Green Party challenges and future prospects

There's just one week to go before voters across the UK give their verdict on Keir Starmer's government in their biggest electoral test since 2024 . Welcome to Political Fix from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. For Labour, it's set to be a bloodbath at the ballot box after another agonizing week for the PM. The Tories, too, are braced for a hammering, so with nationalist parties on track for gains and reform and the Greens also set to be celebrating next week, what kind of fallout awaits Star mer? I'm joined in the studio by my FT colleagues Miranda Green, our deputy opinion editor. Hello Miranda. Hello, Lucy . The UK Chief Political Commentator Robert Shrimsley. Hi Robert. Hi Lucy. And political columnist and writer of the Inside Politics newsletter, Stephen Bush. Hi Stephen. Hi Lucy . So guys, Starmer has limped to the finish line of this parliamentary session, but it's been another pretty gruesome week for the Prime Minister. Robert, he's faced more testimonies at the Foreign Affairs Committee around the appointment of Peter Mandelson. Well one of the reasons he won that vote on whether he should face the kind of inquiry that Boris Johnson faced over Partygate with the incredibly important and powerful Privileges Committee. He won it by whipping his MPs to support him. And that's not a good look, because this is the kind of thing that is meant to be a free vote where MPs are stepping above party issues to decide whether s one of their number has broken the rules. So I mean he won it, it's what you do in his position, but it wasn't great for him. I th I think we sort of reached the point where we're just heaping indignities on indignities and it doesn't really matter anymore. Is any one of these things going to be a killer blow? The answer is any of them could be a killer blow. It's just what's the one that breaks the resolve of everybody in the party. And I think what everyone else is waiting for is the results of these elections in May in Scotland, Wales and England and just how awful they are. And there is this sense, and I was talking to a minister a couple of days ago about this, and then and they were saying, you know, everybody thinks they know what's coming , everybody thinks it's priced in. But when the actual wave of emotion hits you, when you see these councils falling, you know, oh my God, we've lost X, that that it can be a totally different thing. So we're in a slightly phony period for a week where it could go either way. There you can construct an argument for why Kirstama will get through these elections, do other things, move on, and we'll just be in the prolonged period of political paralysis or that the dam could burst, and we're just waiting on that now. Miranda, I've been struck just how hard Starmers had to activate the emergency lever this week, not just with the whipping operation, but himself pleading with the weekly meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party on the eve of that vote, getting cabinet loyalists to ring and text round colleagues, even wheeling out Gordon Brown at this early stage, it does suggest that if things go as badly next week as the polls suggest they will do for Labour, he's already sort of spent a lot of political capital. And while people have been talking about the ability for him to potentially host a reshuffle as a final roll of the dice, there seems to be a sort of counter narrative that's firming up that he's even too weak to do that. What's your take? Well that's so interesting, isn't it? Because you know, a reshuffle can go wrong. And it's supposed to be a demonstration. I mean obviously I in an ideal world it's about merit. Maybe the right people in the cabinet. But pushing that aside, in terms of the politics of it, it's supposed to demonstrate that you have the patronage. And so even if you've lost respect with some of your MPs for whatever reason, fairly or unfairly, you're still the person who makes or breaks careers in in in the party in government. If you're actually so weakened that you end up doing some sort of botched reshuffle, for example, which you know we have seen examples of in the past, does that help your authority? So I'm quite interested in, you know, the pre-briefing around this reshuffle possibility and whether they sort of backtrack from the idea that it will be a kind of you know macho reassertion of Starmer's authority because you can't actually do that if it's sort of ebbed away too much. On the other hand, the mood seems to be sort of slightly despairing rather than baying for blood. But as Robert says, the psychology of a huge electoral defeat can be overwhelming and it can change the mood overnight. It's very interesting. I remember the post elec twenty seventeen election of Theresa Ma She'd just had this actually disastrous election. She'd called a snap vote. It had gone wrong. And she was suddenly unable to do the reshuffle that she wanted to do. She'd it was very clear in advance she was going to sack Philip Hammond as Chancellor. Suddenly she couldn't do it and in fact what was billed as the big reshuffle turned out to be an absolute demonstration of her impotence. Stephen, who could he safely sack from the cabinet to make room for fresh talent or at least, you know, bind in enemies or potential enemies. I think the Theresa May reshuffle in twenty seventeen is I think a really useful historical comparison, right? In the May was actually quite good at doing reshuffles in including those quite elegant ones in the second half of her time when she was very weak, and they were these kind of sudoku puzzles. And the sort of Sudoku puzzles for Keir Starmer is that there are three factions in the parliamentary party you have to have on side to have a