Sir David Omand was the United Kingdom’s first Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister, and he played a key role in developing the UK’s CONTEST counterterrorism strategy. He served on the Joint Intelligence Committee for seven years and was Director of GCHQ from 1996 to 1997. He also served as the Permanent Secretary of the UK’s Home Office and as a senior official in the Ministry of Defence. His is the author of Principled Spying (2010), Securing the State (2014), and How Spies Think (2020). How to Survive a Crisis: Lessons in Resilience and Avoiding Disaster was published by Penguin in hardback 2023 and paperback in June 2024. This is an edited transcript of a conversation recorded on 17 May 2024.

Quassim Cassam (henceforth QC): The first thing to say is that this is an incredibly timely book, in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the October 7 terror attack on Israel and many other major international crises in the last few years. You say in the Foreword to the paperback edition of the book that your fundamental aim is understanding the nature of crisis and how best to survive one. What led you to write the book?

David Omand (henceforth DO): What inspired me to write the book was my own experience in the Cabinet Office in charge of civil contingencies, working to reform the legislative framework that should govern the government’s response to emergencies, and realizing how much I had learned from crises I had been through myself when in government service. And I had come across much folklore about previous crises, some of which ought to be codified and written down, but which wouldn’t otherwise necessarily survive. So that’s why I started writing – from experience. Then, when I got going, it was a question of interviewing a lot of people who had survived a crisis, and some who almost hadn’t, to collect their views of what exactly it is that makes the experience of crisis different from an emergency and what prevents it becoming a disaster.

QC: Could you just explain the difference between a crisis, an emergency, and a disaster?

DO: The distinction I make is rough and ready, but I think it holds some interesting lessons. We have emergencies all the time. In the corporate sector, companies have product recalls, there are fires in the warehouse, there are strikes, industrial accidents and so on. Emergencies of many kinds affect the community such as today we see from weather extremes. And the same is true for all of us—as families we are affected by floods, heatwaves, powercuts and disruptions of all kinds. The point about emergencies is you can pretty much anticipate the types of problem that are likely to arise, even if you can’t predict when. The common types of emergency are well known. Some you can insure against; with some you have to make some form of plan for what you would do if it were to happen and then hope you can adapt those plans in the light of circumstances. There are emergency services on hand, and if it’s a cyber-attack, then there are many specialist companies that can come in and help you.

Crises, I think are different. It is characteristic of a crisis that the person in charge doesn’t immediately know what to do. If they did, they would press the button, their emergency plans would swing into action, the emergency services would turn up at the front door, and it would be dealt with, painful though it might be. Some emergencies of course are extremely painful, and people lose their lives. But when you’re in a crisis, the person in charge and the team around them have to find a way through a situation that is initially at least not under their control, one they haven’t experienced before and probably had not envisaged previously. That’s what led me to think about a crisis being poised between an emergency, on the one hand, and a slide into disaster, on the other, if some way cannot be found to take control of a worsening situation.

QC: Is the essence of crisis that feeling of facing a situation out of your control? Can you grade crises in terms of severity?

DO: Yes, and in my observation even experienced leaders can find that deeply scary. Perhaps it is because the reason the people in charge of major organisations end up in charge is they have strong personalities, they have strong views, they are used to being in control, and they are used to organizing their day around their own priorities. But when the crisis strikes, it is managing them, not the other way around. And for a little while at least, new problems arise making the situation worse. One way of characterising a major disruption is in terms of the intensity of the initial impact of the problem, the extent to which the effects spreads across national life and, finally, the duration of the problem before normal life resumes. These are not independent dimensions, clearly, but you can think of some crises that are mostly about dealing with the initial impact, such as an aircraft crash, some that have widespread effects across the economy such as a pandemic and some that have very long-lasting effects such as a nuclear reactor accident. In my book I coin the initialism IED to denote these three characteristics, recalling the military abbreviation, IED, Improvised Explosive Device. When you have all three you have a major crisis to survive.

QC: How far does having a sensible response depend upon the type of person in charge?

DO: When some situation bursts into crisis the response of the individual in charge matters hugely. Unfortunately, the historical record is that too often leaders can resist accepting that whatever is happening is really serious, and therefore you risk a delay in responding. So there is the “this can’t really be happening to us, can it?” denial. And if you have delay in recognising the seriousness of the situation, then it’s probably going to mean delay in what I call mobilization, which is getting the organization—or it could be the nation as a whole—energized to deal with the problem. Certainly, in the corporate world the crisis may be apparent to only a few people in the C-suite, but the rest of the organization is just going on doing what they do every day. Mobilization means getting the best talent from across the organization, or as we saw with the vaccine task force, bringing in talent from outside, in order to construct a way through the crisis. The bringer of bad news may fear denigration from the boss, and that can discourage early warning from staff of a deteriorating situation, which will make matters worse.

