151: The Epstein Fails

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Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray, and I'm here in the Private Eye office with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen, and Ian Hislop.

We are here to discuss again the three totally unrelated stories from the last week's news, with the link, of course, that they have all been covered or will soon be covered in Private Eye magazine.

So there you go.

There's the thematic link.

It's Private Eye.

Right, first, we're going to go to America.

We're going to talk about the ongoing mission to MAGA, make America great again, again.

The MAGA movement, as it should better be known.

So, Helen, not everything is rosy in the White House Rose Garden, is it?

This is the falling out of the MAGA movement and President Trump's appointees to the FBI and Attorney General over the death of Jeffrey Epstein.

So, there's a whole cadre of people who were like radio hosts, podcasters, maybe people who just say a lot of stuff on Twitter, like Catch Turd 2, if you're familiar with his work.

Of course.

Elon Musk Reply guys.

But they are a kind of really big and influential cohort who have essentially four people who are big fans of Donald Trump, completely replaced the mainstream media.

Because for those people, even Fox News who will say things like Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, are a bit soft and weak.

And to the extent they're so important that

Caroline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, had a special influencers-only briefings,

which were,

I mean, they make North Korea look like a kind of loose-lipped confederation of racist.

This one where the guy from Mumford and Sons, Peter Marshall's son, turned up and asked a mad question?

Yes, he did.

And he's, as they all did, he's like, so thankful for you to being here.

Just amazing to be here.

There's also a special MAGA influencer seat at the regular press briefing.

So you have ABC and the New York Times and all of those, and then they bring in somebody who is, you know, host of sort of weekly world news kind of equivalents, who usually starts their question by going, unlike the lying legacy media here, I want to know how great is Donald Trump.

Anyway, so they're all terribly split about Jeffrey Epstein.

Can you give us a very quick recap, just for listeners who weren't paying attention, Jeffrey Epstein and his crimes?

Disgraced financier and child sex trafficker.

He managed lots of money.

He portrayed himself as a billionaire, which he absolutely wasn't.

He was managing other people's money.

And he portrayed himself in lots of ways.

Like he would wear Harvard sweaters, despite having not been to Harvard.

In common with many of the...

I was going to say, in no other ways,

for the lawyer's purposes, Geoffrey Archer used to sort of say that he'd been to Oxford, remember?

When he'd actually been to like a

teacher training college.

Yeah.

We both jumped in there in stereo.

That's what I was not we could.

And in fact, I did do a mastermind round on Geoffrey Archer once.

Did you?

Anyway, we don't need to go into obsessive lunatics.

Well there's clearly a playbook for people who want to seem movers and shakers.

And some of the things that

Epson did were that he would have a kind of lively social circle.

He found a few influential kind of New York society gatekeepers, Floridian society gatekeepers, and kind of weaseled his way way in with them.

But in the 2000s, he was also investigated for a 14-year-old said that she and her friends had been asked to go over to his house and give him massages.

Then there was a situation in which the police found a load of evidence, but the prosecutors convinced him to go for a really low charge.

He was only done for two counts of soliciting a minor for prostitution.

It was on day release he served a sentence, 13-month sentence where he had a TV, they didn't lock his cell door, and he was essentially, you know, kind of got away with it.

The guy who was in charge of that, the prosecutor, was later named as, in Donald Trump's first term, his Secretary of Labour, Alex Acosta.

Donald Trump himself was also a friend, or at least a fellow partier of Epstein, who was a member of Mar-a-Lago at one point.

And he once gave this monstrous quote from 2002, Donald Trump, saying, He likes, like me, he likes girls, and I hear he likes them on the younger side.

Which is one of those things, in retrospect, doesn't look as great as it did.

But there's this one.

Why shouldn't they look that?

In the world back here.

Oh, things were very different than Ian in 2002.

You just, people thought differently.

They wore skinny jeans.

It was terrible.

But yeah, so there's been this long-standing feeling that, first of all,

there are two kind of Epstein very strange things.

The first is the fact that he really got away with it the first time.

There was a sweetheart deal from prosecutors.

Then a very brave journalist called Julie Brown at the Miami Herald pursued that deal and said how unbelievably corrupt it was, and particularly linking it to that Trump's first term appointment, that this was the guy in charge of it.

At which point the people, the feds, basically got back involved in in investigating him again.

He was arrested in 2019 and not long after that, was found hanged in his cell.

And this has been at the source of many, many conspiracy theories since.

Most bits of MAGA will do not believe that he killed himself.

They believe he was either an intelligence asset or he was friends with people who had his little client list and he would have outed them in court and therefore he couldn't simply could not be allowed to get to trial.

I mean again to talk about eye villains of the past, some of the bits of this are quite reminiscent of Maxwell because there were lots of these things about Maxwell disappearing off the back of his yacht and how unbelievably convenient that that was.

The story itself, when I was reading back through it, just seems very familiar in lots of ways.

It partly plays into conspiracy theories, but it also plays into actual conspiracies, which is the fact that very rich and powerful men do get away with sexual abuse.

There is an actual conspiracy here, which is that lots and lots of people went on his private jet to his island, saw things that are probably actionable legally, and yet, apart from him and Gillette Max, where they procured those people, no one has actually seen justice.

And there weren't genuinely, I mean, these case files have now not emerged, and the American government is saying, oh, they don't exist after all, having digged them up for many, many years.

