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Acast.com. At last it's happened, Kamal. It seems as if Rishi Sunak has found his inner conservative and who started channeling Margaret Thatcher in this election campaign. Few better people.
And Keir Starmer, it seems, is taking a bit of a risk and the gamble we'll be unpacking that. And what we all really want to know is what does the polling tell us about what we may wake up to on July 5th? And of course, brilliant letters, writers, who are also very funny. Welcome to the Daily Team with me, Kamal Arman.
Now, we're going to start in the past. Are we? We're going back to the past to look at the future. That's what we're going to do.
That's what we're going to do. So we're going to be right back to 1976, which, from memory, I was quite a small boy then, was a very hot summer. That was the summer my brother was born in August. My mother had a terrible time.
I wasn't born until two years later. I'm just a little bit... You talk background on the Tommy's there, which is also important. But as important as that is, Margaret Thatcher had recently become the leader of the Conservative Party.
She gave a very, very famous quote now about labour, governments and here she is speaking on Thames televisions this week. And she's being questioned by the really quite smooth Lou Gardner. There are those nasty critics, of course, who suggest that you don't really want to bring them down at the moment. Life is a bit too difficult in the country and that leave them to sort the mess out and then come in with the attack later.
So, next year. I would much prefer to bring them down as soon as possible. I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time. And socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess.
They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. It's so distinctive, her voice there, isn't it? If you look back to the characters of former election campaigns, I feel a bit nostalgic because there isn't a big personality in this.
Maybe we'll come on to this in a minute. But presumably you're referring to this Kamal because of Rishi Sunak writing in the telegraph, trying to channel his inner Iron Lady. Come on, you've met the Prime Minister on a number of occasions privately and you say that he does often say how much he is a true Thatcherite. Margaret Thatcher, of course, is one of the most famous, one of the most successful, if not the most successful Conservative Prime Minister.
And today he wrote an article in the telegraph where he did use almost exactly the phrase of Margaret Thatcher. And he said, the only certainty about Labour is that they run out of other people's money, as socialists always do. Twenty years ago, when Tony Blair was the leader of the Labour Party, the Conservative attack on Labour being socialist didn't hold water. There is clearly a residual fear that the Conservatives may be picking up from focus groups, that the public remember what Kiss Armour said when he became leader of the Labour Party in 2020.
And he backed a lot of Jeremy Corbyn's policies. He actually declared at that point, I am a socialist, brackets and proud. Can I just clarify something when he said I meet the Prime Minister a lot privately? I meet him in a pseudo-professional capacity.
The last time I had a proper chat with him was at the telegraph drinks do at the Tory Party conference. I think he regards me slightly with a gimlet eye because I haven't always been overwhelmingly supportive of him and his administration in my columns. So his idea of us being a critical friend, maybe too much of the criticism and not enough of the friendship. However, he often says to people, you know, look back at my maiden speech in the House of Commons.
And there he very much is channeling his inner Thatcher. He talks about aspiration. He talks about, you know, his immigrant heritage and how that kind of Thatcher spirit of entrepreneurialism spurred on his parents to become a doctor and a pharmacist and make something of their lives in this country that they came from a very poor background, were able to succeed enough to send him to Winchester. So there is that in him.
He often talked when he was transferred about the fact that he had a picture of Nigel Lawson on the wall. That was his economic hero, somebody who went against the Treasury orthodoxy. And then subsequently, Sunak was accused of being part of the Treasury orthodoxy. So it's difficult, but who else should he channel right now?
There's no other conservatives on the slate. It's literally a very clear battle line now being drawn, isn't it, Kamal? Between red and blue. I think which is Sunak has a gimlet eye, frankly, for most journalism.
Talk about his tetanus. It is surprising or it's a dividing line that's growing. Maybe not surprising, actually, that the conservatives are going to try and box labor in to this area of they are truly left wing. And whatever Kissed Armor may be saying now, you've got to remember some of his heritage, the support for Jeremy Corbyn.
As you say, Camilla, him actually saying I am a socialist and the conservative still believe that that plays strongly for those wavering, persuadable voters, which I think is interesting. It's going to come up time and time again for Kissed Armor. And let's just listen to this clip. This is a clip.
