534. Is Wes Streeting Trying to Sabotage Andy Burnham?

At the moment, smart money is on Keir Starmer not being Prime Minister by the end of the year. It's very hard to see how Keir Starmer gets through this. We have West Street in resigning, one of the big contenders against Keir Starmer, and then Andy Burnham, the very popular mayor of Greater Manchester, now trying to re-enter Parliament to run against Keir Starmer. If you're Keir Starmer at the moment, you must be going absolutely nuts. It's very hard to govern in these circumstances. We see the two halves of the Labour Party revealed

the kind of contradiction the Labour Party's dealing with. My plea to all of them, please don't turn this into a soap opera. Well, fat chance of that. This episode is brought you by Fuse Energy. Fuse has introduced the tracker tariff designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier, savings clarity and a bit more control. And it guarantees that your rates stay below the off-gem price gap, which saves you up to £200. And the tariff updates automatically every quarter.

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by-election. We're going to talk about the policy shenanigans that this upcoming by-election have launched as Kirsteamer ponderes from wherever he is at the moment, not heard much over the weekend. And we're going to talk about Germany. You wanted me to report back on my trip to Germany. And I'd also like to give a little shout out to Mr. Péter Magyar for the way he is handling his early days in power in Hungary. Brilliant. Let me start, though, with my big tabloid headline. And the thing that really excited me about this race. So people who glance at the Sunday Times yesterday, we're recording this on Monday, would have seen it leading with West Streeting says that if he becomes Labour leader, he will lead the country back into Europe. So he's somebody who's on record

saying that he was pro-customs union, and he's now saying that if he becomes a Labour leader, he will put into the party manifesto for the next election rejoining the European Union. So now for the first time, we have somebody with an outside chance of becoming Prime Minister saying, if he becomes Prime Minister, we're going to rejoin the European Union. Now, lots of ifs, is he going to make it? Is Andy Burnham going to make it? Is this going to make Andy Burnham have to sound more Eurosceptic? But just on the surface, that's really big news. It is. And because it's in the context of West Street, having resigned from the Cabinet last week, and said that he doesn't want Keir Starmer to carry on being Prime Minister.

Andy Burnham, having put his name in the frame to be the candidate in the Makerfield by-election, which has been created by a former minister, Josh Simon's stepping down, also saying he thinks Keir Starmer shouldn't carry on. The context is more complicated, even than just a leading Labour figure says, let's rejoin the European Union. And I'm going to do this very boring thing for internationalists, again, and maybe to bring up-to-date British listeners who aren't following this minute by minute. So to remind people, Keir Starmer has got a pretty bad popularity in Britain, but he was elected

with a big majority in Parliament, big majority, and could have sat there for five years. And everyone assumed that he was going to sit there for five years. But a very bad showing in the local elections where reform did well, that's the Nigel Farage right-wing party, and Labour did badly. suddenly led to a situation where we have West Street in resigning, who, as you say, is one of the big contenders against Keir Starmer. He's the guy I'm talking about the European Union, and Andy Burnham, the very popular mayor of Greater Manchester, now trying to reenter Parliament to run against Keir Starmer. And as we recorded, if people want to get into the depths of this, please listen to our last podcast where we get into this in depth. But essentially, we're in a situation where it looks likely that if, and it's a big if Andy Burnham manages to get into Parliament in this by-election, he will then run and.

have a chance of being Prime Minister by the autumn, and Keir Starmer will cease to be Prime Minister. So this morning I was listening to David Lamy, Deputy Prime Minister, and listening, I could feel his kind of exasperation, because he's speaking on behalf of the government. He is also a leading figure in the Labour Party, explaining that he obviously wants Labour to win this upcoming by-election, but can't answer for obvious reasons, very simple questions about whether he agrees with something that Andy Berlum, who may be the candidate, was saying at the weekend. So you put your finger on one big paradox, which I think's worth leaning into a little bit more, which is, yes, of course, Keir Starmer and David Lamy would like Labour to win the by-election,

but Labour winning the by-election means bringing in Keir Starmer's biggest rival, and almost certainly leads to Keir Starmer stepping down as Prime Minister and this man, Andy Boehner, taking over. Yeah, so it's sort of crazy. And in addition to West Streeting, who let's not remember, just a week ago was part of the team that put together the King's speech, came out and didn't just call for Britain going back into the European Union, a position which, by the way, I have long supported, but you have to kind of always focus on context. And the context here is very, very complicated because on the one hand, he's basically saying, Keir Starmer's been too timid, there's been drift, there's been a lack of embracing big arguments. So he made it part of a much bigger

attack. Andy Burnham, meanwhile, does an interview. I thought a very interesting choice of interviewer, which was Dan Hewitt of ITV, who's actually whose expertise is housing. And it's ITV. He's not gone for BBC. He's not gone for Sky. He's not doing the today program. There's a long interview with Dan. Explain a little bit what that means. What might ITV mean if you were putting something together? Why would ITV be a bit different to those others? Well, because the normal, you know, the normal thing you probably expect, let's do the first interview. You'd probably do, And it was at the weekend. He'd probably say, well, let's sit down with the Sunday morning show with Laura Coonsberg.

