The Home of Common Sense. This is Talk.

We've got Tim Shipman to talk to, she puts a commensitor at the Sunday Times, author of a new book which is

Out. It's called Out, funnily enough, how Brexit got done and the Tories were undone. Tim, very good

morning to you. Morning, Mike. Very, very, very happy to have you on. You're the man of the moment right now.

Some fantastic stuff in this book, right? I'm going to ask you the question that I'm hoping maybe you haven't been asked before.

When you talk about Boris Johnson challenging Rishi Sunak to an arm wrestle to decide

who should be Prime Minister when Liz Truss resigned. How do you get that stuff? Where do you get

this information from? Well, he and Sunak went into a room in Johnson's office office in milbank tower and um while they were in there

for about an hour um various of their aid sat outside listening to the shouting and the voices

and was there shouting multiple witnesses to the scene like yes i think you can be relatively sure that I spoke to everybody in the room and outside.

No, no, I'm absolutely sure of that because I know that's how it works.

But I just think for sometimes for our listeners and our viewers, they don't really quite know how all this stuff works.

And so, you know, the lobby business is a strange and internecine one for them.

Is it any different now with Stalmers lot in than it was then?

Well, I mean, I guess journalists have been pleasantly surprised how quickly it became a bit of a mess.

Having covered eight years of Tory chaos and listened to Labour people telling us how easy government was going to be when they got in

because they weren't these wicked ineffectual Tories, only to discover that all the problems are the same, all the sort of underlying issues with how the

government works and, you know, are all the same. And it turns out that if you have a leader

who doesn't have a great deal of directional political kind of now, the problems for Starma are going to be broadly the same as the problems were for Rishi Sunaq and some of the ones who came before it.

I must admit, I mean, we'll get back to your book in a second.

I must admit, I was surprised how quickly it fell apart for Stama, though.

Yeah, I mean, people who read the Sunday Times now I do sort of inside government, kind of long read each week.

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