Jen Williams

If you're a prime minister who...

a doesn't want to fall on his sword b is trying to avoid falling on his sword c is maybe thinking maybe i actually i am going to have to the one thing you're really not going to want to do is do it in such a fashion as to allow your biggest enemy in politics to come back and take your place especially having already tried once to stop him so i'm interested to in the coming days to understand what exactly number 10's idea of

trying to ensure that mechanism is not there for him, looks like.

But I guess ultimately it will depend on the strength of feeling within the Parliamentary Labour Party.

And I think that is what we're waiting through Friday into Saturday to get a sense of.

And whether or not there are more people like Dave Watts, and whether bigger figures, more household names than Dave Watts, and also the sheer numbers of people who turn around and say, enough's enough, we need Andy Burnham.

I think the, you know, in terms of a seat, I think, yeah, the intention seems to be or have been a seat in Merseyside.

If you look at the results in Merseyside, I mean, the place to kind of point to is Holton, which is like Wigan.

All the Labour councillors lost their seats to reform.

The key one today there will be St Helens, which is the one that gets talked about a lot as a potential Andy Byrne in by-election seat.

That very much has the ability to flip overnight from Labour to reform.

And I know people who are very sympathetic towards Andy, who have said to me, like, he would be absolutely mad to go in St Helens.

And that was before these results started to come through overnight.

Stephen, last thought on this to you.

Jen, who are you buying or selling?

Well, I'm afraid this is a little bit of a cop-out, but I'm going to hold Manchesterism, which is Andy Burnham's professed vision, I guess, and blueprint for government, which is, if you're an Andy Burnham fan, it is essentially this kind of business-friendly socialism idea that has come out of his time being mayor here.

If you're more of a sceptic, it's a sort of

retrofitting of something that had already happened before that actually isn't particularly left wing and doesn't necessarily tell you all that much about what he would do in government.

I think it's fair to say, and I think probably he knows, that actually that hasn't really been fleshed out in an awful lot of detail.

And a lot of the legwork on that