Mahmood vs the liberal luminaries

0:00And like him, unfortunately, I am the one that is regularly called a fucking packie and told to go back home. It is I who knows through my personal experience and that of my constituents just how divisive the issue of asylum has become in our country. She instead is trying to appease the most ghastly right-wing racist forces all across Europe in undermining and walking away from the European Convention on Human Rights, a convention created by the post-war Labour government. I can't believe that we've got cabinet members saying that this is a compassionate plan. It's absolutely not compassionate, it's the opposite.

0:40I felt a bit sick, to be honest, and more than a little sad and angry. I think the policy is wrong and I think the politics is wrong as well. This isn't Labour, this cannot be the mission of Keir Starmer, the human rights lawyer and now Prime Minister. Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, political editor at The Times. I'm Gabriel Pogrand, Whitehall editor at The Sunday Times. And I'm Patrick McGuire, chief political commentator at The Times. So this week we are going to be talking to you about how Patrick McGuire's scoop on this very podcast actually precipitated the single worst week of Keir Starmer's entire premiership, and that is a competitive field.

1:22We are going to be talking about Shabana Mahmood and how she is dominating the agenda this week. Even though we're in the run-up to the budget, you're going to be hearing more from her later this week. And we think we need to talk about Zach. So we're going to be talking about Zach Polanski and the Greens and how they are eating Jeremy Corbyn's breakfast, lunch and dinner. And we have a significant scoop from Gabriel on that area. So without further ado, shall we kick off and talk about Shabana Mahmood and migration? And we have this extraordinary statement in the Commons yesterday with a huge raft of asylum policy.

1:58As much as people say that Labour can't out reform reform, there is an argument that Shabana Mahmood is having a go here. Yeah, absolutely. And you saw that from the responses from people like Nigel Farage and Danny Kruger, who could say nothing more than they like the sound of it. and indeed in Richard Tice's case and Nigel Farage's case, I think inviting Shibana Mahmood to submit her reform membership application to which Shibana in her inimitable Brummie style told him to sod off. But yeah, it has been one of the most significant announcements of the lifetime of this government, I think. Certainly as significant politically as anything that's been done on the economy because it clarifies just what this government stands for.

2:41You know, it is a line in the sand moment, just like when Rachel Reeves used her first budget to levy taxes on business and employers. It tells you something about the flavour of Labour politics that Keir Starmer, or at least his probably one of the standout performers in his cabinet in Shibana Mahmood, thinks the Labour Party should be. And it is clear that this policy announcement, this asylum crackdown and what we'll hear later in the week about legal migration is one of the most important things this government is going to be doing. And it is a yeah, it's it's strong meat. It is, as one Home Office minister told me yesterday, the sort of return of Labour's old right, patriotic, tough on crime, tough on borders.

3:29and it's no surprise as we heard in the intro that you have quite a lot of Labour MPs, whether it's enough is another question to defeat it, who really, really don't like it. But Shibana Mahmood has planted her flag in the ground and picked aside. It's worth just reflecting for a moment on what Shibana represents politically because I saw some footage proliferating on X yesterday in which she once upon a time called for an amnesty on all undocumented migrants to the UK and was part of a coalition of MPs in the West Midlands, calling for, if not softer treatment, then certainly a sort of route for those who had entered the country unlawfully to become citizens.

4:10And obviously she's been on a journey. She, I think, has been disabused of some of her old politics and also totally rejects the notion that as a British woman of Pakistani descent, that being tough on migration is some sort of oxymoron. She sees her values as a British Asian woman as sort of being part and parcel of the blue Labour notion of prizing community, country, flag, that sense of if you are a person of family values and you believe in the idea of nation, then you don't need to go to reform. Those were once upon a time Labour values and her mission, as she perceives it, is restoring it in the public's mind that those are progressive principles.

