Get ready for a pub brawl, it's local election time

0:00Have you ever been stuck on a weight loss plateau, trying everything and anything you can to lose that extra weight and reach peak health? We've all been there, but Noom's unlocked the secret to reaching the mountaintop. Go in micro. The Noom GLP-1 microdose program starts at$99 and is delivered to your door in 7 days. Start your microdose GLP-1 journey today at Noom.com. That's N-O-O-M dot com. Noom. Microchanges. Big results. Noom GLP-1-RX program involves healthy diet, exercise, and support. Individual results may vary. Meds and personalization based on clinical need. Not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy, or quality.

0:37No affiliation with Novo Nordisk Inc., the only U.S. source of FDA-approved semaglutide. Not available in all 50 U.S. states.

0:44Gabriel Pogrund: I'm looking at the agenda for our Life Sciences Summit on May the 21st. There's so much turmoil right now over drug pricing. It's a massive conflict between industry innovation and the reality of the NHS budgets. Yeah, it's a fascinating topic and the NHS has done its job of getting extremely cheap drugs and then President Trump has done his job of saying but hang on you're free riding on all of our research money and marrying that tension is it's been really hard this is something that I think we'll be looking into on the day. Yeah it's going to be really interesting to hear from our speakers like Patrick Vallance and Melanie Iverson I should warn everyone listening it's already a heavily subscribed event we've got over 200 of the best in the sector signed up to join us I'm definitely looking forward to tackling those tough conversations though and having a real look at what's happening across the sector.

1:25Yeah, look, I mean, obviously, go to thetimes.com forward slash events to find out more.

1:32In the early hours of the 8th of May, we are going to witness another, even bigger, more dramatic political earthquake when reform achieved results in Sunderland and elsewhere that nobody can yet believe.

1:54The potential nightmare for Keir Starmer is this. While Labour come third in Scotland, third in Wales, they lose control of Barnsley and Sunderland and places like that to reform, and they lose significant seats in London to the Green.

2:15I always think of that scene in Superman where Lewis Lane falls out of the window and she gets captured by, caught by Superman, and he says, don't worry, ma 'am, I've got you. She says, you've got me. Who's got you? We should ask that about Rachel Reeves.

2:30Gabriel Pogrund: Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, the political editor of The Times. I'm Gabriel Pogrand, Whitehall editor at The Sunday Times. I'm Lara Spirit, deputy political editor of The Sunday Times. And we are sitting in our new studio, which is fabulous, has been done by our brilliant producers, Molly and Ewan. and it's basically we're in a Westminster if you can't see it when it looks like we're in a kind of classic Westminster bar stroke eatery is that how we describe it what are we yeah it's incredible I think what did you say it was sort of the blue ball cross with somewhere blue ball cross with the cinnamon club I feel like I can sort of smell Patrick and Tim Shipman like on the other side of the room it oozes the energy of the postcode that we spend most of our times we've even got we've got a globe here with some booze in it by the looks of things which we're not partaking in right now it's quite early in the day but uh yeah it's a classic westminster surrounds i think it makes it puts us at ease i think the lurid yellow before it was like we needed a leather paneled pub in order to be our true selves so what we offer you today is like the full truth as to we'll give you the full truth and the full analysis that this podcast has always promised and exactly it's in keeping with our mission statement which is to take listeners and viewers inside the story inside the room where it's happening to tell people what is actually going on and the discussions that are taking place in Whitehall and Westminster.

3:53Gabriel Pogrund: This week we are going to be looking at the absolute carnage that's going to come at the elections in one month's time. We sit here today one month out from the May the 7th local and Welsh and Scottish elections and that will be seismic. It will redefine the political landscape. We're a scoop for you on reform slogan for that which we will give you shortly. And then we want to talk about Iran and the cost of living, which we have to talk about because it's so significant and it's going to hit so many people coming down the line. But let's kick off with the local elections. I mean, carnage is the right word, Lara.

4:26Gabriel Pogrund: You've got the figures there, I think. So this projection that was done a couple of weeks ago by Stephen Fisher was updated, a professor at the University of Oxford. I shouldn't call them projections, rather, we should call them an analysis. They're looking at recent polling and polling over the last few years and election results to say what we might be looking at come May the 7th. And it is a triumph for reform, which of course many were expecting, but I think the scale of it is quite extraordinary. So 2 ,260 seats they're forecast to pick up. That is partly driven by, well in large part driven by Labour and the Conservatives losing three and four of all the seats that they are contesting.

