118: Bye-Biden

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Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

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

We are here to discuss the minor, little obscure stories of the week's news.

Just a few things you might have missed.

So, we thought we'd start off with number one:

America.

The number of very, very aged men standing for the presidency has halved in the last 24 hours at time of recording.

This is very exciting.

Yes, Yes, when you say America, since we were last here, an enormous amount has happened in America.

We are now recording this after the attempted assassination attempt on Donald Trump, after the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, in which everybody in the Republican Party was very, very happy about the fact that they were running against extremely old Joe Biden.

And then the Sunday night pivot into update: Extremely Old Joe Biden has finally conceded he's too old, and now the Republican Party is sad and say Donald Trump did an Amazing Truth social post where he said, I should get all my money back that I spent campaigning against Biden because it's not going to be him now, essentially.

Which is very hopeful.

Good luck to him.

I enjoyed the fact that it was the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who's even older than Biden, who apparently eventually told him, You're too old, even by old standards.

Is that fair?

Yeah, she's 84, and she had been ratcheting up the pressure behind the scenes for quite a long time.

It's generally considered it's been her and Barack Obama.

And she did a very coded interview after Joe Biden said, No, actually, I think I'm going to stay in, saying, Well, whatever Joe Biden decides,

we'll all support him, whatever it might be.

And that kind of gave the coded signal.

And then George Clooney wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in which he also said, I love him, he's one of my best friends, but sometimes you have to say to people,

Sod off, Aldi, it was broadly.

And that was that was sort of seen as being kind of directed by Obama.

So the two people who never needed to run for elected office again in the Democratic Party had sort of taken over the effort so that they wouldn't be seen by anyone to be kind of jockeying for position or doing it in their own interests.

None of the potential contenders had kind of come anywhere near saying they thought he should go.

Can I just check?

Because

Biden, he sent out his resignation letter and then he added afterwards that he supported Kamala Harris.

Now, given that not very long ago, he confused her with Trump,

did he mean to say he supported Trump?

You hope someone checked that tweet, don't you?

I wondered about that.

I asked my American colleagues about that, why they were two separate tweets.

And their theory was that he thought the resignation letter would end up in history books, so he just wanted it to only be about him.

And I thought, oh, yeah, no, actually, that does instantly sound like

that.

It instantly makes sense to me.

But you're right, it was this odd thing, and it was sort of an update regarding my previous announcement.

P.S., I'm releasing all my delegates to Camela, which makes a huge amount of sense because

the campaign funding already has her name on it, right?

Actually, Because she would have been on the vice presidential ballot.

They can just switch that all over to her.

So her, rather than anyone else being the Democratic nominee, has got an enormous funding advantage.

The money just sleuces straight across.

Yeah, you can just sort of

peel down the Biden for president, paste on Harris for president.

Whereas otherwise, they would have had to do something complicated about transferring it to a PAC, a political action committee.

And those aren't supposed to coordinate with the candidate, except we all know that they do.

There can still be a challenge for the Democratic nomination, can there?

Yeah, absolutely.

There will be a vote at the Democratic convention uh in Chicago in August and time for Bernie Sanders to come in even older come on Bernie still time uh feel the burn yeah

I mean he could still

he is I think in practice it will be very difficult um because everybody who you everyone you heard of you thought it would be has already rode in and there was a primary challenger very briefly a guy called Dean Phillips who primary challenged Biden and he got absolutely nowhere and if you remember there was a lot of grumpiness about Hillary in 2016 the fact that she had that establishment to kind of form behind her and no one else could get a look in.

So it is quite, I mean, it'd be, I'd love it.

Obviously, it'd be chaos and drama, but it would be very tricky at this point.

And what about her contemporaries?

Are they just biding their time?

So Biden, terrible.

Oh, my God.

No, sorry.

Are they saying, well, I'll just wait until another time and then it might be me?

Yeah, I think they were before that.

I think that's definitely Newsom's approach.

He's been very loyal to Biden all the way through.

But then the other, if you're a white man from a swing state, now is an incredibly good time to remind everybody that you're still alive because the assumption is that that's who her running mate will need to be.

And that could be a couple of people.

There's a guy called Andy Bashir, who is the Democratic governor of Kentucky, which is about as improbable as that sounds.

Does that swing?

Swing?

No.

Oh, no.

Whereas, so, but you know, he's got a proven track record of appealing to what you would think of as traditionally very Republican elements, right?

How on earth did he become a.

Well, he won the first time by 5,000 votes, and and then he massively increased his majority last time.

So he seems just to be a very parochially speaking, is this the same as sort of Lib Dem Tunbridge Wells?

Is that what we're doing?

Yeah, he's thank you for putting it in tons of.

I can get my head around.

There's a very good sort of Civil War history

long tale that is worth looking at in the South, but sadly, we haven't got time for it.

Sorry, you're not talking about Tunbridge Wells now, are you?

The Kentus is the Kentis man, isn't it?

Charlie works equally well here.

No, the one I'm thinking of in terms of swing states would be someone like Josh Shapiro, who is the governor of Pennsylvania.

And Pennsylvania is probably the key swing state in this election.

So he would be a brilliantly useful addition to the ticket.

Also, the democratically tenant governor of the state would take over from him, so they wouldn't lose that governorship.

Okay, I see.

And I won't get to say the words gubernatorial race.

Some of my favourite words in American politics.

There are so many terms in.

There is a bit of a collective.

British journalists go a bit gooey, a lot of them.

Really?

About.

I'm sorry, not present company accepted.

Present company, very much included.

But you know, when people say, I'm here at the caucus, they're releasing the delegates.

There's this frisson that goes through British Acts who've been happy to cover.

And people who can literally say, I think if you remember the 1956 runoff between Senator Dewey and Senator Louis,

it's impossible not to feel ignorant.