4:57And, you know, Starm has often looked very ambivalent about that publicly. And as we know, he's disavowed his own language, talking about the effect of migration. Whereas I think Shaban has launched herself into this idea and sought to be the kind of personification of the progressive but sceptical on migration position. and she looks she clearly believes that politics her raison d 'etre is politics is about prosecuting and winning arguments then she actually managed to create one of those rare things in the commons yesterday she created a moment and a moment that we clipped up at the beginning of the show but she turned on a Lib Dem who'd accused her of kind of stoking racism effectively with her language and she turned around and said look I've been called a fucking packy to use her language and it is really raw language.

5:48And she said that, you know, there is a problem here and if we don't identify it, that problem is going to persist and continue. Now that actually did earn her a ticking off on the floor of the Commons from the Deputy Speaker, Caroline Noakes, who said that was unparliamentary language. You shouldn't be using it. But her point was, this is what I get called and I'm going to kind of be very forthright on this. And that is really explosive and unusual language that we've never heard in the Commons before. and it certainly stopped everyone in their tracks yesterday and she used it to make a broader point about the need to tackle this issue, that this issue is fostering division, it is fostering hate in some areas and if governments don't respond to it, if they don't deliver, then this problem will continue.

6:30Yeah, it's very much the Morgan McSweeney school of Labour politics and opposition, which is that the centre-left has to do things that make the centre-left feel uncomfortable and has to hear things that make the centre-left uncomfortable to sort of save it from itself, right? Because that has always been the thinking that's underpinned the key political people behind this government, which is if Labour lapses into its comfort zone, it actually delegitimises the causes it believes in. You know, as Morgan McSweeney said, we posted him on a book as saying this, Gabriel, that, you know, he was sat having dinner with some friends and said, why should Labour always be for the judges?

7:03Why should Labour always be for the BBC? And by that, he didn't mean, let's burn down Broadcasting House and abolish the independent judiciary. It's that if you legitimise or are seen to legitimise or endorse the excesses and mistakes of liberal insular institutions, then don't be surprised if populists who don't share your values, populists who want to tear the whole thing down, suddenly find an audience. So I think Shabana Mahmood is very much in that territory. That's the thing that's underpinning it. But the question for me, one of the questions for me is, how do No. 10, Johnny Reynolds, the Chief Whip, and the Home Office manage a small but growing and not insignificant backlash from Labour MPs?

7:48When Keir Starmer, I'm not sure who picks up the paper, he used to read The Times and The Guardian of a Morning. I'm not sure he does that anymore. But when he's told, you know, there are 20, 25, 30 MPs saying this is a tantamount to fascism, saying that we're legitimizing the racism you're spending a lot of time condemning, etc, etc. How does he react? Because one of the things someone in number 10 once said to me was, one of the frustrating experiences of working with Keir Starmer was, there's the professional Keir Starmer who steps out the threshold of the flat. You speak to him, he gets the political arguments.

8:26And then he goes back into his flat and he speaks to his friends from the law, his friends from Kentish Town, liberal luminaries who come and visit him. And they say, Keir, you know, all this nasty right wing stuff. Don't do it. Be yourself. And we've sort of seen that impulse come out. Whereas we know who people like Morgan McSweeney speak to when, you know, they finish work. Because as you revealed in the Sunday Times, Gabriel, you know, Tuesday night last week, he's spending time with Morris Glassman, Lord Glassman, the founder of Blue Labour. So that sort of, this is going to be a real test for the government's commitment or the government's pain threshold, Keir Starmer's pain threshold.

9:02How committed are Number 10 and the Prime Minister to ploughing on, to saying to those Labour MPs, look, we know you're uncomfortable, but we have to do this because we need to save ourselves from ourselves. And what I wonder is, when Starmer is forced to defend or account for some of these things, what does he go and say? Does he have the fruity IPA from Kentish Town Brigade pouring poison in his ear? or you know or ipa or ipa pouring neck oil into his ear saying yeah kia this isn't you or does he in contrast to his past pronouncements actually say no i am gonna i am gonna double down steve reed this morning for instance couldn't quite say what it was the government's position was on the question of children for instance yeah alf dub said it seemed shabby and on labor um for the government to be threatening to do what the united states is doing and i think uh the sort of the Vibes, that overstated word in political discourse, will be as important as delivery in making this sing.

