You can't vibe-code your way to growth

0:00Keir Starmer lost the dressing room and Andy's biggest risk is he loses the dealing room and that's an even more painful way to go as Liz Trust would tell you.

0:12Welcome to the latest episode of The State of It, the political podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times. I'm Stephen Swinford, the political editor of The Times. I'm Ben Reilly-Smith, the political editor of The Sunday Times. And I'm Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for The Times. And look, this week we're going to bring you a quite significant scoop of a major intervention ahead of the budget. It's a very heavy criticism of the Prime Minister's broad economic strategy from one of his closest allies. So we'll bring you that. Patrick is going to talk to you about what it's like to kind of sit with John Healy and where John Healy is trying to sell this budget.

0:46And then Ben is going to give you an insight into a massive scoop that he's got planned for the Sunday Times this weekend. But before we come to any of that, we have some housekeeping for this podcast. we are delighted to say that Patrick Maguire, the great Patrick Maguire, has been named as Political Journalist of the Year at the London Press Awards. I don't do it for awards. I do it for the listener and the viewer. But it's an honour. It's an honour. And as Steven Gerrard said, after Liverpool beat Man City 3-2, this is gone. This is gone. We go again. And that's how I feel. And I hope to be more successful than Steven Gerrard was in the weeks following that stirring monologue.

1:27Right, with that start, we bring you a scoop. We have an interview with a guy called Andy Haldane, who is a former chief economist at the Bank of England and a very close ally of Andy Burnham. So much so, he tried to bring him into number 10 and failed. And it is fair to say that this interview in Forest Times, Andy Haldane is worried. And he lords Andy Burnham with praise on one level. He says he could be a great prime minister. He says he could serve two terms. But by the same token, he says that the prime minister and his government more broadly have a blind spot on the economy. And what does he mean by that?

2:03He's basically saying that this is the moment to take the knife to public spending, to cut public spending significantly. and that if he doesn't do that, there is a risk that the bond markets next year will turn on the government, that we will end up in what he describes as a Liz Trust-style crisis that will, open quotes, crater the economy and therefore crater the public opinion and support of the government. So he is sounding a very loud warning that if you make this a manana budget, as he calls it, deferring all the big decisions on public spending to next year it's not going to get better by then actually everything on the horizon suggests that next year is going to be a full-blown cost of living crisis increasing prices in shops increasing prices at the pumps increasing interest rates a bonfire night rise in interest rates to come you name it across the board things are looking very difficult and i think his point is that this will become unsustainable and at some point his hand could be forced and the markets could make him take action.

3:11And that will fatally undermine him, is the suggestion. And there is a quote where he says that, Andy Burnham, you can't vibe code your way to growth. You have to actually enact some policies to cut the size of the state and cut taxes. So that from someone who is very close to Andy Burnham, I think is a potential problem for the prime minister and is bound to ruffle some feathers. Now, Patrick, you've actually spent time with the Chancellor this week and you had a great interview with him earlier this week, which actually meant you missed the awards ceremony at which you received your award because you were in the plane with the Chancellor.

3:49But can you tell us, you know, what is the John Healy riposte to these accusations that they're basically not brave enough and they're not taking advantage of the moment to cut public spending? Well, that was the real prize, Steve, I received on Wednesday, getting up at quarter to five in the morning to fly to Aberdeen with John Healy. So I wasn't too bothered about the lunch, not least because I got to watch the Chancellor stop at a Gregg's and smother a sausage roll with the bottle of HP sauce he keeps in his briefcase. But anyway... Hang on, slow down here. He keeps a bottle of H... Just explain what you witnessed.

4:25You went into a Gregg's. It wasn't a crime, Steve. It's one of the most nuts things, right? In the briefcase, I presume, is the budget. In the briefcase, a lot of sensitive stuff. But there is also a bottle of HP sauce. And it's not even in a plastic bag. It's just loose, rattling around. Is that right? So I should clarify, and I needed to clarify this myself. It's not in the ministerial red box. So government papers are safe. But in his separate briefcase that he carries with him everywhere, and I do mean everywhere. This was the case when he was defence secretary as well. There is a bottle of HP sauce because it's his favourite condiment and he absolutely can't bear to be without it anywhere he goes, which is not entirely irrelevant to Andy Haldane's point, because Andy Haldane thinks this government is, to quote one of his previous colourful criticisms of this government, he thinks this is basically a 1970s style tax and spend socialist government.

