Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards. Thanks very much again for downloading or listening or subscribing or whatever way you're dealing with this safe form of communication in the era of the pandemic. I'm going to be reflecting on the extraordinary events of recent days and what it tells us about leadership,

the perception of Boris Johnson when news emerged that he was being taken into intensive care,

and then look a bit at Kyr Starmer's early days, the shadow cabinet, his reaction to the pandemic. Before that, just a kind of

warning or something to look forward to, whichever way you look at these things. I did a program

this week on Radio 4 called Left Out of Power, which looked at the challenges facing

Kier Stama. And we interviewed a lot of people, Tony Blair, Peter Hayne, John Lansman, Gloria

de Piero, Charles Clark and others.

The idea was to look at those who have climbed previous ascents

towards some kind of electoral glory in the context of bleak defeat and Labour have had a lot of

bleak defeat so lots of people have tried to climb the ascent to see what lessons there are to be

learnt lessons also from the Corbyn era lessons about why Labor's previous safe strongholds have collapsed and so on,

just to sort of set the context.

And originally, it was going to be a series of three programs.

But when this bloody virus struck rightly, in my view, the BBC said, let's do one. It seems weird to be

doing all these programs on the challenges for Labour and Kirstama when the country's falling

apart one way or another. It was the right call. I was saying to one of my producers,

it felt like being in Monty Python, you know, everyone obsessed about whether they're going to survive the next hour and we're analysing what happened to Labour in 1983.

So anyway, it went down to one program, 40-minute program, which got great reaction on Twitter.

So thanks very much if you listen to it.

If you haven't, it's on the BBC Sounds app, and you can download that and tell me what

you think about it on Twitter or through other means.

But anyway, we obviously did these interviews for the programme, and then the interviews were

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