Hello everyone and welcome to this latest episode of the Uciss Ital podcast

and joining me today in person, which is nice, is the former BBC parliamentary correspondent Mark Darcy.

Mark, thank you for coming over here and for agreeing to do this.

Great pleasure.

Now, you've had a long and distinguished career. You were correspondent for today in Parliament, I think, since 2002. You were a presenter and correspondent for the Westminster

Hour. How long did you work for the BBC for in total? I joined the BBC November in 1991 all thereabouts.

But that was at East Midlands today, so I was doing regional telly for my first few years,

and then got catapulted down to Westminster in 1997,

when the job I had was abolished in the great sort of editorial upchuk.

And so I landed up in Westminster searching for a role and eventually

found my way into the fabulous today in Parliament team. And had many happy years there by the

Oh, it was, it's a fantastic team to work with. I sometimes think the BBC doesn't quite know

what a jewel it's got there, but day in, day out, whether it's the fall of the government

or the committee stage of the fisheries bill, you're getting good stuff out of today in Parliament, rain or shine.

Now, I mean, basically, as far as I'm concerned, you're a sort of walking longitudinal study of Parliament.

So don't be surprised with a lot of my questions are about that.

And I suppose that, you know, there are so many things I can ask you.

Let me start with this.

Just in macro terms, how has Westminster changed over your years?

I will dig into some of the specifics later, but just big pictures.

I think the biggest and most visible change has been increasing numbers of women

MPs and that's not only changed, you know, the look of the place, because it's not all men

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