 Okay, I think we can we can we can get going now so my name is Michael Collins and I'm the Director General of the IAEA and we're delighted to welcome you to this lunchtime IAEA seminar and delighted in particular to be joined by former Downing Street Chief of Staff Jonathan Powell who will speak to us shortly but we're very fortunate and very glad that Jonathan could spend this time with us this afternoon to talk about the British Government and handling generally of the COVID-19 crisis and its wider implications for issues like Brexit and indeed issues beyond that. Jonathan will speak to us for about 20 minutes and then we will go maybe we'll have a short conversation and then go into questions and answers with our members who are joining us and you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom which you should see on your screens. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they occur to you and we will come to them as they once Jonathan has finished his own presentation. A gentle reminder if I may that today's presentation is on the record while the Q&A will take place under Chatham House Rules meaning that you can use the information but can't attribute it to the person who said it or where it was said. These are our normal rules and they will apply again for this webinar. Just also if you would like to do so please tweet in relation to these proceedings using the handle iea.com we'd be very glad obviously if we could magnify through the medium of Twitter and other social media the part of this proceedings are particularly the part of these proceedings that are on the record. Jonathan Powell I've known for many many many years working with him very closely on the peace process over a six-year period when I was working in the Department of the Peacock but more particularly he served as Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007 during which time he also served as Chief British Negotiator on the Northern Ireland peace process as I said playing an instrumental indeed a crucial vital role in bringing about the peace that Northern Ireland enjoys today but it's imperfections, it is a peace that obviously is there and we're very very pleased that that's the case. Prior to joining Prime Minister Blair or joining Tony Blair he was a British diplomat for 16 years and he is currently Founder and Director of Intermediate at Charity focused on ending armed conflict around the world. He is the author of several books including of course one in relation to the peace process called Great Hatred, A Little Room, Making Peace in Northern Ireland which was published in 2008 and thereafter he's gone on to publish at least two other books one The New Machiavelli How to Wheel to Power in the Modern World which was published in 2010 and more laterally Talking to Terrorists How to End Armed Conflict which was published in 2013 2014 a big apartment. So with that I'm going to hand over to Jonathan just to extend to a very very warm welcome to Dublin through this medium and to look forward to hearing what he has to say and picking up the conversation and the Q&A thereafter. So Jonathan over to you. Thank you Michael and good afternoon to everyone from London. It's a real pleasure to be with Michael again. Michael and I worked very closely together on the Northern Ireland peace process for many years and I really like to pay real tribute to the work of Michael and his colleagues in the T-Shox office in the DFA, Barton the Justice and elsewhere. There would not have been a successful peace process without the work that they put in and the ideas they came up with. I'm extremely grateful to that even now. As Michael says I was Tony Blair's Chief of Staff. I can't claim to have any expertise on coronavirus so if you want me to consult about your symptoms I will be of no use at all. But I can talk a bit about his handling crises from number 10 Downing Street. I was Chief of Staff for 10 years while Tony was Prime Minister and a few years before that when he was in the opposition. So I have some experience of dealing with crises rather different sort of crises but we had the foot and mouth crisis that was really quite serious and forced us to postpone the elections. We had the fuel crisis before that that nearly bought the country to a grinding halt. So I guess I have some perspective on the politics of this and the way that things are being handled from number 10 Downing Street. In terms of questions afterwards happy to talk about anything you like. I think if I look at the role played by the British government so far I would have to say they're in the middle of the pack. They're certainly worse than Germany, worse than you in Ireland and worse than Norway for example. But at least we look a little bit better than the United States and Belarusia if we compare ourselves with them. The NHS has done very well. I mean sometimes the role of a centralized health system is played down. But I have to say in these circumstances that central control really comes into its own. The ability to put together those nightingale hospitals so quickly has been quite remarkable. And the ability to flatten the curve by suddenly transferring the resources into COVID. It's been a problem for people with heart attacks and cancer and so on. But just in terms of response that has done well. I'm afraid I'd have to say that our politicians have done a bit less well. So