This is a Global Player Original podcast.

Hello and welcome to another edition of the For The Mini Podcast. I'm Ian Dale. We are Jackie Smith-Less today because Jackie's in Beirut this week. She will be back next week. So I thought, who should I invite to step into her formidable shoes? And I decided that West Streeting was getting far too much exposure on the media at the moment and he would be

furious that he hasn't been invited but I've always wanted to do this podcast with Emily

Thornbury and here she is Emily hello hello Ian that's very nice of you thank you well we've

had some very able deputies in the past Caroline Flint's done a couple uh Wes has done a couple and um so I

thought it's only fair that you get a go as well now have you ever listened to the podcast to be

honest I have although only in the last week

and quite frankly Ian if I'd listen to it before agreeing to it exactly but but you see now you know

why i've invited you because i just i just decided you have the requisite sense of humor a bit

like jackie now um you've had a busy day today you've been doing the

morning round what's it like doing that because you're doing interview after

interview and does it get a bit monotonous after a while with the different

interviewers asking more or less the same questions well I mean the first thing

is to bear in mind is that you get up at five o'clock

and that's kind of, that's a challenge, but I'm not really a morning person at the rest of time.

So you have to kind of get up, try and wake yourself up. And when you get to my age,

you've also got to try and not look like you've just got out of bed. That state lasts for

quite a long time when you get to my age. So there's all of those sorts of challenges and, you know, getting your eyes open and so on. And then you've got to get your brain in gear. Because you're supposed to go on, you know, you go on thinking you're going to talk about a particular story, which is the one that you're pushing. But, you know, and the interviewers may or may not come to that. But they've got a whole load of different things that they want to talk to you about. And you're the labour voice of the morning. And so all kinds of things bubble up. And so they tend to, the styles tend to be different. And obviously the formats are different. And you kind of, what you do is you go along to millbank number six mill bank four and you four thank you and you go up and down

the stairs you know going from one to another and of course they never stick to the times that

they have to take someone else with you who kind of juggles you know and then some are on your

own computer that you do in the cafe and then others done outside, and then some are done on the ground floor, some are done on the fifth, you know, and you're running around like a blue-ass flight, and also there's somebody else, of course, the Tory, who's doing it as well, and so you keep passing them on the stairs, which is odd, you know, they're doing the morning round and you're doing the morning

round and you just sort of hear snippets of what one another is saying as you go around so how

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