Hello, my name's David Rundsenman, 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.

Thank you. both is and isn't all about Brexit. Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books,

which is celebrating its 40th anniversary for the next few months with an unimprovable

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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 raise 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

that you must have written it in real time. It was uncanny. And there was some really unnerving

bits. So as I was reading it, Johnson was responding in New York where he was.

And he said that kind of, I 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 cards and space stations on the moon.

And you have a couple of the, so you can't have written it as I was reading it, but 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 or 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 wrecking our precious planet.

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