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

I hope some of you will be able to see the live version of this, the show in Edinburgh. 14 days, I think it is, August the 12th to

August the 24th. Tickets on sale now at the Edinburgh Fringe website. And what a lot we're going to

explore there so much, I think think that the show's going to be

different every day as we look at the characters shaping this drama. It's quite hard to

work out where to begin with this podcast. Politics is so fast moving. The last time I did it,

the Tory leadership contest was still in play. Jeremy Hunt was

Foreign Secretary and now he's on a beach, I think, somewhere in Portugal, wondering quite

how to play things in the future. But in a way, that is a sort of peripheral sidebar compared

with the epic drama being played out in number 10.

During the cabinet reshuffle, brutally ruthlessly carried out, but with very effective speed,

I was reminded when Harold McMillan went about a brutal cabinet reshuffle, of course known as the Night of the Long Knives.

Harold Wilson then, leader of the opposition, popped up to say,

I see the praying minister, a sect, half his cabinet, the wrong half.

And in that, Soundbite Wilson made people laugh and made Harold McMillan, who was not a particularly

efficient butcher, seem funny. The power of wit in politics, as I'm sure I've reflected in

these podcasts before, is overlooked often these days. And indeed, one of Johnson's skill is the wrong word, but one of his political

weapons is a capacity to make people laugh. They're not quite sure whether they're laughing at him

or with him in his case, but when they laugh with him and know they are laughing with him,

it puts him in a powerful position, wit. And Wilson's soundbite

has been remembered over the decades. I know Jeremy Corbyn gave an interview on the day Boris Johnson

became prime minister, but I can't remember a word he said. He doesn't use wit or frame arguments

...