Nightmare on Downing Street: The mega poll that shows a coalition of chaos is coming

0:08The podcast industry has spent years arguing about formats. The thing is, podcast audiences never cared. 88 % of them now consume audio and video. Not only that, 63 % of them have started an episode in one format and finished it in another format. And then three quarters of those have switched app mid-story to do it. They're not picking a format. They're picking whatever best fits the moment they're in. ACAST's latest research in Podcast Pulse 2026 maps four of these moments and what each one gives back to a brand. Get the full report at acast.com slash pulse. A new megapole predicts a super hung parliament that could turn into a nightmare on Downing Street.

0:50And with the Tories and reforms still at each other's throats, Brace yourself for Deputy Prime Minister Ed Davey and Chancellor of the Exchequer Zach Polanski. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomini. And me, Tim Stanley. Can I call this for what I'm seeing here, to use a boogie night's reference? This is a Dirk Diggler result. This is a super hung parliament. Oh, I know it's grotesque, but that's what this is. If this poll is correct, then we're heading for a situation in which any one of the left or right blocks would struggle to form a majority. And whilst that would be very funny, it's also very bad because there are two or three really important things that need to be done.

1:34And Labour has failed to do them even with a super majority. Tim, before we discuss why exactly you're dressed like Don Johnson from Miami Vice. I'm not. You are a little bit. Like the temperatures have turned and you've arrived in your most summery suit. I'm squeezing the last days out of this summer. Can you just like... Because this is Britain and we always get an Indian summer and everyone always goes wild and says, it's the end of the world. No, it's just Britain. This is what always happens. And I refuse to let it go. OK, for those only listening, Tim is in a white polo shirt, a light grey, very lightweight suit with some trainers.

2:09And can you do to the sleeves what you did when we were sitting downstairs? and then somewhere between don johnson and mike reed that people won't know what we're talking about even timmy mallard but it's very mid-80s i've decided the 80s are back the 80s are back i'm into the 80s suddenly there was a report at the beginning of the week saying what what do you miss most about the 80s and nick ferrari answered on this morning my libido which i thought was a really good answer where did he leave it i don't know he left it somewhere on the bizarre desk of the Sun newspaper, I think. Scarlett Maguire is in the studio, by the way.

2:41There's another voice here. I want to stress that. You miss being too young. Too young to remember the 80s. What year were you born in? 82. Oh, you're just... Scarlett? Probably too young. 93. 93? Really? We're going to talk about... But that's old now. It is old. It is old. That is old. That's now not exceptional. If you're pre-2000-year-old, Scarlett Maguire is here to talk about a mega poll. We'll get onto that in a minute. Can we just talk about a mega debate? I don't know if I've mentioned it, but I'm debating Bridget Philipson at the Labour Party conference on Sunday. Are you? Yes. We haven't talked about it much.

3:12Can you remind me where you're doing it, how much it costs, and do I have to be a delegate to attend? Right. It's at the Royal Liver building. It's£12. Tickets are available on a link via the show notes. And no, you don't need to be a delegate. And thank you for confirming earlier that you were going to bother to... Tim said at the meeting this morning... Do you want me to come? Do I need to come to this? well I mean if if you were debating somebody like your best friend Wes Streeting I would come and watch okay okay so if you wouldn't mind turning up no I will come okay in your Don Johnson suit I'm not sure about food but there'd definitely be like telegraph you know one of the telegraph bags what do you call them a tote bag with a telegraph in it maybe a pen there could be a key ring I I don't know.

3:57I can't commit. By the way, we're trying to get to 40 ,000 subscribers. Please help us to do that by clicking the subscribe button. Somebody has said about yesterday's video on Andy Burnham, which a couple of people did write in, including a man called Phil, who said we're just being too bitchy and too biased against our esteemed Prime Minister, Tim. You take that on board. Although Gary agrees with us. It's like a Mr Bean movie where he accidentally becomes PM and by a series of misadventures ends up in the White House in conference with the president. Or, according to somebody called Giuseppe, it's like David Brent has been elevated to prime minister.

4:39I don't think Burnham is Brent-esque, is he? Oh, yes. I think it's a very good comparison, actually. Like looking down the lens and telling a little eyebrow-raising joke. Yeah. Singing a lyric. Exactly. It is the same good boss vibes. And of course, one thing that was funny about Brent was he was trying to be funny, but he didn't realise he was a joke. Yes. And I think there's an element of that to Burnham. He's trying to be down with us and he doesn't realise how cringey it comes across. That's right. Well, I mean, it comes across cringey to us and we're both Generation Xs. What are you, Scarlett?

