Crisis What Crisis with Andy Coulson

In this special episode, which is brought to you in partnership with the Centre for Social Justice, we’ll be shining a light on the crisis of modern slavery, and in particular the increasing prevalence of Cuckooing – a terrible new trend that you might have seen featured in the TV show Happy Valley. Cuckooing is a deeply damaging and frankly cruel practice used by criminals to take over someone’s...

“I’ve got the ability to kill people and not sort of worry about it too much.” In this episode, I’m joined by the former SAS soldier, hugely successful writer, campaigner and clinically diagnosed psychopath Andy McNab. Andy’s life began in crisis .. abandoned after birth on the steps of a London hospital, he was later adopted and raised in Peckham. After several run-ins with the law as a teenager,...

The two guests joining us in this Crisis Cures episode have both enjoyed stellar careers in broadcasting, but it’s not been a straightforward journey at all for either of them. Richard Bacon started out as a fully paid-up Blue Peter badge holder, presenting one of the longest running and most successful children’s television programs of all time. A tenure cut short when his private life came under...

“You start wondering if your own life is worth continuing. It’s obvious that you think about that. But what do you learn? I don’t know. I think people learn different things and people react to grief very differently.” Joining us for this episode is Professor Robert Winston – scientist, author, broadcaster and politician. Devoting much of his adult life to the crisis of infertility – IVF pioneer L...

This is one of the most difficult crisis conversations we've had to date and some will find this episode distressing. It’s a discussion about unimaginable trauma - the loss of a child in the most horrendous circumstances. Our guest is Lisa Squire, mother of Libby, a 21-year-old student who disappeared after a night out in Hull with university friends in January 2019. 48 days later Libby’s body was...

In this Crisis Cures episode we hear from two remarkable women who faced down two very different challenges. For Roopa Farooki, that took the form of facing down the daily crisis of Covid, with all its drama and tragedy, during the peak of the pandemic in her role as an NHS junior doctor. And for Virginia Buckingham, the former boss of Logan international airport in Boston, it was the shocking per...

Legendary musician Nile Rodgers has endured and managed dramatic crises for him and his loved ones throughout his life. Here he gives us his three top Crisis Cures for when life unravels. You can listen to this valuable conversation in full and all previous episodes, here or wherever you get your podcasts. Nile's full interview is available here: https://www.crisiswhatcrisis.com/podcasts/nile-rodg...

Andrew Milburn is the British educated would-be lawyer who became a decorated US Marine Colonel. A 31year career spent in the midst of crisis in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. Now, as the Founder and CEO of the Mozart Group – a response to Putin’s evil Wagner Group – he trains and rescues Ukrainian civilians. In this conversation, Andrew gives us an extraordinary insight into the psychology of tho...

Fergal Keane is the multi-award-winning BBC Foreign Correspondent and author - a man who through the very nature of his job has spent much of his 33-year career immersed in crisis. The newsreels of genocide and mass atrocities in places like Rwanda and Sudan, that we all have watched from the comfort of our homes, are first-hand horrors embedded in Fergal’s mind. Memories that have caused him to b...

In what is possibly our most topical episode to date our guest is the former Chancellor George Osborne. Talking on the day after Liz Truss’s resignation, George delivers a detailed view on the unravelling political and economic crisis and explains why he fears the end is nigh for the Tory government. And he also talks revealingly about the crises that came before … from the 2008 financial collapse...

In this special episode we reveal the ongoing crisis being endured by the Forgotten 500,000 … those British people whose compromised immune systems mean they live in constant fear of infection, serious illness or death. For a large number of those men, women and children lockdown has never ended because of a government refusal to act. You’ll hear a shocking first-hand account from English Professo...

Gay and Roxy Longworth are a mother and daughter who overcame an incredibly difficult, long and dangerous mental health crisis and collaborated to write a powerful book, ‘When You Lose It’, documenting each shocking step. Although at times extraordinary, the story they tell in this episode will, I think, resonate with parents and teenagers struggling to navigate the dangers of the modern, digital...

My guest for this episode is the journalist, documentary maker and radio script writer, Richard Clemmow. Richard and I are both trustees of Our Brain Bank, a charity which supports people affected by Glioblastoma – one of the most complex and aggressive brain cancers. GBM is a cancer which sadly we both have a very personal connection with. I became a trustee after my family lost my sister Deb alm...