But also, I went to a DeSantis rally a couple of years ago when he was running for re-election in Florida, and that was quite, he's quite a boring speaker.

But it was at a vintage car museum in

a lovely Florida parking lot.

He had proper muscle cars behind him and big spotlights, and that was for you know, just a governor candidate.

You don't understand how much more exciting this is than, I'm sorry to say this, Lib Dem Party conference.

I was going to say, no,

where are the foam hammers?

Where is the glee club?

Who's at six flags going on the biggest and scariest rides until they're elected?

Yeah, you're gonna have to update this.

Did you have a favourite moment from the Republican National Convention?

I couldn't, I couldn't pick out one.

I suppose they were all my favourite moments really, much like Trump's favourite Bible passage.

You know, he just likes all of them so darn much.

I think for me it was maybe Melania Trump having to watch Kid Rock and trying not to laugh and like, why is my life turned out like this?

As he sang a song he'd written about Donald Trump.

Good lord.

But she did bizarrely, in her statement after her husband was shot, say

his love of music was one of the things she brought up.

Which is

one of the stories you get from Mar-a-Lago is that he sits there, quotes, DJing on his iPad.

So he basically, like they let him control the music in the restaurant and he puts on this is a man whose favourite film is Sunset Boulevard so he puts on like ABBA that's I mean that's good no I know it's Walter Woolbangus but very much of a certain you know campness he is the campest man in the world isn't he essentially yeah yeah he blew a kiss at Hulk Hogan that was like Hulk Hogan ripped off three shirts in a row and Donald Trump was there was genuinely the highlight of the convention for him and he just looked at Hulk Hogan and I thought this is so unbelievably camp and he did use YMCA as one of his his campaign tunes, didn't he?

And dance along to it.

You just think, this is great.

It's a man who's secure in his own sexuality and knows that he's appealing to all of his co-constituencies there.

You know, he's going out to the American construction workers, the law enforcement community, the cowboys, the Native Americans, and of course the Leather Joy Boys, who must never be forgotten.

Well, they won't be now.

And is that part of the appeal?

I mean, the Republicans seeming,

I don't want to say normal.

because it's so deeply unnoticed.

Are you thinking that it shows

that they're going for all the different kind of categories?

It's normal for

i mean that that the actual republican conference should not be about politics it should be basically a a revivalist church uh meeting in which the almighty has saved the preacher followed by wrestlemania uh

and then there was a boring bit where i think you um helen pointed out everyone was quite bored by the politics in the middle trump made a 90-minute speech which went through some of his greatest hits including his riff about hannibal lecter which is hannibal lecter great guy once had a friend for dinner and you're like why are we here what's happening?

What are we doing here?

But he went on and on and on.

And it was really sad.

All the people who'd come for the kind of bald eagle being fired out of a cannon were just like, oh,

give it a rest, mate.

So I suppose that's the main question that people have had in the last day or two, is how is the news about Biden going to change things, if at all?

Well, as I say, there was polling that came out before that said if you match up Trump and a quote-unquote younger Democrat, the numbers look pretty good.

So the question is, Kamala Harris flamed out of the 2020 primary when she ran against Biden, having been a tough on crime prosecutor in California, then trying to pivot to being very 2020 energy, very reformist, very kind of pronouns in the bio, and that really didn't go very well for her.

One of Dolly Parton's best, I think.

But

she did not prosper in that environment there, and she's known as being quite awkward.

She gave a terrible, she's made some terrible flubs in interviews beforehand.

So, the question is now, really, will the American people, when they see a bit more of her, like her or not?

But from my point of view, I think the thing was that it was an insult to the intelligence of voters to run a candidate in Biden that the whole party was lying about thinking that he was fit enough to run.

So anything is better than that.

The British press, I presume aping the American press, has now said, well, yes, Biden made lots of gaffes, but what about Kamala Harris's gaffes?

You've replaced one gaffer with another.

Is that fair?

I mean, I've read a few of them.

I mean,

they're not quite getting the wrong president in a major world conflict, are they?

No, they're more just that she's quite awkward.

She does kind of give off a kind of sort of slightly stoned-aunt kind of vibe sometimes.

That's true.

One of the most brutal things said about Joe Biden in the 2020 primary, he was picked up on his opposition to busing, you know, the integration of schools by moving kids around.

And she said, you know, she attacked him on that, and she said, you know, because the little girl on that bus was me.

And it was an incredibly powerful moment.

And the thing that people been close to is say that she's very reluctant to do that kind of emotional politics that Americans kind of need.

So I think, I mean, I'm going to say we do, but then we just elected Kier Starmer, who's also very uncomfortable with it.

So the question becomes whether.

I'm not a former prosecutor.

It's all looking very good for big lawyers this year, isn't it?

But yeah, so I think that's the question: whether or not she can kind of open up.

And also, the other thing I wonder, having seen some of the reaction on X, and Adam, I don't know what you've seen, but people just kind of can't stop doing what are unfunny, racist, and sexist gags about her, which I think actually are probably kind of quite repellent to normal voters.

And that is sort of the big unspoken question, isn't it?

Is how will her ethnicity and gender play with swing voters?

I mean, they weren't keen on Hillary Clinton, not just for the fact that she was Hillary Clinton, but the fact that she was a woman, I think, played into that.

But also, she ran a campaign that was based around the first female president, you know, I'm with her, and sort of no one cared.

And I think that would be, I think that will really inform how Kamala Harris will run, that she won't run as like, this is your chance to make history because it turns out no one massively cares about that.

And does, like Kierstahma, does competency count for something?

Does this look like a safe pair of hands, particularly next to

the unsafe pair of hands that have just gone and the tiny pair of hands that are potentially coming in?

