 After the 2017 general election, Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party seemingly stood on the brink of power. From nowhere they had enjoyed the biggest increase in vote share of any party since 1945, some 10%, and in England they had gone toe to toe with the Tories for the first time since 1997. Inevitable crushing defeat had become something else, the party depriving the Tories of their majority and being just a handful of seats away from being able to lead a government. But from there it was a story of Glastonbury to Catastrophe, and last December Labour weren't merely defeated but gained their lowest number of seats since 1935. A remarkable experiment with a radical socialist leading the party for the first time in almost a century had ended in calamity. But how did this happen? How did so much change and so quickly? Who bears the most responsibility and could have been any different? With me today to discuss all of that and more are Gabriel Pogren and Patrick Maguire, authors of Left Out, the inside story of Labour under Corbyn. Gabriel, Patrick, thank you for joining us and welcome to Navarra Media. Hello, thank you. Before we get on to the really substantive content of the book and there's a lot there, it's a big book but I don't think that should put any of you off from reading it, it's thoroughly enjoyable. When do you decide to write the book? Because you've obviously delivered a manuscript incredibly quickly. Well, we had been sort of kicking this idea around for a while. I mean, the truthful answer is Tim Shipman insisted we do it. The, you know, Tim political agendas under times, you know, wrote, I guess, the last tranche of instant political history, first draft of history books about Brexit and the Rooksons in the Conservative Party. And Tim was insistent that somebody had to write a book on Labour in this period because of the similarly, you know, unprecedented nature of the democratic experiment that happened in the Labour Party, right? You know, Brexit was completely without precedent, as was, as you say, if you accept George Lansbury, a figure from the radical left-leaning Labour Party. So, Tim basically said, you know, you two must write this book. He basically publicly shamed us into doing it. And by January, we were, we had a sort of proposed an idea setting train. But obviously, the idea crystallised after the, after the, after the election. Because obviously, somebody had to tell that story. And the nature of the defeat was as such that it was going to be incredibly contested, that narrative. And people from within the movement were going to tell their own stories, as we're already seeing. And we wanted to be the people, I think, to tell it from the outside in. And that's good to hear. We're going to start with 2017, which where the book starts from, there's not that much of the kind of euphoric period of Corbinism. But I don't think necessarily that's of the most interest to people in the present context. I'll ask a very simple question. What was going on at Ergon House during the election period of 2017? It's been hotly contested. But is it fair to say there was a campaign targeting various seats trying to resource certain parliamentary seats, which the Labour leadership at that time was not aware of? That is, that's correct. There was, there are a number of officials at Labour headquarters on Southside, that's parties headquarters in Victoria slash Westminster, who believe that Labour and the parliamentary Labour Party would be reduced to a rump after the 2017 general election. They saw imminent catastrophe. And what they say now is that in order to preserve some good MPs to help rebuild the party after defeat, they funneled resources to certain constituencies across the UK. Somebody told us that, you know, it wasn't necessarily the sexiest parallel campaign you ever heard of, they principally distributed leaflets, which contained a message, I believe, which had been drafted by Margaret McDonough, the Labour peer, which said something to the effect of, we know that you, the voters despise Corbyn. Don't worry, we hate him just as much. Please reelect us so that we can rebuild the party from whatever is left. And obviously the kind of leaked report provided some amazingly rich documentary evidence of this. We also established during the course of our reporting that there was a WhatsApp group within the kind of Ergenhaus parallel campaign, Ergenhaus being the party's London regional headquarters. The WhatsApp group they had was called the Deck Chair Realignment Society. It's quite a vivid metaphor, basically alluding to the fact that Labour was the Titanic, it was sinking. Armageddon was inevitable and they were kind of, they were joking, they were merely realigning the Deck Chairs as the ship sank. But no, to answer your question, he was a captain, yes. I think, in fact, there's now a group of Southside alumni called, what's that group called, RIP, the captain. I don't know how popular that is. Ian Manickle. Ian Manickle. But so, I mean, so you spoke to a range of people, they principally maintain that this was a well-intentioned effort to save as many seats as possible. You've alluded there to the leaked Labour report, which contains various WhatsApp messages and so on. And within that leaked report, some of the people who were running this counter campaign effectively, within that report, they are angered, upset, concerned or mocking any polling over the course of that election campaign, which suggested Labour were doing well. Do you think there's, there seems to be a bit of a dissonance there to say, well, on the one hand, we were panicking that the party was going to tank, it was a last-minute effort to save as many MPs as possible. And yet we know at the same time, they were saying, oh, this YouGov poll or this opinion poll showing Labour on 35, 36, 37, that can't possibly be right. And then talking up every poll, which Labour performs badly. And I mean, that doesn't quite make sense. It doesn't quite tally with what they're now saying regarding their intentions at the time. Well, to answer your first question, I think the intention was definitely, as Gabriel says, to save as many MPs as they could, but their MPs who they would deem to be South. For instance, you're looking at Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, Tom Watson. I don't think I might be wrong, but I am 99% sure that they weren't devoting resources to, say, Kat Smith in Lancaster and Fleetwood, whose seat was then very marginal, for instance. And the interesting question that you asked about polling is that there was always polling during that campaign to satisfy the narrative that Labour might have done better than Len McCluskey was talking about 200 seats quite early in that campaign. But I can't remember what exactly Patrick Hennigan's final poll said, or the poll he briefed to Jeremy Corbyn, Seamus Mill, but it was still some distance off a hung parliament. But yeah, as you say, there was an expectation that Labour weren't going to do very well and that Southside saw it as their duty to salvage a PLP that they could do business with or they could feel could do business with the public and make as a definitive a breach from Corbyn as much as possible. The book itself sort of hinges around big characters. I mean, that's pretty obvious, I think. You tell the story. I mean, it's not the story of policy, it's not the story of movements. There's no mention, for instance, of the climate change, the Green New Deal. I mean, that's not the intention of the book. It's about various people at the top of this movement slash organization, because ultimately we're dealing with electoral politics. They want to run the, you know, administer the British state. And the big characters are John McDonald, Carrie Murphy, and of course Jeremy Corbyn in his own way, to less extent Seamus Mill. But I think the most sort of pathetic, and all of them actually, you know, at moments you sort of respect them, admire them at other times, you go, no, you shouldn't have done that. But the one I think who comes up almost uniquely is sort of pathetic is Ian McNichol. And, you know, there's this nice little sort of vignette sue officer, one being, you know, something breaks in his office, where he has like a peak of anger, and somebody's cleaning it up after him, and he's sort of musing around his future in the Labour Party and so on. I mean, is it fair to say that somebody like Ian McNichol was, I mean, to what extent did he reflect Labour Party that was utterly dysfunctional? Because clearly, on the one hand, people are saying, well, the Labour Party was dysfunctional under Jeremy Corbyn. But if you've got people behaving in the way they were at Ergon House, that's one thing, right? Because they say we're trying to save something from itself. But I think when you've got Ian McNichol as general secretary, I mean, that suggests something else, doesn't it? It suggests that you did have a sediment of