Angela Rayner's main character energy

0:00Welcome to the first ever edition of the Liz Truss Show. You'd have to be watching the fake news BBC or living on Elon Musk's Mars mission to not know that Britain is going to hell in a handcart. If you speak out against the Islamists or the transgender ideologues, you can be arrested. This calamity, the fall of Britain, the fall of England, the fall of London, is being presided over by a governing elite who hate our country. When the BBC are not busy lying about Donald Trump, they're covering up for sex criminals in their own midst. I'd rather my licence fee money went to Trump media than Trotskyite media.

0:42Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the home of the Cantor revolution. Welcome to the Liz Trust show. Stunned silence there. Stunned silence. Liz Trust 3.0, indefatigable, shameless to a large degree. The world may have moved on, but I'm not sure Liz has. Well, look, we're all doing political broadcasting via podcasts, and obviously you can watch it on YouTube as well. So it's great to welcome another lucky new entrant to the crowded world of political audiovisual media. So welcome, Liz. Good luck. I have had the honour of once being accused of being part of the British establishment by Liz Truss, the establishment that undermined her and ruined and ended her career, which I'm still not sure how I should take to this day.

1:28But there you go. She once spread around an entire party that I was going to be the next director of communications for No. 10 and was a biased journalist. For a Tory No. 10 or a Labour No. 10? A Tory. Oh, no, sorry, a Labour No. 10. I'm trying to remember which party it was now. It changes so often. But that I was also part of the establishment and therefore part of the stitch-up. Well, Liz Truss, despite me writing a very unfavourable review of her book, still follows me on Twitter. So I suppose I'm the only person here who's part of the counter-revolution. So, great. Excellent. Good. Right, welcome to The State of It, the politics podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times.

2:05I'm Stephen Swinford, the political editor of The Times. I'm Caroline Wheeler, the political editor of The Sunday Times. And I'm Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator of The Times, unaccompanied for once in my life by my close friends, my dear friend and professional partner, Gabriel Pogrand, who is off this week and very much missed. He'll be back next week, though. I hope so. Well, look, this week is all about comebacks and most of it is about one woman. We are going to be talking to you about Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister who is gearing herself up for a very public return to frontline politics.

2:41And then we're going to talk about Keir Starmer and what on earth is he going to do for the next five months, his five month battle for survival. But let's kick off with Angela Rayner and her strategy here. So I want to start with a counterfactual. I want to start with that moment where she'd just been sacked and she had left and one of the people around her got a call from ITV and it was from the producers of I'm a Celebrity and they said, we're going to make you an offer, we can't refuse. Well, they didn't put it quite like that. They said, we're going to pay you a lot more than Matt Hancock was ever paid.

3:14Which was a couple of hundred grand, right? The enormous sum, right? So a lot more than he was ever paid. You are worth more than a Hancock. But not as much as Nigel. Yes, not as much as Nigel. to go on I'm a celebrity, to eat kangaroos, testicles, cockroaches, whatever else is it. Will you do it? And as Irina thought about it, she did weigh it up for a bit. And then she said, no, because I'm not finished and I'm going to come back. And that is what she has been quietly working on for the last few months and is now coming into public view. She's got one more hurdle to get over, which is she needs to settle her bill with HMRC.

3:48She needs to pay her taxes. But once that is out of the way, if indeed there is a tax bill to pay for this outstanding stamp duty that she owed and admitted that she'd made an error on, she hopes that the path will be clear for her to come back to frontline politics. Now, whether that's cabinet or as Labour leader, we'll see. I'm genuinely told she hasn't made a decision about what she wants to do because, you know, she's been fairly burnt by what's happened, as anybody would be. At the same time, there has been lots of speculation that there could be a deal done between Angela Rayner and West Streeting if there came to a point where there was going to be a leadership contest.

4:25Now, that was a big story that was on the agenda last week. But what I hear is rather different. What I hear is that actually Angela Rayner, if it came to it and if West Streeting stood in a leadership contest, far from doing a pact with him, would actually stand against him. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think we're having the same conversations with people close to Angela Rayner. I mean, the way it was put to me was that she's been saying privately that she'd rather stick pins in her eyes now back West Street. I don't think that's particularly surprising. I mean, the sort of if you look at it from, you know, as if you'd woken up today and thought, what's the most obvious way to win the Labour leadership?

