130: Merry Quizmas

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at ov.coop and taste the difference.

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious, organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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 Eye Office with Helen Lewis and Adam McQueen.

And we are here for our traditional...

It's the second year we've done it, so it's now traditional.

Post-Christmas, pre-new year quiz of the year's news.

This is hugely exciting.

We've prepared a round each.

There is fierce competition in the air.

The raining is Adam McQueen.

Okay, well, you don't need to bang on about it, but yes, you do.

No, no, we do.

We do.

We did

won last year's quiz.

Me beating Andy last year.

Definitely.

Okay, but now I think, Helen, you're in play as well because you were just quiz mastering last year.

Yes, and now my horrible competitive side will be able to be shown to readers so that they can

leave and never listen to us again.

Now they've discovered what a monster I am.

So we've got three rounds, all very different, but all covering various different aspects of the year's news and the year's news in the eye.

So we're going to start with Helen's round.

Helen, what's the name of your round, please?

Private eye quiz.

That's good.

It's good, isn't it?

It's very good.

Okay.

I have to rename mine.

Oh, no, mine is the year in politics.

Oh, lovely.

Okay.

That's my theme.

And are we going to jingle our jingers?

You want to jingle dingers?

Right.

Okay.

Well, here we go.

I can offer you.

Adam has brought a size of sack.

This is the most exciting bit for me.

You can have.

Oh, that's your hat.

Okay.

Sleigh bells.

They are good.

And he's just snatched those straight off me.

Terrific.

Right, okay.

That's what we have.

What I like to think of as the

sleigh bells ring, are you listening?

The clanging chimes of doom.

Yeah.

The handbell.

I want to see.

What I'm going to call.

Oh, I've got a a good uh the the holiday hooter

i'll have the i'll have the teacher's bell right i'm i'm hooting

so let's go for the year in politics helen take it away okay reality tv star jacob resemogges sixth child famously is called sixtus

name any of his other five children

peter correct that's the one that went um canvassing with him and looks like a like like a miniature version of him and then and then we we we put him in the magazine with a speech bubble and everyone said That's very, very cruel to expose that child to ridicule.

We didn't do that, he did that, he took him out on the streets of Froom.

I was trying to think of any of the boys' names because he's got, I think, five boys and one girl.

And the boys are all called Peter, Dominicus, Sixtus, Wilfredus, the Ophelis Fie Wildebeest, I think.

Yeah, and actually, and the girl is called Mary.

Yes, the girl is called Mary.

She said Mary, damn it.

Mary, Peter, Thomas, Anselm, and Alfred.

He went for a sort of saint's theme.

Yeah, Anselm, Catholic saint.

Okay.

According to the Reality TV show, which one of these relics does Rhys Mogg not claim to own?

Okay.

A, a fragment of the true cross.

B, a fragment of the crown of thorns.

C, a fragment of St.

Peter's foreskin.

Or D, a wisp of Thomas More's hair shirt

stay wells.

I think it's the foreskins.

It is.

Yes, correct.

He does claim to own all of the others.

But yes, yeah, a bit of Thomas More's hair shirt.

That's a great relic, to be fair, because that's probably actually genuine.

Yeah, and the Crown of Thorns, I thought, was in Notre Dame.

I mean, weren't there notoriously three arms of St.

James for quite a long time?

There's enough Crowns of Thorns to make a pretty substantial hedge.

Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, fair enough.

The hair shader is good.

Yeah, no,

I would go and see if I went round to the Reese Mogs.

If you're listening, Jacob, call me.

Okay, next question.

How many times, and you're both going to get a go at this, and whoever's closest wins the point.

How many times did Rachel Reeves say the phrase working people in her budget speech according to the official transcript?

Now, it's harder to be the one who goes first, so reigning champion Adam is going to be handicapped by having to go first.

How many times did Rachel Reeves say working people in her budget speech?

I'm going to go for 14.

I'm going to go higher.

I'm going to say 23, please.

According to the official transcript, 13.

Oh!

Well done, Adam.

Thank you.

I mean, you played that badly.

