Interview with John Bew - adviser to four Prime Ministers

On Whitehall, Ukraine, Trump and the global challenges facing Britain

John Bew is Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the War Studies Department at King’s College London, where he is closely involved in the new Centre for Statecraft and National Security, and distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. From 2019 to 2024 he was the Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy Advisor. We interviewed him before Xmas to discuss his experience in government and the development of British foreign policy. This was before the situations in Venezuela and Greenland rushed to the fore, but you can read his views on those in the current New Statesman.

Sam:

How did you end up in government and what was your role? How did it fit with other foreign affairs roles?

John:

I’d been around the policy space for a while in my position at the War Studies Department at King’s College London. From the early 2010s, I’d been doing long foreign policy essays for the New Statesman about issues like Syria and Libya. At that time there wasn’t Comment is Freed! In other words, there wasn’t that much foreign affairs commentary in the kind of essay style that is common in the US. So that had given me a higher profile with MPs, and I got to know some – including people like Jo Cox and Rachel Reeves – who were taking an interest in these foreign policy issues. And I wrote my Attlee biography, which came out in 2016 and gave me some visibility on the Labour side, having previously written one on Castlereagh in 2011. I also published a more conceptual history of Realpolitik in 2016.

I was very strongly anti-Corbyn, and that oriented my politics in the mid-2010s. I also knew a lot of people on the Conservative side of the aisle, partly because of their interest in Northern Ireland. Many people had come through my family home in Belfast during the Troubles – reporters, politicos and comment writers. And I was a specialist advisor on the foreign affairs committee with Tom Tugendhat as chair and worked quite closely with him. We began to look more at China in this period, which had been a bit of a blind spot in the UK debate. So I had lots of political connections, on different sides of the aisle, but basically with people who took national security issues.

Then in 2019 Munira Mirza, who had been Boris Johnson’s advisor at City Hall and was then a colleague at King’s, asked me for a coffee in the King’s canteen. This was before Boris’s election as Tory leader. It’s was end of the Theresa May period when the leadership race had already started. And she asked if I wanted to join them in a new policy unit. Initially, I was unsure and dilly-dallied around for a few weeks, speaking to lots of people about whether or not I should do it. But eventually I agreed. So I went into the policy unit on the hottest day of the year - I think 26th of July 2019 - feeling utter doom and horror at turning my life upside down, with a young family at home. But some sort of instinct kicked in that I couldn’t say no – having written about this stuff – and I certainly couldn’t just walk out.

Over the course of my time, I got embroiled in things I said I wouldn’t get involved in, like some of the Northern Ireland debates. That was one of my conditions for going: I wouldn’t do Northern Ireland because it was all too painful for me in the Brexit context, and I’d spent my academic life getting away from it – partly because this was also my Dad’s area of expertise. I ended up doing quite a range of issues and got closer and closer to the Prime Minister’s Office - in physical terms, which is crucial in No10. So partly by virtue of doing some of the negotiations, including back-channel negotiations, I ended up in the morning meetings (with the “top team”) and things like that. I also spent time working on the national security strategies. And from March 2021 I was much more present by the Prime Minister’s side because we had Afghanistan, and then the build up to Ukraine, Aukus going on the background, as well as the issues around the Northern Ireland protocol.

Sam:

You ended up, very unusually, working for four different Prime Ministers. How did that happen? Normally when a new prime minister comes in everyone’s cleared out, but you were the point of continuity through all the chaos of 2022 and even after the election.

John:

The main reason was I did lot of stuff at a higher level of classification and I wasn’t deeply political (or partly political) in a way that a lot of special advisors are. Their trajectories are different – for example, they get attached to a minister and are closer to some of the rough and tumble. I had quite a cloistered position coming from academia. Boris Johnson used to jokingly call me “Prof”.