5:05Well, one, it is to have Angela Rayner on your side or to be Angela Rayner, even in her slightly diminished position after having resigned from Cabinet. And you see that from the frequency with which the Prime Minister himself is now saying, Angela's going to be back. I'd love to see Angela back. Angela's my favourite politician ever. Not something she ever reciprocates in the other direction, by the way, and that tells you where the power lies. But you just have to interrogate who Angela is, who West Streeting is, and who the people around them are to realise that isn't going to happen. So go back in time 10, 20 years.

5:42Think about people. Won't mean much to many listeners of this podcast, but the most important person in Angela Rayner's world is a man called Nick Parrott. Used to work at Unite. He's sort of the Morgan McSweeney of that bit of the Labour Party. As they might say, with reference to the Mario games, he's Morgan McSweeney's Wario. or maybe Morgan McSweeney is Nick Parrott's warrior, right? They are very similar in terms of their peerless organisers. They know how to sort of command and control their bits of the party. And they are from completely different sort of bits of the Labour Party. And not just Nick Parrott, Angela Rayner as well, right?

6:23That is the union bit of the Labour Party. and they spent their entire political adolescence and youth organising against, sometimes being beaten by, sometimes beating the right of the Labour Party, the Blairite right of the Labour Party. And think about that bit of the party. Who are you looking at? You're looking at people like West Streeting, culturally and politically, they're from entirely different traditions. And it's going to take much more than West Streeting getting up at conference and saying for applause, I love Angela, Angela's my mate, let's have a round of applause for the GMB, let's have a round of applause for Unison, I'm a proper union man, because the history here runs deep.

7:02And I think it is going to be set up as a battle for supremacy over the Labour Party, and even as a marriage of convenience, because of all those quite profound differences, and because of the long history these people have in the Labour Party, it's quite difficult to see that working. We should talk about her strategy and how she's playing it, and I would, looking at what she's doing, She is keeping all options very much open. So she's not saying no to Starmer and his office cabinet. Her intervention yesterday in the Commons was actually very constructive. So she stood up and she wants to bring forward employment's right legislation.

7:38But look, she would have a case. They have massively watered it down. They have breached some of the day one pledges. This was her baby. She made this legislation. She could have gone on the offensive and she didn't. It's all being done in quite a measured, quite constructive way. and it feels to me like she's giving herself the option of either a comeback via Keir Starmer through his cabinet if he survives, or the alternative, as we discussed, going for it herself. Yeah, she's boxing very clever on the Employment Rights Bill stuff because you could come out, you could accuse Keir Starmer of betraying you, but she's in a uniquely strong political position because every criticism she made internally, and she had dozens of meetings with officials, particularly at the department, Peter Kyle now runs the business department, where she said to officials, look, I know you want to wash this down.

8:24And indeed they did, right? There was a groundswell of antipathy towards that legislation from other cabinet ministers, from government departments that thought it wasn't workable. And Angela Rayner has gone. Peter Kyle literally says we're committed to this thing in full. And then within a couple of months, yes, it was a compromise agreed by the unions and business, but what Angela Rayner predicted has come to pass. They've washed it down. one of its flagship provisions that they were always in public insistent they were committed to. So if you're her, you have that trump card. Well, hang on, I've left and you've done the thing you always said you weren't going to do.

9:01But also she's being constructive, keeping her powder dry. She has a very acute and sophisticated understanding of her own power and how it's best wielded, I think. And she's very clever with how she does it as well. I mean, it was fascinating looking at the way in which she approached the kind of Employment Rights Bill. If you look at any of those briefings about her putting down amendments, etc., etc., none of it was done in her voice. It was all done through friends, through allies. And similarly, even this weekend, she let it be known that she's not happy with David Lammy's proposed jury trial reforms.

9:36It wasn't done again in her name. It was just quietly let known through allies, through friends. if it does come to pass that she actually does end up standing in the race herself. And of course, as you were saying, Steve, that will partially, I think, come down to how the HMRC issues resolve themselves. Now, I'm told she hasn't actually received the instruction from HMRC yet as to whether she owes anything. That's still being gone through. And I think that once that's resolved, that might provide some clarity for her about what she might do in the future. Yeah, they have had to wait quite a while for HMRC now.

