122: Labour's Freebies and The End of the Peers Show

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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 the last week's news, the next week's news, and everything in between. And I should start with a quick little announcement to the three of you, actually.

I just want to let you all know that I want to thank James Dyson for the jeans I'm wearing today,

Hindutra Brothers pay for my shirt, Lembelavatnik for the Casio, and the underpants, model zone. So, just so you know.
And what lovely underpants they are. Thank you very much.

Thanks for dropping the jeans to reveal them. So glad.

Someone noticed. I'm looking my best for the country, as I think we all have a duty to do.

Particularly on a podcast.

An inherently visual medium. And it's nice to know that Mrs.
Murray is looking so dappo as well. Not here with us.

No, no, no. But she wants to thank Richard Branson for all her stuff.

Yeah, this is the news that's been, that was in the eye a long time ago.

So this is a little reward for subscribers that you were well aware that Kirstam was getting lots and lots of freebies of glasses and clothes and holidays in Welsh beach huts and things like that.

And this has been one of the dominant stories of the last week. It's quite annoying, isn't it? The opportunity was for him to take the advice before the election, right?

The private eye has been running stories about this, particularly him going to kind of concerts or soccer matches, soccer matches, I've gone so American,

finally turned football matches. And so it's not like this was a new scandal, in a sense, right? He just walked straight into this one with people having noticed it previously.

The traditional cry is always, well, doesn't he have any advisors? And then the response is, oh, well, you don't need advisors to tell you not to take free glasses or wear suits when you've made a

very, very big point about how corrupt the previous administration is. It's extraordinarily short-sighted.
Well, there we go.

I know.

Has the line should have gone to Specsovers, been trotted out lots and lots and lots in the last week or so? It should have been. Yes, someone said it was a specs scandal as opposed to

Tory sex scandal. Okay, it was me.

And it's not just the smallness of the amounts, it's the fact that he's doing it at all. There are two arguments, aren't they?

Because you're right that the amounts are small in comparison with Boris Johnson's freebie holidays all over the place and freebie houses and Dalesford organic packages being delivered to his door and basically inability to put his hand in his pocket for absolutely anything.

But then it seems sort of makes it worse in a way. But the obvious thing is just to not take any freebies and particularly don't take even cheaper ones.

It's just.

This is the interesting thing, because Starmer actually was, I think between 2019 when he became the Labour leader, and the summer of this year, he got more gifts than any other Member of Parliament.

They're all declared, but they were, as you've said, things like concerts, football tickets, hotel stays, Cold Play, Taylor Swift, Adele, Wimbledon.

To go and see, I like this one, the play Nye at the National Theatre, which is all about the founding of the NHS,

which didn't give out free glasses, unlike Lord Alley.

But the current rules, now the rules that PMs, and in fact all ministers, have to obey, the ministerial code, say that if you are given something, I presume this applies to Starmat since he became Prime Minister, you have to pay the street value for it, as it were.

If it's worth more than 140 quid, you pay.

You can buy it with 140 quid taken off the top, or you can give it back.

That was just the standard set many years ago by a sort of low-ish value for a gift. So, for example, Theresa May did this with clothes that she was given.

Designers were always sending her clothes when she was PM. She bought a few of them, she would send the rest back.

Sarah Brown, the last Labour first lady, as it were, wrote the same thing in her book in 2011, that this is what she did, you know. So that is the kind of standard protocol.

And the fact that Boris was getting all these freebies, I can't quite work out how that squad is.

He didn't care what the rules were. No, true.
Which would be shocking. Yeah.

But I wonder if this was something Stummer was doing before the election when the rules did not apply to him because he wasn't a minister.

The thing that annoys me most about it is it does reveal how bloody expensive women's clothing has got.

Right, so

even just some of the very low-key dresses were £300 to £700, which is not unusual now for IN brands.

But if you're a kind of normal everyday person, you're not allowed to write that off against tax, even though perhaps were somebody who only buys posh clothes, for example, to wear on TV.

I'm just saying,

but it's just personally aggrieved me, right? Because

we're now into Helen's tax crawl.

Well, do you know this was famously why ABBA wore such ridiculous costumes on stage in the 70s, don't you?

It's because they had to prove that they were tax-deductible because they were stage costumes.

And the only way they could do that was to have something so utterly ridiculous that even Benny and Bjorn would not have walked down the streets on it.

But it does make me think there is an unfair expectation that, particularly for women in in public life, you will

keep up to a specific standard of dress.

However, the counterpoint to that is the fact that they do earn a decent wage and everyone else on that wage would expect to buy their own clothes.

It does come down to the Daily Mail headline on Monday, which just said, why can't the Starmers play for their own clothes? Which is a very, very good question, isn't it?

Yeah, this is rare on this podcast, the Daily Mail being quoted

as a voice of sense. Is not the argument that Lady Starmer has said, I do not want to roll in politics and I'm not first lady,

okay,

then why do you need clothes bought for you by Lord Ali?

The other defence that David Lamy was kind of trotting out yesterday, I think, when he was doing a few media appearances, is that, well, US presidents and their first ladies get a fixed budget, which is not strictly true.

No, I was going to say, the only one problem with that is

it's not correct. No,

the president gets a £38,000 a year budget for clothing. Does that include bulletproof vests?

Well, notoriously, the same thing happens with the royal family in that all the way along, Kate Middleton's clothes were bought by the Duchy of Cornwall, right?

So Charles, out of his income, gave her an allowance, acknowledging that she needed a lot of frocks, lovely, lovely frocks for appearances, and someone had to pay for that.

But the first lady who does have an official role in the USA doesn't have an allowance for clothing.