5:22And who else loved HB's sauce, Steve? Harold Wilson. So there you go. The symbolism is a little bit on the nose. Exactly. Exactly. You know, it's like it's like watching Maradona here. You know, you can you can give give me the ball anywhere and I'll get it back to where you need it. But anyway, the point about Andy Haldane is, look, this is a government that I think is quite sensitive to criticism, particularly from people it thinks it ought to be his friends. And I actually asked John Healy about Andy Haldane when we were travelling back from Aberdeen, because this isn't his first rodeo. You know, earlier in the week, he was talking basically about how Labour's plan was for an expansive state.

6:04I have to say, in your interview, Steve, it sounds like he's put it stronger than he ever has before. So I specifically asked John Healy, I said, you know, what do you say to critics like Andy Haldane, who say, all you understand is how to tax, how to spend. This is an unreconstructed Labour government with no new ideas. And he fixed me, the Chancellor, with a very steely glare and said, I say to Andy Haldane, talk to me next Thursday. Now, what does he intend to have done on the Wednesday that dispels that criticism? The other message he was very keen to get across to me was that he wanted to be a chancellor for, in his words, bloody-minded entrepreneurs.

6:47He is well aware that the criticism from business and people like Andy Haldane is exactly the one Andy Haldane has been advancing, i.e. lumping tax obligations and bigger tax burdens on the private sector, not understanding the private sector's role in generating growth, overtaxing the economy, and just growing the size of the state exponentially with no heed for how effective it is. John Healy was talking about how he recognised, and this was an implicit criticism of his predecessors as much as he was careful not to name them or say it was their fault necessarily. He said they had little option because of what the Tories had done to the economy.

7:25He said, I get it. Businesses tell me all the time, employment rights law, tax, regulation, even stuff that you think were flagship labour policy. We had a long discussion about how difficult it is to manage the trade-off between a rising minimum wage, particularly for young workers, which we hear a lot about, and the levels of employment. He was saying that that was a big consideration for the Labour government, and they ended up disappointing the trade unions in the 90s because they set their minimum wage a little bit lower than they otherwise might have done because they were conscious of the impact on employers.

7:59So John Healy is very keen for this budget to be seen as a package that recognises where the last government went wrong, particularly on tax and particularly on business. But of course, the other difficulty is, and this is where Andy Haldane's criticism is more awkward and precarious for both Number 10 and the Treasury. It is absolutely true that Andy Burnham believes public control, a bigger state, a stronger state. And this is what John Healy was talking to me about when he was talking about his admiration for Anthony Crosland in the 1970s, who had been a great Labour revisionist in the 50s and came to the view in the 70s that actually a strong strategic state that did nationalise key sectors of the economy was required to balance and make space for a dynamic private sector.

8:50So they can hardly say to Andy Haldane, well, listen, we're not a big state government because they manifestly are. They're a business friendly socialist government. And this criticism is quite hard to balance, particularly in one fiscal event. And the Manana budget criticism, which the Treasury are most sensitive to, that's the thing that gets you the sharpest rebuttal and briefing in response. John Healy himself said to me, I'm trying to make people understand this budget is part of a process. You know, we've had announcements from the prime minister in his first week of office over the course of the past few months.

9:30Now we've got the budget and in the coming weeks we'll have the prime minister's 10 year plan. So that's his preemptive response to the idea that this budget is less ambitious and broad ranging than it might have been. but even that sort of implicitly recognises that it is not the main event of this government's economic strategy and economic messaging. That is clearly going to come from the Prime Minister himself. So in several respects, it's an awkward criticism, it's an annoying criticism, because as much as they do have a story to tell on business, the other parts of it on the state and the idea that the sort of prominence and size of this fiscal event are actually quite hard for the government to rebut with their chests, because there's a grain of truth in it, even if Andy Haldane expressed it very unsympathetically.

10:15Then can we talk about what is in this budget? Because for all of the claims of like military grade level secrecy around the budget of different sales, they're very proud of that. But actually, from what I can see, most of the budget has leaked, as it often does ahead of the fiscal event. We know the main revenue raisers, we know the cost of living package. Can you just walk through what our understanding broadly is of the budget, and therefore how it is not as big as your Rachel Reeves big whale budgets that she did. I'm so pleased they have the military-grade protections so that the red tape cost of living moves that were announced for a couple of hundred million were protected before they moved markets.

