Julian Huppert

Interview of Julian Huppert on 16th January 2024

AM

So it's a great pleasure to have a chance to talk to Julian Huppert. Julian, tell me when and where you were born.

JH

Well it's a great pleasure to be here with you Alan. I was born in the US, somewhat surprisingly. I was only there for a couple of months, but in the Kaiser Hospital on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. So I'm told it was the poor end of town, but I don't really remember that. My parents were on sabbatical in California at the time.

AM

Right, and when?

JH

1978, so 21st of July.

AM

21st of July, you're just a youngster, yes. So people are often influenced by their family, going back one or two generations. And occasionally, Sir John Gurdon said he wanted to go back to the Norman Conquest, but would you like to tell me something about one or two, back to your grandparents at least, and whether you knew them and how they influenced you?

JH

Yes, so I think my family were massively influential in everything I do, scientifically and politically. I didn't ever know my father's parents. They died when he was not that old, his father when he was very young. And so I didn't know them particularly. I mean, Dad was of course a huge influence, but we'll come back to that later. My mother's parents I did know. My grandmother died on the day I came to Cambridge, so I remember that very vividly. And I was influenced by them, and partly from their backgrounds. So if you go back further generations, they were foresters in Poland. Actually, foresters now in what's now Ukraine, but it was Poland then. In the Second World War, as Polish...

AM

By foresters, you mean they cut down trees?

JH

They cut down trees. I mean, I think on a largish scale. The story is that they supplied quite a lot of sleepers to the Czarist railways and never got paid. I think they were trying to be paid in 1917, and obviously things changed. But in the Second World War, being Polish Jewish landowners was not a great position when Poland was invaded. They fled, as I say, to the forest area, which is now Ukraine. And the part of the family that were on the German side were all killed. The part that were on the Russian side, which included my grandparents, were shipped out to slave labour camps in the Ural Mountains and worked as foresters there. I remember when I was young being told they didn't have to cut trees if it was below minus 40. And that, which is, as it happens, is the same temperature in centigrade and Fahrenheit. So I always remember that number very, very well. But they were then released in 1942, I think, whenever it was that Stalin released the Poles. And they went down to Uzbekistan in a refugee camp. My mother was actually born in Samarkand in, essentially, a refugee camp. And they were then looking for asylum after the war finished. Poland was even more anti-Semitic than it had been. So they spent time briefly there, then in Paris applying for asylum. They refused asylum here in the UK and eventually made it to Australia. So mum got to Australia at the end of 1948. And so that was influential. They were amazing, thoughtful, interesting, educated people. But also because I think it gave me an insight into how the world could be. I mean, I would now identify as a Rawlsian. I didn't know the term. But the idea that a refugee, for example, isn't an other, but somebody who could be like me, felt very instinctive. And I think that shaped a lot of my political values. Because could I imagine me being a refugee? I mean, I had the great fortune to grow up in Cambridge. But mum was one. It's not hard for me to get the sense that happens to people. But my grandparents, Ben (Bernard) and Lotka, were in many ways amazing. Lotka, I mean, I didn't see them at their peak. But grandma was an artist and a provocateur and a brilliant scrabble player. Ben set up an amazing plastics factory back in the day. I don't know what he'd have thought now. But was a really caring, principled person. So I got a huge amount from them, as well as the wider family and of course my parents.

AM

You said you didn't know your father's parents, but what background were they?

JH

So they were from Austria. So they'd managed to get out.

AM

Were they Jewish?

JH

They were Jewish as well, yes. So Viennese. We've tried to trace back, we think actually just over the Czech border. But they managed to get out in the mid-30s to Australia. There were visas available for people in the tailoring business. So they went out on that. It turns out we were very lucky to get out of Vienna in 1933, I think it was. So dad was born in Australia. And they had a sort of schmattaebusiness. They were a tailoring business, making clothes. The factory is still there in Sydney. It got sold a long time ago. But they managed to make that new life and so avoided all the horrors of the late 30s and early 40s in Austria.

AM

OK, so coming down to your parents. You said your dad was a huge influence. Your mother was Felicia, is that right?

JH

So both of them were immensely huge influences, Herbert and Felicia. I was very lucky to have such great parents in many ways.

AM

Tell me about them and why.

JH

So they're both academics. And I think that's one of the starting points, is that both of them are very, very successful academics doing really interesting things. So dad's work, as I'm sure you know, is in sort of applied mathematics, theoretical geophysics, which is fascinating. And mum is a very successful psychologist. So she was working on clinical psychology, then moved towards memory and then ageing. And more recently to well-being. So I think she got a bit fed up with working on why things went wrong and started thinking, like, why do things work? So they've both been, I think one thing that I picked up from both of them in slightly different ways is the power of simplicity and appropriate approximation. So dad's work was on very, very complex fluid flows. So earthquakes, landslides, you know, a whole range of things like that. And you can write these mathematically as incredibly complicated integrated differential equations. And I remember him saying ages ago that there was a school of thought that said, here's the answer. And I said, but this is an equation we can't understand. We can't solve it. In what sense is that an answer? It looks to me more like a problem than an answer. And so a lot of his work was finding ways to approximate the answer, particularly because computational techniques back in the day when he was, you know, PhD student, postdocs, meant that you couldn't just numerically simulate things, which we can now for some problems. We can't really solve it. We can simulate it pretty well. And so you could approximate some things and therefore get an answer that was close to right. So part of the question is when is close to right not just good enough, but actually much better than saying exactly right, but it will take us 20 years to get an answer. And when is it useless? When does it not tell you anything? When is it really actually what you most need? And so that's in some ways a thread of his work. So he taught me an immense amount about that, but also concepts like dimensional analysis, the amazing power of simplicity to address incredibly complex problems. You know, just phenomenal things like that. And some of his works and his papers are on very prosaic, obvious questions. You know, if you have honey on a flat slide, how does it spread? Sounds easy to state. It's not sort of, you know, some scientific problems you have to spend a long time explaining what the problem means. With his, very often the problem was easy and the answers were rich and inspiring. So I learned a huge amount from that take on how to think about what is a problem, what's a solution. Mum's work, of course, is about humans and how humans behave. And again, you have to approximate because if you say, look, I want, you know, I'll only really understand this when I've accounted for every single aspect of human behaviour. Of course you're not there. So because she was more in the sort of, in some domain... so Dad was sort of much more in the sort of mathematical sciences, whereas Mum had to spend more time dealing with the distinction between what sounds good and what's actually there evidence for. So particularly she moved towards things like wellbeing. There is some real science of wellbeing, and she literally wrote a book called The Science of Wellbeing. And there's some trendy stuff which has no science behind it whatsoever and just sounds quite nice. And so there's a big difference between those. And she was interested to say, look, what's real, what actually works, and what, you know, sounds like it'd be great. It's just there's no evidence for it whatsoever. And Mum can be quite engaged in that line and has shown that things which, frankly, I thought were more likely to be nice stories, some of them there's real evidence for, some there isn't. So I learned an immense amount from both of them about how to think constructively. Leaving aside so many other things, activities, travel, you know, experience, all the things you get from growing up. But in some ways, those were the key thoughts. And they were both, in different ways, they're different people, great parents. I look back on some things and think, you know, it's slightly bizarre they managed to persuade me that things were good. You know, if I was on time for school every day when I was younger, Dad would set me a maths problem on a Saturday morning. And somehow I was persuaded that that was a positive, that that was a thing. I'm still incredibly grateful to Dad on a practical level because, again, when I was little, we used to travel quite a bit, mostly to Australia, but also the US and other places. And for a month before a flight, he would say to me, what do you do on a plane, Julian? And little me would say, sleep, because I think I'd learned that was the right answer. And we would practice that. And to this day, when I get to an airport, I start falling asleep. And so a long haul flight to Australia, I will sleep maybe 12 hours of the 24. I get more sleep than I normally would. Great skill set. With Mum, I mean, there's again loads of things there. Great mother, but she, I mean, she's a phenomenal woman in many ways. And particularly because she's been registered blind essentially since her teens. So she has a thing called Stargardt's disease where there's no central retina. So she looks at you as I'm doing now. She couldn't actually see your face. She would have to look away a bit like this in order to actually see a face with peripheral vision. And so it's quite phenomenal that she managed to have a successful academic career, a career which involves a lot of reading that she can't do without assistance. And just managed to do all of that and have all of those. But it meant that when I was little, rather than her reading me bedtime stories, she would either make them up, which was an amazing experience, or I would read her bedtime stories. Because once I could read, it made much more sense for me to do that bit of it. So again, I learned a huge amount from those experiences. And I'm very proud of her. She ended up taking a very important test case against the university at one stage, peripherally the university, more the central grants body, where they decided that if you're over 35, you are too old to have a new position. Astonishing case. We may come back to that, we may not, but amazing case.

