117: A New Pod For Britain

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

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

We are here for our special post-election stats and analysis match.

We're very excited.

There's been all sorts.

I mean, there's been...

There's been so much news.

Adam, you were saying before we started, there have been so much news concertina's into one night that there's still plenty to unpack.

Plenty that hasn't even been noticed yet.

It all happens sort of between three o'clock and seven o'clock in the morning.

I say space these out.

I say just

let them drip through gently.

One of these enormous news events every sort of day for a couple of months would be great.

I think there should be a race to be the slowest constituency to deliver so that you're Friday afternoon late and that's a major achievement.

Keep us going.

Well,

so it's all over.

The removal helicopters have been to 10 Downing Street and

there's a new boss.

So I thought we'd start off with, before the election, we all made some predictions.

So I thought we could get those out now and laugh at how wrong we all were.

This was exactly a fortnight before Election Day, wasn't it?

Where you sat down and wrote.

I would like to point out that,

although I will concede that mine were not spot on, neither was the exit poll.

So in any way, me putting my finger into the wind and going, yeah, probably we're at that, turns out to have been not that far off the greatest, finest pathological minds.

That's a very early concession from you, Hannah.

Maybe you might have forgotten, you might have got it bang on, but I think it sounds like you're not going to be able to do it.

No, I can remember it.

I know.

If the Conservatives had done as well as the Lib Dems, they'd have 2,000 MPs by now.

Interesting stat.

What vote share?

Just increasing the number of MPs proportionally sevenfold.

That's very vote.

How would that work?

Right.

Here's me.

Andy predicts 2024.

Con 151.

Not so far off.

Fine, very respectable.

Lib Dem 48, drastically underranked.

Helen Betts.

How much did you put on this?

Tories, 110 seats.

Lib Dems 56.

Roughly 15 out, just 17 out on the Lib Dems.

But

I would like to put it to you that I made the same error as the exit poll to some extent, right?

I was down on Labour, which I have to say, I share in common with every single person who's covered the Labour Party, been in the Labour Party, done anything with the Labour Party.

We're all miserable as sin throughout all of Thursday.

Well, Helen, you and I spent the whole campaign with me saying it can't be

as amazing as the polls are saying.

There's no way the Tories are going to go as low.

And you went low.

If you want to open my

list,

we'll open the moment.

Let's see what happens when we add Adam into the box.

Tory seats: 150, very close.

Lib Dem's 67.

Spookily close.

Hey, I thank you.

Very.

The Lib Dem whisperer.

Very impressive.

Okay.

Wow.

And finally, Ian, let's turn to yours.

It just says Labour will win election.

Followed.

I've been here before.

That's the sort of insight you need.

What was everyone's favourite moment from the night?

I'd say one of my moments of the night, as I think I predicted a few episodes ago of this very podcast, was that George Galloway lost his seat in Rochdale and didn't even bother to turn up at the count to see himself lose, as he did previously when he ran for London Mayor.

Remember that in 2016?

1.7% of the vote didn't turn up then either.

There was a great subsidiary moment to that too, right?

If you were watching the BBC, you then got to see Neil Kinnock sort of just chortling, I think is maybe the only thing.

Not Not just chortling, but saying he was a repellent little man.

Repulsive little man.

Yeah, that was one of the most glorious moments of the night.

Actually,

I didn't want to sit through a George Galloway speech, but I'm always there for hearing Neil Kinnock slag him off.

He was a very good Kinnock.

Yeah, well, you know.

You thought I was the only impressionist on here with my Rishi and my now completely irrelevant Michael Gove impressions.

I've got a horrible feeling that I'm reprising that from a school talent show in about 1986.

Oh, gosh.

Jay, it was a night for nostalgia.

For many of our listeners, labour and government, two words that don't go together.

Now they're there.

Any other moments from the night?

I enjoyed Ed Davies singing Sweet Caroline in the Lib Dem headquarters because I was on a sort of personal mission, which I think you might have been too, as you were doing your broadcast round, were saying, can we perhaps find to hear a bit about reform who have performed well in terms of votes, and that hasn't really translated to seats to them, which is, you know, sad for them, but that is first past the post.

But actually, Lib Dem's also got three million votes, and we're not really hearing a lot about what the Tory Party might want to do to appeal to those voters as well.

So, actually,

I was very pleased that Davey has had

a fun campaign.

He said he had the most fun campaign out of everybody.

As Adam mentioned in a previous podcast, you talked about carers, for example, something that we otherwise didn't hear a lot about in the campaign.

It was like his long centre park summer holiday was over and he was having one last lash before going back to his work in sort of middle management.

It felt so right as he sang Sweet Caroline, I thought to myself, Yeah, Davey is exactly the sort of man that would do do that.

A so good, a so good bit as well.

Yeah, yeah.

Ian?

The broadcast moment I enjoyed most was almost straight after the exit poll.

Nigel Farage appeared and complained that there was no one from Reform on any of the mainstream media channels.

And this was absolutely typical of how they reacted.

I was watching the BBC, where they'd had a Reform man on for the previous 10 minutes talking, so there was an immediate shot of him.

And then I turned over to channel four, and Anne Whitaker was there.

And I thought, immediately, straight away after the poll, you have told the public something which isn't true.

So that was a good early moment.

Good late moment was

Rhys Mogg.

And I know everybody else thinks the same, but I'd been storing up the chance to shout Vox Populi, Vox Dei

at the television for years.

And finally, I got my chance.

That's an interesting point about reform in the coverage, though, because one of the really odd facets about election night is that all the candidates are at their counts.

