156: It's Your Party, Cry If You Want To

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Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm here in the Private Eye office with Adam McQueen, Ian Hislop and Justine Smith.

We're here to discuss a few different stories that have been in the magazine and in the news in the last couple of weeks.

Later on, we're going to be discussing a very exciting ombudsman, which you may not have heard of, but which has been cropping up in the pages of the eye an enormous amount, and it's genuinely scandalous, the stuff that's been going on there.

We'll also be talking about the ongoing mayhem at Reach, owner of The Mirror, and much else besides.

But firstly, the big political news of the week I think we need to discuss is your party.

Which is a party of the left, which they're searching for a name and they've come up with the Judean People's Front.

And there's been another split and apparently the others want to call it the People's Front of Judea.

But then another group saying, you know, mentioning Judea in the Labour Party, probably not as funny as it used to be.

It's a fantastic story.

It gladdens the heart.

And it should be on a podcast called page 94 because literally this is going on forever.

If you want a cliché about the left, it splits immediately.

But this time it split before it has a name, before it's got any funds.

They've just speeded up the news cycle.

It's incredibly annoying.

They actually managed to split even before they'd announced.

Was it Zara Sartana initially announced the formation of this party and said she was going to be co-leading it for Jeremy Corbyn?

He said...

Hang on, no, you're not.

We haven't decided whether we're doing this or not.

I mean, it's literally almost from before they've even set up, isn't it?

The planning for it, all the considerations started pretty soon after Corbyn was suspended from the Labour Party and it became clear he wasn't going to get back in.

And I think he and various colleagues wanted to kind of found a new movement.

They wanted it to be very grassrootsy, very democratic.

Enter Zara Sultana, until recently, a Labour MP, and then she was suspended from the party over voting against the government on the child welfare cap.

So she and he have been kind of circling each other.

They're obviously very different in lots of ways.

Except for not liking the other person in your party, in which they seem to be quite similar.

They do have that in common, but they sort of...

They hate each other.

That's a good start.

Ian, according to the statements that they've released, some of them through lawyers, they're the closest of colleagues and they're very

much reconciled.

Oh, I'm glad my closest colleagues aren't quite that loyal.

They are due to appear on stage together on the 9th of October, so they really need to get it together before then, according to the website.

This is going to be like those tours of like the Eagles' Hell Freezes Over tour, isn't it?

Where none of them are speaking, or when the police got back together and they hate each other so much they have to be opposite ends of the stage and different tour buses, isn't it?

The Oasis Reunion will have nothing on this it should help sell tickets though

the current week's mayhem is all because sultana she was uh raising some money thank you very much uh you're fired

who else will we get to talk about current affairs then oh my god come on andy read the prune thank you

So she invited supporters to sign up as members via an online portal, and she claimed that on the day of launch, she got 20,000 new members signed up.

Now, for any political party, that would be a great success, that would be a coup.

Corbyn then issued a statement saying this you may have received an unauthorized email urging you to sign up to your party.

Don't sign up, cancel any direct debits.

The message was co-signed by the four independent MPs who we haven't mentioned yet.

They are the Independent Alliance.

So that is Corbyn, Sultana and four others, some ex-Labour MPs.

One of them is just new in a newly formed constituency.

Now, Sultana has claimed she was frozen out of the accounts and, and I'm quoting here, subjected to what can only be described as a sexist boys' club.

I have been treated appallingly and excluded completely.

I know how she feels.

And she said this was an attempted coup and she simply said she was trying to, you know, get members and that those funds would be held by a company set up to safeguard the money until the founding conference.

They haven't had a starting conference yet.

I've signed up as one of these apparently 750,000 people who's declared an interest in supporting or voting for the party.

There are going to be these big rallies, which we know is often Jeremy's comfort zone.

It's where he does well.

He thrives on that.

He likes the mood and the room.

And theoretically, it should be a great combination.

He's a man, she's a woman.

Nitrogen glycerine.

But, you know, they should reach lots of different areas.

So he's 76, she's 31.

They're at very different ends of the political age spectrum.

He's white, she's not.

There should be this, if not a rainbow coalition, then certainly an attempt to reach lots of different bits of the left.

But the problem really has been, so far, huge schisms have emerged in policy terms.

It's not even policy, though, is it?

One is what should we call ourselves?

Two is, are we trusted with money, with the economy?

Oh, dear.

I'll pay your direct debit back because she shouldn't have emailed you.

That doesn't bode well for a party of government, does it?

But there is already a huge policy range, even within the six MPs who are broadly grouped together.

So for example, we haven't really talked about the other four much, but shock at Adam.

I love that.

That always just sounds like the beginning of a tabloid headline about me, doesn't it?

Shock at Adam.

Shock at Adam behaviour.

But he's argued the new party shouldn't be anti-wealth or anti-business and it shouldn't alienate landlords.

