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00:00Andy Burnham, totally predictably, especially at the beginning of his time, is going to want to
00:04be everyone's friend. Ultimately, not that many people know who Andy Burnham is. Why not give him
00:09the chance to do something different and shake it up a bit? Nobody looks at the way we're governed
00:14and thinks, brilliant, this is working really well. This is essentially how it's gone all week.
00:17Great start, we want more. Everyone's happy for half an hour, and then they're like,
00:22please, we're going to have some more. It's been a week of big promises and giveaways,
00:26a week of owning the media landscape, a week as Prime Minister. And today,
00:31Number 10 North is open for business. Andy Burnham has been PM for five days.
00:37He just needs to stay in power for another 44 to beat Liz Truss's record as the shortest
00:43serving Prime Minister. Come on, Andy, you can do it. Come on, Andy. So today,
00:48we look at Andy Burnham's first week in office. I'm Helen McNamara, the former Deputy Cabinet
00:52Secretary. And I'm Clea Watson, a former Special Advisor to Theresa May and Boris Johnson.
00:58And this is In The Room.
01:03Before we get into it, we'd love it if you followed us on Instagram, where you can find
01:07all the best bits of the pod. We are at intheroom.pod. You can also watch us on YouTube.
01:13Our channel is called In The Room Politics. And if you've got a burning question, or you want
01:17to send us a lovely bit of fan mail, you can email us. We are intheroom at independent.co.uk.
01:24We've been loving the email so far. Thank you.
01:27Much to the frustration of news desks around the country who generally like to have a little bit
01:30more notice, the Number 10 press office has been dropping a 6am press release every day with little
01:36policy announcements all week.
01:38So just a very quick explainer on what embargoes are. Normally, to help with newspaper editors,
01:45the embargo from a kind of press release says about midnight, one minute past midnight, if I
01:50recall. And that is so the newspapers the next day will have had time to write up the policy
01:56announcement ready to come out in the morning. But what is happening at the moment is emails
02:01from Number 10 with the announcements are arriving at about 6am. So essentially, the public are getting
02:06the news at the exact same time as the radio producers and newspaper editors, which does give
02:12the government essentially the morning to have the announcement out in exactly the way they want
02:18it to be recorded and talked about. And it's only a bit later that the naughty journalists get to catch
02:25up
02:25with their particular spin on it and ask questions that could be inconvenient.
02:31So this is an attempt by the Burnham camp very deliberately to be on the front foot to control their
02:36agenda and to be deciding themselves what is going to be the news that day, which has worked most days
02:43this week, but not all of them as we'll come on to. What have we had this week then, Cleo?
02:47Tuesday, which is when we were last recording, we talked about this on the episode, was a VAT cut
02:52on electricity bills. Wednesday, Burnham came for the buses, his favourite mode of transport,
02:59and he announced a cap on single bus tickets at £2. Side note, I wish he did that for trains,
03:04that would make my life much better. On Thursday, pubs, clubs and live music venues in England
03:11received a 20% cut to their business rate bills from April. How? He's going to review reliefs
03:17provided to antisocial businesses, such as vape shops. And on Friday, Andy's working from home.
03:25He's got his first day in number 10 North. Is there a clear run, Helen, so far?
03:30Yes. And some of the criticism has been that these are quite small policy announcements for
03:35a prime minister. I think Kemi Badnock has described them as mayor level, mayor level.
03:40What a diss, a mayor level announcement. But the Burnham team have wanted to announce some stuff,
03:45they've announced some stuff. There's a couple of things that I think is interesting about them.
