Matthew Jeffery is an experienced global talent and recruitment leader, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.
At 3.17am, the emergency alert screams from every phone in your street, that hideous metallic wail designed to rip you from your sleep. You reach across the darkness expecting another wildfire warning or some local emergency, something frightening but manageable. Then you read the message properly: “THE UNITED KINGDOM IS UNDER ATTACK. REMAIN INDOORS. AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.”
For several seconds you simply stare at the screen, hoping you have somehow misunderstood it.
Your partner is upright in bed and the children appear in the doorway, pale and frightened. Outside, a car alarm is sounding and somebody is shouting from an upstairs window. You switch on the television and catch fragments of chaos: explosions near military installations, unidentified drones, aircraft being scrambled, reports of possible missile strikes. Then the television goes black, the Wi-Fi dies and every streetlight outside vanishes.
The boiler stops, the refrigerator falls silent and your phone struggles to find a signal. One child asks whether there is a war, while the other asks the question no parent ever wants to hear: “Are we going to die?” You want to say no immediately because that is what parents are supposed to say. Tonight, for the first time, you cannot honestly promise that you can keep them safe.
Across Britain, millions instinctively want to hear from Prime Minister Andy Burnham. What has been hit? Is another attack coming? Should we leave? Are hospitals functioning? Does anybody actually know what is happening?
Suddenly the funny TikTok videos and carefully cultivated bloke-next-door image belong to another world. Nobody wants relatability when their children are frightened and the lights have gone out. They want protection. Somewhere in Whitehall, Burnham is discovering whether Britain still possesses enough military strength and national resilience to provide it.
Generals tell him which installations may have been hit while intelligence chiefs try to establish whether the attack is finished or only beginning. Which aircraft can still fly, how many interceptors remain and which communications systems have survived are no longer questions buried in defence reviews. They are questions upon which British lives may depend before breakfast.
It sounds like the opening of a thriller but the reason it should frighten us is that Russia is now openly threatening Britain.
Moscow has warned that British military installations and equipment “in Ukraine and beyond” could be targeted in response to Ukrainian strikes using British weapons. Russia’s Foreign Ministry has warned of “catastrophic consequences”, while Andrei Fedorov, a former Russian deputy foreign minister and Kremlin adviser, has raised the possibility of British factories producing weapons for Ukraine facing “semi-military” action from supposedly “unknown sources”.
That phrase should chill us.
Russia does not need to send a bomber carrying a Russian flag across the North Sea. A factory can burn, machinery can be destroyed or a computer network can collapse while Moscow denies everything. Britain is then left staring at the wreckage asking a terrifying question: how certain must we be before we hit back?
Western officials believe Putin wants to avoid direct confrontation with NATO. The danger is that he believes he can sabotage, intimidate and hurt Britain without reaching that threshold, then pushes once too often.
Wars do not always begin because somebody wanted one. Sometimes somebody simply makes one mistake too many.
Britain already knows Russian violence can reach our streets. Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London using radioactive polonium, while Sergei Skripal was targeted in Salisbury with the military nerve agent Novichok in an operation Britain attributes to Russian military intelligence. Dawn Sturgess was an innocent British mother who died after encountering the discarded poison.
Russian-linked operatives have also been accused of arson and sabotage across Europe, including an attack on a warehouse in east London. Now imagine those operations no longer occur in isolation. Somebody in Moscow decides tonight is the night to turn disruption into paralysis.
Hours before the emergency alert sounds, a warehouse connected to Britain’s defence supply chain catches fire. Another incident follows at a different site, while the computer network of a defence manufacturer suddenly fails and sensitive documents appear online. Nobody initially knows whether the fire was an accident, organised crime or Russian sabotage. That uncertainty gives Moscow exactly what it wants: time, confusion and deniability.
Drones appear near an airport and flights are suspended. Terminals fill, roads clog and social media claims one of the drones is carrying explosives. The claim may be false but the panic isn’t. Soon, even GPS starts lying. Ships report interference, aircraft experience navigation problems and communications become unreliable. Mobile networks buckle beneath extraordinary demand while millions desperately refresh news feeds for information.
Look beneath the water and there is another vulnerability. Cables on the seabed carry almost all of Britain’s international telecommunications and data traffic, while pipelines beneath the sea carry a huge share of the gas used to heat British homes. Earlier this year Britain disclosed an extensive operation monitoring Russian submarines around UK and allied waters. British ministers have explicitly warned Moscow that its activity around cables and pipelines is being watched.
Now imagine two major cables fail hundreds of miles apart. International connections deteriorate and financial systems struggle while intelligence officers tell Burnham they are increasingly confident Russia is responsible. Increasingly confident is not certain. Does Britain retaliate against a nuclear power on intelligence that could be wrong, or hesitate and risk teaching Putin that British infrastructure can be attacked without consequence?
While Burnham wrestles with that decision, the attack moves inside your home. Your phone vibrates with what appears to be an official alert ordering everybody in your area to evacuate. Ten minutes later another tells you to remain indoors, while an apparently convincing video shows Burnham announcing military action against Russia and Downing Street insists it is fake. WhatsApp groups fill with claims about contaminated water, fuel shortages, hospital closures and another attack expected before dawn. Some are true and some are lies but you have no idea which.
Do you put the children in the car and leave, or stay exactly where you are? Which road is safe, where would you go and how much fuel have you got? A fake evacuation warning creates a real traffic jam and a fabricated contamination warning empties real supermarket shelves.
Russia does not need you to believe Moscow. It needs you to stop believing London.
By now, geopolitics has disappeared. Ordinary families do not experience war through speeches about NATO doctrine. They experience what stops working. The card machine at the petrol station fails, the cashpoint does not give you money, trains are cancelled, schools close and pharmacies struggle to access their systems. Fuel stations develop queues stretching down the road.
