Keir Starmer: the end game

0:00Gabriel Pogrund: Welcome to The State of It, this live recording of the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I am Steven Swinford, the Politicator of The Times.

0:08Patrick Maguire: I'm Patrick Maguire, Chief Political Commentator for The Times. And I'm Gabriel Pogrund, Editor of Insight, The Sunday Times Investigation.

0:16Gabriel Pogrund: Here, newly promoted. Congratulations, Gabriel. We come to you at yet another extraordinary juncture in British politics. I kind of think it will never happen again and then it happens again. So we just had a cabinet where Keir Starmer has essentially sent a message to his cabinet of put up or shut up. And he has issued a direct challenge at that cabinet that essentially, in his words, there's a process. And if you want to trigger that process, there's a way of doing it. It's essentially, and this is my words, not his, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. And that message is aimed at West Streeting, the health secretary and also others around that table that are backing Andy Burnham.

0:56Gabriel Pogrund: And there's one question that really matters, and I'm going to direct this to Patrick and cop out entirely in this moment from answering it. Is there any way that Keir Starmer can survive this, Patrick?

1:06Patrick Maguire: I think he can survive the day and maybe even the next 48 hours. But I was saying to somebody yesterday that we were always going to end up here this morning, which is a 24 to 48 hour period in which Keir Starmer denies the political reality unfolding in front of him. And that's exactly where we are. I was speaking to one of Keir Starmer's many former advisors in the early hours of Sunday morning after the prime minister had given a 12 minute interview to the observer in which the one message he sought to get across was eight more years. I'm going to serve for a whole decade as prime minister.

1:46Patrick Maguire: You ain't seen nothing yet. And this former advisor texted me and said, I see he's entered the Willy Wonka phase of his premiership. And I said, what do you mean? And they said he lives in a world of pure imagination. And that is exactly what we're seeing from the prime minister this morning. You're right, Steve. What he said at Cabinet is a straightforward provocation to West Streeting. It's also very Keir Starmer in that he's seeking refuge in process. It's not an acknowledgement of political gravity. It's, aha, the rules say this, the letter of the law, appropriately as we sit here in Temple, the letter of the law says this, thus, I'm OK.

2:23Is he OK?

2:25Patrick Maguire: Look, nobody challenged him at cabinet, but that was because as several people who are in the room and speaking to people in the room have told me, he didn't let anyone speak. He just gave a short statement in which he said, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough now onto the really important stuff, i.e. Iran. No cabinet minister challenged him. but the provocation is such that if West Streeting doesn't move, there are a lot of angry cabinet ministers around that table who think, actually, it doesn't matter if it's West Streeting. It doesn't necessarily matter if it's Andy Burnham.

2:56Patrick Maguire: What matters is that it's not Keir Starmer. So I would be surprised if we didn't have a cabinet resignation or two by the end of today and that's even before we get Andy Burnham's Finland station moment at Euston. You know, arriving at Lenin, Euston like Lenin, if Leonard had been kicked through the menswear section of Marks and Spencers. Because both Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting now have a small window in which they can define the terms of the contest. If Wes Streeting goes first, we'll all be saying, well, that's it, Andy Burnham's been frozen out, the pace's been set by Wes. And if neither of them do anything, then another cabinet minister will get up and say, enough's enough, Keir Starmer's a joke, let's move on.

3:35Patrick Maguire: Either way, Keir Starmer is not in control of what's going to happen today.

3:39Gabriel Pogrund: There is a world, Gabriel, where Keir Starmer just grinds on, that he is the, as you wrote in your book, the hard bastard of the five-a-side football pitch who refuses to be moved. I mean, it's quite extraordinary what he's doing. He is resisting the pressure. But he's got a strong argument, right? His argument is this speculation is having a direct impact on the cost of living. Look at what is happening to the cost of borrowing. The graphs which the FT does have shot up, right, this morning because of the uncertainty and the threat of a left-wing takeover of a Labour government. There are real consequences to all of the speculation.

