148: Leftie Lawyers and Rightwing Roughnecks

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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 and Adam McQueen.

Later on, we're going to be speaking to Ian Hislop and Nick Newman for a special tribute to Barry Fantoni, long one of the key creative voices at the magazine, who very sadly died not so long ago.

And we're going to be talking about his life and his contribution to the eye over the years.

It's a really interesting chat.

But first, for this bit of the podcast, we are going to be talking about two men in British public life who I would say might be the opposite.

I think they might be the matter and anti-matter of British politics.

We're going to start with one and then move on to the other.

See if you can guess who the second one is from the first, okay?

Who is the literal opposite of Robert Jenrick?

It will hover over the listener's ear for some time.

So Robert Jenrick is the Shadow Justice Secretary and

Freelance Batman.

It seems that you get quite a lot of time on your hands when you're the Shadow Justice secretary because he's been spending his copious free time going down the tube and filming free video content for all of us.

Very grateful for that.

Of him accosting fair dodgers, people who've shoved their way through the barriers, and he then catches up with them and says, excuse me, mate, and says, are you sure you should be doing that?

It's a bit naughty, isn't it?

And, you know, in slightly less friendly tone than that.

Helen, what's he doing?

Well, he is bolstering the media presence of Robert Jenrick.

I think that's one.

He's advertising himself as an should, what's that phrase from Boris Johnson?

Should the ball come free from the back of the scrum for Tory leader?

That he could also, you know, obviously last time around he lost Kemi Badenock.

He's a have a go hero.

He is a have a go hero.

But he is also doing something that you can see Keir Stalma trying to do.

So on my other podcast, sorry to reference my other relationship, I talked about Keir Starmer's increasingly butch tweets.

So Keir Starmer has started doing these tweets that are like, you know, you think you're above the law, you're not.

We're we're coming for you, I'm Keir Starmer.

And I think there is a general feeling that, particularly with the public realm in a bit of a shabby state,

people have a certain level of anger about low-level social disorder and that politicians can usefully seize upon this.

I mean, Adam, you're old enough to remember.

You remember Aspos?

I remember Aspos.

I was thinking about even further than that.

I was thinking Jack Straw and the squeegee merchants of death.

Do you remember them?

No, no.

No, this is very, very early on New Labour.

They decided they were going to crack down exactly on that on sort of anti-social behaviour at a a very sort of low level.

So people used to come up to your windscreen when you were stopped at the traffic lights and wash your windscreen whether you liked it or not and then demand money from you.

There was a lot of that.

Tony Blair talking about aggressive beggars.

To be fair to Jack Straw, you don't actually see a lot of squeegee merchants in death these days.

So that's one that worked.

They were big on this thing, particularly when Jack Straw, who was his first home secretary, was very much cracking down on that kind of...

low-level sort of street anti-socialness, things that didn't quite verge onto crime, but made people feel a bit

both scared and outraged.

I mean, that's the thing with Generic, isn't it?

It's one of these cases of kind of like, why are these people getting away with it when the rest of us are all law-abiding and paying for our tickets?

It's got a lot of interesting overtones to it, because the other thing it reminds me of is Broken Windows, which is Rudy Giuliani in 90s New York saying, essentially, if you just, if things look kind of crap at the low level, then it just spreads upwards and people do law-breaking.

Funny, since Rudy Giuliani, my last memory of him, was him being served with a writ somewhere for some dodgy thing that he had been involved with.

But anyway, and then the pushback to it from liberals was this is targeting young black and brown men, you know, picking people up for these small offences.

And exactly, as you would expect, this has been the pushback to Robert Jenrick's stunt: was saying, Well, you know, you claimed twice for the same journey on your expenses when you went on the train and in your car, Robert Jenrick, or you pushed through Richard Desmond's development plans, and that cost us all a lot of money.

Cost us 40 million quid, which is twice what TfL had to spend fighting fare evasion last year, just to put the numbers on it.

Possibly TFL could stand to spend a bit more fighting fare evasion on the evidence of Robert Jenrick's video, to be fair, because the staff seem to have had the diktat which lots of staff in shops had in San Francisco notoriously, don't interfere, don't put your lives in danger, leave this to the police to deal with.

Yeah, don't get stabbed, you're not combat trained.

It's not an insane thing to say.

It's not an insane thing to say, but

it's the same impulse that annoys people.

This is why I mentioned San Francisco, because this has been a repeated drumbeat of American political conversations: that liberal cities are horrible.

No one wants to use public transport.

There's shops.

And when I went to San Francisco March, sure enough, all the stuff in the pharmacy is locked behind glass, right?

You have to come and someone unlocks it for you.

But there is this general sense that people are getting away with it, getting away with it.

It is definitely significant that he picked London for this, isn't it?

You know, he's not going after kind of like people speeding in

leafy rural lanes.

It's about that kind of metropolitan view of London and particularly Carnes London being this lawless, terrible place.

