The multinational corporations now developing budgets often bigger than medium-sized countries — these live in a global space which is largely unregulated, not subject to the rule of law, and in which people may act free of constraint.

The generous way of putting it is that we were not ready for this. The less generous way is to say: How was it possible to return to the politics of appeasement of the 1930s?

Coalition will come sooner or later, I'm certain of that.

My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut.

Now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico; it’s a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down; the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia; food riots in Africa.

At the next election he'll offer the British public an alternative that provides weight and substance and seriousness in a political debate that is, frankly, increasingly obsessed with modishness and flim-flam.

What my future will not be is active politics in the Liberal Democrat party.