Braverman blasts Tory ‘lies’ in revenge Reform defection

0:28The Telegraph Burnham, but his critics say he won't survive the May local elections. Former Labour MP Rosie Duffield tells us that the Prime Minister is a middle manager, he can't lead and we need a new start. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me Camilla Tominy and me Tim Stanley.

0:55Not another one Fortune appears to have favoured the braverman Tim As Suella takes the plunge Yes What is she thinking? We were going to go to the reform press conference this morning It was about veterans Nobody had tipped us off That suddenly the former Home Secretary was going to storm the stage, talking frankly about how much she hates the Conservatives and how much she loves Nigel Farage. There's a reform press conference every day of the week. Yes, I know. And this is the one occasion which I thought, I've had enough. I know. Tell everyone where you were. I went instead to something called Prosper UK, which is the new wet Tory group.

1:33What are you thinking? David Gork, Amber Rudd. So I spent my morning eating ginger nudge with Ruth Davidson. Wow. And Andy Street. Remember him? Former mayor of Birmingham. Once at the helm of John Lewis. And my plan was to sketch that. And then I came back to the office and discovered that... I tell you what. But of course the cool kids had a cool defector. Why should that surprise me? That little cohort of Conservatives there is Braverman's worst nightmare. It is. That's the interesting thing. Should we hear what she had to say about what Tories are like in secret? That's the great tragedy with the Conservative Party.

2:08Great speeches, good slogans. But when the cameras are off, when the doors are shut, and when they're sat behind that table making the difficult decisions for the country, they fold. When push comes to shove, they go AWOL. No courage, no backbone, no resolve. APPLAUSE Can I just toot my little trumpet? I'm quite good at this defection, Lark. You've got another one. I didn't have the courage of my convictions. Well, I think because Jarenic was so nasty when you predicted him. I know, but I did say, can we just listen to what I said on my show, to Priti Patel on Sunday. We are not interested in psychodrama or vexatious comments and people with their own agendas.

2:55And that doesn't help to put money in people's pockets and solve the big issues. But we're still on defection watch, aren't we? I mean, others could go, I was hearing over the weekend, Suyla Braverman is quite close. She's on the brink. So let me just, Camilla, let me just say this again. my party under Kemi and her leadership over the last 12 to 18 months look at what we have achieved in being focused. I had a sniff of it. I had a little sniff of it, Tim, but I didn't have enough of it. And it's not the most surprising thing to happen, is it? We knew she was agitating towards this for many, many months.

3:28Yes. She and Jenrick are very much a pair. They worked together at the home office. They're friends. And of course, they were at Cambridge together at the same time as me. What were they like at Cambridge? They were a couple of years above me, so I didn't know them very well. Oh, so you were a communist then. And at that time, they were involved in the Conservative Association, whereas I was involved in revolutionary Marxist politics. So our paths tended not to cross. Who's been on a bigger journey, you or Jen Rick? Well, now they're into revolutionary libertarian politics, aren't they? But I am asking myself, in all seriousness, was there something about Cambridge University around 2001 that has produced Tories who have defected to reform.

4:11Is there a sort of generational experience? Because another thing connects them and Danny Kruger and a number of other people involved in reform, which is the National Conservative Conference of 2023. This was an event run by an Israeli philosopher called Yoram Hazoni. And it was essentially to give a sort of philosophical justification to Trumpism and Brexit. And if you look at the list of speakers, a lot of them have subsequently defected to reform. Interesting. Who's next on the list, do we think? So Danny Kruger spoke at it. Yes. Suella Braverman spoke at it. James Orr, the philosopher, was involved.

4:49Oh, yeah. And we saw him last week at that press conference because he's advising Nigel Farage now. Matt Goodwin, the pollster academic who's, let's say, reform adjacent, was involved. Yeah. The one person who I don't recall being involved was Rob Jenrick, but he would have liked it. And there was a meeting after the conference at Danny Kruger's house where they all sat together in a room. And I now feel that even if it wasn't explicitly stated, I was sitting among the Tory to reform group. Got it. Well, I was at a similar event over Christmas. Did I inadvertently have a hand in this? I was at an event associated with somebody very senior at GB News.

