Nigel Farage on Makerfield: Rupert Lowe won’t be forgiven if Reform loses

0:03The Telegraph.

0:10Nigel Farage is preparing for defeat in Makerfield, saying that the Reform Party would beat any other candidate bar Andy Burnham. If Reform loses, says Nigel, because of Restore, then the public will never forgive Rupert Lowe. Is Farage right? Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tominey. And me, Tim Stanley.

0:43Tim, it's Makerfield By-Election Day. Other by-elections are available and we will discuss that in just a minute. Is it going to be a back-of-the-net moment for Andy Burnham? I say that because the unofficial anthem of the World Cup is his favourite band, Oasis's Wonderwall. We had England players, tears streaming from their eyes as they were serenaded by the crowds. Do you know the result in that match, Tim? It was 3-2. No, it wasn't. It was 4-2. There is laughter from the production team. And can I ask you... But I know who won. You know who won. England. Who were we playing? We were playing Croatia.

1:19Thank you so much. And what did you think of Thomas Tuchel's 4-2-3-1 formation? No idea what you're talking about. Right. And do you think that a pre-penalty shuffle on the spot should be banned after Harry Kane, who is our captain, had to retake his penalty after the first one was deemed illegal by the other side? Do you know what I'm talking about? A shuffle like the hot shoe shuffle. A dance. It's when a striker approaches the ball and then does a little shuffle on the spot and then kicks it in. Is that of any advantage to a player? Well, it can be of advantage because it can flummox the goalie as to whether they're going left or right.

1:56In this case, the goalie came off his line, a Croatian player came into the box. The first penalty was deemed illegal, so Harry Kane was given, which he missed. But, well, the goalkeeper saved it. So he had another opportunity to score and he did score and that set us off on a path towards victory. Excellent. Good. Right. Well, I didn't care about any of that because I had a much better event that evening, which I think eclipsed even the World Cup, which is after working here in the office, I was walking towards the station and I passed a pub. And a young man standing outside having a cigarette looked me up and down and said, hello, daddy.

2:33Right. Now, I didn't know what that meant. I went on to record The Moral Maze and I spoke to my friend Ash Sarkar. Yes. And I said, you're young. I was speaking to her friend, Aaron Bastani. There you go. Which is the Sunday showdown this week. These are the ever-decreasing circles. Yes. I spoke to Ash Sarkar and said, you're young, what does hello daddy mean? And she said, that is gay code for good-looking older man. Wow, this is... What a week you are having. Now, the problem is... What a week you are having. So obviously, I'm on cloud nine, but the thing is, here's the thing. Because I'm older, I'm losing my hearing.

3:08So rather than saying to him, thank you very much, I said, pardon? But this is, what a week you're having, because Kemi Badenock earlier this week recognised you're... Accused me of having a glow up. It's not an accusation, it's a compliment. Right. OK, there was some misunderstanding about that phrase, but we now know it's a compliment. And now a young man calls me daddy. And now somebody said, hello, daddy. But I'm quite happy to be thought of as a daddy. But does that mean there's a financial element? Possibly. So you have to keep a younger... Well, when you're older, you're always worried when someone flirts with you if they're doing it for fun or money.

3:44I can't relate to this as a married woman. I mean, is my husband flirting with me for money? It's a bit too late for that. Right. Basically, you missed the football because you were too busy media whoring on Moral Maze and then on Newsnight and actually being treated like a whore by someone at the pub. Blimey. But we knew while we were filming this news night that literally no one in the country was watching it. And that felt very liberating. I could have said anything at that point. I really could. I could have done a Jeremy Clarkson shoot the unions and I'd have got away with it. You could have goose stepped around the studio.

4:19Poor Jeremy, by the way. I hope he gets well soon. I hope he gets well soon. That's very sad news. Really sad news. And it's in line with our campaign because we are one newspaper, at least after the prostate cancer research was one of our charities at Christmas to push for this extra screening. So I think he's given that a little bit of welly, pardon the pun, with his farmer's hat on. There are other by-elections taking place today. They are. They are in Aberdeen South. Can we say it properly? Aberdeen! Sorry. We're going to get burnt down if you're not careful. Well, I used to spend many family holidays in Ballotter, so I feel I can say that.

