In short
The episode argues that Keir Starmer runs a “passive” premiership: he reads and follows procedure but rarely initiates political judgment, leaving decisions to aides and ministers. It claims Starmer takes responsibility for the Mandelson affair yet allegedly never directly engaged with the key people involved, including Peter Mandelson.
Guests
Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrand, journalists who wrote Get In: the rise of Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, and are updating their reporting for a new paperback. Key claims include: Downing Street is unusually quiet; Starmer often says little even after extensive reading; aides don’t know where he’ll land on political issues; and he treats some major questions (e.g., Iran) as legal/process problems.
Notable examples
the British Steel/Scunthorpe nationalisation fight, where Starmer focused on legal thresholds while Johnny Reynolds pushed for political imperatives; and the Mandelson US ambassador appointment, described as lacking a direct Starmer-Mandelson conversation and heavily influenced by McSweeney.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOUnderstanding Starmer's Leadership Style
3:19 to 6:00
A discussion on Keir Starmer's passive approach to governance and its implications.
“But once again, it feels to me that the characteristics of his government all inevitably come back to him.”
Insight into Downing Street Dynamics
6:00 to 9:20
Exploring the atmosphere and decision-making processes in Starmer's government.
“In fact, you say the Downing Street is quiet.”
Starmer's Political Inertia
9:20 to 13:00
Analyzing how Starmer's passivity affects policy-making and his leadership perception.
“It's not a prime minister who's grabbing events by the scruff of their neck.”
The Mystery of Starmer's Political Identity
13:00 to 14:00
Discussing the complexities of Starmer's political identity and relationships within his team.
“And I suppose if he doesn't, then who would?”
Mystery of Leadership: Starmer and McSweeney
14:00 to 15:10
Explore the complex relationship between Keir Starmer and his key advisor, highlighting their contrasting perspectives on politics.
“But it is, when you step back, it is amazing.”
Understanding 'Librarian Labour' and Political Confrontation
15:10 to 18:10
Delve into the term 'Librarian Labour' and its implications for the Labour Party's approach to political confrontation.
“And also they couldn't behave like social justice warriors and think tank members.”
Starmer's Leadership Approach: Superficial Changes?
18:10 to 21:40
Discuss the superficiality of Starmer's changes within the Labour Party compared to previous leadership strategies.
“and some of the shifts on foreign policy, certainly from the Corbyn years.”
The British Steel Controversy: A Case Study
21:40 to 24:40
Examine the significant political implications surrounding the re-nationalisation of British Steel and Starmer's role in it.
“It is a massive political issue but they're not really engaging with it.”
Starmer's Procedural Mindset and Political Implications
24:40 to 28:00
Analyze how Starmer's procedural approach to politics can hinder effective governance and decision-making.
“That characterises time in opposition as well.”
Keir Starmer's Leadership Style
28:00 to 31:00
Explore the uncertainties surrounding Keir Starmer's leadership and decision-making.
“You know, the Island of Stranger Speech, which is, you know, at the time seems like quite a big, important thing.”
Show all 15 chapters
Mandelson's Influence on Starmer
31:00 to 32:08
Discuss the complex relationship and influence of Peter Mandelson on Starmer's government.
“Well we should talk a little bit about Peter Manilson um let's do this after the break.”
Political Appointments and Strategy
32:50 to 42:00
Analyze the implications of political appointments and Starmer's strategic decisions.
“And obviously they didn't say this, but, you know, it was a sense of it's a big thing to offer Trump this early in his second term.”
Keir Starmer's Appointments and Relationship Dynamics
42:00 to 46:19
Discussion on Keir Starmer's judgment in appointments and his relationships with aides.
“He is convinced or told that the pluses outweigh the minuses, that Peter would be good at this job, and so he appoints him.”
The Shift in Keir Starmer's Political Project
46:20 to 52:00
Exploration of the impact of Morgan McSweeney's departure on Starmer's leadership.
“And as we talked about then and now, one of the most interesting, unusual, novel things about the whole Keir Starmer project is that it's really the McSweeney-Starmer project, probably in that order.”
The Complexity of Starmer's Leadership Motivation
52:01 to 55:54
Analysis of Keir Starmer's motivations and challenges as a leader.
“You know, we haven't really mentioned it.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Love bread, baked goods, and pasta, but not the way they make you feel? What if I told you there are macro-friendly options that don't taste like sawdust and sadness? Satisfying sandwiches, fully loaded bagels, noodles that can stand up to your favorite chunky sauces. All delicious, crave-worthy, and smart. Each serving of Hero Bread has up to 19 grams of protein and 32 grams of fiber, and just 0 to 5 grams net carbs and 0 grams sugar. Hero Bread bakes with heart-healthy olive oil and delivers the soft, fluffy, flavorful experience you love. breakfast burritos, schmear-loaded bagels, real mac and cheese.
0:32Hero Bread bakes loaves, bagels, and tortillas that don't taste or feel like cardboard. Noodles that don't fall apart in hearty sauces. Plus, limited-edition small batch bakes like the 2-grams Net Carb Hero Croissant or 1-gram Net Carb Hero Cheddar Biscuit, handmade in a Sonoma-based French bakery. Shop now on hero.co. Use code IHEART for 10 % off. That's hero.co. Per serving, not a low-calorie food. Some products contain allulose. See nutrition info on hero.co over sodium and sugar content.
1:02Lewis Goodall:This is a Global Player original podcast. Keir Starmer says that he takes responsibility for the Mandelson affair. The buck stops with him. But what if Keir Starmer was barely involved in the decision to appoint him? That might strike you as unlikely. Surely a prime minister would take a direct personal interest into who would occupy Britain's most important diplomatic post, especially when the job in hand was to keep Donald Trump sweet, especially when the most likely candidate for the job was a man who had occasionally made himself politically radioactive, resigning from government not just once but twice, especially, again, if you knew that that person had had links with one of the most egregious sex offenders to have ever lived.
1:49Lewis Goodall:A Prime Minister, you might think, might speak to that person directly just to clear a few things up. In fact, Keir Starmer never, ever did. We now know this thanks to the reporting of Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrand. You might remember that last year we had them on the show to discuss their book, Get In, the authoritative account of the rise of Keir Starmer and Morgan McSweeney, their project to transform the Labour Party and make Starmer only the fourth man ever to win a Labour majority in the House of Commons. The new paperback edition of the book has just been published, which includes new reporting and writing on the latest months of the Labour government.
2:30Lewis Goodall:It includes a theory of how best to understand Starmer's premiership, still so young, yet at times which feels so aged. The distinctive thing about the man is that he is the passive Prime Minister, around whom events and politics pass by. That once you understand this, you understand how procedure, not politics, animates this unusual Prime Minister. you understand his government, its strengths and its frailties. So we asked Patrick and Gabriel back into the News Agents studio to talk about their latest reporting and how this Prime Minister has proven himself, for good and ill, one of the most unusual occupants of that office we've yet had.
