Hello, my name is David Rumsman, and this is a special edition of Talking Politics.

I'm delighted to say we're joined by the New Statesman podcast.

We've got Helen Lewis and Stephen Bush here.

They've come all the way to Cambridge.

We're very grateful.

We're going to do this in two parts. We're going to do one conversation, but we're going to cut it in two. So we're going to be chatting to them. And then if you want to hear the second half, you're going to have to switch channels to the new Statesman podcast. And then you can hear the second part of what we talked about. and then we're going to talk about 2016 how we've experienced it what it's been like for us but also what we think it means and we're going to talk about 2016, how we've experienced it, what it's been like

for us, but also what we think it means. And we're going to do a certain amount of looking ahead

what we think might happen next year and beyond. I thought we could start, given this is among

other things, a kind of interaction between a podcast made by academics and a podcast made by

journalists to talk about how 2016 has

been for you as journalists in the age of post-truth and fake news, but also whether your

experiences have been like ours, and I'm speaking for myself here, there's never been a time

where people have been more interested in what we do. And maybe particularly as academics,

you get used to feeling that you're slightly at one remove and, okay, students pretend to be

interested, but on the whole, people are just being polite. And this year, the most obvious

symptom of it is that we have events and we're usually grateful if anyone shows up. And for the last

six months, where you'd expect 30 people, you get

180, particularly around Brexit, which is both exciting, but also then I often felt the audiences

were a bit frustrated because we weren't quite giving them what they wanted. I don't know,

I don't think they wanted facts, but they kind of wanted answers. But did you feel like that the moment you woke up after Brexit? Because I actually stayed up until it was obvious that Leave had won. And then I woke up the next morning, I thought, do you know what? I just have no idea what happens next. It was like standing on the edge of a really vast chasm, right? I just felt everything had been thrown up into the air. It was actually kind of weirdly kind of almost the sense of kind of vertigo, right? You just thought, well, there is no roadmap for this.

No one has ever done this before. But on the other hand, your job is almost immediately, and you're under more pressure than we are because your deadlines are tight than us to tell people what happens next, right? Did you feel that sense of there's this chasm, but also what are we meant to do?

Because I didn't go to sleep and then...

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