Hello, my name is David Runsman and this is a special live edition of Talking Politics.

We're at the junction in Cambridge. This is part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Helen Thompson is with me in our special guest, Aisha Hazareka, who is a journalist, a

comedian and a former adviser to leading politicians including Harry Harmon and Ed Miller

Band. We're going to talk about some of what's going on under the skin of politics at the

moment. 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

offer. Get a year's subscription and a limited edition LRB tote bag for just 40 pounds

by using the URL lrb.me forward slash birthday.

We're recording this on Wednesday evening. We don't know what's going to happen over the

next few days. It looks like the next few days may well be the decisive few days in the

Brexit story. That's going to have lots of implications for politics, but it's also

going to have lots of implications for individual politicians. Some of them are going to have

to make choices that they've been avoiding, frankly, for the last three years. I think

if they can continue to avoid them, they will, but it may be that they won't be able to.

We're going to talk a little bit about that as well. Aisha, I wanted to start with whether

you, as someone who worked really closely in politics, primarily in the coalition years,

I mean before that as well, but that was when you were really at the heart of it. When

people look at politics now, there's this feeling that it's never been as bad as this, and

that it's kind of gone crazy. Almost the camera and milliband days were a kind of golden age

where everyone behaved themselves. Polymetry politics kind of followed its regular rhythms.

When you look at what's going on now and you think about what it was like working at the

...