Freddie Sayers: I was struck reading your book that the world of media politics is changing extremely quickly. In the old days you knew where the power lay — with the big networks, the party establishment, the stars, the newspaper. And now, it’s harder to tell. The characters you cover are in many ways figures from the past.

Michael Wolff: I think this has been the case for some time. Virtually everyone in this business has been challenged in some profound way — and often they’ve been disappeared. They were there, they were important, and then they were gone. One of the interesting things about Rupert Murdoch, of course, is that he has been there for so long — for 70 years. He has held more power and influence far longer than anyone else in our time. But now, the sands are not only shifting but dissolving beneath him.

FS: This week, he finally announced his retirement at the grand old age of 92.

MW: That is partly because at that age, the end comes inevitably — but there are also other factors. It’s not just that he’s aged out of the game. The game has changed, and the game is changing in so many ways against him.

FS: We tend to think of Murdoch as a sort of omnipotent puppet master. But your book presents him as a man overtaken by events. You talk about him mumbling a lot, making the wrong calls, being bullied by his children. He’s actually a rather forlorn figure. And it seems from your account that he’s been like that for some time.

MW: His sell-by date probably ran out some time ago. But he holds on because he’s Rupert Murdoch — because all of the people around him think, “well, he’s Rupert Murdoch, he must still be Rupert Murdoch”. And I think in many ways, that’s not true.

I guess you could say he is reaping what he sowed — and it’s not pleasant for him, especially when it comes to Fox News. Donald Trump won the election largely because of Fox News, and it is confounding — wounding even — to Murdoch that he might have made a man he detests the President of the United States. The ultimate reality is that Fox News and Donald Trump are his legacy.

The tragic irony is that Murdoch never had much to do with Fox News. He started it in 1996 after being rebuffed in his efforts to buy CNN. But he’s never been that interested in television: he never watches it, he certainly isn’t a television executive. He hired Roger Ailes to start Fox News and to grow it — and Roger sat at the top for more than 20 years. It was Roger’s network, not Rupert’s. Although Rupert was happy to collect the incredible amounts of money that rolled in.

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FS: All this paints a very different picture from Succession, the hit TV show, in which the Rupert Murdoch character played by Brian Cox is always in the newsroom. He is obsessed with cable TV. But what you’re saying is that the real Murdoch wasn’t stoking the fires of Fox News — in fact, he was embarrassed of it. It’s in many ways a disappointing revelation.

MW: Rupert Murdoch is a newspaper man. It’s the only thing he really is passionate about — that, and the family dynasty. When you see Rupert with a newspaper, it’s like this physical love affair: the way he handles it, the way he folds it, the way he marks it. You know, it’s nearly erotic. The other parts of his empire, such as television, have made him enormous amounts of money — because he’s a very astute media guy, a business guy. He can see the audience, he can see where the money is flowing. But it’s not him. His love doesn’t flow there.

Now, the bulk of his newspaper holdings — apart from The Wall Street Journal — are no longer profitable. They are declining assets. And it would be very hard to argue that a future without Rupert Murdoch will include his family still holding on to those newspapers.

FS: Has the departure of Tucker Carlson undermined Fox News? Would you say it’s losing its grip on the Right-wing narrative? 

MW: You have to see this against the wider media background: cable television, which was the great media cash cow for 25 years, is a declining business. Its decline won’t be as fast as newspapers — but it is just as inevitable. One of Murdoch’s daughters has been arguing they should sell Fox News because it is only growing less valuable.

FS: Do you think that Donald Trump will win his war against Fox News? He has already boycotted two Fox-sponsored Republican debates. Is he bigger than the network? 

MW: Let’s look at what’s happened so far. Rupert Murdoch, feeling guilty or trying to burnish his legacy, decided that he would try to undermine Donald Trump by inventing the candidacy of Ron DeSantis. DeSantis is a Fox bubble — and he has failed terribly. The result has been that Donald Trump is probably a more popular primary candidate than anyone in modern history. Despite four indictments, and despite New York State having taken away his business, he is still almost inevitably headed for the Republican nomination. He may well be president again. This is all in spite of Fox News.

FS: If you were a betting man, would your money be on Biden or Trump? 

MW: You can logically argue that Trump should not win. He’s always been a minority figure. His campaigns are run in the most chaotic and disorganised fashion. In 2020, weeks before the election, his campaign was $200 million in debt. This has never happened before. So he should not win, except for the fact that in very close races, exogenous factors usually determine the outcome. Will Biden fall over a couple of times? We wait and see. But the important thing to remember is that Trump certainly could become president again.

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FS: Your relationship with Trump is most unusual — and it illuminates some of his strangeness and maybe some of his genius. You are not thought of as a diehard Republican, to put it mildly. And yet he invited you into his circle, he gave you exclusive interviews, and even after you had written about him in a not very flattering way, he kept getting back in touch. Do you still speak to him?

MW: He threatened to sue me and tried to stop the publication of my book. So yes, we’re still in touch. But in a somewhat peculiar way. I think that he’s come to see these books as a positive chronicle — if only because they’ve sold so many copies. Therefore, they must be good. Not too long ago, one of the Trump people said to me: “The only metric we pay attention to is how much attention he’s getting: good, bad, doesn’t make any difference.” So I guess I’m part of that attention matrix.

FS: Allow me to suggest a second theory. Maybe there is still a part of Donald Trump, just as there was a part of Rupert Murdoch, which craves the approval of the liberal establishment. He’s a New Yorker. You’re the Vanity Fair guy: the esteemed journalist of showbiz. Is that fair?

MW: To be perfectly honest, when it comes to Donald Trump, it doesn’t really matter who he’s talking to. He can talk to anyone. The important thing is that he’s talking and someone is listening.

FS: For some people, this will be almost disappointing to hear. We’ve discussed these two outsized, Right-wing characters — Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump — and what you’re saying is that at some level both of them still want to be liked by the mainstream. Does this make them phony conservatives?

MW: Well, I think that is probably true. In a way, it’s more surprising in the case of Murdoch than Trump, who grew up in the bosom of the New York establishment, even if for much of that time he played the buffoon. By contrast, for most of his career, Murdoch has insisted: “I am the outsider.” But clearly, somewhere along the way, he became the establishment — although I’m not sure Rupert himself exactly appreciates this. He became one of the most powerful forces in politics, business, and, of course, the entertainment industry.

FS: Despite having been president, Donald Trump is still mysteriously considered anti-establishment. He’s outside the Citadel. Why is this?

MW: I think part of the genius of Donald Trump — although I’m not sure he planned it out in this way — is that his stature has only increased through conflict. If you spend 14 years as a reality television star, I think you understand that you have to have conflict at every turn — and it doesn’t matter whether it’s real conflict or not, you just have to find an enemy. Challenging “the establishment” is a very convenient way for Donald Trump to keep being Donald Trump.

FS: Let’s focus now on the current president, Joe Biden, because at times your characterisation of Murdoch — slightly too old for the job, slightly overwhelmed by the complexity of the modern world — reminded me of him. Do you think that America has an old man problem? 

MW: Biden looks terrible. He looks like an old man, he walks like an old man, he talks like an old man. I’ve been covering politics for a long time, and Joe Biden, even as a young man, had the air of an old man — certainly in the way he spoke. I think that, under the circumstances, he has actually done a pretty good job. And I think that’s what Joe Biden feels: “I’ve done a good job. So, screw it, I’m 80 and I might fall over at any given moment, I’m gonna do it.”

FS: Do you think liberals are to blame for the rise of Trump — and for the political mess that the US seems to find itself in? 

MW: The liberal establishment has clearly not been up to competing with these rising conservative outliers. It has been unable to respond in any effective manner. I don’t think they have a clear voice. I don’t think that they have a clear mission. I think that they’re caught in their own sense of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction.

At the end of every week, Tony Blair receives his “box” to review over the weekend. It is no longer the tatty, old red briefcase of a Prime Minister, but a virtual one accessible from his laptop wherever he is in the world. Yet, the process remains much the same as when he was in Downing Street. Those who work for him must submit their papers before the box is closed for the weekend. Blair will then review the documents and add comments before meeting his team the following week. Only those really close to the former PM can email him papers directly.

Such is the life of Blair in “retirement”. Aged 70, he works with the zeal of a man with something still to prove; something to build; something perhaps to redeem. Constantly travelling, Blair spends as much as 70% of his time abroad: raising funds, attending conferences, giving speeches and networking with world leaders, plutocrats, corporate executives and “thought leaders”. He flies on private jets and is escorted in armed cars with security always close by. This is Blair today: no longer Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but Prime Minister of Tony Blair Inc.

Formally, he is “executive chairman” of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, known to all as the TBI. The institute was born in 2017 and now employs more than 800 people worldwide, some with salaries as high as $504,000 (though Blair does not take one). He has offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Accra, and enough money to stage the slickest political conference in Britain. He has a media team to manage his media “grid”, a policy team to shape national debate, and a delivery team to project-manage his priorities across the world.

Working directly for him, Blair has a chief executive who used to work in No. 10, Catherine Rimmer, a global managing director who once worked for Justin Trudeau, Michael McNair, and an executive vice president who sits on the board of Oracle, one of the world’s biggest tech companies, Awo Ablo. His policy unit, meanwhile, is the only think tank in Britain with American levels of funding and a direct line into both the Government and Opposition, not to mention the Commissioners in Brussels and tech titans in San Francisco.

It is this arm of the TBI which has produced policy papers on everything from Brexit to AI to Covid. Its influence is such that cabinet ministers and even prime ministers — including Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — are regularly in touch. Starmer’s agenda as Labour leader now so closely resembles the policy prescriptions put forward by the TBI, whether on the need for a closer relationship with Europe or a new planning regime, that there is talk throughout Westminster of a Blairite reconquista. He has openly offered his institute to help Starmer if he becomes prime minister.

And yet, it is not the policy unit that is the TBI’s driving force, but its consultancy operation. Today, the “government advisory work” is responsible for almost all of its revenue, bringing in $79.4 million of its $81 million turnover in 2021, according to the latest accounts. In a recent round of internal restructuring, this side of the organisation was prioritised, resulting in a number of policy specialists leaving, including the policy unit’s leading man, Ian Mulheirn. (When we approached the TBI a spokesman insisted policy making had not been “de-prioritised” and remained one of the three pillars of the institute’s work, alongside “strategy and delivery”.)

The consultancy arm, meanwhile, is expanding rapidly, offering advice to governments around the world on the art of “delivery”. Look at the TBI’s recruitment page and there is an extraordinary array of jobs available: four in Abu Dhabi, three in Eastern Europe, two in each of the Philippines, Rwanda, Athens and Côte d’Ivoire, and one each in Israel, Indonesia, Kenya, New York, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Miami. Meanwhile, its offices in London, Singapore and Delhi are all expanding.

The TBI has become, in the words of one figure who knows the institute well, a “McKinsey for world leaders” — a global consultancy business which advises governments on how to govern, while also acting as a middle man between the world’s political and business elites. Astride it all, of course, is Blair himself, the man who decides what the organisation should focus on, who it should help and where it should expand. Like a senior partner in a law firm, Blair brings in the clients, using his connections with the rich and powerful.

