Andy Coulson: Welcome back to Crisis What Crisis, the podcast that aims to guide you towards a more resilient life and whatever it might throw at you. If this is your first time with us, then please do hit subscribe wherever you're watching or listening and please do leave us a review. It really does help make sure that these I hope useful conversations are shared as widely as possible.

Mark Turnbull: I had a real moment as we pulled into the green zone and I lifted him out of the back of this Land Rover, and I could see where this bullet had gone through his throat, and I knew he had died. And I thought, “He died saving my life to do my job,”

Andy Coulson: Mark Turnbull, our guest today has had a 35-year career as a geopolitical communications strategist. A career that's taken him inside the American invasion of Iraq, to the final days of apartheid South Africa. From the inner sanctum of a leading KGB defector to the cockpit of Cambridge Analytica.

Along the way he has run a dozen election campaigns on three continents. Mark has seen massive changes over that period, from the relative simplicity of an analogue world to one in which political campaigning has been revolutionised by the impact of big data and the growing threat of disinformation.

Mark talks about the physical dangers and reputational risks of his trade and the pressure it put on his family, from being ambushed by insurgents in Baghdad and battling Somali warlords, to taking on Putin's propaganda machine, and the sting operation which would bring down Trump campaign agency Cambridge Analytica. And along the way, cast him as a poster boy for data theft and dirty tricks.

Mark Turnbull: I understood even in the grip of this, that the narrative was just too strong. And too many people were invested in it and wanted to believe it, and the story was- There comes a point where you can't fight the story. I mean I should have known better. I spent my entire career advising clients on crisis and curveballs and how to do media interviews and here I was right in the middle of it.

Andy Coulson: Three years ago, on his 60th birthday Mark was given a terminal cancer diagnosis, a final unexpected plot twist which has brought him to reflect on his life and career in a fiercely honest warts and all memoir, brilliantly titled Clusterfuck. In it he makes the case for how he chose to lead his life, what it meant and why it mattered.

Mark Turnbull, welcome to Crisis What Crisis.

Mark Turnbull: Thank you very much Andy.

Andy Coulson: How are you?

Mark Turnbull: I'm very well. Thank you kindly. I have to say, in preparation for this discussion I listened to a lot of these podcasts, and I'm awed by some of the stories of courage in adversity and the way people cope with it.

So, I'm sitting here now with raging imposter syndrome, I'm probably not the first to tell you that. Thank you for the kind introduction but I’m very happy to dive straight into the deep end.

Andy Coulson: Mark, well thank you for joining us and thank you for that.

When we met a while ago for the first time, we talked about the various jobs that we'd had, and you also told me about your diagnosis. It was about a year ago I think, and you were very, very clear with me that- because we weren't actually talking about the podcast at that stage, but we were talking about the word crisis. And you were very clear with me that you would not, have not applied the word crisis to your situation right now in terms of the diagnosis.

Mark Turnbull: Yeah.

Andy Coulson: But it is of course a crisis of the most acute kind. Just explain to me or explain to those watching and listening now what you explained to me then as to why you've taken that attitude.

Mark Turnbull: Well yes, of course it was- I mean, it was an unexpected plot twist, as you said, in what had otherwise been a charmed life. And yes, it's an existential crisis to be told that you're dealing with a- I can't remember how we put it now, a foreshortened event horizon. I love that Woody Allen quip about not being afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

And I thought immediately, look, you know, I was 60, I've had a brilliant life, an incredibly privileged life, it's been packed full of adventure. And it just seemed to me, utterly kind of self-indulgent to complain that I, you know, I hadn't seen this thing coming, of course I hadn't. The news is a shock. But it could have been so much worse.

As my wonderful mother who turns 90 this year said to me, “Darling, you could have just dropped dead of a heart attack,” as many of our friends had, or suffered a disabling stroke, or been diagnosed with dementia. I have none of those things. I have an opportunity to pack as much into the rest of my life, as I can, with the only thing that I can control, which is my approach, my attitude to life. It's the only thing any of us can control.

And having been an incurable optimist and fiercely upbeat for my entire professional career, it's madness to change now. I can't change. That's just the way I am.

Andy Coulson: It's an incredible perspective. Do you think that your career, which we're going to discuss today, do you think your career has played a part in leading you to that conclusion? You say that you look back and the gratitude, obviously, of the life that you've led, professional life that you've led, has sort of fuelled that philosophy, if you like.

But you've also spent a life surrounded by, immersed in, situations where you can just see how difficult, how unfair, how dark life can be.

Mark Turnbull: Indeed.

Andy Coulson: And yet you've chosen to stay, to probably misquote Van Morrison, on the bright side of the road. But do you think the career then has played its part in leading you to that?

Mark Turnbull: I think it probably has. I mean, I go back even further and say the way we were brought up. I come from a very happy, loving family. I'm in the middle of three brothers, two years either side of me. We were ex-pat brats. My father was BP born and bred, 35-year career man. And so, we were dragged around the world to wherever oil was being discovered or pumped out of the ground.

And an incredibly, in one-way, privileged life, but in another, you get to see how most people in the world live. And you know, we lived in and went to some countries where your life expectancy is a fraction of that. You know, kids were dying of diarrhoea at the age of five or six. So, you sort of understand that there's no sort of overarching system of cosmic fairness built into our universe, it is the way it is.

It made me thirsty for adventure, perhaps too thirsty, a bit of an adrenaline junkie. I used to say that I've sort of cheated death by an inch or a second in various ways in my life. Rock climbing, and as a roughneck on the oil rigs, and a commercial diver in the Arabian Gulf. Quite a few mishaps at sea, and shark diving, and on the ski piece.

Andy Coulson: [We're going to need another episode.

