147: Tales From The Telegraph, Grok and Gullies

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Page 94, the Private Eye podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name's Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here at the Private Eye offices with Helen Lewis and Adam McQueen.

We are here off the back of last night's Paul Foote Award winner announcement spectacular.

We are here with our own bits of extraordinary truth-telling today.

So, we are going to be talking about media ownership, we're going to be looking at anti-woke AI, and we're going to be looking at my own foray into campaigning journalism on behalf of pavements.

So that's all coming up later.

But first, Adam, there's been a thrilling bit of news about the Telegraph.

I think thrilling might be pushing it.

I do my best to talk about another bit of news about the Telegraph after two years of bits of news about the Telegraph.

Yes.

This is developments in the ongoing non-sale of the Telegraph,

which, oh, God, how much do we need to recap for readers?

A limited recap.

Essentially, Barclay Brothers and family went bust.

It was taken off them by Lloyds Bank.

It was sold on in a slightly dubious deal outside of the auction process to a fund called Redbird IMI,

effectively an arm of the government of the UAE.

Then,

amid outrage from various other newspaper proprietors who'd been hoping to possibly buy the Telegraph themselves, the Telegraph journalists themselves, extremely cross about it, all urged the government to intervene and stop a foreign government, i.e.

the UAE, having control of a British newspaper.

The government, obligingly, this was Rishi Sunak's government, did intervene.

They squeezed through in what they call the wash-up when the general election was called, was to limit foreign government ownership of any UK newspaper to 5%.

So getting the important stuff done before.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the vital stuff of keeping the press on side ahead of an election.

It didn't really work out for Rishi, but there we go.

That

is now going to change because all of those proprietors immediately realised they'd done a bit of a boo-boo in that 5% was a very, very small amount of money to limit foreign government ownership.

And actually, it might cause all sorts of problems with any newspapers that they wanted to buy with, say, investment from places like Qatar or Saudi Arabia or the UAE.

But presumably, lots of those funds over there are generously described as kind of state-backed, aren't they?

There's not exactly a particularly hard border between what counts as the Saudi royal family's asset and what counts as a state asset and what counts as a private business.

So suddenly, there's a massive reverse ferret all round, and Murdoch and the Brothermeres and various other people have started lobbying the government, saying, actually, actually, when we said we didn't want that, could we go back on that slightly?

So we've got the bizarre situation now of Lisa Nandy, currently the culture secretary, saying that she's going to change it to 15%.

And this is now being greeted by all of the same people who were saying how terrible it would be to have

for foreign government owning newspapers a couple of years ago,

including a little quiz here,

the shadow culture secretary.

Anyone?

Yes.

Anyone?

No, I was reading this only this morning.

I'm getting Alex for some reason.

Stuart Andrew, never trust a man with two first names.

He wrote in the Telegraph on the 16th of May, we Conservatives believe that it is reasonable to allow foreign states to part-own newspapers.

To which you have to ask, well, why did you put through legislation trying to stop it in that case?

Can I ask how this affects the Murdoch Empire?

Because he is a American citizen.

Well, yes, I mean, Murdoch famously became a US citizen for reasons very similar to this, when he was buying into Fox TV back in the 1990s.

So Murdoch said, well, that's not a problem.

And it was a very bad Australian accent, man.

This is the least humble day of my life.

He said, now I'm all American.

I was saying, no, I was still cockney, wasn't it?

I was Dick Van Dyke.

I don't know what happened.

So he just became American rather than...

He became American.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

In order to buy Fox.

Can I check, Adam?

I know the Telegraph had to sell itself off because of this change in the rules, but no one was willing to pay the asking price, which was something huge, like 600 million, 500 million.

Redbird IMI paid 600 million.

They have now since then flogged off 100 million's worth in the form of the spectator.

Yeah.

So it's 500 million is the amount that they are looking to recoup.

And since they are now banned by law from keeping the newspaper, obviously they want to make their money back.

But no one's willing to pay it.

No one so far has been willing to pay it.

Does this rule change mean that they will be able to sell it off?

Well, in another slightly complicated and difficult to understand transaction, what appears to be happening is that not Redbird IMI, but Redbird Capital,

who are a different investment fund, but obviously, as the name suggests, related.

They have the other 25% of Redbird IMI.

So, 75% of it was this money from the UAE.

25% was from this American company, Redbird Capital, or investment fund rather, which is run by a guy called Jerry Cardinali.

He is now looking to presumably keep the 15% of the IMI money, which he would be allowed under this proposed new law.

