 Welcome to Tiskey Sauer. We are back and hopefully we're going to give you live updates about a Shadow Cabinet reshuffle, although it's all pretty ambiguous at the moment. If you've been online in the last 24 hours or indeed watched our show last night, you'll know that Keir Starmer has lit a bomb in the centre of the Labour Party by sacking Angela Reina, the deputy leader, someone who has an elected position. He can't get rid of her and also someone who's quite popular in the party. He's tried to blame her for the election defeat rallying around his political secretary, Jenny Chapman, and it's all gone horribly, horribly wrong. It's, I mean, an exercise in ineptitude from the Labour leader. We're going to be talking about all of that, taking you through the sequence of events as it all developed last night and this morning a complete fuss, all of it, and we will be interrupting whenever we hear if any more positions have been announced, if any more reshuffles, shifting of jobs have been announced. So you will hear it here first. I am joined, of course, by Aaron Bastani. How are you doing, Aaron? I'm very well, Michael. Can you hear me loud and clear as my picture and focus? I can hear you loud and clear. You look amazing. Beautiful. Thank you. Somebody actually said last night that they asked if I'd had Botox, which I think really is a testament to, to producer Fox's audiovisual skills, because no, I have not. But thank you. Kindest thing somebody's said to me in months. But there would be no shame if you did, Aaron. Of course not. I'm very modern about these things. Absolutely. I completely agree, Michael. If you haven't already, do hit that subscribe button. We go live. Well, I say we go live three times a week. We've gone live five times in the last week because there's just so much going on, which is why it is especially important to sign up for those notifications. That means you know if there's an emergency show like today, because usually someone with a very powerful position has done something very stupid. That tends to be the running thread when it comes to these emergency shows. Right. Let's talk you through the chronology of the last 24 hours, because it's, it's entertaining. It's ridiculous. It's farcical. And you only really understand how ridiculous it is when you go through the series of events as we all did when we were watching it live. So about 7pm yesterday, Keir Starmer, or it was briefed to the press, anyone who made the call that Angela Reiner was going to be sacked as party chair and chief of campaigns. The idea was that because Labour had done bad in a campaign, she had to take the hit. He was clearly trying to scapegoat Angela Reiner. We're going to take you through the tweets that surrounded that announcement from various political journalists who were clearly getting, you know, WhatsApp messages from people in Keir Starmer's office. It probably doesn't surprise you that we at Navarra Media don't get many WhatsApps from Keir Starmer's chief advisers. So that's why we're telling you this through the prism of people who work for the Times and the Mirror. And we're going to start with Patrick Maguire. So this was 7.06pm. So it just been briefed that she'd been sacked. And Patrick Maguire tweets, Steve Reed tipped by one Labour source as a likely candidate to succeed Reiner as party chair, trusted by Lotto. So that's leader of the oppositions, leader of the opposition. Sorry. Did the post Hartley Paul broadcast round and very close to Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff. Steve Reed, not particularly memorable character, but you might have caught him on Friday's show because he was one of the people who was sent out to put forward that completely ridiculous line that Labour were rebuilding under Keir Starmer, even though the vote share had gone backwards. So clearly what was going on here, the idea it seemed from people who were close to the leader of the opposition was that they wanted someone who could be trusted to say whatever ridiculous lines they'd fed them that day. Steve Reed was one of those people. So it seems he was being tipped to become party chair. Who was going to be next? So the briefing at this point was that it wasn't just going to be Angela Reiner. There was going to be a cull of people at the top of the party who were disloyal to Keir Starmer. So Pippa Crerar from the Mirror tweeted, hearing from one Shad Cab minister that Lisa Nandi is definitely next to be sacked because people around Keir think she's disloyal. Nandi stood against Starmer for leadership. So trust is low in some quarters, but many would feel it's a crazy move as she's one of the best communicators. Now, we're going to go to some of the briefings about why this happens. So obviously, when Keir Starmer, his team, they want to get a message across. We sacked Angela Reiner. This is the story. This is what we want you to be writing. So they're obviously furiously messaging all of the lobby journals, and we can sort of see their explanations via them. So Lewis Goodall from the BBC tweets at 8 p.m. Labor source telling a different story saying that this is a part, this is partly about extreme displeasure within Lotto about certain figures briefing, the people who have spent the election campaign not so subtly briefing against their own side and staff should be worried. He goes on, also told there has been significant criticism of Reiner internally about her performance as campaign chair. Whatever the truth of it, whether this was the moment is quite another matter. So he's obviously editorialising there, but for good reason, because this was a terrible, terrible moment to sack one of the most, you know, the second most important person in the party when Keir Starmer was already struggling with his legitimacy because they performed appallingly in these elections and he decides just actually when some decent results were trickling in to sack Angela Reiner. Presumably, he thought people would be impressed. They would say, oh, this is decisive action. He's saying Angela Reiner was briefing against him and he wasn't very, and she wasn't very good at the job. That's what they're, they're briefing. And so he's sacked her. He was presumably expecting a round of applause. It didn't quite happen. A bit more colour to why they were briefing against Angela Reiner, what she had supposedly done wrong. And this is Gabriel Pogrin from The Times. Source close to Starmer says he has personally been very upset by negative briefings about Jenny Chapman, his political secretary. They say he has already indicated as much at Shadow Cabinet. Ally of Reiner says she has no relationship with Chapman, but is denying briefings. The picture that's being painted here. Angela Reiner briefs against the leadership. She's briefing against his political secretary, which Starmer is very upset about, and she wasn't very good at managing the campaign. So a real picture, a real negative picture being painted by people around Keir Starmer to justify her sacking. I'm Sam Coats at Sky. One option to replace Angela Reiner as Labour Party Chairman is West Street. That's the other person who was going out saying completely ridiculous things on Friday. And then in terms of who else was going to be moved, we thought at this time. And Rachel Wimmer from The Huffington Post, another Labour source confirms a reshuffle is ongoing. However, it sounds like this is how it may shape up. Demotions, Annalise Dodds, Lisa Nandy, John Ashworth and Nick Brown Promotions, West Streeting, Rachel Reeves, Jess Phillips, Sarah Jones and Steve Reed. Some of the more context about people briefing against Sandra Reiner, they were saying she took first class trains. And my favourite tweet, actually, let's go straight to graphic nine, Fox, which is from Patrick McGuire from The Times, the shadow cabinet source on sackings to come. People engaging in sustained briefing against staff who can't defend themselves should be looking over their shoulders. We're going to go to the screeching U-turn in one moment. First of all, Aaron, I want your commentary on, I mean, this series of briefings that was coming from Keir Starmer's team or sources close to him. I mean, it really did sound like they're all kind of coked up, right? You know, you better watch your back. They sound like they're from this position of like hubris and strength after they've just had, you know, a historic defeat. It was really, really difficult to fathom what the hell they were thinking. Well, you can never, you know, you can never write off substance misuse. I don't think that's the case here. No, I don't think that's the case here, but you can't write it off. You can't write it off. And also, you know, alcohol and sleep deprivation can do something a bit similar and obviously high stress. But yeah, the sources, you think, well, West Treating might be the party chair. Who's briefing that West Treating? What other Labour MP would have the lack of self-respect to do that on his behalf? West Treating? I mean, A, chair. But I think you're overestimating the people in Kirstalmer's team, because you're saying, well, how could someone be so, you know, ridiculous as to suggest that someone of West Treating's statue could become party chair? Obviously, Kirstalmer is surrounded by political minnows who don't understand anything. So, you know, I've got no idea who this was, but if it's Morgan McSweeney or Jenny Tatman or whoever, you can perfectly imagine them thinking that West Treating as party chair is actually a perfectly plausible scenario. I mean, you're right. I mean, these are the people who, you know, Morgan McSweeney was the gentleman who ran Liz Kendall's leadership campaign in 2015. Famously got four and a half percent of the vote. These are people who famously believed that a second referendum was a vote winner despite the fact that leave won the first time round in over 400 seats. So, yeah, I guess you're right. But I, you know, the credibility of these sources, you know, I can't imagine are they all coming from Lotto really? I mean, on the one hand, if that is the case, then that's terrifying. And yeah, they really aren't going to hold on very long. Or it may just be that journalists, there's somebody on WhatsApp, it might be, it might just be an ex-advisor, it might be a labor lord, it might even be something like Peter Mandelson saying it. So, if it's not on the record, who knows, because this is what labor excel at. And we saw it with Jeremy Corbyn, particularly in the first year that he was labor leader, when you had a cabinet which was very mixed, you had the knives out constantly from everybody all the time. And it does feel like we're in a similar moment now, but rather than attack the leader, they're attacking the members, the electorate, and most of their parliamentary colleagues. So we'll see. But maybe these things will firm up. But I just find the whole thing strange. There were two other names as well, with Kat Smith and Andy McDonald, who were floating around. So you just think, wait, hold on, you've got Ashworth, Rainer, Kat Smith, McDonald. I mean, this is like you're really uniting 90% of the parliamentary party against you here. Lisa Nandi. Very, very odd. Lisa Nandi and Angela Rainer should be the last two people, I don't agree with a word that comes out of Lisa Nandi's mouth. But from a sort of internal and external political perspective, these are the last people you should be getting rid of, giving you just lost a by-election in Hartlepool. I mean, completely bizarre. And obviously, our reaction to this was sort of disbelief. And it wasn't just us. So I think I assume that if you're going to give out these briefings, you're expecting that it's going to piss off the left of the party and impress the lobby, impress the right wingers in the Labour Party. Basically, no one was willing to come out and say this was a good idea. Everyone was saying, what the hell is going on here? Just a few tweets for you to show some of the reactions to this decision to sack Angela Rainer unceremoniously on the day when actually a few good results were coming in, some sort of consolation prizes. Josh Halliday, who is North England correspondent and guardian tweeted, anger and disbelief in the Labour Party over Angela Rainer sacking. It's a clear mistake to fire someone who speaks like the people we need to talk to, says one source. It's all kicking off. It's a huge mistake from a bunch of snobs who don't like how she speaks. Gabriel Pogrant tweets that a Labour source says, sacking Angela to save Jenny s arse is a very, very stupid thing to have done. This will cause civil war and Keir will lose it. The Jenny there being referenced is Jenny Chapman, so Keir Starmer s political secretary who, as you saw in those tweets before, people were saying, Keir is very upset when people brief against Jenny Chapman and presumably they're in line to be fired. The final commentary we're going to get from our Labour sources via these political journalists, Tim Shipman from The Time tweets, this is my favourite one, an old Labour chum messages, the man is as fucking stupid as he is boring. Tim Shipman had a few tweets that were going very viral last night. Not all of them we can talk about, but they did add some flavour to the Twitter discourse last night. And actually, I'm going to go to you in one moment because first I'm going to say this led directly to the screeching U-turn. Let's go straight to the screeching U-turn. So Rachel Wim of all of this, obviously they completely freak out when this happens. Rachel Wim are from The Huffington Post at 10.14pm. Sound of screeching breaks, I'm hearing the reshuffle may have stalled because of the backlash to Angela Reign is sacking. And then they're completely be like, oh, shit, this has gone horribly wrong. We didn't foresee any of this. Then 45 minutes later from the same journalist, a senior Labour source says Starmer s team are baffled by reports. He plans to demote Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandi, adding you won't find many former leadership rivals who have been as loyal. She's a massive asset and highly rated by Lotto. So Aaron, they're briefing this, they sacked Angela Reina. They think this is going to be a moment to really assert their leadership and assert their authority, set off a new course. Everyone from every side of the party, even journalists who are sympathetic to Keystone, people like Stephen Bush, who tends to sort of write favourites about him, they were saying, what the hell is he doing? Everyone was saying, what the hell is he doing? They sort of going through the timeline, and then they're suddenly like, oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, no, no, no, there was no reshuffle screeching U-turn. It's again, it's, I mean, it was exciting to watch. It's quite worrying that these people are in charge of the Labour party. People love messy drama. I mean, people, it's very enjoyable to see somebody going through, obviously not in a particularly malicious way, but particularly powerful people seeing them going through messy drama is quite enjoyable. You know, the Bill Gates divorce or whatever. But yeah, it's inexplicable. And you know, people like Tim Shipman, these are really well-sourced journalists, they're serious people. You know, he's written many negative stories about Labour over the years, more often than not, they're correct, or they have a kernel of truth to them, and you know, it's a matter of interpretation. So super, super strange. The thing about also Angela Rainer, which I don't quite get, is that obviously Keystone isn't from the Labour movement. And we don't know if there's any real legacy for Jeremy Corbyn or Corbynism in the Labour party, but it does feel like the Labour party is to some extent closer to the trade unions than it was before 2015. I think that's kind of inarguable. You know, Angela Rainer from a Labour background, you see the rhetoric even in Keystone's tweets and so on about their relationship to trade unions. Now we can talk about the hiring fire stuff. He's been called up by Unite. GMB said, actually, no, he's fine. He's on the right side. Put that sort of park that for a moment on the shelf. I think most people agree, the rhetoric now is much better than it was in 2015. However, Stammer himself has no relationship clearly to Unite. Stammer himself had no relationship to the GMB, which is Britain's largest kind of, well, it's a big industrial union, Unison's public sector. GMB is in a bunch of areas like mineral extraction, engineering, et cetera, that kind of blue-collar worker jobs. And Rainer was his connection to GMB. I won't go into the details, but through various people that work for Rainer, her friends, her contacts, that was her world. And she was the bridge between the GMB and between Stammer. And so now it's not just Rainer that's kind of out of the loop here to an extent it's the GMB as well. And I think you've got Unite pissed off. You're going to have GMB pissed off. Unison are thinking, what the hell are we doing? I mean, they're not really a variable because they're not as politically active as the GMB and Unite have been in the Labour Party really in recent years. But I think that's a really key point. We'll maybe talk about that later on. But one of the candidates that I've heard touted for a battle in Spain is a lady, a young woman, I've been told by sources called Salma Arif, who is I believe a GMB member. Now we'll go into the advantages or disadvantages, merits, demerits of her potential candidacy. But there's two things that are going on there. First of all, it's obviously deeply concerning that Kier Stammer is still looking to parachute somebody into a constituency. It seems with no selection process. They might just do a short list of three or something to stitch up through that measure, where outwardly it looks fine. But they may not even do that. So that's the first problem. Second problem is, again, she has contacts, as I understand it, through the GMB. And so the GMB starts to say, well, we don't want you to run, or even she might say, I don't want to run because I don't want to be the next Dr. Paul Williams. So I don't understand why at this moment of supreme political vulnerability for Kier Stammer, he's attacked one of the most reliable allies in the labor movement. Like I say, inexplicable, inexplicable. And the only way you can make sense of it is they planned or he planned to do this anyway, with Peter Mandelson, with that whole sort of labor right rump, which is attached to his campaign team, you know, most of Lotto. They were going to do this anyway. And so they've just decided to accelerate it because they know they've got bad headlines and front pages for days to come. I don't think that is the case because I think they're too stupid for that. But that's the only explanation. Yeah, I mean, what's the idea that they wanted to do this when they're already bad headlines, because they were so desperate to get rid of her as party chair? I don't really buy because it's not even a real job. Well, I mean, obviously it came with responsibilities, but it doesn't have any sort of like, it's not written in the Labor Party rule book, they can do whatever the leader asks them to do. So if you didn't want to make some weird statement about sacking Angela Reina, and it's really difficult to understand why they would have wanted to do that, then you would just say, if we don't like what she's doing as party chair, we'll just create a new role and, you know, take away some responsibilities from the party chair. I mean, it would be a much less confrontational thing to do. So it is difficult to fathom. I'm going to go to some comments. We've got lots of them coming in. And Bertie with 20 quid, thank you so much. Thanks for the extra shows. Great work. I have to say I'm not planning to do shows on Saturday and Sunday next weekend, but I have very much enjoyed spending these few hours with you because there's so much to talk to around with Aaron, of course, to allow him with a huge $50 donation. Thank you so much. Boris Johnson went to build an opposition and he walked out with Keir Starmer. Labor being absolutely awful in opposition is actually a threat to democracy. The UK basically has one party rule. It's dangerous regardless of which party is in government. I think that's a really important point. And I think actually what that speaks to it, it's not only that Keir Starmer's opposition is a bit incompetent at the moment and not really threatening the government. They don't seem worried they're going to lose their majority or whatever. But it is that Keir Starmer, his job is partly to, you know, to represent one half of the population. You know, it's most basic level. Obviously, he wants to represent the whole nation, etc., etc. But when it comes to being an opposition, one of your jobs is to say, look, the Tories are representing one block of people. We're representing one block of people. We should make sure we speak up for them so that they have a voice. Keir Starmer was kind of done the opposite and said, people who vote Labour are idiots. This party is terrible. The only people that matter are the people who vote Tory. And we want to be more like the Tories because they're the only party who are any good. So it's almost just his attitude removes the status of opposition party from the Labour Party because the Labour Party just becomes the losing party who call themselves losers and think everyone who votes for them also likes losers. It's really, really bad for democracy, for government and for representation. You know, it's also bad for them. You know, the sort of apogee of this was with Sadiq Khan in the aftermath of the 2019 election. We deserve to lose. I mean, you can say that in some ways. I can understand that self-criticism is, you know, we deserved to not do well because of XYZ and these could have been different. I get that. But the way he was talking about Jeremy Corbyn, we deserve to lose. He didn't serve the Prime Minister. He wasn't saying that after Sean Bailey ran him really close for Mayor of London, was he? He was saying, oh, well, you know, our voters are complacent. They can't take these things for granted. We need to be the first to run this down. That's what the Greens done. Well, no, you deserved it, Sadiq. Or is it only, it's only when other people that you don't politically like are doing it. What is good for the goose? Is good for the gander? I'm going to go to a comment from Sienna Rogers, not on our stream on her Twitter feed. Labor source, the operation slagged off Jeremy Corbyn's team and said they were professionals. Angela Rainer has made them look like complete amateurs by going to the pub. So apparently when Angela Rainer was sacked in that meeting, she went off to the pub afterwards. Apparently she was going to be doing more the following day and said she was going to be really supportive of Keir Starmer. But because he sacked her, she was like, well, fuck it, I'll go get a pint. A couple more comments. Rajya Di with 999, please congratulate me. I had my first jab two days ago. Congratulations for having your first jab two days ago. I'm still waiting for my invite, but I think it's going to come pretty soon. I have a good feeling about this month, maybe the beginning of next month. Natalie Pearl with 499 says, shout out to the Giro d'Italia for ending the second stage in Navarra today. Good excuse for me to spread the word about you guys. Giro d'Italia, is that cycling? Yeah, Giro means turn. It's a multi-stage cycling race across Italy. And they're in Navarra today. I do hope you spread the word. I hope people there will be very pleased that there is a left-wing outlet in England, which uses their name. And one more comment. In Asiobiera with 499, thank you very much. Michael, it's a privilege and honor to be taken by the hand through this by you and Aaron, you sexy baskets. Tom and I are loving the surprise show. That's a lovely comment. Thank you so much for those positive words. You know, everyone's really being very complimentary about Aaron's appearance. He's had Botox, gorgeous face. I mean, you're really basking in this, Aaron. Like I said, it's producer Fox. I think he's done something. He's tweaked StreamYard. Maybe, maybe. Right, let's go back to the chronology of all of this. So we've got Keir