Tiny hands grasping for the crowd.

Well, I think that's the thing: is that the Trump campaign had been built entirely around the idea that they were going to run on competency in Biden's age.

So, in a way, it completely wrong foots them.

They have to now scramble to find all the things that they think will work against Kamala Harris, and they've only got in November, so they've only got four months to do so.

I mean, is it me?

I mean, the Hillary campaign, everyone says it was because she was a woman and she did various things, but it was also because she'd been married to Bill Clinton and just passing the job over to your wife, particularly when your wife had stood by you and you'd been telling rather a lot of lies about your personal life.

I don't want to be pathetic about this, but I mean, surely

a woman who's got there on her own merits and got the job, that's a different proposition, isn't it?

Yeah, I think there was a lot of feeling that Hillary Clinton had been knocking around Washington for quite a while.

I mean, she was a good senator for New York and a good Secretary of State, but there was a feeling of like, oh, it's the Clintons and this are very machine politics, very insider-y.

Whereas Obama, although whatever it turned out to be, ran as ran on a sort of proto-drain the swamp.

You know, we're not going to have lobbyists kind of coming in and all that sort of stuff.

So I think her message of change was deeply complicated by the fact that change to the person who you remember from the 90s is a tough one to do, I think.

Just quickly, you mentioned some of the potential vice presidential candidates earlier.

There's one who we haven't discussed yet, who potentially is the first ever American president or vice president to have been in space.

Even cooler than that,

so this is Mark Kelly, who's a senator for Arizona.

He is a twin

and his twin brother is also an astronaut.

Oh, didn't they do an experiment where one of them got taller in space?

They did it.

No, they both got taller in space.

I'm getting confused.

This is the first time Andy's been excited in this entire conversation.

No, but you get taller in space, don't you?

Because you're

yeah, your spine isn't being compressed by gravity.

So they did the twin study.

NASA did a twin study about him and his brother, and while he was in low Earth orbit in the US, in the space shuttle, to measure all kinds of stuff about his gene expression and all that kind of stuff to see what the effects of being in space for a long time were.

So the other twin was like the control twin?

Yeah.

Did he have to go underground or something?

They made him go down to the Earth's core where he was very

short, but very dense.

Are they identical twins?

Yeah, one's taller.

It's been space.

Yeah, they've got exactly the same genetics.

That's what makes it a good twin study.

So this is a fabulous block for a presidential

thriller.

The president's twin is missing.

Yes.

It's done.

But he's also got a very compelling story.

He's married to Gabby Giffords, who was the representative from Arizona, who was shot at a public appearance.

And they had been in the middle of undergoing IVF treatment.

And then they had to stop as she was recovering from

all the surgery she needed from that.

And they've since spoken about the fact that some of the Republican rollbacks of abortion in states like Arizona have also affected IVF.

And IVF is under threat because the Republican pro-life idea is the idea that you create all these embryos and not all of them are implanted, some of them are destroyed.

So some of the evangelical wing has been going after IVF too, which is obviously,

even among many Christians, deeply, deeply unpopular.

So, not only would you be forced to have the children you might not want to have, you won't be able to have the children you do.

Exactly.

Right.

And already.

It's not a winning slogan.

No, and already in this election, particularly for suburban women voters, the overturning of Roe versus Wade has been a huge issue.

It seems to have motivated turnout in the midterms.

So it's something on which they would be, yeah, I mean, they could have an inspiring astronaut with a really moving story about one of the key election issues.

And, I mean, to be cynical, someone who's been shot in a more horrid way than the opposition.

I mean, that person did, yes, that person did not.

That's not the ultimate American politics, isn't it?

Is who got shot the worst, being the thing that I'm just saying,

from my observation of American politics, that will come up fairly quickly.

Lord, I mean, yes.

Also, he'd have to debate J.D.

Vance, who rather fancies himself as an eloquent speaker.

And I do think a bit like, oh, you went to Harvard.

I went to space.

Just one final thing on this, because the British angler is always interesting.

It's been a magnet not only for British hacks, but also for British politicians.

Can we have the phrase former mostly political?

Well, yes.

No, I mean, Nigel Farage

is, you know, is newly elected.

We also had Liz Truss and Boris Johnson heading over to Press the Flesh.

Sorry.

Press not very much flesh in Boris Johnson's case.

That amazing photo of him addressing an almost empty room of people.

Yes.

No,

I had a look, and because I'm really sad, I think I counted that it was 35 out of 180 potential seats were filled.

So, just so you know.

I counted the people, I didn't count the seats.

This is why you're a better journalist than we are.

You need to have the status.

I was thinking that's worse than the Tories' election result.

Yes, and he was speaking on a panel about, well, something or other, doesn't matter, no one heard it.

But

he was flanked by flags of the Vapor Technology Association, which is a vape lobby.

One thing I found interesting is just a little phrase that got used.

So, Boris met Trump, right?

And he said that

he was on top form.

And when Starmer met Joe Biden, or rather had a chat with Joe Biden at the, was it the NATO summit recently?

The phrase he used was good form.

You know, he's on very good form.

And those are phrases that you use about elderly relatives who

are not reliably

always there.

Yes.

And it can be relative, isn't it?

It's not absolute.

Top form for himself.

Yeah, great form.

Which was low.

He was up and about.

I think he recognised me.

Yeah, it's that kind of thing.

And there was a very odd Liz Truss speech that she subsequently made in Pennsylvania about how she had a shower head in the shape of the Liberty Bell, exactly as Ronald Reagan did.

Which was odd even for Liz Truss, wasn't it?

It was up there with pork markets in one of the great pantheon of weird Liz Truss anecdotes immediately.

But they're like you.

They find America more exciting than Clacton.