That is true.

Although he is going through the crimes quite quickly at the moment, he may find himself reporting on like fly-tipping in Bedfordshire before the year is out.

Just you've got to keep the content fresh.

I welcome that.

There was a video, was it the Tories or Reform that put out the video before the last election saying this crime on the London Underground?

And actually, it was very obvious from the pictures it was actually the New York subway.

Yeah, the clues were like really big trains that you could stand up properly in.

Yeah.

But there is, that's very much a sort of narrative that will appeal to the sort of people who might potentially be voting for Robert Jenrick in a leadership contest soon, I would think.

I feel the familiar irritation of if I see someone fair dodging, I get really annoyed about it.

Jenrick's previous videos, letter dropping, I get really annoyed about that.

Theft of trade tools from vans, I haven't experienced that myself, but I can imagine it's absolutely infuriating.

To what extent is this real or perceived?

I mean, Sadiq Khan's response when he was asked about fair dodging on the tube was that, well, in the last year for which we have stats, 3.4% of journeys were not paid for.

But the year before that, it was 3.8%, so it's moving in the right direction.

That does feel like quite a bloodless way of responding.

But then if the alternative is butchkir, key, isn't it then just a competition of who can be most angry?

And does that add to the debate really?

Well Robert Jenrick has had a quite a butch makeover, right?

And he was no, but he has.

He's got now, you know, the way that George Osborne's hair sort of moved forwards.

Instead of having the swept back kind of school prefect look, he had the swept forward, the Caesar haircut, as I believe they called it at the time.

Robert Jenrick has had something similar.

He's also, you know, used Wegavey.

He's also in a checked shirt.

In fact, actually, Adam, you've come to this podcast recording dressed as Robert Jenrick.

Can I just say I had this look first?

Robbie Jenick is copying me of anything.

I am the butch icon that Robert Jenrik is modelling himself on.

So if Osborne is Caesar, is Jenrik one of the kind of like degraded, angrier, later emperors, like a Tiberius?

Yeah, I mean, you want to, for libel reasons, which is to clarify, probably not Tiberius or Caligula, maybe just a sort of

just Nero.

Yeah, mid-range emperor.

But you know what I mean?

I think you're exactly right to pick it up about it.

It taps into a fear of urban spaces as being places that have a lot of minorities in them, a lot of poor people in them, where people are thrown together.

And I think people who don't live in them, you know, I talk to people who live in other bits of the country and they think London's a bit loud and overwhelming and scary.

I'm thinking also of Nigel Farage many years ago saying about you know he'd been on the London Underground and he'd never a single person speaking English and that that that had that sort of same cutthrough on it didn't it with with people who fear a certain and London semi graphics are very different to some other bits of the country right they just look very very different

and it it's it is also not a coincidence I think so he filmed that in Stratford which is a a very heavily Asian part of London.

Right.

Right?

So he wasn't filming it in Moswell Hill, where I imagine you probably also could find one or two people shoving through the gates.

Is there a synthesis between these two positions?

Can we agree that crime is bad?

Yes.

Okay.

I'm against it, broadly.

And I would happily, as I've said before on this podcast, people listening to stuff without headphones in on public transport should be taking.

I was just going to say, is this yet another case where Ed Davey and his lib Dems are not getting the credit they deserve for this?

Because a couple of months ago, they came out with that as a Lib Dem policy.

It was the law anyway, that you're not allowed to listen to music without headphones.

Or it's a sort of nuisance law or something.

But it was one of those things where lots of newspaper columns said, well, this is terribly illiberal for the Lib Dems, and lots of readers and voters went, Yes, brilliant!

Please can we take these people's phones away and possibly give them the death penalty as well?

Is Robert Jamrick just angry Ed Davy?

Is that what we've discovered?

You're right.

He is sort of like the dark side.

He loves

his malevolent aspect, yes.

Like a sort of Hindu god.

He'll bungee jump, but at the bottom of the axis, he'll cut some benefits just with a pair of scissors, he's gotten them, you know, is that it?

Pretty notoriously, he did ask her if you remember for a mural in a children's refugee centre to be pended over in case any of the children experienced joy.

That's very anti-devi.

Which is like the exactly mirror world at Devi.

But you're right, he's onto something, right?

In the same way that the small boats are such an evocative issue, even when at the upper bounds we're talking about 50,000 people versus the legal migration to this country or other routes over the years has really knocked up.

But it's a visible symbol and it annoys people because they can visibly see people breaking the rules.

It reminds me as well actually of going even further back to the sort of late Thatcher years when single mothers who were having babies just so they could get a council house became a thing.

And it's got that same nature of it, it's unjust.

There have been two suggestions posed in response to this latest wave of stuff about fair dodging.

The non-stupid one is a little bit from the Swiss model where you get increasing fines.

