Hello, my name is Catherine Carr, I'm the podcast producer. Welcome to a festive special

edition of Talking Politics. David Ronserman was recently invited to give the political

quarterly annual lecture on the subject, nobody knows anything, why is politics so surprising.

This episode is a recording of that lecture in which David gives his thoughts on why so

many people, including podcasts like ours, keep calling elections wrong.

Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, Europe's

Leading Magazine of Books and Ideas. We've already had some LRB writers on this podcast

and we'll have some more soon. There's a reading list of pieces to accompany the podcast

at lrb.co.uk forward slash talking, along with a special subscription offer for talking

politics listeners, 12 issues of fearless, expansive, elegant writing for just £12.

The lecture was recorded in a big old equity room in London's Bush House, bear with it,

the sound improves a lot after the first 60 seconds. References to Polly and Ed are to

Polly Toinby who chaired the event and Ed Miliband who commented on the lecture afterwards.

The recording starts as David outlines the political events which regular listeners

to this podcast will know he didn't see coming.

I'm going to focus on the recent surprises, the ones that I'm assuming we're all familiar

with and we'll find out whether we were all surprised but I certainly was. The big four

2017 Trump Brexit 2015 in the UK and I'm also going to touch on the one that came before

that which was the surprise that wasn't the Scottish referendum which in hindsight now

is surprising that it wasn't surprising. But I don't want to assume that politics used

to be predictable and now suddenly become surprising we've heard that wasn't true but

also these are the ones that we're familiar with but they're not the only surprises going

...