Nosheen Iqbal

Raf Baer, welcome back to Today in Focus.

Now, you have been a political columnist for The Guardian for well over a decade.

And in that time, we've seen six prime ministers.

Is that unprecedented in British history?

And how is your whiplash?

Well, let's look at some of those very recent outings of the lectern, as it were.

I mean, how did Keir Starmer's speech go down?

What did you make of it?

Because it felt like quite an unusual atmosphere on Downing Street.

Like, he walked out and there was a lot of whooping and clapping and cheering.

And, of course, yeah, it was a very sombre statement.

You could hear the tears, really.

Well, Raph, if you try to zoom out and look at this situation that we've got in Britain, this sort of sense of political perma-crisis, what, you know, would be described as systemic volatility and chaos, were it anywhere else, you know, how do you make sense of and explain Keir Starmer winning this massive landslide just two years ago?

I believe the third biggest in Labour's history to being so unpopular that he's effectively been booted out.

I mean, it feels like such a waste.

So if you were conducting a post-mortem on this premiership, where did things start to go wrong?

What, so doomed before you even started?

Selling hope effectively.

Yeah.

And to add to all of those obvious missteps, it feels like the political climate was changing around them and they were bleeding votes to the left, to the right, and they just kind of struggled to respond to that.