The real reason behind Keir Starmer's reshuffle

This is a Global Player Original Podcast. As the new Home Secretary, I will be looking to go further and faster because I am very clear I have one top priority in this job and that is to secure the borders. I will do whatever it takes. Uh and for those who've worked with me already in government and in my previous brief, I think people can tell I'm not the sort of person that hangs around. To stop the small boat's problem.

Is that what the reshuffle was always all about? Has it changed the entire tenor of the Starmer Plan? And what will a brand new Labour deputy leader do to this project? Welcome to the newsagents. The news agents. It's Lewis. It's Emily. And on Friday when we left off and we were still sort of digesting the news of Angela Rayner's resignation and we were starting to get the first glimmers of the reshuffle, which turned out to be a pretty

dramatic reshuffle in the sense that not lots of new people joined the cabinet, but it's certainly true to say that Keir Starmer really did shuffle the pack, including the top well two of the very top jobs. So Vivet Cooper became Foreign secretary and was replaced by Shabana McMud, who was a Justice Secretary, very, very well thought of

by number ten. I mean actually one of the most interesting things overall is that virtually every home office minister was removed and replaced. The focus of this reshuffle seemed basically to end up being about small boats. We'll talk about that a little bit more.

In a second, other people getting new jobs. Steve Reed became the housing secretary, replacing Angela Rayner, he was the environment secretary that went to Emma Reynolds, Pat McFadden, who had been the kind of de facto deputy prime minister, became work and pension secretary.

Liz Kendall became the science secretary, replacing Peter Kyle, who became the business secretary. Generally speaking, I mean there were obviously people who kept their jobs, people like Wes Streeting at Health and John Healy at Defence. Generally speaking, I think you can say that this was a promotion for those on the right of the party, the kind of for want of a better expression, the blairite right of the party, which is making elements of the

left of the party pretty uncomfortable, which is itself feeding into the deputy leadership race, which is now getting going already in earnest. Yeah. And I think there is a world in which, if I take you back to exactly this time a week ago,

we were expecting a reshuffle to happen then, and there is a world in which Kir Starmer That he might have to replace Angela Rayner. I mean, we talked as if He started the reset last week and this all took him by surprise. But imagine for a second that actually he had contemplated that he might be about to lose his deputy. And actually everything that he did came as a result of knowing that that might be about to happen. And I think

We cannot underestimate how central the changing of the guard at the Home Office was to this whole arrangement. And fundamentally, there is no, I think, nice way of saying this. Kir Starmer and the team around him decided that Evek Cooper was wasn't landing him the job. She wasn't up to the job in the way that she needed to be. And as soon as he realized it was about removing Yvette Cooper, He realized that he is not

clearly didn't want to demote her, he didn't want the bad feeling that that would bring. The only job that is a step up from the home secretary is is the foreign secretary. And actually Keir Starmer's already his own foreign secretary. You know, he has the relationship with Trump, he has the investment with Zelensky, he does the summer trips to Croatia and meets the ministers even when he's on holiday. He knows Macron and the G seven.

So I don't know if she's gonna have the most active role in that, but it seems to me that all the machinations and all the movements were about replacing his home secretary because he essentially wasn't hearing Strong enough language, strong enough decision makings, or even strong enough rhetoric for what he feels he needs now to fight off Farage. And David Lamy becomes

I think it's fair to say his deputy in all but name, and Darren Jones, who was the one who was moved into that role on Monday, is essentially the sort of personal guard dog. You know, he gets out and he sells the starmer message better often than the PM can himself. And so I think I think that moving Darren Jones to that role was the beginning of him recognising that Angela Rayner might have to go.

