Starmer premiership on life support as Streeting resigns

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0:44It's finally happened. Wes Streeting has resigned. After 24 hours of will he or won't he challenge Keir Starmer for the leadership, the health secretary has quit with a damning critique of the prime minister. The Telegraph's chief political commentator Ben Reilly-Smith brings us the very latest. And does the devastation of Keir Starmer's leadership, potentially leading to our sixth Prime Minister in seven years, prove that Britain really is ungovernable? I ask a friend of the podcast, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley.

1:26This is a special edition of The Daily Tea At time of recording, 1.45pm Wes Streeting has resigned as Health Secretary Camilla Tomini has chosen quite a day to undergo the knife We wanted to give you some instant reactions So I'm now joined by Ben Riley-Smith who is The Telegraph's chief political commentator. Ben, what the hell just happened? Dramatic. He did it via a two-page letter to Keir Starmer that he published with no additional words on Twitter. Suddenly, those journalists who had notifications on suddenly thought, oh my God, West Streetings tweeted. And yes, he resigned. He did a long justification for it.

2:03It included a bit where he said, I've essentially delivered as health secretary, waiting lists are coming down, etc. He said, essentially, I've got to act in the national interest. He pointed that nationalists are now heading up Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish devolved administrations and that the threat of reform had to be challenged. He was pretty devastatingly critical of Keir Starmer personally. He said, we need vision. We've got a vacuum. We need direction. We have drift. We have drift. Yeah. So that is very personally saying, I do not believe you are the man who should be leading us as a party and us as a country right now.

2:45He then said he was relining, indicated that he told the Prime Minister that on Tuesday morning. He then had this interesting line about the leadership contest. Well, there's two things to say about the leadership contest. First, he has not in that letter or immediately afterwards said, and therefore I am launching a leadership challenge. I want or here are the ATMPs I need to back me to trigger it. and secondly he said I want the discussion i.e. the contest that is likely coming to be broad and to have lots of candidates and that seems to be an indication that he's saying I think Andy Burnham should be allowed to run given the chance to get a by-election and get back into the House of Commons.

3:26Now this is a surprise because presumably what we thought Westreating always wanted was a short contest while Andy Burnham was outside of Parliament So we thought that he started this with the intention of collecting the 81 names that you need for a leadership challenge to the prime minister, and then not just resigning, but announcing, I am going to run myself. But that's the bit that's missing from this letter. Yeah. And you could possibly read that a couple of different ways. The first is that they were struggling to get the 81 names. It's 80 plus the candidate themselves because they can nominate themselves.

4:05And you've seen that playing out behind the scenes. There've been reports that Streetings camp have been approaching people who signed the supportive Starmer letter to say, will you flip? Clearly, number 10 believed they didn't have the numbers or wouldn't have the balls, frankly, to go through with the putsch, which is why Keir Starmer did that kind of put up or shut up, trigger a contest if you want to. but I'm not going anywhere message on Tuesday. So that is one open question about did they ultimately not have the numbers? I mean, there are other readings of it. One of them is just if you follow through the street in camp's belief that they hope there's a contest, they hope they win, if they hoped Burnham wasn't part of it, would that really be legitimate and stabilising in the long term?

4:47It's clear from the polls that Andy Burnham is the most popular of the big names who will run for the Labour leadership, potentially. Yes. He's in this weird position where he can't run because he's not an MP, so he needs to find a seat to get back into the House of Commons. I think Streeting has accepted that it just looks so delegitimate, and ultimately if he became PM in those scenarios, possibly so destabilising, not to have Burnham in the contest, that it's not realistic that you can do this too clever by half idea that you go quick and try and keep it out. And obviously there's the gamble that maybe, if you have that position, as Streeting does appear to you now, that Andy Burnham finds a seat, triggers the by-election, loses the by-election.

5:27I mean, he's looking in Manchester, which reform stormed. He's possibly looking in Liverpool and there were signs of reform picking up votes there as well in the council election. So maybe Streeting has decided there is no prospect of me becoming PM and pretending Andy Burnham isn't a thing out there. So when the leadership comes, I'll go for it. Let's see if he wins the by-election and then I might be able to beat him in the campaign anyway. So if a West Streeting coup d 'etat looks less likely, what does seem to emerge from this wreckage is a new consensus among the challengers to Starmer for the need for a timetable.

