Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollas, and as we move into the summer and the House of Commons goes into hibernation,

we thought we'd do something a bit different for the next few weeks.

So rather than our usual panel discussions on politics and policy,

we're instead going to have some one-on-one discussions and go more in depth with interesting people in and around politics.

The first of these is my chat today with a Conservative peer Lord Bethel, who's had a varied career from the Ministry of Sound to the Ministry of Health via time as a journalist and running his own communications agency. We'll come to all of that, but if I'm honest, the main reason I've got him on

is I'm acutely interested in how he made his way into the upper chamber, through a little known

an arcane route into Parliament, the hereditary peer by election. Welcome, James, but let's first

talk about how you kind of got into politics in the first place. Your father, Nicholas Bethel,

was a peer in the House of Lords, but also a Tory MEP for many years.

Is that kind of where your interest came in politics in the first place?

Alan, thank you very much. You know, it's a weird combination. I'm the fifth generation in

politics in my family. The first old Bethel was the MP for West Ham. His brother was

MP for East Ham at the turn of the century. And they were

Edwardian philanthropists who both made an absolute fortune in the boom period of the Victorian

and Edwardian times. And then went into philanthropy and politics big time, building schools,

hospitals, giving to charity, and also being part of Lloyd George's cabinet.

And my great-grandfather literally got his hereditary peerage in the 1923, famous allocation.

And he was a treasurer of the Liberal Party.

So he kind of weirdly linked both the sort of best of Methodist liberalism and the sort of, how should I put it,

valued Edwardian politics.

And so I was born into this sort of funny tradition, but don't get me wrong, you know,

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