114: Special Non-Emergency Election Episode

Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

It's a banal podcast.

It's completely in the normal shadow.

Totally standard.

Yeah, there's nothing to see here.

Move along.

But it is about politics, and so we have to use the word emergency at some point, apparently.

So, as it's election season, we're going to have some audience questions in a moment.

But firstly, Helen and Adam, as private eye hacks, which are the bits of the election that you've been following that you think have not received enough attention?

There's been loads and loads on D-Day and tax claims back and forth.

What are the bits of the campaign so far that you think haven't received enough attention or any sort of fun moments that kind of got lost in the stampede?

I am going to nominate the Conservative chairman, Richard Holden, getting parachuted from his seat in Durham to Billericki in Essex.

You know this phenomenon of the chicken run?

There was a lot of talk during the Boris Johnson era of

how he was going to do a chicken run to a more safe seat.

The chicken run is where you have a seat that you're going to lose, and then you just.

And you find a much more safe one.

And the association basically is whatever blandishment is offered.

There was a lot of it went on before the 97 election.

That was the last big chicken run.

People like, I think, Brian Mwinney, who was the Conservative Party chairman, again, exactly the same thing, did a chicken run to some sort of safer seat.

And Douglas Ross has done it in Scotland.

So the current, seemed to be former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, has moved into a seat.

That the current incumbent of it is a Conservative who was in the middle of having some spinal problems, had hoped to have it, and then was told that no, he would not, in fact, be running for the seat.

It was in fact going to Douglas.

He was, in fact, too unwell.

He was feeling better, but actually, no, he was wrong about that.

You might think you're going to be offered a seat.

Well, you're going to have to move aside.

Right, exactly.

Exactly.

And so, Richard Holden is in a similar situation in which he said, you know, I love the North West.

It's in my blood.

And it turns out what else is also in his blood, is Essex.

And he also loves Essex and has done since last Thursday, basically.

Adam, what about you?

I'm going to go with Ed Davy, just the very concept of Ed Davy, because we're all talking about Ed Davey's crazy photo opportunities and Ed Davy having fun.

But we're all talking about Ed Davey.

And I bet you not many people knew who Ed Davey was about three weeks ago.

And he's very much there, sort of front and centre.

But he's also combined that with he did a party political broadcast and he did a couple of interviews as well talking about

the need for reforms to the care system, but specifically with reference to his own learning disabled son.

And I think that sort sort of personal thing, you have to be careful not to, very cynical, journalistic view, but you have to be careful not to overdo that sort of thing in elections.

But I think personal stuff does cut through when everyone seems very much like a kind of machine politician in the same sort of grey suit.

And I think

I'm predicting great things for the Lib Dems in this election.

I think they're going to be the bit that people aren't quite focusing on, but I think they're going to do very well, certainly by Lib Dem standards

since

the backlash against Klegomania, which was so spectacular.

They will soon be able to fill a battle battle bus.

Exciting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So this time on page 94, we have asked you, the readers and the listeners of the magazine and podcast, respectively, what you would like to know about the election.

We've had plenty in.

Some cheerful, some gloomy.

But we'll try and cheer everyone up and, you know, spread the joy.

How many of them were nice about you, Andy?

One.

Oh, no, no, no.

Actually, I cut that one out of the list.

So on my list, none.

But there was one that was very nice about all of us in general from Jason borthwick loved the page 94 podcast so much less up its own arse than competition that's exactly what we're going for well there is no competition and it's squatting over a low bar

no uh but he did very cheerfully he's been an occasional reader for decades usually buying from news agents at train stations to make it sound very seedy uh but now a subscriber again which is exactly what we've spent nine years making this podcast trying to do so it it's worked jason balthwick has my vote well his question is if labour get more seats than the Tories, is Stalma guaranteed to be PM, even if Labour doesn't get a Commons majority?

And the answer to that is no.

The convention has been if whoever's got the largest party gets first crack at forming a government.

But the test of that is really whether or not you can get budget through.

That's why it's called a confidence in supply.

You have to be able to either win a vote of confidence or get supply measures, which are budget financial measures.

So

you don't necessarily, if you're the largest party, get to automatically be Prime Minister because you might not be able to get anything through, at which point, 1974, things all collapse and fall apart.

You get an election and Labour get in with a minority and they just about managed to scramble through a few months and very similarly at that point there was no money left either.

But then another election later on the year, so we might get a November election after all.