If you thought it was more, you should have gone for 15, and then you'd have had all of those ones.

I know, but during my time as an economist at the Bank of England, I learned to.

Following the Tory leadership race, What job does breakout star Mel Stride hold?

Oh, it's such a half-hearted one.

I'm going to hand it over to my man with the bills.

Is he shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?

No, he's real shadow chancellor of the Exchequer.

That was what I was going to say.

He's got the second most important job in the Tory party.

Wow.

Don't let me down.

Yeah.

I knew that.

That's amazing.

Oh, I'm glad.

I've always been a stride booster.

I also found out that his daughters are called Natasha, Ophelia, and Evelyn.

Lovely.

There's sort of a theme to this quiz so far.

It's politicians' kids' names.

Well, I just, the only reason I wrote that is because Ed Balls has a joke that he often tells in private, which is that if you feel sorry for me, you should feel much more sorry for my sister, Ophelia.

Oh, very good.

Yeah, there we go.

That probably gets aired on political currency a lot.

In his conference speech in the autumn, who did Keir Starmer promise to bring home?

Oh.

half-hearted honk, football, no,

uh, Jimmy Lai.

No, oh, can I have another?

A dog for his kids, and then he bought them a cat instead.

No, remember when I said before we started recording that I tested these on my husband, there was one that was so basic that I thought, well, that's you're good, and that he did still didn't get that one.

It was this one, he promised to bring home the sausages.

Oh, of course, he did, yes, yeah, yeah, sorry, yeah,

which of these was not a real lib dem election stunt by a Davy?

A, playing We Will Rock You in a Care Home.

B, visiting a safari park where the monkey supply had been affected by Brexit.

C, getting a summer makeover on this morning, including a Panama hat.

And D, launching his manifesto on the teacups at Thorpe Park.

Ooh.

So

I'm going to need to jingle.

I definitely saw him do the We Will Rock You at a Care Home.

Yes.

I feel like I've seen him dressed as the man from Del Monte on this morning.

Yeah, I remember that one.

And the teacups feels very Ed Davy, so I'm going to say he did not go to a safari park where the monkey supply had been affected by Brexit.

Correct.

Although I would say that zoos have been affected by delays in Brexit.

There was a story about one of those Andean spectacle bears, the type of that Paddington is, that's been waiting for its export paperwork now for some years.

Is it trying to leave?

Yeah.

Is that where Ed Davy draws the line?

He's like,

I won't work with children and animals.

I look stupid.

When a reform candidate was secretly recorded making racist and homophobic comments, what was Nigel Farage's innocent explanation for the man's actions?

He was just drunk.

Who among us?

He claimed that he was possibly an actor hired by Channel 4 to discredit reform.

From the moment he walked in, the whole thing was an act.

And then he tried to get reform cans officers to say rude and abusive things.

And when they wouldn't do it, he did it himself, Farage said at a press conference.

It's the only possible explanation.

Absolutely.

Do we know who the actor was?

Is it it someone famous?

Benedict Cumberland.

Olivia Colmer.

It's weird that they thought you'd get away with it.

Toby Jones, he's in everything.

Last one.

Why did the former SMP Health Minister Michael Matheson have his Holyrood salary withdrawn for 54 days this year, losing him £11,000?

It's your favourite story, isn't it?

It's the iPad that he took on holiday to Spain, was it?

Morocco.

Morocco.

And then let his kids use the Wi-Fi on it to watch.

They did the data roaming to watch the football.

Yes, and then try to claim it as an expense.

That's all it was constituency business.

Yeah, they docked his salary by the equivalent to the 11 grand expenses bill he put on for using a data roaming room.

It's just the most dad scandal ever, isn't it?

That he didn't know how to switch the data roaming off.

You can set limits.

Yeah, £25 limit and it sends you a text message going, you absolutely sure you want to carry on streaming the

to which his kids said, yes, we do.

That is so funny.

It's not just doing that, it's just thinking, well, I'm not paying that bill, no bloody kids.

Christmas elf.

How do the scores stand?

Half-haunted honk has four.

