123: Party Games

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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 Eye Office with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen, and Ian Hislop.

We are here to discuss all the news that's happened since the last edition of the magazine.

Later on in the show, we are going to be talking about what's happened to London journalism in the last week.

Quick shortcut, nothing good.

And also about Mohamed Fayed and the recent revelations about his sex life, which will be unsurprising to anyone who has been reading the eye since the late 90s.

But first, we are on the week of the Tory conference, and we are going to be covering the ghost of Tories past.

Because, Helen, there are lots and lots and lots of, you'd think, retired Tories knocking about.

Even now, Liz Truss is doing a victory lap of Tory conferences by having lost her seat, saying she definitely.

Well, there was a question where she said that I would have done better than Rishi Sinek.

And that is actually partly arguable, right?

I mean, actually,

could she have done worse?

Possible.

Yeah, I think she could.

I think she could get a seat at the election, whereas she did not.

Is that ineffective at all?

Actually,

that would have been bad.

She also says that she thinks the mini-budget would have worked had she just been given a bit more time.

That was the problem.

Yeah, but received a sort of hero's welcome.

And people cheered when she said that, you know, if there is anything good coming up, she said Donald Trump might win the election.

Right.

Which is fascinating to me, right?

Because there is this established problem that the Tory membership is once again going to vote for the leader, and it is a very small and unrepresentative group.

And it's got an entire media ecosystem, as discussed on podcast Pass him,

set up to catered to it, right?

But it is essentially trapped in this echo chamber in which Liz Truss has been robbed.

Boris Johnson has been robbed.

You know, Rishi Sinek has been robbed.

However, I thought the main attraction this week is the fact that Boris Johnson's memoirs have begun to be serialised.

And I thought you'd like a quiz.

Oh, we would.

Adam would really like a quiz because he's actually read them all.

I did the homework.

I was told before the weekend that we were going to talk about Boris Johnson's books.

So I actually went and did the reading because I'm such a goody-goody.

Such a swan.

It nearly killed me.

You're

the absolute antithesis of Boris.

Yeah.

Whereas I was dedicated to the Boris method.

I've read none of the extracts and I'm going to wing it.

So that you'll rely on the queen to tell you about them.

That's one of the things that's in the extracts is the queen tells him about an RAF fighter that's fallen into the sea.

And he's like, well, she seemed to be more well informed about it than I was.

And you're like, she actually reads her red boxes.

That's the difference.

Okay, Boris Johnson's grandmother's nickname was A, Gan Gan, B, Granny Butter, C, Granny Pack, or D, the Big G.

It's Granny Butter.

It is Granny Butter.

It's Granny Butter.

Yeah.

I know that because it's awful and lame.

She was French, so presumably she should have been Granny Boer, but for some reason wasn't.

The Daily Mail feels it necessary to translate the French that Boris throws in during his conversations with Macron,

and it just sounds like pure franglais.

This one, Boris, talking about joté c'est jouet de all de la poussette,

throw his toys out of the prayer.

They've been doing a little Boris glossary since he started the column, but normally the words are English, which they're glossing.

But when he had the column in the Daily Telegraph, you know, they could rely on Telegraph readers, you know, having at least a copy of the OED to hand, if not a decent public school education, that would mean they were familiar with basic Latin phrases.

I sense this bit may have been a joke, but it's very hard to tell.

What did he not offer Macron in return for a Brexit deal?

A, a new channel, B, his daughter's hand in marriage, C, a nuclear pact, or D, a hydrogen-fueled Concorde.

It was his daughter's hand in marriage.

I think Billy's been secretly sweating up on these.

The one I can't work out if it's a joke or not is the hydrogen-fueled Concorde.

Given that the original jet fuel power one blew up, filling it with the same fuel as the Hindenburg seems like a hostage to fortune, but there we go.

Okay, it's also that the boris solution to everything is a bridge, isn't it?

We'll just build another bridge or a tunnel or something.

Yeah, we need another one of those.

Some massive bit of infrastructure that isn't going to happen and can be named after him.

I think that's the main truth.

Truly.

Which word was not used in the

extracts?

A Boffo, B.

Rubicund, C, grasping like a Grampus, or D, Kachingaroo?

Oh, Kachingaroo is very Johnson-y.

Let's say the first, what was the first one again?

Boffo.

I think he won't have used Boffo.

Yeah, I think Boffo.

Boffo sounds like Helen Lewis trying to do Boris to me.

No, I think he did use that.

Correct, Adam.

A, you know me too well, and sadly, I think you probably know the works of Boris Johnson.

True.

Well, that's good.

I think you're all winners because you didn't pay any money to read that.

I think Andy's the winner because he didn't read it.

Yeah.

Well, I'm just waiting for the full thing to come out, which will be out, I think, a week after this podcast goes out.