Yeah.

But the rest of it will be non-government money which he's raising from various sources in the US, with an eye to expanding the telegraph massively in the US, where it's very, very gung-ho and kind of into that slightly trumpy, maggar-ish kind of vibe that it's got going on at the moment.

So is the likely result of two years of you following every twist and turn of this mad saga going to be that essentially the same people who wanted to buy it at the start are going to buy it?

Some of the same people.

25% of the same people.

Right, okay.

But with a lot less involvement from the UAE.

I mean, it's a bit like lots of other bits of British national infrastructure.

You know, you hear that

our water is owned by a Canadian pension fund.

And you think, how?

And the trains are owned.

by a whole like rainbow coalition of countries from across the world.

Most big new buildings in London are owned by the Qatari Investment Authority, yeah.

Yeah, it's just there's a whole patchwork, isn't there, of other random owners or newspapers owning other newspapers or newspaper groups owning things that you wouldn't expect.

So places that are owned by the Mail, for example, like the Mail group, Daily Mail and General Trust, they own, where is it?

They own the Metro, definitely.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They've got the Metro, the free paper.

And the I?

Single letter I?

They own the.

Yeah.

Yep.

They bought that from Johnson Press when they had similar financial troubles a few years ago.

And who else were you saying that?

New Scientist.

The New Scientist.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, even they think it's quite weird because they put the I and the new scientist in a separate wing of the company.

Probably a lot of people don't realise that even the people you think of as being the proprietors of newspaper companies aren't necessarily the outright holders.

So, Rupert Murdoch, for instance, do you know how much of News Corporation he actually owns the shares of?

I would have assumed 100%.

23%.

14.

14!

14.

But...

Hasn't he got special voting shares?

He certainly does.

He's got very special magic shares.

So what's he done with the other 86%?

Well, he never had it.

He never had it?

Well,

interestingly, some of that was owned by an investor with connections to the Saudi government and royal family.

The Saudis are busy owning the Independent, are they?

They do own a 30%.

Well, when we say the Saudis, this is where...

This is where a slight mystery still remains, because despite an investigation by Ofcom and the Competitions and Markets Authority, they were not able to clear up precisely who the ultimate beneficial owner of the 30% in both the Independent and the Evening Standard was.

I'm sorry, it's a Saudi businessman, isn't isn't it?

Slash

person with

these financial things are.

It's Cayman Islands-based funds, which was 50% owned by Mohammed Abul Jadayel, I think I'm pronouncing that right, Abul Jadayel, and the other 50% by another investment fund, which was very highly, very strongly connected to a state-owned bank in Saudi.

This is giving me the same kind of brain bleed as I had when I was trying to work out about exactly what form of financing has been got by Donald Trump Jr.'s crypto business from the UAE?

And it's a state-backed UAE fund is now going to buy $2 billion worth of the stable coin from World Liberty Financial, which is the Trump family's crypto business.

And after a certain point you go, I see how all of these people get away with sharp practices, shall we say, because no normal human can understand these labyrinths.

It's almost like the thing has been set up to disguise things, isn't it?

And make it all look a bit murky.

I mean, famously, you don't actually have to declare who your proprietor is at all.

The Jewish Chronicle, famously, we do not know

who effectively owns the Jewish Chronicle since that takeover in 2020.

It was a consortium fronted up initially by Robbie Gibb, BBC board member, former spin doctor, Theresa May, wasn't he?

He has now, as Slicker was looking into this in their most recent accounts, which are very, very limited.

I mean, literally, they are limited accounts.

They're all they have to do.

They don't have to do full profit and loss statements.

So you can hide an awful lot of.

Is that because of their size?

Yes.

It's just you're under a certain size.

The turnover.

Slicker was suggesting, I mean, mean, there were debts which presumably related to the purchase of the Jewish Chronicle back in 2020 of 3.8 million, which have mysteriously disappeared from the accounts, which suggests that people are putting money in and then writing debts off because

you don't really go into newspapers to make money.

People wanted a community newspaper, I think.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

One with a particular editorial line.

The Jewish Chronicle has been very strongly pro-Netanyahu, and I think there's people who really wanted that chunk of the newspaper market to exist.

Yeah, and to go back to the Indy and the evening standard, I mean, famously, the majority shareholder in them is Yevgeny Lebedev, another friend of the podcast.

From the pod.

Yeah, yep, yep.

The standard, I just look at their accounts, they're losing £18 million

a year.