I became sort of an honorary member of the Deep State in that I was the point of continuity through a lot of turbulence. I worked closely with two different cabinet secretaries and four NSAs [National Security Advisors] – or acting NSAs – in the space of five years in government which is remarkable as well. So I became the de facto conduit on certain issues for the wider system as well. In each of those transitions I was encouraged to stay by the cabinet secretary, who would suggest to the Prime Minister it was sensible to keep some in-house knowledge. This was more important because the level of civil service churn was also higher than normal.

When Boris left office, Liz Truss came from being Foreign Secretary, and I’d worked with her as the Prime Minister’s foreign policy advisor, so she had a relatively favourable view of me. She also said she wanted to make good on her campaign promise to rewrite the national security strategy with a 3% spending commitment on defence – which I wanted to happen. Then with Rishi Sunak, I got the call initially from the Cabinet Secretary saying he (Rishi) wanted me to stay. I knew some people in Sunak’s team and there were a number of things running that were really important to me, like Ukraine, that were still unresolved and Northern Ireland policy issues. I agonized a bit in both those cases, I was quite keen to go back to academia, which I missed.

Then when it came to the Starmer administration, I’d known John Healey as someone who was doing some sensible thinking around defence reform, and he did a lot of the transition talks on the security side, with Sue Gray (whom I also knew) and Starmer. I was asked to stay permanently and I said “I can’t possibly put my family through another full electoral term.” I’d kept my job at King’s during this period but it was five and a half years, at this point, so I felt I was beginning to take the mickey with my employer and my family. But equally, it was an honour to be asked to stay again and I had been working extremely closely on issues like Ukraine. So I agreed to stay from the June election until the last day before I started teaching again at King’s. That meant being on the plane to the NATO Summit (my fifth in a row) with the PM a few days after the election and still taking a lead on Ukraine policy in No10. I went to Kyiv to lead negotiations on the 100 year partnership, was involved in the UK-Germany defence treaty negotiations and helped launched the SDR, before finally walking out of No10 one morning and lecturing the next. I’ve remained close to government. I returned temporarily to write the Starmer government’s National Security Strategy, I sit on the FCDO’s Planning Committee and I’ve become an Honorary Captain in the Royal Navy.

Sam:

As a result of being the continuity you were one of very few people who actually saw all of those different administrations and how they worked. What are your reflections on the differences in their operational style?

John:

They were very different. The slickest and best organized, as you’d guess, was Rishi’s Number 10. He set the tone from the top. He’s an extremely hard worker, extremely fastidious. There could be a lot of friction in Rishi’s Number 10, more than people presume, because it was quite a high stress environment, but you knew the Prime Minister was on everything. I admire and I like him a lot – my kids spent a few too many Saturdays waiting for me in the building and they still love him because he always had a stash of chocolate.

The drama of the politics was most profound in Boris’s era. His political capacity is unreal: to set the news agenda, etc. When it worked, it really worked. Then you could see the cascade and the collapse. So that was like attending a court, a remarkable experience. The international aspects of that were exhilarating – for example setting the agenda on Ukraine. Working with characters like Dominic Cummings was formative and has stayed with me in everything I have done since.

With Truss I remember being completely discombobulated by her first day, because she decided not to use the prime minister’s office, which is the nodal point of the building – which you creep closer to as you gain more authority, and you spend more and more time in it as you gain even more influence. It was turned into an office for four people. She primarily worked out of the Cabinet Room, which, by the way, Clement Attlee also did.

With the Starmer administration, it was actually quite wild, even in the knowledge I was heading out the door in a few months. The election happened on Thursday and then everyone’s on a flight to NATO for a summit on Sunday night. No one there could believe we have the system where the prime minister doesn’t have time to breathe, fights an election and then he turns up to the NATO Summit making these major statements on consequential issues. That there’s no transition. There was a sense that with Labour out of government for so many years that they felt a bit disoriented at the start. It’s just so hard to prepare for that moment. For me it was kind of a full circle moment. After five years working for the Conservatives, a whole set of Labour figures came up to me in the corridor and said how much they had enjoyed my book on Clement Attlee from the time they were leading the anti-Corbyn resistance. Starmer’s speech on the steps, when he talked about country over party, were taken from the book.

