Hi, I'm Alfa, and I'm Anouche, and you're listening to the new states and podcasts.

Stevens on holiday this week.

On today's episode, we look ahead to the badly-insbend by election, and you ask us, who's better

at their job, curious to armour, or Boris Johnson.

So, Stephen is still off on holiday, missing all of the badly-by-election speculation,

which I'm sure he's got the to miss.

So, we're recording on Wednesday, but we're aware that when lots of people will be listening,

it will be polling day, and there will be a huge amount of anticipation about that result,

which will mean for care-starmer's leadership.

Labour are really braced for quite a bruising, I think.

They've had quite a tough contest against a Conservative challenger, and also against George Galloway.

So, I'm aware that we've spoken about this before, Anouche, but you did that really good

authoritative piece on the state of the race, and anticipated, you know, over a week ago,

some of the uglier trends that we've been seeing in badly-insbend over the past few days.

Do you feel like it has become even nastier since you were there?

That's really kind, thanks, and actually, you know, I appreciate you describing it as authoritative,

but actually, it really isn't, because after I left and reported my piece, a lot of stuff has happened,

since then, that, as you say, I heard rumblings of while I was there, which is basically that the campaign

and the sort of the trends around the by-election on the ground and the constituency has turned nastier and nastier.

So, there was this clip that I'm sure a lot of our listeners have seen of someone kind of chasing Kim Leadby

to the Labour candidate down the road, asking her about LGBTQ teaching in schools,

sort of suggesting that she should stand against that on behalf of Muslim constituents.

...