What America's first dictator could teach Keir Starmer
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
Although some Labour MPs are still fawning over Zohran Mamdani's victory in New York, they may be better off looking to a very different sort of American politician if they want lessons they can draw on in the attempt to recover the party's fortunes.
Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for the Times, is one of the UK's best connected and closest observers of Keir Starmer's government. And he's written this week about how Huey Long, the wildly controversial 1930s Louisiana populist, provides something of a model that Starmer could seek to emulate.
He came into the News Agents studio to speak to Lewis about why...
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:08.1 | This is a global player original podcast. This is one of our weirdest starts, but I'm going to |
| 0:14.2 | start today's episode with a story from a biography of a US Senator Longdead, nicknamed America's first dictator, Huey Long. Here goes. |
| 0:24.3 | The first time that Huey Long campaigned in rural, Latin, Catholic South Louisiana, the boss |
| 0:30.4 | who had him in charge said at the beginning of the tour, Hughie, you ought to remember one thing |
| 0:34.7 | in your speeches today. You're from North Louisiana. And now you're in South Louisiana. And we got a lot of Catholic voters down here. I know, Huey answered. And throughout the day, in every small town, Long would begin by saying, When I was a boy, I would get up at 6 o'clock in the morning on Sunday, and I would hitch our old horse up to the buggy and I would |
| 0:55.2 | take my Catholic grandparents to Mass. I would bring them home and at 10 o'clock I would hitch |
| 0:59.8 | the old horse up again and I would take my Baptist grandparents to church. The effect of the |
| 1:05.0 | anecdote on the audience was obvious, electric and on the way back to Baton Rouge that night, |
| 1:10.0 | the local leader said |
| 1:10.9 | admiringly, why, Huey, you've been holding out on us? I didn't know you had any Catholic |
| 1:15.3 | grandparents. Don't be a damn fool, replied Huey. We didn't even have a horse. All year we've |
| 1:21.4 | talked about Kirstama. All year, we've tried to account for what has felt like a slow burn political demise, a lack, unlike |
| 1:29.8 | long, of the basic arts of politics. All year we've orbited around a question. Why have they |
| 1:37.1 | struggled? Why, with their huge majority, have they failed to reimpose political order on a system |
| 1:43.8 | they promised they would save from |
| 1:45.9 | itself? Why have the forces of populism of the radical rights only grown and strengthened |
| 1:51.9 | as the year has ground to its end? Episode after episode, one way or the other orbiting those questions. |
| 2:00.5 | Well, I thought today we might try and attack |
| 2:02.9 | those questions, those contemporary questions in a different way, partly through a historical |
| 2:09.0 | lens. Patrick McGuire is the chief political commentator at the Times. There is no better |
| 2:15.4 | connected chronicler of the modern Labour Party. And he thinks |
... |
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