134: Mega MAGA

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Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

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

We are here as ever to discuss the stories of the week since the last issue of the magazine came out.

And it's obviously an enormous crunch week for Europe.

capital E, capital everything, with various summits taking place over Ukraine and how the continent is going to respond, how America has or has not responded.

And the thing I suppose we wanted to focus on this time, Helen, you've been looking at a lot of this, is the increasing splits, particularly in the world of the right, as we go mega maga.

And

mega maga.

Mega MAGA, because there have been a few.

People might get mugged.

There have been a few huge conferences recently, which are things like CPAC.

Yes.

And in London, I believe it was, the ARC-ARC, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which does sound sinister now.

I say it out loud.

And we'll see how sinister it is.

But these are things which don't really intrude on the lives of normal people, but which you've been spending a lot of time with.

I know, exactly.

Very important to very abnormal people.

Sorry, Helen.

But I mean.

People like me, they are a big deal.

Politico described CPAC, which is a conservative political action conference, as being like a kind of MAGA comin turn, right?

Which I think is a good way of saying Communist International.

But it is, they are these kind of great international gatherings of this very online right.

CPAC's been around since the 1970s.

It used to be very mainstream.

Ronald Reagan gave the keynote address at the first one.

Then it went very libertarian, very Tea Party, and now it is essentially a kind of audition to be a Donald Trump clone.

So you get Georgie Maloney of Italy spoken there, Javier Millai of Argentina turned up with this chainsaw, which he takes to bureaucracy.

That is the kind of alliance of people who see themselves very much as the coming thing.

However, I feel like in a way...

A bit early to say that it's peaked, but I think in a way the thing that's fascinating about them is they don't have any real ability to deal with that having actual power, quite a lot of these people.

They're so in love with the idea of being anti-establishment that they very much struggle with the concept of actually governing,

which I think is fascinating.

But I also think that there is a danger with a lot of this stuff that these people are drifting further away from the shawls of sanity.

May I talk to you about Liz Trust very briefly?

Of course.

As a proculus, I'm only interested in how this affects our patch.

Yeah, well, I'd always viewed CPAC as a bit like the Doctor Who Convention or one of the international sci-fi things where people turn up in costume.

And Liz Truss seems to be the ultimate delegate because she'll appear in some sort of cosplay.

And here she was again.

Yeah.

I mean, her speech is just

angles about how online things are.

Okay, so she brought out the Albanian chicken nuggets story, which if you've spent any time on the right-wing internet, you'll be very familiar.

We should just say briefly what that is.

The idea that someone couldn't be deported.

back to Albania because of their family member of theirs liked chicken nuggets that they got here.

To be fair, the McNugget is one of of the greatest inventions of human history, but the idea was they couldn't be deported because of it.

So the nugget thing not...

No, I think the nugget thing is true up to a point, but it's an interesting one of these things that just becomes a, I mean, I've talked about this before on the podcast, you know, something that everybody in a certain bit of right-wing politics has heard of.

It's absolutely axiomatic to them that this is an exemplar of the failed state.

And I don't think the left is quite as good at creating those kind of memes.

Can I just say you described that as a very, very online thing?

I think it originated on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, which is its own batshit space.

But it is very online now, right?

It's been eaten alive.

It is no longer, when we had this conversation before, the paper of Colonel Buffon Tufton in the Shires.

It is now the paper of very intense-looking young men on the streets.

The paper of Bufton 85799.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right, she also mentioned the abortion clinic protester.

If you remember, the man who was arrested for being in a buffer zone, which was a big feature of J.D.

Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference saying that Europe no longer has free speech.

Yeah, that was apparently the main problem with Europe.

Right, and again, a story that is true.

He was arrested for praying in a buffer zone, but but the whole point of the buffer zone is that people being there is intimidating to women seeking abortion services.

And then, this is the apogee, I think, of the onlineness.

How online is this?

She then had a go about the fact that USAID funded Rory Stewart's wife, the charity run by Rory Stewart's wife, Shashana.

And you just think, how many people in the world are in the market for a story of basically Liz Truss having a beef with a podcaster?

Presumably she had to explain for that audience who Rory Stewart was.

She didn't at all.

She said they fund the BBC, they fund the Tony Blair Institute, and they fund Rory Stewart's wife.

And the crowd did not go wild.

And the crowd went, who.

As a rule of three, you put the one people know at the end.

You know, I hate to give comedy tips to Liz Truss because she's outshone all of us.

I mean, really, over the years.

Yeah, it was really interesting to watch somebody who has just spent so much time on the internet that they don't, they just completely lost touch with what a normal person would be interested in and care about or might have heard about.

Yeah, I mean I'm obviously I'm on the internet the whole day.

But I mean even I got Farage's speech which again as a slightly older reader is absolutely extraordinary.

Farage turns up in a foreign capital and says my country is a complete hellhole.

Everybody there is miserable.

If only we were like the United States we'd be happy.

We've got an appalling left-wing government and life is miserable.

I mean traditionally we didn't like people going abroad and slagging off our our country.

And, I mean, to be honest, the writer's made a lot of people slagging off their country over the years being one of the major problems.

But to literally hear a man on quite an agreeable weekend, I mean, I did go out a bit when I wasn't on the internet.

It seemed to me there were a lot of people having a very nice weekend.

A lot of people engaged in activities that weren't being locked up for a failure of free speech.

I just thought you are now beginning just to sound like a mad person online.

Well, it just reminded me of all those leftists in the 20s and 30s who used to go over to Stalin's Russia and go, Isn't it amazing?

Everything just works here and everyone's so happy.

And like, we're not like that back in Britain.

We'd love a bit of your Soviet communism back in Britain.

I wish we could have it.

And everyone back in Britain went, We didn't want Soviet communism.

That sounds terrible.