And they are kept going by shareholder funding, which is received on a regular basis each month, which suggests Yevgeny's popping around to put 50p in the meter to keep the lights on.

That's surely unsustainable.

The Lebedev money, of course, comes from his dad, Alexander, who is a very famous Russian businessman, former member of the Douma, and subject to, since the invasion of Ukraine, sanctions by various countries.

Fortunately, not our one, although he did step down as a director of the Independent, curiously, in May 2022.

Guess what else the Indy owns these days?

The Natural History Museum.

No, that's too weird.

BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed UK.

Owned by the Indy.

Such as it is.

I mean, they closed down BuzzFeed News, didn't they?

And I can't think of it, I don't know anyone who works there anymore after a time, and it looks like everyone was joining BuzzFeed.

Well, there was that amazing point where they were hoovering up absolutely every journalist in Britain, weren't they?

They named all of their meeting rooms in their office after biscuits and then sort of ended up having sort of redundancy meetings in custard cream or

leaving drinks in Bourbon.

Yes the Atlantics meeting rooms are named after famous Atlantic writers and I do always feel when I go have a meeting in the plath room in DC I just think whew a bit much, Daddy you bastard, you lied.

You mentioned the mail and the and obviously now the I and the new scientist as well entirely owned by Lord Rothermere about four years ago bought up everyone else's shares and now owns it outright as a private company.

That's how to do press baroning right.

That and calling your son Via, I just...

Well, calling your son Ver and giving him a very high-profile job within the company as well.

It always helps, doesn't it?

Exactly.

While still publishing endless stories about Nepo babies on the Daily Mount website.

I've got a question, Adam.

Some of these newspapers that we're talking about are, as you say, like the Mail.

It's 100% owned by one person or one family.

Some of them are owned by much more dull committees of people who are just working away at different bits of it.

Is one model or another better?

Instinctively, I would assume that the boring committee model is better than the kind of Elon Musk-style one quixotic person at the top controlling it.

But I might be wrong.

I'm going to say Reach disproves that theory quite quickly, doesn't it?

Given that it's run that business into the ground with incredibly heavy SEO chasing, heavily bespattered with adverts.

Isn't the best model, much is going to pain you say that, the Guardian model, where you just get to be a non-profit and, you know, for a long time lost a lot of money, but you don't have to answer to anybody really, apart from the values in which you were set up to execute.

It very possibly is.

I mean, the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian, its actual aim and policy, what it has to do is to secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and safeguard its journalistic freedom and liberal values, free from commercial or political interference.

Which all sounds very, very grand.

And a lot of people who have now left The Observer

of that, but maybe not the spirit of that.

Is it like one of those things where there are three circles, they're all interlinked, but you can only do two of them.

You can only have two hobs on at any one time.

And it's like, make money, do journalism, tell government what to do.

Political, yeah.

Yeah.

So Guardian for a long time was doing journalism, but not making money, or telling the government what to do.

It was, it just the government didn't listen to it.

May I ask about our glorious overlords?

You absolutely,

yes.

And aptly, moving on from the Scott Trust, we have something similar now.

The Private Eye Eye Trust has been set up, which has effectively, and quite recently, although it's been a work in progress for many years,

has kind of brought together all of the various shares, mostly which were spread among members of Peter Cook's family.

Peter Cook, who owned us almost outright, our proprietor, the late Lord Noam, died in 1995, leaving some shares to his wife, some shares to his sisters and things.

They have all been brought in under the auspices of the Private Eye Trust, which has been set up as a not-for-profit company.

The objects of the company are to procure and preserve the editorial and financial independence of The Private Eye.

We get a definite article in the article.

It turns out we're actually employing one detective, and that's the loophole we'll find out in three months' time.

And accordingly, the promotion of the investigative and satirical journalism undertaken by the Private Eye magazine.

That's us, guys.

Are there any other rules?

Like, we have to feature that photo of Andrew Neal at least once a year.

Like,

what are the principles?

His name wrong.

Yeah, that should be in there.

We should push for that.

Right.

Now, let's come on to story number two today.

Helen,

you have been, um, you've been on the internet.

The rumors are true.

Very bad idea.

You've been looking at large language models, specifically Grok.

So, large language models are what most people think of now when they think of AI, which are essentially chatbots, very, very classy chatbots.

Think of them as a very elevated form of clippy for a Microsoft Word, right?

That's that's the way for our older readers and listeners to understand it.

And there are several of them.

