546. Keir Starmer Resigns: What Happens Next?

27:18And one of the criticisms, of course, is that… Sorry, footnote, that's also true of Rishi Sunak. I mean, it's amazing talking now that he's stepped down how many of his ministers say to me how wonderful he was when it came to details. Yeah, so that's the first thing. You can disappear. Andy, I think, is a good communicator. But I'll give you another example. You talked there about you don't have to be sort of so political, in a sense, is what you were saying. You called it being a mascot. And part of Andy's whole message is about politics, is about bringing people together. I was last week, I was comparing an event for the Tessa Jowell Foundation.

27:54Tessa, Andy's political career started as an advisor to Tessa Jowell. Tessa was kind of, you know, she was walking empathy. She was walking politics is about bringing people together. And Andy's got a lot of that about himself. A lot harder when you're standing at the dispatch box with, you know, 50 Malcolm Marshall fast bowlers coming at you from all sorts of different direction. Quite hard to hold on to that line that you won't do party political point scoring. So the communication, I think, will be much, much better. But I think it's going to get tougher. I think the other thing, you know, to go back to what I think.

28:31Sorry, you're making so many interesting points. I want to interrupt you on that one. So one of the tests that presumably is Prime Minister's questions is the classic one where I remember certainly Theresa May saying, I remember Rishi Sunak saying, I remember Jeremy Corbyn saying, and I remember Keir Starmer saying, we want to get out of the punch and duty. We don't want this ridiculous, you know, sort of stupid lines and we're going to try to be more dignified and collegial. And of course, what happened is they were massively punished for it. And in fact, in the case of Kemba Badenock, she had to make herself much more into something almost like a stand-up comedian, have all these sharp lines ready to go and be much more brutal.

29:10So that's going to be the one test for him immediately is, is he going to stand up at Primus's questions, try to bring the sort of style he had as a Manchester mayor, and find himself being mocked by the opposition and disappointing his own party who quite like the, yeah, stick it to them stuff. Well, just to give you one instance on that, and by the way, Roy, on the back of Nigel Farage's statement, we asked the people who are listening and watching now for a poll, should there be an early election? It's running at no 72, yes 28. But let's just take, how does he handle, I mean, it's quite strange, our parliament at the moment, because you've got the government there with a massive majority, and yet the leader is about to go.

29:55You have a new leader coming in. He's going to stand there with all these 400 and odd MPs behind him. And at the start, most of them will try to be behind him. But he's going to have all sorts of divisions that will start up, not least when he starts to reshape his team. And then you've got the official opposition who are kind of filling this bit. Then you've got the Nats and the Liberals. But it was really interesting how often in recent months the debate has actually been directed over towards this very small group of MPs led by Nigel Farage. Now, Andy Burnham has won the by-election in part, actually, by not tearing lumps off the reform candidate, you know, who, by the way, gave a lot of material that could have led anybody to say it, but decided not to.

30:37So how do you handle Farage if you're trying to do this different style of politics? And what's clear from the word go from Farage's statement on the back of what Keir Starmer, there's no, you know, Starmer's good grace in there. This is the UD party at work, and we've got to get rid of the bloody lot of them. So I think the other thing, just to go through a few other things that I think he's got to bear in mind, maybe more than Keir Starmer did. The first is the first big decisions really, really, really matter. So back in 97, our first really big decision was Bank of England Independence. If you go back through the early days of the Starmer government, the first big thing that people remember was the winter fuel payment.

31:21Now, they'd done lots of things before then, but they weren't done with the kind of cut through and the boldness that said, that's what this government is about. And just to remind people, the winter fuel payment, they boldly said that they were going to cut the winter fuel payment because it costs billions of pounds a year. And it's allowing people like you or my mother, who don't need the money, to get a winter fuel payment. So certainly, the Treasury has been desperate to cut that for years and years and years. And people like me who are trying to look at the logic of it have always thought it's a bit daft and why did Gordon Brown introduce it?

31:58But he does it and then he U-turns, doesn't he? Yeah, exactly. So he does it, gets what he thought was going to be political strength by showing we're prepared to take difficult decisions. Then is shown not to be able to get it through, even with this massive majority, which suggests lack of political authority. So therefore gets no credit at all for that U-turn. And just on the other thing that I think maybe was underestimated is MPs. I'm speaking to you here. You know this. MPs matter. It is, I think the question the historians will really struggle with is this question of how you've gone from that majority to this so quickly.

