Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself,

associate editor Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Hi, I'm Toby Young, one of Quillett's London-based editors.

Claire Fox is a British journalist and broadcaster who's been an energetic contributor to public debates for more than 30 years,

often from what might be called a left libertarian point of view, although she defies categorization.

Once a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party,

Claire's now a staunch Brexiteer,

and the Brexit Party recently announced that Claire

would be standing as a candidate for them

in the elections to the European Parliament on the 23rd of May.

I spoke to Claire about what it's like for a political commentator to become a political

competent to enter the arena, as Teddy Roosevelt put it and about

whether she still holds some of the views she held as a revolutionary communist and

how much knows holding she's had to do in order to stand as a candidate for a party led by Nigel Farage, the former leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, generally considered a populist right-wing party.

Here are excerpts from that conversation. When we last spoke you were weighing up whether to do this and you were in two minds.

Can you tell me what your reservations were and whether you now think actually I was right to be wary of this or are you

...