This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Stephen Castle.

Stephen Castle is the London correspondent of the New York Times, and before that he spent

more than a decade in Brussels working for different newspapers. Stephen, we're going to talk

about the referendum on the UK membership of the European Union.

First things first, were you surprised by the no vote on the 23rd of June?

I was somewhat surprised. In fact, on the day of the vote, I bumped into a couple of people

from Downing Street who were canvassing in the street by chance, who were very confident that it was going to be a yes

vote my personal prediction had been exactly a 4852 split but in the other direction I

hadn't actually committed that to print I was though less surprised having been to

Batley in Yorkshire for the very sad,

to couple of very sad events surrounding the death of Joe Cox, the Labour MP, who was

killed just before the referendum.

And talking to a few people there, you got a bit of a sense of a divided country of people outside London who were much more

likely to vote for Brexit. So it wasn't as big as a shock as it might have been.

Okay, well now it's after some hiatus, people are back to school as it were. The Westminster

Village is bubbling away as it is.

Who's actually in charge in the negotiation or the strategy at least from the UK side?

Is it the famous Brexiteers, Johnson Davis and Fox or is it the new Prime Minister Theresa May?

Who's calling the shots?

Well I think at the end of the day it'll have to be Theresa May she's put those three people in those positions partly I think

for strategic reasons they were the people who argued for those policies and

she needs to be seen to give them a good go at coming up with a strategy for

...