Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, April 30th.

I'm John Dickerson in Washington with The Dangerous and Violent.

David Plotz and Emily Bazelon is in New Haven.

And we have a special fabulous guest from...

I want to be dangerous and violent.

Well, you're just going to have to work on it. I can sell you a pitchfork, the special plots brand pitchfork, if you want. I'm currently wearing... I am actually wearing football pads as a kind of protection against his bristling menace. We also have, though, a fourth person joining us, and that's Jacob Weisberg, who is all the way

on the other side of the ocean. And Jacob is... The pond. Well, Jacob is in... You're in Bristol,

right, Jacob? Birmingham. Birmingham. Common confusion. Yes. The second of the prime minister's

debate was in Bristol, and the third one is in Birmingham tonight. It's the last big event of the

British election, which is on May 6 next week. All right. So set us up for what's happening in the

British election. Where are the stakes? And, you know, give us the full narrator's introduction to this

fabulous race. So I got to London yesterday, John, just before a full-scale

feeding frenzy of a kind that I'm not sure British politics has recently experienced

descended when Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, was campaigning out on the stump,

making calls in a town called Rochdale in the

north. And he had a somewhat contentious discussion with a woman named Gillian Duffy, who was a

pensioner, as they say here, retired widow, 65 years old. And she challenged him, among other things, on immigration. And she said,

for some reason, she was particularly focused on Eastern Europeans. And she said all the Eastern

Europeans, where are they coming from? And rather than respond Eastern Europe, which is how I

might have answered the question, he argued with her a little bit, and then he got back in his car and not realizing that he still had a sky microphone attached to him, started complaining about the aides who had allowed this encounter to happen, and he called her a bigoted woman. And this was broadcast nearly live, played back to Mrs. Duffy, who was still standing outside talking to reporters.

She was shocked.

Brown was then confronted on a radio program.

...