How the fuck did this story happen? UK vs Aus Labour/Labor leadership spills

Publication: The Canary UK
Published: 21 August 2026
Paid: 150 GBP

This series explains the reporting process behind my stories for accountability and for people to learn how journalism works. 
This story: Will the UK Labour leadership spill mean the party repeats the mistakes of the Australian Labor Party in squashing dissent and debate?

The story idea

When I first heard of the Burnham-Starmer situation it was when Burnham had been installed as party leader and new PM. And in my mind I said “Oh, a leadership spill, ok.” Because I have just spent 22 years in Australia and look here a spill seems to happen every other bloody second.

It would have stopped there except I realised that people seemed to be quite overwhelmed by people asking Starmer to step back and I, not knowing much about UK politics, then went “Hold on, does it not happen often for this lot of fools over there?”

So I tentatively said to The Canary UK editor: “Do you want a piece looking at what the UK can learn from the Australian leadership spills?” And they said “Yes.” And then I said “Well bloody hell I have to find some people to interview now and hope to hell my hypothesis of there being something to know is true.”

The callout

I have told you in the previous How the fuck did this story happen post how I came to write for The Canary UK. They posted a callout for diverse writers to pitch stories to them and I thought I would throw my hat in the ring and say “Hello, I am a diverse writer, I am in Australia, there are deals happening constantly and I am cross and absolutely flabbergasted at the vast number of very daft policy notions happening between the two countries, would you like some pieces?”

I was more polite than that but you get the gist. Tip of the hat to UK travel writer James Durston, he who runs What Editors Want and Pitchwhiz and The Travel Writing Skool because that is where I saw the initial callout.

The pitch

When I first emailed the editor at The Canary UK, I sent them two pitches in separate emails. The first was for the Uncle Robbie story, the second for this leadership spills one.

And then? Crickets and chaos ensued because first there was silence, then there was the Uncle Robbie story to get done. And then I said “Are you still keen on this other one?” And they said yes.

The initial reporting plan

By this point I had already started randomly googling to see if my story idea had a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving whatever the research said. I had to find people who were experts in Australian and UK politics both who could tell me if there was anything to learn at all from Australia’s favourite pastime of stabbing politicians in the back and often also in the damn front.

And I had found some gold. Writer Lucy Wark had done some research on polling data and she had noticed something interesting about the polls for both Australian Labor and the Liberals when spills occurred. I thought “Hooray there is my first question, we are off to the races mate.”

Then I found reporting for a publication called Inside Story that actually had had someone sit down and count how many spills there had been since 1970. A staggering amount. Both at federal and state level.

“Right,” I thought. “Time to start emailing ze experts.” So I did. That was the plan, email the expert, sit them down for an interview and see what emerged. Very grounded theory for the academics out there.

The reporting process

One of the absolutely brilliant things I did with this piece was to email my first possible researcher or expert, explain who I was, who I was writing for and then say, “Here are the questions and by the way if you cannot do an interview can you recommend someone who can?” That was my hail mary. That was my get out of jail free card. That was my saving grace, my deus ex machina.

Because the first person I spoke to could not do it. So he recommended someone else.

That person could not do it either. So he recommended two others.

I emailed them both. By this point I had been waiting days in between responses and I could not start writing because I needed an expert to tell me if I was barking up the wrong tree or not.

This is common in journalism – people are not always immediately reachable, people do not always prioritise being available for the media within the media’s short attention span of a news cycle, people sometimes have to go through a fuck ton of bureaucracy to get approvals for one small quote to a journalist.

It is also exceptionally common that management especially management that has never done journalism a day in their lives do not understand this at all.

Here is the email and the questions I sent out to the first expert:

My practice is always to ask what is most convenient for them and to include the questions. If I get an interview I am very informal and use the questions as a guide and may ask others depending on what they say. I allow them to tell me if I am wrong. I always include the question about what I might have forgotten to ask or mention. Depending on the person and if I don’t know, I also ask for their preferred pronouns.

