Hello, welcome to this episode of Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government. I'm Alex Thomas, today's podcast host.

To lose one by election is a misfortune. Two is careless, but three on the same night would have meant

finding a different Oscar Wilde cliche. So Rishi Sunak avoided the hat trick, but is he in the gutter

after a bruising evening for the Conservatives who lost Selby and summited and Frum?

Or looking at the stars, given they held Uxbridge, Boris Johnson's old London seat, by just a few hundred votes?

How much should we read into last night's results?

Is this just the case of the electorate administering a bloody nose, or Tory voters not turning out, or is the Conservative Party now mortally injured?

And what do the votes tell us about Labour's prospects, the hopes of the Liberal Democrats,

and the chance of tactical voting playing a big part?

Can Rishi Sunak be confident that he's on course to meet his five pledges?

And should Kirstama be happy that his five missions are capturing the imagination?

And then we'll scan the horizon

for what might come next. There's party conferences, a king's speech, maybe more by-elections,

if the lingering member from mid-bedfichar, as one of her conservative colleagues called Nadine Doris

ever actually resigns. We'll take a look at what might happen next. To explore these questions

and more, I'm joined by two IFG colleagues who will have lost

counter the amount of by-elections they've enjoyed or endured, and that's IFG Senior Fellow

Giles Wilkes and Program Director Kath Haddon. Hello both. Good morning, Aynce. Hi.

Kath, I know you were up overnight because we were WhatsApping at 4 o'clock in the morning.

Was that an early start or a late finish? It was an early start and it wasn't intentional and I just woke up, thought,

I'll just turn on the telly and see what's happening. And it was just as the Selby by-election was

announced as a Labour victory. So I went from that and then looked at the other votes and saw

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