The News Agents: Keir Starmer: born again Brexiteer?

This is a Global Player Original Podcast.

We must have other options.

And conference, that must include campaigning for a public vote.

It's right that Parliament has the first say, it's right that Parliament has the first

say, but if we need to break the impasse, our options must include campaigning for

a public vote and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option.

That was Keir Starmer at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton in 2019.

If you have been in therapy, you'd probably say that Keir Starmer has been on a journey.

Because the journey to date has taken him to the comment pages of the Daily Express

and saying Britain's future is outside the EU, not in the single market, not in the customs

union, not with a return to freedom of movement.

Those arguments are in the past.

So today on the news agents, Starmer's journey, Labour's journey on Brexit, but perhaps more

importantly still, the little noticed big change, it's big journey on economics and

where they might be taking us after the next election.

Welcome to the news agents.

The news agents.

It's Lewis and it is John and we're at news agents HQ, still minus Emily Maitlis who's

away for the week.

And we're going to start with Keir Starmer and an article he has penned, nothing unusual

in Labour leaders or any other leaders kind of writing an op-ed for their newspaper, slightly

unusual that Keir Starmer has washed up on the comment pages of the Daily Express.

Not the most naturally Labour sympathetic supporting newspaper that you could imagine.

You're smirking.

No, he says washed up.

It sounds like he's sort of downed a few bottles of white lightning on Brighton Seafront.

No, it is washed up on the front pages.

It suggests that I think he probably, in the leader of the opposition's office, they thought

we want to send a message and where is the right place to send that message.

And actually, I would argue, very shrewd choice.

The Daily Express, the demographic of the Daily Express is broadly working class conservative

voting north of England, much, much stronger in the north of England than the south of

England.

And some people say, oh, Daily Express, Daily Mail interchangeable.

No, I think they've got very different readership.

And if Keir Starmer is concerned about the red wall, then this message of how to make

Brexit work, not how to get Britain back into the EU, will probably go down quite well.

Yeah, look, this is a paper which perhaps even more than the mail, if that's possible

to be, has been completely uncompromisingly pro Brexit, pro Boris Johnson from the very

beginning.

So this is targeted absolutely specifically, not least because it gets people like us talking,

gets everybody else talking, gets our eyebrows raised.

And look, in a sense, he's not saying anything that he hasn't said before, but I think the

interesting thing is that he's choosing to restate it despite two things, despite the

fact that A, Brexit almost on every economic measure continues to fail, and B, despite

the fact that according to all of the polling, more and more space is opening up for, if

not rejoin, then certainly getting much closer back to the EU because Brexit, which has sold

more polls last week, now more than 60% of people in Britain saying they thought that

Brexit had been a bad thing, that it had been a mistake, and that is a transformation even

since 2019.

And if you were going to add a C to that, the C is, he probably knows it's going to

piss off an awful lot of Labour supporters, probably a large number of Labour MPs, but

we are at the business end of the election cycle, which is about getting votes.

When he's 20 points ahead, the Labour people who feel alienated by that message, so categorical,

no return to the EU, are probably also thinking, well, I've not got anywhere else to go and

vote.

I'm going to vote Labour anyway.

I wish he would be bolder, and he doesn't care.

He wants to reach out to a wider audience.

Look, he's got the political space to do it.

There is a widespread expectation that one way or another there is going to be a Labour

government.

The Labour left are nowhere in terms of challenging him either internally or externally, i.e. there

is no left-wing force to his left or a rejoin force to his left.

Even the Lib Dems aren't saying they want to rejoin the EU.

They themselves are leaving it well alone because they're trying to re-establish themselves

in their old South West heartland.

But I think what is interesting is how emphatic he's choosing to be.

So in this article, what he's trying to do is say the government fails on everything.

They're incompetent.

They mismanage everything.

And part of that, in his words, compounding these wider failures is the government's total

mismanagement of Brexit.

And he restates completely emphatically, Britain's future is outside the EU.

Not in the single market, not in the customs union, not with a return to freedom of movement.

These arguments are in the past where they belong.

And I think what the internal debate within Labour has been about is, is there space or

will there be space to, certainly no one is thinking about rejoining the EU in the next

parliament or anytime soon, but certainly with the customs union and certainly getting

very close to it, given what we know is happening within British manufacturing and so on, British

automotive industry sounding all sorts of warnings about what is going on, that maybe

there could be space.