I mean, I think lots of people in Clacton would probably, if they could listen, well, I don't know.

Maybe I'm being, maybe, please write in if you're from Clacton and let us know.

Would you rather go to Milwaukee and watch eagles being fired out of a cannon?

Or would you rather watch Nigel Farage in your local leisure centre?

Answer the problem about the drop curbs?

We'll find out.

Okay, now,

honeymoons.

How long should they last?

And how long do they last in practice?

You know, sometimes someone has to fly home early, that kind of thing.

And we are in the middle of a honeymoon, a national honeymoon at the moment.

Everyone's feeling very relaxed and tanned and happy.

But how long is it going to last?

The labor honeymoon, Adam.

Well, everyone's feeling relaxed and tanned and happy might be a bit of an exaggeration, at least with the summer we've had.

But no, I was struck by there was an observer in the Observer last weekend, it was a poll by Public First, which suggested that 45% of people are now feeling optimistic about the future of the country following the election, which is a straight turnaround because polled just before the election, 43% of people said they were feeling very pessimistic.

It's quite unbritish.

It is extraordinary, isn't it?

But there is we touched on this last time, didn't we, and the kind of the private eye coverage of De Blair got in in 1997, Ian.

That there is suddenly this moment that people kind of go, Oh, oh no, everything's going to be be lovely again before remembering what life is actually like.

Usually because we remind them.

But Starma's personal rating has gone up as well.

I saw yesterday.

They're up 20%.

They are actually positive.

They've gone from minus 1% to 19% of people thinking Starmer is a good thing.

So there is undoubtedly a honeymoon period, but how long it will last is quite hard to say.

Those figures are extraordinary.

in our recent memory, but a 19% approval rating in real life primarily eyes, is it?

God, it's terrifying to think we've all got approval ratings in our own lives.

It's just no one's bothered doing the numbers because we're not Prime Minister.

But I think there is a sort of natural human reaction, particularly to people who aren't as deeply embedded and nerdy about politics as we are,

to kind of think, you know, just take election as being, right, that's done, that's all sorted now.

And I remember talking to Labour MPs who were canvassing for the 2017 election, so a year after the Brexit vote.

And supposedly that was one of the big issues of that election, wasn't it?

And it was Theresa May trying to solidify her position.

Didn't quite work out in order to be able to push through her Brexit deal.

But um, MPs then were saying on the doorstep, it just didn't come up.

You know, if you mentioned Brexit, people just said, No, no, done that.

We sorted that.

I mean, it was so far from sorted, it was still two years off being sorted.

Well, still not entirely sorted, is it?

But

there is this sort of reaction: yeah, we vote for it, it's happened, it's okay, we're happy now, just get on with it, come back to us in five years.

I think there is an element of that, yeah, yeah, yeah, like the NHS is fixed now.

Good, I'm glad we all voted to fix the NHS, right?

Just check it out.

I think that as we're recording this, Labour are running into their first real sticky patch.

I mean, Shabana Mahmood having to early release the prisoners was

great tabloid front-page fodder, but that was sort of foreseeable, right?

Whoever had been in would have had to do something about overcrowding in jails.

Whereas, what's now happening is discussions over the two-child cap on universal credit and child tax credit.

And that was a really controversial policy when it came in under the

austerity era.

And it's always been a kind of nagging, unpleasant one.

But there is a big mood against it on the Labour-back benches.

Now, obviously, they have a majority of 50 million, so it's not an issue at the moment.

But I think you'll see in the King's speech debate that lots of people will be airing their views.

And not necessarily all the people you would expect.

So

John McDonnell and the other kind of progressive parts of the party have spoken out against it.

But Rosie Duffield, for example,

said it was a thing that got her into politics at the weekend.

And then I think Suella Bravo and the other people.

Swella Brava has spoken out.

It's one of those things that unites all sort of right round in the horseshoe, doesn't it?

Suella Brevman is very much against it and says it should be got rid of it.

And Lord Freud, who was the welfare minister who was responsible for bringing it in under Cameron and Osborne, has also said he now thinks it should go.

And I think there's an issue which

a kind of persistent emerging criticism of Team Starmer is that they have got addicted to what in American politics they call punching the hippie, which is basically always just making sure you're really rude to the left and ostensibly disrespect them in order to prove your kind of centurist credentials and your kind of macho ability to face people down.

You're not a soft, bleeding heart type.

And I wonder if this has fallen into that, that the kind of labour is soft on welfare they know is such a strong attack line.

And so they're actually ended up supporting something that lots of their backbenchers are uneasy about, lots of the labour-sporting think tanks are uneasy about, because it has undoubtedly put more children into poverty.

It costs about three billion as well to fix it.

So it's quite a big ticket item to deal with.

But I think it's the first thing I've seen where

actually I've already begun to see bits of a a Bridget Phillipson's kind of said, oh, we're going to look at it.

Keir Stahmer's endorsed that.

There is a bit of kind of soft peddling backwards on maybe we might have called this one slightly wrong.

Because they've done a bit of punching the hippie on

quite a bit of it on net zero stuff, particularly in reference to just stop oil.

It's incredibly useful for Labour to say, just stop oil are idiots.

We're not going to do what they say.

We're not going to end it all.

tomorrow it's just not possible.

It's a very useful point of differentiation between

yourself and the imagined Labour where people are saying, well, they're just net zero zealots and they're going to turn all the lights off.

But the cap is supposed to be a deterrent, isn't it?

I mean, has anyone done any figures on whether people in certain income brackets are having less children because you don't get benefit for it?

I mean,

is there any fact?

No, I don't know.

There are so many causes, aren't there?

I mean, there are so many causes, things like housing will be a huge factor in terms of whether people have all the children they want to or whether they can't quite think they have the room.

