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

Thank you for tuning in wherever you are.

And I am in Edinburgh. Well, actually, I'm not in Edinburgh at the moment. I'm in North Berwick,

which is about half an hour's train ride from Edinburgh, overlooking the beautiful coastline.

Just to take you behind the scenes, this is what they do. For those of you

who don't follow football, I listen to the rest of this football podcast and Gary Lineker and

Shira and all that lot take you behind the scenes of their live broadcasts and things. I find it

compelling, but I'm probably the only one. Well, I'm not because

they get millions of downloads. But anyway, we're staying in North Berwick, a beautiful coastal place,

which I noticed the Sunday Times long after we booked our place, named North Berwick as the

most desirable place to live in the UK, at which point

rents quadrupled but were still 10 times cheaper than Edinburgh during the festival.

But anyway, that's where I'm overlooking the sea. And so as I record, I've done the first

of the 14 shows at Edinburgh. Each one will be different.

And one of the really stimulating things of doing these shows is how much it gets you thinking afterwards.

And based on a conversation with people in the audience during the show. We have conversations during the show.

It has made me think about the Tory dilemma and conundrum, which I do not see a clear solution for them.

And I'm going to reflect on that briefly. Then actually, something quite significant, really, for all of us,

lot. I must make an apology for last week's podcast. It was recorded as I was watching the chaos

and violence in Rochdale, truly horrendous scenes. But I failed in what is the kind of main fundamental purpose of our time together

in the rock and roll politics cooperative,

which is to provide nuance and context.

...