Mark Turnbull: Car crashes. I figured I'm living on borrowed time; I've got past and through the nine lives. So yes, I guess I chose a career that would- with a pretty high tolerance for that sort of risk-taking uncertainty. And so, I've only got my myself to blame. But I've never had a bad year in my entire career, through all the ups and downs. I've enjoyed every minute of it.

Andy Coulson: Before we get into the career then, let me just ask you about the word crisis, which we have both professionally spent a lot of time around, and indeed personally. What's your definition?

Mark Turnbull: I think it's a set of circumstances which really confronts you at the basic level, at the core level, with questions about who you are and why you are and what you're doing here. And in that sense, I guess, as I look across my professional life, and thank you for the intro there Andy, I can see various points, inflection points in my life, which were crises.

My first professional crisis, I think, was accusing Putin of war crimes. I should say that I joined a company called Bell Pottinger. Sir, then Lord Tim Bell, the first I think real Svengali of our trade, of the communications business, charismatic, controversial, who wore the arrows in his chest with enormous pride, completely unabashed about who he was, an incredible man with a real genius for communicating. And I hadn't joined him for very long before he called me up to his office and then sent me across London to Mayfair to interview an exiled Russian oligarch by the name of Boris Berezovsky and the KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, both of whom were sort of holed up in London and seeking exile.

Andy Coulson: Just explain for those watching and listening your role at this stage. So, you've worked at a PR firm in- and we are going to go backwards at some point, because I want to trace back the kind of characteristics that kind of fuel this-

Mark Turnbull: Yes, where did the trouble start?

Andy Coulson: Where did the trouble start? But by this stage in your career, you've worked in a PR firm in Canada, I think.

Mark Turnbull: I had.

Andy Coulson: You’d decided actually that it was the world of communications, reputation, PR that you wanted to be in.

Mark Turnbull: Yes, yes.

Andy Coulson: And you found yourself at Tim Bell's, you found yourself at Tim Bell's door. So, you're being hired here as a sort of strategic advisor in the Tim Bell universe.

Mark Turnbull: That's exactly right, yes.

Andy Coulson: A universe that included controversial figures. Tim's attitude of life was much like a lawyer. Everyone deserves an opportunity to present their story in the way that they want to present their story.

Mark Turnbull: Yeah, exactly.

Andy Coulson: Have I got all that about, right?

Mark Turnbull: Yes, I think you have got that about right. I mean, I washed up on the shores of public relations having tried and failed at a whole bunch of other things. And with a philosophy degree in my back pocket and a master’s in international politics, emigrated to Canada, two unsuccessful startups under my belt, mid to late 20s, what can I do with my life?

And so yes, I stalked the biggest PR company, sat in their reception until they gave me a job in Canada. And then finally I came back to the UK and found myself sitting in front of this extraordinary figure to be interviewed as part of his sort of praetorian guard.

When I met Tim the first time, he was- and anyone who knows him will recognise this, sitting in his eerie in Hertford Street, wreathed in cigarette smoke on the phone. I came into his office, and he beckoned me to sit down, and all I could hear was his side of the telephone conversation. And he said, “David, if you think posing at the garden gate with your wife and family is going to resolve this, you're basically a bigger wanker than I thought that you were.”

He slammed the phone down and he said, “You must be Mark Turnbull here for a job. That was our esteemed Heritage Minister, David Mellor, who's enjoyed sexual favours with a part-time actress and now thinks he can talk his way out of it.” And I remember sitting there thinking, “Blimey,” it never occurred to me that, you know, part of the day job would be scolding a cabinet minister for his misbehaviour.

But that was Tim. Unbridled honesty. He used to say PR is nothing more than a truth well told. That was disingenuous. We also heard him say, “Why tell the truth when a good lie will do?” And “Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

Andy Coulson: How do you reflect back on that now?

Mark Turnbull: With a great deal of pride, I have to say, and enjoyment, I mean, towards the end of his life Tim went on Paxman, and Jeremy Paxman asked him the question, “Tim, as the- we all know you have this sort of Rolodex of discredited rogues and regimes and so forth. Is there anyone you wouldn't work for?” And Tim said, “I'm not a priest. People come to me for a fair hearing, and if they work for or represent authoritarian regimes, I'll only work for them if they promise to reform.”

And I burst out laughing. That was Tim to a T, and again, thoroughly disingenuous. But he was loyal and generous and instinctively brilliant, and he parachuted me behind enemy lines for eighteen years in various parts of the world to sort out problems, or to run elections and so forth.

Not least sending me down to South Africa as part of the team which worked, first of all, on the de Klerk Mandela election in 1994, that's where I cut my political teeth. That's where I realised for the first time, I think, that this innocuous sounding phrase, public relations, was actually the oil of the modern world, of the communications world. It was everything. The power of narrative to sway people and tell the national story, particularly at the point where an entire country was mired in crisis, was brilliant.

And the four years I spent there working for the ANC and for other corporations, midwifing the birth of the new Rainbow Nation, was an incredible experience and I wouldn't have had it had I not signed up with Tim, so I'm hugely grateful to him for that.

But the occasion of the Berezovsky and Litvinenko episode, it tested me because I thought, “Do we really want to throw an international press conference branding the Russian president a war criminal?” I mean, that is pretty chewy by anyone's standards. But when I met Berezovsky who was a small, wiry, bustling, energetic guy, and Litvinenko who was no one's idea of a KGB director, he was calm and courteous and spread out across the table, he explained to me exactly how and why Putin and the FSB, as the KGB are now known, orchestrated a bombing campaign in Russia in 1999, in which 200 people were killed, in order to blame the Chechens and propel Putin to the presidency.

