Henry Riley

And I mean, he really had to appeal to both of those caucuses to try and stem the tide of Labour MPs.

There's the sort of time of counting

43 of his parliamentary party that have called on him to go.

That's really tough to come back from that.

And people calling for you to go before they'd even heard the speech.

There's also a challenger from within, Catherine West, who's a relatively unknown MP.

She was sacked by Sir Keir Starmer as a minister just a few months ago.

She was saying

that depending on this speech, she would launch a leadership election if no one else puts themselves forward.

So we've got that to look forward to.

But really at the heart of the speech, Claire, firstly, finally talking about Brexit, which, I mean, there's forever been this Ming-Wa strategy from the Labour Party where they have felt that

that they simply cannot talk about Brexit because without trying to sort of narrow the characterisation, the red wall parts of northern England are sort of on a knife's edge in terms of whether they go Reform UK, Nigel Farage's party, or Labour, Keir Starmer's party.

And they very much are in favour or were very much in favour of Brexit.

And there's been a sense that you sort of can't talk about the ills of Brexit and that that was giving Nigel Farage a bit of breathing space because even he accepts that Brexit hasn't been a huge success.

And today, I think really what the prime minister was trying to display is that the shackles are off and that he thinks that we need a much closer relationship with Europe.

Yeah, well, quite.

And Catherine West, who I referenced, is the only person to come out so far and say that she's basically contemplating a leadership bid.

But even she has said if she doesn't get the required number of MPs, which is 81, by the way, she reckons the sources close to her say they reckon she's got.

around 40 at the moment but if she doesn't get to 81 names by tomorrow morning then she will basically call it quits as well now that is because a she doesn't want a protracted debate where this goes on and on and on but secondly we have the king's speech taking place on wednesday whereby um we're going to hear about the list of priorities for this government so this is very much the warm-up act the chance to galvanize and reassure a pretty

divided party, internal party in Labour, but really on Wednesday is when he's going to be judged on the substance with the King speech and the sort of litany of policies.