Second month.

That'd be fantastic.

I don't know what polls you're looking at, what crack you're smoking.

Seems unlikely.

But how do you know if you're able to get a budget through at the time when you're doing all the horse trading?

Like in 2010, where the Conservatives were the largest party, but they didn't have an outright majority.

That's what I mean.

The convention is that it has been the person with the largest gets first go at having a go at getting something through.

And forming a coalition, as with the Lib Dems in 2010, or a confidence and supply agreement, as Theresa May had to do.

But she did have most of the seats, but not an outright majority, and she had to do that deal with the DUP.

And the Lib Dems, if you ask them about 2010, which they still find quite scarring, obviously, will say, you know, you don't understand what the pressure was like.

The Conservatives were the largest party.

We were under pressure to do a deal with them as the largest party.

I suppose it brings us to another question of keeping things exciting and remembering what if everyone's wrong, what if everyone agrees that they're going to vote Labour, and then no one does.

So, this brings us on to a question of no one at all, not one single vote in a single constituency.

It's so embarrassing.

It could happen, is all I'm saying.

So, we should come to Jamie Bamber's question.

Now, I assume this is the Jamie Bamber who was in Battlestar Galactica.

I hope so.

Was fantastic in it.

Yeah.

How much impact will newspaper endorsements and newer media outlets like GB News, never heard of them, have on this election campaign?

The support of all the Tory papers seems to have helped the Conservatives in the past and made things very difficult for Labour.

Will the same hold true this time?

And why isn't the political influence of the Street of Shame discussed more as an issue?

So, Adam, you were writing, I think, in the last issue of the magazine about the number of ex-

advisors and ministers and people who, you know, were all offering them.

They came up to give us the benefit of their advice and say why things had gone wrong for the Tories.

Because when they employed you.

I knew 14 years of people all backed up saying, well, actually,

the bit where I wasn't working was actually the bit where it all went wrong.

So, but this is sort of how much impact do newspaper endorsements have in general?

At this stage in things, I think very, very little.

I think the work has already gone in over the years with newspapers in as far as they're going to sway people's opinions at all.

And they would like to think, editors would certainly like to think they do a lot to sway people's opinions.

I'm not sure that they do.

I mean, actually, any polling that's been done, even the sort of the sun during the height of that Kelvin Mackenzie-Thatcherite era, there was an enormous number of sun readers who were still going out and dutifully voting Labour every in every election.

The mail, I mean, we'll have a lot of people who are going over to Labour this time, however vitriolic they want to be about Kier Starmer in their leader columns.

I mean, in terms of it was the sun what won it, and I think, I think that a lot of that has always been a nonsense.

We've said this before on the forecast, haven't we?

But it was incredibly late in the 97 election that

they came out for Blair.

It's the other way around, isn't it?

It's more like the papers soften up if they see the polls are drifting in one direction.

And I think you can already see that with some of the.

I think it must be quite tough for the Tories in this election, not just because they're making a sort of series of gas, but also because I think the press is being unusually kind of disrespectful to them.

And I think if you're a Conservative minister who's used to having, you know, being treated with a certain level of cordiality and respect and things you say, just ending up on page, you know, even if it's page two of a paper, there has been a, I've been a bit bruised, I think, by the lack of.

Do you know what I think?

Well, I've read a, I mean, I feel like I'm relative, I'm extremely unusual as someone in their 30s who reads reads editorial pages in print newspapers.

They seem to have be sticking very closely to labour will be a disaster, so you vote to keep them out at all costs.

Whereas we were talking about the Telegraph now being quite reformist in its

gone slightly bonkers.

I mean, the Telegraph, I think, the Telegraph, like a lot of these papers, I think now people are looking to, the right-wing papers are looking to the election beyond this one, which is the one for the next leader of the Conservative Party, and which faction is going to take that.

So I think there's an awful lot.

I mean, it is not insignificant that the Telegraph have hired Zuella Braverman as a columnist in the last couple of months.

And

that move towards very much the right wing of the party and the edge of the party that would be doing a deal with reform if certain people had their way.

So if papers do follow where they think the support is likely to go, why haven't we seen many more papers flipping over already?

I mean, if Labour is about to get a thumping majority, if that is true.

I don't think it's about endorsements.

I think it's about seriousness.