Andy has three.

Oh, okay.

Well, I'm going to hand over to you, Andy, for a cultural round.

That's right.

Welcome to what's next for your career and for your future in healthcare.

Carrington College is hosting our biggest open house yet, Thursday, August 14th, from 10 a.m.

to 7 p.m.

Come explore hands-on healthcare training programs, meet instructors, watch live demonstrations, tour the campus.

You could graduate in as few as nine months, prepared to step into a new career.

Ready for what's next?

We're ready for you.

Reserve your spot today at carrington.edu slash events.

Programs vary by location.

Visit carrington.edu slash SEI for important information on program outcomes.

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious, organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

I'm just testing the bell.

Yeah, okay.

Okay, so this round is called the Culture Wars Round.

And I have taken 10 extracts from the diary that Private Eye publishes every fortnight, as told to Craig Brown.

And I would like you to tell me who is speaking, or rather, who Craig is channeling.

I feel like this is one of those ones that is going to be a lot harder than you think from the outside, and we're going to just feel profoundly embarrassed throughout.

I think that's probably true.

And Craig will probably complain.

Craig will soon.

I do read them, Craig, is just probably quiet.

Okay, I'll start, and then, you know, we'll see how we get along.

And if things are drastically difficult by question three, I'll start doing accents and giving clues.

Right.

Okay.

It's a crying shame that Lee Anderson never married Kate Middleton.

What an amazing power couple they would make.

Lee with his strong manly opinions, chiseled draw, genuine concern for others, and can-do personality.

Got Alison Pearson.

Yay!

Well done.

I'll just finish it off because it's such a great line.

Kate with her lustrous legs, perfect figure, and ability to charm the proverbial birds out of the trees.

If there were any trees left, since the hard left councils chopped them all down to make way for compulsory trans clinics.

Craig being Alison.

Well done, Adam.

Brilliant.

That sounds fair, though, because you have probably read, you are probably the only person alive who has read every Alison Pearson column.

Oh, God, I'm not that mad.

All right, here's one.

It's absolutely disgusting in this day and age, and yet another sign of the unspeakable depravity of this Tory government, that anyone with the courage to identify as a woman in the 21st century is being forcibly excluded from entering the so-called Garrett club on pain of death.

Willing for a left-wing firebrand?

Go on, left.

Helen, take it.

Helen.

I'm going to say Billy Bragg.

No.

Adam?

Little Owen Jones.

It's little Owen Jones.

I knew it was Owen Jones, but I don't want to be like, don't look like the person who's obsessed with Ewen Jones.

That's why I was letting you have it.

You softened us a bit of your obsession with him.

That was a pity one.

Here's the next one.

Sadly, I hadn't been long in Downing Street before I realised it was no place for a Prime Minister.

I was literally being held prisoner with a gun to my head by an establishment cabal.

Helen.

Trust.

It's trust.

It's gotta be trust.

Next up.

If I could own one painting, it would be the Mona Lisa.

She reminds me of myself when I was her age.

Quiet and thoughtful, yes, but also overflowing with youthful energy and idealism and full of the zeal to create a truly global brand.

Yep.

Is it Megan?

It's not Megan.

It sounds very Megany.

I was thinking you would guess Megan.

Adam, who makes big global brands real?

I can only think of Victoria Beckham.

It's Richard Branson.

Ah, yeah.

Do you know what I was thinking of that?

Did you see that recently?

Victoria Beckham did a launch of something, and she brought Harper along, who's the youngest of the children, the only girl.

And she said, What's your Christmas wish?

And Harper Beckham said, One day I would like to create an enormous brand.

I just thought that's such a weird, only the child of those particular parents would ever say that.

I hope to achieve synergy through many of my superb.

Yeah.

Okay, next up.

There's an epidemic of deng fever sweeping the world, wreaking havoc.

I've never succumbed to deng, touch wood, but last week I felt a slight tickle in my throat.

Through a mix of determination and working-class guts, I came through.

But truly, I fear for today's coddled millennials.

Gone.

Is that an Aden?

It's an Adine!

