How does your background as a Marxist-Trotskyist help you to understand what's been going on in recent years in the UK, and in the West more generally?
The thing about Bolshevism – which is really what we're talking about here – is that it's an understanding of the nakedness of power, of power without its clothes on. You separate it from the sentiment and the slogans and the loyalties in which people dress it up. It's basically a matter of penetrating disguise. The other thing is that you're aware of how gigantic shifts of power can take place, and that they're often achieved by very cynical means. For instance, the supposed October Revolution [of 1917] in Petrograd was a coup d'état involving hardly anybody, and financed by huge piles of German gold. If you don't know that – I always say, if anybody reads a history of the Russian Revolution, and they look in the Index and the name of Parvus Helphand is not there, then the book is a complete waste of time. Because he was the guy who laundered the German gold which was brought to Petrograd to finance the putsch – because the whole thing was about the German strategy to knock Russia out of the war. Do you know where Lenin was on outbreak of the First World War?
In Germany?
Nope. Try again. You've got three guesses.
Austria?
Well, yeah, sort of – Austria-Hungary. He was in Austro-Hungarian Poland, in a small town. And because he was an enemy alien, when the war broke out he was immediately interned. The local copper came around and put him in the cells – and there he would have stayed in obscurity for the rest of his life, probably, if the Austro-Hungarian military intelligence – together with some Social Democratic political noisemakers in Vienna – hadn't intervened and said ‘‘This guy is okay‘‘. The Austro-Hungarian military intelligence said he was okay because he'd been helping them try to destabilise what then wasn't Ukraine.
You mean it was still Russia.
Yes. And so instead of interning him they put him on a postal train to Zurich. Which is how he came to be in Zurich – and not interned – at the time when [German General] Ludendorff and the boys thought ‘‘What a good idea it would be to send some revolutionaries to Petrograd‘‘. The Germans didn't really want Lenin and his people on their territory – hence the so-called ‘‘sealed train‘‘ in which they sent him to Russia. They were very much afraid of revolution on their own territory, but they wanted to spread one in Russia. Amazing story. It's all in Richard Pipes' version – which is, I think, the best. But it is astounding what a lot of people still think. The BBC in 2017 – when they did this commemoration of the Russian Revolution – seemed to think there'd only been one Russian Revolution. They didn't seem to realise there was a distinct Democratic revolution in February 1917, and that Lenin had not overthrown the Tsar. The Tsar had been overthrown basically by Russian liberals who were proposing to set up a democracy, who then held elections for a constituent assembly. What Lenin did was he overthrew the nascent Russian democracy. It's amazing, this stuff – and it all spreads out into an understanding of the operation of power. People call it cynical, but actually it's simply realistic.
So how does all that relate to what's happening now?
Well, there are all kinds of other things. Having been on the Left, and having seen the beginnings of the conversion of the Left – from Leninism to the Gramscian concept of revolution – and all those ideas which have been contained in the Cultural Revolution, which I write about in The Abolition of Britain. . . .
Gramsci – wasn't he the Italian communist?
Yes, Antonio Gramsci. He was a brilliant Italian communist, who went very early on to the Soviet Union, and could see that this would never work in Western Europe. Christian, prosperous, stable countries would never, ever accept socialism in that form. He saw that to obtain a revolutionary change, you first of all had to obtain control of the culture. Mussolini locked him up, and he was a marginal figure for many years – and then he was rediscovered by revolutionary thinkers after 1968. Two things happened in 1968. First, the Soviet Union demonstrated that it's totally discredited by invading Czechoslovakia. And secondly, the uprising against de Gaulle in Paris demonstrated the enormous power of Cultural Revolution. They were eventually joined, rather reluctantly, by the communist unions, as I recall – but ultimately it was a revolution about sex and drugs and rock and roll. And both of those events in 1968 set the intelligent Left into thinking: We need to change how we approach the whole business of revolution.
So what you're saying is that the people we have today on the Left – in the UK's Labour Party and presumably throughout the European Union – their roots are basically in Marxism, but of a different sort?
The clever ones, yes. It's a much more intelligent Marxism – and also a much more subtle Marxism than Lenin's naked seizure of power by vanguard party plan.