But he is again choosing to be completely emphatic, that there is no possibility of

any of these things.

And of course, the criticism that you just talked about and the kind of irritation and

that be bolder, that has come from a lot of the Blair right wing of the Labour Party,

that they feel there is the space for him to be much more engaged on the subject.

Well, go back to Tony Blair, go back to the 1997 election.

I remember an op-head that Blair wrote for the Sun newspaper with the headline, Why I

Love the Pound.

This was at a time when the whole debate was over whether Britain would join the single

currency.

And there you had Tony Blair, who, as we now know, was very keen that Britain should join

the single currency, writing an article about why I love the pound, I'm never going to allow

a European super state, we've got to preserve our institutions, all the rest of it.

I think if memory serves me right, and I'm sure someone will correct me if I've got this

wrong, I think it came out on St George's Day.

And so don't think that Kier Starmer is unique in using an op-head page to show some political

flexibility.

No, I mean, and also, I mean, that's a really good point in terms of the lineage of this,

because we often, and for natural reasons over the past ten years, we've become obsessed

with the fishes within the Conservative Party on Brexit, on repeated Conservative prime ministers,

particularly obviously Cameron and so on, having to kind of pirouette around Europe,

use Europe for its political advantage, duck and dive and weave and try and manoeuvre around

Europe.

Labour leaders have got a long history of this as well, going right back to Harold Wilson

in 1975, using a referendum to keep us in the common market, clever manoeuvring about it.

We mentioned Blair as well, Brown as well, when he wanted to.

Brown used his anti-Euro stance emphatically, again and again, when he was chancellor saying,

you know, leaking and briefing at the time, I've stopped Blair from joining the Euro and

so on.

So this has a sort of long lineage within Labour leaders as well.

I think the point is, is this, and maybe this is what is surprising, or maybe this is what,

maybe the strategic decision that Starmer could make, or had to choose from is this.

I suppose what he could say, and what Labour could say, is emphatically Brexit has been

a mistake.

We're not choosing to reverse it, because we think that that would be taking us backwards,

that would create more instability and so on, but they could choose to say that Brexit

nonetheless was a mistake.

We did argue against it at the time, we're going to try and take the worst off it.

What instead he's trying to do, is in a sense, he's a born again Brexiter.

He's not saying that Brexit is a mistake, he's just saying that Brexit has been mismanaged,

and I think what those on the sort of more Blairite side of the equation, or more pro-EU

side of the equation, would like is to sort of change the balance of that equation, or

change the balance of that strategy, to say, because they say, look, there is a huge opportunity

here, 60% of the country now thinks this is a mistake.

There is an opportunity there, suddenly, to be able to talk to some of these voters who

have seen the error of their ways.

Starmer is again choosing the safety first strategy, a mechanism, of not doing that,

because he's so worried, why give the Tories that gift in these Red War seeds, and I think

that's probably sensible going up to 2024.

I think the question over the long term, though, is whether Starmer, assuming there is a Labour

government, and assuming those polls hold, that more and more people think the Brexit

is a bit of a mistake, more and more people would like to see it reversed, does that exert

a gravitational political pull on a Labour government in the same way that the sense

that people wanted to leave, and those polls which showed that so many Conservatives wanted

to leave did on a Conservative government, whether over the long term, Starmer can continue

to sort of walk that tightrope, is an open question.

Well, I think that it will depend very much on the sense of how Brexit is doing, how Britain

is doing outside the EU.

I mean, today, as we're sitting here speaking, the trade deal with Australia and New Zealand

comes into effect, which when Liz Truss was Foreign Secretary, she was hailing this as

the great thing that was going to show Britain's future outside the EU.

I know very few people who believe it will make much difference are from farmers who

think it could be absolutely catastrophic for them.

Well, the government's own calculations estimate the deal which comes into force today with

Australia and New Zealand say that the long term contribution to the British economy forecast

that it will increase UK GDP by only 0.08% by 2035, right?

And there are even estimates to say that they will damage, as you say, John, British farming

and British agriculture.

I think this is the point.

I always thought this was going to be the case when we left.

In a way, when we were in the EU, there was a sort of chimera, there was this pot at the

end of the rainbow, which anti-EU people could use and could point to, and basically say

all of our economic problems were as a result of us being in the EU.

And they could all be solved if we just left the EU.

We see how completely fallible that was, what complete nonsense that was.