I mean, the fact is, everyone who becomes president is a millionaire many times over.

Presumably, there would be very little little appetite in this country for a clothes budget for the first lady. I mean, to be announced just after the winter fuel budget cuts.

I mean, I can't see that happening. Not unless she's going to wear a three-bar fire or something.

But isn't part of the Labour appeal harking back to, I mean, Michael Foote, did anyone pay for the the donkey jacket? I think his wife bought it for him, didn't she? Jill Craigie bought it for him.

And both of them would be at Pains Point. It wasn't a donkey jacket.

It was a rather nice pea coat, a beautiful shade of green, which he always insisted he was complimented on by the Queen Mother at the Senate Off and therefore this is negated any criticism of it thereafter.

Well, there's a lesson learned from history. Yeah.

The thing that you said, Adam, about it being a blind spot is so striking because one of the dominant observations made about Starmer is that he's a bit of a roundhead, that he's a Puritan.

He's a Puritan. You know, Oliver Cromwell was not taking free lace collars from, I don't know,

you have no evidence for that.

You know, Norwich's biggest flax producers or whoever it was. I think that's probably why, though.

I remember someone saying this to me about Jeremy Corbyn, someone who'd worked with him, about his blind spot on anti-Semitism.

He said, look, his whole shtick through his entire life, his whole self-conception of him, you know, his place in politics is that he's someone who's always really cared, really cared about racism, really cared about the underdog.

He cannot conceive of himself as somebody who might have missed something like that.

And I wonder if there's something similar true with Starmer's idea is that he is really kind of a horny-handed son of toil and it can't possibly be that he actually likes quite flash suits and nice glasses and so he's just struggled to reconcile that with the the fact that as you say he's been to a lot of Bedell concerts Taylor Swift concerts and so on paid for by someone else but the answer to that is to be a bit more of a horny-sanded son of toil toil a bit more and and then you can afford the nice suit isn't I mean he can that's what it comes to I mean it's not even a question of sums and 140 quid allowances or anything if someone's offering you a gift as a politician why are they doing so It's not out of the goodness of their heart.

Well,

having appeared in front of various parliamentary committees trying to point out exactly that point, Adam, which was entirely lost on many of the members who couldn't see the problem here,

we literally went into the business of tickets for football matches.

And I was trying to say that if, say, Taylor Swift sends you some free tickets, lovely.

If the Premier League sends you some tickets for the Taylor Swift concert, then you should be suspicious because someone else is paying.

And in all other walks of life, we know that people who provide things often want something back.

Again,

my colleagues Richard Brooks and Solomon Hughes and I, having been to this committee once, we are in fact being asked to offer our advice again, which is the same as last time.

This is all blindingly obvious. And now, even the Prime Minister can't seem to see it.
And in the new Labour Party, I mean, the first scandal is from a Blair-eyed source.

You know, it's as though we're right back to 97.

Lord Ali, you mean? Lord Ali. I mean, and again,

why take clothes and glasses and all sorts of different kinds of grey suit,

which aren't incredibly exciting.

Looking at how this will look, even to your own party, why is there no one saying at any point, including Keir himself, this isn't a very good look?

Well, what you've got to remember is that as an MP for several years and the former director of public prosecutions, he couldn't be expected to own any Sioux. Those are very much muffty jobs.
Yes.

Mind you, he's packed on the pans a bit. He's got a bit more timber than he did when he was DPP now.
So maybe

not Ali could have just paid to have the old ones let out. This is not going to devolve into an Ozempic conversation.
I won't let it happen. It's body shaming corner with Adam McQueen.

No, but I do think you're right, Ian. There is this bizarre blind spot in something with politicians, with something that ought to be so obvious.

And it reminds me of the scandal I think in my time here that has caused the most public outrage, which was the MP's expenses stuff in 2009.

And one of the most extraordinary things about that was that it emerged that MPs, as part of their second home allowance, got basically a grocery allowance every week to go and do their shopping.

And you just thought, what on earth do they think that all the rest of us spend our wages on?

Yeah.

What is that that extra? If I have to travel for work and I have to have a meal out, I can write that off against tax. Because it's a meal I wouldn't have had.

I wouldn't have gone to somewhere, you know, if I wasn't 400 miles away from home or whatever.

But I don't get to do that when I have my lunch here, despite the fact I have had to come to my place of work, which I'm very resentful about here, and buy a sandwich, which is probably overpriced, actually.

But also, as you said, you would just want to work from home, like all millennials. You're writing it off against tax.
You're not getting some money in your account to pay for that dinner.

Do I have to write it? No, I still have to pay for for it. I just used to pay for it.

Well, apart from these specifics of Andy's life,

Adam was talking about the expenses scandals. The extraordinary thing about that era was just how small the items were that the public got annoyed by.
You remember the man with the duck house?

Zahawi, the heating bill for his stables.

An MP who wouldn't even buy a poppy for Remembrance Day. Well, it's past my public duty.
I mean, I've got to wear it with a suit.

I mean, he he didn't actually claim the suit as well, so that it matched the poppy. But there is a sort of, there's a patheticness about this scandal that I think is sort of undignified.

We have mentioned Boris Johnson briefly, but I mean, Boris was given all sorts of donations for all sorts of things all the way through.

And they did try and get around the redecoration of the Downing Street flat over the annual budget, which I think was about £30,000 at the time.

£30,000? Who spends £30,000 on DIY?

Not renovating a house from a wreckage, not re-wearing it entirely. Just

kind of upkeep stuff. £30,000.
These sums are just astronomical. Yeah, but the previous decor was terribly common.
It was all John Lewis nightmare, wasn't it?