And as somebody who spent the 2010s covering Labour from the perspective of left-leaning magazine, the thing that was always was that the idea, not they were quite a joke exactly, but that the Conservatives, you could take them seriously, and Labour was sort of a bit of a jobbing amateur outfit, or, you know, the fact that they would make proposals and they would just not even be reported on as being worth being talked about.

You know, this default assumption that, you know, Conservatives were careful with their money.

It did always feel like you were writing into a kind of headwind of, well, obviously if the Conservatives say it, it must be legitimate.

Or subjects that the Conservatives care about are legitimate big issue subjects.

And I think that's the bit that's kind of changed, is that Rachel Reeves is clearly being taken very seriously by the son and the mail because, frankly, her economic policies are probably the ones that are going to be enacted by the end of the year.

It's kind of indefinable, but it is a sense of just being a legitimate, serious party and being treated like grown-ups and with a level of sort of respect.

The idea that if David Lammy says something, it's now interesting because he's prospectively going to be our foreign secretary.

Whereas before, it was a bit like, who cares what Labour's shadow foreign secretary says?

Like, they're miles away from power.

Okay, here's another election-y1 from David Winter.

May I be the 94th person, very nice, to wonder why all political parties, but especially the party of government, leave it until the election campaign to launch policies.

So from the Conservative Party, we've had national service and repeat offenders evicted from social housing, driving license points for fly-tippers.

So these are the big issues.

I actually really like that one.

I really pro that one.

I'm sorry.

As somebody who's been fly-tipped in the recent past.

See the state of Lewisham sentence.

They clearly have a sufficient majority in Parliament to pass these things without trouble, and yet the first time we hear about them is at election time.

Are they just trying to sound fresh and new, or are they going after specific groups of voters trying to pick them off?

It is the $94 million question, isn't it?

As you've had 14 years, why haven't you done any of these things before?

And it's something we in the last podcast we talked about that washing up period and all of those bills that got dropped along the way.

And it was very, I mean, there's not been a lot going on in this last Parliament in terms of actual legislation being pushed through.

So

yeah.

The big problem of proposition parties and why they don't do this is that you get your policies, if they're any good, they get stolen.

So what happened in March with the budget was Jeremy Hunt essentially hoofed Labour's non-DOM clamp down and as a revenue-raising measure, which he then not only stole it off them as because they'd obviously earmarked that to pay for some other stuff that was in their manifesto, but he also managed to use it to put into his tax cuts.

So, the thing is, if you suggest something that is absolutely brilliant,

then why wouldn't the other side not do it?

And you'll get no credit for it.

And you know, if you suggest something that is objectively a good idea but quite unpopular, like planning reform, then you're going to just get endless airtime from the other side about all the downsides of it laundered in advance.

And you and when you're the opposition, you don't get the chance to make the case, right?

You've got a huge amount of clout when you're the government to dictate, again, the kind of conversation about stuff.

Is that why you end up with serious conversations not being had?

Is that because there's no good time?

Like the social care thing, which really torpedoed Theresa May's campaign in 2017, she was at least setting out some kind of way of dealing with social care, and it involved tax, and it was incredibly unpopular.

And as a result, sort of banjacks her whole thing.

When do you have the conversation then about what we actually do about social care?

I would say that that is your beloved favourite podcaster, George Osborne's fault.

And that's because, if you remember, he'd said that Labour are going to have a death tax.

You know,

and any kind of discussion of those kind of care issues, which are very unpopular, they get weaponised against the party that's aiming to bring them in because they always have to propose at some point that people are going to have to pay for some of their care themselves.

Which is why the great tell of the national service idea that it's never going to happen and it's unworkable was we're going to have a royal commission.

Because a royal commission is what you do when you go, this is going to be very unpopular.

We want everybody to dip their you know, it's like the merger on the Orient Express.

We want everybody to stab this one.

Sorry if I spoiled merger on the Oriental Express.

There's some very late readers to that.

But you know what I mean?

Like that's that's the point.

People always talk about why doesn't bipartisan stuff happen?

Actually, at low level, quite a lot does.

But the problem is that lots of those things are nettles that have to be grasped, and people want to make sure everybody is having the same allergic reaction.

And in answer to your question about timing, I would say that the timing for something as difficult as social care or NHS reform is when you've just got in and you've got a pretty significant majority and some goodwill.

And that's probably the only chance that, assuming it's Labour come in in those sorts of circumstances, we have of getting something like that sorted out.

I mean, it's endlessly being kicked down.

I mean,

it was one of Boris Johnson's oven-ready things, wasn't it?

