Keir Starmer is 'reflecting on political reality'

27:25Brace yourself for more talk about installing aircon or not. There's a cooling divide between those who can afford to keep cool and those who cannot. Becky Taylor is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers. Hello, Becky. Hi. Will we hear more and more conversation and more and more sales of aircon in the UK? Yeah, we definitely will because it's an easy fix to being hot if you can afford to install and operate it. But it just misses a bigger point that we're not culturally or physically equipped for rising temperatures. So it needs to be a last move, really, not a first move.

28:00So are our homes mostly built to keep heat in? Yeah, absolutely. They're built to keep heat in and then we need to re-educate ourselves how to get that heat out when it's hot. So Henry Zeffman, who was here at the top of our programme, lives in the seventh floor top flat and says it's absolutely sweltering. What can he do? Well, being at the top flat is definitely the worst place to be because heat rises. And also you tend to find that many buildings have roofs that are not well protected from the sun as well. We're just going to say on roofs, I'm just reading in the papers that the zinc roofs in Paris are reaching 80 degrees Celsius.

28:38yes yeah exactly so we really need to keep the sun off our roofs that's one of the shading generally is really important so shading of windows but also shading of roofs because especially if they're poorly insulated um which would also keep heat in in the winter it keeps heat out in the summer what about hospitals and schools do you think that there could be an argument to put air conditioning in there even though as you've explained it's a short-term fix Well, air conditioning is part of a suite of interventions that we can take. So it's not wrong to put air conditioning into buildings, but we need to take all the measures to reduce the heat gain to buildings in the first place, because that will then take down the air conditioning load, reduce the size of the systems and reduce the energy and carbon emitted by using the air conditioning.

29:22So it's more systemic than just sticking a cooling unit. I was in a care home with no air conditioning and it was quite distressing. Do you feel that there's anything that's a short-term measure short of aircon? I've heard of a fan with ice in front of it or whatever. What do you recommend? Yeah, absolutely. So it's all about keeping the people cooler. So if we can increase air movement, that increases how effective their sweating mechanisms are. If we can stop all the sun getting into the building with shading and opening those windows as much as possible in a safe way. So with vulnerable residents, that can be more difficult.

29:56but then in very vulnerable locations like care homes then I think air conditioning is the right answer but we need to get those loads down as quickly as possible. OK, thank you very much indeed Becky Taylor, Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers. The BBC's Frank Gardner has photographed another rare British butterfly. Frank made the news a couple of years ago when he snapped a black-veined white, so rare that Winston Churchill tried to cultivate the species in Kent. We rang Frank last Sunday when the peacock topped an online poll for Britain's favourite butterfly, but we ended up speaking instead about his day job, because the Royal Marines had boarded a shadow oil tanker.

30:36So here he is, as promised, on his latest photo of a beautiful little flutterer. I saw a couple of butterflies sort of chasing each other round the gorse, the kind of young gorse bushes that hadn't yet developed into mature gorse bushes. and I thought I bet those are just common blues which are lovely but then I photographed them had a look and I thought hang on the pattern's different and then I checked on the app and I thought oh my god they are silver studded blues and I took photographs from different angles under the wing, over the wing in flight and each time it came up as silver studded blue so that was the first time I saw one and I put that on my Instagram feed frank.gardner and I was really happy to see that.

31:20I think it's my, I don't know, 30th UK butterfly or something like that. I mean, we only have around 59 butterfly species in the UK and there are far more on the continent because we're an island. I mean, Ireland has even fewer than that, whereas somewhere like Greece or even Sweden, they have a lot more. France has vastly more numbers of butterflies and so does Spain than we do. So we're an island. Some of them hibernate. Some of them die off. Some of them fly across the channel and migrate. So this year, there's a lot of painted lady butterflies. They seem to be everywhere. And photographing butterflies has become your thing since lockdown.

32:02You photographed a very rare one discovered by people you were with. And what was it? Right. So that was the black-feigned white. I mean, it's quite a big butterfly with very striking, what it says on the tin, black veins across its wings. They're quite common on the continent in France, but they became extinct or extirpated from the UK in 1925. And Winston Churchill tried to cultivate them at his place in Kent. I think it was Westrum. And he had these bushes at his, while he was away, his gardener went and destroyed all the bushes. So that was the end of the black vein whites. And then a couple of years ago, I was near Croydon with a butterfly expert called Martin Wills.

