Well, hello and welcome to this live edition of the For the Many podcast, hosted by podcast

live at the Light in London. Well, let me start by saying that the use of flash photography

is strictly encouraged as Jackie Smith likes the attention. I also have an apology to make. Jackie and I very much

regret the lack of smuts that there will be over the next hour,

and there's a simple reason that we know there won't be much smut

because Jackie's mother is in the audience.

Sitting just over there.

Can I join with Ian?

What she's had to put up with?

But she just got a loud round of applause than we got when we arrived on stage, Ian, for goodness sake.

It's a real pleasure to be here today doing the podcast.

And of course, the story of Ian and me goes back some way. We first came across each other

when Ian was writing, frankly, really horrible things about me when I was Home Secretary in his

blog. I'm sort of over it. We then went on, amongst other things, to do the Sky newspaper review

together to do some shows on

LBC. And then Ian came up with the idea of the For the Many podcast. And on the 12th of November,

2017, we did our first podcast. And since then, I've done, I think, almost, I think I've only

missed two in the whole of that time,

and Ian has missed none. And if you've heard the podcast, you will know that what we will try

and do, and we'll do in this hour, is some debate about what's happened in the last week,

politically, some argument, but what we pride ourselves on doing is being able to disagree without disliking each other.

We really quite often do find that we've got more in common.

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