And is that because that has more listeners or has more Westminster listeners? What's the normal logic for why you do that? The normal logic for that, I think, is just historically everybody always used to do David Frost. Okay. But I thought it was interesting to do it with Dan Hewitt, who has got this kind of reputation. I mean, most of our listeners won't necessarily know this, but he's got a reputation really serious about housing, really serious about inequality. And Andy in this interview talks about one of his big policy ideas. He leans very heavily into electoral reform.

Another thing, which isn't in the Labour Party manifesto, so he's basically saying, I want a stand for this. And his big message was Westminster Whitehall have failed. I've shown there's a different way of doing things in Manchester. I'm coming in to try to do the same in Westminster. Dan Hewitt kept pressing him on whether that meant he was going to challenge Keir Starmer. And he's just found a form of words to sort of go around that. So it's...

Why is he going around that? Because he's obviously trying to challenge Keir Starmer. Because he doesn't... He wants to keep saying, I am just for the moment standing to be the MP for Makerfield. That's insane. I mean, nobody believes that at all, do they? I mean, literally nobody. Nobody on the planet.

Believes that. No, no. And including and especially, Keir Starmer. Right. So on the one hand, he's sort of saying very different sort of politics, very this, very that, new politics. But it's quite old politics. Not to answer a straight question.

Not to admit that this is why you're doing it. So he then found this other formulation. I want to take the arguments that I've made as high as I can, as high as I can go. So what you have now, Kirston. Can I just sorry, because what you're saying is so weird and will be difficult for people to understand. We are in an era where, like it or lump it, people like quite blunt, outspoken, frank type of politics. Which, by the way, is what we're treating was trying to do. Right. So why can't Burnham say, obviously I'm trying to get elected because I want to run to be Prime Minister because I think the problems that Manchester faces and the country faces are best dealt with by my becoming Prime Minister. And I think I'd be a good Prime Minister.

Yeah, I think, but then we're back to the point that I made when Andy Burnham first tried to get selected in Gorton and Denton, where I think if you were saying it as bluntly as that, people will think Keir Starmer has taken leave of his senses if he says, well, come on in then. So, look, this is what I mean. This is why I kept saying last week. Let's just step back a bit. Because this is going to create for the next week. Do you remember my final words on the podcast last week? My plea to all of them, please don't turn this into soap opera. Well, fat chance of that.

When you have literally, we've just about finished the podcast last week when I was in Germany and you were here. And West Streeting comes out with a big attack on Keir Starmer and a big policy announcement on the European Union, followed by, same day, Andy Burnham, doing a very different style, not going for Keir Starmer personally. I think that's what answers your question, not going for Nigel Farage personally, not going for reform. Right. And why that, this is why some of Andy Burnham's people are now saying, well, West Streeting is an absolute bloody snake, he's done this deliberately. Yeah, yeah. Because he knows that in the by-election, you know, in a constituency that voted very heavily leave.

64% leave. 64% leave and 50% of whose residents who voted voted 50% reform in the recent regulations, he doesn't necessarily want to go in all guns blazing, say let's get back in the European Union. So in a very interesting way, we see the two halves of the Labour Party revealed and that the kind of contradiction the Labour Party's dealing with. West Streeting making the big ideas rejoining the European Union, which will be hugely appealing to many, many, I suppose, one, bit of Labour vote. People like you, educated, city dwelling, professional, more liberal, really want to join the European Union. And then you've got another chunk of voters who,

I suppose, we might think of as a traditional Red War voter, more of Labor's traditional patriotic working class base, ticking in the north of England, who went over to Boris Johnson in 2019 because they liked Brexit, they wanted to get Brexit done. And so we're in this situation. We're in in which Andy Burnham is saying, vote for me because I'm a figure from the North, I can re-win those reform voters, I can win the seat that voted over 60% to leave the European Union. And we've got West Streeting saying the problems that Britain faces, all the problems that Britain faces almost, are to do with much bigger things than Britain. You're not going to be able to actually fix Britain's productivity or our cost of energy or our security or anything.

things without rejoining the European Union. And Andy Burnham is saying hyperlocal, hyperlocal, I'm the guy who's going to get your buses running, I'm going to get the police back on the streets, so I'm going to improve things. And Streeting is saying you've got to lift your head and look at the bigger global policy issues. You're not going to be able to fix any of those things. Yeah, and that's showing the tension between the two very different contests that they're engaged in. Because Andy Burnham's fighting a by-election in a northern working class constituency that was when Tony Blair was around, massive. We used to get huge majorities in McCartner as RMP.

