Remembrance Day, November 11, is the day when the British remember and honour their war dead – the soldiers who fell in two world wars, and other more recent conflicts. For more than 30 years I reported such conflicts for the BBC, and I now have to respond to them in a different capacity as a Member of the House of Commons. I was always a free spirit, as tiresome to my editors then as to the political parties now. As the result of political accident, I am the only Independent British MP.

Earlier this year I received a flattering invitation from my old college, King’s College Cambridge, to deliver an address in the Gothic splendour of the College Chapel on the occasion of Remembrance Sunday – a reflection on the wars of this singularly blood-drenched century. The Dean of King’s, in his letter of invitation, asked me to bear in mind the College’s left-off centre and anti-militarist tradition.