105: Defection, Dwellings and Domesticated Animals

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray, and I'm here in the Eye's offices, joined, as always, by Helen Lewis and Adam McQueen.

Ian's away this week.

So...

We're going to trash the place.

So we've got a few things that have been either in the mag or in the news since the last mag, or that might be coming up in the next mag.

And thing one that has been actually all over the place is defection time.

Which of us is going to defect to the spectator?

Who can say?

Yeah, some faces being pulled.

I did write quite a rude piece about the spectator quite recently, and I think they might not be that keen to have me.

They might be even less keen to have me than the Labour Party was to have Natalie Elphick.

Yes.

So Natalie Elphick,

Dover, was it?

Dover constituency, and she's a Labour, she's a Labour MP now, and that's fine.

Or it's not, and it's dreadful.

The most profound question I've heard on this entire topic came from my husband last week when she's on the news standing next to Kirstama.

And she said, Why is she dressed as an air hostess?

It was very BA cabinet, wasn't it?

Red, white, and blue-knotted scarf.

And I thought,

She looks like she's going to ask me if I want a genitalic, and the answer is yes.

But yeah, so she was married to Charlie Elphick, the previous MP for Dover.

He was then accused

of sexual offences by multiple women,

launched a libel action against the Sunday Times about the reporting of these claims, went on trial for a different offence to that, was convicted.

At that point, even the Tory Party went, well, you're probably going to have to kind of give up the seat now, aren't you?

She ran for it, won it, and has now since directed to Labour.

There was some good stuff in the paper over the weekend by Robert Buckland, the former Justice Secretary, saying, Well, actually, you know, she came to me and she said some terrible things about couldn't I sort out getting a different judge?

And she's all terrible, and there should be an investigation into it.

And everyone went, Wow, that sounds like something that was also a scandal last week when she was a Tory MP, Robert.

This woman's dreadful.

But this is the great mistake that people make when they defect, they forget that there's a whips' office in their whole party that's got a big book on them and it's got all of that stuff in that they were protecting them over and taking care of them over up until this point.

But now it's just going to be open season, isn't it?

The thing I think most surprising about the whipping operation is that Giles Brandreth was ever part of of it.

He was a junior whip, wasn't he?

It just does seem slightly extraordinary, doesn't it?

And I think that he's...

The man you would least trust with secrets.

I like the idea of being summoned to see Giles Brandreth in one of his comedy jompers.

Absolutely.

Can we go back to defections then, please?

The bizarre thing, I think, about Natalie Alfie is

the case that Helen has just outlined is...

the one thing she's known for.

I don't think any...

Presumably the thinking as far as it went in Kirstalma's head was MP for Dover, lots of stuff to say about small boats, therefore I will look tough on immigration, which is a good message to be sending out to Tory voters who are thinking of switching sides and other people who are concerned about illegal immigration.

Yeah, I also think when the fact that she wasn't kicked out of the Tory party for any defending her husband post-sexual offences conviction suggests that they don't care that much about it and they don't think she's done anything that wrong.

So I think the calculation on the Labour side was having someone who's the MP for small boats saying Rishi Sunak's small boats plan has failed, brilliant win, and no one normal will really pay attention to all of this stuff.

But it's also, it was the second time she's been in trouble over trying to interfere in her husband's court case, isn't it?

Because she was suspended, along with three other Tory MPs, from the Commons for a while for sending in a letter to the judge attempting to influence the judge's decision.

Yes.

Which is a fairly major scandal to have behind you.

I mean, we'd think makes her not an ideal person to recruit to your party.

But it's exactly as Helen says.

Parties are in this constant state of triangulation between what's going to appeal to their members,

their MPs, and their voters.

And all sorts of different constituencies have to be played against each other.

And clearly, the idea is, I think there was a good article about this by Patrick Maguire.

He said, Labour is simply prioritising the voter above absolutely anything else, no matter how much it annoys members of the party, no matter how much it annoys the MPs.

Which is a case you can make in an election year, I suppose.

Oh, it's grubby.

I mean, it's grubby, but it's probably effective.

And they've had, under Morgan McSweeney, who's the kind of MNOS grease of the Starma Project.

The Svengali.

Yeah, exactly.

He is very much.

They've had this whole idea about the hero voters, which are Tory to Labour switches.

And so Tom Hamilton, who used to work for Labour, a very good sub-sec post about this, and Dan Poulter, the previous defection, saying what they want to do more than anything, Starma wants to do is say, if you voted Tory last time,

lots of people like you are now switching.

That's not a weird or abnormal thing to do.

It doesn't say you were wrong last time.

It says the Labour Party's changed and

you've had a crappy time and this version of the Tory Party isn't for you.

So they want to normalise the idea of moving from the Tories to Labour and that's part of the defection strategy.

It's a very different tactic to Labour's strategy last time when it says, why don't you go off and join the Tories?

You love them so much.

And lo and behold,

people didn't work out so well.

Yeah.

Okay.

I wonder, on the defections thing, is there a

what if all if all the Conservative MPs decided they wanted to switch to Labour?

Is that a legitimate way of winning an election?

I appreciate that's probably quite unlikely to happen, but basically.

At the point that Rishi Sunak devotes to Labour, I think you're going to jiggle it.

If you just get a majority by means of another 40 MPs switching Conservative to Labour, you then have the majority in the House of Commons.

What happens then?

