The New Statesman.

It's official the Labour Party is in third place.

A flurry of polling over the Christmas period has indicated that the Conservative Party

has marginally overtaken labour and now sits in second place.

Nigel Farage's reform is still sitting pretty in the top spot, with Zach Polanski's

insurgent Greens chasing Labor's tail. With the elections in May looming large over the political

landscape post-Christmas, this is the last thing Labor needs. I'm Anusha Kellyan, and this is

Daily Politics from the New Statesman, and I'm joined by our senior data journalist and polling expert, Ben Walker. Hi, Ben. Ben, you've been writing about these latest polls. Can you just fill us in on the numbers? Labor and the Tories seem to have swapped positions. I think you pretty much summarised it, but to just go into the numbers. Everyone has a favourite pollster. Everyone has a pollster which puts their party a little bit ahead more than the others. We have one pollster, for instance, putting the Greens ahead of labour or sometimes close to 20%. When in actual fact, when you look at all the polls, it's not exactly like that. So just to go through the numbers specifically. Reform right now are still far out ahead of the pack. And if you had to summarize

last year, reform being ahead, the radical right, far right, whatever you want to call it,

being in the lead in the opinion polls. If that's not in your top 10 most important stories of

last year, I think you're too much in the bubble. Reform right now on 29%. They're down

a few points from 32. A bit of noise there. I think part of the reason for that is a consequence of

who is now second, which is the Conservatives. They're on 19%, which is their highest since before May.

Okay. So it's the highest since about six, seven months ago, okay?

And the reason for this is what happened in November, the November budget, in which,

which was, by the way, the most noticed political news story of last year.

Hard to appreciate, I think, because I tend to think, you know,

Commons performances don't get any traction whatsoever, but this is one that did.

Kemi Badenock's performance, in the face of Rachel Reeves, in the face of Labor's budget

announcements, in the face of removing the two-child cap that egregious though it was is still the preference of most

Britons, Camry Badenock's performance was a performance that captured the nation. Her approvals

took a soil slight uptick. They went up from 20% to 23%. Not much, granted, but when the Tories

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