3:12Lewis Goodall:Welcome to the News Agents.
3:19Lewis Goodall:The News Agents. well we're joined once again by the uh chroniclers of the starma project i think that's fair isn't it gents you said it list i said it in which case it must be fair patrick mcguire and gabriel pogran and i was just looking back gents to when we last spoke and i think that was february last year when you had the hardback of the book out paperback has just come out and i was thinking back to that february point it feels as if sort of everything has changed and yet nothing has changed in that Now, what we talked about before, and what I think really comes through in the postscript of your book, is that Keir Starmer has burned through, even since then, aides, players, those around him in his projects, including, of course, Morgan McSweeney, most importantly of all.
4:04Lewis Goodall:But once again, it feels to me that the characteristics of his government all inevitably come back to him. And we're seeing that play out again at the moment. I think that's right. I know we're here to lift the veil on Downing Street, but let me briefly lift the veil on the publishing world. Back when we proposed this book, we were speaking to the great people over at Penguin and had spent a few months speaking to sources, trying to assemble, you know, we didn't want to preempt the conclusions of the book. We wanted possibly a thesis that we would examine in the course of 300 or so pages. And our conclusions on Starmuff, speaking to those in his inner circle, were possibly a little damning.
4:46And they seemed a bit iconoclastic, not least because, you know, we'd written one book on Corbyn, which talked about how delphic and indecisive he was. And here we were saying, well, we've got another Labour leader who, you know, notwithstanding the differences, actually shares some key similarities. And actually, unlike Corbyn, in one key regard, doesn't seem to have politics. They were saying, well, you know, is that where the public mood is? Is that where the journalistic mood is? And I think that it might be that between the hardback and the paperback, reality is caught up with our thesis it transpires that however many iterations of the operation or reshuffles of the cabinet you know one of the through lines of the book is this sense that Starmer himself who prides himself on being an anti-politician is congenitally incapable of having the kinds of political conversation that are required to navigate one's way through through Westminster.
5:37Lewis Goodall:I think very early passage in the new postscript for the paperback says this, it says, Starmer is different. He reads everything, but then said nothing. The Prime Minister had vowed in his first speech from Downing Street that politics would tread more lightly on the lives of the British people. He seemed to have his own team in mind. It's just so odd, said one senior official who observed Starmer closely, awaiting instructions that never came. It's a very oddly passive premiership. In fact, you say the Downing Street is quiet.
6:05Patrick Maguire:So one of the questions we asked everybody to whom we spoke for this update with the book was, you know, what's it like inside government? Because we've all spent lots of time with politicians, political functionaries, people who work in politics, but we're never inside the room. You know, occasionally we might be taken into a room for a period, but they're engaged with the media. We never observe what it's like in number 10. And we asked that question of someone who is very close to Keir Starmer. what were your impressions on getting into Downing Street? And they said, well, we expected it to be a hive of activity, a bit like the West Wing.
6:43Patrick Maguire:Sorry, just not to insult them, they didn't use that comparison. But something like that bustling around, the West Wing, when we see political procedural on TV, it's a sort of hive of energy. Vital. Yes, exactly. But they were just struck by it was really quiet. You'd walk through corridors, doors would be shut. You couldn't really hear conversation. officials said much the same thing you know you compare meetings with boris johnson where he would you know there'd be a 40 minute digression about pericles he'd engage the substance for 10 minutes then give you very clear instructions or rishi sunat would berate you for not formatting the graph in the appendix correctly come back with 17 questions about the data and then demand to see you next week and say i want to i want 15 action points resolved by then whereas a very senior official said to us that kia starmer just reads and reads and reads and reads you know there's a lot of reading time they said in his diary certainly when they were working closely with kia starmer but the strange thing they said as you say that as the book says it was never really accompanied with okay here's the political conclusion i've drawn from all my reading or this is the direction i want to set the impression and i think we might use this analogy because it's The obvious one is of a barrister absorbing themselves in a brief in the hope that the right answer might emerge from that process or that in studying every scrap of paper available to them, they can arrive at the answer without realising actually it's all about applying political judgment to that information or trying to marshal what you're reading in service of your point.
8:17Lewis Goodall:I've heard exactly the same sort of things from people around Starmer. And I think once you understand it, you kind of start to sort of join the dots of, you know, of course, there have been virtues to his government where the problems of his government come. And so you've written this. Those who had just begun to work with Starmer, the civil servants who had known him only by reputation, were baffled at first. But then as the months ground on, the confounding realisation struck them. Why would Lou Haig, in this case, the transport secretary, have bothered to consult him about this decision? The Prime Minister was studied disinterest.
8:49Lewis Goodall:Even after many hours of reading time, he remained silent. With other Prime Ministers, they would have known exactly what they would have said had they been in a room like that. None of us could say the same about Keir. It wasn't just that we didn't know what he would say. We didn't know whether he would have said anything. And that seems... What you're sort of describing is a Prime Minister who quite often is inert, which is an unusual state of being for any politician, let alone basically what is a chief executive.
9:19Patrick Maguire:Yeah, I mean inert is a really good way of putting it. Inert, passive. It's not a prime minister who's grabbing events by the scruff of their neck. I think people listening to this will find this really weird. I think they won't believe you. Do you know what I mean? Well, we struggle to believe it but it's just the sheer number of people who tell you the same thing as you know, right? I mean, it's a kind of journalistic cliche. You always ask who's in the room and then one line in the book in the update is well, there was no room. That at least was the conclusion. There's no prime ministerial den where the modern equivalents of Jonathan Powell and Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson with Blair or Brown's age.
9:52Lewis Goodall:In this case, you're referring there, aren't you, to a decision taken by the Transport Secretary. Just tell us about the sort of background to that particular passage. So that was one of the kind of opening gambits of Starmer's premiership was the pay increase for public sector workers, including train drivers. and in the book there are numerous instances where we kind of chronicle decisions that Starmer was conspicuous in his absence for and that was one of them, winter fuel as well, when you think about the extent to which the sort of mould and the narrative was crystallised quite quickly following the July general election winter fuel's the number one thing people point to, that and freebies and people say that Starmer we've called this update the passive premiership was, if not inert, certainly the sort of passive beneficiary or receptacle for policy rather than the instigator.
10:46And I was going to say, I think, you know, in the interest of even-handedness, it might be worth, and also in terms of trying to kind of get to the essence of Starm himself, it might be worth just reflecting that, contrary to us thinking it's somewhat weird, that he doesn't play the role of, you know, instigator and convener of his own political project, Starmer so often is the one that says that it's actually Westminster which is weird he doesn't think in terms of isms and schisms he doesn't think in terms of you know Patrick and I have routinely invoked the visual metaphor of the Fabian Society Boat Party 2011 and who was there and who wasn't and he doesn't have a worldview shaped by factional identity or ideology.
