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

Thank you so much for tuning in wherever you are in the UK and indeed

the rest of the world. And you know what I'm going to say. As ever, we have got a lot to cram in

our time together. A few notices from me, if that's okay with all of you at the beginning.

Then I'm going to reflect last week I went kind of

contextual. One of our favorite words for new listeners and new members of the rock and roll politics

cooperative is context. To make sense of volcanic events erupting around us now, you always have to go

back. Things don't happen by chance

on a daily basis. There are always seeds that are sown much earlier. And in terms of making sense of

the crises erupting around Sunac, well, I went back to 1997 and the Tories's failure to reform in the aftermath of that

epic landslide defeat in 1997. Now I'm going to focus in on one issue, which I think

explains in a micro way a lot of what's going on. And it is a name, a person, Boris Johnson. And I'll be

looking at that if it's all right with you in a moment. Then a fantastic range of questions.

Some of your reflections on the interview with Theresa May's former Joint Chief of Staff, Nick Timothy,

and his ideas about where a modern Conservative Party should and could go in terms of

economic policymaking. And it's one of the interesting what-ifs, I think, if he had managed

to survive and navigate the torrents erupting around Theresa May

what a Conservative Party might look like. I'm not a fan of what ifs, but I think that's an

interesting one, as is what if Michael Heseltine had won the Tory leadership contest in the autumn of 1990,

a passionate pro-European at a junction where the Tory parliamentary party was not at that point

set so against the European Union that any MP was calling to leave?

And a whole range of other questions, too.

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