Now the whole question that you've just raised about the deputy is the really thorny one because they've just told us today that there will be a new deputy leader announced. but not until october the twenty fifth. Now that feels a long way away. It feels like the next Six weeks are gonna then be consumed by a race which is all about Labour, Labour membership, Labour talking to itself. They've already said that whoever it is is gonna need eighty votes.

to get elected. Eighty votes will put, I think, a lot of people, a lot of MPs out of the running completely. But it does still seem then an incredibly lengthy process, which will be taking up most of the conference as well. They're gonna do hustings at conference. And actually, if you wanted a symbol of Labour carrying on talking to itself instead of acting as the party of government and talking to the rest of the

the country, then then that is how you do it. I think the deputy leadership race, as I was getting at on Friday and we start to see the glimmers of, I think is a complete nightmare for number ten in all sorts of ways.

Come back to that in a second. I just I just on the home office thing, I mean I think it is worth worth dwelling on it about event it it seems to me that obviously number ten, Keir Starmer, did not want this reshuffle in this way. They didn't want Rayner to go. But it's very clear, as you've alluded to, I think, that Morgan McSweeney in particular has decided.

not to let a crisis go to waste and to try his best and Starmer to try his best to convert it into an opportunity. And that opportunity was clearly centred around the Home Office. I mean it's not just a vet as I was saying, I mean, you know, every minister being replaced. Tells you everything, right? I mean it's a slightly sort of uncomfortable position to ent be in, right? Which is um you know, we know we've been doing a great job on small boats.

Home Secretary was doing a great job on small boats. We just changed everybody who was responsible for it. Um and we've got a whole lot of new new people in. But it's very clear that McMood Shibana McMood, we're hearing at the clip at the top of the show, Shibana McMood has basically been sent in Well thought by number ten. They think that she got a grip at justice.

in a way that other ministers don't. In particular they've been impressed by the fact that and I think this is quite interesting and is a credit to her political skill. Obviously what they've tried to do from the beginning is pin everything, their inheritance and their problems, on the Conservative Party. which they've largely actually really struggled to do. They haven't managed to pull off the trick.

that George Osborne so successfully did in twenty ten, which was basically to say, every every terrible thing that we're doing is basically as a result of Labour. Blame them. Labour have not been able to pull that trick off. We've tried to do it with the the the twenty two billion pound back hole It's just sort of fallen nowhere. Other government departments as well.

McMood actually is the one who has really landed it. You know, when she was in charge of prisons, I think you can generally say that it's kind of accepted within Westminster, within kind of elite opinion, media, that that was the Tories' fault. And number ten think that McMood has

quite uniquely really, actually been able to land that message. So they think she's a good media performer, they think she gets things done. Um and you know, this can be a bit indelicate in a way, but I think that they think that as a very, very prominent Muslim woman, she can go into the home office and she can say and do things and act in a way that maybe other politicians, including Yvette Cooper, can't. And she can turn to the liberal left.

and say, Look, you can't say to me that I'm a racist, you can't say to me I'm this, that and the other, I'm gonna think the unthinkable on this because we need to in order to see our Farage. So it is a deeply, deeply political move. at a moment of maximum vulnerability on this particular issue of small boats. Yeah, I mean she is definitely going to places that have at Cooper

just couldn't. Or wouldn't. Or or wouldn't, exactly. I mean, she's already said this morning she might suspend visas from countries that we don't have returns agreements with. We should say on her first day in the job one thousand and ninety seven people arrived in small boats. So she's facing this head on. She's saying that it's the most important mission. They have rewritten their goals now to include the stopping of small boats and the immigration issue as part of the the top three.

She has mooted that she wants to remove all asylum seekers from hotels and put them into disused parts of sort of military barracks. again, sort of staring a lot of people in the face. And yeah, I mean it is a really delicate question, but you wonder if Starmer isn't coming to it from a sort of like, who could be my Suela? Now Suela was deeply unpalatable to Labour when they were in opposition.

But right now, they're probably looking for the person who is prepared to say, nothing's off the table. We'll do whatever we need to do. I mean, I even caught myself wondering if the Rwanda Agreement had been up and running. you know, before the election, if they had got the first flights off the ground, the Tory governments, if they hadn't been stopped, would Labour really have stopped that? If they had watched it, if it had worked as a deterrent?