11:28And he appalls Westminster
11:29Lewis Goodall:and he appalls Westminster and I actually think I mean he's not entirely wrong he might not be wrong to But the fact is, you know, there are inevitable analogies and disanalogies with New Labour. But the great distinction with Brown and Blair is the two of them, they shared not just a parliamentary office when they were serving on the shadow front bench, but they also shared a political project and felt like they had a stake in an intellectual idea. and Starmer, we've seen it now, Sean of McSweeney doesn't have that big idea or a sort of, he doesn't feel the need to evangelise on behalf of the particular project, which when you're faced with decisions makes the act of government quite strange.
12:16Lewis Goodall:And I can totally understand, and I think lots of people will share Starmer's distaste for how weird Westminster can be. But nonetheless, the portrait that you describe of a man who basically his own team and sometimes his own cabinet go around him. They don't consult him because they don't think there's any point in consulting him. And a chief of staff even, who, in your own telling, Morgan McSweeney, to whom, you know, there was basically no one closer. I mean, as you wrote in the initial, in the hardback of the book initially, you know, this is their project. It's probably McSweeney's project more than it is even Keir Starmer's project.
12:52Lewis Goodall:Even McSweeney doesn't actually know where Starmer is going to end up on any particular issue. He doesn't know what he's going to think or what he's going to say. And I suppose if he doesn't, then who would?
13:04Patrick Maguire:Then who would? Yeah, exactly. And I think we've seen that a bit in recent weeks with the Iranian question, right? You sort of knew where Keir Starmer was going to land on that because there was an obvious legal answer that he and Richard Herne would agree on, regardless of whether cabinet discussions pushed him in one direction or another. But if it's not a sort of question of legal process, I think the response to the riots after the Southport killings is another example, right? We knew where he was probably going to land there because he'd done it before as Director of Public Prosecutions. But if there's no direct parallel to his legal career or no sort of clear processological answer to a question, if it's a purely political judgment, then actually, you know, as you say, even Morgan Sweeney told friends, we report in this postscript, you know, I don't know where he's going to end up on a given issue.
13:51Patrick Maguire:It's impossible. I mean, that is amazing.
13:53Lewis Goodall:I'm not surprised because, you know, I'm sort of familiar with it and enough people have sort of told me myself that that is the state of play. But it is, when you step back, it is amazing. It is amazing that someone who could have engineered, who basically made this guy prime minister, would still find him a mystery. Having spent so much time together, having presumably had so many conversations together, having presumably talked about politics, right, you would think, at some level. And yet still to be in a situation when you're actually saying, On a very deep level, the guy's a mystery to me politically.
14:24I think it is one of the most visceral details of their relationship that it probably isn't a friendship, and I think that says so much. My mind's kind of cast back to the election night 2024 when they weren't together. When the exit poll came in, McSweeney was at Labour HQ, went outside to smoke a cigar, and Keir Starmer was in Waheed Ali's flat with family and friends and a couple of aides. there is one more remark by the way from mitsweeny which we quote in this new section um which was hot on the heels of the winter fuel u-turn when it inevitably came last year mitsweeny went for dinner with a couple of friends and said to them i need help i'm drowning what he meant by that was you know he had spent the long wilderness years contemplating an alternative for the labour party But he believed an essential precondition of that was that Labour didn't have to hate its own traditions, but the parliamentary Labour Party could not behave as librarian Labour, as people who weren't prepared to go two-footed into confrontations where they would be on the public side.
15:35And also they couldn't behave like social justice warriors and think tank members. Just remind us what he meant by librarian Labour, because I think it is quite an important part of his thinking. So Librarian Labour was his way of encapsulating the soft left of the Parliamentary Labour Party's position on issues, whether it's trans rights, whether it is having a kind of post-industrial, having industrial policy. And specifically the Corbyn years as well, how they behave. They behave like librarians, right? It was essentially that the soft left, confronted with a difficult internal or external political issue, prefer the quiet life.
16:21Lewis Goodall:They'll never seek political pain, political confrontation. And it's summed up, perhaps best, over the welfare vote. Morgan McTweenie would think that is exactly how people expect Labour MPs to behave, which is to back welfare, come what may. Exactly. They've gone back to their constituency Labour Party meeting on a wet Tuesday night. they'd been confronted with inevitable opprobrium. And rather than going out there and making an intellectual argument and saying that, well, this is a changed Labour Party and we were elected on a basis to deal with this inheritance, they'd rather run back to the whips and say, we've got a problem here, Euston.
16:59And he had concluded by then that Starmer and the Parliamentary Labour Party may not have the stomach or fight to do the necessary work to give effect to the promise of the Starmer-McSweeney project.
17:12Lewis Goodall:But the truth about that, isn't it, is that by comparison to previous attempts to change the Labour Party, the Starmer-McSweeney project has always been a facile one. I mean, it was never a serious attempt. I mean, for a start, the way it won the Labour Party leadership was basically to say, I'm Corbyn Minor. Indeed, yeah. It didn't make an argument. In a way, I think that, just as a tangent on this, in a way, I often think of the problem Starmer got in terms of changing the country, exact microcosm with the Labour Party which is that Starmer never made an argument to the Labour Party about what it wanted to be other than to say I want to win and likewise he didn't really make an argument to the country either about how he wanted to change it and so as a result actually any changes you do make are more superficial and if you seek political arguments and win them as Blair did in the 90s
17:56Patrick Maguire:I think superficial is the right word obviously on some issues particularly issues of party management and the relationship with the Corbynite left, some of those changes were pretty fundamental and some of the shifts on foreign policy, certainly from the Corbyn years. But actually, what they didn't do at any point, as you say, from the very beginning of the Keir Starmer as leader concept, they never did what New Labour did, which was, let's try and rethink social democracy in the late 20th or early 21st centuries from first principles. But you can't do that if you're an inert person politically.
18:35Patrick Maguire:Well, no, and if you're totally disinterested in that, If someone sat Keir Starmer down and said, why don't we do an iterative discussion about let's have a blank sheet of paper and decide what the Labour Party stands for in 2026, he would say, I don't know, I have no idea what he would say. Or, you know, if someone said, Keir, how do we reconcile automation in the economy, AI, all of this stuff with the welfare state? people around him are interesting this is the sort of conversation you know Morgan Sweeney might have with a few thinkers over dinner or aides might have among themselves but you never get any sense that Keir Starmer is involved in those conversations that he'd want to have those conversations.
