And so I think, you know, she in that kind of Milibandite without Miliband, um, bit of the Labour Party is, I think the, where the intellectual energy and lifeblood of this government, uh, ultimately comes from.

Yeah.

I mean, I m- I think generally she'd be described as soft left, but obviously that's far too general term.

I mean, she's part of this kind of, uh, clique of women who are very much, uh, uh, have a very strong relationship with the trade unions and specifically GMB, and I think that's really formative.

Um, she's also, uh, the most important thing a-about her is she is an incredibly talented organizer, and we've seen that.

I think one of the underdiscussed things about Andy Burnham's set of appointments, first set of appointments, is the fact that everyone loves talking about, you know, because they probably are WhatsApps by the more the Starmer loyalists being disappointed and angry, uh, about being left out.

You know, why is Darren being left out? Why has he even gone so far as to sack Nick Thomas-Symonds, this sort of thing.

But it's, yeah, that's-- it's tough.

Sienna, you've picked another story that tells us about, Andy Burnham, the scrapping of costly digital ID cards from the Sunday Telegraph.

Yeah, so this is one of the things that he's going to be highlighting.

I mean, the Conservatives have responded to this pledge to kind of scrap digital ID by pointing out, and I think they do have a point, that actually the mandatory element of that scheme was already rolled back on by the government.

Starmer had to go back on that because they messed up the announcement initially of this plan.

so badly that it went down terribly with the public and with Labour MPs as well.

So how much money is he actually going to be saving in terms of scrapping this digital ID is highly questionable because I think the actual, the sort of constituent parts of the scheme, so one login and all the various digital schemes that the government will be implementing, they're not going anywhere.

Nigella thinks it's all rather cringe why Paul's 500,000 helicopter is curdling relations with new co-star in Bake Off Tent.

Yes.

Mm

... and it would be for the purposes of, of a debate that you would be doing this, as well as eventually preparing for government.

Whereas he's gonna go straight in probably, and so everything has just been massively accelerated.

We had, um, the announcement that James Purnell has been brought back to be his chief of staff going into Number 10.

He only started a couple of days ago, so the, everything is happening really, really quickly, and I think no one in that team is denying that it is a huge scramble and, and really actually just quite difficult.

Mm.

So massively empowering mayors, probably giving them tax raising powers.

He's talked about wanting to rebalance, um, taxing wealth over income, which is sort of a, you know, a thing that people in the Labour Party have, have been speaking about for a long time.

Is he out of it, really?

Well, uh, as with everyone, he's in limbo, uh, as we all are waiting on the result of this by-election.

I think, um, he has irritated people this week, his colleagues, with the kind of will they, won't they thing.

Will he, won't he? Uh, in the end, he decided to kind of split up des- his decisions and re-- um, resign as health secretary but not challenge the Prime Minister.

Number Ten obviously insisting that's 'cause he didn't have the names required.

I think it's probably likely that he either did or if he actually announced that he was starting a contest and wanted to go for it, he would get those names because, of course, a lot of them were in government.

Nonetheless, he's decided to wait it out and accept that Burnham must be part of this picture.

What are they leading on? Please talk us through them.

Not only are these midterm results that pincer movement from the Reform Party and the Greens, and it's impossible to come up with a message that deals with both, right?

right?Yeah.

And increasingly taking hold is this view that used to be confined to the left of the parliamentary Labour Party, but increasingly it's been held by more MPs, which is that they need to worry more about the votes to the left than the ones to their right because they do feel that those who have switched to Reform now are just lost, so they actually need to look more at that threat from the Greens as well as somewhat a threat from the Lib Dems.

There's a really interesting thing with the Greens at the moment, which is that they are driving campaigning resources now to places like Bromley, outer London, where really it should be a competition between Tory and Reform, but they actually think that they're in contention in those kind of places and could make their first gains in outer London because they are an anti-establishment vote in the same way as Reform.

Finally, are you expecting a move against Keir Starmer after these local elections, and are you expecting it to be successful?

Yeah, that's an interesting second question, actually.

I would not be surprised if there was a move.

Certainly, there are lots of preparations and constant talk of it.

So can you shed some light on what is actually going on behind the scenes?

(laughs) I am, um, quite plugged into the Your party stuff, and I think that in itself says something.

Because basically the reason I am is that these are a lot of the same players from the kind of Corbyn years, when he led the Labour Party from 2015 to 2019.

And this is why it's been so messy, because there are a lot of historical kind of grievances between people.

There, there's one side saying they don't want things run in the same way that they were run when Corbyn was leader of the opposition.

And the other side, of course, saying that, well, Jeremy Corbyn is the natural leader, um, for this kind of left's answer to Nigel Farage.

He needs to be the one initially at least leading that charge.

I mean, it's quite, quite something, isn't it?