Hi, I'm Anouche, I'm Alva, and I'm Stephen.

And on today's New Statesman podcast, we discuss the summer in politics and you ask us,

why have the bi-election candidates been so bad?

So it looks like we're gearing up for a summer where the main story in town will be the

speed of the restrictions being loosened on COVID-19.

That was the theme at PMQ's today, we're recording on a Wednesday, and usually summers are supposed

to be particularly difficult for the opposition party, but it looks like Kirstaama might have

some opportunity to land some blows considering how controversially fast the unlocking appears

to be.

Stephen, do you think that the Labour Party will be able to sort of ride on the momentum

of this hold of batley and spend and make some political hay?

So the reason why summer is usually a difficult time for whoever is in opposition, obviously,

because those have been powerful so long now, we kind of default to going Labour, but

whoever is in opposition is the government, somebody who works for Cameron when they were in

opposition said to me that they said, you spend all of your time in opposition fighting for the

spotlight, then the summer happens and you're like, oh God, could we really have slightly less of

the spotlight?

Because the government broadly goes away, or there's a war or a major crisis, the kind of thing

where you can't really get attention anyway, but the normal state of Westminster in the summer

is journalists going, hey, why don't we do Labour be for?

Why don't we do Lib Dem be for?

Why don't we do, you know, Tory be back in the day?

...