131: Tulip Mania

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Hi everybody, Andrew here.

Just a quick pre-page 94 announcement, potentially a first, I think.

The conversation you're about to hear was recorded in the private eye offices yesterday afternoon.

The first section of yesterday's show was all about Tulip Sadiq, then the government's anti-corruption minister, who had been in the news recently in a not completely favourable way.

Since we recorded that episode just 24 hours ago, Sadiq has resigned as the government's anti-corruption minister.

It's very clear to us that Number 10 heard that we were going to be covering it on this week's page 94 and thought, the game's up, we better roll over now.

So when you hear us talk about Sadiq as the anti-corruption minister in the present, just try to rephrase that as the very, very recent past.

But as you're about to hear, things go back much further than that between Tulip Sadiq and Private Eye.

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 Tim Minogue.

We are here to discuss stories that have been in the news recently.

And our first one this week is all about Tulip Sadiq, who you may have heard of.

She is the anti-corruption minister, and she has been in the papers recently quite a bit because of some rather unorthodox housing arrangements she's made.

Now you may well know a lot of ministers get a nice residence to live in.

Maybe it's checkers if you're the PM, maybe it's chevening.

These tend to be owned by the government.

It's a bit rarer for them to be owned by large Bangladeshi companies which have links to your family members.

Nonetheless, that's what's been happening recently.

Tulip Sadiq's aunt is the PM of Bangladesh, or rather she was until August last year when she was deposed.

Since then, then, the family have been accused of an extraordinary amount of embezzlement, billions of pounds, all to do with various dodgy contracts for nuclear power stations and that kind of thing.

These accusations have been levelled, and it turns out that various members of Siddique's family have been living in extremely nice homes that belong actually to Bangladeshi companies.

Now, she has denied wrongdoing.

She's referred herself to the PM's independent advisor on ministers' interests.

But it does remain true that there is a substantial number of houses that she's either been given, family members have been given or family members have been allowed to stay in rent-free all connected to the world of bangladeshi politics so we thought this would be fun to talk about and the fact is tim minog you were there first this would be just over two years ago under the headline travails with my aunt uh well done that uh chief sub

we reported that uh Tulip's mother, Rihanna, i.e.

Auntie Hasina's sister, was living rent-free in a very agreeable North London house, which was owned by a man called Shayan Fazlur Rahman, the executive director of Bangladesh's largest conglomerate, Bexim Co.

Bexim Co.

had allegedly benefited during Sheikh Hasina's time in office with debts written off and being granted exclusive rights to distribute the AstraZeneca vaccine during COVID.

So there is clear evidence of people who were close to the regime, wealthy people, shall we say, doing favours to the family.

And it now turns out that there are at least six properties were either gifted to or rented cheap to Tulip or Tulip's close relatives in London.

It's ironic that she's the anti-corruption minister.

Can I say something that I think is liable safe, which is whether or not this is proved to be corruption?

I just don't know who these people are who get given houses by random people.

We're not just talking houses, we are talking luxury houses, some of them right in the centre of London, aren't we?

I mean, these are millions that were.

I feel like it was not impossible to foresee that this might come up again once she was made anti-corruption minister.

That's the bit about this story that I find that's the extraordinary thing that just seems to me to be another case of Kirstarma not

even not spotting a tiger trap in front of him, actually kind of sharpening the spikes in the bottom of the tiger trap, laying the leaves over it himself.

It just gives her a different job.

Isn't these stories of circular corruption minister?

For corruption, you mean

now the other aspect of it that I think is interesting and that we wrote about at least as far back as 2016

was you will remember the case of Nazanin Zhari Ratcliffe, the half-Iranian woman who went to see her relatives in Tehran and then was basically held hostage by the Iranian regime for several years.

And she was a constituent of Tulip in Hampstead and Highgate, or Hampstead and Kilburn, as the constituent was originally called.

Tulip campaigned very hard, noticeably, for Nazanin's release, which was all very commendable.