But it has got that same thing of sort of self-styled intellectuals going to a foreign country and just sort of pandering to its leaders.

That was very much the tone.

Georgia Maloney, I think, at least had some mild sort of sense that actually she might be parting from Trump's line on Ukraine.

But realistically it was the giant Trump suck-up conference.

Again, I probably watched too much of this, but there was a sort of, again, a competition in doing stupid salutes.

Because Steve Bannon, having seen Musk get vast amounts of publicity, then did his own version of a Nazi salute, which he obviously said wasn't.

And then a Mexican actor who, you know, like all actors wants to be in politics because they've seen Trump do it, he did the same thing.

That is why I repeat the sci-fi analogy.

You do seem to see people acting up and copying each other in a rather sort of nerdy fanboy way.

I don't think these people want anyone to live long and prosper.

Yes, it was quite a bleak moment when the leader of the French far-right party pulled out of doing his speech because he thought Bannon had done a Nazi salute.

Bit far for him.

It's sort of a great sitcom to be done for the moments in a sort of very heavily far-right conference where people go, bit much, bit much, come on.

This is another strange thing.

I mean, it's another thing that I suppose Europeans have to look at and say, well, a lot of Europeans living do remember a time when Nazi salutes are being chucked around.

And it probably has a bit more meaning over there.

I mean, it's illegal in Germany, isn't it, to do the things that are being thrown around on stage at CD?

There's a big row about Americans not understanding why Germany might have quite strong rules about hate speech, or why indeed the German parties don't want to go into coalition with the AFD, the far-right party.

And there's a sort of idea that that's illegitimate.

That's somehow by not working with the AFD, you're in some some way kind of repressing them rather than making your own active political choices about who you are and aren't allowed to do business with.

They kind of want, that's what I mean, they want no guardrails, except occasionally someone does overstep.

Adam may be the only one who appreciates this, but in 2017, guess who?

Which Daily Telegraph-aligned later internet celebrity got banned from CPAC?

I think bleached hair.

Milo Iianopoulos.

It was Milo Inopoulos, who was exactly.

Spokesperson for Kanye West.

Yeah, exactly.

The most interesting career move.

Sort of inevitable career move, I think.

Yes, from Daily Telegraph blogger to alt-right figure to Christian evangelist ex-gay to Kanye West spokesperson, maybe the most eclectic CV in human history.

But he was banned after he said, you know, I was abused as a child and it didn't do me any harm.

And actually, it's fine to have sex with people as young as 13.

And again, there was this moment of suddenly lots of people who said, oh, you can't say anything these days went, you can't say that.

And I think this is the bit that they're consistently running into: is that anyone who tries to enforce line, exactly you're saying, is seen as being a bit of a grown-up, a bit of a buzzkill.

And I think it will just take them into places that are obviously ugly and the electorate will not follow.

So what's interesting then becomes who is going to follow, especially in weeks like this one, where what happens with, for example, Ukraine is so important.

So we saw the ARC feels like a slightly vanilla version of CPAC, but there's still plenty of craziness doing the rounds there.

Kemi Badenock made a speech there, and she was later interviewed by Jordan Peterson on his podcast.

And I have to say, Helen, you are responsible now for my YouTube algorithm throwing up a lot of really ripe stuff that I

would, it's really interrupting the heat pump videos that I like to be served and that I'm comfortable with.

And instead, I'm getting loads of Jordan Peterson just dished up to me on a daily basis.

I mean, tell me about it.

You should try getting it dished up to even 90 minutes live.

It's quite the thing.

But she, so Kemi Badenock, you know, has been trying to get in on this a bit and clarify that Western civilization is in crisis.

And that's not because of people, let's say, invading Western countries and killing thousands of people there.

It's because of weakness.

Well, she's quite, she's plugged into this sphere very heavily.

What she doesn't appear to be so plugged into, you've had conservative local party association chairmen complaining that she's not doing the kind of hard work of what they call the rubber chicken circuit, doing that kind of level of rebuilding.

And that's chicken you eat rather than the rubber chicken being the stock comedy gag for comedians.

Is that the yeah, you're eating rubbery chicken at a sort of mid-range um community hall?

Okay, but yeah, and so you know,

also for our non-online listeners, there was another row this week about the fact that Fraser Nelson, formerly Edge of the Spectator, went on a podcast called Trigonometry.

And Constantine Kizen has been a big speaker at the art conferences.

And they had a row about whether or not Rishi Sunak is English.

And Constantine Kizen said, You can't call him English, he's a brown Hindu.

And it moment at which a lot of people sort of suddenly went, Oh my god, who are these people that we've been associating with?

How could this possibly happen?

And it was another moment of people suddenly realizing that there was a line that they hadn't been enforcing and now feeling that they really had to do it.

The interesting thing about that is, who was on the week before Fraser Nelson?

Kemi Badnock was on trigonometry.

This is the sphere that she is plugged into, having these oh so spicy conversations.

Does she want to be a podcaster, or does she want to be leader of the Conservative Party?

At the moment, she seems really rather happier being a spicy podcaster.

And you talk about, I mean, ordinary people realize that there is a line they don't want to cross, and I think the line is different in Europe because of our history.

And again, I mean, this week, a number of people have been coming forward saying, I used to work for Trump and he didn't know X.

We had John Kelly said he wasn't sure that Trump knew who was on which side during the Second World War.

I mean, and again, that is A, funny, but B, sort of explains why that particular group of people in that sphere, they do not know any history.

So the bits of it they choose to interpret are not the ones that people living in Europe see as this is

where we don't go across.

And I just feel that becomes really clear when you look at Trump's version of how the Second World War went, what happened during the 30s, what dictatorship means, what appeasement means.

That narrative, which we've all internalised, he doesn't have.

But I think Trump lives entirely in the moment, doesn't he?