Would they have gone, It's still preposterous, you know, we know the king hates it, we're gonna stop it anyway or would they have just gone, Well, it's not what we would have chosen to do but we're not going to waste more money on undoing it? I don't know. But I feel like there has been a shift and obviously it's a shift that has taken the form of reform rising in the polls.

people gathering outside the asylum hotels in Epping and elsewhere, and this idea that they cannot now not make it their priority. Whether in their hearts they truly believe it is or not, it's kind of been thrust upon them. And I think they've just decided that Shabana Mahmood is the one who isn't squeamish, you know, maybe that's the word. She's just she's just quite blunt about it. She doesn't flinch when she talks about sort of, you know, returns and what it takes.

And maybe that's what they think they need now. Yeah, and it isn't just her. I mean, like I say, I mean they've also put in, for example, Mike Tapp, who is the MP for Dover, a very hard line on on these issues for kind of self evident.

reasons. So it's this kind of whole new sort of approach. I think of course you can't overestimate. What difference any individual home secretary or individual minister is able to affect on small boats very quickly. You know, the fact is, if there were a simple solution, it would have been done by now. There are so many structural reasons why not just Britain, but all of Europe, is struggling with this problem and interior minister after interior minister in different

European countries are struggling with this problem. I think as much as anything this is a communications thing and it is number ten attempting to do a kind of soft reset of small boats and sort of say, Well, you know, here we are, we've got this new person in

And I think there's a lot of frustration in number ten that Cooper wasn't seen to be more on the front foot with these things. You know, wasn't out there doing media stuff, which we've already seen from McMood, about, you know, basically setting up prefabs in army barracks and just being seen To be doing more rather than doing stuff internally, which is, I think, more Cooper style. But of course, if there are significantly new kind of authoritarian kind of moves.

From Mood and from others, and that is, I think, generally speaking, what is perceived is going to happen. That is going to feed into the You know, pretty fragile politics. of the deputy leadership race. And we already saw that

unfolding over the weekend, you know, Andy Burnham being out there as sort of critic in chief of the Starmer government from the outside, talking about the idea of needing to listen into members more. We saw Emily Thornbury as well, who she said herself is considering standing for the deputy leadership. saying we need to stop making these mistakes and so on and I did laugh at the weekend. Uh yesterday the Guardian headline was

Labor figures tell Starmer, stop making mistakes. Like, yeah, okay, yeah, thanks a lot. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It reminds me of an old deputy uh editor at News Night, old colleague of ours who occasionally used to tell me when doing packages Just make it not shit. It's like okay, thank you very much. That's very, very helpful. That's all you need. But yes. I mean look, we should say that you know, the Andy Burnham thing was

I think we need somebody from Manchester, says, you know, Mayor of Greater Manchester, who is also very close to Lucy Powell, who is also from Manchester. There is there is a world in which he is positioning himself or her as the deputy in case he ever tries to take a stab at the leadership, which will be quite useful. And Emily Thornbury knocked that down pretty comprehensively on the BBC yesterday where she said, Well yes, and if you're from Scotland you probably want somebody from Scotland.

If you're from Wales you want somebody from Wales. If you're from Islington South Exactly. I mean it's i it's interesting, isn't it, that the Thornbury place because in one way she is Although from a completely radically different background to Angela Rayner, she is sort of the closest thing you get. to the reign of voice of authenticity. You know, she's she does that wonderful sort of big sigh before she sort of starts speaking. But you know that it's gonna be pretty unvarnished.

And it's gonna be pretty up front and she doesn't shy away from the sticky stuff and I could imagine that she will try and go for the deputy leadership. You know, she's still not in the cabinet, sort of second time running. And She needs to be or they need to be quite high profile because as I say, you need 80 MPs backing you and five percent of local Labour parties or three affiliates, two of which have to be trade unions.

