Making Sense Of A Historic British Election
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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. The Johnson administration fell apart during COVID and it fell apart because of what has become known as PartyGate. Which from an American perspective sounds so quaint as a scandal. Having a party during COVID. Yeah, with the gate tacked on.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druke and happy July 4th. Interestingly enough, to celebrate our independence from Great Britain, we're actually going to talk about their upcoming election. I guess the tie in there is that this would have been our election had we not secured that independence. I don't know. Just go with it.

But anyway, the UK is holding its first national election in nearly five years on Thursday, July 4th. The polling suggests the Labour Party will make historic gains, booting conservatives from power for the first time in 14 years.

Now, to cover this event, we're going to do something very, very special, which is reassemble the Talking Politics podcast and do a crossover. Folks who've been listening for a while might remember back to the days of Brexit when we were regularly doing crossover podcasts with the folks at Talking Politics.

That podcast does not exist anymore, but David Runciman and Helen Thompson have been kind enough to reassemble just for this occasion. So without any more preamble, let me get to it. Here with me today is Helen Thompson, professor of political economy at Cambridge University and host of the new podcast, These Times. Welcome to the podcast, Helen. It's great to be with you, Galen.

And also with us is David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge and host of the podcast Past, Present and Future. Welcome to the podcast. Pleasure. So thank you so much for doing this. I hope you're as excited as I am.

First question, I'm going to pull up the forecast from The Economist right now. It says that there is a 98% chance that Labour wins a majority of the seats, a 2% chance that Labour is the largest minority party, and essentially a non-chance that anything else happens in this election. Now, I know from the time that we have spent together and sort of

Brexit and some high profile polling misses in the UK and some high profile polling misses in the United States that folks like to be skeptical of the polls and sometimes rightly so that polling error is a part of the game. Is there any sense that this election could even be close sort of regardless of that?

I mean, I would say 98% is a pretty conservative estimate. It's more like 99.9%. It would be the biggest shock in British electoral history, I think, if at this point, the Labour Party didn't win a majority. And all of the coverage in this country and all of the questions have been about the size of that majority, but actually what people are really interested in, because it doesn't make a huge amount of difference, it makes a difference to individual politicians and their careers.

whether you have a majority of 100 or 150, the really big question people covering the election in this country is how many seats the Conservatives are going to be left with. And there is a big difference from their point of view between a bad result, a disastrous result and a wipeout.

And what is that distinction and what makes the difference? Is it ultimately how much support the Reform Party gets? I think the utterly humiliating outcome for the Conservative Party would be that

in terms of the percentage of the vote, that Reform did better than them. And there was a bit of polling that suggested that could be a possibility a few weeks ago. I don't think the more recent polling have suggested that. And it's very hard to see a scenario in which Reform would do better than the Conservatives in terms of seats.

There's another possible scenario on the nightmare end for the Conservatives, which would be that actually they did so badly that the Liberal Democrats got more seats than they did and that they weren't the official opposition. Again, I think that that's probably unlikely.

I think, as David said, the only question really in play is the size of the majority. And then there is, I think, some reason to think that there's quite a lot of scope here, because I think one thing the polling has perhaps begun to pick up in different ways, or at least some of the more detailed polling, is that there is still quite a high number of don't-knows for where we are in the election campaign a few days before the election. So if they were to break asymmetrically,

either direction, then you could see an even bigger labor majority than forecast or a significantly smaller labor majority than forecast. From an American perspective, when I hear the difference between 100 seat majority and 150 seat majority, you think, well, this changes what a party can accomplish when it's in power.

A filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, for example, means that you can get a whole bunch done that you wouldn't be able to do with just a nine-seat majority in the Senate, for example. And in the House, it means that you can sort of ignore the far left or far right flank, or you can ignore whatever faction breaks off that tries to stop you from passing legislation.

Is that also what's at stake in this British election to the extent that Labour, assuming that it's the majority party, can just really pursue its agenda without restraint or constraints?

