Chris Patten: Duncan Smith must get everybody on board to revive Tories as a political force

Discussing British politics in the incongruous setting of a tiny aeroplane flying back from Amman to Brussels, Chris Patten cleverly uses a graceful tribute to his (Labour) fellow British EU commissioner to make a telling point about what his own party should have done after two catastrophic election defeats, but hasn't.

"One of the contributions Neil Kinnock made to the revival of Labour in the Eighties was to get everybody on board, left, right and centre – except for the loonies – and that was a very important first step, not least because the front bench immediately looked rather more talented as a result."

The unspoken message is clear: a sharp contrast between Mr Kinnock's 1983 Shadow Cabinet – which included Denis Healey, Peter Shore and Roy Hattersley – and Iain Duncan Smith's 2002 equivalent, in which heavyweight ex-ministers of the Tory centre and left are notably absent.

Mr Patten insists he wishes Mr Duncan Smith well "because the country needs in the short term a good opposition and I hope it will turn into a good Conservative government while I'm still sentient". But he takes sharp issue with the present Tory leader's emphasis, in his party conference speech, on his backbench rebellion against John Major's government over the Maastricht treaty.

"The rebellion against Maastricht was part of the Conservative Party's political suicide. And the problem about political suicides, as Churchill once put it, is that you live to regret it. I'm afraid that is what the Conservative Party is now doing. I think that it's one thing to say we should forget about the past and move on but it doesn't make much sense in doing that to remind people of an issue which split the Conservative Party and destroyed the last Conservative government."

If things had turned out differently, it's just possible that Chris Patten might be in Iain Duncan Smith's place instead of the hard-travelling post of EU external affairs commissioner. And as one of the great political might-have-beens, Chris Patten head-to-head with Tony Blair ranks pretty high.

For while both he and Mr Blair are pro-European, Atlanticist, and sharply focused on the electoral middle ground, their approaches are very different. Mr Patten for example, has drawn fire for criticising aspects of US foreign policy at a time when Mr Blair is attacked for following it too slavishly.

"Maybe it's a professional deformation of mine to think that serious arguments can be had in public without falling out with friends. But I'm not going to abandon it."

Mr Patten acknowledges that if, as it seems, Mr Blair has helped to persuade the Americans to take the UN route on Iraq "then he's done a good job". But he adds: "One has to be extremely careful in thinking that the only way to conduct disagreements is in private. The danger is that sometimes that leaves the field open to those who are putting a position with which you strongly disagree. There is a significant campaign in the think-tanks, newspapers, academic journals and on Capitol Hill which is largely unilateralist in objective and tone. If you are a European politician is it unwise to take on those arguments? If you don't take them on, among other things, you let down people in the United States who don't agree with them."

He takes a sideswipe at the idea in some hawkish Washington circles that the key to an Israel-Palestine peace lies with war on Iraq, "the notion that the road to Jerusalem lies through Baghdad, that the best way of making the region moderate is knocking out Saddam Hussein. I have never found a political leader in an Arab state who thinks that".

As a strong multilateralist he makes clear his own preference – over the widely canvassed transitional plan for the US to administer Iraq post-Saddam – for a UN-mandated operation. This would be "more substantial, more overt and more long run" than the one which has brought Hamid Karzai to power in Afghanistan and sustained him there. While "we would be kidding ourselves that this would lead as night follows day to Jeffersonian democracy, if I were an American policymaker I would certainly prefer the UN to be taking the heat rather than an American general".

So to the euro, on which he also clearly believes that Mr Blair has been quieter than he should have been. He is confident that there will be British entry before the end of the next parliament but "whether or not there is going to be a referendum in this parliament you have to be a psychotherapist to answer. I am not quite sure I understand the cautious intellectual processes which are holding the leading members of the Government back from at least starting the debate in a more vigorous way."

Of course it would be "profoundly foolish" for Britain to enter the euro if it was bad for her economy. "I happen to think the economic arguments are at the moment more balanced than some people suggest but that by and large we'd be better off inside the eurozone than outside." But the overwhelming political case "goes right to the heart of our ability to punch our weight in the European Union".

Mr Patten points to the recent spat between Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and the UK permanent representative to the EU, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, over the latter's internal warning that important decisions were being taken by the eurozone ministers minus Britain. He says that such exclusion is bound to happen more without British entry. Even in Valéry Giscard D'Estaing's convention on Europe, where "it's being noticed we are having a number of fundamental arguments about where Europe is going. But I fear that there is still a suspicion that we're semi-detached from the enterprise and because of that it's more difficult for us to win those points."

One of those arguments is over Anglo-French plans for a full-time ex-prime ministerial EU President, about which Mr Patten is deeply sceptical. So does Henry Kissinger's famous question about "what is Europe's telephone number?" go unanswered?

"Henry Kissinger's question is, with respect, a very silly question. Since you could just as frequently have asked it about Washington over the past 20 years as you could about Europe.

"Of course you need to ensure the EU's agenda is driven forward. But would the existence of a permanent president of the council have ensured greater and more enthusiastic implementation of the stability pact? Is it the lack of a full-time president of the council which is the problem there? No, it's political will."

You are only a few syllables into the inevitable question about whether he could ever see himself returning to the Tory front line when, seeing it coming, Mr Patten barks a stern "No." Yes, his departure from Brussels by 2005 could just coincide with the rebirth of a broad-church post-EMU Conservative Party. But "with the possible exception of Ken Clarke, I don't think it's a 60-year-old's game to revive the Conservative Party."

He has other things to do, he says. He would like one more public service job. He would like another academic role beside his chancellorship of Newcastle University, which he much enjoys. He wants to devote more time to his three-acre garden in France. He wants to learn Italian. He has two books in mind, one of them an account of "what we mean by the West nowadays". And finally there are books to read as well as write: "I am 58 and I've never read Madame Bovary. It's a scandal."