But there were the flight logs, weren't there?

I mean, there were some extraordinary now.

Donald Trump featured on a lot of the flight logs of taking flights on Epstein's private jets.

Bill Clinton did.

I mean, all sorts of figures.

King went to, yeah, went scuba diving.

I think he went to scuba diving.

He went on a trip, was scuba diving.

The Clintons were involved.

Jeff Staley of Barclays, for example, has now been barred.

Is this right, Adam barred for him?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he was the boss of Barclays.

He's actually related to his time at JPMorgan Chase before that, where he worked very closely with...

Jeffrey Epstein.

He was back in court.

He received a lifetime ban from the Financial Conduct Authority in 2023, which he tried to appeal earlier this year.

Interestingly, not actually for his connections with Jeffrey Epstein, but for lying to the board of Barclays about him at the time.

He said that he didn't have a close relationship with him.

Since then,

mostly he sort of self-administered because it was in the case he brought trying to appeal his ban by the Financial Conduct Authority, all sorts of extraordinary thousands of emails came out in which the two of them, Epstein and Jeff Staley, referred to each other as family.

It turned out Staley's student daughter called him Uncle Jeffrey, and he was helping her out with sort of university applications and all sorts of stuff like that.

There's an awful lot of

people still.

Melinda French Gates, the ex-wife of Bill Gates, said one of the reasons that she left Bill Gates was that she found out of his infidelities and his friendship with Epstein.

So there are a lot of people caught in this dragon.

One of whom, of course, is Prince Andrew of Blessed Memory.

Yes.

Who went to a dinner in New York hosted for Epstein after he had had this sweetheart plea deal involving underage sex offences.

Can I check?

One of the things that I have read about Epstein is that obviously his interest was in pigging up that he knew all of these people and so that he might have inflated these friendships.

Now obviously I know in the case of for example Prince Andrew we've got photos of them walking together.

We've got records of their friendship outside Epstein's recollection.

Is that the case with some of these others or I presume these are all quite well documented?

Yeah, I mean, otherwise, you wouldn't be able to publish it.

I mean, during his life, Epstein was incredibly litigious and had a very full court press.

You know, he did that classic strategy of just, you know, saying, I'm going to come after you, and then also like astroturfing sites about him.

And he also did that thing which I think, I mean, you'll know this from the eye.

People just sort of appear out of nowhere, and because someone that they know is sort of semi-vouched for them, they don't do any more research themselves.

That's Cernie Madoff, isn't it?

Right, Right, once you crack into someone into the software.

It's a little fantastically gullible.

It should always be remembered.

And if another rich person says he's okay, they go, well, he must be okay.

He's a big yoga teacher.

Yeah, so I think there was a lot of that.

He was just somebody that hung around.

Like he used to go and eat in Harvard's canteen.

He's just sort of one of those people who appeared and everybody treated him like he was normal.

Right.

And he was.

I mean, the Prince Andrew connections, he was invited to a party at Windsor, a party at Sandringham.

I think one of the daughters, Prince Andrew's daughter's 16th birthday parties as well.

I mean,

this was not sort of, you know, distant relationships at all.

And actually, new stuff is still emerging.

In the Jess Daley case earlier this year, it came out that even after the contact with him that Prince Andrew had been forced to admit to in that disastrous news night interview, there were in fact emails from about six months after that in 2011 in which Epstein said to Prince Andrew, keep in close touch and we'll play some more with four exclamation marks, which, you know, you have to hope they were talking about golf at that point.

Or tennis, but I don't believe either, nor do you.

I mean, your point was that perhaps Epstein bigged up the friendships.

We're now in an area where everyone is bigging down their friendships and saying they barely knew him.

Trump in particular is saying you know hardly registered at all.

And what I want to ask Helen is is it now the fact that conspiracy theories loved Epstein when it might make the Democrats look terrible.

Now it's making the Republicans look bad?

I mean he had been a Democratic donor.

He had donated to several.

But he was one of those people who hung around sort of New York and Florida, and therefore, kind of everybody knew him.

So it wasn't purely Democrat.

But you're right.

Before this election, you get J.D.

Vance saying, release the client list.

The feeling is it's going to implicate lots of people, like lots of posh liberals, basically, in tech and the arts.

Not that it's going to kind of implicate anybody in Republican circles.

Pam Bondi, who is the Attorney General, said she had the client list on her desk earlier this year and now says it doesn't exist.

And it was a deliberate electoral thing to deliberately exploit this kind of conspiracy theory, wasn't it?

Because they were saying, you know, we're going to release all the JFK files and all UFO files as well.

They were absolutely playing to

that kind of that marketplace.

Yeah, deep state.

Essentially, all of it is, so if you want to understand MAGA, one of the things you have to understand is it's deeply anti-establishment.

It thinks it has a touching faith in the ability of the federal government to do stuff.

Cover-ups.

It doesn't believe it can do anything else.

It doesn't believe it can run veteran services or USAID or anything like that.

But it thinks the one thing it's absolutely bang-up doing is covering up assassination attempts.

This level of competence is highly unlikely it's very hopeful i mean but the thing is that the suicide is relatively suspicious in the sense that lots of things happened so for example there were two guards on duty but neither of them did the hourly checks they were supposed to be doing on the night half of the cameras in the wing were down for example epstein's cellmate got moved out a day before but the problem is a lot of this is explicable by

prisons being poorly staffed and maintained.

