A circular firing squad: the bitter war over defence spending

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1:30The government is spending more defence money. You'd think that's a good thing, but there is a veritable circular firing squad somewhere between Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, John Healy, the defence chief, the defence industry. It has been a bitter and bloody process and it doesn't look like it's going to end particularly well.

1:49Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, the political editor of The Times. I'm Lara Spirit, the deputy political editor of The Sunday Times. And this week, we're going to be getting into two main areas. The first, we're going to bring you some scoops on the extraordinary rows inside the defence investment plan. This should be a good thing. It's spending billions of pounds more on defence, but we can tell you that pretty much everyone is at loggerheads over it and everyone is coming out worse from it in the end. And then we want to come on to the Makefield by-election.

2:19It is coming and it is increasingly likely that we're going to see Andy Burnham win that from what we can see. So, look, we'll get straight into it, Lara. Let's talk about the defence investment plan. It doesn't sound sexy. These things dip as it's being called in the Ministry of Defence circles. But it is an almighty route. So the latest that we have for you is we think they're going to settle on an additional£13.5 billion for the armed forces. but I can tell you that pretty much everyone is unhappy. Shall we start with unhappy person number one, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, Laurie. You had some scoops on that at the weekend.

2:56Yes, so we reported at the weekend that she was deeply frustrated. I think it's worth saying there's two things here. She's unhappy with the cuts themselves. You've got to find this money. Number 10 have determined or determined towards the end of last week that actually the way that you should do that is to have a blanket 1 % cut to the capital budgets of all departments and then have an additional set of cuts or like tougher cuts for two departments, Transport and the Department of Energy, Security and Net Zero. Now, Heidi Allen at Transport pushed back on some initial asks for those saying they were way too big, but I think they ended up in a slightly better place.

3:28But there was mounting unease about the impact of those cuts on education and health in particular. You're talking about cuts of more than half a billion pounds to the NHS budget at a time when this is a government who is really proud of the fact that they have given a lot of money, a massive injection of cash in that budget from Rachel Reeves initially to the NHS. And actually, you know, after we broke this story, the number of messages I got from, I would say, sort of Treasury slash Treasury adjacent people pointing to the fact that Rachel Reeves has before said to the House that actually other governments in the past have cut capital spending.

3:57That's not what this Labour government does. And so these cuts in themselves are objectionable to Rachel Reeves. But also what is objectionable is the process by which the government, I say the government number 10 in their view, really has gone about this, which is to say that the spending review process was done, essentially. and then there was this belated effort to reopen this torturous post to find some new money for defence, which made basically everybody unhappy. So I should also say that Rachel Rees is determined to see a path through for this. She's being constructive. She wants to see this work out and she's working with everyone.

4:32But I think there's real frustration under the surface there from her. It sounds like a complete mess. And look, in the wake of your scoop at the weekend, Laura, we were putting in calls this week. And what people kept saying to me is this is a number 10 thing, this whole thing about how it's going to be funded. Number 10 is leading the process. Now, what's extraordinary about that is this is money. This is the job of the Treasury is to find money for things and communicate with departments. But everyone kept saying it's a number 10 led process, which I think tells you all you need to know that this is Starmer trying to drive this through, possibly in one of his last major acts as prime minister.

5:07But it also just talks to the bad blood. Now, look, we should also talk about the number. So let's start with where this began. The armed forces came in and said they needed an extra 28 billion. That is, keep that figure in your head. And where we have ended up from what we are told is 13.5 billion. So that's over the next four years. And what that will lead to arguments, and the armed forces chiefs, I'm told, are really up in arms about it, that it will actually lead to significant cuts to major projects over the next four years. So far from being a moment of celebration, we think this is being unveiled on Friday.

5:44But look, I don't want to be a hostage fortune here because this is now nine months delayed. And every time someone writes that it's coming, it tends to get postponed once again into the manana distance. But look, we're told there's a kind of headline figure coming on Friday with a couple of the glitzy capital projects. but we've got another scoop on it because what we're told is that the defense chiefs haven't actually seen the thing so this defense investment plan is supposed to set out in kind of granular detail how the money billions of extra pounds of funding will be spent over the next 10 years and the defense chiefs themselves have not seen it it's about to go to the press presumably we think we possibly get a two-page summary on friday with the headline figure and the main thing later in July.

