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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 Sarah Shannon.

We are going to be talking about all sorts of things in this episode.

We've got three cracking subjects lined up.

Later on, we're going to be having a quiz.

We're going to be...

It's summer, why not?

We're also going to be having a chat about America, which apparently has an army and is very excited to show it off.

But first, we thought we'd cover something close to home.

So you will have doubtless noticed the fact that reform, the party, have been in the news a great deal recently, partly because their chair, Zia Youssef, resigned and then unresigned 48 hours later.

That's been the big ticket headline about reform recently.

But actually, of course, reform have been far more prominent because on the 1st of May they won big in quite a lot of local elections held around the country.

So they took control of 10 local authorities outright.

Sarah has been writing a little bit about what has actually been going on in those 10 county councils and local authorities since the beginning of May.

So Sarah, we wanted to ask you, how's it going so far?

And what is the agenda that they have?

What is their big offer to the electorate?

I think, first of all, Reform UK is going to be the gift that keeps on giving to the Rotten Boroughs page.

I think the last five issues, they've managed to fill about half the column.

So

thank you very much.

And no, the two key

themes to emerge, I think, are that the reform councillors, quite a few of them, haven't hung around for very long.

I mean, we're only six weeks from the election, and five or six have already either resigned or been suspended from the party for various reasons.

Oh, I hope you get into those reasons, yeah.

Yeah, and the other thing to note is the sort of lack of policy.

All the policies they have got seem to be getting them into lots of hot wars.

Hang on a minute, they've got a great policy about only flying, is it county around now?

It's now the UK flag, the English flag, and also possibly your county flag, but absolutely not the bisexual flag no which

yeah no because honestly everyone waded into this round the toys got involved too and the tories put out press release saying that david lammy was seen hoisting the bisexual flag over whitehole which i think is my favourite euphemism

particularly the bisexual flag they've got a problem with yeah they were

the l and the g and the t and the q but no bees no bees no bees and also the ukraine flag so one of the big claims that reform made going into the local election is that they can run councils much more efficiently

And they wanted to say that they're going to have Doge Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk's American Outfit.

They said that local councils could make so many gains and savings from efficiency.

Is there any evidence of that yet, or that project?

Well, that project has begun,

but let's just say the road's been a bit bumpy so far because the people that took charge of that were Zia Youssef, the chairman of Reform, who resigned recently and then unresigned,

and a tech bro called Nathaniel Fry, Fryde, who's kind of our answer to Elon Musk.

If you imagine, sort of,

no one was asking.

He wears a baseball cap.

I haven't seen him with a chainsaw yet, but I'm guessing it's only time.

So they unresigned, and now they're back looking through the books of Kent County Council.

The residents are getting a bit nervous.

They're saying, is our personal information going to be respected?

We're not sure we really want Reform UK's head office raking through our personal details.

They are covered by rules and regulations and data protection.

So, you know, they're not happy about that.

And then one resident told the eye that he had written back to Reform UK saying, Well, in the interests of transparency, would you mind opening your own books to me so that I could check through everything that you've done since your party was started?

But so far they haven't replied to him.

'Cause Rottenborough's obviously writes a great deal about wasteful spending by councils and it's frequently along the lines of wasteful or rather extremely inflated council salaries for heads of council chief executives officers that kind of thing that does feel like an area where you could theoretically make savings but actually obviously most councils spend i think it's up to 80 of their budget on children's and adult social care so i'm trying to work out what

where these big savings are going to supposedly come from yeah the the idea that there's huge savings to be made i think is pretty ludicrous when councils are cut to the bone.

Their core budget has fallen by 27%

since 2010.

They're having to make cutbacks in really essential areas.

We're seeing councils going bankrupt or technically bankrupt, having to have government bailouts.

You know, there's not loads of money sloshing around in local government ready to be cut.

But but they're not saying they're going to have these big salaries or payouts to departing executives, things like that.

They haven't really got into the policy in that kind of detail yet, which I think was what Rupert Lowe pointed out in his big bust up with reform was that, you know, where are the actual policy papers on things like social care, high street renewal and things like that, and we need some actual facts.

But the things that they have gone big on are things like net zero, low traffic neighbourhoods, that was my favourite, because Zia Youssef said that the ten reform areas would become havens for motorists with no low traffic neighbourhoods anymore because they were going to get rid of them all.

And then it turned out that none of the ten council areas had low-traffic neighbourhoods anyway.

But also, they don't, they don't councils don't spend huge amounts of money on net zero projects.

That's not a council spending area.

No, exactly.

Also,

for example, in Greater Lincolnshire, renewable energies brings in a huge amount of money into the county.

I think £980 million at the last count, and it accounts for 12,000 jobs in that county.

So Andrea Jenkins, the new mayor and her like talking down net zero isn't going to go down very well with the people whose jobs depend on it.

Is part of the problem the way that people vote in local elections?

Because very few people actually bother to put in the kind of homework and know about the minutiae of local government and who does what,

including, it sounds like an awful lot of the people who were actually running for reform.

But they tend to do it on a sort of vibes basis of what they're feeling about national politics at any given time.

And, you know, at the moment, we've got Nigel Farage and his gang kind of riding really high in the polls and people thinking, well, this is a way to give Keir Starmer a bloody nose.

And then you end up with people coming in and actually there's very little they can do in terms of, you know, they could they can tweak a few local budgets in very, very specific areas.