And there's no great ideology behind it.

The big attack on Zelensky last week and calling him a dictator, which is the most ridiculously ahistorical bit of nonsense ever.

But that was just because he thought Zelensky had insulted him by saying he lived in a disinformation space.

So it's just that Trump thing is it's a personal insult and I will kick back in the worst way I can think possible.

And then everyone else has to sort of go along with this and turn this into some kind of policy.

Yeah, you're right.

And the thing that's interesting is that this bit of the right loves to talk, particularly when they talk about gender, they love to say, well, the left, you know, taking leave of its senses, they're so out of touch.

But if you look at the polling on things like who was the villain in the Second World War, was it Churchill or Hitler?

Most people in America are pretty clear on and be able to call that one.

Or the same thing, who invaded who?

Did Ukraine, in fact, bring it on themselves by wearing too short a skirt?

Or did, in fact, Russia invade them?

This is really, like, some of this stuff they have really drifted away from median public opinion without seeming to realize it or care, which is kind of fascinating to me.

And

obviously, not all of these leaders are all elected leaders at the moment.

They're not paying the electoral price for it.

But at some point they might.

Yeah, it's interesting seeing leaders like Farage, who has managed to retain, he does speak at these things, but he has retained an air of relative normality.

It was interesting seeing him being forced into the grudging concession that Nozelensky is not a dictator.

Quite grudging, wasn't it?

It was extremely grudging.

Boris Johnson did similar gymnastics by saying that you really mustn't take anything Trump says literally.

Yeah.

Don't pay attention to any of it.

Just trust he's on your side.

Yeah.

But he's literally come around around today and said, oh, no, it's entirely reasonable for Trump to be demanding all of the mineral wealth from

Zelensky, you know, in return for you.

Yeah, that's absolutely fine.

You just think, this was the one place where people still liked you, Boris Johnson.

You were a hero.

They were like naming their kids after you and putting up weird frescoes of you defeating dragons and things.

And

you lost that one now.

You lost your audience.

That's quite sad because they're asked, aren't they?

There were kids who were called Tony Bleu in Kosovo.

All the generation of little Borises, the only ones left with the ones he actually fathered.

Mind you, if you're in Ukraine, you're called Boris.

You can probably, you know, there's some plausible deniables.

You can actually say, no, no, it's not after Boris Johnson.

Well, he was there for a day or two.

So I suppose the thing I'm interested in, Hannah, is where does this go?

Because this movement, the MACA movement, is in its pomp.

You know, thousands of people are being sacked across the States.

And in the UK, it's clearly the media landscape, the Telegraph, the Spectator, and lots of these publications seem to be drinking the Kool-Aid very enthusiastically.

What comes next?

I think the death of stuff like this is when it begins to seem cringe.

And

a question is: does it stay feeling dangerous enough that it doesn't become slightly pathetic?

I mean, if you look at the way that,

you know, like Woodhouse was writing

in the 30s about swanning around in his footer bags, there was always an element that some of this stuff was laughable that protected people from it.

I do wonder if some of this stuff does seem quite laughable, even as it seems very dangerous.

There's other stuff happening too.

So the German elections among young people, everybody in, you know, that German electorate has moved to the right, definitely.

But women 18 to 24 have moved to the left, to Die Linke, just in extraordinary numbers, just the most obvious shift, which is again an anti-establishment party.

And there's no reason that the left, the anti-establishment left, couldn't pick up on some of this energy too.

It's just at the moment it's all, you know, the Green Party in various countries are picking up some of this energy.

So that might be, you know, we might be looking at a broader dissolution of kind of, you know, the centre crumbling, but it's always only presented as only being the right, because that's, you know, that's where lots of the energy is and the ecosystem is of the media.

I think that's a really good point about being laughable.

And in the same way that Woodhouse's spode became ridiculous, there was just a hint of it in a couple of Trump recent speeches of this being no longer him being the bully who's making the jokes, but a slightly pathetic figure when he made up his own ratings.

That didn't look so good.

I find it hard to believe that we haven't reached the moment of Pete Cringe.

I mean, I watched that bit where the Argentine president comes on looking like something from the comedians in the 70s, the Wheel Tamaran Shunters Social Club, and hands a gleaming chainsaw to Elon Musk, who for some reason is dressed as the Terminator, but sort of halfway through the bit where he's melting into the lava at the end of Terminator 2.

And then he waves it around and actually shouts, chainsaw!

And you just think, oh, for God's sake.

But my favourite thing about that.

I pushed myself inside out is

the fact the chainsaw wasn't switched on presumably due to health and safety.

It's never been used, it was a gleaming.

But it was like health and safety, and you were like, come on, man, if you're sure truly manly, like that's the thing about it, the truly manly man surely uses his chainsaw right now.

Yeah, it should still have sawdust on it.

It's like all the people with the extremely impressive cars that have never seen a splash of mud because they're exclusively used around Notting Hill, right?

Yes, or the sort of North Face jacket.

It's never been mountaineering, has it?

It's only been to SW1.

There was a circus act called R Chaos, which was French, and they were properly properly mad, and they had the chainsaws on, and they juggled with them.

Yeah.

I mean, if you're not going to do that, I'm not going to your conference.

Unless Elon Musk gets one of those fire-retardant suits, sets himself ablaze and runs across the stage in the next one.

Is he even a real man at all?

Can I end with the Liz Truss quote that I thought was absolutely fabulous?

She said, You want totally, she said, We missed the first American Revolution in 1776.

We want to be part of the second.

Do you want to miss it?

What are we saying about people not knowing history?

She did this great parenthetical and she went, in a way it was against us.

In a way.

In a way.

In all ways.

And ironically, now even madder than George III.

So it comes full circle.

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Now we come to an enormous media news story.

I want to say enormous, I mean 15,000 words long, which has been published in the New York Times.