Over 60% of the vote, 63% of vote. I think more than that the first. I think 70% at one point. And so he's fighting that contest. And Westreaching, even though he's not yet, you know, there's not yet a contest formally, he's fighting the leadership election ahead of Andy Burnham being able to get there. Now, I've got to say, if you're Keir Starmer at the moment, you must be going absolutely nuts.

Because it's very hard to govern in these circumstances. He's the prime minister. He's still the prime minister. And he's watching this without any real control over it. And so when I mentioned David Lammy's interview, you just feel his exasperation. How are we meant to deal with this situation. One of the problems is that the tradition in government is that you shouldn't do anything too radical if you're just about a step down. So the civil servants, quite rightly, are extremely

reluctant. And you would have found this when you took over in 97. In the last months, the major government, they don't really want them launching huge new things that the new government might undo. And a classic example here is John Healy was trying to announce an enormous new investment in British defence. And it's probably one of the most important issues in Britain. It'll be a huge amount of the British economy if they go up to three and a half percent. It has these massive implications for NATO, for Ukraine, for containing Vladimir Putin. Can he do it? Not really, because the real question that the Treasury is going to be asking is not just who's the next Prime Minister, but who's the next Chancellor. And what does West Reading or Andy Burnham or Andrew Rainer or Al-Karns or A-N-O-O-N-O-O-N-O-R-N-O-R-N-O-R-R-E-N-O-R-R-E-N-O-Rae-ROW.

Yeah, they all like to say, well, government can carry on, the business of government carry on. A lot of it will. A lot you're taking several weeks out of the political calendar at a time when the reason why Labor did so badly in the local elections was in part because the country is saying, we don't feel the country's working terribly well, and we want you guys to fix it because that's what you said you'd do. And remember, one of the things we've often criticised the last Conservative government for was the ludicrous number of ministerial reshuffles. So famously, you would have 10 prison ministers, 11 junior defense ministers, and so on and so forth. The first thing that will happen when the new Labour Prime Minister comes in, Andy Burn and West Streeting, whoever it is, is there'll be an enormous reshuffle because they have to look after their supporters. Some people will remain in the cabinet. I don't know. Let's say one of them may decide to move Shabana Mahmood from Home Secretary to Chancellor, but that's already a huge shift.

And then at the junior level, they've got to look after the people who are with them, and they're going to be throwing out quite a lot of the people who were large of Keir Starmer. Yeah. That happened, I guess, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, right? There was quite a lot of reshuffle when he took over? When Gordon took over, was it massive? Yeah, there was a pretty big re-shovel, yeah.

But I think that where I've kind of ended up on this, and you could feel my sort of getting very agitated last week, I think it's very hard to see Akeastama. gets through this because the debate has moved in a way already. From being what's he trying to do with the country to what are these people want to do with the country. Okay, so let's imagine I'm the whisperer to the Joe Biden's side of Keir Starmer. I would say it's very important for British governance and confidence and the bond market

that you remain. And here we are. And thanks to West Streeting, raising Europe massively in the minds of the voters going into this make-field election, Andy Burnham may well fail to get elected. Now, if Andy Burnham fails to get elected and it's by-election in a few weeks' time, he's in real trouble, real trouble. Andy? Yeah, Andy Burnham's in real trouble. If he can't get elected in that by-election, to come and say, oops, I failed to get elected in what used to be a very safe labour seat in Northern England, give me another one, can someone else reside? I know, I have another by-election, I have another go-to-get-in.

He's toast, pretty much. It's difficult to recover from if he fails to get elected. Well, the only thing I'm saying that is he can remain as Mayor of Greater Manchester until he gets elected. Yeah, he can remain. If I think he could even stay as an MP. What he couldn't do is be Prime Minister and Mayor of Manchester. Yeah, but his credibility and his leadership race is massively. Takes a hit. So Keir Starmer might well think, well, what are the chances of Burnham being elected?

That's 50-50. And if he doesn't get elected, maybe Keir Starmer thinks, well, I'll be fine. West Streeting is very unpopular now, much less popular than he was in November. November you saw data suggesting that West Streeting had maybe a third more support within the party and he's got now. He didn't manage to get his 81 MPs. So how about a storm of view where he's sitting there with Morgan McSweeney and his mates saying, well, actually, maybe this could be okay. Maybe Andy Burnham doesn't come in.

And I remain as prime minister for the next two and a half years. Well, yeah, possible. What is it? They chant five more years, five years. Well, he says he was 10. But the thing about, and also I must say, when West Streeting, on the day that West Streeting resigned, and we had that whole sort of day of, not chaos exactly, but nobody quite knew what was going to happen and what have you. There was a lot of anger around.

