The Duran Podcast - Starmer Is Finished But Britain's Problems Go Much Deeper Than One Leader

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

Starmer Is Finished But Britain's Problems Go Much Deeper Than One Leader

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation in the UK. And it really does look like Stommer this time around is done for. I don't think he's going to make it. You know better than I do. But the people that he has wronged over the year or so, they're now coming back at him. And they want him gone. The Mandelson scandal is not going away. and he is losing support.

I don't know who even supports him at this point anymore in either party, to be quite honest. He seems to me as if he's very much isolated and alone, and it's just a matter of time before he is gone. I will say this, your thoughts on what I was thinking about when it came to Stommer over the past month. The war in the Middle East definitely helped him deflect much of the attention away from everything that was brewing with Mandelson and he was able to focus on Hormuz and Iran and stuff like that and Trump. And so he didn't really have to deal with Mandelson. But Mandelson came back and he has to deal with it now.

I mean, the month of the war with Iran definitely bought him sometime. Yes. Yes, it did. It absolutely did. I think you're absolutely right. I think it's become clear over the last. week that he has lost support, conclusively lost support from the two last remaining pillars that propped him up. One was the cabinet, the top ministers of the government, who basically

were all supporting Starner because they all hate each other. I can't agree which of them should take his place. So up to this moment in time, they've all, you know, they've been loyally willing to go out and speak up for him, not because they really liked him, not because they really supported him, but because they didn't trust each other and they didn't really want to trigger a leadership election and a leadership contest either. And the second important pillar that he has now conclusively lost is the Guardian newspaper, whose importance in Labour Party politics cannot be overstated. I mean, it is the House Journal. of the Labour Party in much the same way as their Daily Telegraph used to be, and to some extent

still is the House Journal of the Conservative Party. Over the last week, the Guardian has clearly given up on Kirstama and has made it very, very clear that it wants him to go. I think there is also a significant element of factional politics in this. this. This is Britain, after all. And as I've discussed many times, in Britain, plotting and intrigue goes on in politics on an entirely different level from what you see in any other country. You remember we had all of this at the time of the quasi-quarteng, Lizzie, Liz Trust, a crisis, and we saw it previously with Boris Johnson, before that was Theresa May. There are many parallels, by the way, with Theresa May, another dull, incompetent, EU-picked, WF-type leader,

who drained support who people didn't like, but somehow managed to keep going week after week and months after months until eventually support. collapses. And it's the true of Theresa Mayne. It's true of Stama as well. But I think there's an element of factional politics. And I'll tell you what I think is going on, because remember, this latest iteration of the crisis started with a leak from the Guardian that Mandelson had failed. He's vetting. So it's interesting that that leak came for the Guardian. Now, the Guardian is very strongly aligned with the Blairite faction within the Labour Party. And I think what they're worried about is that if they leave it too long,

if they leave Stama too long in place, the factional opponents of the Blairites within the Labour Party, what is called the soft left. They're not particularly left, by the way. But these are just labels, but that's what they call themselves. that they would be the people who would come out on top, that when Stama fell, it would be one of them, either Angela Rainer or another Labour politician called Ed Miliband, who was the former leader, that he would come out, one of them would come out and be the next leader of the Labour Party.

And the current Lerite faction that has been in control, would lose control. So they pushed this crisis now to get Stama out of the way because probably they calculate that with Angela Rainer still being investigated over her tax affairs and with doubts about Miliband, which is still there for all kinds of reasons we'll go into in a moment. This is the moment. This is the last real chance to get another Blair Wright to replace Stama. and obviously that man has to be west-streeting. It cannot be anyone else.

So I suspect there is some element of factional infighting. We shouldn't spend too much time in this because it's factional in fighting taking place on the deck of the Titanic after the iceberg has struck because the reality is the entire ship is sinking. But this is all in the... in the context of labor remaining in power, right?

Yeah. I mean, there's no pressure for snap elections or can that even happen? Well, it can in theory, but it's not going to. I mean, whoever takes over from Stamber, it's not going to be called an election and let Nigel Farage become prime minister. So I mean, it's that they're not going to be. Labor retains control. They limp on for a further, was it, three years? Three years, yeah.