So, actually, they've always traditionally had quite a bit of an issue filling the airwaves.

And that's not what you normally do, is you get aligned newspaper columnists from a particular party, or you get the peers, because they obviously don't even get to vote to the peers.

But there aren't any reforms, there just isn't that infrastructure around reform.

The ridiculous thing about election nights, and I'm not entirely serious about them being spread out over months, but you do get that two or three hours at the front where they're desperately trying to fill time, and all they've got is the exit poll, which in that case, the big story did appear to to be a huge surge for reform.

There was a surge for reform, I'm not writing that off, but it wasn't at the scale that they were saying it was.

It was the most extraordinary thing for the BBC.

They spent sort of 10 minutes at the top of it saying, We've got cameras in every sports hall around the country.

And they kept splitting the screen and showing this feed of people counting votes, which isn't the most desperately exciting thing to watch.

And then appeared to cut to almost none of them to see the actual bit that people wanted to see, which was the, you know, the reading out of the results.

Because there is really interesting drama.

Even if you don't know

the individual candidates, let's see, even if it's a seat you don't know very well there is an interest in hearing the numbers being read out you think oh right well he got 15,000 I wanna I wonder if she'll be able to cap that you know and the the numbers being read out in kind of not in order of number of votes just adds jeopardy and excitement to it so and that that is the event that you're watching yeah

it's not like yeah there are people who are just wandered in into their living rooms at 3 30 a.m.

in the morning and need to have electoral politics explained to them right no these are these are dweebs they know

they know what ashington is it's fine that's why it gets so excited because you get the because they're read out in alphabetical order of candidates, aren't they?

And that is what made my moment of the night, because I was up for Liz Truss.

She was last alphabetically.

So

every other candidate's tally was read out before hers, I believe.

Yes, no.

So it created that, you know, what?

No.

Fabulous drama.

Terrific drama.

She then refused to give any comment at all and was harried out the door by.

She didn't make a concession speech, but she was then asked some questions such as, is this your fault?

Do you feel bad?

What are you going to do?

Is this karmic justice?

Will you cry now?

It actually had some, I think, bad effects because they didn't show Bristol Central, which is where Labour's Fangham Debonair lost as she expected to, to the Green Party's co-leader Carla Denya.

That was an incredibly hard-fought seat.

It was the first time that, you know,

one of four Green seats, one on the night.

Really big moment.

Generally, talk news story of the night, that one, yeah.

Really fascinating.

And the campaign that was fought there, which had very heavily majored on Gaza, very interesting in terms of Labour's kind of weakness on its left flank.

And the other thing that was, I also allowed a really nasty narrative to develop that Fangam Demer had been a completely graceless loser.

When in fact, she'd given a concession speech and she'd a very nice tweet about Carla Denny afterwards.

But

it reinforced that nasty misinformation narrative.

And so surely that's one of the things that the BBC is supposed to be against is giving you the full context rather than you seeing weird little bits of out-of-context clips on Twitter or Facebook or wherever it is.

So I thought that was a real shame.

At one point I said up on the screen it said Tunbridge Wells Lib Dem, which seems to me like a really quite significant moment.

Tunbridge Wells was a significant moment and they missed it on a lot of television coverage and I heard it on the radio coverage and I thought, oh, come on, we're all sitting here waiting to do our not disgusted anymore of Tunbridge Wells jokes and you're not even giving us the chance.

I think it is a failing not to see it.

But of the sofa well thens.

Steve Baker has fast catamaran sailed off.

Very sad.

Steve Baker, you have to say, in the end, was rather a good sport about it because he turned up to BBC right at the beginning to be told told that he was definitely going to lose his seat.

Well, sat there in the studio and just sort of laughed off and said, yes, I've kind of accepted that.

And then carried on doing the rats.

He didn't do a Galloway, did he?

He actually, you know, stood up there and kind of took his medicine.

Yeah, and Jeremy Hunt did a very nice speech and sort of said, you know, look, my kids, don't be too disappointing.

This is democracy.

As did Rishi Sinek's speech on his way out of Down Street.

It was unusually gracious for him.

Yes, where's that guy been for the last 18 months?

Actually, I think I'd like to change my moment of the night to the Jeremy Hunt concession speech.

Not concession.

He'd won his seat, but he acknowledged he was on his way out as Chancellor, and he was talking to his children, saying, This is the magic of democracy.

We're doing it all, you know, quickly, efficiently, carefully.

Yeah, no guns, people in biking horns, people taking a crap on the speaker's desk.

Doesn't take two months to do, like some other major Western democracies we can imagine.

I agree.

And in a lot of the coverage, there were people saying, well, you have to hand it to Rishi Sunak.

He did stabilise things after Liz Truss.

And I thought, actually, Jeremy Hunt did.

If you remember, he came in as unwanted chancellor, took all the immediate measures necessary for the country not to totally implode.

So he didn't get a lot of credit.

And the fact that he vaguely held on, I thought, was quite interesting.

He did plow a lot of his own money, I think, into that.

He really, really seemed very keen not to be one of the people who lost their seat in Winnesley.

Where I think, as Michael Gove saw the writing on the wall and was like, mum,

goodbye.

Farewell to Andrew Bridgeon, podcast favourite Andrew Bridgen, who came sixth in his seat.

Despite issuing his own election song, which, if listeners, you have not heard, as soon as this podcast is finished, please go to YouTube and listen to The Mighty Andrew Bridgen, his official campaign song.

Well, can we not have a bit of it?

Andrew Bridgen, The Mighty.

minute cities, let us be.