It's out on the 10th, and I will hopefully be, unless it finally finishes me off, be reviewing it for the eye.

Well, there's going to be small children in Boris costumes like queuing outside Branters at Waterstones at midnight, aren't they, to get their copy?

Most of them here.

That is Carrie's Instagram.

And they're looking for fantasy and fiction, so that's what they'll get.

No, we had a list originally, we were trying to help him with titles because

unleashed is sort of feeble.

And we had

a range of titles, and we missed one which is untrue

yes the bit when he yeah when he talks about how he's going to invade Holland to seize back the vaccines is a sort of bit of a fever dream isn't it yes I mean that is sort of boy's own yeah um leading a raid Churchill style up the Dardanelles to Holland I mean it wouldn't be that would be the geography involved and very embarrassed members of the general staff going I don't think we can invade a NATO ally and my guess is it was a throwaway remark at a meeting that just embarrassed everybody.

And he's now presenting it as though this was a revelatory, brilliant idea of his.

This book is going to be big, isn't it?

Annoyingly, it's probably going to sell lots and lots of copies.

I'm not sure any books sell that many copies at the moment.

The non-fiction market is really sluggish.

There was one genuine, I would say, revelation everywhere apart from people who read the eye, which is that he writes about the fact that the late queen was suffering from bone cancer.

And that was something that we funky had that, didn't he?

But everyone else.

Funky did, and Giles Brandreth actually had scooped Boris on that one.

He mentioned it in passing in a piece.

But yeah, that was, I think it was the first sort of kind of official confirmation from the former Prime Minister, wasn't it?

Because everyone else said the death certificate said old age, and no one else sort of seemed to talk about it.

But it does account for the fact that everybody knew for a long time she was, you know, she was on the way out.

He says that he thinks that she held on in order to see him off, which established bolsters my long-term conspiracy theory that meeting Liz Truss was the final blow that she thought.

I'm absolutely convinced about that one.

I'm

absolutely certain that the Queen said, I am not letting that man do the address at my funeral.

I'm going to hang on as long as I possibly can.

All right, so she got Liz Truss instead.

Yes, yes.

Yes, no one wants to be your funeral to be some guy going, uh, cripes, um, just a book of

fusion and Paul's.

Jolly good old Grumpy Nicholas, the Queen.

Yes, poor old Theresa May comes out of it quite badly, doesn't she?

She gets described as Grumpy Nickus, and he has a whole riff about her nostrils, which is very peculiar.

Well, given that he spent a whole paragraph saying that the thing that the Queen really admired about him was how unbitter he was

to have lost being Prime Minister, and then he just puts the boot into Theresa May and then into Rishi Sunak.

He's extremely bitter.

And as ever with the jovial Boris Mask, it slips pretty quick.

Oh, there's two very rude bits about his sister.

He refers to my sister, the bracket, like the ubiquitous Rachel.

And it's just, and on the flotilla down the Thames, the remain one, there was brackets, inevitably Rachel.

And there's just a kind of like, just a little knife goes in every so often.

But I thought the description of Rachel on the boat shouting over the fisherman's issue in the EU, he ends up concluding that Rachel's presence there may well have swung it against Remain.

And I thought the family arrogance never ends.

Even in opposition, it has to be a Johnson who swings the vote.

I thought the most interesting thing about the book is the way he's now trying to reposition himself as kind of the anti-Boris as PM.

You know, he's now saying, oh, lockdowns, I'm not sure they were a great idea.

You know, how could I, the great libertarian, have been persuaded to do?

There's various bits where he just says, I can't believe that I did that.

I mean, knows how the rest of us feel now.

But there is this sort of representation.

It's a bit like, you know, as you were saying, this constituency now that the Tory Party are playing for, that he's decided that that one didn't quite work out for him.

So now he wants to redefine himself as the anti-him, which is quite weird.

I mean, the idea that he says the only thing he regrets about the COVID inquiry and the process of examining his role is the fact that he apologised.

And at the time, the whole machinery of government was saying, why does no one believe that the Prime Minister is sorry?

Because he wasn't.

And now barely four years later, he's saying, no, I mean,

when I said sorry, I was lying.

I mean, he's literally saying he was lying all the way through the inquiry, all the way through the committee.

So why on earth at the time was he so outraged that no one believed him?

No, it's extraordinary.

And downplaying it as, you know, it was a matter of some 15 parties or so.

I was assured that all the regulations were being followed.

Yeah, many of them barely parties at all.

Right, but nonetheless, you were allowed zero parties.

What's exasperating about having to read this stuff again is, say, the COVID thing.

We've been here.

He has been proved to have lied all the way through.

He was hounded out of office, quite rightly, for his behaviour at the time.

But he won't die.