Like if you were fined the first time, if you do it again, you get fined more.

and the fines are not really very lenient, you know, they're they're quite strictly observed, and also if they go unpaid, they become a major headache for you.

So, various administrative doors close, like if you're applying for a citizenship or a lease or like a mobile phone, those applications grind to a halt because the system says no, you need to go and pay this fine.

You're frowning, Adam.

You think that's a good question?

If we're going for the Swiss, uh Swiss-Swiss approach on law and order, this is the country where I've only seen certain cantons you're banned as a male from urinating standing up after about eight o'clock at night because it makes too much noise for the the neighbours.

Sensible policies for a greater Switzerland.

I bet that would poll really well.

They're in the COVID pandemic when they polled people about whether or not they wanted a permanent curfew at 9pm and about a fifth of Britain.

Yes.

So quite a controlling, but you know,

potentially reasonable solution.

That.

The other I read in The Spectator, why can't we have two police officers stationed by the barriers at every major tube station in the capital?

Because there's like, that would involve an enormous amount of policing manpower.

They could be.

I think because numbers, yeah, because numbers of total police officers.

That is a new evolution of why can't we just have more bobbies on the beat, though?

So credit to whoever came up with that.

Okay, well, let's come on to the anti-generic,

Richard Hermer.

Lord Richard Hermer?

Yeah, as of last year.

He's in the House of Lords.

Richard, Lord Hermer.

Oh, there we go.

Because he's not the son of an Earl.

Ms.

De Bretz has popped in.

Sorry.

So Richard Hermer is the Attorney General.

He's the government chief lawyer.

He's Kirstama, big lawyers, chief lawyer.

So he's like this sort of Uber lawyer.

Well, Uber is an appropriate word to use actually in this conversation because he's recently been in the news because

he made some comments comparing a pick and mix approach to international law and your international legal obligations to various things that were going on in Germany in the 1930s where various of their jurists were saying,

you know, Deutschland Über Ellers and we can pick and mix.

Like, power is more important than observing technical legal niceties.

This has led to an enormous pushback against him from, among others, Robert J.

Bobby Jay himself, who's no doubt outside the Royal Courts of Justice with his team, filming a little GoPro video or whatever he does.

Can I just correct you on one point?

Oh, yeah.

Because it wasn't various people in Germany in the 1930s.

It was one specific person.

This is a speech to the Royal United Services Institute last week.

The claim that international law is fine as far as it goes, but can be put aside when conditions change, is a claim that was made in the early 1930s by realist juries in Germany, most notably Carl Schmidt, whose central thesis was in essence the aim that state power is all that counts, not law.

So it's one very specific Nazi, which has somehow transmuted into he's saying, everyone who disagrees with him is a Nazi, in the words of Kevin.

I'm just going to go out there and say that you probably could have picked other examples.

I bet there are other people who, without going, do you know what happened in Germany in 1933?

I mean, I feel like he probably knows what he was doing with that one.

He probably does, but I mean, have you heard of Carl Schmidt?

No, no.

I've looked him up.

Funnily enough, I don't know my Nazi.

Charlie Fellow, German academic in the 1920s and 30s.

Most famously, he justified the Knight of the Long Knives when Hitler purged all of his, all of his political rivals, just had them murdered, as the highest form of administrative justice.

So,

yeah.

I mean, yes,

even that in itself is quite an extreme.

Where was he on Tube Ferrove?

Oh, I don't think he was keen.

He really wasn't.

So this gets to a bit of a debate that's been going on about international law and, in fact, domestic law, just the extent to which government should be keeping to the letter of the law, as well as as being against crime.

Kirstalmer is pro-law.

These are not controversial things, but

for some reason, being in favour of governments of observing law has become a bit of a woolly, woke, leftish thing to say.

Well, in this country, it's specifically about the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the entire Human Rights Act that that oversees.

And that's become sort of the bugbear.

I mean, we've left the EU, and since then, it's sort of taken the place of those unelected Eurocrats in Brussels.

The EHCR is kind of the next thing in everyone's targets, including Whispering Bob Jenrik, Kemi Vagenock.

She's a bit vague on it.

She hasn't actually said we would definitely leave yet, has she?

Kemi Vagenok.

Sorry.

She couldn't keep it in any longer.

I play Bandy's influence.

But it's certainly something that's being pushed by a lot of the Tory press.

The Telegraph and the Mail are very, very big on this.

They are also the ones who are most outraged at Hermer and being compared in themselves to Nazis.

I mean, interestingly,

they're not...

opposed to using the EHCR in Strasbourg when it suits them.

So the Telegraph, as recently as last

couple of months ago, was celebrating victory over Philip Green, ex-BHS boss, on this very specific point in Strasbourg, where the court said that actually, no, Parliament should have privilege over the judiciary, and it was fine for Philip Greene to be named as the holder of an injunction against the Telegraph over his behavior when he was boss of BHS.