people at the top of the Labour Party who really viewed themselves as acting autonomously with impunity from the rest of the organisation, and didn't really care about the consequences. I mean, is that an accurate way of looking at some of the people around there, you know, the DEC chair, realignment society and various allies of Ian McNichol? I think that for decades, the role of general secretary, you sort of, a union has its turn every few years. And it's typically a quite managerial, bureaucratic role, you allocate funding, you oversee election campaigns. I don't like using the word unprecedented because we tried to be scholars of the last half decade, I don't know whether this applied to say the party under Ramsey McDonald or whoever. But I think that it is rare that you have this incredible and quite violent gulf between the general secretary and then the leadership of the party. So Ian McNichol was not a figure who rose to office expecting to become the kind of physical incarnation of the resistance. And you know, whether he was equipped to do that, I mean, there are people on his own team who didn't have faith in him. And there are other people who say he did what he could within a context of an impossible situation. I will also say to his credit that somebody from Corbyn's team who was there on election night said that he looked pleasantly surprised by the 2017 result, which couldn't be, couldn't be said for a lot of other people whose faces were sallow and mournful. But to answer your question, I mean, was he emblematic of a kind of wider institutional dysfunction? It was self-evident and he knew this himself on election night that once Corbyn Easters had won the right to run the party, once there was no doubt that Corbyn himself was unassailable after 2016 and then that was compounded in 2017, he was always going to have to go. And the interesting thing about Ian McNichol is that he's actually quite a unifying figure, which may sound like a weird thing to hear instead about Ian McNichol, particularly on a Navarra media podcast. But the thing is that I got a message from a former a former Shadow Cabinet advisor last week and they said, the key to understanding the Labour Party, particularly in the first years of Corbyn's leadership, is the extent to which everybody on every wing of the party, for better or worse, thought Ian McNichol was varying degrees of useless. Now, obviously, he has a small coterie of staunch defenders who will say that's an ugly unfair characterization. But I'd say there's a critical mass of people who were in the Labour Party in that period, you didn't think Ian McNichol was up to the job. So this characterization of Ian McNichol as a sort of wrecker, as the face of a Southside that was determined to resist and didn't see Corbyn's leadership is legitimate, isn't strictly accurate, but not necessarily because Ian McNichol was conciliatory or wanted to go on board. It's because a lot of people in Southside look to other people for their de facto leadership. And actually, a key to understanding why Southside was so dysfunctional in this period is because different people saw different leadership figures incoordinating the resistance to Corbyn as they saw it. Is it true that when he went for the job of General Secretary, what was it in 2010? He basically did an A3 kind of mood board of what the Labour should do. It was with highlighters and felt tips and biros. And is that, rather than a PowerPoint presentation, I don't recall if that was written in the Sunday Times or by yourself. No, I did get a leak that a while ago. That was his. It just suggests an utterly amateurish approach. This was the organisation into which Jeremy Corbyn was, whether or not he became the leader in 2010, it does seem like the organisation was not really at the top of its game when it comes to organisational functions. That might be right. I also think that one feature of the Corbyn years was the extreme politicisation of bureaucracy. There's this moment we recount in the book where Tim Waters, who was Labour's head of data, mourned the fact that people used to report on these meetings, he said, with reference to the NEC. But over the Blair years, over New Labour, the kind of organs of the party have become ossified and they were deliberately depoliticised by the party leadership. Whereas if you want to understand the Corbyn years, suddenly now you need to understand what the governance and legal unit was, never mind the NEC, you need to know what the NCC was. Naturally, as these bodies were politicised, the scrutiny on whether they were there to be quasi-judicial bodies or rather to facilitate the fixing of union bureaucrats was thrown into harsher and sharper relief. It's interesting. You said that I remember having a conversation with somebody in the leader's office and I said, you're going to need to press office at the NEC because there's so much political risk around it. Any new organisation where there was that level of political risk attached to a body, they would have their own press officer and people were like, that's absurd, that's ridiculous. In normal times, it would have been. At the end, there were 20 press officers for the NEC in that every member of the NEC and every persuasion was frequently what's had or what's had broadcast lists without betraying any sources or indeed how exactly they chose to disseminate particular quotes from particular NEC meetings. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And as Gabriel says, suddenly, and it wasn't just the left and Corbyn's leadership had to learn to get to grips with this machinery of power, the right had to relearn how to fight a rearguard. And if you think about it, in the past, say, 25 years, who are the only people on the right of the Labour Party who've been fighting a rearguard, John Speller, I mean, the list is maybe about as long as John Speller, who, you know, in terms of party, in terms of party civil war is like that sort of Japanese POW who at some point in the 1980s, got lost in the sort of rainforest of Labour's internal bureaucracy. But yeah, you know, sort of everybody had to learn how to acclimatise to this new reality. And I think our conclusion is nobody really did. How big a moment do you think, and we may disagree about this, or maybe we just, we probably come to the same conclusion for different reasons. How big a moment was the Salisbury instant in terms of a recalibration again, in terms of Corbyn's perception by the media by his own MPs? Because you identify as a singular, everybody obviously has as a really significant singular moment in this passage from Glastonbury to Catastrophe. I mean, look, we're not sephologists. And whether it's merely, whether Salisbury has any causation as, you know, I mean, people say Salisbury was a high water market, and beyond that point, Corbyn's poll ratings declined. I don't know whether that's correlation or causation. I don't know. As you say, we've written a deliberately SW1 centric book. We've not paid much recourse to focus groups or voters in understanding how that moment went down in the country. I think one thing that is clear is that number one, sort of peace did break out momentarily after the 2017 general election. And Salisbury was a definitive moment at which certain Hawks and other members of the PLP decided we cannot just pretend the status quo can hold. And also, I think, I think we feel like it's a moment where some of the divides between Corbyn and McDonald's offices, you know, what widen as well. There's this quote, which we, which we thought was particularly poignant where with respect to anti Semitism, which I'm sure will come onto, somebody said that John McDonald would have had Jeremy on the next plane to Jerusalem if it had been up to him. Whereas, you know, naturally Corbyn and a lot of people around him were more disposed towards, you know, keeping a principled position and not kind of caving to perceived media or PLP pressure. But Salisbury was definitely a moment again, where we just have these kind of conflicting, parallel views as to the best way of doing things. John McDonald himself, after the attack, said that Labour front benchers should stop appearing on Russia today. And then the Labour spokesperson in the wake of that said, this is something which is under review, but we've not made a final decision. So I think internally for the project, it was a vital moment. And the interesting thing, I think there's a very good quote from Andrew Murray in the book. And Gabriel talks about PLP pressure. And after 2017, even Tom Watson had concluded, according to those very close to him, that sort of, you know, the show was over. It was time to, he had put up the PLP had put up, and Corbyn had gone to the country and won legitimacy in the eyes of the public. So now it was time for the PLP to shut up. And Andrew Murray told us, you know, up until Salisbury, they had a, in his words, a creosant PLP. The polling have more or less held up