00:00for something as high profile as this they have sort of almost made their mind up and that is
00:04part of the problem that that you get involved quite late in the day yeah and then you are trying
00:09to scramble around and you're trying to find out what you can find out from mostly publicly
00:14available information and that's sometimes that is you are showing i've had experience of my very
00:19very good team would go away and they just do some really excellent googling back in the day
00:24and uh i really hope that they're not relying on chat gbt but you know just really excellent
00:30googling is a skill and they'd find all sorts of things because in the end part of the trick is
00:35you are you need to do what a journalist will be able to do and of course a small team
00:40in the
00:41cabinet office neither has the skills or the expertise of the resources as some extraordinary
00:45investigative journalism outfits there's going to be things that you can't get to although peter
00:49manderson's life is fairly well documented i mean there's a lot maybe that was the problem maybe
00:53there were so many things that they had like the their two pages couldn't quite get it all in
00:57but there is a thing about you are just relying on what you have in open source and then sometimes
01:01you are also trying to find out from what people within like what what are the questions that
01:05haven't been asked what's not been made public what don't you know so again for big appointments i
01:11would usually try and talk to people who'd work for people before you do lots of informal referencing
01:15and checking and then sometimes you would go to the chief whip in my case so you'd say
01:21uh look i know all this stuff from the civil service and government side what do you know
01:26from the party side because again there is a there is a proper by the way space between these two
01:31things and there'll be all sorts of stuff that a political party will know that actually never
01:36comes near government and sort of sometimes kind of vice versa so you'd be trying to get as much as
01:42possible a rounded picture and the reason you're doing that isn't because it's really fun to find out
01:47juice about people although but it is sometimes it's quite fun um is that you're trying to make
01:52sure that the government is protected so the whole point of this is that you're putting somebody in a
01:57job you want them the government to be function to function well you want not to have to be in
02:02the
02:02position that you've created a basically delayed detonation and that's what it feels like to me that
02:07Keir Starmer is in the situation where he's got god knows how many delayed devices yeah that are just
02:14going to come back because they haven't done
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