The Mail also had a case in front of the EHCR in Strasbourg last November over being obliged to pay success fees for people who sued them for libel.

And these are sort of extra fees that are added on by lawyers.

And they managed to defeat that one as well.

So they're not behind the scenes, they do have a bit more time for the EHCR than they do on their front pages.

But that's when it's expedient rather than the typical use cases that the public imagine the EHCR being for because I think of it as being much more about whether it's migration or sort of international cases with big ramifications for British politics in terms of who gets to be here, which seems to be the main focus for a lot of people.

That's their main thing that it's become

supposedly a barrier to us being able to boot out people that we don't want in the country and it's part of that whole big fervent immigration value.

I'd have to say, actually, the other thing with the mail and the telegraph is they're not terribly keen on British courts when they go against them either.

I mean, you're not talking about disinterested observers here.

If you remember from a few years ago, that mail headline, enemies of the people, that was three judges at the High Court who found against some particular Brexit legislation.

That, at the time, people were saying, This is quite sort of reminiscent of a certain time in the history of a certain country.

No one's ever keen on courts when they go against them, are they?

I mean, that is one of the truths of life, like death and taxes.

I was just thinking about the Supreme Court ruling on gender.

You had a load of people who said how wonderful it was that the Supreme Court ruled on prorogation on Brexit and how we should never question them, how illiberal it was to question them.

Suddenly, update regarding Supreme Court, I think they've got this one terribly wrong.

Is it because one of the judges lives near J.K.

Rowling in Edinburgh was genuinely a meme?

Right.

And I think that is the problem, is that they're a very, because they are wielding authority, whenever they wield authority you don't like, they're a really big site for people to have a grumble.

Is this part of the reason why there's an attempt to kind of depersonalise judges?

You know, the wigs, the kind of costume, this is not the person you're dealing with, it's the law as embodied by the judge.

More even than that, I mean, Adam, you'll know this better than me, but there's been a couple of cases recently where they've applied to not reveal the judge who was presiding over them because they're so worried about judges getting, you know, on things like terror cases or high-profile cases that attract conspiracy theories.

You know, I think there are real concerns about judges, which have been fought off so far, I have to say.

But the principle of an open judiciary is something that actually lots of people feel quite nervous about at the moment because of the very personalised threats that are being made against people.

And they have been for years and years.

I remember speaking to families of judges in the family court

who were being targeted by Fathers for Justice, you know, sort of turning up in their front gardens and things.

So, you know,

it's not a non-existent threat, but also you have absolutely got to have the principle of open justice.

And for the most part, the judicial system are very good at holding on to this and saying that

courts do need to be open in that way.

Adam, can I say one more thing from Hermer's speech and then we'll get into the kind of the principles and why it matters, I suppose, as we've already started doing.

I just found this line very interesting from what he said.

He was talking about what happens if the framework of international law fails.

And he said it's very obvious that Russia and other malign state actors see the undermining of the legal-based framework as a core objective.

Putin does not simply apply a Schmitt, Carl Schmidt-Ian approach to the rule of law within the boundaries of Russia and its proxies.

He recognizes the huge strategic advantage that would flow in undermining the post-1945 international law framework.

So that puts a slightly different spin on what he's saying, because I think people have interpreted what he's saying as, well, Britain has to scrupulously observe all international law, even when it's to our huge disadvantage.

Whereas what he might have been saying is, actually, we should preserve the concept of international law.

And it's currently under attack from all sorts of directions at the moment, including surprising places like the US.

Yeah, it is.

He He said, I do not for one moment question the good faith, let alone patriotism of the pseudo-realists, is what he calls these people, but their arguments are ever adapted to provide succour to Putin.

So

a nice elegant.

He can't stop making friends, can he?

So we should say who he is as well before anything else.

You know, he was the first Attorney General in a century who wasn't an MP first.

That's really unusual.

He comes from the same chambers that Keir Starmer established with Doughty Street.

Yeah.

Well, he arrived in the job in a slightly dodgy political way because, I mean, right up until the election, the shadow Attorney General had been Emily Thornbury, who is a well-known figure for Islington South, I think, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But sort of knocking around in Labour politics for ages, you know, a qualified lawyer, as you have to be in order to take one of these jobs in the government.

And then at the very last minute, almost everyone went into the brief that they'd been shadowing, and she didn't.

Instead, Lord Hermer was brought in, who, as you say, is an old colleague of Keir Starmer's.

Switcheroo.

Switcheroo.

Exactly.

And I said,

I don't think that's done in many favours amongst certain Labour MPs.

Certainly, judging by those who've been happy to line up and give quotes anonymously on this latest for, did you see in the Times on Saturday, one of his ministerial colleagues was quoted as saying, once a mentalist, always a mentalist.

Which is okay, right?

They don't mean in a sort of mind-reader-y way.

I don't think they're talking to Darren Brown.

So they're referring to Herma there.