5:28It was a Christmas party, Tim, I don't mind telling you. Mr Braverman, Raul, approached me and said, Camilla, hi, how are you? We had a little chat. Saw Suella. He said, would you introduce me to Zia Yusuf? Now, that was interesting because there had been this breakdown between Mr Braverman and reform. He had joined reform. He had kind of signalled that the Braverman household wasn't entirely Tory. back last Christmas or Christmas before by defecting from the Conservatives as a member to reform. And everyone was like, oh, well, if the husband's done it, what's the wife going to do? She's probably a bit sexist, but OK, fair enough.

6:03And then in July last year, there was a massive falling out because Zia Youssef at the time, do you remember, did a tweet where he blamed Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, who were both in the Home Office, for that granting of asylum to the Afghans who were mentioned on the data breach list. Do you remember that? And it was like, you've let in hundreds of Afghans. Why have you done this? And then Mr Braverman said, hang on a minute, Zia Yusuf. My wife wasn't involved in this. In fact, she railed against it at Cabinet. And that's the Jenrick and Braverman argument for why they should be allowed in reform, because they both argue, don't they?

6:41We called this stuff out at the time, so we can't be tainted by 14 years of Tory failure on immigration because we were there like thorns in the sides of a succession of Tory prime ministers complaining about how badly the Home Office was operating. So they'd fallen out in the summer. And then at Christmas, he wanted to see Yusuf. So I actually just said, oh, Zia, do you know Mr Braverman? And they had a little chat and all the rest of it. And now, what is it? A couple of months on, she's jumped ship. And she was very effusive about Nigel Farage. It was a bit of a love-in. Should we listen? Yes.

7:15Nigel knows about courage. You know about courage. Courage means not flinching under pressure. Courage means facing down your opponent and carrying on with steadfast determination. Courage means overcoming adversity with strength. courage means keeping your promises to your country there were a couple of things that which will be appearing in the sketch one is suella said to people uh that the mark of courage is consistency she's a defector yes it's not the most consistent thing and the other thing is telling an audience of veterans about bravery. I think people who've probably thrown themselves on a grenade are braver than someone who's just run for the European Parliament many, many times.

8:16Although Nigel has had several brushes with death. Yes, he has. It has to be said. He's actually physically very brave. He went up in a plane and crashed. And of course, he's had people attack him too. But whenever politicians talk about, do you know what courage is? I don't think it really compares. There is a degree of courage, I suppose, having been a lifelong Conservative member and having been Home Secretary. But the other thing is that I detected from her speech, this is also about retribution. Oh, definitely. So this whole, I was sacked by Rishi Sunak. Settling scores. And remember, it was because of her referring to immigration invasions and two-tier policing, which is now common parlance.

8:54But at the time, it seemed really controversial. and she has not forgiven Sunak and fellow Tories for defenestrating her. She really hasn't got over it. So yes, there's courage, but there's also revenge in this, isn't there? I asked a question at the Prosper UK event, which was branded, by the way, like an insurance company. It's a very unattractive sort of 2010 corporate branding. And I said they've done a poll showing that millions of people regard themselves as centrists and having no party. Well, hello. Everyone always says, I consider myself a centrist and no one represents me. And if you dig into their politics, you'll find out they're either a neo-fascist or a communist, right?

9:32Everyone self-defines as centrist. The point is that the definition of centrism has changed. And that's something that the wets of the Tory party, some of them have kind of recognised it, because when they were pressed on their views on immigration or net zero, it actually sounded kind of mainstream. But a lot of Tory wets still think centrism is Tony Blair. But the public has shifted to the right on issues like energy and immigration. And I think that Braverman and Jenrick get that. They're also a kind of conservative that is not narrowly defined by economic opportunity. If you listen to Prosper UK, they kept saying explicitly, we want to move away from cultural issues and onto the economy because being a conservative is all about having money in your pocket.

