184: Coup What A Scorcher

0:01Thumbtack presents Tile Trouble. Every single time I use my sink, I make eye contact with the uneven grout on my kitchen backsplash. The crooked corners eye me and I'm haunted by more tiling questions than I thought possible. What kind of pro can fix a backsplash? Can I replace one cracked tile or should I replace them all? What? What if I just use Thumbtack? I can hire top-rated pros, read reviews, and compare prices with a tap. All on the app. Thumbtack knows homes. Download the app today. Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. Hello and welcome to Page 94. Do not adjust your set. This is a special one-off podcast because of the big news this week.

0:40Andy is away because he's preparing to run for the Manchester mayoralty on a platform known as Hunter Murrayism. More details on that as we get it. But for now, Britain has a new Prime Minister in waiting, Andy Burnham, who won a resounding victory in the Makefield by-election and has caused Keir Starmer to resign. I am joined, as ever, by Adam McQueen, Ian Hyslop, and guest star, Matt Muir, to talk over the big events of the week. Ian, I want to start with you. You watched Keir Starmer's resignation speech. On a scale of one to ten, how moved were you? Well, I was very moved because it was Monday morning, and we go to press Monday afternoon.

1:12Not only did he time it in time for Private Eye Press Day, he actually timed it in the middle of the Private Eye editorial meeting. So there was a pause as we all went and watched it on our telly, and then sort of reunited tearfully to say, right, what the hell are we going to do now? We're recording one day in advance of it landing on newsstands. Did he get the cover? He did get the cover, but only in the picture of a gilded coach coming into London with the headline, Andy Burnham travels to London. It was a coronation joke, which we were lucky to get. And then underneath it, it said, Britain sheds a cure.

1:48Surely tear. But it was an incredible thing, because I'm still scarred by the day in 2017 that we went to press on a Monday and Theresa May chose 9 o 'clock the next morning, the Tuesday, before we were even out on the newsstands to call a general election. So for one thing, I will pay tribute to Sir Keir for that one. Yes, his inadvertent humour will always win. He actually said, without the slightest pause, he said, I've spoken to the King and I thought, well, Andy. And I couldn't help myself. and we had a long list of the thing that he's achieved and he just wanted to say, then why are you going?

2:27It didn't make any sense to me. I thought the best thing that he said was when he went, I've spoken to the parliamentary party about whether or not they want me to lead them into the next election and I've accepted their answer with good grace. All 400 of them spoke with one voice. So he said in his speech, the hard work of change was with a singular purpose, not power for power's sake, but to change Britain for the better. So the hard work of change was with a purpose which was change, which sort of tells you everything about the past two years, really. This lack of, there's no there there, fundamentally speaking.

2:59It was a noun soup, but I think it maybe was the best speech he's ever given. Not least, it was blessedly short. It had three main points, right? Basically, you've all told me to sod off and I'm in fact sodding off. I would ideally like there to be a contest, not a coronation. He thinks he won't get that one. And the other thing was he both did a sort of forward jab at Andy Burnham by saying he sort of essentially was opening nominations for this long period. But also there was a backwards jab as well at I was the one who transformed the Labour Party. It was, what was it, electorally, financially and morally bankrupt.

3:32Given that so much of his rhetoric during his time in office has been about putting party behind country, country first, it was a very Labour-y speech. It was I changed the Labour Party and now maybe Labour will go on and win a second election. But that was the bit he was good at. That's the strange thing about it. He was a very good leader of the opposition, and he did sort out the party, which was in a terrible state. And then he sort of got into power and didn't seem to know what he wanted to do with it. I mean, it's part of the general feeling that I know a lot of the electorate do seem to have.

4:00The political class currently has become addicted to campaigning rather than governing, and that's sort of been part of his handful. Can we have a moment to say the one unifying thing that swept through the country yesterday, as everyone watched that statement, which was annoyance with presumably Steve Bray playing the Ode to Joy in the background? Adam I sense you've got feelings about this Well I had two feelings about it One was just shut up Just pull his plug out For God's sake enough We get it I know it's the 10th anniversary And everything But the other one was Guys it's a banger isn't it It's a joy It's really good as anthems go Right It's up there with Zadok the Priest Definitely But that's a very football-y now I think if people would have thought That was a sort of World Cup reference If they played Zadok the Priest Don't you think?