10:54I think over the weeks you're beginning to get a sense of where we're ending up. The backdrop, we all know the public finances are getting worse, not better. That means John Healy has less fiscal headroom to play with rather than more. He seems to have taken a decision that he doesn't need to rebuild all of the 24 billion that he was left to by Rachel Reeves, maybe it'd be more around 15 billion. What that broadly means is he needs to raise a bit of money to spend a bit of money rather than having loads of money that he can spend on, say, tax cuts. And then you're beginning to see these three or four areas where they're willing to spend some money.

11:28Business costs, clearly one of them, as the Chancellor was talking to Patrick about. Energy costs is another. The exact shape of that is to be determined. And whether it's, yeah, I think most likely it's largely something targeted at those at the poorer end of the socioeconomic scale, possibly through the warm homes discounts. But basically trying to protect people a bit from the big rise in energy costs that's coming in January. We'll get something on fuel, as we reported a couple of weeks ago. You know, fuel duty is set to increase in January by about 6p rather than decrease at a time when petrol costs have been soaring away.

12:02So expecting that to be delayed. Might they go a bit further than that? Let's see. And then on this whole area of NEATS, those million young adults, not in employment, education or training, a package of moves is being worked up there. The thing that's going to run through it all is devolution, which is Andy Burnham's kind of announced mission for the premiership, pushing power out of Whitehall to regional mayors, to the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland. And some of that will be fiscal, which means some of the money that those errors raise in tax, they'll be able to keep rather than handing it over to Treasury.

12:40So they can both determine what to spend it on, but also raise borrowing on the back of. So that's broadly the kind of positive side of it. And then there's the question about where you're going to raise the money for that and some of the measures that Andy Burnham announced in the summer. We know, as you've reported, Steve, he's not going to increase capital gains tax. so there won't be a new raid on wealth in that form. We know ultimately they haven't decided to, we understand, drop the threshold for the mansion taxes coming from 2 million to 1.5 million. What it does seem very likely, and there's been no attempt from the Treasury to push this back, is that the banks are going to get raided in some form.

13:18Their profits have gone up a lot because the interest rate jumping up means, I was trying to understand this as an economic layman. I said to somebody, why does it mean interest rates go up and the banks get more money. And they said, well, look, they whack it up and they loan out the money to the interest rate. But when it comes to the savings for your cash pot, they're not going all the way up to where the interest rate is. So with their savings, they're not matching interest rates with their loans they are. So they get lots more money in. And actually, you've seen some banking bosses like the Barclays bosses kind of cautiously saying, look, we do know we're going to get hit, but not going fully at John Healy.

13:53So thus far, they seem to have done quite a good job in diluting the political backlash from that. Let's see how that plays out on Wednesday. But yeah, it does mean when you stand back, you think, hang on, this is the prime minister who came in who said, I'm the biggest change in politics for 40 years. We took a wrong term in the 1980s and I'm going to make it right. And then you look at the scale of these changes that are coming and it feels like there's a mismatch. I mean, my take on those two big interventions with Haldane and Healy that you guys got firsthand, but A, re-Haldane, if you've got friends like these, who needs enemies?

14:27I mean, he's endlessly going out in the most harsh zones to take swipes at Burnham. So I'd love to understand a bit more what is motivating him. But also just to step back, it's this clash between political strategy and economic strategy that you're seeing the friction between those two things. Because Haldane's big argument, essentially a macroeconomic one, I think spending is too high. I think the tax burden is too high. You need to cut spending and therefore cut the tax burden and free up the economy a bit. which is all sounds well and good imagine Andy Burnham and Healy announcing tens of billions of pounds of spending cuts to the PLP in their first budget that's very hard.

15:05The political strategy driven by the centre in Downing Street seems to be we're on a roll here, it's been three months, we've got an uptick in the polls, people seem to have warmed to Andy Burnham, let's not use this first budget to smash that optimism with a sledgehammer like Keir Starmer and Rachel Rees did in their first budget when they jacked up tax by 40 billion. Let's just get through it without a huge increase in tax and make sure it's kind of two thumbs up still from the public. The tension is whether that's good economics, even if it's good politics. Yeah. And the question is whether they fall awkwardly between those two stools.

15:40So obviously you have the Chancellor saying, you know, let it, not quite let it rip, but he's doing that very pro-business messaging to me. I mean, one of the more interesting budget stories we've had in the Times and Sunday Times over the past couple of weeks was by our colleague Ollie Wright on how John Healy and Andy Burnham had written to Yvette Cooper saying you can't have any additional money for the NHS because the NHS, as you'd expect, with rising fuel costs and rising energy costs, facing a lot of inflationary pressures, you've got nurses and obviously Andy Haldane was talking about public sector, has spoken about the ever rising public sector pay demands, hence his need for cuts.