I don't think any of those parallels really apply. I mean, one of the remarkable things about the British parliamentary system is if you have a majority, a solid majority in the Commons, you can do what you like anyway. There aren't constitutional constraints. There are a few more than there used to be. You know, we now have a Supreme Court and so on. It's not quite the elected dictatorship it used to be. Welcome to the club. It's a fun one. Yeah, but it's not far off. And actually, there is a view, which one or two people have started to air, that the

Parties need to be careful what they wish for. Actually having a really big majority is harder to manage than a slightly smaller one. One of the things that could happen if this is a blowout election is that all sorts of people wind up in the House of Commons that weren't expecting to be there. And indeed, the Labour Party didn't particularly expect to be there.

And these people have to be managed too. And a party can find itself with wings and factions within it when they really dominate the commons. There is a view that you want something about between 60 and 80. That's kind of manageable and it's enough to keep people in line and discipline can start to break down. But the Tory party have been using this rhetoric in the campaign, don't give Labour a supermajority.

The implication being if they have 150 majority, 200 majority, they can do what they like and you'll end up in a nightmarish socialist dystopia, whatever. It's not true. It doesn't actually make that much difference to what they can do. But somehow that language has entered. I don't remember it coming up before. I don't know, Helen, if you do. I don't remember people talking about super majorities before. It's a sort of artificial foreign language.

imposition on British politics, but it's meant to convey the point that Helen was making for the undecideds. Be careful what you wish for. You might just give the Labour Party carte blanche. But actually, even when Tony Blair won in 2005 on a very low turnout and a very low share of the vote, but he won a majority of around 50 or 60. You can do what you like with a majority of 50 or 60.

I think there's two places where it makes a difference that they win a big majority. The first of them is that it takes care of the English question. So if they win a big majority, they will have a majority of English seats and they won't get into the problem that Tony Blair's government in 2005 got in where they had to rely on the votes of Scottish Labour MPs about legislation that didn't apply in Scotland and Wales to do with health and education.

And the second thing where in principle it should make a difference, so you could see a scenario when perhaps it didn't, would be planning. But they need to get changes to the planning laws in this country through the House of Commons and through the House of Lords for that matter as well, really as quickly as possible if they're going to be able to start delivering on their promise to build one and a half million new houses. The conservative legislation

Liberal Democratic coalition government that had a decent majority between 2010 and 2015 was not able to get

changes to the planning law through the House of Commons because of backbench rebellions, MPs being fearful that there's going to be building in what's called the Green Belt in their constituencies. I think that you could have a large backbench rebellion from Labour and you could still get that through. But this idea of a supermajority, it's just, I think, an imposition from American politics. I know that you don't actually have that term, but I think it's kind of been treated as the equivalent of filibuster proof.

What's interesting about those examples Helen gave is, you know, these aren't constitutional questions, right? This is really pragmatic politics to do with local resistance, to do with English votes for English laws and so on. The constitutional questions are an invention. There's always a political question about what you can get away with, depending on how many MPs you have on your side. But constitutionally, the American analogy just doesn't hold at all.

Let's talk about the why in all of this. It's probably not news to you that far right, sometimes center right governments are on the rise in Europe. Today, Trump leads in national polling in the United States.

And we're talking about the UK being on the verge of electing a... Would you describe the Labour Party as centre-left or left government? Centre-left. Centre-left. OK. So your country is on the verge of electing a centre-left government by historic proportions.

Is it simply anti-incumbent voting behavior? And just because conservatives have been in power for so long, they're the folks to blame? Or is there anything else going on that really distinguishes British dynamics from the continent or from the United States or other Western countries?