AM

Right. So I always ask people what their first memory was. Specific memory, not just vague.

JH

So possibly my first memory, and it's possible that there are others, but certainly one very early on was Passover when I was four. So I was four and a little bit. And traditionally at Passover, you have four cups of wine. And being four, I had a sort of little mini goblet, a tiny little bit. And somehow, and I don't remember this, I must have swapped it cleverly for a full sized one. And my first memory was actually the next day and the garden spinning horribly. And that was my first and only ever hangover. And I don't know whether I haven't had any since because, you know, I got practice when I was very little, but I certainly remember that. There's a few things I really do remember from five. I think other very early memories are more that I remember photos of things. You know, I remember remembering, you know, a very old friend of mine, Jean Parker. I remember remembering the sensation of playing in the Botanic Gardens with her. But I don't remember any of it at all.

AM

So I was going to do it later. Since you mentioned Passover and since you mentioned your parents were Jewish, it says in your Wikipedia you're an atheist. But it would be interesting to know the path that took you from four-year-old Passover to atheism.

JH

I'm not sure I was ever not an atheist. I think, unlike Christianity where the concept of Christian atheism doesn't really make a lot of sense, and there are people who would argue that it could do, Judaism has a very different relationship. So I used to go to Sunday schools and to synagogue occasionally for High Holy Days here in Cambridge and had a very, very good rabbi, Brian Fox, out in Australia where I did my bar mitzvah. But to give you an idea, Brian was very much an agnostic. He saw no problem whatsoever with being an agnostic and a rabbi. It just wasn't a contradiction. Again, in Christianity there are statements of belief. No such thing is required or expected in the rabbinate, certainly not in Reform Judaism, which my family were. The cantor, Michael Deutsch, who led the singing and trained me for the bar mitzvah, and had also done my father's bar mitzvah obviously many, many years earlier, a very big, powerful Hungarian character, he was an atheist. Again, there was no problem whatsoever with we can sing the songs, we can do the cultural things, we can speak Hebrew, we can do the chanting. God, ah, no, no, it's a myth. So I think I was always an atheist. Mum certainly became an atheist in her early and mid-teens. I think Dad is probably more on the agnostic end. I'm not quite certain where he would identify, but it's not a primary aspect of Judaism. So I'm Jewish, and the history of Jewish thought I find quite interesting. I find some theological thought, I mean, some I find rather pointless, some I find really fascinating. And I think there are some interesting traditions that I quite like. I don't keep anything Jewish particularly, other than it's a good excuse for a party sometimes. And I do keep one aspect of Yom Kippur almost every year. So Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, and traditionally there's a 25-hour fast, and you go to synagogue. I don't do those bits. I'm not interested in the religious bits. But the idea of setting aside 25 hours once a year to just detach and think, whenever possible, and it's probably two years out of three, I will keep that day. Almost always on the actual day, but sometimes I'll pick a different day that seems more convenient. And just take a day where I don't work, I don't do emails, I don't do any of those things. I just try and think about who I am, what I'm doing. I find huge value in that. So I'm slightly Jewish, but historically and culturally rather than actively. Very definitely atheist, and also very much involved with humanists. Being an atheist, as a definition, always feels a bit peripheral. Most people are atheists about the vast majority of gods. And we don't focus on the fact that very few people believe in Thor. Very few people identify Thor as a real person. Whereas being a humanist, I'm a patron of the British humanists, Humanists UK, and I think they do really phenomenal work. But it's much more a positive about how do we support freedom, how do we support thinking, how do we support caring, how do we support all of the good humanist things, rather than focusing on, don't do that one.

AM
Fascinating. Moving on to your own education, you were born in America, but you almost immediately went to UK or Australia?

JH

UK. So I came here when I was about three months old, so I'm a sort of accidental American in that sense. I essentially grew up here in Cambridge, with a number of trips in Australia, but nowhere else for long times.

AM

So if you could pick out, since I want to get on to your later life in politics and so on, and therefore skim through your education, but if you could pick out one or two important moments in your education, and maybe one or two teachers who influenced you.

JH

So I think that I was very lucky to go to a range of great schools here, Milton Road, my local state school, King's Choir School here, Dad was a fellow here at King's and was very excited for me to go to that school. The Perse, I wanted to go to Hills Road but was away for a year in Australia so they couldn't take me. So here in the UK, I was very lucky that King's School, at the time, I think less so now, was an incredibly liberal school. It was a deeply egalitarian school, non-hierarchical, we knew the teachers by first name or nickname terms, and there
was a sense that you were in charge of your own education, their role was to help guide you in that, rather than tell you what to do. And in particular, there was an amazing guy, Rob Farrow. And Rob was just a transformationally brilliant teacher for me.

AM

What was his name?

