Rod Liddle insists he's misunderstood. The Sunday Times columnist, controversialist, former revolutionary, ex-punk and long-gone editor of Radio 4's Today Programme says people always bang on about him being a rightwinger, whereas in fact he's a hero of the left. Now to make matters worse, Will Self has only gone and reviewed his new book for this very organ and suggested Liddle might be a tad racist. Liddle is seething – in a quiet, matey, if astonishingly foul-mouthed way.

In Selfish Whining Monkeys: How We Ended Up Greedy, Narcissistic and Unhappy, he rants about capitalism, the internet, language police, the Guardian of course, political correctness gone MAD, broken families, inequality. And most of all, he rants about the liberal elite he claims runs the country. The real enemy within, he says, is this bunch – what he calls the bien-pensants, the faux left, who never have to deal with the downside of immigration, and simply benefit from the cheap labour and pretty eastern-European nannies.

Liddle wanted us to meet in Middlesbrough, where he went to school, but time is tight so we settle for a pub in Soho. He's already there when I arrive – glass in hand, tight black trousers, black jacket, familiar meringue bouffant. He has said that he's often described as looking like "a fat, middle-aged lesbian", though he's looking rather svelte today. He's lost three stone since he and his second wife, Alicia Monckton, the mother of his third child, got a dog.

I ask what he's drinking. "Just lime and soda please, mate." In the book, he says, his memory's not what it was, "its edges gnawed away by increasing age and a continual drip of alcohol."

I fancy a glass of wine, I say.

"Oh, go on, then," he says.

"Why don't we make it a bottle?"

"Go on then." We head downstairs. "Did you see the review in the Mail on Sunday? It said at times I sound like an Occupy protester," he says proudly. "You know, most of that stuff on credit, on class." He's got a point. Imagine Citizen Smith in middle age, gone slightly to seed, a little disillusioned with the way things have turned out, and you could have Liddle. He's no longer a revolutionary, but he's still worshipping at the altar of old Labour. The trouble is that Liddle, champion of the working classes, appears to be stuck in the early 1960s, when he was a boy and his mother flirted with the National Front and hated Jews, pakis were pakis, poofs were poofs and women knew their place. And no matter how often he says it's great that we've moved on, you can't help feeling he's half in love with that world. Perhaps it's because it allows him to stick two fingers up at the bien-pensants and their overly policed, politically correct language. At times, it's hard to know where the provocateur ends and the man begins.

It's amazing how often you refer to "bien-pensants", I say. "Yes," he replies with a naughty-school-boy grin. "I use it too often. It's longer than 'cunt', but how do you describe them otherwise? I don't want to describe them as lefties. They are largely London metropolitan types, who espouse values that are in fact a consequence of their material wealth but that they pass off as being enlightened liberal values. It's an elite that's ever more aloof from the country, and doesn't understand its aspirations, doesn't understand its gripes. And they are inclined to dismiss them as racist."

He talks about his return to London as a young man (he was born in Bermondsey, hence his allegiance to Millwall) to study at LSE and how shocked he was to encounter students who were so posh and so privileged and just so bloody ... liberal. Before that he had considered himself middle-class (his father ended up as a tax inspector, his mother worked at the then DHSS). But not any more. "The gap between my family and the poorest family in Middlesbrough was tiny, and the gap between my family and the London lot was just enormous. And that difference has got bigger and bigger and bigger."

I'm smiling, and it narks him. "I'm surprised you're not seething about it. Why aren't you seething? You're a fucking northerner. You should be seething. I read your stuff, I don't see you seethe very often," he shouts.

The reason I'm smiling, I say, is because you didn't just become part of this liberal elite, you set its agenda. "At the Today programme? Hahaha!" Yes, I say, you couldn't have been more bien-pensant if you'd tried. "On the Today programme, you must be joking!" Oh no, he says, he challenged the orthodoxies all right. He mentions that he broadcast the first piece suggesting Burnley and Oldham were becoming no-go areas because of racial conflict. "And the only politicians who were banging on about this at the time, it pains me to say, were the British National Party." Why does it pain you? "Because I don't like them very much."

But he concedes perhaps he did compromise himself at the BBC. "The sad answer is that, to a degree, I connived. The hair was cut short, the views were put on hold a bit. I got on with the people on the Today programme, of whom I think 80% were public school when I joined. You know, I'm clubbable. By the time I became editor, it had really, really started to fucking gall me that that's what the BBC at its top level was like, and that's how its views were formed."

What does he think 16-year-old Citizen Liddle would make of Selfish, Whining Monkeys. "I think the first reaction would have been that it was reactionary. And the second was that, yeah, actually some of it's right, isn't it?"

The thing is, he says, he was never a proper revolutionary. Sure, his band gigged at the Socialist Workers Party's summer school in Skegness, but he didn't really think that they'd turn over capitalism by arming the workers. "My girlfriend who was in the SWP said: 'You're a rightwing bastard at heart, aren't you?' The truth is I was very old-fashioned Labour. Blue Labour."

This is why he gets so riled when the commentariat label him rightwing. There's Self, for starters. "He could find nothing in my book to support his claims of bigotry. Nothing. The only quote he came up with is that at one point I called someone a hard-faced ex-Soviet babe. The review wasn't predicated on the book at all, it was predicated on, 'We know the cunt's a bigot, so I'll do him on that'. Bizarre. Well-written though," he says admiringly.

