00:00And we've had, you know, the resignation of Morgan McSweeney. He's a key advisor
00:04to the Prime Minister. This ongoing Peter Mandelson row linked the Epsom files and his
00:10appointment as ambassador to the US. We've had a clutch of other advisors going. We've had
00:16Anna Sawa, the Scottish Labour leader, calling for the Prime Minister to go, although no one
00:24joined him in that brave crusade. It's not an unusual thing that is that one guy goes over
00:30the hill first and looks behind him and there's all those people who promised to also come over
00:34the hill. And we've had a couple of U-turns since, or not quite U-turns, almost like we've had
00:38a U-turn
00:39over the local elections. So 30 more councils will actually go ahead and have their elections in May.
00:44And then a kind of half U-turn, more like a kind of sway into the reservation on things like
00:50raising the minimum income for young people and so on. So it's just a bit frenetic, not a
00:58calm half term vibe. But also I think it's a brilliant illustration of just how difficult
01:00governing is. I know that like people have serious sympathy for politicians or people in positions
01:06of power, but actually it is really challenging. And I think from the, you know, if you, if you've
01:10been in those situations, what you can see happening is that this is when, when power starts to fade,
01:15it goes, it goes slowly and then it goes quickly, like, like everything, things fail like that.
01:19And that what you have normally is if you've got a powerful prime minister in number 10,
01:24kind of a lid is kept on the rest of government. There's some kind of structure where actually
01:28everybody sort of broadly speaking stays in their lane. And then as soon as that starts to kind of
01:34go and everyone starts to think, well, actually, I've got to start thinking about my own self-interest
01:37and whether that is actually on the civil service, as well as the political side,
01:41like as soon as there's that kind of lid comes off, then all hell breaks loose effectively.
01:45And these things just keep on popping up. And we've both been there when actually
01:50it's, you know, it gets, it's hard and then it gets harder because you've lost all kind of
01:55control and discipline and things just start to become even more chaotic.
01:59Yeah, the absolute worst expression that we would get in particularly op-eds and things like
02:05party grandees is saying, there's no sense of grip.
02:09Grip, ah, grip and the appearance of grip. We could do a whole episode just about that.
02:14Right, exactly. And it's this, it is, I understand that. It is this sense of, you know,
02:18the prime incident recently was saying, oh, I feel like I pull these levers and nothing happens.
02:22And you think, well, in that case, wrench the lever off and whack someone over the head with it.
02:26Like, we've got to, we've got to get cooking here, Keir.
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