32:48And together, we went to look for them because somebody had spotted them. And sure enough, we found them and I photographed them and got it on the Sixscog News. A rare butterfly, which has been extinct in Britain for nearly 100 years, has suddenly appeared in countryside on the edge of London. Small numbers of black-veined whites have been spotted in the southeast of the capital, to the delight of butterfly enthusiasts. Our correspondent Frank Gardner himself... That was a reminder of his earlier spot. Gardner is spelt G-A-R-D-N-E-R if you're looking for Frank's latest fabulous photos. It's 9.40.

33:24We turn to our guests. Kirstie Allsop is the TV legend who hosts Channel 4's Location, Location, Location and much more besides. Welcome back, Kirstie. It's lovely to be here, Paddy. Joey Durso is the journalist and author of More Than a Shirt, exploring football's links to politics, money and more. You must be living your best life at the moment. I'm loving it, Paddy. Thanks for having me. Your favourite football shirt? Oh, Aston Villa one with Muller yogurts on from the mid-1990s. Oh, God, very niche. And Stephen Bush is here, Associate Editor and Columnist at the Financial Times. Welcome back, Stephen.

33:52Thanks for having me. You braced for a Prime Ministerial announcement this week? Yes. Partly I'm hoping that it will mean that I can go on my holiday in a couple of weeks' time without having to have my phone buzzing all the time. OK, so it's that soon. Yeah, I think it's very imminent. We want you to listen to Beppe Severnini. He's an Italian columnist on Corriere della Sera because seven prime ministers in ten years will bring the UK level with Italy. Here is Beppe. Well, you're becoming Italian and we're becoming British. Basically, we're well known over the world to be excitable, to change things, to change our mind, to change our prime ministers.

34:29And now you do that. So basically, you went the Italian way, we went the British way. So welcome. Is it a habit or is it emotion? Is it emotion? I lived in Britain in the 80s and in the 90s, and I've been coming back and forth. And I noticed how progressively you become more emotional and we become less emotional. Like Brexit, I think, was an emotional decision. Absolutely. And I think what's happening to politics reflects that. It's not the political system or the electoral system that creates stability in politics and the government. It's the country's mood. And your country's mood and the national character has changed dramatically in the last 15, 20 years.

35:11And I suppose there's an argument that many voters who didn't vote Labour will say that swapping Keir Starmer with Andy Burnham is not a very radical change. So we go back to where we started, which is we'll then have to have another prime minister in a few years to make another change. I really don't know that. I knew that, for instance, going back when Boris Johnson became your prime minister, I was not surprised at all what happened. I met him when we were both journalists. I'm still a journalist. He's not anymore. So it's not unexpected. Some of the characters that there were in Downing Street in the last few years.

35:45This one, I don't know. It looks to me, you know, you're playing the World Cup. It's the same thing. You win again and the national mood is so excited that you think you're almost going to win the World Cup again after 60 years, right? It doesn't work like that. Take your time, relax, be cool and wait because, you know, you can pick someone from the bench. I think it's what's happening now. The Labour Party is thinking maybe, you know, Starmer is not Harry Kane. we should come up with something better and try to score. As a friend of Britain, I hope you do score. And by the way, I hope you win the World Cup.

36:22Very gracious. Beppe Severnini, what do you all think about the news that we expect a resignation this week, Stephen? Well, it's inevitable, right? If you have a situation where you become rapidly very unpopular, where you don't, as Keir Starmer famously does... But why is it inevitable? It wasn't. When we grew up, it wasn't. But when we... I think, you know... Actually, in some ways, we shouldn't forget that the long period where you had Thatcher for 13 years, Major for seven years, Tony Blair for 10 years, that is actually exceptional, that we're returning more to the 50s in some ways. If you're an MP and you're looking at the next three years and thinking I'm going to lose my job at the end of this, you want to find the person who's going to stop you losing your job.

37:02Yeah, I think one thing that's curious about it is we've had prime ministers become unpopular really quickly, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, but there isn't this sort of obvious proximate cause. He's just so unpopular. Well, let's turn to what the papers have been writing about in advance of this momentum, which is kind of gaining because of the Peter Kyle interview, which we brought you earlier. Stephen, on the march from the Sunday Times, Andy Burnham's triumphal return to Westminster has echoes of the Jarrow Crusade 90 years ago. Yeah, so this is a profile of Andy Burnham's inner circle and three of the women who were essential to his campaign.

