Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Hannah White.

And it is recess. MPs have gone back to their constituencies, or maybe snuck off to the beach,

and ministers are hoping to escape to somewhere quiet too.

Special advisors and officials might be hoping that the phone stops ringing and things get a bit

calmer for a few days, but governing in summer doesn't always work like that.

So today we decided that we should take a trip into the inside briefing vaults,

digging out a fantastic episode that we recorded take a trip into the inside briefing vaults, digging out a fantastic

episode that we recorded originally in 2021, which explored with former ministers, advisors and

political journalists what being in government is like in the height of summer. It was presented

expertly, I might say, by my colleague Alex Thomas and he's here now with me in the studio. Hi Alex. Hi, Hannah,

too kind, too kind. But it was a fun one. It was. So we should add that you recorded that episode

just before the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan, which provided some proof if it was needed

that events can take over in the summer. And of course,

last summer, having just come into government, Kirstarman was faced with the first real test

of his premiership with what happened in Southport, wasn't he? Yeah, it seems quite a long time ago

now. But yeah, I think that was a real test. It was only a month or two into the new government.

And actually, they've had their troubles this

year, but general consensus, which I think is right, is that the Starma government handled that

situation quite well, both in terms of the reaction to the public order, which is primarily

a police and operational policing question, but that's sort of the tone of the response

and the initial response to unrest and rioting.

But also it was in the context of that, well, still existing, very, very difficult prisons situation.

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