Delivering for Ordinary People (with Marina Hyde)

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Hello, and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio for a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Amanda Unicci and Helen Lewis is off for one more week.

So this week we have another guest Helen.

I'm joined by writer, journalist, the funniest person in print,

Marina Hyde, and co-presenter of,

I wouldn't say the enemy.

They're just another podcast, really.

Just another podcast.

About something totally different.

So in my tool that you've managed to find time in your diary.

I can always find time in my diary for you, Amanda.

And it's an honor to be a guest, Helen, I must say.

This is a very cheap imitation of the real thing.

Well, we'll be the judge of that.

Oh, I can be cheap.

Oh, yes.

What we're going to look at this week is the phrase.

Now, I'm not sure anyone has actually said this phrase, but when you hear it, you'll think, yes, I've heard many, many people say this phrase.

I just can't remember who and when, which is delivering for ordinary people.

Yes.

And that takes in delivery, which is a whole subset of actions that we can talk about.

And then this phrase, ordinary people.

We're going to sort of parse that in in a moment but uh before that you said this is the oasis in your week this is the oasis in my week armand because i know you've had a really interesting time which i'm about to ask you okay go ahead

but i am in the remorseless running to the end of a summer term as a mother of three children of fairly similar age and every single day someone's got a science fair or a sports day or a something

and it is a conspiracy and many others are involved in it and many others are in pain And that's what I've been doing.

And there's no end in sight to this.

So I'd far rather say to you, Armando, I believe you've been on an aeroplane somewhere.

All right.

I have.

I've just come back from Tbilitzi, Tbilisi in Georgia.

It's a conference that happens every year called ZEG.

ZEG is Georgian for the day after tomorrow.

And it's the theme of the conference is journalists, filmmakers, writers, documentary makers, presenters, news

aficionados, and then people like me talking about how we report on what's happening now.

So maybe last year it was all about AI.

The year before that, it was very much about Putin and Ukraine.

I mean, this year it was slightly different.

It was really Georgia itself because events in Georgia are such that an election took place that is still being, the results are still being questioned.

There are protests on the street.

And it's the first time I heard,

it wasn't like tension in the air, but in conversations with people from Tbilisi, at some point they would say, but a friend of mine has just been put in prison for four years for protesting.

So it's that sudden sense of things have changed right on your doorstep.

For me, I did ask myself why I was there because my luggage got lost.

It stayed, it wasn't in Georgia, which was fine.

So I had to do most of the conference wearing, you know, the clothes I...

Traditional Georgian dress.

No, it was t-shirt and shorts.

And I did mention this, but then I thought, my God, my idea of suffering is as nothing compared to

the sessions where from, you know, a doctor who had just come back from Gaza and describing the appalling conditions there, someone else who, you know, took up journalism after his mother, a journalist, was murdered.

And there was me saying, I haven't got clean pants.

Despite that, for the next three days, everyone kept coming up to me and going, have you heard about your suitcase?

Would you like some clothes?

You know, but I did feel very, very small.

What were the sessions?

What sort of sessions do you do?

What kind of things?

So I did one on AI with Chris Wiley, Cambridge, Cambridge analytica revelations and he was very interesting

he was saying that on ai you know we're sold it as this you know amazing digital wonder drug that will do everything but he said underneath it all is the people pushing it don't yet quite know how good it is you know it we can see superficially the things it's great at but actually it's also still bonkers you know so if you said you know ai write me a marina hide column for the guardian out would come a thousand a thousand words.

You'd read, you know, but would you read it?

Because you wouldn't look at it and think, oh, that seems fine.

And you just, but rather like the terms and conditions that come up on your phone, you wouldn't read everything.

And pocketed away somewhere in it would be a phrase like, you know, carrots don't exist or something like that, which will then just go into,

it would just become fact once you've posted that.

You know, we don't, we're impressed superficially by what AI can do, but underneath it all, your Sam Altmans and whoever are kind of still not sure what the next phase is.

I'm so excited by Mordech Bros who don't quite know what their product can do.

Yeah.

That went so well the last time we did it.

Exactly.

The social media guys didn't really know.

