This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website, Encompass-Europe.com,

or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date. I hope you enjoy this

conversation. My guest is Peter Ricketts. Lord Ricketts was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee,

UK permanent representative to NATO, permanent secretary in the foreign office,

Britain's first national security adviser and ambassador to France.

He was also the author of Howard Choices, A New Book, What Britain Does Next.

Welcome to the podcast, Peter. Thank you, Paul. Right. We're going to crack on straight away with

something you say early on in the book, and I quote your words back at you, Peter.

Life outside the EU is full of risks for Britain. Brexit does at least create the opportunity

to come to grips at last with the uncomfortable truth that the country's image of itself

is significantly out of kiltre with reality. Please amplify, Peter. Yes, one of the themes of the whole

Brexit debate, at least in my mind, was the assumption that Britain could

somehow return to a great power global status outside the EU. And it was somehow the EU that

had been holding Britain back from that. I felt there's an awful lot of nostalgia in the whole Leave campaign, as if there was a role

waiting for Britain back at the centre of the Anglo sphere, Britannia rules the waves, the trading

nation dominating the world that we used to be a century ago.

And of course, we're not.

And I do think it's been a problem

in the whole British debate about our relationship with Europe and the world is that there

is still an instinctive tendency to regard our weight in the world as far greater than it really

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