A War on Climate Change: Are Environmental Activists Losing The Fight? (Chris Packham)

33:11But he and Richard Tyce would say, and they are seeking to get elected, that maybe they do have legitimate concerns about whether Miss Miggins, who listens to this podcast, who's struggling to pay her bills, who doesn't feel that she contributed to climate change, is being made by current net zero policies to be poorer and less likely to have a job. That's what they'd say. And I think it's an intellectual position it's worth engaging with. it comes down to the management of those policies then doesn't it really so maybe the policies are wrong no no i say the policies are right how they're being funded and implemented might be wrong we need those policies we've got to cut down on our carbon we've got to change what we eat across the board there are a whole sweeping suite of things that we know that where we need to implement changes they're not all negative changes if we eat less meat we're more healthy there's less pressure on our national health service less people are getting bowel cancer you know there are positives to that are you vegetarian i'm plant-based i don't eat you know meat or dairy i am until i'm with my kids before we get onto the solutions because there's a lot of them and they are optimistic and actually i know that partly because of the extraordinary programs you've made there is a sort of optimism to what you've done for the natural world before we get to that i did say i wanted to put objections to your position under four headlines and i've done the first three which is it's not happening that was from trump second was bill gates saying There are other things which even if you care about climate change in a time of tightened finances, you take a utilitarian position that maybe poverty, hunger, disease matter a little bit more.

34:35The third is that current net zero policies aren't working. And I want to put the fourth to you, which is that the danger is a lot of environmentalism becomes a form of misanthropy. That it casts humans as the problem. That it converts all human behavior into kilojoules and then says less is more. and that actually you go about the world seeing us, noble, anxious, worried apes, as essentially something that's causing problems. I've seen it framed like that. It's not something that I subscribe to at all. I think humanity, humans are remarkable organisms. We're intelligent, adaptable, resourceful, creative, innovative.

35:18I mean, we are remarkable. Are you worried there's too many of us? I'm not worried that too many of us. I'm worried that we're consuming too much. And sometimes a minority of us consume so much that they steal from the majority. So it's not a question of how many humans there are, it's how much humanity is consuming. We've got obviously finite resources and got the old one planet. So it's easy to say the human population is rampaging out of control. But, you know, when you get the average American consuming four planets worth of resources a year and the average Somali consuming point whatever percent it is then you can see that inequality is actually the problem not population it's about consumption there's no there's no question of that can we just go back to the the fact that humans are not the problem because I do see environmentalists describing you know humanity as a disease that's poisoning and killing the world like baselae and a petri dish and actually I, you know, wherever you stand on, you know, obviously climate change or, you know, climate global heating is happening.

36:23But, you know, it might be possible to reconcile a deep concern about climate change and extreme weather with a feeling that, you know, sapiens are pretty cool. I think sapiens are pretty cool. But imagine this. Imagine you're an alien and you've just come from the other side of the universe and you're hovering in your calf just off the moon and you're looking down. And you're looking at a species that's basically very rapidly destroying its one and only home. And at the same time, it's killing itself or each other over ideologies and politics. In a time of abject crisis, when the planet really needs to pull together, we're still warring with one another.

37:07And there's a very ugly phrase, the luxury of war. The luxury of war. Our species is entertaining the luxury of war, of killing one another over those things, where at the same time we are staring, all of us as a species, are staring down the barrel of a gun that potentially could exterminate us. And then imagine you're that spaceship and it switches into, you know, Roland Emmerich and it's Independence Day. What happens in Independence Day, right? Glorious and ludicrous. Will Smith film. Yeah, yeah. sci-fi, is that within minutes of an alien threat that's going to exterminate the human species arriving, the Chinese are ringing the Russians, the Russians are ringing the Americans, everyone's coming together and we're all fighting the aliens.

37:56The aliens are here. They're not hovering in a spaceship off the moon. It's here. It's climate breakdown. It's biodiversity loss. It's here. It's already here. That's where we're at. If we're going to address this, frankly, we need to step onto a sort of a global war footing. And we can, because when you think about how we respond to human stress is remarkable. Let's go back to the middle of the last century. We had a global war. So we've got wars at the moment, significantly tragic, unpleasant, but we had a global war that put our entire species... Do you mean the first or second? Second, second, second war.