Pretty much all incumbent parties that were in office at the beginning of 2022 and through the first half of it are now in a pretty bad state. There is, I think, an explanation of the Conservatives' problems. I still think that you need to have an explanation about how the Conservatives could have imploded so dramatically in

over a short period of time. Because if you go back to the summer prior to Boris Johnson's exit from the prime ministership, that summer when we had three prime ministers in 50 days, the Conservatives had perhaps the best ever by-election result in UK history.

literally, in May of 2021, so just a year before, it all started falling apart. And if you then say, well, what's the intervening bit other than the incumbency effect? It was the disintegration of Boris Johnson and the fact that his chaotic,

personality, the consequences from that became one too many for him to absorb the blow and carry on. So I think it's a conjunction of things that are both a little bit singular to the UK and the huge problem that incumbents have had from being in office in the first part of 2022. And I think if there's just one instance where you can point to and say, look, it matters is Maloney in Italy.

who did very well in the European Parliament elections, one of the few incumbents who did. She didn't take office until November of 2022. I think the other thing is that the British electoral system can give a false impression here. So Labour might be about to sweep to an enormous majority. It doesn't mean that they're particularly popular. Keir Starmer will probably enter Downing Street with the worst favourability ratings of any new prime minister. It is possible that the Tory vote plus the reform vote will equal the Labour vote.

So there you've got a relatively even balance. And there is a scenario, I don't think it's going to happen, but there is a scenario, say, that Labour got...

38% of the vote, the Tories got 18%, Reform got 18%, the Liberal Democrats got 18%, something like that. I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think the Tories will do quite that badly or Reform or the Liberal Democrats do quite that well, but it's within the bounds of polling possibility. Labour would still win an absolutely thumping majority on that score because in almost every constituency, they would still be the largest party, you know, the others, unless they did tactical voting, which they won't.

wouldn't be able to get them out. But it would mean that not many people had voted Labour. And it could be on a low turnout as well. So say it's 60% turnout and Labour get 40% of the vote. That means only one in four people will have voted Labour.

And they'll win almost all the seats in the House of Commons. So, you know, it can give a false impression. I don't think this is an election which is a ringing endorsement of social democracy and centre-left politics. And people are already speculating how long it will be before Keir Starmer's favourability ratings put him on a par with Rishi Sunak. Who knows? He might be a brilliant prime minister and they may turn it around.

But it's this weird anomaly in which it looks like he's entering parliament with the greatest majority in his party's history and in quite a vulnerable position. Interesting enough, all the polling at the moment suggests that he's going to win less of the vote in percentage terms than Jeremy Corbyn did in 2017.

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So one thing I don't think I've heard either of you mention in the why so far is Brexit. And I don't know if it's just because you're exhausted from talking about it for almost a decade, or if it's because it's really not featuring in this election. But from an outside perspective, looking at British politics, it seems like pursuing Brexit and making Brexit happen was a large part of the Tory agenda.

particularly for Boris Johnson and the successive prime ministers after that. And now Brexit has happened. And the hopes and dreams of the Brexit movement don't seem to have been realized, at least as far as immigration is concerned. And maybe perhaps as far as the economy is concerned, we can talk about the economic predicament that the UK finds itself in. But is it a reaction to that that

everything that seemed to have been the goal of the conservative party and the Brexit movement didn't bear the fruit that was expected.

I think that there's no doubt that the rise again of reform as it now is rather than UKIP as it was or the Brexit party, whatever it was in 2019, is bound up with disillusionment amongst the section of the Tory vote from 2019 at the way in which Brexit was pursued and in particular,

the fact that it didn't lead to a reduction in migration, indeed quite the contrary, in the aftermath of Brexit, though these are not necessarily causally related to each other, obviously, is migration reached, internal migration reached the highest ever level. If

If it had been the case that post-Brexit politics had seen a reduction in migration, I do not believe reform would be back on the scene. I think that they would have tried to position themselves as an anti-net zero party, but I don't think they could have done that without the frustration over migration. I don't think, though, there's much evidence to say that the switching direct from the

is over the Brexit question. That isn't because Brexit has become suddenly popular again, quite the contrary. People who think it was a bad idea, it's the highest ever level. It's because pretty soon after taking over the leadership, Keir Starmer diffused the question. I mean, he won the Labour leadership in part by asserting his pro-EU credentials, but he very quickly made it clear that he didn't really mean that and that Labour under him was going to be a party that accepted Brexit.

