Hello and welcome to Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollust, and in the second of our special election episodes, we'll look at the repercussions or the two big moments of this week's campaign.

Tuesday's first televised leaders debate and the ensuing row over taxation,

and Nigel Farage's inevitable decision to launch himself off the sidelines right into the political fray.

We need to discuss all that, we've got a bumper set of guests as well as audio from voters

and key swing seats, but we'll start going through this week's big news and a host of new polling,

each more dreadful than the next for the Tories, with my colleague and Paul Herm editor Adam Payne, Laura Paul Ossurridge, Press for Political Sociology at Bristol University,

and Rob Ford, Pressure Political Science.

So I'm going to start with you, Adam. Can you just talk us through those kind of big moments

of the week? It kind of started on Monday with Nigel Farage, decided to retake the leadership

of reform and decide he was going to stand

as a candidate overall. And then I guess that was kind of the start of quite a bad day for a

Rishishish Sunaka. It hasn't really necessarily got hugely better for him as the week has gone on.

No, so that Monday, I mean, it hasn't been a particularly great opening fortnight of the Tory campaign,

but that Monday felt especially brutal. We had some new

polling, some MRPs, which painted a pretty apocalyptic picture of where the party's

potentially going in four weeks' time. And to make matters worse, we had what was described as

an emergency press conference with Nigel Farage. And there were kind of two suggestions doing the round.

Firstly, and of course it ended up being the news that he was going to stand as a candidate.

And the second suggestion was maybe he did announce some sort of electoral pact with the Tory

party like the Brexit party did in 2019.

Well, that always felt very unlikely. So we got the news from

...