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

Thank you very much for tuning in wherever you are.

And we've got so much to cram in in our time together.

We're going to do it in a slightly different way.

If it's okay with all of you, my reflections are going to come by two of the many brilliant emails

that have come in from the rock and roll politics cooperative at this start of 2025,

a really range of stimulating thoughts and insights.

And then we'll go to some of the other emails as well. But before that, major news

from the legendary Professor Tim Bale. Now, for new listeners, you may not realize the significance

of what Tim alerted me to, but the cooperative through a sequence, which I won't go

into now, pointed to the Tory Lee Rowley as a figure to watch in the last Parliament. It happened

at one of the live shows. Someone said, watch that Lee Rowley. I'd never heard of him.

And within a day, he had become a minister.

And so we've been watching Lee Rowley ever since as our figure to watch.

So he lost his seat with a certain inevitability once the cooperative had adopted Lee Rowley as the figure to watch.

He lost his seat at the

general election. But he's now, you can't keep him down, Lee Rowley. He's now Chief of Staff

for Kemi Badoe. And Tim sends me this report from a recent meeting of the shadow cabinet.

Assembled ministers, I assume they mean shadow ministers,

were given an in-depth overview of the plan for the first half of this year,

focusing on how to rebuild and renew.

Bade not said her chief of staff, Lee Rowley, who led the presentation,

...