The Threat You Can’t See w/ Ex-Director of GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming (Transcript)

I don’t think it was an odd time to join. It felt like a period when the old guard were moving, new threats were coming into play, and new possibilities as well.

RORY STEWART: And then a huge change with 9/11. Presumably an enormous shift in terms of mindset and resourcing — a massive move towards trying to deal with international terrorism.

JEREMY FLEMING: It was a huge moment. It’s one of those “we all remember where we were” moments. Although I note that by the time I left the intelligence agencies, people were joining who weren’t born on 9/11. And that was quite sobering in lots of ways — not least about my age, but also about how people perceive a threat. But for my generation of people coming through the system, it was completely seminal.

RORY STEWART: And how did it change things? What was the big change?

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, actually the change in the UK was slower than it was in America. My first exposure to this was being involved in the 9/11 Commission around data and intelligence. And so I was exposed to a side of corporate America — big tech in its very early days — but also to serious thinking about data and intelligence.

I came back from that experience and, with a number of other officers in MI5, said, “We need to be a technology and a data business.” And we started the transformation then. But the resources and the real difference in organisation nationally didn’t really happen until 7/7. There was quite a slow ramp-up on that. And then 7/7 — the attacks in London, four or five years later — that’s when the real change happened.

RORY STEWART: And then you suddenly saw much more money, much more focus…

JEREMY FLEMING: More money, a regional understanding — a Security Service that had bases around the United Kingdom — and investment in technology and a whole range of different partnerships.

Collaboration Between MI5, MI6, and GCHQ

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You mentioned 9/11 there. I can remember where I was because I was with Tony Blair in Brighton. We came back and asked for a meeting of all the relevant bodies — all of the main agencies were at this meeting. When that sort of thing happens, how much competition is there between MI5, MI6, and GCHQ? Is there a pecking order? Are you all at the same level? And how easy is it to combine your forces when something like that happens and you suddenly have to act?

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, I’ll probably disappoint you a bit by saying that for most of my career it felt incredibly collaborative. And the way in which the agencies work together now is completely collaborative — hand in glove. By the point at which I left, there was shared technology, shared people and corporate systems, and a shared approach to understanding threats. So it didn’t feel competitive in that way, certainly not by the end.

Of course, there are periods when there’s friction, as there are with any close partnerships. But international terrorism was a really good spur for that sort of collaboration, because you can’t have agencies — when you’ve got a threat as live as it was on the streets of the United Kingdom — who are not joined up.

So MI6 understood that their intelligence collection, largely overseas and largely human intelligence, had to be in accordance with the threats that were most serious here in the United Kingdom and the things that MI5 were leading on investigating. Similarly, GCHQ had to predicate its intelligence collection around those threats — because otherwise, bombs go off on the streets.

Accountability and Public Trust

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You mentioned that you were part of the team that brought MI5 much more into a public-facing arena. I always got the sense that there were tensions within that process as well — because that happened a lot on our watch — where you sense that intelligence agencies were coming to terms with something very new and very different. Just describe that process, where you think it started, and where you think we are with it now.

JEREMY FLEMING: I think it started at the end of the 80s, and it started quite properly with getting the agencies properly avowed in Parliament. I mean, it is ridiculous now for me to say that when I arrived and took over the finances at MI5, all of the funding for the agencies was hidden in Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence votes. And the vote holders in those organisations had no idea what this money was for. It’s ridiculous.

So making that properly visible to Parliament, making the agencies on a statutory footing, ensuring that the powers were properly recorded and had statutory backing — this is incredibly important. And it allows me to say what I’ve said a lot in public, and still really believe: the agencies have to earn their licence to operate.

We shouldn’t take for granted that the public trusts us, or that Parliament trusts us, or that we should be able to do the incredibly intrusive things we do. We have to earn that. And part of that is being accountable and transparent in public, and also speaking in public.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Do you ever feel at a disadvantage to those countries whose agencies genuinely are secret service agencies?

JEREMY FLEMING: No, I don’t. I don’t think we’re trying to play by the same rules as some of those countries you might be referring to. I think we have managed to walk a really difficult tightrope, particularly in the last ten years, which is to talk about capabilities without giving up secret sources — and that is incredibly important.

The Role of Intelligence Across Different Threats

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You mentioned three parts of your career — Northern Ireland, Islamism, and 7/7. What’s the difference in what the role of the intelligence services was in those three different contexts?

JEREMY FLEMING: Can you just allow me to do a brief explainer, if you don’t mind?

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Oh, yes, we love that.

JEREMY FLEMING: So MI5, known as the Domestic Security Service, is responsible for disrupting threats to national security and safeguarding economic well-being. It is an investigative service — it mounts investigations with the purpose of disrupting threats, and it does that often with law enforcement and through a whole range of other means.

The other two agencies are largely intelligence collection agencies. MI6 does that through human intelligence, largely. GCHQ does that through signals intelligence — through the collection of electronic data. Both of those agencies are mostly focused overseas.

So when you put them together, they do have different purposes. And for each of those threats that you talked about, they bring those unique purposes, approaches, and capabilities to the things that are most important for national security at that day, at that time.

Technology, Human Intelligence, and the Speed of Change

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: I listened again this morning to a speech you made at RUSI — the Royal United Services Institute — a few years ago. And it seemed to me that you felt, maybe, that we as a country had not quite woken up to the speed with which technology is changing your world. So I guess what I meant by my question was whether, in the Northern Ireland context, human intelligence was maybe much more necessary and much more relevant than what we have now.

The National Security Council and Ministerial Decision-Making

JEREMY FLEMING: I think the balance changes depending on the exact priority at the time, but I think it’s harder to say that one is more important or less important at a particular time. Human intelligence brings you intent in a way that other sorts of intelligence rarely do. A relationship between an agent and someone telling you something enables you to understand much more than the exact thing that they’re telling you, and that remains critically important.

Signals Intelligence data, cyber intelligence has become more important and more prominent because of the technology world in which we live. But it’s also increased the challenge of getting, if you like, the wheat from the chaff. It’s just a much bigger thing. And then in all of that, MI5 still has to perform its role, which is to disrupt the major threat. So I think the balance changes depending on the threat. But the overall need for the three services, the three agencies, remains as strong now as it did back in the 90s when I joined.

