‘Keir Starmer is a liar’ – Voters speak out ahead of crucial by-election

0:03Camilla: The Telegraph.

0:06Tim: Tim, we've got a big by-election special and State of the Nation episode to come. We are apart today because you are in Gorton and Denton ahead of Thursday's crunch ballot. And we'll get on to why you're in Gorton and Denton in just a moment. But we just had to update this podcast with the breaking news last night of Peter Mandelson being both arrested and then returned back to his London home. Only yesterday we asked on the podcast why it was that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor had been arrested but Peter Mandelson hadn't. Well, now he has been. And, of course, what this does is it just drags the story back into the limelight at a difficult time for the Prime Minister when he's dealing with a by-election and also, of course, questions about other scandals in the Labour Party related to Labour Together, the think tank which is accused of trying to dig up opposition research against journalists.

1:02Tim: While you speak, Tim, it should be pointed out to those only listening that you do resemble Tiffany, the singer of the hit song I think We're Alone Now, with some headphones on, the Daily Tea mic, you're in a Costa coffee, I believe. Tiffany is exactly what I was going for. I'm in a Costa coffee. I'm trying not to disturb people's lunchtime, yeah. Fair enough. Now, the interesting thing about this Mandelson arrest is that we now hear from Darren Jones, who is basically the Prime Minister's right-hand man in the Cabinet Office, that that tranche of Mandelson documents that we were going to get, the Mandy files, we're going to get some of them in March, but some of them are going to be withheld because the Metropolitan Police needs them to form their case, presumably, against the former Labour peer.

1:50Tim: And therefore, there is the prospect, and this is a story we're running on The Telegraph, that some of this information will not come to light until potentially after Keir Starmer is out of office. If we assume he loses next year, the year after, 29, who knows? And obviously as journalists, we're frustrated by that. But if the information is going to become part of some sort of criminal case against Peter Mandelson, then one might argue that it's going to be put to better use doing that than being released to the public. So I think it's a case of, journalists shouldn't say this, but where we have to show some patience because this information does appear to have some relevance to a police investigation into a very prominent Labour figure.

2:36Tim: Also, the timing of all this is not great for Starmer. We return back to the House of Commons after the half-term break. He's looking into a crucial by-election. For the rest of this episode, we're going to explain with the help of a pollster, Scarlett Maguire, why it is a test case, particularly for Starmer's unpopularity and Nigel Farage's comparative popularity. Why are you there? Who are you chasing down, Tim Stanley? What are you trying to achieve in Gorton and Denton today? I'm trying to get five minutes with Zach Polanski. As you will see from tomorrow's episode, that has been very difficult to do.

3:13Tim: I have visited the Green headquarters. I could have done this broadcast from there, but a part of me thought, if I do a Daily Telegraph podcast from the Green headquarters, am I going to get lynched? So I thought, no, we'll decamp and go to Acosta Coffee instead. But everyone's been very friendly. Everyone's been very welcoming. And we'll give you some insight into what this constituency is really like tomorrow. I don't want to say too much because we have so little material that if I say too much, there's literally no point running it tomorrow. OK, fine. We will not spike your guns ahead of a sketch coming later, ahead of an expose or not of Zach Polanski in Greater Manchester.

3:57Tim: Just before we go into the rest of the episode, which we recorded earlier this week, can I just say something to you? The last time you were on the road, you had three flapjacks in quick succession. and I think we can both agree nearly died on the train home. Can you just remain calm on the food intake, please? I just demanded that our producer, John, buy me a blueberry muffin. I'm off pastry for Lent. I don't believe muffins count as pastries. And Ryan in the office, who normally handles hotels, booked me into something which I think if he'd looked closer at the computer screen, he'd have seen was a hostel, not a hotel.

4:40Tim: right and I had my own room but not only were there no tea things in this tiny cell it was a Gillian Maxwell shaped cell not only were there no tea things but there was no plastic cup for a glass of water in the middle of the night so whenever I got dehydrated which I inevitably did because it was like living in a prison in Burma I had to actually put my mouth under the tap to cool down. Tim, the things we make you do, honestly. This is what I do for journalism. There's no money in it. I will feed that back to Ryan on logistics, but you have taken one for the team there. Good luck on your Polanski hunt later today, and I'll see you back in the studio tomorrow.

5:27Tim: Now on with the rest of the episode, and the themes are, following Mandy's arrest, Can Keir Starmer retain this key Labour seat? Why is he so unpopular? And why is this by-election in Gorton and Denton on Thursday so important for reform? It's not just a by-election, it's Nigel Farage's biggest test to date. Can reform win in Gorton and Denton? We crunched the numbers with the pollster Scarlett Maguire and also talked to reform's controversial candidate, Matt Goodwin. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tominey. And me, Tim Stanley.

6:14Tim: Camilla, all eyes will be on Gorton and Denton in Manchester on Thursday for a critical by-election, being duked out between reform, the Greens and Labour. You can't read too much in by-elections because they are local. turnout is often low and frequently they are just a referendum on whoever is in power. Nonetheless, it is an opportunity to take the temperature of the nation and get a sense of where we might be heading to at the next general election. It's a crucial by-election for reform. They want to prove that they can get support in what are traditionally known as very long-held Labour seats.

6:54Tim: And they want to prove, a little bit like with Boris Johnson actually, that they have both red wall and blue wall appeal. So the result for reform, whatever it is, a victory or not, and actually who pips them to the post, OK if the Greens do, rather disastrous if Labour, against all adversity, happens to triumph. But I think what's interesting, Tim, is how much does the national scene play out in such local ballots? Does it have an effect that Starmer is now the least popular prime minister in recent memory? and does that affect how people are going to exercise their vote in that Greater Manchester City, which memorably Andy Burnham was blocked from being Labour's candidates for.

7:35Tim: Oh, good recall. We're going to talk to Matt Goodwin, former political scientist, turned GB News presenter, turned reform candidate in Gorton. But first let's talk to someone who can give us a real good bird's eye view of what's going on there and across the country, Scarlett Maguire, founder of Merlin Strategies. Thank you for joining us. We're going to get on to the by-election in a moment. But first of all, let's assess the state of the nation. If there were an election tomorrow, who would win it?

8:04Camilla: I think it would be a bit of a mess, actually. So if there was an election tomorrow, then I think you'd have to say that Nigel Farage has a very good chance of emerging as prime minister. Now, whether that's because reform managed to squeak a majority or whether that's because there's some sort of coalition that's formed, I'm not sure. Though my instinct at the moment is that whatever happens, I think we're looking at a coalition of some sort.

8:23Tim: either on the left or the right, Scarlett.