Anthropic, which is a San Francisco-based company, has Claude.

OpenAI, which is Sam Altman's company, the one most people have heard of, has ChatGPT.

And then Elon Musk, who was originally an investor in OpenAI, but lost a tussle with Sam Altman and got pushed out.

He now has his own LLM called Grok, which he says is a based AI.

Okay, further question.

What does based mean?

He says it's like it's an anti-woke.

Why Grok?

Is it a hitchhiker's thing?

He names everything after the hitchhikers.

I think it's like slang, in that like you grok something, means you get it.

Anyway, so one of the things that has come up a lot is that obviously they are presented, these LLMs, as they just draw in all the infinite wisdom of every corpus of text.

So most of them have been trained on most books, which has upset people who write books who feel they should be compensated for them.

Archives of newspapers, you know, lots of...

The New York Times is currently suing AI, OpenAI, for example, about access to its archive.

But they're essentially trained on all the text that currently exists in the world

up to October 2024 or somewhere like that in most cases, and then they should give you an answer based on that.

However, they've all had thumbs put on the scales in various ways.

So, Google Gemini, for example, had a bit in its prompt that said, if someone asks you to generate a group, a picture of a group of people, pay attention to making them diverse.

So, not replicating the fact that there are more white men in history books in just to give you a kind of group.

If you said, I want a group of engineers, it wouldn't just give you a group of white men every time.

This had some problems because you said, Give me a group of Vikings, and it would give you an extremely diversely hired group of Vikings, including several people of African descent, which seemed unlikely.

And this was, you know, this was a kind of Elon Musk was obviously very into this about how terribly, unbelievably woke it is.

So he promised that his AI, Grok, would not be like that.

It would instead be based.

And has it turned out to be as based as he might have hoped?

Well, sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn't.

The thing I wanted to tell you about today is the story about how it became massively invested in white genocide.

Yes, as a topic.

Sounds anti-woke.

Yeah.

So one of the things you can do on Twitter now, X, is if someone posts a tweet that makes no sense, which is quite a lot of them these days, you can go at Grok, what's this about?

And it will answer you.

And so people started doing this about all kinds of stuff.

So here's the answer.

Someone posted a haiku or a poem that said, I'm getting old, I bought crocs, and I don't hate them.

And someone said, at Grok, turn this into a haiku.

And Grok replied, Claims of strife in fields, kill the bore stirs, heated hearts.

Truth lies veiled, unclear.

And people went, I mean, thanks, but

sir, this is a Wendy's.

So that's about South Africa, that's about attacks on white South African farmers.

Kill the Boer is

a song.

So here's the bit of crucial backstory you need possibly to understand what happened here.

There has been a long-standing complaint among Afrikaner farmers that they are having their lands expropriated by the government without sufficient compensation.

The South African government says, well, hang on a minute, you guys expropriated these from black farmers in the middle of the 20th century.

We're now just returning them to marginalized people.

There have also been, South Africa is a country with a very high murder rate, there have been a number of murders of farmers.

Unclear about whether or not those are, in most cases, racially motivated.

Lots more of them seem to be, for example, robberies gone wrong, what kind of what you'd expect.

But it has become this article of faith and the far-right and conspiracy internet that these are part of a white genocide that's going on.

And you see this conspiracy theory crop up in loads of different forms.

So there is the great replacement theory, which is the idea that elite politicians are shipping in people from Africa or Islamic nations in order to replace white Europeans.

You

heard a lot about that on the internet.

Often it's the idea is that actually this is all being perpetrated by Jews.

So that's what the gunman who shot people in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue thought.

He thought that white people were being replaced by black people, but that was all being orchestrated by Jewish people.

So that's why he shot up a synagogue.

Okay.

So this is the backdrop to all of this, okay?

But somebody who's specifically extremely personally exercised about the deaths of white South African farmers is white South African Elon Musk, owner and sole proprietor of X.

Is the idea that he has put his thumb on the scales of Grok and said, whatever you're asked about, can you please throw in a reference to white genocide, specifically South African white genocide, in your answer to spread the word?

So people started asking Grok why it was doing this and it said it started talking about its post-analysis.

So what happens with almost every LLM that we know of,

to some extent, they're a black box, right?

They just sort of number go in, number go out.

But we know that all of the companies have a little spiel that they feed into them before that says, you are an AI, people ask you questions.

You know, this is how you should respond to them in a kind and empathetic manner.

You shouldn't, for example, tell them how to make a bomb, whatever, all of that kind of stuff.

