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Hello and welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast and on today's episode, we'll be looking at Saudi Arabia's young crown prince as he visits the UK.

We'll also be considering how Labour's Brexit stance is evolving.

And finally, we'll be wondering whether Britain's sporting success has been driven by doping.

First up, Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's crown prince, arrives in the UK this week.

He's being pitched as a modernising leader

who can bring change to Saudi Arabia, but is he as revolutionary as he seems. I'm not joined by

Christopher DeBelag, the writer and journalist, and Sherrod Cooper Coles, the former British ambassador

to Saudi Arabia to discuss. So Christopher, the Saudis are clearly on a big PR drive this week and MBS as he's

called as being pitched as this modernising prince. Do you think we should believe it? Oh, absolutely.

I think he comes from a long tradition of modernising princes in the Middle East, going all the way

back to the beginning of the modernisation drive, which basically started in the 19th century in Egypt and Turkey.

Whether that approach of coercive modernization, modernization from the top will give the desired

results today is another matter, of course. Societies have changed. Saudi society has changed

incredibly quickly in the last 20 to 25 years. But the other

thing that we have to bear in mind is whether his regional vision is sustainable. And indeed,

to ask ourselves what that regional vision is, I know basically I've been at the end of the Saudi PR machine and I know what the Saudis are putting out in terms of Vision 2030, in terms of this incredibly grandiose idea of Saudi transforming itself extremely quickly, becoming a leader in all sorts of fields and also attracting investment and dispersing investment.

He's definitely a moderniser. He could be called a revolutionary, but he could also perhaps be called

a bull in a china shop. Shared, what do you make of him? Do you think he's a modernising leader?

Well, he's definitely a modernising leader. He's definitely a young man in a hurry. And I think for Christopher to describe him

as a coercive modernizer is slightly misleading because what he's doing is what friends of Saudi Arabia,

friends of the Saudi people have wanted for a very long time, which is someone who brings women above all,

...