Maybe undead is a better title for this, but he's a sort of blonde zombie who corpses around, and there's just no way, there's just no way of stopping him but is that because people are willing to go along with it and i do think the book is going to be big i think i've spoken to a couple of booksellers who said the pre-orders

they're great they're really healthy there's going to be lots and lots and lots of copies shifted is that because there is a sizable constituency of people who want to believe the shtick and who are perfectly willing to go along with his version of events even though it has been proved untrue well he did a little video for the mail in which he said and will i be making a comeback and i think there is still that feeling of can that kind of ecosystem around him him make him happen again?

Like I think what you said Adam is really interesting that he's now saying maybe COVID was a Chinese bioweapon or maybe it was an accident in a lab I think is what he says you know the lab leak theory which is very popular online like it's not completely ridiculous idea but it is something that is in those kind of spaces that are very COVID sceptical that taken as gospel he is again now a lockdown sceptic which is where the kind of more the right wing energy is and I think that that's you know Trump is in exactly the same position in America which he also oversaw a very good vaccine programme, which is now not spoken about at all during the presidential race because it's incredibly unpopular with the kind of people that he wants to appeal to.

And so we're in a weird situation, this will be coming out in the middle of the Tory kind of beauty pageant, I believe, as we're having to call it, but of people saying loon things because they need to appeal to that audience that wants to hear the loon things.

Whereas the bits of, like, he does briefly reference the vaccine task force and Kate Binger, a genuinely brilliant achievement, right?

That we started vaccinating people really early.

We saved loads of lives doing it.

But you're right, he complains about not getting any credit for it, but it's because his whole shticker pipe politics isn't about running a government that works, right?

It's about being cool and awesome and raiding Holland with my frogmen.

Is all of this just a sign that the Tory Party hasn't moved on

even now as they're in the process of choosing their next leader?

Well, interesting, Bandnock said we have to move on from Johnson's.

Right.

And whether that plays well or not, we shall see.

The others haven't said that.

She was very specific about it.

Talking of ghosts of Tories past, Theresa May, now Baroness May of Maidenhead, came out and made

what I thought was a very good intervention in the Times this week, saying, actually, if you look at the seats that we lost in the last election, the Lib Dems are a huge danger to us.

Actually, reform obviously are sucking up a lot of votes, but in terms of seats, we should really be worried.

She also said we should remember we're a centre-right party, not a right-wing party, which I thought all of which was very sensible.

But the thing that's very striking is that no one has yet got to that stage in the Tory leadership contest, right?

Tom Tugen, apart from producing an unholy amount of merch, has spent the entire time saying, I'm not a squishy moderate.

I mean, I'm dead right-wing me.

And I think that's the way people do when they're not.

Right, exactly.

That's you have to still put on that costume in order to win over that particular primary.

And I think that they've just got to go through a cycle of that.

I think that who is the most right-wing is the question that still defines Tory leadership contests.

But it's not necessarily where the votes are.

They're losing the waitrose belt.

Yeah, maybe they're going to do the mirror image of what Kierstahmer did, which is when he had to play to a Labour Party constituency to get elected as leader.

He said, Gosh, I'm terribly left-wing, you know.

I'm basically Corbyn, but in a nicer suit.

He didn't say he was paying for it at that point.

And then came in and abandoned all of the pledges that he made then and actually turned out to be very, very far to the right of Corbyn.

Maybe Robert Jenrick has been playing the long game, the longest game, and he will suddenly turn out to be

a very vanilla centre-right person if he wins it.

He'll take off his Hamas our terrorists hoodie, which he's been opportunistically photographed wearing all over the place.

And what's it going to reveal?

It's very complicated, actually.

T-shirt underneath it.

Yeah, there are deep roots in this conflict.

Yeah,

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We should move on, I think, to something that's just as depressing, which is the state of print journalism in 2024.

This is a London-centric story because it's about the Evening Standard, which last week went out of print as a daily paper for the first time since 1827

and has rebranded itself.

It's now the London Standard.

And it's a really interesting, it's really, really interesting because I mean lots of Fleet Street has been in turmoil recently as we're probably going to talk about later.

But the Evening Standard

is a very well-established paper which has been on the skids for some time.

It's been struggling to attract advertisers.

It's been struggling to attract readers.

COVID and mobile phones basically did a huge amount of the work of polishing it off, but so did lots of decisions made about who was going to edit the paper, what it was going to contain,

the kind of writing that went into it, and who it was trying to appeal to.

And the next thing that happens, editor Dylan Jones, formerly of GQ, is still in charge.

He's the editor-in-chief of the London Standard.

And we've seen one print edition so far, which has a bizarre kind of AI Keir Starmer on the front.

It's really peculiar.

Presumably because it would have involved paying someone to come up with an image of Keir Starmer either to take the photograph or draw a picture of him.

And they've just fired a lot of people.