But when journalists asked her, Well, you know, there are some human rights issues in Bangladesh associated with your aunt: disappearances, illegal detentions, extrajudicial killings, dissidents being locked up and the key thrown away.

She was particularly asked about a man called Kassem, a lawyer, and she said, Well, I don't know anything about

that.

And it led one

Fortnightly magazine to

say at the time, well, it appears that she's not as good an actress as one of her predecessors, as the MP for Hampstead and Highgate, i.e., Glenda Jackson.

Mother of Dan Hodges, just as to bring in one of my favourite political journalists.

It's kind of extraordinary looking back and seeing, so what that's nine years ago now was the first piece about Tulip Sidiq in the identifying the difficulty of someone whose aunt is running Bangladesh, the state which is, you know, detaining disappearing people, having them killed.

The details are really grisly of people who, you know, half the people detained.

Bad as it comes.

Yeah, half of them might turn up again, you know, after some years later.

The other half wouldn't.

Some of them might even be alive.

What is it that makes the story blow up now?

Probably the fact that she's been made the anti-corruption minister, which is

that's a pretty effective way of bringing it up again.

It's gained momentum in the last few months because Sheikh Auntie Hasina has been overthrown

in a rebellion led by students.

And now we have, well, hopefully, honest government in charge in Bangladesh.

They're saying we want our money back, and they're highlighting where has this gone.

It is led by an opposition leader who also was given a 17-year prison sentence for corruption and spent quite a long time under house arrest before she came back to leave the country.

I mean, they do their politics in quite a full-on way there.

Whoever isn't in power does tend to be under arrest at any given time.

But this is a all of this stuff makes me think about how much we require kind of oppositional politics and why totalitarian systems are inherently much more corrupt.

Because one of the ways that these things become a scandal is because they get stuck to the government of the time by the opposition of the time, right?

And those two things reverse with the great swell of nature back and forward.

Or, you know, something gets politicised, and although that's usually used as a pejorative, in many cases, that means that a group of people care about it because they think they can use it to wound the government.

Right.

You know, that's how these things kind of work: people who are in power are never going to investigate themselves.

So, in a functional democracy, both the opposition and the press to some extent act as the checks on that.

But I think with all of these scandals, you know, the people who have been promoting them often are the political opponents.

And that's, again, that's a slightly unpleasant but you know, inevitable part of the process.

Okay, so it's fine then.

Yes, everything that's happened in the world up to date, I'm okay with, just to put that on record.

No, but I see what you mean about the necessity of the slightly unpleasant necessity of that, or the inevitability of it, rather.

Yeah, I mean, I think I go into this a lot, but I think it was very interesting the way that David Cameron sort of didn't see the referendum bludgeoning he got coming because he'd been used to a very friendly press environment.

And then suddenly a lot of the right-wing papers didn't treat him as beloved Tory leader David Cameron but leader of hated remain campaign David Cameron.

Right.

And so that process is, yeah, as I say, we often talk about that as if it's that, oh, no, you've made a you've politicised this.

You know, it's often said after some terrible gun massacre in America, don't politicise a tragedy.

But realistically, politicising tragedies is the only way that anything gets done about them.

Tim, can I ask you, do you think the Labour leadership don't read private eye?

We should send them a subscription, shouldn't we?

Loads of freebies.

I just want to know what Tulip Sadiq thinks she got given the house for.

Yes.

And what is your rationale to yourself?

Where, oh, that's very kind.

Thank you.

I've always wanted a house.

How did you know?

You know, I just people need to be a bit more suspicious about where freebies, like, what is the point, why, how many truly just generous people there are in the world.

Sakia

has that worldview, doesn't he?

That he's surrounded by very generous people, but not as generous as Auntie Hasina's chums.

No, it's beginning to make those glasses look like a bad bargain, frankly.

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Right, section two of the podcast now, and there is one thing I'd like to request of all of us, which is that we do not in this section, and I'm going to see if we actually manage to stick to this, that we do not talk about Elon Musk.

You've just done it, Andy.

Oh, no.

So, yes, Penny in the jar.

Come on.

You have to pay a billion dollars into the jar for every mention.

