Starmer, Farage and your monthly bills

0:01Caroline Wheeler: Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Steven Swinford, the Politicator of The Times.

0:10Steven Swinford: I'm Caroline Wheeler, the Politicator of The Sunday Times.

0:13Patrick Maguire: And sat all by himself on this side of the studio is me, Patrick Maguire, Chief Political Commentator for The Times. Gabriel Pogrand is not here, but he will be back next week.

0:24Caroline Wheeler: So look, this week we are going to be talking about three broad areas. First of all, we're going to be talking about what Keir Starmer would like to talk about, which is the cost of living. He is staking his entire premiership on proving that you, our listeners, will be better off by the end of the year. So we will talk about that. What are the chances of that? Is that actually a realistic prospect at all? And then secondly, we are going to talk about the mood among MPs after Christmas. Traditionally, MPs have quite a nice time over Christmas. They see their families. and talk of plotting and removing and defenestrations dies down.

0:58Caroline Wheeler: It's no great secret to tell you that hasn't happened this year. And lastly, we're going to be talking about the elephant in the room. That is Donald Trump, the man that is dominating not just geopolitics more broadly, but also the political agenda in the UK and Sir Keir Starmer's hopes of kind of getting through to voters. He is an absolutely dominant force as we start the year.

1:22Steven Swinford: Well, it's completely eclipsed the big drive that was due to start in January. We had Sir Keir Starmer writing for the Sunday Times this weekend. Ordinarily, a prime ministerial intervention would end up on the front page. It would be talked about on all of the broadcasting rounds on the Sunday morning and nothing. Because the main news was Venezuela and the fact that the US president had effectively kidnapped the leader of Venezuela. But that hasn't stopped Sir Keir Starmer from trying to get this narrative back into the news, talking about, as you said, Steve, the fact that he wants us to all feel better off this year than we did before.

2:03Steven Swinford: And the message really is that they've done all the hard stuff. They did all the hard stuff last year. You know, as part of their always their three point plan, this is now very much phase two, which is that all of the hard work is now going to pay off and everyone's going to feel better off. But, and there is a big but, it's going to be a really difficult narrative to land. There are all sorts of things coming down the tracks. We've already seen energy prices going up because the energy price cap has increased. Yes, only by 0.2%, but still it's going in the wrong direction. You're going to see in April those bills landing on people's mats, which is always a difficult month for everybody.

2:41Steven Swinford: You're going to see council tax going up. You're going to see the cost of spirits rising. You're going to see more people dragged into paying that high rate of tax. And I think overall, it's going to be very difficult, given the fact that there is still huge problems with food inflation, for example, when people are going into their supermarkets and seeing the cost of their everyday basket of shopping going up. I think it's going to be a really hard sell for him.

3:05Patrick Maguire: Well, yeah, exactly. As you said, Steve, just before Christmas, Morgan McSweeney, the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, I think it's one of those speeches that perhaps wasn't written to be leaked, but nobody was upset that it was leaked in full technical to me in the times just before Christmas. That's how he described it, moving from a year of promises to a year of proof. The problem is all the promises they have made on economic policy thus far have been ripped up, U-turned on, etc., etc. But the proof, as voters see it, of Labour's intent or record on the cost of living will be found by most people on their pay slips, in their tax bill.

3:46Patrick Maguire: You know, the stealth tax rates, fiscal drag, frozen income tax thresholds, that sort of thing. Plus, as Caroline says, inflation is stickier here than it is anywhere else in the G7. It's a really, really hard sell. and the Prime Minister, yes, is spending lots of time in and among real voters, getting out from behind the podium in the media suite at No. 9 Downing Street and going to a train station in Reading yesterday, for example, going to a nursery, trying to communicate intelligibly about his priorities. You know, you and I just before Christmas, Steve, had a long conversation with one of his closest allies who's working on all of this stuff, who was telling us about the importance of the government speaking in ways that voters recognise.

4:36Patrick Maguire: They're not talking about RPI inflation or inflation at all, stuff that voters don't really know what any of that means. They're talking about, OK, do people feel when we poll them and focus group them every week that if their boiler exploded tomorrow, they'd have enough money left at the end of the month to pay that bill and still enjoy the standard of living to which they're accustomed. All of that, though, the government is starting from a very, very weak position, both politically and economically, in trying to resolve that. So you wouldn't start from here, as the old Irish joke goes.

