Public Expectations and Future Governance

A vote for me will be a vote to change Labour because Labour needs to change if we are to regain people's trust. So says Andy Burnham, who is inching a little closer to Westminster this week, but what does this mean for government, for Keir Starmer and for everyone else? I'm Catherine Haddon and this is Inside Briefing, the podcast from the Institute for Govern ment. Burnham is now the Labour candidate for the Maker Field by election and has declared that big change is now needed in the Labor Party. So what could that look like? What should Burnham and other would-be PMs be thinking about in how they might govern, and what can Keir Starmer do while this drama plays out around him? If Burnham does make it to number ten, then he will follow a path once trodden by Boris Johnson, remember him? In being a mayor turned prime minister. So what skills does the mayoralty provide and how might they be transferable to Downing Street? And then to what would have been the story of the week in any other week, and that's the economic support package being unveiled by Rachel Reeves. What has the Chancellor come up with and does it meet the scale of the Iran crisis? We'll take a look. Joining me throughout, back from holiday and successfully moving house, congratulations. And now straight into a government in crisis meltdown, and that's IFG Associate Director Hannah Keenan. Happy to be back. Always thrilled to be in Westminster . Yeah, the look on your face suggests yes. And also with me is Tom Pope, our deputy chief economist. Tom, I'm gonna have to say, for reasons of transparency, a question has been put to our Tottenham supporting director of com ms. He says, Your beloved Arsenal won the title last night. As an economist, is this a good return for the one billion pounds that Mikhail Arteta has spent on new players since becoming manager? I promise this is the only football we're doing. I think we should do an entire segment on it, Kath. Well I think as the true football data nerds listening will know, and there must be at least some, the real um predictor of success in football is wage budget rather than transfer sp end and on that man city are far ahead so I think Arsenal and their fans can be very proud to be. Uh you know, take that up with Sam McCrory later. And I'm delighted to be joined by Sam White, uh former chief of staff to Keir Starmer at the beginning of his time as Labour leader and now Chair of the What Work Centre for Children and Families. Hi, Sam, thank you for joining us. Hi, Kath. Delighted to be here. So while the work of government continues as usual or as close to usual as possible, a lot of people are thinking about what happens next. Wes Streeting is already out of the cabinet. Andy Burnham is looking for a way back to SW1 and others are no doubt thinking about what the future holds. Sam, can we start with you? Can you give us your take on how Keir Sarma is responding to all the noise and the challenges around him and what you think he will be thinking right now? Yeah, so I imagine it's been a pretty difficult couple of weeks to be Keir Star mer. It's been pretty tumultuous around Westminster, huge amount of speculation about what happens next, you know, open convers ations and colleagues challenging, um, numbers of you know, MPs and ministers, you know, coming out against him, resigning, all of our stuff is going to take its toll. Having worked with Kier a few times, I've got to tell you, resilient is a word that comes up a lot because he is. Uh he seems to be able to take an awful lot of uh pounding and and keep going. And I think that's what he's doing. And I think actually it's a right approach. We've seen already in the last, you know, twenty-four, forty-eight hours, a number of new policy announcements coming out of government cost of living package that I think we're gonna be talking about shortly. But also I thought a very interesting piece I heard this morning that Rachel Reeves, Chancellor, will be making a speech talking about how do you go further on planning reform in order to get big infrastructure built. This is one of my obsessions, having been a special advisor in the Department of Transport, having done the energy review in 2006, having been a Treasury advisor. Like the Britain's inability to get stuff built at pace at a reasonable price is one of the great drags on our productivity and growth. So you know Rachel's talking about do we get rid of the ability to judicially review outside of very limited cases, you know, will Parliament be able to take some decisions on you know the really, really big pieces of infrastructure in say energy policy, after which you can't go messing around and adding new delays and risk and costs. And of course, delays and risk trans late to higher costs to, you know, investors, uh which is why we're looking at insane numbers like a hundred billion to build, you know, one stub of the high speed rail network. It's kinda kinda mad. Yeah. And I mean we were gonna get stuck into that later, but I mean we might as well continue talking about the actual government before we uh turn to Andy Burnham and what he's doing. Tom, have you been having a look at s you know some of what might be being proposed I mean this is the chance of making a foray into an area that's sort of treasury adjacent? Yeah, I mean it it fits definitely with the sort of thrust of what the Chancellor and others have and and I mean it's the C L G as or the housing community and local government