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Hello and welcome to the special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Katie Bulls and I'm

joined by Isabel Hardman and James Heel. 2022. What a year we've had. As we had towards the

Christmas break we thought it would be good to have a moment to pause and reflect. Isabel where should

we start? I suppose if we go back to the beginning of the year I mean we had our own Patterson end of

2021 which I suppose was the first science I think really things were really turning for Boris

Johnson and then Partigate started to begin. Do you think there was a sense in January that Boris

Johnson would be out before the year was out? Gosh looking back that long I think it feels like more

than a year doesn't it? I think by that stage it was sort of the wheels hadn't come off but I think

the hub caps and some sort of you know there were probably some nails in the tyres at this point

as well and I think the conclusions that we were reaching just under a year ago in early January

2022 were that Boris Johnson was not going to have the easy reforming premiership that we thought

he was going to have when he won that majority in the 2019 election. Obviously that had initially

been paused by Covid but it was becoming quite clear that whatever the global events the big problem

for Boris Johnson was Boris Johnson and the decisions he made around the people who he hired,

who he chose to back who he chose to listen to and indeed the decisions he made in his personal life.

Now not in the sense that when people say Boris Johnson's personal life everyone thinks about

his relationships but actually you know that the saga of the number 11 flat redecoration being one

example and also his attendance at various parties or cake cuttings during the pandemic that's

the sort of personal decisions that I mean that actually his judgment about things that didn't

...