113: Footies #7: And The Winner Is...

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Page 94: The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome back to page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray.

If you've been listening to the podcast over the last six days, it will come as no surprise for you to hear that we are live at the Bullfoot Awards 2024.

We've been speaking over the last six days to the hacks and teams of hacks who've been shortlisted for this year's awards.

All of their stories have been absolutely fantastic.

And we are now about to go over to Ian Hislop, who is in due course going to tell us who has won this year's award.

Over to Ian.

Good evening.

I'll open with an apology.

Private I, in the last issue, we put in a picture of Ed Davy

with the Liberal bus and rather childishly put next stop Chessingdon World of Adventures.

I'm terribly sorry.

It was in fact Thorpe Park.

You really can't make any of it up.

This is an anniversary in lots of ways.

It's the 20th anniversary of Paul Foote's death this year, but it's also, and this is unbelievable, in 1987, Paul Foote wrote a piece about the infected blood scandal.

That's 1987.

It is incredible sometimes how long journalism takes to work.

I mean, Paul started this, and it was carried on by a very brilliant journalist at the eye, Heather Mills, who's retired, and she managed to retire on the same day that the first inklings came through that justice would finally turn up.

And we looked through it, and Paul started it, and Heather must have written hundreds of pieces.

We went through the index.

The sheer repetition necessary to get this sort of story into the public consciousness is amazing.

This is an event where we try and be cheery.

This is the event where we try and recompense for the street of shame, which basically tells you that everyone's been sacked, AI's taking over, clickbait's the way forward,

you've been laid off,

you're going online, which is the new euphemism.

It's in the OED.

The reference given is, as in, Piers has gone online.

Anyway, tonight we get positive stories that actually make a difference, and I always find that incredibly cheering.

This year,

the judges have really pushed their luck.

I mean, there is an extraordinary broad range of platforms and publications here.

We have an entry from the House magazine, owned by Lord Ashcroft.

Oh, great, thanks.

Yeah, he really needs the money.

Another entry from the Evening Standard,

Lord Lebedev.

Again, thank you very much, judges.

He last wrote to me on the letters page, and it said, Dear racist cunt.

No entries this year from the Telegraph,

though I have to say their campaign against foreign ownership of newspapers was very, very moving.

I certainly was shocked not to see them

given a mention there.

The one thing that's true about all the subjects covered by the Foot Awards this year is you won't see any of them referred to in the election.

None of the issues raised by journalists that they think and I think and you think are important manage to feature at all in any of the discourse we're trying to cover.

And again, people say, is it depressing covering the election?

Is satire too easy?

Rishi Soonak today, he goes to Silverstone.

He goes to a track where people go round and round in circles.

I mean, we might as well give up.

So, without further ado, I would like to get on to this

amazing shortlist.

So,

the Porford Awards 2024.

The judges were really impressed this year, and they gave me very clear instructions,

which from judges I don't always take.

But I have to say that this year they said

this was very, very close indeed, and unusually, they would like to make a highly commended award.

I should point out it's not highly rewarded.

I'm not giving anyone

any more money,

but it is highly commended and the highly commended goes to Justine Smith.

And the winner is

Tristan Kirk from the Evening Sand.

So could he come up?

Congratulations.

Would you like to say something?

Wow, thank you so much.

I've spent the last few weeks telling everybody that I wouldn't make the shortlist and I definitely wouldn't make the winner's podium.

So,

obviously, I haven't prepared at all.

Thank you so much, everybody.

Thank you,

Ian.

This is a great honour.

Thank you, Private Eye,

for giving me this award.

It genuinely means a lot because this is a story that

I think that everybody in the country needs to know about.

It's an area of

our society, justice, that gets frequently ignored

on a daily basis.

And I think that everybody should know about the single justice procedure, but very, very few people actually do.

I'd like to say thank you to the Evening Standard,

to

Jack Lefley, who's here, to Dylan, and to Mark Wilkinson, who

have published my stories consistently

when other newspapers may have

completely ignored them

and decided that stories about people being prosecuted for not paying the DVLA £2.75

were not worthy of the kind of coverage that the Standard and other newspapers give.

So

I do appreciate that.

I don't know if anybody's read about it, but the single justice procedure is about people being prosecuted in private.

Anybody in this room could end up in it,

and I think they'd be shocked to find out how little attention is actually paid paid to their case when it's put before a magistrate sat in an office.

Sometimes, in the space of 45 seconds, criminal convictions handed out.