The type of person you don’t want, I think, in charge when crisis arises are the over-confident leaders who simply announce at the outset what the solution is. Almost by definition, in a genuine crisis, they will have to find a way through a unique and difficult set of problems. The best approach is for the leader to bring together the team, bring in some outside expertise if that’s needed, and make clear to the team that together, they will find a way out of the crisis. Otherwise, the obvious risk is that you immediately set off down a path which quickly becomes a blind alley or you take measures in the heat of the moment, which then turn out to make the problem worse. An example might be quickly ordering schools to shut when an infectious disease is detected. Maybe that will turn out to be a sensible thing to do at a later stage, to cut down the rate of infection in the general population, but shutting schools for any length of time has very serious consequences. So all that is what constitutes the nature of a crisis.

QC: Can leaders prepare for the personal test that crisis will bring?

DO: You can build up personal resilience, I believe, and self-awareness of how you tend to react to stress, for example though the experience of exercises, especially if there is an experienced coach on hand. Exercises will illustrate what I call the typical ‘arc of crisis’: from detecting the first signs of trouble, through the initial stages of confusion with a frantic search for evidence of what is going wrong and why, then clarification and commitment to action in order to protect lives and property, followed (hopefully) by consolidation and clearing up. What then results will be a new normal. You can provide practice in dealing with the sort of difficult decisions that might have to be made in a crisis so that confidence is built up. You can coach people in what are sensible questions to ask in circumstances where time for decision is short and what are likely to be time wasting questions.

Another well established trait that leaders can be made aware of is displacement activity, doing almost anything other than facing up to the real problem. When the windows have been blown in by an explosion outside or a flood has taken out the IT in the basement, it’s pretty apparent the crisis has arrived. But one of the themes that I’ve worked on and tried to explain in the book is that very often it’s not like that. The crisis point has been slowly creeping closer. That’s what I call a slow burn crisis and it takes a great act of will, and indeed moral courage to say: ‘stop, this is getting worse and it could get very much worse, so now is the time to intervene.’ But the issue so often besetting the political world with slow burn crises is that the problem may not fit the prevailing political narrative. Governments may not want to admit to the seriousness of the problem that has been allowed to develop on their watch. Or it may look as if it would be impossibly expensive to tackle, or it may simply be that the problem hasn’t manifested itself yet in a way that would allow popular support for the measures that might have to be taken. After the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, the 9/11 Commission of inquiry concluded that there is ‘a paradox of warning’. Even when you know that trouble is looming, the paradox is that you can’t get the political support to do what’s necessary to deal with it until the crisis has actually hit.

QC: Is this what you call the paradox of prevention?

DO: Yes, and it’s a quite powerful factor in delaying action. The risk is that there may be thought to be political advantage in delaying difficult decisions when the case for action is not yet publicly apparent. The political cycle moves on and may not fit the timescale for a developing crisis. There are examples in social policy, for example, where you can see falling numbers of working age people having in future to support an increasing aged population, that at some point is likely to become a crisis for taxation policy.

In the UK we have a marked shortage of mathematics and science teachers in schools, yet we know how much more important it will be in a digital age to have young people grounded in those subjects. There are slow burn health issues, such as how the increasing incidence of obesity in young people due to the availability of cheap junk food is storing up future trouble for health care through diabetes and heart issues. Long term prison overcrowding creates many problems, but if combined with an exceptionally hot summer can explode in violence.

QC: Is this why, as you say in the book, it’s the slow burn crises that are the most difficult to deal with when compared with what you call ‘sudden impact’ crises?

DO: Yes, that’s a hunch I have. I can’t say I’ve got a lot of evidence but when you think that the slow burn crisis has probably taken years to get to the bursting point and when it does explode it’s going to be so much harder to pull back. An example might be, say, the pay of junior hospital doctors in the UK where pay hasn’t kept pace with inflation. For understandable economic reasons you might decide as a government, for a year or two, that government pay awards have to be below the rate of inflation. But if you keep doing that for over a decade and you don’t recognize you’re building up a considerable head of steam and a loss of trust in the employer, then when finally patience is lost and industrial action is taken, as it has been in the United Kingdom recently, then you end up with great difficulty in reestablishing sufficient trust and goodwill to actually agree a solution to the problem, almost certainly involving staging higher increases over several years to recover the situation.

QC: You say that you can sometimes tell that you’re in a crisis by means of what you call the ‘rubber levers’ test. I wonder if you could start by saying exactly what the rubber leavers test is.

DO: The rubber levers test is when you pull on the emergency brake but it bends in your hand and does not connect to the situation on the ground and have the desired effect. You press the button that says ‘emergency stop’, but to your horror, you discover that the vehicle doesn’t stop. That in a sense takes us to the heart of a real crisis, when you realize that things are out of your control and the emergency steps you are taking don’t seem to have sufficient effect.