5:03I mean in England we should say if this projection or this analysis holds fruit then you're looking at Labour only holding 13 % of the seats that they are contesting. The last time most of these were up in 2022, Labour held more than half of those. So it would be an extraordinary collapse in support for Labour. 1 ,900 seats that they would be forecast to lose in these circumstances. And I mean, they are clearly, along with the Conservatives, who are forecast to lose about 1 ,000 seats, going to be the big losers of the night. The big question, of course, is the specifics of this. So if we look at places like London, that is a big, big concern in the Cabinet, elsewhere in government as to how Labour is going to perform because they're not only looking like they're likely to hemorrhage voters to the Green Party which is a phenomenon that's been pretty fairly well covered I think particularly some of those inner boroughs places like Islington, Camden.

5:51Gabriel Pogrund: Camden, Starmers. Of course Starmers' own backyard and of course Daisy your colleague Steve had a fantastic piece about the lone councillor in the Greens in Camden who is seeking to take over that particular borough in Starmers' backyard and I sat in a focus group last week by more in common of those who voted for Starmer in the last election in his constituency in Holbrooke of St Pancras, who I think it's fair to say, very disappointed in his leadership, some of them flirting with the Greens, but generally speaking, just really, really bad news for Sir Keir Starmer in his own backyard. But you're also facing for Labour a kind of five-party brawl in London, where they are fighting not just the Greens, but also the Conservatives in places like Westminster and Wandsworth, the Lib Dems in a place like Merton.

6:33They're targeting that in a very big way at the moment in their kind of stronger southwest of the city. And then reform in the outer boroughs as well. I mean, places like Bexley reform is looking to pick up a great number of votes. So it's a really complex picture inside London. But I think the unambiguous story at the end of the night will probably be that or the end of the weekend will probably be that Labour has not done very well.

6:52Gabriel Pogrund: And the weird thing is, there is no traditional expectation management from Labour at the moment. They are just admitting it's going to be really bad. And what we mean by that is normally ahead of an election, you get them saying, we're going to lose X seats, it'll be, and then the actual result is better than that. So they can say, you know, beaten the expectations. We're not getting that because I think they all acknowledge it's going to be carnage. That's right. I think what's also so tough for them is take London you know Lara was just very eloquently outlining the risks posed to the party both in the sort of redoubts of the inner city Labour's traditional strongholds but then also in the donut which paved the way for Boris's mayoral tease and which has always tilted conservative tilted right what's so tough about that and london is kind of possibly a microcosm for this much wider phenomenon is you can see a world as in the court and indent in by-election by the way in which reform and the greens have historic historic night where their vote share goes through the roof where they are both able to conclude that one has established themselves as the predominant party of the right the other has established themselves as the predominant party of progressive politics and i suppose you know the question of which way labor faces is the perennial question for labor is the perennial question needless to say for any party which attempts to govern from the center but in this instance you're going to have a world in which everybody who's been making the case for labor to chase voters who backed brexit who voted for boris johnson in 2019 who paved the way for the 2019 red war success is going to be emboldened by a world in which reform emerge victorious and yet as we know the psychology of the parliamentary labour party the social world that most labour mps and cabinet ministers inhabit you know they need no encouragement to identify the threat they face by zach polensky's greens and in this instance i mean there are two versions of david lammy we've witnessed over the last fortnight one is the public version in which he i think told the new statesman that he had total confidence that the greens could would never win a seat like his in tottenham and you know he was being very forthright about that privately as laura reported on sunday well he is worried and part of the reason why he's worried is uh well as you reported that he doesn't feel the government has sold its record on domestic affairs adequately and i mean and this is amazing i i think this is a prelude to a return to the uh argument that will sadly loom over us indefinitely he also thinks the party needs to make more of its rapprochement with the eu so we're in a weird world where this is going to be the definitive electoral event of at least the first half of this parliament and it's only a month away and we've all been waiting for it and we think it's going to resolve the situation weirdly could be well we're only reignite interminable ongoing debate and as patrick wrote in his column last week doesn't actually do for starmer because as steve just said we all think he's going to prefer terribly anyway so um it in some ways if you're hoping for uh for it's time to deliver a moment of catharsis and resolution you may be sorely disappointed but in keeping that expectation management laura let's talk about your story for a minute because david lammy it's front page of sunday times at the weekend but it's essentially doing the post-mortem now let's call it a pre-mortem if we if we can do that linguistic bastardization um can you just walk us through the thinking on that yeah so uh he has raised you do a post-mortem on your pre-mortem sorry um he has made it known uh he's raised concerns internally about the party's election strategy and their prospects in the upcoming elections he's obviously particularly worried about london as gabriel says he's been the tottenham MP since I think 2000.

