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

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and this week we're taking a look at the heart of government.

After people across Westminster have repeatedly identified a problem at the centre of our politics,

with Prime Ministers entering Downing Street and being unable to deliver on their ambitions,

whether the relationship between the three most powerful departments, number 10,

the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, are wrongly configured.

With me to discuss the history of government delivery, the problem successive administrations are faced,

and what can be done to help future PMs succeed, I'm delighted to say we have Alex Thomas, program director at the Institute for Government, whose commission on the

centre of government published a report into these issues last month. Alongside him, we have Dr. Michelle

Clement, research in residence at Number 10 Downing Street, and a lecturer at King's College London,

as well as Hugh Bennett, former special advisor, who also worked in the Downing Street Policy Unit under Boris Johnson and Liz Trust.

So I'll start with you, Alex. Just explain what the commission at the centre of government set out to do, basically.

Yeah, so we reported, what, a month or two ago now, and had been working on it for about a year,

and originally kicked off the project because we'd been thinking about the centre of government and how quite a lot of, in our view, the problems that successive prime ministers had

experienced with not being able to get their agenda

done, sort of emanated in many senses from the centre. I don't want to suggest at all that it's

all about the centre. There's a kind of huge complex machinery of government out there, but it seemed to

be at the heart of quite a lot of the problems that we at the Institute for Government were

thinking about. At the same time, Anthony Selden, the historian of successive prime ministers, came to us and said, well, I've been

working with the Times on this Commission on Education. How do you fancy doing one on the Centre

of Government? So we thought, well, let's kind of join forces. And so Anthony and our director, Hannah,

and myself and other colleagues got together a group of interesting commissioners

...