4:52Good for you, but I don't want to give the SNP any ammunition. No. Aberdeen South, where the Tories might be competitive. Wow. Possible that we've all been so focused on Makerfield, we didn't appreciate that the story around the failure to drill and the loss of jobs could end up handing that vote over to the Tories. We'll see. OK. But it's likely to be an SNP hold. And the other seat is Arbroth and Bratty Ferry, which is, again, I think even more likely to be an SNP hold because that's strong nationalist territory. During the Scottish referendum, I was sent to report from Arbroth and was chased out of a pub by angry nationalists.

5:27So I know the area well. Tell you what, you're popular at pubs, aren't you? In different ways. A broth is famous for what is called a smoky, which is a smoked haddock. You cut off the head, you gut it, and then you smoke it over coal. And it's absolutely delicious. And you can order it in the post. My father once ordered a smoky in the post. Wow. Sounds like the kind of thing you might want to take on a camping trip if you had, for instance, a motorhome. Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm making a silly Peter Murrell reference there. Oh, very good. You missed it, Tim. Well done. I think it's interesting that none of the saga seems to have had the cut through that the opposition had hoped because SNP are, according to the pollsters, set to retain both of those seats.

6:06But let's see what happens. Which is depressing, given the scandal that you mentioned, given that it's a pooling record in government. And what's happened there is that two MPs have entered the Scottish Parliament instead, notably Stephen Flynn. So that's why those seats are coming up. But on Newsnight, we discussed Makerfield, of course. And what I will say is that privately, the Reform Party is lowering expectations. Yes, it is. Well, I think it's doing it quite publicly as well. Quite a few people are next saying, oh, it doesn't look like we're going to win this now. It's trying to frame it as we will get the best result we've ever got in a by-election in difficult circumstances.

6:42And we do speak to Nigel Farage. We did that interview earlier in the week and we're playing it out in just a moment. So stay tuned for that. But we've got a couple of really interesting developments. First of all, we've got Andy Burnham accusing reform of smear campaigns against him because of talk and reports about whether or not he might have breached lockdown back in the Covid years. This is the it's a strange story. You remember back then you only allowed a small number of people. Rule of six, was it? Rule of six. But you could have two households. Yes. God, it's confusing. But there was a fire and the fire brigade were called and it is claimed that two separate teens were seen leaving the Burnham household because Burnham has daughters and the suggestion is that they had people over.

7:31So maybe three households were involved rather than two. OK. Now, Burnham denies everything and says this is a silly pre-election stunt and also we're past the statute of limitations, so it doesn't matter either. The other thing about this, why I don't think this works well for reform, is they're developing a habit of doing the things they accuse other people of doing. Yes. We all hated lockdown rules. To invoke a lockdown rule so long after lockdown is the kind of petty, nasty thing which one would expect the left to do. Yes. Not reform. Faraj made the argument about trying to dredge up the stuff he said when he was a schoolboy.

8:10Right, exactly. That's probably past the statute of limitations, not that there were any criminal charges brought, but do you know what I mean? But again, policing of language, squeamishness, this is all stuff that you normally associate with the woke left. And I don't think it's becoming of reform to use those tactics against their opponents. Having said all that, the most interesting story of today is by our colleague Gordon Rayner about these white supremacist banned neo-Nazis that have endorsed Rupert Lowe's party. And one of the most extraordinary lines in this piece, so he's mentioning people who are on X and other social media platforms.

8:50So just to be clear, these are people in black and white on social media openly endorsing Restore. and saying that they have paid money to it. Which is important. So that includes Steve Laws, who founded a group calling for the expulsion of every non-white and Jewish person. He posted on social media that he had donated to the party. Jared Taylor, an American banned from the UK because of his extreme racist views, has become a paid-up member. Now, this is an interesting line. There's another one, Sam Melia, who was jailed in 2024 for stirring up racial hatred. Sam Wilkes, a Nazi apologist, and Simon Burkett, who was buying up land for the benefit of, quotes, the British people.