But when it comes to the the big things that reform is campaigning on, which is sort of, you know, my migration and EDI and

net zero and those kind of things, actually, you know, there's not many levers they can actually pull at that level.

No, exactly.

I mean, you have to assume protest votes were happening.

I mean, that's part of is that part of the reason a lot of the councillors have already resigned as well, because they were effectively effectively going to be paper candidates, which you always get in elections, don't you?

Parties put up certain people because they never think they're going to get in.

And then there has been this huge surge in support for and a few people ended up, hang on, I've been elected.

I didn't actually mean to at all.

I think that was one of the problems.

I mean, I'll go through a couple of the candidates that have resigned.

There was a guy in Durham called Andrew Kilburn who resigned because he was working for the council and you're not allowed to work for the council and be a councillor.

Whether he hadn't spotted that or whether he just saved some money from the budget?

I don't really know.

And then there was a chap called Wayne Titley in Staffordshire Council, and he resigned for personal reasons, which may or may not be related to a Facebook post he'd put up saying that he thought one way of getting rid of small boats crossing the channel would be for the Navy to fire on them.

It did have that air that it was going in that.

When you said that from the start of that post, I got a Facebook post.

Uh-oh, uh-oh, everyone to the head.

So I think there must have been some people that were very surprised to wake up and find themselves councillors delighted in some cases some obviously have already resigned and and the irony is that you know reform uk is all about slashing red tape and saving taxpayers money and they've already got you know five by-elections to run each of which is going to cost about 25 grand so that's a good start the other thing is i think that we're probably going to hear about every single one of these because

from the point of view of labour at a national level they want to run the next election as labor versus reform and i think this is very annoying to the liberal democrats who think like what are we chop liver?

And it's very annoying to the Conservative Party who still exist.

But they know that lots and lots of people, for all the people that love Nigel Farage, there are a lot of people who be motivated to vote against him.

And that might be a way of Labour clinging on to its vote after a very difficult set of years financially.

But what that also means is that the Labour Research Department will be looking into a lot of these.

I mean,

there'll be a lot of Facebook posts being read by people who are.

They're a lot of fish.

And that's the problem they're facing because everyone's getting very excited, as I say, about reform being very high in the kind of national polls at the moment.

But because of the way our electoral system works it's not just the nigel for our show it can't just be the niche for our show he's got to find 650 candidates all of whom preferably haven't got facebook posts that talk about that sort of thing or any kind of skeletons in the closet or anything that's going to come out and that's quite a challenge going on kind of past uh past form isn't it he's got is it five mps now yes because rupert lowe left and then the new one sarah pochin uh

signed up but of those five there's already one with a criminal conviction so if you scale that up to a national level that's going to be well it's going to be well over 100.

And the scrutiny you get in national elections if you stand for parliament is so much more than

you get standing as a local councillor, isn't it?

Yeah.

This stuff is going to get found out.

Exactly.

And I mean, the Liberal Democrats have actually bothered to set up a research unit keeping a reform watch.

So

they're not giving up hope.

But journalists, as well, covering general elections, I mean, most of the grind of a general election campaign is so tedious, isn't it?

Going on battle buses and saying what Kier or Kemi said when standing in front of what vehicle in what factory at any given time.

So, the joy of having a sort of a Jared O'Mara or other loon who you've managed to dig out

some crazy online stuff from, and

we'll do that story instead.

But have we crossed a kind of loon, a porous loon barrier which we will now not be able to retrench from?

Because I just wonder if we're getting into a bit of that post-cancellation zone.

And I know you will have appreciated Adam as much as me watching the new

replacement physier, yousef, David Bull, its party chairman, talk about his belief in ghosts on ITV to Richard Madeley, which may be one of the best clips of television that I've seen all year.

Was this, was he talking about this after being elected?

Reforms in the middle of the year.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because he used to host Most Haunted Live.

Right.

And he told an incredible story.

So Richard Madeley, being Richard Madeleine, asked the questions that Britain is dying to know the answer to and said, Do you believe in ghosts?

Which you can feel that Laura Kunzberg would feel as a bit below her.

And he was like, Yes, I do.

And then told this incredible story about filming Most Haunted Live.

He turned up, he felt there was a presence in the back of his car.

He turned up at the hotel, and Derek Akora, TV medium Derek O'Corra, said to him, you didn't come here alone, did you?

Which he took to be massively spooky, but could also equally be just a very generic question that you asked, well, you not brought someone with you to this hotel.

And then Derek Akora said that he would channel David Bull's dead grandmother, which he started to do, but then immediately started to try and strangle him.

Sorry, there's something about the fatling relationships in the bull family.

His grandmother is.

So Dave, wait, wait, wait.

David Bull's bodyguards at this point, according to his account,

pull off

Erica Cora, as it were.

And the next morning, David Bull asked Eric Acora what happens, and he said, I was trying to channel your grandmother, but then a malevolent spirit came through.

Oh.

Richard Madeley's response to this was magnificent, which was, and you'd have had him hanged under your plan, wouldn't you?

No one out Madeley's the Madeley.

Is this a vote winner?

A lot of people believe in the state.

Most of people believe in ghosts, but I just thought if you can now just be talking about your love of ghosts and I TV breakfast shows,

maybe our belief that the kind of crank element of reform is going to inhibit them may be tragically wrong.

Well,

this is a smaller version of Trumpism, isn't it?

If you've got a thousand targets to aim at.

Yeah, or the guy in the greens who thought he could hypnotise women to get their breasts bigger.