10:10Well, the Jenrick-Braverman people say, that's good stuff. We like money in our pockets and we believe in individual liberty, But we also believe in the nation state, which we think is under attack. Yes. And finally, the big difference between them is conservatives, big C conservatives, typically take a status quo that they've inherited and try and preserve it. So when Cameron enters government in 2010, OK, he does austerity. Fine. But when it comes to things like equalities legislation, ECHR, all that stuff, he just preserves the Blairite status quo he inherited. To Blair. Whereas what radicalised Braverman and Generic was working in the Home Office, because they realised that Blair had put in place things that make it impossible to govern as a Conservative.

10:51So if you have the ECHR, if you have all this diversity and equalities legislation, you can't do things that Conservatives want to do. So the big difference between reform and the Conservatives is this question of, is Britain broken? The Conservatives, good, soft little patriots that they are, will always find themselves saying, no, it's not. And they don't think it is. They can't bring themselves to say it. Therefore, they won't do what needs to be done to fix the country because they just preserve whatever they've inherited. Reform is the party for people who say the country is so broken that the only way we can have our country look like what it used to be and what we all used to understand Britain was is if we change things.

11:32Yes, it's conservation versus reformation. Exactly. The clue is in the name, right? The clue is in the name. It speaks for itself. And also I thought Braverburn, I mean, it's quite a clever thing to do to suggest that because I've been on the inside and I know how much these people wriggle out of their responsibilities, that by the way, when Badenock says that they'll leave the ECHR, they won't. Let's just have a listen to her rhetoric on that. Their so-called promise to leave the ECHR. It's a lie. It's a lie. Half of the Conservative members, Conservative MPs are dead against it. another group don't even understand it, and a mere handful sincerely believe that it's the right thing to do.

12:17So I'm calling time. I'm calling time on Tory betrayal. I'm calling time on Tory lies. I'm calling time on a party that keeps making promises with zero intention of keeping them. And I have to say, I agree. Do you? Because listening to Prosper UK... Well, they don't want to leave the UCHR. Well, they didn't really have a position on it. David Gork was asked about and said, I don't, but we don't yet have a position. But my point is, culturally, I knew that that morning I was with the real Conservative Party. Even though none of them are in office, the people represented there, David Gork, Amber Rudd, Andy, none of them have got an office.

12:56They either lost them or retired or whatever. But that's what the Conservative Party really is. Suella's right about that. The fact that... Badenock will hate you saying that. I'm sorry. But she's almost like the only righty left. I mean, her, Ian Duncan Smith. Yeah. You can't even really count David Davis because he does his whole civil liberties thing. Yes. I tell you who I'm watching. Mark Francois. Should we be on Mark Francois' watch? I tell you what, if anyone should have been unveiled at a Veterans for Reform event, it would be him. A defection always seems impossible until it happens. Yeah.

13:31And then we do have the problem, or Badenock now faces this problem, Like the more righties she loses, the less she can push her party into a rightward direction. And the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that the Tory party is a wet party because the only people are left are wets. And eventually people like Mel Stride are going to say to her, well, we're the only people backing you. Yes. So why don't you just do what we want to do? Yeah, they'll make the argument, look, the Liberal Democrats now are really left wing. Yes. So actually with a really right wing reform party, we can just sit in the centre of this.

14:02And some members of the public, by the way, in the blue wall, those three million that just couldn't bear to vote, you do have a lot of conservative supporting Boris Johnson haters that don't like Jenrick either. You have got this rump. This is the problem for reform, though. Whatever the rump that is left of the conservatives still could, pardon the pun, conservatively poll 15, 16 percent. OK, even if they go back to that lowest of the low, 14, I think. Baden-Ock says it's 17, but one poll put them at 14. But if reform cannot get enough support and they need to do a deal with some semblance of conservatism, they're not going to be able to do a deal with a left wing rump.

