Cleverly, the author approaches the political system layer by layer, starting with how citizens vote for candidates to be selected and how they vote them into Westminster once they have been selected.

Dunt also describes how an independent-minded Speaker of the House of Commons, notably John Bercow, can encourage independent-minded, rebellious Members by facilitating debates on amendments to legislation, emergency debates, and urgent questions, ignoring established rules when necessary—hence Bercow’s unpopularity with successive governments.

One outcome Dunt describes was the poorly designed, expensive, inefficient disaster of Universal Credit, introduced in 2012. The Greatest Secret, the long-awaited major work by Rhonda Byrne, lays out the next quantum leap in a journey that will take the listener beyond the material world and into the spiritual realm, where all possibilities exist. Ian’s narration style is easy to listen to and, since it is his own material he is reading and he knows it inside out, I felt his narration made it very easy for the listener to follow with the emphasis in all the right places. This has led to what Dunt describes as an “irrational,” unfair tax structure which facilitates tax avoidance, as the IFS has pointed out.

Not all is bad in Westminster - the standing committee system works well and encourages cooperation across parties, with chairs being elected by the committees themselves and thus serving more as moderators and consensus builders with genuine interests in the subject matter. How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn't is essential reading, detailing the paranoiac, schizophrenic lurching about of a system designed to make most votes for its winner irrelevant. Imagine having three life-coaches who had been through the toughest mental and physical challenges; a crack team of problem-solvers who knew in their day job that one mistake could be the difference between life - and death.Chancellors of the Exchequer normally turnover less than other Ministers, though there were five from 2020 to 2022 as PMs also turned over unusually fast. In this controversial and exciting listen, Pollan explores caffeine’s power as the most-used drug in the world - and the only one we give to children (in soda pop) as a treat. He describes how MPs rarely stand up to governments with a clear majority—the whips take care of that. There is only so much you can fit in any book, and this one is bursting with information and proposals explaining clearly the changes that are needed.