And the Labour question here is interesting, so it's not come up in the campaign. It's there in the background, as Helen says, for all those reasons. Immigration is certainly a central issue of the reform.

insurgency, if that's the word for it in this campaign, and Nigel Farage's seeming imminent election to Parliament at the eighth time of asking. But the Labour Party is not discussing Brexit. It is one of the possible interesting questions about the so-called supermajority. I mean, almost certainly that will be a party that contains many, many MPs who would like to reconsider the Brexit question, but you can be quite sure that the leadership will not allow them to reopen it up anytime soon, I don't think.

And so it's weird. Brexit's not being discussed. It's not really being discussed by anyone in this campaign. And yet, as Helen says, the current polling, the number of people who, not the number of people who want to undo it or reverse it, that's a totally separate question, because I think most people can feel that would be a nightmarish process. But the number of people who, in one way or another, regret it, think it was a bad idea, is at the highest it's ever been. It's around, I think, Helen, 60%, isn't it?

And yet no one is trying to capture that constituency. And there are also some people who are surprised that Nigel Farage, who could be painted as the architect of Brexit in a country where Brexit has become unpopular, is not having disillusionment with Brexit pinned on him. But he's not. He's being allowed to get away with his narrative of betrayal, which is essentially what it is, that Brexit has not been pursued because what has been done is not real.

And it doesn't appeal to a lot of people, but it appeals to enough. And so there is a weird conspiracy of silence around this question, despite the fact that you can imagine with a bit of a nudge, the incentive for quite a lot of different politicians to raise the question again is there, but it is just not going to happen. And it's probably not going to happen in the next parliament either. The trauma of the Brexit days. But speaking of conspiracies of silence, so immigration numbers did not go down post-Brexit. They actually went up.

Also, recently, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies accused both Labour and Conservatives of having a, quote, conspiracy of silence over Britain's economic predicament, saying that both parties' manifestos aren't being clear with voters about their intentions. According to recent Pew Research poll, 78% of Britons say the economy is in poor shape. And essentially the suggestion there is that

the Labour and Conservative parties don't have any clear plan for how to fix it. Because again, I should say, along with Brexit sort of presumably giving the UK more control over its borders was supposed to also allow for creating new trade agreements with the United States and Asia and other countries that could boost exports and things like that. Today, the British economy, probably no news to you, not in a great spot.

What's going on? I think it is significant that the middle trio of those prime ministers we had in those 50 days, this trust, was brought down by a financial market

crisis, of trying to bring about a change of fiscal direction, both in terms of income tax cut for the rich and very large energy subsidies. And both the bond markets and the sterling foreign exchange markets essentially said, you're not doing that. It's entirely irresponsible. I think it's fair to say that economically, the Conservatives have just not been able to recover from that moment in terms of a perception that they just

don't know what they're doing in terms of making economic judgments. I think though what is interesting, if you turn to Labour's promises about making the economy grow, they're very reliant really on trying to copy Joe Biden or whoever is in charge in the United States, these days, whoever is running the Biden administration. And that is like, we're going to use the energy transition

to drive growth. They're promising that by 2030, I think it's like 750,000. I could have got that number wrong, but new jobs are going to be created. But this is exactly the same economic policy that Boris Johnson promised back in 2019. You create growth by the energy transition. It will lead to manufacturing jobs being reshored. But the United States has got at least some chance of being able to pull that off.

Britain's got no chance, I think, of being able to pull that off. We're too small. We don't have renewable energy companies of the size, even like, say, a country like Denmark has, world leading offshore wind manufacturer. And so there's a chasm, I think, between the project that Labour's committed to

to improve Britain's economic performance and the hard realities that is exactly the same ground that the Conservatives have already trodden under Johnson unsuccessfully and then that they abandoned when Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak took over. The other thing that's unquestionably driving people's frustration is there's a widespread recognition that the state of public services in the UK is bad and getting worse. You hear horror stories all the time about people's experiences of the National Health Service,

Education feels underfunded. The roads are full of holes, all of that stuff, familiar stuff. And the Tory party gets the blame for that. A lot of the vote for Labour is a vote for a party. People remember New Labour did this, is a vote for a party that is going to improve public services.

