Patrick Maguire & Gabriel Pogrund | Inside Keir Starmer’s Rise

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0:57Welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Today I'm joined by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund of the Times. They have just written the book on Keir Starmer and how he turned the Labour Party from its worst electoral defeat into one of its biggest ever victories last year. It's a fascinating read how the party turned itself around, all the different processes that they went through to do that, and how they use business as a core component of that. reaching out to business was seen as one of the key prioritised to kind of detoxify the labour brand. They talk in the book about how Ed Miliband was initially moved from the shadow business secretary and it's a really interesting read on lots of different levels and as I was sitting there thinking a lot about how the Conservative Party probably needs to read the book to understand how to kind of reform itself in the new era of politics.

1:53And we also talk a little bit to Patrick and Gabe about their jobs at the Times and where they see the future of Labour going and why they've had such a rocky start to their first couple of hundred days in power. So, on to today's episode.

2:13Patrick, Gabe, welcome to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Congratulations on a great book, Get In. Where did the name come from? we were in the offices of our publisher penguin about 14 15 months ago now late 2023 and we wrote a book about the corbyn project and its decline of full left out and we wanted it to be not necessarily implying that they were a sequel you know it's not left out to electric boogaloo but something that had the same feeling to it and we did suggest writing because this is about the right of the Labour Party taking back control. But we were told that no normal person is going to understand that distinction.

2:54And because of Keir Starmer's love of football, because of the imperative to get into government above all else, we sort of settled on that. And also, the cartoon is brilliant at the front. What does it sort of, like, resemble? What's the kind of, like, logic behind it? I think one of the question marks which hovers over the theme is, who is Keir Starmer? and there are many faces to him there are many iterations of starmer and starmerism but i think that this sort of is an attempt to capture both the unknowability of the man but also the extent to which at times it has been part of the project to present one version of the leader to the membership even if the political direction was always going to head in a different direction thereafter perhaps the public needed to be told a certain thing even if it was known that the letter of economic policy would head in a sort of contrary direction as well so um it's an attempt to capture some of the essence of his for our last book we had a bit of a crash bang wallet lots of sound clouds and smoke and el gato corbyn's cat on the cover but this is an attempt to be a little bit more sober and serious as well and what is starmism because you two probably know him better than almost anyone else, given the detail in the book and the amount you've done on it.

4:20So yeah, what is Starmerism? Great question, and it's one Keir Starmer himself in the book, very early on, responds to the accusation that Starmerism might exist by telling Jeremy Corbyn's negotiating team just after he suspended him, there's no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be. I have no ideology at all. He was very resistant to this idea that he was defining himself on the left or the right of the Labour Party. Ed Miliband has said before, you know, there is no ism and he's nobody's ite. So it's a really interesting question. I mean, over the course of the book, this question does recur, i.e.

4:57what's it all for? Even Morgan McSweeney, who I'm sure will get on to, the most influential aide in this story, defines himself and Starmer by what they are against, not necessarily what they are for. And the closest we come, I think, to a distinct Starmerism that comes from Keir Starmer himself is in a chapter towards the end called Why Us, which is about the five missions for government Labour once talked about. I think they talk about milestones or priorities or foundations or something else now, or another abstract noun. And it was all about Keir Starmer being 30 points ahead in the polls with nobody knowing what he stood for as late as 2023.

5:40and there was this long period where thoughtful Blairites like Peter Hyman were parachuted into the leader's office and they were all thinking, how can we make this project authentically clear? And they settled on these five missions that were all about ignoring the media, which is very Starmer, and fixing Britain for the long term and not necessarily being passed down about it. And the clearest distillation of how he thinks about politics, how he approaches it, is not from that ideological standpoint. point it's not thinking well blair would have done this and brown would have done this and attley would have done this this is what i do it's peter hyman who told us look kia is an experiential politician by which he meant he finds it really difficult to get animated about things in the abstract which is basically all the labor party does all the time uh and what instead you know the angriest he gets the most animated he gets is if he sees something for himself you know he went to old day hospital in Liverpool the children's hospital and saw kids under general anaesthetic because their teeth had rotted and they couldn't get a dental appointment and he came back to Westminster and said we need to sort this out that's how we get that you know that's got to be the core of our policy offer so that's sort of you know it's a sort of a man who's learning on on the job in real time and it's all about questions of competence and what works which means it's quite hard to categorise because it's syncretic, it changes and so the only thing that makes it hang together is almost that old Herbert Morrison quote socialism is what a Labour government does but that means it's quite hard to put it in one box or another.

7:23One of the interesting things speaking to senior people in Westminster they said the thing you've got to understand about Keir Starmer is that he never expected to be Prime Minister and I said not if you've read the get in book right it's like but it's very different actually because there is this perception he goes into politics much later he goes into it for public service and so on but actually you make the case in the book that he set out very much to be prime minister that's quite right I mean um we definitely depict this long-standing yearning to be prime minister to be in the top job um the only constant in the course of starmer's political career and the slightly chronologically longer tale of starmer contemplating a political career is his desire to get to the apex we chronicle the fact that in 2006 he trooped into gordon brown's treasury went to the canteen spoke to jonathan ashworth who was the then chancellor's emissary and they were contemplating whether Gordon Brown might be able to avail himself of Starmer's services as he assembled a government of all the talents and Ashworth asked what is it that you wish to do and Starmer sort of fumbled about for an answer and contrived something along the lines of I'm quite interested in environmental law but yeah as we noted he does find it difficult to put fine point on the why but the desire to be there to ascend to the very top it borne out again and again over the years in 20 i think it must be around 2014 ed milliband was contemplating whether starmer might wish to serve as a peer and the message that came back from those who knew starmer well was don't even bother because starmer would never care would never go into the upper chamber is only the commons for him.