32:38And I think if you were to ask a lot of the MPs, particularly the new ones, actually, I think a lot of the new MPs say, I was talking to one of them recently. And she said, do you know, I don't feel I know Keir Starmer any better now than I did at the start. And I think the other thing, advisors matter. Advisors are incredibly important. I think it's helpful to Andy Burnham who's now got a bit of time to put together. Because, again, the advisors you might have to help you be the mayor of Manchester, you're talking about a completely different level of operation. You've got to get the right people around you.

33:09And Keir Starmer, he relied too much on one source of advice. That was Morgan McSweeney. It's really weird, this point about making friends with MPs and getting to know them. I mean, I agree it's a little bit like managing some sort of hysterical ballet company, and there's a lot of egos and narcissism around. But it is amazing how consistently you hear this. When I was in Parliament, everybody grumbled that David Cameron didn't make enough effort. The story then was that he and George Osborne were too grand. They were this sort of Notting Hill set, and they thought backbench MPs weren't posh enough and weren't interesting enough, and there wasn't any point spending time with them.

33:46So they just kind of hung out with each other and with their special advisors and, you know, went to the Cotswolds with Hugo Swire or whatever they did, right? Then the story would have been, you know, fast forwarding very much the same, I'm afraid, with Rishi Sunak, which people would have said, you know, he's not clubbable enough. He's not spending enough time in the tea rooms. He's not spending enough time in them. You know, and presumably, understandably, it's because these guys are very, very busy. And the fact is, backbench MPs can be pretty boring and demanding and take a huge amount of your time.

34:19And many of them, oddly, quote Tony Blair, which is where I want to come back to you, which is that when I challenged the Cameron administration about why they were behaving like this, they would say, well, you know, this was, this is what, well, I don't know what they called Tony, but was it the master? Anyway, this was their idea, their idea that this is how he did it. And, you know, it was all about what was happening in number 10. You didn't really need to have to worry about that. But presumably you're saying that you think that actually you made a better job of dealing with MPs than Starmus managed to do.

34:50And in which case, goodness gracious, is burnham's got to do it and he's got to acknowledge from the beginning it's going to be painful tough time consuming it's not enough to do a few drinks and number 10 which is what the whips will always do you know every time the party's discontented why don't we invite the mps and their wives and three series for a summer drink and number 10 um you've actually got to do the horrible thing which is really feel that you're sitting down with them almost into god there's 400 of them but you've got to sit down with them individually you've got to know their names.

35:22You've got to make them feel you care. You've got to praise them for the stuff they're doing in the constituency. You've got to make them feel that you mean it. Over to you. Well, I think I've told you before, George Bush telling me that he became president by writing a lot of letters. And I think you do, you need, look, you can't expect the leader of the Labour Party or the Prime Minister to spend the whole time. But I'll give you an example. You know, Gordon Brown was actually quite good at this. He had people who would be going through Hansard to see who made good speeches and then just drop them a little postcard saying, it didn't even have to be from Gordon.

35:57You know, Gordon said, what a great speech you made in the such and such a debate and what have you. So that kind of thing. But I think what, look, I think if Tony Blair was being absolutely honest, he'd say often it was a complete pain in the ass to have to do it. But he had Bruce Grokot, his PPS, and later on David Hanson and others who were saying to him, we've got to keep the PLP on side. Sally Morgan, part of her job. Pat McFadden, part of his job was, you know, keeping the MPs. It was, and the whips, of course, the two-way thing. But most prime minister's questions, at the end of most prime minister's questions, as you say, Tony Blair, unbelievably busy, hundreds of foreign leaders to talk to, visits to make, that we would always build into the diary some time for MPs, even if it was just signing bottles of scotch that then go to them for their next constituency raffle, whatever it might be.

36:45so and that is as you say a balls aching part of the job but the reason why it's so important for andy burnham see i think one of the things that keir starmer thought is i have helped transform the labor party post corbyn and i have led it to this amazing victory i'm not saying this is what he said but i think part of his thinking so all you lot who keep moaning at me you wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me right so don't expect me to spend all my time when i've got a country to run and all this and that but and but and andy burnham doesn't even have that because Andy Burnham's coming in. And a lot of these new MPs, I was talking to a group of new MPs two or three weeks ago.

