coming up on this episode of White Wine Question Time.

This particular journalist, he called me unnervingly confident. That's what he called me, a glitzy. And I thought, in one sense, I'll sort of take that. But I did actually message him, saying, like, thanks for the nice review. I just wondered, would you call me unnervingly confident if I were an old atonium? during the election we kind of snuck into mara lago which was way easier than you think it would be

basically our cameraman the producer rory confident if I were an old atonian. During the election, we kind of snuck into Mar-a-Lago, which was way easier than you think it would be.

Basically, our cameraman, the producer, Rory, basically, met some woman in a Florida bar, and turns out she was quite high up in the Republican National Committee, and she was like, do I come to Mar-Lago? I don't know. We just had to pretend that we were like, big Trump people. What angered me, even as a child, was that my family were powerless.

The power was being

exercised somewhere else, by someone else. And it was a situation over which they had no power,

even though they had done nothing wrong. And that is how most people, ordinary people,

interact with political life. Politics comes to them.

Hello and welcome to White Wine Question Time, the podcast that asked its guest three

thought-provoking questions over three glasses of wine.

And my guest today is someone who's, well, usually asking the questions, having fast

become one of the most distinctive voices in British journalism, a man known for his sharp

political insight and ability to distill the chaos there is, Westminster and global politics.

Born and raised on a council estate in Longbridge, Birmingham, he and his sister lived

with his parents and his grandparents in a council house that he has since described as,

quote, shocking for this century. His parents had met at Ascarbara holiday camp and became

young parents. His mum was 17, his dad 21, with his mum later going on to retrain as a midwife,

while his dad worked as a welder at the nearby rover factory. The family lost their home on Black Wednesday in 1992,

and it was, he says, the struggles that followed that have made him, well, deeply political.

He says, if you don't have much money, you therefore have a deeply political childhood.

He became the first in his family to go on to university and not just any university.

No, he studied history and politics at Oxford before cutting his teeth behind the scenes at

...