And I think probably Corbyn and Sultana would quite like to alienate landlords.

Basically, Sultana has a lot of young, urban, very progressive left-wing support.

The others might have a little more support from potentially more socially conservative supporters across the country who may be more interested in Palestine.

The other four out of the six are Muslim politicians and and their you know their policies on Palestine are I think a substantial part of what got them elected as MPs.

Which is a thing that an awful lot of people would agree on now.

But I mean it's not a lot to establish a Rainbow Coalition on, especially when you've got, as you say, Muslim blokes who in a lot of cases have pretty socially conservative views, which are very much at the opposite of what Zahra Sultan is saying.

And it's a bit like the the other Rainbow Coalition that was George Galloway's Respect Party, isn't it?

Which was kind of a an alliance of the the Socialist Workers' Party and an awful lot of kind of big gaudy politicians in East London.

They weren't kind of comfortable bedfellows, feels like the wrong term, doesn't it?

Galloway has been sniffing around looking to affiliate with your party, whatever it ends up being called.

More egos, that's definitely, definitely what they need.

More egos and people who can't work with anyone else.

God, brilliant, yeah.

If all this wasn't enough potential fractiousness in the ranks early on, what I found really interesting is it shows the difficulty of setting up a new party, for one.

I mean, it's just very hard.

It obviously shows something about the left's love of factions and, you know, ever smaller divisions.

But I just love the sound of this.

So, this is from now as one of the, as member number 750,000 and one, I can report to you what I looked up on their publicly available website.

They're going to host huge regional deliberative meetings where thousands of members come together to listen to each other, debate, and revise the founding documents face to face.

All members will be able to comment, suggest changes, and track how each document develops.

That is going to be a heck of a shared document.

If they can't decide between two of them, even the most basic policy or how they start or whether they can charge people yet, then it's going to be a bit tricky getting $680,000.

It doesn't bode too well, does it?

It does seem like a lot of left-wing policies always seem to go back to it.

They're very, very fond of rallies and kind of people's assemblies and all these ideas of doing things democratically and talking shop and things.

But actually, getting things done is a bit of a problem.

And it is to be serious for a second.

I think it is a shame because there is is obviously a big gap in British politics at the moment for a kind of populist left-wing party.

Because, I mean, Starmer seems to be tacking so far to the right that he took him a full week to say it's a bad thing to have 150,000 racists on the street of London, which you think, you know, that's sort of fairly obvious from where Labour ought to be on these kind of things.

I mean, the problem I would suggest is if you are looking for a decent left-wing party, the person to choose as a leader might not be the one who has proved that he's not very good at leading a party to electoral victory twice in the past already.

He was betrayed, Adam.

He was betrayed.

I forget it was our fault, wasn't it?

The press.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Sorry about that, guys.

And Andy glibley says, you know, it's very difficult to set up a new party.

It isn't.

Nigel Farage does it most weekends.

He has no trouble at all.

What is it, Friday?

There's another one.

And the one he's set up at the moment is the one that's giving everyone a massive headache.

So the idea that it is impossible to get people to abandon the old parties and move to new parties just isn't true.

So what is it about,

say, Jeremy, that makes things very difficult?

This is a question, well, I mean, Justine, you you've been on the left.

You've you've worked for the mirror, I've seen you.

Tell me, who would back them?

I think they're gonna have to get a long way down the line before they get any major support from a major outlet.

I mean, if you look at Zara Sultana, was part of Enough is Enough in 2022, if you remember that, it was very, very short-lived.

No, she joined with Mick Lynch and the Green Party for a grassroots left-wing political movement.

Sound familiar?

They managed to get 700,000 people signed up in a very short space of time and then disappeared without trace.

And why is that?

Well, enough was enough.

Yes.

Because they got a few rally marches together and then it just fizzled out.

They just couldn't get the leadership together.

They couldn't agree on how it would work.

And then they eventually decided it was never going to be a parliamentary party, and it just disappeared, sank without trace.

If we're looking at your party, or whatever our party is going to be called, at the moment they've got hundreds of thousands of people, but they again can't agree even how they're going, what mechanism their party's going to be formed with.

Whether it's going to be an alliance, whether it's going to be a parliamentary party, whether it's just going to be a grassroots kind of build-up.

The discussion about saying we're not going to be a parliamentary party.

Given our current parliamentary system,

how does that work then?

Does that mean we're not going to be in power ever?

One of the beneficiaries of this is going to be the Green Party, who claimed they'd got 2,000 new members off the back of chaos among your party and how that was going.

So that's one element of it.

The other thing, just as we mentioned, Farage, I think it's, are Farage and Corbin more similar than we've let ourselves think?

I mean, there's a big thing about...

Jeremy falling out with people.

There's a big thing about Nigel falling out with people.

They're both absolutely cracking at a rally.

