And the F.S.A. Hello and welcome to Navarro FM. My name is Eleanor Penny.

Listeners who have been waiting for 14 years for the defeat of the Tory party

might be relieved to see them collapsing into chaos

as they face down the prospect of a wipeout at the polls on July the 4th.

But they might also have the sweetness of that moment soured by the idea of a stama government

where the right wing of the party are in power, having hounded the left and its ideas back to the margins.

Anyone interested in making radical change in Britain must now ask themselves the looming question.

How do you make that change happen within the party and within society more generally

when you've been consigned to the sidelines, the backbenches,

when you're outside the halls of power looking in.

In his new book, The Searches,

author Andy Beckett takes a look at this question

by charting the careers of fire key figures

from the Labour Party's radical left flank. the Jeremy Corbyn. The book follows them from the radical movements of the 1960s

to the doldrums of the Labour left in the 80s and 90s, up through peak

Corbynism in 2017 to its defeat at the polls in 2019.

It's not just about these five individuals.

The book examines the historical forces shaping them,

how their politics challenge the orthodoxies of both party and country

and what their careers in office tell us about how power is organized in the UK.

Andy Beckett is a journalist and historian who writes for The Guardian, the London Review of Books and the New York Times magazine.

His books include Pinochet and Piccadilly, Britain and Chile's hidden history,

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