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Hello, this year was dominated. I mean, not in a good way by the UK general election. And we've got so many memories of just little moments, big moments, trends, things we've realized since that me, Chris and Laura wants to get together and just chew it all over one last time. So for one more time this year, let's have an episode of election cast.
Newscast. Newscast from the BBC. Two chiefs of the same backside. I don't think I'm that bad at politics. People do call me to show Jenny what? On reflection it was a mistake not to stay longer. We did it! Are you all watched the debate? Winning the popular vote was very nice. I don't think I'm being rude, blimey.
Hello, Laura. I just don't know what your tea is. Or is that eggnog or a mulled wine? It's coffee. It's white coffee. Yeah, sorry. Good, hello. Hi, Christmas-y. Hi, Christmas-y. And hello, Chris. Hi. Right, I thought we'd do a little trip down memory lane. Although, is the election a lane?
Or is it like a sort of like six like super highway like a slalom? But first of all, we've done some statistical number crunching about own podcasts. So we rebranded as election cast as we do as we do quite regularly over 10 years.
Yeah, we did 2,565 minutes of election cast. Good God. Everyone absolutely delightful. You say that though, but it's 360 of those minutes, but the six hour long live episode I did on BBC Sounds on the day before. And that is a total of 42.75 hours. How many episodes do you think that was?
Sorry, my mind was already spinning. You were wondering. You're already on memory late. My mind had canted off into a different field. How many? 66 episodes between the 22nd of May and the 8th of July.
There you go, that's a lot. And I remember every single one, which is good, because we're now going to recap some of the most important bits. Do we want to do a little sort of pre-election, like sort of just lay the ground? And I always find it quite hard to like get myself back into the mindset of what was happening before kind of big seismic events that have happened since. But what are your sort of thoughts about the phony pre-election period? Once upon a time, there was a man called Boris Johnson.
Look, I think we were not going that far back. We were in a grinding status quo for a long time when it was pretty clear that the Tories believed they were going to lose the election, Labour believed they were going to win the election, although they maybe emotionally didn't quite allow themselves to believe it in a different way. But that was the status quo. The Tories had been scrapping with each other, having a terrible time for years and years.
Labour had been grinding towards a victory and we were in that status quo for a long time. Basically, all of, just about all of sort of 2023. Yeah, and we were. So the two things that, do I remember two particular moments, the first six months of this year around the election, firstly was a trip to Bristol that I did on pretty much the first working day in January, January 3rd or 4th or something like that. It was pouring with rain.
We were with Keir Starmer, and he was doing the kind of, you know, new year speech, but new year in an election year speech, and then was doing some interviews afterwards. And meanwhile, somewhere else in the country, Rishi Sunak was doing something but a bit more low-key, because his main start of the year speech was somewhere else on a different day. And he was talking to a regional ITV reporter, as often happens, and they do a few questions on a few different things. And in answer to, I think, the third or fourth question,
out popped this line about how the election will be in the second half of the year. Yes, so my my working assumption is we'll have a general election in the second half of this year. In the meantime, I've got lots that I want to get on with. And this was yeah, this was done to originalize the reporter midway through an interview. It wasn't live. We were standing in this manufacturing site.
I was about to say the Prime Minister wasn't the Prime Minister at the time. The Labour leader was doing these round of interviews with folk like me and Robert Besson and others. When this news started circulating, secondhand, what's the Prime Minister said and what's the exact wording? And can we get hold of the tape?
And basically, I had to do a chunk of my interview with Kiyastama again in order to get a reaction to this thing about the timings. But then we were in, and we were already in, as Laura said, into this period where folk like us were using the E word all the time, but with a question mark afterwards, where it would be perfectly reasonable for newscasters and others to think, yeah, yeah, we know it's coming up fairly soon. We just come back and tell us when it's actually on. And of course, we didn't know. And that became the prism through which we were looking at politics for the next.
five months. And so we got that point in. We've had quite a few books, loads of conversations with people. What do you think swung it for number 10 about pushing the button for the 4th of July? I think they believed that nothing was going to get any better. The end.
Yeah. And also, there was a dispute within, within Rishi's. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And the campaign director, Isaac Levito, who was the guy who was, you know, sort of designed the 2019 victory to a great extent, he was against it. And that wasn't a secret. But I think they didn't think it was going to get any better. And I remember a particular conversation with
someone who worked in the treasury. And they sat and said, nothing is going to get better. People haven't realized how bad the books are. This was a conservative source. And also, we're going to have to pay for all sorts of things that nobody's counting in the infected blood compensation. What's happened this week, the government's had to start paying that out. And that's more than £10 billion. The horizon, personal scandal they're going to have to make.