Adam, you, as the reading everything that's ever written about the Murdoch family and their media conglomerate correspondent, have plowed through it.

You must be one of them.

I've read it, so you don't have to.

Yes, indeed.

Not just 11 million words in the New York Times, but an equal number of words in The Atlantic as well.

So the last we heard of them, the Murdoch family, they were suing each other in, I believe, a Nevada courtroom.

They were indeed.

And it's Rupert and one of the sons, the slightly further right-wing one, and the other three principal children.

There are more children, obviously, along the way.

But they've been suing each other over the control over the Empire after Rupert dies.

In summary, yeah, Rupert is trying to vary the Murdoch family trust, which was set up in 1999 when he divorced Anna Murdoch, who is the mother of three of his eldest children.

There is also Prue.

But then the second three are Elizabeth, James, and Lachlan.

Lachlan.

Yeah, we're going to get lethal.

We get in trouble.

We get letters when we call him Lachlan, even though he spelled Lachlan.

But he is Lachlan.

So yes, yeah, yeah.

Those are letters.

That's because his nickname was Lackluster.

And probably given to him by his father, given how cruel they all are after his performance running one of the divisions.

So, Lachlan, Lachlan, you know, it's not our fault.

Yes, so this was the setup when he divorced Anna, who'd been married to for a great many years.

She was entitled to half of the empire, which you can imagine is an awful lot when you're talking about Murdoch at his pomp in 1999.

And she sacrificed that in order that all of the adult children would have a say in the running of the business in future.

This is at the point, of course, where Rupert was divorcing Anna and marrying Wendy Deng, who was his wife, who definitely wasn't a Chinese spy, as opposed to Elena Zukova, who is the new wife, who is definitely not a Russian spy.

So we've got, say it again, James Murdoch, who British listeners might remember a bit better because of the Leverside Inquiry and his walk-on appearance there.

Lachlan, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, and Peru.

Peru.

There we go.

If it helps, that they do map on quite well to the kids from succession.

Oh, thank God.

In that Kieran Culkins, one is sort of laughlin in that he's the kind of bratty one super right wing maybe doesn't really believe anything is quite happy to go along with the drift of the empire very good james is sort of uh the eldest one yep remind me the one who does the rap what's his name jeremy strong kendall got it in that he had a kind of massive crisis of conscience and walked out this is all and rebelled against his father yeah and then shiv is elizabeth and then there is a as proo your fave is connor who was one of the people is running for president yeah

she's just vibing okay but they do, don't they?

And that there is a kind of one son who walked out.

This was the Atlantic piece, was an interview with James, who

was really kind of split.

He absolutely has.

So essentially, the difference between the New York Times basically has accessed all of the 3,000 pages of legal documents which were in that secret courtroom in Reno, Nevada, which we talked about on a podcast a little while back.

The end of this case was, by the way, that the judge ruled that Rupert wasn't allowed to vary the trust, and so all four kids will still have a say in the running of the company after Rupert dies.

And the reason that that matters is that if Rupert had got his way and given

Lachlan

more control of the company, he would have been able to steer the entire media empire in much more of a Ruperty direction, which is a bit further right-wing, whereas the other three children are seen as being a bit more libdem, a bit more milk-toasted.

The word is woke.

The word woke came up in the court case.

No, no, Rupert is determined that Lachlan should be the one that carries the flame on into the next century and beyond.

Because, and I'm quoting here now from some of the court documents that were in the New York Times article.

Rupert says, Fox and our papers are the only faintly conservative voices against the monolithic liberal media.

I believe maintaining this is vital to the future of the English-speaking world.

So he's gone full bad knock on this, basically.

It's about Western civilization.

It's not just about who gets to run Fox News, the TV channel in the UK.

It's so unambitious.

Why not the galaxy?

You know, it's just for Western civilization.

It's wild, because there's already OANN and Newsmax in America that are to the right of Fox News.

And then there's YouTube channels that make Fox look like sort of hand-wringing

Andy-style environmentalism.

Right?

Yeah, but this is Rupert's view of it.

I mean, he's talking about the papers as well as Fox.

So he's looking at the Sun and the Times in Britain and thinking, well, you know, all the others are kind of all the pinko-lefties like the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.

It's us that's fighting the good fight.

What else emerged during the course of this mad trial?

All sorts of wonderful things.

Like the fact that he doesn't even refer to James as James anymore.

He is referred to throughout the legal documents by all the lawyers involved as the troublesome beneficiary, or actually just troublesome.

Where they could say James, they'd just say, This will be a problem with Troublesome,

shorthand, which I loved.

My other favorite detail in it was that

in the deal to hive off 21st Century Fox, which is the film studio side of the business in 2018 to Disney, one of the subclauses of that was that Loughlin got to keep his climbing wall on the 21st century studio lot in LA.

The Atlantic also had this great detail that once they all play Monopoly as a family and Rupert cheated.

And I thought, yep, I believe it.

I absolutely believe it.

Just find them in like a couple of hundred dollar bills

under the board.

We've all been there.

Another wonderful detail was that in 2010, Rupert insisted they all go on a family counseling retreat because things were so bad within this family.

And I've got to say, if you think your family is screwed up, the details, particularly in the Atlantic, please, you will just think you're absolutely fine.

That is an episode of succession.

That literally is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That one went straight into succession.

Well, we get onto that everyone was absolutely convinced that all other members of the family were leaking to the script writers of succession uh we've already heard that you know one of the details of rupert's divorce from jerry hall was that she wasn't allowed to talk to jesse armstrong and the other writers on succession james was convinced that liz was uh briefing uh the the writers of succession but it turned out it was her ex-husband matthew freud who was desperate to talk to jesse armstrong give him ideas but but jesse armstrong declined to talk to Matthew Freud.