They both energise the faithful a huge amount.

They're very, very thin-skinned in interviews and tend to not react well to constructive criticism.

Have they been seen in the same room together?

That's all I'm saying.

You think it's a case of beard on, beard off, do you?

If someone misses doubt firing this whole situation.

So I think the Greens will benefit.

We should probably give an update on what the latest news is as at time of recording.

I think that's only fair.

Sultana has climbed down.

She said she won't be pursuing legal proceedings against the rest of her nascent party, despite the baseless and unsubstantiated allegations against me.

This is all from her statement, I should say.

So there are just a few cracking phrases in there.

I really like this one.

I'm determined to reconcile and move forward, she writes.

I am engaged in ongoing discussions with Jeremy, for whom, like all socialists of my generation, I have nothing but respect.

Devastating.

Clearly, very much.

Jeremy's old, I'm not.

And she finishes by saying we can all confirm that the conference will go ahead as planned in November.

So very sorry to everyone who's booked their tickets because it's evidently not.

There is kind of a genuine goal.

I mean, Zara Soltana, I have talked to young people about Zora Soltana, and they do find her very, very inspirational.

And there is a sort of generation now kind of beyond coming through to voting age, beyond that whole, that whole Corbin I think.

When was it 2019 he stepped down?

So we're talking six years back, aren't we?

So there is, I mean, the potential for a kind of Alexandra Okasia-Cortez, is she, the Democrat in America, a really sort of charismatic figure to come through and kind of inspire people.

You've got to hope there might be.

Are you suggesting that Jeremy is not Bernie Saunders?

Because that, again, in itself

is typical of you.

I think undermines Jeremy's position.

More old men, be they Bernie Saunders or Donald Trump or Jeremy, might not be what we need

going forward, really.

I mean, possibly we have one of these charismatic figures already.

I mean, we've got Zach Polanski, the new leader of the Greens, haven't we, who we profiled in the last edition of Private Eye.

I mean, he seems quite a good fan, doesn't he?

Yes, and I'm interested that Andy's party, or your party as I shall now call it, I mean, you used to be quite green, but then I think you were disappointed that the Green Party was no longer interested in the environment.

It had moved on to other more important issues.

There is a long-running spate of councils, whoever controls them, which have declared a climate emergency, which is very easy to do and takes one meeting, then saying, no, I don't think we're going to have any wind turbines or solar panels in our neck of the woods.

Thanks very much.

We get a lot of dog walkers who want a nice view of a field.

And so that, I think, is an ongoing thing.

And I think the Greens are going to come up against that.

And it's when you get people who, for whatever reason, probably very good reasons, are unhappy with the current government, want to register their disapproval in some party sense.

If your coalition expands, it sometimes expands beyond the point at which you are coherent.

And that's kind of the challenge that Polanski's got, hasn't he?

Because you're talking about rainbow coalitions.

I mean, the election results for the Greens last time were some in rural communities, which is very much about kind of no pylons and restoring the countryside, and then one in sort of inner-city Bristol, which was very much about kind of much more radical politics and trans rights.

And, you know, it is quite difficult to kind of, these aren't things that necessarily coalesce into a coalition of people who are willing to work together, do they?

If you're expecting coherence when you vote, then reform may not be for you.

But I do notice as well that the Green Party MPs who were elected are still all in the same party and have managed not to fall out spectacularly with with each other, which is something that neither the was where we started off with six or four MPs, aren't we?

Where were we at now?

Four, but they're mostly different ones, aren't they?

I think it's yeah, it's much like the sugar babes, in that they'll the numbers will remain the same changing lineup.

But

there's one cast member who does remain the same, which which I think makes uh Nigel Frost the kesher of this uh this particular setup, isn't it?

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Right, on we come to section number two now.

As promised, it's ombudsman time.

So, Justine, first of all, we should say welcome to your first official appearance on page 94 because you were on it last year when you were nominated for the Paul Foot Award, shortlisted effect, talking about children's mental health provision.

But that was when you were outside the tent pissing in.

And so

since you've joined the eye and you're inside the tent pissing out, what a charming metaphor.

You have been writing about lots of things in the back, predominantly, one of which is the parliamentary and health service ombudsman.

Just for anyone who hasn't been paying attention, can you say what the PHSO is?

Well, you wouldn't be alone if you didn't know, because I think during a survey, something like a third of people knew what it was, and two-thirds didn't.

Now, it does serve a very, very important function.

For people who have used services either within the health service or in government services, who've either had a very poor service, an unfair one, if there's been maladministration and they've gone to the service and the service hasn't listened to their complaint, the almost last port of call they have is the PHSO.

Now, the PHSO is supposed to mediate between whichever organisation is being complained about and the complainant.

It is supposed to then either offer recommendations or, in rare cases, financial compensation.

