Is Keir Starmer a closet Tory?

Cindy Yu (CY): Slashing winter fuel allowance, keeping the two-child benefit cap, cutting foreign aid, cutting the civil service, axing NHS bureaucracy and slashing welfare spending. Rod, are we actually living under a conservative government?

Rod Liddle (RL): No, because the Conservative government didn’t do any of that, because they didn’t have the appetite for it or the bravery. I’ve actually, in the last month, considered rejoining the Labour Party. It’s a blue Labour Party, it reflects pretty much everything I ever wanted from the Labour Party. There are a few problems. I think Rachel Reeves is a problem. But other than that, I think Labour is doing things which will make it appeal to working class voters far more than it did in the first 100 days of its existence. And I don’t for a moment blame Rosie at all, who I think is a terrific MP and a great figure in the House of Commons. I don’t blame Rosie for having resigned the whip when she did, because I think the first 150 days of Labour were catastrophic. And you were right about the winter fuel allowance. That was completely wrong of the Labour government to do that. But suddenly a kind of realism afflicted the party, the government, pretty much as soon as Donald Trump had been elected as President. I think that’s the change that’s happened. And I think what it can do now is carry on appealing to working class voters. It’s still remarkably, despite its enormous unpopularity in those first 150 days ahead in the polls, the Tories are nowhere to be seen. And Reform, as I’ve always said, will never get much more than 25 per cent, ever, no matter what they do. So I think Labour has performed incredibly well since about the middle of December, early January.