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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. It's Tuesday the 4th of May and this week I'm talking to Peter Gagan, Investigations Editor at Open Democracy

and the author of Democracy for

Sale, Dark Money and Dirty Politics, published last year. In recent months, he's written a series

of pieces on those subjects for the LRB, on the way the government outsourced its pandemic response,

on the difficulty of making freedom of information requests, and in the latest issue,

on the Greensill scandal.

Hello, Peter, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hello, Tom. Thank you very much for having me.

Kirstama was on the Today programme this morning, and he said that it was always his intention

to offer constructive opposition to the government in the national interest.

What that means, he's said, is that Labour supported the government on vaccinations and

lockdowns, but has been highly critical of all the slees and dodgy contracts. Mutual Hussein,

who is interviewing him, responded by pressing him on whether Labour would have done as well as the

Tories on vaccination, suggesting that bringing in a venture capitalist, a prominent person

from the private sector, was the sole key to the successful vaccination

...