It is three minutes after 10. You're listening to James O'Brien on LBC. I'm just reflecting on something Giva Hofstadt said to Nick Ferrari there about the invasion of Ukraine and the possibility, the likelihood even, that Vladimir Putin wouldn't have done it if it wasn't for Brexit. I mean, crikey, quite a simple position to endorse, given the simplicity of this question,

what would Vladimir Putin want to happen to a united and stable Europe?

Yeah, exactly.

He'd want it to be less united and less stable.

But also, it reminded me of Boris Johnson's attempts to blame the invasion of Crimea by Vladimir Putin back on the European Union. People forget, of course Brexit was what Putin wanted, just as Trump was what Putin wanted. In fact, Trump coming out yesterday saying that he trusts Putin more than he trusts Americans' own intelligence services It's probably, for those who watch these things a bit too closely,

I'd say that was the strongest indicator yet of his intention to run again for the American presidency.

If he's cozying up to Vladimir Putin again, he's asking for help again, isn't he?

So watch that space. Listen, I don't know whether you expect me to come on air on a daylight today sounding like the cat that got the cream. I nearly used the analogy about the dog there instead of the cat, but that would have been a little bit inappropriate for five minutes after ten on a family program, wouldn't it? I don't know whether you do expect me to come on air sounding like the cat that got the cream. Listening to people who persuaded you to vote for Brexit, people who were adamant that it was going to be a great idea, suddenly trying to rewrite history or discovering the ability to ask vaguely difficult questions of the cheerleaders that they were once rolling out the red carpet for.

Reese Mogg on the telly today. Daniel Hanan on another radio station,

Theresa Villiers touring the studios, all offering up various combinations of idiocy, delusion and ignorance.

And of course, now denialism, because where once we had delusion,

now we have denial, not the river in Egypt, but of course the determination to deny the

evidence of your own eyes and ears, which is, as Orwell Wonders, anyway, you don't need

me to remind you about Orwell. So anyway, sorry, I was talking about myself. How dare I change the subject. You might expect me to sound like the cat that got the cream today. If you're not been listening to the program for a long time, I kind of cut my teeth on Brexit. It was when this program moved from the shallows, shall we say, just to a slightly bigger or rather bigger stage.

We started drawing a lot more attention.

And I've often wondered why that was.

And the short answer is because there were so few places in the UK media

that were telling you the truth.

It's astonishing that.

Even the BBC, which, of course, has a requirement for impartiality,

wasn't telling you the truth.

Because it was putting, for every Giva Hofstadt or Mark Carney or Sir Paul Nurse that it interviewed, or in the infamous case I often refer to, Pascal Lammy, the former head of the World Trade Organization, they also had to put up a Jacob Rees-Mogg or Theresa Villiers

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