Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolst.

This week, with more leadership speculation swirling around Kirstama and claims he's seen as a caretaker

Prime Minister by his own MPs, we're looking at things from the other end of the telescope

and asking how do you protect the person in charge

if you're working inside number 10? And what can you do to defend your principle and neutralise

any threats they face? Well, to answer that, we have three people on the panel who worked at the

Colface in different Downing Street administrations and faced a litany of internal threats.

First up is Beatrice Timpson, who was Deputy Press Secretary to two Prime Ministers, Liz Trust, and Rishi Sunnah, and is now a director at Sanctuary Council. Alongside her is Guto Harry, who was Downing Street Director Communications in the final year of Boris Johnson's premiership, and also Paul Harrison, press secretary to Johnson's predecessor, Theresa May, for three years.

And it's now an executive director at Lexington.

So, Bich, I'm going to start with you.

You obviously worked for Rishi Sunak, who perhaps was the only one of the last few kind of

prime ministers who wasn't ousted outside of an election.

But obviously, there was still a lot of

internal pressures, both from the party and kind of externally.

Firstly, were there kind of big crunch points when you were working for Michelle that

he kind of had to get through, I suppose, to know that he was going to perhaps make it towards

that general election last year?

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, as you say, he inherited a very fractured party, you know,

tail under 14 years, a lot of disruption, past gate, eviction of Boris, the leadership campaign.

So the party were sort of in many pieces. What we had to do the whole time, we were trying

and walk that tight rope to make sure that we kept everyone on board as much as

...