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Hello and welcome back to The Bunker, your daily news and politics explainer. I'm Andrew Harrison.

On today's edition, a maverick breakaway party with high-profile charismatic leadership is driving a coaching horses through conventional politics.

They build a coalition of angry voters who feel betrayed by the main parties and disillusioned with politics as usual. After a seismic

by-election win, they start to rack up unprecedented votes of 22 to 27% in local and general elections,

and all the talk is that two-party politics is over. Behind the scenes, things are not quite as convivial among the larger than life figures in the leadership as they might seem.

While that does not seem to stop the party's momentum, there is even talk that they could form the next government.

Now, because of the title of this podcast, you know we're not talking about reform, we're talking about the SDP,

the centrist social democratic party, formed in 1981

by the gang of four of breakaway labour grandees, Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rogers.

What frustrated centrist Labour MPs failed to do with Change UK in the Corbyn years, the SDP achieved.

They were a viable new centre party that won seats. But what

fascinates me now is what's the story of the SDP tells us about the challenge of reform.

Back in 1981, when I was a politics-obsessed teenager, the SDP, to me, with a party that split

the anti-government vote, giving Margaret Thatcher a free ride in her early years, and the

lesson I learned then was that the opposition is split, then the government has it easy. Now, in 2025,

reform is splitting the opposition vote, the one in Roncorn and Halesby, and are projected to have

taken about 30% of the local elections vote compared to the Tories 15%. But nobody thinks they're making the Labour government's life easy.

So why was a new insurgent party a gift to the sitting government in the early 80s,

but it's now apparently a mortal threat?

...