Hello, my name's David Rumsman and this is Talking Politics. Today, Helen Thompson and I

are going to try and make sense of what's been going on in British politics after another

extraordinary year and at the beginning of another tumultuous week.

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And the LLB is returning to first principles with their latest exclusive offer for Talking Politics listeners get 12 issues of the magazine for just £12 and they'll also send you one of their surprisingly famous tote bags acclaimed by the likes of New York Magazine and Vice. Just use the URL my lrb.combecom.com.uk slash talking bag. That's mylrb.com.com.uk slash talking bag. Helen and I recorded this conversation on Monday morning,

conscious that a week is a long time in politics and the week before Christmas

might still have some surprises in store.

So we will be coming back to pick up on any loose ends in the new year. But for now,

this is our reflection on 2021. On the basic politics of COVID, I feel like the Tories or Johnson,

maybe in particular, still has a real advantage, and Labour have a real advantage too on

very different fronts. So I could be completely wrong about this, but my feeling that the

advantage that Johnson has and the last 18 months have sort of been in line with this, people are

often baffled by the way in which he seems to be able to get the benefit of the doubt in public

opinion, given Britain's

relatively poor performance on all sorts of metrics, including the most basic metric of deaths,

but also the relative slowness with which his government has tended to react to the advice

from the scientists, from his medical advisors, but that he's still basically in tune with public opinion in the sense that he

doesn't resist. I mean, he certainly doesn't reject the scientific advice. And in a sense,

he doesn't resist it to the point of pushing back hard against it, but he is reluctant. He's as a

reluctant follower of advice, which means he sometimes is too slow, but he's slow partly because

he believes there are all sorts of trade-offs. And though opinion surveys, when people are asked,

...