But still the same basic idea?
Well actually, what it is – Marx was obsessed with the French Revolution. And in his writings about the Paris commune of 1871, it's clear that his real lodestar is the radicalism of the French Revolution. Which is not so much about seizing and nationalising the Steel Industries – it's more about totally transforming the culture of the country. And indeed also overthrowing Christianity. And it's very noticeable, as the Cultural Revolution reached its advanced stage a few years ago, that it began to make open, quite severe attacks on the Christian religion in Europe and North America, in which my late brother [Christopher Hitchens] was involved. And the reason for doing that, is that it becomes essential. If you want to change mankind, then you cannot have a culture that's dominated by the fundamental view that man is created in the image of God and is therefore unalterable. This is the Helvetius heresy of the 18th century [that man is born a ‘blank slate‘ and is therefore alterable], which was very powerful among the French radicals who created the French Revolution.
What people don't notice about the French Revolution – they know Charlotte de Corday assassinates Marat, the guillotine is set up on what's now the Place de la Concorde, the revolutionary armies march, Napoleon comes to power – all these are very important. What very few of them notice, however, is Fouché's dechristianisation project – prostitutes sat on the altars of churches, churches closed down, priests driven from their livings, and a savage attack on the Christian religion – which is very much at the heart of what was then going on. So, Marx was a romantic revolutionary of that kind – who then got mixed up with the working class radical movements of the mid-19th century, which is where the 1848 Manifesto comes from. But there's quite a lot in the 1848 Manifesto about the casting off of the old traditions – and that obviously means a conflict with Christianity. So that's there as well. But I think Marxism ultimately is an attempt to codify the French Revolution – which has now been re-codified in what today is called ‘‘woke‘‘ and political correctness.
Really?
I think so. It's a pseudo-religious thing. Marx's phrase for what the Communards did in 1871 was that they ‘‘stormed heaven‘‘ – which is a brilliant journalistic phrase. He was very clever journalist. But it also demonstrates his own mind. And the people who think about it on the Left, they know this. The people who don't think about it, as is so often the case, are barely aware of the ideas they're putting into practice.
You said in a recent interview that you believe Keir Starmer is actually to the left of Jeremy Corbyn, but that Corbyn is simply more open about it and Starmer more hidden. Can you explain?
Well, Corbyn couldn't keep it secret if he wanted to. I mean, I don't think he's ever been, as far as I know, a member of any Trotskyist formation, but he was very much involved in London Labour local government politics – it was all trade unions, ‘‘extending the powers‘‘ [of local government] and so on. Under the long, long Thatcher government, the best way to try and bring in forms of municipal socialism was to capture local government – Town Hall, the Greater London Council and the like. And then – and this is always the best thing about the Left in modern Britain – with the added-on cause of opposing racial bigotry, and at the same time building coalitions in the newly arrived immigrant communities. So that was Corbyn, for you. And also, by all accounts, he was a very effective local councillor and Member of Parliament, who was good at doing what people asked him to do – which is why he's still in Parliament. But no profound thinking about the nature and culture of the world. Whereas Keir Starmer – with his almost unreadable magazine Socialist Alternatives, and the group around that – embraced a form of modern cultural revolutionary Trotskyism developed by Michalis Raptis. Do you know about Pabloism?
I know the name.
Well, Michalis Raptis was a Greek revolutionary – ‘‘Pablo‘‘ was one of his noms de guerre. He was the real thing – he ran guns to the Algerian rebels, for instance, in the Algerian War of Independence. He was jailed, interestingly, by the Dutch for doing so. Georgios Papandreou in Athens gave him a State funeral when he died, because he was so revered on the Greek Left. But towards the end of his life he said: Well, this old-fashioned romantic Trotskyism is all very well, but it won't do for the modern world. What we need is something much more designed to capture the minds of the modern young. And he came up with what he called the ‘‘red-green combination‘‘, the red being Cultural Revolution, moral revolution, sexual revolution; and the green being – well, what we now see as Net Zero. And this is very much how you can characterise the Left today.
We've seen a lot of the ‘‘green‘‘ in recent years.