If that was in a British prison, you'd think, well, of course the cameras don't work.

And why would anyone do the shifts?

Can I check?

This split that you're mentioning in the MAGA movement, is this the MAGA base?

And the influencers, yeah.

So base and influencers are on the same side in this?

Almost all of them.

So people like, say, Mike Cernovich, who was one of the Pizzagate people.

Which we covered on this podcast, didn't we?

Which was, I went and visited

the non-basement.

And there isn't a basement.

No.

And the person who runs it is incredibly charming.

And the whole thing was total and utter nonsense.

Yeah, he's very upset about this.

Alex Jones, not the delightful one from The One Show, but the big walrus-y one from InfoWars, also thinks this must be something here.

Laura Lumer, a feature of many of my US icons because I enjoy her enormously.

Tucker Carlson is on this.

Benny Johnson, fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism, since did an ideological 180 and is now a mega, MAGA influencer.

And obviously, as previously mentioned, Cat Turd.

Can I just say how marvellous it is?

You sit there going, yes, he was an online influencer and now he seems to be Secretary of State in the entire world.

I mean, the career progression in the United States is quite difficult for us to cope with.

Oh, it's wild, isn't it?

It's like someone going from sort of heart FM to being head of MI6.

It's literally, in the case of Kennedy, it's his actual lunatic fringe conspiracy theorist to health secretary.

But your point is that it is quite funny that all these people who were out and at conspiracy theories are now in office saying, look, there's no conspiracy here.

I don't know why you all think there's a conspiracy.

There isn't.

I mean, that is quite funny.

Why won't you believe me?

It's like, well, they didn't believe anybody else.

Have you not ever had any encounters with them?

They didn't believe the last head of the FBI.

You have dented your credibility simply by becoming head of the FBI.

But it does point to the fact that for these people,

there is so little trust in institutions.

But it also reflects the oneness of the MAGA movement.

The only thing that unites it really is that belief in Trump.

And I was watching the Turning Point USA conference, which is run by Charlie Kirk.

It's one of those kind of grassroots, young Gen Z online right conservatives.

And I was just reflecting on the fact there's almost nobody really who straightforwardly inherits the Trump mantle, who can just, their word is law.

The closest I think you'll ever come is Tucker Carlson, and he believes some truly bonkers things.

He thought he was attacked by a demon in his sleep last year.

But occasionally he says something that's also extremely cogent, like it's bad that young people can't buy a house, they've got no investment in the future.

But

I think what this reveals is even Trump is struggling to damp it down.

He did a slightly mad Truth Social post that began, boys, or in some cases gals,

stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

Oh, well, that'll do it.

So I think it's a really interesting example of him losing control of the base and in a way him not being able to kind of shimmy into being in tune with them, which is kind of fascinating to me.

And is that dangerous for him?

Well, I think...

You said hopefully.

I know.

You think about it, is there at some point, a sort of tumbrel moment, where they go, oh, you, you know, this is what Elon Musk's theory is that he's pursuing, which is he did a tweet which he then deleted saying, well, of course, Trump hasn't released the Epstein files because he's in them.

And at some point, does that nagging seed of doubt grow and grow and grow?

And at some point, I don't think, I think this is the way around it would happen.

I'm not sure it would happen, is that Trump becomes unpopular for other reasons, like the economy is bad.

And at some point, people turn, and then this is a great excuse, an off-ramp, from being, thank you, but now we need to send you off into the night.

I think this is how people could end up getting off the train if they want to for other reasons.

You can try and exploit them for political means, but when the actual evidence doesn't turn out to be there, that's your fault, and now you're part of the conspiracy.

And that's, I think, the real danger to Trump now.

Because, I mean, it's not hard to tie him into it.

He's on the flight logs.

He is another Manhattan and Florida-based businessman who moved in the exact same social circles as Jeffrey Epstein.

I mean, if you want to

join dots between them, it's one of the more easy ones to do, isn't it?

Yeah, and accused of multiple sexual offences against women.

And some of which...

He ran the Miss Teen USA pageant for years and boasted about walking into dressing rooms when uh when when the girls were getting changed as well, didn't you?

Yeah, so it's not it's not a kind of that would be so out of character, he's normally so monastic.

Yeah, I I but I so I'd I think you I think you're right, Ian, I think it is a bit hopeful to think that this will cause a kind of sundering between the MAGA faithful and Trump, because it is such a sort of one-man faith-based movement.

But I wouldn't be surprised if it comes around again in a couple of years when people are irritated with him for other reasons.

You know, if the economy is flatlining, if, as it seems likely, he has given a load of aid to Ukraine, for example.

Even I think people on the MAGA right right are getting a bit pissed off with his overt support for Netanyahu and everything that Netanyahu does.

I mean, I think he himself is getting pissed off with Netanyahu, hence his great quote the other day.

But I can see this kind of, I can see this one being a kind of case of spelli that just lingers around.

And will it be an excuse for buyers' remorse in the way you'll say,

well, I mean, I wasn't wrong to support Trump, but then when this came out, I obviously knew he was up to no good.

He got captured like everybody else.

That's what I mean.

That's why if I had to place my my money now about if Trump doesn't run again for a third term, and I think he will probably try to in some way, maybe more or less,

you know, professionally, then somebody like Tucker Carlson does feel to me like the next evolution and that he is charismatic.

