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

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and with me to discuss what it's really like to be an MP,

as the current cohort decide whether to stick around in the comments for another five years,

is Rosa Prince, editor of our Custace publication, The House magazine,

and author of Standing Down, interviews with The House magazine, and author of Standing

Down, interviews with retiring MPs. And we'd like to say we're joined by Sir Vince Cable,

former leader of the Liberal Democrats, who this year published a book on how to be a politician.

So this week, Matt Hancock became the latest Tory MP to decide he was going to not stand

as a conservative at the next election.

He'd made about 13, I think now Tories, including key names like Sajid Javid, Chloe Smith,

William Rag, Deanna Davidson.

There are also at least 12 Labour MPs who are going to stand down the next election two

there.

People like Margaret Hodge, Harriet Harmon, Margaret Beckett and Ben Bradshaw.

So sort of more of the kind of older MPs

and a kind of a changing of the guard. Rose, I just wonder what you made of that group of MPs

on either side and that kind of list of MPs sending down, and if we're going to see a few more.

I think we will see more. The Conservatives sort of clearly try to get a bit of control over

the situation because in past election cycles,

it's been a bit chaotic with MPs suddenly dropping out. And I think the party wanted to get a grip.

So they gave this deadline of December 5th. Now, my view is that not all MPs will stick to that

and maybe some haven't yet made up their minds. So they might well want to, you know, in a month or two or even a year, decide that actually standing again isn't for them.

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