And it seems, I mean, I'm, you know, I'm still on the fence about it, but it doesn't seem to have been the greatest experiment, does it?

And what they say, though, but is if you give us more money, we will be very near to finding out what it can do.

That seems to be the

so I don't know whether I left Georgia in hope or in trepidation, really.

Hope for the generosity of the Georgians supplying me with spare underwear.

Yeah.

But trepidation about the fact that we are handing over vast amounts of our government and data to things that its owners don't know what they'll do with them.

No, even though we already have sort of done a run of this experiment.

Yeah.

For the last 20 years, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's talk about ordinary people.

Please let's talk about

tech bros.

Who are, yes.

Well, that's my question.

What do politicians mean when they say ordinary people?

Well, I tell you who I think ordinary people are.

Or sometimes they'll say real people.

Real people?

Real people.

I couldn't possibly.

I'm a journalist, so I couldn't possibly be a real person.

No, no, you're some kind of politician.

Politician themselves, I think, is allowed to float in a sort of...

Yes.

They are allowed not to be categorised.

But actually, the thing about being a person in the real world is that you're not qualified to say what you're interested in.

You require a politician to ventriloquise you.

They've basically got their hand at your backside and they say ordinary people are interested in this or ordinary people aren't interested in this.

And ordinary people lie beyond, they lie in the realm of what we call cut through.

So they make it sound, don't they, like a sort of like a thicket, a briar forest, and in the middle of it might, if you hack all your way through, a sleeping princess of an ordinary person might be in there.

Ordinary people are slightly related to the Westminster bubble in the sense that they're not in it.

And the way people describe the Westminster bubble, you would always think it's like a sort of iron dome shield that would protect everyone in there, except the one thing we know is that everything goes wrong in the Westminster bubble.

So it's very, very burstable.

But you said ventriloquise, and I did, I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, that there is a phrase, I don't know who coined it, called ventriloquise xenophobia, which is when politicians don't say, I think there are too many people coming in.

They'll say, what people say to me is there are too many.

So the the politician doesn't want to be accidentally associated with a comment that might feel a little bit spicy.

Yeah.

But they get away with it by saying, No, this is what an ordinary person

they put in.

Yes, they put in that distance.

Here's some examples that I was thinking about ordinary people, and when we hear about them, people out there in the real world.

Partygate, which I think, I think it's fair.

Okay, well, we'll get to what ordinary people did feel about that.

But a cabinet minister during Partygate, when it was all coming out about all the parties during lockdown in number 10, when everyone everyone else had to see their relatives die on iPads,

said, when you get out there in the real world and you talk to real people,

none of this stuff is a concern.

Oh,

yeah.

And someone else joined in.

Another high-profile member of the Conservative Party joined in at the time and said, there are many things which matter much more to people in the real world.

I was like, have you listened to a Vox pop in the last couple of weeks?

Because I'm pretty sure you'll find that there's only one subject that matters to any caller.

Were they going to just the wrong ordinary people?

This was a critical mass of ordinary people on one doorstep.

They really, yeah, they really cared about this.

I went to one doorstep where 500 ordinary people were living and as one, they said, were not really interested.

This is just Westminster tittle-tattle.

After a while, you can't, in fairly short order with that, remember how quickly...

the government lost support.

So there was polling to prove it.

But then they weren't able to talk about it because they had to wait for a Sue Gray report.

But when the Sue Gray report came out, Boris Johnson said, well, I actually think what people want us to focus on is whether or not the government can be trusted to deliver.

Oh.

More on that later.

Yes, yes.

So once ordinary people have said what they think and something's been said about it, we have to go and talk about something completely different.

And I think you're right about how it's used.

So politicians are, they use the phrase to half-identify with the phrase, don't they?

So if a politician's saying, look, this is what ordinary people are saying, he or she is really implying, and I am part of that group of ordinary people.

Yeah.

Brackets, even though I'm a politician, which is a far from ordinary type of person, close brackets.

And it's also implying that there is some other

that's not ordinary.

I don't know what it is.

Is it subordinary?

If anyone asking an unfortunate question is not ordinary.

No, that's right.