JH

Rob Farrow. Not everybody liked him, he had a particular style, he was manic-depressive and sadly died quite young, had a number of issues with the school, but he transformed the way I think, and he was an English teacher, and I think English wasn't my strong subject, but he made it interesting, and I remember watching 'Spitting Image', this was at the age of 11, 12, watching 'Spitting Image' cartoons and thinking about how they worked, trying to write our own. I also remember I was not athletic at all, but he persuaded me to come to the athletics club with Tom Womack, and spent ages helping me to do, I think it was an 85cm high jump, which is awful, but he put the time and effort in and actually made me realise that I can't do things, but if I try I can do them better, and I don't have to win to do it, and I could do a triple jump. He really opened things up in thought, in reading, I stayed in touch with him for many years until he died, effectively. He was sacked by the school, and I remember challenging Pat Bateson then Provost here about why that was, and I think he was very hard done by, but did have a number of mental problems. He opened my eyes to lots of culture, he used to take people to see plays here or in London, he'd take school trips of 10-13 year olds, and what I didn't know until a number of years later was that he would almost always then miss the last train back to Ely where he lived, and so would just sleep in the corridor in the school, but he thought it was worth it. So, amazing guy. I was also very lucky to have a few periods of education in Australia, and partly I was very lucky there, I went to the Emanuel School, which was a very relaxed Jewish school when I was 12-13.

AM

In Sydney?

JH

In Sydney, yes, always in Sydney suburbs, and TES was a newish school and very flexible, so I took different subjects at different age ranges, and so that was great, and then I went to Sydney Grammar School when I was 17, and it was a useful opportunity to be able to redefine myself, so I was a scientist and mathematician, I did a few other bits and pieces, when I was in Cambridge. When I went to Australia, I became one of the editors of the school poetry magazine, because people didn't know I didn't know anything about poetry, and because they didn't know I was rubbish at it, I could actually, I'm not saying it was brilliant, I wrote a couple of things, but being able to redefine myself and choose who I wanted to be was really, really helpful, and I got a lot out of the time in Australia and got involved in Chemistry Olympiad and various other things, and there's been a whole range of amazing teachers, Charles Proud and various others, but I was very lucky to have an education that was interested in what I think are the true purposes of education, which are about empowering people to think about things and to take control and to be able to do things, not about simply learning how to pass an exam or to memorise a list of things.

AM

When did you discover you were good at mathematics?

JH

I don't know that I ever discovered it, I just was, and I'm sure it was partly because it was around more. We had a rule, no mathematics at the dinner table, but there was certainly conversation about it, and I think I just always was quite good at it. I don't remember noticing that I'd become that.

AM

Perhaps I should rephrase it, when did you realise that you were moving towards the sciences rather than the arts at school. So, it sounds like I'm ducking the question, but I don't think I ever made that decision. I enjoyed them. I later became a chemist, and I remember at one stage looking back at old school reports and discovering, to my surprise, actually chemistry was the subject I'd had the best reports on. But I was always interested in lots of different things. When I went to Australia, one of the great things there when I was 17 was being able to do a wider range of subjects. I did economics, and I did music, as well as English, and I really liked having that flexibility. But I think I just got science more. I think it was about teachers, not so much. Michael Bishop in Australia was phenomenal as a chemistry teacher, again, also sadly died young. But it was about the subject where you could play and think. There's an argument, I think, in another context at the moment about whether we should focus on STEM or on creative subjects. It really annoys me, because STEM is creative, and if it isn't, you're doing it wrong. So I don't think I consciously said I want to be a scientist. When I was sixth form, I would have much rather done a broader STEM subject. I did do economics A-level. I'd love to have done more. My plan was to be a lawyer. That was, you know, I had, I think, every intention of switching to law. Didn't happen, but...

AM

You mentioned music. Has music been important in your life?

JH

Yes, very much so. When I was younger, I played things, I think, mostly because my parents wanted me to. So I did a bit of piano. I did violin. And had a... I didn't get on very well. I'm much better at bass than at treble. And I'm actually much better at rhythm than at melody and harmony. But there was a moment with violin where I really didn't want to keep playing it. But I thought Mum really wanted me to, so I kept going for her. She was fed up. She didn't enjoy me playing the violin. And would much rather I stopped, but thought I wanted to. And so we kept going because she was doing that for me. There was this moment where we were like, hang on, if you don't want to and I don't want to, let's not do it. I tried playing the French horn for a bit, but my real love was percussion. I had amazing percussion tutor, Will Sivier. And so for many, many years, I would hit things. And so I did that in all sorts of places. Some amazing, amazing concerts I got to play at the Sydney Opera House. I vividly remember at King's Ely doing a really phenomenal piece called 'African Sanctus' by David Fanshawe. He was there for that performance. And I remember just the freedom. It's an astonishing piece of music. A Catholic mass set to African tribal music with recordings he made in the 60s, 70s going around Africa. Utterly phenomenal, spellbinding piece. And that really helped me. I played a bit of djembe and got to play in a lot of things when I was an undergrad at Cambridge. I did all of this for many years and a bit as a grad student as well. But there was a real shortage of percussionists at the time. And so you got to play in everything. There was so much demand. And in hindsight, I probably should have done more practice, but you could do a musical this week, this concert that week and that thing that week. I got involved with some, there was a thing with Fused where we did a series of new compositions with contemporary dance. And that was fantastic. I remember doing, there was one South African choreographer, I can't remember who the composer was now. But it was all five against four. So I learned to do four in one hand, five in the other hand. And I realised that if I went just a little bit faster than I was supposed to, I could make all of the dancers fall over. But it was just fun to have that as an outlet. And we got into some Cornelius Cardew sort of slightly very strange, surrealist things at Kettle's Yard. That was really lovely. My girlfriend, who I now partner, who I might come back to, is a very good musician as well as a scientist. I'm sure that was also part of the strength between us. And I now, I don't play at all now, but I listen a lot and have quite diverse musical tastes.

AM

I can see. You mentioned coming to Cambridge and perhaps that's the next stage. Why did you, well your father was at Cambridge, so that's an obvious reason for coming. But tell me why.

JH

Well, both my parents were professors here. And in some ways it's odd. I probably should have gone somewhere else. But when I was applying, I'd just come back from a year in Australia. And so Cambridge didn't feel quite like home again yet. I'd had an absolutely brilliant transformational year in Australia. I came back here. No, no, this was, I did my lower sixth year effectively in Australia. And so applied when I was upper sixth back here. But I'd be back a couple of weeks. It felt like I wasn't used to Cambridge yet. My plan was to do a year or two of maths here and then switch to law. And Cambridge gave the most flexibility of the top places. And I'm not sure it was the best decision in some ways. I mean it worked out extremely well, but I might have learnt more by going somewhere else. But so I applied to various places, but got into Cambridge, had friends here. And it worked out very well for me. I slightly regret not having explored a different place.

AM

Which college did you go to?

JH

So I went to Trinity. My decision ultimately was between Trinity and Clare were the top two I wanted to go to. And it's funny because I obviously knew that the college was much better than the typical applicant. And my reasons for going to Trinity were quite, it worked out very well, it was a good place for me. But they were completely wrong. So one of the things was I wanted to be able to do music and Trinity had more orchestras. And I thought there was a decent chance that I might be able to get into one of them. As it happened, I think Trinity Orchestra was one of the few I never actually played with. I was too busy playing in the rest of the university. I played at Clare, I played at Robinson, I played at all sorts of other places, Queens. But I think never actually at Trinity. Which is slightly bizarre in hindsight. Both lovely colleges and I ended up spending time at both of them as it happens. So Trinity, NatSci came up in 96.