Anna Jones, the Sky TV presenter, was interviewing Kissed Armor this morning. And just listen to how Anna frames the changes that Kissed Armor has had to go on in his policy proposals. Energy is one area that you've backtracked since you became Labour leader, ditching your promise to spend £28 billion a year in green investment. It's not the only one, is it?
You've also dropped pledges to abolish university tuition fees, increase income tax on top 5% of earners bring into public ownership utilities. So are people right to worry that any promises you make now will be jumped once you're in number 10? Well, let me take that on head on and thank you for putting it to me. Because if you take say tuition fees, I do think the current system is unfair.
I think it's unfair on students. I think it's unfair on universities. It needs to change. And I did advocate getting rid of tuition fees.
You're absolutely right about that. Now, damage has been done to the economy. We've got to make a choice because we've got waiting lists that are the best part of 8 million. The money is not available to do both 40,000 appointments every week to bring the waiting list down and tuition fees.
So I've had to go to hit me up because I do think it's very important. In the end, if you can't do both, you have to make a decision. Are you going to abolish tuition fees or are you going to bring down the waiting lists? I've taken a political choice.
I accept that. People will judge me on that. I accept that. My choice given the level of waiting lists is to bring those waiting lists down and put the NHS back on its feet.
That means I can't abolish tuition fees. Now, you will say to me, well, that's a U-turn. It's the practical reality of the damage that the Tories have done to the economy. Truth is, and I put this in my column which comes out on Saturday, he did stand for the leadership on an unashamedly Marxist platform up with the workers, up with the trade unions, taking the power from the powerful and giving it to the powerless.
I'm going to support green activism and all the rest of it. Now he's channeling Marx, but it's Groucho, not Karl. You know, those are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others. Because in the interest of political expediency, he's flip-flopped between being on the side of Corbyn in a bit to kind of out-corbin, Corbyn, and appeal to the left, and now he's trying to be Blair.
But I mean, a socialist once is always a socialist, isn't it? I think there's a different way you could look at that. I think there's one way the public could see it, which is exactly as you explain it. There is another way which is not flip-flopped, but it's actually practical reality, real politics.
Tony Blair was first a candidate in 1983 under Michael Foote. He had to stand on the Michael Foote manifesto. He didn't actually believe the Michael Foote manifesto, but needs must at the time. If Kirstalma was ever going to be leader of the Labour Party, the only way he was going to get Labour Party members to vote for him was to say he agreed with a lot of what Jeremy Corbyn had done.
In the certain knowledge, if he became leader, he would clear a lot of that stuff out and completely change course. So there could be an analysis that it actually shows at least a strength of leadership in that I will dump a load of things because it is all about winning and getting into government. One letter, we're going to come to our brilliant readers later on in this episode, but one letter I did want to just read out from Richard Marshall, who lives in Surrey. It's something that was in my mind this morning when we were chatting about Kirstalma's morning interviews, one of which was without a Jones that we've heard, he did.
I thought quite a poor performance on the Today programme on the BBC. But this letter from Richard, I think, sums up something that's actually just coming to my mind. He says, in 1997, Labour had a great salesman in Tony Blair. In 1992, it had Neil Kinnock, and in 2015, Ed Miliband.
And in both cases, the wheels came off. So Kirstalma has more in common with these two leaders, and I am waiting for an implosion. We were chatting with the editor, Chris Evans, earlier, won't we? And he made the point that actually Stalin came into this thinking he would be Neil Kinnock.
He came into this on the back of an 80-seat majority with Boris Johnson in 2019. Perhaps thinking he'd be in a holding pattern. Now, the spotlight is firmly on him, and the next six weeks will dictate whether he could perform, or whether actually he falls under the pressure of the public gaze. So he's probably actually done a lot better than he imagined, and the Tories have done a lot worse, but it has put him, as you say, more under the spotlight.
The important thing is, though, of course, the voters. That's what really matters here. And as we told audiences yesterday, we want to make this a deep dive into what our voters really thinking. And to help us do that, we've got James Kanagasuriam joining us.
He's the Chief Research Officer at Focal Data, really interesting and brilliant research company, which looks at data in really clever and different ways. He's also a board member of Onward, which is the right-of-center think tank. James, welcome to the Daily Tea Studio. Lovely to see you.