8:25Camilla: That's what it looks like to me. Everything is so fractured, people are so cross, and then each constituency is going to be so hard to predict. So there's been some pollsters that have had a go at this recently by asking questions about tactical voting. I think we'll actually get a bit of a better picture of what tactical voting could look like after the Gorton and Denton by-election next week. But at the moment, it's all very up in the air, and I think the only thing you can say is that voters are actually quite miserable with everyone.

8:47Tim: I mean, on the tactical voting front, first of all, we need to acknowledge the left is historically better at this because it's had to do it, whereas the right hasn't because it hasn't been split like it is now. Second of all, we've already got hints of this. We have former Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable suggesting that people in Gorton and Denton, minded to be Liberal Democrats, should actually vote for Labour because the Yellows haven't got a cat's chance in hell of winning this seat. Imagine, I mean, Danny Finkelstein on The Times made this point. Imagine William Hague or David Cameron turning around to Tories and saying, oh, actually vote for reform.

9:24Tim: I think that the right, the divided right, is totally underestimating the fact that PACs are already being formed on the left, that discussions are already being had. As you say, Scarlett, some interesting YouGov polling suggesting that like three quarters of Lib Dems or Labour or Green would happily vote tactically simply to keep Nigel Farage out of number 10. Has the reform lot factored this in as it keeps on banging on about how likely it is that he's going to be the next prime minister? I don't think they have. But I guess the question I'd like to ask you, Scarlett, is, is Nigel Farage going to emerge as the figure upon which everything becomes a referendum?

10:06Camilla: I think this is why the Gorton-Denton by-election is actually so interesting, because my working assumption before was that we saw in Carefilly in that Wales by-election that happened in the autumn, that there was a huge potential for a progressive tactical vote to stop reform winning and to stop Nigel Farage. However, that progressive tactical vote rallied behind Plaid Cymru. It rallied behind a different party that wasn't tainted. It didn't have a very unpopular leader. You know, it could be it could be another form of protest vote. My big working, I have two big working questions at the moment about tactical voting.

10:34Camilla: The first one, I think the Gorton Denton is actually a good test for both. The first one is, will people get behind someone as unpopular as Keir Starmer and as unpopular as the Labour Party is at the moment just to stop someone else? I think we don't know the answer to that yet. And the second question is, will people even be able to work out on a constituency-by-constituency basis who the best challenger is? And that can work both ways. Who is best to stop Labour? Who is best to stop Farage? At the moment, it's all going to be a triumphant mess. and any pollsters, I think, that are doing seat projections are selling people a little bit of a long story.

11:07Camilla: I think it's going to be very, very hard to work out when you're looking at four or five party fights where even just 20 % of the vote could be enough to get you over the line.

11:14Tim: And we're all thinking that the Greens might play the same role that played in that other by-election of progressive voters don't want to go with Labour, want to stop reform, so look for an alternative. Do you see in national polling, because of course played, limited to Wales, SNP to Scotland, Do you see the Greens emerging in England as a serious force?

11:34Camilla: I think they are emerging as a serious force. I think the Greens are actually one of the most interesting questions in polling at the moment because it's some of the biggest discrepancy that you see between pollsters is how well the Greens are or aren't doing. I think what is undeniably, what is undeniable is that they're doing a lot better than they were this time last year. And actually that rise started to happen even before Zach Polanski, who's the sort of new, I don't know if charismatic is quite the right word, but new leader. Enthusiastic. leader, he's putting himself very much on the scene and he's making much more of an effort to get out there than the previous two co-leaders and is also taking the party in a much more explicitly sort of neo-Corbynite direction, you know, rather than saying they're an environmental party, they're not talking about the environment very much, they're not trying to appeal really to those conservative Green voters that we know exist out there, they're doubling down on a sort of Corbynite economic populist platform.

12:21Camilla: So the Greens are undeniably doing well but some pollsters have them down at 10, 11%, some of them have them even up to 17, 18 % and doing better than Labour. So it's a really big question mark about how well they'll actually do. And they might face some problems there. So I think there's a huge vacuum for a populist party on the left, huge vacuum. There's so many progressive voters that are really fed up with Labour. They felt like they lent their votes to them last time. They feel betrayed by Starmer personally on the leadership pledges and a whole host of other things. And they feel particularly agitated by issues like Gaza, as well as being upset about the state of the country and the economy as a whole.

12:52Camilla: So there are lots of disenfranchised voters on the left that I think could go there. I think the question about the Greens is, will they have the party apparatus to be able to sustain that, especially in terms when it comes to getting out the vote, especially because they do better with younger, less well off voters, also ethnic minorities as well. These are all groups that are less likely to turn out generally. It's harder to get them to come out and vote. So I think it'll be interesting to see what they actually manage to materialise.

13:14Tim: Has your party just died a bit of a death, you know, over confusion about who's leading it, Jeremy Corbyn versus Zahra Sultana? There was a big moment, wasn't there, when it was launched and now we don't hear as much about it. Where are they polling?

13:28Camilla: Yeah, I think actually that the Greens had already slightly eaten their lunch. I think Zabrowski made such a head start with appealing to those voters, even though he didn't actually become leader till September. But your party now, I mean, it's very easy to laugh at. It's very chaotic. It's incredibly messy. I think the future of your party will actually depend on how much they manage to unite a Muslim vote behind them. So it's not so much, I think, about the younger progressives. I think obviously you see that's who they're trying to appeal to. but I think it'd be more interesting to see how many independent, we called them Gaza independents at the last election, but how many of those MPs stand under their banner and how well they do.

14:06Camilla: And actually, locals could be quite a good insight into this.

14:09Tim: There was an exchange in the WhatsApp messages that Wes Streeting leaked, his own WhatsApp messages between him and Peter Mandelson, in which he said he might lose his own seat of Ilford North because of Gaza. Is Gaza and the disaffected Muslim vote still an issue in this country or is it fading since the war ended?

14:30Camilla: I think it is still very much an issue because I think there's a wider question there about, you know, Muslim voters and who they think represents them. And Labour Party has completely plummeted in popularity with that group. And you can see this across different pollsters. And so I don't think that is going away. And I think it's actually one of the most under-recognised stories of the last election was the story of the Gaza independence. So we got four plus Jeremy Corbyn. You can include, you know, some people include and some people don't, but so four or five. And they came incredibly close in the further five to ten seats.

14:58Camilla: In fact, in quite a few of them, they would have won had there not been multiple of them standing and they split their own vote. So it's a real threat to Labour in a lot of areas. And I think we'll get a better sense of what's going on there and whether it has faded, as Gaza's been a bit more out of the news, in places like Bradford that are up for re-election and Birmingham this time as well. So I think that's one to really look out for in May's local elections.

15:17Tim: And what are we to read into George Galloway's Workers' Party, which again is pro-Palestinian, not standing a candidate in Gorton and Denton?

