Welcome to this evidence hearing for the Foreign Affairs Committee. We are officially beginning our inquiry into the soft power strategy for the UK’s success. I am pleased that we have in front of us two exceptionally important witnesses, and we are grateful to them for coming today. Would you introduce yourselves, please?

I am Michael Clarke. I am the former director of the Royal United Services Institute, and currently a visiting professor at King’s College London and the University of Exeter. With my co-author Helen Ramscar, I wrote a book about Britain’s soft power called “Britain’s Persuaders: Soft Power in a Hard World”, which came out in 2019.

Available at all good booksellers.

Good morning, Chair, and thank you very much for the invitation to take part in today’s session. My name is Jonathan McClory. I am a partner at Sanctuary Counsel, an advisory firm located just around the corner, next to Westminster Abbey. I have spent much of my career advising and consulting for Governments, NGOs and international organisations on matters of soft power, public diplomacy and wider global engagement. When I am not consulting, I am very much a researcher at heart. I began my career in the think-tank world. When I was at the Institute for Government, I created what was then the world’s first composite index for measuring the soft power of countries. I then made my way into the private sector, where I did a second iteration of that soft power index called the Soft Power 30, which ran for five years from 2015 to the end of October 2019, when the last one was published—kind of a final snapshot just before the covid pandemic. As I say, I remain a researcher at heart. I have a connection to Hertford College, Oxford, where I am a research associate, and I still carve out time to lead research projects and write on matters of soft power and public diplomacy. Most recently, I was commissioned by the think-tank Labour Together to write a report on what the new-ish Government should do to reset the UK’s approach to soft power.

Very good. May I begin by asking you, Professor Clarke, how you define soft power with reference to foreign policy and international affairs? How is it distinct from hard power, and do those areas overlap?

I have very distinct views about what these days is called soft power. It is a fairly modern concept. Earlier writers on power did not talk about it because they did not think they needed to; it was all part of power. I should say at the start that I do not regard soft and hard power as some sort of seesaw, so that when hard power is more evident, soft power is less evident. It is not like that. Power is a relationship between two or more things; there is a spectrum of power. Hard and soft power tend to go together in the sense that hard power is used most efficiently when there is a soft power element to it, and when soft power is evident, usually it is more effective when hard power is not too far away. I do not regard them in any sense as opposites. I regard them as ways of describing a complex relationship, a spectrum of instruments. I could give you lots of examples of the use of the military being very soft power, in the sense that the military performs very diplomatic functions a lot of the time. Even when the military goes to war it still provides a soft power benefit, because if it goes to war in a way that is admired by others, others want to imitate it. They want to imitate the order, the success, the legality of what it does when it does things properly. Soft power is the power of imitation, because other states want to be like that. Equally, at the other end of the spectrum, you can use cultural exchanges in a very hard power way. If, to indicate your displeasure, you cancel the visit by the national ballet, or say you will not go to the World cup, you will not let your athletes do this and you will not attend that, you are actually using cultural issue in a hard power way, because you are trying to induce behaviour. Effectively, most of the time, hard power is the manipulation of instruments to try to affect someone’s behaviour. Soft power is magnetism—the power to be admired, and it creates the desire to imitate. That is the way I would put it.

You say there are times when there is overlap, so hard power works best when soft power is working at the same time. Do you mind giving us an example of that?

Yes. To offer the most obvious example, if military force is being used but it is clearly being used within the framework of a proper legal mandate, and is being used in a way that is self-evidently proportionate and disciplined, that is showing the rest of the world that when British forces go somewhere, they do it properly. We have not always shown that, of course, but that is the ideal. When British forces turn up, you will notice, and we will perform our operations well. That creates the tendency to want to imitate—other countries want to have forces that look a bit like the British forces and behave a bit like the British forces. Similarly, many other countries would prefer their forces to be trained by Britain rather than by the United States, partly because our size makes us more comparable with them, as opposed to the big one-size-fits-all aspect of the United States. That is an extreme example; another example is hard power being used in terms of economic manipulation. Sanctions may or may not be effective, but sanctions being imposed is an expression of hard power. If they are imposed within a proper legal framework and in a way that shows that we have a reason for doing what we do, and that that reason is consistent with what we think the rest of the world will sympathise with, even if they do not agree—if we explain it properly and diplomatically—that soft power element is helping that hard power coercive behaviour to be more effective. If hard power is just thrown at a problem, it may or may not work, but it will be more efficient if it is surrounded by things which the rest of the world at least understands and is sympathetic to, even if it does not approve.

Jonathan McClory, to what extent do you agree with that, and is there anything else you want to add?

I absolutely agree, and perhaps I can add some comments to reinforce what Professor Clarke is saying. Hard power is about coercion, which is done through military force or the threat of force, through economic sanctions, or indeed through payment. It is coercion; it is about behaviour and changing behaviour. Soft power is about attraction and persuasion; essentially, while obviously it is about changing behaviour, it is about changing preferences. As Joseph Nye, who coined and developed the term, has said, soft power is about getting others to want what you want. It is about bringing others along. A good way to think about soft power is not necessarily as power over others, but as power with others—building coalitions for action and working collaboratively. I suppose that is the only thing I would add.

Is aid hard power?

That’s a good question, a topical one and very relevant, and I think you know that there are strong feelings on both sides. Going back to what Michael was saying, power does exist along a spectrum; this is not a binary, where there is hard power only or there is soft power only. Aid is a bit of both. Aid serves several different purposes in terms of soft power or foreign policy. It is an important diplomatic signal of your values and, one could argue, of your moral character. Secondly, particularly in very difficult, unstable places, it is about trying to create some stability. Thirdly, it is about relieving some suffering for groups of people facing extreme hardship. The moral signalling, the diplomatic signalling, is soft power, but how much money you pour into this is a reflection of hard power, of economic largesse. That is why it is a bit of both. I might be jumping ahead in your line of questioning here, but after the announcement of the proposed cuts to ODA, people might ask: is that going to hit the UK’s soft power? My view—I encourage you to take the view of others—is yes, marginally. It is unfortunate, and in a different world we’d like to be doing more, but we have to meet reality where it is; there are greater demands for security and defence spending and that has to come from somewhere. But I do not think that, among our partners, it will hit too hard. I think we will weather it. I do not think the decision was taken lightly by the Government. I think they probably want to get back to previous levels, but there is understanding of why that money needs to be needs to be allocated elsewhere, at least temporarily. I do not see that being really destructive to the UK’s soft power as yet.

