137: How Trump Ate The British Media

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

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

Later on in the show, we're going to be talking to Tim Minogue, the eyes, I think we could say veteran Rottenboroughs correspondent, about a lifetime spent looking at dodgy local government up and down and across the UK.

But for now, we're going to be talking a little bit about the media, as we so often do, and in particular, about how the press has gone a a bit bananas over America and don't quite know what to do now that the only thing you can talk about is America all day every day and

there are lots of other things happening but there is quite a lot of news about the fact that it's Liberation Week or is it Liberation Week 2?

Is there a tariff on bananas?

I'm not worried about this intro.

So, Adam, you, I'm afraid, have to read a lot of the Telegraph.

I do.

The funniest thing is

one of these few things where the press are pretty much united on this one because there's not much to say other than, whoa,

blimey and God knows where we'll be by the time this actually goes out in terms of FTSE indexes and things.

But there's a couple of columnists who've had a valiant go.

Simon Jenkins tried to do one of his slightly contrarian pieces where he said, well actually, you know, this might be marvellous, but didn't sound entirely convinced by it.

Nick Timothy, who's

happens among other things to be a fresh-ish Conservative MP, he's a Telegraph correspondent, and his his piece was saying Trump is exposing the utter incoherence of Starmer's economic agenda, which I thought was a pretty fresh take to have.

It's a long sort of way round to do that, isn't it?

So there are people trying to fly the flags.

Well, his colleague Tim Stanley said this morning, when we were recording on Monday morning, am I alone in admiring what Trump's doing?

It was just that rarity, isn't it?

When there's a question mark in a headline, usually the answer is no, but actually in this case, yes, Tim.

I'm afraid so.

You pretty much are.

And even he had to admit by the end of his fairly lengthy column in The Telegraph that he thinks there's about a 10% chance that this will all turn out well.

But, you know, at least Trump's trying to do something.

It's a sort of systematic problem for columnists, really, which is that the take that is Trump is bad and tariffs are generally agreed by economists to be a bad idea seems sort of woefully basic.

So you can see people desperately casting around to kind of go, isn't there a more exciting way?

And I just feel like we've had this now for both of the Trump terms, is that lots of columnists have gone, hang on a minute, I know in some ways he looks like an orange fascist, but stop for a minute and think about whether or not he's the shock our system needs.

and unfortunately he has just a habit of terribly terribly embarrassing those people yeah I mean a lot of your readers will be pensioners I guess on these papers and the pensioners traditionally quite like the value of their pensions remaining roughly where they are I like the the people who dug up the smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which, again, I thought this is good.

This is at least worth a look at.

But my American friends tell me this used to be taught in American schools as the worst congressional act ever, which was putting tariffs up to 20% in 1930, followed by something they all learned about, which was called the Great Depression, and which

he's going to make the Depression great again, as our cartoonists put it.

So great, it's going to be the greatest depression ever.

So, I mean, you do have to dig quite deep to find anyone who's got anything other than oh dear.

Elon Musk must have taken a particularly large dose of ketamine because he's found almost nothing to say about tariffs at all.

He did a like a sort of video in which he said he hoped that one day there'd be zero tariffs between Europe and America.

And you're like, well, yes, but the current policy of the man who's prime minister you're effectively acting for is 20% tariffs on the EU.

So it's very much not that, is it, Elon?

Andrew Kaczynski of CNN had this quite good joke, which was basically that Fox News were desperately casting around for transgender athletes to talk about, rather than showing like everyone else, a ticker of the stock market just falling.

The thing that's obvious is that MAGA is a personality cult.

It's not a conventional political movement.

So whatever dear leader says today, you have to agree with.

And if in two weeks' time he says, actually, I've made incredible deals with everybody and now I'm calling off the tariffs, then everyone then immediately has to.

It's like proper like comical Ali stuff, right?

It is where you just have to agree with the latest thing the party has told you to believe.

Well, here, the suddenly quite obscure awards events.

It's the Oliviers.

What, the theatre awards for the West End?

That does not usually make the front page after the weekend.

This weekend, hello, there's a huge feature on the Olivier Awards, and not very much on plunging stock markets, in particular papers who do not want to cover it.

It was fascinating because there was definitely a thing in more right-wing papers here

after Trump was unexpectedly re-elected last November of kind of going, well, hey, it was that sort of, you talked before about that bash the hippie thing on the left, but this was kind of like, well, if the lefties are unhappy with this, this must be a good thing.

And actually, you know, there were a lot of papers very much on board with the kind of culture-warry side of it, and as you say, bashing trans people and all that kind of thing.

When it comes to the actual economics of it

on newspaper companies that are listed on stock markets and are going to see their shares suffering with everything else, I think there's going to be a very different view of these things, aren't they?

Well, the absolute worst thing is the fact that lots of people are affecting any level of surprise.

