155: Re-shuffle, Re-signation, Re-form

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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 an undisclosed location with Adam McQueen, Helen Lewis, and Ian Heslop.

We're here to discuss the news of the last two weeks, give or take, maybe even the next two weeks.

And we start off with the fact we've got a completely new government.

We've had a reshuffle.

Not completely new, but largely new.

Yes, sorry, new.

I thought it it was largely the same.

With different desks.

The funny thing was, last press day, so we're going back to Monday, the 1st of September, at about 10.30, once we thought everything was pretty much done and we knew what copy was coming and nothing else was happening, there's suddenly a big BBC breaking news thing saying, Keir Starmer reshuffle kicks off.

And I thought, oh my God, we're going to have to pull apart the entire magazine and redo it completely.

And that turned out to be sort of, you know, the Minister for Paperclips was swapped with the Minister for Nice Biscuits with Tea and Coffee after cabinet meetings.

And that was pretty much it, as far as I could see.

So I thought we were safe at that that point at which point I disappeared off on holiday for a couple of days and I messaged from Helen to say have you seen the news and it said Angela Raynor would resign and as you say we'd had a lot we had a largely new cabinet suddenly so yeah quite a lot of changes new what is it new home secretary foreign secretary new deputy prime minister and then loads of changes the two ones that have been gone a bit under the radar is Pat McFadden who is the kind of last surviving Blairite and Keir Starmer's big fixer and sort of straight back player on political shows has ended up at the Department of Work and Pensions And Johnny Reynolds, who was at business, has gone to be chief whip.

And the really interesting thing about that is that suggests that they're going to try and put welfare cuts through again.

Because essentially they tried to put through changes to personal independence payments, completely failed to do so because of a huge backbench rebellion.

I think that they still know that that is a big target, a lot of money.

They've eventually ended up making changes that look like they will be net costing them money now in the welfare bill.

And it's money that they don't feel that they have.

So that's part of it.

And then the other part of it, I think, is a feeling that they they wanted Shabana Mahmood in at home because she's the most hard line on immigration and boats.

Every day they wake up and thinking about how they're going to lose to reform basically.

And so they know that's the one issue that they've absolutely got to get a grip on is asylum hotels.

I couldn't see what new weapons as Chief Whip Reynolds has that the previous Chief Whip didn't have.

Is it personality alone?

I mean why should the backbenchers put through any reforms this time that they didn't want last time.

Johnny Reynolds is famously very, very nice.

For many years, he used to send me a Christmas card with all of his adorable children in matching sweaters.

I think the Labrador may even also have been in a matching sweater.

So, you think they've actually gone from bad cop to good copy?

I think they may be trying good cops.

But I agree with you.

The way I see it is that lots of these Labour people think, well, you know, I was elected in a Northern English seat or a Welsh seat.

I don't think I'm going to win it next time.

Do I want the one thing to come out of my five years in Parliament to have been taken money away from disabled people?

So I think they will still struggle to make that case with backbenchers.

But they obviously are trying to, put people in that they absolutely feel they can trust.

There's been a lot of stuff happening in the back room as well, actually,

just to try and make that number 10 operation.

And yeah, they brought back Tim Allen, I'm sure friend of the magazine.

I was going to say,

if you're a dictator, then there was only, for a time, there was only really one person to call.

Which is interesting to me because I think one of the problems that this government has is they don't really understand what the media is now.

They're still wedded to the idea of the six o'clock news bulletin or getting something on page one of the Telegraph or whatever it might be.

I think they're beginning to realise that they really need to be on places like TikTok, where Nigel Farage is absolutely massive.

And James Lyons, who has left recently as government communications advisor, said this in a LinkedIn post.

He said, you know, it's changed massively even in the time I was there, and I still don't think we've really got to grips with what it's like to try and make our case in this environment.

That was something that struck me with Shobana Mahmood as well, as well as being kind of the most kind of hardline kind of and socially conservative person.

But it was also, in terms of effectiveness, I was thinking the last really sort of big success they had in selling a story to the public was the very awkward situation they were left with with the massive prison population that

was going to

explode.

And she, very successfully as Justice Secretary, managed to sell that back as, you know, this is a mess we were left by the Tories and this is what we're going to have to do to get over it.

It's not ideal for anyone.

That was the last time I can remember this government feeling sort of quite sure-footed on something and communicating it quite well.

And using an amazing technique known as honesty,

which, you know, is worth the try occasionally.

We have to let these people out because there isn't room for them.

We don't want to.

We hate them as much as you do.

We don't want to see them coming out and being picked up in jags by their old mates and having a glass of champagne.

But we haven't got any cells.

I mean, that sort of worked.

Yeah.

I mean, it was a potentially government-ending moment, wasn't it?

That sort of imagery.

And somehow that one did kind of pass and paved the way for new disasters thereafter.

The other interesting one is that Steve Reid has ended up going to housing.

