The Rundown by PoliticsHome

This week The Rundown is coming from Birmingham as the PoliticsHome team tick off the final conference of the season at the Conservative Party’s annual gathering.

Later in the episode host Alain Tolhurst chats with Festus Akinbusoye, one of those hoping to be the Tory party’s candidate for London Mayor, alongside PolHome colleague Harriet Symonds, about his campaign to replace Sadiq Khan.

But first PolHome editor Adam Payne joins Alain minutes after Kemi Badenoch stepped off stage having given the keynote address to round off the conference and give some instant analysis of her speech.

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Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron and Nick Hilton for ⁠Podot

This week The Rundown is coming live from Liverpool, where the team have been at the Labour party conference, Andy Burnham’s first since he took over as leader of the party.

Later in the episode is a fantastic interview with one of his Cabinet ministers, the environment secretary Angela Eagle, about working with Burnham again after their time together in the Blair/Brown governments, her frustrations with getting things done in Whitehall, and her plans to tackle the water industry and waste crime.

But first up host Alain Tolhurst speaks to PolHome editor Adam Payne and Sienna Rodgers, deputy editor of The House magazine, just minutes after the PM came off the stage after his big speech to members, to discuss huge announcements on the triple lock, electoral reform and public ownership.

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Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron and Lulu Goad for ⁠Podot

This week on The Rundown features a fascinating interview with former veterans minister Johnny Mercer, who has just published a bombshell new book - No Way to Run a Country - about his time in politics, and what he sees as the broken system at the heart of it.

He spoke to Alain Tolhurst about his own shortcomings as a politician, being lied to by successive Prime Ministers, but despite that helping set up an Office for Veterans Affairs, the mission he had set for himself after leaving the armed forces and becoming an MP in 2015, as well as the absurdity of life in Westminster and the machinations of the Tory psychodrama he became trapped inside.

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Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron and Lulu Goad for ⁠Podot

After a pair of record-breaking donations to Reform UK, host Alain Tolhurst looks at the role of big money in politics, the influence it can bring, why campaigners want to see caps on the amount people can give to parties, and where the pushback against these changes is coming from.

Joining him to discuss whether the two £36million donations from crypto-billionaires Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne to Nigel Farage’s party will lead to changes in the way our politics is funded, are the Labour MP Stella Creasy, who is leading the charge in Parliament to change the law, as well as Olly Buston, director of the campaign group Clean Up Westminster, alongside award-winning journalist Peter Geoghegan, founder and editor of the Democracy for Sale website.

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Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron and Lulu Goad for ⁠Podot

This week The Rundown takes a look at another political party as it heads into its annual conference, this time the Greens, looking at whether after a huge surge in membership and popularity under new leader Zack Polanski their support might be plateauing after Andy Burnham took over as Prime Minister and it suffers the growing pains associated with all insurgent movements trying to break out into the mainstream.

So to discuss where the party goes from here, as well as Polanski’s chances of making it to Parliament after he threw his hat in the ring to replace Keir Starmer as the MP for Holborn and St Pancras, host Alain Tolhurst is joined by a former Green Party leader, Baroness Natalie Bennett, along with Russell Warfield, who has written a new book entitled The Green Socialist about the party’s rise over the past 18 months, and joining them are Louis O’Geran, researcher at the pollsters More in Common, as well as PolHome reporter Zoe Crowther.

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Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron and Lulu Goad for ⁠Podot⁠

This week, as Parliament returned form its summer break, The Rundown takes a look at Andy Burnham’s performances as he got his first chance to speak to the House of Commons as Prime Minister.

But after the long hot summer a cold autumn approaches for the new government, with the same knotty problems that faced his predecessor Keir Starmer staring at Burnham from his in-tray, and Westminster is also heading on tour for party conference season, starting with this weekend’s trip to Birmingham for Reform UK.

So to discuss how the new PM deals with the big issues like social care, welfare spending, immigration and the economy with a Budget due to be delivered next month, host Alain Tolhurst is joined by Joshua Reynolds, Liberal Democrat MP for Maidenhead, along with two colleagues; sister title The House magazine’s deputy editor Sienna Rodgers, and PolHome editor Adam Payne.

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Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron and Lulu Goad for Podot

Has any backbencher caused more of a stir this Parliament than Samantha Niblett, the Labour member for South Derbyshire, although now more commonly known as the ‘sex MP’?

She announced back in April in an interview with PolHome that she wanted to kick off a so-called ‘summer of sex’ with her “Yes Sex Please, We’re British!” campaign - a call for lifelong education around healthy relationships, consent and preventing abuse.

But it was her comments about pleasure, pornography and sex toys that caused many in Westminster to have conniptions, and for some made her into a figure for fun.

She spoke to Alain Tolhurst and PolHome colleague Zoe Crowther, the reporter who first interviewed Niblett on this subject, about the campaign, the backlash to it, as well as the support she’s received from her fellow MPs, and the importance of moral ambition in politics.

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Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron and Lulu Goad for Podot

Award-winning chef, TV star and now campaigner for the hospitality sector, Tom Kerridge joins The Rundown this week to talk about why his industry needs help from Andy Burnham's government.

He is leading the charge to convince the government to reduce VAT in his sector, as it faces pressures from all sides which are sending hundreds of businesses to the wall, and taking with them thousands of jobs and having a huge knock-on effect across the economy.

He spoke to Alain Tolhurst about the importance of hospitality to the UK, why he’s become a spokesman for it alongside running multiple restaurants of his own, and whether the new Prime Minister is taking the industry’s issues seriously enough.

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Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron and Lulu Goad for Podot

Next in our series of summer interviews is former Tory cabinet minister, David Lidington, who speaks to Adam Payne about the state of the Conservative Party.

He tells the podcast that leader Kemi Badenoch is “absolutely right” to rule out an electoral pact with Reform UK, saying it’d be “deeply, deeply damaging” for the Conservatives to do a deal with Nigel Farage’s party, adding that it was "contemptible" for Reform's Zia Yusuf to call his former Tory colleague Ben Wallace a "traitor".

The former long-serving MP, now part of centre-right group Prosper UK, also argues that the Tories should do more to win over young voters, like pledging to scrap the triple lock on pensions and build more new homes.

Lidington, an ex-deputy Prime Minister, also explains why he wouldn’t call a snap general election if he were in Andy Burnham’s shoes.

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Presented by Adam Payne, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron for Podot

In the latest of our series of summer interviews former safeguarding minister Jess Phillips speaks to Alain Tolhurst about government's battle with big tech to make the internet safer for women and children.

The Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley said she was “like a kid at Christmas" as Andy Burnham prepared to enter Downing Street to replace him, and reveals how she felt his first few weeks in Number 10 were going, if the new PM was serious about tackling violence against women and girls, and what life is like back on the backbenches.

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Presented by Alain Tolhurst, produced and edited by Ewan Cameron for Podot