11:01So, you know, for more than a quarter of a century now, he's been in that particular patch of London. And despite his more bullish personal pronouncements, clearly he harbours quite grave concerns about how the party is set to perform in May and also clearly has quite clear views about what they should be doing preemptively to rectify that, including being more open about its domestic achievements, of which I'm not explicitly clear exactly what that refers to. But one of the things that they are, as Gabriel mentioned so significantly, one of the things that Lamy is keen for them to do is obviously to be louder about the fact that they are publicly seeking a closer relationship with the European Union, which is something that we heard Keir Starmer put front and centre of that address to the nation last week when he spoke about the cost of living and the Iran war fallout.

11:43Obviously, that's been criticised as something of a comms exercise because it wasn't like we had that much by way of specific promises or pronouncements by way of what that reset in actual final terms will look like. but I think it for Starmer it clearly represents a direction of travel precisely how loud and how ambitious they want to be about it clearly remains to be seen and Lammy clearly privately thinks that they should be doing much more to make that case and that one of the things we're going to see on May is a hemorrhaging of voters to the Green Party and that one of the things perhaps they could have done before is to be a bit louder about what it was that they were planning on doing.

12:16Gabriel Pogrund: So Lammy says pick a direction I have a feeling that Nigel Farage will be really pleased if that is the direction and they end up going in a kind of more pro-EU, much louder on that. We should talk briefly about one of our scoops this week, which is Reform's election slogan for the elections is going to, really simple, is going to be vote reform, get Starmer out. And what they are trying to do is effectively make these local elections a referendum on Starmer, much like Labour did in the last election, where they did the same to the Tories, you know, get the Tories out. so they are trying to make this referendum on starmer's popularity they see him as the weak spot and i think they're arguably right to do so because his polling is so appalling he is so unpopular and we've talked about it many times on this podcast um so they just want to make it a binary vote reform get rid of starmer so get starmer out so it's we are operating within the tradition of three word slogans and happily for reform as you said it serves their interest to say get starmer out and not get the labor party out and it's not a positive offer though is it it's not a you know vote for us for a brighter future and all that it is a very aggressive one that is built on a negative get him out yeah and get him out rather than i mean this is sort of an inversion of the dynamic that prevailed when he inherited the party but starmer is now in a situation where his party is more of a palatable proposition for many voters than his own personal brand and as you say farage is very very alive to that fact and also you can sort of see the deafness of it as a strategy for what is effectively a set of midterm elections in that it doesn't it's not propositional it doesn't require outline of policy it just enables them to tap into the dissent and hostility towards one person to which you refer i don't know if that came out in your conversations to you when you were reporting i mean they've done they've done loads of internal polling on it.

14:13Gabriel Pogrund: They think people really like it as a slogan. It kind of has an impact and the impact that they want. But it does mean that we are increasingly in an era where politics is defined by people being in opposition to things. I remember when it was all about Boris Johnson being about get Jeremy Corbyn out, get Brexit done. Then, you know, after that, you had Labour just going after Liz Truss and the Tories. And what you hear less of is a kind of positive slogans that often this is just the way politics has gone. I guess it's always been that way but it's particularly stark given the level of change we've had in recent years yeah i mean i think in a way it's slightly ironic because we're just getting to a point where the settled opinion at least in the parliamentary labor party seems to be that starmer won't be going immediately after may and actually that his position seems somewhat fortified while not invincible and i'm actually my view having done that local elections read was that i just don't think the psyche of those labor and peas is quite prepared for how bad it's going to feel if those losses are realized there's a disconnect between westminster and just how bad it might well be um but it is interesting given i mean we had some polling over the weekend showing kemi badenock is now the most popular of the party leaders in the country i mean which i looking at that was so striking how just how unpopular starmer is and she in a way sort of threw him a lifeline when she was asked by the telegraph last week if she would go and she said i don't think there's any leader that's thrown in the towel after a set of local election results which i thought was quite interesting by way of a comparison except the prime minister yeah so i I mean, look, bad night for the Tories, a bad night for Labour, but it will redefine things.

15:41Gabriel Pogrund: And it is, what, seven parties plus independents. And everywhere you go, it's actually, from a journalistic point of view, it's a really interesting challenge to write about because it's so varied. We're going to be sending, and I'm sure the Sunday Times will as well, people to all parts of the country. We did Sunderland at the weekend. We're going to be doing Birmingham. We'll be doing different dispatches from Scotland, from Wales, you name it. It is so different and disparate in many ways. even though there's this common theme of reform making gains and Labour losing a lot of ground and the Tories losing a lot of ground.

16:12Gabriel Pogrund: A lot of different battlegrounds. Yeah I mean just there are a number of very interesting contests. I mean West Sussex for example where I was at the weekend something like a four-party fight there which is just extraordinary. I mean I think it's hard sometimes people to get their head around just how fragmented politics is and it's one of the reasons why after these elections there'll be a huge amount of fighting to determine exactly how bad or how good the results have been. I think it'll be unambiguous that reform will be the winners and the conservatism and uh labor will be the losers but there'll be people saying well how did reform compare to last year when they had that unprecedented win and if they didn't do quite so well in relative terms does that mean they're not doing as brilliantly now and there'll be people on the reform side saying you know if we've completely triumped as we're expected to this is just obviously an example that a kind of testament to the fact that we are the clear winners in british politics at the moment but um i mean there'll be a really big fight even for the liberal democrats who we haven't mentioned at the moment they're forecast to make modest gains but they've clearly been in a position where they're used to making big gains upon big gains upon big gains and you've even started to see some mutterings privately in the papers that some lived mps don't think ed davies up to it for example so it's not like they've got nothing to prove either on this night so it will be really fascinating i think yeah i'll also just make possibly a final word i mean i do think the the fate of the tories is one of those kind of massive stories that doesn't get the amplification it deserves because of the peril facing labor but you do wonder after this well what strategies are immediately available to them because you know their whole position is you know we're not only the official opposition but we are still the party of economic orthodoxy i mean if the voters suggest otherwise you know kevin baden has not elected to adopt a strategy similar to starmer's in terms of performative antagonism with her adversaries within the party um possibly out of a vain optimism i did ask some sources in tory high command the other day if liz truss remained a tory member i thought given her recent re launch of cpac uk um and her uh return to the to the agenda um it would be an interesting time to learn if she had herself discontinued her membership status no you know still in the party and i guess you know they are in this predicament where it wouldn't even help them to symbolically trash the people to the right because it is the people to the right who their own MPs fear are eating their lunch so I mean they're in it they're in a difficult place strategically it's not a good time for centrist politics it's not therefore a good time for them to you know attempt to move closer towards what Starm is offering so where they go after this I think is just a really fascinating question and the the variation the fragmentation to which you refer means that there are so many people occupying so many bits of the political terrain that it's not like there's one big spot for the tories to alight on that they haven't considered already so yeah we are going to be in this weird upside down world of let's assume maybe um i don't don't want to assume too readily but it could be in a world where starmer remains pm notwithstanding the fact that labour is being trashed and then the tories are the opposition for the remainder of the parliament even though they cease to be anything resembling that in the country so a very strange time for our politics awaits right well let's head to the interval when we come back we can talk about the iran war and the cost of living and the limits of what the government can do have you ever been stuck on a weight loss plateau trying everything and anything you can to lose that extra weight and reach peak health we've all been there but nooms unlocked a secret to reaching the mountaintop.

19:45Go in micro. The Noom GLP-1 microdose program starts at$99 and is delivered to your door in seven days. Start your microdose GLP-1 journey today at Noom.com. That's N-O-O-M dot com. Noom. Microchanges. Big results. Noom GLP-1RX program involves healthy diet, exercise, and support. Individual results may vary. Meds and personalization based on clinical need. Not reviewed by FDA for safety, efficacy, or quality. No affiliation with Novo Nordisk Inc., the only U.S. source of FDA-approved semaglutide. Not available in all 50 U.S. states. Refresh your room, upgrade your comfort, and spring into savings at Darvin's two-day spring sale.

20:24Hi, I'm Will Harris for Darvin Furniture. Friday and Saturday only save 45 to 65 % store-wide. Plus, we'll make your refresh a breeze with 0 % APR for 48 months on qualifying purchases. A whole new season, a whole new space. The two-day sale, Friday and Saturday only at Darwin. Restrictions apply. See you store for details.

