The Island of Strangers and the Manacled Gimp of Brussels

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Hello, and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

With me, I'm Adi Inucci.

And me, Helen Lewis.

And this week, week, The Island of Strangers is being led by a manacled gimp.

Yes, we're looking at why politicians might use deliberately inflammatory language.

But first, Amanda, I read a lot of stuff in the papers about it's 20 years since The Thick of It, your

series about British politics.

This caught me by surprise, actually, because I got an email saying...

No, 2005 being 20 years ago, it's perpetually surprising to me.

It's quite frightening.

I got an email from, I think it was The Guardian, saying, you know, that interview you did about the 15th anniversary of The thick of it that we didn't use five years ago well

it's going out tomorrow

yeah and lots of people ask me you know would you do it now and i i say no because for a start malcolm tucker would be done for bullying really i mean he wouldn't survive in today's climate and quite rightly i said you're looking dubious i am looking dubious because i think i still think there are persistent complaints that come out about a kind of macho culture but i think you're right i think the hr departments have become much stronger i mean westminster is still rocked by lots of of sexual harassment and bullying claims.

Because everybody there is essentially 650 sole traders.

I think the civil service now has got much stronger policies on that.

So I don't think you get away with bullying civil servants.

I think Terry Coverley is now in charge of the civil service.

I think she's the Sue Grey.

I think she's stayed on.

Good.

She's the

quiet triumph of Terry.

But the other thing is, you know, the figure was done at a time when...

Politicians were worried they might have done something wrong and it might get out, but now there isn't that level of concern.

You know, when under Boris Johnson's government, a minister stood up and said, technically we're breaking international law, but only in a very limited and specific way, you kind of thought there has been a paradigm shift here now, that the idea of politicians at least pretending that they follow the rules has gone.

So it would be difficult to try and make that any more worrying than it already is.

But was it also for you a bit of a kind of loss of of faith or optimism about government?

Because I now see it going back as a very post-Iraq war invasion.

Yes.

The WMD story falling apart.

Yes.

After what had been a genuinely optimistic late 90s, Blair carried in on a huge majority, a new dawn has broken, all of this sense that things were on the up, they were changing.

Yes.

Which I don't, everyone's so cynical as a starting point now.

There's no loss of faith.

I think so.

You touched on the Iraq thing, and that was the thing that sparked my decision to do it.

I wanted to know how moments like that actually happen.

Is there any scrutiny and why not?

But in a funny way.

And also, thankfully, you know, shows like The Think of It have, you know, made politics a lot better, haven't they?

They've sorted everything out.

So there's no need.

Yes, like what Peter Cook used to say about all those Berlin

clubs that did so much to arrest the March of Hitler.

The other thing I think is still true, as it was then, is I remember you saying, and I think it's to The Guardian, about the fact that one of the main things you discovered was that politics was run by 23-year-olds olds yes you had the certainty that only a 23 year old armed with their oxford degree can bring to the middle exactly and you know our friend big balls or who has come up regularly

you know that doge thing of musk just bringing in 20 somethings to to shut down government all right which is what they also say about rock stars being needing to be young right needing to have that anger and belief that things are very simple and they can all be sorted out i remember people telling me when we were researching for veep that you know there is so much power in washington that if you just hang around even if you're like you're 21 and nobody actually knows who you are if you just hang around the right offices at some point you will be swept up in an entourage of some cabinet secretaries and end up you know administering things it's uh the number of people who take up tennis because they hear the secretary of state plays tennis or who when obama got in everybody took up basketball which yeah i imagine as a sport is not everyone's natural no if you're five foot zero then you're never going to make the big leagues yeah the other thing I found told you about basketball is Obama's kind of Gary, if you watch

the bagman, was called Reggie Love, and he was this tall ex-college basketball.

He was the keeper of the BlackBerry, wasn't he?

Like, he was the guardian of them, like this great piece of technology.

He showed us around the West Wing, but he kept referencing the TV show, The West Wing.

So he'd say, This is the Roosevelt room.

This would be where CJ and Josh would just, and I'm going, but you are, you are them.

We are actually literally next to the Oval Office.

Yeah.

And it's that thing of politicians seeing any dramatic portrayal of their world as flattering.

And I think that was another reason I stopped doing the thick of it, when politicians didn't realize that what we were showing was the problem rather than the solution.

I might have told you this before, but I was once about 10 years ago now talking to a spad, a special advisor, about what politics was really like.

And they said, it's just like the thick of it, except in the thick of it, they don't go around going, oh my God, it's just like being in the thick of it.

That was sort of the only difference.

