Raf Baer

These are the sorts of things that they were embarrassing, but a more able communicator or someone with good political antennae could have jumped on top of it really early on.

And I think a lot of people would say, you know, in the garden of number 10 Downing Street, the big speech saying, by the way, this is going to be really painful and horrible and it's going to hurt and things aren't going to be better for a long time.

Which is a reasonable thing to do if you want a mandate to make hard choices.

But, and this is a crucial thing, without having the final paragraph that says, but I promise you it'll be worth it because this is what you'll get at the end of it.

This is what we're working towards.

This is the country we're going to be.

And I think Starmer probably thinks he tried to do some of that, but it is just not a gear that he could ever really get into.

Yeah.

And if we're talking about why MPs lost confidence in Keir Starmer, I think the point at which the parliamentary party was really lost was the welfare rebellion.

And there was an available audience in the parliamentary party for reforming the benefits system.

A more gifted political leader could have navigated that.

But what happened was that together, the prime minister and the chancellor realized that they had about 10 billion missing in fiscal headroom.

And lo and behold, they said, well, by extraordinary lucky coincidence, there's 10 billion in savings that you can make from the welfare budget.

And we're not just taking money away from disabled people.

And no one bought it.

And it was just not credible.

And so rather than making a case for benefit changes online,

as part of a social reform.

They essentially said, we're going to take money from some people to fill a fiscal black hole.

And then when lots and lots of Labour MPs who didn't come into Parliament to say, actually, we want to take money away from disabled people, said, you're going about this completely the wrong way.