And I think it sort of speaks to what the problem of Trumpism has been, which is the assumption that he says batshit things just to get people to vote for him, but he doesn't really believe them.

But he has always believed in tariffs.

He was talking to Oprah about it in the 1990s.

You know, the guy he appointed Peter Navarro as his trade representative has seems to have been the one who came up with this sort of slightly mad formula where you divide it by a penguin and then add on the number you first sort of in Guam.

And he said this repeatedly on the campaign trail.

Kamala Harris said repeatedly on the campaign trail, his policies will make you poorer.

And that you've still got people like Bill Ackman, the venture capitalist, who suddenly sort of radicalized himself into supporting Trump because of university's Palestine protests, suddenly going, well, I hope cooler heads prevail.

And you're like, no, you elect the head you elected

was Donald Trump.

So it's kind of fascinating.

And there has been an effort to sort of present it as well.

He's been saying this for 40 years, as if this was somehow a good take on.

And the last person I can remember who hadn't changed their politics for 40 years was Jeremy Corbyn.

And actually, generally,

it might be an idea to kind of look at kind of world events and think about things that have happened in the meantime.

And maybe some evidence, which definitely isn't happening with Trump.

But people are bringing up Brexit now.

Did you hear this?

A sad moment.

Mark Carney, who's now Prime Minister of Canada, saying, Well, look, haven't we learned something from Brexit that instituting trade barriers is bad?

And I like the fact that we have now become a cautionary tale of people who committed a mad act of self-harm.

Well, Helen has talked before about how all narratives start to merge now.

So that if you start off talking about tariffs and fairly specific and you just end up in culture wars and somewhere else.

And that's been very convenient for Trump.

And I mean, a failing of the media actually to separate the issues and say, can we talk about this bit?

Then can we talk about about this bit?

Because they're not the same.

Yeah, I think that's true of the Brexit benefit.

I think you can argue that Trump is treating us differently, but that's also to do with the fact that as an individual country, we don't have a big trade deficit with the US.

And you could argue that our vaccine procurement was actually a lot more efficient than the EU's.

But if you're going to do that, you are going to have to acknowledge the other half of it, which is that our economy generally would be in a better state if we hadn't unmoored ourselves from our biggest trading partner.

And that's the bit, the other side of the scale that I'm not seeing a lot of acknowledgement of we found some fantastic floating wood in the wake of the shipwreck that we all just put ourselves through yeah the other thing that a lot of our newspapers are doing now is sort of a transatlantic straddling act which is for two reasons because the expansion of newspapers in recent years has not been in the form of printed newspapers it's been online and a lot of that has been america i mean both the guardian and the mail online have had incredible success over there and also the reason that other newspapers are piling in with

American investment and American-facing websites is that you get more money for advertising over there.

So that's where the growth is.

You know, no one is making any money off advertising on this side of the Atlantic.

Well, that might solve itself because the reason is, I mean, the adverts on the Atlantic website, for example, are beautiful.

They're just sort of Neta Porter and luxury watches.

And I think, God, and then I remember that's because Americans have got a lot of money.

So that may now resolve itself.

But also, it means that there's a sort of editorial line coming out.

Because the increasing feeling I get when I read, to bring it back to my obsession, the Telegraph, is that a lot of it is being dictated by kind of reader comments on there that are not coming from people who we think of as being Telegraph Telegraph readers.

They are coming from people either across the Atlantic who are mad Magaris or Russian bots, very possibly.

But it's pushing the newspaper in a direction.

I mean, I was sort of thinking back 20 years to the Telegraph as kind of the paper of Charles Moore and Peregrine Worcesthorn and people like that.

It's a very, very different beast now, isn't it?

I mean, it kind of looks the same as the paper outlet.

But the thing I always thought you could judge the Daily Telegraph by was the reader offers, which were absolutely accurate.

They knew who their readers were.

It was always kind of shooting sticks or very, very, very nice kind of cast iron garden furniture.

Yeah.

And you look at it now and you just think, well, what paper is out there that is that it is kind of selling and repeating the worldview of the guys in the red cords and the G Lays?

Where have they gone?

Because that's definitely not.

The red cords have all, I'm afraid, been torn up to make red hats.

Okay.

That's what's happened.

Yeah.

Make Cordori great again.

That's what I want to go.

You can tell a huge amount about media consumption by the adverts.

Like I'm obsessed with, you know, almost all YouTube podcasts are built on crypto and supplements, as we previously discussed.

So it's not a surprise that they're all anti-establishment.

And so I think, yeah, there is a very basic economic analysis of British journalism has just become an outcrop of American journalism for, not for ideological reasons, but just for purely financial reasons.

But it's literally across the board as well.

I mean, the Telegraph newspaper splash a couple of weeks ago was whether or not Mark Carney, the new Canadian Prime Minister, had committed plagiarism in his Oxford degree.

And you just think, well, this would sell very, very well in Canada, but who actually,

especially since the story was kind of shot down in about the fourth paragraph by someone from Oxford who said, no, this isn't evidence of plagiarism at all.

