127: Inheriting the earth

Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

With me are Adam McQueen, Ian Hislot and Jane Mackenzie.

First off, as we were recording our last episode, Justin Welby resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury over his failure to follow up allegations of sadistic abuse at a Christian summer camp by a man called John Smythe.

Ian, we're going to have to start with you on this one, because you took the unusual step of writing an editor's note about your encounter with Welby in the last print magazine.

Is that the first such editor's note that you have issued?

No, I did it once before when I had a very, very strange phone call from Julian Assange.

And it was so bizarre that I thought, I can't not write this.

On the whole, I try not to be the person who puts themselves in his own paper.

One reader kindly said this week, oh God, you've turned into Lebedev.

And I thought, okay, fair enough.

So that's what I was worried about.

But I did, I asked Francis Wien, who'd written all the stuff immediately, and he said, well, you know, this happened.

You've got to put this in.

So I tried to write it up without being too self-serving and just register my complete amazement that he should be there the day after he resigned.

at a public event, smiling, pretending nothing had happened, and literally making a beeline towards me and saying hello.

And

I just, I couldn't do the politeness.

So I got a tip off last issue, and I came in very excited to the office the next day.

I said to him, You're not going to believe this.

Guess who turned up at the trustees' meeting at the British Museum last night, completely shamelessly.

Only Justin Welby, the bloody Archbishop of Canterbury, resigned yesterday.

And Ian said to me, Ah, about that.

Yes, that certainly prompted me to think about doing some journalism.

And was there a big response from readers?

Yes.

I mean, they have overwhelmingly written in, which is very kind of them, and there are a lot of vicars

and there are a lot of Anglicans, and they are very pleased that someone has pointed out that they have to go on, you know, day after day, including Sundays, obviously, doing this job.

And they feel very let down by the people supposedly in charge.

Jane, I wanted to ask you a bit about the fallout from this.

It's obviously a story that the I has been covering for quite a long time, but there does seem to have been something that's happened in the wake of the report and actually broader fallout.

Can you tell us what that's been since the last episode?

So, yes, since the Macon report named a number of people who had known for a considerable amount of time that Wattsmith had been up to and had failed to act on it or failed to act properly on it.

So, a number of people who we named last issue have now had their permission to officiate removed, which is a kind of Church of England way of suspending people because they're not suspended as employees, but their ability to hold a service or sort of.

It's like having the whip removed as an MP, I guess.

It is similar, yes.

So, a number of those people who we named last time have had their permission to officiate removed.

Do you think that's where it ends?

Is there any sign of anything else that might possibly happen?

Well, there's a number of recommendations in the report itself that they certainly need to follow up on in terms of making sure that people involved in this case aren't involved in decisions about future safeguarding issues, and that they do a better job in the future.

There's a lot of people who are named in the report as failing terribly who will get away with it by virtue of being dead.

It has taken so long to reach this point where we finally identified who knew things back in the 1980s and covered it up that a lot of the people involved in that first cover-up in the early 80s have evaded justice altogether.

There was an interesting piece of follow-up in the Times, actually, which reported that in 2007, Welby allowed Canon John Roberts to continue officiating, despite being told he was convicted for sex offences committed in 1989.

Now, Ian, that wouldn't have been news to eye readers, though.

This was another Francis story.

Yes, no, it was one of those revelations that, unlike the ones in the Bible, happen

very frequently.

And yes, I mean, Francis had written this story about, and it was the same problem: a refusal to take seriously the issue of a paedophile amongst your myths and a desire to forgive, which I know is part of the Christian mission statement.

I mean I was there, I've sat in the pews, I know that bit, but there was other bits about penance and

going away and sinning no more.

And

there are usually other bits that go with it.

And I think the response of a lot of people in this, a lot of Anglicans, was they were too keen

to forgive and not fast enough to administer justice.

Well in that particular particular case, there was extraordinary detail of Welby actually writing to the convicted paedophile in question to apologise to him and say how awful it must be that one of his victims kept turning up at the cathedral to hassle him, wasn't it?

