Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week, my guests are going to be talking about, well, if journalism is the first draft of history,

I think we could call this the second draft of history. They are both the authors, or in one case, co-author, of books that are kind of journalistic books

about things that have more or less only just happened.

So hot off the press, we have James Hill, who is the Spectator's Diary Editor and co-author

with the Suns Political Editor, Harry Cole, of a new book called Out of the Blue,

The Inside Story of the Unexpected Rise and Rapid Fall of Liz Truss, and another spectator

alumnus, the F.T. Sebastian Payne, whose own new book is called The Fall of Boris Johnson,

The Fool Story.

Now, both of you, I suppose the first person I should come to is James, because his book is even more recent.

Well, the book's not more recently, but the events it describes more recent.

Your book was notoriously overtaken by events.

In fact, I don't think the original title was going to have the word fall in it at all, was it?

No, when we started writing, it was a fortnight before she became Prime Minister, when it was clear she was going to win that Conservative leadership contest. And so I think we and most of Westminster

envis that she'd be in power for two years until the next election.

That was very much the assumption of it. And so we began writing as the rise of Liz Truss and talking about who this woman was and perhaps looking ahead to what her premiership might look like.

As it was, we ended up finishing on the day she walked out of number 10. We extended the deadline

a little bit and yeah, the last day it ends with her driving off into the sunset at the end of an extraordinary

50-day premiership in British political history. Did that mean sort of going through, I mean,

publishing schedules being what they are? Were you able to go through the whole manuscript and,

for example, you know, insert the word not in various

kind of complementary notes about her political acumen and so forth? Or is it just a new intro

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