He does say some things that make sense, but he's also even further down the path of loon.

My question on these occasions is always, can anything be done to rescue the U.S.

media ecosystem, people trusting basic statements from their governments, anything like like that?

Or are people just too far gone?

Do you know what really annoys me about this saga?

It's the fact that I went back and read through all of the reporting.

The New York Times was reporting the original indictment of Epstein, right?

It was this reporter, Julie Brown, at the Miami Herald, who really got the case reopened.

If Epstein, a bit like grooming gangs, is a testament to anything.

It's a testament to a few dogged journalists keeping on at very unfashionable, disgusting, horrible stories in the face of huge amounts of legal threats and pressure.

And

of course, the MAGA influences nonetheless not, you know, know, just not taking any notice of that.

She's not now a MAGA hero or a thing.

She's not now a MAGA hero.

In fact, the year that

Epstein was arrested the first time and did his deal, she had to take a 15% pay cut because

her newsroom was downsizing.

She's now sold this as a documentary idea, which means she's been able to buy a house for the first time in her late 50s.

Taka Carlson will be pleased about that.

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Right, now we come to part two of this week's podcast.

Helen has regenerated as Jane McKenzie and she'll be

Jane will be regenerating back into Helen for the final part of today's show.

There's a detailed plan behind it all, it's all working out.

But before that, just before we come to Jane, there is a little victory for the eye we have to announce.

This is hugely exciting.

I'm just going to read a line to you and then I'm going to tell you who said it.

You shouldn't need a driveway to own an electric car.

My plan for change is boosting funding for infrastructure to allow cables to run safely beneath pavements.

That's cheaper at-home charging, putting money back in the pockets of working people.

Not my words, those of the Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

The Gully campaign has worked.

They've announced funding for gross pavement charging.

So there you go.

Well done.

Congratulations.

Right, brief, cheerful interlude over.

Now we come to more gloom.

Jane, what is...

What's another victory for the eye?

Jane's taken out a bishop.

I pitched this to Jane as

how to get a bishop defrocked or whatever the process is.

But you're denying all knowledge and all responsibility.

As I understand it, by the time the eye hit the shops, the trustees of the Church of Wales had already put wheels in motion to announce they had no confidence in the bishop, so he was already on the way out.

So

we're dealing with a story about the church in Wales.

And that's not the church of Wales, we'll get into that.

But this is about the Archbishop of Wales, Andrew John, who also doubled as the Bishop for Bangor, who has taken early retirement.

He has defrocked himself.

So what we first heard about was, in particular, the sort of financial allegations, although, I mean, these were also cathedral staff were going on lovely foreign jollies quite expensively,

using money that wasn't even the cathedrals.

So they were making use of diocese funds to take cathedral staff on lovely jollies.

They also spent an enormous amount of money on designer furniture for the cathedral.

Designer pews.

Correct.

And

I think like designer lecterns and altars and but yes, they got some very beautiful stackable pews.

They did have very beautiful pews before.

This is where Jane also comes in as the nooks and corners correspondent.

When you say a large amount of money.

I said £400,000.

Yes, that's when, as editor, I thought, this is a church.

They don't have £400,000.

How are they spending this on pews?

And, you know, the people of Bangor have some other needs rather than sort of some brand new uncomfortable seats.

You know, there are issues of poverty in the area that maybe the church could be helping with.

So it was £20,000 on the foreign jollies, the trips to Rome and Dublin, which feel like more Catholic destinations than Church and Wales.

Anyway, £400,000 on designer pews.

You said this was diocese money.

What does that mean?

Where does that come from?

So these bodies are separate charities.

The diocese is responsible for things

across the whole area.

So all the parish churches, any church schools, anything like that is the diocese.

The cathedral and its own specific employees.

separate fund,

separate money.

But this was diocese money being spent on cathedral stuff.

On cathedral stuff.

And that's money that's been donated by members of the public?

Effectively, yes.

And sort of the long-term money that the church has for the ways in which it owns things.

But it's, yes.

Okay.

So

they were already spending like drunken sailors, basically.

Well, in fact, one of the other financial issues that came out during the process of looking into all of this when the church sent people to have a look at their accounts was the uncontrolled spending on refreshments after services.

Ah, we're not talking tea and coffee.

We are not.

Or a glass of sherry.

No, it was considerably more than that as sort of later emerged.

And this was the cathedral priests,

the adult members of the choir were quaffing considerably after services and performances.

And that brings us on.

The thing I really wanted to ask you about, Jane, was the Cathedral Oktoberfest event.

Can you just run past us how that came to be?

So I believe this was in 2022.

They decided to bring back the tradition that the church blesses the beer for the harvest festival.

And then

had

a very drink-focused event focused around the cathedral.

So a lot of cathedral people were involved in that.

I suppose the idea was that it would get involved with the community and be a part of it and try and like a pet service or whatever.

But this turned into a drinking culture.

Absolutely.

I mean, I was slightly shocked when I was reading the details to see that they were on, was it Good Friday?

Yes.

Celebrating by having the seven last shots of Christ.

Yes.

Which is a drink for everyone.

Which Gospel's that from?

Is it John?

As a layman, that strikes me as quite extreme.

I mean, there was a tradition of bishops rather like Mervyn Stockwood, who was a rather famous bishop who used to celebrate some of the religious festivals with champagne, saying, well, if it's good enough for everyone else, it's good enough for our Lord.