far that isn't registered in the polls. What happens in a crisis like this is that people rally to the flag as they say in America. They come to support the Prime Minister and the government. They want them to succeed and they don't want too much criticism. So support for Boris Johnson has gone up. People want the problem solved. Far in talking about his return from hospital at Easter about a second coming. I think that's probably rather over egging it but they do seem to see it in those sort of terms. Now questions are beginning to be raised. First of all they had a free ride as the government in dealing with the crisis. Many of you will have seen the story in the Sunday Times last week. Where it was pointed out that Boris Johnson had missed five Cobra meetings at the beginning of this crisis. The Cobra meeting is where all the ministers come together, all the civil servants to deal with the crisis. It's not unheard of for ministers not to go to Cobra. Prime Ministers don't always attend. But to miss that many, when he was in London at the beginning of a crisis, I think is a sign that they were failing to take it seriously enough. They were too relaxed at the beginning. And I think the response at the moment is beginning to unravel. Particularly we see in terms of social care and the old people's homes that we have where they do not provide the equipment or the support that is necessary. We finally got a political opposition in London. It's about three years too late but it's a loyal opposition. It's one that is going to question. And Kirsten Dahmer has had very good reviews for his first Prime Minister's questions. He is a barrister. He's very good at posing questions about being forensic. And I think Boris Johnson, when he returns to the Commons, will find he's having a much harder time than he did before. And I think the questions that Keir is putting about the slow response in locking down, about the slow provision of PPE and ventilators, about the failure to join in the EU procurement exercise and asking for their views on how are we going to actually exit from this are going to be difficult for them to answer and they will struggle a bit. Now, I am sympathetic to the government in these circumstances. It is very difficult. We were definitely very slow when we had the foot and mouth outbreak. I remember being called, Tony Blair in Washington DC by Nick Brown, who was our agriculture minister at the time, and him saying they were going to lock down all movement of cattle and sheep in the United Kingdom from that moment and thinking, gosh, that's a reaction. This is just a normal foot and mouth outbreak, but actually we were too late. If there's one thing I learned in number 10, you have to move straight away on these things. The longer you leave it, the worse it will get. I did a BBC programme with Nick Robinson immediately after this crisis began and I was with all the scientists and experts. And one question he asked us was, if you had an outbreak in Stoke, would you lock the city down or would you leave it open? And I have to say the six scientists there and the experts all said, no, no, we'd leave it open. I was the only person to say, lock it down. And I said that not because I have any expertise, but because the one thing I learnt is you've got to get ahead of this thing. If you're going to control it, then that's what you have to do. So while I'm sympathetic, I do think that this has played into Boris Johnson's weaknesses. He is, to be honest, pretty lazy. He is a libertarian. He does not want to lock things down. He doesn't want to tell people what to do. He doesn't really enjoy detail. And I think he made a mistake at the beginning of not taking it seriously. Being on holiday with his fiance at Chievening is not an excuse for not gripping something like this. And the speech he made at Cheltenham, sorry, the speech he made at Greenwich while allowing the Cheltenham races to go ahead was, again, a mistake in underestimating the importance of this. The problem we have now is we're kind of the opposite of you in Dublin. In Dublin, you have a T-shock, a prime minister who's a doctor, and we have a prime minister who's a patient. And that's quite a big difference in the way that we try and handle this. And it's a real problem in our system not having a prime minister in place. We do not have a presidential system, but this stuff about cabinet government is nonsense. It hasn't existed since Mrs. Thatcher, at least. You can't leave it to cabinet to come to a consensus on every issue. You need to have someone who can set the answer and then try and argue for it and persuade his cabinet colleagues. And that's going to be particularly important as we try and get out of the lockdown and exit from the crisis. Without him there, it's going to be very hard. They'll have to think about bringing someone else in if he doesn't come back. They're now briefing that he'll be back on Monday. And that, by the way, is another of their problems, that they have spent too much time briefing things to the newspapers. Dominic Cummings has been there sharing it in that way. That is not the right thing to do if you are going to really communicate clearly with people. And they've had some very muddled messages as they've gone along. They also have a problem of having a very weak bench. They've appointed the Brexiteers, not the traditional Tories, and they've