Laura Kuenssberg

There's an unresolved debate in the party as well about whether there should be a contest.

Lord Faulkner, former minister and the big figure in the Labour Party, said this morning it shouldn't be a contest.

They should just get on with it.

They should do it in mid-July, just like hand over the keys, just like that.

Men in a room deciding who runs Britain.

Just for a change.

I'm having some terrible trouble.

Would you let somebody do it?

That would be nice.

That said, there's a different argument about having a contest is that it is vitally important to put Andy Burnham through his paces because people don't know what he would actually want to do in government.

And if there isn't a kind of contest of ideas in the Labour Party, then in six months' time...

If Labour doesn't improve its forties in the polls if Andy Burnham's in charge, people will go, well, we never knew what he was going to do.

He was never tested.

And you might find, somebody in Starmer's camp was rather grimly joking to me yesterday, you might find that the same people who are currently proclaiming loudly that Burnham must be installed immediately and it's all over for Keir Starmer,

might in six months' time be complaining loudly, well, of course, Andy Barnum was never tested, and if only we had had a chance to put him through his paces.

So none of this is straightforward.

There are no good choices here.

The public might recoil from a contest because every single political contest I've ever covered, at the beginning the politicians say, ah, we'll be very civil, we'll do this in a gentlemanly manner, we'll have a discussion about ideas and debates and all the rest, and we won't tear lumps out of each other.

What happens when they actually get into the trenches to try to win a political war is they start tearing lumps out of each other.

That is politics, I'm afraid.