Yeah, but they taught specifically about there was going to be nothing to offer the Conservative Party any hope of doing tax cuts which they might have wanted to offer in an autumn election. However, it's still disputed and it's one of the great sliding doors moments. You know, if they'd hung on till the autumn, inflation went down, all sorts of things might have looked different.
But it was so broken, you know, it was so broken. And when we're thinking about moments of the year, and this goes into the campaign, but it just ducks in my mind because it was just a flavour of how broken everything was. Somebody passed me a recording of a home office minister describing the Rwanda policy, flagship policy, as being crap.
Right. That is how you had government ministers going around. Obviously, they hadn't chosen to put that into the public domain. But it was just so broken. And on air, we sat and we're doing our job. We played it to the home secretary, who was then James Cleverley. And he's had to sort of defend it and say, well, actually, he's saying that the policies crap, but it's not really crap because it's the best policy we've got and just tying himself nuts. You just say, wow, that it has come.
to this. It was so broken. So whenever it was going to be, I think it was, they were fighting the inevitable all along whenever the date might have been. And then we'd had, we'd already had a couple of sort of false alarms around the, a potential moment where it looked like there might be a head of steam building towards the Prime Minister, including once on a Friday sort of lunchtime, which would have been a slightly weird saying, you know, it was all going to happen. And then on the day itself, and most of those, at most of those pretty much all of those previous occasions,
You know, I was able to make a few calls and be fairly confident fairly quickly. It wasn't happening yet yet being the opposite word But when you're trying to find out is it gonna happen today or yeah on Monday or whatever and then came that particular day where the night before
It's a classic thing, it's when people are not picking up phones. And the wider governing government system, people are saying to me, something's going on at the centre. And this was civil servants saying this, as well as special advisors and others, they're not picking up, something's going weird, they're up to something.
And there was only one something they could really be up to realistically, given where we were in the electoral cycle and all the stuff about them running out of steam and things going wrong and all the rest of it. And that carried on that evening, morning after still that wall of silence. And then I was thinking, what do you do with this? Because I'm so conscious doing the job I do of not being
being the emperor with no clothes. Well, it's something that's happening, maybe, and then actually it doesn't. I thought, I know what I'm going to. I went on the soap program and said, I can't be certain because no one's actually saying it, but this time it feels different and I reckon it might be happening today. It's time to go to Chris Mason, our political editor, whilst being said in Westminster and like these inflation figures and elections,
There is a lot of chat this morning, Emma, amongst civil servants, MPs, ministers and others about whether or not the Prime Minister might be tempted to call an election sooner rather than later. Now, there is often a lot of chat that turns out to be drivel, but I've given lots of senior folk plenty of chance to deny that over the last 12 hours or so, and they have not. They might do soon, but they haven't yet, and that leads me. I'm not normally excitable about these things, but that leads me
just a little twitchier this morning than I would normally would be at 30 seconds to 9 o'clock. Oh dear, the political editor of the BBC is getting twitchy about an election. That is all from us. Thanks Chris Mason. And people listening to this might be quite surprised that there were quite senior people in the government and the machine who didn't know. And actually that became significant in the early stages because there were quite a few conservatives going, hang on, I don't agree with this timing. And people who knew they were going to be out of a job going, hang on, I don't have time to sort out my life.
Why has he done this? No, for sure. And because what would happen as well as you'd pass the date when they might conceivably have had an election in May. So the sort of working assumption to actually soon as phrase was that if they were going to do spring, they'd do in May because they're a little elections then anyway. They'd pass the deadline for doing that. And I, you know,
But it's a moment, though, when what is happening is it's not about the government machine, it's about the party machine. So news had reached my ears from a party person saying, yeah, I'm sure it's happening. And I think it's going to be the first week of July. And I was like, July, what were you all about? That nobody has talked about July. Where is the logic?
for July, not least because good Scottish people have already gone on holiday. There was no there had been no smart money on July, November or October or May. But just to go back to your question about is weird that senior people in the government machine don't know what's going on.
these are party decisions. And that's really when you get into an election, you're moving away. This is when the parties fight it out. And it's interesting, Labour for a long time, they'd been convinced, there was going to be a spring election, absolutely convinced. So much so that about 10 days before, which you've seen that call the election, we went to a Labour event in Zurich in Essex. Was this the sixth first step?
Yeah, which was, which oozed election launch because you know when you go to as many events as we do you can see the ones that are relatively hastily arranged relatively cheaply rented and then you can see the ones where they've thrown money out. That's what they planned it as though it wasn't.