There can be rubber levers too with slow burn crises when you are trying to pull back the situation, but it’s got to a stage that the speed of the vehicle heading downhill is such that it’s going to be extremely difficult to stop it without a crash. Some slow burn crises can also be compared to the situation when you knew there was something not quite right with the brakes, but you never got round to taking the car in to be serviced. And the question is why not? Well, maybe you couldn’t afford it. Maybe you thought a complete failure would never happen. Maybe you didn’t realize how serious it actually could be if the brakes did fail. These are all reasons, I think, why governments and companies don’t act early enough to deal with things which eventually become crises.

QC: With a sudden impact crisis like 9/11 you know that you are in a crisis situation. Could it be that the problem with slow burn crises is that you either don’t recognize that there is a crisis or you do recognize it but you don’t have the will to do anything about it? In other words, it’s not that pulling the levers would have no effect, as in a sudden impact crisis like 9/11, but that you never pull them. Is that a reason to think that the rubber levers test doesn’t apply to slow burn crises?

DO: Shortly before 9/11, as has been recorded, the new Administration was warned by veteran counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council staff, Richard A. Clarke, that an Al-Qaeda attack was in preparation. There was strong intelligence to that effect but the target was not known. The emphasis, understandably, was on attacks outside United States given the earlier attacks in East Africa. The strong warning did not cause the White House to mobilise. Maybe it would not have made a great difference given the time between those warnings and the attack itself. But you just wonder.

As a general rule, when well informed officials are providing strong warnings, those in charge would be well advised to pay attention and at least go through a process of debate with them. And in the end if they then decide not to do anything that is their prerogative. But why are warnings so often brushed aside? The whole science of warning is an interesting one. You have to take account of what the decision maker’s view of the warner is. That’s the Cassandra syndrome, doomed to have her warnings ignored. It may be that the warner has a track record of giving warnings before but the events never happened, crying ‘wolf’ too often. It may be that the warning is just not precise enough to take action on or not clear enough about what the consequences would be if it happened. Or it may be, as seems to have been the case before 9/11, that the preoccupations of the new administration were firmly focused on other eminently reputable ends and it just did not feel at that point it had to get seriously engaged in preparing to deal with terrorism.

Sometimes it is hard to spot the developing crisis, I’d have to admit that. Sometimes there are just too many things that need fixing and you can’t fix them all at once. It’s fair that choices have to be made of where limited resources are to be spent, but I just have this feeling that sometimes it’s because the nature of the problem doesn’t fit the narrative of those in charge. To expose the problem is, in a sense, to admit failure. They allowed it to get to this stage. And it may be that political ideology (whether from the left or from the right) gets in the way of recognition of the problem. If I had to pick an example from the United Kingdom at the moment, I would point to growing income inequality, which is associated with health inequalities and educational inequalities. There’s always inequality in society but the statistics show that it seems to have been getting worse over the last decade. If you leave that unattended for long enough, then you are going to end up a society which is severely distorted and is not functioning properly.

QC: Another key notion for you is the national resilience. You speak about societal resilience, but you obviously also think that individuals and families can be more or less resilient. And you say that if we’re to survive the crisis to come, we need a national effort to create a resilient nation. You also say that societal resilience has a physical and a moral component, and that an important form of resilience is adaptive resilience. I’ll come back to the question of moral resilience in a minute, but I wonder if you could just say something about your notion of resilience in general and what you mean by physical resilience and adaptive resilience.

DO: ‘Resilience’ should be the Oxford Dictionary word of the year, shouldn’t it? It has passed into popular usage. The British Government published a Resilience Framework last year. I read it and I counted 556 instances of the word resilience in it.

In its origins, the idea of ‘resilience’ is a borrowing from the theory of materials. If you hit a copper pipe with a cricket bat, the energy of the impact will be transferred into the interior of the pipe and it will deform. If you hit a cricket ball with a cricket bat, with luck, the ball will bounce off to the boundary because the ball is made of material that is resilient. It’s a kind of bouncebackability, so the metaphor of resilience is really about whether you can withstand some kind of impact and bounce back. Then you can make the obvious point that you don’t necessarily want to bounce back into the same position of vulnerability as you were in before you got hit. So rebuild the electricity substation on high ground after your electricity station has been flooded on a flood plain. So that’s what is known as adaptive resilience. And it is best practice, even in the middle of a crisis, to devote sufficient effort to learning the lessons as you go along, not wait three years or more for the results of a statutory inquiry, but log the lessons as you go along. So at the end of the crisis you are wiser and the organisation can be in a stronger position than before crisis struck.

QC: But better surely not to have built the electricity sub-station on the flood plain in the first place? Are we still making that mistake and thus storing up trouble for the future?

