After two hours in his company, I think I have discovered the cure for Alzheimer’s. Whatever Lord Owen is on needs to be made widely available to the ageing population.

His instantanous recall – of names, dates, places – would be astonishing in someone 40 years his junior. In a man who will be 78 in July, they are positively freakish.

The only time he fumbles for a name it’s the disease he suffers from (polymyalgia rheumatica). It’s significant, I think, that a doctor cannot speak aloud the thing that ails him which is, literally, a pain in the neck (and shoulders, and upper arms).

There is no doubt is that David Anthony Llewellyn, Baron Owen of the City of Plymouth, is a formidable opponent for the Remain campaign precisely because he is part of the very European political elite he now seeks to challenge. He not only knows where the bodies are buried; as Minister for Europe in Jim Callaghan’s government, he may well have helped to bury them himself.

There was a structure, he recalls, when the heads of government met the Council of Ministers and made a huge number of the decisions.

“Now everything is done at the Heads of Government meeting, and there they sit round this massive great table so it all has to be fixed by the civil servants – they love it! – and all they have to do is serve up a press release for the prime ministers in which they all claim victory. I mean, it’s a total farce.”