5:13A millennial? I'm a millennial. Who let her in the studio? Excuse me, I'm a millennial. No, you're not. You're on the top. Exactly millennial. No, you're not. You're on the cusp. Yeah, well, cusp of male or female. I'm still male. But I am a millennial. You identify as a millennial. I am a millennial. Who let these people into the studio? I'm a millennial, thank you very much. It's amazing you're here and not still in bed, isn't it? I'm still a target writer. Opining the state of things. OK, Scarlett, we've got two megapoles. Can you explain them? Or is it just one megapole that's been broken down into two?

5:43What's happened? Who's polled whom? And what has it found? YouGovMRP. Can you just quickly explain, is this a significant poll? I mean, it is a significant poll. So first of all, an MRP, it's a model rather than a poll. So MRP stands for multi-level regression and post-stratification. And basically, it's a way of doing a sort of super poll that takes into account lots of different things. So normal polls, normal voting intention polls that you see every week will probably survey 2000 people across the country. And then we'll get, say, you know, reform on 24%, Labour on 25, etc. That's all very well and good.

6:15The problem is in our parliamentary system with 650 constituencies, it doesn't actually tell you that much about what the likely seat outcomes or makeup of parliament will be because there's 650 different constituencies. And that percentage could look very different depending on where it stacks up in what places. And so to get around this, pollsters designed these models. Now, they have been very accurate in the past. They've also not been that accurate in the past. But what they do is they look at the different characteristics of different demographics and say, OK, we think if you are older, if you are less educated, if you live in somewhere like this, you will vote a certain way.

6:47And then they apply that and see, OK, how many voters do we have of these demographics in each individual constituency? And that helps them try and predict how that behaviour will work in each constituency, which is how you then end up with what we've got in front of us here, which is these different seat projections. I believe this one's from YouGov, although we've actually had two or three out recently, but this does look like the YouGov one that came out today. YouGov is significant. YouGov haven't released a model, I believe, in a year, maybe give or take. And they're normally quite a big occasion just because YouGov is such a well-branded and well-known pollster.

7:18And so we can really see the difference in how the outcomes would look compared to their last poll, their last MRP rather. And I think what's really interesting here is seeing the Labour performance improve, but still not close to a majority government and the decline of Reform UK. Right. Tim, you go through the figures. In September 2025, this poll had Reform UK getting 311 seats far and away ahead. Labour on 144, Lib Dems 78 and the Conservatives collapsing to 45. So that is reform quite easily forming a coalition government with the Conservative Party. This September, YouGov has Labour getting 241 seats, so they're in first position, Conservatives in second with 130, Reform UK on 123, Lib Dems on 71, SMP on 40, which is a big recovery for the SMP from the last election.

8:19Now, that's the seat totals. So seat totals is Labour first place, Tory second, Reform third. But what's interesting, Scarlett, is the percentage that they get is slightly different. They're all very close together on percentages in the early 20s. But in percentage terms, Reform is actually ahead of the Tories. So it's Labour first, Reform second, Tory third. So despite that, Reform's still placing third in the number of seats. How can that be so? Well, there's a couple of things to note. And I think, first of all, I will just caveat as well with these MRPs, with these seat predictions, especially at this point in the electoral cycle, when the public's not sort of plugged into an election, when we're not in a campaign, they can be, they can not necessarily be the best predictor of what will happen.

9:03In fact, they're not necessarily meant to predict. They're meant to just sort of replicate what would happen if people voted like this. And then the second thing is, again, as you pointed out, all the parties are polling incredibly close together. And in fact, even in the seat projections that we have, four in 10 of these seats that YouGov have done are within five percentage points of the vote between the winner and the second category. So a tiny amount of movement or voter behavioural change could have huge impact in the seat outcomes that we're seeing in front of us. So I think it is just important to say that I don't think listeners and viewers should take this as sort of an absolute data point saying this is exactly what will happen because there's actually a lot more in flux than that.

9:36But what's happening there with Reform UK compared to the Conservatives is YouGov have a very efficient Conservative vote, which just means they're stacking votes up in places they can win. Whereas the Reform vote, firstly, is less efficient. So it's more evenly spread throughout the country. So you don't get, it's like the Liberal Democrats, for example, at the moment have a very efficient vote. They were more likely to put on votes in places they can already win. In places the Liberal Democrats don't have a presence, they're not wasting many votes there at all. The second factor in this is the extent of tactical voting.