It can also lay down reports before the government if it thinks it's really important.

This is important in two ways.

So, for the people who are actually making the complaint, it's their last place they can go.

And on a second level, they believe that they don't want this mistake to be made again.

We all accept, especially within the NHS, mistakes are made.

Doctors are under pressure, they're human beings.

But if the same mistakes are being made by the same staff in the same units, then that is systemic.

And if that can be picked up by the PHSO early, perhaps we wouldn't have so many huge scandals as we keep seeing.

One thing you point out early on is that it's a huge public service ombudsman, it's the biggest in Europe, got 600 staff, spends about 40, 45 million quid a year.

You'd think it would be powerful.

But in the case of patients like Alison Bryan, for example, it absolutely has not been.

So she was a 78-year-old woman.

She needed an urgent operation.

She was promised emergency hip replacement surgery within a few weeks.

Then, due to an administrative error, she didn't get the operation.

And after 10 months, her son-in-law said, you know, this is ridiculous.

And he stumped up.

He paid £40,000 for a private operation on her knee just to help with the, you know, chronic pain she was in.

I mean, really, really severe.

Now, he assumed that he might be able to recoup some of the money he was spending there.

He went to the PHSO.

Well first of all they decided that he hadn't given the NHS trust that was involved enough of an opportunity to come back on his complaint.

So he was told to go back to them.

They obfuscated.

So he went back and said we haven't got an answer from them.

By that time he'd timed out.

There's a 12 month

timeout after everything's been exhausted.

So they actually rejected his complaint on that basis.

They also said that if he had the option of taking legal action, they wouldn't consider it.

Now, legal action, as we all know, is difficult and expensive.

And most people think the PHSO will be an alternative to legal action.

And you know, I don't think that many people want to take legal action against the NHS.

I think a lot of people feel very protective about it, they feel very understanding, they just want to be heard, they just want to know that what happened to them won't happen to someone else.

And the PHSO should offer an alternative to expensive litigation, which is harrowing for people to go through.

It's difficult, you know, it diverts resources from the front line for the NHS.

So why tell someone who's coming to you to ask for some kind of redress to then take it through the courts?

It makes no sense, does it?

No, the idea that we're actually paying 600 people to say, I'd go to court if I were you.

Yeah.

gives me a bit of a harsh jack.

Exactly.

I would add, there Ian, you probably have been sued by 600 different people, so it's a bit triggering for you, I suspect.

Just while we're on the initial thing of talking about these cases, talk about Naomi Darling.

She was a cleaner from Hereford and she went to the dentist.

She was told she needed some root canal work.

And it later emerged that she hadn't even had any x-rays and may not have even needed the work in the first place.

She ended up losing all of her front teeth, the bone collapsed, got terrible stress about this as well.

She's in a lot of pain, terrible, terrible pain.

Ended up losing her job.

So she went to the PHSO hoping they would help.

Now the dentist had just, it appears, moved from place to place gathering complaints and just kept going to different places.

And they just said, you just have to go and find the dentist, pretty much, and get him to get him to deal with it.

And they just, again, totally rejected her complaints.

And then eventually they offered her a very small amount of compensation.

£400.

£400.

It's going to cost her £12,000 to get some new teeth.

She hasn't got any front teeth now.

Now, for anyone to have their teeth removed and not be able to afford to replace them, you know, the bones are all disintegrated, so it's not a question of her being able to just replace them easily.

So she's having to go through the rest of her life with no front teeth, feeling totally depressed.

In the article you wrote about it, she says, it's ruined my life.

She did, yeah.

The whole process left her feeling demoralised.

She spent years trying to get some kind of justice and then just gave up.

And like many people who speak to me about this, they say they come out of the process feeling a whole lot worse than when they started.

Not only has it not helped, it's traumatised them, it's demoralized them, and it's made them feel like their problem is not important.

And it is extraordinary.

I mean, the sort of tenacity these people would have to have to get things to that stage, because as you say, you don't even end up with PHSO until you've exhausted all avenues of complaint and all kind of official things with the initial body that you're engaged with and their kind of complaints procedure, do you?

Exactly.

And then when you get to the PHSO, in some of your pieces, you were saying, you know, it's sort of seven months even before they assess your complaint and to see whether it's worth pushing ahead with.

And the numbers of complaints that are actually then followed through are tiny, aren't they?

Yeah, they are, they are.

So the PHSO gets about 120,000 inquiries a year.

Last year it accepted nearly 39,000 to be considered,

but it dropped three-quarters of them at the initial sift.

Just drops them.

It has a variety of excuses it uses to push back on them.

So it agreed to look into 10,000.

Of them, only 722 were given detailed investigations.

And of them, of all of those complaints, so down from the 38,000 or so, 464 resolved,

ending with the complainant being happy.

Now, that is about one in 80.

