Thank you very much, Sam, and thank you very much to the London Review of Books for inviting us along this evening.

It's a tremendous honour to be invited to mark this 40th birthday.

And we were both delighted to have this opportunity to talk about our work.

We're going to talk about political crisis, as Sam mentioned, but specifically the

crisis of liberalism, however we might mean by that, and what the current crisis of

liberalism might consist of, and how writers might attempt to try and narrate that crisis

and to make sense of some of that crisis.

There's been quite a lot of discussion in the public sphere, in academia, in policy world,

joined also by the likes of Vladimir Putin, even, that liberal values are in decline,

that post-liberalism is the future of some kind, movements like blue labor,

various forms of populism that challenge liberalism on its particular grounds of procedural justice and rule of law. But there's also, I think, something which I think we might come back to,

which is a certain irony of the present moment that we're living through, which is that in some ways, aspects of British liberal democracy are in motion and are active like we've never seen in many decades.

The courts are now very actively involved in upholding rule of law in society. We see a

separation of powers between the executive legislative and judiciary right now, the like of which

Britain has not seen in living memory. And we see huge levels of political mobilisation, including

by liberals.

Jean-Claude Juncker said in an interview with the Independent today that Britain is now home to the largest pro-European movement in the whole of Europe.

So there is a question about the extent to which, if liberalism is in crisis, what does it mean to say liberalism is in crisis when in some ways the defenders of liberalism and the instruments of liberalism are active like we've not seen

recently? Now, of course, the enemies of liberalism, whoever they might be, the opponents of

liberalism, are energized by this. Boris Johnson is doing extremely well in the opinion polls

at the moment. But I suppose one way we might come at this question of the crisis of liberalism is that although

liberalism is everywhere right now, it's very active, it's very energize, it's very vocal,

...