Long life: While I won’t vote for the EU withdrawal, part of me hopes the quitters will win

I sometimes think that, by the time I die, my entire life will have been blighted by sterile, unresolved arguments about Europe. I have to admit that the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 made little impression on me at the time; but I was only 11 years old, Britain wasn’t involved in it, and I had no idea in any case what it was all about. It was, of course, the precursor to the European Economic Community, created in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome; but by then I was 17 and thought it sounded a very good idea, for its main purpose appeared to be to prevent for ever the recurrence of a European war. Having been lucky as a baby to survive a German bomb attack that blew out the bottom two floors of an apartment block beside St Paul’s Cathedral in which I was sleeping in my parents’ flat on the fourth floor, this seemed like a very good idea, and I reproached my country for its snooty attitude towards such a noble ambition.

I was also beginning to feel rather ‘European’, having studied German at Eton under John le Carré (Mr Cornwell, as we boys then knew him) and, during 1958, the year in which the EEC came into existence, spent six months in Vienna practising my German before going up to Cambridge to read it. Vienna was then a wretched city full of maimed war veterans and despised Hungarian refugees, its population only just beginning to recover from ten years of Allied — but especially Russian — occupation. And this confirmed me in my view that European integration, if it served to prevent war, would be well worth some sacrifice of national independence.

In 1960, as a student at Cambridge, I went to Berlin (a city split between east and west, but not yet by a wall) to attend a conference of young Britons and young West Germans.