The second verse is about chemtrails.

Honestly, it just gets better.

There's six minutes of it.

That's actually the kind of thing people are going to be using AI for in the future.

Farewell to a lot of SNP MPs.

They fell to nine.

Yeah, that was nine in the end, wasn't it?

Seats in the end.

I mean, that was an extraordinary.

For all the people who said Labour didn't do that well, actually, Scotland is the counterpoint to that, right?

Where they were the way to get rid of the SNP sort of domination.

People did actually vote Labour in those seats.

Yeah, yeah.

That was an amazing bit of the coverage: watching Nicola Sturgeon, who'd been hired to sit there all night.

And you just thought, this is very, very masochistic.

She's sitting there, not having a great deal to say about the rest of the country, watching her own laptop and her life and career going up in tatters.

And John Sweeney said, basically, sort of conceded maybe he should have not protected his MSP, who spent 11 grand on

the roaming charges to watch the football.

Well these things are always easier in hindsight.

Can I just point out with the SNP?

They've now got about the right number of people to fill a quite substantial camper van.

Another one you might have missed,

Ian Paisley Jr.

Oh, lost his seat to some people who were even more right-wing than him, the TUB.

But a Paisley has held that seat.

It was held by his father from 1970 and him from 2010.

So the uninterrupted Paisley rule has been broken.

That is extraordinary.

Actually, there's just too much news.

There's way too much.

I did not realise until Helen told me this morning that Theresa Villiers gauged Therese Coffee being swept off into the sea as like a noxious substance.

I did spot that one, but Therese Villiers.

Nimby, Theresa Villiers, has not only been sort of struck out, but also immolate.

Her legacy has been immolated by Rachel Reeves on day three.

Can I just point out one that people might have missed as well?

Everyone is all about Jacob Brees Monk, but in the neighbouring constituency of North Somerset, Liam Fox off to spend more time with Adam Warraty.

Just reading the Stephen Crabb.

I thought him better.

No one's thought about

it perhaps, but he's gone.

South Dorset, Richard Drax.

Oh,

I mean, Richard, full name, Richard Grovesner, Plunkett, Earnley Earl Drax.

God, that must have taken a while to read out on the platform, isn't it?

Mark Harper, Transport Secretary, gone.

Britain's, until the election, tallest MP, Daniel Krzezynski.

Oh, is that?

Gone.

He was once done for threatening and intimidating a couple of members of staff and claimed it was partly thanks to his height.

He felt scared rather than he was.

That's right.

Grant Shaps.

Gone.

Johnny Mercer, gone.

A frequent eye target and

a source of great dispute over his exact payment for representing those veterans who he represented in many ways.

Miriam Cates.

Miriam Cates, who has also already offered her prescription for how the Tory Party can get better.

I mean, that's sort of Liz Trussish cheek, isn't it?

Do you not think a period of reflection might be appropriate on your part?

Is it Christian social conservatives?

It's more babies, yeah.

This is more babies.

There's always more babies of Miriam Kate.

So it is quite striking.

We should probably make clear that it's very sad when anyone ever loses their seat.

No, it isn't.

It's sad for the staff.

I mean, that's the thing.

I think there are a lot of people who are pretty blameless and work really hard, slogged.

A lot of campaign volunteers who've slogged around places.

And I would like to pay tribute to all of them and the magic of democracy.

Yes, and I was very, very taken by seeing all the candidates on the platform.

There was a moment when there was a monster raving loony man who was up there and I thought, are you going to say that a lot of your candidates turned out to be monsters and raving and loony and you'd vetted them all

and it wasn't your fault and obviously you're not raving or loony or a monster.

But just seeing them all, it was just such a pleasure.

There is something about the fact that there was someone dressed as Elmo standing next to Keir Starmer as he got his declaration and I know it's the most sort of basic opinion but I like the the fundamental lack of respect that that indicates.

Not in a mean way, but just in a kind of like, don't get above yourself.

We know you're Prime Minister now, but can't go away.

Just to mention other novelty candidates, we should note that Rod Liddle lost his deposit, standing for the SDP.

I think we should have a moment's sadness for that.

Silence.

It's fine.

He's still got like 15 columns.

I'm sure we're going to scrape by.

We should talk about some of the other smaller parties, and in the case of the Lib Dems, not so small anymore parties who had good nights.

So reform, Reform UK, can't get away from them.

I think the interesting thing about them, and we've spoken a bit about this, is that they've made a very, very, very little bit of progress in the last 10 years since they were effectively UKIP.

I know Farish says it's a new party, but it's not really.

It's a 1990 party.

It is the Brexit party, isn't it?

It's just got a new badge on it.

It's the same as it was set up as it is in no way a new party.

In 2014, there were 24 UKIP MEPs elected to the European Parliament.

It came top of those European parliamentary elections.

Would you like to guess how many of them were still UKIP MEPs by the end of that parliamentary term?

By the end of that time.

24,

I'll say down to

12.

I'll say they're halved.

So, so much higher than the actual number.

Two.

Nearly there?

Three.

Nearly there.

Four.

Four, correct.

Four.

Wow.

So, this is your, Adam, this is your Galloway point as well, that UKIP or the successor parties have traditionally been okay at winning seats in particular elections, holding on to those MPs.

If you remember, one of them punched someone, one of them got done for Spencer's irregularities.

And I think I would be interested to see whether or not all five of them make it the distance this time.

I would say the odds are against.

Yes, we've got Viennaj Tice, Lee Anderson, and then two others who.

One of whom is 38, which is

wrong in my mind.

Welcome to the world of people being younger than you expect.