RORY STEWART: Okay, so let’s try to jump forward for a second and bring us into the current day. If you were sitting at the National Security Council at the moment, what would you say the biggest challenges facing Britain are over the next five years and over the next ten years?

The Threat Landscape: State Actors and Cyber Threats

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, I’m going to start by saying that when I was there, I was there with the other agency heads, and I’m trying to rack my memory as to whether we ever had that sort of conversation. I think it’s pretty rare to have that sort of conversation, really. And I think that is probably one of the things that we need to do better at.

But if I was sat here today and I was thinking about the threats ranged ahead of us — obviously we are in a world where geopolitics has been turned upside down, where we have a multipolar superpower situation with China approaching a peer-level superpower to America and exercising its power in a different way, and where we have a range of threats coming at us in ways that we probably thought unimaginable even a few years ago. Multi-domain, from space right down to old-fashioned spying, from cyber threats right across to extortion and fraud on a scale that I think is actually a national security issue now.

So you’d want to set the piece about how the threat environment has changed, and then you’d want to highlight some priorities. And this is the really hard thing. How do you prioritize the critical work we’re doing in support of Ukraine against, say, a ransomware actor who happens to be extorting hundreds of millions of pounds that’s affecting our economic well-being? It’s a really hard thing to do, and it is a choice that ministers are faced with.

I’d start with talking about state actors. I think we are still talking about the same list of state actors. I think we have been shy in talking about China as a threat, but we need to talk about China as a threat. Russia’s proximate threat because of Ukraine and its actions is incredibly obvious — it’s on our back door, and we have to keep focusing on that. And then Iran and North Korea. But 80 states now have offensive cyber capability. This is a much broader canvas than it was in the past.

Ministers, Decision-Making, and the Limits of Power

RORY STEWART: Just before we get into the weeds of where the threat’s coming from and what the world’s going to look like — you said something very interesting there about what we do and don’t talk about at the National Security Council, and ministers making decisions.

My experience sitting on that council was that we could waste an enormous amount of time talking about, frankly, issues which, before I joined the government — seeing American equivalents — would have been decided by a two-star American general. There was absolutely no reason for us to be spending half an hour, 40 minutes talking about things which were sometimes quite tactical.

The second thing that I thought is that even in the Cabinet, and even sitting at the NSC, the idea that we as ministers were really making decisions on these things didn’t reflect the way in which our weeks worked and what we actually spent our day doing. What are we actually spending our day doing as ministers? You’re trying to worry about what’s hitting the headlines next morning. You might be putting leaflets through a door because you’re campaigning. You might be making a speech in the House of Commons. You’re getting through 14 meetings a day in your diary. There’s not a great deal of space. And the people making the decisions are themselves often not professionals in this area — they haven’t been trained to think strategically in that way or engage in that way.

So there’s a fundamental problem, I think, right at the heart of the situation. I remember, for example, being called by one of your colleagues and being asked to make a decision — in whatever it was, I don’t know, a few minutes — on doing something internationally. And I remember saying, quite late at night: “Listen, I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me that we need to do this, you’re telling me this is the stuff that has to happen immediately. If it makes you happier to feel that a minister has made the decision, that’s fine. But just be clear about what’s actually happening here — how little I know, how little qualifications I have, how little time I have to dig into this decision.”

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: What Rory seems to be saying is that ministers have a lot less power than the spooks think.

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, maybe it’s just Rory. I’m a fan of the National Security Council. I started to get in and around it when David Cameron created it. But it’s fair to say that when you look at the span of the Council, depending on who’s interested in its operation and how the top group of ministers work together, it depends very, very strongly on how effective it is and what it does. It has gone through peaks and troughs of effectiveness.

But the point is, you are bringing together senior ministers under the Prime Minister to be able to take national security questions, and that has to be a function which is important. What sits under it is a whole superstructure of assessment, of intelligence collection, of discussion that brings together the agencies and Whitehall in a way which is just necessary to make the machine work. Yes, it’s about briefing the Prime Minister and ministers, but the process is not just a Council meeting — it is a necessary process that brings things together.

RORY STEWART: But it’s an incredibly weird process. And what I’m trying to get at — it can be. You’re right, the thing is articulated, but —

JEREMY FLEMING: You and I have both been away from this for a while now.

RORY STEWART: Yeah, sure. But this lovely language of —

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: It’s much better with the Labour government.

Groupthink, Afghanistan, and Strategic Failure

RORY STEWART: This lovely language of accountability structures and small groups and all this kind of stuff sounds fine in theory, but in practice, the sausage is really weird. A lot of the things that we tell ourselves when we talk about the Constitution don’t really reflect the reality of where the knowledge lies, how the power works, how decisions are made, how transparent they are.

And this becomes problematic when you get into optimism bias, when you get onto groupthink, when you get into the things that I saw really directly — and you would have seen too — the catastrophic decision-making around the Afghan war, where the US and its allies spent nearly $2 trillion and literally invaded to get rid of the Taliban, and then at the end of 20 years, handed the country back to the Taliban again. At no point in that period did I feel that our institutions were remotely adequate to the strategic conversation around what was a $2 trillion screw-up. So I want to push back at you, because you got so used to defending the system, and you and I feel like we’re missing that.

JEREMY FLEMING: I’m not defending the system. And I agree with you that big strategic decisions that go beyond political lifespans are really, really hard to manage. Government has a problem with long-range continuity and strategy — not just because of a change of party, that’s baked into the system too. So I think it’s slightly — and I’m not accusing you of this — but I think it’s slightly lazy when I hear thinking that is constantly blaming the system, because it’s not all about that.

RORY STEWART: But what is it about?

Incentives, Systems, and How Institutions Really Work

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, partly it’s because we’ve set it up with those sorts of tensions, partly it’s because of the longevity of those who are in senior positions. But it has to be about where the incentives are in the system.

When I went to GCHQ, I went around the place. It’s incredibly complicated. I thought I’d worked very, very closely with it for 20 to 25 years, and yet when I arrived there, I hadn’t the foggiest. And what I found was a system of systems — incredibly complex, very careful, very clever, motivated, values-driven people doing the right thing all over the place. But at the heart of it there was a small professional cadre of people called systems engineers. And I thought, well, I’d better go and see them. I’d seen everyone else. And they said to me: “You know how this place works? It works all on incentives.”

