MG: People who write about terrorism have a responsibility to be clear about the terms we use, clear about the particular challenges we face, clear about what’s achievable and what is going to take far longer. You use the phrase “the long war” essentially to describe the ideological conflicts that divided the 20th century and then you go on to mention the fact that, funnily enough, the Defence Department chose to describe the war on terror as a “long war”. And whatever mistakes Rumsfeld may have made, that at least I felt was useful in making the point that in attempting to deal with the threat that we face from al-Qaeda it wasn’t going to be the case that this was like Malaya or dealing with an insurgency that might be familiar to people who were looking at colonial wars or wars against any of the national liberation movements that sprang up from 1945 to 1990. In spelling out that it was likely to be long, Rumsfeld began to openup the debate. But there was a chance for leaderers on both sides of the Atlantic to spell out the precise nature of the ideological challenge that we faced and in securing public consent for the sorts of changes that we needed to make, but that chance and a lot of that energy were dissipated. And one of the tragedies, looking at our own country, was that Tony Blair only spelled out the ideological nature of Islamism, its roots within the Muslim brotherhood and its challenge to the West and the Islamist analysis of what was wrong with the Middle East very late in his premiership. And unfortunately, because of what had gone wrong in Iraq, by that stage he was no longer a trusted witness as far as most people were concerned. So they weren’t listening.

If I look at the past four or five years in the war on terror there are people who have done the right thing by their own lights in a number of ways but it does worry me that we haven’t had statesmen leading a consensus to enable us to see precisely what the nature of the contemporary threat is. There’s a broader concern I have as well. If you look both to America and to the European Union, do we have political leaders who have outlined with precision the nature of the threat? Who have explained to their electorates the profound difference between Islam, a great religion, and Islamism, an ideology? Who have explained the seamless nature of the threat and – as your book explains – the way in which spontaneous attempts to commit acts of terror here are nearly always foiled, but when you have a group in Europe that connects with a network, the al-Qaeda network in Pakistan or Afghanistan, then you have real danger? And I don’t think that that appreciation is there in the public mind.

PB: Though of course I live a good deal in this country I can’t really speak of the public mind here; but in terms of its leadership I always thought that Tony Blair was miles ahead of any other leader in Europe and certainly miles ahead of the administration in my own country. He may, as you say, have explained later than one hoped, but I was so thrilled when he did articulate his position and if it was late for you it was earlier than anybody else. I would also say about “the long war” that it’s a historian’s idea. It is therefore a retrospective idea. I got a cartoon from someone as a gift. It was a Spanish cartoon and it showed a man getting out of bed and his wife is still in bed, he’s putting his trousers on and he says: “Darling, I’m off to the 30 Years War.” You really can’t say this is a long war until it’s almost over. But what you can say, and I may be wrong about this, is that the first historical epoch of this war, the war against Al-Qaeda, will not be the last.