Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great honour to be here tonight, the second time I have spoken in this hall with this extraordinary and impressive mural. And the subject that I have been asked to speak on this evening is quite a challenging one - but then, this is an environment in which one should rise to a challenge, I think.

My subject then is "George C Marshall, Jean Monnet, Winston Churchill - which special relationship?"

Let me begin by just recounting, as I have done once or twice in Richmond over the last couple of days (because I've been in Richmond for the American National Conference of the English-Speaking Union) what happened when I flew into Dulles last week, because it does speak to the issue of special relationships, I think. I stood in the queue, as one does, and I reached the immigration officer, and I handed him my passport, which is a House of Lords passport. And he looked at it, and being a perceptive sort of fellow, he said, "Are you a member of the House of Lords?" So, I confirmed that I was and I said, "Well, as a matter of fact, there are two other members of the House of Lords on this particular flight from Heathrow into Dulles this afternoon." He looked at me, and he said, "Three Lords?" I said, "Yes." He said, "What is it? Are you trying to get America back?"

That's not the special relationship I wish to talk about. You've got your Independence and we have no intentions of taking America back! As a matter of fact, I was here with the Queen's visit, in May, this year, and I was asked a very interesting question, by a television network, an American television network, who stopped me after the ceremonies and said, quite straightforwardly, "Well, what are you British celebrating? After all, you lost the colonies." I thought that was a very stimulating question.

And I explained to them that not only were we very happy to celebrate the first birthday, so to speak, of America - though not, of course, the United States. This crossing in 1607 really marked the beginning of the voyage of English from being a language spoken in the British Isles and, to some extent, in the West Indies at that time by some three and a half million people, but not more, to where we are today, which is that, by the end of this decade, 2 billion people around the world will be using the English language. Some voyage! And that's surely something we can celebrate, when we think of this 400th anniversary.

So, the first of the three people I wish to speak about is Sir Winston Churchill. It is appropriate to begin with Winston Churchill because, for him, the special relationship that he felt with the United States was not only the small matter of his mother having been American. As he quite appropriately said, when he addressed Congress, "If my father had been American, and my mother British, I might have got here on my own". And I'm quite sure he would have done so.

For him, the relationship was based and pivoted upon the English language. Winston Churchill had an extraordinary relationship to the language. A quotation I always enjoyed from Churchill is when, after the war, he was receiving an award by Parliament in London, and he said, "If I found the right words, you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue. It was the nation and the race growing all around the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar."

So, Winston's relationship to English - to the language - was, in a way, a professional relationship. He was a prolific writer and if you have read recently, or earlier, "The History of the English Speaking Peoples", you will see absolutely that his intimacy with the language and his command of it was vital to how he thought about the English Speaking Peoples, and about the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain.

One fact about Winston Churchill's attitude to America, which I only discovered the other day, was that while he made an exhaustive study of the Civil War battlefields, he could never bring himself to visit any of the battlefields of the American Revolution! Clearly he felt the "loss" of The United States.

Winston Churchill, during the war, also spoke about a different relationship, and I think it's worth pondering this, when we think about our relationships and how they will evolve in the 21st century. Winston being Winston, of course, drew what he was talking about on a napkin in The Savoy Grill, and photographs of this extraordinary drawing appeared in the British newspapers several years ago. I have a facsimile of it. His vision was of Britain at the point of intersection of three circles. What were the three circles?

They were, first of all, the relationship between Britain and Europe, which he always saw as being crucial. As we know, one of the reasons why Winston, in 1940, made such extraordinary attempts to keep France within the war and to prevent their surrender was that he really couldn't believe that, at this critical moment in human history, this great army, for which he had such an admiration, and alongside which he had served in the trenches in the First World War, could possibly, at this moment of ultimate crisis, collapse. I think Winston was lacerated by this event. But Winston, after the war, returned to the theme of Europe, and you will remember in his famous speech in Zurich he called for "United States of Europe". So, that was one circle. And, at various points in his life, that was the most important circle.

And then there was a second circle. This, during his early life, was for him the most crucial, and was the circle of the British Empire and the Dominions. Remember that Winston Churchill's education was completed serving in the Army of the Raj in India, where he largely educated himself during days and weeks and months of extraordinary boredom, which he managed to overcome with that ferocious appetite that he had for literature. He could not conceive of a world in which Britain did not have huge responsibilities and power overseas.