10:11and there is a world in which HMRC actually says there's something effectively an honest mistake so it could say that you have no fine to pay that is her best case scenario here her worst case scenario is you get a kind of a very significant fine that she may actually even struggle to pay but her you know the people around her seem pretty confident it's likely to be on the lower end of the fine schedule and until that's dealt with she's got the risk that every time she says anything she'll just get this tax investigation brought up again and again it will be debilitating So once that's out of the way, I think it is fair to start expecting speeches, big interviews.

10:44I imagine she'll be doing that kind of stuff and more and more interventions. And all of that is in the run up to May and all of the pressures that Starmer's under over that and the kind of continued speculation about leadership, which, Patrick, you kicked off in dramatic style this week by revealing that Labour Together have been doing something behind the scenes. Yeah. So let's remind ourselves of what Labour Together is. It was the think tank founded by several current members of the cabinet in the Corbyn years, among them Steve Reid, Shabana Mahmood, Lisa Nandy was involved to start with, not so much now I think it's fair to say.

11:23People like Jim McMahon, Lucy Powell, people have always been in and around the top of the Starmer project. But they did something really interesting last weekend. I got a text on Sunday from a senior Labour figure saying, have you seen this? and they forwarded me an email from Labour Together to local constituency Labour parties and a link to a survey. And it basically said, you know, please fill in the survey, 500 quid for any member who does it as part of a prize draw. Your local party can win a grand. So I thought, I wonder what this is asking. So I, you know, on a couple of devices accessed the survey and it was asking me questions, you know, who are you?

12:06what's your level of education where do you get your news then it started asking questions like do you think it's more important for a Labour leader to have principles that they stick to or compromise the principles to get things done I thought hang on I can see where this is going and then all of a sudden you're presented with a page with eight names on it Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham, Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting, Darren Jones, Lucy Powell, Shabana Mahmood oh god I can't remember the other two that's really bad, anyway basically there were nine choices one of whom was Keir Starmer eight of whom were members of the cabinet Bridget Philipson was another and senior Labour figures all of whom have been discussed for the leadership Ed Miliband, I can't remember whether I said Ed Miliband or not, and it asks you a range of questions, one rank them in order of who you think can win a general election two, rank them in terms of your likelihood to vote for them in a leadership election, then it ends with a series of hypothetical head-to-heads.

13:07So it says, imagine there's a leadership election tomorrow. Would you vote for Keir Starmer or Darren Jones? Would you vote for Wes Streeting or Shabana Mahmood? Would you vote for Shabana Mahmood or Angela Rayner? What struck me was Keir Starmer's think tank, the Starmerite think tank, is putting around a survey, inviting party members, who of course will decide the next leader when that election comes, however soon, be it May or sooner or sometime in 2027 or 2028, it's inviting them not only to say, here are eight people potentially who are more likely to win the election than Keir Starmer. But by the end of the survey, it's accepting the premise, not only that a leadership election is going to happen soon, but that it might not involve Keir Starmer at all.

13:53And it's that toxic question, I think, who can win the leadership election, which is the most provocative because I don't think there are many Labour members right now who are looking at that survey thinking, hmm, could Keir Starmer definitely win an election? Is he definitely more likely to win than Andy Burnham? Now, I should say what some people more sympathetic to this mission have said to me is, well, what they're clearly trying to do is get some data together that can furnish number 10 with proof for what they've been trying to tell MPs, with what they briefed to me and others a couple of weeks ago and then started a big war with West treating, which is that if you kick off a leadership election, Ed Miliband's going to be prime minister, Andy Byrne was going to be prime minister, we're going to veer to the left and it's going to be a complete disaster.

14:39Whatever the motivation, you know, Labour Together's line is that we're being helpful. It is not helpful if you are so closely associated with Keir Starmer, if, as our colleague Sam Coates pointed out on his own podcast the other day, your advisory board contains such luminaries and your board as Labour Together contains such lunary as Sally Morgan, used to work in Number 10, Alan Milburn, very close to our streeting, and a range of other Labour grandees, right? It's not helpful if you're that organisation to say, you know what we're going to do at this point when leadership speculation is running out of control?

15:11We're going to email tens of thousands of people, hundreds of local parties, and encourage them to fill out a survey that asks the very questions Number 10 is trying desperately to pretend, aren't being asked, don't matter, are a distraction. The point at which Labour Together does that, one, it's definitely going to leak, and I'm the grateful recipient of that leak, and two, it's just completely explosive. So any sort of helpful intent was immediately overshadowed, blown out of the water, obliterated by the fact of the survey's existence, the questions they were asking, and also, inevitably, it means Keir Starmer faces another day, he was at McLaren's HQ on Monday, one of the questions he was asked was, is there any future for you as Prime Minister?

