Liam Byrne

But that kind of blame carries you a long way.

But second, people do just feel that because the system is broken, it needs shaking up.

And therefore, that becomes the principal objective in supporting populists.

If you couple that with a sense that I've got nothing to lose by voting these guys in, then actually you've got quite a potent political movement.

Yeah.

I mean, the notes got a bit longer now.

The notes have got a bit longer, so this is now 40,000 words.

Yeah, and people have been leaving that note since Churchill.

So Churchill invented the tradition and everyone has followed in their wake.

And it's carried a bit of a curse.

So David Laws, who kind of revealed the note once when he apologised to me a few years later, said, look, Liam, if it's any consolation, David Cameron came to my constituency waving that note around and I then lost my seat.

And we all know what happened to George Osborne.

So there has been a curse of the note.

But

I'm not sure if it was populism because I think it was just, you know, effective Tory attack kind of politics.

I mean, it certainly had a level of kind of speed and aggression, as they say in the British army, that was quite effective.

But I think in the long run, it will be judged as the cover for what was the disastrous austerity program.

Because of course, what people forget- That's why it became so significant.

Yeah.

And what people forget is that we also left a plan for getting the deficit down by half by 2016, debt falling by 2016.