So we are going to try not to talk about Elon Musk, which is going to be very difficult because the next story we're going to talk about is grooming gangs and the radicalisation of the British right.

This has been an enormous story this year.

You will, of course, have seen it already if you're listening to this podcast.

And it's a very interesting one because in the old days, there was...

a right-wing foreign billionaire who everyone counted to and he was called Rupert Murdoch and it was fine.

Things have slightly changed when the billionaire in question has their own Twitter account and is putting out extraordinary amounts of quite far-right stuff from quite random accounts, which may not have been completely on it with their fact-checking.

Actually, Rupert Murdoch, in many ways, is the hero of this story because it was his funding.

No, it was the London Times under Andrew Norfolk, and at the time edited by James Harding, that published, you know, one of the front pages was A Nation's Shame with the pictures of all the perpetrators.

And Andrew Norfolk had to work incredibly hard in the face of, I'm sure, stuff that we'll talk about, all the stuff that Tim deals with on a daily basis of councils being deliberately obstructive and throwing absolutely anything at me to stop reporting.

So, yeah, I'm afraid.

Update regarding billionaire Rupert Burdock.

Turns out billionaire's could be a lot worse.

Also,

you can tell that Helen also writes for an Atlanticist publication.

By the way, she says the London Times.

I just wanted to point that out.

We call it The Times here, Helen.

The actual Times.

Oh, no.

See, that's one other thing.

I mean, we pointed this out in the last edition you wrote, he's pointing out that, you know, Andrew Norfolk, he got the Paul Foote Award for Investigative and Campaigning Journalism right back in 2012 for this, and it was very much a campaign.

But part of the tone of that campaign was that this issue had been ignored and had been covered up because of concerns about councils and various people being seen as racists.

So it's not even like that's a new element to this story that's been added on now.

It's all been very, very much part of the narrative right from the outset.

Okay, so in terms of the initial element of the story, we'll get to the reaction later, but I think in terms of the actual story about should there be a new inquiry into this, Tim, you deal a lot with rotten boroughs.

Do you have any knowledge of whether council inquiries are automatically a good thing or whether they are always going to be second fiddle to a big national inquiry?

There was the national inquiry into child sex abuse, which concluded two or three years ago, which included this issue.

There was a section on this issue.

And Alexis Jay, who conducted that, made a number of investigations.

So, by all means, let individual councils see what lessons need to be learned.

But I personally think that

we know what was happening, we know what was going wrong,

and what councils need to do and they know they need to do is put processes in place so that when this behaviour is flagged up, something is done about it, and that social workers and police don't

push it to one side, as unfortunately, they did in some cases, not all.

The one good thing that's come out of this sort of recent eruption of interest in it, I think, was actually some of Alexis Jay's recommendations do now appear to be in the process of being implemented, which is extraordinary.

I mean, Ixa, I listened back, we did a podcast, you and I were on it, and Francis Ween as well, and Jane McKenzie talking about ICSA when it was

the Westminster hearing, sort of back in 2020.

That's the independent inquiry into child sex abuse.

Yes, yeah, which was this great

overarching, you know, it took in sort of abuse in churches and schools and kind of it was enormous and incredibly comprehensive.

And actually, you know, you can have as many investigations as you want, but if no one actually acts on the recommendations of them and does anything about it.

And the other thing that really struck me is this whole thing, sort of recent eruption of interest in this came a day or two days after we'd been told, West Streeting had announced that we were having yet another inquiry into the issue of adult social care, which another thing we've banged on about endlessly on this podcast.

And that was being sort of, you know, that was universally presented as the government kicking that particular issue down into the long grass until 2028.

So, you know, it's got to be a point, hasn't hasn't there, where you stop having inquiries and actually do something.

It's also fairly obvious that it's been picked on as a stick to beat Labour with.

Although, given that as the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer is quite well informed about it and made quite a few well-documented changes to how these crimes were reported, it feels like a slightly odd stick to pick up.

It was a very difficult Prime Minister's question because Kemi Badnott used all of her six questions on it.