DO: There’s one further development in resilience thinking which the British government has introduced in its Resilience Framework. That is to say it shouldn’t just be about bouncebackability after the event. The concept should also include anticipating possible future crises and adapting your systems in advance to be better able to cope. At that point, you have probably stretched the resilience metaphor as far as it can go because it covers almost everything to do with preventive contingency planning.

I do accept of course that an important part of preparation is anticipation, which I think is an important word to have in your mind when you talk about resilience. Anticipation has an emotional component to it. It’s not just being told that situation X might arise, perhaps with a certain degree of probability associated with it, it’s imagining what it would actually be like if situation X did arise. So in your mind, you’ve actually anticipated the event, and that is much more likely to reveal to you what your vulnerabilities might be and how the organisation would be affected. How well would I and my colleagues cope with this? Do we actually have the necessary tools on hand? Would it be a real struggle to get a grip of this? Such imaginings can lead to practical actions which I spell out in the book, like making business continuity plans, earmarking the place where you’re going to run your situation center, making sure you have the right kind of resilient communications and so on.

Resilience is not however readily measurable other than in the simplest of cases. We can, for example, think about sea walls which are an important part of critical national infrastructure. They are battered every winter by heavy storms. You could measure the resilience of sea walls by integrating the curve of measured stress and strain on the concrete, and that’s what engineers do with materials. But for the life of me, I can’t imagine how you could measure the resilience of the nonlinear complex networks that make up supply chains and communications networks. So at that point you’re more dependent, I think on the power of the metaphor than a number that can be turned into a costed proposal to put before the Board or the Finance Minister.

QC: In fact, my next question was about anticipation, which you’ve just mentioned. You say in the book that anticipation is central to creating the warning of the coming crisis and that the planning has to be on the basis of a reasonable worst-case scenario. The 1st edition of your book came out before the October 7th terror attack on Israel by Hamas, but you do talk about October 7 in the Foreword to the paperback edition. As you point out, Israeli intelligence had indications of the extensive preparations by Hamas for their attack but misread the signs. The authorities failed to anticipate the attack and did not regard an attack on the scale of October 7 as a reasonable worst case for which plans needed to be in place. It was a massive failure of intelligence and anticipation and perhaps also a failure of imagination. How do you account for such failures?

DO: We have intelligence failures, we have operational failures, and we have policy failures, and the three tend to be chained together. One explanation which I hold, though we’ve yet to have the results of a serious inquiry into those events so it’s a provisional view, is that the Israeli cabinet were following a policy which involved allowing Hamas to run Gaza partly as a way to prevent a dual state solution, and partly to be in a state of perpetual but not existential conflict, so rockets would continue to be fired at Israel but they would be able to shoot most of them down. That policy was fundamentally flawed because the assumption on which it was based was that the threat from Hamas could be contained. You will have heard that awful phrase, mowing the grass, which some in the Israeli military use to describe how they would go in occasionally and take Hamas down a peg, arresting some of the most militant members, but leaving Hamas still there running the administration of Gaza.

The firmness with which that policy was held, particularly by the right wingers in the Israeli cabinet, seems to have distorted the ability of the intelligence chiefs to assess objectively the degree of danger that Hamas posed. I think from the outside you would say the policy being followed was unstable. When, as you say, there were signs detected that Hamas was preparing for terrorist attacks, there could be two alternative explanations: one would be that Hamas is preparing something new and serious that must be taken very seriously; the other would be, they are winding us up again, as they always do. The latter seems to have been the chosen explanation. But that view of course has to be subject to the outcome of proper investigation. But on that basis, the operational failure then follows fairly obviously. If the possibility of an attack is not taken seriously, why would the IDF have dedicated forces on standby for something that it is judged very unlikely to happen?

As a general principle, however, I still think you should prepare for the reasonable worst-case scenarios and a worst case might be something approaching the scale of October 7. As I say in the Foreword to my book, you could imagine the reaction of some in the Israeli cabinet if they had discovered that the intelligence chiefs all believed a mass breakout on that scale was possible, and that the IDF had deliberately ignored the government’s priority of working in the West bank and the north of Israel but it had actually held forces against that possibility. I suspect what they would have said is: ‘you’re planning for the failure of government policy.’ And that leads to a trap that governments fall into, and companies fall into, of thinking this can’t happen because it’s our policy that it can’t happen. And every time you hear that you have to be very careful that you’re not missing something.

QC: What I take way from what you are saying is that simply thinking of October 7 as an intelligence failure is a mistake. It’s not just an intelligence failure. It’s an intelligence failure that followed from a policy failure and that then entailed an operational failure. So, there are three types of failure, and one needs to think about the policy dimension when thinking about failures of intelligence.