And I had enough evidence there, I thought, to go ahead and run the press conference. I did have a moment, I have to tell you, in the lift on the way down from those two days in which I was closeted with them, when Litvinenko told me- in my briefcase of course I had all the evidence ready, and I was beginning to sweat slightly. And he said, “Watch out when you cross the road, because hit and run is the KGB's preferred assassination method.” And I don't mind telling you, I did run all the way back to the office.

Andy Coulson: Berezovsky was a divisive figure in some ways, right?

Mark Turnbull: He was, he was.

Andy Coulson: Some saw him as a sort of heroic whistleblower, others as a sort of self-serving oligarch. How did you navigate that sort of complexity when crafting the sort of narrative around that story?

Mark Turnbull: I never got to the bottom of- I mean, we all knew that Boris had blood on his hands. You don't get to be an oligarch and profit from the privatisation, or pirateisation I should say, of Russian state assets back in the day without being completely unscrupulous. His bodyguard was killed. He had several death threats. Litvinenko himself was ordered by Putin to assassinate Berezovsky. It was his refusal to do so which led Litvinenko to flee to Britain and seek asylum. And the two of them knew that they would be hunted down and killed on British soil by the Russian state. They knew it.

Our job was just to make life as uncomfortable as possible for Putin, so we had to kind of learn the Kremlin propaganda playbook. This was way back in the day when it was almost quaint. You know, we held press conferences and put out press releases and drew attention to human rights abuses in Chechnya, and Boris would fund us to go and run election campaigns along the rim of the former Soviet Union to unsettle Putin.

But this was before Russia really industrialised its disinformation and propaganda capabilities.

Andy Coulson: What’s your sort of state of mind at this stage of your career? Because I think anyone listening to this will be thinking this is pretty dangerous stuff, right? You're not a soldier; a lot of former militaries end up in this world. You're not as far as I'm aware a spy, you'll tell me whether I'm wrong about that?

Mark Turnbull: [No I’m not, and I'm still I'm still disabusing my children of that notion.

Andy Coulson: And you’ve never been in the employ of MI6, as far as I'm aware.

Mark Turnbull: That's correct.

Andy Coulson: You were there as a sort of story shaper, as the guy who was helping to shape and deliver this narrative.

The other side of your life, you're happily married, you've got kids, you've got a secure, lovely home, you've got two sides of a coin that are, you know, entirely at odds with each other, one might argue. How are you managing that, and were you always comfortable with it?

Mark Turnbull: I managed it by compartmentalising it. I think a lot of blokes would understand. And I remember when we won the contract against all the odds to do the communications for the first election campaign in war-torn Iraq, this was a year after the invasion in 2003. You remember, we sort of kicked the door in, the point of a gun, promising democracy, and pretty much everything had gone wrong from day one. You know, no weapons of mass destruction, looting and rioting in the streets, a Shia uprising, a Sunni uprising, terrorist campaign, sectarian violence. You know, for those who thought that the war itself was an illegal, completely specious pretext for invading Iraq, and then it rapidly became a fiasco.

And I remember the day we got engaged, I got engaged to Juliet, probably the best decision I ever made in my life, because she's an extraordinary woman about whom I cannot say enough. But the day I did, my body armour arrived in the reception at Bell Pottinger, and I had some explaining to do. I had to say, “Look, I'm really sorry, but I hadn't seen it coming. We've won this business. I'm going into a war zone. It's a four-month contract, but we've got to persuade the Iraqi people to get out and vote. And Al-Qaeda are cutting off their heads, and we've got to sell this strange thing called democracy. And I'm going to be away for a while. So, would you mind selling your house, my house, buying our marital home and organising a wedding? And I will sort of parachute in, rather like Timothy Dalton, for our wedding.”

I mean, what an idiot. But she did, and she took everything in her stride, incredibly. But the thing is, you know, for seventeen years, I was living in shipping containers in war zones, one way or another. For eight years in Iraq, three in Somalia and various other places. And Juliet, for a lot of that time, brought up our kids single-handedly. Even the fact of our having children was something of a miracle. Juliet herself had been diagnosed with cervical cancer in her early thirties. She had narrowly escaped a death, lost her cervix, told she probably wouldn't have children.

So, conceiving our daughter Olivia, no-one knew it at the time, but she was six weeks pregnant when she walked down the aisle. And then again, Jack two years later, these were kind of miracle kids for us, quite extraordinary. And Juliet paid a big price. She was diagnosed with a condition called lymphoedema, which is the swelling of a limb, in this case, one of her legs. And it meant that she had to wear compression stockings and have certain massages. It affected every single dimension of her life.

But that was a price she was willing to pay for the fact that we've got two beautiful children. And the liberty of me being a, you know, haring off like a mad bugger, doing what I was doing, while she anchored the home front.

Andy Coulson: So, everything that she has endured I suspect is also another factor that-

Mark Turnbull: She could be sitting where I'm sitting, having the same- the flip side of the same conversation about the crises in her life, because she dealt with me. It was easier for me, being in Iraq, being rocketed and mortared and shot at. Talk about crisis, that was a physical crisis. I think it was the only time, really, I thought I'm going to die out here.

Andy Coulson: Just talk us through that. Give us an idea, where in the career timeline does this moment sit, just to give everyone context?

Mark Turnbull: So, we're now 2004, a four-month contract, the election campaign, a long story as to how and why we won it, but it was ludicrously improbable. Next thing I'm strapped into a C-130 doing a tactical landing into Baghdad in the middle of the night and then barrelling down the highway. You land in the airport in Baghdad, and you've got a sort of 8, 10-kilometre road between the airport and what we called the green zone. It’s wonderful, isn't it? We put names on everything, you know, and we signal.