And unfortunately, it was sort of like picking on something that, yeah, Kier Starmer is a world expert on.

And he was able to to say, like you said, the ICSA, that report inquiry took seven years.

You know, do we really want to have it wait another seven years before doing anything else about this?

The counterpoint to that is that, correct me if I'm wrong, Adam, but it was like five case studies in that report of different types of abuse, none of which were an Asian grooming gang.

So that's the complaint that no one has really stepped back and looked at that particular racialized phenomenon, which does have a, I think, a fair point to it as a question.

And I think people have been reluctant to engage with that aspect of it.

But yeah, unfortunately, yes, as DPP, Kier Stalman, for example, argued for mandatory reporting.

He was the one who gave the sign-off for some of the prosecutions.

So the kind of online speculation that he's worried about what this is going to uncover about him seems to be a flawed assumption that just because he was sort of near when some of this stuff happened, he must be implicated by it.

And then there's been flat-out misinformation circulating as well.

So one of the charges is that the Home Office in 2007 circulated a memo saying this is just a lifestyle choice for these girls.

Don't do anything about it.

Right.

BBC Verify spent ages running down this piece of information.

Gordon Brown denied it.

It must have been 2008, he was Prime Minister at the time.

And it was eventually all came down to the prosecutor in the cases.

Nazir Afsal had said it off the cuff in an interview in 2018 that this memo existed.

He'd never seen it.

When the BBC went, can you tell us a bit more about this memo?

He couldn't stand it up.

He said his words had probably been misinterpreted.

BBC went and looked for any such memo with any words anywhere in the Home Office archive, any of the FOI requests, couldn't find it.

So we've got this systematic problem in which there are are some things that are true in all of this, but they are happening in the place of this massive swamp where things are just kind of, and you will, I'm sure there will be people out there who'll be surprised to hear that that Home Office memo doesn't exist because it has almost sort of passed into legend, but it came from one unsourced claim from one person speaking a bit too casually.

And that's the information environment that we're in, though.

And the other thing is that what we need is a massive inquiry to find out the truth, isn't it?

But there's another, so here's an element of it I didn't really know much about.

So, there have been various stories about the racial breakdown of perpetrators of these kinds of crime.

And there was a story in the Telegraph headline, Pakistani is up to four times more likely to be behind grooming.

When you get into the detail of that, it turns out that specific

offences of grooming, which is specifically child sexual exploitation by groups, that accounts for about several hundred offences a year.

And that is between 3% and 4% of recorded abuse of children.

So, you know, it's obviously hideous.

It needs prosecuting.

It needs identifying.

But it is a relatively small piece of the overall picture of abuse of children.

And in one particular two-year period identified by the Telegraph, Pakistani men were disproportionately represented.

It was something like 12% of those several hundred offences as opposed to 3% of the overall population of the UK.

Now, again, when you get into the story a bit further, as the Telegraph acknowledged, This data covers only about a third of suspects who were interviewed by police.

And the people behind the programme itself, which released these figures, said either Pakistani men are likelier to commit this specific offence, or the victims of these crimes are easier to identify, or it's a statistical sampling quirk.

And, you know, it remains true that the biggest threat to a child is someone within their family or another child.

That's the, you know, the overwhelming statistical preponderance.

That is quite complicated to get across, particularly in a headline, which is why you end up with the headline, Pakistani is up to four times more likely to be behind grooming.

That is true of this two-year period of this particular subsection of offences.

A colleague of mine on a different publication who was investigating these matters some years ago was given a sobering assessment by a senior police officer who said pedophile is a three-letter word, D-A-D.

We have these outbursts of concern, such as the one about focusing on the grooming gangs, the tabloids promoting the idea that abusers are, you know, old men men in dirty Macs who spring out from behind the garage, you know.

And I think our society has a problem in looking at where, as you say, where most of it is going on.

It's in the home, it's somebody across the street, it's your neighbour, it's somebody in your family.

And as a society, we just can't get our heads around that.

So look for bogeymen elsewhere.

I'm not saying that the so-called grooming doesn't happen.

