The David Cornwell that I knew, who is famous as John le Carré, is a 21st-century writer, an author for our time and a forensic investigator of its ills.

Overwhelmingly the salutations in his obituaries emphasise his role in the Cold War. They are filled with a stench of stale melancholy for past self-importance. He despised such sentimentality, personally there was nothing nostalgic about him.

Starting with 'The Constant Gardener', which he published in 2001, he wrote seven novels in this century alone. His theme was the predations of corporate power, the corruptions of finance, the inhumanity of the looting of Africa, the venality of modern capitalism, the abuse of surveillance and the vile penetration of arms-dealing, as politicians danced to the tunes of oligarchs. Often his contemporary work is described as 'angry' as if his views could be dismissed as the weaknesses of old age. In fact they were a tough, always carefully calibrated, exercise of hard judgment.

They mattered because of his fame.

This was exceptional and it did not come just from his being a bestseller. He became an event when 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' was published. He personified the correct belief that something funny was going on, that we did not know about, and that power on our side was not all that it seemed. This was then reinforced by the films and TV adaptions of his work and his indefatigable productivity.

He was indeed a subtle writer, who recounted the ambiguities of our own side without ever conceding a moral inch to Stalinism. His capacity as a great story teller made his books literature. His overview shaped the perception of the Cold War world.

But in addition there was something self-indulgent and narcissistic about his popularity. Americans loved the way he allowed them to project their own bad faith onto the Brits while feeling morally superior to the declining empire. They made him genuinely wealthy.

But he did not give an inch to US power or Israeli aggression.

He enjoyed playing up the ambiguity, the weaknesses and corruption of power and money, and the vacuum at the heart of those who purport to represent us. At the same time he absolutely refused to collude with or become a part of it - hence his rejection of British honours.

For his self-presentation as a chronicler of deception was itself a mask. It veiled an adamantine, steadfast commitment to fundamental integrity.

Integrity is always work in progress, and is something that needs to be protected. He understood this well and was controlling about his influence and reputation (which made life hard for his biographer Adam Sisman). One deception that helped him was the use of his writer's name John le Carré. His real name was David Cornwell. In the last century he deployed the device to keep his public writing and his private life distinct. The David Cornwell and John le Carré of this century, however, became two sides of the same person - giving interviews and performing.

This John le Carré, the David-Cornwell-who-was-himself, the writer who was "becoming real" entered the early life of openDemocracy and supported it at a critical moment.

It came about because he was writing 'Absolute Friends' whose hero was a revolutionary in 1968. David himself had driven past a 60s demonstration: who knows, I might have been on it. Had we met then we would not have hit it off. Thirty years later, in 2002, he wanted to check his manuscript with someone from the other side of the car window and Tim Garton Ash suggested he contact me. I was happy to help and we clicked.

When the book was published I was delighted that in the conclusion, when the story of THE AMERICAN RIGHTISTS'S CONSPIRACY AGAINST DEMOCRACY was revealed, it was in "a not-for-profit website dedicated to transparency in politics". Much more important, he had dissected Steve Bannon before he even became Steve Bannon.

David came to the office of our non-fictional website for a meeting over sandwiches with the staff to discuss Iraq. Out of it came his article in The Times in January 2003, 'The United States of America has gone mad'. It linked to the openDemocracy debate of writers on the coming Iraq war, led by his brief contribution (reproduced below).

The war was a historic turning point in fact. The depth and clarity with which he saw this also changed him. No longer was there any ambiguity in the exercise of power by Washington and London. With extraordinary lucidity he described the change in himself through his hero in 'Absolute Friends', Ted Mundy.

So what had happened to him that hadn't happened before?

He'd weathered Thatcher and the Falklands ... The lies and hypocrisies of politicians are nothing new to him. They never were, So why now?

It's the knowledge that the wise fools of history have turned us over once too often, and he's damned if they'll do it again.

It's the discovery, in his sixth decade, that half a century after the death of Empire, the dismally unmanaged country he'd done a little of this and that for is being marched off to quell the natives on the strength of a bunch of lies, in order to please a renegade hyper-power that thinks it can treat the rest of the world as its allotment...

So Mundy redux marches ... with a conviction he never felt before because convictions until now were essentially what he borrowed from other people...

It's about becoming real after too many years of pretending, Mundy decides. It's about putting the brakes on human self-deception, starting with my own.

We marched with him and his wife Jane in London against the visit of President George W. Bush in November 2003. With his bright eyes David picked out a demonstrator with large polished boots as a policeman.

In 2006, enraged by the Israeli attack on Lebanon and with his views no longer so welcome in the mainstream press, he published a surgical condemnation in openDemocracy and in support of Saqi Books.

When we needed to launch a funding campaign he gave us its lead endorsement:

Let's support openDemocracy to the hilt. Intelligent, unbought, unspun opinion, uncomfortable but necessary truths and a lot of good horsey argument: heaven knows they are in short enough supply!

I enjoyed "horsey", a superbly ambiguous term of praise, signalling with exactitude the site's publishing of arguments that while they smelt of life may not be ones you would want to live with!

In 2013, I helped a little with his rendition of New Labour treachery in 'A Delicate Truth'.

I thought of David as indestructible - and still do. He was a man of the future that we need to have.

Last year, in a 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft to publicise his most recent anti-Brexit novel, 'Agent Running in the Field', this most European of writers whose books covered the world was asked if he felt he was English. His reply was typically exact as he rephrased the question.

"What kind of Englishman at the moment? Yes, of course, I'm born and bred English. I'm English to the core. My England would be the one that recognizes its place in the European Union. That jingoistic England that is trying to march us out of the EU, that is an England I don't want to know".

He is everything his country could have been, that it should be, that, in the hands of its contemptible leaders, it is not - the England that it can become, but only when the generation that have betrayed it, Labour and Conservative, has left the scene.

From openDemocracy