The Litvinenko Affair | Londongrad Today - Interview with Luke Harding | 5
British Scandal
Audible
4.4 • 7.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alice and Matt talk to journalist and author Luke Harding about what The Litvinenko Affair means today. Luke Harding is a foreign correspondent with the Guardian. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief. The Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war. He is the author of A Very Expensive Poison -The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello Prime Members, you can listen to British Scandal at free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. |
| 0:15.0 | From Wundery, I'm Alice Libby. |
| 0:17.0 | And I'm Matt Ford. |
| 0:18.0 | And this is British Scandal. |
| 0:32.0 | Matt, today we are wrapping up our series about the murder of Alexander Litvenenko. What a journey it has been. |
| 0:38.0 | It's an incredible story with so many different parts to it. At the heart of it is this tragic murder of a defiant and brave individual. |
| 0:46.0 | And the legacy that has for his family and for his friends, there are then these bizarre, |
| 0:51.0 | daft parts of it, these two clowns that are meant to carry out the murder various times and fail. |
| 0:56.0 | And what those two guys were like. |
| 0:59.0 | Yeah, it's almost slapstick if it wasn't so devastating. We talked a lot in the series about their night out, their big night on the town. |
| 1:07.0 | That radioactive towel was one of the botched attempts. The fact that we'll never go to an It's Susushi ever again without thinking about this. |
| 1:15.0 | So yeah, it's it's it's two very different tones. |
| 1:18.0 | It is. I've also cancelled my hey Joe's membership after this. |
| 1:22.0 | Quite right. It doesn't feel good. Does it anymore? |
| 1:25.0 | It doesn't. So there are those elements to it as well. And then there's the grand geopolitical elements of this Vladimir Putin at the heart of it. |
| 1:33.0 | This murder being carried out potentially with the personal approval of the current leader of Russia. |
| 1:40.0 | As we said at the beginning of this series, power, corruption, money, poison, spies, it's got the lot. |
| 1:48.0 | And it leaves massive questions for us now about the uncomfortable relationship between the British state and Russia. |
| 1:55.0 | The things that the British state is perhaps still willing to overlook. |
| 2:00.0 | And it therefore begs the question, will this happen again? |
| 2:04.0 | I don't know if I can answer that for you Matt, but I know that today's guest will definitely give it a good shot. |
| 2:08.0 | Luke Harding is a journalist. He was foreign correspondent for the Guardian and was based in Moscow as their bureau chief. |
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