But has he stepped down from running for the leadership?

Okay.

No, maybe there's a huge boob hypnosis vote out there.

You just don't know.

And actually there is.

I mean, I don't know about their views on the supernatural, but there is certainly a very kind of porous membrane between people who are kind of going to that right-wing reformy type ticket and some quite serious conspiracy theorizing, isn't there?

I mean, we wrote a bit in the last issue about Neil Oliver, who was a presenter on GB News, which is kind of, if anything, it's the reform TV channel.

He's now actually kind of so wacky and out there that they've taken him off air and put him on online only.

So

Ofcom get no say over what he says or doesn't say.

But I mean, he's been quite happily retweeting David Icke and talking about how outside forces are controlling our world and recording videos with Beverly Turner.

Is it Beverly Beverly Turner, I think it's another GB News presenter

about how COVID may never have existed in the first place?

I mean,

there is an audience out there,

and they are a politically active audience who like this kind of thing.

So maybe, maybe, maybe the kind of, what was David Cameron's phrase about UKIP?

Fruitcakes and nutties.

Fruitcakes, loons, and racism.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, the racism is certainly less closety

in a lot of cases now.

But the loons and the fruitcakes are also kind of having a bit of a day in the sun these days, aren't they?

Yeah, but I think there is going to be an interesting point about when the scrutiny comes in, because as you say, Sarah, they've now got all these councillors who will be doing things that will either delight or annoy their constituents.

But they're also predicted to do quite well in the Welsh elections next year.

They're doing increasingly well in Scotland after having some sort of slightly high-handed Scottish commentary about how that, you know, these English racists will never get a foothold here.

Actually, not doing badly.

They came third in the recent by-election, but with a high 20s share of the vote.

But But this is happening a lot.

They often come in not what objectively doesn't look like a great position, but from absolutely nowhere with very little campaigning base.

As you say, paper candidates essentially sometimes being put up.

The vibe is definitely

people are really pissed off with Labour.

They haven't yet forgiven the Tories.

Everyone's forgotten about the existence of the Lib Dems unless you live in the Gales Belt.

And then there's like who else?

Who else is left?

Can I give you one more stat, which I just found interesting about a major plank of reforms appeal?

It's certainly in the councils they're running, which is the idea of we need British Doge.

This is from about a week ago.

This is a YouGov poll.

From everything you've seen and heard, do you have a favourable or unfavourable opinion of the US government's Department of Government efficiency at Doge?

Very favourable, 6%.

Somewhat favourable, 9%.

So 15 in total have a positive view of Doge.

Somewhat unfavourable, 13%.

Very unfavourable, 34%.

And then lots of don't knows, 37%.

This is not...

It appears to be, I'm just looking at these numbers.

Thinking this is like unpopulism almost.

What's the reasoning?

Why do it?

But the answer is that Doge as an idea is incredible.

Doge and reality was terrible.

And this is what you were coming back to saying about slashing the budgets.

You know, the idea of there's lots of people being paid 50,000 grand a year to be the gay officer in Northamptonshire, and we'll get rid of that.

Like that in like that is a workable proposition.

It's just obviously these stories often end up not to be what you might call true.

And then what actually ends up happening is that they get in, see that 70% of the budget goes on social care, and the idea of chucking old people out onto the street is not that popular in Lincolnshire.

Yeah, like, well, Andrea Jenkins' big thing was to get rid of DEI-related things, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And then Lincolnshire pointed out to her that there were no DEI-related posts on her new council.

And she said, well, they're hiding under n other names, like community outreach officers.

So I can see why, in principle, Doge really appeals to them.

In the same way, in massive Elon Musk, going on stage and saying, I'm going to cut two trillion from the federal budget, got a clap line every time.

It's just that he got there and he was like, Oh, shall we take benefits away from veterans?

Well, it'll be very hard for anyone who's been reading Private Eyes Rotten Borough columns for however many years to object to the idea of someone going in and actually getting rid of excessive spending.

But also, when it comes to the realism of what you can do, as you say.

That's true.

And just at a moment where councils are really struggling with very small budgets for really emergency essential services, it seems like it'll be interesting to see where they come up with that that needs to be cut.

Are there any more especially juicy or weird councils or councillors?

There's this chap in Leicestershire called Andrew Hamilton Gray,

and he failed to mention to voters that he'd been sacked from the police last year after a long career in the police.

He had been reporting himself in as sick, and actually, he'd been delivering cars for a luxury car company.

But he did tell the voters that he was a long-standing public servant.

So

just didn't mention that until quite recently when I now I'm not.

Find out what I was really doing.

I'm sure there's going to be a lot more about reform in the coming issues of Rottenborough's and the coming pages of the Mac.

I'm sure.

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Right, now we're back for part two of the podcast.

And actually, little

team change.

We've had a substitution.

Sarah Shannon has regenerated as Ian Hislop.

Hello, Ian.

Hello.

I'm going to turn into Billy Piper in a minute.

So for this one, I thought it might be fun to

get into it via a joke piece because there was a joke in the last eye, which was, the headline was, America Invades America.

And this is about the fact that having taken office, promising to annex Canada, take over Venezuela, control the Suez Canal, various other bits around the world, Donald Trump has now deployed the army to California.

And this coincided last weekend, scenes of riots and National Guards and Marines being sent in, with a huge military parade in Washington, D.C.,

where Trump was celebrating the U.S.

Army, and they were celebrating their 250th birthday, but they had not originally intended to have a parade.