They're referring to Herma.

So he's represented all sorts of people.

The mother of one of the ISIS Beatles.

Shamima Begum.

I mean, he represented her, but he sort of weighed in with an opinion.

As in the woman who've tried to go to Syria to join up.

Yes.

Was he not involved in something related to Jerry Adams?

He was not the latest case where Jerry Adams has just had a libel victory over the BBC and had his reputation restored as the fine, upstanding, lovely man that he is.

But a past one of that one.

I mean, this is always a bit of an easy one.

Is it shooting fish in a barrel, isn't it?

I shouldn't say that in conjunction with Jerry Adams.

I shouldn't say shooting, should I?

They don't have any knees.

No.

You see, it's always something you can do with lawyers, isn't it?

Because they take cases on the taxi rank principle, so you can go through and

find kind of

something grotty.

Or if not, just make it up.

I mean, given those online rumours that were going around about Keir Starmer's personal involvement somewhere in the Axel Rudicabana case of representing him or representing his dad, which turned out to be a little bit of a killer.

The Southport killer, right?

The Southport killer, yeah.

Yes.

And that rumour really went kind of nuts on various social media things.

Because people like to believe bad things about lawyers.

I mean, it comes into the stuff we were talking about with Jenrick, and that's specifically London.

I mean, specifically North London, the case is one of the shorthands that gets used.

It's sort of sort of general purpose term of abuse that can be put in lots of directions.

I always like Islington, that's my favourite one, because

famous past residents in Islington, of course, include Boris Johnson and Paul Dacre, those well-known lefties.

Actually, speaking of Boris Johnson, it was an attack line he used, quite a successful one, on Kier Starmer.

It was that, oh, he's just a lawyer.

He doesn't, you know, he's a human rights lawyer, he doesn't really believe in anything else.

Which, again, is quite a turnaround because I remember you go back 20 years, who was the great hunk and fantasy man of the world?

It was Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones, who was a human rights lawyer, wasn't he?

We know we used to sort of quite like this, this, this as an idea.

Still do.

Sorry, just give me a moment.

I think this kind of comes back to why Keir Starmer's doing all the aggressively sort it out, you slag tweets, because he knows that this is an attack line that has got a huge potential to work against him.

Because it's not just lawyers, is it, Adam?

It's specifically if you're a human rights lawyer.

by definition the people who need a human rights lawyer tend to be wrongs in some way who nonetheless deserve not to be like tortured or you know subjected to capital punishment in a foreign country or whatever it might be yeah and if you look at Hermer's history it's not

I mean I'm sure he's very capable of doing the job in a completely disinterested fashion but if he's for example said Donald Trump was the most brazen liar ever in 2020 he's argued there's a moral argument for reparations to Caribbean nations over slavery it's not impossible to divine broadly where he comes from in political terms.

He's not going to be a friend of the Daily Mail, is he?

Right.

So does this matter at all?

I mean, politically, obviously, it's got some significance.

I think the really interesting thing about this

is the Nazi comparison.

I mean, there was a looking into Godwin's Law, which everyone knows.

Could you say where it is, just for any listeners who don't know?

Godwin's Law is specific to internet arguments.

The longer the Internet argument goes on, the chance, the probability of someone being compared to Nazi reaches 100%.

And the bit that got appended to it afterwards was that the first person saying Nazi has lost the argument, isn't it?

But there does have to be a point.

I mean, I'm looking not particularly at this country, but I'm looking across the ponds to where, you know, we've got an American president who is ruling largely by executive order, who is really in terms of personal vendettas going after the legal system, specific lawyers, universities and the free press.

At some point you do need to kind of be able to say he's a little bit Nazi, isn't it?

without just being shouted down and someone told that that's the worst thing you can possibly say in the world.

Interesting.

Mike Godwin has said this himself.

He did say in 2023, yes, it is okay to compare Trump to Hitler, just to clarify his offer.

I mean, I don't think it's helpful, actually, because I think everybody ends up having an argument about how offended they are.

Whereas if you just say he's an authoritarian, this is Trump, that's completely logical and defensible.

It's just, I do, you know, one of those things where people end up arguing about the word and not the actions.

And I just think I find it completely derailing.

But you would say that because you're a Nazi.

Ah, yes, of course, I'd forgotten.

Do the actions in question include various straight-arm salutes made from stages at rallies?

Are those inappropriate for Nazi comparisons?

Do you know what, though?

Senator Cory Booker, who is a Democrat, did something similar where he did one of those stretching out to the crowd salutes.

And of course, all the online right are going, oh, you're not calling him a Nazi, are you?

You're not calling him a Nazi.

And you say, of course, the thing is, Elon Musk, there was a bit of a background, wasn't there, to you doing this, like saying lots of things like, I think I should have many babies and repopulate the world.

world.

You know,

anyway.

Are you saying context matters?

I am.