16:22Nurses want the same package as the doctors got when they signed a deal for their pay. So there's a threat of a nurse's strike. So I bet Cuba's going to have to find the money for that. So she went to number 10 and said, hello, just to let you know, we might need some more money, lots of inflation pressures, and you guys definitely want to avoid a strike, which number 10 and the Treasury absolutely do. And from then the answer came, No, you're going to have to find it within existing budgets to the extent that you have NHS Trust now looking at their budgets and saying, well, what are we going to cut?

16:56Because we're working on the assumption that there is no more money. And that is something if you speak, you know, that's filtering through to Labour MPs who think, hmm, if they hold firm to that line, right, if they're trying to find money for defence, If, as Emma Reynolds, the chief secretary of the Treasury told us earlier in the week, you know, the message to departments is, sorry, you know, the Treasury is not a cash point. You're going to have to deal with it for now. The problem is maybe hidden somewhere in this budget with that spending restraint, which is obviously intended to show the bond markets and people like Andy Haldane.

17:32No, no, no. We have a grip on this stuff. if you have hospitals cutting budgets, etc. That is what makes some Labour MPs worry that maybe somewhere in this budget is hidden a winter fuel style debacle that we haven't yet twigged. Let's see, and let's see if they do hold firm on no extra money for the NHS, which would be a very, very bold move for a Chancellor. But that's the danger, right? If you're trying to keep a lid on spending domestically to send signals and also to keep things under control, there is every potential that you could cause, you could throw something up unpredictably that is kryptonite for the Labour Party and the average Labour MP.

18:13Just to pick that up, I mean, it would be fascinating if they decided to announce increased health spending at a time when the right is absolutely hammering them for not announcing increase in defence spending. Because right now, the public decision from the treasuries look spending we get it but we're going to deal with that next year in a spending review i mean if you suddenly start making chunky spend departmental spending announcements this budget and certainly on defense people are going to be saying well hang on isn't it more pressing that we counter the threat to russia it'd be interesting if that happens i wanted to give listeners and viewers an insight into what it is like to report on the budget so you get healy is about to meet the obr john healy meet obr obr meet john healy you get healy's statement in the chamber when he speaks at length about all his measures.

18:58And that's all the government's spin, is how it wants the budget to be interpreted. So he'll say, this is a business-friendly budget. It's backing family businesses. We know the kind of broad narrative pitch he wants to do, which you're very eloquently with Patrick. So that's fine. Then as he finishes speaking, we all gather just outside the main press gallery, the bit where we can stand and watch the Commons. And there's room outside there with a table in the middle of it. and the number 11 spinners, the Treasury spinners, gather there and tell us what the budget means. And loads of people fire questions.

19:30But that is also the moment that you get the OBR document in hard copy. So you get this surreal thing. You get all the spinners trying to give their version of events. And we are all frantically reading this OBR document. And the reason we're reading that and the reason it has such significance is because it is an unvarnished version of where they think the economy is going to go. And I can already tell you it is going to show that taxes are rising to record levels probably. Again, it shows that every time. It's going to be talking about living standards falling. It's going to be talking about the impact of the Iran war.

20:05And invariably, that document is where all the actual stories are. because actually most budgets, even mega budgets, are kind of as nothing to the broader scale of the economy and the direction of travel and global events. And those global events and the impact of those events on the economy are spelt out in black and white on the scorecard, which is over five years in its Office for Budget Responsibility document. And that has been one of the biggest changes in politics since I've started reporting on it. that you went from the kind of Gordon Brown era where the Chancellor was all-powerful, banging the dispatch box, and that was the central event, to the central event being owned by a tiny organisation that sits on the 13th floor of the Ministry of Justice building over in something called Petit France, just down the road.

20:57And that is how budgets are judged. And I can tell you that has driven successive chancellors completely nuts. Ritchie Sunak hated it. Rachel Reeves hated it. I am sure John Healy will hate it, but it is unavoidable because it's the bigger picture, basically the macro picture. Steve, I told you about the time I literally went to that 13th floor at the OBR. The best thing about it is they literally looked down on the Treasury. When it was created by George Osborne, economic watchdog, it used to be just a couple of rooms in the Treasury and now befitting their rise in clout and significance. They've been lofted above the Treasury and they look down over their noses at the Chancellor.