38:35Look at the technologies that were developed. Look, what happened in the space of just six years? You know, we shut down entire industries. We respond when it really comes to the crunch and we respond remarkably because we did away with fascism, which was a global threat at that point. And we invented or we rolled out things like penicillin, skin grafts. I mean, all sorts of remarkable technologies in just six years, just six years. That's how brilliant we are. Six years we solved a global problem. Fast forward COVID. We weren't prepared. We should have been. Everyone was telling us we should be prepared for a pandemic.

39:13We weren't. Tragically, millions of people died. But within eight months, we've got a vaccine that saves millions more. That's the brilliance of humanity. but the stupidity of humanity is that you've got to wait for a war to start which costs millions of lives leaves a desperate legacy of division around the world or tragically as i've said millions of people need to you know to die of a pandemic which could have been better managed but we solve it all i'm saying to you is let's not wait to trip over let's implement the solutions that we have at this point in time to do that. And in order to do that, we need to come together globally.

39:53This is the dichotomy of our species. This needs to be our independence day.

40:05I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Chris Packham. If you are, please do us a tiny favour and subscribe to this podcast and turn on your push notifications on BBC Sounds. That way, you will never miss future episodes. And also, make sure you spread the word about Radical to friends, would you? Friends, family, colleagues, anyone who might listen. We really want to expand our community. We need your help to do it. It is going rather well, as I tried to say, in an honest but mildly humble way. And it would be wonderful if you could help us, not least by leaving a review. If you did want to say we're a five-star podcast, Nat Amol Raj, and he's great, be my guest.

40:41Right. Thank you so much. And back to Chris. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:35Let's talk about the optimistic case. What we do about it is some radical solutions, the Packham solutions at the state, social and individual level. The state level, part of it's taxation, which is something you've advocated for, the polluter pays. What else would you like to see this government do immediately? OK, so let's start at the top. Inequality is what drives all of this and leads to so many of the problems. And that's not just in the UK, that's globally. So let's start, you know, we need a wealth tax, basically. How does that help with climate change? well I mean I think that you know what the moment we're seeing is is the division between rich and poor has got so great that the the those who are suffering without are easily drawn to the far right we've seen this before haven't we we've seen this in you know in in Europe after the first war world war that's how that's how that works I think that you know a lot of people are justifiably scared and worried and you know hungry uh they're worried about their their access to fundamental what i think should be fundamentally um you know available resources health education security homes a home to live in and and and then they're not getting that and therefore discontent is is something which is easily preyed upon and if it is preyed upon by the wrong people which it always has been then we find ourselves in even deeper deeper trouble and you think that's undermining the ability to make the case for for instance doing something about net zero Yeah, quite clearly.

43:09You know, there are still tyrannosaurs in the room. You know, animal agriculture is one of them. It's the leading driver of biodiversity loss. We have to get to wildlife at some point. I love life. I love everything that slimes, slithers, stings and crawls. You know, it turns me on. It gets me up in the morning. It's also incredibly important. If we don't have ecological resilience, we're not going to have any food. you know essentially when you think about it everything we put in our mouth every day comes somewhere from nature we either haul it out of the sea or it's grown out of the soil and that soil needs to be healthy and those seas need to be healthy and they won't be healthy unless we have a rich stable resilient biodiversity there.

43:41James Rebanks the uh the shepherd and farmer and best selling author was on this podcast and he was saying that we this is all the cost of too much cheap food that we need to pay more for food uh do you agree with that? We pay less for our food in the uk than any other country in western europe is that right yeah yeah and um and and and we're in the grip of a supermarket monopoly which has has never been fair or friendly to our farmers and they're not helped to completely turn our back on uk farmers and make their life so difficult makes my life difficult i have to go and bang on their door and say hold on i want more hedges i want more ponds i want more wetland don't cut that woodland down stop using all of those noxious chemicals which are basically killing all the insects so there's no birds and bats or anything else you know it's but we still got a badger coal running on you know which is enormously divisive i don't want to be arguing with farmers i want to be supporting them through that transition these are people that i mean they're connected to nature in a slightly different way that i'm connected to nature but instead of which we've been set at loggerheads because of these insane prescriptive policies that they have to follow and the fact that we are not supporting them but that's the bottom line if we were putting more money in their pocket then people like me get more of a welcome at the farmhouse door when i said to james what should james rebanks what should individuals do he said look i might be the most cynical person in the world but i don't think it's about individuals it's about politics and i think there's a bit of that in what you've been saying uh in this conversation where you think actually in the end we need better policies and at the state legislative level, particularly when it comes to taking on big oil or corporations that are polluting, we need to be much firmer.