37:36Louise Haig, a former transport secretary, tipped and expected to have a big role in any Burnham government uh he is a press aide uh grace which obviously most people expect will go in uh and then the the there is a slightly tenuous link to the jarrow jarrow march uh and yeah and then the third one being annalise midgley uh a labour mp and crucially a well-respected mover and shaker on the party's left and within its trade union movement um because we're you know to let the light in on the magic a little bit when When you're writing for print and you know that a story is likely to emerge afterwards, a profile is always a really good way of future-proofing yourself because it's still interesting even after he's become Prime Minister.

38:17The man on Sunday, Kirsty Allsop, Starmer turns to the one person he trusts the most, his wife. Yes, I love this story because actually when we were discussing it, you have to have one person. For a lot of people, that's their mum. But when your mum gets to a certain age or she dies, who is that? Your partner. And Keir Starmer has obviously been blind to what's been going on. And rather like Jill and Joe Biden, someone in the last 24 hours has brought him to his senses. And that is probably his wife. Yeah. And, you know, I think we all maybe have that person. I don't know who it is, but yeah, she clearly.

38:59But also I think the trappings of being a wife must be wonderful. You know, you get to go on all these exciting trips. You probably meet all sorts of interesting people. you certainly wouldn't want to give it up. Oh, no. Oh, God, sorry, Joey, but no. I mean, how many prime ministerial wives or husbands have walked away and wanted to walk away? I should think 99%. Well, on that, can we go to the human in the machine? Will listeners be thinking how decently this can be done, how Kierkegaard can still be respected as a human, or have we moved through that now and everyone just shouts at everyone and it doesn't matter that there's a human being in here.

39:37There's a wife, there's children, there's probably siblings. There are probably all sorts of people who love Keir Starmer and can't bear to see what they're seeing at the moment. I think one of the problems with the age that we're in is that I think we have become crueler and we've started to treat people on our TV screens like they're not real human beings. I think that's something that has been lost as we've gone from a world of very few channels where we kind of have a shared thing to everyone scrolling in a different world, is we do dehumanise not just our politicians, but, you know, celebrities, influencers, in a way that we wouldn't have in the past.

40:10Yet one would hope, and you go, that whatever one may think of how Keir Starmer's conducted his government, he's going to leave office very soon, and he should be able to do so in a way that is not, you know, yet more humiliation. So we turn from the politics. Thank you all for bringing us the different remarks that were written perhaps 12, 24 hours ago, and we'll tell you any news if we get it before 10. Joey Durso, the observer, how Algeria stole the hearts of a small corner of Kansas. Yeah, I think this is a really lovely story. And amongst all the sort of quite grim politics of this World Cup and the Iran team not being allowed to stay in the US and visa bans and all sorts, this is really nice.

40:45The Algerian team in Lawrence, Kansas, and it's not an obvious match, a sort of Muslim country in sort of red Republican Kansas, and they've really taken them to their hearts. And the local marching band have learnt the Algerian national anthem. There's kids running around with Algerian flags and shirts, and it's sort of really lovely. And I think, you know, the World Cup, for all the politics of it, I think, I personally think is kind of the pinnacle of human civilisation. And just, you know, it's great. The pinnacle of human civilisation? I do love the World Cup. There was a very good piece written by Martin Samuel a couple of weeks ago in The Times.

41:13We were saying, look, you know, it's corrupt, FIFA are awful, but, you know, like football will find a way. You know, like the beautiful game will be. And there is just something so exciting, like that Cabo Verde draw, that knowledge that everyone watching, unless you were Spanish, across the whole world, desperately wanted this tiny country, this team with a 40-year-old in goal, to just get a point and get a draw. And there's just something so exciting about it. I agree with every single word you just said, Stephen, that I feel exactly the same. I don't even have a British football team that I sport.

41:43When it comes to international football, I love it. And I'm away from home on Tuesday night and I'm already worrying about who I'm going to watch the game with. And the Today programme played the musician in the stadium who plays all the Scottish music and everything else. So there's a lot to enjoy. That's the Algerian story. Stephen Bush, The Mail on Sunday. My most fun buy. This is a former footballer, Viv Anderson, talking about how he spent his money in his life. Viv Anderson, Forest player, Arsenal player, and played for another team who I'm not going to dwell on because I'm a bitter anti-United person.

