Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and this week we're taking a look at the future of the Conservative Party,

as it heads for likely defeat at this year's general election, who will help shape the direction

of the Tories as it navigates life in opposition, and will the world's most electorate

successful party manage to keep its broad coalition together after being stretched to breaking

point by factionalism in recent years? To discuss what the key issues would be, the dangers

facing Rishu Sunaq round the corner, and who might end up replacing him as leader? I have a fantastic panel with me. Firstly, we have Katie Balls, political

editor of The Spectator, Henry Hill, acting editor of the website, Conservative Home, Paul Scully,

the Tory MP for Sutton & Cheam, and Gavin Rice, director at the think tank onwards,

Future of conservative project.

So I'm going to start with you, Katie, then. You know, if the Tories end up in opposition,

I suppose it will come down to partly how many MPs they still have left, but who are kind of the key players going to be shaping the party's direction? We know a lot of, a lot of talent,

a lot of experiences is leaving. Who's still going to be around to kind of shape the future of the party,

do you think? Well, it ultimately depends which MRP poll you want to go on in terms of

the scale to wipe out as who has the safest seats. But I think if you at least entertain the

idea that the polls could narrow, it could also go the

other way. And therefore, we're not going down to extinction levels of Tories left. Then I think that we've

really seen some of the key players who are trying to shape the debate. Some of them want to do

a pre-mortem, not a post-mortem. But you have Liz Truss, for example. I don't think she is a

future leader, but the launch of something like PopCon, popular conservatism, not the two words

you're currently put together for how people perceive the Conservative Party right now. But that is an

effort, not so much to do something pre-election as to get some like-minded

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