Sam:

We’ve talked before about government effectiveness and the dysfunctions of the state. From your vantage point in number 10, what was your sense of what you’d want to change about how the centre of government works to make it more effective? Because you were involved in some effective projects – like the response to Ukraine, but also saw a number of substantial failures.

John:

A lot of it is down to personality, energy and individuals. The chemistry of those individuals really matters. How alert is their antenna at all times to enable them to avoid disaster, but also not to let the antennae confuse you from walking in a straight line towards a clear direction. You can see people who had brilliant antennae, but who were too panicked by minutia and people who had a good sense of direction but failed to see all the challenges on the way.

So when I think of books that I would have everyone in government read, it would be Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, with its focus on the tension between Virtu, which is vigorous action based on learning, and Fortuna, which is the Wheel of Fortune. Having the right mentality is the most important thing – 100 times over. But you still need a system, and you still need a process.

I’ll give you a very tangible example of the system failing and replacing it with a different type of system. During fall of Kabul I watched as well-oiled processes around the national security secretariat and actually the whole national security paradigm failed. I don’t think that’s the reason why the Taliban took over Afghanistan. I would go back US decision making, which has nothing to do with the UK, and maybe should have had more to do with UK. No UK combat troops were there from 2014 so our leverage was reduced in any respect.

But what looked like system failure was people using an old paradigm and making incorrect suppositions about likely courses of action. The intelligence assessments about the pace of the Taliban victory were wrong and it felt like nothing was working. We pulled some of the last evacuation work into Number 10 in late August, literally physically into number 10. We had a screen setup with the evacuation team from the cabinet room. At times like that Number 10 has to lead in unconventional ways.

That’s crucial to understanding the comparative effectiveness of the UK response on Ukraine in terms of pace of decision making. We pulled a lot into Number 10, so we had clear Prime Ministerial authority and an immense amount of prime ministerial interest, including phone calls at ten at night, absolutely clear directions and a relatively small team, so the NSA was able to act on that. The Prime Minister knew what he wanted.

Everything we did with diplomatic channels and parliamentary channels, on choices for travel, on phone calls, on prep for ministerial meetings, on decisions on capabilities, whether we give weapons to Ukraine or not, had that sort of centrifugal force, because we pulled so much of it into Number 10, probably to the consternation of some. We also had a very active defense secretary at that time [Ben Wallace], and he was probably frustrated at some of his advice or views getting mediated through the Cabinet Office. Ben Wallace was the first to move on sending lethal weapons to Ukraine. So it’s a combination of the clarity of political leadership, which the system does respond to, and the antennae of the key people involved in that policy. If you have those things you can orient the system and have it respond absolutely brilliantly. This is why I think the British civil service is completely underestimated. But to make things happen you do often have to set up mini- separate processes. Which is what Henry de Zoete was saying in his post for you about the AI Security Institute.

Sam:

It is a problem that the way you get something done is to set up a separate process within Number 10, rather than it being done by the department that’s supposed to do it, or in the way that the system is theoretically supposed to run. So you have to set up these separate processes which can then be incredibly effective. Would there be a way of making the system work as it’s supposed to work, rather than having to end run it like that?

John:

I’m a bit more sympathetic to things happening like that. If we look at the national security system as an example – there’s lots of aspects of it that could be improved. I worry we’ve over-corrected in response to Butler and Chilcot and the mistakes that were made in and around the Iraq War. Take the Iraq war: it was a massive political and strategic blunder. Let’s presume that’s our starting point. It therefore wasn’t a systems blunder. We focus on processes rather than the decision being taken: that there wasn’t enough challenge; that the Foreign Office never saw the Chicago speech; that Alastair Campbell shouldn’t have sat in on certain sensitive meetings; etc. So the system’s response is to put more structure in.