21:40I think there is a kind of boring technical reason about why the OBL has suddenly become more influential. And you don't want to keep banging on about it, but it all comes back to headroom. When you had a big gap between the fiscal rules that a Chancellor met and how comfortably they were achieving them of 20, 30, 40 billion pounds, it didn't matter that much if the forecast moved around a bit because fundamentally you were still hitting your fiscal rules and so there wasn't this obsession about whether they were being broken. Under the Tories especially under Jeremy Hunt who to be fair was cleaning up the mess of this trust's mini budget it got down really small and Labour has not been able to build up the headroom that much so for the last three four five years you get this endless kind of thumbs up, thumbs down, are they going to hit their self-declared fiscal rules that has kind of increased them in importance.

22:31And it's fascinating now in the latter Tory years that we all covered, ending in 2024, it was the right that was moaning about the OBR and Labour actually championed, held up the OBR as... Well, made it more powerful after Trustgate. The first piece of legislation was protecting the OBR even more. And in two years, what they found out it's a bit of a nightmare to have somebody who's marking your own homework and shapes the whole media coverage to these fiscal events. So much so that for those in the bubble, Ben Nunn, who was the chief of staff to Rachel Reeves, has now gone public in recent weeks bemoaning how the OBR would set the media narrative after her budges.

23:11So it's not just the right now, it's the left that are getting these tensions. But defenders of the OBR would say, don't blame us. You guys give us way more headroom and we'll become irrelevant again. There is one potential silver lining, isn't there, Steve? There is some suggestion that I think you picked up that the OBR could take a kind of view on welfare spending and where it's likely to be at the end of this parliament than it otherwise might have done. And that would be quite a significant prize if the OBR said, if they introduce Alan Milburn's reforms, welfare spending might have been here really high and it might just be moderately high.

23:49Yeah. And then the other upside is that obviously all of these increasing prices mean that they're going to be increasing tax take. So they're going to get a lot more tax revenue. There are some upsides. I just thought that while we're here, I should quote a little bit of Andy Haldane just to read it out to you. When Andy Burnham said that Britain is in hock to the bond markets and the government is in hock to the bond markets, he was right. We are. And the point is, we need to get it's not good to be in hock to things. We need to get out of that position. And then he said this. The biggest risk to Andy not transforming Britain, to not serving two terms, to not being seen in the history books as a great prime minister is not political risk.

24:27It is not those who sit behind him. It's probably not even those who sit opposite him in Westminster. Keir Starmer lost the dressing room. Andy's biggest risk is he loses the dealing room. And that's an even more painful way to go, as Liz Trust would tell you. And there you go again is the bond markets. The markets are all powerful. And that is the other audience for this budget. So there is going to be an audience of Labour MPs who are going to be delighted with everything John Healy does. There is going to be the OBR setting out his fiscal view. And then there is the bond markets and how they react.

25:00And all of those come into play in different ways on a budget day, which is always full of psychodrama. So look, we're going to head to the interval briefly now. And when we come back, Ben is going to give us an insight into his mega scoop that he's running this weekend for the Sunday Times, which is all about Andy Burnham.

25:22Welcome back to The State of It, the political podcast from the Times and the Sunday Times. Right, Ben, I think it's time to get some of your stuff interview, which is very unusual for a Sunday political editor. but you have been spending a lot of time with Andy Burnham ahead of his 100 days in power. I know you're limited in what you can tell us about what he said but just to give us a flavour of what you've been doing and a flavour of Andy Burnham, you spent many hours with him. It all goes back to the summer really. When he was running to become an MP in a make-a-feel by-election it was becoming pretty clear as you were both documenting at the time that if he won he was going to become Labour leader and therefore Prime Minister because it would have reinforced this...

26:02argument that he could crush reform and he could lead the party back in the opinion polls and thus it happened but there's a curiosity about his premiership that he's been around politics for a long time he first became mp 25 years ago in david cameron's intake and yet because he's been away from westminster for the best part of the decade i think actually the public don't know or understand a lot about him his whole public image his project what he wants to achieve is pretty blurry or certainly was in the summer. So we approached his team and said, look, we'd love to have a series of interviews with him throughout his first hundred days to get him to talk about what's motivating him, what he wants to do with power, how he wants to shape the country to help readers and ultimately citizens and voters in the country to know more what their prime minister is doing.

26:51Delighted to say he said yes. And we had four different conversations through those days. and we're going to be publishing everything we talked about in the Sunday Times. So please do buy a copy or make sure you're subscribed online to get it when it drops there on Saturday evening. I mean, one thing that always just comes across to me is his openness and willing to engage with questions directly, which is quite different to a lot of politicians. I will say one thing that he said, which was, and he's hinted at this before publicly, He was deeply burned by the 2015 Labour leadership race. He ran twice.

