Raf Baer

His voice was catching when he talked about how he was going to move on to the most important job, which was being a good husband and a good father to his children.

He sounded very close to breaking down, actually.

Absolutely.

And given that...

One of the criticisms of Keir Starmer has been the lack of emotional connection, the fact that he can come across as stiff and robotic.

I just think for him to have showed that amount of emotion at that moment was setting aside the politics of it, I thought very poignant.

It is extraordinary when you look at it, you think the UK constitution is such that a prime minister with a majority of 160, 170 can do more or less whatever he wants.

And so I think the big picture answer to the question, well, why didn't he do that?

Why didn't he exercise that power?

Why didn't he dominate British politics?

And the answer is you can use those powers, that constitutional opportunity is available to you if you know exactly what you want to do.

And I think that is where it really unraveled, the sense that he came in thinking that ultimately someone who had a good sense of duty, civic obligation, a heart in the right place, not a chaotic, wicked Tory would bring a kind of...

ethics and pragmatism to the job would necessarily succeed because everything that had gone wrong before was a function of just the wrong people being the job.

And it just wasn't enough.

The tough job of prime minister involves making really hard political choices.

And he didn't have, it seems, that clear sense of what his political destination was, that when he was confronted with a problem that couldn't just be solved by the way he had when he was a DPP, Director of Public Prosecutions, when he was a barrister, you could just look at the evidence and

stare at the problem hard enough and the solution would present itself to you.

That doesn't work when you're prime minister.

There are sort of insoluble problems and you just have to make a hard political choice.

What are you going to spend the money on?