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Welcome to this special edition of The Spectator podcast. I'm Isabel Hardman. When the country last held a referendum on Europe, every newspaper in the country advocated a yes vote, apart from two, The Morning Star, and The Spectator.

With less than a week to go until the polls open, the Spectator has this week urged its readers to back Brexit.

Here to discuss the decision is the Spectator's editor Fraser Nelson, and he's joined by Nick Cohen,

who takes a rather different position on Brexit. So Fraser, how did the magazine come up with its pro-Brexit stance?

Is anyone going to be really surprised by this, do you think?

Well, I like to think that over the last few weeks, our readers will have felt

we weren't pushing any one point of view down their throats.

As Alexander Chancellor put it, the spectator is more of a cocktail party, even a political party.

We don't tend to bang on about any one political view.

We're here to give our readers the best range of the best comment.

That's what we've tried to do throughout this campaign.

We've shown our hand late on, so readers wouldn't feel as if they were being lectured.

Now that said, there wasn't really any doubt where the spectator would be, given that we've been for Brexit since 1975.

We've been consistently, as a publication, sceptical about the claims made, I mean, not just in the last referendum,

but when the exchange rate mechanism came along

and there was this crazy idea to link our interest rates

haven't set by the Bundesbank, only the spectator argued against it.

Everybody else wasn't for it.

Now, we've seen the illogic of that position played out with a single currency and the heartbreaking consequences, from the 50% youth unemployment in Spain and Greece, through to the morass that the whole Eurozone finds itself in right now. So we didn't really agonise that long about what to say in our leader, Colin, the editorial

decisions we've been taking week in week out is how to make sure our readers get the best

side of both debate.

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