One of his great difficulties in his relationship with FDR was that FDR never really got beyond the word "imperial" when thinking about these things, and Winston wasn't willing (as he said) to be a "King's first minister" in order to proceed with the dissolution of the British Empire.

He was opposed to the India Act, between the wars, and very unhappy about Indian independence, eventually, in 1947. But he didn't only think in terms of India and, indeed, of imperial power, he thought of the great dominions, the great democracies, he thought of what evolved into the British Commonwealth of today, which I am glad to report is still growing.

In fact, when I get back to London, I'm going to see the finance minister of the Madagascan government as Madagascar has now stated that it wishes to join the Commonwealth. Of course, South Africa has rejoined the Commonwealth. So, the Commonwealth is, in fact, very much alive and kicking. Winston would be pleased and even more delighted at the rise and rise of English. The Queen has described English as "the golden thread" binding the Commonwealth together. Today it is becoming the working language of the whole global village.

The third circle for Churchill, of course, was the American relationship. And, during the Second World War, and particularly after the fall of France and America's entry into the war, it became the most important of the circles. It was crucial to Britain's survival and to any prospect of eventual victory.

Remember, however - then you begin to see the tension between these three circles - that, only four years earlier, Winston Churchill was willing to endorse a proposal that Britain and France should become one country. In a last desperate attempt to prevent the French surrender, a proposal of union between France and the United Kingdom, common citizenship, common institutions would have been signed if France had not fallen.

So, Churchill was always at the point of intersection between these three circles. To think of him simply within one circle and within the special relationship with the United States, is misleading and historically inaccurate. If you want to understand the tension which Winston Churchill could experience between these circles, go to the Cabinet War Rooms in London.

Last week, I was at Cambridge, at Churchill College which houses the Churchill Archives. We gave an Australian, who used to head up an American company, Coca-Cola, a sculpture of Churchill's right hand as a token of our appreciation for heading up our successful appeal for the Archives. Now, Churchill had quite small hands, rather feminine, long slender fingers, and he wore a very conspicuous ring, and that was on the sculpture of the hand. If you go to the War Rooms and you actually look at Winston's chair in the underground headquarters, you will see, on the right hand side of the chair, that deep grooves have been etched out in the wood, and they were etched out by Churchill pulling his hand with this ring across the arm of the chair. It is a glimpse, a physical visual of the extraordinary tension under which Winston had to work during the Second World War. FDR and his opposition to Churchill's concept of Britain's imperial role was one major source of that tension.

They agreed, partly due to George Marshall, that the priority was the defeat of Berlin rather than the defeat of Tokyo; that it had to be in that order - and that was of fundamental importance to the future of the world. But in addition to the disagreement over Empire, there was a profound difference over Russia and the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, at the conferences at Yalta and Potsdam there was undoubtedly a real confrontation between Winston Churchill and FDR on the prospects of cooperation with the Soviet Union and their real intent. Later, in Fulton, Missouri, in the famous speech about the Iron Curtain, Churchill spelt out his fear of and resistance to Stalin's ambitions.

So there is tension in the Special Relationship. A relationship that has come under great pressure as a result of our Allied action in Iraq.

I thought it might be of interest to you if I just shared with you what I said in the House of Lords on 18th March 2003 when there was the crucial debate on what the United Kingdom should do over Iraq. I looked the other day at what I'd actually said in that debate, and I thought you might be interested, perhaps, to hear it. I said this.

"My Lords, we are at an extraordinary moment, we are in an extraordinary situation, and both the moment and the situation are to be regretted. There are attempts to ensure that we go to war with the rhetoric of unity, but the disturbing and dangerous reality is of disunity, because we go to war without the sanction of the United Nations, without consensus in the European Union, without agreement in NATO, and with both the nation and Parliament deeply divided. That we have arrived at this moment and this situation represents a tragic failure of diplomacy.