42:13But giving his money tips in the mail, it's just quite a nice, fun story and gives you an insight into the kind of person he is and how he spent his life. I very much enjoyed you. who was asking, what was your first luxury process? And he said, oh, yeah, when he was 22 and just starting to really make his name, he bought a BMW. And he's like, what was your worst decision? He was like, well, buying the BMW. But yeah, the nice thing is, there's a story with a happy ending in that he got on the property ladder early, did not, as some footballers do when they get very wealthy very quickly, look back and regret.

42:42And he gives the very important advice to everyone, which is to take care of your pension and to top up your private pension contributions whenever you can. Yes, it's very hard to do if you're earning the national living wage. But there we are. That's how to spend money from someone who's had a lot of it, I imagine, this time. Kirsty Allstop, the Sunday Times. NHS dismissed mothers' concerns in cover-up of baby deaths over a decade. I'm really sad that what's happening with Keir Starmer is probably going to mean that this story is missed next week. Donna Ockenden, who's a remarkable woman, has done this report on the Nottingham University Hospital's NHS Trust.

43:19and I think it's quite important sometimes to read things out. Hundreds of avoidable mother and baby deaths, stillbirths and cases of severe brain damage in children. How this went on for so long and it wasn't noticed and it also says it is understood that half of the 60 former senior executives and directors she approached refused to answer questions about their role in the scandal. Staff who tried to raise concerns about dangerous working conditions were ignored and warnings that the maternity department faced disaster were dismissed. It's so appalling and it's happening up and down the country and it just hasn't got the traction that it should.

43:56There was a train crash, as we all know, which was ghastly and one train driver was killed and there will be a major inquiry into that as there was into the last train crash two years ago. And yet this is going on with hundreds of mothers and babies dying and being injured. Anthony May, chief executive of the Trust, praised the bravery of families to pursue the truth. I have met some of the affected families. they've shared their painful and life-changing experience with me, for which I am very grateful. I am very sorry for the pain and suffering these families have endured. I hope they receive the answers they have been waiting so long for.

44:26Thank you for bringing that to us, and your comment that you hope is not ignored in everything else that's going on. Joey Durso, Nicky Campbell's daughter injured in an e-bike hit and run from the Sunday Telegraph. Yeah, so, you know, I hope she's recovering. It sounded pretty menacing. She was hit on a bike in London, but these e-bikes were a real menace, you know, and I think there's two things going on here. There's firstly the companies that kind of hire, you know, you tap them with your card and you cycle them around. But then there's these unregulated ones, just ordinary. You'd buy them in a shop and they have speed restrictions on.

44:54But you can fairly cheaply pay someone to modify them and they can go really, really fast. And I'm sure we've been cut up on the pavement by things that are basically motorbikes and mopeds. And they're really, really dangerous. They're all over the place. And it happens every day. If you're in London, if you're a driver, if you're a pedestrian, if you're on a bike that isn't going at that speed. and it seems to me that the rest of us have to drive at 20 miles an hour and these bikes go much faster than 20 miles an hour. Yeah, I mean, I think it is a problem. It's been great and it's transformed active travel in some ways but it is particularly stressful when you're either in a bicycle lane and you suddenly see something much faster than you, particularly if you're pedalling on your own.

45:33You actually can't stay ahead and save. I think it is something which needs a little bit more regulation. Because I had an idea that the problem on the pavement is the corner of the pavement. it's the fact that you can imagine a cyclist hopping on the pavement some parents like their children to do it on a clear straight pavement because they're not on the dangerous road so there's many arguments about this but at the corner a fast bike doesn't know that i'm walking with my dog at the corner that seems to be one of the main problems here it's not just being on the pavement it's where on the pavement yeah exactly and i think another thing is these food delivery drivers that are completely working on the clock and you have they're trying to do so many orders these incredible financial pressures and these acts so they're just completely incentivized to to cut lights on these dangerous bikes.

46:15We will report more on this. Please let us know your views. This is obviously something we will have to return to. And as Joey said, we hope that Nicky Campbell's daughter is getting very well very quickly. The Observer, Stephen Bush, regrets. We have a few. Yeah, so it's... Yeah, we talk a lot of seven prime ministers in ten years. Well, what happened ten years ago? We voted to leave the European Union. On Tuesday, was it? Yeah, on Tuesday. And since then, we have cycled through many, many prime ministers. And as a result, as the Observer reports, and for other reasons, Most people now think it was the wrong decision to leave and wish it hadn't happened.