It is important to stop for a moment to appreciate just how mould-breaking Blair’s post-premiership life really is for a British politician. When Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister, she joined the House of Lords. When John Major left office, he became chairman of a cricket club. Gordon Brown became a UN special envoy, David Cameron took on various chairmanship roles, Theresa May and Liz Truss remained in parliament and Boris Johnson returned to his old life writing newspaper columns. None of them tried to build anything on the scale of Blair’s globe-spanning TBI, a British “Clinton Foundation” combining philanthropy, business and political influence. Blair has assembled something so big, in fact, that according to one figure close to another former prime minister, he has approached at least one of those who succeeded him in No. 10 to see if they might be interested in working with him.

But the question I keep coming back to is: why?

II

At Blair’s Future of Britain conference in July, I watched as he weaved through a packed drinks reception, glass of water in hand, posing for selfies, imparting his wisdom. I hoped to grab a word. But such was the scrum of acolytes and security, I could not get close.

As Blair worked the room, hugging old friends and granting quick audiences to starstruck Labour MPs, it felt like being back in the early 2000s. For many of my generation, Blair will always be a defining politician. For me this is doubly so; I grew up in Sedgefield, his constituency, and knew him, tangentially, through my parents who were both Labour activists. I knew all those who worked for him and, indeed, spent time in his constituency office myself as a wide-eyed work experience kid. Back then, Blair seemed almost the ur-politician, the archetype others copied to win power. To this day, seeing him still feels a little bit like journeying back in time.

I am not the only one who thinks this. One person who worked at TBI, and has since left, compared life inside the institute to the movie Goodbye Lenin  — in which a woman who fell into a coma before the fall of the Berlin Wall is shielded from the truth by her protective son. Blair’s new life, according to some former colleagues, feels like one long prime ministerial cosplay in which everybody must play their part. There is the media grid, the box, the police protection officers, armoured cars, private jets and constant meetings with world leaders and VIPs. Spend a day in the TBI offices in central London and you might see anyone popping in: a leading Indian politician one day, Bill Clinton greeting his old friend with a bear hug the next.

Yet there are plenty of giveaways that time has not stood still: the grey hair; the suede Chelsea boots which are a shade too informal for frontline politics; the Apple Watch poking out from under his jacket. The truth is that Blair is only just emerging from a period of his life when public animosity meant that he rarely ventured out in London and, indeed, felt more comfortable not just out of the city but out of the country itself. Looking back, it is astonishing how quickly his reputation fell after leaving office.

Blair resigned as prime minister in 2007 with high hopes for his new life. He was given a standing ovation as he left the House of Commons for the last time and was immediately confirmed as the new “Middle East envoy” representing the UN, EU, US and Russia. There was hope he could do for Israel-Palestine what he had done for Northern Ireland. The tides of history, however, were no longer with him. By the time he left the envoy job in 2015, peace in the Middle East was further away than ever.

During this period, the world Blair had tried to build as prime minister seemed to collapse all around him. Soon after the financial crisis, which immediately followed his resignation, Blair lost his bid to become the first permanent president of the European Council, the stain from Iraq just too great. And then his old rival Gordon Brown ordered an independent inquiry into the Iraq War — a trial Blair could neither win nor escape.

This was when he set up the basic structure of his life today, creating a number of charities in the areas of policy he was most interested in: the Tony Blair Sports Foundation in the North East of England; the Tony Blair Faith Foundation which worked across the world; the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative focused on development. He also set up “Tony Blair Associates”, his consultancy business. To begin with, each of these organisations were nominally separate, which meant most of the attention went on the business wing, leaving the impression that he was simply hawking his services among a range of unsavoury governments — from the Kuwaitis to the Kazakhs —  to the highest bidder, his post-premiership life one primarily driven by money-making.

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Fair or not, the fact that Blair was evidently making a lot of money did not sit well with a public who had been thrust into a world of austerity immediately after he left office. He had swiftly taken a well-paid seat on the board of JPMorgan Chase and joined the lucrative speaking circuit. This work brought in enough money to allow him to swap his old constituency home Sedgefield for two multi-million pound properties: one in London and another in the Home Counties. It did not go unnoticed that he seemed to be recreating the life he had in No. 10, only now freed from having to care about public opinion. His Georgian townhouse in London looked just like Downing Street and his country retreat was not only near Chequers, but had the same air of Chilterns grandeur.

Taken together, the money-making nature of his post-Downing Street life almost destroyed Blair’s public image. Even his decision to give away the entire £4.6 million advance for his memoir, A Journey, was dismissed as a publicity stunt.

But then came Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit and Donald Trump — the populist revolt. This was the moment his resurrection really began. Brexit, in particular, replaced Iraq in the public consciousness as the defining political event, with a new set of political villains whom the public could boo and whistle.

This period of political turmoil, according to many I spoke to, shocked Blair into becoming more involved in politics again. Blair took an important step towards rebuilding his public image by merging all his business and charitable interests into one organisation — the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. From this point on, instead of having a consultancy business and several charities, Blair presided over one giant not-for-profit organisation.

In 2017, he set up a unit called “renewing the centre”, recruiting a team of smart, young Anglo-Americans to come up with ideas to save the liberal order, as they saw it. From the beginning, though, there were tensions in the team. Some believed that given Blair’s background as Labour leader, “renewing the centre” meant, in effect, renewing the centre-left, finding new policies that would rebuild the coalition of progressives he had once so successfully amassed. Others, though, saw it differently. For them, “renewing the centre” meant renewing both the centre-left and the centre-right, and even forming an alliance where necessary to defeat their existential enemy: the “populists” who must never be appeased. I was told Blair was firmly in the latter camp.

For some, he was drawing exactly the wrong conclusion, confirming the populist narrative that there was no difference between the traditional parties, and that neither of which would allow any real change to the system. Over the years that followed, some of Blair’s more Left-leaning recruits departed in frustration, believing, as one person put it, that Blair was not really any different from George Osborne when it came to austerity. Others said the tensions in the project ran even deeper.

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“It was really fraught,” said one. “We were trying to save democracy — but from Mayfair.” Could the TBI really learn lessons this way? Another simply said: “It was a failure.” At this time, Blair was devoting much of his energy to campaigning for a second referendum — a fight he would eventually lose in December 2019, when Boris Johnson comfortably defeated Corbyn’s Labour with the promise to “Get Brexit Done”. The centre was collapsing.

And yet, from this point of political impotence, Blair’s reputation and influence has recovered. As the pandemic began to spread across Europe the following year, Blair put his policy unit to work. As cases escalated, the TBI released paper after paper on everything from face masks to mass testing and even international vaccine passports, always seemingly one step ahead of the Government. When the country was desperate to be vaccinated, Blair released a paper calling for a delay between the first and second doses to improve efficiency. The Government quickly announced the same plan.

Finally, Blair seemed to be back in touch with the zeitgeist. The pandemic was an ultimate test in apolitical “delivery” — that what matters is what works. He was back. His institute was flying and donations were beginning to pour in from around the world. But under the surface, all was not well.

III

In his memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, Blair describes how he helps developing countries. First, he hires teams of “highly qualified young people” from “Governments, the World Bank, McKinsey or private banks”. Then, after hiring these bright young things, he sends them out into the world to “build capacity, so that in time the locals can do it”.

Over the past few years, Blair has rapidly expanded his team of consultants. In Africa alone, the TBI is active in Rwanda, Senegal, Nigeria, Mozambique, Togo, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Teams of TBI experts sit at the heart of foreign governments, advising on everything from how to improve crop yields to the creation of “presidential delivery units”.

A quick look at the description for its “Country Director Eastern Europe” job gives an indication of the kind of work the institute does. “The Country Director will lead a TBI team embedded in country at the highest level of Government,” the advert reads. One of its key responsibilities is to “build and maintain a relationship of trust with your counterpart (typically President or Prime Minister level)”. In doing so, the candidate must be able to “suggest and convince your counterpart on key development priorities that TBI could be supporting”. What would be the reaction if this was the other way round: if, say, the Clinton Foundation, advertised for a team of people to be embedded in the British government or simply to “suggest and convince” the British prime minister to follow their advice?

Yet the TBI is proud of what its teams have been able to achieve . “In Nigeria, our energy advisor worked on the design and implementation of a mass solar-connection programme called Solar Power Naija that aims to provide electricity access to 25 million Nigerians,” the report states. In another example, the TBI said it “supported the government of Burkina Faso to improve the country’s agriculture and agri-business outcomes”. In doing so, the TBI claims, they helped increase the country’s “fertiliser-blending capacity”.

To the TBI’s critics, this is just the gloss of “deliverology”, the belief that what is really holding a country back is not so much deep structural challenges such as corruption, economic exploitation or colonialism — but bad governance. And this can be fixed. The problem, in other words, is largely technocratic, not political.

Another criticism levelled at Blair is that what he is really doing is advising on how to build a version of the Downing Street he created 20 years ago — right at the very moment the British state has shown itself to be so woefully dysfunctional (something, ironically, Blair also believes).

But it’s not just cynical Brits who are questioning the effectiveness of the TBI. There are also plenty of raised eyebrows in Africa. In June, Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper published an op-ed by an academic which dismissed Blair as a “self-serving lobbyist… projecting dubious altruistic inclinations”. Nigeria, it said, must not “willingly [offer] itself as a cheap financial rehabilitation home for retired British Prime Ministers”.

In Malawi, there is similar public disquiet. The TBI first arrived in the country in 2012 soon after the former president Joyce Banda came to power. However, after Banda’s government was overwhelmed by an extraordinary corruption scandal known as “Cashgate” — in which it emerged that as much as $250 million had been looted from public funds after a junior civil servant was found with $300,000 in cash in the boot of his car — the TBI left.

It returned to the country, though, in 2020, after Lazarus Chakwera, its new president, took over and asked for help to “strengthen its delivery and implementation mechanisms”. Not everyone in Malawi was happy about it. Charles Kajoloweka, executive director of the human rights and governance watchdog Youth and Society, said it was almost impossible to to find out exactly what TBI was doing. William Kambwandira, executive director at the Centre for Social Accountability and Transparency in Malawi, agreed. “Our greatest concern is that government dealings with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have been kept under wraps.” In a statement, the TBI said the “sole purpose” of its work was “to ensure the government is delivering on its commitments to improve the public services it provides to its people.”

Such criticisms get to the heart of why some are sceptical about the TBI’s modus operandi. The TBI offers technocratic support based on a technocratic assessment of development, but it does so to political leaders often based on personal relationships with Blair himself.

The former Malawian president Banda explained how her relationship with Blair worked. “When I ascended to power, he and his wife Cherie flew over to Malawi within one week of my presidency,” she told UnHerd. “When he came over, during a state banquet hosted in his honour, I had a conversation with him where I personally requested [support] and he offered to send over three of his staffers to help me, due to the fact that I had assumed the presidency abruptly. I remember that is when he told me about his global programme and offered to lend me a hand. I remember what he said: ‘I have several people working in the region and I will shift them around.’” As Banda put it: “There was no formal agreement or big ceremony because he was just helping a friend.”