But the new idea is that it's going to be, I just want to quote the idea behind the new London standard.

The London standard will be available outside tube stations as well as in certain gyms, galleries, museums, theatres, and private members' clubs.

Is that a big market, is it?

Well,

drunk Rear Admirals.

It's very much trying to say it's going to be a premium paper.

If you read what Dylan Jones said about it or what the the chairman Albert Reed said, the word premium keeps being used.

This is going to be a premium product.

And it's always been a funny kind of tension about the paper as to whether it's for all Londoners, or before 2008, all Londoners who had 50p and wanted to buy a copy,

or whether it's for a

kind of select group of Londoners who might not be outside the tube station anyway.

I mean, they might drive past it, but it's a really interesting question about what makes a newspaper relevant, especially a geographically limited one, and if it makes sense to have that in a city which is a global city as well.

It always had two kinds of aspects to it, one of which was the daily paper, and then it had this ES magazine, this glossy, very fashion-y, very kind of Chelsea-based.

It was all the stories about various rock stars from the 60s daughters who were opening up boutiques and that sort of thing.

That they've got rid of, and this, just economically, this is one of the many things I don't understand about this.

They've got rid of the glossy paper.

They kept the magazine going.

They made all the members of staff on the magazine redundant, but they kept them on until September so they could do a special fashion week issue, because it was London Fashion Week, which obviously is doing, you know, like the September issue of Vogue and all those kind of things.

You can sell an awful lot of glossy advertising.

Now they've got this

new London standard, which essentially is not a newspaper.

It's a magazine.

It's a kind of a roundup of stuff, some newsy stuff that's been going on during the week, and then a load of features.

But it's printed on newsprint, so they can't even sell the high-end advertising.

You know, your Gucci's and all of your Petate Philippes and all of those kind of people are not going to want to buy tatty newspaper advertising.

That's why we have almost no adverts who'd rather die from high-end fashion chains.

That's absolutely it.

But also, I mean, economically as well, I...

Why the intervention didn't happen sooner?

I don't know.

I mean, the idea now seems to be to ape the success of Time Out, which is given away free outside tube stations for a while and was a summary of everything cool that was going on in London before it went out of business a couple of years ago.

But then you look at Metro, which was using the same dump bins in various stations around the capital.

That's still doing really, really well.

That's still giving out hundreds of thousands of copies a day.

So there is a market there.

I mean, most people, when you go on a bus or you go on the tube, they are now looking at their phones.

But there are still, you know,

there obviously is still a print market for free stuff out there that you can sell advertising off the back of.

And Metro have made it work with news.

That's the really striking thing about Metro is if you look at all of the newspaper front pages of the morning, Metro will always have a different story and they'll have a different take on it.

I mean, beginning of this week, Monday, most of the papers were going with sort of the psychodramas from the Tory conference and various political things off the back of the weekend.

Metro had seized on a report about the number of drink driving incidents and the fact that those are rocketing, which really surprised me.

I'm just really unusual thing because you think of that as being sort of 70s thing that's been stamped on.

I thought, well, that's an interesting news story.

I want to read more about that.

So there is still a market that you can still do with news, even given away for free.

And the standard just seems to have failed to grasp that.

And And then I'm not sure what they're grasping at.

I think they're grasping at something that isn't there anymore now.

It's premium.

They're going premium.

But I'm interested in that because Private Eye runs this set of journalistic awards, which the standard, despite its proprietor not being frightfully keen on the eye generally,

they kept winning or being shortlisted because they ran really interesting stories about the way London works.

Whether it's that brilliant piece about bussing the workers in at four o'clock and that unseen London that you were doing there, or the recent one about the courts failing completely in London.

I mean,

they were very good at news, and the combination of that with the culture and the theatre of views and whatever struck me as not illogical or ridiculous, but quite complimentary.

So, Tristan Kirk, who did those pieces on the single justice procedure and won the Paul Foot Award this year, is being kept on.

He's not one of the many, many people who have been Ray Redundant from the standard.

But the idea, from the look of it, he's not going to get a look-in on this new print product at all.

Is that these great stories he's still churning out on that extraordinary miscarriages of justice on the standard website?

But they're kind of buried there amongst all this.

They don't seem to be taking advantage of that kind of news machine that they've got and the good people they have got.

I do wonder whether that's the only way to make a paper like the standard really successful is to combine a strong news operation with all the other stuff, all the cultural stuff, because London is a global city.

It is, you know, it's a really important city, but you can't do it and also only the news stories recently, there have been so many about this or that party in West Hollywood.

And you would pick up your copy at Stockwell and think, why am I reading about this in this paper?

So I want to know about something that's happening in Woolwich, you know.

And so it's really tricky, I think, to make something work as a free sheet.

with a quote-unquote premium product.