10:05Look, what you need for all rebellions is you need a clear focal point, and it is not clear what the focal point is on this. I am willing to bet that this policy, the most contentious policy, which is deporting entire families who don't have a right to be here, including children, that is upsetting a lot of Labour MPs. If you actually look at the wording in the policy statement that they put out, that's kind of in some kind of manana consultation territory. so it's generating a lot of ill will it's generating a lot of anger but it may not actually ever come to a vote so with the welfare reforms very clearly there were changes to the PIP system that were tangible that people could therefore vote against this is not that this is much broader the other point I would make is this is creating a lot of heat it's creating a lot of headlines but is this really going to have any deterrent effect at all if you are someone who's on the other side of the English Channel you've made it all the way to France you've crossed incredibly dangerous countries with the aim of coming to the UK.

10:59Is a technical change in the asylum status really going to deter you? Is it going to have an impact? And I'd probably suggest no in and of itself that a lot of these reforms are years away from happening. So I think it appeals to a domestic audience, but the real crux of this is going to be come the next election, are people still crossing the English Channel in record numbers? If they are, then whether you're shabana mood or keir starmer you've got a massive problem on your hands or indeed kevin baden and i think you put your finger on something crucial there which is that the raw politics of this and the relationship between style and substance shabana mood is very good at politics she's got a good reputation as a minister as well but the mistakes she has made or the things you know look i think nobody's talking about her stewardship of the ministry of justice at the time when the ministry of justice is falling over obviously she's moved but if she was less good at politics we might be saying, well, is Siobhan Amu that good a minister?

11:57But she's really good at politics. They have taught this up, and it's landed very, very well in terms of how it's been received. It's sort of slightly bamboozled their rivals on the right. But what happens in, as you say, six months, a year, 18 months, if the substance of the policy hasn't changed anything? You know, for instance, the jewellery thing, speaking to a few people in government, sort of sceptics across government about this yesterday, and they were saying, you know, look, any other announcement this thing they've said about jewellery right you know it was briefed to the papers then alex norris the illegal immigration minister sort of came out and said look we're not going to be taking people's wedding rings off them mike tapp another immigration minister was having to tweet and say in the commons yesterday we're not seizing jewellery shibana said the dispatch box how many times am i going to have to say we're not going to be taking people's jewellery off them in any other announcement it's a testament to how good shabana mahoud is at politics any other announcement we'd all be pointing at that and saying what a shambles they don't even know what their policy on jewellery is right so and i think that for some people in government and in the labour party is a bit of a clue as to or an omen are bits of this policy going to unravel and secondly the big pertinent question is does the substance work and a massive question mark hovering over this government shabana will attempt to resolve it over the course of this week is what of legal migration obviously channel crossings are this great metaphor for the lack of control but you know the boris wave has entered the lexicon as well this notion of unfettered legal migration being as much of a problem funnily enough over the summer i spent far too much time on a very remote corner of kent called the island of sheppie it's an island which has three prisons on it one of which is called HMP Swaleside, which I learned recently relies upon foreign workers for about a third of its workforce.

13:52There's this whole phenomenon of TikTok influencers telling people in Nigeria and Ghana that coming to the UK on a skilled worker visa to work in His Majesty's prison and probation service is one of the easiest backdoors to enter the United Kingdom. Now Yvette Cooper introduced changes to the tier one skilled visa regime over the summer, raising the salary threshold in order to qualify. And I've learned that David Lammy has been telling Shabana Mahmood that his people are warning that you could be looking at thousands of people having to summarily leave the employment of prisons at a time when, days ago, the front pages and broadcasts was dominated by the accidental release of serious offenders.

