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Thank you. spectator.com.uk forward slash free. Hello and welcome to the edition, the Spectator's weekly podcast, discussing some of the most

intriguing and important issues within our pages each week with the writers behind them.

I'm Cindy Yu.

This week is the first few days of a national lockdown because of the

coronavirus. So have humans been hubrisic in not expecting a pandemic like this to happen? We also have a

look at the situation in France and ask whether or not President Macron is dealing with it any better.

And at the very end, I talk to historical novelist

Antonia Sr. about what it's like to be a writer in the age of Hillary Mantel. But first up,

a brief disclaimer. Because our staff have also gone home to work, even the Spectators'

podcast might sound a little bit different to you than what it usually does, as people are dialing in

from the safety of their living rooms. Our cover piece this week is a reflective look by a journalist Matt Ridley on just why he

didn't take the coronavirus quite so seriously. In part, he says, is because humans have stopped

expecting infectious diseases to really impact our mortality. James Forsyth also writes in his political column this week that this is a

testing moment not just for Boris Johnson, but for our British way of life and the British political

system. James joins me down the line now, together with Dr. Elizabetha Grapelli, a lecturer in

global health at St. George's University of London. So James, can you tell us about your thesis this week?

Well, Boris Johnson says that he now leads a kind of wartime government. And I think therefore

it will be judged accordingly. I think British people have tended to whatever their cynicism about

politicians to have a fairly high level of trust in the state itself. I think if at the end of this crisis,

the state is seen to have got this broadly right, then I think that will be unchanged or trust

...