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

And today we're going to look at the leadership chances of Boris Johnson, but we're going to do it through a slightly different prism to the normal kind of speculation about his chances of becoming the next prime minister in the next 10 minutes, next 12 months or whatever.

I've been recording another series of talks for the BBC, these unscripted talks that I do on various

themes. I've done a couple of series already, one on modern prime ministers from Harold Wilson

to David Cameron. I think maybe Theresa May got in there as well, although that one inevitably

had an unfinished quality to it.

I did then a series on turning points in modern politics, the SDP, the financial crash and various

others, the Iraq War. And starting next week, I've recorded a series of nine on prime ministers

we never had. And of the three I've done so far,

this became for me the most interesting because quite a few of the figures in that list are,

I think objectively, whether you come from the left or the right, in some respects, bigger figures than some of those

who did become Prime Minister. In many cases, more charisma, more weighty figures, deeper figures

than some of those who made it to number 10. But for various reasons, none of them got the top

job, although in all cases they were seen at certain points in their

careers as the likely next prime minister or the probable next prime minister and they never got it.

The reasons for that has kind of guided me as to what will happen to Boris Johnson.

But before I explain that and reach a conclusion about Boris Johnson's leadership ambitions

and what will happen to them, here are the people that we or I speak about in this

television series starting next week. I think they're opening with Michael

Heseltine. So Heseltine is one obvious Prime Minister we never had, someone who was ambitious

openly so in some respects for the top job and never got it. We do Dennis Healy, Ken Clark. There's one which I enjoyed doing,

was the idea of one of the producers, to do the Miliband Brothers as one, Ed Miliband and David

...