5:14Caroline Wheeler: Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, it's not necessarily the wrong strategy. If I'm sitting here, we have sat through so many different Labour strategies now under Starmer. This is the first time we've entered this new year. There is now one strategy to rule them all, not to quote Lord of the Rings, but cost of living is it. And they finally arrived at this point when that is what they are going to be talking about and predominantly focusing on. And if you talk to economists, there are green shoots. There are wages are going to be higher than inflation. Interest rates are coming down. There are signs that things could be getting better.

5:45Caroline Wheeler: So what they're trying to do is to get some of the credit for that. They've also done a big load of research in number 10, which suggests that they poll better among young families. there is a caveat to that. The families like the policies. They like, for example, the free childcare. They like the free school meals. But they're not clear that the government actually delivers those policies. They think, for example, they come from the school or the nursery. So you can see the logic of what they're trying to do to connect the dots. But at the end of the day, living standards are still forecast to stagnate, mostly because of that stealth tax rise.

6:18Caroline Wheeler: And if people do not feel better off, and all the polling we're seeing suggests that they don't, then that's a problem for them. They're not going to get the credit for it.

6:25Steven Swinford: It's quite incredible it's taken them this long to kind of hit upon this strategy because it was one of the reasons why, as I understand it, Darren Jones was put in that role because there had been a kind of acceptance that they hadn't put the cost of living, you know, hard enough into the heart of what they were doing. They weren't looking at policies through that lens. But also I think that as you in fact wrote, Patrick, I think they're trying to take a leaf out of the Australian book which was Anthony Albanese basically came from behind, like significantly behind in the polls, made cost of living absolutely his number one central focus and romped home.

7:02Steven Swinford: But it was a risky strategy there as well, wasn't it, Patrick?

7:05Patrick Maguire: Well, it was. It was. And also, you know, as you say, I wrote a column about this before Christmas. Bridget Phillips and the Education Secretary spent a week in Australia the week before Christmas. One, because Australia, it's interesting you mentioned childcare, Steve. Australian Labour introduced a similar child care subsidy policy that was a big vote winner for them in the last Australian election in May. And also because, as you say, they offer a template as to how to win with a sort of slightly low energy. Although I don't want to insult Anthony Albanese compared to Keir Starmer. It's all relative.

7:43Patrick Maguire: but you know a leader lots of people in sort of elite political circles would think was slightly underwhelming a bit of a dud never hugely personally popular you know it's no surprise uk labor people many of whom are very close to their australian labor counterparts look at that go to australia as the education secretary did before christmas and say well we can learn something from this but i was speaking to an albanese strategist and i was writing that column before Christmas and they were saying look great idea this is obviously what you need to do what was Labour's mandate UK Labour's mandate in 2024 why did the poll crossover happen or rather why in the wake of the mini budget did Labour's poll lead extend to 33 points at one point well it's because the cost of living was already an issue and the Tories made it much worse so Labour's mandate was basically, we don't like this, fix this.

8:42Patrick Maguire: I think it's as simple as that. Or people didn't like the Tories for that reason. But Albanese was only able to win in the way that he did because they had spent all of that time in government. And the Australian term is only three years long, by the way. They spent the entirety of that three-year term trying and sometimes failing, but they had delivered tangible progress on the cost of living and could thus go into an election seeking a mandate on that basis. The difficulty for Keir Star making this his big political mission for the new year, as he told the cabinet this morning, you know, it's their primary focus, their only focus is that the biggest decisions they've made thus far, particularly in the budget that's just gone, cut in the other direction.

9:29Patrick Maguire: You know, people's taxes are going up. Look at what's happening in the hospitality industry. Small businesses are going to the wall, particularly pubs and restaurants. So it's a more difficult sell, as ever, looking at a successful Labour Party somewhere else. It's all very well and good looking at them and saying that's the model, but you've also got to actually approach it with a degree of humility about your own decisions to date, your political context and whether the leader is capable of selling it. And I don't think any of those three metrics are particularly kind to Keir Starmer's Labour Party.