I was expecting a detailed plan of how this thing fits together. Complex systems work on where incentives are in the systems. And it’s the same for government, it’s the same for big business, the same for intelligence agencies. So it goes wrong because you haven’t got the incentives in the right place.

China, America, and the Threat Debate

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You mentioned China, and the speech I mentioned that you made four years ago was very much focused on China to some extent, and on Russia and Ukraine. But China was your big point. Rory and I did an event earlier this week where we asked an audience of business people and financiers — quite a large group of people — who they saw as the bigger threat to global security right now: the USA or China. And by a large majority, they said the USA. What’s your reaction to that? These were quite bright, wealthy business people in the UK. What’s your reaction, and what’s the danger in that?

JEREMY FLEMING: Yeah, well, I find this quite hard to talk about, actually, because if you’ve grown up in a system where you’ve understood where the values-driven institutions sit, and you know what the stakes are in the ground for the international system, then it does feel like a lot of that has been thrown up in the air. When I hear you say that, I’m appalled and slightly horrified.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: That’s a common reaction right now.

JEREMY FLEMING: I can understand it because of the turmoil, and I can understand it because of the way in which the current debate is upending so many of those things that we hold dear. But it’s simply not true.

If I was on that stage, I’d be saying: of course, some of the actions we’ve seen recently we find very difficult to deal with. Of course, we’re very worried about where this goes. But the reality is, comparing China and America through a threat lens — that’s just not tenable at all. One is a communist-driven —

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Back to Rory’s point about systems — if you wander around GCHQ, you don’t have to be there long before you’re hearing American accents. We’re very, very dependent on the Americans, so therefore we have an inbuilt desire to believe in the system. Rory and I were both in Davos, and seeing Trump and his entourage, it’s quite hard to believe in it right now.

JEREMY FLEMING: I have lots of sympathy with that. I have real problems with the tone of the administration. I have problems with some of the actions, as I think we all do. But I think comparing America to China from a threat perspective is just completely wrong.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: What about the Five Eyes?

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, let me go back to your “swarming with Americans” point.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: I didn’t say “swarming.”

The Five Eyes Alliance and Intelligence Sharing

JEREMY FLEMING: I mean, that’s not true either. But it is true that there are lots of Americans inside GCHQ. There are also a lot of Brits inside the National Security Agency in America. And so the systems have grown up together over 80 years in a way which has kept us both safe, and I’m sure will continue to keep us safe.

But to think of it as a partnership — I mean, you say the UK is a junior partner. No doubt at all, but it is a partner. It’s not just a recipient here. America’s security has been dependent on its UK allies at particular points in the past. And what America thinks about intelligence — I’m sure it’s still reporting intelligence in its daily brief to the President, which he doesn’t read — will include UK intelligence. So I just want to push back a bit. Yeah, I think that’s important. Five Eyes — I mean, funny enough, I always feel quite protective about this.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Canada? UK?

JEREMY FLEMING: Yes.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Australia, New Zealand.

JEREMY FLEMING: Thank you.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: I’m not explaining to you. I’ve explained to the listeners.

JEREMY FLEMING: No, I know. Well, if you were explaining to me, we’re in trouble. Yeah. So Five Eyes, nearly 80 years long, came out of the cooperation — signals intelligence cooperation during World War II — and it later expanded as a sort of moniker for all sorts of intelligence collaboration, and then defence collaboration. And then, in my time, we even had Five Eyes, home office style. It became a much bigger thing than its original intent.

It’s not an organisation with a charter and an organogram and a whole load of objectives and funding lines. It doesn’t work like that. It’s an alliance built on trust. But it’s also an alliance where the geometry varies over time. And it is not the case that everything we do in the UK is shared with the Americans. It’s certainly not the case in the other direction. There have always been—

Politicisation of US Intelligence Agencies

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Do you worry that their services are being more politicised, and does that worry you about the relationship at the leadership level?

JEREMY FLEMING: Yes, I worry about that. My successor — I’ve been out of the intelligence world for nearly three years now — my successor has had four heads of the NSA in that time, or will have had four heads with the appointment of the current one. And I think it is a very worrying signal when the heads of these agencies are being moved on, apparently because of the politics. So, yeah, I am concerned about that.

US Leverage and the Question of Resilience

RORY STEWART: Jeremy, my understanding is when you’re saying you can’t compare to the US, you’re saying one of them is an aggressive communist country, another is a liberal democratic country and a strong ally. But when you look at threat, it’s not simply a question of intent — it’s also a question of capability and probability.

The US leverage over us is far beyond any kind of leverage that China can exercise. Think cloud computing, probably the future of all the AI systems that will underwrite all of our public services, economy, defence and security. Nukes — our nuclear weapons. The dollar. And these dependencies are being weaponised. This is something the European Commission is very, very conscious of. We saw just a glimpse of it over Greenland.

You can see Trump being tempted to do in Europe what traditionally America did in countries which were not like us. He’s currently telling one country who it can and can’t have in its cabinet. He’s telling another country who it can and can’t prosecute. He’s able to use tariffs going up and down to do this. Surely if you’re looking at a threat assessment in five to ten years, you need to think about resilience, you need to think about diversification, and you need to ask yourself whether you can in the long term be that vulnerable to this kind of activity.

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, I think you’re right to bring this down to resilience. And I think we all realise that across defence, across Europe, we have for far too long relied on a generous American security umbrella. I think the UK is in a slightly different position—

RORY STEWART: That’s a very different way of putting it. That’s a very DOD way of putting it. I’m saying we are not resilient because their ability to weaponise vulnerability — their ability to use our vulnerability to extort concessions, to throw us off balance — is extreme. Why did we not deal with that over ten years? Why not fifty years? Why have we allowed a system to emerge, including when you were in charge, that allowed America to have quite so much of a stranglehold on almost everything? So much so that many people in Britain and Europe will say there’s nothing we can do, it’s too late, they own us. We can’t actually diversify.

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, I took it to the resilience and the defence point for Europe. I was going to put the UK in a slightly different position to that, because we have fulfilled a different role historically — we’ve played much more of a role on security, and we still do on intelligence, by the way. We massively punch above our weight in comparison to Europe and as a partner to America. So that is the fact.