And there was a sort of, there was a wry observance to the slight excess.

But then this one was just straightforward, just boozing.

Who was controlling this?

It sounds like nobody.

Who should have been?

So

because the Bishop of Bangor is also serving as the Bishop of Wales, the day-to-day management of the cathedral is passed on to a sub-dean.

The sub-dean was suspended last year and spent much of 2024 on garden leave and has since left

while all this was gradually, little bit by little bit, trickling out in terms of they had an inspection for their financial issues and they had an inspection for their safeguarding issues.

So it became clear that he was kind of the

head man during all of this process.

But the real head is still the archbishop.

He's still the top man.

Right.

And one of the things that you've found out since this story started, as it were, is that it has led to allegations of sexual assault.

Yes,

and that they had been reported and dealt with internally.

So the archbishop and bishop

has gone.

Yes.

He has taken retirement unexpectedly soon, earlier than planned, just as the trustees of the Church of Wales were sort of setting out their lack of confidence in the church leadership.

Is it like the Church of England?

Do we just

have no one in charge for a while and see what happens?

This is like the time when Belgium had no government for about two years, and it turned out everything sort of just kept going and it was fine.

Yes, I think there'll be bishop selection proceedings, but it's very very hard to recruit bishops these days.

It's quite difficult to find people willing to do the job, willing to have their own safeguarding records raked over.

Where are we at with recruiting another Archbishop of Canterbury?

Because it's a long time since the last one stepped down now, isn't it?

Yes, it's a much longer process than selecting a new Pope, that's for sure.

Yes, a Crown Commission has been formed.

Even that was quite difficult.

People on it kept having to step down.

So it has to represent the Canterbury Diocese, has to represent the Church of England, it has to represent the wider Anglican communion.

And in each case, finding people who could fill all those roles has been quite complicated.

It's also trying to sort of find a commission that will be able to come up with a candidate that fits the whole Anglican communion.

So for instance, one of the representatives of the wider world, the person representing Africa, is a Ghanaian woman.

She's therefore got to represent a number of countries in Africa that she is ordained, but that wouldn't ordain her, and that certainly wouldn't consecrate a woman bishop.

So if they were to choose a woman archbishop, she's put in quite an interesting position.

Is there a timetable for it, though?

I mean, do they have a deadline?

We're several months late in even getting the commission together.

So whatever deadlines were set in the first place.

And this commission will eventually recommend one candidate to Downing Street, to the king.

And then they choose from two, the Prime Minister traditionally.

I think they've narrowed it down now to one, because the story always was, wasn't it, when George Carey was made Archbishop of Canterbury, that Mrs.

Thatcher had been presented with the one that everyone in the church could agree on, and then thought, Oh, we've got to do two.

But I had no hope of George Carey, and then she picked him instead.

It's quite high risk, especially given how many different issues could schism the entire Anglican church.

Is that an active word now?

To schism.

Well i readers have already provided a set of alternatives starting with Russell Brand going through grills.

You know we are trying to help

and the fact that they're slow I would say is not our fault.

There have been so many stories recently about bishops taking retirement or defrocking themselves or being defrocked for all of this.

Why is it?

Is the church uniquely bedeviled by these safeguarding issues?

No, they can't be.

I mean you were saying, Jane, there are schools which exist and

they might have potential problems, but they have processes in place to deal with it.

What's missing here?

I mean, the church has been spectacularly slow to grapple with the fact that it needs to deal with safeguarding, that it has

long been a place where there are a lot of vulnerable people who are receiving help from the church, but are therefore sort of in close contact with people who have their own interests people who might turn out to be abusers basically absolutely yes yeah you know there are plenty of other areas of life that and of society that have managed to get on top of this earlier i mean sports for instance

terrible culture of abuse in sports coaching for decades but the amount of training for safeguarding they now put in is is enormous and that was across the board That was gymnastics for girls and football very heavily for boys.

And one of the allegations that's been made is people being incredibly inappropriate in front of young members of the choir in Bangor Cathedral.

Yeah, the choir has little choristers as well as adult choristers, and they would be around at the end of services when everybody was heading off.

Getting drunk in the midst of us.

Yes, making inappropriate and lewd comments.

Good lord.

So is it a developing story?

I mean, it sounds like it'll be developing for the next few hundred years at this rate.

Yes.

Can I just add an apology here?

The story that Jane ran, I inadvertently illustrated with the Church of England logo, leading to our readers accusing me of being a disestablishmentarianist,

which I am not.

I realise that the church in Wales is a disestablished church.

It is part of the Anglican Communion, but it is not the Church of England.

So could I apologize?

I think we were all waiting for you to say that.

So

is that the first example of anti-disablmentarianism on the podcast?

I think it's on a double word score as well, so we can do really well.

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Right, for the final section of this week's episode, we are going to have a summer quiz.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So one of the chief stories that's been across the British press certainly in the last fortnight is that that of the salt path.

This is the memoir or is it, by Raina Wynne about the journey that her and her husband took across a sort of coastal path and it's about losing your home, it's about you know terrible illness but there have been a number of claims made in the observer that the couple lost their home due basically indirectly to financial fraud and there have even been question marks raised over the diagnosis that

Raina Wynne's husband received.

So I should say the couple have vigorously denied all this, and they've claimed it's grotesquely unfair and highly misleading.