15:54And he has to say, no, no, I don't want to talk about internal Labour Party politics. Every Cabinet Minister on the radio, what do you think of this survey? Why aren't you in it? You know, who would you vote for out of those nine people? It's a complete disaster. And it's because there is blood in the water, right? And everyone can smell it in Westminster. Everyone knows it. And that is why we're having all of these conversations. There is another aspect to it. There was a kind of very cruel meme that did the rounds of Keir Starmer at that event at McLaren where he stood there and everyone in the audience was looking incredibly bored.

16:22Including Pat McFadden, the working party secretary. Including Pat McFadden. And there is an argument that actually one of the things that's missing from politics at the moment is proper main character energy. The reason people are thinking about and writing about and talking about Angela Rayner is because for all her faults, and obviously there were issues over her tax fees, all of those things, she does have personality. She's a big figure in Labour ranks. We're streeting, again, different strengths, different weaknesses, but he clearly has personality. And the lack of main character energy in the centre is meaning that we're all having these discussions about potential other people to go for the leadership.

17:00I mean, you know, you speak to any cabinet minister, virtually any of them will tell you that this is not going to go on much longer. I think there is a kind of there's a reticence from anybody to sort of wield the knife. And I feel that really acutely. So many people have said to me recently, you know, I just wish people would stop whispering and somebody would put their head above the parapet. It's kind of getting annoying because, you know, you can smell the sense of decay, but yet there's no purpose to it. But, Patrick, what I'm fascinated about what you said is that if the recipient of this information is supposed to be Downing Street, which, as you were saying, is it creates a kind of really toxic situation anyway.

17:37I mean, we already have some of those answers by another story that you wrote last week, which was the polling of Labour members, which is notoriously difficult to do because you have to get through people that kind of understand that it's not voters. This is actually people who are members of the party. And when asked who they would like to see lead the party, actually the results were quite surprising, weren't they? Yeah, it was really interesting. Well, it depends how surprised you are by the Labour leadership, the Labour membership's appetite to forgive Ed Miliband for losing an election. I told you he'd be in there.

18:08I've been talking it up for weeks. So this was a private YouGov poll done for a city consultancy called Blonde Money, which fell into my hands. And, you know, one, it's interesting, by the way, that people in the city doing private polling of the Labour membership, trying to work out where this is going to go. But it was about the favourability of members towards certain Labour figures. And two really surprising things. Well, one unsurprising thing, which was that Ed Miliband had the highest favourability score of anyone. 55%, wasn't it? It's huge. 5%. You know, that's a big score. But the other thing that struck me, right, what's the conversation we all have with Labour people if we're talking about the leadership?

18:48Often Labour MPs will say to you, well, you know, Wes is never going to win the membership. Wes can't win the membership. Wes is a Blairite. They think Wes is really right wing. What struck me was, okay, Ed Miliband's on 55%. He is clearly the most popular Labour politician among the Labour membership, or certainly Labour cabinet minister among the Labour membership. I think it's him and Andy Burnham are always up there. But in this YouGov poll, who was second in the favourability score? It was Wes Streeting. You know, 55 for Ed Miliband, positive score, 49 for Wes Streeting. Just a brief sidebar, by the way, Keir Starmer's numbers have collapsed 36 points in three months from plus 33 to minus three.

19:30That shows you what the membership think of Keir Starmer and how he's likely to do in that Labour Together survey if people are still filling it out. and that will I think one if you're west streeting looking at that you will think you know what actually favourability is a different question to the leadership question it's a really good place for west streeting to start from you know so looking at that you think you know you'd fancy a crack at it if you were street yeah and I think he knows that Ed is the person to be most worried about and you know there will be an enormous enormous sort of amount of effort I suspect put into stopping Ed Miliband getting through to those membership rounds in voting.

20:12And actually, you know, people around West Streeting say quite confidently that they don't think that Ed would get enough nominations from the PLP, because, of course, that's what you need to do first. But if he did sneak through to the membership, he is potentially the one person that could stop West Streeting from winning the leadership. Of course, not bringing into context Angela Rayner herself, which perhaps we don't know, but that's what surprised me about the poll was that she wasn't higher. Well, Wes should be trying to get Ed on side, offer to make Ed your Chancellor. I mean, we talk about Angela...