You've come out with some new research this morning, hot off the press. Pleasure to be on here. Three big points you land, which really substantially changed the way we might think about how the election is going to develop over the next few weeks. Firstly, your research suggests that Labour's current poll lead is being overstated, and that probably their lead is something more like five to seven percentage points rather than 20 percentage points that we've seen in some of the polls.
Secondly, that if Rishi Sunak had hung on, there may be more chance that voters would have given him the benefit over better economic data. Thirdly, how is Keir Starmer's approach going to affect the way the polls move over the next few weeks? Let's get the first bit of that. How far do Labour need to be ahead to govern with a majority of one?
At the 2019 election, when the results came in, it was very clear that if Labour mechanically was 12 and a half points ahead of the Conservatives, based on the 2019 results, they would have a majority of one. That was driven by how the Labour and Conservative votes were distributed, because basically when it comes to elections, not all percentages are equal. You can have a party that's at 40% in one election where it wins a load of seats and then you can have a party also at 40% where it doesn't. Now, that's driven by two things.
First of all, what's the opposition getting? Second of all, how is the vote distributed? The reality is that the margin needed for either the Conservatives or Labour at every election in order to govern is completely different. I think if you parse a lot of what's coming out from the Conservative campaign, there's a lot of mentions of 2017 in reverse.
The 2017 campaign was really interesting for a huge number of reasons. The first is the two main parties stacking up votes. They both collectively got more than 83%, I think, by the end, which was the most it had been for decades. Second of all, the minor party shrank substantially.
So you keep away. I think it was in the Brexit party and the Green Party really shrank overnight. The third thing was the movements in England and Wales were the opposite of what happened in Scotland, which again was really, really interesting during the campaign. So the Conservatives in Scotland increased their votes substantially, but it fell during the campaign in England and Wales.
But the really interesting thing about the 2017 campaign was the sheer momentum, as it were, no pun intended, behind Jeremy Corbyn. It's easy to forget the 2017 campaign because of course Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party to a disastrous result, the most disastrous since, I think, in 2019, however, his performance and the Labour party's performance in 2017 is actually a massive outlier in political science. The idea of an opposition party kind of midway through a Conservative government, basically putting on 10 points, basically in a matter of weeks, is extraordinary. So a lot of people are making that comparison with Theresa May 2017 election, where she went in with a 20-point lead in the polls, came out with a hung parliament.
Can you see any evidence that the Labour party on this occasion could blow a 20-point lead? That's very hard. That's to do with how these guys have got to perform in debates. For those of you that remember the 2010 election with Cleggmania, they can make a difference.
It entirely depends on the performance of these kind of politicians. I think what is interesting, though, is it going to be 20 points or not? I think one of the things that came out from the research is that I'm skeptical that Labour will lead by 20 points come election day. Let's be really clear, if they can win a majority on five to seven points, if they are 20 points ahead, that's a proper blowout.
That's very unprecedented. We're going into an election with a very wide spread of polls. We've got companies like YouGov, where Labour at 27 points ahead, we've got other companies where they're 12 to 40 points ahead. What's interesting is that we're going to be closer by election day to the bottom end of the scale, but because the voter efficiency of the Labour party has increased so much, that will still lead potentially, if the election is held today, to a larger majority.
I hate to ask you this as a pollster, but is polling worth the paper it's written on? Are people honest with pollsters? Because we hear about shy conservatism. Don't people get called up and actually lie because they feel a bit embarrassed to be supporting 14 years of Tory rule?
It's a great question, and the reality is polls can be right. They can be wrong, tends to change from each election, you always ban catch up. I think the key is for the people who are doing them to be modest and the people who are receiving them to be skeptical, which would be my watchword. 1992 was an election where it was called the spiral of silence.
I'm not going to pretend to have come out as four years old, so I was not interested in anything. That's about how young you are, James. That's my first election. It's the first time I had to be young for weeks, but thank you very much.
The 1992 election was famous, basically, for the polls being wrong. John Major needed to be six points ahead to govern, and he ended up in seven points ahead, but all the polls suggested it was going to be very, very hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party. It didn't happen. A lot of the diagnostics around that were people just embarrassed to say that they were voting conservative.
But I guess each election, we've seen a different era go a different way. So 2019 was right. Polls said brothers and uncles for a decent victory. It happened.