As indeed is every one thing that this family seems to be able to agree on, they all hate each other, but they seem to hate Matthew Freud more.

They're pretty much agreed that Liz's ex-husband, Matthew Freud, is

Tom.

He's one worse than any of the Murdoch.

I mean, I know blurring fact and fiction is a big Murdoch thing, but I mean, I find it impossible to listen to this story without seeing Matthew McFadden.

To be honest, the script writing was an awful lot better on succession because the agreements that came out, the Murdoch Principles, which were agreed at the end of this family counseling.

Sorry, just to say, that's a funny phrase, Murdoch Principles.

Yeah,

I haven't made that up.

The The Murdoch Principles were drafted by Elizabeth Murdoch, and they said, the top line of them was, we commit to undertake active dialogue with each other at all times and to relentlessly communicate openly with trust and humility.

Well, this is not what has been happening.

There were all sorts of accusations about secret meetings at Claridge's to discuss the possible demise of Rupert and what might happen next.

And this was brought up in the court case with Lachlan saying, you were clearly plotting against me.

You are plotting a palace coup to get rid of him.

Why else would you have chosen a private dining room at Claridge's?

To which Liz's lawyers pointed out that it was because we were sort of talking about our dad dying and what what what was going to happen about funerals and stuff and we didn't really want anyone overhearing you don't want to go to an all-bar one yeah

this is this is giving me strong strong whiffs of the telegraph which was all the the the Barclay brothers feud was all about them eavesdropping on each other in private dining rooms at

the Clarides or the Rits why they went for Claridge's rather than the Ritz which it turned out yeah now the Barclay family had rigged up their hotel the Ritz with uh with bugging devices so they could all spy on each other I I mean,

these families are really quite weird, these families that own media empires, it has to be said.

And the Barclays were plotting against each other, and it did end up in court, but I had an awful feeling we wouldn't get to read about the Murdoch version because they would have different rules in Reno.

Because we'd read all of it in Britain, and marvellously entertaining it was, too.

But it's all out there.

Yeah, all told.

So what happened to Murdoch's desire for privacy?

I thought you went to Reno so that no one could know what you were up to.

Well, this is the big mystery.

So the Atlantic piece is based on a very long series of interviews with James and his wife, Catherine.

So it's absolutely their side of the story.

And unsurprisingly, it comes out extremely complimentary of James all the way through.

And it turns out he was actually a bit of a business genius.

He was completely underrated by his father all the way through.

The New York Times piece, as I said, is based on these 3,000 pages of court documents, which have been leaked by someone.

It's quite slightly hard to tell.

I mean, presumably not James, because James would have given them to the Atlantic, who he was talking to.

I also played the fun game of speculating who leaked, leaked, and I presumed it was one of the other children, one of the dissident children, rather than the loyalist child.

Or at least, rather, one should say perhaps their camps.

But it's got to be one of the parties to the litigation to have access

to it, surely.

I mean, I thought it was my colleague McKay Coppins, who's a really lovely guy and a super good reporter, who did the Atlantic piece.

And I think one of the things he brought out of it that you don't necessarily just get from the documents is the kind of human aspect of it.

What you were talking about, the way he frames it is Rupert wants Lachlan to succeed because he seems Lachlan as being the most like him and he ha and having his Murdoch principles.

You know, that that it's an it's a kind of it's an old man's attempt not to die to some extent, right?

That he wants to know that his legacy is secure and he thinks that and that and that does make it very king Learish, you know, the idea that your children are gonna go and be their own independent people, not carbon copies of you.

I think it's helps me most.

Yeah, and I think it does which,

yeah, I d it it really did remind me of that in the sense of just that that's the tragedy of it.

Not that that any of this stuff makes you particularly feel sorry for any of the people involved who seem to be fighting like rats in the sack.

But it is a very human story about aging and death and the idea that you have to let go no matter how powerful you were in life.

It all ends eventually.

It absolutely is.

And one of the oddest things about it is this is not about disinheriting the kids.

They all get a share of the business and the money whatsoever.

This is just about who gets to run the empire afterwards.

And, you know, in the course of these two articles, we go through the fact that neither James or Lachlan have been to have a particularly impressive business record.

I mean, there's this weird thing with all the Mernup kids that they strike out on their own.

Liz had her own production company, very successful production company.

It was behind things like MasterChef, which is franchised all around the world, which was bought up by her dad for such a ridiculous amount of money that the shareholders actually revolted at Fox and sued him.

James went off and set up a hip-hop label.

He literally is Kendall.

I mean, this is just a shit.

But that, too, was brought in by his dad.

So his dad has this incredibly sort of,

he's really very unpleasant to his kids.

That's what comes over very strongly in this.

But he's also quite indulgent, and he will buy up their businesses and bring them back into the fold when it suits him.

Oh, did you read it like that?

He's literally then taken over after James.

James screws up the phone hacking scandal completely and the sky take over and ends up out of the company.

Loughlin then goes on to such great victories as the Dominion voting systems lawsuit against Fox News, which costs the company absolutely billions of people.

Most of neither of them has ever paid.

Yeah, it's extraordinary.

But at no point in any of this does anyone seem to consider the possibility that the person who could run the company successfully after Rupert's death death might not have the surname Murdoch.

You know, they could actually get someone else in who could do it.

And all the kids could just retire on the billions they're going to inherit anyway.

One of the questions that James was asked when on the stand was, why did you not phone your dad to say happy birthday on his 90th birthday?

And then he also sends over this passive-aggressive note on top of a load of legal documents to James that says, P.S.

Love to see my grandchildren sometime.

The playing off against each other is absolutely hideous in this world.

None of this is for a courtroom, is it?

It's not nice.

No, I do like the idea that you end up on the stand in Reno saying, you forgot my birthday.

Yeah, well, I might have done, but I had a lot on that week.