To take that a bit further, I think one of the direct results of the changes happening in the US in terms of cutting USAID is the closure of Voice of America. What might the impact of that be in terms of soft power and influence, and is there a knock-on effect in terms of the importance or otherwise of the BBC World Service?

I am so glad you asked that question. I was going to jump into that, but I did not want to get too far ahead. I do not want to be too extreme, but I think the closure of Voice of America is a long-term disaster for American soft power. It is incredibly short-sighted. There will be celebrations in Chinese and Russian state-backed media, which will look to fill the gap. Even though cuts to ODA need to be made, I implore our Government not to cut the BBC World Service out of our ODA budget.

Why do you say cuts need to be made?

Cuts to ODA? You can put that question to the Government, but I assume it is a reallocation of resources, and thinking about all of our foreign affairs resources in one envelope. Sometimes you have to dial some resources up and others down, and the money has to come from somewhere. Again, it is probably a question for the Government, but I can see the logic in having to dial down ODA in the immediate term to shore up defence and security spending where it is needed more. That may be a strange thing to say during a soft power inquiry, and it is not something I think any advocate of soft power aid will be celebrating. It is a loss, absolutely, but I can see the logic. I am trying to keep a cool head and ask whether it is going to hit the UK’s soft power. Immediately, maybe marginally, but not as much as not providing what need to provide in terms of defence and security resources right now. I hope that answered that. To go back to the BBC World Service—we can extrapolate further into other areas where we are already seeing a retreat of American leadership—there is an opportunity for the UK to fill what is going to be a vacuum in global governance, in frontier technology global governance probably, in climate governance, and obviously, with the shuttering of Voice of America, in the global information landscape. The BBC World Service is just a tremendous asset for the UK and a huge asset for the whole of the Western alliance. I hold it up as one of the main pillars of British soft power. It gives fantastic value for money. Russian and Chinese state-backed media are spending on average, year on year, between £6 billion and £8 billion—that is year on year. I do not have the BBC World Service budget in front of me, but I think it is in the hundreds of millions; I think it is less than £500 million a year—about £400 million, maybe. BBC World Service and BBC News, according to studies, are the most trusted news sources in the world. That is an amazing asset for the UK. Everywhere we go, people are more likely to think us fair, trusted and even-dealing. When the information really matters, that is where they are going to go. We could go on and on about the state of disinformation, but the BBC World Service is a bulwark against that. As an example, the BBC World Service cut shortwave radio broadcasting into Lebanon—

BBC Arabic.

Yes, BBC Arabic. We vacated a radio frequency there, and Russian state-backed media came swooping in and now broadcast on that same frequency. As we pull back, others will fill the vacuum. Despite all that money spent, Russian and Chinese state-backed media do not enjoy anywhere near the same level of trust that the BBC World Service does.

I quite understand your passion, but what I want to know is, in the circumstances, would it be your strong advice to the Government to increase spending on the BBC World Service at this moment?

If money can be found, yes, I would be doubling down on the BBC World Service. As VoA is shuttered and vacates, it becomes more important—absolutely.

Maybe you can take over some of the frequencies.

Quite possibly.

Given the definitions that you have given of the concept of soft power, if it is to be real and meaningful, you might expect it to explain some of the actions or policy decisions that different Governments and states are making. Would you consider it a meaningful concept for understanding why states are doing the things they do and making the decisions that they do?

Do you mean in terms of what the impact is?

We talk a lot about this concept of soft power, and it feels like some of the benefits, although real, are very intangible. If there were real benefits, we might expect to see that translating into the policy decisions that different Governments and states are making. Do we see that, or is it just something where we say, “We’ll do this and hope that it is having a positive influence”?

It is probably a mix of the two, but I would come down more on the side of there being an impact. We can divide that into two types. There is a steady drumbeat of the impact of soft power, which tends to come through an economic benefit. Studies have shown that countries that are more admired—those that have more soft power—do better on exports. Their goods abroad can charge a premium. They are more likely to attract higher levels of foreign direct investment. They are more attractive to international students. That is the steady drumbeat of benefit that countries can accrue if they are admired, and so have soft power. The second group of outcomes or benefit would be the big one-off moments where a change can come about. The best examples tend to be multilateral, so things like the Kimberley process, which put in place regulations around conflict diamonds, where you have to build a coalition of the willing to bring about change and get people onboard. Another example is the Ottawa process, which, with a few exceptions, had most countries signing on to ban landmines. Another is the establishment of the International Criminal Court—it is all about how we can bring together a collective of actors to take action. Those are the moments. You could also say that the UK getting into the CPTPP was an exercise of British soft power, because on the face of it, what on earth is Britain doing in a Pacific-facing trading bloc?

Distracting ourselves from leaving the EU.

Well, that could be said. Even so, it is a good example of British soft power where you had some real champions within the CPTPP. Japan in particular was very supportive of our membership in that. Geographically we have no business being in that trading bloc, but we were seen as bringing something good to the table because, by and large, we are an admired country that does bring things to the table. That is an example of British soft power in action.

You said earlier that soft power is about building coalitions. How important would you say the UK’s being part of global networks and transnational organisations such as the Commonwealth is for soft power diplomacy?

Hugely important—and not just membership of those organisations. The individual British roles in these international organisations are also very important.

In several previous sessions, people have talked about the UK as a global convenor. Would you consider being a global convenor as part of our soft power, and is it therefore important to be a fundamental part of these groups and organisations?

I would say yes—but I have been rambling. Mike, do you want to answer?

Yes, absolutely it is. Just reinforcing what Jonathan said, of the two most obvious ways in which soft power seems to have a specific benefit—there are all sorts of ways—one is the investment climate in Britain. It is not just a matter of the performance of the economy, but whether individuals from around the world with technical expertise, particularly in the financial sector, want to come and work here. They think about their families and whether this is a place that they want to settle for five or 10 years or longer. That really matters. The other area is in diplomacy and the fact that British diplomacy is still regarded as very influential, both bilaterally and multilaterally, because British diplomats are regarded as effective. They are practical and they get on with it. They are very good at drafting compromise texts and so on. It makes us boringly useful in international forums, where a lot of other nations grandstand for their own sake, but the British get on with it. There is a sense that because we convey an idea that we are competent, that we know what we are doing and that we do not grandstand particularly—or not usually—that gives us this convening power. It is not just there by accident. It is there because British officials, by and large, are well trusted to do what they need to do. The Commonwealth is an astonishing organisation, but we have always lamented that it is really hard to mobilise the Commonwealth on any given issue. There are lots of differences in the Commonwealth: cultural differences and differences over issues of LGBTQ politics and racial politics and so on. They exist. But a lot of people have felt that we could have used our Commonwealth convening power much more effectively over the last 30 years if we did not regard it as just a “nice to have” element based around the monarch and the monarchy. It is more important than that. A lot of other countries would love to have a Commonwealth like ours, and none of them do. No other country has anything remotely like it. It would be better if we thought much more creatively, avoiding the issues on which we know the Commonwealth would disagree and concentrating not just on the sport element and Heads of Government meetings, but on the more specific regional issues in which the Commonwealth can play a role, and I think there are quite a lot of them.