14:45They might have a chance with a more right wing rump. So Farage also needs to be careful what he wishes for. Because if he picks off all of the righties and then you're left with a centrist soup run by Andy Street, they're not in a million years going to entertain a coalition with reform and then reform can't get the majority. Or if they did, it would come at a very high price, which would water down reform's offer. I mean, the blue wall versus the red wall, it's crude, obviously, to lump people into those two categories. But my feeling is there is an unresolved tension between them that has to be resolved through a general election.

15:21They just don't agree. They've not agreed. They've not liked each other since Brexit. But it was the most awkward caucus ever. That whole caucus of like, oh, you're up in the north and you supported Brexit and you're meant to be aligned by Boris Johnson with somebody in leafy Surrey who likes David Gork. How can this work? Yes. And of course, there's a similar battle going on within Labour. Polling from YouGov showing that people who are wealthy and well-educated tend to vote left. This is a problem for Labour. Yes. Because its whole raison d 'etre is we're here to support the poor and those who haven't yet enjoyed the fruits of education.

15:56And yet its chief constituency increasingly is graduates. Yes. And it's competing with Green for those voters. And the Greens can speak more to them because they've got that kind of dappy, loony... Did you see the video, by the way, of Polanski... Running. No, singing about taxing the rich. Did he sing? I've seen him run. My children showed it to me and went, what the hell is this? And I went, oh, my God, this is so embarrassing. So basically we have the Tories facing a red wall to blue wall dilemma, how to keep both on side. And we'll get on to next the divide in the Labour Party, which appears to be King of the North versus Supine Prime Minister of the South.

16:52Camilla, this is one of those occasions when nothing has happened, but it's significant. Yeah. Everyone thought when a by-election was called that Andy Burnham would put his name forward, which he did indeed do over the weekend to be the Labour candidate. The NEC then met, and then by a vote of, I believe, 8 to 1, the one person who voted on Andy Burnham's side being Lucy Powell, they voted to block his candidacy for Gorton. Now, they had a good argument on their side, which is that theoretically, if he had got the nomination and won, which I think is likely, there would have been a very expensive new election for Manchester mayor.

17:30Yes. But of course, the other argument, which is a little more self-interested, is this really would have torn the Labour Party apart because they would have had months of speculation that this by-election was a referendum on Keir Starmer because everyone knows that Burnham loathes Starmer and wants to take his job. and then if Burnham had entered Parliament, what does Labour then do with him? So in a way, Keir Starmer has dodged a bullet. But has he? But has he? Because he's dodged a bullet, but it seems as if there is a knife very carefully aimed for his back. Right. A sword of Damocles. A sword of Damocles, that's right.

18:05That's what it is. Hanging over his head. So Keir Starmer, having had quite a bruising and embarrassing weekend one way or another, is celebrating Burnham's night today. Was he actually in Scotland? I don't believe he was. I don't believe he was, but he or his team put out an Instagram post, which has to be seen to be believed. When I first saw it on Twitter, I thought it was one of those AI things that young people are always doing. So I went on to Instagram and checked that it's real. It's Keir Starmer sitting at a sort of MDF desk. Yes. With a plate with things like Tunnock's tea cakes on. And Tunnock's caramels.

18:40And a can of iron brew. Oh, no. And it says, to those in Scotland and around the world celebrating over a Barnes supper, I wish you a very happy Barnes night. Oh, Lord, alive. It's appalling. If PR wore a kilt, this is what it had come up with. This is a tartan clad public relations disaster. Yeah, so this is one reason why, in all seriousness, the Labour PLP is angry. because they're always being told you have to have Keir because Keir is the grown-up and Keir can do presentation. But when it comes to celebrating Burns Night, we don't have Keir in a kilt. Imagine Boris doing this. He'd be tossing a caber somewhere and quoting Rabbie Burns.

