DH-A: Let me first say that I agree with Jay [PPR's nickname] that background and family are very important. We are old friends, although from different families, and I think we share certain emotions. But certainly his family brought to rural Yorkshire an outlook of culture and art that was completely alien to us until then. We regarded Sir Herbert Read [Piers's father] with a mixture of fascination and fear. But it certainly enriched our own family experience. Although mine wasn't entirely rural Yorkshire: my father being a soldier meant that we travelled and indeed lived in places like Egypt and Germany during my very early life, which has given me an internationalism which is sometimes not believed.

It is true that the EU was set up after the war, and was an effective step towards a profound reconciliation that has succeeded. But you cannot go on justifying an organisation on events of more than 60 years ago — it has to be refreshed. Today, we are more demanding in our choices and our ideals about democracy, and the EU is, in my view, incredibly old-fashioned: it is large, it is centralising, it is obsessed with harmonisation and it can't spend other people's money properly. It simply has to change and come up to date. And so it is completely valid that we should criticise it. Indeed, the Convention on which I sat for two years, to draw up the European constitution, was avowedly reformist, but it failed. It did not hand more powers back to people, it created more powers in the same institution which created the disillusionment in the first place. That is why it was rejected in all these national referendums. So I don't accept that we are trying to change the rules after we joined, it is time that the peoples of Europe were governed better, and more in accordance with their wishes.

PPR: I completely agree with you on that, and one of arguments in favour of the EU is — and you may not like to hear this as one of our MPs — is that Britain has been since the war a particularly badly governed country in almost any area you choose, whether it is education, health, energy or transport. The only things we are good at producing are unmarried mothers and broken families. In almost any other area we have done really badly. I would rather be well governed by a Dutch bureaucrat in Brussels than badly governed by a British civil servant.

DH-A: You would have been entirely at home in the British Empire then. I would have been on the side of the liberation movement, and you would have been this patrician imperialist. 

PPR: But you would agree, David, that we have been very badly governed?

DH-A: But we can do something about that, we can change government. And indeed I hope that we are about to change this one, and mistakes can be corrected, laws can be repealed. Tell me how many European laws have been repealed and how many decisive changes there have been in the EU because of the electors.