It was just an immediate jumping to his defence.

It was an assumption that I think the way it was reported was that Welby had thought that the man had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice before, and so had said to him, Obviously, you mustn't officiate any services involving children because it would be too easy for people to make more accusations.

And I think this goes to the heart of the big debate, which is, can Welby been assumed not to have known before 2013.

He admits that post-2013 there was more he could have done, but he says before then, nothing.

But this case, this Canon John Roberts case, this guy had been convicted of a sexual offence, and then someone else made another similar accusation, and that didn't apparently ring any bells that, oh, well, hang a bit, maybe that didn't seem such a miscarriage of justice in retrospect.

It's an extraordinary thing that it either goes in one direction or another, because the other case I was remembering, which I think we also wrote about, was the case of Alan Griffin, who was the Church of England priest who died by suicide in 2020 after a year when he knew he was under investigation.

And that turned out to be based not on any sort of accusation.

There was no accuser, there was no complainant.

It was just a bit of sort of priestly gossip that someone had said at their retirement interview.

Yes.

Well, one of the interesting features of sort of what went on with Smith after the sort of

early 1980s investigation is that a lot of the people who kind of knew or knew a little bit had heard about it through priestly gossip.

There was an awful lot of quietly on the side saying

oh you just want to watch out for him but people didn't sort of ask the question well why

um or it was hinted you know that he was a bit kinky rather than that he was abusing dozens and dozens of teenage boys and people must have thought well that's what he does in his private life rather than that's appalling and we have to act.

Yeah, sorry, the bit that I found hard to to believe, having grown up, was you know, my dad's a deacon in the Catholic Church.

My mother was a Eucharistic minister for a long time.

Like, priestly gossip is a thing, right?

It just is.

So is gossip amongst 16-year-old boys, even Christian boys at camps, even boys who are, you know, fully convinced by the rightness of the people who are doing this.

They do talk, they do say things.

So I found that period of no one knowing particularly sort of difficult to excuse.

I mean, and small details.

I mean, someone wrote a letter saying, Well, yes, I mean, after these boys have left school, they carry on confessing to Smythe if they're in a relationship with, say, their girlfriends, and they confess to him, and then he takes appropriate action, beating them if they've had any sexual design.

This is the most appalling interfering in young men's heads, trying to convince them that any sort of sexual contact is deeply sinful.

Whereas the man, you know,

smashing them

around the bum, that in itself is not of any interest.

But it also speaks to the one, the weirdness of this story, which is that he didn't have an official position.

He wasn't ordained.

He was a lay reader.

This is, you know, it wasn't like he was taking any kind of official confession or anything that had any official pastoral role.

He was a sort of freelance flogger.

Yes, and you know, the denials by a lot of people, including the Archbishop at one point, saying, you know, he wasn't a member of the church and he wasn't CF.

Well, he was.

He was on specific camps which were designed to create leaders of the future for the Church of England.

And the knowledge must have been so widespread because those 16-year-old boys, was it 27, 29 of them, went on to be priests within the Church of England?

They obviously had absolute knowledge.

I mean, it cannot have been that secret.

Internationally known about, too.

At one point, there's messages going between a church in Paris and there's senior people in the church saying somebody had made a disclosure to them and that people ought to keep an eye on this.

But again, keep an eye on it is not the same as taking proper measures.

Can I just ask one question?

Yes.

Which is, why is Justin Welby still the Archbishop of Canterbury?

I mean, it's very obvious from your intervention that he doesn't understand the disgrace part of resigning in disgrace.

But he doesn't seem to have got his head around the resigning part either.

He's sticking around till January, isn't he?

He's just been on an international visit in his role.

I mean, this is not what happens when you step down from a role.

Can I reiterate?

In disgrace.

I mean, you don't get to stick around till Christmas because that's when you get to wear the really nice frocks and do the service and the bit on the telly.

Is he going to be doing that bit at Christmas?

Well, as he said, he's not at the moment.