19:23Instead, he's sitting at a corporate table with some Tunnock's tea cakes and an iron brew, which is an insulting backhand compliment to Scotland. But the cherry on the cake is that sitting behind him is what looks like a blown-up photograph of an oil pipeline. If only. Most people in their offices have a picture of the family. Keir has infrastructure. Well, isn't it odd as well that there are oil pipelines that can no longer flow with oil because of what Ed Billiband is doing to the North Sea? Shall we just listen to Keir Starmer and how he explained why it was right that Burnham was blocked from standing in Gorton and Denton?

20:00Andy Burnham's doing a great job as the Mayor of Manchester, but having an election for the Mayor of Manchester when it's not necessary, would divert our resources away from the elections that we must have and that we must fight and win. And resources, whether that's money or people, need to be focused on the elections that we must have, not elections that we don't have to have. You see, the trouble is now that the damage has been done, hasn't it? It's really weird that Burnham's called the King of the North. Actually, he should be called the Queen because he's manoeuvred the actual king into a checkmate position.

20:38Right. I thought that was a reference to his Max Factor eyes. Well, to be fair, can somebody let us know which mascara he is using and can we order it in bulk? We had this discussion at GB News. It's with Elizabeth Taylor and Cleopatra. My producers won't mind me saying there was quite a lengthy discussion before my show on Sunday about how good-looking Andy Burnham was. Bessie Davis eyes. Is he the best-looking person in Parliament and all this? I won't give you the conclusions that were drawn, but just it was a subject of discussion, which I don't think has ever been one concerning the actual prime minister.

21:09So there's that little sexy edge to the man. But apparently it's not necessarily my cup of tea, but then generally socialists aren't. I digress because he's checkmated him completely, hasn't he? If he blocks him, he looks weak. And we all know why this was happening. I had Sarah Jones, bless her, the policing minister on, insisting that Andy was doing this for the good of Gorton and Denton. I said, what? He's demoting himself from mayor of Manchester because he wants to go and replace Andrew Gwynne. What are you talking? This is a naked leadership bid. Oh, no, it isn't. Andy Burnham is the most disingenuous person in British politics.

21:45So today he is putting out that I don't know all the fuss is about. I don't know why you journalists keep asking me about this. We keep asking because he submitted his name. I know. What's the joke? Should we tell the joke? a Starmorite, a Corbynite, a Brownite and a Blairite walk into a bar in Manchester and the barman says, hello Andy, what can I get you? So he's all over the shop. And the thing to do if he wanted to get into Parliament was to spend the year saying, I want to lend my talents and my expertise to the team. He hasn't done that. He spent the year briefing against the Prime Minister and he does have a constituency of support and it's based on two things.

22:25one, authenticity, this feeling that Andy is northern to his fingertips. And in the Labour Party, northern is a byword for authentic. It's always counted against Kirstama that he comes from Surrey, which I think is very unfair. But if you want shorthand for a real person, they've got to come from the north. All ads nowadays in Britain are a female voice from the north. Sure, and they needed to have been fed on coal as a child and lived in a cardboard box in the middle of the street. But the second thing is, if you want to know what the Labour grassroots are angry with Keir about, look at what Andy Burnham talks about.

23:02So it's we need to be a bit closer to Europe. He's uncomfortable with some of the immigration stuff. He wants to nationalise everything. He wants public services to be more publicly controlled and cheaper for people. So there is a sense that Andy would step in and be the authentic voice of what Labour is supposed to be in office. Which is weird because he's been very wishy-washy in the past as to what he believes. He just pivots in accordance with anywhere that the Labour wind is blowing at any given time. Also, we have, through devolution, created a kind of a reverse pull factor. When devolution was first introduced to Scotland, all the talent moved to Westminster and that's one reason why the Labour Party collapsed up there.