Starmer. Says he's second Angela Reina. Then there's a big outcry from all of these sources talking to the press. No one thinks this is a good idea. They try and roll back. Then Andy Burnham gets involved. And Andy Burnham is very significant at this point because he'd obviously just won a stomping majority that day on Saturday yesterday. And it was essentially, I suppose, the Labour person with the highest standing in the country right now because he's increased his majority, 76%, I think in Manchester. Incredible mandate, quite popular across the country. He hadn't ruled out actually standing again to be Labour leader in an interview that day. He tweets an article from The Guardian, which is just a report on Angela Reina getting sacked. And he says, I can't support this. So at this point, it looks like a bit of a declaration of war against Keir Starmer from, if you're looking at the last two days, how did Starmer come out as a loser in all of those interviews? I'm basically apologising for himself and the party and everything. Andy Burnham came out that weekend a winner and Andy Burnham is saying, I don't support what Keir Starmer's doing. That was worrying for him. And because it was worrying for him, their messages the following day had to get really, really ridiculous. So I said they sort of tried to roll back the night before. We saw what that looked like this morning. This was Ian Murray, who is a shadow secretary of state for Scotland. So a Keir Starmer ally. He spun the line that Angela Reina had in fact been promoted. It wasn't very convincing. Let's take a look. Well, this is another example of where we seem to be having political dialogue from social media. Angela Reina hasn't been sacked, as I understand it. Angela Reina has been offered a significant promotion to take her from the back office of the Labour Party running elections to the front office where she's talking to the country. So in actual fact, Angela Reina, as I understand it, as I have been told, has not been sacked. But Keir Starmer has decided to do a reshuffle of his front bench to respond to those election results. Take Angela Reina from the back office to the front office. I'm not aware of what she's definitely doing. She's definitely doing the party. She'll take a significant role in the cabinet. As I understand it, although I don't know the position, she's been offered a significant promotion. That means she spends more time talking to the country about policy, using those great ways that she communicates and using the mandate that she's got as best we do of the party. So that's essentially what's happened. Angela Reina has not been sacked, but social media has blown up over the last 12 hours. So I understand it. I hope that Lotto will, well, I hope the leaders of this will respond to that and do the reshuffle. And you'll show that this has been, this hasn't been a sacking, but actually a significant way of getting Angela Reina from the back office to the front office. You'll forgive me if I'm skeptical at the fact that this is now being spun. There's a big promotion for Angela Reina when you can't even tell us what job she's going to go to. Maybe that's been scrambled right now by the leader of the opposition's office after seeing the reaction. We were being messaged yesterday, including myself, saying that Keir said he was taking full responsibility for the result of the elections and he said we need to change. That means change how we run our campaigns in the future. Is this not social media, TwitterStorm? This is coming from the leader of the opposition's office. Yes, and the leader of the opposition hasn't just said that in messages to you, Sophie, in the media, he said it publicly that he was taking full responsibility for these elections. And I think that's the right thing to do. I mean, given the tweets we saw about Wes Streetsig or Steve Reed being promoted to party chair, Ian Murray should be in for a promotion now, because if the way to advance in the Labour Party is to be willing to go out and chat whatever lines you've been given by Keir Starmer or Peter Mandelson or whoever it is, however ridiculous they sound, then Ian Murray really demonstrated his loyalty there because that was a terrible, terrible argument. So for one, when you promote someone, I mean, as Sophie Rich pointed out, I thought that was a very good interview. She says, if you promote someone, you normally have a job for them to go to, right? She's like, she's been promoted to what? He's like, well, I don't know what she's been promoted to, but she's been promoted. You don't sack someone and say, I might give you an unspecified job in the future and call that a promotion. And you also don't negatively brief about them. So, you know, why we've done this chronologically is because you can see between the hours of seven and 10 PM yesterday, everyone close to Keir Starmer, all of Keir Starmer's allies were tweeting that Angela Reina is useless. She takes first class train tickets. She's disloyal. She speaks out against the political secretary. They are not the messages you'd be sending to journalists if you were giving someone a promotion. They are the messages you send out to justify demoting someone, which is why Angela Reina thought she was being demoted because I don't even want to say why she thinks she was being demoted. She was being demoted. She was sacked. And now this morning, they're trying to pretend that actually it was all a social media storm. And she was in fact promoted to a, to nothing. Aaron, would you, actually, my question for you is that, you know, if you were Ian Murray, right, you back the project of Keir Starmer and you want him to do well, would you be willing to go out on Sky and chat as much breeze as that? Because I mean, in a way, you've got to respect someone so willing to take one for the team that they will make that big a tit of themselves on Sunday morning television. No, no, I don't, I don't think, I don't think I would. I think when there's a political question at stake, like something like you have to defend a political line, like Barry Gardner would, for instance, over the brexit tests or whatever, he would sometimes say things he doesn't really believe politicians do that all the time. But when you're covering the arse of a leader who's just chucked a colleague of yours under a bus and you're actually saying it's a promotion, I mean, it's just shitty behavior, isn't it? It's shitty behavior. And it's the only only a shitty person would do it. Sorry, sorry, Ian Murray, but it's true. Trying to dress up that as actually a positive, I think it's a really gruesome thing to do. I think it transcends left, right, center, whatever. I think it means you're a bad person. I don't really like speaking moralizing language, but I think that's the essence of it. And I was thinking, Michael, actually, you know, just as you were responding to that video, Keir Starmer was the director of public prosecutions from 2008 to 2013. Five years. I mean, this guy, he clearly can't run a bath. How the hell was he in charge of who we should prosecute in the criminal justice system? You know, I think people, I'm being deadly serious about this, Michael, they need to go back and review every single case that this guy was on between 2008, 2013. Because if he's this shambolic, this disorganized, this messy, if he lives just for drama in the public eye, I mean, my God, I really think people should now be reviewing his time as director of public prosecutions. He is clearly a deeply incompetent, incapable man who can't think clearly or strategically. So, A, he shouldn't be in politics, but B, my God, what the hell was he doing at the top of the law profession? A very different politician to Ian Murray. But what we can say about both of them is I think neither of them should be at the front of the Labour Party right now. I mean, this fake promotion, I want to go back to that, because as well as making them look really stupid in the morning TV round or whatever, it's also the reason I think the reshuffle hasn't happened yet. We're hoping it happens quite soon because we wanted to happen while we're still going on live, not being announced at 11pm or 7am or whatever. But the reason it's being massively delayed is because they've got to now find a job for Angela Rayner, which they can spin as a promotion. Because obviously, this has all been terribly embarrassing for them when they want to just do a big U-turn, but now they have to find a job for her. So, Rachel Weirmoff, we've used quite a lot of her tweets today from the Hummington Post. She tweeted this afternoon, Labour reshuffle still expected to go ahead today. Not imminently, however, sources say Starmer has to decide Rayner's role before anything else. So that's not how promotions work. They wanted to demote her. Then there was a backlash. They realised it was stupid and that people didn't buy this line that if someone's mean to Jenny Chapman, who's stuck here as Starmer's political secretary, then they should lose their job. So they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we fucked up. Now they've got to find a job for her. I mean, it can be the case that by the end of the day, they'll just give her the chair job back. What do you think they're going to do, Aaron? I think they're going to give her the chair job back, but change the name. That is like proper corporate blair ride disaster management. So you be like, we didn't actually remove her from the position of chair. We eliminate the position of party chair. We're now calling it party non-executive director. And that's the position we really see Angela Rayner and she can be both back and front of house. That's what's going to happen. When we designed the role, we thought there was one person who would be perfect for this job. It was Angela Rayner. And we just happened to have briefed all these negative things about what she was wearing to Harley-Ball over here. We have nothing to do with that, actually. We didn't even read that. Who said that? Very, very strange. Let's go into some more detail. The Guardian had a write-up about 5 p.m. today talking about the origins of some of these tensions between Starmer and Rayner. So according to the Guardian, relations are understood to have been strained for the best part of a year. Rayner supported Starmer's rival, Rebecca Long Bailey, in the 2020 leadership contest, but deteriorated further during Labour's torrid campaign for the local elections. Rayner's allies complained she had been frozen out of key decisions by Starmer's aides despite her role as campaign coordinator and that some in his camp had spoken about her in less than flattering terms. Later in that article, they go on to report there is a feeling among Rayner's allies that she is seen by some at the top of the party as a working-class oik and a bit thick who doesn't fit their patronising Camden style. Another Labour source who has no loyalties to Rayner said it's a clear mistake to fire someone who speaks like the people we need to talk to. It's a huge mistake from a bunch of snobs who don't like how she speaks. Labour sources said Starmer had gone on to offer Rayner an alternative post. Some suggested it related to social care, but that she had declined to consider it believing it was both a demotion and a bid to blame her for the local election results. So they tried to give her a job in social care incredibly important, but that's not a promotion. It's not a job in the Cabinet. So they're inventing a role for her to be shadow secretary of state for social care. There isn't a secretary of state for social care. She wouldn't be shadowing anyone. So that would be... It's not a great office of state. It doesn't exist as an office of state. So she was quite right to decline to consider that. Aaron, I want to focus here on the way that this is being interpreted by many people, or they're saying these people are not even necessarily close to Rayner, but as snobbishness from Keir Starmer and from his Camden office, et cetera. And obviously, I don't know where these sources are from in this specific instance, but we were talking on Saturday night, so last night about how the real counterpower to Keir Starmer might not come from the relatively weak disorganized socialist campaign group at this point in time, but from different regions of the country. So specifically the Northwest, we saw that tweet from Andy Burnham speaking out against Keir Starmer. We're now seeing people who are taking the sacking of Angela Rayner as an affront to people who aren't from his Camden clique. So obviously Angela Rayner is from the Northwest. Do you think that he has mobilized a real power base in a region of England, so the Northwest in this particular case, which will have an ability to challenge his leadership in a way that the organized left hasn't been able to up to this point? What are the mechanisms to remove Keir Starmer ultimately? It's going to have to be a specific number of MPs. Just look at it sort of procedurally. It's going to have to be a specific number of MPs. 41 or 42. Yeah. And right now, we've got mid 30s of the socialist campaign group. So I mean, it's eminently, if the socialist campaign group want to do it, I think it can happen. Of course, it will require signatures from more than just them. I mean, they could try and do it. They could fail to get the appropriate numbers, and it still puts pressure on Starmer, especially with back and spend coming up. I mean, that in itself could be that. That's why organized opposition from, say, the Northwest or Northern MPs, that would be much more powerful, right? Because they can easily get the numbers. That's why sacking Angela Rayner was seen as such a mistake because as long as the socialist campaign group are isolated, it is quite difficult to mount a credible challenge. If he's pissed off, someone who isn't in the socialist campaign group, but who can create a basis of opposition, which is a bit broader, so a regional one with the backing of Andy Burnham, then that could really challenge both his authority. And ultimately, they will have the numbers to challenge Kit Starmer as well. Well, there's a great deal of crossover. So obviously, you've got a bunch of generally newly elected MPs from around Liverpool, people like Ian Burn, who are in the socialist campaign, Kim Johnson. I'm not sure if she's in the SCG, but she was very much on the left when she came into Parliament after the 2019 general election. So they're a part of that Northwest group. You, of course, have Preston Council, you have Andy Burnham, you have the mayor of Salford, Rebecca Long Bailey. But I think you're right. The question is strategically, would you want to make him resign now or do you want to kind of grind him down over a month or two to apply political pressure and say, look, if you go in this direction, we're very happy to work with you. And if you don't, then you're going to have to resign. I don't think people are going to be saying that overtly. But I think clearly, clearly, people will be thinking it implicitly. The question is, there isn't a candidate, Michael. I mean, that's the big problem. There is not, if there was a candidate, I think they're all, you know, I think the signatures will be underway already. But there is not a candidate. There is not a candidate, really. That could change in six months. You have elections, somebody else can come in or somebody might, you know, make a name for themselves. Somebody who's right now in camp, the Stammer might not be in it. Personally, I don't really see anybody in the Parliamentary Labour Party. I think, yeah, they won't just lead the Labour Party, but they could also be a prime minister. Andy Byrne could be a prime minister. You know, maybe Clive Lewis or Zara Sultana in five years, there'll be the politician that could do that. But right now, I don't think that, I mean, given the scale as well of the challenges that Labour faces, incredibly, incredibly difficult. I think, I think Byrne is an astute and smart enough politician to do that. Who else? You know, who else? So that's the major barrier, Michael. I don't think it's necessarily the signatures. I think it's the absence of a candidate. No, I agree. Well, I mean, Angela Rainer could run for it and build up a bit of a coalition around it. Is she a credible prime minister? Difficult to say. John McDonnell could be drafted back in. I mean, he would be probably the most credible candidate at this point in time. Would be difficult for him to get on the ballot. Sienna Rogers has just tweeted recently, I'm told that Angela Rainer wants senior lotto figures gone. Easy to see why negotiations aren't getting anywhere fast. So that's one of the reasons why this reshuffle is being halted, apparently, if that source is correct. And you can see what's happened here. They thought, oh, look, we can get rid of Angela Rainer. We can humiliate her. We have all the power. And they've realized that actually, they've created a bit of a monster. And now Angela Rainer realizes the power she's got, which is that if she says, look, I'm going to challenge you, Kirstarma, then she can easily get the signatures. And she can easily get support among the unions. And so now they are actually having to really take seriously the demand she's making. Because if she says, look, now screw this, I'm going on the back benches, I'll go on the back benches. I mean, I definitely challenge him straight away, but I'll go on the back benches for six months, see how things go. Then after she's built her, you know, operation, she compounds, right? That's why they're now desperate to keep her in on the inside. Aaron, you want to come back in on this point? Yeah, I think it's a really good point. I think the composition of a campaign under radar would be much different than six months to what it is now. I mean, look at the MPs that built a sort of brand for them on themselves on the back benches. You think David Lamy did incredibly well as a back bencher. On the other hand, you could think of somebody like Chris Williamson, you know, he was an MP who had a big public profile. People are going to say for a bunch of things, some look very good. I don't want to get into that. But on things like Venezuela, he was saying things that no other politician could say. In the cabinet, shadow cabinet rather. And so having a back bench really does allow you to shape the conversation in very strange ways. And interesting was Jess Phillips is another one. Again, I don't really like Jess Phillips's political, you know, her politics. I certainly preferred David Lamy's. But, you know, if you put Angela Rainer in that kind of role, I think that'd be incredibly dangerous. You know, she could basically set up a parallel, parallel leadership within the party, very, very dangerous. Is she capable of doing that? That's the big question, Michael. She's only been an MP since 2015. You know, she's had a successful bid for deputy leader, but that is a really big ask, take some really talented people, takes real collaboration, the ability to work with others, not have these hissy fits that we're seeing from Lotto. And that's not a critique of her staff or anything. That's a very tough thing to do under those situations, you know, very, very difficult. Going back to the briefing point, I can honestly say, you know, I know Sam Terry, I really like Sam Terry, you know, we knew one another before he was an MP, that applies to a number of MPs, and nobody says a word to me. I honestly haven't spoken to Sam Terry and like maybe a text message, oh, something about football or something, oh, this fucking, this guy's being funny, lol. But nothing to do with politics in like a year. Sam Terry is a close ally of Reina. And there are, you know, there's lots of people like that. So, honest to God, it strikes me that this seems to be a real flight of fantasy in Lotto. Lotto is sort of collective imaginary, if they think that they're being briefed against by people, because that simply isn't true. You know, when we got, for instance, the leaked labor report, which of course, the Navarra media broke that story, you know, that wasn't coming from allies of Sam. All the big stories we've run on on Starma, and quite frankly, his disastrous leadership up until most recently, I did a long piece, for instance, on the Labour Party in Bristol. And by the way, you could see what's just happened in the council, we'll talk about that later. That was coming, you see it coming a mile off because of the political management of party right. None of that was, information was given to me by sort of people that are close to Angela Reiner or people that are in the shadow cabinet. So it does feel like paranoia, paranoia coupled with talentlessness, coupled with an inability to understand your own limits. I mean, that really is a recipe for political disaster. We've got over 4000 people watching, which is great to see, 850 likes. Let's get that over a thousand in the next minute. Let's get it over 2000 by the end of the show. It really helps us on the algorithm. Let's go to a few more comments. Chris Hill with a 50 pound donation. Thank you so much. This is all turning into a bit of a farce, isn't it? I mean, it's long past that. It's been a farce for a while now, but it definitely intensified over the last 24 hours. Henry VIII fake with a 5. Thank you very much. Week 53 of questioning. If Kierstahmer is a secret Tory plant, let the speculation begin. That's an interesting point because when all this happened yesterday, my main thought was, look, you know, remember those briefings where it says he's going to replace Lisa Nandi, Annalise Dodds, and Angela Reina with Wes Streeting, Steve Reid, and who was it? Jess Phillips. I was thinking, look, Eva Kierstahmer is much less intelligent than we thought, you know, because, you know, I never really trusted him politically, but I thought he's presumably some bit of an astute politician. Why would he, you know, I don't see the personal benefit he's getting from sacking Angela Reina. So the only reason you'd want to get rid of those figures who were, you know, from the soft left, but I mean, they're not really holding out for left wing policy and replace them with really, really right wing MPs like Wes Streeting, Steve Reid, and Jess Phillips, if you're really, really right wing, you know, so the actions Kierstahmer is taking now are, they're not opportunistic because they're self-defeating. They only make sense if his mission is to make the party just as right as it was under Tony Blair. I mean, Wes Streeting is a classic Caballera, really far to the right of the Labour Party. And Kierstahmer not only is sort of saying, oh, I'm not going to talk about policy because all I want to do is win elections, he's saying, even if it's damaging to the party, I'm going to shift the shadow cabinet to the right. So Tory plant or not, I mean, you know, everything suggests he's just very right wing or that he's just being controlled by his staff or whatever. Aaron, what's your take on that? It's worse than that. It's worse than that. He's not a Tory plant because I genuinely think the Labour right, this is something we've talked about for years, but I think it's just now so obvious, the Labour right is the right of the Tories on the economy. There's a move away from austerity, there's a move away from sort of stigmatizing deficits, there's a move towards industrial policy, big public spending. And that is, I think, to the left of where the Labour right are on the economy, lots of lefts and lots of rights. But the Tories under Boris Johnson have a greater faith in the capacity of the state to increase living standards or to create growth, to create jobs, to improve certain sectors of the economy. They believe the state is better at doing that than the Labour right. People like Pat McFadden, who by the way, oh my God, he's in a margin in all the Hampton, he's a goner. There's a lot of people like that on the Labour right as well. It's going to be so difficult for them to reconcile this. Keir Starmer is electable, he's the only person that can lead Labour to power. But actually, I've got a majority of less than 2000, by the looks of it under his leadership, I'm about to lose my seat. How many of these kamikaze Labour right politicians are there? I think probably enough actually to