Welcome everyone to this new episode of the Brexit and beyond podcast from the UK and the Changing Europe.

I'm Aran Mennon, Director of the UK and a Changing Europe and I'm delighted today to be joined by the

most Reverend Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury. Justin, thank you so, so much for doing this.

Thank you. Now, we've got a lot to talk about, not least your book, Reimagining Britain,

which I very, very much enjoyed reading. I usually resent having to read things for podcasts,

but actually on this occasion, I rather enjoyed it. And I want to

come back to the book and talk about it later on, but as we are who we are, I thought we'd start

with Brexit. And it was interesting that you came out in favour of Remain a couple of weeks before the

referendum. Did you do a lot of soul searching go into that in the sense of whether you thought

you should intervene publicly? Yes. And I suspect

that if I had to do it again, I wouldn't say where I was coming from. I had this quite naive

view that as I was writing about it, I ought to declare an interest. And I was very careful,

of course, to say what I think shouldn't have any

impact on how people decide. But as everyone around me told me at the time, they won't print that

bit. They'll just print the bit that says, I am going to vote remain and imply that I, therefore,

I'm a diehard Remainer and everyone should do what I do.

So I do rather regret being public on that.

And a few years later, there were reports that you talked to a number of MPs about creating

a Citizens Assembly to avoid a no-deal outcome.

And I know you were subjected to some quite harsh criticism from the Brexit side of the

debate. Were you surprised by the levels of criticism that that attracted? I wasn't surprised. I had

conversations with a number of MPs responding to them. I mean, they came to me from both sides,

...