6:02Yes. So it had been in recent days, we assumed, the team's treating position that they didn't want a timetable. They wanted a speedy contest because then they could keep Abburnham. that position now seems to have changed or been clarified and streeting is behind this give us an orderly timetable request so then when you step back and say okay who also has that position well pretty much all of the hundred plus mps who have gone public calling for the resignation all of the trade union movement who have put their names to a letter saying kirsten we don't think you're gonna be leader uh lead us into the next election i.e let us know when you want to step down because you have to before the next election uh some people around the cabinet table, reportedly Ed Miliband, Shabana Mahmood, possibly the foreign secretary, Edeck Cooper.

6:49So suddenly it really begins to mount up. I think you would say, going slightly further than what we know so far, there is probably a majority, if not a sizable majority in the parliamentary Labour Party of people who think Keir Starmer will not fight the next general election and therefore it's probably in its best interests at our timetable. So I think now for the next 24, 48 hours, the big question is, does Keir Starmer accept that political reality? And despite all his stubbornness this week and his insistence, he'll go on. And I'm sure a lot of personal pain and frustration at how his colleagues are acting and say, OK, look, fundamentally, this is unturnable in the medium term.

7:26And I will bow to pressure and lay out a timetable. On the other hand, as of right now, no one's come to him with 81 signatures and said, I am challenging you for the leadership. True. So if his position at the cabinet meeting was, you haven't come to me with the signatures yet, so I'm not going to do anything, he might just repeat that for the next 48 hours and say, put up or shut up. If you really want me gone, one of you has actually got to come forward. Yeah. And that remains the weakness in the vast group of critics among MPs of Keir Starmer's leadership, is they are not unified around one candidate.

8:02And the formal Labour Party rules to trigger a contest is you need one name with 81 signatures next to it. And that is very, very hard to get still. Looking over the letter again, obviously he's able to crow about the NHS statistics that came out this morning, which add weight to his argument, I'm one of the most effective ministers. So people might want to remember that if a contest comes along. But there's also some stuff about reform that I found fascinating, because I'm always frustrated with Labour that none of them can tell me what motivates them. What is their worldview? And in this bit, he sort of identifies the biggest threat, which is, quote, a dangerous English nationalism represented by Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

8:45This represents both an existential threat to the future integrity of the knighted kingdom, but Reform UK also represent a threat to the values and ideals that have made this country great. Progressives across our country understand this threat and our responsibility to confront it, but they are increasingly losing faith that the Labour Party is capable of rising to our historic responsibility of defeating racism and offering hope that Britain's best days lie ahead through social democracy. Now, this goes to the heart of what to me is Labour's confusion. On the one hand, Britain is a progressive country.

9:21On the other hand, it's full of bigots who threaten to destroy it. On the one hand, we've got to win back reform, people. On the other hand, anyone who votes reform is voting for, I infer, a racist party. So either reform voters are themselves racist or they're thick and they have been conned by racists into voting for them. I mean, this is a very strange pitch, but it's a pitch which does make sense when you're selling it to Labour because that is the way a lot of Labour activists see it, that the greatest threat is reform. Yes. Well, there's a couple of things going on there. Number one, this contest will fundamentally boil down to I am best placed to beat reform.

10:01Yeah. That's going to be the big question and every candidate will have to show they are best placed. And secondly, yeah, you are going to see this debate, as we saw in the wake of the locals, is do you tack left predominantly to try and hoover up those voters who have gone over to the Green Party? Do you tack right to the centre ground and try and win back? former Tories and those who are kind of moving to reform? Do you somehow do both as Keir Starmer was trying to imply in his wake? And therefore, if you are trying to win back reform voters, how much do you dial up or dial down the rhetoric?

10:36Remember Keir Starmer got into this problem when he did his tough on reform speech at the last Labour conference. And from memory, I think unthought through when he was interviewed by Laura Koonsberg in the big Sunday interview at the start of the conference, he said, yes, I do think some reform policies are racist. And then for the next days, it was a debate about, well, OK, are you saying people who vote reform are racist? Yeah. To which he said, no, no, no, no, I'm saying some of the policies I think are racist, but the people who support them aren't racist. And you get into quite a difficult rhetorical hole there.

11:06So in this contest, there'll be a big debate about how tough to be on reform and how tough to be on reform voters and where you draw the line. A very left-wing journalist, very left-wing journalist, said to me, where's streeting is someone who's been campaigning his whole life to run a party that will never elect him. And if that seems a little unfair, we have data of Labour members' voting intentions from Labour List. And this is Starmer versus various candidates. Starmer versus Streeting. Starmer would win 53 % of the vote. Streeting, just 23%. But this is not a reflection of Starmer's strength.