I mean, who else stands in?

Do we get the Archbishop of York instead?

The only thing I've heard is that one of the newspapers then approached the Archbishop of Canterbury's office for a statement after the ICE stuff appeared and it said he doesn't comment on personal conversations.

And I thought, maybe, maybe he should have done.

It also just does strike me that this is the week in which we're going to see the assisted dying bill in the Commons.

If there ever was a time that certain people might be looking for some sort of moral guidance from the head of the Church of England, this would be it.

And he is not in a position to offer it.

Well, that's the other side of this that I suppose is relevant to us, which is I felt some of the slightly knee-jerk defences of him were on political grounds.

He's intervened on austerity, he's intervened on refugees, and therefore anybody coming from is sort of part of a Tory plot.

And I think that's an unwelcome new...

not exactly new entrant to our politics, but it's something you see all the time in America, right?

That everything is now just so polarised that no one ever does anything wrong.

It's always just a plot from the other side.

And that's become an easy tool to reach for, clearly, on this side of the Atlantic, too.

And a basic failure to understand anything about the Church of England and

what the term evangelical means, what the term conservative means.

I mean, the fact that the Archbishop intervened about refugees does not mean he was not part of the conservative evangelical wing, the muscular Christianity.

All of that particular lot are one group in the Church of England, and they are not on the whole very liberal.

So

it's a confusion and a desire not to be interested in the C of E, you know, which I, you know, I get, I understand, it may not interest anyone, and there'll probably be people out there saying, why are they wanging on about it?

But if

at the moment they still sit in the House of Lords, right?

The C of E is an established church with a law-making capacity for us.

I know that Labour are trying to remove that, but that is, we all have a vested interest in the C of E at the moment because they rule over us.

Anyway.

Let's turn our gaze inward next because there is a smorgasbord of stories about the media this week.

This is like a mere quick-fire Adam round.

I'm quite excited.

Plenty of developments since the last street of shame.

Adam, first of all, let's do the observer.

Two strikes called since we last spoke over the sale of the observer potentially to tortoise.

Indeed, and not just strikes by observer staff, but the whole of the Guardian as well.

The NUJ Chapel at the Guardian have voted by 93% of them that these strikes should go ahead on the 4th and 5th of December and the 12th and 13th of December.

So it's going to be a case of the army being deployed in Green goddesses with emergency Yotamotolengi recipes, people stockpiling Zoe Williams columns to read by candlelight, that kind of thing.

You can't make me laugh when I've got a cold.

This is going to sound a terrible thing.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, this, of course, is over the...

The old round, their braziers burning only like bickly approved charcoal.

Yeah.

Singing old folk songs about Owen Jones.

Oh, yes.

Can you get on to the do-to-bat of them?

This, of course, is over.

We've talked about this on the podcast before.

We've written quite a few pieces in the magazine about it.

The proposed sale of The Observer by The Guardian Media Group to Tor Toys, which is the start-up, sort of new media start-up, turned podcast factory, turned apparently now wannabe print newspaper publisher run by James Harding, former Times editor and former boss of BBC News.

And it's got absolutely everyone up in arms across The Observer and The Guardian, who haven't traditionally been particularly

united together.

Yeah, but on this case, they absolutely are.

And the latest that has been said by Anna Bateson, who is the CEO of Guardian Media Group, is that should this sale to Tortoise not go through, which seems to be what people at The Observer want it not to go through, there will be difficult decisions to be taken about the future of that paper.

So it's a bit devil in the deep blue sea at that point, isn't it?

Whether they're better off going with someone who does want to own them or someone who's made it very clear that they definitely don't want to own them.

That's a strange thing to be striking for, the right to be sacked by the Guardian.

Well, I think that is one of the issues in it, is the rights to be sacked by the Guardian.

They actually, extraordinarily, for I was going to say for any newspaper, but probably for any workplace in this country, the current agreement between The Guardian and the NUJ Chapel is that there can never be any compulsory redundancies under any circumstances, which is an extraordinary perk.

