Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards,

another election special.

Each podcast will be an election special until July the 4th.

And we've got a lot to reflect on.

Some of you have already kind of flown in brilliant questions

via email and I've got a few reflections too. But before that, a kind of health warning

about election campaigns because us lot in the Rock and Roll Politics Cooper cooperative, we are political addicts and therefore

there is inevitably a frisson of excitement when an election is called. I personally find

mixed emotions, excitement and a sense of disturbance, you know, but clearly elections are for political addicts,

a moment of great significance. They are also utterly stifling. And one of the frustrations I

have is that there will be more politics on the airwaves,

there will be more politics on the podcasts, if that is possible.

And we will be swamped by politics over the next six weeks.

And yet election campaigns are in some ways the least interesting part of the political cycle.

It's the moment when, in theory anyway, although this hasn't happened with the conservatives,

remarkably in a way that I can't quite remember an equivalent.

The Tory campaign has been panic-stricken and indisciplined from the word go,

and I'm going to be reflecting why shortly.

But on the whole, these are periods when the scope for candor, always limited in politics, is more or less

shut down. Messages are framed. They have been carefully cultivated for many, many months,

and every leading figure is sent out to utter those messages.

There is no room or appetite often because parties on the whole want to win for a questioning

...