department as well that have been worked last year on the Planning and Infrastructure Act. I think what' s particularly interesting here is as Sam says, it's it's seeing judicial review as one of those key blockers to getting things built. And yeah, so if these these economically significant, nationally significant projects that get designated by Parliament, then the only means of judicial review would be on human rights grounds rather than irrationality or procedural unfairness, which are the kinds of reviews that tend to be brought up more often against these projects. She's focused there specifically, the announcement suggests, on green energy and trying to build that. And I think she's trying to make that part of the the narrative around the Iran crisis response . I think it it's it's a sensible set of moves. We'll need to see see the details, but it's certainly a sensible idea to ensure that judicial review is kind of happening in the right ways and and on the right grounds. I I think I caution that judicial review is not the only reason why projects get delayed. There are also issues around grid connection and various other constraints that is part of the reason why the government has approved lots of projects, but they're not yet getting lots of those projects off the ground. So I think it would need to be as part of a package of things that the government is doing, which to be fair, some of those things were in last year's act as well. But it's not a kind of panacea, but it probably is a part of the solution. And not to bring everything back to the civil service immediately, but I thought was interesting, Sam, you mentioned HS2 as one of the things that has kind of gone massively over budget. We saw this report from Stephen Lovegrove earlier in the week talking about kind of some of the lack of skills and specialist expertise in the civil service that has, in his opinion, really contributed to that massive kind of overspend and growth of the project. And I think, you know, we can sometimes feel um a bit removed from the real world in saying, well you need you need to open up the civil service or have better external recruitment or pay people more to do special skills. It's quite interesting to see that how how that plays out in projects like this. Yeah. Well let's come back to this when we talk about the Rachel Reeves support package in a little bit. Just turning back to the sort of the weird situation that we're in with this pretender to the throne who's just going through a by-election. Sam, I mean it seems likely that a number of Labour MPs, probably quite a few in the cabinet, will be thinking about the prospect of him becoming Prime Minister. What do you think that's any candidate, whether it's Burnham or others, should be thinking about in terms of potentially preparing for government. I know obviously Keir Starmer is focused on continuing in office himself and all of this might end up falling away by the wayside. But if we are to have a change of Prime Minister, you were there in the early days of of Keir Starmer's preparation. What are the things they should be thinking about that they might not be thinking about? Yeah, I mean, Kath, I know this is one of your fav ourite subjects and and and the origins of how we met in the first place talking about it is uh prep for government uh back in the day. Our focus probably at the time was dragging the Labor Party back from near extinction and probably had prep for government in the sort of later phase, uh, which was beyond my time as chief of staff. I think your question is really interesting about what does it mean for the candidates, what does it mean for MPs, what does it mean for the government at the moment on on uh what's going to happen in the rest of this year. I think to start with one of the most underpriced scenarios, I think out there is that Keir remains Prime Minister longer than people expect. I know everyone has gotten very excited about this for good reason. You know, last week was a very unusual week of high drama. But Andy Burnham, as you mentioned, is one of the prime pretenders to the crown. But he has to face them the the the the by election uh what eighteenth of june I think is now confirmed, in which yes, Labour has won that seat and have passed, but the reform vote in those wards two weeks ago and local elections was something like fifty percent of the vote. So that is something that Andy will have to overcome. So there is a scenario where if he doesn't win it, Keir remains prime minister. Maybe there's a challenge. I don't know. Some people are talking about it. But on a polling we've seen he might even see off those challenges. Or maybe there is no challenge at all. And then I guess a subset of that one is even if Andy does win, does he challenge straight away or does he hold off for a while? There's an awful lot of pain coming in the fallout from the Iran war in terms of prices that are going to be absorbed by whoever's in government over the next kind of six, nine months. So I think we need to not underprice the reality that Kia might be around for a lot longer than people think. That said, if you were coming in as a new government , I think the challenges at the moment, probably we're looking for three things to get us through this. The first one is whoever leads needs to be entirely grounded in reality. The problems the country faces are pretty serious and you need to take the extent of our vulnerability to bond markets front of mind. You know, we are 100% of GDP in