The credibility gap is how they're going to pay for it because they promised not to put up taxes. I think there's an assumption that the tax burden will have to go up. But the Tory party is squeezed because on the one hand, Labour are offering better public services. On the other hand, part of the reform pitch, the pitch further to the right and reform is positioning itself as an anti-immigrant party, but also a party of low taxation.

The Conservatives say they haven't put taxes up because they've not increased the base rates, the nominal rates. But because of inflation, a lot of people have entered new tax thresholds because the thresholds haven't risen in line with inflation. So there is actually a lot more tax being paid. And people are very aware of that. They're aware the tax burden has risen. And yet here are the parties saying, particularly the Conservative Party, we are not a party that puts up taxes.

So the Conservatives are squeezed by this. They're not the party of public services. They're not the party of low tax anymore. So they're being attacked from left and right. But the challenge for the Labour Party, and this is, I think, where some of the conspiracy of silence argument lies, is this party has made quite a wide ranging series of promises that they say depend, as Helen pointed out, on growth to fund it.

That may or may not be plausible in the medium term. In the short term, it's not going to happen. And people are going to want action on this stuff pretty damn quickly. I mean, the NHS, anyone who's used it recently knows, you know, it's not going to be an easy winter. And the Labour Party have got to find the money from somewhere. And there hasn't been much openness about that.

in this campaign. I think they've been trying to fudge it with no new tax increases for working people. I think that's... But what were that? Yeah, there was a hilarious debate about what counted as a working person, which ranged from everybody to people who could, you know, call on us any sum of money at all in a crisis.

This sounds like the debate we were having in 2012 about whether somebody who makes a quarter of a million dollars a year counts as wealthy. And then I mean, this conversation has continued. You know, the Biden administration's talking point is that they're not going to raise taxes on anyone who makes under four hundred thousand dollars a year.

You know, I've been asking you questions a little bit, well, obviously, from an American perspective, the most important issues, according to our polling, are one, the economy and inflation, two, immigration, and then third, at the moment, is poor government leadership. Are there issues that are unique to the UK that I haven't thought to ask about that are really shaping this election? I mean, I think it is true, as Helen said, that the Tory party's position is a result of

which more or less destroyed the brand. You know, the phrase is trash the brand. And Liz Truss's premiership was one of those. And it's comparable to what happened to John Major's government. The difference is when John Major's government was booted out and Tony Blair won a massive majority, the economy was actually doing pretty well then.

It's not doing well now. But it is also true that the Johnson administration fell apart during COVID and it fell apart because of what has become known as Partygate. Which from an American perspective sounds so quaint as a scandal, having a party during COVID. Yeah, with the gate tacked on. Nonetheless, it was catastrophic for the conservative brand. And the legacy of that, no question, is still there. There are two things that did for

The Conservative Party, they can be summed up in three words, party gate, Liz Truss. But that combination is toxic. And there isn't an equivalent, I think, in other places. The counterfactual of where the Conservative Party would be if what everyone, I think, expected in 2020 and 2021 was the case, which is that this would be an election between Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer. If Boris Johnson had not been

destroyed his own brand, never mind his party's brand, and got through COVID. This would be a fascinating election. I have no idea what would happen. The moment Johnson was done, I think the Conservative Party was done as an electoral force, certainly for this election cycle.

I think there's two things that stand out, the follow on from what David said. The first of them was, and this was true really about Rishi Sunak, if he had beaten Liz Truss the first time round, as much as it was about Liz Truss, that both of those candidates that summer when they were campaigning against each other had zero interest in what had come to be called the levelling up agenda, which was, if you like, the domestic corollary of Brexit. They both effectively said that the only thing we're interested in is growth. We just have to get growth done.

