The Duran Podcast - Starmer, insecure and unpopular, blocks opposition

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Starmer, insecure and unpopular, blocks opposition

All right, Alexander, let's do an update on what is going on in the UK and what is happening with Kier Stommer and his canceling of Andy Burnham. Is that correct? His number one opponent, right? Yeah. Okay, he's been deleted, canceled, removed by Stommer, right? Is that a right way of putting it? Not quite. It's actually much more interesting.

He's been Corbent? Is that a good way to put it? There's an attempt to do that. But as I said, this is, it's much more interesting, actually. And the key thing to say is that with Stama, it really does look now as if we're in the final weeks. Because this is a very, very desperate move. So Stama is unpopular. We've discussed this in many, many programs.

The Labor Party is sinking. It's the most unpopular government, I think, that I can remember. in my lifetime. Stama is now, I think he's somewhere equal with Liz Truss at the moment of her failure. I mean, he is also massively unpopular. So the Labour Party is short of alternatives to replace him with. There is a politician, Andy Burnham, who is the mayor of Manchester. Manchester is a big industrial city, the north of England. It's very close to Liverpool, by the way. The two cities are fairly close to each other. They represent a kind of north-western industrial belt in England, which has been very, very much a labour heartland and very much a labour heartland. It has its own

distinctive politics, its own style of politics, if you like. Andy Burnham, who used to be one of Tony Blair's lieutenants, but has now basically morphed, it was somewhat more left-wing figure. He becomes mayor of Manchester. He's seen as quite successful, and he is relatively popular. I say relatively popular. It's important to be clear about this. He's not very popular. He's just slightly more popular than the main three. of the political class. I mean, compared to them, the rest of them, he looks like, you know, he's somebody who is more popular. And he's widely seen as have been a fairly good, effective mayor. So there's increasing talk and increasing talk from him that he would make a better leader

of the Labour Party and a better prime minister than Kirstama would. Not a difficult thing to be, by the way. But anyway, so his problem is that he can't, he's not a member of Parliament. He's not in the House of Commons. And to be Prime Minister and to lead the Labour Party, you have to be in the House of Commons. So there's a scandal involving a British Labour MP. He happens to come from Manchester and his constituency is in Manchester. This person stands down, making the seat vacant. There has to be an election to fill the seat.

So Andy Burnham says, this is my moment. I want to stand for this seat. I'm going to be elected to Parliament. When I'm in Parliament, I can finally challenge Kirstama. And, well, there's a lot of excitement. Many people within the Labour Party support him. Many people say that this is the final way of getting away from this problem with Kyr Stama. So what does Stama do?

What do his officials do? They used the internal machinery of the Labour Party to block Burnham for standing for election to Parliament in this seat. They say if he stands for this seat, he has to step down as Mayor of Burbank. of Manchester. That means that if there is an election in Manchester, the Labour Party will have to spend money on that election. But it's hardly a good reason you would have thought to call off an election. But anyway, that's what they say.

And of course, the word that goes out is that if there is an election in Manchester, reform Nigel Farage, his party might win. Now, that has created. It's created absolute uproar in Britain, and it's created absolute uproar within the Labour Party. Because people are saying, what is this? You're using your machinery, the machinery of the Labour Party, wire pulling and all of that, to block a popular or relatively popular political opponent. It is seen as exposing how deeply unpopular and insecure Kirstama himself is.

But it's also something else because there was actually a mayoral election in Manchester in 2024 at the same time as the, roughly the same time, as the general election. Now, in that election, Labor got, I think, around 64% of the vote in Manchester. Reform got 7.5% of the vote in Manchester. Manchester is a very left-wing place. If things are really so bad with Labor that there is a real risk that in a merrill election, reform could win Manchester, people are saying, well, there is no hope in that case for the Labour Party. And if they're using these manipulations, both to keep a deeply unpopular prime minister in power. and if they really are afraid of losing Manchester, then they're finished.

They're finished not just as a government, but as a political party. It is an existential moment for them. So this is the crisis. I don't know whether it's crisis is exactly the word, but this is what everybody is saying today. And over the last few hours, even the most loyal supporters, of Stama in the media have turned against him and are saying that the time has come for him to go. So, I mean, his support has collapsed.