Yeah, and that's, you know, they're getting £42 million a year, and one in 80 people walk away from there feeling happy with what's happened.

And you're suggesting that you can't account for that by the 79 others being wingers

who are just looking for money.

Exactly.

I think if they were looking for money, they'd be going to the wrong place.

and they start.

If they're looking for justice, it sounds like they're going to the wrong place.

And this has been a problem for many years.

The Patients Association looked at the PHSO 11 years ago and concluded that it was just not fit for purpose.

It's had some internal investigations, internal reviews, that have also found itself not to be fit in some cases.

Yet, nothing's changed.

It seems to have got worse, if anything.

People are still waiting far too long, and then they're having not getting the results they need.

I'm talking to a woman at the moment who's been fighting for 13 years to get some kind of answers as to why her father died, with the hospital having missed four clear opportunities to diagnose him for lung cancer.

She has been through four different ombudsmen.

She's just written to the new one, Paula Sussex, who has come in in August after a crazy protracted effort to try and replace the previous one.

And she hasn't had any joy with that either.

Her MP's been involved.

Her MP, Rachel Maskell, is really concerned about the PHSO and its ineffectiveness and says, you know, this is a safety valve for the NHS and it's not working.

So there is a parliamentary committee which is supposed to oversee it, but they just don't seem to do anything.

They hear one problem after another and nothing has been done.

It feels more like people say to me that they feel like its job is to bat them away, not to help them, and to reduce the number of compensation claims.

And instead instead of actually really listening to them and taking on board the complaints and trying to change the NHS for the better and ensure mistakes aren't repeated, it's just to bat them away.

It strikes me that by its very nature, I mean, it's so huge and unwieldy, isn't it?

Because I would have thought, I mean,

a sort of one-stop body that deals with all complaints about the whole of the NHS, and as you say, dental services and things as well, is an enormous task enough already.

But it also deals with complaints about, you know, the parliamentary side of it, of its title, all UK government departments and other public organizations so I was looking at some of the sort of triumphs they're they're they're talking about in the news section of their website they've been looking into recently the Windrush compensation scheme that came under their purview the student loans company the the the charity commission all this on top of the health service I mean it's just it seems sort of too too huge for a task for any organization I mean yeah they brought together the health service and the parliamentary services some time ago and I think from that moment on it was doomed never to be able to do its job properly really.

And West Streeting kind of abolishing various different

endlessly, whenever a new government comes in, we have a bonfire of the quangos, don't we?

But he is getting rid of various sort of lower levels in the complaints procedure, is that right?

Yeah, there have been lots of layers, but there's a lot of overlap as well.

For example, if you're using a service that is funded by the local government, you have to go to the local government ombudsman.

If you're in a care home, you don't know whether you go to the health service ombudsman or the local government ombudsman.

You might want to go to the GMC first, the NMC, the parliamentary commissioner, Ofcom, Ofsted, you know, there are so many different regulators that just even working out where to start is the biggest, you know, is a headache.

And once you start, you can time out.

If you go to the wrong one first and then you get knocked about within the system, you might end up timing out and not having any justice.

Is part of this due to the long tail of COVID?

Only from what you say, it sounds like the problems go back many years.

COVID obviously hasn't helped.

There is a backlog.

There is definitely a backlog.

And everything slowed down so much during Covid.

There was also a problem, as I said, with finding a new ombudsman when the last one ended their seven-year term.

So, Rob Beyrons was coming to the end of his seven-year term nearly two years ago.

They'd had seven years to know this was going to happen, but they didn't find anyone in time.

So, they put an interim in who's only allowed to stand in for one year.

Even by the end of that year, they didn't have anyone in place.

So, there were several months where they had no ombudsman and the whole thing had to freeze.

So, they were already running behind due to COVID.

And then that just created even more delays, and people are waiting even longer now.

And as far as I understand it, the alternative to this hellish process is trying to get a judicial review.

Is that right?

You could potentially have a lawsuit if that's what you wanted.

But in terms of going through the legal channels in order to try to change what's happening, change policy,

have it looked at so that mistakes aren't repeated.

The judicial review is the next solution if you don't get what you want from the PHSO.

But that, as you know, is a very unwieldy process, very expensive, prohibitively expensive, and can be quite traumatic unless you can afford to pay for very expensive legal support.

Normally, these sections where we're sort of diving deep on one particular failure, I try and end up by saying, Are there any prospects for improvement?

I mean,

should I bother asking in this case?

I think

we need to put that to the government, but that's why I keep going back to it.

We keep going back to it.

You know, that's what we do well, isn't it?

We keep going back to it.

We keep talking to people and we keep going back to the PHSO and saying, what are you doing about this?

They'll come back to us and say they've had an extraordinary increase in the number of cases coming to them, but they have also had a 50% increase in their funding in just the last four years.