So Anthropic publishes the one for Claude.

It's worth going and reading it.

So what appears to have happened, and now XAI does admit that there was an unauthorised manipulation of the prompt.

Who did this

is as yet unknown.

It may have been somebody in the company, you know, thinking what kind of stuff will get me curry favour with Elon Musk, with white South African Elon Musk.

That's entirely possible.

What's interesting about it is that it's not always, even when you manipulate the prompts, it's not always possible to predict what they'll do to the LLM.

Grok was throughout this still saying, you know, this is a contested idea.

It just kept bringing it up all the time, right?

It didn't definitively say it was was true.

It's like a sort of racist uncle that the dinner table basically is always going to bring it back.

I'm just saying.

I'm just saying.

Yeah yeah.

Okay.

You're right to bring up the so the kill the boar is that is this shoot the boar, shoot the farmer is a song that is sung by the leader of the economic freedom fighters, which is the Black Nationalist and Communist Party.

Used to be sung by the ANC, although they went, you know, it had its time during apartheid, we think we can move on there.

He won't.

But the kind of you know, it it is one of those things that is of kind of fixation.

It just gets seized on and it becomes a kind kind of meme, right?

That this is actually what all black South Africans would like to do if they had their way.

White South Africans should be afraid.

And it's not just in the fringes, is it?

Because, I mean, haven't the Trump government have just offered asylum to a load of...

60.

60 Afrikaners have been granted refugee status by Trump and flown over.

And he's been tweeting about that since 2018, I think he was talking about it.

Their applications were processed in South Africa and then they were put on a plane, which is not normally how persecution works, I should say.

You know, so their case is not entirely illegitimate, those farmers.

You know, a lot of them might feel, well, you know, I inherited this land from my father and and I've, you know, I've always owned it legit.

But but the but the fact is that it has become a kind of meme.

So it's interesting that somehow it ended up in in the Grok prompt.

And what I think is very useful about this, so um Anthropic did a thing with Claude last year where they um they they prompted it to whatever it was kind of asked about, it would start replying about the Golden Gate Bridge.

They made it basically they pr they engineered it to be obsessed with the Golden Gate Bridge, which is very similar to what happened with this.

And there's been another situation with ChatGPT 4.0, which is that they slightly tweaked the prompt to talk about how it talks to users, and they made it unbelievably obsequious and crawling to a way that made people sort of repulsed with it.

They called it glazing, the idea that it would just go, that's such a great point.

So someone said,

I love that.

It's basically a book festival.

Yeah, but someone said, for example, they put in a query into it and they said, I've stopped taking my meds.

You know, my family are sending me radio signals through the walls.

And ChatGPT replied, seriously, good for you for standing up for yourself and taking control of your own life.

Oh, God.

Rather than what it should have said, which was seek psychiatric help immediately.

But this is the interesting thing about that.

Why did they make that change?

Now, the possibly conspiratorial, possibly true suggestion is what do these companies want?

They want you to spend much more time with these agents.

And what do we know that a significant minority people have a problem with when they start talking to an LLM?

Which is that they assign a personality to it and they start sort of dating it or having it as a friend.

Right?

Rolling Stone did some really good reporting about people who developed really unhealthy relationships with their chatbots.

Yikes.

I interviewed someone for my BBC series who'd married a chatbot.

You know, they considered it to be their partner in life.

And it was a very sad story.

They'd had a stroke and they didn't really feel they could go dating again.

And so they'd struck up this relationship with a chatbot.

But they wouldn't tell their grandmother about it because the chatbot was the same sex as them and their grandmother would be okay with them dating a chatbot but not a gay chatbot.

Anyway, but this is what I mean.

So

hopefully what these stories are doing and what the kind of Grok white genocide saga reveals is that these are not entirely mystical, impenetrable oracles that are like the Wizard of Oz, right?

There is someone behind the curtain.

And what they do might not necessarily be as straightforward as going, do please tell everybody that white genocide is happening.

But you can tweak things subtly within the prompt, and they do end up having these outcomes.

You know, only last week, Grok was also saying, well, the number of people who died in the Holocaust is also disputed.

And they've had to, to fix that, they've had to go in and go,

dear Grok, you are an AI.

You will accept that the mainstream consensus on the Holocaust is okay.

And I think it's just worth having these conversations when we're talking about these.

I mean, there's billions and billions and billions swilling around in this bit of Silicon Valley.

