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From the Guardians today in focus, this

0:40

is Election Extra with me Lucy Hoff.

0:43

This evening, all bets are

0:45

off. If you thought things couldn't get

0:47

any worse for the Tories, they have.

0:49

If it was one of my candidates, they'd be gone

0:52

and their feet would not have touched the floor. Senior

0:54

ministers like Michael Gove already standing

0:57

down seem resigned to their fate.

1:00

I'm a Scotland fan, so you wait until the

1:02

final whistle. Sometimes it looks as though the odds

1:05

are against you, but you keep on fighting. And

1:07

party leaders are preparing for their next

1:10

televised grilling tonight. But is

1:12

there such a thing as too many TV debates?

1:18

Well with me is Archie Bland, editor of

1:21

the Election Edition newsletter. It's

1:23

genuinely quite difficult to know where to start

1:25

today, but I think let's start with this

1:28

betting scandal. Can you just first of all

1:30

run me through the sequence of events that

1:32

have brought us to where we are now?

1:34

Yes, absolutely. If I sound a bit bewildered

1:37

as I do it, it's because it really

1:39

has been a bewilderingly bad 24 hours for

1:41

the Tories, even in the context of their

1:43

campaign so far. But yes, let's start with

1:45

the betting scandal. So you will remember that

1:48

last week Pippa Crearer of the Guardian revealed

1:50

that a backbencher who is also an aid

1:52

to Rishi Sunak had placed a bet on

1:54

the timing of the election and

1:57

was under investigation from the gambling commission. So

1:59

this is 53

6:01

seats. Yeah, 53 seats. That's three more

6:03

than the Liberal Democrats, so they'd be

6:05

vying for second place. And that prompted

6:08

the Daily Telegraph to run a headline

6:10

that said, Tory wipe out in very

6:12

large letters indeed. So

6:14

we've spoken before about the fact that

6:16

the Tories have right from the get-go

6:19

been running quite a defensive campaign going

6:21

to very safe Tory seats to kind

6:23

of effectively shore up the scale of

6:25

their losses. But it does

6:27

seem that that's been stepped up another gear.

6:29

What's happened? Yeah, this is very much in

6:31

light of these polls and presumably their own

6:34

evidence that they're finding on the ground and

6:36

through their own private polling. Earlier

6:39

on in the campaign, they were pouring

6:41

resources into seats with majorities of around

6:43

10,000, which already seems like a very

6:45

defensive campaign. Today, Bloomberg has reported that

6:47

money and party activists are being diverted

6:50

from those seats to even safer seats

6:52

to ones with majorities in some cases

6:54

of 20,000 plus. The kinds of seats

6:57

that they're now defending include the Prime

6:59

Minister's own constituency in Richmond and North

7:01

Allerton, where he has a majority of

7:03

about 27,000. Okay, so I

7:05

mean, it's pretty much as bad as it gets. And

7:07

if you were a Tory minister or

7:10

a donor, you'd sort of be hoping that

7:12

you could slink off quietly and nurse a

7:14

sad pint in the pub and watch the

7:16

England game. But that's very much not the

7:18

case. No, indeed. Remarkably,

7:20

they're headed tonight to the Herlingham Club,

7:22

where the Conservatives are having their annual

7:25

summer party, which is a

7:27

fundraising exercise. And I don't know if anybody is

7:29

going to be in the mood to pay the

7:31

£12,000 that a table costs, but I'm sure that

7:33

some interesting lines will emerge. And I

7:35

expect also that people will be making a

7:37

beeline for the likes of Jeremy Hunt, who

7:39

admitted that he might lose his own seat,

7:42

for Mel Stride, who said that we're on

7:44

course for an unprecedented Labour majority, and for

7:46

Michael Gove, who put on a brave face

7:48

by comparing the Tory campaign to the Scotland

7:50

football team, which is sort of

7:52

true, except that the Scotland football team lost

7:54

5-1 to Germany on Friday night, and they

7:56

are currently vying for second place. I don't

7:58

know if that's... what he meant. Yeah,

8:01

it's got the energy of the sort

8:03

of captain of the Titanic going down

8:06

nobly with his ship. Okay, so elsewhere

8:08

there's another TV leaders event tonight. This

8:10

time it's a BBC Question Time special.

8:13

So what's the format here? Yeah, I

8:15

mean, honestly, it's quite hard to remember

8:17

now with so many of these debates

8:19

having happened. But this one

8:21

is on the BBC. It's a Question Time

8:24

special. And it's interviews with

8:26

the leaders of the four biggest parties,

8:28

the Labour Party, the Conservatives, the Lib

8:30

Dems and the SNP. So

8:33

questions from the public, which you know, we

8:35

have seen a bit of this week with

8:37

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer on LBC taking

8:39

quite testy questions from the public. So it'll

8:41

be more of that. Yeah,

8:44

and that is always a slightly more interesting

8:46

format and a bit less predictable than some

8:48

of the other stuff that we see. It's

8:50

really hard to tell, I think, at this

8:53

point, how influential any of this stuff will

8:55

be. It's obviously desirable for people to be

8:57

informed, but the audiences keep shrinking. And

9:00

the fact is, is that most people encounter these

9:02

programmes through the kind of sound bites that they

9:04

hear on the news or on radio. I think

9:07

most of the time now, because the formats

9:09

are so constricted with such little time for

9:12

answers, and because the level of the debate

9:14

is quite low, it's pretty

9:16

hard really to see what sort of democratic

9:18

value they have when there are such a

9:20

massive quantity of them. All right, so is

9:23

there anything from the Labour camp that's jumped

9:25

out at you? Yeah, I was looking for

9:27

a balancing disaster on the Labour side, in

9:29

the hope of sort of trying to demonstrate

9:31

that this isn't just a kind of a

9:34

one eyed guardian take on the election and

9:36

we're keeping across all of it. And

9:38

the only thing I was able to find

9:41

was a story from Islington North. You'll remember

9:43

that this is the constituency which Jeremy Corbyn

9:45

has held as a Labour MP where he

9:47

is now running as an independent candidate after

9:49

his expulsion from the party. And

9:51

it's been reported that the Labour chair

9:53

in that constituency who is obviously supposed

9:55

to support the Labour candidate was

9:58

spotted by members of the party.

10:00

campaigning for Corbyn and allegedly hid

10:02

behind a hedge. Perhaps

10:04

unsurprisingly, she has reportedly now been

10:06

forced to resign. It's

10:08

a bit like that gif of Homer Simpson disappearing

10:10

backwards into the hedge, isn't it? That's what it

10:12

looks like in my mind. Well, Archie, thank you

10:14

very much. A truly wild day. Thank you. I'm

10:16

going to go and have a nap. That

10:20

was Archie Bland. Make sure you're signed

10:22

up to his daily election edition newsletter

10:24

at theguardian.com. Today in Focus is back

10:26

as usual tomorrow morning. Helen Paird will

10:29

be speaking to Esther Adly, who's been

10:31

out on the campaign trail in Clacton.

10:33

Election Extra will be back at the

10:35

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