It was always, I think, obvious that as soon as we left, if there was no sense of this

thing being an economic success, and it was always going to be very difficult for it to

be an economic success, there was no vision for what it could look like.

Erecting endless trade barriers could only be economically damaging.

That was one of the problems we didn't have that honest debate before and during the referendum.

That naturally every economic problem we had, every travail we had, would lead to a situation

where people could just say, again, all we need to do is just pull the lever and we just

rejoin the EU and that will solve everything.

And so rejoining the EU over the long term could become this kind of magic salve, this

magic wand that we can wave, and that will occupy a central place of our political debate.

And like I say, the question is whether Stammer can avoid it or whether it just pulls him in.

Such an interesting argument about where Labour would go if it won power, what its attitude

would be towards the EU.

Because even if you have the British public saying, and it's possible they will, well,

actually we've made this massive miscalculation, we need to return to the fold of the European

Union, we were better off there.

Will the European Union be taking Britain back on terms that Britain could ever accept?

Yeah, there will be no rebate.

We would have to be part of the Schengen area.

We would have to be part of the single currency.

And I think that actually, where Kirstjen Stammer is absolutely right, is for the foreseeable

future.

I cannot see any circumstance where Britain rejoins the EU, because the terms on which

Britain would have to do it would be so unfavourable to the UK that people will say, well, God,

we can't have that.

And it would be a surrender.

And whether they would want us back.

Because we have shown that we have an unstable politics, that the question of being in the

EU is so highly contested that it just is a source of instability for them.

But look, I think, you know, we started the show by pointing to Stammer's journey.

And we should say, I suppose, what he would say about that.

He and his team argue that he's entirely, internally coherent.

Because his argument was, well, in 2019, it was still up for debate whether we would

leave or not.

That's why he thought that to break the am pass, as he said in that speech, we should

have had a second referendum with remain on the ballot paper.

His argument now is that that is in the past, that we have left, that those questions are

closed.

And to return to them would simply be another source of instability.

I would just say this, though, if you look at, I mean, as I say, Stammer has been saying

this for a long time.

Almost a year ago, on Monday the 4th of July, 2022, he made a speech setting out his Brexit

policy.

There were five points to it that he said government had mismanaged Brexit and that

he wanted to, and that he wanted to address.

And my point is, again, to go back to that kind of long history of British prime ministers

dancing on the head of a piano, having to pirouette around Europe, there has also been

another long history of British prime ministers wanting cake-ism, of wanting to have their

cake and eat it with a garganty, of wanting all the benefits, but not wanting to have

the downsides.

And I think Stammer is in danger with his policy now of basically doing exactly the

same thing.

So if you look at his five points, sort out the Northern Ireland protocol, well, without

rejoining the customs union or some version of the single market, it's not entirely clear

what really would sort out the Northern Ireland situation over the long term.

Tear down unnecessary trade barriers.

Well, what would that look like?

That's basically what Theresa May wanted to do when she was trying to negotiate leaving,

but without there being a really sort of hard Brexit.

That would rely on the EU basically allowing us to want to do that.

Support our world-leading services and scientists.

Likewise, that would rely on the EU allowing us to opt back into a load of things without

being part of the EU structures.

Keep Britain safe in terms of the safety protocols.

Same thing, encouraging investors to invest in Britain because we're close to the EU.

Exactly the same thing.

Basically Stammer, the danger is that Stammer is trying to create a EU, UK economic model

which does not exist, which is exactly what Boris Johnson was trying to do.

It's exactly what Theresa May was trying to do.

And arguably even within the EU, what David Cameron was trying to do and the danger is

is that the EU just says, no, you can't do it because you're out.

Well, let me do another bit of long history, which is Labour leaders who fail because they

try to go to the electorate and say to them, but you're wrong on this.

You know, you're wrong not to want to rejoin the EU.

It doesn't go down well telling voters they are wrong.

Successive Labour leaders that fail have kind of almost taken the attitude that if

only the British public read a bit more and understood a bit more political theory and

whatever else, then they would be in a better place, whereas the Conservative Party kind

of knows where British public opinion is.

And that if you look at the history of the 20th century, why the Labour Party have been

so unsuccessful and the Conservative Party have been so successful, Keir Starmer knows.

There is no point saying to the British public in the next general election, you got it wrong.

And therefore he's just saying, we are where we are and making the best of it from that

position.

But in order to create a lasting new Brexit settlement, i.e. a post-Brexit Britain, an

economic settlement which people think is working, Labour knows and his shadow Chancellor

Rachel Reeves knows that they have to craft that settlement.