appointed people who are loyal to Boris Johnson. And that has left them without the sort of people who they can easily put in front of the TV cameras. Pretty Patel, for example, has been hidden away apart from one disastrous outing. And many of the other ministers have simply failed to explain what will happen. You need to have someone who makes the decisions and someone who can explain. I remember Bill Clinton saying to Tony Blair, I think it was actually after 9-11. Your job is explainer in chief. You've got to go out there, explain to people, keep their confidence, show they have a plan. And we haven't got anyone doing that in Britain at the moment, and that is a serious problem. Dominic Cummings, I'm afraid, has also been sick, quite seriously sick according to newspapers today. He's come back now. He is the master of three-word slogans, and three-word slogans do help when you're trying to communicate a message. But there is a problem with the central control he tries to impose from number 10. We were accused in our time of being very centralizing, very controlling of government. But actually, if you look at us by comparison with what he's tried to do with the Treasury, what he's tried to do with other ministries, we were positively laxadaisical. And I think if everything is controlled out from number 10, when you run into a crisis like this and the prime minister gets sick, you have a serious problem steering the ship of state. Now I want to focus in particular on what they've been doing in terms of saying that this all depends on the science. All they're doing is listening to the scientists and implementing what the scientists say. But scientists are not Moses, and they're not interpreting tablets of stone that have come down to them. You have different views from different scientists. The editor of the Lancet will have a very different view from your chief medical officer or your chief scientific officer. And we discovered that in the foot and mouth crisis. We had our chief scientific officer, who is David King, and then we had a lot of other scientists who were telling us what we should do is vaccinate the sheep and the cows. Now remember Prince Charles weighing in with those scientists and saying the government must vaccinate. Had we vaccinated, we'd have had a real problem because those cows and sheep would have been, we couldn't have sold them in the EU at that point. Had we gone down that scientific route, it would have been a real dead end. So you have to listen to one scientist decide their right and then stick with them, which is what we did with David King. He described to us the modeling, but done by the same modelers at Imperial that showed us the foot and mouth outbreak going up. Like this one, almost vertical line. If we took the measures he suggested, which was locking down, it would go flat, and then it would come down again. And the model certainly followed it going up and we were absolutely terrified. But then it did go flat, more or less when he said it would go flat and came down remarkably quickly. So you can't just blame it on the scientist. You have to actually interpret it yourself from the advice that they give you. We're now moving on to the question of the exit. How do we get out of this newer course in I think in Ireland will probably get out of it before us by the looks of things because you've had a better experience altogether than we have. And this will be a very difficult decision. It will not be easy to persuade people to leave their homes. Having persuaded them to go in and be safe, you have to persuade them something is different out there for them to be persuaded to go back out again. And the position the government has taken up to now of not discussing this and not being prepared to even reveal in any way how they're going to make the decision about exit has been a really serious problem. If we don't have the vaccine and we clearly won't have the vaccine by the time we have to come out of this, I hope it's speeding up and God willing, we'll have the vaccine by next year. If we have no testing, we're now aiming for 100,000 tests a day for people who have the disease, but we're actually going to need the tests that haven't yet been invented to show if you've already had the disease to get things back up and running and we know we're near getting those. The other thing is we will almost certainly, all of us, get a second peak when we come out of this. And the question really will be how serious it is. I don't want to keep comparing it to foot and mouth because I know we killed all the cows and sheep and that's a very different sort of thing, but we did get a second peak. We knew we would when we went back up again. Luckily, we were expecting it. We knew how to control, we knew how to deal with it. In this case, the danger is the second peak is not going to be controlled. What we will do in Britain, I think, is probably follow others. We won't be the first act. We'll see what happens to you. We'll see what happens in Norway, see what happens in Germany. Germany, of course, has many advantages over us because of their regime on testing. They're now here adopting the mantra of test and trace, but that was the one they rejected at the beginning when they decided to go for the herd immunity approach, which they then backed off because the numbers showed how many would die. The other thing that's been quite