Yes, it was positively unsustainable for Boris. I do like what this is giving away about all of us.
Helen has agreed about the unreasonable cost of women's clothes. For me, it's sandwiches.

For Adam, it's you could, you know, do P and Q much. She's poppies.
Well, what a surprise.

But for example, I mean, Boris, you know,

his wedding was funded by the Bamfords. The JCB magnet.
The JCB Scully there, yeah, yeah. Yes, they had a traditional South African barbecue, did they not?

They had a South African barbecue, an ice cream van, they had some Portaloos, all of which tottered up to £23,000.

They should have actually had a big banner for Boris's wedding, saying, If you're in a hole, stop digging. That would have been a good.

Surely there was a visit to a JCB factory that caused some problems afterwards with people, I don't know, probably working for a satirical magazine saying,

is this entirely justified? Yeah, I think so.

But the whole timbre of Conservative politics for years has been, if you pay a lot of money, you get access to the party leadership, and you get to join the advisory board if you give a lot of money, and that gives you access.

I don't know what Labour's mechanism is, but I won't be surprised if I hear there is one. That, I think, is what plays into the side of the story that we haven't really seen yet.

In that all we know that Wahid Ali got in return for his generosity was a pass pass to Downing Street, supposedly to help with the transition process. So maybe he's doing redecorating as well.

I mean, who knows? Which apparently has since been revoked. But there do seem to be a lot of these figures.
And they're all figures from the 1990s. It's a weird retro feeling we've got at the moment.

But Alan Milburn as well is still knocking about with no sort of defined role, but appears to be turning up at meetings and things.

And I would suggest that kind of, yeah, looking slightly beyond the headlines of the suits and things, you're getting into some potential.

Were I a Labour spin doctor, of which they don't seem to have any at the moment, I would be saying, guys, do you want to maybe have a look at this one? This is looking a bit iffy.

I've got one last little international fact to show how other countries do do this much better than us. Yes.

Recently, Emmanuel Macron got in trouble for booking a business-class seat on a flight from Paris to Brazil for two of his suits.

I was so poised to defend him, because I think the one thing we are necessarily Puritan about is politicians travelling first-class on a train. They should absolutely be allowed to do that.

They should work on the train. They should not be harangued by weird people with camera phones.
I'm totally fine with that. However, I will not defend the suits.

No, well, they had to be able to lie flat. That's apparently

I'm making that up.

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So, we come back to the thing which is probably going to be the title of this episode, despite the fact I won't write that for another two days. The end of the Piers Show.
Helen.

Are you proud of yourself, Andy? Really proud.

Has Piers Morgan resigned? Oh,

I'm afraid not. From what, Ian? From that little show on YouTube.

It's got billions of hits, Adam. Thank you for your sinners.
Never met anyone who's watched it. No, we're in the House of Lords.

Yes, so Labour have introduced a plan to get rid of the last remaining hereditary peers. There's 92 of them.
And it's sponsored by the Cabinet Office.

So this is a bill with government backing, which means it might actually happen. Okay.

So if you remember, the last Labour government sort of did half the job. When they were elected in 97, about just over half of the House of Lords were still hereditary peers.

And they said, let's get rid of them all. And then there was an amendment that was put in that said, look, let's have a bit of a transitional arrangement.
Some of them haven't got homes to go to.

But we'll kind of, you know, we'll then get rid of them in the next bit of Lords reform.

And so over the years since then, people have kept on proposing amendments to it.

And the Conservatives largely have said, well, we can't just get rid of the rest of the peers because we're waiting for the larger bit of Lords reform. And let me shock you, that's never come.

And it's been a quarter of a century. It has been a quarter of a century.
I've prepared a little quiz, though, which I know you like, which is: are these people real hereditary peers or not? Great.

And all but one of them are sitting in the Lords, or one of them has tried to be. So, okay, is Valerian Freyberg a real peer?

It's a herbal remedy. It isn't, it's a character from House of Thrones.

I'm going to need an answer from you. Yes.
I'll say hereditary. Hereditary.
Hereditary. Correct.
He's a crossbencher. Hey.
Peregrine Pickle.

No, Woodhouse, minor character. Hobbit.

Dickens.

You're all wrong. It's Tobias Smollett.

We need to think very carefully. It was The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle is one of Tobias Smollett's.
But actually, it's not as good as Humphrey Clinker, but it's good.

Anyway, Ruelin Howell, Thurlow, Cumming Bruce.

Yes, definitely. Yeah, he's real.

Yeah, okay, yes, he's a crossbencher. Merlin Hay.

Merlin Hay?

Oh, he's real.

I don't know why you would say that with a kind of real... No, I've just said.
Oh, Merlin. I'll say it.

Because I feel like I've read all those 70s political biographies that we banged on about in people. You're thinking of Merlin Reese.
I am thinking of Merlin Rees, aren't I? Yes, sorry.

I'm going to say fake. No, it's Merlin and he's Welsh and he lives in Hay.

Very nice. He's real.
I'll go with real. He is real.
He's the 24th Earl of Errol and a crossbench peer.

Arthur St. John John Copper.
Russ Abbott character.

No.

Minor player in EastEnders, I believe. I have made that up because that's the first two of the four names of Evelyn Waugh and Lord Copper are surnames.
So that would be one that'd be nice for you.

Up to a point. Exactly.

Charles Rodney Muff. Big Charlie Muff, yeah.
He's real and he sits on the bench next to Lady Garden.

Yeah, he tried to be a lib Dem tier. He is the third.
Lady Garden is real. That's his Lord Panic.

Third Baron Calvary. There you are.
How many of them are actually active? Well, there was a big report into the fact that lots of people had been turning up and claiming expenses.