We had taken over the Presidential Palace, that's where the Americans were sitting, the new sheriff was in town, and the green zone was this sort of 30-acre or 300-acre, I can't remember, but it was covered in blast walls, surrounded by blast walls and machine gun nests. That was the safe zone. Everywhere outside that was the red zone, and the most expensive taxi ride in the world was getting from the airport to the green zone, which you did either in heavily armoured vehicles, or in my case, in soft-skin Land Rovers, which were called rocket magnets.

Andy Coulson: As someone who is there not under the cover of the security that the military might provide, or indeed other agencies at play, you were there as a comms guy working for a commercial outfit.

Mark Turnbull: There was a comms guy, and we had to hire our own security. So, we hired a British security firm who in turn hired a largely Iraqi security team and met us at the airport with three Land Rovers. You as the client would sit in the middle and the first and third would sort of box and cox their way as you as you hooned down this highway which the Americans had cleared either side for about 200 yards to try and clear away. But every single bad guy in Iraq with a rifle and RPG mortar considered it sport to try and pick you off on the road.

And so, it came to pass. I had a sort of presentiment that it would. I’d talked to the security team to the extent actually that they put me unusually in the lead vehicle because I thought, “Well I can outsmart the bad guys here.” So, I was sitting in the lead vehicle when we passed a couple of Mercedes on the road and the windows came down the machine guns came out. It was like Al Capone in the 1920s. I made like a carpet on the back seat of the of the vehicle as you do, I was wearing body armour and helmet I could feel and hear the bullets punching through the soft skin of the Land Rover.

It was all over in in seconds. One of their cars exploded and flew off the road and the other one just went into reverse, but it did kill the guy sitting behind me who was the machine gunner as it were, and he was sitting on my briefcase, covered it in blood and bits of glass, and it was it was a real- I had a real moment as we pulled into the green zone and I lifted him out of the back of this Land Rover, and I could see where this bullet had gone through his throat, and I knew he had died. And I thought, “He died saving my life to do my job,” and that was a real moment.

Because I could take anything else. I mean, two weeks earlier I'd been blown up by an RPG at the top of our hotel in the red zone, which narrowly missed me, but it shredded my clothes and peppered me with shrapnel. I could kind of take that, I sort of understood that. This is the war we're fighting in; I've signed up to be a civilian- effectively a combatant. But when somebody else-

Andy Coulson: That’s how you viewed yourself? There was a kind of moral purpose that sat behind this as well as the fact that it was your job.

Mark Turnbull: There was a huge moral purpose. And I have to tell you it had nothing to do with peddling coalition propaganda or being apologists for the war or trying to sell it in any way. Our job was to try and make the case for peace and to transform a violent dynamic into one of peaceful political engagement and thus try and persuade Iraqis to have a stake in their own future and save lives, both Iraqi and coalition. That's what we were doing.

Andy Coulson: So did those two incidents harden that resolve? There must have been doubt, there must have been, “What on earth am I doing?”

Mark Turnbull: Well, Juliet was, “What on earth are you doing there?”

Andy Coulson: But you weren't? You weren't thinking that for a second?

Mark Turnbull: Yes, I was, but the bigger part of me was thinking- and maybe this is just a vanity or ego. The mission, the sense of mission and purpose is incredibly important to me.

Andy Coulson: [0:38:27] Is there something else as well? We've had a number of war correspondents on this podcast, my friend Jeremy Bowen Boone one of them, who has found himself in very similar situations to the ones that you've described. Colleagues being killed next him. He told us, or he characterised it as an addiction. He said that he absolutely as a result of the job that he has done became addicted to danger, to risk.

Is there a bit of that in you?

Mark Turnbull: [0:39:03] Yes, there may be a little bit in me, Andy. I think what goes alongside my adventurer's heart, I would describe it as, rather than an addiction to risk or adrenaline.

Andy Coulson: You are a wordsmith.

Mark Turnbull: I am. But I think it is an important point that runs alongside that, and that is, you know, we need a purpose in life, and I'm very mission driven. And when we were sitting in Iraq, I remember sitting under my desk, because the mortars were coming in. It was about three weeks before my wedding, I was in my mid-40s, and I told everybody, “Just get under the desk. Just sit under your desks and carry on working. There's a deadline here, laptops open, carry on talking to each other and working.” And all we could hear was the dust coming off the ceiling, because the mortars were coming in.

And I figured we either take a direct hit, in which case this is all academic, or we don't, in which case, keep buggering on, as Churchill so famously said.

Andy Coulson: Pretty fatalistic about it.

Mark Turnbull: I am pretty fatalistic, and there is something about, you know, Nelson on the quarter deck, I have to say, about me, Andy. I think a calm head is incredibly important, panic doesn't help, ever. And so, I try and quell that side of me.

Andy Coulson: In that your sort of strategy or your approach, this is an acute example that you're giving us here, but when in crisis your practical kind of approach, summarise it for us?

Mark Turnbull: Yes, a few things. One, don't panic Captain Mainwaring. Not least because people are looking to you for that kind of example and leadership. I don't know whether it can be taught, but a calm head is incredibly important. Behind the calm head of course, I've got a loving family and friends and I'm emotionally grounded. So, I'm not liable to go spinning off in the midst of all of this.

A sense of purpose. I understand why I'm there and what I'm doing. It's incredibly important, I think. We were there for eight years and for every year of that, I thought even though it was all going to hell in a hand basket, “What we're doing here is incredibly important work. Incredibly meaningful work.”

And I think the final piece of that coping mechanism is a sense of humour.

Andy Coulson: [Massively underrated.