9:21Keir wants to be Prime Minister. And perhaps most striking is what happens shortly after he gets into Parliament. Because I actually remember, I think the Sunday Times News Review did a pretty textured interview with him talking about, you know, he's quite an unusual guy. A lot of people in Labour politics are completely conversant in the factional identity and all the nuances, social nuances ideological nuances of labor politics here's a guy who's run the cps who's had a career of his own might he be you know king over the water future leader this was um just after he'd been selected as a candidate and hoping inst pancras but you sort of assume uh that though that's written about you or though that was written about starman there's no way that he was actually thinking about the leadership in explicit terms as early as then yeah but he was His first parliamentary staffer, Chris Ward, helped Starmer prepare for Prime Minister's questions and schooled him on how to respond to a budget as early as his first year in the Commons, which, you know, there are all these people in the book that accused Starmer of not being sufficiently political.

10:33well yeah he's the guy who you know literally within weeks of arriving in sw1 was thinking how do i upskill how do i improve myself so that when the time come when i'm at the dispatch box leading the labour party i can make a decent fist of it hence his voice coach by the way yeah the big stories from this book that we accidentally happened across um you know it's as that desire to upskill and self-improve and recognize one's weaknesses you know i'd imagine he'd be a fun person to line manage because he'd always be one of his kpis yeah by the way we're just we must we have said this before but um we were engaging the fair amount of ritual uh self flagellation our best story had nothing to do with us yeah so tell us about this because some of our listeners might not like be aware of it but you've basically inadvertently broken quite a big story which has given Conservative campaign headquarters something to do for two weeks.

11:28It has. Well, you know, I know your listeners have their eyes trained on much bigger, much bigger structural forces than, you know, the weeks they peaked in Trostle of Life in Westminster. But yeah, we reported that he had, that Starmer had retained the services of a voice coach, a woman called Leonie Mellinger, a Shakespearean actress. And she was in and out of his parliamentary office and part of his campaign team from about 2019 until 2022 or three and my editor at the Sunday Times suggested we contact her after he read the book we'd only dedicated a single line to their relationship but in his great wisdom he said well I mean how on earth have you not gotten gotten her on the record I mean what do you want to what a fascinating also quite an intimate story because to have the vulnerability to say to somebody my voice or my personality doesn't enable me to connect emotionally i can't speak i freeze in front of crowds i can't address crowds you know i'm so wooden help me basically and she did but yeah we um went to her and again we did this interview during which she said you know i was actually really close involved with so many of the big speeches you know we call her a voice coach but actually she was part really part of his communications team as well yeah performance case yeah exactly and and she sort of was like you know i was in there for every speech even during covid i went in and we thought oh well that shows you this secret member of kids in a circle that's how involved she was and then within about five minutes of the story going up uh the fatal error on her part or maybe fatal states that but she did supply a picture of herself wearing a mask in labor hq on christmas see you 2020 which to address your question prompt is some questions from conservative campaign headquarters as to whether that had adhered to the letter of the then covid restriction so what's the what's the latest with the with the story because there is also a fascinating bit in the book about sort of the uh durham beer gate and all that side things but it is funny how these sort of you know political history can turn very sort of what seemed like quite innocuous moments at the time.

13:39Yeah, the police have already said they're not going to investigate any breach of lockdown by Keir Starmer. I think written into the legislation was some sort of statute of limitations. So even if the Met wanted to, we have, perhaps overshooting our original deadline for this book, ruined CCHQ's chances of nailing that one, we're afraid. But yeah, it's interesting how people's jobs work out. And with understanding Keir Starmer, you don't actually meet him until page 40 book to really understand starver you've got to understand this guy morgan mcsweeney so tell us a bit about him because a lot of people won't yeah so morgan mcsweeney is now the most powerful unelected man in britain um but that was never inevitable as you say he's managed to maintain even now a pretty low profile compared to his predecessors number 10 chief of staff su Gray compared to some of the Tories who've done that job, like Dominic Cummings in the past.

14:42But as you say, the book starts not with Keir Starmer deciding he wants to be leader of the Labour Party. It starts with a man called Morgan McSweeney climbing the stairs to the leader of the opposition's office, going to meet Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. And we deliberately chose that because this is a story that does not begin with Keir Starmer in a literal sense and lots of people who reviewed the book have said this seems like Keir Starmer is a supporting actor in Morgan McSweeney's story and to a certain extent if you look at it in the broadest possible sweep he is because Morgan McSweeney, a man from a very small town in West Cork or Mid Cork in Ireland called McCroom, a slacker at school, went to London, accidentally fell into employment at the Labour a party after an internship and then was called back when the receptionist of party hq dropped a vase on his foot on her foot rather nobody really knew who he was peter mandelson would walk past him every day not saying hello you know he was sent to work in terrible by-elections that labor started to lose as the country fell out of love with tony blair and over the course of the noughties This young Irishman who's sort of learnt how to work on a kibbutz in Israel on his gap year, has a new work ethic, having been a slacker with dreadlocks as a teenager.

