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Chapter 1: What recent advice has Yvette Cooper given to Keir Starmer?
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Sometimes even just looking at you makes me laugh.
Well, I'm glad I have that effect on you at such serious times.
Chapter 2: How has the mood shifted regarding Keir Starmer's leadership?
I mean, have you ever known people in politics who don't talk say a lot with their silence?
They certainly do. And this weekend, there is something of tumbleweed going across Westminster and also tumbleweed going across the metaphorical Westminster.
Has a new senior Labour figure and cabinet secretary of state told him to push off?
So, as I understand it, Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, is also now one of those who has said to Keir Starmer, perhaps you might want to think that this is not realistic for you to stay and fight. We know Heidi Alexander had done that already. I'm told that many other ministers have also now done that.
I think that the number of people in Starmer's administration still saying to him, stand and fight, has dwindled very quickly. So go back 24 hours, Friday afternoon, journalists like me are still getting briefings from Keir Starmer's allies saying,
that he would stand and fight Andy Burnham, who, of course, has just won the by-election, that he thought he could beat him in any leadership contest. In fact, I was even told when Keir Starmer had decided that he would take on Andy Burnham was a fortnight ago when he saw Andy Burnham on that big Question Time special and he thought he didn't do it very well.
He watched Andy Burnham then do an interview with Victoria on Newsnight where he failed to explain the fiscal rules, the rules on spending and borrowing. And then that Saturday, Keir Starmer phoned up his allies and said, I can beat him. I will stand and fight. To me and the conversations that I've been having in the last 24 hours, that mood of defiance is shifting.
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Chapter 3: What challenges could Andy Burnham face in appealing to voters?
And I think by Monday morning, we might feel that things have moved very fast.
so let's get underway with saturday's newscast newscast newscast from the bbc humanity's next great voyage begins we are in the midst of a rupture nostalgia will not bring back the old order six seven yeah it's supposed to be me as a doctor daddy has has also a special connotation thinking about it like a panto helped do we play music now what do we do
Hello, it's Paddy in the studio. And it's Laura in the studio. And it's chaos in number 10 again. The chaos that Labour explicitly promised not to give me as a voter. They weren't going to do personality politics. They weren't going to do prime ministerial churn. They said it in Downing Street. They weren't going to do this.
They said it again and again and again.
And I'm going to do that thing today that I sometimes do is it's annoying, but I'm going to read you some of the things that people have told me because I want to explain to newscasters what's been going on behind closed doors in these conversations that people will have without revealing their identities, because it means that they can tell the truth privately.
We can report on that then to picture, to give people a picture of what is really going on at a time when nobody wants to come out explicitly who's been on Keir Starmer's side. But there are people who are increasingly feeling that he is going to have to go.
This is, to your point, one Labour advisor who's worked for the party for a long time just said to me simply, we promised people we weren't going to do this.
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Chapter 4: What does the Labour Party's internal conversation reveal about Starmer's future?
And that is a big problem. And it might be the last promise that Keir Starmer breaks.
We knew that there was a chance Andy Burnham would win. He won bigger than it was predicted. It was a bigger turnout than the general election.
Via some way, yeah.
So it's full beam message from the voters of Makerfield.
Full beam message from the voters of Makerfield. We want Andy Burnham. Full beam message then from Andy Burnham's supporters to the party. He can beat reform. He is the special anointed one. He should come and do this for the party in the country, not just here in Makerfield. And that on Thursday morning or the early hours of Friday morning was clear as day that that was his message.
I mean, he didn't do a normal acceptance speech for a backbench MP.
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Chapter 5: How are Labour MPs reacting to the prospect of a leadership contest?
He basically said, Keir Starmer, I am coming for your job. And they are so kind of full of excitement and froth and excitement. Somebody on the upper 13 said to me yesterday, you know, they are high on their own supply. You can see the pictures of Burnham's team are amazing, all the sort of cheering, clapping, all the rest. You know, they are absolutely believing, hoping they are on their way.
But the shifting pattern of support, if you like, behind Starmer is really the critical thing, because it's not up to Andy Burnham to decide if and when here Starmer goes. It's not up to Andy Burnham to decide if he gets away with getting to number 10 without having a leadership contest.
It's not up to Andy Burnham to decide, even if Starmer has concluded that he will resign, does he do it straight away? In which case, Andy Burnham, you're up and you better have some ideas and some plans.
You better learn the fiscal rules.
