Why does everyone hate Keir Starmer?

Summary

Podcast Summary: “Why does everyone hate Keir Starmer?”

Podcast: Today in Focus (The Guardian)
Date: May 12, 2026
Host: Nosheen Iqbal
Guest: Aditya Chakraborty (Guardian columnist)

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the crisis facing Keir Starmer, Labour’s embattled Prime Minister, in the wake of disastrous local elections. Despite leading Labour to a historic majority just two years earlier, Starmer is now deeply unpopular across the political spectrum. Nosheen Iqbal and Aditya Chakraborty explore the reasons for Starmer’s universal loathing, the collapse of two-party politics, and the broader malaise afflicting Labour and UK democracy.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Starmer’s Unpopularity: A Cross-Party Phenomenon

• Starmer is “probably the most unpopular prime minister ever,” with favorability ratings lower than Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, despite a much less scandal-plagued record ([04:21]).
• His unpopularity transcends party lines:

  "He's unpopular everywhere to everyone. He's unpopular to people who are leaning left, he's unpopular to people leaning right." — Aditya Chakraborty [04:51]

2. Voters' Perspectives: The Doorstep Experience

• Aditya reports from London and post-industrial towns:
  • In London: Voters cite Labour’s stance on Gaza, racial profiling, and lack of action on housing as reasons for abandoning the party ([05:11]).

    "Black and brown voters are saying, you can't count us anymore." — Aditya Chakraborty [05:55]

  • Outside London: Former Conservative (Boris Johnson) voters now migrate to Nigel Farage's Reform party, motivated by disillusionment and political nihilism ([06:00]).

3. The Problem with “Adult in the Room” Politics

• Starmer presented himself as the pragmatic, competent alternative to “childish” or ideological politicians ([07:00]).
  • The Labour brand became “about being the grown-ups”—but competence and caution have failed to inspire or deliver concrete change ([08:13]).

    "Being the adult in the room… isn't enough. You actually need to do more than be competent. You need to have some idea about politics and what you actually want to do with your power." — Aditya Chakraborty [07:33]

4. The Issue of “Change” and Policy Drift

• Labour’s central promise was “change,” but this has become an empty platitude.
• Multiple policy “resets” are likened to rebooting a faulty mobile phone—superficial, rather than substantive ([08:14]).

5. Lack of Political Authenticity

• Starmer’s style stands in contrast to figures like Nigel Farage or Green leader Zack Polanski, who embody “authentic” politics—plain-speaking, conviction-driven, and resonant for disaffected voters ([09:14]).

  "There's a whole kind of politics which is about being authentic… that's a very difficult position for a center-left politician to be in." — Aditya Chakraborty [09:15]

6. The Reform Party Voter Base: Complex and Growing

• Reform voters aren’t just “angry men” but include many in post-industrial areas, long alienated from mainstream politics ([11:51]).
  • They’re motivated by economic stagnation and a sense of powerlessness, not just by culture wars or immigration ([12:20]).

  "They wake up each morning and they know that today will not be better than yesterday. That is such a corrosive thing within politics." — Aditya Chakraborty [12:31]

7. Britain’s Broken Politics: The Collapse of Two-Party Dominance

• Two-thirds of voters now cast ballots against the main parties; protest votes are the new norm ([13:17]).
• Economic decline—stagnant living standards, crumbling high streets, generational pessimism—fuels political instability ([13:33]).

8. The Immigration Narrative and Culture Wars

• Both left and right resent Starmer, albeit for opposite reasons on immigration and asylum ([15:20]).
• The “small boats” scandal is emblematic of deep political and social breakdown, with immigration debates masking wider issues of powerlessness and socioeconomic decline ([16:33], [18:08]).