37:24This was before it was so obvious what was going to happen. And one or two of them were very down on Andy Burnham. They thought that the sort of combination of West treating, doing what he'd done, and then Andy Burnham making the by-election so much about him, they were getting a bit sort of iffy about it. And one of them said, look, he's going to come in here and think we're all going to bow down. He said, we don't know him. We don't know this guy. So he's going to have to, and listen, Andy's very good at this stuff. Don't get me wrong. He's very good at relations. He's very good at being warm and charming.

37:52And once you tell him your kid's name, he'll remember it and all that stuff, which is part of politics, whether we like it or not. So I'm not saying he can't do it, but I think if we're going through the things that Keir didn't maybe do as much as he should have done. And I think the point about advisors is so important. You know, I got, I copped it in a way that Dominic Cummings did, Morgan McSweeney, you get some advisors who sort of become in a way too high profile. But that being said, I think that I will always say the difference, say between me and Cummings in relation to Johnson is I didn't have my own agenda.

38:25And secondly, the difference in relation to Morgan McSweeney, I was not the only advisor whose mindset the MPs and the ministers thought mattered to Tony Blair. He had a whole group of people and you need that. You can't just rely on one track of advice. Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goalhangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by WISE. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way.

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41:44I also wonder whether there isn't an opportunity for him as the Tory party fragments to bring over moderate Tories. This is, I mean, who knows, because it might all turn around. But if the Tory party is on course to being like the Liberal Party was after the First World War, the strange death of liberal England. One of the moves that the conservatives made at the time was to pull a lot of the leading lights of the Liberal Party over into their ranks. So I think there are a large chunk of people who are in play between Kemi Baden-Ock and Andy Burnham, if it's Andy Burnham, and who aren't going to go Lib Dem, much to the fury and frustration of the Lib Dems.

42:30They're people who are horrified by reform, horrified by the Greens, define themselves as centrists. And so one of the questions is, will he really lean into this idea that he's about unifying? And that's again difficult culturally with the Labour Party because I remember these slightly comical conversations that we were having with Bridget Phillipson and Rachel Reeves before the election when I was trying to get them to guess how Tories felt or who Tories were. and they really struggled to empathize, really understand Tory worldview. I think Andy's much better at that, I think, because he will have got used in Manchester to dealing with Tories.

43:18He was very charming, for example, when we had him on with Andy Street. We did Tale of Two Andes, which, you know, definitely worth listening to people. But that's another thing that would be interesting. Cameron did it to some extent, getting people like Andrew Adonis on board, getting former Labour ministers to run commissions, chair things, which was actually quite sort of interesting in the early days. I don't really remember this, but in sort of 2010, 2011, 2012, it was quite difficult for Labour MPs to attack commissions that he'd set up. You know, he'd put David Lammy looking at racism and youth justice.

43:52I think that was the issue. He had other people looking at child poverty who were former Labour ministers. And suddenly, the whole thing becomes a bit sort of unsettling for the opposition. Well, it did. I mean, Michael Gove asked me to do a review of mental health in prisons. And I remember at the time thinking, well, I think I'm being drawn into a trap here. But anyway, such was the chaos that he got moved on to a different job very soon thereafter. So what you're basically saying, Roy, is this a memo for you to take charge of British prisons? Absolutely. This is just my job application yet again to another Labour prime minister.

44:25Review of the BBC, review of Ofcom? You name it. Standing by, public servant, standing by. Listen, let's move on to the thing that I want to get you on to, which is we've talked a lot about theory, strategy, style, people skills. But I suppose the big question now is what's in the national interest and what are the really big calls that a future prime minister needs to make? And how does Andy Burnham, let's assume it's Andy Burnham, but it could be West Street, but let's assume it's Andy Burnham. How does he think about these things? And I've got some dilemmas in my mind, right? Does he return to the Rachel Reeves view, which as far as we can understand it is that they needed to cut things like wind fuel payments, concessions for farmers on inheritance, payments for unemployment benefits, because that was an important part of generating growth.

