126: MAGA, monarchy and Welby’s woes

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

In the absence of Andrew Hunter Murray this week, he's off with another different podcast that we don't mention here, touring Australia and New Zealand. I don't know when our tour's coming up.

But anyway, I'm here in the Private Eye Office. I'm Adam McQueen, and I'm joined by Helen Lewis and Ian Hislop.

Later, we're going to be talking to Francis Ween about the child abuse scandal that led to the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

But first, let's talk about something else pretty big that happened since the last edition of the magazine. Donald Trump won an emphatic victory in the US election.
Is that fair?

Oh yeah, I think that's fair enough. I think people have been overdoing the idea that it was a surprise victory.

Actually, all of the polling suggested it was kind of 50-50 and within a normal polling era either way to be a landslide in each direction.

But definitely he won the popular vote, which he has so far never managed to do. And actually Republicans have really struggled to do since the 90s.

So the popular vote turns out to be a statistic that is quite familiar to British listeners. Can you tell us?

I think Camilla Harris will end up with 48%, and Donald Trump may nudge over 51, not quite.

52. Not quite the cursed ratio, but

it is a Brexit. Come on, admit it.
They don't add up, do they? There's a sort of almost 2% of people missing at the moment. Who are they voting for?

Well, they just take a really long time to count votes. So, mostly Republican state legislatures have done stuff where you can't start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day.

So, which was done with some idea about, oh, this would be great. We'll make it really hard to work out what the results are so that Donald Trump can claim victory.

And as it turned out, they didn't need any of that.

He just flat out won. It was fine.
I was slightly amazed because amongst the many, many predictions I was reading, a lot of them were saying, Oh, well, you know, it won't be over.

The counting's going to go on for ages, and then the court cases are going to go on for ages after that. It's going to be like 2000 with Al Gore and George W.
Bush.

And I woke up at sort of seven o'clock in the morning, had a look at my phone, went, oh, God.

They've decided already. Went back to sleep.
I mean, Arizona didn't declare until the weekend. It's just by that point, he'd already won Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.

And the other thing that's crazy is that, you know, the Trump swing is absolutely everywhere. You know, he won Beverly Hills.
He did really well in New York, you know, much better than you'd think.

It's not just that the red states got redder, it's that everywhere, basically, apart from the Mormons, basically the Utah was the only one that didn't really follow that pattern.

But pretty much everywhere else swung to Trump. Now, I had to do have to pull you up.

We're talking about predictions, and I know some listeners are going to be saying, Well, what did Helen say last time? And you were very clever.

You didn't, as I think it's now known in the podcasting trade, do a Rory.

You did, you refused to give us an emphatic prediction of who would or wouldn't win. But you did say you found yourself optimistic about Kamala Harris's chances two weeks ago.

You pointed out she was sneaking ahead in the polling. Well, I mean, that did seem to be what was going on at that point, and the early voting returns were looking good.

And you suspected there was going to be a big turnout by women who were were driven by the decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion.

Middle-aged women, you said, are quite reliable on turning out to vote. They are.
Were they? Well, they were, just they turned out to vote for Trump. Right.

So they were. It says they're very reliable on voting.

Very cleverly phrased.

No, what I got wrong. So I was confused by the fact, you know, I went to these rallies and there was genuine enthusiasm for Harris.
And that's true, right?

Actually, in terms of raw vote, she did not do all that badly. It's just that Donald Trump turned out a load of people, including a load of really low-engagement voters across swing states.

I think primarily motivated by the economy. So, the thing is, I thought lots of angry women were going to turn up to vote against him, and they didn't, right? That's the bit that I got wrong.

And one of the reasons for that might be: if you look at it, people not only there's quite a lot of really interesting split-ticket stuff where people have voted for down-ballot Democrats, but also Trump at the top, but actually, quite a lot, I think, two-thirds of the abortion measures, which were all aimed at liberalizing the regime in various states, all passed.

Florida's one got to, you know, in the mid-50s, but it needs to get 60% to clear.

So, what clearly happened in a lot of those cases is that people who were motivated by Dobbs, that judgment, turned out to vote to liberalise abortion in their state and then tick the Donald Trump box, even though he was the guy who appointed the three Supreme Court justices that it all rested on.

That is sort of extraordinary, isn't it? Voters make no sense. I think this is one of the things that you have to come out of it in this election.

Blaming the voters, are we? I'm not blaming them. I'm just saying that people have some wild opinions about politics that are very funny.
So, you know, there are people.

Alexandra Akezia-Cortez, who's a very socialist kind of, somebody who's very much on the left, like economically within the Democrats, she did

a thing where she asked people on Instagram, why did you vote for me and Donald Trump? Because there were plenty of those people. And the answers are really interesting.

