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

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and as the attention switches to the party's manifestos this week,

we're going to be discussing what impact these documents can have on campaigns,

with several people who have first-hand experience of writing them.

We'll also discuss the second leader's debate Kirstama and Rishi Sunak,

speak to some of our reporters who've been out around the country this week,

some exclusive polling on how votes are feeling about the economy,

discuss whether three weeks out from polling day the Tories might have already admitted defeat.

So to get stuck into all of that, I'm delighted to be joined by our editor here at Paul Home, Adam Payne,

and alongside him we have Lucia Hodgson, partner at strategy firm Charlesby and Boris Johnson's former Deputy Press Secretary,

as well as Fred de Fossard, former Conservative Special Advisor.

So I'll start with you, Adam, as I said, the big moments of this week are the various manifesto launches.

What did you make of the Tory launch? It was at Silverstone, so obvious driving metaphors aside.

What did you kind of make of Rishishinax launch?

Well... That's a great start.

To be honest, I think you can't think about that manifesto, manifesto launch.

You can't separate it from what had happened in a days leading up to it, right?

We had that fairly extraordinary misjudgment in terms of the decision to leave the D-Day event in Normandy early,

which may well be remembered as the moment of the campaign, a misjudgment which had virtually everyone,

including numerous people involved in Tory politics in some way, who I spoke to, absolutely

gobsmacked by that decision. And it really, I mean, his campaign was struggling anyway,

but any momentum he felt he had, any sources of, you know, optimism he felt he had really were just killed by that D-Day moment. So because

...