115: False Advertising

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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 Ian Hislop, Adam McQueen, and Matt Muir.

We're here for our last pre-election episode.

We'll be coming to you, you know, in the record fifth Conservative administration two weeks from now.

So that's very exciting.

Today, we thought we'd have a last go at getting all our election stuff in.

So there are a few really interesting stories we'd like to talk about.

We're going to be talking about gambling, we're going to be talking about reform, and we're going to be talking about advertising.

In the second half of today's show, I'll be speaking to Helen Lewis because, in another first, we're breaking ground all the time on page 94, we are going to be going transatlantic and speaking to Helen Aslive in Brooklyn, where she is joining the British invasion of British hacks going over and running American organizations and firing everyone.

But first, election special.

I think this is about a third or fourth election special.

So we will.

It's even more special though this time.

It feels like about the three thousandths, but actually it is only the third.

So let's talk first of all about the first TikTok election, all sorts of digital advertising, also the first AI disinformation-fueled election.

Matt, you have been looking into what has actually been happening in terms of online advertising.

For my sins.

Just to note for everybody, this is now the fifth consecutive first social media election.

The first first social media election, which is in 2010.

We then had 15, 17, 19.

But I think what's been really interesting is, firstly, looking at the amount of money that has been spent on digital advertising across social media.

So we've got data that's accurate to a few days ago, which suggests that, and this is just across Meta's platform, so that's Facebook and Instagram, and across Google's platforms, so YouTube and Google advertising, the five and a half million pounds has been spent in total on political advertising since the 22nd of May.

That works out roughly at about £3 million from Labour, a million from the Conservatives, and then the rest from assorted other players within the space.

What's also amazing is if you think of the sheer scale of the number of adverts.

So roughly speaking, right, on Meta, that equates to somewhere between 10 and 20,000 individual adverts.

That's a lot of individual adverts.

I'm sorry, Matt.

When you say an individual advert,

like a different image, a different ad being placed?

That's not twenty thousand impressions, times that people have actually seen that advert.

It's obviously millions more than that.

If you want impressions, we can estimate.

Impressions, we're looking at probably at about six hundred million, which is basically opportunities that someone will have seen a piece of political advertising across one of these platforms.

Well, that's ten times for every human being, even the ones are not allowed to vote.

Everyone sees at least ten adverts here.

We were talking about this being the the fifth first social media election, but I can remember back in twenty ten, I live in a marginal constituency, I'm in Hastings and Rye, so it's one of those real kind of fifty-fifty Labour Tory ones.

And in 2010, it was the election that Michael Ashcroft was bankrolling.

And literally, every single advertising hoarding across Hastings had a big picture of David Cameron on it.

So at that point, they were obviously still thinking that that sort of advertising was working.

I haven't seen a single one of those either.

In terms of physical posters, other than ones outside people's houses, which I've only seen two conservative ones.

Do we think they put the money online?

Because these sums you're talking about, I mean, that's one donation from Frank Hester.

I mean, you know, these are big sums, these millions of pounds.

As of last week, it is possible to get a vague idea of the past week's spending on a week-by-week basis and where it is.

This is who targets me, who done this in conjunction with Sky News.

And so, over the course of the past week, the two constituencies that have seen the most spending on social media ads, and again, this only covers meta platforms, so Facebook and Instagram, but it's usually representative of where the money's being put, have been Bristol and North Herefordshire, with the Greens investing over six grand, targeting just those two constituencies, very, very hard.

The next ten are rural reform.

So you start to get a very clear picture of exactly where is being targeted by whom.

Now, there's an interesting question about the extent to which this does actually move the needle,

which is very, very, very hard to prove.

And there's a question as to whether parties are doing this just because, well, we've got to put this money somewhere, and billboards don't work, or at least we can't tell, and leaflets are increasingly expensive.

And with this stuff, at least we know we can reach people.

What happens when they reach those people is, of course, somewhat unknowable.

But those are the parties, the Greens and Reform, who have target seats in the single figures.

So I suppose naturally they'll be most concentrating their spending on the couple they think they're in the middle of the century.

Well, what's interesting is the Conservatives have also started doing that over the past few days.

Oh, God, and the 10 seats they think they can keep on.

Well, it's genuinely interesting.

The Tories are currently running ads focused at about 1,000 to 1,500 people in very, very, very small constituencies.

So it's things like, do you live in North Hitchin?

Are you worried about your pension?

That's very few people.

So it does suggest that they're running ever so slightly scared

as to how the rather more elderly

residents who are on Facebook are going to respond to the reform assault.

And do we know if there are equivalent adverts saying, are you 17 and live in North Hitchen and don't want to be conscripted?

I mean, is anyone doing that?

Again, because of the sheer volume of these things, it's incredibly hard to tell.

And the platforms don't make it hugely easy, it's fair to say.

So Facebook, sorry, Meta, has gotten better.

You know, the European Union's legislation has in part helps the degree of transparency that exists around these things.

Boo to this program Russell's lies.

I'm one of those plants that all of your readers think work for you.

But again, it's very, very hard to get any sort of complexive idea about the content, the targeting, the magnitude, and the messaging simply because, so for example, you can, if you want, download a spreadsheet of all of the adverts running politically over the course of a set period and then analyze them in whatever way you want.