03:48The first is that these have been, it's been a week of Andy Burnham being everywhere,
03:52right? So every single story is Andy Burnham does this and Andy Burnham does that. It's very kind
03:58of presidential style. There's not been massive amounts of space. You'd normally get, you know,
04:04an announcement which is effectively, I mean, the bus fare one is an absolute classic. That is a
04:07department for transport announcement. Where was Heidi Alexander? Where was the, all of the kind of
04:13media, all of the focus was on Andy Burnham. There are some downsides to operating that way as a
04:19prime minister. You don't want to really annoy all of your colleagues. And perhaps this would be a
04:24time to be spreading a bit of the Andy sunshine around the cabinet, maybe. So I'm not sure how
04:31that has gone down. And then some of these announcements, and again, we talked about this
04:35on Tuesday, it's been, as always, the government's own side that's been doing some of the knocking on
04:40great, but how are you going to pay for this thing? Which is one of the more frustrating bits of
04:45our political discourse these days is people like, but how are you going to pay for it? It's like,
04:48well, we're the government, we're going to work out how to pay for it, is broadly speaking their
04:51answer. And I don't know what you thought, but I thought they changed the business rates on pubs
04:57and make those naughty vape shops pay more rates. Didn't seem to me like a bit of simple maths that
05:03was going to actually deliver the savings that were, was going to work there. So not really sure how
05:08that might work in practice. I think that's right. The pubs, clubs and live musics announcement
05:13wasn't actually that well received from the industry. They all sort of said that this is
05:17essentially how it's gone all week. Great start. We want more. Everyone said that. So Tom
05:22Kerridge, he was famously helping him campaign in Makerfield a month ago, was straight out the
05:27gate saying, this isn't really going to make any difference.
05:31Welcome to government. Welcome to government. This is how it plays out. Everyone's happy for
05:36half an hour. And then they're like, please can I have some more?
05:39Yeah, exactly. I also thought, you know, he managed to just about squeak John Healy, the new
05:45chancellor along to his announcement, which he did in a pub for that. Mainly because Andy
05:49Burnham obviously wanted to pull a pint because that's the classic prime ministerial shot. He had
05:53to pull it for someone. And that was, that was basically all John Healy was there for. And then
05:57he sort of beetled away and it all became the Andy show again. I mean, this is, this is absolutely
06:03textbook. This is exactly what we did in summer 2019 when we kind of needed to show off to the
06:09public that there was a new prime minister and he was listening. It's very Bill Clinton. I feel your
06:14pain. I'm in listening mode. And, you know, ultimately not that many people know who Andy
06:19Burnham is surprisingly, well, or not, but it might be surprising to him. So he's got to get out
06:25there and get known and make a good impression as soon as possible. So this first week of things
06:31happening is I think just a classic of the genre for trying to give a sense of momentum and change
06:37happening. And we've got our sleeves rolled up. Speaking of which, he's got his sleeves rolled up
06:42in a very specific place today. Has he not Helen? Number 10 North. Number 10 North is opened. And
06:50today we're going to have the first meeting of the National Economic Council, which has been
06:55announced with great fanfare. And we've got a whole host of ministers all up in number 10 North
06:59changing the country. So we're told, I think one of the other things to say about the announcements
07:03this week. So if you look at the bus fare one, those are exactly the sort of things that everyone
07:08says those decisions should be devolved to local level. So you've got in his first week,
07:13Andy Burnham has been making these announcements. They are announcements that in his brave new world
07:17of power to the people and local devolution won't belong to national governments anymore. So maybe
07:22Andy Burnham, this is the last hurrah of prime ministers in their first week in office being able
07:27to do these very kind of small retail things. We shall see. And yeah, there's been lots of people
07:31talking about, yes, possibly. There's been lots of people talking about number 10 North. And very
07:37obviously, you know, our old stamping ground in Whitehall is extremely cynical about the notion that
07:43it's possible to have a centre of power outside of SW1. I have to confess, I'm a big fan of
07:50number 10
07:50for the North. Like I've said before, I'm a bit sad that it's in Manchester as opposed to the North
07:54North. But there we go. But it's a good idea to get ministers and decision makers, people living in
08:03totally different place who can actually make decisions which are a bit more tied into the rest
08:08of the country and not just in London, it does make a difference. And I sort of think why not?
08:13Like why not give him the chance to do something different and shake it up a bit? Nobody looks at
08:18the way we're governed and thinks brilliant, this is working really well. So why not back something,
08:22which is a big, big shift and a change and attempt to bring the different kind of DNA,
08:27do things differently. I'm an enthusiast.