keep them going for a little while. But I think it's a really important point to say here, Michael, the Tories gently moving away from that austerity consensus after 2016, particularly after 2019, with the premiership of Boris Johnson, particularly in their response to COVID, I think it's completely short circuited the Labour right when it comes to conversations about the economy, the role of the state, there's the market and so on. And I think that has to be one factor here. So there's an ideological crisis going on for the Labour right, coupled with a bunch of really fucking useless people working around Keir Starmer, and that kind of explains what is, for one of the better word, a complete clusterfuck. I'm going to go through some more comments. I want to read out this one. Megan Forrest tweets on the hashtag Tiskey Sour. Okay, I feel we need some balance. Yes, yes, Aaron is very nice looking, but Michael is next level. Thank you very much. I do appreciate that one. Important to say that. Peter Harrison. You are younger than me, Michael. You should be better looking. I don't think we should go down this rabbit hole. Peter Harrison tweets on the hashtag Tiskey Sour. I reckon the timing had everything to do with Labour successes being announced because they were victories for the left. This is Starmer and the right drawing a line in the sand effing hilarious. It's an interesting hypothesis. I'm not actually sure that does stand up because, I mean, there were big victories on Saturday for parts of the party that are more left-wing than Keir Starmer. So Mark Drakeford was a Corbynite. He's genuinely on the left of the Labour Party. Andy Burnham has shifted left over his career, at least discursively, and definitely now sits to the left of Keir Starmer. But some of those victories that came in, the mayor of the west of England, Dan Norris, was an out-and-out Blair right, really right-wing. I don't know who the mayor was in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, but the story there, the narrative there didn't seem to be one about left-wing Labour mayors winning. I think in a way that's overestimating the competence of these guys. I mean, it is possible they hated the fact that Andy Burnham and Mark Drakeford were getting all this attention and so decided to take out Angela Reina because they thought it would make them look strong. I suppose that is possible, but they were also getting out of the headline stories which could have been quite good for the right of the party, for example, Dan Norris winning that minority. RC with a fiver, Aaron, have another run in politics, too many clowns in it, we need people like you. What does he mean another run in politics? Have you stood for election before, Aaron? Not to my knowledge, no. Maybe he's confusing with Aaron Porter, former NUS student president. That's quite niche, but Aaron Porter was the NUS president when both me and Aaron were students. He was quite hated by many in the student movement. He was the successor of West Street and very much in his image. Ianie or Lainie, I don't know if that's an L or an I, tweets on the hashtag TisgySawa, you guys are such a stress antidote from Astama and companies, Aaron Nonsense. Did you see Sky talking to John McTernan suggesting Labour needed to move to the right? Ain't they learned anything? Of course, I didn't see that. I'm pleased to be quite frank. I don't need to hear John McTernan saying the Labour Party should go right anymore. By the way, all of these people who were saying the Labour Party should go right at this period of time, none of them come with any evidence. The only evidence they come with is to say, oh, the last person who won was Tony Blair. That's a really long time ago. No one who is a pollster, no one who looks at public opinion for scientifically or whatever. Obviously, there are flaws to polls and focus groups or whatever, but none of those people are saying what the Labour Party needs to do is go to the right. What they're saying is that if you go with pure liberalism, that's going to struggle in huge parts of England. These pollsters are often saying you need to accommodate to social conservatism. None of them are saying what you need to do is go to the right on the economy because no one in the country or barely anyone in the country wants to go right on the economy. But you've still got people like John McTernan, Peter Mandelson, who are pretending that you've still got a public who are terrified of socialism. It's not the case anymore. It's just so incurious, so unscientific. It would be completely disastrous for the Labour to go right on the economy. It seems like they're already doing that, but it would be completely disastrous. Aaron, do you think the Peter Mandelson and the John McTernan's of the world really, really believe it when they say that Labour needs to go to the right on the economy if it wants to get elected? Yes, 100%. I think you could have an intelligent analysis of Corbynism and its failings, and you would say in response, well, look, let's take 40% of that agenda. Let's shave off some edges and let's have a kind of establishment-looking leader, and we'll actively walk towards and try to mitigate and nullify where we're weak foreign policy policing the army. I don't agree with all of that because I think ultimately you're not believed anyway, but I get the argument that Paul Mason would say it. You could argue there's elements of what happened with Joe Biden's successful run and his presidency, although I think we should say it. Now, Joe Biden probably wouldn't have won if there hadn't been coronavirus, so the extent to which that template is replicable is a big question. But in any case, that would look something like what Keir Starmer often in the Labour leadership in 2020, that's what he was saying he would do. And I think if you're a smart person within the establishment, I think you recognize that actually more market is not the solution to most problems. Just read the Financial Times editorials once in a while. Read The Economist magazine. Ben Houchin, which by the way is wrong about a lot of stuff, Ben Houchin in the T's Valley mayor, he's taken the local airport into public ownership. This is the most successful elected Tory mayor there is. He's got far bigger mandate in T's Valley than Sadiq Khan does in London, where he barely beat Sean Bailey. Well, barely is a bit of an overstatement, but was it 55-45 on the second round? And Sean Bailey's getting 73%. And Houchin's getting 73% actually adopting policies which the likes of Mandelson or Andrew Donis or John McTernan say that the electorate hates. We know the electorate quite likes Labour's policies. The problem for Labour is they don't think Labour can implement them. They don't think they're serious. And when the Tories offer the same policies, this is really good. Folows are really good policy. Great. They like public ownership. They like higher wages. They want to end higher and fire and fire and higher. They don't like outsourcing. Low wage economy, low productivity economy. So that's a big, big problem for Labour. No, getting around it. It was a big problem for Corbyn and the Labour left and still is. But you're absolutely right to say there is zero evidence that Labour will do well if they go to the right when it comes to policy. Zero. Zero. You could say that they can keep most of the policies and go slightly to the right on rhetoric. Yeah, there's zero evidence that right wing policies would be more preferable. And I think it does go back to that thing I said earlier, Michael, which is this is a moment of ideological crisis for these people. They look at Joe Biden across the Atlantic. They look at the collapse of Blairism, really, across Europe. They don't know how to make sense of the 21st century. You've got the post-2008 context. You've got the climate crisis. You've got coronavirus. You've got these three big crises in the last 15 years, which completely shattered this idea that the market always knows best. Get the states out of the way, privatise as much as you can. That's just no longer believed by much of the establishment, the powers that be, the people that, like I say, write those leader articles in the Financial Times and whatnot. These are kind of like, you know, I think when I think of Peter Mandelson and John McTernan, I think of like, you know, they found these Japanese fighters which still thought they were fighting the Second World War and some little secluded island of, you know, Singapore in 1962. These are like the last holdouts of neoliberalism. And that's fine. And those people genuinely still thought they were fighting a war. They were obviously wrong. They were completely misguided. And I think it's a very similar thing going on the likes of Mandelson and McTernan. Similar parallels. They're delusional, misguided, confused, can't understand the 21st century. And so they just go to the things that come for them. We can be like Tony Blair in 1997. What are they going to do when Tony Blair dies? I don't want anybody to die. But when he's 19, he dies. What are they going to do? Even today, Andrew Adonis is saying, Tony Blair, he's the only person that could win the next general election for Labour. All the data suggests no. What are you going to say when Tony Blair isn't around anymore? Are you going to say simply because Tony Blair is no longer alive, Labour can never win a general election ever again? He's physically the only person capable of winning a general election for Labour. It's physically impossible for anybody else to do it. What's he going to do? Is he going to sort of necromancy Blair from out of the grave? Heaven forbid, maybe they're going to develop technology life extension technology in Blair. Blair will be around at the age of 300, still talking about his 1997 election win. Maybe, maybe that. I mean, my God, can you imagine? Anyway, let's go from the realms of speculative horror to where we're at, because that's bad enough. Why is so frustrating is because I do think that, you know, empirically, the best shot that Labour have, and this is what, you know, most of the pollsters or whoever are saying, not particularly left-wing, and you can have criticisms of it. You can have sort of ideological criticisms of it, but I think sort of empirically, the easiest way to get a Labour majority is to have a fairly radical economic program and to not say that much about liberal issues. You know, so to not be for no borders, to not be for abolishing the police, to try and reassure people on patriotism, which I don't think means waving the flag, by the way. I think it means saying, of course I'm patriotic, of course I'm tough on crime. You know, I think if you want to be a Prime Minister, you probably have to be able to say those things quite confidently. The annoying thing about Keir Starmer is he was in a position to be able to say those things quite confidently. Look, I'm Sir Keir Starmer. I was Director of Public Prosecution. He's in quite a good position to say, I'm going to sell popular radical policies. And then when someone asks you, oh, but you hate the country, so of course I don't hate the country. You know, I was Director of Public Prosecutions. He could have done that instead of course I'm tough on crime, I was Director of Public Prosecutions. Instead, what he's done is said, oh, we're embarrassed of the economic policy. All I'm going to talk about is crime and all I'm going to talk about is flags, which is the complete opposite way to do it. The response to people being, you know, concerned that the left are unpatriotic isn't to wave flags. It's to just look comfortable and confident when you say, no, we are, of course we are. You know, it's not that big a deal though, right? Aaron, you want to come in on this point? Yeah, quickly. I mean, I kind of half agree, half disagree, which is, I don't think that Keir Starmer should be saying, yeah, no borders, I'm an abolitionist, I agree with that. It's absurd. And actually it doesn't mean anything for an elected politician from a central left party. And on the radical left, you need to understand that. But at the very least, he should be able to say, and I think any left-wing politician should be able to say, he's certainly not left-wing, say, look, am I tough on crime? Crime is bad. Nobody on the left thinks crime is good. You know, socialists don't say, well, the more crime the better, the more burglaries and assaults and thefts, you know, that's the indicator of our political project doing well. The question is, is the modus operandi, how we presently try and fight crime? When you've got less than 8% of all crime being solved in this country, reported crime, actually not himself, going to prosecution, right? That's clearly not working. And you've got 15 billion pounds a year going towards policing, 200,000 people work in that sector, huge allocation of resources, even after austerity, and less than one in 10 crimes go, you know, end in the prosecution. Maybe we could, maybe we could try something new when it comes to criminal justice. Now, I'm not even expecting him to say that, Michael. But I think the whole, like, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say. You know, maybe a system where fewer than one in 10 reported crimes ends in a prosecution. Maybe that doesn't work. You know, what are the public service provision would get away with that kind of failure? Maybe we should spend more money on prevention, you know, reduce recidivism and reduce reoffending. Just an idea. You know, we know that countries with far lower levels of inequality, both have fewer police and still have less crime. They did that more cops means less crime. Well, if that was the case in Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Ecuador, Colombia, would have no crime at all because they've got so many cops. And yet they have plenty of crime, not including Ecuador, I should, I should add, Colombia. So, yes and no. But like you say, that's what's most frustrating actually, because the offer that he made was always a relatively credible one. You know, like I said, just try and, you know, you need to talk about your vulnerabilities. You talk about your strengths. You have a relatively radical offer. And yeah, you don't necessarily, you just, you don't go big into sort of, yeah, the cleavage liberal issues, of course not. But you do defend basic principles like, I think a criminal justice system should work. I would like to have lower crime. That's not what we have at the moment. I think that everybody deserves a quality under the law. You know, somehow these things are now being sort of presented as ultra-woke, wacky. No, it's common sense. And so I'm kind of, I'm 50-50 with you there, Michael. I'll accept 50-50. Let's look at the discussions that are going on now about what the left can do, because this is the weakest Kirste Armour has looked, which does open up opportunities for the left. The left, I mean, as we've discussed in the party, are pretty weak, especially in Parliament at this point in time. But we have some examples of how people have been responding. So first, for you, we have John McDonnell on the Owen Jones show earlier today. This isn't just members of the campaign group in Parliament. These are people right the way across the party. I mean, people who thought they were part of quite a broad coalition are now waking up to the fact that actually there's a small coterie, a cabal, if you like, that are trying to take over the party, using Keir as the front for this, and to drag us to quite right-wing reactionary positions that we thought would never, ever see this party adopt again. So I think the first step that we have a responsibility is to get the message into Keir, that actually, the Labour Party was founded on the basis of people coming together through solidarity. And that part of that solidarity was a recognition that when someone is democratically elected, we give them our support and loyalty. But when that is betrayed, I think the message needs to go into Keir. Actually, you're straining at the very ethos, the very values of solidarity that we found our party on, and that you're going beyond anything that you were elected for, and that we're not going to let that happen. And if we have to fight it, we'll fight it in every branch, in every trade union, in every meeting, at every conference, and I'm not into leadership coups or anything like that. That's not the way we go about it. I'm not into all of that. I believe that what we've got to do is win the battle of ideas. And yes, if necessary, at different times, the battle of elected position as well. But the first step is to explain to Keir just how serious this is. And I think I hope and those people around him wake up to it, because disunited parties don't win elections. That was John McDonald's take. I've got a few thoughts in it. I want to go to you first on this though, Aaron. What do you make of John McDonald's response to what's gone on? You go first, Michael, because I'm going to be very unkind. Okay, I'll go first. I think it's perfectly reasonable, actually. I think John McDonald's response throughout Keir Starmer's leadership has been quite intelligent, because I think it comes from a position of, you know, you could say that sounds incredibly naive, and on the face of it, it does sound incredibly naive. I don't think if you make Keir Starmer understand, he's going to change, because it doesn't seem to me that he has any desire to change. It seems to me that he's just quite right wing, and he doesn't really have any interest whatsoever in making any kind of alliance with the left. And he's an idiot. I mean, I don't think the future of the Labor Party or the future of the left is in being, is in relying on the goodwill of Keir Starmer. At the same time, I mean, what else? I know people say about John McDonald, oh, you want him to be more oppositional to Keir Starmer, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, to what end? For me, the only route that the left at this point do have to getting back some influence within the Labor Party is with an alliance, with the soft left is by picking off some other MPs. It's by making yourself like a constructive opposition instead of a disruptive one instead of a wrecker. And so everything John McDonald does, in my mind, basically fits into that framework, which is to say, look, we recognize that at this point in time, we're from a position of weakness, let's try and build alliances while critiquing what's going on in a friendly way. And I'm not convinced that John McDonald believes exactly what he's saying. I think that's a fairly political response. I don't have to form alliances with soft left MPs. So I can easily say, no, Keir Starmer's the right wing, he's never going to be a terrible Labour leader. There's no point in trying to persuade him. But if you want to look like, if you want to be persuasive to people who are in the middle between the left and the right of the party, then speaking like John McDonald is speaking there is an intelligent thing to do. That's my case. I know you're going to disagree, Aaron. What's your take? What do you disagree with with what I've just said? Well, I agree that, obviously, he's talking like a politician. It's important to say, John McDonald was always a politician. Jeremy Corbyn wasn't. And that explains where both failed and actually succeeded. But to say that Labour now needs to win the battle of ideas is just ridiculous. You've got a Labour leadership, which now seems to be to the right on the economy than the Tories. And that's not me being silly. That's on the corporation tax. That's on a bunch of stuff. The corporation tax was the most visible moment where that happened. They're talking about deficits more often. How are you going to pay for this? We can't have deficit funded growth, heaven forbid. Or what if inflation goes slightly up? Actually, that would really help to pay down debts in the longer term. If you bump up inflation in the next 10, 15 years, that would be really good except for people with assets. And that's why we're told by all the powers that be that actually inflation is bad. I think you should just say that. It's not about the battle of ideas. The left has actually won the battle of ideas to a significant extent. Really, see what the Biden presidency is doing. Look at the free fall within the Republican Party when it comes to how do you administer the economy in the context of COVID. Look at what's going on in much of the European Union. Look at China. The idea that the state actually plays a major role in the market is no longer the exclusive preserve of the radical left. Many people who believe in markets are saying something similar. I read recently Bill Gates book, and before people go crazy in the comments, I don't agree with many things that Bill Gates says. I disagree profoundly with his views, for instance, on pharmaceutical patents. But when I read that book, it was quite clear to me that actually even somebody like Bill Gates is probably to the left on the role of the state in terms of solving problems than somebody like a Tony Blair or an Alistair Campbell. Definitely a Tony Blair. Definitely. And so this idea of, well, we need to win the battle of ideas. No, because politics is about power. It's about power. It's about how your relationship, yes, to the means of production. Our work is alienated. But in terms of what the Labour Party is trying to do, what the left is trying to do, where's your support base in the media? How many MPs can you get to go in a particular direction? How can you exert influence over Kier Starmer? Where do you have leverage? These are concrete questions of political power. It's not about ideas. So I thought that for me was a really, really weak argument, Michael. It's not an attack on John McDonald. I think clearly, if your opponent adopts your ideas and does what you want them to do anywhere, I think there's a really big win. And I don't think we talk about that enough. Yes, Labour have just been smashed, but the context of Labour doing terribly, really since the 2019 general election, is that actually the Tories are now doing quite a few things that Labour wanted to do. You know, this idea of a couple of hundred jobs for the Treasury up in Darlington, that was John McDonald's idea. There's dozens and dozens of policies like that coming out from the Tories. So I think he's got that really badly wrong. I think this is about power. How now can you get a coalition of people? And I think you can explicitly say that, Michael. We need to say, Kier Starmer had a massive mandate from the membership for his 10 pledges. He's now no longer on that path of bringing the party together. He's decided to break with that. I think the right thing for him to do is to call another leadership election to get another mandate because he does not have the mandate to do what he's presently doing. I think it's a perfectly plausible thing to say. And if somebody says, well, I don't agree, well, why not? You think he has a mandate to do this? Because he clearly doesn't. I mean, why is that such a difficult thing to say? I think there's a more meaningful form of opposition than to say on the one hand, he should resign or on the other, you know, like John's saying, it's about ideas. Talk substantially. Come on. And we're going to have a, we're going to have another Zoom rally, you know, from the Socialist Campaign Group. Great. Zoom rally. Haven't been on any of those the last year. Now, I understand, of course, there are limits because of coronavirus. I'm not shit talking some really great people in the SCG, but that's clearly not going to make that much of a difference. And so, what can I make it? Because if John McDonald says, oh, what should happen now is there should be a leadership election? I didn't say that. He should explicitly say, you don't have a mandate for this. And clearly, if you don't have a mandate, you should go back to the membership. That's what he should say. I don't think you need to say... But that is saying there should be a leadership election. Or you mean, you want him to go back to the members in some sort of plebiscite? Or no. Or you just say, maybe just say you get a clear statement from Keir Starmer saying, no, I still believe in party unity. I still believe in the 10 pledges. And you have to concretely show us why. And of course, then if Keir Starmer says, no, I won't do that, then of course, you have to call for the guy to resign. I mean, then it starts to look really ridiculous. No, I won't promise to bring the party together. No, I won't try to unify the party. No, I won't, actually. I think you're just... I mean, for me, if he says that at this point in time, and he says there's a time limit, if he has not done this by X, Y, Z... What time limit? What time limit? Not a time limit. So he says Keir Starmer has to restate this. I mean, we probably would say that here. Keir Starmer should restate the 10 pledges. It's fine. But you're saying he should say that with a threat. Otherwise, we'll have this leadership election. And what I'm saying is... Because they can't. They're not a threat saying it's not a threat. It's a piece of advice. If you want to do that, you need to get a new mandate. I think that's a perfectly fine thing to say. It's an observation. It's not a threat. Wow. When it comes to... We'll talk about leadership elections a bit more in a moment, because John Trickett actually on the Owen Jones show, he strongly implied that a moment for a leadership challenge could be if Keir Starmer were to lose an upcoming by-election, which is going to happen in Batley and Spen, we'll go on to that in a bit more details. But that could be a moment of, I suppose, crisis for Keir Starmer at a moment where his opposition in the party could get organised to potentially try and topple him at the extreme end. And there will be presumably some actions that can be taken in between doing nothing and trying to topple him. One more suggestion from the left or demand from the left was from Richard Bergen. So one of the most organised people in the socialist campaign group he tweeted today, it's clear that the Labour leadership's current approach is not working. There should now be a special Labour Party conference where the leadership outlines its plan to turn this around and seeks the confidence of the party for it. Aaron, can I go to you for your take on Richard Bergen's demand for a special Labour Party conference? Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not a party bureaucrat. I mean, maybe that the procedure, maybe that's the most effective way of either getting him to uphold something, stick by his pledges to unify the party or to go or to have another leadership election. I mean, I don't know the sort of the bureaucratic technicalities at play here, the niceties of Labour Party bureaucracy. I mean, it sounds quite strange. It sounds quite weak. I mean, maybe you can make the argument for him. Like, although I did see you sort of tweeting that you thought it was... Well, I don't think it's a particularly good idea, but my issue here isn't really because when people say, oh, that's weak, you should be doing something stronger. I mean, the left are in a very weak position in the Labour Party. For me, at the moment, the idea what the left need to be doing is basically holding space, building coalitions. So when the time is right, they can challenge for the leadership with a decent candidate and a decent coalition behind them. This idea that the action has to be extreme. Otherwise, it's pointless. I don't really buy because what's the point in taking an extreme action when you're just going to lose and isolate yourself? I think probably a leadership challenge right now, unless it was around someone like Angela Rayna, someone who was a bit more unifying than people on the left of the party, potentially John McDonald. I think that could be a curveball. But if it was someone like Richard Bergan or Ian Lavery or whatever, I think they would lose very badly and it would energize Keir Starmer. So my problem here isn't that this is a weak demand. My problem with Richard Bergan's suggestion here, which I tweeted, is that it just doesn't... One, it's not going to happen, I don't think. And two, it's just not very attractive. I mean, I don't think members really want a special conference. This idea, I think people assume that the Labour membership is full of people who want to go to a big conference and get really angry at Keir Starmer. And that's not true. I mean, all the polls of the party membership until very recently, I mean, obviously we haven't had one since he tried to get rid of Angela Rayna, but they do show there is still overwhelming support within the Labour Party for Keir Starmer. They want to give him a chance. And even though sacking Angela Rayna has destroyed his relations with the left and people who follow the party closely and with MPs, that's what's quite important in this situation and potentially trade unions, I don't think it's going to dramatically mean that there is a big demand for a massive member conference where everyone says, oh, Keir Starmer has gone too far for the right, therefore let's rein him in. You disagree with me, that, do you? There are many people across the country, whether it's in Wales, Scotland or parts of England, they were running in these elections, whether it was Metro Mayor, you know, Police and Crime Commissioner, Council, whatever. And a lot of people did really good work and actually, Labour did quite well in many places. And that was in spite of not because of Keir Starmer. And he's made the last 48 hours all about him. He's made it all about Westminster, rather than the fact that in Worthing, amazing success by activists there. Council has been picked up in so many places, or the Andy Byrne and Wynn, or the result in Salford. He's decided to basically say, none of that matters. It's all about me. And it's all about this psychodrama that's going on within my office and my relationship to my deputy leader. And, you know, I'll get people out who will bat for me, I'll get them on media to basically call you all useless pieces of shit. And I do think for many people, Michael, I don't think even on the left, I think if you're standing as a councillor, and you've just lost by 50 votes, or if you've been canvassing for three weeks, but some of you really think would do a great job, and you see Keir Starmer acting in the way that he has, I think you'd be very angry. So, no, those people might not support a special conference. But I think he's lost a great deal of faith and credibility from people across the Labour Party, MPs, councillors and members, and that goes well beyond the left. The point is, there is nobody else. If there was an alternative leader from the centre, centre-left, like you say, he could be something of a consensus politician. I think what Michael Howard did, for instance, with the Tories after Ian Duncan Smith going into the 2005 general election, under him actually, they picked up lots of seats. He was just a caretaker, but he was a pretty good one. If that option existed for Labour right now, I believe that many MPs from the centre of the party, even the centre-right, some people, would say, let's get this person in, because Keir Starmer right now, if he carries on, well, if he carries on this time tomorrow, he might not be around, but if he carries on with this kind of general direction, Labour are going to lose 40, 50 seats in the next general election, at least, because you're looking at people like, for instance, I mentioned him, Pat McFandler and Wolverhampton, I think majority of them are less than 2000, Leave Voting Place, he's going to lose his seat. There's lots of MPs that applies to, and yes, Labour are doing really well in Wales, and yes, they're doing really well in parts of the English South, but that's not enough to make up for the losses they'll suffer elsewhere, which is kind of lost on people like Ian Dunn and the FBPE people on Twitter, you know, all of a sudden are really interested in Labour politics, they go, well, let's take a mixed picture for Labour, they're doing really well, and we shouldn't just be talking about Harley-Paw, we have the red walls crumbling, but the blue walls growing, yeah, there's some really interesting, the blue walls crumbling as well, which is the Tory equivalent in the South, one might argue, true, good observation, but it's not happening nearly quickly enough, and Labour, like I say right now, yeah, they might pick up three, four seats for the Tories in the South, they're going to lose 50, 60 plus elsewhere, and so I think Michael, I do disagree with you, I think that Keir Summers lost a lot of faith from a lot of people, and I don't think he can solve it, I don't think he gets it back. I mean, I think he's lost a lot of faith from a lot of people, I mean, that's precisely where I think the opportunity is for the left, and you should try and build that, I'm not convinced at this point in time, it's the majority of the people, you know, I think probably he's going to have to fuck up a couple more times, I mean, and again, I think probably in a year's time or six months time or whatever, after battling and spend, if there is some energy around a Canada and Keir Starmer can be shown to be, you know, complete and competent, this has definitely helped, I don't think it's enough to say, oh, we're done with this guy, I think the membership overall will still want to give him a chance, and I think, you know, every passing week, the number of people who are, you know, whose patience has run out with Keir Starmer is probably going to be growing, and there would have been a massive increase in that over the past three days, but I still don't think that means, oh, there is this overwhelming desire to have a leading position, which will overthrow Keir Starmer. I'm not suggesting that, I'll just be quick, I mean, let's wait for the next opinion polls that come out with regards to sentiment within the Labour Party towards Keir Starmer. I don't, I think there are many, many people who voted from previously who wouldn't vote from another time. No, I'm not saying they'd vote for somebody else, but I really think he's lost his mandate, Michael. It depends on, it depends how election comes about, doesn't it? If an election comes about and it's seen as wreckers, then I think he'd be in a good position to win it. If an election comes about and it's seen as, you know, a legitimate contest, not an attempt to overthrow a democratic election, which happened, you know, just over a year ago, then I think he could lose. I think if the election in, you know, if an election that was perceived as fair and timely took place, he would have a good chance of losing. If a given election happens, which the membership at large perceives as being sort of forced as unwelcome, then he's probably in a position to win it, which is why I think the left need to be fairly careful in terms of demanding it. Oh, I entirely agree. I shouldn't rush into it. I entirely agree. And again, it goes back to the thing about John McDonnell, what we now need to do is the battle of ideas. No, what if we have another think tank, somehow Keir Starmer's going to become a the leader that, you know, some people thought he might be, I mean, if there's a division of labor, isn't there? If there's a division of labor, if you're one of the minority of left MPs in parliament, one of the things that's quite useful to do is build alliances with people from other wings of the party. That's the only way there's going to be a leadership election. You will say, I mean, he said, what's that got to the battle of ideas, though? I think focus, people like ideas, they're not intimidating. No, I know. But Michael, you just say, look, we've done the party's done really well in a whole bunch of places. And I think we should really focus on that. And we should all try and learn from that. And I think we need to elect more socialist councillors and ultimately MPs. And I think that's again, it's talking about power, the battle of ideas come on. It's just, it's, it's politically neutered language. It basically means when people say that battle of ideas, I basically feel like they're saying, I don't really want a political fight here. I want to have any conversation around power. And you're right, in parliament, socialist structure is very weak. So I can understand why you don't want to actively seek out as a left wing parliamentarian. But I think, you know, you don't need to completely dodge it and use such a misleading sequence of words. I like McDonald. Let me just clarify, I'm not slagging off John McDonnell. I just don't think that's, I don't think it's a helpful, helpful perspective. We might be overanalyzing a sequence of words instead of a real difference in terms of strategy. I do think there are some differences we have in terms of strategy, but I think we're in danger of going down a rabbit hole of looking too much into it, into a sequence of words that McDonnell used. So we are McDonnell used. So we're going to go to some comments and then we're going to go to the latest on Peter Mandelson's involvement in all of this and an update from what's from, from, from the lobby journalists at the moment. Sam Coates from Sky Tweets, it's still on for this evening, apparently. So we are still expecting this long-awaited Shadow Cabinet reshuffle to happen. And Gabriel Pogrand from the Times tweets, plenty of Shadow Ministers and Labour MPs are bewildered by Starmer's office and their way of making decisions. No idea how to get things past him or who to go to. Source says it's not that they're not in the room. We don't know where the room is, what it is or if it exists. So you've got all of these people who, who not sure whether they're going to go to a Shadow Cabinet meeting tomorrow, they don't even know who's making the decision, whether a decision is being made. I mean, it's clearly terrible, terrible political management, which is, you know, very good for the left if they can look a bit constructive, which I think, you know, some of them are managing. Let's actually, I said comments, let's go to some comments. And before we do that, if you are a regular donor, thank you so much, you make all of this possible. If not, please do go to navarramedia.com forward slash support. We ask for you to donate and very kindly the equivalent of one hour's wage a month. And we have some big donations on the super chats, which we really do appreciate. Michelle Razzio with £41 and a £20 super chat. Thank you very much. That is so kind. And over in the Twitch chat, Spinwood says, Dave Ward had a great quip, the Rainer promotion stuff. So he was talking about it being fire and rehire, which is fire and rehire, isn't it? Because they fired Angela Rainer and now they're going to rehire her in an unspecified position. So that's actually, you know, it's a good quip. It's also just factually what's happened here. Obviously, her income and livelihood isn't at risk in the same degree that many people are who are threatened with fire and rehire. I don't want to belittle the trauma of being subject to fire and rehire for people where their income is at stake. Peter with Fiverr says, Elami could be leader after Stammer. I don't think he's got the coalition behind him that would probably be needed because he was too. He just gave up everything to the People's Vote campaign, which I think, you know, he's a very good communicator. I think that means you're not in a position to be the leader of the party. You're in a position to be a vocal and persuasive member of a team. But not to lead it is my particular figure or position on that. Stuart Brown with 499, I couldn't vote Labour this time. I stayed at home. What Stammer is doing sickens me because it reminds me of Kinnock in the 80s and worse policy. And Callum Watt with a tenner. I've just been elected Labour and Cooperative Councillor in Lincoln last week. Thank you for the work that you do to keep our members and our politicians better informed. Congratulations Callum Watt. I've just been elected Labour and Cooperative Councillor in Lincoln. Very, very exciting. Very good to hear. Let's do you want to come in on any of those before we go to Peter Mann also, Naran? Yeah, quickly. I think, I think, like you say, Lamme is a really effective politician. That doesn't mean you should be the leader of a political party. I think Labour's next leader clearly has to be from from somewhere that isn't the south of England. Clearly, Jeremy Corbyn, Southerner, Ed Miliband, Southerner and Alkea Stammer. And they're hemorrhaging seats in the West Midlands and Northeast. I think it's really important that actually you have a leader of the Labour Party that sounds like people from these communities that they're losing. Some people might disagree, but I think that's really, really important. Politics goes beyond Westminster. It's not to, you know, denigrate London. It has its own problems. But I really think that's critical now. I think, ideally, Labour would have a woman leader and ideally, they wouldn't be from London. And of course, that's why at the last at the last time of asking, I voted for Rebecca Long-Bailey. So don't blame me for all this. I mean, I think with these sort of identities, I think, yeah, that would be ideal. But ultimately, you've got to go for the person who can communicate best with the people you need to win, which isn't necessarily going to be someone from the same identity group. But, you know, I agree that would be ideal. As we said, there aren't many obvious options to become Labour leader at this point in time, which is, you know, a bit disappointing, really. We said we would go on to talk about Peter Mandelson, who has been ever present this weekend, constantly on our televisions, talking nonsense. Mainly, we analyzed one of his interviews on Friday's show, and we have been finding out this weekend quite how involved he has been in Keir Starmer's operation. And there was a nugget in, this was a Sunday Times write up about the Angela Reina Rao, which involved Peter Mandelson. Let's go to that nugget. So I think this was Gabriel Pogwin writes, party staff say David Evans, General Secretary and Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's Chief of Staff, took control of elections a month ago. McSweeney 42 is a centrist who joined Labour after Blair signed the Good Friday Agreement. He is close to Lord Mandelson. Blair's former spin doctor asked Reina following a meeting of Labour MPs and peers to explain what the party's campaign message was. Sources say she was unable to do so coherently, a friend said. It feels like she's being stitched up to distract from failings closer to the top. So Peter Mandelson asking her, well, I mean, I don't think it should be a particularly difficult question, but asking her a question which seems to be intended to catch her out. Angela Reina doesn't perform very well. That gets briefed to the press, and now she's being sacked. So a key role for Peter Mandelson there. Owen Jones had a really interesting bit of information today. He tweeted out, senior Labour sources tell me that when shadow cabinet members complained to Keir Starmer's office about the terrible lines they were given to take to the media after the Hartley Paul disaster, they were told Peter Mandelson had signed them off, which is, I mean, Keir Starmer's operation is so out of ideas. They're going to Peter Mandelson, who when you listen to him on the radio now completely incoherent is like what me and Aaron were just saying. He is one of those people where he hasn't woken up to the fact that politics have changed over the last 22 years and literally just thinks everything has frozen since 1997, and we just have to do 1997 again and everything will be wonderful. It's, I mean, just not only taking advice from Peter Mandelson, but essentially giving control of parts of the operation to Peter Mandelson is phenomenal and phenomenally bad. And the proof is in the pudding because we saw what people were saying after that Hartley Paul defeat. It was the sort of, even though we've lost nine percentage points, the problem is that everyone hates the Labour Party but likes Keir Starmer, even though Keir Starmer formed less than Jeremy Corbyn didn't convince anyone. And then the most ridiculous responses were from people like Jim McMahon, who was saying, oh, the reason people in Hartley Paul are voting Tories because the Tories will invest money in Hartley Paul. He's like, you shouldn't say that. Maybe you're a politician for the Labour Party. Final, our final Peter Mandelson tweet and it's from Rachel Wimmer from the Huffington Post. This was to date. Mandelson says the hard left factions attached to trade unions have to go and party reform should be a priority for Starmer. This is what you might call not exactly a neutral statement. So Aaron, two, I mean, really important bits of information that one is the influence that Peter Mandelson currently has in the Labour Party and two, the fact that even now in 2021, he thinks his priority should be for Keir Starmer to destroy hard left factions attached to trade unions. We keep talking about Joe Biden. He is in the United States saying trade unions are a really important part of our society and economy. You've got here Keir Starmer being advised by someone who thinks that the political influence of trade unions has got to go. It's terrifying. I mean, why should Peter Mandelson have his finger on the pulse when you think about it? He lives in a, I think, a five million plus pound house in Notting Hill. If he still lives there, that's the place he famously purchased in the early noughties, I believe, maybe late 1990s with an interesting loan, which was partly funded by an interesting loan, which is the reason why he had to leave the Shadow Cabinet the first time, the Cabinet rather the first time. So, yeah, I mean, Peter Mandelson, I really, I really don't get it. And I don't understand why he's treated still as this kind of Spengali by the media. I remember once in maybe 2016 after Keir Starmer, Keir Starmer was wrong with me after Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected as Labour leader. I went to do BBC Radio with Vanessa Feltz and we were talking and chatting away and she said, oh, Peter Mandelson said this. And I said, who cares what Peter Mandelson says? And I sort of said it quite openly. I said, I don't think anybody's really taken seriously anything that's come out of Mandelson's mouth for the last decade. So I really wouldn't worry about that. And she looked at me like I'd murdered somebody. She said, this is Peter Mandelson we're talking about. And I think Mandelson, you know, it's a continued role he plays. You know, he was on the BBC Radio as well again today, talking about, and I quote, the respectable working class. What does that mean? Labour should be trying to get the vote of the respectable working class, but not the disrespectful working class. I mean, your guess is as good as mine. But, you know, he exerts the influence, he personifies everything that's wrong with British politics, not just as an operator, not just his lack of ideas, but this kind of interface that he operates through between media and politics. You know, he has the influence he does because he's on, you know, he's on the quick dial for so many producers and presenters and editors. And it's really sad because he's got nothing important to say. He's got absolutely no solutions to the great crisis of the 21st century. We've had the global financial crisis, you know, 12 years of stagnating living standards, massive regional inequality, climate change. We've got a demographic aging crisis on the horizon. We've got a breakdown, effectively, of American hegemony over the course of the next 30, 40 years. We've got the rise of the East. I think that's a wonderful thing, by the way, not a challenge. But in any case, all of these new, all of these new contexts, he hasn't got any ideas. It's crazy. And all he'll say is we'll just need to reduce taxiness. He always wears these lovely immaculate, bryony suits, lovely 200 pound haircut, very calm, very, you know, cut language, you'll have a Mont Blanc pen, well, we need to do this, we need to do that, we need to do this. This in no way relates to people's lives. That's why, you know, he was, he was connected to the original sort of strong grin, I think it was called campaign during the Brexit referendum. He was then attached to the People's Vote campaign. You know, he was, the candidate he would have wanted to win in 2015 was Liz Kendall. In 2016, it