Often people would say, you're both kind of anti-establishment candidates, right? You're both outsiders. You're both real people.

Bernie Sanders underperformed, it looks like the Democratic ticket, even though in other places you'd say that economic populism has done quite well for the Democrats.

In Arizona, the Democratic Senate candidate, Ruben Giego, won, and he won by being extremely tough on the border.

All his ads were him with a sheriff driving on the border going, I'm going to close it. I'm very, I mean, you know, so there's all kinds of cross-currents that went on.
We don't see from him.

We just don't see. So everybody said.
Exactly.

Yeah, everybody said all the Arab voters in Michigan have moved towards Trump.

That may be true on a community level, but the Senate candidate that they've returned is a pro-Israeli person who used to work

in the CIA. So they're not necessarily super against American foreign policy in that sense.

Well, I noticed in the Trump grand victory speech, he thanked a specific list of Americans, including Arab Americans and Muslim Americans. He didn't mention Jewish Americans.

Does that mean anything, or was he just having a brain fade? No, I mean it I I think it's more that those were just unexpected.

There was a great thing of him, the picture of him hugging an imam, because he absolutely loves that kind of sense of, you know, people call me racist, people call me sexist, but actually women love me, black men love me, you know, that so I think he he really runs against that idea that people consider him sort of untouchable.

So I think he really liked it.

The other thing he did in that speech was he called up Dana White, who is the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and he then, Dana White, then shouted out all the influencers, you know, Logan Paul and Joe Rogan and people like that.

So there really is a sense that those people are kind of on the march. This is the new kind of MAGA monarchy.

And there was a great photo from election night of Mar-a-Lago in Florida, which was a Trump family photo, except Melania had been replaced with Elon Musk.

She wasn't in it. He's there.
Holding one of his kids. Yeah.
The one with the weird sort of mathematical formula name. Yeah.

His eldest kid, who he basically, actually, he did a podcast with Tucker Carlson in which he he brought the kid on and he started saying mini me you complete me So that kid is either gonna end up very weird or extremely normal.

I can't see which one you know

right exactly just the most normal person you've ever seen

just like an actuary or something my really depressing thought last week when I saw that photo was oh god he's next isn't he you know it's not gonna be Eric or Don Jr.

that inherits the mantle from Donald do you think Elon's gonna run for president next time you are depressing I really am well look we don't get nice things anymore I said all the way through this was the result we were gonna to get.

He can't. He was born in South Africa.
Ah. Same thing that kept out Arnold Schwarzenegger because he was born in Austria.
I'd like to see that birth certificate because

I believe he's an American. If they were going to repeal anything, I think it's the amendment that stops you running for more than two terms.

People have already been hoping that you'll get the 2028 election will be after that's repealed, and then it'll be Donald Trump versus Barack Obama, which is kind of like the final boss match of America.

Wow. That would be amazing.

And then Donald just stays there and keeps the seat warm for Baron when he eventually gets to the age and height, which will be about 27 stories high by that point, because he just seems to keep on growing.

He's huge, six foot eight, yeah. So is there any evidence that old-fashioned things like Taylor Swift or having celebrities endorse you makes any difference?

Or is it the type of celebrities you now need wrestlers and golfers?

I think the trouble with those celebrities is they didn't create the kind of sort of self-reinforcing, I want to say echo chamber, that that sounds pejorative because you know the thing about all of those podcasters is they were just avowed partisans who just hammered away at the same things and the campaign messages.

Like the thing about the conservatives in the US is there's a bigger tent, right, and that they will just have anybody in. And actually, they're just much more loyal.

So you end up with this weird situation where the liberal media and progressive groups constantly criticise the Democrats and the Republicans. But what's the counterpoint to that on the right?

There's not really so much of an independent right-wing media anymore. I think some of the celebrities may even have backfired.

Or I think, kind of gloriously, people might have gone, well, thanks, you know, Beyoncé, for your opinions, but you know, to stick to the singing. But they didn't do that on the other side.

They don't say stick to the wrestling or stick to the looking wide-eyed on podcasts and believing stuff about aliens. They don't do that on the right, do they?

No, I've been trying to work out, well, because there's been a big discourse about, you know, should there be a liberal Joe Rogan? And then everybody's been chatting about it.

And I suddenly thought, I don't think you can make the argument that culture in America hasn't got a lot of left-leaning people in it, right?

You know, Hollywood is, I mean, it's mostly filled with people who care about making a lot of money. But if you, insofar as it has cultural values over the last 10 years, they are softly liberal.

But Joe Rogan in 2016 was backing Bernie Sanders, wasn't he? And Elon Musk as well has switched stars. He was very, very anti-Trump and has come around fully on board, utterly on board now.