That's what they'd planned it as expecting. It was going to be that complete. Yeah, because you had all the classics. Like it wasn't it was like the audience was in the round. So Kirsten was surrounded by people. It was a parade of of labor supporters. The videos, the lighting, the things that take time and money and focus and attention. But then they plowed on with it. You know, that was.
So I do remember that day, it's like, oh, this is a group of people that love a bullet-pointed list to explain what we're doing. And don't they just? Yeah, that maybe isn't necessarily the best way of conveying a powerful message to the general population. It might be quite a good way of organizing yourself and organizing a potential government, but not necessarily convincing people that you've got a really obvious plan. Then there's the moment itself where we're recently like presses the Go button and he's in Downing Street in an image that's now become infamous of him just getting totally soaked.
in the rain and chatting to somebody who is very involved in that they said the biggest reason that that happened was because the last time he'd done one of those big street moments was after George Galloway had won that by-election and he wants to do a big thing about the dangers of extremism and tend to take some of the rain during that but it was in the dark and so they'd all got into their minds oh the PM can go out get rained on and actually doesn't really show up on TV watching during the day it does.
Yeah. And it really, really, really, really, really did. Earlier today, I spoke with his Majesty, the King, to request the dissolution of Holland. The King has granted this request, and we will have a general election on the 4th of July. This election will take place at a time. But I remember on that day, and someone involved to look, the thing is, well, if he hadn't been brave enough to do it in the rain, he'd have got slated for not been brave enough to do it in the rain. Or if we'd put a brawling on him, it would have taken the mix for him having a brawling. And it did look absolutely
And the thing is, it was proper. It was proper. And you know, because you were there. Yeah. And all of our in the street for longer. So we'd spent a bit of the earlier in the day starting to think about assembling all of our kits on the road for six weeks and various members of the team. So we must make sure we've got spares and all the rest of it.
We went through all of our kit in the first afternoon because there's one thing electronic kit really does not like and that is rain and everything was wrecked and we were absolutely soaked and the thing is it tilted from, it tilted from.
I just have to say for the record. I never wanted to know that. I didn't want to be reminded of it today. Thanks. Sorry. Sorry. But it's true. I've lost my train of thought now. Sorry. Good. Let's move on. Yeah. It was the thing is it was just beyond it was it was absurd levels of right. That was the thing. It was actually not necessarily at the start of this piece. No. You can understand why somebody might take the gamble and be like, oh, we can get through it. It was actually
But here's another thing, and it's a thing about Rishi Sunak's sort of one of his, and you know, he had many strengths, his backers would say, but one of his flaws or difficulties as a politician was improvising. So a different politician in a downpour would have been able to crack a gag, refer to it somehow, say something sort of self-depregating. Wrap it up quicker or whatever. Wrap it right, and he just was sticking to the script, not even saying,
I wouldn't have done it today if I don't write. And then that's how you charm people. And as we were saying, I actually think I was saying to Patti a couple of weeks ago, it's a great line from somebody in one of the parties said, the thing is not sure that care is the good politician who can put your taxes up with a smile and make you feel good.
And it's the same, actually, as soon as I can stand, I have a lot in common, I think. Yeah, they do, certainly. A lot in common. And how you turn some really sort of quick, silverish politicians can turn moments of a real challenge, actually, into a win for them. Oh, it could have been years and years ago.
Tony Blair at a CBI conference, and there was a bit of a protest, I think it was an environmental protest. It was back to their power. Something like that. And it was completely chaotic. Do you do the speech? He ends up on some sort of soapbox or standing on a chair or whatever, but managed to kind of pull off and keep the audience with him in a moment of total
kind of shambles and chaos. And I guess some those moments of improvisation, some political leaders can rise to that and others. Yeah. Others not. And that idea of nimbleness actually takes us to the first kind of big news story of the campaign, which is what would labor do about Diane Abbott, which lasted for three or four days. And they did not look like they were in control of their narrative.
they were having a lot of internal rutcheons about it and it looked very, very messy. And so the backstory to this is that Diane Abbott had been suspended as a Labour MP back in April 2023 because of some comments she'd made to the Guardian about how Jewish, Irish and travel people don't face racism all of their lives. She then withdrew their remarks and she was a subject of a big investigation and she was allowed back into the Labour parliamentary party
But there was lots of speculation that she would be blocked from being a candidate at the election for Labour, or maybe even that she was going to sort of retire gracefully, but that all kind of blew up and ended up in a multi-day row about which she wouldn't she be allowed to stand.
