In an exclusive interview for ITV News’ Talking Politics Podcast, Sir Simon – who was the most powerful British official till the end of last year – said that the shock to global trade and the economy from such an invasion would “make what happened during Covid and Ukraine… pale into comparison”, because of the dependence of our economies on Taiwan’s semiconductors and Chinese manufacturing.
In a wide-ranging interview about the Prime Minister’s plans to significantly invest in the UK’s defence capability, including its nuclear deterrent, Sir Simon stressed that our living standards would be massively damaged by the fallout from China launching military action to take control of Taiwan.
In a resonant section, he said: “We spend an awful lot of our money as a nation on secret intelligence to help us understand the secrets of other nations, of our adversaries.
“One of the things we’ve not been great at is reading the speeches of autocrats and dictators. President Xi has told his military and his economy to get ready for, as he would put it, the reunification – or, to the rest of us, the invasion – of Taiwan in 2027 or 2028.
“[Xi said] his forces have to be ready to do that, and his economy should be able to withstand the sanctions that he assumed would come on China for doing that. So it’s there in plain text.”
In a separate section, he confirmed that he had written to the then prime minister Liz Truss in the autumn of 2022 warning her that if she didn’t reverse her disastrous mini budget that she risked the humiliation and economic harm of the government struggling to borrow what it needed and of acute damage to the financial system.
Truss had already told me she had received a written warning from Case in an interview for the Rest is Money podcast, but Case has never spoken about it.
He told me: “It wouldn’t have just been a challenge for the government’s responsibility to borrow. It would have been that many companies that we don’t think about, but we do rely on day in and day out, like insurance companies, would suddenly find themselves in very serious financial trouble.
“The value of their assets were falling very fast. I mean, of course, in that scenario, someone like me spends a lot of time, at the then Prime Minister’s request, speaking to all of the experts that you can find both domestically and internationally to say ‘what is the right thing to do here?'”