Early National Security Advisers will tell you is that they had a much slicker, smaller operation, and the NSA was the Prime Minister’s chief diplomatic advisor. The size of the national security secretariat has ballooned because every time Number 10 says we need a critical mineral strategy, or whatever happens to be on the agenda, they can’t get it from departments.

Ultimately the system should be able to deal with a problem like Afghanistan, which is a genuinely cross-government national security effort, £6 billion development money spent, counter-insurgency, intelligence, NATO mission, key to our US, alliance and partnership, the domestic terror threat, etc. It’s set up to deal with something like that, and it failed. But it’s not really set up to deal with a war in Europe of the scale and significance that we saw in Ukraine. So we had to do things slightly differently. And I think that you’d find that for any era, actually.

Lawrence:

Chilcot didn’t come out till 2016 so the NSC structure was there before [Lawrence was a member of the Chilcot Inquiry]. I worry myself sometimes that the Chilcot messages got a bit over-formalised, as if any junior can jump up and say, “in the name of Chilcot, I think this is this is foolish”, because it’s still going to be career threatening if they’re not careful, and it can just provide an excuse for continual delay.

Part of the argument we made was that the relevant cabinet committees hadn’t met. There hadn’t been challenge from senior ministers. It wasn’t part of their ministerial briefs, but it might have been better if they’d been there, worrying a bit and asking hard questions in the way that a Willie Whitelaw or a Dennis Healy might have done in earlier times. There an issue when national security problems get detached from the rest of government as a specialist area in which ordinary ministers are not expected to have a view. Even chancellors are kept away from it if possible.

John:

As you know senior officials do use the Chilcot checklist. There’s a laminated copy that appears on desks at critical moments. I don’t think I ever rolled my eyes when I when I got it, because actually the checklist itself is not that heavy.

I guess I’m thinking more about the national security processes in the round. Of course, it is right and proper that national security is an all of government thing. We all say this repeatedly, so then the DBT minister wants to know why they’re not on the NSC. Then the security minister calls number 10 and asks why they’re not in the NSC. And the truth is, Prime Ministers hate it because they’ve got very tight calendars and it makes it harder to reach decisions.

They turn up and sometimes junior ministers are speaking and not bringing anything new to the party. So you’re right in principle, but almost all Prime Ministers, after an initial bout of piety about cabinet government, end up with a smaller group of key ministers.

For some of the longer-term strategic issues, like our defense strategy, industrial base, critical minerals, China relationship, you must do a bit more of that cross-government work. Whereas some of the more acute issues, where the pace of decision making is key, where there is concern about leaks or information being shared, or where you have sensitive issues like terrorism or sending a particular weapon systems to Ukraine, probably necessitate smaller groups.

Lawrence:

When you arrived, Trump was president. He wasn’t quite President again when you left, but the writing was on the wall. How is Trump one different from Trump two? What are the shifts that you can see?

John:

It is a different presidency. It is highly challenging. But there is something to work with. He feels quite personally about Ukraine, in a way that’s hugely problematic for the UK, but he has affection for the UK, deep affection, which is actually more manifest this time around. He’s got a good functioning relationship with Starmer. I was there for the early setting of that relationship. It is important. And he thinks that NATO increasing defense spending is one of his success stories. It’s not without justification that he can say in the Middle East that his unorthodox approach to diplomacy has yielded more success than there was under Biden. It’s hugely problematic on the Ukraine portfolio. But then there’s still a lot to play for.

But it’s unquestionably a different beast. First time around there were the so-called adults in the room, even if there was a lot of churn. Jim Mattis talking about the rules-based order being the greatest gift of the greatest generation. Gary Cohn and H.R. McMaster saying America first does not mean America alone. You could orient yourself around that.