It's an Adean Dorring.

It was the coddled millennials that I was just like, that's an Adean, isn't it?

Come on.

Really, this is all just a declaration of how good Craig is,

how good he is at channeling all of these people.

Extraordinary.

Okay.

Stuff and nonsense.

That's my reaction to the so-called stars, non-entities more like, who whinge about so-called abuse on strictly come dancing.

They clearly never fought in the Battle of the Somme, where plucky young soldiers face the choice of death at enemy hands or drawn-out misery and filthy rat-filled trenches.

Oh, that could be.

The trouble is that is a kind of whole style of columnism.

It is a columnist.

I'm going to go Clarkson.

It's...

Can I, we guess?

Older.

Yeah, come on.

Older than Clarkson.

I was going to say Amanda Patel.

I'd say a bit.

We're going to get a letter from her libelary.

Sarah Vine.

This lady straddles the divide between columnist and politician.

Oh.

And is a strictly old hand herself.

Anne Whitticom!

It's Anne Whitticom.

There we go.

Well done.

I feel like I was giving those clues even, Hannah.

Recently sacked from the Daily Express.

Oh!

That was a nicely ambiguous noise.

Oh!

Brand new information.

I continue to be appalled.

That's great.

We should just leave it there.

By assaults on traditional family values.

Reports coming through of rabid left-wing Muslim London mayor Sadiq Khan forcing a penguin at the London Aquarium to wear pink to conform with LGBTQ zoo quotas.

No, Sadiq, this is not politics.

It is bullying.

Pure and simple.

I'm going to go little on that one.

Not bad, but it's not little.

Oh, sound like Alice's.

I know, I know, I know.

It really shows you there is a style of columnism, which is like the sort of why-oh, why, is everybody gay now because of woke?

Yeah, it's another telegraphy voice.

Alistair Heath.

Sheryl Jacobs.

I'm all crazy.

I'm going to title it.

Tell me Alistair Heath because Alistair Keith would be like, and that's why the doompocalypse is upon us.

It's Isabel Oakshot.

Oh,

underrated choice there, yeah.

Okay, here's the penultimate one.

If there is a Democratic Party victory, their stated aim is to force us to speak Mexican and wear sombreros in our homes and workplaces.

Have you seen how big sombreros are?

This disastrous policy would mean widening our doorways at the cost of billions so we could go in and out of our houses in this cumbersome headgear.

I remember this one and thinking how funny it was, but I'm going to say, I know Lionel Shriver did a whole column about wearing a sombrero, so I'm going to say Lionel Shriver.

It's not Shriver.

Is it Musk?

It's Musk.

Oh, well done.

I knew it was Musk.

Oh.

Okay.

And here's the final one.

There's a portly bumblebee caught in my kitchen skylight.

Your Nigel Slate.

It's Nigel Slate.

That one's the one that's got all the adjectives in it, isn't it?

I just read it.

The Nigel Slater, I know, because so many people contacted me for about a month before I'm just saying, please make Craig do the Nigel Slater book.

Please make Craig do the Nigel Slater book.

It's fantastic.

It's such a good idea.

People wrote letters in about specifically the Slater.

The musky, charred, cardamom-scented.

That's it.

After a struggle, I rescue him with a long-handled feather duster from Fukuoka, a cherished present from a dear friend, and gently place him in my skillet.

I can't believe he cooks for me.

Served with a tart tart, Gooseberry Puree and Segovian parsley.

Bumblebee Fritter makes a perfect mid-morning snack.

Lovely.

Well, well done, everybody.

Tortoise is paying the big bucks for, isn't it?

So Adam scores nine, but now he's out of the game because he's doing the next round.

Right.

So he's frozen, that's locked in.

He's peaked.

Andy still has three.

Tell him is on two.

I think we all know who's going to win this one.

Anyway,

you never know.

If you get every question right in my round.

So it's time for my round, which is called the year in hackery are you ready weapons are the ready please why did mr justice fancourt run through a catalogue of the eye's golden oldies at the high court and who as the first edition of the eye in 2024 recorded was whinging about not being invited

go for it it was a half holiday and they were this was their version of watching a video in court was to go through great legal uh stuff that's been covered abroad

in board games yeah that's that's my that's my answer no

yeah exactly i'll give you a clue.