I want to return to something you said, Mr McClory. Both of you have been talking about the benefits of soft power, but I am wondering how we actually measure it. Are there tangibles? Are there palpable metrics that we can look at?

It depends on what we are measuring. It can be very difficult and certainly tedious to try and measure these things. We can measure the inputs—the soft power assets and the resources that countries have—that the UK has. There is now a decent emerging literature. Indeed, Professor Clarke’s most recent book goes into that in great detail. It is important. What separated the index that I created from similar studies that came before was that it combined objective metrics—things that we can touch, feel and count—with subjective data. Previous and most current studies are wholly reliant on polling, and there is some value in that, but with polling, you are into the downstream effects for policymakers. With objective metrics, you can see where things have maybe fallen back and where you can make tweaks. It is much easier, though still difficult, to measure the inputs—those resources. Measuring the impact—I would be interested to know what you think, Michael—is probably best left, in a way, to historians. When the Government have said, “We want to achieve x”, you can track back to find out whether they achieved x and what forces were brought to bear on that. In finding whether there were elements of soft power, you have to work back and cut through that complexity, so it is probably best left to historians.

That feeds back into what you were saying about the cuts to ODA: in reality, it is difficult to find the link between cause and effect. There is no way of saying, “If I increase ODA by 3%, I get x back in inward investment.”

You might be able to run a correlation analysis on that, and you might establish a correlation, but correlation is not necessarily causation. That would be quite difficult. You can do it on hyper-targeted things. If you are looking specifically at an outcome or an objective that has a binary outcome—it either happened or it did not—you can kind of work backwards and work it out. I do not think there is a way to create a really easy dashboard of whether we are winning or losing in the soft power stakes—in outcomes, anyway.

I think Jonathan is exactly right, as you were in your question, Mr Morello. Soft power is best understood in fairly long-term ways. The perception of a country usually is not geared to what its Government are doing in that particular term or what even the last two or three Governments have done; the last five or six Governments will tend to create a 20 or 30-year narrative that it is this or that sort of country. During the cold war, the Soviet Union had under its influence about a third of the world’s population. It did so in very traditional hard power ways, using manipulation of energy and military force and training—all hard power stuff—but there was a lot of soft power in that as well, because individuals from many countries around the world went to study engineering in Russia, learned Russian and adopted a Russian mindset on the way world politics worked. That accompanied the Soviet Union’s presence on the world stage, so that was both hard and soft power together. Over that period, however, for all the Russians did that gave them a soft power advantage, it disappeared pretty quickly. There were not really many roots to it. The soft power advantages that a country may derive take a long time to build up. They may take a long time to decline but, if they do decline, they probably take a long time to rebuild again. There are long historical cycles at play when we try to understand the soft power that countries may possess.

I accept the points both of you have made, but in terms of the policy success you are talking about, are there trends? If there is not empirical data, are there trends on, “If you do this, this is the real-world benefit you get,” which we can see as a model, looking globally, to say “If a country pursues this soft power avenue, this is the real-world benefit they can enjoy.”?

I think there are. Jonathan’s material has captured quite a lot of them. Some of them were indices. A very measurable one is the number of students who want to come to study, or the number of foreign nationals who want to come to work in your country at a certain level of expertise. There are certain metrics, but that, in a sense, is not the totality; those are just indices of how your country is regarded in the fundamentals. Is it stable, is it law-abiding, is it prosperous and is there opportunity? Generally speaking, it comes down to those rather big concepts—the understanding that a country is stable, law-abiding and prosperous, and there is opportunity. If it has those elements, the indices—number of students, inward investment and that sort of thing—are telling you quite a lot. But they are only indices; they are not the be-all and end-all of a soft power benefit.

Absolutely, and I go back to what I said earlier about the two types of benefit. There are the steady drumbeat benefits—Michael just mentioned some of them—that are more economic in nature. Studies show that more admired countries will do better in terms of exports, foreign direct investment and international students, which is a funny one, because I would say that it is both a benefit of soft power and a soft power resource. Studies have shown that when international students go back to their home country, they leave with a higher favourability towards the host country they studied in. There is also a ripple effect to people around them—they tend to be mini-ambassadors for the country in which they studied. Our ability to attract the best global talent is wrapped up in all the factors that make up a country’s soft power and how people feel about it. Those are the drumbeat ones, and then there are the big set-piece political events that tend to have a binary outcome, whether that is the establishment of new governance standards, a new trade deal with economic partners in the Pacific or even the establishment of a new international organisation. It is helpful to remember that there are those big moments, but there is also this steady drumbeat where there will be a correlation between soft power and smaller day-to-day economic benefit.

I think we all have a rough idea of what the concept of soft power means, but the range of aspects is huge. Britain getting the Olympic games in 2012 was a massive boost to the reputation of the UK. How do you score that? You are producing indices of soft power. Did we suddenly acquire another 10 points because we had got the Olympic games? Our major competitors do not have royal families. Does that give us another 10 points? I do not understand how you can produce a ranking when there are so many different aspects, most of which are utterly unquantifiable.

That is a fair challenge. Every index, including those that I have created, needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. At the end of the day, these are proxies. They give us a snapshot in time that gives us a sense of where the global balance of soft power is, but they are proxies—they are an approximation. Where these metrics become really useful is not so much in answering, “Where does the UK rank? Where does France rank? Where does China rank in this global context?” That is an interesting point of discussion, and commentators might like to debate it, but for policymakers or diplomats—or, indeed, parliamentarians holding them to account—it is about drilling down a level further and looking country by country at what the data says. Let us take the example of the bilateral relationship between the UK and India. What do we have to work with there? Where are the connections? On the subjective side, how are we polling among Indians on science, technology, sport or whatever the factors are? That is where it starts to become a bit more interesting, because that kind of data can then inform how you go about engaging country to country. You are right that that is much more useful than those big indices. For the indices that I did, Olympic medals did factor into the culture sub-index, which I think is a good proxy for—

Every country is competing for Olympic medals. Winning the hosting is a much bigger thing.