The first out of the two recommended to me said yes they could chat. We set up a time. I called them on my phone, set it to speaker mode and ran Audacity to record the interview and then the plugin to transcribe it.

And it was a lovely informal chat. We meandered around the topic a lot and chatted for an hour but in the first few minutes she told me the tidbit about the emergency department deciding it was no use asking who the PM was because it had changed so often.

Once I had the interview done, I let it sit. I knew some of the quotes I already wanted to use and I was kind of glad I was taking my time to write this story because it was one of those ones that needed to sit in your head while you made sense of all the information first.

Writing the piece

It took about a week and a half, partly because I had a few issues with health and energy levels and other work I had to balance with everything. But also because I wrote a couple of drafts and it took me a bit before I felt comfortable enough to put a draft into a Google Doc and share it with the UK editor.

It also took me some time to track down someone whose work I wanted to reference in the piece. I wanted to name them properly and it took awhile to find the name they did their research under.

Some of the information in the interview also sent me off looking for references and to do a bit of extra research and reading for background so that I wasn’t going to get facts wrong when I wrote the piece. That led to a lot of reading about UK politics and what has been happening over there over the last few months.

I think there is a tendency sometimes for journalists to feel the pressure that they should know everything. But I think the nature of the news industry now and the pace at which we have to deliver news means we often get very focused on the particular beat or topic we are covering and slowly becoming an expert in. When I wrote about property development, I was head down in it and didn’t know what was going on generally in the news outside of it for the most part.

So even though I had this idea, I wasn’t going to assume I knew everything about UK politics. I didn’t and I still don’t. I don’t live there.

The editor and I went back and forth a bit as I tried to explain the central point I was trying to make and I found a few more quotes to put in where they thought it might bolster the argument. I was trying to keep it to 800 words or less, my editor was kindly asking me to add what I needed to properly explain it.

Eventually we both hit a point where we felt we were ok with it and I said fine, please take it and go. And they did. And sent me the link.

I then scheduled social media promotion for it, added it to my portfolio and started writing this post and then promptly realised I had not sent them an invoice for it yet.

The pay

The pay was the same as for the previous story. I am enjoying writing for The Canary so as long as they will have me, I will continue sending them pitches. This time I added the SWIFT code to my invoice for their convenience.

I also made sure to add the story to my Copyright Agency account in case it generates some revenue that way.

The impact

I expected Reddit, Tiktok and X to have the highest response when I posted and promoted the story. That was where I saw the most response for the last story. But I wasn’t sure if the nature of the story would also change the reception itself. The Canary’s own numbers were always going to differ because they have built audiences on the platforms.

I also don’t expect anyone to be pointing at this story as a shining example of political analysis, no. I wrote a story about an idea I had and spoke to people to see if it had legs or not.

I don’t have visitor numbers from The Canary UK’s end but I do know the story got 173 upvotes from logged in members on the site before I promoted it.

Lessons learned

1. Pre-reporting would have helped me a bit I think. Just in terms of workflow and feeling a bit less lost at drafting stage.
2. A random vague idea about the possible connections between two things can become a story. This idea came out of the question of “Are there things that the parties are learning or can learn from each other and what are the consequences? Good? Bad?” And what transpires is that it is a question for maybe a body of research – it’s not a question easily resolved in one story. So I hope the story points to something where it’s more like “Hey look, maybe cohesion at the cost of stifling debate is not going to work for you as well as you think it might.”
3. My early science journo days came in clutch for me with the “Please let me know if there is someone else who can be interviewed if you cannot be”. Honestly saved my bacon and everyone else’s time too.
4. I am going to have to send pitches to the editor in seperate emails otherwise I think between us, we will find it hard to keep track of them all.

What next?

I do have a few ideas of what to pitch next to The Canary but I am not expecting yeses. I also want to take my time and ensure that they are stories that they think their audience will want to read about. Their audience is primarily UK-based. Whatever I write for them has to have something informative for that audience. So I will take some time to think before pitching again.

But now you can choose what to do next. You can read the story or commission me if you like the way I report.