Jun 10, 2026 · 41 min · 12 segments
Next week will see one of the most consequential by-elections in UK political history. Journalists, pollsters and politicians are swamping the small market town near Wigan - where the voters of…
Helen MacNamaraHost
Cleo WatsonHost
I don't know about you, but from the outside anyway, it feels like things have really quietened down since a few weeks ago when nearly 100 Labor MPs said that they'd lost confidence in the Prime Minister.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, resigned, uh, which sort of happened over the King's Speech in quite a fraught way.
And everyone was saying, you know, the Prime Minister's gone, and we were in this kind of fiery fury center of everything being doom and gloom for Keir Starmer, but it doesn't really feel like that now.
So we've got Keir Starmer's been hosting Zelensky again, um, and European leaders.
So we've had lots of flags outside Downing Street, and this week we had the Prime Minister out and about making his usual junior ministerial level announcements, this time at Tech Week.
[laughs] That is the worst thing I can say about a Prime Minister, a junior, a junior minister level announcement.
Whether that is in fact true or whether we're in the calm before the storm, I think is a different thing.
You know, we had the Mandelson files last week as we talked about on last week's pod.
The Prime Minister has become a, a, an NPC, a non-player character in that, you know, that, that should have been fire and fury and everyone cross about it and, and people trying to dislodge him.
It was quite surprising actually to see just how little reaction there was to the whole thing.
In the meantime, it feels like every single journalist in Britain has gone up to the constituency of Makerfield, and, you know, Labor/Andy Burnham really are leading by 10 points there.
In the meantime, uh, I don't know if you saw this, but on Friday evening, Question Time was hosted in Makerfield, and they had all the candidates on for that.
And it's, it's like the first time really I've seen people properly pay attention to a Question Time show because, you know, how many by-elections do we have where one of the kind of town hall hustings is actually televised on national TV on the BBC? Is anything gonna happen? Because certainly from the outside, I don't know what you're hearing, you're a bit more plugged into Labor circles than I am.
It just feels like there's this strange Cold War or truce where everyone's sort of downed tools and, or downed weapons anyway.
I don't know about you, but from the outside anyway, it feels like things have really quietened down since a few weeks ago when nearly 100 Labor MPs said that they'd lost confidence in the Prime Minister.
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, resigned, uh, which sort of happened over the King's Speech in quite a fraught way.
And everyone was saying, you know, the Prime Minister's gone, and we were in this kind of fiery fury center of everything being doom and gloom for Keir Starmer, but it doesn't really feel like that now.
So we've got Keir Starmer's been hosting Zelensky again, um, and European leaders.
So we've had lots of flags outside Downing Street, and this week we had the Prime Minister out and about making his usual junior ministerial level announcements, this time at Tech Week.
[laughs] That is the worst thing I can say about a Prime Minister, a junior, a junior minister level announcement.
Whether that is in fact true or whether we're in the calm before the storm, I think is a different thing.
You know, we had the Mandelson files last week as we talked about on last week's pod.
The Prime Minister has become a, a, an NPC, a non-player character in that, you know, that, that should have been fire and fury and everyone cross about it and, and people trying to dislodge him.
It was quite surprising actually to see just how little reaction there was to the whole thing.
In the meantime, it feels like every single journalist in Britain has gone up to the constituency of Makerfield, and, you know, Labor/Andy Burnham really are leading by 10 points there.
In the meantime, uh, I don't know if you saw this, but on Friday evening, Question Time was hosted in Makerfield, and they had all the candidates on for that.
And it's, it's like the first time really I've seen people properly pay attention to a Question Time show because, you know, how many by-elections do we have where one of the kind of town hall hustings is actually televised on national TV on the BBC? Is anything gonna happen? Because certainly from the outside, I don't know what you're hearing, you're a bit more plugged into Labor circles than I am.
It just feels like there's this strange Cold War or truce where everyone's sort of downed tools and, or downed weapons anyway.
Every episode on Radar is fully transcribed, speaker-labeled, and rich with metadata. Here is a taste of this one. Try Radar for free to see the rest.
3 of 5
Four Teeth, Seven Yachts
Wait for this brutal Farage focus quote
PM Runs Against Himself
Ever seen a PM publicly battle themselves?
Deadline For Real Change
She maps their shrinking governing window clearly
+2 more clips · 3 min 52 sec of audio in all
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
All 5 clips — the highlight moments, each cut as its own audio, with a title and a speaker
All 12 segments — the transcript broken into labeled sections, every ad read marked
All 21 topics — jump to every other episode discussing the same subject
Every related episode — other shows Radar links to this one
No account is needed to search Radar.
