'The same TALENTLESS LOSERS as before!' - Patrick Christys tears Andy Burnham's Cabinet to pieces

Andy Burnham's cabinet is an absolute calamity circus. What were the big things that Andy Burnham promised? We can be that party, the party that puts more power in people's hands, drives good growth in every postcode and puts hope in every heart. That's my mission as your new leader, to bring back hope. We will change politics to make it more collaborative, more about problem solving than point scoring. Change, hope, a changed Labour Party, hope. So he's appointed a convicted fraudster to a cabinet position, Louise Haig, brilliant, great star. Then back comes Angela Rayner as housing secretary. She'll be in charge of the largest council house building programme in history apparently. She had to quit or was sacked because she failed to pay £40,000 stamp duty on a lovely little seaside flat in Hove. And when she was housing secretary, the number of new homes being built in England actually went down. So Andy's off to a flyer here, isn't he? Ed Miliband was absolutely desperate to be chancellor, so much so that he even reportedly wanted to sell his own soul and allow more oil and gas drilling in the North Sea. He didn't get the job. He's now foreign secretary. John Healey is the chancellor, which meant that Ed Miliband had to sit next to Healey in cabinet today. And if looks could kill. Andy, thank you. This is just such a huge honour and a privilege to be your chancellor, your chancellor as our prime minister's cabinet. And I want you to bear in mind that as foreign secretary, this man... ...is now in charge of MI6. Remarkable, isn't it? I mean, who has replaced Ed Miliband? Miata Fanbula, who is apparently even more hardline on net zero than he is. And she didn't do herself any favours by somehow managing to get lost on her way out of Downing Street last night. We have Dame Angela Eagle and Miata Fanbula, who is the new energy and net security. Will you come over? These leading ministers in the cabinet, will you come and say hello to Newsnight? Are you delighted with your jobs? I have to say, we have a veteran and we have one of the high flyers of the Labour Party, Miata Fanbula. And there they are. They're walking out. They walk out the wrong way. If I'm allowed to save it, obviously happy. There you go. Off they go, finding their... It all bodes very well, doesn't it? It all bodes very well. Burnham has reappointed failed business secretary Jonathan Reynolds back to being the business secretary. This is a bloke who had to apologise after falsely claiming that he was a qualified solicitor, when actually he's just nothing of the sort. It's come to my attention that in a speech I gave on the 28th of April 2014, recorded in column 614 of Hansard on the subject of high speed rail, I made a reference to my experience of using our local transport system when I worked as a solicitor in Manchester city centre. I should have made clear that specifically, Madam Deputy Speaker, that was a reference at the time to being a trainee solicitor. This was an inadvertent error, and although this speech was over a decade ago, as it has been brought to my attention, I would like to formally correct the record and I seek your advice on doing so. Yeah. Now Yvette Cooper is health secretary. Brilliant. Another person who doesn't seem to know what a woman is. Presumably can say, yeah, I'm very confident what a woman is. Yeah, but if I, I don't know, I just wonder if we could get into rabbit holes on this. Why are we all kind of getting ourselves tangled up? Well, I think it's because a lot of people listening would say, well, I know what a woman is. It's really straightforward. And then it feels that politicians start to get themselves into into rabbit holes about this. Yeah, as you can see, I'm avoiding going down a rabbit hole because I just think this is pointless. So do you know that or not? That doesn't sound like it. Anyway, Burnham has put Lucy Powell as education secretary, which is good news for people who despise the spiteful class warrior that is Bridget Philipson. But it is, of course, this Lucy Powell. I don't know if you saw the documentary on Channel 4 about rape gangs. No, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Yeah, OK. There was a real issue. Let's get that dog whistle out, shall we? Yeah, she was forced to apologise for saying that she thinks that the rape gang issue is just a little kind of racist dog whistle. Nice. Oh, and West Streeting is now defence secretary. So Burnham overlooked the current defence secretary, Dan Jarvis, who served in the military as an officer in the Parachute Regiment. He also overlooked Al Karnes, who was a Royal Marine, I believe, won the Military Cross, has served in every major conflict for roughly the last 20 years. And he's replaced him with... Oh, Jeremy Corbyn! Yeah, I mean, that just makes sense, doesn't it? That just makes absolute sense. Burnham promised change and hope, but his cabinet is just full of the most failed, talentless losers that we have before. I mean, it's just ridiculous, isn't it, really? Using the internet without a VPN, a virtual private network, is a bit like taking to the road without car insurance. All it takes is one unlucky moment to cost you a lot of cash. This video's sponsor is Private Internet Access. They are the VPN to help keep you safe. Click the link in the description below to find out why over 30 million people have downloaded PIA to protect themselves online. A virtual private network is an app that hides your IP address and helps keep your data private. When you're browsing the internet at home, you give up a large amount of data to businesses, to shops, and indeed to social media giants too. Hackers have the ability to steal your personal data with ease, including sensitive information such as passwords, keystrokes, and even your personal photos. 