If you're talking about something they don't want to talk about,

then you're a sort of alien and you're

a denizen of the Westminster bubble.

That's right.

And then you do, and I've noticed

I mean Farage does this a lot but I'm sure it cuts across all the parties there is that oh here we go again one more legacy media coming in or some one lefty lovey guardian writing

tofu wearing north london inhabiting and I don't know 101 other activities that ordinary people don't do latte sipping um well latte sipping is one of my worst ones because I mean the terrible state of our high streets which politicians are aware of because people write to them all the time.

Go and look at one of our high streets.

If it's not boarded up, it's charity shops and coffee shops, okay?

Everyone sips lattes.

Go to any station, go to a station in the red wall.

And it's a tiny pleasure of people's day.

It's a milky drink, okay?

And they like it.

And it says something about...

the crapsack world that you've left us with that that's the great pleasure of the day everyone sips lattes okay the length and breadth of this country because there's not a lot else to do and there's not a lot else on the high street and coffee shops are about our only boom industry.

So when I hear things like that, I can't say, but they're sort of bad, they're like bad jokes, they're kind of a quick short

and it also does make them sound quite weird.

I remember Keir Starmer saying, almost nobody's talking about trans issues.

I do sometimes just wonder why on earth we spend so much time discussing something which isn't a feature of the dinner table or the kitchen table or the cafe table or the bar.

So he just named a lot of tables, really, there.

And you can just feel him that if I keep saying tables, then no one is going to ask me a follow-up.

This is just bits of word now.

Everyone listening is going, no, that's not my table.

Oh, that, yeah, yes, I have that, a bar table, right?

Yeah, so you're talking about me, just naming naming tables, but they always sound so odd when they do it because you can't really picture any of them

in those spaces.

Yeah, like as it's becoming clear, you can't actually define what an ordinary person is because it is more or less in the eye of the politician who is saying it, isn't it?

Who they mean.

The implication that they are similar by acknowledging ordinary people.

I think to politicians, an ordinary person is in their head, an ordinary person is someone who's not that interested in politics.

Well, yeah, I think that's right.

But actually, those people, or they're interested in the things that that politician thinks they're about.

Yes.

So when Liz Truss's mini-budget, which you may recall,

budget.

She said, now I've done a lot of traveling around the country.

When it was all completely, she was standing in the sort of smoking ruins of it.

She said, I've done a lot of traveling around the country and people aren't interested in this.

What they care about, ordinary people, is job opportunities, business investing, high streets, roads being built, mobile phone signal.

They don't care about this.

It's like, well, I sorry to have to make that causal link, but you can't really have any of those things because of your mini budget now.

And I'll tell you something else ordinary people definitely care about is their mortgage payments.

Okay, so yeah, I remember her defining the enemies, the enemies of ordinary people as the anti-growth alliance.

Oh, yes.

Or were they the anti-growth coalition?

The anti-growth coalition.

Yes, but they'd formed a coalition.

They were actually from disparate sources of that's right, yeah.

But they'd somehow managed to work.

But she managed to thread these disparate groups.

So that which included the BBC, it included possibly the royal family, depending on what Charles had said, the church,

everyone, basically.

Yes, it included all sorts of people.

Yeah, it included the guilt market.

I mean, yes, from someone who really thought that markets were the ultimate arbiter of everything.

Yeah, yeah.

The markets became an enemy of ordinary people.

And now that she's out of power, if that's what she was ever in, she talks about the deep state and how the deep state ejected her from politics rather than

public opinion and her government and her MPs.

That's a big conspiracy.

And obviously, you see it far more in American politics.

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You know, they talk about Washington.

You know, I'm not from Washington.

I'm sure Farage says, you know, I'm not, I'm outside the Westminster bubble, which implies that actually politics itself is a dirty business that you shouldn't be associated with.

Well, I mean, you know,

certain amount of sympathy for that position, but in fact, you know, what politics is, maybe we should just come up with another name for politics.

It does need a rebrand.

It does, because, you know, it profoundly affects our lives, whether it's local politics or national politics.

But this sense of Westminster, you know, I always think if Westminster suddenly moved to, say, I don't know, York, you know that in 10 years' time you will get politicians going, this is this whole York-centered.