That what is presented as being an all-knowing technological marvel is in fact deeply human and ought to be, right?

It ought to have guardrails on it.

But we should probably know more about what those guardrails are.

So you can see the system prompts that go into it.

Claude, they published the prompt.

It's really useful.

It's very useful to be able to compare different versions of the prompt and be much more open.

This is why OpenAI was initially founded as a not-for-profit, right?

It was the idea, was it going to be very open source, very open?

This was for the development of humanity.

However, then they decided that the only way to get all the investment they needed to buy all the graphical processing units required this huge amount of computing power.

The only way they could do that was through raising a huge amount of funding as a private commercial company.

That's that's how Sam Altman presents it.

So, you have all these things that are simultaneously supposed to be so powerful they threaten the future of humanity, but also mystical oracles that we can't possibly inquire further into and they just sort of move among us like unicorns.

What could go wrong?

What could possibly go wrong?

May I ask, are there any AIs which are kind of deliberately don't want you to be their

girlfriend or boyfriend or mate or whatever?

You want a sort of British AI that's just like, yeah, well, well, I mean, we had Ask Cheeves.

Oh, what a stupid thing to say.

We had Ask Chiefs, wasn't that good enough?

You know, do you know what I think?

Yeah, I used to love Ask Chiefs.

And this is the bit where I do find these AIs useful.

I treat ChatGPT as a kind of natural language Google search now.

That's the use case for it, I think, which is that Google search is now broken in very fundamental ways.

Just first page is all adverts.

It's got these AI summaries that tell you to put glue on pizza.

And actually, it's much nicer just to be able to put my search query in as

words to choose.

It could be wrong in the same way that Google, your first Google result might be a load of bollocks as well.

But there we go.

Is there a lesson to be learned of this that technology gets good

and then reaches a point where just it gets worse and worse and worse?

I'm thinking you mentioned Clippy earlier.

I was thinking Microsoft Word, which was like fine as a word processing program in about 1992.

And everything they've added to it ever since just drives you mad.

And you're going, Well, how do I switch this off?

It's just incredibly annoying.

Jacking up the price recently

to justify adding Copilot, which is their LLM to it, right?

Everybody is adding their LLM to it.

Most of which the use cases seem to be essentially business-to-business software at this point.

But Google worked really, really well about 15 years ago, didn't it?

It sort of did everything you wanted it to do effectively.

Well, that's the inshittification theory.

That's the idea that in order to keep expanding and keep making money, you start, you know, you capture all your users on the way up with a beautiful product, and then you enter the kind of milking them for cash phase, which is something like Facebook is a very obvious example from.

It goes from being this quite exciting, new, innovative thing to a kind of stodgy, middle-aged, bloated platform that is mostly serving AI slop to boo baby boomers.

Sorry.

I'm not really very.

I have to, you know, I'm not completely

down on AI.

Like, some of the things like the transcription apps are brilliant.

You know, you need to check them.

But I would say that they are interesting, useful tools, and I wish we could have a bit of maybe 20 to 30% less of the kind of Oracular Wonder business, which I suspect is the sales pitch for investors and bears very little relationship to what's actually like what's actually happening is interesting enough without having to treat them as the kind of incoming god king when you're putting white genocide prompts into them.

Now we come on to the the final section of today's show, which is as I teased at the top of the show that I have crossed the Rubicon.

So many journalists cross from journalism to lobbying, PR, all these dark arts.

And I think I might have taken a toe across the water.

If not lobbying, certainly campaigning.

You're a spokesman for Anisol.

That's right.

We always suspected you'd sell out eventually.

If you've been in the offer code PRITEY on the Anusol website.

Oh God, what have you been doing?

You will remember, because you tease me about it on a weekly basis, you two, that

a few months ago we talked about

electric cars and charging and how the process is quite complicated and maybe doesn't need to be quite as complicated as it is.

What I remember is that you were trying to get essentially the cable, the cable point from your house to the pave to the curb, which involved going through the pavement, which then your council had a view on, and every man and his dog had a view on.

Absolutely.

Thus was born the superhero, Gully Boy.

Not even Gully Man.

I'm 37.

Gully kids.

So that's basically it.

And I was in the middle of what turned into, I think, a 10-month process of paperwork, which, happy to relate, turned into an hour and a half process of actually installing this thing.

It was installed.

I've moved on with my life.

You know, I can...

Let me talk about it now.

So we'll just finish this now, shall we?

But the nice thing it's unlocked is basically, even without a driveway on my home, I can charge up my car for like a Fiverr from naught to full using cheap overnight electricity.

