Jon Sopel

Cancelling all his military May Day parades.

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I think Keir Starmer has realised that there is an imperative as the Prime Minister to come out strongly, very strongly, against the attacks and whoever's behind it, and he does so with the backing of the government.

But there is also...

The small matter of the local elections, which may be coming for Labour in as big a way as we can imagine.

And it is quite interesting to put some of.

these issues back in the context of how they're affecting the standing of each of the party leaders.

And Luke Trill, who, as you know, is a good friend of the podcast, more in common pollster, has been looking at leader approval ratings.

And it is fair to say, I think we should start with Keir Starmer, who is down at the bottom of the pile on minus 45.

That hasn't changed that much for the last few weeks.

But the big change that he

has pointed out in some of his work is Zach Polanski, who had this phenomenal sort of rise to power, extraordinary sort of expedited successes from his leadership back in September, October of last year, and has now dropped quite considerably to minus 27 on the sort of net approval ratings, which is much further down.

And so if you were trying to work out, this is literally over the weekend, polling done in the last few days, what has happened?

I guess you might look at Polanski's more recent comments, most notably after the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green last week.

where he seemed to come out and criticise the police response, suggesting it was too heavy-handed for the way they had tasered, tackled a mentally ill man to the ground.

A mentally ill man, we have to say, who had shown himself fully capable of stabbing two men and leaving them in a very serious position.

And so it is also probably...

helpful for Keir Starmer right now to be talking about this, because certainly in London, the Greens are snapping at Labour's feet.

If Polanski starts to look a little bit less popular, a little bit less confident going to these local elections, then you have not just a prime minister, but a Labour leader.