But for Trump's 79th birthday, so he's one-third as old as the U.S.

Army, interesting.

He had said, I'd like to have a parade on my birthday.

Lots of tanks, lots of soldiers.

Helen, how did it go?

Very badly, I'm delighted to report.

There was a guy carrying a drone.

That was a low point.

Yes,

hoisting it aloft.

But he was also holding the remote controller.

Yeah, I presume you just can't fly directly.

They charge the batteries.

They forgot.

Someone forgot.

Exactly.

Ages three and up.

Yeah, but

also that they couldn't march.

Fundamentally, they were not in time.

Anyway, I've conducted extensive investigations in this by asking military contacts.

And the theory is apparently it's very hard to march without a drum beat of some sort to keep you in time.

And the fact they were playing Fortunate Sun and YMCA and whatever, the disco classics didn't help.

As did the fact, apparently, if you're wearing rubber boots, combat boots, they don't make enough of a snap on the floor to be able to, again, keep you in time.

Over here, of course, we also had we had the king's birthday on the same day and the uh the trooping of the colour.

Have we just been spoiled by Britain's traditional mastery of pageantry over the years?

Are we used to explaining the currents?

I'm afraid I watched both ceremonies

with a swell of pride,

thinking they have Trump's birthday, which I've decided is now the trooping of the colour orange

always to be known.

And it does make very, very clear the boring constitutional point that pro-monarchists always raise is loyalty to the crown means you don't end up with loyalty to a big orange man baby celebrating his own birthday.

And there's a dignity, even if it's mildly amusing to watch the antics of the royal family on the balcony, and it is, but that somehow is less undignified than watching a frankly shambolic display of non-marching to commemorate an event which Trump didn't seem to understand what had happened.

So they couldn't march because there was no drum beat and they were in

the wrong shoes.

But it looked like they were out for a walk.

They just ambled along, didn't they?

There was another crisp kind of...

Say what you like about North Korea, but they know how to put on a parade.

Well, that's...

I imagine that North Korea, Russia,

the huge, where they, you know, wheel the cruise missiles through the main square.

I mean, they've had decades of practice of this.

So is it simply about that?

But also it's about what you want your army for.

Do you want a huge ceremonial army that are drilled in this all the time?

Or do you want an army?

Lots of people in the US Army that were on that parade will have they'll work in things like beating drone operators over kind of Pakistan.

They're not necessarily that sort of

marchy type of soldier.

But the mood was wrong.

I mean, Americans traditionally don't do this.

One of the marks of being a fascist is you have military parades which celebrate the Commander-in-Chief, which, you know, in our case is a member of the royal family or it's Princess Anne in a terrific hat.

She's not Commander-in-Chief.

I'm perfectly aware of that, but you get that feel to it.

In America, traditionally, they associate that with fascist regimes or communist regimes.

It's surprisingly un-American.

And the only bit that I thought was genuinely American, I think whether Helen agrees, was the recreation of the dressing up of the first defeat of the British, which, you know, was very well done.

and they're good at that bit.

But again, I think someone should explain to Trump what the point of that army was.

The Continental Army, you know, full of people like the French.

Again, none of these details are very useful for him, but it was about freedom.

They should have made poor Marco Rubio be like the Marquis de Mac Lafayette and stuff like that, like a school nativity play.

They've all got to dress up.

But you're right.

My colleague Tom Nichols at the Atlantic, who worked as a military instructor, naval instructor for 25 years, said this is about habituating Americans to the idea of seeing tanks in the streets, about seeing the army on the streets.

It's all about politicizing the army.

So not long beforehand,

Trump had given a speech at Fort Bragg and had mocked Joe Biden, saying he could never get a crowd like this.

They were selling MAGA merch.

They'd specially selected the soldiers to be enthusiastic about Trump personally.

So this is an audience consisting entirely of American soldiers.

They were serving soldiers in uniform, which is, so it is forbidden for American soldiers in uniform to do anything that is political, right?

It's just like one of those hard lines.

But they asked for volunteers to come to this, and they were selling MAGA stuff on the base.

And so it is just blurring of the light.

This is what Trump wanted to do.

He wanted to send in the army to, if you remember, crush the George Floyd protests in 2020.

And he wanted to have an army basically tear gas people out of the square in D.C.

so that he could go and look at some of the stuff.

And the people around him at that time said no, because there were still some normie generals.

And he's just obviously cleared them out.

But the thing I I was going to say that's the kind of coded to this is Fort Bragg.

Could you imagine who Fort Bragg is named after?

Melvin.

Billy.

Billy's even better.

So, Fort Bragg historically was named after Braxton Bragg, who was a Confederate general.

And then the Pentagon under Biden, who went through this process where he said, maybe we should, given that they lost in the Civil War, maybe we should rename all of these bases.

So it was renamed Fort Liberty in 2022.

Anyway, the Trump administration has now gone back to renaming all of these bases, like Fort Lee, which was originally named after Robert E.

Lee, but it now pretends that it hasn't named them after Confederate generals.

This is now allegedly named after private first-class Roland Bragg, who got a purple heart for the Battle of the Bulge.

The Robert E.

Lee one is now allegedly named after Private Fitzley, a black soldier who fought in the Spanish-American War.

So the Trump administration, under Pete Heggs as Secretary of Defence, has restored all the Confederate names, but in that typical bloody, irritating little internet troll way that they had, been like, it's not actually named after Robert E.

Lee, it's another Robert E.