46:45But we're not going back in any time soon, the same article says. Yeah, it's much harder to join than it is to leave. The politics of it would have to change quite radically, even though most of us would like to go back in. When you have a Eurosceptic party leading the polls, as we do now, when you have one of the major parties of government still irretrievably opposed to the EU, as the Conservatives are, it's very, very hard to rejoin in those circumstances. But Brexit is a big part of why we have become harder to govern and why we've seen the chaos that is culminating now in Keir Starmer resigning.

47:17Yes. So this is the argument that many people blame Brussels for the problems in our country. And Brussels deserved some blame, but perhaps not all blame. And this is being churned over now. There's a series on Radio 4. There's an article in the papers. Can we have this conversation at home or does everyone get very annoyed? I think the conversation's been had and everyone realises now that it really was a bad idea to leave. And I spoke to a journalist very days after the referendum and he said, oh, no, we wrote those stories because we knew that we got readers and half of them were literally made up.

47:53But there was a big push. We won't relitigate the whole thing. But it's just what you're really reminding me 10 years on is that we don't have an answer to the public. they may regret it, but we're not going back in any time soon. Yeah, I wonder if Switzerland is an interesting place to look at, because obviously the EU's whole thing is, you know, you're in or you're out, you can't have your cake and eat it, which was the few years after the referendum. But Switzerland has increasingly been having all these sort of very complicated bilateral deals with the EU. And I wonder if the sort of Burnham administration could be opting in some things and out of others in a way that wasn't possible in 2017 or whatever.

48:25OK, I'll ask you all to listen to what's been happening on Laura Koonsberg's TV show to end our review, because this is obviously the latest we have on the moving position. Here's the Business Secretary, Peter Kyle, talking to Laura a moment ago. I know it's frustrating for your viewers. I know people want from me certainty, but this is a moment where there is clearly political uncertainty. We as a party have learned the lessons of where the Conservative Party failed time and time again, where there was political uncertainty in their party. They put the chaos onto the country. We are not going to do that.

48:57The conversation I had with Keir, the Prime Minister, on Friday was a thoughtful conversation. He was very mindful of the interests of the country. And in that conversation, he repeatedly said to me and asked my advice on what I believe the country wanted at this moment. Stephen, can you translate? So Peter Karl is the loyalist's loyalist, right? He goes on air, he defends the government. I think the fact that he is giving that to be charitable word salad, what that really tells you is that he knows that the Prime Minister is on his way out. He doesn't want to be the person who twists the knife in public.

49:33And so you have that slightly garbled. Well, we have these conversations and who's to say what they're about kind of rambling. OK, but for the listeners joining us during the review, we are saying we expect a prime ministerial resignation this week. OK, so in the final minute of our review, how are you coping, all of you, with the news cycle? It's been very accelerated. It's very shouty. It's very angry. It's the seventh prime minister in 10 years. There's the tragedies. What is keeping you sane at the moment, Joe Durso? A while ago, I disabled all notifications from news apps, which I think is fantastic.

50:02And I still read lots of news, but I tend to read longer articles, rather than little fragments. And yeah, I highly recommend it. I think that's the best idea I've ever heard. And I'm going to get a hold of my telephone and do that as soon as I get off that. I'll show you how. Thank you. You took up crafting, I seem to remember. I do quite a bit of crafting. at the moment I'm doing a lot of stuff with China and hanging it on walls, that's what I do I put stickers on the back and I hang China all over the place. That's great and Stephen you're obviously in the business how do you remain sane? Classical music, I'm very excited about what I think is the best thing the BBC does which is the proms which is coming around the corner, I spend a lot of time whenever I need to decompress circling the things I hope to go to that season.

50:44Thank you all very much, you've made a perfect link. Today's producers This was Sam McLaren and Lucy Thomas. Studio direction from Antonio Fernandez. The editor was Mary Fuller. One email, it's our public service duty to read to you. Good morning, Paddy. Never mind the solstice. Please remind my daughter Erica that it's Father's Day today. Kind regards, Lawrence Courtney. Goodbye.

51:07How did the United States build the largest soft power empire in the world with the help of some tiny metal objects? I'm Tristan Redmond one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC to mark 250 years of the United States we speak to Roman Mars of 99 % invisible this soft power this influence was an incredible invention for more listen to the Global Story on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts