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Friley.

Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, The Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm

Oscar Remington and I'm joined today by James Heel and Tim Shipman. And we've had some very interesting

news this morning regarding political donations. And it seems that reform are in the money, James.

Yeah. So obviously donations has been a big metric for the Conservatives. It's something that

backers of Kevin Bay not keep referring to when they say about struggling poll ratings. And the Tories are sort of very proud of that. So reform obviously are trying to sort of outcompete them in all spheres, be that sort of the intellectual, the political, all these different worlds. And so now they're very proud of the fact that in the third quarter of this year, Q3 between the summer and October,

they've actually been able to get more donations, 10 million pounds, which is a very impressive figure, but it also includes, of course, the single biggest donation by a living person of modern

times, which is Christopher Harbone, he's given 9 million pounds, and obviously that 10 million

figure overall is more than twice what the Tories are,

4.8 million and Labour down on 2.2 million. So obviously there's a lot of chess beating to labor reform. It's a good news story after quite a few difficult weeks, given all the stuff around Russia and what's been happening when they think Gill and the stories about Nigafranche's childhood. I think a couple of interesting points, one of which is, of course, that there's the question of can they keep this up?

And actually, of course,

is it just a one-off guy or a whale,

a whale, a crypto bro, giving this? Are they going to get actual sort of other Tory donors coming across? And I think the second thing that's interesting, of course, is that Labour is down so low. And more than half of that $2.2 million was given by United G&B. Both unions have been very critical

recently and both, of course, have a large number of their members, not the leadership,

who are thinking of getting before. Tim, can you take us inside the sort of murky world of

political donations and give our listeners a flavour of just how much material difference

will a nine million pound donation actually make? Politics is a lot cheaper here than it is in the United States where they literally spend

...