He was going to sort of social care.

We've never heard another word about that other than Matt Hancock wearing a little green badge with care written on it.

That was about as far as that one went.

And it's so wrapped up with the immigration question as well.

You know, there were the specific visa arrangements for carers because they fall often under the salary cap for migration.

So it's a really fraught piece of the migration puzzle about how are you going to bring in people who are on much lower wages than technically we claim that we want people to come in and work on in this country.

Right.

I've just remembered my favourite policy announcement from the campaign, which was actually on the front page of the Daily Mail, which was, Tories will close the murder loopholes.

Who left the murder loopholes open for 14 years?

One of the murder loopholes.

It's actually on a Sunday.

Because I've been getting away with it all this time.

On a Sunday, it's not illegal.

Amazing.

I mean, that's such a loophole.

Yeah.

No, it was a sensible-ish suggestion about sentencing, actually, but it was very much doled up as

the purge style thing.

Andrew Yoanu writes, Why does mainstream media continue to give people like Nigel Farage, Piers Morgan, et al.

a voice and valuable airtime?

Regardless of their politics, which are bitterly the polar opposite of mine, these people have nothing of value to say.

And the mainstream media has no impartiality rules to abide by

in the case of these people, but continues to give them airtime.

I'm going to harsh his mellow here by saying that I went to look up Yugo popularity ratings.

And Nigel Farage is the most popular politician in Britain.

30% of people have

a favourable view of him, and 98% of us know who he is.

So there is a reason that he is the most well-known figure in British politics.

And unfortunately, they're also the most popular.

I mean, Rishi Sinek has got a net favourability of, I think, minus 46.

Gestama is thrilling along like minus three or something like that.

It's a sub-minus 10.

But Nigel Farage Farage is obviously incredibly divisive, but quite a lot of people do like him.

And even more people have heard of him.

It comes down, doesn't it, to the same reason that there's endless Harriet Megan stories online?

It gets the clicks.

People look at this stuff.

But there are rules, aren't there, about which parties get the airtime on things like question time.

And it's a bit more complicated than you might think because it's related to who did better in the most recent, for example, local elections.

And but UKIP always complicated that because they always did incredibly well in European elections.

So, in a way, you could say, How lovely that we were giving more airtime to these undercovered elections.

But yeah, that has been a consistent complaint of the fact that Nigel Farage got way more time than, say, the Greens or Plaid.

Over the last decade.

Right, right, right.

The way it's often phrased is: maybe the Green Party would be doing as well as reform or UKIP if they'd had the sustained level of attention, which I think to some extent is true, but I think also misunderstands the way that reform and UKIP have always been advanced by the right-wing papers as a way of sort of stiffening the sinews of the Conservative Party

not to go squishy, which is not, there aren't really left-wing papers to kind of do the same with the Greens, although you do see it now.

You know, the Guardian is very pro-Green at this election and I think is

using them and talking about them and being interested in them as a way of interrogating where they feel that Labour's left flank has kind of ebbed away and that there's been a take over by the right or the party.

That's basically a mirror image of what the Telegraph is doing with reform.

Yeah, and it makes a lot of sense.

If your interest is in stopping your party drifting towards the centre, then you talk up their rivals on the edge and be more interested in them and pay more attention to their policies.

We should also just point out that

the impartiality rules only apply to public service broadcasters and those who are regulated by Ofcom.

So, I mean,

whatever Piers Morgan is calling his show online now, all of those other YouTube things, all of those YouTube channels run by newspapers, and you never mind the ballots presented by Harry Cole, which is being very heavily trailed in the sun and possibly not watched by quite so many people, or newspapers themselves, you know, or us we can do absolutely what we want can we yeah we don't even talk about the election at all we don't need to be here

here is a question about process from nick jones i'm so disappointed with our electoral system not being proportional representation what do you think would be the key election issues and approaches if we did and how does that differ from what we can in quotes look forward to over the next few weeks

i think that will be a case of being slightly careful about what what you wish for in terms of coverage.

Because if it was a PR election, I think everyone would be the Lib Dems.

Everyone would be coming up with things that they knew they would never have to enact by the time they got into power on slightly wilder and wackier policies.

Isn't that what the Conservatives are currently doing?

Well, yeah, they're kind of a bit de-mob happy, aren't they?

I mean, they'll close these murder loopholes.

But it gets me thinking back to those days of coalition government and the expectation of another coalition government in 2015 when David Cameron did crazy, wacky things like going, ah, yeah, no, we'll have a referendum on Europe, thinking, that's all right, we'll be in coalition coalition with the Lib Dems again.

They're never going to let that happen.

I think you'd hear a lot more from the radical right.

I mean, if you think that reform are getting covered a lot now,

if you look across Europe, we are quite unusual in that our radical right, populist right party is not represented at seat level in the same way that reflects its vote share.

So if you think about the fact that Italy's got a populist right prime minister, the AFD, Altent of the Deutschland, have done very well at the European elections.

They've actually did all right in the German elections specifically.

France is now going to have an election, sneaking in an election jealous of ours, in which what used to be the Fronde Nationale is now called National Rally, are expected to do pretty well.

So if anything,

you know, it depends where you sound your politics.

Sound like our correspondence politics may not be those of Richard Tice.

Actually, we'd probably be hearing a lot more from the populist right if we had a proportional system.

And there would be more interest in

deals between the parties as well.

So you would almost certainly see the Conservatives kind of being more happy to move in that direction of reform and thinking in the expectation that they might end up doing a deal with them afterwards.

I mean, that would be the obvious coalition, wouldn't it?

A lot of squeeze messages you'd get.

Because if you remember 2015, you had any vote for Ed Miliband is actually a vote for the SNP to get loads of money for their Scottish hospitals and non-fuels, which the Conservatives will tell you worked extremely effectively in England as a message that they're just going to be more and more bungs to Scotland and nothing for us here.

And that did really harm Labour.

What was that?

Say that again.

Any vote for the...

Basically, if you don't vote Conservative, end up with the Conservative government, you'll end end up with the Labour SNP Coalition.

Do you remember those images of...

Chaos With Ed Miliband?

Yeah.

Do you remember him in the pocket of Sturgeon Salmond?

That was the idea that Labour can only govern with the SNP, so that what they're going to do is give them a load of money, which will be spent on Scottish Public Services, not on you.

Ironic that we then, two years later, get to Theresa May handing out 11 billion to the DUP in order to get her budgets through.

Can we quickly digress into the

election poster featuring someone in someone else's pocket thing?

It's a big thing for a few elections running.

Well, it's but I only the only a couple of days ago, there is an advert of Keir Starmer as a glove puppet being controlled by Angela Reyna.

Not quite so effective when it's Angela Reyna, who is in the same party as Keir Starmer.

No, it's when it probably is if you're really, really sexist, but you just don't think they mentioned that.

Well, no, I think that's exactly it, because the other figure that there is in every party, as well as the attack dog, there is the Boo figure.

And now, for a long time,

and this would be all Labour leaflets for a whilst in the Ed Milliband Milliband era would feature Michael Gove in them.

Because for Labour voters, the one person who really got the tills ringing, they were like, Do I bloody hate that Michael Gove?

And for the flip side of that in the Corbyn era, was Diane Abbott.

Now, you might say that these things, I think in her case, racism and sexism were part of that, that there was a kind of fear of her like that.

But there is one person who is seen to represent everything you hate about that party to the opposite side.

Now, obviously, lots of Tories love Michael Gove, lots of people in Labour love Diane Abbott, but they were the negative polarising figures.

And Angela Rayna is now, for some Tories, because she's quite gobby and she's a woman, fulfilling that role.

And it's moved on, hasn't it?

Because a long time it was, well, Keir's Dahmer served in Jeremy Corbyn's cabinet.

He wanted to make Jeremy Corbyn, but he's so emphatically broken with the Jeremy Corbyn years that they have had to identify someone else, haven't they?

I just feel like it's one of those election-y things that if you work in politics, you recognise as a thing, and if you don't, it feels a bit weird and alien.

And it's just.

But isn't that most of politics?

Well, it is.

I mean, if you're listening to this show right now, and thank you, and please please keep doing it, you're aware of it.

You're weird.

You're weird.

I mean, most people, there's this awful stat that most people think about politics for 20 seconds a day, you know.

If that.

Well, the amount of space that the election campaign is getting in, for instance, the sun,

most of it on a very sort of technical, nerdy kind of level, on a very unsun, not very fun sort of level.

You just think, how much of this are your readers actually bothering with?

How much of this is?

This is a great time to announce the fact that this podcast will, of course, be going daily for the rest of the day.

Oh, God.

Can you imagine?

