Lewis Goodall

And I think that that is...

you know, surely he must know whether he's got the numbers.

And then, presumably, he must... I mean, I know this is a dynamic process, so there are no kind of 100% guarantees, and people are duplicitous.

And so, you know, it's perfectly possible that MPs are not being straightforward when they say, oh, Wes, I absolutely... Or they don't know either.

Well, it seems it seems that an awful lot of MPs are holding their breath right now that they you know, if you think of the people that have signed and said, right, you've got to go.

And then you've got the payroll vote, which is all the ministers and

cabinet ministers and parliamentary private secretaries you know that's about 80 or 90 people there are an awful lot of people who've not said one thing nor the other and I think it does leave Starmer in this position now where he is too strong to die but too weak to thrive too weak to govern too weak to be able to do anything and so this Labour does seem to have managed to get itself into

into the worst of all possible positions right now, where you cannot see an easy, clean...

I think we're very close to what happened with the Thatcher leadership when she faced the challenge and she was two votes short of winning outright.

And so there would have to be another contest.

And what happened then was and I think this is what happens if West Streeting gets the numbers.

The cabinet on day one, you know, came out that mad scene, those mad scenes yesterday of people rushing to the microphone, West Street scurrying up Downing Street.

But, you know, and you played it on the podcast yesterday of, you know, them all coming out to say, oh, well, yeah, we've got Keir's back and we love Keir.

I think that if there is properly a challenge and it's going to happen, that is the moment when the cabinet go in one by one to see Keir and say, I'm sorry, we wanted to support you.

We did support you.

But now we're in a position where the game is up, which is exactly what happened with Thatcher when all these ministers went in one by one to say, I'm sorry, Margaret, you can't carry on.

You don't have the support to do that.

So are there other candidates who can emerge?

Because if it's 80 to get on the ballot and there are 400 Labour MPs, John Sopel's maths is just about capable to work out that there could be five potential candidates.

Well, Keir actually doesn't have to get 80, so he could just stand there.