debt. It was 35% when I was in the Treasury 20 years ago. And we're paying 1 1000,2 billion a year to finance that debt, and we're borrowing an awful lot of that from not British lenders, i.e., from international markets, much more than say Japan. So we are much more vulnerable to what they think of us. And if they don't think we're credible , that might cost us a great deal uh more money. So ground in the reality, the second, it's got to be about growth, growth, growth. And I know all governments say this, but I think all governments, even this one, has sometimes taken some anti-growth options alongside many other pro-growth options. I think you have to be relentlessly focused on growth and productivity. And then thirdly, you need someone who can sell it. You need a story. You need to take people with you because what I learned, and this goes back to our infrastructure conversation, to do the really difficult, necessary long-term productivity enhancing changes in the country takes time. I was a special advisor in 2004 in the Department for Transport working on Crossrail that opened two, three years ago is Elizabeth line. You know, that gives you a sense of the timescales you need to be thinking about. And any political strategy that doesn't persuade the public to give the government the time for these things to actually work is going to come a cropper. Yeah. And Tom I mean that's it's a really good point that was saying this in our webinar the other day this assumption that there's this sort of inexorable path to Andy Burnham, like he's the Messiah and he's he's on his way. It's a very unusual sort of situation for for all of us to be in. Uh it's a particularly unusual situation for a by-election that's almost being treated as an election of a prime minister. And therefore Burnham's being put under pressure on national policies when what he's doing is is, you know, trying to get elected as as a by election. He's already said he'll stick to Rachel Reeve's fiscal rules. His team have sort of it wasn't so much that they refused to commit to sticking to her tax pledges, they refused to answer the question. But what do you think are the things that could sort of trip him up in terms of talking about future policy, if he's thinking about the current fiscal situation facing the country, what are the sort of dangerous questions to get into? All the questions that he should be asked if you know he is going to end up as prime minister. Yeah, I mean to your first point, Kath, Burnham has has tried to say, hasn't he, that he's going to be fighting a local campaign for the people of Makerfield. Inevitably, much as he might say that this is going to be a a national campaign and the things he says now are going to be interpreted in that broader context. And one way of looking at it would be if you think Andy Burnham as Prime Minister as leader of the Labour Party is going to be successful, he needs to be able to win places like Makerfield s with a national style campaign. So in that sense, perhaps the by-election is not a terrible test. On the finances, I think committing to the fiscal rules is a sensible thing to do. As as Sam says, the bond market at the moment is the real constraint in a sense, rather than the letter of the fiscal rules. I think part of the nervousness around around Britain in international markets is not just that that high level of indebtedness that Sam talked about, but is also a sense that with this government in particular, but previous ones as well, that we we've lost the ability to take difficult decisions and that actually getting to a fiscally more more sustainable place will will require difficult decisions on on tax and spend. And if you look at okay, it wasn't that much money, but you look at winter fuel, you look at the botch disability benefit reforms, you look at sort of decisions on tax. Generally, there's been lots of ducking difficult decisions. I think one thing I'm a bit worried about, certainly if this goes from sort of more of a coronation into a full-blown leadership contest, is what are the other sensible, difficult decisions that candidates feel compelled to rule out in that election that then makes governing even harder? And perhaps one lesson from 2024 is, you know, those tax pledges were were there to to help win an election but have made governing more difficult. That should be a a real warning now for for this campaign not to be trying to box yourself in even more and possibly even to release some of those constraints. I mean, we talk about this a lot, that the the danger of way election sort of election retail politics meets preparation for government ends up boxing parties in. Burnham's already talked about developing a sort of first hundred days. Do you think that's a a good strategy for him to be thinking about in a by-election? It's definitely better than not thinking about what would happen, right? You know, he's a pretender to the throne to the to the prime ministership, but it is a viable route through. And I think it would be perhaps a dereliction of duty is a bit strong, right? But it's sensible that he's thinking about it. But I mean it's also it's worth saying just how much harder it is to do this as a candidate from within the governing party compared to being an official opposition, right? You're then you're sort of you're scrabbling to find people, to find funding. You don't have a shadow cabinet who have been following their briefs for years and years , you're sort of on your own trying to figure those