BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, welcome to Political Thinking,

the programme that involves a conversation with rather than an interrogation of people

who shape our political thinking. Over the years, we've talked to many of the key figures

in British public life, not least to the man and the woman who wish to be our next Prime Minister

to Rishi Sunak and to Liz Truss. My day job is doing what the newspapers often refer to as a grilling

of a politician taking them through policy ideas, looking for contradictions, checking whether

they understand their facts. There are times over the years I've done these interviews for political

thinking, where I've worried if they just feel a little bit too soft, a bit too gentle,

a bit too much on the terms of the politicians themselves. But never more so than today have

seen the value of them. Because crucial to this Tory leadership election is the backstories

of the two people who wish to replace Boris Johnson. Rishi Sunak, insisting that you should see him

not as the very wealthy man he is now, but the son of a former sister in a GP, the son of immigrants,

a man who is a British success story who knows how to make Britain work. And Liz Truss saying,

yes, she has been on a journey from her early political views, which were far to the left of the

one she advocates now. But she insists it's part of the story of her determination of her clarity

about what Britain needs now. In this podcast, you'll hear most of what Rishi Sunak told me,

we've simply edited out the things that now seem hopelessly out of date. I interviewed him back

in November 2019 when he was virtually unknown outside Westminster. At the time, he was chief secretary

of the Treasury, seen as a rising star not least because of the endorsement of William Hague,

the former leader of the party, who he replaced as the MP for Richmond in Yorkshire. He didn't know,

we didn't know that he would soon be the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We had no idea that he was

...