  "It’s socioeconomic powerlessness from people who feel like… their powers were going to be stripped away from them and it's not fair. They have their power stripped away from them…" — Aditya Chakraborty [18:13]

• Labour’s attempted counter via patriotic posturing (union flags, tough rhetoric) is derided as forced and lacking credibility ([19:08]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Starmer’s Leadership:

  "There are times when I've watched Keir Starmer promising he's gonna change, saying, trust me, honestly, it's gonna be different this time..." — Aditya Chakraborty [03:21]

• On Labour’s Reforms and Principles:

  "What are you going to do with your power? ... Instead you get a single word... change. You get a lot of talk about growth and a growth strategy. And the growth strategy seems to consist of hoping that growth will come along..." — Aditya Chakraborty [07:53]

• On the Green Party’s Appeal:

  "Polanski basically says a lot of stuff that Labour people would like to say... I know people have been scared and we have been afraid, but days like this are here to send a message… we are unstoppable." — Aditya Chakraborty, paraphrasing Zack Polanski [10:51]

• On Voter Disenchantment:

  "Support for the two main parties has been ebbing away... Two out of every three voters voted against the two main parties…" — Aditya Chakraborty [13:17]

• On Labour’s “Patriotism” Messaging:

  "When I've turned on telly to watch Keir Starmer speak and it has looked like he's been broadcasting from a GB news set. Right. There's so many union flags behind him." — Aditya Chakraborty [19:08]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:35 — Introduces Keir Starmer’s challenge after disastrous elections
• 04:21 — Chakraborty: Starmer’s record-low popularity
• 05:11 — What voters told campaigners on the doorstep
• 07:00 — Starmer’s self-branding as the “adult in the room” dissected
• 09:14 — The challenge of authenticity for Starmer vs. Farage & Greens
• 11:51 — Who are Reform voters, and why are they defecting?
• 13:17 — The two-party system’s collapse: protest votes and deeper malaise
• 15:20 — Contradictory narratives driving “hate” from left and right
• 16:33 — Small boats scandal: an emblem of political impotence and alienation
• 18:13 — Socioeconomic decline as the root of frustration
• 19:08 — Labour’s patriotic turn, “flag politics,” and credibility gap
• 21:29 — What should Labour do next? Can anyone rescue the party?
• 25:14 — Leadership speculation: Andy Burnham as a possible successor
• 27:01 — Why Burnham might appeal to both reform and green-leaning voters

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Where Next for Labour?

• More important than a new face is a new direction: Labour needs to offer bold, realistic answers to Britain’s structural crises, particularly for those feeling left behind ([21:49]).
• Burnham is floated as an ideal candidate, not for personality but for his outsider status and cross-spectrum appeal ([26:53]).
• The real test is whether Labour can move beyond platitudes and address the deep-rooted economic and social problems that drive political cynicism and fragmentation ([27:32]).

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Tone and Language

The conversation is frank, analytical, occasionally sardonic, and leavened with honesty about Labour’s predicament and the hollowness of Britain’s political messaging. Chakraborty’s critique is unsparing but rooted in economic realities and genuine sympathy for those feeling disenfranchised.

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This episode is essential listening for anyone trying to understand the roots of Starmer’s unpopularity, the crisis of British Labour, and the end of two-party dominance in UK politics.

Transcript

[Aditya Chakraborty]

This is the Guardian.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Today. Why does everyone hate Kia Starmer so much?

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[Nisheen Nikbal]

In these highly polarized times, dunking on the Prime Minister, this particular Prime Minister is the one thing that seems to unite people in fear, fury, disappointment, loathing. And so, as he rolled his sleeves up to address the nation on Monday morning, the weekend after one of the worst election results in Labour's history, Starmer had quite the job on his hands. The Guardian's Edicia Chakraborty wasn't the only one watching and wincing.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

You know what, Nisheen? You get these speeches and they are make or break and everyone's meant to be watching them. And the film fate of the man who runs a country rests upon what he's going to say in half an hour. And actually, no speech can withstand that amount of pressure. If after six odd years of Keir Starmer's leader of Labour Party and Prime Minister, you don't know what a Keir Starmer speech sounds like, I feel some degree of envy for you. But no, it's Keir Starmer, right?

