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

Thank you very much for tuning in.

As promised, this is a quick podcast in response to Rishi-Soonak's speech, his first as Prime Minister to the Conservative Party

conference and unavoidably and inevitably a genuinely significant speech in what will be almost

certainly a pre-election party conference. So I'm going to look at that. I've had some fantastic

questions and points already

from the Rock and Roll Politics Cooperative. If it's okay with all of you, I'll save them for early

next week when we get together for the beginning of the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool.

So keep them coming in. Steve Rick 1-4 at iCloud.com. But here are a few reflections,

just minutes after the Sunak speech. Sunak faced one very difficult challenge. He had to be seen as the

change maker at the end of a long period of conservative rule.

He has no choice but to pose as a candidate for change

because every focus group, opinion poll and every other other paralyzing instrument that measures public opinion

is clear about one point. Voters ache for change at a time when there is a sense with good reason

that nothing much works in the United Kingdom. It's all a hard slog. People feel very insecure on many different

levels. They need change. And for Sunak to get back into the game, he has to be the change candidate.

So the politics of the speech is very interesting because it's a big challenge.

I'll come on to how he tried to address that challenge in a second,

but let's look at the one figure who managed this successfully,

which was John Major when he became Prime Minister in 1990

after a long period of conservative rule and won in 1992. Now, there's one

factor that Major had in his favour that Sunak hasn't got, and it's a huge factor. By then,

...