I don't think the hereditaries are any worse. In fact, I think they might be better because the system has always been.

So, when they went down to just 92, they fixed the percentages of them at the composition, you know, a rational composition at the time.

So, there's 49 Conservatives, four Labour, four Lib Dem, and 35 crossbenchers.

And basically, what happens is when one of them dies or now retires, there's a by-election, and they have to say, you have to say, well, well, look, you're going to have to be a Lib Dem hereditary peer.

So the people who are motivated to put themselves up for those elections do actually tend to turn up.

It's just weird because there are only three Lib Dem peers when they had the last election in 2016. So only three people voted in that election.
They all voted for the same person. It was fine.

But you can end up with more candidates than voters. Yeah, that can quite

easily happen. Because if you're a TOF and you want to be a Lib Dem peer,

the Tory leadership election.

There's only so many of them left. So the odd thing is that these are the only people in the House of Lords who are elected in that sense, although they are elected by other lords.
So

there's a little bit of election. Yeah, and to be fair, they don't just sail through.
You have to write a statement of application, which has to be up to 75 words long.

It doesn't have to be 75 words, though. You don't have to hit it.

I love them. They are like UCAS personal statements.
They're like, I have spent a lot of time in Africa and Asia exploring mineral wealth, and now I'm very interested in environmentalism.

I would be a good member of the House of Lords.

My favourite one that I found of these was in 2021. Lord Milverton, Lord Milverton's statement was eight words long.
He said he would try to be as objective and reasonable as possible.

Although he was 90 years old when he was making his application, so he may have simply been quite tired.

But I had no idea how many were herds until I started researching this, that there were nearly 700 hereditaries in the House of Lords before 1997, and so it's obviously an enormous difference now.

It's also a big diversity and equality and inclusion challenge, right? In that there are only 90 peerages that can even be inherited by women, let alone ones that go to a male heir first.

So currently, all 92 hereditary peers are men. And as you would expect, unless I know there's an exception I don't know, they're all white or would identify themselves as white, right?

So you just have this block of votes that do not represent the diversity of what Britain actually looks like.

You know, the Countess of Mar was the last female hereditary peer, but she died, so and they was replaced by a bloke.

I mean, we had an an account and if you want to see the standard of the quality of debate in the Lords, the Lords were debating well of themselves in a recent debate and that was in the last issue and you get a flavour.

I mean extraordinarily quite a lot of the hereditaries are in favour of the hereditaries staying.

Again there's surprising stuff you read in the eye. And is there

a party waiting to it because there are more conservative hereditaries than Labour? I mean did you say it's 40 odd conservatives?

45 conservatives, yeah, plus anyone from the crossbenchers who might want to vote with the Conservatives.

And has it remained at those levels which are representative of what the state of the party is in 1999? Yeah, yeah, it was fixed. It's changed enormously, hasn't it?

I mean, there was an awful lot of Labour peers were put in to address that imbalance, but that bit stayed the same. Yeah, and it's wild to read.

So the Lib Dems, one of their constitutional reform things they wanted to do when they were in coalition was reform the Lords. And they wanted to take it down to 360 elected and 90 appointed.

Well, that's like half the number of peers we've we've ended up being, because exactly that problem, right? Which is that everybody wants to stack the lords in order that their stuff will go through.

So there's just been a real huge influx of peers over that Conservative time and kind of wanting to maintain their numerical superiority. How many are there now? Of peers, I think.
They're about 800.

Yeah. So it's one in eight that's hereditary.
And they have enacted various reforms. So you can't now retire as a peer or you can get kicked out.
I mean, Lord Prescott was recently kicked out.

But the rule now is that if you haven't made a contribution or attended in the last parliamentary term, that's it. You You were all automatically retired.
Well, Prescott's very ill health.

He had a couple of strokes a few years ago, and so he didn't turn up. But our favourite peer, Lord Archer of Weston Supermare, also stepped down just before the last election.
So various people.

Michael Ashcroft as well, Lord Ashcroft, has retired officially from the House of Lords. Really? Now that is a shame.

Yeah, that might have had something to do with them actually enforcing some tax rules.

I have another quiz question, which is, what is unusual about Lord Simon of Withenshaw?

Not actually from Withenshaw. Probably not.

Is he a hereditary? She is now legally a woman.

So this is Matilda Simon, who is a transgender woman, not sitting in the Lords, did briefly, was briefly on the list, but is now withdrawn, but has inherited the title ahead of her elder sister because the Gender Recognition Act says that you can change your legal gender under British law, but it doesn't affect the inheritance of peerages, which is just the most British thing that I've ever heard.

It's like, well, I'm not sure. My son is now primogeniture critical.

I just think it's so funny that we go like, let's move with the times, but not that much.

Actually, the listing, bless them, on the House of Lords websites about the gender breakdown says male, female, non-binary.

But we haven't got any non-binary lords yet. Still hanging on in there, but it hasn't happened yet, but maybe it will do.

One of the problems with lords reform, and part of the reason that nothing's been done further has been done on it really for the last 25 years, is that logically you just get into terrible problems because obviously it's unjust to have hereditary peers, 92 of them in the House of Lords.

But it's also completely unjust to have political appointees in the House of Lords if you give it more than two seconds thought, isn't it?

So you really do have to come up with a solution that encompasses the whole thing and then force that through to a point that's going to disadvantage probably the party in government at any given time and the chances of anything actually getting done.

Yeah, well the gavelbasher piece was very good on this because it basically said you're never going to get the Lord Turkey to vote for Christmas.