Oh, it's such a relief to get out of York and speak to some non-York people.

You know, it'll become this totemic idea of all that's wrong and bad with how the country is run.

But also, by you implying that, it means that you're not tainted by it.

But the thing about both those people you've just mentioned, Trump and Farage, is that they do speak in a much more ordinary or relatable way.

And I increasingly find the way that the entire lexicon, the entire way of talking about politics is like some ancient theatre.

It's like the light from one of those stars that actually died.

It's just reaching us now, but the star is dead.

And you see the way people talk, and I'm sure we'll talk more about this with this word delivery, but you see the way that people talk, and you think nobody has ever said words like this, you know, at the cafe table, at the bar, at the

breakfast bar.

Do you do bump into people?

Oh, yeah, I was just talking on the doorstep with someone.

Have you ever done anything that's been multi-pronged?

Yeah, yeah.

And my old favourite is turbocharge, which is back.

Turbocharge is back.

Yeah, I have noticed that.

I think we're going to be a turbocharged AI country or something.

Those phrases.

And I mean, even someone like Hirostamer, who would say he's not a traditional politician and that

he had an outside

life before he went into politics, rather than be a kind of party official or a campaigner or, you know, even he when the microphones are in front of him will will talk about um missions and targets and delivery and you know but they're buried under this language it is completely i've always wondered why do they do it they must know that this because there's a way of doing and and you've got they've got to look around and see that this is an age which for whatever reason prizes authenticity above absolutely anything yeah and they all sound completely weird like nobody talks like that and farage and trump who don't obey those rules and don't talk in that kind of, you know, very sort of rigidly, politically theatrical way,

seem much more real to people.

Yeah.

And yet, it's almost like they take you aside as soon as you get in and tell you to how to start talking, and you lose the complete ability to communicate.

I mean, I just think it's at a real crisis point, and people have got to start.

I do think this goes back to New Labour.

I was trying to think about this the other day.

I think it goes back to New Labour and that message management.

Yeah, speakings of excellence.

There were very Blair out of the language was ridiculous.

Speakers of excellence.

Hello,

clusters, clusters, skill clusters.

Nobody talked about clusters.

Have you ever clustered?

I've never clustered.

This mad way of talking, but also a very centralized way of talking.

You know, everyone with their pager and their line to take and a way of say, and they were so terrified of saying one wrong word in case, you know, Peter Mandels came round and boiled them or whatever that they had to just stick on message.

And actually, the tyranny of staying on message, it does take people to just say, Well, I don't mind, you know, the press because the press, by the way, report on things in exactly the same way.

By the way, you know, I am a journalist and I notice it all the time.

No disrespect to anyone because I'm part of this too, but it is like an ancient way of doing it all.

And it's a way of saying, Oh, one person said this, and someone said there's a split amongst the labour

to senior ranks about this or that because you'll want to try and find something to write a story about.

And all of this is dead and meaningless, and people don't care about this.

I mean, now I'm citing ordinary people, but just because I don't like it.

But

they don't care about it.

Are you an ordinary person?

Yeah, I know.

And we've got to get, everyone has just got to get through the terrible period where we allow people to make gas, we allow people to understand.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, if you follow the Blair years, and I don't want to sound sinister about this, but one by one, anyone in the Blair cabinet who was in any way idiosyncratic or had a dint of personality gradually disappeared.

You know, Robin Cook and Mo Morlam.

The only one who was left was John Prescott because he's John Prescott.

Well, he was a sort of licensed fool.

Exactly.

That's John being John.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, John John.

You know, he's, you know, he understands the ordinary.

That's ordinary people speak like John.

But in almost in the most cynical way, that they had a sort of market map and he addressed an area of what they would regard as a bad thing.

It's like John Prescott is our diversity and inclusion hiring, you know.

Yeah.

So we've ticked ordinary.

And then there was this managerial speak that, you know, beacons of excellence.

And

I mean,

I think we should get on to delivery, but we should go on to delivery.

But just one thing I remember about politicians who say things like ordinary people, or they just want to, you know, they just want to get on with their day.

It pulls against this other trend

where we're all being told we're extraordinary.

