Hello, my name is David Runceman and this is Talking Politics. Today a special extra episode

with Ian McEwan talking about his new novella, The Cockroach which as you'll hear, both

is and isn't. All about Brexit.

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We recorded this conversation with Ian in London. It was the night after the very, very

heated commons debate in which Boris Johnson said one or two things that we're going to

refer to that raised the temperature even higher. But we started by talking about just how

extraordinarily well timed this book is. So you know I read this on the afternoon of the

Supreme Court judgment which happened in the morning and it felt like you must have written

it in real time. It was uncanny and there was some really unnerving bit. So as I was reading

it Johnson was responding in New York where he was and he said that kind of accept what

the judges think and then he went straight into his kind of but Britain in 2050 is going

to be the greenest, funnest, bounciest with flying cars and space stations on the moon.

And you have a couple of the so when you can't have written it as I was reading it but

it felt when did you write it? I wrote it in August. So how did you know?

Well actually if you look in Hansard 26th of July there's Johnson in a kind of priority

statement which I thought I could satirize but then I realized I couldn't so I lifted it more

less whole scale. I told the publishers I said do you expect any copyright problems and they said no.

Yes we're going to be the home of the electric airplane and we're going to be first in not

...