 Keir Starmer has been Labour leader for 12 months now. Many have been assessing his first year in charge. We did so on Friday's show and it was happening all weekend. Now on that topic, this is former Labour Home Secretary and Blair Wright, Alan Johnson speaking to Tom Swarbrick on LBC. I think you have to be in the Labour Party to really appreciate where we were in December 2019 compared to where we are now. I mean, I thought we were finished. You know, when you see us losing Redcar, Bishop Auckland, Sedgefield, Grimsby, Scunthor, Bolsova, it really looked as if it might all be over for us. Not because of that election result, but because this cult of the far left had virtually taken over the party at all levels and it looked as if the only successor to Corbyn would be a Corbynista and then we would get more of the same. For Keir Starmer to first of all be brave enough to put himself forward for what is an awful job, even more terrible in the circumstances Labour Party was in, and then turn that around, you know, in June, we are talking about where we are now, but in June he reached the highest rating for an opposition leader, any opposition leader since records began, since they started to record that in the early 70s, and now it's not too bad, by the way, there's been a boost for the government with the vaccine, of course. You think 10 points off is not too bad? But I feel, oh, 26 points off when Keir Starmer was elected, and you can sum up where the Tories are now in one word, which is vaccine. So, no, he's had a tremendous first year, more than anyone could expect, and I think I caught a bit of Jack Straw earlier on, as Jack Straw was saying, we've had a long period of leaders who haven't been popular with the public and have been less popular than their Tory counterpart, going right back to Gordon. Now, a few things to mention there. First of all, he says, you know things are really bad when Labour loses red car. Now, Labour lost red car in 2010 when Alan Johnson was the home secretary. So, a bit of an odd example. Obviously, the 2019 election wasn't particularly good. No one's going to pretend it was. Anyway, a few other things he says. He says the Tory lead is all down to the vaccine. Now, this is the story that the Starmer stands, like to say, he's doing brilliantly. But how could anyone possibly be popular when Boris Johnson is rolling out one of the most successful vaccination programs in the world? On one level, that's a reasonable argument. On another, it doesn't really fit with the the facts. Because as we talked about on Friday, if you look at when Starmer's satisfaction really tanked, it was way before the vaccine was rolled out. So you can see here, Starmer, as Alan Johnson says there, people were very satisfied with him at the beginning of his leadership. I think partly because he looked like a Prime Minister. He's knighted. He wasn't Jeremy Corbyn and the media were very nice to him. But once they sort of started to see the decisions he was making, that's when they changed their mind. So you can see that the biggest drop is between October and December last year. That's when he goes from 15% net positivity to 5% net positivity. And the big drop there is among Labour voters. So he goes from 50% people saying he's doing a good job net to 31% saying that. And what happens then is not that the vaccine was rolled out, is that he kicked Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour Party. He's basically set a big FU to a huge section of Labour's base. And guess who else is saying a huge FU to huge sections of Labour's base? Alan Johnson on LBC. If you want to be cheerleading for the Labour leader, which is fine, you know, he wants the Labour government, that's good. He's on LBC telling people Keir Starmer's a good guy. Then you have to take seriously the fact that one of the big things which is threatening Keir Starmer's ability to become Prime Minister is the fact that he's pissed off one in five Labour voters. One in five Labour voters thinks he's taking the party in the wrong direction, basically because he's been incredibly insulting to anyone who supported the previous leader. And now that is just being reinforced by Alan Johnson calling everyone a cult. Right, so it seems like these people in a way have a death wish for the party. They would prefer to insult the left and kick out the left than have any chance of entering government by forming a broad coalition which includes, yes, both voters in the Red Bull who voted Brexit. By the way, Alan Johnson ran the Labour Remain campaign, one of the worst campaigns we've seen in the last 20 years, right? He's one of the reasons we're in this mess. But you also have to have left-wing Labour voters. We saw in 2017 there's actually quite a lot of them. Ash, what do you make of people like Alan Johnson constantly coming out to basically say a big FU to the Labour left? What do they think they're achieving here? Well, that's the things that they actually don't want Keir Starmer to succeed at the helm of a kind of soft left, right-ish coalition. That's not what they want. What they want is for Starmer to not do so well in the local elections to panic for there to be some backbench jitters about losing confidence in the leader and then what that creates the space for as a Labour-right coup within the Shadow Cabinet. So they're already making