11:45is a reflection of how unpopular where streeting is. Because Starmer versus Andy Burnham, Starmer gets just 28 % of the vote and Burnham gets 61%. Why doesn't the Labour movement like where streeting? Because fundamentally they are more to the left than where the parliamentary Labour Party is and much more to the left than where the country is. I think often in, use that phrase, midterms, although that's kind of an American import, but we're now using it in the middle of the way of a British Prime Minister's term, you often get this frustration from the party that they're not doing, with Labour left-wing things enough and with the Tories right-wing things enough.

12:23And so if there's so much frustration that you ditch a party leader and you try and replace them with a new one, often the membership are in this position, which is, I want us to be more like what we really believe in our values and our instincts and less pushing for the centre ground, as most Prime Ministers do, because they're representing the whole country, not their party base. so we saw it four years ago when it was Rishi Sunak versus Liz Truss Liz Truss well to the right Rishi Sunak endlessly said red meat Tory things and got elected and I suspect the dynamic for this race will be a membership pissed off frankly that this government is not being Labour enough and looking at the candidates and thinking who is going to be really Labour and to throw one more set of stats at the listeners I went back after the Angela Rayner news that she's been cleared by the HMRC Labour List and left-leaning website does polling of members where they asked them on each cabinet minister and their approval rating.

13:16I went back to August when all the main contenders were in the cabinet. Ed Miliband was one, Angela Rayner was two, where Streeton was the 17th most approved of cabinet minister from Labour members. So all of the indications we have is that the membership does not favour him over another left-wing candidate. Right, right. Okay, well, to take Angela Rayner, her polling is a lot closer. Rayner would win 45 % against Starmer on 41%. Now, Angela Rayner had some good news, it seemed, today. She's managed to beat the HMRC, which to me almost makes her electable in its own right. We reported last year that she had failed to pay£40 ,000 in stamp duty when buying a new home in Hove, Brighton.

14:03She referred herself for an investigation. She had to resign as Deputy Prime Minister. She now says that she has been cleared of that. She has paid the money back, but she has not had to pay a fine. Is this her out of the woods? This has put her back in contention? Well, it's firstly worth saying our reporting has been vindicated because she has paid back the exact sum we said she had overpaid. She did indeed owe the money. And also, it's unusual when you owe money to the HMRC that you never pay any fine. I don't personally understand that. I went through the Dartford tunnel and I didn't pay and I got fined.

14:39I'm sure the HMRC is tougher than Dart charge. But anyway. And that was short of 40 grand than you were in the cabinet at the time. No, it all comes down to the judgment, two judgments they made. A, she wasn't deliberately avoiding tax, but B, more importantly, she had not been, quote unquote, reckless. Right. She had sought advice, but she says the advice was wrong. Yes. And I can see today some tax experts are raising their eyebrows at that and saying, so I think the phrase is careless rather than reckless. Right. That she, there's an argument to say she had been careless and that the people she consulted had said, look, you probably need to go to a specific tax advisor to do this and whether she did that or not.

15:20But anyway, setting aside the rights and wrongs of their conclusion. Yes, she's massively out of the woods politically. If HMRC had said, what you did is so bad that we are punishing you with a fine, that would have been a much more tricky political position. And the timing of it, just as all this is beginning to kick off, kind of frees her up to run if she wants to. And the big question in Labour left politics is if Streeting's going for it and Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, is locked on the outside because he's not yet an MP, who will be the left's standard carrier? to take on streeting.

15:53Will it be Rainer? She is now more free to take up that position if she wants to. Will it be Ed Milban? Will it be someone else? She was able to do a sort of Princess Di style interview with ITV. They seemed to be sitting in a hotel room and it was all very soft focus and how are you feeling? Sounds like the Taj Mahal or something. Exactly. And of course, she brought up, she had to talk about her son as well. And all of this will have emphasised to Labour members this idea that the media ganged up on her. And so that really plays to her strength because that's a real paranoia among Labour activists, that the right-wing media is always coming after them and it will look to them as though she has proven them wrong.

16:31Last year at the Labour Party conference, we cornered West Streeting and at that time, Angela Rayner had just resigned and we asked him what he thought about her. And you might remember that conference. He began the calls for her to return in the future with his speech. And he said to her, I think she's great. I want her back on the team. We need all of our best players on the pitch. And she is someone who's fought for everything she's built in her life. She is someone whose values, I think, have driven a number of big successes of this government so far. And you saw the reaction from the crowd.

17:04You know, we need her back playing a part and finding her voice again. Are their camps in touch with each other? Could there be any deal between them? I think you've got to say there could be any deals between any camps broadly. And we reported before Christmas, I think, that Wes Streeting had been reaching out to Angela Rayne and said, look, why don't we do a joint ticket all their camps had? I mean, I wouldn't underestimate the enmity between the soft left, which is this kind of ill-defined bunch of MPs to the left of the Labour Party and Wes Streeting, because he's seen as the ultimate Blairite.