Well, that's like police officers and doctors being younger than

reform MPs.

I'm feeling great, great relief that the Prime Minister is finally older than me again after the last two.

Thank you very much.

Well, I keep being told and spent the whole evening being told that reform is absolutely huge on TikTok.

It's particularly large with 16 to 18 year olds.

So if Sakir is looking for an early pledge to drop, I think the lowering the voting age would be a good one.

I'm just offering that now.

Or reintroduce national service, teach them all some hard lessons about what's really needed to run a democracy.

I think we'll be seeing that soon.

Okay, either or.

But I think the problem is that Farage basically is, this is the bit he likes, running running for election and getting to make speeches and having everyone look at him and the actual working with other people is the bit that he really has a serious problem with I mean good luck having Lee Anderson and Nigel Farage as two egos in the same room

along with Richard Tice who at some point has got to get cross with having to just do all the dirty work that Nigel can't be bothered with and stand in for him for the bits he he doesn't like doing while Nigel gets in front of the cameras instead.

But I mean there's a history of this.

This is what Farage does.

He gets elected to things and then he falls out horribly with people.

I mean he did this with Alan Sked, the founder of UKIP.

He did it with Nikki Sinclair, a fellow UKIP MEP.

Marta Andreason, do you remember the old EU auditor who inexplicably having exposed all sorts of corruption with the EU then decided to tie her flag to UKIP, then fell out horribly with Nigel Farage.

Neil Hamilton and Jared Batten and all of those people who are left in that rump of UKIP who I think were still fighting a couple of seats this time.

Yes.

Annabel Fuller, his former mistress and spokeswoman and speechwriter who now has not even no good words to say about him, really, really

terrible things to say about him.

And in the end, you know, he fell out with UKIP so badly he had to set up his own party, which isn't even a party, as we keep saying.

It's a limited company, which is a very, very odd setup.

And as you were saying,

pretend it's this sort of scrappy startup.

And already, I see, they're talking about...

what they're going to do at the next election and the labour seats they're going to be targeting in the next election.

It's not just about elections.

You know, you're actually going to have to represent some people in Clacton.

You know, Richard Tice is going to have to deal with farmers in Bolton and Skegness who are saying to him, we haven't got anyone to pick our crops anymore.

What are you actually going to do about that it's a bit like you know those those those couples who spend tens of thousands of pounds on their weddings and then realize on sort of the first day of the honeymoon that they don't actually like each other very much don't want to be married to each other well I mean it was a very good analogy because I mean in the days before the election reform candidates a number of them were suddenly saying oh god I haven't joined that party have I oh I didn't realize they were like that

but you're right exactly about the um the fact that they now have a little taste of power which has classically been an issue for smaller parties.

And one of the reasons I think the Greens have managed to build themselves into actually a similar situation to the Lib Dems, right, where they often become the kind of local NIMBY party, is that some of the councils that they've held, they've built up their presence there and done really quite well.

So have been, I think, the Brighton experience has been slightly less happy for them, but they have become a functional party at a local level and able to put grassroots campaigners down and really embed themselves in a couple of places.

And it'll be very interesting to see whether or not reform can do anything like that.

I would suspect that Miguel Farage will now go back off to the US to go and stand next to Donald Trump for a bit, which I'm not sure the people of Clackton was what they entirely wanted for an MP.

Well, all he said of his intentions in Parliament is that he intends to be a bloody nuisance.

But he's got four other people who are down to be a bloody nuisance.

So good luck whipping that operation.

But on a voting for celebrity basis, maybe his constituents, if they see him in America next to Trump, will think even better of him.

Yeah, I mean, if your MP is a member of the cabinet, for example, there is normally a little boost, I think, that comes associated with that.

And you sort of give them an allowance for not doing maybe as many constituency surgeries as you might hope they do.

But there's a little bit

attached to it.

Well, after all the chat about Rishi Sunak not being worried about holding Richmond Northallerton, he actually held it completely handsomely.

It's on one of the safest Tory seats that there still are.

So it turns out people do just quite like having the Prime Minister as

their candidate.

And within a month, this will be interesting.

We'll see what benefits Nigel Faroche has received over the last year and all his current financial interests as well, because it's retroactive by 12 months, the register.

So, not earnings, not everything he's earned, but all the benefits received.

So, that will be great fun.

I mean, you must be bookmarking some space in the magazine for that.

I'm just a wild stab in the dark that there might be some interesting things.

There will be some room, but there was a very good piece last time just about how extraordinary the funding is for reform.

And it's a set of people in Mayfair.

It really is about as unclacked and as you could get, And we'll see if the base gets any wider.

But at the moment, it isn't.

We should talk about the Lib Dems as well.

Speaking of parties which got roughly the same number of votes as reform.

I don't think they're going to be so keen on proportional representation anymore, are they?

I think the fire might have gone out on that one.

They said today we're going to go for it, even if it means reform, win more.

But they're the only party which has got a rough proportion of seats in the House of Commons 2 share of national vote.

The extraordinary thing about this election, I think, was that people have learned how to work the first-past-the-post first-past-the-post system.

I mean,

it was very much all about tactical voting, I think, and getting the anti-Tory candidate into

a lot of constituencies right across Britain, wasn't it?

Well, Jacob Brismorg is evidence of that, and the Libs didn't campaign hard for that seat.

And as I say, you would have expected that it was a South West seat, that it would go Lib Dem from Tory, and it didn't.

And that's because there was a kind of assumption, like, you know, there was a kind of tacit,

not exactly agreement, but people worked out who was closest and then it overtook it.

