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State dinners, royal birthday parties, treaty signings - the Locarno Suite at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) saw them all before finally hosting the London Business Forum (LBF) in late 2005.

Attendees to this evening event had to clear a security checkpoint just off Whitehall and cross a gloomy quadrangle before entering the FCO's Grand Staircase, with its ormulu and bronze chandeliers; mosaic flooring; and murals depicting the development of the British Empire. At the top, around the corner of a lofty corridor, they finally entered the series of classical Italianate rooms designed in the late 1850s by George Gilbert Scott.

First, the "Conference Room", whose gilded ceiling was embellished with majolica plaques depicting the emblems of 20 foreign countries. Second, the "Dining Room" (tonight serving as a champagne buffet), whose walls were stencilled with olive, red and gold designs. And lastly the "Grand Reception Room", whose barrel-vaulted ceiling was a celestial collage of gold, powder-blue, painted figures from antiquity and signs of the Zodiac.

There were around 200 seats here in preparation for Lord Patten's speech. Sitting down, it was difficult to believe this was still a place of work and not a protectorate of the National Trust. Yet a sign outside had reminded everyone that mobile phones were off limits, presumably for reasons of national secrecy. And when Patten arrived he was clearly nonplussed by his surroundings. Indeed, he was so casual with the audience that, for much of the time, the event had the feel of a college tutorial.

Upon being introduced, for example, he walked from the side of the room to the centre, but eschewed the podium in favour of a freestanding position at the front of the aisle. He then apologised in advance for having to receive a call from his wife on his (presumably forbidden) mobile phone, because he had forgotten to bring a dinner suit and black tie for a function later that evening at the House of Lords.

"Thank you for mentioning the thing for which I'm best known: that is, leaving a job rather than doing a job," he said in response to Events Director, Steve Chamberlain who had just introduced him as "the last governor of Hong Kong".

Throughout his speech and the Q&A session that followed, Patten had the patriarchal air you'd expect from a Chancellor of Oxford University, and a concomitant eagerness to impart knowledge. He also had an agenda: to impress on the audience that a deep understanding of history - both recent and distant - is vital to international diplomacy.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 was, he said, the earliest incident in international politics that he could remember (he was 12 years old at the time). "It was the last throw of the European empires, which we thought we could manage while the world's only other superpower looked the other way," he said, recalling Harold Macmillan's infamous prediction, "I know Ike, he'll lie doggo."

As Patten pointed out, the Americans didn't "lie doggo". On the contrary, "they intervened through the UN to prevent the invasion of an Arab country by Britain and France, partly because of their concern of the impact on public opinion in the Arab World. They threatened to pull the plug on the British economy. It was one of the first dramatic reminders that even though Britain was still a great country we were no longer a great power."

Patten explained this was a time at which America had shaken off the isolationism it showed after the First World War, when Woodrow Wilson's League of Nation's was dismissed by the US public and its Senate. Back then, he said, "the Americans turned in on themselves, and the result was the dog-eat-dog protectionism in 1920s and 1930s in Europe and yet another war between France and Germany... After the Second World War, they were determined nothing like it should happen again and were prominent in leading the construction of the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions."

In an ironic dig at today's US administration, Patten reminded the audience that: "It was the Americans who pressed most vigorously for the concept of an international rule of law, who first pushed for an international criminal court. And it was the US, under Eleanor Roosevelt, that led the campaign for the US declaration of human rights."

He added that, despite the popular view that America invented NATO while Europe invented the common-market, the reverse is effectively true. "The Europeans wanted the US to stay behind again after the Second World War to provide a security shield for Western European democracy against Soviet Communism. The Americans were only prepared to stay behind if Europe would put that 19th-century nationalism on the back-burner - on the basis of France and Germany agreeing, through an historic act of reconciliation, to lash themselves together."

Of course, Patten mentioned all these things to underline the incongruities of the era of "George W.". However, he also clearly found it upsetting that the ideal behind the European Union was in danger of being forgotten:

"My wife's father fought in the Second World War, like many of your parents I'm sure, and died in the bocage of Normandy after the breakout from Falaise after D-Day, a couple of months before my wife was born," he said. "At his college at Cambridge - and the same is true of quite a few Oxford colleges - the memorial tablet in the college has the names of the dead listed as British, Australian, Canadian, South African... and German - there were German Rhodes scholars at Oxford!"

It was a "terrible obscenity", he said, that young people had been "brought together at the great universities of Europe, to learn about Western civilisation, to learn about the humanities, only to go back to their own countries to be armed to go out and shoot one another."

In spite of its flaws, self-contradictions and wastefulness, the EU can't ultimately be ridiculed, Patten argued, because it is "probably the most substantial, indeed unique, example of sovereignty sharing we've ever seen. Europe isn't in the business of becoming a superstate; it isn't, as some people rather witlessly say, trying to become a 'country', but we do see nation states, 25 of them, working together, in an unprecedented way to create a single market, a single environment policy... a single trading bloc." He later added: "The most extraordinary thing about the EU isn't that it's ramshackle, isn't that it lurches from crisis to crisis, but that it exists at all."

This example of how formerly warring nations can reconcile their differences will be increasingly important in the tripolar world of the US, China and India, he argued. "I find it difficult to understand why anybody thinks that between a fifth and a quarter of humanity becoming better off is a threat. I think it would be a much greater threat to us if China were impoverished rather than well off."

Patten also echoed various public speeches in which he has criticised the West's inconsistent application of and adherence to international law. "We have a tendency to ask China and India to play by certain rules and then, when those rules don't suit us, we change them," he said. "That's what happened in the row we had over textiles earlier this year. The multifibre agreement ran out with entirely predictable results, [including] a surge in Chinese exports. As an EU commissioner I had presided over conference after conference that discussed how we were going to cope with this, but when the predictable happened we slapped on a curb that went against all the previous agreements we had with China and that we had encouraged China to keep."

Intense diplomacy will be required when it comes to dividing the world's natural resources, given China's newfound thirst for oil, Patten said. "But the way to go about this is not, as the US did recently over Unocal, to prevent a Chinese oil company from buying a US one."

A lot of people foresee "an inevitable fight for leadership between America and China over the coming century, but I think that's a very dangerous way of looking at things", he concluded, adding that it was a view that could be self-fulfilling if allowed to fester. "I think if we play our hand sensibly then what the next century will actually be about is a battle of ideas: like free markets, the rule of law, participative government, civil society... It's more likely to happen if the US returns to the approach to international leadership it took for 40 or 50 years after the War."

Patten's final statement was delivered in the quiet but resonant basso he reserves for real contempt: "We must hope this [US] administration is an aberration, and that we will see a more traditional approach to American leadership afterwards - not the approach I think vice-president Cheney would agree with."