The tepid bath of managed decline

0:00It is obvious total bullshit. Nobody believes, could possibly believe, the number 10 version of events which they're trying to spit. She's just obviously completely unsuitable for any kind of serious job. She blames all the juniors for everything, she's massively fucking lazy, and if anyone puts in a serious job she'll obviously blow up. If you've got a rogue elephant then you don't let the rogue elephant just start trampling around and smashing everything up. The people in charge now say we can't even stop fucking dinghies on the channel. There's a certain Westminster type. Nigel Farage is not like that.

0:40He never has been. He is not a psychopathic, I must climb to the top of the greasy pole. Starmer is completely rubbish at politics, and he never had any kind of plan. Fundamental infrastructure for transferring the most sensitive data around the British state was compromised. Not just Boris, a few people in the room were looking around like this, like, am I somehow misunderstanding what he's saying? Because it sounds fucking crazy. Welcome to The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, the political editor at The Times. And with me is Caroline Wheeler, the political editor at The Sunday Times.

1:25Hello. Gabriel Pogran, the Whitehall editor at The Sunday Times. Hello. and Patrick Maguire, the chief political commentator at the Times. Hello. So what you just heard was a clip of Dominic Cummings from an interview that we did with him last week, in which he effectively laid waste to the entire British state on every level. And look, the Dominic Cummings thesis is this. It's very simple. He argues that there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, that the entire state is broken. And so look, coming up today, we've got two major scoops. The first concerns one of the most powerful men in government, and the second concerns what's going to be in the budget.

2:07So over to you, Gabriel, and over to you, Patrick, for the first kind of mega scoop of this show. Patrick and I, over the last few days, have spoken to a very senior Whitehall source, very senior political source, both of whom told us the same thing about the most senior official in the British state, the Cabinet Secretary, Chris Warmold. He was only appointed last December. But what we've heard on, I should stress, impeccable and unusual authority. These aren't people that unburden themselves very often, is that the prime minister's inner circle has absolutely lost confidence in the cabinet secretary.

2:43Those around Starmer, and that does not just mean Morgan McSweeney, his chief of staff. but from top to bottom there is growing consensus that war mold is the personification of everything which Cummings identifies as being wrong with the civil service and the personification of everything Labour needs to overcome in order to give effect to its stated pledges on the economy and migration. Now there's sort of delicious political dimension to this which is that Boris Johnson, while we're recording, is appearing before the COVID inquiry. We've been told that when, as anticipated, Chris Wormald's record comes under scrutiny by that inquiry, because to the uninitiated, before he served in this role, he ran the Department of Health and Social Care.

3:33When his record is subject to public scrutiny, number 10 intends to use that as a pretext to begin the conversation about replacing him. And what we've also learned is that there's another personality who has been driving this behind the scenes. And so I'm going to hand over to Patrick to talk about, one, who Warmold is, and two, who has been choreographing this plan to replace him. So he is the British establishment, no flesh. He was always a slightly curious choice for Keir Starmer's cabinet secretary. Because remember when he came in, he was talking about insurgent government. He gave that very strange speech where he said too many civil servants were comfortable sitting in the tepid bath of managed decline, which within two days he'd apologised for.

4:19But there was always this sense in Number 10 that the centre of government is too weak and they lack the levers to do so. I mean, when we were having a conversation with one of our sources this week, Gabriel, we asked, well, what is wrong with Chris Wormald? And they'd say they said to us, our source, that, you know, you'd say to Chris Wormald, you know, there's a really urgent thing we want to get done. can we do it? And Chris Wormald will say, yes, of course, you know, we can definitely do that. I'll go away and commission some work and you'll definitely have an answer for some point in the mid-2080s.

4:49You know, to some people around Keir Starmer, Chris Wormald is the embodiment of the blob, the Whitehall blob, as Dominic Cummings has said many times before. And it makes them feel weaker. Number 10 does not feel like it's driving the government agenda. So what's the solution? Well, over the summer, Keir Starmer spent a lot of time thinking about this question. How can I make myself more powerful? How can I retool the machinery of government to enhance the power of number 10? And who was at his side when he was doing that? It wasn't necessarily his close political aides. It was a woman called Baroness Casey, Dame Louise Casey, the career Whitehall troubleshooter.