It'll be quite an ask.

I mean, it's quite rare that people cross the four, isn't it?

I'm getting another 40 on.

And are there actually enough left?

Because most of them said they're stepping down in the next election anyway, aren't they?

And it's the same true in both these cases.

Dan Poulter and Natalie Elphick have both said that's it.

We're not standing again for Labour in the next election, which is probably a good idea because I think that is a point where the voters in Dover would say, on both sides, would say, well, hang on, I think we've had enough of of this.

This is a bit off.

And the CLPs, the constituency Labour parties, particularly in the case of Nathalie Elfik, the CLP is not happy.

Should I tell you the boring answer to your question, which is that a Prime Minister governs by being able to pass confidence and supply motions in the House?

So Rishi Sunak would run a minority administration with whatever Tory MPs he had left, at which point he would try and either the opposition parties would try and put through a no-confidence motion.

If he lost that, the government would fail.

He'd have to go to the palace.

Or he'd try and put a budget through, and if that failed, that would be treated as a confidence issue.

So he could, but he could carry on, even if there was just him and Jacob Rees Boff in a committee room somewhere he could try and carry on and just try and get through votes on an individual basis.

And this effectively sorry to come on all Adam's History Corner on this.

We've agreed we're going to have some loot music whenever we do Adam's History Corner.

Matt, the producer is not looking at me about it.

Buming.

But that was effectively what was going on in the last couple of years of John Major's administration was that it wasn't there were a few people who crossed the floor, but also it was mostly by-elections and kicking people out over votes on maastrichts and things.

He ended up running a minority government.

He didn't actually have a full majority to get votes through and had to do it on various kinds of confidence and supply arrangements with the Democratic Unionist Party, I think it was at that point, wasn't it?

In Haiti and people, yeah.

And presumably using Giles Brandreth and his dastardly whipping operation.

Yeah,

which was so effective, as we can clearly see at that point.

He'll tell you an anecdote about the queen, and then he'll hit you with the stuff they've got on you.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so there have been rumblings, murmurings that this is going to happen again before the election, because Dan Poulter was a fortnight ago, or three weeks ago, Natalie Offic was a week before we were recording this podcast.

Are we seeing a point where the event horizon is slowly getting closer and we're going to see an hourly drumbeat of defections?

Or is this not going to happen anymore?

I think it's very unlikely because defections are relatively unusual.

What you've got instead is lots of Tory MPs just going, I've seen enough.

Like the Queen with Liz Truss, I've seen enough, I'm out.

So I think that's more likely to happen.

But, you know, it the momentum would be, I mean, Labour would love to keep the momentum going.

Do you remember the heady autumn summer when people kept defecting to the Lib Dems?

Do you remember the

holidays?

Do you remember TIG?

I do remember the the TIGGAS, the the independent group.

The independent group.

It's made me a teeth itch a bit, the fact that the T was part of the acronym.

I didn't like it.

Well, yeah, but otherwise it sounds like a racial slur, so I think I can see see why they didn't do that.

But then, you know, Luciana Berger went, Chikramuna went, various people went, and there was a kind of, in the run-up to their conference season, they kept going, and welcome to the Liberal Democrat, Sam Jima.

And everyone went, who's Sam Jima?

And that's what happened.

And I think probably if you were Kier Stammer, you'd want another couple before conference season.

But again, you do need some to be people where you say, welcome to the Labour Party.

I mean, did you see the great funny graphics?

People were making fake ones.

Welcome to the Labour Party, Baron Harkinen.

You have to be somebody who your backbenchers greet with a certain level of appreciation and respect.

Otherwise,

it's not quite so exciting.

I mean, Dan Poulter was not exactly a household name prior to defecting a couple of weeks ago, wasn't it?

Well, depending on which paper you read, he was either a senior conservative and former minister, or he was a nobody, and we've never heard of him.

We didn't need him in the party anyway.

Always my absolute favourite nonsense journalistic phrases: a senior backbencher.

It's like, unless you're actually talking about Peter Bottomley, who is the father of the house then you know they they end say unless they're really quite old you just say there is no such thing as a senior backbencher yeah yeah but that's like i mean there's a version of a regular verb isn't it when i worked at the new statesman it either used to be all wells magazine or it used to be like the house journal of the left or it used to be kind of you know

small circulation socialist rag and I'm sure a version comes from private eye as well too depending on what on what whether or not people agree with what you're doing.

Yeah.

Do you know what I wish we had, Andy?

I wish we had some kind of quiz.

Me too, actually.

Yeah, that would have been good.

I should have thought of that.

Oh, hang on.

What's this I've got written in my notebook in front of me?

Yes, folks.

It's quiz time.

It's time for the grand defections quiz.

Would you like to select your weapons?

Yeah, absolutely.

Do you want to?

Would you like the bell?

No, I think, no, I think actually

it was hot.

Everyone wants the hooter, don't they?

Handles looking enviously at the hooter.

I remember from Christmas that that actually requires quite a lot of grip strength.

So

let's see if I can.

Okay, we're back, we're back.

So Helen goes.

And Andy goes.

I think there's like a second delay on that.

I think you've taken a handicap.

Yeah, you're right.

Fingers on

things.

Which MP has changed parties twice in the past year with hardly anyone noticing?

No, not the Anderson bugger.

George Galloway, no, not George Galloway.

You can't just name all the MPs.

Come on.