AM

Was there anyone at Trinity who particularly was an outstanding influence on you?

JH

Yes, I mean, I was very, very fortunate in particular with my Director of Studies, Shankar Balasubramanian. He's a phenomenal character. I was very lucky I think, not just to get to know him, but to get to know him when I did. So I first met him when he interviewed me, December 95. He was newish at Trinity then. So I was very, very lucky because he had time. So he's now become a sort of demigod in science. He was my PhD supervisor, mentor, friend, colleague, all the rest of it. But he's now Sir Shankar, he's set up a transformation.

AM

Is he President of the Royal Society?

JH

President, no, Fellow of the Royal Society. He's won all the prizes short of the Nobel Prize. And it's always a bit of a lottery, but if he won one, I would not be at all shocked. So the work he did there was essentially a new way to sequence DNA. And so the transformational reduction in cost of sequencing DNA is basically because of the work that he did with David Klenerman. And I had the great, you know, I did a summers project with him and had a choice between a really interesting piece of thermodynamics about DNA mismatches and frayed ends, or this crazy idea he had to sequence DNA. And I chose the really interesting scientific one. I could have been one of the people there. But Shankar was brilliant and I learned so much from him scientifically. And so to have him as a director of studies, as an undergrad, as a PhD supervisor and then all the rest was just, I was phenomenally lucky. He's a great person.

AM

And you kept well in touch with him?

JH

Yes, I don't see him as much as I'd like to because he's very busy. But yes, I mean, we're friends and periodically meet up for a drink. And of course, I know his group and we still interact. But yes, really I was very fortunate to know him.

AM

And what was your PhD on? That was at Trinity too?

JH

Yes, that was Trinity as well. So, yes, I did my undergrad. I never switched to law, although I'd meant to.

AM

Why not?

JH

Because I found the science too interesting. You know, I was lucky in so many ways, actually. You know, I had my first ever supervisor was Sarah Teichmann, who's gone on to be absolutely phenomenal. But it was her. I was also her first supervisee as an undergrad. So, you know, and so many other people. I just found science so exciting. In my second year, Trinity was very supportive. I was also able to take more subjects. So they very kindly funded myself and Marta Zlatic, who's also a brilliant scientist. We did four subjects in second year. We were supposed to do three and they funded all the supervisions. So we did got to psychology, experimental psychology, just for fun. Simon Baron Cohen supervising us. It was brilliant. And John Gurdon taught me how to dissect frog embryos. And he's quite good at that. And I know Steve Ley was great organic chemist and lots of people. But so I just got too excited by the science. I was doing other things when I come to Model United Nations, which is quite important influence on my life. But I just stuck with the science, really enjoyed that. I did take a year off before I did the PhD. Actually, my hope was to work for UNHCR was what I really wanted to do. I hadn't quite realised how hard internships were to get. I thought bright young thing saying I will do anything you like anywhere in the world for free for a year. Just give me somewhere to sleep and food would be an attractive offer. I was naive and had a very interesting year. Did a little bit with the OECD, but mostly working in London for a financial software company. But came back to the PhD with Shankar. Originally, I was trying to work on a really interesting fundamental question about how DNA is replicated. So in some ways, it's amazing that we when we copy DNA, which happens all the time, the error rate is about one in a billion. And that's really if the error rate was too low, evolution would struggle. You know, we wouldn't be able to adapt. If it's too high we also wouldn't be able to keep going. So we just have too many problematic mutations. Most mutations statistically will be bad. So you don't want too many of them. Viruses have a, you know, not so... So one in a billion is quite phenomenal. And to a chemist, it's particularly surprising because there are four bases, A, C, G and T, and they pair up A with T, G with C. And they're most stable that way. But not one in a billion. There should be roughly one in a thousand errors because although it's supposed to be A with T, G will go with T reasonably well. Not as well, but reasonably. So it should be about one in a thousand. So why is it one in a billion? And the biochemistry is really fascinating. So there's about one in a thousand for finding the right base to bring in. Then the chemistry of actually attaching it works better when it fits better. So it gives you roughly another factor of a thousand. So you have to get it right twice. But that's still only one in a million. And it turns out there's also a delete button. And the deletion happens if it gets it wrong and essentially gives you another one in a thousand factor. I'm simplifying slightly. And the enzyme that does this is the Klenow fragment of DNA polymerase one or equivalent. And it, sorry I have to use my left hand, because it's shaped like a left hand. And so it has, the enzyme looks a bit like this. The DNA sits in here. And so you've got the template and the bit that's growing. New base binds in here. And the chemistry happens with that finger around here. So that's the important bit. I'm just going to get rid of one finger because it's a bit hard to see. Down here is the delete button. And so sometimes the sequence goes down there and is cut out. And so the question is, how does it do that? Is it that it's here almost all the time unless there's an error? And when there's an error, it goes down for deletion. Does it flicker between the two the whole time? How does it actually manage to work? And so my plan for the PhD was to use a single molecule fluorescent technology with David Klenerman as well as Shankar to use a technique called FRET, fluorescence resonance emission, where you can measure on a single protein, a single piece of DNA, how far apart things are and how they're moving. You can actually watch that happen. And it was really exciting. People had done these experiments at bulk, but not yet at single molecule. Really interesting fundamental thing and built on to work Shankar had done before. So I spent two years working on that, playing with phosphorus 32 labelling of DNA to check the chemistry all worked, growing up the bugs to produce the protein, labelling with these amazing, incredibly bright dyes, because they have to be bright enough that you can see literally one dot. And two years in, it didn't work. Nothing worked. I could make things, but they wouldn't. It was just I think I was I'm not a great lab chemist. I'm not fastidious enough for some things. I was juggling with some politics on the side, which I might come back to. But two years in, I had basically nothing to show for it. And I remember saying to Shankar, look, either it's going too fast to measure. Because it's really, really fast. You can't see anything or it's too slow, in which case you can't see it. Or there's some other problem where I just can't do it. Like I don't know. I think he was pretty fed up with me. You know, I don't think anybody's actually managed to do this yet. So it's possible it wasn't entirely me. One group I knew would try and gave up a few years later. But I almost dropped out of the PhD and had the conversation with Shankar about saying, look, could I write this up for a master's? Because, Yes. And. But I've done a tiny little piece of work right at the beginning, just a sort of warm up about four stranded DNA and a couple of quick experiments and started thinking a bit about that. And whether you could start thinking more generally about those, they're beautiful structures. And I turned that into a PhD. So basically one year was the entire PhD. So I was very lucky. I had a friend who helped me with some of the coding. I later learned how to code, but Si Rogers wrote the initial version of the code to do the things that I needed to do. And I taught me how to then take over. But it's a really fascinating. Everybody knows that the double stranded structure of DNA. Hugely important. It's one of the things that's really made it into public consciousness. But in some ways, I'm overstating this slightly. It's the boring version. And it's a bit like if you think about books. Most of the time, what shape is a book? It's an oblong that sits stacked with lots and lots of other books on a shelf. And that's an important storage state for a book. But it's not the interesting time. You know, books are interesting if you open them up. And similarly, DNA is more interesting when it opens up. And it can do so many things other than the double strand. And so my research really pivoted because of that into thinking about what are the other structures? And I started with these beautiful G quadruplexes. So four bases in DNA...