things out and building your team as you're running and as you're fighting this by-election and as you're trying to figure it out. So I think you know, good that you're doing that, but not an easy task. Sam, if if this all does fall away, and I I agree there's a lot of presumption going on at the moment. Do you think it's another reset moment for Starmer or do you think we are going through the reset? As you say, there's been a sudden uptick in uh policy announcements and a few good news stories coming out of certain stats and and so forth, NHS growth and so forth. I mean, this is all before the crisis proper hits from the Strait of Hormuz, but is there another reset? Is there a big reshuffle? He's got a lot of people in who seem to have been gunning for his job or who are supporting the people who are, and he's done nothing about it. It was it was Wes Streeting who stood down, not Kirstarmer who kicked him out. Yeah, I think Kath, your point around some of the stats that have come out in the last week in particular will be of great frustration to the government because they are quite good and they've been quite buried by all the drama. And I think the argument that I think Rachel Reeves and possibly Keir would make is 0.6% growth, which was the first quarter of this year. That's great. Not only is it the best in the major economies at the moment, but you know, if that was on an annualised basis, you'd be back up to kind of Blair era trend rate of growth, kind of two and a half percent, right? That's exactly where you want to be if you're gonna solve almost all the problems this country has in terms of its public finances, its public services, its cost of living, it living standards, all of that stuff. Obviously that 0.6 growth is going to be completely blown out of the water by Straits of Hormuz and Iran. And I'd be very surprised if anything near that level could be sustained for the rest of the year. So I think it it serves as a sort of where we were headed before this Iran war upturned the apple cart. And I think that's important because the government has been trying to put across, not always in a way that's clearly been heard by the public, that a lot of these problems do have solutions. There is reason for hope, but a lot of them will take a long time to really fundamentally change. And you need patience because these are the right reforms. We're doing the right things. They need time to bed in. Now I know that is not a popular message. And I remember being on a debate with pollster Luke Trill right at the start of the the the the Kir government where he said the public are gonna give 'em maybe eighteen months to have turned the country around after a decade and a half, and like that is a hiding to nothing because you cannot turn around a decade and a half in a year and a half. It's not how infrastructure productivity works. Hannah, amidst all of this drama, Darren Jones, a very IFG topic, Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, was out on Saturday setting out how a set of changes to how this government is going to get things done, trying to make that delivery happen quicker. What's happened? Changes might be generous, Kath. Okay. So Darren Jones announced two things on Saturday. So back in January he announced this series of task forces that were going to kind of rewire the state in this big speech that he gave. He announced two of those on Saturday, one on sharing data across the criminal justice system and one on procurement for community services to tackle violence against women and girls. So we sort of know those are up and running. Other thing that he announced is that every department will have its own delivery unit. They'll be kind of staffed by a senior civil servant and they will have a don't know if you use the word delivery czar, but someone who has had either frontline or business experience come into the private office and kind of run these delivery units in every department. Do you think some people might be surprised that there aren't delivery units in every department? I mean there used to be, we you know, uh back when delivery unit, deliverology, Michael Barber, all the rest of it, it was rolled out and it was rolled out, wasn't it, as a particular methodology that the delivery units would be the same in every department or at least working as parts of the same web. What happened to all of those? I mean it it seems like they're just fragmented. So you you did prior to this announcement, lots of departments will have had delivery units that have already, you know, stood up and existed and have existed for a long time. They might not change. You know, some of the stuff in this is quite sensible. They're saying, from number 10, they're saying, we're going to share best practice on how delivery units actually work. And you don't have to follow our exact pattern, but we're gonna make sure that we're sharing that. That is exactly the sort of the role that the cabinet officer number 10 should be playing. But I think also the other helpful thing on this is that they are, I hope, aligning the metrics that those delivery units are looking for. You so you've got this big central one in number 10, and then you've got all those individual departmental ones. We know that delivery units only really work if they are focused on a very small number of very targeted metrics. If you've got your departmental delivery unit asking you to do one thing and number 10 asking you to do another, it's a recipe for disaster. So hopefully this is