Political Fix Election special: snap analysis

0:00Jen Williams: Thinking long term about your investment career? Hear stories, advice and lessons from seasoned leaders at Capital Group on the Capital Ideas podcast. Subscribe and start listening today. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc.

0:15Lucy Fisher: Hey guys, it's Mark. The UK Labour Party is dealing with an election hangover and not the good kind. This week's massive defeat raises a lot of questions about the UK political system. Like, what does this mean for the future of Prime Minister Keir Starmer? What's to become of the Conservatives? And does Reform UK's big win signal a permanent shake-up to British two-party politics? It is a lot to take in. Luckily, our friends over at the FT's Political Fix podcast have dug into the details and have an excellent conversation on it. We're going to play that for you now. Enjoy.

0:50Jim Pickard: Hello, it's lunchtime on Friday. Results are still coming in, but Labour have taken a hammering, reform are on the march, the Greens are up, and the Tories have suffered heavy council losses but clinched several wins in London. I'm Lucy Fisher, and this is Political Fix from the Financial Times. Let's get straight to it with our panel. Jim Pickard, who's been up since 4am. Hi, Jim.

1:13Jen Williams: Lucy, how dare you? It was 3am.

1:15Jim Pickard: How dare I minimise your sacrifice of sleep. Stephen Bush, who eclipses you, Jim, he's been up all night, haven't you, Stephen?

1:22Lucy Fisher: I have, yep, so I might start to sundown during the pod. It's halfway through.

1:27Jim Pickard: And down the line from Manchester, it's Jen Williams. Hi, Jen. Did you get much sleep?

1:32Stephen Bush: I worked through for midnight and then I did try and get to sleep. Then the doorbell rang after about an hour. So, yeah, I don't know what that was, but it didn't make me very happy and I'm not very awake.

1:42Jim Pickard: OK, well, you're all slightly showing me up. I feel a bit embarrassed because I had 40 winks and I woke up at 7 a.m. to check in on all the results, dash to the office and get on it. So I wish I could pretend I'm as frazzled and over-caffeinated as I presume you guys are. As I mentioned, vote counts are happening as we speak, but there are some clear themes emerging. Jim, give us a snapshot of where we stand.

2:05Jen Williams: So the theme is pretty much what we've been anticipating for months, but seeing it crystallise in front of our eyes is obviously fascinating. Now, as of lunchtime on Friday, reform is over 400 seats up, Conservatives around 200 down, Labour down somewhere over 250. And the Greens have got modest gains, but then the Greens are still waiting for the inner city London seats to come through. And the Lib Dems have had a sort of OK-ish performance. But what this basically is, it is the reality on the ground and local government catching up with opinion polls, which have been telling us for over a year that reform is relatively much more popular than the other political parties.

2:45Jen Williams: and therefore it's come from almost nowhere. Remember, Nigel Farage only set the party up five years ago. It's coming from nowhere. It's going to end the week, I suspect, a couple of thousand seats up. Now, the only glimmer of hopes for the Labour Party, and of course attention is already turning to what is the mood in the parliamentary Labour Party? Are they going to try and depose Sir Keir Starmer? Have they got the foggiest idea inside number 10 and outside number 10 where they should be going? The two glimmers of hope they've got is that, firstly, the expectation management on this from academia was quite positive from Labour's perspective, because you had very respected political professors saying that the Labour Party could lose 1 ,800, 1 ,900 seats.

3:28Jen Williams: And now, as the results are coming through, they're suggesting that it might be closer to 1 ,200, 1 ,300. We obviously don't know. And then the second glimmer of hope is that if the result lands in that area, it would be very similar to 1999. We're going to hear that 1999 repeated over and over, which is when Tony Blair, two years into his first premiership, lost 1 ,100 seats and then went on to win the 2001 general election.

3:54Jim Pickard: Jen, let's come to you. Not all council seats in England have been up for election, but huge swathes of the North and Midlands we've seen turn from red to turquoise. turquoise? Give us the lowdown of the key results so far.

4:07Stephen Bush: Well, I think one thing that makes a little bit more complicated to hear through the noise of these election results is that so many of these councils are elected on thirds, which means that only a third of councillors are up for election in any given year. And that then means that although you can see the direction of travel, it doesn't necessarily result immediately in, you know, a Labour administration losing its majority because that might take two or three rounds of elections for that to happen. But you can absolutely see the direction of travel in some of the, particularly the sort of former Red Wall type councils in the North and Midlands.