If you’re asking me how we’ve created this system over the post-war period, that’s probably beyond — think back to me as a historian. But the answer is we’ve done it because it’s been in our national self-interest to do so. Because in that context — a globalised world with America as a superpower, the only superpower following the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 80s — it was in our interest. And with the benefit of hindsight, 20/20 hindsight, I think we can say, yeah, we have created too many dependencies across Europe and we haven’t paid enough attention to our resilience.

It’s not just an America thing. Covid taught us all sorts of lessons around resilience. It comes from a massively interconnected world with technology at its core and a global trading system that’s meant our supply chains we’ve taken for granted. So yes, with 20/20 hindsight, I sort of agree with you. The context of the time and our interests at the time meant that those decisions would have been really hard decisions to take.

Russian Money, Misinformation and Brexit

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You mentioned the role of the agencies as defending our economic interests. Do you think we were too lax and too slow to see the damage that was being done to us — as a country, as an economy, as a society — by Russian money? And I’m slightly obsessed with Brexit, as you may know. My sense is that the line on whether the Russians interfered in Brexit is basically: “We don’t really know, because we never looked for the evidence.” Is that a fair characterisation? Because you weren’t told to look for the evidence, you weren’t asked to look at the evidence.

JEREMY FLEMING: How to get into that as a question. I don’t need to listen to the podcast to know your interest in Brexit. If you were to look back to that time and think about our understanding of how misinformation could start to be exercised at scale, then I think you could say, yeah, there was some catching up to do at that point. And of course, that most dramatically is illustrated by the way in which the Russians interfered in the US Presidential election.

I’m trying to think how much is in the public domain. But the agencies certainly were not blind to that sort of threat, and certainly were asked about it, including through the Intelligence Oversight Committee in Parliament. And it looked pretty hard to see if there was any—

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: So is politics, as it were?

JEREMY FLEMING: No, absolutely not. And that’s what you need to remember in the public space—

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You’re doing the work, but we’re not told about it because it didn’t sound political.

JEREMY FLEMING: No, I don’t think you should conclude that from what I’ve said. But come back to the role of the agencies. The agencies’ role is to look for threats to national security. Doesn’t matter where they come from, they need to look for them. And so looking for a state-level misinformation campaign that could have undermined our security is absolutely in the wheelhouse of the agencies. And I think you should expect them to have taken that seriously.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: What about the Russians just flooding the place with money and their people, and the battle of the oligarchs in our courts to take over media?

RORY STEWART: Today we’ve got Abramovich accounts at Deutsche Bank, with the federal German government going through seven years of money laundering — and we let this guy buy Chelsea Football Club.

JEREMY FLEMING: I’m not sure I’m right to focus on the football. Alastair has more to say about that than me. I think you have to think back to the context of the time. If you look back and say clearly it wasn’t in our interest to have so little understanding of how the money had arrived — yeah, I think that’s probably fair to say.

RORY STEWART: We knew Abramovich was basically a gangster.

JEREMY FLEMING: I’m not going to talk about a particular individual. No, but—

RORY STEWART: We knew. I mean, look, nobody was ignorant about how the oligarchs made their money.

JEREMY FLEMING: It was already obvious that some of the ways in which Russian society and oligarch competition play out were happening on the streets of London. You could see that, and the police could see that. We could see that.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: But also — how much did you feel it when Lebedev, son of a KGB guy, comes in and starts buying up our media? Did that not — were you not ringing alarm bells all over Whitehall at that time?

JEREMY FLEMING: There are processes in place to help understand where beneficial ownership sits and to try and make a decision on that, and to warn people about that. Now, there wasn’t legislation that enabled anyone in government to do anything about that at that time.

The Chinese Embassy Debate

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: On China — we’re talking around the time that Keir Starmer’s been to see Xi Jinping in Beijing, and there’s a lot of focus on this Chinese embassy. Both Rory and I have said on the podcast we can’t quite see what the fuss is about. Can I have your take on whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that the Chinese have got this mega embassy being built?

JEREMY FLEMING: So I always react to the “mega” and the “super.” I don’t understand why we describe it like that. It’s a reasonable-sized building slightly outside the centre of London. My view is that there’s a lot of noise around this and it probably doesn’t deserve that.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Yeah.

JEREMY FLEMING: Because the decision about where to locate it and how to make sure it doesn’t pose an additional threat to national security would have been thought through very seriously. Indeed, two of the heads of the agencies have written to ministers now to explain what those processes are and made it public. That’s pretty unprecedented, actually.

So I think, as an ex-intelligence chief, you can expect me to go to the realpolitik bits around all of this. Of course the Chinese have an embassy here, and the fact that it’s in one place and not in five places around London is probably a good thing. I thought the cable stuff was a load of nonsense.

RORY STEWART: Just quickly, for listeners who don’t get that reference — what Jeremy’s saying there is that famously a fibre optic cable runs quite close to the new site of the Chinese embassy. And the British media and some MPs have got very excited about the fact that this is a real reason why the embassy can’t be built, because they’re going to be getting into that fibre optic cable.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Just tell us why it’s nonsense.

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, given that we know where the cables are and what they carry — if the Chinese decided, by some long stretch of the imagination, they were going to bring in a tunnelling machine and go to them and tap them, we might notice that.

I think it’s a good thing in that it highlights what is the actual situation, which is that there is significant Chinese espionage activity in this country and we need to make sure we’ve got that properly covered. But it won’t be happening from the embassy particularly. This is a much broader question.

Navigating Cyber Threats and Economic Dependencies

RORY STEWART: So how do you think thoughtfully through these kind of choices? So again today, Octopus Energy has said they want to buy Chinese wind turbines which they think are 30% cheaper and much more efficient. Canada’s allowing in Chinese electric vehicles much, much cheaper than Tesla. You and I were in government when we were all discussing Huawei. My memory basically of that was sitting around tables where for a long time the experts were saying, “It’s okay, we’re not that worried about Huawei.” And then suddenly we were so worried about Huawei. Huawei was all booted out and it probably cost us a couple of billion quid. How does one work our way through this? Because again, the way I’ve just described that doesn’t make me hugely confident about what these processes are and how they operate and how one thinks reasonably and logically about what is a threat. What’s the risk and how to manage it.