This time around it’s harder to orient yourself around a particular faction or grouping. The head of policy planning is gone already, Michael Anton, who was regarded as the Trump intellectual, though his hand is on the national security strategy. The National Security team in the White House is much smaller. In the Biden White House the NSA was massive, hundreds and hundreds of people. So you’ve got more confusion about who’s doing what, as you have seen with what’s going on with the Ukraine negotiations (Kellogg to Witkoff to Rubio to Kushner).

Another observation: the Trump thinking is “we have to do everything at pace”, because as soon as the midterms come into view, our authority is diminished. So the revolution has to be as fast as possible. You can almost see that they may have been right in that assessment, that their room for manoeuvre is now being squeezed. On the right you have Laura Loomer and the groypers and Tucker Carson. But there’s also people like Lindsey Graham, the traditional Republican hawks who can take so much but not that much. So the room for Trump is being a little restricted already.

Arguably the biggest restraining factor on the Trump administration is American capitalism. The most interesting thing I’ve read on this is an Oren Cass essay on a Trump grand strategy. The Trump intellectuals who have a more “blue Labour” type approach are struggling with this. There’s already concern among them that the revolution will be temporary. So the temptation to succumb to despair is a mistake because these constraints are real. Ukraine needs the UK, the proper allies, to stay in the fight and play with whatever ground there is. There’s room for sharp, effective diplomacy. It’s more radical, it’s more combustible. It sticks in the craw. However, we’ve learned some useful habits. Why should we have commentary on every US domestic political issue when we don’t on Chinese and Indian ones. For the sake of diplomacy, do we need to respond every time JD Vance says something about our free speech? No, we don’t.

Lawrence:

So there’s a couple of problems. One, just the lack of bandwidth of this administration. As you say there just aren’t enough people. You can see with the Witkoff’s 28-point Ukraine plan. It irritated a number of senators, and this wasn’t even just a question of policy substance but the sheer incompetence of the operation. And then Rubio comes in, and it all looks different.

You have written British grand strategy three times: first the 2021 integrated review, then the refresh because of Ukraine, and most recently, the first Starmer review. What did you think you got right first time, and why did you feel it needed to be changed second and then third time?

John:

So the most intellectually honest review, the most academically rigorous review, is the first one, the integrated review in 2021, though that’s not how it’s perceived. Partly because we had so much time during covid because everything was so disrupted, and we kept on having to kick the can down the road. We did a last minute deal in the autumn of 2020 with the Treasury for a multi-year settlement for the MoD because it was in such a crisis, and that became the platform for writing the rest. Of course, part of that deal, which was very uncomfortable for me, was the temporary reduction in development spending below 0.7 percent of GDP which subsequent governments have sort of doubled down on.

With the Rishi Sunak review, he was sceptical at whether we needed to do one. In the Tory leadership campaign one of Liz Truss’s big themes was “we need to get tough on China”. She was playing to the hawks in the Tory party. So she was arguing we need to rewrite our review. And Sunak says in one of the debates, “Liz as a cabinet minister you signed off the last review. I think it’s completely fine”. That meant we had a dilemma when she went and the work had just begun. But we decided to continue. It was actually a useful device, we got a further uptick in defence spending, and a lot of attention paid to nuclear. I think we used it quite effectively on the national resilience side.

At each stage, the reviews got more and more Leninist, so fewer and fewer people were involved. We had a tiny team by the third one, for the Starmer government. I got more closely involved again at the start of 2025 when I had some input to the Prime Minister’s speech for his big defence spending announcement ahead of his visit to DC. That committed to a national security strategy before June. We had a defence review, a homeland security review at a higher classification, then you’ve got a China audit – so it needed to brought together in some place. It was formally commissioned in April and then we got it out for the NATO Summit in June.