19:16Patrick Maguire:Or wouldn't he actually say he wouldn't want to have the conversation
19:18Lewis Goodall:he would find it well he would find it effete he would find it sort of chin strokey the sort of thing that Westminster people do
19:26Patrick Maguire:there's a phrase he uses which is fantasy politics you know some people have told us about if you try to have a conversation with Keir Starmer about Keir, should we reshuffle the cabinet? You say it's fantasy politics. That's fantasy politics. I don't want anything to do with your fantasy politics. That's a near verbatim quote of what someone said when they suggested a reshuffle to him. There's one way to look at it. Obviously, the way lobby journalists talk about reshuffles sometimes is fantasy politics. It's like fantasy football. What have we put Andy Burnham here or Yvette Cooper moved here and Rachel Reeves had a career-ending injury or something like that.
20:02Patrick Maguire:But actually, it's quite fundamental in the context of the Labour Party, which cabinet minister is where, who's running the treasury and what does that say about your economic policy and the direction you want to take the country. And what do they believe? Yeah, exactly. It's quite revealing. Keir Starmer would say that sort of thing, which is pretty fundamental if you are running a political party and a government, is just purely fantasy politics.
20:21Lewis Goodall:Again, just on this point about passivity, which I think is so interesting. I think a vignette in the new chapter, which I think really brings it out, or brings out the way that Starmer looks at politics, is actually something that is generally considered to be one of the highlights of the Starmer period, or something that polled really well, which was the re-nationalisation of British Steel and saving the Scunthorpe plant. Johnny Reynolds, who was then business secretary, was sort of instrumental in that. Just tell us about what happened there and Starmer's role within it.
20:49Patrick Maguire:So there's a week in April last year where it's clear British Steel is going to go to the wall. And if you turn a blast furnace off, that's it. That would have been the end of virgin steelmaking in Britain. And so Johnny Reynolds is desperate to find a legal solution to stop that happening, to keep it open. And it becomes clear that the only way to do that is to seize the plant from British Steel's Chinese owners. But there's no clear legal way to do this. and there's a meeting in number 10 with johnny reynolds keir starmer rachel reeves a couple of other ministers and there's this really circular discussion it goes on for ages and ages and ages they're talking about whether they can use something called the civil contingencies act which is like basically you know state of emergency legislation to seize the plant and obviously keir starmer if he knows anything about politics it's how legislation works and again and again they come up again the ministers that come up against the sort of brick wall of Keir Starmer saying well you know can we use the Civil Contingencies Act I don't think we've met the threshold for using the Civil Contingencies Act you know the Civil Contingencies Act wasn't used during Covid like how do we do this and they're sort of circling around the big political issue which is British steel is going to shut down we won't have the capacity to make steel in this country and this goes on for ages and that's a political thing that is a that's a huge political issue and it gets the hard.
22:13Patrick Maguire:Not a legal one. Yeah. What's the industrial economy? National security. It is a massive political issue but they're not really engaging with it. And eventually Johnny Reynolds has to say to Keir Starmer, look Prime Minister, do you want us to make steel in this country or not? Because, you know, if you say yes we will find a way of doing this. And in the end they do and they recall Parliament on the, I think this is happening on Friday, they recall Parliament on Saturday. Keir Starmer gets up on the Saturday night and says I've been to Scunthorpe, British deal's really important I've met those workers Yeah, three cheers for me this is really important, but the day before he's obsessing over the small print of legislation in a meeting and it takes the business secretary to say no, no, but what's the political imperative here what do you as the Prime Minister think we should do and we'll be able to find a way to do it, but we're not here to discuss what's the technical threshold for triggering this bit of the Civil contingencies at that is merely one potential process by which we can do it but sort of you know it's pure Keir Starmer it's sort of like it's all about the process and you've got politicians surrounding him saying yeah but what what what's the politics like you know you're the prime minister you have in a parliamentary system infinite power just say you want to do something and we'll do it but you have to at one point say you need to do something that's also sort of helps reveal or shed light on exactly how um Starmer's thinking about Iran right because and and
23:40Lewis Goodall:instinctively we probably have known that he would take the position he would about Iran because it is a political question and perhaps the political questions have been put to one side but he's clearly treated it, not improperly necessarily by the way, but like he's treated it as a legal question and therefore I think it's been telling that he's been willing to be so, he's been willing to lean into that so much more than he has, a whole array of other things that you might expect a Labour Prime Minister to be more passionate about and instinctive about but it's this because it's fundamentally for him a legal question and something that he feels deeply comfortable with.
24:11I think the first moment, the moment that gave effect to Starmer's leadership campaign came in February 2019. He was at the home of his parliamentary colleague, Jenny Chapman, with a number of advisers. And they said to him, you know, these are the secret discussions that we hope one day will lead you to the doorstep of Downing Street. What do you want to discuss? and we reported in the hardback that Starmer wanted to make sure that they were wholly compliant with trade union legislation and the parliamentary standards regime. That is to say the first occasion where Starmer gave flesh to his own leadership ambitions, his priority, he was reluctant to chair the meeting, but when forced to speak, he wanted to ensure that they were conducting the process in the right way.
Read the full transcript
24:59That characterises time in opposition as well. One of the moments we say he gets angry as Labour leader is when people are late to shadow cabinet meetings. There was an occasion where Rosanna Allen-Kahn came into a shadow cabinet meeting trembling with a LEM sip in her hand. He was furious that she was late. Because he's so procedural. He's procedural. He wants to do things in the right way and in the serious way. It's one of the great pieces of ex post facto narrativisation within the Starmer project that he'd always wanted to cast Corbyn into the wilderness. Well, he didn't, but Corbyn very unprofessionally and unseriously interrupted his process for responding to the Equalities Commission.
25:36Lewis Goodall:Because that would have been a political act to get rid of him. That would have been a political act. He never, ever sat down and said, I do not want the Islington North MP to have a Labour reset on his lapel by the time of the next election. The problem was not the politics. The problem was the procedure. It was the way he conducted himself. It wasn't serious enough. it didn't comply with what Starmer deemed to be the correct way of behaving and approaching a problem. We always wonder, well, will that, how does that translate into government and governance? And that sconthorpe anecdote is the answer.
26:05Lewis Goodall:And the other way in which I think that you can sort of understand and then think about how this translates into kind of stodginess within government or struggles within government. I remember talking to, I mean, it's quite well, I think it's quite well known, it's been written about a lot. talking to an official not so long ago who told me about Margaret Thatcher's only time as Prime Minister and how they had been accustomed, officials had been accustomed to, during the sort of, again, rather stodgy, a kind of like tail end of the Labour years, they'd been accustomed to writing three or four options as part of their submission.