Is the lesson from this that people just like outsiders and people who don't fit the political mold and that you know, the sort of Hollywood stars endorsing the Democrats does kind of very much fit into that?

I think it's hard to tell the story of either Elon Musk or Joe Rogan without talking about the huge misfire that kind of left-wing cancellation has been in both cases.

Because the trouble with Rogan, initially, he spoke out about trans women competing in mixed martial arts fighting. He also had some pretty wacky theories during COVID.

But there was a kind of like, let's keep him a distance, let's kind of cordon him off, and a real attempt to make Democrats not go on that show so you know he had Bernie on he had John Fetterman on the senator from Pennsylvania just before the election who's this also Baron Trump size just giant ogre of a man who only wears sweatpants but he he just likes kind of outsider people I think and Bernie Sanders was that you know some of Rogan's opinions are very like anti big pharma you know really worried about money and politics that kind of stuff and the the Democrats have just ended up being painted as the establishment and all the media suspicions of big pharma in America after the opioid scandal.

Not a bad position because they didn't behave very well. No.
It is one of only two countries in the world, along with New Zealand, where you're allowed to advertise medicines on TV.

I mean, a lot of them, a lot of the American medical adverts, do you remember the stuff, the cake stuff from Brass Eye? Oh, yes.

All of the side effects, there will just be a list of horrific side effects for this heart medicine that you have to get.

It all rattled off incredibly fast because they've got to do them, blah blah blah, blah blah blah. At the end of it, yeah.
Yeah, there was a whole one that just went on for ages.

It was a heart medicine about this terrible, potentially fatal infection of the the perineum that it often caused. And I just thought, I'm eating.
I don't

need this. But it is literally

every outbreak as well, isn't it? I mean, that's almost what fills everything.

And then if you go to Walgreens, because every third shop in certain parts of America seems to be a Walgreens, and just the medicines you can buy, not even over the counter, I mean, just off the shelf, things you would need a long consultation with your GP to get over here.

Well, and A, you're not going to get a long consultation with your GP.

And B, that's the way it's heading if you don't have a functioning NHS. So Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. was part of the kind of extended MAGA universe.
He's part of MAHA, which is Make America Healthy Again.

Whether or not he gets a formal position in the administration, his views are very influential now.

In that, you know, all we talked before about the kind of anti-woke vitamins that get advertised to you.

But there is a difficulty because, as you say, Ian, lots of people in America rightly find pharma very suspicious and think it's trying to sell you stuff for problems that it's created, or in the case of the opioid scandal, rapaciously just lead you down a pathway to addiction.

So he gets people with that stuff, and then he leads them on to PS, also, vaccines are bad. And trying to defend one and not the other is a bit that I think people find quite hard.

When do all of the appointments have to be taken? When do we find out what job LRFK might get and what job Elon might get? So they've got the transition team working at the moment.

They've appointed a fairly sort of dry bureaucrat to oversee it, along with some more sort of spicier people. One of the early warning signs is that Trump has said basically he wants the leadership

in Congress to be okay with him just appointing acting secretaries for everything, which is a way of getting through the, you know, avoiding the Senate confirmation process.

So that does imply that he might be giving full throttle jobs to some people who wouldn't get confirmed rather than just giving them advisor jobs.

He's got both houses as well, hasn't he? I mean, but they've both gone Republicans. Yeah, he's got a pretty whopping majority.
So he's going to have to be quite extreme if he can't get approval.

I mean, who are we talking about here? Some of these people are quite extreme.

Now, I don't know if you've been keeping up with Tucker Carlson, former Fox News host, but in the closing days of the campaign, he claimed that he'd been attacked in bed in sleep by a literal demon that had clawed him.

Right. And that's definitely not disqualifying.
Trump's going to give a cabinet job to the demon.

Yeah.

You have to remember with Tucker Carlson that Rupert Murdoch was about to marry this woman and then didn't because she thought Tucker Carlson was literally the Messiah.

And

it was stated at the time that she was too right-wing for Rupert Murdoch.

So he's pretty right-wing. Have we checked where Rupert Murdoch was on the night in question? Because I can imagine him turning up in your bedroom, Clausa.
It could be quite terrifying.

There were so many potential other explanations.

Not leading to the fact that Tucker Carlson, it turns out, sleeps with his four dogs, which may provide an alternate explanation of why he woke up with Claus. It might be more likely.

Can I ask you, Adam? I don't know why I'm making you do this, but can you guess what Donald Trump's favourite film is?

I think I know this.

Isn't it Sunset Boulevard? It is Sunset Boulevard. It's still too magnificent.
He used to make people come to Camp David and watch it. Camp David, the clue is there.
It's YMCA. It's Sunset Boulevard.