Right? And that is always the problem with Lord's reform. If you're getting rid of the hereditaries, which is that likely to actually go through? It's a cabinet office bill, so span by Pat McFadden.

So the previous problem has been, you know, know, they were 10-minute reform bills or they were Lib Dem bills that, therefore, the Tories didn't really care about. But this is a

policy. This is a proper, like they will whip it, yeah.

So if you're getting rid of the hereditaries and you're getting rid of the ghastly spiffs that Boris was seeing wandering through the office and putting in, who's left?

Well, the left is what we call the arbitrary peers,

which appears that no one knows why they were appointed.

Right. It's quite a large group, but it's led by Lady Owen.

I think the best thing that they could do, really, is introduce term limits.

I mean, it wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing in the world anyway, because the average age in the House of Lords is about 70.

So, realistically, people are probably not going to be there for, unless they are, Baroness Owen, not going to be there for 50 years.

But that would also allow a kind of natural wastage means it sounds like they're being taken outside and shot, but you know what I mean?

It would allow not to kind of vastly outlive the complexion of the government that appointed them, right?

So, even if you get somebody who comes and stacks it, those people will cycle back out again when perhaps the political wind has changed. Can I offer my solution?

Because I genuinely think this is one of my only good ideas of actually solving something.

Elected second chamber, but done according to share of the vote.

So, if all of these peers have a good reason to be in there, parties can put them up as a list, like they do, you know, in the Scottish Parliament.

You have the constituency, and then you have the list of other candidates who are used to sort of top it up.

You have your candidates for various parties in an order of how you want them in, and the seats in the second chamber are just accorded every parliament according to the actual share of the vote.

Then you solve, yes, you're going to have a few reformy type people in there, you're going to have lots more lib dems, you know, more greens and things, but it addresses two problems at the same time of getting rid of unelected peers and sorting out an element of proportional representation in parliament.

Can I just say that as a journalist, your job is to be incredibly critical and offer no solutions at all? That's my only one. That's literally.
I still feel that. You are letting the side down.

I'm sorry, forget it. Doesn't proportional mean that you'll be able to get through anything you like as the government.
Doesn't it mean that you'll have a limited amount of scrutiny?

Well, you already can in the sense if it's a manifesto commitment or a financial measure,

the kind of standing rule is that the lords shouldn't vote that down. They can send things back and ping pong.

But the idea is that laws should provide scrutiny, but they can't go against the government of the day on things like that. It's 1911, isn't it? I mean, we have done this once.

I think there's a committee that's allowed to recommend expert peers, but it's only a couple per time. It's only sort of two two per year.

And there were proposals to raise the number of expert peers to 10 a year, for example. But there's an argument for that.

And there is actually an argument for some retired people from the House of Commons to go in there, if they've got

particularly useful skill sets, a few of them, maybe.

Having a second chamber to scrutinise and potentially oppose is a very, very good idea, isn't it? It's just not the one we've got.

Yeah, there are some really good peers, but there are also some people who don't turn up very much or don't really have a great deal of expertise or political appointees who just regard it as a sort of private members' club, I think, is the way that some people do it.

I think working peers we should encourage people to be working peers, and this is their first and probably only job, which is why retirees, I think, do tend to work quite well. All right.

John, here, one of my favourite peers. Yeah.
Lord Christopher. Familiar with that name? No.
Lord Christopher is the oldest member of the Lords and will soon be turning 100 years old. Wow.
Yep.

Last living British parliamentarian to have served to the Second World War.

Is he still turning up? I don't know. I haven't checked him on his record.
Sorry. He's not a hereditary.
No. No.
He's just one of the appointeds.

But he was, I mean, briefly, he was in the RAF in 1944. Still counts.
I'm sort of picturing a Galapagos tortoise at this point.

In her memory.

Now, speaking of creaking institutions with extremely elderly heads and battles over primogeniture. We come to the Murdoch family empire.
Adam, there's a rumble happening in Nevada this week.

There is, in Reno, Nevada, home of my favourite casino in the world, the Peppermill. Just a little travel tip for you there if you're popping over to cover the Murdoch trial.

Which you won't be able to because it's all happening behind closed doors. All of this is taking place in secret.
And this is the battle between Rupert and most of his children.

He's got one on side, Latlan Murdoch, who is the boss of News Court these days.

And this is all about the trust that was set up for the family after Rupert's second divorce out of four so far, five wives, four divorces so far.

We all know the rhyme. We all know the rhyme.
He's completely lost track of the wives.

Okay, well, this is a fun quiz for you, if you like, because I realised the other week that I can't name all seven dwarves, but I can do all five Murdoch wives. Can you? Yeah, sporty, ginger.

Prudence is his eldest daughter with his first wife, Anna. Nope.
Oh, so so first wife is Patricia. Right, okay.
Patricia. Second wife is Anna, and that's the main.

I would say the main wife in terms of heirs.

Well, she's three, so she is Lacklan, James, and Elizabeth. Yeah.
Not necessarily in that order. Third wife.
Friend of Tony Blair, Wendy Deng.

Great friend of Tony Blair and admirer of Tony Blair, Wendy Deng, who produced Grace and Chloe.

Two more wives. Gerry Hall.
Very good. Of course.
And then he had the near-miss with the one who turned out to be an evangelical Christian who believed everything that Tucker Carlson said.

She thought Tucker Carlson Carlson was the second coming of Jesus. She went quite a bit of a job.
She was too right-wing for Rupert Murdoch, which, again, is quite a feat.

And I'm afraid I don't know the lucky number five. He is now in a state of connubial bliss with Elena Zukova, former mother-in-law of Roman Abramovich.
Mother of Death. She was all in air of sorrows.

