 MPs earning money on the side will only be made a political issue if Labour make it one. Mainstream journalists probably aren't going to kick up a fuss about this, they often also make a fair deal on the side. Here's Starmer here should have a good story to tell in Labour's 2019 manifesto. The party promised they pledged that we will stop MPs from taking second jobs, paid with limited exemptions to maintain professional registrations like nursing. Very reasonable policy saying for these exceptions that you think are important, you want to remain a member of the Royal College of Nurses or the BMA, the British Medical Association, then you can go and work once a month in a hospital, very reasonable. It would also be a very helpful thing for the Labour Party to be shouting from the rafters right now because one of the best things you can do with a political demand is make the other side make a really, really unpopular argument. And if Labour stood up and said we need to ban second jobs and essentially force Boris Johnson or his allies, I'm sure he would try and keep out of this. I suppose you do it at PMQs, he has to answer the question. You have to force them to say £80,000 is not enough for us to live on. If you've got the Prime Minister to say that, you're in a very good position. So Labour should be shouting about this. They're not. So Angela Rayner did tweet something along these lines this week. Some people read this as a suggestion that the policy was still in place. So on Thursday she tweeted, you can be a paid lobbyist or you can be an MP, you can't be both. Labour will end this racket and ban MPs from taking money to lobby for private companies and Labour will ban former ministers from lobbying after they leave office. So you can see that that's along the lines of the manifesto. It is ambiguous though, because it is already against the rules for MPs to lobby. If it can be proved they've used their position as an MP to lobby for people who are paying them, they've broken the rules. That's what happened to Irwin Patterson. What's not against the rules is working for these big consultancy companies and not getting caught lobbying essentially. That the 2019 policy had definitively been dropped was then confirmed by Keir Starmer, who in a comment piece for the Guardian wrote the following. If I were Prime Minister, I would ban anyone who holds ministerial office from selling themselves to companies that want to write legislation in their own interests. This is very weasley. There's very Keir Starmer demand because you'll note that of all the MPs we showed you at the start of this segment, the ones who are making the most money, none of them are ministers. Ministers don't tend to have second jobs. That's because they already get an extra income for being ministers and MPs can in a way be as busy as they want to be. So you can get very diligent MPs who are constantly doing casework, who are constantly meeting people in their constituencies, who have lots of political interests. They take part in debates, write written questions. You'll also get lots of MPs who just twiddle their thumbs, go into Westminster every now and again to vote with the government when there's a free-line whip, and the rest of the time, I don't know, play solitaire or whatever. Keir Starmer has got it in his head that you can't look too oppositional. Otherwise, it looks opportunistic or hostile or aggressive. Because of that, it means that you've got these huge open goals where you could just put clear red water between you and the conservatives. And like you said, make them make the unpopular argument. You come out something strong like 80 grand seems like a lot to live on, more than most people in this country, so we're going to ban second jobs and make the Tories defend it. So I don't know whether Keir Starmer's got one eye on perhaps compromised interests on his own back benches, or whether he simply has no sense of political strategy or antennae. Maybe it's a bit of both, but to me, it's frankly unforgivable for a Labour leader to avoid making an argument which will, one, be popular. Two, makes democratic sense. And three, will stop big money corporate interests from corroding our legislature. Seems really straightforward to me. I mean, it's a simple argument to make. And it's so obviously one of the things, I mean, we do often, because he does say some interesting things, we do often sort of show tweets or sections of Dominic Cummings blogs. And one thing he really gets right is that no one in Westminster is willing to accept, other than say someone like Jeremy Corbyn, but none of the insiders in Westminster are willing to accept that the public really hate MPs. They really hate Westminster. They really hate the establishment. And he says, you know, that's why he was so successful in 2019. No one cared that they prorogued Parliament. No one cared that they took the whip away from Amber Rudd or whoever, because, you know, they don't identify with these people. They don't sympathize with these people. But Keir Starmer is the opposite of that. He is like, oh, to be a legitimate politician, what you have to do is be very, very nice to other politicians. And that's, But again, this is Keir Starmer who is playing to a gallery made up of lobby journalists, not people out there in the country. And I can't tell if this is, you know, vapidity or ego or just straightforward idiocy, that he turns to people who've consistently gotten every political call wrong since 2016 and goes, your approval means something to me, right? If you're telling me I'm doing a good job, that means I'm doing a good job. I really can't make sense of that. And Boris Johnson to his credit, and I think this accounts to the speed of the climb down around Owen Patterson and the Standards Committee, is able to keep in touch with what it is his base really wants. And the trouble with the Owen Patterson situation is that a significant chunk of the Tory base, particularly 2019 voters, were motivated by a kind of anti political impulse. They didn't care how Brexit got done, they just wanted it done. There were the people who voted leave because they wanted to give the establishment a bit of a bloody nose. They're people who don't like MPs and it seemed like Boris Johnson, particularly when he was being advised by Dominic Cummings, shared at least part of his, part of their disdain. Whereas Kirstammer comes along and he just always sounds like he's about to say, oh, wow, actually it's more complicated than you think it is. And he's got absolutely no way of reaching out to those people who have, with good reason, developed an awful lot of hostility to Westminster and Westminster's version of business as usual. And Kirstammer is neither able to consolidate a genuinely progressive, positive, optimistic vote and is also unable to tap into this mood of anti-politics.