Hello and welcome. For weeks we were told not to leave the house. Now the government wants us out all of the time.

Eating, drinking, exercising, you name it, you can pretty much do it again if you live in England, of course.

The science says it's all fine, claims Downing Street, as long as you follow social distancing rules,

of course. But with the economy on its knees and thousands of jobs going every day at the

moment, some will say they have no choice but to lift lockdown and get the country going

again in the hope. The same doesn't happen to the virus. This is calling Pestan. I'm Daniel

Hewitt. That is Sheehab Khan. Hello. Jump the gun, mate. And Robert Pestan, our political Daniel Hewitt. That is Shihab Khan. Hello.

Jump the gun, mate.

And Robert Pestin, our political editor will be joining us later, as ever for his take on this week's summer statement from the Chancellor Rishi Sunak.

And our special guest before we hear from Robert this week is David Gork, former government minister who spent a total of seven years in the Treasury.

He was until December a Conservative MP.

So we'll be uncorking the gork, as they used to say here in Westminster, in a few minutes time.

But first, a special moment here for the ITV Politics Podcast team.

As you can maybe tell, we're in a very echoy room.

And we are together for the first time in four months. Shehab, producer Lewis and I have been recording this podcast apart in our own homes over Zoom. Other video conferencing

platforms available. But we're together in the same room. I can, I'm not going to touch you,

but I can see you. You can see me. We are socially distanced, which is good.

Yeah, it's nice.

It's nice.

We've run into each other.

We've seen each other.

A couple of times in the office where we've crossed paths.

...