9:57Caroline Wheeler: It's also like a congested space, this. So it's not just Labour that's talking about the cost of living. reform wants to start talking about the cost of living much more. Nigel Farage is making it one of the three planks of his approach to local elections. You're going to hear him talking about cost of living, obviously migration and crime are the kind of big tramvure that he wants to sell in the run-up to it. And we're hearing in a couple of weeks' time, he's going to do a speech where he's going to make some tangible commitments on the cost of living, particularly around energy bills. We know that they want to scrap all the green levies to cut energy bills and also fuel duty because one of the things that's happening this year is that fuel duty the 5p cut comes to an end in september and so drivers are going to see costs go up at the pumps and you're also going to have kemi baden not trying to build on what she did after the budget pointing out you raise taxes you've hurt people you're being dishonest and hypocritical when you're talking about cutting the cost of living so that is a competitive and difficult environment to play in for stormer

10:55Patrick Maguire: yeah exactly and it's interesting the reformer leaning so hard into this i remember after Nigel Farage's speech on economics in November. I think there was a feeling in reform that, right, we've cleared the decks, we've got rid of our slightly nutty 2024 manifesto, and it's£80 billion worth of unfunded tax cuts. But what does that actually mean to voters? Well, it might mean that Westminster elites think we aren't completely reckless or cavalier or sort of listrust on steroids, But there was an awareness that Nigel Farage didn't yet have a big cost of living offer. He made cost of living in absence before, you know, the Britannia card, which was his scheme to charge non-dom taxpayers 250 grand a year to fund a£600 a month payment, I think it was, to the bottom 10 % of earners.

11:48Patrick Maguire: There's an awareness that they need to do more for the squeeze middle, for the working poor, all of which are sort of quite shrewdly chosen dividing lines. Look at their policy on the two-child cap as well. It's for British families in work. All of this will be about the working poor. It will be about tradesmen. It will be about people who get up in the morning and drive a van or car to work. So actually Nigel Farage there and reform strategists there are looking at it and saying, well, the prime minister wants to talk about trains. that's an offer to white collar professionals in the southeast of England and in London.

12:21Patrick Maguire: This is another example of Farage not only honing in on an issue, Keir Starmer is honing in on the cost of living in a fairly incohate way. This is Nigel Farage refining and laser targeting an electoral coalition that Labour was obsessed with before the last election, but is rapidly losing, indeed has lost, and going exactly where they're feeling the pain.

12:46Steven Swinford: The thing about reform, though, is that, again, they are going to have a little bit of a hard argument here because, actually, despite campaigning on the fact that they were not going to raise taxes, there are now a number of councils, reform-held councils, which are now raising council tax. And we're looking at the polling around reform, which seems to be plateauing. And I do wonder if they are going to have to kind of shift their narrative because we are now seeing not illegal migration, but legal migration falling dramatically, which is going to take out a sort of key plank of their argument away from them.

13:17Caroline Wheeler: That's one of the biggest stories this year, by the way. It's enormous. It is. It could be a net zero migration later this year. It's huge.

13:23Steven Swinford: Which is what, it's very much what the Labour Party wanted to do. They were talking about this, you know, when we were talking to people at the Labour Party conference, the big plan was to try and take migration, the kind of heat out of the migration argument. And I think that may take some of the wind out of the sails of a sort of resurgent Nigel Farage as we go into 2026, which is why maybe they're right to start picking on a different issue.

13:48Caroline Wheeler: Just to end this section on the cost of living, one of the things you look for as a journalist is little microcosms of the bigger picture. And today's cabinet was an absolutely amazing one. So Starmer did this big, big address on the cost of living and they briefed his remarks afterwards. Cabinet had to be cut short because he's going to Paris to talk about Ukraine. and actually the message was I remain focused on the cost of living effectively despite all of this international stuff I'm going to do and when we look at the year ahead we were talking about it earlier but the big thing this month is going to be a trip to Beijing at the end of the month you know Ukraine is going to dominate Venezuela is going to we'll come to this towards the end of the podcast but foreign affairs is absolutely massive and it does drown out a lot of the domestic messaging they want to do.

14:32Patrick Maguire: Yeah indeed and what do they call the prime minister in focus groups never hear Keir. You know, the Prime Minister always seems to be abroad. And obviously, it's churlish to some extent to complain about that right now, you know, when the world is teetering again on the brink of conflict or parts of the world have been plunged into conflict by a president Keir Starmer is desperate to show he has an in with. But it's something people in Number 10 have long worried about. You know, the Prime Minister often starts political arguments and then through a combination of accident and design is then unable to start prosecuting that argument.

15:08Patrick Maguire: Look what happened after the Labour conference. He started a massive argument with reform, saying they're racist, basically, saying that immigration policy was racist and then sort of nothing happened. This happens a lot. Keir Starmer makes a big, bold play for the domestic agenda and either doesn't follow it up or can't follow it up. And that's a problem for the Prime Minister, particularly if, by the way, this cost of living campaign is just him saying stuff they've already done. I think the test will be, do they have something else up their sleeves to say, here's a new offer on cost of living, here's a new policy on cost of living.