I would argue the hosting of big events is absolutely important, and it was great for London in 2012—not just winning it, but the way we delivered it was fantastic. Biases aside, it was a great and very well-run event. Hosting these big events does not always work out that well, though. If you do not do it well, it can be a problem. I am reminded of an analyst researcher called Simon Anholt, who runs a polling study called the Nation Brands Index. I remember him talking about data before and after South Africa hosted the world cup. After the world cup, he saw a dip in global perceptions of South Africa, because a lot of people had thought about South Africa as this country that had come through apartheid and out the other side—Nelson Mandela and all of that. The perception was that it was almost a country of western European levels of development in southern Africa. Then people went there and realised that it has some challenges and problems, and it shone a light on that.

I completely understand that. I think you are the person who essentially invented indices, or—

The methodology of indices, maybe, but I did not invent them.

It may be that this is designed for commentators, but it does get a lot of attention. When China overtakes the UK—as it is reported that apparently it has—that gets a lot of attention. China is now outperforming us on soft power. Why did China overtake us? What measure suddenly made China better than us?

Let me stress that that is not my index. That was not me.

Where is China on your index then?

It was the Brand Finance index, wasn’t it?

Yes, the Brand Finance index put China there. In terms of my index, in the Soft Power 30 they were hovering around 30—between 25 and 30 usually is where China was. I could not speak to that methodology. I know it is based on polling, and it polls a lot of people; you would have to look at where it is polling and how it does all of that. That does not quite compute with me either. I would not put Chinese soft power there, and I am not sure how many analysts would. This is something we might come on to later, but I will jump on to it now. My own views on the utility of public polling have evolved since I started researching this. I am not saying that it is not useful at all. It can be very helpful to poll the public, but—and I do not mean to sound elitist or undemocratic—in fairness, what does the man or woman on the street in São Paulo really know about Polish foreign policy? Probably not much—with all due respect to the people of São Paulo, because why should they? I am not sure that the nuances would be that well understood in order to create this index.

You have knocked down my next question.

I apologise.

No, it is good that you anticipated it. I was going to say, is this not just a glorified opinion poll? Clearly in your mind it is not. But if it is not just a glorified opinion poll, I am still completely unclear how you rank countries when there are so many different aspects, most of which are impossible to put a measure on.

I suppose, to carry on my train of thought, there is probably more value in doing semi-structured interviews with 100 diplomats, decision makers, policymakers, commentators or investors than polling 100,000 people or 1 million people.

So a focus group, rather than an opinion poll?

I think so, or certainly a group of interviewees. You want to be speaking to the people who are making the decisions we are talking about. Foreign policy is statecraft. It is happening at a very high level. That is probably where you need to go to get a sense of who is up and who is down in the soft power league table.

Sorry to cut across you, but I just want to link this to evidence we heard yesterday from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Much of the evidence was much more serious than this, but one thing that stuck in my mind was that one of the witnesses said that at a public meeting that she had spoken at, she had said something disparaging about the Russians, and there was a sort of hiss that went around the room. I thought that was really striking.

I had a comment directly to that, Chair, in relation to China. The idea that China’s soft power has suddenly improved may be true, but I think it is a very good example of the way hard and soft power work together. A lot of people in the world perceive that China is rising in geopolitical terms—it is becoming more powerful militarily and economically, and it is throwing its weight around, since 2012 with Xi Jinping. Therefore, the soft power index goes up as well, because people take more seriously the sort of place that China is. That is what soft power is. Hard power is what you do; soft power is what you are. As the perception of China’s hard power is increasing, what China is seems more attractive or more consequential. That is exactly the case in terms of Russia. The perception that Russia is now actually an ascendant in world politics, along with China and Trumpist America, translates into a sort of psychology that we need to take that society more seriously. That may be a classic soft power benefit.

Essentially, the reason why Russia was admired was that it was taking on the wicked capitalist west. That was the driving principle—they did not like us more than they did like the Russians, so that played out.

That is a relative judgment that people are making, but it creates a soft power benefit in the same way. Coming back to the rankings, I think Jonathan is exactly right. The press get excited if No. 5 becomes No. 2 and No. 3 falls to No. 8, but the practical policy issues come when you look at the rankings of, say, 150 countries. What is interesting is asking which are the 20-odd at the top where soft power seems important, which are the 50 or 60-odd in the middle where it probably does not make a lot of difference, and which are the 50-odd at the bottom that wish they had a bit more soft power influence, but do not. I regard these things as useful in big handfuls, even though the press, of course, get themselves obsessed with who is up and who is down in very specific terms.

I have people stacked up wanting to speak, so I will go to Aphra and then Blair.

I have a quick follow-up on measuring. The Government’s soft power team are, we have been told, putting together a taskforce to assess how soft power tools can have an impact on hard policy outcomes. Given the challenges that we have been talking about around measuring the impact, I wanted to get your thoughts on whether, if we are focusing too hard on things that are measurable, we might end up encouraging the FCDO to spend money on things that are easy to measure but that will not necessarily have the biggest impact overall.

You raise a really important point. I am interested in the Soft Power Council that has been launched this year. The remit of the Soft Power Council is very limited. It is—

We will come on to the Soft Power Council in a second. Let us get through these two questions first.

Okay, we will talk about that separately then. The danger is that the Government falls into the idea that soft power is about being a cheerleader for all the things that are obviously soft power, such as the BBC World Service, the Arts Council, the film industry and so on. That is fine, but my argument is that soft power is so much wider than that, so Governments need to think a bit more analytically about it. Ultimately, it comes down to institutions, many of which they cannot influence directly, but where they can affect the environment in which those institutions exist, the narrative that they pursue is really important. The narrative that we represent in world politics used to be relatively unchallenged; now it is completely challenged. In those respects, leaving the Soft Power Council aside, and the creative industries initiatives that I fully applaud, I think we have to be much wider in our conception of how soft power in the UK can be conceived and augmented in the best way by a whole-of-society approach.