[Nisheen Nikbal]

The Prime Minister and the leader of our party, Keir Starme.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

So he says a bunch of things, which he probably means, but to most people I think they sound fairly platitudinous. We lost some brilliant Labour representatives. That hurts. I get it. I feel it. They're about the need for our children to have more hope in their future than we might feel right now for them. They're about labor making a change and we made the big calls, right? But we've done some things wrong. I know I have my doubters and I know I need to prove them wrong. And I will. And in the Meantime, saying, I'm gonna change, honest, this time I'm gonna change. Which, you know, there are times when I've watched Keir Samba promising he's gonna change, saying, trust me, honestly, it's gonna be different this time, honestly, stick with me,

[Nisheen Nikbal]

stick with him. But at what cost to the Labour Party? From the Guardian, I'm Loshi Neqbal. Today In Focus, how Starmer's leadership spelt the end for two party politics. Aditya Chakraborty, welcome to Today in Focus.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

Nashee Nikbo, it's a pleasure.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Now, I am going to trust you to make sense of everything that's happened since those election results, not least Keir Starmer standing on Monday morning, fighting for his right to stay on as Prime Minister. Aditya Just how unpopular is he?

[Aditya Chakraborty]

NISHEEN he's probably the most unpopular prime minister ever. I mean, the popularity, the favorability ratings on Keir Starmer are unbelievably low. He's beneath Liz Truss for some reason, although he's not done anything near as disastrous in office as she has done. He hasn't lied barefacedly to the public like Boris Johnson, yet. He's seen as a lesser character than Boris Johnson, yet he, he really is huge unpopular. And the thing that came out of last week's election results is that he's unpopular everywhere to everyone. He's unpopular to people who are leaning left, he's unpopular to people leaning right.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

It's been such a fast fall from winning such a huge majority. Now these elections were always going to be tough. Not sure anyone expected them to be this bad. Aditya what were voters saying about him on the doorstep?

[Aditya Chakraborty]

It depended which doorstep you were on and where you were. Right. If you were in London and I went out with the Greens in South London and what really struck me was a Green campaigners, green activists I was with, they were knocking on doors but they weren't actually saying anything. It was the voters who were volunteering their opinions about what they thought. And there it was. Three things. Gaza, why is this government complicit in the bombing of children, Shabana MacMood and immigration. London's obviously about half visible ethnic minority now. And so in South London you were getting black and brown voters who were saying, I'm not voting for party that's going to racially profile me out. And that's a pretty big thing. It struck me that people were talking about her in particular. One of the key constituents of the Labour Party vote has been black and brown voters for the past 50 years. And clearly, black and brown voters are saying, you can't count us anymore. And then the third thing was housing, which is a big issue in London in, in all big cities. If you get away from London, the people who five, six years ago would have said they'd vote for Boris Johnson, now they're saying they're voting Nigel Farage. And it's in the same spirit of everyone is a liar. And if Nigel Farage is a liar, he can't be as bad as all the other lies we've already got. So it's a kind of nihilism about

[Nisheen Nikbal]

the political process ditches Keir Starmer would admit. And in fact, at times he's made a virtue of this fact that he's not the most natural politician that, you know, he came to it very late. But actually what he has on his side is integrity, is this moral compass, is this competence. How much do you think, though, that this sort of loathing of him is about the way he presents as a political figure?

