Hello, this is the Webbox Podcast. I'm Matt Chauley bringing you a special festive delights.

Patrick McGarry will be back with daily episodes of the podcast from January 2nd.

I'll be back on the 9th. But until then, we're going to be dropping our leader of the

opposition feature in your timelots every day. In 2021, we rounded up every Prime Minister with

Andrew Jimson and in 2022. Nigel Fletcher from the Centre for Opposition Studies has been

telling us about every leader of the opposition who crucially never made it to number 10,

from Charles James Fox all the way through to Keir Starmer. So let's get on with it then.

Hit the button, Taj.

What's the definition of the leader of the opposition, first of all, before we get stuck into this

week? Well, it's quite a tricky definition that you've given me because if we exclude those

who didn't become Prime Minister, it's quite hard sometimes to work out who actually was leading

the opposition because if you go back into the sort of 18th century and even sort of into the 19th

century a bit, parties weren't as well defined as they are today. So you can't identify always

who was the leader of a particular party. It was much more personalised and so you go back into

the 18th century and MPs sort of gathered around particular leading individuals. So you have

in the case of today, you talk about the Foxites, people who sort of gather around a particular

individual and so the party labels quite quite difficult. So often it's it's only when they become

Prime Minister or they start to lead a government that you can say or they were clearly leading a

faction that became successful. So your definition has been really difficult from a sort of political

perspective. But if you look on sort of a a certain web based encyclopedia resource, they've

come up with a sort of list of leaders of the opposition from actually the person after Charles

James Fox who we're looking at today. But they can identify sort of just about who was leading in

...