17:38He was incredibly critical of Jeremy Corbyn. And allied at one point to Peter Manilson, although he's tried to dispel that. Yes, and he's lent some private healthcare provision to bring down waiting lists. I mean, you know, Labour is such a factional beast. And there is a big chunk of people on the left who are anybody but street in camp. And certainly people around Angela Rayner in that position. What about Burnham? What are we waiting to hear on him? Well, with Burnham, it all connects to the question is if there's a contest, how long it takes. So under the scenario that the Prime Minister comes out and says, OK, I accept I've lost everybody's confidence.

18:14I'm laying out a timetable maybe it'll be three months and yes if Andy Burnham triggers a by-election we'll give him the go ahead so it depends on the timing thing if there's a contest quick he's going to struggle to get it and if there's a longer contest he might be able to find a seat it all really comes back to that simple idea that he needs to find a by-election which means you need a Labour MP to resign who is supportive of you in an area that you might win and then you need to win the by-election which is very very hard when you look at what happened When approached by journalists, some of them have been sort of saying, I am not stepping down, which doesn't mean they're not.

18:50I mean, it means I'm not going to do it right now. Yes. But they might suddenly change their mind. They might decide in the future. When the slightly ludicrous cycle of Burnham allies saying we definitely found the seat or seats. And then journalists trying to work out what those seats might be. And then journalists going to those MPs and then those MPs saying, well, hang on, no, I'm not going to step down. Some of them might be genuine. Some of them might be using clever semantics, as you suggest. and therefore journalists going back to Burnham Maller saying, where are these seats? This is what politicians do.

19:17They use the media in briefing wars sometimes to make something happen that wasn't necessarily going to happen. So in the case of Weir Streeting, everyone's demanding, we've got the numbers and therefore everyone's demanding, Starmer, that he sets out a timetable. They possibly didn't have the numbers, but by constantly saying and therefore everyone's demanding a timetable, they might have made that happen. And that is a good reminder to listeners, no matter how excitable we get in the Westminster bubble to always treat the allies of X say this or friends of X say Y to treat what they're claiming with quite a degree of salt because there may be an advantage to those individuals to get information out there without saying it publicly.

19:55We are at the stage in the race. It always comes when a soldier appears on the horizon. Al Cairns, Minister for Defence. We had in the past Dan Jarvis. We had Tom Tugendhat. Tom was a little more substantive, although when he first ran he'd only been sitting on the chairing the foreign affairs committee who on earth is al cairns does he really stand a chance well he's a former soldier he seems very impressive in terms of charisma when he speaks he's doing these quite impactful um constituency visits where he puts up videos i mean the slightly mad thing is he has not yet been an mp for two years yeah and it appears he genuinely thinks he should be prime minister right normally you are a junior minister for a period, almost always he'd been in the cabinet for a large chunk of time.

20:37So that you may interpret that as thinking he's kind of getting his name known for the next contest. There was this brilliant, again, off the record source quote that said he's not going to trigger a race, but if somebody files the starting gun, he's not afraid of gunfire. Of course, just sounding like a Republican congressman. It's the sort of thing John McCain would have come out with in the 2000s. And you're quite right, we're likely to see a number of people announce that they are considering running. Just a signal to those contenders who are actually running, I am interested, I'm a power broker, you must pay attention to me.

21:12Yeah, I've got the scars on my back of many Tory leadership races. And my main takeaway is that anybody who at any point is thinking about it will probably chuck their hat in the ring. Because why not see how it plays out for a couple of weeks? And if it doesn't work, then fine the challenge of the labor contest is that 81 np mark is one in five mps and the starma rights in 2021 deliberately raised it very high to make sure a hard left jeremy corbyn type politician could never get across the line yeah so it is now pretty hard to progress to the members vote and then finally on the list we have ed milliband against starma starma would get 39 99%, Miliband would get 46%.

21:55So he is quite popular with the grassroots. Yes, it may be tricky for tell grassroots to get their head around, but Miliband is the darling of the Labour members, I think partly because... Environmentalism. Yeah. Because they feel he was robbed in 2015. Yeah, and I think, you know, and this is probably fair, he is someone who seems to have a vision in his patch for what he wants to do. It's pretty bold. It's pretty out there, and he's pushing ahead with it in terms of his net zero drive, and it is incredibly controversial. that he is doing something he appears to believe in with vigor and gusto.

