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

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and after Rishi Shunak's surprise announcement will be having a summer

election, I'm going to be speaking to two MPs who won't be fighting to keep their seats,

having decided to call it quits and stand down from the comments, about what they've learned from their time in Parliament and what they'll miss

about the Green Benches. With me, I'm delighted to say I have Stephen Hammond, the MP for Wimbledon,

and Henry Smith, the MP for Crawley, and after the last week's episode, to under some candidates

hoping to become MPs, I'll be asking them what advice they have for those wannabes hoping to replace them as the campaign kicks into gear.

So I'll start with you, Henry.

Obviously, I was actually going to do this episode.

The election was sort of in the future sometime, maybe in the, maybe in October, November, maybe even January next year,

obviously the announcement from Richie CUNX brought that into kind of sharp focus. I just wonder

what you made of that announcement and what it means, obviously, for MPs like you who are going to

be standing down now. Well, I was surprised. I announced that I was standing down from Parliament

in March last year, so 14 months ago.

But of course, all the pundits and I think all the rumor was suggesting that the election

was going to be after the summer, October, November, I think was some of the favorite dates.

And so I suppose psychologically it was a bit of a bit of a shock yesterday.

I suddenly went back to my office and thought, I've got to clear this out the next week.

But in the short term, I think it's a shock. But you can understand why the Prime Minister

has called the election now, inflation back to normal,

some of the action with regard to tackling illegal migration about to actually swing into

practice. So you can see why perhaps a summer election is the attractive choice for him.

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