23:45Anyone Scottish and Labour with any ability said, I don't want to be in the Scottish Parliament. I want to be in Westminster. And the result was they were really run by empty suits. And that's why people voted the SNP. It started to go the other way. Talented people are now running devolved bodies, be it Sadiq Khan in London, be it Andy Burnham in Manchester, be it even Tracey Braben, who I rather like, in Yorkshire. Talented. Yeah, OK. Look, I think they're personable and I think they're popular. My point is a lot of Labour's talent is now not in Parliament. But then there's disgruntlement because despite the devolution attempts, I know that Burnham was getting increasingly frustrated around the time of the last Labour Party conference at Bridget Philipson's educational reforms.

24:33That is true. Because they're demanding a kind of command and control. Right. No, you can't have free schools. You can't have academies. We've all got to be the same. because, of course, people like Catherine Burblesing were showing them up terribly, showing up the state, not being as good at running schools as, shock horror, really good headteachers. Burnham, meanwhile, is trying to do T-levels. He's trying to tailor education in Manchester to the jobs that the businesses locally are offering. And he felt like he was being really stamped on, which also explains a degree of vindictiveness, in a way, in the background, about that whole Lucy Powell versus Bridget Philipson divide when it came to the deputy leadership, which Powell obviously won.

25:12And he's also been critical of the Home Office and its policy of sending asylum seekers around the country, which is another classic provincial complaint. Why are people being sent here? Right. Why I say about the checkmate thing is that, OK, he's blocked him, but he looks terribly weak as a result of it and nobody's buying his, we are doing this because of efficiency savings idea. And second of all, it's then emboldened all of the Labour rebels. So who's out on the airwaves apart from Rosie Duffield, who we're going to speak to? not quite a Labour rebel because she's an independent, but critics of Keir Starmer have now been even further emboldened to call out his behaviour because they see him as being kind of despotic in some way by trying to cling on to power against all the odds and polling suggesting he's the least popular prime minister in history, actually.

25:57The other person who was out was Karl Turner. You know, Karl Turner is upset about trial by jury. So it's now kind of like almost enabled Labour MPs that wanted to rebel over policy doing so because they're rebelling against what they regard as this kind of Downing Street stitch-up. So the blocking has weakened him. And, of course, if he'd allowed him to stand, it would weaken him because he then knows that he is having a rival in the vein of Kemi Badenock and Robert Jenrick, nipping at his heels, wanting to unseat him. So he is in a terrible position. He might feel like he's stronger today because Burnham's been blocked.

26:36Is that the end of all this? Of course it isn't. No, it's not. And the word on the street in Westminster is that Number 10 has decided if the Prime Minister does face a challenge at some point, if the party is going to be captured by anyone, they would rather it was Wes Streeting than Andy Burnham. And someone who will be breathing a sigh of relief is Wes because he could not win a leadership contest against Andy Burnham because the party membership doesn't really like him. He probably can only get the leadership by being coronated. And that means you have to very carefully limit the number of candidates who can oppose him.

27:10And I think keeping Burnham at bay really helps him. Shall we also just briefly discuss the electoral maths? So the other problem was, what if Andy Burnham had chicken-runned to Gorton and Denton, only to discover that because the vote on the left is split three ways, the rise of the Greens, Labour doing OK, obviously Gwynn won with a majority last time round, and the prospect of George Galloway running towards the seat because, oh my goodness, it happens to have some Muslim voters in it. That could have split the vote on the left and then let reform in. And actually, that is the one area where you could feasibly consider Badenock holding back.

27:51The Conservatives aren't going to get voted in in Gorton and Denton. I mean, you'd literally sooner vote in a donkey, OK? So therefore, you could have seen reform surge, win that by-election and make Andy Burnham look very stupid indeed. I'm willing to bet Burnham would have won it and won it quite easily. Partly because the swing reform would have needed was off the charts. Well, even with the divided left. Even with the divided. Because the Greens were leading in that seat until recently, right? Maybe they could do it. But I suspect because it would have been seen as a referendum on Starmer, and that's how Burnham would have run it, let's be honest.

