Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times.
I'm Stephen Swinford.
The political editor of The Times.
And I'm Caroline Wheeler, the political editor of The Sunday Times.
And I'm Patrick McGuire, chief political commentator for The Times.
And we have a single mission statement here.
We're going to take you inside the room where it happens.
We're going to give you the combined knowledge of all of the breakfast,
lunches and dinners that we have with politicians.
We're going to give you the gossip, the inside track, and we're going to give it to you fresh.
every time.
If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in some of those most interesting conversations where policies are formulated,
where the coups start,
we are going to bring you inside those conversations at quite frankly the most interesting time of British politics that I think I've ever been here for.
Yeah and we'll crack open our phones and tell you what MPs are really saying behind the scenes,
the stuff they would never say in public.
In short, we're going to do proper reporting.
not boring old punditry about years gone by and most of all it's going to be fun
because look We report every day on people often with monumental egos doing extraordinary things,
some of them good, some of them absolutely terrible,