My guest is David Hane. Baron Hane of Chiswick is a distinguished British diplomat who's had a long

distinguished career in the British diplomatic service, including the UK ambassador to the United Nations

in New York and the UK's permanent representative of the European Union in Brussels. Welcome to the podcast, David.

Hello. Right. We're going to talk essentially,

David, about Britain's standing in the world, but also Britain's positioning in the world in this

post-Brexit world we're all living in. But before we do that, I can't resist the temptation to ask you

to walk a bit down memory lane. You were as a young diplomat clearly heavily involved in negotiations the UK leading up to its

accession to the EEC as it was then. Could you give me an idea what role you played before you

could join the EEC and how straightforward or even how complex you found the negotiation with our

future European partners? Yes, surely. And if I might, I'd go back even a tiny little bit further than you have,

because during my early years at the UK delegation to the European communities

when we were outside in the 1960s. I was involved as the Brussels end of the

Kennedy Round of Trade negotiations. So I think I'm probably the only British civil servant who

was involved in the Kennedy Round who can tell people what it was like before we joined and I can tell you it was not good

we were basically marginalized in the Kennedy round the Kennedy round the big deals in the

Kennedy round of trade negotiations were fixed between the US the European communities and

the Japanese and we were then told what the score was

and we had virtually no room for manoeuvre. What room we had we made good use of because

Roy Denman was the representative in Geneva and he was a brilliant master of detail, but he recognised like all the the rest of us, that we were really a fifth

wheel in all this, and that's where we'll be in future in world trade negotiations if I've

got it right.

So the UK decides to enter into serious negotiations again with its future EEC partners. What was your role

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