Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, you're going to hear my conversation with Mark Field, the former Conservative MP,

minister and author, after the release last week of his memoir from his time in Parliament,

the end of an era. As the title suggests, it charts his time in politics, from his political awakening, just before his 11th birthday, through to his time in Parliament, the end of an era. As the title suggests, it charts his time in politics,

from his political awakening, just before his 11th birthday,

through to his time in office as the member of Parliament

for the cities of London and Westminster,

before his return to the private sector in 2019,

and his reflections, five years on, from stepping down from the Commons.

His time as an MP maps onto the rise and fall of the 21st century Tory

party, entering Parliament in 2001 after a second landslide defeat in a row to Tony Blair,

through the modernisation under David Cameron, then the collapse into chaos, following the

EU referendum, leading ultimately to its record defeat last year. I spoke to him the morning

after his book launch about what his party got right as well as

wrong in office, how the Conservatives can recover once more, how it faces down the threat

from reform and every other party, and his reflections on his much publicised affair with

Liz Trust and the incident that led to his premature end of his ministerial career.

So Mark, kind of why now and why this book, you say in the introduction that, you know,

five years have passed since you left public life. But you see your reflections have been the

cause of kind of melancholy unease and even a sense of kind of guilt that you left in 2019.

So why sort of come back to it now? Why sort of five years on do you think now was the right

time to come up with this book? I think politics obviously was very turbulent, particularly in the latter years,

...