those noises of dissatisfaction about Annalisa Dodds. There have been talks about a lack of joined up thinking between himself and Angela Rayner, Angela Rayner who was drafted in to talk to the parties left. I think that there are those like Alan Johnson who would look at it as a chance for return of some of those Labour-right figures, in particular the likes of Evette Cooper. What that shows us is two things. One, these people aren't serious about winning elections and winning over the public. They're simply not. What they want to do is reassert control over the party and they don't care if it's in opposition for 20 more years. The second thing is that they also are completely out of ideas. Now, I don't want to define my politics by Jeremy Corbyn. I didn't even want to do that when he was leader, but it's certainly not a healthy political culture now that he's not leader. And to the left's credit, while I think there are still huge amounts of people who are quite rightfully very wounded by everything that's happened in the last few years, is that you do have those aspects of the left who are looking forward and thinking about what are the really important policies you need to get people moving on, what are the kind of movements that we need to draw together to make those things happen, whether that's around a green new deal or a nurses pay rise combined with rolling back on privatisation in the NHS. You do have people who are out there doing that thinking. Alan Johnson, I don't know what he would say if you go, okay, what's your solution to the most pressing political, social and economic crises which face our country today? He would probably just say, I don't know, Yvette Cooper, I don't know, kick Jeremy Corbyn in the head one more time. These are people who are completely defined by an animated, their own petty squabbles within a party that nobody particularly cares for anymore, the country at large being a core component of that. One of the reasons why people don't really care for it anymore is that people just see it as a vehicle for infighting. This is a mistake that the left makes, is that sometimes it gets so caught up in its own experience of the infighting, which is of course really awful, that it goes, oh, this is what people will be really interested in, is how we've been introduced and betrayed and vilified by the right. No, actually, people don't care about that. But it's also a mistake that the Labour right make, which is the go, aha, well, we heard that you don't like Jeremy Corbyn and guess what? We still don't like him either and we hate everybody that ever liked him. The public don't care about that. They don't care about your petty internal beefs. And so the more that you have this kind of story out there and just getting air time, I think the more turned off people feel from politics. What we've learned is that there's a Conservative Party in power, which is able to capitalise on that sense of apathy, cynicism, and lack of faith in politics's ability to do anything good for you or the community that you come from. The Conservatives are actually best placed to capitalise on that feeling. So no, I don't think it's going to be good for Labour. But the point of Alan Johnson doing these media rounds isn't for it to be good for Labour. It's for it to be good for the Labour right in terms of the progression of their own careers within the party. That's it. That's why it was so striking that he said, and I wrote this down in my hand to make a note of it, it's not because of the election results. Because I think even Alan Johnson recognises that in all those places, Red Car and Bolsova, that the Labour vote share was in decline and had been since 2001. It's about the results of 2019 offering a lifeline to a dying and discredited set of politics, because it allows them to define themselves against Corbyn rather than having to make a case to the country. I'm going to say now you should support Navarro Media so we can get Ash a pad so she doesn't have to write the notes on her hand when we're showing videos live on Tiske Sauer. Also, what I want you to do is hit the subscribe button. We go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7pm and we put out videos every day. We have a little bit more of that interview. We're going to subject you to apologies in advance. It's Alan Johnson. The criticism would be that for you Blair right lot, it's looking good because the hard left cultures you've described have been pushed back. Jeremy Corbyn is no longer a Labour MP in Parliament. He's an independent. He has to sit as an independent now. But there are huge percentages of the Labour membership who are much more left-wing brought in by Jeremy Corbyn and who, for instance, 66% of them want the Labour party to campaign to return into the European Union. What does Stammer have to do to address that? Just ignore him. No, well, I mean, in a sense, you're right. I mean, me endorsing Keir Stammer, as same as Jack endorsing him, is kind of old Blair rights, kind of looking for a repeat of history. When I'm looking at, I can only look at it from my point of view. And the biggest poll, 7,000 people in the opinion poll in December. I've got to remember we're not even 18 months beyond that general election, by the way, when, you know, a huge boost for conservatives. That opinion poll in December went into the