Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is Secretary of State Eric Pickles. He was the Tory

chairman who helped steer his party to coalition government at the last

election and has been the man in charge of communities

and local government ever since. It could all have turned out so differently. His

great grandfather helped find the Independent Labour Party and as a teenager young Eric was an

enthusiastic communist who devoured das Capitol. Even though his politics have

since transformed, he adds an appropriately piquant flavor to a front bench packed with privileged and pompadored politicians proudly describing himself as fat Yorkshire and bald.

He says, I don't believe there's a career path for politicians. I think there's a length of crazy paving.

Quite a lot of it is pure serendipity. So politics is more luck than judgment.

I think so. I mean clearly you've got to have a gift for it, you've got

a determination, you've got a burning for it, but anybody who writes happily on the

back of an envelope, guards when they're 20s, city in their early 30s parliament, when they're 20s, city in the early 30s, Parliament when their 40s and

Prime Minister when their 50s are just kidding themselves.

How much harder is it being in government than you thought it was going to be?

I think it was pretty much what I thought it was going to be, but from the first moment you

realize life was going to be different.

I volunteered to sort of walk up to the departments, I don't Calvio and I arrived to a sort of a North Korean moment when the entire staff I was there applauding me and I thought this is just a little wacky.

Who do you sit next to around the cabinet table?

Well, I've recently changed positions.

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