20:47Gabriel Pogrund: I'm looking at the agenda for our Life Sciences Summit on May the 21st. There's so much turmoil right now over drug pricing. It's a massive conflict between industry innovation and the reality of the NHS budgets. Yeah, it's a fascinating topic and the NHS has done its job of getting extremely cheap drugs and then President Trump has done his job of saying, but hang on, you're free riding on all of our research money and marrying that tension has been really hard. This is something that I think we'll be looking into on the day. Yeah, it's going to be really interesting to hear from our speakers like Patrick Vallance and Melanie Iverson.

21:17Gabriel Pogrund: I should warn everyone listening, it's already a heavily subscribed event. We've got over 200 of the best in the sector signed up to join us. I'm definitely looking forward to tackling those tough conversations though and having a real look at what's happening across the sector. Yeah, look, I mean, obviously go to thetimes.com forward slash events to find out more. Welcome back to The State of It, the political podcast from the Times and the Sunday Times. We wanted to talk briefly about the Iran war and the cost of living. And there is what I'm picking up is mounting frustration within government on the assumptions.

21:49Gabriel Pogrund: So they believe that people have become conditioned to bailouts from the government, big bailouts. And from everything I'm hearing, we are not going to be getting a big bailout from the government. We're going to get a targeted bailout on energy bills come the winter, so miles away. So that's not happening yet. Doesn't sound like there's anything coming until September at the earliest on fuel duty. I think there are probably some questions to ask about that, because in other countries like Ireland, they've done fuel duty cuts. Australia, fuel duty cuts. Other countries, albeit from higher bases where fuel duty is higher anyway, so they've cut it.

22:24Gabriel Pogrund: But for a government, what do you do essentially about the cost of living when there is not not the money, the fiscal firepower to do it when the cost of government borrowing is going through the roof. How do you deal with that? And I think you guys had a bit in the Sunday Times at this at the weekend, which was some stuff on junk food. Yeah, well, our colleague Daniel Wolfson in business reported a fantastic story, which was on some of these food bosses calling for the government to rethink how it classes unhealthy foods. So they've got this planned overhaul of junk foods, which those particularly in the Department of Health are very passionate about.

22:56And what some in the food industry are saying is that adds undue costs on us, especially when food inflation is forecast to possibly 10 % later on this year, why are you going ahead with consulting on this and doing this kind of unduly onerous and expensive new government policy for us in circumstances where we're already facing these costs? And I think it's a good example of where all of these government plans and reforms that they've got, if they even cost a penny now, they're going to be under much stricter review and possibly might face being delayed or cancelled. I mean, we should say, you know, government officials saying this very much remains government policy at the moment it's a big part of their plan to tackle obesity something that we're treating the health secretary is very passionate about but it is it will be a massive overhaul if it comes into play because it basically affects whether or not you can stock your food in certain parts of the supermarket whether or not on how you can advertise your foods and you work harder to find my quavers when i go for my meal deal yeah you might not be able to find them uh quite in as much of a prominent position gabriel you might have to walk for about two seconds two seconds longer in the supermarket um so yeah so that i I think it just is a testament to how hard this is going to be for the government.

23:59Many different corners of it will be under pressure to come up with ways to ease the cost of living for consumers and businesses alike. And I think the business facet of this is probably more underexplored than with the wider British public. But at the moment, like you say, I don't think they've won this argument on the fact that they can't afford to make these bailouts. I mean, clearly, they're trying to say to people that they've got their interests at heart. They're looking at tackling down on what they see as possibly profiteering. profiteering and there's all this language about emboldening the competition and markets authority but I think that's a difficult argument to win in circumstances where they're sort of maybe also trying to say okay there's actually not that much we can do I mean it is it is it is hard they have basically made it known that they will probably do something targeted and now all the reporting is about exactly where that where that line is going to fall and anybody that doesn't come into qualification for any of that kind of bailout is obviously going to be rightly probably a bit annoyed.

