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Imelda Marcos is spitting with rage. “This British musician, this Fatboy Slim,” she fumes, striding into her gold-covered sitting room. Big hair, red nails, halogen-green shoes, it’s all there. “I would prefer him not to make this musical of my life, but there is nothing I can do. I would rather do it myself. Show the people the real me, the real Imelda.”

At 76, Imelda is known for such outbursts of emotion. Over the next five hours the former first lady of the Philippines certainly lets it all out.

First up, “They took my shoes!” she seethes, as she recalls the night 20 years ago when political activists drove her and her husband out of the presidential palace and into exile. Famed for a lavish lifestyle thoroughly at odds with one of the poorest nations on earth, Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos were forced to abandon 3,000 pairs of her shoes, 50 suitcases stuffed with jewels, several bulletproof bras and a stunning collection of art.

“About ten Canalettos! These are the only paintings left,” she says, gesturing to the Pissarro, the Picasso and the Gauguin on her walls. “The maid took one of my paintings and kept it in a slum area for five years during our exile. She had no roof! They sold the paintings, the silver, and now they want to sell the jewellery.”

Still, she is hardly poor. Despite 901 charges of corruption – they supposedly embezzled more than $ 30 billion – Imelda is down to her last billion.

Her spacious condominium, on the 34th floor of an up-market apartment block in a quiet part of Manila, is a tribute to the very expensive and the dirt cheap – beneath the Pissarro sits a two ft Snoopy. There’s also a huge collection of 20-cent gold photo frames with pictures of her at the height of her power, flirting with Saddam Hussein, Chairman Mao and Fidel Castro and hobnobbing with the Queen.

“The night we left, there was the jewellery, but what did I take?” she continues. ‘Diapers, bottles and milk for my grandchildren. But I put some of the diamonds in the diapers, so they said, ‘The Marcoses (fled) with diamonds and diapers.’ She pauses. ‘Marcos died in a state of shock. He couldn’t believe it.”

Her mood soon turns more upbeat. “Can you believe I’m almost 77,” she says, sitting down on her gold Louis Quinze sofa. A white-jacketed attendant brings cold drinks: cola and water. “Someone said to me, ‘I thought you were dead. But you look beautiful.’ Well, yes, 50 years ago and 50lb ago I looked great. Cecil Beaton photographed me for four days, 18,000 shots.”

She gestures, lace handkerchief in one hand, a rosary in the other. ‘They ask me my beauty secret. There is no secret. I do all the wrong things. I eat a lot” – “She eats a lot, I can tell you,” interjects one of her staff.

“I don’t sleep at night, only two hours. I drink a lot. I don’t exercise, but I have a lot of energy. I get up at five. I go to church. I see a beautiful flower, a beautiful lady, beautiful this, beautiful that, talk to hundreds of people, by night-time, I have one million energies, and I am ready to jet off.”

Imelda’s energy is legendary. She still carries out a punishing schedule of public engagements, and a lot of effort goes into maintaining her look. At 5ft 8in she cuts a regal, square-shouldered presence and is covered in jewels. Immaculate in a bright purple suit, she has shunned her regular outfit of the terno, the traditional stiff-sleeved Filipino dress, in favour of a more Thatcher-ite get-up. Familiar touches include knee-length lacquered hair twisted in a bun, lashings of make-up, and the coral pink and white manicure that has stayed the same for 50 years.

A small Filipino flag is neatly pinned to her lapel. “I have a duty to dress up and be a star,” she continues. “I’ll spend two hours at it when I’m visiting the poor.” Her footwear, a pair of locally made court shoes, is already a topic for conversation. But she’s having none of it.

‘I have no fetish for shoes,” she bellows. ”In fact, when I was in the palace most of my shoes were given to me by Filipino shoemakers. Anyway, the press exaggerated. They said it was 3,000. But in fact it was more like… er.” She grasps for a figure: 200. But I say, at least when they went into my closets they found shoes, not skeletons.” But old habits die hard. She has even got a slimmed-down collection here. In the corridor, well over 200 pairs on huge racks cover an entire wall. The silver section alone is 15 pairs.

Imelda’s four-car convoy is a familiar sight around Manila, where she is often seen handing out cash. Despite her past, Imelda came a respectable sixth in the country’s Presidential elections. The entire Marcos family is still extremely visible: her son Ferdinand ‘Bong-Bong’ Jr. is a governor in the north of the Philippines; her daughter Imee is a member of Congress; and another daughter, Irene, is a socialite. “I see them every day on television or in the newspapers,” she says, “or they call.”

