Peter, I've been dying to ask you this question, but all the polls suggest, can it be true that normal is the new normal? It's very tricky to

say.

Let me let me lay out the British scene in terms of your question.

What you've got is the polls at the moment.

And I'm saying at the moment after the party conference season, Andy Burnham bears in as as prime minister.

And after the recent eruptions involving reform and the Greens, Labour seems to be in the high 20s percentage wise.

say, 26, 27, 28, somewhere around there.

With all the controversies about racism and what have you they've had, And with Polanski now having a lower approval rating than Farage even, does that same we will stop the Greens come what may, does that threaten the Greens as much as it threatens reform?

But will this translate to votes? Here's political analyst and local resident Peter Kellner

The reason why the Labour Party kicked out Keir Starmer was because Labour was very unpopular.

Andy Burnham comes along and his offer to his party is, "I can go back and reconstruct a Labour election winning coalition." A large part of reconstructing the Labour winning coalition is that he appeals more to the disgruntled people on the left who've gone to other parties.

And in Holborn and St Pancras, that means the Greens

yeah right peter kellner can give him some marks though he is a political commentator former president of yougov peter very good evening now you've been writing today in the new statesman that you think the burn and bounce might be a little bit short-lived why

I'm not saying it will be, I'm just saying it's too early to say that it will last.

We've had two more polls out today, so if you take the four polls we've had yesterday and today, we've got two of them showing Labour and Reform That's YouGov and DeltaPoll.

We've got two of them showing Labour narrowly ahead.

That's More in Common and Salvation.

So, look, the parties are close together.

Individual polls are subject to margins of error.

I can't remember how long it was before the suits and glasses thing blew up, but it wasn't that long after, was it? And let's hope he doesn't suffer something like that.

What, what did we learn from that poll?

Well, we learned that, uh, most people who have a v-- but a few, a- a- around a third don't, at YouGov, but those who have a view, about two to one, say it's not worth having a, a by-election.

Uh, it, it, it, it, it, it's a mistake.

It shouldn't happen.

What you've got, most Reform voters think it's a good idea.

Tory voters are evenly divided.

Everybody else is, is, is against.

Do you reckon, in your own judgment, as a veteran observer of these things, do you think this tactic is gonna backfire?

Is there a suggestion from the result that he also gained some Conservative voters and some Reform voters who might otherwise have backed Farage or Kenny Baddow's supporters?

Now, the trouble is, when you look at the polls, you're down to very small sub-samples of what conservatives did.

But the impression from these very small samples is that conservatives went mainly, but not only, to reform.

But let me say this, to pull back from this, because what is fairly clear is that throughout the campaign, the total progressive vote... of around 55% stayed constant and is the same as the progressive votes two years ago.

And the right-of-center vote is mid-40s percentage point two years ago and through this campaign.

But what has happened is that Labour has won almost all the progressive voters.

So 98% of progressive voters ended up voting for Labour.

Do you think that he could potentially have trouble translating that to an appeal to the nation as a whole? And how would this very localized campaign set him up to be prime minister for the country?