I'm sure even many trade unions have that.

It is an amazing deal that they've managed to get signed.

So, the idea, certainly, amongst Guardian staff, is that, well, if they can write off the Observer, which they always thought was part of the family and was controlled by the Scott Trust kind of agreements to keep the Guardian.

And And it's $1.3 billion that it's got sitting in the bank or in a large basement like Scrooge McDuck in coins, is always how I always imagine it.

Yeah,

they don't get any part of that.

But Guardian stuff, I think, are very concerned about other rights and other long-standing understandings being whittled away as well.

What can you use the $1.3 billion for?

To keep the Guardian going in perpetuity.

That's what it is specifically for.

So it's been built up by all sorts of other businesses.

I mean,

they used to own AutoTrader.

Do you remember we wrote an awful lot of stuff about the deals they did over buying and selling that, which were quite interestingly channeled financially?

I think Emap, the magazine group, have been all sorts of investments in the past.

And they've owned things like the Manchester Evening News, which have come and gone.

And they built up this kind of war chest there.

But that is there, has been made very, very clear now to the Observer staff and to everyone else, is just for the Guardian's own personal use.

But the thing that's hard about it is there has been quite a lot of integration between the two papers.

For all that they have sometimes ended up with very divergent editorial views, for example, on Iraq or on gender.

But things like the foreign desk and the sports desk are integrated.

So it's not entirely clear how you unweave that rainbow.

But it's not just that.

I mean, the Observer has never been allowed by the Guardian to stand as a brand on its own, except in paper form.

So it has no website.

So exactly what tortors are buying.

They are buying a print newspaper, but they don't have the ability to print it themselves.

They'd have to negotiate that without.

I think it's now printed on the Trinity Mirror Presses.

So it's not even something in there.

That's a whole separate deal they'd have to do to actually print it and distribute it.

But also, it's got no website of its own.

So they're going to have to start that from scratch.

James Harding is apparently very sure he's going to get lots of investment in from from all sorts of people and lots of people will be keen to hand him the

tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, that will be necessary to keep this going in the long term.

Does it invest in it?

Well, the Guardian have said they will retain, as part of this deal, a financial interest in it.

So they will still have some kind of say in The Observer.

But the details are all, if you talk to anyone at the Observer or the Guardian, everyone feels the details are still very, very murky.

The Scott Trust, apparently, who oversee The Guardian, were meeting this week to have a say whether or not this is the final say.

I'm not sure

on the deal and whether it goes ahead.

But at time of recording, we don't know exactly where that one's going.

This is genuinely watch this large space at the front.

Jane, have you ever been on strike?

Because it used to be like a rite of passage that all journalists at some point had been warming their fingers over a brazier at some point.

But I think, I just don't know whether I...

I've been at Private Eye a very long time.

We've never

had a work.

We should.

Worked at all over Ian's tyranny.

No, famously, there's those photos of Michael Gove when he was on, was it the Babadine Press and Journal or something in his younger days, out on the picket line, warming, literally warming his fingers over a brace here.

It's bloody cold at the picket line in Aberdeen.

Tell us also, things are not exactly happy in Murdoch Land.

I mean, there is an extraordinary,

we do this roundup of kind of all these different newspapers that are going to flux at the moment.

I mean, Murdoch Land, the biggest flux that's going on, we talked about before, is secret and went on in a Nevada courtroom.

And we don't yet have a judgment on that, which is what happens over the Murdoch Family Trust when Rupert departs this mortal coil.

He wants everything to go to to Latlan, who is his most right-wing and trustworthy progeny, who will keep the Fox and News Corp empires going on in the way that Rupert has always intended them to.

Rest of the family not so happy about it.

But also, they're not the only ones who are unhappy because last week at the News Corp AGM, a bunch of shareholders started kicking up a fuss, not for the first time either, about the way that News Corp is set up.

But if you asked most people who owned News Corp, they would say to you, Rupert Murdoch.

Do you know how much of the shares in News Corp is actually held by the Murdoch family?