It's got a royal connection and the person who was winding that not being invited never gets seen anywhere very much these days.

Prince Andrew.

Nope.

Oh.

The other one.

Prince Harry.

That's the one.

Hey.

It was the case of the Duke of Sussex and others versus Mirror Group Newspapers, which covered Piers Morgan's boasts about having heard Paul McCartney's voicemail messages to his then wife Heather Mills in 2011 and the occasion in 2002 when Morgan detailed exactly how easy it was to hack mobile phone messages.

Do you remember who he unveiled that to?

Jeremy Paxman.

Jeremy Jeremy Paxman, Enrique Johnson, and Sir Victor Blank,

the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers, at a lunch.

Amazing.

Weird lunch to be having.

But anyway, yes, all of these were stories that the Eye had revealed up to 13 years earlier, and they all got an airing in court.

And Moron reacted by whinging none of the lawyers involved had even tried to talk to him.

But as we pointed out, that was because the Mirror Group have long since given up trying to pretend he and his fellow editors were unaware of the massive amount of phone hacking going on in their papers.

Nice.

Next question.

January also saw the broadcast of Mr.

Bates vs.

the Post Office, which finally exploded the story that Richard Brooks had been following for the Eye since 2011 into the mainstream.

But which of the following long-running Eye investigations is not currently being dramatised for TV?

A.

Who was really responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, which the Eye first started covering in 1989?

B.

The contaminated blood scandal, which the Eye first reported on in 1987?

Or C, the sexual abuse of Harris staff by Mohammed Fayyad, which the Eye first gave details of in 1998.

I think they're not doing tainted Blood.

And I'm going to say, I think they're not doing Harrods.

And I'm afraid the point goes to Andy.

As yet, no plans to dramatise the Fired story.

But that's only because the Crown on Netflix made such a good job of dramatising exactly what he was like.

Spare a thought for the actor Nadeem Sawala, by the way, who used to do one-man shows pretending to be Mohammed Fired and has now completely lost that aspect of his enjoyment.

Think about all the queen look-alikes who no longer get any work.

Unless they want them to have beyond the grave, opening a leisure centre.

Those poor people who were doing Gary Glitter tribute acts up until about 1999.

My Michael Govework has tailed off completely.

It's been very sad

since the election.

We should send you, put some glasses on you, and send you into the spectator office because we can see how long it takes them to be.

You're an AT version of Ludwig.

He can go and sort of do Edif a bit of copy.

Great.

In February, the report the government commissioned into the Teesside Regeneration Project, championed by Tory Mayor Ben Houchin, or Lord Houchin as he is now, was published.

As the eye showed, it confirmed that dubious deals had been struck with no formal decision-making process, the board of the South Tees Development Corporation misled, and that taxpayers were taking all the risk on the project, while the businessmen involved had no liability at all, but had extracted tens of millions from it.

Is there a question at any point?

How?

It's more of a common question.

How?

How did Houchin react to these findings?

He claimed it was a total vindication, the report, and it was actually very supportive.

Absolutely, yeah.

The phrase I've got written down here is dick-de-boo.

He just said everything was fine, nothing to see.

The people of Teesside, Darlington, and Hartley Paul can welcome this investigation, which sets out in black and white that there is no corruption or illegality at Teesworks.

And of course, because you know, private eye stories have such an enormous effect, they did appear to agree voting him back in as Tees Valley Mayor in May.

Yay!

It's just a deferred retribution, that's all it is.

30 years' time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm loving this round of

extremely boring questions.

No, I was going to say vengeance concealed as quizzes.

It's brilliant.

This is the aren't we great round?

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Another long question.

The questions have been lovely.

That one I have, that one was a little chewy.

Good luck getting any points, Helen.

I'm like, no, you're the thing of us.

You're the only one who can take down Atom.

I'm entirely, I'm throwing this match.