May I add to that quickly? It is good that the unit exists, and I commend its work so far. There is a role for focusing on how we make sure that HMG is a good steward of our soft power assets, but I think it would be a mistake to have a separate group of objectives just around soft power. It should be feeding into the wider foreign policy objectives of HMG, and then it is about finding the right tools that go in. Sometimes that is soft power—so great, let us think about how that fits in. To your point about what gets measured and what gets done, if the Government start coming up with, “Well, we need these measurable things. We have to do this and if we don’t do it”—forget that. What are the big objectives that we need to achieve? Let us focus on that, rather than the specifics. What I am driving at is that you would not want a siloed approach to soft power.

Can I ask about something that occurred to me while you were both talking there: the changing way in which people consume media? Is that making the projection of soft power more difficult for liberal democracies? I had the same thought as the Chair when they were talking about the opinion of Vladimir Putin, but I was thinking that if you are thumb-scrolling through the algorithm, you are more likely to see the braggadocious bully than you are the boring, safe, rule-of-law person. Is there now a built-in advantage for demagogues over liberal democrats, in terms of the projection of soft power through the algorithm? Conflict and big personalities cut through in a way that being the more reliable person does not. Is that something either of you has a view on?

I would absolutely agree with that. The nature of media has become so fragmented. Younger people are not so interested in the news, and when they are, they do not really get it from mainstream sources as much as on their tablets or phones, and that fragments the audience. As we have seen in the last 15 years, that fragmentation can be pretty effectively manipulated. We have seen it in elections all over the western world, and we see it in advertising campaigns. The ability to target certain groups of people based on their known preferences—preferences they did not think they were expressing but they have expressed, indirectly, through their choices and what they look at and so on—has made a reliable narrative, of the sort we were talking about in terms of the BBC World Service, very difficult. Yes, the world is much more permissive now to autocratic and undemocratic forces who want to manipulate what happens in democracies. Going back to where we started, that means that soft power is based not on what you do but on who you are. The who we are is more important to us now—to ourselves and to the rest of the world—than at any time that I can think of in my lifetime. It is a huge challenge. We are still trying to grasp the edges—where the challenge starts and finishes—but I do not think anyone would disagree that the challenge is there, because it is demonstrably there in the rigged elections and the elections that have been interfered with, to our certain knowledge, over the last 20-odd years.

I completely agree with Professor Clarke, and do not have a huge amount to add. The only thing—this is a huge problem and absolutely a challenge—is perhaps a bit of optimism. Every now and again, polling is done on the most and least trusted professions. Usually, journalists are quite low, and doctors and teachers are quite high. I can’t remember where parliamentarians are on it. [Laughter.] Interestingly, in the most recent study, when Ipsos MORI broke this down by age, it found that among Gen Z respondents, trust in journalists was as high as 40%, whereas among other generations it is down around 20%, give or take. I do wonder if there is something happening with the digital-native generation that means they will be slightly less susceptible to some of that manipulation, because they have grown up with it constantly and there will be a bit of a jaundice-eyed cynicism around it, and that they know that when information is important, they need to go to a legitimate, reputable source rather than asking, “What’s this TikToker talking about?” That is my optimistic take.

The other side of that coin is that there is a generation of people who have grown up to be sceptical. They are sceptical of everything. They are sceptical of what the Government says, of what institutions say, of what the news says—they are so sceptical of absolutely everything that they end up clinging on to some crackpot theory that they have got on social media. They become the ultimate conspiracy theorists because they are so sceptical. They do not have an instinct for what is more reliable and what is less reliable. I hope that is not a generational phenomenon, but you certainly see it. The scepticism, scepticism, scepticism breeds ultimate credibility for the stupidest, most crackpot theories.

We are trespassing a bit on our disinformation inquiry.

It is very good. We are writing it down. We may add it to the disinformation inquiry. It is very interesting.

This Committee travelled to Paris back in January, and we heard there from the UK ambassador, but also from representatives from the British Council, about the resonance of the British royal family, for instance, amongst French citizens. To what extent is a country’s ability to project and show influence through soft power a result of its ability to tell a story, or its brand, rather than the actual assets that a nation has?

It is hugely important, I would say. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are both very important, right? All the soft power assets in the world won’t do you that much good unless you can mobilise them, and part of mobilising them is having a compelling narrative. Equally, if you have an absolutely brilliant, silver-tongued story about the country but none of the underlying assets are there to underpin that, it just crumbles on contact with reality. In the Labour Together report that I wrote, which I referenced earlier, I tried to make the argument that narrative is hugely important, and that probably for the first six months of the Government, the narrative wasn’t fantastic, and that we definitely need a pivot to a more positive narrative. A couple of years ago—it is referenced in that report—a Rand Corporation study looked at the factors that make for a successful country, not in soft power terms, just writ large. The first factor and recommendation given was an overarching national narrative, a kind of purpose—"Who are we? What are we doing? Where are we going?” In soft power terms it is, “What can we bring to the global community?” Without that, any country will struggle to move the needle and put soft power resources into play. So they are very important.

How effective do you think the UK has been at weaving that narrative, that story?

We have probably not done a brilliant job of it. Not that we want to turn this into a relitigating of Brexit, but since then, I think, we have struggled to work out what our narrative is. We spent decades being part of Europe but global—the Atlantic bridge, all of these things. We were the most networked country in the world, and we have lost one of those big networks. Obviously, we are not going back—certainly not any time soon—so we have to do something different, but I think we have struggled. Given the change in leadership and the overall political instability while we were working out what our post-Brexit future would be, we have struggled with that. I get a sense that we are perhaps at a moment where we are turning the corner. In a funny way, all the disruption brought on by the first couple of months of the Trump Administration has really galvanised thinking, and perhaps given the Government a bit more purpose. So there is an opportunity to clearly define our narrative and where we are going. But I don’t think it has been great for the last nine years or so.

I think we have been a country that has not shown the world that it is confident in itself, for all sorts of reasons that we could talk all day about. Some of that we can blame on ourselves, and some of that is just unfortunate: it is just the rhythm of history. What we are aiming for, I guess, is a country that shows more self-confidence in who we are and what we do, in whatever situation we are in. Life for us in the 2020s, geopolitically, is going to be very uncomfortable, as it is for all European states. We are in for a period of real international discomfort—probably quite extreme discomfort—but as we go through that period, we need to show some confidence in who we are. And ultimately—maybe anticipating what we may talk about later—that comes down to confidence in our institutions. Our institutions did not buckle under the pressures of internal nationalism or the devolution arguments. They did not buckle under the pressures of Brexit, they did not buckle under the pressures of covid, and they are not buckling under the pressures of ultra right-wing or ultra left-wing challenges. Our institutions do have resilience, and the network of our institutions, and our confidence in our institutions and their ability to express the sort of country that we are, to me is pretty fundamental to the soft power. Below the level of the Arts Council, the British Council and the BBC World Service, all of which are important, is a sort of hinterland of national institutions. The resilience of those institutions and our sense that we like them are important. R. H. Tawney said, I think in 1907, 1909, “Only those institutions are loved which touch the imagination”. Not many of our current institutions, I would argue, touch our imagination—not the Post Office; not our utilities; not Thames Water. We do not have a lot of institutions that touch our imagination, except perhaps the monarchy and the armed services. There are many institutions in Britain that do not touch our imagination and that we do not care for very much, and that seems to me a very big deficit in the confidence with which we as a society view our existence.

