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Hello and welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Laura Prendergast and on this week's bumper episode,

we bid farewell to the EU. We also look at the most high profile mismatch in professional boxing history.

And we speak to two living legends,

the actor and director Simon Callow and the explorer John Hemming. First up, Article 50. It has now been

triggered by Theresa May, beginning Britain's exit from the EU. I'm now joined by James Pescythe,

Fraser Nelson, and Hugo Dixon, the chairman and editor-in-chief of InFacts. So James, in your piece,

you say a great drama is about to begin. What does this all mean? Well, I think the negotiations will

be declared dead several times over the next few years, but it's going to be lots of macho

rhetoric on both sides. We're going to be taught, you know, and they are going to be fraught. They

can't not be given both the complexity and the amount of money

involved. But I think eventually a deal will be struck. And I also think this, I think there will be

a dawning realisation that both the EU and the UK have a mutual interest in each other succeeding.

And they have a mutual interest in a constructive, grown-up relationship at the end of this process. And I think

there's a mindset shift that needs to, I think it's already beginning to occur on the UK side,

and I think it needs to occur on the EU side too. But this process is as much about a new

relationship, which is going to be based on free trade, security cooperation and shared

democratic values as it is about the UK leaving the EU.

Hugo, someone who supported Remain, what do you make of James's position that this is a great

opportunity for Britain?

Well, I think it is an opportunity, but I think there are lots and lots of pitfalls.

And, I mean, the piece that James has written, I mean, if it actually ends up the way that James has sketched it with a deep

...