The former first minister of Northern Ireland, like the Ukrainian president, knows what it is like to enter talks with sworn enemies, suppressing personal feelings of revulsion for the benefit of present and future generations. This is a woman whose school bus was bombed by the IRA, and whose father survived being shot at their home by terrorists, yet she attended the funeral of Martin McGuinness, the former IRA commander who lionised her father’s would-be killer.

She is full of admiration for the way Zelensky has conducted himself, and in recent media appearances she has preferred to offer reassurance, rather than advice, when asked what she would do in his situation. “Compromising isn’t weakness,” she says, “and I think he has shown that. In fact, it might lead to a position which is more beneficial for you.

“There’s always going to be a compromise, which is always very difficult for your supporters, because they want you to get 100 per cent, but in Northern Ireland if you get 80 per cent you’ve done really well and if you get 40 per cent you haven’t done so well but at least you’ve got something. And I think that’s probably going to be the same for Zelensky.”

We meet in the tea room of the House of Lords, sitting next to a window with a magnificent view of the Thames. Foster, in a stylish printed dress, sips a glass of sparkling water as she enthuses about her new life as a working peer (she was created Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee in 2022).

Having never been an MP, the 54-year-old is clearly enjoying the novelty of life in Westminster, where she typically spends three days each week, away from her family home near the border town of Enniskillen. “I’m really enjoying this stage of my life,” she says, “because, whilst I love being here and participating in more politics at a UK level, I’m also enjoying the fact that I have more space for my family.

“My mum’s 91, still very much with us, thankfully, so I can enjoy her. My children are now 18, 22 and 24 and, God love them, have grown up with Mum being in the public eye, so it’s nice for them that it’s not so much like that now. And my poor beleaguered husband as well!”

Home life is something Foster wasn’t often asked about when she was in the depths of negotiations over Brexit, or power sharing in Stormont, or internal divisions in the DUP. She rather resents the fact that the public think politicians should not be entitled to any sort of work-life balance. “I see people making comments about Kemi Badenoch,” she says, “and I say to myself, ‘Yeah, but Kemi has kids, and she needs to balance that’. And that’s really important, because, if you can manage childcare, birthday parties, what’s happening at school, medical appointments, and then hold down the other job as well, you can do anything. You have to be incredibly organised.”

Foster’s public image is of a tough, serious woman with a voice that could be deployed as a foghorn if necessary, but the reality is rather different. She laughs a lot during our interview, chats about her love of BBC sitcom Amandaland and family drama Gilmore Girls, and tells me how much she wants to go and see the new Bridget Jones film. She is also a long-time fan of Strictly Come Dancing, but insists she wouldn’t go on it if asked. “No, no,” she says. Why not? “The curse of Strictly!”

Female leaders have to work harder to earn respect, she believes, and being the first female leader of Northern Ireland was especially hard: “We’re still the most conservative part of the United Kingdom,” she says. “I mean, people used to ask me about how my ‘poor children’ were, as if they were in fear for them. Who was looking after them? That sort of thing.”

Growing up in the 1970s, Foster had Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II as role models, which had a “huge impact” on what she saw as possible for women, and when she stepped down as first minister in 2021 she received letters from young nationalist females who said they hadn’t realised how important it was to have a woman leader until she left.

She was leader at a time when Theresa May was prime minister and Nicola Sturgeon was first minister in Scotland, but she was the only one having to juggle the demands of leadership with motherhood.

Did she get on with Sturgeon? “Does anybody?” she laughs. “I mean, she was a very particular lady, very driven, she wasn’t particularly warm towards me and I think that was because I am a Unionist and she is a separatist, she was political to her very fingernails. I don’t damn her for that. But there was no small talk.”

Unlike Sturgeon (or Theresa May for that matter), Foster could chat all day, and beams with pride as she talks about her children. “The lovely thing is, the kids have all done very well. They’ve all got different interests. The boys both play rugby for the local club in Enniskillen, which is lovely for their father because he’s big into rugby.” Her eldest child, Sarah, is a lawyer in Belfast, following her mother’s original career, while George is finishing a Master’s in electrical engineering and youngest child Ben is doing his A-levels.

