Alistair Campbell

And actually, a lot of the Second World War was about the Germans advancing to try to seize oil fields.

That's why we're going to talk, I think, a little bit about the Caucasus, but that's why the Caucasus really mattered to Hitler.

And of course, in the 1970s, there's actually quite an interesting book being written by somebody called Philip Delves Broughton about this,

The war in the Middle East, which was the invasion of Israel, the Yom Kippur War, led to an oil embargo, which then sparked a global crisis.

Now, because of the world we've been in since the 80s, the world of globalization, we've created a more and more interconnected world, and we've become more and more reliant on other people.

and more and more tending to assume, if you're Europe, that you've entered a new universe.

You might think, for example, you don't need to worry so much about oil and gas because you've got so much renewables.

Now, the problem with that is, of course, that even with a lot of renewables, most countries need gas to back up the wind turbines when the wind's not blowing and the solar when the sun's not shining.

But more important than that, our whole economy doesn't run on electricity.

Our trucks need diesel.

Our planes are not electric planes.

They still need jet fuel.

The 2022 shock made us wake up to gas because we suddenly worked out we were very dependent on Russian gas.

But we didn't worry about oil and jet fuel.

Why not?

Because we were worried about our enemies, not our allies.

So,

We were worried about gas and we built up these big stockpiles in Europe, committed to getting 90% stockpiles on gas.

But we basically don't have any stockpiles on jet fuel and diesel.

I think 90 days in one case compared to Japan, which has 200 days or China, which has the most enormous stockpile.