08:31I'm afraid I think I'm perhaps one of life's pessimists on this one. I think that I can't
08:35emphasise enough how much easier it is to run the country when Parliament isn't sitting. And so
08:40I think quite a lot of the ministers who do not have seats in Manchester might find the commute
08:47quite inconvenient once Parliament is sitting and you have days that you don't have control
08:52of. And of course, you are an MP first and foremost, so you need to be back in the constituency
08:58doing surgeries and stuff like that. I don't know why, but one of the things that bothers me is just,
09:06he's just moving everything to Manchester. And I know he's been mayor of Manchester all this time,
09:12but a sort of concerned part of me thinks, you know, this is great for Manchester, but what about
09:19everything else and everywhere else? And you've sort of made this point already, is it even the
09:24North? I don't know if I do love this sort of devolving everything to Manchester instead. It
09:30doesn't quite sit right with me. You know, even like the announcement yesterday on pubs, clubs,
09:35live music venues, that directly profits quite a lot of the people who were donors to his campaign
09:42in Manchester. And so I just think, I think he has to go easy with some of this. You know,
09:47we joked on Tuesday that Manchester is our new capital city. I think he has to go easy with some
09:52of this. That's separate to actually running the government from somewhere else and, you know,
09:57running the country properly. I just have a kind of, is the Manchester obsession absolutely correct?
10:05It's interesting you say about MPs and needing to be in their constituencies and how awkward
10:10Manchester will be, because this cabinet has got more members of parliament for the North and
10:15particularly the North West than any other in the history of time. There we go. Two exciting facts
10:21about this cabinet. It's the most Oxbridge educated that we've had for a very long time. It can't be
10:26ever, but it must be in recent years. It's the most Oxbridge educated and the most Northern in
10:30terms of where they represent their seats. So actually, Manchester is much more convenient
10:34than London from them to work from. Who knew? Well, as a Cardiff University alumni from the
10:41South West, I don't like it. I don't like it at all. You don't feel seen. I'm not sure these
10:46people
10:47are your people, my friend. I know. I don't even like I'm being represented. I tell you who has
10:51had a good week and that is Kemi Badenoch. She has. So she has, I mean, she keeps on getting
10:57better and better at doing the kind of basic fundamentals of being good at politics, I would
11:03say. She started a speech this week by saying that she thought Andy Burnham was a really nice
11:07guy, which is, oh, that's like a, that's a troubling sign of literacy. So she's been dismissive
11:15of him operating at mayoral level in his announcements, which I think to be fair, I'm sure we've just
11:21done a little bit of a sideswipe on that. She's kind of developed this style where she's just happy
11:24to do really open Q&A with journalists. And I think it's working remarkably well for her.
11:31I think it works particularly well in the context of most of the lobby being quite cross with number
11:3610 this week. So if she's sort of saying, don't worry, I'll feed the beast and I'll answer any
11:41questions you've got. Hit me. Whilst the Burnham team are a bit more controlled and, you know,
11:47some people are saying they're avoiding scrutiny by doing stuff on TikTok instead. I think that's
11:51very interesting. I'm, I also just think she's had some good zingers in general on specific things.
11:58So Gary Lineker and a bunch of his mates, his millionaire mates have written a letter saying
12:05they should be taxed more. And she's just come back saying, feel free. You're allowed to pay
12:11a lot more tax, but you don't, you don't need us to, you know, do the government to tax you.
12:16And I thought that was great. And I noticed number 10 have stayed a bit more quiet about that. I
12:22also
12:22think she's, she has got a challenge because she's got to work out how to kind of get purchase on
12:29Andy
12:29Burnham, who is, you know, is an incumbent, but is coming in as an insurgent. He, even the way he's
12:35kind of doing his comms just now, like I said, he's doing interviews with TikTok stars and
12:40Gary Lineker. And he's doing like his own media rather than using the kind of traditional,
12:47let's say apparatus and system that is there. And I, I actually thought her final PMQs with
12:54Keir Starmer was a bit of a clue for how she'll have to go forward with this. So for those
13:00who
13:00were watching, I mean, it is quite traditional to be quite nice to the prime minister, although
13:04Keir Starmer was not very nice to Boris Johnson when, when he was going out and she made little
13:09jokes, but she was essentially quite generous. And, um, she was not the kind of traditional
13:15shouty Kemi Badenoch that she has been for the last couple of years. And I think that is a sign
13:20of things to come a bit like starting that press conference saying, I think he's a nice guy.
