As the world becomes better connected and we grow ever more dependent on technology, the risks to our infrastructure are multiplying. Whether it's a hostile state striking the national grid (like Russia did with Ukraine in 2016) or a freak solar storm, our systems have become so interlinked that if one part goes down the rest topple like dominoes. In this groundbreaking book, former government minister Oliver Letwin looks ten years into the future and imagines a UK in which the national grid has collapsed. Reliant on the internet, automated electric cars, voice-over IP, GPS, and the internet of things, law and order would disintegrate. Taking us from high-level government meetings to elderly citizens waiting in vain for their carers, this book is a wake up call for why we should question our unshakeable faith in technology. But it's much more than that: Letwin uses his vast experience in government to outline how businesses and government should respond to catastrophic black swan events that seem distant and implausible-until they occur.
"Highly readable and, for a memoir of this kind, unusually candid; Letwin is much more open than most former ministers about admitting what went wrong. His conclusions about Thatcher and about NHS marketisation are probably the most important in the book, but it is all worth reading."
Guardian on Hearts and Minds
"To read Hearts and Minds is to spend time in the company of Oliver Letwin and that is always a pleasure. Civilised, amusing, persuasive, engaging and insightful. This book is a convincing account of the development of modern liberal conservatism and an inspiration for its adherents."
Daniel Finkelstein on Hearts and Minds
"Oliver Letwin is that rare thing in politics, an intellectual with as much passion for putting ideas into practice as he has for thinking of them in the first place. He did as much as anyone to create a modern compassionate Conservative Party and was a linchpin of the coalition government. This book is a brilliantly frank and often amusing account of what worked and what didn't."