Now, he is, music to my ears, a little bit on the build-baby-build side.

And I think they realise that that target 1.5 million homes is something that they're going to be judged on.

I mean, there is a housing theory of everything about what's wrong with British politics.

And if you look at something like asylum hotels, that's a very good example of it, right?

Actually, where are we going to put people while they wait for their claims to be processed?

There's two problems there, no places to put them, and it's huge backlogs in home office processing.

So anything that can address housing

is going to make everything else across all their other policy areas easier.

The massive fall from the so-called Boris wave of immigration to this year's immigration figures, it's something close to halved.

I mean, they have actually kind of gone, oh, oh, no.

And I'm trying to work out why Boris Johnson let that happen.

Was that an ideological thing?

Or did he just be ready to be shocked here, simply just do something he didn't really understand the consequences of?

Meaning carelessness and inattention to detail.

It seems unlikely, I know.

I don't think so.

But it was always going to be a lump in it, as it were, because of Ukraine and Hong Kong, which both added substantially to the stats.

And I believe I'm right in saying that the backlog, people waiting for their claims to be processed, is substantially down.

Yeah, and NHS waiting lists have fallen a bit, and they have seen off a reasonable number of strike threats, not the tube strike threats, that are happening as we're recording this.

But it isn't actually quite as bleak a picture as you might initially think, although I'm currently feeling quite pessimistic about it all.

I mean, if that backlog has come down, and I think it's by a decent chunk in what have they had now, 14 months, the question then becomes, does that matter?

Or is the debate about immigration, boats, housing, flags, all of that, now so dominant and so toxic that even results don't make a difference.

Well, also, they just lack the ability to punch Nigel Farage.

Stephen Bush, my former colleague at the New Statesman, said this.

They're planning to run the next election against Nigel Farage as a fear message.

Do you really want this guy to be prime minister?

Because lots of people, for everyone that does, there's someone that doesn't, but they won't tell you what you should be afraid of.

And so there's this mad situation when he said, well, look, I'm going to return people because we'll get out of the EHCR and I'll return them to Afghanistan and I'll, you know, I'll pay them.

And people went, you're going to pay the Taliban.

You're going to give money to the Taliban.

And they kind of couldn't really land that point, right?

That this guy is so irresponsible, he'll give money to people we've said are jihadists and terrorists and misogynists.

And it's worse than that.

You'll pay money to the Taliban to murder people who were on our side briefly

during the war.

And this is the kind of thing I think that a kind of government comms operation ought to be able to make a little bit of pay out of.

But they can't.

They just kind of can't quite get there on reform.

It's the problem with blaming the government comms office.

Just a way of, as is always true in British politics, of saying, well, the advisors aren't much.

The comms aren't.

Could the leaders do it?

The members of the cabinet?

I don't know.

Well, we should say what's brought this whole reshuffle on in the first place and, you know, say a sad farewell to Angela Rayna.

Probably an au revoir, I imagine.

Can she stand again for deputy leader?

That's something I haven't seen anyway.

Could she just, I mean, I was talking about the threat from the left and who might stand for deputy leader.

Could she just put herself up for it again, having resigned?

I think technically she could.

You have to get a certain number of either CLPs or trade unions and MPs.

There's this kind of two-step process to show you've got a reasonable amount of support to winnow people out.

There may be some bit in the rule book that says you can't do it immediately, in the same way that Kemi Badnock's most favoured line in the Conservative rulebook is that you can't have a leadership challenge within a year of the new Tory leader getting in.

There are a lot of people who are showing a suspiciously high level of interest in the Gaza situation in a way that suggests that they are about to imminently announce deputy leadership bids.

I'm looking at you, Emily Thornbury and Stella Creasy.

Remember Suella Brownman resigning from Liz Truss's government and then coming back immediately to the same job as Home Secretary and Rishi Sunaks just like a couple of weeks later.

But are we saying A, that people's memories are short, or B, that they just don't care?

So if you're judged to have behaved very badly and badly enough to have to resign from the second highest job in the country, that doesn't mean you can't come back.

I mean, it suggests you've done something wrong in the first place.

Which you haven't, obviously, because no one has ever done anything wrong at any point in any government.

The record on people being brought back is not a brilliant one, is it?

I mean, you might remember both Peter Mandelson and David Blunkett had resigned from Blair's government and were both brought back fairly rapidly to other jobs.

Do you remember what happened next?

Oh, yes, both of them then had to resign again, didn't they?

But Lord Mandelson is now with us.

Always.

Like the poor, he is always with us, isn't he?

Yeah, no, he does just keep bobbing back up to the surface of the pan, doesn't he?

That's extraordinary.

I'm going to say that I'm quite sympathetic to Angela Raynor on the basis of someone who has to do a tax return.

I don't understand any of it.

I don't think anyone can understand our taxes.

I'm not sure anyone does.

And I was thinking about this.

Is it the most boring reason for a political resignation ever?