aligning the system, you do, and I I do have to say this, you do have to know what it is you want to deliver and stick to that over time. You can't keep resetting that bit. Yeah, Sam, I mean uh the the m obviously the Tony Blair ones, one of the things that people know about, well, those of us who have studied that period, know about the delivery unit at the the Prime Minister's one, was that he took a close interest in that. Do you think Starmer will take or has he passed this on to Darren Jones to be driving delivery. I agree with you. I remember me as a special advisor, my boss Alistair Darling as the Secretary of State for Transport , whole bunch of senior officials being pulled in to number 10 on a regular kind of cadence of these meetings and being asked to really explain ourselves and how far we'd got on on some very specific, you know goals and and metrics uh in front of not just the prime minister but you know senior people from the government officials and uh politicians and delivery unit and it was actually it was very powerful. The very existence of the the meeting that Prime Minister would be at forced people to get their act together, take decisions that might otherwise have been put off, you know, to sort of make those phone calls, to chase things that hadn't been done. I felt it very, very effective. And again, if I may, I saw it in the National Uh Economic Council that Gordon Brown created in two thousand and eight-nine when the uh we were responding to the global financial crisis. And again, it was an unconventional meeting, it wasn't a standard cabinet committee, but it had the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, it had the Cabinet Secretary and the POMS sec of the Treasury, and then the relevant ministers, be they cabinet level or more junior from the different departments where the Prime Minister could say, Oi, I need to have a plan for reducing the number of people who lose their homes during a global financial crisis. I want this plan here next Tuesday and I will be summoning you back in front of this group to explain your plan. And it really did force a pace that you didn't otherwise see. So I'm a big believer in that. The Prime Minister can only focus on a certain number of things, but where they bring that I have saw on lighthouse, you know, beam effect, they can really drive something. Whether Keir's done enough of that, I I I don't know. He has been pulled into far more international than I think he planned. I think he would argue, given the state of geopolitics , the level of global chaos, you know, the our allies like America behaving very differently than we're used to, wars in Europe and you know with Russia, and the knock-on effect of some of this stuff onto the number one issue for voters cost of living means his time is well spent representing the UK in these international fora, but that does mean every hour you spend on international is now you're not spending on driving out sort of domestic brief. So maybe it's right to delegate that to Darren or or or Rachel or someone else who can really, really uh lean in. Yeah. And it's I mean it's a big question for anyone wanting the top job is that that dilemma of there is a lot that you need to do internationally and yet you get punished if you do take your eye off the ball on the domestic. Sam just said something that really resonated, which is a point about, you know, the PM can only focus on a certain number of things at any given point in time. And I think this is what leaves me feeling a bit flat about some of these delivery unit announcements. So that I think, you know, the model sound that you described, I think works very well as we know this deliverology model for specific departmental goals where it's not, it might involve one or two departments, but it's not these big cross-cutting missions. Similarly, something at the NEC, it's very, very focused. And what we're seeing are these task forces or these delivery units that tackle quite small things. And what we're not seeing is how do you move that into actually changing the system which was a vision that Labour came in with and which they didn't then follow through on the Well let's say if Andy Burnham does win the by election , if he does challenge Keir Starmer for the leadership, and if he did then win, he will be following a path to Westminster that was trodden by a fairly recent Prime Minister. Yes, Boris Johnson, who went from being Mayor of London to Prime Minister after a finding his own way back into Parliament. Tom, let's talk a bit about Mayors and how well they set you up for being Prime Min ister. Is it a good training ground? Are the skills comparable? I've spoken to a couple of people about this and I think my my sort of glib answer, which I will then elaborate on, is that I think the really key difference is that I look at mayors in particularly well functioning places like Greater Manchester and think, wow, that looks like a great job. I'm quite jealous of you. And I look at people who are a Prime Minister or try to be Prime Minister and I think that looks very hard and I don't envy you at all. So I think that that is definitely one difference. But there's there's more underlying that. So I think there are definitely some ways in which it is a good set of transferable skills when it comes to leadership and setting direction. I think you can see ways in which Andy Burnham has done that very well in Greater Manchester. He's set a few priorities that he's really focused on. They've emphasised