George Parker

But how did they do?

Really badly as well.

I mean, what you're really seeing is the breaking up, or at least we saw the breaking up yesterday, of the old two-party system in Britain, the sort of duopoly of the Conservatives and the Labour Party, who've dominated Westminster politics for the best part of, well, for over a century now, being broken.

And the Conservatives, like the Labour Party, were hammered in places like Essex, just outside London, which is where Kemi Badenock, the Tory leader, has her seat, and a number of other places.

Tory bigwigs.

Reform UK completely smashed them.

They lost, I think, over between 500 and 600 seats.

The only thing that I would say about the Conservative Party is that despite the fact they did really badly, the spotlight has not been on Kemi Badenoch in the way it has been about Keir Starmer, just because she actually is slightly more popular than her extremely unpopular party.

Now, the statement from Starmer that I take full responsibility for these terrible results, but I'm not going anywhere.

So what does taking responsibility mean?

Well, that's a good question.

And there are a lot of Labour MPs who would wish that he took responsibility, as you suggest, by quitting.

But Keir Starmer's a stubborn man, he's a proud man, and he believes that he can turn things around.

He doesn't want to be dragged out of number 10 at a time when he's perceived to have been a complete failure, when his own administration is mired in the kind of scandals we've seen recently with the Peter Mandelson scandal.

affair so he claims that he has a he can see a way through that he can raise his game and he's going to take responsibility by leading the party out of this mess the problem is that a large part of his party including privately a number of members of his cabinet think that it's gone too far that his popularity in the country is just so appalling you just simply can't turn it around with him as a leader

Now, the question is who might be leader in his absence and how it would look.

How many prime ministers would we have had in the past five or six years?

Oh, my goodness.

You're testing my memory here.

So this seems to be quite an easy question to answer.