22:26And not a lot of other Labour cabinet ministers can claim that, I think. I'm starting to wonder if the person who wields the knife doesn't wear the crown. I don't know where I've heard that before, but in the case of Wes Streeting, does this confirm the curse of Michael Heseltine, who was running against Margaret Thatcher, brought her down, but didn't win the title himself? because in politics, even if people don't like the king, they really dislike usurpers. They dislike people who appear disloyal because if he's disloyal to him, how can we trust him? But they also don't like people who trash the brand of their party in public and spread chaos.

23:06Well, there's an endless debate in Westminster about whether that cliche holds or not. People point to Margaret Thatcher who brought down Ted Heath and obviously went on to be prime minister. Gordon Brown spent years undermining the guy next door and eventually got the job. And Rishi Sunak, you can read either way, he stabbed Boris in the back, didn't become prime minister. But then he did seven weeks later when Truss implated. And again, in the case of West Streeting, we shouldn't rule him out, even if this time it doesn't happen, because Rishi Sunak took two goes to do it. And again, in his case, the party preferred Liz Truss.

23:40The wider party liked her and her economics. the insiders preferred Rishi Sunak and it took the failure of Liz Truss for the insiders to finally get their own way that could happen here yep and it's just where from the most important dynamic is the membership and where the membership are and membership polling can be quite dodgy to be honest because it's quite hard to identify members who are still active so ultimately the key question is where are the members not the great machinations about who's backing who in in the parliamentary party that we're going to see playing out presumably quite soon Ben Reilly-Smith, thank you very much Thanks Tim Coming up next, this could lead to our sixth Prime Minister in seven years We're joined by Jacob Rees-Mogg who's been on this rodeo many times before under the Tory party and ask him, has our country become ungovernable?

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25:45Jacob Rees-Mogg, thank you very much for joining us again on The Daily Tea. How are you? Very well. All the better for coming on in this exciting political time. It's thrilling, isn't it? So my first question to you, Jacob, is, of all these potential candidates, Angela Rayner, Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, Keir Starmer, let's not forget him, and now Al Kearns, we'll come on to that which of these would you rather have a pint with? Angela Rayner would be by far the most fun several I think everyone will get frightfully annoyed with me and they do whenever I say nice things about Labour people on my YouTube thing anything of that kind but actually of those candidates I don't really know Andy Burnham at all I don't know Keir Starmer I was on a select committee with West Streeting and I've bumped into Angela Rayner over the years.

26:35West Streeting and Angela Rayner are perfectly friendly, respectable people in their way. And I'd be quite happy to have a pint with them or a nice glass of claret, whatever your choice would happen to be. They're not weird, strange people. They are effective politicians. Angela Rayner is a charismatic politician. West Streeting, probably more administratively competent than Angela, thinking interesting things, not having done very much, but interesting things about the health service. And so one shouldn't write them off just because they are political opponents. And you've left out, of course, Ed Miliband, who is a highly civilised man.

27:16Yes. I've always liked Ed Miliband when I've met him one-on-one. And as for West Streeting, I feel I've been a bit cruel this week in my sketches. You're very funny. I know, but I'm also fighting a wisdom tooth coming through. It's all happening for me and Britain at the moment. And one thing I would say about Wes is he is a committed Christian. He's a very involved Anglican parishioner. The reason why I asked you that question is because while this psychodrama is playing out, the British economy is suffering and pubs are really being hammered by Rachel Reeves' policies. And as part of the Telegraph Save Our Pubs campaign to mark National Pub Day this Saturday, we have teamed up with Renegade Brewery to create our very own Telegraph Ale.

27:55We should really have had it here. We don't. You've given us a glass of water instead. I've given you a big glass of water. But it's in a Telegraph Save Our Pubs glass. We have lots of merch. We have mats for beer and mats for pub bars and things like that. So we've got everything. And I'm wearing a Save Our Pubs t-shirt for those who are listening. But the ale is limited edition and will be served exclusively at hundreds of pubs across the country while stocks last. If you want to claim your free pint of Telegraph ale, Please go to telegraph.co.uk forward slash support your local. That's all one word, support your local.

28:34Of course, you have to be over 18. And we will put all this in the link in the episode description. The first thing I want to know from you, Jacob, is what's it like to be at the centre of this storm? Because you've been through this with the Tories, not once, but three times. Well, I've been on different sides of it. The first time I was not in the West Streeting position because I wasn't trying to put my own name forward, but I was trying to get rid of Theresa May. And I had exactly his problem. I couldn't seem to get the numbers. They came eventually. But we had people, I was doing this with Steve Baker, and I announced she must go, we must have a vote of no confidence.