Andy, do you want to come in here?

Do you want a clue?

I'd need a clue.

Potato.

Andrew Bridge.

Andrew Bridgeon is the right answer.

Just get it from that clue.

That potato potentate.

I know the way Adam thinks.

He sees a potato.

He thinks Andrew Bridge.

I do very much.

It makes mealtimes extremely difficult, but it's very good because I'm off the carbs.

Andrew Bridgen was kicked out of the Tories in May 2023 for saying that comparing the vaccine rollout to the Holocaust, he, a little while after that, joined Lawrence Fox's Reclaim Party.

So Reclaim actually had an MP for a little while, but not for all that long, it turns out, because he left again a few years later and is now running as the independent candidate for his seat of North West Leicestershire in the general election.

Although weirdly, as the eye revealed in January, he's still being bankrolled by Jeremy Hoskin, who is the bankroller also for the Reclaim Party.

But just a bit too embarrassed to be associated with Lawrence Fox, I think.

As you said, there were two defections from the Conservative Party to Labour in the space of a fortnight.

But who was the last person to change parties directly, not after being deprived of the whip and kicked out and becoming an independent, independent, but the first person to cross the floor, first MP to do that before Dan Porter in April.

And that's Helen.

Christian Wakeford.

Oh, very good.

No.

Oh, not very good.

Oh, I've got a second chance, but that was the name I would have said.

Okay, do you want to try and throw in?

I'll ask you.

We're one in 650 chances.

No, I've got no idea.

Lisa Cameron.

Who's she, you asking?

October 2023, she left the SNP for the Conservatives.

Oh, that's spicy.

She's the MP for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Les Magau.

And she said at the time that the SNP was a toxic environment which was affecting her mental health.

Well, good thing she's joined the modern Conservative Party.

She's a former clinical psychologist, so she knows a thing or two about that.

And in order to disprove her claims, the SNP president, Mike Russell, said she was just having a rather odd tantrum from somebody who was going to lose their seat.

So not toxic at all, as you can clearly see.

He also said it was a sort of ego-driven politics that was deeply unattractive.

When was the last person to defect directly from the Conservatives to the Labour Party?

Go on, Andy.

I'll say 1996.

1979.

No, go higher.

Go more recently.

2015.

No, 2007.

Quentin Davies.

Any idea?

I had absolutely none.

He was Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford, now Lord Stamford, because funnily enough, ended up in the House of Lords.

But he defected on the day that Gordon Brown was elected as leader of the Labour Party, saying that this was a leader he had always admired, unlike David Cameron, who has a towering record and a clear vision for the future, which I fully share.

And indeed, he fully share

by having stepped down at the next election in 2010 when Gordon Brown was swept out of office.

Didn't go so well.

Before that, never heard of this one either.

Robert Jackson.

January 2005.

Oh, yeah, Robert Jackson.

Yeah, yeah, you know the one.

Yeah, yeah.

You know the one.

Saying that the Conservatives had dangerous views on Europe, amongst other things.

Okay, so quite a lot of these defectors have been proved right by the tides of history, I will say.

Yes, but it seems like such a difficult and unpopular thing to do.

I'm amazed that anyone, especially in that chamber, you've got two sides, one of them is your side.

It must take real gumption or real confidence to do it to walk across.

But that's a really, that's why I think the Starmer project is so interested in defectors, because most people will never ever admit that they were wrong about anything, right?

They won't say, I regret doing this, I regret voting this.

I've spent my entire life, as it turns out, completely pointlessly on a lie.

So you have to provide some plausible psychological mechanism, which is why they are so intent on stressing in the Labour Party that Labour has changed.

As in, of course, you wouldn't have voted for Jeremy Cormann's Labour Party, but you're fine voting for us.

That's not, you know, you're not saying that you were wrong to vote for the Conservatives last time.

You're just, you know, now we've got you've got a better choice.

It's sort of detribalising things.

Which MP, who you definitely will have heard of, changed parties four times?

I've dropped the horn horn in excitement.

And a drop.

Go on.

Winston Churchill.

You are correct.

Yes.

For a bonus, can you name the parties?

Conservatives?

Liberals.

That's two of them.

1904 switched from the Conservatives to the Liberals.

Did he have a cheeky bang as a Labour MP?

That seems unlikely, but.

No, that's one of the ones he doesn't do.

How about a bit of time as a Whig?

I think the Whigs were the Liberals, weren't they?

Oh, no.

Pretty much.

Okay.

Yeah.

1924 stood in a by-election as an independent.

A bit later on in the same year in the general election, stood as a constitutionalist.

Very

and swiftly ended up back in the Conservative government as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

That's the end of the quiz, and I'm reliably informed that the winner this week is

Andy.

Thank you.

That Winston Churchill biography I read really came through for me in the end.

What we've established here is that the only politician that two private eye journalists can name accurately is Winston Churchill.

So we're doing really, really well.

Oh, Lord.

Well, that was a really difficult quiz, Adam.

Thank you.

I knew that Emma Nicholson was a Tory peer, and I thought, well, that's some fun.

I mean, I'm such a

Tory peer.

And then you foxed me.

Trick question.

You don't like losing quizzes, do you?

I'm really upset.

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Get started today at Certapro.com.

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Contractor license and registration information is available at Certopro.com.

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At washablesofas.com, you'll find the Anibay sofa, which combines ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price.