[Aditya Chakraborty]

You're quite right to say that he basically came to power both in the Labour Party and in the country by saying, look, I'm a grown up, right? All these others, they're kids, they've always been in politics, they don't know anything. I am an adult. I'm the adult in the room and I'm gonna make things happen. No fantastical blue sky proposals, a pragmatic approach. Labor are now the grown ups in the room. And I think one thing that you've learned that we've seen tested a destruction over the past two, two years or so is that basically being the adult in the room, the self declared adult in the room isn't enough. You actually need to do more than be competent. You need to have some idea about politics and what you actually want to do with your power. What, what else is what? What other famous catchphrases that come out of Keir Summer's mouth? We're the party of power, not protest, right? So what are you gonna do with your power? Okay. And instead of which, getting a clear idea of what he's gonna do with his power, you get a single word on the manifesto that everyone knows from summer 2024, change. You get a lot of talk about growth and a growth strategy. And the growth strategy seems to consist of hoping that growth will come along and then not much more.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Resets.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

And then you get a number of resets as though it's a faulty mobile phone and all you need to keep doing is jabbing at it and it will somehow spring back into life. Like, these are bad metaphors for the leading politician in the country to be trapped inside. But in the end, what they speak to is a sense that just being competent, just looking serious, just saying platitudes and cliches because that's what you think politics is. That's not enough. You actually need to do stuff.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

And at this point, is the competence even a fair assessment if he's lost it to this degree? I mean, you say that, you know, it's not really about the adults in the room, it's about knowing how to do politics. If someone knows how to do politics, really, it's Nigel Farage, right? I mean, he speaks with this fluency that Starmer could only aspire to, you know, irrespective of whether one is repulsed or not yet. And how much of that do you think the comparison to something like that shows us just how far Starmer is behind?

[Aditya Chakraborty]

I think that's a really important question. There's a whole kind of politics which is about being authentic and, and that, that basic politics is an authentic racy and you've just got to be true to yourself and just say what you think and be unfiltered and all the rest of it. That's a very difficult position for a center left politician to be in. If you think about where the Labour Party has been over the past 15 years, before it got into power again in 2024, it tried being a bit soft left undead. Miliband didn't win. It tried being a bit further to the left on Jeremy Corbyn, glorious defeat. And then it tried being a sort of nothing y blanc mange. And it got into power largely because of Liz Truss. Liz Truss got into power and she messed up the economy. And after that, people said, right, I had enough Tories just gonna vote for anyone else. So if you are Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves, these people, you think, I don't really know what the public want from me. Right. And to some extent you see that in the pronouncements that Keir Starmer's made in, in Cincy local elections, whether it's a speech this week or the remarks he made directly after results is I'm going to be really true to myself and I'm going to do all these things. And you think, well, what took you so long, boy? Because, you know, you've been around for some time. You could have said all the stuff he says.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

He'll be here for another 10 years.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

Right, right. I mean, that, that is particularly deluded. I Think that's not what the public told us on Thursdays. They want 10 more years of Keir Starmer. But I think the really refreshing contrast, a really interesting contrast, is between Keir Starmer and Zach Polanski, the leader of the Greens. And Polanski basically says a lot of stuff that labor people would like to say. Like he says stuff like what's happening, girls? In an outrage. He says Trump wouldn't deal with him. He says we shouldn't be racist. Basic things. Yeah. And I think there are an awful lot of labor activists and labor mps who think, actually, I'd quite like to say that, but we're in a party where you can't really say that. I know people have been scared and we have been afraid, but days like this are here to send a message, a message to Tommy Robinson, to Nigel Farage, to those who appease them. The message is when we turn up in our heart, hundreds of thousands, we are unstoppable.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

I guess that explains why progressive voters feel betrayed. But why do you think it is reform voters in particular, the ones who used to vote Labour, why do you think they can't stand Starmer?