President Bush has used the metaphor of a poker game, 'it is time for people to show their cards,' he has said. They have. And the result is a poker game that has gone badly wrong. There is no coalition such as that his father built before the first Gulf War. There is no coalition such as existed after 9/11, and after NATO invoked Clause 5 in response to that attack. Instead, there is division and there is recrimination. But the moment has arrived and, My Lords, we must now hope and pray that our armed forces and those of the United States of America succeed swiftly and decisively, for the longer the war continues, the higher the price will be for this failure of diplomacy.

Personally, I believe that as the Security Council authorised the United Nations inspectors, we should have backed them. They asked for more time, they should have been given it. War will not remove the political challenges we face. The courage and professionalism of British forces, we all hope and believe, will contribute to a military resolution, but only in matters which can be dealt with militarily. But they cannot be expected to resolve the political challenges that we now face, and it is to these that I wish to turn."

I then did so. I commented on the yawning gulf that had opened up between the United States and European perceptions of peace and war in the Middle East itself, and of the very nature of power in an interdependent world. I said this gulf has been famously described, in recent weeks, by Robert Kagen of Harvard, in these terms. He has written, "It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On all the important questions of power, the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power, American and European perspectives have diverged."

I then shared with the House of Lords my experience three weeks earlier, when I had visited Washington DC as part of the House of Lords Select Committee on European, Foreign and Security Policy. During that visit, we met with many officials of the administration here. I said to their Lordships' House, "It seemed to me that the tonality of much of what we heard from the administration was essentially isolationist. And so, too, was a significant part of the content. Figures in the administration were pleased by Britain's loyalty, but they made it clear that, on all the key issues, it was for us to choose and not for them to change. We were either with them or against them and no third position was possible."

Then I talked about where we might go from here. You will see that I'm now beginning to move to George Marshall. I said, "My Lords, in 1945, American power was used to shape a new international community. It was United States hyperpower, at that time, that made possible Bretton Woods, the founding of the United Nations and, indeed, the beginnings of European integration and, above all, the Marshall Plan. This was the creation at which so many leading Americans, politicians, civil servants, military leaders, were present. But today there is no comparable vision. There may be a roadmap for peace in the Middle East, but will we proceed along it?"

I quoted something which was said to me by Richard Perle, who was sitting next to me at a dinner at the British Embassy, on the last night of our visit in Washington. "My Lords, Richard Perle, an unofficial spokesman, at that time, to the administration, said to me, 'remember, for us, a counterweight cannot be a friend or ally'." And then I looked to the future and I ended in this way, "My Lords, now it is beginning, perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, almost certainly this week. We cannot know the outcome, although we all hope that the courage and professionalism of the British and American forces will contribute to a swift and successful conclusion. The military successes, however, will not resolve the political crisis, only change it."

When I read that, I remember how sad I felt when I made the speech. Because I love the United States, and I believe that the relationship with the United States is of huge and crucial, continuing importance, not only to the United Kingdom but to the whole of Europe. But I was deeply disturbed by the experience in Washington, deeply disturbed by it. The opinion which was expressed to me several times by U.S. officials was that it was now an open question whether European integration, which had long been an objective of American policy, was any longer desirable.

We must remember, of course, that this was a time when French fries were renamed "freedom fries," and the American Ambassador produced a "bon mot" which I have always delighted in. When he was asked at a press conference whether, in the circumstances, he was getting rid of his French wine cellar, he said, "Yes, one bottle at a time."

I'd like now to turn to the second person in this threesome, and this is Jean Monnet. I just ought to explain a few things right at the start. Jean Monnet is sometimes called the "Father of Europe." His life was long and complicated and he was a most extraordinary person, a sort of opportunist for idealism, in a most extraordinary way.

I was privileged to get to know him well, of course. I was then with the BBC and I was sent to produce an hour long documentary on Jean Monnet to be shown on BBC1 and BBC2, just as Britain joined the European Union.

He lived then, as he had done for many years, in a suburb outside of Paris called Houjarray. He was not an easy person to interview, like many remarkable men. His career had covered, first of all, the creation of the joint supply and joint convoy system in 1917, in the First World War. He managed to coordinate the purchase the raw materials and other supplies from the United States, between France and the United Kingdom.