Mark Turnbull: It’s massively underrated. I remember sitting in the Marsden being given my terminal cancer diagnosis. And of course, part of me was in shock. Part of me was preparing to sort of set the dial to stoic fortitude, which is my default. But another part of me was remembering and savouring that wonderful gag by the late Bob Monkhouse, who also died of prostate cancer. He went on Parkinson. Parkie said, “I'm sorry to hit the news,” and Bob said, “Look, it went like this. The chap in the white coat told me, I'm sorry Bob, you've got terminal prostate cancer. He said, I'm not being funny, Doc, but would you mind sticking two fingers up my bum? I'd like a second opinion.” And that was going through my mind. And I thought, what is this? You know, is that some sort of displacement activity? I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. You know, you alluded to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, so-called scandal.

Andy Coulson: It was a scandal. We don't get to decide whether these things are scandals or not, it was a scandal.

Mark Turnbull: Okay, it was a scandal. And I remember I was sitting there on the phone. It was a classic sting operation, which was a Channel 4 sting. But the New York Times and The Observer and others had weighed in. They were setting their traps, and they were determined to bring Cambridge Analytica.

Andy Coulson: Can I, before you dive in on Cambridge Analytica, I absolutely want to talk about this. We're sort of racing through the various points of crisis in your life, but let's just pause for a second. How did you come to join Cambridge Analytica? What excited you about the company? And was it this- did you see it really, or did you see the company as being at the sort of cutting edge of what you considered to be this sort of new frontier on the trade that you'd spent so many years working on, reputation? Is that really what it was about, influence?

Mark Turnbull: [Yes, well I needed a job.

Andy Coulson: Slightly less of a philosophical decision.

Mark Turnbull: Well, yes and no. Yes, I needed it.

Andy Coulson: So, you’d come out of Iraq, let's just paint the picture for the listener.

Mark Turnbull: I'd come out of Iraq, yes exactly. And my job disappeared from underneath me. Bell Pottinger and Chime, the holding company, split, and Tim Bell and his merry men went on one way, and Chime went on the other. And they both looked at our little unit, the special operations, special projects, as we called it then, there were a dozen of us. And for a few years, for about five years in the history of Chime, we dozen made over half the profit of a group 700 people strong. But we were secret, and we were hidden in the basement.

And because the Iraq contract, when it became a little harder-edged to take on Al-Qaeda and counterinsurgency and counter-radicalisation, it was classified by the Americans. So, we kind of couldn't even admit to it being there.

So, Chime was sitting on this spigot of cash in the basement, and they were spreading it across as many of the other companies as they could possibly kind of get away with. And so, when the music stopped, there wasn't a chair for us. They all looked at us and said, “Well, we’ve got away with it for this long, we can't-”

Andy Coulson: Can’t get away with it anymore.

Mark Turnbull: [0:46:42] Yes. So, we were closed down. I was for the second time let go by Chime, I think that's a record, I don't think anyone else has been fired twice from Bell Pottinger and retreated down to our holiday home on the south coast. I was sort of whittling wood on the beach in West Wittering, thinking, “I need a job, what do I do?” And I’d promised Juliet something more London-based, UK-based, a bit of travel, but calmez vous.

And so, when I got the call from Alexander Nix, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica, I sort of flipped open the laptop, I Googled him and his partner in crime Nigel Oaks, and I could sort of see what they were doing. I had no idea about big data.

So, in parentheses, I don't do social media, Andy. This might seem strange, given that I was the managing director and so-called sort of Darth Vader of this organisation that was advancing fearlessly into the world of big data and psychographic profiling and behavioural micro-targeting. I don't do social media, partly because I didn't want Al-Qaeda to come and kill me, there were some very good reasons. And partly because I instinctively saw it as a kind of addiction that was infantilising a people and our society and hollowing us out from the inside. And we can talk about that.

Andy Coulson: You reached that conclusion quite early on?

Mark Turnbull: I did. I saw it and I thought no good is going to come of this. You know, the attention span problem and the polarisation, all people sitting in their echo chambers and filter bubbles curating, going to great lengths to create the sort of idealised image of themselves and adjusting their news feed-

Andy Coulson: But you made a decision then to join to join a company that would be-

Mark Turnbull: Yes, who was right in the midst of all of this.

Andy Coulson: Right in the midst of that and was seeking advantage left right and centre from it.

Mark Turnbull: [And proud of the work that it was doing. And Nix said, “Look, we've got 5,000 data points on 250 million Americans. Wewe know people better than they know themselves now because of the internet and our surveys and these fast data machines and learning models. We can model and segment any electorate down to-”

Andy Coulson: That's a line from a Bond film, I think, and I don't think it came out of Bond's mouth. Put it that way.

Mark Turnbull: We, he looked a bit like a Bond villain. I'm not surprised when it came down. And I was warned before I joined Cambridge Analytica. People said to me, “Mark, you're dealing with an outsized ego and a sort of Teflon coated self-regard, and somebody else for whom the facts will never get in the way of a good story.” So, while I- I liked Alexander, he was also very charismatic and charming. Trust, not so much. But I thought, “Yes, I can handle this.” I mean, I could handle Tim Bell. I'd spent a few years working with Tim Spicer, and that was no picnic. I thought I can handle outsized egos, and I can do my own thing.

And anyway, he and his cohort of data scientists were sitting on a in an office on the first floor of 55 New Oxford Street-

Andy Coulson: And everybody was knocking on the door, right? There were governments knocking on the door, and-

Mark Turnbull: Well, at the time they had just won the Trump business to do the Trump campaign, and so all of the organisational resources had swung to the US, and so he took me on to do the rest of the world. He said, “Now, you just run election campaigns, build a team for the rest of the world.” We already had Kenya; we were deep into Kenyatta's campaign. And so that's what I did, and I thought, “Well you can do that over there and I'm going to do this.”

Andy Coulson: So, the moral purpose that you found in Iraq, you were seeking out the moral purpose at Cambridge Analytica?

Mark Turnbull: Yes, I was. And I found it. Amongst the folks that worked with and for me in the campaigns that we were doing, we often thought about which clients we would take on, what we were seeking to achieve, what was legitimate, what we wouldn't do.

Andy Coulson: And there was, as ever with these situations there was a lot of very clever, very good work being done. Am I right?

Mark Turnbull: Yes, some terrific work being done.

Andy Coulson: And a bit like Nix- this is a podcast that seeks to be non-judgmental. Even Nix charismatic, super smart, as a leader of the team and of the staff. Is he someone who inspired loyalty?

Mark Turnbull: I think yes, he did. He was relentlessly upbeat; he had a kind of Tigger-ish enthusiasm. He bounced around the office extolling the virtues of this brave new world. I never quite bought it, if I'm perfectly honest, I didn't really understand it. I was much more- I mean, I got into this business because I'm fascinated by the way we are all hardwired, the human brain, and how we think and feel and behave the way we do.

And it seems to me that every endeavour you can think of from the boardroom to the battlefield is about understanding and motivating people and communication sits at the heart of that. And so therefore I'm the guy with the bullhorn in the strategy room going, “Who are you? What do you do? Why are you here? Why do you matter? If you don't know the answers to those questions, you shouldn't be in business or in politics. And if you can answer them, I'm going to help you answer them in a far more concise and lucid way.”

If you can't get it down on one page, you don't know what you're doing. And if you can't get it down in one paragraph, you're never going to persuade anybody. So that was my calling, if you like. That was my business. And I think, you know, Nix and Oaks and all the rest came from the same stable, but they saw this bright, shiny thing, the data analytics, the algorithms that could determine human behaviour.

I never saw elections being won by machine generated adverts. I thought no, this is about human creativity at heart. And it's about candidates and policy ideas. I'm afraid I'm not so much big data, but small data. Because I think the irreducible unit of any election campaign is the individual human being. And we're not consumers or rats in a maze or clusters of neurons being guided and nudged by your algorithm. We're human beings.

So, a healthy scepticism about that side. But I loved the excitement of working in a company with these incredibly bright data scientists plotting the American electoral landscape and threading this improbable way through for a Trump campaign victory. Which indeed they did.

Andy Coulson: No doubt about it.

Mark Turnbull: So, chapeau to them, but boy, remember 2016 Andy. Within the space of four months, we had Trump, and we had Brexit. And although Cambridge Analytica didn't secure a paid contract or do any work on Brexit, there were enough people that thought their fingerprints were all over them. And of course, Alexander was, you know, a nudge is as good as a wink to a Bishop. So, he sorts of-

Andy Coulson: He rather liked the idea that people thought-

Mark Turnbull: He loved the idea, and-

Andy Coulson: And also, the mood around all of that at the time, which is often the case until, you know, it's great until it's not. The media certainly, the political class, our game, writing comms and reputation, everybody was terribly excited about it. And everybody was frankly quite impressed by it and wanted a slice of it. That's the truth of it. That's what I mean by the door was being knocked pretty heavily and repeatedly.

Mark Turnbull: Yes. Afterwards he would say, “This is our trump card,” no pun intended, you only need one case study, and this is it. The problem was that half the world who was horrified by Trump and Brexit were heading in the wrong direction, heading out of the door and away from us. And the other half that were heading towards us was anyone who thought, “Well, I want the killer algorithm under the bed,” and that included a lot of regimes and leaders and so forth.

Andy Coulson: A lot of regimes, a lot of politicians of all flavours, and all tribes, everybody just reached the conclusion there is a silver bullet here and I want it.

Mark Turnbull: That's it.

Andy Coulson: Let's talk about how it went wrong. You were there, I think, for about two years.

Mark Turnbull: I was.

Andy Coulson: When you suddenly found yourself in the wrong end of the story. Just tell us what happened.

Mark Turnbull: Well, I should have known better. I’ve spent my entire career advising clients on crisis and curveballs and media interviews, and here I was right in the middle of it. Channel 4 hired an actor pretending to be a client, a Sri Lankan philanthropist, and I went to meet him, first me and then our data scientist guy, to talk about what we could do to reform the political system in Sri Lanka and get some honest politicians elected so that this business could extend these philanthropic projects. It was really exciting.

And so, he asked me about how we could do this, particularly given that it’s basically an authoritarian regime in Sri Lanka and there's no room for doing this openly. We had to be incredibly discreet. And so, I sort of unpacked for him a lot of the work we'd done in Iraq, which was all unattributed advertising and so forth, and other parts of the world, with that aim in mind.

Well of course, if you strip away all the context I'm beginning to sound like some kind of rogue arm of MI6. And finally, this actor said, “Well, I really want to meet your boss. Can't go back to Sri Lanka and sign the contract until we've got Nix.” And so, one snowy December day, I said to Alexander, “Come and join me for champagne, high tea,” it was in the Bartley Hotel, “And one more conversation with this chap, and I think we can sign the business.”

And so, in we walked, oblivious to the unmarked van outside and the fact that the place had been wired with cameras and for sound in the corner of this bar. And halfway through the conversation, all pretence was suddenly abandoned by this guy, and he suddenly said, “Look, let me cut to the chase. I'm really looking for someone who can film politicians in compromising situations and just discredit them.” And I sat there thinking, “Oh, I've just wasted six months on this clown.” So, I was angry. And I'd already told him, “There are companies out there who may do that. We don't do that.” And I expected Alexander sitting next to me to put him straight.

But of course, you know, Alexander is a salesman. And he didn't so much cross the line as charge across it like a wounded rhino, and off he went, entertaining these ludicrous speculations about what we can and can't do. I sat there thinking this has really gone off the rails. And to my- you know Andy, afterwards, I thought maybe I should have stood up and said, “I want nothing to do with this. He's talking rubbish, you're a rogue, and I want nothing to do with this.” But I'm English and we're polite, and you don't throw your boss under a bus in what you think is a is a private client meeting.

I also thought, because I'm operational, whatever he agrees won't matter. Because when it comes to the operations, I decide what we can and can't and will and won't do. So, I put that out of my mind, really.

But what I didn't know was that this was the last piece of the sting operation which led to the Channel 4- a week of me starring on the Cambridge Analytica Files and the so-called scandal. I say so-called because it was made up of two parts.

Part number one was the accusation that Cambridge Analytica had either stolen or scraped or harvested 50 million Facebook profiles two years before I joined the company, and they'd use those to win the American election.

Part number two was the sting and the shredding of Alexander's credibility, because he was sitting their sort of admitting to entrapping politicians and subverting democracy, and you know, shipping in the Ukrainian hookers. You couldn't believe it; it had everything that a good scandal needs with a cherry on top.

Andy Coulson: Just finish up on the so-called bit.

Mark Turnbull: Okay, why do I say so-called? Because over in the States the whole business of whether Cambridge Analytica did or didn't steal or inappropriately take these-

Andy Coulson: Facebook data.

Mark Turnbull: Yes, was never resolved. And there were parliamentary hearings and congressional hearings and so forth.

Andy Coulson: Facebook moved away pretty swiftly.

Mark Turnbull: Yes, Facebook- they lost 100 billion plus on their share price, but effectively they said, “Look, first of all, you have to understand that our entire business model is based on people doing exactly this. You know, you're being chased around the web by people who want your business. And we can help you do that through Facebook.” So, there was nothing untoward or illegal or now ethics, certainly nothing illegal about this. So that's the first thing. I'm not condoning it. I'm just saying that that they didn't lay a glove on the company in respect of that particular charge.

The other charge, you've been very naughty boys. You know, you have been authors of dereliction, a dreadful subversion of democracy and so forth. That charge was investigated by the Information Commissioner's Office, who raided the office in SWAT jackets, ICO SWAT jackets like the FBI, and carted off all the computers, terabytes of information. And two years later came back and apologised and said, “Oh, actually we found no evidence whatsoever that Cambridge Analytica played any role in the Brexit campaign or broke any rules with regards to safeguarding of data. So, we're sorry about that.” But this is two years later, and 120 people have lost their jobs and we've all gone down the Swanee.

Andy Coulson: So, are you bitter about that?

Mark Turnbull No, not remotely. Not remotely, because I understood even in the grip of this, that the narrative was just too strong. And too many people were invested in it and wanted to believe it, and the story was- There comes a point where you can't fight the story. And there was no point in me standing up and saying, “Oh, hang on a second, just for the record. I've never hacked anyone's data or bribed or entrapped a politician or bought an election or incited tribal or racial violence or done any of the other things that you laid at our door.” Because I wouldn't be believed.

And secondly, that just sounds horribly self-exculpatory. So, I thought, “No, I joined this company. I was proud to have served with this company. We had some fantastic people doing great work,” and I couldn't disown all of that. I just thought this was absurd. The whole charade around the breaking of the of the story and the narrative inflation around it. I just thought, “Well Mark, you know, you chose this profession. And you had to have known, ultimately, that you're going to find yourself on the wrong side of a particular story, and so you take it on the chin.”

And the big irony about my situation is that because I didn't do social media, the twitchfork mob couldn't get me, they couldn't find me, I have no digital footprint.

So, while others were being hounded, I mean, I got papped and so forth as you as you did Andy, but no microphones peering into the living room. And no doom- scrolling of hate and vitriol aimed at me. I felt like I was a bit part player caught up in a crisis.

Andy Coulson: You were still though, for the first time at the wrong end of the story. As someone whose job it was, if you like, to control the narrative, you're in the story and you’ve totally lost control of the narrative. How did that feel?

Mark Turnbull: Look, it felt pretty horrible. It felt even worse going home and telling Juliet, who wasn't particularly well at the time. I went home with a big, thick binder of Channel 4 accusations and said, “I think you need to read this.” And she was like, “I can't believe, you know, you joined this company for a quiet life, and I can't believe you've done this.”

And we lost a few friends as a result, people who didn't understand or wouldn't give me the benefit of the doubt. And there were some nights, I have to say, where I woke up rather sweaty in the middle of the night and thought, “My god, why am I a part of this?” And for about a month, I wouldn't answer the doorbell because I had this horrible feeling, this presentiment that there'd be cameras and so forth, and I wanted to protect the family from that.

So yes, probably for a good six months I was shaken by it. But I was determined not to let it define me. So even while all this was happening, I climbed out of the wreckage of Cambridge Analytica, even while the good ship was sliding beneath the waves and was offered a life raft by one of the investors in the company. I took some of my team with me and we set up another- I thought, “Well, I'm going to set up my own agency to do the kind of work we were doing, dial the moral compass up to about 11, put our values in the shop window as it were, and be entirely unapologetic about who we are and what we do.”

The first thing I did was walk down, cross the bridge into the Financial Times and say, “Hello,” with my investor, “I'm Mark Turnbull, Cambridge Analytica. I'm setting up a new agency. “They were like, “Ye gods.” So, I gave them the story and we made the front page, our launch.

Andy Coulson: And the pitch of All Specs which was the company was essentially moral data.

Mark Turnbull: Yes, it was, “We're going to do good work for good people,” effectively, “And we're looking for strong positive outcomes.” And I think my pitch and my pitch to the team was, if you look across the world, most societies, particularly in the developing world, 99% are completely disenfranchised and poor and have nothing. Power is concentrated in the hands of the 1%. Let's see if we can bridge the gap between power and the people and hold politicians accountable. Let's see if we can find the up-and-coming politicians that want really good change and attach ourselves to them and deliver. And we did. We found a couple and we did some brilliant work.

