119: They Predict A Riot

Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

who either live internationally or might need reminding what this is actually about, this all started about a week ago with the murder of three girls in Southport, the attempted murder of eight others and two adults.

The alleged murderer was not named at the time due to being under the age of 18.

He has since been named, and the judge who named him at Liverpool Crown Court said that continuing to prevent the full reporting has the disadvantage of allowing others to spread misinformation in a vacuum.

And how it has spread, there were rumours that the alleged murderer was a Muslim or was a recent immigrant and this has in part led to enormous amounts of disorder and unrest in various places around the UK places very far from Southport you know Aldershot Hartleypool I mean just all over the place and huge amounts of stress and unpleasantness and policing how did this misinformation spread I suppose is one thing that we're interested in it's interesting the judge said misinformation I would say it was disinformation right a lot of it's deliberate well there's also a very interesting thing where you in two of the different things that happened.

So one of the accounts that was the first one to give a false name, this false name of Ali al-Shakati for the alleged murderer, which is not the correct name, was someone who said, you know, if this is true, then all this thing is about, all hell is about to break loose.

So there was a first kind of thing that you do online, which is you just go, I'm just passing this on, I'm just saying it.

Who can say whether it's true or not?

I'm just putting this in the, injecting this into the bloodstream.

And then Nigel Farage on July the 30th said, I just wonder whether the truth is being withheld from us.

I don't don't know the answer to that.

Well, why not find out?

Yes, this is the thing.

We've talked about this before.

This is a new style, isn't it?

Just asking questions.

Well, the point of just asking questions is that you ask them to people who might be able to give you the information.

And Nigel Farage is now, after eight goes, in quite a good position to do that, given that he could have turned up at the Commons and asked some questions of, say, the Home Office.

How did this start in the first place?

How did this disinformation start being spread?

There's a disinformation researcher called Mark Owen Jones who looked into it and time stamped all of where the false name came out.

And the first person to put out that false name was a woman called Bernie Spoffeth, who runs a swimwear business.

In every other respect, you'd say she was like a delightful Daily Mail feature subject.

Her husband's a sculptor, they live in a very nice house in the middle of the countryside.

One of her kids is an actor.

But somehow, during the COVID pandemic, she became a lockdown sceptic.

She kind of fell into that crowd.

So you can see appearances from her on both GB News and Talk TV talking about that.

And she's billed as a social commentator.

What that means is she has got a popular Twitter account.

And so she was sort of made into a person who we should listen to and be interesting because those channels had a kind of COVID sceptic-shaped hole that they needed to fill, and she put herself into it.

She afterwards said she completely regretted how terrible it was.

She made the most biggest mistake of her life about

this false name.

She said she wasn't the person who did it first.

Someone else had told her, then her story changed, she got it from somewhere else.

But what's interesting to me about that is so often the people peddling this misinformation aren't kind of dispossessed and marginalized people, they're actually very comfortable people, often top end of Gen X, lower end of baby boomers, you know, you know, who've lived through periods of peace and prosperity and stability in their own lives.

And actually, in their own day-to-day lives, you wouldn't say we're kind of economically struggling.

But I remember the guy who paid money to have Gina Miller, the anti-Brexit campaigner killed, was a Viscount.

You know, we have to have talk about the fact that lots of middle-class, middle-aged people spend a bit too much time online during COVID.

And these days, you don't just end up falling for one of these kind kind of tropes.

You become a lockdown sceptic, which bleeds into a vaccine sceptic, which bleeds into you're worried about the World Economic Forum making us all eat insects, or you're worried about 15-minute cities and control, and then you're worried about MK Ultra and thought experiments, and then you're worried about contrails, and then you're worried about whether or not they're controlling the weather, and then you're worried about whether or not all of these kind of racist memes that still perpetuate around you.

And was there a girl who was turned into a Donna kebab by immigrants?

That's a very big one in the annals of kind of far-right conspiracy theorists.

Ironically, I mean, 5G internet is responsible for a lot of this stuff, but not in the way we think.

But what's interesting is that people end up drifting from one bit to another.

All of these kind of different islands of conspiracism are kind of connected to each other.

And yet the people who appear on the streets, many of them without their shirts on, are not those agreeable middle-class people spending too much time on the internet.

Right, you don't actually hear from a lot of those people on those TV channels, actually.

That's the kind of interesting thing about it.

So I can see why they feel like they are being locked out.

Do hear lots of people on those TV channels saying, well, you know, this is just the concerns of the white working class, which I just find the most patronizing nonsense in the world ever.

I mean, there has never been anyone better assimilation than the white working class.

If you go back to the Bristol bus protests in the 1950s, or Cable Street in the 1930s, or Stockport last Monday, I mean, it's just this dribblesome idea that all working-class people are racist.