4:42Stephen Bush: So in Wigan, for example, which is significant for a few reasons for Labour, it's got kind of deep, longstanding emotional connections to the party, anti-trade unionism. Andy Burnham's seat of Lee is in Wigan. Lisa Nandy's seat is Wigan. so it's a chunk of the borough, all of the councillors that Labour were fielding this time lost to reform. And that had not been unanticipated, but it was the worst case scenario. And I think Labour had hoped that they might be able to defend a few of those seats, and they just hadn't been able to do so. Elsewhere in Greater Manchester, again, obviously Andy Burnham's current backyard as mayor, you saw a similar theme happening in Tameside.

5:25Stephen Bush: and again Tameside's significant, Chief Whip Jonathan Reynolds's constituency is there, Andrew Lorraine's constituency is there, it's part of the Gorton Denton constituency where there was obviously a by-election in February. So that has a degree of a kind of national significance for the Labour Party as well but actually in both cases they seem to be part of a kind of broader trend, Salford, most of the Labour seats lost, mostly to reform etc etc and And then also over on Merseyside too, and this kind of, I'm sure we'll get to the Andy Burnham story and where he ends up standing, but you can see a similar pattern in Holton and Merseyside.

6:03Stephen Bush: And today, St. Helens, which is one of the specific places that has been tipped as a potential seat for Andy Burnham to stand in if he wants to go back to Westminster. That's unusual and that has an all out election this time as a one off. So that means that all the councillors are up, which means that it could flip entirely from Labour to reform. So although not all of these councils are going to change hands overnight, you can very much see which direction things are going in. And I think the other thing, just to add on some of the results here that haven't yet come through, we haven't seen the northern cities yet.

6:37Stephen Bush: And in northern cities like Manchester and Leeds, Labour are defending seats both from reform and from the Greens. The early signs from Salford, which has seats right on the border of Manchester City Centre last night, it was the Greens are getting purchase in those sort of urban professional wards. So here it couldn't so far have been an awful lot worse.

6:59Jim Pickard: Stephen, so far Labour's losing about 70 % of its seats. Governments almost always do badly in midterms. But is this worse than expected? How bad should we read it given that Jim pointed out it's falling short of some of the worst predictions from analysts?

7:13Lucy Fisher: It is falling short of some of the worst predictions, But it is worth noting that although numerically it looks like the Labour Party will end up with being able to go, oh, look, if you look at the numbers we lost in 99 and the numbers we've lost now, they're about the same. In 1999, they were defending a much larger number of seats, right? So in percentage terms, this is an apocalyptically bad set of results thus far. I really cannot overstate enough that this is at the upper end of what we're doing. This is a record-breakingly bad election, unless everywhere from here stays red. We are talking worse than Margaret Thatcher in 1981, which is the current, that is the floor standard to beat.

7:56Lucy Fisher: That is the worst performance by a government that went on to be re-elected. So this is far worse than your usual off-year blues for the Labour Party.

8:04Jen Williams: I think it isn't the figure that Labour's currently losing about 70 % of the seats that they held, whereas I think in 1999, that figure of 1 ,100 was only about 23%. Yeah, exactly.

8:13Lucy Fisher: It's a much smaller number. Now, if I were a Labour spinner looking for something that was both positive to say, but grounded in some truth, the interesting thing is thus far, that is a better performance than what they have done in individual council by-elections, right? which if your argument is look in local elections people know that they can kick the boss particularly in large chunks of the north whereas jen says they elect in third so it does not matter at all right your labor council's not going to change at all that one of the things they tried to do in lots of their leaflets across greater manchester was do a kind of like hey remember to keep have andy on the front page basically like re-elect re-elect re-elect this guy because the combined authority means and the local authorities really do matter.

8:59Lucy Fisher: It does appear thus far, with the important disclaimer that most of the London councils haven't declared yet, that in London, which are all up and where therefore it's not just an expressive vote, you are actually going to change your council. Labour have done a better job holding off the Greens and the Conservatives have done a better job holding off reform than they both have in places which are demographically similar, but are not all up. So I guess what you could say is this does show that people are less likely to abandon one of the big two parties when it's an actual question of who runs something, which of course will be the thing that Labour will tell itself.