13:25I don't think it will work for her to look like she's yelling at Andy Burnham in the same way.
13:34And so I think exactly to your point of her having this kind of summer tour, just like Andy Burnham's
13:39doing of, of trying to get people to know her better and to see that she's a reasonable and very
13:45open person works really well. There's also something in, you know, depending on, on how Andy
13:52Burnham weathers his spending commitments and how foreign affairs go, because as everyone can see,
13:59things are kicking off in the Middle East again, we might end up in this kind of funny dynamic where
14:05there'll be a little course correction and the Conservatives will be the kind of centre right
14:09again. And they'll be talking about, you know, fiscal responsibility and foreign affairs, and they'll
14:16come off as the kind of reassuring grown-ups versus everybody else. And I mean, Andy Burnham and Nigel
14:24Farage and Zach Polanski and Ed Davey doing skits and stunts and TikToks.
14:31Who knows?
14:32Well, and spending and spending commitments. I mean, that's the other thing. I think if that is the
14:36divide is the amount of money that is being casually promised left, right and centre. I mean,
14:42it's quite, it's, I would like, would be interested to see the butchers bill for this week and how much
14:46it's actually potentially costing the taxpayer. Because I'm not saying that these aren't, these
14:50are bad policies or that they're bad things to do. But there is a kind of, he's already had to,
14:55Andy Burnham's already had to ray back a bit on one of the things he said earlier in the week
14:58about
14:58adjusting the allowance of which people pay income tax. You can't, if you're the Prime Minister,
15:04go around just making soft commitments about spending, because in the end, you're going to have to
15:08make some hard choices. We talk about that a lot to governors to choose. And you're adding up quite
15:14a lot of spending if this is just week one.
15:17Yeah. I also think as well that if he is putting, you know, a butcher's bill together, as you say,
15:23why not include slashing the inheritance tax announcement for farmers that Keir Starmer and
15:29Rachel Rees brought in and has been incredibly unpopular? You know, he's got, he's got to find a
15:34voting coalition of people who will vote for him in the next general election. And he is not a rural
15:41guy. He's, he, you know, he's, he's grown up in urban environments. He represents an urban seat.
15:47He's very Manchester and now he'll be quite London. Why wouldn't you have him at like the Royal
15:53Wealth Show this week, unveiling a reversal like that, which is the same kind of money we're talking
16:00about here. It's not, it's not producing a lot of money for the exchequer, but it builds so much
16:05goodwill with a constituency that really don't know him and assume he's more of the same.
16:11You write about where he's making these decisions and all of this spending. So today we've got the
16:15National Economic Council where with great fanfare, they've talked about how all the mayors are going
16:21to be involved, businesses are going to be involved. This is a committee that's going to make big
16:25decisions about economic policy. But there is a fundamental problem here in that if you're a
16:30mayor of a particular place, your job is to get a really good deal for that place. It's not to
16:35get
16:35a really good deal for the rest of the country very explicitly. No one's going to vote for you as
16:39the
16:39mayor of South Yorkshire if you've done a really good job for the Welsh farmers. Who cares? That's the
16:44point of kind of national government decision making. So there are some really big kind of brewing
16:49tensions in between the kind of aspiration of talking about devolution and involving everyone
16:56in decision making and going back to the fact that there has to be choices. And you can't. It's not
17:00fair or reasonable to ask a load of mayors to decide which of them gets to lose out. That's not
17:05going to
17:06work. So you have to kind of somehow find a way of balancing and managing this tension. And while
17:11Andy Burnham totally predictably, especially at the beginning of his time, is going to want to be
17:16everyone's friend, there is risk in putting it all back on himself. And that's not just for kind of
17:21how everybody feels about it. It's also how people feel about it in his own cabinet, because we've
17:27seen some interesting plays from our cabinet this week, I think. Yes, I'm dying to talk to you about
17:34that. So you're right. Andy Burnham's had a very sort of presidential style so far as prime minister,
17:39which is, by the way, interesting. And it's a deliberate tactic we chose again in 2019 that summer. We knew
17:45we wanted to have a general election. And we basically worked out the voters we were after,
17:50or at least the sort of coalition we could create, weren't really natural conservatives,
17:56but they were willing to vote for Boris Johnson, specifically on Get Brexit Done. And in the same
18:03way that one of Kemi Badenoch's problems is that the public seem to like her. She has a very high
18:09approval rating, but she's not really able to lift the conservative vote. So far, Andy Burnham,
18:15has just been his own thing to me. He doesn't feel like a Labour team player,
18:20would you say? And I wouldn't say the rest of his cabinet have been able to catch up with him
18:26on his, it's me, Andy. No one's calling them by their first names, apart from maybe Shibana,
18:31because she's cool.
