This is Spectator Radio, The Spectator's Curated Podcast Collection.

Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Forsyth.

So today we will see two cabinet meetings and currently we're recording this in the middle of the first one. James,

what can we expect to hear from these cabinet meetings? Well, the cabinet have had a slight

change of plan. They were expecting kind of five hours of meetings with an hour beforehand to

read through some plan that number 10 was hatching. The reading was scrapped and the sessions

have now been paired back. And I think there are two reasons for that. I think a lot of people in Number 10 expected the customs union vote to pass last night. I think there was a lot of talking government about the best way to respond to that. I think some people thought that what you could do was to take the plan from the Common Market 2.0 model, which Labour supported, which essentially

says the UK will stay in a customs union with the EU until alternative arrangements are in

place that would allow frictionless trade, and then at that point the UK would start having

its own trade policy. And the argument being that if you adopted that,

you were basically going a very long way towards the customs union, but in our kind of almost

theological level, you could say to Tories, where we haven't given up on the idea of an

independent trade policy, we don't have to abolish Liam Fox's department or anything like that.

And then the other question was this question of an election. I think cabinet opinion has

massively hardened against an election in the last few days. I think people who were perhaps

entertaining the idea is kind of what everything is now from a Tory point of view, the least

worst option, have lost their appeal for it because they've seen some dire numbers on it.

What sort of numbers are we talking about here?

Polling and cash.

So no money.

Yeah.

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