They have to craft something, a new type of economic model that works outside the EU,

but is delivering the sort of security and the sort of stable economic settlement that

they think people voted for in 2016.

And that all very neatly.

You see what I did there?

A little segue.

That was worth it.

Worthy of John Sopel himself, it was a Sopel segue.

By the way, I think that we have had the first use of Chimera on the podcast from Lewis Goodall.

Well of course.

And that's the banned word list.

It's a beautiful word for our podcast.

A beautiful person.

We'll be back after the break.

This is the news agents.

Welcome back.

Now, the shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been in America.

You may not have noticed that much about it.

Maybe you noticed that she flew business class.

I did notice, I have to say, because I'm a saddo, that when she posted a picture of

her on the plane, I noticed that she was sitting in 3K.

Did you recognize that seat, John?

Oh, I thought that's a nice seat.

That's a nice one to have on the way up.

John Sopel Memorial seat.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you care about being rich?

No.

I just never want to have to turn right on an aeroplane.

And you never do.

I tried never to.

I often did though.

So she went to America and made quite an important speech that probably got drowned

out a bit by all the noise about whether she flew business and who really gives her down

whether someone flies business or not.

Yeah, it did.

It was actually, I think, a really, really important speech.

And it didn't get the coverage it deserved really last week, not least because there

was all the stuff again with Boris Johnson once again, sort of absorbing all of the

bandwidth of our national political conversation.

But she went to Washington and she went to New York, which is a kind of like, particularly

for Labour leaders, is a bit of a sort of rite of passage, you know, Labour leaders

trying to establish themselves on the, and Labour sort of, you know, shadow chancellors

and so on, trying to establish themselves on the sort of world stage, sending a message

to investors and to international partners that you can trust the Labour government.

You know, Tony Blair did it.

Neil Kinnock did it.

Brown did it.

Brown did it.

They did it a lot.

Yeah.

Neil Kinnock did it.

He only got 30 minutes with Ronald Reagan in the 80s, didn't he?

Very sort of cold reception.

Neil Kinnock was absolutely snubbed.

Yeah, that was not a great success.

But Reeves' trip, I think, was quite successful in one sense, in that, as I was saying before,

the critique about Stammer and Stammer's leadership in Reeves is that they have no vision, they

have no sense of political economy, that they have no sense of the kind of economy they

want to build.

I don't think you can say that, or at least you can't say that with nearly as much credibility,

having heard Reeves' speech, because what she was doing was setting out a quite interesting,

compelling vision for what a labor economic model might look like that responds to the

vast number of changes that we've seen in international economics and the world economy

since 2008.

And what she was doing is she was essentially setting out, to some extent, a repudiation

of at least some of the economic tenets that really guided the last labor government.

If you go back to the last labor government, particularly by its end, not so much at the

beginning, but by its end, I think one of the fair critiques was that Blair had become

pretty messianic about globalization.

He came to view it as something which was immutable.

Some people would say with Tony Blair, you could have just ended that sentence that he

had become messianic.

Full stop.

Yes, indeed.

But particularly around, you know, this sense of the idea that basically world economic

change could not be bridged and it could not be halted.

And just for a sense of that, it's just worth listening to his party conference speech back

in 2005.

So this is two years before he left office.

And it's just after he's returned to office for a third term, despite the Iraq war.

Despite the Iraq war.

It's become a quite famous or infamous kind of section, really, this speech.

Just listen to it.

It gives you a sense of where Blair's mind was at that time.

The pace of change can either overwhelm us or make our lives better and our country stronger.

What we cannot do, as pretended, is not happening.

I hear people say sometimes, we have to stop and debate globalization.

You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.

They're not debating it in China and India.

They're seizing its possibilities in a way that will transform their lives and ours.

Yes, both nations still have millions living in poverty, but they are on the move.

I think that for many people, this is where the new labor projects and Blair's personal

thinking started to go off the boil.

Because for a social democratic party, which labor fundamentally is, and I would argue

actually Blair was in lots of ways, to argue essentially that there was no stopping the

kind of rise and the flow of international capital of the international free market sat

very uncomfortably.

What is the point of a social democratic party if it doesn't take the edge off those massive

economic forces, which can buff it all of our lives?

