Paul Holden

speaker

257 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 12 Feb

Paul Holden’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Pod Save the UK · McSweeney: the man who made Starmer and his ties to Mandelson · 12 Feb 2026 podcast

It's actually quite juvenile.

It's this concept of shadowing.

So what McSweeney does is he identifies whatever political contest he's facing.

He identifies, okay, this is the opponent.

I'm going to copy them as closely as possible.

Maybe I'll flank them.

to make sure they cannot have any space to develop a coherent set of differences between my candidate and the candidate we're standing against.

And this was openly briefed, right, in 2022, 2023.

So how do you defeat Farage using a McSweeneyite methodology?

You put his longest colleagues, his longest allies, Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary, and you start off-lanking reform and the Tories to the right on immigration.

Their briefing at the time, what always sticks with me, this phrase they use, is that we are remaking the DNA of the Labour Party, and they do.

Fundamentally, they do.

At every level of the Labour Party, McSweeney's allies take over the bureaucracy.

They then, using their bureaucracy, purge any sort of councillors who are not loyal, who are not potentially biddable to a Mandelsonian politics.

then they choose their Labour Party MPs, right?

So, you know, a very substantial part of the current Labour Party intake is drawn from this political project or backed by it.

So you have this political party that really has been transformed by them.

I feel quite disappointed in the Labour Party, but I'm also looking at the Labour Party thinking, like, this is a 100-year-old institution that has delivered fundamental progressive change for this country.

This is a disaster and it's a tragedy, right, for this institution to collapse.

And I can only see this

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