Chris Mason

How does Labour prosecute... How does Andy Burnham and his campaign prosecute that argument where they say, vote for me to change Labour, which was what he said at his launch, and he repeatedly says, where...

The binary nature of a cross in a box is to endorse one party and then therefore, by definition, reject another one.

I find that conundrum, that kind of cephalogical conundrum for people in Makerfield who suddenly find themselves with this massive privilege slash responsibility slash bind slash annoyance, depending on their outlook.

How do they weight that?

I think that's fascinating.

Sarah?

A couple of things I think going on there, if we take a bit of a step back from the Northwest and from Greater Manchester, part of it I think is the power of the mayoral model in projecting a central character.

In those roles, it is that the whole model of having a mayor is about putting a face and a name on a pedestal above all other politicians in that area, in that region, in that city region.

And the sort of first name thing that people might recall in London with Bolton.

to use the first names, Boris or Ken, for instance.

There was perhaps an element of it with Andy Street in the West Midlands.

In other words, folk who have kicked around in the job for quite a while.

So I think that is a factor.

What I hear from Labour folk at the moment, albeit heavily caveated and there's two weeks to go, albeit postal votes are going to start landing pretty imminently.

is that they think they probably have the numbers as things stand.

They are conscious, by the way, of Restore, although from their perspective, they would talk up, wouldn't they, a potential challenger to reform.

And they talked to me about there being a sticky in the teens proportion of the electorate in the Makerfield constituency who are playing quite hard to get.

And where does that chunk of the electorate break in the end?

Is that right?

It does.