5:29Whenever the government or any government of any colour has a problem that's too big. Louise Casey tends to come in, chair an inquiry, cut through the noise, you know, like a human whirlwind. She's very highly regarded by lots of people for that reason. Indeed, the government got her on board to help solve or at least give themselves an answer to the grooming gangs problem. Now, over the summer, there was a plan to create a permanent secretary for number 10, i.e. a civil servant with real clout responsible for running number 10 and giving it direction and oomph on Whitehall and Louise Casey was going to take that job but there was a plan to give her that job and by the time Keir Starmer sacked off his number 10 team and hired new people Louise Casey was nowhere to be seen but she is a non-executive director at the cabinet office in plain English she has a gig at the other most powerful department at the centre of government the cabinet office and is very much on the scene as somebody who people are looking to a sort of embodiment of Keir Starmer's authority.

6:30But it's clear that there is a desire on Keir Starmer's part and on the part of lots of people in government for clear leadership on Whitehall. And I think the first move, as we've picked up, will be getting rid of Chris Wormald. And whatever happens, I think Louise Casey will have a big say in deciding what exactly happens next. We should say as well that notwithstanding the non-executive bits of Casey's current brief, I mean, we're being told that she is increasingly issuing diktats, demands, instructions over email and in person as though she is Keir Starmer's representative on earth. And I think that the extent to which warm old is already being circumvented is only a sign of what, if you speak to a lot of people, and number 10 is increasingly an inevitability.

7:16inevitability and in a way there have been lots of phases lots of resets but I think that when this does happen I mean Starmer will in effect be acknowledging that these levers that he believed were at his disposal have not had their intended effect and I mean Cummings of course regards Keir Starmer himself as a laboratory growing example of the blob that of which he has such a trenchant critique and I anticipate that in some ways Steve I mean you were speaking to Cummings Starmer has a critique bearing more similarities to Cummings than one might presume. I mean the staggering thing for me about your scoop in that story is the questions it raises about Keir Starmer's judgment I mean he there were other options available there were much more radical figures and everyone was genuinely gobsmacked when he went for a career mandarin who has a lot of questions to answer about the handling of Department of Health, which he used to run during the pandemic.

8:16And Caroline, it's just worth reflecting, there were much more radical characters that he could have gone for. Well, nobody was talking about Chris Wormald when that job came up. I mean, his name was known to be in the frame. You know, he was considered to be the kind of almost like the establishment figure, if you had one in the kind of frame for that particular job. But there were some real kind of movers and shakers in there. Like, for example, Tamara Finkelstein was up there. Ollie Robbins, who we've talked about before, who's now the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, who is obviously, you know, intrinsic in some of those Brexit negotiations.

8:47There was Antonio Romeo, who is now the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office. And I'm told that at the time of the appointment, if we think about when that was, you know, we were just dealing with the fallout of the departure of Sue Gray at that point. There had been a lot of sort of scandal surrounding the government. There'd been a lot of missteps in those first few months. And I'm told that when Sakhir Starmer thought about who to appoint to that role, He wanted to go with somebody who didn't have a profile, somebody who wasn't going to be a story, somebody who we weren't going to be reading column inches about in the Sunday Times or the Times about various things that they'd been involved with.

9:23Now, that's not quite the case with Chris Wormald. But I think what I'm really intrigued about in terms of the scoop that you've come in with today is this is yet another person that Sir Keir Starmer is blaming for the failings of his government. I mean, there are a whole host of people now who have been tasked with really important jobs in the government. And we start with Sue Gray, who lasted a matter of months once they entered Downing Street before she was dispatched. It seems that once again, we have another name here in the mix of somebody who should be at the centre of policymaking decisions, the way that Whitehall works, who is being blamed for the failings of this government.