Each one of us has the freedom to be the me you want to be, that we are super, you know, ordinary is an insult.

Yeah.

You know, it's all about encouraging.

Everyone is special.

It's their hyper-individualized people.

Exactly, their own idiosyncratic.

And you get this pool.

And the other thing, it sort of implies that ordinary is

the desired status for everyone.

And yet politicians campaign on making our universities, you know, the envy of the world.

And yet you're criticized if you go to one of them.

It's all about social mobility, about aspiration.

Free speech is we want innovation, we want geniuses, we want mavericks.

What do you?

You seem to want ordinary people.

Yeah, and there is, there is, well, you say we want mavericks, but you know, I remember from the referendum, the Brexit debate, Michael Grove saying we've had enough of experts.

That sense of the elite, the, and I've said this before, what's wrong with being very good at, or an expert in your field?

Well, they could no longer say that anymore because elite was regarded as a sort of desiccated, kind of failed liberal class.

So then what they had to say is, we want mavericks, we want people who are different, people who go around the edge, which is what, you know, non-swamp people, non-kind of metro elite people, whoever it is, you know, and that slight disparagement of anyone who does the traditional course by like going for a kind of

get a degree in something.

I can't believe you worked hard, went to school, and tried to get into an industry where people need you, or into the civil service where people, we do actually need people to work.

And I do wonder whether there's something, is there something in our national character, rather like Eskimo's have like 50 words for types of snow.

We've got like, you know, more than a dozen phrases for people who are a bit clever that nags at them, you know, smart Alec, smart ass, too clever for their own good.

That's very good.

I haven't clever clothes.

Smart pants.

You know, that sense of, you know, if you show any kind of no better than she should be.

That's one of my favourites.

Oh, God.

She's no better than she should be.

You know, and to me,

when I hear phrases like ordinary snow, it sort of implies that they're trying to put us in a box that we're not allowed to get out of.

Yeah.

That we should be just, just, we should be happy with what we've been given and stop complaining.

Well, I find it quite sort of lump and proletariat, don't you?

It's like you're in a big homogenized mass.

I'm going to say, by the way, you shouldn't, obviously, you couldn't possibly be expected to speak for yourself.

I'm going to say what you do and don't care about.

Yeah.

And the things that you do care about are the general sort of small things that I think I might be able to fix.

Exactly.

The small things.

So that gets us on to delivery.

Let's talk about

delivery.

Again, this is a word that nobody uses in anything normal.

If you say the word delivery, all I'm thinking is, oh my God, it's a message from every and they're not coming today, or my courier's been delayed, or there's some sort of delivery is a soul-crushing experience for now that we live in a male-order society.

Yeah, most people experience delivery as an annoyance every single day.

Yes, it's no longer exciting delivery, is it?

No, if anything, it's quite an irritation.

It's another one.

And first of all, it is such a meaningless word that they shouldn't even use it.

And it's sort of become one of those words like an auto-antonym, you know, like cleave and cleave, you know, something that means it's opposite, an autoantonym.

All right, cool.

So cleave, to cleave, to cut, you know, to hug off, but if you cleave to something, you join with it.

And so if you trim something, you could be cutting something off, but you could also be adding extra edge.

So there are these words called autoantonyms.

I feel delivery is like that because delivery, every time I hear it, I think, well, that won't be happening.

And part of that is, and not just with every, who, by the way, you know, the other career companies are available, I should say, but there's a sort of sense of national hopelessness.

And we we no longer expect better.

And I do think that I remember talking to you in the pandemic about that very interesting book, Failures of State, and it was so interesting in some ways that so many terrible mistakes were made in all sorts of different ways.

And I just think that it didn't make such a big crack all of that because actually people deserved better, yes, but they didn't expect better.

Yes, no one was surprised by what happened.

We don't believe really in ourselves.

