I'm to Coffee House Shots. I'm Lucy Dunn and today I'm joined by James Heel and Reform

Grandi Gawain Toller. Today is the day of Donald Trump's big meeting in Alaska with

Vladimir Putin. The pair will sit down for the first time in six years to discuss the future

of Ukraine, although Ukraine's president, Vladimir Zelensky, will not be

in attendance. It's going to be quite a long day of waiting to find out how the talks go with

the meeting to take place at 8pm UK time, so we're going to discuss something a little closer

to home today instead. Nigel Farage has criticised Kier's army's decision not to ask reform

to nominate any peers and accused him of

presiding over a democratic disparity given there's no reform representation in the House of Lords.

James, it's unusual that Fras wasn't asked to provide a list of candidates.

Well, this is an interesting kind of area because it's very much one of those bits of the

constitution that's governed more by convention than it is by law, sort of

set down in stone. The convention has obviously typically been about the leader of the opposition

being able to nominate peers. You've had a system where rotation whereby everyone is incentivized

not to block the others' peers because, of course, it then means that someone can then block your

list. And so this debate around creating a peerages brings me back to debates we had in 2023 when the Boris Johnson list was published after many months delay. And there was some talk there that perhaps that list will be blocked. But of course, Rishi Sunak and thereafter, Kirstam, were very much disincentivised to do so because they wanted to create their own apparatus and flunkies and mates, etc., and get them in the lords. So it's an area where I think reform has a pretty strong case for it. You think the Green Party has only got two peers. Now, the issue, of course, is that they can come back and say this is very much based on the last election and last election results, at which reform only won five MPs. They only have four now. And of course, six was the rule for short money to get the money for opposition funding and you need to have six peers. Sorry, six MPs. But obviously, politics has changed so much since then. We are moving at warp speed. You know, it now looks pretty extraordinary to have a party which is 31% in the polls and not entitled to any period just over the

next three, four years or so. I think the other interesting thing, of course, is that, you know, some people are trying to have a gotcha with Farage saying, look, there's a 2018 clip of him disparaging the Lord's and saying we just get rid of the whole shooting match, etc. But there is a pragmatic case for this, which is that reform are going to come in for the first time since the Rams indonald government with no experience of government whatsoever, I mean, unless there's some defections, etc. And there's a useful case having some people in the upper house, experts. A bit like the Gordon Brown government had Adonis and Mandelson and Jan Royal. So I think that that's going to be something we see more of is reform getting ready for government. And look, it's August. It's a good story. It's on the front of the Times. As I said on yesterday's edition on the podcast, Reform, we're very happy having those kind of fights and going up against the establishment. And I think that the Lord's in the kind of mindset, I'm sure Gwen could speak more to this, represents everything that Reform is and Farage is very suspicious of in terms of how the establishment has tried to fix the rules of the games against them, very much an elite cabal and a sort of emblematic of many Brits failures. But equally, it is one of the two chambers of Parliament. And they feel, and I think they've got strong grounds for this, they ought to have a voice in it. Well, Gwyn, I mean, as you mentioned there, there's that 2018 clip of Farage previously calling for the upper chamber to be abolished

and suggesting to be replaced with an elected Senate. I mean, what do you think is behind

this change of heart now? I don't think it's a change of heart. I mean, you must understand

that Nigel Farage is somebody who, for example, was very much against our membership of the

European Union, but didn't have a huge problem about taking up seats in the European Parliament

in order that we could in the European Parliament in order

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