The New Statesman.

Hello, I'm Anous Shekelian and this is the politics show from The New Statesman, Listener Questions Edition.

With me is the New Statesman's editor, Tom McTague. Hello, Tom.

Hello.

We've got a couple of questions this week which speak very much to the topic of your latest cover story for the New Statesman titled What Britain Won't Face.

Before we take our first question,

just talk me through the premise of your essay because it was a bit of an essay crisis week,

wasn't it? A lot of people were writing essays. Yeah, I feel like it maybe timed this essay wrong

or badly because it was, it landed the same day as Tony Blair's, which was sort of, I felt

slightly blown out of the water.

Well, it was much more elegantly written, Tom, if there's any consolation.

Well, there's, there's a lesson for journalists out there.

It doesn't matter how elegantly written it is.

You've got to have the scoop.

You've got to have the celebrity.

I think strangely, actually, reading Tony Blazers in mind, I felt that we were thinking,

at least, about the same kind of subjects, thinking about the sense of, you know, political

crisis, the crisis of leadership, and the sense that so much of the discussion that goes

on is almost irrelevant to the,

uh, to the sort of fundamental problems facing the country. And I,

and I think that was the, the basis of the essay. Like I'd spent a week, um, having these

meetings, a kind of unusually busy week for me, actually, in Westminster,

...