15:40Patrick Maguire: If they're just looking to communicate better, I would caution that putting all your stock in Keir Starmer connecting with the voters at this point is probably a bit of a Hail Mary.

15:52Steven Swinford: Especially as they seem to be doing exactly what West Streeting was complaining about them doing in that incredible New Statesman article before Christmas, where he effectively accused them of creating all these kind of listicles of things that they'd done, which actually didn't mean anything to people. And as one senior Labour minister said to me last week, the problem with all of that is you can dance around a reset as much as you want. You can talk about bringing new blood in, sacking a few people, doing all of those things. But ultimately, there are a few people, in fact, I would say the vast majority of Cabinet, that believe that there is a fundamental problem with this government, and that is the Prime minister.

16:27Caroline Wheeler: We should talk about that, the survival question, where are we after Christmas? Because often people go away at Christmas, they're quite jolly. People are pretty miserable out there. My colleague Aubrey picked this up from the Labour PLP WhatsApp group, where Starmer did this big 40-minute set-piece interview with Laura Koonsberg, and someone posted on the group, strong start to the year, excellent from the Prime Minister, and it was liked by five people. And there was a happy birthday message, which had more likes than that. Now, that is a particularly cruel example. But the mood out there is still not good.

17:00Caroline Wheeler: And I'm not saying that anything is going to happen before May, unless something unexpected happens. But people are kind of moving behind the scenes. And Wes Streeting, as you wrote this weekend, Caroline, is pretty pissed off still. That doesn't seem to have changed.

17:13Steven Swinford: It certainly doesn't seem to be changing. I mean, if you speak to Wes Streeting, he will say very clearly that he's getting on with the job in hand, that he has an important job as health secretary, that he's not seeking to destabilise the government and doesn't want Keir Starmer's job. But behind the scenes, certainly his allies are pretty clear that this is not working. This is not sustainable. And I think that there is a sense amongst his allies that he would do better if he moved quicker for a number of reasons, including the fact that Angela Rayner will have more time to come back. Andy Burnham could come back.

17:46Steven Swinford: There's been lots of suggestions that he's now identified a viable seat. However, there are still a lot of people that say the status quo is sort of underpriced. I think, again, Patrick, you wrote a bit about that in your column this last week. And one of the reasons, I mean, I sort of liken it a little bit to sort of New Year. You know, we all sit here and we talk about, I'm going to lose£10. I'm going to go for a run every day. I'm going to stop drinking. I'm going to do all these amazing things. But those things are quite difficult. And actually, the easiest thing to do, I certainly fine this is to snuggle up under your duvet and put your head under the pillow yeah i i so almost

18:20Patrick Maguire: as an intellectual challenge to myself as someone who's very down on the prime minister's chances of survival i was thinking what is the case for kia starmer staying or what's the scenario in which kia starmer stays and actually i was inspired to write it because i had seen uh saipan which is the new film about roy keane and mick mccarthy of 2002 world cup and their You'll see that coming. Football fans will know, and everybody will have seen this clip on Twitter. It's one of my favourite memes. It's, I think, the best meme of all time. But Mick McCarthy was manager of Blackpool in 2023. And a reporter says to him in a press conference, Mick, one win in 17 games.

18:58Patrick Maguire: It can't go on like this, can it? And Mick McCarthy sort of sighs wistfully, smiles inscrutably and says, it can, which is how I sort of look at the political situation. situation at the top of the Labour Party, you know, it shouldn't go on like this. It's not to say it will go on like this, but it could go on like this. It can go on like this because the first mover needs to move. You know, it's very, very finely poised. And while it was very easy to say, yeah, the challenge is lap bottle, the challenges are divided, all the arguments I was rehearsing in my column, I sort of finished that column saying, yeah, it can go on like this.

19:38Patrick Maguire: But, you You know, Mick McCarthy was not manager of Blackpool for very long after he said it can. So that's the problem.

19:46Steven Swinford: There is anything that could precipitate a conversation, which means that it becomes suddenly a very urgent thing to do. And I was actually talking to a cabinet minister about this only last week. You know, we didn't expect Boris Johnson to go over the Pinscher affair. You know, we'd all been speaking for months, as we often do, about the local elections being a catalyst for getting rid of a prime minister. You know, it was the same with Rishi Sunak. And that wasn't what brought him down. He did cling on. But with Boris Johnson using that as the example, you know, it was something entirely unexpected that then precipitated that rebellion.

