Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards.

Thank you for tuning in in the heat wave. If you are tuning in,

while the heat wave is still with us, it's over 30 degrees where I'm recording. I love heat

and sun and yearn for it when we're deprived of it. And now it's here. It's quite challenging.

But anyway, as ever, we've got a lot to discuss in our time together. If it's

okay with all of you, I'm going to just look, it's a very, it's just an interesting exercise

over how caricatures and clichés are formed about political leaders or potential political leaders in relation to Andy Burnham.

And have a look at an article which virtually every senior member of the Westminster lobby

tweeted and retweeted admiringly. And as they did so, I could see how their view of Burnham was taking shape.

And as I say, it's a stereotype. And it's a shame in politics that these stereotypes are formed

because politics and those that are part of politics are always more

interesting than the kind of accepted view. I was remember in the new Labour era, really smart people

in the world of the media. He used to just say to me when, for example, Ed Balls was a

prominent figure working with Gordon Brown, oh, he's just a bully. And I would say, well, how do you

know he's just a bully? And, you know, the impression, it was far more complicated and

interesting than that, Ed Balls and his role in that New Labour era.

I put him as the third most important figure in the New Labour era after Blair and Brown.

And you can just go on with this.

You know, Blair, first of all, revered out of all proportion as this great bold radical figure when he was being

cautious. Or with Iraq, oh, he's a liar. He's, you know, he's just lying his way into a war.

And you just sort of step back and think, well, is that caricature right? Does it make sense?

You know, and in fact, of course, you probe and it's much more

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