But you can only download three of those a day.

What?

Yeah.

So, and how many roughly are running?

Well, the thing is, when I say you can only download three of those a day, that's one, you can download ads bought by up to three pages.

Now, Labour, for example, has many thousands of pages on Facebook.

There's the Labour Party page, there's the Keir Starmer page, then there are all the Labour pages.

So if you think about it, there are many, many, many thousands of pages buying ads, all of which have to be aggregated somehow manually to get any sort of impression of where these are and what they're saying.

So in terms of what we the public or we journalists can see in terms of the aggregate collection of ads being run in in this election, there's nowhere we can go.

It's very, very hard.

So, I did a little bit of looking, and you can see certain things.

So, I did have a look at the main Conservative Party Facebook page to have a look at the adverts that they're putting out and the messaging of them.

And the message is: be frightened.

Be very, very frightened.

Be like us.

Because they are.

Be frightened of tax,

this fabulous £2,000 tax burden,

which

there are certain questions about the factual validity of that claim.

Be frightened of increased class sizes.

Be frightened of Angela Raynor.

Be frightened of Sadiq Khan.

Be frightened of the supermajority.

There's a wonderful series of ads that are running at the moment, or were running recently, that variously run.

Keir Starmer needs your pension.

Keir Starmer needs your taxes.

Keir Starmer needs your wallet.

Which assumes that he's there panhandling.

Kirstama needs your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.

But

there's a significant amount of project fear, I think we can call it, being peddled by the Conservatives.

Labour, on the other hand, they're very much peddling the change message.

Change, change, change.

Kirst Armen needs your change,

which is to be found in your model.

He does, too.

And

if we look at the Tories', well, what Nigel Farage likes to claim are the Tories' main challenges, reform's messaging in their adverts are again,

be scared, but in a different way.

There are two messages fundamentally: that Britain is broken and only we, Reform, can fix it.

And the adverts.

I'm with you on half of their message.

The adverts very much do one of two things.

They either point to the pledges in the sorry, not the manifesto, the contract with the British people that Reform promised to pull together, and then go very hard on immigration.

And another slightly dubious claim that is being put around with wild abandon in reforms advertising on meta platforms is the promise of 14 million new immigrant arrivals in the next 12 years.

Literally not true, according to the Office of National Statistics, which has said that's 10.4.

And that's also not net migration, which is a scant 4.5 million, which is 10 million is a significantly

different number.

From 4 million.

So the advert by reform runs 14 million new arrivals.

The actual figure, net migration, 4.5.

So that's a 10 million million difference.

Yes.

Right.

Yes, that is quite quite a significant ned.

That's kind of the Brexit playbook, isn't it?

Because it's a bit like the 350 million.

You see, we've fallen into it because we're now talking about the difference.

What we're doing is banding around big numbers.

So, I mean,

a million is a big number in a lot of people's heads.

So

it is going with

the same tactic, isn't it?

In terms of regulation, Matt.

Is there any going on or could we get any?

And how would it work?

I mean, we could.

This is

the significant.

I would say million pound question, but it's the tension question.

I think it's £14 million.

So, as things currently stand, political advertising in the UK is not regulated by anybody.

The Electoral Commission issues guidelines and can make requirements on political advertising that has certain disclosures.

So, for example, in 2019, it became a requirement that the people funding the adverts had to be named, whether it be the individual or the party.

They had to have a name and an address so they could theoretically be traced back.

But the actual content of political advertising is entirely unregulated, which means that there is absolutely no pushback whatsoever on reform, or indeed the Tories with their £2,000 figure, or indeed any other political parties that might be using claims that are

factually, possibly not entirely correct.

I mean, again, this is a very, very sort of left-field thought.

But could the responsibility for the content of these political adverts, A, start with those who put them out, so they would have to clear them first?

Or B, could it be the publisher, the platform, who could look at the ads and say, no, we can't run these 10,000 ads, submit three, we'll see if they're true or not, and then we'll put them out.

Is that beyond?

So two points there.

So the second one, the idea that they're ever going to turn down any money.

So no, sadly.

Theoretically, there is fact-checking that's supposed to happen.

So Meta, again, does work in partnership with, in the UK, for example, it works in partnership with Full Fact.

And the way that works is if there are posts that are posted on Meta organically, not adverts, that get traction and they're fact checkers, Full Fact fact checkers.

So things like the Conservative Party page makes a lot of posts which are not ads.

For example, the organic things.

Yes, the organic things.

So if Full Fact sees things on there that are factually incorrect and it can demonstrate that, it tells Meta and Meta appends a warning to that post.

And in theory, when a warning has been appended to that post saying this is factually incorrect and it has been demonstrated by organization X or Y, that fact should then not be allowed to appear as an advert.

However, so take the £2,000 tax claim for example.

Full fact effectively looked at that and said, well, it's complicated.

Like technically if you stretch the details in certain ways over four years and it's not quite £2,000, but you could probably arrive at that figure.

So they said it was potentially misleading, not false.

Potentially misleading doesn't fall within the bailiwick of Meta's arrangement about ads, so the ad stays up.

And this is why it's all so incredibly complicated and hard.

Can you think of one that's been effective?

I think what's really really interesting when you look at all of this is

because you can comment underneath adverts on all of the major platforms.