14:37And I understand that the new chief executive of the prison service as well was telling Lamy that literally 2 ,000 people could find themselves ineligible to work in our prisons. And Shabana Mahmood knows this is a problem, but I got texted by a source shortly before the podcast saying that they're simply not moving. And the question is, what does happen on legal immigration when Mahmood is forced to reckon with some of these trade-offs? How radical and arm-bending does she prove to be? I think it's much easier to make sort of universal pronouncements on illegal immigration, but it's legal that it could be as complicated and thorny a question for government as refugees as well.

15:14Let's move on to the nuclear bomb that Patrick dropped on Westminster last week. On this very podcast, he said that Keir Starmer's approach was, come and have a go if you think you're hard enough. And particularly, people were taking aim at West Streeting. Well, we put the podcast to bed, you put the front page to bed that day. And all hell broke loose. And all hell broke loose, because it turned out West Streeting wasn't very happy. Please continue the story, Patrick. No, he wasn't very happy at all yet. So this podcast went out mid-afternoon, wrote up a story, it went out. And then something curious happened.

15:46You know, I thought I had done some, I had a day of frantic reporting. I'd been for breakfast with somebody and I spoke to three other people over the course of the day. I was quite proud of all the work I'd put in. And then clearly someone over the course of Monday had warmed to the theme we discussed because no sooner did I put my story up, about 45 minutes later, The Guardian put one up. And then by the end of the evening, the BBC had a version as well. So clearly the conversation I had on Monday morning might have excited people. We since learned that Keir Starmer had agreed that it should be out there, that he wasn't just going to roll over and take it and, you know, be told by West Streeting or whoever.

16:25okay fine if you say I should resign I'll resign but somewhere along the line somebody decided to turn up the heat on West Streeting and accuse him of having 50 front benches ready to resign if Keir Starmer didn't resign and predictably that went down incredibly badly and you revealed Steve that he was at a an armistice day service in Ilford and got a call from a rival newspaper saying you won't believe what number 10 are saying about you uh at which point gabriel you learned over the weekend that he then made another call of his own west streeting to uh one morgan mcsweeney that's right um so it transpires shortly after being approached by an unspecified rival newspaper that the health secretary picked up the phone rang mcsweeney and all but accused him of being the source of this notion that he had a uh you know retinue of mps ready to topple the pm if keir starmer didn't voluntarily step aside after the budget and he thought he'd already heard that he already had a suspicion number 10 were putting that around that's right his team streetings team had already got word before patrick's marmalade dropper of a scoop that the health secretary they heard this notion that mcsweeney was personally disseminating the idea that Streeting had 50 MPs standing behind him.

17:52And I learned something else, by the way, in the course of reporting on this story over the weekend. By the way, I mean, it sure beats work for a living just being able to follow up Patrick's scoops for my Sunday read. But it transpires that McSweeney and Streeting had not spoken for up to two months and haven't been on good terms for as long as a year. These are two men who, by the way, during the dog days of Corbyn's leadership and the early weeks and months of Starmer's leadership, used to huddle around the dinner table of the Labour peer, Roger Liddle, to discuss locking the left out of power forever.

18:26And they were, you know, sort of kindred spirits in their shared conviction in Labour's path to power. And West Streeting actually made, we revealed the existence of that supper club in our book on Starmer Get In. And actually, after it was published, West Streeting had a mock blue plaque made. It was like, at this table, the Labour Party was saved to buy a group of people, including Wes Streeting and Morgan McSweeney, who we should say denies briefing against anybody in any terms ever. But, you know, that breach is really significant and it could determine, I think, the direction this leadership race takes when it happens.

