The New Statesman

Hello and welcome to Daily Politics from The New Statesman, listener questions edition.

I'm Megan Kenyon and I'm here with my colleague Ethan Croft to answer your questions.

Hello Ethan.

Hello.

We've got some good ones today, lots about reform following Robert Jenrick's defection last week, plus a listener suggests a way Labor might raise a few quid in tax.

So first up, let's look at the glut of questions that came in after Robert Generic dramatically

defected to reform after being kicked out of the Tories by Kemi Badenock.

Laura asks, when a politician defects to another party, do their aids go with them or

stay? It seems someone in Robert Generic's office shared his letter. Ethan, you covered this for us last

week. Can you explain what kind of happened and what has happened since? The story that originally

came out when Robert Germick was kicked out by Kevin Biednock

was that she had obtained irrefutable evidence that he'd basically been planning to defect a reform.

And then it turned out that the Conservative leadership had obtained a draft of his resignation speech, which was sort of doubly proven

by the fact that that speech that appeared in the Sunday papers.

And that was when we got the sort of Alan Partridge lines about the new sheriff in town,

user humor, it's your greatest asset, all that kind of stuff.

So it seems that somebody in Robert Gemerick's office

or somebody who had had access to Robert Gemerick's office

had managed to get this document to the leadership

and was therefore sort of disloyal to Gemerick

or at least disloyal to Gemmrick in his reformed effector mode

...