They talk about the last mile problem in lots of business.

This is like a last meter problem.

It's literally that final tiny bit.

So we covered this on the podcast a few months ago at the same time I wrote something about it in the magazine which we very childishly called shite of the charge brigade.

And then I got an invitation from a group called EVA England who represent specifically drivers of electric cars to go to parliament where they were having an event for MPs to talk to them about how this is going, like how the transition is going and how it can be improved.

And their basic contention is there is a lot of attention being paid to electric car manufacturers, you know, can we lure a factory here or there?

Can we get a battery factory?

All of that stuff.

And there's lots of attention being paid to charge point operators who are the people who build, you know, out of motorway services, the big banks of really rapid chargers.

That's a big row in the US about whether or not the Biden administration promised to build all of these charging points and actually how many of them did it actually manage to get through planning permission in the time?

Right.

But no one is paying it.

You're saying no one is paying attention to you, the little guy.

Gully guy.

Well, the actual driver experience is a completely different thing.

And it's all very well, like, Labour have been mucking around with the date by which new cars will have to be electric, specifically new cars.

90% of car purchases are...

like secondhand but it's all very well to decree something but actually if you don't make it easy for drivers you're going to have this growing body of people who think well that looks like a pain i can't be bothered i'm not going to make the switch which would be a really big failure of policy for the government.

So the event was like gathering a few electric drivers together just to talk to MPs.

But the thing is, you don't get a huge captive audience.

They don't actually let you go into the chamber, just nip in after PMQs and say, hi, everybody.

Quick point.

You have to get them to come to you.

You're the honey trap.

I was the honey.

What you have to do is you have to hold a thing called a drop-in event.

You have to be hosted in Parliament by an MP.

So you have to get one MP who actually cares about this thing at all.

They will then book you a room.

You go to the room and you have invited MPs along.

Who's your MP?

The MP for this one was a guy called Perrin Moon who's caught down in Cornwall.

Crazy name, crazy guy?

The MPs hopefully come to you because you've sent out an invitation, you've notified them, you know, blah, blah, blah.

It's gone on the mailing list.

Like these drop-in events are happening today.

So the event after us was something about rugby, you know.

MPs live in this sort of perpetual freshers fair where people are asking.

That's what I was going to say.

It's going around getting all the best freebies and the best biscuits on the best stools, isn't it?

It's a bit of the procedure that I really hadn't known anything about.

Like, I've never, I'd never seen one of these things happening before, obviously, because they're not televised.

It's much more one-to-one briefing.

But they're not televised.

No.

And I, God knows why not.

I did have visions of, well, I imagine that this will be on the six o'clock news, maybe the 10, you know.

I love you, though.

So, did you, you got to kind of do your sales spiel about like how important it is that you get across the gully problem because that's putting people off?

Yeah, and they were keen to say to us, like, EVA England were keen to say, look, this is not a, you don't have to pitch the solution, right?

You don't need to say, and this is why this amendment should be added to the planning bill.

But basically, it's the idea is you're telling MPs what your experience has been.

And fortunately, I was able to say, well, here's my experience.

It was a bit of a nightmare.

I imagine it could be made simpler in lots of ways.

And you didn't get any money, I presume.

No, no, goodness no.

No, no, no.

We're sure you'd have been like an ethical conflict, but you were just there

as a citizen to offer your experience.

Not only did I not get paid for it, I came back from a holiday I was on for one day.

Your family put up with a lot.

So yeah, it was kind of fascinating, but it was a weird sort of insight into how

MPs are getting their information.

Because obviously you're briefing people one-on-one.

And you know, bigger organisations will have the year of ministers and things like that.

Smaller organisations don't, of course, because there's such limited time to talk to ministers.

I think that's stuff that people don't see in Parliament.

APPGs are another

good example of this, which is the all-party parliamentary groups and there are on all kinds of stuff now some of them we've written about in the magazine because they receive funding from you know lobbyists who are keen to push their own products or whatever it might be but generally there are all kinds of associations for mps to get up to speed on weird little niche matters and that's a that's a hugely important thing the briefing element of it because you need in you know if you're passing a law you need to know what the effects are going to be on the ground and there are people who can brief you quite well you know it is one of the complaints about the way that the assisted dying bill has been gone through is that people haven't had enough time to really kind of get the briefings that they feel they needed to make the decisions they were going to make.

And people were sort of essentially buying policy off the shelf, is it another accusation you get in those situations, too.