AM

Better keep the technical stuff....

JH

Yes. But there are four letters which make up DNA. A, C, G and T. But they're not just arbitrary letters. They are chemicals that can do real things. And so if you take a solution of A, it's a clear liquid. C, clear liquid. T, clear liquid. G forms a gel. G is different from the others. And in particular, when you have a sequence with lots of G's in, they can fold up into sort of knot-like structures. They'll act a bit like on-off switches. And I started to say, well, can we predict based on the sequence, the letters that you have, when it will do this and when it won't? And I did some fairly basic experiments to explore the parameter space. So it doesn't matter how many G's you have, it's about what the gap between them is. How does that work? Working with a group in London, Pascal Hazel in particular, who did some computer simulations, and came up with something which I call the G quadruplex folding rule. Basically, if it looks like this, it might fold. And once you've got a formula like that, a rule, you can then start asking questions like, where are they in the human genome? Are they where we expect them to be? Statistically, how many ought there to be? What's odd about them? And that was really my PhD. And so the paper where I proposed that rule has been cited well over a thousand times. I don't know how many since. Still heavily cited. I'm not sure if most people who cite it now have read it or understand it. And it was intended, and this is what I got from both my parents, as a grotesque approximation. Like it's not right. We certainly didn't have the evidence to say it's a binding rule. And there was a paper later from brilliant scientist Jean-Louis Mergny where he said that the classic Huppert rule is, I can't remember what the figure is, only 84 percent accurate. I thought if it had been 50-50 I'd have been delighted. But it still meant that you could start to say, where are they? And it turns out, for example, that two thirds of all cancer related genes have these control switches in their control areas. OK, well, suddenly that's interesting. You can work out where they aren't. There's clearly been evolutionary pressure on them. And so even if not everyone that I predict is quite right, and even if it misses a few, you still go, oh, suddenly we've got all of these targets, all of these things to explore. And so what had been an almost failed PhD suddenly turned into actually, I think, quite a successful PhD, which then got me a fellowship at Trinity, one of the junior research fellowships. And, you know, I post-doc'd at the Sanger Institute in chemistry and then got a position at the Cavendish working on physics of medicine, basically on the basis of approximating something just the right amount.

AM

Fascinating. I understood about half of it. So, approximately. Going back to, you mentioned, the other strand in your life, which I want to talk about now, which is your political interests. You mentioned that Oxford, Cambridge, you were interested in the United Nations. Is that when you first became interested in politics or even at school?

JH

So both of these started at school. So I. I mean, modern nations, but is perhaps the simple one, because my interest initially was in international human rights, refugee issues, mum's heritage. And when I was when I went to the Perse, which was a very good school, I was actually quite bored because I had great experience in Australia beforehand. And King's was at the time phenomenal. And I just wasn't feeling stretched at all. And I remember, you know, we'd done King's, we'd done phenomenal. You know, we were reading French magazines. We just used French as a language. And I remember an early lesson at the Perse where we were practising counting to 100. I can just do this like I can, you know, I can go to a thousand. This is not there's nothing to learn from this. And after a bit, I was bolshie enough to say to the head, Martin Stephens, that I was quite bored. And he gave me some of the worst advice I've ever been given, actually, which was learn to be bored. And I think I know what he was trying to say. And we've chatted since. But when I was more of an adult, I was very lucky that a friend of my parents mentioned a program called Model United Nations, which is simulations of the UN. I got very involved with that at school, set up at one at my school. Then when I came here, got involved with that, set up the Model United Nations Society here. We then took that group. We actually won the World Model United Nations Conference, in Brussels. Then the next year hosted the World Conference here in Cambridge. Did a lot there. And I'm still senior treasurer. And that was quite helpful to me in thinking about the world. But also unlike debating.... lots of politicians come up through debating. In a debate, I win by proving you wrong. You win by proving me wrong. In a UN style discussion, you win by persuading everybody that you've reached something everybody can live with. It's a fundamentally different success. So if it's a Security Council simulation or General Assembly, success is working out how to compromise and bring everybody's interests together. Not by proving somebody to be you don't want you don't need a loser for you to win. That was very important. But my values were very much. I mean, I grew up under Thatcher and I always knew I was on the other side. I don't remember the 83 election. I vaguely remember the 87 election. Disappointment, feeling disappointed. I definitely remember 92. I think we're in Australia when it happened and just the shock that it hadn't been the end of the Tories. But it was actually when I was at the Perse as a sixth former that I realised. I used to row twice a week, because of the timings, when I was having lunch, I would watch whatever was on television. And Prime Minister's question time always happened to be on that slot. It used to be Tuesdays and Thursdays. And so I watched that. And the discussions afterwards was when I realised I was a Liberal with a capital L as well as a small l. And that was thanks to the likes of Paddy Ashdown. I don't remember exactly who I saw, but I realised I was Liberal, not just left. I hadn't really done much about that. And then when I was 17, so upper sixth back here, in the run up to the local elections, a leaflet was delivered through my door. I now know by Ian Nimmo-Smith, who then went on to be leader of the council and mayor for the Lib Dems. And I thought, actually, I do agree with this. And so I decided to join the Lib Dems. I went over to the place I was told to go to, which was the house of a guy called David Howarth, who then became leader of the council and MP. David being David, couldn't find a membership form anywhere in his house. But somebody else came over by chance then, who did, Sal Brinton, who was leader of the Lib Dems on the county council and became a baroness and president of the Lib Dems. So I was quite lucky with that set of people. So I joined the Lib Dems. I couldn't vote in those elections. But then when I came up to Cambridge, I got involved with the Lib Dems society here and really enjoyed the campaigning, the philosophy, the ideas, the vision for liberalism. I didn't go into it to hold office. That was never the plan. In fact, it was an argument with Mike Proctor, former Provost here at King's, who was at the time Dean of Trinity. In the 97 election, which was an amazing moment to be involved in, he had a rule that nobody was allowed political signs in their windows. And the porters went around and took them all down. And a few of us were annoyed. I didn't have a great spot. A friend of mine who had a great spot for Labour on the other side was really annoyed. And at a dinner of some kind, I had a go at Mike around the table somewhere because I thought this was really unfair. It was slightly bolshy He said, no, my ruling is final. No political signs unless you're the candidate. I thought, oh, that's interesting. And at the time you had to be 21 to stand. But so when I was doing my part three, I stood for the city council in Abbey, unwinnable seat at the time, mostly so that I could put a big Lib Dem diamond. And when the porters came to take it down and say, no, this one actually does have the dean's approval because I'm the candidate, and so I didn't. It was mostly just making that point. I didn't expect to win. And then the next year I was asked by our agent, Phil Rogers, whether I'd like to stand for a winnable seat in East Chesterton for the county council. In the last minute, I actually already was planning to stand just help out in Abbey again and very quickly changed and won the seat from Labour and became a county councillor in 2001, just a couple of months before starting my PhD.

