125: US Election Special

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Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

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

We are here to discuss everything that's happened since the last edition of the magazine was published, and we're going to be talking about what's coming up shortly, starting with...

The American election.

If you haven't noticed, there's one on.

And we are very lucky because we have in the room with us today a reporter and journalist who has actually been in the USA very recently, unlike 98% of the British commentators on the election.

Who just re-watched the West Swing box set.

Exactly, Helen, you've been there.

You've been living it.

I have.

I've been at The Atlantic, my other gig, asked me which swing state I would like to drive across, and I said Pennsylvania.

So I've been to a Trump rally, I've been to a Harris rally, I've been to a Tim Waltz event in the middle of a field with some pumpkins where they said you could take a pumpkin home.

And I had to explain that journalistic ethics.

Sorry, I misunderstood.

The other just said, said, drive across Pennsylvania.

See how long it takes you.

Actually, they laughed at me because quite a bit of it I did on the Amtrak.

I took a five-hour train journey

from Harrisburg to

Pittsburgh.

Is that laughable?

Is that.

It is to Americans because they think when you pop out to get a snack for a five-hour drive,

why are you treating this like it's an epic voyage across the Far East?

So we thought we better treat this as a kind of town hall event before the election.

You're going to be answering all our questions.

So would anyone like to leap in first?

Tell me about the Trump rally.

I mean,

what's that actually like?

How long did he talk for?

Oh, 90 minutes.

I can see why people leave because it is.

I've just written this, but like the experience to me, replicate.

You know, sometimes when you're very sleepy late at night and you're watching TV and a drama and you'll just sort of nod off a bit, and then you'll wake up in a minute and they're in Venice.

That's exactly how it feels to try and listen to a Trump speech.

You'll just nod off, and you'll be talking about fracking, and then you'll come to and he's talking about, you know, something like he covered how much he hates Whoopi Goldberg, who I said something mean about him.

And, you know, he said, and I once booked her to do a comedy set of Mar-a-Lago, filthy mouth, filthy mouth.

And you're like, why are we here?

Why am I getting reviews of Whoopi Goldberg's comedy from the 1990s?

And it's a real challenge.

It makes sense, sort of weirdly, if you let it wash over you.

It's a bit like a sort of magic eye painting, right?

You just have to sort of step back and let your eyes unfocus, and you kind of get the vibe.

But on a sentence level, it makes no sense at all.

What are they for?

Is it literally just to hear him do a rambling speech?

That's the entire function of the

whole thing.

But it's like going to a WWE event or a concert.

Like, I found it quite reminiscent.

The thing it most reminded me of this year is going to a Taylor Swift concert because you've got people with their families, people queue up for hours outside.

They've got, instead of friendship bracelets like you would have if you're a Swifty, they've got MAGA hats, right?

People have signs, there's a carnival-esque kind of thing, there's loads of merchandise.

So it's fundraising as well, presumably, is it?

The merch and stuff?

No, because it's all bootleg merch.

Right.

It's all people who've badly screen printed that picture of him with his fist from the assassination attempt and are trying to sell him for people.

People want to go to share an event.

Yeah.

Someone said to me, He keeps saying that he's a stand-up comedian and he does stand-up, and they say, No, no, no, he isn't.

Because a stand-up comedian A has to be funny and B, there has to be some sense during the 90 minutes that you've had

some sort of coherent experience.

I mean, I'm still baffled.

What were the lowlights and the highlights?

Well, there's a point.

He does do a stand-up sort of improv thing because he does a free association.

So at one point, he started talking about having been to Iowa and he liked Iowa and he just went, I love Iowa.

I love corn.

And it was just like that was what his memory, like his mental Rolodex retrieved.

All right, input, Iowa, output.

What's in Iowa?

Corn.

It's like a very bad whose line is it anyway.

Right.

Effectively.

It had that kind of.

Whose lie is it anyway?

Thank you.

And then there's all these people who do warm-ups who are trying to essentially do impressions of him, which is a very peculiar and extremely embarrassing thing for all of them.

So, Vivek Ramaswamy was there that night, who's the

he was in the running to be the vice president at one point.

Yeah, he ran in the primary and he's a biotech investor and sort of I yeah, I described him in the magazine as being a podcast in human form.

That's he just will turn up and talk about anything at any point.

You'd be a bit disappointed though, because some people get kid rock, some people get Hulk Hogan, and you get Vivek.

That's

he, at least I say this for Vivek, it was a type five.

Some people ramble.

Just by comparison with Trump.

Yeah.

So the doors open at 3 p.m.

in the afternoon, and Trump doesn't come on until 7:30.

So it's a

good idea to translate this into slightly parochial terms.

But can you imagine anyone wanting to wait four hours to hear Keir Starmer give a speech?

I just think the Americans are a much more enthusiastic people than we are.

So it's kind of a collective thing.

Generally, we are about politics.

About everything, about just small things in their lives, about the concept of getting dressed up and going out.

You know, there's just a.

But definitely about politics.

I think British people regard enthusiasm in politics as innately suspicious.