Lee who goes to another school.

You can't have a go at us.

That's utterly pathetic.

It is a bit windrush-line, isn't it?

It's a bit like you can't, yeah, but also that you kind of like, you know, can't, I'm not touching, can't get mad.

You know, it's got that sort of sense of like winding you up deliberately, but then you can't, oh, but it's not actually, you can't actually have a go at us for renaming everything after Confederate soldiers because of Confederacy's support for slavery and other things.

Is there a fault Jim Crow that we could have?

No, exactly.

James Crow, a wonderful railwayman.

You know, yeah, but it's all like that, basically.

They brought back, in the same way that they've renamed, you know, Mount McKinley the Gulf of America, they brought back all of these names.

And that's where he was speaking at Fort Bragg.

And when he takes the salute and actually gives a salute, are you allowed to do that as a civilian who's had not only no combat experience but five separate successful attempts to avoid doing military service yourself?

I think I was thinking about it when you were talking about Princess Anne on parade.

It must absolutely kill him that he can't ride a horse.

I mean, maybe he can, but certainly not to the the quality required to ride one in a military parade.

And I think one of the reasons they got so annoyed with Admiral Rachel Levine, who's the highest-serving transgender official, was that she was a decorated Navy veteran who was therefore allowed to wear a Navy uniform, which you were the female version of.

But I think it must absolutely annoy Trump incredibly well that someone is allowed, someone else is allowed to wear a uniform who they think is a sort of woke DI hire.

I bet he'd love a uniform, wouldn't he?

He'd love the gold braid on the cap.

Which is not something our royal family have a problem with.

They're quite big on the uniforms and the medals, aren't they?

Yep, yep.

Oh, yes.

I did think when they were playing the song Fortunate Son, which is just about the most famous anti-war, anti-nepotism, anti-capitalism song of all time.

I wonder if this takes Donald back to his days and not in Vietnam.

But apparently,

that's in the Forrest Gump soundtrack.

So that's the theory.

He used to play it a lot at rallies.

So the theory is that he quite likes the film Forrest Gump.

It's a great film of the 90s, in fairness.

Sure.

And has simply never ever asked what the lyrics are about.

Right.

Well, it's also Bruce Springsteen points out that Born in the USA is not a song about how great the USA is and how well it looks after the working classes.

I mean these are all veterans protest songs.

And there are a lot of rather good accounts of veteran protest groups turning up and then being arrested

by policemen half their age and then having to say, we actually fought in the military.

We are allowed to do this protest.

And No Kings is a very specific historical constitutional point which these protests are called.

We haven't really mentioned yet the third event that was happening in America.

You have on one coast, you have the parade, on the other coast, you have the Marines being sent in.

And then all over the country, there's No Kings Day of protest, which I think attracted somewhere between four and six million people.

I think it's a really good slogan, because I think it's exactly how Trump sees himself.

Yes, he's been elected, but I think he now sees him, he sees the executive branch as the source of, you know, he's Louis XIV.

You know,

he is the state as far as he sees it.

Well, he has actually put out, as well as pictures, AI pictures of him as the Pope.

He did put one of him out with a crown on, didn't he?

As well.

Le Troit c'est moi.

Just one for our fans of French history.

Very good indeed.

That feels like a lot of people to draw out.

I know that's, what is it, a couple of percent of the overall population.

That's really seriously big protests.

And actually largely, as Ian was saying, non-violent.

In contrast to the riots that have been happening in LA, where there has been, they were setting Waymos, the self-driving cars, on fire, which was the pretext for then Trump sending in the National Guard.

Now, he didn't ask California Governor Gavin Newsom before doing that, which is a violation of how things are supposed to be done.

And that then went to a judge, and then that went to appeal.

It will probably end up in the Supreme Court, as I think that that's the one thing you, if you want to say anything about American politics now, a bit like you saying things are very different in the South, the thing you have to say in American politics now is it'll probably end up in the Supreme Court, you know, because almost everything does.

But the courts are really at this point the only thing that are effectively holding Trump back from what he would like to do, which is politicise everything and turn the entire state into a personal extension of himself.

I mean Helen, you you wrote two columns and one was about how the MAGA movement really hates California.

That's its main thing.

And the other thing was about how much they hate Gavin.

And both of those things came to a head this week.

So I thought, oh, not only I thought maybe you know what you're talking about,

but is this something he's just been waiting for?

There is in the mythology of America, California is, you know, is seen as the kind of place where there's sort of hippies, and now that's matured now into wokeism.

There is a feeling that they hate the coasts, they hate snooty kind of do-goes in the same way that they hate sort of Martha's Vineyard and like that, which is where Obama has sort of retired to.

But there is a feeling that, yeah, that's not heartland America, that's snooty coastal America.

So, you know, and funny enough, it's now the other set of mythology, really, Trump is best understood as a Floridian politician.

The archetype of America is basically Florida versus California.

And Gavin Newsom has really used this moment.

Tom Homan, who's the borders are, threatened to arrest him and he said, come and arrest me then.

And he was clear, I mean, he's the consummate public, he's quite oleaginous, but he really wanted to have this fight and has now, I think, leapt to the front of the pack in kind of 2028 terms as being somebody who was willing to be the face of opposition to Trump.

And, you know, he can do that because he's got a huge amount of money, he's got a big state, you know.

But I think there are things in the same way that for Kamala Harris were a problem.

If you run in California, your only ever your challenges only ever come from the left.