Obviously, I think when you consider what's happened since the financial crisis in 2008,

all of the crisis of the eurozone which followed Brexit and then Covid, all of these things

actually stood in complete contrast to what Blair was saying there, because all in their

own separate ways, if you tell a story of the world economy in the last 15 years, for

all sorts of different reasons, actually that globalization model has been stopped in all

sorts of ways.

It has been changed, it has halted, because you've seen the return of and the importance

of the nation-state and you've seen the importance of on-shoring.

And the big change that we're starting to see and the big repudiation of that in a sense

is what is happening in the Biden administration with the Inflation Reduction Act.

So the Inflation Reduction Act is interesting.

I mean, I would push back on a couple of bits and pieces, I just want to pick up on a couple

of things that you said.

Look, in that period of politics, around 2005, pre the financial crash three years later,

there was a sense that these growing emerging economies, it was the time of the G20 when

people were talking about these emerging countries that would become economic powerhouses that

would lead to economic growth and greater wealth in the developed countries as well.

Which they did.

And that if you have a highly educated workforce providing high quality services, then yes,

you're going to be fine.

Now, of course, when the 2008 crash happened, you saw the hollowing out of all sorts of

industries.

And you talk about America, and I just want to come to that, because I mean America has

had recessions all the way through the history of the United States of America.

What was different in 2008 was that steel towns shuttered, the factories closed, and

they never reopened, because the business had gone to Korea or wherever it had in the

world, to Mexico, to the Philippines, to all sorts of other places, which were able to

supply labor much, much more cheaply.

Donald Trump comes along almost as a response to the financial crash and the globalization

that you've just talked about with this very economic, nationalistic message, you know,

we must have American jobs for American workers.

And don't think Joe Biden is any different.

He is following the same economic agenda and the Inflation Reduction Act, which I think

is really an interesting piece of legislation, because it is ostensibly there for kind of

marketing purposes to tell people how green America is.

It is subsidizing the manufacture of wind farms and turbines and solar panels and all

the rest of it.

But it's also about creating American jobs in that industry and effectively subsidizing

them so that the government is subsidizing the growth of an American industry that is

going to present huge challenges to the UK, because we can't afford an Inflation Reduction

Act like the Americans have introduced.

And it's a huge challenge to the EU, where they now feel there is unfair competition.

So it is going back to the idea that government can pick winners, that you can have an active

government.

Exactly.

And I think that is, and this is what I'm trying to say with a sort of Blair comparison,

that is the change.

Because again, and it's totally fair enough, you've obviously got to understand the kind

of intellectual context in which Blair was making that speech.

We were still in the post-Thatcherite world, the pre-2008 crash world, and I think where

Blair was wrong was that there was a sense in that speech, and a lot of that sort of

late Blairism, that history was only going in one direction, that globalization and the

forces around international free markets, that model was only going in one direction.

The return to what you've just described, government picking winners, industrial strategy,

national on-shoring of industries, not just allowing your industries to be spread all

over the world, that that was all gone.

What we've seen from over the last 15 years is that was wrong.

And what we've seen, as you say, with the Inflation Reduction Act, is that that is wrong.

Which is, as you say again, just a continuation in some ways of what Trump was doing.

And this is what, to go back to the Reeve speech, this is the modern Labour Party's reaction

to all of that context and all of that change and everything which is going on in America.

What Reeve was outlying, or trying to outline, or beginning to outline, was a British Labour

Party response to Bidenomics, which he has been bringing about and changing American

economic policy.

It's just worth listening to a bit of that Reeve speech.

Securonomics is an approach that builds on the contributions of more people in more parts

of Britain and with a more secure national economy taking advantage of some of the big

opportunities, but also ensuring our resilience, our strength and our security to give families

that security that they are desperately crave right now.

So I do think that whenever you get a new Labour leader and they're trying to set out

their stall, this catchphrase, for whatever the economic idea is, you know, when Blair

was in opposition, it was the stakeholder economy.

I think now we've got Securonomics.

Does that withstand scrutiny?

So I think that the challenge for, and we should just break it down, I suppose, what

it means again, if it's just a sort of, it's not completely, but if it's an attempt to

transplant some of the Biden ideas to a British context, it is more investment in green energy

and green industry.

It is having a very significant industrial strategy and industrial policy.

It is about trying to bring jobs back on shore.

It is about trying to make sure that we have resilient national supply chains.

Because again, the argument was, look, during COVID, it was a problem for Western economies

that our supply chains were all over the world, were so reliant on China and so on.

