When the American media describe Chelsea Clinton as royalty, they refer not to her popularity but to her ubiquity. Her very first home was the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Arkansas; the family home she left for university 18 years later was the White House. Ordinarily, it’s only young royals who grow up in lavish official residences and the pitiless media spotlight, a permanent presence in our consciousness. It is a uniquely strange and unenviable version of celebrity that stole Clinton’s anonymity before she was old enough to spell it.

When we meet there is, therefore, a disconcerting sense of deja vu. Everything begins exactly as one might expect. On the previous day there had been the pre-interview call from one of her handlers, who was ostensibly warm and yet conveyed an impression of wary control, leaving me worried about how far I’d be allowed to stray from the subject of Clinton’s new book. The interview takes place at the Clinton Foundation, a vast but discreetly unadvertised expanse of midtown Manhattan office space populated by serious-looking people and elegantly adorned by African-inspired artwork chosen by Clinton’s father. Clinton is waiting in the glass boardroom; the interview starts precisely on schedule, to the second.

The 38-year-old displays impressive fluency in British current affairs, knowing all about the NHS’s missed mammogram test results, and praising David Lammy’s recent Windrush speech in the Commons. Her father once talked about the importance of really seeing people – the person who opens his car door, or pours his coffee – and I’m struck that Clinton notices the medical support sleeve I’m wearing, and asks about the origins of the name Decca. But any impression of intimacy is offset by a facial expression that remains glassily still, and a voice that never modulates. Clinton has inherited her mother’s unnerving composure, and speaks in monotone paragraphs consisting almost entirely of language no human being I know ever uses. “The choices that they made,” for example, “were fundamental to me feeling affirmed in charting my own journey”, which is not how anyone else talks about their mum and dad.

Clinton has just published her third children’s book, and will be appearing at the Hay festival next weekend. She Persisted Around The World is a picture book in which she tells the stories of 13 extraordinary women through the ages, from Marie Curie to Malala Yousafzai, who persevered in the face of prejudice and changed history. It’s the sequel to her New York Times bestseller She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World, the title inspired by Republican senator Mitch McConnell’s scathing attack on Senator Elizabeth Warren for trying to read aloud a letter from Martin Luther King Jr’s widow in the senate. Warren was famously silenced, under an obscure senate rule that McConnell later defended with: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” only for his words to be swiftly converted into a feminist rallying cry.

Clinton and husband Marc Mezvinsky with their daughter, Charlotte, in 2014. Photograph: William Regan/AP

Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, have a three-year-old daughter, Charlotte, and one-year-old son, Aidan. The purpose of She Persisted, Clinton explains, is to show girls – and boys – what women through history have achieved. She cites research by the Geena Davis Institute, which found that more than 80% of the most popular children’s cartoons have male protagonists, whereas female characters are defined by their relationship to the male protagonist. “Even when the characters are animals, they’re someone’s sister or they’re someone’s mother, or they’re someone’s partner or friend. So from the earliest ages we tell our children that boys are more significant.” She quotes the astronaut Sally Ride, who memorably observed, “You can’t be what you can’t see”, and goes on, “It’s so often the case that our stories are centred around men, told by men, the heroes are men – and so I think it’s hugely important that we make women more visible in the stories in our history that have always existed, but also to imagine and create more female-centred stories moving forward.”

She began reading newspapers when she was just four, 'and my parents expected me to have an opinion'

Clinton is completely right, of course. But later, listening back to my tape, I notice that when I say it feels important to me for my sons to know these stories, she responds with: “Thank you for framing it around both our daughters and our sons.” A few minutes later, when I tell her I took them to see Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle In Time, which features a geeky female protagonist who’s good at maths, Clinton replies: “I’m really grateful that you took your sons to see it.” Her odd construction of gratitude (most people would say, “Oh, well done,” or “That’s great!”) means that – even when we’re agreeing – it can feel hard to connect.

She has talked in the past about inheriting her maternal grandmother’s “responsibility gene”, and mentions to me that her daughter’s nursery has been encouraging conversations about the concept of fairness. “It gives us the chance to talk with her about what is fair, and that she already has unfair advantages because of who her parents are. I don’t think she really understands the concept of privilege yet, but I want her to be able to understand that as soon as she’s old enough to. So we can start having larger conversations about privilege, and about the clear responsibility that comes with privilege. It’s also about kindness and respect.”

My guess is that Clinton feels unable to say something as simple as “Oh, well done”, for fear of sounding superior. The unfortunate irony is that her thanks, intended to convey humility, end up making her seem either inauthentic or grand.

Our stories are often centred around men, told by men - it’s important that we make women more visible

***

It’s just a tiny glimpse into the lifelong impossibility of being Chelsea Clinton. At elementary school in Arkansas, her teacher called her precocious – “and it wasn’t meant as a compliment” – though her parents told her it was “a very good thing”. She’d begun reading newspapers when she was just four, “and my parents expected me to have an opinion about what I thought the most important stories were, and then to be able to muster an argument in support of what I thought was right or wrong. They taught me early on the difference between opinion and fact. A crucial distinction,” she adds dryly, “that seems to be not as appreciated at the moment by some, unfortunately.”