29:17This is at the height of Brexit when Theresa May was infuriating her backbenches with her negotiations with Europe. That's right. And it became obvious that she couldn't get a deal through Parliament, that it didn't have support from the Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour was going to oppose it. but she'd also lost the confidence of the Conservative Party because she'd promised that no deal is better than a bad deal and Brexit means Brexit. And then she came back with a deal that was essentially a complete surrender to the European Commission. And so I called for a vote of no confidence in her.

29:53And we had at least the number of people having said they would send in letters. And then of course they didn't. So I was stood there to be very stupid when the letters didn't come in. They came in after about a week or 10 days. And why do you think people would say to you one thing and then do another? Well, because it was secret, which of course this isn't. They could say they would do it and you never knew whether they had or not. And they could position themselves, if there was a new leadership that came in, they'd be ready because they could say, oh yes, we put a letter in early. We said we'd put a letter in early and we did.

30:29and if it didn't all go wrong, they could carry on with whatever position they had. So people have their own motives for doing things and some people just like stirring things up. So you find it's much harder to get over the hurdles than it initially seems. And sometimes you were linked to leadership campaigns or you were defending an incumbent prime minister. What's it like to go out and defend a cause that you suspect is dead? Um, it's quite an interesting intellectual challenge. And it's, I love doing it. Basically, Boris's press team would only ever let me out when things were very difficult to do the morning round and stuff like that.

31:13The thing about the morning round is you're in trouble with the Downing Street press office if you quote, make news, unquotes. And I had a tendency to make news answering perfectly routine questions and sometimes found the government line to take extremely boring and varied from it. But when Boris was in trouble, they were quite happy for me to go out. And then I'd say things like he should carry on longer than Robert Walpole. You've got to enjoy doing it. And you've got to put as good a case as you can. And I think Kyle was doing it well earlier in the week. He did a very respectable job of defending Keir Starmer, probably knowing that Starmer's toast.

31:55But we shouldn't assume that he really thinks what he's saying. We shouldn't assume that he thinks Starmer can survive. Yes. I think you should assume that he wants him to survive. Yes. I certainly wanted Boris to survive, but obviously could read the politics of it as well as anybody else. And it looked increasingly unlikely. Yes. But I thought if I could help him survive, and sometimes things change, it was worth doing. So I expect Peter Carr wants Starmer to carry on, but he's not a stupid man. He would recognize that it's very difficult. That's an element of politics that the public finds frustrating.

32:29People saying one thing while thinking and knowing another. Well, they only think they don't know the other. Right. And these are always, you're dealing with possibilities. You're not dealing with certainties. Yes. And if the defense, not just by you, but by others is the best defense. Yes. You can change the outcome. Yes. But if you go out and say, yeah, of course, he's finished, then you create the circumstance you don't want. Precisely. So you have to. It's like politicians before a general election have to say. No coalition. That they will win the election. Yes, and we will never go into a coalition.

33:07That's right. You can't go into an election saying, we're about to lose. I'm fighting this to win it. Yes, indeed. I even said that in Central Fife. If I knew, of course, I'd lose by miles, but you can't say that. Yes, I detect a mood among the electorates. It's bad form. I don't believe in polls. It's so much better on the doorstep. Whenever people say that, you know that they're finished. Yeah. So from the point of view of the prime minister, he's got to say and perhaps believe, I am going to fight and I'm going to govern for 10 years. You've got to adopt that view. And it's not just lying. It's actually in the national interest.

33:42because if he were to say otherwise, I'm not sure, I might not last, everything would fall apart and he can't govern. It's the same as the governor of the Bank of England asked if the pound will devalue. As soon as you say yes or no comment, it's devalued. And prime ministers cannot say I'm going tomorrow without weakening their position. They can't say I'm going before the next election without immediately becoming lame duck prime ministers. So you are the prime minister until you're not. And in a way, it's a stupid question to ask a prime minister, how long are you going on for? Because the prime minister has to say, I'm continuing.

34:20In 1974, when Gerald Ford replaced Richard Nixon, who had to resign over Watergate, at the time, Ford's people thought maybe he'll just do one term. So a couple of years and then step down in 76. So he can just say, I wiped the slate clean, but I know I don't have a mandate to fight another election in 76. And his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, said, absolutely not. You must tell everyone you are running again. Why? Because I'm representing you overseas. And when I'm negotiating with the Soviets or the Chinese, they want to know they're talking to a man who believes he will be here for six years.