45:22But there are a lot of people listening to this. There'll be a lot of people who followed your programs for 10, 20, 30 years, who would be really interested in what Chris Packham does on a daily basis to try and improve the lot of his local environment. Just go through a couple of things that you do. Plant-based diet. Why is that a good thing for you and for the planet well because i'm very fortunate to be able to choose what i put in my mouth a lot of people don't have that um choice because they can't afford to make that choice or maybe they can't put anything in their mouth they're even less fortunate but the single most accessible thing that i can do to reduce my carbon footprint basically is to choose more carefully what i eat and it's also beneficial for my health and the well-being of those animals which would otherwise suffer if i were if i were eating that's a that's a three-pronged argument it's better in terms of animal welfare as a lot of people would argue biodiversity loss obviously you know i mean let's face it we're cutting down lots of you know habitat we're mismanaging habitat that's there we're impinging on that biodiversity to produce you know that food i'm not saying that there's not you say within the plant-based arable that there aren't problems of course there are but we know that the leading driver of biodiversity, that's wildlife loss in the world.

46:40And let's be clear that, you know, we know since 1970, we've lost more than 70 % of the world's wildlife. And the leading driver for that is animal agriculture. 70 % of life on earth, wildlife, has been wiped out. Yeah, that's since I can remember. That's since I was into chasing butterflies around a little patch of wasteland behind our house. That's on, you see, that again, that's on my conscience. you know because I carry guilt for that. Why don't you carry guilt for that? It's not you. Well I'm one of you know. You wear this stuff so heavily Chris. You seem to wear this as sort of injuries on your back.

47:20Well I should have been able to influence this more positively and when I say I I'm speaking for a generation of in this case conservationists who basically haven't done their job. The State of Nature Report is an audit of the UK's wildlife. is extremely accurate. We've got brilliant naturalists out there. I would argue that we can put our finger on the pulse of the UK's changing populations and distributions of its wildlife with greater accuracy than anywhere else in the world. Now, these are published. It's fantastic. Yeah, it is. It's amazing. And it's a great testament to our, you know, being a nation of all animal and plant and fungal lovers, you know.

47:57So we go out and we produce these reports and it's basically, it's a catalogue of woe because they get worse and worse and worse and the declines get steeper and things start to disappear. And we've got 13 % of monitored species now in danger of extinction in the UK. We're one of the most impoverished set of nations in the world when it comes to biodiversity. This nation of animal lovers, that's what we've got in our backyard. And what that says to me is that our methods, our policies when it comes to conservation just haven't been working. And much of the dismay of the environmental NGOs, I will say that if I'd been a shareholder in UK Nature I'd have sold my shares years ago because they've just dropped through the floor what we're doing hasn't been done broadly enough and rapidly enough and we haven't used our strengths basically and when you think that there are a million members of the RSPB so if you collectively think about all of our NGOs these are people where people like me invest we buy our memberships we voted with our money to be essentially shareholders of UK nature.

49:02There's no jumping up and down and screaming. It's being pulled from under our feet. I'm watching it and listening to it and smelling it disappear in front of my nose, eyes and ears. And basically, there's too much self-conservation going on. What you've described at the global, national and indeed local level is nothing short of an emergency. I really want people listening to you now, who might be interested in your work, to go over some practical ideas for what they can do as individuals. I know they'll be mindful of your broader political points, but as individuals, what can they do? Okay, well, before we finish, let's just hit the nail on the head when it comes to those broader political points.

