Paddy O’Connell

And yet it ends up ending at kind of the time you might expect a result when, you know, you'd started counting just after the polls had closed at 10.

But yeah, I think the ticker is a good way of describing it, Laura.

So towards the tail end of yesterday afternoon and into the evening, there was a kind of trickle.

of Labour MPs, some of whom who had been public in the past about concerns about Keir Starmer, others who hadn't, who were saying, as you say, broadly similar arguments around their desire for the prime minister to set out some sort of timetable for his departure.

Most of them were not saying words to the effect of he should sort of pack his suitcase this weekend.

but suggesting that, yeah, he shouldn't be around for all that long.

And then this morning, Saturday morning on the Today programme, hearing from Debbie Abrahams and also from Clive Betts.

Clive Betts, long-standing Labour MP, been in Parliament since the 1990s.

And in particular, I thought what was striking, and I've heard this so many times from Labour MPs privately, and they don't say it with any sense of...

kind of enthusiasm or venom towards the Prime Minister personally, but they just recount over and over again stories of being on the doorstep and when they ask people who have voted Labour recently why they wouldn't have done this week or they weren't willing to do this week, so often they say it was Keir Starmer's name that was coming back to them, that sense that he was a drag anchor, if you like, or hauling the party backwards rather than anything positive.

And you've been speaking to the Prime Minister.

Yeah, so he did a thing.

It's interesting, yesterday they were suggesting that he wasn't going to be around and about today, which I didn't really believe at the time.

And sure enough, here he was.

And you can see from his perspective why they wanted to have him out and about, because otherwise there'd be something of a vacuum.

He was in Wimbledon.

So we were at the home of AFC Wimbledon, quite a fine little sports ground, AFC Wimbledon.

And not an accident that he was there.

Wimbledon is in Wimbledon.

merton the borough of merton in southwest london which was a a rare bright spot for labor they actually went forwards they gained a seat um in uh merton so he was meeting labor activists working the tables usual format that he does he likes going to smaller football clubs as well that's one of his things has a cup of tea at each table does the selfies all that kind of stuff and then did what's known as a pool interview where one broadcaster on behalf of