Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. This week we're going to

talk about something that we touch on a lot, but I think we've never fully confronted.

Who do we think Jeremy Corbyn really is and what does he want?

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So to tackle this difficult question, I've got Helen Thompson with me and Chris Brook

and Helen and Chris and I and other people on this podcast have definitely circled around

the Corbyn question a lot. I think it's also true, while we've been doing this podcast

we occasionally get people telling us that we're not doing it right and one of the criticisms

has always stayed with me is something that someone said quite a while before the 2017

election which was that we didn't take Corbyn seriously enough and I can only speak for

myself. I think that's fair, I think it was true that there was a tendency to treat him

as a kind of accident because he is the accidental leader of the Labour Party and we know the circumstances

in which he entered the race and then won were in some sense accidental. But I don't think

anyone could say now that there's anything about his leadership that does not deserve

to be taken seriously. It also reminds me a bit of the period before Tony Blair became

Prime Minister when there was a lot of questioning of what he really stood for. Who was this guy?

Obviously we're talking about a very different space on the ideological spectrum but some of

the questions were similar. He was quite hard to fathom. We might come back to Blair at

...