interesting in the recent developments is the way the nations have gone their different ways. So far, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland have stuck together with the London government. They're all on the Central Committee. They're all on Cobra. They're part of the decision-making. They're now beginning to separate. Nicola Sturgeon made a very good speech in which she said she was going to treat the population like adults. She was going to explain her thinking, explain how she was going down the path towards exit. The Welsh have done the same thing. Arlene Foster, I noticed this morning, is now calling for Northern Ireland to leave earlier than the rest of the UK, which I must say brought back to my mind Ian Paisley coming into Tony Blair's study during the foot and mouth crisis, banging the table and saying, our people may be British, but our cows are Irish because he wanted the cows to be able to move in the same way they were in the rest of Ireland. So we now see the nations pulling in different directions. And this will have implications not just for this crisis, but for what comes after this as well. Of course, the biggest implications, apart from those of the very sad deaths and the very serious illnesses, is for the economy. And here the question is so huge, it's very difficult to even get your mind around it, let alone explore what the implications are. Rishi Sunak, our newish Chancellor, has certainly done well. He's been seen as a very good communicator. He's moved very fast with the Treasury machinery to get policies in place. There have been some snarling over things like loans, which is, I think, understandable. But it is extraordinary to see, as Jeremy Corbyn has pointed out, the Tory party embarking on huge spending and huge loans and huge, even moving in the direction of a universal basic income as the only way to deal with the self-employed and those in the gig economy. Now some in the government are still hoping for a V-shaped recovery that we'll come out of this demand and come back and push it back. I think the problem is that so many firms will go out of business that it'll be very difficult to get that kind of recovery. So many people will be unemployed, it'll be very difficult to get that kind of recovery. I think there will obviously be a recovery. We don't know what it will be like. The other thing worth commenting on, I think, is the inquiry that we'll have after this. You know, after the Iraq War, we had the Chilcot Inquiry. Earlier, we had the Hutton Inquiry. There will be an inquiry into this. It will be obviously long after the decisions have been made. I think what the Conservative government seem to be doing, a twofold. One is they are trying to set up Matthew Hancock for the fall on this, the health minister, who has been very glib with his promises and less good in delivering them, although I think on testing he may be able to do it. And the other thing I think they're setting up is to blame the scientists to say it's the scientists who misled us. The scientists are beginning to fight back in their briefing and I don't think that will come out well for them. I think that the inquiry will be bad for the government, but it will be so late that it will have a very little impact on politics later on, a little impact on these immediate events. If I turn to some of the consequences of this, and this is all very speculative because we don't really know how this ends or how this impact is pretty clear is on Brexit that although the government is insisting, there will be no delay, they won't ask for a delay, they won't accept a request from the EU for a delay, I think a delay will be forced upon them. I don't see how they could conceivably, given the negotiations have only just restarted, they're being done online. There's no way they could be ready by June to know that by December they're being in a position to leave and leaving without a deal in this weak and economic position would be catastrophic. So I think this is all bluster, as we've seen from Boris Johnson before in his negotiations. Besides anything else, the civil servants are all working on coronavirus, they will be moved over from Brexit and everything else, so there isn't anyone working on this subject to do it. Maybe we should discuss in the discussion rather than now, but the Northern Ireland border I fear will come back again because it's clear from what Boris Johnson said before that he wants to reopen the question of whether there will be a border as he conceded between the rest of the UK and Northern Ireland, which is a real problem for Unionist, but is much better than what he was proposing before. So maybe we should discuss that there. Now people say very glibly that the world will never be the same after this crisis, but if you look back at Spanish flu, actually Spanish flu had remarkably little impact in changing the world. The First World War had an impact where Spanish flu did not. The only way this will change things if people do something about it. The reason why the UK and Britain changed in 1945 was because people had prepared during the war a series of really radical ideas. We had beverage with unemployment benefit, we had the National Health Service, we had universal education. Actually some of them drawn up by Tories, some by Liberals, but those were there and the Labour Government in 45 put them into place. Unless we