18:34Yeah, we've got no, we've got no Madonnas in the cabinet, it's fair to say. We had John Healy
18:39standing up in the, he's got, he's got an amazing intonation, John Healy. I don't know if you've
18:43noticed this, but when he talks, he really sounds like a vicar. To me, he's got like a very kind
18:48of,
18:48uh, this reminds me of the story about Jesus kind of vibe. It's amazing. Um, he's a serious
18:55grownup. He's definitely a grownup. So he gave this speech, uh, to the treasury and it is your
19:01heart. So when you hear a new minister talk about their priorities, you sort of get your pen out and
19:05like, right, let's go, let's hear these priorities. And then, you know, priority number three is backing
19:10Britain. You're like, I didn't know that was on the table as an option. Were we, were we until now
19:15backing any other countries? It's like the King will be delighted to discover that his ministers
19:20are on our side. I find the growth in every postcode thing a bit dispiriting.
19:25So those interested in the other three priorities for John Healy are fiscal stability, wealth creation,
19:31making life more affordable. And, and he trotted them out. And, and I mean, it, I think it bears
19:37repeating that he did this on LinkedIn, a platform I'm not a member of. And it was back to some
19:44of the
19:44worst music I've ever heard. The whole thing was just like, it was just really lame. And it has,
19:50not everyone will get this reference, but the film Mean Girls, where, um, the, the mother in that
19:56says, I'm not, I'm not a regular mom. I'm a cool mom. And there were, there's been a lot of
20:01that from
20:01the cabinet this week where they've just sensed the change with Andy Burnham. And now they've completely
20:06changed their personalities to be kind of high-fiving and, um, hugging and all, all this.
20:13Can I, can we just pause a bit on the hugging? Cause one of the things I found very difficult
20:18to
20:18watch is the amount of hugging. The awkward hugging this week has been off the charts. If that was
20:24something that we could bank as a productivity or prosperity, we'd be, we'd be, we'd be winning this
20:29week. It's been horrendous.
20:30It's also a specific hug because it's combined with doing up the button of a suit jacket. So
20:36then you get this kind of scrunch up as you, someone's got to go high and someone's got to
20:41go low on a hug, right? That's just, that's just physics. Someone gets their jacket all bunched up
20:46trying to go high. And it's just, it's so unnatural. They're trying not to touch crotches. I, I hate it.
20:54I hate it. Just shake hands.
20:55You're touching crotches. Shake hands, the handshake. What, what has happened to the handshake? I
21:00really, the, some of the, some of the, I'm sure that our lovely team will find some clips of this
21:05so that you can enjoy it to your heart's content, but there are some horrendous kind of awkward
21:10handshake into grabbing elbows into hug. I think the new foreign secretary and the prime minister win
21:17the absolute prize for that. And that troubles me because 85% of Ed Miliband's job as foreign
21:23secretary is being able to execute a competent handshake with, with, with anyone really. And
21:29this is someone who's supposed to know really well, and he can't even manage the handshake,
21:33smile to camera, you know, camaraderie pat on the back.