To answer your broader question about grand strategy, none of these reviews are strategies. They’re strategic frameworks - they have pillars, they have some prioritization, but they’re not ends, ways and means. The first one is a restatement of internationalism post-Brexit, and probably over does it. It’s the most-misty eyed about the international system. It’s very focused on climate change. Because Boris Johnson was hugely focused on climate change; the second and third just don’t have it so far high up the agenda. Each review gets more austere and less booster-ish.

So what are the big changes over time? The first thing is the UK, still with a bit of incoherence, admittedly, has got far more robust and serious on the China challenge. Secondly, the science and technology side, I think we deserve some credit for elevating this is as an absolutely vital part of strategic competition, future prosperity and wealth. Third, there has been a considerable reorientation of our budget, away from what people call soft power to hard power. Most explicitly in development aid going down and defence spending going up. And then there are ways of acting which are articulated in the document. There’s a reaffirmation of the importance of collective security. There’s a view that we should be more forward leaning with higher risk appetite, which we’ve seen over Ukraine.

Lawrence:

What’s interesting in this discussion is, if you look at the way that people normally talk about UK Foreign Policy, you haven’t once mentioned “where do we stand between the United States and Europe”. You’ve assumed that we have to have close relationships with the US. You haven’t mentioned Europe very much. Yet one of the sort of features of the Starmer time is an attempt to mend relations with Europe. I’m just interested in your thoughts about how that can develop and how far it can go.

John:

In terms of power to mobilise other countries the most significant actor, by a million miles, is the United States. The size and scale is just so important. Ukraine affirms that in a considerable way - from deterrence effect to intelligence sharing. The vast power of the United States is something that anyone with a strategic brain in any European capital understands very profoundly.

But within the G7 in the period preceding the invasion of Ukraine the two most robust actors in terms of urging clearer sanctions and deterrence messages were the EU and the UK. In his speeches before the war Boris Johnson was praising Ursula von der Leyen for the robustness of EU action.

Some of the conversations that are happening now on shared capability developments with Paris and Berlin were happening already during the Sunak government. The Windsor Framework was a kind of reset before the reset. Sunak and von der Leyen had a very good relationship, not only because of the Windsor framework, but the importance they put on Ukraine as well. There was a lot of pre-work done.

The big thing that’s different now is there’s more emphasis on the E3 [France, Germany, UK]. It’s easier for Paris and Berlin to push the E3 envelope now that time has passed after Brexit and the divorce is a bit less raw. It’s easier for them to withstand the objections of Rome or Brussels, which come with that format. Remember too, that the Scholz administration in Germany was not as robust as Merz on Ukraine and that President Macron had a “deal with Putin approach” at the start.

What’s tangibly different now is the Trump administration approach in Ukraine, which changes the conversations that are being had privately between Paris and Berlin and London. In particular, those between Berlin and London right now are of greater consequence than they were when the Biden administration had a relative constancy and transparency about its approach. Secondly, though all three countries are careful about wishing away American support and flouncing around about the future Europe without America, there’s more behind-the-scenes planning in place for what you might call an orderly transition from a dominant American security umbrella.

There are lots of areas where the substance of what the UK-EU relationship should look like hasn’t been worked out. And there are big trade-offs coming. They’re quite significant. The UK has made a pretty explicit bet on US tech. I think it’s the right bet. It’s $3 trillion floating about. It may be a bubble, but it’s the likeliest source of growth. The atmospherics with the EU are unquestionably better and easier and, in principle, the ability to work together. But it’s not transformative in substantive terms yet.

Lawrence:

The integrated review was noted for the tilt to the Indo-Pacific. Now people say we’ve moved away from that, but it seems to me there’s an awful lot more continuity than that suggests. How do you address the issue that the 2021 review had an exaggerated view of what the UK could and should achieve away from Europe?

John:

Nothing irritates me more than this, but you’ve given me the opportunity to set the record straight. So first of all, it’s a tilt and not a pivot. The US was talking about a pivot. We chose tilt as a more humble term. Secondly, every metric, from military power, purchasing power, GDP, market share, technological and scientific development, advanced manufacturing, told us that the Indo-Pacific was becoming more and more important, visibly, versus the rest of the world. It’s a prioritization point.