10:03And what do they say about people? bad workman blames his tools well to me this just smacks of another example of another lever that the prime minister thinks that he can pull to affect change without perhaps looking more deeply at himself and his own judgment when it comes to some of these failings that have happened during the course of his premiership yeah because the big question would be okay say you get rid of Chris Wormald, you have a permanent secretary for number 10 or a cabinet secretary, Kirsten picks his dream cabinet secretary and all of a sudden number 10 has all the power it wants.

10:40It's truly driving the agenda across government and Whitehall. What's it going to use it for? What is the change it's trying to affect across? And that's the big question we always come back to after these changes of personnel. Okay, you've changed that now, transfer deadline day has come and gone, but you still don't have a sort of football falling philosophy for government, to put it in terms, Keir Starmer might understand a bit better than our usual jargon on this podcast. And that's the problem. We've got a clip from Dominic Cummings of his views of Chris Wormald, which is probably quite interesting to listen to briefly.

11:12He sent a very, very, very strong signal by Poy B. Wormald that if you put in place the guy in charge of pandemic planning, and the Department of Health was a complete and utter shit show, and you put him in charge of the whole system, you're telling everyone performance is not relevant and we're going to defend the old system to the death. That's what that tells you. So that's the challenge you've articulated, that it is this gap again and again that we see between Sir Keir Starmer's rhetoric, which is all about being the guy that's going to change the nation, an insurgent in government, and really radical, and his actions, which are to come up with some very extensive plans, milestones metrics and appoint somebody who was seen as a bastion of the establishment in chris wormholes yeah that is the ultimate problem with this government you know it can't decide and you say you know we've used words like insurgency it's the insurgency in the tepid bath and all this language it's sort of they can't decide from week to week whether they want to smash up britain's institutions or save them and the appointment of chris wormhole to a government run by among other people people like morgan mc sweeney you know people who see themselves insurgency is the ultimate problem either you guys are want to grab the state by the scruff of the neck like you grab the Labour Party by the scruff of the neck or you're just going to be sort of incremental technocrats and that's the fundamental tension at the heart of Keir Stammer's Labour Party.

12:32Absolutely I mean one of the sources we were speaking to said something quite stark which was get together the 10 most influential people in this government ask them to write down the five things that they are there in order to achieve there would be no harmony between them and if you were to ask Keir Starmer for his position well that would be anybody's guess I think we've said on this podcast before that once upon a time when Blair was in number 10 you could sort of imagine what he might say in a meeting that's that's not been the case with Starmer and for that reason I think that replacing cabinet secretary only goes so far I think there's always this sort of ambivalence in Keir Starmer's mind as to where where he lies his conference speech reflected that lack of clarity the sort of part of it was racism bad cutting the halftime orange is good progressive patriotism nice and you know some of it was much bolder more blue laborish arguments about diversity and immigration yeah globalization is over etc etc globalization is over you know we've got the memo that new labor was a reflection of the politics at the time but Labour has to change.

13:37I think Starmer often you know regards politics as an exercise in technocracy and getting all the different parts of a system interacting in the correct way and there may be some course correction in replacing Wormald but the sort of underlying political dynamics are the same. But doesn't this speak to the fundamental point which I think is raised almost immediately by Dominic Cummings which is what is the plan? There wasn't one. You guys know that more than anybody actually when Labour came into government there was no plan I mean from what I've been told on many occasions there was basically a grid for two weeks of stories and a grid is is basically a kind of list of stories that that they're going to place into newspapers onto broadcast for two weeks which is going to talk to some of the kind of radical changes that they want to introduce but beyond a two-week sort of media plan there was nothing underneath it and I've certainly spoken to people that were in the transition team who basically said that transition team met only once or twice.

14:37And indeed, Sue Gray herself didn't go to any of those meetings either. So one of the underlining problems with all of this is that there wasn't a plan. We're going to segue now to talk about a different issue, but we're going to segue through the medium of Dominic Cummings. And look, this week, Dominic Cummings is actually on stage. On Thursday, he's at the O2, where he's appearing alongside an unusual assembly, which includes the world's greatest female poker player. It includes Katie Land, the up and coming Tory MP, and it includes Chris Curtis, who's a kind of young Labour MP who's very into growth.

