Jones, Sean, Ian Alec, the official Monster Raving Looney Party, 159.

Spencer, Hannah, Catherine, the Green Party, 14,980.

Stoyer, Mastroya. 80. Stop. Stoya

Angoliki, Labor Party,

9,364.

Hello, hello.

Invetigation in process.

That was an office joke if you got it.

I don't know.

Gareth Keenan investigates.

And it was prompted because the Zoom said recording in progress. And you know, the best jokes of all are ones that you have to meticulously explain right after you've made them. Yeah, hang on. I got

some catchphrases I can do. More cowbell. More cowbell. What's that? You don't know more

cowbell? No, what's more cowbell? Oh my God. It's the most famous Saturday night live sketch of all

time. Anyway, doesn't matter. Welcome to Michael and us. I'm Will Sloan. Here is always with.

Luke Savage, welcome back, everyone. And we weren't sure if we're going to be able to record today, because as you can probably hear from his voice, Will's got a bit of a cold, but, you know, podcasting never stops. We are chained to this golden treadmill, and we'll probably be chained to it for the rest of our lives. So here we are. Yes, I do have a bit of a cold. So we're only going to record one episode today, I think. We might have a slight decrease in our output this week. I ask you, the listeners, our bosses, to have mercy on us. Have mercy on a poor, froggy-voiced, ailing podcaster. But the thing is, too, there's just so much going on. How could we not record today, right? I got my, I got a glass of neocitrin here that I'll be imbibing throughout this episode. Let's catch up on the news. You must be feeling pretty good about what's coming out of the UK, right? Yes, so the Gorton and Denton

by-election was last night. Gorton and Denton is a seat in the greater Manchester area. And, yeah,

if you're listening to this, you've probably heard the news, but not only did the Green Party win,

you know, they elected this 34-year-old plumber, Hannah Spencer, in a seat that the Labor Party won with over 50% of the vote in the 2024 general election.

Not only did that happen, but the far-right campaign reform and its candidate Matthew Goodwin, I mean, this was not even close.

This looked like it was going to be a sort of three-way fight. Reform did very badly as well. You know, it's funny. You know, somebody pointed out, I think this was in the magazine, Salvage. They wrote, Goodwin didn't even want supporters. His films showed him alone or with a single interviewer. He didn't seem to trust a crowd, even a sympathetic one. So this is the populist

right, folks. This is how Farageism is going to shake up Westminster and disrupt the status quo.

It's going to parachute a racist London pundit into the north of England, avoid crowds and

...