I think the thing that I feel like I've learned over the last, what, 20 years in journalism is that you have to have something that other people don't have in your product and you have to ask them to pay for it.

And that doesn't necessarily have to be news, right?

It can be writers.

It can be if there's a columnist that you think is so good you can't get them anywhere else, people will pay for that.

If there's a coverage of an issue that people care about that you can't get somewhere else, if there's a package of entertainment news, they can't get anywhere else.

But the IAI thing is really interesting, right?

Because I think

it's symptomatic of everything that is wrong with that approach to journalism that the standards end up taking, which is that there's a thing called content, which is basically slurry, and you just pour out 100 mils of content.

and that's what people just want content.

And you can cut the cost of producing that, rather than the idea that you produce specific things that people value enough to pay you money for.

The AI Brian Sewell was the low point of that, I felt.

But it's worrying as well.

I mean, the way that, I mean, that's done just for novelty value.

That was a one-off, wasn't it?

There's a lot of stuff being done with AI across, as you were saying, other local newspapers across Britain.

I mean, Reach PLC, which owns an enormous number of them, has this AI tool called Gutenberg, I think it's called,

which supposedly repurposes bits of

a copy which are put out for one newspaper website for every other newspaper website throughout the country.

So effectively, presumably that means changing Birmingham for Liverpool for the Liverpool Echo or whatever.

But actually, when you look at the stuff that Reach are putting out on the websites, barely any of it is local at all.

I mean, there's an enormous amount of it is just sort of the ones that we get copied in quite often on the memos that are being sent around by their digital editor-in-chief, David Higginson, and the ones he's really excited about are kind of three amazing cleaning hacks that will revolutionize your sink.

And you just think, really,

is this what is going to bring people to

their local newspaper, bring them back?

But this is back to what Helen was saying about having something specific to offer that people can't get elsewhere.

So Private Eye has lots of investigative reporting that you won't get elsewhere.

It also has lots of jokes you won't get elsewhere.

It provides something that is quite specific and which not a lot of other people do.

An objective view of itself.

But the Daily Mail went big online by being very, very good at doing pap photos and very kind of intrusive celebrity stuff and said, that's what we're going to do.

And we're going to do it really, really well.

The Guardian has its own things that only The Guardian does online.

You know, they've taken their brand and done that.

But wasn't, I mean, the point of the standard, that it was a London paper and you got things in it that, you know, the rest of the country is always complaining that, you know, everything's London-centric.

Well, the standard was London-centric.

That was the point of it.

But I find the idea there's no place for that really sad and difficult to quite square.

Well, my cynical side says Evgeny Lebedev now has his peerage.

He's now under a Labour government instead of a friendly Tory government.

Maybe

there's no real advantage to him in losing money on a newspaper anymore.

I mean, is it just as crude as that?

Am I being unfair to Evgeny Lee?

Friend of this podcast, Evgeny Lebedev.

Well, it's not just him either, is it?

There's the mysterious Saudi investor who is rumoured to be the one that pulled the plug on it and finally said, look, this is unfeasible.

You can't keep producing this print newspaper.

So, I mean, there are

the point of having Saudi investors worried about money.

I thought the entire point of foreign investors was that they didn't care, they just keep churning the money in.

It's not all miserable, though, because there is an interesting model that's happening on Substack at newsletter levels.

So, Manchester Mill has now expanded around and is trying to recreate essentially a very lo-fi, low-cost version.

Jim Waterson took voluntary redundancy from The Guardian, he's now launched a a subset called London Centric.

He's trying to essentially replicate the evening standard as a sort of one-man operation.

And I think it'll be really interesting because they are essentially cutting it down to the bone in terms of staffing.

They don't have those print distribution costs to pay, which are genuinely.

I mean, we haven't mentioned the fact that since our last podcast went out, the Observer is potentially up for sale for Tortoise.

But by buying that, they would be taking on a huge cost of print and distribution.

Getting a newspaper to the like Orkney is an enormous logistical and financial challenge to take on in this day and age.

And so, maybe the future of local coverage is people opting into it and paying for it and it coming to their inbox.

Yes, it's kind of hyper-local, and you need to be quite engaged to engage to pay for it, which is a shame, as in it's a shame that it's not as immediately available.

And the real unspoken thing that's hanging over all of this is how long it's going to be feasible for people to keep producing daily print newspapers.

And I think it's really interesting.

I mean, we've got a yet another runner, front runner,

in the race to take over the Telegraph, that endless battle that seems to have been going on for most of our lives now.

But it's

a man by the name of Dovid Efun, there's a challenge, the sub-editors, not David, but David, who is the owner of the New York Sun.

Now, the New York Sun does not have a print outlet.

It is an online-only thing.

So, you know, this is, I'm afraid, the way the industry is going.

