Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus It is episode 1,214 for Wednesday, the 23rd of July 2025.

I'm your host, Luca, joined today by the Stelios.

Hello everyone.

Return from his odyssey around Greece back to, but not Ithaca, Swindon, this time.

And special guest, Charlie Downs, thanks for coming in today, Charlie. Thank you,

look. Great to be here as always. Wonderful. We're going to be talking to you today about the

Britannia Hotel in London being colonised, the latest in the long line of hotels, to get such a

treatment. We're then going to talk about the Medi Hassan versus the Pine Sap incident, right?

And then we're going to be talking about why Kimi Badenock is probably just finished at this point.

Yeah, it's over.

I want to say something to everyone here.

First of all, no one likes coming back from summer holidays, but the very fact that I'm

here with you two esteemed gentlemen in this office and talking to you actually makes things better.

So, I mean, things could be worse. That's very wholesome. Thank you very much. Yeah. Cheers for that.

Right. Let's begin by talking about the Britannia Hotel.

Okay, so obviously, as I've covered in two segments in the past week now,

everything that was going on in Epping and with the Bell Hotel over there in Essex and the genuinely remarkable protests that we were seeing outside that hotel, not just in terms of numbers,

but in terms of conduct.

And the way that all these locals have come out in a really, really sophisticated way

that the whole community should be really proud of.

And so I'd just like to start by talking a little bit rounding that story out.

Obviously, one of the main things was that the police, the local Essex police, first denied

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