And in doing so, they were sticking two fingers up at all those people who voted Conservative for the first time in 2019 in these seats, particularly in the North East, that had given the Conservatives their majority. And having already then done that, then Liz Truss inflicted this spectacular act of really of fiscal damage to the country. She made it impossible for the government to continue to protect

people from the energy crisis in the way in which that they had been planning to do because the market said no no you're not going to borrow that amount of money nowhere near that amount of money so the promises that were made was literally the day the queen died as I recall that was going to be about 200 billion pounds which is a lot of money of like energy support

was retrenched literally a few weeks later. And again, I just don't think parties can recover from that. And I think that what is interesting here is that there is, in some sense, that pervasive sense in this country that nothing really works. At the centre of nothing really working is a Conservative government.

It's just kind of one of those things that's just been shown to be, in some sense, hollow. And it is probably worth saying, we don't know what's going to happen in these results, but it seems quite likely the Conservative Party under Boris Johnson in 2019 won this whole wave of seats that became called the Blue Wall in the north of England, including seats that had been held by Labour for nearly a century, seats that had never elected a Conservative MP. And it won all of them.

And I think that depends where you draw the lines, but it's thought to be about between 45 and 50 seats. It seems likely they're going to lose every single one of those. And that's quite an achievement in a single parliament. We've been talking quite a bit about policy here. And I think you'll be unsurprised to hear that when we discuss American politics, identity plays a large role in it. And to the point about the blue wall as well, I imagine that those are...

sort of historically blue collar working class parts of the country that, you know, have a long history of labor support, but also may have supported Brexit or uncomfortable with the levels of immigration, et cetera, et cetera. You know, how much does identity figure into the

this election. You know, maybe it's on educational lines, maybe it's on racial or ethnic lines, or, you know, income we've discussed a little bit, even gender. I mean, from an American perspective, you tell somebody, you know, four key indicators about their demographics, and you get a pretty good sense of how they might vote in the next election. Is that the case in the UK today? Yeah.

I think it partly depends on how many people turn out and vote for the Conservative Party, because if they are right at the bottom end of the range, it would suggest that a lot of people who are very uncomfortable with aspects of Labour's

on a number of identity politics issues have just said, you know what, however much I don't like that, I dislike even more the idea of the Conservatives staying in power. I think it's difficult to underestimate or overestimate rather, Galen, just how much this election is being shaped by the Conservative failure. And so everything else is just kind of like, in a way, like absorbed into it. I think that these identity politics questions will come back and

and cause labour quite considerable difficulty in office. But at the moment, despite the efforts of Rishi Sunak, they haven't really been able to get them to bite.

And it should be said as well, on top of everything else that the Conservatives have done, Rishi Sunak committed an unbelievable one in the early stage of this campaign when he left the D-Day commemoration. It's pretty difficult for a party that's done that to then get on its high horse about patriotic identity. I mean, there's no question there's quite a lot of identity politics coming from the reform side in this campaign. Nigel Farage is an old hand at that kind of

dog whistle politics. He talks about Rishi Sunak as not understanding British people. And then when he's accused of that being racist, he says it's got nothing to do with race. It's all about class. He's talking about him being rich, not talking about him not being white. But everyone knows what's going on there. The Reform Party have had a few exposés recently where candidates have been caught saying outrageously racist things. And then on the one hand, it damages them with wavering voters. On the other hand, presumably it shores up

some of their core support. But race doesn't play anything like the same role. I think in this election, it does in the United States. And the Labour Party is genuinely a pretty ecumenical party across a lot of different demographics, the Conservatives less. I think age is still an interesting question. My favourite statistic about the 2019 election, Corbyn versus Johnson, is that if the

franchise had been limited to people under 35, Jeremy Corbyn would have won the biggest landslide in British political history. And if the franchise had been limited to people over the age of 60, the Conservatives would have won every single seat in the country bar four.

And at the start of this campaign, Rishi Sunak was doing what conservative politicians are told to do, which is just target the votes of the people over the age of 60, because that is your core demographic. And that's the basis of all recent conservative electoral success. So he started floating ideas like national service for young people, which was not about young people. It was about pandering to older voters. The politics of pensions is still pretty acute in British politics, but it's just not working in this campaign environment.

