What I had done was, of course, to them history. When I did it they were not born. Nothing wrong with history. We ignore it at our peril. It provides the roots for our country’s life as the roots do for the trees in St James’s Park. Nothing wrong, for that matter, with being a tribal elder if tribal memory can alert the tribe to the mistakes of the past so that, with a little bit of luck, it won’t repeat them in the future.

The task I have been given is "The UK, the EU and the World". A modest remit, as you will agree. Shakespeare’s Puck could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes. I have half the time but none of the magic. But, here goes.

The Conservative Party, of which I am not a member, was much criticised during the recent general election for banging on about the Euro instead of addressing bread and butter issues, like schools and hospitals. A front runner for the leadership, Mr Michael Portillo, has said that the Tories should stop talking about it because "we have become a pub bore on the subject". Hmmph!

Tribal memory recalls that when I was a lad in the 1930s, I used to visit Hitler’s Germany to improve my German and to gain my first experience of totalitarianism. One of my first domestic political memories was of Stanley Baldwin, who was reported as saying that if he had called for rearmament at the time he would have lost the 1935 election. Another vivid memory from those years is of a splendid lady with a yacht who sailed from port to port round our islands with lights blazing from the rigging bearing the device "Wake up, England". She was thought a tad eccentric by some, downright barmy by others. She was merely right, like Churchill.

This poses a dilemma for us, does it not? Of course bread and butter issues are important and people’s justified concerns must be dealt with. That is what politicians are for. But what about the future of our country? What about our liberties and our right to self-government? Is it not legitimate to talk about these things too? Is it not the responsibility of political leadership to alert the nation to the dangers ahead? Churchill did.

As a nation we pride ourselves on being pragmatists, rightly so. We deal sensibly with problems as they arise. Not like those foreigners, who are forever theorising and coming up with tiresome ideas.

But there is a downside to this admirable quality of ours. We tend to turn a blind eye to problems until they are almost beyond solution: the too little, too late syndrome. In my lifetime we have invented the just-in-time technique in politics long before it was introduced by manufacturing industry. In 1940 we had to experience the disasters of Dunkirk before we sent for Churchill. Forty years later we had to endure the miseries of the "winter of discontent" before we sent for Margaret Thatcher. Today, as the Congress for Democracy has long known, we face threats, different but hardly less serious, to our independence as a nation and to our liberties as subjects, but the Stanley Baldwin de nos jours frets about being a pub bore. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Who will assume the mantle of Churchill? A retirement job for William Hague, perhaps?

I shall not talk about the Euro. The case for an independent pound has been eloquently put by Roger Pincham. I would only add that to the Chancellor’s five bogus and subjective points should be added a sixth and genuine one, advanced by Roger Bootle in the Sunday Telegraph a couple of Sundays ago; and that is whether the Euro is any longer a thing worth joining anyhow. The markets have given it the thumbs down from the day of its invention. And we have the authority, if that is the right word, of the former President of the Commission, the egregious Jacques Santer - the one who was sacked, now metamorphosed into the Honourable Member for Luxembourg in the European Parliament - that the EU has lost its identity.

I would propose instead to concentrate during my fifteen minutes of fame on discussing a development which is no less a danger to our independence and to our role in the world and from which we are not protected by the people’s veto in a referendum. I refer to the ESDP and in particular to the proposal for a European army or Rapid Reaction Force.

Now there is everything to be said for Europe, after the end of the Cold War, bearing a larger share of the burden of western defence. Our American allies have been asking for it for decades and would welcome it if it were ever to materialise. Our Armed Forces have, rightly, been restructured to be ready for new and different dangers. All NATO allies have, understandably, taken a peace dividend in the form of reduced defence spending. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, if that were all that there was to it. But it is not all that there is to it, far from it.