Yeah, exactly.

As you say, it's a relatively small proportion of the overall rather horrific picture.

Because you're right, every time you attempt to kind of give some kind of context to this, it's accused of being the same as you're minimizing your covering up the grooming gangs.

And I think that's just a very difficult thing to try and back.

And this whole subject has been sort of swallowed by narrative.

But you're exactly right, Tim.

You know, I followed the Giselle Pelico trial of her husband, Dominique Pelico, who invited upwards of at least over 50 convictions, 50 men in that local area via a website, he recruited to rape her while she was unconscious.

And that's just by a random sampling of people who were in that vicinity, that many people were prepared to commit a horrific sex crime.

And there is some sort of odd, sadistic kind of comfort in saying it's limited, you know, that it mostly happens in these forms that are completely monstrous and awful, rather than also happening in these ways that are really banal and unremarkable.

So now shall we get on to the

erection online and off, and particularly, in fact, not on Twitter, X, but in the pages of for example places like the Telegraph and the Times because that has been really fascinating how they are they have been can we say radicalized well I think it's really interesting this has been presented a lot as a as a problem of online and a problem problem of I'm going to say his name Elon Musk

and and and that people are now using unverified sources online and and believing what they read on Twitter but actually I mean the the

horrible phrase but mainstream media have quite a big part to play in this as well and it's become a sort of weird circle whereby Twitter was such a useful journalistic resource for so many years.

Newspapers have been so paired back to the bone, and the resources they've got have been minimized so much that a lot of people were relying on, you know, if it's on Twitter, it becomes a story.

I mean, we've done endless bits of clickbait corner in Street of Shame, just showing how nonsense on a kind of Reddit forum or a popular tweet thread gets turned into a story for the Daily Express website and then the Daily Mirror website and all of this.

But as well, I think it has happened that, I mean, certainly in the last week, we've seen very much the editorial line of the Daily Telegraph, which which has gone very strange as a newspaper in the last couple of years,

has just been following this.

And it's not even, I mean, Twitter was never that mainstream, was it?

It was over-represented among media people.

And it's not just that Elon Musk is dictating what's going on his own site that he's bought.

It's the, you know,

it then goes, feeds into the mainstream media, it's then leads the news agenda for days.

You know, the lobby are all asking questions to Gear Starmer and to Kemi Badenock about this stuff.

And it just becomes this sort of vicious circle in that way.

But again, again, to say all of this isn't to say that the grooming gangs didn't happen or weren't a huge scandal and that there weren't a huge number of victims who deserved justice.

I just think that I'm finding it very hard to put aside

the sort of spinning on a dime pivoting opportunism of what I'm seeing in

a lot of this.

Elon Musk would never work for someone who had been accused of any kind of sexual impropriety.

I think we should put that on the record.

I think there's a couple of things.

One is the structural decline of local news and newspapers generally, which was always the reason that they picked up stuff from Twitter, right?

Was that it was just you could reprint 19 tweets on a subject and suddenly you had a news story.

And then, you know, then you write op-eds off it that often are like, Why isn't anybody talking about this?

Which to me is the kind of last refuge of the scoundrel in op-ed terms.

We need to have a conversation about this.

Okay, you start it.

That's what a column is for.

Yeah.

I mean, I've written that column before.

We've all done it.

But there's that.

So, and I think the same thing with the, you know, Charlie Peters from GB News said, you know, he was the only reporter at one of the sentencings quite recently.

And I think that is a fair criticism.

That bread and butter court reporting that we used to have has been massively, massively hollowed out.

So there are other factors going on about, you know, maybe more of the local papers would have been able to report on this stuff.

Now, some of them did really, really good work, but maybe there could have been more of that if they'd had any bloody money from the 2000s onwards because of the internet hollowing out their business model.

Well, this is very relevant to your patch, Tim, in terms of councils and reporting on councils and the very hard work of reporting, you know, council council meetings, council processes, dodgy councils.

It's really, really fallen away.

As I've said on these occasions before, we do six or seven items a fortnight out of a possible 200 tips and submissions and so forth.

