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

Thank you for tuning in. I'm as grateful as ever. And as ever, we have got a lot

to cram in in our time together. If it's okay with all of you, I'm going to reflect on the

SMP leadership contest and the lessons of leadership much more widely than that contest alone.

So that's what I'll be doing.

Your questions will involve a dialogue on all sorts of things.

First of all, got tons and tons of questions or points on the interview I did with Neil Lawson,

the Chair of Compass, last week. So if you haven't heard

that, do listen. It's triggered a huge array of questions. No, more points, some questions.

So there's that, there's the Northern Ireland protocol, more on that and the position of the

DUP, the stuff on Boris Johnson,

the Sue Gray appointment, and so on. So that will all be covered when we go to the questions.

But I'm going to focus on the lessons of leadership from the contest so far with the SMP.

So before all of that, yeah, got so much. Just a reminder of the live

shows coming up and it's really the timing is brilliant, frankly. You've all got to come along because

a lot of these shows coincide with the week when Boris Johnson will appear before the Privileges Committee.

This will be an extraordinary moment.

Here will be a Prime Minister, I'm going crazy, former Prime Minister who has really throughout his life and certainly his

political career avoided scrutiny of any sort. It was a form of genius that he rose to the top

of his party avoiding great scrutiny via the media or internally. And when Prime Minister, he managed to avoid it too,

which is incredible by appointing a cabinet of subservient figures and by winning by a huge margin.

And then a Prime Minister can do whatever they want, the December 2019 election. But here,

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