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

Thanks so much for tuning in. I'm on the road at the moment. So this might be a

slightly shorter podcast. Let's see. Let's see how we do. But we will be coming to some brilliant

emails from the Rock and Roll Politics Cooperative, including the latest from the member of the

cooperative who lives in the make-ofield constituency where the by-election is taking

place. So we will be getting a clear eyewitness report from him and other brilliant points

from some of you shortly. We are witnessing in this by-election the most extraordinary context context i was going to say

contest and context that i can recall the oddity is in some respects underestimated even though

there is going to be feverish coverage between now and June the 18th and then

further feverish coverage after that. Partly because of the wider position, politics is a noble

vocation because it's human beings trying to work out how to resolve situations, how to prevail without using force.

The only alternative is war.

Give me politics every single time.

You either prevail through violence or through weird maneuverings at times.

And that's what happens when there are leadership crises.

The Conservative Party, the first symptom of the party's deep, deep problems,

came when John Major as Prime Minister stood down as leader of the Conservative Party to fight a leadership contest while remaining as Prime Minister.

It was a desperate and weird manoeuvre, but Major was not a weird person. He was just in a weird situation because his party was changing through Europe

and the insurrections around Europe and then the Maastricht Treaty. And it had become

unleadable and was to prove to be so for a long time to come and arguably still is,

although it is kind of in a curious way rallying around Kemmy Biednock, but that's for another

podcast soon. And so is the very muscular Tory commentariat, with, I suspect, consequences.

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