Andy Zaltzman

As we record, you can never quite tell from day to day, hour to hour, or minute to minute in this country these days.

For our British listeners, if you've been having a strange feeling over the last...

Couple of weeks that our politics has become impatient, infantile, irresponsible and incurable that you're watching the slow decay of democracy.

Well, you might just be onto something.

We are just we are not even two years into this current Labour government who won a big majority.

in the 2024 general election, as exclusively reported on the Bugle.

And Starmer is now clinging onto power as if he's been in for about six terms and has started multiple illegal wars around the world and started kidnapping children and selling them on

for a profit on the sly.

It's a very strange time politically, so I turn to you two for an objective outsider's view on exactly how fucking mad British politics is right now.

Alice.

Well, yes, the health secretary you talk about, Wes Street, in quat, I think is the correct word, isn't it, last Thursday, saying he'd lost confidence in Keir Starmer's leadership.

This followed disastrous election results in the local elections in England and national elections in Scotland.

and Wales, and Starmer has clearly failed to win over a sceptic public and a sceptic Labour Party.

And he's come out fighting the Prime Minister, come out fighting like a potato in a compost bin.

He's vaguely still there, but long term, it doesn't look tremendously good.

He warned that any potential leadership contest, and Wes Streeting has said that he will stand for leader of the Labour Party, would, quotes, plunge us into chaos.

which, given the state of the Labour Party, is a bit like plunging the Titanic into the North Atlantic now in the year 2026.

So it's quite hard to see how it's come to this so quickly.

It's something we've sort of discussed in previous issues of The Bugle, but people clearly tired in this country of the sort of chaos we had with Brexit and then Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss and Keir Starmer represented a kind of dull managerial technocratic option.

And unfortunately, he's managed to be dull, managerial and technocratic in a completely chaotic way.