From convicted boxers to ailing dictators - the Home Secretary Jack Straw has had a busy week.

The former Conservative Home Secretary Michael Howard and Labour backbencher Frank Field give their verdicts on how Mr Straw is doing in the job.

Sean Woodward, now on the Labour benches after his defection, explains what it is like to have your former colleagues now ranged against you.

Meanwhile, the race to be London's mayor continues with Frank Dobson trying to distance himself from the New Labour machine.

A Dobson campaigner, Mike Gapes, and one-time Conservative mayoral hopeful Teresa Gorman discuss whether the Dobson campaign has failed to take off.

Then, of course, there are the spin doctors.

Lord Neill said in his report this week that their numbers must be monitored. Labour MP Phil Woolas and the Conservative's Sir Geoffrey Johnson-Smith argue their corners.

All in this week's The Week in Westminster, presented by Steve Richards on Saturday 15 January 2000 at just after 1100GMT on BBC Radio 4 and on the internet with BBC News Online.

Listen to the programme by clicking on the link below:



You can send your comments to The Week in Westminster by clicking here: week.westminster@bbc.co.uk

All about the programme

The Week in Westminster turned 70 years old on 6 November 1999.

The Week in Westminster is presented by a range of leading political commentators including Steve Richards, Michael Gove and Peter Riddell every Saturday morning while Parliament is sitting.

Initially a weekly broadcast given exclusively by female MPs about parliamentary business, The Week in Westminster was immediately popular with listeners but less so with some politicians who believed it wrong for parliamentary business to be discussed in public.

Such views prompted the BBC's first director general Lord Reith to defend the programme as "chiefly for the benefit of housewives ... shift workers, unemployed, invalids, etc".

In its time, the programme has had a range of presenters and producers - including Guy Burgess, the infamous spy who defected to Moscow.

Lloyd George's daughter Megan and Tony Blair's official spokesman Alastair Campbell have also been presenters over the years.

Although it has moved around the radio schedules since it began on Wednesday mornings, it has recently returned to Saturday mornings and made the transition to the internet with BBC News Online.

More importantly, its original aim of giving the public a chance to see what the people they elected are doing is very much the same.