After the Conservatives suffered two by-election defeats but were spared the embarrassment of a whitewash, Matt explores what it means for Sunak and Starmer's fortunes with polling expert John Curtice, Red Box Editor Patrick Maguire, Conservative Minister Claire Coutinho, Labour's Thangam Debbonaire and Lib Dem leader Ed Davey.
Plus: Columnists James Heale and Eleni Courea discuss political expectation management, lobbying via WhatsApp, and why teenagers are getting their news from TikTok.


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Hello this is the Redbox podcast I'm Matt surely bringing the best of my Times Radio show.

You can listen live Monday to Friday 10 till 1 on your DAB radio on your smart speaker or on your Times Radio app.

And actually today was probably the sort of day we should have

been listening live to the whole show because there was an awful

But fear not, we've rounded up all the best bits.

We've got the best analysis of what the 3 by-election results actually mean.

Patrick Maguire, new Times columnist and Times Radio senior political correspondent just been announced.

He joins me alongside John Curtis to pick over the entrails of it all and actually separate the spin from the reality.

But first, as we always do on a Friday, let's take a look at what we learned this week.

We learned that Simon Mayo once dabbled in politics.

up my own political party, which was only joined by my sister, and so we were the only 2 members.

It was called the Independent Social Democratic and Radical Liberal Party.

We learned how they change the siren on police cars.

We learn that Keir Starmer won't say that things can only get better.

And the mood then was 1 of growing optimism.

That song, Things Can Only Get Better, that's not the position.

Raising the prospect that things might actually get worse.

We learned that Tobias Elwood was a bad choice as the new presenter for A Place in the Sun.

It feels different now that the Taliban have returned to power.

may be hard to believe but security has vastly improved, corruption is down, and the opium trade has all but disappeared.

We learned at PMQs that nobody is good at maths.

Everybody knows that I'm a fan of doing maths to 18, But the honourable gentleman makes a very strong case for doing maths all the way to 61, quite rightly.

Mr Speaker, I'd be so good at maths if I'm

We learned of a big tech investment in my Somerset homeland by offending some people by slipping into my native dialect.

We learned that John Cooper's brilliant at pointing out shoddy new builds on TikTok.

And how would you like your windows, sir?

That window is cracked, this window's cracked, that window's cracked, everything's cracked.

But most of all, we learned that Boris Johnson could well have held on to his seat in Uxbridge if he'd stood in the recall election instead of running off.

More hard-hitting analysis of the by-elections coming up.

Now, let's kick off with today's columnist panel.

Yes, normally on a Friday we'd have Night at the Marriott, but India Knight and James Marriott are both away.

So instead, we are joined by, from the spectator, James Hillman.

We've at least got a James, if not the James.

I mean, I know from personal experience, you're not averse to gossip, Eleni.

Basically, my job is to publish pure gossip, not really interested in news.

Now clearly we should talk about the by-election result.

It's sort of the perfect news result because everybody can point at a good thing while slightly ignoring the bad thing.

What's your sort of main top line takeaway first of all, James?

I think that Uxbridge has really been a bit of a fig leaf here.

Obviously it was a bad night for the Conservatives.

I think sort of 20 points on average across, swing away from the Conservatives across the board.

And I think for me, the really interesting story is going to be about tactical voting here and how much better it's got in terms of opposition parties in trying to sort of turn the Tories out across the country, whether that can hold for a general election is going to be the big thing next year.

I think Selby is a massive victory for Labour and that would be what we were talking about had Uxbridge not been narrowly won by the Tories.

So that's given Rishi Sunak something to, you know, claim that he's not on track to lose the next general election very badly.

But I think the Tories have a lot to be worried about actually here.

And we should talk about the Lib Dems, not least because we've just had Ed Davies stunt.

Now previously, he's what burst a balloon, a blue pin, a blue balloon with a pin.

He's knocked down hay bales with a tractor.

He had a clock to say it's time's up for the Tories.

This time, he's had a cannon with, get the clowns out, time to get the clowns out, written on the side of it.

