People should go about their daily lives, to work, to live, to travel, to shop, to do the things people did in the same way as they did them before 11 September.

There are two outstanding issues in democratic politics these days. One is the relationship with the media, which is now 24/7, and operates with a completely different intensity than even 15 or 20 years ago. How do we have a proper conversation between leaders and country when it's moderated sometimes in a very partisan and inflammatory way? And the second thing is the effectiveness of our democracy. How do we get the right gene and talent pool in politics?

We have a situation where we are rich really as a world overall, and yet we have the capacity to destroy ourselves, either through nuclear weapons or through environmental degradation, and we allow the life chances of hundreds of millions of people to be destroyed because we haven't found the will to tackle it

I don't concede it at all that the intelligence at the time was wrong.

The trouble is nowadays that parts of the media operate in a very partisan way. There's no point in complaining about it, that's the way it is. But let's be clear, a lot of it is driven by the views of a pretty small number of people, rather than a normal standard of journalism.

Whatever the short term clashes between protecting the environment and eradicating poverty, medium term and long term it is clear. Unless we grow sustainably, at some point we face catastrophe

There are big questions about the sort of skills you need in modern government today. You put politicians in charge of billions of dollars with absolutely no training and very little support system around them. It's an extraordinary thing.