There have been follow-up stories in The Observer making further claims and bringing further evidence to light.

So I'm sure there's plenty more to come out on this one.

But I thought it might be a jumping off point for a quiz.

Not about the salt path itself, but about other times that memoirs have been revealed to

maybe not be 100% scrupulously accurate, slash have been exposed as containing a few little

fibs here and there.

So, ready?

Can I just say that I want you to...

I think we should all do it.

You know how Timothy and her husband is rebranded as moth?

I think your rebrand, you'd have to just be.

Yeah.

Of all the details that I've read about them, there are many insane details about the story.

The idea of being a Timothy who becomes a moth.

That was the thing that irritated me the most.

They were both called Walker, and they didn't use that for their book about walking.

Sorry.

Let's kick off the quiz about memoirs and the errors they may contain with everyone's favourite.

So the Sunday Times printed the Hitler diaries in 1983.

I knew this would be a specialist subject for you, and I just had a hunch.

But according to the German newspapers which bought them and printed them first, before the Sunday Times did, what was their origin?

This is multiple choice, this quiz.

Is it A, it was stashed with all Hitler's things in a transport plane in the final days of the war, which then crashed near the Czech border?

Is it B, Hitler had sent a copy to his publisher within the last days in the bunker, thinking that a tell-all memoir might turn things round?

Or is it C, it was stolen by Eva Braun, who kept it in a locked safety deposit box in Switzerland.

Which of those was the story that was given?

Well, Eva Braun also died in the bunker.

She did, but had she sent it in advance.

Oh, okay, so

I'm going to go with the crashed plane.

Okay, yeah.

I said crashed plane.

I know this one, sorry.

It's a crashed plane.

Everyone has plane.

That's one point for everybody there.

I had the idea that Hitler thought he might go on a rehab tour, maybe go on Oprah, you know,

make some moving TikToks.

And instead of calling it spare, it would be hair.

Super.

And this is the interesting thing.

This sort of comes back to what you were saying earlier, Helen, about

there was conspiracy, you know, to keep Epstein out of prison.

So there was a plane.

It was shot down.

Ten planes had flown out of Berlin with lots of stuff on board.

By the time the SS and the local police got there to lock down the site of the plane crash, lots of things had gone missing already.

So it's one of those perfect opportunities for someone to say, ah, yes, this was in the road.

This was by a guy who used to churn out all of this stuff.

I mean, he really did know his Nazi history and knew how to make it sort of seem authentic and convincing.

We come to question two of the quiz.

Excellent.

So, the Hitler diaries were printed with the right kind of ink.

They were written in a period-appropriate notebook and in a heavy gothic script, which you wouldn't have put past Hitler.

In fact, they were by East German forger Konrad Kujau.

Kujau went to prison for the fraud.

What did he do after coming out?

Was it A, he apologised and set up a charity helping repatriate stolen Nazi goods?

Was it B, he got a job as a fact-checker at the New Yorker?

Or is it C, he set up an art gallery selling fake paintings?

H C.

H C.

Yeah, I thought it was C.

I like the idea that he did it in a Gothic script though, like one of those sort of Biakella kind of menu fonts.

It would have taken ages to write anything.

But the Sunday Times had employed as their fact checker

the very famous historian Lord Dacre

and who

it later transpired couldn't actually read this script.

Not Paul Dacre.

Not Paul Dacre, which is

Hugh Trevor Roper.

He became Lord Dacre, and then he changed his mind at the last minute, said, I'm not sure these are real.

And Rupert Murdoch said, fuck Daker.

And history, largely because of people like ourselves, thinks he was shouting at Paul Daken.

But actually,

he was showing his regard for truth and accuracy in the face of a deadline which was about to make the Sunday Times a shedload of money, which it did.

Gosh.

I wonder if they regret it now.

I wonder if they now think that the credibility hit was kind of

mega box.

Well, just to polish off that question, Kujau opened a gallery in Stuttgart and he sold forgeries by people like Salvador Dali and Juan Miro, but he did put his name on them.

Although he was later done for forging driving licenses and fined.

Last one on the Hitler Diaries.

Why should the Sunday Times have been particularly ready and prepared to spot the hoax?

Was it A, the editor of the paper at the time was actually a fluent German speaker?

Was it B, the diaries were written on the same kind of paper that the Sunday Times itself was printed on?

Or was it C, they had already fallen for and purchased the Mussolini diaries?

Is it Andrew Neal who was editor at the time?

No, no, it wasn't for him.

It It was Frank Giles.

Frank Giles.

Later made Emeritus editor.

I famously asked Rupert Murdoch, what does it mean?

And he said, the E means you're out, and the emeritus means you deserved it.

Brilliant.

That's actually a banger from Rupert Murdoch, though.

Didn't we hear that one pre-prepared?

Oh, yeah.

Written out in Gothic script.

It was an incredibly funny period

to observe a national newspaper just completely getting egg all over its face in all sorts of avoidable ways.

Robert Harris wrote a very funny book about it afterwards.

I did ask a question several minutes ago and we'd have all been dancing around.

I think it's short for Frankenfurt and you think Frank Charles spoke German.

His wife was German.

Okay.

I'm afraid it's C.

It's the Mussolini diaries.

In 1968, Thompson, the publisher, had spent £100,000, a huge amount of money at the time, on 30 volumes of Mussolini's diaries.

And they had reasoned partly that there are 30 books of these things.