16:07He applies himself as a political organiser just as the country's falling out of love with the Labour Party, with new Labour that had only known how to win. And he's like the canary in the coal mine. He's in Brent East when the Liberal Democrats win because of the Iraq war. He's in Lambeth, you know, one of the flagship councils of the hard left in the 1980s, where the leader Red Ted Knight, one of Jeremy Corbyn's mates, had overseen a big child abuse scandal that lots of people, including an official government report, blamed on their sort of ideological indulgence. And Morgan McSweeney, over that decade, over that cycle, you know, he goes to the Barking Dagenham where Labour is losing to the BNP, and over the course of several electoral contests, you know, Lambeth in 2006, when it's the only council Labour gains, Barking and Dagenham 2010, when the BNP loses all its council seats, Morgan Sweeney is learning that the Labour Party, be it the Blairites or the hard left, lose really badly when they look inwards and they don't talk to or reflect on what the voters really want and what they're actually saying, not what they think they're saying, not what they think they ought to be saying, And that sort of leads him, you know, as the 2010s develop and Ed Miliband is flailing around, he has a very clear sense of where Labour needs to be.

17:30And it's not yet where most mainstream Labour politicians are. and he sort of, by process of elimination, spends the Corbyn years with lots and lots of money, polling the membership, trying to work out who could be the person to take on Jeremy Corbyn, who is the ultimate evidence, by the way, that the Labour Party is not thinking about voters. But at the same time, that the right of the Labour Party, the Blairites, are looking at Labour members and not thinking about them either. They are their voters and they're saying, no, no, no, no, you're all weird and Marcus whatever. And then, you know, he alights on Keir Starmer through Labour Together and the rest is history.

18:05I mean, it's amazing how he goes from basically being, you know, Labour HQ receptionist to Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister, right? Like, it's an extraordinary kind of winding tale. And the bit about Labour Together is fascinating in lots of ways. I mean, the bit I would like to sort of drill down into is the sort of business leaders that get involved with this point. I mean, you talk there about him sort of, you know, having quite a lot of money, etc. Like, Labour Together is essentially this sort of, like, third-party kind of organisation that makes Sweden. It's sort of the closest thing, I think, in British politics we'd have to, like, an American super PAC.

18:39Yeah. You know, it's quite hard to categorise otherwise. Well, I think, to be fair, what... Sorry, go on. No, no, no, no, no, please. So, it's a pretty unusual organisation by Westminster standards for one reason, which is that nobody found out what it was up to. had any sense as to its significance until well after it had fulfilled its core objective. Yeah. It existed for two reasons. The first was to manipulate and shape discourse within the Labour Party so that in due course the membership might be prepared to have a conversation about a non-Corbynite leader. and in sweeney's mind that meant detoxifying the conversation within the left by destroying some of the corbynite blogs and websites that were constantly propagating conspiratorial pro-corbyn propaganda and then it involved producing a candidate which the membership could tolerate and i think the thing which for us that makes mc sweeney quite a compelling character is over the course of this period there are a lot of people in the parliamentary labour party and uh on the back benches who were would routinely hyperventilate on broadcast about um why corbyn was a moral aberration why his pronouncements on scriptal or anti-semitism were inadequate um but what very few of them did was consider well given the extent to which we despise corbyn what can we do to win the party back most of those um who were who felt that corbyn was you know a moral aberration concluding that labor itself might be a spend force which really shared their disquiet and shared that depth of hostility towards the politics that corbyn represented but he then said well let's examine the membership let's try and prize the mythology about who they are apart from the reality and he he mentioned business lead and with the help of some very well-heeled and and generous philanthropists he spent tens possibly hundreds of thousands of pounds on polling the likes of which had never been done in order to determine here are the labor membership which had risen to an unprecedented figure under corbyn are they composed of deranged trotskyist conspiratorialist types who hand out julian assange flyers outside labor party conference uh you know wear wear shorts and and and have socialist worker pamphlets on their person at all times or actually is it possible that is part of the membership but not all of this and what he eventually developed by the way was the sort of taxonomy who that membership was and it was more nuance than some of um i plead guilty here some of the the media's depictions might have had people believed he did accept with swede that there was a faction within the membership that was hyper ideological um was more likely to harbor anti-semitic views there's some super interesting research which we examined which showed that a lot of these people have problems sleeping at night that uh when asked if they disagreed with the george osborne uh purportedly saying he'd like theresa made chopped up and put in a freezer most of them thought that was fine they generally were less bothered by sort of apparently violent language um but he said these hard left people were were only one party called them the ideologues he said there were also the instrumentalists or the pragmatists who were the blairite but his position was that the kingmakers within the party coalition were the idealists people who coveted a slightly fairer better world a new politics a better kind of economy and sure they fell into corbyn's arms because he was the only person it seemed in 2015 prepared to articulate a politics that wasn't new labor but msweeny's view was we can get somebody who can plead fealty to corbyn and corbynism but who can appeal to that latent desire among the idealists to win yeah he always predicted corbyn would lose by the way he said well at some point these people they're going to want to give effect to their principles so let's find somebody who appears to share the principles while having a greater chance of winning and there are only a handful of people by 2019 who appeared capable of doing well emily thornbury might have been one um some some people thought that she had a lot of the kind of credentials to go the distance becky long bailey angela rayner but really starmer was the man that mcsweeney identified as being the plausible the essential idealist candidates and the rest uh excuse the fee shows history it is amazing how becky long bailey has gone from almost being the favorite at the start of that contest to sort of almost being kind of an irrelevance now yeah keir starmer was 16 to 1 at the start of that campaign it's sort of like listening to some of the aides who really believed in it at the time is like listening to leicester fans who put yeah 10 or 5 000 to one yeah it's fascinating but by the way i mean what that speaks to is that there was it wasn't just within parliamentary labour party in general nobody in the public or indeed the bookies quite understood what who these members were and maybe i mean i can't speak to uh you know the odds makers and and their thought process but it's very possible that everybody was taken in by the idea that the continuity candidate just would win and yeah thingless weenie had a had a slightly hustler appraiser of what they wanted that is a classic group thing thing that does happen in westminster right and i always think about it obviously my background and knowledge is a conservative party but there is definitely a kind of like media stereotype of the sort of tweed wearing more captain of the army kind of wants low taxes low regulation etc and that character tool that's there and that does exist but actually There's also like, you know, the vast majority of people will have served in local council and are actually quite practical when it comes to it.

