In 2019, Boris Johnson won the election by a landslide. He turned the Labour heartlands blue, and it was a huge opportunity for the Conservative Party to make good on the Tory campaign promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’ following years of parliamentary stalemate.

This episode charts how so much of that early optimism and opportunity was to be undone as Boris Johnson’s government struggled to deal with the crisis of Covid-19, just as a new, radical approach to civil service reform saw the relationship between ministers and their civil servants break down. Show less