My position is not that John Kerry is either Jesus Christ or the prophet Mohammad. My position is that John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics.

Good politics starts with empathy proceeds to analysis then sets out values and establishes the vision before getting to the nitty-gritty of policy solutions.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

I'm not a political person. When I start to get into it it just upsets me. I feel so powerless when it comes to politics. So I've just decided to be non-political and very very pro-soldier.

When I started 'CNN ' I made the decision to stay out of endorsing candidates and let the doers make up their own minds about politics that it wasn't going to come from me.

Once you start saying 'Let's talk political my own politics my own aspirations ' it can become not just distracting in that it takes time but it can become confusing and frustrating and is this now a political agenda or a governmental agenda.

When I first started working in politics as a junior aide on Walter Mondale's 1984 presidential campaign it never occurred to me that I would one day work in the White House. There were plenty of women among the volunteers who stuffed envelopes and walked precincts. But there were fewer and fewer on each successive level of influence and access.

I've rarely kept my distance from kind of - I don't know if we can call it politics but kind of civic engagement and that kind of thing except I tended to think 'Well do it yourself before you start telling other people what they should be doing.'

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean the clues were in the poems but they didn't read them very carefully and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

Well I write a lot of poetry - that's where it usually all starts. I definitely want to show you guys sides of me - love loss heartbreak - all of that good stuff!