Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas

podcast. Today's episode is a special live recording of PPF that we did last week with two schools in

Doncaster for people who are not based in the UK, that is in Yorkshire, in the north of

England, Hillhouse School and Hayfield School.

And it's a conversation between me and the political scientist Rob Ford about what it

would mean if Nigel Farage became the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Would it be unprecedented? Is it going to happen? What might stop it?

Our audience was made up of pupils from the two schools aged between 14 and 18, as you will hear

at the end when we take some questions from the audience,

some of their parents, some of their teachers too. This is a conversation about British politics,

but as you'll also hear, it touches on a lot of the themes that we've been talking about

in our series, Fixing Democracy.

Just before we talk about Nigel Farage,

I have a first question for Rob,

because he has just come hot-foot, as people used to say,

from the Conservative Party conference where he was speaking at a fringe event. And this is relevant for what we're

going to be talking about now. Dead yet? The people at the conference didn't seem to think so,

but you wonder if it's rather like the person who walks out happy from the doctor's

surgery having failed to realize the gravity of the diagnosis they've just been given.

So I think that they haven't fully internalised the magnitude of their defeat.

But aside from the psychology of the conservatives themselves, I think it would be very

unwise to declare them dead with four years to the next general election, given that four years

...