And I tell you what, the evidence also suggests that we can spend a bazillion you know that is a technical term pounds trying to build up trying to build a rail link and it will come to somewhere in West London but not one of the main lines you know just to go that extra mile I think it is almost an extra mile HS2 correct me if I'm wrong but at the time when it was launched you could see it coming couldn't you well actually no you couldn't you could see it not coming yeah that's it not coming you know why I've always said about hs2 why didn't they start building it in Leeds because that was the main point about it which was you were to be able to get to leeds don't start in london you know if you start from leeds you're then committed to having to finish it i'm amazed you didn't just sort of start in the middle and just build out a little white elephant tunnel i mean in a way the back tunnel that you keep seeing the aerial picture i have heard again and again how these big contracts get given out i mean we've talked in the past about how government ministers are just bamboozled by anyone in business or anyone who has a company or anyone in tech who they just think oh my god someone who knows stuff about this has come into my office.

They're asking for a lot of money, but I know if they sign this contract, it's all taken off my desk and I don't have to worry about it.

Politicians don't believe in themselves anymore.

And that is the thing, is that they have progressively given away their power.

I mean, it was interesting.

Do you remember that time when Belgium didn't have a government?

I can't remember how long it was for.

It was more than eight years.

But you know, Belgium continued to function.

Yeah, yeah.

And so that suggests to me that the power in Belgium lies somewhere other than the Belgian parliament.

I slightly, I not so much disagree as I have a variation of what you thought about that, which is I think some politicians go in thinking that they are extremely capable,

even though they've had absolutely no experience in the field that they are ministers of in the past.

They go in rather like, you know, rejected apprentice candidates

who believe in themselves.

You know, I can turn this around.

When it was the early days of COVID and Matt Hancock was talking about we want to get 100,000 tests up and running by the end of the week, and they posted operation moonshot was it operation yeah they they they posted up hancock and a few of his aides with a whiteboard and all the figures that had come in that added up to over a hundred thousand with a thumbs up as if they were sort of working it out in one office all this expertise and so it felt like a headlight yes it's an instagram politics

institution is a class i don't think they believe in themselves anymore which is why they constantly and there are certain types of politicians who actually believe even more power should be given to the particularly to the the huge tech companies

and that they would eventually serve, I assume, the logical end of this, as a sort of a prime minister, as a sort of front of house figure, a sort of maitre dee.

A kind of mascot.

Yeah, yes, a mascot.

It's the country's mascot, really.

And Peter Till and Sam Alton and whoever are actually running.

Because they do, you know, they can create seamless systems.

Which takes us back to what I said right at the start, which is...

Actually, they don't really know.

You know, the tech bros don't actually know what it is they do.

And actually, what we do know about the tech bros is that they may be be able to glide through their seamless world on their jets and whatever, but it involves millions of people paddling frantically below the surface, being Uber drivers or delivery drivers, or all of these

disrupting things have actually let, you know, you see the bottom end of it and it's 20 people sleeping in a dorm in East London so that they can do this.

And you think, well, I mean, their world doesn't seem very seamless.

I'm sure yours does.

And talking about the power of the politician, I think as the things that politicians can change, as it reduces because, you know, there are outside forces like world, global trade, war, climate, and so on, technology, they get more confident about the process of promising what they'll do, the missions that they'll go on, the delivery rates they promise.

But it's about smaller and smaller areas, which is why I think, again, you mentioned Farage and talking the language of older people.

The ones who've been elected to run councils, they've prioritized filling potholes, getting the bins

because they're very, very obvious, measurable things.

You know, long-term projects like, you know, national infrastructure and bringing social care up to date and so on, that's a harder thing to plan.

If it is done successfully, that success will come in about 15 or 20 years, so you won't be around to get the credit.

Well, the short-termism is extraordinary now.

But actually, people think it's quite interesting over the past sort of few years, what's emerged is a theory, deliverism, the theory that if you actually do little things, then it makes people's lives better, and in return, they give you their vote.

People are now starting to see that that doesn't necessarily follow.

And in a way, I'm sort of quite behind the idea that it shouldn't always follow because deliverism kind of suggests that people are motivated above all by material things, and that if you make things materially better, whereas, and of course, we know that people on the left are allowed to vote against their material interests and their financial interests.