25:01Aren't as ideologically driven as you think. I mean, who knows? The problem is that parties themselves have a lot of difficulty, right? Like pulling all this data together. But tell us a bit about the business leaders that kind of got involved with Labour together and so on. Because I found that really interesting of a way that business can kind of like impact politics and so on. Well, the two key people who Morgan Sweeney has to thank for keeping him in a job for the Corbyn years, for the wilderness years, and making all of this very expensive polling possible are Sir Trevor Chin, who, best known as a philanthropist now, but made his fortune selling what was then the Royal Automobile Club back in the early noughties.

25:42And Trevor Chin, he's a practicing Jew. He is very committed to his faith and interfaith relations and that sort of thing. And what drove Trevor Chin to donate to the Labour Party, or particularly that bit of the Labour Party, was having been on an al-Qaeda hit list. He was pretty disgusted and to some extent terrified about what a Corbyn government could mean for British Jews like him. so devoting yourself to a cause that is looking to rebuild the Labour Party after Corbynism and make sure that whatever politics replaces Corbynism doesn't look like it or doesn't have those sorts of views you know you can see why he did it the other guy is a hedge fund uh a hedge fund multi-millionaire called Martin Taylor who deliberately keeps a very very low profile it's very hard to find a picture of him I think he's done one interview which was about a decade ago in which he said look hedge fund managers like Ed Miliband too I think he might have been the only one you know he grew up in a sort of in a pretty poor background in Greenwich in the middle of the last century I think actually he's a bit younger than that but to give you the full Billy Elliot treatment but you know and he I think you know just wanted to see a sensible Labour government elected you know and this is a guy by the way you know one of the it's splash of color all over books like this but just to keep listening an idea of how wealthy this guy is you know he wears lycra cycling gear in his in the headquarters of his funds because the computers get so hot expending all the energy trying to make money uh you know it's too hot to wear a suit in martin yeah exactly we spoke to people who said that they're actually complementary but distinct personalities chin is all about relationships and um yeah he he has relationships which might confound and surprise people it's not just what sweeney who he became close to he's got a profound personal relationship with angela rena as well and in a way i think perceiving himself as being one of a more sort of old school captain of industry who would bring trade union representatives into the boardroom into his office to hold court discuss i think he in his own work not only the RAC but um CBC Capital uh company I think he um spent a lot of part of his career around I think he sort of always sought to have work as representatives you know at a boardroom level and I think that um that reason he actually had more of a commonality with the likes of Rainer who'd come through the trading trade union movement than one might foresee for a by the way former uh member of the Tory party and a close personal friend of Tony Blair himself Taylor much more policy oriented he's a big funder of the IPPR which we've spoken about uh later together having this slightly nebulous state so I think uh the Institute of Public Policy Research is sort of ultimate star-mright think tank and Taylor has backrolled him for a long time and I think his politics are quite Miliband-ite in sort of um attempting to find a uh well I won't use the word third way but trying to sort of produce a capitalism that is fast far fairer and more redistributive um redistributive um than than that which uh the tories might might opt for so they're quite interesting characters these two men and um as patrick says i mean essentially they took a bet on mc sweeney yeah they said at a given point in time you're you know you're a pretty wacky character in local government um you appear to have a very clear eyed assessment of how the party can get back into government we'll fund your salary for a bit let's let's see what happened and what was unusual by the way about chin and taylor was that at that time a lot of leftish liberal donors were looking at the labor party and say this is dub yeah and in that they were encouraged by the way by people like tony blair people like jonathan powell who were trying to set up something new at the time you know they were chucking money at the lib dems uh you know new parties popping up yeah exactly the independent group change uk and you know mcsweeney spent a lot of his time you know he already had chin and taylor's money in the bank but it was sort of going around down and saying you are you know i'm trying to i'm trying to save the labor party from a shit wreck here you know your new party's not not a lifeboat because i'm going to blow up the lifeboat because we need to prove that the labor party can be saved and that you know this corbyn period is not permanent realignment it's a blip it's a historical blip and at the time you know we all remember what it felt like at the time at the time that felt like a crazy suggestion but sort of you know seven to ten years hindsight behind us yeah see that you know he was onto something there he delighted by the way in waving around a glossy brochure which had been leaked to him was prepared by one of the advocates of british on marsh a sort of centrist new party and and he said yeah this stuff is preposterous it's like this is pre-chat gpt but if nowadays you'd say it was like chat gbd had generated it he said you know this stuff is a joke we've got to destroy uh not only what blair's former advisors are up to but we're going to have to at some point go toe-to-toe with blair himself because we cannot let this idea get off the ground friend of the show yeah yeah but let's just go into a bit more of the sort of like the Labour Party's relationship with business because one of the sort of bits of the book that jumped out at me was when you were talking about the sort of various reshuffles that partly the shadow cabinet were ranked on the amount of meetings they'd had with business and I thought gosh that's interesting.

