Hi everyone and welcome to this latest episode of the Brexit and Beyond podcast from the UK in a changing Europe.

And today, to mark the fifth anniversary of the referendum, we've got a special episode with some of my favourite people.

We've got Jill Rutter, Catherine Barnard and Jonathan Portez, all of the UK in a changing Europe.

And we're here to reflect a little bit on the last five years.

So welcome all of you.

I hope you're doing well.

Hi there.

Just to kick us off with a sort of broad general question,

what about the last five years has surprised you the most? What has really taken you back?

I think what surprised me most is that we're still here. We've still, the four of us are still

sitting around talking about Brexit, working about Brexit, and we're still only at the

beginning. If you told me on June 23rd, 2016, or especially on June 22nd, that in five years,

Brexit would still be my main research area. And moreover, that we'd only have a couple of months

worth of data on what Brexit was actually

doing to the UK economy, I would have been very surprised.

This has turned out to be, you know, we always said Brexit was not an event but a process.

Well, it turned out to be a much, much longer drawn out and more painful in every possible sense process than I would ever

predicted. I'm going to jump in before Catherine because Catherine will tell me this just shows

how useless anyone in government is. But if I could just channel my former civil servant role,

I think what struck me is I don't think I had any

sort of grasp, but just how complicated the process of getting out of the EU would be. And I know

that's been a recurrent theme in lots of the interviews we've done for our witness archive that

...