Which is a pretty high ask. Now I don't know if Emily Thornbury has that behind her, but I don't know who on the sort of the harder left, let's say, has that either with the ability then to get AT MPs. And so I think you're talking about a fairly select Kind of Contest at this point, aren't you? They have to be very well known. They have to have an or an awful lot of backing in the parliamentary party, and they have to have

trade unions behind them and I guess it's who else, you know, manages to get their act together and get round the country and raise the money before conference which is at the end of September. Yeah, these rules were designed to ensure that basically you need

pretty high levels of institutional backing. You know, they were designed post the Corbin period to ensure that that would never happen again, either for the leadership or deputy leadership. Stummer has also expelled quite a few left wing Labour MPs, so that reduces their their numbers again. I I find it very hard to see how there will be a candidate of the left

What I think is f likely though, is it's hard to see how there isn't a candidate of the kind of soft left, the sort of critics of McSweeney and Starmer in particular. And this is why I th the sort of paradox of this race is that for precisely the reasons you say, Emily, and precisely the fact that a lot of newesh MPs within the PLP will still on some level wanna try and stay on side with a Starmer government, you kind of need the arithmetic would suggest

that basically a candidate of number ten would be well placed. They would have the structural backing. But that would also be the kiss of death. Because right now what the Labour Party is not if everything were going really well, then the Labour Part Party might want to h hear that. What the Labour Party right now and this is why this contest is dangerous of Starmer, the Labour Party right now

has got questions, profound questions, existential questions with the rise of reform about the future direction of the government and what has gone wrong so far. And the reason this contest is dangerous for Starmer is those conversations of course have been happening behind the scenes Sotovoce, two journalists between different uh MPs, different institutions of the Labour Party, sometimes aired in public at particular moments, but generally sort of under the surface.

This contest quite literally licenses those conversations to be made public. There will be hustings. The conference will be dominated by those questions and you're gonna have each particular candidate leader, whoever it happens to be or candidate for the deputy leadership. being asked repeatedly and searching and scrutinizing what the government has done so far and what the government might yet do. And the premium will basically be on a critical voice.

That basically legitimizes all of that descent that we've seen so far. And so and if you think about I'm just thinking about two of the most likely candidates. The sort of polit political delicious irony and pain for Starmer is this. Two of the most likely candidates, Emily Thornbury, you've already mentioned, Lou Haig as well, who of course left the cabinet.

These are people who in one form or another have been dismissed by Keir Starmer, have become sort of critics of him, and might end up having to walking into number ten, being elected by the Labour Party basically to stick it up him.

And what a delicious irony that will be. Yeah, and I think when you look at the shape of the cabinet and you talked about the sort of the Blairite wing or whether it was looking more sort of Labour right. I guess one of the things that we shouldn't overlook is the movement of Pat McFadden, who is really seen as close to Starmer, one of the sort of original grown ups in the cabinet, now moving to Department of Work and Pensions.

I think there's a feeling, pretty much in the open, recognized now, that they failed. You know, they failed on the welfare mission. They failed to get the party in step. They failed to deliver something that looked like a proper cut or a proper reform and Pat McFadden's come back to kind of knock heads together to put it bluntly. And I think part of the problem here is a is a wider one, which is they keep on linking reform with cost cutting.

And actually if you are invested in policy and reshaping policy and if your idea is to, you know, to get people back to work because it's fundamentally better for them, better for the country, better for the whole shape of the workforce. that can sometimes kind of knock up against just the need to cut cost. And I think You can understand why they've done it, but they've sort of elided reform and cost cutting, reform and cost cutting, and it's not always worked.

And I think they've sort of thrown it back now at Pat McFadden and said, Right, you do it. You take this up. We're gonna have another go. And I think I think all these in their own way are an admission of, as you say, failure. You know, they didn't manage to make it work at the Home Office. They didn't manage to make it work with the welfare reform. They didn't manage to do the things that they wanted to do in the first year. So

It is quite a hard story to tell. There isn't a tick by those boxes. There's a big red egg.