Oh, no, it wasn't.

But

she's a scientist and she's a microbiologist. She is, yes, yes.

And she is looking for the secret of eternal life.

Yes, I've made that bit up.

She is of an age that means she's considerably younger than Rupert, but then everyone in the world is considerably younger than Rupert.

She is of an age where she's unlikely to produce any more children.

So we probably do have the full complement of children now, which is what this current legal battle is about, because Rupert is currently trying to change the terms of the arrangement by which... the

four older kids get a vote in what happens to the company after he dies and make it Latlan the sole person who gets to decide anything.

So this isn't in terms exactly of money, it's in terms of control. Is that fair to say? No, everyone gets money.
So, Grace and Chloe, the younger kids also get money.

What they don't have is a say in the running of the company and voting shares. And now, the proposal is that not only do those two younger children with Wendy Deng

not have the right to control, the three others apart from Lachlan lose that control.

They lose that, they keep the money, but Lachlan is in sole charge. And the reason for this is that Lachlan is the most right-wing and most aligned with Rupert's own political views.

So, Roman and Shiv get nothing. Nothing at all.

Not a thing. And the Tom Womsgans of this setup,

who is a chap called Alastair MacLeod, who is married to Prudence.

Now, Prudence is always a weird one because whenever you see any reference to Prudence, they say, Prudence, who's a lot less involved in her father's businesses.

Guess what Prudence did until last year as one of her jobs? She runs Sky, I don't know. Director of Times newspapers.

Guess what Alistair MacLeod,

Mr. Prudence Murdoch, did for 21 years.
He was a page three girl?

Close. He was managing director of News Corp Australia.
So the idea of being slightly more detached from the company.

I mean, admittedly, he didn't actually run the whole thing and screw it up completely like James Murdoch did, which was then he suddenly had his political awakening and decided that his views didn't align with his dad's.

And he didn't have his own TV company purchased for 450 million like Elizabeth Murdoch did

when her dad paid that much. And it was one of the rare events where the

other shareholders in Murdoch's companies have got so cross about it, they actually tried to challenge that one, and it went all the way to court and ended up in a large payout.

So, sorry, I'm just playing catch-up here. So we've got Lachlan over here.
Furthest on the right is Lachlan.

And then the other three, Prudence, James, and Elizabeth.

Prudence being the much older of the three, James being the one who did all the appearances with Rupert Murdoch after Leverson and things like that.

And then Elizabeth, who ran this Shine

TV and film company. And then then sold it to her dad.
They are all, I presume, very angry about this. And this is why it's happening in secret? They are extremely angry about this.

Well, it's happening in secret because it's being done in Nevada, which is a place which offers complete and utter secrecy on any court case involving family trusts. Okay.

Otherwise, that would be a very rogue decision because it's not like anything's incorporated there. No, it's a completely bizarre one.
I mean, usually these things happen in Delaware, don't they?

That's the kind of place where most of these things go. But I think they've actually sought out the place where they are assured of absolute secrecy.

And there are various international news organizations who've tried to challenge this, but there's very, very little chance of anyone getting inside that courtroom at all.

They are very angry about it.

We can grade how angry they are about it by the fact that none of them turned up, none of those three, Prudence, Elizabeth, or James, turned up to the last wedding to Elena Zukova back in June.

They all suddenly found they had very important other appointments. I mean, once you've been to a certain number of weddings,

you sort of know what the cake will taste like. Does anyone know of any just cause or impediment? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do, actually.

Am I right that you, my other bit of weird murder trivia that's coming out of my brain is that James has got a tattoo of a light bulb.

He may well do. I feel like he is interesting.
He is an interesting place in that he as he sort of not exactly huffed off, but he left off. He left America, didn't he?

As the sort of Fox Empire was going very

weird, to Australia. James did initially, when he was young, try and branch off in a different direction entirely and went and founded, I think, hip-hop labels in Manhattan.

And they weren't desperately successful and suddenly at one point he decided that maybe he did want to be part of the family business as well came over to head up News UK News International as it was known then

right into the heart of the phone hacking scandal which he handled fairly appallingly so what actual decisions at the Murdoch Operation will will this change or would it change depending on the results of this case

what will happen to the entire Murdoch Empire there is no sign that any of them are very interested in newspapers for instance

and Rupert is the man who has kept the interest in newspapers going within that company. Certainly, none of the other shareholders.

This is the weird thing about News Corps: there are a lot of other shareholders.

They actually have a minority interest in it, the Murdoch, but because of the way it's set up, they have the full control of the company.

It's all about the voting shares as opposed to the ordinary shares. Lachlan, I don't think, has got any interest.
I mean,

I would be very surprised if the Times and the Sun survive for very long under Murdoch family control after Rupert departs

this particular plane.

But actually, Rupert was in town with Lackland last week inking another deal, which was to buy something else entirely, which was right move, you know, the estate agents listing site. Yep.

I didn't think it was a political website.

It might have just been a real snub to Elizabeth and James, mightn't it?

We're moving right.

Even further.

No, I mean, actually, I think that's one of the most revealing things that's come out in the last few days is that the future of NewsCool is unlikely to be in any media properties other than Fox, which is still violently, virulently successful in America.

But, you know, they've just had the massive failure of Talk TV over here. They can't replicate that on a British site.
I don't think Latin is very interested in Britain at all.

It's very much the fiefdom of Rebecca Brooks. She's pretty much, you know, the woman in charge over here.

And the fact that they're moving into Right Move, I mean, it would be a great purchase. I mean, it is a site that completely revolutionised house buying and is enormously successful.

Hopefully going to be a more successful purchase than MySpace. Remember when Rupert said, oh, I've heard of this thing called the internet.

