My guest is Michael Heseltine. Lord Heseltine is a former deputy prime minister of the UK and is president of the European movement in the UK.

Welcome to the podcast, Lord Heseltine. Pleasure to be here.

Right. We've just had the seventh anniversary of the Brexit referendum, not exactly a cause for celebration for many people.

But could you tell us a bit about how you think the country has changed in those seven years?

People outside the UK look at this country and many can't quite believe what they're seeing.

I think that most people would feel that nothing much has changed.

That ever since the financial crash of 2008, there have been anxieties

widely felt about living standards frozen or hardly moving. And within the domestic political scene,

there has been a very undesirable chopping

and changing of leadership.

But the basic underlying anxieties

about people's living standards,

I think, are still there.

And that, of course, was the underlying cause of the Brexit decision.

People wanted change because they were fed up and the populist arguments for change are well versed in history.

You've got to have someone to blame and if you can blame

foreigners that gives a color to the debate which is appealing to quite a lot of

people so we now have a relatively new Tory leadership which is soon I became

Prime Minister here a few months ago what changes do you see in terms of attitude towards engagement with the European Union

under this new Tory leadership?

I think that Ritchie Sunak argued for Brexit, and that that puts in, therefore, in a different

camp to me.

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