The leave-supporting veteran politician and SDP founder is as outspoken about the prime minister as he is about the EU, Cameron and Corbyn. But he also harbours surprising hopes for Labour, the party he deserted

David Owen’s claim to be a visionary is lodged even before he opens his front door. He lives in Limehouse – in the same house where he and his fellow Labour rebels formed the breakaway Social Democratic party (SDP) in 1981, issuing the Limehouse declaration, which would change the course of British politics. It is in a part of east London that was derelict when Owen bought a burnt-out old cafe and the rooms above it for £3,000 in 1965. He was a young doctor at St Thomas’s hospital back then and this corner of Docklands was ready for the bulldozers.

But Owen saw the potential and, my word, was he right. Now the house is all but a London landmark – the day we meet, I spot a tour guide stopping to point it out – with Ian McKellen living next door and stunning views directly on to the river Thames, the water no more than a yard away from the windows.

Not that I have come here to take in the scenery. Owen is one of the few people around who knows what it is like to leave the Labour party and attempt nothing less than a political realignment. While the Independent Group (TIG) takes its first steps, and as Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson sets about forming his new Future Britain group – aimed at providing a home for the party’s “social democrats and democratic socialists” – it seems wise to call on one of the founding Gang of Four. What’s more, Owen has trenchant – and perhaps surprising – views on Brexit, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, David Cameron and what he says is the foundation of his politics: the NHS.

Even now, aged 80, you can see why he cut such a dash in the often drab world of Westminster, and why he seemed destined for the very top. The once-trademark sweep of hair – rivalled in its day only by Michael Heseltine’s – is silver now, but he and his American-born wife, the literary agent Deborah Owen, are still a striking couple. You look at his election leaflets from the 1960s, and you could mistake him for a film star. There was something of the Kennedys about the Owens and when he became foreign secretary in 1977, at the absurdly young age of 38, Downing Street seemed an inevitability.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Still a striking couple …’ With his wife, Deborah Owen. Photograph: Dan Wooller/Rex/Shutterstock

Instead, he threw away his chance by leaving Labour along with Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins and Bill Rodgers. “I knew I would not be prime minister the moment I decided to join the SDP,” he says, matter-of-factly, sitting at the same kitchen table where the four of them drafted the Limehouse declaration. Such a move is the opposite of careerism, which is why he speaks with some admiration for the TIGs – although the admiration is qualified.

“I understand what they’ve gone through and they’ve shown courage and I respect that,” he says, adding that “they did it out of desperation”, citing Luciana Berger in particular. But he thinks they made a fateful mistake by opening their doors to dissenting Tory MPs too. Not so much Sarah Wollaston or Heidi Allen, but, in particular Anna Soubry who is, says Owen, “an identifiable Cameronite. You can’t have her there without being a centre party.”

And why is that such a grave mistake? Because it is the very same error the SDP itself made. He explains that when it was a gang of three – Williams, Rodgers and him – “There was never any question that [the SDP] was going to be a left-of-centre party.” The project, bluntly, was to replace the Labour party: to be a centre-left party shorn once and for all of the hard left. What changed was “the advent of Roy”.

When Jenkins fought two byelections for the SDP, coming close in one and winning the other, his success pushed the new party on to Jenkins’s preferred path, towards the middle ground and an eventual alliance with the Liberals. For Owen, that changed everything. “Up until the moment we became a centre party, I thought we could [win power],” Owen says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Owen (right) with the rest of the ‘Gang of Four’ in 1981 (from left): William Rodgers, Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

He maintains that same analysis today, that when faced with a Labour party in the hands of the hard left, the correct response is not to flee to the centre, but to fight the hard left for ownership of the broader left terrain. For that reason, he suspects the TIGs’ main achievement will be no more than “freeing up other MPs to say what they think” (although he is impressed that they have urged the Lib Dems to join them, rather than the other way around). Of much greater interest to Owen is Watson’s project. In his view, while the TIGs are repeating the Jenkins strategy, Watson and the MPs around him are pursuing what would have been Owen’s plan.