DO: Yes, in an ideal world intelligence analysts would not be influenced by an unconscious desire to please by providing intelligence assessments in line with the prevailing policy, they would simply be trying to infer the best estimate of how things may unfold from their awareness of the situation on the ground and their explanation of that situation. As far as one can tell from the stories in the press, that’s what Israeli analysts were doing. But when it comes to the interpretation of how a situation might develop in the future, there are bound to be alternative points of view. And if the policy context is being insisted upon with enough conviction, that’s when you risk the misjudgement. You could apply the same argument to flawed intelligence assessments in 2002 in the run up to the Iraq war.

QC: I want to move on now to the idea of strategic notice, which also comes up in your previous book about how spies think. You say we will be less surprised by surprises if we can obtain strategic notice of future developments that might pose a danger to us. And you also point out that a common problem is not that we can’t identify possible future problems to worry about, but that there are too many of them. So, the challenge then becomes how to decide which of the possible future problems are worth taking seriously. For example, on 6 October 2023, a large-scale Hamas attack might have been one of a range of possible futures for Israeli intelligence to worry about. On what basis should that possibility have been taken more seriously than other possibilities?

DO: You probably would be better off if you weighed different possible futures by their consequences as well as their likelihood. There are some reasonable worst-case scenarios that you can envisage and that you really, really don’t want to happen, where you recognize that were they to happen, the consequences would be extremely serious. You probably want to think quite hard about those scenarios. Are there measures I could take now, for example, which would make the situation more manageable were it to occur or even make it less likely that will be a future that affects us. You’re not predicting that it’s going to happen, and indeed you may judge it unlikely, but you know low probability events do sometimes occur and if this event did it would be very serious. I think this is one of the key things about strategic notice. It’s not a prediction. These are possible futures which might or might not come about. We may of course have strategic notice of opportunities as well; it’s not all downside risk, there’s also upside risk. Where we have strategic notice of future opportunities from which we might benefit we have to think of what we need to start doing now so as to be able to take advantage of them if they occur.

Let me give a simple example of using strategic notice. Consider what would happen if China turns out to be the first to build a quantum computer that works at large scale. That would give the Chinese authorities visibility inside our financial transactions and military affairs because these are all encrypted using the current public key cryptography which would be vulnerable to such a quantum computer. The theory is impeccable, but nobody has yet developed the technology to get a quantum computer to work at a sufficiently large scale. For me that’s quite a good example of the value of having strategic notice. The United States is probably more likely to get there first, but we cannot be certain. Having the strategic notice allows us to consider precautionary steps we could take now, such as spending more money on developing quantum resistant cryptography and inviting the Bank of England, the International Financial Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other institutions to initiate preparations over the next 10 years so that we’re not in such a position of vulnerability should China get there first.

QC: That leads to my next question. You say that the severity and duration of a crisis are largely down to our state of preparedness and that we need more investment in resilience. And yet even though there is, as you say, an unanswerable case for investing more in building up national resilience, governments all too often fail to make the necessary investments and look away before it’s too late. What can be done to persuade governments to act in a timely manner to address slow burn crises?

DO: I don’t underestimate the problem because there are many pressing demands on public expenditure. And whoever forms the government after the coming British general election, they are going to find the public purse is depleted. So the problem is acute. On the other hand, not every step to improve the resilience of our infrastructure need be hugely expensive. Take a simple example. We could retain a minimum capability for emergency service broadcasting using long wave radio at least until we have established in practice complete and robust coverage using digital radio. That is a small example where it would only take, I imagine, a few tens of thousands of pounds just to patch up the existing transmitters to keep them going at least until we are absolutely sure that there is an alternative to fall back on.

There are lots of examples like that. If you look at our water supply system, it’s under a lot of strain. The digital control systems, which increasingly run all our infrastructure, are vulnerable to being hacked. We know from American reports that Chinese advanced persistent threat hackers have been exploring North America’s digital infrastructure. They haven’t sabotaged anything yet, but they would be in a position to cause chaos if serious tension arose between the United States and China. We should not remain in such a state of vulnerability. Some improvements in resilience will come anyway, as new investment comes along, some of it probably should actually be mandated, allowing the regulators of these critical infrastructures to lay down standards. Competitive pressures mean it’s unreasonable to expect any one company in a competitive marketplace to spend a lot of money on precautionary investment when their competitors aren’t. That’s where regulation comes in.

There’s also a corporate social responsibility dimension. For example, over the protection of our information as citizens held by companies. Maintaining a secure information environment for their customers and suppliers should be recognised as a corporate responsibility, and companies should be called out when they get hacked and personal information goes missing. For example, the company that’s been running the Ministry of Defence’s payroll for the armed forces was hacked recently, and the personal information of most of the British armed forces was stolen. The US ran into the same problem when the Office of Personnel Management in Washington DC was hacked. That really shouldn’t happen.