[Aditya Chakraborty]

The reform vote is such an interesting vote. People tend to think of the reform voter as being this red faced, angry guy who turns up at the back of the question time audience and he starts heckling them about, breaks it or whatever. And actually the reform voting base is a lot more complicated than that. Like there is Maybe, I know 1 in 5, 1 in 4 of the reformed voters are kind of the people in post industrial towns who feel like politics has been failing for decades and they're not wrong to think.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Yeah.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

And they've been looking for ways to protest at a ballot box for a long time, whether that's over Brexit or over 2019 and that election or whether it's against Keir Starmer now. So whoever's in power any particular time, right, they will give them a punch and nose. But then there are a whole variety of other people who, within that reform coalition who, you know, research, extensive research from Hope Not Hate and others show, are basically there because they feel like their living standards are either going backwards or frozen. So things aren't getting better for them. You know, they wake up each morning and they know that today will not be better than yesterday. That is such a corrosive thing within politics. There's a, there's a material base there and we've talked a lot so far about why everyone hates care. But if you stand back for years now, Support for the two main parties has been ebbing away.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Right.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

And then the lot at these local elections have just gone. Two out of every three voters voted against the two main parties, which is to say they vote against the party government or His Majesty's official opposition. So they voted for what you used to call the fringes.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Yeah.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

And that we would have called in previous decades, we'd call that a protest vote. Like there's a lot to protest about. We know from official data that than that a child born today will have fewer years in good healthy life than they would have expected a few years ago. We know that living standards have barely budged since 2008. We're coming up to the 20th anniversary of the banking crash and this country has not moved forward since then. We also know in the cities in particular, if you're young, that it's really hard to get your life going because you can't think about moving the house, you can't think about all the family decisions that go around. It's impossible. Right. So there's a lot for people to protest about. And what you see time and time again is that the two main parties, and we've had a lot of the Tories and now we're getting our bit of labor is they can't really answer those questions with the speed or the scale that voters seem to be demanding.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Given what you've said about the cost of living, I do take that on board. But when you talk to people, you can't deny that the resentment around immigration and asylum seekers, it's so high and that these so called facts that Farage and Reform are pushing people absolutely believe them to be true. And so I wonder if there's something weird going on about the visceral hatred that Starmer attracts because there are these two very different opposing political narratives about him where the right believe he's only pro immigrants and minorities and the left feel he's failed them entirely.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

I have some sympathy with what you've just said. I just want to make a kind of counterpoint to that, which is for most people, most of the time, politics isn't something they think about. Right. It intrudes into their lives at particular points. Actually, you have to be pretty bothered to go out and vote on a Thursday to, you know, who runs your local council. So for most people it's not a thing. And when they mean they hate Keir Starmer, say they probably just mean they hate the Labour Party. It's just that he's the guy who's there five Years ago they were saying they hate Jeremy Corbyn, they hate the Labour Party, really. And when they say they hate immigration, it's always really notable to me and I noticed this a lot when I was reporting on the Brexit referendum, that I could go to a small X mining town in South Wales and they'd say, I hate all these migrants who come over. And I say, but where are the migrants, madam? That they aren't there.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

But this is what I mean by living in what seems to be twisty political truths. Because the whole small boats problem, the immigration so called problem, is entirely a conservative issue and it has been yet been completely made a Labor one. And hasn't that now been to their detriment because instead of gaining those reform voters, they've repelled them even more.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

But let's take that seriously. What is that telling you? So that's telling you that they hate the idea that the borders are breakable and that they don't feel secure in their own country. They hate the idea that government after government, whether it's Rishi Sunak or Kirstam, is saying they're going to stop the boats and they can still see lots of pictures of boats and in fact number of people coming over in boats remains very, very high. Right. The small boat thing in particular, I think is actually emblematic of the political breakdown we're in. Think about it. The only reason you got small boats is because essentially the Conservatives stopped nearly all legal means of entering this country and claiming asylum. So if you want to enter this country, you have to come over illegally on small bow and, and claim asylum as soon as you turn up on the beach. Right? Where do you get put if you're an asylum see, you get put in an asylum. See, we used to get put in asylum seek hotel run by one of three main private companies who make their business model out of going to towns which are on, on the down and buying up a hotel and putting loads of people in, in there. And so if you live in these small towns, all of a sudden you're there and a British company has put next to you an entire bunch of men who just come off a boat and you think, I've got no control over this. In a way, the small boat scandal, rather than thinking about it just about being race, think of it also. It's about you. You as a person who's paid in your taxes, as a citizen, you've got no power now over what happens in your town. In the same way that people get really vexed about their high street, they get really vexed about the pubs closing,