AM

Interesting. So you didn't go up with a kind of union path of debating? No, I was involved a bit with the Union. I got elected onto one of the sort of small committees. I hated the hackery. It was, you know, I remember every week. So two people who were responsible for posters and one of them would define their job, but they had to produce the posters. And they said their job finished when there was a completed poster on the computer. And the other person was in charge of distribution. And they said their job started when there was a printed pile of posters ready to be distributed. And the thing was that people too often were essentially saying, what's the least I can do to not get in trouble and rise up the ladder? And so every year it was a muppet like me. I was on the Treasurer's Committee who would do the bit in between because I actually thought it'd be quite a good idea to get people to know about things we're doing. And so I didn't enjoy that much. I did do a bit of debating. I very fortunately once managed to meet a couple of friends who'd won the World Debating Competition, which shows how much of a random thing it is. But I was much more involved with the MUN. I knew the Union. I've been to things. I've spoken up there many times. But it wasn't my, it wasn't the environment I liked. I got, you know, a friend elected as president and a former neighbour. But it wasn't quite my thing.

AM

How did you make the jump from local politics to national politics?

JH

So I did eight years on the County Council and became leader of the opposition at the time when Cambridgeshire looked like it was going to be conservative forever.

AM

I mean, this must have taken a lot of your time.

JH

Yes, I think Shankar wasn't very impressed with me, although I still remember, so I happened by sheer luck to be at Trinity when the fellowship and election results were being read out. And it really was just like, you know, I had no idea what it was and was very surprised to hear my name read out and delighted. And I remember Shankar coming over to me and saying, congratulations, this means you can really focus on science. And I remember Martin Rees, who was master at the time, coming over and saying, congratulations, means you can really focus on politics. Not sure Shankar was pleased about that. At first, it was about half a day a week and it worked quite well. Later, when I was leader of the opposition, it was probably more like two and a half days a week. And it was quite time consuming, but I managed to make it work. But then in 2007, we'd had a very successful election campaign in 2005. We'd gained. I'm very happy with that. I thought, look, what I want to do, I don't want to be leader of the opposition forever because it's just a bit frustrating. You know, I remember working really hard on a really good budget amendment for the end of year. And we put a lot of effort into really doing it properly. So actually costing things out, actually thinking what we do, what we'd give up in order to do the things we wanted. And it was it was the best I think we'd done for a long time. And I gave a speech which I'd spent ages working on to really push it through. And I'd set up a new systems for scrutiny and done all sorts of things to the best it would possibly be, and huge amount of time and effort. And the Lib Dems all voted for our amendment. The Tories all voted against it and Labour abstained. And I thought if I'd actually done it on the back of an envelope and we hadn't bothered to really do it properly, what would the vote have been? I thought, hmm, exactly the same. And I thought it's actually quite frustrating. I was able to get things done. I chaired the Cambridge Traffic Management Committee. So I did a whole lot of things to the transport system here, which mostly worked very well. But I got a bit frustrated. I thought, look, I can't keep doing this and science at a high level. And I had stood for Parliament in 2005 in Huntingdon, but to help out mostly, like it was we needed to find some candidates. I did go for then a serious selection for Parliament in Oxford East. A guy called Steve Goddard had come very close to winning in 2005. And the story I'd been given was this is an amazing target seat. He didn't do it last time. Somebody more dynamic might be able to. And I went for the selection. Massively didn't win it. Steve is a very nice guy and he was a young academic from the sort of liberal green wing of the party with a ginger goatee who cycled around everywhere. And I spent a month in Oxford campaigning and people sometimes got us confused because we looked quite a lot like each other. And when you're only USP is you're the one who's not from Oxford. And so basically people who liked him put him first, me second, the third candidate, Liz Leffman, who is also brilliant, but a different bit of the party third. And people who didn't like him put her first, me second and him third. And so I got basically all the second preferences and nobody actually wanted me. And so I thought, look, Parliament's not happening. David Howarth, who was by that time the MP here, will hold the seat. I'd be very involved with helping run his campaign in 2005. Will hold the seat as long as he wants to. How wrong I was, but, you know, I think I should make a decision. And so I decided in 2009 I retired from politics. So that was in May. I stood down from the council and I really said, look, I'm just going to focus on science. I've got an academic job. Let's do that. And that October, I heard that David was planning to stand down very unexpectedly in just a few months time in the next election. I thought, oh, that's interesting. You don't often get a chance to represent your home seat, and having not expected David to stand down, I thought, look, if he is, I'm going to give it a go. And so there was a fascinating selection process done quite quickly. The election was coming, ran over December, January, and I had a fantastic team and ended up winning the selection. And I mean, I can bore you for ages about the selection process itself, but it was very well run. Very nice. We actually we all broadly got on quite well, which was always nice. I remember the returning officer saying it was the first selection he'd been involved in for a big seat where he was contacted more often by candidates saying, something's gone wrong in my favour, I think it might be a bit unfair that people will complain. But I won the selection in January and then had a very short run into the general election and became the MP.

AM

And you were MP for five years.

JH

Five years.

AM

Tell me about one. I mean, we're now getting into sort of the public domain of what people know about. But tell me about one or two high or low points in those five years.

JH

I think, it was it was an amazing experience in many ways. And I because I hadn't been somebody who'd hung out around Westminster beforehand. It was it was all very, very new to me. You know, a lot of MPs have been in lobbying or PR or working for an MP and know.. and I didn't. And it was also very strange because it was it was a coalition. We were in government. It was the first time in peacetime for a century that there'd be liberals in government. It was a bizarre experience. And I learned very quickly, but not quickly enough. And some highlights would definitely include bits of legislation I got to be involved in. So I was very. So I became the Lib Dem spokesperson on home affairs, justice and equality. So all the all the easy subjects, immigration, human rights, same sex marriage. You know, I got to be very well getting same sex marriage legislation through and opening that up quite, quite significantly. I'd been involved when I was at school in campaigning for the 0.7 percent gross national income to be on international development aid. And I got to co-sponsor the legislation that made that law. Well, Boris broke it. And so there are immense things like that that I got to do, and I campaigned again. Sal Brinton reminded me that I'd been at school. I'd been in a photo on underfunded Cambridge Schools, and managed to get how much money, 35 million extra for Cambridge Schools. I got to do a lot of those things. But there are also a lot of pressures and there are certainly decisions that I agonise about. When is it worth actually achieving something versus shouting about how awful something is? Because if you know, I'm a believer in negotiation, compromise and getting, you know, making things better, not just always holding out for perfection. But there's downsides to it as well. I did some good things on state surveillance, killed off the Commons data bill, which was still awful. I think we did manage to get things in a much better place there. I was named Internet Hero of the Year for 2013, which is an amazing sort of thing in London. I think Erdogan won the Internet Villain of the Year that year. So, you know, he didn't show up to collect his prize, but I did. And I did some good stuff, I think, on drugs policy, which was, again, fascinating. And on a lot of local things. I mean, we had 35,000 pieces of casework in five years. And so just seeing bits of people's lives and being able to, in some cases, fix them and really just provide them with the support that they needed. In other cases, just seeing sense, you know, there's certainly times and I wasn't always, you know, I still occasionally have people who say you intervened and they transformed this thing for me. Too often it was about dealing with the immigration, the Home Office, who were just randomly rubbish at times. Housing issues were the really big one. So the local things were amazing. But it was also the most stressful thing I've ever done. You never stop. And, you know, Caroline, my partner, hated, hated me being in politics. She didn't want much to do with it and stayed out of it, which was fine. She saw the worst of me. She saw the exhausted version of me who'd been out emoting and doing. And then I remember once early in the season, we went to climb Snowdon and it was still snowy, icy, visibility was a few metres. So it was crampons and ice sacks. I've been up several times. The only time I've done it with crampons and ice sacks in order to get to the top. And there were a few people clustered around the top, ice covered everywhere, you know, all wrapped up warm. And, you know, we politely said hello. It wasn't a normal tourist crowd. And one said, oh, are you Julian? Yes. Would you be free to speak at our Rotary event? And I remember thinking, look, does it look like I've got my bloody diary with me? I'm on holiday. I'm at the top of a mountain. I'm not working. So I think that was really hard. And there was and the cultural style of politics became much nastier over those five years. And some people really were extraordinarily nasty. I don't mean disagreement. I'm very comfortable with disagreements, but actively nasty. And I think that was a shame. But, you know, I got to do some amazing things and in a number of ways make differences that I'm quite proud of.

