The 'Anglo-Gaullism' debate | Ben Judah

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

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🗓️ 9 April 2026

⏱️ 16 minutes

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Summary

In the magazine this week, Ben Judah – former adviser in the Foreign Office – makes the case for ‘Anglo-Gaullism’. He says that Britain should learn the lessons of France’s Charles de Gaulle when carving out its place in the world, especially given the increasingly erratic nature of the US and the fragmentation of politics at home.

In practice, Ben suggests that this would involve an Australian-style ranked-choice voting, injecting Whitehall with experts (in tech and AI), taking on the welfare system (including ending the pensions triple lock) and European geo-political co-operation which would limit reliance on the US. But would Anglo-Gaullism ever work in Britain? And is it still possible to produce a leader with the authority of de Gaulle to implement it?

James Heale speaks to Ben Judah.

Produced by Oscar Edmondson.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Seale and joined today by Ben Judah, former special advisor at the Foreign Office.
0:10.7	Now, for this week's magazine, Ben has written about why it has to be de Gaulle or nothing, lessons from the general.
0:16.7	And your piece, Ben, basically argues that we ought to sort of look to the French president,
0:21.3	who ran the Fourth Republic from 1958 to 69, as an inspiration for this government,
0:26.7	given the pivot that America is making under Donald Trump.
0:29.8	Thank you so much for having me on. Absolutely.
0:31.9	I wrote in this week's issue about how my experiencing government turned me from a pretty conventional
0:39.4	progressive Atlantisist into a British Gaulist. And that was because working closely with
0:47.6	the White House and with the State Department, what I saw confirmed my worst fears, which is that
0:53.6	the United States, the superpower that we've
0:55.5	built, our entire security around for generations, has become profoundly erratic, emotional,
1:03.7	unstable and unreliable. And I think that that's only got worse in the last few weeks
1:08.9	since I started writing this essay. And I just wonder, I mean, you talk about British ghoulism. Is there much of a tradition
1:13.9	of that? Because, I mean, reading it, you know, sort of standing up to America, having the need
1:17.8	to sort of put your national interest first, having a sense of modern with technology, while also
1:23.7	respecting historic institutions. I mean, it sounds quite sort of more like palism than Anglo-Goolism. I think that there is a submerged tradition of thinking of
1:32.8	Britain first and foremost as an independent country that should take a kind of clearer stand for
1:41.1	itself in the world that should not automatically assume that its interests are the
1:46.5	same interests of the United States and not kind of relegate itself to followership.
1:51.1	You see some of that on the right in the very confusing potpoury that is Paulism, which
1:57.3	there's a lot of kind of contradictory, sometimes contradictory ideas in, but there was
2:01.2	a strong strand of, you know, mid to late 20th century skepticism of the United States. And you also
	...

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