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 Kay.

You can support our podcast by visiting

Patreon.com forward slash quilette and becoming a monthly patron. By becoming a

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Hi my name's Toby Young.

I'm an associate editor of Colette.

Today we'll be doing something slightly different.

Today you'll hear a live podcast though it's not actually

live obviously I was invited to do a live podcast in front of an audience at a

festival a free speech festival called the Battle of Ideas in London last weekend.

It organised by the Brexit Party MEP and Colette Contributor Claire Fox. And I interviewed Steve Richards a well-known veteran political

journalist and pundit who's also an author he's just written a book about nine of Britain's recent Prime Ministers,

but he and I have obviously been following developments in British politics since Boris Johnson

managed to call a general election last week so we spend quite a bit of

time talking about the forthcoming general election due to be held in the UK on

December 12th. Hope you enjoy it. Today I'm going to be interviewing Steve Richards.

Steve is a veteran political journalist, a columnist, a pundit, but he like many of us in the journalism game have diversified and now has a portfolio career.

And in addition to continuing to write and comment about politics. He writes books. He's just written a book about Britain's

Prime Ministers, about nine of Britain's Prime Ministers and there was a tie-in radio show on Radio 4 about Britain's

...