Against Wes. A lot. And not just from Kirstarmalo. This is a famous cliche that I remember when I was going through all these conservative leadership things. He who wills. Exactly. This famous story that you don't want to be the person who's seen as bringing down. the leader, that Michael Heseltine made that mistake, you don't want to seem too ambitious,

that actually the smart money is being slightly dark horse. Now, the one person who managed to defy that was Boris Johnson, who was such an enormous brand. He somehow got away with it. But it's certainly true that Gove's reputation was deeply, deeply damaged by the sense that he'd been too clever by half, too political, too disloyal. And so all the people like you who are like, this is the last thing we need at the moment, all those leader writers who've been pumping out articles saying Britain used to be respected for its governance around the world and now we're a laughing stock.

All those Tories who are saying this is ridiculous, we can't have another prime minister, are blaming worse treating, aren't they? A lot of them are. And I think that when you made a point about, I thought Andy Burnham's interview was actually quite effective in lots of ways. But I think a lot of real people will actually reach the conclusion that you reached, which is basically, hold of it. Why can't you just say yes? because that's obviously what you're doing. But I just worry from the Labour Party's perspective that the debate is you're already seeing it going off in directions that nobody really planned.

And then the other thing that I've said you many times before, that I really resent the way that people claim to speak for whole regions and whole chunks of the population. There was this Labour MP on the television on the radio over the weekend who was really going for West Streeting, saying, you know, the last thing the country wants. Lisa Nandi saying nobody in this country wants to reopen the debate on Brexit. It's just not true.

Lots of people do, including in the north of England. Including possibly Lisa Nandy herself. It's very odd that she's... I like Lisa very much, but I seem to remember she was quite sympathetic on Europe back in the day. So this guy, Jonathan Hinder, who's an MP up in East Lancashire, and he's saying, you know, if I went to my constituencies, then we're going to reopen the whole debate. Yeah, if you put it in those terms, they might say, well, that sounds a bit mad. if you said that this government is getting punished because we're not delivering on the things

that we promised. And the first thing we promised was growth. And if we're serious about growth, we've got to reopen the debate about the European Union. Having made the case for Andy Burnham and our last recording where I said, you know, there could be a great story where Andy Burnham wins, proves that he can take a reform seat, comes romping in, charismatic delivery guy. Let me make the case of West Trading. Case of West Streeting is this, that actually there is a really, that everybody has become completely obsessed with reform voters. It's true of the conservatives, it's true of Labor. And that's understandable reasons, because these are voters who are better

at turning out, and they're also voters who are in these marginal constituencies that everybody's focused on. But as a number of the people in the country, it's actually not that many people. What you're talking about when we talk about the reform voter, only one in five reform voters have university degrees. They tend to be older than the general population, whiter than the general population. 85% of reform voters voted Tory in 2019. 85% voted to Tory in 2019. They are an existential threat to Kemi Bader Knox Tory party because she's trying to occupy the same space. But if your labour, there's a completely different strategy, right? The completely different strategy is to say British politics has changed. You no longer need to get 45% of the vote to win a majority.

just proves that actually you could probably be the largest party was 28, 29% of the vote in the five-party system. And there is a huge vote bank of progressive, educated, more diverse, younger, pro-EU remain voters. West Streeting was smart, allowed the Conservatives and Reform to duke it out chasing the traditional reform voter. He has a huge space where he can get moderate conservatives, Lib Dems, Greens, Adix cite a loss of a progressive labour base. And I think he could lead labour in. He could be the biggest party. He could make a good coalition.

He could get us back in the European Union. There you go. God almighty, you're becoming a Labour Party, spin doctor. You know, you did the case for Bernhardt last week. You know, the case for West Street. We'll get you on Al-Karns soon. I've got to say, I'll show you this little graphic, which the main rory in my life dug up from somewhere. It's a graphic 10 years of elections in Wigan.

And this is relevant because McEfield is Wiggin. Correct. Yeah, the borough of Wiggin. And what you'll see, Labor has been the biggest in all of them. Yep. Right. But the dark red is the three merit elections. Uh-huh.

So what that says is Andy Burnham pretty substantially outperforming the Labour Party at the time. By a huge amount every time. By a big amount. Yeah. So a lot is depending on that. And there's been a lot of reporting from McEfield saying whatever the, the national figures are, he's genuinely popular. Many of them are using buses that they credit him with providing as mayor of Manchester. And it's not, again, we talk a lot about reform voter. One of

the things that comes across is that it's easy to talk about a reform voter or a white working class older voter, but it's a very different story if you're talking about those voters in Nigel Farage's seat, these are east of England coastal constituencies. And, you know, of what was happening in places like Norfolk, where they were taking a lot of Tory votes away. That's very different from the story up in the north. And even in the north, I think there are two different stories, aren't there? There's the difference between, I don't know, maybe a community like Easington Colliery, which is in a very, very extreme type of deprivation and economic challenge.

