Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor of Current Affairs

Magazine, and I am joined today by Oliver Eagleton. He is an editor at the new Left Review,

and he is also the author of the book the Sturmer project a journey to the right available

from Verso books Oliver Eagleton welcome to current affairs thank you so much for having me

Nathan someone told me recently that I I should never at the comments, but I looked at the comments.

I was like, he begins these podcasts of such exaggerated drama.

It's great.

It's like being on with Orson Wells.

It's perfect.

I want to build people up.

I want people to feel special because they are.

So, okay, listen, we have an American audience.

You're British, you're right about British politics, so you're going to have to break it down into little kindergarten lessons for us here.

People might have heard our interview with James Schneider a little while back about what happened to Jerry Corbyn,

so those people who did listen to that will have some of the background here of recent developments in British labor politics. But I think that was about a year ago,

and things have happened since then. So, you wrote a book about Kier Starrmer. Kirstarmer, now the

prime minister of the United Kingdom. He was not at the time that you wrote this book. But

let me begin with the basic question. Who is Kierstomber?

Well, Kierstomber is typically described as a kind of managerial politician, a kind of void,

a hollow man who doesn't really believe in anything and got to be the leader of the Labor Party,

one of the two dominant parties in the UK's Westminster political system,

by just being kind of pushed in different directions by different interests and influences

...