AM

You obviously enjoyed it enough to want to go on because you attempted to win a seat in the last two subsequent elections. And if the chance came up now, you would probably take it, would you?

JH

Well, so I stood again in 2015 and very narrowly lost by five hundred ninety nine. Not counting. And I mean, that was essentially we as a party were punished for being in the coalition. You know, and one can talk about I have lots of thoughts about that, but it was a very happy... And actually losing is really hard. Regardless of party, you know, it's exhausting, you know, finding out at five in the morning after five years of huge effort, but a month of absolutely solid effort, you're not there in a very public way as well. I mean, awful things happen to people all the time. You know, and there are much worse things that happen, but rarely so publicly. You know, rarely, you know, rarely are you told you've lost your job because people don't want you. You know, and everybody knows, you know, you can't just go to the pub and relax. And that was really, really tough. I was very helped by actually things like the beer festival was really helpful for me. I was volunteering. It's a nice way to recover. I was quite depressed, I think, for a year or so. And yes, I did try again in 2017, which was again a bizarre election swung from being a very anti-Labour election to a very anti-Tory election, suddenly. So at the beginning of the campaign for that snap election, I was having quite a lot of Labour members in Cambridge saying I'll be voting Lib Dem because we can't have Corbyn. And then over the weekend with Theresa May's awful manifesto, it changed from we have to stop Corbyn to we have to stop Theresa. And so I went from winning comfortably to losing comfortably, which is frustrating and hard. But I haven't stood since. I'm not planning to stand since I do. I do other things to keep the public service work going, the political vision and values work. And I'm not saying I would never stand again. But. You know, I don't think we will win Cambridge until there's a Labour government. I think once there's a Labour government, I think things will change massively because I think they will struggle to continue to say all the things that people believe they will do. And we'll see a transition. But also I'm now being moved into a.... my house is staying the same, but the boundary means I'm now in South Cambridgeshire where Pippa Heylings is very likely to win. I hope she'll win. I'll be delighted to get her to win again. So I'm hoping to have a Lib Dem MP representing me again, at least.

AM

Right. Well, we've got about 12 minutes or so. So there were three political, current political things I was just hoping you might comment on. One was your interest in the UN. I read a book recently called 'The Great Convergence' by Kishore Mahbubani. I don't know if you know it. He was the Singaporean ambassador to the UN for some years. And this is about whether we can save the United Nations, given its current structures. And his view is that if it goes on as it is constituted at the moment, it's absolutely hopeless. We can't do anything. And he has some suggestions for improving it. But do you think we can save the UN or replace it with something that is better?

JH

So I think the UN is spectacularly flawed and essential. I think it gets... I think it has less good of a reputation than it should do, partly because a lot of the things that are done, people don't notice the fact that things just work. That we don't notice the fact that I think it was UNESCO who standardised globally traffic light colours. We don't think about that. We don't attribute that to the UN. It's just kind of obviously quite convenient that red means stop everywhere and green means go everywhere. But that didn't just randomly emerge. And so I think the UN existing means the world is a much, much better place. The number of conversations that are happening between countries that would otherwise struggle to talk just because there is a UN for them to happen. So it's a huge amount we don't see. I think it's also hugely flawed. I think there are many structural problems with it. I think the way the Security Council operates is deeply problematic. I think many of the institutions are deeply bureaucratic. I think there's a whole lot of problems as well. I think if we lost it, we would regret that bitterly. The League of Nations was more flawed. We redid it after a world war. I'd rather we found a way not to have a world war while we try to create this. Because ultimately there are... I'm a great believer, and I think I say always have been, I'm sure there was a time when I wasn't thinking about these things, in government at the appropriate level. And I want people to have as much local decision-making power as possible where sensible. So small things should always be done locally if at all possible. And you scale up and then some things can only be done globally. And we need to have globally reliable systems for agreeing some things, because otherwise it all falls apart. So I'm a nervously critical, concerned optimist. If we don't have proper ways for the world governments to interact, things become much, much, much worse. And I think while there are flaws with the UN, it always seems to me that anything else would be more problematic and we would regret it. Ultimately, I'd like to see a properly constituted world government in a federal way. I mean, we're centuries away from that possibly. And I'd like to see a better way of managing the UN and running the UN. I think there are lots of flaws in fundamentally believing in nation-states as the compulsory building blocks. But we're a long way away from that. It's not going to happen for a long time.

AM

Well, I agree with all that. The second question, a particular part of the world tensions at the moment, is the relations between the United States in particular and the West and China. I wondered if you had any thoughts on that.