No, sorry, it's not true.

I think some of those people might be locked down skeptics, the people who are doing the writing, although they have got a very nasty surprise coming, you know.

But you're right, the kind of nexus of accounts that really pushed all of these narratives, particularly about being an illegal immigrant, were often people who were banned under the previous iteration of Twitter, which had its own problems.

But for example, the Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate,

who said, you know, I think this is an illegal immigrant.

The really odd thing about that is that he has converted to Islam after saying Christianity was, quote, cucked.

And he is saying the same set of things that led to people trying to attack mosques.

So there's him, he's back.

Bernie Spoffeth was banned over COVID misinformation.

She's back.

Tommy Robinson banned and is now back.

So, what's happened is we are now seeing

what it's like when all of those people are allowed back into the open.

In a way, it might be quite useful because clearly there was some coordination also going on in private Telegram and signal groups, these are encrypted apps.

And what it's now made very obvious is that there is a network of people who all talk to each other and they all have the same set of talking points.

And we can now see that out in the open, which if it was all happening on Telegram, we couldn't.

Right.

So that's useful for the police, for example.

They might take an interest in some of that.

Because I think there comes a point where...

Presumably, having been attacked on the streets and then beaten up and vilified by the people who claim that law and order is their abiding principle, maybe the police will suddenly find they've got more time and interest in policing anti-police sentiment.

Yeah, I mean, I think there is a really interesting question about whether or not some of the people who have been posting openly, some of the stuff they've been posting, is tantamount to incitement to violence.

And that's a very, obviously a difficult line to draw.

But if you look at the images of people writing, they do just seem to a lot of them be having a really great time.

I mean, you know, one doesn't like to slur anybody, but this is supposedly a protest against the murder of children, and that has somehow turned into people looting branches of lush bath bombs.

Right, it's not hard to suggest that maybe it may have drifted somewhat from its original aims.

It's not coherent as a protest, really, is it?

This is reminiscent of the riots in 2011 and previous ones.

And the idea that the people involved actually quite like violent confrontations with the police is not new.

But I don't think we can blame all of this just entirely on social media because the other dangerous thing that I've wanged on about for ages at Private Eye is the way that mainstream media, to use that horrible phrase, is more and more being dictated by what's going on online.

I mean, we do a lot of this just sort of silly clickbait stuff, which has now taken over every single newspaper website, pretty much.

But also, that kind of agenda of what is being talked about on Twitter and Twitter being quite a different beast to what what it was 10 years ago is now feeding right back into a very sort of right-wing nexus of mainstream media outlets who know that they've got a market there they can target with that.

I mean, one of the things that struck me was Darren Grimes, who is a presenter on GB News, and as such, ought to be a journalist and know some basic journalism.

And we did a podcast, I won't go over it all again now, but we did one a few months ago, which people can go back and listen to, about reporting restrictions.

And the simple fact of it is just that if a suspect is under 18, they have automatic anonymity until the point where a judge says that their name can be released.

And usually that's at the full end of a trial after a conviction.

The comparison that Darren Grimes made was with the Brianna Jaikillers, and that was certainly the case.

It went right through to sentencing before the names were released.

And I can't think, I may be wrong about this, but I can't think of another precedent for a name being released at this stage of someone who is still under 18.

I think part of it was that the suspect was only a few days away from being 18.

I think he was six days short of it.

So I presume there was a consideration that, given the amount of civil unrest this appears to be prompting, shall we just get this cleared up now?

I'm not objecting to it.

I think in this case, it was the sensible thing for the judge to do to get out of there and to say this name that's going around is a false one.

But I had a look at the GB News website today, and very interestingly, it seems to have got this new strapline which has appeared at the top, which says, Don't let them silence you, support GB News.

Who are the them here?

Is it the hedge fund owner, Paul Marshall, multi-billionaire and owner of GB News?

Is it

Eamon Holmes, you know, ex of ITV and Sky, and now plying his trade on GB News?

This sort of narrative of us and them and something is being hidden for you, which is being propagated just as much by Nigel Farage and Lawrence Fox and Tommy Robinson and an awful lot of dodgy people online, is feeding right into a much, much more mainstream media.

And I thought as well, interestingly, on Monday's Telegraph, the fact that they chose to go, this is on the sixth day of unrest, the day after the sixth day of riots, and they chose to go with the headline, far-right clash with Muslims in rioting.

Which, strictly speaking, is accurate, specifically to Bolton protests yesterday, where there was a counter-protest by people who were chanting Allah Huaqba.

But also, things were kicking off in an awful lot of different cities.

That is an interesting framing of what has been going on over the last few days.