24:49Gabriel Pogrund: I think there is a lag between the politics and the economics of this. So I was listening on the radio the morning quite early on in the day and they had this guy who was a maritime shipping expert and he was just soberly saying, yeah, this is much worse than the 70s oil crisis because oil permeates so much of what we do now and we're much more dependent on it. So it's going to be worse than that. Prices are going to continue to go up. They're probably going to go up over this, whatever happens, even if the Strait of Hormor is open tomorrow. That was all pretty bleak and then he got on to fertiliser and he just said people are really underestimating fertiliser because that means prices in shops are going to go up and so I think we are in a slightly suspended reality prices are going up people are feeling that at the pump they're going to feel it in their energy bills come later this year but the prices in shops is a particular issue and as a government what can you do about that you were elected on the grounds that you'd cut the cost of living and quite soon people are going to be feeling the pinch in the supermarkets you're start to see it with long-haul produce first you're going to see less of that that's come through holidays subsequently could be an issue that is a political nightmare to deal with absolutely i mean don't forget that this party has prided itself on its focus on the money in people's pockets they like talking about uh you know they don't like talking about economics in terms of you know fractions off interest rates or the big macro economic trends that feel abstract to people they do talk in terms of you know fuel at the pump in terms of the cost of everyday goods and that is something which a crisis of this variety is uh you know almost like laboratory grown to directly affect steve as you said it's you know not just oil but any products that oil or liquefied natural gases use to create and as well as that the kind of geopolitical uncertainty the uncertainty emanating from the white house perpetuates this sort of holding pattern we're in now where the government doesn't itself know what world it is intervening upon you know we're talking about bailouts we're talking about you know the fact that we've been conditioned publicly owing to the pandemic and this trust to expect a certain level of interventionism from the state but it isn't the government's in a weird world of saying we don't know what phenomenon we're even being expected to intervene upon and even if we do intervene it won't be in a way that you're anticipating that does not make for a particularly sellable position it seems to me for the time being that the best domestic political sell relies up to a point upon their ability to say this was not our geopolitical misadventure it wasn't our decision and in the circumstances which lest anybody forgets we remind you once again we're nothing to do with us we are taking labor decisions to back the people who labor exists to serve but you know it's not just labor's traditional voters who get to cast a vote in a month's time so it's a very very tricky predicament that they're already in and it's not quite clear who labor exists to serve i mean and that minor detail as well yes i mean they've never labor has never resolved that issue so how do you define that where do you draw the line you know benefits can go up um but at the same time taxes are going up we had a story on that today that the energy bill uh cut this is coming 117 pounds for middle income households will be entirely wiped out by the freezing thresholds i think the fertilizer point is really interesting if we can just pause on that for a minute because that is the thing that i'm told uh is coming up a lot in discussions between uh those in defra the uh obviously the environment department uh and farming department and uh the nfu who have been having regular discussions with them about just how this particular crisis is affecting farmers.

28:31It's fertilizer chiefly. It's also red diesel, of course, which has been disproportionately affected by the current cost of living crisis. And I think it'd be really interesting to watch reform in this space in the coming weeks, because they are very proud of the fact that increasing numbers of farmers are backing them. Very proud of the fact that actually they feel Labour have, through various mistakes of their own, dropped a lot of their support from this party. And I think they may, if you're looking at the kinds of things reform might advance by way of cost of living, I think this would be a particularly good area to watch because it's one of those areas where you've got a group of people who are already upset with the government.

29:03They're disproportionately affected by the coming cost of living crisis. And there's a party that is seeking to represent them and win their votes.

29:09Gabriel Pogrund: Right. I think that brings this week's episode, the State Fit, to a close. Gabriel, can you do our big red button to thank our amazing producers? Yeah, we're going to thank Molly, Ewan and Harry, and we will be with you next week. Looking at the agenda for our Life Sciences Summit on May the 21st, there's so much turmoil right now over drug pricing. It's a massive conflict between industry, innovation and the reality of the NHS budgets. Yeah, it's a fascinating topic and the NHS has done its job of getting extremely cheap drugs and then President Trump has done his job of saying, but hang on, you're free riding on all of our research money and marrying that tension has been really hard.

29:45This is something that I think we'll be looking into on the day.

29:48Gabriel Pogrund: Yeah, it's going to be really interesting to hear from our speakers like Patrick Vallance and Melanie Iverson. And I should warn everyone listening, it's already a heavily subscribed event. We've got over 200 of the best in the sector signed up to join us. I'm definitely looking forward to tackling those tough conversations, though, and having a real look at what's happening across the sector. Yeah, look, I mean, obviously, go to thetimes.com forward slash events to find out more. Hey, marketers, here's something to note. 75 % of listeners don't consider podcasters to be influencers, yet 84 % say a podcaster has changed their mind about something they once believed.

30:20That's the paradox of podcast influence. It's built on credibility, not clout, trust, not trends. ACAST's Podcast Pulse 2025 report reveals how podcast creators are redefining influence through resonance, multi-platform fandoms, and their ability to shape culture. Get the full report free at podcastpulse2025.com.