Not necessarily fortnightly magazines, which are still selling

enormous numbers in print because they don't have a website.

I don't have a lot of the room at this point.

I don't want to hear about the decline of the print.

But even if you were a Saudi investor with bottomless pockets to come in and say, we've got this amazing product, but we're going to print it out in the early hours of the morning and then put it in vans and send it around the country, you might think, in 2024, is there an easier and better and cheaper way of doing this?

Well, no one's found it.

There's also the fact that if you put stuff out in petrol forecourts and in WH Smiths and everything, it's big advertising for the fact that those papers exist.

Sometimes I sort of forget about things that don't, you know, with social media now having turned into weird little silos and Facebook and Meta its owners saying that we don't really want to do news anymore.

Twitter is now a sort of mad hellscape of conspiracy theories.

What are the channels by which your publication advertises itself to people who already don't read you?

That's shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.

And I think there must be also a worry that without that projection of the newsstand, like, you know, the fact that I might not buy all the papers, but I see them when I go to the garage.

That and the fact that broadcast media amplifies amplifies it as well.

I mean, the fact that the BBC do still put up the front pages every morning, and the Independent for a while tried to pretend that they were still a newspaper when they went online only and produced this front page for something that wasn't a newspaper anymore.

You don't see much of that anymore.

I don't think it makes the BBC pay-per-view or the Sky Paper Review.

But it's not just having those front pages there, that then does set the agenda for your LBC shout-alongs in the morning from Nick Ferrari to James O'Brien and most of Five Lives output and things.

So, newspapers do still have this enormous sway and say.

It's just a way of making the paper work.

Yes.

And if I just say, from Helen's earlier point of view, it isn't helped by the fact that the Royal Mail

used to be one of those organisations that, you know, essentially it would deliver the mail and it would deliver newspapers and magazines and parcels.

And in its current incarnation and in the current sale,

one really doesn't know what it's going to do.

So that becomes a problem.

They'll go online.

It'll be fine.

Okay, so now it's time to turn to Mohamed Fayed.

Bet in R of the eye for decades.

Died last year.

Recently, a documentary, Al-Fayed, Predator at Harrods, was broadcast for the first time, which detailed the claims of many women who said they had been either raped or sexually assaulted by Fayyad.

That number of women has risen drastically since the documentary was broadcast.

I believe it's now in the hundreds of women whose claims police are investigating.

This wasn't unknown to lots of people in the press, and particularly to those who read The Eye, because as the last edition of the Mag showed, there was a piece, was it 98 or 9?

1998, 98, which detailed claims of not assault, but of him being,

I think the phrase was a revolting old lecture, prowling the shop floor looking for young women who worked at Harrods.

And then sending them to the doctor to check that they were

clean.

Yeah, propositioning them, banging them handfuls of notes, this kind of thing.

So this was kind of known about, but it took his death for it to become public.

Well, actually, it didn't even take his death, because if I remember sitting in this room a year ago, and listeners, when they finish this episode, will be able to go back and listen to it.

It was the edition we recorded the week that he died, when we were slightly gobsmacked by the obsequies that were being paid to him all over the shop, and people praising him to high heaven, people like Piers Morgan, certainly, and lots of other newspapers.

and we were saying in that we were explicit we said but he was a serial sexual assaulter and and a bully and you know

and and and you know I was amazed when I went back and looked at that piece the 1998 piece last week because it did seem quite comprehensively to cover a lot of the rev the supposed revelations that were in the BBC piece.

I'm not, this is not to disparage what the BBC have done.

They've done a fantastic job on getting the women on record and working with them and finding out more and more gruesome details of it.

And it is brilliant that this stuff is finally coming out to the extent that it is coming out now.

But it was there.

It was not even just sort of being hinted at.

I mean, we wrote about it in Private Eye.

Tom Bauer wrote about it in his biography of Fired, which came out that same year, 1998.

And an awful lot of it was in that Vanity Fair article that Henry Porter wrote, which I think was 1995.

1995.

And certainly was in the dossier of stuff which Henry has written about since, compiling, in order to fight off the enormous libel suit which Mohammed Fayed launched against him at the time.

Okay, well, that's what I wanted to ask about because Vanity Fair

agreed

after he sued them to put all of their evidence in locked storage.

Tom Bowers described the legal threats and actually physical threats to his personal safety that he received from Fayette and his cronies.

You know, those weren't the only people that he was intimidating.

Dominic Lawson, whose wife was a very close friend of Princess Diana, wrote about the fact that when Rosa Moncton said Diana wasn't pregnant when she died, Fayard sent a car around to her house with the kind of legal threat inside when she was at home alone.

Right.

I mean, I think, I mean, this story, people always say, I saw some of that stuff on Twitter of people saying, why isn't this reported?