6:27But if the people that are expected to oversee the expenditure of this money have not seen the document, I think that's a pretty big problem. Yeah, and I think probably brings us on to the second group of people who are unhappy, which are those in the defence industry. Because even at the point at which Starmann can stand up and say, I have found some extra money for defence, these are people who are going to be saying it's not enough. It's far short of what you said it was going to be. And actually, they're completely livid. And my colleague, Dominic Housechild, had a story at the weekend, which was that a key pledge on military housing was going to be watered down.

6:57I mean, this is not going to be a triumphant moment for the defence industry in the way that had it been published on time, had it been published with perhaps more money, it would have been a genuine gesture from the Prime Minister and this government to say, actually, we are making major, major sacrifices to make this happen and we're going to meet the demands of the moment. So we have an unhappy Chancellor, we have an unhappy defence chief, the defence industry is unhappy, which brings us on to John Healy, the Defence Secretary. So from what we are told, and others have also heard this, he is very unhappy about the way this settlement's going.

7:30I'm sure that that will be denied. John Healy is a very loyal foot soldier to Keir Starmer, but he is concerned because obviously, just look at the numbers, 28 billion, 13.5 billion, that is hugely less than expected. And one of the points that's being made to me is a lot of this money is already kind of earmarked. It's going to be swallowed up by this new six-generation jet fighter that they're working on, which is six billion over the next four years. So before you even start, lots of this money has been spent. So effectively, defence will be kind of standing still is the concern. And that's the big worry.

8:05So John Healy, the defence secretary who has been at the heart of this row, is not particularly happy either. I interviewed John Healy and he stressed in this interview, and this was after the Makerfield by-election had been announced, he stressed basically how loyal he was. He is not one to be known to make his displeasure publicly known in any sort of aggressive way. And, you know, I'm told there was a bit of unease at Cabinet last week when Keir Starman was speaking about this. You know, his Cabinet colleagues are going to be saying, well, sorry, you've cut my budgets significantly. And also, let's just be clear, like when I was speaking to people about this over the weekend, they were saying, we haven't even done key stakeholder conversations about these things across government.

8:42I mean, there are going to be people who are reading about it in the Sunday Times, for example, and be perhaps listening to this podcast, who will be saying, well, I wasn't aware that there'd be hundreds of millions cut in this particular area, for example, you know, take the NHS, for example. I mean, you do have to ask yourself, from John Healy's perspective, he's like, I'm getting all this incoming from colleagues, likely. And actually, this is a process that I was very transparent about from the beginning, that there was going to be a huge demand. The prime minister was going out day in, day out saying, I'm going to fund the defence investment plan.

9:09This is really important. We're going to get it done. And belatedly has come to the table with this kind of rearguard action to make this happen, which is making everybody unhappy. And then we come lastly to Keir Starmer himself, who is in now the position, this has been delayed for nine months, which is extraordinary in its own right. There is this huge gulf between his rhetoric and the reality, this consistent delay. It just drags on his authority because you have eminent people, day after day, very senior military people saying this is a joke. This is kind of discrediting the entire industry.

9:38So the gap between the PM's words and the reality, There were also suggestions of frustrations at various points with John Healy, the Defence Secretary, about it, that he kind of felt this should have been fully costed at an earlier stage. But that is disputed. But either way, you've got an unhappy Prime Minister. But we are in, what should we call this, is this legacy care mode? We're in kind of the mode where he is trying to get things out the door to either, one, bolster his premiership so he has a chance of fighting Andy Burnham, or two, we are in that bit that happened at the end of Theresa May's premiership.

