Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a new podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host Alan Tolhurst and here with me to discuss the latest sorties in the battle for number 10 is my colleague, Caitlin Doherty,

as well as two Conservative MPs who are backing the rival candidates in the party's leadership contest.

The MP for Northwest Durham, Richard Holden, who was a supporter of the former Chancellor

Rishi Sunak, and the Elmint and Rothwell MP Alex Shelbrook, who is backing Foreign Secretary

Liz Truss. So as we speak, it's Thursday morning, we're past the kind of the latest

round of TV head-to-head debates. We're on to the next stage of the contest,

which is the leadership hustings for Conservative members. The first one tonight is going to be

in Leeds, where Alex is speaking to us from. And kind of, Caitlin, where are we this week?

We've moved on a bit from the initial stuff around taxation and the economy and moving on to

some various other policies by the two candidates.

We've had a bit more detail on a number of policies this week. This morning, Rishi Sunak has

announced that he would like to protect the green belt a little bit more from a house building.

We've had pledges from both candidates on policies to tackle violence against women and girls.

And we also had a commitment from Liz Trust overnight in a number of newspapers in the

north of the country about Northern Powerhouse Rail, which is a policy that was somewhat

watered down in the integrated rail plan, which was released at the back end of last year.

Alex, obviously, yeah, the Northern Powerhouse Rail, obviously you're speaking to us from Leeds.

How do you think that's going to go down, do you think, with the voters up there?

Well, I think it's really important, Alan.

It was a bad piece of PR by the government when the HS2B phase was cancelled because it was leading

on that thinking that was the popular thing.

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