parliamentary majority. The sort of revisionist, Blairite, modernizing wing, the traditional old right, and the middle of the party slash the soft left, right? Those are the three factions which together make up the parliamentary majority. And after the last reshuffle, there are essentially two more Blairites around the cabinet table than there should be. I don't mean that from a competence perspective. I just mean the whole of the party feeling represented. You gotta get rid of two. Now, what Theresa May did is she got she effectively sacrificed Damian Green's full cabinet seat because he was a close ally and friend of hers. Ultimately, when you're an embattled prime minister, what do you do? You dismember one of your friends. And that would if you are Cier, you Not literally. Not no not literally, but we if but if you were Kier, then that would suggest good night Steve Reed. You know, you was big in Labour together, they've been together a long time. And that of course is literally like for like Angela Rayner's old job because the whole point of doing a reshuffle would be to find a slot for Angela Rayner, to find a permanent role for Lucy Powell. And then of course you this being a cabinet reshuffle, you're also then thinking about regional balance and gender balance. So I would then suggest the other person to be worried would be Peter Kyle, because he's a man, he's from the South, he represents a Southern seat, and he's a Blairite. And so I kind of feel that you know through no fault of his own he's the the obvious out of the air lot option. But Keir hates reshuffles. Right. One of the reasons why you have a lot of people in there who have these kind of still these slightly weird non-jobs is because he doesn't like sacking people. He had to be really talked into the last reshuffle, which of course made his position much worse. So I think there's still a chance that he just decides he doesn't want to do it, even before the fact that if you get it remotely wrong and someone instead of going, oh you know, fine off to the back benches goes, I'm gonna do a big statement about how useless you are, which you know you can't predict will happen until you do it, I think yeah, there's quite a good chance he'll just go, Oh no, it's not worth the candle. I think the added problem, I mean Stephen's explained all of the sort of intra-party political nuances. But the other thing is , given the circumstances in which a reshuffle like this would be held, you have to use it to be saying, We've got things wrong, I'm doing something different. If you think back to the big reshuffle he did in opposition, where he got rid of his I think it was after the Hartley pool by election, he got rid of his big friends like Annalise Dodds, who was Shadow Chancellor, and he dem oted Nick Sim Simmons. There was a point there which I'm bringing in more experienced people, I'm pushing us back more towards the political centre and away from my own rough base. There was an argument there. I think in the circumstances he's in, he would have to be presenting his party with an argument as to why, after everything that's gone wrong, there is a reason to stick with him beyond fear of what the alternatives might be. And that argument has to be I'm pushing the party in this particular direction. I am reshuffling my cabinet in order to say we're going to do less of this and more of that. And what I don't hear so far is any convincing argument, apart from that we've got to get Angela back, any convincing argument that says he will use this reshuffle to show that Labour is now moving in X direction. X direction has to be in terms of where they're going, has to be away from the chasing reform and towards regrouping the left block. And that has to be the primary purpose. And I don't hear anything about that. And I don't have any sense of that. And so I find myself thinking, even if he is able to do a reshuffle, he feels powerful enough to do it. Mirando, I'm keen to get your sense of whether you think Rayner would want to come back, because there's now some suggestion, you know, that might not ta ctically be the best move for her. We're hearing a lot of swirling briefings from her supporters, also where streeting supporters suggesting they have both have the numbers. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester Mayor, he popped up on Wednesday a and giving little interview to Bloomberg to talk about his view that Labour needs to change direction. I thought very interesting him making a sort of sop to the right in the party by saying we need kind of higher defence spending and raising the prospect of doing that through more borrowing, no doubt something that would cause jitters in the guilt markets. But it feels like the alternatives, as you called them, Robert, they are beginning to position or at least their supporters pretty strongly in the lead up to the election now. They are sort of definitely jostling, aren't they? But again I think it's quite hard to to to predict what the mood will be like when those, you know, results come through in full and whether the in the famous phrase whether the herd will move or not. As for Rainer, she's got to get this tax problem out of the way. You know, her HMRC little local difficulty with un underpaid stamp duty. She's got to get that out of the way. Sort of, you know, cleansing herself. I think, you know, can I try it on you? What one of her supporters said to me, which is look, you know, she's already said she'll pay it. That's not in question. She's already resigned over this issue, so therefore she's taken responsibility . You know, it's a matter now of just, you know, dotting the I's and crossing the T's and we can all move on. Do you think that will wash? I think that's really hard. I mean all of the people