Hello everyone and welcome to our brand new, rebranded, all singing, all dancing podcast.

Our new podcast called, rather innovatively, the UK Inner Changing Europe podcast.

We've adopted the Ron Seal approach to titles.

And to mark this special occasion of our

relaunch, we are joined by one of our firm favourites. Those who've listened to us before will remember

the name and the voice of Dr. Alan Wager. Welcome Alan. Hi, Anand. Thanks for having me. Alan decided

for reasons known only to himself to stop working for me and go and work for a bloke called Tony Blair, a decision I imagine he's regretted ever since.

But while he was here, actually I've got a script here that says Alan was an industrious colleague.

So this is clearly written by someone who arrived after he left.

Obviously didn't overlap with him.

That was.

Yes, okay.

But while with us, Alan found time to write a book on cross-party politics in Britain,

which is available for a SNIP, 76 quid, from the Oxford University Press website.

And I want to talk to you a little bit about the book, Alan, before we get on to politics in general.

But just talk us through the book. Where did the idea, I mean, obviously came from

your PhD, but where did the idea of working on cross-party politics come from?

Go, well, this is now showing my age. I was my 33rd birthday this week. I was back, I was in my early

20s and the coalition happened. And there was a bit of confusion. Why is this coalition happen and what does it mean

for the future of British party politics? And then when you dug a little bit deeper, you

realised that actually conservative liberal democracies weren't actually that unusual discussion

of them happened throughout the 20th century. And then it got me thinking about

...