since 2017. And at that point, if you get to see the openly seditious PLP reappear, you know, you have people like Ben Bradshaw and Pat McFadden getting up on the back benches in the, and making sort of hostile interventions on their own leader in those Salisbury debates. I suppose there's maybe, you know, maybe, I don't know what you would think about this, but there was a very interesting Andrew Murray to return to Andrew Murray again. If you're looking at Labour's status on foreign affairs, there was a strategy paper Andrew Murray wrote before the independent group split, in which he said something like, you know, Mike Gates and all of these splitters are representatives of an old fashioned pronato Atlanticist order on foreign affairs that post Trump no longer holds. And also, as Seamus Mills successfully argued in the 2017 election, there is now sort of isolationist mood posted racking in British, among the British public, that means actually foreign interventionism isn't the flavor of the month. And you wonder whether, you know, to see the project at war over something that was so essential to Corbyn, if not Corbynism, you know, Corbyn stands on foreign affairs is very much not a very much not a reds under the bed sort of school of foreign affairs, as you might put it, you know, it's always been sort of more pro dialogue in that in that respect. So you wonder whether seeing that attention that fundamental at the heart of the project, seeing them dragged in all in all different directions, you know, so it's often said, of course, as we're calling from the left this period or Lotto or labour in this period is that they lost the insurgency, they lost the authenticity because they were pulled all over the place on Brexit and became a parliamentary party rather than the insurgent movement. And I think that make this may be one of those, one of those instances when the sort of soul of Corbynism was contested very publicly. And as Gabriel says, the conflict between Lotto and McDonald, you know, is emblematic of that in this particular moment. Yeah, I think one thing that sort of establishment media in this country hasn't really come to grips with or quite doesn't want to have the conversation is that when we have, you know, multiple terror attacks from the 2017 campaign, Jeremy Corbyn articulates a very unique by the standards of British political leaders, understanding of it and a response to it and his polling numbers go up and you might agree, you might disagree, but that was empirically what happened. And it feels and I personally think that's because he tapped into something within the broader general public, which like you say, is nobody wants boots in the ground abroad. I mean, we know that just from Ed Miliband voting, you know, against deployment intervention in Syria before Corbyn is even leader, that in itself was a momentous kind of historical moment for opposition to do that. And I do think he tapped into something and I think that it was a very brave position to have at the time. And I wonder, you know, if those attacks happened in a non electoral context, would the response have been different? I'm not seeking to compare Russia to that because I think actually they made a big misstep personally on Russia. That's not to say you start, you know, start saying, this was Vladimir Putin, this was ordered by the Kremlin. I think it makes sense to sort of want to be in receipt of all the facts before you make big declarations, especially with regards to a major power. But what I think it did say to the establishment, when I say the establishment, I'll be more succinct, you know, the power players, not only in the media and the Tory party, but even amongst, you know, ex-labor donors and so on. I think after 2017, they thought we could take this guy seriously. Okay, he can maybe be the prime minister. He's going to have to moderate a few things. That's fine. But look, he's an older guy. He's going to need a broad project. We've still got most of the Parliamentary Labour Party fundamentally, you know, they're going to hamstring anything we don't really like. There's many checks on him. And I think what he did over Russia was two things. Firstly, yes, it became a problem of political management. I don't think necessarily for the electorate was a big thing. It probably registered, but I think it was a huge thing. In terms of political management for the party, it was a disaster. And also, I think it was signaling, basically, to a lot of people, look, I'm really not willing to compromise one inch on a lot of things. And I think, you know, I think a lot of people would have said, you know what, we're willing to meet you halfway on quite a bit of this, but he wouldn't recognize that. That's by the by. What I think is really interesting, you both sort of mentioned there is the John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn Fisher. And that to me, I mean, we see this repeated in the book, I think it's really well documented, not just on the big issues like Brexit, you know, it was the big constitutional issue of our time, people didn't disagree on the Margaret Hodge disciplinary issue, on a bunch of things like that. And again, entirely entitled to disagree. But the fact that there was such public disagreements was quite new. And the genesis of that does seem to be Salisbury. Do you think that John McDonnell in 2018, did Salisbury trigger something in him? And why did he change? Because obviously, we're three years in now to the Corbyn project. He's not done this until now. I mean, why does he start to make these increasingly public interventions at odds with the leader's office? It's a great question. And, you know, as ever in the wilderness of mirrors is labor, you'll get different answers depending on who you ask. I mean, according to people who are close to Corbyn, you know, a number of people who are sympathetic to his stance on Salisbury, they say that Corbyn actually grew in confidence after the 2017 general election. Sure, him and John McDonnell, you know, friends and comrades, and I think they had actually expressly said they didn't want to mirror the TBGBs, the rouse between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown over the new labor years. And yet, you know, Corbyn did grow in confidence after that surprising election result. And there are some who think that John McDonnell basically couldn't deal with the fact that, you know, occasionally Corbyn would diverge from him. And ultimately, what Corbyn wanted was what Corbyn got with respect to the party's position. I mean, that probably is quite a kind of interpersonal analysis. I think the kind of political issue at play was that the liberation struggle that ultimately compelled John McDonnell was the liberation struggle, as we write, with the British working class. He was a guy who was obsessed with power and, you know, winning power in a country in order to bring Britain to the left, change the way the countries run, democratise power and wealth. Whereas Corbyn, you know, naturally always saw himself as the far left or the hard left, depending on what term you use. He saw himself as a left shadow foreign secretary. And on issues such as foreign policy, for him, the notion you don't die on the hill of Russia or antisemitism would have felt quite unnatural, I think, because the whole point is that he spent his career dying on that hill. He was chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. He was, you know, a torchbearer of the resistance to Iraq. If the left has this moment, moment of power, moment of influence, why not say what you think about foreign policy? We're not here to appease the Atlanticists, you know, the people who would have voted for airstrikes in Syria, the people who did vote for Iraq. Whereas I think John McDonnell's assessment was arguably more pragmatic. It was one of, well, listen, you know, we can help the Palestinian people when we're in office, but we're not going to get into office if we expend political capital and time on issues such as this. I mean, indeed, you know, after 2017, I think there was this feeling that, you know, it's quite rare in politics you get to define the debate and sure, you know, the majority of the time, it's going to be the government or the media who set the terms of the discussion in the country at large. What we have to do is we have to try to transcend that discussion or we've got to move on from it quickly. We're not going to gain anything from being mired in the debate on Russia. And I think there was a lot of frustration because of that. I mean, I can entirely understand the sort of political analysis there. So you're saying that somebody like McDonnell just wants to neutralise contentious issues of foreign policy to focus on the domestic agenda. But then that doesn't necessarily explain. So for instance, he was saying that, you know, members of the shadow cabinet shouldn't be going on Russia today. That's not, you know, that's just not his decision. That