Chris Mason

He's very close to Andy Burnham, who said on camera that he thought that Andy Burnham could be back in Parliament within a couple of months and that the by-election, which of course would be something of a circus, would be him...

seeking to be the next prime minister.

That would be the pitch.

He wouldn't be fighting that by-election, trying to defend the work of the current government.

He'd be running that by-election to become prime minister.

Now, clearly, winning the by-election is not the same as becoming prime minister.

It would then be the whole process of a contest, etc., etc.

That's what he'd be seeking to do.

We're into one of those zones.

In fact, I just came off the 6 o'clock news and I was recounting as I walked down the stairs of remembering the whole business around...

Boris Johnson and indeed around Liz Truss and moments where stories just move with incredible pace and in the time it took for Sophie Raworth to read the introduction at the top of the six o'clock news and then for me to talk to her live about ten minutes later that ticker that number of Labour MPs who had said the Prime Minister should go had gone up by four or five and

And that's the kind of world we're in now and where no one person is in sole control, certainly not the prime minister, where the various leadership camps are thinking, you know, what do they want to do and when?

Because timing can be so, so crucial in all of this.

Cabinet meeting happening first thing tomorrow morning.

What happens then?

What does the cabinet do next?

What do ministers at a more junior rank than the cabinet, but more senior than those ministerial aides, what do they do?

And it's one of those things where, and you'll recall this, we were saying a few minutes ago, weren't we, the whole business of Graham Brady and the letters and the conservatives and all the rest of it.

It can get to the stage where

where the individual action of a particular minister or aide or whoever it might be... I mean, often, of course, they will talk to lots of colleagues, etc., etc., but the individual decision that may have been weighed and kicked around in their mind for days on end or whatever...