So you normally end up saying a lot of slightly bonkers things in primaries because you know that's where the real election is.

And so that will be his problem going forward.

But for the moment, it works quite well because he's got this, you know, he can also, he's running one of the biggest economies on earth.

He's got an independent power base.

And so as a face of opposition to Trump, he's in a very good place to be that.

And, you know, California has made a profit.

Yeah.

Unlike any Trump business we've noticed.

I mean, you know, if you're if you're talking about successful business experience, then presumably that means something.

Trump doesn't have it.

Well, one of the things I did notice, it comes back to another column that I wrote, was the fact that one of the sponsors for the parade was Coinbase, which is the crypto exchange.

I mean, this is just cheap, isn't it?

At least we did the trooping of the calibrated by O2.

I think it's

just cheapens it, doesn't it?

But the Trump family.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, they have to have these banners when they invade somewhere.

Well, they have to have some Coinbase representation.

and the my pillow guy gets his own like regiment but this is you know this is what it is it's like trump is has made so much money and the whole trump family has made so much money particularly from crypto and again it's another example of him just thinking he can license his image which is as you say in that's the only thing he's ever really done in business successfully and now he's able to do it from the you know the podium of the presidency so the lines between the president and the army have blurred the lines between the president and the treasury and public and private money they're all blurred is this deliberate i mean i think there's people behind him you know they're like the the heritage foundation the think tank put together this very influential document called project 2025 in which they laid out a blueprint essentially for the term and and all the things and the regulations they wanted to handle i think the main way to see it is just from trump's perspective he thinks he got elected he's beloved by the people and therefore he should be allowed to do what he wants because he's the people's instrument right i think it's you know it's a shame he went to see les meres because i think really in a way he would have been better off seeing a Vita.

Because I think he just has a great, like, he just thinks they love me.

I mean, one of the things he said to the troops, where it's great to see all these troops here, you know, I love you and you love me.

He's got this sort of belief that he should be allowed to do what he wants because he's in tune with the soul of the people.

Even though, you know, half of them did not vote for him as well as half did.

I do get the feeling that two sides are sort of fighting on a different battlefield, to use an appropriate metaphor here.

Because you've got one side, the No Kings thing, is about a very specific point in history and what George III did.

And then you've got Trump giving his address to the troops in which he said, Our soldiers never give up, never surrender, never ever quit.

They fight, fight, fight, and they win, win, win.

Literally, how many years is it since that chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan?

I mean, even before you get onto exactly how things ended in Vietnam or Korea, you know, it's this broad-bushed view of history, which is sort of history how you want it to be and the army how you want it to be.

And it just sort of sails over reality, doesn't it?

Not to mention Iraq.

Where are the wins?

We fight, fight, fight, and we have a reasonably good record.

It's less catchy here.

Or we fight, fight, fight, and then we withdraw in a shambles.

Yeah, I was going to say, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, it's not like, it's not great.

I mean, you really want to go back to the...

You can see why they're going back to 1776, can't you?

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Right, now for the third section today, as promised, a bit of summer fun, a quiz.

Prompted by something that Liz Truss, Ask Your Parents, did a week or two ago.

Ask your mortgage advice.

She was photographed promoting a brand of whiskey alongside a man, the proprietor of the whiskey firm, who in 2023 was jailed for 10 months after repeatedly punching a 78-year-old man in the face during a pub brawl.

And she didn't see a problem with promoting it.

This has prompted some...

some comment, although quite a lot of people have just thought, well, let's not bother.

It is Liz Truss.

Can I just say, when you say no one was that bothered, I'm afraid the people who write Private Eye could find no other subject

from him saying you've had enough love to Liz Truss to pictures of her with a whiskey barrel, people going this is the bottom of the barrel.

I'm afraid there were quite a lot of people who cared.

Sorry.

It was the pure Liz Trussiousness of it, wasn't it?

Because an ex-Prime Minister flogging some dodgy whiskey brand.

Already, that would be quite a story.

But because it's Liz Truss, it has to be a guy who's been convicted of GBH.

It has to get worse.

It has to get worse and worse.

Suppose she didn't even get any money for it either.

So she did this humiliation for free.

Do you think she thinks GBH is a special type of patriotic

arm?

Yes.

Well, no, you're absolutely right.

She wasn't receiving the big bucks of this, but she's done a few other things since her time in office.

And I thought it'd be a fun jumping off point for a quiz about what other things members of parliament or ex-members of parliament have done or are currently doing in many cases.

You don't have to justify it, Andy.

You know, when you just say quiz, we go, yes, great, all right, all right, all right, quizzes.

Okay, here's question one then.

It's about the truss incident itself.

Now that was huge brand opportunity, but what was the whiskey?

And what was her excuse after she was challenged about it?

I have no idea what the whiskey is called, but her spokesman's response was, after saying that he'd come out with it, he'd got an assault conviction, was, I thought you believed in the rehabilitation of offenders, which is what I'm going to say whenever I get caught doing anything dodgy.

Have you no Christian mercy?

Exactly.

There's a point for that.

Any potatoes on the whiskeys?

It was named after the guy, wasn't it?

It hasn't even worked, this grand campaign of hers is all I'm saying.

But he wasn't called Mr.

Jameson.

Is he called cease and desist?

He should be selling punch, really.

Sorry, that's a very, very cheap joke.

You're so close when you say Jameson's because it's not James, but Joyce.

It's called Joyce's Irish Whiskey.

