Hello. This episode of Newscast is going to be a conversation with one interesting person.
Now, when I was in Brussels covering Brexit,
I hung on every word of Leo Veradker because he was the T-Shock, the Prime Minister.
of Ireland and such a massive player in the Brexit negotiations, whether it was the the backstop.
Do you remember that was the original plan for EU law to still apply in Northern Ireland so that you avoided checks on goods going from Northern Ireland to Ireland.
Then there was the UK wide backstop under Theresa May.
Then Boris Johnson took over and we had a front stop and all sorts of shenanigans.
And there was that amazing moment when Veradka and Boris Johnson met at a hotel in the Whirl and it all looked really bleak and then they emerged and they're like,
oh, we've got a deal.
And that basically opened the door to Brexit actually happening.
And then he, uh, his party didn't do very well in the elections.
And then he went into coalition with his arch rivals and they did a deal whereby they'd share the position of T shock.
So he then came back for two years as T shock and then stunned everyone by doing a Jacinda Ardern and saying,
actually I'm quitting because I'm not really enjoying this anymore.
So he's now written all of this down in his new book, Speaking My Mind,
and we thought it'd be interesting to get him to speak his mind here on this episode of Newscast.
I was just going to say, like, what's the word for a former T-shock?
Uh, ear-he-shock.
Okay, I'm not going to try and pronounce that.
Just think of ear.