Clinton with her father at the Democratic National Convention, 1992. Photograph: Amy Sancetta/AP

Just 12 when she moved into the White House, an awkward adolescent jumble of frizzy hair and braces, Clinton was 18 when the father she idolised confessed to an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Two hundred and fifty journalists covered her arrival at Stanford University, where she was criticised for keeping a low profile, hidden away in her bulletproof dorm, but then criticised again for partying with celebrities when she moved to Oxford for an MPhil in international relations. She tried working for management consultants McKinsey, and then a hedge fund, but her heart wasn’t in it; as she has said, “I tried to care about things like money. I just didn’t.”

Following another master’s in public health she became a special correspondent for NBC, but was widely panned, one critic describing the decision to hire her as “journalistically bankrupt”. New York magazine ran the headline: “Chelsea Clinton at NBC: When Nepotism Goes Wrong”.

The caution with which she parses my questions is therefore unsurprising. Now vice-chair of the family foundation, she seems to have found a public voice and role that fits, campaigning for girls’ empowerment, early access to childhood education and global healthcare initiatives – but even so, for the first half of the interview she sounds more like a policy paper than a real person.

At Oxford University. Photograph: INS News Agency Ltd

For instance, I ask if we’re now living through the best of feminist times, thanks to #MeToo, or the worst, thanks to Donald Trump, and her answer is at once impressive and thoughtful and mindnumbingly clunky. The heavily abridged version goes: “I think progress is possible and I think we should always feel a responsibility to that mandate in some ways, but that it’s not inevitable, and that it has to be both protected and advanced at every moment,” before digressing into a wordy, wonky lament about “the restrictions on a woman’s reproductive agency, and also on her ability to access reproductive health services that she thinks are right for her and often for her family, [and] that right is certainly not secure in our country.”

And then, quite unexpectedly, something changes. Feminist opinion is divided, I observe, between women who feel we should seize this #MeToo moment and go all out to tear down the patriarchy, and those who fear our rage will alienate support. Does Clinton still believe we should go high? She gazes at me in silence, as though making up her mind whether or not to become present, and when she opens her mouth it feels as if she is suddenly here.

“For me, maybe because I’ve had so much vitriol flung at me for as long as I can literally remember, people saying awful things to me even as a child, I’ve never found it productive, personally, to engage in that way. To retaliate with crass language or insult someone personally – I just don’t think I’m built that way.”

‘I no longer ignore it when people say hateful things to me on the street or on social media.’ Photograph: Benedict Evans/The Guardian

Does she tell herself they’re not really talking about her? “Oh, no,” she flashes back, with a low chuckle. “I know they’re talking about me. I just think that the way they’re talking about me, to me, to my face, online, is a reflection on them and not about me. The savagery that is directed at me, sometimes it’s because I’m just the person that they happen to see and recognise, and they’re angry, and so that anger kind of spills out. Sometimes they’re mad at me because of something that my mum or dad did, or something that my mum or dad never did – but they have been fed the narrative that they were trafficking children, or drugs, or some other heinous crime.”

The way our president has mainstreamed hate is deeply dangerous. We have to say this is wrong

She used to believe the right thing to do about “all of the meanness” was simply ignore it, she reflects. “Now I’ve come to feel differently, because I think that the way that our president and many people around him have not only mainstreamed hate, but mainlined it, is so deeply dangerous.” Her eyes fill with dismay as she cites the rising reports of bullying in schools catalogued by the Southern Poverty Law Centre. “Not just the hundreds but now thousands of instances in schools across America, where children are citing the president as they’re demeaning a little girl, or they’re chanting ‘Build a wall’ in an attempt to demean and degrade brown children. So the reason, now, I no longer ignore it when people say hateful things to me on the street or on social media is, I think we have to shine a light. I think those of us who have platforms to do that have to say this is wrong and unacceptable, so we don’t normalise it but try to detoxify what has been unleashed. Because if we don’t, we leave a vacuum. And I think the darkness fills that vacuum.”

The family at Hillary Clinton’s caucus night rally, Iowa, 2016. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

Clinton’s Twitter account has featured some choice examples of filling the vacuum with pointedly cheery light. Last year, Trump defended his decision to ask Ivanka to deputise for him at the G20 summit, by tweeting: “If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother, as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!” Clinton tweeted back: “Good morning Mr President. It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not.”

I tell her a lot of people in Britain are wondering how they should receive Trump’s visit in July. What’s her advice? “Well, I’ve been to multiple protests since the election. Charlotte’s been to at least three, maybe four. Aidan’s been to one. If I lived in Britain I would show up to protest, because I don’t agree with what he’s doing to degrade what it means to be an American.”