In fact, if they have money, they are advised to, and then they get a lot of self-regard from doing so

if other people vote against their materialist if something matters more to them than money then they're called stupid well you're going to be poorer so you're stupid and that it seems to me that's one of those real things and that is actually what you need to be serving as well as delivering on things is that you need to sort of be serving people a vibe

if i might put it that way you must be telling them something about the sort of country they want to live in and that sort of migrated away from our politics and what people kept saying is that you know if you deliver on this, if you kind of fulfill your promises, then people will just reward you with their vote.

And we can see now that that hasn't happened.

And that happened to the Biden administration talked about how he passed a big growth bill, you know, jobs and whatever.

He did a lot.

And it was.

But it was all in areas that fell within those political

lexicography traps of

measuring growth or measuring infrastructure or measuring, you know, it's not.

And I can't say it was long term because it was maybe 15 years.

But that in politics is like now something from another planet.

People were saying is, yeah, but I don't feel that my life has got better.

So, you know, the abstract notion of the country might, there might be an argument to say that it's improved over the last four years, but I don't feel.

And that's similarly, that's where Keir Stamer, I think, is his problem with his

attempt to kind of not go for the vibe and not go for the quick headline, but to declare that what they're working on is something long term, in that we've become less and less patient with wanting to wait for the benefits of something long-term.

I don't know whether it's to do with attention span, or we sort of now expect something long

straight away.

I think it is social media.

And of course, we all know about how, you know, there are however many news cycles a day now, and there used to be maybe one.

Yeah.

So there's that.

But I do think people's patience has been tried ridiculously.

How long have things not really changed?

It's really interesting.

You know, people now talk about who is the reform voter?

Well, let me tell you, the reform voter was the Brexit voter.

And before that, they were the person who got done over in the financial crisis.

You know,

this is not a new type of human.

Yes.

This is the same type of human you've been letting down for quite a long time.

So it's...

Well, yes, that's the other thing, of course.

The reason politicians in the main parties can't really identify...

or are reluctant to identify systemic failings that require, you know, a concerted effort over the years is if they say that, it kind of implies that they got it wrong the last time they were in power.

We're seeing that with the discussion about grooming gangs.

And, you know, at the moment, in the House of Commons, the language is about whether this current government got it right.

It's away from what the Louise Casey report is talking about, which is, you know, this has been something that has been unchecked and not dealt with over the last 10 to 15 years.

But you cannot say that as a politician in either Conservative Labour, because it implies that you were a fault.

Just arguing about who did or didn't implement this bit of which report.

I mean, it's so completely ridiculous because one was the children's minister and one was it.

It's so ridiculous.

But you're sort of like, well, hang on, I'm no longer in government, so my slate's wiped clean.

And that is the sort of demented short-termism of it all.

And I think we, the ordinary person, I'm putting me in that category now.

We can all be one.

We can all be one.

You can be who you like to be.

Yeah, if Robert Jenrick can be one, so can I.

I think we see that, though, don't we?

And I think we are frustrated that there is no concerted effort

across parties to acknowledge that certain social care is another one that just gets booted.

Every five years, there's always a, we're going to look at this.

Oh, it's really hard.

We might not be able to look at this.

There is no attempt to find consensus or not some woolly, wishy-washy kind of compromise, but ideas from all around.

Let's all accept that we've all made mistakes in the past.

We haven't dealt with this problem the way we should.

But let's all admit it so that we can now sit down and try and work something out.

Well, this is why there are no big ideas in politics anymore.

Actually, something, speaking of social care, you know, Theresa May's idea in the 2017 general election was a big idea.

Yes, and

immediately within 15 seconds, known as the dementia tags.

Yes.

People are frightened of having big ideas in politics.

And as a result, all the interesting ideas and perhaps many of the interesting people are working in things like tech, in the lots in the charity sector actually they're really interesting solutions but I don't feel that the big ideas are in politics anymore and they're certainly not enunciated by anybody I mean as we're talking about this weird dead language and then they're not enunciated by anybody what what do we do what do we do

well I mean I do think we have to go through pain um and I wonder whether you know God this is as I'm just sort of thinking off the top of my head but I do feel that I've just asked you how do we sort the country out so

and if you could make it quick, the fact of Trump being someone who is so completely, I mean, is he even a politician?

