Welcome to the Restisted Polities with me, Aleister Campbell, and with me Rory Stewart.

And Rory, given the news last week, was dominated by a guy seemingly escaping somewhere easily,

it would seem from one's own prison. We should talk about your time as prison's minister, I think.

I think we should also have a little run around the block about Chinese espionage

with this guy getting arrested allegedly for smiling for the Chinese in Parliament.

We've had the G20, pretty unsatisfactory outcome on all sorts of levels I would say.

We've also got the meeting with Putin and Kim Jong Un today.

It's a bit of foreign on that, and I'm really keen to talk about the voice

referendum in Australia, which I was really hopeful was going to be a sort of positive,

uplifting, historically significant event in Australia's history.

But it feels like it's going the wrong way. We can talk about that a bit later.

But should we kick off with prisoners? Absolutely, yeah.

So, I mean, international listeners should have picked up, but maybe not a guy called Daniel Halife,

who was being held on espionage allegations. He was a man who had been a British soldier,

British signals soldier. And he is accused of having made an improvised dummy bomb,

and of having passed information to the Iranian intelligence agency, seems to be the implication.

He escaped from one's worth prison where he was working in the kitchens

by attaching himself to the bottom of a vehicle, bottom of a bakery truck, rolled out of the prison,

and the police set off on a manhunt that lasted two or three days, and then he was finally recaptured.

But it produced an extraordinary flurry of interest again in the British prison system.

And what did you make of it all?

Well, I think it did go very quickly to the issue of staffing levels, cuts, our old friend

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