9:31Now, this is interesting. This is the line in Gordon's piece that caught my eye. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who spoke at the Oxford Union last night to protests here, there and everywhere, also known as Toby Robinson, expressed his own concerns about these people contributing to the party. He actually asked, would a black person be allowed to run for Restore? and has suggested that he thinks the party has become too extreme. Now, I'd remind you that some time ago, I wrote a piece in which I lightheartedly said that the party was attracting young men who in a different era might be wearing a brown shirt.

10:13Restore kicked off about that. Rupert Lowe accused me of slandering his membership. They contacted this newspaper. He demanded a right of reply. he spoke online about looking at other options available to him, which I took as hinting at legal redress. Here's the evidence. This is the thing. It was always there. Yes, I know. We always knew this because every time an account popped up that said I have just joined Restore, you only had to click on it to look at the various things they had posted to see that it was self-evidently true that the party has become a magnet for neo-Nazis, racists, fascists, and a lot of homophobes too.

10:56Let's not please leave that off the list. No, that's right. Also, we're not saying that because Restore attracts racists, everyone in Restore is a racist. Absolutely not. We're not saying that because we met Chris in Makerfield, the Restore supporter, who was a perfectly cogent, intelligent, father of two daughters who basically said he was supporting Restore because he felt that Farage had lost his way. However, I will say this for the Reform UK leader. His decision to expel Rupert Lowe is increasingly becoming vindicated. Now, he won't feel that if Lowe costs him this seat in Makerfield, granted.

11:32But the other thing we need to consider here is the fact that conspicuous by its absence in Gordon's piece is any rebuttal at all by low. Any suggestion that actually, oh, thank you for uncovering that these people are white supremacists. We must expel them immediately. Yes. I know because I know Gordon extremely well and he's a friend of this podcast that he will have offered Restore a right of reply. Yes. the restore response these days to any of these sorts of stories is, oh, but you're only reporting this because you want to cover up the rape gangs. Yes. We've come out with a rape gang report.

12:07You're complicit in a conspiracy. Yes, yes. And it's like, well, we know you've done great work on the rape gangs and we've covered it like any other newspaper has. Just because you've produced a report on the rape gangs doesn't excuse you from having allowed neo-Nazis to support and pay into your party, does it? No. The two aren't related. And it's a tribute to the growing significance of Restore that we're even discussing this. It is possible that they will be the decisive factor in the by-election and maker field, in which case if you're gaining that kind of attention, then you're going to come under scrutiny.

12:40Now, what reform says privately is, we're delighted because this party is attracting away all the people who might embarrass us into their ranks. And let's not forget that every time a new party on the right has emerged, people like this have entered it, infiltrated it, and done damage to it. The same happened with UKIP. The same has threatened to happen with reform. So reform is saying we're quite happy for all this to happen. So on the one hand, it's very important for reform that those people are over there and they're not in their party. The problem is, is that those people over there, there are enough of them to cause damage to reform in elections.

13:21Reform can't really try and entice those people back. No. But it's also harmed by the fact that they're over there. Now, what Restore might say, I don't want to put words in their mouth, is one thing we believe in is loyalty. And if people want to support us, who are we to say you can't support us? It's part of the woke mindset to try to police the people's thoughts and to try to say someone can support us, someone can't. But we're not in the business of doing that because we just believe in common sense and saying sensible things. But the things that some of these people have said are well beyond the pale.

13:58Yes, of course. We're advocates for free speech and freedom of expression. So people are entitled to believe what they want to believe and to support whom they want to support. Yeah. But the question is surely on Rupert Lowe, who is an elected member of parliament. He's a representative for Great Yarmouth as to whether he has any red lines when it comes to the supporters in his party. In the same way that we would, I think, demand that the Labour Party had red lines when it comes to the supporters of its party. Yes. And we called for them to enforce those red lines when Jewish MPs were being forced out by some of the anti-Semites in the membership.

14:35So we've got to have a degree of equivalence, haven't we? The demands we make of hard left infiltration into Labour, the Greens, we must also enforce on the hard right. Otherwise, we're not being equitable. And surely Lo and Co would be the first to point out some of the wrong ones on the other side. I just think it's inconsistent. Of course they would, yes. Is this a good opportunity to listen to the Nigel Farage interview? Because we do talk about this whole battle, this battle in Makerfield between reform and restore. Yes. Very quick question before you go about Makerfield, Nigel. How's this looking?

