Hello, I'm Hugo Rifkin, and now we're going to be unpacking the politics of the day,

covering everything from the impossible trilemma facing Rachel Reeves to the craze for performance poetry among Gen Z.

And joining me are two Times columnists who have bravely, some might say foolishly, agreed to speak only in verse for the next

three quarters of an hour. And they are, Cindy, you, hello Cindy. I did not realize that. And

the next line that rhymes. Oh, God. I really like cats. I'll let you off. And Janice Turner,

hello, Janice. Hello. You're not even going to try. What have we got? I'm going to have a very high coup style quality to my verse, I think. Hang on a second. It could be intellectual descendant of the bra burners. It's Janice Turner. Is that good? That's pretty good. Very good, Hugh do. Thank you very much. Just come up with that. Just like that, just then. As I said, I thought this could go badly wrong, but I think I got away with it. We've got what to talk about, so let's crack on. I want to start with the economy. Rachel Reeves, a report from a think tank called the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has underlined

the worsening outlook for the Chancellor. It says she's going to need to find more than

40 billion pounds of tax rises or spending cuts at the budget in order to meet her fiscal

rules, should she indeed still want to meet her fiscal rules. The cause is poor economic growth,

higher than expected borrowing costs, you know all this, and the failure to cut welfare by as much as she had planned, or indeed to cut it by much at all. Cindy, I'll start with you. Do you think Rachel Ruiz is a surprise? Do you think this is how she thought her first year would go? I think it could have gone either way because at the very beginning the government was so

gung-ho on their honeymoon phase about the welfare cuts, about the winter fuel allowance payment

cuts that now we understand a bit more why she was crying so much, you know, that day in the

House of Commons because she would realise at that point, actually she's not going to make the numbers

add up. But at the beginning of, you know, the Labor government, I think they were incredibly confident

that they could get these cuts through the House of Commons. And they basically, this is the

cost of bailing out in the face of your backbench opposition and actually some front bench opposition

as well.

And she knew, you can just understand it now, like she knew in that moment that, you know, she can't make the maths start up and this is what we're seeing now. I mean, Janice, you probably remember like I do, lots of people saying at the time of the election, this isn't going to work, the maths don't add up. You know, they might do the finances better than the Tories who are doing the finances later, lately, but, you know, this, this simply isn't going to work. The math simply don't work. And it is a bit odd that you get this sort of surprise from labour. You apparently get the surprise from labour, that it now indeed isn't working. Well, I guess the theory was that Starmo was a lot braver than he, than he's proved to be. I mean, in terms of dealing with the Corbynites in his own party before the election and on anti-Semitism, things

like that, he showed some sort of, he showed some kind of guts. And I suppose the view was that

he would, he would be a, the sort of politician, he would take task by task and would

try to fix things. And this would mean speaking to his own bank benches in a way that they probably

wouldn't like. But as we've seen each time, that courage has failed him. And that's where we are now.

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