And some are like Mcfield, which is actually on the edge of rising prosperous areas like Manchester, where in fact, if you look at the data around unemployment benefits, it's not as deprived as some of the other areas of the country. Just to dig into the population to make it feel it would be 105,000 people, 96% were born in the UK. Yeah, compared to about 85% of the national picture, I think it is. Yeah, correct. But it's often in communities which don't necessarily have huge immigrant population that feel most strongly about immigration as an issue. And one thing for sure, it's already started,

because West Streeting has put Brexit and possible reentry into the European Union center stage in the Labour leadership debate, Andy Burnham, when he was asked, I don't think he knew that West Streeting had done this when he was asked by Dan Hewitt in the interview in ITV. He said, it was played back his words, I hope in my lifetime to get back in the European Union. and his response to that was, I'm not advocating that in this by-election. In other words, he knows that reform will really go for that. Now, I actually think if the Labour Party had not, since 2016, essentially conceded so much ground in this debate,

that actually that wouldn't be a bad place to be. Because the one thing, one of Nigel Farage is, we've interviewed Rahm Emanuel on leading this week, the American possible contender for the Democratic nomination. And he said, we're asking about him, Pete, the three presidents he'd work for, and he said, you know, everybody's strength is often their weakness and vice versa. I am convinced that if the Labour Party had, over the last few years, attacked Nigel Farage over his role in making every single person in this country weaker and poorer,

because of Brexit, we wouldn't be in the state that we're in now. But for Andy Burnham, that is a big risk to do at this time in this violation. So we're back to the point about the clash of those. And we're back to the point that all these parties, Labour and Conservative and reform, we're all fishing in the same pool. They're all trying to get the same pro-Brexit, working class, older white vote. And it's partly because of the electoral mathematics, I guess if you were brutal, for Labour, where they have huge majorities in someone like London or central Manchester, there's not much point in them adding a couple of votes there because of our first-past-the-post system. But it's very weird. It means that the whole of British politics is being distorted towards

perhaps 20% of the population who are not very representative of the populations a whole, who are more conservative, more anti-immigration, more anti-EU. But the problem is that is exactly the battlefield that Burnham's chosen to fight by election. Yeah. Well, Andy Burnham has achieved something today, which is a very rare thing. He's managed to get the Daily Star to lead on the Labour leadership election with Burnham calls to scrap Var. of that, Rory. Well, there we are. There we are. Listen, listen, and this is the controversial

video football thing, right? The video football thing is exactly what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Would you support getting rid of VAR? I think I probably would. Is that because you're just a massive populist and that's just a thing to say if you want to get a tabloid headline? Shall I tell you another fact, if Andy Burnham does win. Yeah. Did you just saying that to flatter the listeners, the VAR thing? Do you really believe? No, Art did you know the only time that the Daily Star? What would David Dean say if he was listening to you? The only time that Dave The Daily Star led on politics during the 2001 election campaign was Brittany Bax Blair. So getting the Daily Star, they did the lettuce, though, didn't they with those tries?

But let me give you another football fact, Roy. This will absolutely get the geeks. If Andy Burnham does become a leader in the Labour Party and Prime Minister, it means the two of the G7 leaders will support the same football team. No. First time in history. No, and who were they both support? Mark Carney and Andy Burnham are both huge Everton fans. No. There we are.

So David Moyes could be challenged to the East Chekker in no time at all. That's amazing. Well, look, this is a terrific news. Listen, let's just finish up and then we'll go into a break. So to wrap it up again, at the moment, smart money is on Keir Starmer not being prime minister by the end of the year. And probably if Andy Burnham manages to leverage his popularity as mayor of Manchester and not be torpedoed, he wins the by-election and he's probably odds on, I guess, in the betting to be prime minister. but there's a lot of butts there. And we have this very different, I think, rather interesting candidate in West Streeting,

who's pretty unpopular at the moment because he's wielded the knife and he's seen as a bit of a snake in the grass. But I'm really liking the shape of his policies. I think it's bold. I think it's radical. And thank goodness there's somebody in this era of nationalism and parochialism who's making the big structural arguments that we need for rejoining the European Union. I had a few exchanges yesterday with Gary Stevenson, sitting doing a bit of reading and recent. He's got a bit cross from me on YouTube recently.

Did he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you got a bit cross with both of us on this latest one because I got several people sending me messages saying, have you seen Gary Stevenson's thing? He's had a bit of a go at you and Rory. And actually, it wasn't that much ago. He basically said we were sort of centrists. But also what he was saying, he did make some really, I thought, really interesting observations. There weren't, he wasn't specifically talking about the issue of the by-election.