And they've got to start all over again whilst pretending that nothing's actually gone wrong. Well I have to say something I was surprised by was the fact that, you know, normally in reshuffles you get some new blood. And generally speaking, there was almost no new blood in this coming. This was literally a reshuffle in the sense that it was a shuffling of the pack. It was giving a lot of the same people different jobs.

And the sort of obvious critique of that is, Well, if you didn't think they were being terribly successful in their old jobs, why do you think they're going to be terribly successful in in these new jobs? You know, giving the same people different jobs is not really a kind of refresh. There was

more significant movement in the junior ministerial rungs with with lots of the new twenty twenty four MPs, rising stars sort of coming through that we'll hear a lot more from, I think, in the next sort of year or so. But yeah, I mean look, we've talked about it so much on the show and w you know, in Westminster and you know, people like us we get very excited by reshuffles and it's all quite interesting. But of course, you know, structurally speaking

Everything in terms of the direction of the government, with the possible exception of the Home Office, is much the same as it was before. If you talk actually to ministers, most of them will say the defining thing about this government is previously, and maybe this will change now, who knows?

But previously there has been relatively little direction from number ten. That's clearly something that Morgan Sweet McSweeney wants to change. It's not gonna change in terms of we're never gonna get we've talked about it before, a sort of overarching kind of philosophy from Keir Starmer that's just not his style.

And so the question then really does become about this question of delivery. But structurally speaking, the biggest change is not really the shuffling of the pack. The biggest change, structurally, politically, is what is going on in the deputy leadership. That is the thing that will destabilise

the Starmer project, precisely at this moment of what was supposed to be of of renewal and reset in a way that they would not and could not have anticipated. And like we were saying on Friday, this is really unusual. You know, deputy leadership contest for the Labour Party

very, very rarely happen separately from a leadership election itself, right? D particularly in government. This this is this is a really unusual situation. It's almost inbuilt to be unstable and difficult. So it is gonna dominate Westminster. For the next month or two. We'll be back in a moment talking about what on earth was going on at the Reform Party Conference.

The news agents. If that song has been going round your head over the last three days, Rest assured, you are not alone. It is Andrea Jenkins, the Mayor of Lincolnshire, and she opened the Reform Party Conference by singing it on stage.

Simon, Garfunkel, McCartney, Lennon, Jenkins. What a tune. Yeah. So she kicked off the reform conference last week and I guess the narrative has always been, Oh, you know, poor reform Angela Rayner's departure stole the headlines, made Farage rewrite his speech and move it up and they were sort of slightly pushed back and off the headlines because of all the

So shenanigans at Labour. And the other way of looking at it is they were bloody lucky. I mean, when you actually see what came out of that conference, they were bloody lucky, more people weren't paying attention. We had the anti-vax conspiracy From Trump's Department of Health, who decided to float a theory that perhaps

King Charles's cancer was related to the COVID vaccination. Nice one. Let's just hear Miss Malhotra there. Well one of Britain's most eminent oncologists, Professor Angleish, said to me to share with you today that he thinks it's highly likely That the COVID vaccines have been a factor, a significant factor in the cancer of members of the royal family.

Kate's cancer as well. Highly likely, right? There is no data, there is no graph, there is no evidence. There is just a bloke on a stage telling an entire conference filling up Birmingham's NEC that the royal family's cancer came from the COVID vaccination. And nobody seems to be talking about that. Nobody seems to be saying, What the actual are you saying here? Well and that wasn't it. I mean they also decided to give a central slot on the conference stage.

To Lucy Conley, who of course only recently released from prison for incitement to violence during a national riot. She was hailed as a political prisoner, this this completely ridiculous idea, which has been doing the rounds on the radical rights. Somehow she was kind of Kirstama's personal prisoner and she was sort of sent to prison as a result of two tier justice rather than committing a crime.

