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Hello and welcome to this special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots.

I'm delighted to be joined today by the legendary pollster Sir John Curtis.

Now John, a huge set of local elections up next week.

Talk us through the top lines in terms of what we're likely to see. It's not a huge set of local elections. It's a remarkably small

set of local elections because we only have elections for 23 councils, most of them county

councils, which are often more difficult to be, together with six moralities. What of course you mean is that there's a big set of elections in terms of

Westminster's interest in what they are going to tell us, because of course, these are

elections that are occurring at the time when the opinion polls suggest that support for the UK

Labour government has fallen away more rapidly than that

for any newly elected government and that reform are the principal party to have risen

since the last election, as a result of which Labour and Reform roughly neck and neck in the opinion

polls, Conservatives who have shown so far no sign of recovery, if anything,

in a slightly worse position than they were last July. But with the Greens, still knocking

even more loudly on the door than they have done in the past. And the Democrats also,

if anything, in a slightly better position they were last summer. So we're all just wondering what this is going to mean for the outcome of local elections

or to put it slightly differently.

Will the local elections confirm the message of the opinion polls

that a reform are indeed a significant threat to the conventional British two-party system and indeed,

...