figures, you know, in the language that you and I will understand at many listeners, one, the C2DE votes, which is the working class, coming across to Labour and leave voters coming across to Labour. And so I think in terms of all the big issues, the big calls that Keir Stammer has had to make, he's made them right, not least of all on Europe. Remember, there was a lot of internal disagreement that we should oppose the deal on Europe, and Keir Stammer faced it down. And he was absolutely right to do it, because we can't go through those arguments over again, all over again. And for the 66% of Labour people who want us to go back into Europe, that's the 66% of Labour supporters who voted to remain. So they're not going to change their views. But, you know, the politics of this isn't that they're going to vote for another party to get Labour back into Europe. You're never supposed to say that. He said the quiet part out loud. The truth is, they're never going to vote for anyone else, are they? Now, I actually, you know, I agree with Keir Stammer and Alan Johnson's latest position on Europe, even if it's evolved over the past few years. I don't think Labour should be talking about going back into Europe. I actually didn't think they should have kicked up a fuss about Boris Johnson's deal. I think that's one of the things that Keir Stammer kind of has got right, even if it is a bit of a U-turn from his position when he was in Jeremy Corbyn's shadow cabinet. I mean, also an issue there was the question. It's not the Corbynites in the party who want to return to the European Union. That was not the contours of the battle over the past three years. I want to go to you, though, Ash, on that really important thing, which I think is Alan Johnson there basically saying, look, I'm coming to this from a position whereby we only have to appeal to people in the Red Wall and people in the so-called Red Wall, which were traditional Labour seats, which went conservative at the 2019 general election. Everyone else, no one else has anywhere to go, so we can completely ignore them. He's being quite explicit, isn't he? Well, yeah. And he's also displaying the attitude which lost Labour, the Red Wall, and was responsible for their decline, at least in part, which is this idea of, you've got this cohort of voters, they've got nowhere else to go, and somewhere else in the country there are swing voters, and they're the ones who you have to appeal to. Now, when Tony Blair was leader of the opposition, that thinking was centred around London and the cities. There are swing constituencies here. We've got an opportunity to turn urban blue constituencies red, and so that's who we focus on when it comes to the North and the Midlands and formerly industrial areas while they've got nowhere else to go. That wasn't true. And I think whether a myth or whether in truth, there was a narrative which emerged of a patrician distance and somewhat disdainful Labour leadership, which didn't care very much and took for granted all of those voters. And that's a narrative which the Conservative Party, having rebranded itself through the lens of Brexit, and indeed, you know, parties further to the right of the Conservative Party, first GKIP and then the Brexit Party, were able to wield to their advantage. There's also, I think, a fundamental lack of curiosity about what is it that the Conservative Party do so well? Who are their voters and how are they appealed to? Because it's not simply through narrative about, you know, disdainful patrician Labour because, you know, the Conservative Party have actually served some voters within those, you know, formerly industrial heartlands very well. There's homeowners and there's pensioners and there's people who live in relative privilege in deprived areas, right? And that's who the Conservative Party are relentlessly focused on. And I think that there's a lack of honesty, both in terms of the Labour Left, who want to homogenise these areas as just sort of, you know, bastions of, you know, authentic working-class decency. You know, it's like they're watched brass off once and they're like that's everybody who lives in the North. And then there's also a fantastic movie, but then there's I think, you know, there's a lack of willingness to explore the kind of other cohorts of voters which exist within the same place and who've been very cannily appealed to on a material basis by the Conservative Party, both the Left and I think the right struggle to deal with that. And also those in the Left who say, well, you know, that's fine, just focus on London, London will see you through. There's also a lack of honesty there about having to have a, you know, values-based container and a policy platform which can appeal to, you know, there's quite diverse coalition. But Alan Johnson's not interested in having that conversation. And very few people are because it would mean interrogating some of your core political assumptions about who the working-class are, where they are and how is it they live. And you don't want to ask those questions because actually conjuring up a, you know, straw man of the working-class and the most convenient shape to you is often a very good, you know, ventriloquist dummy for the thing that you always wanted to say anyway. It's very rarely got anything to do with how people live what they actually think.