They cannot be forged.

In fact, that was a clever thing by the forgers to write 30 volumes of diaries.

It was an Italian mother and daughter who had

just conned them.

And the editor at the time, Harold Evans, made clear that he had not known about Thompson buying those.

He was incredibly irritated at the suggestion that he had fallen for them.

Right.

But they didn't publish them.

No, they did not.

They did not see the light of day.

The Hitler diaries themselves are quite tedious.

They're largely just sort of lists of appointments and things because your forger by that point knew better than to put anything too sensational in them because people would think, well, these must be fake.

Right, we now move away from the Hitler Diaries.

We're going on to other memoirs now.

Boo.

What was the biggest claim of author Misha Defoneska, who wrote a memoir about her time during the Second World War, which turned out to be fabricated?

So was the claim A

during North Africa she had been romantically involved with both Montgomery and Rommel?

Was it B, she had invented the atomic weapon two years before America did?

Or was it C she had crossed Europe on foot and been raised by a wolf pack along the way?

She was raised by wolves.

I know this because I did a whole, yeah, I did a whole piece that was about people who, like, in the 2020s peak social justice period, people who faked social justice outrages.

And it got me reading about all the Holocaust fakers.

And there's an incredible story of a guy who claimed as a kid he'd been in Auschwitz, met up and made a piano concert in LA many years ago with another woman who claimed that she'd also survived Auschwitz.

And they were both fraudulent.

And I love to imagine the moment where they had to be like, well, I know I'm, it's like pie stakes poker.

I know I'm bluffing.

Are you bluffing?

Wasn't it terrible in Auschwitz?

I remember very well.

Yeah.

And she'd also, it later turned out, at some point, claimed that she was a victim of the satanic panic as well.

I mean, not only was she at a school in Brussels in 1943, she wasn't even Jewish.

So she had previously won $32 million from her publisher due to a copyright claim or case.

Anyway, she was then ordered to pay all of that money back.

And the wolves, did they get anything?

Nothing for the wolves, I'm afraid.

Right.

Next up, one of the biggest literary hoaxes of the 1950s was Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, supposedly a top-ranking Tibetan llama.

Who did Rampa turn out to be in the end?

Was it A, a housewife from Stoke who had a lot of bingo debts she needed to pay off?

Was it B, a surgical truss manufacturer from Devon?

Or was it C, a disgraced deacon deacon from Ayrshire?

I'm still going deacon.

I don't know what's going on.

It's got to be deacon because the other two are such Andrew Hunter Murray dominated.

That's the problem.

You made a rocker in back, Beth.

I would always go for the vicar

in a mean way.

It was the unemployed surgical truss maker from Devon.

Oh, yes.

Cyril Hoskins, born Cyril Hoskins, later, Tuesday Lopsang Rampa, wrote an incredibly successful memoir about being a Tibetan Lama.

It turned out he didn't speak Tibetan, he'd never owned a passport, he hadn't battled the Japanese Air Force during the war.

I mean, none of it was true.

Absolutely none of it was true.

He came up with the explanation that he had been born in the body of Cyril Hoskins.

Trustmaker.

Trustmaker.

But while leaning over out of a tree trying to photograph an owl, he'd had a fall, and at that point, the soul of Tuesday Lopsang Rampa had entered his body.

And this is the reincarnation theory, but just taking it to have happened during a a life.

Absolutely, yeah.

I absolutely respect that.

Have you seen that story about the Dalai Lama and the Chinese Communist Party want to control who he reincarnates as?

Yeah.

Incredible story of a collision of religion plus central bureaucracy.

Absolutely.

Rampa wrote 18 more books in his character as Tuesday Lobsang Rampa before moving to Ireland for tax reasons.

I love that.

I love that when I do a fraud and then they're out there as a fraud and they carry on doing it and people just sort of decide it was sort of spiritually true.

Fascinating.

And this is a little bonus question, I'll ramp up.

But which of his pets did he claim had dictated his book, Living with the Llama?

Was it A, his frog, B, his dog, or C, his cat?

Or D, his Llama.

D his Llama!

I don't think you can put a llama in there.

Who wrote this?

Frog, cat, or dog?

Yep.

One of them dictated the book, Living with the Llama, to him.

Cat?

Ian's got it.

Yeah.

Point to Ian.

It was Mrs.

Fiefy.

We could spot each other because they have nine lives.

You said, Really,

it was Mrs.

Fifi Grey Whiskers who dictated the book.

Was that really the name?

That was really the name.

She was born Cyril Hoskins.

She dictated it to him in Siamese cat language and then he translated it into idiomatic English.

I think we say Thai now.

Other books included accounts of his visit to Venus, the hidden time capsule left by the Atlantis inhabitants, and one 21 years after his death to an underground realm under the Himalayas.

So is there something in it after all?

Next up.

It makes a lot of the MAGA stuff look pity-themed, doesn't it?

Right, Naked Came the Stranger was a 1969 hit, trashy, full of sex, and supposedly written by Penelope Ashe.

It was all about the erotic adventures of a radio host.

But who was the real writer?

Was it A, 12 nuns from Wyoming?

Was it B, 24 writers from a US newspaper?

Was it C, 200 students from Yale?

I'm still stuck on erotic adventures of a radio host.

Of all the sexy professions,

she leaves the studio, she does a lot of roving reporting as a radio.

Sorry, there you go.