15:25Camilla: I think that was an effort to hurt the Labour Party so they could try and get everyone to rally behind the Green Party vote. George Galloway enjoys probably more than anyone else giving the Labour Party a bloody nose at these things. And that's what, you know, he's made a political career out of doing so. And I think that was saying, well, we don't want this left block. It's basically all a fight for Labour, Greens, Workers' Party. It's all a fight for who can claim that left block to defeat Nigel Farage. And it looked like George Galloway didn't want to get in the way of the Greens trying to get there ahead of Labour.

15:53Camilla: I don't know if the Greens have had enough time in Gorton and Denton to do that. I think everyone's flying completely blind. There's been no good polling that's been done of it. I'm very hard to try and read what's going to happen. So we're all flying a bit blind. But my instinct is that because it was such a short election, is that potentially the Greens might not have got the run-up they needed like Plaid did to Carefilly to really make the case that they were the ones that were best positioned to win.

16:15Tim: We're going to be speaking to Professor Matt Goodwin, who is Reform's candidate, after speaking to you, Scarlett. What are Reform's chances? And also, how significant is it if they don't win, not least when Nigel Farage is saying that this is a test case for the locals and then the locals is a test case for government? He's setting a lot of store by this by-election, but also he thinks that the locals are going to indicate what's going to happen at the next general election, which he thinks is happening sooner than 2029. Many people say, well, regardless of who the next leader is, if it's Keir Starmer or somebody else, why on earth would Labour volunteer to give up government before they have to?

16:52Camilla: Yeah, I mean, I think there's lots to talk about there. So in terms of reform in Gorton and Denton, in a way they don't have any business doing well there. It doesn't, you know, demographically, it's not a reform-friendly seat. It really shouldn't be one of the ones that they could do well. I mean, it's much harder for them, even than Runcorn, which they pulled off by six votes and that was still a massive swing to them so it's not really a place they should have a good chance

17:15Tim: I just ask why, demographically what's it like?

17:17Camilla: Yeah well demographically it's quite interesting it's very much a constituency of two halves so the Gorton and the Denton which sounds like a cheap thing to say but they're very different places and so it's very ethnically diverse a lot of the more working class and poorer voters are ethnically diverse which doesn't play to reform strengths and then a lot of the white voters are sort of, well homeowners doesn't necessarily play against reform that can work for reform but it's not so much a white working class constituency with some ethnic minorities it's sort of a mix of ethnic minority working class progressive a bit of students a bit of the university town and then some sort of white working class slash home owning people as well but it's just the mix shouldn't really suit reform and it is very much like a core labour constituency and so the way reform would win and I wouldn't be surprised at all if they do, by the way, is just that, say, if you had Green and Labour sort of neck and neck, taking all the votes away, so reform can slip through without winning much of the overall vote.

18:12Camilla: But I think it is important for reform, because what I would say is that actually a reform loss to the Greens, I don't think would be that bad for them, which sounds like a funny thing to say. But I don't think that necessarily hurts their overall strategy. I don't think if I was them, I wouldn't necessarily be that rattled by the potential for the Greens to back them there, I would be worried if Labour not only beat reform, but if Labour managed to really suppress the Green vote in order to do so. Because what that would tell me was there was a really big potential for voters, even who really don't like Labour, who are really cross with Keir Starmer, with a candidate who's not particularly, you know, is not an Andy Burnham, not someone who comes with their own huge brand and huge popularity.

18:53Camilla: I would then, if I was reformed, be getting quite nervous about that because what that would tell me was there might be hundreds of other constituencies all around the country where people, even behind Keir Starmer, who they do not like, say, actually, I'd rather that than I'd rather that.

19:05Tim: I agree strongly with that. I think any outcome that puts reform and green in the top one and two is good for reform. Because if the narrative becomes it's us versus green, well, that's just great for reform. Because the kind of people who would be tempted by reform are horrified by the greens. But as you say, if it becomes a contest with Labour, that's tougher because Labour is a more serious prospect in those Redwall type seats that reform needs to take.

19:30Camilla: Yeah, I think it is much tougher. And I think, you know, there are some complications with the British public at the moment. There's a small subsection of Green voters that say they'd prefer a reform conservative coalition, for example, to a Labour-Lib-Demont. You know, so voters are idiosyncratic and can be quite weird, you know, and they can go against our expectations. But you're absolutely right. For the most part, I think reform would love Gawson and Denter to come out as a reform versus Green fight, sort of no matter who edged it.

19:54Tim: But can we just discuss on a more macro level, Scarlett, the state of Labour and the state of the Prime Minister's own popularity right now.

20:03Camilla: Yeah, I mean, it is extraordinary. It's extraordinary to watch. He is now the most unpopular Prime Minister that records have recorded since polling properly began. So you can look at this. The best pollster to look at this actually for is Ipsos because they've been polling Prime Minister consistently for the last 50 years. And they now show Keir Starmer to be even more unpopular than Liz Truss, for example, which is quite, I mean, if we remember the Liz Truss days, it is quite something.

20:25Tim: I mean, she was compared to a vegetable, a lettuce.

20:28Camilla: Yeah, and she still is actually often in focus groups. So that was the... Wow. If Keir Starmer was a vegetable, what one would he be? Discuss. That actually sounds like a focus group question. Yes, indeed. I can try to ask you. Carry on, Scarlett. No, no, absolutely. But it's extraordinary that the amount by which he's dropped is extraordinary. But I think it's actually a warning lesson to politicians of all stripes at the moment. So I think there are lots of things that Keir Starmer and the team around him have not done very well. I don't think, you know, I don't think that's a controversial thing to say.

20:56Camilla: I think we're now on 14 or 15 quite major U-turns, all of which have undermined his standing with the public. It's been very unpopular decisions. And then there's just this sense that they don't like him as a character. And however, I think the warning I would see is if we look at the last few prime ministers, they've all suffered these drops in opinion poll ratings, you know, and quite an increasingly steep and sharp ones. and what I think to that is is that the public are in such a bad mood with politicians and you can say that's completely reasonable for them to be but they are that they completely dislike them they don't trust them at all they don't think they've got their best interests at heart they don't like any of them really when they get to know them and I don't know if anyone survives contact with a selectorate I think especially if you haven't been very careful to build up your brand and your mandate to do things which might not always be popular then I think anyone taking over be that another Labour leadership contender or someone from a different party, would risk suffering a similar fate.

21:53Tim: Yes. Even Archangel Gabriel or Joanna Lumley wouldn't fare well with the electorate right now. It's so angry, Tim. Is there any evidence that the public feels some things are getting better? I mean, sometimes, even as someone who doesn't like the government, it astonishes me how unpopular it is. Because, look, immigration is coming down, deportations are up, wages are going up homicide is going down and whenever the government has done something the public said it didn't like it then u-turns on it so this is there's a case with saying this is a government which is actually giving people precisely what they want eventually eventually but it's not like this is a government which is is pouring uh cod liver oil down people's throats no but the growth rates at 0.1 percent and wages have gone up but unemployment's gone up too Does anyone care about growth rates?