Did it go Labour then?

Yeah.

Brismogg's seat?

Yeah, I assumed it would have gone Lib Dem, but solely because of geography.

But there has been a lot of that.

I think very few of the Lib Dem, there was one target seat for both Labour and the Lib Dems, which was Nick Clegg's old seat, Sheffield Hallam.

Yeah.

That's the only one where they had a proper scrap over it, really.

Yeah, and Labour were reasonably challenging in Whitney, which in which George Osborne's old advisor, Rupert Harrison, didn't win.

It didn't go to him.

So, yeah, but I mean, there were quite a few three-way marginals, and there are now small seats that have been subject to huge swings back and forwards in the last 10 years.

There's very few now, what you would call ultra, ultra-safe seats.

I think that's really interesting.

In the last few years, people have spent time telling us that it's all about identity politics now.

And people seem to have abandoned those old sort of identities of I'm a Labour person or I'm a Lib Dem person and I will be them till I die.

In the same way that they have with, I suppose, with newspapers, haven't they?

You know, people, no one defines themselves by the newspaper they read anymore.

Those sorts of loyalties seem to have died away completely.

That was always the red wall kind of question.

If you had been somebody who'd voted Labour all your life and you decided to flirt with reform or Boris Johnson's sort of Brexit Tory party, did you then snap back to being Labour?

Or at that point, are you actually a swing voter?

And I'd be interested to see what the analysis of that is, but I suggest probably that may be where it is.

I think you're right.

I think some of those things, those tribal lawies, have been broken, and I don't think you ever really go back to them in the same way.

I think the other thing that people forget

as older people who tend to be doing the analysis on this kind of thing, like us, is that every generation that comes through sees things completely differently.

I mean, the thing that amazed me, and my first vote was in 1997, when there was absolutely a much more enthusiastic view than there has been in this one, of we've got to get this awful knackered government out and get Labour in.

And I was really surprised to find when my nieces and nephews came up to their first vote, which was in 2010, they felt exactly the same way in the opposite direction, that they were just, my God, we've had Labour in for 13 years.

They're so knackered and sleazy and all.

We've got to get them out.

And that, you know, each generation does come through differently, which suggests to me, as you were saying, Ian, that the, you know, the 16 and 17-year-olds, if they get votes, may see things very differently to how we expect them to.

One of the things I did notice in a number of the Vox pops on the night was people saying, I'm very disillusioned with the Tories, but I literally cannot vote Labour, so I'm voting Lib Dem.

And you wanted to say, Have you noticed how left-wing the Lib Dems are now?

The idea of Labour in your head isn't exactly what you would be hoping with the Lib Dems.

So, yes, I think there's a lot of clever tactical voting, and I think there's a lot of slightly catching up tactical voting going on as well.

It wasn't as weird as 2015 when a lot of people said, We want to punish the Lib Dems for going into coalition with the Tories, so we're going to vote Tory instead.

That was the weirdest weirdest election move ever.

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So that is enough.

Stamping on the cinders of the last government.

Let's start gloriously brick by brick.

Tearing down the next one.

What was that phrase from Kiss John with the pale sunlight of hope?

I thought that sort of summed it up, really.

It wasn't.

And like, yeah, things are going to get better.

It was like, oh, yeah, we're all right.

Things might.

Things good.

So we've got a lot of so hello then.

I mean, a couple of hundred of them, to be honest.

I think it's the House of Commons with the most new members certainly in living or recent memory.

I mean about half the MPs in the House of Commons have have not been in the House of Commons before, very rare.

The privatized series, new boys and new girls will start next issue and will run as long as

they're still there.

We've got about 200 issues.

What's that?

It's 10 years.

Yeah, that's about right.

Decade of national renewal.

There we go.

A lot of them are lobbyists in the Labour.

It is really interesting to look at the breakdown.

Because obviously it's costs a lot of money to run as an MP and you know you have to be quite a masochist to do it.

So, that I think that new Labour intake will be really interesting to scrutinize.

You know, and I'll see you about a massive Lib Dem new intake, too.

I mean,

very few survivors from the coalition still left.

Yes, how was their vetting?

I have no idea.

We heard a lot about Labour vetting all its candidates, you know, scrupulously to make sure that they were centrist dads and mums, I suppose.

But the new Lib Dems, unknown quantity.

I know some of them might be in favour of building houses, they might have slipped through the neck.

You can say.

So,

is there anyone new who you're especially interested in in the new intake?

Well, my new person that I thought was a really interesting one is not a new MP, he's a new lord, and that's James Timpson, who Kit Somer was one of the first people he announced in the cabinet as prisons and probation minister, which I just think is a really, really interesting job.

I mean, this is getting experts in, basically, along.

He announced him along with Patrick Valance coming in as Minister for Science and the new Attorney General, whose name from Moment escapes to

an extremely experienced lawyer, rather than being, God, who else have we had in that post?

Suella Braverman, who I think had done some photocopying in a lawyer's office once on work experience, and

Liz Truss, who

I don't think had done anything, really.

No, it was pretty tough on Emily Thornbury, who's been a pretty dogged shadow for the entirety of the miserable opposition years.

But I think the idea was he wanted someone who's a very recently practicing internet.

Given that Kier Starmer sort of prides himself as being a lawyer, I don't know if he's ever mentioned that he ran the DPP.

I think he wanted somebody who was really up-to-date with their practice.

So that's why Richard Hermer got picked.

Another great lord will be Rishi Sunak's former Chief of Staff Liam Booth Smith, who's been rewarded for his exquisite judgment in deciding to have an early election by going to the Lords.