2017, they were wrong in Labour's favour, so no one saw that beyond anything. You guys thought there was going to be a hung Parliament. People couldn't catch up with how fast the Labour vote share was rising. 2015, there was an era where the Conservatives got a slightly larger vote share than was expected.
So you're right to be skeptical. There's a lot of errors there. Maybe not dismissive. James, can I ask you about this idea of Rishi soon going early?
When you're looking at voter attitudes, some of your research picked out that if you'd waited longer, would the voters start realizing that some of those economic indicators are more positive? Yeah. So there's two things that you want to consider about election timing from an evidence basis. The first is what's happened in the past.
And there's very strong evidence that incumbent governments, even when they're going to lose, put on substantial number of votes during an election, happened with Gordon Brown, it happened with John Major, substantial vote share, not just over the course of the campaign, but crucially the pre-campaign, the four or five months beforehand. And actually, both of those results would have been catastrophic for Brown and Major, more so than they were if they'd gone early. And that's because you see a lot of committed, what you're talking about, slightly embarrassed voters who may not be happy with their own party, kind of returning to the fold, their ideology, giving it time. And there has been some good news on the economic front.
And then I guess the second lens you'd look at it, do you go early or not, is what's to come versus, you know, looking at the past. And clearly, the calculation was made that even history aside, tending to favor incumbent governments even when they lose, must have taken the decision that the stuff to come was so bad that they weren't going to make that decision. What that was, I don't know. I imagine it could be to do reform and then kind of putting that together.
You've made that point coming in and also Gordon Rayner, our associate editor, former political president in the paper this morning saying that the bad economic news that was possibly coming, not bad. Sorry, not bad economic news. That'd be too strong. The economic news that may not be quite as good as the last quarter has been was affecting which you see next decision making.
Yeah. And also, I think this idea that he couldn't produce another budget out of the hat that would then call for tax cuts, because they've already committed too much money to defense spending, infected blood compensation, tens of water bailouts. There's nothing left in the coffers. James, we spoke just before you were right to the DDT today about kids.
I seem to have some sense of a different type of approach, keeping mentioning I've been a very long, I don't do tribal politics, welcoming, testing questions from journalists, very sharp contrast to Rishi Tsunak. Does that stuff work with voters? I must make a comment on myself. Maybe a bit more traditional.
We were kind of, well, I can't see why he's not going hard on the NHS waiting list. I can't see why he's not going hard on how COVID was managed. I can't see why he's just not making sure his messages really land about why Labour will be different. He's getting into these conversations about territory he doesn't need to be on.
But some of our other members of the team were saying, no, no, I quite like the fact that he is different. He's talking in a conversation. He's not just giving you his sound advice. He's wondering, is there any evidence about what the voter might think of this new approach from star?
Yeah, that's a really interesting one. Do you know what it really reminds me of as the 2017 election? I think a lot of people on the centre right couldn't pause and fully comprehend why Jeremy Corbyn ended up with 40% of the vote and stacking 10 points on during a campaign. Some of it came down to his positioning.
He was very popular on the nationalisation of certain things. But actually some of it came down to tone, that kind of conversational manner that to many people seem straightforward. Why is he doing it? He's not been a politician for that long.
He is a career civil servant. That's probably just how he naturally is and how he talks. But I think the ease of which he's doing it is probably a function of sitting on a 20-point lead and having a lot of the entire British state cultural and political state turning towards him. You probably feel quite easy.
You probably feel quite confident. You probably feel like you can venture into different areas that you shouldn't go into. I'm very interested to see how Batman changes one, two, three years time from now. If he becomes Prime Minister and he's five points down.
I wonder what that looks like. James, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining us.
Thank you. It's been a pleasure. I asked this morning, because we just had James come to consider him on the programme. I asked this morning whether there were any suggestions yet around polling that anything's moved in the polls since the calling of the general election.
But then I thought, let's have a quick look at those betting exchanges. Because sometimes betting odds start giving you some slight indications about the way the market and maybe the market of voters is moving. So John, one of our brilliant producers, our editor, did put together a few facts and figures. What's he come up with?
He's come up with the idea that a Labour majority is still an 85% chance. Conservative majority is at just a 2% chance. Although if I was a Conservative party campaign, what does that say? It isn't near it.