On a slightly different tack, mention was made earlier of the Soft Power Council, which is producing the UK soft power strategy. Mr McClory, you said earlier that measurements, aims and objectives need to take that longer-term view, potentially out to 20 to 30 years. To what extent should the strategy that is being produced have tangible aims and objectives baked in early on?

You are absolutely right that these timeframes are longer, and certainly longer than a single parliamentary term, so it would be right to take a long-term view. Where it can take a more immediate-term view is on two things: thinking about the stewardship of our soft power resources and assets; and setting, for here and now, what our national narrative is, for all our global partners. What are we doing? What are we here for? What do we bring to the table? That needs to happen now; we need to do that work now. I would say that is probably the balance.

Professor Clarke, you mentioned that there were potential concerns about the scope of the Soft Power Council’s terms of reference.

I have concerns; I think the terms of reference are not very ambitious. This group of very useful, distinguished people are going to meet, as I understand it, about four times a year. There are 20-odd people on the council, so they will obviously have lots of ideas, and they will exchange ideas and spark off each other four times a year. I wish there was more evidence of a more persistent consideration. I would like to see a champion, or a little group of people who are champions of soft power, who are good networkers. Again, we found in the covid response that there were some people who were really good at networking between different parts of our society—they didn’t normally talk to each other because they didn’t think they needed to. The thing about soft power is that lots of groups do not think they need to talk to each other. Some do, obviously—the film industry and the entertainment industry do—but do they speak to premiership football very much? Do they deal with the regulatory organisations, which were really very good, like the International Maritime Organisation, over the road? People who can bring others together, just sparking off those possible relationships, will be very good. Also, going back to what I said about institutions, the Soft Power Council seemed to be focused on the obvious ones, perfectly well—the World Service and those in the arts and culture, and so on. They are all important, but the level below that—the hinterland of that—did not seem to have as much representation. Without making the council so big that it is unwieldy, that has to be done, I would think, in some other way.

Who is missing? Give us a couple of examples.

What is missing is a secretariat around it, rather than more people on the council. I noticed that General Sir Nick Carter was on it, and I was very pleased to see Dr Comfort Ero on the council, along with Mark Leonard. Those are all people with a geopolitical sense of power in all its aspects, but I would like to see, not 10 more people put on the council, but a more permanent expression of how its work would interact with wider foreign policy objectives. In a way, it has got to plug into, not just the Foreign Office, but all our outward-facing Departments of state. The Foreign Office had a little soft power unit a while ago, which I think was useful, but—

It is still there.

It is still there, but I don’t think it can penetrate the Whitehall silos well enough.

We took evidence from the directors of the Foreign Office unit, alongside a director from DCMS, so I think there is cross-Whitehall co-ordination going on at official level.

But it has to go below the Whitehall level as well—that is my point. We need to think through our national institutions. Some of our institutions—the monarchy, the armed forces and the judiciary—are Government. Below that is a level of arm’s length relationships, such as the BBC and the Arts Council. That is fine. Then, below that are organisations that certainly do not want to be dragooned by Government or told by Government what they ought to be concentrating on—that is not the idea—but these institutions are really important to the projection of the United Kingdom in the world. The Government might be able to help the environment in which they exist, or at least be aware of what they do. That needs a lot more investigation, more work and some championing, which could feed into the Soft Power Council.

Can I add to that quickly? On who is missing, I would argue it is DSIT, and indeed science and tech more broadly. We can perhaps get into it, but a core part of the argument in my most recent report was that we have probably over-indexed on the soft power elements of culture, heritage and those more consumer-facing elements of soft power. Really, we need to lean into more of the science, tech and national capabilities.

That is something that Abtisam is really interested in.

There is one; I cannot remember exactly what it is—I think it is a scientific organisation, or it might be one of the universities from Northern Ireland. Obviously, the Foreign Secretary and the Culture Secretary are jointly chairing the council. Three chairs are perhaps too many, but DSIT feels to me like a notable absence on the council.

I want to come in on that final point in relation to what our universities export internationally. Given the riots last summer and how political rhetoric can be one the indices—to use one of your words—in relation to soft power, how do those affect the overall view of soft power? Universities are saying we have had a massive drop in international students as a result of perceptions.

It would have a negative impact, without question. Economically, international students are a massive export industry for us, and part of our soft power is that international students themselves go back with links to the UK. Between us and the US, I think UK universities have educated more world leaders than any other country. That is quite remarkable, and not to be sniffed at. When there are events like last summer’s riots, or unhelpful divisive political rhetoric, they weigh on our ability to attract not just international students, but global talent. That is net negative.

Coming back to what Sir John said earlier about how we measure soft power, it all feels very subjective; it feels very much as though these are our western perceptions. How does the global south view soft power? Is it different in their eyes?

We cannot lump all the global south together, but I think it does have a different view. To go back to the ranking that Sir John referenced—again, it is not my index or ranking—and put up a defence of it, it is possible, not that they were over-indexed, but that they were more appropriately indexed on polling from the global south. In the global south, China certainly fares better than it would do perceptions-wise in the west. Likewise, Russia will be seen differently in certain global south countries from how it would be seen here. The way that perceptions work has definitely changed. What I do not have an answer to is this question: is the calculus different for people in the global south, or in different parts of it? Are the things that shape our opinion of other countries compatible with others in the global south? I do not know. It would be a really interesting study; I would love to do that. But I am not sure of the answer now.