It just seemed a very, very odd agenda that's going on.

And part of that is down to the fact that that paper is completely rudderless at the moment.

You know, it's been in limbo since, wonder how long we've been talking about the possible sale of the Telegraph and various contenders.

June 2023 was when it first went on sale and was snapped up by Redbird IMI, who still own it.

And the latest twist in that, I have to update you, is we did a podcast about him a few months ago and said, farewell then, David Montgomery.

I ended that by warning, he'll be back don't worry he will be back guess what he's back potentially he's back in the bidding for the telegraph uh with the help of uh todd bowley am i pronouncing that right the uh the the owner of chelsea fc uh possibly

yeah i'm looking at my football experts here

there is one thing at the telegraph that is properly consistent though and which i think they have shown is a real growth area and that is headlines with a particular phrase in them can i can i just share a few of these with you please so i thought right be fair andy you know only go back, let's say, eight weeks or so.

Just see if you can spot the phrase.

Unless Labour acts fast, Britain's growth mission is doomed to fail.

Labour's plans to drag sick Britain back to work are doomed to fail.

Labour's benefits cuts plan is doomed to fail.

Europe's Coalition of the Willing

is doomed to fail.

Star Wars peacekeeping plan, doomed to fail.

Europe's anti-Elon Musk space challenger, quite a long one, doomed to fail.

Wealth tax, doomed to fail.

In the 70s and also again now.

And I just think this is a really, I think we're going to be entering a phase where every other headline in the Telegraph, and eventually every single one, will start with those words.

But it also kind of demonstrates my point that the Telegraph these days just seems to be telling you how awful Britain is.

I get the same feeling whenever I tune into GB News.

It's just telling me that Britain is this awful, dreadful housekeeping where everything is going horribly wrong.

You think you're called GP News.

You've got a union jack in your master.

Are you not supposed to be patriotic?

No, the part of being GB News is talking down Britain

and then accusing other people of talking it down.

It's essentially an expat's view.

I've always noticed that over the years, you expect that people who've chosen not to live in Britain anymore, but read the Daily Express and drink large amounts of imported British spirits,

by about midday they tend to tell you that Britain is a terrible place to live.

They wouldn't know, they don't live there anymore.

But they do listen and now increasingly to American versions of what Britain's like.

Yes, Richard Littlejohn was a real pioneer of this in retrospect, wasn't he, when he took to Florida to go.

It's very rainy in Britain, I assume.

Can I ask one question then?

Can I keep the confusion about buying the telegraph going in the joke section?

Oh, that's not.

For another couple of months.

Because the condition that is obviously very clear from Todd Bowley and David Montgomery's possible bid is that they ain't going to pay 500 million, which is what Redbird IMI want for it.

Now, not unsurprisingly, Redbird, who you'll remember with the United Arab Emirates-backed consortium, who bought the Telegraph and then were told that they couldn't have it.

Not surprisingly, they don't get a newspaper for it.

They do at least want their money back.

But everyone agrees that they paid massively, massively over the odds on it.

They paid 600 million.

They've since made back 100 million from Paul Marshall, owner of GB News, as aforementioned, who bought the spectator titles, which were part of the Telegraph group before that.

But there's still a 500 million bill, which they are determined to make that.

And this is the problem, is that no one thinks it's worth that.

No one is willing to hand the money over.

And no one can force Redbird to actually sell it either.

So we are lost in this weird limbo, which even people at the, I mean, Charles Moore has described it as being under house arrest.

Chris Evans, the editor, has talked about the inevitable sense of drift at the paper.

He seems to have absented himself entirely from editing duties to try and sort out the future of the paper.

And it's left to his deputy, Robert Winnett, who's already tried to jump ship, you might remember, last year and go to the Washington Post,

only for things to blow up there.

that paper to be proved to be in an even worse state under former Telegraph editor Will Lewis.

So Robert Winnett came back.

So basically the person that got in charge doesn't even want to be there.

Are attempts to sell the Telegraph doomed to fail.

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Right.

Now we're going to turn for our second section of this show to a story that deals a lot with America.

Oh no, we've done it.

We've done it again.

No, it's going to be very British.

Those Eb Speed spiders are going to get a mention, Andy.

Okay, let's talk about abundance.

Helen, what is it?

This is a new book that is out from New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson, which is about basically picking an argument with liberals about the fact that if you look in America at blue states and blue cities, it's really hard to build anything.

So Ezra Klein is originally from California, so this is their big flagship example.

They've been trying to build high-speed rail in California for what, like a decade now?

Oh, like more than 20 or 30 years, yeah.

And it's really hard.

I was in San Francisco, that's where I wrote my USI column from, and it is almost impossible to build public affordable housing there.

The cost per unit is about $700,000 to $800,000.

And why is that?

Well, there's a load of things.