It's not going right out there, but it's a little bit dog whistly, isn't it?

It is, and the immediate response, I mean, certainly of the mail, I was intrigued by the mail on Sunday's response that it was, this is appalling, this writing.

The far right are there.

Who on earth can be to blame for this?

I think it's the woke members of the cabinet.

And I'm reading the second para and I'm saying, what?

A, they've been in power for about five seconds, and B, how did you get from the first half of that sentence to the second half?

And it's because of the failure to deal with immigration by the Labour government.

Okay,

he hasn't had long to deal with it, and I suppose they're objecting to not voting for Rwanda.

But it's

an immediate response is to say, this is appalling, but

and that's the same sort of heading for the whistle.

What is quite interesting here is that a lot of the things that you are now getting from commentators on the right, i.e., people have got legitimate concerns, they haven't been heard for so long, was exactly the things that people in the left said about the 2011 riots, which was sparked by the police shooting of a guy called Mark Duggan.

And so there was a kind of riots of the language of the unheard element to that, too.

Is there something to do here as well about crime reporting?

Because there are a lot of crime influences on TikTok who have the potential to spread a lot of mis and disinformation.

And there is obviously, I mean, there's always been an obsession with crime reporting, but now there is such an enormous appetite for it.

Is that reflected in the mainstream press as well?

I think that's a particular problem, which is the way that our laws are structured, which we talked about before.

You know, the idea that, you know, now everything is kind of sub-judice in the sense that there can't be lots more speculation about the suspect because he's entitled to a fair trial.

And into that vacuum, there's a lot more of, why aren't we being told this?

This has all gone very quiet, isn't it?

Very, it's all very suspicious.

And I think the same thing happens, you know, the way that the rule here is, you know, you shouldn't publish things that could prejudice the jury is very different to America.

And I think because the internet is so American, and so many of these right-wing influencers are really either funded by or plugged into American internet, they think it's like, oh, Jane, you could just write everything you want about a trial while it's going on.

And therefore, there's something innately sinister about the fact that our press conducts itself in a very different way.

And it also, fundamentally, by doing that, our press also leaves a vacuum of people who want to consume this content and are not being offered it by the mainstream media.

It was interesting seeing a former police chief saying, Is there now a case of balancing the right to a fair trial with the right for your cities not to end up on fire?

Is there something that the police and the judiciary can do between them that allows a fair trial still to be conducted, but also to get in and stop the lie putting its boots on before it's halfway around the world?

And I think that's a really interesting development.

And again, we have been writing about this before in the magazine, but there does come a point where you think this is we do things differently here to the way they're done in the States.

Is there a way of getting an official source in earlier saying

this isn't true?

Yeah, I mean, I do wonder if our our rules around reporting are actually sustainable in the long term for exactly that reason.

I mean, one of the ways that this can happen, for example, is you know, like the fake name thing.

If enough accounts tweet that, and it really doesn't have to be very many, it can really be a couple of hundred, it will vary in a short space of time, it will then show up in the trending bar on Twitter, at which point people see it and assume there's something they're not being told.

They go and look for it.

And the way the engine of this works is that then, well, hang a minute, it's not appearing in the mainstream news, which is just more proof that they aren't reporting it, right?

It's this incredibly self-reinforcing narrative.

This happened recently with a story about Jay Slater, who's a teenager who went missing on Tenerife.

He wasn't found for weeks and weeks and weeks.

There were searches all over the island into which there stepped this mass of disinformation about, was he involved in the Moroccan mafia was there was he was he dealing drugs was there all of this you know i mean his you know his poor family were trying to just cope with their you know son being searched for and not being found eventually he was found he'd fallen into a ravine he'd been lost and he'd been out and he'd sort of gone walking and not found his way back and he you know that was the simple truth of it but the number of people who've tried to talk to me about oh it's interesting this jay slater thing isn't it what do you think's going on there it's just another vacuum that's the interesting thing about it ultimately whatever it turns out the circumstances of his death were, it's not something that is being covered up for any reason.

It was just a purely people not knowing as the search was going on.

And there is this kind of, I think, what you're describing is that innate suspicion that if you're not being told something, there must be a kind of dirty reason for it rather than it's like this is when we talked about this before, the simple inability to deal with the fact that some things are currently unknown at any point.

That's the kind of tension that we're picking up here.

is an enormous headline that says, Why did something happen?

and then in tiny letters underneath says we don't know.

And that's the truth of the story.

We had this with Kay Middleton at the start of the year, which feels like ancient history now.

You know, why aren't we being told what's happened?

Has you know, has she been bumped off and it's been covered up, and there's a mistress thing that knows, well, she's ill, and they just didn't want to say so far, and they've got young children.

