Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Hannah White.

So what are the aspects of governance that are holding back the UK. Why do the institutions of the state

sometimes, maybe often, fail? And what can we actually do to address these problems?

Well, these are the sorts of questions that dominate our thinking here, the RFG, which you will

be well aware of if you listen to this podcast regularly. They're also the sort of head scratching problems that have

been vexing today's podcast guest. So it's a very big welcome to Sam Friedman, former government

advisor, co-author of Britain's most popular substack, IFG Senior Fellow and the author of a new book

called Failed State, Why Nothing Works and How to Fix It.

So that's an upgrade, Sam, on my book, which was just about how the House of Commons

doesn't work. So you're addressing the entire state. It has that in it as well, but it has a

thing else too. So, Sam, thank you so much for joining us. I'm just curious to know when you began thinking about writing this book, was it an accumulation

of thinking about the state, which obviously you've been doing throughout your career?

Was there some particular episode which triggered you into the writing process?

So I decided I wanted to write a book when I was coming out of

hospital. I was in hospital for a long time in 2021 and had to quit the job I had at the time.

And that sort of gave me the mental space to think about writing a book, which I had always wanted

to do, but never had the space to do. And I think probably over the course of the next year

into 2022,

is how I started to form the idea of writing it. It's based on sort of a lot of things

that happened during my career that I've always been interested in and failings I've seen

across Westminster over the many years. Of course, as I was writing the proposal, it was middle

of 2022. So you had Boris Johnson

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