Harry Todd is senior research executive at Get Britain Out, previously worked as campaign manager for Conservative Party. He was also the national ground campaign manager for Leave means Leave.

I fact-checked some of the things that Harry said in the interview including that the EU required member states to maintain a VAT rate of a minimum of 17 per cent. In fact the UK VAT rate is 20 per cent, much higher than the minimum standard VAT rate that the EU allows, which is 15 per cent. It is the UK government that chooses to set it at a higher rate.

But that is the minimum standard rate, EU rules also allow member state governments to set lower rates for specific items, as low as 5 per cent, and that female hygiene products can be included in this much reduced rate, and there is a specific proposal in the works to set this to zero.

*****

I don’t like knocking
other podcasts, particularly other Irish podcasts, but I heard one thing a
while back that I’ve been thinking about, and just have to comment. You’ll
probably remember the Maria Bailey swing case against the Dean Hotel. The Fine
Gael TD sued the hotel because, she claimed, in 2015 she hurt her wrist when
she fell off a swing there. It’s clear that she had drink taken at the time,
and was holding drinks in both hands, this was confirmed because the hotel had
CCTV footage of the incident.

However, Bailey
claimed that the hotel was negligent because the hotel had not provided staff
to supervise her drunken antics. Maria Bailey is certainly an idiot, but there
are lots of idiots in Ireland, so that’s not really worth commenting on.

In Bailey’s legal
submissions she illustrated her injuries by claiming that she had not been able
to run at all for three months after the fall. In fact she ran a 10k race in
less than 54 minutes, a pretty impressive time, less than three weeks after the
fall. And on a
subsequent interview with Seán O Rourke on RTÉ, she claimed that she had only sued
to recover €7,