26:40Lewis Goodall:You can do option A, B, C, D. One is quite a sort of right-wing thing to do, one's a left-wing thing to do, one's somewhere in the middle and, you know, whatever. and then after a while they realise that there was no point sending this to Thatcher all you actually did was just have A which is kind of quite right wing and option B which is really right wing and then you decide and as they were saying what it does is it's very efficient right it's much more productive because the whole of the machine has an instinctive reflective understanding of broadly the parameters of where the Prime Minister will go and sit and that probably just doesn't exist now in the same way because if McSweeney doesn't know then how the hell does sort of you know deputy undersecretary for x in the outer
27:19Patrick Maguire:fringes of department y have a clue they won't well no exactly and this is that this is the problem you don't even have that you know often particularly in labor governments you have different departments occupying different expanses of the center left but you know if you were a random official if you were a classic generalist official and you move from one department to another these are two good examples right you go you know in shibana mahoud's home office this is what shibana mahoud wants you know in ed milliband's energy department this is what ed milliband wants because they've got very clear agendas and very clear politics but you know at the top you think well what is you know what is keir starmer's way of marrying quite different visions of labor politics that coexist within the white hall ecosystem he's created or if you're going into a meeting in number 10 what do you think Keir Starmer is going to say about this thing you're presenting to him and how would you know and I think it's not just you know hypothetical mid-ranking officials who say that as I've just sort of ventriloquized it is his cabinet it is you know his own aides who will say you know we just don't know what he's going to think whereas with blair brown thatcher even someone like theresa may rishi sunak the machine works towards it's a bit like a newspaper as well right you you know what the editor wants you know what the editor will think about a given story and that's how you know yeah so you don't bother
28:48Lewis Goodall:writing up all the stories or even starting yes exactly you know the editor isn't going to be interested unless you can provide a compelling view i mean i think also that and and the sort of picture you described so well and the passivity point and the fact that so many of his even closest his political aides aren't sure what he will think, explains little episodes, right, that seems so inexplicable at the time, like the Island of Stranger Speech. You know, the Island of Stranger Speech, which is, you know, at the time seems like quite a big, important thing. And, you know, a real statement of political intent about where the prime minister thinks his government's going.
29:21Lewis Goodall:And then, of course, he reveals or Tom Baldwin reveals his biographer shortly afterwards that he didn't read it. And that seems inexplicable until you're sort of you become more familiar with the situation because then you realise actually he's not that interested in a lot of these fundamental political things. So unlike other prime ministers, he will just read stuff that's put in front of him. That was an incredible moment and it was a moment which a lot of our sources related, unprompted, when we asked what were the kind of key political events of this period. A lot of people said it's quite a remarkable thing, not just for morale in Number 10, but for Number 10's conception of itself, that the Prime Minister could disavow his own words because it poses so many questions which for so long Downing Street had sought to forestall.
30:09Don't forget, actually to coincide I think with the year in power, Starmer gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which he was challenged about the idea that he was overly dependent on McSweeney and that he was but the passenger at front of Morgan McSweeney's DLR train to which his riposte was bollocks. it was that deep for him it irritated him that much he said our book explicitly and its thesis was bollocks he doesn't love you lads sadly not we funnily enough didn't interview him for the paperback update but by saying that something that I myself said does not reflect my position he in the most in the most thoughtful way you could imagine confirmed the thesis and I think that that was quite a difficult moment for a lot of a lot of the people around him.
31:00Well we should talk a little bit about Peter Manilson um let's
31:02Lewis Goodall:do this after the break.
31:07Patrick Maguire:From a range of trusted voices and award-winning journalists.
31:11Lewis Goodall:Good morning I'm Nick Ferrari it's time to get to your calls. Find out the latest news and hear every side of the story. They have no navy they have no air force and they have no leadership we could call it a tremendous success right now, or we could go further, and we're going to go further. There is absolutely no pleasure to be derived from predicting almost to the letter how this sorry saga would unfold. The Conflict in the Middle East. Follow it live on LBC. Listen on our free global player app or the LBC app. Organic Valley Protein Plus Ultra-Filtered Milk is pasture-raised from cows that might take more steps than most people.
31:49That's a plus. And it has 50 % more protein and 50 % less sugar than regular milk. That's a big plus. And the fact that it didn't make a pun about moving? Also a plus. Organic Valley Protein Plus Ultra-Filtered Milk. Protein plus pasture-raised. Learn more at organicvalley.com.
32:16Lewis Goodall:The News Agents. before we well actually it's part of the mandelson story i read with great interest in in this post script and i i wondered a lot about this at the time um the whole state visit thing after which mandelson of course has already become ambassador um turns out as you reveal that the palace was extremely unhappy about the second state visit even going ahead or at least going ahead at the time that it was uh offered by the government yeah indeed the message from the palace is basically
32:44Patrick Maguire:sort of hang on just a minute like can we maybe leave this a bit so we have a clearer sense of what trump too is going to because of course at the time just just for the context of course at
32:57Lewis Goodall:the time uh trump is is insulting the prime minister of canada he's suggesting he might
33:01Patrick Maguire:annex canada of which of course the king is king yeah yeah yeah exactly and so there's a sort of the palace are pretty leery about this by the standards of the palace they're leery and they're wary they're sort of like well you know we've got to protect the institutional reputation of the crown and they make number 10 aware of this yes indeed his private secretary was seen as a block on the extension of this second invitation
33:37Lewis Goodall:Because the palace's argument is that we have to represent political interests around the world that are not the purview of the British government, but we have to maintain the UK-Canada relationship or the relationship between the Crown and Canada.
33:49Patrick Maguire:Indeed. And obviously they didn't say this, but, you know, it was a sense of it's a big thing to offer Trump this early in his second term. yeah it's not uh maybe maybe later but you know what if the guy starts cancelling elections and you know turning you know shooting people in the street or you know we don't know what this guy is going to do and yet you're proposing to roll out the red carpet from have him into winter castle there might be pro there might be massive protests like it's a big thing he wants to do but number 10 in the word in the beautiful words of one official you know they the crown acts on the advice of its ministers right that is the bedrock of our constitution they upgraded their their advice from lowercase advice to capital a advice um and so the king fulfilled his constitutional duty yeah
34:37Lewis Goodall:and actually trump didn't even know until the very last minute it was actually going ahead
34:40Patrick Maguire:no exactly because it has taken so long yeah so he got the call yeah indeed by the way i do think that that is sort of starmer as he would perceive it but possibly you know entirely reasonably that is starmer at his best well you are quite complimentary i mean you're not terribly
34:52Lewis Goodall:complimentary in this post group generally about the start of a project i think it's fair to say but you are quite you do say that they are quite clear-eyed from the beginning really in terms of when it becomes clear that trump is likely to be president again that the starmer operation you know they extend the hand of friendship that there's some real statecraft that actually goes on and you think about that moment that thespian flourish where he gives the handwritten invitation from the king to trump in the oval office well that you know we talked about reading time in this book that is the consequence of starmer's uh fairly formulaic and rigorous approach towards relationships and politics at the outset he said i've got a political challenge how do i address that political challenge we've got to swat up we've got to figure out what it is that appeals to trump we've got to move the entire machinery of the british state and the palace and array it behind our strategic objective yeah in a weird way actually that thing that is actually usually a problem for him, which is his lack of politics.