And A, it was, and B, it was reported in the face of enormous legal and you know, intimidatory threats.

He wasn't legal.

I mean, the vindictiveness with which Fired and his henchmen pursued anyone who crossed them or who displeased them.

I mean, there was a guy called Christoph Betterman, who I think was

a senior manager at Harrods, who resigned and was pursued with false accusations of kind of shoplifting and fraud and all sorts of things.

They had him arrested, absolutely innocent of all of them.

I mean, they were not beyond, you know, the bugging, again, was the thing that we wrote about extensively in private throughout the 1990s.

He actually bugged all of his staff and recorded their calls in order to be able to use them to blackmail them

or take vengeance on them later.

And the sheer thuggery, there was a guy called John McNamara, who was his head of security, who was an ex-Met policeman.

And there were an awful lot, there was a lot of tied up.

I mean, the fact that he could get people arrested was all to do with the connections that senior security staff at Harrods had with it still within the Met police.

And it's a matter of record that John McNamara was, you know, the threats that were revealed in that BBC thing to one of the women who attempted to speak to Vanity Fair and literally said to her, We know where your family lives.

Which, of course, if they're your employer, they do.

You know, they've got your next of kin on record.

They do know all about you.

So these were very real threats that were made to people.

And that's the reason, I think, that it took

his death, McNamara's death, and Fayad's death before the people involved would come out.

I mean, the threats to the journalist.

I mean, Tom Bauer had seen off Maxwell on one biography, so you know, he wasn't going to cave on this one.

Vanity Fair had a great deal of money.

They ended up settling in the end, which was something of a surprise given the evidence they had.

We used to get letters saying

Private I are just racist,

Private Eye are just snobbish, and that's the only reason this this person who's trying to join the British establishment and you can't bear it.

You know, just the same as with Maxwell.

I mean, the fact that these characters were trying to take over British institutions, claiming to admire them, and then subvert them and make them pointless.

I mean, Fired wanted to buy Harrods and he wanted to buy punch.

He wanted to buy punch because he'd read it.

abroad and thought this is what being British means.

I mean, the Crown's portrayal, which again, most people, as far as I can see, seem to think the Crown is a documentary, its portrayal of Fired is an absolute disgrace.

Well, it does come up in the BBC documentary.

I was really surprised by that.

But the number of women who say that they decided to speak out because the Crown's portrayal was essentially this poor Egyptian who'd got a black servant, you know, he was very, you know, it was an outsider coming in, and the sniffy British royals didn't like him, had driven them so made them, you know, had re-traumatised them that that was going to be the historical verdict on him that they decided finally to speak out.

And I thought that was quite extraordinary because I think we covered this: the fact that, as you say, he wanted to buy these British institutions, he succeeded in some cases.

He had racehorses that allowed him to stand next to the Queen.

He sponsored the Windsor Horse Show, yeah, and that got him into the box with the Queen every year.

I mean, that was you don't get much more on the inside of the establishment than that.

Well, Dominic Lawson said, you know, the British establishment didn't shun him, it didn't shun him nearly enough.

Yeah, um, Harrod's had a royal warrant.

When it comes to stories like this and how difficult they are to get into print, I mean I know things did get into print.

Have things changed substantially in your opinion between then and now?

I mean Me Too cases which is why you know hats off as Adam said are incredibly difficult to get into print to get over the line and I when I say Me Too cases I mean this is rape

but all of those are difficult because you need someone to be brave enough to sign a piece of paper saying, yes, it happened to me and if it comes to court, I will testify.

That is very, very difficult to do.

I mean, it's one of the first stories I ever did at Private Eye was someone who worked in the BBC who was

harassing all his female staff.

And, you know, this was 86, 7, and they were brave enough then.

And I mean, you think comparatively, it hasn't got that much easier to come forward, particularly when there's a sort of huge

threatening apparatus coming at you.

So I would say, you know, even now, hats off to really all of them who came forward and said, yes, this is what happened.

It was noticeable as well in the documentary that some more of the women who wanted to speak in camera were ones who had managed to get away, that they got the terrible story, but they had actually managed to kind of run out of the apartment.

And I think that probably makes it slightly easier to speak out if you're not having to speak about the actual trauma and relive that trauma.

But the other thing is, if you go back and look at the contemporary coverage of it,

I worry that there, and I think it's probably true, there was a feeling that they were getting something.

So that these were young women who were employed in the perfume department, and yes, you had to get yourself fondled by some creepy old dude, but you got a handbag out of it.

And that there was an implicit trade-off that all of these women had taken, right?

That he was a skeezy old lech, but he was essentially paying them off in bundles of cash.

And that was a convenient story for people to believe because it absolved them of responsibility about the fact that when you hear the women's stories, they didn't know that this was the bargain.

Lots of them turned down the money.

