Hello, this is the Red Box Podcast. I'm Matt Cholli. Now, do you employ your other half?

Paid for by the tax payer? Dozens of MPs employ family members in their parliamentary office.

Weirdly, it's only allowed to do it if you were elected before 2017.

Why, given that it's a 15 years since this scandal first blew up?

Is there anything wrong with it? R is one cabinet minister suggested.

We're getting more bang for our buck, which is one way of calling it.

Or is it a practice which needs to be stamped out?

That's coming up, and that's a big thing.

In just a moment, first, as ever, we kick off with our columnist panel.

On Tuesday, it should be think of it, but now Danny Finkelstein's gone off for a sparkly.

So instead, we're joined by David Ronevich and from the stories of our time's podcast, Banffin Marner.

Let's start, first of all, with Russia, David.

We're hearing more and more stories about how Russian, normal Russians, Russian people,

and the information they're getting from the Russian state.

And they're the absorption of their lines, essentially.

The incredible stories of people phoning.

There was somebody who was a story that somebody told on Twitter yesterday about some Ukrainians phoning their mother in Russia.

No, it must have been Ukrainians who did this.

And what it tells us about what it's like in Russia right now.

I think this is terrifying, not least because we had a kind of model about how this might go,

which was with significant sanctions.

Ordinary Russians would turn on the government, or at least put pressure on the government to adopt something other than a massively aggressive and quasi genocidal view of Ukraine.

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