Three minutes after 10 is the time. And what a frabious day. Astonishingly important news coming up for you at 12 o'clock, which you've either guessed or already seen on my Twitter account. But in the finest traditions of commercial media, I'll be hyping this up to the max and pretending that it's a massive announcement, stroke, stroke, hashtag breaking news coming up at 12 and a day,

allow me to suggest that it may well be the difference between a great Christmas and a brilliant one.

I could be filling the whole left, perhaps by turkey shortages, or Christmas cracker shortages,

or a mince pie drought, or what other other consequences that are, quote, most definitely not a result of Brexit, end

quotes, may be plaguing us all come the Christmas season this year. Speaking of hype,

that's a very generous comment from Simon there in the news bulletin. It's actually 1.33 million

listeners that we've now recorded on this programme. We tend to round down if it's

less than a half and round up if it's over a half. So many thanks to everybody for that. And I'm

going to take that, if I may, as a justification perhaps for returning to the territory that is

probably most responsible for turning this radio programme into one that, for example, is now considerably

more popular in London than Radio 4, the BBC's flagship speech program. And that is, of course,

our Brexit coverage, the fact that we found the wherewithal and perhaps the wit to swim

against the tide of most of the country's coverage, certainly

almost all newspapers and almost all commercial broadcasters, and God bless the BBC and all

who sail in her, but they're ludicrous attempts to be equivalent and balanced when discussing

issues as complicated as questioning whether or not it's raining outside or not, men that

we became something of an outpost, we became something of a sort of refuge, I suppose, a safe space, if you like, for fact-based, evidence-based

analysis of what had become an incredibly emotional and rhetorical debate.

And I know that with the exception of you know people who spend their lives

pretending that being compared to a pork product is somehow racist with that exception I

know that a lot of people who thought Brexit was a good idea to continue to listen to the

programme but I also know that for for a while now you probably haven't felt very compelled or keen to call in on those issues.

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