But in the 2021 review we say the Euro-Atlantic is by far and away the most important focus for the UK Government. This is part of the emphasis on NATO and collective security, which is – to decode it – the national security state assuring core allies that nothing has changed on this front. It has the most robust language on Russia of any G7 country. It says Russia is the most acute threat to European security. And therefore the primary area of focus is in this region. It’s very explicit about that, but says we’re going to be more engaged in the Indo-Pacific in the following ways. Aukus was in the back of my mind though not fully transpired by the time of that document. You’ve got the Global Combat Air programme, which is European and Indo-Pacific, which may, by the way, end up being more European, as people always conceived it might be as well. You’ve got CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership ), bilateral deals with Australia and Japan, significant inward investment, semiconductors. The PM was recently in India. The last three British Prime Ministers have gone there. Not many went before that for many years. So all those things are being delivered.

Then you have these two aircraft carriers, and you might as well use them. They’ve now done two circumnavigations, and you have John Healey saying NATO first, but not NATO only. It’s always been NATO first, and not NATO only. There’s a vast degree of continuity. The last two of three priority areas - the Euro/Atlantic, Indo-Pacific and the Gulf - are level pegging with the first the most important. That means there’s less on Africa. There’s less on climate. There’s less about multilateralism. There’s less about Latin America. So there has been prioritization, but it got very tied up with the Brexit story that we’d fly east of Suez again, etc. But you look at it tangibly, there’s been no surge of forces away from Europe to the Indo-Pacific at all.

Lawrence:

Is there anything you else you’d like to get on the record?

John:

Here’s what I would say as a way of rounding things off. I think we’re at the sort of foothills of the fourth great structural strategic challenge since the French Revolution. The first being the Pitt/Castlereagh era where you have a six-fold increase in size of the state; the introduction of income tax as a wartime measure; a huge increase in size of the Army; the union of Britain and Ireland; state formation. Then you have that peak Diamond Jubilee period of 1900 through to 1918 which is Imperial preference, tariff reform, early social insurance. That’s all to do with the fact that Britain’s got a very diffuse empire and now has acute vulnerabilities in protecting that empire. Then you’ve got the socialization of the Keynesian economy of the 40s through to the 1950/60s. The Second World War, the Cold War, mobilization of state and economy, full employment planning for the first time in UK history. I think that that ran through the end of the Cold War.

We’re in the foothills of the fourth shift and I don’t think the state is prepared for that. It has massive implications for industrial strategy and, for national security. It may mean we have to take periods of very difficult financial pain. All we’ve done is move a few concepts here or there in the various national security strategies, and move some resource around. But it has vast implications for the social contract, our political economy and so on.

I’ve been very anti-presentism, anti-tech bubble, but I’m starting to think all these tributaries are flowing into something of huge significance. What I don’t want to say is we’ll see, social disorder, social disruption. I don’t buy the argument that violence is coming to our streets, even as I’m stressing the radicalism of the moment.

It’s about dealing with these major structural problems. Like the guys who looked at the state of the economy in those earlier periods and thought we need tariff reform, or imperial protection, or planning. Who’s coming up with these sort of major, bold structural moves? And you can see the Reform people sort of grasping for something but not knowing what. The current Tory political response is to double down the fiscal propriety – ie. “we’ve got to live within our means” - and maybe that’s one answer to it. But to my mind, it’s inadequate. We probably need massive changes in our political economy, and our tax code, and the legal framework, or at least our adherence to the international legal framework.

The question really interests me is, what if a group of bright things, young and old, sat down and wrote down a plan to make this country safe, secure and prosperous in the next 20 to 30 years. What are the things we need to do? You’ll find none of that in any of the current manifestos.

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