This is a

lot.

But I think everybody learns in a different way, too.

So I mean, like that's where like individual training, I think, is so and so important.

I think if you find the right person that's willing to come in and give you everything they've got and you can read that on this person, you can tell that this is somebody that I know.

Like if I pour into these folks, they're going to buy in.

They're going to they're going to build relationships like I'm asking them to do.

What are a couple of things that you can say that helped you learn to be a better trainer that you can pass along?

Mm.

You don't cut during a period of crisis, you invest.

And that he had a plan that was not irresponsible, would not send borrowing through the roof, but would allow you to support growth.

Uh, Ed Balls gave a very significant speech about that to Reuters some years later when he was the shadow chancellor.

Ed had been his chief economic advisor.

But the argument that the Tories were landing, which is about the need for spending restraint, the need to cut borrowing, the need for that word austerity, was the one that was being more successful.

And Gordon hadn't even won the argument within his own party, so that I remember vividly on one occasion the Prime Minister going on holiday, and I texted a man people may have heard of called Peter Mandelson-

Mm.

Just do a little potted history of, of that.

The Tories under David Cameron referred to modernizing the Tory party or detoxifying the Conservative Party, and what that was basically saying is the things with which the Tory party had allowed themselves to become associated through the Thatcher years, even in John Major's era, and I say even because he was seen as a kind of kinder, gentler sort of Conservative, kinder, gentler, I'm putting it in inverted commas because it's a phrase that George Bush once used to distinguish his brand of conservatism from Ronald Reagan's.

David Cameron took the decision that they had to look, frankly, more modern about society.

So where the Tories were seen as hostile to single-parent families, they were no longer hostile to gay men and women.

Mm.

You know, after all, Mrs. Thatcher had brought in Section 28, which, uh, attacked local authorities if they, in inverted commas, promoted gay rights through the literature they had in, uh, libraries or through schools.

So it was a concerted effort by David Cameron to embrace progressive causes, to, uh, broaden out a sense of what conservatism was and who could be a Conservative, all of which put him in a better place when he had a tougher economic message, because he got a much softer image for his party as a whole.

It's just

beautiful.

When this happened, the thing that I fucked up the most with this situation is when this happened, Clearly, I'm on social media a lot, right? So everyone knows me when I'm not fucking on social media because I post a lot.

When I didn't post in the morning, people that are in my everyday life were like, fuck, Nick, where you at? Where you at? I'm out, right? Because that's how it is.

So they call me whatever.

So I end up getting on to it that night at like, say, one o'clock in the morning.

I went to like, probably like, I don't know.

Keep going.

And I mean, they've paid something of a price for that, I guess.

Huge price, isn't it? Because remember that Keir Starmer in many ways defined himself as being the opposite of Boris Johnson.

I'm not the flashy guy.

I'm not the guy who's good at the sound bites or the performance.

I'm Mr.

Stability.

I'm Mr. Grownup.

What you think it might be?