How many times?

How many times is this going to happen before either rules or protocols change about what is being put out there?

We don't know.

So now let's turn from something incredibly depressing to something else that's incredibly depressing.

Hugh Edwards.

So this is a story that we covered a year ago on the podcast when Hugh Edwards was removed from his job at the BBC, supposedly for sending explicit messages to someone who might have been under the age of 18, but the story was not reported terribly well in the Sun.

And Adam, you wrote a lot about this at the time.

Yes.

But readers may be confused as to exactly how what's happened now, the grimness of it, relates to the Sun story last year.

And the simple answer to that is it doesn't.

The supposed 17-year-old, who may have been an 18-year-old, who was being talked about in The Sun last year, who Hugh Edwards had solicited £35,000 worth of explicit images from, is nothing to do with this latest case, which is much, much grimmer.

And it's to do with category A, B, and C photographs of very young children indeed.

Okay.

Which he's now pleaded guilty to.

And so

just completely separate cases.

The Sun clearly knew that he was a wrong one, and there's an awful lot of other stuff come out about Hugh Edwards since, which bears that out.

So this prosecution appears to have arisen out of the conviction of another paedophile, a man in his 20s in Cardiff, I think last May, who, once he was convicted of distributing images of child sex abuse, the police then followed up all of his contacts, one of whom appears to have been Hugh Edwards, and that's where these charges, over 41 photos, came from.

So it's an entirely separate thing.

But interestingly, that Sun story is still sort of growing and metastasizing in a way because the son famously did not have the young man in question, who he can now refer to as a young man.

He was referred to as a young person.

And the son suddenly got very, very keen on gender-neutral pronouns, which are not one of their usual areas of interest.

Which we talked about before on this podcast was because they were so worried about outing Hugh Edwards

that they got themselves into a bit of a tangle over that and had to refer to him as the child of the two people who they did have on the record.

And we're talking to them, who were this person's mother and stepfather.

Now,

this last weekend,

the young person, who's not particularly young anymore, he's now 21, did give an exclusive interview, but not to the son.

Okay.

He's gone to the mirror.

So, this is some proper old-school tabloid rivalry here that they have brought up the son of the family, but the stepfather and the mum are still with the son, who attempted to do a bit of a spoiler over the weekend.

It's very confusing to see.

See this footage that the son is not with the son.

No, the son is in the mirror.

S-U-N.

Thank you.

Okay.

Sorry.

The Sun attempted to do a spoiler where they said, we've got this video of the stepfather confronting Hugh Edwards at a station.

And actually, it turned out when you watched the video, they didn't at all.

They had a video of Hugh Edwards standing at a station, which didn't seem particularly looked like the sort of thing that anyone who spotted that man off the news standing at a station might have videoed themselves.

So they slightly fell down on that one.

I wonder if it's time to say a word in praise of the Sun, really, which is that at the time that that story came out, people, maybe including us, were really critical of it.

But is there a case for saying that they actually had got a huge amount of information on him and they were fairly sure that there was he was acting in various inappropriate ways?

This was the only one they could get over the line.

I think there may be, so certainly Victoria Newton, the editor of the Sun, did give an interview this week where she said they'd been investigating Cubans since 2018.

And other stories, if you remember, Newsnight at the time came out with a load of allegations about inappropriate behaviour towards younger members of staff at the BBC.

There's some more stuff has come about that, including him inviting a young producer over to stay in his hotel room the night after he'd been covering the funeral of Prince Philip.

So it was kind of a tip of the iceberg thing.

But yes, so there is something, as I say, the sun were clearly onto him being a wrong one, but not onto the specifics, which turned out to be much, much grimmer than I think even they probably at that point were.

And a huge amount of the coverage at the time was spent in the media criticising the BBC's either failure to investigate or its reaction to this piece of information about the sun and the £32,000 worth of photographs.

Yes, I mean, mean, the police were very quick to clear up that particular thing and say that there was no criminality involved in the story that the son were writing about.

And the young person in question was very clear that he, at that point, didn't want any prosecution to take place and thought that nothing illegal had gone wrong.

He has since then changed his tune in the latest interview with the mirror and does say that he now feels that he was groomed.

And there are other cases as well of people who come forward and said that Hugh Edwards sent messages and were in a very, very controlling and grooming kind of a way.

One of whom we learned over the weekend is having therapy paid for by the BBC.

So the BBC have sort of been on catch-up with all of this.

And they have, to be fair to them, been put in a very, very difficult situation.

Hugh Edwards was suspended at pretty much the moment that he announced through his wife and a PR company run by Andy Coulson, Hex News of the World fame, and John Stiefel, who used to be deputy editor, I think, of the Daily Mail, came in and did it.

