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 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?  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.  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.  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.   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.  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.  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.    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.   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.  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.  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?  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.   Now they've got to find a job for her.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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 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.  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.  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.  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 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.  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.  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.  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.   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.  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.  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.  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 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'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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  And that includes winning general elections.  It's one opinion.  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?  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?  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.  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.  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?   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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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.  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