28:28I think Burnham would have been elected. The issue is that there then would have been a mayoral election and there the polls favour reform. So Keir Starmer would have gained a rival inside Parliament and lost this very important, perhaps it would have been like the biggest mayoralty actually that reform has yet won. Imagine, yeah, reform could have tried to get some kind of star candidate like an ex-Man United player or Liam Gallagher. Just someone really recognisable could have been parachuted into that seat for reform. Yes. Yeah. Interesting. Shall we speak to somebody who's very well connected in Labour circles, Rosie Duffield, even though she left the party in September 2024 citing a toxic environment.

29:10You'll remember, Tim, she had quite a large row with the Prime Minister over his failure to identify whether or not a woman could have a penis. She's now independent. She's in Canterbury. She's been there since 2017. But she is very plugged into the campaign to see Andy Burnham conquer Westminster. Rosie Duffield, the independent MP for Canterbury, joins us now. We've just been discussing Suella Braverman's defection, Rosie, and as you are as critical of the Prime Minister as she is and indeed Nigel Farage, and you're an independent, come on, isn't reform now beckoning? Could you be unveiled at a future reform press conference?

29:51No. I think when Dominic from the paper asked me that last week, I, in typically unfiltered fashion, said I'd rather eat glass. So, no, basically. They do know what a woman is, though, which is handy, isn't it? That is true. I have got that in common with them. Yes, that's about it, I think. On to the very serious matters that are engulfing the Labour Party right now and Burnham being blocked. The King of the North wanted to come south and he's been stopped 8-1. What do you make of this? because I think the Prime Minister's in a bit of a checkmate here. Yeah. I mean, look, he's terrified, isn't he?

30:29He's running scared. Actually, I'm not sure he does know how unpopular he is with the PLP because it's been controlled with such a rod of iron since his leadership and that's kind of crept up more and more. So if there's any dissent or even a question asked, Labour MPs are losing the whip, they're suspended, they're offered to have a slip so they don't have to vote in something they hate. That's happening all the time. So perhaps he's shielded from quite how angry his own MPs are, actually. And the public, obviously, the ratings are through the floor. If Andy Burnham had been allowed to run, and let's assume he would have won Gordon, what then would have happened to Keir Starmer?

31:10Can you guess? I think we know that Keir Starmer's parliamentary days, well, certainly as leader of the Labour Party, are pretty much numbered. but it's just a question of when. So for months and months now, people in Parliament haven't been saying if and how, they've just been saying when. And we know that two big rivals have got their campaign teams ready to go. And Andy would have been another one in the mix for the soft left left of the party. And people would have found a way. I'm not sure how, but he would have probably eventually staged a leadership contest, I would have thought. What should we make of Lucy Powell's role in all this?

31:45because she was famously elected as his deputy as Labour leader, replacing Angela Rayner following some confusion over her tax affairs. She was the only person to vote in favour of Burnham. Are we to extrapolate from the membership supporting her that indeed any candidate that she supports will in turn get supported? I ask that in relation to the attempts by others, including Rayner and Wes Streeting, to try and take on the leadership as well. I appreciate Burnham's been blocked for now, but how do you see this panning out? Because I feel like the ball is now rolling on something and it's kind of unstoppable.

32:23Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people thought that Wes would be what we call a stalking horse. So someone to sort of, you know, just take his head off, if you like. And then there would have to be a sort of membership vote for who they eventually wanted to take us into the next election. but it's so fascinating to see that Lucy Powell is kind of labelled almost as someone who's sort of opposite to the Prime Minister and the rebel kind of leader. She absolutely isn't. The majority of us see her as part of Keir's inner group. She's very, very close to Ed Miliband and just those handful of MPs that will always get a job in the front bench.