10:07Now, most pollsters are increasingly anticipating a lot of anti-reform tactical voting, which will also harm their seat count here. Can I call this for what I'm seeing here, to use a Boogie Nights reference? This is a Dirk Diggler result. This is a super hung parliament. Oh, I know it's grotesque, but that's what this is. Because at the end of the day, we've done a daily tea on should Andy Burnham call a general election early. And the conclusion was probably not because the bounce is a blip and it's not that great. And if you were looking at this projected Labour number, you'd be thinking to yourself, why on earth would I call an election to squander my majority unless I literally wanted to commit Theresa May-esque Harry Carey?

10:52Second of all, you might conclude by looking at these figures that because of this broader spread of support across more parties, the end of the two party system, it basically looks to me that this is heading towards a left wing coalition or a right wing coalition. And it's just about the numbers. So say if we add up the righties, Conservative plus reform gets us to 243. No, that gets us nowhere. That is not nowhere close. Just to say, I agree with everything you're saying. So politics is now multi-party. People are voting for what they want. And yet it still kind of falls into two camps of a left block and a right block.

11:34But the curious thing is, neither block actually has enough seats in this model to form a majority government. Yes, that's why I'm saying it's super hung. We need to add, of course, you can govern by a minority government and you can have an arrangement with a party whereby they vote on supply. so they will let your financial bills, etc. go through and you can survive as a government. But what you need in this country to have a majority is 326 votes. Yes. So you're right. The Conservative plus reform result takes you to just 253. So that's nowhere close. They would have to deal with the Lib Dems and even then they don't quite do it.

12:13Yes. But equally the Lib Dems and Labour can't do it either. If Labour joins with the Lib Dems, that takes you to 200... No, 300. 312. Yeah. That takes you to 312. To carry on my boogie nights analogy... Then you add the green votes... By the way, this is like Ed Davey is the fluffer in chief here. Which side will he go to? It's absolutely appalling a prospect. We know he'll go to Labour. But if you take the 312 combined Labour and Lib Dem votes, you're still short. You add green... Oh, God, do we have to? 300. That brings you up to 321. You're still five short. Plaid will go in with the left.

12:54Other is three. Well, you're going to have to start allying with nationalist parties like Plaid. And Plaid will just say, I want you to pave Wales in gold. Yeah. And we'll come on to the political consequence of that in a second. But I just want to double check with you, Scarlett. This movement of labour recovering, reform collapsing, and the Tories somehow just by kind of standing still eclipsing reform only just, is that reflected in other polling? I think it is, actually. And again, I think you're right to point out that the Conservatives are basically standing still in this picture. It's not actually that they're making huge gains.

13:30But what we are seeing, I think there's a couple of interesting things going on. So we are seeing a Labour recovery under Andy Burnham, still not up to where they were anyway, close actually to where they were when they won the general election already on a very low share of the vote in 2024. And we're seeing a decline in support for reform. Now, I think what's really interesting was Keir Starmer was such an unpopular prime minister, such an unpopular politician. He was the sort of bogeyman of everyone really in the country. And so that meant you had left wing voters that were willing to vote against him as well as right wing voters.

13:59When you remove him from the picture and just replace him with someone, now Andy Burnham is still in net positive territory. but I have a feeling as you say it's more of a bounce than necessarily a prolonged period of affairs when you remove that really unpopular figure suddenly everything just looks a lot more like people are a bit like well don't really necessarily love any of the options which is what this result produces it's a not giving a sort of a definitive vote to anyone in particular and you know first past the post gets an awful lot of criticism I suspect after a result like this it will get even more because it will be a very chaotic hung parliament.

14:32However, I would just say that I think this result actually really accurately reflects the mood of the country, which is that a majority of people don't feel represented by a political party at all. Most of them don't trust any of the politicians they've got on offer to deliver the results or the change they would like to see. And that's why you get something like this. A year ago, reform was clearly the leading party in some polls in the early 30s in its support. Why has that support fallen, can you link it to a particular event or a change in the dynamic? Is it Andy Burnham competing in the Red Wall or is it all the financial scandal?