9:35Lucy Fisher: And it will be different in 29 because that will be about who runs the country rather than kicking Keir Starmer.

9:41Jim Pickard: But Jim, we've heard Nigel Farage come out, call this a historic election. That's fair for reform, isn't it? It does feel like this is the death knell for the two-party system and that a fragmented multi-party landscape is now here to stay in England. And of course, that's something we've already seen take place north of the border and to some extent in Wales too.

10:02Jen Williams: Yeah, I think Nigel Farage has every right to sound and feel triumphalist right now, because who wouldn't be impressed by a party that's gone from basically nothing to being ahead in the polls, taking a couple of thousand council seats. We haven't got the Welsh results yet, but they'll probably become first or second in Wales. They're probably going to displace Labour in Scotland. Let's not forget those votes are happening as well. And so, of course, he has every right to be feeling extremely happy. The big but, as Stephen alluded to earlier, is that people vote differently in local elections to how they vote in national elections.

10:37Jen Williams: And the fracturing of the old duopoly, the Labour and Conservatives is definitely something we can see happening right in front of our eyes. But we've also seen the reform was polling at 31 % last September. They're now polling at, I think, 26 % if you look at the aggregate of all the polls. Now, that happens to be enough right now to basically win with a pretty clear sweep when the other parties are even more unpopular than you. But if the party can lose six percentage points in half a year, the polls can keep moving and people's intentions and how they vote can keep moving.

11:10Jim Pickard: Jen, I noticed blogging through the night, you were ahead of the pack in noticing that turnout appears to be up. Is that a phenomenon that's been borne out? And what's that all about? We hear a lot about anything but reform brigade and it potentially galvanising progressive liberal voters to come out. Is that what's happened here if turnout really is up?

11:32Stephen Bush: Well, I think the trend was sufficiently pronounced that late afternoon I was getting messages from people out campaigning and following this in councils of different parts of the country saying turnout is definitely up. So it was something that was kind of clocked relatively early doors. And for Labour in many places, I think that then led to further jitters, because what reform have proved very good at doing previously is turnout voters who don't habitually vote, people who may be sat on their hands in 2024, in some cases haven't voted since the EU referendum. And there is some suggestion that is partly what was going on here, but it's a little bit early until you know how that played out in different places.

12:15Stephen Bush: to actually know what turnout was driving what in what location. But certainly Professor John Curtis was saying last night that there was every reason to think, certainly in some places, as a result of that knack that reform have got to get non-voters to turn out to vote for them, that should be good for them. But that's not to say that in places with different make-ups that it couldn't benefit the Greens, for example, or that there may be in some places a sort of stop reform vote. going on as well. There were definitely kind of differing views, I think, among experts overnight as to exactly what it is that's going on.

12:51Jim Pickard: Stephen, let's talk about the Tories now. They've had a bad night overall, suffered heavy losses in councillor terms. They've lost more than 170 seats at the time of recording. But there's been a silver lining for Kemi-Baden-Ock's party in London. They've won back Westminster, which they lost in this shock defeat to Labour at the last round of these elections. They've also become the biggest group again on Wandsworth, although it's no overall control. What do you make of their performance overall?

13:18Lucy Fisher: I mean, their performance is also pretty disastrous, right? They have some results in London that the party can talk about to make itself feel better. But one we should be very clear, in Wandsworth in particular, that really was a coin toss between the Conservatives and Labour. Neither of them did well. They both dropped votes on last time. Labour dropped a little bit more. But again, really, we are talking about tiny margins. It's nothing to write home about. And I would say the broader problem for the Conservatives is essentially, thus far, the places they are doing very well in are places where you have high affluence, but also fairly high ethnic and cultural diversity.

13:56Lucy Fisher: And we expect that to continue, right? We expect them to continue to hold on to Harrow, where there's a large Hindu population. I would be very surprised if they did not take control of Barnet, which has a large British Jewish population. and they will, of course, hold on to Kensington, which has a very cosmopolitan European and also various British ethnic minorities there. Now, the thing is, is there are very few seats in the United Kingdom which are both high affluence, high ethnic diversity, and the Liberal Democrats are not a factor in, right? So essentially, the conservative line on this is, hey, look, guys, if you look at the most eccentric seats in British politics, we're on our way.

