 Laura Kuhnsberg is set to stand down as political editor of the BBC. It's a role she has held for six years. The Guardian report she is likely to move on to become a host of Radio 4's Today program. The paper writes that BBC political editors are often moved to senior presenting jobs well ahead of general elections, enabling their successor to get used to the position before a vote is held. As part of the reshuffle of leading BBC journalist John Sopell is stepping down as North America editor and returning to the UK. Sopell's return means he is now a candidate to be the new BBC political editor having been connected to the job back in 2015. According to Politico, Vicky Young, Amal Rajan, Beth Rigby and Chris Mason are also among the runners and riders for the BBC's top political job. Aaron, Laura Kuhnsberg has been a key player in setting the political agenda over the past six years. How significant could this departure be? I mean, I think she's the worst journalist at the BBC. And I know that there are some people, like I read Alex Wickham's newsletter in Politico this morning, and he said, I know pedestrian whining about how bad she is. She's driven the big political scoops at the BBC over the last decade. I mean, look, it's one, you can have that position. I just don't, I just don't. And maybe my problem with her output is that as the BBC's political editor, she's obsessed with the Westminster and she very rarely looks or talks about the country at large. And the whole conception of politics with the BBC politics editor, I think is quite limited. So is that a criticism of the role or Laura Kuhnsberg? You make your mind up. I think also she's really let her down professionally time after time. Now again, somebody can disagree with that. What I would like to see with somebody in the role is a big shift in where their focus is, a big shift in actually how they try and talk about stories. It's not gossip. It's not, you know, a conjecture or speculation at Westminster. It's actually trying to sort of craft a narrative about the big picture, which is interesting and appealing to a wider audience. Lewis Goodall at Newsnight is very good at doing that. He's probably the best BBC politics journalist at doing that. He won't get this job in my opinion, or I think he probably should get the job. I think he's the best qualified person for it at the BBC presently, because if he did, I suspect the Tories would cut the license fee and Boris Johnson would have an aneurysm. So that won't happen because of politics. So when people say the BBC is neutral and it's not subject to government pressure, this will be a pretty good example. If Lewis Goodall gets that job, I will agree with you, but I don't think he will. Amal Rajan would also be another good bet. He can be quite heterodox. He can be quite interesting. He's a good broadcast journalist. And then you're looking at the outsiders, Michael. I don't know if you saw this, but just before we went live on air, a bookmaker put odds of Ash Sarkar at 66 to 1. And she put myself, they put myself at 100 to 1. But Michael, I was asking myself, where is, you guessed it, Michael Walker? Because you are, I think, you know, at Navarra's most astute Westminster head, I would have had you at least 50 to 1. So what's going on, Michael? Or maybe you're the dark horse. I've been shaking my head all morning. Let's get up the odds. This is a Daily Mail graphic based on the Betfair odds. So it has John Soappell at 6 to 4. I mean, it does sound, you know, quite likely. He's very much like a BBC political editor, which is that he talks about it all like a soap opera. Lewis Goodall at 5 to 2. He is definitely not the second favourite for this job. As Aaron said, they're not going to hire this guy because it would be the end of the license fee. Chris Mason at 11 to 1. He's actually good. Perfect. Yeah, exactly. 11 to 1 possible. Emily Maitlis at 6 to 1. Again, definitely not going to happen. They're not going to put Emily Maitlis in that job because again, they would probably cut the license fee because she's, you know, she's quite clearly a remainder and not particularly Boris Johnson. Ben Brown at 8 to 1 and as you say, Amal Rajan at 16 to 1. Maybe he's the, if I was a betting person and I wanted to bet on someone who could get the job, but also you get a decent payout, I think I'd probably go for him. Moving on from speculation though, let's focus on Laura Koensberg and her record in the role. I've chosen one clip which I think sums up her style of journalism more than any other. Hello. Hello. I'm sort of being high. That's quite all right. You okay? Do you have any coffee though? I'm sure we can get you some. I've just been pummeled by the best of you. He kept laughing. Should I have thought it wasn't? Robert, thank you very much. Thank you. That was an education as always. Thank you very much. See you later. Yeah. Who's he laughing at? Breaking scales of laughter that seem to me to be. Is he laughing at you or with you? I think you have to understand about Boris Johnson is he really wants to be loved and actually underneath it. Oh, he's quite shy, but we all know someone like that, right? We all know someone who plays the clang because they don't want to be themselves. Why I think that really sums up the problems of Laura Koensberg is because it is, it's politics is psychodrama, politics is soap opera, but also it's wrong. Boris Johnson isn't shy. Boris Johnson has a real put on persona to make him seem awkward. He's actually an incredibly calculated person as, you know, people who write about the occasions where he sort of turns up late to a meeting with his papers all ruffled and he sort of pretends that, oh, I've almost forgotten my speech. And then he does the exact same performance at another charity in a year's time. He's a very calculated person and Laura Koensberg not only falls for it, but she then projects it to 60 million Britons, which I think is quite frustrating. For a characteristic tweet, let's go to this. This is how she responded to Kier Starmer becoming Labour leader. Whatever your own politics, this is a really big moment. Labour could now be an opposition that gets things done, plus carries out effective scrutiny irrespective of anyone's ideas. Labour under Corbyn struggled ever to do that. Now, one of the reasons it struggled to ever do that was because Laura Koensberg was confecting outrages about Corbyn not wanting to kill terrorists, which she had to apologise for afterwards. So this pro-establishment bias of Laura Koensberg, where it's completely fine to delegitimize Jeremy Corbyn, because, you know, he's not seen as a Westminster insider. She's a Westminster insider. Anyone who's not, she just doesn't understand. And she seemingly doesn't even consider it to be biased to say that Corbyn was useless in opposition. As I say, the deference to the establishment is not just a feature of Laura Koensberg. We shouldn't say this is all about her. It seems to be built into the role. Andrew Ma was one of Koensberg's predecessors. This is how the then political editor reported the fall of Saddam Hussein 26 days after the launch of the Iraq War. Leif, I've been watching ministers wander around with smiles like split watermelons. Well, Mr Blais, I did share of troubles and worries, as you rightly say, over the past few weeks. We've talked about the many times. To what extent has that changed now today? Well, I think this does one thing. It draws a line under what had been before this war, a period of, when a faint air of pointlessness almost was hanging over Downing Street, there was all these slightly tawdry arguments and scandals. That is now history. Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren't going to thank him because they're only human for being right when they've been wrong. And he knows that there might be trouble ahead, as I've said. But I think this is a very, very important moment for him. It gives him a new freedom and a new self confidence. He confronted many critics. I don't think anybody after this is going to be able to say of Tony Blair that he's somebody who is driven by the drift of public opinion or focus groups or opinion polls. He took all of those on. He said that they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath and that in the end, the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points, he has been proved conclusively right. And it'd be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister as a result. I'd guess there are a few things ever said on national TV that have aged worse than that. Aaron, Andrew Ma used to be a Trotskyist. He ended up spouting some of the most pro-establishment imperialist nonsense I think I've ever heard on national television. Is there something about this role, which means that people have to treat politics like soap opera and have to have just an offensively pro-establishment bias and disregard the lives of Iraqis to only pay attention to how much people are smiling in number 10 or not. Thatcherism changed the rules of the game to such an extent that these people just they converted. It was like a religious conversion. And why I think they've been so unable to adapt to politics, post Brexit, post Corbyn, post financial crisis 2008, post COVID, this kind of ensemble of crises and possibilities and just a new kind of politics emerging on the right, on the left, not always good. The reason why I think they can't necessarily explain and understand it is because they've already converted once. And it's very, very rare that somebody converts once in their life, let alone twice. So you're sort of demanding they leave their new faith, which they found in the 80s, sort of centrist, social democracy, highly socially, culturally liberal, economically, quite conservative, don't really want to change anything from the Thatcherite orthodoxy. And actually that explains why I think people like Ma, people like Mandelson, people like Alistair Campbell can't really get to grips with politics and economics in the 21st century. In terms of what he was saying, we also have to recognise, Michael, that the job of the BBC political editor, the job of the BBC political editor, not somebody who's bad at the job, the job, the job description, is to effectively be a stenographer for power. It is to effectively be a press officer for the government in a moment of crisis, not all the time. But if you're at war, or during COVID-19, or when a head of state passes away, or during a national emergency of some kind, the BBC time after time has demonstrated that it's a regime broadcaster. And that's not a left-right issue. That is about it being effectively an outside flank of the state working on its behalf. And this is 1926 with the general strike, and you can think it was right in doing so or disagree with it. It did something very similar during the Second World War, the same applies. I would agree with that. It was a war against Nazism, but the same applies. And really, all the way through to the 80s and the 90s in the Iraq war, generally speaking, the BBC's coverage of these stories wasn't about informing, entertaining, educating the public, but actually offering a cultural and political pillar of support for the government of the day. So when people say that the BBC has a left-right bias, I think they get it all wrong. Fundamentally, the BBC has a bias towards the sitting government. And then, if we're going to talk about its kind of ideological values, yes, culturally and socially liberal, but absolutely resistant to economic distribution, which is why, yeah, they had a few problems, Boris Johnson, but my word, they prefer him to the likes of Jeremy Corbyn or all the Labour left. And that's really crystallized in somebody like Laura Koonsberg. The idea for her, and she's the BBC politics editor, Michael, Jeremy Corbyn won 40%... Well, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn won 40% in the 2017 general election. Clearly, you might not think all of it was because of the policies and so on, but clearly, there was a big appetite for the policies and the ideas in the party manifesto. She's not remotely interested. She's not remotely curious. Somebody like Louis Goodall, I think he's quite a curious guy. Same with Amal Rajan. They're quite curious and interested in politics beyond their preconceptions and their prejudices. Somebody like Andrew Ma, somebody like Laura Koonsberg, no. Which is why they're the BBC political editor and the likes of Louis Goodall. I really think it's highly unlikely. I would foreclose that possibility, despite the bookmakers odds in the in the Daily Mail. So, yes, the problem with the BBC political editor role, I think you're right. It should be seen slightly distinctly from the inhabitants of that role. And I think we need an industrial editor of the BBC. I think you need to probably dismantle the role a little bit. Laura Koonsberg, she can tweet something and it can completely undermine the work of dozens, if not hundreds of her colleagues in the same organisation. People say the BBC's line on something is X. Well, actually, the PM show today, World at One, six o'clock news, the website, they all say something different. But because of our Twitter feed from a good many people, that's the BBC line. And I think there's clearly a problem with that in a public service broadcaster. It gives so much power to one person who, as I've said, not particularly good at their job, but also I think the role itself has problems.