45:33Question one. Question two, does he, like Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, believe that he really needs to stick to this ruling out any rises in income tax, which forces you to do a lot of weird, quite damaging taxes and borrow more money because you can't put income tax up. And broadly speaking, all of that stuff, I think, sits in a question about competitiveness, winning back business, and what kind of Labour Party this is. Is this a party that is about, and look, I agree, Andy will resist this, but sometimes there are things which feel like a choice between our priority is more equality and our priority is more growth.

46:16And look, obviously, there's a third way idea that you can do both. But we haven't had growth in this country really since 2008. And a lot of the problems in the country stem from that. And I just don't know how radical he's going to be. On the triple lock pension, let me finish on this one. Is it actually plausible that the guy's going to come in and really be prepared to kick pensioners and the teeth in order to achieve long-term gain? The short answer is I don't know. I'm not sure. But that's the sort of thing that I mean when I say that his first days and his first impressions and his first decisions are going to be so, so, so important.

46:59And I think it would be best for him and for the country if, in a way, he were prepared to confront the country with the reality of the situation that we're in. I think you can persuade the country, for example, that Russia is a bigger threat than we've maybe been prepared to acknowledge. I, as you know, remain obsessed with the fact that we've still not properly fully understood Russia's role in Brexit. There was a very, very interesting you know call me obsessed rory and by the way talking of russia i must direct people to our leading the interview this week which is bbc steve rosenberg the russia editor it's one of my favorite interviews actually and partly because i won't give away the ending but mainly because of the ending it's the best ending of a podcast we've ever done that's all i'm going to say but yesterday we had this extraordinary situation one of the things that's kind of obsessing me and keeping me awake at night is that you now have the combined forces of MAGA in the United States and Donald Trump.

48:04I mean, how disgusting yesterday that he sort of pre-announced Keir Starmer's announcement. Almost implying that he was on The Apprentice and had fired him. I mean, it was really weird. It was disgusting. And then with two lies saying that, you know, when you've got immigration actually coming down and crime coming down, and he talked about soaring immigration and soaring crime. So you've got MAGA, you've got the hard right around Europe, including in our own country, at a time when the hard right is so radicalising some people that you have like that guy going around the streets of Edinburgh with a knife, just going around randomly stabbing Muslims.

48:40And I think it's shocking, by the way, that that has not had the same sort of outpouring as we had recently when somebody was stabbed in gold as green. And I think there is a sort of double standard there. But then alongside that, so you've got Maga the hard right and you've got the Kremlin. So yesterday, Roy, I don't know if you saw this, one of the – Trump did his post saying Keir Starmer's going to go, nice guy, but, you know, I always knew he wasn't up to it kind of thing. You're fired. One of the first people to repost that with something like, we've got him or, you know, we've come together and got rid of him or we've got our man kind of thing was Kirill Dmitrieff.

49:18the Steve Wyckoff of the Kremlin, Putin's right-hand man. So that's the other thing that I think. And that problem is not going to go away just because you're a bit more charismatic. That problem is going to be there. Well, let's develop that second problem. So if the first problem is domestic growth, the economy, the second problem is what are Andy Burnham's instincts about the shape of the world and how Britain sits in the world for the next five to 10 years. So is Russia a security threat to Britain by 2030 or by 2035? It's a hell of a big judgment call he's got to make because all our defense procurement depends on that.

50:03Have we got 10 years to sort ourselves out or four years to sort ourselves out? Drives almost everything he's going to have to do in the expansion. What sort of threat is China to us? We forget about China, but actually, of course, the reality is that China is something that has wiped out a lot of European and American industry through a cheap currency, through subsidizing, and through a lot of very impressive technology strategy. And then the third one is what's his instinct on the US? And this is a really difficult thing. This is where one never really sensed where Keir Starmer ended up. The problem with sending Mandelson to Washington is Mandelson was still very much struck in the world that you just had to be nice to Trump and there was no real alternative.

50:52Um, if Burnham senses, as I think the whole world does now that Trump is the canary in the coal mine, Trump shows us how dangerously dependent we are on the U S for everything, how the U S basically has us by the throat. and we did rather an interesting interview, which is coming out soon with Malcolm Turnbull, and he talked about capacity and intent. He said, look, I'm not saying that either China or the US has the intent to weaponize our dependencies, but you also have to think about capacity. And you also have to ask yourself, look, if you have built a whole economy dependent on American cloud computing and AI and American defense recruitment and the dollar and the payment systems, is it inconceivable that Trump or a future American president might weaponize those dependencies to get what he wants?