QC: One might draw the somewhat depressing conclusion that in these cases you just can’t get the relevant authorities to address problems in many cases, even though the amounts required are quite small. And then maybe there will be some crisis, followed by a furore about how short sighted it was not to spend the relatively small amounts of money needed to build up national resilience in some cases. And then the same thing happens again with some other issue. Is that too pessimistic?

DO: I like to think of myself as a realist, with an optimistic outlook that companies and other organisations will come to recognise that it is very much in their commercial interests to help create secure information environments and improve their resilience. Being hacked is bad for corporate reputation, makes investors jittery and can attract large fines from regulators if it turns out sensible cybersecurity measures were not taken and the company is shown therefore to have been negligent with personal data. There is a UK National Preparedness Commission of which I’m now a member and which is outside government and is therefore free to push for improvements in resilience and rope in experts in infrastructure, cyber security, disaster relief, and so on to contribute to the research base. So, I’m guardedly optimistic that the whole subject is on political and commercial radars in a way it was not ten years ago.

QC: One thing that emerges from your book, I think, is that is that there are really significant differences in how well or badly different countries and different governments handle crises. For example, you praise the Icelandic response to an impending volcanic eruption in December 2023 but you’re critical of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s handling of COVID-19 in the UK, including his failure to attend Cabinet Office Briefing Room meetings in the early stages of the crisis. Yet not long before the pandemic hit, he won a handsome majority in the 2019 general election. What do you think democracies can do about the reality that electorates sometimes elect to high office populist politicians who, when major crises hit, are found not to be up to the job? Do you think that Western democracies today elect less capable leaders than they have done in the past?

DO: Well, Ronald Reagan was elected as a very popular president of the United States. But few would have expected a lot by way of strategic thinking from a retired actor noted for his Westerns. Actually, he surrounded himself with some very talented people. His cabinet had people of real quality, as did his White House. And his style was to form a team. It then matters less if the person who is elected by popular acclaim isn’t necessarily the deepest strategic thinker or necessarily the most workaholic. I think it’s an error in the corporate world and in government departments to think that you have to have at the top a paragon of all the virtues. What you need are individuals who are sufficiently self-aware that they know which are their strong points and which are the parts of the job they find come less naturally. They can build a strong leadership team with people in their cabinet or in top positions who more than make up for that.

A problem in the UK with the management of COVID-19 in the very early days was the lack of mobilization. There were other things going on in the Prime Minister’s life, some domestic, and he had his own political priorities he wanted to pursue. The looming danger of the pandemic was apparent to the experts, those who were following events in China and in Italy, where it had really begun to take hold. But it hadn’t penetrated sufficiently for the Prime Minister to say, ‘this pandemic looks exceptionally dangerous and it must now be the priority for me personally and my Cabinet. I’m going to show leadership by issuing the order to mobilize the resources available to government to find the best ways to deal with it.’ It appears to me—again, this is subject to the outcome of the long inquiry currently going on—that that absence of leadership inhibited in the first few days the official machine from kicking into action. In ‘peacetime’, there are small official teams that diligently keep the emergency machinery running and that work on identifying risks and making contingency plans. But when something unexpected and potentially very serious looms – threatening large scale IED – you need to bolster a team like that by bringing in very senior people from across government, and expertise from outside, to get the clout to kick start the whole government machine and local government in order to deal with a major crisis. And the sooner you do that, the better.

So that’s really where I come out on the question of mobilization: it has to be a message from the top. The cabinet secretary of the day I don’t think felt empowered on his own to do that. One of the results was that the Prime Minister’s senior policy advisor, Dominic Cummings, was so frustrated by the absence of immediate action that he spurned the official system and tried to run the crisis response from a couple of rooms in Downing St. That was a mistake, I believe. The proper response would have been to kick ass and say, with the authority of the Prime Minister, no, you’ve got two days to get mobilised by which time we want to see the system working at full tilt.

QC: Suppose you’re right that Reagan recognized his own limitations and therefore surrounded himself with competent people to whom he was willing to delegate important matters. But what about a character like Boris Johnson who lacked Reagan’s self-awareness and wasn’t up to dealing with the Covid-19 crisis? What defences are there in a democracy against leaders like him who, when a major crisis hits, just aren’t up to dealing with it?

DO: I don’t think there’s a pat answer to that in a democracy. We rely on a free press and an active democratic opposition to expose weaknesses in government. One of the things that struck me both working on this book and on my previous book, How Spies Think, was that when you look at the person who has to take an important decision – it could be the head of a family, a corporate CEO, it could be the head of the government – they have to integrate inside their mind two very different kinds of mental activity. One emanates from the limbic system. It’s emotionally charged and values driven and it tends to say ‘this is how I see things, this is the way the world is because I believe this is how the world has to be, and this is therefore what must—and will—be achieved by my decision’. The other component of thinking is the dispassionate and analytic part that says ‘this is what the situation is, these are the real options that are open to you and these are the limits of what can be’. If you have too much of the former thinking, you end up with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and populist rhetoric where the wish is father to the thought. If you have too much of the latter, you end up with governance by spreadsheet and I doubt anyone was ever motivated to heroic efforts in a crisis by a spreadsheet.