15:08Or is it down to Restore, which is taking three percentage points from Reform's vote? So it's down to basically, in short, pretty much all the above. And I think what's dangerous for Reform at the moment is they're losing different parts, quite very different parts of their coalition and they're going in different directions. So if you look at Reform a year ago, you're absolutely right. They were dominant in the polls. In most polls, I think they have between like an 8 % and 10 % lead. They still weren't getting regularly above 30%, but in the way things are at the moment, that was enough to produce majorities or close to majorities in a lot of these seat projections.

15:40I think things started going wrong for reform in a number of ways. Firstly, the Conservative defections, I think, really hurt reform amongst some of their voters or the bulk of their voters that wanted to vote reform to see change. They were looking for an anti-establishment vote. They were really fed up with the Conservative Party. So they said, You know, why are you taking these conservatives then? Doesn't that mean you're just more of the same? So I think that hurt Nigel Farage and reform space. The corruption allegations have really hurt them. And what's really interesting about that, again, is I think they've made conservative voters less willing to vote for reform tactically, to see a right-wing government and even encouraged conservative voters to vote against reform tactically and think, OK, I might even rather a sort of left-wing coalition just because I'm so disgusted at what's going on in reform.

16:23and there are other issues as well I think you know when we talk to voters the restore is definitely more of a phenomenon than I think a lot of us have got our head around still and it's not quite the phenomenon people think it is so I think the stereotype of a restore voter is the sort of you know it's difficult to describe it like that sort of online very very right-wing very very vocal anti-immigration support now it is an anti-immigration vote you know those voters do feel very strongly about immigration but what I found in focus groups when we encounter those voters is actually they're saying you know this might sound strange to some people but they're saying actually we're voting restore because we think they're less racist and they're less sort of vulgar than reform so it's quite interesting dynamics going on there no i know but it's because they see videos of rupert lowe on facebook predominantly and he might not even be talking about immigration probably on a farm with his animals or be talking about how you have the right to take your children out of school summer holidays early or you know whatever it is um but they're actually, for a lot of voters, they think the version of Rupert Lowe they see is less extreme and less racist than Nigel Farage and some of the other figures in reform.

17:25You know, again, I think it's quite hard for commentators sometimes to understand how things filter down to people. That's so interesting. Anyway, lots of interesting going on. But in short, reform is in trouble because they are losing support in lots of different directions and for lots of different reasons. And we've also seen Nigel Farage, I think, again, because of the corruption scandals and because of the sort of real kicking he's taken for the last few months, his popularity is really going down. And again, it's going down even with people who've liked him for 20 years. This is interesting though, isn't it?

17:53Because if he pivots further right, what you're saying, Scarlett, suggests that might not particularly help him, even though Restore are eating into his support base by a margin of 3%, which is what apparently people inside Reform HQ were worried about. Meanwhile, to go back to Davy, and I'm sorry for planting that analogy in people's minds, but this idea of Ed Davy of all people being the kind of power broker, the playmaker, the kingmaker potentially, is interesting because then of course Kemi Badenock, who has tacked further rightwards in order to compete with Reform, also has a chance of perhaps expanding her supporter base by appealing to some of those Liberal Democrats.

18:36But if she does that, then people will accuse her of speaking right and governing left. So she's in a sticky situation herself. And then isn't it interesting that Davey, again, at conference, a conference which didn't go down particularly well, you know, the speech appeared facile, and there are now Liberal Democrats calling for him to go. But he's been flirting with the idea of doing a deal with the Conservatives, because he now appreciates he's in this quite unique position where he could play both sides off against each other. We care, we fight. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing is a conservative Lib Dem deal would make no sense if they were to do a sort of non-aggression pact or anything in an election because all the Lib Dem seats are conservative Lib Dem fights.

19:17They're blue wall seats, right? Yeah, exactly. If he could somehow persuade the conservatives to stand down in all those seats, I just don't think it would make any sense and I don't think it's going to happen. And again, if you think about it at the moment, you're absolutely right. The Conservative Party is technically the party at the moment of still leaving the ECHR of mass deportations. Is that really going to be a party that the Liberal Democrats can enter a coalition or any sort of agreement with? It doesn't seem that way. Certainly not if it also involved reform. This is the other issue, isn't it, for that side of the argument.

