Hello and welcome to the Red Box Politics Podcast in The Times, I'm Matt Chorley.

Who has been the best and indeed the worst Prime Minister Britain has ever had.

We're going to try and answer that question in this week's episode.

I'm joined by Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein,

who is coming in the process of reading a biography of every Prime Minister ever.

Andrew Jimson, the contributing editor of the Conservative Home website,

and author of a new book of Jimson's Prime Ministers,

which chronicles the biographies of every Prime Minister Britain's had,

and Katie Perry,

former Director of Communications in Theresa May's at Danish Street,

who's seen what the Prime Minister does up close.

Before we begin, about a week ago,

we ran a poll after Andrew wrote for Red Box, asking Red Box readers what they thought of who

had been the best and worst Prime Minister of the past 40 years. Gordon Brown came out the

worst on 36% followed by David Cameron on 19 and Theresa May on 18 and

then on the best Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came out top on 49% Tony Blair

on 31% and poor old Theresa May just 2% on the best but still time it's still time for to tell it

so you can be on that so Andrew just talk us through it's not a huge book so how do you know

it's not meant to be huge it's brief lives.

So how have you managed to boil it down, how do you sort of approach something like that?

Well, with trepidation, but also a feeling of liberty because you're not trying to say everything.

And I found when I started working in political journalism that I knew very

...