quite a lot the sort of public service reform agenda and prevention on the one hand and on transport, the joining up transport, the B network, getting the buses back in house and so on. That's been a really big focus from Burnham. And if you talk to people in the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, the officials there, they know what the mayor cares about, and they know what he's interested in. And so they they know that prioritization and being able to prioritise is is clearly different. But that's I mean that's also an issue of scale though, isn't it? It is e easier in a sense in a small er organisation to make sure you're communicating well. Part of the problem with the UK central government is the the complexity of it and making sure that your writ is across different parts of the system. I think that's completely right, Kath. And I that's what I was going to say is the really big difference here is that a mayor's scope is just so much smaller. The sets of things that they're having to worry about, you know, the sets of responsibilities they have are less, mainly focused on economic development, not directly involved in public services, and so on. Then their kind of hard power levers are even less against still. Lots of where Andy Burnham has made himself a very popular mayor of Greater Manchester is where he has lobbied central government for things and he's been Manchester's champion in Whitehall, or where he's sort of managed to bring priv the private sector into projects and things like that. Those sort of soft power levers are much easier to wield, in a sense are much more much more popular to to wield . Whereas a prime minister's day is littered with difficult decision after difficult decision, and in that sense the job is is very different. Sam, can I ask you, I mean, is this showing that the mayoralty model is producing a different kind of politician or so, you know, people whom they might see themselves as heir to the top jobs. Because as a few people have pointed out, there's a real contrast between the sort of Burnham as a candidate, you know, the mayoralty skill set that he's developed and the profile and so forth. And yet nobody's talking about Sadiq Khan as a potential candidate and, you know, the mayoralty in London. So is it a very Andy Burnham unique phenomenon that we find ourselves in, or is this something about how the rise of mayoralties is changing our politics and the way in which the public view leaders? Yeah, I think you're right, Kath. I think the creation of powerful mayors is actually changing our politics because there's an alternative route where you can kind of rise to a top job and be a highly visible public figure. Admittedly, you're speaking for only part of the country as a mayor, but you can still be a national figure and, especially if you know how to use those moments, which I think Andy did very well in the COVID crisis, where he really did become this moment where he stood up to the Prime Minister at the time, Boris Johnson, on is Manchester being treated fairly here? That was quite a powerful visible moment that has probably cemented him in a lot of people's minds as as as a national figure. I mean I I worked for four years at the Great London Authority myself for the first mayor of London, who was Ken Livingston at the time, uh who managed to make himself quite a a big public character in the debate, even though was never really uh tipped to to to be Prime Minister. And then of course Boris Johnson did go on to be Prime Minister. I would argue that I'm not sure what he learned in the Meralty served him that well. What were Boris's big successes? They were the expansion of the East London line, uh the Olympics, uh, Crossrail, Boris bikes, all of those actually were bequeathed by the last Labour government. The Olympics too, bequeathed by the last Labour government. Even the famous Boris bikes were actually called Ken Livingston bikes for a while before Boris rebranded them. What did he do? He did um Boris Island, remember that? That never happened. And that disastrous uh cable car that no one's used yet, going over some part of East London. So, you know, it's qu I think it's a quality of the individual, not necessarily the role as mayor that that that equips you with the skills. I think Andy's perceived to have had a better run as the mayor of Manchester than St. Boris had as the mayor of London. And I hope Andy does take some of that. He's been described as some of his colleagues as someone who's more of a kind of empirical theorist, right? He's someone who's learning by doing, by testing things, you know, in the the petri dish of one city, uh, which he then hopes to replicate at a national level if he ever finds himself in that position. So I think there is something to be said for that. But I do agree with your your your starting point, which is it is very difficult to be Prime Minister with the number of things that on your plate and number of directions you're pulled in every day. And any strategy I've ever seen which has been successful has tended to be one where you focus, you make decisions, you accept trade-offs, and you don't try and do everything. And that is very difficult in the top job. Yeah. And I I mean Tom Burnham has done quite a good job of I don't know characterizing his style of government or or uh you know presenting it as not Burnham ism but Manchesterism. But at the same time he has put himself in the centre of the revival of Manchester. Is that fair or do others