Good morning. It is three minutes after 10 and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC. I wonder how many

days there are where we open the show with the story that is also leading the news bulletin. It doesn't

happen as often as you might expect, does it? For reasons that I have explained to you in the past,

what is best for our purposes together during the time we get to spend

together every day is not necessarily the biggest story of the day or indeed the most newsworthy

issue of the moment but we find the planets aligning today without too much force I mean I am drawn

to the gambling story for a heap of reasons, and it is obviously

incredibly topical because of the white paper that is due to be released today. At risk of

prompting you to run away from your radio at 100 miles an hour, that's two things at the

moment that Ian Duncan Smith is right on. China and gambling for my money.

I guess you sort of...

Is there a weird recalibration going on here

because of the existence of people like 30P Lee and Andrew Bridgen?

So that the political figures that you found

I mean are utterly ridiculous previously, have now been

outflanked so completely by much, much more ridiculous figures. I'm thinking of 30P Lee,

Jonathan Gullis, I mean, even you go up to cabinet level now, can't you, look at Braverman

and Jenrick, so that politicians who 10 years ago, or even less than 10 years ago, do you know that, I think Ian Duncan Smith was the last Tory cabinet minister I was allowed near on this program. So you're going back a long time, a long time. He said to me, there are more people in work than ever before. And I said, there are more people alive than ever before. I'm not sure that's the measure that we should be using. Surely it's about percentages and per capita's. And to that end, actually, if you look at

the number of police officers per 10,000 members of the population, we're actually lower than we

were previously, rather than boasting about this 20,000 officer uptick. you should be looking at how policed we are rather than merely counting.

But I digress, just a quick word, a quick, quick word of, I don't think praise is necessarily, but acknowledgement that Ian Duncan Smith, somebody who on this programme has never been short of criticism is right on gambling it would seem to me and right on

on china as well as james cleverly swims in the opposite direction five minutes after ten is the time um

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