was over the Smith. People at Peter Mandelson don't win things anymore in politics. And you can say, well, neither Jeremy Corbyn, Jeremy Corbyn was the Labour leader who was responsible for, and I think this will happen. If we have a general election in 2024, Jeremy Corbyn got the highest share of the vote for any Labour leader by then in 23 years. That's a lot more than what Peter Mandelson's done since 1997. And again, it goes back to 1997. It wasn't just Peter Mandelson, it was a bunch of people, so many people. And we kind of replicate this neoliberal myth of genius and so on. No, to do something like that to win a massive majority takes real collaboration from many, many, many, many people. A good Marxist understands that you can't achieve anything with that collaboration. You know, there's always a socialization of production for anything that's actually hard to do. And that includes winning general elections. So this idea that, oh, Sven Gali, he knows what he's talking about. It's one opinion. Ask Bill down the dog and duck. He's got just as valuable opinion on this as Peter Mandelson, in my opinion. The stronger in people's vote point I think is really important, because people talk about Peter Mandelson like, oh, you might not like his politics, but he's a winner. I mean, what has he been involved in since 1997? Campaigns which lost, right? The People's Vote campaign was the biggest disaster in British politics in a generation, right? I mean, you could say actually Peter Mandelson was successful because all he wanted to do was bring down Jeremy Corbyn and actually quite successfully, the People's Vote campaign did destroy Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. So he could say actually he's a strategic genius or he runs losing campaigns. In this instance, I mean, one thing we can say about him is either he's completely incompetent or he cares more about destroying the left and factional fighting than he does about Labour performing in any kind of general election. So in either of those situations, the thing Keir Starmer should do is not really trust the guy, right? It is not really have him signing off People's Lines on important political moments when you've got Shadow Covenant members going out on television saying, oh, it's Peter Mandelson who signed it off, right? If Peter Mandelson signed it off, it's probably, I mean, something that you should not have said in the last 20 years in front of a television camera, right? It's irrelevant in this day and age. And this trade union stuff is so, I mean, I've said it already, but I do, I do just think it is incredible that you've got Joe Biden, someone who was on, I mean, still, you know, still is on the right of the Democratic Party, but in much of his career, he was really right-wing, right? And he has come to realise, not because I think he's had some conversion to left-wing politics, but has come to realise that if you want to build a coalition in the 21st century, you don't disparage trade unions, you don't disparage public investment, you don't talk about the necessity of balanced budgets. And you've got these people like Peter Mandelson, you know, zombies from a previous age who are coming out and saying the only way you can possibly win a general election is to do exactly what New Labour did in 1997. And the whole thing, I mean, I've said embarrassing, Aaron said terrifying, I think they both are appropriate in this scenario. Let's go to some comments. Producer Fox is informing me that he thinks Keir Starmer is waiting for Tiskey Sauer to finish to announce the reshuffle. I hope he starts announcing it soon, because my throat's starting to, I'm quite thirsty at this point. Maybe I'll go grab a drink next time, Aaron's in flow. Let's go to some comments. Musk, 88, with a fiver. I regretted voting for Keir ages ago. I made the mistake of taking him at his word. Christopher, I'm sure there'll be lots of people thinking that at this point in time. Christopher Bowles tweets on hashtag Tiskey Sauer, Christopher Bowles, big fear of MPs right now must be that Johnson rushes the repeal of the Fixed Term Parliament Act and then immediately declares a general election seeking a new mandate after Brexit. Very possible. Could happen. Definitely could happen. Again, it's a very risky thing to do that. I mean, remember Theresa May did that and it was, you know, appalling for her, although Boris Johnson has been tested much more than Theresa May was. And then we've got to do Cantwell with 10 euros. As an outsider to the UK, looked up Batley and Spen. Tory candidate was 3000 votes behind Labour in 2019. Anything else I should know. That's a great question. It's almost like we planted that comment. We didn't, I promise, but we are now going to go on to the topic of Batley and Spen because we're talking about this because Tracy Braben has won the race for West Yorkshire Mayor. Tracy Braben is the MP for Batley and Spen. Let's actually talk about her victory first. So she becomes the first ever woman to be elected as a Metro Mayor. I'm slightly embarrassing. You know, it's taken this long, but it's very nice that now it's happened because she has been elected. It means a by-election will take place in her current seat of Batley and Spen. And this is potentially worrying for the Labour Party because it's tight. You know, she won by 3000 in the in the last general election. And the Britain elects have published an aggregate for the council elections in Batley and Spen. So obviously Batley and Spen is a parliamentary constituency. But if you top up the various wards in that constituency, they've said what would the result be in a general election if exactly the same people voted and in the same way as they voted in the council election? We can't necessarily say that would be the case. But let's get these up. Britain elects is telling us based on this aggregation that if a general election, not general election, a by-election were to happen in Batley and Spen tomorrow, and people voted in the same way they did in this council election, the Conservatives would win with 39.9% of the vote. Labour would come a very close second on 39.6%. You can see the Lib Dems and the Greens doing quite well in these council elections. What Labour will be hoping is that in a by-election, the support for third parties will decline, which often happens. You know, people see this as a neck and neck raise, very high stakes. And so if you don't want the Conservatives to win and you were a Lib Dem or a Green voter in this council election, you will go over to the Labour party. Right, Aaron, what do you think will happen in Batley and Spen? I mean, it's quite a difficult question, but what do you think? Yeah, I think, well, look, we've just had a by-election in Harley-Paw. Governments don't win by elections generally. I think this is the seventh time now if you include Harley-Paw. I think in 100 years is something ridiculous. And of course, important to say, one of the times that happened was with Copeland, Jeremy Corbyn was the Labour leader, and not long after we have the amazing result of 2017, where actually they increased their share of the vote by 9.5%. So things can turn around. However, it would be something special if Labour lost the Harley-Paw by-election and then lost the Batley and Spen by-election. To do two consecutively, I mean, it's really important to highlight how unprecedented that would be. Really, really unprecedented. Batley and Spen, I think, on paper, is easier to keep than Harley-Paw. But that said, they thought that Harley-Paw was a safe seat. That's why they parachuted into a political ally in the form of Paul Williams. Oh, yeah, he's a Romain. Yeah, he doesn't live in the area. But that's, he's not from the area. That doesn't matter because they'll win anyway. That was obviously wrong. And so I think they would be very remiss to have the same attitude in Batley and Spen, although can't rule it out. There would be a by-election independent of a broader national context. There wouldn't be elections elsewhere. By-elections generally have a lower turnout. That wasn't so much the case in Harley-Paw because, of course, there was the Metro-Mayor election and all sorts of other elections. Of course, it wasn't as high as a general election, but this would be even lower. You can get by-election. I don't know the record is, but you get low 30s in the past, I think. This could be mid-30s. Obviously, I think the higher it is, I think probably the worse for labor. So it's going to be very challenging. And important to say, actually, in this constituency, I believe about one in five votes is Muslim, come from certain Bane communities, which we would generally say vote labor. But, of course, that can go very badly wrong. We saw, for instance, Luke Akerse running for a council position in Oxford. He lost two Greens, one in that ward. And I was told by a source there, they said he lost partly because it was going around various local mosque WhatsApp groups and so on that this guy was a really bad ombre. I'm not saying I agree with that. This is simply what my source told me. It was a factor in why he lost. And so I think if labor were perceived to parachute another candidate, if the Tories were perceived to, if they were still carrying on the sort of rhetoric, I think Harley-Paw was quite unique because of what Ben Houchen was doing in Teese Valley. I think this is a bit different. But you could see how the sort of stars were aligned and they could be in big, big trouble. I think if they parachuted another candidate, which, like I say, at the moment I'm told is a young woman called Salma Arif, who is favoured by Lotto. If she's parachuted in with no selection process, I would say there's a good chance labor will lose. I think that's what will happen. We'll see. Very, very difficult to say, Michael, because look, if you're Salma Arif or whoever else that Lotto wants to parachute in, or indeed anyone, I mean, do you really want to contest this election? You'll be under such national scrutiny. If, like Paul Williams, you lose by seven, eight thousand votes, your political career is basically over where it started, very difficult. So lots of moving parts right now. But right now I'd say it's 50-50 labor would lose it. I think they should win it. I mean, looking at that aggregate there, the Conservatives on 39.9%, Labor on 39.6%. So this was a poor election for labor anyway. They're nearly over the line. And then if you're looking at those Lib Dem votes and those green votes, we can probably get this up. Can we get up graphic 21 again, Fox? So if you're looking at those Lib Dem votes, 11.6% for the Lib Dems, 6.8% for the Greens, you've got to expect those to go more to labor than to go to the Conservatives. So I think it's going to be difficult for labor to lose that particular by-election. If they do, then obviously I think that we would be in leadership, leadership battle territory. There would probably be a leadership challenge. Of course, as I said, this is how people vote in these locals. It could be very different in a general election. And let's go to a comment. We have a comment from Moonstone with 20 pounds. How do you feel that the previous Hartley-Poole Labor MP allegedly sexually harassed a woman who received no support from the Labour Party under Corbyn and Stammer? Do you think that Labour does not register complaints seriously? This is a story that was in The Guardian today, super important, which is essentially that the person who was the person who allegedly was sexually harassed by the MP who had to stand down, so Mike Hill was the MP who stood down and forced this by-election, basically said she wasn't treated properly by the party. They didn't really pay that much attention to her well-being and didn't take the complaint particularly seriously. Now, obviously, this is a problem which has happened both under Jeremy Corbyn and under Kier Stammer. So it doesn't seem like it's necessarily a factional issue here. It just seems like the Labour Party is pretty poor at dealing with complaints like this. I have to say, I mean, it's not sadly not a surprise. I'm not sure if there's anyone who really speaks about the Labour Party as being particularly good at dealing with complaints about things like sexual harassment. Hopefully something they are able to work on. It was interesting in the EHRC report, they actually kept talking about the response to sexual harassment complaints as this example of how Labour can deal with complaints very well, look how they deal with sexual harassment complaints and why haven't they been able to deal with anti-Semitism complaints? I mean, I think lots of people would question whether they were very good at the sexual harassment complaints, but they thought it was dealt with in a less factional way, at least. I'm sure this is a story we'll be coming back to an issue we'll be coming back to. Sal with a fiver, let's all get behind Andrew Adonis' call. Tony Blair first battalion spent a short fire win. How long is it going to be until people are saying we need to parachute David Miliband into battalion spend? That normally happens every time there's a fire election and you have the Blairites sort of back on Twitter saying we've got to bring David Miliband back. Anyone who watched Friday's show will know that Peter Mandelson his anecdote for knocking doors in Hartlepool. He said, no one mentioned Brexit. Everyone mentioned Jeremy Corbyn or most people, loads of people mentioned Jeremy Corbyn and one person when they answered the door, they said, the reason I'm not voting Labour is because in 2010 you voted for the wrong brother. So Peter Mandelson still obsessed with David Miliband, the leader that could have been. So I expect some of them will be suggesting that David Miliband leaves his million pound job in New York and comes back and represents battalion spend. Aaron, who would be the curveball candidate? If you could choose anyone to stand in battalion spend, who would it be? Personally, I think it should be down to the local members. I think they should decide it democratically and I think that that isn't just morally right. It tends to be the most politically effective thing to do. The idea of parachuting somebody from outside the seat, not familiar with it and so on, I think that's in the new politics, I think that's deadly. So it either have to be something like that or you just get like a celeb, battalion spend probably has to be like a left leaning, left leaning celeb. It can't be Gary Neville obviously because he's from Lancashire. He's a manc. Somebody like that would be quite fun. It can't be Kara. He's you know, Merseyside. So you know, maybe somebody put that in the comments. Is there a Leeds version of that? Is there somebody that used to play for Leeds United who has really good politics and they should become a Labour MP? I would love to know. Nobody springs to mind. So I'll leave that one to the local membership I think. Gary Neville would be great, wouldn't he? I mean, you know, he's Manchester not Leeds, but he's someone who I could imagine being leader of the Labour Party. If he wanted a challenge to Kirstam, who would genuinely like terrify him and unite much of the party membership and probably become Prime Minister, it would be someone like Gary Neville. He's probably the person we've played more clips of than anyone else over the past three weeks because of all the issues of the European super league and he has come out so articulately with a critique of it. But I think if he were to, I mean, if he were to stand, he would, I mean, he would be incredibly successful. Michael, I suppose is Andy Burnham becoming an MP and then Gary Neville becoming mayor of Manchester. Michael, you don't understand the rivalry between Leeds United and Manchester United. You think you think that you think he wouldn't get elected on that? You just don't get it. No, I don't. Gary Neville would probably never run anywhere near Leeds or Liverpool, I think. Just my view. I might be wrong. Maybe again, put it in the comments. Maybe I'm wrong. I think he would be an amazing, and I think he would actually want to do that. I think if Burnham re-enters national politics, I think Gary Neville would be an amazing mayor of Manchester and we've not had that yet. It's so interesting because, you know, and by the way, I have really, I have no problem with like celebrities and politics. None. You know, it's just, it's just terrible celebrities with bad politics that I have a problem with. But if you think about, you know, there's, there's, there's been many good people in the United States who've done activism with, you know, the DSA. Is it Cynthia Nixon? You know, you know, I'm talking about. Yeah, Cynthia Nixon from Texas in the City, she challenged Andrew Cuomo to become governor of New York. Great. I'm thinking that. I'm not sure which, I'm sure there's like a radical celebrity that we can coax to challenge Sadiq Khan in three years time. That's what I'm hoping for. You know what? You know what? I'm going to call it here, Michael. Ash Sarka. Sick. Yeah. Ash Sarka, the challenge Sadiq Khan in three years time. Mayor for London. Amazing. It was right in front of me. Why was I, why was I searching for this radical celebrity? It's like Paulo Coelho and the alchemist, Michael. And he finds the treasure and it was where he started the journey. Let's look at some more election results. We can go on to the Greens winning big in Bristol. These were very, very impressive results actually. So in Bristol, the Greens have won 13 seats from Labour, which brings the Green Party into joint first place. So both Labour and the Greens are on 24 seats. So it was an all out election. So every seat in Bristol was up for election on Thursday and the total results we haven't made. The Greens are on 24. They've increased their number of seats by 13. Labour are on 24. There's a down by 13. The Conservatives on 14, no change in the Liberals on eight, no change. And we can get up the vote share across all wards for the council elections in Bristol. So when it comes to vote share, the Greens actually won. They got the largest vote share, let's say. So the Greens had 32.4% which was up 11.7% from the previous election. Labour got 31.6% which was down 4.2% from the previous election. The Conservatives on 20.7% down 0.3% and the Lib Dems on 14.4% down 2.2%. And the Greens did especially well in wards within Fangham-Devenay's constituency which was the key target seat for the Greens pre-Corbyn. Obviously once Corbyn was elected, Bristol became very, very red. But now he's gone. It looks like Bristol isn't particularly impressed with Keir Starmer. And I mean, Bristol already has gone green to some extent. They are now going to be the joint largest party with Labour on the council. But presumably we could soon see a green mayor of Bristol. Obviously Marvin Rees was re-elected this time around and green MPs in Bristol as well. Aaron, this is a pretty significant development, isn't it? Yes, huge, really huge. Only three Labour councillors in the Bristol West constituency which of course, you know, there could be boundary changes, but that's a pretty remarkable indictment on Labour in the city. Of course, Marvin Rees is very similar to Sadiq Khan in so much. He was a bit of a poster boy for the kind of soft left slash centrist Labour factions. I mean, it's very difficult to place these people generally. They're not Blairites, but they're most certainly not on the left either. And they have a kind of very managerial progressive pluralistic politics. And just like Sadiq Khan in London, Marvin Rees has kind of been found wanting. You know, he struggled to win the mayoralty. And then of course, this is genre of political leadership. He's defined Bristol Labour, again, found wanting. And so I think, you know, it's really, it's really undermined the kind of the trajectory they they and probably many around them thought that they were on, which is, you know, we are the future of the Labour Party post-court and people like Marvin Rees, people like Sadiq Khan. Actually, people want concrete policies. They want politicians who are really connecting with them emotionally. They don't want the kind of early 2000s, vacuous, you know, suited bullshit. And I personally think that's the politics of Marvin Rees. I'd like to be proven wrong, but that's I'm just going on what I see. So yeah, it's huge interesting, you know, I don't think that the Green Party will win Bristol West at the next general election. The majority is I think something like 27,000. After 2017, it was 37,000, something like that. But what I do think is that they will have a really good go at it. And I think they'll get a couple of really strong seconds at the next general election and all of a sudden those are marginals. And I think if you would if you would place a bet right now, which seat is the most likely to have a second green MP after Bryton with Caroline Lucas, I think Bristol West is probably a good bet, although probably won't be at the next general election. That said, who knows? You know, we've seen some incredible swings in British politics over the last 10 years. I mean, most most memorably with the SMP in 2015, when they wiped out Labour in a bunch of really safe seats. So it could happen, you know, it could happen that at the next election, the election after that, the Greens pick up a couple of MPs in Bristol. Don't write it off very progressive city. Let's I mean, we're in a difficult situation at this point, because we've got no idea when this shadow cabinet reshuffle is going to be announced if it's going to be announced at sort of half 10, which is sort of after when the, you know, when the papers go to press, it might be that Keir Starmer doesn't want this on the front pages tomorrow, then we'll probably do it on tomorrow's show. If it gets announced, we don't want it to get announced five minutes after we end the stream. Aaron, what are they waiting for? What? When do you think this shadow cabinet reshuffle is going to happen? Do you think they're waiting? Do you think they're waiting? Well, the whole that the line is that a lot of people are refusing to move. Yeah, I mean, they are waiting because they don't they can't really control when this gets announced is that they they haven't worked out who's going in what position they haven't got the political authority to tell people like John Ashworth or Angela Rainer, like you're going here, they're like, no, go fuck yourself. No, I'm not. What are you going to do about it? Especially actually, because he is taking on because John Ashworth and Angela Rainer are both, you know, from the GMB faction, right? So he's taken on a really powerful faction that wasn't actually that hostile to him. Maybe we did a couple of negative briefings about Jenny Chapman, his political secretary. Maybe he's gone to war with GMB, right? Over this. It's so bizarre. And yeah, now his political authority is completely, you know, is catastrophic. They've got to find a promotion for Angela Rainer, but no one else wants to get the demotion. Like what were they thinking? I mean, it's also incredibly dangerous to brief beforehand who's going to go because they've already briefed, you know, Annalise Dodds is going to go, at least Annalise is going to get moved. As you say, Johnny Ashworth is going to get moved. Now if this doesn't happen, we know that the health, the shadow health secretary isn't Keir Starmer's chosen shadow health secretary. They're just the person who refused to move, right? And we know if Angela Rainer ends up as, you know, the shadow education secretary or whatever, then that's not because Keir Starmer wanted her to have that job. It's because she wouldn't accept this made up job that he just invented about social care. It's not to disparage a potential position for shadow minister, the shadow secretary of state for social care, but it's not actually an office of state. It doesn't exist yet. So that is a demotion. So whatever he puts her in, it's like, it looks like a defeat. You know, it's embarrassing. Well, as a reshuffle, maybe you remember this, Michael, very early on in the, in the Corbyn leadership, I believe it was 2016. And they sort of, it took really long and it was briefed really late. And the whole lobby, you've not made us the center of attention. We matter