this, however, Thatcher later invited Duffy for tea when he was appointed President of the NATO Assembly. "We got on so well that her officials were starting to get nervous that our meeting would never finish," he commented in 2020. Duffy stood down from Parliament at the 1992 general election. In a 2020 interview with Catholic magazine The Tablet, Duffy was quoted ("half in jest", according to the interviewer) on his career as an MP: "I spent 19 and a half of my 25 years in opposition. If I'd known that was how it was going to be at the beginning, I'd never have gone in for it". , he remains president of the Labour Life Group, in keeping with his pro-life views on abortion. He had hoped to go to the House of Lords upon his retirement, but, according to The Tablet, the then-Leader of the Labour Party Neil Kinnock was "not a fan" of his. Outside Parliament Duffy was president of the North Atlantic Assembly (the parliamentary arm of NATO) during the first-time delegations from the Warsaw Pact nations. In 1991, he served as leader of the first Western parliamentary delegation to the Kremlin, and that year, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, in recognition of his NATO role, becoming entitled to be known as Sir Patrick Duffy for his contribution to the Western Alliance. In 2014, he said "After the Catholic Church and the International Post Office and the International Labour Organisation in Geneva, I don't believe a more impressive international organisation has emerged other than Nato." He was president of the NATO Assembly at a time when the Cold War came to an end in the late 1980s and early 1990s; it was in this capacity that he also had a private audience with Pope John Paul II, on 9 October 1989. It was said that Duffy was a "major force" in bringing the Cold War to an end. In 1993, he was made an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by the Dominican University, Illinois. Duffy also functioned as Deputy Chair of the Atlantic Council of the UK. As of 2017, he served as a member of the Advisory Boards of the Centre of Defence and International Security Studies at Hull University, and the Universities of Lancaster and York Defence Research Institute. He also served as an associate of the Centre for Defence and International