The Edition: Russia's plan to unleash chaos
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2020
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
With Russia journalists Owen Matthews and Mary Dejevsky; the Spectator's deputy political editor Katy Balls; Conservative Home's editor Paul Goodman; Sunday Telegraph columnist Madeline Grant; and author James Innes-Smith.
Presented by Cindy Yu.
Produced by Cindy Yu and Pete Humphreys.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The edition is sponsored by Charles Stanley, one of the UK's leading wealth managers, providing |
| 0:05.8 | bespoke investment management and financial advice. Find out more at charles dash stanley.com.uk. |
| 0:15.4 | You're listening to the edition podcast from The Spectator with me, Cindy Yu. |
| 0:25.9 | On this week's episode, I speak to Owen Matthews about what Russia wants. |
| 0:32.3 | We also take a look at the new intake of the Red War MPs. Are they happy with their new jobs? |
| 0:40.2 | And at the very end, lockdown's clearly been difficult for a lot of couples, but what about those singletons who are still looking to date? |
| 0:47.8 | First up, the long-awaited Russia report is finally released this week. |
| 0:53.7 | But Omer Matthews writing this week's cover piece that the only person who will be happy with it is Vladimir Putin. |
| 0:55.6 | He joins me now, together with Mary Dajewski, a columnist on foreign affairs for the Independent. So, Owen, can you explain |
| 1:02.0 | why you think Putin would be the only one who's happy with this report? Well, because what's |
| 1:07.8 | most powerful and what's most powerfully evident about the Russia report is that there is complete a lack of specifics. |
| 1:16.6 | All we know is that Russia is this phantom menace that needs to be addressed. |
| 1:21.9 | And it's interfered in various unspecified ways. |
| 1:25.6 | And the committee spends a lot of time criticizing the intelligence |
| 1:29.7 | services for not making greater efforts to protect our democracy from attack. But we don't know what |
| 1:35.0 | that attack is. And in fact, that's much more psychologically powerful, terrifying and crucially |
| 1:40.8 | disruptive, important word, disruptive of our democracy than any actual |
| 1:46.4 | specifics. So actually, if we were talking about, let's, for instance, say for the sake of |
| 1:51.1 | argument, you know, the Russians put caused this Twitter storm about Brexit and X,000 people |
| 1:57.5 | responded, or they put out this sort of meme on Facebook and they sponsored |
| 2:02.8 | these Facebook ads and so on, the kind of things that Russia is known to have done in the |
| 2:07.9 | American election. If we actually knew those specifics, it would be much less terrifying. |
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