14:34Lucy Fisher: But if you look at the traditional backbone an awful Conservative Party, they're in real, real trouble.

14:40Jen Williams: I think it's also worth pointing out that Wandsworth was under Conservative control from 1974 through to, I think, 2022. And therefore, to claw back a no overall control where you're the biggest party by one councillor is not really the sort of successful gaining ground that Kemi Baden-Ock would like to be seeing right now.

14:59Jim Pickard: So, Jim, can I ask you, why aren't we hearing more questions about Kemi Baden-Ock's future? because this time last year, shadow cabinet members, Tory MPs were saying, look, she's got another year to turn things around, but if we're not starting to properly rebuild and make gains, her leadership could be on the line. And I should also add, quite striking the way she's presented the results this morning, isn't it? Talking about signs of conservative renewal and glossing quite quickly over those heavy councillor losses.

15:28Jen Williams: I don't think it's really in Kemi Badenowicz's nature to be overthinking her own weaknesses, deliberating where she might have gone wrong here or there. I don't think that's really in her makeup. I think what I would say is that when conservative people in gray suits who have done a lot of plotting in the past look at Kimi Baden-Hog, they're totally aware that their party is doing really badly, but they are also aware that they are possibly less popular than Kimi Baden-Hog. She is outperforming her own party in the polls. Conservatives are really unpopular when you look at the polling. Kenneth Badenock, actually one of the more popular political leaders, at least in terms of net polling.

16:05Jen Williams: But I think the main factor we're seeing here is that usually the Conservative Party is quite regicidal. They went through killing off leaders quite a lot in the last five years. It didn't go very well. And right now, their own travails, their own weakness and the shedding of hundreds of seats is not on the same scale as the Labour Party. They are being eclipsed in their uselessness. And that means that all the pressure is on Stammer and not on Badenock.

16:29Jim Pickard: I think we should also say that Badenock has done a good job with the donors shoring up support there and the party managed to fundraise pretty successfully in the past year, which I think has boosted morale a bit as well. Jen, is it too early to talk about the Greens? Some early signals that they might have been slightly underwhelming compared with expectations?

16:49Stephen Bush: I think a lot of the psychologically important results he had to come through today, Certainly up here in the cities where, as in London, they are trying to take Labour's vote in middle class areas, in Muslim areas, in young professional areas, just from younger areas in general. Those results are really going to start to serve history today. And, you know, I mentioned Manchester earlier on where what has traditionally been an extremely effective party machine is fighting on both fronts. there were signs last night in some of those Salford wards that the Greens have made progress and that was one of the immediate concerns that came out of the Gorton and Denton by-election result was that councils in this neck of the woods in the sort of urban councils in that kind of general vicinity looked at the result there and thought there could be implications here for us Sheffield worth watching today, Leeds worth watching for similar reasons so I think the green picture will probably crystallise later on Friday.

17:51Jim Pickard: Stephen, I don't want to talk too much about things we'll know more about later, but it looks like the Scottish and Welsh parliaments could end up with coalitions, but clearly Nationalist Party is going to do well there. Not a good night for unionists, is it?

18:04Lucy Fisher: Yeah, no, I mean, it's not. I mean, so obviously the important caveat is in Wales, Plyth Gymru are running on a platform of more powers for the parliament. To be honest, the other parties have talked more about the constitution than they have, because in lots of the polls, Plaid Cymru are more popular than the idea of Welsh independence. And it's very hard to say because the other parties, other than reform and Plaid Cymru, are so close together under their new electoral system. You could have a situation where the only viable alternative is some kind of Plaid Cymru Labour coalition arrangement, similar to the One Wales deal from 2007 to 2011, but with the parties reversed.

18:39Lucy Fisher: You could end up in a situation where the Labour Party vanishes from the Senate because of how the new system was. Similarly, you have a situation where the Conservatives vanish from the Senate, and all of that will change the mood music quite significantly. But yeah, I mean, I think the big defeat for unionism in these elections are the SNP have been in power for 19 years. Their policy record is not much to write over. They've been mired in scandal. They changed leaders three times, just as the Conservatives did in the last Parliament. and unlike the Conservatives who were sharply repudiated, they will almost certainly be re-elected for another term.