10:10where she announced a load of massive thonking things in the final days of her premiership, got stuff out the door. I mean, the machine is being pushed very hard, but there is a real risk with this defence investment plan that for all the blood, all the sweat, all the tears, all the political capital, all the anger burning around Whitehall and in defence, that it doesn't deliver what the Prime Minister says it will deliver. Yeah, and can I just say the great irony of this, of course, and something that we've mentioned many times in this podcast, Our solicitors might be tired of hearing it. But we'll, I think, agree with the truth of it, which is that many people inside government say the chief flaw of Keir Starmer is that he cannot make difficult decisions.

10:47When push comes to shove, he just does not want to make those big calls. And actually, here he is trying to make quite a big call, basically saying people are going to have to tighten their belts here. And yet, because it's happened so late, and because it's actually not really to a degree that it would need to be to fund defence properly, he's going to get absolutely no thanks for it whatsoever. Whereas if he had said months and months and months ago, I'm going to take a proactive leadership on this issue and actually I'm going to make it a big fight and I'm going to say we are going to make difficult decisions on this.

11:14We want to prioritise defence for X, Y, Z reasons. I think we're all very well aware of what those are and polling does show that voters are feeling more perceptive of threats. At this point I just think it's going to look again pretty weak from the Prime Minister, not least because he doesn't have his main cabinet colleagues behind him on it. I mean that's going to be a really, really difficult thing. say he does go into an existential fight with Andy Burnham for the leadership of this country, and he doesn't have those cabinet colleagues around him because they've just had this massive fight over defence spending, it's going to be really difficult.

11:44There's also, look, there is a fundamental legitimacy question which needs to be asked. It's a brutal question to ask. But if Keir Starmer's premiership is coming to an end, which looks likely, if Andy Burnham is on the horizon, that entire cast of characters we just talked about is likely to change. You'll have a new prime minister. You'll most likely have a new chancellor. You'll probably have a new defence secretary. And who's to say that any of these decisions remain as decisions? It's not clear, right? And that is one of the challenges. And what particularly struck me, if we're right on this, and I think we are, is this kind of two-phased announcement.

12:18So what we are told is on Friday, somewhere in Swindon, some kind of drone factory, we think the PM and John Healy will stand up and announce this summary of what the defence investment plan is, which will have the overall figure plus a couple of the shiny projects with the granular detail of the plan itself to come later on that in itself carries inherent risks it's another delay and if you're a prime minister by that stage Andy Burnham will be an MP and he will have views on defence spending he will have views on capital spending and he'll probably by that stage be gunning for the leadership so it's a problem what Slime's doing is trying to get things out the door but at the same time his authority as we get closer and closer to next week's by-election, that is ebbing away.

13:04And that's the challenge that he faces. It's an interesting question, like what does Andy Burnham do about the defence investment plan? Because if you look at where the cuts are likely to fall, Transport, Des knows. I mean, his chief ally, Ed Miliband, is obviously at the helm of that and a great and ideological champion of that industry, right? And then in Transport, again, you know, this is something that Andy Burden, for those of us who are paid to listen to every single day, is talking about day in, day out. Is he going to buy these cuts? But if he doesn't, where is he going to find the money?

13:36I mean, I think this is one of the big problems and one of the things I came back to over the weekend in conversations with people were, you know, we had the story reported by Gabriel Pogrent some months ago that they'd ruled out a further cut to foreign aid to fund the defence investment plan. We know they'd ruled out a cut to welfare as well. So the Treasury was having to go around in this kind of salami slicing way, finding things that they could cut. And it It just does, to all of those who are frustrated about this, seem like a genuinely abysmal way to have gone through this process. I mean, what is Andy Burnham going to cut to fund the defence investment plan?

14:06Very good question. And if Andy Burnham doesn't want to fund the defence investment plan, I mean, he has said previously, I mean, he's clarified his position on this, but there was a point where he'd suggested that he might be open to borrowing more to fund for defence. We're not in that place anymore. But he's not a future Labour leader who doesn't think that we should be spending money on defence by any stretch. And I think, you know, if there is something to be said in sympathy for the Prime Minister, It is that. One thing that is worth noting just before we move on to the make-a-field by-election, this is arguably what the Prime Minister should have been trying to do all along.