51:48And if it is conceivable, how do you build the strategic autonomy? I mean, not complete sovereignty, but how do you build a strategic autonomy? And that relates back to the bigger question, the big elephant in the room, which is, of course, the only way that Britain can do this is with Europe. The real answer to how you stand up to Russia, China, the US, do any of this middle power stuff, is not just talking about what we do with Canada and Australia and New Zealand, or Japan or South Korea, but accepting that right on our doorstep is an entire institution, which was largely designed in order to try to coordinate between nation states and in order to have some strategic autonomy.

52:29Yeah. And again, I mean, I know Andy well, but I have an instinct for what his answers might be in those, but I don't know. And of course, the one part that you didn't really go into was Europe, because that's going to be a very important part of his messaging as well. So if you take those things one by one, I think it's very, very hard for any leader of the country right now to make the case that there isn't a genuine threat from Russia in all sorts of different ways. And I think we need to be much more open with the public about what they are. A very interesting interview I spotted the other day with Al Kahn, who's obviously just left the Ministry of Defence.

53:02He was talking about the influence of Iranian and other misinformation campaigns on Scottish independence debate. I presume that is based on stuff he was briefed about when he was in the MOD. So I think all that kind of thing we need to be much more open with the public about. So I'm imagining he will want to be pretty hard over on defence. But we all know one of the reasons that Keir Starmer was weakened in recent days is because he lost his defence secretary, John Healy, because his defence secretary, John Healy, was not happy with the decision making process around the defence investment plan and felt that Keir Starmer and Rachel Rees were taking too long and making the wrong decision.

53:43So Andy's got that problem on his plate straight away if he becomes prime minister, unless Keir Starmer gets that sorted before he goes. um on china again i think there's there's is one of those where you have to be very very clear early on about a strategic position and and so he needs a bit of time to think of those things and then on europe i mean i can remember andy as a you know pretty not maybe as obsessed as i am but not brexit derangement syndrome in the way that i am but at the same time that's where his kind of core belief is that britain's britain's place is in the heart of europe but of course he's just been elected in a constituency that is very much not necessarily of that view even though most people think that brexit has been a bit of a disaster i mean just just just to underscore people a constituency that voted two-thirds for brexit you know 65 percent for brexit um i mean it's a very strong leave constituency i want rory can i read you um can i read you let's see let's read between your few lines.

54:47Andy Burnham has posted as follows. Keir, Keir Starmer, has given huge service to our country. I want to thank him for his leadership and dedication during such a challenging period. His decision marks the beginning of a transition. It's important that this process is conducted in an orderly, responsible way. I will put myself forward as part of this process. The country expects stability, seriousness, and a continued focus on the issues that matter most, and that is what it will get. as we move forward our priority must be to work together to get the country back to where we all want it to be people want to see progress on economic growth cost of living public services housing etc etc etc political change should never distract from the responsibility to improve people's lives the labor movement has always been at its strongest when it looks forward with confidence of purpose that is what we'll do from here and we will make sure this transition is a positive process of renewal for our party and our country so we don't really get much in terms of that's very much sort of being nice to care.

55:44Let me give you my final one. And this, I guess, is really my job pitch. I'd be pitching myself, if I was trying to help Andy, to try to get people to think seriously about AI. Because I think we're underestimating the fact that this could, in three years, change almost everything. It could have a radical impact on unemployment. A lot of people could lose their jobs. It could completely transform the balance of power in terms of how weapon systems work. It could completely transform productivity and public services. And the problem is that we built it all on an American stack. So what are we going to do about it?

56:22And somebody needs to sit down with Andy Burnham and get his choices. And again, it'll be his gut instincts, I guess, as well as his thing. What's he going to think if you say, okay, we could gamble that the US in the end is going to be nice to us and they're going to want our markets and they're never going to do anything as brutal as cut off our access to these frontier models. So let's just keep cozying up to the US and integrate ourselves and maybe build some smart apps and the life sciences, which they may want to use, and that will grow our economy. Second choice, we're going to try to build off chinese open source models and we're going to um not develop our own frontier ai but we're going to build off chinese open source models and do some rather interesting things as backup choice number three we're going to build a lot of data centers and we're going to buy a lot of chips and we're going to host american weights in britain and europe so that if an american president switched off access to the next generation of mythos at least we've still got the last generation and put legal protections in.