22:45Tim: We always go on about growth rates. It's about the money in my pocket. Exactly. But they care generally, Scarlett, about the state of the economy. And it looks as if both the Prime Minister and Rachel Reeves, who, by the way, are personally irritating to people just in the way they speak, OK, people look at them and say, this is like, you know, Lauren Hardy politics. What are these two people doing here? They're in office, not in power. Surely it's the general sense. And there's a feeling they're liars. Yes. Lied about their programme and lied about their CV.

23:11Camilla: Yeah, the word liar does stick to Keir Starmer a lot. And in a way that I found quite surprising. So, you know, you get those word clouds of politicians and some of them have been quite striking over the years. I was surprised that even a year, 18 months ago, liar was one of the biggest words for Keir Starmer, which, you know, I mean, someone like Boris Johnson, after everything that happened there, you can understand that. But for Keir Starmer, it's an incredibly strong word. And actually, it's when I first saw one of those word clouds, I thought, really, oh, I don't know if he can turn this around.

23:36Camilla: People's views of him are so hardened and so deeply ingrained. But when it comes to the public feeling better, the public are very... So, first of all, you're actually right, they care about their own personal circumstances and they're very vibes-based, they're not numbers-based, which I don't think is necessarily an issue. It makes sense to me that they would be. And so when I say vibes-based, I mean, you can tell them inflation's coming down, but the public, when they say they want inflation coming down, they don't mean it, they mean they want it undone. You know, they don't... They want it reversed.

24:02Camilla: They want it reversed, exactly. That is essentially... Can everything just be a lot cheaper, please? Can everything be a lot cheaper? And there's a similar story with immigration numbers. So I just did a very large scale focus group project at the end of last year, which was fascinating for lots of different reasons. But one of the things I found very interesting about that was that voters across the political spectrum, even the voters that were incredibly upset and agitated by immigration, and it was their number one issue above and beyond anything else, you know, trying to control it and get it down and stop illegal immigration, hugely underestimated the numbers.

24:30Camilla: And so I think this creates a bit of a bind for politicians because they can stand up and say numbers are coming down. but then they can point to a number where, you know, Joe Public says, hang on, that's actually much bigger than I thought. And I think if you apply that sort of vibes-based rule of politics, I think that there's lots to say this might get better, but I think as long as you still have, for example, hotels with asylum seekers in people's constituencies, things like that, it will still be a flashpoint. And it's actually interesting. If you look at when immigration, concern about immigration, started really peaking and going up, it was basically exactly when that hotel policy started coming into effect.

25:04Camilla: And I think that was not even because of the coverage at the time. It didn't get a huge amount of negative coverage at the time. I think that was people around the country and constituencies. Just it felt a lot more real to them and it felt a lot more present.

25:14Tim: Also, maybe people look at the immigration numbers and say, well, what else were they meant to do? Of course, they're coming down. They've been too high and they remain too high. Oh, yeah, they're still coming down to historically very high levels. We've got through this whole Daily Tea without using the C word, which is a miracle for me. As you know, I'm very potty mouthed. The Conservatives, Tim, is what I'm talking about. I knew there was something I'd forgotten. I was thinking, have I left the iron on? Yes. Have I left the car lights on? No, it's the Conservative Party. It's the Conservative Party.

25:42Tim: Does anyone give a damn about the Conservative Party?

25:45Camilla: Not yet.

25:47Tim: But what about Kemi? Kemi, yeah. I get the impression that Kemi's getting more notice than her party is.

25:53Camilla: So I think it's just very difficult to cut through. So what I've noticed is that when I was doing all these groups and I did 40 hours and 40 days before Christmas, it was actually a bit too much. Good lord. I know. I feel like I'm asking for some sort of medal but it was 40 hours in four days that's a lentil observance I've done my time but no it was always a joy to speak to the public obviously but I found it really striking because at that point no one was mentioning Kemi no one was mentioning her organically and this is even after a good conference, a good budget response you could prompt on her and then people would be like yeah not really sure, haven't heard much from her maybe she looks alright but I'm so fed up with the Conservatives I've noticed a difference since Christmas with especially conservative voters.

26:35Camilla: So conservative voters that are thinking about reform, conservative voters that might be sticking with the party are feeling more enthusiastic about Kemi, saying, I think she's doing better. They're still saying things like, I'm not sure she's PM quality yet, but I can see her on the way to that. She's definitely making a more positive impression with voters that I think are already more inclined to watch and to switch on in a way that she wasn't cutting through at all. And you can see this in her personal approval rating. So she went from most people having actually not much of an opinion of her at all to her positives increasing without her negatives really increasing at the same time.

27:08Camilla: And I think a lot of that was coming from disenfranchised Conservatives having a look at the party again and thinking, actually, she's all right. You know, I may be. However, if you look at the overall picture, I think it would be a mistake for the Conservatives to get too carried away about how good a news that is for them at the moment. If you look at the voting intention picture, you know, I don't tend to look at polls week to week because there can be a lot of noise and very hard to actually glean anything insightful from it. But if you look at the actual polling, when Kemi Baden-Ock took over as leader of the Conservative Party, they were still hovering on about 24, 25 percent.

27:38Camilla: They then fell down. Then Nadir, in averages, was about 17 percent. You can say a lot of that was not her fault. That was other things. But that is what happened when she became leader. They're now sitting on 18.

27:50Tim: But they're still sitting on 18. They've not fallen further. So the point is, this whole... They are a factor. They're part of the calculation. Nigel Farage, Conservatives are dead. They're going to be annihilated. Look, that may well happen at the local elections, OK? Yes. But it could be the case that Labour suffer an even greater fate of a bloodbath from which Starmer cannot recover. And then we have to look at what the dynamics mean when inevitably the leader is changed at some point, if he does terribly, terribly badly. But the point that Farah surely needs to accept is this rump of Tories, whatever's left of them, once you've picked off the righties, will still be there polling in the high teens.

28:29Tim: Therefore, are they actually going to prevent you from getting this massive majority that you need, this stonking majority, to push through a radical legislative agenda? So this whole talk about, oh, well, they've betrayed us, we're never doing deals, it's not practical. Unless he is intent on heading towards being the next leader of the opposition rather than the actual prime minister. And by the way, MPs hate it when we ask them, will you form a coalition? Will you form a coalition? But the reason why we're asking it is because voters have a right to know. What am I actually going to get once I voted?

29:00Tim: You're saying right now you'll never go into government with these people. Well, if that's a lie, then we need to know. If you have some other plan, then I want to know before I cast my vote.