Religion, too, right?

Actually,

there's a lot of strain of US evangelical Christians.

But, you know, I grew up in the Catholic Church and there was a deep suspicion of those kind of like Alpha Course people or the evangelical people who would fall to the floor and speak in tongues.

This was seen to be a bit sort of bit much.

We all like God, but you know, bit much.

I kept thinking of Halloween, which seems to be an event that's got nothing to do with all hallows even, or indeed anything else.

It's a chance to dress up and feel part of something or other.

And worship the big orange face.

Yeah.

Okay, it's a Trump rally.

Is it a bit like Labour Live?

I say this to you as someone who has been reporting on Labour politics.

Do you remember Labour had that kind of one day

festival?

It was the Corbyn Glastonbury, wasn't it?

Exactly.

After Corbyn had played Glastonbury to great acclaim, and he did have a number of massive rallies in the run-up to the 2017 and 19 elections.

And hundreds of thousands of people came along to them.

And then Labour Live was an attempt to kind kind of piggyback on that Glastonbury thing.

Yeah, I went to a Corbyn rally in the Union Chapel, it was the very first one, it was packed to the rafters, and everybody started seeing the red flag.

And it was, and that was a moment when I really thought, wow, something's happening.

He came to my hometown, St.

Lano-C, and packed out the local park to the extent that someone was climbing over the railings to try and get in and managed to impale themselves.

That's how much people wanted to see him at the time.

Wow.

But this is directly contrary to your theory about British people are not very bothered by politics and find enthusiasm for it embarrassing.

Perhaps Glastonbury was the end for enthusiasm.

Oh, Jeremy Corbyn and everyone think, oh, no, no, we can't do this.

This is.

Yes, yeah.

Unless they're a Davy and they do resolutely non-political things.

Which is probably, he might be Britain's Trump.

You know what I mean?

He turns up, makes a bit of a wally of himself.

Everyone says that he's not.

And at the end of this 90 minutes in which you're half asleep and some people have left, presumably the bulk of the crowd think this is the sort of person we'd like to be president.

I think there's a real difference in Trump support.

There is a hard core of supporters who really love it, a properly full MAGA.

And then I think the other big block of people in this election are relatively low-information voters, low-engagement voters, who think that Biden put the country on the wrong track and think that they were richer under Trump.

Because if you remember, he handed out checks literally with his signature on.

And inflation in the US hasn't been as bad as it has been here, but it was, you know, prices did go up.

So I think

there's two dynamics.

There's some people who really love the MAGA stuff, and there's other people who think the economy was better for me, my taxes were lower under Trump, and are willing to ignore all the other stuff.

They either think it's a lie or a media confection, or they think it's not that big a deal, and it's overblown, and it's, you know, it's compared to the stuff that he did.

They just see him as a normal Republican politician.

Can I bring up the F-word at this point?

Because does it matter that everyone's calling him a fascist?

The funny thing is that the polling shows that it is the least good of the Democrat arguments in terms of persuading people.

But then, lots of people have historically voted for fascism.

This is not a thing that has never happened before.

Victor Orban said, I'm an illiberal Democrat, and people voted for him in Hungary.

And then what tends to happen is that the elections get less and less democratic, right?

And people become more and more disillusioned with it.

But then they don't have a chance to rethink.

But I've been reading this Sinclair Lewis book, which is called It Couldn't Happen Here, 1935, which is about an American president who gets voted in and then becomes a dictator.

And he is an absolute fascist.

And it's a brilliant, prescient read.

I mean, by the time this podcast is out, it may be just of historic interest, but no more.

It may be current offence.

But he said, you know, when fascism arrives in America, it will come wrapped up in the flag and carrying a cross.

Do you get a sense of that?

I don't think that's true.

I think it's arrived in a clown wig,

making funny jokes.

This is Mussolini time, isn't it?

Who was called the clown?

Hitler was the serious one.

Mussolini, no, he was a joke.

Until he wasn't.

There was a Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday night, and that one would be the one where I I'm I'm always really hesitant about using these words or making compar you know, comparisons between Israel and the actions of you know the Warsaw Getta, all those things, because I think you just get stuck on having that argument rather than arguing about the substance.

But I did watch that Madison Square Garden rally and think this is this is a b a bad business.

So there was, you know, not just the usual enemies of the people stuff about

but there was there was Trump and other speakers explicitly calling for mass deportations.

And, you know, it's never said how these would be accomplished, but there are a huge number of undocumented people in America, often with American citizen children, right?

Because you get American citizenship if you're born in the U.S.

The only way in order to do this would be to set up an enormous police and paramilitary state and go door-to-door, dragging people out of their homes.

Is it remotely in the same way that he promised to build a big, beautiful wall and people cheered and then he didn't do it?

I mean, is it does anyone seriously think it's going to happen or do people just like the idea and they're willing to countenance it?

People then say well what he's actually saying is that he would be tough on the border and he would restrict immigration right?

They mentally downgrade it to a level that is palatable to them or they think it's a rhetorical flourish.

It is a slight change in American politics to say bring me your huddled masses and I'll deport them all.

