Henry interested me, so I asked if he could tell me about his career. I even asked if I could record the conversation:  “Would it bother you?” I said.

“No. If I become senile they will probably send some officials to sit with me and make sure I do not burble secrets. But I am not quite senile yet — and very well trained.” 

“I was a backroom boy”, said Henry.

I recorded the interview. Here are some of the things he told me, carefully avoiding the detail of the teams or units he worked in.

Henry saw active service in Malaya in the 1950’s, dealing with a communist insurgency. He told me about the tribe called the Semai. They were known to be a peaceable pastoral tribe who always fled rather than fought, never beat their children. But when recruited by the British they turned into savage soldiers, indeed enthusiastic killers. “You could say that at times they became possessed of a kind of bloodlust, which shocked some of us. Yet when they returned to their society they became gentle and peaceable again.”

“I learned something very important from that experience,” he said. “A nation’s culture can change. It’s the story it tells about itself. In many ways it determines attitudes and behaviour.”

His military career must have evolved away from active service into some kind of policy role. He admired a man called Tizard, who argued, shortly after the second world war, that Britain would never again be a world power, must recognise that and adapt to the new reality. Its best option was to join with other European nations with similar histories. Together they would comprise an economic unit similar in size to the US and the Soviet Union.

A small group of civil servants believed in this, passionately, he said, but the politicians did not want to know. “Indeed, it was regarded by many as treachery.”

Britain lost the opportunity to lead the way and allowed a small entity called the European Economic Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) to create the kernel of the European Union.

But from the late 1960’s it was obvious Britain was falling behind, while Germany had recovered magnificently from wartime devastation. “You just had to count the number of washing machines and refrigerators per every thousand inhabitants in France. British-made cars were a byword for unreliability. Everything we did as a country was a kind of default solution, lacking inspiration or vision. We built dreary houses, read about our royal family and hoped our country would win the World Cup again. The country was depressed. Hugo Young, the best writer on all this, speaks of ‘the incubus of past glories and future fantasies’.”

That was the moment the “Europeans” saw their chance.

He spoke admiringly of Edward Heath who took the country into what was then the European Economic Community.  “But even today Ted Heath is accused of betraying the people by not telling the whole truth about our entry into the European Union. Was there a degree of necessary deception? Is that always the case because geopolitical choices always have to be domesticated if they are put to the people? Yes, probably. But there remains another better story about Europe that has never been told…”

“However the moment had passed when politicians could say: we will join together as nations and our country will aim to play a leading role…..”

Afterwards he said he had enjoyed being interviewed and maybe he would start a little blog about politics. “The Official Secrets Act does not stop me saying what I think now I am out of the service. Maybe I have lived with secrecy too long.”

Later, I wondered about the things he was not allowed to talk about. High level speeches that were shelved? Secret agreements between the great powers? Minutes from officials that were suppressed? I remember him saying that Hugo Young, while researching his book, was “probably told as much as anyone will be allowed to know for a long while yet…”

I got a second-hand copy of “This Blessed Plot” and began to read it. I read about Henry Tizard and what he said: “If we continue to behave like a Great Power, we shall soon cease to be a great nation”.

He said that in 1949, in a minute, as an adviser to The Ministry of Defence.