IV

In April 2022, Blair needed someone to manage the TBI’s vast, global consultancy. He hired Mike McNair from McKinsey, a Canadian who had worked for years as Justin Trudeau’s policy chief in Ottawa. Since arriving, McNair has overseen a rapid expansion of the organisation.

The nature of this expansion, however, raises questions about the TBI’s future and how it is funded. There has been a push from the TBI to access philanthropic donations and to create partnerships with business. One relationship in particular jumps out from the TBI accounts: that with the tech billionaire, Larry Ellison, and his company Oracle.

Ellison, 78, is currently thought to be the world’s fourth richest man, with an estimated fortune of $140 billion. Like many tech billionaires, he has cultivated a reputation as something of an iconoclastic sage, a workaholic visionary who can see the future more clearly than others — and, importantly, deliver it. Like his friend Elon Musk, Ellison is known for his almost impish impatience, his mind moving from one grand projet to the next, often making grand claims about their revolutionary potential only to move on to something else soon after. “I am a sprinter,” Ellison once remarked. “I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.”

It should not have been a great surprise, then, when in 2020 Ellison announced that he was suddenly disbanding his entire team at the Larry Ellison Foundation in London. The unit was led by Matthew Symonds, the former Economist journalist (and father of Carrie Johnson) who wrote an “intimate” authorised biography of Ellison, published in 2003. When I rang Symonds, he immediately hung up.

Ellison’s decision to close his London operation came at the height of the pandemic, announcing that he wanted to focus all his charitable energies on “medical philanthropy”. In many ways, this made perfect sense. Ellison bankrolls the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, focused on trying to find cures for cancer.

At around the same time, Ellison began deepening his relationship with Blair. In partnership with the TBI, Ellison’s Institute for Transformative Medicine created a “Global Health Security Consortium” with scientists at Oxford University to provide “support for leaders around the world to help them prepare for the health-security challenges of tomorrow”. Ellison also began giving more and more money to the TBI. In 2019, the Larry Ellison Foundation gave the TBI $10 million with a further $20 million committed. By 2021, this had risen to $33 million, with plans for future donations of a further $49 million.

At some point, Blair was evidently able to convince Ellison that the TBI’s methods were a more effective way to make the world a better place than his previous efforts. And the partnership between the two does have a certain logic. Blair believes that “the power of technology” must be harnessed by bringing together politicians and “innovators”. This, then, is one of the central purposes of the TBI as Blair sees it: to act as a matchmaker for plutocrats such as Ellison and political figures such as himself. But it is an approach that raises awkward questions about power and transparency.

Alongside the Global Health Security Consortium, the two of them have also created a “Tech for Development” programme. The idea is to help developing countries build “comprehensive digital infrastructure”. Together, Blair and Ellison have rolled this out in Ghana, Rwanda and Senegal for free, with a view to building electronic health records so that governments know who is vaccinated and who isn’t.

Not everyone, however, looks so kindly upon the partnership. Ellison, after all, is a divisive figure. To some, he is an intense visionary in the same mould as Musk, with the same intense desire to conquer all in business. As Symonds writes in his biography, Ellison has an “unquenchable optimism and almost messianic self belief”. And he is not shy about it. During the pandemic, Ellison offered his medical research facilities to President Trump free of charge. He has bought an island in Hawaii which he uses as both an ultra-exclusive resort for the rich and a living agricultural experiment, part of his grand plan to secure global food supplies. Even as he approaches his 80th birthday, he is still dreaming of his next great breakthrough as well as his legacy. Perhaps that’s why, last year, he made one of the biggest gambles of his career.

In June 2022, Ellison bought the electronic health record company Cerner for almost $30 billion. It was the largest buy-out of his life. Almost immediately after the purchase, Ellison announced that it would help him realise his aim of building a single national database for health records. The plan was endorsed by Blair. His hope is that, using Oracle technology, every American will be able to store their medical data online. It is a visionary move, which, if it pays off, would make Oracle the Amazon of health records. To some, the partnership with the TBI makes good philanthropic and commercial sense: if Oracle can show that digital health records work in Africa, why not elsewhere? And by partnering with the TBI, Oracle gains access to parts of the world it might not have been able to reach before.

The problem is that such a scheme to create a single national health record database is not only incredibly complex and hard to deliver, but extremely contentious. In fact, the main objection is not technocratic, but political — even moral. Do we want every health record to be stored on a cloud run by one corporation? Oracle is already facing a lawsuit in the US over claims it has unlawfully collected information on 5 billion people.

Whether you see the partnership between Blair and Ellison charitably or otherwise, it reveals an important reality about today’s world and the way power works in practice. Blair and Ellison operate in a sphere of hyper-connected individuals (one board member, for instance, is Baroness Rona Fairhead, Boris Johnson’s former minister for trade and export promotion). They talk and meet each other regularly, making important decisions that affect the lives of many people, in ways which are far harder to scrutinise than those taken by governments and political leaders.

Others I spoke to said it is not possible to judge Blair’s enthusiasm for this technology without acknowledging the fact that his institute is partially dependent on donations from a tech billionaire. Some of those who have previously worked closely with Blair went further, arguing that the conflicts of interests within Blair’s new life go even deeper, extending into the heart of the organisation itself. One arm of the TBI might be writing papers on how to protect the international liberal order, for instance, while the consulting arm is embedded with illiberal governments who pose a challenge to that very same order.

Rather than hide this, the TBI actively advertises its partnerships with business, arguing that the “partnerships” it has built up, alongside the donations it receives, allow it to do “the great bulk” of its consultancy work at no cost to governments. When it comes to tricky questions such as patient privacy, Blair is adamant that they do not undermine the transformative potential of technology. In Malawi, for example, the TBI boasts of its partnership with Musk’s “Starlink” internet service, which helped hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by a cyclone. Blair’s entire vision today is for governments to become more effective by linking the kind of strategy, delivery and policy units he had in No. 10 with the kind of technology that was not available to him. Just as he wanted to introduce ID cards back then, he now supports digital ID cards today, as well as vaccine passports and vast new health databases to tackle the spread of disease. As Blair sees it, his partnership with Oracle is just pragmatic policymaking.

But like Ellison, Blair is something of a utopian futurist. He believes, almost as a faith, in the power of technology. Blair is a good boss, according to many I spoke to, because he is always so upbeat and energetic, but when it comes to technology he is a little too “naive” about its possibilities. Another former employee suggests he is “fatalist” about technology in the same way he was fatalist about globalisation — not thinking critically enough about its risks and political consequences. The greatest irony, though, is that such wide-eyed belief in technology now feels almost old-fashioned. To a younger generation who grew up in a world dominated by Big Tech and Big Pharma, the dominance of giant corporations run by tech plutocrats feels less utopian than dystopian.

V

When Blair left office, he consoled himself with the thought that his life was not over. As he wrote in A Journey, he’d always had a bigger passion than politics: religion. Religion gave him purpose. “There is so much frailty still to overcome,” he concluded in his memoir. “But in overcoming it lies the meaning of life.”

But what are these frailties Blair must overcome? According to Catholic teaching, “sins of frailty” are minor acts committed through “indecision, weakness, lack of vigilance or courage”. Those who have previously worked closely with him see a bit of all these in Blair. Some believe he too often shies away from conflict, even today. In No. 10, he outsourced being the bad guy to Alastair Campbell and did not confront and demote Gordon Brown soon enough, which undermined his premiership. Some believe Blair is now shying away from confronting Starmer, a man he believes will become prime minister, but, according to a number of people I spoke to, not a sufficiently reforming one. Even as Blair battled to save centrism, he was careful not to burn bridges with the Trump or Johnson governments, or indeed any of the illiberal governments he works with.

Is this is a sign of indecisiveness? It is striking that even those who most like and respect him are unclear what exactly he wants from the TBI. Does he really want it to be the McKinsey for world leaders? Or a think tank? And for what purpose exactly? To Blair, this type of thinking is overly reductive. To have a political impact you must have policies and the ability to implement them. But it is also for this reason that there is what one former employee described as a certain whimsy to the TBI — an organisation less committed to the service of an abstract goal than to the aspirations of Blair himself. If Tony wants something, it happens; if he wants to help someone he helps them.

The more I studied him, the more I wondered whether his biggest frailty of all is simply the desire to remain relevant, the frailty that J.D. Salinger once described as, “not having the courage to be an absolute nobody”. Blair was a somebody once and it is very difficult to give that up. He had power to do things and he still wants to do things — and so he needs power. But to get power you need money and connections and ideas and people. And he now has all those things in droves.

This is the reason he continues to work as hard as he does, taking his box home at weekends, raising money, flying around the world, attending conferences. Maintaining the network becomes an intrinsic goal in itself. This helps explain why Blair takes meetings with world leaders and works for countries many would avoid. He has what one person described as a deep, primal need to be “connected”.

Today, Blair lives the life of a prime minister, but with the freedom to shake off the petty realities of government, working on campaigns to help American governors one moment, flying in to help embattled African leaders the next; all while working on grand plans to change the world with exciting, utopian tech bros in California.

But how much of this is actually real? “Do governments really want his strategic advice,” one person who knows Blair put it to me, “or his phone number?” Do those companies he has partnered with really have only altruistic intentions? And do political leaders really only work with him to make their governments more effective? The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in the ambiguous soup of human motivation; in the flawed, frail characters of ordinary human beings with conflicting aspirations, trying to do good in the world and for themselves.

​​Blair today is more influential than any other former prime minister: he has built an empire that connects business to power and himself to everyone. In the 15 years since he left office, Blair has created a world in which he might not be prime minister but he remains powerful. And that is the point. The power is the point.

Additional reporting: Jack McBrams

Earlier this week, he visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview about God, his love for WB Yeats, the heroism of JK Rowling, and how he changed his mind about vaccine hesitancy. Below is an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Richard Dawkins, welcome to UnHerd. You’re launching a podcast, “The Poetry of Reality”. Why?

Richard Dawkins: I’ve always felt that science is poetic, and deserves to be treated as a part of our culture. The magnificent fact that the universe has given rise to us, supremely complicated beings capable of even understanding where we came from, ought to be a topic of great literature. Science is the poetry of reality.

FS: Am I wrong to detect a softening in your later years? The choice of podcast name seems designed to give the impression that you’re a more romantic, less rigidly rational spirit than people realise?

RD: I think I’ve always been a romantic spirit and I think that’s what science inspires, or ought to inspire, as opposed to the cold, hard, dispassionate image that science can be mistaken as projecting.

FS: We’re talking at a time in which once-unassailable scientific ideas have become… complicated. Gender is an obvious one. Do you worry that the scientific institutions you cherish have become overly attuned to faddish politics, and that science risks compromising its reputation?

RD: Certainly, I have noticed that some of the leading scientific journals have capitulated to political pressure to become unscientific, and to betray what is an obvious scientific dichotomy between male and female. This seems to have been betrayed for political reasons by people in editorial positions in leading scientific journals who ought to know better.

FS: Another example might be Nature magazine, which has stated that part of its mission is to work to correct racial injustices — it seems to be a political agenda rather than a scientific one.