So there are so many stories out there waiting to be told, and a lot of people clearly don't think that their local papers are going to do it for them.

And

there are honourable exceptions, but certainly nothing like it was 20 years ago.

And not only their individual stories, but I mean if you were going trying to spot a pattern in specific towns like Oldham or Rotherham, you know, if you had a full-time court reporter who was covering a lot of trials of this kind and putting sort of joining the dots together, but if you can't afford to put anyone in the courtroom to report on what's happening, then you don't get a chance to do that, do you?

But there was some interesting polling about what reform voters look like.

So Nigel Farage's vote.

And I have to say, also, after praising updates.

When you say what they look like, what do you mean?

Well, what their political interests are, what they are demographically.

And it's one of the things that they are like Conservative voters, they do skew much older.

But the difference between them and Tory voters is that they are very, very, very online.

They are the people in the Facebook groups that are hearing this girl was made into a kebab.

In the same way that for a long time you would hear online, Gordon Brown sold all the gold.

Or there was a time in the mid-10, 2010s where there was about the banning ivory became a really big issue in the political campaign.

It was almost not really reported on in the context election campaign, but it was a huge amount of Facebook adverts about why they hate the elephants, you know, that kind of stuff.

These things that circulate online, there will be community spaces on Facebook and wherever else where everybody will know this fact, whether or not it's true, and it never quite breaches the surface.

And that does correlate quite highly with reform voters.

But I was going to say, not only do I praise Rupert Murdoch, I'm also going to praise Nigel Farage, who, despite having made some pretty gross remarks in the House, one of the things he did do is stand up to an unnamed billionaire by saying, I will never admit Tommy Robinson.

He's not right for reform.

And I thought that was a really fascinating moment because that collection of the new online right, including Jordan Peterson, my old sparring partner, who's one of Tommy Robinson's biggest fans, so much of a big fan that when he interviewed him on his podcast, his wife came along as well because Tammy is such a big fan of yours.

Sorry, Tammy Peterson.

I thought it was Tommy Robinson and Tammy Robinson.

It would be adorable.

I couldn't miss it.

Folk couple, singing couple.

But anyway,

there is a feeling on the American right that Tommy Robinson is a folk hero.

And he's the only one who's ever spoken the truth about this and he's now a political prisoner and the one person who hasn't bought that narrative is Nigel Farage which is why there was that that falling out is everyone just too online now I mean Kemi Bednock's in her I think early mid 40s like Elon Musk is in his early mid 50s have these people just been too on the internet for 20 years and it's it's it's broken them we're kind of going back to my solution to everything aren't you switching it off for two hours in the afternoon so we all have to go and play outside in the fresh air

and you say on again, but I'm not so sure, Adam.

We could just sort of lose the password, couldn't we?

Sorry, everyone.

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Right, so now we come to our final section of the show, which is about David Montgomery.

Beloved?

Question Mark.

Adams muse now for 30 years.

Many, many years ago, as a very callo young boy, I came in on work experience of private life.

This is October 1997 we're talking about.

And the very first story I filed was about a bloke who was in charge of the mirror called David Rommel Montgomery.

And here we are, all these years later, I'm still writing about him, and he still hasn't gone away.

The medium of podcasting has been invented in the time you've been covering.

Why is his nickname Rommel?

Do you know so much?

I know.

Right now, he has nicknames, and you're just like, it's too late to ask now.

His real name is Montgomery.

You were there, Tim.

Because Montgomery was on our side.

Ah.

See, and the journalists at the mirror never ever felt that Mr.

Montgomery was on their side.

Can I just say, do you want a little potted career summary of David Montgomery?

I'd just like to say that actually Rommel did a huge amount of good to the Allied war effort by going back to Berlin for his wife's birthday just before the D-Day landings because the weather was bad.

And actually Montgomery was criticised heavily for his actions in the Normandy campaign, but we don't have time for that now.

I have just finished.

Just become trapped in a room with

the music.

The rest is history.

I'm just saying

there's a case that Rommel was on our side too.