19:16Lucy Fisher: Yeah, they'll probably have to get support from the Greens to pass things, but that is a huge defeat for unionism in what ought to have been a golden opportunity for some kind of Scottish Labour revival.

19:28Jen Williams: And I think one of the subplots which is going to be lost in the tsunami of news over a couple of days is that the Conservatives in the Welsh Shanneth in the last parliament there had 13 out of 60 seats. They were actually level pegging with Plaid Cymru, who only had 13 seats. And yet we're going to see Plaid more than double their presence and the Conservatives almost vaporised, which is fascinating.

19:51Jim Pickard: Whichever word on the Lib Dems and Ned Davey too. Is he in trouble at all?

19:56Lucy Fisher: So there has been for a long time rumbling in the Liberal Democrat Party among the MPs this feeling of, oh, you know, He hasn't adjusted to life where he has to manage a team of 72, not of 12, and where most of the 12 were his immediate neighbours in the West London area. And we're not getting the cut through we should. We're not using the team well enough. Now, it looks like they've had some exceptionally good results, including in Sutton, where if you were to pick somewhere where something might have gone wrong, it's a very Levy out of London borough where reform might have expected to emerge as a stronger challenger to them.

20:32Lucy Fisher: but they have not they've lost their majority in hull where they're still the largest party but they'll probably have to do some kind of deal with labor i think those grumblings and rumblings in the liberal democrats are going to continue i don't think we're yet at the stage of we need a change some of the most recent changes have made the parliamentary party feel a bit more included but i think that feeling of why are we getting so little attention for our 72 why aren't we making the running and also like broadly speaking we have very normal european style politics now right like far right party far left party struggling center right party struggling center left party what we don't have which lots of other places have is a resurgent center party and that question being asked by some liberal democrats look why isn't that us and that i think question is going to get louder and louder throughout this parliament now yes there has been plotting by

21:22Jen Williams: lipped them MPs against Sir Ed Davey. We had relayed some supposedly secret chats at a specific pub in Westminster only a few weeks ago, and we saved the blushes of those particular MPs planning to oust their leader. But I think the case that Sir Ed Davey's got is that in a world where centrism is no longer cool, if it ever was cool, and in fact, the electorate are moving further to the left and further to the right, and the idea of a sort of technocratic, centrist government is massively out of favour. The Lib Dems are a very centrist party and therefore to have increased their local government presence eight years in a row is actually going against the trend.

22:01Jen Williams: So I think the idea that there are Lib Dems who think that under a different leader they could somehow totally reinvent themselves and suddenly make the British electorate go centrist, it does feel a bit wishful thinking to me at this present moment.

22:13Lucy Fisher: It is also worth pointing out to also undercut myself and make a further pro-Lib Dem point here, which is that They have done a remarkably good job in the seats thus far of digging in the places where they already have an MP. Oh, Richmond, right? Yeah, Richmond, where they have 54 out of 54.

22:28Jim Pickard: Richmond, London, we should say. Richmond upon 10%.

22:32Lucy Fisher: And the Greens lost five. Sutton, where, again, you would really, if you're picking a place where the Lib Dems might get anxious, where they have an MP about reform, those would be the two most vulnerable seats, would be the Sutton seat in the Carl Shulton and Wellington one. they have really done in the places they've won, which, I mean, this is, to return to my, the Conservative Party is wildly complacent about this election, right? If the Lib Dems don't collapse, there is not a path to a Conservative majority. Like, it just ain't going to happen. And then they've done the, I remember one now former Conservative MP who talked about the problem with Lib Dems is they like Japanese knotweed.

23:08Lucy Fisher: Unless you rip them out of the root when they get one ward, they take over the whole garden. Don't they describe themselves as cockroaches and surviving nuclear wars? And they have taken over the whole garden in quite large numbers of the seats that they won in 2024. That is a positive result for them in terms of holding on to their 70, because they can hold on to those and then nick a couple of the places where they're second. Well, then we're in hung parliament territory, and then they can get to what they see as their holy grail, both in electoral and moral terms, which is to change our electoral system.