So curious about taking control and grip of the Labour Party by his supporters would say marvelously ruthlessly rooting out left, taking control of the party machine, absolutely cracking down on anti-Semitism. But it was a lot about anti-Semitism and getting rid of that. But it was also about grabbing control of the levers of the party that in the heat of the first week of the election campaign, they found themselves in a massive dilemma over what to do with one of the iconic veterans of the Labour left.
a black female MP who is a household name and not many politicians are household names. That was shambolic. Diane Abbott was elected in in 1987, the first black woman MP. She's been a trailblazer. She has carved a path for other people to come into politics and public life. The whip has obviously been restored to her now and she is free to go forward as a Labour candidate.
Have you spoken to Diane and do you understand that she wants to put herself forward to stand? She's free to go forward as a Labour candidate. The whip is back with her. It's been restored. And of course, you know, she was a trailblazer for many, many years and has cleared the path for others to come into politics. So, formally matter for the NEC, but I've not expressed a view up until now. She's free to go forward as a Labour candidate.
And they didn't have control of the briefing. They weren't really in charge of everything that was happening. And I just thought, God, you know, they've been preparing for this for a long time. But it stuck out to me when I was thinking about the campaign, because it showed you that actually maybe they weren't quite as ready as they thought they were. And that's been the theme of their first six months in government. So when I was thinking back to it, it's like, actually, that was just a little pebble in the pond.
that yes, this machine is slick, they're already, they've worked damn hard, they say, and during, I'm sure people were saying the same thing to you, because I remember talking to people who are now a cabinet minister saying, oh, you won't believe the amount of preparation we've done. It's amazing, Sue's made us do an old, but also the program of work for government.
And now they've arrived as much more comments have a minister saying, well, and their opponents saying, and including some government officials saying, I don't really think they've got that much of a problem. We're not sort of messing with the timeline a bit, but have we got to the bottom of whether Labour were prepared enough for government? And I know it's all tied up with personnel issues and personalities as well, but I'm a bit of an impossible thing to get to them as well. So the thing that I was struck by, save for that. And it was a big moment the whole day I'd have a kind of wobble that they had.
And this has become something of a cliche really in the last six months. But the surprise election caused by the Conservatives played out looking like more of a surprise to the Conservatives than it did to Labour. And Labour on the whole, particularly in terms of what they had prepared to do, was dealing with things that came at them and took them by surprise. They were really prepared for their campaign and they knew what they wanted to do and they knew the message that they wanted to prosecute.
But they were also, and this gets into the sort of psychology of the party really, they were obsessed in those six months before about not giving an impression that they were measuring up the curtains, that they took anything for granted. They were very aware of their own history, which is their capacity to lose elections, including ones that many people think they're going to win.
And yet we were being told at the time, oh, yes, but and this reflects what you were saying. You know, we've got Sue Gray. She worked in government for years. She's focused on the plans for the plans for government, et cetera, et cetera. And yet what we've seen since then, and it's a real contrast because so much of their campaign was so well prepared and, you know, pretty slick, really. I'd say multiple times we're ready to govern on day one.
Oh, we've grown, growing, growing, growing, growing, growing. Yeah, and yet they've sort of hit the ground stumbling. Yeah, yeah. And with real concern privately from ministers at a very senior level that that kind of narrative that's built up is an accurate one, that is the reality of what's happening. I think that's what we've seen, right?
Yeah, yeah, and a real worry from them that if they don't turn that round pretty quickly, a year will have gone by, where they perhaps not made the most of what they could have been. Do you know what, while we're mucking around at the timeline, Dr. Strange is producing this episode of Newscast. There's no way to talk about the team through their glasses and crangers.
just for the record, I will always defend your interests over my colleagues here. Just in terms of the tweaking the timeline again, back to the whole the day the election was called actually Labor.
Labour had been tipped off because of movements in the betting market, which then became a massive story at the end of the election campaign because of some revelations. Yeah, I mean, yes, that whole twist in the campaign was astonishing, really. The tip-offs that I had and Pippa Crea of the Guardian had. And certainly, the ones that I got
There were proper moments of what? Really? That people in the Toriana circle had been betting on the date of the action. Yeah, not just them. I mean, the first tip off I had related to those who were close protection officers of the prime minister, police officers.
And that we quickly managed to stand up to use this sort of journalistic phrase because the Metropolitan Police acknowledged that that was happening. Yeah, and then I had a tip off about a parliamentary candidate who happened to work in Conservative HQ and we chased that down and did all of our checking and we brought and we broadcast and we broadcast that and then
We broadcast that first on the 10 o'clock news the night before, having done the police story at six o'clock. And then I was on my way home about gone midnight, one of those nights. And someone texted me and said, do you know who she's married to? And I said, no, because to be honest, I'd not heard of her until five hours before. So the family tree was certainly news to me. And they said, oh, you know, she's married to the, yeah, the director of campaigns.