I mean, absolutely.

She had to go.

She'd gone against the Ministerial Code of Ethics.

I'm not disputing that at all.

So what was it?

It was so technical, right?

As I understand it, she went because she'd failed to seek further tax advice, as recommended by lawyers, on her stamp duty obligation on buying a second home.

Yeah, and then lied about it and then tried to throw the local conventing firm under a bus.

She was the minister responsible for housing.

So when for the second time in six months you are involved in a housing purchase scandal, you might think, you just might think, I'd better ask someone who knows about this or I'd better take the safe route and pay the maximum amount of tax rather than the minimum.

Both good points.

Just suggesting.

No, but also this is the government of the ironic resignation, isn't it?

And you get your anti-corruption person having to resign for private.

Well, that's what I was going through on Russian Arab.

In terms of absolute slam dunks, they do kind of stay on topic with all of their resignations, don't they?

So, we lost Rushanara Ali just a couple of weeks earlier, the homelessness minister.

She had to resign after evicting tenants and putting the rent up, whilst specifically trying to push through the renters' rights bill through parliament, which banned exactly that sort of behaviour.

We had Tulip Siddique, who was the Treasury Minister who was responsible for

fighting financial corruption, accused, and now, in fact, on trial in Absentia in Bangladesh for financial corruption, connected to her aunt over there.

Yeah, auntie corruption as well.

We had Lise Haig, that was an undisclosed conviction for fraud when her mobile phone turned out not to have been stolen and she'd just gone on upgrade to an iPhone instead.

Now that wasn't connected.

She was Minister for Transport, so that wasn't entirely connected to her brief, but slight irony in the fact that she was working for an insurance company at the time.

You wouldn't say you were Deputy Prime Minister and there'd been all these series of scandals and enforced resignations going on.

Wouldn't that make you slightly more careful?

You would think so, wouldn't you?

Yeah.

And the charge of recklessness, does that not hold?

Oh, I think it absolutely does hold.

I'm just saying it's the technicalities.

It's slightly lost in the weed.

I mean, the fact that it took kind of two weeks.

Well, actually, it was more than two weeks because we had the scandal last year, didn't we?

When we had over the home in Stockport or Stockton, was it?

Yeah, the original.

Yeah, and I remember the mail on Sunday going into two pages of forensic dissection of Instagram photos of her sofa cushions, which was supposed to prove whether or not it was the.

I mean, that's the thing with scandals.

It's quite hard.

When they're very, very straightforward, like the ones we've just mentioned, it's really nice and easy to make them stick.

But some of them, it's just sort of a lot more complicated, isn't it?

But again, the overall optics, which I believe comms departments call this, is someone who shouts Tory scum and spent a huge amount of time having a go at the other side for corruption and tax avoidance

just should be a bit more careful.

That's what Damdi, you're right.

She was straight out of the traps on someone like Nadim Zahowi, for example.

And there was a lethal moment of Prime Minister's question when Kemi Bardenock said there was some dimension of her being the minister and responsible for housing, and everyone groaned.

And as soon as you become that sort of punchline, the government would never be able to say anything about housing

if the second thing is everyone groans.

And I thought,

that's just, that exemplifies why she just had, she did have to go.

Now, all this is leading up to a very exciting thing, which I know you've prepared, Adam, which is a brief quiz about some of the most technical and abstruse reasons ministers have ever had to resign.

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, yes.

We're not doing the big sex scandals here.

We're doing the really kind of slightly tedious workman-like ones.

Can I say that Ian is looking very confident about this?

These are the ones I like.

We have mentioned Peter Mandelson already.

So, not the first resignation.

That was an absolute slam dunker.

If you remember, he

failed to disclose, it was housing again, wasn't it?

He failed to disclose something that might seem relevant to certain people.

He owed £373,000

to another cabinet minister who he was working with across the table, which he'd used to buy a very, very expensive house in Notting Hill.

Wow.

That's why he went that time.

But as I say, he was then brought back to the cabinet.

Can you remember why he had to resign the second time?

Any other?

Hinduja other passports, right?

He was involved in helping to get passports for a couple of people who were labour donors and industrial tycoons.

And at this point, ahead of the private eye lawyer, I jump in to say that at the inquiry into it, he was cleared of any improper involvement in trying to source that passport.

But yes, it was.

And it was all tied up.

Do you remember why it was felt that he owed a favour to the Hinduja family?

Had they set up a

mushy pea factory in Hartleypool?

No, I'm afraid it's even more time than that.

It was the Millennium Dome.

They were sponsors of the Millennium Dome or a zone in the Millennium Dome.

Yeah, indeed.

Boris Johnson promised to lie down in front of bulldozers to stop Heathrow's third runway.

Yes.

So, ahead of a parliamentary vote on exactly that subject, which minister resigned from Theresa May's government on principle so that they could vote against the third runway?

Was it Zach Goldsmith?