I mean that's new isn't it?

It's kind of been a year zero in the Republican Party right if you think about the fact that nobody from its history is on his side it's like there was a kind of terrible event that happened.

So, John McCain, previous presidential candidate, died hating him.

George W.

Bush won't come out and campaign for him.

Mitt Romney, former Republican presidential candidate, voted to impeach him and has now retired from public life, essentially.

His former vice president, Mike Pence, he tried to kill, so he's not stumping for him.

Kamala Harris is able to send out Barack Obama, still a popular politician, Michelle Obama, even more popular.

Bill Clinton has been doing events in the South where he's still quite popular.

You know, she has these surrogates from an idea of what the Democratic Party's tradition and achievements were.

But Trump has succeeded by trashing the institutions of the Republican Party and its personnel.

One of the most popular lines when I went to his rally, which was wild to me, was him saying, I didn't, you know, I'm the first American president for 70 years who didn't start any wars.

In fact, I ended a war, quote, I beat ISIS, which was good of him to do that in his downtime.

But that, you know, to somebody who came of age as I did, like in the Iraq war era, where everybody hated George W.

Bush for being a kind of hawk, the fact that that's where the now, the Republican Party is, and that Dick Cheney, kind of the great architect of the Iraq war, is now voting for Harris is just kind of it.

There's been a complete fundamental reset in American politics that he's accomplished because of that kind of cult of personality around him.

I'm not sure if he loses what's left of the Republican Party and where they go from that.

That's a, I mean, I also think even if he does lose, he will never concede that he lost.

Well, obviously.

There was some good polling done this morning that was about how many Americans believe who would or wouldn't concede.

Quite a lot of people think Trump wouldn't concede if he lost, but there is a small core of, I think it's 11%, who believe that Harris wouldn't concede if she lost, but Trump would concede if he did.

And you think

I'd like to play those people at poker.

Well, quite easy to take money off.

So what about the Harris event then?

What was that?

Well, the funny thing about that was it was just really normal.

I mean, the Trump event was boring in this completely surreal and bizarre way, but the Harris event was kind of slightly like, yeah, it's all right, isn't it?

I mean, yeah.

They copied a trick from the Democratic National Convention, which they had DJs beforehand.

So you get a sports arena full of people bopping away to Dancing Queen and like, sweet dreams are made of this.

I was like, or weddings.

I mean, she can't escape out.

She walked on to Beyoncé's Freedom and then gave a really, you know, there was a terrible bit where she said,

why won't we go back?

You know, her slogan is, we won't go back.

Why won't we go back?

Because we're going forward.

And I thought, yes, that's the kind of cliche that soothes me.

This is fantastically meaningless.

That's beyond even yes, we can.

That's just.

But, you know, I thought one of the things that's interesting is that the Republicans have been trying to claim there's no grassroots enthusiasm for her.

You know, it's all the media propping her up, blah, blah, blah.

But Erie, where I went to the Harris rally, and Reading, where I went to the Trump rally, both have 95,000 people that live there.

So the town's of equal size.

If anything, Erie's harder to get to.

And the Erie rally was packed, whereas the Trump rally, actually, they'd had to section off the back stalls and quite a bit of the floor space.

It wasn't it would it was only full for the cameras because they'd rigged it to look that way.

Trump lying about the thing.

I know.

She should turn up to events.

This is extraordinary.

And the the kind of tone of coverage in the UK has very much been that the the air has gone out of the Harris souffle.

Based around an incredibly small, within the margin of error, tightening of the polls in the last couple of weeks.

I mean they're essentially where they were when she she had enormous bounce after taking over from Biden, right?

People genuinely did think Biden was too old.

And at that point, it was a Trump landslide that everybody, including the Trump campaign, was planning for.

She then had an enormous boost and has coasted downwards, as you would kind of expect from independence finally breaking one way or the other, whatever it might be.

And she hasn't, she's run a very tight and competent campaign.

She hasn't done that many mainstream media appearances.

As I said, when I swatched at the CNN Town Hall, and the answers are quite vague and waffly, right?

She's not an Obama-level inspirational visionary.

She's a competent technocrat who, you know, doesn't make you think I prefer this in the original German.

I'm not surprised about that, but the thing is, it comes down essentially to seven swing states.

Anybody who tells you they think they know what's going to happen is lying because it is a matter of, I think Joe Biden won Pennsylvania last time by 80,000 votes.

So, you know, well, we'll have all this commentary afterwards about what it tells us about the state of America.

And it's sort of redundant because we already know what it tells about the state of America.

It's that a race between these two people is essentially tied, right?

And that you can be Trump and you can still get 47% of the electorate in America think that.

That's the bit we don't understand from the coverage over here because, as you say, at the moment, everyone thinks, oh, Trump's going to win, he's going to win.

You know, it's just too depressing for words.

The whole of America must be mad.

I mean, which isn't a very rational

analysis of what's going on there.

But there is

genuine bafflement that someone can come out, out, say what he says, and people don't care.

I mean, this is a really basic question, but why?