They were often invited, you know, they were often like 19 or 20 in their first job as like a perfume assistant and then got summoned to the private office.

But I think it suited people at the time to think, well, this is what all dirty old men do, don't they?

And everyone's getting something out of it.

And it's the requirement of witnesses to be perfect.

Absolutely flawless, you know.

Completely, shouldn't have been drunk, shouldn't ever have tried to say anything nice to the person afterwards.

Shouldn't have taken the job, shouldn't have, yeah, yeah, yeah, shouldn't have gone.

We know how hard it is to bring any cases like this to court or to prosecution, you know, let alone

get them out in the media.

It is incredibly difficult.

I mean, it is a case, in the end, it's going to come down to a case of he said when he is an incredibly powerful man, and she said when she is considerably less powerful.

And that is very, very difficult.

So, you need to put the work in.

You need to, you know, as recently Ros Irwin did with the various alleged victims of Russell Brand.

She actually had worked on it for a long time to get people to go on the record and be incredibly brave enough to do that.

Even though he's still, as we speak, on stage with Jordan Peterson leading people in the Lord's Prayer.

Like, he's effectively had, you know, he's moved to the fringesphere, but like he was heading that way anyway.

But he can still work.

And there's a feminist theory idea, which is that the trouble with these cases is that believing the perpetrator demands nothing of you.

Saying that Russell Brand is innocent means you get to still be friends with Russell Brand, you still get to use a celebrity, you get to go on his shows, get to all of that stuff.

Whereas believing the victims requires you to shun somebody.

This comes back to the Mohammed Fire point.

It's very inconvenient for everybody involved.

And that was where, I mean, sort of post-the death of Princess Diana, you know, that sold newspapers, to put it bluntly.

And that was a calculation that was made in various newspaper offices, which was that

Mohammed Al-Fayyad, as he styled himself at that point, was a very good person to have on side.

I mean, I remember cringing, obsequious interviews done by Piers Morgan when he was the editor of the mirror, which he openly admitted Piers Morgan were done because he believed in sucking up to millionaires, and particularly ones who might have an interest in buying into the media.

And he also had an incredible PR operation on his side.

I mean, one of the other things that we printed before anyone else was a transcript of a conversation that Chris Atkins, the documentary maker, had with

Max Clifford, fellow sex offender, but also one of the many people who represented Fired along the way.

And he was absolutely blatant about it, thinking he was speaking off the record.

You know, he was talking about if he's groping 17-year-olds, they're quite willing because they're being paid a lot of money.

There are an awful lot of young ladies who are extremely happy to pamper up to rich old Randy Old Sods.

This is

what people told themselves.

right?

Yeah, people told themselves, well, they're getting something out of it.

And then you hear the actual stories of women who were terrified, often thinking that, am I going to make it out of here alive?

He's that powerful.

And it just does not match up to what the Max Clifford.

Well, as we know, Max Clifford had his own reasons for promoting that idea.

God.

But Clifford's payoff was that Fyad gave lots of money to charity.

It's the old Jimmy Saville one, again.

It's that if you pay off your guilty conscience by giving lots of money to kind of children's hospices and things, and then you can get away with whatever you want.

But Clifford, of course, was not the only PR man involved.

I mean, endless letters we used to get from Michael Cole, who was Fyed's kind of representative on earth.

He was his PR man for years and years and years, then kept on as a consultant and a director of Harrod, so, you know, extremely well paid for all this.

Gone very, very silent now.

He would, if we mentioned Michael Cole at any point, he would write in a rude letter complaining about

that we were writing nonsense about his esteemed client and it was because we were racist and terrible and representatives of the establishment.

Very, very quiet now.

Doesn't want to say anything.

Not a word.

I mean, I would only say in terms of the tone, I mean, because

we did laugh at Fayed repeatedly and for decades.

And we did that partly because it worked.

The one thing he hated, as so often in these cases, is being made to look a fool.

What he wanted to do was...

have people accept his version of himself.

What we wanted to do was say he was a ludicrous figure, not a commanding, brilliant, genius figure, not a benign figure, just a deeply creepy, ridiculous individual.

And he hated that.

And then he bought punch

and devoted it to attacking private eye.

It was extraordinary.

They were supposedly our rival, but all they did was write about us, wasn't it?

They didn't try to compete in any way whatsoever.

He put a picture of me on the cover, and I remember thinking, it's not going to sell any papers.

All right, that is it for this edition of page 94.

Thank you very much for listening.

Thank you to Ian, Helen, and Adam.

If you would like to find out more about the stories we've been discussing today and a whole lot more besides, you can get a subscription by going to private-eye.co.uk.

It's out every fortnight, it's reasonably priced, and it's terrific.

So that's it.

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

Until then, thank you to you for listening and as always to Matt Hill of Reading Audio for producing.

Bye for now.

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