31:36And that comes from Keir Starmer himself you know the summer of 2021 after the Hartlepool by-election disaster there's a sense he's finally woken up to the oh god I can't unite this party because it's a complete basket case organisationally and he commissions um senior officials of labor hq several of which are now running the party all together now so can you just do me an audit as you say of how good my shadow cabinet are how good they are in the media are they meeting with business and you had you know at the time this in 2021 i think the line that was we were told by one of the people who did this review was you know you had people not replying to businesses people turning up late with their cameras off people turning up to meetings and slagging businesses off now you know it's the labor party of course so the culturally it's sometimes difficult but it was pretty shocking in some respects hearing that sort of amateurism which is but which by the way there is a starism it's a hatred of that sort of thing it's sort of why can't you be more serious like i am but is it and it's interesting and also you know go on to talk about a reshuffle in which ed milliband is shifted precisely because businesses don't much like him and he doesn't much like many of them yeah uh yeah and that was uh that was also a classic thing of milliband's leadership as well that was a problem so they put all this kind of right effort in and jim o 'neill had a great quote this morning on the radio talk about they've made business feel really warm and fuzzy um about it it's it's not gone like that in the kind of like eight or nine months since government it's gone pretty sort of fracturous where what do you make of the the current kind of relationship between business and labor so there's there's no doubt that there was good faith from both sides going in um and in a way i'd sort of reflect on the government's relationship with business in the same and not dissimilar vein in which i'd reflect on its relationship with the public there are two commodities you can never recover in the first six months of the year of a premiership you know goodwill good faith and momentum and the party did needlessly squander them in it public and political profile because of the dysfunction at the heart of downing street um at the start of the administration all that all that controversy about spectacle dresses and freebies yeah um but but also it sort of sacrificed so much of what it had with the business community as well because of because of the budget and I'm you know I'm sure that you would ask me about or ask us about national insurance increases and you know the implications of that on not just relations with business but on the economy full stop and we are at the point now where even the Bank of England itself has expressly stated that measures in that budget had a depressing effect on on on on the dynamism of the economy so in in the end you know it's sort of self-evident that relations are better than that they were in corbyn era but given that that you know requires one to exceed the threshold of zero or yes than zero um no i think in the end you know the opposition in a way is frustrating uh your friend you mentioned the french story tony blair i think he routinely bemoaned the fact that the great the greatest frustration of opposition is that you cannot in actual fact do anything you are left then to use your party as a sort of form of performance art if you can discipline your party run your party then maybe you can run the country and similarly rachel reeve and starmer for the last five years they've not been able to show business what they represent but they've been able to tell them and you know in a way that that's always going to be so but we're now at the point where business is small and large can judge them on the letter of policy itself are you a fan of jimmy's jobs of the future hi i'm sunny one of the producers behind the show have you ever thought my business deserves to be in a spotlight too well you're not alone companies reach out to us all the time asking us to create podcasts and digital video content for them but until now we've only taken on a limited amount of projects But here's the good news.

35:52In 2025, we're expanding. Our production company, Boxlight, is now ready to help more businesses like yours tell their stories with high-quality white-label content. Curious to see what we can do or how much it might cost? Head over to boxlight.io. You'll find examples of our work and even a podcast calculator to explore your options. That's boxlight.io. We'd love to help you shine in 2025. Now, back to Jimmy. What does the modern Labour Party I'm trying to zoom out from the book and the day-to-day What does the modern Labour Party's economic standpoint What is it? What does it view of it? Particularly when it comes to jobs The Labour Party does really interest me It was founded on the basis of standing up for jobs and getting as many people into work as possible etc giving them rights and so on and yet as you say what they've done with nix is like quite surprising in terms of like it's hit the lowest pays although not directly it's hit the businesses that kind of employ them i'd just be really interested in your kind of right assessment of what is the sort of starmer economic vision well i guess i'm not parties reveal themselves the soul of a party or a leader or a movement or a moment in politics reveals itself when their backs are against the wall.

