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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Katie Pauls and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and James Versaif. This week is decision time for the government as decisions loom over HS2 on Huawei. However, before we get to those, an interview that is doing rounds this morning relates to Leah Varadka.

He's spoken to the BBC and suggested that EU will be the stronger team in post-Brexit trade talks with the UK.

James, looking at Leah Varadka's comments, you could definitely describe him as fighting talk.

I suppose an important thing to note here is the context in which he is speaking.

Yes, there's currently an election going on in Ireland.

Varadka's party aren't doing so well in the polls.

You know, in stark contrast to when the kind of Brexit anxiety was at its height,

and Varadka was doing very well. And one of the big themes of his campaign is, you know,

there's the second half of the Brexit negotiations to come.

Why change horses in midstream? So I think you can see this interview as an attempt to kind of ramp up

some rhetoric about Brexit, remind people that it's not all finished, and try and get some domestic

political benefit out of that. I don't think anything he said there will be, is particularly

surprising. It's the kind of classic EU line, which is don't think anything he said there will be, is particularly surprising

is the kind of classic EU line, which is don't think you're going to be able to pick and choose

the kind of relationship you have with the single market and don't think that we're going to

let you sign a trade deal without this, you know, what the EU likes to call there's no dumping

provision, this idea that the UK is going to have to carry on conforming to EU standards on social and environmental rules.

Fraser, when it comes to the agreement that Boris Johnson managed to agree with the EU prior

to the general election, a lot of the talk behind the scenes was that it was Leah Viradka who made

...