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Anyway, the breaking news tonight, just when you thought this shower of a government couldn't get any worse, a video has now emerged tonight of Wes Treating and Shabana Mahmood joking about Labour's early release scheme. Yeah, we'll play that for you again in a little bit. You would have probably had to read the subtitles on that one, but they were essentially laughing and joking about allowing people out of prison early. And it comes as also breaking tonight, two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper are set to be released early under Labour's plans to tackle the prison crisis. That is according to the Daily Telegraph. Albert Bowers and Jesse Cole, who were jailed for 13 years in 2020 for the manslaughter of PC Harper, they were in a car that dragged the police officer for more than a mile along country roads when his ankles got caught in a tow rope loop. His mother, Debbie Adlam, was told by the Ministry of Justice that they had had their sentences cut. And she's told the Daily Telegraph, which I believe are, I think putting this on their front page tomorrow, it makes me feel sick. Andrew's life doesn't get to come back. It feels like a slap in the face and an insult. So look, there you go. Let's get the thoughts of my panel. We've got a Conservative MP for Tatton, it's Esther McVey. We've got a GB News contributor, Will Kingston, and journalist and broadcaster, Kai Wilshaw. Right, Esther, okay, let's deal with the broader picture first here. The actual quality or lack of in this cabinet for a bloke who promised change and hope. Yeah, well, there were two things he did and I think he's storing himself up a lot of problems. He purged ministers who were loyal to Starmer and then he brought back, failed and disgraced ministers who were in Starmer's cabinet. And a reason I'll point out a couple of things. One, just because somebody's loyal to a prime minister, that shouldn't be a reason to get rid of them because actually you need people loyal to a prime minister. Now don't get me wrong, there'll be lots of cheers that David Lammy went. Oh yeah. Right, so there were people that he got rid of who we needed to get rid of, who weren't up to the job. But as he found out today from Darren Jones, who was up to the job and was very able, he got rid of him. He knew what was going on. Burnham announces a policy to get all his figures wrong on this reduction in energy prices. So we've got an issue bubbling up there. But to bring back people like Angela Rayner, right, to bring back people like Louise Hague, I mean, neither of them were good at their jobs and they're disgraced too. So what was the point of bringing them back? Now I think Alex Norris, who's come in instead of David Lammy, I think he's a good guy. Anything will be improved. Anything would have been an improvement. A vegetable would be an improvement. But to put people into cabinet, which I think is insulting, who've only been in parliament for two years, they cannot do the job. You've got a chief whip who's been in parliament for two years, Annelies Midgley, and you've brought in Mia Vamboula, who's only been an MP for two years, who is sort of left of Corbyn and also more net zero than Ed Miliband. So I think there's a problem there. And equally, Ed Miliband should never have been made foreign secretary. It's not a compensation post because you didn't get chancellor. And equally, the Trump administration not only thinks he's terrible with his net zero policies, they think he's dangerous. They don't like either of the Miliband brothers. Ed Miliband, dangerous, and David Miliband is a Hillary Clinton fan and acolyte. So I think there are a lot of mistakes in this cabinet reshuffle. Well, Patrick, this cabinet doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. It's not below the bottom of the barrel. It doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as barrels. It is, we've talked about for some time, the rise of the career politician and the relative decline of people with actual real world experience. But this is the sad culmination of that trend. Settle in, I'm going to give you all, and there's 28 cabinet ministers. There we go. Settle in, I'm going to give you the full sum total of all of their private sector experience for all 28. Louise Hague, three years as a middle manager in Aviva. That ended with a fraud conviction. Andy Burnham, three years in a small publishing business straight out of university. And that's it. That's not. Six years of private sector experience. It's not, is it? Six years of private sector experience. And that is it out of a cabinet of 28 ministers. Now, this is like absolutely unacceptable in a climate environment where we need to grow an economy and these people can't read a balance sheet. We need to do better and we need to get better people in politics. This is not good enough. Well, you were quite exercised by that. Well, just two examples of where your facts just aren't right, where Streeting spent a year in PwC and Lucy Powell spent three years in a public affairs firm. Those are private companies, Will. But of course, don't let facts get in the way of a good story. I'll increase it up to 10 years then. 10 years of private sector experience for 28 cabinet ministers. The fact that you couldn't even get that, the fact that you couldn't even get that wrong will suggest that there might be others. One year of PwC in the grad programme for West Streeting. I apologise. I'm sure that'll really help his defence portfolio where there's no defence experience guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an insult to the voters of this country. No, no, no. What this is, is pathetic