Well, ever since the Greens began to supplant Social Democracy in Germany, it's been clear that the Greens – in terms of Continental Europe – are the most solid and reliable part of what used to be the Left. They are the Left. And they're the clever Left. And Starmer embraced that. But he doesn't go on demonstrations, he hasn't taken anybody on strikes, he's not an obvious militant, and he couches his proposals in rather boring phrases. It's not obvious that he is what he is. The same with Blair. At university Blair had been a Trotskyist – and kept it secret. His political career only makes sense if it's true. But he admitted it himself, in a radio program two or three years ago – which I thought was an astounding thing for him to reveal. But to this day, I'm the only journalist who's ever written about it. Because no one else is interested – because people don't understand politics.
Where do you see the European Union in all of this?
My basic point about the European Union is that it is the continuation of Germany by other means. And I'm fascinated particularly by a tremendous book by Adam Tooze called The Deluge, which was one of the books published on the Centenary of the First World War. But unlike most of the weary stuff about ‘‘sleepwalking into disaster‘‘ and all the rest of it, it's actually a realistic and intelligent assessment of the war – particularly its later stages – and the German invention of this extraordinary concept of ‘‘limited sovereignty‘‘ by Richard von Kühlmann. He was the Kaiser's foreign secretary towards the end of the war and during the German attempt to win the war by financing a putsch in Russia. And what he had discovered was that if they really wanted to dismantle the Russian Empire, what they needed to do is to stimulate and support nationalist movements in Central Europe and Ukraine – which they did in this era – and to offer them the opportunity of limited sovereignty – a sort of semi-nationhood. This would actually put them in Germany's sphere of influence, but would also detach them from the Russian sphere. This had been the main source of the great wrestling match over the Baltic States, and also was the basis of what happened in Ukraine after the Peace of Brest-Litovsk.
And how does all this relate to the European Union today?
Well, the German attempt to resolve this by two aggressive wars was of course a disaster and a stupidity, and a terrible failure. And I think the cunning of the European Union, really until 1989, was that it contained and controlled and directed that German impulse to dominate. Which is natural – Germany is a huge country, an enormous culture of gigantic economy. It has to be strong. And from the moment that Bismarck defeated Napoleon III in 1870, German dominance of Europe was an inevitable fact. The question was how it was to take place. And the compromise that was achieved in the European Union – though I don't, myself, think my own country should belong to it, because it involves a huge sacrifice of national sovereignty, which I don't think we should make. But that compromise actually enabled Germany to dominate Europe peacefully. And when the Soviet Union collapsed between 1989 and 1991, the old, very long-term desires of Germany to have spheres of influence to its East were revived again. And again, I see this as perfectly reasonable. I don't really get upset about it because it's bound to happen. This is an area in which basically Germany and Russia with various foreign interventions have been struggling for more than a century. All the three major European conflicts of the past 120 years have been about Ukraine.
Really?
When you think about it. Everyone in Britain is obsessed in the First World War with the Western Front, with Wilfred Owen and war poetry, and Flanders Fields. But in fact, the real struggle was always going on between Russia and the Central Powers – in Ukraine. And the Peace of Brest-Litovsk – which of course didn't last very long, but if it had lasted – foreshadows, if you like, what a German-dominated Europe would have been like. But now it's being achieved, as I say, by the much more civilised and lawful methods of the European Union.
But nonetheless, I do believe very strongly that there are great powers and they do dominate their neighbours, and there's no point pretending otherwise. The EU has very much extended the power of Germany – which is now expressed as the power of Europe and is done in Europe's name – into the East. Before Poland joined the EU, I went out to do a story on the Polish border. And it was quite funny coming back into Germany across the Oder River – which at that time was still the EU border – into Frankfurt an der Oder. The first thing you saw was a great big sign in German, saying ‘‘Welcome to the European Union‘‘. And then the next thing you saw was ‘‘Welcome to the Land of Brandenburg‘‘, the German state there. And finally, as you drove along, buried in the grass by the side of the motorway was a little tiny sign saying ‘‘Welcome to Germany‘‘. And this seemed to me to symbolise rather well that Germany had become subsumed into the European Union – but also that it quietly dominated it.