Ever since Mr Blair went to St Malo and set this thing going with President Chirac, he and the President of France have had complementary but different agendas.  Mr Blair has chosen European defence as his route to the heart of Europe by outflanking the Euro. Mr Chirac has seized this golden opportunity offered on a plate by his friend Tony to achieve a French objective of long standing: autonomy from the United States in defence matters. France has long been semi-detached from NATO: this is her chance to cut loose. At Camp David before Christmas, Mr Blair assured President Bush that the European army would not undermine NATO. But our Prime Minister is Mr Facing-both-ways, pro-ESDP in Europe and pro-NATO in the United States.

What is happening, as we all know from the French Presidency report of November 2000, is that Europe is at present busy setting up a defence organisation separate from and in rivalry to NATO with de-coupling from NATO at the end of the road. Just as NATO has its Secretary-General, George Robertson - as decent a man as you could wish to meet in a day’s march - so ESDP has its High Representative, Mr Solana, whom I have not had the advantage of meeting. He was Lord Robertson’s predecessor at NATO and does not regard his new job as a demotion. Under Mr Solana are a plethora of committees of soldiers and civilians which exactly duplicate NATO’s committees and are designed to be autonomous from them.

There are, of course, enough phrases in the Presidency’s report to make Mr Blair’s assurances just about plausible. The European RRF is to operate only when NATO as a whole (i.e. the United States) does not wish to be involved. NATO assets will be used when Europe does not have the assets necessary for the tasks in hand: the so-called Petersburg tasks of peacekeeping, peacemaking etc. But the real purpose, as seen from east of Calais, is, in the immortal words of Romano Prodi, President of the Commission, to give the EU "the currency and the sword", the essential attributes of the future superstate. At least our European partners are open and honest about what they are up to. The only government which is not levelling with its people is the British government.

General Guthrie, the recently retired Chief of the Defence Staff, when asked when he thought the European RRF would be ready for operations, replied, "not in my lifetime". He is 62 and, so far as I know, in good health. I wish him long life and happiness, for the longer he lives, the longer it will take for the Euro-RRF to arrive. For that we should all be grateful. But for this Political Exercise without Troops the political damage has probably already been done. Mr Bush does not need Mr Blair’s assurances, for he has perfectly good sources of information of his own who will doubtless keep him up to speed with events. But we do know, from Mr Iain Duncan Smith’s contribution to the debate on the Queen’s Speech, that the President has asked that Europe should add value to NATO. That, on present form, is unlikely to happen: there is no increased budgetary provision. The Americans have asked that planning be done together. That has been refused.

Europe as a whole is therefore busy in adding to the trade disputes which it enjoys with our friendly superpower a whole new raft of military disputes. We have it on the authority of the Prime Minister of Sweden, who presided over the last European summit in Gothenburg, that Europe’s purpose was to combat America’s arrogant power. The mind boggles at such monumental folly. It has an arrogance all of its own.

One of the grosser misrepresentations repeated by the proponents of "ever closer union" is that if we do not go along with all these stupidities – economic, political and military – we shall be isolated. What rubbish. But Dr Goebbels has taught us tribal elders that a lie repeated often enough comes to be believed.

Fortunately this line of argument has been comprehensively destroyed by Sir John Coles, a former Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, in his admirable book, Making Foreign Policy. If, as he and I hope, we submit to no further integration with Brussels and, indeed, negotiate the repatriation of things like the Common Agricultural Policy, we would still in our own right be a leading member of all the really important institutions of the world. We shall still be a member of the United Nations and, of greater significance, a permanent member of the Security Council. We shall still be an important member of NATO, with all that means for our defence and alliance with the United States. We shall still be a member in our own right of the G7 group of industrial nations. We shall still be a leading member of the Commonwealth, with all its links to our natural friends in the English-speaking world. Membership of the World Bank and the IMF would still be ours. Some isolation.