4:37I think coronations were Zadok the Priest But maybe that's just the circumstance movement I had it sung at my wedding and so the class hierarchies of the podcast team are revealed enough handle chat it is handle right yeah okay good I had it sung when playing George III in The Madness Of but there we go oh brilliant effortlessly hang any advance on that Matt? literally none whatsoever my upbringing was culturalist I had it played the first time I rode to hounds can we get back to how annoying Steve Bray is it's sort of an irony right which is that his right to do that is probably protected by some human rights legislation of the kind in which Keir Starmer is in favour very strongly.

5:15And the right to kind of peaceful protest. But I did, I had exactly the same visceral reaction as you, which is I'd actually like to hear, you know, I felt like the teacher. I'd like to hear what Keir Starmer is saying, thank you. It's not peaceful protest when you're rattling out Oat of Joy at several decibels, I'm sorry. What's he protesting? The concept of silence. Well, it's just a bit mean too. This is the last time Keir is going to get to command attention and maybe it was difficult before. That's quite brutal, isn't it? Yes, no, it is. I mean, on the plus side, at least it wasn't Yakety Sax, which would have provided a riotous backdrop to the tears.

5:46Can we have his list of achievements, though? Because my other feeling, apart from pleasure at the timing, sadness at the going, was just if any other prime minister had had his current crop of good news to boast about, he'd still be in. Keir's going, oh, well, yes, the boats, they really are. They are down. Net migration figures are down. 50 % cut since last year. I mean, yeah, which reflects two things, doesn't it? It reflects the Ukrainian scheme and the Hong Kong scheme working their way through and the kind of what's so-called Boris wave, where Boris Johnson government just lost control of visa allocation, like they lost control of everything else.

6:23But yes, that is something to boast about. I think they may have at some point built a house somewhere in the country. And inflation is not looking that bad. I mean, there are things that other desperate governments would have boasted about and survived. I was watching him thinking, what, and you're going? My other last thought is just thought, why did you have to go in such a classic Stammerite way, having told everyone you weren't going to? There was briefings about you fighting on. Oh, God, it's the last U-turn. You've resigned. He went out as he lived, you turning down the street. Yeah, I think you're right.

7:02And the other thing I felt when I was writing this up yesterday was the fact that Liz Truss, till to her dying day, will say that it's not her fault everyone was against her, that the mini-budget failed for other reasons. But I do think there is also the fact that, and this is useful when we're discussing anti-Burnham, as we will later, lots of the things that happened to Keir Starmer were genuinely out of his control. So sickness and disability numbers have been persistently high since COVID. You know, that is something that he inherited. He didn't start the war in Iran. He didn't start the war in Ukraine, both of which caused energy price and inflation.

7:32He didn't start COVID, as far as we know. So, you know, he has dealt with Trump in the White House. Just an enormous time suck of energy, presumably, sorting all of that out. It was a pretty rum hand. But Matt, before we get too carried away in fondly remembering him, what do you think his biggest mistake in office was? having the entire country hate him I think was probably quite a big mistake but why? why so much? why much more than comparably leaders with worse track records? so I mean I'm going to base this on a lot of the filth I have to marinate in by looking at the internet for my job but if you look at X as a fairly representative swathe of the anti-kircist I really did not think when you said filth I thought you were going to say he lost the milfs or something like that.

8:23The furry vote is very important, Helen, and we'll talk about that in a subsequent episode. I think partly because he, and this is, again, no fault of Keir Starmer, by dint of his profession, by dint of his previous role as Director of Public Prosecutions, he embodies a particular type of establishment politics which is anathema to a certain swathe of voter now and has been since that day 10 years ago that we're not going to talk about. So there's partly that. I think partly there is something fundamentally uncharismatic about him as a man, which feels unfair and maybe cruel to say, but it's also basically true, right?

8:59Never got a sense that he enjoyed the job or really even wanted to be in the job. It just sort of felt like it had sort of fallen to him. He was kind of a middle management figure and he didn't know what he wanted to do with it and didn't get any joy out of it either. The political class in this country have over the course of the past decade, potentially longer, but let's fix it a decade, become very, very, very bad at telling the electorate, like, things aren't going to be nice. We have lost the ability to hear, as a populace, I think, the news that things are not going to be good and there is nothing that we can do about it because there are some very good reasons outside of our control.