There's very tight construction unions which won't even let you build modular housing, you know, when you kind of get bits that are pre-packed.

Even though those factories are unionised, they're really against that.

There are environmental regulations.

In America, there is zoning, which has an explicitly racist history.

Most of zoning comes from wealthy white families who don't want houses of multiple occupation, which they think will be filled with minorities.

So, you know, all of these things that look like they're kind of left-wing principles, you know, the idea that you'd have kind of quotas in the construction industry, all of that, everything gets kind of hung on new buildings and infrastructure properties like they're a kind of Christmas tree, essentially.

Like all of these things that individually are quite good ideas, like strong environmental protections, strong worker protections, social justice initiatives.

But the end result is that people are still living under bridges because there aren't any homes or whatever it might be, or people are still in their cars belching out fossil fuels.

So, they're basically kind of at an interesting moment for the Democratic Party while it's basically sobbing in its room alone,

trying to say, Well, look, wouldn't it be great if we had this positive vision for what we could offer to people that is not just about us stopping stuff getting done?

And so, Kirstam was really into this, and it's interesting because it comes, I think, mostly out of the Yimby movement, the Yes in My Backyard movement, which in Britain and America has been much more cross-partisan.

So, this is kind of fascinating.

It's a political tendency that takes in everyone from Aaron Bastani of luxury automated communism now all the way through to like a Sam Bowman who used to be at the Adam Smith Institute.

So, there is a cross-party consensus in both Britain and America.

It's much too hard to build new rail lines, it's much too hard to build new housing.

And we've ended up with this sort of sense that things are kind of stuck, essentially.

But this is

followed by: shall we deregulate everything?

Well, that's the problem, right?

And that's why they've explicitly kind of addressed this to the left, because there is a part of the left liberal space that just instantly hears this and thinks what you are is like someone from the kind of

was it Prechania Unchained?

Was that terrible?

The book from Little Truss and Quasi Quartet, which is basically like, let's make it really easy to fire people and send children up chimneys.

Or the kind of Elon Musk Doge agenda, which is, why don't I just go into government and smash everything with a hammer and then try and put together something much smaller afterwards.

So it's Dominic Cummings, too.

We can't entirely blame it on the American.

Do you think, but if it started in the States, is it coming here?

Is Starmer going to go with this?

It's already come here.

If you listen to what

Starmer says, he says, you know, we want builders, not blockers.

He has explicitly referenced the Ebbs Fleet spiders, which are, for those of you not

intimately

with the distinguished jumping spider, which is my favourite thing about them.

They're distinguished, like they've got little monocles and hats.

Anyway, so they've been trying for a really long time to build more housing around Ebbs Fleet train train station, which would be 17 minutes into London.

Brilliant.

Natural England has designated some of the area around the station as site of special scientific interest,

and that prevents about something like about a thousand houses being built.

It sort of nukes the whole plan, essentially.

And the reason they've done this is that they've found this colony of distinguished jumping spiders there, and also a lot of water beetles.

Now, the kind of Yimby say, well, these only moved in because you've left this land derelict for so long.

Basically, the way it works is if you're a a quango like Natural England, you don't have to take any kind of balancing account, right?

It's the same thing with the bat tunnel.

You know, they don't put a value on the life of a spider versus all the people who will then use the train who will get to live in a house, all the people who won't use their car, which will improve air quality, which will help all spiders and people.

So the problem is, you have all these individual agencies that have their very narrow remit, which they execute really well, but they don't have to take into consideration any kind of serious like checks and balances.

Their job is not to make HS2 happen.

You know, I just find myself incredibly sympathetic to it because

we just can't build housing in this country.

It's been a real problem because all of the, and I had this rant before, the voices of all the people who'd like housing are not represented in the system to the extent that the voices of the people who already have housing are.

We just hear the developers and then we hear the objectors.

We never hear a queue of people saying, I would like a house.

Because it's impossible to

hear the views of people who would have got a house but now won't because they don't know it.

Right.

There's another really good example which is the Makarter food market around Elephant Castle.

Are you familiar with this?

And it talks to the bias and how the reporting on this goes, which is it's all being reported as beloved food hall to be demolished to make way for houses.

Actually, what's happening is that that was a site that has been they've been trying to redevelop since 2016.

And because it was otherwise going to sit derelict, they said, why don't you come and put these temporary pop-up food market into it?

So now what happens is they've been

advantageous business rates, for example.

They'll have to move out for a couple of years.

And then

in the scheme they are there to at the end of it they'll move back in.

But you'll also have 900 homes of which 300 are affordable or social housing.

But all the reports in like the standard, the BBC are all food hall to be demolished.

We like a beloved tradition that goes back to Mars Royal 2016.

And it's it's fantastic.

I mean the the quotes you get out of people who don't want something to happen are invariably better.