21:37There's also an incredibly awkward photo of Ed Miliband and Marco Rubio, the, the US secretary
21:42of state meeting. And they look like they're at their wedding or something. They're just like,
21:46it's side on, it's side profile. And they're just gazing into each other's eyes. And you think,
21:51do you, Ed, take Marco? And again, I'm obviously that's actually been choreographed,
21:56which is weird. That's not even like, Oh, in the three second awkward moment, this is
22:01how Ed Miliband, you know, hugs people. That was also, you know, decided by their mutual teams. Oh yeah,
22:08we should put this picture out. It's absolutely bizarre. I would say also the, the pictures of Wes
22:13streeting standing next to all the sort of, dare I say, beefy defense dudes, um, are a bit awkward
22:21as well. And they remind me a little of, um, when Gavin Williamson, who people may recall had been
22:28chief whip and then became defense secretary. Um, he looked similarly, uh, I think you could be able
22:35to puff your chest out perhaps. And they both look a little bit, gosh, this is very bitchy,
22:41but here we go. A bit private Pike from dad's army. I think that's totally fair. It's factually,
22:47it's factually, it's factually accurate. Um, on the hugging, there was Jonathan Reynolds when he
22:52arrived back at the business department. I think there was again, probably a video I saw on LinkedIn
22:57for which apologies, but he just like hugged everybody. And I, you know, I'm not somebody who
23:02doesn't believe in affection. Lovely, gorgeous, actually a bit of a hugger at work myself
23:07occasionally. I mean, you spend a lot of your time telling people to stop doing it where was
23:11appropriate to touch someone. Exactly. And that's one of the things that has been thrown into disarray
23:16this week. It's very confusing. Dare I say it's the influence of football into political life.
23:25One of the things I do want to talk to you about is we've had this series of policy
23:30announcements that has been very much, um, under the government's control, but there was a story
23:37this week, which they had to respond to. Um, and I think it was interesting to see how they responded.
23:43And that was of course the prisoner release story. Just give a kind of quick positive history of what's
23:48going on here. The Starmer government had this plan to tackle overcrowding in prisons with the early
23:54release of some prisoners, um, which is, I'm afraid to say quite standard. It's happened in many
24:01governments, uh, beforehand, but this was a shocker in particular because it involved two of the killers
24:08of PC Andrew Harper, who people might remember was, um, the young policeman who was killed in the line
24:14of duty while responding to a theft in 2019. So it is a kind of cocktail of all the, all
24:22the
24:22ingredients that a new government doesn't want to deal with, which is kind of soft on crime. Plus
24:29a, a very, a visceral story that everybody remembers. Um, uh, PC Harper had a, a widow who was in
24:38the
24:38public eye for quite a long time campaigning for sentencing against, you know, for crimes against
24:43police officers and stuff. So it's been pretty awful actually. And what, how do these things go,
24:49Helen? No, so this, you're right. This is the first kind of big external event story that the
24:54new government had to respond to. And we have not been building enough prisons or keeping enough
25:00prison places for a very, very long time. It is very difficult for secretaries of state for justice
25:06to win the argument within government that on the long, long list of things that people like spending
25:10money on, would you like to spend the money on a new prison? No, thanks. I'd much rather spend the
25:14money on something which people are going to see and like, and it's a positive thing. So the net
25:19consequence of this is that we've been keeping our prison population at a level, which is totally
25:24unsustainable. And this was a problem when Keir Starmer came in, in 2024, he made all sorts of
25:31kind of quite tough decisions, including that some prisoners in order to keep the prison population safe,
25:37some prisoners needed to be released early. There was an awful lot of work done in debate,
25:41discussion, etc, etc. That is now starting. So inevitably, as night follows day, then people
25:48are told, rightly, that the person who has committed the crime against their loved one is going to be
25:54early release, because that's an important piece of transparency. And again, as night follows day,
25:59those stories are awful. And just from a kind of common sense perspective, you look at that and
26:03think, hang on a second day, surely this can't be the only way. What is slightly kind of small
26:10bell ringing for the Burnham prime ministership is, this has all been considered really recently by a
26:16Labour government. Like there's not this isn't a kind of inherited for them conservatives policy,
26:21this is a fresh policy of this government has been pretty much thought through. There aren't easy
26:26answers to prison places. And yet the first thing that they did was say, well, they're going to know
26:31Burnham has stopped this, put a stop to it. And there's going to be a review that that review is
26:36not
26:37going to find magic answers, which have not been considered up until now, I would say,
26:41although there's one thing that you and I do think is a magic answer, which we should talk about in
26:45a
26:45second. But it's kind of the, the leaning into not this is a terrible problem. And these are the
26:51consequences, but I'm quickly going to review everything that there's any criticism of, I mean,
26:55probably had to do that this week, because it is the first week, but it's, it doesn't it kind of
27:00there's a there's a really, is this the way that you are going to do these things, because you're just
27:05delaying the point at which you're inevitably going to have to say, well, actually, we do have to
27:09release people. Didn't you think it was an interesting lack of distance, though, to have
27:14the Prime Minister Andy Burnham is looking into this, not the Justice Secretary?
