The Trawl Meets Tessa Dunlop
The Trawl
Jemma Forte & Marina Purkiss
4.7 • 867 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Historian and Broadcaster, Tessa Dunlop, joins Jemma and Marina for a gloriously wide-ranging conversation about monarchy, British identity and the fury of being an outspoken woman in public life. From her PhD on Romanian royalty to why she believes King Charles still gives Britain “soft power” on the world stage, Tessa brings nuance, history and plenty of passion to some of the most divisive debates of the moment.
The trio chat Trump, royal diplomacy and whether Prince Andrew is a “seeping wound” for the monarchy, before diving into Meghan and Harry, Britishness, Brexit, immigration, and why Romanian teenagers demanding a GCSE in their mother tongue actually made Tessa proud to be British. They get candid about the media industry, the “authority gap” facing opinionated women, and why being left-leaning can make you professionally radioactive.
There’s laughter, disagreement, conversation about Iain Dale, and a brilliantly enraged clip involving Laurence Fox and Jeremy Clarkson that leaves everyone cheering. A fantastic Trawl Meets. Enjoy!
Tessa's book 'The Bletchley Girls' Is 99p on the Kindle Store for the month of June. Head to https://amzn.eu/d/02Zf7PsV get a copy and also check out her other titles while you're there.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Society finds it safer to employ men. |
| 0:03.0 | They find it easy to trust men. |
| 0:04.9 | They believe in what men say. |
| 0:06.9 | And so, yeah, I feel, I want to kick fucking doors down all the time. |
| 0:10.7 | I feel properly, properly angry about it. Hello and welcome to The Trall Meets. I'm Marina Perkis. |
| 0:30.1 | And I'm Gemma Forte. And on The Trall Meets, Marina and I get to chat with someone we admire and find interesting. |
| 0:36.9 | We discuss political topics |
| 0:38.9 | they're passionate about, find out what makes them tick and determine what level of despair they |
| 0:43.4 | have or haven't reached in terms of the batch shittery that's happening in the world. |
| 0:47.5 | And today we're meeting someone whose deep knowledge of history brings real depth and |
| 0:52.0 | perspective to her political commentary. When she's not hosting her |
| 0:55.1 | own podcast with LBC's Ian Dale, you'll see her on programs like Jeremy Vine, writing acclaimed |
| 1:00.6 | books, or lending her expertise to historical documentaries, often with a royal flavour. Welcome to the |
| 1:07.0 | troll, Tessa, Dundlock. Hello, thank you. Hello, Tessa. |
| 1:11.6 | It's lovely to see you here today, and we're going to avoid just having a gossip about the shows that we're all on, because that would be boring for everybody else. But drilling for us, we'll do that another time. We've actually done that off air, haven't we? We had a little gossip off air. We did. |
| 1:25.7 | Then we're like, right, we must crackle. |
| 1:26.9 | So we will. |
| 1:28.3 | So, Tessa, before we get really stuck into all sorts, |
| 1:30.7 | we're going to be talking about flags up polls, British values, being podcast partners with Ian Dale. We want to know more about the fact that you've got a PhD. You're a doctor. And yet so often you are booked on telly to talk about the royals. Why is that and do you love it? |
| 1:46.5 | That's a really interesting question and I would have answered it slightly differently even a month ago. |
| 1:51.8 | I'm booked on royal programs and I always have this joke. It particularly happened in the wake of the |
| 1:59.3 | mexit, that hideous, sexist term, |
... |
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