That's quite interesting, isn't it? I think the other point is well. I think the other point that John's put here is that no overall majority was the big mover on one of the exchanges. I think, given what James has just said to us, this idea that the polls could be tighter than we imagine, I think it's just worth keeping an eye on.
Also, I think turnout was so low in the locals that that could change the dynamic of things. Yesterday's announcement by Nigel Farage means reformer now odds on to win. How many seats do you think, Kamal? Ten.
Zero. So there's a 71% chance. I can hear some giggling. You can hear some giggling.
Ben Butcher, who joins us now from our data team, finds quite amusing. Dominic Penner, political correspondent turned political statistician extraordinaire, joined by two resident telegraph statos. Do you mind if I call you that? I'm suggesting you're...
Statos, data nerds, I'll take anything I should find. Brilliant. It overestimates my ability to... Don, we know about journalists and their problems adding up.
Thank God Kamal is here who can count. Should we talk about this brilliant piece of data that you put together, Ben, on the eight seats which could hold the key to the election? Where are they and why do they? I mean, between me and Don, we've pulled together a few seats that we think are interesting and could pay big parts in this election.
The first one is entirely statistically based for me. We've obviously just heard about the kind of swings that are needed for Labour. They may be a little bit less than what's been suggested, but the one that goes around a lot is 12.7, and that is the swing needed for Labour to secure Buckingham and Bletchley. It's a new constituency, but the two seats who kind of bring it together have never voted Labour since 1966, and so that 12.7 for that constituency will make a big moment for that seat.
I think it's interesting because it represents that kind of southern area where if you start seeing Labour picking up those seats, the map will very quickly start turning red throughout the night. It's blue wall, isn't it? Not far from me, Buckingham and Bletchley in Buckinghamshire. I'm on the heart.
Buck's border. That's hard to say. But Ben, just to be sorry, just to be clear, this is, at the moment, if we had a vote share that was similar to 2019, this would be solid, conservative territory, even though it's a new seat. Yeah, absolutely.
So the press association basically took the new seats, and they did some very clever data analysis and just gave us a rough idea of what the vote shares would have been in those new seats, which is really helpful for don't you understand myself to kind of work out where the seats are going to be? Don, tell us why Michael Gove may soon be back in a nightclub in Aberdeen. Don's been in commiserating his own political career. Yes, the housing sector is natural habitat if his previous vorays into the disco text of Aberdeen are anything to go by.
But the Cabinet Minister may soon be an ex-Cabinet minister, his constituency of Surrey Heath, again in 2019, a very Victorian majority, of around 18,000, pretty much 30, 35 cent. But the Liberal Democrats, as part of their offensive and so-called blue wall, made up of about 40 true blue, hotland seats, which in 2019 it would have been unthinkable that they were challenging for any of those seats. But these seats with more sort of socially liberal Tories, people who are still upset by party gate by, for example, the sewage scandal, which we've written a lot about here at the Telegraph. And there is, as there is in many seats, a very strong mood for change, and all the projection show that Gove's seat of Surrey Heath is a bit of a toss-up.
He could be on his way out. Well, to no moment for him. We haven't spoken that much about the Lib Dems, and we are going to be writing that wrong. Maybe not at wrong, is it?
But we're going to be rebalancing that. Sorry. But watch your YouTube. You can see from the space of the sponsor we've been discussing the Lib Dems, but we are going to be discussing the Lib Dems in more detail, because we're a very fair-minded set of daily tea presenters.
But Dom, I asked this question yesterday, as well, of Kelly Bevo, who's the Chief Executive of Ipsos. But Dom, how well are the Lib Dems doing at the moment? What do they need to do to really have a victorious night? And how dangerous are they for the Conservatives?
One of the great mysteries of this Parliament, with all the scandals that have affected the Conservatives, the Antitori vote, is that the Lib Dems haven't benefited more. They continue to poll at around 10 per cent of the vote, which is basically where they were under Joe Swinson, who had that disastrous campaign in 2019. However, they are set to benefit. They are on track to win, perhaps, 30 or 40 seats.
That they didn't win last time out, not because they've particularly done anything extraordinary, but because the Tories have collapsed a lot of Tory voters at the moment, or unless Richie Zoonac can turn things around, or mind her to stay at home. So, I just say, the first election, what do you call it? Not poster. Claxon, what are you doing in your office?
What are those signs? How come I know he's holding a fist up in the air? What do you call that means? An election sign outside your house.
