Hello, my name is David Runthesman 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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Helen, 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 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 death but also the relative slowness with which his government has tended to react

...