00:00How survivable is this for the Prime Minister?
00:02I don't think it's survivable.
00:04I think he's really effectively a dead man walking.
00:09He's no longer an effective Prime Minister or party leader.
00:13Whether that means physically he will stay in place is a different question.
00:17I think it's not clear who his successor will be.
00:20It's not clear what the mechanism of succession will be.
00:23There are many contenders.
00:25And it's actually quite difficult to displace a Labour Party leader.
00:28But as an effective Prime Minister and as an effective party leader, he no longer exists.
00:35Right. And so it's about that then.
00:37And it's not necessarily the specifics of this.
00:40It's about the fact that once again we have U-turns and admissions of having made bad judgments perhaps and apologising for things.
00:49And this is just one thing after another for the backbenches of the Labour Party.
00:53Oh, it's more than just one thing after another.
00:55Look, Keir Starmer was never very good at his job.
00:57He's made lots and lots of mistakes.
01:01You know, from the very beginning he came in on a ticket of getting rid of sleaze and immediately accepted a large number of gifts.
01:06It was an extraordinary and unforced error.
01:08But this is of a different league.
01:10It's failing properly to vet somebody for a job which, you know, it's very unusual to bring somebody from outside the Foreign Office and put them into a senior job like that.
01:25Very, very unusual at all.
01:27Something you'd only do under great consideration.
01:29Mandelson was already known to have various odd associations.
01:33He'd been sacked numerous times.
01:35So it was really a manoeuvre from the leadership of the Labour Party which went dramatically wrong.
01:42It wasn't as though he was sort of in line for succession and they didn't properly vet him.
01:46They went out and sought him and put him in that job.
01:49Adrian, this is a story that we've seen causing jitters on the markets this week as well.
01:54I mean, do markets need to be worried about what happens and whether Keir Starmer will be toppled from his job?
02:02Absolutely.
02:03I mean, they need to be worried because we now have a Labour Party with seemingly a large majority but with no authority and with no direction and with no proper leadership.
02:13And we have two possible scenarios, both of which are bad for the markets.
02:19One is that he remains in place without any particular purpose and there's just a lot of rumbling and discontent.
02:24So you have a very unstable system in which you can't possibly tackle the big problems facing the country, which is levels of debt and things like that.
02:33Or you have a fairly prolonged leadership challenge and leadership race, which again destabilises things.
02:41But either way, you have a government that can't deal with the big problems that confront the country.
02:47Now, I would say personally that his authority is so short and he's so bad at the job that it's better to grasp the nettle and get rid of him than it is just to dither along.
02:59But that's the decision the Labour Party will make.
03:00Yeah, and you think this fiasco, it's the end of a political era in the UK?
03:06Personally, I think that we've had an era in British politics which has been dying for some time.
03:12And one reason we've had six prime ministers in a row sacked is a particular way of governing the country and a particular philosophy of liberal government has been dying.
03:24And that's the philosophy is that basically we should have a pro-free market and pro-nonjudgmental permissive attitude towards morality.
03:38Those two things have been put together into what I describe in my column as a sort of Bobo, bourgeois, bohemian consensus.
03:46And that we have a sort of class of people who run the country, professional politicians, professional media people who've been running the country from their base in London.
03:56And we've seen a succession of revolts against that, of which Brexit was the biggest.
04:00But the Epstein affair is another manifestation.
04:03So it's not, I mean, Starmer was particularly about this, his job, particularly untalented as a politician.
04:09But we've had a lot of people who've been trying to adjust to this change in political regime and have failed to do so.
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