9:31It's a very hard position for any politician to be in when you also add in the lack of charisma, the fundamental mistrust of his background, etc. Yeah, there was, for me, a defining moment in the by-election when Count Binface, who is the very brilliant John Harvey was asked what his key manifesto point was and he turned the bin to the camera and he promised the electorate, he said I'm going to lower your taxes and raise everyone else's and I think that is what the electorate wants to hear. So yeah, I mean the austerity of the 2010s protected homeowners who saw the house prices rise and protected pensioners thanks to the triple lock.

10:09So George Osborne had got a constituency of people who he was telling them that we're really cutting back, not on you. And I don't think Starmer ever achieved that. We should say we were quite tough, if you remember when he just got in, saying, why are you so miserable? Maybe we should have been easier on him that he was trying to make the case that everything was screwed. The problem, as I see it, is that they came in saying we're not going to raise national insurance, income tax and VAT, and therefore they realised very quickly they needed some money and went for smaller tax rises that annoyed more people violently and individually, like the inheritance tax on farms.

10:40Which, again, from a media relations point of view, and I appreciate it, it's very important to stress this, the failure of Keir Starmer's premiership is not about comms. It's about politics. Comms is a very small part of it. But from a media relations point of view, a load of very, very small things, they all stack up and they feel worse than one big hit. Yeah. I mean, you say it's not about comms, but I remember thinking when he first brought in the farming inheritance tax, if this had been pitched as we're going to get Dyson, that might have been popular. If you say somehow, oh, it's going to hit all farmers, then it becomes very unpopular.

11:18And so there is a comms issue, isn't there? There is a comms element to it. And it will be really interesting to see whether in Keir Starmer's probable departing honours list. He said previously he wasn't going to have a resignation on us. Number 10 this morning were, I believe, a little bit more ambivalent about the possibility of whether or not that's going to happen. To be fair, it's a bit like Joe Biden pardoning everyone on the way out. It's like, YOLO, what are you going to do? Not vote for me again. So I look forward to seeing Sir Morgan McSweeney in the aftermath of all of this. I also do think there's a name that has to come up here, which is he who should not be named, which is Mandelson, which I just think was the most enormous and avoidable screw-up.

11:54I mean, it was really, really sort of... why appoint someone that so many people dislike so intensely to a job you don't need to appoint anyone to you had a perfectly good ambassador who got on really really well with trump anyway why put that bomb in there and wait for it to explode it's like with boris johnson everyone forgets that what he resigned over actually was chris pinchup because party gate became the defining thing of him and away he had to go and i think it was amongst his parliamentary party i think with kia starmer mandelson was exactly the same thing i think from that drip drip drip of more and more bits um bits of evidence coming out and paperwork and text messages i think that was what was inevitably going to do for a minute.

12:28You're right. It's the scandal that validates the critique that people already sort of intuitively felt to be true. And in Boris Johnson's case, it was, you don't pay attention to this, you don't have the same morality as everybody else, right? You just don't think you should play by the rules of little people, which both Chris Pinscher and Partygate represented. And I think you're right. In the case of Starmer, it was, you decide things with a little cabal. You don't really trust people, include them in your decisions, and you're supposed to be Mr Process, but you bend the rules when you want to.

12:53and I really felt that Sue Gray was a harbinger of that which was when he was leader of the opposition. She went from being the neutral civil servant investigating party gate to his chief of staff in charge of preparing for government. Squeak, I mean, all the relevant authorities signed off on it in the end but the Tories complained about it and I think not unreasonably so and then she was dumped on from a great height saying she hasn't done any preparation for government but it's okay because Andy Burnham has about three and a half hours to prepare for government. So we're not going to repeat that mistake this time.

13:29I had to drop a joke from the last issue, which I thought was slightly poor taste, which was the man who pushed a woman under the bus all those years ago finally being caught out. And it was Starmer. Poor old Sue Gray was the one. Well, as we wrap this section up, we're going to take a chance to be nice. So is everybody ready? Brace yourself. I know it doesn't come naturally. Can we, in the interest of balance, name one good thing that's come out of the Starmer era? Adam, would you like to go first? I think you would have to, you would say Ukraine generally and sticking by Ukraine, but I'd also say particularly that moment after President Zelensky was horribly bullied in the Oval Office by J.D.