It's really astonishing. Like, I just think, I can't imagine him watching it going, like, yes, it's the politics that got small.

He honestly, go to YouTube and look up some old Liberace performances and all of the nuance. He's taken half of his mannerisms from Liberace.
I know. It is just extraordinary.

But I think it makes it really work. I mean, you were saying that calling him a fascist doesn't work.

And because of the gleeful, the funny, the surrealness, and the campness, I think it really jams your brain from being able to go, mass deportations would be a horrible policy of people being like dragged out of their homes at night.

Because then it's like,

you kind of can't put the two things together in your brain.

Yeah, and people didn't. So that's democracy taken care of.
Yes.

I mean, the gloom, I mean, I have to say this because I'm not terribly gloomy on the whole, is you would guess from the reaction from some of the British media that 100% of the American population had voted Trump and had also said, it's not extreme enough, can he invade Britain?

That isn't what actually happened. Rather than this being a not unprecedented election result and stuff we've done before, I'm going to remember quite how hysterical everyone was about George W.

Bush back in the day, and he now looks like quite a sort of. Yeah, I saw a photo of him talking Spanish fluently to someone.

I was like, I feel bad about all the things we said about how incredibly stupid he was yeah can you imagine how I feel about Reagan

that now that Reagan Mondale now that's a landslide Mondale ended up with what 13 electoral college votes out of over 500 but yeah you're you're you're right in I think you say it's a resounding Trump win, but also point out that he did lose in 2020 when people directly remembered what it was like to be governed by him.

I mean he's a giant figure in politics and a very improbable success story. Other people really struggle.
Other MAGA people really struggle to capitalise and do what he's done.

I think he's a real one-off in that sense. I don't think J.D.
Vance, much smarter than him, but I just has not got the kind of camp exuberance.

And I think people really, that's the bit that people really like. They like the showmanship.
Yeah. You know, they like, I mean, it was the interesting thing.

This one, Ken Livingston ran for mayor in 2000 and just appeared to be different to other politicians.

And it's the same appeal as Nigel Farage had and as Boris Johnson had, I think, to people, of just someone who feels like they're giving a sort of bloody nose to the establishment, even though a lot of them could not be more establishment figures.

They're just slightly eccentric and very good at playing up to it. So

I've got in my head an image of a new statue of Liberace

with his hand held out in a rather sort of scamp way. Big flouncy cup.

That'd be lovely.

We should petition for that to happen.

Okay, it's kind of embarrassing how bad I am at budgeting. Let me see your charges.

Fine. You spent over $600 on takeout last month.
I can't cook. You know this.
Yes, I have had your disgusting food, but you're literally paying for a meal subscription on top of that.

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Okay, so we've taken care of of democracy.

We're going to go back to the alternative now, the pre-1776 system, and have a chat about the royal family, who we haven't covered on the podcast for a while.

A whole batch of royals out over the weekend at the various Remembrance Day commemorations. King Charles and Princess Kate both making return after their cancer treatment.

But specifically, there have also been a lot of stories in the last couple of weeks about the financing of the royals and the various ways that that is done.

First of all, we had a documentary by Channel Force Dispatches, and it was a joint investigation with the Sunday Times, Times, which revealed all sorts of details about the Duchy of Cornwall, which is the Prince of Wales's private estate, and the Duchy of Lancaster, which is the duchy you pass on the left-hand side as you go up the M6.

There is a joke that will mean something to people who watched Top of the Pops in 1980 and no one else. Two of the genetics.

It is indeed. Very well done, Your Honour.
So

I only dipped into this story because I was in America, but tell me what... So basically, the idea is that they, because they're landowners, they extract a lot of rents from people.

They are enormous, enormous landowners, yeah, awful lot of property, awful lot of land. So, the Duchy of Cornwall is known to just mostly down in Cornwall.

Duchy of Lancaster is a bit more sort of spread all over the place.

It's a sort of traditional name that dates back to the 14th century or something, as all of these things tend to be. But they own all sorts of things, very, very modern things.

A lot of the scandal, or so thought-to-be scandal in this, was the rents they're charging to public bodies

for the use of both duchies' properties. So, Dartmoor Prison belongs to the Duchy of Cornwall and is charged to the Ministry of Justice for the use of that.

There's an NHS Trust in London which has rented a warehouse where they're storing lots and lots of ambulances from the Duchy of Lancaster, I think that one was. But there are schools as well.

There's the MOD, which has an awful lot of land which they're paying rent to

for the Navy, local councils, all sorts of things all across the country.

And the scandal as it is, is that this is not what we think of as the Crown Estate, which is kind of the publicly owned royal estates.