He was talking about the far right and how to beat them. And his big thing, and this is. is something which I think Andy Burnham was trying to do in his interview, talking about affordability, just as Zohran Mamdani won on Affordability in New York. He was basically saying that the reason why mainstream parties like Labor and the Tories keep losing and getting hammered is because the big, big, big thing for people is falling standards of living related to inequality. So there are loads of very rich people, but there's so much more poverty.

But the other point he made, and this is where he sort of, he basically thinks that you and I talk to people like us. Okay. Now, I've not seen the analysis of how many reform-leaning people listen to us, but where I think he's got a point, and this is what Andy Burnham is definitely trying to do. This is why Andy Burnham was not. He was asked directly, do you understand why people vote reform? Yeah. And he said 100%. Whereas, you know, I might be tempted to say, yeah, because they're manipulated and drives a liar and blah, blah, blah. Can I challenge for a second note? It's absolutely true, I think, if you look at all the data, that a lot of people who are furious with Labour and conservative and attempted to vote reform are motivated by the fact that cost of living's going up.

Wages have been stagnant since 2008. Housing's difficult to afford. Services are creaking. What they really are looking for is a government that's going to be pro-business, cut their taxes, cut welfare spending, get the economy going. The voters sound as though they believe that there are market solutions to this, not that they want Gary Stevenson to come in and redistribute and steal the money from the rich and give it to the poor. No, I guess he would say that in terms of the Lanski has made such an impact is because he has been pretty clear about wealth tax and so forth. But that's not, I think, it'd be interesting. I mean, how much of the vote that is. I mean, we get on to that. That's a totally different vote market, isn't it?

There's a young, green party voters. Another couple of points he made. I don't know. There's very few of them in McAfield. And also, the other thing, you've got this debate going on in McAfield. The Greens are going to stand a candidate, whereas Caroline Lucas, former leader of the Greens, she was actually advocated with the Greens not to stand, assuming that those who might be tempted to vote Green, actually vote for Burnham and stop the far right. But the other, just a couple of other points that Gary's team's made that's what

were worth thinking about. The first was he had this line where he said, we've got to stop the beef between the left and the centre. And I'm like, yeah. Well, he said he's got to stop. We. No, but I tell you what, I actually reminded me of how we did actually try to sort of build

new labour, which was, yes, we're appearing to the centre, but we don't want to lose. We don't want to lose people that sort of... You don't want to rub the left's face. Correct. So, and I think there's something like, and he actually said the centre needs the left, and the left knees the centre. And that is true. And I think that. And then he's the final point, he made nine pretty big points.

The other one where he absolutely was right. He was an hour long. Well. I did watch. He was interesting. It was interesting. He mentioned us about four times, none of them very flattering, but let's just park that. It doesn't matter.

But the other thing he said, and he's absolutely right about this. Incidentally, he wrote a very, very good book. He did write a good book. You had your name on the cover of it. Yeah, yeah. And you even read it. Yeah, he wrote a book. The name's on covers.

He's not always the case. He's a very good writer. He is a good writer. Rory trying to get back in with Gary Stevenson. But the other point he made was that this isn't just in the UK, but around the world, and this is true, and I saw this in Germany, which we'll talk about after the break. The right-wing parties, these popular right-wing parties, are so much better at social media than, and I've been watching Andy Burnham's stuff, and it's fine, it's fine, but it's on a different level.

What the right do is on a different level. And the other thing he talked about was funding. He was making the point that when these sort of upstart, right-wing influence start-up, they suddenly get money, getting given big donations to build them up, and then suddenly they end up on Joe Rogan because there's this international network. And so I thought there was a lot in there that the Labour Party needs to get its head around because the truth is, on social media, both of the two main parties, Labor and the Tories, they're still, to my mind, pretty lame.

You know, I'm lame because it's not my thing, right? I'd like to think the podcast is better, thanks to the team that we have doing it. But that is, so the point he was making to me, he actually said, he said, you, me, you're like a general sitting above and you sort of think you're ordering troops. But out there, the troops are all fighting in a different way. They're not reading, they're not listening to the BBC. They're not listening to newspapers. They're sharing anger-making videos about Muslims.

And they're all, that's why- And rich people. And rich people, exactly. So I do think that we've, and my argument to him is I don't want to get into the same means of fighting for the lying and the disinformation or the other stuff. And bear in mind, Nigel Farage is going to chuck so much money at this violation and they've got a lot of money to chuck. But I just thought you should watch his, he did it yesterday, came out yesterday. It was interesting. Good.