It's not surprising people think that, I say – you are a complicated mix. "No, I'm not," he bellows. "YOU shouldn't think I am." Why not? "Because you know the background. You know the immigration from eastern Europe in the last few years has hit the poorer sections of society. I'm not in favour of the free movement of labour and capital. It's a fuckin' down-the-line Marxist line to take. When I go outside London, they say, 'Well, that's not a controversial thing to say, why don't you go further?'"

What do they mean by that? He looks abashed. "Well, you're going to hear some racism then. But the racism would be a consequence of frustration rather than animus I still think. The real animus is directed to the people who allowed it to happen. That's why Ukip got its vote."

Would he be attracted to Ukip? "God no! You couldn't get a more anti-working-class party than Ukip. The problem with Ukip is that I suspect at its heart it is pro-immigration. It was set up for small businessmen! Petit bourgeois."

He challenges me to find one bigoted thing in the book. Well, you tend to define people by their ethnicity or sexuality, such as, "The homosexual David Starkey … talking ... out of his arsehole." "If I'd said 'gay' would you have objected?" It's irrelevant either way, I say. "I don't believe you."

And what's all that about children being unhappier because most mothers now work? "Yes, but I also say the move of women into the workforce is an unequivocally good thing. GOOD THING. But it's very difficult to say it creates another problem without cunts like you saying you want them to move back into the home. What am I meant to do, not say it? Because it's true."

Anyway, he says, what about the racism, where's the evidence? There is the bit where you talk about your parents and say, "I don't possess their views about wogs, or at least not all of them." Exactly, he says – he doesn't share all of them! He knocks back the glass of wine, and pours us another. "D'you know I was the third person in Middlesbrough to join Rock Against Racism?"

I ask if he was a gobby child. "God, yes. Gobby, endlessly, irritatingly so. Too much so. Still I have a tendency to speak before I have made …" – he smiles and considers his words – "... a long and considered assessment of the arguments on each side. And who it might offend."

If he could apologise to one person he's offended, who would it be? "Harriet Harman," he says instantly. "It was a Spectator piece. 'Harriet Harman – would you?' I was trying to parody laddish sexism. I didn't think how it would affect her. For the first four days after, I was in a state of denial. 'I'm just joking, don't you understand?' I try to get away with things too often by saying that. It's a flaw." In the book he bemoans the fact that today's materialistic generation don't understand the virtue of deferred gratification. I tell him I couldn't help thinking of the infamous story of him making an excuse to leave his honeymoon with his first wife early to be with his mistress, Monckton. He grimaces.

"It didn't quite happen like that. That was 11 years ago, and I don't want to hurt my ex-wife or my current wife. I'm not at liberty to talk about that any more."

Have you changed since then? "Yeah, the laddishness has gone."

A taxi is waiting for Liddle to take him to the studios of Russia Today, where he is promoting the book. I ask if I can go with him. Yes, of course, he says welcomingly. "It's very cheap to try to get me pissed then try to talk about my divorce," he says convivially. "It's what you'd do to Cheryl Cole for fuck's sake! I mean, I'd sleep with you, but I wouldn't actually tell you things!" I take it as a compliment.

He speed smokes a fag while hunting down the cab. "Excuse me mate, are you for Rod Liddle?"

"No, I'm waiting for someone else." "Oh fuck mate, sorry." Despite the profanities, he's ever so polite.

I ask if he misses Today. God yes, he says. "It was the most intellectually challenging thing I've done, but I also miss working with a team. There's something solipsistic and insular about sitting at home and writing a column." They were wonderful days, he says, even if he was bossing the bien-pensants.

In 2010, there were rumours that Liddle was going to be made editor of the Independent. But then he got into another spot of bother. He was exposed for posting controversial comments on the Millwall fans forum under his moniker MonkeyMFC. He insists they were taken out of context. What about saying black people have lower IQs than white people? "It's true that 97% of intelligence tests put whites 7% ahead of black Africans, and that we're behind Asians and particularly east Asians. And I then said there's a greater division in races than between races. And you can't trust any of them because they're culturally determined. I'm merely being accurate."

Didn't you wish you'd not done it? "No. Never. Absolutely not. I thought about my mates at Millwall Online, God I respect them so much more than these other people, these ghastly fucking people." Who are the ghastly people? He mentions a journalist he had a spat with about it, but struggles to remember his name. "You know, the one who's married to the Labour MP, the rather foxy bitch …"

We're back in his cab, heading towards the station where he'll get a train back to Kent. He talks about how he doesn't go to church as often as he should, but how he thinks he's a better man than he used to be – more true to himself, less compromised, less selfish. "I am more like I was when I was 16, except pessimistic. That rebelliousness at 16 was always a rose-tinted rebelliousness, because one thought that things could get better, but by the time you're 54, it's more difficult to think that, isn't it?"

No, not necessarily, I say. Actually, he says, he's not as angry as he portrays himself in the book. In the final chapter, he apologises for all the negativity. "To be in your 50s is discombobulating," he writes, "it gnaws at the psyche and maybe warps one's vision."

We part company at King's Cross. "Good luck with it, mate," he says. "Just write he's still a cunting bigot …" I get out of the car first. "I'm not, though," he shouts after me.