It was not.

I've now got infused in my brain with the time that Michael Gove either locked himself or got himself locked in the toilet on his first day as chief whip, which I just thought is a way to get out of a vote that you don't want to do.

But Boris Johnson flew to Afghanistan.

He did indeed.

In order to have a meeting.

In order to not be in the country so he wouldn't have to vote, yeah.

Yeah.

Who resigned?

I'll give you a clue.

For audio listeners, Adam is doing jazz hands.

Jazz Hans's brother.

Poor old Greg Hans, no one remembers him at all.

Do you know?

He's still looking for Chelsea and Fuller.

I would never have got Greg Hans from Jazz Hands.

I was thinking, like, was there someone who was in a cabaret at one point?

Yeah, I think this is Jazziest member of Theresa May's government.

I think Nadine Dorris, she seems like she might have done Jazz Hans.

If this section does actually make it onto a visual one, can I say that's the worst charades I've ever seen?

Now do Greg.

I do the concept of Greg.

Sounds like.

Egg.

Oh, that's very good.

Yeah, no, you go for that.

Okay, so he resigned on principle.

Yeah.

He went ahead of of the vote.

And Boris Johnson just scuttled off to Afghanistan, giving rise to a memorable private eye cover, can you remember?

He was with a translator.

Yeah.

And I think the joke was that it wasn't the third runway, it was a third runaway.

That's the one.

Brilliant.

The finest tradition of Catullus.

I mean, can someone explain to me why

this dramatic reshuffle in which Yvette Cooper becomes foreign secretary and David Lammy becomes vice president?

No, that's his friend.

But why is this going to help?

Well, a change is as good as the rest.

Oh, I know the answer to this, which is because if you listened to the Keir Starmer interview with Matt Shawley, we are now in phase two.

This is it, phase two of the Starmer government.

You may have not noticed the passage of phase one, but the idea is that basically they're now going to try and put people in to do things that people like.

Yeah, I know.

I don't think it's going to work.

If that was the plan for this to be phase two, though, I come back to, again, that reshuffle that they had a few days before it.

Why didn't they do it then if this was the grand plan all along to move everyone around?

My hunch is that they had all this ready and they planned to do it after party conference because everyone will be preparing their speeches for party conference and now you've got a load of people just you know who are going to have to give the biggest speech of their life as a minister and something they only sort of swatted up on 10 minutes ago.

So I think this was all like in the offering and then in a way they decided to kind of take the advantage of the crisis.

In terms of resignations though, I mean a lot of the speculation before he had to do another reshuffle was, yes, the Minister for Paperclips had changed, but he'd put in all these sort of very, very good economically minded people to undermine Rachel Reeves.

So there appeared to be some point to that procedure.

And then suddenly we're told, no, Yvette Cooper, who's been just in the homes, she's going to foreign affairs.

Is she?

But I think that was a kind of face-saving thing because actually she was being moved out because they never really got along with her.

I think they followed the, you know, kind of, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

But it does seem an odd move then to put her in charge of the foreign affairs of the entire country, doesn't it?

That's traditionally one of the big jobs, isn't it?

One of the big jobs.

It's not anymore, though, because the Prime Minister just does it.

Who flew over to the White House to sort out the Ukraine situation?

I mean, it was Kier Starmer last week.

That's the thing.

And that's why David Lammy's got DPM, is so that he, as you reference here, he can continue his fishing-based romance with J.D.

Vance.

But basically, she's got a kind of a job that involves her going and sort of shaking hands at boring summits and not really driving a department in the same way.

It's not like it was in the good old days when Liz Truss was foreign secretary.

Think of those trade deals.

Think of all those great trade deals we made.

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Right, so Reform had their conference, their annual conference, they had it at the huge Birmingham NEC, massive great conference centre.

Very, very big.

It all happened over the weekend.

I'd just like to know from the three of you where we are on the ancient timeline of first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Because I think we've had the ignoring and the laughing at.

I think the laughing at can coexist with the winning, unfortunately.

That's what my mainly takeaway from that conference is that Farage has been spending a lot of time with Donald Trump and he's obviously learned a lot about the American right-wing style, which is campers' absolute knickers,

but also incredibly successful in electoral terms and enacting a lot of its policy agenda.

So you get a situation in which, yes, it is objectively very funny that Andrea Jenkins comes out in a cat suit and sings a song that she has composed herself, which you'd normally think was the attitude of a fringiest of fringe parties.

But it was a heavenly professionalised conference.

It really was.

As you say, a big audience, big attendance, you know, loads of bodyguards sweeping around the place, you know, stalls, all the exhibitors, things, all the things you would associate with a main party conference were there.

And the fireworks.

I saw a quote from a reform member this morning saying, you know, we have fireworks.

You won't see Labour Royal Conservatives having fireworks on stage, will you?

And I thought.

Right.

Well, clearly you're ready for government.

Right.