I just want to just take a moment there to acknowledge all of the listeners who are just about to write in and say fewer children, not less.

Right.

Because I know private Irish.

Can I just take a Biden moment and say,

I deeply regret that misstep?

I think there's two things to this, though.

I think, and they're two kind of key labour messages, aren't they?

Because there's the punching the hippie one that you mentioned, and there's also this Rachel Reeves being very, very tight with the purse strings and very, very sensible.

And it's a bit like, I know I bring everything back to 1997, but that commitment that Gordon Brown made to stick within the Tory spending limits for that first term and that kind of like headline thing that, you know,

I'm sure both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves and everyone in the Labour Party would like to get rid of the two-child

cap.

But being able to say we'll do it when it's fiscally appropriate to do so and we've got the cash to do it does play to a certain point.

But also it'd be a good one for them to be able to make a concession on, wouldn't it?

Yeah, and they have a similar problem about the pay awards.

So nurses and teachers and other NHS staff, the independent bodies said give them a 5.5% pay rise.

And that would cost them billions as well.

But they're also looking

slightly soft on that.

I suppose the ideal thing, if you're Rachel Reeves, is what you hope is that the economy's done a bit better than you thought.

You've suddenly got a bit of fiscal headroom to play with, and suddenly this largesse can be counted out in the autumn statement out of nowhere.

And you make it in the autumn so that you can make it very clear that it's the economy doing better under your government rather than just the tail end of the last government.

Because that's the incredibly clever bit of spin I think Labour are doing on everything, and they're doing it very, very effectively.

So, with the prisoner release thing and with the pay awards, which was a case, you know, the independent advice on pay awards at 5.5% went in to the Tory government before the election and they sat on it and didn't do anything with it.

And this line that Labour have now got of

it plays incredibly well with the still remaining mystery of why one earth Rishi Sunak decided to call an election in July rather than in October when everyone was expecting it.

It's just to spin it as, well, obviously he saw all these problems coming down the line, didn't want to take any responsibility for them and just handed them all over to us, which does work incredibly well.

And brilliant.

It's something they learned from George Osborne, that, isn't it?

That you just, you can keep coming back and specifically blaming the government before you.

You know, how many times did he harp back to that Liam Byrne note about there's no money left and use that as the excuse for absolutely everything?

Well, a lot of decisions were left on desks, weren't they?

And some of that was to do with the election being called, but a lot of it was just things which were slightly inconvenient.

Seek, when he was justice secretary, did actually say, I'm going to have to let people out.

The prisons are full.

So, I mean, the brilliant thing about this spin is some of it's true,

which I find works incredibly well.

Yeah, and and I think that's why the early releasing has fizzled out for now.

The way it will come back, if you remember the new Labour government, is if one of the people who's released early goes on to do a crime.

Right.

And that was, I think that was the John Reed got under terrible trouble because some people he'd let out went on the run dressed in hijabs.

Do you remember this?

Terrorists sneaked across the border.

Yeah.

So that's that.

If you are now the Daily Mail news desk, what you're on absolute watch for is the minute that someone who's released 40% into their sentence rather than 50% in

commits an offence.

Within that 10%

sentence, they were in charge of the fact that they were imagining they're staking out every front gate of every prison in the country and just following people into crime, into crime.

But I would imagine Keir Starmer, having been in charge of the GPP, is also looking very, very carefully at the people who come out.

Now, Helen, I know there is only one thing you like more than me finding a parallel from 1997, and that is me finding a parallel from 1974.

Oh, God.

So, on the pay awards front, you'll remember, of course, that Edward Heath went into the election in 1974 after the miners' strike on the grounds that he

could not agree a pay deal with them and he

went to the country on the platform of who governs this country?

And the answer came back as a resounding, well, it ain't you.

Harold Wilson immediately comes in within 48 hours has settled the miners' strike with a pay award.

5.5% is what's being recommended for public sector workers for Rachel Riester award.

What do you think the pay rise that was given to the miners in 74 was?

Please say it was 5.5%.

Higher?

I was going to say, in 1979, I think the teachers were asking for 30% or something like that.

So some of these pay demands were

huge.

Oh, higher.

40.

35%.

Not bad.

Not bad going, is it?

It's up there with the junior doctors.

But again, I think it was sort of taking advantage of, again, that honeymoon period that people think, oh, well, we've elected you and

you were given a bit of leeway at that point to just be able to sign things off, sort them out.

And you could make big decisions like that.

This is the moment where you can do it.

There's an odd parallel with that.

So West Streeting went and immediately had talks talks with the doctors' unions, and it came out sounding kind of quite positive.

They were kind of basically like, We're not going to use this as a kind of wedge issue, you know, and say how terrible these people are holding us all to ransom.

We're going to try and work constructively with you.

There's a parallel with the way that Starmer has approached foreign policy, right?

Where he's gone to Europe and gone, Don't worry, lads, you know, we're not going to be constantly briefing that you're a load of cheese-eating surrender monkeys, foisting your, you know, small boats on us.

We're here to work with you.

And it'll be really interesting to see whether or not that approach works versus the much more kind of like what they just need is a really good talking to and then they'll see the British point of view.

Starmer is, we all agree, has always been very, very lucky.

So to go to Europe at the point where most of the people you're talking to have got the far right hammering at their door and you're the only left or left-ish, depending on how our readers perceive Mr Starmer,

you're the only surviving centrist politician.

I mean they're incredibly keen to be nice to him and to accommodate him and to listen to what he said.

And so he, his timing and his luck is extraordinary, which I think will extend the honeymoon.

And actually, most of you have not even listened to this bit.

You've listened to the election in America bit because it's more interesting.

So he's lucky again

because this is item number two.

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Now we come to Phil Hammond.

