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

And this week is the last of our party conference specials, recorded in front of a live audience in Birmingham for the first Conservative Party conference with them in opposition since 2009.

After an unexpectedly down our atmosphere in Liverpool last week for the Labour,

those of us who made up to the Midlands found the Tories in surprisingly chipper mood. Despite the event

being a much quieter effect than recent years, the grassroots seemed buoyed by the new government's

struggles, an increasingly vigorous contest to be their next leader. So to discuss whether

there was some collective denial going round, just weeks after suffering their worst defeat in more than a century, or if there are grounds for optimism, what direction the party should follow to try and win back

power, whether it can be truly united again, I chaired a panel featuring two concerted

politicians, one at the start of their Commons career and another who had just finished.

First, we had Lord Graham Brady, former chair of the 1922 committee, who stood down in July

from the Commons having served as MP vulture in Seoul West since 1997, recently elevated to the Lords. His new book, Kingmaker,

lifts to the did on what really happen behind the scenes of Tory party for the past 14 years,

and the rise and fall of five prime ministers. With him was the new MP for South West Devon,

Recker Smith, elected in the summer, as well as the polls to Scarlett Maguire, director at the Opinion Research Insight and Strategy Company, JL Partners, and also my colleague at Polholm, our editor, Adam Payne.

Here is our chat on Monday afternoon. Enjoy.

So, Graham, I'm going to start with you. Last night was the annual 1922 reception for concerted

of MPs. You're off the clock now, I suppose, having been the person introducing it for many years.

What did you kind of make of it? And there was these kind of 60 second pitches for all four of the candidates.

I wonder what you made of each one of those.

Well, it's an event that Paul Goodman and I came up with, I think 13 years ago.

So I did 13 of them introducing the speakers, usually conservative prime ministers, and it's

actually very nice to see things carrying on and new people taking things forward.

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