Just set out the background to this budget dispute and why you think that the UK taxpayer, Whitehall, should actually not underwrite the failure to, or not bail the parties out of their failure to agree domestically.

Well, as David said, we're now more than, what, seven months into the financial year.

We still don't have a budget.

I mean, I suppose if you're asking me to be optimistic about Stormont in its current iteration, the most optimistic thing you can say is that it still exists.

We still have a government.

And yet that's not really true because to govern is to make choices, difficult choices.

And the most basic of those is to have a budget.

Sam, what's going on there? What's what's behind that? Is this a fallout from the Jeffrey Donaldson scandal? Is it from their performance in government or quite why? And is that actually going to change things in the run up to the next election? Are we going to see a sort of shift because the big advantage of being the biggest unionist party aren't there under the Good Friday Agreement?

Just set out the background to this budget dispute and why you think that the UK taxpayer, Whitehall, should actually not underwrite the failure to, or not bail the parties out of their failure to agree domestically.

Well, as David said, we're now more than, what, seven months into the financial year.

We still don't have a budget.

I mean, I suppose if you're asking me to be optimistic about Stormont in its current iteration, the most optimistic thing you can say is that it still exists.

We still have a government.

And yet that's not really true because to govern is to make choices, difficult choices.

And the most basic of those is to have a budget.

Sam, what's going on there? What's what's behind that? Is this a fallout from the Jeffrey Donaldson scandal? Is it from their performance in government or quite why? And is that actually going to change things in the run up to the next election? Are we going to see a sort of shift because the big advantage of being the biggest unionist party aren't there under the Good Friday Agreement?

So what is he doing in Cameroon with this very important work?

So this is not a fancy diplomatic job.

This is, as I say, it's not a junket at all.

I don't think you could in any way describe it as that, albeit he's staying in a very nice five-star luxury hotel in the capital of Cameroon.

But this is a very unusual situation.

Cameroon's dictator, if you give a little bit of the background to this guy called Paul Bea, who's now 93, he's clinging to power still.

He's been in power since 1982.

But I mean, what did he actually do?

So what is he doing in Cameroon with this very important work?

So this is not a fancy diplomatic job.

This is, as I say, it's not a junket at all.

I don't think you could in any way describe it as that, albeit he's staying in a very nice five-star luxury hotel in the capital of Cameroon.

But this is a very unusual situation.

Cameroon's dictator, if you give a little bit of the background to this guy called Paul Bea, who's now 93, he's clinging to power still.

He's been in power since 1982.

But I mean, what did he actually do?

Do you think it's on its last legs or do you think it will survive?

So I honestly don't know the answer to that question, but it's clear that Carla Lockhart is at variance with her party leader on this.

Gavin Robinson does not, as we know, want to build on Stormont.

However, if this comes to...

The leadership is on the line.

And the only way to save it is to build on Stormont.

I have no doubt that's what will happen.

do you know where the Sammy Wilsons, the Nigel Dodds, the Paul Givens, the big beasts within the party, the Johnny Buckleys, do you know where they stand on this? Who are they siding with? Carla Lockhart or Gavin Robinson?

And people will forget that it's been hanging around like an albatross around their necks for years.

Yes.

I think, though, there is an aspect of this where there's a tension between Sinn Féin's electoral benefit in the North, in particular, and its wider strategic vision of where it wants to be in, let's say, five or 10 years' time.

And so if you listen to that interview, which was very impressive in many ways, albeit it was not a difficult political interview on The Late Late Show with Michelle O'Neill.

She talked about the people, um, who were, who were, who were, um, in many ways involved in Drumcree, um, as being a, as this small minority, was the phrase she used.

And basically, here she is, she's in the heat of victory, she's got what she wants, and she's dismissive of this minority.

And as it happened that night, I was in Paris talking about a United Ireland with Fintan O'Toole, um, about our book, et cetera, et cetera.

So your position has changed in two weeks?

Where are the pillars of law and order and our judicial system because of all of this?

Well, that has been the aspect of this which has concerned me the most this week.

