My guest is Tom Baldwin.

Tom Baldwin is a writer and journalist and author of the acclaimed biography of Kierstama called Kierstama the biography.

And an updated paperback edition is about to be published, recounting the first year of the Labour government.

Welcome to the podcast, Tom.

Hello, nice to see you again. Right. I should say actually welcome back. We had one of these

podcast chats about the hardback edition of your book back in March of last year. So we're not going to

go over that ground, but we are going to cover essentially the Labor in Power, your hardback

edition finished, obviously,

before the general election took place. But the new edition very much focuses as well on the

travails of the Labour government since it took office back in July last year. Before we talk about

some of the specifics about how things have gone for the government since it took office,

can you give us a flavour of how, what kind of contact you had with the Prime Minister in preparation

for the book? Clearly, when you wrote the Heartback last year, you had the expensive time

with the Prime Minister. How was it this time? Since now, he was a Prime Minister,

presumably he had less time to spend. That's true. I think one of the reasons why the book works, I mean, I thought I sat myself,

is because it began as an autobiography.

And I established a relationship with Kirstama when I was writing his book, if you like,

where he could tell me what he wanted, what was inside his head, because he had control over it, and he wasn't like talking to sort of

journalists who might stitch him up or something like that. So I think we've continued that

relationship where he's quite kind of confessional, I suppose, and there's quite a lot of

internality, even up to now where, to now where he's behind a big front door

of Downing Street and I've been in to see him a few times there different rooms, different

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