Sienna Rodgers

He sets a lot of the direction.

He has lots of the ideas himself.

But all this team who've been working on that.

assumed that they would have the summer and that they were doing this work policy work for example for a leadership campaign or that the economic speech he was going to he's going to deliver next week they thought that would be in the context of a of a contest um whereas basically what you'd unveil some health policies on monday some economic policies on wednesday some other policies in another area on friday and then repeat that cycle for six

Yeah and you'd be doing some visits and you'd be responding to what any other contenders would say and yeah you would have a little bit of time and it would be for the purposes of a debate that you would be doing this as well as eventually preparing for government whereas he's going to go straight in probably and so everything has just been massively accelerated.

We had

The announcement that James Purnell has been brought back to be his chief of staff going into number 10.

He only started a couple of days ago.

So everything is happening really, really quickly.

And I think no one in that team is denying that it is a huge scramble and really actually just quite difficult.

Yeah, he doesn't actually have his own permanent office.

Yeah, he's still waiting for that.

And you would think, why give him a backbench MP's office for three weeks when he's probably going to...

There is definitely a discussion going on about that.

And I mean, I think there's such an inevitability to this idea that Andy Burnham will win eventually, whether that's a quick or a sort of slower process.

I think that the most sceptical and, you know...

sort of Keir Starmer loyalist people would argue that there are maybe up to 100 Labour MPs who will happily support Andy Burnham eventually, but who have their concerns, who want a bit of a debate, who maybe could get behind someone else just for the sake of a contest.

And that was sort of where that chatter around Darren Jones came from, even though he has ruled himself out.

So I think that, like, probably he will go unopposed, but there...

I think that I'm quite struck from speaking to Andy Burnham's team that they are really not discounting that possibility.