It's very unpopular to say that that on the internet, but I'm nonetheless insisting on it.

I'll clarify my view.

Obviously, it's not helpful to just go around calling everyone Nazis, but if we're at a point where we can't learn from specific actions and things that happened in history without it becoming a frankly confected, nonsensical thing about, oh, he thinks everyone's a Nazi and now he's got to resign, then we're going to be able to do that.

I think this is great.

I think an update to the law, a change in the law, if only there was someone who was qualified to advise on that.

But I think that's really interesting that you were talking about the fact there's one set of people arguing about the law at the kind of top end, right, in its most abstract international form, versus how people feel about the law at the bottom end, which is people committing minor petty misdemeanours that they can see in their everyday life, right?

They're almost they just, even though they're species of the same thing, they feel so completely different and politically kind of the salience of them is one's right-coded and one's left-coded.

Are we saying that maybe Richard Hermer should get down to Stratford two barriers and start filming?

And Robert Jenrick should take his case to the ICJ.

Yes, I want some sort of job swap.

You know, this is a channel 4 format.

It is.

This is wife swap, but for the next generation.

Yeah, big justice, small justice.

Oh, that's it.

Get them on the phone.

Good cop, bad cop.

Yes, okay, great.

Sold.

I'll take two.

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Now, what do E.J.

Thripp, the Eyes resident poet, Glenda Slagg, Neesden FC, all have in common?

They were all the brainchild of one man, Barry Fantoni, who very sadly passed away a couple of weeks ago.

You may have seen in the latest edition of the magazine EJ Thribb himself writing a tribute which began so farewell then to the man who came up with the words so farewell then.

Barry Fantoni was a key part of Private Eye for 47 years from 1963 all the way up until 2010.

He had an extraordinary tenure at the magazine which started with cartoons, it moved on through various other bits of art all the way into the joke writing team and he was a really significant figure in the life of Private Eye.

He was a very different kind of person.

There was a reputation in the early days that the eye was full of stuffy ex-public schoolboys.

Barry was Jewish Italian from London and he had joined art school at the age of about 14, so he brought a very different energy with him.

In fact, as he put it, one of his first jobs at the magazine was literally painting the door.

Over to Ian Hislop and Nick Newman to talk about that and about all the other aspects of Barry's long and glorious career at the Eye.

Here's Ian.

I think Barry was quite keen to give the impression that there was this group of public schoolboys sitting in Soho without a clue about what was going on in the real world.

And Barry came through the door and started off painting the door practically and then designing the mag and then doing the cartoons and then writing it all and eventually just taking it over completely.

Which is not entirely untrue.

But that was

his myth.

Okay.

Recollections vary, I think.

My understanding was that he was sort of brought to the attention of the eye by this painting painting he did, which was it exhibited at the Royal Academy?

The one of Prince Philip in his underpants,

which was a wonderful piece of pop art.

He was sort of straight out of Campbell School of Art.

And this painting was sort of like a sort of thing that you'd find in a comic of how you dress up Prince Philip in different outfits, a naval uniform, a sort of duke's uniform,

Colonel of the Bombardier Guards.

But basically it's him in his underpants, which is just very funny.

And the Daily Express just went nuts.

Yeah, quite controversial, I would have thought.

I mean, even these days.

I know we've seen Prince Harry playing strip billiards in Las Vegas, but I think the Express put it on the front page and said, you know, Britain is finished,

and this is proof.

And I think the then fledgling editors of Private Eye thought, right, we'd better get a bit of this.

Because in the early days, Willie Rushton drew all the cartoons, and Barry came in about the same time as Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.

And he drew not really satirical cartoons at all.

They were just gag cartoons.

And really, about the 60s, I mean, it was hippies.

They were very unusual style because he was a consummate artist and his portraiture and stuff was just amazing.

But the cartoons themselves were like they were drawn by a child, you know, which was part of their charm.

Yes, and Barry, who was not a public school boy and hadn't been at Oxford with the other founders, or at Cambridge,

brought something completely different.

I mean, I think Richard and Christian Booker were rather appalled by the 60s, even though they were very much

part of the counterculture.

And Barry loved it all.

And men in flares with ridiculous hair going, This book's too much, man.

So,

you know, cartoons of

little maps saying, you are nowhere.

He was the 60s.

Didn't he have a TV show, which later became the title of his memoir, which is the most 60s title of anything ever, anywhere, which is a whole scene going on.

Yeah, I mean, it's...

He's a parody.

He was the sort of, sort of voice of youth?

The whole scene going on was the BBC's attempt to have a pop.

program to appeal to young people and it was an answer to ready steady go

and barry appeared in the in the pilot which wasn't very good

and he appeared as a guest to talk about pop art and Ned Sherin saw it and said Barry Fantoni is the face of the 1960s that that was his quote Ned Sherin was the producer of that was the week that was okay so it was a small group of of people saying what is the 60s

and there he was

right

and Barry had sort of long hair and at a time when you look at the early photographs of people at Private Eye and there's Richard wearing a tie.