35:47Lewis Goodall:Actually, in that sense, actually being something of an asset, because a more political Prime Minister, Labour Prime Minister Corbyn being the obvious example, would have found it difficult to swallow it. And actually, as we've seen in the beginning, those efforts do bear fruit, that Trump and Starmer get on. I read with great interest that Starmer, or that Trump, enjoyed David Lammy's company because of his voracious appetite.
36:11Patrick Maguire:Yeah, offered him an extra helping of chicken, I believe, was the generous and I think accepted offer. I think that was in Trump Tower. But yeah, look, as you say, they planned ahead. It was one of the few things they did actually plan for in government, the prospect of Trump returning. And you know, until now that looked like one of the few unalloyed successes of Keir Starmer's premiership that he had managed to navigate the relationship with Donald Trump in a pretty adroit way. but alas I don't think we're certainly not there we're certainly not there anymore and what was of course partly undermined that
36:51Lewis Goodall:was the appointment of Mandelson because in the way that he obviously had to leave the ambassadorship I think one thing that perhaps isn't as appreciated is how, not just that Mandelson had this job which some people found inexplicable, but the extent to which as you write about and has been written about elsewhere as well how central Mandelson had become to in a sense the Starmer project itself because he had become such a close advisor to Morgan McSweeney and indeed others around Morgan McSweeney. How did that happen? So I mean I think that Mandelson for our last book gave us one of the first ever quotes in the public domain about Morgan McSweeney which was to the effect of I don't know who created Morgan McSweeney but whoever they are deserves their place in heaven.
37:35I mean they did not have any joint history. McSweeney's story has been well chronicled but he was not straight out of central casting. He wasn't as spad in the new Labour years. But in that wilderness period, as much one can accuse Peter Manson of at the moment in particular, one thing that is a matter of fact is that when a lot of members of his political tradition had concluded that Labour was a spent force, he was of the view that he should keep convening lunches at his Regent's Park house, keep calling up positively disposed members of the parliamentary Labour Party, keep trying to organise the party's way out of Corbynism.
38:15And in that, he and McSweeney were kindred spirits. And I think, you know, a lot of people have said that Mandelson's appointment was a consequence of the boys' club that predominates within Downing Street. Obviously, men are a common denominator in this story. But another through line is that McSweeney, Mandelson, Matthew Doyle, who later served as Starmer's Downing Street Director of Comms and actually signed off Mandelson's appointment. They were all members of, I don't even think you could call it a faction, it's a micro-faction, a tiny cell of people. A trot-like micro-faction, ironically.
38:49A tendency. Yeah, indeed. It was a tendency, and a tendency gathered around the dining room table of Lord Liddell for much of the Corbyn period and Starmer's early leadership phase, and it meant that the people entrusted with appointing Mandelson who were charged with seeing round corners and making a kind of decision of great gravity were the very same people who'd been mentored by Mandelson. And Mandelson, we wrote one of McSweeney's foundational memos, Labour for the country. It was his own sort of mission statement for the transformation of Labour politics. He literally held the pen on a document which bore McSweeney's name.
39:25So he was so embedded, I don't think anybody could possibly be accused of having acted independently in relation to his appointment.
39:31Lewis Goodall:I mean, you're right, not a single strategic decision was taken without the Irishman, McSweeney, canvassing Mandelson's view. Yeah, I mean, they were in constant contact. And therefore not surprising that he found his name at the very top of the list for the ambassadorship.
39:49Patrick Maguire:Well, indeed, but it's worth saying in the interest, you know, it's not simply the case that Morgan McSweeney said to Keir Starmer, do this, and he just went, OK. you know very senior officials told us even before in the access talks before the election it was made clear by I think even by Sue Gray that they wanted to make Keir Starmer's preference was to make a political appointment to whoever became president because of course they had already appointed an ambassador Tim Barrow
40:22Lewis Goodall:and I think several names
40:26Patrick Maguire:are mentioned in the process in several conversations between Labour and the Whitehall machine. You know, people like David Miliband, I think, would have been nailed on if Kamala Harris won. You know, Jonathan Powell's name is mentioned. Peter Mandelson's name comes up. People like Cathy Ashton, who've been a Gordon Brown minister and EU high representative. Yeah, and then later on, George Osborne is suggested by Morgan McSweeney. There isn't a job he doesn't want, is there? So it's not simply the case that Morgan McSweeney is saying, we must appoint Peter Mandelson, although he's clearly one of the chief advocates for that.
41:02Patrick Maguire:But there is a plan to have a political appointment as ambassador. But did you get any sense?
41:10Lewis Goodall:Because Starber and Mandelson didn't enjoy a close relationship. And that's one of the many ironies of this whole story.
41:14Patrick Maguire:Or a relationship full stop. Indeed. There was no relationship. They didn't particularly like it. They didn't know each other. They didn't particularly like each other. All Mandelson had said about him is that he ought to lose some weight, which he said on his own podcast. Yeah, indeed. Everyone's got a podcast now. I'm looking forward to Keir Starmer. Yeah, exactly. He should lose some weight. They're in sort of... I don't think we'll be worried too much about the Keir Starmer's podcast. They're on sort of texting. They were on sort of texting and nodding terms. You know, I think... Well, texting was one-way traffic.
41:38We said, in the book, we write that Mandelson would routinely share his wisdom with Starmer and responses often there came none. So I don't think there was any meaningful relationship. I mean, that's fair.
41:51Patrick Maguire:And Mandelson is one of the generation who bluntly find Keir Starmer either battling, you know, at best, led bemused by him and at worst and it's not just peter munson i'm not saying you know this is what peter munson thinks i'm saying that generation of labour politicians look at keir starmer with abject bafflement if not a bit of contempt and not and not a small amount of pity because they're like what is this guy's deal and what is wrong with him and yet starmer appointed him anyway
42:17Lewis Goodall:yeah indeed isn't that telling despite the fact that they had no relationship um starmer would obviously have been aware of his i'm not just talking about his relationship with epstein here which he's acknowledged he was aware of but also obviously the fact that he's had to resign multiple times there have been people as we now know who warned him about this so despite that fact he appointed him anyway you might think that if he had this warm relationship and they'd known each other and he himself had been a close advisor that would be explicable explicable that would be something that would help you understand how it happened therefore why did it happen do you think
42:48Patrick Maguire:because Keir Starmer outsources his judgment on lots of crucial questions. It's the same thing as your book.
