Hello and welcome to this week's instalment of calling Peston, though maybe it's just me,

but it feels like we've lived through this week before.

Hospitals struggling to cope, daily deaths of COVID rising above a thousand, stay at home,

the government's central message, questions over whether we lock down soon enough

and hard enough, questions over how long it will all last. Marcus Rashford, shaming the government

into action over free school meals. Ten months into this pandemic and this week felt like we'd

tragically come full circle. The grim reality, the deaths are higher, the hospitals are closer

to breaking points. The hope provided by

2021 is the vaccine, which the UK continues to roll out faster than most. So much to discuss on this

week's podcast with me, Daniel Hewitt, my trusty colleague, Shihab Khan, and of course our political

editor, Robert Peston. Also, with the United States seemingly imploding, we have one heck of a special guest state side this week, don't we, Sheehab?

We do indeed. We have the former director of the FBI, James Comey. He was in that role from 2013 up until 2017 when he was dismissed by the President Donald Trump.

Got to be a fascinating interview with James Comey. He's got a new book out. We'll be talking to him

about that as well. But first of all, let's kick off, shall we? Shihab. On the domestic front,

another incredible week, another pretty grim week. And not only have we got all the things

I just listed in my introduction, we also now potentially have another new variant, the Brazilian variant.

It just feels like it's coming at us at 100 miles an hour at the moment.

It does feel never-ending, isn't it?

When we get to a point where we have some good news,

and the good news throughout the last few weeks has been that there have been more vaccines

that have been approved, more vaccines are being rolled out. It feels as though it just doesn't stop and

there's more bad news. And the news today is that we expect anyway that the Prime Minister

...