20:45There's a splash for Saturday, Steve. Pact. A pact. People talk about Angela Aynor as the king or queen maker. I think Ed Miliband is also in that situation. Having him on your ticket might demonstrate a lack of credibility to their pockets of the PLP, but I think it would just be a net benefit benefit to anyone wanting to run for Labour leadership because of his popularity and also he's one of the few effective ministers in this government. It is incredibly debilitating for the Prime Minister. If you talk to Rishi Sunak, if you talk to Boris, any of the former Prime Ministers, they will say one of the hardest things is you get to this point where every conversation just turns into a conversation about your leadership and your failings.

21:25It is relentless. And it immediately devalues anything you say as Prime Minister. What is the ultimate power a Prime as it has. It's the office. It's the title. So the point at which you could say, tomorrow I'm going to give everyone a free puppy. I'm going to give free puppies. Well, exactly. That might work for him, actually. It would in my household. The first question we would ask is, yeah, but hang on, the rollout of this puppy scheme is eight months and you're not going to be here in eight months, Keir. Totally debilitating. And actually, you're only saying this, Keir, because you know Labour MPs want to chuck you out.

21:57So we can't trust your pledge of free puppies anyway. Well, look, we're going to talk about how Keir Starmer tries to weather the next five months ahead of the local elections. It is going to be very difficult. Before we do that, we've just got something to play you briefly. The Political Podcast Awards are returning in January with me, Giles Brandreth, and public voting is now open for the People's Choice Award. If you'd like the stage of it to win the People's Choice Award, cast your vote now. The People's Choice Awards, sponsored by YouTube. What an endorsement. Fantastic. Giles Brandreth. Brilliant.

22:30I love the fact that we're plugging the completely independent awards that are being run. But please do vote for us. It's our equivalent of the Labour Together survey. Fill it in and you'll get exactly what you want. But we can't offer you 500 quid. Welcome back to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. Now, we want to talk about what on earth is Keir Starmer going to do to try to turn this round. So let's not forget the task ahead here. It is a kind of Herculean task. He is incredibly unpopular. He has seen the biggest collapse in his own personal popularity ratings of any prime minister in history on record.

23:09The figures speak for themselves. So how does he turn it around? Well, he did an interview at the weekend in which he alighted on a new theme, which it feels like we're going to be hearing a lot about, which is young people. So he wants to appeal to young people. He wants to kind of do more to address the issues and barriers that they face in life. there is just one small problem with that strategy we have just had a budget which overwhelmingly favored older people where they put their money where their mouth is we had the triple lot go up and massive tax rise on workers and it also made young people more difficult to hire because of the fiddling with the minimum wage and the abolition of the or reforms to the differential rates and also hiking it all together it's more difficult than ever to hire young people so So let's start by trying to give him the benefit of the doubt on it.

23:56Why is he? What is the strategy here? Why is he trying to reach out to young people? What does he hope to achieve? I'm going to say that I've been banging this drum now for months. I mean, I think it is completely ludicrous that a Labour Party is not throwing absolutely everything that it's got at young people. If you think about young people in this country post-COVID, there's a proliferation of mental health problems that are happening. Kids aren't going to school. There is nearly a million young people. I think we're going to see that threshold crossed fairly shortly, who are NEETs. That's not in education, employment or training.

24:26And if I were a Labour government, I can absolutely tell you that the first thing that I would be doing is making that my number one priority, which would be fighting for young people, trying to repair that social contract that's been broken between young people and political parties, particularly because of the lack of aspiration. You know, all of these young people, they're going to struggle to find a job to get on the housing ladder. But I feel that instead of saying, do you know what, we're going to use this mission, this moral purpose, to fix things for the next generation. And because of that, I'm really sorry to the pensioners.

25:03We're going to have to do something about your triple lot. You can't have your winter fuel payment. But because we're going to put all of that money into fixing things for the next generation, which personally, I think that the older generation would have some sympathy with, because so many of us are parents or grandparents. But no, instead of doing that, they've done exactly as you were just saying, Patrick and Steve. In the budget, they've made it harder to employ young people. You know, employers are already frightened of employing people because of the Employment Rights Bill and some of the changes that are coming there.