Blimey. Right. Well, there's another strand. And also that, yeah. And so off we went again. And then you and I were on the phone the morning. And then I got that was on it. And it was and it was extraordinary. And seeing the Prime Minister as what's, you know, seeing Rishi Sunak at the time, because obviously we're chasing him and Keir Starman and David and John Sweeney and all the others around the country.
just that sense of yet from his perspective on a human level from his perspective, yet more air going out of the balloon of this thing that he or any political leader in that moment would find that sort of thing off the scale irritating. But given his character and his sense of propriety and all the rest of it, just a punch and go.
Yeah, another punch in the guts after the previous punch in the guts, which is the criticism he got for leaving D-Day, so that we got that picture of David Cameron, sorry, Lord Cameron, the then Foreign Secretary hanging out with the German Chancellor, the French President of the United States. And you know what? I was at a do about a week ago and was sitting next to a senior conservative who was still six months on venting about that.
and what a, in their view, massive and goal it was. And in the view of this person, the direct impact they reckoned it had in particular seats. Yeah, for sure. I mean, there was a dream for the Labour Party and the absolute nightmare. I mean, but, you know, the betting thing, the D-Day thing, the rain,
you couldn't have scripted a worse set of events for a leader on the right during an election campaign. I mean, you just really couldn't, because they all saw kind of a lack of, they all kind of talked to a lack of dignity, right? Yeah, it was just when you're thinking about soon, that's carried into it. You know, he's not a sort of a joker and some of them might be like, oh, well, everyone had a little bit of a flutter, ha, ha, and people go, well, that's a bit grim, but never mind move on. He was at somebody who'd be able to say,
come out and say, well, D-Day, well, I had an important bit. I was there and I paid my respects and we did this, that and the other. And he just, all of those things were terrible political accidents that just all looked awful.
And in policy terms, I mean, the signature policy, the conservatives was the return of national service, which was actually not even that. And that's an interesting lesson in how an election campaign, something can get lots of attention and everyone's talking about it and everyone has an opinion about it. It's very easily communicable, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually achieving anything with it.
No, although they did manage with the campaign at that. And they grabbed the conch, if you like, for a couple of days over that policy. And I remember getting briefed on that and thinking, well, that'll get people talking. And it did. And you thought, oh, because there was a view in a lot of senior conservatives, actually, that summer was still.
Not that good. And they probably weren't going to be able to beat him. That would have looked completely ludicrous, but they didn't actually have to have the kind of complete pasting that some of the more outlandish polls were suggesting. And indeed that the result bit was a pasting, even though it wasn't a kind of completely outlandish pasting that some of the crackers ended the polling industry were suggesting.
Pulling, of course, can be very useful, but the ranges and the levels of pulling that we were seeing were just wild. But actually, those sort of unforced errors just meant that that idea that they might not actually take on that much water. It wasn't even wanting to make a pun then. They just lost it.
But you get the instant flows as well so it's interesting this conversation just starts the memory sort of jolting through the highways and byways of the campaign. Glad you knew what the format was going to be in advance.
Because whilst Rishisunak and the Conservatives had these really kind of grim moments from their perspective, think that the National Service thing got people talking. The other moment, that first TV debate, the ITV debate in Sulford that Juliet and him hosted, Rishisunak was arguably won that night and he really... Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so basically, like, Rich Houston, I was making all these claims that Labour would put up everyone's taxes by £2,000 over the course of a parliament. And it took Kirstalmer a long time. About an hour and a half. It was a long time. Even like a kind of amateur armchair politician knows that the first rule is you have to fight back and not let that dominate.
Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, I speak to conservatives now who say that figure was an underestimate. Because there was a huge argument in the days afterwards around the veracity of that number and how that number had been arrived at. But there was also a fair bit of soul searching within the Labour campaign about
the perceived lack of sharpness from Keir Starber that night, in dealing with something that had come at him and it took him rather a long time. I said two hours a minute ago, it was a bit about 45 minutes, wasn't it, it was an hour. It wasn't like the length, like a lot of the rings fell, although it did feel like. It took him most of that programme to get to the point where he was willing to try and hose it down.