who, you know, hold focus groups around the country , even beyond what we know about her numbers, it comes up spontaneously in focus groups. You know, people really did not like this and it's a serious vulnerability for her, you know, not just a technicality. I mean I personally actually think she's very sort of underpriced in terms of her actual political talents and what she could achieve. And I think she's a bit too useful for the right as a kind of bogey man of what a post-starmer Labour government could look like. And I think if you think about what she said recently about being serious on defence and that she's actually not a sort of fiscal danger in the way that Andy Burnham with his remarks about not being in hock to the bond markets has seemed comfortable with being. I think there's a lot more to her potential candidacy, you know, than is often sort of appreciated. But I think it's all about the timing, isn't it? I mean, you know, it's Robert's piece this week said , this whole game of waiting for Burnham to be actually in a position to challenge is one aspect of what might go on, in which case they'll all be sort of treading water for a while. I think the thing is though is that I find it very hard to see how someone how anyone not called Andy would beat him, right? Because the argument is essentially like none of them really want to change the fiscal position, right? They don't think there's an appetite for broad-based taxes. And although some of them are happy to pretend to be madder than they are, none of them are actually you know crazy enough to go, oh do you know what we really need to do during a looming supply shock when we're already struggling to sell our debt at a price we would like to, let's have more of that. So they are all going to be going look, I am I'm better lipstick on this pig. If it if it's a question of who has the best lipstick is obviously Andy Burnham. That is clear in every single poll than he is the best if you just want to have a new face. I think what's mo most likely is and the leadership change will essentially end up triggered by accident. You remember after the EU referendum defeat when there was there were kind of these vague plans about getting rid of Jeremy Corbyn that had been being sort of half passed around. And then we left the European Union, which for most Labour MPs was this horrible, dislocative event. There was huge upset in the parliamentary party. So it was it was a very fraught space emotion ally. And then suddenly all of these coups kind of went off without meaning to, right? They all kind of launched at the same time and they were all kind of half baked and half thought through. And I think that's probably the most likely way that the end of Star War will happen. It might not be the local elections. So yeah, my instinct is it will just be like a panic. It will be some weird event or someone unexpectedly resigning. I mean, that's ultimately what did for Boris, right? It was Rishi resigning over an unrelated manner, looking abroad, that's what did for Justin Trudeau, right? Like was Christopher Friedland deciding that she didn't go along with other issues and that being the thing which caused everything to collapse. And that feels to me still the most likely thing is just like a random event. Yeah. Although you know, ahead of next week, let's just look at some of the forecasts. Lord Robert Haywood, a Tory but very respected holster, predicts that Labour will lose three quarters of its local council seats, one thousand eight hundred and fifty odd seats. That is going to be a hugely traumatic moment. Robert which parts of the country are most unhappy? With Labour. With Labour. I don't know. I think there's this this is one of those occasions where the phrase uniform swing I think kicks in. I think there is general discontent everywhere in different forms and it's manifesting in different forms. So in you know the the places that we used to think of as the Red Wall, it's manifesting itself with the reform. In the cities, it's manifesting itself through the Greens. I think the interesting issue I think we're going to see is the extent to which and I think what triggers everything, extent to which MPs look at these results and are able to say, that's midterms . They're bad midterms, but you know, that's where we are. Or they suddenly look at this and go, oh my God, that's the Greens now really seriously challenging for my seat in my constituency, or that's reform meaning I'm not going to be an MP anymore. And so I think England is the place that matters most in this respect, just because England matters most electorally. What happens in Wales is going to be a huge jolt. power and they see reform and the Greens and the Liberal Democrats who we keep we all forget about, but they are going to have a pretty good night probably. It's just going to be an across the board sense that everywhere in the country people are finding someone with whom to who can beat us. And I think there's something really fundamentally challenging about that as well for Labour, which i the message is who are Labour's people now? You know, if you lose Wales, which you've literally controlled since the 1920s. And you're also being challenged in these other areas, which are more those kind of the areas where all of the presenters stand on general election night because they're the swing territory that govern s who gets into number 10, all the rest of it. If you're losing those as well as your heartlands, who is your party for? And then you've got this new vehicle on the left, you know, eating up the kind of Corbonite tendency, which we surprised us all with how alive it was during the Corbyn years. You've really got a big, you know, task of thinking to do about how you recover. And it because it's