LATER this week I will be coming to your city with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Liverpool for hosting this high profile visit and explain why I am bringing Secretary Rice to the area.
Secretary Rice is without doubt one of the most powerful people in the world. She is also a human being, the product of her race, her religion, her background.
That came home to me - bang between the eyes - when she and I were answering questions at her first overseas press conference after becoming US Secretary of State, my equivalent in the US government, in January last year.
We were in the Foreign Office, answering questions about foreign policy. One was about the apparently slow pace of change towards democracy in Iraq (and elsewhere in the Middle East).
Secretary Rice was going through an answer about the difficulties of establishing democracy. Then suddenly there was a brief pause, a distinctly different tone of voice, as she said: "Listen. When the Founding Fathers [of the United States] said: "We, the people", they didn't mean me."
It was a striking moment. In a millisecond, we had moved from Condoleezza Rice the world states-person to Condoleezza Rice the human being.
She is brilliant, a former head of a world-class university (Stanford, California) in her early forties, speaks fluent Russian, writes books, plays the piano to concert standards - the works.
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