Hello and welcome. At this time of year, politics has usually wound down for Christmas. MPs would be at home for carol concerts.

Corridors of power would be emptying out, certainly of working ministers.

Not so at the end of 2019.

Central London already seems half deserted, but Westminster is still buzzing.

So, with Johnson keen to get his Brexit deal through Parliament and keep faith with the voters who gave him an 80-seat majority, there's lots to talk about on the last episode of Inside Briefing

this year.

I'm Bronwyn Maddox,

hosting this just ahead of the IFG's Christmas lunch, complete with traditionally fabulously geeky quiz.

Was the general election really only a week ago? Now the government is setting out its agenda in a new Queen's speech. We've read reports of plans to overhaul the way

white all works, and the word radical is being scattered around just about as much as it was

in Labour's plans. One man who is excited about it all is Douglas Carswell, the former

Conservative MP who then famously defected to UKIP and played a big role in securing and

then winning the 2016 Brexit referendum. We'll be

speaking to him later on. And joining me today to work out what happens next are our Director

of Research, Emma Norris, senior fellow Kath Haddon, and our special guest journalist Chris Cook

of Tortoise Media. Chris, Tortoise was set up to take a slow approach to the news,

but it hasn't been slow, has it? How did it work out for you in the last Parliament?

Well, it has been a bit of a challenge. One of the things we found, though, is that there's

actually the principle of slow news is rather than try and sort of chase everything that's

happened today, there's a lot more, you know, you can learn a lot

more by taking a slow and more considered approach to things. So, for example, one of the things,

big things we published this year was like an eight-part account of the Theresa May Brexit negotiations,

...