34:57So you have to adopt publicly the position that I will go on and on and on, because as soon as you hint that you might not, people won't negotiate with you in good faith anymore. That's very important. Also, in terms of the civil service, the civil service downs tools when it thinks a prime minister is about to go because then practically every minister will be reshuffled. Yes. The policy priorities of the new minister will be different and that will have been happening. Yeah. The civil servants will be looking at the weakness of Starmer and they will be looking at ministers who are likely to go.

35:31The Department of Health will not have done any health-related policy with the Secretary of State. But that's what I want to ask you, because again, you've been there while this sort of thing is going on. Does just no governing get done? Well, some inevitably does, some routine stuff. A determined minister can push some things through. But you get very distracted as a minister because you're suddenly called to an urgent meeting with supporters of the prime minister to try and reassure them that it's all all right. You're being asked to call people up to say, are you still backing the prime minister?

36:00So instead of having your time devoted to running a department, your time is devoted to firefighting, reassuring colleagues, all those sorts of things. Towards the end of Liz Truss, we had a vote on fracking, which the government won by 100, which was slightly frustrating considering what happened next. I spent that whole day on the telephone talking to fellow MPs saying, please vote for us on fracking in the House of Commons, not in the business and energy department doing business and energy related things. I mean, you could say this was a big energy related policy and therefore it related. But it was very much more party management, in my view, than governing.

36:41And what's the mentality of the average backbencher? Because a lot of these people would have realized they're never going to get a job. They could easily have entered in 2024, lose at the next election, and have left no mark on this parliament whatsoever. But suddenly, Wes Streeting's ringing them up and asking if they would like to put their name on his letter. Does this turn every backbench MP into a king for the day? Yes, it does. And there's an awful lot that goes into this, and Wes Streeting will have been doing this for some time, and he will be asking unheard of backbenchers for their views on transport policy and what they think should be done in relation to China and all sorts of things.

37:26And he'll be saying, oh, what a very good idea. Let's keep talking. Let's keep this dialogue going. Yes, yes. And such a pity that Keir hasn't recognised your remarkable talent and all of this sort of stuff. Yes. And they'll be thinking, oh, my goodness, well, if Wes became Prime Minister, I might become junior minister and then I'm on the greasy pole. Are Tories, retired Tories, taking some pleasure in seeing Labour repeating everything that it criticised the Tories for? Oh, inevitably. It's a nasty German word, but there is always an element of schadenfreude. There's always a nasty German word.

38:03There is. There usually is for most things. I feel a bit guilty about this because I think schadenfreude is an unchristian emotion, but I can't avoid feeling it. and I want the country to be reasonably governed. I mean, I never thought Kiyostama would be brilliant at governing, but I hoped he would at least be competent. And this level of incompetence is bad for the country. So if one's high-minded and proper, we shouldn't be enjoying it. But they were so pious, particularly Starmer. I think you can feel bad for the country, but enjoy it from the point of view of partisan politics. Thank you. You make me feel better.

38:34My new father confessed. I don't think that's a sin. Now, we have had in the last few years, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and now Keir Starmer. Why do you think in this period of history, we are cycling through so many prime ministers so fast? Well, my silliest answer is that this is what happens in the 20s. So in the 1820s, the 1920s, and the 2020s, we seem to have had more prime ministers than are good for us. Okay. And I can't work out any theory that makes the particular, I'm not an astrologer, But it's quite an interesting... It's a good point. We had three different parties running the country in the 1920s, and Labour was only in for a few months to begin with.

39:17You have a lot of turnover in the 1820s and the 1920s. But there's no theory behind that. I mean, there's no logic to that. Well, let's try and fit the theory to the dates, because I think there might be similar things happening at every occasion. So the 1820s, you're building up the Great Reform Bill, huge advance in democracy. In the 1920s, you have just got the complete franchise and women get the full vote. Both occasions, you're off the back of a continental war. Both occasions, you're off the back of a continental war. Napoleonic in the 1920s, First World War in the 1920s. And expanding participation in what's going on in the country, degree of financial and economic instability, and a feeling within the country that they're not happy about things.

40:03So in the 1820s, you've got disorder. You've got an attempt to murder the cabinet. 1920s, you've got a national strike. You've got the feeling that the country fit for heroes hasn't happened. 2020s, we're just on the back of COVID, feeling of discontent, that things aren't working. And the democracy isn't working. Democracy isn't delivering because you've got the sort of uni party. And what is the difference? I didn't think it was a good look yesterday of Rachel Reeves and Mel Stride giggling away together on the floor of the House of Commons. That plays into this idea. It doesn't matter who you vote for.