14:35He's pushing the system really hard now to try to get some form of announcement on the defence investment plan. We talked about the pitfalls of that, but nonetheless, after all the delays, it appears to be something is in the offing. And we'll judge that on its merits when it comes out. But he's also pushing it on the social media ban on the under-16s. He's been on a journey, as they call it, having been opposed to banning social media from the 16s to now probably having looked at the polling, realised how popular it is. And he is very much on board with that. I think he used to tell other MPs that his children benefited from using social media like TikTok and Snapchat.

15:07And he saw benefits to it. But from what we hear, he's now taking a maximalist approach and we're going to get some kind of Australian style ban announced. Then you've got Brexit. it after all you know they are trying to get all these legacy announcements out and there is an argument that if they'd have done all this a lot earlier in his premiership we might be in a very different position we might not right but well i think in europe we definitely would i mean i did a story a few weeks ago about uh you know some diplomats who had raised concerns with the uk about the fact that actually they're feeling a bit wary about negotiating and putting lots of weight into it in circumstances where kistama's leadership is up in the air i mean from their perspective, you know, I think the slightly more optimistic view from some of them might be, well, let's wait until a more pro-European prime minister comes in.

15:52I think they were also suggesting that because West Streeting had said that he would want to see the EU rejoin, that that might unsettle things. But I think, you know, everybody knows that that's not an immediate prospect at all. But I do think that is a classic illustration of why you cannot leave these big decisions until the end of your premiership in circumstances where the people that you're negotiating with and dealing with can see this. And if you do have to have a negotiation as it is in the European Union, it just weakens your hand massively. Yeah. And at the end of the day, you get this really surreal situation where the Prime Minister is telling his cabinet to deliver.

16:22They're all looking over his shoulder, getting on the train to make a wheel and are going to kiss the ring of Andy Burnham, hoping to ensure their jobs in the next administration. So it is a pretty surreal situation. So look, we're going to head to the interval now. And when we come back from the break, we're going to be talking about Team Burnham and how they are increasingly confident. There's a swagger to it. They think they've got, they're going to win Makerfield. They're not taking it for granted, but they think they're going to win. Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone.

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18:56Welcome back to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. We are going to be talking about the make-a-feel by-election now and Team Burnham. And when you talk to them, they're pretty confident they're going to win now. And that wasn't a given. When this all started, everyone was saying it's a really hard fight for him. But where they're sitting now, they think particularly that the right is dividing. And we think they may be right in that, that Restore is picking up a lot more votes than people thought it would. So that divides the vote on the right. And they also think that his broad message is getting through.

19:27I was listening to one of those kind of radio phone-in debates between the different candidates the other day. and he was just he was pretty dominant in it he was like i agree with you on this rob i agree with you on this michael but don't agree on that but it was all the energy was his energy as the front runner and he feels pretty confident i think i think that's definitely a fair representation of of where they are i mean we did a focus group with more in common last week where a woman who was undecided said that she had a conversation with andy burnham through her ring doorbell um she was in wales at the time and he promised to come back this week she was genuinely undecided had voted for him as mayor, had not otherwise voted Labour and was looking forward to the Question Time debate to try and make up her mind.

20:08And her reservation, which again is something that we've heard multiple times in these focus groups, is just this worry that he's using it as a stepping stone, that he's not going to be their MP. Also a real sense of, oh, he was elected as mayor, should he see that out, etc. I think they're very, very sensitive to those arguments. And you heard on Question Time, Andy Burnham's response to that many times over, as you have in countless interviews too. But this woman, interestingly, was relatively undecided. And, you know, our friends at More Uncommon called her after the question time debate and said, have you made up your mind?

20:37She was like, no, I'm in turmoil. I still haven't decided. But Burnham's going to be knocking on her door this week to have a conversation with her. And it'll be interesting to see whether or not he can change her mind. I think, you know, those around him do feel that when people are face to face with him, he has an impact. But equally, you know, I'm not picking up a great deal of unhappiness or concern from reform. I don't think they feel like this is going badly. I was in the office in the campaign HQ on last Thursday. They were editing a TikTok rap video. Everyone was in genuinely high spirits.