Okay, we'll do. Let's take a quick break and then back for more. Welcome back to the rest of the politics, me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alastaird. Now, Alison, I would love to hear what you picked up in Germany. You've been Germany for the last week or so. Yeah, yeah, gone. So German politics, really interesting.

How's Friedrich Merz doing? How's the greatest economy in Europe doing? How's the AFD doing? Are we going to be able to have the middle powers led by Germany, recreating the global order? how's Germany-Trump relations going? If people can remember those questions in order, badly, badly, too well,

and I don't think so. Okay. So, Merti's doing very badly. His ratings are now just absolutely tanking. We went up to the very, very north. In fact, it was rather starting to arrive at the hotel and his gigantic portrait of Angela Merkel, right up on the Baltic coast.

In former East Germany. Former East Germany in Mecklenburg-Ferpomron, is the land of the state. And am I right? This is like AFD territory? Well, interestingly, Mecklenburg-Ferpomeren and below us, Saxony and Halt. Right. Okay. These two states, the reason why I was particularly interested to go into this area,

they are the two states that have elections in September. Okay. And as things stand, the AFT are going to do well. Okay. How does it look? Well, so if you start in Saxony-Anhalt, The current minister president, which is their kind of prime minister, is called Sven Schultzer. And he only took over in January because his predecessor was in real political difficulty.

So he stepped down to improve their in their prospects. In the result, in the last election was 2021, the Christian Democrats, Maozi's party, got 37.1%. The AFD got 20.8, which was down from their previous vote. And then the link got 11 and the social democracy got 8. So the Serial Democrat is not very big there. Latest poll last week, AFD 41.4, CDU 24.9, Linker 12, SPD 6. So that's Saxony-Hanhalt. Okay, just to explain again to people, remind people, AFD, strong links to fascism.

Real question about whether the German constitutional court should actually be certainly launching investigations into some of the AFD leadership. And if they win this, Landa, if they win the state, they actually will end up with a president there who is in charge of the police, who's in charge a lot of local operative, very, very disturbing if you end up with them actually having proper executive power. And this guy is called Zygmunt, Ulrich Zygmunt, and this is the AFT candidate, and his manifesto was as out there as it gets, and big on what they call remigration. Right.

And remigration, again, to remind people, this is an idea that's beginning to get into British politics. And the idea is that effectively lots of people who live in your country are booted out. So reform is talking about millions of people. So not just people who are asylum seekers, but people who lack indefinite leave to remain. But some of the AFD adjacent figures are talking even about German citizens with German citizenship being removed from the country. And largely Muslims. And just to give you a flavour of the rhetoric, this is what he said at the launch. Let's take back our country.

In other words, it relates to take back control, make America great again, etc. Big clamp down on immigration, as you say, huge support for large families. And a family means a man and a woman and lots of children. Pushing back on all sides of that. The stuff that really worried me, one of the slogans that they run is we have to stop recognizing Ukrainians as war refugees. They are broadly pro-Russian. It was interesting how I watched a documentary while I was there. about why they were doing so well in this area.

Quite a lot of people, elderly people in particular, saying, you know, why are we giving all this money to Ukraine when we've got so many of our problems here? So to what extent is this similar to reform voters? And to what extent it's different. Similarity, I guess they both are very, very focused on the question of immigration and control of immigration. Different is that this isn't connected,

as it would, and be in Britain with Brexit, instead of which it's connected with the strange relationship between East Germany and West Germany. And is there a sort of different feeling to this era of Germany to what you'd expect to see in a classic reform voting part of Britain? Does it feel different? It does. Yeah. I mean, we, you know, we were driving around and the place, I said to Fiona one point that we were going through all these kind of quite small towns and villages, they all feel very clean, whereas a lot of the, you know, this left behind. communicators in Britain, you always feel very, you know, I didn't see the whole shuttered-up shops phenomenon that you have here. So you wouldn't necessarily have complaints that public services

are collapsing, high streets are shutting. No, not in the same way, not in the same way. And the other thing, I've got to say, particularly in Mecklenburg-Fort Pomeran, apart from one waiter in one restaurant, we didn't see a single non-white face. And yet this is the place where, so at the last election in Mecklenburg for Pomeran. This is Merkel's constituency. Populations smaller than Saxony, unhalt, is about 1.6 million or something. The last election, the

governing coalition in 2021 before the election was Social Democrat, CDU. After this election, after the 2020 election, the Social Democrats got 40%, and they went into coalition with DeLinka, the left party. You look

now, and the AFD, which got roughly 17% I think last time. They've more than doubled it. Okay. So they're now ahead. So one of the themes that we're seeing, and maybe this is a good transition to Hungary, is party loyalties collapsing all the way across Europe.

