Welcome to the Eurointelligence podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, Susanna Muncheng and

Jack Smith. Today we're going to talk about the UK. We had a mini crisis in the UK, really a mini

crisis. We could tie me to three days, three days of excitement where it looked at one point,

at least if you followed the media, that Kirstana was about to be kicked out

of Downing Street.

And we, you know, we've been sort of watching this with a certain incredulity and disbelief

because we've been sort of wondering what on earth could this possibly achieve.

Not the question we're not particularly interested in who, you know, who's the prime minister or not.

This is sort of not a debate that we normally use to engage in, but the question is, okay, what would a different prime minister do?

And interestingly, that question was hardly ever discussed.

It was just about whether Kirsteum was popular

and whether someone was more popular than him and what the Labour Party could do to win the next

election because they were not popular enough. Certainly, my impression was always that it was

like a very, very strange discussion, much stranger even than the 22 upheavals when Boris Johnson and the Trust got

ousted. I mean, they got ousted for at least some obvious reasons. The experience of

ousting leaders hasn't been entirely positive in the UK in recent years. Jack, what do you make

of it? There were two factors that led to this sort of fizzling out.

Starmour is not very popular at the moment, either within his own party or within the electorate at large.

So I don't think that the danger is completely gone, but I think that this particular attempt fizzled out for a few different reasons.

I mean, the most obvious and immediate one was that Andy Burnham,

who was going to be the more like clear contender to Kear Starmor for, you know,

Labor's leadership is not in the House of Commons. So, you know, he has no way to sort of directly challenge Stramer for the leadership. And basically any avenue that he could take

...