I read a report in the papers last week of this that this projected solar farm will turn our village into a concentration camp and I I thought steady on will it the phrase that gets used is a vetocracy where lots of people get a veto whether they're people who live in the area and and naturally don't want it to change or whether it's the I think it's up to 27 bodies you might have to consult depending on whether you're near a cricket pitch or whether you're near some jumping spiders or or whatever it might be.

There's a bill currently going through the Commons to put Swift bricks.

Have you heard of a Swift brick?

It's a tribute to a popular singer.

That's a Taylor Swift brick in every pack.

It's a satirist, I think.

Jonathan Swift, their name was.

They're for him.

It's so Jonathan Swift can nest in your house as you always want to.

No, but this is the idea that we want to encourage swifts to nest, so shouldn't there be a regulation that says every new house building has got to have a swift brick in it?

And already Brighton has this for buildings over a certain number of stories tall, as well as bee bricks for solitary bees, which I have to say, every time I say the phrase solitary bee, it makes my heart break.

A lot of them are in cells.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Try the the honey.

So, Brighton has had these regulations for a while, having a lot of green councillors, and this bill has been introduced by a green MP.

And the problem is that he had a professor quoting the Guardian in 2022 saying, if you don't clean out the B bricks,

the holes aren't deep enough for the bees, and also they can get infested with mites, out-competed.

So, it's not like you can just put a bee brick in and job done.

There needs to be a whole kind of suite of bee brick maintenance that you'd have to do.

And I presume probably the same thing is true of the swift bricks.

But there is this assumption that you can have

single things that can be added onto building regulations with zero cost.

But actually, what you're doing is just adding hurdle and hurdle and hurdle.

And maybe we should have some nationwide SWIFT encouragement initiative.

Must the theory allow for civil action as opposed to state action?

So does it say we should all put Swift boxes in because there's a campaign to do it, not because it's legally required?

This is your Christmas tree metaphor, isn't it?

I mean, there's too many baubles, it's going to fall over.

I think that's the thing.

It's about where the point of action is.

And the abundance agenda is about we need to remove barriers.

We need to have a much more of a focus on outcomes.

And this is where they would say that they distinguish themselves from Elon Musk or Willis Truss.

Their end outcome is they want a greener future, for example.

They want to decarbonise the economy.

But in order to do that, you cannot say that every single vole along the high-speed rail track is going to have to be preserved.

You are always letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

It's a really big challenge.

And I think I've certainly changed my thinking on it because you're right, it is a fundamentally kind of right-wing hobby horse, the idea of deregulation.

But I don't think you can look at the British property development and housing market and say, what a triumph for the left this is.

Haven't we got incredibly green homes and everything is working out really fantastically?

I think there's one really interesting thing, which is that there hasn't been a big national infrastructure upgrade for quite a while now.

So one of the more recent ones was switching from coal gas, which was in the 60s, really.

And that shifted over from a much dirtier source of fuel to a relatively clean, still fossil fuel one.

But that involved a great deal of change.

The government had to take out a lot of adverts in newspapers saying, right, you are being switched over.

This is going to be better.

But that was a long time ago.

And I think people have kind of forgotten that the state has the capacity to do that kind of thing.

And the state also feels like it doesn't quite know.

But, I mean, the new planning and infrastructure bill, just to bring it back to what's being done here, does have a lot of

quite good measures, if you like this kind of thing.

If you you don't, you'll hate it.

But

yeah, if you were going to write this book in the UK, the people really you'd want to challenge would be the Liberal Democrats.

Because the Liberal Democrats have a huge variety of very worthy environmental and social aims, but what they mostly run campaigns on in each constituency is don't build any new houses here.

And that's the kind of constituency who are being addressed by this abundance agenda.

You know, the right already might believe in deregulation in a various number of ways, but it's people who want these particular outcomes, saying that actually your kind of, you know, your local interests are often acting against the things you claim to believe at the wider national level.

I mean the argument is always, well, yeah, but oh, definitely, definitely renewable, but not here, not this.

No, no, no, no, no.

Try over there.

Try those bastards over there in the next village.

They can take it, you know.

But we used to believe that Britain was alone incapable of doing this.

I mean, this isn't that new an argument, and that France was marvellous.

And that the French national interests would always override.

So their railways marvellous because they don't care what anyone says.

Nukes everywhere, nuke powers.

Nukes everywhere, suburbs wherever they feel like it.

I'm guessing this argument was never terribly true, but are we now saying Britain is worse than America?

Well, I think there's a big difference between blue states and red states.

So the obvious difference is between California and Texas, which are very close to each other.

And Austin, where I was last year, actually went through a phase where I imagine this, house prices dropped.

They said it could never happen.

I mean, they have recovered again, but they were actually at one point building enough houses for all the people who wanted a house to live in one.

Imagine such a thing.

And they're building it.

This is the weird thing about this from your perspective: is Texas is building a load of renewable energies.

Just because you can get government subsidies to build renewable, but the only place you can actually build them are in red states that have very loose planning places.

