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Hello and welcome to the special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm

joined today by Tim Shipman, Spectator's political editor and Tom Ballwin, the Prime Minister's

biographer. Now Tim, in this week's magazine, you've written about the sentence in Labor that maybe it's time to sort of tack left. There's a bit of a bribe with the sort of greens going up in the polls, and perhaps the current strategy isn't working. Can you talk us through the thinking on this? Well, look, I think if you look at the budget, if you put aside the sort of boilerplate view on the day that Rachel Reeves was just placating her back benches, and there was undeniably some elements of that in what they chose to do, there is actually a sort of logical position of attacking to the left, at least on the economy, if you look at the numbers.

And what the polls show is that since the turn of the year, Labor's lost about 15%

of its 2024 vote to the right to reform, and that's remained pretty steady throughout the year.

And if you look at the figures for the number of voters who are going to the left, it is increasing.

It was about 15% at the start of the year. It's now 25% or more, if you look at the most

recent polls. And that has accelerated since Zach Polanski took over the Green Party. So on the

face of it, they're losing more votes to the left and to the right. Now, the votes to the right

are proportionately more important because they're in more seats. And we had some figures in the

magazine this week showing that that's probably, if those numbers were replicated at the general election that

Labour would lose pushing 200 seats to reform on the right and they'd lose about 170 to the left

with those levels of voter bleed but if you also look at what voters who are stuck with Labor might do, the number that

are still sticking around but might go to the reform is very, very much smaller, less than half

the number who might still be prepared to vote for Greens or the lip-dem. So the downside risk is

there as well. And there's a sort of logic to, particularly on the economy and on environmental

stuff, to go and appeal to those voters who are appealing away on the left. And a lot of what

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