Airport security was much on my mind last Friday afternoon. I had been due to fly from Heathrow to Zurich that morning, but the substation fire meant a switch to an afternoon departure from London City Airport. City is a business-oriented operation in every respect and one of its many efficient features is a baggage-checking regime that does not require you to separate your 100ml bottles of shampoo and shaving foam into a plastic ziplock bag. The X-ray machine and associated sensors are supposed to penetrate your luggage and identify anything dangerous with scientific precision. My heart sank when my carry-on bag was shunted off the conveyor belt and a security operative summoned me over to explain myself. I wondered if I’d left a lethally oversized bottle of shower gel in my washbag or if there was gunpowder residue on my moleskin trousers. ‘There is something potentially dangerous I need to take out, sir,’ I was informed by the latex-gloved airport employee. Diving into my bag she fished out a copy of Sing As We Go, Simon Heffer’s history of Britain between the wars. She then proceeded to rifle through the pages and dust it with a probe to which was attached some sort of screen wipe. After a tense 30 seconds she told me: ‘It’s safe after all.’ I daren’t tell Simon that’s the official verdict on his work.
I was heading to Switzerland to support the work of a wonderful charity, Supporting Wounded Veterans, which every year takes soldiers who’ve endured horrific traumas to Klosters for a week of recovery. The vets are taught to ski, paired with buddies and mentors who help with their rehabilitation. They all bear their injuries – physical and mental – with the quiet stoicism and black humour which characterises military life. But listening to their stories – of losing friends in front of their eyes, witnessing children mutilated, learning to live with paralysis or prosthetics – was deeply moving. There are no words to express the debt we owe to these brave men and women. But one way we can discharge our obligations is to support organisations like SWV and the woman who runs it, Gilly Norton.
Gilly had invited me to Klosters to join a panel to discuss geopolitics for an audience of veterans, mentors and corporate sponsors of the charity. I was the weakest link, speaking alongside the former FT editor Lionel Barber, the Times Radio broadcaster Manveen Rana and General Sir Richard Barrons, former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command and the military brains behind the government’s current Strategic Defence Review. Given the tendency of defence reviews to be policy sugar-rushes – exercises in fudge manufacture and cakeism – it was reassuring that Sir Richard was bitingly dry and witheringly honest about our collective failure to take security sufficiently seriously since 1990. It was not just military weakness which worried him. Domestic resilience concerned him even more. The Heathrow substation fire might have been an accident, he mused, but the Russians do have a revealed preference for taking out critical national infrastructure, are known to hire local bad actors to start fires for them, and might have enjoyed seeing our major international airport crippled on the day our allies were in town to discuss joining the ‘coalition of the willing’. Whatever the cause, though, our vulnerabilities were vividly advertised to a world audience.
Over the weekend several military figures told me that a slice of our augmented defence budget should go to creating a British version of the American defence tech company Anduril. Set up in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a Donald Trump-supporting tech bro who’d previously made his fortune from virtual-reality headsets, Anduril manufactures drones and develops artificial intelligence products for the US and UK military. It is certainly the case that, as the Ukraine war shows, the future of conflict lies in autonomous vehicles and AI, but another thought struck me. Anduril is named after the sword wielded by Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien has a curious hold on the minds of Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters – especially Peter Thiel, whose investment fund is called Mithril (a metal favoured by the dwarves) and his data analytics company is Palantir (a crystal globe used by Saruman to see places far off, or events in the past). Tolkien may have a reputation as the nerds’ favourite novelist, but I do hope his novels are genuinely influential in Trumpworld. The key lesson of The Lord of the Rings after all is that, faced with evil, it’s vital the good guys put aside their differences and ally.
On the way back to London it was another novel, however, that had me gripped. Fugue for a Darkening Island was written in 1972 by Christopher Priest. His most famous work is The Prestige, an atmospheric tale of Victorian magicians locked in a deadly rivalry, which inspired a superb Christopher Nolan movie. Fugue is a very different work. It’s a bleakly dystopian account of a future Britain consumed by ethnic conflict. While the work’s treatment of race is dated, there are some curiously apt anticipations of our time. Politics is dominated by the robustly right-wing Reform party. The Reform leader, John Tregarth, is a former Tory who left the party because it was insufficiently nationalist and who ascends to power on the back of public concern about migration. I’m not sure what airport security will make of it.
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