15:10We spoke before about Rupert Lowe and you told Tim and I it's a protest vote. They'll never get above 1%. One poll has put them on 7 % in that constituency. Is Rupert Lowe going to cost you this seat? Well, I'd be a seller at seven, I have to tell you. I really would be a seller at seven. We will see. I mean, if, let us just say, in a hypothetical scenario, that the difference between us and Burnham was less than the vote that Restore get, I don't think he'd be forgiven for doing it. But he doesn't care. It's all about vengeance. He just doesn't care. He's not interested. It's a nihilist campaign.

15:56But I understand why voters, I mean, because of what's happening with Elon, people on their social media feeds are seeing this restore stuff the whole time, and they're attracted to it. And I understand why they are. But I very much say, with what I had to say to you previously, that this will not last. But if reform loses a 65 % leave seat with a 97 % white majority, then the country might turn around and say, well, if you can't beat Burnham here, where can you? I think you find that we're going to get our highest percentage we've ever had in a by-election as reform. Whether it's enough, we'll have to wait and see.

16:39And Burnham enjoys one advantage. And I hadn't thought about this before. When Boris Johnson was mayor of London, everyone loved him. And then he storms the victory and suddenly people don't love him. Andy Burnham is popular. Why? Because mayors of big cities are predominantly civic, not political roles. They get to do the good stuff. They get to cut the ribbons. They get to open new buildings funded by taxpayer money. They look like local champions and heroes. So it's very, very interesting that former mayors can be popular. I honestly would say to you, if the Labour Party had put up anybody else, we'd have won it comfortably.

17:18This is going to be close. Just a quick disclaimer, though, that poll was carried out before the by-election.

17:37Nigel Farage is saying two things there. First of all, he's saying if it was anyone but our Andy, reform would be storming to victory in Makerfield. Probably true. And that's actually reflected, there was a very interesting piece in The Spectator by a guy called Andy Twelves who does some appearances on GB News. He went to various pubs and he kept on meeting people that had voted for reform in the locals but had some kind of Mancunian loyalty to Andy Burnham. And OK, it's a very small sample, but there's this general good feeling towards this guy, whether or not we like him or not. And it says a lot that Andy Burnham's Facebook ads, of which he has made 98, only two mention Labour.

18:15That's how poorly regarded the party's brand is. And the second point that Farage is making there, and I'm wondering whether he's being a little too optimistic and idealistic, is that if Rupert Lowe is blamed for costing reform this seat and paving Burnham's path to Downing Street, the public will never forgive him and he will implode. Is that quite right? That sounds like a politician who assumes the public want what he wants. Yes. And it might just be they don't have as much of an investment in reform beating Burnham as he does. Yeah. I mean, I take the point that a lot of right wing voters will go, ah, you've just split the vote and you've let in this man who's going to become prime minister and will be a socialist, etc., etc.

19:00But let's remember this. In the 2024 election, there were conservatives begging reform to stand aside in certain seats. Yes. And they refused. The reformer vote probably cost Jacob Rees-Mogg his seat. So that was pretty darn stupid. And reform's argument at the time was, we don't care. We hate the Conservative Party and we're here to offer people a choice. That's exactly what Restore says about reform. Now, you mentioned Andy 12's going into pubs. This has to be the most intensely covered by-election I've ever seen. I think more has been written about this by-election than the Spanish Civil War.

19:42And there's been some really great reporting. Will Lloyd, Tanya Gold in UnHerd. Peter Snetfangers, our old guy who's been up, our own guy who's been up there for the last two weeks. He's done a wonderful job and he tried to get a quote from the Restore candidate and they refused to allow her to speak to him. It's an extraordinary clip. but Tanya Goldnotes is something which I noticed and it's really pleasing when someone confirms what you've said but you didn't quite have the guts to say it publicly which is that the public is starting to talk more and more as if they're online what I mean by that is five or ten years ago you could reassure yourself that whatever was being said on Twitter was said on Twitter and went no further, that it was a bubble.

