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On 24 May 1982, Nick Butler, then a 27-year-old Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (usually known as Chatham House, the name of its building in St James's Square in London), wrote a memorandum to David Watt, the director of Chatham House, headed "Anglo-US contacts". It began: "I have been having discussions... about the possibility of establishing some form of regular contact for Britons and Americans similar in style and purpose to Königswinter but for a slightly younger age group. We started from the point of view that as well as the active hostility to all things American from some parts of the political spectrum here there is in addition a serious lack of mutual understanding over a wide range of policies."

Butler, who was treasurer of the Fabian Society and a prospective Labour parliamentary candidate, came from the "centre left" of British politics. As an economist with the oil giant British Petroleum before (and after) his secondment to Chatham House, he had a direct view of Anglo-American economic relationships which was unusual in Labour circles. He was also an enthusiast for international discussion forums.

The traditional British left-wing remained deeply suspicious of the United States, particularly on foreign policy and security issues: this was the era of Michael Foot's leadership of a Labour Party committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. There was, however, a growing interest among Butler's own peer-group in American ideas: "how cities are regenerated, how market forces worked, and so on". But there were few mechanisms available for useful contact, because the strongest Anglo-American relationship "had always been focused on the right of the political spectrum and the older generation, and there was nothing to renew it or broaden it".

Butler's initial step had been to contact Maxine Vlieland, who was general secretary of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government and the organiser of the British side of the Königswinter conferences, which Butler had taken part in. These were to provide a first model for the BAP. Maxine's husband Pieter, a Sunday Telegraph journalist, was also involved in Königswinter, and the two of them ran a business called Specialist Conferences. Maxine saw immediately a need for political balance in the construction of the Project, and it was she who brought in Dr Christopher Coker, a defence expert and lecturer at the London School of Economics with distinctly conservative views.

This foursome "sat and chatted and drank quite a lot", Maxine says; they also opened a dialogue with the US Embassy. In due course they were ready to put Butler's idea to David Watt: the hope was to establish a regular annual conference for 25 to 40-year-olds from a wide variety of backgrounds, alternating between the US and Britain and covering "each of the areas of contention and misunderstanding — economic policy, defence, international relations - possibly taking a different topic each year".

Watt supported them, and the project was officially endorsed by Chatham House. It also received the backing of the English-Speaking Union, whose director-general, Alan Lee Williams (a former Labour MP, later chairman of the Atlantic Council) became one of the first members of the UK Advisory Board.

Group Captain David Bolton, director of the Royal United Services Institute, Britain's senior defence forum, was also brought in, with a different professional perspective on traditional links across the Atlantic: even in the military sphere, he felt, "connections had faded". With the reduction in the size of forces and the opportunities to serve together, the number of personal contacts was greatly diminished. "The Americans, to some extent, felt they had much less need of us, and we had far fewer means of influencing them. It was a sin of omission that needed to be repaired." But Bolton never wanted the Project to have a military flavour; he was convinced that it should be inter-disciplinary, with as wide a spectrum of political opinion as possible.

Others who came in at an early stage were the management consultant Dennis Stevenson (now Sir Dennis and chairman of Pearson, the media conglomerate) and Sir Michael Palliser, a former head of the Foreign Office who had been a special adviser to the Prime Minister during the Falklands War. The US embassy provided a grant of £1,000 to fund a first fact-finding trip to Washington by Butler, Coker and the Vlielands in the summer of 1983.

Their challenge was to find sufficient funding for a first conference, but the response from potential British sources was "get it going first then come back to us", according to Maxine Vlieland. The American side was "more open-minded", but no real progress was made until the idea was put — by Butler and Watt, at a meeting at Chatham House — to Sir Charles Villiers, the former chairman of British Steel Corporation.