19:00I think as well, the idea that the architect of this government and the person responsible for giving effect to its signature domestic policy position are basically estranged, is pretty unreal. And I think it also shows how much Starmer's vulnerability has contaminated relations at the top of the party. Wes Streeting used to say that Starmer likes tall poppies, he doesn't mind people who are ambitious. Well, that was true, it seems, until it wasn't. Because lots of people down the street also know that the more that Wes Streeting bigs up Zoran Mamdani and talks about his objections to digital ID cards, the more he looms into view as a viable contender.

19:36And I think for that reason, And Patrick's story was, it's probably the first time a government with a majority as big as this has so rapidly been required to address speculation about its leaders' future. And isn't it interesting? I mean, Steve, I'm nicking a point you made on Times Radio this morning. But you made the point that Keir Starmer is on the front page of Tuesday's Mirror saying, I'm going to fight the next election, which one is, as you said, is a remarkable thing to do on the morning after your Home Secretary has made a sort of government defining announcement on immigration. but two it makes you think why didn't he just do that in the first place you know it speaks to the weird way this government works that this big announcement about the prime minister's resolve was briefed out to me and others why doesn't the prime minister just come out and say that himself i don't know it's bewildering and the other thing it was absolutely chaotic to be reporting on last week because we then went from the speculation about keir starmer massively weakened authority, full frontal assault by West treating on number 10.

20:39We lurched into the U-turn of all U-turns on the budget. We went on Thursday night to learning that the government had dropped or recently dropped plans to jack up income tax. And that caused absolute carnage with the Treasury having to basically brief the bulk of what will be in the budget in a bit to reassure the markets the following morning. We barely caught our breath between the two stories. Now, look, when you stand back it feels very chaotic and I think the question we probably need to be asking is where does it leave Starmer and I think I'm going to make a controversial argument that actually in terms of the budget u-turn at least that puts him in a slightly stronger position after the budget yes there are huge risks with the budget still but if he'd have ripped the plaster off and gone for this income taxing I said before I thought it'd be electoral suicide I maintain that and by not doing that after the budget it means that he is more likely to make it through to May and then all bets are off the table at that point.

21:38I think it's it was a choice between electoral suicide and a slow bleed and they've chosen they've chosen a slow bleed the choice was between we do one hugely unpopular but fiscally effective thing which by the way I agree and lots of Labour MPs agree would have been cataclysmic and would have hastened Keir Starmer's demise or you do 10 or 15 mildly unpopular things or things that will be deeply unpopular with one lobby group you know this morning there's a suggestion that they're going to increase the the banking surcharge you know that is not going to alienate the public in the way that breaking a solemn promise you've made twice not to increase their taxes not to take money from their payslip i think you know you'd rather be bleeding out on the floor of the car park than you know dead in the in the mortuary decapitated outside the tower of london or something yeah no i think as well what this does is it gives her a bit of a story she can say you know we're going to ask people who own mansions to pay a bit more on council tax we're going to ask big banks to forfeit some of their profits and we're going to invest the proceeds in the health service and and public services i think that is a much happier place to be than they were only a few days ago but look, people are really unhappy.

22:53I was talking to one minister on Friday night and they were obviously in their constituency by that point and they were just saying, it's just weak. We look weak. We haven't done the difficult thing. There was something to do here to avoid death by a thousand cuts and we've chosen a thousand cuts. And they were talking to the idea that people are getting semi-organised. There are spreadsheets out there that people are putting together of potential people that could, you know, the numbers that would be needed to get towards a challenge. The problem is there's more than one spreadsheet because there's different candidates that are jockeying for position.

23:25But people are trying to organise. They know it's coming. It's clearly not just coming yet. Now, obviously, we have the budget next week. And in the wake of that budget, Patrick and I and Fraser Nelson and Maureen Khan from The Times will be doing a big budget event in Westminster. people can come see us in real life, IRL as you put it Patrick, talking about the budget, its political and economic consequences and the aftermath. So you can book tickets at the times.co.uk forward slash events. We'd obviously love to see you there and we're going to release it as a special edition of the State of It podcast after that.

