This is The Guardian.

So I did bump into him on the stairs once and I was thinking, please, Chris,

please, whatever you do, don't say a word.

This is embarrassing.

But he went, no, hello John.

And that was the moment I knew that he knew that I'd written a few weeks earlier

that he was a nose in search of a bum.

I'm Pippa Carrera.

And I'm Kieran Stacey.

You're listening to Politics Weekly UK for The Guardian.

Hello, well we've got something really special for you today.

Our beloved colleague and the Guardian sketchwriter John Crace has published his latest book,

The Bonfire of Insanities. How does this government thing work again? Plenty in Westminster could be reading it and taking tips, John. And so we thought we'd get him into the broom cupboard for a chat about it all. Welcome to the broom cupboard, John. You've never been in this room before, have you? No, I never knew it existed. Neither did we until a few months ago. I can see very much why people want to keep it quiet. Not because it's glamorous, be sure. Not because it's glamorous, no. I mean, obviously a prime piece of Westminster real estate. If we're really lucky, one of the producers will keel over because of lack of oxygen. So you've added sound effects during the podcast later on.

But you've been our political sketch writer since 2014, John.

And this book, which is a compilation of some of your daily sketches, I think it's your fifth

collection, isn't it?

It was published in November.

Tell us about the process of how you put a book together.

Well, it's very much a question of collaborative because I sometimes am not the best judge of what is the best sketches.

So there's a fantastic editor called Mohafee's at Faber.

And we go through together and we try and get something that will

encapsulate a narrative of the previous two years, really. When we started back in 2017,

...