So that's nice.

Are you allowed to have a sort of leather jacket ermine combination?

Sorry, that's a very niche joke about what he likes wearing.

Leather ermine jacket, yes.

But I mean,

Sunak, having said, I am not Boris all along, ends up with

a totally gratuitous peerage, which is just as embarrassing and pathetic.

He can sit next to to Ross Kempsell and Charlotte Owen, can't he?

It's just.

But those political appointments, I thought they were the sort of after, they're normally after the end of term, as it were.

You don't do the political ones in your dissolutionised point.

Wait.

But, I mean, again, like all sort of traditions and protocols, they go out the window as soon as anyone cares.

And presumably, Rishi Sunak thought, if I don't give it to him now,

someone will sit on this and say this is embarrassing.

Do you reckon?

I mean, it feels to me like another example of what kept being trotted up before the election, which was that Rishi Sinek isn't very good at politics.

Which again feels...

It doesn't matter anymore, does it?

No, no.

I mean, personally, if you were good at politics, you would have waited until the polls had closed to say, yeah, I'm giving a peerage to Chris Grayling, wouldn't you?

Oh,

there was still half an hour where people could get down to the ballot box and register their dissent at that one.

I did a sort of 2 a.m.

tweet that's like, can we park this and come back to it?

I mean, the man who destroyed the probation service by carving it in half, I mean, has extensively covered in private eye, deciding to give all the high-risk cases, keep them in the public one, and then carve off what he thought would be the easy, lucrative ones to the private sector.

The private sector then says, Oh, actually, we can't do this.

It turns out it's probation servicing quite hard, actually.

They then have to sew it all back together.

I mean, in a decade of terrible ministers, Chris Grading is just the worst.

You're not even bringing up the ferries, and you're not even bringing up him banning reading and books in cells.

All of his departments, I mean, a lot of them, Michael Gove, had to go in and sort out.

You know, I didn't think I'd hear myself saying that.

Hooray.

No, it's extraordinary.

And I mean,

much as I love the idea we all move on, let's not quite forget.

I'm never moving on.

Hilary Cass of the Cass Report into Youth Gender Services got one in the Peerage and the Dissolution Honours.

And that's nice.

I think that's the same thing as Timpson, right?

Which is putting in people who are in civil society, who have expertise relevant to legislation that you might be considering.

And we should say the reason, just for any listeners who don't know, is that James Timpson runs Timpson, who you know, Shoesmended, Keyscutt, who employ a lot of recent ex-prisoners and provide a lot of pathways back into the workplace after people have done Tim Simpson.

He's also involved, I think, with the Prison Reform Trust and various other kind of big initiatives as well as those that he's doing through Timpson, who are one of those real sort of amazing, slightly Victorian-era employers, a bit like William Lever or Titus Salt or someone.

And you are literally, Andy, looking at a sole on my shoe put on at Timpson's.

And very, very well too.

And I think that's really interesting because people initially wanted to portray that as a Labor going soft on crime, which is combined with the fact that Shabana Mahmood, the new justice secretary, is going to have to early release a lot of people.

Now, that was just something that was going to have to happen because the prisons are overflowing and there hasn't been any work done in the six weeks that we were in Purdue because of the election campaign.

But the thing I thought was really smart about Timpson is he has quite a few rules.

He doesn't take men under 25 because he thinks that those people aren't ready to kind of turn their life around.

They don't take sex offenders because they're often very manipulative.

So

he has got a hard-headed realism.

He's not starry-eyed, is he?

He's not Mrs.

Jellybee, no, he's absolutely.

So this is something that interests me, the sort of

appointing experts, because it's very unfamiliar territory.

Well, it's Gordon Brown's government of all the talents,

which didn't necessarily always work out that well.

But that was a very late New Labour idea, if you like.

And I just found myself wondering, is this interesting because this is a big change of government as opposed to simply one Conservative Prime Minister to the next?

Is this unusual?

Will it keep happening?

Because what you found in the later years of the Conservative government is there's lots of shuffling the deck chairs.

You know, you are slowly running out of people who you might be able to give ministerial jobs.

There are about a hundred ministerial jobs, aren't there?

Is that roughly the size of the with senior and junior ministers all in?

More even than that.

And then you can have almost any number that you want unpaid.

There's only a count on the number of paid ministers in the payroll vote.

But you're right.

If you've got 300 and is it 26?

If you've got a small majority, one-third of your MPs are going to be ministers, unless you appoint from outside.

So after a certain number of years, you're inevitably going to be moving people around, which is why you see Grant Schapps or Michael Goval, whoever, go round and round lots of different departments.

Whereas here, it felt like these people have been mastering their brief, or certainly in a shadow position for some years, and then they get posted.

Is that something that we can expect to be a lasting change, or is it just the consequence of having a big changeover?

I would say historically, there is always a moment where governments of whatever stripe say it's time we had someone who's actually done something.

So you get in people from business.

Mrs.

Thatcher loved Lord Young, if you remember.

You bring me problems, he brings me solutions.

I mean, there was all that sort of reverence for business and expertise.

And I think it does go in waves.

There was a Blairite period where it was we must have people who've done things.

The next Tory lot, you remember, they got in the man who ran Asda, they got Archie Norman was suddenly, this is the sort of person we want in.

But then we hit gove, which was we don't want experts anymore.

And do write in and correct me and say that's unfair and not the full quote.

But you know what I mean.

It was also the fact that you have to reward more and more people in order to buy them off.

And that's one of the things that's interesting about this transition is that Starmer has appointed lots of people who shadowed those briefs in opposition.