4:15Gabriel Pogrund: And that, I think, does work in his favour to a degree because he can make the case this is really damaging. Whether Labour MPs are listening is another question. Absolutely. Keir Starmer, I think I last spoke to on the 2024 election campaign trail. One of the reasons I suspect that a sort of Fradeur set in in our relationship, I'd cover this to Patrick as well is that we wrote a book which he severely resented whose central thesis was that he was the passenger at the front of the driverless train thinking he was setting its direction when in fact the direction had been set for him by Morgan McSweeney now Starmer described that as bollocks that those were his words and I actually did an event last week where I said that he may well have had a point because what I said was As actually, Sean of McSweeney over the last few months, we've learned that perhaps there is something more to Starmer.

5:10It's possible that he is not merely aboard the Morgan McSweeney Express, but sat at the front of whichever train belongs to the person in a position of power in a given moment. So for the last few months, the tenor and shape of this political project has changed. And now Keir Starmer, for some weeks and months, has been giving a message on Europe, on questions of nationalisation, on questions of the economy that much more strongly aligns with the sort of soft left centre of gravity within the parliamentary Labour Party. So my thought last week, and I'm offering you some honesty and sort of self-effacement here, was that why would the parliamentary Labour Party replace Starmer when they have him where they want him?

5:53I think the bit where I got this wrong was that you can't really predict the psychological energy of the parliamentary party in the aftermath of a set of elections such as these. Dominic Cummings very memorably leaned on the Wizard of Oz to describe the Tory backbenches as being akin to flying monkeys. And I will say that the PLP have sort of given them a run for their money recently in terms of, you know, faced with all these collective action problems. And, you know, as ever, the parliamentary party, you can slice and dice it into a million factions and micro factions but faced with no unanimity as to the who or the what you have this weird world where a backbench mp you've never heard of katherine west has ended up being the tip of the spear and i just think the emotion in the situation is so unpredictable it makes the situation quite unpredictable and here's one thing that i think is worth dwelling upon and is probably the reason why I agree with Patrick, which is that for all the reasons why it might seem preposterous to replace him, Starmer is toast, which is there is just such contempt across the parliamentary party for him.

7:05I think there will be a sort of post-Biden, Democratic Party-style inquest into how it was that Labour ever put in power a man who its own rank and file were so universally contemptuous of. I think it's one of the things which hasn't often been said out loud, but which now people in the PLP, and by the way, in the cabinet, absolutely in the cabinet, will need to address. I mean, it wasn't a secret. We did record in the form of 400 pages the extent to which these people had a purely transactional relationship with him. And when you have a transactional relationship and the underlying cost-benefit is turned on its head, this man's an elections winner, oh wait, now he isn't, then the whole pact is torn asunder and that is the essential dynamic of where we are now.

7:55Gabriel Pogrund: Let's move on to some of the contenders. We need to talk about Wes, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, because a lot lies in his hands today. What he does next could determine the future of the Labour Party. So I'll just take you back to yesterday evening. And I had this torturous conversation with Team Wes. So Wes Street told Downing Street back in January, look, guys, just so you know, I am preparing for power. I'm preparing for a potential leadership bid, but I'm not going to go over the top. It's just a contingency. Yeah, planning, not plotting was the phrase used. The key quote is planning, not plotting, but unless things fall apart, right?

8:30Gabriel Pogrund: Now, yesterday's conversation was a question of threshold and definition. and I said to them, does 81 MPs going over the top constitute falling apart? And the answer to that was silence. And we had this circular conversation, which I'm sure was deeply frustrating for both of us. But the end result is that, yeah, there is a world where that threshold has now been crossed, where clearly Labour is, to a degree, falling apart. If we just talk about those numbers, 81 MPs, that's a third of backbenches, so that's non-payroll. You've got ministers resigning, other ministers considering doing so. And what's really interesting is when you look at the 81 MPs, it's not one faction.

