Hello and welcome to The Spectator podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast and on this week's episode

we'll be turning our attention to Brighton, where Jeremy Corbyn, potentially our next Prime Minister,

has been holding court at Labour Conference. We'll also be looking at how child refugees are

managed by the Home Office and finally we'll be discussing which whiskeys to lay down for the future.

On to politics and the Labour Conference. I'm now joined by James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman, who's in Brighton.

So James, in your piece this week, you talk about how the Tories risk handing Britain to the hard left.

How has it come to be that this is now the

situation? I think this is something that very few people would have predicted six months ago.

I mean, before the general election, Jeremy Corbyn was, for all the grassroots adulation,

a bit of a Westminster joke, a hundred and seventy plus of his MPs that declared no confidence

in him. And the polls all indicated that Labour were on course for a very bad result.

I think he has Theresa May to thank for this turnaround in his fortunes that now means he's the

bookie's favourite to be the next Prime Minister because that general election campaign gave

him his opportunity. First of all, all his internal critics shut up basically because they

didn't want to kind of stab in the back narrative. Secondly, he massively benefited from the soft bigotry of low expectations in that campaign.

And thirdly, Labour were able to pull together this very odd coalition of people who passionately

hoped that Jeremy Corbyn would win, and people who thought it was safe to vote for Labour because

he wouldn't win. But I think what is most warning for the Tories is that, you know, since the general election, and it became clear quite how close to power Corbyn is. The voters haven't recoiled from

Labour. And instead what we're seeing is that Jeremy Corbyn has managed to successfully fuse together

the kind of traditional social democratic Labour Party with a kind of radical left party. This is, I think,

why Labour, in contrast to the German social democrats, the French socialists are doing so well,

because they're putting together their traditional party and then all the parties of the radical left have been folded into it.

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