In The Room

Westminster is back, and so is conference season, beginning with Reform’s scandal-hit gathering in Birmingham. Helen was there, and gives her verdict on whether Nigel Farage’s party still feels like a government-in-waiting after a bruising week.

Meanwhile, Keir Starmer’s decision to stand down in Holborn and St Pancras has triggered the sixth by-election of the year, with Green leader Zack Polanski eyeing a contest that could become an early test of Andy Burnham’s ability to reunite the left.

And as politics returns for a new term, we ask whether Kemi Badenoch’s reshuffle can revive the Conservatives, what Burnham’s first moves back in government tell us about the autumn ahead, and whether Labour can really fight Reform, the Greens and the Tories at the same time.

Executive producer: Rod Ardehali
Producer: Sam Durham
Find the best clips from the podcast and more from Helen and Cleo on the show's Instagram page here.

Email your questions to Helen and Cleo on intheroom@independent.co.uk.

This podcast is part of The Independent Podcast Network and is produced in association with Next Chapter Studios.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Being prime minister can be a lonely job. Everyone wants your attention, your approval and a say in the decisions you make. But when the fanfare dies down, it’s you holding the pen and making the biggest calls.

Fortunately, every prime minister has one person at their side: their principal private secretary. Peter Hill was Theresa May’s PPS from 2017 to 2019, as well as her sherpa for the G7 and G20 summits. As the most senior civil servant in No 10, he was there for the private conversations, difficult decisions and encounters with some of the world’s most powerful leaders.

In this episode, Peter takes us behind the scenes of meetings with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, revealing what they’re really like in the room, the unexpected humour behind closed doors, and the reality of being at a prime minister’s right hand through thick and thin.

Producer: Sam Durham
Executive Producer: Rod Ardehali
Find the best clips from the podcast and more from Helen and Cleo on the show's Instagram page here.

Email your questions to Helen and Cleo on intheroom@independent.co.uk.

This podcast is part of The Independent Podcast Network and is produced in association with Next Chapter Studios.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“It's a comms problem” is the diagnosis politicians, pundits and the public often reach for whenever a prime minister flounders. It was arguably Keir Starmer’s biggest undoing. From the beginning, he failed to articulate what kind of prime minister he would be. In the end, nobody really knew what he thought about anything. For today’s guest Lee Cain, Starmer was a “political vacuum” - but believes his successor Andy Burnham is ripe with rhetorical promise.

Cain was director of communications in No 10 under Boris Johnson at the height of the Covid pandemic, and before that was a newspaper journalist for many years. He created the idea of the ‘bubble’ - the group of six people you were sanctioned to mingle with during lockdown’s bleakest days. He was also at the sharp end of Johnson’s counterintuitive policy howlers, like instructing the public to avoid pubs, without actually closing them. In this episode, he reveals how these moments unfolded.

In this episode of Lessons from No 10, Cain reveals how those moments unfolded. He explains the problem of Whitehall’s comms bloat, revisits the “slow-moving car crash” of the pandemic’s communications failures and offers an insider’s view of Burnham’s “social-first” strategy.

Producer: Sam Durham
Executive Producer: Rod Ardehali

Find the best clips from the podcast and more from Helen and Cleo on the show's Instagram page here.

Email your questions to Helen and Cleo on intheroom@independent.co.uk.

This podcast is part of The Independent Podcast Network and is produced in association with Next Chapter Studios.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With the Clacton by-election just days away, In The Room welcomes perhaps Nigel Farage’s most unusual opponent: Count Binface.

The intergalactic candidate joins Helen MacNamara and Cleo Watson to defend his manifesto, from capping 99 Flakes at 99p and building “at least one” affordable home to tackling Britain’s badly positioned hand dryers. He explains why housing and homelessness sit behind some of the jokes, reveals what he’d do with Buckingham Palace and offers Nigel Farage some advice should he lose the election: head straight to the nearest Ferrari showroom.

Afterwards, Helen and Cleo look at what is actually happening in Clacton, whether Binface can translate his media momentum into votes, and what the extraordinary contest tells us about Farage, Reform and the state of British politics.

Producer: Sam Durham
Executive Producer: Rod Ardehali
Find the best clips from the podcast and more from Helen and Cleo on the show's Instagram page here.

Email your questions to Helen and Cleo on intheroom@independent.co.uk.

This podcast is part of The Independent Podcast Network and is produced in association with Next Chapter Studios.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Apple chief executive Tim Cook visited No 10, he stopped to admire David Bailey’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. Jimmy McLoughlin, then Downing Street’s business director, gave him an impromptu tour and discovered along the way that Cook was also a fan of Netflix’s acclaimed royal drama The Crown.

Working under Theresa May, McLoughlin’s role was to help ensure that some of the world’s most influential business leaders had a productive relationship with the prime minister. Cook’s fascination with the Queen pointed to something broader: the value of British soft power, and the importance of the relationship between Westminster and the corporate world.

In the first episode of Lessons from No 10, McLoughlin joins Helen MacNamara and Cleo Watson to discuss what ministers really need to understand about business. Now host of Jimmy’s Jobs of the Future, he argues that politicians do not all need to have run companies themselves – but they do need to understand the people who have.

Executive Producer: Rod Ardehali
Producer: Sam Durham
Find the best clips from the podcast and more from Helen and Cleo on the show's Instagram page here.

Email your questions to Helen and Cleo on intheroom@independent.co.uk.

This podcast is part of The Independent Podcast Network and is produced in association with Next Chapter Studios.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.