14:10Vance and President Trump. And there was a very, very good bit of sort of soft diplomacy after that, where he was brought immediately over to London, I think on the way back before he'd even gone home. and there was an embrace in Downing Street from Kirsten armour and then he was sent round to have tea with the king, do you remember? And I just thought at that point, there's some class in that. So that bit impressed me. All right, Ian? I would agree with that. I mean, I quite like the idea of him being Foreign Secretary, but I don't suppose that's going to happen immediately. That bit was OK. And I quite like his response to the riots.

14:40On two occasions, he proved that when he was DPP, he had learnt how to do this. We had the riot, he banged people up, the sentences were long, in they went. And that's a bit of a Tory response. Ignorously popular. But he did it. It proved that he was capable of doing things, but the overall failure is, I think, one of nerve. It's not saying, we're bust, but I will do the best I can in the circumstances. It's not saying, why on earth would I appoint Mandelson? It's not taking any of the bolder decisions. Hang a minute, so you're about to be mean about it. Yeah, I was going to say it didn't last long, didn't it?

15:19Oh, yeah. And in conclusion... Oh, yeah, sorry. Matt? I mean, this is a little bit of a... still a negative one, but harking back to right at the beginning of his Prime Ministerial career, if you will cast your minds back to the scandal about all the freebies that he was getting. Remember freebie care? Hang on, this is also mean. Yeah, yeah, but the thing is... You think he looked snappy. I mean, you know what? The duds were beautiful. But no, I think it was a good thing because it once again shone the spotlight on donations to political figures and the possible benefits they can note. And when we were talking about this earlier, Adam very amazingly said that Starmer walked so Farage could run.

15:58And, you know, whilst obviously the five billion crypto donation story would have been one anyway, you do think that possibly there is... Did you say five billion? That is a story. That's interesting. Sorry, just to be very clear, it was one level of magnitude less than that, a mere million. I'm going to give him credit for driving anti-Semitism out of the Labour Party and also really purging what I'd see as a kind of crank tendency of the kind of people who do Facebook posts about false flags. You know, he set that as a moral mission. He said one of the things that he didn't reverse, and he was saying that during his campaign for leader in 2021, that he thought that Corbyn had messed up on that.

16:30And he really followed that through, to the extent of expelling Corbyn from the party, which is an extraordinary thing to do to your immediate predecessor. He was incredibly popular within the party. And he did it efficiently and he did it quickly as well. I mean, that was essentially what Neil Kinnock's job was over sort of 10 years in charge of the Labour Party. was getting rid of militant and the trots and the tankies and all that kind of element. They came back in and were purged, to use the phrase, very, very quickly and effectively by Starmer. So there we go. Starmer, good on Ukraine, good on Iran, snappy dresser.

16:59So that's our round of Keir Starmer praise. Yeah, you're not going to get more comprehensive than that.

17:10Thumbtack presents Tile Trouble. Every single time I use my sink, I make eye contact with the uneven grout on my kitchen backsplash. The crooked corners eye me and I'm haunted by more tiling questions than I thought possible. What kind of pro can fix a backsplash? Can I replace one cracked tile or should I replace them all? What? What if I just use Thumbtack? I can hire top-rated pros, read reviews, and compare prices with a tap. All on the app. Thumbtack knows homes. Download the app today. Adam, before we move on to the sunlit uplands of Burnhamism, I want to spend a minute just talking about the Makerfield by-election.

17:45So, a couple of days out from it now. A couple of things stood out to me. Let's talk about Restore first. So, this is Rupert Lowe's hard-right, far-right party, anti-immigrant party. Given that they only existed for how many, you know... It's a year. They've kind of been bubbling around in all of those. A year now, based on Rupert Lowe having a tiff with Nigel Farage. As so many have before him, yes. But none of them have managed to parlay the TIF into a party that took 6.8%, putting them third in that by-election. Admittedly, some of the other parties didn't really ran paper candidates, didn't campaign.