Foster’s husband Brian has just retired from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary this year they plan to treat themselves to a cruise. Spare time at weekends is spent walking in the Fermanagh countryside with her family and their energetic fox red Labrador, Max, whose picture she can’t resist showing me on her phone.

It is impossible to look at Foster’s impressive career without seeing it through the lens of her extraordinary childhood. On January 4 1979 her father John Kelly, a full-time policeman in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), survived a murder attempt at the family smallholding, when he was shot by IRA gunmen. He was lucky, she believes, because his would-be assassins were lying in wait at the entrance to the farm, presumably to shoot him at close quarters as he returned home from work, but he was not working that day. Instead, they fired at him as he went to put his cattle indoors for the night. Foster traces a finger across her forehead as she describes how one bullet hit him at an angle but did not penetrate his skull. He was also hit in the face by shrapnel from another bullet that missed.

“He crawled into the house, bleeding,” she recalls. “He brought us all upstairs to my parents’ bedroom – myself, my two siblings, my mother and my grandmother – we were all lying on the floor. I’m sure my father was thinking, ‘Will they come into the house, will they come and finish it all off?’”

The house was equipped with distress flares triggered by a button in the bedroom, to summon help even if the phone lines had been cut, and the security forces arrived seven or eight minutes later. She says that “seemed like a long time”, which to an eight-year-old fearing death is impossible to imagine. The family had to move house, but it took several weeks and in the meantime their extra security consisted of a German shepherd dog provided by the police. Foster would hide under her bed covers at night in the hope that if the terrorists returned they would not notice her.

For her father, “a real community police officer”, the hardest thing to cope with was the knowledge that someone had betrayed him, that “the IRA had gained intelligence from someone who was a neighbour, someone had set him up”.

On Remembrance Sunday 1987 a former prefect at Foster’s school, Enniskillen Collegiate Grammar, was killed in the Enniskillen bombing, then, in June 1988, Foster was on a school bus when an IRA time bomb exploded on it. The target was the driver, Ernie Wilson, a part-time soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment. Mercifully no one was killed, but several girls were wounded, and Foster escaped injury by pure chance.

“It was about a 12 or 13-mile journey to school,” she says. “So if you sat by the window you could rest your head and have a nap. The sister of one of my dear friends was sitting next to me and I asked if I could have the window seat. She was sitting in the aisle seat and she got the full blast of it coming down the aisle.” Both she and the bus driver are still alive, but tragically, the driver’s son later took his own life, plagued by the belief that he could have stopped the bombing if he had checked under the bus before his father set off.

“A lot of people who weren’t directly killed by a bomb took their own life or suffered for the rest of their days,” says Foster. “The huge toll of the Troubles will probably never be properly documented. Families of RUC members went through so much. Kids couldn’t even talk about their dads being in the police.”

Was the pursuit of a political career her way of coping with what she had been through, perhaps? “It could well be,” she says. “It’s one of those sliding door moments, you don’t know what might have happened otherwise.”

Moments before our interview Foster had noticed on social media that the Sinn Fein branch in Fermanagh, her home county, had organised a commemorative walk to mark the 39th anniversary of the death of Seamus McElwain, a convicted IRA murderer. McElwain, who was shot dead by the SAS in 1986 after escaping from the Maze prison, was suspected of involvement in at least 10 murders. He was also thought to be one of the men who tried to kill Foster’s father.

For the only time during our nearly two-hour conversation, Foster struggles to keep her emotions in check as she shows me the post on a Facebook page. “He was a psychopathic killer,” she says. “And yet Sinn Fein continue to glorify him. What message does that send to young people now?

“They are saying that these people were heroes, but they were murderers, killing their neighbours. Michelle O’Neill [the Sinn Fein vice-president and current First Minister of Northern Ireland] claims to be the First Minister for everybody in Northern Ireland – you can’t do that.”

Nationalists, she says, “always like to portray Unionist leaders as not being interested in reconciliation. That’s not true. I made some moves for which I took quite a bit of heat.” In particular, she attended the funeral of Martin McGuinness in March 2017, even though he had delivered a eulogy at McElwain’s funeral. It’s not hard to see why she regards next month’s celebratory walk for him as a slap in the face.

