Mostly, I react well to stress. A lot of my best ideas come bubbling to the surface when the pressure is on. Readers will remember the prime minister playing in a cricket match at the St Helen’s Orphanage for Partially Sighted Children. That was after a particularly difficult patch during which legislation to enable a newly trained corps of health and safety inspectors to provide logistical support for operations in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East was struggling to get through the House of Lords. The Opposition and, I am afraid, some of the less well informed public had no conception of the overstretch of our armed forces at that time, otherwise we would never have faced such time-wasting arguments. We needed a distraction and that cricket match at the orphanage was it. That was one of my ideas: thought up in five minutes and put into action ten minutes later. I can still feel a prickling of excitement when I think how good that was.

So now I started to think about ways in which we could take the pressure off the government agenda. I thought about initiatives in the National Health Service, in education, in crime, but when I looked into it the last three governments had all taken so many initiatives in those areas, there simply wasn’t room for another one. So I turned my attention to policy initiatives abroad. It’s always easier to do things abroad; you don’t need planning permission or public enquiries or White Papers. You just go abroad-either on a fact-finding tour, a goodwill tour (which means taking a chequebook) or you invade. Those are generally the choices available. Unfortunately, we were already using all three methods in a number of different regions.

But Jay Vent had not employed me to tell him that something was impossible. My job was to find the solution. No matter how radical, there was always a way forward, and Jay recognised that. He called me his pathfinder, although I prefer, as I have said, the image of the helmsman. I started to look for other choices. I asked myself the question: what if there are other options in the Middle East? To be absolutely candid, the Middle East has been something of a graveyard for the reputation of a number of governments, and Opposition parties too. I found myself wondering if there was anything that we could do about that.

I decided to do what I often do when I’m in this situation; it’s one of the reasons I was so good at the job. I have a great ability to put myself in the place of the average voter, sitting watching television, just as I did, every day. What images would he see? Which of them would he select as representative of what was happening in the world? Which would remain in his mind and form the basis of his opinions?

One of the consequences of some of the things going on in the Middle East was that there was an increasing divide developing between those who wanted to keep theocratic government, sharia legal systems, and women in the home and not behind the steering wheel of a car or in a restaurant; and those who wanted democratic government, votes for women, a judiciary separate from church and state and so on. These, of course, are fundamental arguments which have been going on for decades. It could be said that the Middle East has polarised around these choices. I saw a shot of Damascus on the television the other day: a city of endless tower blocks, each apartment with a satellite TV dish on the balcony, and, among the tenements, the spires and domes of a thousand mosques. It seemed to me to sum up the conflict, the choices, at the heart of modern Islam. As I said in an earlier chapter, I watched a lot of TV in my job. I had a big flatscreen TV on all the time in my office tuned to CNN, another one tuned to BBC 24, and another with Sky News.

Mostly I watched the TV with the sound turned off-when it looked like there was breaking news, I hit the remote for sound. Most of the time I was just watching images. They washed over the surface of my mind and then they were gone, but every now and then an image would stick. I would remember it. It would shape my thought.

I would watch the images on the screen and think about what they meant. I saw young Kazakhs and Ossetians in baseball caps and tracksuits throwing stones at riot police trying to keep them off the streets at night, trying to stop them using mobile phones and wearing Western clothes. I saw those who had failed to dodge the bullets lying in dark pools in the street. I saw other images, of men young and old, in the traditional dress of their people, rioting against Westerners. And I saw that this was a society at a tipping point. Fourteen hundred years ago Islam began in the Arabian desert and within a century controlled an area which extended from Spain to central Asia. The same thing might be about to happen now. Or it could go the other way.

Images of people in the Middle East dressing like Westerners, spending like Westerners, that is what the voters watching TV here at home want to see. That is a visible sign that we really are winning the war of ideas-the struggle between consumption and economic growth, and religious tradition and economic stagnation.

I thought, why are those children coming onto the streets more and more often? It’s not anything we have done, is it? It’s not any speeches we have made, or countries we have invaded, or new constitutions we have written, or sweets we have handed out to children, or football matches between soldiers and the locals. It’s because they, too, watch TV.

They watch TV and see how we live here in the West.

They see children their own age driving sports cars. They see teenagers like them, instead of living in monastic frustration until someone arranges their marriages, going out with lots of different girls, or boys. They see them in bed with lots of different girls and boys. They watch them in noisy bars, bottles of lager upended over their mouths, getting happy, enjoying the privilege of getting drunk. They watch them roaring out support or abuse at football matches. They see them getting on and off planes, flying from here to there without restriction and without fear, going on endless holidays, shopping, lying in the sun. Especially, they see them shopping: buying clothes and PlayStations, buying iPods, video phones, laptops, watches, digital cameras, shoes, trainers, baseball caps. Spending money, of which there is always an unlimited supply, in bars and restaurants, hotels and cinemas. These children of the West are always spending. They are always restless, happy and with unlimited access to cash.

I realised, with a flash of insight, that this was what was bringing these Middle Eastern children out on the streets. I realised that they just wanted to be like us. Those children don’t want to have to go to the mosque five times a day when they could be hanging out with their friends by a bus shelter, by a phone booth or in a bar. They don’t want their families to tell them who they can and can’t marry. They might very well not want to marry at all and just have a series of partners. I mean, that’s what a lot of people do. It is no secret, after that serial in the Daily Mail, that that is what I do. I don’t necessarily need the commitment. Why should they not have the same choices as me? They want the freedom to fly off for their holidays on easy Jet. I know some will say that what a lot of them want is just one square meal a day or the chance of a drink of clean water, but on the whole the poor aren’t the ones on the street and would not be my target audience. They aren’t going to change anything, otherwise why are they so poor? The ones who come out on the streets are the ones who have TVs. They’ve seen how we live, and they want to spend.

And so I had my inspiration.

All of a sudden I knew there was a better way to spend the taxpayer’s money. I didn’t know the latest Treasury estimates of our various military operations but they were enormous and growing all the time. At the time of writing we were operating in fifteen different countries, five of them officially. Because the reasons for our overseas interventions are sometimes complex and politically quite sophisticated, the sad fact is that sometimes the general public does not always appreciate the value of these operations. Who can blame them? Some of our involvements overseas have been going on an awfully long time.