I think you can't discuss it without the media environment.

And I've always been slightly skeptical of the idea that kind of media gives people their marching orders and then they just herd off.

But if you look at America, and I think, Adam, I'd be really interested in your take on this because I think it's what some people are attempting to recreate here, is a kind of Marvel cinematic extended universe where you never have to hear anything that contradicts your preconceptions, even slightly.

So that's an alliance between the mainstream news channels, the influencers, the podcasters, this hermetic universe.

I met this Trump voting couple from Florida who were on holiday who said, While we're voting Trump, I think we were much more respected abroad when he was president.

And I went,

slightly unprofessionally.

No.

And I just thought, well, of course, you don't know that.

Where is this?

If you're watching Fox all day, you're just that information will simply never reach you.

You know, your information has been so tightly curated.

And I think that's the point of polarization.

It's why I feel very lucky in Britain to have a spread of news outlets and a BBC which is obliged when it puts Nigel Farage on to also put someone from the Labour Party on question time, right?

I just think whatever happens, you are exposed to a wider range of opinions here than you are.

The thing he's done that has been very, very clever has been to just say to people, you don't trust the media, the media just lie to you.

And that has been sort of adopted wholesale.

And people can now live through social media, whatever, in their own sort of ghettoised area and just get the news that appeals to them.

But there's me watching it thinking, now, who was the first person who said don't trust the mainstream media?

Oh, yes, it was Goebbels.

I mean, it's not new, this approach.

But I suppose you're right, Annie, there is a certain sort of authority that comes from the fact that he's standing up there at Electern on stage and delivering it that way.

I mean, as you said, he is avoiding debates, he's avoiding questioning, except by fairly friendly people.

But even the, you know, the Joe Rogan interview that's just come out, he he's very deft at kind of avoiding the question.

Yeah, and then tries to get him onto the subject of whether or not in the second term he would sort of declassify the alien information, which obviously Joe Rogan is mad for because he's obsessed with aliens.

You mean outer space aliens?

I mean, not illegal aliens.

Yeah,

I think you're entirely right about that.

And obviously, I think there has been a certain boiling frog aspect, but there's always a bump for the fact when there's the first presidential debate, if it's a new person, an incumbent versus a challenger, there's always a bump for the challenger.

Because finally, at that point, it's like, oh, they're standing on a podium next to the president.

Like, they could be president.

These people are of equal worth.

And I think a similar thing is true that because someone's standing behind a podium,

you go, oh, that's obviously everything he does is presidential because he's doing president.

I mean, I remember Sienna Miller saying this about upskirting, right?

Which is if you had 10 men chasing a 19-year-old down the street trying to look up her skirt, everyone would go, that's obviously disgusting.

When they've got a camera in their hands for a period of time, everyone was like, well, that's the pursuit of journalism.

That's got to be allowed.

And I think there's a similar kind of, well, he's behind a podium.

So So it's,

as you said about Kamala, whatever the completely anodyne, meaningless phrase was, but if you say it to a cheering crowd behind a podium, you could just say it absolutely with the right intonation.

People will go, oh, this is a bit where I clap, isn't it?

Yeah, that's what you learn the first time you go on question time, which is just that if you say it with enough gusto, people will applaud and you realize the terrible power that you hold in your hands.

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I suppose while we're on media, we should talk about the various endorsements that the have or haven't been because two big newspapers have failed to endorse anybody.

Yeah, the LA Times, which is run by Patrick Hsunxiang, who is a billionaire, and then the Washington Post, which is run by Jeff Bezos of Amazon and incredible midlife crisis fame,

have both declined to endorse at the last minute.

Jeff Bezos, one of the very few people whose yacht has its own yacht.

Doesn't it also have his

fiancée, a bust of his fiancée on the front of it, no?

It does.

Like the finger Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Does it matter that these two mainstream media outlets don't endorse the president?

Well, I think, should we fight all this, Adam?

Because I.

Well, I mean, see, I'm going to come in with, it won't surprise you, my usual take on the American media, which is, oh, for God's sake, get over yourselves, you pompous, self-important bunch of lunatics.

No one cares what you think.

I mean, the idea, though, I just love the idea that readers of the Washington Post are saying, oh, no, well, who am I going to vote for then?

I haven't had my instructions.

I mean, the idea that this will change absolutely anyone's mind.

Well, I did this rant, didn't I, ahead of our own election when Kirstam was desperately courting the Murdoch face.

Oh, it's just the pompousness.

I mean, it's sort of in, I just think over here, journalists, we can be incredibly pompous, but mostly we kind of know our place and we know we don't make that much difference.

It's this idea that

the Washington Post will speak its mind, the LA Times will speak its mind, democracy dies in darkness.

They won't mind as long as they can find the crossword, most of them.

It's fine.

Well,

again, it's the pop star endorsement thing.

It's very.

It's pretty alien here.

Taylor Swift endorsing or Kid Rock on the other side.

I've forgotten the days when Andrew Lloyd Weber would say, look, if there isn't a Tory government, I'll go abroad.