Are we all kicking ourselves that we didn't specifically ask Labour ministers whether they were planning to put up employers, national insurance? Well, the Tory said Spotted it. It's a lot of Trump who was the then as the chief secretary to the Treasury. I mean, yeah, I was thinking about that as well because we had Reeves on and she did say,
And it was a sort of story of our interview. She said, we will not put up income tax and we will not put up there. And of course, you think, oh, well, should have asked her about that more specific thing. But you know, you're dealing with what you're dealing with. And it's not very interesting if you go down the chat list of how to think about it. No, no, no, but it's a good question. And it's a good question. And I think also what they've said in that is they'd have stuck to their formula, which is we are not going to put tax up on working people.
That was their formula. That's still their formula. And then, well, actually, it's now modulated into, we're not putting taxes on pay slips. Yes. Because, like, if you get a pay slip from a... But... But... And it took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It took them a little while to come up with that formula. It
But part of the election dynamic was that whoever wins, they're going to have to do really horrible things in terms of pressure on public spending, and they're going to have to raise taxes somehow. And that was very clear, and we did all wang on about that endlessly.
Back to the psychology of labour and their attitude pre-election, given their nervousness about their electoral performance, and particularly their economic credibility, that Rachel Reeves as Shadow Chancellor could have decided, and Keir Starmer could have decided pre-election, to oppose those cuts in employee cash insurance that the Conservatives had, and make an argument about
It's not sustainable given the state of the public finances blah blah blah But didn't feel they had the political didn't feel they had the political space or the courage or willingness at that point to do that with an election coming and What would have been attacked from their opponents about typical old labor bugging up your taxes etc etc
Although I do remember very clearly sitting in that seat that you're sitting in now, Laura, when we did that six hour long marathon newscast, the day before the election day. And Liz Kendall, who's now the War Compention Secretary, was on down the line. And I said to Liz Kendall, can you promise me that Rachel Reeves, kind of about a month after she's become Chancellor, will not come to Parliament and say, I've opened the books, there's loads of things that are really bad in there that I didn't know about, we're gonna have to change our plans. And Liz Kendall said, I can guarantee you that will not happen.
I was like, really? Because that normally happens after, like, she's like, nope, we've got the office of budget responsibility now that lays it all out. It's all very clear. We will not, Rachel Reeves will not do that. And then what happened? Rachel needs to do exactly that. I think it's both true and untrue that there weren't, there were things that you couldn't possibly have imagined, nasty lurking. So, and if you talk to people in government who are not political about that, they sort of say, well, it's sort of fair that yes, you can only understand how difficult things are once you're on the inside.
it is also a great a nonsense to suggest that nobody knew that there were going to have to be very difficult decisions about probably raising taxes or cutting loads of public spending or trying to do both and around the round. And we tried to reflect that. Yeah, we've reported it all the way through Johnson of the eye of the official studies about making those arguments as well. Yeah. Nigel Farage. So he did a bit of a, he did a bit of a U-turn because he wasn't going to be a candidate. He wasn't the leader of reform and then
I took the day off yesterday and had a normal day. Walked the dogs, did a bit of fishing, popped into the pub, you know, a normal sort of day, which gave me time to think and reflect. And I began to feel a terrible sense of guilt. I can't let down those millions of people. I simply can't do it. It'd be wrong. But I have decided
I've changed my mind. So I am going to stand in this election. I'll be launching my candidacy at midday tomorrow in the Essex seaside town of Clapton.
but then a couple of days he was a candidate for a constituency and he was the new leader of reform. Are you suggesting that Nigel Farage sometimes dances around what his plans might be until he can decide what the best outcome might be for himself? And makes news at every stage well. Yeah, exactly. Of course he was. And actually though, that's another reason why some Tories think soon I should have waited, waited to the autumn. Farage might have been over in Trump world, enjoying himself hanging around Mar-a-Lago and then however, you know, sliding doors, who knows. But yeah, Nigel Farage,
and reform had an absolutely stonking election. They came second in, I think, nearly 100 seats. They managed to get some MPs, Faraj's seventh attempt, or eighth attempt, to actually get his bum on the green benches managed. And they, since they've, and I think not necessarily because of using this sort of pulpit they've got in parliament, it feels in a way, they're doing clever politics outside parliament. They're doing really professionalising, building, campaigning around the country.
And he had a great election, and I think 2025 is going to be very interesting to see how reform does, because they have successfully tapped into that mood in the country that politicians are very aware of, and Labour is very worried about, is that not just the feeling that, well, nothing really works, but also that nothing really works, and nobody who's in charge actually has got any idea how to solve
I hadn't quite clocked this until a few weeks ago, which is that for the first few months, reform were a presence in Parliament because of the things that they said and the issues that they raised and the behaviour of some of their MPs. But they didn't really feel like a sort of the big structural presence.
in British politics that the election results suggested. But then, in the last few weeks of 2024, that change, everyone started talking about actually the impact. And it's because people are starting to think about the next set of elections, whether it's local authorities in England or the Welsh Assembly. Yeah, and they're working very hard in Wales.