And what we said at the time was an extraordinarily good PR job, which was to...

To put it in a cynical way, play the mental health card and say that he was having treatment for his mental health, which at that point killed the story completely.

The BBC and no one else could comment at that point.

And when it emerged much, much later on, they heard from the police in November that he had been arrested on suspicion of possession of images of child sex abuse.

They were kind of stuck in a position because they still, he was unavailable for any sort of questioning.

The BBC very famously screwed this up with Cliff Richard a long time ago when there was a police investigation into him, ended up paying out an enormous amount of money.

And there has now, because of various legal findings, which we've talked about on this podcast before, there is now a precedent that you don't name people at well while a police investigation is ongoing but it did mean because Hugh Edwards is always top of that that awful chart of the enormous amounts of money paid out by people at the BBC and even more unfortunately for them got a £40,000 pay rise in the last year and continued to be paid his salary there's an awful lot of money licensed fee payers money which has gone over to him not only during the period of suspension but post-arrest as well.

Your pay rise while you're suspended seems very ambitious.

Well, Tim Davies be very clear that the pay rise was agreed before,

before the suspension, even.

But I mean, it's not good.

The optics are absolutely bloody awful on the BBC.

There's a pay rise, too.

So you can see there's going to be some internal anger as well as.

There is an awful lot of internal anger at the BBC over this.

But this is the counter-narrative, isn't it?

I mean, we're reading Hugh Edwards was a god, he was untouchable.

Why on earth did everyone defer to him?

And my memory is that nearly everyone at the BBC didn't think he was a god.

They thought he was really tiresome and pompous and was given all the best jobs for reasons they couldn't understand.

And the person who really thought he was brilliant was Hugh Edwards.

So again, there's a bit of backstory here, surely.

What should the BBC have done?

It seems I can't quite work out how.

I don't think they could have done anything differently, but morally is a different thing to legally, isn't it?

Which is why it looks so bad now.

Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, has suggested that they should try in some way to claw back at least the £200,000 that they paid him since his arrest in November.

Whether there's any sort of legal precedent or way to be able to do that, I mean, it's a bit like Jimmy and Roll that fuss over Fred the Shred's pension and whether there was any way of clawing that back.

You know, legally and contractually, these things are quite kind of sealed up.

So, I mean, maybe we find a way.

Maybe he will voluntarily return some of that money.

He's surely got enough of it by now.

I mean, it's almost exactly the same point we were making about procedure in the previous discussion on the podcast.

At the point in which the police told the BBC he's been investigated, he may be charged.

Is there an argument for saying this might be the point at which you stop paying him?

Is there some halfway mechanism which again balances these two sets of rights?

Between the police don't want you naming him so that it messes up the investigation, but

it's going to look terrible in three months' time.

I mean, I feel there must be something that's possible.

It would be surprising if there wasn't a clause somewhere in that contract about not bringing the BBC into disrepute, wasn't there?

So

possibly there was.

It definitely has done.

It definitely very much has done.

Yes, yeah.

I'm going to have one last crack at covering something that's not totally depressing.

I think we can do it.

I have great faith in us.

Go on.

What's your cozy moment for this episode?

The Conservative Leadership Contest.

Oh, thank goodness.

Great.

One of those Olympic sports that

doesn't matter too much.

If you don't cheer up at the hit, just the sound of the words Mel Stride, then are you even alive?

You're right.

The starting gun has been fired, and there are just three

short months to go

of waking up every morning, seeing how everyone's doing, putting more bets on all of that.

I would imagine everyone in the Conservative Party has had their bets on weeks ago.

Yeah, I'm pretty confident about my tenor on Penny Mordaunt, actually.

So,

right, 5% of the party's MPs are standing.

Just a few stats for you.

You only needed 10 MPs nomination to stand, and Suella Bravo said she well totally could have got that many, but that it was clear that the party disagreed with her.

Was it like my diagnosis of my prescription?

I think was the phrase she used.

So she will not be.

Okay, the doctor will not be delighting us.

All right, well, so we've got we've got six for August, then in September it'll be whittled down to four, and then there will be hustings which will remove two more, and finally there'll be a full vote of Tory members and the new leader will be announced on the 2nd of November.

Squid game.

It's long.

It's long.

So

we should just quickly talk.

The candidates are Pretty Patel, James Cleverley, Kemi Batanock, Tom Tugenhat, Robert Jenrick, and let's not forget Mel Stride.

I have found every single one of these described at some point or another over the last couple of months as the front runner in the race, with the exception of Mel Stride, who no one has yet described as the frontrunner, but there is always time.

Do it now.

I think he's the front runner.