The ads from the major parties, broadly speaking, they all receive a mix of reactions, some of which are kind of broad approval from their base, and a significant amount of which is partisan debate about you're lying, you're not, we're great, we're not.

And that also applies to organic content as well insofar as it can be seen.

The only party that bucks this trend is reform, where all of the commentary under their adverts is universally lauditory.

All of the commentary underneath all of their organic stuff is universally lauditory.

Albeit in Russian, yeah.

And a significant proportion of the comment under, for example, Tory party videos, whether it be on TikTok or whether it be on Meta, is voting reform, voting reform, voting reform, voting reform.

Now, there's an open question about the extent to which this is actual people demonstrating their support for the party or whether it's what we would call coordinated inauthentic activity, i.e.,

actors who may or may not be human, actors who may or may not be

CIA.

So, who knows?

Well, that's very gloomy.

Thanks, Matt.

I'm glad I only see my heat pump adverts on Twitter now, frankly.

This is a big relief.

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Well, from ads and online content to one specific piece of online content the Conservatives released and quickly deleted last week, which was a picture of a roulette wheel

and the message effectively of don't gamble on labour.

We're here to talk about the Conservatives and their gambling problem.

This is about the bets that have been placed by a number of people at the top of the Conservative Party about there being a July election.

Currently, at time of recording, it's four members of the Conservative Party, two of them candidates, one director of campaigning and one director of online, and a police officer who's the only person so far who's been arrested, a member of the protection team who's been arrested for misconduct in public office, or suspected or potential.

Apparently it's not misconduct in public office if you just do this when you're in the room when Richie's deciding to call an election.

So we thought it'd be fun to look back at, not fun, but interesting, to look back at the Conservatives' relationship with gambling over the last five years.

And it's pretty close.

There are so many MPs who including Liz Trust gambling with the entire economy in this.

Yes.

Basically there was a white paper released about a year ago into the gambling industry, potential harms, potential action that could be taken to

save people from themselves and stop them making incredibly foolish bets, which then cost them everything.

Insert your own joke here.

That was delayed four times, actually, partly due to the various sort of Boris Johnson chaos.

It was around then.

And then it was eventually released last spring with some recommendations.

And they've been since then going back and forth on

what decisions can be taken and should be taken into things like affordability checks.

Should you check if someone's actually got the money?

We've run a lot about this in the magazine, actually, about the relationship between various MPs and the Betting and Gaming Council.

Yes, in a number of the pieces we've pointed out.

It's not just close, it's specifically within a few days of the money coming in and the question being asked in the House of Commons, which is

exactly that.

Old-fashioned corruption

rather than this sort of broader influence that we all now pretend isn't corruption.

But it's extraordinary that the Tories should get caught out on a gambling scam.

It's just, it is the perfect metaphor

for their approach.

It's kind of one last bet.

You know, the gambler can't resist one last bet.

It just goes back to the table.

I think I can chloridol back if I do.

And I mean, to be fair, the number of bets they've placed or the number of the amount of money they've received from the gambling industry is staggering.

So do you want some numbers?

Yes, yes.

More than that.

Great fun.

All right.

So, the Betting and Gaming Council, they are the official sort of industry body.

And they have sponsored various articles in places where MPs are likely to see them.

So, places like Politics Home, the website, Conservative Home, owned by a friend of the podcast, Michael Ashcroft.

The Betting and Gaming Council, as of early last year, had given MPs £300,000 in the course of a couple of years.

And that's gifts in kind.

You know, that's tickets to Ascot, it's tickets to Aintree, tickets to Madonna, bizarrely.

Unclear why.

But there have been a number of freebies given to various MPs.

Remember Scott Benton?

Oh, indeed.

He was caught by the Times who were posing as gambling industry investors.

And they were asking if he could ask questions in the House of Commons and lobby ministers and all of that.

And he was saying yes very cheerfully.

He is now obviously no longer an MP.

There's Esther McVeigh, who's taken lots of freebies.

She's married to Philip Davies, who is a long-time freebie snaffler.

Is that a safe safe word legally?

Yes.

But it's got so bad that the all-party parliamentary group on betting and gaming was disbanded last year because the head was Scott Benton.

And so

I think there's also something quite interesting about the role of lobbying agencies in this whole thing.

So over the past three years, if you work in marketing, communications, advertising, and lobbying, which is a constituent part of that, you will have seen it becoming increasingly socially unacceptable to work for certain industries.

The fossil fuel industries, for example, it's increasingly hard for ad agencies and lobbying companies to lobby for, for the sake of argument, Shell or BP or Exxon, although they continue to do so still.

Gambling, on the other hand, weirdly, no one seems to care about that.

And it's incredible how many lobbying agencies have sought to supplement the income that they have lost from no longer being able to socially acceptably represent fossil fuel companies and the like by very, very quietly taking on a significant number of betting companies.

If you look at the number of lobbying agencies that, for example, Paddy Power, Betfair, Betfred, all of these people employ, they spend a lot of money.

Now, lobbying is not the most transparent industry in the world, as we all know, but I think there's some interesting questions to be asked about exactly how much is being paid to lobbying companies for access to our politicians, lords, select committees, and the like.

