Welcome to The Restless Politics with me, Alistair Campbell, and with me, Rory Stewart.

And really Rory, we both are absolutely desperate to talk about the same thing, which is Israel,

to which we're going to devote most of the second half of the podcast, and we're also

going to kick off with the continuing fallout from the bi-elections last week.

I can't believe that we're still talking about U-Lez and whether Labour and the

Tory should ditch all their, what David Cameron used to call the green crap.

And I think we should also have a chat about what's been going on in Spain with

rather interesting elections, where I hope we've got more interesting things to say than

a lot of the pretty bang average commentaries that I've been reading.

Very good. Well, let's start with U-Lez. So just just remind listeners who,

those few people who might have missed out on our bi-elections special.

The surprising thing in the bi-elections was that although Labour did spectacularly well

in Yorkshire, where it took Nigel Adams to seat, so defeated a sitting conservative MP with a

majority of more than 20,000, so hugely optimistic and a great sign from Labour's point of view

for how they're doing the election. A seat with a smaller majority, which was Boris Johnson's

old seat in Oxbridge, which he was holding with a majority of 7,000, to their complete

astonishment, the astonishment to most of the commentary at except for possibly you and one

commentator who I saw in the news statesman, and they failed to take. And the conservative campaign

which allowed them to hold that seat was a campaign in opposition to extending the ultra-low

emissions zone out to Outer London, which would have charged people with cars that

were considered polluting a great deal of money. And this was a centerpiece of

Sidiq Khan, the Labour mayor's policy, and it's one that the Labour candidate supported. But

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