And get this, it's the only sofa that's fully machine washable from top to bottom, starting at only $699.

The stain-resistant performance fabric slip covers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash.

Perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa.

With a modular design and changeable slip covers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style.

Whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Anabay has you covered.

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Right, let's move on to story number two of the week.

And this is off the back of another bit of audio.

This was something that was on the Today programme at the weekend.

They've been running a series about housing and especially the problems faced by tenants.

And that's because there's a new bit of law slowly working its way through, which is called the Renters Reform Bill.

And the Today programme, at the end of their week's programming on the subject, they had Michael Gove,

who's the Secretary of State, responsible.

And he was on, and he was interviewed about

the housing situation, about the progress of this bill.

And obviously, because that was the sort of culminating point,

there wasn't a follow-up to that.

So I thought it'd be fun for us to provide that follow-up.

Can you run me quickly through the registered reform bill?

I'll tell you what my basic level of knowledge is.

It wants to get rid of no-fault evictions, that's how it started off, and change from having fixed tenancies to kind of rolling tenancies where you have to come up with some reason to kick people out, trying to move us more towards the European standard where people rent for a long time in much more stable arrangements.

But then

my feeling was then landlords got it watered down to the extent that the housing charities withdrew their support for it and said this has been terribly neutered.

Can you give me more than that?

Is that a reasonable pricey?

You've said everything I know about it.

No, no, no,

that's exactly what has happened, basically.

So there were two really clear pledges going into the last election by the Conservatives in 2019.

We're going to build lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of houses, 300,000 a year, a million over the course of the Parliament, which isn't the same number, weirdly.

Because they will have built a million, but they've fallen very far short of 300,000 a year, which was the target.

And there was this renter's reform bill to ban no-fault evictions, where your landlord can basically say at very short notice, you're out.

So

just like someone frantically doing their homework right at the, you know, right before the teacher comes in and collects it all in, the government are now finally trying to get this passed.

There are thousands of these no-fault evictions every year.

And

the rule at the moment has been watered down as it's passed through the House of Commons.

So, for example,

the new rules will allow landlords to evict tenants if they want to sell the property or if a close family member wants to move in.

Now, it's not crazy if you own a home that you're renting out to think, well, I want to sell it.

You know, if I need to fund my old age, whatever.

This was actually going to be my really stupid person question.

Are you allowed to sell your house?

You're allowed to sell it, yeah.

Okay.

Can I say that I read the exemptions, and my favourite one was that the house is required for for a minister of religion?

Well, wow.

You can say, well, I'm really sorry, I've just got, I need to move a rabbi in, actually.

He really needs to be in.

His vicar's just turned up.

Oh, nothing I can do.

Well, you're kind of getting to the heart of the problem with this.

So the other exemption is if a close family member wants to move in, right?

Now,

the rules have been changed and they've been altered and altered and altered.

So now there are plenty of extra powers for landlords to kick people out under Section 8, different part of the law, at two months' notice.

So it used to be just if they or their spouse or civil partner wanted to move in.

Now it's a whole load of family members, all the children, all the grandchildren of any of this whole load of family members.

The second problem with it is that this is really hard to enforce.

Right, because the thing is, you could presumably say, I'm very sorry, but my second cousin once removed, needs this flat, I'm going to kick you out.

And what is the enforcement mechanism for going back in six months' time and checking that they really are then living?

It's supposed to be local authorities.

Now, local authorities, as anyone will notice, are a bit stretched at the moment.

And also, are tenants really likely, after they've been kicked out, they've noticed three months later, actually your granny didn't move in in the end.

So are they really likely to go through all the hassle and the pain of a tribunal or whatever case it might be?

Because

it's just not likely to achieve anything for them.

And also, if the landlord does move someone in, they are then not allowed to market the property to be let again for a whole three months after that's expired.

That's not very long.

Because the story that I kept hearing was people, you know, say your rent was £1,500 a month.

Your landlord would kick you out and then would put the flat back on the market for two and a half grand a month, right?

That there were lots of, because the housing market is so squeezed, because rents have gone up so much that there was kind of essentially, you can't say it's, you know, it's a market adjustment, but somehow it looked like very much like price gouging.

Yeah.

And I'm not sure.

And I think that's one of the things that this bill was designed to address.

And I think it will struggle to do that without very heavy-handed regulation, which the government doesn't seem to be up for.

This is a sign that the government really can't pass anything, you know, because conservative backbenchers are the ones who managed to get the bill effectively neutered.

And about a fifth, the last time I checked, I once very laboriously checked through the entire register of members' interest to see how many MPs of which parties were landlords in their own right.

And it was about a fifth of Conservative MPs were landlords.

Right, whereas very, very few of them are renters.

Oh, and maybe some of them are renters in their second home, but they're not, you know, they're not profitable.

It's a tiny, tiny proportion of people who,

of members of parliament who do not own a property.

It's a very tiny proportion.

So the argument then is about

whether Parliament gives us a true representation of.

I mean, we made this argument, you made this argument, in fact, Helen, on the podcast not so long ago.

When you said about Charlotte Owen going into the House of Lords, actually getting a few younger people who have different life experiences into our legislature might be a bad idea, might it?

I'm afraid

I'm both a yimby and very landlords sceptic.

Because I just think that having housing as an asset class has worked out quite poorly for basically everyone in Britain under 45.

And this is one of the things that Gove said in the interview, which I found so interesting, which I wanted to kind of review his appearance.