Hey, hey, you know what?

At least Mel Stride.

Oh, gosh.

Sorry.

Awful.

I was trying to do something with Tom tugging hat into the ring, but it doesn't know.

It just doesn't know.

No, no, no.

So, who would you like to know about first?

Mel Stride.

I'm fascinated.

There's a bizarre thought experiment with it.

Try this, listeners.

Try and picture Mel Stride in your head right now.

I bet you can't.

He's sort of ubiquitous during the election campaign, but he's just sort of there, isn't he?

Well, I've got Mel Smith

and Meryl Streep.

I've got Saicho Mel from The Simpsons, as far as I know.

Honestly, I like the look of Mel Stride.

So you'll have heard, if you're a sort of nerd who's listening to this podcast, you will have probably listened to him on the radio doing all the media rounds in the run-up to the election because everyone else was trying to save their own skins.

And Mel generously and nobly stepped up to the plate.

Here's a fun fact about him: he has the fifth smallest what in the House of Commons.

Majority, it's 61.

Very good.

I know this because I think it is genuinely one of the big things that counts against him.

And he actually did the same thing that poor old Ed Balls did it in which election was it?

That he went and campaigned in everyone else's constituencies very generously, and then that's when he lost his seat.

So it can hubris can be swiftly followed by no one.

Do you say a majority of 61?

61.

61.

Is the fifth smallest.

The fifth smallest.

There are four smaller than that.

Is this why he's going for it?

Because you get a bump for being Prime Minister.

Oh, Prime Minister.

So leader of the opposition.

God, old nabbits do hi.

We do.

Yeah, yeah.

The smallest majority at the moment is 15.

15 votes.

Who's that?

Rich Holden's is quite small.

Who's Hendon?

Rich Holden's is between 15 and 61.

There we go.

Oh, yeah.

Anyway, I'm interested in Stride because I think it's nice we're talking.

It's probably the longest anyone so far in the campaign has talked about Mel Stride, and I like that.

Has he got a heat pump?

Is that why?

I don't know.

I don't know.

He's got the sixth smallest heat pump in the comic.

So he's talked about changing the shape of the party because I think no matter what happens over the next three months.

From very, very small to non-existent.

Whatever happens over the next three months, they've got the same method for picking the leader, which has produced such golden hits as Liz Truss, Ian Duncan Smith.

You know, you cut it down to the last two among the MPs, and then the membership choose whoever is the madder of those two.

That's a tried and tested formula.

And there was a speculation that one of the last things Rishi Sunak might do in his much more comfortable position as leader of the opposition might be to change that system possibly so that just the MPs get to pick.

That hasn't been changed, so we are going to get the madder of the two of whoever's remaining in October.

And there is precedent.

Michael Howard, when he was leader of the opposition, did exactly that.

He changed the rules precisely because he wanted a much longer process because he thought that would be more likely to lead to David Cameron rather than David Davis.

And no, he was correct.

Yeah.

And so there's been some tinkering around the edges with the length of the contest, but the shape of it basically is the same.

Stride has said, we've got to turn this into a mass movement organization.

So exactly what you're saying, where people are involved because there's something in it for them.

Okay, well, that doesn't sound very different to the traditional thing.

But

is he talking about increasing the membership?

Because so far, it's been a one-way...

trajectory for the membership in the last 20 years or so.

And that does produce odder results, as we've discussed on this podcast before.

But he has said he's not going to take strong positions on issues, which I find fascinating.

Because he was interviewed by Politics Home and he said that he thinks candidates should not try to appeal to sections of the membership.

His words.

I don't know what contest he thinks he's in.

Well, I mean, he's been watching Keir Starmer over the last three months do not have strong positions on anything in the run-up to an election.

It works.

Prime Minister's questions would be amazing if they both just stood there with the leader of the opposition and the primacy just going, ah.

I don't know.

I don't know.

What do you think?

Could be.

You might be right.

And he's the only one who said on the ECHR, I'm not going to give a strong opinion about whether we leave the ECHR or not, because that's not what my job should be.

It's not about whether the leader believes in that, which is a very strange and different position.

Does he think he's in the Green Party?

That's what's happened here.

I don't know.

Don't you think all of that is a coded rebuke to Kemi Badenock, who is probably the actual frontrunner, who has got a strong opinion on pretty much everything that has ever happened?

Kemi Baderock, former Minister for, was it Women and Equalities, Minister of State for Business, and Minister for asking you out for a fight that was the minister for having outside yeah no it's i'm in the middle of reading her um the biography of her by lord ashcroft at the moment and it's she you know from her earliest days she was quite tasty she turned up at university and daubed in one of her flat mates for for taking drugs and they got expelled i mean

she she's a woman who knows her own mind should we put it that way

she she has been described as the front runner hasn't she I mean in lots of places.