Have they got like what the tech companies often do, which is have they got two-tier shares, so they get special extra good shares, and then other people get kind of crappy shares that are just of like a like in the crystal maze, they get the gold ones, and everyone else gets the silver ones, actually deduct power.

That is exactly it.

They have 14%

of the shares in the company, which is a tiny, tiny amount.

But when it comes to the voting shares, the ones that actually give them a right and the way that the company gets managed, they have 41%.

So they've got a much smaller number of other shareholders that they've got got to keep online in order for Rupert or in the future Lachlan to get their way.

Now, this was the bit that was challenged by shareholders, institutional shareholders in News Court last week.

And not for the first time.

They were quite restless, the kind of shareholders.

In 2015, they challenged this as well and said, We want a bit more say, we want to get rid of this dual-class capital structure, which is what it's called.

2012, they had a go at it as well.

They were particularly exercised at that point over the handling of phone hacking on the British papers, and that's when James Murdoch was in charge and proved himself perhaps not the best heir which is why he seems to be quite out of the picture.

And of course in 2011 they actually had to settle at a cost of £91 million

rather a lawsuit from shareholders over Rupert treating the company to quote like a wholly owned family candy store and indulging in rampant nepotism which of course was when he paid $675 million for a TV company which just happened to belong to yes yet another Murdoch.

That one was Elizabeth.

And shareholders argued that this was enormously overvalued and absolutely shameless profiteering within the family, and it led to a court case.

On one level, I'm sympathetic to.

On another level, it's a bit like when people buy crypto and then get scammed, and you sort of think, what did you think you were buying?

You were getting involved in Rupert Murdoch's business.

He's not a newcomer to this.

You know what he's about.

What did you think you were doing here?

For many listeners, it just feels like I've been watching this for the last three years.

A waffle succession, isn't it?

Absolutely.

The most pleasing detail that came out after the divorce from Jerry Hall is that one of the conditions of that divorce was that she wasn't allowed to speak to the scriptwriters on succession and pass on any inside gossip.

But to be honest, it sounds like she really didn't need to.

I'm going to give you one sentence to tell me what's up with David Montgomery, that little scamp.

Well, and as ever, trying to destroy journalism in all its forms, as he has been doing ever since his days at the mirror.

For someone with a pathological hatred of journalists and journalism, it's a very odd career choice he's made to keep owning newspaper companies.

His latest one is National World.

He's being challenged by shareholders in that, specifically a company called Media Concierge, which owns a load of Irish papers, but owns 24% of the shares in National World.

They're now challenging him.

They want to take full control of National World.

This may be because he actually sacked Media Concierge from their job doing all the ad sales on the newspapers, so their nose is a bit out of joint on that one.

Okay.

And final question.

What's the latest on the sale of the Telegraph?

Another saga that seems like it's been dragging on for about three years.

Well, we've now got to the point in the Telegraph where so many people have been involved, they're recycling them.

Because the latest exciting new name is Nadeem Sahawi, former Chancellor, another person who had to resign in disgrace, didn't he?

Yes.

But not for long.

First of all, he was on the Barclay family's side as their frontman in the debt payoff they did with the United Arab Emirates-backed company, which then wasn't allowed to take over the telegraph.

Then he reinvented himself, along the way, getting a job as chair of Very, which is another one of the Barclay family's companies.

Then he tried to put together his own bid, so that 600 million that was wanted for, at that point, the Telegraph, and the Spectator.

Got knocked out of the running in that one, and And David Efun, who is the owner of the New York Sun and the Allegheny Journal, started putting together his own bid.

Some of his funding's fallen through, but guess who's just arrived, like a white knight on a charter?

Yes, it's Nadeem Sahawi.

And this time he's brought along another Tory treasurer with him, a friend of the eye, Mohamed Mansoor, whom we've written about on a number of occasions.

The one-line Wikipedia on Mohamed Mansoor.

