Hello and welcome to the Spectator podcast. I'm Freddie Gray. On this week's episode, we'll be

examining the fallout from last week's shocking election result and asking what's next for both

May and Corbyn. And we'll also be speaking through the magic of Damian Thompson to one of the

world's greatest living

pianists. First up, Theresa May. In this week's magazine, James Fawcith describes the repercussions

of a hung parliament in the Conservative Party and the attempts being made to reprogram the May bot

by senior figures in the cabinet. But can the Prime Minister really be patched back to

normality? Or is she so defective that she will now have to be thrown away? I'm joined now by James and Andrew Rawnsley, Chief Political Commentator of the Observer.

So James, isn't the fact that senior Tories are talking about a Maybot and reprogramming,

rebooting a Maybot and adding an empathy chip? Doesn't that actually suggest that they don't believe in it at all? Her authority is

completely shot and I think it would have been shot even if she'd won a majority of six seats or

12 seats. What is keeping her in power isn't any desire for her to still be Prime Minister,

but the fact that the Tories are petrified on another election and they can't agree on who her

successor should be. But she now serves at the pleasure

of a cabinet. And that makes her a remarkably weak prime minister. She is in office but not in power.

And I think we will see her having to try and change her style. But the question is, you know,

if you have always operated in politics in a particular way, can you suddenly behave differently?

It was, I thought, very telling that she sacked David Davis's Minister of State without consulting him first.

Even now, she is struggling to kind of keep up with this new reality.

But again, one of the things helping her is the cabinet,

they're united in their demands about how her working methods must change. There was no one in

the cabinet who wanted Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill to stay in place. But they're not

...