20:30Now you speak to people in Makerfield and they're saying the kind of stuff that is said on social media and they're not getting their news anymore from the BBC and they say to you things like, are you on YouTube? Do you have a podcast I could watch? Yes. I think there's been a decisive switch from legacy media now to online media. It took some time to happen and it's now fully happened And that means that actually what Elon Musk does now matters way more than it did a few years ago. He can shape the conversation a lot more. And that helps to explain the rise of restore. Yes. But how worried should we be about that in light of Gordon Rayner's story?

21:11I think on some level, I just feel morally neutral about it because I think it represents just a change in the technology and the media that was inevitable. and those of us who worked in the legacy media were resisting it, can't stop it, it's happened, just accept it, go with it. I think one good thing about it is there's a degree of political literacy in this by-election which I've not seen in previous campaigns. It used to be far more the case that you'd speak to people and one in two would say, I just don't care, I'm not involved, I don't know the issues. Much less of that now. So ITV with Robert Peston did a focus group in which the people they had on, and admittedly they've chosen people who are articulate, have got something to say on telly, but they had really clear opinions and they were opinions which match very well with the kind of debates that are happening online.

22:00It has been pointed out, for instance, that a lot of Restore's support is being generated off Facebook. Yes. People are responding to what Rupert Lowe writes or is written for him as much as the videos. That's really interesting. So there's a degree of engagement there that we didn't have before. Of course, the downside is that it also means that extremist content has much wider reach than it does before. And because the legacy media, for all its faults, does things like we've just done of saying, here's the problem with the person who said this. Yeah. Instead, people are just getting it from the horse's mouth and they're not hearing context.

22:39They're not hearing nuance and they're not necessarily getting pushback or correction. Well, there is no journalistic scrutiny. If Rupert Lowe wants to put up a video of him opining the state of things for five minutes, that's great. But it's just a monologue. The whole reason why we wanted him on this podcast is to ask him questions like, do you think it's a good idea to have a white supremacist banned neo-Nazis supporting your party? And of course, he's resisted that because in his mind, he'll be saying, look, I've got X million followers in social media. Why do I need to do any of this? But speaking as a journalist, that is so dangerous for our democracy, because what is the point of these people who are garnering huge amounts of support?

23:21This is my argument about Tommy Robinson. If you want to represent and unite the kingdom, run for office, do it properly. And then we can all question your ideas, ideals and all the rest of it. Yes, that's how it should work. This isn't just an unchallenged soapbox. What's the point of that? Yes. And we get comments all the time saying, why don't you have Lo on the show? We've invited him. We have asked repeatedly. We've invited him. He's declined to do it. I'm afraid he's frit right now. I don't know what it is. I mean, he can correct us. I mean, he thinks you're a reform apparatchik and that I'm a Tory stooge.

23:55Right. OK. But why wouldn't you have a conversation? If you're really confident in what you're saying and you think you can change Britain. Yes. I mean, I don't think Tim Stanley and Camilla Tomini pose much of a threat, do we? Anyway. But if you see, for instance, the report that he's produced on child grooming, and I've now read most of it, it is a horrific read. Yes. It's very useful in the sense that it gives voice to those people who were abused. And I think it is very well intentioned. But if you just read the report, there are important details that you might miss. some scholarly voices have questioned elements of its methodology that it takes extrapolations and represents them as fact about the numbers of people who might be being abused across the country so that's one issue another is if you read it you might not pick up on this happened over a decade ago or more than over a decade ago and restore type people will always say the media covered it up or wouldn't report it.

24:58That's not true. No. The Times exposed it. This is the other fallacy. People have got short memories. There were a number of Labour MPs, female, who first exposed it. A number of them got absolutely pilloried. Labour MPs exposed it. For writing pieces in the actual mainstream media. Norfolk, now deceased, was a member of the legacy media. He was the one who blew all of this apart for the Times. Right. Even Robinson seems to be claiming that he broke this story. No, you didn't. No. You wouldn't know about any of it if it weren't for the mainstream media. And another claim is we wouldn't be discussing it had Elon Musk not promoted it on Twitter.