9:09Gabriel Pogrund: It's actually pretty even. You've got a third hard left-ish, roughly a third a soft left, and then another third a moderates. It's coming from all wings of the party and all the different generations. So there is a world in which West Streeting does go over the top by its own definition, but it will be a deeply dangerous moment for him personally and for the Labour Party politically. If he succeeds, then, you know, he gets a march on Andy Burnham and could become the Prime Minister. But if it goes wrong for him, he is politically damaged, he will be forever remembered as the Michael Heseltine of 2026 or James Purnell, however you want to frame that.

9:48Gabriel Pogrund: So that is the challenge and the decision that Wes Streeting is facing today. If he goes over the top, it could really screw his long-term chances of ever becoming Prime Minister.

9:59Patrick Maguire: Yeah, but he'll never have another opportunity like this. The clamour in the Parliamentary Labour Party for somebody to take ownership, show leadership and make this stop. And these are all people who, even if they have their own factual leadings, even if they don't want West Street to be Prime Minister, one want to be led and two know their voters will never vote for the Labour Party or not enough of them will ever vote for the Labour Party if Keir Starmer is leader so there is this clamour to make it stop and I think there are some cabinet ministers who would have a preference but right now I think this situation is so grave I don't care if it's Wes I don't care if it's Andy can one of them do something can we just make this stop and I was just reading a text there from one of the people who resigned yesterday from a government job, and they were pointing out that Keir Starmer was refusing to see cabinet ministers individually to talk about this after the cabinet meeting, and they just said to me, this is typical and ridiculous.

10:57As Gabriel said, Gabriel used the word contempt, and I don't think that's too strong a word of anything, it might be too mild a word, for the feeling towards Keir Starmer and the way he's carrying on today among the Labour Party, among junior ministers, among people who've resigned, and people who are thinking about resigning to bring this to an end. So if West Streeting doesn't take ownership and do this in a clear way, if Andy Burnham doesn't try and set a clear frame for what's about to happen, then I think we're going to see many more people taking this into their hands and it's going to happen in a very messy way.

11:28Gabriel Pogrund: Okay, but we should talk about one person who has shown arguably leadership in this moment and that is Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary. So we broke the story last night at the Times that she had been to see the Prime Minister, she should be one of three cabinet ministers to do so and said, you need to set out a timetable for your departure and that is a pretty unsustainable position we revealed the same about ed milliband about a fortnight ago did the same thing but to have people sitting there in your cabinet that you know want you to go uh she's in a really difficult position she is very personally upset by what happened in her own constituency in birmingham with the council there falling you know from labor falling from power and just more broadly it's got to be a big question about shabana and what she does now because she could precipitate a whole thing now we've often talked about the disanalogies between starmer and the other post-modern uh labor election winner tony blair in that blair had a sort of coterie and a project and starmer is sort of weirdly rootless within the labor party and i think that is why you have a situation like this where somebody who should ostensibly be you're an occupant of a great office of state you are in principle a pillar of this premiership she's gone in 48 hours after these local elections said you know Keir the game is up and it is a weird situation now by the way we were just in the green room a few moments ago looking at who's actually coming out on the airwaves and defending him Steve Reid I think was the only senior member of the cabinet who actually emerged from this meeting and made a principled argument for Starmer going on.

13:10So maybe a sort of touch of the downfall of Thatcher in terms of, you know, people going in with the scotch and the revolver and saying there's an easy way and a hard way to do this. But yeah, one thing that militates in Starmer's favour, because he's an anti-politician or is disinterested in politics, he sort of weirdly, you can see a world where he just doesn't actually engage with what's going on quite a Boris the sort of Johnsonian thing of I'm not even going to name what is unfolding around me I guess one of the problems with politics is people feel that what led to their initial victory is a formula that can be repeated again and again and in this instance Starmer just ignoring politics may not work but it could buy him some time and it will force what you were just outlining which is somebody at some point to say enough yeah i mean just to give you an idea of what it's like in number 10