RD: There’s an analogue of original sin, that white people are expected to feel guilt for what their ancestors — or maybe just people of the same skin colour — did to other people of a different colour. It’s as though we are supposed to inherit the guilt of people of the past, just because we have the same colour skin as they did. And that is, I think, racism. It is actual racism to confer guilt upon people because of the colour of their skin.

FS: So would you prefer a completely colour-blind world, as far as institutions are concerned? This is controversial in the United States right now, with the Supreme Court reconsidering whether affirmative action has a place in education. For years, admissions criteria for university science departments have considered an applicant’s race. Where do you stand on that?

RD: If I were in favour of any sort of affirmative action, it might be in favour of those who have been disadvantaged in their own past, through poverty. And if they happen to be black, fair enough — but simply because they’re black? No, that’s the wrong sort of affirmative action. That is racism.

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FS: And if that resulted in fewer black people going to elite colleges, you’d be fine with that, on the grounds that places would be going to the most deserving candidates?

RD: Well, they would probably be the people most able to benefit from those places, yes. But there is also something to be said for bending over backwards to help people from a disadvantaged background who have a genuine ability that hasn’t had a chance to flourish — and if they were to get to Harvard, then they might be able to. And so I am in favour not of affirmative action but what I would call ‘intelligent looking’ for talent, which is what we try to do at Oxford. In my time, we did, anyway. We tried to recognise that somebody might be not so well groomed for an entrance exam or for an interview, but who showed signs of genuine talent.

FS: You’ve also been critical of New Zealand schools including indigenous origin stories in science classes. How do you think people of a scientific mindset should treat the irrational, or intuitions for which there is no clear proof? Is it not possible that poetic and symbolic ways of describing such things get us close to a different kind of truth? 

RD: My favourite poet is W.B. Yeats, a notorious mystic. Obviously, I have no sympathy whatsoever with his belief in fairies and things like that, but I resonate with his poetry. I think it’s wonderful. It’s hard for me to explain what I mean, but I suppose that’s the point. I’m not trying to be a scientist when I do that. I’m resonating as a human being. In the early poems — “The Wind Among the Reeds”, for example – I empathise with this lovelorn young man, struggling with his feelings of lost love. And I get that, but not as a scientist.

FS: But those feelings of being a lovelorn young man are true, are they not? They exist in the universe?

RD: They are true for this subject, what’s going on in his own mind, yes.

FS: Hearing you talk about a Yeats poem, you don’t sound that different to religious people. Just as when you talk about the beauty of the natural world and the miracles of science — although you might not use the word “miracle” — it feels as though you’re moved by that. Perhaps the difference between you is more a question of language?

RD: I think there’s something wrong with that idea. According to supernaturalism — which is what I take to mean religiousness — there is something beyond physics, beyond the material world, which I do not believe. I do not believe in anything beyond the material world, no matter how poetic you feel, no matter how much you’re in love, or no matter how deeply you feel emotionally about looking at nature, looking at fields of wheat, looking at the stars. These are all human reactions, which I feel as strongly as anyone. But there is nothing supernatural about that.

As a human being, when contemplating the Milky Way, I get a feeling in the pit of my stomach. There’s nothing supernatural about that, it’s something in my nervous system. That’s not to demean it — it feels real to me. But it’s not truth in the scientific sense, which really is actually physically true about the material world.

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FS: In the realm of theoretical physics, for example, there are whole dimensions of the universe that we simply don’t know how to describe yet. Is there not a chance that some of those feelings might be perceiving physical realities that we don’t yet have a way to analyse?

RD: As it happens, this evening I’m going to a meeting in London with Lawrence Krauss, the American theoretical physicist, who has just written a book called The Known Unknowns, which is about all that we don’t yet know. And physicists are proud to admit that there’s a lot that they don’t know, but they’re working on it. It is entirely possible — probable, even — that there are beings in the universe who already do understand things that are beyond our understanding, and that our brains simply aren’t big enough to understand these profundities about the universe. But to somehow equate those with mystical feelings that you get when you’re in love, or when you contemplate a rose, or religious feelings, that’s a naive confusion.

FS: Your work on evolution and natural selection holds that most things about human nature and the human body, in our evolved cells, are there for a purpose.

RD: Yes — and I might be in a minority of biologists for believing that. For that reason, I’ve been called an ultra-Darwinian. Quite a lot of other biologists feel there’s a lot in life that is not actually Darwinian, in the sense that it’s not actually designed by natural selection, but is there by chance.

FS: In which case, should we not view the religious impulse, or mystical impulses, and those feelings that we were just talking about, with more respect? Should we not view them as more likely to be more intelligent than purely a kind of mistake, possibly being wiser and more purposeful than you have been prepared to admit?

RD: Not wiser and more purposeful, but possibly there for a reason. I readily agree that, because it’s a human universal, pretty much, and therefore logically that means that it is highly probably that it is of Darwinian advantage. That, I get. It doesn’t mean religion is true, though. I mean, you could say, the tendency to be religious, the tendency to believe in something supernatural, the tendency to think there’s something higher than you, the tendency to think that people also can connect… all this could have been built in by natural selection.

I often suggest that this could be because children have been naturally selected to be respectful of what their parents tell them, what their culture tells them, because they need that in order to survive. Religion flourishes because children who are vulnerable, in a dangerous world, need to be instantly obeying their parents advice, not to endanger themselves. You don’t question what your parents say, you just believe what they say, which means the child mind is pre-programmed by Darwinian natural selection to be credulous of what elders tell them. And that is fertile ground for falsehood, as well as truth.

FS: But if it’s there by natural selection, it must be a net positive?

RD: A net positive in a survival sense, yes – but it doesn’t make it true. It’s not true that if you sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, you will cause the crops to succeed. But it’s a net positive in the sense that it’s a by-product of the impulse to obey authority, because the impulse to obey authority, in general, is a net positive.

FS: In that context, the latest mostly secular generation could be seen as a species-wide experiment. It hasn’t happened before in history — and you had a fair bit to do with bringing it about. Judging on the evidence, how do you think the secular experiment is going?

RD: The statistics I’ve seen suggest it is slowly getting better. The statistics I’ve seen suggest that the number of people who profess some kind of religion is going down. It’s now below 50%, which is the first time that a British census has shown that to be the case, which I think is good. Similarly in America, which is lagging behind, in this respect, but it’s still going in the right direction. Those are the only figures I’ve seen and, all I can do is offer you my intuition, which is worthless.

FS: There’s a book by Tom Holland called Dominion, which has been very influential in suggesting that a lot of what we consider to be secular Western ways of thinking on morality is still drenched in Christian thinking. So perhaps, although people aren’t describing themselves as religious in the census, they’ve just moved those religious intuitions into other realms?

RD: Yes, I think that’s very likely true. You can make a good religious case for the trans debate. I make an analogy with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the wine in the Aristotelian accidentals remains wine but, in its true substance, becomes blood. Similarly, the trans person: he has a penis, but that’s a mere accidental, and in true substance he’s a woman. I mean, that’s a perfect analogy to transubstantiation. It even begins with the same prefix.

FS: So which is better, then? We’ve gone through this whole process, we’ve had a whole generation who’ve now been brought up reading your books, and Christopher Hitchens, who are now ardent and proud atheists, and then they end up believing things like you just described. And that has all sorts of societal repercussions. Should we now look back on the New Atheist movement with regret?

RD: No, I don’t get that at all. It’s just an interesting analogy to point out that there is a strong religious element to a current political fad. So what?

FS: The question is: empirically speaking, between conventional religion and what appears to be its successor ideology, which will be proven by history to be better for the flourishing of the species? Early signs are that this new kind of religion, which thinks it’s secular, has some major problems.

RD: Well, if you care about the flourishing of the species, yes, but I care about truth.

FS: So you don’t care about the flourishing of the species?

RD: Well I do care about it as a human being, but more deeply I care about truth.

FS: And if your sense of truth would lead to the annihilation of the species, would you be content with that?

RD: No I would not be content with that. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t happen. I think that truth actually is a genuine value. I believe that a true scientific outlook on the world would actually be best for the flourishing of humankind.

FS: We have to talk about the most recent scientific controversy of our age: Covid. It feels like we are now emerging from the Covid years, when our trust in science was enormously damaged. Millions of people now intuitively distrust what they are told by scientific authorities. Do you think Covid was a moment of scientific glory, or something more problematic?

RD: I think glory, with regards to the unprecedented speed that vaccines were developed. And that is a tribute to molecular biology. It was possible, almost instantly, to sequence the genome of the virus, and to transmit the genome directly to labs all over the world, who set to work developing vaccines with, as I said, unprecedented speed. That is magnificent. Whether humans mistrust or trust science, that’s their business.

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FS: But the vaccines were enormously over-promised in terms of their efficacy. They were originally sold to us as being 95% effective in preventing infection. That was then endlessly revised downwards and, in the end, we were told vaccination didn’t stop transmission, it only improved outcomes for vulnerable patients.

RD: The speed with which things were happening means that it’s very difficult for people entrusted with authority to give advice. And normally, there’s much more time in order to examine all the evidence and give balanced, wise advice. When you’re required to give advice almost instantly, there inevitably are going to be mistakes.

FS: During the pandemic, you condemned people who were sceptical about the pandemic response. You tweeted that: “Some faith heads have a ritual of handling snakes, believing faith will protect them. When they’re bitten, they deserve it, they alone suffer. Vaccine refusal is different. Others are endangered. It’s as though their faith told them to release rattlesnakes in supermarkets.” This was April 6, 2021. Your vilification of people who were hesitant about taking the vaccine, in retrospect, seems too much, doesn’t it? Do you take that back?

RD: Well, I had become aware of the conventional wisdom about vaccination, which is that it’s a matter of altruism, because it’s not simply a matter of saying: “This is my private business, whether I’m vaccinated or not.” And in the case of the measles vaccine, for example, it really is a matter of altruism, because if you don’t get vaccinated, then then you are part of the problem if there’s a measles epidemic. And I thought that that would be the case with Covid. Now, it’s not entirely clear that that was right. And so, to that extent, I would take that back, yes.

FS: Do you also think that Covid showed how vulnerable scientists and institutions such as universities have become in this social media age — to peer pressure, to a fear of being cancelled and of being on the wrong side of mainstream thought?

RD: Yes. There are some heroic scientists who go off on their own and don’t need grants and just get on with their research — people like James Lovelock, who I’ve criticised on other grounds, but…

FS: Recently, universities have not been good at defending their own when they come under assault, on social media and elsewhere, for taking an unpopular position. The trends we saw with American universities during Covid, but there are lots of other examples. Professor Kathleen Stock springs to mind. Surely we can be constructively critical of universities for this?

RD: I think we can, and I think Kathleen Stock is a very good example of somebody who’s been appallingly treated. I think she’s a real hero. I think J.K. Rowling is a real hero. She’s not at a university, but she’s another one. Yes, I’ve been rather shocked at the way universities have not stood up to a rabble, a lynch mob, really, going after people like Kathleen Stock. But you can also sympathise with a university vice-chancellor with a baying mob of students after their blood. It’s difficult, but I think in that case they should hold the line.