Being so completely outside of the system, the way he talks, surely it acts as a kind of snowplow for perhaps someone from another part of the political spectrum to come out and also speak in a different way and not necessarily be picked up on every gaffe.

Well, lots of food to chew on there, food for thought, food there that one day hopefully can be packaged and delivered.

As thought.

Before we go, we have a few quick fire questions that we want to ask if people come in.

You may or may not have an answer to these.

First was, what's the best political speech or interview you've ever seen?

Well, I mean, I'm very changeable on my best of anything.

And actually, given what we've been talking about, I'm so tired of these fine speeches.

You hear lots of fine speeches.

There were some great fine speeches in the U.S.

election.

The Democrats had lots.

It shows you how much speeches matter.

That David Ogilvy, you know, the great ad man, David Ogilvie.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, he's amazing.

Now, he didn't like it when people said his ads were creative because he felt that his job, and they were, he was a very creative man, but his job was to sell a product.

And he said, he was very contemptuous of those sort of people.

He said, when Aeschinese spoke, they said, how well he speaks.

But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, let us march against Philip.

So I want a let's march speech.

I want a speech which makes something actually happen.

Yes.

I've had enough speeches.

Not the grand words.

Sorry.

Yeah.

I want a speech that, dare I say, delivers.

Yeah.

Or makes me deliver or something.

So what would you get rid of?

Is there a political phrase that you would chuck in the bin?

Yes, there is.

I'm just asking questions.

Ah, yes.

Yeah,

I know what you're doing.

No, I know exactly what you're doing.

You're not just asking questions.

Also, I think it's your job to find some answers.

So it's like journalists who can't be bothered to stand stories up, so they just put two pictures on Twitter and say, join the dots.

Right.

Yeah, no, no.

That's not what you're doing here.

It's like something I once said, only half in half seriously, which is, you know, experimental theatre's been around for like 70 years now.

When are they going to come up with the results of their experiments?

You know,

give us some answers, I suppose.

Just asking questions is completely disingenuous.

Isn't that what the interviewer is meant to be doing?

Just asking questions.

You're meant to be doing the other part of that.

But all right, no, it's like, Farage, if you think something, then say it.

But I'm just asking is no good.

And who is the best political deliverer at the moment, if any?

Well, Trump, because he's completely, I mean, he doesn't feel to people even like a politician.

Yes.

He's like, there's a someone in the Legham movie called President Business.

There's an element of that, isn't there?

I mean, he just feels outside the system.

And as I say, I just desperately think we need people to become more...

I mean, he is authentic.

I suppose that's him.

I mean, it is authentic.

I always think about Trump, though, at some point, deliverism is going to come and hit him in that people in about two years three years time will be saying

has my life improved because of him because he does i think you're right i think he's very good at capturing the attention something we've discussed endlessly here uh he gets the mood of the moment he's always on he basically he's always on he manages to write the headlines

he manages to he manages he manages to be top billing i'm just asking the question is what will it be like in two or three years time when ordinary people ask themselves what their life is like.

I may be completely wrong.

They may go, actually,

it's a burning hellscape, but I much prefer that.

Well, maybe there'll be an election to decide it, Armando.

Maybe there won't.

Oh, yeah.

So let's wait and see.

Okay, yeah.

That's a phrase he uses all the time.

Let's see what happens is his answer to everything.

It's actually a parenting technique that's quite effective.

So maybe, maybe.

So we're all his children.

And on that note,

we bid farewell.

to our temporary Helen, Marina Hai.

It was an honour.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

I'll be back next week and we'll be rejoined by the real Helen Lewis.

All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Hello, Greg Jenner here.

I am the host of You're Dead to Me from BBC Radio 4.

We are the comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.

And we're back for a brand new series, Series 9, where we're covering all sorts of things from Aristotle to the legends of King Arthur to the history of coffee to the reign of Catherine of Medici of France.

We are looking at the arts and crafts movement and the life of Sojourner Truth and how cuneiform writing systems worked in the Bronze Age.

Loads of different stuff.

It's a fantastic series.

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We get great historians.

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So if you want to listen to You're Dead to Me, listen first on BBC Sounds.

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