20:20Patrick Maguire: I think a lot of Labour MPs have told themselves the status quo is under price, but we just don't know how they'll respond to the next disaster. And we always know that with this number 10 and with this prime minister and with this operation, there is always a disaster just around the corner.

20:32Caroline Wheeler: Let's head to the interval. And when we come back, we are going to be talking about the man that is dominating international and domestic politics, Donald Trump, and what he's doing next and how on earth Britain is going to react to that. It's also worth noting at this point that this podcast, The State of It, is up for People's Choice at the Political Podcast Awards. And you can vote online for that. Just Google it until January the 9th and all votes would be gratefully received. Welcome back to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. We are going to talk about that one man, Donald Trump, the man that Keir Starmer has invested so much of his premiership in trying to befriend, but who keeps dominating the agenda in a way that is almost inescapable.

21:20Caroline Wheeler: We've currently got the government hedging its position on Venezuela in one of the most bizarre contortions that I've seen, where they are saying we believe in international law, but we will not comment at any cost on whether capturing Maduro represented a breach of international law. And also they are trying to convince the US to do two things, don't invade Greenland and please give a security guarantee to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

21:46Steven Swinford: Well, it's an incredible tightrope that the Prime Minister and in fact all members of the cabinet are now currently having to walk because at all costs we cannot be seen to be offending Donald Trump because so much capital of this government has gone into the Trump whispering and the fact that, you know, out of all the European nations, you know, we seem to have one of the better relationships with Donald Trump and they really don't want to upset him. But at the same time, what we've seen in Venezuela is extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary to see a country, yes, admittedly, with a president who didn't win the election, but has now been replaced by his own vice president.

22:26Steven Swinford: But I think the thing that completely blows my mind is what happens next. You know, there's been a lot of talk about this Monroe doctrine, which I'm sure Patrick will talk about, being our sort of resident political geek, which I'm sure he won't mind me describing him as. But, you know, this reassertion of the United States in the Western Hemisphere and the fact that they, for whatever reason, want to exert this kind of dominance. They are tearing up the rules-based system, as we speak. And it seems now that Greenland is the next target on their list. And I know that there have been sources quoted as saying there's about a 30 % chance that he goes after Greenland.

23:06Steven Swinford: But it's not the first time he's talked about Greenland. He's saying fairly categorically, as he did with Venezuela, that he wants Greenland. It's going to be ours, he said. You know, there is a very good strategic reason why he wants Greenland. It is basically the thoroughfare for where Russian subs would have to pass if they were going to launch a strike. on the United States. And at the same time, we've got to keep the United States on board, because it looks like we're tiptoeing towards some sort of ceasefire in Ukraine, potentially. There was a call on Saturday, actually, which got largely overlooked between President Zelensky and the Prime Minister, where they talked about the necessity to have boots ready to go on the ground if there was a ceasefire agreed.

23:49Steven Swinford: And we're just, it's just this incredible balancing act going on. But at the end of the day, the only way that I can look at this right now is that Trump is trying to create a new world order. And Europe is very much not part of the picture.

24:05Patrick Maguire: Yeah. And it's also, this is a new kind of American government. Or rather, you know, look, the US governments have always taken unilateral action on foreign policy that sort of flies in the face of their stated commitments to whatever international philosophy or the rules based system. But I think this is a challenge, particularly for people like Jonathan Powell in Number 10, who have always had the philosophy of, OK, the way to deal with American governments is to exercise influence behind the scenes. Will the influence on the Americans behind the scenes, even if that exposes you politically, domestically, the rewards you get in terms of global security, reap their own dividends?

24:50Patrick Maguire: The issue with Donald Trump is that he's so capricious, he's so unpredictable. What he's doing is so unusual by the standards of recent history, recent sort of geopolitical, geostrategic history. and there is no pretense on Donald Trump's part that he is really interested in anything but US interests. You know, it is pure America first and it's not like Keir Starmer in the way that Tony Blair and Jonathan Powell could say we are engaged in some sort of shared global project or enterprise on security in terms of the war against terror. the problem is Keir Starmer looks like a supplicant or an irrelevance and that's not to say he's doing the wrong thing I thought it was telling that Wes Streeting who had every incentive to have a pop at Donald Trump in this of all weeks given everything we've been talking about Labour leadership declined to do that when he was on the media round on Tuesday morning but it's I think the whole thing just sort of basically exposes yes the UK will have influence some some influence a little bit of influence or at least have a line to to the White House but are they ever going to listen I mean I think the lesson of everything this White House is doing is probably not and where does that leave Keir Starmer how do you plan if you're Keir Starmer for the new world order Caroline was talking about for a new era of hemispheric regional power politics.