49:37And that is that the change needs to be mandated. It needs to be mandatory because at the moment it isn't, it's voluntary and it's simply not happening and it's not happening in time. So the Climate Change Committee and wealth of other people and food strategy, nutritionists, are all saying we've got to eat less meat. but that's not being mandated it's not being supported it's not being subsidized that transition is not being subsidized so i think that they but very realistic targets need to be set but they need to be set around you know not just pie in the sky numbers they need to be set around significant investment and that means education changing people you mentioned obesity um because of the types of food i eat more healthily now because i'm plant-based than i did before it's that it's that simple oh did you eat meat for a long time no no i didn't i've been vegetarian since i was in in my in my 20s i ate meat as a kid you know um but um but the but you know i'm not saying by the way that you know chris is this is a one step fix to you know food because i mean you could be plant-based and eat a lot of processed food and there's still a lot of packaging so there's still a lot of problems there it's not just the be all and end all it's not the simple you know magic bullet but nevertheless it it makes a difference but no i think that what we need is is mandatory and whenever we have this we have you know accusations of i don't want to live in a nanny state well look sometimes the state needs to take control because it can implement the bigger broader changes more rapidly than we can collectively through education or through recycling our stuff and and sharing our cars and all those sorts of things just interestingly on public health one of the lessons of the mike bloomberg leadership of new york and the coalition government here imported some of those lessons on public health people actually sometimes not always it's not a blanket rule but sometimes people are more relaxed about so-called nanny statism so for instance on a sugar tax people are kind of okay do that because we've got a big problem with sugar so sometimes when it comes to all smoking there's a smoking ban in this country we're about to go further on it so sometimes on public health people don't mind that because they think the soft pressure or power isn't climate break down public health isn't biodiversity lost public health.

51:43That's my point. It is. It will impact significantly. Look at the hot summers. You know, we've got buildings which aren't designed to take that amount of heat. We've got cold winters. We're going to have wet winters. We've got people's houses underwater. They don't get flood insurance. They're stressed. Their businesses are ruined. Their lives are ruined. And this is all going to increase. That's going to have a significant impact on people's, not only physical health, but their mental health too. We've already got a mental health crisis. Climate breakdown touches all of these things. So you want much more mandatory policy from the top in terms of other things politically that you can do, looking at agriculture, things like the supermarkets and the imbalance.

52:22Support your local farmers. Right. If you're a member of an environmental NGO, you're a shareholder, you paid the money, you know, send them an email and tell you you want action. You're fed up with looking at new magazines with dormice on the covers. You actually want them to do something because this is a crisis. You know, that's one thing you can do. I suppose when it comes to things that the listeners can do, you know, to make a significant difference, changing where you keep your money, you know, put it into a bank that's not investing in fossil fuels or weapons or those sorts of things. You know, that makes that's another really significant.

52:56Look at your pension. Where's your pension being kept? And what we're looking at when we look at some of the very biggest, baddest banks is that they are very rapidly transitioning out of that. I was offered a job a little while ago. It didn't come off, but I investigated the company. It was a big bank. And I sort of thought, I'm not going to accept that until I see what their policies are when it comes to the environment. Were they perfect? No. Were they making significant changes? Yes, they were. They were divesting from those interests, as the church has. Church of England is going through a process of divesting its wealth from where it's invested in fossil fuels.

53:30So, you know, it takes you two minutes on an app on your phone. Change where you keep your money. That makes a significant difference. also sends a message, also empowers you to think, I've done something good. And when you're empowered, you say to your mate on the phone that evening, guess what, I did something good today. I moved my bank into one where they're not investing in fossil fuels. And actually the service is exactly the same. It only took me three minutes and it's great. It's quite interesting for a bank to think we're going to get, was it a green message that they wanted you to convey?

54:01No, it wasn't. It was actually about neurodiversity. And so you're a very ethical consumer. You check out the people that you're going to work with, obviously, before you sign up to them. They go through the finest sieve. But listen, they don't have to be perfect. They need to be improving. They need to be wanting to improve. Because for me, the key ingredients to getting through this, right, are patience, because not everyone is going to move at the same time. Okay? They're not all going to think, yeah, I've just heard Chris. I'm going to give up meat. I'm going to go plant-based. Some might, but whatever.

54:38All they have to do is think, do you know what? I might just have one day less meat this week. Meat-free Mondays is what the UN and Paul McCartney advocated for. There we are. So that's the thing. You've got to be patient. That's the first thing. And then the second thing is we've got to be kind. We've got to be kind to one another. Again, all this divisiveness. I'm not an ultra-vegan. I'm not telling your listeners, in order to save the world, you've got to stop eating meat that's an unreasonable thing to do that's not the stance you can take you've got to allow that patience and kindness you know to to come into it and therefore you know in order to make that effective transition we've got to implement those sorts of things but at the same time we need to do it with greater urgency if you care about you know there's always this thing isn't it i don't want the world to be a rotten place for my grandchildren you know So for me, it's not that.

