Tom Bradby

I mean, what ultimately happens in Secret Service, not to give it away, is that Kate's a sort of relentless truth seeker.

That's the sort of core of her character.

But when they ultimately take it to the

if I allow this to go forward and it leaks out, it's going to poison this election leadership race.

And he's not wrong about that because it did in America.

And you guys dug into that in a really clear way, I thought, in your series and demonstrated beyond any doubt that that was one of the principal outcomes of that operation.

So I think there are things to really think

deeply about, and that's quite apart from no one wanting to, in any walk of life, to go and tell their boss something that's really explosive.

Well, Russian influence came with Russian money, which just flooded in after 2010.

I mean, they were buying up Knightsbridge, they were sending their sons to Eton, and they were occasionally donating money to political parties if they were British citizens, nothing wrong with that.

But there just was this massive change.

And as I've said, the thing that's always bothered me, and I guess it's part of the idea for the novel and the TV drama, was

You have to be really careful in Britain by saying that British MPs aren't well paid because, of course, by the standards of the average salary, they are well paid.

I think most people living professional lives in London would certainly not say that MPs are overpaid.

As I said, it's really, really difficult to get money for your local party.

It's really difficult to fund national political campaigns.

I think our politicians are really quite susceptible to that.

There was obviously the case of Nathan Gill, which, let's be honest, came from an FBI tip-off, the former leader of reform in Wales, at one time very close to Nigel Farage.

I really dug into that when it happened.

Because I sort of wanted to understand it.