The Edition is sponsored by Charles Stanley, one of the UK's leading wealth managers,

providing bespoke investment management and financial advice.

Find out more at charles-hyphenly.com.uk.

Hello and welcome to The Edition, the Spectator's weekly podcast discussing some of the most

important and intriguing

issues within our pages, with the writers behind them. I'm Cindy Yu. This week, Brexit is back on

the agenda, but talks might be more difficult now than before. I also take a look at why immunity

is so elusive for coronaviruses and what this means for a policy of lockdown.

And at the very end, a discussion about fish. If it's going to be the thing that breaks

up Brexit talks, shouldn't we at least eat more of it?

First up, James Forsyth writes in a cover piece this week that Brexit is back on the agenda.

But the gap between the two sides is still incredibly big

and it's not clear that it will be bridged, especially during this pandemic. James joins me now,

together with Rao Ruperol, former special advisor to Theresa May on Europe. So James, can you catch

listeners up on what's been going on in the Brexit negotiations and why exactly

next month is so important?

So there have been an assumption that because coronavirus meant that the two negotiating

teams couldn't meet in person, Brexit was going to have to be delayed.

But the UK government has made very clear, but it doesn't want to do that.

It thinks that the

differences between the two sides are so high level that it's not something that's going to be

solved by just more meetings. And they think that you actually need a kind of deadline to exert

...