23:42Jim Pickard: Well we've had a look at all the parties of course we should focus on what all this means for Starmer and his future that's one of the key questions about the consequence of the elections this week Jen, where do we stand with Andy Burnham? Quite striking that he cancelled a long planned speech for Friday on top of that we've had Lord David Watts not a household name but an important machine man a former chair of the parliamentary Labour Party come out and say on Friday that Andy Burnham should return to Parliament and make a challenge to Starmer?

24:15Stephen Bush: Yeah, I think the speech that he was supposed to be giving Friday morning and that cancellation might be more cock-up than conspiracy, to be honest. Never underestimate the kind of background vibes of chaos around what is not really a particularly big machine, if you can even call it machine, right? So, I mean, I don't know. Maybe there was something more complicated going on there, but I don't get the impression that there was. My sense is actually that the Berlin plan has been to largely keep his head down over this weekend. And clearly there may then be outriders like Dave Watts who are going to go out and say like, oh, it's terrible, isn't it?

24:50Stephen Bush: And he needs to go back to Parliament. So fundamentally, he needs a bit of space in order to set out or clear or organise his path back to Westminster in order to do this. And I thought it was interesting that John McDonnell actually came out and said, Keir Starmer should be allowed to stay on for a bit. It shouldn't go straight away because that would plunge us into chaos. And of course, that appears to be the thinking in terms of how would we secure a return for Andy Burnham. We need to make sure that we buy ourselves enough time to ensure that he can get back. So there's that aspect of it. I mean, one note of caution that I would sound that seems to quite often be overlooked is just the sheer animosity that Keir Starmer has towards Andy Burnham.

25:31Stephen Bush: I know it sounds obvious. I think I've said it on the podcast before, but I think it goes beyond political rivalry. If you're a prime minister who, A, doesn't want to fall on his sword, B, is trying to avoid falling on his sword, C, is maybe thinking maybe I actually am going to have to. The one thing you're really not going to want to do is do it in such a fashion as to allow your biggest enemy in politics to come back and take your place, especially having already tried once to stop him. So I'm interested in the coming days to understand what exactly Number 10's idea of trying to ensure that mechanism is not there for him looks like.

26:16Stephen Bush: But I guess ultimately it will depend on the strength of feeling within the parliamentary Labour Party. and I think that is what we're waiting through Friday into Saturday to get a sense of and whether or not there are more people like Dave Watts and whether bigger figures more household names than Dave Watts and also the sheer numbers of people who turn around and say enough's enough we need Attene Burnham.

26:38Jim Pickard: That's right isn't it Jim I mean there are many moving parts and Downing Street's got to be alive to Feld Council leaders and prominent figures from local government calling for his resignation. So far, we've had Darren Hale, the leader of the Labour group on Hull, who lost his seat, saying that Starmer needs to go. Beyond that, there's obviously the Cabinet, there are other Labour MPs, and the trade unions, who reports suggest are having a key call at 5pm today to discuss what happens. It seems to me so far, we've had people who've already been critical of Starmer and called for his head, using this moment to reiterate that.

27:15Jim Pickard: the Hartlepool MP, Jonathan Brash. Hartlepool has just fallen from Labour to reform, so perhaps unsurprising he's spoken out. The General Secretary of the TSSA Transport Union, Mariam Eslam-Doust, has also repeated her call. What's your sense of whether the pressure is going to bubble up today or whether it might be the weekend, next week or further down the line this year, if at all?

27:38Jen Williams: I think there's been a sense of despondency within the PLP and across the Labour Party for quite some time, but there's never been a common agreement about what the solution for the party's plight is. Now, we've been talking about individuals, we've been talking about Burnham, we've not been talking about policy. And there's a policy question there, which is, should the Labour Party stop trying to chase defectors to reform? And should it start worrying about defectors to the Green Party instead? Now, the problem with the results as they've come in overnight is that they don't show a clear trend of Labour losing voters to one party or another.

28:14Jen Williams: There was very interesting data I saw from More in Common suggesting that basically the vote is scattering to the four winds, which makes it so much harder for the Labour Party to search inside its soul and say, should we be more left-wing? Should we be chasing more blue-collar northern white voters or not? So they're in a bit of a pickle that they don't really know which direction to go in. And therefore they ask the question of, well, maybe Keir Starmer isn't getting it wrong in policy terms. but we just need someone with more charisma. And they think, well, Angela Rayner has more charisma, but there are issues with her as well, such as she seems to be very unpopular with a lot of the public.

