This small book bobbed along for four years after publication, perhaps un-noticed, or ignored in part due to the argument around potential disasters, and possibly due to lockdown.

However, in April 2025 there was a fire in an electrical sub-station that affected power supply to Heathrow airport, and consequently affected flights all over the world.

Worse was to follow, and on 29 April 2025 the whole of Spain and Portugal closed down with a complete and immediate failure of the electrical supply system across both countries.

With no electricity for as long as 14 hours, there was no street lighting at night, ATMs ceased working, shops closed, television and mobile phones were unavailable as there was no access.

The Spanish authorities have much to reflect on because on 8 May 2025 inexplicably several municipalities on La Palma, in the Canary Islands, lost electrical power for two hours.

Sir Oliver Letwin’s argument is that as the world becomes closer connected and everyone becomes more dependent on technology, the risks to all infrastructure are multiplying.
The idea of total network failure was more than illusory by public experience of the very practical outcome of a total collapse of all services across the whole of the Iberian peninsula.

That was a black swan event: a phrase commonly used in the world of finance, for an extremely negative event or occurrence that is impossibly difficult to predict. In other words, black swan events are those occurrences that are unexpected and unknowable. How do firms, or other organisations, plan for unexpected rare events? Sir Oliver intersperses his abstract discussion of the principles and the means of approaching the difficulties from a collapse of connectivity with hypothetical discussions. Various government ministers, in the scenarios he suggests, try to assess the extent of the collapse of society with no means of doing so, and how some sort of order might be restored.

One character senses that descriptions charting the scale of the fictional problem then facing the decision-takers might prevail rather than any attempt to devise deal with it.
The difficulties from 14 hours of societal isolation in Spain and Portugal were corrected with restoration of normal facilities, and the administrative and financial mess dealt with.
Yet, it is easy to envisage, compounded by Sir Oliver’s descriptions, the potential scale of these disasters as challenging the legitimacy of the state if prolonged, and if due to dissident groups.

The threat of such disaster is real and nobody can now say that they were not alerted to a possibility of it happening, even though the potential nature and cause of it are uncertain. Suggested planning is outlined by Sir Oliver, in this very perceptive study, with a suggestion of a real need for preparation with fall-back options, as well as general contingency planning.

Apocalypse How? makes for less than cheerful reading, but the possibility of 14 or far more hours of degraded facilities ought to concentrate the minds of management everywhere.

Apocalypse How? Technology and the Threat of Disaster by Oliver Letwin. Published by Atlantic Books, 256 pp, £9.99.