And we all thought, oh, well, there's always a cost, isn't there?

But anyway,

did it happen in the 60s?

Did it happen with, you know, did the Trogs endorse Alec Douglas Hube?

I mean, damn.

That was Hermann's Hermit.

Okay, sorry.

Harold Wilson was desperate to be photographed with the Beatles.

Okay, and that's personally presented them with their MBEs, I think.

There's an amazing photo shoot, which

it comes back to me.

Now, Geoffrey Archer somehow managed to get himself involved with as well, didn't he?

Yeah, all of the great publicity.

Though he has now endorsed Kamala Harris, which I thought was

one of the worst

costumes then.

We really are.

The Beatles wrote a whole...

I mean, one of the weirdest Beatles songs is Tax Man, which is them complaining about their tax rates.

That was a sort of political intervention.

Yes, I mean, the labor tax rise is very current.

No one likes them.

But I think that's unfair.

I think there have been celebrity endorsements,

but presumably, Taylor Swift matters.

I think there's an interesting thing that two sets of endorsements are interesting for the Democrats.

One is the celebrities, and Taylor Swift is incredibly popular.

And also, she just might increase, get out the vote among young people who are reluctant to vote, right?

Just by increasing turnout, that might be an influential endorsement.

And then there's all of the stars of Puerto Rican descent who appear to be extremely angry about the Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian's comments at Madison Square Garden, including Bad Bonnie, who I'm sure you're intimately familiar with, and J-Lo, who you actually probably have heard of.

But, you know, it's not good to have that mood music of like people that you like are endorsing someone else.

But they've also done the thing which Keir Starmer did, which is court Republicans.

Well, he didn't caught Republicans, but he courted Tories, right?

They've wanted to reduce the cost of defection in identity terms.

So it's like Kamala Harris has done events with with Liz Cheney, former congresswoman, daughter of Dick Cheney, because there's a kind of whole Republicans for Harris and a whole line that is, you don't have to be a Democrat to vote for Harris, you just have to be a patriot.

Like, go back to voting Republican after this, but this one election, we need you.

And so I think those endorsements are interesting because a lot of people think, well, neocons endorsing you is quite repulsive.

That's not where the zeitgeist is now.

But the counterpoint to that is seeing the people cross the floor might help other people feel that they can do the same.

And when those senior military figures endorse Camilla Harris and say, don't vote Trump, you know, even though I was, you know,

her head of staff or I was in charge of the arm at the time, don't vote for him.

Does that matter?

Is that the equivalent of a younger influencer?

Will that get old people thinking, my God, you know, the head of the army thinks he's a fascist?

Well, I met some moderate Republicans, as they would have described themselves, who just thought

that Trump had betrayed what they saw as conservative values.

And that is a caucus of voters.

Nikki Haley did all right in the primaries.

Everybody, she did best by being an old-fashioned, internationalist, sane Republican and not doing the cultural war stuff at all.

So that caucus does still exist

on the right and has been thoroughly marginalised by the Republican Party.

But I think there are people who do think, why did I identify as a Republican?

It's because I believe in low taxes, but also institutions and the military and the police.

The weirdest sign that I saw in the whole time driving across was in the rural areas, which was a Trump sign that said, I'm voting for the felon.

And I've just been thinking about that ever since because it doesn't match up with you know the hatred of the defund the police as a slogan, all the people who, during the Black Lives Matter protests, had pro-police ones that said Blue Lives Matter.

And yet, you get to this stage where people who simultaneously would say that they love the police and the military and the rule of law also love that Donald Trump has stuck two fingers up at those institutions by becoming a now convicted criminal.

Yes, I'm struggling with that one too.

But it's also the same people who were saying, oh, it's an awful politically led persecution of Paul Donald, who were at the rallies chanting, lock her up, about Hillary Clinton, weren't they?

I mean,

people are perfectly capable of holding two completely contradictory views at the same time.

Yeah, and to Harris's great credit, people started chanting lock him up at her rally, and she held up her hands and said,

let the courts deal with that.

We're just going to deal with the election in November.

And this is what I mean.

It's such.

In that sense, that's a lot less fun than actually getting to chant lock him up.

I mean, that would be fun at a rally, I'd go.

Yeah, but that's what I mean, is this you have this bizarre situation in which one people are running it what is a recognizably normal political campaign and some people are doing what is half a very professionally run campaign at its headquarters and in its ad spend and then half this kind of mad chaotic drama.

But it's not totally unlike what's happened over here, has it?

That we have this this form of conservativism now and in a few days we'll know whether it's Cami Badenock or Robert Jenreck that are leading it.

But I mean neither of them are coming from sort of mainstream conservative with a small C, are they?

I mean we had this mad situation where people like Jacob Brees Monk have been presenting themselves as the anti-establishment candidate.

And Boris Johnson is incredibly successful at coming and basically just kind of smashing things up and acting unconstitutionally and proroguing parliament and being knocked down by the courts and things.

And then now we're all talking about leaving the ECHR.

I mean, we've gone to quite an extreme on that side.