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FS: Another concept you’ve defended recently is AI, and whether we might be leaving human nature behind altogether, either through some kind of AI future, or via extraterrestrial life. With your materialist hat on, explain how you think AI could supplant organic life?

RD: Well, the brain is a material object — and what it does is, although we don’t understand it fully yet, it must have a scientific explanation. And it must be the case that whatever the brain can do, in principle, could be done by an AI simulation. So, an artificial intelligence must be capable of doing what the human brain can do — and there’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t be greatly superior to it.

It is conceivable that an artificial intelligence could greatly surpass what the human brain can do. And in many ways, that’s a very frightening prospect. People, many people, are very frightened of it. I haven’t decided whether I’m frightened of it or not. I think I could imagine it going both ways. But, as a materialist, I can’t deny that it’s possible.

FS: People might also be surprised by how much credence you give to the possibility of extraterrestrial life. How likely do you think it is that life exists on other planets?

RD: Very likely — especially when you think of the sheer number of opportunities in the universe for it to exist. It has arisen here and evolved to the point where it can understand its own existence. That was a ridiculously improbable event, but it happened. So why deny that it has happened anywhere else in the universe?

FS: So, on the balance of probabilities, we’re talking more than 50% likely, in your estimation, that there is life beyond our own planet?

RD: Yes. And I would make a distinction between life existing elsewhere, which is far more probable, than actual intelligent life, because one’s got to come from the other. We might well discover intelligent life through radio communication, but we will never be visited by it. Flying saucers, no — very unlikely. But visitation by radio communication, electromagnetic waves , that’s not totally unlikely. And I think that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is a worthwhile enterprise that should be pursued and funded.

FS: You don’t think interstellar travel will become possible through some breakthrough in physics?

RD: Well, that’s very, very far off in the future, because of the huge distances involved. So far, we are waiting for interplanetary travel within the solar system. Light years is a very long distance for solid, physical objects to travel.

FS: So if Elon Musk succeeds at getting human beings to Mars in your lifetime, would you volunteer for his next flight?

RD: No, I wouldn’t volunteer… actually perhaps yes. If I knew I was dying, it might be the last thing I’d do.

* “The Poetry of Reality” With Richard Dawkins is available to download now.

Katie Law: Why don’t you start by telling us what sensitivity readers are — what are your views of them?

Lionel Shriver: For the few of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, sensitivity readers started out being hired mostly in young adult fiction — a genre that, for some reason, woked out earlier than anyone else. The idea is that these people are self-nominated experts on whatever category of humanity they happen to have been born into. So I’m a professional American and a professional white person. They’re supposed to go through, line by line, and find anything in this book that could possibly offend anyone, especially their hallowed group. And unsurprisingly, that results in a much more anodyne, boring manuscript. Basically, you can’t win, because if you have a character do something that most people in that category wouldn’t do, then it’s inauthentic; but if they do things that that category of people are renowned to do, then it’s a stereotype.

I should make it clear that no one at HarperCollins has yet had the nerve to subject me to these people. And I object to the whole idea of it. There’s nothing wrong with being professional, being accurate. If the book you’re writing requires you to write people who are credibly disabled or black or Muslim or what have you, and it’s a realistic piece of fiction, then you should probably do a little homework. But it shouldn’t be against the law not to do your homework. If you’ve made glaring errors, then it’s the part of criticism and a responsible reader to notice. But it’s a very different thing — deciding to do a few interviews or a little reading on your own account — from having your publisher sic these self-nominated experts on your manuscript to tell you everything that’s wrong with it and everything that has to go. I won’t mention her by name, but a very successful novelist who I talked to recently was subjected to multiple sensitivity readers and they reduced her to tears.

What few authors understand is that they don’t actually have to take the advice of these interfering little people. But most authors think they do and therefore make these moronic changes. What the publisher is really doing is protecting themselves, so that if this book gets it in the neck, on social media or in criticism, then they can say, “well, she didn’t do what she was told”.

KL: How have these edicts affected you personally? Have you had any pushback from an agent or your own editors in your fiction writing?

LS: I have been subjected to very little of that kind of interference, but it’s not foreign to me. One of the things that now makes people extremely nervous is the use of accents. Now, I don’t generally like heavy-handed transliteration of accents in fiction. I think you can sometimes convey an accent with a few little touches. And those little touches can be very useful in creating the character. But even expressing the way people actually talk when, for example, English is not their first language is now considered offensive. And there are whole books, therefore, that would be cancelled for this very reason.

In The Mandibles, there’s a short dialogue with African immigrants, and I had used those little touches, and I had my British editor say that it was “othering”. I find that word so repulsive. And rather than take her head on, because I wanted to keep things cool and she had restrained herself in relation to a lot of other things, I obliged, except that I did so in an underhanded way. There was a way of changing the dialogue so that you did get the accent, but I expressed it with whole, legitimate English words. So you couldn’t quite say that it was transliterating and “othering”, but I still got my way.

There was another instance where I got myself into trouble with objecting to the concept of cultural appropriation. I had written a short story in which there was a girlfriend of a white character who was black. She was a very appealing character. She’s smart and very well spoken. And she’s upper-middle class and her mother’s rich — so not a stereotype. The story takes place in Atlanta, where there is a huge upper-middle class black population. So this was credible. But my agent suggested that I changed this person to a white character, because if we submitted the story to the New Yorker — eye roll! — and they rejected it, we would never know whether or not it was rejected because I was culturally appropriating, or the story just sucked. I always allow for that possibility. Sure enough, it was rejected, and I do not know whether or not it was because I culturally appropriated or this story sucked.

KL: Authors seem to sometimes apologise too quickly if they’re accused of a particular misdemeanour.

LS: Oh, I have never apologised in public for anything as a matter of principle. Once you go down that road, you have lost the battle, you have finished yourself. And the irony is that apologies don’t even work. They’re never accepted. You never apologise enough.

But it’s worth pointing out that transparent cowardice is not so much on the authorial but on the publishing level. As I wrote in a Spectator column, one of the reasons that publishing has become so timid, and frightened, and compliant, and risk-averse, is because it’s been taken over by women. I do not say that with any pride in my sex, and there are many exceptions, but women err on the side of being fearful. They also have, as a group, a fatal desire to please. What’s needed in this circumstance is balls, and I don’t care whether they’re literal or figurative.

KL: You won a prize in 2005, The Orange Prize. It’s now been renamed as The Women’s Prize for Fiction. At the time, did you think there was a good reason to have a women-only prize? And today, do you think we still need women-only prizes for fiction?

LS: I think at the time there was some good reason for it. There was a real historical disparity in the award of prizes, especially the big prizes, to women. We just weren’t getting acknowledged. Now, I was quite forthright, even at the time, about the fact that if I had my druthers, I would prefer to have won a prize that was open to both sexes. I have no problem with going head-to-head with men and I do not feel that I need special protection. But it was at a rather low point in my career, and I would take what I could get.

I have made a habit of not doing down the Women’s Prize. For the most part, it doesn’t do any harm, it’s just one more prize. It means that there are more people out there who have a little more money and a little more profile. But if you look at the statistics of who’s being awarded what now, if anything we need a men’s prize. We now have a serious reverse discrimination situation, whereby authors, especially debut authors, simply cannot get into print if they are straight, white males. And you know what, I think even the gay white males are starting to struggle.

KL: Do you put that down to the number of women running publishing? Do you think that they are wanting to push their own interests?

LS: It’s partly a matter of fashion. Publishing is utterly obsessed with diversity. And that means that they are not choosing books strictly on the basis of whether they’re any good. This is a huge, society-wide problem and it’s not just publishing — we have ditched excellence and even competence, and all we care about is what category you belong to — but publishing is the worst of it. Women are slaves to fashion, including ideological fashion, and have this drive to please, and regard talking about diversity all the time as pleasing because that’s what you’re supposed to do now. However, I do not think the problem is female readers. I sense no demand, from the ground up. “Listen, stop foisting these male, white writers on us. We only want to read books by people from Zimbabwe.” I do a lot of events and I just don’t hear it. The readership wants good stories and good characters, and also something with a little edge, which is where I come in.

KL: A lot of the management in publishing houses are terrified of their very young staff, who are calling the shots, who are feeling offended, who are feeling uncomfortable about JK Rowling’s views. Is that something you’ve experienced?

LS: Yes, which is bizarre. It’s just a complete inversion of who has the power. I mean, we’re dealing with an entire administrative class that doesn’t realise that they’re wearing Dorothy’s shoes. They have the power; they can fire all these people. Look at what happened at Netflix. They did a trim after the Dave Chappelle brouhaha, and the first people in the firing line were the people who’d made a big stink about the Dave Chappelle comedy special.

But in publishing there’s just this complete failure to exert control. I’ll tell you an interesting story. I hope Douglas Murray is cool with this. Douglas recently changed publishing company from Bloomsbury to HarperCollins. And by the way, HarperCollins, in the big picture here, has acquitted itself quite well. They’re my publisher and they have not given me a hard time, much less fired me. And they have been a refuge for a number of other authors who have fallen out with their publishers. But this particular instance of leaving Bloomsbury was interesting to me because of a twist. They were wrangling over the contractual details — they didn’t actually want to lose Douglas — believe it or not but they threatened Douglas with their younger staff. They used their younger staff as a weapon and said, “you know, you’re lucky: our younger staff hasn’t gone for you. The younger staff of all the other publishing companies wouldn’t put up with you. So we’re the only people who would have you.” It’s really underhanded, really creepy. And of course, it was a lie. Douglas didn’t have any trouble finding someone else to publish him. He’s very profitable. It was using the current political situation to get what they wanted in a much more mercantile sense, not in an ideological sense.

The real problem is that, in the elevation of these ostensible values of diversity, equity and inclusion, whole organisations and corporations forget what they are for. I got myself into trouble in 2018, after Penguin Random House sent round a declaration to all the agents of their authors that, by 2025, they were going to have both their authors and their staff perfectly reflect the demographics of the United Kingdom — it’s hard to say this without laughing — in relation to sex, sexual preference, ethnicity, gender ID, of course, race, and even class. Now, that’s a hell of an algorithm. I thought it was hilarious and I wrote about it for The Spectator — about how the purpose of a publishing company is not to perfectly reflect the demography of whatever country it’s selling books in, but to sell books. And somehow that column got twisted so that, according to the Guardian — they’re so creative there! — I thought only white people wrote good books.

KL: I’ve actually got the sentence that you wrote here: “If an agent submits a manuscript by a gay, transgender Caribbean, who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published whether or not it is incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible.”

LS: That line was endlessly quoted back to me as somehow terribly prejudiced. If you examine each element on its own, there are no pejoratives. There is nothing insulting in that line at all. But it is, in its composite, funny — and that’s a crime.

KL: You talked on the Today programme about what you had meant when you wrote that and why you’d written it. I think you defended yourself and acquitted yourself brilliantly — but I wonder how these things affect you, and whether you come away from it feeling bolshier? Or whether you ever fear you’ve gone too far?