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, you know as well as I do that there are many aspects of those sorts of decisions and there are pure security driven aspects of it and then there are economic and there are political and there are diplomatic. So they all came together.

RORY STEWART: What would your framework though be, hypothetically? How would you think through what sort of things should a policymaker think about if they’re trying to think in the future about becoming very dependent on China or Russia or the US in some sector of their economy?

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, I think the first thing to do is to try and understand the importance of the sector to the national interest. What is the thing that we most care about that is most important for our economy, for jobs and our security, and take a view on that. Because as well as a defensive posture, that also gives us the opportunity to architect things which are important to us as a country upon which our future prosperity is going to rely. And the old fashioned way of putting that was our industrial policy. So there are sort of two sides. What are the things that we really care about?

RORY STEWART: And they could be energy. Tech.

JEREMY FLEMING: Yeah, energy, tech, bioscience. Actually the government has eight of them in the industrial strategy. It’s a pretty good articulation of where the UK can be important and where it will get its future prosperity from.

So if you’re looking at something like, you’ve decided that energy is important to you, you’ve decided that you want to spend on offshore energy for a whole range of policy decisions as well as economic decisions. And then you’ve got to look at, well, what are the vulnerabilities that you introduce into the ecosystem by doing that? What is the opportunity for having a safe trading relationship with China or indeed any other partner on this, or is this an opportunity to try and do things in a more sovereign way?

So there is a step through on all of these. I don’t automatically assume that China equals bad or China equals threat. From a security perspective, it’s still really hard to switch things off. The sci-fi notion of a big button somewhere that someone is going to hit and the lights are going to go off everywhere — it just doesn’t work like that. It can’t work like that.

The Scale and Impact of Cyber Attacks

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Give us some examples of the sort of — when we talk about cyber attacks, what sort of things are we talking about and how do they operate and how do we detect them? And when we fail to detect them, what’s the worst that can happen?

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, I’m glad you’ve come onto this. 600,000 businesses in the UK had some sort of cyber attack last year. If you’re an individual, the crime you’re most likely to suffer is a cyber crime. If you took the economic benefits to cyber criminal actors and put them all together, they would be the same as one of our most important trading partners in terms of scale. So this is a massive thing and I’m amazed that there’s not more politics around it.

Because if you’re an individual, if your mum is being hit by a cyber attack, or if you’re a business losing money, or if you’re a big business in the UK and you’re systemically challenged — this is what happened with Jaguar Land Rover — these are massive things that we need to take really seriously.

The National Cyber Security Centre said last year that the number of cyber attacks that they were seeing in total had come down slightly, but the number of nationally significant ones had increased dramatically — over 200 nationally significant attacks. And by that they mean it could have a fundamental impact on our economy, on jobs, or our ability to deliver services.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Take Jaguar Land Rover. Just for somebody who doesn’t get this world, what happened there and why did that end up damaging Jaguar Land Rover and therefore the economy more broadly?

JEREMY FLEMING: A cyber criminal attacker found a vulnerability in some of Jaguar Land Rover’s computing systems — quite far out, not very central to their systems — and then found a way to put some malware into those systems such that they couldn’t operate. Critically, they couldn’t operate their supply chain effectively. And so what that does in a just-in-time industrial manufacturing process is to bring the whole thing to a halt. With Jaguar Land Rover, for weeks on end, we didn’t see cars come off the production line.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Why is it so hard to catch the criminals that are doing that?

JEREMY FLEMING: I think Jaguar Land Rover’s estimate is that it cost nearly £2 billion. So this is not a niche sport. This is something that has gone systemic and strategic.

How do you stop this happening? Well, you harden your defences. It’s actually a really hard thing to go after people after the event. So what you want to try and do is to make yourself as hard to attack as possible. And that is hard, but it really is not as hard as dealing with the mess afterwards.

Who Are the Cyber Criminals?

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And what sort of person is making what sort of money in essentially malwaring and blackmailing these companies? How do they make money and why can’t we find them?

JEREMY FLEMING: A large proportion of the criminal actors are in places where we don’t have any law enforcement reach. Shorthand for many of them — they are Russian speaking. Not just Russian speaking, but also North Korean, and some Iranian.

North Korea is a cyber state. It funds a significant proportion — some people think over a third and maybe as much as a half — of its budgets from cyber fraud and extortion. It’s got really good at doing it in the financial services business, going after banks or cryptocurrency exchanges. But there are also English speaking cyber criminals in America and Europe, including in the UK, and we can go after those.

But if you compare my 600,000 businesses last year in the UK, there were 200 prosecutions under the Computer Misuse Act. There is a structural mismatch here. One of the conversations with ministers — and maybe it plays to your previous point, Rory — whenever you have a cyber attack, I think it’s natural that ministers say, “Well, how can we go after them, hit them back with cyber?” But it doesn’t work like that. You can’t do it that way. You have to pursue all sorts of other means. But crucially, you have to harden your defences. You have to make yourself less easy to attack.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And when you say Russian speaking, are they essentially state actors, are they operating on behalf of the state?

JEREMY FLEMING: Some of them are affiliated to the Russian state because, as you know, in that society it’s quite hard to do things completely freelance. So I wouldn’t say they were 100% state actors.

Missed Opportunities in Cyber Regulation

RORY STEWART: One interesting question is around the fact that we didn’t actually set up the proper regulation and guardrails around cyber in the way that ultimately we had to around banking regulation and many of the other international agreements since 1989. And one of the reasons some people suggest why we didn’t do this is because countries like America and Britain felt they benefited more from the porosity of these things — their ability to access these systems. They would have benefited from a very tight regulatory system. So is it another example, along with letting in Russian money and waving off globalisation, where the short-term benefit meant we didn’t actually take the measures that we could have taken over 15 or 20 years to regulate this properly internationally?

JEREMY FLEMING: No, I don’t think so. That was never a reason, as far as I understood it, for seeking to have less secure technology than we could have. In fact, that would have been, I think, criminally negligent to have allowed that to happen.

I used to say in GCHQ that our responsibility was for making the UK the safest place to live and do business online. You get much more advantage from making tech secure for most of the people most of the time than you would from, in theory, leaving some sort of loophole. So the problems we had with international regulation were that we didn’t agree internationally on how to approach it.