Again, in 1940 he had been decisive. He had been in the United States - he had great admiration for FDR - and he negotiated an extraordinary contract with the United States for the supply of aero engines and raw material to France, and almost single-handedly, he ensured, as France moved to surrender, that those supplies were redirected to London.

He worked closely with de Gaulle, whom he found difficult, and Churchill, whom he greatly loved. Those supplies made a real difference in the Battle of Britain, particularly the aero engines. Incidentally, he spent a lot of time in the United States between the Wars, and also in China. Something that he shared with Marshall was an understanding of China. He did say of the United States in my interview "It was their attachment to liberty". Their participation in World War I and World War II was not a question, for them, of domination. Essentially, it was a question of defending liberty, not only for themselves but for everyone.

So, Monnet had great affection and respect for the United States. He was profoundly influenced by the American political system, and he used it when he drew up the constitution for the European Coal and Steel Community. In that, of course, he was also much influenced by the success of the Schuman Plan. De Gaulle had asked Monnet to take over Le Plan which was the French response to the Schuman Plan.

He was extraordinary, Monnet He was a diminutive man, bright eyes, big face, and apparently he said to de Gaulle, "General de Gaulle, you always speak of grandeur, but France is not a modern country, and as France is now, she has no grandeur". So, de Gaulle said to him, "Well, you'd better take over responsibility for Le Plan, work with these Americans on the Plan." And that's exactly what Monnet did

He was always positive. For me, the insight I acquired was to see that, in moving, he always moved essentially in one direction. He said to me, "I don't think, you know, in terms of priorities, but in terms of the general accomplishment. And that accomplishment requires actions. The point of the actions is to generate further change." The point of the action is to generate further change. He said, "I don't think in terms of a final destination, but of what things can become, as one change brings another. For me, what is most important is to replace the spirit of domination by trust and shared interest, because it is not natural for men to unite. They do so only under the pressure of necessity. And, in my life, I have seen that, in 1917, 1940 and in 1956."

He was, in a sense, destiny's opportunist, as well as destiny's optimist. I will speak, in a moment, about what I think was his unique contribution to what I now see, to some extent, as an evolution of thought which united Winston Churchill, Jean Monnet and George C Marshall.

I now turn to Marshall. I have read, many times, the speech of which we celebrate the 60th birthday, namely, the speech that launched his plan, which, of course, was very nearly called the Truman Plan. Truman would have been quite happy if it could have been called the Truman Plan, but it's just as well that it was called the Marshall Plan.

At the conclusion of Marshall's speech at Harvard, he said these things, which strike me as being so important and interesting. "It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for our government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a programme designed to place Europe on its feet economically. This is a business for the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from them. An essential part of any successful action on the part of the United States is an understanding on the part of the people of America, of the character of the problems and of the remedies to be applied. Political passion and prejudice should have no part in what we now do."

Towards the conclusion, he says that (and remember he's proposing a remarkable act of systematic, coordinated generosity), that the precondition of it is cooperation, cooperation between the Europeans and between the Europeans and the United States - and he concludes like this. "The whole world of the future, not the future of the world but the whole world of the future, hangs on a proper judgement. It hangs, I think, to a large extent, on the realisation of the American people, of just what are the various dominant factors, what are the reactions of the people, what are the justifications of those reactions. What are the sufferings, what is needed, what can best be done, what must be done?"

George Marshall's extraordinary contribution was not in the use of sovereign American power or of the vast material strength that the United States commanded. It was that he deployed that strength on the basis of understanding and of dialogue, of listening as well as speaking.

Ladies and gentlemen, last Thursday, Paul Tibbetts, commander and pilot of the Enola Gay B-29 that dropped the bomb, died in his home in Columbus, Ohio, aged 92 years old. As we all know, Little Boy reduced Hiroshima instantly to ruins, in a split second, a split atom, but it also changed our world.

The bomb was born from the vast cooperative effort that we know now as the Manhattan Project. Last year, I was privileged to visit Oak Ridge and to see something of the vast scope and intensity of that project. It involved American scientists, American treasure, American commitment, American organisation. It also involved refugees from Hitler's Germany, and it involved a lot of British science, much of it originated in my own university in Cambridge, and transferred, by Churchill's direct orders, to the United States in 1940, when Britain was threatened by invasion.