57:27Final one, we go all out for a Manhattan project trying to get Japan, South Korea, Canada, Europe, Middle East together to build our own frontier models on the grounds that this is everything. This is like electricity, this is like gas, this is like nuclear, we can't afford to be without it. And the cost of that would be phenomenal. And he's also going to be facing the politics of AI, which maybe we need to talk about more because Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, was booed off a stage trying to talk about AI at a commencement. In America, public opinion is moving against AI very fast. People are very worried about losing jobs, very worried about data centers.

58:12And that will become bigger and bigger in Britain. Who's going to take up the anti-AI mantle in British party politics? I'm not sure that would be Andy, but at the same time, again, I don't really know what his views are on all those choices that you've just set out. I thought it was interesting in his campaigning and in Makerfield and also in the speeches that he made since winning, he did say that part of the challenge facing the country was that we do not go down the dark and dangerous road that American politics has gone down, which said to me he's going to be more in the kind of call Trump out than just sort of, you know, pull the envelope from the pocket, as it were.

58:51But that's a big call as well, how you handle that relationship. It's, again, very, very high up in his intray when he takes over. By the way, Rory, your role is to apply for jobs. My role is to tell you what's happening inside the process now unfolding. I've given you Andy Burnham's reaction. West Streeting has basically just put out a statement withdrawing any possibility of campaigning. He's basically saying he's going to get behind Andy Burnham. He thinks that's what everybody else should do. He supports what he's trying to do, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he does mention, by the way, that one of the big issues that he's been setting out, plan for Britain to grow again, grow together, progressive capitalism focused on wealth creation as much as wealth distribution, leading the world in the fourth industrial revolution and protecting people from its risks, modernizing public services, giving Britain energy security.

59:41I am reading into that. He's bidding to be chancellor of the Cheka. And he's bidding to be a chance to checker who agrees with quite a lot, I think, of what your friend Tony Blair said in his essay. So can Andy Burnham do that? Can he bring in somebody who, I don't know what the polite word from somebody who's from the right of the Labour Party is. What do you call that? You call it the soft something? I noticed left-wing Labour people are called soft left. What do you call people who are on the right of the Labour Party? Well, no, soft left is, so you've got hard left, which would be, I guess, you know, yeah, but even Corbyn is, you know, hard left in the old days was kind of Derek Hatton, Mulhern, Militant.

1:00:21But yeah, Corbyn would probably be seen as hard left. And then soft left would be more Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham, etc. I don't think we like to make the comparison on the right. so soft right i don't want to be soft right i'm i'm kind of i'm left of center i've i'm hard left of center um but yeah so anyway what what it means is that if there's no challenges i'm just trying to think how this works are we now in a theresa may situation where there are no challenges then andy burnham comes prime minister in july or september he's crowned and comes in in july Absolutely. That's the way I understand it.

1:01:01It may be that somebody else will jump up and challenge who isn't West Streeting. All cows? Yeah, exactly. We need to have a competition. The reason, of course, I favored it very much with Kamala Harris is I thought it does two things. One is it puts you through your paces and sees whether you really can hack it as a campaigner on a national scale. And secondly, if you win it, it gives you a degree of legitimacy and democracy that's actually brought you through.

1:01:32So, Alistair, look, just come back to this once more, because I think it really would encourage, and this is the death knell for poor old Wes, isn't it? But I do think there are many, many people in the center ground and in the business community who'd be very reassured if Wes Streeting became the chancellor. But does that mean that he's not going to get the job because the Labour soft left will be horrified? well and the thing he's going to have to do he can't govern according to one strand of opinion in the labor party you just can't do that it does have to be broad and merit-based it really does and obviously politics is a part of it and you know has he even tacitly or even openly said to lucy powell who's been very very important in his campaign you'll be back in the cabinet said to louise haig you'll be back in the cabinet said to angela reyner you'll be back in the cabinet That's three cabinet positions that three other people then have to vacate.