25:33And if you talk to people around the Prime Minister, he says that this is the issue that lights him up like no other. But I see, personally, no real impetus behind this or momentum behind this. The announcements that we're expecting this week, which began with Pat McFadden on Sunday, I think we're going to see more tomorrow where we see Lisa Nandy coming out and talking about supports like new youth clubs and new purposeful activities for young people. That's great. That's all grist to the mill, but it's not going anywhere near where we need to be if we need to fix some of the problems for the younger generation.

26:10I say that as a parent of, well, a parent of three children and a step-parent of three children, so six children. And I've said this to the Prime Minister, if he wants to come to my house, it's a Petri dish. He can come and do his focus groups. He can speak to my children. They're differing ages, differing political perspective experiences. But the fear that I have for all of them is that they are being let down and that the focus is not on them. And we really do risk a situation where we leave this generation worse off than those that came before it. And it really genuinely, sorry, I'll stop talking now, but you can possibly see I'm really perturbed by this and I'm really passionate about it and I think it's a really, really big issue and a really big missed opportunity.

26:55Well, firstly, Caroline for Prime Minister. Secondly, the phrase that stood out for me there, Caroline, well, two of them, you spoke about the Prime Minister saying this is the thing that lights him up, that gets him going. And the other phrase you used was his moral and political purpose. Now, what they're clearly trying to do with all this talk, not much of it's substantiated by a coherent policy programme, as you're saying, is trying to remind people that the Prime Minister does have a purpose, that this is the thing he cares about, that actually the reason he did the two-child cap in the budget last week or a couple of weeks ago wasn't just because the PLP were kicking and screaming, I mean, because he really cares about young people's life chances and making sure everyone has the best start in life.

27:41I mean, that's fine, but it's not an easy thing for them to do midstream, particularly when over the past year we've been told he is, you know, the prime minister who's all about security. And he spends a lot of his time speaking to world leaders about Ukraine, as he's been doing in number 10 this week. To that effect, you know, he's been banging on about immigration. He's been banging on about growth. So like it's great that we're now being told by the prime minister with his sleeves rolled up in the observer that he's all about young people. But five minutes ago, he was about something else.

28:19And five minutes later, it'll be about something else. If, you know, his new communication strategy, which is trying to explain a little bit more why he's doing this stuff, why he believes this stuff. He's launched a TikTok channel. Like me, he's launched a sub stack to explain in further detail why he does stuff in his own voice, or at least with a very good ghostwriter. Maybe this is the thing he will stick to, but he's found that difficult in the past. Number 10 have found that difficult in the past. So maybe this is a new style of Starmer and Starmerism that is endowed with the most elusive quality of all, which is consistency, but I wouldn't necessarily hold my breath on that.

28:59The comms strategy is interesting in and of itself. We've hit this period, again, I remember this under successive Tory provinces as well, where they're getting a really rough ride in the papers, right, and on TV and all the main broadcasters. So they try to go straight to the voters. And this one is doing it. Rachel Reeves has had loads of influencers into number 11. Starmer's doing a similar approach. And they are trying to go directly to the YouTubers, to people online to try to sell their message. The challenge, again, is they don't always say the things that they'd like them to say. But that certainly seems to be the strategy to try to cut out, how do they frame it?

29:34We want to cut out the 11 political editors out there and just go straight to the people. It feels to me a little bit sort of disingenuous that if you get that kind of response from the mainstream media, a bit like a kind of petulant toddler who gets a no from one parent, they kind of go, oh, well, I'll just go and ask the other parent instead. It feels a bit like that to me. I think the more fundamental problem with all of it is this. Tony Blair used to have a sort of very elegant Blairish insult for Gordon Brown's approach to policymaking, which was, you know, Gordon is obsessed with announceables, right?

30:07Every Gordon Brown speech had to have an announceable policy in it, right, that was contrived for the moment. The problem is Keir Starmer is all about announceables, but the announceable is always, I told you these are my values last week, but actually this is the thing I really, really, really believe in now. they're not bad or ill-advised ideas in of themselves actually they're quite good ideas but for Keir Starmer a leader with a reputation for inauthenticity who's deeply unpopular who's not a particularly fluent communicator in front of a camera the substack thing is actually quite a good idea because it doesn't require him to do any of those things the short form video TikTok talk influences i i'm not entirely sure that's keir starmer's medium it's sort of he's increasingly looking a bit like you know a television politician in a digital age he's frozen in a generation he was too busy being a lawyer to take part in and has come into politics at the wrong time that's my sort of fatalistic reading of it but i may well be wrong one thing we can expect i think some noise on in coming months it's one of the few slithers of good news out there is that we are about to get another interest rate cut.