LS: Well, so far, I’ve got away with it. So I don’t live in fear all the time. I realise that the era we’re living in is dangerous to me — the irony being, however, that it’s also been very useful to me. I mean, you are probably here not just because you like my novels, but because I have stuck my neck out politically. And therefore I have benefitted from wokeness more than I have suffered from it. And that makes me rather gleeful.

KL: And do you feel that you can harness it for your next novel?

LS: I really broke the rules in The Motion of the Body through Space, which came out in 2020. One of the secondary characters is an incompetent diversity hire. You’re not supposed to do that. And, of course, it was widely criticised. And that made it really fun. But I don’t want to become just an ideologue and I don’t want to just write books that are shadowboxing with the enemy. I want to write books that would be interesting beyond this moronic era.

I don’t always want my novels to be focused on the culture wars, but I have used the culture wars and more broadly, I have found the whole experience of the last several years informative, not necessarily in a cheerful manner. It’s been very discouraging — in the same way that I found the whole Covid era incredibly discouraging — and I think less of humanity as a result. But I find this time period illuminating in relation to any number of other political movements that I have known about in theory, but have not known in practice. It illuminates the French Revolution and Year Zero in Cambodia and Maoism and Stalinism, the whole package of authoritarian movements which have not always been top-down but have sometimes been ground-up — instituting an orthodoxy, which if you do not hew to it, you lose your job, your livelihood. That is what’s happening. I sometimes worry that it’s petty and I shouldn’t get that concerned with it, but on reflection, I don’t think it’s petty. I think it’s real, I think it’s important. If it gets much worse, we’re really talking about total dysfunction. We’re talking about countries just not working anymore.

KL: Have we reached peak woke, or do you think it’s just going to get worse?

LS: Everyone I talk to wants to know whether or not it’s started to subside. The real problem is that it has a life of its own, because it has produced this entire class of people whose jobs rely on this DEI nonsense. And you know that theory of the overproduction of elites? If you haven’t encountered it, basically we’re sending too many people to university. There are not enough jobs. And this DEI crap, it creates lots of little useless sinecures — often very well paid — for these overproduced elites to fill, and they’re going to cling to those positions for dear life.

For the organisations involved, or the companies, they’re a terrible drain but what’s happening is that these whole layers of management are being maintained as a protection. It’s a little bit like the sensitivity readers. They don’t cost that much and it’s good PR: “look at us, we have a whole department of 30 people who do absolutely nothing”. And furthermore, the ideology, which began in the universities, is still being promoted in universities. At places like UnHerd, we may feel we’re winning the argument because the essays are so good but that doesn’t mean that they’re teaching UnHerd essays in university, as they should do. I’m afraid that none of the people who need to be persuaded are reading this stuff. It’s a very atomised media situation.

I think there is a role to be played in preaching to the choir: the choir needs sermons. And we need to reach out to each other and to feel that we’re not alone and that there are other people who are sane. It makes you feel, in the current parlance, “safe”, because everyone is not crazy. And it gives us a sense of community, a much-misused word, but this is a community. You are actually physically here, and we are of like minds, though we don’t agree on everything — that would be creepy.

KL: If the woke tide is a youthful one, and more young people are coming out of universities and going into the workplace, then what is going to stop it?

LS: The problem is not only young people. And I have to say, I feel a kind of funny mea culpa in relation to my own youth. I grew up at the tail end of the so-called Sixties, which in truth lasted well into the Seventies. And this is where a lot of this stuff was born — and by the way, as a kid, I bought into it hook line and sinker. I would still oppose the Vietnam War, if I could go back, and I still recycle. But this whole obsession with self-criticism, which has an almost communist touch and feel, started back then. And I was very proud of being critical of the United States and being ashamed of the United States and being obsessed with all the terrible things we’d done wrong. People these days act as if we only started talking about slavery yesterday. No, we were obsessed with it in the Sixties, slavery and the genocide against the Indians. A lot of the stuff that you hear harped on now, we harped on, and I’ve internalised this stuff, and I was very proud of how ashamed I was. When you’re ashamed, you’re superior, because you know how terrible you are and everyone else is dribbling around in their ignorance, and they don’t know what evil they hail from.

That lasted well into my young adulthood, until I became a permanent expat. Even for the first few years of my ex-patriotism, when I was living in Belfast, I was ashamed of being American. I was a little self-conscious about opening my mouth with my accent and giving away that I was from this terrible place. And honestly, I’m not quite sure what did it. Maybe it was just living in Belfast, where I realised there are other terrible places. I grew up politically and I grew up personally. I came to resign myself to being American.

I didn’t choose to be born American. There are worse places to be from and I was not responsible for slavery. I didn’t kill any Indians. Everyone has to be from somewhere and actually, that shame is perhaps the main thing that I should have felt ashamed for. Because it is a false pride in being so illumined and it’s an empty pride. And frankly, from the outside, it is unattractive. We don’t really like people who are ashamed of where they come from. It’s a kind of betrayal and it’s a lie. It’s as if you can repudiate that which cannot be repudiated. It’s also a denial of fact, of physical reality. I was born in the United States in a little town called Gastonia, North Carolina: that is a fact. A fact, and I can’t live it down, and for me to feel that I have to is, well, shame on me.

So, I came round — but this self-hatred stuff goes way back, this very Western-centred, “oh, haven’t we done terrible things”. And it starts with my generation. The Boomer generation brought this stuff to life. And those are the people who took over the universities. So, it is not just a bunch of young people who got some stupid notion in their head. They got it from us.

KL: On that note, shall we take some questions from the audience?

*

Do you think that books like Satanic Verses wouldn’t be published now? Or that series of books called The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, which was beautifully written by an elderly Scottish professor, Alexander McCall Smith, but from the perspective of a black woman?

LS: Funnily enough I had a conversation with somebody in the upper levels of HarperCollins — they publish Alexander McCall Smith — and he was bemoaning the fact that if one of those books came in today, they would not publish it. And that’s HarperCollins, the refuge. The truth is that HarperCollins’s CEO is a Brexit supporter. Very conservative. And that helps explain why HarperCollins is a bit of an island politically. But even they would probably turn down The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, because it’s an older Scottish white writer with a main character who is female, black and African — which is, from my perspective, admirable. It’s an extension of imagination, of empathy. I’m far more interested in reading that book than I would be if it’s about a barely disguised older, white Scottish male who happens to be the main character and writes novels for a living.

*

You said a while back that the best way to fight this war on language was to either ignore it or to laugh at it. Do you still think that?

LS: That’s a hard one because, yes, my tendency is to laugh at it. I find these lists of words we’re no longer supposed to use, which get longer and longer, hilarious. You can’t refer to a “field” of study anymore, because it’s going to remind people of slavery. I mean, it is beyond satire. These people are doing our work for us in making a mockery of themselves. The trouble is that it does start trickling down. The Associated Press guidelines set a standard that is largely observed across the journalism industry, but now they’ve said that you can’t use the word “the”. Now, obviously, it’s in certain contexts, but honestly, they are banning articles. You can’t say “the disabled” because it defines a person in terms of a particular aspect of themselves. They even said you couldn’t say “the French”. The French got really pissed off!

For this lunacy to have filtered down to even the AP Stylebook means that it’s a little more serious than I would like it to be. I would like us to be able to laugh it off. But honestly, they have successfully made it almost unpublishable in mainstream newspapers to say “slave”; you have to say “enslaved person”, because otherwise we idiots are not going to know that we’re actually talking about a human being. They’re starting to endanger whole classes of words that pertain to people. Pretty soon we’re not going to be able to talk about me as being “a writer”, because I’m also a person. So, I have to be a “writing person” or a “person who writes”. It’s dumber than dumb, but at the same time, it is starting to have an impact on what is considered acceptable use of language.

My biggest sense of upset about all of this stuff is that I just hate bad writing. I hate the mangling of language. I hate stupid use of words and that’s what they’re promoting. They honestly have people on the news saying, “people living with obesity”. And again, this is funny, but there’s another level on which it is more insidious. It is denial of reality. I gather there’s a series called Goosebumps — I haven’t read it; it is for children — which is removing the word “fat”. I mean, first off, no matter how many references to the word fat you eliminate, it doesn’t change the fact that being massively overweight is bad for you. It also doesn’t change the fact that most people do not find being massively overweight attractive. If you eliminate the word, you don’t eliminate the prejudice against that state. And by the way, that’s a healthy prejudice. We don’t want to encourage everyone to be massively fat. So I don’t think we should stop finding it funny but we do also have to take it seriously. I use the word “slave” at every opportunity.

*

I wonder whether there’s any way of engaging with a lost generation of people who are completely captured by weird, weird ideologies?

LS: Fortunately, I don’t have to confront people who have swallowed this ideology whole very often. One of the problems with the ideology is the way it seals itself off. So that part of the ideology is a refusal to have a conversation, that it causes you harm to talk to somebody or listen to somebody with whom you disagree. It’s anti-education, which is why I find it incredibly ironic that this stuff originates in universities. Because it’s the antithesis of what real education is.

I think parents may have a role to play. I’m not a parent, but I wouldn’t give up on trying to talk to your kids. One of the things that dismays me is that a lot of the parents believe the same stuff. And so the kids are not entirely against the parents. What dismays me about younger people these days is: they don’t rebel. This is what they’re being told. This is what a lot of their parents believe. It’s not rebellion, it’s anything but: it’s conformity, total conformity.

Now, what is wrong with young people who don’t tell the adults that they’re full of shit? That’s what we were like. I bought into my parents’ liberal ideology, but I grew up and I overthrew it and started thinking for myself. My first experience of asserting myself was overthrowing my parents’ Presbyterianism. Both my parents were professionally religious, and I instinctively didn’t buy it. Now it turns out everyone else is the same way, so it doesn’t seem especially interesting, but it was risky in my family, to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to go to church anymore. I don’t believe this.” And it gave me practice for later, when I realised that I didn’t entirely buy their political ideology. I became an independent intellectual being.

What is wrong with younger people that they don’t go through that process? It is empowering, as we used to say; it is exciting and it’s fundamentally Oedipal. It’s overthrowing the previous generation and asserting yourself and growing into yourself, and deciding that you are capable, and that you can think for yourself. Why is this generation — and even to some degree, the previous one — not going through that rebellion and that self-assertion? I’m afraid that a lot of the self-assertion we do see is an assertion of weakness, so-called vulnerability, mental illness, feeling unsafe? It’s all soft. I would like to see a little strength.

*

As a sensitivity reader, I advised somebody to remove something because he was calling able people “blessed”, implying that disabled people are not blessed. But I felt bad, because at what point does it become self-censorship?

LS: I don’t think there’s any formula. There is such a thing as being edited well, and my editor occasionally calls attention to something that’s going to alienate people. I don’t mind having that called to my attention. I’ve been a little careless, or I wrote something in such a way that it could be interpreted in a way that I don’t want it to be interpreted. So, if you’ve got a line that seems to be dissing anyone with a disability and that’s not what you’re trying to convey, then you should fix it and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t believe in gratuitous offence. I sometimes offend on purpose, but there’s nothing wrong with having another perspective, and I’m always willing to listen. If someone can make a good case that I should cut a line or change a word, or whatever, I’ll listen to it and I will entertain it. And sometimes I’ll reject it, but sometimes they’re right. There’s always a danger of becoming so dogmatic in the service of anti-dogmatism that you close yourself off to information that actually is very useful to you. I sometimes have to watch that myself.

