Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute of Government.

I'm Gemmetello, the IFG's chief economist in today's podcast presenter.

Westminster, or more importantly, Wellingborough and Kingswood, are waking

up to news that, well, the kind of news that we regularly seem to wake up to at the moment.

The Conservative Party has lost lots and more by-elections, which means new MPs for Labour.

So it's a bad day for Rishi Sinek, and that's after a bad week of economic news for the Prime Minister as well.

The UK has officially fallen into recession. Conservative backbenchers are restless, and Labour is on the

attack. But it's not all good news for Labour, far from it. After last week's clumsy handling

other parties' U-turn on its Green Spending Pledge, Kirstama has come under fire for the selection of

and then slow rejection of Labour's candidate in the Rochdale by-election.

Labour has now withdrawn its support from Azar Ali for apparently making anti-Semitic remarks,

with another parliamentary candidate, Graham Jones, suspended for the same offence.

So bad weeks all around for government and opposition

and politics as a whole, which means plenty for us to talk about on today's podcast. Joining me are

IFG duo, Catherine Haddon and Giles Wilkes. Hello both. Hi, Gemma. Hi, Gemma. And I'm delighted we're

joined again by Chris Cook, senior reporter at the Financial Times. Hi, Chris. Thanks for joining us from Ireland, I think. Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. Let's talk with the by-elections then, Giles. You keep a close eye on polls and swings and all this sort of thing. You have some lovely spreadsheets for doing these modelling. How big are these defeats and are they surprising?

They are not surprising because we've seen a lot of them in the last year or two.

Although if you looked at the whole parliament, it's been an incredibly surprising parliament.

You've got to remember that, what is it, just two, three years ago, Hartlepool was the

biggest swing towards the government in a by-election. And now we've had

almost the biggest swing ever away from the government in the Wellingberg case. So yeah, I mean,

if you translated these into a general election, there would be an absolute bloodbath. I mean,

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