31:21There are suggestions there'll be two more cuts early next year. And if number 10 and number 11 get behind that and start to kind of talk up that, we are now at a stage where mortgage rates are below the Liz Trust. We've gone full circle to start the show. Below just before Liz Trust's premiership when they shot up. So that is actually a moment. That is a kind of three years on. We are back to where we were. And if you were kind of deft on that number 10, number 11, you could try to claim some credit for that and galvanise it. The problem they've got is that voters don't trust them on the economy at all.

31:52And that's one of the issues where they've plummeted in the polls. But that is certainly there is a slither of good news around the corner that I imagine they'll be trying to make hay out of. It's interesting though, our colleague Tom Calver, data editor of the Times, Sunday Times, wrote a fascinating piece in last weekend's Sunday Times, the Sunday Times just gone, saying actually high interest rates have become actually weirdly popular, despite what the government would think, because people like saving. Since Covid, we've become a nation of savers. People like seeing their bank balances grow.

32:20They like putting money in an ISA. So maybe actually the combined assault on the ISA limit by Rachel Reeves, plus saying interest rates have been cut, will actually be a classic example of their reverse Midas touch and people will hate them for it. I'd love to meet these people that can cope with higher mortgage payments and save. But there we go. But I take your point, Steve. I think what you're saying is, I mean, that the whole idea behind the way in which they've choreographed this government is that the good news comes later, that they do the tough stuff at the beginning and then things come good at the end.

32:52But look, I mean, I can certainly already see a number of kind of looming sort of thorny issues for them on the horizon. You know, if David Lammy's justice proposals come in, we've already starting to see a number of Labour MPs coming out. Carl Turner going as far as to say that not only will he stand against David Lammy on these proposals in the chamber he will walk through the division chamber with the opposition and will then if they get defeated call for David Lammy's resignation which is pretty punchy stuff well and by the way the subtext of that Caroline you know he's talking about dozens of MPs as you say signing his letter he's been very strikingly critical of the chief whip Johnny Reynolds yes he went on Times Radio on Sunday and went for Johnny Reynolds but if you're carternally and you're saying look what I've just done I've organized dozens of people to rebel on a policy issue I'm going for the chief whip etc etc is it a hop skip and a jump from that to imagine that actually what you're proving is that 80 MPs can materialize like that if they're really angry with the government as so many of them are and what's 80 the magic number four a leadership contest now I'm not saying Carl Turner is the stalking horse, but it's an interesting case study in how out of nowhere...

34:10I mean, Carl Turner's been around for a long time. It was exactly that. We suddenly got to over 100 in a couple of weeks. And also, he's not one of the serial rebellers. I mean, Carl Turner has never voted against the government in his life. He was a shadow Attorney General. He was then a shadow Solicitor General. He hasn't been given a job in this government, which perhaps they'll regret now. But it does just prove that these issues can be lightning conductors really, really quickly. And again, I can see another one on the horizon as well, which is this puberty blockers trial. There was a meeting with West Streeting and Hilary Cass last week, which was attended by a cross-party group of MPs.

34:46Rosie Duffield coordinated a letter to show that there was cross-party opposition to it. It is not just the Tories led by Kemi Badenock who are opposing it. And this is something, again, if you look on Twitter, it's being massively weaponised out there against the government as being, how on earth can this government support the effective, as they describe it, the experimentation of children? Yeah, so a load, a whole panoply of problems all to come before you get to May. And we haven't even talked about Europe. We haven't talked about Trump, we haven't talked about Europe. It is a difficult period to put it mildly.

35:19Right, I think that brings us to the end of this week's episode of The State of the Year. We can continue. It's been an absolute delight as always and thank you for listening. You can contact us on our email address which is thestateofit at thetimes.co.uk. We want to hear from you. Patrick, would you just like to get out the big shiny red button? Yeah, in Gabriel's absence, I'll do his constitutional role of thanking our excellent producers, Molly Guinness and Ewan Daughtry, for making us sound good, cleaning up our profanities, and making the whole thing sing.