*

I’m left with the feeling that this is an era of even greater polarisation than I had thought. And perhaps what we’re missing is more of a voice for the centre ground and the middle ground. And I wonder if, to get through the era, that voice might be better than the two polars fighting each other?

LS: That’s what got us here, the centre ground! I’m afraid that the centre ground is now interpreted as Right-wing. Nothing I’ve said, 30 years ago, would have been faintly controversial. And now it is. It’s funny, I was just speaking with another audience member who said that she’s from my same generation and she started out a liberal, and she hasn’t changed any of her opinions and now she’s regarded as Right-wing. And that’s what’s happened to me. The irony of the position I find myself in is that most of the positions that I advocate for are expressing the views of the majority of the population. And the views of the majority of the population are no longer acceptable. And that bothers me. It shouldn’t be brave to say most of the stuff I say, and unfortunately it has become so.

Was Rishi Sunak’s claim to have single-handedly prevented another national lockdown at Christmas 2021 accurate?

I think, to be honest, a number of factors were there. There was the parliamentary revolt by Steve Baker and Mark Harper and others. I think my unexpected departure was part of it, and the Cabinet clearly wouldn’t go along with it. So I think there’s quite a lot going on… I think the only conclusion you can draw is that I was the only person to leave over opposition to the COVID measures and plan B. In the end, the rest of the Cabinet supported them.

Why should Brexiteers support Liz Truss, who voted Remain, over Rishi Sunak, who voted Brexit?

There’s no point in saying you’re in favour of Brexit if you’re not willing to do the things that make Brexit succeed. In my view, what’s necessary is significant reform, liberalisation, change, a somewhat smaller state, lower taxation, domestic reform, while rebuilding an effective state that can do important things properly, like control the borders, law and order… All those things go together. And that’s why for me, Liz Truss is the candidate who best encapsulates them. She gets that we need to change. Things need to be done very, very differently to how they’ve been done over the last 25 years and we need to start that now.

So you proposing Liz Truss as the “change candidate”?

I do think that there is a fundamental choice being offered between continuity and change. And when I look at Rishi Sunak, how he started the campaign, it does seem to be on a much more sort of continuity Conservative, fiscal conservatism and responsibility, pitch. Now, obviously, in principle, those are important things. But I think at the moment, we’re at a time where we need to support growth, we need to kickstart the economy and get ourselves moving again, get out of the immobilism, and the slow growth and productivity that we’ve got used to in recent years. And that’s why I think a change of direction is most important.

What happened to “sound money” Conservatism? Truss is in favour of more borrowing.

I don’t think either Rishi, or Liz, are proponents of modern monetary theory or the idea that borrowing doesn’t matter. I don’t think either of them would say that. I think what the Liz campaign is saying, given where the economy is at the moment, some leaning towards a bit of fiscal relaxation and reversing the tax increases that we brought in is the right thing to do.

Everyone seems to be talking about Thatcher on this campaign — it’s not very Thatcherite to be in favour of more borrowing is it?

Mrs Thatcher came in at a time when the challenges faced by the country were quite different ones … She came in at a time when the British state had just called in the IMF, fiscal responsibility was something that seemed to have gone out of the window a long time before. And the focus had to be establishing credibility with markets, that somebody had a grip once again. Now we’re in a different position. The country, the successive governments, do have fiscal credibility compared to many others around the world. The question is, what do you do with that, without losing it? Mrs. Thatcher also believed in growth. She believed in reform, she believed in change, she believed in boosting productivity, and those are also Thatcherite things and that’s what we need to be doing in the short run. We need to be increasing the size of the cake so we can do some of these other desirable things as well.

In retrospect, do you think there was an irreconcilable division between “free market” Brexiteers and “protectionist” Brexiteers?

I think both of those elements were clearly in there and in the debate afterwards. But I think they’re an oversimplification… Most Brexiteers, even the most economically liberal, free market ones, would still say that immigration control was an important thing to achieve. So I think the contrast between inward-looking protectionist and outward-looking globalist oversimplifies. I do think that there is no choice for the country other than free market reform, change, getting taxes down, getting the state a bit smaller. All history, all experience we’ve got around the world, shows those are the ways in which you increase prosperity and wealth. And anyone who says there’s an alternative “Fortress Britain” way of achieving that, is, I think, simply wrong, and can be proven wrong by history and politics.

Surely many Brexit voters were looking for the opposite – for more protection from the globalised economy?

I think there’s a spectrum on this, and there probably are people you can find who would say that large state, social democrat-type economics, and very strong border controls are an important thing for the country in future. I don’t agree with that. I think it’s probably a minority view in the Brexit coalition. Equally, I think that the very deracinated globalisation that we’ve seen in recent years, in which there was a lot of offshoring, in which big companies seemed not to care about where they operated from, and only to look at costs, and not to look at where they were rooted, was also a problem. And I think it’s moving away from that. If you’re in favour of free markets, that doesn’t mean you need to be in favour of every barrier disappearing and big companies being able to do what they like. It’s finding the right point on the spectrum.

Is “Levelling Up” now ever going to happen?

Every British government for the last 100 years or so has tried to achieve it. And most of them haven’t succeeded. I think there are some very deep economic forces of geography and history that pull economic activity towards southern England. That’s probably been enhanced by EU membership, and being part of the single market, though that’s certainly not the main underlying cause of it. I think if parts of the country are less productive, as some are, the right response is to reduce the burdens. And I would say the right way to do it is reduce tax rates, expand the free ports, have bigger areas where it’s easier to act and invest and get things going, rather than have very big transfers of government money from south to north to simplify. That I think we’ve seen doesn’t work from historical experience and we need to do something different.

So is the much-hyped “Red Wall” Conservatism, more comfortable with state intervention, already finished before it started?

I think everybody’s committed still to making devolution work and build up regional mayors and the ability of people to do things the way they want locally. But I think it is only part of the picture. Success isn’t only extracting money from central governments and using it to generate things. It’s about becoming self-reliant, generating private sector movement somewhere to increase things. And once again, I think the difference between Red Wall and Blue Wall is an over-simplification. I don’t think Conservative voters in the Red Wall are particularly different from voters in the Blue Wall. They know the importance of business, they want freedom, they want to make a success of their own lives and build things, and they want the social capital that comes with being part of a successful economy and country. And I don’t think there’s any real difference. Let’s not forget, in the ’83 election, Mrs Thatcher won a good chunk of what’s now the Red Wall with exactly that sort of appeal. It’s not something new.

How will history remember Boris Johnson?

I think history will judge him more kindly than a lot of people have in the last month or two. He cut through and resolved the constitutional crisis. I think, for all the fact that I ended up going over Covid, I think our record on Covid in this country is better from the freedom and the economics point of view than many others. I think one can fairly say that. And obviously, I think he got the calls on Ukraine right. And I think that is a good record for three years. I’m very sorry about what has happened…

I loved working with him. He’s, he’s an amazing guy. And I’ve never met anybody like him. It’s obvious that his shadow as a kind of campaigner and the delivery of Brexit will remain for quite a long time.

Did it all go wrong when Dom Cummings left?

I’m an admirer of Dom, although I haven’t agreed with him on everything. I think he brought an ability to see beyond the day to day, to set strategy, work out where he wants to go and get there. Every successful government does need people like that. They don’t need to do it in the way Dom did it necessarily, but if you don’t have that strategic grip, you eventually are pushed around by the day to day media, the lobby, the normal ways of doing things. And I think that’s what began to happen.

Do you think Liz Truss could realistically ever match Boris Johnson’s majority?

Majorities of 80 come along pretty rarely, and it takes exceptional circumstances which we had in 2019. These things don’t always replicate themselves… The number of seats you win isn’t the only test. Can she win a convincing majority that shows that people are comfortable with what has happened, hopefully after a couple of years and can take us forward? Absolutely. We can do that.

Last week, after some negotiation, being passed from activist cell to cell, UnHerd was granted access to a group of Insulate Britain protestors preparing to disrupt rush hour traffic in the City the following day. I wanted to find out who they are and whether they think their campaign is working. Arriving at their safehouse — an Airbnb flat off the Edgware Road — we were welcomed by their organiser Louise Lancaster, a middle-aged teacher from Cambridge. With a few exceptions, the activists were middle-aged or impeccably middle-class retired professionals from Middle England: as they hugged and grazed at the buffet, the atmosphere seemed more like a Church of England social than that of a radical protest group. 

Yet all were united by a firmly-held belief that the climate crisis presented such an urgent, apocalyptic threat that the only course left was direct action. “I’m prepared to lose my liberty, lose my home that I love, not see my family, have everything taken away by the government,” Biff from Canterbury told the group, as they took turns introducing themselves. “Because I’m raging now. And I’m absolutely disgusted at the criminality of this government. They are condemning our children and our grandchildren to war and starvation. Our children are going to be the cannon fodder in what’s coming and what’s looming, and the Government are just lining their pockets, and blinkered to what’s going to happen to this country.” 

David, a white-bearded retiree, agreed, arguing that “anybody who understands this problem now, and does not begin to act — not write to their legislator or MP — get out into the streets, make themselves known and tell the Government this is unacceptable, and join with others around the world. They will be in a state of complicity. They’ll just be observing the end of humanity. And knowing that it was coming.” 

Yet there seemed to be a curious mismatch between the apocalyptic scale of the climate threat — which absolutely accords with the scientific consensus — and their proposed solution of insulating homes. Britain accounts for a mere 1% of global carbon emissions, and by their own reckoning, leaky insulation accounts for only 15% of that 1%. Surely there were more pressing targets for their campaign? Why not campaign for an increase in nuclear power generation, which underwrites France’s vastly superior carbon efficiency compared to the UK? The response was one of horror: despite claiming there were only a few years left to save human life, the activists cited the millennia-long storage times for radioactive waste as a reason to discount the idea. “Nuclear power stations need extreme control,” argued Margarita, a retiree. “And if we lose that, you know, if there’s social breakdown, what happens, is those power stations could become extremely dangerous.” Instead, they argued, home insulation was “low-hanging fruit”, a concrete and easily-achievable goal behind which the public could finally be rallied to the looming urgency of the climate crisis.

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The advanced age of Insulate Britain’s activist base is striking, and judging from the tone of much online commentary, which snarkily portrays them as baby boomers who have enjoyed the most comfortable living conditions in world history now seeking to enforce eco-austerity on the downwardly-mobile young, it’s an Achilles heel for the wider movement. Why does their demographic skew to the old in such a pronounced way? “I’ve got the time,” answered David: “I’m here because I can be here, there are millions of people who aren’t in the fortunate position that I’m in, I’ve had my career, I’ve paid my mortgage. I passionately am concerned about humanity going down the pan while I watch.” 