42:57Lewis Goodall:It all comes back to this same... It's a political judgment.
43:00Patrick Maguire:Passivity. He is convinced or told that the pluses outweigh the minuses, that Peter would be good at this job, and so he appoints him.
43:09Lewis Goodall:Well, I also... I note that you wrote something that's, I think, particularly interesting given events just as we're recording this today. He said there was no formal interview for Mandelson. His record spoke for itself. The warm words to which the Prime Minister put his name on the 10th of December marked the first time the new ambassador had heard Starmer's view about him. I'm delighted to appoint Lord Mandelson to be the next British ambassador to the United States, he said. Very, very intrigued to read that there was no interview, no conversation apparently between Starmer and Mandelson. Now Starmer has said, Prime Minister said on the floor of the Commons, that Mandelson lied to him.
43:47Lewis Goodall:Now, that does rather imply some sort of conversation, doesn't it? I think this is one of the sort of weird features of this whole tale, is actually, at the heart of it, Starmer, he's not blameless, but it does accord with everything we understand, that he probably didn't have particularly deep or meaningful conversations with Mandelson before the appointment. I don't know whether that exonerates him or not, but I think that... I think a lot of people find that astonishing. The natural meaning of he lied to me is that we spoke. And I don't think that's true. That's quite, I mean, it's an important detail.
44:21Lewis Goodall:Well, indeed. In the context of all of this. Because I do think that people, I mean, I suppose the Prime Minister might say, well, he lied to me via the machine. He lied to me via the... By my chief of staff. Yes. By my director of communications. OK, you know, that's logical. I mean, I can see that that would allow him to say that he didn't mislead the Commons. But I think a lot of people hearing the words, Maddelson lied to me, would take that to mean that he had lied to him personally or that the Prime Minister had asked him questions about his record,
44:48Patrick Maguire:which apparently he doesn't seem to have done. Well, and what a curiously detached way to appoint your most... As Simon Case says in one of the papers we read yesterday when they were released, Simon Case, the then Cabinet Secretary, opens his note to the Prime Minister about this appointment process with a sentence to the effect of, this is one of if not the most important posts in the diplomatic service you would maybe think that the prime minister would have a conversation with peter mandelson or an interview or a fireside chat or something before that happens now to which i'm sure kirsten would say actually it's they report to the foreign secretary it's a foreign office appointment you know they have the chat with the foreign secretary it's that proceduralism again yeah well exactly it's like that's a question for the foreign office you know you know when peter mandelson is is sacked at half five in the morning by the government when Keir Starmer decides, you know, no, we can't do this anymore.
45:39Lewis Goodall:About Ollie Robbins.
45:39Patrick Maguire:It's Ollie Robbins. No one from number 10 gets in touch with him.
45:41Lewis Goodall:The top civil servant.
45:44Patrick Maguire:Yeah, exactly. That's who sacks him. The Prime Minister doesn't say, you know, I've come to the view this is politically unsustainable. It is, you know, the designated line manager for the ambassador to the US knocks on the door of his bedroom. Obviously, Ollie Robbins didn't fly over and knock on Peter Manston's bedroom and wake up his dog. Unfortunately for Ollie Robbins, yeah. Yeah, it's, but yeah, our understanding, well-sourced understanding, is that there was no conversation between Peter Mandelson and Keir Starmer at any point during that appointment process, which is remarkable, considering all the problems it's caused for him, and how important Peter Mandelson was to managing the most important relationship Britain has.
46:18Lewis Goodall:The big difference between the last time we spoke and now a year ago, of course, is that McSweeney himself has gone, as we've been discussing. And as we talked about then and now, one of the most interesting, unusual, novel things about the whole Keir Starmer project is that it's really the McSweeney-Starmer project, probably in that order. Where does it leave Starmer, do you think? Because he's never been in politics, really, without McSweeney in any serious sense. No. So where does it leave him? We were often asked after writing the hardback, what is Starmer without McSweeney, Sean of the Irishman, as we occasionally mocked for repeatedly calling him, what is left of this political project?
46:57I think we're seeing the answer play out before us, which is, well, not very much. I mean, Starmer has instincts and sometimes those instincts align with circumstance and lead to outcomes that you could predict, as in the case of Iran. but on the kind of stuff of domestic politics on on economic policy on social policy i mean starmer remains as inscrutable as he was before he doesn't now have this sort of relationship where he can outsource that to the personification of the blue labor tendency so i think politically you know the project has has possibly probably run its course and we're just waiting for resolution
47:36Patrick Maguire:and there's a there's a line i think from a one of the many people who i was going to say from somebody who's left downing street and that usually gives you pause to think god will people be able to work out the source of this then you realize that applies to about 500 people in the last week so um but one of the many people who left downing street said you know this was they told us this before morgan mcsweeney left but even before morgan mcsweeney resigned they offered us the judgment lucy powell has replaced morgan mcsweeney as the driver of the dlr you know in our first book we quoted an ally of mcsweeney an acolyte of mcsweeney one of his fellow advisors is saying you know kia thinks he's driving the train he's not we've sat him at the front of the dlr the docklands light railway which doesn't have a driver and what's changed now from the view of lots of people in the labour party is that whoever's in the control room at tfl uh you know twiddling the knob and deciding whether it's going to Lewisham or Canary Wharf, that person has changed and the destination has changed.
48:33Patrick Maguire:Now it's Lucy Powell, Ed Miliband and others who are providing the politics. Keir Starmer is seamlessly, without ever acknowledging the shift, saying it's his own.
48:42Lewis Goodall:Gabriel, I can't let you go without asking you specifically about, of course, because you had a sort of connection in a sense with McSweeney, because you were one of the journalists at the heart of this remarkable kind of twist, which was revealed recently that you yourself were targeted by Labour Together, the group that Morgan McSweeney ran, which was instrumental, the vehicle to make Keir Starmer leader of the Labour Party, his power base within the party. And of course, they targeted you effectively. They ran opposition research on you and a few other journalists. How have you found navigating that whilst also writing about him?
49:18well um it's been a uh unusual time um i will attempt to choose my words carefully um i suppose one thing that's important to say um and has never been any risk of us being friends with kia starmer based on our creative output but it is always important not to be friends with the governing class we we like a creative tension between whether you're in no danger of that the fourth estate and the politicians um and so you know in some ways it's vindication that anybody saw fit to spend tens of thousands of pounds uh digging up dirt on me or uh as was the case uh producing a tissue of lies about my career and sources um they talked to discredit you but it
50:03Lewis Goodall:was because you were asking questions about labor together it's finances and actually i i think i mean in the end the story broke shortly before mcsweeney's departure i've always thought it was sort of the dog that didn't bark. I mean, it's quite a big deal, by the sounds of British politics, the non-declaration of three quarters of a million pounds. I don't expect the entirety of Westminster still left people outside of it to have read the book, but actually the non-declaration about money was material and foundational to what McSweeney did during that time, which was covertly plot, plan and poll his way.
