This is a global player original podcast.

Three minutes after ten is the time.

I mean,

cricky, we ran through some of the greatest hits yesterday,

didn't it, when it comes to my well-worn and over-rehearsed anecdotes

that I like to use to sometimes highlight rather bigger pictures.

What do we go with for today?

My old geography teacher or Donald

Rumsfeld? Donald Rumsfeld's famous litany, of course, of, I always forget precisely what it was,

the known knowns, the known unknowns, the unknown unknowns, the unknown unknowns, and the unknown

knowns. And my old geography teacher, who was not, shall we say, the most knowledgeable

exponents of geographic arts, who used to respond to questions that he couldn't answer

by telling us, don't know, nobody knows, don't need to know,

it's not in the curriculum.

And there is an awful lot that we don't know

about the extraordinary,

the close to unprecedented revelation

reported by the Guardian newspaper yesterday

that Peter Mandelson, prior to being sent to Washington, D.C. as the ambassador to the court

of Donald Trump. But it would appear after it was announced that he was being appointed to that role,

failed a or the vetting process, well, the vetting process, his security clearance.

Pause for a moment, just to reflect and forgive me for this, but on the journalistic,

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