That's a long way from your sort of mainstream old-fashioned conservatives.

It's now embarrassing because there is almost nothing they want to conserve.

The disruptor party would do better.

But I presume that's the same.

You detach yourself from the old party, as with the Republicans, Republicans, and you do well.

Yeah, I think it's a difference between a Conservative party and a radical right party.

And whatever else you want to call it, I would say that probably Jenrik and Badnock are more from the radical right than they are from, you know, Berkeyan Conservatism.

And it was traditional that what happened in a Tory leadership election post-Cameron is you have one sort of middle-of-the-road person and then one more fire-breathing person.

And we go for Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak, right?

And now, no, there's not even a kind of the Nando's mild option is no longer available.

It's just two different grades of spicy.

spicy but Adam you you sort of study the endorsement thing a lot and you probably know more individual endorsements than I would say just about anyone in the I mean like just you're like you know a lot of who's endorsed I know when the Guardian went lib dem so you I know when the independent said let's have another coalition

so there is something in maybe in that it doesn't matter to individual voters but the fact that papers might be declining to provide a an endorsement because they're nervous of retribution if Trump wins or if a billionaire proprietor says, you you know, I want to keep him sweet.

Well, I think in this case, it is significant, isn't it?

Because Patrick Soon Chung is not just a newspaper owner, he's got biotech and AI firm startups and all sorts of things that have got contracts within the healthcare sector in America and could be affected.

I mean, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, I mean, if they decide to start cracking down on the way that Amazon treats their tax bill, then that could be interesting.

But more to the point, he's got Blue Origin as well, hasn't he?

Because they all end up in space, don't they?

All of these billionaires, that's what they then start like mask, they start spending their money on.

But I mean, that's largely

contracts with you know the American Defense Department and

things.

So

there are sort of direct, obvious ways that their businesses could be damaged by a vengeful president, such as we know Trump is promising to be.

Yeah, and he's explicitly said that's what he wants to do.

He said that there was a comment he made on a podcast about the fact I'm going to be watching Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Facebook, very closely.

And if he does anything wrong,

I'm going to see him in jail.

I mean, I think there has so the tech leaders have all started phoning him up.

He was recounting both on Rogan and the most recent rally how Sundar Pekai of Google had phoned him up and said how well the McDonald's stunt had done.

He claimed it was the most Google thing ever, and I thought, I think it's probably pornography, actually.

Donald's approach, but well done.

But clearly, they've all, all the tech guys, this, you know, the tech elite, like the tech workforce is still, I think, donating more to a Democrat, but there is now a cadre of people who think, God, we better suck up to this guy.

Do you think that Trump has seen the latest private eye cover?

Because I felt that finished him off really

in terms of an anti-endorsement.

I mean, surely, surely, it's all over for him now.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know how he can recover from.

Was it Donald McRonald?

Donald McRonald.

I enjoyed that a lot.

And I think Elon Musk is the interesting counterexample to that, which is one of the reasons he has gone all in on Trump is that he thinks Trump will just give him regulatory ability to build rockets and not get in his way.

But the funny thing about both him and Peter Thiel, who is the founder of Palantir and a big investment venture capitalist, is that they're both kind of, or we're the height of capitalism.

We're kind of these Randian supermen, and both of them really depend heavily on government contracts.

It's going to health data and things like that, and surveillance technologies and AI.

Everyone's obviously puts AI in it because it means that people give you more money.

But the Department of Defense contracts for both of them are absolutely their lifebloods.

So they don't actually like competition all that much.

Musk came on stage and said, so

the US budget is something that says 6.4 trillion a year.

And someone, and the guy who was introducing him said, How much do you reckon you could cut out of that?

And he went, I reckon the Department of Government Efficiency, Doge, could cut out 2 trillion.

And it was like, Oh, okay,

I look forward to seeing you try.

But if people had to think about what that actually means, in practice, you know, if you say, I'm sorry,

we're going to shut the roads,

in order to cut that kind of figure, it would be immensely unpopular.

So, people are allowed to get away with saying insane, wild things with no then drill down.

That's in America, that has completely gone.

The idea that things you say at a political rally have in some way to be tethered to reality is so over.

And yet, here, all we're hearing about is: well, Labour may have broken a manifesto commitment, depending on how you define working people.

Right, and the equivalent would be kind of Keir Starmer going out and saying, you know, I just decided that we're no longer going to have bees.

Look, we can't let Helen get away with this podcast without a prediction.

Surely.

I just feel like I'm the weight of a thousand humiliating sons of being asked to do predictions.

I'm not going to make a prediction, but I'm going to say that I find myself, more than people in Britain that I talk to, optimistic about Harris for two reasons.

She is sneakily ahead in the polling, still.

She's not dropped behind in the polling.

And the early vote returns look good for her

because lots of people mail in ballots or do in-person early voting.

I think there might very well be a big turnout among women who are driven by the Dobbs decision to overturn the fed um the constitutional right to abortion.

And you probably don't hear as much from those women because they don't spend all their time on X screaming at you.