It's entirely understandable that people have strong views on this parade one way or the other.

But setting aside whatever the issue was, and I know that's difficult to do when it's something of this nature, when people feel that strongly about it, when there's so much tied up in this.

But whatever the issue, if a court, if the highest court in Northern Ireland has looked at this, has examined it, has found comprehensively on one side of the argument.

And you then have senior political figures, people who are ministers in our government, going and breaking the law consciously, deliberately.

And I knew that that hadn't been something which has been tested in court yet, but it seems overwhelmingly clear that in a place where people were being handed flyers by the police to explain what the law was, where Lloyd Keillor things were being said by police officers making it very clear I mean this is not a complex area of law I think everybody knew what was happening here and their stance was the moral thing to do is to break the law regardless the difficulty with that is that if it's every man for himself in terms of how we interpret the law If it's not the courts that interpret the law, well, it is complete anarchy.

What is the out here for society, for Northern Ireland? Like what would the NIO really want to happen going forward here?

Sam, how serious a threat do you believe this highly controversial issue poses to the future of, first of all, the devolution

project at Stormont? Well, in many ways, power sharing is already over in the sense that power is not being shared at Stormont.

We had the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister speaking from the back benches this week in Stormont in the Assembly.

We had the Deputy First Minister joining party colleagues in a walkout from the chamber before Michelle O'Neill got to speak.

We then had Michelle O'Neill refusing to come to the chamber when she was summons to answer an urgent oral question as First Minister by the Speaker.

I mean, this is a pretty chaotic situation.

The government is still there, but what is the point of government if it's not governing? The order paper for the Assembly this week was incredibly sparse.

But he's also, never mind what pressure he may or may not be under within his own party, he's under pressure from others within unionism, from Jim Allister on one side and John Burrows on the other side, who, as you say, has adopted clearly a more nuanced position and presumably quite deliberately so.

At least, we thought it

was well-known.

So some people listening to this will immediately think, hang on a minute.

Why is the Sunday Times libel action with a private individual in Northern Ireland in a Dublin court? Why is that in a government file? What does that got to do with the government? This is a private dispute, a civil law dispute.

It's not a criminal matter.

We'll come on to explain why it's in these files, but let me give you a little bit of the background or give some of the background for our listeners here.

So Thomas Slab Murphy and his two brothers, they claimed that the Slab nickname implicated them, sued the Sunday Times over a 1985 article which described Slab Murphy as the IRA's top commander in Northern Ireland.

Does this newspaper, The Sunday Times, in this instance, ever get help

Uh, what happened in Stormont yesterday? Describe the scenes there, uh, before and after those two politicians were speaking.

Well, first of all, Audrey, as you said, these were the joint leaders of our government in Belfast, but they were not speaking as leaders of government.

They were not speaking from the front bench.

They were doing this unusual thing of being on the back benches and making clear that they are not in that post any longer, at least when they're speaking in that context.

So, in some ways, when you asked the question earlier there, um, will power-sharing go in Belfast? In some ways, it is gone already.

Um, it's still there in the sense that we have not got a total collapse of government.

Um, it, that may not happen, that may happen, but there is no power being shared.

Sam, how do you see the standoff in Portadown being resolved?

And I think those people that wanted to force this march down that road need to give their heads a shake.

I think there is an extraordinary unity of purpose from nationalism.

I can't recall anything of this nature in my 20 years as a journalist.

Brexit brought incredible unity across nationalism, but I don't think you ever had dissident Republicans involved in that side of the campaign.

The idea that you have dissident Republicans all the way through to the SDLP, and it's a fascinating detail from Alison that she observed that about Claire Hanna.

That's very interesting.

I hadn't picked that up from any of her interviews.

Sam, you're looking to speak.

And I think those people that wanted to force this march down that road need to give theirselves a, give their heads a shake.

I think there is an extraordinary unity of purpose from nationalism.

I can't recall anything of this nature in my 20 years as a journalist.

Brexit brought incredible unity across nationalism, but I don't think you ever had dissident Republicans involved in that side of the campaign.