But that's what Trump has kind of learned.

Like, those rallies are sort of slightly like WWE cage matches, right?

There's a whole, and there's old people dressed up in stuff, and like, there's a whole kind of pageanty aspect to it.

And I have to say, as someone who's attended many party conferences, it's not unwelcome that someone might try and make them slightly entertaining.

Do you remember that Theresa May speech where everything went wrong and the thing fell off the bat and she got the throat sweet and the person got the P45?

Reforms conference, although it was objectively Delulu in some ways, was a lot more professional than that Tory party conference when they were in government.

So I think you can over-egg the laughing at them.

We might have to one day laugh at them as they do stuff and they win.

And they unveiled Nadine Dorries as their secret weapon, their new recruit, architect of the online safety bill, which they are now hugely against.

But no one's interested in consistency, Adam.

I mean, Farage literally said,

we're going to deport everybody.

And someone said, well, you did say a few months ago that wasn't possible.

He said, no, I didn't.

And he did.

No, it's literally there in black and white in the last issue.

As we said, the Trump playbook, isn't it?

Yeah.

You just go fake news.

Didn't happen.

But fess up, Adam, because you secretly love Nadine Doris and her column in the mail.

She is a magnificent Daily Mail columnist.

I'm not her abilities at that at all.

I mean, what I was interested in, the justification for bringing her in, because a few people are, there's some rumblings going on reform, aren't there, about bringing in lots and lots of ex-Tories when supposedly they're saying they're useless and they're going to replace them.

The justification was that they actually need people who've got experience in government and know how to do it.

Which is an odd justification for getting Nadine Dorries in, because she wasn't exactly

the sort of greatest performer in.

And she wasn't Home Secretary, as I remember.

No.

Or Chancellor.

She was Minister of Culture.

Was she not?

Joining which her big quest was to privatise Channel 4, something that was abandoned and hasn't happened.

Yeah, and she didn't know the details of who owned Channel 4, which you may remember.

She was all over her brick.

I sort of thought she had already gone to reform.

So I don't know what she was

doing.

She definitely left the Tories.

I mean, she's written two entire books, which poor old Helen has read

about how awful the Tories are and how they're being run by an unelected cabal of rabbit murderers.

Don't you think that Boris Johnson at some point might go reform reform or try and go reform, which would be fascinating?

Well, this was

today.

But that's because this town ain't big enough for the both of us.

I mean, that's the thing that's kind of fascinating to me.

If you're Boris Johnson, you still harbour some hopes for comeback.

You've just got to think, where could I just pop up back again?

What I just felt about that reform conference is that the political momentum is all with them.

So they've now got a Daily Mail columnist on their side.

They've got GB News on their side.

They've got The Telegraph on their side.

For their voting base, those are the places that you would want.

Who still likes the Tory Party brand?

Absolutely.

Sarah Vine.

Sarah Vine, page in the mail on Sunday saying, although I deeply respect Nadine in that way that all daily mail columnists absolutely definitely do because they're all best friends, she said she thinks she's wrong about this and the Conservative Party still has some life in it and Kemi Bagnock is a marvellous thing and she will be sticking with the party of the man she divorced quite recently.

Someone wants a peerage from the Tory Party, something hearing there.

Well, like Nadine.

But the aim, as far as I understand it, of the conference this weekend was to show, firstly, that it's inevitable.

This is just going to happen.

Yeah.

So get used to it.

Don't fight it.

Maybe in two years.

Maybe in two years if there's an election for no reason that I can fathom there will be.

Okay.

And the other was to show that this is no longer the Nigel Show and we've got lots of talent waiting in the wings and this is a party you can see putting in a cabinet of 20 MPs.

20 human beings, real human beings.

Yeah.

Yeah, the third one is a lie though.

It is still the Nigel Show.

It's always, this is, I mean, it's not, it's not.

No, basically that party does well when it's got Nigel Farage as its frontman and doesn't when it hasn't.

Right.

And I don't really see that that's changed just because Anne Whitticom is now sitting in a big hall rather than a small hall.

And Adam's earlier point is right.

I mean when confronted by some anomaly between spending and tax that someone had turned up in the in the list of wishes on the back of a fag packet which Nigel had presented as some sort of agenda, he was questioned about and he said, well I can't answer that now.

We haven't got the senior people with experience in, but we will have.

And then the first person with with senior experience is Nadine Dorris.

I mean,

that's not a big hitter.

Well, don't forget they got your mate, Jake Berry, in there as well, haven't they?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who you famously had a bit of a run-in with, didn't you?

I did.

I had a bit of a shout-up.

Okay, he's in.

It is the creme de la creme, isn't it?

This is the real top Tories of the last

listeners.

I confess I had an argument with him about the remuneration for the post office

scandal victims, which I wasn't terribly temperate about.

But you can continue that when he's in government.

That'll be another select committee appearance to look forward to.