19:47On these numbers, it would have to involve reform. Of course it would. And I think that would put off the Liberal Democrats. But equally, are they going to be put off? This is all about, well, who's going to be put off by whom? Yes. Is there going to be a problem on the left if Zach Polanski's lot want to join in, along with, as you say, some of the nationalist parties? I mean, that 40 SNP MPs could be useful. But of course, the Scots, Nats and Labour are at war in Scotland with each other. And Labour has spent a great amount of time absolutely slagging off everything Nicola Sturgeon's done to try and regain some supremacy there.

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21:56your podcasts.

22:04I suspect that whatever people say about reform being the new Nazi party, the next parliament with these numbers would be more about trying to keep those 40 SNP MPs out of government than they would be about trying to keep reform out of government. Do you think? It's how can you come up with a formula on numbers that means you don't have to bring the nationalists into government with you or rely upon them because their price is going to be a second referendum exactly so this is also going to be so it's going to be about right versus left coalition it's going to be about unionists and separatists it's probably still going to be about sovereigntists and globalists but you made a point about Andy Burnham having a preference for proportional representation earlier well if you read his interview with Tom McTaggan the new statesman, McTagg tries to squeeze out of him a sort of animating principle, one thing he's willing to go to the wall over.

22:59And it seems to be proportional representation. It's one thing that jumps out that he feels very strongly about, that this country should have PR. Scarlett, if we had PR, do you think this would look different? Because actually, this looks like a PR result. That's the funny thing. Yes. Yeah, it actually wouldn't necessarily look hugely different to what it is now. Reform UK are actually you know even given what Andy Burnham was saying Reform UK are actually hurt by first past the post under this system slightly not not hugely and the Conservative slightly benefit and the Lib Dem was about about the same just as they were at the last election in fact the Lib Dems here slight again ironically given how much they've been campaigning for PR over the years slightly benefiting from first past the system here would go backwards if there was proportional representation so it is a really interesting question but I do think that it'll be interesting to see whether Andy Burnham does maintain this because something that I mean I've noticed is that parties tend to sort of pipe up or be quiet about PR depending on when they are or are not benefiting from it.

23:55Yeah that's right. The same with reform by the way. Yeah so exactly so we heard an awful lot from reform at the last general election with their five MPs and 14 % of the vote saying this is an absolute travesty. We heard a lot less this time last year when you know their sort of high 20 % of the vote was potentially going to put them in governing majority territory so So some might say on reform, when you look at the local, the recent local elections, this seems so juxtaposed, doesn't it? This MRP polling in comparison to how well they did, the Reform Party. I think it doesn't. It doesn't. Again, the local elections was an interesting example.

24:26So, again, you have low turnout in the local elections. And again, I would just say, so the reform, I think we probably talked about this time, actually, the reform campaign in the local elections was fought solely. It was a get Starmer out. That was their national message that they took everywhere. You can do that when Starmer was, again, was the most, actually Rachel Reeves was technically the most unpopular politician in the country, but Starmer was more unpopular than Farage and there were voters across the spectrum motivated on this message of getting Starmer out. But again, even reformed their vote share, they had lots of victories.

24:53Their vote share went down on the year before. So actually it was a sort of, it was quite a good predictive indicator to suggest all was potentially not well amongst reformed voters in terms of how they were feeling about the party. You mentioned when talking about Restore's vote that some people have been put off voting reform because of the Tory defections, because it makes reform look uni-party. Three casualties in this poll, three reform MPs who would lose their seats, even as the party gains dozens of others, are Rob Jenrick, Suella Braverman, and Danny Kruger. ironic but does that confirm the point about the Tory vote being strong or at least thick in those constituencies where they do well I don't mean intelligently no I know I mean you mean deep because the point is is that those three are in really Tory constituencies they are in Tory constituencies or they're quite different constituencies from from others so I would have thought pre-generic defection by the way but if you'd have just had And if you'd had a by-election in Newark, say, a year ago with a generic Conservative candidate, a generic Reform candidate, a generic Labour candidate, I think Reform would have won that seat.

26:07I don't think the case. I think Danny Kruger, I think that seat was always going to stay Conservative, even this time last year. Most model predictions had Danny Kruger's seat saying Conservative. I do think it does show you, though, that the fight for the right is not over. So I think this time last year, going into Conservative conference, I feel a lot of Conservatives even were feeling that potentially they had lost that battle for voters to see who was the main party on the right. And now it's very much up for grabs again. Although, again, looking at these numbers, it's not necessarily actually that the Conservatives have hugely benefited in some senses from the reform vote going down.