29:09Camilla: Well, yes, and I think that there tends to be quite a lot of attention on the Conservative voters out there that would vote to stop Farage. And they do exist, they are there. There's definitely quite a sizable chunk of them. However, there's lots of Conservative voters that will vote primarily to stop a Labour coalition. coalition. We can see that in the polls. So Lord Ashcroft did a good poll where he said, what would you prefer, a Conservative reform coalition or a Lib Dem Labour coalition? Because that really is the choices, because you get some pollsters polling, say, would you like a Conservative Lib Dem coalition to voters?

29:39Camilla: But that I don't think anyone really realistically thinks that's on the cards. Exactly. And actually what that means is Conservatives would, what you get from a lot of these polls is yes, that people don't mind so much a coalition as long as their party is in charge of it. But overwhelmingly Conservative voters, not by any means all of them but more than the majority would much prefer a conservative reform coalition to a Labour-Lib-Dem coalition so there's quite a lot of voters out there and again I speak to them in focus groups who basically actually aren't happy with either the options of conservative reform in front of them they have big problems with both problems about how the conservatives did in government question marks over Farage question marks over policies people all the rest of it for reform but they're sitting there thinking which is the best bet and I and I do think it then you're right I think it does matter if they're trying to work out what is the best bet to prevent a Labour-Lib-Dem green coalition.

30:27Camilla: And they don't know the answer to that because they don't know whether actually there would be any sort of coalition formed.

30:31Tim: We're entering the era of becoming like Europe and having these weird coalitions and mashups, by the way, Tim. Yes, but without proportional representation. Yeah, weirdly. That's the surprising thing. We're doing this with First Past the Post. Reform isn't campaigning for that anymore. The final thing I'd like to know is the Reform Party is gambling a lot on looking serious now. They're still stuck at between 25-32 % in the polls. OK, they're ahead, but they're not quite breaking up towards 40, which would make them comfortable and secure. What is stopping the British public from just going, Nigel Farage is going to be the next prime minister.

31:04Tim: I'll have a gamble on him. What are they not quite yet getting right?

31:07Camilla: At the moment, I think there are still lots of hesitations about a lack of team. That's something you hear quite a lot, a lack of team, a lack of policies and just this uncertainty. There are lots of things that a lot, I say a lot, but a good chunk of the public like about Nigel Farage or will give him credit for. Primarily, they see him as more of a conviction politician, especially on immigration. They say he stuck to his guns on that. He's still doing that. And I think he'll sort that out. And then the second one being that he's more in touch. He's more authentic. He's actually not got that same taint that other politicians have in quite the same way.

31:37Camilla: And then the hesitations are, all of that's great. I'm just a bit worried he's not quite serious enough. Or I'm just a bit worried, what is he going to do on everything else? Now, what's interesting about that is they also have serious hesitations about the Conservative Party and about the team around... You know, they can't identify necessarily a team around Kemi, but it just has more of an institutional backing. So I don't think these concerns are necessarily entirely unique from reform, but I do think they are holding them back.

32:01Tim: Scarlett Maguire, founder and director at Merlin Strategy, thank you for joining us on today's Daily Tea. So we've heard from the pollster Tim. Let's speak to one of the candidates. Matt Goodwin of Reform UK joins us next.

32:34Tim: Matt Goodwin, thank you so much for joining us. My first question is, one thing I find fascinating about you is you were or you are an academic, and yet you were writing about politics and the state of Britain and now you're actually involved in politics and you're running for election. So you're doing the thing that you wrote about. Can you give us your academic scholarly objective view on what's happening in this by-election? Sure.

33:03Scarlett Maguire: Firstly, thank you for having me. With regards to your first point, I think probably all writers, journalists and academics might be able to relate to the fact that we often spend a lot of time writing about things, but there's always this question hanging in our minds as to whether we're actually going to get involved and do something about the things that we're writing about. And I just reached a point in my life watching the managed decline of our country where I decided I wanted to do something about it. Let me just try and give you an impartial objective view of what I think is happening here.

33:35Please.

33:35Scarlett Maguire: What we're seeing in Gorton and Denton is essentially the rise of the new British politics, if you like. We've got, on the one hand, the emergence of the Greens as a significant force, but we've got also the ongoing rise of reform. And the two established parties, which have dominated British politics for a century, are basically being squeezed by those new forces. But within that, and where I'm especially worried, we can also see in this seat some darker forces at work, which include the rise of a new sectarianism in British politics, which I would argue the left progressives, if you like, are enabling, openly encouraging.

34:19Scarlett Maguire: And on the other side, you have lots of hardworking, taxpaying British people who are desperately concerned about what all of that means for their communities and their country. So in essence, I see this race and this seat as really a microcosm of wider trends that are reshaping our politics and country.

34:40Tim: How have you seen that sectarianism manifest itself in this campaign? Have your opponents tried to appeal to certain demographics in certain specific ways?

34:49Scarlett Maguire: Well, I found it very interesting because we've got both the Greens and the Labour Party presenting the reform campaign as, in their words, a divisive campaign. Yet we are actually the only people talking about Gorton and Denton. The Greens are talking about Gaza. The Labour Party is talking about how to save the Labour Party. But both of them are, I would argue, running on sectarian lines. We've had the Labour Party under police investigation for allegedly offering free food to voters of minority backgrounds if they support Labour. We've got the Greens who are leafleting in Urdu and Punjabi and are talking specifically about mobilizing, in their words, the Muslim vote, campaigning outside of mosques and so on.

35:32Scarlett Maguire: And I think actually this really does trouble me because there is a sort of deep irony at the heart of contemporary left-wing politics. They use words like unity, but they are actually incredibly divisive when it comes to how they're now running these campaigns. I really do genuinely believe this. I'm not saying this just simply because of politics. I am the only candidate at this by-election, who is talking about all of Gorton and Denton, who is talking about all of the communities here, whereas the left have sort of descended into this very blatant sectarianism, which I think is also, by the way, mainstreaming anti-Semitism, which is one of the big things that is now starting to really force itself onto the political agenda.

36:18Scarlett Maguire: A lot of the people in and around the Green Party, for example, are known anti-Semites, and I would stand by that, no matter the pushback. And that deeply concerns me. I have a lot of British Jews who have been supporting my campaign, who have been canvassing with us, who are rightly horrified by the direction of travel in this country.

36:37Tim: Okay, Matt, so you say that your opponents are divisive. They say you're divisive. They say you're being sectarian in focusing on them going after Muslim voters. I mean, presumably you would like to have some Muslims vote for you in that area if there's a high proportion of Muslims?

36:54Scarlett Maguire: Yeah, well, we do have lots of British Muslims who are planning to vote for reform, business owners, especially who are alarmed by high taxes, who are alarmed by also some of the cultural issues. You know, there's a curious tension within the Green and also Labour electorates, which is, they've sort of been rallying support around this issue of Gaza. but at the same time they're imposing the most radically liberal policies on what is a deeply socially conservative part of the electorate so i've been talking to british muslims here in gordon and denton and saying hey uh you know i get the gaza stuff but um you do know the greens want to legalize all drugs right including crack cocaine and heroin you do know that they want little boys to be able to become little girls and little girls to become little boys you know they want schools to teach this stuff, right?