RORY STEWART: Even with the US companies, we didn’t set up the standards and the regulation tightly enough from the beginning. All these systems — the ability of Russian hackers, half associated with the Russian government, to get into our systems — is partly to do with the way that we allowed these systems to be designed.

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, I agree with you that we didn’t do a very good job at designing the Internet in a secure way. And actually we’re doing the same again with artificial intelligence. It’s back to my point about incentives. It’s not just about regulation. In fact, regulation and legislation — that’s the last resort. That’s what happens when things go wrong. But standard setting and international agreements and collaboration on these sorts of things, we ought to do a much better job at that.

We are still suffering from poor decisions about Internet protocols that were designed 30 years ago and they’re still all over the Internet. But to suggest that we’d sort of left them there deliberately — I would completely disagree with that.

Artificial Intelligence and the Race for Dominance

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Presumably you worry, as I do, that artificial intelligence is essentially absolutely dominated by the two superpowers.

RORY STEWART: Yeah.

JEREMY FLEMING: That is the reality for aspects of artificial intelligence. I hate the term — it covers such a wide range of things. When we’re talking about it now, we’re largely talking about the large language models, which have become so prevalent.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And you talk about the next stage of technological development —

JEREMY FLEMING: When you put it like that, I agree. There is no doubt that America and China are dominating that bit of AI, but they don’t have it all their own way. And certainly — I know you’ve been talking a lot to Matt Clifford — if you talk to him about where the UK has advantage, there are places where we have advantage.

But is it right for us to think that as a nation we can go out and recreate OpenAI or Anthropic? No, of course not. We’re not going to do that. We shouldn’t waste our time doing that. In fact, my view is that we should spend the marginal pound on making sure that we adopt AI properly and we adapt.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Europe needs to compete in that space. You think it’s gone beyond that?

JEREMY FLEMING: I don’t think that Europe can compete exactly on those terms, but the AI that will be the next generation isn’t exactly the same as this one. Many people think that as they get more capable, there are going to have to be new ways of doing it, and that you can build on the back of what has been happening there and still have a credible offer. So I don’t assume that sovereignty means that we have to have a whole stack that is purely European at every point in the cycle.

AI as an Accelerant: Cyber Threats, Hyper-Personalisation, and Population-Scale Harm

RORY STEWART: I was at a dinner last week with a couple of people who’d been playing around with some of the new open models. One of them had run an experiment from a university where they’d sent an email inviting people to speak at a conference. You had to click on a link, and they’d also used AI to generate a voice conversation to follow up the phone call. They managed to get 80% of people to click on this link. And these were smart people they were targeting, because of the voice call follow-up.

Another person at the dinner was talking about how increasingly plausible it seems that you could create some pretty significant bioweapons. What does this mean in the way that you think about security threats, AI regulation, and standards?

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, as AI is an opportunity, it’s also a threat, and it needs to be secured. And at your dinner, I’m not surprised that you’re starting to hear those sorts of conversations. The reality is that, just at this period of time, AI is an accelerant for the sorts of threats that we already see. AI is enabling bad state actors, or is enabling criminals, to do more of the same sorts of things that they’ve done in the past — to do it more effectively, more convincingly, and in different languages.

I do quite a lot of work in Japan. What’s really interesting there is how large language models are allowing cyber attackers to be much more effective in Japan than they were a few years ago, when their language did quite a good job of insulating them from some aspects of the cyber threat.

The framing at the moment is to think of AI as an accelerator, but what’s not far around the corner is hyper-personalisation, which is the sort of thing you’re talking about. I used to use this story quite a bit: if I had stayed last night with my friend Bob, and Bob just now got a text from me saying, “I’ve lost my wallet, send me 50 quid,” he’d probably think, “I’m not going to do that.” But if Bob got a message saying, “I had an awful journey in from Teddington, and when I got here Alastair asked me some really tricky questions, I was a bit grumpy, and on the way out my wallet was stolen, I really can’t get home — send me 500 quid from my text number,” you’d probably think twice.

That’s actually quite trivial if you’ve got access to my diary and access to other data about me, which is probably out there. Hyper-personalisation at a population scale isn’t that far off. And for me, whilst we like to go to the chemical weapons, the bioweapons, the switching off the lights — the much more proximate and worrying threats are all about population-scale harm, crime, and fraud. I don’t think we’re focusing enough of the conversation on that. We like going to the sci-fi end of the spectrum.

That said, we do need to worry about chem-bio risks, and we need to make sure we are looking at those tail-end risks. That’s why we have a security institute here in the UK, and in America and elsewhere, to try and think about that.

Technology and the War in Ukraine

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: How has this tech revolution changed the war in Ukraine, including during the period of the war? I get the sense, just from reading about it and talking to people, that the war that we had when it started almost four years ago is being fought in a very different way now. How much of that is about the technology?

JEREMY FLEMING: It’s completely different. But the change started before the invasion four years ago. The change started when Ukraine began to take its cyber security really seriously after Crimea. It did some pretty extraordinary things at that time, including taking its government into the cloud — really thinking very seriously about how it brings new technology into its defence. That has accelerated since. Russia, as an adversary, has learned from that too. And what you see, as you do in any war in history, is a technology arms race as each party tries to bring technology to bear.

If you were thinking about the match at the beginning of this conflict — a vastly less rich, fewer people, less armed nation — and were told that four years later they’d still be holding Russia, with Russia creeping forward perhaps a percent of Ukrainian territory in the last year, you’d have to say that Ukraine has done a really good job. One that many people didn’t expect it to be able to do. And part of that is because it’s brought technology to bear more effectively and more quickly.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And who in that system has the greater resilience?

JEREMY FLEMING: Wars are always about the will to fight, as my military colleagues tell me. For the time being, I think Ukraine is showing extraordinary resilience. But the losses are significant on both sides. There will come a point when the losses become really significant for Russia, as they have done at times in its past. Over a million men are now dead or badly injured from the Russian side. And despite their system, despite the repression and the surveillance and everything else we know about Russia, those sorts of losses — I don’t believe Russia can continue to take them over the long term.

The Threat from China

RORY STEWART: Jeremy, tell us about the threat from China, because we hear about it a lot, and obviously it’s absolutely central to the whole American discourse. What is the threat from China? If you’re trying to explain it to an ordinary person in Britain, why should we be worried?

