DJ: So you think the Left is drawing the wrong conclusions?

NC: Yes, a lot of people on the Left and liberals sound like paleo-conservatives in America or Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind, and Simon Jenkins-type conservatives in Britain. There's very little difference between them.

AR: People who would have let the slaughter go on in the Balkans or Rwanda, or as we have in the Congo. At least five million people have died in the civil war in the Congo, and you hardly ever read about it, you hardly ever see it on the television screens and we're doing nothing.

NC: Strangely enough, in America, there was a huge movement about Darfur — on the Left and Right. George Clooney was involved, black churches were involved. But in Britain and Europe we heard very little about Darfur. Mainly you get endless pieces in the liberal press saying it's not really genocide. 

AR: Blair was right when he talked about a million people dying in Rwanda and we sat around in the West and did nothing about it. We are going to have to have a re-examination of this because, Nick's right, although Iraq's been terrible for the cause, does that mean you get a Tory isolationism plus a Left that doesn't want to do anything about it? We just wash our hands of the most appalling acts being perpetrated around the world?

DJ: That's the poisonous combination we had in the 1930s.

NC: It's going to be more than that. With the rise of radicalism certainly, with Russia possibly, it's not just that we sit here and decide whether we intervene or not as if we are all-powerful Westerners. There might be people coming for us, what then do we do about it? It strikes me that if you don't have liberal reasons to help Muslims who are being oppressed by radical Islamists, then we are in trouble. What I wanted to ask was what happens if Labour and Brown form the next government? What would that government be like?

AR: It still looks unlikely, I'd say, but it's no longer completely outlandish, which means I might just have to adjust the title of this book.

NC: You could just say it's got a long shelf-life, keep it on the bookshelves until 2015.

AR: There are two scenarios. Scenario number one: Labour is the biggest party, but hasn't got a majority. Can it do a deal with the LibDems? Very difficult for the Liberal Democrats. It might be sellable to the party by their leadership if they could say, "OK, but Labour's going to have a new leader, this one's being rejected." Although that could work as a neat Westminster deal, the logistics are fantastically hard to pull off, not least the problem of Gordon saying, "Well, I'm not going actually because I'm the leader of the largest party." The Liberals have not been in power since Lloyd George, and their first taste of power would be doing swingeing public spending cuts. That would be terribly, terribly difficult for them. 

Scenario number two: let's just say there's this most remarkable recovery since Lazarus and Brown's back in Number 10, we assume with a very small majority. It's going to be amazingly tough for a government with that small a majority to deliver big-time public spending cuts — tough for whoever gets in. None of the parties is being honest yet about what that's going to feel like. We've not had cuts like these since 1945, they're going to be more severe than anything Margaret Thatcher did and they lie to you — all of them — when they say they can do it from efficiency savings — they cannot, it's going to hurt frontline services. Some people on the Left, certainly a lot of Tories might think, a bit of schadenfreude, how wonderful it would be to watch Gordon Brown having to clean up his own mess, I can see people arguing that.

NC: I quite like that one.

AR: I think secretly, although it's very hard for them to say so — politicians never want to go out of power, they could be in power six terms and would still argue that they should be in power for a seventh — but some of them secretly think that, maybe the best result for Labour would be for a Tory government with a smallish majority to do the really nasty stuff. We've had what I call long-wave politics recently: three terms of Labour preceded by four terms of the Tories, but it doesn't always have to be like that. You look back to the Sixties and Seventies, it's more pendulum politics. Labour could be out for only one term, and given what's going to have to be done, the Tories could get unpopular very, very quickly, especially because they're not fully worked out themselves. Labour, remaining in a sensible place and under attractive leadership, would not necessarily be out for more than a term. Some of them must secretly think that is really the most attractive result but they'd never want to admit it.