And so when countries like Slovakia joined the EU, they were essentially coming back within the sphere of Germany?
Well, that's where I see the Czech lands and Slovakia, and all the European Union countries which have acceded since the end of the Cold War. I see it as basically a return of Europe to the course ultimately of German domination – to a great extent at the expense of Russia – but without the violence and the lawlessness. But it does entail a huge sacrifice of national sovereignty on the part of the countries that joined. Interestingly – one of our cleverest politicians, Nigel Lawson, went to live in France. He said: The reason I love living in France is you can get away from the bloody European Union there. The French carry on doing pretty much what they like, although they're members. It's a very – not in terms of politics or sloganizing, but it terms of the way it runs itself – a very euro-sceptic country. Of course, France was granted the tremendous symbols of limited sovereignty – it has a seat on the UN Security Council, and it has the force de frappe [nuclear deterrent] and is still a significant military power. It maintains its former Empire and Commonwealth, and the francophonie [French speakers throughout the world]. So it's granted all those things – whereas Germany is a political nothing, and a military nothing, but an economic and a diplomatic giant.
An English friend of mine explained Brexit to me in terms of the difference between the French and the English in relation to the European Union. He said the French – being French – just ignore the EU's rules if they don't like them. So they have no problem with the EU. But the English – being English – actually try to follow all those rules, and it's driving them crazy. And so they want to get out – that was his explanation.
Yes, the French regard EU rules as a start of negotiation, while for the English ‘‘law is law‘‘. I didn't myself have any particular objection to the ‘‘single market‘‘, once we'd got into it. I thought you might as well try and unscramble an egg as get out of it. And it has proved very difficult. And the customs union I could probably put up with. For me the fundamental thing about the European Union, the thing that worried me, was the inevitable conversion – the EU aim of an ‘‘ever closer union‘‘, as it's translated from the French, but would be better translated as ‘‘ever tighter union‘‘, or indeed ‘‘ever narrower union‘‘. It would ultimately involve a contest between, on the one side, the Roman law and civil code legal systems of the continent, and on the other side the common law jury trial systems of this country. And the one that was bound to win – given the huge preponderance of civil code and Roman-based law – would be the Continental style of law. And it would be an irreparable loss to this country if it lost the legal system going back into Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, and Alfred the Great's codes. If we lost that, then we wouldn't really be a country anymore. And I thought that couldn't be tolerated. So I thought: Go for some sort of Norway option, of being half in, half out – or maybe 2/3 in, 1/3 out, whatever. But don't go any further. But the idea of a total breach seemed to me to be quite difficult. And I thought it would probably turn out to be unpopular when it happened. So I didn't vote in the referendum – people thought that I would, but I didn't. I didn't take part in the campaign either. Because I was uneasy – and I feel my uneasiness has been borne out.
And how would you characterise how it actually ended up?
It hasn't ended. The European Union – if it has the wits it was born with – will, I've no doubt, seek to entice us back in, in fact but not in name. I think some form of limited sovereignty is on offer. And the question is whether it will be a better deal than the one that we had before we left, or a worse one. It has a slight look of being a worse one. Braggadocio and stamping about and saying we will do this or that, is seldom a good way of achieving your ends in foreign or domestic policy.
And you think that's what the British were doing?
Well, I think it was an accident. I think nobody really understood what would happen when David Cameron tried to save his ridiculous party – which is why people hold referenda in this country. That's what Harold Wilson did to try and save his party from an otherwise impossible split. David Cameron had no idea that he would lose the referendum, because what he didn't grasp – and what an awful lot of people didn't grasp – was that the campaign to leave the European Union, which had once been full of people like me – sentimental British patriots who love the misty origins of our nation – became a very slick, quite neoconservative movement. It also latched on very cleverly to the great Gillian Duffy fact. Do you know Gillian Duffy?
No.
She was a woman living in Rochdale, one of the northern towns. And she was filmed in conversation with Gordon Brown, who was then the Labour prime minister, saying that she was worried about the level of immigration and what it was doing. Brown, thinking the microphones were turned off, turned away from this conversation and said to an aide, ‘‘Bigoted woman!‘‘ – thus making plain that the Labour high command despised its own voters on this issue. He thought that one of his own most loyal voters was a bigot. And this message went home to a lot of people.