Is there a special name for that? Yes, there's boards. Placard, maybe it's Placard. Placard.
Yeah, so the big orange ones. I spotted the first placard last night coming back from work in my village, and it was Lib Dems. Now, I tell you what, say what you like about Sir Ed Davies, and many people do, well, they just don't bother because he's so anonymous in the whole political scene right now, apart from having denied Alan Bates, the post office champion meeting all those years ago, say what you like about the leadership on the ground, the oranges, they are effective. I witness what they did in Chesham and Amisham, and they could repeat that across the country to be fair to them.
And this is what you're saying in local elections, and the most recent ones we had, you saw the big jump fight back coming from the Lib Dems. I think you're right, the Lib Dems aren't being spoke about the moment. Maybe it's because of their polling. They're polling just a little bit less for reform at the moment.
The M.R.P polling, which is the big multi-consticiency polling that we've seen, has them jumping up to 49 seats in the election, so they're heads, so they're just behind reform, but jumping back to almost where they were in 2010 was an extraordinary return. And I think it is places like the second seat, which we're going to look at, was North Norfolk, which is a old Liberal Democrats seat to Norman Lamb, a constituency man who represents the area, he even managed to survive the 2015 massacre of the Liberal Democrats. I think a big finger Liberal Democrats have on their side, and managed to bypass the first post-post system, is that they have very, very good local constituency MPs, they understand their local areas very well. They get the bins out, they fill the pot holes.
So you should go to telegraph.co.uk to look at those eight seats. As you say, we've been through Surrey Heath, we've been through Buckingham Bletchley and North Norfolk. Dom, you've got Gillingham there as well, which, of course, was Keir Starmer's first stop on his election campaign, so Gillingham is one of those seats you should be watching. Exactly.
And again, ordinarily, this has been a true blue, safe, conservative seat for a long time now, and the local MPs were fairly anonymous, Raymond Chishti. We all remember his successful leadership bid that lasted all of three minutes. Yes, he ran a memorably amusing leadership campaign to replace Boris Johnson in 2022, which, needless to say, didn't quite work out for him other than going viral. But other than that, Chishti is sort of a fairly tip-clampy, of a fairly safe, conservative seat, and the fact that, again, with a majority of about 15,000, the fact that Keir Starmer parked Labour's tanks on that particular lawn launching his campaign there shows the scale of Labour's ambition, and if they are able to term majorities of around 15,000, we are in for what could be a very, very impressive night for Labour.
Equally, if Labour do fall short in places like Gillingham, that would be a sign that Keir Starmer hasn't connected with a lot of those traditional Tory voters, who perhaps he would hope to win over. If they win Gillingham, it is a sign of maybe Labour doing better than we expect. If they fail to do so, it does open up the possibility that Labour could underperform across the board. So two things we need to do, Camilla, before election night.
Make sure we've got the timings of the declarations for these eight seats that you two and your teams have identified. Second point, we need to make sure that we are following reform and hold your horses, Camilla, the Lib Demss, and I'll leave more of your horses, Camilla, the Greens. We need to follow because we will have a high impact on whatever the Labour majority may or may not be, or whether we are approaching a hung Parliament. We'll be dependent on the performance of those three parties.
Yeah, and George Galloway's workers' party. Yes, of course. If he tables more candidates, particularly in the north. Should we talk about the departures, Dom?
I know you've done the spreadsheet on those who are suggesting that they're no longer going to stand as MPs after July the 4th. They're up to the record of 75. So, just as I came into the studio to record this, we had a 75th MP, Greg Clark, a former cabinet minister confirming that he will not be standing for the Tories at the next election, and I believe 9 or 10 just since Rishi Zunak, called for Snaps on the pole, having intended to stagger their departures over the summer, expecting an autumn election. Tory MPs have now almost been bounced into a quiting at the same time, which is not a good look for the government.
That's 75, sorry. That's back to... 97 was the record number, I believe. Tory people saying, I'm going at the next election.
Yeah, we've reached that number literally in the last half hour, I think. Things can only get better, but I didn't know I'm out of office. One of them is John Redwood, who's been in office since the dawn of time. I think he was elected in 1987, like David Davis, who was in the other day.