15:11So he is engaged in politics and he'll be talking from a stage this week about the problems with Britain and how to solve them. And they are manifold in his view. So I want to just put listeners in the chair of a sitting in his house in North London. And we talked about the interview. It's going to be wide ranging. And it was he machine gunned literally everyone. I think by about 10 minutes in the entire British state was lying in a metaphorical wasteland around us. So Kemi Badenock, Keir Starmer condemned absolutely everyone and the way things are working and said you need something much more radical.

15:45He had some kind of words to say about Nigel Farage. He said that if he can build the right team around him, which is a big if, then maybe he could change things up and be more radical. And then at the end of it, and bearing in mind, I hadn't gone into this interview looking for news. We talked about it and it was going to be a kind of discursive thing, talking broadly about the British state. I asked him about China and he just suddenly sat there and said, well, you know what? On China, in 2020, there was a secret meeting in the bunker in number 10. That's where there can be no listening equipment.

16:16And I was there, he said, with the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. And I was told something quite extraordinary. I was told that there was a vast compromise of the secure systems that carry information around Whitehall and the wider government, and that huge quantities of classified material made their way into China. And the interview wrapped up a couple of minutes after that, and I walked down the street afterwards. And I was just thinking, that is extraordinary. I probably need to act on that. That is news. and so I rang up two people in quick succession I was walking down the street they confirmed it that there had been this massive breach gone completely unreported nobody knew about it it was literally a secret Cummings said it was a cover-up and we ran the story and we splashed it that day and then there was you know lots of other people splashed it too and the reason that it particularly was very striking is that we're now in this extraordinary position and Caroline I want to talk to you about this particularly, where everybody agrees that China is targeting Britain on a daily basis.

17:17There is massive espionage. It is obtaining huge tranches of data about the people that live in Britain. The head of MI5 says this, the government says this, and yet we still cannot describe it as a threat to national security, mostly because we want to do trade on it. And that is an extraordinary state of affairs, I think. Absolutely extraordinary. And I think, you know, that was borne out again. There's a system that we all adhere to, which is called a lobby system, which means that every day that Parliament is sitting, journalists like Steve, not so much us on the Sunday Times, because obviously Parliament's not sitting at the weekend, but Steve and his team will go and talk to the Prime Minister's spokesman about the most salient issues of the day.

17:56and yesterday the question of China once again came up and repeatedly pressed on this question about whether the Prime Minister would describe China as a threat they refused to do so. No they won't do it. Even though only you know days before the director of MI5 had said very clearly and starkly almost as a bit of a kind of punch in the nose to the Prime Minister that China was a threat talked about some of the kind of activities that they got up to was absolutely you know unequivocal in the language that he used about China and yet our government cannot use the same language but the fact of the matter is that the reason and I'm pretty confident of this now that the espionage case collapsed against the two Chinese spies is because the deputy national security advisor wouldn't describe China as a current threat in his statement to the CPS.

18:51So I should just say that Chris Cash and Christopher Berry deny all wrongdoing and have maintained their innocence throughout these proceedings. But I promise you I don't spend all my days off watching Parliament television. I do occasionally do some washing and occasionally go and buy some food for the children to eat. But I did again spend my afternoon screaming at the television as Dan Jarvis once again came to the House of Commons and was pushed repeatedly on this question, which was why the Deputy National Security Advisor, whose main job is to protect this country, to stand up against the threats that are posed to our national security, and he was asked repeatedly whether or not he had been able to describe in his evidence in that case China as a current threat.

19:38And he actually spent four minutes in one particular instance a question that was asked by Jeremy Wright, a former Attorney General, not answering that question. Given the revelations that even, you know, we have learned from the Cummings interview about something that happened historically, we still have a complete vacuum and ambivalence about what this government thinks about China. So we're going to come to the interval shortly. And after that, we're going to come back and talk about the budget. And we have a particular scoop for listeners on what is in it. So welcome back. Now, we are going to talk about what is probably going to be the biggest story in British politics.