We've seen during the Ukraine war what a problem it was that we had so much of our energy or

certainly in Europe more than in Britain, but there was so much energy reliance on Russia.

So the idea of national resilience, quote unquote, is back in vogue.

That's where Securonomics, Reeve's version of Securonomics comes from.

I think the sort of, the policy challenge for Britain or for an incoming Starmer government

is this, America can do that.

America has the scale, it has the dollar, the world's reserve currency.

It has the political and population muscle.

It can onshore all this stuff.

We're seeing it.

It's being a huge success.

Partly started with Trump, but really hammering home with Biden.

We are seeing significant on-shoring.

We're seeing automotive industries and green industries taking huge investment from Britain

and Europe into the United States.

So in that context, Britain has got to have a response.

The EU is currently coming up with its response, already has done so to some extent.

I think we'll see very similar and have seen similar moves from the EU.

The question for Britain is whether it has that scale to bring those supply chains back

onshore.

The question is how you finance it.

And the downside or the whole moment for Labour is, Labour is on the one hand saying

we want to have a sort of Biden-style strategy, but it is also saying that we want financial

iron discipline, that Reeves and her Treasury team are slapping down any Labour spokesperson

or whatever who is saying, literally 50 quid, they'll say, no, no, no.

The question is whether those two things are compatible, because we know from Biden that

my word, did he get the checkbook out in the first part of his administration?

And really, it's difficult to see.

I mean, Labour do have, they've still got, I think it's £28 billion of green investment

that they previously committed to.

Even that, it isn't clear whether that is going to make it to the manifesto.

And it isn't clear if it does, whether they are going to be brave enough to say to the

British public, we'll borrow to invest this money.

And that will be a big, big test of where Labour's strategic vision is for the next election,

if they're still terrified, again, to go back into history, of a 1992-style Labour tax bombshell,

give a tax and spend critique from the Conservatives, or whether they're brave enough to put their

money where their mouth is and say, yes, we believe in this secure and omics thing, and

we're going to raise the taxes or borrow the money to pay for it.

And it's one of those things where Labour is always under more scrutiny when it comes

to the economy in a way than the Conservatives are, just as the Conservatives are under more

scrutiny over what they'll do to the NHS.

Labour trusted, Conservatives not.

And it's the same on the economy where Labour are not trusted.

And so to get out of that kind of knot is incredibly tricky.

And we'll be back after the break with an extraordinary story that whilst most people

are trying to get the hell out of Russia, there is an American woman who came to prominence

in the 2020 election, who is now seeking Russian citizenship.

This is The News Agents.

Welcome back.

So during 2020, when Joe Biden was about to get the Democratic nomination and it looked

like he had it sewn up, this woman called Tara Reid came out of the woodwork who had

been a former Senate aide to say that Biden had sexually assaulted her.

And we were under an awful lot of pressure on social media particularly.

Why aren't you making the same fuss about her that you did about Stormy Daniels and

all the people that had accused Trump?

There was something that wasn't quite right about it.

No one who'd worked in the Senate at that time would corroborate the story.

No one knew anything about it, heard a report of it.

And so it kind of just quietly went away.

Today I read that Tara Reid has told the Sputnik news agency in Russia, very fine news

organisation, that she has moved to Russia, was seeking citizenship there because she

felt surrounded by protection and safety.

Oh yeah.

I mean, it just kind of made my jaw drop.

Why don't you feel safe there?

So I wondered whether she's either a spy and was an agent and was a honey trap or whatever,

or whether she has been on a journey, rather bigger journey than Kiyostarma's, but quite

a journey that makes you think, what I want now, where could I go where I'd feel safe

and secure?

Moscow.

Moscow.

I don't know.

It's not something you hear a lot of these days, is it?

You hear about an awful lot of Russians in the Gulf States and Turkey, but you don't

hear a lot of people thinking, I know, what I need to do now is move to Moscow.

Do you think that's where Emily's gone this week?

She'll feel safe and secure.

I think she's probably...

She turns up in the Kremlin.

No, she'd probably like to get as far away from you and me as possible.

So she's probably gone somewhere where it's very quiet and calm.

Putin says, I can give you protection, Emily, from those two people.

That would be a story, wouldn't it?

Make this ghost to Moscow.

Right, well, we'll just check in with her to see how she's doing and bring you an update

tomorrow.

Bye-bye.

This has been a Global Player original podcast and a Persephoneka production.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.