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Hello and welcome to The Spectator Podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman. In this week's episode, we're going to be talking about Theresa May's impossible situation and ask, how can she get out of this bind created

by the Brexiteers and the Remainers? We also discuss the hostile environment policy, and ask,

is Ireland going to repeal its Eighth Amendment? First, Theresa May is in a bind. On the customs

union, the EU, her colleagues and her advisers are all pulling her in different directions

James Forsyth asks in this week's cover what she can actually do to get herself out of this problem

James joins me now along with Chris Wilkins former director of strategy for Theresa May

so James Theresa May hasn't had the easiest few weeks, but you're saying in your cover piece

that things are actually going to get a hell of a lot worse?

I think things are about to get very choppy for the Prime Minister because the screw has been

turned on her from both sides, essentially.

You've got Michel Barnier ramping up the pressure, basically saying, what's wrong with

the goods border in the RSC, knowing how unacceptable that is to Theresa May, and knowing that that would

cause a Democratic Unionist party to withdraw their support. You've got the House of Lords and

defeated the government nine times on the EU withdrawal bill. And if you talk to people down

at that end of the corridor in Parliament, they say it's hard and harder to stop the opposition

from winning these votes because the Lords thinks that opinion is shifting in the Commons

so that their amendments aren't just going to get chucked out.

That's the other problem.

The Commons is becoming less biddable on Brexit.

You know, Tory MPs who campaign for remain very passionately, who a few months ago when you talked to them,

they can have accepted that Brexit was happening, that they weren't going to soften it in any

...