20:13Well, it will be. Fact. It's run up to November the 26th. It's the budget and what's going to be in it. And Rachel Reeves is in a very, very difficult spot. She needs to find somewhere in the region of£25 billion and£30 billion, mostly from tax rises. And that is really, really challenging. In fact, the figures seem to be getting worse every day. and this is going to be a defining moment for this premiership. So what we can tell you today is one of the ways that she's going to try to raise that money. We are told that she is looking to essentially some of the wealthiest people in this country.

20:49She's going to lawyers. She's looking at lawyers. She's looking at GPs. She's looking at accountants and other people that work in the city who have partnerships. So look, I work for The Times. I work for a company and I'm paid by that company. There are things called limited liability partnerships, which are used by lawyers, particularly in magic circle firms, these are your megabucks ones. And by some weird anachronism of the tax system, they're not subject to employers' national insurance. So our companies are, our businesses are, but they're not. And they're also treated as self-employed people.

21:23And Rachel Reeves is looking at that, and I'm told her view is that it's fundamentally unfair. you have some of the richest people in the country that are paying less tax as a proportion of their income than other people and she wants to address that with a kind of national insurance tax rate on those very wealthy people but there is a problem for her if she does that it raises about two billion pounds there's a mansion tax which again is targeting the wealthy you'll note a current theme here she wants to go for the wealthy again that's raising in the low billions and the problem that they've got is at the heart of the manifesto was a promise not to raise the three big tax levers income tax vat or national insurance and the way these numbers are going the way it's adding up that looks inevitable at the moment and there is a big conversation that's happening about one thing on top of that which is income tax yeah we both picked this up steve so there is a discussion that's been happening for a long time you know it's happened at every fiscal event, basically, but it's now got a new urgency about that tax pledge.

22:28And they now have to break it, as you say, because not only do they need to make up the big black hole, they need to build up their headroom as well. So effectively, the black hole is even bigger. And something I know we've both picked up is how they might make a political argument for breaking that pledge. So they've already ruled out VAT because that's regressive, you know, cost of living crisis. That's the thing Labour hears in its focus groups all the time. That's what got the Tories out, more or less, and that's what got them in. They haven't addressed that. UK inflation is uncoupling from the rest of the G7.

23:03It's stubbornly high. So the last thing you want to do is, okay, we're putting VAT up and everybody's weekly shop is going to be more expensive, you know, so long and thanks for 100 years of Labour Party history, right? That would be this government completely finished national insurance for employees is a tax on workers right it's a specifically a tax on yeah it's a tax on jobs it's a tax you only pay if you're employed by somebody else income tax though you might pay that if you have a sufficiently big pension you pay that on all of your income regardless where it comes from you pay it on you know if you have rental income so and as i say this it feels slightly ridiculous it's probably the least worst political argument they could make if they want to make that tax pledge.

23:44Like we said we wouldn't raise tax on working people. I mean, I'm not entirely sure people will be listening, nodding along to this distinction, saying, you know what, you're right. Thank you for putting on my income tax. But everybody who earns enough money is going to pay more income tax. That is the sort of argument they've been thinking about or people around number 10 and number 11 have been thinking about if they absolutely have to break this pledge. But, you know, having just said it out loud, it's not a good argument. It's not an argument you'd want to make ever. It's an economist's argument.

24:13Just to kick out as a subject for debate, I move that this would be electoral suicide. Because for all the reasons you've outlined, Patrick, it hits every income group, whether you're a worker or a pensioner. And if they do it, which they may have to, bear in mind this is a serious discussion in government, it is the end of this administration as we see it. The backlash would be so significant, it would be irrecoverable. That starts at the 10, but please. I agree with you to a certain extent because I think it is electorally very difficult. But I think they are thinking about things that they can do that would be swift and easy and not complicated and not have kind of unintended consequences.