14:06Gabriel Pogrund: i remember talking there are real parallels with boris johnson today so boris johnson gave what was actually a very good speech when he said when the herd moves it moves uh and the momentum takes you with it and no politician is indispensable that's what you discover because boris johnson spent a lot of his friendship thinking he was indispensable and suddenly discovered that he want he wasn't but in that building right now there will be a real air of anger there'll be frustration and in boris johnson's case i remember it vividly there was real paranoia i remember like getting calls from people about the snake michael gove and what he was up to in the background and starmer will be feeling that there's no way you can't feel that kind of pressure as much as he gives this granite edifice of an exposure in that building you wake up in the building you go to bed in it and everyone is consistently telling you you're doing a terrible job it's really really difficult and that was too much for some of the Tory prime ministers I know of examples of them just losing it with their staff when they kept waking up and being told they were terrible at their jobs and I cannot imagine what the pressure is like it's all very well for us on the outside this isn't a let's all feel sympathetic for Keir Starmer but on a human level the pressure in that one building where you live and you work is epic it's quite something that's going on there yeah

15:24Patrick Maguire: it is but i'd say a lot of the people who work closely with kia starmer know kia starmer don't necessarily describe a mountain under pressure they describe in their view a man who is obstreperous who is vain who is stubborn that's the word i hear again and again and again from his close allies he's stubborn he is almost energized at moments like this because he is so convinced of his own rectitude and that in part is obviously about what he sees as the national interest but it is also his desire and it's been his desire since childhood you know just read what his book for Tom Baldwin wrote read what you know friends from outside of politics told Gable and I for our book there is this just overwhelming desire to win and to be proven right to you know to prove people wrong as he has been doing since he came from that ramshackle home in in Reigate.

16:19And that is what we're seeing again, writ large across the whole government and indeed across what is left of the Labour Party in Westminster and the country. And it is, as Gabriel said, a completely different way of conceiving of this to the people who would like to see him go.

16:35Patrick Maguire: And ultimately, only one perspective can win out. But in the meantime, that means a bit like Boris Johnson in 2022, Steve, if there are cabinet resignations today, who would bet against Keir star was saying okay the three of you have resigned here are three more hires and then will it be for the replacements to resign as nadim zahawi famous he did after about 24 hours as chancellor so let's

16:59Gabriel Pogrund: see yeah i mean it's it is this extraordinary and we need to talk about um the other guy coming down on the train from manchester andy burnham and where things are we've got a scoop that we're working on at the times at the moment which we'll put up in a bit but there is at least one cabinet minister we know that is working directly with Andy Burnham to try to sort out his issue which is a seat he is the mayor of Greater Manchester he is like and this is genuinely he's really popular I sound shocked when I say that but no politician is popular anymore they are all really unpopular and it's a case of who is slightly more unpopular than someone else but Andy Burnham is a genuinely popular politician he is can I just break in Steve Andy Burnham has arrived at Euston there we go Lenin has come to the street.

17:42He's getting into a car. I can see the street. It's where the Ubers pick you up outside of Euston. And he's actually wearing a suit jacket, so you know it's serious. There's no collared shirt, but he has dressed up for the occasion. No Fred Perry. No Fred Perry today. The moment calls for something more serious.

17:59Gabriel Pogrund: So the cabinet are working, people in the cabinet, to actively find him a seat. And they've therefore got a vested interest in the timeline. And the timeline matters here. it matters a lot so West Streeting wants a really quick contest quick and dirty you get him in great that favours him Andy Burnham that campaign slogan quick and dirty Andy Burnham he needs time he has to find a seat he has to contest that seat let's say it's a Manchester seat which is logical okay Andy Burnham's really popular in Manchester he's really well liked but I'll tell you what isn't liked the Labour Party is incredibly unpopular in Manchester at the moment you look at the election results from last week, there is no guarantee he'd win that by-election.