26:40All that's happened is the right bloc overall has just shrunk. But then when we look at some of these policy announcements, so let's take Kemi Badenock on welfare today. She's written for The Telegraph telling everybody how bad she thinks Andy Burnham is faring. And she's made this suggestion that the Conservatives will block jobless from spending benefits on alcohol and indeed cigarettes. This is what I would call kind of like Centre for Social Justice, sort of Duncan Smith type policymaking in terms of we can't increase the benefits bill simply for it to be spent on booze and fags. and I've got a kind of personal affinity with that because I've previously made the point on the Daily Tea.

27:16The notion of giving PIP payments to addicts is just preposterous. You're killing people with kindness because they take that money from the state straight to the off-licence or in other cases to their drug dealer and they kill themselves more quickly and it's funded by the taxpayer. So it makes no sense at all. But I'm interested to know, Scarlett, when it comes to this big row that keeps on going on about welfare, It's almost become as significant, I think, in the public's conscience as immigration. And the two are interlinked, aren't they? Because the idea of people coming here illegally and then being able to claim benefits is driving people slowly potty.

27:53Do protestations like this from Badenock have a chance of increasing support for the Conservatives? Benefits is a more complex question than it first looks. So we are seeing that overall, when you ask the public the question, should the benefits bill be reduced, essentially, you get more and more of the public saying yes there is a sense that the country is spending too much on benefits the difficulty or where this gets more nuanced is which benefits and who are they cut for um and so what you do find in the public is there's no appetite for cutting the triple lock and that's across age groups you know no matter what what quite a lot of young wonks think or want to happen it's not it's not a popular move um and that's obviously the actually the largest part of the bill uh but even then when you get to things like disability benefits most people think disability benefits should be increased rather than decreased.

28:38And when you really drill down into it, a lot of voters are actually only willing to see benefits cuts for migrants or for young people. And there's not much more they're willing to give way on. And so it's again, it's this, I think, you know, if there is a politician that wants to lead the conversation and move the public to potentially a sort of more sustainable footing or benefits, that's great. But there is quite a lot of leading to be done. I say I really agree with that. And I think that parties on the right, which assume they're on to an election winning pitch with we need to cut the overall bill.

29:12I don't think they're right. Because I partly because of the size of the bill, it touches so many people's lives. Things like PIP, mobility cars, motability cars. I know people who get these things. And it becomes harder and harder to withdraw benefits when more people are getting them because everyone can say but i know someone who gets this and they really need it no well that's right if you're saying that 50 of the population is entitled to some sort of benefit or another then you're not just talking about the working classes who might be minded to vote labor you're also talking about middle class people very much who might be minded to vote for the lib dems and the conservatives and by the way as we've previously discussed nigel farage's own supporters in clacton who are overrepresented in the benefits tables so to speak i would add on Kemi's proposal, to me, the more significant thing than the you can't spend it on booze and fags is it tries to introduce a contributory principle into the system.

30:05So the idea is that if you're made unemployed for the first six months, you get universal credit the same as you always do. But after those six months, the amount of money you get depends on how many years you have worked. So for every two years you have worked, you get one year of full universal credit, which means if you're in your mid-50s and you lose your job you get full universal credit up until retirement but if you are younger than that or if you have been long-term unemployed you don't get it and in that case you fall back onto a subsistence allowance of 70 percent of universal credit which is paid for through this card that can only be used for food and essentials so that my point is so scarlet you mentioned what where do people want benefits to be cut Well, reform emphasises for foreign nationals.

30:54And what the Tories are doing there by introducing this contributory principle is cut it for the young. It'll be the young because they've not been paying in because they've not been working and paying their taxes. Or they might just try and try to expose the lunacy. Most rational people think that benefits should be used for food or for energy costs or for things that support the poor to get back into work. They are, to be fair, you know, William Hague's common sense revolution. They are tapping into something, which is that most sane people, regardless of their ideology, do think that it is not right for people to be given increases in their benefits only to spend them on booze and fax.

31:38Yeah, but just to say that will not apply. My point is that the card, which says that you can only use this card for food and essentials, will not apply to older people who are made unemployed. No, OK. So then it does disproportionately affect the young. So it's young people who will be forced to only buy food, water, etc. Older people will get the full universal credit up until retirement. I just think it's interesting that, I mean, I'm all for, because we discussed this in the previous programme, a contributory principle. That's how some European states do it. I think that's a very good reform.