55:35It's about humanity's conscience. We've done so many remarkable things. This evening, you know, I was going to go into the Tate Gallery and look at paintings, which will, you know, can virtually reduce me to tears. You've got a big thing about Turner, haven't you? I like Turner. I like lots of art. But, you know, we write music. We've written books. We've put up buildings. We've been to space. You know, we've discovered this, this and that. The science is just unbelievable. Do we as a species want it on our conscience that we stupidly destroyed our one and only home and us with it? Particularly when you think about it, right?

56:18We've got no proof that there's any complex life or anything like us anywhere else in the universe. All life and civilization might just be this tiny candle. in an endless expanse. And here we are, me and you, the two of us, the team on the other side of the glass. It's incredible. And to be alive now in this era, in this time, we've got studios and microphones and iPhones and AI and delicious sausages. No, I'm joking. Vegan sausages. Vegan, vegan. No, there are vegan sausages and they're very good. Have you, because you care so much of this, have you made a decision that you're prepared to take the brickbats and the kind of, how can I put this um friction the heat the controversy the um the uh the death threats the uh the beef that you get did you actively decide a while ago it's worth it because what I'm fighting for matters more um not not recently I mean I you know I sort of think I think there's sort of uh the way that I lived as a teenager um and in my early 20s you know it wasn't a great that wasn't a great time you're depressed you're depressed and bullied yeah yeah and and and i i have a compulsion to tell the truth as i see it and it's known at that point in time and uh my mother used to say i was the most tactless boy in the world she would say what do you think of my new summer dress and i'd say a bit tight or red and blue you know what you're thinking about blue and green should never be seen um you know or whatever it happened to be so i i have a compunction to tell the truth do you do you in your own understanding of it because you know a lot more than i do but do you think that comes from autism i think there is a clarity that you know and and and again you know i think there's a sort of a an intolerance of injustice i think that it comes from from that there's a our world can be quite black or white you know um there's it's hard to find grey sometimes and that can make life quite difficult because there is grey but over matters of significant importance then you know I've got to do it so when it comes to you know taking the flag well Billy Bragg who's a mate of mine says if you're not getting flack you're not over the target that's the first thing so you know and and you just have to be resilient and I think you you You have to care.

58:41But look, here's the thing, right? You can either want to be universally liked, which is quite ambitious, or you can be authentic. You can't be both. And I don't need to be universally liked. I'm not here to be liked. I'm here to make a difference. What price have you paid for your activism? I suppose it's the frustration that I mentioned when I first come in. It's that weight of guilt. You know, I feel that I have. I was thinking more about death threats and endless grief. Yeah, but that's just noise, isn't it? Putting your name into social media and finding an absolute ocean of people being horrible about you.

59:18Does that not upset you? No, it doesn't. It fuels me to do even more. Like I said, if you're not getting flack, you're not over the target. I mean, I get abuse. I mean, look, you know, ultimately, and this is not getting the violins out. You know, I was bullied as a kid. You know, I get bullied now. It's been part of my life. I've learned to become resilient. you know that's that's what i do i just you know and sometimes yeah it does it does spur me on i see things and you know so a couple of years ago they they put a car full of fuel outside my house and they blew up and burned my gates down and um when i got back after all the ferroa i looked at the gates and they were the burned oak looked beautiful it looked like mackerel skin it was all sort of iridescent so i said to my mate let's take these down really gently so we took the gates down they were replaced and we had them and then we cut them up very carefully and and i made um three tables out of them and i had them set in resin and then the two gate posts that were equally damaged by the fire we took those out they had to be replaced as well and i had fox's heads carved into the in into one of them and i made a bench and it's in the garden you know they can be as negative and destructive as they like i'm going to turn it into something positive what i learned a long time ago in the days of punk was i was very very angry young man still quite an angry old man is that you've got to turn that anger into something positive so in that instance you know if if if if i do get touched by any of that hatred and loathing and division then i will turn it into something positive it will spur me to do more or and in and in in the sense of those those gates i just sort of thought yeah do you know what you burn them down it's cost me a lot of money to replace them i'm gonna make something good out of them we've been absolutely inundated with questions for you and I want to leave time for that I've just got a couple of final thoughts as you reflect on it now we talked about almost 50 years ago why do you think you were bullied as a kid and and also how did that shape your personality uh well I was undiagnosed autistic and and you know and I didn't know how to manage myself and I didn't and obviously no one my parents not anyone at school had the ability to understand that um I just began to realize by the time I I was in my early teens that I was different.