24:03I think we'll cut to an interval now but after that we're going to come back and talk about Zach Polanski, the irresistible force that is Zach Polanski and what that means for your party, Labour and more broadly the whole political theatre. Welcome back. We are now going to talk about Zach Polanski and the extraordinary polling that we're seeing around him and how this is changing the politics on the left. The Times has a YouGov poll this morning which for the first time has the Greens in equal third. They are on 17 % with the Tories. We are officially reaching a position where the Tories could lapse into being the fourth party in British politics and the Greens appear to have a pretty unstoppable force at the moment.

24:46Yeah it does look like they have that elusive but very important quantity in British politics and only sort of one person or at the most two parties can possess it at a time and that's momentum. Maybe actually he also has momentum which is to say Jeremy Corbyn's old supporter base which we'll discuss in a moment because that's one of the fascinating things about this. So I wrote the Saturday essay in last week's Saturday Times about Zapolansky because to me he's one of the most interesting people in British politics right now. Precisely because six months ago nobody knew who he was. I remember having a conversation with Owen Jones, the Guardian journalist, about the future of the left to the left of the Labour Party.

25:31And he said to me, the Greens need to be populist. Very few people get that. Now nobody does not know who Zapolansky is. He is everywhere. So I wrote this essay to work out who is he? What does he think? And I had a long and very interesting conversation with him about, among other things, Brazilian experimental Marxist theatre. I always like to ask politicians what they're reading. What's your formative intellectual influence? And Zapolansky used to be an actor. He used to be in an improvisational theatre troupe. And he said, what really animates me is this thing called the theatre of the oppressed.

26:08which was a project in the favelas in Brazil in the 1970s where there'd be a central actor called the Joker who would invite spectators to be part of the play. They'd be watching and playing at once. And that, he says, is his approach to politics, building a mass movement, that sort of thing. We also spoke about Tony Benn. Anyway, why am I giving you this history lesson in Brazilian pedagogy and sociology and the Labour left in the 1980s. It's because this is Zach Polanski's project. It is unashamedly about speaking to 50, 20%, maybe 25 % of people who identify with liberal causes, environmentalism, that sort of thing.

26:58He doesn't actually talk that much about the environment, does he? No, exactly, exactly. He calls himself an eco-populist, but it's a much more sort of conventional left-wing economic populism that's all about wealth inequality. It's about pitching to the sort of people who can't afford houses. And crucially, it draws a very thick red or indeed green line on values. And he has been everywhere in the past 24 hours or so, basically saying the Labour government is dealing in fascist policy. and Labour people roll their eyes at this and say take up residence in the real world but the problem is this is the sort of world lots of their voters inhabit and you speak to Labour MPs particularly in the big cities and they're incredibly worried about the Greens.

27:46Now on the immigration thing actually speaking to lots of people in government they say well you're flattening the nuances out of this you know second generation immigrants are often quite hard line on the question of legality and border controls and that sort of thing. But it is clear that this message of Zach Polanski's delivered very charismatically and fluently. You know, one of the things about being an actor is you're also capable of stringing your sentence together and speaking convincingly, which I think is not something we would accuse Keir Starmer of doing. He's good at answering questions.

28:15Trevor Phillips, our Times colleague, has a show on Sky News. I was on it the other week and he interviewed Zach Polanski. And Trevor, who is not a natural sympathiser with those sort of politics i think it's fair to say said this guy is really impressive he answers questions and all of those things the nature of the politics the nature of the delivery like nigel farashi really understands the modern attention economy speaking to someone very senior in reform over the weekend and they said well look the future of british politics might be nigel's on one side zap polanski is on the other we're going hammer and tongs at each other we're very very clear alternatives to each other and Labour and the Tories are in the middle sort of being pulled in each direction not being able to speak with the clarity so for all of those reasons he is one of the big stories in British politics right now and he's not to be underestimated.