25:37What? That's not true. We're discussing it more because of that. More people in the country know about it because of Elon. Fair enough. But I've been working for this newspaper now for about 12 years. I was writing leaders about the grooming gangs 12 years ago. I was writing about the grooming gangs on the Sunday Express. Right. And I started there in, what, 2003? Yeah. So it's not the journalists and the politicians that he's brought it to the attention of. It's members of the public who never knew about it before. And the language of restore and elements of the right and the left is one of constant and growing crisis.

26:15And I mentioned how well covered this by-election has been. the tone of some of the reporting has in some way validated that sense of crisis. And my own feeling was when I went to Makerfield, as I said in my sketch, it doesn't look that bad. No, it's the posh end of Wigan, Makerfield. It's the nice bit. It's a nice constituency. And there's a part of me that's starting to wonder the way that politics is covered. Are we becoming a feedback circuit of someone says the country's falling apart? Yes. And then journalists look for and find evidence that the country is falling apart. That tells the voters it's falling apart.

26:53So they vote for people who say it's falling apart. Are we in some danger here of actually accelerating something rather than pausing, acknowledging what's going wrong and looking for solutions? I mean, that was the impression that Farage gave us, but we've actually recorded a longer interview with him for the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote next week. And Farage has got it wrong before. We remember on the eve of the exit poll, just a few hours before, he said, it looks like we've lost this. And then, of course, they won it. So who knows? He could be managing expectations. Often politicians do this.

27:28They say, we're going to lose, we're going to lose to get the vote out. And who can blame him? And we know that we met a lot of shy reformers who wouldn't admit to us that they were voting for Farage. Who knows what they might do in a polling booth, but the same would apply to Restore, right? So let's see. But let's just war game quickly. What happens if Burnham wins? What's the timetable on this leadership race? I was speaking to a former MP earlier saying, well, Burnham wins and there's a new prime minister within a fortnight, isn't there? And I said, is there? No. Highly unlikely. That's not just unlikely.

27:59I would write that off as impossible. OK, but doesn't Starmer need to control this somewhat or he's going to look really even more stupid than he's already looking? Yes. Because he now, he's clearly digging his heels in. He's offered Burnham this big job in government. Sources close to Burnham have let it be known that Burnham's accepting no big job in government except the job of prime minister. Yes. Doesn't Starmer have to show some metal now and maybe on Monday say, all right, let's have this leadership challenge so that he's in control? Otherwise, next week, we could have a flurry of resignations and basically he's kicked while he's down.

28:37He loses complete control of the narrative. He doesn't look statesmanlike at all. And he's basically bungled out of office rather than controlling his own departure. OK, so we're hearing many different things about what the camps think might happen. One thing we shouldn't assume is that once he wins, Andy Burnham rides into Downing Street on a white horse. and just becomes prime minister. The prime minister has some agency in this. His opponents are calling for him to consider his position over the weekend. We know what he's like. He will be thinking, Labour has just won. On my watch. Fine. You all kept saying Andy Burnham is a big beast and he's been inside the tent.

29:19I will offer him a job. Fine. We might win the World Cup, in which case Labour might start to poll better. So he will be thinking, I don't have to go anywhere. And the notion that I need to set out a timetable for a leadership election which hasn't been triggered yet, I think he will find a nonsense. So I don't expect him to act like that. And he has more agency in this than people give him credit for. Because if a leadership election is triggered, if he does run in it, he'll be running in it as a prime minister. And he has certain powers and leverage in that process, which Andy Burnham does not.

29:57Now, another element to this is people like Wes Streeting, who are chomping at the bit. We're not quite sure if Wes is doing all this to Angle for a job or if, as he insists, he has the 81 votes necessary for him to trigger and enter a contest. He can't have him because otherwise he'd have triggered and entered it already, unless he thought, I don't want to trigger and enter it before a by-election. Yeah, and publicly he says he's been waiting for Burnham to get him because, you know, Burnham might trigger the election. So you can sort of see there's some logic there. But either way, streeting is putting pressure on him to make his mind up and go.

30:30And then we have Burnham. There are some within his camp who say, win the election, go in, put pressure on, demand a contest, trigger it, make it happen. So this is all done by conference. There are other people in his camp who are saying, that might look bad. And also, do we need to do that? Is Andy really ready just to walk into number 10 in a couple of months? No, because he doesn't know whether he thinks women can have penises or not. And he doesn't think whether we should reverse Brexit or not. And he doesn't think he wants to be in hock to the markets. So he doesn't understand the fiscal rules.