21:06Like they were very relaxed. They've got their ground game. They know what they're doing. And they are confident on Restore that they can squeeze that vote slightly. But I thought, you know, our colleague Oliver Wright wrote a fantastic read with Public First where they'd had, I mean, loads of conversations with people. More than 100 conversations. Yeah, where Restore really were still a very potent threat to them. And it's the reach of Restore that's really interesting. There is a whole parallel universe which we're not really, people don't tap into as much, but Rupert Lowe is very big on Facebook and people are getting a lot of their news on Facebook.

21:37So you have conversations with people and my colleague Oliver had a conversation with a pensioner and she had been hearing all about Rupert Lowe on Facebook and his persona on Facebook is actually very different to his persona on other social media outlets. It's a more reasoned one. It's slightly less hard line and it was having an impact. Now, look, we're not saying that Restore have any shot of winning this. The question is, can they take enough of the vote from reform to split the right? And therefore, Andy Burnham walked through the middle. Yeah, I mean, they're well resourced. I did a piece with David Collins at the weekend where he had been looking at, we'd been looking together at the impact, the digital war in Makerfield, basically.

22:14And what was very interesting was that Restore are spending significant money online. They are targeting basically exclusively women, which is really fascinating. and you wouldn't necessarily think. My initial instinct was, you know, is this to do with Robert Kenyon, the reform candidates, previous comments about women, you know, self-referred sexists, etc. But what was really interesting was seeing like just how present they were online. And Makerfield has so many of these community Facebook groups where people are engaging with each other all the time. And these candidates, Andy Burnham is posting in them, you know, reformer posting in these community groups.

22:43And they're different from your usual, you just see a post promoted on Facebook. These are actually, you know, organic posts where they're trying to really embed into the local community. but online, which is really interesting. And that, I think, is just a kind of aspect of this election that we hadn't been thinking about that much before. Can I just talk briefly? Because it was so nuts. I enjoyed the whole thing in a way. But on Friday, there was the most crazy... There was an announcement from Andy Burnham, which was essentially, we are in the middle of a by-election on local issues. And Andy Burnham went to a pub and announced£350 million worth of cuts in business rates for pubs, for music venues, etc.

23:19And we got this press release through. And the press release, I think I'm right saying, came from a Labour press officer who's been seconded to the campaign. It looked like a kind of nationwide press release. It was basically saying, this is what I will do if I'm prime minister. It included some very aggressive criticism of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, who had undervalued pubs in local communities. And I just I remember just looking at it and just thinking, this is extraordinary. This is a by-election campaign where we're getting a major kind of national spending pledge. and and that is what you have here this weird parallel campaign where Andy Burnham is at once fighting to be the local MP but also fighting to be prime minister and he nods to the prime minister thing when it suits him but what he also does is when people ask him tricky questions about the fiscal rules or this policy or that policy he says this is an insult to the voters of Baker Field you are here to to talk to you know I'm here to talk to them so he's doing both things kind of when it suits him at the moment.

24:15We should talk about what comes next. And the big question of what comes next is, when does Andy Burnham make a move? And to address that question, we need to start with the personalities. We need to start with the people involved. Because let's put this bluntly, Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham do not like each other very much. Is that a fair assessment? It's there's an enmity which goes back years here. It goes back, doesn't it, to Keir Starmer trying to get Andy Burnham's endorsement Labour leadership, making the journey to Manchester to get it and coming back empty handed. And the kind of briefings, I'm sure you'll be getting the same thing, Laura.

24:51Starmer's allies say that Andy Burnham is behaving unforgivably. That what he is doing is fundamentally destabilising and will make it much harder for Labour to win the next election. And on Burnham's side, I mean, Burnham is saying the quiet bit out loud. He's campaigning on a pitch to change Labour and change the country, i.e. change the prime minister and change the way they do business. You know, they are, it's all out there in the open, but it's pretty, pretty ugly. Yeah. I mean, I think from the Burnham side, there's a sense that, you know, Number 10 are sort of labouring under these delusions, basically.