She has eight grandchildren, all boys “these are my jewels,” she says, proudly pointing out their photographs. “This one, Sandro, attends Worth school in England, like his father. I am an Anglophile. All my children went to school in England.”

What Imelda really loves talking about is her recycling programme, in which she turns, “garbage into money. I turn garbage into jewellery.” An attendant dutifully lays out a range of her plastic ‘garbage’ jewellery on the dining-room table.

The rest of the flat is strewn with trinkets. Golden Buddhas recline next to Tiffany lamps. The coffee table is loaded with a bright display of rubbish plastic flowers; even her 80 gold photo frames, with pictures of her with various world leaders, are made from garbage. Looking at these photographs almost defies belief. For 20 years Imelda toured the world in her own private 747, leaving her husband at home. “And what did I use? Did I use a gun? No! I used beauty,” she says of her diplomatic technique. She picks up the remote control to her 50-inch plasma TV screen, and flicks on a video of the opening of Sydney Opera House in 1973. “It must have been 31 or 32 years ago,” she says as she appears with a yellow dress and matching parasol, towering over the Queen. “It was funny, because the Queen and I were watching the performance next to each other. Then suddenly one of the ministers collapsed and had a heart attack behind us, and his feet were sticking over our shoulders. I didn’t know what to say! It was so funny…”

As was the time she kissed Mao Tsetung. She signals urgently to an attendant for a picture. There he is, falling all over her wrist. “At the height of the cold war I met Chairman Mao,” she continues. “At first I thought, oh, he’s an old man, about 80. So I took his hand and put it on my forehead, our sign of respect for an older man. He took my other hand and kissed it. He said, ‘When she respected me, I not only respected her back, but I admired her and I loved her’. We finished the cold war in five minutes!”

As for Fidel Castro, with whom she enjoyed a jeep ride, “He said to me, ‘I have only driven two women: you and my mama’.” She puts down the last photograph. “But quite a movie, no, where Saddam, Castro are only supporting actors?” she chortles.

And then there’s her husband. In the opposite corner of the room, on an ornamental table, stands Imelda’s shrine to Ferdinand. A bust covered in medals is surrounded by yet more photographs. Marcos died in 1989, while the couple were still in exile in Hawali, but has yet to be buried. He waits embalmed in the north of the Philippines, while Imelda tries to secure a state funeral.

She speaks of him with local reverence and always simply as ‘Marcos’. Apart from recyling waste, it is her life’s work to clear his name. “How could he be a dictator, when in 20 years he had 15 referendums?” she says plaintively. It would not be a big leap to suppose she was a little brainwashed by the diminutive politician she met, by sheer chance, in Manila in 1954. A 24-year-old beauty queen from the provinces, she was swept off her feet by Ferdinand, a man 12 years her senior. Within 30 minutes he had proposed; 11 days later they married.

In 1965 Marcos swept to power as President. Imelda transformed the presidential palace into a Filipino Camelot complete with chandeliers and expensive western art.

“Marcos was a real macho,” says Imelda. ”I wouldn’t say he was a difficult man. But...” In an attempt to make her the perfect political companion, Marcos gave her improving books, which he later quizzed her on. She tended to put on weight, so he put scales in the dining room so her food could be measured: he had not married Cinderella for her to turn into a pumpkin.

The pressure was enormous, not to mention the demands of their three young children and the constant stream of visitors. She suffered a nervous breakdown, and was diagnosed with manic depression. Her recuperation strategy was simply to throw herself ever more tirelessly into the cause and become Marcos’s number one disciple. Hence the note of evangelism.

Now she shares her bed with her dogs. “Venus,” she coos, taking a yapping miniature dog from an attendant, who in an exasperated attempt to calm it down, has walked out of the kitchen holding it at arm’s length. “Venus for beauty. She is the most spoilt little dog you can think of.” It’s time to go. Ma’am has an engagement.

“What size shoe are you?” she asks. Spookily, she produces a pair of sparkly mules in the correct size, which she signs as a gift. Other gifts follow: pearls (real), chocolates, a small teddy. You can almost see how Imelda, in her mind at least, accumulates stuff in order to give it all away. Almost.