The idea that you have dissident Republicans all the way through to the SDLP, and it's a fascinating detail from Allison that, that she observed that about Claire Hanna.

That's very interesting.

I hadn't picked that up from any of her public pronouncements about this.

Sam, you're looking to speak on that.

And I think those people that wanted to force this march down that road need to give their heads a shake.

I think there is an extraordinary unity of purpose from nationalism.

I can't recall anything of this nature in my 20 years as a journalist.

Brexit brought incredible unity across nationalism, but I don't think you ever had dissident Republicans involved in that side of the campaign.

The idea that you have dissident Republicans all the way through to the SDLP, and it's a fascinating detail from Alison that she observed that about Claire Hanna.

That's very interesting.

I hadn't picked that up from any of her public pronouncements about this.

Sam, you're looking to speak.

There are very, very few British Israelites alive today.

So this, this is a fascinating and quite disturbing aspect of this story, and I suppose I should say at the outset that I've done a bit of a rabbit hole trying to understand what this ideology is.

And so in the hope that we head off any possible complaint from the British Israel World Federation, as I think it's called, I think that while some of them think that the people of the British Isles are descended from the lost tribe of Dan, I think some of the others might think it's another tribe or it's multiple tribes, whatever it might be.

The key thing is that they think we, the people who live on these islands, are God's chosen people, effectively.

So this is a sort of Old Testament view of the world where they view us as a modern children of Israel.

Now, when you think about that, it has very significant connotations.

If you think about the Old Testament, it's full of this very militaristic language, obviously, and much more than language.

How did this tape come about?

I do wonder, is it rhetorical, explicit, direct? What exactly was said

by this person? Well, I think as we come to go through this particular document, we'll get a sense of how unusual it was.

And that's not just me saying that as somebody who's looked at an awful lot of these files.

That's what the civil servant writing this says.

He is clear that this is out of the ordinary.

He's talking, it's his job.

to go around and basically talk to politicians and to gather up information.

And I just wonder, did he bring it up or did he complain? So at its most

Uh, you know, what, what, what got you to take the jump in the startup plan?

Yeah, it's funny.

So when I graduated from college, I was in finance doing healthcare M&A.

And my wife worked for a PE shop.

And my side of the business, we were merging hospitals and surgery centers and things like that.

There's another side of the business that operated hospital systems.

So my wife's PE firm bought this group of hospitals and they needed someone to come in and operate them.

Um, and then how, how do you get introduced to our expert? Cause at the time when you joined, I think employee like number four or five, um, and then, you know, doing revenue, but still very young, you know, relative to where they got, like, how did, how did you get, how did you discover them?

This is something that is going to be explored in the, uh, the Darcy McGee Summer School.

Yes, and I mean, that's, that's sort of the, the part of it which I'm taking part in.

So I mean, there, there is this, um, sort of dual reality which since Brexit, the truth is that most unionists, the vast majority of unionists in Northern Ireland have simply not moved their position on this.

They're completely unionist.

They have complete opposition to Irish unity.

That has not altered.

Now, that's quite disappointing to some nationalists.

And, uh, I mean, we certainly hear, uh, rhetoric, uh, from, from the north, from the likes of the, the TUV, people like, uh, Jamie Bryson, uh, who are very, very vocal, uh, in the media and online and, you know, you think of, of, uh, people like that, they're never moving.

He is still active on social media, but he's, he has made no further statement on this.

No, so about two and a half weeks ago now, the staff of The Newsletter got an email from Ben Laurie.

It began with the words, "It has been my last day at The Newsletter after almost two decades," and he went on to thank them for their work and, uh, say some of the things that you might expect somebody to say when they're leaving their role as the leader of an organization.

However, as of the time that we're recording this, uh, which is more than 10 days after he's left The Newsletter, my understanding is that the staff have still not been told by management even that he's left.

Now, [laughs] that is quite remarkable.

The idea that the most senior person in an organization would leave and the staff aren't even told that's happened is beyond my experience.

