the moral strength of the Pope, who has supported the debt campaign - which must make him such an effective adversary. If I were a recalcitrant G8 finance minister, I would be running away to an island as well.