These are specifically the private estates of, as as I say, Dutch of Cornwall was Prince of Wales, so it was Prince Charles, and then he handed it over to William, who is now his dad's landlord.

There's a nice little fact.

He is the landlord of Highgrove.

So if his rat kicks off and has too many parties or anything, he can kick him out, which would be interesting. But don't we get that money back?

How much of that money do they keep for themselves? I know there was.

All of that money for themselves. So as I say, it's entirely different to the Crown Estate, which was handed over in 1706 by George III in return for.
so that was given to the public purse,

but in return for receiving what is now called the sovereign grant, which is based on a percentage of that, which is the money that actually goes towards the upkeep of the royal family and kind of their public duties.

My reaction on hearing this was not huge surprise, as this story does bubble up quite frequently. And I agree, we need to know these things and we need the transparency.

But the essential fact of this is these two duchies pass to the next holder. So they remain the property not of a series of Russian oligarchs or whoever else you would like to own this property.

They remain the property of two individuals who have to continue it in a line which means they can't sell it and it remains answerable in terms of Britain. It does.

I mean Dartmoor Prison would belong to someone as would the warehouse in the centre of London. So the question seems to be if it's a prison should it be paying rent?

So it's the public paying rent to itself. You know, the NHS, I'm not quite sure what these ambulances are doing in a warehouse.
I'd be quite happy for them to be out.

Might be handy. But so I see that

you could take that, but both of these estates are

meant to ease the public purse so that we don't have to pay for Prince Charles and Prince William. So presumably, if they're charging rent, they use that to fund their life.

And then we don't have to pay them any more money out of taxpayers' purse. Is that not a consideration? I think so, yeah.

I think one of the things that slightly shocked people is the amount of money involved.

So we're talking about the Duchy of Lancaster returns 27.4 million to the king, the Duchy of Cornwall, 23.6 million to Prince William.

And I think some of that sticks in people's scrolls at the point, particularly Prince William is trying to reposition himself and doing an awful lot of stuff around homelessness. Yeah.

Not something that people approve of. I mean, the other big story about royal finances that came up recently was that Prince Charles is not so keen on sharing any of that with his brother Andrew.

No, I think this is going to be very popular.

I think the first story is probably not good for the royal family. The second story seems to me a big PR win.

In terms of a PR move, yes, withdrawing funding from Prince Andrew, the disgraced Prince Andrew, as we have to call him, who, having had royal funding for his very lavish lifestyle in the 30-room royal lodge in Windsor, is now, or has been, slightly on his uppers.

Reports have been that the Prince.

I can still think of him as the Prince of Wales. He's not.
He's King Prince Charles now, isn't he? Has withdrawn the funding

for Andrew's security in an effort to try and boot him out of Royal Lodge and persuade him to move into that cursed address, Frogmore Cottage, which was, of course, not a cottage, another massive house, albeit not quite as big as Royal Lodge, but the former residence of Harry and Megan before they moved out.

And then Princess Beatrice had it, didn't she? Yeah, she was in there for a while, but the theory is that Charles is trying to...

is trying to put Andrew in there, along with Sarah Ferguson, who is his ex-wife, divorced years and years ago, but still lives in Royal Royal Lodge with him. Yes,

it's very one new 30 bedroom, so they can be very, very separate from each other, a wing each or something.

And for those of you who are watching Wolf Hall, it is fantastic that members of the royal family obviously cannot confront each other and never could.

So they send intermediaries to say, we're withdrawing your royal protection. So you'll have to go.
He could just say, you're out. Yeah.
Move it. Move.

Well, that was the thing that struck me as it's like EastEnders, isn't it?

In the, you know, people inheriting houses around Albert Square from each other and all the Fowlers are going to move in there.

And then actually, you know, the Beals are in number 13 now, and who's got a share of the Vic?

But it's not like it's enters, as you say, they don't have massive barneys with each other and fight it out, do they?

They're sort of terribly polite on the front, and you get these coded references to certain bits of money being withdrawn. Yes, they send some sort of equerry with a nickname like the WASP.

The WASP and the Bee, wasn't it?

Well, Flunky, our Royal Insider, pointed out recently that it's not quite as straightforward a story as a lot of people are presenting it as.

Because, I mean, for one thing, Andrew has actually got a lease that runs on Royal Lodge until 2078. So the pressure on him to move is not is not enormous on that front.

He paid quite a lot of money when he was still kind of on, he had public duties and still had money coming in from his mother and he took the place on. And he's paying a peppercorn rent for it.

Whereas if he did move into Frogmore Cottage, he would apparently have to pay a rent of something like £300,000 a year. And he's a lot less than that now.
So

you can see why he's kind of

digging his heels in a bit on that front. Could we not move the ambulances into Royal Lodge? That would be more useful.

