This podcast is slightly longer than the usual podcast.

It is in fact a slightly edited version of a live webinar I conducted recently for the EU-UK forum, which I chair.

I hope you enjoy it. I'm delighted to welcome Anton Spizak, a senior fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change,

who will discuss his new and much-talked-about paper called Fixing Brexit,

a new agenda for a new partnership with the European Union.

Before joining the TBI, Anton was a senior policy advisor in the Cabinet Office,

and more recently in the then Foreign and

Commonwealth office, where he worked on the Brexit negotiations. And before that, he held roles

at the Financial Times, where he worked as a leader writer, and at the Institute for Government

and Rand Corporation. Welcome, Anton, and thank you for being with us this morning.

Good morning, Paul. It's a pleasure to be here.

In the discussion that Dante and I about to have, we would very much welcome your input and expertise.

We will not have a formal Q&A session as such towards the end, but rather bring in your questions and comments as our conversation progresses.

So please use the chat function on the right hand side of your screen,

and I will do my best to make you part of the conversation. So let's get cracking. Anton,

so I said in my introduction that the mood music seems to be improving. Do you agree with that

assessment? Is that a recent phenomenon, and is it likely to be sustainable?

I think the mood music has definitely changed in the last couple of weeks and months. I think there is now

much more political willingness to find a way through the Northern Ireland Protocol dilemma. I think

there was a real effort since the end of Lestrace's

premiership to get into a more constructive mode of operating between the UK and the EU and look for

a potential way through. That said, I don't think it's going to be easy in the next couple of weeks

...