It's very easy now for them to make this more acceptable because it's football, it's a working-class activity, it's racing.

How dare you, you frightful snob, stop intervening.

Who do you think you are, Gladstone?

uh daddy state protecting people from them it's only a laugh it's a flutter and people earnestly pointing out it's not really a laugh for the people who essentially the poor who you take money off it becomes easier for this to be socially acceptable and therefore mps do it and you just you look at the figures um in the eye and it's sort of it used to be spread betting it was across all parties you'd take them all out now no they're just concentrating on the next lot in well the next lot in is exactly what's going on at the moment.

So this is a story that I ran not so long ago.

This is about Rachel Reeves, potentially the next Chancellor.

And she's taken donations from Neil Goulden, who is the chair of a couple of gambling operator groups, who has so far,

at time of recording, again, there's plenty of time for the figure to rise, paid about £30,000

to support her office.

So Stephanie Peacock, shadow gambling minister, has received various sort of tickets to things as well.

So what do you say about it?

The money just naturally heading towards the next government is kind of

exactly right.

What I love about it is there's no other possible reason for it, is there?

I mean, the idea that when you say £30,000 to support Rachel Reeves's office, it's not because he's concerned she hasn't got enough paper clips.

She needs to upgrade her computers or something.

Yeah.

And the head of the Betting and Gaming Council is a former Labour MP, Michael Duger.

Oh, sorry, he left earlier this year and was replaced by Gronya Hurst, who used to work for Esther McVeigh.

Well, it is the question that Richard Brooks asked in the select committee when we were sitting in front of his MPs.

He said, why do you think they give you the money?

Why?

Which is unanswered.

Yeah, is it extra?

And also just coming to the voter, why can't they pay for their own tickets if they want to go to Ascot?

Why don't they

pay for their Madonna tickets like the rest of us have to?

Yeah, exactly.

Who paid for Keir Starmer to go and see Taylor Swift this weekend?

Oh, some very, very wise spin doctor who said,

this will work very, very well with the 16 to 24 demographic.

Can I just say, I love Taylor Swift.

Everyone at the I loved her.

She speaks very highly of you too.

You were in the next box along dancing with Prince William, weren't you?

I was.

So I mean, some of these recommendations will go ahead, potentially in the next Parliament.

Things like affordability checks.

I think the only one they've introduced at the moment is they've limited

they've limited the stake you can make on online slots, right?

So online slot machines used to be effectively stakeless, and now they're limited to £5 at a single bet or £2 if you're under £25.

So that is the only one that's come in so far.

How many bets are you allowed to make?

Presumably you can continue betting £5.

Well, this is the thing.

So affordability checks are the next area which are still being debated.

It's so interesting because it's completely more of a trision because we've already been through this once with fixed odd betting terminals, which there was another gambling act, wasn't there, in the last Parliament.

And that was done.

There's been restrictions on those.

But we we were having them, and the same sort of debates were going on at that time, and the same money was going to MPs.

And we were being told that this was absolutely, you know, this would be an absolute affront to human dignity and human rights if these people weren't allowed to go in and

lose their entire life savings in one go on a machine in the corner of the world.

And it's two pounds, that's the limit on fixed odds betting terminals.

So now that's moved to online slots.

But the current prop proposal, just so you know, is that if you lose a thousand pounds in a day

or two thousand pounds over ninety days, you'll face checks about whether you can afford it.

About whether you really should be betting that.

Yeah.

That sounds like an awful lot of money.

It is an awful lot of money.

It's not a particularly low threshold, is it?

No, but I think the game...

Probably not far from the amount of money you'd spend on like a day out at, say, Aintree or 20 days to see Madonna at Wembley.

I'm just thinking.

Okay, and now, oh, Segway Corner.

Speaking of,

I think we can do it.

Speaking of somebody who's placed a big old gamble, no, it doesn't work.

We're back to Nigel Farage, though.

Everything comes back to Nigel Farage, I'm afraid.

Everything in this election campaign comes back to Nigel Farage.

And this is the right-wing papers, specifically the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph in particular, suddenly waking up to the fact that they have created a monster.

This morning.

So we're recording on Monday, which is the day that the Daily Mail launched their 10 Days to Stop Starmer Super Majority campaign.

By the time you listen to this, it may be 8, 7, 6.

It may just be Starmageddon, they may have gone for it.

They've got one of their little logos for it, which is where you can tell that the Daily Mail are really scared about something.

They're taking things really, really seriously.

And the way that they're doing that is a full double-paced spread in the Daily Mail, advising you to do tactical voting, something they usually object to, but tactical voting in order to keep reform out and keep the Tories in.

Except for a few places where they want you to vote reform because then otherwise, Labour might win.

It's quite complicated

where you are in the country.

But the aim of this is essentially to stop, as I say, this monster that they created,

Nigel Farage, in hiving off so many Tory votes from the party that the Daily Mail has been consistently telling you for the the last five years are hardly Tory at all and have the biggest tax burden on you ever and basically all of the and all of the immigration stuff that Nigel Farage is also now pushing.

They now want you to forget all that and actually keep some Tories in in order to stop the terrifying supermajority.

And this is such a turnaround.

It's fantastic.

I had to look back at

the Mail's coverage of when Nigel Farage did his first flip-flop of this election campaign and said he would be running after all because he wasn't going to go and work for Trump because I don't know he wouldn't want him or something.

