My guest is Tim Bale.

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London.

His latest book, The Conservative Party After Brexit, Termole and Transformation, has just been published.

Welcome to the podcast, Tim.

Thanks very much, Paul.

Right, just to give a steer to our listeners.

This book covers the period from just after the result of the

Brexit referendum June 2016 and finishes roughly when, which is sooner becomes Prime Minister

in the autumn of last year. So it's a mere six years, but you've managed to nonetheless

write a tone of almost 400 pages when you embarked on this exercise. Did you ever imagine that covering a period

of only six years or so would actually end up in a book covering almost 400 pages? No, to be honest,

I mean, I didn't really realize quite how many kind of thrills and spills what a roller coaster

ride this period would be. I knew it was going to be difficult for the Conservative

Party because I think Brexit was always going to be, let's put it this way, a challenge for them.

But I really hadn't realised quite how much it would destabilise the party, particularly with regard

obviously to the leadership. And of course, a lot of the book is about the various leadership

challenges and contests that we've seen. But then again, a lot of the book is about the various leadership challenges and

contests that we've seen. But then again, we also had COVID, which presented possibly an even

bigger challenge for the government. Right. So there's still this quite well-established idea,

and I did politics many centuries ago, of the Conservative Party, the British Conservative Party

as, quote, unquote, the natural

party of government. And it's obviously, you say in the book, it's the most successful political

...