Nobody's watching Jonathan Gullis's podcast

“Inside Whitehall demystifies UK politics by looking behind the scenes at major events, policies and personalities,” boasted a new podcast as it was unleashed upon the world two months ago. It promised that it would be “speaking to some of the most influential people in Westminster, the heart of British politics.”

And how! The podcast is the brainchild of two colossi of SW1A. One is Jonathan Gullis, the former Conservative MP for Stoke-on-Trent North, whose experience of Whitehall is unrivalled, having spent fully 50 days as a junior education minister under Liz Truss’s brief premiership in 2022. He lost his seat in 2024 and has since defected to Reform.

The other is James Starkie (or Starkier, as Inside Whitehall’s own YouTube page rather awkwardly misspells it). He’s a former Conservative special adviser and communications advisor to Dominic Raab’s 2019 campaign for the Tory leadership, a campaign so short-lived that Rats in a Sack had genuinely forgotten had ever happened at all.

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And what about those “most influential people in Westminster” the pair promised to speak to? After 13 episodes, so far the pair have actually only spoken to each other – which may account for their tiny viewing figures.

Only one full episode has broken three figures in terms of people tuning in to hear Gullis and Starkie’s anodyne musings, with another, “Inside Reform’s Shadow Cabinet” racking a whopping 10 views. The most recent episode, in which the pair analyse the outcome of the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, had, at the time of writing, been watched 26 times in two weeks – meaning few people got to see Starkie wrapping up the podcast by interrupting Gullis mid-sentence as “I need to now go and get my shopping”.

Still, it keeps the boorish Gullis – who claimed he couldn’t get a job after being booted out of Parliament thanks to his political views – off the streets, so that’s something.