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

Thank you very much for tuning in.

I hope you're all in a kind of festive mood after kind of spending the whole year trying to make sense of the

wild world of British politics and well beyond Britain as well.

Yeah, maybe a few days we can all just relax and switch off and have a good time and then try and make sense of it all again and again and again.

Anyway, at the end of the podcast, I'll let you know what is planned for the Rock and Roll Politics

Cooperative over the festive period.

For this podcast, if it's okay with all of you, I thought I would look at what we do know

at the end of this year, because a lot of kind of political reporting is about what we don't

know, you know, speculation about X, Y and Z, oh oh, if so and so does this, what happens to so and so

will so and so survive? And the answer quite often is we don't know, but it's a very easy

column to write, you know, oh yeah, this is going to happen, this is going to happen. And when it

doesn't happen, political commentators

forget that they ever said it would. That's the way we get away with predictions that go

badly wrong. But what we do know is always much more interesting than people, I think,

in the media, tend to realize.

I always think of Herkieu Poirot, the Agriarche deict detective, you know, when he's with

his sidekick, Hastings, and the two of them are walking along in the middle of some

who done it.

And Poirot says, Hastings, it's all in front of our eyes.

And Hayst says, good Lord, Poirot, what do you mean by that? It is staring in front of our eyes.

And so it is with so much that is happening now.

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