nonsense. And you know why? It's because the right is running scared, isn't it? You're scared of what we've seen in this appointment. You see an incredible chancellor with serious experience. He was at the Treasury many years ago. He's coming back. Mahmood is coming back to finish the job. Rayner, Cooper, McFadden are all coming in, serious briefs to get serious priorities sorted. Things like council housing, social care, and sorting the welfare bill, right? All you could do was pick up a few people misspeaking, missteps, people changing their mind, people not being able to find their way out of 10 Downing Street. You're running scared, Patrick. Admit it. OK, well, I'm not going to admit it because I'm absolutely not running scared of any of them. The best appointment was John Healey, so I'll give you that. Absolutely. So he had got experience before, but he's also been set up, I think, maybe, and he's got to watch out this to fail because he needs to find money for the defence and he's got to balance up welfare and defence. Now, how are you going to do it? Because I think you'll find Burnham will always duck out of the way. But to bring somebody who was convicted for fraud and put them in charge of ethics was a major mistake. In a cabinet position, a plum cabinet position, they've already had to take the public sector fraud authority brief out of her portfolio and move it to DWP because she can't be trusted to do it. This is going to be a weeping sore that you've got somebody, and I'm going to go to Angela Rayner here as well. She failed in her brief before. They weren't on course to build 1.5 million homes. She did fail. She had a year and a half. And then as secretary of state for housing, didn't pay the right amount of stamp duty. Trust me, those are two major failings of appointments. She was exonerated in the latter. The first point you make, this idea, this idea, this idea. Absolutely, she did not. She's been exonerated by it. She's been exonerated by her own lawyers and others. Let's just, let's just, sorry, this housing thing, as if being housing minister for a year and a half suddenly means, I mean, how long do houses take to get bill tests there? Things don't happen overnight. This is symptomatic of the kind of political culture we have. A sugar rush high that we expect things tomorrow when it's just not realistic. Then your prime minister at the time, Starmer, along with Angela Rayner, shouldn't have promised 1.5 million. By the end of the parliament. Listen, but we all knew it wasn't possible. And they should have known it wasn't possible, but they were promising things in their manifesto which were fundamental lies, whether it was not taxing working people, whether it was growth for the country. You know, we're not going to tax people, but they were all lies. And that was another thing that turned out to be a lie. No, trust me, the reshuffle will prove to be a weeping sore. I think this is the start of Burnham now absolutely on the demise. It was a bad reshuffle. There were two posts that were worth anything. Let me just reintroduce this clip. I would just urge everybody at home to read the subtitles on this clip, because it's a kind of hot mic moment between Shabana Mahmood, Wes Streeting and Alex Norris, the new justice minister as well. And this is this is the clip where they appear to be kind of joking, really, about the early release of prisoners. Here it is. The fact that you've got Hamish Faulkner still anywhere near the thing, I've said it before, he looks like the lad who used to chew his collar at the back of the classroom. And he's someone, you know, I mean, look, you know, he's a handsome looking man. But the Hamish Faulkner post is a very interesting one because it turns out Ed Miliband is really only going to do net zero going around the world. Hamish Faulkner is going to be the main person in the Department of Defence. It's going to be straddling it with Cabinet and he's also going to be working closely with Annalise Dodds, who's Burnham's eyes and ears. So he is the dominant figure now. Are you of the view that we've basically given Ed Miliband a job of flying either privately or first class around the world to talk about net zero? Absolutely. You couldn't make it up and it's to keep him out the way. And that's why it's probably the best appointment of the lot, because it means he has no real power in this country and that can only be a good thing. But he's an embarrassment. The Trump administration don't like him. I'd rather him be embarrassing than increasing our energy bills. No, not alienating ourselves with our closest partner. I'm not defending the bloke. Obviously, I don't like him, but I don't want him as Chancellor. But you just said it was a good appointment. All relativistic. All right. Well, look, just on the video that emerged there about the kind of like laughing a jerky little bit about early release, Shabana Mahmood in the last few minutes said, I think everyone can see there is no ill intent behind this ribbing of the new Lord Chancellor, a role I once filled and which comes with immense challenges thanks to the vandalism inflicted on our justice system by the last conservative government. But I appreciate this is an extremely serious issue and do not want anyone to mistake this moment of levity for a lack of serious intent. West Streeting, as the new defence secretary, is commenting on the same video. I hope everyone can see there was no ill intent behind this ribbing of the new justice secretary. It was a reference to an old May Clark joke, but I appreciate these are very serious issues and I'm sorry for any offence inadvertently caused by this moment of levity. And yeah, it does come, of course, as the killers of PC Harper are set for early release. So the timing, of course, not particularly good.