Calm down dear, it's Michael Winner

"Well, she did," he says. "I had a triple heart bypass operation years ago and never did any exercise. Then Geraldine got me to exercise and I'd never done that before."

What happened, then? "Well, you know how things are in relationships, darling," he says. "They are great for a bit or maybe for even more than a bit but if there are problems, there are problems."

So he and Geraldine had problems? "Obviously, darling," he says, "or else we wouldn't have parted!"

Isn't he even a tad sad? "Oh, people are always going on about me and my relationships. When I tell people I've slept with more than 130 women they are appalled but, you know, I've been doing it for 55 years so I don't think that's bad going!"

But why can't he commit to anyone? He's never married, never had children. "Oh, I'm always asked about that but I tell people I do have family. I have all my ex-girlfriends and they are my family. I get on with all of them! I talked to three of them yesterday - but I'm not giving you names!"

I don't imagine one of them was Geraldine, I say. "Oh, I find these things blow over," he says. "Everyone feels hurt for half an hour and then it's all fine again. I'm not worried about it. It's all fine on my side.

"Anyway, who says I won't marry? I tell you, if things carry on as they are with Paula I' ll marry her, darling! I'm having a wonderful time! I've taken an interest in her for years. It's marvellous!"

But didn't he say he'd marry Geraldine? And wasn't he very in love with the actress Jenny Seagrove? They were together for six-and-a-half years and she is the only woman he has let move in. "Of course I loved Seagrove," he says, "but we're no longer in contact." Why not? "She doesn't want to," he says.

"I wrote her a letter three years after we separated suggesting we meet up. She said she didn't want to see me as she wasn't ready yet. It was three years later! I wasn't asking for a blow job!"

Michael Winner doesn't mince his words. He doesn't stop for a minute, seemingly having had no noticeable break between Geraldine and Paula, just as he didn't seem to have a break between Geraldine's predecessor, Georgina or Vanessa.

Maybe he just believes that life is for living and not dwelling on. There would certainly be a lot for him to think about, after all. First up would be his mother, Helen, who gambled away £8 million in the casinos in Cannes. "Oh, my mother was quite extraordinary," says Winner. He barely mentions his father, George, who had a menswear business, went into property management and invested in art.

"The problem with that," says Winner, "is that when my mother owed money she'd just take a painting off the wall and go to a dealer and sell it for way less that it was worth. When she died she had nothing left but trunks full of old lightbulbs and some soap, all carefully wrapped."

But what's really amazing is that while Helen Winner was spending a fortune nursing her addiction, mother and son politely dined together as regular as clockwork. They continued even when she sued him for no real reason, which led to Winner himself paying her lawyer's bill when firm after firm told her she didn't have a case.

" She was very marvellous, darling," he says. "She never admitted to me that she gambled. She used to say she was at the casino looking after someone else's chips and just having a small flutter."

Did he never mention it? "No," he says, "but for the last three months of her life I stopped seeing her. She accused me of stealing her jewels! It was too much, too hard and very sad." I am sure she'd be proud of him now. After all, he's an Establishment figure. He may be a touch Mr Toad-ish but everyone seems to love him. "Oh, everyone talks to me," he says. "They all love the commercials!" Does it bother him? "No, I'm very approachable."

What's the downside of Michael Winner? "I'm very tenacious," he says. He says that once he gets the bit through his teeth he will not let something go, which is why, after 10 years of battling just about everyone in bureaucracy from Westminster council, the National Police Memorial will be unveiled tomorrow. It turns out that, many years ago, Winner wrote a piece after the shooting of PC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan embassy in 1984.

"I said, 'There's all this fuss about this girl dying. But who remembers the name of the last police officer killed on duty? We ought to put up memorials to them.' Then so many people wrote to me and sent me money that, to cut a long story short, I set up the National Police Memorial Trust."

Tomorrow his efforts will be repaid when the memorial, designed by Sir Norman Foster, is unveiled on the corner of The Mall and Horse Guards Parade. "Tony will be there," says Winner, "and the Queen!" Of course he likes to blow his own trumpet a bit, telling me how many letters he gets a week ( hundreds upon hundreds), how close he was to Marlon Brando, how it's not the money, the wealthy lifestyle, the trips to Barbados that makes the ladies love him. "When I was young and had nothing, I still had girl --friends," he says.

In his book he describes how shy he was as a child and how unattractive he felt. He hated his Quaker school in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. He came out of it virtually illiterate, and had to employ a tutor to get him into Cambridge. When he left, he had to work very hard in order to buy this beautiful house from his parents. It's all too easy to do the Jewish boy with strong, mad Jewish mother shtick but maybe that loneliness and sense of being abandoned, aged six, has made him move on and on in his relationships.

I am desperate to snoop around his house but he says it's time to go. "I'm going to leave it to the nation," he says. "Do you think that will be lovely?" I think it's a marvellous idea, I say.

A little bit of Michael Winner, with all his foibles, will live on for years to come. Thank goodness for that.