It was also the case that the Conservatives were boosted by the fact that older voters turned out in far greater number than younger voters. But I think there's a chance in this election that quite a few older voters will not vote as well. And some of them will vote Labour, some of them will vote Liberal Democrats, some of them will vote Reform. So the Conservative Party's lock on voters over the age of 60 has been broken. And I think those voters are up for grabs. Younger voters will

vote Labour, many of them, some of them will vote Green, but it's a much more fractured picture. In 2019, your questions, as indeed with Brexit, actually, your questions, not gender so much, but age, income, and level of education at which you left education, could tell you an awful lot about how people would vote. I think in this election, that is much, much more fractured.

Yeah, it's interesting sort of how you talk about you can already see some of the challenges that labor will face, assuming that it's the majority party from July 4th onward.

that, you know, in these kinds of circumstances, elections only ever answer the question for now. And as long as democracy endures, the questions are going to have to be answered again in short order. A victory for center left today doesn't mean a victory for center left tomorrow necessarily. And maybe we'll have you back on to talk about it then. I want to

ask one more question before I let you go, which is I have been reflecting a little bit on British politics from my American perspective. If you would all like to reflect a little bit on American politics from your British perspective, we got a lot going on here. We got an election. I don't know if you've heard about it. What are your main takeaways from what we've been going through over here on this side of the pond so far? Helen, you can kick us off and then David.

I mean, I think the main question that comes out of what happened last week is like, not how does Biden be the Democratic candidate in November, is how does Biden carry on as president? Because it's pretty hard to watch that and think that Biden, as I suggested earlier, is actually in charge.

of this administration and the alternative to Biden in an electoral sense is a man whom we know is, should we just say, highly problematic in any number of ways. This seems to me to be pretty unprecedented territory. I'm not somebody who thought there were issues with Biden's health back in 2020. In fact, I remember us discussing it on

talking politics and election, an episode, as I recall, that we did, David, on the day of the inauguration. And you and I were quizzing Gary Gerstle on that score. So I don't think, to me, the revelation about his health is the thing. It's the fact that it can't be denied when so many people have seen it. That takes us and takes you, sorry, into unprecedented territory. Yeah, it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. I mean, the thing that was exposed was not Biden's incompetence. What was exposed was

cover-up and the cover-up looks... Seen from the outside, it looks breathtaking actually. And the thought that

you can get to November and beyond that having been exposed because apart from anything else, it just makes it too easy for the other side in whatever form they take to point out you can't trust these people. But to connect this question with what you're just saying about the Labour Party and how soon it'll all fall apart for them. British Senate gave a speech before the campaign was called which for which he was widely mocked in which he said,

the next five years are probably the most dangerous in Britain's history since the Second World War potentially. And he said two things going on. One, the AI revolution is going to really bite. Well, that's a separate subject. And second, just look at the world out there and look at the risks out there. And by implication, one of those risks was the reelection of Donald Trump. And that looks both more likely now, but also the circumstances under which that happens

You know, it's hard to think of an outcome of the election in November that doesn't make the world a more dangerous place one way or another. You know, even if Biden's replaced by Harris and Harris wins, you know, you still...

just the circumstances under which people will be able to question the legitimacy of the result in a very precarious and a very dangerous world. My mother's always saying this to me on the phone. My mother's quite old. And she's always saying, we should be so grateful that our politics is so boring compared to what's going on everywhere else, France and America. I say it's true. This is a very low stakes election, actually, our election.

but a low-stakes election in a dangerous world feels dangerous. The next six months seems to me to be, I used to be someone who would try and be sanguine in the face of people who worried about the end of democracy, but I've shifted a little in that I think Rishi Sunak was right. I think the next five years are the most dangerous in political terms, geopolitical terms of my lifetime. And therefore, you know, be careful what you wish for, Keir Starmer.

All right. Well, we're going to leave things there. And of course, we'll have results in the election soon enough. Thank you so much for joining me today, Helen and David. Pleasure. Thank you. Pleasure. My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chortavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at FiveThirtyEight.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.

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