25:24There's a level of political unreality in the world in which they're existing, which is essentially to say Kiesama is historically unpopular and there is not a way through for labour in the current iteration that Kiesama is leading. Obviously, from the Number 10 perspective, they would say, you know, Andy Burnham has been an open adversary of Starmer really since Labour conference last year, that it was clear from that that this was somebody who thought the Labour Party should be run differently and that that expression was not necessarily helpful in that point. I think, I mean, for number 10, of course, I think there'll be a private sense of if Andy Burnham loses this election, it's good for us, full stop.

26:01I think there's also a sense of understanding that if Andy Burnham loses this election, you know, Labour's most popular politician in his own backyard, more or less, has lost an election against reform. What is the path through for Labour at that point? I mean, on what grounds can you make a case that Labour is capable of reviving its fortunes and winning the next election? So I think the strategy that Starmer is employing now is basically a rerun of the strategy that he employed during that testy week where West Streeting was mulling perhaps what his next moves were, which we'd reported was, you know, a Morgan McSweeney back strategy, which was essentially, you know, a rerun of the Gordon Brown, David Miliband strategy, i.e.

26:38force your opponents to say what they want explicitly. Because in politics, as we know, and particularly in the Labour tradition, moving against a leader is not necessarily a popular thing, generally speaking. And to make somebody do this makes them less popular. And I think they're feeling much more confident having seen what's happened to West Streeting, saying, actually, you know, this has essentially left him as a more denuded political force. And actually, they want to make Andy Burnham look like, be explicit about the fact that he's trying to take the job of someone who's won an election with a big majority, right?

27:06That if he wants that, he's going to have to come and get it, basically. And I think for those who say, oh, this is ridiculous, Kisan would never fight an election. Why is he saying this now? You know, there's politics to this, which is essentially, even if he doesn't want to fight this contest, and we can talk about what his actual motives are, it is a good thing for somebody who feels that they're about to have their job taken from them in quite a humiliating way to make that as embarrassing and exercise as possible for the person who's going to come and do it, I think. So look, let's talk about what comes next then?

27:35When does Andy Burnham move? If you talk to people in Team Burnham, so I was talking to a cabinet minister last week, and they were suggesting that actually he's not ready. If he goes straight for number 10 and goes for the coronation approach, it's going to be a problem because he doesn't have the detailed plan drawn up. He doesn't have the policy agenda. We repeat the mistakes of Starmer. So they were hoping there would be an orderly transition. But at the same time, all of this bad blood between the two men, I suspect, makes an orderly transition impossible. So you end up with a position, others around Burnham say he's scarred, that he lost out on the leadership twice, that his view is you've got to go for it, you've got to seize it, you've got to use the momentum of this and get straight to number 10, which carries huge risks in its own right.

28:22But it means that this could all come to a head very quickly in the wake of Makerfield. The watchword of Burnham sceptics at the moment is scrutiny, which is to say, you know, they think that there should be a contest. They think that actually it's a really good thing to force Burnham to think through all of these factors. You have to ask yourself whether the motivation for that is actually that they want to undermine Burnham as much as possible. I think from Burnham's perspective, you know, he would probably say, well, look, like I am the one that's likely going to win this contest. And do we want to have a massive fight amongst ourselves about all of these issues and allow ourselves to be dragged through the mud only to leave me as a slightly more denuded political force when the inevitable happens and I end up in Downing Street anyway.

29:02I mean, the other thing, the other big question we need to ask is what does Starmer do? So if you listen to the briefing, Starmer is very actively telling lots of friends that I've seen dozens of these reports and MPs that you've spoken to would say he wants to fight on. He is insisting that if Andy Burnham comes to him, he, because he automatically gets to fight that contest. So he will fight, they say. He will stand up for his mandate and he will fight. And at the back of my head I've just got this voice which is going this sounds very familiar it sounds extraordinarily familiar and I kind of rewind to Boris Johnson in the dying days of his premiership insisting that he would fight on until suddenly he didn't Liz Truss the day before insisting I'm a fighter not a quitter David Cameron back in the day insisting he wouldn't walk away and then doing literally that walking away whistling back into number 10 and he was gone into the middle distance somewhere.