Judy, 82, from South Wales, argued that her age provided her with the breadth of personal experience to understand just where the world was going wrong. “For one thing,” she said, “I’ve been around longer than other people to pollute this planet, and you know, to contribute to the state we’re in. But I also remember what the world was like when I was young and what the countryside was like, what it was like to travel and the beautiful places and the wildlife, which is all being destroyed by what we’re doing. And it’s not necessary. It doesn’t have to be that way.” Arrested four times since September, Judy insisted that direct action was the only way: “I marched against the Iraq war. There were a million of us, and bloody hell, what notice did anybody take? Sod all, it was. And so we’ve got to do this disruption, we’ve got to do something that makes people get annoyed, really get annoyed.” 

If that’s the plan, it’s working. If Insulate Britain has intruded into the public consciousness at all, it’s through all that footage of their tiny cohort of activists blocking ordinary, possibly previously sympathetic, drivers from going to hospital or taking their children to school — footage the activists claimed was being disseminated by a hostile Right-wing press “inciting murder”. As Louise shared the plan for the following day’s action — blocking traffic on Southwark Bridge in the heart of the City — she took great pains to stress that they would allow emergency vehicles through on cycle paths, and that the assembled protestors should visibly empathise with stranded drivers’ annoyance: “We are aware that we are creating the situation that other people are suffering from, and we need to support them as much as we can.”

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During rush hour the next morning, the group put this empathic approach to the test. They gathered as inconspicuously as possible in a small garden near the chosen location before walking to the access road north of the bridge and sitting down in the road. There they unfurled their banners, some gluing their hands to the asphalt. Immediately, they drew the ire of stranded drivers who yelled, honked horns and tried to drive through them. One black NHS worker trying to deliver medical supplies and an angry man with a thick Iraqi accent claiming he had a sick child in his car were both allowed to drive through the sit-in after voluble protests. It was striking to watch, as white-haired representatives of Middle England were abused and dragged off the road by London’s multiracial working class. “You know, it is terrible when people start screaming at you and don’t understand,” reflected Margarita, who had glued herself to the road. “And you do sort of start questioning yourself. But yeah, we’re just doing it because we feel it’s got to be brought out, the whole issue, you know the insulation will definitely help but the climate crisis, people don’t seem to take it on board.”

After half an hour of abuse and anger — and very occasional gestures of support — the police arrived, dealing with the protesters with a tenderness which contradicted the Government’s stern warnings of a crackdown. The whole scene seemed to express a deep, essential Englishness, as young coppers tried to dissuade women who could have been their grandmothers from obstructing the highway, then unglued them and softly prised them away from the road towards a markedly amicable arrest. I’ve covered many demonstrations in London, from student protests to EDL rallies, and have never seen such gentle policing. “They probably won’t thank me for saying they’ve been helpful,” Judy said of the police surrounding her. “But they have been, they’ve been great. And we’ve talked to a lot of police officers and a lot of them say, ‘yeah, we think about our children and our grandchildren as well you know, we’re not looking forward to the changes that are going to happen in the world.’” 

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I asked Susie, a fortysomething mother of two from Cambridge, how she felt about being arrested, as the police prepared to carry her into the waiting van.“Compared to the climate crisis? It’s a doddle. It doesn’t mean I want to be arrested, doesn’t mean I want to face court. doesn’t mean any of that. But compared to the climate crisis, being able to do this now while I’ve got food in my belly, a warm roof, my kids looked after: bring it on.” 

Yet as the Government gears up for next week’s COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, Insulate Britain’s direct action campaign seems more divisive than effective, however compelled their activists may be to feel they are at least doing something. 

In the context of a Conservative government struggling to commit its own party to Johnson’s Net Zero aspirations, Insulate Britain’s campaign has functioned as a lightning rod for critics of any action on climate change at all to portray those concerned as middle-class cranks, divorced from the needs and aspirations of ordinary working people. In reality, the decisions that will really make a difference on climate change will be made in China, America and India: British politicians’ time may be better spent focusing on building domestic resilience to the seemingly inevitable disaster than frittering away political capital tinkering at the edges of a process they are more or less powerless to prevent.

After all these months, does he now think that his strategy is a failure or a success? A bit of both, he says quickly, but emphasises more of the latter:

“I think to a great extent it’s been a success. We are now seeing rapidly falling cases, we have continuously had healthcare that has been working, there have been free beds at any given time, never any crowding in the hospitals, we have been able to keep schools open which we think is extremely important, and society fairly open — while still having social distancing in place in a way that means that the spread of the disease has been limited.

The failure has of course been the death toll … that has been very much related to the long-term care facilities in Sweden. Now that has improved, we see a lot less cases in those facilities.”

Mortality is hardly an afterthought — so why is Sweden’s mortality rate so high? At around 550 per million of population, it sits just under the UK and Italy but far above neighbouring Norway and Denmark. Dr Tegnell offers a collection of reasons: with its larger migrant populations and dense urban areas, Sweden is actually more similar to the Netherlands and the UK than it is to other Scandinavian countries; he believes the Swedish counting system for deaths has been more stringent than elsewhere; also, countries are at different points in the epidemic cycle so it is too early to compare totals.

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The one thing he doesn’t mention in this list is that Sweden, uniquely in Europe, did not impose a mandatory lockdown at any point. Is he really claiming that this is not even a factor?

“I am not sure that it is easy to say that lockdown would make the difference … in many ways we have had a very stringent lockdown in Sweden. We have cut down on movement in society quite a lot: we have compared how much we travel in Scandinavian countries, and the decrease in travel is the same in Sweden as in neighbouring countries … In many ways the voluntary measures we put in place in Sweden have been just as effective as complete lockdowns in other countries. So I don’t think complete lockdown is the way to go for all countries … the rapidly declining cases we see in Sweden right now is another indication that you can get the number of cases down quite a lot in a country without having a complete lockdown.”

I ask again: is he claiming that lockdowns make no difference?

“We don’t know. It would have made maybe some difference, we don’t know. But on the other hand we know that lockdowns also have big other effects on public health. We know that closing schools has a great effect on children’s health in the short and the long term. We know that people being out of work also produces a lot of problems in the public health area. So we also have to look at what are the negative effect of lockdowns, and that has not been done very much so far.”

Tegnell points out the huge differences between different areas in Sweden — parts of the South that have had much lower Covid-19 than Copenhagen just over the water while Stockholm has had it much worse, despite the same lockdown policy nationwide. This he puts down to the volume of original introduction of the disease due to international travel:

“There seems to be a close connection to how many people introduced the disease at the same time… The spring holidays in Sweden are spread over four different weeks depending on different geographical regions. Unfortunately Stockholm happened to have its spring holiday just when there was an enormous spread of Covid-19 in Europe … so a lot of Swedes living in the Stockholm area came back with the disease. And that started an epidemic on a level that was much higher than the start of the epidemic in the South of Sweden, or in Finland or in Norway. Currently that’s to me the most likely theory – that if you have a massive introduction, it’s going to be a disease that is very, very hard to control.” Stockholm, in other words, was more like London or New York than Oslo or Helsinki in terms of introduction of the virus.

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He believes strongly that eradication — the zero-tolerance approach that is increasingly winning the day in the UK and US — is not a viable option.

“I don’t think that this is a disease that we can eradicate – not with the methods that we have right now. It might be a disease that in the long term we can eradicate with a vaccine, but I’m not even sure about that. If you look at comparable diseases like the flu and other respiratory viruses we are not even close to eradicating them despite the fact that we have a vaccine. I personally believe that this is a disease we are going to have to learn to live with.”

Many people feel that Anders Tegnell’s approach has been overly laissez-faire and that even now, he should be introducing more draconian measures. A model this week from his Health Agency suggested as many as 3000 additional deaths may be seen in Sweden in the next year — shouldn’t he do more to stop that happening?

He insists that those projections are only models, and that he hopes and expects to achieve a much better result. But he is also mindful of whether these draconian measures may do more harm than good:

“Of course we are trying to keep the mortality rates as low as possible, but at the same time we have to look at the draconian measures you are talking about. Are they going to produce even more deaths by other means than the disease itself? Somehow we need to have the discussion of what we are actually trying to achieve. Is it better for public health as a whole? Or is it trying to suppress Covid-19 as much as possible? Because getting rid of it I don’t think is going to happen: it happened for a short time in New Zealand and maybe Iceland and those kind of countries might be able to keep it away, but with the global world we have today, keeping a disease like this away has never been possible in the past and it would be even more surprising if it were possible in the future.”

One type of intervention that does not appear to have adverse effects is encouraging, or mandating, the use of masks. This has become an intensely political issue in the US and more recently in the UK. In Sweden mask use is minimal in almost all settings. Why is he not even recommending use of masks?

“One reason is that the evidence base for using masks in society is still very weak. Even if more and more countries are now enforcing them in different ways … we haven’t seen any new evidence coming up, which is a little bit surprising. The other reason is that everything tells us that keeping social distance is a much better way of controlling this disease than putting masks on people. We are worried (and we get at least tales from other countries) that people put on masks and then they believe they can go around in society being close to each other, even going around in society being sick. And that, in our view, would definitely produce higher spread than we have right now.”

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The emphasis on spread of the virus to the exclusion of everything else Dr Tegnell believes is misguided, as the number of cases is less and less correlated to the number of deaths.

“Deaths are not so closely connected to the amount of cases you have in a country. There are so many other things that influence the amount of deaths you have. What part of the population gets hit? Is it the elderly people? How well can you protect people in your long-term facilities? How well does your healthcare system continue to function? How can we improve the treatment in ICUs? All of these things have been changing a lot in the past few months… Those things will influence mortality a lot more, I think, than the actual spread of the disease.”

His belief is that, in the final account, the Infection Fatality Rate will be similar to the flu: “somewhere between 0.1% and 0.5% of people getting infected, maybe … And that is not radically different to what we see with the yearly flu.”

On the controversial question of immunity, he suggests that a larger percentage of the population in Sweden is already immune than antibody studies suggest.

“There are a number of small studies already that show that of people who had been diagnosed with Covid-19 with PCR, not all of them develop antibodies. On the other hand we have quite a lot of evidence that falling ill with Covid-19 twice seems to be extremely rare… Obviously there is also quite a big part of the population that has other kinds of immunity and T Cell immunity is the one that is most likely.

“What we see right now is a rapid fall in the number of cases, and of course some kind of immunity has to be involved in that as nothing else has changed. That means that immunity affects the R value quite a lot in Sweden today.”

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Does that mean that Sweden will be better placed to limit second waves and future flare ups than countries that have had minimal infection levels so far?

“I think it’s likely that those kinds of outbreaks will be easier to limit in Sweden because there is immunity in the population. All our experience with measles and other diseases shows that … we know that with large immunity in the population it is much easier to control the outbreaks than if you don’t have immunity in the population.

“There is now a number of countries in Europe that have a fairly low level of spread for a very long time, which is very unusual with a disease that seems to be so contagious, and where there is so little immunity in the population. If that is really a sustainable way for the disease to exist we will wait and see — I think the fall will show if it is possible or not.”

The eyes of the world have been on him for the past few months. How would he like to be judged, and when?

“It is better to have a more complete discussion around this in say 12 months, after next summer, then I think we can more fairly judge what has been good in some countries and bad in other countries.”

He has promised to talk to us again at that time. 23^rd July 2021 – it’s in the diary.