27:282010, he was an outsider. 2015, he was the favourite. And he felt he was contorted. He called it the David Meliband curse from 2010. He was contorted by indecision, cautiousness, and felt that he listened to advisors and outside influences too much. He didn't stick to his gut. Ultimately, Jeremy Corbyn crept onto the ballot paper and electrified the base. And we know what happened from there. so this time around he is determined to try and protect his own authenticity you can see it in his communication style when he speaks very fluidly and openly in public sometimes that leads to number 10 having to clean up some positions we're talking about the other day but he's also trying to go with his gut and not do this triangulation new labor where do we want to be with the public thing so that always comes across to me and came across really clearly in our conversations.

28:17I mean, the other person who spent a lot of time with Andy Burnham is you, Patrick, right? You've been there before he got in and after as well. I mean, that clearly chimes with your own experience, I imagine, certainly what I've seen of him. It is this shoot from the hip, you know, clarify later, but just try to be as authentic as you can. I think that's the game, isn't it? Yeah. And look, I think the other striking thing about the time I've spent with Andy Burnham is. I wonder if you picked up this as well, Ben. He is sensitive is perhaps the wrong word, but he is acutely conscious of and defines himself against Westminster's criticism or what he believes is its misconceptions about the sort of politician he is.

29:04He sort of thinks Westminster is stuck thinking he is that same politician he himself didn't like very much in 2015. So I do wonder, I would love to be a fly on the wall of whatever room it was early in the week when he read Andy Haldane in the FT. And I'd certainly like to be a fly on the wall. One of the public, semi-public rooms, the kitchen, the kitchen table in Andy Burnham's house at the back of Haydott race course tomorrow. when he opens his Times and reads Andy Haldane's Invective, because that is the thing I think that enrages him most, the idea that people are getting him wrong and who are pigeonholing him incorrectly and that he feels that he is trying to do something bold and radical and different and trying to shift the paradigm of politics, but he's not being given the space or being taken seriously enough.

29:59And so all this discussion around the budget, I imagine will be to some extent irritating him, but, and I picked this up from John Healy as well, will have sort of redoubled their resolve to prove everyone wrong. But sadly for them, there is one thing you can't really talk yourself out of, as Andy Heldane was saying, and that's the line on the 10-year guilt. But we will see. But yeah, and the aftermath of the budget, if Andy Heldane's predictions come to pass, will be the biggest test of the Andy Burnham we've both spent time with, Ben. Both spent a lot of time with, who is, as you say, the straight shooter, who thinks you should address problems candidly and believes he will be given credit for being transparent about what he wants to do, trying to do it and doing some of it, rather than, as was Keir Starmer's case, saying he can't do anything.

30:58Anyone who wants to understand the Prime Minister's well, of, of course, reading, listening to all of our works, go back and read Head North, the book that he wrote with Steve Rodham a couple of years ago. The way he describes Westminster is essentially a kind of malign force. He talks about it as being a place of establishment, of cover-ups, of sharks swimming in the waters, of turning good people into frauds. I think he feels that very personally from his time there. And there's one particular line he says, at the weekend, I'd go back up to Manchester and everybody else from all the other parties would have their dinner parties and gossip.

31:31And I'd come back in at the beginning of the week and feel like I was Adel Luke. He hates this idea that there's a kind of political class in Westminster that looks down on him or dismisses him. That comes across really strongly in that book. And I think there's still a chunk of that. So yes, I'm sure Patrick is right that when he sees people swiping at him, he kind of rolls his eyes. Yeah, look, I can already read the YouTube comments saying what they always say about comments such as this, but he is right. There is a degree to which, quite a strong degree actually, that that is true. And let's say the budget and subjectively the 10-year plan can confound it.

32:10The big difference now is he is all powerful, right? He is the man in number 10. He's got the bully pulpit at the dispatch box and you can do with that what you will. So you are the power and we go from there. But I think that brings this week's episode to a close. And very good to see both of you on here. congratulations again patrick on your award well can i can i just show even as an award-winning journalist i don't forget the people who who make it all happen uh because often people say oh the talent you know they're uh uh you know they're full of themselves you know award-winning journalists where's the talent on this podcast we'll find that one day well yeah exactly we're still looking we're still looking um but anyway thank you very much as ever to the holy trinity of producers at News UK, Molly Guinness, Harry Kitson and Ewan Daughtry.