Hi, folks, welcome to this slightly delayed podcast of the Lotus Eaters for Wednesday the 27th of May, 2026. I'm joined by Connor and Harry. Hello. Apparently, there was a Windows update that happened this morning and it broke a few things on the back end, but hopefully we are here with you now. And we're going to be talking about basically just the meltdown that is happening about Restore Britain at the moment, which is just incredible, frankly. Dan Hodges did call it. He was like, look, you're feeling squeezed by them.

You're going to get on them, and you're going to attack them, and it's going to increase their salience. And when people are like, oh, right, so I can have Restore Britain rather than Nigel Farage's wishy-washy reform, Restore Britain are going to start gaining. So we're going to explore it.

Why is this happening?

What has their response been?

And what does it reveal to us?

Which I think is also more surprising than people might believe.

Anyway, right.

So let's just get straight into it.

Why are they currently having a meltdown of Restore Britain?

Well, it's because of Poles. They think polls are, well, I mean, is it chiseled in stone, basically? Yeah, destiny,

yeah. They seem to think that the electorate is already carved up, and now it's just about

settling the scores. But I don't think that's the case. I think that people actually change their minds, which is why reform are on parity with labour on this poll. I mean, that wouldn't have happened six years ago. So things must change. And I think they're genuinely worried that things will continue to change. Because, of course, this came out from a very, very tiny sample of people in Makerfield.

369 people is not a big sample, but even then getting the 7% restore on there was quite a shock for them. Because of course you remember Nigel Farage said, well, they won't get 1% anywhere

even in Great Yarmouth. And that was one of the worst political predictions anyone's ever made.

It aged like milk. At least, I think this might be discounting the local level support for Restore,

according to the canvassing returns, not only the Restore.

Well, we'll get into that.

But I will say at the very least, Restore have achieved parity in the local constituency

as what they've been reliably getting on the national polling when prompted.

So it's holding steady.

And this was a phone survey of 509 people, and they left out those people who thought

they were not likely to vote.

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