GW: They're brave people to take on the job because they'll be more than professors of studies — they become rallying points for information. For the sake of argument, if you're a professor of Israel Studies in, say, Manchester and a medical student comes to you and says, "Is it true that you're poisoning all the wells?" he'd say no, it's not true, but I tell you what is true — the number of outpatients at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem is greater for Arabs than for Jews. And I think this kind of information will make an enormous difference.  

AR: And what has happened to you, politically, since '67? Obviously you sit as a cross-bencher, but where would you feel your loyalties in British politics lie?

GW: Today I would with some reluctance vote for the Conservatives. I say with some reluctance because I disapprove of their European policy — that's the only thing. Otherwise they're very nice individual people. I have a high regard for Michael Gove, and for Pauline Neville-Jones, and what I know of George Osborne, who I've met a few times, I like very much. I distrust the foreign policy of William Hague, who is a highly intelligent man, but I don't know Cameron. But basically I think I would choose them rather than the other side. 

My view is this: whatever opinion we may have held on Europe, all of us, looking into the future — into the 21st century, not to the next election, to 2030, '40, '50 — it requires a concentration of America, Europe and Russia to hold their own against the giants of the East. Not to confront and gang up against them, but trade with them prosperously and peacefully.

AR: By "giants of the East", you mean obviously China and India in an economic sense.

GW: In every sense!

AR: But do you also, with regard to Islam and Islamic fundamentalism, see Russia as key to the defence of Western civilisation against that?

GW: Yes, I see Russia as the eastern flank of the Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman world. When I go and see the Mariinsky Theatre, or talk to its director Valery Gergiev, or read some of the scholarly books that have come out of Russia, I say that these people are our cousins.

AR: Are you disappointed by Putin's revanchism?

GW: I am working now in my institute on a project called Ameurus, America-Europe-Russia. It's a long-term thing, and it's a triangular group, a standing committee of people who say, "To reason doesn't mean to appease, we don't offer the other cheek, we're fully aware of what is being done badly by Russia, and fully aware of what was the bad past after the implosion of the Soviet regime, but we have to gradually, by reasoning, get them to be where we are friendly, where a partnership for peace between the Russian forces and Nato is not an empty phrase but a reality, and where there is a modicum of human rights." I'm not going into the details of whether they should copy our institutions of democracy, and they have different traditions. As long as they have no Sharia and they have no Lubyanka — that is what matters to me. Not whether they have this or that system of democratic election. But I do believe this is the future and we have to be very, very careful and therefore Europe has to be united.

AR: There's a great nobility, it seems to me, in a man of 90 to be looking forward to what you call "the long term", to 40 or 50 years in the future.

GW: It's the only way I can think. The older I am, the more I think of the future. First of all I think of my grandchildren, and secondly I can't afford to sit back because I won't be there, but I can therefore think about it. I'm only interested in long-term things; I'm not interested in elections in Newcastle and so on. If I were 30 years younger I would come to you and Niall Ferguson and start a thing called the "Three Ms" — the Movement of the Militant Middle. The "Three Ms" would have the same kind of vigour and passion and fanaticism for the middle ground — for what we call the Graeco-Roman, Judao-Christian thing — that the extremists have for their ideals.