Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, we're taking a look at the role of modern communications in government,

how Downing Street speaks to people and gets its messaging across,

whether it still has the right tools to go where the voters are.

The row over X and its AI tool GROC, creating non-consensual

indecent images of women and even child sexual abuse material this week, has ignited the

long-running arguments over whether Downing Street and Whitehall departments should join the

growing ranks of MPs and finally come off the website, formerly known as Twitter, and where

the focus on social media comms should now be. To discuss all

that, I'm joined by former number 10 director of strategic communications, James Lyons, alongside

my colleague, Paul Home reporter Zoe Crowther, and later in the episode, we'll also talk to

the Labour MP, Sarah Owen, chair at the Commons Women Equalities Committee.

So James, starting with kind of the big story of this week with X and kind of a lot of the criticism of the way that GROC is being used for creating indecent images and child sexual abuse.

How do you feel about kind of the use of X these days by MPs and by government?

You know, is now the time after lots of criticism over the past couple of years since Elon Musk took it over, that government should finally come off, X. Well, I have to say, I was one of the first people to go on Twitter, as it was then called, back in 2009. I think it was me and someone called Paul War. I'm not quite sure whatever happened to him. We were the sort of first people in the lobby to adopt it. And it was

interesting to see other colleagues sort of poor scorn on us for going on, only to join sort of six

or 12 months later. I have fond memories of my colleague at the time, Paul Routledge, the mirror

columnist who was sat in the corner probably about 18 months later and just says someone,

who is this mirror James who keeps tweeting stuff? He's sat about three feet from you, Paul. But, you know,

it is not the same place that it once was for all kinds of different reasons. Clearly, some of the

content that's on there now is wholly unacceptable. I'm not here to condone that in any way.

You know, I think Liz Kendall is absolutely right to call for action. What I would say is

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