40:41They're all best mates. They all like each other and nothing much changes. And that's made people dissatisfied with politics and therefore the electorates become extraordinarily volatile. And this side date back to 2014, the Scottish referendum. Yep. 2015. I think that's the first major event of the modern political era. And it's the only one where the nationalist side lost. The nationalist side lost, then they won in the general election. Exactly. And if it happened now, they'd probably win. And you wiped Labour out in Scotland. And people who had been elected to seats that they thought would see them through a 40-year political career were suddenly ex-MPs.

41:232015 also gets the Lib Dems being wiped out. Then 2019, Labour in the Red Wall. And then 2024, the Conservatives, including me, in seats that looked very safe. And to go back to the 1920s, what happens in the 1920s politically is the Liberal Party dies. Dies. And is replaced by the new working class movement. And in 1935, you get an election result, which is the biggest election victory for the Tories in our history. and almost every Labour MP loses its seat. See, you get these times when general volatility feeds through to the political process. Yes. And then you get decades when things are quite stable.

42:04Yes, yes. I agree with that. I think part of the problem is that the 20th century parties just don't effectively represent the country anymore. The question has been asked, have we become like Italy? But the difference is, is that Italy has proportional representation and it has a tradition of coalitional government, of the idea that you vote for parties who would then join an umbrella of the left or the right. Whereas in this country, we're taking a very fractured population and we're still trying to get them to vote either for the Conservatives or for Labour. And I don't think that reflects anymore the way people feel.

42:44I think all political parties in a first-past-the-place system are inevitably coalitions. And here Starmer may have tried to be too aggressive in his reforms of the Labour Party. Yes. Because he expelled the hard left. Yes. But the hard left were part of that coalition and they were willing to remain in the Labour Party in the 60s and the 70s. The 80s were slightly different, the 90s and onwards, because they had some taste of power. Once he got rid of them, well, they've all gone off to the Greens. So that wing has been lost and the conservatives became too concerned about being in office rather than their ideology.

43:27Yes. And therefore alienated the right who have gone off to reform. Yeah. I have been surprised and even a bit shocked in the last week by the bitterness of division within Labour and how open it is and how ideological it is. If you go back to when Tony Blair stepped down in 2007 and was replaced by Gordon Brown, they couldn't find anyone to run against Brown. And there had been hard left members of Tony Blair's cabinet. It's not that there weren't disagreements with the Labour Party. Michael Meachar sat in his cabinet, for instance. This time around, the Stammerites have excluded all the left, as you say.

44:06Some have gone to the Greens, some have gone to your party, but there sit a lot of people within that party who are very, very left wing. and they hate, they actually hate the centrists and the moderates. And it really has the feeling in Westminster of people waking up to, we have nothing in common with these people. We are two different parties under one umbrella. And that's what I feel is unsustainable and may break. It seems possibly already to have broken, yes. And Labour's position is fascinating because they have lost the old patriotic community labor to reform. The people who believed in maintaining the nuclear deterrent when that was the big issue in the Labor Party, those sorts of people have gone.

44:57So they've got the London intellectuals left and they've got the Blairites and those two don't seem to agree. But because of the accidental nature of first past the post, they have found themselves representing reform constituencies. Yes, yes. But only by getting about 35 % of the vote. That's right. And they can't. They don't reflect those communities. They don't reflect those communities. They don't necessarily even like the communities that they represent, that they are alien within them. You see, I was so lucky in North East Somerset. My best pieces of good fortune was that I represented a community that I felt part of and I loved.

45:36I don't mean that in a sentimental way, but Somerset was so important to me as a member of parliament and the community living there was important. But if you're parachuted into what was a very safe Labour seat and you're essentially a London intellectual, you're probably going to find very little in common with the relatively down to earth, straightforward constituency that you're representing. And I think that's been a problem. I also think it's been a problem because, and this is something I've been thinking about since the election, there's a difference between a majority and a mandate. Labour has a huge majority, but no mandate.

46:13And therefore it can't do difficult things. It can legally, but it can't politically because all the MPs sitting on majorities of 1 ,000 have had a letter from a pressure group signed by 500 people saying don't do this. Yeah. and they think, oh, I must... And they'll listen to that letter. And they'll listen to that letter. Yes. If you've got a majority of 20 ,000, you can ignore that letter. That's where the mandate comes in with the majority. That's very interesting. J.G. Breeze-Mogg, thank you very much. Thank you very much. OK, we will see you all tomorrow again at 5pm.

47:28We'll see you next time. That's a big one. And I can keep track from my phone while I get the job done. No bills in sight. What a life. Do right by yourself and your business and search Xero for your free trial. Conditions apply.