deserve a bit more credit, do you think? Yeah, I I think two things can be true at once, and one is that Manchester's revival is a long story, a two decades and more story now, even three decades, that long predates Burnham's Meralty and Greater Manchester more than anywhere else in the country has had the councils coming together, working together on actually a pretty consistent platform and pretty consistent prospectus of what will drive growth over two decades and more. And I think it can be true at the same time that since coming in a decade or so ago, Burnham has both elevated the focus on on Manchester and that success story, and also continued it and furthered it on and made a set of very good decisions and Manchester has continued to grow and get stronger. So he definitely was building on on the shoulders of giants, if you like, in in what he's done in Manchester, but that doesn't mean he's not done a good job. I suppose translate that to if if he were to be PM. If we're saying in Manchester he managed to come in on two decades of stability and everyone p pulling in the same direction and generally things already trending in the right direction. Well in Westminster he's not facing any of that. It's a kind of turnaround situation which he definitely didn't have to do in Manchester. Hannah, just because uh we we can't leave him out of this, but Starmer, on the other hand, was director of public prosecutions. So a uh former permanent secretary level civil serv ants and not quite the same as heading one of our UK central departments. But do you think that shaped the type of Prime Minister he's been? Is that is that a good route? I suppose two things. First is that y you get the sense from Starmer and I've heard this reported that you know he takes each problem sort of on its own merits and assesses kind of the pros and cons. It's quite a civil service way of doing things, you know, here is this particular submission that I need to write and I'm going to weigh up all the pros and cons and I'll take this decision. And you're sort of looking for someone else to to do the strategic thinking there. And I think that's been a real flaw in kind of this this version of number 10 as well, right? Tom talked about kind of ducking trade-offs earlier. Part of that is kind of strategic thinking and political will to to make the argument, but it's also having space to do the strategy. And I think the other thing is that lots of civil servants thought he would be a kind of more civil service-friendly prime minister. And that's not just kind of nice warm words, but it's actually also doing the reforms. Warm words have gone away and have been replaced with um some some quite pointed comments and the reforms haven't quite come through. So it's um it's not proving a great training ground I think. Well let's end by turning to the story that in normal times, as I say, would be the big story of the week, and that's the government's response to the Iran crisis, the closure of the St ofraight Hormuz, and its impact on the cost of living. Rachel Reeves is set at the time of recording to unveil a government support package. Tom, how big a moment is this? I mean, you know, we all keep talking about this crisis might be coming, but we don't yet know the full shape of it. Do we think the government's done a lot of work thinking about what the the shape of it might look like and are gonna meet that moment? I'm I'm sure the the government is i is doing lots of that work, ha has done it . And as you say, there's still a lot of uncertainty about what this crisis will look like, although some of the most benign possibilities when the crisis started, which really involved all the hostilities being done by now, clearly haven't materialised. In terms of how big a moment this is right now, I I find it a bit hard to tell. There haven't been lots of leaks of enormous support packages. I mean we're definitely not in a twenty twenty two world here when the government stepped in and paid a huge chunk of people's energy bills for for a while and added extra support on top. And and it's right that we're not in that place because this crisis is not of the same scale or the same type. Um just to put this in context, in the government stepped in to put the energy price cap at around two and a half thousand pounds when i about back in the old in the twenty twenty two crisis, when it would have been over 4,000 pounds. The latest projections suggest that it might head to a bit over £2,000 in September. So we're, you know, we're in a very different world there in terms of how acute the crisis is. But then it might also be a bit broader base. So where that crisis was very focused, at least initially on utilities, oil and fertilizer, which are two other things affected in the straight of four moves, is going to affect lots of other products , including foods as well . I'm not expecting an enormous amount tomorrow. Most people listening to this will probably know if I'm right or wrong then. I don't certainly not expect a very big sort of fiscal support, but maybe some some regulatory and other changes. We already had the announcement today at PMQs that the five P increase in fuel duty that was set to happen in September now won't happen. Whether that that was likely to happen anyway, in in the current context, is certainly not surprising that they're going to do that. And we'll have to see what else they'll do. There have also been rumours today, discussions about supermarkets voluntarily price capping