I'll be phoning up for Adam when he's having his bath in the evening and going, got any thoughts on Ed Miliband?

Herma Crisis podcast.

You don't want to know what I think about Ed Miliband in the bath.

I think we should move on from our listener questions.

I think we really should.

And move on to something a bit jollier.

Now,

we've got a couple of rival quizzes.

So...

Adam, you've done a quiz and I've bashed out a few questions as well.

So my quiz, I'm doing past elections as depicted in the eye.

So join in at home with this one, Liz.

Brilliant.

Here's me.

Can you present your weapons?

That's Andy.

And I will be doing this.

Ooh.

So, the cover of i920 showed John Major calling the election in 1997.

It depicted him grinning broadly with a giggling Tony Blair.

And in our version, Blair is saying, so it's May 1st.

And Major replies, May Day, May Day, May Day, which I think is a joke we've used on several other occasions as well.

But in that photo, what were they actually laughing about?

Is it something sports related?

It's not.

Okay.

Unless you count fishing as a sport.

Is it something fishing relating?

It is!

Is it about trout?

No.

Okay.

It's about John Major's sunburnt goldfish.

John Major was telling me that him and Norma had had to fish all of their goldfish out of the pond in their garden and apply suncream to them because they were getting sunburnt.

Wow.

You can't put SPF on a

Well, but you think it would just feel like it'll play proof.

It'll play absolute haywire with their genes, I suspect.

It looks like the three-eyed fish.

You'll get some blinkies, yeah.

The bit I'd forgotten was that this was then confirmed by a spokesman for the Prime Minister who said, the Prime Minister has a pond in his garden in which he takes a great interest.

He has a number of other types, but the bulk of the population is goldfish.

Get him back.

Get him back.

We need this kind of salesmanship.

That's great.

I would like people to write in if they know what sun cream you put on fish because that's great information that you could use.

I knew you wouldn't get it, but I knew you'd want to know once you'd heard what the answer was.

So the 2001 election, we're moving on a few years.

Tony Blair called it at a venue that had certain resonance for private eye readers, as pointed out by an incredulous Jeremy Paxman when he interviewed him on Newsnight a few days later.

Why so?

Certain resonance.

For private eye readers.

The Coach and Horse family.

The Cochin Horses Pub.

Did you not go to our local pub to do it?

Although that would have been rather brilliant, Helen.

Was it like the Ugandan Embassy?

Not that resonant

for our readers.

Neisden.

Somewhere in Nisden.

We're just going through all of

the possible.

No, he did it at a lectern in front of a stained glass window, not actually in a church.

But as Paxman pointed out to me a few days later, how soon did you realise it was a mistake?

Come on.

Seriously, there must have been a point there where you were in front of the stained glass window and you thought, I'm the vicar of St.

Albion's.

Very nice.

Which was, of course, for younger readers, our spoof prime ministerial newsletter that we ran for many years.

Blair, not happy about this.

Blair, very, very stroppy.

He said, I'll tell you what I thought.

I hope people would pay attention to what I was saying.

That was naive.

I quite know that we got both your John Major and your Tony Blair impression so far today.

It's a bit of whirlwind.

So, final question.

Two members of the Eye's editorial team, neither of them, sadly, still with us, have stood for election themselves, both against the leaders of major parties.

Who and what were their slogans?

Oh, that was a kind of joint thing.

Do you want to say, do you want to join?

I'll have a first crack.

Willie Rushton

ran in 1964 against Alec Douglas Hume with the slogan Death to the Tories?

You're one year out, in the words of Ken Bruce.

It was in 1963.

It was the by-election which took Alec Douglas Hume out of the House of Lords, giving up his peerage and back into the House of Commons in the safe seat of Kinross in West Perthshire.

Because Harold Macmillan had basically said, yeah, no, you should be Prime Minister now.

I'm off.

Because that's how it used to work in those days.

So, yeah, 1963, Willie Rushton, death to the Tories.

Helen, do you want to go for the other one?

Did Paul Foote run?

But not against the Prime Minister?

He didn't run against the Prime Minister, and he didn't run with a sort of private eye-in premature.

One of my favourite stories from the 70s.

Rough, rough.

The dog.

Oh, the drink of the dog.

I've got it.

Auboran Waugh

ran against Jeremy Thorpe in his constituency for the Dog Lovers Party.

He did indeed.

Under the slogan, a better deal for your dog.