[Nisheen Nikbal]

that it's a, it's all, it's socioeconomic. Right, but this is what I mean.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

Socioeconomic powerlessness from people who feel like they. No one warned them their powers were going to be stripped away from them and it's not fair. They have their power stripped away from them and it goes along also with decade upon decade of rollback. In a workplace where as a worker we're less powerful than we were 40 years ago, there is a massive failure if politicians in the mainstream aren't able to talk about it in non culture war terms, if they're not able to propose policies to do stuff about it, if they're not able to think about the economics that you would need, the actual policy solutions that you would need to make this less of a problem for people. Right. And what has Keir Starmer and Shyvana Mahmood in particular, what did what they done, they've heaped on the culture war. Right. There are. There have been times in the past two years, Nasheen, when I've turned on telly to watch Keir Starmer speak and it has looked like he's been broadcasting from a GB news set. Right. There's so many union flags behind him.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Yeah.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

What is that guy doing? And you know when he or Yvette Cooper asked about how much they love the flag? Oh, I love the flag so much. I've got it above the conjugal bed. I've got as many flags. You know, like this is ridiculous. First of all. No, it makes. It gives most of the public the ick. I don't want to know someone's got a flag everywhere in their flat. Like that's weird but secondly, it's not believable.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Coming up. Can anyone get labour out of this mess?

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[Nisheen Nikbal]

ADITYA We've had six Prime Ministers in the last 10 years. Now reportedly coming up to our seventh. Our politics, as you've explained, are very different to what they were a decade ago. And if Starmer has proven himself to be so wrong for this moment, where do you think it is that Labour should now go?

[Aditya Chakraborty]

If Keir Starmer does go this year, which you have to say looks like the odds on certainty, it means that since Theresa May, we will have burnt, the UK will have burnt through more prime ministers than Italy in the past. Yeah, right. That is pretty amazing as a record, you know, number one at something, ditching our leaders. Where should labor go in response to that? This is probably where I'll break away from the pack a bit. I, I'm not, I am a bit less interested in who in whose face it is I see and who it is who actually gets a top job. And the thing that does frustrate me more is there's much less said about what they will do to make things different. Like we've just been touching on a whole variety of material issues that affect people day to day, whether it's in behind their closed doors with their family or whether it's out on the high street or whether it's at work. There are so many things that need to be done. And I think the one thing that Keir Starmer has admitted so far this week even is that they haven't made the progress that they said. They haven't made the change that they promised. Yes, they've done some things and it should be remembered by the way, they have done some things. Often they've done things against their will because labor back benches have rebelled and said, you need to change this. Other things they've done because they got, they, they got it inherited from the Jeremy Corbyn era of labor and that's on employment rights in particular. They've also done stuff on rent rights, which I think actually is very, very good, doesn't go far enough. But still, these are things that you can hold up and say, these are achievements. You need to start thinking a lot more about actually restructuring the economy so that you're less focused on what some leather jacketed American comes along and says about data centers and AI, and you're much more focused on what you're offering to the care worker or the barista behind the counter at your local cafe. You know, this is the government that went on and on about its AI strategy and its growth strategy and all these other things and not enough about the cost of living until they got into a load of trouble and they start saying, well, our polling's telling us we should talk about the cost of living. So we're going to talk about it, but without anything substantial, without doing anything. Exactly. So whoever is in the frame to run the party, whoever puts their name forward, the key question they need to answer is what are you going to do that's different? And how can you do stuff that's sufficiently different, given that A, you don't have the mandate as leader that Keir Starmer did? B, you're, you have to work within a manifesto that was a tiny, tiny, narrow offering. Right. So that, that means that they, that it puts all kinds of limits on what they can actually do in office. In office. And three, you have to negotiate with a parliamentary Labour Party, many of whom were hand picked by the right of the Labour Party and they're therefore among, you know, some of the most conservative politicians in some of the most conservative people in the Labour movement and so will not want to do anything particularly radical. They don't have those kind of radical ideas because if they had had them, you'd have seen them in the past two years.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

I know that you don't like to make predictions and I know that you don't really care about which personality now comes in. However, given that it does matter, considering where labor goes, who do you think will take them there?