So you ended up with all this weird green investment going into places that don't really believe in it.

It's not surprising at all.

It's cheap, you know.

And the housing thing, the brilliant move that lots of cities in Texas have made on housing is they have instituted a rule where you can change your single, massive The Simpsons style home as long as it doesn't go over a certain height you can turn that into I think it's up to six flats and that means you get six families living on one spot and unless you're in a very very unusual conservation area or anything that bit of deregulation has happened and it massively increases housing density which is what you want near say places like train stations you know the place to have your dense housing is near those bits of infrastructure uh and that's that's kind of what they've done yeah but i mean that again goes back to the kind of racist history of zoning in america because what the people who've been blocking those kind of conversions are people who say, we don't want, you know, students or low-income people living in our they'll change the character of the neighbourhood.

Nudge, nudge, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is often somewhat of a dog whistle, as you might imagine.

So is it going to work?

Are we going to get abundance here, Helen?

Well, the interesting thing is that Angela Reyna does seem to be doing a lot of stuff.

She's called in a lot of projects that have been blocked by local planning developers.

I think it would unequivocally be a good thing.

I think it's there's a huge amount of resistance to it from very from narrow interests, which I, you know, individually or usually things that I support.

But I think we have got an acute, if you think about the fact of the wages that have stagnated in the last 20 years, but housing has become multiple times more expensive.

That is just not a sustainable situation for a democracy.

And you talked about France, and interestingly enough, if you look on places like TikTok, obviously owned by a Chinese parent company, you will see American influencers going to China and going, oh my god, you've got a train that runs through a building and like they put this city up and it wasn't here five years ago.

And so what people are getting are a lot of CCP propaganda because it's like, if you were 13 in China, you could buy a house.

And obviously, if you were 30 in China, you also couldn't criticise the beloved leader.

That may also be the case in America, too.

It does also kind of strike me as being one of the things that, I mean, I've always feel with this Labour government, they're just sort of, what are they for?

New towns and like expansion and opportunities in a country that's growing again.

I mean, you know, Tony Blair said, I want to make Britain a young country again.

And I think that, again, that's actually an optimistic vision, which isn't what we've had from Starmer so far, which is we've got no money and everything's terrible, which may be true, but.

It's a good opener, but I feel like

you've then got to move along a bit.

It does sound a bit thatch-right, home ownership.

I'm sure Kier will go for it then.

Yeah, even the idea that actually renting doesn't take up half of your disposable income.

I think that's important.

I think we have a country that is in a rent, specifically a renting crisis.

The recent story of a Labour MP who had to, the scandal was, Labour MP has charged 900 quid for her cat, I think it was.

No, it was a cockapoo.

Dog, sorry.

Actually, it was that she rents somewhere in London, and her landlord has charged her another 100 quid a month to have a dog in the home, which, you know, she's allowed to claim because she needs to rent a place in London because it's not near her constituency.

But the story was very much sold as how outrageous for the MP.

Whereas you read it as this rent is appalling.

Exactly.

Can I give you one last example of

what this reminded me of, this Christmas tree thing of yours, Helen?

Because

in Britain it gets called everything-ism as well.

That's the other term that gets given.

Everything-ism.

Well, the bad news is, like, trains have to be good for bats.

You know, can't they just be good for trains, as you were saying.

And what it really reminded me of is Bleak House.

There's a character in that, Mrs.

Jellyby.

Yes.

Who has a telescopic philanthropy?

She has a cause.

And the cause is Boryabula Gar, which is that she wants everyone, she wants to move poor Londoners, basically, to Africa, where they will grow coffee, and that'll solve everything.

And she has got one cause in life and it overwhelms everything else in her life.

You know, when her daughter gets married, she says, well, what am I going to do for a secretary with my Boriobula Gar scheme?

And she has a load of gruesome friends who all also have one cause and cannot see anything outside it.

I think that was Dickens predicting, in a way, the way the internet allows people to radicalize themselves.

You know, he's writing about the way that people can get really sucked into something and lose all perspective.

But at the same time, how do you balance that with the need to have people who know a lot about a subject, being enthusiastic, wanting to get things over the line?

In his own case, he was an advisor to various philanthropists on charity, including the Burdette Coots, who was the most richest woman in Britain.

And I once read a list of his charities out in the attempt to make people give some money.

And he supported just about everything.

Oh, really?

He was the opposite.

of that character and he was phenomenally well-informed.

She also is very

uncaring about her own children.

Incredibly uncaring.

This is another point he was making about people who are very, very keen on single charities.

Yeah, I think that's where I've landed on it.

There's nothing wrong with having environmental charities or quangos who care about their specific things, but they should be invited to input into something where there is some level of overall sight.

That's where we're coming to with the bat tunnel, right?

If I gave you £100 million to make life better for British bats, would you spend it on like a bat reserve?

That'd be adorable.