is in subordination. That's not his decision to make. If he said, it's my personal view, you know, but ultimately, it's down to the leader or it's a collective decision for the shadow cabinet or whatever, but he didn't say that. You know, he was often freelancing, quite radical, not radical, but ultimately, it's got, you know, it's regulated by offcom. It's allowed to broadcast in Britain. It's quite a radical thing for a British politician to say that doesn't mean anything. You know, I think if he said they, you know, their license should be reviewed or something, I mean, that's something else. So that in itself was quite significant. Then you've got, for instance, Margaret Hodge. And you actually, I think it's a nice, again, another vignette where you sort of clarify what happened. It wasn't necessarily as confrontation as people depict, but, you know, him intervening there. And I think, you know, for me personally, I think it's just a disciplinary issue. The older I get, the more I realize I quite like rules, you know, otherwise, anarchist politics, as you sort of, everybody has to internalize the rulemaking all the time. And some of my anarchist colleagues might get upset with me at the moment. But, you know, we have rules for a reason because otherwise we'd all, you know, we'd all go crazy. I read in Law and Order, Bastani. And I just feel like, you know, if somebody's being disciplined, you know, that's, that's a matter for the disciplinary process. And I think the more senior opposition I say, and Keir Starmer is a sort of politician who generally that's the kind of thing he would, he would say he has a respect for due process. And so when I saw McDonald do that, the Campbell interview, and of course the positioning on the, on the, on the second referendum, regularly he would have Mandelson and Campbell go to his office. On the one hand, I think that's absolutely true. He was trying to neutralize the foreign policy issues and Paul Mason says something similar. I think that's one of things that Paul makes sense on, actually, in the last couple of years. Sip Brass did something similar. I mean, that makes sense. But it does feel like the more you give these accounts of the relationship between Lotto and the Shadow Chancellor's office, it feels maybe there was a bit of jealousy there. I mean, that's how it strikes me. Either there was a bit of jealousy or not even necessarily jealousy. I'm the more talented politician. I know what's right, rather than necessarily saying, well, I think I know what's right. But ultimately, I have to refer to this guy because he is the leader. And it feels like McDonald lost that towards the end, increasing over 2018, 2019. Well, that's that's certainly what people close to Jeremy Corbyn would characterize it as that sort of, you know, John, you know, there's Carrie Murphy herself has said on the record and says in the epilogue of the book that the coup, which we'll get on to later that the Putsch and Corbyn's office that Carrie Murphy later engineered. No, sorry, John McDonald engineered against Carrie Murphy and not quite against Seamus Mill. Carrie Murphy suspects was driven by John McDonald's feeling that he couldn't influence Corbyn as much as he felt he was entitled to. Because Gabriel mentioned Tony Brown, Gordon Brown before, perhaps a better analogy here is George Osborne, David Cameron, right? Corbyn and McDonald were partners in an ideological project, just as Cameron Osborne were, you know, people used to refer to Cameron Osborne sort of as a joint premiership with one person as the front man, the other is the sort of M&R screens. I say that's probably a fair assessment of what people in lotto what people very close to Corbyn think John McDonald's perception of Corbyn and McDonald's relationship was. So as Gabriel said, and as as you correctly say, as that starts to diverge, it's no wonder people like Carrie Murphy say, well, obviously this is explained by John Luz's control. And part of I think that's that's also part of partly an explanation for why you have him saying, I'm going to vote remain in this referendum or with banning RT and frequently he'd be asked, why are you saying this when Jeremy Corbyn doesn't think it? I think a good way of, you know, you can explain it one of two ways. One is that McDonald realized that public pressure or electoral pressure would push them to that position anyway, and it'd be less painful for Corbyn to make that move if he'd already broken the ground, you know, a phrase you see as you know, he's like Jeremy Corbyn's Navi, he does the sort of backbreaking work of breaking the harplist ground and Corbyn sails through. Or I think if you're people close to Corbyn think, well, he's doing that, so we're hostages to fortune, we're doing that, so he has to follow John McDonald down the road. And obviously, you know, we can't see it inside of John McDonald's head. But I'd say that both of those explanations carry some weight, it's a new thing. Because he's an extraordinarily talented politician, I think most people would agree, I mean, it's a certain in the book, and I would certainly agree with it, John is the most talented sort of left-wing politician of his generation. And it reminds me of there was the anecdote from Barack Obama in I think 2008, he said, you know, I would be a better speech writer than my speech writers, I would be a better policy advisor than my policy advisors. And it feels like John McDonald maybe felt that was him. It's a bit like Barack Obama being a number two, running as a VP perhaps in 2008. I'm the one that's got the most to offer here. I guess, when do you think that became toxic? Because it feels like it became toxic in this kind of rivalry ultimately between McDonald's office and Corbyn's office. By early 2019, was there a particular moment where, as you say, this culminates in John McDonald, amongst others, saying we need a complete reconfiguration of the leader's office? So, I mean, to answer that question, I just want to briefly go back to the circumstances of Corbyn's initial leadership victory in 2015. I think part of the standing John McDonald's approach to the way that Lotto was run lies in the fact that, you know, naturally this won't be new to anybody that watches this channel, that, you know, Corbyn did not expect to win. He threw his hat into the ring because Dinahba had done it before. John McDonald had done it as well. We hear a lot about the phrase. It was his turn. And, you know, there are some, including those close to Corbyn, who say that it wasn't incidental that Corbyn won. Because, you know, naturally, McDonald couldn't have won because the PLP thought he was swivel-eyed, nasty trotskiest, whereas Corbyn was kind of avuncular and cuddly and harmless. You know, there are those close to Corbyn who say that nobody could have, you know, nobody was as much of an anti-politician as him, and therefore nobody could have inspired that kind of enthusiasm and sincerity from the grassroots. But, nevertheless, you do have this feeling that emanates from people who are close to McDonald who echo the fact that, well, yeah, it was his turn, but we were both marginalised over the decades. We've both been fighting a long, lonely fight. There's nothing kind of unique or exceptional to Corbyn other than happen to win, but we should jointly be the architects or kind of co-conveners of this. I mean, as you say, over time, it becomes clear that that's just not how the project is run. I think probably the key point at which this becomes, you use the word toxic, is the summer of 2018 because, basically, you know, McDonald took to telling people that if only they'd had one last week, if the 2017 election campaign had lasted for seven more days, they could have won based on where the polls were going at that time. They were agonising to be close to power. They were literally talking about what Corbyn's number 10 might look like in the days running up to the poll and possibility of bringing an unaccompanied migrant or refugee into Corbyn's Downing Street or redecorating the number 10 rose garden. You know, they could taste power. And so the summer after that, 2018, was about a big summer of pushing forward, making inroads into the red wall, extending labour's reach in kind of cosmopolitan areas where they'd done better than expected in 2017. And what did it become about instead? They were debating the accompanying examples of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. And I think that just inspired a fury from within. I mean, it's not just John McDonald. A lot of people were furious that they wasted this moment. I mean, how can that happen? The left is in touching distance of power and you then spend a summer, you know, answering questions about whether you're a Zionist or whether you think that Zionism and being pro-Palestine are mutually exclusive. Will Margaret Holt be expelled or suspended or not? I mean, it was just a waste of time. And I think there was so much frustration