28:48Jen Williams: Do we go back to Ed Miliband? There are issues with that, i.e. he's already lost the general election. Do we go for Wes Streeting, the health secretary? Well, the Labour membership don't particularly like him, or at least they think he's a little bit too Blairite. And then the question comes back to Burnham. He's popular in Manchester. He has a doe-eyed look that some people seem to like. But then the one thing I think Jen didn't mention, unless I missed it, is that he has problems of his own, which is how does he get a seat? Firstly, can he be blocked by the National Executive Committee again, who blocks him standing in Gorton?

29:20Jen Williams: Secondly, can he win a seat? Where is this fantastical constituency somewhere in Britain where a very popular former cabinet minister, Andy Burnham, is popular enough at a time when Labour's really unpopular? It doesn't seem to be in Greater Manchester. it doesn't necessarily seem to be in London either and so the path back even for Burnham is fraught with problems as well I think one of the things that the unions will be like to discuss on Friday is will they somehow engineer it for Burnham to come back but that is only part of a much wider mechanical series of complicated overlapping issues and problems I think the

29:56Stephen Bush: you know in terms of a seat I think yeah the intention seems to be or have been a seat in Merseyside. If you look at the results in Merseyside, I mean, the place to kind of point to is Halton, which is like Wigan. All the Labour councillors lost their seats to reform. The key one today there will be St. Helens, which is the one that gets talked about a lot as a potential Andy Byrne in by-election seat. That very much has the ability to flip overnight from Labour to reform. And I know people who are very sympathetic towards Andy, who have said to me, like, he would be absolutely mad to go in St Helens.

30:34Stephen Bush: And that was before these results started to come through overnight. Stephen, last thought on this to you.

30:41Lucy Fisher: Yeah, I mean, I think, as Jen set out in a very good piece for the Inside Politics newsletter, Andy doesn't have a machine behind him. He's not someone who's ever been into the sort of fixing side of the Labour Party. And because it's now so uncertain that he would win a by-election, his path back does sort of rely on some people going, oh, I'm going to immolate myself both with Keir Starmer and with any other possible leadership contender, because ultimately Andy is the physical embodiment of none of the other leadership contenders will do. And then what happens if having done this, having burned a huge amount of capital for Andy Burnham, what if he then loses in St.

31:15Lucy Fisher: Helens, loses in any of the other places he could go, then I've burnt myself up for nothing. And I just think one of the real problems is that Andy does still have an uncertain route back.

31:25Jen Williams: And then some of them are also thinking, what if we go through all of that and he becomes the leader and it turns out to not be that great.

31:31Jim Pickard: Well, we'll be back on Monday to do some more analysis of the entire results and focus much more on Scotland and Wales and to answer all your questions. And we've had some great ones come in. So do email us at politicalfix at ft.com if you've got a burning question you want us to put to the panel on Monday. For now, we've just got time left for stock picks. Stephen, Who are you buying or selling this week?

31:56Lucy Fisher: I'm going to sell Angela Rayner because I think it's very striking. We haven't talked about her at all when talking about the Labour leadership. And I suspect the reason for that isn't we've all had very similar conversations with different Labour MPs, which is they go, I had a terrible time on the doorstep. Everyone hates Keir. But the combination of the tax affairs, even if they're settled, I think loads of Labour MPs are concerned that they would still kind of hang around her neck. And I think the very fact that you have a bunch of people going, oh, maybe we can have some kind of like weird sort of Rube Goldberg machine to get Andy Burnham back shows how much the soft left has doubts about Angela Rayner's electoral appeal.

32:38Lucy Fisher: Whether they're right or wrong is entirely irrelevant. It's their opinion that matters. And I think that is a real reason to suspect that her leadership hopes, at least in the short term, I think Labour would have to get much more desperate than they currently are to go, let's risk it with Ange.

32:53Jim Pickard: Jim, how about you?