1:02:26And then he thinks, oh, maybe that John Healy. Absolutely. Does John Healy, you know, both John Healy and Wes Street, if you're looking for a list of the people who have brought about or helped to engineer this situation that looks like Keir Starmer is going to resign under pressure and you're going to take over without a contest, then it's part of politics that you look to reward the people who helped you get there. So that means that then, you know, is there a danger then that people who actually you and I would say were very effective? So, well, sorry, there's no room for you. He will want to bring on, he probably will want to bring on some of the younger people to show the younger people that there is a there is opportunity onwards.

1:03:07So listen, the thing I've said many, many times, having watched one prime minister in particular, very, very close up, but also Gordon and the ones I covered as a journalist, is I don't think anything prepares you for it. I don't think anything prepares you for it. And yes, Andy's had quite a long, he's been an MP, he's been a junior minister, he's been a cabinet minister, he's been a very successful mayor for nine years. But this is happening at a time when the challenges facing all of us are so immense. I was even thinking today, I've got my Brexit derangement syndrome saying something very symbolic about, you know, literally tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the referendum.

1:03:47We're still dealing with that. Today, we're talking about possibly having the highest temperature that's ever been recorded. Okay, we're living with climate change. And yet, because of Trump and all that is going down, we're living with polarization. we're living with the muskification of the social media landscape we're living with a media that just doesn't really want to cover politics as it is it wants to turn it into a soap opera that none of that's changing none of that's changing unless yeah and we've got and i mean final one for me because i think we've come to all the end but the the big question is is he going to buy into the idea that Britain needs something very, very radical, that we can't just manage decline, it can't just be business as usual, that we're becoming increasingly irrelevant and marginalized, partly because our economy is just not performing.

1:04:42And therefore, he's going to be prepared to take real political risk, show real courage, make some people very, very angry, including fighting with people in his own party, and doing things that will horrify you and me. uh, in the hope that in the end, we say three years later, well, okay. I was really angry that he did X, Y, and Z, but I've got to say, he's got growth going. This is really working. Britain's feeling much stronger and more significant than before. Yeah. Well, it has to be, it has to be the latter. So I think the route is either, I wouldn't put my money on this, but I think, you know, don't rule out, maybe you have an election.

1:05:22Uh, you take, you, you call for Arj's bluff. you actually you take out of what you take out of the bakerfield by-election is that deep down the country does not want even a place like that does not want nigel farage as prime minister you call that bluff you then get your own mandate big big risk but you know don't rule it out or he comes in fights off the legitimacy claims basically says no our constitution means i can you know be prime minister because i'm leading the party that's got a majority in parliament and then he has to show that it can be a lot better than what we've had so far either way it's a tough road it's a tough road there's no point pretending this is going to be easy it's not easy politics right now i think is as hard as it's ever been and i obviously wish him luck i desperately want labor to be successful i've wanted kia starmer to be successful uh i feel deep sympathy for the fact that he's not been able to survive and he's not been able to survive for political reasons uh and that's the life that he chose so on we go um so there we are we've we've we've june the 22nd it's a day of history rory because you know what else happened on june the 22nd no what else football 40 years ago today the hand of god rose in the sky your favorite man there he is behind the attack of the ball ever it's dodgiest thing listen i'm also winning as As Andy Burnham will tell you, it's about winning.

1:06:47So for those of you who've been watching us live, thank you for all your comments. And they've been great. Medieval Arpad Cook's goodness watch Rory fall for all the conservative fallacies. Someone else, Labour needs to institute capital gains tax, equality for income tax. People talking about Mamdani, people saying Fanalytics, the UK won't be able to build a deep tech stack by themselves. They'll need partnerships. So thank you for everyone who came in. Sorry we didn't bring you into that conversation, but those are exactly the arguments that Keir Sam is going to be having in his inner team. And thank you, Alistair, so much for taking us through so much there.

1:07:24Thank you. And just to remind people that question time this week is going to be a special with the European Commissioner for Climate and Energy, Dan Jørgensen, former Danish government minister, very, very smart guy, very interesting guy. so if you've got any questions you want me to put to dan jergensen then just go online and you can find that um and i think this will probably do as our main podcast of the week unless anything even more dramatic happens tomorrow very good thank you all very much for listening guys look forward to seeing question time bye