Yes, you're listening to Patrick McGuire in for Hugo Rifkin.

And now, as ever, we're going to be unpacking the politics of the day and the stuff that's even more important than politics from tricky tax rises to the perfect pubs and whether Nigel Farage is peaking too soon.

Now, joining me in the studio are two people who'd of course be at the bar at my perfect pub. Seb Payne, Times Leader

Writer, hello, Sab. How are you doing, Patrick? Great to see you. Neither has been in Leader

Conference as we ought to be in 12 minutes time, but oh well. We're doing a much better version of it here even more unagged than leader

conference if it's possible to imagine if they ever put that in the radio um yeah that's uh i'm

not going to let in daylight upon the magic and carroll lewis in the times property desk hello

carroll hello i'm feeling like i miss out sounds like leader conferences a hoot yeah you could

say that.

It's intellectually stimulating.

How are you describe it, sir?

It depends what sort of how you get your kicks and whether you describe it as a hoot.

It's always very interesting.

I mean, the ones that I find most interesting, which you've been in some of those well, Patrick,

is where the paper's view doesn't end of where you think it's going to end up at the beginning because

there's a lot of topics where readers and listeners will have a pretty well-formed view of what

the Times thinks about certain things but then there's other times where it actually goes in a different

direction and it's also just the brain power of that room they often you'll see senior

editors in the paper senior columnists who have all got great expertise, different worldviews, sometimes slightly different,

sometimes very different. And the result is that you just learn a lot from it. Just being around

a lot of smart people is a good thing. Yeah, on the sublime to the ridiculous, you know,

everything from the global economy to whether the cold side of the

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