Tory treasurer, knighted by Rishi Sunak, extensive business interests in Egypt, some of them down to the fact that he was in in the cabinet of Hosni Mubarak, a notoriously corrupt and autocratic Egyptian leader, and also extensive business interests and dealings with Russia, which went on for at least 18 months after the invasion of Ukraine.

So a lovely, savory crowd.

Is there any small spark of joy happening in the British media at all?

The Christmas edition of Private Eye is coming out in a couple of weeks.

Well, talking about another group of people who aren't happy.

See what I did there?

Angry farmers.

So currently,

I wish I'd not had to learn about these different types of tax, but I had to.

Currently, farms and farmland are eligible for two types of inheritance tax relief, agricultural property relief, or APR, and business property relief, or BPR.

But in the budget, Rachel Reeves announced that these will be scrapped from 2026 for farms worth over a million pounds or sometimes more.

There's been quite a little backlash against this.

Ian, do you have any sympathy?

with the National Farmers Union position against these changes to inheritance tax?

Well, I mean, I'd take the line of our correspondent, used to be Mike Spreader, now new bio-waste spreader, who's been writing about these things for a long time.

And he's been fairly consistent in pointing out the problems of farming.

And it's a very, very tough business to be in.

And he continually tells you the things that are very difficult for farmers, starting with Brexit and the slowing up of the payments, the squeeze from the supermarkets.

The eye has been fairly sympathetic, despite being described as a woke, blobby, liberal North London elite.

Both the magazine staff and its readers are full of people who live in the countryside and are quite interested in it.

Jane, I want to ask you something about this.

As a kind of resident nooks and therefore, in my view, kind of space and land expert.

It's a good thing to be an expert in.

I was surprised.

I was a geography.

I was kind of interested in how many farmers are there, right?

There are 209,000 farm holdings in the UK, according to government, average size of 82 hectares, but half are smaller than 20.

So I thought that really complicated my version of it, which is there must be some absolutely whoppers of farms that distort the average upwards.

And then you were saying also that also lots of people who farm don't even own their farms.

Absolutely.

So there still are around

15% of farmers are tenant farming.

They don't own the land and they're paying to be able to work it.

families will not be inheriting because they don't own it in the first place.

And that's more common in the north also where land in itself is less expensive.

And then some of these very large farms are those farms in the north doing what's called LFA farming, which is not large, fluffy animals, even though it is mainly sheep farming.

It's less favoured areas.

So the land per hectare is

worth a lot less.

It'd be very hard to do much else with it other than farm sort of large fluffy animals.

Build loads of lovely houses.

I mean, if you can persuade lots and lots of people to move to Northumbria.

yes, you make a fair point.

Transport links probably would have to proceed there.

So

there are 15% of people who none of these inheritance things apply to anyway.

Then there's a large percentage of them who are just well below these thresholds.

And the people who are using farms in order to avoid inheritance tax have bought sort of lovely tracts of beautiful kind of arable farmland that's sort of worth lots of money in order to store their money.

But they're not the people we would traditionally think as farmers, and the vast majority of them, I'm sure, are paying farm managers to do the farming, not doing the farming their own situation.

Well, on an entirely unrelated note, Adam, I wanted to ask you about Jeremy Clarkson.

He lived his life like a candle in the wind on this one, having gone through becoming, I'm going to be the face of this, to then being basically told by the NFU, could you not be the face of this?

Did you appreciate how the the papers suddenly decided that protest was good actually?

Disrupted protests are actually great.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

We like some people coming down Whitehall, don't we?

When they're on toy tractors or they're wearing the right barber jackets and Wellingtons.

Clarkson was extraordinary.

The thing that really, really struck me with that interview that he did with Victoria Derbyshire from the BBC outside Downing Street was quite how Trumpish he was.

The moment when he tried to tell, I mean, you've talked to me a lot about being over and covering Trump rallies and the way that he kind of turns things back on the media.

Oh, if Jeremy Clarkson wanted to be our Trump, he absolutely could be.

But the moment when he said, I mean, that's just typical BBC.