Well, Beans are wearing a tie as well.

Things haven't changed much.

But Barry was, you know, he was an outsider, and he came in with a very different perspective.

And he was doing jokes about football, popular culture.

The whole world of Spiggy Topes, who was a sort of parody of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, was Barry.

And Spiggy Topes

had this band called The Turds, and they were the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.

But it sort of summed up 60s pop culture.

But, you know, when you got to know him, you realized he actually was there.

He was a friend of Paul McCartney's and the kinks, and you just thought, this is very bizarre.

He advised Paul McCartney on buying a harmonium, and they drove up to somewhere in North London where, because Barry had a harmonium and Paul McCartney liked his harmonium.

And then Paul McCartney rings him up and says, Barry,

I've been playing my harmonium all night.

Come and listen to it.

And so Barry trailed up to St.

John's Wood, where Macca had his house behind Lourdes.

And McCartney plays him

Your Mother Should Know, you know, which he's just

written that night and then plays I am the Walrus or something like that.

But

it was all happening.

It was a whole scene going on.

You've brought props along.

You've got a lot of stuff here.

Well, we're basically trying to put together a little tribute.

tribute tribute to barry a tribute

um he was also the voice of ej thribb which is you know much remarked on and in the last issue we tried to capture a bit of uh so farewell then barry because it was sort of but that's about as meta as i've ever been there thinking well normally you'd have been writing this um and now it's you i mean barry was here when christopher booker died and booker wrote a a very serious book called

The Seven Plots, which was all about, you know, it was an analysis of literature.

And the joke in that one was, now you're in one.

So there was a certain comradely spirit there.

You shouldn't underestimate how much he did for the magazine.

I mean, I edited the

50-year retrospective of Private Eye Cartoons, Private Eye Cartoon History.

Barry's there on page one, and he's there on page 293 out of 294 with the scenes you seldom see.

Which was one of the last things he did before he retired, which was just,

and I think the one

in the books was a plumber coming around and saying, Yeah, no, the guy before did a really good job, but I mean, very little, very little for me to do here.

And that was that was the level of it.

He just

came up with fully formal jokes.

Yeah, they were interested.

There is one of two dads with one with their son between them saying, Yeah, Ben's not very clever.

There's such good, that was one of the first things I liked in the Mag when I was reading it when I was much younger, was just there's just pure observational comedy.

Wonderful observational comedy.

But he was also part of the kind of initial core joke writing trio, which was Ingram's booker Fantoni.

Yeah, they were a trio for a very long time and they were all sort of great classical music lovers so they were always sort of talking about a trio.

Collaboration was something that I think worked particularly well for the eye and still does.

Nearly everything is done with sort of lots of people trying to do things together because everyone brings something different to the party.

I mean, when I first joined the Eye, I was allowed into this trio, which Booker then said had become a quartet, which was very good of them.

I mean, they were incredibly open and friendly, and Barry, particularly, I mean, Nick claims he taught him to draw, which

it was about time someone did.

No, he was incredibly welcoming,

which we would probably be very suspicious of anybody trying to

invade.

I've been trying for 16 years, I'll get there one day, yeah.

But I mean, I think Barry took his cue from Peter Cook, really, because he he recounts in his book about how when he was first working at the eye and Peter just arrived and nobody else was there.

But Peter was just very, very friendly to him and just said, oh, and Barry said, oh, I'm doing some jokes.

And Peter said, oh, great, you know, let's do some jokes together.

And Barry was like that with, certainly with me.

it you know it sort of took a long quite a few years to get into the writing process but you know once we were we were working together he was a wonderful collaborator he'd pick up ideas run with them improve them embellish them but also you know just go off on sort of cook like flights of fantasy which was much more his he wasn't a very sort of political animal was he no i mean richard would have ideas would have specific jokes booker always wanted to make a point I'm a bit more like him.

You know, he wanted it to make sense.

He wanted it to be logical.

Barry was like a voice.

You said, you know, what does a very left-wing person sound like?

And Barry would go, well, basically, it's absolutely sickening, the attitude of everybody.

And you'd think, oh, that's Dave Spart.

That's Dave Spart.

Or we said, you know, royal coverage is really terrible.

I mean, it's like...

bad romantic novels and Barry would go, Charles put down his pen breathlessly.

The Sylvie Crenza, because he was heavily involved in Sylvie Crenn, wasn't he?

And so, you know, for anyone listening to this, Sylvie Cren is the eyes, Barbara Cutland, which for younger listeners, just ask your parents.

But those are mad.

They just go off into mad tangents of jokes and they go round and round, you know, the sort of fractal puns.

Another of the voices he did was Glenda Slag, which was...

based on Gene Rook.

