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

Over the last few days, again, there has been revived talk of a new political party,

apparently when Vince Cable, unfortunately missed a key Commons Brexit vote,

he was at a meeting talking about this very topic.

Others raise it on a regular basis.

I'm quite sceptical in many respects.

It seems to me that it's largely driven by a commentariat and a

group of people whose ideas have been at the center of power for a very long time and now they

suddenly find themselves unrepresented in power and by either of the

leaderships of the main parties and instead of trying to assert and win within their parties

they opt for the in some ways easier course of just saying oh well let's set up a new one and there is a lot

of imprecise talk about it on what it stands for a kind of economic liberalism social liberalism

pro-Europeanism that raises about 25,000 questions. Now, the reason I talk about

this is because I'm going to play you a discussion from the politics festival that Ian Beryl,

my friend and journalist, sounds as if it's a contradiction in terms, being a friend and journalist.

But anyway, he and I, as you know, or some of you might have known,

organised the annual politics festival at King's Place.

And one of the best events, I think, to our surprise to some extent,

because you spend a lot of time booking people like John Major who came along

and other big names, cabinet ministers and kind of shadow foreign secretary came along

and all the rest of it. It takes a long time. But the discussion we had about whether a new

party should be formed, could be formed.

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