Because he pointed out that housing has become seen increasingly as a good investment.

And well, okay, who's been in charge for the last 14 years?

He also said that housing is a repository for hot money, especially in London.

Same question.

Also blamed the crisis in part at least on the number of people coming to this country, as he phrased it quite delicately.

Well, okay, who's been in charge of those?

You know,

there's a certain point after which you say, right, you have created this situation in large part.

Right, but you know, I think you're right about not being able to pass any legislation.

If Michael Gove, who whatever else you might say about him, you know, my secret love of Michael Gove, he isn't a very effective minister.

He's renowned as somebody who absolutely understands his brief.

He gets on top of it.

He can push things through.

He can prioritise.

And he's got, traditionally, he has had a lot of buy-in in the party and the ability to get things done.

But he cannot get this done.

Suggests to me that the Tory Party can't get it done.

And I think part of that is the fact that almost every local election campaign is run on NIMBY grounds.

And the Liberal Democrats are absolute fiends for it.

They're brilliant at running this kind of.

But you actually get even Labour MPs recently, John Elledge, who swept me at New South Wales, has been cataloging like the Greens' opposition to housing is obviously incredibly high.

Because if you're a none of the above party running in a local election or a by-election, then one of the most popular things you can do is oppose any new housing development.

So we have all these incentives just at the local level for people to just block everything, everything at all.

Even if it's like turning a Derek Lick warehouse on Brownfield site into a six-story block of flats, people nonetheless come up with some reason, whether it's like some boll weevil or something, that they can't do it.

Those people are the bananas, aren't they?

There's the Yimbys, there's the NIMBYs, and then there's bananas who are build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything, which is a very good.

Yeah, it's a great acronym.

There's a lot of them.

And the other problem with this, with this bill, which is really interesting, it's a court thing as well.

And it's another reason why housing charities and various organisations who are quite fond of the idea have slightly gone soft and withdrawn their support.

So lots of the backbench MPs opposed to the renters' reform bill in its original state said, well, the courts are going to be overwhelmed with complicated cases and tribunals and eviction cases.

We have to delay this until the courts have capacity to deal with the new cases that might arise.

So the ban on Section 21 will not be enacted until a full probe into the courts has been held.

And there's now going to be a full review of the courts.

And the government have claimed that, on top of that, they will give six months of notice before ending section 21 for new tenancies.

Never mind existing tenancies.

These are only the future ones.

This is not even kicking it into the long grass, is it?

This is loosing it sort of right out somewhere beyond the greenbelt.

But I think Labour have said that on day one they would ban no-fault evictions.

So it may be, possibly, I couldn't say, I haven't seen the polls for some time.

It may be that

it will require a change of government.

And this is the stealthy argument, if you are a Yimbi, for a massive Labour majority, is that you need to be able to have a big enough majority for the Labour Party to afford to annoy some constituency bases, to force through some house building.

And I think that, unfortunately, because realistically, you wouldn't need all these huge gamuts of legislation if the market worked better.

If you, as a renter, could approach and have a like look at a decent number of properties at a decent level of proprietary where you want to live, it would efficiently sort itself out.

Bad landlords, people wouldn't have to put up with them.

The problem at the moment is there are far too few properties.

And so it gets stuck.

There's supposed to be a market and that market is not working.

And that's why all the solutions that have been proposed that are basically altering the market a little bit, like a very, very, very long mortgage term, 40-year mortgages, or

we're going to do share to rent, or help to rent to share to buy, you know, all of these schemes.

They're really complicated, but they're much easier in themselves than building another 3 million homes, which is actually the only thing that would really

concrete over Cambridgeshire, build another reservoir.

No, I didn't say that.

Don't write into me people from Cambridgeshire.

But you're right, like we did at one point, remember in British history, we built entire new towns.

Garden cities.

That was used to be a thing that we thought was a reasonable thing to do.

I know.

Well, and there are lots of reasons why they are much harder to build now.

Part of the part of it, a small part of it, is grid constraints.

You know, you actually don't have the electricity supplies to get these developments up and running.

It's not just electricity, it's water as well.

We've run stuff on how many reservoirs have been built in Britain in the last 30 years.

Yeah.

And it's a big fat zero.

It's certainly very, very low.

I mean, my entire town down in St.

Leonard's on the sea last weekend was cut off for four days from water entirely because one pipe burst.

I mean the infrastructure we've got in this country is in pretty much the same state as the roads.

So there's an awful lot that has to go with it that isn't just building houses, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And not to go too far on, you know, this is not fully statistically backed, but it does make me wonder whether that leads to more of an appetite for more radical change, you know, or

saying we really actually need to crack on and build entire new towns, which is, I think, one of the planks of Labour policy on this.

Yeah, and I mean, there have been, for example, Cambridge North has been quite developed as far as I know.

You know,

there are places in Britain that you could build if you had sufficient political will.

But I think if you look at HS2 and the fact they were going to put half of that through tunnels at vast expense to avoid spoiling people's views of fields, this is not a country with a ravenous appetite for building.

Yeah.

And it's

because housing is such an intractable problem, but we often forget the really, really sharp end of it, which is the I think it's 100,000 families who are in temporary accommodation,

which is often extremely unfit to live in.

Yes, I've been wondering about this.

I live in Lewisham, and

there's a Premier Inn, and there's also a Travel Lodge, and it's almost impossible to get rooms at the Travel Lodge.