There's also a situation where for several days after he left, they were still printing in the paper that he was the editor.

Is that fair to say?

Can you tell me what CPACGB this year, it was its first year, what actually was it?

Well, it was very much modeled on this American concept, as you say, and this is a very big deal in America.

In American conservative political circles, this is the thing to be seen at, or it's one of the things to be seen at on the right.

It goes all the way back to Ronald Reagan, and it's a glamorous event.

It's a glitzy event.

It goes on for a very considerable period.

There are huge numbers of people there.

What is he up to at the minute?

Did he give you a hint of what's to come or what he thought about Northern Ireland?

In short, no, but we probably shouldn't end the podcast now.

He was coming here as the first potential Labour leader to campaign in Northern Ireland.

So that was one of the reasons why it was interesting at the time.

And he was doing that on the basis that he had been nominated for that position to run for leader by the Labour Party in Northern Ireland.

Now, there's a very long history here.

It's a bit technical.

How can he whip it into shape?

Now, that's not the way life always works out, but you would presume a man of his means would have paid this off by now.

So there's two interesting elements of this in terms of what's registered in these documents about mortgages.

The first is that he has a mortgage that is registered as a charge.

That's the legal phrase for this.

It's a charge on the property by AIB, so that bank has still got something hanging over him.

Now, how much of that has he paid off? Is it 1,000 pounds left? Is it hundreds of thousands of pounds? I have no idea.

It doesn't tell us that.

So it would be a long process and a very difficult process.

Now, that's not the way life always works out, but you would presume a man of his means would have paid this off by now.

So there's two interesting elements of this in terms of what's registered in these documents about mortgages.

The first is that he has a mortgage that is registered as a charge.

That's the legal phrase for this.

It's a charge on the property by AIB.

So that bank has still got something hanging over him.

Now, how much of that has he paid off? Is it 1,000 pounds left? Is it hundreds of thousands of pounds? I have no idea.

So it would be a long process and a very difficult process.

So tell us what is alleged to have happened on this particular trip.

So the aims, the official aims of this visit were that it was to outline the work and the achievements of the policing board that had been, um, set up.

The advent of Sinn Féin coming into that was a very significant moment that had preceded devolution in 2007.

This was a feel-good event.

It was, "Here, here we're celebrating not just devolution coming back, but there's wider support-" For policing in Northern Ireland, and it was about increasing the profile of the board.

It was meant to be about pushing it out to people who were key influencers and, and people who were opinion formers in Washington at the heart of power in the US, and there was a delegation from the policing board, which included the then chairman, Sir Desmond Ray, the vice-chairman.

There was Alex Maskey of Sinn Féin, Basil McCrea from the Ulster Unionist Party, Ian Paisley Jr., et cetera, et cetera.

[inhales]

Thank you.

Is that a letter? Is that a letter? Where was this? I've got it here.

mainly because there's a microphone here and I've been done with the cold, so I'm going to make myself hoarse in the first five minutes here.

Look, thank you very much for the invitation to be here tonight.

I'm relieved that there are no, I don't know very much about the litterific, but I'm relieved that there are no sort of strange ceremonies where there are animals being slain or me being asked to drink blood or whatever it might be at some of these university debating societies.

This book is quite an unusual concept.

It is, in a way, something which means that I'm not really meant to be here tonight, so you're not really listening to me because I'm not really telling you what I think.

So how do you think that the defence and security arguments will play into the sort of unification debate? And are we maybe seeing a good rethinking in GB of the strategic importance of Northern Ireland?

right? The police ought to tell us which paramilitary group was involved.

Of course.

But I mean, at the time, what the police were telling us nonsensically was that they had no evidence that this was being driven by paramilitaries or that this even involved paramilitaries.

I mean, you know, that that was ludicrous at the time.

But there's a pattern here.

This is not something that stems, I think it's fair to say, from John Boycher, because it massively precedes his time as chief constable.

Five years ago, you'll recall there was serious rioting over Brexit on Lanark Way.

Now, why are they doing that, Sam?