“They should just say: ‘We are Labour and we’re not going to move,’” he suggests, advising that they organise together, vote together and “act as a parliamentary group” – even perhaps, eventually, seeking recognition as such from the Speaker of the House of Commons. “They have to show that they’re not prepared to see their party taken from them.”

All this is complicated, of course, by Brexit. Of the many surprises the 2016 EU referendum threw up, one was David Owen campaigning for leave (although, he insists, “I never got on that bus”). Here was a man who, along with Jenkins, had quit Harold Wilson’s shadow cabinet in 1972 over Labour’s refusal to back British entry to the EEC. Culturally, the SDP was pro-European to its fingertips. Its people, its image, its style – all of it would now be called ultra-remain. So how did Owen end up alongside Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson backing leave?

It was “painful”, he says, describing his wife as a “reluctant remainer” and their children as outright “federalists”. Part of it was about defence and his belief that the EU ambition to create a European army would undermine Nato which, in his view, has done far more than the EU to secure the peace of postwar Europe. Part of it was the realisation that the Eurozone was “broken”, a conclusion he drew as he saw events unfold in Greece (where the Owens have built a house, once again on the water, “right down at the bottom of the Peloponnese”). He is particularly damning about the EU’s treatment of Greece, where “a whole generation of people have been put out of work quite unnecessarily, through neoliberal austerity policies that were completely unacceptable”.

And there was a deeper motivation, which he links to his first political inspiration, the former Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and his warning that integration into Europe would mean “the end of a thousand years of history”, with Britain no longer an independent nation.

That, for Owen, was the red line, which he saw getting ever closer with the EU advancing towards outright federalism, pushed there by Brussels and a Eurocracy whose great consuming project is, he believes, the creation of a European state. “They all have it in their blood,” he says. “Day by day, inch by inch, hour by hour, they move it on … And then along comes a prime minister who offers the chance to get out of the damned thing.”

Still, I say, it’s not going very well, is it? “What we are going through now is a Reformation. The problem is, we don’t have a Thomas Cromwell.”

If he had a vote in the Commons, he says he would use it “unequivocally” to back Theresa May’s deal – although he refuses to use that phrase. “It’s not ‘Mrs May’s agreement’. It’s an international treaty signed up to by 27 states plus one – and we are in the process of trashing it.” The Northern Irish backstop doesn’t trouble him unduly: he believes that, if Britain were determined to escape it, the EU could not do much to stop us, given “the size of our country, and being next door”. When we speak again, on Wednesday morning, he backs May once more, on her decision to seek only a short delay on Brexit. “A long extension was purely and simply a device for remain. She chose the only possible option.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lord Owen’s London house enjoys stunning views of the river Thames. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Not that he approves of the way May has handled the process, identifying as a key failing her insistence on doing things alone rather than relying on her cabinet. Still, that problem long predates May: for Owen, the “fatal flaw” in today’s British political system is “the loss of cabinet government”.

Which brings us to the question of leadership. It is clear he allocates the greatest blame to the man who offered that chance to escape the EU. “David Cameron is not a serious politician,” he says, noting that George Osborne was at least a man of ideas. He faults Cameron’s tactics in staging the referendum before he had extracted substantial concessions from the EU, contrasting him with Wilson, who “wouldn’t set a date until he knew he could win”. And he questions Cameron’s integrity, for resigning after losing the 2016 vote even though he had promised to stay on. “He utterly lied.”

The result was that when Theresa May took over, “She comes in and discovers that the cupboard is bare,” because team Cameron had failed to do contingency planning for a leave vote. Owen has maintained a regular correspondence with May since she became prime minister, chiefly over his view that Britain should have sought continued membership of the European Economic Area to smooth its exit from the EU. May has pushed back on that, but he gives her credit all the same. “There’s no reason for her to engage with me: I’m a has-been.”