Rishi's darkest hour was the big headline then and Quentin Letts, their sketchwriter, gleefully saying, Nigel's given our boring, patronising politicos a boot up the bahuki.

Your guess is as good as mine, I'm afraid.

Stephen Glover wrote an op-ed saying, It is impossible not to admire Farage's Elan and the scope of his ambition.

I'm going to give it a good old go.

He said, this feels like a pivotal moment in British politics.

And unfortunately for them, it has turned out to be.

They were a bit.

So this erupted really over the weekend with an interview which Nigel Farage gave to Nick Robinson on the BBC Panorama, in which he talked about the Ukraine war, the reasons for the Ukraine war, and essentially said it was down to NATO expansion.

It was largely the West's fault.

Yes, the EU as well, of course.

And the mail.

This was to be fair.

I didn't even know before that interview that Ukraine was in the EU.

So I was educated by it.

Thank you, Nigel.

I think we'll go over to Full Fact for a check on that one when they've got time amongst all the political advertising.

But this has resulted in all of

the great guns

of the Daily Mail being turned upon him.

So the Mail on Sunday ran the headline,

Zelensky, Farage is infected with virus of putin.

When Zelensky hadn't actually said Farage, he was just asked about people generally saying that

the war was NATO's fault.

Farage didn't like this at all.

He's done a video in which he said the Daily Mail is collaborating with the Kremlin to protect the dying Conservative Party.

I love this.

You're collaborating with the Kremlin.

No, you're collaborating with the Kremlin.

No, you are.

Even better than that, from our point of view, he's called in Carter Fuck.

He says he's suing the mail on Sunday for ascribing those words about him to Zelensky when he says Zelensky was speaking more generally.

I think so.

There was a beautiful thing that initially he said he was going to sue Zelensky, which I think then he rode back on very, very quickly.

He's probably not a vote winner to sue him in the middle of the day.

Sir, a new front has opened in the West.

Yeah.

So there are very, very few juries I can think of

who would find against Zelensky and then want to go home.

So we have a court case, potentially.

Potentially, yeah, and we will see

when it comes to that.

It is a threat.

I think it's a viral video, possibly, rather than something that's going to amount to anything.

So, Adam,

is this because the Mail and Telegraph wanted excitement?

They obviously wanted to cover something that didn't look like a foregone conclusion.

They wanted movement in the election, and they got carried away.

And they weren't expecting reform to be polling similar numbers to the Conservatives.

I think it's partly that, and that they weren't expecting the Conservatives to be doing so badly.

I mean, we've talked on episodes of this podcast before about the Telegraph skewing very, very reformy

in the last year or so.

I saw a couple of their headlines on Monday morning.

Farage is playing into our enemies' hands, and people who vote reform will get the opposite of what they want.

So

they're having the same sort of freak out at this point.

They're also still employing Nigel Farage as a columnist, along with Richard Tice, the erstwhile leader of the Reform Party and stand-in

for when Nigel doesn't fancy it.

So we're going to have to come up with a new term because screeching U-term doesn't really cover this.

That's not even a reverse carry.

I'm not sure what this is.

We need a new vocabulary for this level of journalistic.

Well, the Telegraph is still trying to have it both ways because they gave Farage his right of reply on Friday after the interview with Nick Robinson.

And the opening line of Farage's reply was, Don't blame me for telling the truth about Putin's war in Ukraine.

There you go.

You have my Nigel Farage impression and my Arnold Schwarzenegger impression in this podcast.

It doesn't get better than that.

I mean, the Telegraph are obviously concerned enough about something.

So in the list of the biggest political spenders over the campaign,

the Telegraph is up there.

Because it counts as political advertising because, you know, for obvious reasons.

So yeah, they're spending an awful lot of money promoting their own headlines around this.

And whether that's a desperate attempt to replace their dying readership or whether it's an attempt to influence people's opinions about the validity of reform and the Conservative Party variously.

They're in a difficult situation just on kind of strict working terms because, I mean, at this point, none of the papers are pretending there's going to be anything other than the Labour government.

They really have just given up on it, and it's all about this super majority they're trying to prevent instead.

But they're going to end up annoying reform and annoying the Tories and having a Labour government they've got to work with.

So it's going to be an interesting time to be a political correspondent on one of these papers in a couple of weeks' time, isn't it?

But you'll find yourself with no invite from any of them.

No one will pick up the phone to you at all.

But it is madly schizophrenic.

It is weird looking at the Telegraph front page at the moment, because we do expect newspapers to have a broad line.

And there are just two lines next to each other.

It's really weird.

Tell me about the discovery of the candidates, because

all the papers have suddenly found that there's a great new vein, which is things reform candidates have said.

Well, there was this amazing thing.

It was very attractive.

It turned out that the Reform Party, or the Reform Limited Company, as we should refer to things, they're not actually a political party,

they paid an enormous amount of money to a vetting agency who was supposed to go and find all of the dodgy things that their candidates have said.

That vetting company doesn't appear to have done a great deal.

So Farage has threatened to sue them as well.

But luckily, there's a lot of journalists out there

who've done the job for them and enormous dossiers of dirt on people.

What have we had?