Who is supporting Stammer? I mean, his support has collapsed, but he's still prime minister. He's still prime minister, but he's only there. Yeah, he's only there because he could still controls the bureaucratic machinery of the Labour Party. I mean, that is the only thing that that continues. to prop him up. That cannot continue for very long, obviously. Who supports him? Well, there is a small group of basically people he's put into important positions who support him. And he's chief of staff, Morgan McQueenie. They both know, they all know that if Starma goes, they go to.

And that's basically what props him up and keeps him in place. The other thing that he has, of course, is that the Labour Party in Parliament is a desert. Nobody there is a or popular. There is no political figure within the Labour Party in Parliament or in the government who anybody seriously believes would be more popular or successful or effective if they took over. And up to now, that has worked in Stama's favour. I think the calculation many people are making is that however bad the replacement is, it cannot be as bad. is keeping Stammer in place. What would have to happen for Stammer to go?

I mean, does he have to call snap elections? Is there a vote of no confidence in the parliament? But Labor has a majority in the parliament. So no confidence vote would pass. Well, indeed. This is absolutely correct. And I mean, there's great uncertainty because, as I said, the party machine continues to be very strongly

under the control of Stama and the officials around him. But ultimately, it will depend on the parliamentary party and on members of the cabinet, the actual central government, if you could put it that beat, the people who sit around the table with Starmann who run the ministries. And Stama's becoming increasingly unpopular with them. What will probably happen is that at some point, he's going to face a rebellion within his own cabinet.

Ministers are going to say that unless he goes, they will go. We will end up with a situation. Probably this will happen after the local elections in May. And remember, we did a program recently in which we pointed out that Stamer is doing everything he can to prevent elections being held wherever he can. But probably sometime in May, things will come to a boiling point. And we're going to start to see a situation where Stama simply can't govern anymore because ministers are quitting the government. And then he will have to step down.

Right. Defections to reform from the conservatives, we're seeing a lot more conservatives go to reform. Reform is becoming a conservative party, is it not? Well, this is absolutely true. And it may not work out well for reform in the long term, just to say. But in the meantime, what we have seen over the last few months is a kind of dead cat bans for the conservatives in the sense that their rating in the polls improved from the utterly catastrophic to the merely disastrous.

I mean, they went up from about 15% to about 18, 90%, 19%. Now, this is not because anybody really feels more warmly about the conservatives or that the conservatives are becoming more popular or anything like that. It is just that the government, Stama, are so unpopular that merely through the fact of being in opposition to them, you're going to get a few people, a few more. people to support you. What has happened over the last two weeks is that that support is now starting to drain away again. People are looking, because they went up slightly, people are looking at the conservatives more closely. They don't like what they see. They see the same party that they voted

out of power in 2024 when the conservatives collapsed catastrophically. And by the way, even at their best moment during their dead cat bounce, they were still a lot less popular than they had been in the 2024 election, just saying. So what you're now starting to see is a migration of the more right-wing, more popular figures within the Conservative Party to reform. So it started with a man called Jenric, who had once had ambitions of becoming conservative leader and, by the way, Prime Minister. Another figure called Sweller Braverman, who used to be Home Secretary under Rishi Sunak, and became extremely hostile to Rishi Sunak, by the way. She's also left for reform. And I suspect over time this is going to become a flood. We're going to start to see more

and more people quit the Conservative Party moving over to reform. And the problem is exactly, as you said, that we're going to have all of these people who previously served in government. They'll come along to Nigel and they'll say to him, look, we've all the experience you don't have. We know how the while machine works. We are, you know, important, important people. The fact that we've been minister of this or minister of that proves that we are important people. so they're going to demand senior jobs from Farage. And of course, if he does start to give it to them, many people across the country will say,

well, reform is just the Conservative Party under a different name. So that is a real danger. I don't know whether Farage himself sees that. Perhaps he does. For the moment, these are more right-wing pro-Brexit conservatives who are making this transition. So you can just about see how reform can absorb them. But if this continues much more, which perhaps probably it will, then as I said, I can see that it could become a problem. One way or the other, the political system in Britain is that we have known that has existed since the first decade of the 20th century.

