Good morning. It's three minutes after ten and you are listening to James I Brian on LBC,

which I thank you for. It's an odd one, isn't it? You know when, and my apologies if you're not

in the parenting business, because this analogy depends or presumes that you are, but it won't

alienate you. It's very, very easy to understand. You know when your mum comes to visit and you haven't seen her for a while, lockdown being a fairly good recent example of when a much longer gap than usual may have been imposed upon interfamilial interactions? And your mum comes to visit, she goes, oh, crucky, haven't they grown? Haven't the kids grown? Oh, haven't they grown? She says. And you think, well, no, they're exactly the same size as they were yesterday. And you're both right, because they have grown, obviously,

what we've been mammals, young mammals, and they are probably, more or less, give or take a sort

of micrometer or three, exactly the same size as they were yesterday. But because she hasn't seen

them for a while, the growth is a lot more striking. And because we've been with them every day, they look, well, the same as they did yesterday. And you don't notice that they're bigger than they were last year, because you've been with them every day in the last year. That's your sort of growth equivalent of the boiling a frog analogy. The idea that if you put a frog in water, I'm told this isn't true, and please don't try it at home.

If you put a frog in cold water and put the heat on and the water heats up slowly, the frog won't notice that it's boiling.

We'll never reach a point where the frog goes, oh, it's getting a bit hot around there, I'm going to hop out.

Because it increases incrementally and sort of lulls the frog into

a false sense of security, and the next thing you know, it's cooked. As I say, please don't try that at

home. But the point I'm making is that sometimes when it's happening all around you, you don't notice. When it's happening more and you, you don't notice.

When it's happening more and more, you don't notice.

If it arrives like a juggernaut smashing through your sitting room wall, you are going to be aware of it.

But if it's termites slowly nibbling away at your living room wall, you don't really notice that you are

approaching the point where the wall is perhaps going to fall down. And that is, some days,

you know, that's how I feel about the vote leave government. And I call them that for a very

specific and limited reason. It's because that for me, and you may choose a different starting

point, that was the point where something broke with regard to public discourse.

So Boris Johnson yesterday was forced to defend our country, this sceptred aisle,

from accusations of being corrupt. I don't think that would have happened two and a half years ago.

We could have faced accusations of all sorts of things,

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