We could afford to avoid facing up to many of the challenges of contradictory commitments. Now we can't do that. Now in some respects we are like many other second-rank powers and in so far as people choose to focus on economic issues — and I'm not an economic determinist for a minute — we don't appear to be playing a clear role at the top of the narrative. We are not a tiger economy. We are not an economy that is seeing great growth rates. We are not a country which attracts an enormous amount of inward investment, other than buying assets in some sort of fire sale. 

I suppose one of the present challenges is to try and right the economy. And if that doesn't happen, there may well be interesting and fascinating intellectual and philosophical ideas and they may be really important but whether anybody else will necessarily be interested in them is another question. I suspect what helps is the very fact that you, Daniel, are sitting here as the editor of a journal which, thanks to English being the universal language, will be read widely outside Britain. Therefore, in a sense, ideas that come to fruition here have a wider resonance. That is going to continue to be the case but in terms of foreigners being interested in the policy of the British State, it's much less clear that that will be the case. 

DJ: That's a sort of linguistic accident. But our part — and it is only a small part — in for want of a better word one has to call "Western civilisation", or perhaps the "Atlantic community", is still significant, I think. So I want to broaden the question really to: does the West still have a great future? What is it really, now that the Cold War is over, that we represent in the world? Why do we still matter? 

NS: Well, everybody wants to go there. Full stop. That's the answer, isn't it? I live a lot of the time in Turkey and if you think about it, Turkey is the only place between Athens and Singapore that actually attracts refugees. Nobody wants to live anywhere in that hemisphere, or quartersphere, or whatever it is. The reason is that Turkey is quite close to the West and everybody wants to go to the West — apart from a few crazies. So let's not talk about the declining West. There are some very interesting questions about why there are such negative features for this success, and that I do find difficult to understand. Quite often as you get into a Turkish taxi people will ask: "What's your favourite football team?" I have rehearsed a line which translates into, I think, any language under the sun, that sometimes sounds a little anatomical, which is: "I would very gladly break the jawbone of the last rock singer with the shinbone of the last footballer."

DJ: Well, that's not what we are defending, the culture of sports and pop music...

NS: Oh no, if you want me to join the Taliban then send me to Michael Jackson's funeral. But I think that is a bad sign about Western civilisation — it may contain a cultural rot of that class. It is very difficult to get round. There are all the social consequences which people point to, like the business of endless unmarried mothers, or teenage pregnancies and all that. I get sick of it and I don't understand why on the one side we have this fearfully creative civilisation, which everyone wants to imitate, and at the same time we've got this negative side. I don't understand it. It wasn't like that when I was a boy.