Heroes, hookers and Hillary. It's a DC thing

I have a confession to make. I love places stuffed with signed photos of famous men - and from grand old restaurants to neighbourhood barbers, Washington is full of them. That doubtless explains my predilection for Diego's Hair Salon, about 10 minutes walk from The Independent on Sunday's office. How he does it I don't know. But to judge from the signed pictures on the walls, the proprietor seems to have trimmed the locks of every senator, cabinet officer and president for the past 30 years.

I have a confession to make. I love places stuffed with signed photos of famous men - and from grand old restaurants to neighbourhood barbers, Washington is full of them. That doubtless explains my predilection for Diego's Hair Salon, about 10 minutes walk from The Independent on Sunday's office. How he does it I don't know. But to judge from the signed pictures on the walls, the proprietor seems to have trimmed the locks of every senator, cabinet officer and president for the past 30 years.

While getting the treatment at Diego's moreover, I understand the appeal of this under-valued city to long-time residents and first time visitors alike. New York and Los Angeles may have the wattage. But Diego's modest and friendly establishment and the photos on its walls capture Washington: unglamorous but beautiful, exuding power yet oddly homey, with history around every corner and great men's shadows on every wall. But ghosts they remain, even those currently running the world's sole superpower.

Long before 11 September, presidential security was an obsession here. Now, after the terrorist attacks, the anthrax scare and and rumoured "dirty bombers", it has become an oppression. The only glimpse you are likely to get of George Bush is of a silhouette through the tinted bullet-proof windows of a black limousine in a motorcade. But then again, given that even the limos now travel in pairs to further confuse any potential assassin, which limo?

My own regular contact with the world's most powerful man comes most weekends but is even more remote - when a trio of dark green helicopters sweeps high above our house, one of them carrying the world's most powerful man back and forth from the White House to the presidential retreat at Camp David, 60 miles to the north.

Mr Bush's daily schedule is not published, and you now need a congressman to get you on a tour of the White House (and then only of the ceremonial bits). If politician-spotting is your inclination, then Capitol Hill is a better bet. Queue for the regular morning tours, and with a bit of luck, and after being thoroughly body-scanned, you might get into the Senate visitors' gallery when Teddy Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and the rest are taking part in a roll-call vote.

But Washington has far more to offer than live politicians. This is a place where many of the great global events of the past 75 years have been shaped. Better still, it is an American town where Europeans feel at home. It is full of soggy liberals, many of them present and past federal workers who, like Europeans, believe in the virtues of government. If we cannot bear Bush, most ordinary Washingtonians do not care much for him either, voting 85 per cent Democrat in presidential elections, a proportion approached in no other US city.

Washington does not even look very American. It has myriad monuments, but no skyscrapers. The main downtown sights are within walking distance of each other. Strolling around Georgetown, you could be in the back streets of Chelsea. And travel a few miles up or down the Potomac - to the untamed rapids which divide Virginia from Maryland just upstream, or the broad calm estuary into which the river flows - and the capital region looks just as it must have to the first European settlers 400 years ago: vast, primal and majestic.

No wonder so many people never leave, even retired politicians who previously spent their entire career bashing Washington government and all its works. This is a beguiling, beautiful place, bracing in winter, but at its very best in the azalea and dogwood-studded spring and in autumn when this greenest of cities turns into a quilt of yellow, gold and scarlet. Only in the humid, enervating weeks of high summer do you remember that Washington was built on a swamp so infested with malaria-carrying mosquitoes that the British Foreign Office in the 19th century counted it a hardship posting.

But Washington has come a long way since then. The restaurants, bars and nightlife in the older neighbourhoods around downtown - such as Georgetown, Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle - get better by the year. Beyond them lie the diplomatic quarter around Massachusetts Avenue, stately Cleveland Park, and Rock Creek Park, a fully fledged national park in the heart of the District.

This is also a world-class museum city. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is the most visited tourist destination in Washington, and rightly so. But do not forget the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of American History with its wonderful First Ladies exhibit and the brilliantly laid out National Zoo (which also counts as a national museum). Best of all, they are free.

And do not overlook the smaller ones, such as the Woodrow Wilson house on S St NW, the only presidential museum in town, where Wilson lived for the three years before his death in 1924. And if your taste (like mine) runs to Byzantine art, the Dumbarton Oaks Collection on the northern edge of Georgetown is a jewel. But doesn't the name Dumbarton Oaks ring a vague historical bell? Indeed it does. In 1944 the building hosted the two conferences which laid the framework for the United Nations. In Washington there is no escape from A-list modern history.

About the only thing we do not have is decent professional sports, despite the fleeting stay of Michael Jordan with the basketball Wizards. "First in peace, first in war and last in the American League" was the old jibe in the days when the city still had a major league baseball team. But if you are looking for spies and scandals, Washington is in a class of its own.

A couple of blocks east of The Independent on Sunday's office is the former Vista hotel (now the Madison) where in 1990 Mayor Marion Barry was caught in an FBI sting, shacked up with a hooker and smoking crack cocaine. "Bitch set me up," were Barry's unmayorly first words when he was arrested. Or you can stop off at the Potomac's Tidal Basin, scene of the 1974 downfall of Wilbur Mills, Arkansas Democrat and, as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, one of Washington's most powerful men. Mills and a woman were stopped at 2am speeding in a car along the waterfront close to the Jefferson Memorial. Mills's companion was Fanne Foxe, a stripper known as "the Argentine firecracker". Under Jefferson's stern gaze, the lady did a runner and had to be fished out of the water by the police. Mills resigned from the Ways and Means Committee and a couple of years later retired from politics.