18:38Gabriel Pogrund: So we are, you know, there'd have to be a discussion about whether he could stand with the Labour's ruling body. Starmer would probably try to stop him. We are talking about he needs months. He needs all the way. If you're lucky, there's a world in which he could become an MP by the autumn. But if you're not, we could be, you know, towards the latter part of this year before he gets a shot. So you've got a load of people that want Starmer to go, but just not quite yet. They need time to get Andy burn them in and i'm not sure given the pressures involved here and the kind of the way it feels i'm not sure that's going to be possible you know in some ways starmer is a really lucky general because when you examine the field of candidates so many of them appear if not fatally flawed then for some quirk of circumstance then at least not foregone conclusions angela rayner still has the HMRC monkey on her back and she until she can fling it off there's no way she can put herself forward as a serious candidate.

19:37Andy Burnham you just outlined Steve and then that leaves streeting and I think one thing that is difficult to overstate is that you know there are a lot of people that would much rather a perpetuation of the status quo than have a person that they, you know, fictitiously or otherwise believed to have been grown in Peter Mandelson's laboratory. So, you know, there are lots of reasons why the status quo may persist for a bit of time yet.

20:06Gabriel Pogrund: We should also talk about two underappreciated things. We're in this world where all things are possible right now. Who knows where it goes next? And two of those things are, one, Angela Rayner, and two, I say it quietly, Ed Miliband is a distinct possibility. don't necessarily rule it out because if you are in a world where Andy Burnham cannot get back in time and the leadership contest is triggered then despite the tax investigation Angela Rayner is seriously thinking of having a shot at it and she would, as you have previously reported Patrick, what was the phrase that was used about eyes?

20:39Patrick Maguire: I would rather stick pins in my eyes than back that expletive is what she said of Wes allegedly, I'm told she then denied it, I think

20:48Gabriel Pogrund: Yeah, but it was pretty well-sourced at the time from memory. So she is obviously keeping her options open. And Ed Miliband, he was the first mover. Like two weeks ago, he told Starmer to set out a timeline. And there is a world in which he could actually end up being prime minister. Now, he has told friends, I don't want it. I don't want the top job. And he's widely viewed as a kind of kingmaker for Andy Burnham and as putative chancellor. But don't rule it out. Like all things are possible right now.

21:15Patrick Maguire: Can I outline two scenarios that are doing the rounds in government, one of which feels more plausible to me than the other? The first is, what happens if West Streeting goes over the top? This is what Keir Starmer's remaining loyalists are trying to spin, and several of them have been having this conversation with me over the past 24 hours. Wes Streeting, say today he responds to Keir Starmer's provocation at Cabinet, which was there's a formal process. If you want to challenge me, use that. So say everything that Wes Streeting's allies were briefing last week is true. He does have a list of 81 MPs and he signs them up.

21:52Keir Starmer in that scenario is automatically on the ballot. And Keir Starmer says, all right, then, if you want to challenge me, I will run against you. Now, I think the point at which 81 MPs are willing to challenge you, you're finished. but some members of Keir Starmer's cabinet and this is probably just brinksmanship because I think it's an absurd scenario say they are genuinely convinced in that scenario that they could convince members of the soft left to endorse Keir Starmer to stop West Street saying that Keir Starmer could win now I think when you consider for a moment what endorsing Keir Starmer and giving this notoriously stubborn immovable man even in this context a fresh mandate from the Labour membership would mean I don't think anyone would actually do that So that's one scenario.

22:34The other scenario, more outlandish, is this. Say West Streeting challenges today. Then immediately a conference call is convened. WhatsApp blows up. Ed Miliband is ringing Louise Haig. Louise Haig is ringing Angela Rayner. Angela Rayner is ringing everybody else. And they think, what the hell do we do? some people genuinely think and they come from all wings of the party this is the Ed Miliband scenario Ed Miliband doesn't want West Reason to be Prime Minister nobody is quite sure about Angela does she want to run? does she want respect? can she run? is she the right candidate? people see a scenario in which Ed Miliband despite his denials feels impelled to stop Wes only I can stop Wes a bit like De Gaulle Only I can save the republic from itself.