Correct. Or if Andy Burnham's desire is that Keir Starmer says, OK, we'll have a transition and you can move in in September. But that's not in Andy Burnham's gift. It's not up to him. It's up to Keir Starmer.
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Chapter 6: What are the implications of a leadership change for the Labour Party?
There's an unresolved debate in the party as well about whether there should be a contest. Lord Faulkner, former minister and the big figure in the Labour Party, said this morning it shouldn't be a contest. They should just get on with it. They should do it in mid-July, just like hand over the keys, just like that.
Men in a room deciding who runs Britain.
Men in a room deciding who runs Britain. Just for a change.
Oh, that's a new podcast we've just started. Don't start me.
I'm having some terrible trouble.
In the current go-round, there are no women in the room. Because there was talk, Harriet Harman floated the idea that if they did have a contest, a woman might be allowed to, because a woman's never actually... Allowed. Yes, a woman might be allowed in.
Would you let somebody do it? That would be nice.
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Chapter 7: What insights do political analysts provide about the current political landscape?
I was being ironic. I wish I hadn't scratched this one. David Blunkett told me they can do this two ways, the shambles way or the organised way. So it's possible this weekend people are trying not to be the chaos maker, the rainmaker, because if I come out as a Burnham supporter and I'm in the cabinet, then I've created the chaos. It's on me. Correct.
That said, there's a different argument about having a contest is that it is vitally important to put Andy Burnham through his paces because people don't know what he would actually want to do in government. And if there isn't a kind of contest of ideas in the Labour Party, then in six months' time...
If Labour doesn't improve its forties in the polls if Andy Burnham's in charge, people will go, well, we never knew what he was going to do. He was never tested.
And you might find, somebody in Starmer's camp was rather grimly joking to me yesterday, you might find that the same people who are currently proclaiming loudly that Burnham must be installed immediately and it's all over for Keir Starmer, might in six months' time be complaining loudly, well, of course, Andy Barnum was never tested, and if only we had had a chance to put him through his paces.
So none of this is straightforward. There are no good choices here. The public might recoil from a contest because every single political contest I've ever covered, at the beginning the politicians say, ah, we'll be very civil, we'll do this in a gentlemanly manner, we'll have a discussion about ideas and debates and all the rest, and we won't tear lumps out of each other.
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Chapter 8: How does the public perception of leadership changes affect political stability?
What happens when they actually get into the trenches to try to win a political war is they start tearing lumps out of each other. That is politics, I'm afraid. It might not be pretty, you might not like it, but that's how it's done. What I want to go back to, though, is your dreadful assertion that women have never got anything to do with politics.
There's a very, very important woman this weekend, Victoria Starmer. So the prime minister is with his wife at Chequers this weekend. People who know him well have said to me, he's just desperate to talk to her about it, to make his plan, to absorb, I think, the enormity of what is happening. And that is what he is doing this weekend.
Andy Burnham is also somewhere in a secret location away with his family. So I've been kind of entertaining myself with the idea that you've got basically these two middle-aged blokes both on mini bricks with their families while the fate of the country is being decided. And it's just an extraordinary place that we've got ourselves to actually as a nation. I mean, it's extraordinary.
It's not just extraordinary because Labour promised they wouldn't do it. But if you'd said to anyone like 10 years ago, oh, yeah, Britain will have seven prime ministers in a decade, you'd have thought they were off their head. I mean, it's a completely, I hate the word unprecedented, but I was about to say it.
This is just a massive twist in what has become, our policy has just become this never-ending drama. Although I think it's important to say, though, too, you know, when Labour politicians castigated the Tories time and time and time again for changing leaders... There's nothing wrong with changing the leader if the next leader then does well. Which happened. It did.
The Tories got rid of Theresa May. Boris Johnson then won them a massive majority.
90 seats. 80 seats. 80 seats. Sorry. 80 seats. 80 seats. And that showed that he had the mo. That showed that he had a mandate. That showed that his get Brexit done thing would change history in what we call the Red Wall, but you hate all the wall analogies, but in seats that had never gone Tory. Correct. So that was the public speaking.
So the argument really comes down to, has 77,000 people in Makerfield, of whom 55% of whom voted for one man... is that the same as the public speaking? And the Prime Minister is in the position of arguing on Friday that it's not the same as the public speaking.
And on Friday, people were saying to me things like... Well, it's fantastic that he got 21,500 votes. Really? But Keir Starmer has a mandate of many million voters.
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