The odds are on her.

Does Michael Gove know that?

Because he's her strong backer, isn't he?

She's very opposed to that sort of thing.

James Cleverly, in other situations, you would think, would be a very strong candidate, having been home and foreign secretary.

But my sense is a bit like Jeremy Hunt, he might just be a bit too normal.

Sensible.

Yeah, for the Tory membership, who like the exciting taste of Liz Truss.

Again, I mean, he is portrayed as batshit man in the pages of Private IO Weekly in the great comic strip due to the fact that having said Rwanda was batshit

as an idea, which it obviously was, he then pretended it was a terrific idea for the rest of his time as foreign secretary.

I mean, he's not a great candidate, is he?

I think Suella Brahmerman does think that Rwanda is good.

Wouldn't you rather have someone who's lying about that than somebody who genuinely is uninterested enough to believe it?

I'm not going to answer that.

It's one of those I don't know.

Cleverly's pitch is, as you say, as a centrist, and he's also said the party shouldn't be, quote, sacrificing pragmatic government in the national interest on the altar of ideological purity, Which again does raise the question of where he spent the last few years because that is the stock in trade.

I know, I'm just, I, I, for a while, he was the kind of designated broadcast minister in the way that Mel Stride is now.

So I did lots of things alongside him, and he had to defend during the Brexit year some pretty wacky shit.

And I remember thinking, this is why I couldn't be a politician, because you're sitting there going, well, even we might get this legislation passed, you know, hope springs eternal.

But he was always quite pleasant and non-weird in a way that I could not say the same of everyone on that list.

But what about when he sat in the conversation and quite clearly said shithole

and then said he didn't?

Yeah, I mean, he does seem to mostly get in trouble by saying things that sort of accurately represent his beliefs.

Indeed, they're true, but they do all contain the word shit.

They're going to go weird.

They are going to go weird.

I mean, they were seriously considered a little while back having Ian Duncan Smith back as interim leader, weren't they?

With Rishi standing down while all this went on, which is just, I mean, if Ian Duncan Smith is the answer, you are definitely asking the wrong questions.

Pretty Patel is also standing, and she would be the third MP with an Essex constituency to be standing.

So, this might well be an Essex stitch-up.

Three out of six are from Essex.

The really interesting thing about Pretty Patel's constituency is she's also going for the Unite the Party, Can't We All Get Along approach, which is somewhat inconsistent with her previous approach to politics.

But she wrote a Telegraph op-ed that was kind of like, put aside our ideological differences, shouldn't we be more good at building people homes, but not in the greenbelt?

You know, she was she's definitely, and she came out and condemned Nigel Farage's statement on the riots.

And there has been this big question about whether her.

She's a former dance partner from the Conservative Conference.

It's so sad.

She can dance with him, but she will not support him.

Isn't it, in terms of sheer disillusionment?

But it is interesting that that line has now been drawn because I think Swella Breverman has been in lots of those very fringy Conservative conferences that are the kind, the nationalist conferences that also invite Nigel Farage.

So Pretty Patel has clearly decided that

you never go full bonkers.

Pretty Patel's gone very, very quiet since she left the cabinet.

I've hardly heard anything out of her at all.

Yeah, she hasn't been turning up at those weird kind of national conservatism conferences and things like that in the way that Swella Bravman did.

So there is an interesting.

I mean, I always wondered at what point the Conservative Party would claw its way back towards wanting to appeal to the centre.

I thought it might take them one more go-round.

I think, in a way, my presumption would be that it'd be Kemmi Badnock because they really need to get it out of their systems.

We really stand up for what we believe in, even when most people don't agree with us on it.

And then they might go, oh, what about if we compromise with the electorate

in another cycle's time?

But we'll see.

They did do Liz Truss, didn't they?

So they have tried it it out once right and then but then Rishi Sinek was then crowned by the MPs so have they only had 49 brief days of Liz Trust was it enough was it not nearly enough no

Tom Tugenhart is there any appetite Tommy Tuggs Tommy stop it

the nickname I'm not supposed to use in the office

upsets me

but he's got the same problem as what Ian pointed out as James Cleverly's problem which is that he was very you know sopping wet centrist candidate and he's now saying I think maybe we should leave the European Convention on Human Rights.

That's the kind of thing you people like, isn't it?

Isn't this about his third time around as well?

I feel like Tom Tugenhat has been running for the leadership

since about 2000.

Yeah, he came fifth in 2022, and Kemi Badenock came fourth, which was not a bad result for her, given that she was at that point very little known.

Yes, we literally have been doing the Tom's put his Tugenhat in the ring every single year that I can remember.