And that's because the Lib Dems are sniffing around, who could go from Wokingham to Woke under the yellows, Dom. Exactly, this is another of the Blue Wall seats where the Liberal Democrats are targeting in much the same way as they're targeting Michael Gove's constituency. And again, it would have just been unheard of a couple of years ago that someone like John Redwood would basically decide to pack up, or I guess that does show the difference in terms of where he is, and I've conserved to parties on issues like immigration, zero... The economy is spent the last five years, called if a tax cuts to be faced by a bit broader than...
I wonder if he's learnt how to sing the Welsh national anthem yet, but... Do you know how to sing the Welsh national anthem? I wasn't the Welsh secretary. That's a very good one.
And then this has made me sad, because we're only talking about him the other day, Craig McKinley, who returned to Westminster with a fanfare on prosthetic limbs on Wednesday, has now said he's not going to fight south fan. Why not, Dom? So, again, on account of Rishi Sinat calling the election a lot earlier than anyone had expected, Craig McKinley has decided that perhaps he would have recovered in time, sort of mentally and physically, to get to where he wanted to get to. It was his intention to stand again, and there was a very moving scene in the movie news documentary when he said the bionic MP, that's what I want to be, and inspire people.
And regardless of politics, that is a man who has the respect of all 649 of his MP colleagues. He does. And there's no other politician you can really say that about. His recovery has been extraordinary, but because the election is now going to be in July, rather than October or November, which I think most of Westminster was expecting, Craig McKinley has just decided I don't quite have a strength yet at this particular time.
Whoever is in power should commission him to do a report on prosthetics in the NHS, or something similar. Because imagine being out of work, having gone through what he's gone through for the last six months. After he suffered from such a devastating bout of sepsis, it was amazing that he'd got back into Parliament at the time. As you say, we were praising him and celebrating that.
But it shows Dom doesn't it? The real people impact of Rishi soon-tax decisions. But let's put that out there as an idea that Craig McKinley needs to be commissioned to do a piece of work like that. That's an excellent idea.
Dom and Ben, thank you so much. You are going to join us regularly on this journey to July the 4th and then July the 5th. Absolutely. And if you have any statistics, we're sat just down there.
Can we eat? We always need statistics. I'll send you a status of the day then. Thank you so much.
Good idea. Come on, Dom isn't one to blow his own trumpet. But he has done a sit down with his trustable people, and that's coming out in the Sunday telegraph. And then next week in his politics newsletter, she has been answering readers' questions.
Obviously, the context now of the election makes the answers quite interesting. At the time of recording the Daily Tea, the number of Tory MPs who had stood down was 75, but it's now 76. Because subsequently, to David Evernet has announced he's standing down in Bexley Heath and Crayford. That then beats the record that was set in 1997.
I would imagine that over the course of the weekend there may be more resignations still to come. And just before we finish for today, as promised, our wonderful writers of letters to the telegraph were a great bunch they are. We've just picked out a couple, just 11, the mix. Although, I must admit, Camilla, our mix is pretty 11 already, even though we are speaking about the general election.
What they reflect, and it's something we're going to reflect on the Daily Tea in the coming weeks. Of course, we're going to be covering the election, but we're also conscious that you don't want wall-to-wall election coverage day in day out. So we're going to be across the latest news, but we're also going to be delving into other important subjects, because the world continues to turn, and people continue to have issues aside from what's going on in the battle between the reds and the blues. Jane Oldroyd from Cheshire sums up the mood, I think, of the letters page.
So we are thinking of how much we're going to save on electricity over the next six weeks, because of not having the television or radio on. That's fine, Jane, but you can have Camilla and I in your ear or on your YouTube, because, as I said, we're going to be doing a real mix. Yeah, so no radio, no television, but lots and lots of podcasts listening. That's for you, Jane.
And then Timothy Davie, actually, not a bad question. He says, sir, now the games have begun. We should at least get the rules straight. What is an aspiration?
What is a manifesto pledge? What is a policy? Dr. Timothy Davie, I think Camilla, we should come back with some answers to those very good questions.
Not before, after the week we've had, we've had a lie down in a darken room. And for the rest of you, have a lovely weekend, and do join us next Tuesday, because we've all got Bangkok a day to have a little bit of shut-high. Hooray. For more unrivaled insight into the race for number 10, do get a telegraph subscription to our website and the telegraph app.
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