Hi, I'm Anouche. And I'm Alfa.

Stevens on holiday this week, despite Matt Hancock trying his best efforts to stop him over

the weekend. On today's New Statesman podcast, we discuss the Matt Hancock resignation

and what the implications are for the Conservative Party, and you ask us. Have Labour MPs been

taken by surprise by his summer's leadership?

Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, ended up resigning over the weekend after pictures

that I'm sure all of our listeners have etched into their brains of him kissing his aide

in his office in the Department of Health in what was seen to be a breach of social distancing

rules and also a breach of all about eyes. So even though he's gone, there's plenty of

questions left about what her role was. He was the one who appointed her. She was being

paid £15,000 for a non-executive role on the board at the Department of Health. What was

she doing there? Why was she hired? Was there a conflict of interest? Were they in a relationship

when this happened? And there's also questions over her parliamentary pass, which was sponsored

by Lord Bethel, who is a health minister as well, and she didn't work for him. So there's a question

of why she had that pass. She's also resigned as well, which I think says something to about what

she was doing in that role. And during this story, it's also come out that Matt Hancock was using

his personal Gmail account to conduct government business. And obviously that's a big issue because

it makes freedom of information and transparency in general much harder. And he's already been

under a great deal of scrutiny for how contracts over the course of the pandemic have been awarded.

Alva, you were following the twists and turns of this over the weekend. What do you think is sort

of the enduring issue now that he's gone? I like that you went with the sort of straight down

the line kissing description there because I feel like journalists have really got themselves

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