37:44Scarlett Maguire: You do see these policies on the green agenda. Now, when you have those conversations on the doorstep, one of the remarkable things to me is either the extent to which people do not really know where the greens are on those policies, or the extent to which sort of Gaza overrides everything, and there's just this cognitive dissonance where they ignore a lot of that stuff while focusing only and exclusively on Gaza. So So to me, it's absolutely fascinating. But we've just been drawing attention to the green position over and over again, saying to people, look, do you really want children being taught this stuff?

38:21Scarlett Maguire: Do you want children being taught about how to take drugs safely or how to change their gender? Or do you want a party that's actually going to defend what are the three words of reform, family, community and country?

38:34Tim: I can see the appeal to socially conservative Muslims and I appreciate the point you're making. Isn't it the truth that really reform have no business even beginning to think that they can win this seat, but you are going to be buoyed by UK-wide dissatisfaction with Labour and the Tories, disgruntled righties saying enough's enough. And actually, for Farage's point of view, obviously the best outcome for you guys is you win this seat. Matt Goodwin. The second best outcome is that the Greens win it. Because if Labour win it, it will suggest that reform cannot reach the parts it thinks it can.

39:13Scarlett Maguire: Well, I firmly believe we, firstly, I genuinely believe we will win the seat. We have an incredibly strong pledge base. We've got lots of people from across the community, not only in the white working class neighbourhoods of Denton, but actually across this seat. We've got a significant rump of support in Longside, which is the most diverse part of the seat, for example, people who are planning to vote for reform on Thursday. So the media story that we had about this campaign at the beginning, which was reform will do well in white working class areas and Labour and the Greens will do well in diverse areas.

39:44Scarlett Maguire: And that will be it. That's not what you will see on Thursday, actually. For example, there are a lot of British Nigerians who are supporting our campaign. There are a lot of voters from minority backgrounds who can see that on the one hand they believe in Britain passionately, but they can see where Labour and the Greens want to take this country in terms of sectarianism and mainstreaming, not just anti-Semitism, but also I would argue radical Islamism. People are not idiots, right? They can see where this is going to go. And when you say reform have no business winning this seat, actually, I think reform have every chance of winning seats like this.

40:20Scarlett Maguire: For example, if you look at, I do remind people, take Brexit as an example. People tend to forget that Brexit was actually a very broad coalition of voters. About one in three of Britain's black and minority ethnic voters voted for Brexit. But if you look at Donald Trump in America, he had a lot of support from Hispanics and Latinos and so on. I think we've moved past the conversation we were having maybe 20 years ago. I think actually there are lots of people from minority backgrounds who are now fully on board with strong borders, managed but much lower levels of migration, lower taxes and putting the hardworking majority first.

40:56Scarlett Maguire: And what I've been saying to people throughout this campaign is let's speak to that hardworking majority. It's not about race and ethnicity. Let's prioritise that hardworking majority. If you pay taxes, if you contribute, if you play by the rules, we will always prioritise you, which Labour cannot say. And the Greens cannot say. And that narrative is a narrative that is keeping us right at the forefront of this race. And I do genuinely believe there is going to be an almighty upset on Thursday.

41:24Tim: Matt, can I put one controversy to you, which we can dissect, which is that you are quoted as saying that women and young girls require education about biological reality to address the UK's fertility crisis. And this is part of proposing some sort of negative child benefit tax to encourage people to form families. Now, this idea was received badly by some on the left who compared it to The Handmaid's Tale. So I'd like to invite you, first of all, to explain what you were talking about, but also to come back to this point about moving from academia to politics. Has this experience of running for office given you a sense of how difficult it is to say things in the political arena, which everyone else says outside of politics, without being abused for it?

42:09Scarlett Maguire: Well, there's two things there, and I'm glad you asked the second point because I'll come back to it. Look, in terms of what I've said, we have an enormous demographic crisis in our country, which is going to get much worse in the years and decades ahead. The birth rate in our country is about 1.4, it's 1.2 in Scotland. A country basically needs a rate of around 2.1 if it's going to survive and endure over the longer term. Many countries around the world are talking openly about that crisis and what they can do to promote families and to encourage people to have more children. I find it personally utterly absurd that we in Britain are incapable of having a mature conversation about how to support the family and how to encourage people to have more children.

42:58Scarlett Maguire: What I referenced with that idea around taxation was actually not calling for that policy at all, but was putting forward a range of ideas that the demographer Paul Moreland, a very respected demographer, one of the world's experts, he put forward a package of measures and said, OK, if you are serious as a country about dealing with this demographic crisis, here are 10 policies that are being looked at around the world that you should think about. One of which was this idea of having lower tax for people who have three or more children. And the other was this idea that Paul had mentioned around higher rates of tax for people without children.

43:36Scarlett Maguire: Now, I wasn't advocating for that idea. I was saying here was a package of policies. But of course, what the Labour Party do and the Green Party do very well from a political point of view is they take that and then they will use it to spread misinformation through an election campaign. I never asked for that policy or demanded it. I just said we need to have a mature conversation about all of these different ideas if we're going to be serious about dealing with this demographic crisis. The second question you raised, Tim, I think is one I've been thinking a lot about in recent weeks. What this experience has taught me is that as a country, our national conversation is not remotely ready to talk about the things we really need to talk about if we are going to address the deep-rooted problems that are holding us back, that are weakening our society.

44:33Scarlett Maguire: We are not remotely ready as a country to talk about, for example, what a pro-family agenda would look like. We are not remotely ready to talk about the problems of multiculturalism, really. Even though David Cameron said it had failed in 2010, we just cannot, as a country, seem to move past this rather absurd debate about somebody said there's a problem, oh no, we can't talk about it. Many other countries are well ahead of us in thinking about, well, OK, what is a successor to multiculturalism, for example? I don't think we're even remotely ready to talk about broader issues around, you know, what would a regime look like that would allow us to control our borders and actually maintain some sense of internal coherence within our nation?

45:21Scarlett Maguire: And I think that's what struck me, that politics is incredibly constrained and tightly controlled. And the conversations that people are having out there are not the conversations that are happening within by-election campaigns like this one.

45:37Tim: I mean, you have pushed the envelope, haven't you? You came out with some research fairly recently, which again garnered a degree of controversy and some negative headlines, particularly in the left wing media, about this notion of the immigrant birth rate being higher than indigenous Brits and this idea that whites will be in a minority by what year, Matt? Remind me.

45:58Scarlett Maguire: It's around 2063.