Well it's a bit of a paradox, isn't it? Labour's base is the working class, who don't want immigration.
It is a paradox, that's right. But this has been held in check, because as long as people voted according to party loyalty – which they did very much more up to 2016 than they do now – as long as people voted according to tribe, Labour people would vote Labour. Well, the referendum had no parties standing in it. And if you look – it's a fascinating thing about the campaign material of the Vote Leave people. They had nothing to do with the Labour Party – the Labour Party was against Leave – but the colour they used was exactly the same colour that Labour uses – exactly the same shade of red, and more or less the same typography as well. They were appealing directly – and subliminally – to Labour voters, on the issue of immigration. They wanted them to vote to leave the European Union – but they weren't talking to them about the European Union, or the single market, or the customs union or all the rest of it – they were talking to them about immigration. They changed the Leave campaign into a campaign about immigration. And because it was a referendum and not a general election, Labour voters – even though party loyalty is very powerful – weren't tied to their tribe this time. They could vote freely to leave the European Union, even though their party was against it.
Because stopping immigration is what they really cared about and what they were voting for.
That's right. In the end it was a referendum on immigration disguised as a referendum on the European Union. The Vote Leave campaign was taken over by these very clever people who understood that that was how to win it. These were the ‘‘Singapore on Thames‘‘ people, the free market people who thought somehow that Britain freed from the European Union's restrictions would become like Singapore. Which has turned out not to be the case.
Could you see at the time that this is what was happening?
At a certain point, yes. I don't often travel by bus, but I'd hurt myself during the campaign and was having to use the bus. And a driver on the bus – I'd got to know him reasonably well – he said to me one day: ‘‘Look, I want to ask you a question‘‘ – because he knew roughly who I was – ‘‘What should I do? I am the only person in my bus garage‘‘ – in the very ordinary town of Aylesbury – ‘‘who is going to vote the way I'm going to vote in the EU referendum‘‘. I said, ‘‘Well, which way are you going to vote?‘‘ He said, ‘‘I'm voting for Remain. Everybody else in the garage is voting Leave‘‘. And I realised then what had happened – that the Leave campaign had managed to persuade Labour voters to vote Leave in order to stop immigration.
And from their point of view it made sense to vote against immigration, regardless of party loyalty – didn't it?
Well, it would make sense for them if they'd been voting in a general election, for a political party which had a policy on immigration that was in some way implementable. But the thing about a referendum is that you don't elect a government. You vote for a thing. And you haven't elected anybody who's then responsible for implementing it. So they then turned to the Conservative Party and said, ‘‘Right – it's time you implemented this departure from the European Union that we voted for.‘‘ But the Conservative Party, almost to a man, wanted to stay in the European Union. So you can see what a mess they made of it. If you want something done, ask somebody who wants to do it – not somebody who doesn't want to do it.
What a mess.
A total mess. And because all political coverage in this country is seen through the microscope of Westminster politics, it's totally misunderstood by most people to this day – like most things. People don't know what's going on. If you haven't had a Marxist-Leninist training, you really don't know what's going on most of the time.
Before we end I'd like to ask you a bit about the war in Ukraine. How likely do you think it is that we'll get a peace deal under Trump? [This interview was conducted on 11th February, before the US-Russia talks in Riyadh were announced.]
It's extremely difficult. Both leaders, in their different ways, are trapped in their positions. I don't think Volodymyr Zelensky can make peace. And I don't know what would happen to him if he did. Do you remember what happened during the pre-invasion period – when he had been elected as a peace president and he tried to make something of the Minsk Accords? He was attacked both by the Banderites [Ukrainian far right] and also by Poroshenko. And he was publicly insulted, I think on live television, by one of the Azov Brigade people, and accused of – the word the Ukrainian nationalists always use when a compromise is proposed – accused of ‘‘capitulation‘‘. So I don't think he would survive if he tried to make peace. Any peace deal he made that's realistic would be described as capitulation. I don't know what would happen to him politically if he did that. Putin, on the other side, whatever he can or cannot do, he certainly can't withdraw from Crimea. I don't think he can withdraw from the Donbas either. So it's a bit like the First World War, only without anything to break the stalemate.