24:51And if you think about that, then doing something on income tax is kind of the easiest option. But look, do we actually think that Rachel Reeves could survive that herself? She has not only said at the last budget she wouldn't come back for any more. Well, it looks like she's going to have to. But this is a big, big, big pledge to break. and actually her entire reputation her commitments to what she said in the past are all very much bound up to this and so I think everybody in number 10 and Sir Keir Starmer himself will be thinking can he afford to lose his chancellor over this if she feels that she's been pushed into this and has to break something which actually it has become so sort of intertwined with her and her sort of fiscal policies that she actually has to go as a result of it yeah I mean I think I've been saying for a while that Reeves' line manager is not the prime minister, it's the bond market.

25:42So, you know, the notion that she could deviate so dramatically from her own stated fiscal tax policy and retain her credibility in the eyes of the markets and indeed the PLP is, it seems far-fetched. The other thing to say is that it would, I think, lead to a complete revision of how we understand the first year of this government, because if you look at all the things the government did hot on the heels of it the election victory you know winter fuel cuts they're going to come back on welfare reform all the language about 22 billion everybody knew at the time that there were these levers they could pull on a big three they said no we're gonna have to make tough politically difficult and sort of emotionally difficult pitches to our electorate on the basis that we have to because we've boxed ourselves in whether it's inheritance tax on farmers whether it's slashing the existing welfare settlement the essential position has been sorry but we have to and what would raising income tax amount to your will it would amount to admission that no in actual fact we don't have to so i think it would just essentially pose quite a complicated question of starmer and reeves which is how now do you justify the trajectory of the first year and a half of the government well it's interesting your point about the markets interesting i was having this conversation with somebody recently who said actually you would expect Reeves ripping up a manifesto would cause her problems but actually the markets now look at the the tax lock and are increasingly saying you know traders increasingly say this is mental like why are you doing this it's making your fiscal situation much better so perversely actually breaking that pledge committing electoral suicide doing the George H.W.

27:22Bush read my lips no new taxes then imposing new taxes and a bit like George H.W. Bush you know not really Rachel Reeves' fault exclusively, although actually probably more to a greater extent than Bush having them foisted on him by a democratic Congress. You know, she might shore herself up with the bond markets, building up the headroom, but, you know, imposing taxes you promised the public in an election you weren't going to raise would be really damaging. For that reason, I could understand why there is so much squeamishness in the Treasury about not doing this and that they're only now sort of staring down the barrel of it saying we might have to because breaking that manifesto pledge is probably really bad for trust in this government in particular, not that there's that much left to squander.

28:04Can we talk about the leadership contest that Keir Starmer didn't want to have, that not many people in Westminster care about? It does connect directly to what we've just been talking about. We are talking about the deputy leadership contest. So on Saturday, in probably a well-lit but windowless room somewhere in Labour HQ, there will be a live stream of the results of the Labour deputy leadership contest, and we are expecting Lucy Powell to emerge victorious. And the Labour Party is doing this without any fanfare. But it is a moment and it is significant and it does matter because Lucy Powell, if as expected, does win it.

28:38It's not Keir Starmer's biggest fan. I'm putting that gently. She really does not like him after he sacks her. But also she can cause a lot of problems. This position is really important. And when it comes to the budget, when it comes to decisions like tax rises, she can make a lot of noise and she has an electoral mandate effectively to do that because it is an elected position within the Labour Party and I put it that that is a big problem for Keir Starmer. Well Steve it isn't it isn't important the deputy leadership because it actually doesn't doesn't have like a specified set of responsibilities you know I think Tom Watson who was famously the incumbent under Jeremy Corbyn said it offered its holder theatre without remit which is basically a fancy way of saying you can cause all the trouble you like and you don't have any responsibilities obviously she gets a seat on Labour's all-powerful national executive committee yeah yeah exactly exactly what was it Stanley Baldwin said the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages not casting any aspersions on Tom Watson there or any or any subsequent deputy leader of the Labour party but um yeah the problem for Keir Starmer is Lucy Powell as you say precisely that will have a mandate will has a big bed of support in the commons i think when they sat lucy powell as leader of the house of commons they underrated her abilities as an organizer and i think frankly her appetite for you know revenge is that i don't think it's putting it too strongly she thinks the government is making the wrong decisions on a range of issues and they're ignoring mps and she will now be able to go on tv speak to mps and be an alternative figure of authority within the government.

