Thatcher to Trump: Lawrence Freedman on UK foreign policy in wars and crises

So the job was advertised, and I was encouraged to apply.

I was at, uh, IISS at the time working on a history of nuclear strategy, which I carried on working on all the time I was here, and what attracted me was first that this seemed a slightly more secure job than the one I had.

Secondly, I'd worked for my PhD and at IISS largely on American and nuclear issues, and I wanted to broaden it a bit.

Also, the deputy director at Chatham House at the time was Ian Smart, who had been at IISS, who I knew and admired, and I thought it would be fun working with him, so I applied.

As far as I am aware, I gave a pretty poor interview, but they decided on me nonetheless.

The other member of the team, there were only two of us, was Josie Statler, and she'd already been appointed, and she really handled the administrative side, which was quite heavy, of the project.

So when I came in, I think Ian already had quite a number of ideas of the names who formed the main steering group.

I mean, I had no idea of these people.

They were all literally the great and the good, permanent secretaries, captains of industry, the lot.

Pretty male, pretty white, but within that some variety.

We had Robin Cook and John Edmonds, who was a trade unionist.

On the one hand, we had the head of Unilever.

On the other, Michael Palliser.

Vince Cable was involved.

He did a paper for us.

So lots of, I mean, lots of people got involved, but I knew none of these people when, when I arrived.

I think Robin Cook was my idea.

So we put together the steering group, and the way that the project worked was that we would put together subgroups to look at particular issues and then report these to the main group, and that I and others would produce papers.

Normally, these appeared as, uh, articles in International Affairs, occasionally in World Today.

And then with the more important ones, particularly the Polaris one that Ian Smart wrote, we published them as separate papers.

But we hadn't really thought about, on the dissemination side, which is terribly important these days, we hadn't really thought it through.

So basically, each meeting of the steering group, we'd give them a paper of some sort, some of which were written by me, many of which were written by other people.