Mark Paul

I mean, she's made several calls for Burnham to be allowed to run in a by-election to come back

But, you know, if a contest is held before Burnham is eligible to take part, well, then you wouldn't rule Andrew Rayner for standing out or somebody else on the soft left.

I wouldn't even rule out Ed Miliband, even though he keeps saying that he doesn't want it.

But somebody from the soft left of the party will challenge treating, I think, if he goes without Andy Burnham in the race.

Morning, Brendan.

It's absolutely disastrous for Labour.

I mean, they've lost 1,500 local election seats in England.

They've lost control of Wales.

They've basically lost their dominance of Wales.

They've had their political dominance for over a century.

And they've lost their fifth parliamentary election in a row in Scotland.

And so from the southwest to the northeast, across every part of the land, Labour is in retreat.

And in its heartlands, probably the most wounding thing for all of this Labour is what's happened in the northwest of England, up around Manchester and Merseyside.

These are areas that Boris Johnson, even with his big wave in the general election of 2019, he never got near those areas.

And Reform UK and Farage have marched into those areas in the last couple of days.

We do.

Catherine West, who until recently, until last year when she was sacked, she was a junior foreign office minister.

She's basically come out and she said, look, to the cabinet, if you guys don't launch a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer, I'm going to do it myself by Monday.

Now, there's scepticism over whether or not she could get the 81 MPs required to trigger a contest to challenge Keir Starmer.

But I suppose the importance of all of this is that it throws a real spanner in the works for Andy Burnham, who is essentially the prince over the water, the king of the north.