Hello and welcome to this special live

of Inside Briefing the podcast from the Institute for Government.

I'm Catherine Hadden.

Thank you. We are recording this episode at the Labour Party conference.

The rain outside is torrential. Liverpool has been doing a roaring trade in umbrellas and the conference centre is very, very busy. But we are nice and dry here in the IFG bubble

and what could be a better way to end a busy Monday at conference

than by being joined by this excellent panel.

We have my IFG colleague, Alex Thomas,

who leads all of our civil service work.

Gabriel Pogrand is Whitehall editor of the Sunday Times.

Anand Menon is director of UK Interchanging Europe and has effortlessly stepped across from

presenting duties on our sister podcast, The Expert Factor. For any of you here who might

have been expecting to see that podcast being recorded, well, you

still got an aunt. And Alva Ray is associate editor at Bloomberg and author of their essential

afternoon newsletter. So thank you all for being here. Let's start, Alva, I'm going to start

with you with the traditional conference question that everyone asks each other, how is the mood?

I mean, this is a party at their first conference having just won a huge landslide, so presumably it's extremely upbeat.

Oh, far from it. I mean, it's very interesting for us journalists, but I think that this was not the mood that they were hoping for coming into conference on so many levels.

We came in under sort of the shadow of lots of stories like freebies and donations, which everyone here is probably well familiar with.

And then lots of infighting in number 10, as well as lots of, I'd say, unhappiness among the special

advisor ranks, which we might talk about a little bit more. So it's a perfect opportunity

to get them all together under the one roof with loads of warm white wine, or he's lots of

...