Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots,

the spectator's daily politics podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined with James Forsyfe and the new statesman Stephen Bush.

So, the debate is on.

Theresa May actually wants to do a debate this time, only there's no election campaign.

The Prime Minister has confirmed her intention to go head to head with Jeremy Corbyn to

debate the merits of her Brexit deal, the date 9th of December Sunday. So, Stephen, in your

new statesman email, which arrives in the morning, morning call, obviously the spectator one is

evening, you say that you don't actually think this is such a good idea that Theresa May has

challenged Jeremy Corpenter to this. Why is that? Well, so I kind of, when I first saw it, I thought,

okay, she's obviously across the detail in a way than he has admitted he's not on this one,

but in general he is not someone who handles detail well. But the more I think about it,

let's kind of go through the potential scenario.

Scenario one is the Labour leadership, having agreed in principle, it's a debate format which allows him to range across austerity, cuts to the public realm, the kind of freewheeling

question time format which he does very well and he's very experienced at. Well, he will be

favoured to win that,

and I don't see how her getting sort of smacked around the park across the range of domestic

policy is particularly helpful to her in this situation. Option two, it is narrowly on the

withdrawal agreement. She has to defend a specific real world proposal, and he can do this

kind of, yeah, my Brexit deal would be

better because reasons. That's incredibly facile, but seeing as it is where most of the political

establishment is, it's very difficult to see how he will not do very well in it. She doesn't

...