Good evening and welcome to the Pompey Politics Podcast.

I'm Ian Tiny Morris.

And I'm Simon Sandspring.

Good evening and welcome to the Pompey Politics Podcast.

You join us for the last show of 2023, where we're taking a bit of a look back across the the tumultuous last four years

and are adopting a bit of a Christmas carol theme in terms of in homage to one of

Fort Smith's finest authors how are you Simon well after trying to figure out what the hell went wrong then,

yeah, I'm all right. I'm, you know, battling away. The festive period is nearly here. How's your week

being in? Yes, I am still bedeviled with this Ebola or cold.

It's one of the two.

So yeah, I'm into week three and not loving it, if I'm honest.

But yeah, apart from that, we are relatively poised, long weekend, took Friday and Monday off,

done very little, but except prepare avidly for this evening show. I think as regular

viewers know, there has been a historically, I have sat on the right of politics and Simon

has sat on the left and for most of the year we sit there being very neutral, don't we? And

allowing our guests to fill the air with much more sense

than we make. But we thought we might have a little bit of reflection looking back this evening.

Yeah, indeed. And taking that Christmas carol theme, thankfully not one with songs in it, which

our audience will be, I'm sure, glad of.

We're looking at the, not so much the ghosts of Christmas's past, present and future,

but the votes of Christmas's past, present and future.

No, we're not going to run through the statistics of who voted how much and when.

...