I found that astonishing enough to keep writing about, and I genuinely thought somebody from the government would have stopped me by now.

But there's been no noticeable activity to reform the system, to make it better, to make it work so that people aren't treated harshly, so that these injustices stop.

And then an election was called.

And so, we'll have to wait, I guess, a little bit longer for anything to happen.

In the meantime, I suppose I'll have to keep writing about it.

Keep talking about it.

If you don't mind, there's a certain irony to doing my job as a court reporter.

I started writing about the single justice procedure because I thought everybody needed to know about it, and I've now found myself winning an award for investigating into it.

It really shouldn't be a system that needs investigating, it should be something that's just there and everybody knows about.

But there we are.

Maybe things will change in the future.

If I might,

last thanks to my wife and to my long-suffering parents, who every time I go around, I tell them that I'm writing about the single justice procedure, and they nod along

and they say, Oh, that sounds nice,

very good.

Single justice procedure, by the way, is commonly referred to as SJP.

When I started, that was Sarah Jessica Parker.

I hope that from now on, it will represent something slightly more significant.

So, anyway,

thank you very much for having me.

I genuinely wasn't expecting this.

So we're here with Tristan Kirk, the winner of this year's Poor Foot Aboards.

Tristan, congratulations.

It's a fantastic story.

I suppose the only question to ask is, what comes next?

Well, the next thing to do is for somebody from the government,

whichever government comes in next, do something about it.

It's an easy thing to fix.

It's a system that's not working properly.

Even the magistrates say it's broken.

Do something because people deserve that.

They deserve a system of justice that actually works rather than one that churns out injustices.

Unfortunately,

well we haven't seen the Labour manifesto yet, but we've seen the Conservative one and it doesn't really mention anything about the wider justice system, let alone the single justice procedure.

Everyone's just reluctant to talk about it.

Maybe now they will.

Who knows?

As this goes out, there are a couple of days left for the Labour Manifesto, so hopefully somebody from head office is listening and they might try and shove something in at the last minute.

Is there anyone else who contributed to the story just in case you missed anyone?

Lots of people, everybody who's within the system whose story I told,

they played

obviously a significant part in this and all those people who came forward to speak to me, all those magistrates who agreed to speak to me at some points,

people who work within the system who provided that kind of information, just that insight into into what's going on, because this is a system that is so cloaked in secrecy that it requires sometimes people to come forward, to bravely step forward and say, this is what's really going on, and

that really helps.

We talked a little bit during the podcast episode, which I'd obviously recommend everyone go back and listen to if you didn't already,

about the sort of echoes from the post office campaign.

And you were saying this is a very different, in lots of ways.

There are one or two similarities.

Is there a grassroots campaign

like the one that we saw with the post office, or is it, at the moment, is it really just you?

Yeah, I'm sad to say, I think it is actually just me.

Other papers, broadcasters have taken it up as a story, and I'm very grateful to them for doing that.

But I think if anybody said within the journalistic community, single justice procedure, unfortunately they'd point at me and then that would be the end of the pointing because

it's

such an area that's so difficult to get into that it's become niche, it's become specialist, it really shouldn't be specialist but it is.

And so yeah there's no grassroots campaign and that's why I decided that it was enough was enough.

I can't just do this quietly.

Let's start putting it on social media, whipping up some attention, copying in some of these MPs who are in the areas where it's happening, put it right on their desk and say, Look, what are you doing about it?

Unfortunately, the government called the election slightly too early for my campaign, so nobody had really committed to change.

But I mean, if the next Labour government or Conservative government, whichever it is, they don't do something about it, I'm going to continue writing about it, I'm going to continue putting these stories out there and saying the magistrates say the system's broken, I say the system's broken, why don't you care?

And I think there'll be changed quite soon, or at least I hope so.

Fingers crossed and as with all great, as with all of Paul Foote's fantastic stories, they may take a few decades to get there, but they do get there in the end.

So congratulations again, Treston, on a fantastic story and a very worthy award.

I appreciate it.

Thanks very much.

Tristan Kirk there, once again, congratulations to him on a fantastic story and of course to all the other shortlistees.

Thank you for listening to this episode.

We will be back again tomorrow.

I mean within hours of you hearing this there will be another regular episode going out which is going to be an election question special with adam and helen it's great fun so i suppose tune back in before nightfall and we'll see you then this episode as always was produced by matt hill of rethink audio bye for now

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