And when she pointed out, she was quoting his own words back from him, literally, that he'd written in the Sunday Times because he's written everything he's ever thought in one of his newspaper columns.

He said, facts, facts.

This is typical BBC saying things are facts.

And she said,

you said them.

But then he turned to the crowd and just said to them, to this crowd, slightly hostile crowd around him, are you hearing this?

And I thought, well, that's the moment, isn't it?

That's the Trump thing, where you just say, I've been asked a question I don't like, biased media and turn the supporters who probably didn't even hear the question but are quite happy to go along and kind of boo with it.

That really did strike me as a moment.

I thought, oh, my God, we're looking at President Clarkson.

One of his last columns of the Sunday Times was about how he thinks we're going to get rid of the monarchy and have a president.

And he was warning how awful it would be to have President Blair.

I thought, oh, my God, no, they'd elect Clarkson, wouldn't they?

And I just had this sudden, horrible moment.

He did do a fairly rapid reverse ferret, didn't he?

After he saw how his appearance had gone down, he then said, well, it was terrible.

I was on painkillers.

Yes, he'd had some back injury and therefore he was slightly spaced out.

But also that he then said that actually Andy Wilman, his long-term producer on Top Gear, had said that he had to go make a speech at this rally in order to, quote, have an ending for the episode.

Which is a great way.

I mean, it's sort of an almost Liz Jones approach to your life, isn't it?

Just make things happen in my personal life for content.

Well, he then wrote, I mean, in one of the columns afterwards, that do I want to be a politician?

He said, I suddenly realised I don't, I'm a journalist.

I like throwing things at people.

I don't want to be the person who gets thrown at them.

And then I think he must have watched himself with a journalist, i.e.

Victoria Derbyshire, saying, Look, you've you said this, and now you're saying something different and blaming me for bringing it up.

And I think part of him must have thought, I was a journalist for most of my life.

I do realise what she's doing.

I am now the person who is having things thrown at him for talking nonsense.

He said, you know, I originally bought this land for tax.

Then he said, Oh, I was lying then.

I didn't buy it to avoid tax.

I bought it to have a shoot.

But I thought it would be better to tell a lie and say I was buying it to avoid tax.

So you just think, well, how do we know whether you're telling the truth now?

There are too many reverse.

The ferret disappears.

And also, it's not...

It's not a farming metaphor.

It's not necessarily the thing that you want to hear either as a farmer who has turned out in Whitehall.

concerned rightly or notly, whatever the statistics say, about losing your livelihood and not being able to pass it on to your kids, to read in the Sunday Times that actually you are just a bit part in an episode of Clarkson's Farm, and that he actually did just need a kind of end of episode crescendo, does it?

Speaking of somebody who read the last Diddley Squat book, I did my time in those mines.

The thing the great tragedy of Clarkson is that he's putting it on.

He's basically a kind of sweet lefty of recycles.

And he has to work himself up into this kind of, ooh, Brussels.

I mean, I just, you know, he voted remain.

His friends are all media lovies.

I guess the person most in the US he reminds me of is Tucker Carlson, who's the same, who wears like loafers without any socks and sort of preppy drag, and then has to hang around with people talking about how he's been attacked by demons because that's what he thinks the crowd want to hear.

And I don't, to be clear, I don't feel sorry for either of these people on the basis they've built large and expensive houses on the back of playing these caricatures.

But I sometimes wonder if the reason that they're so angry with journalists is because they know fine well that the person is pointing out something that they're aware of, right?

And that's when they get very defensive about it.

I just think when it comes to the farmers as well, I mean, there are so many other financial things that the government is not showing any sign of tackling.

I I mean, the kind of elephant in the room, the large unfluffy animal in the room, I guess, is the fact that they are vastly, vastly underpaid by supermarkets for the food that they are producing.

And that's another really difficult conversation with the government, because in the end, that's going to mean higher food prices in the supermarkets for the rest of us as consumers.

But it's also, I mean, that's the main problem with farming that makes it financially unviable.