So it's a circus themed thing, and then he sort of, it's just a cardboard cutout, it's not real cannon, and then he sort of pretended to light it with a sort of comedy cartoon sort of fuse.

It's time to get these clowns out of number

Just had David cheering there because this 1 worked unlike the clock which didn't last time.

Unfortunately there wasn't a sort of clown Rishi Sunak which fired out of the cannon though James I think I feel like that's what it was missing.

And I would think he has the next by election is probably going to happen, which might be mid Bedfordshire, where the cons the leaders have a really good chance.

I think in the Dean Dory's career offers a whole host of kind of visual metaphors and imagery which the Lib Dems will have fun trying to exploit.

I was thinking of kangaroos testicles, yes.

I'm not sure, we'll see how far he wants to go with

Lady, do you think the Lib Dems can take, you know, another big by-election win and turn it into you know it's gonna be much harder for them fighting 600 odd seats rather than 1 essentially.

Yeah that's the thing I mean the Lib Dems are incredibly good at winning these by-elections, they're incredibly good at running these localised campaigns where they hone in on the issues in these sort of blue woolly constituencies where there's a lot of disgruntled Tories but as you were saying earlier Matt that they've not really managed to translate that into a national kind of an increase in the national poll lead and I think it will be much tougher when we come to general election and they're not really able to give you know kind of contradictory messages to people in different constituencies.

We should also talk about, let's talk about the in-betweeners Because winning in Selby, Keir Mather is only

I mean, the big surprise, I suppose, for him, his perspective, is getting selected to go up against a 20, 000 Tory majority and then actually getting elected.

But this was the Tory Minister, Johnny Mercer, on Sky News comparing Keir Mather to a character from the school-based sitcom The Inbetweeners.

I think it's always good to get new people in politics.

I mean I think we mustn't become a sort of repeat of The Inbetweeners, right?

Well, this guy has been at Oxford University more than he's been in a job.

Is he right to mock a 25-year-old who's been elected like that?

I think, look, there's a whole history of people going on to do great things in politics from a very young age.

You think, you know, Gladstone, Tony Benn, Abalfa, Churchill etc.

All 25 or younger when they were elected.

I think it was his attempt to have a bit of fun with it and I think as I say much more it's about character and substance rather than the actual age at which you're elected.

Definitely want, I don't want to be an MP at

Don't want to be an MP at 25, don't want to be an MP at

The funny thing for me is that I was having coffee with somebody from Labour earlier this week who was saying that Rishi Sunak in Downing, having Rishi Sunak in Downing Street feels like we're being run by the, you know, people from the in-betweeners, him and some of his advisors, you know, slightly kind of nerdy.

And actually, Rishi, we get every single time we do PMQs on a Wednesday, someone will message in and say Rishi Sinhak sounds like Will for the in-betweeners.

so maybe, maybe that's, maybe yeah, you should have maybe picked a slightly different choice.

Let's move on, because we'll talk more about the by-elections later on.

But new Whitehall reforms can see government officials and ministers have to declare when someone has tried to lobby them by phone or WhatsApp.

We've talked a lot about lobbying before, my favourite story being ministers at party conference where people just bump into them and go, oh I'm sorry, can I just mention to you the company that I work for, they can go off and bill ministers?

But now they might have to declare if they're lobbied on WhatsApp.

This seems like, as ever, Whitehall very slowly catching up with technology, Eleni?

I mean, we've seen from the COVID inquiry and the controversies around Boris Johnson's WhatsApp messages, but also just the general, Matt Hancock's WhatsApp messages earlier this year as well, which were leaked, how much people in government use WhatsApp.

We know that it's extremely, it's used for all levels of communication.

So this feels massively overdue, but it's good that finally some you know rules are being put in place.

What's interesting is that increasingly ministers are using disappearing messages on WhatsApp so I don't know how that ends up affecting you know it given that messages can disappear after you know a day or a week and I don't know how much that ends up affecting transparency because it's easy to hide these communications.

But isn't the issue here, James, it's actually saying that there will be a that you'd be compelled, but if you are a senior official or a government minister, that in the same way you have to declare if you have a coffee with someone who lobbies you, you would have to declare that someone is trying to lobby you via phone or text?

