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Right, this is slightly different, isn't it?

It's just me, Nick Erdley at Westminster and...

Me, Phil Smith, Holyrood. That was really organic. That works.

And we're just... We're going to do a slightly different episode, a shorter one, to talk about

a story that was on The Nine, about Scottish independence, and what might happen next,

partly because we think the story's interesting, partly because we want to

talk about why we do some of these stories like this, but also so we can kind of discuss what's

going on at Hollywood and Westminster. People do love discussing independence, don't they?

People, and it's still the big issue, isn't it? I'm sure our timelines will be full of praise and nice thoughts.

No one's getting muted today. It'll be fine.

Should I just, I mean, I did the story. Should I just quickly run through what was on the nine?

For the last few weeks, I've kind of been chatting to loads of people in the UK government, in the SMP, some others as well, about what is going to

happen next with independence. Now, as we all know, Nicola Sturgeon has said, she will say soon what

she thinks the next steps are, but she's, is it fair to say, Phil, her and her team have been

very tight-lipped about this? It's very much been, they've stuck to the same line, it'll be in the

coming weeks, and they've stuck to that for months now. It's almost become this running joke in

like government briefings where you go in and say, oh, any update on that independent statement

is in the coming weeks, it'll be in the coming weeks. And let's go, will it be before conference,

it'll be in the coming weeks. And she has quite a tight circle, doesn't she? So it's not as if there's loads of people who are just keeping it stum. There are only a few people, maybe a handful, a dozen who know.

Yeah, I think, I think Nicholas Sturgeon does have this very close circle of advisors. And that's

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