George Galloway.

Won the Rochdale by-election for his Workers' Party of Britain.

And greasy private eyes coverage of the putinophile outpourings of some of his supporters by tweeting at us, Cry war.

Cry war?

Cry more.

Or cry war.

No, no, very much not

cry war, because then he was defeated by Paul Waugh at the general election, none of us, the Labour candidate.

But was Galloway's reign in Rochdale longer or shorter than Michelle Barnier's equally unedifying stint as French Prime Minister?

Oh.

I mean, you're both going to get a go at this.

I'm going to say, I'm going to go longer.

And I'll say shorter.

Okay, Andy, you were just wrong.

And it was.

It was very, very well done, Helen.

Longer.

Galloway lasted 126 days as MP for Rochdale, which is approximately two and a half Liz Trusses.

Whereas Barnier managed me in 90 days as French Prime Minister, which is 1.8 Liz Trusses, or 360 periods of martial law in South Korea.

That's very good.

God, these are all really, really long questions.

I'll try and edit as I go.

No, I like that.

Other people have quizzes that are just simple questions.

Yours come with footnotes,

explanatory diagrams.

All of the questions are a statement of one length or another, followed by but.

How?

There's no but in this one.

In May, before anyone had found out what Hugh Edwards had really been up to, the Sun declared its disgust at the BBC keeping details of its internal investigation into what they had reported secret.

The eye pointed out the Sun was being equally quiet about its own internal investigation into its former star employee Dan Wooden and his catfishing of colleagues, who alleged he'd tricked them into sending him compromising photos and videos of themselves.

On the very day that that edition of the eye came out, the sun reacted.

But how?

There was a but.

Hang on, reacted to what?

Reacted to the eye coming out, saying they were keeping things secret.

Oh, that was kind of joint.

We'll let you go, Andy.

Yeah.

They completely ignored it?

Amazingly, they didn't in this case.

Didn't they fire a Dunwood?

He was long gone from the Sun by this one.

He'd been fired by GB News by this point.

No, they informed men who'd given evidence to the inquiry that they were going to continue to keep all the details secret and not even tell them what had been found out.

But this hasn't, since you asked, stop the sun from demanding to know why the BBC didn't do something about Greg Wallace's behaviour sooner.

A big row blew up in September after the press caught onto the fact that new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, along with his wife and plenty of his colleagues, had been taking freebies from millionaire Labour donor Lord Ali.

Can I say it's very hard to concentrate when Andy's Andy has his

bells are rocking in a pleasant way.

I'm sorry, I'm ready with those bells out.

He's putting me off.

Because the actual question is coming up.

When did i i readers first find out who was paying for starma's suits and glasses?

Ooh, um go on, Helen.

Earlier.

You want to go for a month or now?

I'll say

February.

It was in June, a month before election day.

But I was thinking about it

far from the first time we'd highlighted his freebies because in October 2023, we pointed out that the £4,500 bill for his family summer holiday had been picked up by, of all places, a Swansea van leasing company.

And we said at the point, his freeloading is starting to look rather conspicuous.

Yeah, you heard it here first.

Which of the following is not a genuine headline from an Alastair Heath column in the Daily Telegraph, as featured in A Hack Watcher this year?

We are the West's last generation before the new Dark Age.

Starmer's sinister plan for Britain will end the country as we know it.

Armageddon is upon us, and Britain will never be the same again.

I fear nobody can save Britain from its inevitable catastrophic collapse.

Go on.

I think they're all real.

Oh, it's a trick question.

I think it's a trick question.

They're all

Alastair Heath columns.

Okay, I'm going to go for number two, whatever that one was.

No, it wasn't.

It was number four.

Because that was his colleague Sherelle Jacob Sherelle in December 2023.

All genuine Telegraph ones.

Fantastic.

Armageddon is upon us.

I mean, amazing.

Incredible that you can file a copy under those circumstances, really.

That's professionalism.

Yeah, absolutely.

I just like the idea of Aleister Heath going about his business, like

his wife hasn't put the bins out, and he's just like, oh, my goodness, upon us, the bins have not been put out.