As for the inevitability, I think it's one that's worth taking seriously because they are high in the polls.

The thing about this, first past the post, and we always say this, notoriously hostile to new entrants.

The mountain they have to climb is absolutely incredible.

Can they do that in one electoral cycle when Nigel Farage is, you know, it's so dependent on him?

Or can you see Nigel Farage sticking with this as a 10-year project and kind of of building that momentum through the next parliament?

That to me is the kind of don't get ahead of yourself

a bit of this piece.

That to me seems the biggest hurdle they've got.

It's not just that they've got to get 20 people in who could sit in a cabinet and know what they're doing.

They've also got to get at least 320 electable people in different constituencies around the country to get that majority.

And given, as we've been noting in both the Rotten Boroughs and HP pages of Private Eye in recent weeks, the record of the people who did get elected on that wave in the local elections and what's happened since and the number of them that have had to resign or have been caught up in really quite extreme kind of cases of racism, and as recorded in the last issue, and other things.

That seems to be a big, insurmountable hood that no amount of fireworks and opera singing ex-Tories is going to surmount.

Some of the people in the local councils, it's just boils down to they can't be bothered to do the job, didn't think they were going to elect, and don't want to very much.

And that is the other problem about government: it's quite boring.

And reform will have to learn how to do the boring bits.

That was one of the other pieces on the Roundup page, NHP last issue, was they've, I believe, loosened their vetting criteria, which for a party that's had as many problems with vetting,

you would think might be quite

a bit on all hosts.

But they've gone bananas

if they're genuinely loosening the criteria.

They wrote it to their members saying, look, if you got rejected last time,

have another pot.

But I think that's genuine fear, that they need 650 warm bodies, and and you're going to have to take in the fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists and not-so-closet racists just to have bums on seats.

That's why I just think that the obvious play for them is to try and eat alive the remnants of the Tory Party with all its institutional machinery.

Because the Tory Party has got lots of people with huge amounts of experience of running associations, but a dwindling membership.

Reform has got a growing membership, but almost no institutional campaigning memory.

And, you know, fair enough, like Nigel Farage is very good at things like TikTok, but you do still need stuff like boring stuff like contact sheets, you know, to find out who you've been around, who you like to go knocking knocking up doors all of that kind of stuff still does actually matter in closely fought seats as soon as you get in you have that moment which they're finding in the council in saying what is your policy on special needs potholes

libraries we're going to stop the boats yep and after that yeah and that matters more in a national election because local elections are often like do you hate the government yes no whereas uh you know it's going to be do you think this reform mp is going to be good for your constituency is are they actually going to turn up to Westminster?

Can I ask a question then?

Is it a mistake for the Labour Party to be so furiously obsessed by Farage in the same way?

Is it a mistake for private eyes to vote any further coverage to Farage?

Is this helping him out?

It's a very good question, is why are we playing all of British politics on the terrain that he has decided?

I mean, I I don't agree you know, immigration is obviously something that comes up again and again, but people are also really worried about the economy, really worried about the NHS and public services.

I think the reason that Labour are being lured onto this is that they don't have a great story themselves to tell about the things they'd like to talk about.

And their devout hope is that in three years' time they will be able to say, well, stick with us, we're halfway through this plan and you'll begin to see signs of it happening.

But they don't really think there's anything they can point to at the moment to make that that case.

And therefore, they just keep being dragged.

And again, I say as a media environment that follows the right-wing papers and the BBC follows that bulletin.

And you always end up with that, you know, we had a new Green leader.

No one gives a toss, even though they've got a similar number of MPs.

And actually, there's lots of people who are disillusioned with Labour from the left and would be easily peeled away to a different party.

And the backstories of both the new Green leader and the deputy are

pretty fruity.

At least as good as the stories about reform, but no one cares.

But I mean, I think we are slightly disregarding the extent of the talent which reform does have at its disposal.

So, for example, Viscount Christopher Moncton, I'm sure you're all familiar with him,

once wrote to Private ID Deny that he he had a pointy head, and this is why he wore a bowler hat.

Interesting, interesting.

Well, a few years ago, he made a speech where he warned that homosexuality is one of the four sins crying out to heaven for vengeance in traditional theology.

He's doing it wrong.

I am sorry.

I don't know what the other three are, but we'll have to come back to that, okay.

He also called for cigarette-style warnings about the dangers of being gay.

What?

On gay people?

He didn't say what you put the warnings on.

No, you're right.

Where would you put the warnings?

Right on the front.

Yeah, just plain packaging and a big, big, big picture of it.

I like that.

Yeah, no, a photo of a disease line.

So do you see some people doing YMCA?

Yeah.

Okay, well, what about Asim Malhotra, advisor to the US Health Secretary, no less.

Oh, yes.

Who made the very sensible point that maybe the Royal Family got cancer because they'd taken their COVID jebs and that it's all Bill Gates's fault and that the COVID vaccine is more harmful than COVID.