Life suddenly becomes brutally basic. How much food is in the cupboard, how much cash is in your wallet, how much fuel is in the car, how long will your battery last and how much medication does your mother have left? Yesterday, you barely thought about any of them.
By the second night, the disbelief has gone. The house is colder because the heating has not returned and you have stopped opening the refrigerator because the food inside is spoiling. Your phone, almost fully charged when the first alert arrived, is down to eight per cent but you keep checking it because it is your remaining connection to a country you no longer entirely understand. The children are quieter now.
Your mother called earlier. She had four tablets yesterday and now has three, while the pharmacy cannot tell her when its systems or deliveries will return. You tell her everything will be fine because that is what sons and daughters tell frightened parents, although after the call ends you realise you have no evidence for saying it. Suddenly national security is not Russia, Ukraine or NATO. It is whether your mother gets tablet number four.
Then somebody hammers on your front door. Your neighbour’s husband has collapsed and she has tried 999 repeatedly but the mobile network is failing and the landline is dead. You desperately want to tell her an ambulance is coming. There may be one coming, there may be hundreds trapped elsewhere or the hospital itself may be struggling but nobody on your street knows.
This is what “national resilience” actually means outside Whitehall. It is a cold house, three tablets, eight per cent battery and a frightened woman discovering that the number she has been told to call in an emergency no longer answers. If her husband dies before help arrives, his family will know only that when they desperately needed Britain to work, it didn’t.
Make enough British families frightened, cold and angry and eventually they stop asking what is happening in Ukraine and start demanding that their own suffering ends.
Is Ukraine worth this? That is the question Moscow needs millions of Britons to ask. Putin does not need tanks rolling down Whitehall or Britain to surrender.
Putin needs Britain to lose its nerve.
If we intend to deny him that victory, we must be strong enough to withstand the consequences. For decades we reduced stockpiles, surrendered industrial capacity and persuaded ourselves that spare capability was waste. Now Moscow threatens British targets while Westminster talks about capabilities arriving years from now. Russia prepares while Britain reviews.
War does not care about Treasury timetables. The interceptor exists or it doesn’t, the ammunition is there or it isn’t and the factory can replace it or it can’t. Nobody digging through rubble will care how convincing the saving looked in Whitehall. A saving today can become a body tomorrow.
Then suppose Britain still refuses to bend and a British military installation is struck. This time there is no plausible deniability. British servicemen are dead and Burnham is shown the intelligence before being asked the question every Prime Minister hopes will belong to somebody else: do we hit Russia back?
Do nothing and Moscow learns that British lives can be taken without consequence. Retaliate and British forces kill Russians. Moscow responds, Britain responds again and within hours two nuclear powers that supposedly wanted to avoid war are exchanging fire. That is the miscalculation Western intelligence officials fear.
Now every aircraft on a radar screen matters, every submarine contact matters and every unexplained explosion matters. Somewhere in Whitehall exhausted men and women are trying to decide whether the latest Russian movement is another attack, a bluff or something worse, knowing that waiting too long could cost British lives and acting too quickly could cost vastly more.
Russia has nuclear weapons and so does Britain. Millions sitting in dark homes now depend upon Moscow and London understanding each other before somebody makes the mistake from which there is no coming back.
That is why defence cannot be something Britain promises itself for the 2030s. The missiles, ammunition, counter-drone systems, cyber resilience and factories must exist before the emergency, not after it. Once the sirens start, money cannot purchase yesterday.
Now go back to your bedroom, where the television is dead and the street outside is black. Your phone is down to five per cent, your mother still has three tablets left and nobody knows what happened to the man next door. Your children are awake beside you when the emergency alert screams again but this time nobody jumps because fear has replaced surprise.
You read the message while they read your face. Perhaps it warns of another missile strike, perhaps British and Russian forces have exchanged fire or perhaps the Government believes something worse is coming. Somewhere beneath the Atlantic Britain’s nuclear deterrent is hidden, somewhere in Russia another nuclear arsenal waits and between them politicians are desperately trying to prevent the worst night of your life becoming something unimaginably worse.
Your child asks the same question again: “Are we going to die?” You want to say no because you are their parent and they believe you can protect them, just as you have spent your life assuming Britain could protect you. Whether those words are true depends upon decisions being made now, while there is still electricity in the sockets, medicine in the pharmacies, ammunition in the warehouses and time left on the clock.
This nightmare has not happened. The lights are still on, 999 still answers and your children are sleeping safely in their beds. But the threats from Moscow are real, Russian violence and sabotage have already reached British soil and Western intelligence officials warn about the danger of miscalculation. An attack on Britain is not inevitable but nobody can honestly pretend it is unimaginable.
There is a bitter irony in John Healey having resigned as Defence Secretary because he believed Britain was not spending enough to defend itself, insisting on three per cent of GDP by 2030. It was a principled resignation. Yet now, as Chancellor, the man who resigned because the Treasury would not provide the money is reportedly preparing to abandon the very target he demanded.
Today those decisions are measured in percentages, spending reviews and Treasury calculations. If even part of this nightmare becomes reality, they will be measured very differently: in missiles we cannot intercept, ammunition we do not have, factories we failed to build, infrastructure we left exposed and lives we could not protect. What looks like a budget decision in Whitehall today could cost British lives tomorrow.
We cannot stand amid the consequences and say nobody warned us. We cannot tell grieving families that we knew the threat but the money was difficult, the capability was coming later or another review was needed. We cannot live with the knowledge that Britain had time to prepare and chose to wait.
The lights are still on tonight. That is precisely why we must act now. Because if Russia ever does attack Britain, the most unforgivable words any Prime Minister could utter the following morning are these: we knew it could happen but we weren’t ready.