Suella Braverman defects – not another one!
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2026
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s psychodrama all round on Coffee House Shots today. Between Andy Burnham – who over the weekend was denied the opportunity to stand in the Gorton and Denton by-election – and Suella Braverman – who has just announced that she’s defecting to Reform (shock horror) – it seems like the main parties are competing to see who can appear the most split. After high-profile Labour MPs gave their support for Burnham’s return, what impact will this have on Labour party unity? And with this latest defection of a former Tory, can Nigel Farage dodge accusations that Reform is becoming the Tory party 2.0?
Isabel Hardman speaks to Tim Shipman and Gabriel Pogrund.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to you, Coffee House Shots, The Spectators Daily Politics Podcast. |
| 0:10.2 | I'm Isabel Hardman, and today I'm joined by Tim Shipman and Gabriel Pogrand of the Sunday Times. |
| 0:15.7 | Now, we have two big political fights today. One is the fight on the right with the defection of Suella |
| 0:22.1 | Braverman to reform. But the other is the big story that has dominated Westminster headlines over |
| 0:27.6 | the weekend, the return or not of Andy Burnham to Westminster. Gabriel, let's start with you. |
| 0:35.4 | You were covering Andy Burnham's bid to return in the by-election over the weekend. |
| 0:40.8 | Just tell us how that played out for you as a reporter. |
| 0:44.5 | Well, I'll tell you, it played out as these things often do, namely in ways which |
| 0:50.9 | were not wholly helpful for a Sunday newspaper journalist. |
| 0:53.9 | But I suppose that wasn't |
| 0:56.0 | Andy Burnham's first priority. I will say it occasioned a sudden return to the Labour Party |
| 1:01.8 | rule book because as well as examining all the abstruse new rule, which required Burnham to get |
| 1:09.3 | the permission of the National Executive Committee. I was |
| 1:11.7 | also getting my kind of rebooting my Kremlinology brain and trying to contemplate what would |
| 1:17.7 | have happened in the event that there was a five, five split on the NEC officers group making |
| 1:23.3 | the decision. And I was quite proud because there were a few people much more schooled |
| 1:29.2 | in these matters than me who said they didn't know what would have happened. It may have |
| 1:32.5 | fallen to a Shabana Mahmood's casting vote. In the end, we didn't get there. It was an 8-1, |
| 1:38.4 | possibly Kirstarmer's last ever landslide victory. And I keep saying that the relationship between Andy Burnham's desire to return to Parliament |
| 1:49.3 | and Morgan McSweeney's willingness to let that happen is inversely proportionate. |
| 1:54.0 | And there's so many people in Westminster who think of these things in terms of 4D chess |
| 1:59.8 | and slightly overcomplicate, |
... |
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