23:26You know, 2026 is 1958 to Ed Miliband.

23:30Patrick Maguire: And he does it and he runs for leadership and wins. But some people suggest this supplementary twist. Again, this is far too clever by half. Ed Miliband shows that politics can be different because what does he say? He says, I'm going to become prime minister on a time limited basis. And my first act is to say to Labour and EC, you must let Andy Burnham run for the leadership, run for a parliamentary seat. And he can do so on the basis, could be back to be Prime Minister. Andy Burnham gets back. I resign. And the soft left are in power forever and ever and ever. We're going to win the next election.

24:07Now, both of those scenarios are so convoluted, I can see neither of them happening.

24:11Patrick Maguire: But that just goes to show the preponderance of theories that are taking root in the Labour Party this week. Can I just say, by the way, I think that the ridiculousness of what Patrick just outlined is another one of the big factors that favours Starmer. And we should say, I don't want to misquote YouGov, but I believe that Andy Burnham was the only political figure who a reasonable proportion of the non-Labour voting public believed would be a marked improvement on Starmer. so i think about it was only about a third of people i should say but he's the only person who commands a you know a sizable share of people who didn't vote labor at 2024 election and who say he would do a better job than starmer and the ongoing ambiguity about what happens next is I think one of that is the that is a really big and powerful tool in Starmus Swiss army knife and I think um you know I've actually got uh very pleased to have my mother-in-law sat in the audience visiting from the United States I think if you were to explain this situation to um uh somebody coming from outside the Westminster bubble possibly outside the country you know it is difficult to articulate how we are in this situation where for six months we've done podcasts where we've outlined every week that Starmer faces a reckoning come these May elections every week it seems like Starmer has contrived to find a way to compound his own political predicament by you turning on a given policy or inexplicably I still can't get over this committing to producing a you know British library's worth of correspondence about the appointment of Peter Mandelson yeah he's done so much to press the bruise of his own situation and yet here we are and there is still no clarity on what happens next and that I think in politics is also a powerful thing and I'm not here to say yeah how how how dare we indulge in this talk because it's clearly it's of the essence and it's an unignorable fact that there are dozens of MPs saying now they don't have confidence in the Prime Minister.

26:32So, you know, it's not a crime for us journalists to be remarking upon it, but we ought to remember as well that there'll be a lot of people in the public and possibly in the Parliamentary Labour Party as well who say, you've had enough time to prepare for this moment. The fact you've failed to do so in its own way militates in favour of keeping Starmer around for a bit longer.

26:52Patrick Maguire: Well, yeah, look, and more to the point, millions of voters are saying to the Labour Party they have no confidence in Keir Starmer. And your point about we've known this is coming for ages, and I've heard that from several people in government and outside of it in the past couple of weeks, sorry, couple of days, it feels like weeks. All of them have said to me, number 10 knew exactly what was going to happen in these elections, and they could have guessed what the reaction was going to be. So why do they seem so ill-prepared? Have they not been acknowledging this. Ditto, by the way, Andy Burnham, West Streeting, right?

27:27Patrick Maguire: It might be that West Streeting sending his allies to resign from government and call for the Prime Minister's head yesterday might have been part of a plan. It might have been an instinctive response. Team West is keeping its counsel. But Andy Burnham has known for a long time that this will be his moment. There just seems to be a sort of lack of... Some people have compared this to AJP Taylor's very famous war by timetable theory of how the First World War started. And indeed, that is, you know, in our book, we say that was how it seemed to Starmer in 2021, when he was being challenged, 2021, 2022, when it looked like he was going to be challenged for leadership on a couple of occasions, and people were mobilising because they could see others mobilising.