But m like middle-aged women are quite reliable as a block at doing things they say they're doing, whereas eighteen year old men are less reliable, I would say, at doing things on a particular day at a particular time.

So I think I'm probably I'm I think I'm more optimistic about a Harris victory, which is my personal endorsement, just in case anyone has been waiting.

I think she probably did better at it.

I will make a prediction.

I will make a very confident prediction.

I think that most readers of the LA Times and Washington Post will manage to cast a vote for Kamala Harris anyway

without being told what to do.

But basically, yeah, about 250,000 people can swing it in either direction.

So there is no clear winner in the way, someone who's ahead ahead.

And none of the polls are trustworthy because they've all tried to readjust what they felt were mistakes they made last time.

And we don't know, they drastically undercounted the Democrats in the midterms in 2022, and they drastically undercounted Trump supporters in its previous 2016, for example.

So the polls have been wrong.

And if you think about the polls for the UK election, we were having MRPs that said the Tories were going to be on 50.

And then actually, what happened there is not only were maybe those statistically their methods wrong, but also the polls dramatically tightened in the last couple of days when the Tories switched their message to, please don't hurt us that badly.

We're we're never going to lose, but we'd like to still survive.

So I'm afraid you're going to have to just, they call it the polar coaster, which is that you can just check the polls every single day and kind of worry yourself to death.

Yeah, well, I read a headline saying, election in Georgia rigged by Russians.

And then I realised it was not Georgia, it was the country, Georgia.

You had the wrong Georgia on your mind.

We should probably turn to a bit more, that was just magnificent.

We should probably turn to some

British politics because, you know, Britain is capable of producing world-leading headlines as well.

Actually, is it?

That one about the cheese theft was the only one that really broke through to me when I was in America.

Well, that was fantastic.

But there was also over the weekend, Helen, so you might have been on the red eye at this point, back from the Caucasus.

Not the Caucasus, that's the other Georgia.

Anyway,

Labour MP Mike Amesbury was suspended from the Labour Party after there was some CCTV footage released of him supposedly punching a man to the ground and punching him a bit more while he was on the ground.

He has lost the labour whip.

This is being investigated by the police, so obviously we shouldn't say too much in either direction.

But it might be a fun opportunity for a little look back at political punch-ups in previous years.

It's the sub-Judice A quiz.

That is it.

So you're only going to be quizzed right now on punch-ups that have already happened and that have been totally litigated.

Yes.

Anything you say is safe.

Hooray.

Mike Ainsbury did say when he was elected, re-elected this year, I'm going to fight for all my constituents.

Dimension is going to also be fighting with.

Yes.

Okay.

Right.

Now, you remember the story of Eric Doyce, who pled guilty to attacking four people in a House of Commons bar in 2012.

Yes.

Yes.

And it was entirely different because he was attacking other MPs.

They weren't members of the public.

It's a much lesser crime.

Firstly, can anyone tell me what kind of event he was at?

Can you say it was like the Temperance League or something?

It wasn't.

Fundraiser for the AA.

Quaker meeting?

I was so close in the sound of it.

It was a karaoke night.

It's kind of the opposite of a side of Quaker meeting.

I don't say anything at either, is what is the similarity.

No, he said there were too many Tories in the bar, and

that was why he lashed out.

It was one of the reasons, anyway.

Eric Joyce Punch is known in Westminster Law as the punch that changed politics because it was his deselection in Falkirk that led to the, if you remember, Lem McCluskey trying to get his very close associate to that seat, which led to the redo of the Labour rules, which led to the change of the Labour leadership election rules, which meant you only had to get nominated by a certain number of MPs and then you're on the ballot, which is what got Jeremy Corbyn elected Labour leader.

And then Labour not campaigning strongly enough to remain in the EU is attributed by many to not activating those voters and thereby us doing Brexit.

And there is a butterfly effect, isn't it?

Direct line from Eric Joyce's karaoke addled fist to us leaving the EU.

Superb.

Can't fault it.

That's what happened.

Joyce floating like a butterfly and spinning like a beef.

Wow.

Excellent.

Well, now let's go to another political punch up with a butterfly effect, actually, too.

This is a great one.

We go to Ryl in 2001.

The Prescott Punch.

This was Labour's re-election campaign, as it were.

So 2001.

And Prescott's a former boxer.

So

that makes a difference.

He was professional.

And actually, didn't he start out doing cabaret on ships?

He was a ship steward.

He was a steward.

Steward, not a cabaret.

Sorry, you're absolutely right.

He didn't do cabaret really.

He was serving gin and toning, which gave Tory members a lot of chances for snobbery for most of his career.

Is that so?

Okay.

Well, he was walloped with an egg and then immediately lashed out.

John Lanchester, the writer, has a theory about the butterfly effect of this one.

Can anyone tell me how John Prescott's punch changed the course of history in terms of the Iraq war?

Was Prescott anti, and therefore after this his opinion was discounted?

Not bad.

It's about how he hit the farmer who had walloped him with an egg.

Right.

Left hook, wasn't it?

Left hook.

That discredited UN weapons detectors somewhere.