I want to get into it and purchase MySpace for some ridiculous eye-watching amount of money in 2005 just to watch that go down the pan entirely.

But I think that is a sign of the way that the business is likely to be going under Lachlan. The Mail Group has got a number of websites like that, hasn't it?

It owns various things that are sort of news adjacent. There's a kind of group of like financial websites.
They do a lot of financial websites.

They do a lot of event organizations and conferences and things like that.

Yeah, if you look actually at the DMGT website, Daily Mail and General Trust, the name of the newspaper is there in the title of it, but it's not desperately prominent in the description of the business as far as Rothermere and his.

Well, it comes back to that thing that we've talked about a lot on this podcast, which is that now the bottom has fallen out of the market in terms of making media.

Print media make money, and internet media makes far less money than

the 90s when you used to be able to sell hugely profitable print ads. So, really, who wants to own media properties anymore?

It's either people like Rupert Murdoch who have a sort of legacy attachment to them, or it's people who want an influence operation.

And don't negate that last part of it because the other thing that Rupert did when he was in town last week with Lachlan was to meet up with Kemi Badnock and Robert Jenrick, the two frontrunners and I think probably fair to say the two most right-wing candidates in the Tory leadership contest.

So he's still keeping a BD eye on that.

Someone tried to convince me recently, a son person, that he's got Rupert really has genuinely retired now and handed over the reins and doesn't take any interest in what's going on at all and is just sort of inconnubial abyss in his vineyard in California with Elena.

But I think there's still very much a BD BDI on what's going on.

And on the second reason, Hannah, that you mentioned the kind of political machination side of why you'd want to own a media business, we come to Paul Marshall,

who has just bought The Spectator for a hundred million, which is I think last time it was on sale, Adam, correct me if I'm wrong, it was twenty million. So even accounting for inflation,

he's paid a premium whack for that. That's a huge amount.
Yeah, I mean I don't know how much they've got to recoup on the Telegraph, but the whole thing is like 800 million, isn't it?

So this has done a huge amount for recouping the Barclays losses.

And it makes the case, really, that the Spectator is a more powerful asset, maybe perhaps than the Telegraph, you know, not at least because it makes money. Well, the Telegraph makes money as well.

That's the one thing that can be said of it. But only as a result of the sort of weird asset stripping, right? Like it's been cut to the bone.
I'm not sure. Do you know what I think? I don't know.

A lot of it is down to that. They have been fairly successful in their subscription striving stuff.
I think the attraction of the Spectator is it's also got an international angle.

It's it's got an American edition, it does a lot of kind of internationally conferences with sort of Victor Auburn and various dodgy people in Hungary, and you see Andrew Neal

all gone and Douglas Murray and people

popping up in Budapest and things.

So it's got it fits that Paul Marshall GB News unheard kind of what we've talked about before on here, this weird form of international nationalism that seems to be a big, big thing in conservatism these days.

And where does Andrew Neal go? I mean, I think that's the main concern we've all got. He's out as publisher.

He had always said in advance, if you remember, he had that sort of weird spat with Jeff Zucker, X of CNN, about who was going to buy it. And he said, well, whenever it gets taken over, I'm leaving.

And so he did, I want to say it's a Facebook post, but I'm not sure. My mind maybe just transmuted this, saying, I'm going.

I think it's terrible that the workers won't get compensated in this takeover, says chairman Neil.

Which was never a traditional line he had when he was at the Sunday Times and The Economist, I have to say. And also, I hope that they'll respect the editorial freedoms.
And you're like,

what about Unheard makes you think that they're not prepared to publish spicy right-wing content? You know, I read a lot of Unheard, but it will push, you know, pretty brisk stuff

of the type that the spectator also does. So

it was not a

gracious farewell post, I think, as well as.

It was not, but I just love the fact that, you know, Paul Marshall got him into GB News, where he lasted a week and in an enormously embarrassing episode resigned after doing, I think slightly more than we, I think he did eight shows at the end, didn't he, Andrew Neal?

And he retired to lick his wounds from that one, but still had the job as chair of the spectator. And Paul Marshall's come back to take that away from him too.

I want Paul Marshall to move in next door to now in France.

Just put up rude topiary looking over his wall and things. Just did everything.
Take it all, Paul.

So moving us swiftly on from that, we should come to the last question of media ownership, which has been in the news in the last week.

So we've talked about the Murdochs and their sort of vexed ownership, and we've talked about the spectator changing hands.

The other story that has been in the news, but a bit lower on the radar, I'd say, has been about the Jewish Chronicle.

There's been a mass walkout of staff from the Jewish Chronicle over a particular columnist, but there's been trouble at Mill for a while.

So Hadley Friedman, David Aronovich, Johnny Friedland, and David Bediel have all said they're not going to work for the paper anymore.

And the inciting incident for this, although I think some of them have troubles going back a bit further, is that the Jewish Chronicle published a series of stories by a freelancer whose biography appears to be somewhat inflated.

One of the clues that maybe it wasn't all straight down the line is the fact that he claims to have been a member of an elite Israeli Special Forces unit at the age of 53,

which is a bit sort of dad's army. I like the idea of a sort of Mossad Dad's army.
Was he a hereditary member of the Special Forces Unit?

And also, the other thing that was very coincidental about these stories is that they all peddled a very specific line that was very helpful to Benjamin Netanyahu, which was the idea that the leader of Hamas was going to take some of the hostages and into Iran, and therefore there was sort of no point doing a hostage deal.

