On the 27th of March, the Coffeehouse Shots team will be joined by special guests to give you their take on a Spring Statement.

We will be live on stage at London's Cadogan Hall. To get your tickets today, visit spectator.com.

UK forward slash spring statement live. We'll see you there.

Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leif, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week, as Elon Musk takes his chainsaw to the US federal government in the hopes of creating a huge number of improvements, we're celebrating the launch of a new collection of essays called Who Is Government, the Untold Story of Public Service, which is edited by Michael

Lewis, and I have with us one of its contributors, John Lancaster. Now, John, can you tell me

how you got involved in this project, first of all, and what appealed to you about it? I mean, not least because, to state the bleeding obvious, you're a Brit,

and this is a book about the American federal government. Hello, Sam. Thanks for having me on.

Well, it started in early September, 2023, and Michael Lewis, who's a friend, we got to know through, I think we

initially had reviewed each other's books, then we turned out to have the same publisher.

So we met backstage at the thing when I was going to interview him at the LSE, and we

gradually become friends.

He rang up and said that he had this project he was wanting to set up with the Washington Post,

with David Shipley at the Washington Post.

The late Lamenters.

Exactly, who all too relevantly, I'm afraid, has just been, in my view, effectively

forced out of his job by Jeff Bezos personally because he was the opinion editor.

And Bezos said he only wanted

to run just for outsiders.

Opinion editors basically everything that's not new.

So they have like a dual editor structure at the post.

One is news and one is everything else and he's everything else.

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