We've had admiring Hitler.

We're saying Britain should have stayed neutral in the Second World War.

We managed to find a reform candidate who was actually

on the battle bus with Farage when he had those objects thrown at him up in Barnsley, who it turned out was accompanied by his girlfriend who had a criminal conviction for assaulting a police officer, which was an emergency worker.

Always good.

So yeah, no,

there's quite a lot coming.

This is not new, is it?

This used to happen a lot with UKIP candidates at sort of every election.

You would think they might have a bit of a policy in place.

in place for this by now.

Is it possible the vetting company did their best, but they were just overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers?

So I think the interesting thing about the vetting company is that they've come out and there's been a bit of digging into this.

And it appears that they're not a company that does vetting.

They're a platform that enables you to vet candidates, but you have to do the work yourself.

So I think rather than say Farage didn't do the work himself.

I think rather than the vetting company not having done the work, I think...

reform fundamentally misunderstood the service that they were paying a violent amount of money for by dint of the fact that they don't appear to understand how the service worked.

So, yeah, there's a double layer of oddity there.

I would suggest that this one, also, like the Carter Fuck case against the Melon Sanin, may be one we don't hear a great deal about in the future.

I can't get enough myself.

It used to be the Labour Party that got caught on this, didn't it?

This was pre-Starma, but now they're too efficient.

I mean, cases like Jared Amara, I mean,

you know, the mainstream parties used to suffer from this.

But now, it strikes me this time, we're not finding this.

Well, it was partly down to the last two election results being so weird.

Because in 2017, under Corbyn, Labour did much, much better than they expected to.

An awful lot of candidates like Jared Amara are up in Sheffield Hallam, which was Nick Clegg's old seat,

and was kind of swept out on the tide of vitriol against the Lib Dems at that point.

But a lot of people like him managed to get in as Labour candidates who wouldn't never expected to.

We're kind of the no-hopers, the very, very young people that you put into

a seat you've got no no-hope again.

And maybe, you know, in about 10 years' time when they've done another two elections, they might get a seat they're expected to get.

And then the same thing happened with the Tories in 2019, that sort of red wall.

So many people got swept in, which is why the Tories then ended up with such a kind of split and undisciplined party and all sorts of different

five families and all of that kind of nonsense going on.

But yeah, no, this time around, I mean, Starmer, if nothing else, has kept an absolutely iron fist over candidate selection, hasn't he?

As various people like Diane Abbott could tell you and Lloyd Rossell Moyle and various other candidates around the country could tell you.

And maybe, I was going to say, maybe Farage can learn something from Keir Stahlmer for future elections.

We'll see if that happens.

So that ends our final pre-election special.

We will join you afterwards in two weeks' time for the washing up.

But now we go over to America.

Again, hugely exciting.

As I said at the start of the show, a world first for this podcast.

Helen Lewis is over in the States right now doing some reporting.

And she is not the the only British journalist called Lewis who is doing that.

Will Lewis, formerly of The Telegraph, and formerly of actually almost everywhere on Fleet Street, has just gone over to join The Washington Post.

Helen has the inside track on exactly what is going on.

Here she is.

I would like to clarify from the start that Will Lewis is not, to my knowledge, any relation to me, right?

I do.

I think.

Well, there's been a bit of a problem.

I also just, I wrote a book review about Michael Lewis, another very famous American journalist who's been having a pretty rough time recently.

And basically it's been a bad year for the Lewises in journalism.

But yes, so Will, my long-lost brother, came over to be CEO of the Washington Post.

And he recently brought over a couple of his guys with him, and they are guys.

He wanted to bring over Rob Winnett from The Telegraph.

And then something happened that's still slightly mysterious.

He simultaneously announced plans to create a new third newsroom that was going to be much more social-oriented.

And at the same time, the previous editor that was working under him, Sally Busby, who hadn't been around for that long, but she ended up going under slightly mysterious circumstances, may or may not have been related to the fact that Will Lewis was named, as Adam has reported in the magazine a lot, you know, named in these documents related to the fallout from phone hacking.

And the Washington Post, being an American publication, was very keen to report on this.

Will Lewis, it turns out, not so keen on them to report about this.

And that's the problem, isn't it?

As in, if he's interfering with the editorial side of things, that is presumably a problem

for the hacks at the Washington Post.

And this is a bit.

There are several very obvious differences between American journalism and British journalism.

One, I think, in British journalism, it's pretty much accepted that the reason people buy newspapers is to have some kind of political influence and voice in the conversation.

When you say people buy newspapers, you mean buy the whole thing, not buy your copy.

I mean the very classy version of buying a newspaper, yes, buying ink by the barrel.

But you know, the idea that the Barclay brothers, for a long time, you know, owned the Telegraph because they had a particular vision of the world, or they felt that it supported their other businesses.

Paul Marshall, who we talked about on the podcast before, who has got investments in GB News and Unheard, he has a particular set of interests that he wants to pursue.

And this is kind of...

Whereas I think in American journalism, there's more this idea that you selflessly and altruistically buy a newspaper and then

never impose your will on it at all, which is a very lovely aspiration, but I think probably more honoured in the breach than the observance.

So who was it who brought Will Lewis over?

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, he bought the Washington Post and everybody thought this was really incredible.