And we'd like to make it clear, we don't endorse it.

Great.

But it wasn't James Joyce that was selling it.

No.

Okay, fine.

When he's been dead for 100 years, it's quite an achievement.

It wasn't Eric Joyce's, was it?

Now,

I'm going to stay on whiskey for a moment.

Which parliamentary figure has been selling their own whiskey for the last five years?

Parliamentary figure.

Parliamentary figure.

Are you saying not an MP?

It's the speaker.

There's a trick there, isn't there?

Ian, you've got it.

It's Lindsay Hoyle.

Every speaker of the House of Commons makes their own whiskey.

which is the thing they actually make their own, do they?

They put their name to.

They probably taste a few whiskies.

Behind the chair is a distillery.

But

literally saying order orders.

What a great little boondoggle.

So you get your speakership and then they send you off to some charming Scottish island where you taste a number of whiskeys.

It is a huge thing.

If you ever go along to any sort of MP's Christmas raffle or anything, there will always be a bottle of the speaker's whiskey signed by Mr.

Hoyle and party leaders as well.

This apparently is a tradition which dates back to the 90s.

So I'm not convinced it's

the 1990s I'm afraid last one on parliamentary whiskey

who knew you could get three questions out of it on hardtofindwhiskey.com great website

who is the only former mainstream party leader for whom a bottle of signed whiskey can be yours for under 400 quid there's only one everyone on everyone else's is 399.99 this one is 100 quid less ted heath treason man

Right party.

Rishi Sunak.

No, he doesn't have one actually.

I know, because he doesn't drink.

Boris Johnson.

No.

Okay.

I think we're out of options.

David Cameron.

Michael Howard.

You can get a bottle of Michael Howard signed whiskey for 300 quid.

Bargain.

Have yourself a something of the night.

Oh, very good.

Should have done this before Father's Day, shouldn't we?

Yeah.

Everyone else is.

I'm talking David Cameron, John Major, William Haig, Paddy Ashdown, a joint one by Ed Moll, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, 400 quid.

There you go.

That's considerably less than the private eye whiskey, which does exist.

It was created for our 30th anniversary, wasn't it?

There's a special bottle of McAllen.

There is an enormous amount of money now.

You drank yours, didn't you, when you got presented with it?

There are people working downstairs who have retained their bottle.

Is it illustrated by McLaughlin?

Is there a I think it's a Gerald Scarfe illustration.

That's classy.

So if you're listening to this and you've got one of those bottles, do not open it, is what you're saying.

Just send it to us and we will dispose of it safely.

Right, we're off the whiskey ones now.

You'll be relieved to hear.

Next up, Nigel Farage of Reform UK.

In, I believe, January this year, he made a video for We Save telling people that they could save money by buying nappies in bulk.

Now, he wasn't actually paid for that video or for any of the commercial involvement with WeSave.

But how many hours a week does Mr.

Farage spend spend on his other jobs, and which one pays best proportionally per hour?

I reckon his investment newsletter pays quite well.

His GB news gig paid pretty well.

He does loads and loads of those cameo videos.

Yeah.

He gets a lot for those.

He gets money off Twitter as well, doesn't he?

A lot of the

seven grand a month.

A lot of money off Twitter.

I'm going to need some answers.

I'm going to say he spends 25 hours a week on other stuff.

Okay.

28.

40.

Long-time job.

Helen's closest.

She gets another point.

It's 22 hours.

And I'll tell you, the best paid job he has outside his parliamentary work, in fact, including that, is selling gold as a tax-free investment for direct bullion.

And that earns him roughly £32,000 a month for four hours of work.

See to close.

That's £8,000 an hour.

God, gold is the best investment.

Okay, now here, each of you only, well, once you've answered, you don't get to guess again.

So be careful.

and it's a long question.

Which right-wing politician took part in I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here,

was voted out very quickly

in 2008,

and their appearance provoked irritation from fellow parliamentarians, plus it led to clashes in the camp with Joe Swash and Timmy Mallet.

This was a former leader of UKIP.

It was

the orange bloke.

Narrow it down.

Not with Kilroy Silk.

Robert Kilroy Silk.

I'm so glad you gave us the thing that we had to wait because I was going, it's going to be Nadine.

It's going to be Nadine.

And then I was like, maybe,

then it's Matt Hancock.

Maybe it's Matt Hancock.

I know.

Kezia Dugdale.

No one remembers Kezia Dugdale.

I'll get this one.

None of you took the plunge and buzzed in.

No, that's we waited for Robert Kilroy a second.

It was worthwhile.

Absolutely.

Yes.

He believes in ghosts.

He was an MEP at the time, and one of his fellow MEPs said, We are in serious times, and people expect their politicians to do a job of work.

And you can't do that if you're in the jungle, covered in cockroaches, eating kangaroos' testicles, and swimming with crocodiles.

That was a hell of a challenge doing all of those at once, wasn't it?

They're not normally.

Niger Farage did very well, actually.

I thought there's a bit where they did Camp Karaoke and he sang I'm too sexy by Right, said Fred, which I believe to be his party piece that he's also done on GB News.

Far right, said Fred to use.

Kieris Hook, incidentally, was voted off first and then claimed the show had been badly edited.

Classic.

And I'm afraid to say, tragically, this even spilled over into the Wags camp where Jan Kilroy Silk had some harsh words for Linda Mallet.

Linda Mallet.

Wow.

We go again.

Slightly more recently.

David T.C.