not tactical recovery at that point. It's who are you now for ? And and Stephen, the Tories, I mean they've been sort of a little bit under reported in recent weeks, maybe months, but they're also going to have a really dreadful night. It could be looking quite existential for them on May the eighth. Yeah, I mean the the sort of irony of the Conservative position is one of the things Kemi Badmack has very successfully convinced her party is that the essay question that she has to answer is are Labor doing badly rather than are the Conservatives doing well, they're also forecast to have sort of similar kind of you know 70 to 74 percent of their seats un up being lost. Now there are far fewer Conservative seats up this time just because of the nature of the map this time around. I think for them the devolved elections are actually an even bigger deal, right? Because unless the polls are wrong, and I would say I don't know anyone else by my impression travelling the country is the polls are gonna be about right, they will be in both Holyrood and the Senate, the biggest right wing party won't be them. It will be reform. And those are paid full time jobs, right? And at the point you have paid full-time legislators of another party, that is baking in the existence of that other threat on the right. And I think a Conservative Party will somehow still manage to at the end of this set of local elections go like, oh but it's fine because Labour are doing badly. I I think however they should be much more alarmed about the fact that it's wholly possible that in lots of these places they will be sort of full-on replaced. Yeah, then in say Cannock Chase, a stretch marginal for the Labour Party, a place which when they made gains there in 2024, it was such a sign and you know they were on course to be elected with a big majority. For Labour it's a nice to have, for conservative or reform government it's a must have if you want to be in Downing Street. I think then it looks likely somewhere like there that you will overnight I mean Alex in third, so there'll still be yeah, but overnight all of those conservative seats might go yeah from blue to teal. Should really panic them. Most Labour MPs, even in marginal seats, were selected for the first time this time around. They don't have that experience of losing and losing again. And I think that's going to make them much more likely to panic when they wake up in the morning and they go, Oh w, where have all my friends gone? And they suddenly have a hostile council, a council leader who'll probably be the candidate next time, you know, making announcements about the things they're doing in the area, and I just think that stuff is so corrosive to the morale of a parliamentary party. So it's one other thing that's so interesting as well about that point of the Conservative Party having a bad night and just being effectively replaced by reform as the party of the right in some areas. The Lib Dems are briefing that some of that territory that we would always have under stood as a very easy to grasp blue versus yellow fight is now a reform versus libdem fight. So it's changed overnight even pre the results, which is really interesting because that's a territorial shift. What was so destructive for the Conservatives in London was they lost the council and then in the election cycle afterwards their vote went tactically and through ideological and realignment and demographic change to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. And so they just kind of vanished from places where they had previously at least had a sort of punchers interest. And I think that, yeah, that is the real risk for them in the former liberal conservative battleground is if you have somewhere like, say, Gosport or East Surrey, where you suddenly go from, oh, it was blue, and now it's blue and yellow, oh, and now all of that blue has been replaced. We know from London that it's so hard to get back into contention. Mark Pack, who is a very he's probably like the most influential important liberal democrat than you've never heard of. He used to be party president. He was very influential in the strategy and lesson getting 72 seats, always argues then w our country is becoming a six hundred and fifty different two party contests and the Lib Dem Aim has got to be the second party in as many of them as possible. And yeah, I think that big risk isn't the Conservatives wake up on Friday and they are no longer the second party in a lot of contests. Trevor Burrus Stephen's right in that the Conservatives will just breeze through this in in their own heads and say or think they will that actually, you know, Kemi's done really well. They c she can point to the fact that she's ahead of her party in the polls, which is important, that changing the leader doesn't necessarily improve their situation, which is a big deal for her. But there are a few things that are going to happen, I think, which are when they stop and think about it, they'll start to reflect rather more gloomily. One of them is that we're just not going to talk about them. That when this election comes and goes, we'll be talking about reform, we're talking about the Greens. And when we're talking about who's vanquishing Labour, it won't be the Conservatives. Their best hope is clawing back a couple of councils in the places in places like London. And if they do that, they'll suddenly proclaim it as a good night. But I was talking to someone from Reform earlier today and he was saying, look at our prospects in Essex, for example. You know, you look at look what happens in the wards in Kemi Badenok's own seat in Saffron Ward and one of the safest seats around. You look at how many of those wards we actually end up taking. You know, and actually, although the Conservatives will still be hanging on in lots of places , they will be becoming less and less relevant in the conversation. That's what's got to worry them. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. As to reform, can anything stop their momentum? And in particular, I'm interested if you think that the , to my mind, pretty extraordinary story this week that the Thai-based crypto investor Christopher Harborn gave a personal gift of five million pounds. We've all been young friends, haven't we? We have. To Nigel Farage in 2024, just before he stood. Will that change the dial at all? How will the public view that? I mean it ought to be something to reflect on, not least because of reforms' deep fascination with and for crypto. But my slight feeling about reform at the moment is that if stand ards and propriety are your thing, you're probably not looking at reform at the moment anyway. You're looking at people who are you know breaking the rules, changing things, shaking it up, defying the odds. And so uh unless you're able to pin Wells cutting a few corners. But the thing is you've got to be able to pin a specific thing on Farage Something wrong. And that's the tricky part if it exists at all. Is it the kind of thing that more motivates the rivals of reform and their voters than actually turns off people who are reform curious? I mean I think the the the fundamental question about reform at some point is what is their ceiling? You know they have a core which is very committed. There's a chunk of people who don't think reform is hardline enough and they dally with Rupert Lowe's party. But you know, they have a core, a committed core. The question is, how much more can they pull in? Because the core isn't quite large enough yet. So this is the kind of thing that can alienate the people who look at them and go, well, you know , I I like some of the things they're saying, but I'm just a bit worried about the kind of people they are. And this is in that space, along with a lot of other reform issues. So the question is, does any of this amount to pulling people who are wavering back away from them, back to the Conservatives, back to Labour, whatever it is. And it goes to this fundamental question, which we will get to the next election, is your imperative to remove this Labour government or to stop reform, if those are the two big choices. And if it becomes an election about reform and stopping them, then they're in trouble. If it's an election about getting rid of labor, then they're not. So it's all about how much muck you can hurl onto these people. Stephen, could we just pause a moment on Rupert Lowe's party restore, which he sort of you know incorporated as a political party in February? Paul's to suggest that's bouncing around three, four per cent. Is that potentially significant in some places, you know, going forward to a general election, if we're in a fragmented five-party plus system, could that change the outcome of seats? And do you think that it could force or compel some in reform to sort of move further rightward in a way that could turn off reform curious voters who are more to the centre and will be definitely turned So look, I have to be honest, my instinct when we look when we talk about oh yeah, other polls about right is that when I see a poll suggesting that restorer on four percent of the vote. You know, this is a party with, you know, an ex, as you say, an extreme ethnationalist position. I don't feel when I travel the country as obviously a visible minority, that this is a country where one in every twenty people is going there's an orc I should deport. Right? Like I that might turn out to be like gravely complacent. But what would worry me if I were a pollster, seeing is that most of the places where if that lead is showing up our online samples and go, oh, is this the perennial problem of polling where I have too many engaged people in my samples? However, the more important part of your question is, does this mean that within every sort of far-right populist party than success succeeding in Europe. You've got someone who's successfully presenting as, oh, you know, look, I'm more I'm moderate, I'm different, I'm changed, I'm bloky, or I'm, you know, I'm an approachable woman, you know, so you know, Farage just though, oh, I'm a bit of a geezer. And then you always have other people in that party going, no, let's have the old-time religion, you know, let's talk more about, you know, race and nation. Now, the potential benefit for Farage is it's a way he can position himself as moderate by going, Look, I don't have those people in my party. That way then he yeah, he always makes great play of the fact that he runs the only party where you can't be a member if you're a uh former BNP member, which is partly how he performs moderation. So it could help him in that way. But equally of course, if I'm wrong about and it turns out that four percent is about right, that every little thing helps when you have fragmented politics. I'm not sure about this because I think there are bits of the country to your kind of geographical point, Lucy, where they can do a bit of damage, particularly on the east coast. And I think, you know, as you said, if you've got this hugely fragmented voting pattern, you need to keep those people on side somehow. And I'm not sure that Farage's traditional shtick of his performative moderation, as you put it, Stephen, has been quite so uh evident in recent months actually. And so I think if you put that slight tendency to try and keep those people in the fold, together with worries about the probity of reform and Farage and the finances, which does matter to some groups of people, we saw that strongly in the blue wall in the general election, for example. And you put that together