Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards, and the entire rock and roll politics cooperative.

This is the first normal, in inverted commas, podcast of 26.

I hope you enjoyed our festive series of specials looking at defectors,

the big personal dramas involved in defections and the wider implications. They are always an important and

potent barometer of politics at any given time. And defections, of course, are playing their

part in the current feebrow political mood, Tories to reform, laborors to Greens, etc. And they tell us something,

defection, sometimes more in a way than opinion polls, which aren't a prediction of the next

general election, but capture a moment with varying degrees of accuracy. But anyway, if you didn't listen to

them, they're there. If you did, thank you. And there's been brilliant emails about some of those

festive episodes. But before I tell you what we're going to be doing in our time together today,

I hope you all had a great festive break and we're able at times at least

to switch off from politics. I know because emails continue to pour in, even though I said,

let, have a rest, you know, just because we're going to be so busy in 2026, making sense

of it all and delving deep. And some of you had a rest, I can tell, but a lot of you sent brilliant emails.

You obviously weren't resting wholly.

It's very interesting the Christmas New Year period.

More than August and Easter, politics does tend to stop for a bit.

As some of you will know, quite a large number of my family

are deeply involved in politics at the moment. But I noticed that they were kind of undisturbed

for about an hour at least on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. And we had a wedding, in Sheffield, which was another part of our

celebratory period. And actually, one or two of them were disturbed during the wedding,

but that's another story. But on the whole, politics does stop. Do you agree over that period?

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