18:18Were you surprised by that? Do you think that's had enough attention? In a way, I was relieved by that result because I think the worst possible result for Andy Burnham would have been if the combined reform and restore vote had been above what he got. And it was comprehensively below. It was 13 points below that combined vote. Right, he didn't just squeak a win. Farage didn't get to say, oh, well, we would have got it if it wasn't for these upstarts coming in on the even further right win. It was a very, very definitive victory for Andy Burnham. Yeah, I mean, it's not great. I had a look at the statistics on this.

18:476.8 % seems like an enormous amount. We would obviously prefer there not to be that many people voting for a sort of outrightly racist party. But I was looking at Makerfield in 2010, which is kind of height of the BNP under Nick Griffin being up there. 7.4 % at that point. So if anything, that kind of element has gone down a bit. And certainly some of the big kind of scares of the 1990s, I mean, it's not directly comparable to these council elections, but there was a point in 1993 where a BNP councillor got in in Millwall in the East End with 33.9 % of the vote. Again, in Barking, which famously, Barking and Dagenham Council in 2006, before the big fight back led by Margaret Hodge, which West Streeting was also very involved in, 17.2 % there, and that made them the official opposition on that council.

19:31So again, not directly comparable parties, not directly comparable situations. But we have been in situations like this before where the extreme right, as opposed to just the right wing, come in and take a substantial proportion of the vote. But not to say it isn't concerning. I was really interested in it for another reason, which is you had a plausible reform victory in that seat, at least on paper, as you say. It turns out that Burnham won very convincingly. But that there were 6.8 % of the electorate who didn't care about getting a reform candidate in. They wanted so strongly to register their protest about the direction they feel the country's going that they were prepared to do that at the expense of getting a right wing anti-immigration candidate against somebody who's seen as being relatively now the soft left, left of the Labour Party.

20:13That's quite, we want to burn things down more than Nigel Farage who sells himself as Mr. Burn Things Down, Drain the Swamp. Well, I think this is where it makes it, it really does make it Nigel Farage's problem. That was very obvious in one of his many petulant videos that he's put out recently. But the one directly loves it where he said, well, what more do you want from me? I am the right-wing hope. You have to vote for him. The one in the field. That one, yes. But I think in a lot of ways, the worst thing that could possibly ever have happened to Nigel Farage was getting elected to Parliament on his eighth attempt.

20:40Because that and the various scandals that have blown up around him, we keep coming back to the£5 million donation, which he is still to this day saying he was under no obligation to declare and he could have spent it on anything he wanted to and it's none of anyone else's business. That and all of the outside jobs that he now has to put in the register of interest So we're aware of just how much time he's spending on everything else and how much money he's raking in from crypto and cameo and all of these kind of dodgy side side gigs that he's doing. All of these things serve to make him look like an establishment politician in the eyes of people who have decided, as you were saying, Matt, that's the ongoing narrative at the moment is we don't like establishment politicians anymore.

21:13That's interesting because my view was always what a terrific spiv he is. Yes. He's quite clearly a man who's trying to sell you nylons and say, hello, lady, I've got some of this up my sleeve. and suddenly your view is, oh no, for most people he's just bang in the middle of the establishment. And I'm thinking, oh, right. I think, no, I think it was that, but I think that appealed to a lot of people because he felt like he was the outsider and he was coming in and giving a bloody nose. I mean, all those speeches he used to give when he was an MEP where he was incredibly rude to various sort of Belgian figures, which were then clipped up.

21:46I mean, it was very early on, we'll talk about this in a bit, but for YouTube and for social media, that was his kind of appeal, that he was this upstart coming in. And he hasn't got that. Rupert Lowe has stolen not only a significant proportion of the people voting for him, but his clothes as well, effectively, that he is now coming in. Again, this is extraordinary how he's done this, because Rupert Lowe is your classic kind of red-trousered kind of Tory country. He has stolen his clothes. He's a country man. True. But he really has taken the whole shtick and turned it into someone who is not only further to the right, but feels like more of an anti-establishment outsider.

22:17And Farage has got to find a way of polling that. He's got probably, unless there is a snap general election call, which I think is probably very unlikely, He's got another three or four years to get through this as that man in Westminster who has somehow still got to convince us all that he is an outsider. You're right, though. There was a sense that he was a kind of English folkloric character who could be played by David Jason, right? He could have been Del Boy. He could have been Par Larkin. Yeah, George Cole. Keeping things off the books a bit, but, you know, wheeler-dealer geezer kind of stuff.