towards Lotto because of that. And I think with Brexit, it then never really recovered. Let's stick on the IHRA. I mean, I remember speaking to so many people at the time and they said, look, we just need to get all this down, agree all the examples, and it will be over. And I think the reason why people got, you know, why people stuck sort of to their guns on that was because I think they're quite rightly said. I mean, I said this at the time, I said, A, it won't be over. B, it shouldn't be over because people always, they'll always rightly, hopefully you want more complaints if this is an issue. And so I think that that's one reading in terms of sort of political and instrumental political logic. It was clearly ridiculous. On the other hand, if you think, well, look, this isn't going to go away. That's incredibly my own pick. I can see why that would happen. I mean, for me, the big problem with IHRA was get a position and stick to it. Either you're going to adopt it 100%. And I thought I could see either making sense. Personally, at the time I said, there's two examples, I agree actually with the Labour Party, you can reformulate them. Other organisations have done precisely that. But stick to it. And what Labour did, and this was something that persisted actually really across 2018-2019 was they get one position, they don't hold it, and then they buckle anyway. And so you lose a whole tonne of political capital, ultimately for nothing. And that was my sort of big concern with it. I don't know what you guys think about that. I think it's worth remembering actually that, and we do cover this in the book, that the Jenny Formie's credit, Jenny Formie was someone and lots of people on the right of the party will disagree with this. But I don't think anyone, particularly in the Jewish community, doubts, or in some Jewish community organisations, rather, doubt that Jenny Formie came in and sincerely wanted to tackle this problem. And part of the problem was she proposed this new code of conduct, thinking she had the backing of the Jewish Labour movement, and it turned out they'd sent two people who weren't in the position to agree with the new code of conduct went to the meeting with Jenny Formie, and thus the Pandora's box opened. But I also think, sort of like you say about finding a position and sticking to it, while Corbyn had already done that over his 40 years in politics, the most fundamental position to Corbyn's politics, and if you want to bring advisers into it, in Sheamus Mills' politics as well, is that they stood up for the Palestinian cause. And that was the primary, the racism they cared about, as much as everybody acknowledged anti-Semitism was a genuine probability. I think that's important. We assume good faith on everybody's part in this narrative, that nobody, and even Tony Blair, as well, we quote Tony Blair as saying, Tony Blair couldn't see the point in people leaving the Labour Party over anti-Semitism because it was clear that while Labour under Corbyn's leadership had a problem with anti-Semitism in some form, to say Labour was an anti-Semitic party, that had moved to an actively anti-Semitic position, notwithstanding the many Jewish people who came to genuinely fear, existentialist Jewish government, sorry, a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn. Even Tony Blair would say, well, Labour isn't an actively anti-Semitic party or hasn't moved to an anti-Semitic political position, so to leave Labour for that reason is sort of absurd, is what Tony Blair says. But Corbyn and people around in Sheamus Mills deeply cared about the Palestinian cause and didn't want to be seen to do something that enabled or muffled the rights of Palestinian people to complain about racism against them, the jittermised anti-Palestinian race, inadvertently the jittermised anti-Palestinian racism. So that was, yeah, that was the starting point. But also, I think that was a recognition, as you say, that this necessarily wasn't the hill to die on. But because that was so fundamental to a lot of people's politics, and Kerry Murphy again says this on the record, you know, this wasn't imposed on the party by her or even by Sheamus, it was something so fundamental to Jeremy Corbyn's politics. But as you say, over the course of the summer, it was so obvious Labour were going to move one by one the unions and the people who made up the seats on the NEC. They fell, and by the end of the summer, you have Len McCluskey sort of saying, Jewish community leaders are guilty of truculent hostility on this towards the Labour Party, sort of fulminating an inimitable Len style. And at the end of the interview, he says, well, and obviously we're going to have to adopt full IHRA now, because, you know, why, because that's the political wind is blowing in one direction. And I think that was part, as you say, that was what was so corrosive is that it was a sort of summer of, you know, pain and very public disputes within and without the Labour Party, where you had Jeremy Corbyn pitted against the minority community, Jeremy Corbyn arguing publicly with Benjamin Netanyahu, that was pulling constituent bits of the Corbyn-Ike coalition in different directions, but everybody sort of knew quite early on where Labour were going to end up, which was saying in early September, we accept full IHRA. And as you say, if politics, for better or worse, was going to demand that, I think there was a lot of frustration among some people, why didn't we start there? Because we don't get any credit for ending up there after being hauled over the coals publicly. But ultimately, Jeremy Corbyn had, as much as it pains a lot of people in the Labour Party and outside the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn had a consistent and coherent political and philosophical case of being uneasy about that definition and its examples, well, not the definition of the examples. And indeed, as you say, you know, the Home Affairs Select Committee, Majority and Conservative MPs at the time, and also had said a similar thing. You know, it's fine to amending the examples wasn't sort of unheard of, but I think just the way Labour handled that, as you say, so haphazardly meant maximise the pain. And to do so publicly as well was not helpful. And I think this sort of ties into what we were just talking about previously with regards to John McDonnell. I mean, John McDonnell, and we'll talk about this shortly in regards to the attempted defenestration of Tom Watson. I was talking to somebody and I said, wow, I'm really surprised that what's happened here with regards to the Tom Watson episode and John McDonnell. And they said, well, look, you have to understand, John is a politician, right? John is a politician. Jeremy isn't. And I think this, to understand so much of why people are behaving in the ways that they are, the various outcomes, the various enmities, a lot of it can be just explained by that. And I think it's Jeremy Corbyn's fundamental strength and weakness was he wasn't a politician. That's why people like him. And that's also ultimately why he wasn't capable of providing the political management in a non-electro context. The minute there wasn't an election, Jeremy Corbyn's party management just generally just kind of was not great. Tom Watson, did Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell know about the attempts by members of the party's NEC to abolish the position of deputy leader ahead of the 2019 Labour Party Conference? Yes. And I mean, I think to say yes is to allied the fact that there had been multiple attempts from within Lotto to get rid of him earlier. Some say that they never did it because John McDonnell was happy to have Watson onside advocating a second referendum. But by 2019, the conference, it was clear there was perhaps never going to be a better opportunity. So in terms of what actually happened, I mean, the night before the Friday of conference, Carrie Murphy and John McDonnell had an exchange over text in which Murphy in short said, we've got Watson's head on a block. We're ready to decapitate him. See you tomorrow type thing. And John McDonnell's response according to these texts was to say great Teehee, exclamation mark. So it seems pretty clear to us that he was aware of what was happening. It is quite difficult to decode where Corbyn was on the issue. He certainly knew there was this plan, but a word which a lot of people used to describe him by this stage in 2019 is that he'd become quite Delphic. It was difficult to establish what he did or didn't want. And there were people going into his hotel room in Brighton. There had been people calling him in a fortnight prior to conference saying, well, do you actually want to do this? I mean, frankly, it's amazing that they ever did do it to relinquish the opportunity of a great conference before a general election in order to deliver the coop to grass and get rid of Tom Watson. I mean, it seems to be, I think Ed Miliband said that whoever had