Dr.

Hammond, who is also a doctor, but I would suggest one that it might be worth listening to slightly more seriously.

He will be addressing the subject of Reform's new brilliant medical expertise.

Okay.

And that was a great moment for Rajism as well, wasn't it?

Because afterwards he said, well, you know, he was just a guest at the conference.

And actually, he'd been introduced as the man who was helping to draft Reform's health policies.

Slightly awkward.

Yes, Reform said they don't endorse what he said, but they do believe in free speech.

And to be fair, he's not the only one working on health policy because there's also Dr.

David Ball, who is the guy that was strangled by Ghost.

So, you know, he'll be bringing the sensible side.

And he followed Lucy Connolly, is that that right?

Yes, yeah, the convicted criminal who pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred and

helping them with their justice policies.

Oh, yes.

Yes, her policy is release prisoners, particularly women prisoners.

And you can make a quick case.

It has a very sensible policy.

You can make a good case for lots of that, but it does slightly clash with the...

I think you'd probably find some other people to make that point, though, couldn't you?

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Now we swivel inevitably towards Free Speech Corner, which is a section of the podcast that we've been running on and off, not under that name, but you know, we covered Palestine Action recently

and John Farley, iReader, who was arrested after foolishly taking a private eye joke to a protest.

Your joke.

Yeah.

So now we come to Graeme Linehan.

Yes.

Now, and we should say there is a trial on at the moment.

We have to be circumscribed in what we can say, but there are two different cases that are being discussed here.

Can you just say who Graham Linehan is?

Graham Linnehan is a comedy writer best known for things like Father Ted and Black Books, and in recent years, a very prolific tweeter and gender critical campaigner.

Now he arrived in Britain from Arizona where he's been living working on a new sitcom and was arrested by five armed police with the explanation being that all police at Heathrow are armed and there were lots of them they didn't really have a lot to do so a couple of them just wingmanned it and turned up anyway.

This wasn't a totalitarian show of force according to police but these were for they didn't tell him exactly what it was for but they said it's from some of your tweets on this particular date in April and he went back and looked at those and essentially it seems to have been if you see a trans-identified man, that's what he would call a trans woman, in a women's women's bathroom, punch him in the balls.

And this is being apparently treated by the police as incitement to violence against a protected group.

Now, he was in town anyway, in order to, as you say, attend, he's a defendant in a different trial, a harassment trial that is related to a charge of he grabbed someone's phone out of their hands and threw it on the road and had called them a scumbag and various other things.

That's ongoing, and we won't hear back until shouting back for the trans woman on the road and that.

Yeah, there was a teenage transgender activist with whom he had an altercation.

Let's put that one aside from that because that that is ongoing

until at least October about that.

But I do think that that arrest for those tweets is symptomatic of something that the police have got themselves dragged into, which is basically trying to adjudicate on extremely fine lines of things that are now quote-unquote hate speech or harassment or whatever it might be

and just work that they are ill-equipped for and they are overwhelmed by.

So I went and looked up the figures, hate speech reports, England and Wales 2013, 41,000 of them.

By 2023, that had had gone up to 145,000, so it's tripled.

The guy who's the head of the police officers association said, We just can't cope, we're just swamped.

We're absolutely swamped.

There was a report in the first couple of months that came in that neo-Nazis were making vexatious complaints, right?

It's just a system that is set up for people who are either motivated by whatever reason or not, or having an online Barney to try and get the police involved.

And it puts them in exactly the same difficult situation as they're policing a protest, which is they're trying to pass what words mean in very contextual febrile situations.

I did feel that having complained about someone holding up a private eye joke and get arrested, the fact that Graham Linehan had made a joke, clearly is a joke, and was arrested by armed police officers when he touched, and that is outrageous and that is police overreach.

And Graham Lineham doesn't like me at all and feels I've failed him in any number of ways.

But on this occasion, it did seem a Voltaire moment.

I mean, I find the whole grotesquely rude and toxic shouting matches between the various extremes on this hideous.

But these are not arrestable offences.

And when the senior police officer says, well, we are obliged to do this,

we all know this isn't true.

We all know that this can't be true because when we report other offences, they don't feel obliged to do anything at all.

And this involves nearly all crimes that I can think of.

Yeah,

apart from murder.

So It is a reasonable point to make.

A, is the police shouldn't be there to adjudicate in what seems to be an online spat.

And B, they should be doing something else.

I don't think either of those points are terribly contentious.

If you're saying if you see a member of a protected group in this environment, punch them in the balls, isn't that incitement to violence?

The thing is, it's a deeply hypothetical situation.

There's not a named person.

It's not like go around X's house at whatever Y address and punch them in the face.

And we know that there's case little precedent on this because there was a hearing for a trans activist called Sarah Jane Baker, who was out on license for attempted murder at the time, who gave a speech at a protest.

You said, if you see a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, punch them in the fucking face.