37:15And you can definitely say that about the budget, right? They had a load of choices to make in that budget, i.e., we've got a huge fiscal headache. How do we alleviate it? We could, as the Treasury will probably tell you, I think it did tell them, if you whack 2 % on VAT, that's a massive revenue raiser. They didn't do that. They didn't put up income tax. They didn't reverse the Tory nit cuts. What did they do? they taxed the bosses of people who are employed by other people even if that's in an sme with three employees right um so that's very revealing right you know how they conceive of labor people when the government is extremely limited politically and fiscally in what it can do and it's that idea that you know we are for the people who work for other people and live and you know and they got that such a rabbit hole in the election campaign trying to find working people but it is that sense of the numbers on my pay slip are the be all and end all of my financial well-being i mean that's true for most of us of course but it's like you know the people who are most acutely feel a 10 are up a 10 and down or whatever yeah and it's that key thing working for other people now that's actually quite a flat and reductive view of the world right because you know just look to france and look to other parts of the world to see how to use the example of shopkeepers and pierre pujard and other people like that you know the movements that that petty bourgeois like you know lower middle class the sort of that sort of sense of you know we're aspirational you know we run small businesses but we're not well off what why are you clobbering us but you know that very reductive take on it i.e if you work for someone else it is the boss who's going to get it in the neck or you know the wallet i think is very revealing about how ultimately when it comes down to it these very labor people and they are very labor people even if they're on the right of the labor party you know yeah most of them have spent their entire adult lives in the labor party thinking about the labor party you know pat mcfadden rachel reeves and others you know despite rachel reeves's brief or contested phrase into the banking world right like she is Labour to her bones.

39:28That's true of most of the Cabinet, and that's how they see the world, and that's ultimately reflected in their quite sort of very big L and small L Labour budget and fiscal choices so far. I think also there's a possibility that there is no such thing as Starmerism, that we ought to take Starmer's words for it, and that therefore the party just has been boxed in by its own political communication and vocabulary. I wrote a piece last year about the fact that a lot of people within Star Mozilla Circle were influenced by this idea from across the pond of deliverism, rather a critique of it. The deliverist idea states that if you deliver effective policy, then the public will thank you for it.

40:20And there are a lot of people who, by the middle point of last year, was saying well look at Biden's poll ratings we're not so sure that there is actually a linear relationship between delivery and outcomes and political reward and so a lot of people in Starmer's team have felt well we need to reflect not only on whether for instance in relation to Biden you can look at the Inflation Reduction Act with Obama you can look at Obamacare those were massive fiscal endeavors massive policy programs which appeared to have clear outcomes but which didn't yield any dividend politically uh almost whatsoever and a lot of people around the time we need to make sure that people experience the fruits of our policy it's not good enough to say we've spent 1.2 trillion on a program people need to feel it and that sort of is part of what led to what Patrick was leading to a few moments ago, policy, they say we're going to make sure that people feel they've got more money in their back pockets, and that possibly forced them in the direction of indirect taxes.

41:23Yeah. It's one of the great counterfactuals. What did Rachel Rees actually need to promise in order to win power? All these promises on taxes which have ended up boxing them in, but also they've possibly boxed themselves in politically, and that has led to the closest approximation of Starm's economic philosophy. And one thing we haven't spoken about in all this, by the way, is Angela Rayner's workers' rights agenda. Yes. And it has reflected how Labour sees jobs and work and bosses and employers. The analysis basically is that too many employers are unscrupulous, that work doesn't pay enough, that it's a bit rubbish, that you are getting screwed over by your boss.

42:08and obviously that's certainly true in lots of cases but i guess if you're on the flip side if you are a you know responsible small business owner who tries to do best by their workers you know you're looking at the labor party and probably not feeling a lot of love right now because it's you know we're going to tax you even more your margins are going to be even tighter and by the way we we don't think you're a particularly nice person and so we need to you know put all this regulation on you despite the same time talking about growth and letting it rip and deregulating etc etc so it's full of contradictions yeah no exactly and i think that's the uh the thing they've put in so much effort like prior to the election and they just seem to have sort of spent a lot of that kind of like political capital that they built with businesses i also think businesses were you know some were a little bit naive with it all and sort of this is a labor government yeah exactly and sort of being you know perhaps not getting as many assurances as they could have done out of it i mean i think the the sort of like the collapse of the cbi during that sort of year is a very interesting sort of again kind of right countertouch yeah because it's i just think that it's yeah this was the labor government it was always going to do this and look yeah after 14 years of the conservatives particularly what they put the country through in the last four years of that like it's not a surprise that people were ready for a change but business leaders sort of you know seem to do quite uh yeah they seem to give away a lot quite easily and i think it is interesting that you know to be fair labour have got some really credible business people sort of backing them they were supporting james timpson as prison's minister which is interesting richard walker ceo of iceland as well was very kind of like prominent campaigner and in the book as well greg jackson the chief exec of octopus energy was on the candidates list as well.

43:55Well, he was vetted. He was among several public figures vetted for parliamentary seats. Everyone had to go through his very arduous vetting process. Whether Greg Jackson volunteered or they wanted to tap up Greg Jackson is a question we don't get into. But certainly he was a name people at the very top of the Labour Party hoped and maybe expected would be a Labour MP at this point. But alas not, who knows what happens. Who knows what happens. But I do think it's just generally, I mean, obviously I would say this one right, but it's very interesting to see how business and politics, and particularly given everything that's happening in the States as well, and telling the mosque whether more people are kind of going to be involved in it as well.

44:38One of the things that struck me in the book was just how unprepared they were for government. You talk about goodwill and momentum being very important early on in the government, and if you lose those things, then you're in trouble. I could not believe the stories about the grid being empty. And I just sort of think you talk about Rastam being this sort of very serious kind of like professional person, like prioritises that above all else. And yet, you know, OK, fine, slightly caught on the hop by there being an election of bitter than they'd anticipated. It just seems extraordinary that there wasn't a plan.