1:01:36I didn't know why. I didn't like it. Obviously, I wanted to fit in. And that made me initially, you know, very frustrated, I suppose. And then it turned to anger. I became very angry. And then it turned to self-loathing. Because from my perspective, I was definitely the odd one out. So therefore, I had to be the one that was broken. In fact, I've got a piece of paper at home. and it says everything I am is wrong and I'd written it hundreds of times on one piece of paper I remember sitting one evening and writing it in my bedroom and that's to the level to which I blamed myself and I admit I was difficult to deal with I had those traits, those unmanaged traits of a young autistic person and I wasn't able to see how they were impacting in a way that would produce a negative response from my peers or my family.

1:02:33And it was quite difficult. And also as a young person, bear in mind it's very difficult to articulate what you feel. And I can do so now with the benefit of hindsight because I'm lucky to have a good memory and I can remember all of those moments. But at that point, had you asked me to explain what was going on, I wouldn't have been able to put it into words anyway. Have you got over that self-loathing? I'm still trying. you know I still um I still try to like me but not not not really but I don't think it's important I think maybe it's part of that energy uh you know dissatisfaction in terms of my own achievements continues to get me to to strive to to do and learn and achieve more not I've achieved much but you know it's it's yeah it's part of that fuel I don't really like contentment I fear that it might breed complacency I like being on the edge and I'm a fighter and you know and the problem is that for me winning is not giving up it's not that I'm ever going to fight and win anything for me it's just about keeping going keeping going keeping going keeping going and keep them going.

1:03:50Chris Packham, it's been a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you so much. No, thank you very much.

1:03:57OK, well, there is a lot more of Chris Packham answering your questions directly in our forthcoming Q &A episode. That's going to drop on Monday. We've had lots and lots and lots of questions for you on the climate, on fox hunting, on neurodiversity, and I get through quite a lot of them. So please do tune in next Monday. I have to say it's a galvanizing and high energy and dynamic experience talking to Chris Packham. He has this tremendous sense of urgency in his voice. And the one statistic which he mobilized, which did jump out at me, which I've heard before, but which when you hear it makes you think, yep, something is going on in a very, very big way, was that number about the loss of biodiversity across the world since 1970.

1:04:42What he's saying there is that in the past half a century, And you remember, humans have been around for about 100 ,000 years, this particular type of human called sapiens. In just the past 50 years, almost 70 % of wildlife has been wiped out. Huge numbers of species that will just never be seen again. And that does, I think, convey a profound sense of emergency. As to whether his solutions are sufficiently radical for you, I certainly think they had a radical flavour. Whether or not they'd work is really for you to decide. It's really interesting, though, that in that mix, I thought it was, to his credit, if I may say, that he didn't just bemoan what the UK government is doing.

1:05:18And I kept coming back to this sense or kept getting a sense from him of the fact that this should be an optimistic, a positive, a positive kind of campaigning moment where we try and say climate change isn't some dreadful thing that should make us all feel guilty about how awful the world is and how it's going to hell in a handcart. It's really about changing how we all live to live better lives that are more in sympathy and in harmony with nature. But having said all that, you know, the thing that I would take away as I cycle home from the studio today, it's just this profound sense of the weight of the world on Chris Packham's shoulders.

1:05:51I didn't know that. I spent a bit of time with Chris in the past. I've done a few TV shows with him. I've spoken to him down the line on the Today programme and on the One Show. I've never spent that much time with him in the studio. I mean, he's extraordinarily bright and clever, as well as neurodivergent, obviously. but he wears it very very heavily and I got a sense when he came in then at the start of that interview where he talked about being isolated frustrated angry and scared but also as things went on he just feels this profound sense that his generation and his type of conservationist has let people down and I think that's a bit much really I think he's done extraordinarily important vital work and he has made a positive difference but that doesn't seem much consolation for him.

1:07:01Budget. He's going to get the inside story on life as opposition leader, find out how she plans to navigate the new multi-party fragmented world of British politics. You've got to listen to Nick's podcast if you're someone interested in UK politics. Last week, he had Shibana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, on and it was absolutely riveting. Listen, right, we'll speak to you next week. Goodbye.

1:07:31In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. you