And I mean, how does this happen?

The buying of Shine now, reading this stuff in this lawsuit, did make me rethink that.

And then in a sense, I wonder whether or not it was like a feeling of wanting to control all the children and not to have one of them be successful on their own.

And actually, was it about saying, well, yeah, you've done very well with your production company, but daddy's still the king.

And what it also demonstrated is that Liz is the only one with capability independently, or semi-independently, she's never going to not be a Nepo baby, but to run her own media business and make it very, very successful.

And yet she seems to have not been considered in the sort of succession plans at all at any point.

And James makes it very clear that that's because his father is a misogynist and he absolutely does not trust women at all.

And Prue and Elizabeth were never given a trust.

But then, of course, you've got the great mystery of Rebecca Brooks, who absolutely he's laid himself on the line for, you know, after the phone hacking scandal, did his best not to have to sack her, but when he did sack her, gave her an enormous payoff and brought her back into the company.

So that's another bizarre dynamic.

She's about the same age as his daughters and seems to be trusted infinitely more.

But that, if I were a psychoanalyst, I would say that is the child that you never had.

And someone says, well, you did have children.

You had all these ones that you didn't like and didn't work out.

So you find someone outside the family who you treat as a child.

And you just project it onto them, yeah.

So what happens?

All this amazing drama and fun.

What's the result?

The result is that they're not allowed to vary the family trusts.

They are attempting to appeal the decision of the judge in Nevada.

It's unlikely to succeed, everyone reckons.

And in a way, all of this is slightly academic anyway, because the Murdoch Family Trust, which was set up in 1999, expires in 2030 anyway.

This is only in five years' time, at which point the kids are free to do whatever they want with their legacy.

They can give it away, you know, they can sell it to anyone, they can do what they want with it.

So this is quite technical.

Now, there is a strong possibility that Rupert will still be with us in 2030, so none of this will apply at that point either.

His mother, I I have to say, maybe it's to 103.

Rupert will only be 98

in 2030.

Can I check?

Sorry, when you say this thing runs out in 2030, the four children after that point, if Rupert is still with us then, and then dies after that, the four children still get the creative control?

At that point, they would get, under the current terms, both the money, the share of the company, and the shared creative control over what happens to the company.

But they are not bound by

the trust to keep it it within the family at that point.

At that point, they can sell to the highest bidder.

Well, at that point, we'll get to see whether or not James Murdoch sort of the rubber hits the road, right?

If he sells off his stake and gives it all to kind of, you know, pansexual dolphin preservation, then we'll finally know.

I hope he gets a good price for it, because the other detail that came out was that the first attempt at all this was when Lachlan, Rupert urged Lachlan to buy out his siblings.

They all got $2.1 billion from the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney.

So at that point, they think could be sorted out.

He could have taken over the whole company.

But unfortunately, he refused to pay more than half of the market value of the company at that point and refused to negotiate, which was a tactic I discovered this.

Rupert also adopted with his own sisters and mother when he bought them out of his father's empire back in the 90s.

He just said, there's the deal on the table, elderly mother, you take it or you don't.

So it worked for him, but unfortunately,

Lachlan's siblings

refused to play at that point.

So

it all ended up in court many years later, very unhappily.

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Now, for the second half of this week's show, we're going to be talking to MD privatized medical correspondent Phil Hammond, a regular visitor to this podcast.

And the last two times he's been on, he's been speaking about the trial and the conviction of Lucy Letby, a neonatal nurse who is currently serving 15 consecutive life sentences for multiple murders and attempted murders of very young infants at the Countess of Chester Hospital, where she worked.

Phil has been covering this case for about 18 months now, and there is a growing body of opinion and evidence that perhaps the trial was not handled in the best possible way, to put it mildly, and that raises question marks over the actual convictions themselves.

In the most recent edition of the magazine, Phil, in part 15 of his story on Lucy Lettby, has been covering an assembly of experts who've been gathered together to give their own expert view.

Here's Phil.

Yes, I think the big change was she changed her barrister, and Mark MacDonald took over as a new barrister.

And when I had interviewed him shortly after he'd taken over, I said, what are you going to do?

And he said, well, there are various tactics, but my main tactic is probably I'm going to scour the world for the best experts I can find.

You know, you need the people who have impeccable academic credentials who know more of this than anyone else.

And although the Court of Appeal doesn't like games of expert top trumps, it would be hard to ignore a global coalition of people.

Plus, I also want to get UK experts because they understand the NHS so I want to get some practicing neonatologists who do this at the highest level in the NHS to look at all these cases and I want to get international experts I want the two groups to look at these independently and I said to him do you promise to publish the results of their findings whether they are in favor of letby or not and he said yes so I thought that was quite a clever approach I think the other advantage of getting international experts is that they have much less skin in the game.

It's very hard to be a UK neonatologist and not to express a prior view on Letby's conviction.

Whereas the vast majority of the international experts he found, who all agreed to work pro bono, as did the UK experts, didn't really know much about the case.

They might have seen the odd headline, but basically they were looking at all the evidence afresh.

So all the evidence that was presented at the trial, all the clinical notes they had access to.

And when Macdonald said he was going to make it public, I hadn't realised he was going to do it in two fairly inflammatory press conferences.

So we had one press conference mid-December where some of the results of the UK neonatology analysis were reached and

they've now looked at four cases in great detail and not found any evidence of deliberate harm and have managed to explain all the deaths and collapses that they've looked at in terms of sick babies, some of them receiving substandard care, some of them dying of natural causes.

But they only looked at four cases in detail.

The international panel

14 experts

looked at all 17 cases she were originally charged at in great detail, pro bono, and they've reached exactly the same conclusion.

They can't find any evidence of deliberate harm by anyone.

However, they do find substantial evidence of substandard care to the extent that when I asked the panel, the lead panel expert, Dr.