One thing that has impressed me about President Zelensky is that he did have a morale boosting presence, he produced an authentic narrative of defiance and national pride that motivated his fellow Ukrainians in very difficult circumstances, but he didn’t forget the other part of the decision to resist, the rational analysis of what he would actually need to do to organise resistance and obtain overseas military equipment supplies and so on. You could make the same argument about Churchill in June 1940. His rhetoric of national survival could not be bettered (with its ‘we will fight them on the beaches…we shall never surrender’ message) but he didn’t forget that he had to bring in Beaverbrook to sort out Spitfire production.

You need both kinds of thinking. It’s probably quite a rare individual who is really good at doing all of that when the stakes are very high. We ask a lot of Presidents and Prime Ministers.

QC: Do you think that authoritarian governments are better able to plan beyond the needs of the immediate moment?

DO: In theory, yes, they are more able to, in the sense that they do not have regard to the immediate pressure of public opinion and a raucous media so they could if they so chose to devote more time to the longer term strategy. But in practice, probably not, because with their authoritarianism comes rather rigid ideological thinking. They are more likely to be defensive about preserving their place in the future and to reject innovation. Would they be able to be sufficiently pragmatic to think out of the box and to say during a crisis such as Covid-19 this is an occasion on which we have to devolve power to innovate and allow new ideas to flourish? There are obviously some areas where if you have a command economy you can mobilize industrial facilities to build tanks and shells. We see this with Russia today. That is always going to be harder to do if you have to persuade all the nations of NATO or the European Union with their different national agendas. Getting them all to the same level of diversion of effort to help Ukraine is much, much harder than for Russia to expand its arms industry.

QC: I’d like to return to your account of resilience, which you say has a psychological and moral component as well as a physical component. As you say, inequality has a negative impact on resilience in all three senses. I’d like to ask you about a related but slightly different issue: how important is it for the psychological and moral component of societal resilience that we have shared values? Do you think it is even possible for the polarized and increasingly diverse societies we now live in to have the necessary shared values? I ask because, until recently, the UK’s counterterrorism strategy – CONTEST – described democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs as ‘fundamental British values’. Do you think these values are sufficiently widely shared today in Britain or the West more generally to provide a secure basis for societal cohesion and resilience?

DO: I was very struck during the early days of Covid-19 when a senior minister – it may have been the Prime Minister – claimed that ‘we are all in the same boat’ in the sense that everyone, high and low, was vulnerable to the virus (and remember the Prime Minister himself caught the virus and had to be hospitalised). And yet that sparked a firestorm on social media saying no, we’re not all in the same boat. You’re in a luxury yacht and we’re in a small leaky rowing boat. Covid-19 heightened perceptions of inequality, made worse when it became known through the media that those in power in Downing Street were not living strictly by the rules they had set for everyone else.

I suppose if you go back to the Britain of 1939, there were also significant inequalities of life chances. Few made it to college or university. There was no national insurance or national health service. Yet it was possible to bring people to perform extraordinary feats of communal solidarity, particularly when under attack during the Blitz. As with Covid-19, there was a very clear and present danger. There was an expectation that the values which you just mentioned were the shared everyday values of the population. That reinforced what has been called our island story, the common feeling that that’s the kind of people we are and we’re not going to be bossed around by people who clearly believe in very different values. And that’s a strong binding emotion. It can be a positive force, but also an exclusionary narrative if misused.

In my book I talk about many of the different crises we must expect in the future. Along with the rest of the world we are going to experience difficult times with the effects of climate change, but are we going to get the same level of national solidarity to help us through? We live much more of our lives online these days. We are a more diverse society. Some of the traditional venues of social interaction we no longer have; the churches for example don’t play the part that they had in everyday life in the past. So there are differences from the past.

That is why I think there is a necessary moral component in how people deal with adversity. We should look for it in familial upbringing, hopefully reinforced by the experience of education, and from wide interactions in society, all of which should bring out our responsibility for others, not just for ourselves. I would like to be optimistic and to think that when we have to face extreme difficulties we should regard ourselves as all being in the same boat with the common obligation on those who can row together, which is why I’ve brought in the problem of growing inequality.

QC: I was struck by a passage in the book where you describe a security conference in Munich on the topic of ‘Westlessness’, which is defined as a mood of collective helplessness, reflecting a lack of confidence in the ability of liberal democracies to stand up and defend their values.

