This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Alex Barker.

Alex is the Brussels Bureau Chief of the Financial Times.

Alex, I think it's fair to say you were the first mainstream journalist to write about the

divorce bill or the exit charge of the UK if it wants to leave the European Union in a couple of years' time.

And subsequently you wrote a much

lengthier paper for the think tank centre for European reform, the 60 billion Brexit bill. So let's

start with how this figure has arrived at. What are the main components of the 60 billion euros

that UK may have to pay the rest of the European Union? Sure. And before we do so, it's probably

worth remembering that this didn't come up at all in the rest of the European Union. Sure. And before we do so, it's probably worth remembering that this didn't come up at all in the referendum

campaign, as I remember.

There was some obscure references to kind of pension costs that might go on and so forth, but

the kind of sums involved and what a kind of central part of the Brexit negotiation this would become

was never really envisaged by government otherwise and it took many months to kind of slowly emerge

and what you have really is an overhang of financial commitments that the EU entered into thinking Britain would pay its share,

which it is now calling on Britain to honour even after its left.

And in there you've got three main bits.

One covers contracts, what they call commitments in the jargon, that are entered into

in an annual budget round that haven't been paid yet. So there's usually a big gap between

commitments and payments and it's at about 240 billion, roughly, at the time that Britain

will be leaving in kind of end of 2018. And what share of that would Britain be at the 4th?

Well, I mean, that's an open question as well. Do you, you can look at the kind of traditional

share of contributions that the UK would make and it's

...