more than anybody else. And the fact that you've done this so late and it's taken so long to conclude, Jeremy Corbyn must resign. Now, see how this is being covered by the BBC. LBC, you know, if it was, if this was Jeremy Corby, you know, LBC, the political editor, you know, all those guys, this is why Jeremy Corbyn can't run the country, Nick Farrowy frothing. Why haven't they done the reshuffle yet? It's, it's five to nine. Right. But of course, it's Keir Starmer. Well, we'll see what's going on. I don't know. Because of course, you know, there's a very huge double standard. Important to say as well, Michael, it's not just on Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer's staff are really inexperienced, generally not very good people. Ben Nunn, you know, the party's director of communications at a piece on him for Navara Media when Starmer first won or during the campaign, actually, and another piece for Huck. Ben Nunn, his political smarts, you know, not, not that great. Another guy, Chris Ward, previously worked alongside Chris Leslie's wife. And good terms with Chris Leslie, some sources tell me. And so again, the political judgment of these people, their skill set, their competence sets, quite a question. And I think there's, you know, we're in a perfect storm of really incompetent office staff and a really incompetent party leader who seems to be very sleep deprived, possibly even drunk. Because how else do you make sense of such preposterous positions and decision making? We are going to, at this point, show a video, which has gone very viral today and really divided opinion, you know, that lots of people have all complained about the comments that it's led to. I think it's actually very interesting sociologically. It's a clip of the BBC talking to voters in Hartlepool. Malcolm, you're a traditional Labour voter. How do you reflect on this by-election and how you decided to vote in the end? Well, I suppose it's like for Hartlepool, and the likes of a Labour, it stems back to your grandad, your dad, and it's passed on to you. You vote Labour because we're working class, etc, etc. And now we're getting to a stage where you can sort it. Think for yourself, we've had enough Labour. They've just, they've just wrecked it, everything, wrecked it, totally the hospital. We haven't even got a cell where we can lock someone up on the night. We haven't got a court where we can take them to court. What's that all about? We're a big town, aren't we? Yeah. You've got to have these for the police, all the police, and the hospital ones are one for us because we had the option to give birth to our second son in Hartlepool. But we decided against it because there's no doctors and no theaters and sort of, if there was anything went wrong, God forbid, we'd have had to go to North T's. So that video has, I mean, been, I mean, it's had over a million views, and the comments really vary from people who were annoyed at Chris Mason, who's the journalist for saying, why didn't you correct the people speaking and saying, wait a minute, the Tories have been in government for 11 years. Do you really think it's Labour's fault that the hospital has moved or that the magistrates court has closed down because, you know, they don't, you know, they don't control the purse strings here. That funding is from central government and the Conservatives were in power. Then there have been other people who've sort of said, ah, look at these idiots, they deserve everything they get. If now they've, you know, they've made their bed, they voted for the Conservatives because they don't pay attention to politics. And so they deserve it when their hospital moves. And then there are people who say this represents a failure of the Labour Party, because they haven't been able to successfully articulate that the cuts that you are experiencing in your local area is the fault of a Conservative government, not your Labour MP or Labour Council. I think Hartley Paul has been switching. I'm not precisely sure actually who has had control of that council over the previous, over the previous few years. But it is anyway, what's clear here is the issues they were talking about there are under the control of central government is the funding decisions of central government that will determine if they have a hospital and a magistrates court, and they are blaming Labour who have been in opposition for 11 years for it. Aaron, what did you make of that particular video? I mean, some of the moralising around it obviously was not helpful, but it's incredibly sociologically interesting, isn't it, when you've had people who have lived under a Conservative government for 11 years and are blaming Labour for the closure of hospitals? I think it's a really complex argument that you've got to kind of make here, because in the one hand, what they're saying is factually wrong, let me say. However, you know, Labour have been in charge in Hartley Paul, whether it's, you know, local government, I don't know the history of the council going back decades, but generally they're in charge of local government. The last time they lost an MP was, what, 59? It was 64? I'm not sure precisely the date, but they've been there at least 50 years. The constituency was created in 1974 and it's been Labour since then, but I don't know what was the case in the constituency. The Tories won it once, you know, in the last century, and that was by like a couple of hundred votes, a hundred votes or whatever. I think it was 59, wasn't it? Before that it was 1950, I'm told. 1950 was the last time the Conservatives won it, is what Fox was telling me. 1950, okay, I'm surprised at that, but whatever, okay, even further back, 70 years. In the 1950s, sorry. Okay, okay, Fox. There you go, I might still be right. Labour controlled the council between 2010 and 2019. So that's interesting. That's an important point. But my point is this, basically, that Labour have been in charge of many of these places for a very long time and people have seen things get worse. And so they may be wrong to identify, for instance, the local council mismanaging something because the reality is there's been a two-thirds cut to local government funding since 2010, but it's not entirely inexplicable. And so the problem then for Labour is they have to communicate why that's happening and how they are offering a solution and they fail to communicate that. At the end of the day, votes are going to be misled by the Tories, by the media, and you have to try your best to get the message across. Now, one of the answers to that with Jeremy Corbyn with the Labour Party after 2015 was saying, we're going to have a massive membership, we're going to mobilise them so they have credibility when talking to people in their communities to say, actually, this isn't true. This is the case instead. Now, that's very difficult. That takes decades to build up. But I think fundamentally, it boils down to this, those gentlemen responding in the way that they did, I think shows a complete failure of the Labour Party over the last 40, 50 years to engage in meaningful political education at a local level. And that's clearly what a left party has to do. And they, instead of doing that, they took votes like that for granted and they thought, generally speaking, we can, it happened several times, generally speaking, we can form a government if we bank these people, we don't even think they're going to go anywhere else. And instead, we concentrate our energies and our interests and our organising into these marginals, generally speaking, trying to target more middle class voters. Again, that worked, right? It worked in 97, it worked in 2001, 2005. But that has come at a cost. And so, yeah, it's sociologically interesting. But I also think it does speak to certain failures of the Labour Party politically over the last 40, 50 years. I'm not putting that on Keir Starmer, right? I'm not even putting that on Tony Blair. It goes back a very, very, very long way. How does the Labour Party, particularly now in the 21st century, try and do that and circumvent the media, particularly the print media, in a way that's effective? That's a million dollar question. It was a question that actually Jeremy Corbyn was trying to answer. Keir Starmer doesn't. And that's what's really worrying for me with the Labour Party is they don't think that's a question that needs to be answered anymore. Their answer is, well, actually, we're just going to suck up to the times and the sun. And we think the BBC will give us a fair shot. I think this is probably going to be a bit more difficult than that. But let's see. Yeah, I mean, it is super difficult because, obviously, Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of the Labour Party for five of those years. So he had the largest bully pulpit where he could speak and clearly there are lots of people trying to undermine him. But there was a left-wing leadership at the Labour Party for five years, and still people in Hartlepool are blaming the Labour Party for conservative cuts. So it can't just be, oh, this is a failure of, I'm not saying this is what you're saying, by the way, but it can't just be this is a failure of centrist labour. I think an issue here is this is just really fucking difficult. It's a real, real challenge. And personally, I don't really like the, I don't like the phrase political education, because it reminds me of sort of like either sort of Gramsci seminars, or this sort of very, I mean, I find it, I think it sounds a little bit patronising. It's sort of like, we'll teach you how politics works. For me, more plausible in this instance. And again, I think this is, I don't think this is easy. I think this is incredibly challenging. But I think if you were to have a proper campaigning MP, you know, a proper populist campaigning MP who, you know, people really recognise as representing the town, you know, a bit like Andy Burnham in Manchester, right? Andy Burnham in Manchester is famous enough and has enough personal legitimacy and weight to be able to make the case very strongly that if there are cuts to Manchester bus services, etc., people will be able to blame the Westminster Government because it's the Westminster Government's fault. I mean, that's one of the actually benefits of Metro Mayors is that they can build up that kind of stature, which means that they can successfully point to where the problem is. For me, that's not political education. Political education, for me, sort of reads as we teach people how to understand politics, instead of just, I think it's more just a megafiner platform. Are you able to persuade people and tell people that actually these cuts are coming from central government, not from this council? They're not mutually exclusive. You know, Leo Panitch got arrested so, you know, before he passed away, we'll talk about political education and the democratic practice of, you know, a mass party is actually the same thing. So, you know, you have deep organising, you get, you know, working class, local people, running as councillors, and through the process of seeking election and then running things locally, that itself is a form of political education, that the democratising party, mandatory selection, choosing policy both locally and nationally, formulating that democratically, that itself is a form of political education. So, yeah, it's not just seminars and reading lists and you have to do this. I think you combine the idea of deep organising with MPs and councillors who have to do, like you say, this kind of very populist campaigning, you know, really prominent stuff. By the way, many MPs are very good at doing that. I wouldn't see those things as mutually exclusive. They're entirely right. Short-term, it's far easier to do the campaigning MP than it is to do the other stuff. And we're seeing this, by the way, across the country. The councils that are doing really well for Labour, you know, again, it's just like you see these Muppets on Twitter, FBPE Muppets, well, Labour's share of the right went up by this, and actually, they're going to win these, it's no, that wasn't sociologically inevitable. What happened in wording was the result of dozens, hundreds of people that were committed to changing attitudes and winning people over day after day after day for years, right? And Labour, if you're not doing that as a party, you're not going to win, right? And I think, you know, we do need to be fair that one of the better parts of the Corbyn era was that there was at least that realisation, you know, the format, you know, at the beginning of the community organising unit and so on. And actually, if you look at how it had real successes, if you look at the election in Peterborough, people repeatedly said, had it not been for the community organising team, had it not been for that flooding of canvases, we would have lost that. And we would have had this conversation, we're having now about Hartlepool, we would have had about Peterborough in 2019. And that's only short-term. And clearly, you can't do that all the time. You can't just flood everywhere with activists. But the fundamental basis of that is connection, talking to people on an emotional level, having somebody from the area, trying to represent it, you know, that's really going to cut through. And Labour, what were they doing to win this for Paul Williams, who they brought in, who's, you know, I think he's originally a Southerner, Peter Mandelson. Look, Peter Mandelson was an MP for the Hartlepool constituency. And Paul Williams said, well, we had him here because he reminds people of better times. Well, if Peter Mandelson loves Hartlepool so much, why does he live in West London? You know, I think if I was somebody from Hartlepool, I'm saying this guy, he was our MP, it got him a national celebrity status. The second he was no longer an MP, he fucked off. I wouldn't want to see him. I would think this guy really doesn't have much respect for me. And actually, you know, we've talked about this repeatedly. We talked about it on Friday, yesterday. The Tories are now much better at kind of deep organising and building an emotional connection with place. They are. And I mean, that's really tragic. And so when people are mocking those two guys online, I think, on the one hand, yeah, of course, what they're saying is actually inaccurate. So they're wrong. But on the other, it also speaks to certain failings, I think, from the left. And there have been too many MPs, particularly, and again, let's blame the Blair era, Michael. You know, David Miliband and South Shields, I think he had a contact rate of like 0.5%. That that that era of politics of sending somebody from London who went to Oxford and Caringbridge and sending them to a Northeast constituency, safe seat, that era is gone. Good, by the way, that's fantastic. And it's not coming back. It's never coming back. So we've very hard for people now to win seats across the country if they have no connection to that seat. Good. That's a wonderful thing. It should be celebrated. We've got a comment from N. Martin with 4.99. Thank you very much. Supporting you staying online until we get the reshuffle update. You are doing a great job, guys. Thank you so much. We really do appreciate that support. It will keep us going. We've still got no idea when these announcements are going to, well, I say announcement is actually the wrong work because it's not they're waiting to announce it. They need to work out how to do the reshuffle because everyone's refusing to move. I wish I was a fly on the wall at this point, I have to say. Thomas Smith first with 4.99. Sure, it's the Tories fault things about in Hartlepool, but it's not like it was the city of gold under Blair. That's a very interesting point. I mean, I think probably lots of complaints that people have in Hartlepool will go back to the Blair era. The deindustrialization happened under Tony Blair. There wasn't active industrial policy which tried to make sure that there was broad-based growth across the country. At the same time, the hospital did move in 2011. I think the magistrates court was moved in 2017, I've read. The concrete changes that they are talking about right there were a victim of the coalition government and the governments which followed that, not labor policies. While I think there are many, many, many legitimate complaints that people will have in especially post-industrial parts of the country with Tony Blair. Again, we do need to distinguish between the austerity agenda and the neoliberal agenda, which I suppose in practical terms are very much lived in the same way. Can I say something quickly, Michael? Yes, you can, Aaron. Please do that. Important to say this. Paul Williams, I believe, was one of the NHS clinical commissioners who pushed for hospital downgrading in Hartlepool. That's a very concrete example, actually, of labor participating in the kinds of political management that those two guys were criticizing. They probably didn't know that, but there you go. Yes, that's true. Austerity was not overseen by labor government, but on outsourcing, on low pay, labor could have adopted the Preston model nationally in 2005, 2010. It could have done that. I think these places would feel quite differently about the party had they done so. No, I think that's absolutely true. I think that's a very important point. Back chic with a fiver says, it's time for NM to join the 24-hour news cycle. Strap, Michael, to the chair. Here's a fiver for the cuffs. I want to get a mini fridge as well, so I can top myself up with drinks as we go. Corey Johnson with a tenner, thanks for the long stream guys left labor yesterday and joined the Greens. Interesting. I'm a Kiwi and in New Zealand, the Greens always force labor left. Let's hope that can happen here. Interesting point. I'm pretty sure that New Zealand has proportional representation. The Greens can, in this country, definitely pull labor to the left, but it's much more complicated in first-past-the-post because the strength of the Greens can also help the conservative. Is this real dual problem or the dual nature of a strong Green party, which is that one, it can do this really important thing, which is pull the labor party to the left. The other thing it can do is hand seats to the conservative party. That's why proportional representation is so much better and why it's so much more functional than the system we currently have, which is actually a very good segue to my next section, which isn't quite about proportional representation, but the second preference voting system in the mayoral elections. Because one of the things that's great about the metro mayoral elections is that you don't have to feel that you are blackmailed into voting for the labor party. Because in constituency elections, if you live in a marginal, you'll be told, and you'll be told quite reasonably, if you don't vote for the labor party, you're helping the Tories get elected. What's great about the metro mayoral elections is that you get a first choice and the second choice. In London, if you say, well, I don't think Sadiq Khan is great. I think he's too complacent, but also I don't want to let Sean Bailey in. You can vote for someone else as your first choice. So Sean Barry from the Green party, lots of people did, then Sadiq Khan as your second choice, and then you won't accidentally let in Sean Bailey. The second preference system, really important. We've done that since we've had these metro mayoral elections. There's also the case that in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, the Labour candidate only won on second preference votes. So if it had been first passed the post, the Conservative would have won. So Green and Lib Dem votes went to Labour in the second round, and that meant that the Labour candidate won the metro mayoral election. This is probably why the Conservatives want to get rid of second preferences. So they are now saying next time around, we're changing electoral law, these metro mayors will be elected by first past the post. It's going to be terrible for the Greens, it's going to be terrible for the Lib Dems, it's going to be terrible for any minor party. It's going to probably be good for the Conservatives because the non-tory vote, or progressive or left-wing votes, however we want to say, are more divided than the right-wing vote, especially with the collapse of the Brexit party. So this is why the Tories want to do it. And it's a really bad reactionary move. So one of the issues and one of the justifications we're going to hear from the Conservatives is that the reason we have to move away from this second preference voting system is because it's too confusing. It's too confusing to put your one tick in the first column and your second tick in the second column. And this time around, it's unfortunate because it was quite confusing, at least in the London elections. It was confusing in the London elections because there were so many candidates that there were two columns for the candidates and then there were two columns for the votes. And this meant that in the end, 87,214 Londoners had their mayoral votes rejected. And that's because they accidentally voted twice in the first preference column. So that's a massive number of people. One in 30 of all votes cast in that election or the equivalent of Wembley Stadium had a ruined, destroyed ballot. I think we can bring up a graphic of what those ballots did look like in the London mayoral election. I have to say I found them, I mean, I'm pretty sure I managed to get it right, but I had to double take and work out how to do this, which means it's not a surprise to me that there were loads of spoiled votes. But what's very unfortunate is the Conservatives are now going to use this as an excuse to say, oh, second preference voting too confusing, we have to go back to the traditional first pass the votes, first pass the post system, which inherently benefits ourselves. Very, very cynical argument. What they've done in previous elections is if you have all candidates in a single list, then it's much easier to work out, oh, I see, first column, second column, boom, boom, there were much fewer spoiled ballots last time around. So the problem is the two columns, all you have to do is put it on one sheet of paper. Potentially you could make the barriers for standing slightly higher so that you don't have all of these candidates who've never had a hope in hell. Could you say you have to get a certain amount of signatures or something before you can get yourself on that ballot paper? I think that could be an option which wouldn't inherently fix elections in favour of the Conservatives. Aaron, your take on this. I'm quite worried about this actually. I think this is really not good. Yeah, it's sad. I think it's one of the good things that the Black Government did was change voting for European elections became more proportional, obviously at Holyrood and the Welsh Parliament similar. I think they both have additional member system. In any case, not first past the post. And of course, the mayoral votes as well. It's a real shame because what it does is the Greens, for instance, had we had first past the post, it would have just been a really dull contest of Labour versus Tory. And basically, Sidney Kansen, if you don't vote for me, you're going to get this guy and people vote out of fear rather than what they agree with. And that's why I understand criticisms of proportional representation. But from a moral point of view, I just think, I think it's such a bad way to operate. And it's a shame because the way that these elections are run has really opened up new vistas of political possibility in many, many places. I mean, first and foremost, Scotland. But I think we should be moving more towards that, not away from it. So it's really sad. But also from a strategic point of view, I understand why the Tories have done it because the status quo doesn't really work for them. They won the West Midlands. They won Tees Valley. But generally speaking, it's quite clear now that city mayors are going Labour's way. I mean, even in the West Midlands, after a terrible night, bad national campaign, Liam Lernstil relatively competitive. And it may be that even in the Tees Valley, beyond Ben Housh, and actually the Tories don't really have much