And lots of these cases are rejected on the grounds of lower severity injustice, which is quite the phrase, isn't it?

That was only brought in in 2021 or two, and I think that was really brought in as part of an effort to clear the backlog from COVID.

So they lifted the threshold rather than dealing with more cases.

Yes, they said we have decided to focus on the more serious complaints that people bring to us where they may have faced a big impact.

For example, these may be about a potentially avoidable death or where someone has suffered prolonged pain.

Surely losing your front teeth and having no way of redressing that is a significant injustice and causes significant pain.

Well, I think she has chronic pain now from that.

As well as the, you know, the side, you know, how she feels about herself going out, you know,

for anyone to lose their front teeth and not be able to replace them, it's devastating.

I mean, I really think it is.

It's not just cosmetic, is it?

It makes her feel that she can't go for a job.

You know, she's embarrassed being at family events.

She thinks people would judge her and think, you know, she's been in a fight or something.

So it's really affected her mentally as well as physically.

And the other case is an avoidable death.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Which is one of the things they said they would consider, and then they haven't.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's just a detail.

Yeah.

There'll be more.

I've got more in the pipeline, I'm afraid.

You know, I have a huge backlog of PHSO stories, and behind every single one is a story of suffering, injustice, and people not getting any kind of audience from the body that they went to in the first place to help them.

So, if anyone's writing in with a similar story and Justine doesn't process it quick enough,

I will be acting as the ombudsman for the backlog.

So, don't expect any response at all for at least a year.

And if you do, it won't be the right one.

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So, time for section number three now.

And it's good news, Caller.

We always like to end on a light note.

So Adam, what's going on at Reach plc terrible terrible things yes well I want to talk specifically I mean reach plc for those who who don't know is an enormous newspaper publishing empire it was formed from the the combination of Richard Desmond's set of papers which were the Daily Express the Daily Star and various celebrity magazines like OK and Trinity Mirror which as the name suggests produced both the Daily and Sunday Mirror and also had an awful lot of local titles as well.

So I mean sort of over 120 different newspapers and websites around the country kind of come under Reach PLC.

And ever since 2018 when that takeover took place

they've sort of been whittling away at it and there have been so many rounds of redundancies which we've been cataloguing in successive issues of Private Eye.

And it does feel a bit like, I mean the latest round of redundancies are falling particularly hard on the Daily Mirror where an enormous number of people including a lot of their top and I would say best journalists are at risk of redundancy.

The news from this week, the update from this week since the last edition went to print is is that the NUJ Chapel at the Daily Mirror are saying that nothing is off the table now in the terms of the action they're going to take against it.

They said the NUJ Chapel demands that this six-week countdown to destruction must be halted.

I mean, they're not messing about with all this.

So nothing is off the table.

Strike action is actually a possibility on that particular paper at the moment.

So this is the mirror.

This is the mirror.

This is the paper that has survived megalomaniacs being in charge of it, like Cecil King, who tried to lead an armed coup against the government in the 1960s.

Robert Maxwell, who stole most of the money from its own pensioners,

and of course Piers Morgan, probably possibly the worst of them all.

It got through all that, but it really does look to be in, or its journalists certainly feel it's in rather dire straits at the moment.

So in the last issue of Private Eye, I think you said it was something like 300 roles that were going?

It's 321 roles across the whole of Reach.

So that's all the kind of local papers and things.

But on the national titles, it's falling disproportionately on the Daily Mirror this time around.

I think think it's 38 people who have been got rid of on the mirror and only one person on the express, which they are understandably not very happy about.

I should state, actually, to be fair,

one of the last redundancy rounds back in 2018 was almost an exact mirror image of this.

There were something like 70 people who were got rid of on the express and only one person on the mirror.

So maybe they're just thinking they're sharing things out fairly, but the net result of it is that there's hardly anyone left.

Could one reason for this be that no one wants to buy any of their papers?

I'm just asking.

Well, a surprisingly large number of people still do want to go out and buy the Daily Mirror.

And kind of more to the point,

even Reach's own bosses admit that 75% of their revenue comes from actually selling physical copies of newspapers every day.

People are still going out and buying copies of those papers, and that's the only way they found of making things work.

I mean, the extraordinary thing about we always say, oh, the internet is the future, and news has gone online, and the printed press is dead, except for one

plucky fortnightly magazine of indomitable ghouls

still fighting away, there's one for the Asterix fans.

But no one has yet found a way, other than just charging for content, like you do with newspapers, of making money off the internet.

So there is not the money in advertising to sustain any of these businesses.

And the solution at Reach has been to keep on hiking up the cover prices of those newspapers.

They keep going up, I mean, incrementally, sort of 20p at a time, every six months or so, but also reducing the stuff that's in there.

And some of the decisions that have been made over the mirror, I mean, the mirror is really, I think it's 124 years old, is it now?

