PMQ's Unpacked on Times Radio, unpacking the politics and cutting through the crossfire. And I'm joined as always by the Times Chief Political Commentator Patrick McIntyre. Hello Patrick. Hello, Hugo. What's the tea? How are you? What's the tea? Well, my tea's not arrived yet. Sorry, that makes me sound like the most demanding panelists on Times Radio. I'm sure, I'm sure it'll We're also blessed this week with the return of the Sunday Times' former political editor, now political editor of The Spectator. It's Tim Shipman. Hello. Welcome back. Thank you. It's very nice to be back with you all. It's like you never went away. Well, in a way, I haven't because I'm an every week listener. We only do our own PMQs podcast, but later in the day.

So I still prefer to listen to PMQs through the medium of unpacked.

Wonderful. Do you find yourself shouting at us in a rage?

Not really, no.

It's a violent agreement a lot of the time.

But now I'm in the sort of guest slot.

I'll make a series of left-wing jokes, hopefully.

I mean, I felt for you series of left-wing jokes, and hopefully, yeah.

I mean, I felt for you since you left, because actually, this isn't on you at all. PMQ's got much better than it was when you were here. I don't mean PMQ's unpacked is obviously remained at its high standard, but basically, Kemi Badenox's got a lot better. I think the skill as Patrick will say is in is in keeping it interesting when it's boring, but it's not been boring, has it?

Yeah, that's all. Yeah. I mean, what, tell me about what your view of, do you see the same improvement in Kemi Badernock over the last, whatever it's been, six months. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you and I spent months and months saying how absolutely hopeless she was. And then she suddenly, about last September, I left in June.

She suddenly got much better, sort of got rid of Peter Mandelson.

And she's relatively sharp most weeks now, isn't she?

But, I mean, the great thing about this, you know, lots of people say, what's the point of PMQs?

And, you know, I always used to make the argument that it's about keeping the morale upon your own side

and prosecuting your arguments and sort of testing your lines and that sort of thing and it's still got some use for that

but quite what effect it's having out there in the wider world who knows because while kemy baydonough is 10 times as good as she was when I left

it hasn't made a great deal of difference to the conservative poll standing so I I do think it means, though, that if they have a disastrous time at the May elections, that her own side will kind of give her a bit more slack to deal with that. It's not clear that the Labour Party will do the same for the Prime Minister. What are you expecting, Patrick, this week? Obviously, it's going to be Iran-based. Is it going to be Starour being no Winston Churchill? Is it going to be Richard Homer focused? Is it going to be military

unpreparedness? Well, all of the above, I think. I mean, I'm not to continue the, well, I will

continue the either great or unedified journalist tradition, journalistic tradition when you can

only talk about colleagues by saying how great their work is.

But I expect someone in the leader of the opposition's office might have been reading Tim's recent pieces about the special relationship not being so special.

You know, defence funding, all of that stuff.

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