Well, this is the other thing that would be a bad PR move for the king, of course, because he's already got quite a lot of palaces which are lying empty for a great many weeks of the year.

And if he moves Andrew out of Royal Lodge, that's another quite big property. Yep.
Lying empty. Not great for Prince William's campaigning on homelessness either.

But the slightly worrying thing about this is that Prince Andrew is now saying that he has found the funding to stay in Royal Lodge, although he's declining to tell us who.

And given Andrew and Fergie's previous sources of funding, which of course, I mean, this is how we got here, included Jeffrey Epstein, that well-known billionaire, pedophile, and sex trafficker,

and also the son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan, another handy billionaire who bought Andrew's last house for him for $3 million over the asking price. This was her chalet with him, wasn't it?

No, there's the chalet as well.

The Swiss lady who sold them the chalet is very, very cross about it because she said she was kept waiting to be paid for years and years, and suddenly he's magic this money up out of somewhere.

But that is a kind of question on this. If we don't want to pay for Prince Andrew, that's fine.
That's very, very justifiable. But

who is then going to pay for Prince Andrew? Because he's got some quite dodgy people around him. I'd admit to you that we could pay for Prince Andrew to live as I live in a two-bed semi in zone three.

Yeah, I'll tell you what,

he could stay in Dartmoor Prison. That would be handy.
Well, as it turns out, Dartmoor Prison is largely lying empty and not even being used by the Ministry of Justice at the moment.

So he can have as many wings as he wants. Fergie can have a whole block to herself.

Do you know what? We've solved this already. I know.
If only they'd asked us earlier.

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Helen has now left us, but for the final part of this Fortnite's podcast, we are joined by journalist emeritus of Private Eye, Francis Ween, who since 2017 has been following the story of John Smythe.

Now, finally, in the last week, an independent review ordered by the Church of England into this case has come out. Smythe viciously abused generations of boys at evangelical summer camps.

He ran England in the 70s and 1980s.

And as if that wasn't horrifying enough, Justin Welby has admitted knowing about Smythe's behaviour, which he should have done, given he was involved in those summer camps back in the day.

Francis, thanks for joining us. Hello.

So take us back to the beginnings of this and tell us about John Smythe. Well, the beginnings of the eye coverage were in 2017, as you say, after Channel 4 News broke the story.

But the story was first emerging in 1982 when a chap called the Reverend Mark Rustin was asked by the Ewan Trust, which ran these evangelical summer camps, to look into the activities of John Smythe, who had been chairman of the trustees of this trust from 1974 to 82,

who was a barrister. He was Mary Whitehouse's favourite barrister, among other things.
Whenever she took someone to court for obscenity, he was usually the chap involved. High moral tone, he took.

He was a muscular evangelist, so muscular that he beat young men and boys violently in the shed at the bottom of his garden in Winchester.

And he recruited them and groomed them at these Ewan Summer Cramps, the trust he was chairman of.

And it was largely run by Church of England clergymen to recruit the next generation of evangelical muscular Christian clergymen, including the man who is now Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

And in fact, in 1982, the year of this Ruston report, I think 22 of the attendees at this youth summer camp were themselves Church of England vicars. They were sort of acting as supervisors.

And of the boys and young men who went to the camp that summer, 29 went on to become clergymen. So it was a pretty good feeder camp for the C of E.

And

the scale of it was extraordinary, wasn't it? I mean, it was something like 130 victims identified. But the actual beatings, I mean, we're not just talking about sort of six strokes of the cane.

It was hundreds, if not thousands, of

lashings.

It was, it ran into thousands. I mean, they could hardly stand.
They bled so much that they had to wear adult nappies for days after the beatings and had the scars for months afterwards.

Some of them still have the scars. I mean one of the victims I know who

tried to kill himself, in fact,

he'd been beaten so many thousands of times and John Swythe then said to him, It's your birthday coming up. I'm going to give you a special birthday present.

I give you the beating of your life, an extra hard beating, all justified in the name of Christianity. It was all to do with this is to atone for your sins.
So

if you've masturbated, you need a hundred lashes. It was all sort of dished out on a scale of punishments.
And this poor chap who I know

tried to kill himself.

And that was when the story broke, except it was immediately suppressed, because he wrote a suicide note, sent it to a man called Reverend David Fletcher, who succeeded Smythe as chairman of the trustees of the UN Trust.

And Fletcher thought, oh, God,

I think he might have sent a copy to somebody else. This is all going to come out.
We better look responsible and have an inquiry into it. And so they did.

They commissioned this chap, the Reverend Mark Rustin, who was, as you said, former housemate and close friend of Justin Welby, the young Justin Welby. And this is in 1982, is that right? 1982?

