Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, recently appeared on The Mishal Husain Show, a podcast hosted by Bloomberg. Over the course of 50 minutes, Farage gave one of the longest, in-depth interviews conducted in recent months by a British political leader, ranging widely across foreign policy, the money markets, immigration and state failure. His interviewer, Mishal Husain, an ex-host of the BBC Today programme, gave a masterclass in the modern political interview: constant interruptions; bizarre segues triggered whenever the conversation strays from a limited range of predetermined talking points; and the inevitable and unpleasant countermove (at one point Nigel Farage turns on the charm and calls Husain ‘love’).

But the most revealing aspect of the interview came right at its end: ‘Is it true you read constantly?’, Husain asks Farage. He responds that he has just finished Mr Balfour’s Poodle by Roy Jenkins, a blow-by-blow political history of the constitutional crisis between the Commons and the Lords triggered by Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909. Farage reflected that the text had shaped his thinking on the potential for constitutional chicanery should Reform win a parliamentary majority.

‘In the early 20th century’, Husain cuts across: ‘Why were you interested in that?… You’re going back a hundred years to find the answers to that.’ The tone – really? The past? The early 20th century? A hundred years ago? History? – speaks to a deep problem in British public life: a political and media class, often interrelated, cut off from an historically informed understanding of the nation’s institutions.

For the early 20th century is a crucial period in the making of the modern British state, when its fundamental contours were moulded by conflict and great-power competition. Its leading institutions were developed at speed, improvised at the barrel of a gun. The Cabinet Office, for example, and professional espionage agencies licensed to operate at home and abroad in defence of the realm, indeed much of the apparatus of what we now call the British government, had its origins in the war that engulfed the European continent from 1914 to 1918, ‘a hundred years ago’. In the decades before the First World War, dual-use technologies, appropriate to peace and wartime, had outpaced Britain’s state capacity – and when war broke out, a mind-boggling array of committees and sub-committees sprang up, tasked theoretically to deal with the complexities of modern warfare. It was a dysfunctional system that produced one disaster after another.

What changed? During the crisis of 1916, officials and politicians mobilised from within the British elite to rejig the war effort. A slimmed-down, dedicated War Committee, proposed to manage the conduct of the war, was led by Cabinet Minister David Lloyd George. The PM Herbert Asquith rejected the proposal and soon resigned. The man behind the proposal was Maurice Hankey, a former Royal Marine, who had chaired the Committee for Imperial Defence. Typical of his precise and meticulous style, he later estimated that he had spent 174 hours preparing the case for a change of tack. In his 1961 memoir, The Supreme Command, 1914-1918, Hankey reflects on some of the characteristics of the new system, and how it would meet the demands of ‘major war’:

War cannot be ‘departmentalised’. A major war throws up problems interacting upon one another that require the incessant, day to day vigilance of the Supreme Command. Not only has the main policy to be decided, but it ought to be kept under continuous review from day to day, and almost from hour to hour… Such co-ordination, which involves very delicate considerations, is likely to be best assured by a body in continuous session, composed of persons free from departmental and Parliamentary duties, who can give all their time to the central problems of the war.

Under Hankey’s newly professionalised War Cabinet, the running of the war effort dramatically improved. An instructive contrast is the development, and deployment, of the tank. As early as 1914, just months into the war, a military observer on the Western Front, Colonel Ernest Swinton, had been persuaded of the ‘petrol tractors on the caterpillar principle’, after hearing of the success of American-made tractors in forging through muddy terrain. When Swinton proposed his ‘caterpillar principle’ to the military authorities on the ground, they rejected it. Luckily, Swinton knew Hankey well and could appeal directly to him. Hankey, an advocate for a new kind of armoured fighting machine, championed the idea, raising it with Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. Work then began on the design and manufacture. But it had taken all of Swinton and Hankey’s tenacity and skill to manoeuvre through the bureaucracy. The system had worked against capable people on the ground, and at the top of the hierarchy.

The ‘Supreme Command’ was Hankey’s vision, and a personal one. He was a clever and practical man with a capacious memory, perfectly suited to the ‘incessant, day to day vigilance’ required to drive a war effort. He took a keen interest in new technologies, adding a crucial insight to Swinton’s thinking: that a tank could be an offensive weapon, rather than a mere adjunct to an army’s logistical efforts. Had his new system, with the right personnel at its heart, been adopted at an earlier date, perhaps the tank would have been deployed far faster, saved lives, and made a much greater contribution to the winning of the war. The tank did go into action in 1916, but its full potential was largely unexplored by the end of the war (although it dramatically reduced the effectiveness of the machine gun). The tank would remain a tantalising vision of how war might be fought in the future. It would fall to other powers to realise the promise of warfare conducted by ‘petrol tractors on the caterpillar principle’.

Hankey’s mind was alive to the lessons of history, both ancient and modern. To break the deadlock of trench warfare, he looked back to medieval siege tactics. Only the introduction of a new kind of ‘special material’, he concluded, could make a difference to a static battlefield. In his positive appraisal of Hankey’s influence on the technological dimensions of modern warfare, the South African scientist Basil Schonland, who helped develop radar during the Second World War, writes that Hankey proposed ‘to employ “Greek fire”, either floating on water or fired from mortars, for both attack and defence. With various concoctions of “petrol, paraffin and petroleum”… Though the idea was little used in the First World War except in the development of smoke-screens, it was revived by him [Hankey] in 1940 when Britain was once again and this time more seriously threatened with invasion’. When Hankey proposed the idea in 1914, Asquith remarked in a letter to his lover Venetia Stanley: ‘It will be strange if we are driven back to medieval practices.’

In a memorandum, Hankey draws lessons from the actions of the US Marine Corps in the Philippines to work out whether nimble, maritime raiding forces could be deployed to divert the attention of the enemy. In his memoir, he also regrets when the lessons of the past were ignored. During the First World War, the British high command ‘had not studied history sufficiently to use sea-power to its fullest effect’.

The system Hankey built was by no means perfect, and indeed, a century on, many of the institutions he championed, including the Cabinet Office, have changed out of recognition, and now, arguably, contribute to the sense of inertia that grips the British state. It needs a new generation of historically informed decision-makers, and pundits, who can draw the right lessons from the past, and apply them to the different problems of the 21st century.

We have a good test-case for the effectiveness of the presentist governing class in recent memory. When the Covid crisis hit, the most significant test of state capacity and population resilience in decades, few journalists asked hard questions of the politicians in charge: who is responsible? The scientific committees? Or the politicians? And for what? How much power do the politicians really have? Secondary questions – just as important – such as how the scientific committees that shaped policy made decisions, or how the minuting process worked, were left largely unexplored.

Key problems, which could have been addressed in real-time when it mattered, have instead been left to be answered by the UK’s ongoing public inquiry into the country’s pandemic response. Many of the personalities involved with the pandemic response have left public life altogether. Some of the important decision-makers who do remain in politics and public service are no longer in power. Officials in charge of disaster response may have been moved on to a new brief. Those who experienced the crisis cannot now rectify the failures they saw in the system, let alone apply the right lessons to a future crisis.

Britain is attempting to navigate an era in which major war is a reality on the European continent, and a near-certainty in the next few decades. Once more, the state will have to deal with scenarios in which, as Hankey observed of ‘major war’, ‘problems’ interact ‘upon one another’. In such an age, history is our wisest guide, and to neglect her is to take the short path to defeat.