You know, conservatives, labor, liberals, is breaking down. It's breaking down before our eyes and the whole system has no real hope of reform, actual change within it, or revival within it. The only question is how rapidly the collapse will come. And the other big question is how long are we to continue this limbo system of having a government which is in office led by exhausted and discredited people. Whoever replaces Stama will also be exhausted and discredited very, very quickly. If Andy Burnham got into Parliament, become prime minister, had successfully challenged Stammer, in other words, and become prime minister, he might have avoided becoming quite as unpopular as Stama is because he's a rather more likable man. But she would not have had any of the solutions

to the problems the Britain faces, that he just doesn't have that level of ability or skill. So we are treading water politically, even as everything else changes and collapses all around. And meanwhile, the economy continues to sink. I was with a friend of mine, who was a very high-end estate agent yesterday. He was telling me that the situation in the London economy,

the housing and property market in London is collapsing. I've no doubt that is true, by the way. And that reflects a generally awful situation across the whole country. Would Farage be any different than Stommer or anyone else in labor or the conservatives? I don't even think the conservatives have a viable person for prime minister. It doesn't seem like it. So, I mean, you're effectively looking at Farage, aren't you? And would he be any different? Well, the two emerging parties are reform on the right and the Greens on the left to answer your question.

As far as the Greens are concerned, I think they're just another Blair Wright faction. By the way, I mean, what they will eventually turn out to be is something very like the Labor Party that we had a few years ago. and which Starma took over. So I don't think they've got any of the fundamental answers. Now, as for Farage and Reform, I've said this before many times. Farage is a brilliant opposition politician. His genius is in opposition. I've never got the sense that he's in government.

He's never had experience of government. I mean, he's never run a local authority. He's never run a ministry. He's never done any of these things. And I just don't think that he is the person again to take charge and deal with these major intractable problems that we see in Britain now. He is different. He has been the person who has successfully, and very bravely, by the way, I mean,

we know, one shouldn't underestimate this, very bravely. challenged the establishment over something like 30 years. I mean, you know, very tough politics that he has done, which have brought him to this point. But I don't get the sense that he's the man to take things further. You could call him the icebreaker who's breaking the ice, but he's not the person who can navigate the ship through it. I don't see anybody who is. because the political class have in effect created a desert all around them. People on the left have been purged and systematically excluded. People on the right have been perched and systematically excluded.

There is still no willingness to change track on policy where project Ukraine is concerned, for example. There is no real plan on how to deal with the economy. There are some people who say, well, we've got to cut social welfare in order to cut taxes. That's how to energize the economy. I think that's going to be very difficult to push through, by the way. But anyway, there's that view. There's another view, which is the more left-wing view, which is, you know, that we need to wire out the country, link everybody to the internet, pursue more left-wing socialistic policies.

I'm not sure that's going to succeed either. So, I mean, we are in a very, very difficult position altogether. And one that would require a leader with imagination and authority, such as we have not seen in Britain for many, many long decades. I mean, the last person who had something of that quality was Thatcher. But I think the challenge that would, as somebody like that, who came forward today, is actually much greater than it was in Thatcher's time. I know people talk about how bad the situation in Britain was before she became Prime Minister. I lived in Britain at that time.

I remember how it was then. I could say, without any doubt at all, that today is worse, much worse. All right. Well, we'll end it there. Did you catch Stammer wearing the sunglasses? Well, indeed. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, people said that he did that in mockery of Macron. Of course he didn't. I mean, he did an imitation. That's what you need to understand. His people have told me, look, you know, you got this reputation of being boring and all of that. So you see the amount of attention that Macron has. got from wearing these sunglasses and wear those sunglasses too. And apparently there's been a run on the shops in people buying them so you look cool and exciting. There is absolutely nothing you can ever do that would ever make Kirstama look cool and exciting. And it was just to add one

last point about Kirstama. The one big selling point that, I mean, I don't think it was ever a selling point, but one of the things he constantly said was that he was the one European leader, apart from perhaps Alexander Schnterb, who actually got on with Trump, and that he was able always to win over Trump, and Trump took him seriously and light him. Well, we've had an enormous row over the last couple of days, weeks between Stama and Trump and Trump started over Greenland, quickly expanded to other matters. Everybody can now see that there is really no respect from Trump to Walt Stommer. So there's one thing that Stama was always telling us was, you know, however bad everything else is, at least on the one person who can keep us

on a good relationship with Donald Trump. It turned out that wasn't true at all. Yeah. All right. We will end it there. The durand.orgals.com. We are on Telegram and Rumble and X. And we are also on substack. And go to the Duran shop, pick up some merch, 26% off all merch on the Durant shop. The link is in the description box down below. Take care.