45:59Tim: And you stand by that research and think that is still the case, even though we are witnessing immigration numbers come down. And indeed, if reform does form the next government, we've heard this week from Zia Youssef and some of the measures that he will bring in if he is Home Secretary. Clearly, that migration rate is going to go into the negative under a future Nigel Farage government. So where do we stand with this whites in the minority point of view? and were you surprised about the backlash to that?

46:31Scarlett Maguire: No, I wasn't surprised by the backlash. I stand by what I said. I mean, it's the government's own data. I'm not making these numbers up. It's all based on what the government's own forecasts are showing. It's just they don't want people to talk about it. Look, regardless of race and ethnicity, millions of people are concerned about where we are going as a country. What kind of country are we becoming? In other words, as Samuel Huntington once asked, who are we? And that is the question that people want to talk about. And what I've suggested over and over again is every nation needs a majority group.

47:05Scarlett Maguire: If you look around the world, 80 % of all nations have a clear majority group and 70 % have a majority that is at least 40 % of their population. On current trends, Britain will have neither by the end of this century. Now, the only countries that are in that position are places like Sierra Leone and Lebanon. So I actually think it's responsible to put your head above the parapet and say, okay, do you want to follow the trajectory of countries like Sierra Leone and Lebanon and moving into a much more fractured, sectarian, chaotic politics? Or do, as a country, we want to ask this question, okay, who are we becoming?

47:49Scarlett Maguire: Who do we want to become and what is the best way that we can move forward that keeps us in a stable, ordered community. I think that is really responsible. And with regards to Zia Jus' policies, I think it's great. We're a Christian nation. We're based on Christian foundations. This should not be controversial. We should be reasserting who we are. It's not to say that we don't like other groups. It's to say that our entire national culture, history, and collective memory have been shaped by those foundations. And I think it's wonderful speaking, for example, to lots of voters in this constituency.

48:26Scarlett Maguire: I was at a church last night speaking to Romanians, speaking to Nigerians about the importance of our Christian heritage. It's just, again, considered taboo in a national conversation that, let's be honest, is still tightly controlled by a large media class, and I'm not including the Daily Telegraph in this, obviously, but a media class that seems incapable of talking about these themes of belonging, identity and culture.

48:57Tim: So in a constituency which is very ethnically mixed and which has the sectarian divides that you've just described in this interview, are you of the view that Gorton and Denton isn't British or is heading towards becoming un-British?

49:11Scarlett Maguire: I wouldn't frame it in those terms, Tim, and I think you're alluding to some of the comments that have attracted attention during this by-election campaign regarding Britishness and what is it that makes somebody British. Let me just set forward my view. Citizenship is not the same thing as belonging, and belonging requires more than a piece of paper. And the reason I said that is because for much of the last 25 years, it has been quite clear from 7-7 to the London Bridge attacks to Lee Rigby to the Manchester Evening News Arena bombing that we do actually have a significant number of people in our country who do not share that sense of belonging.

49:55Scarlett Maguire: Roger Scruton once said that it takes more than a set of legal documents to make a nation and what he meant by that, drawing on others like Edmund Burke and so on, is that people need to feel an emotional bond to the moral community, to the nation. And if they don't feel that bond, or if they reject that bond through things like terrorism and violence, then they are rejecting their membership of that community. And I think across the West, we're very nervous about talking about this. We're very nervous about dealing with it because to me, it means we have to accept that actually some of the people that are in our country have absolutely no interest in integrating into who we are.

50:36Scarlett Maguire: And what I was saying was I simply do not accept that the 7-7 bombers or Salman Abedi who walked into Manchester Evening News Arena and blew up children and their parents are as British as the people they murdered. And the reason I said that is because they are rejecting that emotional bond to the community. And I stand by that. I was, you know, attacked widely from the left on that position because they do not view citizenship in that way. And I think fundamentally, we need to have this out as a country. We need to decide what is it that makes somebody one of us.

51:13Tim: But Matt, forgive me, you are setting the bar very low there at you're no longer British if you kill people. I think most people would accept that. But in terms of the people who you're currently canvassing, do you see people who do not intend to learn English, for instance, as putting themselves beyond being British?

51:35Scarlett Maguire: Well, firstly, you say most people would accept that. Clearly, many people actually in the institutions in our country don't accept that because I was attacked widely for even suggesting that, for example, the 7-7 bombers were not really British. No, what we need to get to, I think, is what is it that is coming after multiculturalism in this country? No one has answered that question yet. We've all decided multiculturalism isn't really working, from David Cameron to Suella Braverman. But nobody yet has figured out, well, OK, what's coming after it? Are we going to do a more muscular integration where everybody has to be able to speak English and everybody has to be contributing to the economy?

52:15Scarlett Maguire: or are we going to go to a much more assertive assimilation where actually we're going to be doing what the Danes are doing? We're not going to have segregated schools. We're not going to have segregated neighborhoods. We're going to actually break them up and we're going to have people mixing with one another. Are we going to follow Singapore in saying we're not going to have segregated housing anymore? We're going to ensure that all neighborhoods are mixed. These are questions that I think we should have been asking 20 years ago in a much more serious way and coming up with answers to them. But because the conversation is so tightly controlled and anybody who steps outside of this very narrow Overton window is sort of cast as controversial, we're not actually addressing these questions.

53:03Scarlett Maguire: So that's my answer. We have to move past this and say, okay, this is clearly not working. From Blackburn to Bradford to Leicester, this model of multiculturalism that we have is clearly not working. I've heard during this campaign last week. Just to come in on that,

53:18Tim: in some cases it's about policing people's views, I agree. But in others, sometimes the media just wants to be precise and to know what you mean. So, for example, to give a concrete example, there are people reportedly in this constituency campaigning in a foreign language, right? Is that un-British? Is that undermining Britain? Should people living in this country be required to communicate in and speak publicly in English?

53:45Scarlett Maguire: I think a shared language is a foundation of a coherent, stable society. So yes, I think when we're talking about democracy and elections, we're talking about the NHS and we're talking about taxpayer-funded institutions, we should be communicating in the national language. Yes, I do believe that. I have no problem in saying that. But I'll give you another example. I've talked about sectarianism during this campaign and the response from Labour and the Greens has been, how dare you question diversity in Manchester? How dare you question how well things are working in Manchester? I have pointed out to people, it was only a few months ago, two British Jews were murdered in this city.

54:23Scarlett Maguire: And it was only a couple of weeks ago that we had what would have been one of the biggest terrorist attacks, one of the biggest mass murders of British Jews in the West. And thankfully, it was foiled by Greater Manchester Police. So the idea that the current model is working well, I think is absurd. And we need to move past that and say, okay, what does the response to that look like? And there's a whole host of things that we could then be getting into, not just around language, but around the financing of religious institutions, around schooling, around what we're teaching children, around what our story is as a country, what our sense of unity, where that's coming from.

