Hi everyone and welcome to this latest instalment of our Brexit and Beyond podcast, and I'm delighted today to welcome to colleagues and friends to talk about the book of the year.

Rob Ford and Paula Surridge have finished what seems like a mammoth task of putting together the new Nuffield General Election book on the election of 2019.

So welcome both of you.

Hi.

There's almost too much to talk about here.

But what I want to do is in a sense talk about what the book says about the campaign and

the election first and then end up with some more general reflections on what it was like

writing this thing and so on.

So I suppose the first thing is I was brought up to think that campaigns don't matter,

and then 2017 happened.

What lessons can we learn about

campaigns from 2019? Well, they certainly matter in terms of informing what parties do because

the central operating principle of both 2019 campaigns was how the parties digested and understood

the 2017 campaigns.

So basically everything that was being done in CCHQ was don't repeat the mistakes of 2017,

often using rather more industrial language regarding the 2017 situation.

Whereas the operating principle explicitly in Labor, and this is indeed

how one senior advisor described it to us, it was 2017 plus plus. So the idea was 2017 was a dream

campaign. All they had to do was repeat the very effective decisions of 2017 and the thing would take off again. So both campaigns were

basically reactions to the previous campaign. So even if most campaigns don't matter, they still

matter in terms of how the parties behave because the parties believe that they can learn

lessons from what's been done before. So weirdly, in a sense, both campaigns were kind of

...