And this went to magistrates' court and the magistrate court said, no, you didn't seriously mean this, you were just seeking publicity, which I think comes back to Ian's point that everybody involved in this is seeking publicity.

It's not a serious threat, not guilty.

And I think with that precedent in hand, you would say, what are the realistic chances of prosecuting someone airing a general belief that people who, in their sense, are doing a bad thing should be punched for it?

It just doesn't seem very likely to lead to prosecution.

And the problem is that it leads to these accusations of two-tier justice, that different favoured groups are treated differently.

And also, the thing that West Streeting said, which is the police should be out policing the streets, not policing tweets.

And

which rhymes, so it must be true.

Very corny, but I think it speaks to, as you say, what everybody thinks.

I saw that arrest and I thought, have you solved every murder?

Have you solved every bike theft at this point?

But there is also this very simplistic kind of argument that's being put that anything that's said online doesn't count and actually you know there are people in naming no names who are running very very vicious campaigns online against specific people and targeting them and and and and making what what could well be considered to be things beyond the criminal threshold so this idea that somehow putting something on Twitter is different to shouting it in someone's face is not always the case.

I mean, there are nuances in all these things.

And you have to, you have to.

We've already mentioned Lucy Connolly.

this we've mentioned Lucy Connolly this episode who's who got sentenced to 31 months for saying you know set fire to asylum hotels was that general not a specific person it's not a specific person in her case the sentence is because she pleaded guilty and also because it happened at the time of the riot so that's the thing if you're saying it in this general context of things being set on fire saying please set something on fire that said i think the sentence was disproportionate it's higher than the sentence you'd get for an actual assault yeah the sentencing i thought was crazy but it was i might want to pleaded guilty to it as well so the court is stuck in that position.

Yeah, but you're right, Adam.

Behind all this is a lot of the fact that the police are struggling to catch up with the volume of commentary, things that people would have once said to their mate in a pub now being said online.

Or people who have got mental health issues or don't have enough hobbies or whatever it might be turning into sort of online obsessives.

I think when I was at the Daily Mail, we used to have a long strand of Leylandii feuds.

Do you remember this?

A great thing, which people would get obsessed with boundary wall disputes.

And it would start off as a minor argument about a hedge.

And then 20 years later, they were sort of people putting dead cats on each other's doorsteps.

All of that has moved online, and that's the bit that the police I think are really struggling to cope with.

There is a problem here.

I mean, in the last copy of Private Eye, we had an Anglesey councillor saying all Tories should be shot.

Now, he said that was a Welsh idiom, was his defense.

It's about as convincing as Elon Musk and the pedot guy being a South African traditional insult, isn't it?

Yeah.

But I think it is historically the sort of thing that people could say, and it wouldn't be taken seriously.

But then, various MPs did get killed.

And suddenly, the difference between using, oh, string them all up, I hate them, I wish they'd all die, suddenly became something that happened in the real world.

So, I think there was a problem for how do you police the

new world where these things merge into each other.

And that creates, as Helen says, a huge problem from police.

But as I'm trying to agree with both of you, but on the precedents we have, there is no specific resolute line.

But individual police surely must be able to use their judgment into saying,

is this actually an incitement to violence that we have to worry about?

Or is it someone being hot-headed and ridiculous?

I think it's between 60% and 70% of trans people have reported either violence or harassment as a result of being trans.

So to them, I imagine that judgment would feel very wide.

That's why it's counted as a protected characteristic.

Right.

So, you know, I mean, to them, that judgment would be substantially different.

It's very tricky, though, because the Scottish law, and the same thing has happened here, does not have sex as a protected characteristic as one of the things.

They said they were going to bring in a separate misogyny law.

I've always suspected it's because misogyny is just so widespread, and one person is, you know, you get called a bitch.

Is that now actionable misogyny or not?

It's just something that happens all the time.

And I think that speaks to the difficulty of working out what the general consensus in the population is.

So the example of trans status would be, is misgendering somebody a hate crime or not?

Some people would say yes, but it came up as an issue at the trial about whether or not referring to someone using sex-based pronouns was sort of an acceptable thing to do or not.

People have wildly different views and the police are in the situation of trying to find a median ground that everyone can agree on when very obviously people cannot agree on what is offensive and what is hate speech and what isn't.

Well I think we've cleared that one up.

It's all sorted now.

And thus concludes this week's tour of Free Speech Corner.

We'll be back next time with another look at some people you really don't want to have to support.

But the free speech course means you have to anyway.

That's it for this episode of page 94.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you've enjoyed it, then why not go and get your subscription to Private Eye?

Or just go into your local news agent and get a copy of Private Eye.

That's your gateway to a wonderful world of fantastic investigative journalism, fantastic jokes, fantastic cartoons, all of it.

That's your local news agent.

Look up where it is and then go there.

And we'll be back again in a fortnight's time with another of these.

And thanks to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing.

Bye for now.

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