have those ideas in place, the world will revert to normal very, very quickly and we won't get those remarkable changes as in 45. So I hope people will start thinking in that sort of way. Secondly, I think that experts are certainly back. The government has spent a lot of time attacking experts. Michael Govers said we don't need them anymore. They certainly did need them and they've been depending on very much not just scientists, the civil servants and others who've been working on these things. I think big government is back in quite a serious way. I think it's very hard to see, given what's happened economically, how government can retreat very quickly from this dry approach of pulling back. Thirdly, I think solidarity, an old fashioned word is back in place. Certainly here in Britain, I'm sure in Ireland too, there's been a great out breaking of solidarity of people trying to support each other in these circumstances. I think as I say the universal basic income is something that we might see back on the table in a serious way now because even a Tory government is introducing it. There will be a lot of support for that. There will be a huge hangover, fiscal and monetary hangover we're going to have to deal with. How are we going to pay for this? How do we make paying for it fair? We just put it all on income tax. That's not going to be very fair if we put it on VAT or other indirect taxes and national insurance. That's not going to be very fair. Are we going to start taxing capital or are we going to find other ways in which we can raise the money to repay some of this? I think as Michael and I were discussing before, we'll see more of what we're doing today, more working from home. My day job now is working on armed conflicts around the world and I basically spend all my time on aeroplanes. I'm obviously not doing that now. So I spend my entire time on my laptop talking to presidents or prime ministers or guerrilla leaders in different countries by Zoom and it's remarkable how quickly they've adapted. I think we'll see government and business adapt to many more people staying at home and working from home. Well actually, at least in my experience, you get a lot more out of people because they don't even get coffee breaks or the commuting time. They work all the time. And I think we'll have to do something about thinking through how we deal with the next threat. We all knew a pandemic was coming. We knew it would be serious. We did a certain amount of preparing for it, but we were not prepared. We all need to be prepared for the next threat. It may not be a pandemic. What are we going to do about China? How are we going to deal with the issue of surveillance that's now become acceptable? What are we going to do about global warming? Those sort of questions will really have to start dealing with what about AI and its impact on jobs where it will be destroying jobs. I think it will make us a bit more serious. I think it could go the way of populist politics and people like Hungarian leader Orbán taking us in a particular direction, or it could go to people actually wanting more boring leaders who are more serious, who are addressing the real questions. We'll see. So lastly, to wrap up, I think it's very interesting that here we faced a global challenge and yet we have failed very badly in terms of international conflict as individual countries. The EU had a plan, a policy, a committee, but actually you failed to bring people together. France acted as France, Italy acted as Italy. We need to have a review of that. If we face a global problem like this, surely we must find some way that we can cooperate better together. There will be tensions, people pulling back and trying to blame it on the Chinese, but I think those of us who are serious about trying to address these questions need to think, how do we get the international system better capable of dealing with global problems like this? Global warming is the obvious example, but there needs to be a real way of dealing with it. So in conclusion, I think that will be a really important point of the agenda and one subsection of that will be UK-Irish affairs. After Michael and I's time in government where we worked together so closely, really British and Irish relations have been very good until the Brexit negotiations. They're really revocation horses through them sadly, which pretty much 98%, if not 99% of the fault was on our side. How do we go about rebuilding that, particularly if we have to carry on with the Brexit negotiations and things like the border reopened. But I'm optimistic, I do believe we've reached a new stage now in our relations. It would be very hard to turn that clock back. So I'm optimistic that this crisis and indeed even Brexit will not have a long-term impact on British-Irish relations, but we'll find ourselves in a much better position. So to end, I think that I have sympathy for the government in these problems. They've not handled it well. They will pay a price eventually in an inquiry. But now it's important that particularly on this exiting from the crisis, they have clear leadership, clear communication. And if possible, bringing in some outside people, businessmen, people with practical experience who can run some of these things for them. That would be the sensible thing to do. Michael, thank you very much. I'll stop there and happy to engage in any questions.