55:06Scarlett Maguire: which organisations we're prescribing, where we're drawing the lines in the sand as to what is considered acceptable and what isn't. You know, I found it very obviously frustrating over the last few years to see us unable and unwilling to venture into those debates in a much more serious way.

55:25Tim: You have been on the receiving end of quite a lot of negative reporting. You had a little bit of a bust up with the Green candidate on Newsnight. She seemed to accuse you of being complicit in some way in the Manchester Arena bombing, which you clearly pushed back on heavily. She was trying to make the point that you yourself have been divisive.

55:41Scarlett Maguire: What I will say in response to the Hannah Spencer reaction, whereby she clearly views people raising questions over things like migration and borders as being responsible for Islamist terror attacks, actually this is a very important moment in our national debate. It's as important as that interaction in Whitechapel, where a group of protesting Muslim men, very aggressive, you may remember in Whitechapel, shouted at the radical left woke activists that they're not working together, they're very different, they're not on the same side. We've seen a couple of very revealing moments in British politics, and this latest one with Hannah Spencer is revealing, because there is a view on the left that the cause of Islamist terrorism is not actually Islamism, the cause of a nasty right-wing people who are talking about migration and borders.

56:35Scarlett Maguire: This is, at best, naive, at worst, deeply corrosive to our culture and to our country. I personally do not think that people who hold that view should be elevated to the House of Commons and should be representing large parts of our country. I think it is a very dangerous worldview. We need to be able to say what is the primary threat to Britain today, and that is violent Islamism. I don't have any problem in saying that, but from Keir Starmer to Hannah Spencer, there has always now been, there is an ongoing attempt to undermine people who point to that problem or to deflect from it or to put their heads in the sand and not talk about it.

57:18Scarlett Maguire: And Hannah Spencer's reaction in that debate, I thought, was very, very revealing because it also tells us quite a big deal about where the Greens see their political future. And they clearly see it in embracing parts of the Islamist world. And they see it as being rooted in this embrace of sectarianism. I do not believe that is the way that we should be heading as a society, as a country. I think we should all be pushing back very hard against that. That is the path towards chaos and carnage.

57:50Tim: But Matt, if we had the Greens on right now, you know they would say that it is reform that is dividing Britain by talking about immigration, by having Zia Yusuf talk about preserving Christianity, which to some ears will sound sectarian. It has been reported that some supporters of Britain First have been associated with your campaign, or people who are suspended from the Conservative Party for anti-Muslim derogatory comments. In other words, how do you respond to the charge that, look, the people who are really driving the conversation about religion and ethnicity are not the left. They're fighting back against you, the ones who are showing up in seats like this with perhaps some tension, perhaps a bit of poverty, and trying to stoke up a white reaction.

58:34Scarlett Maguire: Well, we've not been doing that at all. I do not recognise that picture of this campaign. Anybody who has come within a thousand miles of me who has been associated with any forms of extremism, I've been very clear, those people are being immediately rejected and removed from our campaign. Although interestingly, I've not seen the Greens be as robust and proactive at removing people within the Green Party who have voiced anti-Semitic comments or sympathy for radical Islamism. I mean, look, it was only yesterday we had a picture of Jeremy Corbyn standing alongside the deputy leader of the Green Party.

59:15Scarlett Maguire: And that image, I think, is very symbolic. You have somebody who has openly described Hamas and Hezbollah in the past as friends. You have a political party that is very clearly mainstreaming anti-Semitism in this country. And you have a party that is turning a blind eye to what is going on within some communities here in Britain. And I've been calling that out. I think this has been the responsible campaign. We've not been deliberately targeting voters by race or ethnicity. We've not been campaigning in different languages. We've been putting forward policies that have been presented by a party that represents modern Britain.

59:53Scarlett Maguire: Zia Yusuf is an example of that. Leila Cunningham is an example of that. But so too is Nigel Farage, and so too is Richard Tice. I mean, I think reform actually is the only political party that can really cut through and present a message that is going to appeal to the hard work working, taxpaying, law-abiding majority of people who believe in Britain and who can see that we're now at a point where if you enter Britain illegally or you spend your life living on welfare, you are now put before the hard-working majority. And that is unacceptable to me. We can't treat our own people like second-class citizens.

1:00:32Scarlett Maguire: The social contract will collapse if we carry on down the road that Keir Starmer and Zach Polanski would push us down. We have to push back against this. We have to go in a different direction. And I'll just say this, you know, lastly, it's the sixth safest Labour seat in the country. OK, this seat has been held by Labour. This area has been held by Labour for 100 years. All right. The fact that we're even talking about the possibility of a reform victory on Thursday is itself striking. That shows how strongly we have connected with this area. I know the numbers behind the scenes. I know exactly how many people we have who are committed to voting for us on Thursday.

1:01:12Scarlett Maguire: It's not going to be a disappointment at all. I think we're in with a very good chance of winning this seat. And that speaks volumes, because if we win this seat, every Labour MP in this country is on notice. Matt Goodwin, good luck on Thursday.

1:01:27Tim: Thank you very much for joining us on The Daily Tea.

1:01:29Scarlett Maguire: Thank you very much.

1:01:30Tim: Interesting stuff, Tim. It should be stated, by the way, we did say to the Greens and to Labour and others, come on the Daily Tea. I've tried so hard. Weirdly, none of them wanted to. The Green Party advertised that Zach Polanski would be available for interview the whole day. So we said to him, so can we speak to you? And he said, no, I'm not available. Funny that. I'm available for the New Statesman, the Daily Mirror and the Guardian. Yes. But not for the Telegraph or the Daily Tea. Having said all that, we will be bringing you a Daily Tea special on Friday with the result in Gorton and Denton.

1:02:03Tim: It's a big one. So stay tuned for that. We call it emergency pocket. It's not really. We're just doing a podcast that happens to be on a by-election live. People might say why. The answer is because this could be the seat where we see the new politics born. If Labour comes in third, if the Tories come in fourth, and it's between reform and green, That right there is the moment that the new politics was born. It's the conception of Prime Minister Nigel Farage, potentially in Greater Manchester. Opposition leader, Zach Polanski. What a thought. So that'll be coming on Friday, probably early, actually, because we may as well get it out as soon as we know it, so we'll probably record it in the morning.

1:02:40Tim: Now, before we go, the Daily Tea are going to start a little social series, a Q &A with me and Tim on the issue of the week. This week, obviously, it's going to be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. I know Mandelson's been arrested, but let's just focus on royal matters. And therefore, you have an opportunity to ask me whatever you like in relation to this royal scandal. Is the monarchy in crisis? Can it survive? The role of William and Kate? Just what is Andrew like in real life? I've met him several times. Anything you want to ask me, please do so via email. That's thedailytea at telegraph.co.uk or get in touch via our socials on X, the Tiki Top and Instagram.

1:03:23Tim: and I will be answering your questions on our social media feeds on Thursday.