You know, he's got so much money.

I mean, he did a multi-billion dollar divorce settlement with his ex-wife Mackenzie Scott, but nonetheless, still really up there among the richest people.

And the theory was, well, this is somebody who could afford to lose a lot of money owning a newspaper.

Update, Jeff Bezos is not that thrilled about the fact that the losses are so high on the Washington Post.

And as a result, one of the things that Will Lewis said very early on in this particular Farago was, we're losing a million dollars a week and our traffic has really precipitously dropped since the Trump era and you're all going to have to pull your finger out and they're going to have to be some cuts.

And this is not,

one at the same time, it's not an untrue thing to say the traffic has dropped and that they are losing money.

But it is also probably, as you might imagine, it didn't go down that well with the Washington Post acts who felt they worked very hard.

But the Washington Post and to a lesser extent the New York Times have both had a bit of an issue, which is that they put on huge, huge numbers of readers during Trump because you know, the Washington Post slogan during that time was democracy dies in darkness.

And the idea was that they were not exactly the resistance, but you know, that they were the kind of, that they were helping you,

you know, sort of, it was a way of demonstrating your opposition to Trump and what he was doing and his assault on democracy and judicial norms was that you were kind of supporting journalism.

And so in the slightly more quieter Biden era, those readership figures have been on the slide.

So something does need to change at the Washington Post.

And I think some of the reporting that was slightly more more sympathetic to Will Lewis said, you know,

the journalists seem to think that Jeff Bezos is really rich and he should subsidise them forever.

And that's, I mean, that would be lovely, but

he made a lot of money from Amazon, not by being a philanthropist, right?

He may have come to philanthropy late in life, but he was a pretty hard-headed businessman all along the way.

And the signs are that he wants the Washington Post to run as a business, too.

Okay, so Lewis comes in, sets up this, did you say a third newsroom?

I'm still trying to work out what the second one is.

So the idea is you have a news operation and you have an opinion operation.

And in American journalism, again, the two should never meet with each other.

So you have the situation where, you know, the New York Times, you have the editorial board who essentially do the leader line.

And, you know, there's all kinds of stuff about them.

And they have big summits where they think about who they're going to endorse.

Update, it's always the Democrats.

But the idea is that then you have opinion columnists who are completely separated from the news operation.

And,

you know, that's not.

In some places, it's very obvious.

So the Wall Street Journal has been, and, you you know the kind of the way that people in the media generally record think about the wall street journal is that the news operation is very sound and straight down the line and then a couple of the opinion columnists are a little on the shall we say a little on the telegraph spectrum right that they can sometimes say things that are kind of kooky and would not be in line with what some people might call objective reality.

But the idea is that there's a kind of separation of powers there.

So there were the idea was there was going to be news, there was going to be opinion, and now there was going to be this mysterious third newsroom that was going to probably speak to young people.

And we know that where Will Lewis came to the Washington Post from this thing called the news movement.

Now,

I'm sure you're a big fan of the news movement and consumed a lot of its content, Andy.

Oh, yeah.

Well, it's aimed at young people, isn't it?

So I'm decreasingly relevant to its catchment area, you know.

Well, what do young people like?

And the answer to that is Kamal Ahmed and Will Lewis.

So Kamal Ahmed, formerly of The Observer, then went to the BBC, and Will Lewis, who went through the Telegraph and the various roles in the Murdoch Empire, founded this idea that they were going to kind of talk to an underserved population.

And as far as I understand it, that didn't entirely work out for them because no one has really cracked the code about what young people want, apart from TikTok videos, from individual creators, right?

They seem to trust individuals more than brands.

So I think the suspicion was that from the Washington Post generous, there's been like, could you stop filing 400-word boring news stories and could we all instead pivot to video?

Which gives everybody in media heebie-jeebies because they remember happening this happening in 20 circa sort of 2012, 2013 when Facebook started prioritising video in its algorithm and everybody went, let's start a video newsroom.

Let's get all our comically unkempt journalists to try and pretend that they're broadcasters.

And it's, you know, it's still quite triggering for a lot of people.

I do remember that phase.

You do remember that phase, right?

It was like, why wouldn't somebody whose entire skill set is kind of banging out 300 words in an hour after lunch also be a brilliant broadcaster?

And having read British newspapers for many years and occasionally visited America and see the kind of stuff they're offering, it does feel like these are coming from two completely different environments.

Yeah, I mean, I always find it wild that American journalists stand up when the president walks in.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah, the press corps.

And, you know, they see it as a kind of symbol of respect.

And I remember there was a big row a couple of years ago where Jack Monroe, the food author, said, why don't the journalists stand up and clap at the end of a Corbyn speech?

And you had all these

lobby hacks who were absolutely delighted to go for once.

I'm sorry, but I, as an extremely independent person, would never do such a thing.

My role is to be a Rottweiler of democracy.

Well, also, the fact that so much of the British lobby has been pretty slavishly towing the Conservative line for a long time now doesn't quite help that.

No, I think if we

can't make the claim

that British political journalism is a kind of glorious island of contrarian independence compared with their Access-obsessed American cousins, that would be an overstatement.

The other thing that's there, there are different ethical norms, and one of the big ethical no-nos in America is paying sources.