It was sort of very, very opinionated 60s tabloid journalists who basically wrote two versions of the same thing, and it was an attack on journalists having no particular views.

So, paragraph one was, aren't you sick of him?

And paragraph two was, don't you love him?

And it was an incredibly funny template about nearly all journalism about public life.

And nowadays, you read The Mirror or The Sun or The Daily Mail or any of those papers.

And day to day, it's, yeah, aren't you sick of him?

Day two, yeah, don't you love him?

And it was a very good observation.

Collaborating with him, you would try and say, Well, can we get the idea in here?

and then maybe we can do this at the end?

You know,

we would all be sort of discussing the sort of issues we should be writing about, and it was something like conspiracy theories.

And Barry would just come out with a headline, Moon is fake, claims Nutter.

And it just sort of a piece would write itself straight out of the top of his head.

Yes, there was me thinking, How do we counter the fact that there's so many conspiracies about the moon landing?

And Barry decides that the moon is fake, there is no moon

and that's what real conspiracy theories think you know which is just incredibly funny my favourite bit of collaboration with with Barry was when I think back in about 2006 or 2007 when smoking was banned in pubs and we were just talking about it and we we decided we'd write an eyewitness piece it was Phil Ashtray or somebody like that or Ken Fags but it was a I was there as the last cigarette was smoked and Barry just came out with this lie.

He said, I was there with tears in my eye because of the smoke and a lump in my throat because I got cancer.

And it was so black.

And I thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever heard.

I was crying with laughter when he just pulled.

But he does it all in his voice, you know, because it's just he adopted the character.

Right.

You just knew the journalist that he was channeling.

Yes, both pompous and very bad.

Like a lot of these eyewitness accounts.

That's the tradition that continues.

ian you've got a book of is it gnome mart here yes i mean that was another things barry absolutely loved which is fake adverts yeah for products at christmas and then we've started doing them in the summer but he had a a gift for for items that were entirely uh ridiculous but some of them later which was quite odd turned out to to be real.

So he would invent something like a pair of wellingtons that had lights in the end.

So you would never get lost going out to put your bins out.

So these wellies would have lights in both the ends.

You'd never get caught in the dark.

They were welly-light electric rubber boots.

And a couple of years later, they were on the market.

Did you invent Sat-nav?

I think an early version of Satnav was.

I'm sure that was in Nomart at some point.

I think we might imagine.

Yeah, somebody other than you knowing Barry.

Yeah, he was very keen on items for your dog.

For Fido,

why should your man's best friend miss out on the video boom?

It's Fideo Boom.

Videos for dogs.

He did something called the Dicta Brawl.

This was for businessmen.

And it was an umbrella that in the handle

there was a dictaphone so that you could make important speeches while you were in the rain.

That was his world where people always needed special gadgets because he would help.

But even after he technically retired, you know, every Christmas we'd get in contact and say, Barry, have you got any?

And you know, sheaves of ideas would come through.

And it was always, you know, the singing ping pong tree from Thailand,

warning, you know, it may not sing.

But the Charles and Diana tap tops

were

a terrific idea.

It was a pair of taps that on your bath, and one was Charles and one was Diana, and you they were the right royal taps.

Charles is hot and die is cold.

and you would just combine

the perfect level of warmth and we should say you know and if Barry survives in the magazine if you look in the in the back pages you'll see the in the city that logo yes is Barry any mention of thrib that's that's Barry originally he was brilliant at formats like Coleman Balls now called commentator balls yeah Barry compiled the original Coleman Balls.

Any reference to Neesden is generally Barry.

I still sometimes chuck in if I'm writing a joke a reference to Neasden and I wasn't aware that that was Barry's innovation.

Yeah, well he brought football to the table with the joke right.

Nobody was interested.

Football's still on.

But Booker was interested in cricket and he would do jokes about cricket but Barry created Neasden and E.I.

Addio and Sid and Doris Bonkers and that sort of world of dismal

North Circular football.

And the idea that, you know, really big streamer hits now now are about failing english football clubs well i mean barry did have the idea of nisden fc the most useless football club ever he was owned by a bloke who ran laundrettes he was the laundorama magnate and you just think well these jokes are quite familiar yeah um so no i mean he did he did fill in a lot of those areas.

The great thing, I mean, when I started was being allowed to go in and sort of do the voice and join in the joke.

And obviously there are loads and loads loads of formats, and lots of new things happen, but there's still remnants of Barry all over the place, which is very, very pleasing.

So, farewell, then, Barry, and thanks to Ian and Nick for talking all about him.

Thanks too to Helen and Adam, and to you for listening.

If you would like the edition of the eye with the special enormous Fantony tribute that's coming up, that'll be out in a few days' time.

The existing edition of the magazine is still on newsstands and is also terrific.

You can subscribe at private-eye.co.uk.

We will be back again in a fortnight with another episode of this podcast.

Thank you for listening and thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing.

Bye for now.

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