Early 82.

And so he did this report and he found, I think, spoke to about 22 victims of SMYs who had been beaten within an inch of their life.

And there was clearly a sexual element to it. There was a lot of sort of fondling and stroking that went on.
And

it it took place naked. He'd built a little shed at the bottom of his garden to carry out these beatings in so that it wouldn't be audible by his wife.

I think she must have guessed at some point, but anyway. I think she gave tea afterwards, didn't she?

In the kitchen.

She was very solicitous, yes. They used to sit on the sofa, barely able to sit, frankly, even in their adult nappies.
So this was in 1982. We're talking about 42 years ago, aren't we?

How come it took so long for it to come out after that? What happened then? I wrote about it in the eye in 2017. If anyone has a strong stomach, I strongly recommend a book called Bleeding for Jesus.

Bleeding for Jesus. It's quite graphic, isn't it?

Yeah, Andrew Greystone, the way he describes it and goes into enormous detail about the scale of the brutality of these beatings that this man, John Smythe, was carrying out, and how he groomed them, and how the cult atmosphere, the sort of evangelical cult-like atmosphere, encouraged these boys not to blab to anyone else and led them to think that if they refused these beatings, beatings they were committing a sin against Jesus and this was what God wanted.

The report was produced and it was circulated to a number of clergymen who were involved in the UN Trust so it was became known within certain C of E circles that this report existed and several vicars had actually read it.

But all they did by way of taking action, instead of say going to the police, because the report says this is clearly criminal activity, and no argument about that. That's what the H2 report said.

Instead of thinking, oh, criminal activity, activity, that's where you go to the police, isn't it?

They said, I know, let's all club together, because we're quite well off. Let's raise funds, a sort of go-fund me thing, so he can carry on beating somewhere else, away from our jurisdiction.

And so they packed him off to Zimbabwe,

where he set up a similar thing called the Zambezi Ministries, which had summer camps, and where he carried on beating boys. And indeed, one boy died at one of these camps.
He was so badly beaten.

He was called Gaiden Yachuru. I think his name ought to be named.

There was an attempt to bring a prosecution for culpable homicide against Smythe over the death of Gaid Naturu, but Swythe's barrister successfully persuaded the Zimbabwean court that there was a conflict of interest in the case and that it just couldn't be brought because the lawyers for the prosecution were in some way complicit.

But anyway, the real point was friends in high places saved the vacant, up to and including Robert Mugabe.

Just as in England, his activities were hushed up because he had friends who were bishops and senior clergy.

At what point does Justin Wilby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, admit to having some knowledge of what had been going on?

Initially, when this first appeared on Channel 4 News in 2017, Justin Wilby gave an interview to Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News and said,

I had no idea. I had no reason to think there was any problem with John Smythe.
I mean, I'm a shocker.

And he said a number of things, which, I mean, bearing in mind what the Bible says in the Ten Commandments about thou shalt not bear false witness.

Most of the stuff he bore in the sense of gave as interviews turned out to be totally untrue.

So he said I had no contact with him after 1978 when I moved to Paris to work in the oil industry, except that actually, because he admitted he had been a dormitory officer and a senior figure at these camps before then and so had known Smythe in the 70s.

He said after 78 I had nothing to do with him but he was there at the 79 camp when Smythe was still present and still grooming and beating. And actually Welby was one of the people who contributed to

the Zambezi ministries, the Zimbabwean operation set up by Smythe. I love the idea that we export sadism and paedophilia to the colonies.
That's fine. I mean it's extraordinary

we must take it as well.

But even I mean the report that came out last week by Keith Macon, the Church of England, long delayed, it has to be said, many times delayed review, which is damning for well-being.

Yes, you wrote about it a number of times and said it's 15 times this report's been delayed.

The idea that they were actually in any way trying to get this report out is just complete nonsense, isn't it?

Yes, in his interview with Cathy Newman of Transport News in 2017, he said, Well, we've got to look into this. Now

it's been drawn to my attention.

As if he hadn't heard of it before. What he now has to admit in this report is he's admitted he did know from 2013.

He says he's no idea before that, although the report makes it fairly clear that he should have known because in 1981 he was when Welby was living in Paris working in the oil business, he was told by Canon Peter Sertin, which is at a church he attended, a COV church in Paris, that there were concerns about Smythe, because Sertin knew that Welby knew Smythe, who'd just passed through Paris with a gaggle of boys on their way to a ski trip.

And I think whereas it's what Sergey said to him was,

Smythe is really not a nice man. One of the boys had a chat with me.
And Welby says, Well, I wasn't to know that this meant he was abusing them all.

I just thought, well, he has warned me that he's warned me off, Smythe.