There's been very few changes.

He obviously had to swap out Thangham Debonair and Jonathan Ashworth, who both didn't win their seats.

Annalise Dodds has been downgraded to only Minister of State.

But you know, essentially, it was a kind of trying to smoothly port over.

However, that does leave approximately 19 billion Labour MPs without a job.

And with, you know, with and there'll be some select committee chairships coming up, there's not a lot of baubles that he can buy them off with.

And people say people kind of go, oh, it's terrible, the super majority will be so undemocratic.

And I just feel as someone who's covered the Labour Party for a long time, it's very possible for them to argue amongst themselves.

I really wouldn't worry about that.

This is another thing I found interesting about the appointment of Patrick Valence, because he's been brought in as a the science minister.

He actually appeared on a podcast in November, the Carbon Trust podcast, and he was talking about how you apply the lessons of COVID and the vaccine program to net zero.

And it just gives you a bit of an indication of the things that matter most to them.

Firstly, it's an indication of how long these things have been in the works and being planned, as in it wasn't like the election happened and then Starmer phoned up Patrick Valence and said, we've just thought of this.

So his messages were things like, you need to have clear, objective, measurable, you know, time-bound aims of what you're trying to do, whether that's vaccines or net zero, whatever it is.

And that seems to be a big thing for the Starmer project is measurable, you know, deliverable, but measurable.

They haven't given an awful lot of concrete commitments about when things are going to get better, but supposedly that's part of it.

And the other thing he said was bring experts into government quickly.

Weeks, not months or years.

So, you know, his own advice has come in handy there.

It's the point you can do it as well, isn't it?

When you have got that big majority and they're fresh in, that actually, if you're ever going to be able to have a proper, sensible, mature conversation about prisons, which don't work and have never worked, and it's insane that we are spending so much money on putting people in prison and bring and so they can become worse criminals and then bring them out again.

Now is the only possible time to do it, and maybe you can defy all of all of all of that kind of coverage, which is going to say, oh, soft on crime, soft on prisons, and do something.

And the lags is going to start to appear, that only appears in tabloid stories about prisons.

Do you want a quick Labour Nepo watch?

Yeah.

Sue Gray's son is now an MP.

Okay.

Yeah.

Morgan McSweeney, who is the kind of architect of Starmerism.

His wife is now an MP for a Scottish constituency.

But sadly, for me, as I think I was hoping this would happen, no Joe Dancy, who is Mr.

West Streeting.

I'd hoped that we'd have the first pair of married men in the Commons, and that's, we haven't yet had that.

Yeah, we had Yvette Cooper and Ed Balls, if you remember, as the first married couple in the cabinet.

I am looking forward to Yvette Cooper being giving a real grilling on Good Morning.

I mean, these boats, they haven't stopped.

We're a week in, Yvette.

Come on.

What's the plan?

What's the plan, Yvette?

What is the plan?

Hey, speaking of faces from the past, just in case I myself am looking too starry-eyed about James Timpson and Patriot Valance and all these kind of experts coming in, within 12 hours, my heart had sunk when I saw a couple of old faces back in the cabinet.

We've got Jackie Smith, former home secretary

and wife of Porn User on Expenses, and

another man who's featured in the eye an awful lot over the years, Alan Milburn,

who was one of those many Blairite people like John Reed, who just used to get shuffled around different departments, didn't he?

And seemed to be the answer to everything.

Let's just give it to Alan Milburn.

So come on, tell us what you've got against Alan Milburn.

He was health secretary from 1999 until 2003.

Quite instrumental during his time in health, pushing PFI into hospitals and opening up a lot of private contracts, a lot of outsourcing, this kind of thing.

And his most recent appearances in the eye have been because he's made a number of, you know, he's written articles, he's appeared on Newsnight, and every time he's, you know, he's Alan Milburn, former health secretary, rather than Alan Milburn, who is also the chair of the advisory board at the private equity equity group Bridgepoint, director of medical technique firm Human Therapeutics, doesn't sound sinister at all, director of a Spanish health giant, senior advisor to PWC's UK government and health industries practice, lots and lots and lots of jobs, all private health and kind of pushing private health and saying, look, don't be afraid of it.

It's wonderful, really.

And the pieces always say, could someone point out that he has a vested interest here?

And when the broadcasters have him on, could you mention he's a pretty major lobbyist, either for his own interests for other people's, and he's not just the health secretary from a Labour government who you'd imagine would have a particular view, but they never do.

So we have to keep repeating the people.

Anyway, now he's back in government.

That's very interesting to me because I think that it has been.

I mean, I remember reading Barbara Castle biographies about pay beds in the 1970s.

The amount of private intrusion you have into the health service is always going to be something that is a thorn in the side of a Labour government.

Wes Streeting has said that he's open to it.

You know, he'd said if he hadn't been able to get his scan for his kidney cancer through the NHS, if he had to wait a month, he said at that point he would have gone private.

So he's definitely in a different place to other people.

I think also, honestly, in Islington North, where Jeremy Corbyn held on to his seat as an independent, the fact that he was running against a guy who ran a private chain of IVF clinics was actually something that he really made a big deal about in the campaign literature: about I'm in favour of the NHS, this guy is a private healthcare provider.

So it's a point where actually Labour's base and,

you know, I would say not exactly his base, its campaigning base may be very out of tune with what they end up now doing in government.

That could be a real sore spot as we go on.

That's interesting.

Can I just make the point that I will try and make whenever we get in front of one of these select committees?

I mean, I don't mind people being private health providers and running businesses.