Standing behind that farmer was Hans Blix.

No, it was.

It was that.

Now that would be good.

This is John Lanchester's theory, so put tongs of caution around it.

But basically, Lanchester reckons that he hit with his left, Prescott, because that was the hand closest to the farmer.

Whereas if he'd hit with his right, he might well have broken this guy's jaw, being a former boxer, which might have hospitalized him and meant he actually probably would have had to step down.

As it was, Blair said, John is John.

John is John.

Yeah.

Now, if he'd had to stand down, Blair might have had to appoint a new deputy leader of the party, probably one who'd had less clout with the Labour left, which might have meant that when Blair had his big vote on the war in 2003, he would have had less support from Labour-backed benches, which might have meant he'd lost it, which might have meant that Britain didn't get involved.

It's not a slam-dunk butterfly, but I quite like it.

Who would he have appointed then?

Unclear.

I mean, if he'd ended up with Robin Cook as the deputy leader, then it would have been quite a different

had then resigned from that role.

Maybe that would have changed him.

Food for thought.

What was Prescott's nickname, which predated the punch-up, but proved very apt in the event of it?

Well, it was two jags, because he owned two jaggers, and then he was known as two jabs.

That's slightly inaccurately, because he only hit him once.

That was one of his nicknames, but there's another nickname he had.

Bruiser.

Oh, you're so close.

If I say that Blair was nicknamed Bambi..

Thumper.

Brilliant.

Thumper.

That was his other nickname.

Now, why, in the early 90s, did Alastair Campbell punch Michael White, political editor of The Guardian?

Oh, I know this.

It was because Michael White said it was a good thing that Robert Maxwell had died.

No, he told a joke.

He told a joke about it.

I think the joke goes something something along these lines.

Watch line.

What is in the sea?

Going bob, bob, bob.

And the answer was drowning Robert Maxwell.

I mean, it's not the most tasteful joke ever.

But beloved podcaster Alastair Campbell was so offended on Robert Maxwell.

Presumably at that point, not yet well-known pension fraudsters.

So Robo.

He was the man who saved the mirror.

Great eulogy is being paid to him everywhere.

And it was about four days later that everyone went, yeah, all that stuff that was in private eye.

He actually might not have been such a great guy after all.

And they discovered the 450 million hole in the mirror's pension funds.

Well, Campbell was political editor of the mirror at the time.

He was indeed.

That's like punching someone over sort of Jimmy Saville's honor and then having to go update regarding the punch.

You can now punch me back because I need to withdraw that.

Look, you've all been very impressive back to the 90s.

We're going to go even further back now.

Which MP and eventual Prime Minister owed their first front bench job to their predecessor kicking someone down a flight of stairs?

Adam looked so confident when you said we were going to go a bit further back in history, but now it looks tense.

How much further back?

30 odd years.

Oh, right.

I was going to like, Disrately.

Was it Disrately?

Pitt the Younger.

Is it Giles Brandruff?

The answer to most of your questions is Giles Brandreff.

No, I think that's appalling.

And this person's predecessor.

I'm going to give you another clue.

This person's predecessor was a chap called Sir Walter Bromley Davenport, the Tory MP for Knutsford at the time.

Wow.

This is good.

Gosh, they know how to pick him in Knutsford, don't they?

So then they got Neil Hamilton and then they got George Osborne.

Wow.

Okay, shall I tell you what happened?

Yeah, yeah.

Soon after the war, Sir Walter Bromley Davenport saw an unfamiliar person leaving the House of Commons just at the time of a three-line whip vote, like compulsory vote, challenged him, sort of shouted after him.

The person kept on going.

Sir Walter kicked him down the stairs when this guy refused to stop.

Anyway, the person Sir Walter was in the whip's office, the person he kicked down the stairs turned out to be the Belgian ambassador.

And the consequent vacancy in the whip's office was filled by a young Edward Heath.

Wow.

That is good.

No, Walter probably did not.

I'm not kicking down the stairs with the ambassador, just the information.

There you go.

Again, I just feel like kicking the Belgian ambassador down the stairs is a private eye phrase in the making.

It is, it is.

And finally, we can't have a punch-up political quiz without a brief mention of the UKIP.

Stephen Wolf, Mike Hookham, Barney in 2016 in Brussels.

With what headline did Private Eye sensitively cover this story in the jokes pages?

Ian, I'm looking at you as you probably wrote this joke.

Yeah, and I'm thinking, I can't remember.

Was it a pun on UKIP?

No, it wasn't.

That would have been good.

Shall I tell you?

Yeah.

Meeting breaks out at UKIP fight.

Classic.

That was Nick Newman's joke.

I remember it.

Well, you're all winners.

You all did marvellously.

There you go.

That's it for this episode of Page 94.

Thank you very much for listening.

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

Until then, if you want...

to get more page 94, go and listen to the other episodes or go and get a copy of the magazine, private-night.co.uk subscriptions are available and reasonably priced.

Until then, thank you very much to Helen, Adam and Ian.

Thank you to you for listening and thank you as always to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing.

Bye for now.

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