Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you very much indeed for tuning in wherever you are around the world.

As ever, we have got so much to cram in during our short time together.

If it's okay with all of you,

my kind of theme will be reflecting on a question posed by Tony Ben in his time.

He used to say, not he didn't, he asserted it.

He didn't pose it as a question.

He used to say, and those of you, you know, of a certain age will remember, he used to say, look,

it's policies that matter, not personalities. And it was a sort of interesting assumption that

what determines the course of history, the fate of governments and oppositions, is in the

end policy and not personality.

Is he right? I thought I would reflect on that, looking at several running themes at the moment.

The battle between Salmon and Sturgeon in Scotland, Rishi Sunak and his budget, and a bit about Brexit. Is it the polishes or the personalities?

And then of course we'll have some of your questions, great range of questions, one on the BBC, bits of Kirstama, bits of Brexit, of other stuff, you know, not what I'll be going on about.

So yeah, tons. And take a deep breath and let's get going.

Policies or personalities. I was reflecting on that whilst watching the extraordinary appearances of both Alex Salmond and Nicholas Sturgeon

in front of the Select Committee of the Scottish Parliament.

And I was impressed with both of them in the hours of interrogation in terms of demeanour, mastery of detail, capacity to frame arguments,

and reflected that there were no equivalence really in the Westminster Parliament at the moment

with that same range. And you can see how an argument can easily be formed that the rise of the

SMP has been dependent on those two personalities first of all Alex Salmond and then

Nicholas Sturgeon and there's no doubt at all that the SMP has benefited from them, particularly, I think,

...