All right, I'll move on.

Right, David Rommel Montgomery has just announced he is selling off his National World stable of newspapers.

For those who haven't heard of National World, what is it?

It's not a stable of newspapers.

It was specifically set up, as have most of

his ventures in recent years, as an investment company.

But he just thought that he could buy up the media and take as much money out of it for himself and for his shareholders as he possibly could.

Okay, but it does consist of

largely of local newspapers.

Yeah, he's his third, no, fourth, actually.

Go at this.

So, Montgomery started off as he was a chief sub on the mirror.

He worked on the sun back in the 80s, and then he was, he actually edited the news of the world, which seems slightly extraordinary for a couple of years in the 1980s.

And then he was taken off by Rupert Murdoch to work for a newspaper called Today, which both of you are far too young to remember, but Tim and I, and some of our listeners will recall, was the first full-colour newspaper.

Host today, when Today had become yesterday, Rommel moves on again.

He goes back to the mirror and takes over as chief executive of the mirror group after Robert Maxwell has fallen off his yacht.

And unbelievably, he turns out to be an even worse boss than Robert Maxwell, in many people's views.

He wasn't actually embezzling millions from the company like Maxwell was, but he certainly, I mean, he sliced the place to the bone, cut it back horrendously.

And that's the model he has then followed in all of his other ventures, which briefly have included a spell in Germany.

Then Local World was a company he set up where he bought up a load of local papers that used to belong to Northcliffe Papers, which was the local paper bit of the Daily Mail group,

sold them on to Reach after about three years, after slashing everything to the bone.

And then he did the same thing with National World, which he has just reached a deal with before Christmas to sell to a business associate of his, someone who had already had a quarter of the company, called Media Concierge, which is just a horrendous name for a company.

But they do own a couple of newspapers in Ireland and have promised, in a most unrommely move, to actually invest in editorial and stop sacking people.

And this is a bit of a story about local journalism, really.

And again, we're coming back to what we were talking about before with local reporting of whether it's of councils or scandals or crimes or that sort of thing.

And if you haven't heard of National World, the company, you will probably have heard of The Scotsman or the Yorkshire Post.

Yeah, those are their two big titles.

We did a story a little while back about

the Scotsman offices, which in the old, because everything, it's just a merry-go-round of ownership, this stuff, owned by the Barclay brothers for a long time when they were in their pomp.

And so in their pomp were they that they built an enormous office, state-of-the-art office, right next to the new Scottish Parliament in Holyrood,

which they called Barclay House, but then didn't have the funds to keep that going.

And it was in a wee work for a while, and now it's above a super drug in a shopping street in Edinburgh.

It's about four people and a dog there.

So is that to do with Montgomery's ownership?

Yes.

His model has always been to slash everything.

He also seems to, I mean, Tim is the person in the room who has actually worked for him.

But I would say, I mean, what he has displayed over many, many years is a sort of pathological dislike of certainly journalists and largely journalism as well.

Yes, it's curious.

I mean, he was a graduate of the

former Mirror Group trainee scheme, which gave us a number of luminaries of British journalism, such as Alastair Campbell and

me.

When he worked on the mirror, when he was in more lowly positions, he was known as the cabin boy because of his penchant for toadying to the bosses, you know, and always being in and out of the editor's office.

You know, can I do this for you?

Can I tie your shoelaces?

Am I right in saying that

did he fire you?

I was actually what we call a casual journalist.

I wasn't on the staff, but the mirror did use a lot of casuals.

And one way of instantly saving money was Montgomery just locked out all the casuals.

There was no notice.

So, this is scores, if not in the small hundreds of people, just had their livelihood cut off.

There was no negotiation with the union or anything like that.

And then, among the people who were sacked or locked out were people who were officials in the NUJ.

So,

I rather foolishly agreed to step up and became, I think, the chairman of the Mirror Group branch.

I had given a couple of quotes to newspapers giving the NUJ's view on stuff that was going on there and

Montgomery didn't like that, so

I was summarily fired.

You weren't the only private eye figure to be fired either.

