Introducing...The State of It

0:01Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Steven Swinford, the political editor of The Times.

0:11Steven Swinford: And I'm Caroline Wheeler, the political editor of The Sunday Times. And I'm Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for The Times. And we have a single mission statement here.

0:20Gabriel Pogrund: We're going to take you inside the room where it happens. We're going to give you the combined knowledge of all of the breakfast, lunches and dinners that we have with politicians. we are going to give you the gossip, the inside track and we're going to give it to you fresh every time.

0:34Steven Swinford: If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in some of those most interesting conversations where policies are formulated, where the coups start we are going to bring you inside those conversations at quite frankly the most interesting time of British politics that I think I've ever been here for.

0:52Patrick Maguire: Yeah, and we'll crock open our phones and tell you what MPs are really saying behind the scenes the stuff they would never say in public. In short, we're going to do proper reporting, not boring old punditry about years gone by.

1:10Gabriel Pogrund: And most of all, it's going to be fun, because, look, we report every day on people, often with monumental egos, doing extraordinary things, some of them good, some of them absolutely terrible, but they are human beings with human frailties, and we will bring all of that to you and insight into what these people are actually like. So please, listen to the state of it, download it wherever you get your podcasts and we'll be here to inform and to entertain you.