Andy Coulson: So, this podcast is about lessons, essentially. What's the lesson there? The lesson there is, you went through a very difficult period, but ultimately what you were able to do is dig into that crisis and find an opportunity.

Mark Turnbull: Exactly. I think, yes, don't give up and don't let other people define who you are and what you believe and why you do what you do. So, stay true to yourself, a big lesson for me. And get back on the horse.

Andy Coulson: And confront the mistakes?

Mark Turnbull: Yes and confront the mistakes.

Andy Coulson: So how would you characterise your mistakes?

Mark Turnbull: Oh my god, they're legion, Andy. We have another session lined up. You know, we all make mistakes all the time. But if you're doing things for what you think are the right reasons, then you do them. And don't spend too long engaged in endless post-mortems about what you do.

I've had friends say, “You shouldn't have been in Iraq. Simply being in Iraq means that you've got blood on your hands, you were part of an illegal invasion. You shouldn't have done it; you've profited from the Iraqi people.” “You shouldn't have helped to run the clerk's election campaign against Mandela. You were on the wrong side of the argument. How could you possibly do that?” These are long and complex discussions to have. “How could you work with Gaddafi? He's funding terrorism around the world.” Yes, he is. But if the brief is to normalise Libya's relations with the rest of the world-

Andy Coulson: which our own Prime Minister was pretty keen on doing.

Mark Turnbull: I'm with him. I'm with him. So, I chose to work in an industry freighted with moral hazard and every political and you could argue business decision you make has moral ambiguity and decisions and trade-offs and compromises attached to it. So don't second-guess yourself the whole time, trust your instincts.

Andy Coulson: You obviously hold to the view that at this stage of your life this is a discussion worth having, and that this kind of moral ambiguity, the grey, which is often where we find ourselves in this podcast, is a place that we should explore perhaps a little bit more than we have done previously.

Mark Turnbull: Yes.

Andy Coulson: So, you're going to pour all this into your- you have poured all this into your book.

Mark Turnbull: I have.

Andy Coulson: Congratulations on the title, by the way.

Mark Turnbull: Oh, thank you. The subtitle is Misadventures of a Global Propagandist.

Andy Coulson: Very good. Just tell us about the book. What's the plan? How was it to write? How are you feeling about it?

Mark Turnbull: Well, I was prompted to write it by the diagnosis, because I thought- I don't know how long I've got left and I don't want to waste this time. And so, I thought I'll write something for Juliet and the children and for friends. When I started getting into it though, I thought, “Actually, this has commercial value I think, beyond-” because the adventures that I've had in the grey world, of strategic communications, are really worth recording, and some of the lessons learned and so forth, particularly as we hurtle into a new world of artificial intelligence, which will be exponentially transformative.

You know, my career was rooted in the analogue world, we're now heading into uncharted territory. We're also at war; it's an information propaganda war. We're being assaulted by Russia, China, others, who- and authoritarianism is on the rise in the world, democracy is in the retreat. Even though ironically last year more people voted than in human history.

The fact of the matter is, we are under attack and our enemies are causing us to lose faith in our own institutions, our own values, ultimately, in ourselves. And so, we're fighting a psychological war here. The next war, the battlefield is in our minds, and we need to be equipped to fight it. And so, I thought, I'm going to write a book about this.

Andy Coulson: What's the key lesson then from the history that we've only scraped the surface of in this conversation? But what's the key learning from your career that can help us navigate this next phase?

Mark Turnbull: I think we've sleepwalked into one of the most dangerous periods of our history. So yes, I think it's about rediscovering- I mean, we're clever at this sort of stuff, you know? In the First and Second World Wars, the Sefton Delmers and Dudley Clarkes and so on, we are really clever at understanding psychological operations and so forth. But we’ve sort of lost all of this, we need to find it again. We've lost Generation Z, I read it in a report the other day. They don't know what they believe in, they're frightened. Only 10% of them would fight for their country. You know, we seem to have been losing a sense of who we are.

Andy Coulson: So, it's about a sense of patriotism.

Mark Turnbull: It is.

Andy Coulson: And it is also a sense of, you're arguing the positive case for propaganda skills.

Mark Turnbull: Yes, I am.

Andy Coulson: Because we've got no choice.

Mark Turnbull: No, and we're being outthought-

Andy Coulson: If we believe in who we are and what we are, we have got to play that game, is your view.

Mark Turnbull: Define those values and project those values.

Andy Coulson: And develop those skills.

Mark Turnbull: Yes, absolutely. And find the best of the private sector who are doing incredible work in this space, and the government and military ,and put them all together and create if you like a task force up to the crisis we face as a nation.

Andy Coulson: This podcast is in danger of sounding like an MI6 recruitment video, because this is the case. This is the case.

Mark Turnbull: And the reason I called my book Clusterfuck, which is a bit rude and risqué, is that one of the observations I've had in my life is that geopolitics is driven by cock-up rather than conspiracy. And everyone who is looking for a master plan in the bottom drawer, there isn't one, okay? And often no one is in charge. Even the people in charge don't know who's in charge. And the law of unintended consequences is alive and well.

And we have to be- I’m incredibly proud to be a Brit. I think we're amongst the cleverest, most ingenious entrepreneurial people in the world, so now we need to start applying ourselves to this. Because we're being outspent, outthought, outfought by our enemies. And this is not a pitch for MI6 or MI5, although I hold both organisations in the highest regard.

Andy Coulson: Mark Turnbull, thank you so much for joining us today.

Mark Turnbull: A huge