Unfortunately, I've just got derailed by the fact that didn't Alistair Campbell have a career writing erotica at one point?

Did he?

Oh, funny.

He did, yes, he was the bagpiping buccaneer or something.

All about his adventures with his bagpipes on the uh on the um Cote d'Azur.

Gotcha.

The rest is filth.

This I'd like to hear.

I'm going to say 200 students, but only because my mind is on Alastair Campbell's erotic fiction.

Any more for anymore?

The others were the nuns or the reporters?

Nuns.

Cargo reporters.

And point for Adam.

Simply by default.

So 25 journalists, they were led by a hack called Mike McGrady.

Mike McGrady was very irritated about the state of American literary culture.

He basically thought, oh, you can sell anything as long as it's got enough sex in it.

He set out to prove the point, put together a collective of writers.

Some of the chapters had to be re-edited because the originals were too well written.

And it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is the depressing fact.

Next up, I Libertine was a raunchy memoir by the pseudonymous Frederick R.

Ewing.

The book was banned in Boston, but requested by multiple bookshops across the USA.

What was especially impressive about this hoax?

Was it A, the book's editor was unwittingly defrauded by his own wife?

Was it B, there was no such book at all, it didn't exist?

Or was it C, the entire book was a palindrome?

I'm I'm going palindrome.

Well, that's the title.

You're faking it as well, though, isn't it?

I libertine.

I mean, the title isn't.

Well, no, but the whole book, you see, start to finish.

Yes, but then, like, the last words would have to be.

Don't pick that option there.

Yeah, okay, we make a point.

I think maybe it didn't exist.

Let's defect to that one.

It didn't exist.

I'm afraid you'd already given the answer.

So, this was an American radio host called Gene Shepard.

He was annoyed at the the system because book charts were done by sales but also by what was requested in bookshops.

So he said to all his listeners, right, let's all go and request the book iLibertine.

And thousands of people across the states went into their local bookshop and said, I'd like to buy iLibertine, please, it's out soon.

And it got onto the New York Times bestseller list as a result of that.

Yeah.

He actually then wrote iLibertine.

Yes, the book was then commissioned and written.

It's like Fly Fishing by J.R.

Hartley, which became a book after being an obese.

Exactly how publishing works.

Right, two more.

In 1998, an illustrated biography of New York artist Nat Tate was published, full of interesting photos and details of his life.

Tate was, in fact, a completely fabricated artist, despite the fact one of his paintings had been sold at auction to Ant from Anton Deck.

So Tate was complete.

It took a turn.

Tate was fictional.

Which Big Beast author was behind the fraud?

Was it Wilbur Smith, William Boyd, or Salmon Rushdie?

It was William Boyd.

It was William Boyd.

But David Bowie was in on it, wasn't he?

David Bowie, who we haven't said, was at the launch party and you know quotes about how coming to know this artist and really admire his work.

This completely passed me by.

This must predate me.

When time was...

When did this happen?

Late 90s.

Oh, I was too busy being Yarn and Cool and

Oasis.

It was a very, very good scam.

Yeah.

And

an inordinate amount of detail, which, like with the Hitler forger, you just thought no one could have made up all this stuff about this bloke's life.

And they did because they knew you lot would look it all up.

Yeah.

And the really nice thing is William Boyd,

one of the friends of Nat Tate pictured in the book, was Logan Mount Stewart, who was the actually fictional person that Boyd then wrote his Any Human Heart about.

You know, a very detailed but like fictional biography of a 20th century life.

Yeah, he should have done it once, so he did it again.

Finally, this year's summer reading list in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer included completely fabricated books by real authors, including Isabel Allende's Tidewater Dreams, not a real book, and Percival Everett's The Rainmakers, also not a real book.

Who had made up the fake titles?

Was it A, a recently fired sub-editor?

Was it B, the editor's boyfriend who got drunk and hacked the system?

Was it C, nobody at all?

It was nobody at all.

It was an AI.

Well damned it.

He was a family.

They hallucinated it.

And they just, then then some guy had just plugged it in and he was some random freelancer.

A random freelancer said it was a huge mistake on my part and these books had been kind of AI generated and just ended up on the books to read this summer list.

Which Percival Everett's The Rainmaker sounds like a brilliant book from the synopsis, but it does not exist.

It's a John Grisham book called The Rainmaker, which presumably if you had that rewritten, like he did to Huckleberry Finn, if he rewrites John Grisham's Rainmaker, that will one day exist.

Yeah, I'd read that.

I was hoping for J.T.

Leroy.

That's my favourite literary fraud.

Do you remember that?

Two women cooked up this entire author, and

they pretended to be a sort of androgynous guy, and it just seemed to involve one of them wearing a hat.

Yeah,

that was amazingly unconvincing.

Yeah, it's just a guy in a hat or a woman in a hat.

Right, scores at the end.

In third place,

Adam, I'm afraid.

In second place,

Helen.

First place, Ian.

It was the Hitler Diamond.

Early on age.

Anyway, there you go.

There's your quiz about the greatest and least true memoirs of all time.

Hope you enjoyed playing along at home.

Hope you enjoyed this whole episode of Page 94.

We'll be back in a fortnight with another one.

Until then, why not go and buy the magazine, privatehye-oni.co.uk?

Thanks to Ian, Helen, Adam, and Jane, of course, and thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio, as always, for producing.

Bye for now.

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