This is Paul Adamson and welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of my online magazine InCompass.

I chat informally with personalities from a wide variety of backgrounds on a wide variety of subjects.

If you like this podcast, you can go to the magazine's website

Encompass-Europe.com or any of the main platforms for free access to all the podcasts to date.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. My guest is Philip Stevens.

Philip Stevens is the chief political commentator at the Financial Times,

and his new book, written alone, will be published on the 28th of January.

Welcome to the podcast, Philip.

Thank you.

Right. So you say up front, Philip, that this book, Britain alone, is a story, quote,

of inflated ambition and diminished circumstance, unquote.

So what was your real inspiration of wanting to write this book?

Well, there are two sets of inspirations, really. The first was personal. My journalistic career, proper, as it were,

started in Brussels as a correspondent for Reuters in 1980, between 1980 and 1983. And so I saw close

up from the beginning. That was the, the you know the battleground then was the

British budget contribution so I but one of my the sort of first impressions I took as a as a

proper journalist was of this battle that we were having within Europe a Europe we'd only

recently joined and the second part of the personal reason is that

since then, I've been covering in one way or another British politics for 30-odd years.

I've seen four, I think, conservative leaders from Thatcher onwards fall over Europe for one

reason or another.

So I wanted to tell a story, at least part of which I've been a sort of,

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