29:03I'd also say if you are to reflect on the two events that have bedeviled the government over the last week the first the U-turn on income tax the second speculation over Starmer's leadership there's something which unites them which is that in both instances I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying that the organ grinder spoke before the monkey but certainly these things appeared off the record first and then were only consummated by on the record confirmations thereafter now that might have worked once upon a time but patrick posed a question why couldn't starmer just say himself that he would definitely face down a leadership challenge zach polanski is the antithesis of that kind of politics actually i saw it being said the other day that polanski might be the first poster to lead a british political party what do we mean by poster we mean somebody who actually posts on social media themselves who replies to comments in their own voice you know starm was always accused of having the most bizarrely flat and impersonal social media output and you see things like you know we are the party of national patriotic renewal and you know you can tell he cannot possibly have written it himself and there's always that sort of and i've spoken to senior people in government about this quite a lot because they are sort of morbidly fascinated and horrified by it it's that sort of thing but also then the next one is don't you bloody hate potholes me too that's why we're going to fill them right and it's like these tweet after tweet after tweet or he'll come out and say tell you what's really bad racism and then he'll tweet something like we are going to shut the borders and kick out every illegal it's like what and it just as you say polanski's not like that because he speaks in one voice all the time whereas kia starmer is depending on what platform and who he's just last spoken to and where he's speaking it's 100 different 100 i think he also he does a great job of transcending the the every day in politics i remember interviewing him back in june when he was just running for leader and the question at the time was well who will get to define the populist left over the coming years if polanski wins will he make a big bold offer to jeremy corbyn will there be some sort of accommodation between the people's front of Judea or the Judean people's front and Polanski basically just sort of shrugged and he just said basically I don't care like I'm going to do what I'm going to do and you know Jeremy's going to do what Jeremy does and I'm more than happy to work with people who are happy to work with me and that sort of insouciance and humanity isn't just a sharp contrast with Starnberg but it's also a sharp contrast with those to his left in your party who not long ago it seemed were going to inherit or be the bearers of the Corbynite flame this is the party founded by Jeremy Corbyn and Zahra Sultan they had a two-month head start on Zach Polanski's green leadership that was the third of July when that announcement was made and in the time it's taking them to do anything other than brief furiously against each other, often to you, Gabriel.

32:09Zak Planski has run for the Green leadership, been elected leader of the Greens, and taken the Greens to levelling the polls of the Conservative Party. And the money. The Greens, in the past 11 weeks, has made£4 million from membership fees. They've got so much money, they don't clearly know what to do with it at this stage. They started talking about getting a diversity and inclusion manager, and kind of spending more on that, but they literally have more money than they know what to do with. So that is a problem, a nice problem for the Greens to have. But all of this, while your party appears to be mired in civil war.

32:40I'm possibly not wholly blameless on the topic of this civil war, because literally seconds after the launch of that party earlier this year, I revealed that Corbyn was incandescent with Zahra Sultana for jumping the gun by launching it. It transpired that Corbyn had not given his blessing for the fact of the party's existence to be communicated. and that was only the opening salvo in what has been a busy summer leading into autumn leading into winter of acrimonious infighting within your party such that one is forced to ask every time you see anybody speak on its behalf well whose party is it is it corbyn's or is it sultana's and the key matter being litigated at the moment is who's in charge of the money you talk there about the runaway fundraising success on the greens well actually your party raised northwards i think of a million quid hundreds of thousands of which was sequestered away in a bank account belonging to and we mustn't overburden our listeners with context over here but uh memorandum of understanding limited memorandum of understanding limited which is composed of sultana's allies and they've only reluctantly agreed to pay that money back to those on team Corbyn but they're going to do it in tranches and I was learning earlier there's also a dispute as to who's going to get the interest paid on this money which is currently somewhere in an MOU bank account but they've got their conference next week it's at the ACC in Liverpool and the extent of the embitterment is such that we don't even know whether Zahra Sultana is going to be able to speak and address this founding conference.