cash up there. So politically, you can see why they've done it. But I think it's, yeah, I agree. It's a very disturbing story. And I think something we're going to see more and more is the Tories trying, I mean, basically shift electoral laws so that the system is even more biased in their favour, right? So we already know the electoral geography of this country means that the Tories are, you know, it's in favour of the Tories because Labour votes stack up in city centres. What they also want to do is now introduce things like ID checks. When you go to vote, just make it much, much harder for Labour, whoever they're led by, even if it's not by a completely vacuous, incompetent like Kirsten Armour, to win a general election. All right, we've got an update on the reshuffle. Henry Zeffman from The Times is tweeting, seems shadow cabinet ministers finally starting to get calls about what they're being offered. And he says in a second tweet, a few ministers already staying in place. Is this a reshuffle whose ambitions have shrunk dramatically over the course of the day? So it could be a reshuffle that we end up having to wait a long time for and then ultimately is a bit of a anti-climax because, I mean, of course, we know that's not a surprise that it's the ambitions of it are going to have been shrunk over the day because, I mean, we already know they wanted to give Angela Rainer an emotion and now they're having to give us her a promotion. So it's essentially by definition less ambitious than they wanted. And it seems that it's actually going to be just a complete flop. Tadduce Cantwell with 10 euros. Thank you very much. That voting paper is Madness in Ireland and STV. So that's single transferable vote. There is a single column which can be numbered one all the way down to the amount on the ballot paper. So that's one, two, three, four, etc. I think. I think that's how single transferable vote. You rank everyone and then they redistribute it. We don't have that anywhere in this country. So I'm slightly confused as to how it works. But a good voting system, I'd be happy to learn it if it was introduced here. Aaron, what do you think is sort of like the, do you think it will significantly damage Kirsten Armour's authority if when they announce this reshuffle, it's, you know, it's just like two people moved sideways? What's that? So what do you mean? I think that for the public, it's just labour is just a mess. That's very important. It's just a mess. The nuance of it are kind of like, you know, I don't really know. I think that this is more fatal from in terms of internal party management externally. I mean, he's in deep shit already. But no, I think it certainly weakens it within the parliamentary labour party. Yeah. I'm actually glad you said that. I think you, that's an important point. No one gives a shit about this stuff. This doesn't matter in terms of the public. This won't destroy Kirsten's authority in terms of the public. But what matters here is the internal stuff and how many people within the parliamentary labour party, within the trade unions and members who are following this closely think, well, this guy's incompetent and he's a joke, which I think could be the outcome of this. The general public do not follow reshuffles. I mean, we just showed you that two voters who thought that it was the fault of a labour government or the labour opposition that their hospitals have been defunded in 11 years when the Conservatives were in power. This isn't to say, oh, they're really stupid. It's just like most people don't follow politics, which is fine. It's a particular interest of ours that we follow politics. That's not necessarily a more righteous thing to do. Most people have no fucking clue that a reshuffle is going on. And quite frankly, probably they shouldn't. I shouldn't say that because you're our audience and I love it just as you love it. But I don't think there's any obligation on people to follow all of this. You're like Jim McMahon. You're putting down your own people. Well, I'm not putting them down. Labour have been spending the last two days basically saying that anybody votes them as a fucking idiot and you're saying on a Sunday night, you know, who cares? It's like, well, we care. We've been on our hair almost and lots of people don't care. We've been streaming. We've been streaming for two and a half hours. You people watching care about reshuffles because we're interested in politics, but it's important to recognise that not everyone is. And that's also fine. I think I think I'd also add, Michael, I think a lot of people do love the drama who aren't even interested in politics. I love the drama. You know, but even like, so I think, you know, if this was super messy, yeah, I think it could really, and it's not going to be right. But like, if there was a real high drama like, you know, Angela Ryan says this, and it was all played out publicly, I think people take notice of that. But I think, yeah, if he's doing what is being reported, kind of limiting the scale of this thing, yeah, it's only it's only really going to damage him internally. I think there's so much of the stuff going on. He just looks ridiculous for public at large. It's kind of, he's just confusing, right, as well, because people are like, Corbyn's gone. There's this new guy every saying he's electable. He's professionally slick for the director of public prosecutions. But this, this seems a lot worse, you know, where's it come from? So, you know, even John Bartley, the green leader, the great story they had in Bristol earlier on today, where John Bartley gets, I presume he didn't drive, he's the green leader after all, presumably got on a train, he cycled to, you know, he needed to go with maybe a Brompton bike. And he found a good news story and he was trying to basically, you know, big up green activists who've done well, you know, Kirsten hasn't gone anywhere. As far as I can see, has he gone to Wales? He could have gone to Wales. He could have gone to Preston. He could have gone to Salford. He could have gone to see Paul Sweeney in Scotland, who, you know, friends with the show, he's, he's, I believe he's now an MSP. Come on. It's very, very strange. Like, we keep on going back to it. You know, it's like he's taken a class A substance. I don't believe he has. But it just seems very erratic behavior from somebody who's been, whether you like him or not politically, you know, he's been at the top of his game as a professional and, you know, as the director of public prosecutions. This seems a very erratic man reshuffle underway is what Gabriel Pogrand is tweeting. It's happening. The shadow cabinet members are getting their calls. So hopefully we'll get some news very, very soon. And there was an interesting comment. I've just been looking through the comments. There was someone saying, let's have a look. Someone was upset at me saying that people don't have to follow politics. Barry bulls it. Bollocks, Michael, people have a civil duty to follow politics. It's not a hobby. It's the future of the nation. Stop excusing ignorance. It's an interesting point. Isn't that, isn't that what Aristotle said? Aaron, you're better at sort of like ancient philosophy. I think it was Plato. I think it was Plato. Because I thought Plato was like, we should have a benevolent dictator that manages everything. So why would you follow politics? Whereas Aristotle is the good life is to engage in politics and to debate with people and take control over your life while engaging in political debate and that kind of thing. I think Plato had these nice little aphorisms. And I think he did have one where he said refusal to participate in politics means basically being ruled by idiots. I think that is Plato. He had some great lines Plato. Although, yeah, he was, you know, he loved autocracy. He said, he was asked by one of his students, should I marry? And he said, yes, of course, you should marry because if she's a good wife, you'll be happy. And if she's a bad one, you'll become an excellent philosopher. So Plato, funny guy. That's an interesting one. Amazing. Right. All right. They are going to come very soon. I'm almost getting like, I want to crack open a beer now. I'm very disappointed that there is there's no cold alcohol to hand for like the matches just is just about to begin. I need to almost roll back now. I said, oh, people don't follow reshuffles. They're boring. I love this shit. You love this shit. We are one. We are one following this reshuffle, even though we can all recognize this is quite nerdy to most people. And so therefore, it's not really going to affect the electoral chances of Keir Starmer with the general public that he's cocked up this reshuffle. But it will matter in terms of the internal management of this political party. Fabulous. Who would you, Aaron, hypotheticals? Who would be the one person you would promote and where would you promote them to? Where, you know, coming out of this, where could you think if Keir Starmer made this decision, which, you know, and this is completely, you can be as ambitious as you want, you'd say, actually, this guy is serious. Maybe this whole cock up for the last 48 hours will forgive him. Maybe this guy is serious about power. Serious about power. I would give John McDonnell a token role, but like an important one. Like, I don't know what it would be, but I would make him kind of a player in terms of policy formation, but he might not want the sort of stuff to do the hard yards of being in the shadow cabinet. But, you know, so I would ideally have him take Rachel Reeves's job, right? But I don't think he would want to do that. But I'd basically say, look, I'd be like with Bernie Sanders, you know, seemingly playing quite a big role policy-wise for Joe Biden, something similar. I was, you know, it would be great if he said, I want John McDonnell and Rachel Reeves and somebody else, they're going to come together and sort of oversee Annalise Dodds, Rachel Reeves and John McDonnell to oversee our sort of economic offer at the next general election. That would be very reassuring. Other than that, I mean, not really. I mean, I don't really, you know, the thing is, Mike, we have to remember this, you know, his first shadow cabinet was actually quite broad, you know, included some good people from the left, including Rebecca Long-Bailey. I suppose, yeah, probably bringing Rebecca Long-Bailey back in, putting her on something on the economy shadow, putting her in the shadow, someone in the shadow treasury team. I think that would demonstrate that he's serious about actually having a broad tent. That isn't going to happen, by the way. So ideally, you do both of those, right? Reintroduce our RLB and then get Johnny Mack to coordinate this interesting document about how label would change the economy after 2024. I think you're actually, because I was going to say John McDonnell to shadow chancellor, but I mean, I don't know if he wants to do it, but also there is an issue of you don't want to look like you're going back to the past. So I think you're absolutely right. John McDonnell to Rachel Reeves current role, which is shadow chancellor of the duchy or whatever ridiculous name we give these. It's basically the brief way you get to do whatever you want, essentially. Michael Gove sort of plans the COVID response. And I don't know what he's been planning now. Brexit for a while, wasn't it? So that's what you give John McDonnell to say. He's our fixer. He's going to do the big thinking. Well, isn't I think Rachel Reeves, he doesn't really do big thinking. Rachel Reeves was basically shadow under secretary to the treasurer. Is that correct? That's basically all right. That's Bridget Phillipson. Right. I think he could do that as well though. I mean, I sound so I sound so what a what a brochure list I'm saying get rid of Bridget Phillipson and Rachel Reeves for John McDonnell. He couldn't do that though, because that's a demotion because you can't go from shadow chancellor to chief. No, I know, which is sort of equal but different to shadow chancellor, which would be that duchy of Lancaster one, the shadow cabinet office one. We have some news. Lisa Nandi apparently staying. So they were briefing yesterday. Their original plan obviously had from what everyone was writing that Lisa Nandi would well be demoted was the initial briefing. Then they were saying Lisa Nandi would be moved to a more domestic facing role because they thought she should be talking about domestic politics. I mean, presumably, obviously shadow foreign secretary is one of the great offices of state. So it would either have to be shadow chancellor or shadow home secretary for it not to be the motion. So it seems like Lisa Nandi's essentially said, well, let's you give me one of the other big ones. I'm not going anywhere and she is staying. So that's the first flop of the reshuffle. Not that I'm saying I think you probably replaced Lisa Nandi with someone worse. So I don't think this is particularly a terrible result, but it's them not getting their way. While we're waiting for more news, some more comments. Steve Farr with a fiver reshuffle underway. Starmer will send for posh pizza. Navarra, here's an Iceland pizza out of the freezer. I don't mind a posh pizza. I don't have one in my freezer either. I would love that right now. Sound migration with 10 euros, nerding out on the reshuffle from Dublin. Don't be doing us down. Great show as always. I'm not I really should clarify. I'm not doing anyone down for nerding. I think that it is one of the most fulfilling interests one can have. I'm just saying I don't judge people if they don't. Right. It's also fine. I know some of you do. Some of you got this Aristotle vibe in the comments where like to live the good flourishing life, you have to engage in this stuff. I personally disagree, even if I love geeking out on it myself. Let's talk about Lisa Nandi as foreign secretary. How do you think she's done, Aaron? I think she's terrible. I think she's terrible. Well, I just think she's meant to be the big thinker of the labor right on these things. And then you see the policy pieces she's attached to, what she talks about. She talks about the rise of China as one of the great challenges of the 21st century. I mean, it has obviously highlights major foreign policy questions. Of course it does. You've just raised people talk about all these people leaving poverty. Actually, global poverty measured by a bunch of ways, not measured by the standards of the Millennium Development Goals of the UN, but measured by a bunch of ways has massively increased over the last 30, 40 years. And if you don't include China in absolute terms, of course, I'm talking because there are more people. But if you take out China, the figures are staggeringly bad. It's a real indictment on the capacity of neoliberalism to actually improve people's lives. So the Chinese state over the last 40 years is basically taking more than 700 million people out of absolute poverty. And you're calling that one of the great challenges of the 21st century. I think it's kind of cool that people aren't dying at 55 or dying in childbirth or entirely preventable disease and that they can read and write and that they're building a country of their own where people are housed and have education. It's not perfect. China doesn't have an NHS. I'm not saying it does. It's still a low to medium GDP country. But I would say that's still a good thing. That should be welcomed. So I find that kind of stuff strange. I think she's a neocon. If she's a neocon, and then she kind of attached herself to that open labor paper where they talk about like a peace court. There's sort of weird political Frankenstein where you need to attach yourself to like these woke sort of totemic policies. But we kind of know your Donald Drumsfeld you know, reconfigured for the 2020s. So I think she's a very strange politician personally. Clearly a talented woman, perfectly capable on the media. I can see how she if you had a broad cabinet where you could put her somewhere interesting. She's got a great story on the north of England. I mean she looks like Wigan I think is re-compelling on towns. I think she'd be really good. If you were saying look, we want to deliver a really impactful industrial policy and regional policy, leveling up policy of our own. And we want you to be a big part of that. I could see that working foreign policy. No, very bad. Yeah, I agree. She's a good communicator. I think she's got terrible politics on most counts to be honest. And especially on foreign policy, super, super hawkish. I agree. She would actually be much better as like community secretary or business secretary or whatever. But you know, obviously this has been managed very poorly. And also she wouldn't have been moved there because they thought she'd be more effective at that. They're trying to get rid of anyone they see as a potential threat. So yeah, you know, I don't think this is them saying, oh, she'd actually be much better at communities. They were maybe trying to dress it up like that, but essentially they wanted to promote her and promote someone who was more loyal to them. I think Steve Reid was in community. So it's quite plausible. This is completely a guess. But you can imagine that they wanted to promote Steve Reid to part each other, wanted to put Lisa and Andy in communities that were like, oh, it's great, Lisa, you'll get to talk about towns. She's like, fuck off. And she stays in place. Apparently, Nick Brown has been sacked as Chief Whip. That's what Patrick Maguire is suggesting. That's according to allies of Nick Brown, I think. Nick Brown is Chief Whip. I don't know much about him personally. I know it was Chief Whip under Corbin, wasn't he? So he kept his job. That was a sort of continuity position. He was Chief Whip on Brown. Yeah, I think he was Chief Whip under Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown as well, actually. So he's like the great survivor. And now he's gone and now Stammer's getting rid of him. Maybe he thinks well, the whipping operation hasn't been good enough for a long time. That's kind of strange because, you know, we reported on this story a few months back. Keir Starmer basically is not accepting any dissent from his back benches. And Nick Brown was very much doing his bidding on that. So that is a real surprise when people were talking about it a few hours ago. And often a leader shouldn't take on their Chief Whip because it kind of, you know, has big political problems in terms of party management, unsprisingly. But he's been a very totalitarian leader, effectively. Keir Starmer with back benches, whether it's Spicops, whether it was, you know, we saw this with, you know, Labour MP, I think it was on Pestin, being told that they were no longer on the Shadow Front team because of I think it was Spicops or maybe it was on the Armed Forces stuff. But anyway, really, really ruthless stuff. And, you know, Nick Brown was the, he was the, he was Starmer's Iron Fist. So I find that a very strange move. But maybe they just want to freshen things up. But also, it makes you ask the question, if they're getting rid of Nick Brown as the enforcer, I mean, what do they plan to do to their back benches? Maybe this, maybe this prefigures, you know, actually, maybe we've not seen how bad Keir Starmer is going to be to anybody who disagrees with the parliamentary party. Maybe it's about to get much, much worse. Well, again, but I mean, the thing is, if they try and make it much, much worse, then they're already struggling with discipline, right? So, I mean, this is why it seems odd to get rid of Nick Brown, your chief whip, because if they're, if they're in a moment where they think we're going to struggle with, with, you know, the opposition is starting to rumble on a merge, you get rid of the person whose job it is to be the best connected person, right? The whole job of the chief whip is to know every MP, to potentially have something on a bunch of MPs. Their job is to manipulate the MPs to get them to do what they want, right? So, if you've got someone who's been, you know, networking to be very good at that job, he's been, he's done that job, as you say, under many, many leaders, you get rid of him. Suddenly, you've just got a ready-made power base, right? If you're Angela Rain or whatever, and you want to build up your power base and your manoeuvres, the one person you want to get on site now is Nick Brown. He's got everyone's number. They all know him. And he potentially has something on, on a lot of them. Potentially, he, maybe he's going to get, he could have been given a promotion as well. I mean, they might, they might call going on to the back benches of promotion. It's a promotion because now he gets to speak his mind as chief whip. He was quite restrained, actually. You couldn't go on television as a, I don't know if you can't go on television, but you obviously can't really put forward your ideas. That's not your job. I mean, I can quickly come in, Michael, as well with Nick Brown. I mean, I was told by sources close to the former leadership that actually Corbyn's inability to manage his MPs over Brexit, the second referendum stuff, they, a lot of people I spoke to kind of said Nick Brown was a big part of that because he was saying, you need to do this, you need to do that. You can't push things too far. Otherwise they'll do this. And, you know, in the last year of the Corbyn leadership, he really hindered their ability to manage the party on the biggest issue that was to, you know, ultimately seal the fate of Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. So again, it's not like Nick Brown's some leftist, you know? So that's my bit of goss anyway. He, some people claim he has a portion of blame. He bears a portion of blame for the party's catastrophic position on the second referendum stuff because he really, he never really got on top of it. Well, yeah, maybe he's not very good. Maybe they got rid of him because he's not very good as chief whip. Maybe. But Starmer was one of the MPs playing silly buggers. That's true. That's true. And it depends on who, you know, who do they replace them with, presumably they're going to replace them with someone. I mean, does it matter the politics of a chief whip? Because, I mean, their job is really just to enforce what the leader says. Or as you were saying, when it was Nick Brown and Jeremy Corbyn, he freelanced a bit. That's what you're suggesting, I suppose. He freelanced a bit. As I understand it, he only really freelanced a bit with the Brexit stuff. And those were also very difficult political conditions. So maybe he was just stretched as an individual, but he, he, he, you know, but like you say, okay, he's, I believe he's been in that position for Gordon Brown, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn. I mean, none of those, none of those people, you know, won a general election. So going on, Michael, a very big one, Aaron. Annalise Dodds has been sacked as a shadow chancellor. She will be a new role within the shadow cabinet. No surprises there. I mean, there were, as soon as the bad results were coming in, there was sort of like Annalise Dodds might take some of the flak for this. It's not like it's clearly not Annalise Dodds fault. I mean, no one in the country knows who the shadow chancellor is for a start. You know, took a while for John McDonald to get any name recognition going on. And so, I mean, I think blaming her is ridiculous. I mean, I don't, she didn't leave much of a mark as a shadow chancellor. It's not like why I found sort of sacking Angela Rainer so surprising was because, you know, if Keir Starmer wanted to promote people he wanted to put front and centre more often, then he could have quite easily, you know, got rid of Annalise Dodds and no one's really going to kick up that much of a fuss. It seems a bit harsh, but at the same time, what's her power base, right? She hasn't really been seen as fighting anyone's corner. I mean, I don't think, I think it's going to be quite easy, essentially, to sack Annalise Dodds. I think this was probably one of the easier ones to do. Probably the issue was that everyone now wanted a job, now they're still everyone. But yeah, her going is not much of a surprise. But if it is Rachel Reeves, then we