And how is it like the First World War?
Well, it just goes on and on and on. This is another illustration of Churchill's very clever statement that the wars of democracies will be much worse than the wars of kings. Because a democracy faces always a population reluctant to go to war and to support war. And therefore, to get people to support war it has to propagandise them into very strong passions about war – which, once released, can't easily be got back into the bottle. The whole of the Western world has been told things about Ukraine which make it very difficult for a compromised peace. Have you read Brave New World?
Yes.
I think it's in the Preface to the second edition, which Huxley wrote I think in 1948. He makes the point that the world he suggests in the book has come into being partly because of the collapse of conservatism. He says the last conservative statesman in Europe was Lord Lansdowne, who in 1917 proposed a negotiated peace to the First World War, and wrote a letter to the Times proposing it. This was a really distinguished statesman – the former Foreign Secretary. And the Times wouldn't print the letter.
Because there was so much war passion?
Yeah. And what Lansdowne said was that in all previous wars – the Seven Years War, the war of the Spanish Succession, and of course the Napoleonic Wars – every war in the history of Europe had eventually ended with a compromise of some kind. So why didn't we set out to make one? But all those, of course, had been the wars of kings – and this was a war of democracies. And to some extent, this war today – I mean, Russia of course is not a democracy. But on the other hand, Putin is not the Tsar. His power comes from machinery rather than from inheritance, and ultimately, he can be overthrown by people more nationalist than he is.
And there are people like that.
There certainly are. And when we meet them, we'll look back on Vladimir Putin with some nostalgia. But they're there – and if he gives away anything important, they'll get rid of him. In any case he can't live forever. So there's that. Have you read The Wizard of the Kremlin, by Giuliano da Empoli? It's a fantastic novel, basically about Surkov, Putin's aide. It's a fictionalisation, but there's a moment in it where they discuss Ukraine. It's brilliant in many ways – if you know Russia at all, which I do a tiny bit – in explaining that Russian politics just is not like Western politics – the ruthlessness of it. And there's a moment where, I think it's the Putin character, who's never named, says: Well, with Ukraine – the Ukrainians think that the West is backing them, but you've got to realise that if this thing comes to a bump in the road, they'll just be left abandoned.
And you think that's how it is?
Well, if you're a sort of [Zbigniew] Brzezinski person who believes Europe is a great chess board, then Ukraine is obviously important. But I really can't see how hometown America, or indeed hometown Britain, can endlessly sustain an interest in the exact shape of a country that most of them had never heard of ten years ago, and couldn't find on a map now.
Yet there has been a constant push to keep this conflict going. What do you think is behind that?
Well, with an American government wanting to push in the Brzezinski direction of driving all Russian influence out of Ukraine, that's the course that was basically set at the 2008 Bucharest NATO Summit – where it was suggested that ultimately Ukraine could become a NATO member, and Georgia too. Now the French and the Germans and quite a lot of other European leaders objected to this policy. And yet the policy was in the end followed.
Because the Americans were pushing for that.
Yeah – it was George W. Bush, that master of diplomacy, the man who brought us the Iraq War. But he was working under the influence, I still think, of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which was set out pretty much in the Clinton era, or pre-Clinton era, with the idea that Russia should never rise again. And this just seems to be the policy. It's not an intelligent, American self-interested policy. And George Kennan – who must be the cleverest man in American diplomacy – completely opposed the whole thing. And lots of other intelligent people did. But somehow or other, American foreign policy has been captured by this faction, who were the same people behind the Iraq War. And they still want it. I don't know why. But I think they may be losing interest, because they're now getting obsessed with China. And look, those of us who have observed American foreign policy since Vietnam know that America, when things get tough, is inclined to abandon things which up till then it thought were very important.
This anti-Russia policy seems to have intensified over the years.
Well, I think there was also a view in some parts of the American foreign policy establishment that Russia had to be punished for its behaviour in Syria. I think that may have made the United States keener on getting a confrontation in Kiev.