We're really hard in Wales. We're working really hard at building the kind of not sexy, but really important structures that a party needs if it's going to do well, which is the operation on the ground in lots of different parts of the country. They're putting a huge amount of attention and having real success in terms of social media, as far as on TikTok. So talking to an audience that you might not imagine would be there, kind of core audience, young men in particular, they're reaching with... Doing this video about the London hotel that didn't have any full fat milk.
Oh yes, yes, yes. But it's an interesting thing that I remember we did a load of folks groups in the year that we did that Britain in a room thing. And the reform voters group were fascinating and they weren't people who you'd have put in any particular political box. So when we used this all about, you know, UKIP and then Brexit party, the sort of ancestors of the reform party.
They were always either driven about by immigration or dislike of Brussels and the European Union sort of mega structure and that kind of flank of politics, basically, you know, it was a sort of a right-wing strand. Reform is much more complicated than that. It really is. Yeah. And it's much more about sort of emotion and sentiment. And I think, as I say, I think the
2025, they're going to have a very interesting year. And the only person probably who enjoyed the election campaign more than that was Ed Davie. Yes, paddleboarder extraordinaire. Watery fun, you know, Ed Davie theme park master. So, you know, they had a great time and the Lib Dems, I mean, they, they for incredibly good campaigns on the ground for a long time, they were laser targeted on seats that they thought they could win candidates had to really work hard to get central resources. You know, they were very canny about where they were putting their resources.
in terms that had pushed bakeries. And they are now once again the third party in Parliament. And so that was a huge, we shouldn't forget about that part of the election and the massive demise of the SMP. So they did a big switcharoo and all sorts of very interesting things. The Lib Dems played a binder as a campaign to turn, you know, a party that for so long has railed against the first past the post-system because it was so often something that did them an injustice this time. It was, it was reform who ended up with a massive number of votes versus a very small number of seats.
And to turn those stunts, because those stunts were very visual and shareable on social media and all the rest of it. They were also very geographically focused. So you knew that, oh, he's at that place down the road where you can zip down a waterslide or whatever. And their big thing was about the sewage problem. And so the paddleboard falling in was a perfect distillation of that being their issue.
I hear people wonder whether I fell in deliberately at the window millike. I fell in five times. They were not all intentional, but it was a serious message about the fact that sewage is a big problem, not just in Lake District, but in lakes and rivers and beaches across our country and the issue about sewage be on the ballot paper on July the 4th.
Yeah, and sort of professionalising the embarrassing dad routine. But then because he could talk very passionately and very authentically about his own personal experience, as far as looking after his disabled son is concerned and the loss of his parents when he was young, he couldn't be caricatured as a sort of middle-class bloke having a whale of a time when lots of people are struggling because he could talk very authentically about his own
his own family struggles. So combining those two things with the stunts and then that geographical focus was an extraordinary outcome from them. The challenge though for them, and I've been struck by this in the last six months, is how you turn 70 odd MPs into influence. So they've massively expanded their parliamentary footprint. But they're now in a parliament with a, you know, a Labour government with a colossal majority.
And then a noisy argument involving reform, and then the conservatives trying to work out what they do, given reform, and given where they find themselves in Parliament. And I think the challenge for the Lib Dems now is, yeah, how do you turn that into influence? Well, and the same issue, but on a much smaller scale for the Greens, who got four MPs, so quadrupling their number of MPs from the previous Parliament.
It's looking like a good night for us. We stood a record number of parliamentary candidates in this election, so more people had the chance to vote green than ever before, and it looked like they took that chance. But that then maybe reveals more about divisions within the Greens than it does about what the Greens can do to influence everyone else. And it's what you do with it now, right? You've got there, what do you do with it now? And there's interesting, they did well in town and country and ran different campaigns in different places. And of course, successful political parties always run different campaigns in different places.
Even though, of course, we endlessly talk about their national message and the big thing that politicians who do well are flexible and nimble and they do run differently in different places. In the Greens and Suffolk, we're running different focuses to the Greens and Bristol and what they do with it now will be really interesting to see. And 2025 is going to be, I think it might be quite a wild ride. But without question, the massive, massive headline from the election beyond all the different strands we've talked about is just that we have, after 14 years of one lot,
another driver in charge, and they absolutely smashed the Tories. They've got a historically incredible, thumping, massive majority, significantly child care of the Boris Johnson's huge majority in 2019. And that is a huge moment of history that every newscaster will remember. And that's like, there just haven't been that many Labour prime ministers who've been elected. Correct.