JH

Yes, it's a really interesting question. I'm an interested novice. But I've been thinking about it really since then. There's an exchange programme between the British political parties and the Chinese Communist Party. And in 2010, I went on that to Beijing and Shanghai. And we met some very, very senior people from the party. We had a really interesting delegation from the UK as well. And it gave me some real insight, of course, the thinking and reading in advance and reflections afterwards. And I think there are some real challenges. China is a surprisingly nervous country. And certainly the very strong steer I got from that visit in particular was that they said, essentially, the Chinese history is everything goes very well and there's great stability. And then there's a period of instability. Everything goes wrong for a while. The kingdom collapses. And then eventually it comes back. We have a period of stability. And that fear of instability was a really driving piece. And so I remember the conversations there. They were surprisingly open. They put Tibet on the agenda for us to chat about. They were interested in talking about democracy and how you make it work. But everything was overlaid with this, as long as there's no risk of instability. And that was pre-Xi. I mean, things have definitely changed. But there is that fear of things there. So it's different. Whereas, you know, the US isn't scared of instability. The US is perhaps overconfident that it has the right to tell other people what to do. China, I think, is in a slightly different place. And I think they are. They were very scared by some of what Trump did. You know, this idea that we don't have control over our own destiny if we can't have access to things. That's terrifying. They're terrified of people having control over them. And while they go further than I think is the right balance to try to have control over their own citizens and over activities in other countries. It's horrific behaviour. I think it's driven by that fear of others doing that to them. Which puts it in a slightly different place. I'm really nervous about the risk of conflict. There's this whole idea of the Thucydides trap, which I'm sure you know, and in some ways, of course, oversimplified. But I could very much imagine, let's say, a US naval commander saying, if there's going to be a war with China, the sooner the better. And therefore an incentive to escalate something which doesn't need escalation.
China is absolutely being provocative and some of the actions in South China Sea are provocative as well. But I don't think it wants that war. I mean, my sense was very much that a war would be would be bad for China because of the risks of instability. So I'm nervous about how that will play out. I think Russia is making things much, much worse. I see Russia is much more malign in some of those ways. I hope China will get out of the Xi era and learn to be a bit more relaxed and less terrified about critics. Yes, I don't know where it will go. I am nervous. I'd love us to get to a stage where we say, look, there are cultural differences, all sorts of differences. And that's wonderful. We can work together and everybody can be much more secure. And I think there is a route to that. But it relies both sides to trust that the other one will stick to that.

AM

Thank you. Last one. You don't have to answer this if you don't want to. But obviously, all of us are thinking a lot about the Israeli-Gaza war at the moment. And with your background and political interests and so on, if there's any insight you want to share with us on that matter.

JH

I'm not sure I have that much insight. We had... I run a centre at Jesus College. I think it was open for we had Philippe Sands end of October.

AM

I read his East West which is ...

JH

He gave a brilliant talk about this. It wasn't on the agenda when we booked it. But he's much better on this than I am. But I find it terrifying. I went to Gaza in 2010. It was something I said I wanted to do in the run up to the election because I was hearing very different stories about what life was like in Gaza. So I'd actually like to go and see for myself what it's like. So I went in, it must have been September 2010. And we met a number of people from different sides in Gaza. And the sense of, I mean, we wrote a report, I managed to get a big debate in parliament when I came back. And the sense of imprisonment, the sense of disempowerment. And one of the things, I mean, there are lots of impressions, but Israel, in my mind at the time, was behaving against its own interests. I think Hamas and there are more extreme groups than Hamas even are horrific. And the you know, there's no defending what they did on the 7th of October, like hideously awful. But I think Israel has fostered a situation which helped Hamas. We saw that very directly in 2010. So this was in the era where there were tunnels from Egypt. And we actually went into one of the tunnels like they were huge, really obvious. And Hamas made a lot of money on the imports, so basically charged a tax. And things came in either there or from Israel. And every time a rocket was sent off by Hamas, Israel would tighten the border. And the consequence of tightening the border was that more things came through the tunnels, with the consequence that Hamas made a profit. And so certainly at the time, the situation was that Hamas sending off a rocket got Israel to make more money for Hamas. And Israel is not run by stupid people. Mossad are not perfect. There's all sorts of criticisms, but they're not idiots. I can't believe they didn't know this. And you never want to incentivise an opponent to do the things you you're against. And it was you know, and so there was this ridiculous situation where Israel's behaviour was leading to worse things. They were, I'm sure not by choice carefully, but they ended up supporting Hamas's income stream, which you don't want. And so I found the sense of helplessness, the inability for an economy to flourish, meant that people were, you could see, being forced into competitive positions because there wasn't an alternative. You know, there's some interesting comparisons with Northern Ireland. I spoke to John Alderdice, who's a friend and colleague from Parliament, of course. One of the things that changed in Northern Ireland was that the benefits of peace were stronger and stronger for the people in Northern Ireland from each side. And so if you were a Republican civilian in Northern Ireland, you increasingly start saying, sorry, what is it we're fighting and dying for? Like I can go, you know, the EU helped, of course, but, you know, if I want to go to Dublin, I can just go to Dublin. If I wanted to, like, what is it that's so important that would change my life if we win? It's not that different. It's a bit different, but not exciting enough to fight and die for. And again, if you're a Unionist, it's like, well, we are part of the UK. Like, what is it we're fighting and dying for? It doesn't matter that much. And so I'm not trying to trivialise the differences there, but it became less important than the benefits people got from economic growth development. You know, you can see the alliance doing better and better because this isn't the fight that we care about. Whereas in Gaza, there was no opportunity. People couldn't do the work that they had been doing. It was, you know, we met some people doing some nice computer aided design stuff because they could work electronically. And every now and then the Internet would work and they could send the results out. But otherwise, you know, shipments of flowers were only happening occasionally. There wasn't an economy, huge unemployment, lots of people with nothing to do. And no way for that to get better. So there weren't the strong voices saying, could you please stop antagonising? Because we don't have anything else to do. And so the debate that I had was supposed to be a half hour date and ended up being much, much longer because some other business started early. So it was really quite a big debate in the end. And I reread recently my speech, my summary at the end. And I'm not sure it was the greatest foresight of anybody, but I said what I saw was that there's this, you know, the pressure cooker that's being created. There's no way to defuse that. The pressure will just keep building and building until it eventually erupts in furious violence. And I'm not saying I have this brilliant insight that no one else would have had, but unfortunately, that's what happened.

AM

And now will it go on?


HJ

Well, the problem is at the time I was arguing for various ways to rebuild. I still believe in a two state solution, all of those things. But it becomes harder and harder because I don't see how Israel can destroy Hamas. And I don't see how Israel can destroy the ideology of Hamas. And it's a it's a nasty ideology. I'm not, you know, but which ideologies have ever been stamped out by military assault? And what worries me is you're going to be left with a destroyed Gaza with even fewer people who feel that they have benefits from peace and agreement and settlements. There are groups worse than the Hamas that were 2010. Now, it could just become worse and worse and worse. And I think what you have, unfortunately, is an awful ideology in Hamas. And these aren't directly comparable, of course. But Netanyahu is also, I think, massively opposed in every possible way, desperate to stay in power. He needs this to go on because he's out. If there's a peaceful settlement, he's out. And I just don't see very good answers. You know, we have to have a way where Palestinians, whether they are in Gaza, West Bank, Israel, feel empowered, feel that they are in a position which is good and can get better. And at the moment, the sort of far right Netanyahu style, I mean, I think they're abomination anyway. I'm against far right in all forms, particularly the one. They aren't interested in creating positive environments for the others. And it's just going to keep being worse. You know, you either have constant military incursion. Or you kill. They don't have a way to step off that ramp at the moment. And I just think that's hideous. I think future solutions have to involve a two state thing. They have to involve massive rebuilding. They have to involve Gazans feeling empowered to do things. And, you know, there are some awful people there, Hamas are awful, but it's because of the history of the people there. If you want Gazans to be like everyone else and fundamentally good, you have to give them opportunities. It's going to take a long time.

AM

Well, on that cheery note, thank you very much indeed.

JH

Thank you for listening.

AM

It was fascinating.