What about the Europeans? You mentioned that European leaders back then were opposed to bringing Ukraine into NATO.
The Europeans have been more cautious on this than the Americans. The EU did try to pull in Ukraine with the Association Agreement in 2013, but I'm not sure they would have pushed it anything like so hard without American encouragement. It was very difficult, the Association Agreement – very difficult for [then Ukrainian President] Yanukovych. It would have hurt a lot of his voters. And people don't understand that Ukraine actually had an economy which was still quite heavily linked to Russia. Well, that's over now, of course. A lot of its economy doesn't exist anymore. Anyway, I've talked to quite intelligent people in this country and I've said: You're giving the wrong starting point to this conflict. The starting point is the overthrow of the Yanukovych government by a violent mob in February 2014. I mean, I'm absolutely not an expert on Ukrainian politics or history, though I know a bit about it. But compared with most people in Britain who opine very ferociously on the subject, I'm an absolute genius. The ignorance of the issue – of the geography, of the politics, of the history, of the nature of the dispute – is so vast here, that as I frequently say, knowledge and understanding of the issue is a positive disadvantage in debate. Know anything about it, and you've had it. It's much easier to just open your mouth wide and shout. But I get called a Russian agent and all the rest of it.
I get some of that myself.
It's tiring. My sole preoccupation is always the interest of my own country. And I don't see any interest for the United Kingdom in fomenting a dangerous conflict in the southeast of Europe. I just don't see it. I don't see what it gains us. I'm not even sure what the nature of this country's conflict with Russia is, except in terms of clashes between our intelligence organs.
There seems to be a lot of animosity towards Russia, particularly in Britain, that was there long before the invasion of Ukraine. What do you think is behind that?
Do you remember that Gorbachev had a brilliant spokesman called Gennadi Gerasimov? There's a wonderful moment when he was giving a press conference, and he was being confronted by American conservative journalists. I mean, I was also in that state of mind at the time – I couldn't believe the Soviet Union would actually dismantle itself, I really couldn't. And the American journalists were railing at him: We don't believe you – why should we trust this man Gorbachev when he says he wants peace, and to withdraw? And they went on and on, and Gerasimov just sat there, smiling like a pussycat. And eventually, he said: ‘‘Gentlemen, I'm so sorry. We've done to you the unkindest thing anybody could have done to anybody. We have deprived you of an enemy.‘‘ And since the end of the Cold War, there's been this terrible struggle to find a new enemy – which at one stage actually devolved on the shoulders of Manuel Noriega, who was the ‘‘new Hitler‘‘. But none of it ever worked. And it's quite hard to get people worked up about China, even though it is an evil empire. So for many, many years Western politicians had to function without an enemy. Now they've got one again!
It's very handy to have an enemy.
Well, it's essential in a way. But it's desperately sad – because I've been to these places. And I know people on both sides. I don't want them killed or turned into refugees – it's hateful. And whenever I see people fleeing, refugees fleeing, towns burning – I imagine it happening here. And I know it's never, ever that far away. It's one of the most powerful scenes in The Lord of the Rings – have you see the film?
I haven't seen it, I've read the book.
Well, the film is worth seeing for one particular moment. There are several moments in it that are good, and one of them is when the companions of the Ring are being shown, in a magical pool, visions of what will happen if they fail. And you know they've set out from the Shire, which is basically England. And what they're shown is the armies of Mordor, or the Orcs, storming through the peaceful villages of the Shire, burning the houses and dragging people away to slavery in chains. And it's very, very well done. It's quite brief, it doesn't concentrate – like all really good flashes of foreknowledge or revelation. It's brief – but it stays in the mind. And when I watch such things on television, I don't see them as a spectator of somebody else's woes. I see them as a warning. When Yugoslavia went wild, I thought: So much of it had been prosperous and pleasant before, people living on good terms with their neighbours – and suddenly, absolute hell. It can happen anywhere. And indeed, people think nuclear weapons are appalling, and they're right to do it. But with the whole range of modern weaponry and the power of it, none of us is immune. And playing with war in Europe is just so stupid.