I still think it comes down to those three basics: is a society stable, is it prosperous and is there opportunity? I think that people in the global south have an instinctive sense of that as well as we do. If global south societies—say, Brazil or Argentina—seem stable and prosperous, and have opportunity, then they are attractive societies, and more attractive societies than the ones that do not seem to have those things. When we come to the global images of the Southport riots, or whatever we might be talking about, it is extremely damaging to our sense that we are in essence a stable society. There was always an assumption, until the financial crisis of 2008, that the most prosperous societies were the liberal democratic societies. That was an instinctive assumption—that if you wanted to be prosperous, it was better to be liberal democratic to allow entrepreneurship, freedom and all the rest of it. Since 2008, I think that assumption has worn very thin across the global south, because self-evidently societies that are not particularly liberal democratic are a good deal more prosperous than we are. They are maybe not more equal internally, but they are a good deal more prosperous.

In terms of how you group things together, earlier you said that you would not see it as advantageous to talk to the general public in assessing soft power, but that it was perhaps better to talk to smaller groups or to have smaller workshops. Would it not defeat the purpose of looking at soft power overall if we are not speaking to the general population?

I think there is a role for both. I mean, countries need to speak to publics, but they also need to be speaking to the elite decision makers. Foreign policy is one of those things where—

Why the “elite decision makers” if it is the general public who would make an assessment about a country?

It depends what country. We have to deal with countries that are not necessarily democratic, so speaking to the people might not be all that helpful. You have to go to the decision makers. I do not mean to sound elitist or undemocratic, but foreign policy is not—that kind of area of statecraft or policy—

I will just use an example in relation to our cultural sector. It is the general populations externally who view our monarchy or pop stars—Adele, Ed Sheeran, all of those people—as being intrinsic to British culture. Why would we have a hierarchy—a different level—for speaking to business leaders and global leaders, instead of assessing the strength of those kind of institutions in our soft power?

I did not mean to have painted myself into a corner and say you should only focus on one; you have to do both. But what I am saying is that just to poll the public on really niche things, where there is going to be a very limited understanding, will have limited utility for diplomats or for policymakers trying to work out what to do and how we can best bring country x along with what we want to do—

But you referred earlier to speaking to countries based on individual areas, or our individual specific niches, and perhaps approaching a country on that specific area. Now you are saying otherwise and that perhaps we should not speak on individual niche areas.

No, I would say that you need to do both. Well, I guess what I am saying is that sometimes there are niche areas, whether it is a trade deal or trying to make new global governance arrangements. There are going to be areas where there is a very small set of people who are ultimately going to make the decisions. That is just reality; that is the way that foreign policy works. There are other areas where—absolutely—we want to speak to the widest possible range of people and we want to engage the public. I do not mean to say that it is just one over the other and that is it; we need to be doing both. It is helpful to have public engagement and public polling but, if you are wholly reliant on that alone, you do not have the complete picture. It will just make the conduct of foreign policy more difficult. It is both; it is not either/or, and I did not mean to suggest that it is.

We have a fraying multilateral system. Professor Clarke, given that the west has shaped that multilateral system from the off, does that mean that soft power is becoming less relevant for us?

I would argue that soft power is even more relevant in this harsher world that we are going into. We have to play this long. As I indicated, we have to get through the next decade still maintaining our fundamental values and what I would call the crown jewels—the things that really matter to us. Undoubtedly, the multilateral system was based on a general acceptance of western values and western thinking. As we all know, it was a system that had arisen over 200 years or more, and we were taking it for granted. In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the victory of liberal democracy and capitalism seemed obvious, we were very complacent about it and talked about it as if it were the default in world politics. Clearly it is not— certainly not for the foreseeable future. In that respect, we now have to think more carefully about what our values are. We certainly should not take them for granted. The liberal democracies are now becoming—I want to avoid the word “niche”—an embattled part of a broader international system of, let’s say, 30-odd states that are genuine liberal democracies, within a society of 193 members of the General Assembly, the vast majority of whom are not liberal democracies in the way that we are. That embattled status means that we have to operationalise our conscious soft power—things like the Arts Council, our student intakes and so on—as well as think more carefully about the “who we are” thing. Again, I go back to what I said at the beginning: hard power is about the exercise of power to try to change or affect somebody’s behaviour, whereas soft power is about magnetism; it arises not from what you do, but who and what you are. We have been very complacent about who and what we are. We have been very complacent about the fact that other societies wanted to imitate western society—they did until the late 1990s, but it has changed a lot in the last 20-odd years. I would argue that the sort of soft power that we have taken for granted has been badly damaged by events over the last 15 or 20 years, but the concept of soft power is even more important than ever. We have to re-engage with the fundamentals of it—not just the monarchy, the armed forces, the Arts Council and the BBC World Service, important as all those things are, but something broader in terms of our societal institutions. We have to have confidence that those institutions will weather the assault on them that they are facing from the outside. There is narrative assault, an assault on the loyalties of people to those institutions and an assault on their values. I know that all sounds very generalised, but it seems to me—I hope somebody in Government will really take this on—that we have a big conceptual problem ahead of us to understand better the way our institutions work and what makes them as resilient as they are, and to do all we can to increase that resilience and that public involvement in them.

I am sorry to give a time warning, but we are about two thirds of the way through the questions we wanted to ask, but definitely not two thirds of the way through the time. If possible, can we be a bit shorter with the questions, and perhaps the answers too? Then we will have a fighting chance of finishing not at 12 noon but not that late afterwards.

Luckily, one of my questions has already been covered.

Good; I am glad you recognised that.

I am nothing if not efficient. You talked about the amount of money that Russia and China are putting into this space. Is there a competitive advantage when it comes to soft power that we get from being an open society, and a disadvantage for those closed societies? Given the enormous amount of money they are putting into this, they do not seem to be getting the same returns as us.

I would say that they are not getting the same ROI. To go back to Joseph Nye, he often comments on the soft power competition between the US and China and says that for the foreseeable future, notwithstanding the current challenges, American soft power will remain in a better place than Chinese soft power. There is a natural ceiling on Chinese soft power because so many of the sources of soft power come from outside of Government—from civil society and the private sector—whereas in China everything is the state. That is just an inherent disadvantage. Obviously, that will play out differently depending on what country we are talking about—beauty is in the eye of the beholder—so that might not be the limit on soft power for China in some countries that it might be in the UK, Europe or elsewhere among democratic states. The transparency and openness that we have—to go back to the BBC World Service, the fact that BBC News is happy to bite the hand that feeds it is an important signal, and we should welcome that openness and self-criticism—is part of what makes us trusted.

