Keir Starmer

More disturbing is what happens when the established parties decide not to resist this politics, but to chase it.

The Labour Party under Keir Starmer was bad enough.

Under Andy Burnham, the direction is becoming clearer still And then there is Ed Miliband, Britain's Jewish foreign secretary.

Last week, Miliband stood at the dispatch box and announced a new sanctions regime directed at Israeli settlement activity, banning settlement goods, targeting companies and individuals involved in settlement expansion, and imposing further restrictions on exports connected to what Britain now formally declares an unlawful occupation.

Live from London, Saturday Night!

Funnily enough, Anne, I do think that the SNL Keir Starmer, which was done by the comedian George Fouracres, was actually pretty deadly and kind of seeped into the national consciousness, meep, meep, in the first half of the year.

[laughs] It really did, uh, have a bit of a impact, I think, on how people, quite large sums of people, thought about him.

So the fact that George Fouracres now is doing Andy Burnham, well, he better watch out.

Oh, question for all impersonators out there.

Is Andy Burnham easier to make fun of than Keir Starmer w- was? It will test the prime ministerial sense of humor.

[laughs]

But the serious stuff also keeps coming, Sam.

... um, that we need to understand who was the creator of this content.

You know, is it legitimate? You can imagine the potential ramifications if someone, you know, a, a fake Keir Starmer video saying something that is, you know-

Mm

... potentially harmful and dangerous and so on, for, for example.

Hello and welcome to the Political Party.

Today's guest is Matt Langford, who works inside Number 10 as a special advisor to the Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

And this is a great inside account of one, what it was like to work for Keir Starmer, what he was like as a boss, what those final moments were like.

After the local elections, in between those results and Keir's time renouncing, he was going, what the mood was like in the building during that time, what Keir was like as a leader, just the whole thing.

And also what it's like to work in number 10.

And Matt's a young fella, still in his 20s, and already he's worked for number 10 and now he's not working in number 10 and what he wants to do with his life.

But this is just such a great behind-the-scenes insight into working at the very centre of of the UK state what Keir Starmer was like as a person what he was like as a leader what he was like as a boss and just how you end up there and what it's like and whether there's a canteen and what the working culture's like everything I've been a right nosy sod And I ask him everything he would want me to ask about working in number 10.

So this is fantastic.

Pure racist riots.

And Keir Starmer comes out really firmly.

There's a smack of firm government.

You do this, you will go to prison.

Perhaps we can win over some of these people who want to burn Muslims alive in their mosque in Southport.

Do you think somehow that got into their consciousness? Does that explain what's going on?

Well, the sequence of events you describe supports the analysis that at some point the Keir Starmer's Labour Party, at least, didn't have the will to make this a defining fight of the government.

It's to use it as or to embrace the ethical urgency of standing up for liberal values, democratic norms, and let's be honest, law and order.

Now that Keir has flounced off, I'm just gonna interject with Ren's question.

Flounced off is right, isn't it? So Keir Starmer stood at the general election, "I'm gonna be your prime minister for five years.

Here are all the things I'm gonna do." Then events turned out that he became the most unpopular prime minister ever, which was g- took some doing, 'cause he's got some, he's got a high bar there, and people...

Boris Johnson told the entire country to not go anywhere and stay indoors, and it was then found that he'd been having bloody, doing MAGA loof in 10 Downing Street.

[laughs]

While even the Queen had to sit at her husband's funeral on her own.

He was not as unpopular as Keir Starmer.

You would think that Keir Starmer might in some part of his mind think, "I wonder if anything of this might be down to me."

Once again, the UK is wading into something that is not helping the Trump administration.

It feels unnecessary, particularly at Starmer's first trip.

He thought he had to go, excuse me, Burnham.

I can't even keep up with them.

The puppet masters of that party are exactly the same.

Their guy got unpopular.

Keir Starmer was, you know, completely pathetic, basically.

They swapped him out.

It's hard to judge, right? I guess this is kind of the honeymoon period.

So he's got a bit of a bounce from the political genius of just not being Keir Starmer.

He's starting to see the occasional grumble creep in.

Like, I don't think he handled the weird masked men in Dover protest very well.

So like, we've got to see the budget happen and there's going to be trade-offs in the budget.

And I guess the big question is, how willing will Andy Burnham be to upset people when it comes down to it, when he has to make the famous sort of politician's difficult decisions?

Yeah, and this is the danger, right? Because bluntly, Starmer sounded good on this stuff on paper, but by the time he was a year in, a lot of this stuff was just subject to the same dithering and delays.

It was 18 months between the banner review reporting to get to anything concrete happening, and that was just for energy.

It was the biggest turnout of political voting, of actually people exercising their right.

In the election that Keir Starmer won as then leader of the Labour Party and then was prime minister for two years, who was a total and utter technocrat, was a member of the Trilateral Commission, I think, from 2018-19 to 2022.

People need to look these things up.

Many things are hidden.

Some people say maybe 1865.

It was then to create and have a Bolshevik revolution, of a revolution, but without the violence and without firing a shot.

Keir Starmer was a member of the...

Fabian Society.