probably will see the party go dramatically to the right now. Is that what you, you know, if you've got Peter Mandelson out sort of saying, what we need to do following these results is essentially go back to the time of Tony Blair, then putting Rachel Reeves in that job is a very, you know, it makes sense. Well, I think when you look at, if Rachel Reeves does become the shadow chancellor, you know, I think what comes to mind, Keir Star and Rachel Reeves, either people auditioning for a Lemzip advert, right? I'm being serious. No, that's very, they're two of the most nasal politicians. Yeah. Or R2D2 and C3PO. I mean, they are both very robotic. Neither is particularly affable. They're quite distant and very nasal. You've just had a really humiliating few days. And this is your response politically. Okay, let's see how that works out. They seem to like robotic people, though, because they go out and say whatever they, you know, Bridget Phillipson is another one where whenever she speaks on television, she sounds so robotic. It sounds, you know, like there isn't any, you know, it seems like she's just saying lines. She's just saying lines. It's saying with Rachel Reeves, she seems like she's just saying lines. She doesn't really respond to questions. You just, you know, it's almost like you're pulling a string behind sort of a doll. Same as Steve Reed, right? On the morning after the... Same as Steve Reed. But they seem to really like it, right? That's what gets you promoted under Keir Starmer is if you can robotically repeat the lines. Anyone who goes remotely off script, that's why Angela Rainer is gone because she's gone off script. But it turns out that people don't actually really warm to people who are very robotic. Of course, Keir Starmer is the obvious one. I missed out Keir Starmer there, Keir Starmer as well as Rachel Reeves, Bridget Phillipson are very sort of like, I'll give you my robot answer. I'm not very good at communicating with the audience and I'm not very good at responding naturally to a question. So you've got, yeah, this lineup of really, really, yeah, I mean, they all sound quite similar and it's, it doesn't seem like a particularly good idea to me. A big issue here, and I think, Anna, I mean, with all of these and why it was, it's just worth saying this because I saw people sort of reply to one of my tweets today saying, why didn't they just plan beforehand who would go in what slot? And also, how can MPs say no, because it's, you know, it's within Keir Starmer has the authority to move anyone. The issue is they don't want these people to go on the back benches, because if they go on the back benches, then they're an independent power base. So it's basically, they have to find another spot for them. So moving Lisa Nandi, her authority, they could have just said, no, you're actually going on the back benches. But she was saying, but they didn't want to do that. They want to move her to a different position. And she says, no, I'm not moving to a different position. I want this job. Annalise Dodds could have said, I don't want a different position in the shadow cabinet. I'll go on the back benches. I think in that situation, they probably would have said fine, because she doesn't have a power base. But it's this question of, do these people accept a different role? That's the issue. Annalise Dodds probably will. Lisa Nandi probably wouldn't. It'll be interesting to see what happens with people like Jonathan Ashworth. He was tipped as being someone who'd be kicked out. He's apparently staying, which is, again, not a surprise. He was sort of backed back by GMB. He's staying as shadow health. So it's Rachel Reeves is in as shadow Chancellor. So Rachel Reeves is the new shadow Chancellor. That didn't take long, did it? I mean, there were people saying in that leadership election, you know, Keir Starman, the first thing he'll do is get Rachel Reeves. She was the one who said Labour weren't tough enough on benefit claimants and that Labour is the party of people in work, you know, implying it's not, no, she did say Labour is not the party for people on benefits, right? And she is now shadow Chancellor. So can I just say, Michael, I'm not voting for that in the next general election. I mean, I think a lot of people will have that reaction. Annalise Dodds is being demoted to party chair. God, that's embarrassing, isn't it? She's only been an MP since 2017. Party chair, again, it's meant to be the senior role, organisational role. Because she's a technocrat, right? That was both her strength and her weakness. She seems like someone with a grasp of the detail. She's an economist, got PhD in economics, yeah, academic. But now she's been put in this organisational role. I mean, they would have been like, it's an important position. Angela Rainey used to have it. Rachel Reeves, a shadow Chancellor is to the right of Rishi Sunak. Her shadow Chancellor, she is to the right of what Rishi Sunak has been over the last year. She is to the right of Rishi Sunak. I don't believe Rishi Sunak is the guy we've seen over the last year, you know, with his background and so on, incredibly independent wealth, you know, worked in finance and so on and so forth. But she is to the right of the chance that we've seen over the last 12 months. Terrifying. Terrifying. Wow. Starma says he wants to stop the infighting. Oh, that's not a new, that's a that's obviously his old lines. We're still waiting to see where Wes Streeting goes and who else he's going to be putting forward. Presumably Reeves' old job, no? No, he can't give, he can't have Wes Streeting shadow Michael Gove. That's got to be someone of more stature than that. I mean, maybe that could be Steve Reid actually. Steve Reid's a little bit older. I mean, you could plausibly put him in that position, especially if they, you know, they originally intended for him to be the chair. I think, yeah, Steve Reid in Rachel Reeves' old job, I could imagine. It seems like we're not going to have, it'll be interesting to see how many more changes. So Annalise Dodd's gone. Again, do you think anyone will really protest that? Do you think, do you think I feel like that was probably the most risk-free move he's doing? She's very bad at the job. She doesn't cut through to the public. Nobody knows who she is. She's not very memorable. I mean, I don't think that's on her, by the way. I think Leader's Office has limited the ability of various people in the Shadow Cabinet to actually do anything. So I'm not putting that on her, but that's just how it reads externally. I think there was even Labour members, there was a few polls, wasn't it, where there were Labour members who preferred Rishi Sunak as Chancellor to Annalise Dodd's. Labour members, not voters, members. You're sure? I think it was voters. I doubt they did that poll on Labour members. There was something really, well, okay, okay, let's just clarify this with two hours, 45 ends of this, we can find out. There's definitely loads of polls where Labour votes, there's obviously loads of polls where Labour votes prefer Sunak to Dodd's, but it's like embarrassing numbers for Dodd's, embarrassing. So they all know she should have stayed. She's such an asset. I mean, come on. What she was, though, is she was a sort of compromise. She was a part of Unity Candidate. Because when she was put in there, I was sort of pleasantly surprised because she is, clearly to the left of Rachel Reeve, she was someone who worked constructively under John McDonnell, in fact. So she was someone who was reasonably left-wing. But as I say, yes, I mean, I don't think she's impressed enough people for anyone to really kick up a fuss about her now losing this job. Yeah, even from the left. What left-wing stuff has Labour done with her as a Shadow Chancellor? John McDonnell tweets, sacking Nick Brown, one of the most experienced and tactically astute chief whips the party has ever had, is inept in the extreme. This looks like Mandelson's revenge. Oh, there must be a backstory there between Nick Brown and Mandelson. I suppose if Nick Brown was a brown-eyed, yeah, then Mandelson was a Blair-eyed, did they have lots of beef in the Nauties? God, we really are reliving all of this sort of irrelevant... It's 2021. It's 2021. We've got 10 years to turn around the climate. Come on, Peter Mandelson, please. Just be happy. Spend your time with ultra-rich billionaires who subsequently died in strange circumstances. I won't mention names, but I think we know we're talking about also a close friend of Prince Andrew at one point. Hang around with those people. Do what you like. You live your best life, but please stop taking out on the rest of us. Yeah, this is a real move to the right, isn't it? Rachel Reeves is shadow chancellor. That's the right of the Tories. During the pandemic, they often were outflanking the Tories to the right. When there was the issue of extending furlough, they would say, oh, we need a targeted extension, so we need to extend furlough in the certain sectors, which are hardest here, et cetera, et cetera. It's too expensive to do it in all the sectors. The next week, Rishi Tsunak announces, oh, we're extending it all. It's so easy to outflank Rachel Reeves from the left. Also, what's terrifying actually as well, Michael, is what makes us worse is that, at least with Corbyn MacDonald, the Tories realize the centre has now moved. But the point is, if the Labour Party moves this far right, it means the Tories can move right as well. They don't need to. It's not like they can position themselves on certain things. You can outflank Labour on the left by standing still, essentially, when it comes to Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves. All these liberal idiots, people like Ian Dunn, the FBPE people, James O'Brien, Jeremy Corbyn transformed the political conversation in this country for five years, and it made the Tories go in interesting, and I think positive, directions. Look what you've done. Look what you had done. Not just Keir Starmer losing hardly, Paul, not just Labour. I think they're heading for a worse general election result than 2019. But actually, they've moved so far to the right now politically that Labour is now almost overtly saying, we have no answers to any of the problems of the 21st century. Congratulations Ian Dunn and James O'Brien and all the panoply of centrist pundits who said, any other leader will be 20 points ahead. Thank you so much. Thank you. We are so grateful for what you've done. Now we have Rachel Reeves who wants lambasted people on benefits, a shadow chancellor. Great. I mean, I wonder if there will be... So Sienna Rogers is tweeting Nick Brown and Annalise Dodds were both representatives of party unity in big roles. That is very much true, especially Annalise Dodds, I think. I mean, Nick Brown, I don't think was particularly famous among the members, presumably he was very well networked among MPs, but Annalise Dodds was a real sort of representative for the soft left influence within the administration. Angela Rainer tipped to shadow or tipped to shadow chancellor for the Dutch chief of Lancaster, shadowing Michael Gove. I'm not sure why I use the phrase tip there, it's from Sam Coats. So Angela Rainer is now in Rachel Reeves' old job. She was going to get demoted to social care. Now she is shadowing Michael Gove. It's not a very good role for her, I don't think, because the whole thing is to be a technocrat, right? And Angela Rainer is, you know, I think she's a great politician, but she's not, I mean, she's annoyed us in many ways, but it seems like a strange job for her to be doing. I default sort of like the party organizer made actually more sense, but anyway, that's where she agreed to go when Rachel Reeves went to the to be shadow chancellor. Presumably someone is disappointed who thought they were going to get Rachel Reeves' job. Where's Streeting in line for promotion, apparently, and we're still yet to wait to see where that will go to. Interesting. Party, it's so funny moving her to party chair, that's such an Annalise Dunters party chair. It made much more sense to have her as shadow chancellor. I mean, that does, I wonder if they're going to try and spin that as a promotion. I suppose they can't spin that as a promotion because then they'll get tired in loads of knots. It is actually kind of easy to call. Angela Rainer kind of now has been promoted just by accident, so they tried to demote her. She said, I don't want to be demoted, and now they have been forced essentially to promote her. That is a bigger gig than party chair, no? Being the shadow to Michael Gove. I think they've publicly humiliated her. I don't think she'll go, oh, yeah, I've got, I don't know. Well, I think she's also publicly humiliated them, right? She doesn't start it. No, but what I mean is they tried to publicly humiliate her, and it has backfired so much that she's actually increased in stature and has been able to publicly humiliate them. But only like you said earlier, only to keep her off the back bench, because she could basically become a power, she could probably create some sort of parallel leadership. Come on. I think Angela Rainer should tell them to go. Well, I mean, again, she can keep her power to drive. She knows that if at any point she resigns, a bit like Tom Watson, right? So instead of going on the back benches to shout at you, I'm going to use as a threat that I'll resign at any point, etc., etc., and that will destabilize your leadership. So I think it makes sense for her to stay there. She can keep her power to drive while Rachel Reeves is going right on the economy, and she'll presumably, she'll continue to say things that, you know, if it was up to me and I'll be happy to do it, suspend thousands of Labour Party members, a power to drive. A power to drive for what? Well, as I say, I don't, well, to become leader. I mean, she wants to, I think she's an ambitious person, right? So why would you serve? Okay, well, we'll see. We'll see. We're proof of the eating, right? We're now in six months. Why would you serve in the Shadow Cabinet if you want to become leader? I mean, that's what Keir Starmer did. Serving the Shadow Cabinet is a great thing to do if you want to become leader. It's an entirely different context, though, Michael. Clearly, clearly, clearly, no, but clearly, the person. Resign in a dramatic way. Resign over, resign over an issue of principle, like Boris Johnson did over the. She's not resigned. She's not resigned. She was kicked out. You keep your power to dry until you resign over an issue of principle. Is that what Boris Johnson did, right? So he takes that job as foreign secretary, then he waits until the checkers agreement for him to resign in a sort of flamboyant way where he says, I resigned on the position of principal, then he comes back and challenges for the leadership. That's what I'd do if I was Angela Reina. I'd take that job, be quite happy that I've publicly humiliated Keir Starmer by forcing him to give me a promotion. And then when there is an issue of that, I can pretend as principal. I don't know if she's a principal person. I don't think she will do that. I think Boris Johnson is quite good at politics. I think quite a few of these people aren't as good as politics. I think Angela Reina is actually okay, but you know, I think generally. I think she's proved herself to be quite astute this weekend, actually. No, I know. I think she's definitely won this round. The idea that, oh, the Tories do this. Therefore, the Labour should do something similar. I just don't think, and you're saying, well, Starmer was in Corbyn's shadow cabinet. That was because it was clear to Starmer that if he wanted to lead the party, he had to be seen as an ally of Jeremy Corbyn. I don't think the next leader of the Labour Party will necessarily have to be close to Keir Starmer. I agree that Areca won't be very well. It will help the next leader of the Labour Party to see like they were a constructive team player. That always helps in Labour. Well, we don't know. Do it, does it? I suppose he didn't for Jeremy Corbyn. Right. Oh, we have a new Chief Whip. Nick Brown's erstworld deputy, Alan Campbell, is Labour's new Chief Whip. I think you'll really call if you follow cabinet reshuffles, but if you know who Alan Campbell is, you probably are a bit of a nerd. Do you know who Alan Campbell is? I don't want to offend the two viewers who know who Alan Campbell is. Labour have like 200 MPs, but I swear to God, I keep on hearing new MPs, and I'm like, I've never heard of this person, like Labour MPs. I thought they had 200, just like they got 2,000. Alan Campbell, no. Is it Alan as in Alan, L-U-N? A-L-A-N. No, I've never heard of the guy. Alan Campbell. I've never heard of the guy. Wes Streeting is going to be given a new brief on child poverty. Nick Brown now. Angela Rainer, to be shadow chancellor of the Duchy Lancaster, focused on the future of work, which is an interesting gig. I think she'll be happy with that. I think she's won this round. This just seems, this is a very strange, you know, what's really funny is that somebody like Paul Mason, some of the sort of soft lefty people who backed Starma will be like, Yash is really good, like actually Angela Rainer is going to talk about the future of work, like the care economy is like, what the hell are you talking about? Some people are going to love this. Oh, yeah, you know, we've got, you know, Wes Streeting on child poverty. Come on. This is window dressing. The big story here is Rachel Reeves going to shadow chancellor. It's going to really shift Labour to the right on the economy. Not good. No, I think that's true. I mean, I'm not excited about her doing that job. I think she'll be very happy with this. The big story here is the Labour Party is dramatically shifting to the right. Well, I think there are two big stories actually. I think the big stories out of this reshuffle is that one, Keir Starma has tried and succeeded to shift the party to the right in terms of putting Rachel Reeves in that very important position, but also the power of Keir Starma has been or the limit of it has been dramatically demonstrated because he couldn't do the reshuffle he wanted to do. And especially the personal power of him, visa v Angela Rainer has been showed to be incredibly limited because he wanted to demote her and she has not been demoted, right? So I do think that story is as important as Keir Starma's choice to shift the party to the right is Keir Starma's limited power and influence when it comes to the Labour Party. That's not to say that Angela Rainer is some leftist and this is a huge victory for the left. But to be honest, I do think division at the top of the party does create openings for left. So I'm glad that Angela Rainer has won this round. Are you not? We've got a new story here, Michael. Can I say this? Yeah. Thangam Debener is appointed as shadow leader of the House of Commons, replacing Valerie Vaz. Well, at least she's away from housing. I mean, she was terrible at housing. Shadow leader of the House of Commons. That's the opposite of Jacob Rhys-Mogg, isn't it? Yeah. Sideways move. If anything kind of demotion, actually. Well, because you're not talking about anything that anyone... It's one of those jobs which means it kind of makes sense because Thangam Debener, actually, they do roll out quite a lot. She's often on like politics live and stuff. And I suppose a job without brief means they can just send her out to talk about anything. And they can put something... She's telling me, yeah. I mean, yeah, her politics are appalling. I mean, we've talked about her talk about it. She was also... Yeah, when she was on any questions, what did she say to Ash? Like, she should be kicked out of the party. Didn't say why. Ash had spoken about like bringing the centre left and the left together, and then she's like, no, kick them all out. You know, the early days of 2020 where they were sort of high on their own supply, again, a really poor politician, really, really poor. Bristol West, the Greens are really pushing close next time. It's not, you know, it's 27,000 majority, so they're not going to win it. But I think people like that, people like Rosie Duffield in Canterbury, they think that they're winning those seats because of them, rather than because of the sociological trends, because of the policy offer, because of the activists. I think that she's going to find out the hard way. But anyway, that's not really it. Like I say, not a big story. At the moment, it's racial roots. Annalise Dodds will be chairing the Post-Elections Policy Review, I'm told. Policy reviews are meaningless. What policy? What policy? There's no policy to review. Well, this is going to be the outward vision. This is going to be the vision of looking out to the country, and winning back with an inspiring vision about inequality. In a way, if she's not a good performer, but she can write a decent paper, you know, these all make sense as well as, you know, I mean, most of it's a factional thing, but some of it does, you know, make a bit of sense. No, Michael, none of it makes sense. They're moving things around so they could get racial rears into shadow chancellor, which is what we've been saying since day one. That was what they wanted to do all along. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, of course, of course, of course. I mean, of course. That's why they're getting rid of Dodds. But I'm just saying, you know, I can see why she'll take that job. Rebecca Long-Bailey should have been the shadow chancellor. I'd have preferred that, but I mean, I didn't expect that to happen. At the start, no, I know that I'm just saying, if you're talking about the best person for the job, I mean, that's probably, you'd hope that's what it's about. I mean, it should have been Rebecca Long-Bailey. She had a similar-ish role in the shadow treasury under Jeremy Corbyn with John McDonald. She's the only person I'd seen who sort of bested Rishi Sunak in a debate in the run-up to the 2019 general election. She would have been great. Non-Southern accent, I suppose. You know, Alice does a Scottish. You could make the same argument, but in trying to appeal to certain voters, they hear somebody who, you know, they might give a second chance to. I know people say, oh, that doesn't matter. Well, it kind of does matter. Having an older woman as shadow chancellor is a nice statement about a party that wants to reflect the country as it is and what kind of values it embodies. Anyway, interesting. I think we're getting towards the end of the very, very dramatic reshuffle. So our two big stories. Labor is moving to the right. They've managed to get Rachel Reeves in a shadow chancellor, which was their plan probably all along. But Keir Starmer has taken a bruising when it came to his attempt to demote Lisa Nandi and Angela Rayner and Jonathan Ashworth. Is that the big picture? That's how it seems. I mean, there may be more stories to come. Yeah. I mean, there will be more stories to come, which you can check out on Tiskey Sour tomorrow at 7pm. I think let's wrap up there. We've been going a while. Nick Thomas Simon's staying as Home Secretary, that was always going to be the case because he's been such a standout character, not because he happens to have the same very dry politics. As Keir Starmer. Aaron, it's been my privilege spending the last three hours with you on this probably our longest ever live stream, although I suppose actually it's not our longest ever live stream because we have eight hour live streams after general elections. But apart from general elections, this has been our longest live stream. It has been a pleasure watching the Labour Party switch further to the right and Keir Starmer take a bruising with you. Marilyn, you too, Michael, as well. I mean, also to our audience, thanks for sticking around us for three hours, 4,600 people still watching. Wow, the appetite is there for a different kind of media. Absolutely. If you do want to support a different kind of media, you know what to do. First of all, subscribe to this channel. Second of all, go to navaramedia.com forward slash support and donate the equivalent of one hour's wage a month. Thank you so much. We do absolutely appreciate it. For now, you've been watching Tiskey Sour on Navaramedia. Good night.