It was certainly set up sort of way, way, way back at the beginning of the last century.

It's got a hell of a history behind it as a campaigning and labour-supporting newspaper.

And it just appears to me that the current management just don't seem to understand any of that at all.

I mean, this time around, I was gobsmacked to see Nick Summerlad, who's the investigations editor on the Daily Mirror, who's been bringing in scoop after scoop for him.

It was him that broke the story about how Nigel Farage financed or didn't finance the sale of his house and his partner's mysterious money that she had to buy and register in her name.

And it comes a few years after also they got rid of Andrew Penman, who was their brilliant kind of consumer investigations guy who was out there.

Scambuster was how he described himself.

He was kind of out there, you know, finding people who were defrauding pensioners on the doorstep and dodgy timeshares and all these things.

So all of the stuff that I think made it a great paper, they just seem to have absolutely, I mean, less than no care for.

They seem to be actively opposed to it.

Justine,

you're an ex-mirror journalist.

How do you feel about it?

When I got to the mirror, I think it was in 1995, there was a team of off-diary reporters, four of them, dedicated to investigations, which was appropriate for the paper that had Hugh Cudlip and

Private Eyes Own Paul Foot at the heart of it.

So to get rid of their only, if they do get rid of their only investigative reporter, he has been told his job is at threat.

It's not confirmed yet.

But if they do get rid of that, that's a very, very sad day for that newspaper and its long and distinguished history.

I'm also very, very sad to hear

there are some incredible talent at the mirror, there really is, and it's been held together by love and prayer, really, by some very dedicated journalists who are ideologically committed to it, which I don't think you find on all other newspapers.

They could have easily gone off and made more money elsewhere.

They're there because they respect their readership and they care about them.

And among them, some of the photographers, Phil Coburn.

Phil Coburn's a fantastic photographer.

In 2010, he and colleague Rupert Harmer were in Helman province in Afghanistan.

The convoy they were in hit an IED, and sadly, Rupert was killed in it.

Phil lost both his legs beneath the knee.

He went back to work.

He's worked ever since for them.

He is a multi-award-winning photographer.

He finds himself on the list too, and I'm quite frankly disgusted.

And it's also, I mean, you look at what the plan is for replacing all of these people.

It's effectively, there is an argument to be made if you own 120 different newspapers for a certain amount of kind of sharing of resources and possibly even copy between them.

But the plan at the moment seems to be that maybe the first 15 pages of The Express and The Mirror will be their own stuff

and the rest of it will just be shared copy.

Then they're not touching the politics teams.

So, I mean, that would be complete insanity because The Express is still really sort of rabidly Tory.

Pretty much the only rabidly Tory paper out there at the moment, because the Mail and the

Telegraph seem to be lunging more and more in the direction of reform.

And The Mirror, of course, is at least

Labour-supporting, a critical friend to Labour, probably coming slightly to the left of where the Labour Party is now.

So they have had the sense so far not to try and meld those two things together and just have the same political outlook across both of them.

But the rest of it is going to be largely shared copy across all the papers.

Can I just ask, are they deep in the red?

I know you say that lots of people are still buying it, but I'm sure it's expensive to run.

What are the accounts looking like?

Pretty good if you ask the shareholders.

Indeed.

Shareholders are paid more than 11% dividends, which is higher than any FTSE 100 company.

And the money sloshing around in there is dependent on sales of the physical product.

I just want to make this absolutely clear.

The print version is sustaining a profitable organization.

So what is the rationale that's been given for these 300 roles under threat 321?

Effectively it's more money for shareholders.

But

what have they said the reason is?

Is that we're integrating and we're making things better for the future?

What is it?

They believe the future is digital and they believe the future is in video.

So they want much more video content.

Is that right, Adam?

Yes, yeah, yeah.

There was a big thing that happened in 2015 when a lot of newspaper organizations, media organizations across the board pivoted to video very famously because the Facebook algorithm changed and supposedly video was the great future.

And no one seems to stop to question whether a load of sort of print hacks who'd been writing for a living for the whole of their careers would actually be the best at producing videos or maybe we could sort of leave that to broadcasters and people who actually do that.

But as ever with a lot of Reach's tactics, they seem to have caught onto this about 10 years later.

So yes, they've decided that video podcasts, I mean, I'm not going to slag off podcasts being

how I'm here doing one.

They've decided, oh, which obviously are a growth area, so they're doing a lot of that, but also a lot more video reporting rather than concentrating on, as we say, to reiterate again, the written words that bring in 75% of their income.

So they are creating new jobs, aren't they, in the kind of video arena?

They are.

And they will be much, much lower-page jobs as well for younger people, which I'm sure is also an attraction.

But the other thing that they've decided is the future is just the number of clicks they get on website stories, and that leads to what makes the bosses at

Reach, Piers North, and David Dickinson very cross when we call it clickbait.

