The Wargame
Belatedly catching up with one of the best podcasts of 2025
Sir Humphrey Appleby: What is the point of Britain’s defence policy?
Bernard Woolley: To defend Britain?
HA: No, Bernard. It is to make people believe Britain is defended.
BW: Who, the Russians?
HA: Not the Russians, the British. The Russians know it’s not.
Yes Prime Minister, The Grand Design.
With so many podcasts to listen to, it’s easy to miss some great ones if you don’t catch them as soon as they appear in your news feed. This isn’t just an excuse to post a link to the growing back catalogue of Political Fictions episodes. It’s also to recommend The Wargame. This collaboration between Sky News and Tortoise made many best podcast lists of 2025 and deservedly so.
The set-up in The Wargame, devised by academic Rob Johnson, is intended to be one that’s low probability but high impact. An explosion takes place on a Russian base. Dagestani rebels are responsible, but Russia blames the UK instead and uses this explosion as a pretext to begin offensive operations on Britain.
How this plays out is then war-gamed by a range of participants in the sort of exercise often undertaken by governments. The roles of British Cabinet Ministers are played by Ben Wallace, Jack Straw, Amber Rudd, Helena Kennedy and Jim Murphy in a sort-of political Avengers Assemble on a budget. Soldiers and academics also play roles. The premise of the podcast is absolutely correct: games like this can help illuminate problems and dilemmas of political and historical problems. I love political and historical board games like Mr President and Twilight Struggle, which really show you the mindset of actually governing America in the 20th and 21st century more than a thousand textbooks could.
In the same fashion, I listened to The Wargame to get a bit more information on defence issues, something which I confess to being rather ignorant about. This series is definitely an interesting way in to the topic, aided by a couple of concluding episodes from Sky News’s Deborah Haynes in which she describes how the UK’s defence spending has shrunk since the end of the Cold War. These episodes manage to do what I thought was actually impossible: to get you to sympathise with Gavin Williamson.
The worst case scenario of The Wargame might be outlandish but events since the podcast’s release last June give the events portrayed more plausibility. In November, Britain sent military equipment and personnel to Belgium after Russian drones were spotted there. This year, UK and US joined forces to seize a Russian oil tanker apparently evading sanctions. There has been a 30 per cent increase in Russian ships entering UK waters in the last two years. whilst a Russian spy ship normally used to map undersea cables was out near Scotland. Something which is eerily reminiscent of the series has been stories of Russian warships mapping Britain’s undersea cables in November and again earlier this year.
Another a key theme which plays out in the series which feels more scarily relevant is the strength and unity — or otherwise — of the NATO alliance and the ‘Special Relationship’. An academic devised a hypothetical US position based on the principles of America First. Without spoiling the episodes, I think it’s fair to say that their posture was less than helpful to the British cause, but given recent events if anything The Wargame underplays the possible damage to NATO that this current administration has caused.
As Jeremy from Peep Show might have put it, binging this podcast in late December was not very Christmassy. Christmas is a time for old war films though, most of those made in the Cold War when Britain’s defence budget was still relatively high. The Wargame makes clear how much the squeeze on defence spending over the last three decades has left the British army severely depleted. In the wargame itself this was almost comic at times. Britain’s stretched air defences meant that it could only defend two different places at once. Other ships were unable to become operational and had to languish in dock. When discussing retaliatory options against Russia, it turns out Britain had just sold the two ships best used for this purpose to Brazil. It was impossible to ignore the similarities with the preparation for the Covid pandemic, where running down extra supplies of PPE in the name of efficiencies left the UK woefully unprepared.
The question Deborah Haynes poses when setting up the series is “The Russians know our weaknesses. Do you?” Which reminded me of the exchange in Yes, Prime Minister which starts this piece. However, you can overplay the similarities. Having talked to people who lived through the Cold War, it’s clear that the possibility of nuclear war was definitely understood. It strikes me that we are not only unprepared militarily for a conflict but also psychologically. “Armies fight battles”, says one of the military personnel interviewed by Haynes, “Countries fight wars.” Listening to The Wargame was, for me at least, the start of getting my head around this difficult but necessary topic.