Three minutes after ten is the time. A very good morning indeed to you. A slightly odd show today in that I'm not entirely sure that there are going to be any invitations or reasons for you to call me. And I have nowhere near enough material to get, well, I have more than enough material to get the topic we're going to start with up and running and indeed probably running all the way to 11 o'clock.

But it would not be conventional radio.

It would just be me playing a succession of clips from a succession of records and archives

and focusing attention on a frankly remarkable story.

And it is a story that has been bubbling away now for five years, receiving curious levels of interest and indeed inconsistent levels of interest.

For example, there was a brief period, a brief three-year period when the Daily Mail was not edited by a Boris Johnson fixated psychopath.

And during that period, they carried the following headline.

Disheveled Boris Johnson was seen barely able to walk

and holding war strategy manual in Italian airport

after partying at Russian billionaire Evgeny

Lebedev's villa when he was foreign secretary. Now, I don't know that it is actually

Evgeny Lebedev's villa. I think it's Alexander Lebedev's villa, although the source of

their fortunes is the same. Alexander Lebedev, of course, is the former KGB spy, at which

point altogether now, what did Vladimir Putin say about former KGB spies? He said there is no such

thing as a former KGB spy. Alexander Lebedev has now been sanctioned in Canada and in Ukraine

as a key member of Vladimir Putin's inner circle, whereas his son was

put in the House of Lords by Boris Johnson, despite advice from the intelligence services,

that he shouldn't do that. So back to 2018, it was in March that Jeremy Corbyn was slammed for

his prevarication over the Russian attempts to poison the Scrippel family in Salisbury.

And a month later, with rather less media brew-haha, present company accepted,

Boris Johnson was at a party, having dispensed dispensed with his own security services, the

serving Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom

...