Now, the backdrop to that is the fact that there's huge pressure, both from the Americans and from within Israel itself, to do a ceasefire deal and the belief that that will lead to more of those hostages coming home.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been really resistant to that. So, what had happened really was that a slightly fishy freelancer had been putting stories in the JC that were very pro-Netanyahu.

And I think that really coalesced people's concerns already that the paper has become very pro-Likud, specifically, rather than like representing the British Jewish community or even representing a sort of broad pro-Israel self-defense position.

But as you say, the issue of the ownership has been dribbling on for a while. So, Robbie Gibb, if you remember, was actually Andrew Neal's producer on the Sunday Politics.

That's where I remember him from. He then became Theresa May's spin doctor.
He then now sits on the BBC board. He was until recently listed as the person with sole control of the Jewish Chronicle.

Okay. But we don't know where he got the money from.
He suspiciously found something like 3 million down the back of the sofa in order to pay for it.

And so Alan Rusbridger in Prospect a couple of months ago raised the question maybe it was a US multi-millionaire that was funding this, but no one has been able to get to the bottom of it.

Like lots and lots of people have looked.

Has Gibb been asked about this? Has he just flatly refuses to answer? Won't say.

And there is now a plan to turn the JC into a charitable trust, which I think would be very tricky given its kind of very overtly political stances.

You know, so there are now, including talking people from the Blair era coming back, Lord Austin, the Labour, was he a Labour peer?

Ian Austin, anyway, has now been named as a director along with a couple of other people. So the ownership, technically, people whose name is above the door has changed.

We still don't really know where that initial money came from.

And that bothers people in the same way that it bothered people that the UAE was going to take over the Telegraph, right?

You should kind of know and be able to hold accountable the owners owners of big media properties in Britain. Yeah.

I mean, yeah. If you own a pub, you have to say who's the owner on the outside.

Right, but I think it's all got sucked into, as soon as you mention anything to do with Jewishness and money, people react very strongly, right?

And so, I mean, I mentioned how bad I felt for all the people who had resigned on principle.

And someone came back at me, telegraph writer, saying, Oh, I see, you're just saying it's all murky because it's Jews and money.

And I said, No, I think I've taken a fairly principled stand all along about media ownership and plurality.

But, you know, but it's this odd situation in which Robbie Gibbs just won't say, and no one can make him. But he won't say either, yes, I do own this, or

where the money came from.

And I think that one of the reasons it's particularly concerning to people is that he sits on the editorial board that adjudicates on complaints about Israel-Palestine coverage.

At the same time, as he has been owning a very pro-Netanyahu, very hawkish paper.

And I think that people feel that's a conflict of interest, you know, that he's not a neutral observer, you know, at a time when the BBC's coverage, as you might expect, has been enormously controversial, with activists from both sides complaining about it an awful lot.

But the idea that people are leaving the Jewish Chronicle because they've noticed that it peddles stories that are sympathetic to Netanyahu, I'm not shocked.

And I'm wondering where they've been.

I did feel rather sorry for Josh Glancey, who took a principled stand and left the Jewish Chronicle, I think, last October, for exactly these reasons that he didn't like the increasingly right-wing and pro-Netanyahu lying it was taking, went off to work at Jewish news instead, and kind of popped up saying, Hi, guys, yeah,

some of us did this months ago.

Yeah, and Gabriel Program, who is the kind of ace reporter at the Sunday Times, who does the Starma Glassester and stuff, he popped up on Twitter quite bravely a couple of months ago and said, It is really weird that we don't know the ownership structure of this.

But, you know,

all of those people have been either kind of ignored or shouted down, I think. And, you know, and I think the community is really divided over it.

There was a statement by the chief rabbi that was also pretty much kind of, we need more weapons. It was a very political statement for a religious leader to put out.

And I think there is an increasingly interesting schism in the British Jewish community between people who feel don't question what Israel's doing when there's a war on and people

who don't subscribe to that view, who are probably slightly to the left, slightly more predisposed to the people.

Should you suggest that in a satirical magazine, you would find yourself in a great deal of trouble.

So, a cartoon that says they've moved from saying support Israel's right to defend itself to support Israel's right

that is not acceptable. How did that go down? Very, very badly.

And again,

it does make me feel that those people working on the Jewish Chronicle could perhaps have looked around a bit more widely at other media to see how they were handling this particular story before they suddenly all noticed that the paper they were working for was not entirely reliable in presenting the facts of this situation.

Well, I think I'm probably more sympathetic to you because I kind of know and like several of the people involved.

And I think it's, I think, Johnny Friedland's resignation letter was a really interesting example of this. He said, you know, Friedland's been writing for this paper since the 1970s.

You know, my birth was announced in it.

I think lots of people have a kind of deep loyalty to the paper and what it was, and have therefore been hoping that at some point it would kind of come back round again.

But I do, I mean, you are right that there have been rumblings of discontent about it for really quite some time now.

What happens next? I think it's a really savage blow to lose four of your really objectively biggest name columnists in one weekend is a pretty big blow.

But then it comes back to this question that we were talking about before:

is it being run as a media business?

Well, it's losing quite a lot of money, or is it being run as will it be run as a charitable trust?

Or is whoever owns it, whoever that might be, happy to keep supporting it because they want to have Britain's biggest Jewish newspaper be in tune with their political opinions?

So the brutal answer might be that it might just carry on without really caring. Well, watch this space.

And if you would like a magazine that is fortnightly, funny, and interesting, just go to private-i.co.uk and subscribe.

For the low, low price of £2.99, roughly £100 million less than the spectator cost,

you can get a subscription today. And in fact, if you subscribe, it's even cheaper than that.
That's it from us this week.

Thanks to Ian, Ian, Helen, and Adam, and to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now.

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