Dan Hodges

But the key thing is Keir Starmer is such a unique distorting prison within British politics.

Because he is so unpopular.

He is so despised.

We will all have had the experience.

Julia will have had this.

You, I'm sure, will have had this.

You go around the country, you go anywhere, north, south, east, west, red wall, you know, metropolitan, wherever.

Keir Starmer's name comes up and it is met with

ridicule, boring on hostility and hatred that I personally haven't seen before.

I haven't seen it at this level and I frankly can't properly quite rationalise.

so it's only when Keir Starmer goes that in a sense the picture will will clear now the other thing is I completely understand the criticism there's been of Andy Burnham flip-flopping but the point is Andy Burnham did exactly what Andy Burnham needed to do in that by-election

So if you remember when the by-election started off, and I remember having this debate at the time, the initial thing was the by-election has been going 24 hours.

It's already been framed through the prism of Brexit and his support for Brexit.

That's a disaster for him.

Make a field Brexit seat.

It's a disaster.

And I remember saying at the time, no, it's not because he's not going to get sucked up into a national sort of campaign in what is basically going to be a very, very localised campaign in terms of it's Andy, he's from here, his kids go to school here, etc, etc, etc.

He was very skillful in my view in ensuring that he didn't get sucked into a huge debate on Brexit or a debate about his economic policies or his debate about his foreign policy or a debate about welfare policy.

He basically just wandered around saying, you know, and I'm, as Julia said, I'm Andy, I'm a nice guy.

I'm from here, you like me, don't me.