Correct. And there haven't been that many governments ever with such a big majority. And it doesn't feel like it, which is the interesting observation for the first six months. No, quite. It feels more competitive. The conversation feels more competitive than the numbers. They can win any vote they want, win it comfortably, even with significant massive rebellions they could still win. The key thing, and we just touched on this earlier, and this will be the essential to the political story of 2025,
is can they demonstrate a sense of delivery? Or does there become a growing sense that neither of the big Westminster parties are, for whatever reason, sufficiently equipped to deliver a sense of lives getting better for significant numbers of people? Governing in the 2020s is proving pretty tricky, whatever your political colour. Can a government with a really big majority
Actually do stuff that people think okay. Yeah, the things are happening or not And it was just and this is the cheesy Christmas bit It was just such a privilege being able to sort of sit and think and read and listen and then talk about it every day with with you guys It's just amazing. It's amazing. I want to end on some momentous moments pick a momentous moment either the campaign or election night or
Well, I mean, the two things actually we've touched on already, the Diana, but the thing I thought was fascinating, the Rwanda's crap moment was just a kind of the moment. And they're like, this is really, really broken and bad. But oh, the moment that I think, well, when we said that labored one, you know, when you have enough in to know that labor are going to win, I can't remember what time that was or the exit.
An exit pole, that's an exciting thing to do. That's just sort of selfishly reading out the exit poles quack, if you do a kind of job. That's kind of quite exciting and you're standing there and you're going urgh, your heart rate's going brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Sakeer Starmer will become Prime Minister with a majority of around 170 seats. The exit poll predicts that Labour will have captured 410 seats, adding 209. It suggests that Conservatives will have lost 241 MPs, landing on 131. Onto the other numbers of Liberal Democrats, up 53 on 61 seats, reform on 13 seats.
The SMP down 38 seats, according to this exit poll, on 10. Blood Camry are on four, they're up two, and the greens are up one on two. All the pointers tonight are that Sir Keir Starmer is taking Labour back to power, only the fifth Labour leader to win a general election. These are the first indications of what may unfold, but a moment of history beckons, Chris.
Blimey, just take a look and take in those numbers. The Conservative Party so often an election-winning machine looks pulverised tonight, taking in those... Well, I think I said before, I practised all the different versions when I was in the shower. It's the logistics. The exit polls predicting, yay! S&P, landslide, no, that one's probably not going to happen.
Everyone was getting wet at some point in the day. I remember obviously prior to that moment where Clive and Laura were reading out the exit poll result and Nick and Rachel were doing it on the radio and all the rest of it. Obviously, we're told the numbers just before and just being sat there. I think I was sat next to you.
with a biro and a grid and you think, okay, okay, okay. And then immediately I'm thinking, right, well, what does that mean for what I'm gonna be saying in 10 minutes, 10 minutes time? And that's a privilege, real privilege. Oh, being in that room is amazing. And I may or may not have told people to shut up and stop talking about whatever they... Oh, yeah, I do remember. I didn't even say anything, Laura.
No, I know it wasn't. My mum was very boring compared to that but it was sort of like on-air one and it's when Chris and I were recording an episode of Newscast on a Friday Tea Time and then we got the news that Michael Gove wasn't standing as a candidate and now it's pretty obvious you probably wouldn't because why would you after all those years in office?
And then want to be in opposition and bottle. But for me, it was just like, all right. So that will cliche of the end of an era. That was like, that was the moment. This is that chapter, which was basically been my whole political journalist life. Michael Gore was being there and was was ending.
And six months later, he was handing out prizes to politicians at the spectator awards, including new cover of the year. And then interviewing and then interviewing Kemi Badenock for the magazine he now edits. Who ever said that Westminster is a revolving door of people who are connected?
Well we're not heading for a revolving door we're heading for the exit door because that's it for this episode of newscast where we've been looking back at the 2024 general election and the best thing is that you were there with us the whole way through so thanks for for reminiscing with us too bye bye
And that's all for this episode. Thank you very much for reliving the 2024 general election with us. And we'll be back with another episode of Newscast very soon. Bye.
Hello, I'm Katya Adler, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. Each weekday, we break down one big news story with fresh perspectives from journalists around the world, from artificial intelligence to divisive politics tearing our societies apart, from the movements of money and markets to the human stories that touch our lives. We bring you in-depth insights from across the BBC and beyond. Listen to the global story wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