31:05Is he ready? No, he doesn't seem to be very ready, no. In a by-election, you don't irritate anyone. So you don't have any positions. Once the by-election's over, then you can come out with some positions that you want to have. So he's going to calm a suture up, is he? So he's going to wait, wait a little bit longer. and this is the crucial thing, allow authority to drain away from the prime minister. Because once Burnham is in parliament, you might see more resignations from the cabinet over policy. You might see more open complaint among MPs against the prime minister because their guy is over there in the corner waiting to go.

31:43The point is, I don't think that on Friday afternoon, Keir Starmer is going to resign Andy Burnham's going to go to the Queen. If nothing else, that's just not constitutionally and machinery-wise the way it works. And let's just imagine this for a minute. If reform wins, Keir Starmer remains prime minister till the next general election. If reform wins, yeah. It's embarrassing for him. He is a Labour PM who has just sacrificed a long-standing Labour seat to Nigel Farage, but in the process he's eviscerated his main rival's premiership hopes. He then has to go back to Manchester, drown his sorrows on Canal Street.

32:27Where it is important where there's going to be a Manchester mayor election and they have fiddled the voting system so that Labour will stand a better chance. They're moving towards a kind of PR system rather than a first-past-the-post. Even so, they're worried they're going to lose Manchester. Yes, so that would be the biggest embarrassment ever for Burnham. Yes. You're conceding on a stage alongside Count Binface and you've lost your Manchester King of the North. Yes. Position. Yes. But then I think it does cement Starmer's position as prime minister because the internal Labour membership voting, which YouGov had put at 36 percent Burnham, 36 percent continuity Starmer.

33:11Yes. And I think that's predicated on the fact that Labour backbenchers are quite happy with Starmer because they could just push him around in any direction and he caves at the earliest opportunity. And all the other candidates, including Streeting and indeed Rainer, your bestie, are on single digits of support. Yeah. They'll think better the devil you know. Labour MPs are convinced that the problem is not Labour, it's not their policies, it's the Prime Minister and his inability to sell them. That is supported in part by the focus groups and by what we've seen and what other journalists have seen, Will Lloyd said the reaction to using Keir Starmer's name in Makerfield is visceral.

33:51People actually physically recoil. They win. He is despised. But if Burnham loses, Starmer can reasonably say to his backbenchers, it's not just me. No. If Burnham cannot win, the problem is with all of us. And there's no point changing your leader because, look, the public doesn't like any of us. Even the most popular person in his own backyard couldn't win. so it definitely strengthens his position we will be bringing you all of this tomorrow morning we're going to go to the news podcast awards this afternoon where we are nominated for scoop of the year we can come back as award losing journalists yet again we're nominated for our news night scoop you know the producers also doctored a second trump speech which was a great story that was largely orchestrated by john our producer who is sitting producing this episode So the three of us are going, you're in linen, I'm in a dress.

34:47And what was the programme that was accused of misrepresenting the president? It was Newsnight. And last night when I was on Newsnight, one of the producers came up to me and said, hang on, didn't you produce that story? It said we misrepresented Donald Trump and created this global scandal and nearly brought down the BBC. And I smiled and said, yes, I'm up for an award tomorrow for it. So we look forward to losing that award. And then I'm going to some sumo wrestling just because, you know, I've got some time to fill. We're going to stay overnight in a hotel around the corner from the newsroom so that we can get up very early and do a Makerfield by-election result special, which we're going to push out as soon as possible tomorrow morning.

35:29So do look out for that because the Daily Tea will be dropping far earlier than 5 p.m. And as I mentioned earlier, I had a right-to-left showdown with Aaron Bastani. and it's quite interesting to hear his views on luxury communism and me, I've got to be honest, completely tearing them to shreds. Such funness, it really is. You must join me for the next one. So there we have it, our next podcast reacting to the by-election result tomorrow morning and then you'll have more Daily Tees over the weekend, including the Sunday showdown.

36:08Thank you.