Chris Patten has been a member of the British cabinet, chairman of the Conservative Party, governor of Hong Kong, and he is now European Commissioner for External Affairs.

A bit of him thinks he has been a failure. This is because he has never held "high office" in Britain; he has never been, for instance, home secretary or foreign secretary or chancellor of the exchequer, the three highest posts in the British government below that of prime minister.

Indeed there is a sense of disappointment that he was never prime minister - he fences when asked if he would still like to be that. He is 57 this year and says he will retire from public life when he is 60.

He is one of the rare intellectuals in politics. He reads and reviews "important" books, he is much prized as a speaker and lecturer and he has that sense of gravitas that goes with being intellectual, being in politics and being at the core of the establishment.

Actually, the establishment of the Conservative Party nowadays has no time for him and vice versa (he says, however, he would still vote Conservative for "tribal" reasons.)

We met on Thursday at 7.30 a.m. in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. We sat at separate tables for breakfast, for he was to meet Maurice Hayes, a co-member of the Northern Ireland Policing Commission, who failed to show up until we were just about to leave for the Killiney Court Hotel at 8.45 a.m.

We travelled in a British embassy Jaguar and, en route, did the interview. Apart from the British embassy driver, we were accompanied by his private assistant, Paul Power, who is from Kilmeedy, Co Limerick.