50:39Lewis Goodall:He didn't declare it as he should have done. He did not declare the money and the money that he didn't declare was the money that he used to expensively research what the options were for in due course transforming the Labour Party. So the fact that they then spent more money covering up or trying to discredit reporting on the non-declaration of money is an irony and I'm not feeling too sorry for myself but it certainly put some things into... It's cast certain events in different light among them the fact that both Patrick and I, Patrick being my work husband and therefore immediately made aware of anything circulating about me.
51:14We were both being asked about the truth of allegations about my alleged relationships and sourcing and alleged journalistic integrity. So I didn't know at the time that that was, in actual fact, the contents of this report that Labour Together had paid for.
51:29Lewis Goodall:It must inevitably make you feel differently about Starmer, though. Actually, funnily enough... He probably doesn't know what Labour Together is. Exactly. I mean, honestly, no, it doesn't, because I don't think that, I mean, for better or worse, there's no way Starmer would have had any idea about any of it. And that is sort of the thesis that, you know, from very different sides of the political spectrum, we and Paul Holden, who had endowed me with some of the emails that supported that story, we both elided on, which was this is McSweeney's project, not Starmer's. Just finally, there is one question, given everything that we've been talking about that people listening and watching might think, which is if he's so passive, if he's so inert, But if he, on some level, he is both uninterested and disinterested in the work of his government and apposed politics so much, why does he keep going?
52:16Lewis Goodall:It must be such a difficult life. Let's be honest. You know, we haven't really mentioned it. Maybe we should. But I think it's almost a given. Circumstances are incredibly difficult. They would be incredibly difficult for any incumbent prime minister. It must be extremely, it must be excruciating. He's a family man. We can see he's concerned about the effect it has had on his family. I've asked him about that. And I can see that is deeply sincere. He really worries about it.
52:36Patrick Maguire:given all of that why does he keep going he wants to win he wants to prove people wrong as he felt he's as he feels he's done repeatedly throughout his life he wants to be vindicated he wants you know the he feels like he's proven people wrong before on the specific question of his labour leadership and will do so again i don't think it's controversial to say or you know speaking out of school or it's not it's not groundless to say the guy has a very high opinion of himself you know if he didn't he wouldn't have run for the labour leadership if he didn't he wouldn't have done any of the things he'd done in his career and i think you know that's at the heart of all of this and i think he's able to do that because he has quite uh you know clearly he had a not to get all armchair psychology about it but he had a he's had a strange life certainly a strange childhood and you know tom baldwin his biographer puts this saying you know there's always something bottled up inside him that drives him be anger or despair or you know some sort of some sort of there's a sort of psychic force driving him on in ways that other people can't really understand and i think i think that's at the core of everything and as one senior official said to us he has his attitude to people is unlike anything they've ever seen in British politics, having worked with several prime ministers.
54:02It's the, at one level he's, you know, really polite and well-mannered and, you know,
54:09Patrick Maguire:decent is a cliche, but, you know, on an interpersonal level, a perfectly agreeable guy. But there is a coldness about him, particularly the way he deals with close aides who leave. All of them come with the same, a variation on the same story. You know, he took three weeks to text me, he never rang me, he never gave me an explanation. and I think at the heart of that is his desire to drive on and prove that he is a winner and that I think is the thing that's driving him on I happened to cycle on my way in today past the five-a-side pitch where Starmer applies his trade as a central midfielder from time to time I don't know if he plays as regularly as he did in opposition but Martin Plout, a friend of his from his constituency Labour Party told us that he was a hard bastard on the pitch and played to the edge of the rules and desperately wanted to win.
55:01And I do think that that is part of this. He also, in response to the critiques of people such as ourselves, says, well, lest we forget I'm the guy that won the three-figure majority and defied Labour's greatest tradition, which is losing. And I think for that reason, he has, as Patrick said, a deep conviction in his own ability to turn this situation around and I don't think he's going to be told we actually reported that last summer he did have doubts he expressed with some friends one friend in particular told us that he questioned whether he was the right man for the job but in this instance I think he has that singular desire to win and that will drive him on
55:48Lewis Goodall:gents well we look forward to the post post scripts when it comes inevitably if there is one might be in book form to see you there thank you so much thanks thank you
56:03who doesn't love warm carby comfort satisfying sandwiches loaded bagels rich mac and cheese crave worthy and smart hero bread's loaves bagels and noodles have just zero to five gram snack carbs zero gram sugar and up to 19 grams of protein and 32 grams of fiber per serving Hero Bread bakes with heart-healthy olive oil and delivers a soft, fluffy, flavorful experience you love. Shop now on Hero.co. Use code IHEART for 10 % off. That's Hero.co. Per serving, not a low-calorie food. Some products contain allulose. See nutrition info on Hero.co for sodium and sugar content.
56:38Lewis Goodall:The News Agents Well, those boys are genuinely some of the best and most astute reporters of their generation, as I'm sure you can tell. Better chroniclers of the contemporary Labour Party you cannot hope to find. I can't recommend their book. Get in. Enough. It is out in paperback now. That is it from all of us for this week. No John or Emily today, unfortunately. They're off in John's catamaran to defend the Straits of Hormuz. But thanks as ever to the valiant efforts of our production team on the newsagents Shane Fennelly, Michaela Walters, Natalie Inge, Arvin Baddowell, Anna Georgievich, Jess Williamson, Mikey Baggs and Lizzie Ward.
57:14Lewis Goodall:Our executive producer is Louis Degenhardt. Our editor is Tom Hughes. Remember to tune in to my LBC show this Sunday from 10 for the very best political interviews, opinion and analysis. If you're used to Sunday shows having the collective energy of an autopsy, then I reckon this one is for you. We will be back on Monday, though. Have a lovely weekend.
57:33Patrick Maguire:This has been a Global Player original production.
From the publisher
Just over a year ago, Lewis spoke to Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, co-authors of the authoritative account of Keir Starmer's rise to power 'Get In: The Inside Story of Labour under Starmer'.
Their book shone a light on the weird political inertia at the heart of the Starmer project, often lacking in instinct, allies, and any particular ideological belief. Morgan McSweeney was the driving force behind the operation that thrust him into Downing Street - his authority draining the second he picked his cabinet.
McSweeney is now gone. The Mandelson scandal still poses a potentially existential threat to Starmer's premiership. The UK has been sucked into a conflict Starmer did not want to fight. The local elections in two months' time look like they will be brutal.
Gabriel and Patrick have just released the updated paperback edition of their book. Does it take us any closer to understanding who is the real Keir Starmer?
The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/