Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Alex Thomas.

Parliament is in recess and the domestic grid is pretty light, but I doubt it would have made much

difference, even if it had been chocker-block with government announcements, because once again, Donald

Trump is making pretty much all the headlines across the world. This week, the American

President appears to have blamed Ukraine for starting the conflict with Russia and not ending it,

which is not true, attacked Ukraine's leader Vladimir Zelensky for having low poll ratings,

which is not true, and called the Ukrainian a dictator, which is grimly ironic from a man who

tried to overturn his own democratic election loss and has just pardoned the violent criminals

who assisted him.

All this after previous announcements from Trump and his administration set out a huge scaling

down of any US military presence in Europe.

It's no wonder that British politicians have been scrambling to respond, not least

Defence Secretary John Healy, who this week was speaking at the IFG on a stage bedecked with union flags.

We'll catch up with what Healy had to say and try and make sense of what Trump is up to.

And after all that, something just a little bit lighter.

We've got a new batch of our Ministers of Reflect interviews out, this time featuring Matt Hancock. We'll give you the

highlights. Joining me throughout is IFG Program Director Catherine Haddon. Hello to you, Kath.

Hello, Alex. Nice to be here. And I'm delighted that we're joined again by Peter Ricketts, Lord

Ricketts, who, amongst many

high-profile roles in a diplomatic career spanning four decades, served as Britain's first

national security adviser from 2010 to 2012.

Hello Peter, you are in demand a bit right now, I imagine.

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