Ironically enough, there is one major organisation in which we have no separate representation and that is the World Trade Organisation. There, because we are already subsumed in the Single Market, we are represented by the Commission. In trade matters we are no longer a sovereign nation. At Seattle, we were no longer a country. Of course, there is a lot of guff about the sharing of sovereignty. Under Qualified Majority Voting the UK has in fact 10 votes out of 87. So we have only ¹⁰/₈₇ of a say in what happens to them while they have ⁷⁷/₈₇ of a say in what happens to us. That does not seem a fair swap to me. At Nice we gaily abandoned another 40 or so vetoes.

The consequence in the WTO is frequent deadlock with the US and we are virtually powerless to do anything about it. Those who welcome deadlock have the votes. An excellent way out of the deadlock is there if we want to grasp it. It is to negotiate a trade agreement between the EU and NAFTA. The welcome sign is out in Washington. In fact the worthy Leon Brittan suggested it when he was one of our Commissioners in Brussels. The French promptly kicked it into touch and Sir Leon was unable to bring it back into play. As in Orwell’s Animal Farm: all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

Some of this might be tolerable if it rested on popular consent and if public accountability was taken seriously in Brussels. But the so-called "democratic deficit" grows with every loss of veto and every new QMV. Lip service is paid to the problem but nothing is done about it. The plain fact is that the cosy concentration of power in Brussels is agreeable to everyone there, for the énarques et hoc genus omne who run the show are not interested in democracy as we know it. Theirs is a top-down view: parliaments are there to support the executive, not to control it. Giving the Commission the sole power of initiative was Jean Monnet’s most successful wheeze, and he knew it.

For continental Europe operates a totally different political culture from our own. It is a top-down democracy run by and for the political élites. We have had a ringside view of it in action in the quasi-authoritarian response to the verdict of the Irish people on the Treaty of Nice: "Go and do it again, only do it properly next time", they said at Gothenburg. It reminded me of a cynical comment by a German communist dramatist, Bertolt Brecht, who once said famously, "Let us dismiss the people and elect another in their place". By all means let the people of continental Europe do things their way. But let us be clear on one point: that is not our way. We have no vocation for Europe and the heart of Europe is not a place where we belong.

Even our Ministers, of whatever party, are not immune to the corrupting influence of Brussels. Mr Robin Cook was a case in point. He went to the Foreign Office in 1997 with reluctance and a reputation for euro-scepticism. It did not take long for him to succumb to what the French call "la deformation professionnelle": "going native" is perhaps the nearest English equivalent. It is very agreeable to confer in secret with fourteen of your peers, without troublesome legislatures snapping at your heels. They are all very deferential to each other – so unlike life at home. I have known only one politician who did not succumb to this insidious form of brusselisation, and she was not popular east of Calais. But she got some of our money back, which must have been worth about £30 to £40 billion over the past twenty years. Good value, don’t you agree?

A final thought. In his splendid book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, a fellow tribal elder, Robert Conquest - perhaps the doyen of historians of the Soviet Union - ruminates on the tendency to authoritarianism on the European continent. His view is that the disasters of the twentieth century stem not so much from problems as from solutions, not from forces outside human control but from ideas and actions dictated by ideas. Looking to the future and to the many and varied dangers which are likely to confront us in the twenty-first century, he includes Europeanism among the list of potentially rogue ideologies which may prove dangerous, for in the attempt to impose ever-closer integration, often against the will of substantial sections of the individual nations involved, resentments are being stoked up which may one day lead to violence. For as he has observed: "We have learned that to give the state too much power is disastrous". One final quote: "Our natural links are over the open seas, to countries that emerged from a similar legal and political history".

I go along with that. I think that we took a wrong turning in 1973 when, according to the official records, Mr Heath’s instructions to our chief negotiator were: "Swallow the lot and swallow it now". We must recognise that we have no vocation for the sort of Europe that our continental partners clearly want to create. Let them get on with it. Let us make for the open seas and our cousins in the English-speaking world. Who can articulate that destiny for us? It is nearly too late, but someone could once again be just in time – or am I being a pub bore?