Rory Stewart

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welcome to the rest is politics it's an emergency podcast on the local elections with me rory stewart and me alistair campbell is the emergency or is it live it's live is it also a live emergency anyway it's not one of our normal things because we're having this amazing local election in britain which just to remind people could be huge change for the way the british electoral system works yeah got a new system very new system in scotland and wales and

And then I think the story... Slightly better, I guess, is that John Curtis was looking, the famous Sir John Curtis, the great pollster,

seemed to be suggesting that his polls were thinking SNP will do very well in Scotland, but they won't quite get a majority, which won't be enough for them to push for a referendum on independence.

But he thought it's possible reform could come second, and Labour and Conservatives neck on neck on about 17 seats.

So doing better presumably would mean Labour coming second rather than equal third.

The one that's interesting also is because broadly across Europe, the parties on the right, so parties like the AFD in Germany, Le Pen, I mean further right than the conventional right-wing parties, tend to be getting between 20% and 30%, don't they?

And at the moment, of course, people like me who are very disturbed by the rise of the AFD in Germany,

Very disturbed by Fraser Nelson reporting that Robert Jenrick was talking about essentially tracking down and getting rid of 2 million people from Britain, presumably predominantly Muslims who reform don't like, take comfort in the fact that they're getting 25, 30% of the vote, that they're not the majority of the vote.

Just quick on expectations.

There was some very odd reporting over the weekend that Nigel Farage was not doing your famous Ken Baker trick of setting expectations very low.

In fact, he was doing the opposite.

He was doing something that you almost never see in local elections.

He was going around saying, this is going to be an amazing win.

This is going to be a great Bonanza win, which of course gives people at the Conservatives the opportunity to say in Harlow, for example,

where there were 11 seats up and where reform seemed to be talking about getting seven or eight, the Tories have got a clean suite.

And remind us the two.

So with Polanski, I noticed there was a front page article in the Times saying that he'd not paid council tax on a canal boat that he'd been living on.

That's a lot of money.

I'd be interested also, I don't know whether anybody's polled reform voters, what the range of opinion is about Farage taking five million pounds personal donation