International Relations and Defence Committee — hearing of 15 July 2026: transcript & video

00:05 - 02:24

Speaker 2

Can I say order, order, and start this proceeding and welcome Richard Gowan, Olivia O'Sullivan, and Sir Matthew Rycroft for being available to the committee. This is the seventh evidence session of our inquiry which seeks to explore the multilateral system and how the United Kingdom might play a better part in that. I have to say to the witnesses that we are being streamed live on Parliament television and that there are apparently people out there watching these proceedings, as I have found out to my cost. You will at the end receive a transcript and if there are any small alterations, technical alterations that you want to make, then they will be received. I'll ask members of the committee to declare any relevant interest before they ask any questions at all.

And I declare that I was the lead reviewer for the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, which may well be relevant to the discussion that we're having here as well. So, we're very grateful to you for taking the time to come along. We've got a dead stop because we're being briefed at secret level by the Ministry of Defence about the situation in the Middle East. But if there are any questions that are not asked by members of the committee, maybe you might look at them and see whether there's something that you might like to say to each of them since you've been supplied with the questions in advance. So, can I start off from the chair by basically asking you, Sir Matthew, if you could give an idea of how the British government treats multilateral institutions.

Are they given sufficient priority to your mind? What is your experience? What has that experience been in the jobs that you have done about multilateral institutions as a whole and in some in particular?

02:24 - 03:20

Speaker 1

Thank you very much for this opportunity, Chair, and thank you to members of the committee as well, and it's a great pleasure to answer that question and the others that will follow. I was the British Ambassador to the United Nations for three years from 2015 to 2018. That was probably the peak of my time directly engaged with the multilateral system, but in every single job that I have done in the civil service, there has been some multilateral aspect of it. I think it's fair to say that the British state did extremely well out of the creation of the multilateral system after the Second World War, which has one way or another continued to this present day. It has given us, if anything, an oversized role, which we have used responsibly and carefully and in pursuit not just of our national interest, but also of global interests.

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