Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself,

associate editor Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan K.

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Hi I'm Toby Young, one of Quillett's London-based editors.

Last week, the Conservative philosopher, Sir Roger Scrutton, was fired as an advisor to the British government after giving an interview to a left-wing

magazine in which he made a number of supposedly offensive remarks about China, George Soros,

and Muslim immigration to Hungary.

I visited to Roger at his farmhouse in Wiltshire and asked him about these comments,

as well as the implications his firing has for intellectual freedom more widely.

Last week you were sacked from your job as Chairman of Building Better, Building Beautiful,

which was a commission established by the government to improve the design of new homes, villages,

and towns. How was the news of your defenestration conveyed to you?

I was coming back from Paris where I was giving an interview on the French edition of one of my

books for France Guiltur, got onto the Eurostar,

and rang home to see how everything was, and was told then by Is he, my secretary, that this had happened.

And that was it.

I didn't receive any official notification later,

and nobody's ever told me the reasons why.

...