More recently, another Arkansas Democrat was involved in Washington's second biggest scandal. Though you can't visit the Oval Office, you can see the building where Bill Clinton's girlfriend, Monica Lewinsky, lived - the Watergate building overlooking the Potomac - which, in a perfect segue, leads to Washington's ultimate scandalous blockbuster.

The old Democratic National Committee suite in the complex which Richard Nixon's re-election team tried to burgle in 1972 is now company offices, and the Howard Johnson Hotel opposite has been turned into a student residence for George Washington University. Ask nicely, though, and you may wangle your way up to room 723, which served as listening and lookout post for the operation that two years later forced Nixon's resignation.

Or try a spy tour, for Washington is truly the global capital of espionage. A good place to start is the Pied au Cochon restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue, Georgetown, and the seat with its commemorative plaque marking the spot where in November 1985 the Soviet double defector Vitali Yurchenko had a "last supper" with his CIA minder before fleeing back to the Soviets a mile up the road. The episode remains a riddle to this day.

Was Yurchenko a genuine defector who changed his mind - or did he go to the US to protect the newly recruited Soviet agent Aldrich Ames, the most damaging mole in CIA history? A few blocks away you can see the blue US mail box on the corner of R and 37th streets, which Ames used to mark with chalk when he had a dead drop ready for his handlers. Nearby is another espionage landmark, Alger Hiss's house at 2905 P St NW.

If you want a British connection, drive up Massachusetts Avenue to our embassy - not the ugly 1950s-style essay in TGWU-chic that is the modern chancellery, but the handsome Lutyens building that is now the residence, where in the late 1940s a fresh-faced pair of diplomats called Donald MacLean and Kim Philby sold Britain and the US down the river. Running the whole thing was the KGB Rezident, buried in his bug-proof safe room at the the Soviet, now Russian, embassy, a French chateau-style building on 16th Street, just five blocks from the White House.

Finally, visit the two-year-old International Spy Museum, on the renovated and once more bustling eastern edge of downtown. Next door there is a splendid watering hole, where louche-looking Russians and loose-looking women mingle at the bar, dreaming of the good old days. You might even see Oleg Kalugin, a one-time KGB major general and friend of Philby back in his Moscow exile days, but who now takes capitalism's shilling as Washington's resident pundit on Soviet spookery.

Of all Washington's places however, my favourite is Arlington cemetery, with its stunning views over the imperial city. John Kennedy's grave, of course, is the main attraction, the final stop in a Washington life that moved from his Georgetown home at 3307 N St to the White House. At the Catholic Cathedral of St Matthew the Apostle, barely 100 yards from my office, are the steps where the infant JFK Jr stood in salute before the coffin of his murdered father, almost exactly 40 years ago.

But Arlington offers much more: the memorial to the Challenger space shuttle victims, the grave of the boxer and former serviceman Joe Louis, and the countless, spotless rows of graves of soldiers who have died in America's wars. And if you want to taste the age when the special relationship really was special, stand before the equestrian statue of Field Marshal John Dill, one of the handful of foreign nationals buried at Arlington, whose work as chief British military liaison officer in Washington during the Second World War made him one of the great unsung heroes of Anglo-American co-operation, until his death in 1944.

But the city has a present as well as a past, and a bizarre relationship with celebrity. As noted above, the really big players are rarely spotted; the genuine Washington frisson comes when you are sitting in a bar and suddenly realise that the elderly man having a drink at the table in the corner is a former director of the CIA whom you have just seen on CNN.

But real celebs have the city weak at the knees: above all, movie stars and sports stars. A sighting of Michael Jordan during the two years he was with the Wizards was better than a Bill Clinton sighting. Now we adore the visiting Hollywood luminaries when they shoot yet another movie about the presidency. Sometimes life and art become indistinguishable, as when George Clooney made a recent TV series on Washington politics - and every real-life lobbyist, congressman, hot-shot campaign strategist and TV pundit in town stampeded to get on the show.

To see this breed in its natural habitat, you must visit the power watering holes they frequent. The Palm restaurant on 19th St is one, where $64 (£40) buys a 36oz slab of sirloin steak, and lobsters start at 3lbs each. The Old Ebbet Grill near the White House comes cheaper, as does the Monocle on Capitol Hill, another restaurant of choice for the political crowd.

My own preference however is for the Occidental Grill, a slice of a vanished, slower-paced Washington, with waiters in long aprons, and burnished dark wood booths that have witnessed more than their share of history over the decades.

Take October 1962, when over lunch at one of those discreet tables, a Soviet agent passed on to John Scali, an executive at ABC News, a Kremlin offer to withdraw Soviet missiles from Cuba. The encounter led to a negotiated solution to the crisis. Typical Washington, where pleasure is rarely separated from business. And you have probably guessed. The walls at the Occidental Grill are smothered with photos of its great patrons of the past. Just Like Diego's barbershop.

The Facts

Getting there

Return fares to Washington start from £263 with British Airways (0870 850 9 850; www.ba.com) if booked before 30 November for travel until 18 December and from 25 December-31 March 2004.

Being there

A free Capital region guide is available on 01234 764 553 or www.capitalregionusa.org.

The International Spy Museum (001 202 393 7798; www.spymuseum.org) is open daily, 10am-5pm, November to March. Admission $6 (£4) for adults.

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