So, you know, with Britain continues to sink. And it is sinking. I mean, again, it's, you have to have lived in Britain to see how fast the decline is, the decline is playing out now. So they will remain in control. They will remain the government. Whoever takes over from Stalin will lack authority because they will. won't have been voted into power by the people. And we will have a government that just

limps on ineffectually and unsuccessfully. We might see further factional infighting take place within it. But it will no longer be factional in fighting in order to win the next election, or even to preserve the Labour Party in any coherent form. Beyond it, it would be factional. in fighting, to gain control of the keys to power now so that the people who gain that control can benefit from it whilst labour is still in power. That's what it's going to be all about from this point onwards. I don't see how anything gets fixed. Nothing gets fixed. I mean, nothing gets fixed. If we can talk about just a few things. I mean, Angela Rainer, who I think, think, I just see her as remotely the right person to become Prime Minister at this time. It's

very interesting, but she was involved in a tax scandal last year. She referred herself for investigation by the tax authorities in September. It's a very simple affair about non-disclosure of taxes in relation to buying of the second house. It should have been resolved months ago. I know a bit about this. I know people who work in tax issues. Nobody's asking the obvious question, why is this investigation dragging on for so long? And again, I can't help but think that this has basically been done to try to keep her out

of contention. I mean, it keeps from standing as Labour leader, which gives us a, which gives us a, you know, time to get West Streeting or whoever it is that the Blairites are thinking of to bake him Prime Minister in Stama's place and they probably decided that now's the moment to do it. Stama is exhausted, Stama is discredited, Stamor is isolated, so we strike now, get him out of the way, get West Streeting in as quickly as possible before Angela Rainer has managed to sort her issues out. person that people are talking about, who is Ed Miliband, probably marginally more credible as a

former, as a prime minister. But his major problem is that he was previously leader of the Labour Party. He led the Labour Party into an election in 2015, and he lost. So he's already been rejected by the British people. And yet there are some people who are suggesting that he should be our next prime minister. I mean, I've never heard of a situation where a prime minister, a politician who's already been rejected in that way becomes prime minister after all. I mean, it's going to provoke a lot of negative comment to put it. mildly. But anyway, if they can't sort out something with Angela Raina, they might try something with Miliband. There's been a lot of talk about Miliband recently. And I wonder whether the reason

we've seen this thing happen now, you know, with the leak of the Guardian, the resurrection of the Mandelson story, the pressure to get Mandelso, get Stammer out of the way, is to, you know, get Starma in, shoehorn, get Castama out, shoehorn, we're streeting in before this milliband thing gains traction. Just saying.

But it's musical chairs on the Titanic, as I said, as the ship sinks. Nothing is getting better. No. The Labour Party ship is sinking. Yeah, the Labour, yeah. But the Conservatives don't.

But Britain is sinking as well. And that is what is so terrible about this. And there's no other party that can provide any relief to anything, is there? No, no. Farage, I have to say this, as leader of what is realistically Britain's main opposition party is now very unconvincing. He's been very successful as an opposition figure on the margins, focused on specific issues, on the EU, on immigration, on those kind of things. But he does not look very convincing as a prime minister, a future prime minister.

and there's no sense that you get when somebody's rising and looks like they're going to become Prime Minister. There's none of the excitement and the co-lellan, you know, the sense of people are coalescing around them in the way that I remember, for example, with Margaret Thatcher all the way back in the 1970s. So you don't get any of that sense with Farage. So he's not there. And, well, as far as Polanski, Zach Polanski and the Greens are concerned, where we've discussed them already, their Labour Party Mark II, as far as I concerned, with a certain Corbynite fringe. But again, I don't think they're remotely convincing or remotely up to dealing with the problems in prison today. It's a bad situation all round.

And to my mind, it all goes back to the Brexit war. There was the referendum, the British people voted for Brexit, the entire political class worked to a great extent successfully to sabotage it. That was a massive breakdown in trust between the political class and the wider nation. It also demonstrated that the political class is now a class of its own that exists for itself. People like ourselves knew that already, but now everybody after the Brexit war can see it. And that has collapsed, support and authority, both for the political class and the political parties, Labor, conservative, liberal, too, by the way, which it represents. All right. We will end the video there, the durand.locals.com. We are on X, we are on Rumble and

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