So Phil is a privatized medical correspondent, also known in the pages of the MAG as MD.

And for some time now, Phil has been writing about the Lucy Letby case.

For any international listeners or those who haven't been following the story, Lucy Lettby was a nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital.

Lettby was convicted of seven murders of young babies at the hospital where she worked and seven attempted murders as well as that across various different trials.

So her trial lasted for eight months.

She was given a whole life term in prison for the offences and she has recently been appealing the charges.

That appeal has just failed.

Now Phil has been writing about this case for a long time, although not everything he's written has been in the pages of the magazine for reasons that he will doubtless be explaining in a bit.

But Phil, can you tell me your initial opinion and what that was of this trial?

Because this has been a very long-running story.

These deaths all took place in 2015 and 2016 at the Countess of Chester Hospital.

So when the initial verdict came out, I guess like the jury, I think I sided with the seven consultant pediatricians who'd worked on the unit alongside Lucy Lepty with a hundred years of experience between them, all of whom, having observed sudden deteriorations of children they weren't expecting, had reached the conclusion that it must be deliberate harm.

And looking at the shifts, she was nearly always on duty, or there or thereabouts, as they caused it, which later gave me slight pause for thought.

But my slight blind spot over the years is I've relied very heavily in 32 years writing for Private Eye on senior medical whistleblower sources.

The first big story I broke, the Bristol Hart scandal, almost exclusively relied on a senior medical whistleblower, Steve Bolson, who blew the whistle on Far Too Many Babies Dying in Bristol.

And because I, nearly always senior medical whistleblowers, in my experience, have been right, I assumed that the Chester consultants were right.

The jury had reached the right conclusion.

And so my initial piece in Private Eye was to say we should have listened to these whistleblowers earlier.

They were raising concerns about Lucy Lepi long before she was stopped.

Perhaps the manager should have listened more.

So that was my first take on it.

Immediately, I started to get letters and contacts into private eye.

The first one came from a chap called Dr.

Bernard Freudenthal, who wrote an exhaustive letter saying that basically this was largely a supposition.

There was no firm evidence, no definitive evidence that babies had died from insulin injection or air embolism.

And he absolutely felt that the case wasn't proven beyond reasonable doubt.

And then, of course, as an investigative journalist, you have to investigate.

um and i'm very lucky now because i have lots of really good contacts and one of the first contacts i went back to was one of the chester consultants who'd worked on that unit um and said look people are writing into private eye several people have contacted me saying this isn't right it's not proven beyond junior uh reasonable doubt and they were saying things like random fluctuations in death so that lucy letby was accused of

found guilty of seven murders and seven attempted murders, but there were maybe 35 incidents over that period and a number of deaths.

One of the slightly alarming things is that people can't even agree on the number of deaths.

If you can't even get the body count right, what on earth are you, what else are you getting wrong?

But

there were between six and ten other deaths that she wasn't implicated in, and those deaths alone represented a significant increase on previous years.

So perhaps there was something to do with the unit.

Perhaps they didn't have sufficient senior staff.

And we know from reading the notes and what came out in the inquiry that they did have staffing problems they didn't have enough junior or senior staff or nurses it was a cramped unit the cults were too close together there are a number of reasons that could have contributed to substandard care and interestingly if you ask any statistician random fluctuations in deaths can occur year on year by chance alone So there's a lovely account on X, formerly known as Twittercull, tried by Stats, and he puts up for 2014 to 15, he puts up 10 hospitals with significantly excess deaths and asks you to spot the Countess of Chester and it's a trick because Countess of Chester that year was number 12.

So lots of units of having excess tests rising across the country perhaps because of austerity or cuts in care or we hear of all these maternity scandals where maternity units aren't able to cope.

So perhaps there was an influx of really sick babies onto this unit.

So the question really was

how was this case proven beyond reasonable doubt?

I think that's an important thing to raise because, as you said in your last column in the magazine, you're not saying anything about the guilt or innocence of Lucy Lepi in this particular trial.

What would you define as what you have been trying to ascertain here?

What I've been trying to say is that having looked into the case, it appears to me that the science and statistics weren't fairly and completely explained to the jury, and so they were making a decision based on partial interpretation or a partial picture of the science and statistics.

Had they seen the fuller picture, they may have reached the same conclusions.

They may have reached different conclusions on some of the cases, or they may have decided all of it was not proven beyond reasonable doubt.

Of course, that doesn't mean that she didn't do it.

There are cases where people have got away with murder, and the reason they have is because proving medical murder is extremely difficult, particularly in a cohort of babies who are already very sick.

They're at increased rates of death and anything from an infectious disease outbreak or not having sufficient staff.

So when they do suddenly go off and suddenly

have breathing difficulties or their pulse goes down, people don't pick it up in time, a bit like people not picking up a sepsis in time or whatever.

And babies can die for a combination of being very ill and a unit not quite having the expertise to cope with babies of that complexity.

And statistically, that's a far more likely explanation because it happens in the NHS all the time.

We reckon there are about 11,000 avoidable deaths every year in the NHS because people don't get the expert care they need.

So, when you're trying to ascertain what's most likely, you start with the likely thing.

When I was taught statistics, I was told, if you hear hooves on the bridge, think first of the horse before you think of the zebra, before you think of the unicorn.

The medical murderers like the unicorn option, it's incredibly rare, it has happened, but you're going to need pretty rock-solid proof to show beyond reasonable doubt.

So either you catch someone in the act, either they confess, either there's some evidence perhaps on their internet history that they've researched specific methods methods of murder, or the pathologist picks it up and says, this is a clear act of deliberate harm and we need to do something.

None of that happened in the Lucy Lettby case.

It was sort of fitted together long after the event.

To me, it just doesn't seem that the case was proven beyond reasonable doubt.