32:54Jen Williams: So I'm going to sell an industry. I'm going to sell the opinion pollster industry, not because I don't think they're lovely, intelligent people. I think their job is getting harder and harder as we move from a duopoly of two parties towards a multiplicity of potential outcomes. And I'm obsessed by the fact that two weeks out from the 2024 general election, the pollsters were giving Labour a 20-point lead, which on the day turned out to be 10 points. Now, if they turn out to be 10 points wrong on reform in terms of general election voting, can you imagine how wild the result potentially could be?

33:31Jen Williams: I'm not saying that's likely, but I'm just saying so much uncertainty is baked into all of this. And if you have reform, Greens, Labour conservatives, all a few points away from each other, they're going to have such a nightmare predicting the next election.

33:47Stephen Bush: Jen, who are you buying or selling? Well, I'm afraid this is a little bit of a cop-out, but I'm going to hold Manchesterism, which is Andy Burnham's professed vision, I guess, and blueprint for government, which is, if you're an Andy Burnham fan, it is essentially this kind of business-friendly socialism idea that has come out of his time being mayor here. If you're more of a sceptic, it's a sort of retrofitting of something that had already happened before that actually isn't particularly left-wing and doesn't necessarily tell you all that much about what he would do in government. I think it's fair to say, and I think probably he knows, that actually that hasn't really been fleshed out in an awful lot of detail.

34:23Stephen Bush: And a lot of the legwork on that has in practice been done by civil servants when he has gone and made speeches in his capacity as mayor talking about Manchester and Greater Manchester. and so those speeches have then doubled up as a bit of a nod and a wink to certainly to the soft left of the Labour Party. I think that needs to be fleshed out and at the moment I'm not entirely convinced what that means as a platform for government. So yeah it is a cop-out but maybe in future weeks I can take a slightly a slightly whiskier decision on it.

34:56Jen Williams: Lucy who are you buying or selling?

34:58Jim Pickard: I'm selling Rupert Lowe, the ex-reform MP who set up Restore Britain, the hardline nativist far-right party in February this year, because despite that move, turning what was a pressure group into a formal party, they've only been able to stand a handful of affiliated candidates in Great Yarmouth and Sheffield. And I was talking to one analyst earlier this week who said, having announced they're here, not being able to advance beyond that suggests there may limited bandwidth for them. And I should, if I'm allowed to plug a piece that my excellent colleague Anna Gross and I have worked on this week about Restore, if you're interested in the extreme positions they hold, we've filleted them so you don't have to go through all the things they've said on X.

35:42Jim Pickard: Still remains to be seen whether they could end up dragging reform to the right or, conversely, helping Nigel Farage present his party as a moderate alternative to this far right. But And Rupert Lowe, I think, despite having the endorsement of Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson, so far hasn't been able to cut through in a mainstream way. Well, that's all we've got time for. Stephen, Jen, Jim, thanks for joining.

36:07Lucy Fisher: Thanks, Lucy. Thanks, Lucy.

36:08Jim Pickard: Thanks, Lucy. Thank you for listening. Remember to send us your questions for our Q &A special on Monday, the 11th of May. George, Robert and Miranda will be here and we'll do our best to answer them. Our email address is politicalfix at ft.com. There are links to subjects discussed in this episode in the show notes. Do check them out. They're articles we've made free for Political Fix listeners. There's also a link there to Stephen's award-winning Inside Politics newsletter. You'll get 30 days free. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Claire Williamson. Manuela Zaragoza is the executive producer.

36:46Jim Pickard: Original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. The broadcast engineers are Andrew Georgiades and Petros Jumpasis. Cheryl Brumley is the FT's Global Head of Audio. See you on Monday.

37:18Lucy Fisher: They don't just run, they evolve. Continuously, intelligently, at scale. Because true advantage isn't experimenting with AI, it's making it real. PwC Managed Services. We evolve your operations from day one, so you can turn pilots into performance. Capital raising is being redefined in real time, from macro disruptions and shifting investor expectations, to AI-driven demand and the rise of private credit. When headlines can tilt markets overnight, how can companies stay on course? Strategic Alternatives, the RBC Capital Markets podcast, explores how corporates and investors are navigating new pathways to raise capital, create value, and drive growth.

38:01Lucy Fisher: When conditions change, alternatives matter. Listen to Strategic Alternatives, available wherever you get your podcasts.