Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and this week as we come to the end of the year,

we're taking a look of Richard Sunax's progress in turning the Tory ship around,

and what more he can do as we head into an election year, with his party still well adrift of labour.

Would me to discuss the PM's fortunes we have Paul Scully, Conservative MP,

and until last month, the Minister for Technology and for London,

until he got what he described as the Spanish Archer in the reshuffle,

the elbow for those at the back,

alongside him is Laura Dunn, political and digital consultant who advises senior Tory MPs,

and Ben Riley Smith, political editor of The Telegraph, and author of The Right to

Rule, a new book looking at the past 13 years of the Conservatives in power.

So, as I said, we're going to look at the kind of Sunax time, obviously, his first full year as

Prime Minister. Ben, your book looks kind of the longer view, including this, you know, the 13 years that Tories have been passed since 2010, a lot of Tories I speak to say that, you know, part of it is that kind of the tide going out

on the Conservatives and that whoever was in charge this last year would have been very

difficult to change things around. You know, what's your kind of sense of that? How much has it

been, the problem is down to Suna and how much of it is down to perhaps some sort of fatigue with the Conservatives being in power overall. Well, I think it's worth putting in historical context just how impressive in political terms

this run has been. So 13 years plus this Tory run has overtaken the new Labour stretch,

Blair and Brown. In fact, in the century before Rishi Sunak took over in the 100 years

preceding that, there's only been one longer run and that's Thatcher major at 18 years.

So it is pretty rare for a party to be in power that long.

But I think with that comes this challenge of how you regenerate,

how you project to the country that you can stand for solving the problems of tomorrow. I think the biggest

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