Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Noah Hoffman, the Spectator's political correspondent, and I'm delighted to be joined today by political editor Tim Shipman and Deputy Political Editor James Heel.

And we are delighted to be joined by you, I think it is fair to say. I am fluttered, thank you.

This is the first coffee house shots with the new Triumvirate, the dream team in place. We've hired

an Aussie ringer, everyone, and this is good. One of us... Fair better than the Roman triumvirate.

Yes, well indeed. I don't know. I mean, I compared the three people on the left of the Labour Party to Ed Miliband, the wannabe Chancellor, Krasas, but who will be Caesar? Well, it's very clear. I'm Caesar here, so you two can fight over Pompey and Krasas. Are you Pompey or just pompous. It's the question we're asking.

Or maybe I'm mirroring Portsmouth Football Club's fortunes and going down.

So I'll take Pompey, as it were.

Very good.

Thank you very much for that incredibly warm welcome.

So James and Tim tomorrow voters will take to the polls across England, Wales and Scotland in local elections like we've not seen really ever in history.

And that is because two populist parties have really experienced a huge surge in the polls.

And I want to focus right now on the Greens because they've had a rocky few days

to say the least. James, what do you make of their performance and the challenges that are being

thrown at them or that they've thrown upon themselves really in the day before local elections?

So there's always an element, I think, of political parties embracing new energies, which is that

you're playing with fires that can sometimes come back to burn you. One of that being social media, and

Zach Polanski in the past couple of days has been sort of criticised for his posts on things like

blue sky. The economist has gone through, and as well as showing how much that Plansky posts,

it's also illustrated him liking a series of controversial posts about female

journalists using very disparaging language, which you'd imagine if it would say Nigel Farage would be

very much criticised. I think this shows, I mean, this week Tim Shipman has done his column on

the rules he would have for political leaders. I have my one very small contribution to this

...