So, yes, he's been around a long time.

All I know, I mean, has he had, he was, was he in the cabinet at some point?

Literally, all I know about him is he was being mooted as a leader.

They always thought he should do defence

because he'd been in the army, but he didn't.

He chaired that select committee.

He said lots of things about China that turned out to be quite true.

He did have a sort of sense base, and as Helen says, unfortunately, he's decided that's not the way to win.

But this is a really interesting sort of switcheroo dynamic in this race.

All the centrist, boring liberal ones are saying, no, no, no, we need to leave everything and we need to, you know, bring back the birch, tow the island into the middle of the Atlantic, all of this stuff.

Yeah.

And all the ex-nutters are making some very emollient noises.

Weird.

Well,

I'm genuinely really interested in what will happen.

In a way, as you say, apart from the kind of Essex dominance, it's also, you know, it's a very wide open race in terms of gender, ethnicity, and class.

That is genuinely quite interesting that that is not a factor in the Conservative leadership and suggests Britain is in a slightly better place than you might otherwise have thought.

Five front-runners and Melstride.

That is something actually we should pay tribute to, because that's true of the last couple of

Conservative leadership elections as well.

They don't mind having ethnic minorities on ticket, and they don't mind women either, which is something Labour have always had a problem with electing as leaders.

Fun fact about Tom Tugenhat, one of his donors so far is a man named Michael Torrey.

That's nice, isn't it?

At which point, I mean, if you've lost Michael Torrey, you've really.

Yeah, anyway.

That is a hang with it.

Have you not mentioned the most generic of all the candidates?

Robert Jenneric.

There we go.

This is one of his ex-nicknames.

Yeah, Robert Jenerick.

What happened to him?

Because he was in cabinet and then

he was immigration minister under Rishi Sunak.

He resigned over a point of principal on Rwanda.

Before that, he was seen as a

slightly centrist, very

un sort of controversial figure.

He was briefly a health minister.

Liz Truss made him a health minister.

But I did read in a profile of the spectator that this has given him an insight into the bureaucracy of the healthcare system.

All right.

What was his role when he decided that in the children's asylum you should paint over the welcoming, friendly cartoon and it should be white?

Because we don't want immigrant children in particular to feel that this is a nice, smiley country they've come for.

I think that was his immigration minister.

He was Suella's sort of deputy, wasn't he?

And didn't he make the same mistake of resigning on a point principal about the same time that she was sacked?

And It sort of slightly went unnoticed, I think.

He has definitely pitched as the I'm the candidate of the right, and

he wants to bring back the Rwanda scheme, he wants to stop the boats, he wants to build more houses, more prisons, and definitely wants to leave the ECHR.

I think that's not an unfair characterisation of his.

Can I just point out that he is known for one other thing, which involves our greatly lamented, departed, one of our favourite press proprietors on Street of Shame, Richard Desmond,

who moved into property development, in fact, with the old West West Ferry printers site that used to print the Daily Express and the Daily Star.

And Robert Jenrick made what turned out to be an unlawful decision over the fact that Richard Desmond didn't want to spend £40 million

on supplying social houses and stuff for the community, which is one of the conditions.

of the development being passed by the local council.

Robert Jenrick overruled them, and then a judge overruled him and said it was an unlawful decision.

So let's not forget that one.

And it was complicated by Richard Desmond, who's actually formerly known as Dirty Dez,

gave quite a large sum of money at a fundraising due when he was sitting next to Robert Jenrick and showing him videos of how wonderful the West Ferry development was going to look.

Yeah, it was sort of fairly sort of straight up.

Yes, it was straight up.

What word are we looking for here?

Are we looking for dirty?

Dirty would do here.

Dirty would certainly do.

Well, he wants more prisons built, and maybe that's because he knows he'll get the contract.

So that's it for this episode of page 94 we do hope you've enjoyed listening if you'd like to get a bit more page 94 uh in print form then you can buy the associated magazine private eye just go to private-eye.co.uk click the button mark subscribe and you'll be sent a copy almost as inexpensive as this podcast is to listen to it's really a bargain cannot recommend it enough we'll be back again in two weeks with another of these we're going to be doing a summer culture special how exciting that's going to be for your holidays it's going to be great so tune in then.

We've never trailed the next episode before.

I think we should start doing it all the time.

And in the interim, if you want to read my review of Cammy Badenock's biography by Lord Ashcroft, that will be appearing in the magazine.

Yet another good reason to buy the next edition and all the subsequent ones of Private Eye magazine.

Thanks to Ian, Helen, and Adam, and thanks to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio, who produced this episode as he produces all the episodes.

And thank you for listening.

Goodbye.