32:09But one perhaps unintended effect will be that the young, yet again, are the ones who get the cut, whereas older voters are looked after and nothing changes for them. It might not be an accident given that that's where the Conservative vote is concentrated, though, because there is heavily concentrated in those older voters, which, again, has explained quite a lot of the policy we've seen over the last couple of decades. Also concentrated among women, according to a graph you saw yesterday, Tim. So Tim turned to me and said, if only women were allowed to vote, which strikes me as a fabulous idea, Scarlett, the Conservatives would win hands down.

32:45um i yeah but i believe and people can write in and correct me but i believe that since the introduction of full suffrage for both sexes if only women had the vote would have had a conservative government in every occasion until 97 wow i write in to correct me but i one reason why historically the tories opposed or some tories opposed suffrage because they didn't want women voting but they did so always knowing that the women would probably vote for them but for some reason british women and this is completely different to america where the voting there is gendered the other way men tend to vote republican and women tend to vote democrat in this country historically women have lent conservative and men partly because of the organized working class vote have lent labor well i tell you why back to the way things used to be i tell you why else they might lean labor because andy burnham's come up with a brilliant idea tim when he's not advocating realigning with the eu and possibly reversing the referendum he wants to reintroduce fans drinking alcohol in the stands at football matches.

33:47Scarlett, how many votes might that policy attract? Goodness knows, I've not polled that. But it's, I mean, I suspect it's him trying to play into his image of being, you know, a football fan, of every man. Pork scratching, eating. Yeah, and you know what, that's not done him any harm so far. Let's see. I mean, it's not, I don't think it's the sort of thing that will really, you know, if you're a member of the public that's really upset about a huge number of things, I think the fact that Andy Burnham has said, oh, you can now drink again. The football stand I don't think is going to move the dial.

34:14But, you know, I think it is very much playing into the sort of image of himself that he would like to project. I think it's a classic example of the left screw things up, Tories come in and fix it. And then everyone forgets how bad things used to be. And so they repeat the mistake all over again. Drinking in stadiums was banned in 1985 by the Thatcher government in the context of widespread football hooliganism. so i don't and and we have beaten that football hooliganism has been reduced partly because we've cut the link between alcohol and football i don't know it's so frustrating that after decades of enjoying the relative peace and quiet we'd then go well no one's getting drunk at a football match so why don't we bring the booze back i think quite a lot of them are getting coped up in the stands and also it's a funny time to say it because there is now an alliance between some of these people protesting in places like dover and portsmouth and football fandom but that's a subject for another day.

35:05Well, they will probably be tracked by this new data information centre. In fact, Labour actually benefits from first past the post in this latest YouGov projection. If this poll is correct, then we're heading for a situation in which any one of the left or right blocks would struggle to form a majority. And whilst that would be very funny, it's also very bad because there are two or three really important things that need to be done and Labour has failed to do them even with a super majority. Yes. You need to rein spending in. Yeah. You need to redesign the immigration system. Yeah. And grow the economy, please.

35:45And, well, it depends upon abundant and cheap electricity. Yes. These are three really complicated, difficult reforms that both blocs will have MPs who will be against the measures necessary to make them happen. so the next government needs to have a working majority that can beat rebellions i'm sorry i'm biased but the right if they formed a coalition once they get over their personal differences are likely to agree on much much more yes than actually a kind of like you know dolly mixtures socialist party of greens and libs and labs and goodness knows what else yeah and and the irony is is the greens for example might get very relatively few votes relatively few seats but because of this coalition they will have a veto power yes over anything that labor and the lib dems and he may be played tries to do yeah polanski will be given far more power than he ever deserves yes so i think for anyone who's who's thinking the important thing is just embarrassing people and creating chaos and isn't it hilarious isn't it fun no consider what we've got right now and make it 10 times worse, a situation in which a party cannot govern and has to rely upon its votes upon an extremist organisation, basically what the Greens are now, they're essentially communist, to rely upon them and give them veto power over any sensible policy.

37:12So one thing one must conclude from all of this is the centre-right has got to get its stuff together. You cannot afford, guys, to go on doing this. The battle for who's going to come second is irrelevant. Yeah. All that matters is who comes first. Paging the centre right. For goodness sakes, save us from a fate worse than what we have now. Scarlett Maguire, Merlin Strategy. Lovely to see you. Post baby as well. Congratulations on becoming a mum. Thank you.

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