Yeah, I mean, another issue that's facing farming is it's massively aging.

So more than half of farmers are over 55.

And BioWaste Waste Spreader points out that the inheritance tax relief put up the price of farms, which meant buying your own farm was out of the question for any younger person who wanted to enter the farming business.

Well, a new departure for page 94.

We are going to hear from an AI.

Are we going to hear from an AI correspondent or is this going to be terrible?

I'm very excited by this.

It's not an AI correspondent.

It's an EI.

Did you see what I did there?

Yeah, correspondent done this.

The whole surprise.

Check it out and work backwards.

I spoke to our producer and he said you need something to end the episode.

These are the thoughts of BioWaste Spreader brought to you by the magic of artificial intelligence.

Tell us, what did you see at the protests?

Starmer, the Farmer Harmer, read the banners attached to the front of tractors in Whitehall.

Some of which had been driven from as far away as Yorkshire.

But making such long journeys with such slow-moving vehicles should have given the drivers time to question whether they shouldn't be addressing the broader challenges facing British farmers post-Brexit, rather than simply wailing about a tax that everyone else pays.

More than 250,000 people have now signed a petition to overturn the family farm tax, as the National Farmers Union has labelled it.

But did it not strike the massed ranks of green tweed or brushed cotton gilet-veur-clad farmers that it would be disastrous to allow professional petrol head Jeremy Clarkson to grab the lion's share of media attention surrounding the protest.

Do they not see it?

Clarkson is not their white knight saviour.

He's a public relations disaster and, arguably, at least partly responsible for the tax exemption.

I just suddenly reminded me halfway through of the weird period in British history where you weren't allowed to hear Jerry Adams' voice.

They're simply worried that BioWayspreader is going to radicalise people if we're actually allowed to hear his voice.

So I have another question for you, AI BioWayspreader, which is,

There's a whole raft of them.

The accelerated loss of the old EU subsidies will be tough on tenant farmers, many of whom will not be able to renegotiate their rents with their landlords for several years.

The hike to the minimum wage will impact heavily on an industry notorious for low pay.

Then there are the significant increases in employers' national insurance payments and the proposals to impose carbon taxes on goods like imported fertiliser and steel, which will increase the cost of farm machinery and the cost of fertiliser by £50 per tonne.

The London protest could have brought all of these issues to public attention.

It could also have asked how farmers are supposed to meet such cost increases when trade deals bringing in imported food, signed by then Trade Secretary Liz Truss, don't require equivalent animal welfare or environmental standards.

And one final question for you, AI biowayspreader, which is, what do you think the outcome of all this will be?

Post-Brexit, UK farmers' interests are no longer protected by the common agricultural policy, so they need to be extremely careful about the issues they choose to protest and who is invited to voice those concerns for them.

Your correspondent was crossing Westminster Bridge soon after the farmers had departed central London's streets and pubs.

Two young men picked up a discarded placard that read, Bullocks to the budget.

No farmers, no food, no future.

Where have they all gone now?

said one.

Back to their big country estates, I guess, laughed the other.

Well, that's slightly bizarre a way to end an effort.

I'm not sure that AI is going to replace us yet, Ian.

I think we've got another couple of podcasts in us before we're all replacing it.

Yeah, this is my secret agenda.

But I think I'm by a waste, but it was very, very worried that he might be outed as someone who's not entirely uncritical about Jeremy Clarkson, which is quite an offence.

Okay, well then he won't be seen at the local ferret wrangling again.

That is all for this episode of page 94.

My thanks to Adam, Jane and Ian, as well as AI Bioware Spreader.

If you like this sort of thing, then you can head over to private-eye.co.uk and subscribe.

The Private Eye Annual is also in the shops.

Why not pick a copy up for that for yourself or a loved one?

As ever, our thanks to Matt Hill and Rethink Audio for producing and editing.

See you next time.

I have been asked by the editor to assure listeners that we won't be using EI or indeed AI voices again and will in future employ live actors.

I am fired.