And there are several other aspects I found really distasteful.

So they...

They retrospectively came up with a spreadsheet to show Lucy Lettby was always on duty when the things we're worried about happened.

Right.

They ignored the other deaths and the other serious things that happened when she wasn't on duty or wasn't there or thereabouts.

So she focused in on this and they paraded it around the courtroom as if it was some killer piece of evidence.

And statisticians say to me, if you did that in your undergraduate statistics viva, you would fail.

It was such an embarrassing portrayal of

over-regging the certainty on this.

Clearly, it shows that Lucy Lettby was on duty when Lucy Lettby was on duty.

That's all it basically shows.

So I think they attached overdue importance to that.

And if you've watched expert witnesses over the years, the ones that are slightly overconfident and they use a bit of razzle-dazzle and they're perhaps overcertain of their evidence tend to have more impact than the ones that say, well, on the one hand, on the other hand, we can't be sure of this.

There is still an area of uncertainty.

So I think that particular evidence was over-egged.

It's not unlike the Second World War planes.

There's a famous image showing where planes were hit on bombing missions in the Second World War, and they were largely hit in the wings.

And the argument was, well, should we reinforce the wings?

No, you shouldn't.

The place you should reinforce is the place where the engines were hit when they then didn't return from the mission and so couldn't be studied.

Well, it's a very hard distinction often between cause and coincidence.

I think the other thing that was woefully lacking in this case was proper statistical input.

So the Royal Statistical Society and the bases

looked at many previous miscarriages of justice, often involving babies, because the baby stuff is really complex science.

And they said it should be mandatory in trials of this complexity to have full statistical input.

You need proper statistical data to make sure people aren't milking the statistics and making these outrageous claims and waving their spreadsheets around and attaching more significance to it when other possible causes or varieties of causes and plausibilities hadn't been examined.

So that was pretty worrying.

And the thing that was most worrying at all when I looked at it is that in addition to the seven consultant pediatricians who all felt she was guilty, the prosecution brought on six expert witnesses.

The defence didn't call a single expert witness.

So, if you're sitting there in the jury, there's this really complex stuff going on about air embolism, which nobody really understands.

And could this be a cause of death?

And then somebody's been accused of sometimes they're injecting air into the stomach, and sometimes it's into the brain.

And they've got insulin, but they weren't actually on duty when one of the insulin tests came on, so they must have hidden it in a bag somewhere.

It's really confusing and complex.

What you're going to do is the jury, you're going to say, okay, there are 13 on that side, seven consultants, and six consultant experts, and there's none on the other.

Just by sheer weight of numbers, I think those guys with the 13 on their side are probably right.

It sounds compelling.

It does sound compelling.

The next thing that really confused me is that I discovered that the defense actually did have a really good expert witness who I was able to contact.

He, for the life of him, can't understand why he wasn't called to give evidence.

He's since been interviewed initially by the New Yorker who did the first big piece about this because we weren't able to because of the reporting restrictions.

And he makes some very interesting points, but the interesting points he made were that he thinks the babies were actually far sicker than the prosecution portrayed.

So the prosecution said these were babies who were previously particularly very well.

They suddenly fell off their perch for no apparent reason.

We excluded every possibility and decided it must be deliberate harm.

Whereas he's saying, actually, I think they were sicker than they portrayed.

One of them had an existing chest infection.

Three of them were premature.

Quite a few of them weighed less than three pounds.

And they just could have gone off for natural reasons as these babies do.

The second thing he pointed out which made me worry is that six of these seven babies had a post-mortem examination at the Regional Center of Excellence which is Alderhay Hospital by a specialist pediatric or perinatal pathologist and not one of these babies was any sign of deliberate harm picked up.

These were signed off by the coroner so they've all had quite extensive coroner's post-mortems.

So the deliberate harm bit

was fitted on later.

At the time, none of this was picked up.

Now, I've been struggling to get a pediatric pathologist to speak to because actually I needed to understand a forensic pathologist to understand how it could be that this wasn't picked up.

And I finally managed to speak to one for this issue, a forensic pathologist who works for the Home Office but didn't want to be named.

And she made some really interesting points.

And the first was,

If you don't suspect murder at the time and tell the pathologists and they don't pick it up, they will get a coroner's postmortem, which is very thorough.

It's even more thorough in babies than it is in adults.

But it won't do emergency testing to look for deliberate harm.

So it won't do emergency testing for insulin or it won't do emergency testing for air embolism.

And unless those things are done pretty quickly, you can't prove beyond reasonable doubt.

So they've come up with these theories of how the babies died.

But they're not able to prove them beyond reasonable doubt.

And she said, people always look at pathologists and they say, oh, you must come up with the answer at post-mortem.

And she said, pathologists are actually quite cautious.

And the reason that they're cautious is partly because of previous miscarriages of justice.

They say, oh, you know, we've had some big issues.

And so they will say this gives a likely indication of.

They won't definitively say this is one thing or this is another.

So actually, the statistics...

doesn't say anything other than Lucy Letby was on duty when she was on duty and the pathology isn't definitive.

It doesn't provide evidence beyond reasonable doubt.

Physical evidence.

So all you have at the end of the day is the opinions of the consultants.

Can you describe the process of hot tubbing?

Yes, this is a new idea, relatively new idea, which says that juries nearly always get very confused when two professors of equal status take diametrically opposed views of the evidence.

Who are you supposed to believe?

You're sitting there as a layperson and two highly eminent professors.

So the idea of hot-tubbing is that you put the defense and the prosecution experts on the stand.

They take the oath at the same time.

They'll often have had a pre-meeting to say these are the areas we agree on, these are the areas that we disagree on.