Davies, former Welsh Secretary, has not got a job yet, or he hadn't as of a few months ago after leaving Parliament.

What did he blame for the fact he hadn't got a job yet?

Was it anti-Tory bias?

It's not anti-Tory bias.

That has been a complaint.

Jonathan Dulles has said that he can't get work, for example, as a teacher because.

Was he anti-Welsh bias?

It wasn't anti-Welsh bias.

Was it anti-politician bias?

They hate all of us.

It's actually.

People kept accusing him with the other David Davis.

Oh, you're not that David Davis.

No, what this is, it's actually anti-human bias.

So he doesn't have a degree, right?

That's not how his career started out.

He thinks that automatic CV reading software has ruled him out of the running because, you know, you just plug the CVs into a computer, it just tells you, right, you can rule out these people immediately.

These are the remaining candidates you might want to hire.

I just like this a lot.

He did get an application form for one of the jobs he was applying for.

And he says this, he says, it asked him, name of last line manager.

I answered, Rishi Sunak.

Job title of last line manager, I put Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Telephone number of line manager he said i have rishi's number but i wasn't going to put it in the box and he got rejected from that right you're all doing very well by the way which former prime minister's tv appearance was what was voted one of the most awkward moments of television ever by channel 4 so this is after they were prime minister yeah it's a it's a presenting gig that a former pm took oh i know this one of course i know this one it's harold wilson presenting um saturday night and sunday morning isn't it friday night friday night and sunday morning sorry

adam i i did throw a bit muddled with the clash there.

I just throw in a 1970s one just for you, Adam.

I know, right?

That's just

blatant favourite.

He apparently just couldn't do it.

He just couldn't host.

It was too informal, too unscripted, and he just couldn't.

He's got some in the early stages of Alzheimer's, to be fair to the poor man.

I also remember it's always bracketed with Peter Cook, who ran a chat show and then gave it up.

And he was asked, why did you give it up?

And he said, I just wasn't very interested in other people.

Which is a more honest reply.

Which former Conservative minister has, in the last year or so, earned nearly their MP's salary again for just two speeches?

It's not an obvious one.

Two speeches.

Yeah.

Not big gov?

Not gova?

Is it quasi-quateng?

It's not quasi-quateng, Adam.

I can't even remember any of the recent Tory ministers.

Suella B.

Suella Bravman.

This is an interesting thing from the Register of Members' Interest, and I found it after laboriously ploughing through all extra employment, so you've got to hear it now too, I'm afraid.

She has just been paid £29,000 by Chosun Media, a South Korean media organisation, and last year it was £35,000, including flights and accommodation for speaking at one conference.

Do you think they put the decimal place in the wrong bit?

And they were just too embarrassed to go back.

I'm so sorry.

It'll be a currency thing.

Anyway, I just thought that was quite interesting.

She's a huge darling of the South Korean media and politics circuit.

She's practically a K-popper.

Right, final one.

This one is really hard.

Which MP would you want with you if you had been on a ship which sank near a desert island and you'd been injured in the process?

Who is that MP?

So, you want someone who's a doctor, but maybe had been a doctor at sea.

Can swim really well.

Is this ever or current?

Current.

So I can't say John Prescott because he'd serve you a gentonic and you'd feel better.

Who was the woman who was on splash?

Penny Morden.

Penny Morden.

She'd be good.

She'd be John Morton.

She'd be falling off the boat in the first place.

I don't know if the skills are transferable after that.

No, she's a strong swimmer, though.

She could tow you to shore.

Yeah.

I think that's a really good answer.

She had a naval reserve.

And she would fight, fight, fight for survival afterwards.

I think that's a point too, Ian, because it's not the answer I've got, but I think it technically qualifies as a good one.

Well, let's give a point to the boss.

Oh, he gave you a question about the 1970s.

Okay, fair.

You've all been pandered to disgracefully.

Don't abuse it.

Andrew Morrison of South Wiltshire, brackets con,

is a surgeon commander, which is the coolest job I found in the entire register of members' interests.

Surgeon, but also in naval reserve, and has done tours of duty and things like that.

So I just think that's an interesting, you know, you get a lot of people who've got rather drab consultancy jobs, and I think surgeon commander is quite a good one.

But I mean, he can get called up, and you'd have to take time off parliament because he'd have to go and

theoretically.

James Cleverly is in a similar situation as a reservist for a long time.

Oh, really?

Steve Baker, of course, constantly ready for the SAS, should they rest.

Do you think Trump will end up listening to this podcast and thinking, Surgeon Commander?

Yeah.

I could do that.

That's it.

Well, congratulations, Helen.

I love a quiz when I win.

I don't when I don't.

It's funny how that works out.

How are you going to spend the winnings?

I'll buy a cameo from Nigel Farage, congratulating Private Eye on all its great work.

Can you buy a cameo from Nigel Farage asking him to provide some properly costed policies?

That's how we'll get some properly costed policies from reform.

I'll pay for them in 75 quid increments.

Well, thank you very much for playing at home if you have been.

Thank you to Sarah from earlier.

Thank you to Helen, Ian and Adam.

And thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing.

As always, if you would like more, page 94 in written form, there are more stories about dodgy reform councillors.

There are more silly jokes about Liz Tross.

And there are more columns analysing the current absolute state of the nation of the USA.

It's all there and lots and lots and lots more besides.

It's terrific.

Go to private-i.co.uk, get a subscription now.

We'll be back again in a fortnight.

We'll see you then.

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