And it could have been even even worse. It could have been even worse. We're told there was some reporting over the last twenty four hours that Sarah Pochin, the MP for Runcorn, who has previously called for the burqa to be banned in Britain, said that she had wanted to arrive on stage in a turquoise version of the Islamic headdress

and she was talked out of it by the deputy leader Richard Tice. Like now when Richard Tice is the one saying, you know, look let's just calm down here, like, you know, let's steady on. Steady on, Sarah. You know, you know you're into kind of slightly weird territory. And I think this was I think just overall

This was actually disastrous for reform. It's easily their biggest misstep after a period of continuous momentum, right? I have been told repeatedly, just like other journalists, you know, talking to people central to reform, this conference mark the kind of apogee of our professionalization drive. We're not just doing the thing that we normally do when we were in UKIP or Brexit party, you know, meeting at Doncaster races or the Winter Gardens in Margate and all of this sort of

faded grandeur of the seaside. We're going to the Birmingham's NEC. It's this part of the professionalisation drive that we've been doing. And it is of a genuine I think it reveals and adverts to the real paradox at the heart of reform, which is on the one hand,

They are driving towards that professionalisation. They're trying to court more moderate voters who might be interested in some of the things that they're saying but are a little bit concerned about, you know, Farage's past, some of the people who might be involved. And it diverts to that

Paradox which is there, which is they're trying to do that on the one hand, but at the same time, they have got a load of cranks in their midst, they've got a load of weirdos in their midst. They attract a lot of the elements of the online right, with all their conspiracy theories and weird ideas.

And I'm just surprised that Farage, who has actually been at the center of wanting to see that off, would have allowed this to happen. And I think actually probably reveals that he is somewhat worried about some of the splinter groups that are happening to his right.

and wanted to or elements of the party wanted to sort of reaffirm their kind of place in that sort of weird online world. Yeah. I mean, I think we would have both paid good money to be in the room, which I'm sure was about sort of blue sky thinking.

when Sara Pochin suggested the turquoise burqa uh and got talked down, you just kind of wanna be on that wall, don't you? But I think the Some of the coverage about the Reform Conference has been breathless and excitable, and my interpretation of that is not just that the rest of the UK media thinks that reform is everything that the country needs, but just that they think that they are leaning into what the public wants. They think by talking up reform and talking up its chances and talking up

the conference itself, they are basically placing themselves as where the public is. And I just want to take you to some really interesting data from Tom Larkin, who's the head of Observer TV. who was at the conference and he writes big support on crank Twitter, for me being an out of touch Lib Tard because I said the positions on vaccines, climate change and Lucy Connolly promoted at Reform Conference are wildly unpopular with the public.

Are they right? And he says the short answer is no. He goes into quite a lot of detail that shows how much of the UK Completely disagree with the position on climate change. Sixty-seven percent of of Britons think that climate change is man-made. and I think it's eighty three percent are in favour of the vaccine. They're not gonna start welcoming the remarks by a sea malhotra describing the cancers of the royal family as caused by COVID.

COVID vaccine I should say, and he goes into various bits of the reform platform, which I think is just worth having a look at because We have all really sort of sucked up this idea that the reform government is inevitable, that Farage as Prime Minister is inevitable.

that the people, whoever the people are, are massively supportive of reform and that there's this 30% rise in the polls. I think it's certainly true to say that reform as a concept are much more popular now as a concept than either Keir Starmer's government or what's left of the Conservatives.

But that doesn't mean that when you dig down into the policies that they're espousing, the people that they are encouraging to speak on their platforms the public aren't gonna be absolutely horrified by what comes out of their mouth.

Well, this is what I mean when I um talk about the paradox of the heart of reform, which is that they are on the one hand, they set themselves up as being the kind of the embodiment of kind of where the British public, the authentic British public really are. That is a sort of populism as as to where they are.