26:37Caroline Wheeler: What block are you going to align with? We should talk about the politics of it because Keir Starmer has invested so much in this relationship with Trump. And I think the question increasingly is going to become, where are the wins? Where are the gains? So there is a gain arguably on tariffs. We are placing tariffs, but they are less than the EU and elsewhere. So that is technically a win, but it's still higher prices for British goods being sent to the States. When Donald Trump came to the UK, there was all the kind of pomp and ceremony. We put on the red carpet for him and there was a promise of a tech deal, a massive£30 billion investment in the UK by US tech companies, tech prosperity deal.

27:16Caroline Wheeler: They always signed it. They signed the document. That document is now on ice because America is angry that we're not accepting US imports on agriculture. Number 10 insists it's live. Other people I'm talking to in government say it's dead and we're not going to be able to revive it so that doesn't seem to be gone and if we don't get what we're looking for in ukraine like you said patrick obviously the right strategy is to engage with the u.s that is clearly the correct approach you've got to do what you can to influence it but there is a risk here that he's put in a lot of his political capital into a relationship with donald trump which is not actually yielding tangible benefits for british voters beyond a kind of visit by a smiling Donald Trump to his golf courses in Scotland and the state visit and a couple of meetings in Washington.

28:03Caroline Wheeler: And that's the problem for him.

28:05Patrick Maguire: Yeah. And Trump is deeply, deeply unpopular in this country. I mean, Zapolansky, the leader of the Greens, regularly tweets the picture of Keir Starmer bending down to pick up Donald Trump's papers. You know, it is the sort of Charles Kennedy, George Galloway playbook from the 2005 election in the Iraq war period that sort of Britain is America's poodle. And regardless of the fairness of that comparison, that's a proven way for parties positioning to themselves with Labour's left, particularly on foreign policy, to make hay. And I think that's a real risk for Keir Starmer, particularly in London and in other major UK cities as we go into the local elections.

28:42Steven Swinford: And we know that Ed Davey thinks that. I mean, he will take every opportunity that he can to sort of capitalise on that and to talk about, you know, Starmer and his friend Donald Trump. But look, you know, the position here, okay, Venezuela, you know, you're seeing some rifts within the Labour Party open up, but largely on the kind of real left flank of the Labour Party, the likes of Richard Bergen and some of those that were formerly members of the Labour Party, like Zahra Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn calling out Sir Keir Starmer for, you know, effectively not calling Donald Trump out in terms of the breach of international law.

29:17Steven Swinford: But if it comes to Greenland, that's going to be an entirely different ballgame. I mean, that is going to be the moment, I think, where he is going to have to pick sides. There's no way that he can sit on the fence over that because, you know, it literally is a question of which block are you going to support? Are you going to throw your lot in with Europe? Or are you going to keep kowtowing to Donald Trump? And I think that that would be a maximum moment of peril for Sikir Star. We were talking before about leadership and whether something unexpected could happen. But that is the sort of thing that could unravel pretty quickly because, you know, it really is about a new world order and our place within it.

29:53Patrick Maguire: You can only sit on the fence for so long. And that is the ultimate challenge for Keir Starmer, choosing when to speak out. I mean, it's interesting. He already has spoken out on Greenland in the most straightforwardly, not quite condemnatory, but straightforwardly negative way about the Trump administration. And it's important for us all to remember, and I think in number 10, they'll remember, sort of the cynics in number 10, of which there are a few, will have this thought developing at the back of their minds, which is actually this level of, if we can play this right, global instability is good for our political position.

30:33Patrick Maguire: Now, it may sound absolutely crazy to imagine people thinking like that, but everybody in politics, things like that at one point. It's a sort of third order, fourth order question, given that we're talking about the future of the world and global security here. But there will be people around the Prime Minister who think, if the proposition is, do you want to get rid of Keir Starmer for West Streeting? And the brief is, take us through a world war. I don't think that's a leadership election anyone's going to win in a hurry.

31:03Caroline Wheeler: I think that brings us to the end of this week's episode of The State of It Gabriel Pogrand will be back next week In his absence, Patrick, could you possibly push the big, very important red button?

31:15Patrick Maguire: Of course, thanks as ever to our two brilliant producers Molly Guinness and Ewan Daughtry And that's the button, that's the button isn't it?