Hello, this is the Red Box podcast. I'm Matt Jorley. Don't miss tomorrow's episode. It's

part three of the Sunday shows in 50. This week we take a look at on the record. So John

Humphrey's Jonathan Dimblebee, Tony Blair, Peter Manelson, David Ronevich. It's a cracking

episode so you can catch that on the podcast tomorrow. Today though, we're sort of

wind the clock back to December 2018. When on this podcast, I went to the foreign office

and interviewed then from sexually Jeremy Hunt about what he feared was the decline of democracy,

the end of the postwar settlement and the rise of strong man politics. And it's slightly

all panned out a bit like that. So I've joined again today by Jeremy Hunt looking back at

that and the situation in Ukraine, how Britain responds to Russia, but also a new polling

which shows about a third of people in Britain think there's a risk of the decline of democracy

here too. So that's coming up in just a moment. But first, as ever, we kick off with our

columnist panel, normally on a Thursday, it's night at the Marriott, but Indian night in

James Marriott are away. Instead, we've got Times columnist and Times Radio presenter Hugo

Whiffkin and from the Sunday Times, Rosemary Erwin.

Hugo, we've got another little bit of peace talks happening between Ukraine and Russia

and Turkey today. Do you, is it realistic, you think, that we could strike some sort of

deal with Putin at this stage?

No, I mean, not at this stage, but that doesn't mean not, not ever. The problem, the problem

we have is that the war's gone too badly for Putin so far for him to want, for him to

want to end it. I know that that might sound counterintuitive, but because it's been disastrous,

you know, militarily disastrous, Russia needs to sort of show for its own face-saving

reason that if it can't benefit from what it's done, then Ukraine really, really needs

...