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

Thank you very much for tuning in wherever you are around the world and the UK and as ever

we've got so much to cram in in our time together uh blimey yeah i delayed recording the podcast to

await the uh sue grey update we mustn't call it the sue grey report and and Johnson's reaction to it and all the rest of the dramas.

And I'm really pleased I did, because quite often in politics, the rhythms are unexpected.

You know, you can pick up patents, and if you pick up a pattern, you can tell the way, for example, a leader will behave if that leader becomes prime minister and so on.

But the daily rhythms can be unexpected.

So sometimes, you know, the build-up to prime minister's questions is just frenzied and then there is an anti-climax. The publication of the Sue Gray update was the opposite.

To the point that so many had convinced themselves

that it would be a redacted anti-climax

that when it was published, they said,

well, this is a redacted anti-climax.

It doesn't tell us anything when it told us a lot.

Clearly what has happened is this.

When the Metropolitan Police and Cressida Dick, and we'll come to them in a moment,

announced that they were finally investigating the

parties. There was frenzied negotiations. And many just thought that Sue Gray had accepted the

requests from the police, the subsequent request to redact all the

sort of key parties, which they were investigating. So you would have a sort of wholly,

banal report on the gatherings that the police didn't think worthy of investigation. And Johnson would then have popped up and say,

Sue Gray is reported, she's found nothing wrong with these parties and all that. It would have been a

Monty Python style farce. But of course, when you think about it, she was never going to do that and accept that.

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