32:59It's a sort of automatic right for this particular small group. So the backbenchers, the PLP themselves, don't really see her as representing most of us or anyone, gosh, us, when I used to be in the Labour Party or my colleagues. She's seen as really kind of part of the establishment. But in the north, that's a different story because she represents the northern people that aren't represented by Keir. So it's just one of the many splinters and factions and groups who are not happy with Keir Starmer and his leadership. Very few people are. Rosie, I think a lot of voters would tolerate Keir Starmer being authoritarian if he was good at it.

33:35How do you account for the Labour leadership in his inner circle doing this so badly? Look, I didn't vote for Keir to become leader because I don't see anything leader-y about him. He's a manager, he's a technocrat, and OK, we need that to a certain degree, but he's a kind of middle manager. He doesn't lead by persuasion. Essentially, our job is a kind of sales job. He's not persuading anyone. And if you semi halfheartedly support a policy and then two seconds later, you're semi halfheartedly you turning on it. I mean, several of those in a row, it just looks farcical. Nobody calls this leadership that I know.

34:13And I think we just need a new start. We need the public looking at it going, what is going on? You know, once the policy is announced and someone adjusts their lifestyle, does their own household budget, and then that goes the other way. How's anyone supposed to know whether they're coming or going? Wouldn't it be hilarious if the next U-turn was him U-turning on blocking Burnham, even though it signalled his own demise? Oh, I've said that. By his consistency, he'll be inviting Andy Burnham to move into number 10 by the end of the year, I've no doubt. They'll be roommates. Rosie, would you return to the Labour Party if Andy Burnham was leading it?

34:50Yes, I think I'd seriously consider it if he would let me, because, you know, people like that and the NEC would probably, well, not Andy, but the NEC would probably block me at the moment because the leading faction, obviously, are the ones that I've criticised. And that's how it happens. Every time we get a new leader, they pack it with their own people from their own faction. And then there's another churn a few years later. So if you're in favour, you're in favour and you've got a chance. It doesn't seem to matter much about your own constituents. And, Rosie, would you be drawn back to the party because of, as you've said, salesmanship and leadership qualities or philosophy?

35:24Is there a philosophical offer from someone like Andy Burnham that's more appealing than Keir Starmer? I think so. I think potentially there is. The public did vote for change, although I don't believe they actually voted for Keir Starmer and this version of the Labour Party. They voted against the Tory party. In this Labour Party, you're trying to be a weird hybrid facsimile of sort of some Tory things chasing the reform vote. There's not much Labourness going on. So I think, yeah, Andy does represent that in Manchester. He's stemmed the bleeding for now. How long do you give Keir Starmer in post?

35:58How long is he going to last? He absolutely cannot last after the disastrous potential predicted May results. I think that's the absolute last minute. I don't know, will he really carry on that long? Does it have to be spelled out that clearly to him? I don't know, he doesn't seem to have seen any of the other signs, but that's the absolute last chance saloon, I would have thought. Rosie Duffield, thank you very much for joining us on The Daily Tea. Thank you. The Telegraph has done a poll of 46 ,000 readers. Blimey. 75 % say they think Andy Burnham should run. Now, I suspect it's a similar attitude to when Corbyn was running to be leader of the Labour Party.

36:39And a lot of right-wingers said, oh, he should win. Yes. Thinking he'd never stand a chance and he had dragged Labour down with him. And then Corbyn nearly won in 2017. Yeah. And likewise, Starmer has his faults, but he is basically blue labor. And on things like immigration, he is becoming more right wing. He is at least following the Treasury orthodoxy in the sense that he's keeping the bond markets happy. And he has ruled out a return to the customs union. By contrast, I think small-C conservatives have got to be careful what they wish for here. If Andy Burnham were somehow to enter parliament and somehow to become prime minister, I think we'd be heading back into the EU.

37:15He wouldn't care about the bond markets. He would spend a great deal and it might be a case of you're better with the devil, you know. Also, Angela Rayner might be his deputy and Ed Miliband might be his chancellor. Yeah. Pause for thought, isn't it? You think Starmer's bad? My God. Well, we'll let people sleep on that and see them tomorrow at 5pm.

37:47Thank you.