45:14I think that's right. I mean, I think that there's a sort of tension within the way that Starmer operates, which is, yes, he does prize competence and efficiency. And Patrick used the word serious. He likes the idea of having a serious operation, but he also delegates. and I think that he will rue the day not just that he delegated power to Sue Gray but that he alighted on this very curious division of Labour where McSweeney oversaw the politics and Gray oversaw government preparation and those who've been in government will tell you that there can be no division between politics and government that they're one and the same and they have to address and exist in the sort of equilibrium with each other and i think that you said it was shocking i mean we we were shocked because the cupboard was basically bare at the beginning a lot of the preparing for government work ended up being subsumed by personality politics by by office politics by things as simple as sue gray not appearing to like or trust a person enough for them to be deemed capable of speaking to simon case about the work of their department or speak the permanent secretary of their bit of whitehall and um you know in in the end i think that that is very easy to partake in uh sort of demolition derby on sue gray and you know third to the grid this sort of all all powerful document in westminster that determines what the government's announcing on a given week but but starmer too i mean uh it cannot be that he is uh you know transcendentally serious and yet also didn't double check that they had a plan for government that their tour his tour by the way of the reed nations the very first thing he did upon getting into downing street was planned at the uh it's not even fair to say the 11th hour it was planned after polling day um such was the lack of detail in in their plan so um he did realize star moving occasionally ruthless that she had to go but um the the damage of of that first hundred days still sort of characterises, still defines the government's political situation because they've never managed to recover the lead, the slender lead that Starmer enjoyed in those first few weeks.

47:38Why do you think they were sort of, it just seems so strange and counter to Starmer's sort of percentage because there's this sort of idea that kind of like comes across I think with Labour, which is like, Tories were terrible, and essentially we'll go in, that will provide political stability, that means there'll be economic stability, that will unlock growth, we'll make better decisions, we'll listen to the civil service and we'll take better decisions than the Conservatives because we're not ideologically driven, and therefore we'll perform better government. And that just seems like such a naive view of how it all works.

48:14I think they did, it certainly drew up to the point that that was the analysis, by the way. The idea that things have been so unstable, everybody will breathe a massive sigh of relief that we're in, and then they manage to create their own kind of instability. It's really difficult to understand. I think, you know, we come close to answering parts of it, but just how it happened. Look, I think if your chief of staff is trying to sack your heads of policy and comms the week before the election, as Sue Gray was, if your head of communications is only told he has a job at 4 p.m on polling day yeah then obviously it's going to be a complete mess and you know simon case for much of the period the transition talks period was sort of sat there saying am i ever going to meet someone who isn't sue gray here because there's a hell of a lot of stuff i want to talk about with you guys you know why haven't i met the head of comms or policy or is oh right that's because sue is trying to sacked them you know it's all all very very very odd and by that point as well there's sort of the internal politics have become so toxic that sue gray needed to be seen to fail by her internal opponents so in a sense that it happened by design as much as by accident i mean we were speaking to people as early as january 2024 who were saying to us this sue thing is a complete disaster you know she could lose the election i mean that was a bit hysterical but anyway you know it's never going to work and they were right but Keir Starmer had made the choice to delegate in the way that he had and he was never going to be convinced by you know bluntly people briefing us in the times of Sunday Times that they didn't like Sue or this thing's gone wrong or that thing's gone wrong it reached a point where the only thing that was going to get rid of Sue was a terrible start to government and indeed that's what happened but it came at the cost of momentum looking serious and indeed that crucial stability but also you know you can blame sue gray you can blame waheed ali the book stops with the book stops with starmer ultimately and i think you're right to put your finger on that that sense of seriousness you know there are lots of people who are my case starmer will say it's a mark of maturity and his disdain for political culture and its trivialities that he's not ringing me up at 3 a.m in the morning like ev miliband used to saying, why is there a stray semi-colon in this press release?

50:36Or have you seen what Bill Keegan's written in The Guardian about my latest economic policy? Keir Starmer's not doing that, but nor is he sweating the small stuff of leadership. Some of the people who'd worked on the 97, 2001, 2005 campaigns, who were working on the 2024 campaign, senior people, were sort of baffled that Keir Starmer met them at the start of the process and was basically like, all right well you guys run the campaign you guys run the strategy i'll see you on the other side and they were sort of thinking well it's great that we're just here thrashing it out but i grew up watching tony and gordon butt heads and really have detailed conversations you know tony gordon and peter and alistair and keir starmer's just not there so it's unsurprising that if the prime minister is sort of something between a non-executive chairman absentee landlord or master delegator that things might not have a clear sense of direction what do you think drive Starmer?

51:32Why is he doing all this? Because it's quite a decision like, you know, going through the new labour intake, I was really struck by the amount of them that are young and sort of under the age of 35, right? And people want to, you know, impact, make change, see politics as a way to do it. You know, he went into it much later in life, having done a public service job. Like, it's a far more considered decision, perhaps. Yet, there is still this sort of question that overhangs the whole book and the end of it of what is Keir Starmer for? So let's just get one thing straight, which is you're not alone having posed that question and it extends to people who work closely with him.