It is not possible, of course, to predict the sort of crises that are waiting for us down the road, but they do seem to be building up. I doubt that the Europe we have at the moment, with 32 members of NATO and 27 members of the EU, will look as cohesive in 10 years’ time. I think it will be much more fragmented. I suspect that northern Europe and southern Europe will have different security and foreign policy agendas, even though they will stay within the organisations. I see an increasing divergence between the things that bother north European states and those that bother south European states, both internally and externally. I suspect that that is where we are moving—into an era, at least for now, of a new imperialist world where the three big powers have imperialist ambitions. It is clear that Russia is a new imperialist power, China is an imperialist power in east Asia, and under Donald Trump the United States is an imperialist power. He is very serious about Greenland, Panama and maybe even Canada—he is serious in his own mind about Canada, certainly. We are looking at a United States that is making comments that support an imperialist agenda. That is completely antithetical to Europe; we thought we had left imperialism behind a century ago, but it is back with us now in expanded form. To get through whatever these challenges turn out to be, we have to consolidate—that is why I mentioned the words “crown jewels”—and to think about what matters to us in terms of our freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of education and freedom of religion. We have to get it right, as opposed to flip-flopping into too much of one and bringing the dial back to too much of another. We need to think about the things that matter to us in our society, more widely than the World Service, the Arts Council and so on, although all those things should be promoted as much as we can. We have to hunker down on the things we think are right and good about our society, and we have to believe in them ourselves. What is worrying is that our public are, at the moment, somewhat confused and lacking in confidence. It is not that we want Governments to be cheerleaders for this—we do not want boosterism or that sort of thing. What we need is a growing, quiet confidence. I am getting more optimistic that that may develop, but that is obviously a different argument. I am sorry; that is a bit of an elliptical answer to your question, but that is the sort of thing we are looking at.

Indeed, and the belief in societies with both internal and external integrity—external integrity that they are not unduly threatened, and internal integrity that they know who they are and are happy about who they are. You could look for good examples of that in some of the Scandinavian states. Finland is a society that lives with a constant sense of threat from over the border—it has lived that way since 1945, arguably since 1940—but, my goodness, they are confident in who they are. It is a small country, and it is different, but they are confident in what makes them the Finnish nation. You could say the same for some of the other Scandinavian nations.

We have probably covered the overseas development aid question, so I will move on to Richard.

Staying with the changing way in which people relate to the nation state of which they are a part, we have seen post pandemic the different ways that people consume media, and we have talked a bit about that. How can we better engage citizens in foreign and security policy to persuade them that investing in soft power matters?

Personally, I think we should explain more the benefits we get from the obvious soft power elements like the film industry, television and so on. A lot of people do not realise how good these organisations are. I always say that Hollywood would not be Hollywood if it wasn’t for Wardour Street, with all the post-production expertise that Britain can bring to bear. We need to be able to talk more about that—not just to have press releases about it, but to popularise the idea that in some areas, Britain has enormous resources of expertise and inventiveness. It might be the regulatory area, advertising, education or even eccentricities. Britain is really good at tolerating eccentricity. We do not take it as a political problem. We almost celebrate eccentricity because it is individual expression. It is about all those sorts of things. We could certainly talk more about that as a way of introducing a broader, less abstract discussion of the sort of thing I have been talking about, which is people’s affection for their institutions. There has to be a way into it, and for me, the way into it is through the obvious victories or success stories we have had, which we all are fairly well aware of, but I think the wider public have only a dim awareness of.

To add to that, I would say three things. To pick up on what Professor Clarke is saying, it is part of the growth agenda—if we are doing soft power well, it does help economically. It helps with security as well, and I think everyone is well aware now that security is pretty important. We can then appeal to a higher purpose. The UK has plenty to bring to the table as a global problem solver. I think the British public want to see that and want to be making a positive difference. Soft power is a big part of how we help to make the world better, whether that is by preparing for the next pandemic or stepping into the leadership vacuum we are going to see on dealing with climate change and the climate emergency. There is also a bit of an education job, so that people recognise that they do feel foreign affairs in a day-to-day way. The link might not be obvious, but they will feel it.

Do you want to ask about the digital aspect, Richard, or do you think we have covered it?

I feel like we covered that when we talked about the changing ways in which people are consuming the media, but I do have one related question. You talked a bit about how hard power and soft power are complementary to each other, but of course, resources are limited, and choices have to be made. If this is something that the UK is very successful at, why, Mr McClory, are you so content to see the shift of spending from soft power to hard power in the way that we have with the shift from development assistance to defence?

I would not say I am content to see it. I understand the logic behind it, and I see it as a temporary measure that needs to be taken to deal with a very real and present danger. But I would like to think we will get back to the levels that we would prefer to see.

Quite a lot. As you say, 15 or 20 years ago, those meetings would have been in Geneva, London or Paris, because certain countries are good at convening, depending on what the issue is. Now, Abdulrahman Al Thani, the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the tiny Qatar, has made himself a star on the diplomatic stage.

A convenor, yes. Mohammed bin Salman is the same. He is very anxious to rehabilitate himself, after the Khashoggi murder, as an international convenor. That is the phenomenon we are seeing more of. The fact that other nations are trying to explicitly take on the convening role means, again, that we cannot be complacent about this. We have always been good at convening.

We certainly could not have President Putin in this country, for sure. That is true; sanctions come with a cost.

It is about the rules of international law though.

The traditional neutral mediator is Switzerland, and even they have signed on to Russian sanctions, so who the neutral platform is has moved.

But that does not prevent Britain being a convenor behind the scenes. If you look at the way in which the Ukrainian 30-day truce deal is going, British diplomats and the Foreign Office seem to have played a pretty good role in keeping that on track, in so far as it is on track. I think history will show that Britain has done some very useful behind-the-scenes diplomacy, which it will get some credit for from the players, although it is also risky.

They are a very important network. Our ambassadors are an important network. Our defence attachés are as well, although they perform different jobs in different countries and regions. We are looking at this on the back of successive cuts over 20-odd years. The number of staff that our embassies have is very small compared with most of our direct competitors—European competitors and big power competitors. We cannot expect as much from our defence attachés and ambassadors, unless we are prepared to put more resource into our international representation. When William Hague became Foreign Secretary, he said there should be no strategic shrinkage. I understand why he said that, but spreading the personnel more thinly just meant that lots of things did not get done. I could keep you here for the rest of the morning talking about the things that British embassies were not able to do around the world that private organisations fixed and did, and the embassy took a certain amount of credit for—there are lots and lots of examples.

Thank you very much indeed. Professor Michael Clarke and Jonathan McClory, your evidence has been so interesting and important for us in establishing this new inquiry. Thank you for your time.