And my assumption is that's because Lewisham Council is putting up families in them.

And that's definitely been the case in other

relatively affordable hotel chains.

But you know, you get an entire family of four that is living in a kind of premier in room for months at a time because there just physically isn't anywhere to put them.

That's right.

And that's sort of the current situation.

Often you get social housing tenants who are in work,

still qualify for housing allowance, which then goes directly to the landlord of the property which was a social house until it was sold off under right to buy.

And then the landlord, so

the money passes straight from the government via the social housing tenant to the landlord in what was once a social house.

So as was pointed pointed out to me by an MP, I was talking to about this a little while ago.

That landlord doesn't even necessarily live in the country, let alone in the area.

You know, a lot of this money is going straight out to completely different places where people are controlling large property empires from.

That's the bit where I think protectionism kind of is on the rise.

I think people are more open to the idea that we shouldn't be, you know, in the same way we shouldn't have a kind of huge outsourcing conglomerates being in charge of things.

Maybe we also shouldn't be treating housing as a way of making people in other countries rich.

Which is interesting because that now I say unites the left and the right, and that kind of opposition to like ultra-free market neoliberalism is now quite popular amongst almost everybody, really.

But it also has become intractably associated with in the public mind with the fact that you make money on houses, your house is-I mean, that's your Daily Mail and Daily Express headlines that we're always printing spoofs of of you know,

nuclear war could have effect on house prices and that sort of thing.

But people are genuinely, I mean, people over 45, as you mentioned, you do kind of have it there as your security and your nest egg because pensions aren't aren't doing so brilliantly.

But in a lot of cases, that's the thing.

Whether this is a generational thing, because also those people over 45 have now got kids of 25 or 35 still living at home with them because they can't afford to move out.

So I think it gradually is not the sort of straightforward oldies versus youth kind of

thing that has been.

I remember David Willits, who wrote The Pinch, which is about

intergenerational unfairness, said that to me.

He said he thought the tipping point would come when you had people who were very happy with the fact their house has gone up by 400%,

wondering why their kids are now having grandkids and they've got the baby in like a bassinet in the you know in the corner of their room and they haven't managed to move out.

But it really exacerbates social unfairness.

It's a real

diminution of social mobility, right?

If the people who've already got rich parents who've got houses in the southeast can pass those on or pass on some of the equity to allow their kids to buy houses, that's just rigging the system against new entrants to an absurd degree.

You're getting into a fully predetermined view of what your life outcomes are going to be based entirely on whether your parents happened to snap up a house in the 80s or not.

Yeah.

Someone should write a really sort of funny gripping thriller about this kind of thing.

But not you.

No, no, no.

How is it a beginner's going to breaking and entering, I believe?

Tell me, is that available in all good bookshops, Andy?

Tragically, we only put it out into bad bookshops, which is my mistake.

But, you know, go to your...

No, never mind.

Look, anyway, let's press.

It's all right.

Well, in order to achieve BBC balance, I should say that Adam's book of ghost stories is coming out before.

Yeah, next October, available for pre-order pre-order from All Bad Books.

Yeah, it's got a lovely cover.

That's the quote that's going on the paperback.

Helen Lewis, Private Archives,

and I've just filed my book, so at some point that should come out next year.

So we'll

lovely.

We've all got product to flog.

Goodness me.

Can I finish off this bit with a quote that I think is quite revealing?

Is it about your property?

No, no, no, no, no.

Okay, just listen to this.

Owners of property found it convenient to close their eyes to all but the handsome revenue they obtained from their unsavoury tenants and the municipal authorities where not apathetic felt themselves helpless.

That's from a book called The Housing Problem in England that was published in 1907.

And it was at a time where the vast majority of people, I think it was 80%, rented, right?

At the turn of the 20th century, 80% rented.

There was then an enormous amount of house building and by the turn of the 20th century, 70% of people owned their own homes.

the numbers have now started trending downwards again.

So I think that's a really telling comment on where we've got to.

Well, it is the first Alan Johnson memoir, which is very beautiful, is he talks about growing up in a sort of slum with ice on the windows, and then they all get kind of that all gets cleared and they all get moved out to these new housing estates that are built.

And for the first time, people have got their own bit of front garden, they've got somewhere to kind of call their own.

They're not jammed into these unsanitary conditions.

And I think the way that he writes about that is quite moving about what it meant to people to have a kind of space of their own somewhere that they felt secure in.

And that's when you read so many of the stories about the private rental sector now.

What comes across is insecurity.

At any rate, you are living on probation and could be kicked out at any time.

It's Victorian.

It's Edwardian, technically.

Very nice.

Thank you.

Right, well, that's quite enough incredible gloom about the housing situation.

Let's have something cheerful instead.

What's been on telly lately?

I've been watching a lot of Telly because I haven't been able to go out because I've been writing stuff.

And I since you and I are going to have a fight about this, but I would like to nominate as an incredibly good TV programme, Clarkson's Farm on Amazon.

Okay.

I think it's the greenest programme on television, and you know, all you woke bicycle-munching, lettuce-riding, woke-mind virus people won't get this.

But the thing he's done in this series is divide it up between Caleb, the assistant, and him, and say, you know, Caleb is going to manage the bits of the farm that have got traditional arable crops on, and he's going to try and make money out of all the other bits.

