Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. This is an episode with me and Helen.

Quite soon after we recorded the last one but a lot has happened since, including in the House of Commons.

And we are going to try and take a step back and see what's really at stake here.

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Normally it's Wednesday morning, today I think uniquely we're doing another one on Thursday morning,

late morning. The headlines in at least two papers this morning were that the commons had reached boiling point last night

and it was pretty extraordinary. Helen and I both saw bits of it.

I don't think we want to talk about who said what to whom.

But there are still a whole series of questions that are going to have to be answered on both sides.

Some of them about domestic politics, some of them are tactical questions and then wider questions about Europe.

So we'll start maybe with the more domestic ones.

So there's still a fundamental question here which relates to some of our conversations this week about Italy.

When does it make sense for the opposition to have an election?

And there is a choice and the choice has been made but it may come up again in a different form that it's better to keep Johnson twisting in the wind

in the phrase that's often used to keep him hanging there ideally past the 31st and then go to the country,

rather than risk going to the country now given the polling situation given his own,

it may have changed even in 24 hours, but his own ratings being considerably higher than Jeremy Corbyn's.

But I'm not certain which way it should go and I think there are some questions for the S&P and the Liberal Democrats.

If they just take a step back, strip out all of the heated rhetoric, just ask the basic question,

...