[Aditya Chakraborty]

Okay, the way I see the last six months of Labour Party politics from January up until nearly June now is basically everyone has known that these elections were going to be absolutely awful. And there's been this long drawn out game of chess being going on about can kiss some of stay who replaces him, how they get to replace him in that is a particular existential problem for Andy Burnham because he's not even in Parliament and though Clive Lewis has offered him his seat and I can't see the King in the north taking over in Norfolk, so I don't think that's likely that he'd take up that offer. But there's an awful lot of moving pieces that have been going around. You basically had cataclysmic results for the party government on Thursday. The Prime Minister comes out and says, on Friday morning. Yeah, these are really bad. I'll talk to you later. Don't go anywhere, guys. I'll be back on Monday. There is no Cabinet meeting at all. Now, if you're a Labour councillor politician, especially one who's just lost your seat, you might want to get some sense of urgency. I know that in Wales also there are members of the Senate who've been saying, hang on, we just got wiped out. Why is no one acting? Why is everyone acting like it's business as usual? It's not business as usual. And if we are not careful, in three years time, we will wake up and the electoral map will have gone light blue. And so I think there is a degree of pace which has now been added to it. For my money, the best candidate would be Andy Burnham.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Andy Burnham with a mega pact with Angela Rayner, I think.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

Well, I mean, the reason why I say Andy Burnham is one, he's outside the Westminster machine. I think that actually is a good thing.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

And the only one who's polling positively.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

He polls positively with people who might be about to vote reform as well as people who might vote Green. And I know that the Greens are particularly worried about the prospect of a Burnham leadership because a lot of people who drifted over to them might go back to Labor. But also, I think being out of Parliament crucially has allowed him some time to think about what he would do differently. And that is why I like him out of the possible names now.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

So you've the reinvention of Burnham.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

No, I. I'm not. I'm really not saying. I'm not saying. I mean, I'm not that. I'm not a political journalist, I'm not a lobby correspondent. I think mainly about economics. And what I'm really interested in is seeing who will change the social and economic makeup of this country away from being a very unequal, rather toxic politics to something that is better and fairer and allows more people to breathe more easily and feel like the basics of life are being taken care of, like

[Nisheen Nikbal]

to get behind that.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

And it strikes me that at least is a conversation we ought to get into about making this country better, rather than crap about flags, toxic rubbish, poison about immigrants and people who don't look like you. So I really would like a serious conversation about what would actually change as a result of leadership, not just who is going to be fronting that change.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

We will see. Aditya, thank you so much for your time.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

Thank you, Nisheen.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

That was the Guardian's columnist Aditya Chakraborty. You can read all his pieces and I highly recommend you [e-mail] that's it for today. This episode was presented by me, Noshi Nikbal. It was produced by Eli Block, Tom Glasser and Angelica Jobson. Sound design is by Rudy Zagadlo and the executive producer was Huma Khalili. We'll be back this afternoon with the latest.

[Aditya Chakraborty]

This is the Guardian.

[Nisheen Nikbal]

Today's markets move fast. Get the insights you need in 10 minutes with the Barclays Brief, a new podcast from Barclays Investment Bank. Through sharp dialogue and scenario based analysis, our leading experts analyze key market themes each week. So whether you're managing a portfolio or leading a business, the Barclays Brief podcast can help you make smarter decisions today. Stay sharp, stay brief. Find Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

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