 Next, we're talking about Keir Starmer and the ultimately deflating Labour leadership race coming to its conclusion. This week, of course, we'll see the new Labour leader being elected. There's a great piece on the Labour list. We're not going to link to it or show it. I saw Michael commenting on Twitter a few days ago. All of the leadership candidates and deputy leadership candidates will have to produce video, you know, an acceptance speech, so to speak. And the one who wins, well, that will be the one that's actually published, a very strange experience for all involved, I'm sure. There was an article in The Critic today. I wouldn't like to link to this too frequently. It's the same magazine where Toby Young wrote a rather daft article. And it was by John McTanon, a former Blairite spin doctor. The piece is titled Five Rules for Ruling, not the most sort of, you know, tidy title. Nonetheless, Memo to Keir Starmer from John McTanon with the subheader. There's no problem with a witch hunt when there really are witches, humorous of nothing else. So in that memo, McTanon has five proposals. Act immediately. Act ruthlessly. I mean, those are relatively apolitical. Punish the losers. We're getting a bit more political here. And then finally, ignore party members and take back the unions. An early suggestion is to sack the general secretary and all related staff immediately. We should probably tell that seriously, given something that effect was mooted in the Sunday Times a few days ago and is repeated here. And then there's punish the losers. Point three. I'm just going to read to you from that. Continuity Corbinistas like Rebecca Lombelli and Richard Bergen must be exiled to the back benches for the rest of their parliamentary careers, which should be as brief as possible. Victory has to be absolute. It's crucial to show you understand just how toxic Corbins tax and spend manifesto, default dislike of business and deep lack of patriotism really were. Clearly, this was a piece written in the weeks before COVID-19 took hold and the government effectively socialized significant amounts of wages from the private sector. But this is to be blunt, not pulling its punches. What do you think, Michael? Does John McTanon have Keir Starmer's ear? Well, I mean, it's interesting with Keir Starmer, isn't it? Because obviously, his whole campaign has been run on the basis of I'm the Unity candidate. And I respect that the Labour Party is a broad church. And so I'm going to try and bring people on, win them round through argument instead of factional fighting. But then I think it was that Sunday Times piece where sort of in the same piece it says Keir Starmer wants to get rid of factionalism and also he's going to sack everyone in the party who doesn't come from his faction, which there's a bit of an incongruence there. I mean, when it comes to what John McTanon's written in terms of getting rid of a toxic tax and spend manifesto, as you say, the government are spending a hell of a lot more than we ever would imagine. Obviously, that's because we're in a period of crisis. That doesn't mean they've converted to social democracy. But presumably, the battle that the Labour Party are going to have to fight when this is all over is that the cost of coronavirus should be paid by the wealthy, but not necessarily because they caused coronavirus. I mean, they didn't. There are some wealthy interests who I think share some blame when it comes to why RNHS has been subject to chronic underinvestment, people who have dodged tax or who have campaigned for it to be lower, for example. But it's clear that it's going to be the wealth with the broadest shoulders to rebuild society. There was another interesting argument actually in there by the director of the IFS who said one thing that should happen likely is that we sort of inflate our way out of this debt, which he was saying has there's some equity problems there in terms of distributional justice. But actually, inflation tends to be quite good for the working class, because what it does is it reduces the it reduces wealth inequalities fundamentally. But yeah, I mean, I haven't seen yet what John McTurnan's plan is for rebuilding Britain after coronavirus, because I mean, this could have been written in 1992, couldn't it could have been written in 1984, you know, for for say, like Neil Kinneck has to be brutal when he's, you know, fighting militant, etc. And he has to, you know, dump dump everything left wing, it doesn't seem to me that John McTurnan and his, you know, particularly come to terms with the fact that we live in a somewhat different world to the one in which he, you know, developed his own political career. So on that note, we go to graphic four punishes been labeled by Fox, punishing Bergen and Long Bailey will alienate a portion of the membership. Good. Let them return in disgust to the fringe parties where they should have been all along to about several hundred thousand people here. They clearly all didn't come from the SWP. Remember the words of the Tory Prime Minister, AJ Balfour, quote, I'd rather take advice from my valet than from the Conservative Party Conference. Don't fetishize party members. Any gathering of more than a handful is disproof of the notion of the wisdom of crowds, restore party conference to its proper role, a loyal leadership rally, which think of that, Michael. I mean, that's when I thought maybe he's sort of trying to provoke here with sort of a dash of comedy, but maybe maybe you disagree. I mean, it's a funny article. He's quite a funny guy. So I think he probably relished the extent to which people would take offense at what he's writing. But I don't think that means that he doesn't believe it. To be honest, when I read this, I thought that this is actually what John McTurnan believes. And I suppose what's different about John McTurnan to many other people on his wing of the party is he's very open about what he believes, which is that he thinks members should have no role. The party should be run purely by political professionals who have no accountability to members whatsoever, and who basically disown anything that's particularly anti-war or left-wing, etc. etc. We had him on the show actually, and it must have been a couple of years ago now, with Grace Blakely on sort of an interesting argument about centrist economics versus third-way... centrist economics versus socialist economics. All interesting. Obviously, I agreed more with Grace and him, but then by the end of it, he was still justifying the Iraq War, still saying it was a good thing. So this is someone with some quite extreme ideas about what the future leader of the Labour Party should be advocating for. You picked up on also what's been misunderstood in this paragraph, which is to say that Corbynistas, or people that joined the Labour Party to vote for Corbyn, should be in fringe parties. Because if all the people who joined the Labour Party to vote for Corbyn should be in a fringe party, then that fringe party would be bigger than the Labour Party. We've got 3949 watching, only 595 likes. Come on, smash the like button. The more likes we get, the more humorous things are going to be after this weekend with the likes of John McTurnan. What's interesting is actually he reviewed my book in the Financial Times, and it was quite a nice review, but something he says in this piece about be magnanimous in defeat and be total in victory, sums him up because I... Totally what he was doing for the last four years. Totally. Obviously, that's an inversion of what you're meant to do. I did sky with him the day after the 2017 general election. He was like, you know what? I was wrong. We need to work together. That's when we should have said, fuck you. If we were taking a lesson out of John McTurnan's book, that's precisely what we would have done, right? That's what he would have done. Instead, well, we can talk about this more. We'll talk about it more in a second. Let's move on. This is the final part where he talks about Tony Blair. This is bizarre. Tony Blair once said about party discipline, you only have to break one of their legs, not both of them. Actually, the trick is to make people believe you're willing to break their legs. It's time for Sean Connery's strategy and it's Al Capone and the Untouchables. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone. Now, do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? What's interesting is that if a Jeremy Corbyn supporting journalist wrote those words in a magazine, you know, there would honestly be thousands of tweets calling on Jeremy Corbyn to disown him. And yet here, I mean, we hear absolutely nothing.