But on the other hand and you know that it is true that on some policy positions that is true, you know, they are probably are roughly where the public are, or much of the public are on things like uh immigration and so on, Farage has been quite adroit and adept uh moving to the left economically. The truth is the British public are kind of

Has have always been a little bit statist economically and a bit more authoritarian on questions of immigration and those sorts of things, sort of left and and right in that order and that's not always been well represented in British politics. Reform are there. But then when you as you say Emily, when you then just

When you lift the lid a little bit, the truth is is that Many of those at the heart of reform, or or certainly maybe not the heart, but certainly many of those associated with reform are of the radical right and not just a radical right, but the sort of MAGA end of it. And all of this this weekend felt pretty magger, right? And that is why you saw, you know, this sort of conspiracy crank stuff around vaccines, all of this sort of stuff, you know, political prisoners as you say, you know,

If you ask the British public, there's been polling on Lucy Connolly, they didn't think there's a big part of the British public they didn't think she went to prison long enough, right? They are actually not at one. with the British public on many of these elements that are on the more MAGA end of the sale, on the online right, right? Whatever they think, they're not. I mean and the danger of this

And what's happened this weekend and you're right, they got off lucky. They got off lucky because it would have been this stuff would have been poured over, but because of what was happening with Labour and the reshuffle, it wasn't to the same extent. But it just meant that you just ended up instead of a conference where they could have been talking about their immigration message, they could have been talking about their economic message.

You ended up getting people being put up and asked about whether or not the King's cancer had been caused by a vaccine, something that I put on my LBC show to their representative this weekend, Leila Cunningham, who is a councillor in Westminster and considered a rising star by the party. Do you think it's appropriate for a a party that is aspiring to government to spread misinformation in that way and talk about, very disrespectfully, the cancers of our royal family? We're a broad church.

We believe in freedom of speech. We might not agree with whatever. Should you be that broad? No, I mean I'm not sure. That's not a party line and uh that's not party policy. But I should hope not. No, but we believe in freedom of speech. And people are welcome to disagree with him. It uh it got the debate going and and that's why we put him on. Debate on what? Vaccines don't cause cancer. Debate on what?

The causes of vaccines. I'm not saying qu COVID vaccines uh cause cancer. There I haven't seen proof of that. He may have. I have not. No, there is no proof. There is no proof because it doesn't happen.

You can't be staunch defenders of free speech like we are and not allow to people to voice opinions that you may disagree with. Obviously, Lewis, you have an issue with that. You think people who don't agree with you. Oh, it's always down to free speech. I mean it's so interesting, Lewis. It goes back to something that

I think we touched upon last week, which is that Reforma in the ascendance and what they do brilliantly is attack what already exists, attack the institutions, attack the establishments, attack the elites, that's fine. But the moment it comes to putting together their own policies,

you just feel like saying, Let's get the sunlight in here because once you have to look at the policies, once you have to look at what they're actually suggesting, is this your positive way forward? Is this your suggestion for the NHS? Is this actually what you think as a party? It becomes

Much more complicated. And I was talking to Luke Trill, the polster from More in Common, who'd been at the conference and he was with a former senior member of the last government, and he said the way the members see it. is that to use the mean girls, as in the film, the mean girls analogy It's the people who think the Heathers were mean to them now have their own bigger club. In other words, the thing that binds people at the moment.

is that anger and hatred of everyone who's not in their club. You know, we hate what you did to us, we hate your government, we hated the government before that. We don't like what happened to us. And a lot of that is totally understandable, totally understandable anger or resentment or a sense of wanting to get your revenge on a quality of life that hasn't changed, a standard of living that hasn't changed in twenty years.

I think that's understandable, but as soon as reform puts its actual policies on the table You've kind of got a binary decision there. Do you agree, do you not? Do you want cranks to speak at this conference or not? Do you want to go down a debate of whether the COVID vaccine caused the king's cancer or not? And it's where I think the reality hits the kind of

it bursts the bubble of everything can be fine if only we had reform. Well the reality is is that thank heavens, for the moment, although I do think this is slowly changing, we do not have MAGA style American polarization on many of these key issues. In America, there is a lot of political polarization on vaccines.