Still, he is not a fan. He says that being PM requires “a special form of intelligence – you’ve got to be broad in your intelligence. You’ve got to be able to operate at many different levels. But I think she is very narrowed down by her intelligence. I don’t know what her intelligence level is – but, you know, studying geography is not actually the best form of training for a prime minister, put it that way.”

Nor was he especially impressed by Tony Blair. Blair wooed him in 1996, he recalls, seeking to bring Owen back to Labour with the implied promise that a “political future” awaited him. “I was very tempted, but then he started to talk about the euro.” Owen concluded that Blair was “passionately committed” to taking Britain into the European currency and Owen said no. “Best decision I ever made in my life,” he says.

The Labour leader of whom he speaks most admiringly is, perhaps, a surprise. Owen did not rejoin Labour under Ed Miliband, but he did donate £10,000 to party funds. He admired his integrity, not least when Miliband rejected Owen’s advice that Labour embrace Cameron’s 2013 promise to hold an EU referendum. Miliband said no, because he just didn’t believe in it. “Barbara Castle’s was my favourite saying in politics: ‘David, in politics, guts is everything.’ And that man [Miliband] had guts.”

We haven’t mentioned the leader with whom he was, for a while, most closely identified: David Steel, the other half of the two Davids, when they were the twin faces of the SDP/Liberal Alliance. I ask about Steel’s recent suspension from his party over his alleged failure to act on accusations of child abuse made against Liberal MP Cyril Smith when Steel was leader. “I don’t want to speak about that,” Owen says, adding that he has no obligation to do so, since he is not and has never been a Liberal or Liberal Democrat. But he does add that the famous depiction of the pair in Spitting Image – with a diminutive Steel in Owen’s pocket – was unfair. “He led his party and I led mine.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Owen (second right) depicted as one of the two Davids on Spitting Image, along with Neil Kinnock and Margaret Thatcher. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

These assessments carry extra force, not only because of Owen’s own record – including his apprenticeship as a junior minister under several Labour giants, at health under Castle, at defence under Denis Healey and at the Foreign Office under Tony Crosland – but also because he is a keen student of leaders and their mental states, writing extensively on those themes in his later years. (He suggests May might suffer from a form of “cognitive inflexibility,” rendering her unable to adapt to changed circumstances.)

It all adds up to an unexpected picture. For years, Owen was a byword for treachery in the Labour party, condemned as a “red Tory” before that label was invented and long before Blair. He may have valuable art on his walls – a Lowry, a Gormley and a Hepworth, as well as a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in the bathroom – thanks, one suspects, to lucrative spells chairing major companies, including those involved in steel, oil and gas in the former Soviet Union, but he defines himself still as a radical. He backed the Greens for a while, is impressed by Momentum and faults the current Labour leadership for not being more firmly committed to his beloved NHS, which he wishes to see return to its founding roots. “We’re losing the National Health Service; it’s going to be the American system if the Tories win the next election,” he says. Later he adds: “I know I shouldn’t dislike Conservatives, and I do try my best not to … but every single decision they’ve taken is destroying the fabric of society.”

And yet, despite all that, he says that if he had a vote at the next election – which, as a peer, he does not – he would not vote Labour. Not while Jeremy Corbyn is at the helm. I ask why not, expecting an answer related to defence, nuclear weapons or the Atlantic alliance. Instead, he says this and with great vehemence: “A political party cannot be anti-Jewish any more than it can be anti-Roman Catholic or anything else. You can’t have that degree of prejudice, when it’s perfectly obvious that it’s ingrained in the system … If you can’t tackle that one issue, you do not deserve to be prime minister. I cannot support a political party that has not unequivocally rooted out antisemitism.”

Still, he is not ready to write off Labour. He has high hopes for Tom Watson and he knows, perhaps better than anyone alive, that the Labour party is a stubborn, resilient old thing, not easily displaced. And I notice something else. When Owen speaks of the task facing Watson today, the founder of the SDP does not refer to the Labour party – he refers to “our party”. Even after all these years.