with worries about his closeness to Trump, as well as some of the more out there policies. I think there are a set of factors which then makes reform almost slightly easier to beat in some areas for whichever is the centre-left vehicle party to stop them. And I think that dynamic is going to become more and more important . Robert, can we move on just to talk about the Greens? They're obviously having a good election campaign, but a few question marks being raised about Zach Polansky and his attitude towards anti Semitism. He is himself Jewish and obviously we've seen the appalling attack in Gold ers Green this week. Do you think that's something that's cutting through? I I think it possibly I mean I have to say, of all the things I find really irritating is when people are defending Zach Polansky on this issue. So the Greens can't be so anti-Semitic in any way because they've got a Jewish leader. But I don't hear those people saying, well, reform can't be Islamophobic because Zir Yusuf, one of their most important figures, is a Muslim. It it just doesn't work that way. Life I think that it is a problem for the Greens long term. I don't know that it'll be a problem for them in these elections, they're going to have good elections. But I think it's raising some issues and tensions that they're going to have to address because you've got Zach Polansky, I think, trying to be nuanced about this. He has clearly a very strong anti-Israel position. I don't think Zach Polansky is an anti-Semite, but he's got a party which is pulling in those same toxic crowd that Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party pulled in. And some of them really are anti-Semit es. And at the same time, you've got a deputy leader of the party in Mothin Ali who's saying, no, no, we must defend our people from these attacks. It's all a get-up, it's all a scam. None of these people are anti-Semites. And I think you're going to see these tensions begin to play out in the weeks and months that follow because you've got someone in Zach Polanski who's trying professionalize the party a bit as well. He's a very effective communicator. They're doing all kinds of small things to try and knock off their negatives. And he can clearly see there, and there have been a couple of cases in the last week where there are people in the Green Party who so obviously crossed the line that they should be got rid of and he's done it. And you've got other people saying no, he mustn't succumb to this. So I think what you're going to start seeing after the elections is more focus on the Greens and the fact that they are just nowhere near in a state of readiness to be major challenges. It's all happened a bit too fast. And all of the things that they're exposed upon, the people who think that pris ons should be abolished, the people who want heroin legalized, as well as all the stuff around anti-Semitism. I just think it's all gonna burst out and they're gonna find themselves in a mess because they haven't got the professional network in place to deal with these things. If you look compare them to say reform, who clearly have many of s similar problems. But the one thing reform have is an absolute dictator of a leader who could just say, okay, no, he's out, she's gone, that's over . The Greens don't work like that. And I think they're gonna just gonna find they're gonna have a great night next week, and then I think they're gonna find all kinds of messes. Piece by our colleagues this week on the problem with vetting candidates in both reform and the Greens, which you might call the two sort of populist wings of our new political landscape. There was a, I think it's the chair of the London Green Party saying that he was very annoyed with some candidates who wanted to put the c put climate change on the leaflets . You can't make it up, can you? I think the other really l interesting long-term risk for the Greens, right, is that unlike reform , who are broadly speaking, going to take over a bunch of councils which have due to the long period of austerity, essentially are just delivery bodies for their statutory responsibilities, the councillors can't do very much that's different, right? Whereas your green counsellors will be taking office and in some cases power in places where a lots of people who work in the media live and will be directly affected by their services , but where actually, because they don't have as big social care responsibilities because they have younger populations, there will be real choices about how they govern that if you have a situation where you have people who have said you know crankish and vile things and means you're having to kick them out before the election, you probably also have a bunch of people who, in a couple of weeks' time, are going to be asked to help run local authorities. And I think in terms of their stated aim of replacing the Labour Party, you know, not just being a left-wing challenger, but it's an alternative, I think this is a clearly a week they're going to do very well. But the but the reason why the SNP have been able to replace Scottish Labour is they've been able to take not just people who wanted a left alternative, but centrist Labour voters, Labour voters who might at one point have considered voting for the Scottish Conservative, respectful yeah, people with mortgages, all of which the Green Party is consciously making itself repellent to. And that I think puts a very hard ceiling on their ability to get beyond the fifteen, seventeen, twenty percent and they're polling on around now. I can't believe how old fashioned this is, Stephen actually daring to mention that the local elections might be about running local services. I mean surely it's just a national poll of another. But I do think actually It