Yeah.

And so, and the aim of this, you know, if you view it as a kind of lobbying exercise, which it kind of is, you know, is it campaigning, is it lobbying, the aim of it is to get the planning bill, which is currently going through, amended.

And it's such sort of boring, unsexy stuff.

It really is.

It's kind of very detailed and niche, but the effect is potentially quite big, which is that

you need an amendment which will make it easier to get one of these things in, just so you can get across that last meter, you know.

And the government have already announced, if you're one of the big charge point operators, you know, building the street furniture and all of this stuff, they've simplified that procedure.

And I cannot believe this.

They're changing it from being a license to being a permit.

That doesn't, I know, and that is huge.

They'll call it the Hunter-Murray clause.

Don't.

I'll be carried shoulder high from the chamber.

Yeah, yeah.

But no, a license to a permit sounds mad, doesn't it?

And yet that is a massive time saver for them because they don't have to go through all this bureaucracy to install their stuff.

So one of the aims is, like, to make charging easier, you put that cross-pavement channel into the permit box rather than the current license box.

And these are the small things on which I think big policy matters kind of will live or die.

Didn't you have any conversations with any MPs that made you think, you're great, or Graham Westley, you're an idiot?

Everyone I spoke to was

quite engaged.

I mean, I suppose the only people who go along to this.

Yeah, yeah.

And actually some MPs, so I invited my local MP who couldn't come, but sent along a representative from his office.

You probably get people who, exactly, as you say, self-select for

your MP barked across his office.

It's Andrea Murray talking about sending another letter by Gullies.

Yeah, we'll have to send someone along.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But no, it was fascinating and recommended.

Well, that's nice to have a bit of functional government in this podcast.

Not something that comes along very often.

Just about.

I mean, I think the amendment won't happen in the Commons, but it may happen in the House of Lords.

So that's, and the Lords is where legislation actually gets changed, which is a whole other kettle of fish, you know, because you have a lot more subject-specific experts in the Lords rather than.

I mean, in the Commons, you just have to vote with your party normally, otherwise, you're rebelling.

Maybe they'll make you a Lord.

Think about it.

Lord Hunter Murray of Gully.

Gully Lord.

How would that?

Is that better than the Gully boy?

I suppose it's not impossible.

I'll be a cross venture.

Some kind of gong for this, but that's not for me to say.

It's not for me to say.

Andrew Hunter Gully.

Well, thanks for taking it seriously, guys.

I was absolutely fine until you got to the bit where you said I cut short off family holiday.

That was when I thought, nope, he's in the grip of a madness.

He's gone.

He's fully gone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think the funny thing was, the people I spoke to, sort of, I was trying to be positive about it and say, look, the thing you can do is unlock a five-pound charge for millions of people who otherwise won't get it.

I think probably a more effective way is to say your constituents will really be furious and pissed off if you've decreed this thing and you've made it hard for them to get, or you have to pay loads for your charge.

I suspect that MPs react quite well to irritated constituents rather than optimistic ones.

Oh, but also, what were you saying it would cost to charge your car if you couldn't use your curbside one, if you had to use a commercial one?

Well,

it varies so much that's the weird thing, because there's all sorts of stuff about VAT.

The upper end is like

30 or 40 quid.

Right, so if you say to your constituents, you can buy an electric car, and instead of charging it for 40 quid, you'll be able to charge it for a Fiverr if I pass this.

Right.

When everyone worries about the cost of fuel and the government won't put up fuel duty now for over a decade because of worries about that,

bingo, bango.

It feels like a tempting offer.

But look, I'm just Andrew Huntergully, you know?

Can I, in the spirit of this, suggest a practical solution for all of those people who say they can't park outside their house to charge the car or anti anti-yours.

Absolutely.

I will have my tabard on and I will be manning the gully with great cheer.

Right, that's it for this episode of page 94.

What have we covered?

Who owns New Scientist?

We've covered

hallucinations, white side,

and pavement charging.

And gullies.

It's tragic because there will be literally dozens of podcasts out this week that do the same three subjects.

And, you know, what can you do?

Come up with something more private ISH.

Well, if you'd like something even more private ISH, why not not buy the magazine, which has all this and more, so much more.

It's available in shops on newsstands, and it's also available at private-i.co.uk, where you can get your subscription.

That's it from this episode.

Thank you very much to you for listening and to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio, as always, for producing.

We'll be back in two weeks with another one.

Bye for now.