52:09In our last book, Left Out, we spoke about Paul Mason, the leftist journalist and commentator, having been part of Starmer's inner sanctum in 2019 when he was contemplating the leadership. And they had this various sessions with him where they thrashed out the ideas, the pitch, the membership, but also trying to get a greater feel for him because you know the coalition between the soft left and Starmer was was incidental there was nothing preordained about it it wasn't like Corbyn and McDonnell who'd been championing that course forever it was it was a transactional relationship and Mason said to some well what is it that you are about what what what do you want to give effect to by becoming a leader what you know we're at a what does b look like and in the end they developed something which i think felt quite unsatisfactory to those present which was well kia doesn't like seeing an injustice and walking idly by which is not dissimilar to what patrick was saying about children at alder hay hospital the experiential style of the man who doesn't necessarily have policy prescriptions or ideology but has values and values that demand out of him action in a given scenario and but but for me i think that only goes so far i think that there's also a deep competitiveness to the man and we spoke to martin plout a friend of starma's from his constituency who um i should say as a compliment described him as a hard bastard um you know he he described him as somebody who was ultra competitive not only um with those around him but with himself and somebody who at every juncture in his career has sought to get to the top he didn't just want to be a human rights barrister he wanted to write the textbooks on it he did he didn't just want to be a barrister who was on one side of the courtroom he wanted to be you know involved in involving it from the other side of the telescope he became head of the cps he didn't just want to become a labor mp he wanted to become the leader of the party i think there is a work ethic a self-improvement ethic and a deep desire to be at the top and to win that drives him on as well and in the book one of the opening passages in the prologue is Starmer Matsuini being upbraided by Vic Starmer by the Prime Minister's wife because only moments after the exit poll when they're at the tate at the victory party cruising up the elevator and what should be your moment of gay abandon and your unbridled delight the two men were bemoaning the fact that they had fallen agonizingly short of blair's landslide in 1997 that is not the sort of thing a normal person does yeah you have corrected you you've bent history to your will you have defied years uh almost uh well more than a decade but almost decades of labor not winning and the best thing you can produce is a sort of wary, all right, Vic, I'll shut up now and be grateful for this.

55:06That's an unorthodox and deeply competitive persona that does that. Do you think there's an aspect of where he sort of sits on the neurodiverse sort of spectrum, as it were? Because I think there's a very interesting bit in the book which made me sort of really sort of stop in my tracks was the bit about Diane Abbott and her sort of being suspended from the party and her having this conversation with him in the chamber after the debate where she wasn't able to speak. And, you know, he was saying to her, you know, is there anything that I can do? Let me know, Diane. And she was like, yes, restore the whip.

55:46And she had to say it twice. And it was, I just found it sort of very, like there's almost sort of, like we get it a lot with people on the podcast. Yeah, a lot of very successful people do sit on that neurodiverse spectrum? It's an interesting question. It's not one... We've never been asked. Yeah, we've never... We've never been asked that question. And we've never asked it. And that's partly because one of the eternal paradoxes of Starmer is that the non-political Starmer is probably the most neurotypical person you could imagine being described to you. Like, he is just somebody's dad. You know, he's a dad from North London who likes his football, he's good chat in the pub.

56:25but you know there's something about the performance of politics maybe that you know the inherent pretense of politics you know like we all know politicians reasonably well don't we and you know they have to be on you know you can never be truly off can you yeah yeah and I think coming to politics late in life means that there is something stilted robotic about his his public performance you know it's been a big it's been a big change for him so you know I think nobody's ever suggested that that it's that and also i guess he's had a very difficult childhood that involved bottling stuff up and not talking to people about it so i think it's sort of you know maybe a set of emotional responses you know i'm not remotely qualified to diagnose these conditions in people we're journalists we'll do it anyway yeah yeah exactly we've just written a book we've just written a book full of uh full of you know heavy inferences uh you know about people and their souls, etc.

57:21But no, I think everybody says, you know, the private care is the most normal and straightforward guy you could ever hope to meet. Justin. Gazing slightly into the future, around about 18 months' time, you were talking about the sort of division of, you know, government, politics, etc. They are going to be in a situation where they need to start thinking about the next general election campaign. What kind of happens to Morgan McSweeney in the Downing Street operation at that point? Because if he's the sort of Linton Crosby-esque figure, is he going to go back into Labour HQ and be focused there?

57:56Or, you know, what will the plan be? What does the future of Starmer's Downing Street look like, do you think? Look, in principle, McSweeney has sought to set in motion a much more uncertain and political form of government than that which defined not only the first half year of Starmer's premiership, but also the tail end of Stunat. you know he he is constantly seeking to remind people at political cabinet and in the party full stop that the party has reformed breathing down its neck there's a whole constellation of seats in the northeast in particular where reformers um second party by a whisker um you know the there's sort of no complacency when you speak to the man um or when cabinet ministers and mp speak to the man about um the threat that the party faces and um as long as the party as long the right is fragmented the party has a bit of time but they the sort of stated purpose of the government is to array its resource and channel its policy you know in order to address these anxieties that have fueled the rise of the populist right and i mean as early ago as before the election itself we were speaking to people in labor high command who were already contemplating how are we going to characterize reform and the Tories on the other side of the election they're already teasing out phrases and strap lines and images that they thought would be helpful in sort of repudiating populism I think coalition of chaos was was one of them to describe the sort of Tory reform nexus but um but but no look they're they're very conscious of the sort of political threat posed not by the usual adversaries of the tory party but by reform and i think if we did have mc sweeney sat here he would say that the way they're going to address that um is not by conceiving of a effective or amusing slogan or planning the election campaign a bit earlier than they otherwise might but by addressing it in government and um and they're only a very finite number of levers one can pull in government and especially short to medium term ones a lot of the pro-growth strategies, things like Heathrow, will bear fruit in a decade's time.