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Hello and welcome to the Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by

Stephen Bush from the new statesman and Katie Balls. So is Kea Stahmer doing well in his

role as opposition leader? The polls seem to think so, with a

UGov poll from this week showing the Labour Party four points ahead of the Conservatives at 41%.

Stephen, how do you evaluate Keir Stama's performance in recent months so far? Does he warrant that lead in the polls?

So I think the interesting thing is I think there are two functions of the leader of the

opposition, right? The first is their kind of constitutionally important accountability and

improvement mechanism week to week, right? The person who goes, isn't it a catastrophic idea to have

a weird partial lockdown for airlines, which means then all of the businesses will go bust, but people will

still come through hub airports, right? There's that kind of stuff. And then there's the party political

function of the leader of the opposition, which is to replace the governing party. Now, of course,

there's a slight link in the, it doesn't matter how good you are at the scrutiny accountability stuff

if you don't look like you could plausibly replace the other party then you know if you don't

scare the other party you aren't very good at the accountability stuff now because the two parties

seem to be quite close together in the polls you know one week laborer ahead one week

tourists are ahead one week they're tied you, that's kind of what we'd expect.

But in terms of the thing that he has clearly been in origin, which is that fairly steady lead on job approval,

I guess that's the thing which I say, I say he's done a fairly good job at looking at someone who could plausibly replace the government in 2024, right?

His ratings are better than Cameron's about this point in his

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