2025-05-28
This is another magnum opus, a work birthed for our time when confidence in the ancien regime is collapsing on many sides, and few sensible people care to predict how matters may resolve themselves.
" ... how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken"
Now let me say straight up that I'm not necessarily agreeing or indeed disagreeing with much that he says in this piece, but it's value certainly lies in it being the views of somebody who was very senior in government at a time of great national crisis - he is informed by his personal experiences of how government may react, he has done time in the system.
That said, no two crises are identical, so "this time things may be different". Or not.
Whatever we may think of the man, his views are likely informative at some useful level. Our task is to sort the wheat from the chaff.
But he does have a sense of humour, which is always a pointer in favour of humanity:
"If you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! "
He indicates that the machinery of government is approaching the point of no return - collapse from within:
" ... the Cabinet Office in recent years has excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO [Cabinet Office], which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire"
"SW1’s OODA loop has operated for years as a massive denial-of-service-attack on its own perceptions of reality"
I admit, it's a long piece and I have not yet had time to read through it, but I don't doubt that it will be a useful contribution to our understanding of the current state of the nation.