29:53So you have to take these things with a bit of a pinch of salt because there is an argument that if Starmer fights this, it would be, as someone put it to me, an extraordinary form of masochism because he will lose. The caveat is that someone suggested that actually the whole of Keir Starmer's premiership has been a kind of exercise in masochism. I mean, it's never a good look for a prime minister in their dying days to accept the end. Because, I mean, you look at the things that Starmer's doing, defence investment plan, social media. When you say it's gone, it goes, right? Yeah, and these are not uncontroversial things.

30:29These are things that you need some semblance of political authority to push through and to champion. And so I think that is one of the reasons why, to the very, very end, you do have to maintain this insistence that actually you're going nowhere. But I think you're completely right to say that actually there is something in Starmer which has constantly wanted to kind of fight on you know people that are close to him will say will say to me you know he's never failed at anything before you know his life has just been one long uh you know conventional success after conventional success and people used to say that these are not people who are accustomed to losing and you can imagine him in the depths of despair in number 10 at the moment in you know incoming from all these cabinet ministers about the defense investment plan thinking Andy Burnham doesn't have to face up to this yet like he just he doesn't have to speak to the fact that there is, you know, essentially insanely difficult fiscal decisions to make if you want to have a big injection for something like defence.

31:23And he doesn't have to do that yet. So actually, I am going to make him spell that all out and I'm going to make him spell that all out in a way that actually forces him to reckon with the fact that there are a lot of really difficult circumstances that he'll come into and we'll have to find solutions to. Let's just stand back briefly from the politics of it because if you remove yourself from what's, you know, the Westminster discussion about a leadership contest, it surely it will look insane to people to have a leadership, a long, hot summer with a bitter leadership contest, ideological divide.

31:53It might be a battle of ideas, as they call it, right, as West Street calls it. But you'll get really nasty briefings, a very bitter row, all the time as the country is sailing towards a massive cost of living crisis this winter, caused by the Iran war. So that is one of the challenges, that it would be a problem for the Labour Party more broadly because of how difficult the winter is going to be. And I mean, I think one of the things that some of those who are worried within Labour have said to me in recent days is they just worry there's too much diagnosis at the moment. That actually Labour absolutely loves to diagnose the problems, to talk about where we went wrong, to try and talk about big ideas and solutions.

32:30But I mean, one of the things that people in Number 10 will say to you is like, that's just not the world that we're living in inside Number 10. The essays are lovely. The essays are great. I mean, I think in Blair's defence, you know, there were, you know, he was making difficult decisions. The triple lock is unsustainable, for example. That is a difficult decision. Welfare is something that has been, I think, is going to rear its head in a massive way when we see the defence investment plan, because many people will be saying you've left this massive pot of money completely untouched and you're cutting other pots of money that the Chancellor has previously said are, you know, important for growth.

33:02I mean, I just think that's going to be a big part of the conversation over the coming weeks. But I do think you're right about this kind of, you know, this period of ideas, as refreshing as it is to some in Labour who have felt that the Starmer project has been lacking in intellectual curiosity. You know, I do think there is a case that these decisions are really difficult and that some of it is couched in a level of slight unreality. OK. And look, we are duty bound to list the full candidates standing in Makerfield. So we will do that now. They are Jake Austin of the Liberal Democrats, Count Binface of the Count Binface party.

33:36Andy Burnham of the Labour Incorporated Party, Dan Clark of the Libertarian Party, John Dyer, who is an Independent, Ed Gemmell of the Climate Party, Paul Gould, who is an Independent, Howling Lord Hope, the official monster raving loony party, Rob Kenyon of Reform UK, Robert Paunel, an Independent, Rebecca Shepard of Restore Britain, Sarah Wakefield of the Green Party, Peter Ward of Rejoin EU, Michael Wiss Stanley, the Conservative and Unionist Party. On that note, I think that brings us to an end this week, Lara. Thank you for listening. Thank you to Molly Guinness, to you and Daughtry, and to Harry Kitson.

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