28:07That doesn't really seem to have happened in this instance. So yes, the sort of the stasis and the on-pass we're living through right now is partly because of Keir Starmer's stubbornness, but it's also just because of a sort of, I think, a squeamishness, a reticence, an excess of caution among the leaders, and this, I think, nonsense belief that he who wields the knife will never wear the crown, the ultimate sort of suffocating cliche of British politics, when actually, if you look through history, and these are the comparisons of where Streatham should be aware of, right, actually, you don't wear the crown if you never wield, like, you know, wielding the knife gives you an opportunity he's wear the crown.

28:43Roy Jenkins isn't Labour leader in 68 after Drevel set a local elections because he doesn't wield the knife. Everyone thinks he's unserious and a dilettante. Margaret Thatcher is. You know, she wields the knife and wears the crown in 75. You know, similarly, David Miliband bottles it, is never leader of the Labour Party because he thinks I'll get a better chance than his brother beats him. You know, repeat to fade. So this is the remarkable thing. I think everybody's calculations seem off and everybody's behaving in quite a strange way. regardless of what's at stake. So the emotional process, the messy emotional process is what's taking its place because everyone's thinking, can someone else make the first?

29:20Yeah, I don't know if it's an opposite comparison, but after the death of John Smith, there was this similar thing of, you know, it's Gordon Brown's, he's got to go for it. And then Tony Blair just decided, no, in actual fact, it is me. I'm not going to be Brown's mentee. I've got my own political vision, my own political economy, my own sense of politics. and I'm going to own that fact. And I think, you know, if we're permitted to talk about him outside the context of Epstein, I think that Manderson has said that Blair's incision in that moment was one of the things that persuaded some of his parliamentary colleagues that he had the sort of brutality and winning mentality to do the job.

30:06And I do think this notion of being, i'm not sure i you would have heard the phrase at the beginning but just to um just to repeat it that this notion that streeting is what is it preparing but not plotting planning but not planning but not plotting what's that mean what are we expect to take from that you are preparing to be prime minister you're you're getting ready to do that job but you don't wish to actually give effect to that outcome so what are we what is what are his colleagues meant to take from that I think Patrick has been quite forceful in outlining that these last 24 hours, they have been streetings moment.

30:43And the notion that you'd be ready, but then wait, as you were saying, Steve, until the autumn for Burnham to come in to have a contest. I agree. These cliches can be quite obstructive and they can have their own effect on politics.

30:59Patrick Maguire: Well, it's like this idea that the Labour Party doesn't like disloyalty or regicide. It's like the point at which nearly 100 MPs, probably more than 100 now MPs have come out and said, we think the prime minister's rubbish, get rid of him, please resign, is the point at which actually you'll be thanked for being disloyal to this prime minister. He's not a popular guy. No one's going to say, well, that's a bit gauche or, you know, please don't say what we're saying. You know, it's different for you. You know, it's a wide open goal and I really just don't understand.

31:22Gabriel Pogrund: Can I make an argument for something that Keir Starmer is right about? So Keir Starmer says this has real world consequences. It has implications for the cost of living. All of this chaos and turmoil is damaging. He is right about that. Look at the cost of government borrowing this morning. That is not wrong. And I have this, sometimes when I'm struggling to sleep, I like to repeat things in my head over and over just to see where we go. So I play this game with myself where I name all of the prime ministers since David Cameron. So we get David Cameron, Theresa May. Who are we after Theresa May?

31:51Gabriel Pogrund: We go to Boris Johnson. We go to Liz Truss. We go to Rishi Sunak, Kiyos Dama. And it's a game, and I'll just do that on loop for a bit until I eventually kind of die of exhaustion. but it's it is ridiculous it is this question of whether britain is actually governable anymore and when i talk to friends and family like in our jobs when things like this are happening there's i'm so acutely aware of it there is an adrenaline to it right there's another person's gone over the top another minister's resigned the spreadsheet's getting bigger you know this person's tweeted this it's all politics on hyper overdrive and sometimes when i talk i was talking to a friend this morning They were just saying, it's just mad, Steve.