27:19Yes. And that's, that's goes to our kind of presidential style that you would, if you're
27:24fully inhabiting your Prime Minister role, you are shocked to discover this is happening. And you say,
27:29you boy, you, you go and or you girl, you know, you look into this and tell me what on
27:35earth is
27:35going on and come back to me with some options. Yeah, it would have been smarter to just say,
27:39Justice Secretary, come back to me by next Friday with a plan for how you're going to stop this from
27:43happening. Well, you made this point a couple of weeks ago, when we were talking about Shibana Mahmood,
27:48and how clever she's been with politics, because people's memories of the sentence and of say,
27:54Lucy Connolly, who spent 13 months in prison for a tweet. Keir Starmer was characterised as two-tier
27:59Keir after that. Whereas people forget that Shibana Mahmood was Justice Secretary at all
28:05during that period. Indeed. So you spotted that Edward Garnier, who's a former Conservative
28:09Minister in the Lords, had made a very sensible suggestion about what might be done
28:13a couple of weeks ago. Yes. Can I just throw a few stats in to contextualise this? So in my
28:19lifetime,
28:20which I don't entirely care to admit to, but let's say late 80s to now, the prison population
28:27has risen by 94%. So it's nearly 90,000 people at the moment, which is a lot of people. And
28:35as
28:35exactly as you said, Helen, we've not been building the prisons to house them. So Edward Garnier has had
28:40this great idea, I think, where in England and Wales, we've got 3,650 women in prisons, and they're
28:49all kept in women's prisons. There are 12 of them in England. Of that 3,650, only 2,500 of
28:58them
28:58are in custody for non-violent offences. That's about 70% of the women's prison population.
29:04And that is honestly for stuff like unpaid gas bills. Or indeed, a tweet. So there was a real
29:12question about why doesn't the government look at the non-violent women prisoners and do a bit of
29:19reorganising and then use some of these prisoners to house the worst of the worst from the men's
29:25prisons. And the interesting thing about this is Harriet Harman, the former interim Labour leader,
29:31has actually endorsed this position, presumably because you can actually strike two birds with
29:36one stone here, which is from the kind of good politics side, which is tough on crime and proper
29:42sentencing, and also carry some of the kind of women's sensitivities here and say it's just
29:49completely ridiculous to be banging up women who have families and so on for crimes that in the eyes
29:56of many of the public, they don't really think are crimes. I mean, it wasn't that long ago.
30:00We used to imprison people for not paying the licence fee.
30:03Yeah. And I think the damage that's done, one of the problems with putting people in prison is the
30:08damage that's done to the family and to the children and to the community and to everything
30:12else. So there are very, very good arguments that it's not a good idea to put people in prison if
30:17you can at all avoid it. And that's men with children as well as women with children. But it's
30:24particularly odd that this very obvious solution has not in fact been looked at up until now.
30:29There's something else as well, which I think already is slightly embroiling Andy Burnham,
30:35because he sort of threw his weight behind the idea of deporting the leader of the Rotherham
30:42grooming gangs when he was released from prison a couple of weeks ago. And he did a tweet basically
30:49saying we've got to do something about this. We can't have people like this in the country.