So France, Germany, increasingly Britain, the fact that your parents, grandparents, voted for a particular party doesn't seem to make any difference. Between one election and another, vote shares can double, you know, millions more people vote. The other thing, though, that you're picking up, particularly in Saxony-Anhalt, is that is the sense it's a very, very strong right-wing vote. And that's an interesting thing as we move to Hungary, because there, too, the left is getting very, very little vote, even if there's a split between the far right and the right. Yeah.

And then, of course, the other thing that this gives rise to, so let's just say, for example, that this guy's segment in Saxony-Anhalt, let's just say he does get, I don't know, over 40%. Yeah. The angst that is running through the main parties at the moment is whether they can keep to this thing about the so-called Brandmauer, the firewall. So none of the other parties will go into government with that. And to be fair, Matt's is holding that line, but there will be people in his party, which is, you know, the equivalent of Camillebadenots Conservatives,

who will be thinking, no, no, no, no, we need to go into coalition with them. Not least because, for example, in Turingia, another of the German lender, the CDU are in coalition with the Bhuntnessara-Vagen-Knecht. Which is the far left. Breakaway far left. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, I mean, I suppose it's like, yeah, it'd be like Kemi Badernaut going into her party, going into coalition with Jeremy Corbyn. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In your party. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The new Jeremy Corbyn, away from the Labour Party, to the left of the Labour Party. So that's sort of getting up there. So it was, look, on the one hand, we were swimming in beautiful water. We were seeing lots of nice, happy-looking German people, having lots of interesting conversations. But the politics are, I would argue, in a really. really bad state. And Mance, he's starting to look really kind of troubled by it. He's got this

thing of answering questions very directly, which you and I both support, but you do have to be a bit careful. So basically, he's just about got over the row with Trump about saying, you know, you're completely screwed up in Iran. He was asked whether he would advise his children to go to America. And he said, no, not in the moment. Not with everything that's going on there. So that sort of made big headlines in America. Final thing before we go to Hungary. one of the things that's so troubling about your German story is that often, if you were Gary Stevenson or someone, you would say the reason why people are voting for the far right is cost of living, austerity, creaking services, rubbish NHS, roads not working,

council's not working, everything being ground down. But Germany is a lot better than Britain on a lot of those end of case. Not perfect. I mean, Germans listening to this will grumble, But it would take a hell of an effort for any Labor government to get the standard of public services, street cleaning, local services up to German levels. And even when you get up to German levels, 40% of people are voting for the AFD. Yeah. One of the things I argued with Gary Stevenson about yesterday because he was saying that the right-wing parties are the only ones who are giving people a clear answer to how they're dealing with living standards. And I said to a whole minute. What is that?

Well, he said, you, people like you and me, you think opposition parties have to come up with thought through policies. They don't. They just want people to think, because this law haven't dealt with immigration, the economy's screwed. So he's basically saying it's not that they've got policy, but they've got an argument, which in this new media landscape is proving to be very, very powerful. So, but I'm going to, with the benefit of having now been back a few days, I'm going to write a piece for our newsletter. about the German situation, because it is fascinating. And if you want to sign up, do that go to the episode link in the description below. And the newsletter actually is definitely, if you haven't signed up,

definitely worth signing up for getting a lot of high-quality journalism out of Alastair. But we're also actually getting some amazing commissioned pieces by independent journalists. It's becoming quite an interesting magazine. And Izzy, our newsletter staffer, I think what you call her, is churning it out. Yeah, that's a great, great thing. Final thing, hungry. I just see he's interesting. I mean, I've said, I saw you a couple of videos.

I am very, very different. The European flag was flying from the Parliament the other day because they need the money that Viktor Orban's moves, meant it was locked up. And I guess that the signal for West Straiting or Andy Burnham might be that. Put the European flag on the building and go after reform on corruption. Go after them on funding, corruption, expense. That's the thing you have to keep pounding. Without sounding too much like Gary Stevenson,

I would say that the key argument to make here is these are people who present themselves as speaking for the real people against the corrupt, out of touch, plutocratic elite. And boy, the whole thing is crazy, rolling in millions and millions of pounds coming in from crypto donors from Thailand, whole series. of people who've made their money and business deals around the world in ways that are pretty difficult to track. I mean, take a camera around and film some of Nigel Farage's five houses. Yeah. And the, no, because this, this five billion thing, we still haven't got to the bottom of it. He's changing his story every five minutes. By the way, Rory, I think I'm right.

We've got through a whole episode without mentioning the word, T dot dot dot P. Don't try, but there might be a bit of a clue on how you might go after him. too, because I'm not mentioning the ballroom. On which, let's finish for the day. Do come back, listen tomorrow to question time, where we've got some great questions which will allow us to do a deep dive on U.S. China, on Russia, on Ebola, international aid, and the far right. A lot of things to cover tomorrow. See you.

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