Rory Stewart

And the story is nobody can change Japanese politics because, to use another cliche from British politics, governance is broken.

Japanese government's broken.

And basically, the story is prime ministers don't last, nothing can get done.

The LDP is mired in, as you say, old people, corruption.

these incredible factions and policy machines, so she's stuck.

And then she calls an election.

And then everyone's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, how on earth is this gonna work out?

Because how on earth is she gonna deal with the populist rights and the fracturing Japanese politics?

Yes, exactly.

Contrary to most of these pundits' predictions, she's killed it.

And again, you can imagine when people call snap elections, people have visions of Macron, but she didn't do it like Macron.

Having been in for a long time in a very weak position, she moved very, very quickly.

But you've also pointed out three reasons why that election might not have worked.

So now she said, next problem that we have, which is that journalists writing about it find it sometimes, if we can share a New York Times article, which is a classic example of this, they get very excited by the fact she's the first woman.

She plays the heavy metal drums.

So there's a lot of memes about her playing the drums with the South Korean president.

And there are lots of special celebrity toys being made with her face.

And there's a bit of a movement around her, etc.,

And so a lot of the journalism is quite personality-driven, and it's not really asking the questions we normally ask in an election.

What actually happened district by district?