Stephen Bush

Thank you very much for listening to the news piece.

Goodbye.

Taking part in the news piece were Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Robin Morgan, Chloe Petsch and Stephen Bulls.

In the chair is me, Andy Zaltzman, and additional material was written by Maisie Adair, Angela Channell, James Farmer and Catherine Brinkworth.

The producer was Georgia Keating, and it was a BBC Studios production for Radio 4.

I have, yep.

So I might start to sundown during the pod.

Halfway through.

It is falling short of some of the worst predictions, but it is worth noting that although numerically...

it looks like the Labour Party will end up with it, being able to go, oh, look, if you look at the numbers we lost in 1999 and the numbers we've lost now, they're about the same.

In 1999, they were defending a much larger number of seats.

So in percentage terms, this is an apocalyptically bad set of results thus far.

I really cannot overstate enough that this is at the upper end of what we're doing.

This is a record-breakingly bad result.

election, unless every everywhere from here, you know, stays red.

We are talking worse than Margaret Thatcher in 1981, which is the current that is the floor standard to be that is the worst performance by a government that went on to be reelected.

So this is far worse than your usual off-year blues for the Labour Party.

It's a much smaller number.

Now, the...

If I were a Labour spinner looking for something that was both positive to say but grounded in some truth, the interesting thing is thus far, that is a better performance than what they have done in individual council by-elections, right?