I do not believe that many of the people Trump has hired are qualified to do the jobs

We are meeting two days after a smiling Ivanka Trump opened the US embassy in Jerusalem, as dozens of Palestinians were massacred. I ask if Clinton feels any sympathy for the first daughter, obliged to do her father’s grotesque bidding, or considers her complicit. Her expression hardens.

“She’s an adult. She can make the choices for herself. I mean, she’s 36. We are responsible for our choices. In 2008 I was really proud to support my mum – but I disagreed with her fundamentally on a few things, particularly her then opposition to equal marriage rights for LGBTQ Americans. I never defended that position, because it wasn’t what I believed was the right thing to do.”

With Ivanka Trump, 2014. They used to be friends and seemed to have much in common. Photograph: Laura Cavanaugh/FilmMagic

Ivanka and Chelsea used to be friends, and seemed to have much in common: famous and powerful parents; young families and busy jobs in Manhattan. In 2015 Clinton told American Vogue, “She’s always aware of everyone around her and ensuring that everyone is enjoying the moment. It’s an awareness that in some ways reminds me of my dad, and his ability to increase the joy of the room. There’s nothing skin-deep about Ivanka.” The friendship somehow survived the election campaign, but not Trump’s presidency; the pair haven’t formally fallen out, but Clinton says they haven’t spoken in “a long time”.

Were Ivanka to succeed her father in the White House, as some have speculated, would the election of the first female president still constitute a triumph for feminism? “Well, I didn’t support Sarah Palin when she was the vice-president nominee in 2008. And I hope my son is as much a feminist as my daughter. I think it is more about what we stand for, and how we do it, than the gender of the person there.” With the exception of Barron – “He’s 12; let him be 12, please” – she has no sympathy whatsoever for Trump’s children. “They’re adults who’ve made the decision to work in this administration.” Had her mother been elected, she says she would never have gone to work for her, so I ask if she shares others’ distaste at Trump employing his family.

“I think the president should be able to hire whoever he or she thinks are best qualified. I do not believe that many of the people that he has hired have been qualified to do the jobs. Not only do I want an administration that isn’t venal, corrupt and focused on making life harder for millions of Americans, I also want a competent administration. So for me, the larger question is the collision of cruelty and incompetence and corruption that we see across the administration.”

Sure, you should not be in prison because you said something racist. But you also shouldn’t be able to run for president

Does she hope the president will be impeached? “I don’t think about that yet. But I strongly believe it’s important that Robert Mueller be allowed to continue his investigation [into Russian collusion in the election]. I’m more focused on what can I do to help elect Democrats.”

Given her father’s track record, I’m curious to know how she would feel if Stormy Daniels were to take down the presidency. “I haven’t followed that as closely as I have everything that’s emerging around the Russia investigation. But I do think it’s important that no one is above the law, and so whatever investigations come out of what Mueller’s doing, or the other ways in which many people are attempting to hold the president accountable, I think it’s important that those continue.” Following the scenes in Charlottesville last summer, she must have considered the danger of violence if Trump’s supporters feel he is unduly hounded out of office. The spectacle of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Klansmen marching through the Virginia town last August, bearing torches and swastikas, sent shockwaves through America and cost one counter-protester her life. When Trump declared there were “fine people” marching on the Unite The Right rally, to many frightened Americans the nation’s politics felt profoundly and ominously altered. Just how febrile does Clinton consider the situation? She looks grave. “Quite, I think.”

Her assistant announces that our time is up, and I turn my recorder off, but Clinton tells me to turn it back on. Now that she’s really here, she wants to keep talking.

Since Barbara Bush died, she says, she’s thought a lot about the importance of intentions. “I disagreed with her husband on so much, and with her on so much. But I also never doubted that she believed what she and her husband were fighting for was going to be to the benefit of most Americans. She really believed that what they were doing was the right thing to do.

“I used to believe all that mattered was the bottom line of the outcome, like, how many lives were improved, how many people were saved, how many more people got to go to school without debt, how many people had healthcare, how many women got to have paid maternity leave. I still believe that is what matters most. But I also now believe that intentions and tone and decency matter, because I think the wreckage that we’re seeing at this moment is one that will, I hope, be repaired on the policy standpoint when we elect Democrats. But I think we will still then have work to do on repairing the tone in our country, the exposure of the real racist and sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic and antisemitic feeling which is on the rise in our country – a rot that has been exposed.”

We are well over time now, and I glance at her assistant, but Clinton hasn’t finished. “I think one of the big mistakes,” she continues, “was, for so long, we focused on tolerance, which I just think is insufficient. People tolerated casual misogyny, but casual misogyny is maybe the gateway drug. We have freedom of speech, which I do think is hugely important – and yet people thought you couldn’t dispute hateful things, because they’re like – well, it’s freedom of speech. Well, freedom of speech doesn’t mean there is freedom of consequences.

“Sure, you should not be in prison because you said something racist. But you also shouldn’t be able to run for president. And yet here we are.”

She Persisted Around The World, published by Philomel Books, is available at the Guardian bookshop for £9.99 (discounted from £12.99). Chelsea Clinton appears at the Hay festival next weekend.

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