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

Thank you very much for

tuning in at the end of another strange, odd, wild week in British politics and the leadership

of Kirste Starma. It is interesting when people say he's robotic and dull and plodding.

He is, in some respects, one of the great risk takers in British politics in modern times.

And the risk is in his treatment of people, key figures.

Their appointments or dismissals or expulsions,

are without president of any leader. They used to say that Thatcher could be a ruthless leader,

but in terms of the way she dealt with people, whether civil servants, cabinet ministers,

her own MPs, that really wasn't the case. Remember, the key departures from her cabinet were resignations. No significant figures were sacked. Nigel Lawson resigned.

Jeffrey Howe resigned and so on. Blair, Simley, you know, would

always say he had no reverse gear and was utterly focused and ruthless when needs be. And he was,

but he was a kind of gentle puny, newly trained teacher coming into a rowdy school compared with

Kirstama. It is true and with great regret he got rid of David Blunkett and of course

significantly and famously Peter Mandelson, acts of great ruthlessness. But not in the Kyr-Stama League. And it seems to me that of all the

various issues arising from his leadership, and there are many, it's been a very unusual leadership.

This is one of the most significant. I felt it when early on, and some of you will remember this, when he in effect expelled Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour

Party early on in his leadership. He suspended him, but there was no way Corbyn was

coming back, so it was in effect from the beginning, an expulsion. And there were echoes,

the context was wholly different, but there were echoes with the sacking of Olly Robbins last week,

in the sense that it happened very quickly.

Hours after that, damning report on anti-Semitism in the Corbyn era was published.

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