Xu Li,

what he would do if a unit was performing like this in Canada, he said I'd close it down.

So they're very much in the camp of these deaths are entirely explained by a unit having an above average number of sicker babies than it would normally get and not having the expertise to cope with it, which is what my original hypothesis was 18 months ago.

But obviously

we needed this to happen.

We needed people who knew what they were talking about looking at all the notes to reach that conclusion.

There's a slight complicating factor here in that there has been an inquiry set up to investigate the events at the Countess of Chester Hospital, the Thirwall inquiry,

which am I right in saying is ongoing?

It's ongoing, yes.

I mean it was based on the premise that she was guilty, so it was accepting her guilt and is predicated on trying to figure out whether she could have been stopped earlier.

And again, I wrote to the whole inquiry back in May saying, I think this is misguided because, you know, one of the reasons she wasn't stopped earlier is perhaps she isn't guilty.

And you shouldn't just consider the deaths and collapses that involved Letby.

There were plenty of others that didn't involve her, and you need to look at those in its entirety.

But they decided not to.

So all they've done is assume she's guilty

and tried to find ways to have stopped her.

And it's now in a terrible fix because these experts have come and said, Well, actually, the basic we're questioning that there was ever any homicidal act.

Certainly, the means of murder have been strongly refuted.

So, should it be paused until the Criminal Cases Review Commission has reached its view on whether it's returning it back to the Court of Appeal?

I mean, it could end up being a huge waste of public money.

And if it's based on a false premise, it could come up with recommendations that are profoundly damaging.

I mean, it may say, you know, we need to put CCTV in all hospitals, neonatal units, maternity units, operating theatres, to watch people all the time to make sure they're not murderers.

Well, if no murder ever occurred, that might be overkill.

So my view is it probably should pause itself until the CCLC has reached a view.

But as you know, the CCLC can take 10 years or more to reach a view.

There's no reason why Letby's case should jump the queue.

There are plenty of other cases that are still being considered.

And so it may be at least a year before they go through all this very complicated new evidence to reach a view.

And that is, we should say the CCRC is the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which looks at cases which have, I suppose,

where evidence has emerged to suggest that maybe another view should be taken.

Yes, and they are in trouble themselves.

Their boss has resigned and they have lots of vacancies.

And it took them 10 years to turn over a rape conviction recently.

So a chap was wrongly convicted, was in prison for 17 years, and there were various others waiting in the wing.

So Letby is not the only one.

And it would be unfair unfair if she jumped the queue just because there was loads of,

you know,

well, now global because of these press conferences.

You're seeing, you know, articles in Australia and New Zealand and America saying, have they locked up the wrong person, etc.

You've got very established people like Joshua Rosenberg, the BBC legal correspondent who is now questioning the conviction.

There have now been two articles in The Economist.

The Church of England Times are even saying, have we locked up the wrong person?

It's an interesting tactic by Mark MacDonald because he's basically poking the snake of his own profession.

He's basically saying, you could have got this really badly wrong.

What

an obedient, compliant barrister would have done is just quietly submit his evidence to the CCRC, not done two great big press conferences.

And it'll be interesting to see what effect it has on his profession.

Now, they might say, gosh, we need to expedite this because there's lots of public concern, or they might say, this is now so profoundly embarrassing, we'll kick it into the long grass for as long as we can.

So we don't know which way it's going to go.

And I think the first time you

spoke to this podcast about the Lettby trial, you were quite equivocal about whether...

You said, I'm not saying anything in particular about Lucy Letby's guilt or innocence.

You were more concerned with how the trial itself might have been mishandled.

It feels like your opinion has changed since then.

Well, the thing that needed to happen was the very thing that has happened now, which is really top-end experts looking at all the clinical evidence and saying there's no medical evidence of murder.

Now, my argument going all the way back to the Bristol inquiry, which is the first big scandal I exposed about babies dying after heart surgery, is that the two things the NHS needed, one was mandatory safe staffing levels.

So if we are going to do these incredibly complex operations or, you know, we're going to look after premature babies.

We need to have properly, safely staffed units, and we don't.

And the second thing I said is you need a crash investigation team for the NHS, a bit like the airline industry.

So when these things happen, people, independent, trained experts go in very quickly, hard and fast, and they come up with the reasons why.

Had this happened in the Letby case, this would never have gone to court.

She'd have never been implicated, if the experts are right, and nobody would ever dug up her garden.

They'd have said this is a failing unit with substandard care, and we either need to,

you know, take it down a notch or close it or give it the staffing it requires.

So that's, you know, but I was reluctant to say she's guilty or innocent because that's for the court to decide.

My feeling is she had an unfair trial for complicated reasons, but the person who changed my mind most was a chap called Dr.

Mike Hall, who was the expert witness for the defence who was never called.

And he contacted the eye very early on and said, I think she had an unfair trial.

I think the babies were sicker than the prosecution was

alleging.

And I think there were more plausible causes for death than murder.

But he wouldn't share any of his reports with us because he said they're court documents.

So we've had to wait all this time, 18 months, for other experts via her barrister to be able to look at all the evidence.

So, I was reluctant to reach a view until proper experts had looked at all the evidence.

I now think it's far more likely she didn't do it, but I still maintain it has to go through the correct legal process.

But, you know,

if the best experts in the world are saying we can't find any evidence of deliberate harm, and there isn't any pathological evidence, and all the coroners performing post-mortems, and the pathologists couldn't find any evidence of deliberate harm, it all comes down to the prosecution experts who appeared in the original trial, led by Dowie Evans,

who, with characteristic modesty, has dismissed all these international experts as talking absolute nonsense, and I have no respect for them.

I mean, if he was sensible, he would have said, Look, I'm standing by my views.

They were tested in court.

These experts are entitled to their views, and it has to go through the correct legal process.