In America there is a massive political polarisation around things like they wouldn't call it this, but they basically mean you know two tier justice and so on and the way that the police works. The truth is that the British public are not yet

anywhere near that polarized. And the problem is, is that a lot of on the sort of wider edges of the Reform Movement, the kind of ideological intellectual edges of the Reform movement, they are born of and inspired by the MAGA movement and those sorts of ideas. And the problem is is that they're trying to marry that, marry those ideas, onto a British public which is very sceptical of those things.

So it is a dangerous thing, and I think it's to some extent born of their hubris that you know they keep holding so well and so on, and it's a dangerous moment. Their problem is that they swallow their own hype. That they believe that these ideas are widely shared out there in the public and they're not. And so it is dangerous, and not least because, as I say, their main political weakness.

And you you see this in focus groups and you see it in polling is a worry precisely that they may have cranks within them and that they may have eccentric ideas or radical ideas or whatever it happens to be. That is dangerous. So having their first big, big conference With the main message being about vaccines and about Lucy Connolly or whatever it happens to be, it was a stupid mistake. We'll be back in a moment.

The news agents. Well, as we record at ten past three, the French Parliament is sitting and is fully expected to be toppling their third Prime Minister within a year. Francois Beirut. has called a confidence vote over his efforts to cut the deficit. which he is now widely expected to lose. He sits

at the helm of a very fragile minority government, led of course by Emmanuel Macron. Yeah, I mean this all goes back to the fateful decision that Macron made after the European elections in twenty twenty four, which his party lost to hold SNAP parliamentary

elections which resulted in no majority, no absolute majority, no obvious coalition. As a result he's burned through prime ministers since then raising questions about the governability of France, which are particularly acute and problematic because much like ourselves, now our own government is finding they've got a problem with the bond markets, France's debt is rising and rising, therefore he's tried to have prime ministers to cut some of France's, you know, pretty large state expenditure.

And they just haven't been able to find a majority in the parliament for it. And so there are even whispers in the French press and I still think it's unlikely, but you know, you never know, it's probably less unlikely than it was. The Macron himself might even have to resign as a way of breaking through the logjam. More likely probably he ends up with a socialist prime minister having to try and lead a sort of left wing coalition

But they are very, very unlikely to want to do the sort of budget cuts that Macron has tried to orchestrate. So you end up back at square one. Exactly. I mean the parliament is basically split into thirds now. There is the kind of hard right block the sort of macron minority centrist bloc and then a very forceful block on the left as well.

And talking to friends in Paris, they think that this is going to lead to a socialist Prime Minister coming in. There is even some speculation that Beirut has. sort of done this to himself so that he can get out of being Prime Minister and come back into the presidential elections when they're held in twenty nine. But as you say, Macron will now

basically be on the fifth Prime Minister in two years. It's been massively a time of massive unrest for Macron, which has made life pretty hard for him. And there is a world in which the person who comes in this time round is not one of Mackerel's men like Barnier, like Beirut. And it's not even a socialist, but it paves the way for Jordan Bardella, which was the thing that he was originally trying to almost precipitate

when he first called the confidence vote a year ago. Jordan Bardella is of the Rassemblement National, the the far right group that Marine Le Pen heads She of course was cannot stand for Prime Minister because of those corruption charges that came down against her. Well we'll obviously keep an eye on that and if there's more to be said tomorrow, we'll bring it to you. Also of course I should say as well, Emily I'm sure you'll be following it very closely, Norwegian election day today.

Are you excited? Very much. Are you excited for for Vive twenty twenty five? I'm excited for all your family. Well, we'll keep an eye on that as well. We'll be back tomorrow. See you then. Bye for now. This is a Global Player original podcast.