34:24I was speaking to somebody earlier and said, well, will Sultana get to make her pitch to the mass ranks of the Your Party membership? To which the answer came, well, she'd need to get on with anybody in Your Party in order to get permission to do the speech. So, you know, this is ludicrously petty, but it alludes to something important, which is that this bit of the left is eating itself while Zach Polanski is eating their lunch. Yes, exactly. And eating their voters. You know, as one Your Party person said to me earlier in the week, you know, they wouldn't mind me saying that, take it as a compliment, a very radical left turn of phrase.

34:57They said, Zach is hegemonising the liberal left, by which they meant, you know, that bit of the electorate is now his. He's doing good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That bit of the electorate now belongs to Zach Polanski's Green Party, because unlike Corbyn and Sultana, he has just got on with it and is speaking directly to voters. Whereas Corbyn is, in classic Corbyn form, seemingly avoiding any possible confrontation and his staff are getting on with it. And Zora Sultana is not popular among them, it's safe to say, and is spending a lot of time criticising publicly her colleagues in the Independent Alliance, who are Corbyn and the four Gaza independents, one of whom Adnan Hussein, the MP for Blackburn, actually quit your party before even properly started last week on the grounds that he was sick of, you know, I think Zorozhat Hanh in particular, making it a cold house for conservative Muslims.

35:51And that was his broad argument. And there are other people in your party who are now saying, look, we had a ready-made formula. It was, you know, those sorts of constituencies, places like Blackburn, Leicester, Bradford, Dewsbury, all the sort of places that were either won by Gaza independence or where Gaza independence ran Labour MPs close, Birmingham as well. And now that alliance, the alliance between Corbyn and those MPs seems to be falling apart because of the complete shambles that has been trying to start this party and trying to mediate disagreements between different bits of the radical left.

36:31All the while, as we keep saying, Zak Polanski is just out there saying, tax the rich again and again and again, answering questions, accusing Keir Starmer of variously emulating fascist policies on immigration, having a pop at Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf. He's always visible. He's always present. He speaks something resembling human with a smile on his face, and it's working. And I think your party will look back on this after their conference, if indeed the conference happens, which has become a point of speculation among some of its more disgruntled members and say, well, how do we let this happen?

37:12A guy who 10 years ago was a Lib Dem activist who was singing gospel music on the Lib Dem conference stage. And heckling Corbyn as well. Yeah, and heckling Corbyn has now succeeded him as a much more charismatic, much more effective leader of the radical left in Britain. That's an understated point, by the way, that Polanski once upon a time was a Lib Dem activist who was picketing a Corbyn event in 2016, asking why he had sold people down the river on the topic of the EU. So it sort of shows people don't actually care that much about one's history. They don't know about the campaign for Labour Party democracy or Dennis Healy versus Tony Benn.

37:50They just see a guy speaking plain English, bigging down billionaires, and it seems they quite like it. What it shows more than anything is that politics is on hyperspeed now. The tectonic plates are moving. They are shifting. We have huge numbers of swing voters who don't particularly identify with one party or another, and they're moving. And we are seeing here with the Green Party's insurgency moving into third, the Tories down to fourth. It's so unpredictable because lots of voters are so disenchanted with what's on offer. So if you can position yourself to be the person to capitalize on that, in this case, Zach Polanski, in other cases, Nigel Farage, then you kind of move up in the polls and it goes.

38:28So that's the challenge. It's the challenge to report on it. And it's the challenge for politicians today to adapt to that as well. will bring this week's podcast to an end at this point we should say please get in touch with us if you've got any questions at all on the state of it at the times.co.uk and we will be back next week on the eve of the budget that defining budget for rachel reeves and keir starmer we'll find out which taxes are going to go up and the kind of narrative they're trying to sell around that it will be all consuming by next week and obviously please gabriel our weekly tribute to our amazing producers i'll press my big red button thank you so much to molly guinness and you and uh for another wonderful week of our of our podcast here