32:32Gabriel Pogrund: Like, you look at it from where we're sitting. I just want someone to get on with actually running the country. And there is a fundamental problem with British politics in that external things happen. You know, wars happen. Ukraine, Iran, they have an impact. And voters obviously blame the incumbent government. But it means that we are now in a, either we've got a really awful set of politicians, which we may well have. I'm not saying we don't. they could not be fit for purpose or there is something fundamentally wrong with our political system now and there is just this i'm not saying registries in the dna i don't know quite what it is i don't know where i'm going with this point but i think that you know sir keir starmer was not wrong when he stood on the steps of downing street and said he wanted a politics that would tread more lightly on people's lives that might have been terrible for journalists like me i remember turning to my colleague and saying oh my god it's gonna be like early days of gordon brown What the hell are we going to write about?

33:26But actually, I think there is a desire for that.

33:30Gabriel Pogrund: It's just the economic circumstances and pressures that come from us being an open trading nation and uniquely exposed to the rest of the world create immense pressure in and of themselves. William Hague wrote a very perspicacious column in the paper today saying that governing from the centre-left in the year 2026, it is bloody difficult. but it's not impossible. And Keir Starmer makes it look impossible. I do think that there's a massive question to be had about whether systemically, you know, the velocity of political news, the sort of media politics nexus has made it functionally impossible to be in a position of power for longer than a few years.

34:16We've had four prime ministers in four years, but I do think that part of why we are where we are is because of decisions that Starmer has made. Yeah, absolutely. And unmade. You know, he chose to, you know, Winterfuel, which we wrote in our book, was a decision he made on the fly without any consideration of the political implications of that decision. That's not like, you know, Patrick and I wrote, we did write a mischievous story about Starmer's sort of unorthodox arrangements for a donor paying for his spectacles and such like. But that's not the fourth estate being mischievous. It's not him being unduly trashed by the tabloids.

34:59There are some big tectonic political decisions he's made which have caught up with him, which might be a little distinct to what we've seen before.

35:08Patrick Maguire: Yeah, the flip side of all this stuff about what Keir Starmer says about, oh, instability, look at the bond markets. Whenever this kicks off, you know, borrowing costs go up, so I've got to stay because they only trust me, is that he is the instability. The reason we have these recurring, and you can have these chin-stroking discussions about the nature of democracy on hyperspeed and everything we've all been saying, but ultimately, right, the government's in a mess because the prime minister doesn't have any politics, because the instability is him, because he occupies every possible position within Labour history on a loop, on like a sort of fortnightly basis.

35:46He reinvents himself constantly, sometimes within the space of the same speech. He doesn't do politics. He doesn't have any sense of political economy. There has been no clear agenda. They govern in one way, which is a sort of as a conventional centre-left European social democratic government with all of the policy choices and decisions on tax regulation that imply. But they speak in the other direction, right? So business don't like them. Progressive voters don't like them. and it's all very well and good to say to Keir Starmer, look at the bond market. Well, actually, the bond market is spiking because you're the cause of political instability, because you're the reason the government is failing.

36:24So as long as you're in office, well, keep this instability baked into your premiership because you have no clear agenda, no real political facility with your backbenchers or anybody else. The cabinet don't rate you, etc, etc, etc. So, you know, the bond market isn't something that sort of is uniquely in awe and respectful of Keir Starmer. You know, he is responsible for the political situation that keeps blowing it up. And I think, you know, regardless of and also he's by the way, he's proven himself unwilling to take the decisions that would really calm it down because he's incapable of prosecuting and winning.

36:59You know, ironically, his former head of the DPP. Right. He's incapable of prosecuting argument for, you know, the big, crunchy fiscal reform that the bond market would dearly love to see. And, you know, he'll be not down with a feather if his backbenches don't like anything. So that is ultimately the problem.

37:15Gabriel Pogrund: I think that brings us to an end. So thank you so much. We are very privileged to be here. Thank you to you and Autry and Molly Guinness. And Harry Kitson, of course. And Harry Kitson.

37:48We'll see you next time.