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

And what a week. Well, every week you say what a week these days Politics is wild and has been for some time.

A resignation of two cabinet ministers, one supposedly at the heart of the Brexit negotiation,

David Davis, though he had ceased to be for many reasons, and of course Boris Johnson,

the Foreign Secretary. I want to begin my reflections on this week of

epic thrilling politics, further proof that Brexit is the equivalent of a Netflix box set where

no one knows the ending, including the leading players, by going back a bit,

to the first year of the coalition government.

It will all interconnect.

I haven't gone completely crazy, only mildly so, with Brexit fever.

And look at the Fix Term Parliament Act, which the coalition passed in that

first year of frenzied, shallow change. At the time, all the commentators, and we get everything

wrong, we're saying, isn't this? A period of remarkable political maturity,

two parties coming together in the national interest and behaving with admirable moderation as they

embark on the task ahead. It was completely the opposite. They moved in and went for it with a revolutionary zeal, the austerity economic policies,

the misjudged soaring increase in tuition fees, the consequences of which are still being

played out. And of course, in amongst these things, the fragmentation of the health

service with the NHS white paper that was then paused and then revisited in a different form,

in amongst all of that was that fixed term Parliament Act. Done for two reasons. One wholly superficial,

and that was Cameron and Osborne's desire to make sure that they could hold on to power in a fragile house of commons for five years and the Lib Dem's more

principled belief that a prime minister shouldn't have sole power to call an election. But this was as ill thought through as all

the other reforms that will rush through in a period when they behave with much more zeal than

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