But honestly, it really, really cannot be described as anything else.

Have you any examples?

Well, it's funny you should ask, Ian.

I wondered whether you might like a quick Reach PLC clickbait quiz.

What the hell are they talking about?

Yes!

Okay,

question number one.

This is a recent headline which went across all of the local papers in Reach's table.

Drivers told to place conkers in car in September or face £2,500 fines.

Conkers.

What the hell are they on about?

Well, they deter spiders, don't they?

We have a winner.

This is incredible.

I think this is probably best expressed.

The convoluted process by which someone got to that as a clickbait headline is perhaps best explained by the correction they were obliged to publish exactly a week later.

And they said,

in fact, the potential fine relates to dangerous driving if a driver should react on spotting a spider in their car while driving and experts there's a lot of experts who appear in stories like this unnamed experts experts had suggested placing a conker in the vehicle which is believed to deter spiders and then the caulker we are happy to clarify i don't really believe the thing about conkers i know a lot of people swear by it i do do it myself and i have actually crashed my car when an insect landed on me so

okay yeah

yeah were you fined No, I did pay the damages to the other person's car.

It was a really big insect in my defence.

Let's carry off.

Let's move on.

Okay, the next one is also a pretty scary headline.

If you haven't yet faced your 2,500 fines for not carrying your Conker with you, then you should be warned that Lloyd's, Barclays, and NatWest customers are urged to close account within 48 hours.

Customers of some of the nation's most frequented banks have been issued a 48-hour notice to close their accounts.

Did you get this notice?

No, I am with one of those banks, and I missed that.

Do I need to go now?

I think you're all right, because it turns out that actually all it is was a press release from a price comparison website pointing out there are some better savings rates available from other banks.

There is no 48-hour notice.

Nothing has been issued.

It's just complete and it was a very, very boring financial press release dressed up as that warning.

I do find that these stories,

they do engage me quite a lot because I read them thinking, wait,

this isn't at all what the headline promised me.

So maybe they're trying to drive deeper reading.

If the headline tells you accurately what's in the article, you sort of know it already.

And at the end of that deeper reading, do you think, well, this is

clearly a quality news site that I want to read more stuff from?

Or do you feel slightly cheated and like they're taking the Mickey out of you a bit?

Well, I'm quite interested in the idea of Andy crashing a car

because a giant insect landed on him.

I mean,

if this podcast was about anything interesting, that would be headlining it.

It's such an embarrassing memory and it's from the last two years as well.

Let's just, let's plow on.

On we go.

Potatoes will stay sprout-free for months, and the months is in inverted commas.

I'm not sure whether that's relevant or not.

For months by storing them in an unusual kitchen location.

Can you guess what that unusual kitchen location might be?

Is it the fridge?

It is the fridge.

And I can tell you that the mirror, because this one was actually from the mirror, the mirror was so thrilled with this life hack that they ran it in May and then again in June and again in July.

And presumably the potatoes from May are still looking fantastic in that unusual location.

I think I take things too literally.

I thought if the potatoes are sprout-free, it means you just store them not near any sprouts.

And then you're away.

Just quickly, wasn't there a thing about, was this Reach, it was them having to link to other articles or was that someone else?

Oh no, that was extraordinary.

That was one of the many brilliant editorial innovations that have been brought in by Reach.

They said that every story that went, every news story that went on the website had to contain a link in the third paragraph to another story.

Nothing unreasonable about that.

You know, you want to keep people on your site, send them to another relevant story.

The word relevant, not the case.

This was not just a story that the editor might think was relevant.

It was one from a list that was sent out by management every day.

Didn't matter what it was, you just had to cram it in there.

So it ended up with some extraordinary juxtapositions.

My favourite one of all of them was a story about a family who was stopped from boarding at East Midlands Airport because the passport was damaged.

And paragraph three began, this comes after an octopus climbed out of an aquarium tank and tried to eat boy six in front of his mum.

Not at East Midlands Airport, I think in Florida.

But it just came after

that.

Which literally, temporarily, is true.

I think journalism's safe.

They have, I would like to say, abandoned this plan now, possibly because three issues of private height running.

We ran examples of quite how silly this was, and it has now been abandoned.

That one spoil sport.

Okay, that is it for this edition of page 94, which comes after

a man is eaten by a wasp in Midlothian.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get more fantastic stories, more stories like Justine's brilliant ones about the PHSO, the magazine can be found on newsstands.

You can either go to private-foni.co.uk if you're willing to make the commitment to an extremely reasonably priced subscription, or you can just go to your nearest news agent and get a copy of Private Eye.

Lots of jokes, lots of cartoons, lots of stories.

It's great.

Go and do it now.

Thanks to all of today's contributors.

Thanks to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing, and thank you to you for listening.

Bye for now.

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