Matt Bevan

Perhaps... So the British could have had some and the Americans could have had some.

Potentially.

Potentially.

Or one lemon tree has...

been brought in at some point and everybody's heard about this and then they've returned home to Britain and America and they've gone, I've got this amazing story.

Stalin made a lemon tree appear right outside my room, you know, and you end up with multiple lemon trees even though there was only one lemon tree at the centre of it.

Can I tell you what I suspect is going on here?

Lemon trees appearing out of nowhere.

But, you know, we've got all these firsthand accounts, but historians have written about this.

And the British, if you read the British Foreign Office's official history, then they say that the tree appeared outside of the British palace and it was requested by Churchill's daughter, Sarah.

So we've got now a fourth version of the story, but that is the one that's been accepted by the historians of the British Foreign Office.

Absolutely.

But if you or I were writing a history of the Second World War and we got to this story...

we would almost be forced to pick one because, you know, in the middle of a thing about tanks and about, you know, this happened and that happened and these terrible events and the Holocaust and all these terrible things, you can't go, I'm going to stop the story right now and I'm going to spend three and a half pages writing about the provenance of a lemon tree.

A historian would pick one of those stories, write it down, go, it's probably pretty close to the truth and charge on.

But, you know, I had the joy of being given a book contract and no real instructions about what I was to put in it.

And so I decided to spend four, five, six pages writing about a lemon tree and nobody could stop me.

So, yeah, George Papadopoulos wasn't even a paid advisor.

He was sort of a volunteer to the Trump campaign, and he was touring around Europe just meeting people, you know, meeting people here, meeting people there, talking about what the Trump campaign might do if Donald Trump was elected president and that kind of thing.

And in Alexander Downer's telling of the story...