Now, the three men of whom I have spoken this evening, Winston Churchill, Jean Monnet and George Marshall, all knew each other, and all three were united in the mission to win World War II. All three knew that without victory, freedom would be expunged. And all three knew that victory would not be enough.

Churchill saw first that the Soviet threat was real, that it would have to be contained, and that its ideology would have to be disproven by the resilience of democracy.

George Marshall, whom Churchill initially thought of only as a soldier, then as an organiser, but later recognised as a statesman of outstanding vision, Marshall understood that for democracy to succeed, it had to prosper. It could only do so if people were fed, cities rebuilt, commerce restarted. He also knew that for this to happen, Americans had to think and feel "beyond the frontiers of their own experience". They had to understand the abyss into which Europe and the world had fallen, and they had to enable the recovery, without which all would be lost. Thus, the Marshall Plan. But George Marshall understood something else. For his plan to work, Americans had to listen to the Europeans, and the Europeans had to listen to each other. Cooperation, genuine and committed, had to replace conflict

Jean Monnet understood something else again. His experience had taught him that it is not natural - as I said earlier - for men to unite, but that they do so only under the pressure of necessity. And then, in my judgement, from his mind, a shaft of genius illuminated a new landscape. If the spirit, the instinct, of domination, was to be replaced by common endeavour, all would turn on a momentum of common interest and common achievement. Only thus could there be a perception in men's minds and in their imaginations that a new and different landscape of interdependence is possible and preferable.

And this evolution of thought, born of Churchill and Marshall and Monnet, has already transformed the world, as decisively as the uranium bomb carried in the belly of the Enola Gay.

But, ladies and gentlemen, this transformation is far from over. We are on a long and difficult journey into a new landscape. We have made much progress: the sharing of sovereignty in NATO, so vital in the outcome of the Cold War, and the sharing of sovereignty in the European Union, which has reshaped Europe. First inspired, as I have described, and facilitated, by the success of the Marshall Plan, later widening from the original six members to embrace Great Britain and Ireland and others, then taking in the former fascist dictatorships, as they moved from that to democracy, of southern Europe - Greece, Portugal and Spain - and, finally, after the collapse of Communism in Europe and the USSR, the nations of east and central Europe, providing them with a roadmap to democracy and free enterprise, and saving them for a return to alliances and competitive spheres of interest, motivated by the spirit of domination so abhorred by Jean Monnet.

Thus, much progress, but also many false turns and many mistakes - the folly of hard power without soft power, the illusion of sovereign power with the failure to build alliances, above all, the failure of allies, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and others, to put the imperative of alliance before the invasion of Iraq.

I believe that in moving to interdependence, the world is on an evolutionary path, but it is a fact that our planet's ultimate survival depends upon it. We will have to overcome chasms of misunderstanding and bridge huge cultural differences. Bridging the Atlantic is challenging enough. To grow real communality of interest with China for example will be much more. But until we all see, and benefit from, our interdependence, our world will not be safe; its future perilously insecure. The momentum to interdependence and the proof of its advantages is the key to our future and safety.

Fortunately, and this is how I would like to conclude, interdependence in our age has found a great facilitator - and now, finally, I come to the matter of the English language. English and its ever widening use, not as a language to replace others, not as a language in the spirit of domination, but as a means by which different cultures can communicate with each other is indeed the great facilitator of global understanding. English as the working language of the global village, a language which, by the end of this decade, will be used by over 2 billion people, amongst them 300 million Chinese learning English today.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this fact is a gift of history and, of course, it would rejoice no-one more than Winston Churchill, who did glimpse the prospect that English could become more than just the inheritance of the English Speaking Peoples. In 1943, Winston Churchill was given an honorary doctorate at Harvard and, in his speech, he spoke about the priceless inheritance that we shared. But he then asked a question, looking towards a world in which people could move and travel, and in which we would have to build institutions of interdependence. He asked: "Can English, one day, help the world to unity?" And he answered, "I believe, yes."

So, Churchill, and Marshall, and Monnet, which special relationship? No, I don't see it like that. I'd rather see Churchill and Marshall and Monnet as the great contributors to a special relationship of interdependence that, ultimately, embraces the entire world.

Thank you.