And then you put them on the stand together and they're cross-examined on the stand and it's a slightly more discursive collaborative thing where you're more likely to get to the truth of the science rather than this fiercely adversarial system where prosecution may absolutely try to destroy the expert witnesses on the other side and vice versa.

And generally the expert witness who can take the pressure best tends to be the one who's believed, not necessarily the one who's telling the best science.

So I think that's all collaborative thing.

My other idea was to take it out of prosecution and defence altogether and say it should be a duty of, say, the Royal College and the Royal Statistics Society to provide a group of the best currently available experts to give evidence on behalf of the court rather than one side or the other.

And that would get away with the financial incentive to make your evidence more relevant because you're obviously being paid by one side or the other.

And I think and these experts would be currently practicing experts, not people who had retired 15, 20 years ago.

So you knew they were absolutely on the money.

Is the hot dubbing thing being used anywhere at the moment?

Yes, my pathologist friend said it has been used.

I mean, it's up to either side to agree to it.

Right.

It's a process that can be used.

And if the court agrees and the judge agrees, it can be used.

How interesting.

But I think this particular trial was very fiercely...

adversarial.

It was trying to rip shreds into each other.

And I don't know why Lettby's barrister didn't call an expert witness, but it may have been, having meted out quite a severe beating to the opposition's experts, he was worried that

his own expert might be ripped to shreds.

But having spoken to his expert, he gives very eloquent explanations about why he thinks the babies were sicker and that the cases aren't all true.

And he put doubt in my mind.

Well, if he put doubt in my mind, I'm pretty certain he would have put doubt in the minds of some members of the jury.

And the final thing I wanted to ask you is about the publication in Private Eye and the sort of tricky road that you've had to publication.

Can you tell us a bit more about that?

The judge, Judge Goss, decided...

But that's at the initial trial.

Yeah, at the initial trial.

Well, shortly after the trial, in fact, the Chester consultant I was in touch with said that he was very confident that this was just the tip of the iceberg.

There were plenty other deaths that Lucy Lepby was implicated in, and the CPS were likely to bring many more charges.

And I think because there was going to be a retrial and the possibility of the appeal, and there were already people,

statisticians particularly out on the internet not necessarily resident in the uk querying the process of the trial yeah he decided to put a really strict order preventing any reporting

of the case other than the outcome at the original trial It was a slightly bizarre order that came out because as well as protecting Lucy Lettby's fairness of any trial or retrial, it was supposed to protect the babies and yet he named one of the babies in his court order.

Now that sloppiness suggests to me they were under huge pressure and they rushed it through.

But it also meant that a whole well of experts built up the sort of frustrated mass and so suddenly

I talked earlier about the New Yorker Rachel Aziz writing a really brilliant and very detailed piece and she paid a lot of money to get the entire court transcript.

That would have cost a lot of money and she went through it and wrote an extremely detailed 13,000 word essay that's actually quite compelling and really did a very thorough job.

And then of course as soon as the reporting reporting restrictions were lifted after she'd been she'd lost her appeal and had been reconvicted um on another count

publications across the spectrum started publishing so it started with a very good piece in the guardian uh with felicity lawrence and then the telegraph did a fairly long piece it's now in the daily mail it's been in the mirror it's been in the independent fortunate unfortunately for us because we're a two-weekly uh cycle the bit that I wanted to publish in September I published later but I've never been particularly you know I'm not somebody who cares about breaking a story.

What I want to do is to get justice right.

And I just,

it's just, I've always had a thing about expert witnesses, and it just, it doesn't, there's something about this that just doesn't seem right.

And I don't see what would be lost in offering an appeal.

I think the trouble now is that Let Miss Barrister picked up on the importance he'd missed a trick with experts and he put experts forward.

for his appeal.

There was a detailed letter from experts saying the insulin testing wasn't proven beyond reasonable doubt.

Right.

And then another expert who'd actually done a paper, done the paper that was quoted by the prosecution talking about skin changes that happen if you deliberately inject air into the vessels calling an embolism that may cause death.

He said, actually, the changes weren't the same ones that I'm describing.

And anyway, in a coroner's post-mortem, you tend not to take photos.

And so you're relying on people's memory of what a rash looked like and what happened at the time.

So that was another weakness in the case.

Anyway, very compelling bits of evidence, but the appeal court said this isn't new.

Not new evidence.

This is interpretations of existing evidence, which you should have produced in the first trial.

And that's not allowed for a first trial.

So that's not allowed, so we're not granting a retrial.

Whereas my argument is had there been a fuller picture of the statistics and the science behind the available evidence first time round, the jury may or may not have reached different conclusions, but justice would have been seen to have been done,

which I think is just as important, that it's seen that...

people give evidence on both sides and give the fullest scientific picture and acknowledge areas of uncertainty.

We simply don't know why X, Y, or Z happened.

That's what science is.

The final point I will make, which I think is important, is that I spoke to my pathologist about do people get away with murder?

And she said, yes, they do.

She spoke of a case where somebody was smothered towards the end of life and it left no trace at all and it wasn't picked up at post-mortem.

and it only became apparent when the person later confessed to it but there was no post-mortem trace so it is possible that people can get away with murder but proving murder beyond reasonable doubt in this case is extremely difficult, and I'm not convinced it was done.

And I think on that basis, she deserves an appeal, preferably before 10 years have passed, which is normally the standard time it takes for someone to linger in jail while they're waiting to see whether she's guilty or not.

Phil Hammond, there.

That's it for this episode of page 94.

Thank you so much to Ian, Helen, Adam, and to Phil.

Thank you so much to you for listening.

And thank you, if you haven't already, for going out and buying the magazine, or even better, subscribing to it at private-eye.co.uk.

Final thanks go to Matt Hill, who as always produced this episode.

Goodbye.

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