Jim Pickard

And the message I'm told from people in the room that he conveyed was, you know, I'm not perfect, but I am getting better in the job.

You're getting better in the job.

But if we pull the rug from under me, you might not even have a job, let alone the opportunity for us to improve and work together.

Ultimately, we're still in a holding pattern.

He is obviously privately praying that Andy Burnham messes up and make a film that either loses or only wins by a narrow amount.

You can see a scenario where Andy Burnham wins by a couple of thousand and then the people around him suddenly sort of gulp and say, well, is this really the sense of momentum?

But no, Starm is in a bit of a holding pattern like the rest of us.

Is this the joke about the bar or is it another joke?

Can you remember it?

Which is a bit like the joke, a Blairite, a Brownite, and the Corbynista walk into a bar, barman says, hi, Andy.

And we think Sue Gray may be helping.

And we think Sue Gray was bad.

But the other thing is 2015, 2016, which I'd totally forgotten, Andy Burnham, Shadow Home Secretary, Starmer and his team worked really closely together.

So it was a year or two during the Corbyn years where the two of them worked together and for whatever reason came away not bezies.

I have a question for you, which is because you know the Healey MAD defence much better than I do, and you've been at the forefront of reporting on this whole defence investment plan.

Do you think this is entirely Healey...

believes passionately in this argument that we need to remilitarize and you know the threat from russia or is there an element of personal ambition and and burnham coming back and politics you know because we become cynical when we do this job what do you what do you think is actually happening here i think it's a really good question so um i uh wrote a profile of healy and which i started work on speaking to people weeks ago about six weeks ago when we were first talking about

And your profile dropped literally five hours before he quit.

So perfect timing by someone on the news desk got it right.

The reason I'm hesitating is because I think it's easy to forget just how well they did in the local elections.