does really annoy me actually it's really important, you know, how these devolved governments work and how local government is billions and billions of pounds and that's why the number one salience issue at this electoral point is the state of the roads. People care about their local services well we've just got time left for political fix stock picks Robert who are you buying or selling I think I'm going to buy Angela Rayner this week. I don't quite know exactly why it is. In the sense that we know that we're gonna ha She matters. We know that well that sort of is my point in a way. That we know that after the elections there's going to be this enormous shake out and row in the lay party as to what happens, whether they tr do move against Starmer, whether they keep him in place. And I think she's going to be completely pivotal to the outcome. Whether she decides to go over the top and stand against him Whether she comes back into the cabinet and therefore helps help helps him survive, whether she makes the calls that begin to top him. I don't quite know where it's going, because all kinds of people are briefing on her behalf and not necessarily her behalf, but their behalf as her allies. But I think next week she is going to be the pivotal figure in what happens with Keir Starmer, so I'm buying her. Miranda, how about you? That's a really good one, but I'm going to sell prevent the counter-terrorism program because once again, and somewhat depressingly, the suspect in the Gold's Green attack was in fact known to prevent, had been reported to prevent, and this just keeps happening in these appalling terrorist attacks. And it's a total miracle that lives weren't lost this week. And uh doubtless this will happen again. Stephen. I'm gonna buy John Glen, who uh is Kemi Badenok's newish PPS, so uh parliamentary aide whose job is effectively to act as the eyes and ears of the leader or whatever shadow minister or minister they operate in the House of Commons. And I think one of the striking ways in Kimmy Badenok's parliamentary performances have improved is at PMQs there was a long time which you kind of get lost in the second half of first six questions, because the first set, you know what you're gonna say, you've got a pretty good idea what the prime minister is going to answer. And then afterwards it becomes a game of how well prepared and well-briefed you are. And I think one of the reasons why she's improved, and you can see this when you're when we're when one pops into watching neighborhood is having a PPS series, kind of sitting there, kind of whispering the back, helping with the preparation. And seeing as she will almost certainly be both strong enough and will want to refresh the top team. I would suspect he'll be one of the people who, if she does have a broader reshuffle, will have a higher shadow cabinet position than the one he currently enjoys. And he was a Treasury Min ister. Yeah, and I think in the nicest possible way I think one would struggle to say that Mel Stride had led up trees as Shadow Chancellor. Lucy, who are you buying or selling? Well I was going to sell Eleanad Morgan, the Welsh Labour leader who made an extraordinary gaffe on the campaign trail this week when she declared vote plied cum ri. I think her allies say she was exhausted from uh all the pavement pounding she's been doing. But I'm actually going to buy King Charles because I think he's played a blinder in W Washington this week with his speech to Congress. I don't know about you guys, I've come to expect sort of bland fluff from the royals and I thought he landed a political message really quite well, forced Trump to recommit to the UK US relationship, even if it, you know, give it two days and he'll be on on to the next thing. But I thought it was a, you know, it was a bit of a diplomatic masterclass, as some of the more fawning royal commentators called it, managing to make the point about resisting the urge to look inwards, getting climate change in there, and and his bravery basically in going and pulling it off without a gaff. Robert, I'll give you a hat tip because you said it would go off well and um and I think you were right. So if we're buying him, what is the position you think he could be elevated to after king? Emperor. Emperor King Empress. Emperor Emperor God. D Disraeli, of course, created the title of Queen Emperor. Was it for Queen Victoria's birthday or was it some kind of pre election stunt? Maybe that to if Keirstan will'd do a reshuffle, maybe Yeah, because we do still have a handful of technical imperial writings. He could become King Emperor of the Falkland Islands. I mean the jokes were very good, weren't they? So maybe he could be promoted to host of his own royal performance at the Palladium. Very good. That's all we have time for. Robert Miranda Stephen, thanks for joining. Hi Lucy. Bye. Bye, Lucy . And thank you for listening. And if you have any burning questions that you'd like to put to our panel, a question about the election result maybe, or about life inside Westminster or Whitehall, then get in touch. We're having a QA special on Monday, May the 11th. So send me your questions to polit icalfix at ft.com. We'll do our best to answer them. There are links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They're articles that we've made free for political fix listeners. There's also a link there to Stephen's award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You'll get 30 days f ree. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Claire Williamson. Lo Phillips is the executive producer. Original Music and Sound Engineering by Breen Turner. The broadcast engineers are Andrew Georgiardis and Bianca Wakeman. Cheryl Brumley is the FT's global head of audio. We'll meet again here next week.