My guest this today is James Timpson OBE – the inspiring and successful businessman whose family-run company boasts over two thousand Timpsons, Snappy Snaps and other high street brands. In this conversation you’ll hear how the impact of lockdown almost took the company down. As he said, “half of me thought, this is a business experiment to see if we can survive - the other half thought, if we’re...

In this episode I’m joined by the world-renowned performance psychologist, Dr Nate Zinsser. Dr Zinsser (or Dr Z as he’s known) - is the Director of the Performance Psychology Programme at West Point, the US Army’s famous officer training facility. In that role he prepares new and experienced soldiers for the mental stresses of battle. He also works for the FBI and is a top US sports psychologist,...

My guest today is the former Foreign Secretary William Hague. As someone who has been ‘in the room’ as the decision maker at so many moments of political drama, Lord Hague has an incredibly valuable voice to add to this conversation that we’re having about crisis. From his challenging time as Conservative Party leader, the wilderness years out of frontline politics, the four he spent as Foreign Se...

My guest today, I am thrilled to say, is one of Britain’s best broadcasters – the brilliant Andrew Marr. Perhaps best known for his Sunday morning politics show, which he recently left after more than 20 years, Andrew is a true polymath – a man who can not only present but who writes prolifically, is a talented painter and who has forgotten more than most of us have learnt about Britain’s history....

To kick off this new series I’m joined by Ginny Buckingham – the quietly spoken, devoted mum-of-two who for a period of her life faced the frankly unfathomable trauma of being publicly blamed for thousands of deaths. Ginny was the boss of Boston’s Logan Airport where, on the morning of September 11th 2001, a group of terrorists boarded American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, ai...

My guest for this special episode – talking to me from the world’s crisis capital Kyiv – is BBC broadcaster Jeremy Bowen. Jeremy’s dramatic dispatches, with his trademark focus on the moving, at times frankly horrific, human stories of loss and despair, have revealed the appalling impact of Russia’s invasion. This is a truly frontline crisis conversation with a man who felt compelled to put himsel...

Nick Robinson is a man who for more than 25 years has had a seat in the front row of so many political crises. First as a news producer and then in front of the camera as political editor for ITN and the BBC Nick really has witnessed it all when it comes to Westminster drama. Since 2015 Nick has also, of course, fronted Radio 4’s Today Programme, a role in which his piercing interview style has ma...

For our first outdoor episode media business leader and one of a kind motivational speaker Ellis Watson joins me for a walk in the Scottish Highlands. Ellis has worked at the sharp end of corporate crisis – heading a national newspaper business, turning around The Greyhound bus operation in the US and as Global CEO of Simon Cowell’s Syco Corporation, before taking charge of UK media group DC Thoms...

In this week’s Shortcut episode, we are joined by award-winning author and junior doctor, Roopa Farooki. In February 2020, Roopa - who is the daughter of the celebrated Pakistani novelist, Nasim Ahmed Farooki - lost her sister Kiron to breast cancer. Then weeks later she found herself struggling to cope in an overstretched and under-resourced ITU department, caring for the critically ill Covid-19...

In this episode we have something different as I’m joined by the brilliant psychiatrist Prof. Steve Peters, author of the best-selling The Chimp Paradox. Steve’s landmark book has become a bible for anyone looking to cope with crisis or break down the barriers that can prevent us from living a fuller, happier life. During an illustrious career Steve has worked with people facing life threatening c...

Peter Owen Jones is the former ad man who gave it all up to become a parish priest. By the late 1980s, the former farm boy had carved out a successful career working as a creative director for a top London agency. But shortly before his 30th birthday, Peter walked away from his lucrative career to embrace a simpler, more meaningful life. Known to many as the ‘vicar in the hat’, and seen often on T...

Pauline Stonehouse found herself at the centre of what is one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice. Between 2000-2015, the post office bullied and prosecuted more than 700 innocent sub post masters and post mistresses. Those prosecutions carried out by the post office’s criminal law division were based on evidence gathered from a recently installed but as it turned out fatally flawed compu...