it was peter mandelson that i remember saying the labour party needed to find a new narrative. be talking about rasputin! i thought, how weird. what does that word mean? people are so self conscious now about the need to construct stories, to have a back story, a charismatic central figure struggling to do something. and it seems like the techniques of novel writing have been adopted wholesale by spin doctors and political analysts and movers and shakers. when you were writing it, you must have been aware that the whole political debate about fake news, the now famous phrase, about truth, falsehood, the manipulation of truth, had really been taken and thrust into the limelight for us all in a way that wasn't the case five years ago. that was the weird thing about the book. i finished it last spring. fake news wasn't a word when i handed the book in to my publisher, and i had a weird tingling in my spine when people started arguing about the truth and falsehood, and alternative facts, and i thought, this is so bizarre. i suppose there is nothing new under the sun. this book deal

talent on the backbenches, as well as the front — rachel reeves, chuka umunna, advisers like peter mandelsonck, should jeremy corbyn say, you are welcome into the fold and you get jobs? there is a fantastic amount of talent currently on the front benches and the shadow cabinet. is that a no then? no, it isn't. i don't pickjeremy‘s team. all of us have to live with the consequences of our actions. i've had to live with it all my life in the labour party so there are some of the parliamentary labour party and some of the leading lights who resigned and were part of that kind of attempt to undermine corbyn shouldn't be surprised if there isn't suddenly desperate wish to fall over to drag them back in. but of course they have a role to play. tom watson, your former roommate, does he have to pay the price? i am not sure why he engaged in the undermining, the others live —— he obviously feltjeremy was a problem and he has to work that out with jeremy. tom is a talented guy. but you see it as undermining rather than an assertion of a different view? well, it was at that time. you know, let's be hon