And admittedly, Wilby wasn't a clergyman at the time, so he wasn't necessarily obliged to go to the police or ask the church to look into it.

But still, when he became a clergyman and became, let alone when he became Archbishop of Canterbury, you think at some point that might have crossed his mind and the reasons he's given he said well I lost contact with him anyway and I was advised that there was a police investigation going on and it would be against correct policy to do any further things until the police investigation was complete there was no police investigation going on he said and i i did write to the south african primate the head of the anglican church in south africa about this so i you can't say i didn't warn them because while this went on in 2013 Smythe was still abusing boys in South Africa.

And he Wilbur claimed he'd written a letter to the primate in South Africa, as he put it. Except he didn't, actually, as it now turns out, and as he now admits, he says, I misremembered.

I thought I'd written a letter on that, actually, I didn't. In fact, he did absolutely nothing.

And then, when it was the day after the Tanner 4 News thing went out in 2017, he was on Nick Ferrari's show on LBC, and Ferrari said, well, did you not feel as head of the Church of England you had some responsibility to take urgent action about this, given that the guy was still around

indeed is still around in 2017? And Welby said, Well, he wasn't an Anglican, you know, he had no connection with the Anglican Church. And

the Ewan Trust, which ran these camps, had nothing to do with the Church of England either.

He was not an Anglican, except that actually he was a licensed lay reader in the Church of England, licensed by the Dutch. Well, 22 boys became Anglican priests.

So it suggests the link was fairly clear.

Well, a bishop said to the eye at the time, he's more of an Anglican than I am.

And Francis, am I right in thinking that they use that as an excuse as well that this independent investigation hasn't covered the events in Zimbabwe?

It literally is just what Smythe got up to in England.

So far, yes. There are allusions to what went on in South Africa and Rhodesia, but that is still uncharted territory, largely.

I mean, there have been several inquiries while we've been waiting for the Church of England to publish its long, long delayed review. The Scripture Union did an inquiry.

The Winchester College, the public school

where a lot of these boys were recruited from, because John Smythe lived near Winchester. And so he used to hang around the public school.

And after Sunday services, he had a little group approved of by the headmaster, the then head master, John Thorne, encouraged this.

And then, when it all went wrong, when he discovered that these boys were being beaten and abused, Thorne said, I tell you what, I think perhaps you'd better stop.

Why don't don't you just give me a private undertaking that your mission, your ministry will not involve this anymore and that you will leave these boys alone? Just a private undertaking.

We won't take anything. We'll say no more about it.

So Minchester College published a terrible sort of self-abasing report saying, oh, God, we're so sorry we didn't do anything and we should have done.

And the Scripture Union published a report saying, oh, dear, oh dear, an awful lot of these people.

seem to have been involved in the Scripture Union and we didn't do anything about it, so we should have known.

Now, at long last, the C of Essex thing, and Welby is still saying, Well, I don't think I should have done anything about it, so I'm frankly sorry, but I don't see that it's anything to do with me, really.

In terms of where we are now, we should just say we're recording this on Monday afternoon, and their most senior figure in the Church of England so far to say that Welby should resign over this is Helen Ann Hartley, the Bishop of Newcastle.

But I suspect, as you say, she will be joined by others, and he should not be the only one who is resigning. Bishop Helen is a good egg.

For Welby's part, he said that he plans to remain in office until he reaches retirement age in 2026, If people are happy, this is the same Justin Welby who thought it would be a good idea to have Paula Bennels as Bishop of London.

I mean, talk about complete dud.

He's just such, such a dis. I mean, I'm an atheist, but I am also a church-going Church of England atheist.
I remember my church choir indeed.

Both my parents were laborious in the Church of England, so I do feel quite sort of attached to the Church of England.

Do you feel, Francis, that the Archbishop's confession should be accompanied by some sort of act of penance.

Well, I think he should just,

to use a biblical phrase, admit that he's now a whited sepulcher.

And on that note, thank you very much, Francis Ween, for joining us. Thank you, and God bless you.
God bless you too. That was Francis Ween speaking to us on Monday afternoon.

And 24 hours later, there was a development in the case when Justin Welby resigned, which, as you might note, is the first quick thing that has actually happened in this entire case.

Welby's statement said there had been a conspiracy of silence to protect Smythe, but he himself only took responsibility for the period after 2013.

So, if you'd like to stay ahead of stories like this and an awful lot more, then what you need to do is not only listen to this podcast, but also to buy the magazine.

Subscriptions are available from private-eye.co.uk, and if you take out a yearly subscription, you'll be getting it at the cover price of just £1.73 an issue.

Bargains don't come much more bargaining than that. My thanks to Francis Ween, to Helen Lewis, and to Ian Hislop, and also, as ever, to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing this podcast.

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