Hello and welcome to the Political Party Daily episode eight of this special election

series where I'm joined by James Mills, John McDonald's former head of comms and head of

comms to Jeremy Corbyn during that first leadership campaign and we talk about all sorts

of things, the personalities of the two men, their ideology, their priorities, the manifesto,

all sorts of things. It's a long-ish interview so I don't want to ramble too much at the

start but it's a wide range in discussion and I started by asking James about last night's

leadership debate.

First and foremost, I don't want to really dwell on last night's TV debates because as a

piece of television it was quite frustrating but what was your assessment of last night and

as someone close to Jeremy Corbyn, how did you feel he did?

I think it was a bit of a score draw to be honest with you. I was going to take the party

politics out and just look at Labour's winning the moment that happens. Regardless who

leads the Labour Party and what your positions are, to get that, in opposition you really

want to be on the same platform as the Prime Minister and to get a TV debate where you

can talk to millions of new voters and people who just don't care. There's just one before

you start. I've got tons of mates who just do not give a monkey about politics and

when they talk to me I'm sort of like the mate who's like, he's a bit political. I've always

used to be a good sounding board for how the party's doing. A classic one from recent

history was they used to confuse Dave and Evad Milliband and those are the people who

could vote Labour, might not and we need to get out and they were aware of it and they

were listening into it. I always do my little cab driver test today and again people

were aware of it. Given our economy, we're not surprised that most of the people in the

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