Do they also have to be in the government?

Could we not have people in the government who don't own large companies that are going to benefit?

And then they could make the decision.

And if their decision, where's Streeting's decision, is we need more private health care owners, then we could appoint one that says isn't in the government.

I mean, why can't we split these things?

That was very inefficient, Ian.

I just like to bring up one of my other bugbears as well, which is that

the requirements of the Register of Lords interests are a lot less stringent than the ones of the House of Commons.

You don't have to declare figures as strictly as you do if you're an MP, which is something that I've been saying for years really needs to be tightened up because there's no reason for it.

But if you're going to start appointing junior ministers or even senior ministers from the House of Lords, then you know, with business interests, then you really have to have a look at that.

Is that why we didn't learn maybe as much as we could have done about David Cameron's interest?

Because I think there was lots of interest in his interest in China, for example, and there was the whole Greensill palava.

Yeah, and John Prescott, we never found out exactly how much he was being paid for his Sunday mirror column at the time when he was inveigling against the News International newspapers, their rivals, for their involvement in phone hacking and ignoring his own newspaper groups.

Yeah, there are all sorts of things.

We never found out what Nadine Dorries was getting for her various talk TV and mail gigs, but that's because she didn't declare, didn't declare, didn't declare, and then left.

So

I hope Channel 4 are happy with

whatever they paid her for election night.

We should wrap up shortly.

Are there any more things looking forward, any more fights that you're looking forward to, or any more discussions that you're looking forward to seeing how they play out over the next couple of years?

First big labour scandal, and I'm not going to predict what it is, but we'll have one.

We'll have one before Christmas.

I remember, so I started here on Work Experience late 97 when it was a very odd time for the eye because readers were kind of, oh, no, that's that, that, that's it it's all over now we don't want there's no more sleaze or anything this is this lovely shiny new government

and i remember the do you remember the first big one ian was the uh the tobacco donations bernie acclaimer

and there was suddenly this moment that's when tony blair

listeners for younger listeners please they were cracking down on tobacco advertising but they were gonna they decided to have a loophole that would allow it them still to sponsor formula one proprietor bernie accleston proprietor bernie eccleston who it turned out had given i think a million pounds to labor completely coincidentally of course and it was that moment when tony Blair was ordered by Alastair Campbell, who was the one giving the orders at that point,

to go on the BBC and take a kicking.

And he said famously, I think people know I'm a pretty straight kind of guy.

And it was the moment when people realized, maybe actually he wasn't.

No, you've just literally done the,

I'm a black is white, two plus two is five kind of guy.

Which, to be fair, he was really, really good at.

Well, that's why he went on and took the kicking because Gordon Brown, who was absolutely incensed and devastated, and thought, I can't believe we've got to do this.

This is what I didn't want to go into politics for.

He didn't.

Can I nominate housing?

Which, as you know, is a pet issue of mine.

And there's a really interesting thing where Rachel Reeves' first speech as Chancellor was basically like, Build, baby, build.

So there's no more ban on onshore wind farms, for example.

She's Angela Rayner, who will now be in charge of housing policy essentially, is going to call in a couple of the developments that were blocked.

They're going to try and, for example, unbung near where my parents live, Worcestershire Parkway Station.

There's bizarrely a park and ride station in the middle of nowhere, waiting for the housing development that you always assumed would come around it and has nonetheless not appeared.

So they are really determined to block what has now been called the kind of anti-growth coalition.

Theresa Villiers, who is like the arch NIMBY, lost her seat.

And that's the interesting thing there.

And I think it's a particularly interesting fight because it shows the split between the kind of much older Tory voting base, who are largely very worried about protecting their asset prices and meanities, and the Tory think tanks who are all like, but we need some economic growth.

This is the only one of the only ways to do it.

So, all the energy in the kind of Tory intellectual right, which is mostly people under 50, are all desperate to build some houses, whereas the Tory voters are very anti and quite worried about it.

Well, there was a Griselda cartoon in this very issue, which is someone with a red rosette saying, build more houses now, and someone with a blue rosette saying, build more houses somewhere else.

My other interesting thing I'm just fascinated by, it's a very small issue, but it's the uh refurbishment of Parliament.

Is anyone going to actually take it on?

Is it because it's been kicked down the road many, many years in a row and riddled with mice and I think at some point might burn down.

I mean that is the traditional way that Parliament gets rebuilt is that every sophomore just burns down and we have another one.

Do we just put them all in a shed with um computer links and it'll be fine and we turn the House of Parliament into a big museum or a theme park or a karaoke night or Davy would love it if it was a theme park.

He could be MC.

Ed Davies has house of farm.

The only MP who's going to have a space hopper instead of a green bench to sit on.

Well, that's your option.

And I think people will fight that not on cost, which is absolutely unbelievable, but on a sort of how moth eaten are we?

And is moth eaten okay?

What traditional value is there in that?

I mean, if like me, you're quite keen on Pugy

and the building as a whole,

it'll be difficult.

Isn't it one of the issues is that there aren't enough seats now for all of the Labour MPs on one side of the house.

So, I mean, if ever there was a time, the whole thing will tilt over, it'll be unbalanced and it will just start listing.

Right, that's it from us.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you've enjoyed this episode, there is a magazine, actually, a related magazine called Private Eye.

Go and buy it or go to private-eye.co.uk and get yourself a subscription, which is reasonably priced, and you'll be making a long-term decision for a brighter future.

Thanks to Ian, Helen, and Adam.

Thank you to you for listening.

Thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio, who, as always, produced this episode.

Goodbye.