JEREMY FLEMING: This is the diplomat in me — I’d start by saying that China is a superpower, and it’s a country we need to have a relationship with. We need to have an economic relationship with it, and there are opportunities from that in the future. But the balance is always a difficult one: what’s the cost of that relationship, and what sort of threat does China pose?

If I were explaining it to a minister now, I’d be using examples of what we’ve found them doing. In the last five years, we’ve found them not only mounting a significant number of cyber attacks, stealing secrets, and going after intellectual property, but also attempting to control the diaspora here in the UK — creating unofficial police stations that are trying to make sure the Chinese diaspora stays in line. And you can point to areas where they’re clearly not acting in our interest overseas, including supporting Russia in its fight in Ukraine.

I don’t think it’s very hard to paint the threat picture. The difficulty — and where we always have a problem — is in making the balance. Prosperity and security are not trade-offs. It’s not a zero-sum game. You can have a trading relationship, you can have a grown-up intelligence, diplomatic, and political relationship, but you’ve also got to be very clear-eyed that in some circumstances China poses a threat. And when they pose a threat and when we catch them at it, we call them out.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: And if you add all those things together, what’s their strategic goal? How do they see the threat they want to impose?

JEREMY FLEMING: Their goal is the long-term security of the party and the continuation of the state. That’s where you start any conversation on the PRC and the Chinese government. It’s how President Xi thinks about the world. Their goal in mounting espionage here, or posing a threat to us, is to collect intelligence, to gain access to things which will make them more economically successful in the future, to undermine criticism of them as a regime, and to reduce — in their minds — the threats they see, whether from the diaspora here or from the country posing a challenge to their longer-term interests. I don’t think it’s very complicated to see why they do these things.

Russia vs. China: Different Natures of Threat

RORY STEWART: But a different sort of threat from the threat posed by Russia?

JEREMY FLEMING: Yes, it is a different type of threat.

RORY STEWART: Could you explain?

JEREMY FLEMING: Well, Russia’s threat is much more proximate. Russia is much more on our back door militarily. It poses a threat in the way that China hasn’t posed a threat to us yet. And we deeply understand Putin’s mindset because he’s told us about it for the last 20 years — how he thinks about Russia and its near abroad. So it is, at the moment, a different type of threat. It’s sophisticated in a different way, and that means it’s different to counter as well. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach.

RORY STEWART: Some of the things we might say about the difference between Russia and China’s threat challenge me. Some people would say, okay, one difference is that Russia is a genuine expansionist power — he makes no secret that he wants to add new bits of territory which will be Russian, not just influence them, but have them. He wants to really shatter NATO. He wants to divide Europe off from the US in a very dramatic way. Are there other ways of explaining the different nature of the threat from Russia and China?

JEREMY FLEMING: I’d agree with that. I’d also say that the thresholds in the way Russia takes action are at a completely different level. We have seen inside Europe, over the last four years, increasing levels of violence and boldness in what Russia is prepared to do — everything from intimidation through to killing, from going after supply chains of what they perceive to be supporting the Ukrainian effort, to taking steps to get inside critical and top-secret systems in NATO and allied countries.

So yes, it does pose a very real threat, and it’s on our back door strategically. I remember talking about the threat and describing China as the long-term threat. I still think we should be approaching it with at least that in mind as we pursue a broader relationship.

What Makes a Good Intelligence Officer Today?

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Jeremy, thanks for all your time. Just my final question: if somebody was applying for a job — not via the Ministry of Defence, but saying straight, “I want to work for the Security Service today” — what in the modern age makes a good intelligence officer? Do you have to be very tech-savvy? Do you have to have an understanding of the way the modern economy and modern technology works? Or is it still really about human analysis and connection?

JEREMY FLEMING: Let me answer that from a GCHQ perspective, because it’s where I spent the end of my career. GCHQ is the biggest intelligence agency — thousands of people and a very broad range of professions inside: analysts, scientists, mathematicians, linguists, people who look after the accommodation, the environment, the estate, people who are making sure that when we’re deployed overseas, we’re safe. It’s an incredibly broad range of people required to make an intelligence agency work.

The happy reality is that you apply online now to publicly available job adverts. And if you are going for an intelligence officer or intelligence analysis role, then that will be a more tech-heavy role than it was at the time I joined. But we’re looking for the same things. We’re looking for people who deeply care about the mission, who have very strong values, who can meet a security threshold and can be vetted, and who frankly want to be part of something which I found throughout my career to be always energising, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately a career well spent. So if you’re up for that and you’re listening to this, it’s still worth doing.

What Are We Missing in Tech Policy?

RORY STEWART: What do you think we’re missing about tech and tech policy — in the world? What sorts of things worry you that you think people aren’t talking about enough?

Global Governance, AI, and the Limits of Transparency

JEREMY FLEMING: That’s a really hard question after the softer Alistair one. So I would answer that two ways, and you’ve touched on it already. We have got to get around global governance for AI. We really have to get our heads around what that means, and whether we do that with an alliance of like-minded countries, or we do that through some sort of established multilateral partnership — less likely — or if we do that starting with just a few nations, we have to get our head around this. Because at some time we will see something we don’t like from this technology, and we’ll be rushing to catch up.

So the first thing around tech is we have to find a way of having a global governance. I’m deliberately not saying regulation here. It might be, that might be an aspect of it.

RORY STEWART: Is that because you’re working for tech companies?

JEREMY FLEMING: I’m working for tech.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: You’re a quantum physicist.

JEREMY FLEMING: So I think we’re definitely missing that. I think inside the UK we need to do much more of the education stuff — and I know the government’s made some announcements this week, and I really welcome that. But we have to prepare the population for the pace at which this is coming, and it is coming in years, not decades. That means really upping our efforts to help the population adjust. I forget who said this, but the thought of “we have always evolved alongside technology” — we have to evolve really quickly alongside this technology.

RORY STEWART: Well, thank you very much, Jeremy. Thank you for coming on.

Reflections After the Interview

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: God, your questions were long, Rory.

RORY STEWART: Yeah, they were terrible. Let me just sort of reflect on everything. Maybe I’m sharing too much with you in the public here, Jeremy. In private, he is the most incredibly funny, quirky, outspoken person. And of course I was reminded suddenly —

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: — here that he’s a spy.

