Jen Williams

But does that just mean that...

They rely on some random stalking horse to come along and trigger that to happen, like as Catherine West attempted to do a few weeks ago.

I think my reading of it is that the answer is, as is quite often the case actually with things around Andy Burnham during this campaign, it's not clear.

Yeah.

And also, I think, you know, there would be some potency to the argument if the Greater Manchester mayoral election was lost, that Andy Burnham had just thrown Manchesterism under the bus for his own personal furtherment.

Right.

And I'm sure.

I'm going to sell Lucy Powell, the deputy leader of the Labour Party, because I'm told by multiple sources that at the beginning of Andy Burnham's campaign, she had been essentially running the show.

And

relations cooled let's say and it ended up being run by uh by louise hay which is not to say that lucy pearl wouldn't have some kind of role obviously in in uh in an andy burnham administration and she's clearly deputy leader but uh it doesn't really show the power currently with her within the andy camp jim

I worked through for midnight and then I did try and get to sleep.

Then the doorbell rang after about an hour.

So yeah, I don't know what that was, but it didn't make me very happy and I'm not very awake.

Well, I think one thing that makes a little bit more complicated to hear through the noise of these election results is that so many of these councils are elected on thirds, which means that only a third of councillors are up for election in any given year.

And that then means that although you can see the direction of travel, it doesn't necessarily result immediately in a Labour administration losing its majority because that might take two or three rounds of elections for that to happen.

But you can absolutely see the direction of travel in some of the, particularly the sort of former Red Wall type councils in the North and Midlands.

So in Wigan, for example,

which is significant for a few reasons.

For Labour, it's got kind of deep, long-standing emotional connections to the party and to trade unionism.

Andy Burnham's seat of Lee is in Wigan.