So he tries and has like pigs, he tries to have honey, he tries to harvest his hedgerows, you know, all that kind kind of stuff.

He has a bloke from Groove Armada turn up to tell him about the fact that we're taking all the nutrients out of the soil and actually you should try and grow beans and stuff like that across as well as conventional crops.

From Groove Armada?

Yeah, yeah.

What has happened with this music to environmental campaigner thing?

Burgle Sharkey started this.

Yeah, a load of money in the 1990s, didn't they?

Well, Alex James from Blur and his cheeses.

It's a very long-established thing that, I mean, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull is a salmon farmer these days.

That's a bit less environmental, actually, given what Providence is.

Quite considerably less environmental.

What Private Eye has written about salmon and its horrors over the years.

But yes, so.

But the thing I think it does a couple of things.

First of all, it is a very soft way of talking about climate change because they talk about the fact that, for example, last year they were doing it, the spring was so rainy, they had to plant a lot of, I think, their barley and stuff later than usual.

And he talks about the fact that the costs, the spiking of costs, you know, the fuel costs, the labor costs, everything that's gone up that's contributed to your food being more expensive, and explaining that supply chain process and the fact that working for the supermarkets, you know, something that Private Private Eye has covered a lot over the years, on those wafer-thin profit margins that farmers are being expected to kind of live with.

All of that stuff he's covered while also

he cried over some little baby piglets that died.

Oh, that's what's got you.

You've gone for the story about the piglets.

Sad little piglets.

So, are we essentially saying this is Clarkson is the new archers?

Because the archers famously were sent up in 1951 to educate British radio listeners about the countryside.

And it used to be long sections of Doris and Dan Archer reading out sort of milk yield quotas to each other.

It's slightly more integrated into the storyline now.

No, but there is a lot of that.

And to go back to our last segment, there's a lot about his running battle with West Oxfordshire Parish Council that seems to want to keep the Cotswolds as essentially a kind of museum rather than like letting him run the farm shop, for example.

They're just sort of

bananas, I think, in many ways.

And so watching him, a man who will have a sort of pick a fight with a wall hanging,

argue with them is quite enjoyable.

But yeah, I feel it has genuinely educated me about how the challenges of being a farmer today.

Well, frankly, people like you would do well to remember that.

Oh, get away.

Okay, I just got to push back a little bit about this because I haven't seen all of Clarkson's farm, so you're better informed about what happened to the poor baby piglets before they would have been turned into sausages.

Yeah, but that's what the guy, the butcher comes along and says this is the thing about farmers love their animals, and then he hands him some sausages and goes, this way you can love them twice.

Crumbs.

Okay.

Speaking of someone who used to eat his own goat,

can I just say it is possible to love your animals and also

ensure that they have a very, very good life before

not having to be carted off to the side?

Okay, well, that, all right, that's fair enough.

But I think that, well, the thing that a lot of people

are speaking of someone who had to eat his own goats is just

so exciting.

You've lost over that.

And this is a big change in farming.

These days, everything has to go through the slaughterhouse.

So you get...

Animals being...

And this is true of deer as well, which is the most extraordinary thing.

I did not personally kill it.

I'm nine years old.

But you used to see signs at the side of the road, didn't you?

Kill your own goats.

You're coming and...

yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm not running for vice president.

I'm not in the habit of going out and shooting goats.

No, we used to have a slaughter man used to come around because in those days

you didn't have to pack animals into the back of a lorry and take them off all terrified and into a horrendous environment.

It could just quietly be done in their own goat shed.

And mum and I would take the dogs for a very, very long walk, and my dad would deal with the slaughter man.

But there was the thrill of being able to go and look through the crack in the carriage door and see the body hanging up, bleeding into a bucket and going, oh, Rikey.

I think we've gone quite far into we've gone deep into much else yeah it's really important you know seeing how your food arrives is something that almost nobody thinks about because the number of people working in agriculture has declined so much over the last century so now we're very very disconnected from it so it's great it is great to see that i i think one thing that clarkson has got wrong on plenty of occasions is he's been a consistent denier of climate change or that there's there's any need to change our activities and now he's moved on slightly from that because he is literally farming his land and he can see that half of it's underwater but he's moved on to the next stage towards actually realizing things can be done and should be done so he was interviewed by the I think the observer just as to plug this series basically and one of the things he said to them was well you know look the fact is politics isn't going to change any climate stuff it's all going to be solved by the science which is a I'm afraid a really classic you're just past the denial phase it's just well it'll be sorted by science and it's not going to be politics And then with the very next breath, he said, I would never drive a Tesla.

I've got eight cars all with V8 engines, whatever.

And I think the thing that he's not putting together there, he's so close to it, that's the thing about Clarkson,

is that science does not exist in a vacuum.

You might be able to invent the electric car, which means you never have to burn petrol again.

You know, you don't have to transport it across the world.

You have to get it out of the ground, refine it, transport it, put it in the petrol station, put it in your car, and then burn it once.

You can run it off renewables.

You can effectively run it off sunlight.

But you need politics to roll that out.

You need politics to change the status quo, to bring people with you, to make sure it's not

prohibitively expensive.

That's the politics, and that's where they duffed out together.

And I think Clarkson has frequently simplified things partly for comedy and partly for popular effect, but also sometimes quite far, quite far.

Yeah, he's super attached to the idea of himself as a kind of beery everyman.

I think

that that stops him.