Which brings us back to the situation in Ukraine. She watched the Trump/Zelensky row in the Oval Office with the same mixture of horror and disbelief as the rest of us, and notes that “at the moment we have an awful lot of macho men in leadership positions”. One of them, of course, is Trump, and when I ask if she has met him she whips out her mobile phone to show me a picture of herself chatting to him at a St Patrick’s Day breakfast in Washington in 2019.

It was not a profound conversation. “My impression was that he didn’t have much interest in what was going on with St Patrick’s Day,” she says. “The Open golf championship was in Northern Ireland that year so I suggested he should come over. He didn’t though.”

She thinks Zelensky will have to accept that Crimea is gone, and possibly other parts of Ukraine too, and says that he will need to decide where his red lines are and make absolutely sure no one else knows what they are, “otherwise they are going to go to your red line immediately”. To those who have criticised Zelensky, she asks “What more could he have done?” and says the difficulty for him in the coming negotiations will be having the “stamina and resilience to keep going” when progress is undermined by events.

She believes his promise to step down if he becomes the barrier to peace “took a lot of courage” and shows true leadership. Foster’s one front-line career came to an end in 2021 when she was ousted in a no-confidence vote by her own party, many of whom believed she had become too moderate on issues including Covid regulations and the post-Brexit border in the Irish Sea. She insists she is not bitter about what happened, partly because she would be the loser if she was, and embraced the opportunities her unexpected freedom afforded.

One of her current roles is as a parliamentary adviser to the Friends of the British Overseas Territories, which include the Chagos Islands. She still believes the Government’s handover of the archipelago, which includes the Anglo-American military base on Diego Garcia, can be stopped. “The treaty still has to come to Parliament,” she says. “There are enough of us in the Commons and Lords who will very much be looking at the detail of the treaty, Labour as well.

“The British Overseas Territories, for me, are probably more critically important now than they have ever been, with the Chinese influence and the Russian influence around the world, because all these strategic places across the globe are under our control. And we’re just going to give them away?” She believes that naivety on the part of the Government has played a part in the decision, in the same way that Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves fell for the suggestion from civil servants that they should cut the winter fuel allowance to save money.

“There was such a long period of negotiations when the Tories were in office, and then the minute the Labour Party came in, it’s almost as if the officials said, ‘Oh this is all done, all you need to do is sign’. Have they ever thought about the question of why did the Tories not sign it off?”

She also believes that Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying Bill – which she bitterly opposes – can be stopped. “I think the Lords will, pray God, reject it,” she says, “because there’s a lot of us who don’t agree with it in principle and a lot of people concerned about the safeguards.” She thinks changes already made to the Bill, including replacing judges with expert panels to sign off assisted deaths, show how ill thought out it is, and can see it falling apart as a result.

The Lords, she says, will give it a level of scrutiny it has not had so far, thanks to the “thoughtful debates” that happen there, which are its great strength, she says. Having seen the Lords from within, she thinks the Government is being “cruel” in kicking out hereditary peers as part of ongoing reforms, believing they should be made life peers if they are making an important contribution, and notes that Labour is replacing them with people who are “either from north London or trade unionists”. She adds: “It does smack a bit of class war.”

Another of her roles is as chairman of Intertrade UK, which promotes trade between the mainland and Northern Ireland and which she hopes will help challenge customs arrangements that currently mean there is a border in the Irish Sea. It was a mistake, she says, to rule out a customs border with the Republic of Ireland during Brexit negotiations, as “there has always been a border”, and she wants to see a revival of the sort of technological solutions to cross-border trade that were once championed by Boris Johnson and others but which never came to pass.

As we end our conversation Foster tells me she is heading to the airport to catch a flight home, which leads to a conversation about the standards of service on different airlines. I suggest standards have gone down among cabin crew, which she disagrees with, and I cheekily suggest “that’s probably because they’re frightened of you”.

“Why does everyone always say that about me?” she replies, only half feigning offence. After discovering just what good company she is, the only answer I can offer is that they simply don’t know her.