Well, indeed, Paul Foote of this parish used to have a page in the mirror, and one week he produced his page, and it was all about the depredations going on.

Look in the mirror is the headline for those.

Over a large picture of the lovely Romald Montgomery

Do you know, I have for years thought that was a picture of Max Hastings in the 70s.

So it's good that we finally cleared that up.

So yeah, Paul, they weren't going to put up with that, so Paul was out.

And Montgomery did once give his view of how industrial relations should be conducted.

And he said, if you have an unruly horse, you beat it with a plank until it behaves itself.

Just to prove there's nothing new in the world, he was also involved in some very early sort of fake news when he and his editor on the Daily Mirror at the time, Mr.

Piers Morgan, now on YouTube, took a photo of Dodie and Diana in August 1997 and adjusted it so as it would look as if they were about to kiss each other, when in fact Dodie had been looking in completely the opposite direction.

And when people pointed out that this was a bit of a dodgy thing for Piers Morgan to have done, it emerged that actually he had not only the approval of Montgomery, who was his boss and a boss of the whole company at that point, but Montgomery had actually written the headline for it as well.

Wow.

Well, I'm glad he learned his lesson on that one.

That's very good.

Okay, I've got something else to say, which is that actually Piers Morgan came out of the recent story quite well as well, in that he did a show with Jordan Peterson in which he listed Tommy Robinson's extensive rap sheet to his biggest fan.

Helen, when is your GB News show starting?

Strong pitch.

I just think Nigel Frost has got a lot on, so I could probably be his parliamentary assistant and take over his GB News slot.

Is this broadly a good thing for the staff of the National World conglomerate?

sorry, investment company?

It's very early.

Well, the media concierge takeover, you mean?

Forgive me, yes.

They are making the right noises.

I should say this, I don't think the sale has, but it was agreed before Christmas.

I don't think it's actually gone through yet.

But people I have spoken to are

cautiously optimistic.

I mean, it's quite hard if you're working particularly in the local press at the moment to be optimistic about anything very much.

I mean, Reach PLC, one of the great big rivals, have just brought in some horrendous things about the sort of page counts that they're expecting all journalists to meet.

You know, whether they are writing internet clickbait about what happened in Strictly last night or whether they're writing

detailed stories because they're the health specialist or whatever.

Sorry, do you mean a kind of click target?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You've got to get X hundred thousand

views per story.

So, I mean, it's not a fun place to be working at all

local media.

I was hoping we might be edging towards a happy-ish

potentially ending, but I think you've put me back in my box on that one.

Where next for Rommel?

Well, who knows?

I mean, you've done, as I said, nearly 30 years of reporting on Ray.

He is 76.

But also, the other big elephant in the room is the Telegraph, which

endlessly,

how long have we been mentioning the sale of the Telegraph now on these podcasts?

But that was all looking a bit dicey.

Dover Dafun, who was who had his bid coming in, now appears to maybe not have the financing for it.

Charles Moore wrote an impassioned piece in the Telegraph last week saying, come on,

let's end this hell of us not knowing who owns us, but paying tribute to the fine, fine journalism reporting that was being done by his colleagues.

Gosh, have you read it lately?

I've been talking about the Telegraph for so long that I think that the Observer sale sort of came up behind it, happened, and I mean, that's as far as I understand it will be.

Yeah, well, I mean, the Observer sale is supposed to be finalised by March or April, I think.

So, you know, they're in a race now.

Whether we'll still be talking about the Telegraph in a year's time, I don't know.

But one of the bidders who is in there is Montgomery.

He still thinks he could take over yet another another newspaper and

wreak his reign of terror over it.

So that's something certainly people at the Telegraph are very, very nervous about.

True, that's right.

The Guardian media group are not getting anything.

In fact, they are actually paying tortoises to take it away in one of the most extraordinary deals ever.

They are putting up 5 million of the purchase price to buy their own newspaper from themselves.

Thank you, you, Tim.

You can take the representative out of the NUJ.

Okay, thank you so much for listening to this episode of page 94.

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