decided to do this had taken leave of their censors. I think that that is pretty clear in retrospect. But I think Corbyn Omdenard, he saw the appeal of getting rid of Watson and replacing him with a number of vice chairs like the Tory party has. And I mean, in the end, I think literally hours before the meeting itself, he did decide actually, let's not do this because the distraction is going to create, won't be worth getting rid of Watson. At which point it is said that the left on the NEC basically turned round and said, no, we've been waiting our whole lives to do this. You can't just click your fingers and expect that the NEC or the left NEC is going to do something different with moments to go. We're going to do it. And what we're going to do is we'll, you know, we'll get in your ear moments before we hear extraordinary motion. So you can leave and, you know, subsequently look down the barrel of the camera and say, I wasn't there for what was happening. I didn't vote on it. I didn't know what was going on. Mildly farcically, I think that as Corbyn left, he whispered in the ear of John Lansman thanking him for a Rosh Hashanah that is the Jewish New Year video that he recorded a few weeks earlier. And it is understood that Lansman took this as benediction for the Watson plan itself. He thought that if Jeremy's whispering, thanking me for this, for this video I did, he must be broadly associated with what he's happening with where I am right now. Therefore, let's do it. So did they know about it? Yes. Did they want it to happen unclear? And I think that, you know, the notion that they're nothing to it at all is ludicrous based on the fact that the people who did it, say that they spoke to them before the event and had been planning on doing it for months. I mean, I was aware that Jeremy was kind of, didn't know about it, but he may have known about it kind of thing. I had no idea about the claim in regards to John McDonald knowing. But it was one of many, many interesting anecdotes in the book actually. And that wasn't the only hiccup ahead of last year's Labour Party conference. You had, of course, the leaking of Andrew Fisher, the chief policy adviser to Jeremy Corbyn. It wasn't just sort of him leaving, it was a very clear declaration of why he was leaving. I mean, it's remarkable, isn't it, to have these self-inflicted own goals by the left ahead of a conference where you've got a Tory party, at that time it was still in real disarray. You had the proroguing of parliament, although they did have a deal by this point. You've got a general election around the corner. Did people not think that these perhaps weren't the smartest of moves? I mean, just people can talk about the media being hostile and which I think is incontrovertible, but there were a lot of avoidable own goals, weren't there? Well, in one respect, yes, but I think it's important to understand motive. So, for instance, you can say IHRA was a horrific summer of a self-imposed own goal, and especially the public spats between Jeremy Corbyn and John MacDonald. But both sides of that argument were acting in good faith where there was a political point to the way they were behaving. They think the position I'm trying to arrive at is a net benefit to the Labour Party. It's politically useful for the Labour Party or politically right for the Labour Party to be in this position. And the same is true of the Andrew Fisher thing. So, Andrew Fisher didn't write his very long and pretty fiery resignation note in which he said Labour can't win an election. Lotto is a blizzard of lies and excuses, lack of basic human decency among colleagues. He shared that among a group of close colleagues and then said this can't go any further. It was very swiftly deleted. He didn't, it wasn't for public consumption. But the reason somebody leaked that to The Sunday Times was because they wanted to take out Seamus Milne because they thought it was so transparently about Seamus Milne. But they thought, well, this will really screw over Seamus and the project will be in a better place if we get rid of Seamus. So, well, I mean, for maximum, for maximum damage. And obviously, maybe if you think two steps ahead, and maybe that's a consistent theme in this book, people think don't think two steps ahead or maybe they're rather they're thinking three steps ahead rather than the one step ahead. They think this will exert maximum damage on Seamus and make his position untenable. And that will be that. And then we'll be in a better place. The ultimate result will be we're a more functional team or whatever. When actually, as you say, as you correctly identify, the net result is, well, there's a load of disciplining headlines on the first morning of Jeremy Corbyn's last conference before a really decisive general election in which the story of the day is Corbynite dysfunction. The most senior Corbynite, the guy who was a Corbynite before the term was even coined. Thanks, Jeremy Corbyn, can't win a general election rather than, and obviously that's the way it's consumed politically rather than, you know, Lotto, criminology thinking, oh, God, this really throws into doubt the decision change within Lotto, things cannot go on. Even though that was actually the net result, it sort of precipitated a real organization of Lotto in real money, as it were. It just made the project look completely disorganized and dysfunctional, which is by that stage, it arguably was. How did this happen? I mean, you convey it really well in the book. It's just towards the end. I mean, you know, it was obvious from the outside looking in. I mean, the broader context was British politics generally was in meltdown. So, you know, just isolating on that one particular thing wasn't what we were all doing. But how does that happen? How do you go from full to center general election, which obviously requires anybody who gets full to center general election requires, you know, very good project management, very good, you know, coherent teams. They've got a common kind of objective, pulling together a great team ethic. How do you go from that? Something so phenomenal, something so without precedent in recent history. I mean, it is unprecedented under a left leadership in the party to arguably the most dysfunctional, chaotic team around a senior political leader in this country, arguably ever. How does that happen? Where does blame lie? I think that part of what Labour did in 2017 that was so brilliant was it transcended Brexit. When Theresa May called that election, a lot of the broadcasters were relatively compliant. They characterised it in the framing on the news channels as the Brexit election. What Corbyn did very effectively was he called Theresa May's bluff. He basically said, actually, you've got a parliamentary majority. You can't justify calling this election in order to strengthen your hand in Brussels. I'm going to fight this contest on the terrain which suits me. The difficulty was that by 2019, it was almost impossible to avoid the terrain of Brexit. And it was a kind of perilous issue for the party. There had been attempts for them to resolve it earlier on. We've got this memo in which Andrew Murray, in the wake of 2017, said, we've got the DUP and the ERG on one side. We've got the Romaniacs on the other. Let's come through the middle, look like we're sensible, and put forward a kind of soft, compromised Brexit that this parliament can pass. Dian Abbott derided it as the Jeremy, or rather the Ramsay-McCorbyn plan, referenced to Ramsay McDonald having done a deal with the Conservatives around the time of the Great Depression. But basically, they didn't resolve Brexit. And so as time went on, the personal and the political divide within Corbyn's office widened and kind of fueled each other. There was probably a kind of correct assessment on behalf of John McDonald that it wasn't going to be possible to go into a general election without having attempted to resolve the divide over Brexit. Probably the greatest mishap is the fact that he decided to intervene so late. I mean, to be doing this in a run-up to a party conference, we knew there would be a general election in September, October, the latest December, was probably a kind of criminal mismanagement. And I mean, I'm not pointing the finger at John McDonald personally. I mean, a lot of people within Lotto would have to do some solemn introspection as well. I mean, the person that leaked that Andrew Fisher resignation note, they summoned the political editor of the Sunday Times for a furtive brush buy and a costar in Westminster in order to give them this letter so that it would cause the greatest combustion possible at this all-important party conference. And, you know, this reckoning was probably inevitable, but it just happened way, way too late. And the personal and political had fested so much by that point that it's quite hard to imagine the general election, I mean, which Labour could have once again transcended Brexit and summoned