Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home. I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst.

With me to look ahead at the upcoming year in politics is my colleague political editor Adam Payne,

and special guest this week, Natasha Clark, she's a political correspondent at the Thun.

So after a pretty mad 2022, we'll be looking ahead to 2023 and trying to answer the five

sort of big questions around British politics.

Starting off with, you know, Rush Sunak at the end of 2022 announced his plan to try and end

the asylum backlog.

Really the question is, you know,

is his focus on the small boat crisis going to pay off? Tash, starting with you, let's just

talk through that policy that was outlined in December and kind of the politics behind it, really,

and why Sunak have chosen this to be one of the big focuses of his beginning of his premiership.

It's a really interesting one, isn't it?

I remember when I interviewed him on the plane to Egypt going to COP, and obviously for

our readers, for Sun readers, it's obviously such a huge topic, the small boats crisis, and

something that's really important to them.

And I was really surprised to hear him say, you know, this is one of my absolute top

priorities that I'm that I'm working on in government. Because you wouldn't think naturally that

would be one of his policies, the sort of thing that he would be interested in. No, definitely.

It's not naturally sort of, I think, his sort of stomping ground. It's also like he's never been

home secretary. So he's probably never had to sort of see this up close. But I think what he realised was when he became Prime Minister,

he realised that he had to tackle some of the top priorities

that the Conservative Party as a whole wanted him to deal with.

...