 You worked for Afghanistan, you were a government in Iraq, and then you came back and joined politics. Why did you do that based on your experience? I think I realised that although it's incredibly exciting to be working in other people's country, in the end if you really want to make a change you have to return to your own country, particularly if like me you're interested in political change, because the kind of political change which a foreigner can bring in somebody else's country is very very limited. So how do you expect that your role in politics will help change things for the better? I'm not sure, I expect this. I think changing things through politics is very difficult. But I do feel deeply that the best question to pose people of our generation is not exactly what do you do to countries like Afghanistan or what do you do to countries like Iraq? In other words, how do you turn them into us? The more difficult question is what do we do with our own countries? Where do they go? So would you say you're disappointed in your time abroad? You didn't achieve what you wanted? I think I'm disappointed by the international community in general, and yes my own personal time abroad, I mean certainly when I was in Iraq it was a disaster, but I think it's a disaster at a more structural level. I mean it's not only the individual, it's not only the mistakes that I made trying to deal with the Civil War or trying to stop people firing rockets into my building, it's the complete idea that foreigners can come in from another country with a very limited understanding of the language and the culture and attempt to apply a very very vague plan on somebody else's society. So I think this is not just disappointing, I think it's scandalous, it's objectionable. Scandalous? That's a very strong term. What do you think is to be done about it? I think the first thing is the international community, Holland, Britain, the United States, needs to acknowledge its limits. It needs to acknowledge how little it knows, how little it can do, how little legitimacy it has. We need to be honest about ourselves, we need to be honest that we don't speak these people's languages very well, that we are isolated in compounds, that we don't spend nights in people's houses, that we don't have long-term commitment to these countries, that we're impatient on the one hand and on the other hand we need to try to acknowledge that the local society has much more energy, much more power than we ever acknowledge, that we talk about these countries as they're their failed states, as they're their blank, whereas in fact there's incredible amount of local energy institutions, practices, local politicians, Afghan politicians can do much more than we acknowledge, we can do much less. Alright, then my final question before you can head up to have breakfast, what is your personal mission right now and how would you like to fulfill it? I think my personal mission is to try to do my part to convince people of the dignity and the glory of politics, to pull people back into the political sphere. At the moment we live in a society which is either obsessed with trying to change the world at a completely crazy and impossible level, you know, talking about ending global poverty or ending global conflict, or we live in a world where everybody just gives up and they retreat into their home and they say, oh what matters is my family and I'll just get on with my life. The complete middle ground, which is the ground of elected politics, of the citizen has lost all its dignity and in order to recreate it, it's not just a question of getting politicians to participate, it's a question of getting citizens to take this seriously again, to believe that there is moral value in the civic sphere. So we should have more belief in our politicians? We should have much more belief in the idea of politics. We should encourage the bristest of our generation, not to be management consultants, but to stand for election at local councils. We should try to ensure that we create societies where people understand that we are political animals, that the political decisions are the most important, most virtuous parts of our lives, and that if we don't engage with those things we create a world of unreality, that the politics is the most real part potentially of our lives.