We're delighted to be joined by joined by the external affairs commissioner of the EU, Chris Patten, who's been taking a look at the papers. Before having a word or two about your week, which is a fascinating one, what have you picked out in the papers?

Well, the first thing I picked out is this panel of experts, great international strategists, and it talks about how they see the crisis developing. What I think all of us should feel is quite encouraging is that none of them actually have anything particularly interesting to say that everybody else isn’t saying, but I think what comes through is a recognition that the military element in what is going to happen is important, it's going to demand professionalism and courage of a very high order, but it's only part of what is going to be a very, very long campaign, and the diplomacy, the political efforts, the international co-operation required are going to be unprecedented, or have to be at an unprecedented level if we're actually going to win and live in a rather more comfortable age.

And Don Rumsfeld said this week that, you know, part of that campaign, that war, that battle, you know, would be people like Customs officers and… across the board.

Absolutely right. We actually have to work at every level. We have to work at financing and dealing with the money they get - and incidentally, one reason I think why this brave Irish journalist has been killed is because he was probably getting quite close to the links between paramilitary terrorism and sheer crookedness - but we have to deal with a number of issues. This has to be multi-faceted. One thing which Roger Scruton, who's very often a largely impenetrable philosopher, says in an article in The Mail On Sunday as though it was a striking insight is that people will give their lives for their country, but not for an abstraction such as the EU or UN. Of course, that's entirely correct - the primary source of political loyalty is the nation state, but I think everybody recognises that we have to work much more closely together in the UN, in Europe, when we're going to deal with a problem like this, and it doesn’t weaken our links with our oldest allies the United States - I guess we've never been as close to the United States since the last war as we are now, but we recognise that we need to do more with the UN and need to do more with Europe as well.

Do you suspect that there will actually be, from the other 14 EU nations… there will actually be troops fighting from those nations, or will it just be logistical?

I think it'll be a mixture. When we talked about it, when heads of government talked about it last week, they agreed that some would provide direct military assistance, some would want to provide other sorts of assistance, so I think it'll vary each according to his means, but there's no question of the solidarity of the European Union and of the applicant countries to join the European Union behind the campaign to defeat terrorism once and for all, a recognition that these atrocities which, according to the Sunday Telegraph, have meant that over 10,000 kids are now without a mother or father, that these atrocities won’t happen again in the future.

And in terms of things at home here and ID cards, the Daily Mail - or, indeed, The Mail On Sunday - has a letter which was sent to the Daily Telegraph which was worth quoting in The Mail On Sunday, which says: "Identity cards are like locks on doors and windows - they manage to control only the honest." A rather interesting point.

It is, and I certainly think that if you’re going to debate identity cards, the idea of making identity cards voluntary is pretty absurd. I think there are serious issues on either side in this discussion about identity cards, but I think we have to sit down and look at all these issues, and if you can make a good case for a change in the law, maybe a slight change in our view of civil liberties, but a change that will make a real difference in this fight, then we have to face up to that.

Did you have a successful week on tour this week? The reports said that you had quite a good time in Iran, but they back-slid the day after you left.

Well, I think that… we started off in Pakistan, we went to Iran, we went to Egypt, to Syria and to Saudi Arabia. I… what we were trying to do in Iran was first of all to make the point that this isn’t a battle between the West and Islam, between the West and the rest. We're all involved in the campaign against terrorism, and of course the Iranians have very strong views about the Taliban - they don’t like them a bit, the Taliban murdered lots of their diplomats. We're also saying out of this terrible atrocity maybe some good can come and maybe we can open doors and windows to countries with which we've had a pretty difficult relationship in the past. There is a group - and they've just won an election in Iran - who want to see political reform, who want to open to the rest of the world, and I think we have to encourage them hard-headedly, realistically, as much as we possibly can, but there isn’t, obviously, any great love lost for the United States. At the same time, I think there is a recognition that the US will have to respond with others of us in a military sense if we're to deal with the perpetrators of these atrocities, and that beyond that there has to be an international campaign involving the UN if we're to prevent further terrorism in the future. I think those points are understood.

Those points are understood.

And I think that the other point that we got across to Iran is the extent to which we're able to develop a normal relationship with Iran is going to depend on how Iran behaves, not least in relation to these awful events.

But ironically, they’re still classified as a state sponsoring terrorism at the moment. Ironically that you were there, really [sic].

Well, a point we made is that there's no distinction between good terrorists and bad terrorists. Men and women who get up in the morning determined to go out and murder other men and women, innocent men and women, in order to make a political point are always, always wrong, and that's a distinction that isn’t difficult for us, having experienced terrorism in the last few years, and it's not difficult for Spain, having experienced so much terrorism in the last few years, and when we get through the… into the second stage of this campaign, into all the diplomacy, I think that has to be a central argument that we go on putting.

And do you think this unwonted unity, really, of the EU, really strong, people have been impressed by that over the last week or two, this long campaign you talk about - do you think it'll hold, that unity?

It's got to hold.

If, for instance, we felt we had to bomb Iraq or something like that?

The unity has to hold. A lot of people after the atrocity said - as I think people did when the Berlin Wall fell - nothing is going to be the same again. Well, I don't think anything will be the same… quite the same again, but one way in which things have to be different is that we have to make a reality of multilateral co-operation, we have to actually do better in creating institutions of global governance that really deliver a more peaceful and prosperous world.

Was Berlusconi's main sin not thinking it, but saying it?

No. I think…

Well, I think you have to distinguish between civilisations and the behaviour of individual countries. I think it's absolutely right for us to press countries to improve their human rights record, but we're unlikely to be able to succeed in that if we give the impression that we make that point from… with a monopoly of virtue from a soap-box saying that we're greatly superior, and we're unlikely to be able to make the point if inherent in what we're saying is the suggestion that somehow Islam doesn’t care as much about the individual as Western civilisation, or that the Asians don’t care as much. My own view is that values are universal and we should argue for them universally, and we shouldn’t give the impression that we think that some cultures, some civilisations don’t actually value the individual.

Right. Well, thank you very much indeed for being with us, Chris.

Thank you very much.

As ever, we appreciate it.

Thank you very much indeed.

I hope you have an equally eventful week this week.