Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you so much for tuning in.

And we've got a special for you today, today being the day when you

choose to listen to the podcast, such as the glorious flexibility of podcasts. As I think I probably

mentioned in previous podcasts, I did an event very recently with the former cabinet minister,

Alan Johnson at the York Literary Festival. The event was

hosted by St Peter's School, who also kindly recorded the event. And it was curated by the brilliant

Ben Fuller, who has been responsible for the York Literary Festival for a long time. But this was his last event.

He's retiring from the huge burden. I know what it's like putting on festivals. The huge

burden of putting on festivals. And this was the finale. And he had a good idea of,

see, Alan Johnson has written a biography of Harold Wilson. I've written one on Tony Blair,

part of a series of post-war prime ministers, short biographies. Ian Dales are Margaret Thatcher,

and I know Jason County is doing athlete to be published, I think, next year.

So Ben thought it would be a good idea to get Alan and I together to reflect on Harold Wilson, Tony Blair, and Keir Stama.

And obviously I leapted it because in the cooperative, our favourite word is context.

And this contextualises Stama,

and we reflected deeply on Wilson and Blair from our different perspectives. And then there were

questions. And if you can't hear the questions, don't worry, because Ben chaired the question and answer

session, and he repeats the question. So you will get the questions. And given that we've

talked a lot recently about Wilson on the Rock and Roll Politics Cooperative, I'm still getting

lots of questions. And obviously, Kier Starrma is a running, running theme, and Blair crops up quite a lot.

I thought you would enjoy this discussion. I'm also conscious there have been some brilliant

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