Or would you spend it on a tunnel that we don't think even necessarily works next to a place where we don't know if the bats even are?

And that's the problem: is that for each individual actor in this, they only have one set of interests.

What government is supposed to do is balance a range of interests against each other.

So, what you're saying we need is some sort of equation or formula, aren't you, which would balance, you know, bat lives against human lives and homes.

And you know, he's really good at coming up with equations or formulas.

We could ask Donald to have a go.

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Now, for the second half of today's podcast, we have a little bit of sad news, which is that Tim Minogue, friend of this podcast, and the man who has been writing the Rotten Boroughs page all about local council fraud and waste and mismanagement and corruption for the last 26 years.

Tim, very sadly, is retiring from full-time duties on the Rotten Boroughs page.

He'll still be contributing plenty, but he's stepping back from that particular beat.

And so, this is a little bit of a victory lap for Tim.

It's It's about some of the greatest stories he's ever covered.

It's about what he thinks councils should be doing.

It's about why you only seem to see stories about councils being completely broke these days.

So here's Tim.

I started off by asking him which stories he was most proud of having covered.

I suppose it's a rather strange one and it's the story of a publican called Jeff Monks who was persecuted by the former East Northamptonshire District Council, which is no more.

His pub was called the Snooty Fox.

He had a row with a customer who claimed he had brought her the wrong bottle of wine.

And he said to her, Well, it

doesn't seem to have stopped you drinking it, madam.

And things got a bit heated.

She was barred from the pub.

He then found himself being prosecuted by the local council for having served at Moldy Ham.

It was alleged by him that the customer had a social relationship at least with the leader of the council or

had friends on the council at any rate.

This resulted in this vindictive prosecution.

So in 1999, there was a court case at which magistrates imposed fines and costs totaling nearly £32,000.

Monks couldn't pay that.

He hadn't got it.

It was the largest amount for any offence,

such offence offence ever brought against the sole trader.

So he got banged up in prison for two months.

He won at a retrial of that case in 2015.

And then there were two other prosecutions against him, evidence, one mouse sighting and one cracked pane of glass.

They were quashed on appeal as far back as 2003.

And the judge noted the curious fact that out of 7,000 inspections of food premises carried out by the council over 10 years, only four had resulted in prosecutions, three of which were against Geoff Monks.

Well, I'm proud that we stayed with the story, and it's in that tradition that Private Eye has of sort of nagging away at things.

And so we returned to this story many times.

But the credit really goes to the tenacity of Mr.

Monks, or Dr.

Monks, as he now is.

And in 2022,

he finally won an apology from North North Ants Council, the successor of East North Ants, and was awarded a very large sum of money, we think about four million pounds, which is less than he said he had lost from losing his three

businesses.

But I'm pretty pleased about that one.

I do like the sort of human frailty stuff, and

the Tory Cabinet Minister for Economic Development at Eden District Council in Cumbria, who we exposed in 2016 because he'd attended a Buckingham Palace garden party.

He's very proud of his services to industry OB, he'd got earlier.

But in fact, he owed more than half a million pounds in unpaid tax to HMRC.

He could have paid it there and then.

He could.

He was with HM.

We gave him the cucumber sandwich award.

He did a thing which is quite instructive which is people often tell their local paper that you know they're suing private eye and they're going to take us to the cleaners and all that sort of thing which the local papers usually dutifully report but of course no legal letter is forthcoming.

I think you've heard of it yeah.

And I should say I mean for many years you've been doing the Rotten Boroughs awards at the start of each new year.

You kind of sum up you know the greatest examples of misbehaviour that have crossed your desk in the previous year.

And it's always an absolute highlight of the like the year's private eyes to me is that page of

just extraordinary malpractice.

Well, we try and have a bit of fun there.

2018 we gave the Award of Services to the Arse.

Yes, you did hear that, right?

And Croydon Council, which was Labour at the time, they contributed 10 grand and provided the venue for an arts festival which featured performers inserting butt plugs.

And it was intended to demystify the anus

while others consumed laxatives and diuretics until they lost control of their sphincters.

It wasn't in person, as it were, but there were microphones there, so

you could hear the results.

Is this connected to Croydon now being the most bankrupt council in the country?

No,

it went in

the debit.

Part of that billion quid they owe

that,

didn't it?

But we've all demystified the anus now, so you know, maybe it was worth it.

We had a Vintner's award in 2012 for a man, Councillor Shiraj Hack,

also known as the Brick Lane Curry King, who had bankrolled the successful election campaign of Tower Hamlet's mayor, Lutfer Rahman, in 2010.

Old friend of the Rotten Boroughs page?

A great friend.

And where would we have been without him?

Empty columns.

But anyway, Councillor Hark lost his premises license after his own council's trading standards department caught him selling cheap Italian plonk in his restaurants, re-labelled as top quality Australian chiraz.

The nice thing is, it's all of this is kind of human behaviour.

