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So welcome to episode 11 of The Restless Politics with me, Alistair Campbell, and me Rory Stewart.

We are going to be discussing lots and lots of things, matters local and global,

fall out from last week's elections. I've got a particular interest in what's going on in Northern Ireland,

where the pro-protocol parties did well. The anti-Northern Ireland protocol parties did badly, especially the DUP,

and so inevitably the conclusion from our government is that it's all about changing the protocol.

We'll also go global with Putin's military show in Red Square,

and also with first party gate, now beer gate, we'll be discussing what it takes for a story to get its own gate

in our dumbed down media, and we'll take, I hope, quite a few of your questions.

But Rory, where do you want to start? There's a lot of places that we can start.

Where do we start with the local elections? Let's just start with a little bit of the facts and figures.

Labour gained this local elections in Britain. Labour gained 108 seats,

Conservatives lost 488, and Lib Dems gained 224. Quite surprising, that's nearly twice as many as Labour.

Probably slightly larger losses for the Conservatives than most pollsters were predicting,

but of course inevitably, as we said in last week's show, not as big a loss as number 10 were trying to brief out,

which of course helps Boris Johnson, probably not a catastrophic enough loss to be able to top them immediately.

Labour's got five more councils, Conservatives have lost 11 Lib Dems put on three,

so that's the situation in Great Britain, and then maybe we'll get on to Northern Ireland.

Well, I do think, I mean, before we leave Great Britain, I do think that the Tories' expectation management was so transparent,

...