30:52And the eagle-eyed on Twitter have noticed that, you know, of the prison population,
30:58about 12% of them, so that's about 10,000 prisoners, are foreign nationals. And so I wonder
31:04whether in part of this review, you know, there are what you could call more positive solutions
31:12endorsed by Harriet Harman, which will make a lot of the Labour women MPs feel more secure,
31:17which is creating space in women's prisons, but also a greater clamouring for deporting foreign
31:24nationals who we, you know, the taxpayer is paying for to sit very comfortably in HMPs at the moment.
31:30Well, I mean, it's questioned very comfortably. And I also think that one of the problems when you
31:35get down that reach is that you can, you're letting people evade justice because you are
31:40deported, they've committed a crime in our country, which is why they're in prison in our country.
31:44And yes, you can deport them, but are you deporting them into a prison in another country? It's
31:50it's actually quite, it's quite complicated to work out exactly what do you do, which is why
31:55go back to this was a problem when it was a problem in the last year of Rishi Sunak's government,
32:01it was a problem in the first couple of years of Keir Starmer's government, there is there's quite a lot
32:06of complexity in it. I personally think the women prisoner thing is probably the most useful thing
32:11to do. But for our purposes, it tells us that Andy Burnham is taking problems onto himself that he
32:17might not need to be taking onto himself. And that his reflex, his reflex to review and look
32:23shocked and ask questions might not be, it can't be a mode that he stays in for very long, because
32:28in
32:28the end, you want government to look strong, and you don't want him to disown and distance himself
32:34from every single thing that the previous government has done. I know that this team think that they're
32:39totally shiny and new and that they're going to be really different and look at all the stuff that
32:44they are. But the government that was elected is the same people in Parliament. And you can't
32:49totally distance yourself from the previous two years, because we've seen parties try to do that
32:53in the past. And that doesn't work either.
32:55Yes. And actually, I think adding to that, the idea of new directors of communications coming in and
33:01saying, I'm going to do this differently. I mean, it's a story as old as time. And we came up
33:06against
33:06this a bit in number 10 when we were there. So, you know, one of the interesting takes this week
33:13has
33:13been Andy Burnham is not facing scrutiny properly, because he's not doing a lot of the sort of
33:17traditional BBC interviews and so forth. And we came under a lot of fire in the 2019 general election,
33:24because Boris Johnson didn't do the Andrew Neil, the classic Andrew Neil sits down with the party
33:32leaders interview. And there was a huge amount of pressure internally, from people saying you must do
33:39this, lots of Tory grandees, you must do this, you must do this. And he didn't do it, because he'd
33:43got
33:43hammered. And guess what, the public didn't care at all. And there's, and there's a bit of that going on
33:48here.
33:49Look, I mean, there were lots of kind of, you know, would have, should have, is this going to last,
33:54all of those
33:54things. I think it's fair to say, that as week one goes, pretty good, pretty good, pretty good for Andy,
34:01I would
34:02say that, you know, it's school report time of the year. And I would say is either at greater depth
34:07or
34:08exceeded expectations or whatever, I think it's been not a bad week, they will be pleased with
34:12themselves when they get to the weekend, and then they won't think about it properly. But they've got
34:17to start it all again, next week. And that's the other thing that this new team and it is a
34:21really
34:21quite new team in both number 10 in London and number 10 in the north are going to have to,
34:26they've got a long
34:27old summer ahead of them, I think, as they are trying to learn their way around these various
34:31buildings and work out who does what and how they work together. And if the 6am, the 6am new notices
34:39of policy can't last the summer, surely, surely we're not going to be living in that forever. It'd
34:44be a very funny way to run a country. But you know, watch this space, I guess.
34:48Yes. Well, there we go. A glowing endorsement from one Cambridge alum to another.
34:54We stick together as Northern Cambridge alum. Thank you for listening to today's episode.
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35:21This podcast is part of the Independent Podcast Network and produced in association with Next
35:26Chapter Studios. The executive producer is Rod Ardahali and the producer is Sam Durham.
35:31And a special mention to our content editor, Myra Nishka, and our video editor, Vali Reza.
35:35Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week, unless you're attending Latitude Festival,
35:39in which case we'll see you on Sunday.
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