products, but the pushback to that has been been pretty severe. Yeah, and meanwhile in Scotland, John Swinney has unveiled plans to actually sort of institute some price caps. So the government was looking for voluntary from the companies to uh to try and put on on like basic good you know foods and and so forth, eggs, milk, bread, that sort of thing. What is Swinney doing differently and do you think he can do it? Is it a lesson for us? So I think I think the generous interpretation of what sort of has emerged in in leaks really from what what the UK government is trying to do is that they're clearly looking at these other regulations that supermarkets face, like on plastic packaging and on food health, and uh have been talking to supermarkets about are there ways that we can reduce costs for you and these regulations have come up. And one generous interpretation of these voluntary price caps is well, how do we make sure you actually pass on if we're going to do this thing that helps your own regulation, how do we make sure you actually pass that on to consumers and you know a little bit more cynically, how do we make sure that we get the credit for that? I think that's probably as far as the UK Treasury discussions have gone. In Scotland, John Swinney's suggestion is quite different, and that is mandatory capping of the prices of of these products. Although as I understand it, there are um it's unclear whether that would be consistent with the UK Internal Market Act, which is best understood as sort of some of the single market infrastructure that we imposed in the UK to manage our own internal markets after we left the EU. So what while it's something that John Swinney has announced he's like to do, legally it's unclear whether he'd actually be able to do it. And so again, the the cynical interpretation here is that he's possibly handling for for some kind of popular fight with with Westminster on that. Yeah, which it makes it all very difficult. Sam, I wanted to ask you, I mean, uh Tom slightly alluded to it there, but it i the government does seem to, and I think Keir Starmer has talked about this, want to avoid the kind of all encompassing support packages that we've seen in the past in COVID and after in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Ukraine war. Do you think it's possible to put the genie back in the bottle there or is public expectations so high that the government will act if my flights are cancelled, if I can't get these kind of products from the supermarket or, you know, everything costs too much and so forth. Is it is that an impossible job to try and reverse course on on public expectations about government intervention? Yeah, I think that is quite hard now. Public expectation has uh got quite out of sync with political reality or economic reality of the country. I think the the the gap between what the government needs to do and what is politically possible to do seems to be growing, which creates the space for the uh the sort of populists promising easy answers and and leading us down probably another spiral sort of downwards. I think the government will probably have to be quite careful not to fall into providing mass support. In some ways, this neatly ties together our various conversations because there are things that the government has to do when things get so bad that people need some urgent support. So things like temporary cutting fuel duty or you know messing with the prices of current kind of commercial operations, those are very much second best things. What you really should be focusing your energy on as government is those long-term fundamental things that improve the productivity and a trend-rate growth in the country. So this is a mixed package really. We've seen a few things like the cut to 5P, but we've also seen the Rachel Reeves um cutting down judicial reviews on major infrastructure, which is a long term reform. So those are the prizes that will really deliver something tangible to the country. The other things I'm afraid are uh sort of sticking classes to get through a particular problem at a particular time which don't really solve any problems. And Hannah, I mean, as we've been discussing, this is being led by the Treasurer, at least by Rachel Reeves. But obviously as Tom was saying, this is a crisis that could hit lots of different parts of the UK state. What sense do we have that Whitehall is working together on the response? Has it learnt the lessons from recent crises? Yeah, I mean the Treasury are very good at not working with anyone else and and unveiling their fund package of things and they get a few exemptions and things like the cabinet manual for, you know, not having to talk to the rest of Whitehall, but you would you would hope that after things like the the Farming Inheritance Tax they have learnt the lesson. Usually it comes out after the fact. So it's a little bit of let's wait and see um who cooks up a fuss in a couple of days' time. Yeah, definitely. Well that's the end of this week's inside briefing. Thank you to Hannah, Tom and Sam White. Head to our website now for our explainers on the Labour Leadership Contest and the role of Mayers, but also my new blog on the constitutional complexities of the current situation and a whole lot more. And I expect there will be even more explaining to do in the weeks ahead too. Kistama is celebrating for now. The title is in the bag, the Premier League title that is. The title of Prime Minister, though, might be up for grabs. See you next week.