It's very much like the definition, isn't it, vice, folly, and humbug of, you know, what satire is meant to expose.

And it's all in this page, isn't it?

It's all people being naughty and normally you finding out about it.

Expenses are always an issue and in 2018 we had the expenses king of the year, a chap called Nathan Elvry who was the new chief executive of West Sussex County Council and he accepted a £47,500

permanent relocation allowance for moving.

to Chichester.

But we found out he hadn't moved out of his home in Surrey where he'd been living for the previous 12 years.

Oh my goodness.

I think that sealed his fate and he had to go after a while.

And then some of the other ones we've done aren't so funny, but I'm still proud we did.

Like last year we exposed the then Conservative leader of West Northamptonshire Council

who was a serial wife beater.

I mean going back over 30 years,

his first wife had tried to bring this to the attention of the councillors, and one councillor, one independent councillor, bravely tried to bring this up at a council meeting and was shut down by the officers, by the legal officer and the chief executive.

We got hold of this story and we published it and the local BBC

did a very good report following up where they interviewed all these women on camera.

And the guy stood down as the council leader, but having a lot of brass neck he stayed on as a Tory councillor and he only quit as a Tory councillor after the then local MP one Andrea Leedsom to her great credit said you know come on this isn't on but he went to last Christmas's North Ants Tory party lots of cheers slapping on the back and he still sits as a councillor.

Does that indicate there's a problem with accountability?

You might say that.

Another one from the same part of the world, earlier this year we found out that a senior Tory councillor called Matt Binley had admitted to his Tory colleagues having had underage sex.

He wasn't underage.

young woman concerned was when he had been a police officer back in 2008 or 2009 and it just occurs to me there that three of these stories stories, the wife beat of the underage sex man, and the persecutors of Jeff Monks, the publisher,

they were all from Northamptonshire.

Now, what do we make of that?

It's just extraordinary, Tim,

the number of councils and the number of stories you print each issue about the entire length and breadth of the country.

And the bad behaviour that goes on in each of them, or the mismanagement, all of it.

I mean, one thing we've talked about on the podcast before is when councils start their own energy company or start their own, like, robbery.

Housing companies.

Housing companies, energy companies, wars.

I think there was a water cut, just all sorts of these things, and then it goes slightly wrong, and then they end up in the hole financially.

There's a big problem, isn't there, with councils not having the money they need and then doing slightly risky things like this in an attempt to make that money back and deliver services.

They are in desperate financial straits.

A few years ago, there was a craze for selling stuff off.

Sell off buildings, sell off land.

But of course, once you've sold the family silver, that's it.

So some of them have had the bright idea.

And on paper, it's not too bad.

Why sell 10 acres to a developer who's then going to give you a fixed sum for that and make a ton of money out of building houses on it?

The sensible thing might be considered to cut out the middleman.

But as we have found in Croydon, which it drove the council into bankruptcy, and

Cambridgeshire Council is having similar problems now, you've suddenly discovered that housing developers and builders actually know what they're doing.

And if you haven't got the expertise in-house, it's, you know, we can't all be experts in everything.

And in just the report from

their auditors, KPMG, talking about Cambridgeshire a couple of weeks ago, the auditors said the council does not have the suitable skills and experience to effectively manage the risks associated with their commercial private sector subsidiary, because they have a wholly owned building company called This Land, which is now scores of millions of pounds in debt.

They got into the absurd situation where this land wasn't making enough money on its projects to repay the interest on the loans they had had from Cambridgeshire County Council.

So they borrowed more money from Cambridgeshire County Council in order to repay the interest on the loans.

You know, that's not good.

Why is that?

It's not corruption, it's certainly incompetence in some form or another, but you could say, being charitable, that they've been driven to desperate measures by the fact that they are in the financial crisis that all councils are to one degree or another, and that is being caused by the parsimony of central government over many years.

I think we've probably got to the end now, Tim.

And I'm very sorry, and I'm also very irritated because I'm thinking of all the dodgy councillors up and down the country who will sleep a little easier in their beds.

as you won't be on the Rotten Berreth feast anymore.

I hope not, because I hope the page will continue on and go from strength to strength.

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

Thank you so much for listening.

Thanks to Ian, Helen, Adam, and to Tim, of course.

We will be back again in another fortnight with another episode.

And just to remind you, we have a live show coming up at the Cambridge Literature Festival.

Email podcast at private-eye.co.uk.

Send us your questions, your burning questions about anything you want to know, as long as it's about the news in some shape or form.

we would love to answer them, and we'll be answering them live on stage in Cambridge.

It's sold out in the room.

But you can buy a streaming ticket if you like listening to this podcast, but you think it needs to be more visual.

You can get tickets by going to the Cambridge Literature Festival website.

The show is called Page94 if you didn't know that already.

Until then, please go and buy a subscription to the magazine.

Thanks to you for listening, and thanks to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing.

Bye for now.

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