the kind of levity and optimism of two years previously. So you think it was undoubtedly the sort of broader political context which explains the difference in outcomes? Because again, what comes through the book, and I think Paul says it, towards the end of the ultimately Jeremy Corbyn has state responsibility for the result. And I would agree with that absolutely 100% if that probably hasn't come through what we've said so far. That's also what I think. And what comes across in the book is Jeremy Corbyn's just inability sometimes to make quite hard decisions. And very frequently that's outsourced to Carrie Murphy, for instance. And so she comes in for a bit of a she'll get attacked or denigrated by other people, but at times it was almost pathological, the inability to make quite tough decisions. I mean, you talk about, for instance, his private secretary, this amazing episode, I haven't put this in the notes, but I mean, it's a really interesting kind of anecdote about his private secretary. She seems to think she's basically got an executive director role. She's like a personal advisor. And she accompanies him to meet the head of MI5, is it? Was it five or six? It was both. Okay, yeah. But the interesting thing, the root of that feeling of sort of defiance towards the lotto order was precisely because there was a feeling of resentment within lotto that Carrie Murphy had taken too much power. But as you correctly identify, the reason Carrie Murphy ultimately was so powerful was because there was a vacuum where quick executive decision making was meant to be. I mean, people close to Jeremy Corbyn recall that in the wake of the 2017 results, the people close to him started going to training sessions at the Institute of the Government because they were so close to forming the government or Theresa May could have formed at any time so the conventional wisdom went then. They needed to get ready for the business of running the country. So Jeremy Corbyn was provided, I can't remember whether this is in the book, but Jeremy Corbyn was provided with a sort of a mock red box. It said, part of being prime ministers, you have to make 20 decisions sort of before breakfast. So practice this. And close age tried to practice it with Jeremy. And he, and people say to his credit, he's a peaceable, very kind man who loads confrontation. And frankly, in this period was a bit of a ditherer. So finally he struggled to even do the sort of mock exercise of 20 mock decisions a day. And as you say, over time, the political context becomes so much more febrile and it also tears apart the project at its core. People are being dragged in opposite directions on Brexit and much else besides. And it's important to remember how close knit this group of people was. When the coup, the chicken coup, as people remember it, the PLP coup 2016 was raging, the decision to fight on was taken at United States coup and only seven people were in that meeting. That was how small the nucleus of this project was. And over time, because of Brexit, even that small group was being torn apart. And obviously at the center of this, Jeremy Corbyn, the only man binding it all together, already pathologically averse to confrontation, didn't like disappointing friends, was prone to tell people, according to those who spoke to him or tried to influence in this period, prone to giving people the impression that he'd agreed to their impassioned appeal for something or other when really he'd done no such thing. Of course, that was going to exert more tension on Jeremy Corbyn. It was more tension on any political leader. But for a political leader who already didn't like this aspect of leadership, it was always going to be disastrous. Yeah, I think that's the big takeaway from me. Speaking of leaders, when did Keir Starmer decide that he wanted to replace Jeremy Corbyn, do you think, as Labour Party leader? I think that there's this point where you start seeing Keir Starmer in his suit, but nevertheless in the streets. There was this people's vote rally in Parliament Square where he spoke alongside John McDonnell and Diane Abbott. And I think, for many people, that kind of crystallised the fact that Keir Starmer was on manoeuvres. Because he's a former DPP, suited former Barrister, not the kind of guy that typically is pounding the pavement with campaign group MPs. I think probably a vital turning point was that conference of 2018. It is disputed whether he always knew he was going to say, rooting out Remain on the ballot paper, or whether he said it, because Len McCoskey had seemingly defied what had been agreed the night before. But I mean, a lot of people kind of traced Starmer's leadership back to this moment where he says before Labour conference, nobody's rooting out Remain on the ballot paper in the event of second referendum. And by all accounts, his team was shocked by the fact that he elicited this standing ovation. And in that moment, I think a lot of people around Starmer thought, well, wow, I mean, who else could do that? Who else would have the authority to do that? Who has the position on Brexit that would enable them to say and get away with that? I think, frankly, there just wasn't that much planning on the left for the eventual succession. Because so much drive and resource have been dedicated to merely preserving Corbyn's own leadership. And so certainly, beyond 2018, I think there are a lot of other people that wanted Starmer to run. And we do reveal in the book that Paul Lason did put forward this idea in the summer of 2019 that Keir Starmer might need to lead an interim government in national unity. And he did, Starmer himself did spend a lot of time in the 2019 general election campaign, marginalized. He wasn't asked to do big events with Corbyn. His team grumbled that he was basically told to be quiet and stay in London. And so he did. He just banned his leadership campaign in the meantime. So a lot of time has been gathering in the House of Conky Bassie with the IPPR think tank. Paul Lason was there a lot of the time as well. And they were together kind of answering some of the big questions as to what was needed to win a campaign. What's interesting for me is that, and this is why I'm worried that Keir Starmer isn't actually that interested in power. And people might be sort of, that's a bit of a strange thing to say, is I always, I've always been hugely impressed by Tom Kebassie. I mean, he's been on the Vara Media. I thought he had a very good position on Brexit, the idea of the shared market and so on, not the single market. And he was never offered a job. And I find this interesting. You talk about it in the book, it's towards the end. I think I tweeted about it a couple of weeks ago, Laura Parker, Tom Kebassie, Paul Mason, these kind of left figures. At this point, Laura Parker is still the head of momentum remarkably, assisting Keir Starmer in advance of him launching this leadership bid. Yet none of them have jobs with Keir Starmer. And I find this particularly interesting. Kat Fletcher is another one as well. I don't think she's inside the tent anymore. And so what does this tell us? Well, firstly, I feel like those characters have possibly been used by Keir Starmer. That's obviously not for me to decide, but that's how it appears. But in the case of Tom Kebassie, you think he's a hugely impressive guy. He's been at McKinsey, so the Labour right and all that kind of, that milieu of people are going to naturally like him. And yet he's not offered a position. And I feel like it's perhaps because he's actually a threat. So I throw this back over to you, I guess. Why wouldn't other people that you've talked about as kind of coming from the left, helping Starmer become the leader? Why wouldn't other them offered positions? Well, that's the million-dollar question. And I think it gets to the core of what was Keir Starmer's leadership campaign for. Who was it for? And obviously, a character we analysed in some depth is the man who's now Keir Starmer's chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, who ran a very different leadership campaign in 2015, Liz Kendall's. And then spent the ensuing years heading up Labour together, trying to work out a sort of language in which you could speak to an overwhelmingly Corbynite membership about the values every Labour Party member shares, or most Labour Party members shares, regardless of their views on PFI or rail franchising or foreign intervention. You know, the McSweeney thesis is that actually Labour members think in broad-based values. And that was the sort of language Keir Starmer thought. But I think a phrase we use is, you know, to McSweeney, the point of that campaign was to marginalise Corbynism without Corbynite members knowing it. Or without sort of anti-austerity Corbynite membership thinking it. And obviously, if you look at the Labour together, election post-mortem, it does say retain the economic radicalism, not that we've seen very much of that from Keir