30:13And it's almost brilliant for her because she's not in the cabinet. So we've had previous deputy leaders that have been in the cabinet, which means to a certain extent, they are bound by collective responsibility. So they're not allowed to say things which are unhelpful or to speak against government policy, for example, or to talk about particular areas that they are responsible for. She's going to have absolute free reign to say whatever she likes, which means cue lots of stories in our papers, which talk about a divide between the leader and the deputy leader over a plethora of different things.

30:44So it is going to give her a voice and a platform that I think Sir Keir Starmer would not have welcomed at this point, particularly when things aren't going totally brilliantly with his premiership. And I think that he will be slightly anxious about that. But look, I mean, I can tell you that Lucy Powell has told me that she has already had an olive branch moment with Sir Keir Starmer. They've had a conversation about how they can make this work. I'm not as confident as she is that that will indeed work and I would love to have been a fly I think on the wall of that particular conversation because it would have been the second conversation they had after he unceremoniously sacked her from her position as leader of the commons in a reshuffle which now basically looks like it was entirely done to sack her if you think about the fact that other people just moved around she was the only person that was actually physically removed from the cabinet.

31:34When Labour was in opposition there was always this aphorism to describe where they were in relation to power which was the more frequent the words national executive committee were mentioned in print the further away labor was from government and we need not get into the sort of criminology of the labor party but what this will do is institutionalize conflict it will institutionalize discussions about the deputy leadership we'll be talking about the position we'll be talking about conflict within the labor party and also you know reyner and starmer was always an awkward marriage and neither of them would claim that they were personally close but they made it work and reyner ended up playing this vital role when it came to gaza when it came to winterfuel and much else which welfare welfare you know she was a short steward of the parliamentary she was the heineken deputy she reached the places where kia starmer didn't basically didn't or couldn't by the end of his own relationships or lack thereof And the notion now that that role will fall to somebody who is demonstrably pissed off at Starmer and who holds no candle for him, having been, as you said, Caroline, the only person defence rated in the most recent reshuffle is a dynamic that this government could do well without.

32:45Wow. And Bridget Philipson has been saying all this. And unfortunately for her, you know, it's been very easy for Lucy Powell to dismiss it. When you make arguments about another candidate being divisive or disruptive from position of weakness, as Bridget Philipson is unfortunately doing, it can taste a little bit of sour grapes. But, you know, we were having a conversation yesterday, Gabriel, where a friend of Bridget Philipson's, colleagues of Bridget Philipson's rather ruefully said to us they sort of feel bad for having encouraged her to do it, given how the race has gone. but they said you know what I think she is right and she will be vindicated by exactly what you've just said about how this Lucy Powell thing is likely to go you know she will be the Rishi Sunak of the Labour Party you know in two or three years she'll be able to say I warned you I told you and none of you listened let's see but also by the way it's entirely possible that we're massively overstating this Keir Starmer is the Prime Minister yes Lucy Powell is not entirely on board does she necessarily want to blow up the entire government i mean discuss uh there are certainly some people in number 10 who probably unfairly inaccurately accuse her of trying to do so on a weekly basis yes she'll be an irritant for keir starmer but does she want to and does she have the power to you know throw a grenade under the whole government i don't know but let's see that's the counterfactual worth entertaining i think that brings our latest episode to a close so we'll be back next week for more discussions no doubt about the impending budget, the aftermath of the deputy leadership contest and much much more so thank you very much for listening.

34:14And just to say a huge thank you to our producers that's Molly Guinness and Ewan Daughtry. Many thanks.