The World

As a “foreign affairs commentator”, I am meant to follow politics all over the world. At least in theory, I have cogent views on everything from the Bolivarian revolution to Chinese land reforms. This is an interesting, if tricky, assignment.

Wednesday was a particularly head-spinning day. At lunch-time I moderated a session at the LSE on the future of the Russian economy. In the afternoon, I took part in a conference call about a seminar on China that I am going to in France next week. Then at 6.30 pm I went over to the Policy Exchange think-tank in Westminster to interview Larry Lindsey, before an invited audience. Lindsey is a former economic adviser in the Bush White House, so we were talking about the Obama stimulus package. When that was over, I walked a few hundred yards across Whitehall to go to a dinner in Churchill’s War Rooms (an underground bunker, just near Downing Street). This was dedicated to the study of the problems of Pakistan’s tribal areas – and I found myself sitting between Pakistan’s deputy defence minister and a senior Nato general.

Fascinating – particularly the last event. Except by the end of the day, all these various problems had merged into one and I was confusing my TARPs and my FATAs. Should I be more worried by collapsing Russian banks, ballooning American deficits, jobless Chinese peasants or angry Pakistani mullahs? And can I come up with some sort of global strategy which solves all of these problems, simultaneously?

The Pakistan event was organised by the World Security Network, which is masterminded by Hubertus Hoffmann, a German entrepreneur – and so the event was full of German generals. I know it was all a long time ago, but it still seemed slightly odd for them to choose to dine in the rooms where Churchill organised the war effort. But, for Mr Hoffmann, this was evidently part of the point. In a short speech, he urged the Pakistani participants to take inspiration from their surroundings and from Churchill’s dedication to freedom. And he added that we should never forget how close Churchill came to defeat “at the hands of an Austrian – as we German like to think of him.”