Starmer. But I think there is definitely, and I think, you know, Gabriel might agree with this, that I think among people who were around the Starmer campaign but didn't necessarily end up in the leader of the opposition's office, there is a degree of resentment about the way the cards fell in the end. But I mean, there is also to a certain extent what do people expect from a leadership campaign run by Morgan McSweeney, who is on the evidence of this mandate an incredibly talented guy. But he's not of the left of the Labour Party, even if he believes that, you know, there's a broad base of Labour members who broadly agree with the same thing, regardless of whether they voted for Corbyn in 2015 or whether they voted for David Miliband in 2010 or indeed whether they actually went to the Labour Party until 2017. So the short answer is, it's almost too early to tell. But to say it was a campaign by the left for the left, obviously there was a significant Corbyn left input into this campaign, would be a misnomer. I mean, and it was very effective that it looked like, in many ways, the continuity campaign, like there were two kinds of continuity in this election. There was institutional continuity as represented by the RLB campaign and almost sort of not necessarily ideological continuity, but sort of, you know, Keir was carrying forward the 2015-2017 agenda and, you know, RLB was the candidate of the project, as it were. Yeah. I mean, I was just also going to say, just on a very personal level address your question, I know that a lot of these people are surprised and mighty fucked off about the fact that they've not been off the jobs. Peter Mandelson very memorably said to us, whoever created Morgan McSweeney deserves their place in heaven, which might tell you a little bit about McSweeney's own kind of political heritage. And, you know, as Patrick said, he spent a lot of the time between 2015 and 2019 thinking very hard about how to build a vehicle to succeed Corbyn and bring the party back towards what he would regard as kind of sensible, centre-left democratic socialism. But yeah, I mean, a lot of people feel like they've had the wool pulled over their eyes. I don't know whether this is a little scooplet for Navarra media. I do gather my people in Lotto do say that Kat Fletcher, who worked on both of Corbyn's leadership campaigns, may soon be returning to Southside. But yeah, Laura Parker, National Organiser of Momentum, Tonki Bassey from my IPPR, a nowhere to be seen. And that's super interesting. And it does pose a question as to who the campaign was for, as it was certainly by, a lot of pretty serious people on the left. Yeah, I think the best way to understand this, Tom, I think you did a fantastic job, like you said, continuity Corbynism. It's Corbynism in 2017, but I can win. Right. And I'm going to neutralise all these attack lines. And a lot of people bought that. And it's a very compelling message. Then on the other hand, you've got Rebecca Long-Bailey. I just want to finish with Rebecca Long-Bailey, really. Why was that campaign so bad? I mean, ultimately, she got less than 30% of the vote. She wasn't a particularly bad candidate. You know, she's, you know, she's the only politician really who's taken Rishi Sunak to task in the last couple of years. She's a relatively good public speaker. She's got good policy chops on her and so on. She had credibility when it came to the Green New Deal, for instance. What was that campaign so bad compared to the runaway success of the Keir Starmer campaign, do you think? I mean, bluntly, because it didn't exist for two weeks after Jeremy Corbyn lost the election, at least two weeks after Jeremy Corbyn lost the election, you know, people who worked on that campaign were called turning up sort of well after Keir Starmer has started motoring. And there's no logo. There's no slogan. There's no sense of what they're going to do and where, you know, early on, aides walk out over the perceived, you know, the perceived excessive control John Lansman had over the operation. But I mean, bluntly, it was just a lack of organization, a lack of succession plumbing. Like Keir Starmer is looking at spreadsheets and whoring over PowerPoints, talking about, you know, which segments of the membership think what. And, you know, here's the 5% that still think Iraq was a great idea. You know, you're not going to win them. Here's the chunk you're going to win. Whereas, you know, Long Bailey, as his only human after a grueling election campaign that's been personally and politically painful, went on holiday after the election. That's not to say, you know, Long Bailey was wrong to do that. It's a testament to the fact that the left weren't necessarily, you know, didn't have a plan nailed on, that there, the woman who was obviously spoken of as their successor, doesn't it, for the whole of the 2017 parliament is on holiday when Keir Starmer is really, is already hiring people and, you know, has a fully functioning campaign. And then obviously you have the public will he won't see Ian Lavery in Lavery episode. And then, I mean, I mean, this, this represented the extent to which there was the project, the Corbyn project had sort of fractured and was unclear on what it wanted from the moment, let alone the future. You have the bizarre Barry Gardner two days where Barry Gardner is pondering allowed the fact where the Len McCluskey wants him to run. Obviously Barry Gardner insists at the time that, you know, sources close to Barry Gardner brief that Len McCluskey had asked Barry Gardner to run. Both Barry Gardner and Len McCluskey denied that. But the very fact that this conversation was happening in public, betrayed the fact there had been no thorough succession planning. And that, bluntly, is a big part of the reason why, because Keir Starmer had already got out there with his video of a Yorkshire minor, with a video of him talking about being on the picket line at whopping. Keir Starmer had detoxified himself, taken on all the arguments about himself. You know, Brecht, he said, let's get Brecht. He done essentially said, you know, yes, I'm a very wealthy lawyer, but here are all the progressive causes I work for. All the while, Becky Lombelli was nowhere to be seen. Through no fault of her own, if the project had been serious about winning the succession, they should have had a plan. And people who worked on that campaign say, there was no plan. We're going to end it there, Chaps. I mean, it's a fantastic book. I mean, it's important to say as well, because you came under some heat for Oat Cate Gates. It's a first draft, and actually, I think you put it very well at the beginning of the book. This is the first draft of history, a bit like the Tim Shipman books and relations to the Tories in the context of Brecht's hit. It's very good. It's very readable. I would recommend it to anybody who wants to know more about the last three years in particular, in regards to the internal political machinations that are overcast. Is there anything else you, Chaps, would like to say before we let you get on with the rest of the day? Where can people find you on Twitter? What are your handles? What is the next project? I'm at Patrick K. McGuire. People ask us whether we want to write a Starmer book next. I don't think there's... It's to Kier Starmer's credit. It's a testament to his current political strategy that I don't think either of us would know where to start on the inner life of the Starmer leadership, because they're betraying so little. So maybe give us a couple of years and we'll work on that. But we've got a paperback of this book to get our teeth into. So all additional colour on the period gratefully received. Testimony is if people want to challenge the recollections of others, please do. We've got a paperback to write. We did this Romaniacs podcast the other day and they asked us whether there were any causes that we wanted to give a shout out to. I think virtuous guests on the podcast are allowed to say this is my favourite charity. It probably doesn't flatter me or Patrick that we are such amoral reporters-reporters that we sort of said, you know what, we'll let other people promote particular charities today too. But I think what I'm trying to say is that we tried to approach this, but from that perspective of being kind of reporters-reporters, we weren't necessarily trying to take anybody's side or make a wider moral point. I don't think either of us necessarily have particularly big politics as it were. And so, you know, it's lovely that you recognise that we've tried to do it in an even-handed way. And, you know, we welcome thoughts, criticism, leaked WhatsApps and anything else that the Navarro audience would like to send our way. So no, thank you so much for having us on. My pleasure. It's critical that we get the historical record depicting the fact that reality is often far strange than fiction. Good luck with the paperback and thanks for joining us on the Navarro media.