Yeah, I mean the onus is going to be on the person to declare it and for understandable reasons they may be less forthcoming and willing to give those information.

I think if you look at the current transparency logs we have, they're clearly not updated regularly.

They're a bit of a joke, actually, because it suggests that some cabinet ministers don't meet a single journalist all year, which I find hard to believe.

But also, I think it shows really how all the things that have been going on in Whitehall and Westminster have affected the kind of rules and they are kind of outdated.

The stuff on WhatsApp is clearly out of date, it doesn't actually sort of keep up with the trends of what ministers are actually doing.

But also this was drawn up in response to what happened with Greensill and that was 2 years ago, so it's a belated attempt to kind of address the issues.

You know, even though the whole political scene has moved very much on from since then.

And I suppose it goes back to the point, James, that actually, you'd like to think that people who are in politics are abiding by the rules, doing the right thing.

You know, it actually it's a slightly sort of pernicious idea that they're all breaking the rules all the time in it for themselves, dodging scrutiny, and actually most of them just aren't.

No, I do have some sympathy and reading what came out from the telegraph WhatsApp messages as well.

I think you could see a variation of things where, you know, different ministers respond in different ways.

So you know, Ben Wallace was added to 1 of these WhatsApp groups during COVID and just immediately left because he didn't think it was the right thing.

Other ministers probably, clearly junior ministers perhaps felt pressured by their boss to be involved in these kind of WhatsApp groups and discussing things in informal channels.

I don't, and I say I don't think it's necessarily about malice or incompetence, but the problem is if the procedures break down, you know, that leads to bad policymaking as a result.

And when we try and sort of assign the historical blame or kind of learn lessons, etc, for things like the National Archives or Covid Inquiry, there just aren't the sort of records there so it's important to kind of make sure we're looking at these things in a 21st century way.

Apparently the social media app has become the most popular news source for 12 to 15 year olds, according to Ofcom.

Well, Dylan Page, known as the News Daddy, is 1 of the most popular news readers on TikTok.

This is terrifying footage showing what would happen to your flesh if you were bitten by a Komodo dragon.

The mother has just given birth to a baby whilst underneath the rubble of a collapsed building after the earthquakes.

learned that there is a type of bee that exclusively eats rotting meat and this is what their bloody hives look like.

China have just responded after their spy balloon was shot down.

In a statement shortly after they said, China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and protest against the US using force to attack civilian unmanned airships.

They said that a man is 6 times more likely to go bald if his ring finger is longer than his index finger.

I always find this very interesting for the videos which which are chosen for that intro.

So how did you get into delivering news on TikTok to build up 8 million followers?

Yeah, I mean, it's happened over quite a period of time, But I started with just interesting content that I was seeing on the internet, and I thought that, yeah, this is great for everyone to see.

And then as time goes on, the stuff that I was generally interested in happened to be in the news.

And so I guess you just lean into what your audience wants to see and It's kind of a started getting comments like thanks news daddy in the comments, which I thought was hilarious So that name kind of stuck

Came from the comments rather than you deciding that's what you were gonna be.

Yeah, well, it's definitely not self-proclaimed news, Daddy.

It was a name given to me, which I thought was hilarious.

So, you know, I went with it and it's stuck, so...

Well, it's clearly worth to build up such a massive following.

James and Eleni, do either of you get your news from TikTok?

I think I get my news from Eleni's playbook when she writes that

And so those 2 main things really, but so more much more traditional.

But I do appreciate you know, this is the story out today about, you know, 12 to 15 year olds mostly getting the news from it.

And it's gonna be something we have to take, you know, be aware of is that most young people absorb their information from video, from sort of TikTok, brief clips, etc, rather than traditional print media.

I think 28 is like slightly on the borderline.

I'm on TikTok, although I haven't put anything on there for ages.

Well, it was 1 of those, it just requires a lot of energy to be across all of the plat, you know,

See all Red Box Politics Podcast transcripts on Applepodcasts

What Do The By-Elections Mean?