In August, the eye pointed out to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology that Simon Blagdon, the former chairman of Fujitsu UK, who was now serving as the chair of their broadband body, Building Digital UK, had been misleading them about his involvement in the Horizon scandal at the post office.

What happened next?

What?

Go on.

He was fired.

He was?

Yeah.

Well, he lost his job.

The DSIT announced that Simon Blagden has resigned as chair of BDUK on the 18th of July 2024 with immediate effect.

So a rare, quick result for the terrific.

Yeah.

Only took however many years from you

scandal to actually get one of those.

Also in August, one of Britain's biggest manufacturers announced a new sustainable product that we believe is both is safer for both the user and the environment.

Who were they and what was it?

Can you give us a clue?

Is it to be used in the home?

Oh, bombs!

Smart but

BAE or

BASTABABABINDERS.

It was BAE.

It was one of the big Lockheed Martin, one of the big weapons manufacturers.

They said, we've got a fantastic new bomb that is going to leave much less plastic pollution in the ground of the crater.

It's close enough.

It was BAE Systems.

It was the first of their new next generation munitions, which was a 155-millimetre shell, the kind being used heavily in Israel's war in Gaza, but it would now feature a lead-free explosive.

Oh, that's very sustainable.

Very, very happy New Year's.

So this is going to be available to all warmongers, sanctions permitting, from 2025.

You won't get lead poisoning, basically, as you

that's it.

You will as you'll be dead, but you won't be poisoned with lead, so that's nice.

Okay, this is my final question for you.

In September, a claim went viral on Twitter, the social media site now known as X, because it's toxic and everyone's left it.

Private Eye haven't printed a word about Charlotte Owen.

Is this a coincidence or a super injunction?

How many times had Private Eye printed words or put them out on this very podcast about Charlotte Owen being appointed to the Lords at that point?

I'm going to say we did it four times.

And I'll say three.

Okay, we're both wrong because it's five.

Oh, Helen's five.

First, way back in September 2022, and one episode of this very podcast in February, in which we discussed at length how there definitely wasn't a super injunction covering the appointment of Charlotte Owen to the Lords.

And how superinjunctions really aren't a big thing anymore and haven't been for years.

But no one knows.

Once again, I say it didn't matter.

And in proof of how journalism works, simply no one cared.

So the winner there, definitely not the I, except in one case, Simon Blagdon.

Brilliant.

What are the the scores, Christmas elf?

Helen has five.

Yeah.

Andy has eight.

Oh, Adam, get it with nine.

Thank you.

Woo.

Wow.

I think if you win next year, Adam, you get to take the podcast home for keeps.

Well, like the school hamster Christmas holiday.

You've got to feed it.

Oh, well, thank you so much for playing, everybody.

Thank you for listening at home.

We hope you've enjoyed 2024.

And we hope you enjoy 2025 even more and keep on reading the eye and listening to this wonderful podcast.

We'll see you next time.

Thanks as always to Matt Hill of Wreath and Cordio for producing.

Bye for now and happy new year when it comes.

We are going where?

Back to school shopping.

This is the playoffs for parenting, aka getting ready to get back to school.

As we get ready for back to school, doesn't matter your income, your race, your background, whether you have a disability or not.

Our public schools are a place where all kids feel like they belong.

My child.

My children, my family, my friends, kids, my community.

All students.

All students.

All students belong in a great public school.

Let's get ready for back to school at NEA.org slash back to school.

You want your master's degree.

You know you can earn it, but life gets busy.

The packed schedule, the late nights, and then there's the unexpected.

American Public University was built for all of it.

With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40-plus flexible online master's programs are designed to move at the speed of life.

You bring the fire, we'll fuel the journey.

Get started today at apu.apus.edu.

You want your master's degree.

You know you can earn it, but life gets busy.

The packed schedule, the late nights, and then there's the unexpected.

American Public University was built for all of it.

With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40-plus flexible online master's programs are designed designed to move at the speed of life.

Start your master's journey today at apu.apus.edu.

You want it?

Come get it at APU.