That would have been scientific and diplomatic.

Instead, he said, I don't respect these people.

I think they're talking nonsense.

And it's just inflaming things even more.

So, in the absence of the clinical evidence, there are other things like circumstantial evidence which were taken into account.

Things like notes that she may have written while these babies were ill or the fact that she was looking them up online, looking at their families online.

I think all of that is written in your latest piece.

I think all of that is relevant and all of it matters.

However, there does also appear to be other plausible explanations that the jury weren't aware of.

For example, the notes that she wrote saying I am evil and I did this, which also included notes saying I didn't do this, were part of her counselling process where she was encouraged to write down her feelings.

And often you write down feelings of guilt.

That's a normal thing.

The jury wasn't appraised of the fact that this was a counseling process.

That wasn't an admission of guilt.

Lots of neonatal nurses you speak to say we look up patients on the internet, including relatives of people who've, patients who've died, their families, we go to their funerals, we go to their christenings, we do this and that.

A lot of them have said to me, we've now backed off from doing that to avoid raising suspicion.

So her actions could have been seen in an innocent light.

She kept lots of handover notes, which are not clinical records.

They're bits you scrawl on a piece of paper when you're handing over on a shift.

And again, that's not uncommon.

Now, she might have collected more and put them under a bed than other nurses did.

But you'd think if she really is a murderer, she's a genius.

So she's come up with methods that have evaded all the pathologists, all the internal and external reviews the hospital did, and now they've evaded 16 clinical experts, 14 international ones and two from the UK.

Is she that clever to have been able to done that?

There are loads of nurses who wrote to the Thurwell Inquiry saying, we think she's innocent.

We worked alongside her all this time.

We never saw her do anything wrong.

Do you think someone that brilliant and devious would be careless enough to leave notes for the

people to find, even though she knew she was under suspicion?

I don't know what her motive was.

There's lots of stuff that doesn't make sense, but the bottom line is, I don't think the science and statistics were fairly presented at her trial.

And for that reason alone, I think she deserves an appeal.

And from what you're saying about this team of 14 international neonatologists,

they have found that there were enough incidents that this might have been described as a failing unit.

Yes.

Even

outside the deaths of which Lepby was convicted.

Yes, and that's always the most common thing.

If you look at the history of the NHS, we've had quite a few maternity scandals and neonatal scandals, and they nearly always come down to the same thing.

A unit doesn't have the staffing, or expertise, or equipment to cope with the volume and complexity of patients that it has.

And so this was a fluctuation that was a sudden rise in the more complex cases.

And the unit themselves, the consultants themselves have said, we're woefully understaffed.

We're only doing two ward rounds a week.

On average,

we don't have enough specialist junior doctors or nurses to cope with this.

And they raise those concerns.

I think what's interesting is that the consultants themselves didn't seem to spot that the babies could have been dying due to substandard care.

And that to me is interesting because it

well it shows that you shouldn't really be investigating your own mistakes.

It's the reason we need a crash investigation team.

So when you investigate your own mistakes, you'll probably have a certain amount of bias towards not exposing yourself.

So what happened is that they were convinced that she was a murderer and they sort of led the police in the direction that they had already concluded, whereas actually what you wanted was somebody independent.

Now the independent experts have spent hundreds of hours looking at

all the evidence, according to Dr.

Xu Li, whereas the prosecution lead expert, Dowie Evans, said he realised it was murder within 10 minutes of looking at one set of notes.

And that really worries me in that he'd he seemed to have reached a conclusion fairly quickly, whereas others have taken a far longer and more detailed and measured approach and reached a different conclusion.

So I think there are lots of lessons there.

The first is let's staff our units safely and this may never have happened.

B, let's have an independent investigation team that acts quickly.

And if we'd had those two things, this has never gone to court.

I

hate to even estimate how much money we've spent on this, never mind the emotional harm that we've caused.

But in terms of all the investigations, all the litigation, the court cases, the public inquiries, there's tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of pounds we could have spent on employing neonatal nurses for

these units and to make them safer.

So it could be such a colossal disaster in so many ways.

And I think the other thing that saddens me is that I've spent a lot of time trying to grow up about patient safety.

And one of the things is that, you know, in a mature patient safety culture, you own up to your mistakes, you explain them to patients, etc.

And there's much less litigation if you have an open, transparent culture where people own up to stuff.

And this let me, the whole let me case could set back this patient safety culture decades because people are now just all, you know, we're back in a blame litigation, a counter blame culture that I just think will be, you know, deeply counterproductive to having a safer NHS.

So I think the ramifications will be huge, which whatever the Criminal Cases Review Commission decides.

So that alone has made it probably the most depressing case that I've had to write about.

But of course, the advantage of Private Eye is it allows you to go back to the same story.

The reason I've written 15 consecutive columns is that the editor allows me to do so, and that makes private eye quite unusual.

But it has allowed me to immerse myself in the case fairly deeply.

And I keep waiting for the the moment to hit me in the face saying, oh no, she obviously did it.

And it hasn't after 18 months.

I've got all the court transcripts.

I've spoken to experts on both sides.

I've spoken to Dowie Evans.

I've corresponded with Ravi Jayaram, who's one of the consultants who think she's guilty.

And it just more and more to me looks as if there were more plausible causes for the deaths.

But clearly the courts must decide that.

Phil Hammond there.

Thanks to him and to Helen, Ian and Adam Phil.

There in Titalia.

That's it for this episode of page 94.

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

Until then, go and buy the magazine.

Private-fidye.co.uk.

Go there, get a subscription.

It's a fantastic magazine.

It covers all this and more.

We will be back, as always, in another fortnight with three more slabs of topicality, or maybe even four if you're lucky.

Until then, thank you to you for listening and to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio, as always, for producing.

Bye for now.

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