Archie Bland

And Pat McFadden will now have hung around his neck the expression, every meeting I have is, who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?

The thing about this is that...

Interestingly enough, this is not actually the direction of the government he's talking about.

He's talking about the Labour Party more generally.

There might be people who think that Labour should be thinking about which taxes it needs to raise in order to make sure that the welfare state is working properly.

But if anything, this is an indication of the fact that the government was firmly pressing against that direction of travel.

So I'm not sure that it is really the smoking gun on the kind of agenda of the Labour government that it is cracked up to be, but there is no doubt that we are going to be hearing about it again and again and again.

Yeah, you wouldn't expect the Prime Minister to be constantly in touch with Peter Mandelson.

But what you would expect is his agenda to be written through the government like a stick of rock for everybody there to know this is what the Prime Minister wants.

How are we working towards what the Prime Minister wants?

It doesn't feel like that at all.

It's also worth bearing in mind that this is really quite early in the Salma government that we're talking about.

And already, last year, it's really clear that people feel like things are going awry.

One thing about all of this that is in a kind of a perverse way

consolation for at least Labour MPs is that the Starmer government is sort of priced in as being in this position now and it looks very likely that he isn't going to be Prime Minister for that much longer.

If all of this had emerged six months ago it would have been much more consequential but instead it feels like the obituary for this government was already being written kind of within six months of it being in place and by some of the people at the very centre of it.

Well, we might not expect a prime minister to be in close contact with his ambassador to the US, especially if, as we think with Starmer and Mandelson, they aren't particularly close.

But what is clear is that Starmer is absent from these messages in quite a fundamental way.

It's incredibly similar, I think, in terms of tone to the Epstein files.

It's obviously not about alleged criminal activity on a massive scale in the way that the Epstein files are, but there is something about the kind of networking effect here and the way that women only appear and kind of walk on parts a lot of the time when they're being asked to do something on behalf of a man for another man.