DO: ‘Westlessness’ was a very striking term to describe a moral malaise, born of post-Cold War complacency optimistically concluding that our democratic values of freedom and liberty along with international respect for the rules-based global order has prevailed and no longer needed to be fought for. And what you no longer feel a need to fight for becomes devalued as something not worth fighting for – even when challenges arose from the autocrats of Russia and China. For example, with growing evidence of concerted Russian digital subversion in the so-called ‘grey zone’ including interference in our democratic elections and fomenting discord along the fault lines of Western society over free speech, race, immigration and policing, and with the evidence of a new Chinese military assertiveness.

That pessimistic Munich conference came, however, before the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that finally shattered Western illusions. The consequences of the West having looked the other way in 2014 when Russia illegally annexed Ukrainian territory have become apparent in President Putin’s demands that Ukraine cease to be an independent state. Both Russia and China openly challenge the existing US-led international order and would like to replace it with one more suited to autocracy than democracy. It is at least now clear what is fundamentally at stake for the West.

QC: I wonder whether some of the recent campus protests about the war in Gaza might be a symptom of Westlessness, of a fracturing of shared values where people look at an event like October 7 in such dramatically different ways. It appears that increasing numbers of people who live in liberal democracies no longer believe in liberal democracy. Could this become more of a problem in future if there aren’t shared values to fall back on?

DO: In my first book, Securing the State, I tried to highlight the importance of social harmony and shared fundamental values, encouraging different groups to live side by side in the same place, perhaps with different ideas about how they want to live their lives, but nonetheless each recognizing the legitimacy of the other. I think that it takes quite a lot of hard work within the community to create those conditions of tolerance of perceived difference. One of my fears after 9/11 and the rise of violent jihadist extremism in the UK itself was that we would end up with a fractured society. It would only have taken a small number of terrorist attacks that caused significant casualties for there to be a counter reaction against Muslim communities, for example, from the violent right. We could then have had community vigilantes and inter-factional fighting in the street. We have to remember how the Troubles in Northern Ireland started with conflict over the denial of civil rights, there was the ‘battle’ of Burntollet Bridge, and how extremists on both sides of the religious divide then exploited the resulting street confrontations for their own ends. Intimidation forced previously mixed communities to separate out on sectarian lines. At the time, we saw that as unique to the historical circumstances of the island of Ireland. But there are warnings in that experience for the increasing polarisation of political debate across Europe and the United States today and with violent protests, for example over Gaza, that stifle contrary voices by the sheer passion with which views are held. Liberal democracy depends upon freedom of speech being extended to those whose views we may disagree with. The brave resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shown, however, that in Ukraine there are a people who will stand up and fight for their freedom and right to choose their own future. That should put to shame those who despair of loss of confidence in our values.

QC: I agree. I’m pressing the question of shared values because in the world of terrorism studies there has been a lot of criticism of the CONTEST definition of extremism as vocal, active opposition to fundamental British values, which has been sort of derided over the years. But reading your book really brought home to me how important shared values are for the moral component of resilience.

DO: When I was putting together CONTEST – the UK Counterterrorism strategy – I was always very clear that this was a strategy for countering terrorism and violent extremism. Extremism has a wide definition today as the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; or to undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights; or to intentionally create a permissive environment for others to inflict those harms. It is perfectly legitimate for a democratic government to work on issues of social harmony, and to want to reinforce values they consider important for British society, for example equality for women and minority rights.

The British counterterrorism strategy is about reducing the risk to the public from terrorism. It inevitably involves trying to identify and manage the problem of violent extremism. I think the government in the Cameron era got this aim rather confused with the promotion of what they saw as essential wider British values. The issue of shared values or lack of shared values is best treated as a distinct problem that deserves to be looked at in its own right. If it’s a result of, say, inequalities in different regions in the country, that needs to be addressed. If it’s about a failure to educate together different communities, that needs to be addressed. But the reason we should be addressing these issues is not because a small number of people from a few communities threaten to throw bombs. We need to encourage educators to take youngsters through some of these debates in a rational way and expose the different sides of the arguments. I do fear for education if we get to the situation where you can’t have that debate. The sort of cancel culture seen on some US campuses is not a good development.

QC: Last question. How would you summarize the overall message of your book?

DO: Expect more and deeper crises, not just arising from climate change but also wars, massacres and genocides, internal conflict and strife, famines, natural disasters of every kind and serious cyberattacks that compromise our information space and lock up vital data for ransom. Expect good developments too, for example in healthcare from new science and technology. But recognize that understanding the nature of crisis, and understanding the discipline needed for decision making to survive a crisis – the fundamental aim of my book – is more important than ever because, crucially, we are more vulnerable to disruption. The way our infrastructure is increasingly digital makes it more fragile than it used to be. The historian Niall Ferguson wrote an entertaining book called Doom, pointing out how over the centuries, humankind has survived disasters of many kinds, bigger than Covid-19 and recent weather events. I accept that, but my argument is that we have to address our vulnerabilities because over the last few years we have hollowed out so much of what kept normal life going.