And so, the scoop that made Will Lewis's name was the MP's expenses scandal, and they paid a six-figure sum for the kind of, I wouldn't say the CD, I think it would have been at the time with those with those details.

Oh, yeah.

And I think that has provoked a lot of reaction because, particularly, there are big campaigns here, like Project Veritas, for example, the organization that did undercover stings on journalists, trying to make out that they were all kind of, you know,

sort of in cahoots with each other in a kind of liberal conspiracy.

And I I think that people feel if you paid for access to sources, that would, you know, underline some of the criticisms that people made for you, that you are not just nobly seeking the truth, you are kind of a political actor.

So there is an allergy to that idea of payment.

And the other thing I would say is that American journalism at its absolute best can be rigorous.

And I say this as someone who's been through an American magazine fact-checking process, which is like having a kind of root canal on your copy.

And that's kind of an amazing thing to go through.

And I've never worked anywhere in British journalism that has just had the time and resources to put into that.

The flip side of that, I think a lot of British journalists would say that they sometimes find American journalism slightly ponderous and possibly slightly self-important.

I think the British psyche around journalism is that we're this kind of pack of kind of, you know, people with rat-like cunning.

We don't feel, I don't feel like there would be that many

very upbeat movies made about...

Can you imagine all the president's men about British journalists in which they are kind of uncomplicated heroes saving democracy.

It just doesn't, it's not our self-perception.

It's much more

Michael Frein's novels or even more scoop, the kind of idea of just a bunch of bastards, hard-nosed bastards.

Okay, so I can see why that might be unpopular with the writers of the Washington Post.

There are worries about Lewis's...

How can I put this delicately?

The phone hacking situation.

Yeah, there are concerns about what Will Lewis did in the aftermath of the phone hacking saga, which I think probably, if you've read Private Eyes' excellent coverage of this over the years, you'll know he was brought in to kind of do, to some extent, the clean-up.

And I think he would phrase it as he wanted to clean the stables out and make sure that they weren't, you know, still doing things.

The accusation against him is that he superintended the deletion of a large number of emails that were intended to be kept as evidence.

And there is also a level of general resentment among the kind of worker day staff who were involved in that that actually some low-ranking journalists ended up being kind of turned over to the police and their sources ended up being turned over to the police.

And the accusation has always been that that was to help protect the people higher up the chain.

Now, Will Lewis, you know, has always denied all this and he wouldn't have got the job if there was a kind of smoking gun.

And at the moment, Jeff Bezos seems to be standing by him.

What has happened is that Will Lewis's pick for the new editor has decided to stay at the Telegraph.

I mean, I think that was very much decided for him.

And there was also, I mean, there's a great sensitivity as well in American newsrooms about the kind of of diversity of leadership.

So I think the idea that he was coming in as a white guy and he was bringing in more people that he'd worked with, there didn't seem to be an open recruitment process for the new editor, and it was a kind of cliquey Jobs for the Boys issue.

I think that also rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way.

But they are not alone, Lewis.

And I know Wynnette is not now joining from the Telegraph.

But

there is a British invasion.

It's the 60s all over again.

You know, Will Lewis is Paul.

But there's a John and George and the Ringo, isn't there, as well?

There are loads of British hacks who are now running.

I'm not sure who the Ringo, the situation is.

Let's not say who the Ringo is.

Yeah, Emma Tucker has come in from the Sunday Times in order to edit the Wall Street Journal.

And she was a popular editor at the Sunday Times and is, again, a relatively popular editor there.

The only reason I put a caveat on that is that she, too, has been making job cuts because, again, this is a newsroom that is felt to be overstaffed.

And I would say that I think if you look at the comparative headcounts of British newspapers and American newspapers, because the media market is five times bigger and the population is bigger, and because even one, you know, the Washington Post and New York Times are technically local papers, except obviously they're not, they're national papers.

And in the case of New York Times, an enormous global operation at this point with a cooking section and a wire cutter and, you know, and a hole.

You know, so they are very well-resourced, and American journalists compared to British journalists are better paid.

So

that has always been able to be sustained from the number of news consumers and the fact that Americans are richer than Brits, right, and they're just fundamentally able to pay pay more for their news.

But the supposition is that some of the reason you might bring the Brits in is that Brits are used to operating in a much leaner media market.

What a nice way of putting it.

I think that's basically like calling the bailiffs in.

Right, well, yeah.

Effectively, it's what's happening.

Yeah, and I think, and so, but, yeah, uh, John Micklethwaite is also former OV of The Economist, has been at Bloomberg for a long time.

So, there is a kind of a feeling that you kind of, you know, you bring in Brits to kind of superintend you through the hard times, I think is probably how I would say it.

Now, you know, we're talking in the middle of a presidential election that might bring Trump back in again, which I would then imagine would very much re-energise the anti-Trump movement again.

So,

you know, some of the possible end of American democracy might re-energise some of these papers in the fall, and that's that's lovely to think about.

Helen Lewis, there, who will, we hope, be back in the room with us for another episode of page 94, our first post-election special emergency episode next time.

Until then, if you'd like to get more information, news, and very good jokes, just buy the magazine, either on your local newsstand or at private-y.co.uk.

This episode was, as always, produced by Matt Hill of Rethink Audio, and we'll see you next time.

Bye now.

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