RORY STEWART: And he’s also very conscious that, as the former head of GCHQ, he doesn’t want to be causing problems for his successors, for the government, etc. So he is a little bit more cautious in the podcast than he is one on one. And I guess my incredibly convoluted questions were a way of trying to say, “Come on, Jeremy, I know you really believe this. How am I going to get you to say what I think you believe?”

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Yeah, but listen, Rory, you can just — for those who are watching rather than listening — just look at the guy’s face when he’s listening. You’re not going to get anything out of him. He doesn’t want to give. He’s been trained.

RORY STEWART: He’s been trained, but he —

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Listen, I thought he was really interesting and very thoughtful. He obviously doesn’t want to criticize his own services, and he doesn’t want to criticize the government, past or present. But I think he is kind of alerting us and warning us of threats and of technological developments that he thinks we’re somewhat behind the gate on.

RORY STEWART: He doesn’t want to come with me on saying there’s something wrong with our institutions, our bureaucracy — our establishment is a bit reluctant to do that. But the fact is, you mentioned one thing that we really screwed up on, which was Russian money. There’s another thing we talked about, which is our complete failure to really create a secure Internet, which we’re now struggling with 40 years later. I talked about the Afghan war, and I saw a lot of stuff where — and he said it himself — we’re not good at 5 or 10-year planning.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Yeah, that was a remarkable thing to say, that we didn’t really have those sorts of discussions. I think what we did back in the day —

RORY STEWART: And of course, he would say it’s not just structure, it’s personality. I mean, maybe Tony — obviously he’s got a mind — and Gordon likes that kind of big-picture stuff. I think though, it is a problem. And I was sad I couldn’t quite bring him with me, because I came out of government really feeling we’ve made mistakes again and again and again, and there should be a much more urgent drive to reform.

I was also obviously hoping that he’d come closer to me on seeing the fact that our vulnerabilities to the US are very, very significant.

The Intelligence Establishment and Political Accountability

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: But it’s very hard. I mean, if you spent your whole life hand in glove with the Americans, as he has, then it’s quite hard to. But I thought he at least acknowledged why we were worried about it — why that audience I told him about were worried — although he was horrified, as he said, that people genuinely think America is now a bigger threat than China. And it’s interesting when he talked about Stephen Lander, who was — I don’t think it was he the first —

RORY STEWART: Probably your first. Yeah.

JEREMY FLEMING: When you arrived.

RORY STEWART: Yeah.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: So we had all sorts of interaction with the heads of the agencies. And I think what does happen — I don’t know whether this is the case with Keir Starmer, who would have known a lot of these people anyway through his work as DPP — but certainly when we got in in 1997 and Tony was Prime Minister, you do kind of have a sense that these guys really know what they’re talking about. And there’s also a desire to work with them, to cooperate with them.

And essentially, he mentioned that the head of GCHQ has seen four heads of the NSA. They have all seen this relentless churn of Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Home Secretary over the last decade under the Tories, and that gives them an awful lot more power.

RORY STEWART: Absolutely.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: I’m not suggesting that they want to run the country, but why wouldn’t they exploit that for their own advantage?

RORY STEWART: Absolutely. And they will understandably think, “We have a very, very clear idea about what we’re doing.” I mean, I spent many, many months trying, as a minister, to fight government policy over Syria. And I never quite got to the bottom of it, but it was quite clear the system disagreed with me on Syria and they weren’t going to shift.

A lot of the time when I pushed, they’d say, “That’s secret, you can’t see that,” or “There’s a meeting here that you can’t go to,” or “There’s a small group there.” And it’s understandable, because they’re thinking, “Who the hell is this minister? Why the hell should Rory be telling us what to do in Syria?” And I’m saying, “Well, I’m the minister. This is my job.”

So it’s a really interesting question. And it’s something you’ll tease me about, because you’ll say this is just because they’re disagreeing with me and I’m getting wound up. But I wish people were a bit more honest about it, because they can’t have it both ways. They can’t both say, “Actually, we know what’s going on, the minister doesn’t,” and also keep saying, “Of course, ministerial accountability, Minister, society.”

Transparency, Legality, and the Cost of Playing by the Rules

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: It does give them their cake and let them eat it too, doing that. But anyway, listen, I think the other thing that’s really interesting about these guys — and of course, back when I was a journalist, you weren’t even allowed to ask questions about the security services. You weren’t allowed to say they existed. It was totally absurd. And so he’s come through that incredible cultural change for them. And actually, I think it’s a good thing now that people like him are out there talking — him, and John Sawers, and Alex Younger, and these guys. There will be —

RORY STEWART: — some people listening who will say we should have challenged a little bit more on the transparency and legality stuff. So Jeremy, absolutely sincerely, like John Sawers, very much believes we’re in a much, much better world because we’ve become much more transparent, much more legal.

There are bits of the British system, and a hell of a lot of bits of the American system, who think that we’ve lost capacity by doing it. Now, he’d deny it. He’d say, “You just get stronger by becoming more legal and more transparent.” But there are many people who say, “Well, in this operation in Syria, this operation in Iraq, this thing that we tried to ask them to do, suddenly we’re meeting a lot of lawyers saying, ‘I’m sorry, the Brits — or this part of the British state — can’t join you in that.'”

It is a question. And he said, “We don’t want to be one of those agencies,” but lawyers are increasingly important. And of course, they, as the bosses, have to keep saying to their staff, “We have to remain within the law.”

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Yeah, they can’t drop people off balconies.

RORY STEWART: They certainly can’t. And I’m not in favour of dropping people off balconies.

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: No, but that was what I was asking — do the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans — are they operating at an advantage?

RORY STEWART: The Americans in some areas have much more latitude than we do. The French certainly have much more latitude than we do. The Israelis have a latitude well, well beyond. And our risk assessments will be different — who we’re prepared to talk to, who we’re prepared to work with, even governments.

So one problem, again, we didn’t get into, is that there are some governments that we’ve effectively had to stop working with, that many of our other partners work with, because we’re just like, “These people are too extreme, and we take too much legal risk collaborating with them.”

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Anyway, there we are. Another spook.

RORY STEWART: Another spook. Thank you very much indeed. And I think he’s wonderful, and I really would recommend that people engage with him. He’s wonderfully bright.

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