Hello and welcome to Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Government.

I'm Emma Norris. So the final countdown has commenced. At the time of recording, we're just a

week away from the general election. At the time you're listening to this, we'll be down to days. In some ways, it doesn't seem all that long

ago that Rishu Sonak forgot his umbrella and surprised us all by calling the election, and yet

at the same time it feels like time has slowed right down. So what has actually happened on

this campaign? What could happen in the final week and what will come next? And could there still

be any surprises along the way? Plus, one of Labor's biggest policy challenges is on net zero.

The party set itself some pretty big targets, well one big target. A new IFG report sets out the

early priorities for a Starma government that wants to get on with delivering the energy mission

and we're going to be talking to the report's author. I'm joined throughout for his IFG podcast debut by senior IFG

researcher and former government special advisor, Jack Warlidge. Hi Jack. Hi, Emma. And Giles Wilkes,

our senior fellow and obsessive poll and predictions watcher is back to. Hey Giles.

Hi there, Emma, a fair description.

Thank you. And I'm delighted that we're joined today by Raphael Burr, columnist and leader writer at The Guardian.

Hi, Raff. Hi there. We're five weeks into the campaign. How are you bearing up?

I cannot claim to have enjoyed it. I agree with you entirely.

There's strange sort of interminable feeling now.

And I think that's because there are two very conflicting things going on.

One is sort of no significant movement in the overall picture.

This looks like it's going to be some variation of labour winning.

And then a sense of

enormous volatility underlying that and causing that so you have this strange feeling of a sort of a static

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