But you're right.

One of the interesting things that's happening in the US, for example, that Tesla is having a lot of problems.

But one thing that does seem to be going well in their business is rolling out the superchargers.

Because one of the things you need to do, if you want to make electric cars work, is obviously you need to be able to charge them and be able to find those charging points relatively easy and conveniently.

And that kind of stuff, you do just need, you know, I think we've benefited enormously from subsidies and encouragement and support from the government about kind of long-term plans about this will be worth your while investing in this as a private company.

But yeah, so okay, he can't stop his essential clerksonicity.

I do not think he'll get there, though.

Do you not think it's one more outrageous column for the sun and then him having to do a kind of sackcloth and ashes contrition thing and then he'll go he'll go fully Greta?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I'm not really worried about him, especially.

I also think, you know, my analysis of the Green Movement, I think it's a really big shame that the Green Party has become now, particularly it's now become a recipient for all the people who've left Labour because it's not left-wing enough for them.

And I think the problem with that is, in a way, I want to, I'm fine for that Green Party to exist.

I would also like a right-wing Green Party to exist.

You know, the way that the King talks about conservation, right, his sort of lovely woodlands and England and nostalgia and sustainability and all that kind of stuff.

There is a very conservative, traditional form of environmental politics that I wish we heard a bit more about, because it would reach a whole constituents of people who don't get reached by the current Green Party.

Well, I think that's why Labour have been so clear on the emphasis of renewable energy means energy security, means not having to import oil and gas.

You can very much lead on a this is good British sunshine hitting British land.

Let us use it to power Britain.

You know, that's solar nationalism and it's

powerful.

I love it.

I'm a solar nationalist, 100%.

Why wouldn't we do that?

If you you import oil or gas from Russia, they can turn off the taps.

If you import a solar panel from China, it cannot be deactivated.

That panel will work for 15, 20 years, give you all the power you need, and then you can recycle the ingredients in it.

That is solar nationalism, baby.

And my new party will be launching next week.

Solar would be a great name for a political party.

It's got that sort of vibe, like it sounds like an apprentice team.

Yeah, yeah.

It does feel, the farming thing, quite public servicey.

You know, it feels like a sort of show.

I mean, it's very much top gear, crop gear.

That's what he should have called it.

I presume members of them were offering more money than the BBC, so fair enough.

But I would also, he got fired from the BBC after the unpleasantness with

it would have to be called Land Tour, like Grand Tour, if he was going to do a spin-off.

Well, we've come up with two better names already than Clarkson's Farm, which is.

I think your SEO specialists will probably say they want the name Clarkson in there.

And sure enough, that Pangram has done incredibly well, and they are, I think, currently filming the four series.

After they're kind of like, oh, maybe we'll sack him over being mean to Megan.

Maybe what we'll do is we'll be quiet for a year and hope that everyone has forgotten.

Right, right, right, right.

And it's lucky they have because we haven't brought it up at all.

Well, also, I haven't watched yet episode six, but I saw the preview of it and it was Caleb and Charlie, the farm manager, going to meet Rishi Sunak, and I was just going, no, don't make me hate Caleb.

Come on, Caleb.

I've never seen two people who look like they would have less in common than Caleb, who, until I think filming the series, hadn't been more than like 25 miles away from his home.

And Rishi Sunak was just, I see.

And what's a sheep?

I I think Caleb said, didn't he?

He'd been to London once, but he hadn't liked it, he hadn't got off the coach.

No, he didn't like it, didn't like it at all.

Seems fair.

Yeah, yeah.

I have to come to London every week to do this, and I don't like it.

And that, of course, for people who want to hear more about Clarkson's farm, we did, of course, review it in the magazine last week.

So that I don't know, yeah,

and I will go to my grave defending Clarkson's farm from you people.

This question of what you're funding on a farm and

how you're paying farmers and what you're incentivising them to do is something that BioWaste Spreader, who's the eye's agricultural correspondent, has been writing about.

In fact, their column last week was about exactly this.

It was about incentives to farmers for

regenerating your soil basically rather than growing food.

Is it a good idea?

To what extent is it a good idea?

That column is often a window into lots of quangos and NGOs and environmental regulation bodies that I had no idea existed.

I think that's one of the things that's interesting about farming is, as you say, one of the things the fact that the the labour force has dropped out of it so much means that it is kind of less talked about, but obviously still equally important.

Absolutely.

And we're looking at a situation, I think, where there is real worries that the rest of this year there are going to be another set of food price inflation.

I mean, food price inflation the last couple of years has been really appalling, and particularly so because that affects the poorest people most.

Because if you, you know, if the price of luxury goods goes up 200%,

well,

buy slightly fewer Rolexes, but if the price of bread goes up by 200%, it's a huge, huge catastrophe.

The price rises are the stage before food shortages to uh to add a cheery note to proceedings, you know.

But the magazine, I should say, does also have some jokes in it.

The cartoons are very, very, very good.

And if you would like to see those cartoons, and if you'd like to read the accompanying stories, then all you need to do is go to private-night.co.uk and click subscribe.

It's incredibly reasonably priced.

It's very, very fractionally more expensive than listening to this podcast, which is free.

So go and do that.

Until then, thank you very much to Helen and Adam.

And thank you to Matt Hill, who, as always, produced this episode.

And thank you to you for listening.

And we'll be back next time with another one.

Goodbye.

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