Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the twice weekly podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thanks so much for tuning in, wherever you are in the UK and indeed around the rest of the world.

And thank you all those who came to the rock and Roll Politics Live show in Birmingham on Tuesday.

And by the time you listen to this, thank you to those who have been to, who went to King's Place on Thursday night.

I'm in Belfast on Sunday at the Black Box and at the rope tackle in Shoreham next Wednesday.

And we'll put all the blurb with the podcast, all the details of those live events.

But now, what a few days in British politics?

It is quite something when a apparently mighty Prime Minister, a landslide winner in December 2019,

a winner, I keep on thinking about it, of the Hartlepool by-election not so long ago,

as a Prime Minister gaining a seat from Labour, appearing then because of his electoral success, almost omnipotent

in the government, and there a lot of you I know will have watched Boris Johnson in front of

the Privileges Committee fighting for his political career. It is quite an arc that we need to make

sense of, and we need to make sense of it

partly by making comparisons with other prime ministers. This is a chance to make sense of

leadership in all its epic drama. And who better to make sense of it than Michael Cockrell,

the broadcaster and author who has, as you will

all know, followed closely many prime ministers and in a way for television made unique sense of

their lives with those glorious profiles, which included of, them, the leaders watching archive of themselves

and others and many other wonderful techniques.

Michael's latest book, which he'll be talking about at festivals and with us now, reflects

on his whole life in which these leaders have played a big part.

Michael, thanks so much for

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