The deal in question being that it's probably not going to get shot in the head in an attempted murder on your ex-boyfriend.

Wow.

Do you want to know how many votes you got?

Yes.

79.

Is that better than Willie Rushton got?

45.

I thought more people liked dogs than that.

I would have thought running on the dog, I mean, just as a general, like if there was a dog lovers party, I reckon it would consistently pull three or four percent.

Andy, you are victorious.

So you get to do your own quiz as a prize.

Well, this is just a Quizlet.

This is just to sort of follow up on...

And this is on the current election, so it's just based on bits of the campaign that you might not have seen yet.

Ceremony, hand over the bell.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There we go.

Okay.

Are these following categories of potential voter real or not?

Okay.

And this is actually this election and previous ones.

Right.

Waitrose Woman.

Real.

She's real.

Point to you.

Motorway man.

Not real.

Not real.

Motorway man is real.

Oh, yeah.

He was cited a few

elections ago.

Mondeo Man was also real.

1997, isn't he?

And he would have driven along a motorway, I suppose, at some point.

Sadly, the Mondeo was phased out in 2022 because Ford's going all electric.

Not sadly, actually.

I'm very happy about it.

Anyway, Basildon Mann.

He's real.

He's 1992.

That's another point.

That's another point to Adam.

EastEnder's woman.

Helen.

I don't think that is real.

Bingo.

She's not real.

There was a Holby City woman, but East Ender's woman, as far as I can tell, has never been made up by a newspaper or a party.

She was.

Was she really in Cardiff?

She was going to be somewhere else.

I think she was the sort of woman who would have watched Holby City.

So she was in her 30s or 40s.

She worked in clinical or clerical work, and she was a key demographic.

Sounds like a Worcester woman, like re but re-badged.

Much like many of the cars involved, who simply had a new skin put on.

Okay, great.

I think Adam was a couple ahead there, so I'm going to give Adam two points.

Okay, and one more now, quickfire.

This is: who commands leads in these specifically polled sectors of British society?

Okay, which party?

So, for example, Waitrose.

Helen.

Labour?

No,

I'm afraid not.

It's the Conservatives.

Waitrose is the only supermarket where the Conservatives have a lead.

It's only a lead of 1.2%.

And five years ago, they had a lead of 36%.

So...

Does Waitrose have a vote?

Waitress is a marginal constituency.

In a sense.

Interestingly, which party is doing best in the co-op?

Adam.

The Labour and Co-operative Party, presumably.

No, it's reform.

What?

I know.

That's the place where reform are doing best.

Sorry.

Reform are not among co-op shoppers.

Red Isle or Frozen Isle?

I see.

You've lied to us.

Actually, Labour and Premier were doing best overall among co-op people.

It's just of all the supermarkets, co-op buyers are most likely to be reform.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I retract that question and that point if I ever gave one out.

I just got one from Adam for engaging with it.

GB News viewers, which party has a lead there?

Adam?

Must be reform.

No, it's Labour.

What?

It's not.

That's, again, another point off him, I think.

I'm going into minors figures now.

This is like, I'm like, I'm the Rishi Sunak of this election.

It is a sign about.

I mean,

I assume the answer to all of these was going to be Labour, because Labour's leads are just monstrous among absolutely everyone, apart from the over 75s.

But yeah, even GB News, GB News is a very good thing.

That kind of proves my point I was making earlier, doesn't it, about how little effect that the media actually have.

If GB news viewers are coming away from that and thinking, oh, well, Labour, they look good.

Yeah,

actually, I love Wokery and I.

An hour of Jacob Reesmog every night.

Cancelled Christmas.

Suddenly, you're pro-Diane Abbott.

All right, final segment of society: farmers.

Helen.

Labour.

Well, this is according to the Farmers Guardian, and it's only based on a poll of about 150 farmers, but the Conservatives have a very narrow lead among farmers.

Yeah.

And I think edging that by about one point was Adam.

Oh, hurrah!

So you know, yeah.

Right.

I am prepared to enter coalition talks with Helen, so we'll sort something out.

Great.

Well, we'll be back in two weeks when the pulse have tightened and everything has changed all over again, or when they haven't and it hasn't.

So we look forward to seeing you then.

As always, please do get a copy of the magazine.

In fact, do as Jason Borthwick does and get a subscription yourself.

This episode, as always, was produced by Matt Hill of Rethink Audio.

We'll be back in a fortnight, as I say, with another one.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.