And I think when you're working in politics, you just get so used to people shouting at you that even being sort of visible and being seen begins to feel like they're on our side.

Oh, yeah, there is somebody out there who's thinking of us, even if it's in a slightly malign way.

If you were going to do not a new thick of it, what is the bit of government?

What's the office you'd want it to be in?

Where's the place to be?

You see, that's the thing.

I think power now is slightly more and more outside government.

I'm very fascinated by these big companies like Circle and G4 and outsourcing companies.

I have no understanding of how they got into that position and how they've suddenly become experts in everything.

I mean, G4 used to be like a prison security firm, but now it does restaurant events and

bag checking at the Olympics and so on.

And a lot of these contracts, in the rush to cut public spending, normally what happens is a lot of very, very complex jobs get just given to these outsourcing companies.

But nobody does an inventory or an audit on how these companies recruit.

You know, when we hear that the adjudication of welfare benefits and disability benefits, we're going to get more people to look a little bit harder at their qualifications.

Who are these people?

Who are training these people?

Where do you recruit these people from?

These are the young answers.

So that's an interesting area.

And also, I hate to say it, big tech, you know, our friend Elan Musk and,

you know, the frat bros, the tech bros.

I think he's that's where a lot of power and influence is.

The one pleasing thing is that I would say the great Musk experiment has ended in terrible, terrible failure, which is very sad.

Couldn't be sadder.

But I think basically what the special election in Wisconsin, where he went, wore the cheese hat, poured a load of money in, and still didn't get the result he wanted.

And now this week said, I don't think I'm going to be giving any more money in politics anymore, is a bit kind of like, I'm taking my button ball home.

I know.

Yes, yes.

How surprising that you would react to this like a petulant child so have we reached you know maximum musk i wonder and now

and now the musk back begins

what have you been up to well i've had quite a busy week i i went to a pixies gig on friday which was um they're still around they are still around i i was one of the younger people in the brixton academy let me tell you which made was very cheering to me but um unfortunately your friend of mine chris morris has ruined the pixies for me he had a song called mother banger

and all the way through all i could think of there's a bit on on a line when it goes, ah, ah, my mother is a horror, ah, ah, my espionel a moipora.

And that is just basically every Pixie song.

So every time they started a new one, I just, my brain was playing Motherbanger in the background.

I have a very tiny knowledge of the Pixies because I started my radio career as a youth music presenter in Scotland.

Okay, I'm struggling.

Give me a moment to say.

I know.

I was born age 45, so it doesn't, I did a lot of reading of the NME and Melody Maker.

So I know a little bit about music from 1988 to 1990.

And then I, you know, I then became a producer in London, but I did shows on Radio One.

And there was the most surreal moment in my life when I was taken out for a coffee by the then controller of Radio One.

I said, the breakfast show presenter was standing down.

Would you ever think of perhaps as that something?

And in my head, I was thinking, well, that would be hilarious, but it would also just be the biggest scandal to hit the BBC.

And by God, there have been some big ones.

Well, see, the only thing is, in a way, it'd be great trolling, but you'd also have to get up at 4 a.m.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm not getting up at a time.

My commitment to comedy is not that much.

Not just that, but also to be enthusiastic on air from 6.30, which I think is a hard one.

No, terrible.

But the Pixies aren't the perfect band, just in case any middle-aged people out there are hoping to go to a gig, because they come on, bang on the stage at nine o'clock.

Absolutely no chat between songs, each of which is a maximum of three minutes long.

They played sort of 20 songs, and they're home in time for Last Orders.

Excellent.

Do they do matinees?

They should do a kind of over 60 sort of buffet special.

Yeah.

No, so I thoroughly recommend them to people who don't.

I mean, I went to the ERAs gig, you know, the Taylor Swift thing, and it was phenomenal, but it was three and a half hours long, which is just, you know.

Yes.

Can we wrap it up, Taylor?

Slightly fewer eras.

Swift in the name.

Languorous in nature.

Let's move to our main discussion.

Topic of the week.

Topic of the week.

Phrases of the week are island of strangers and

orange bowl chewing manacled gimp.

The sort of yin and yang of British politics.

Do you assume that everyone listening gets all that, or does anything need to be?

Guess which one of those was Keir Stahlman and which one of those was Boris Johnson?

Hard to call, isn't it?

The background to it is that Keir Stahlmer published a white paper on immigration last week in which he said, you know, we had to have fair rules, and in a diverse nation like ours, I celebrate that.

These rules become more important.

Without them, we risk becoming an island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.

When you listen to that, did you think objectionable?

Because people did find this objectionable.

You see, I'm one of those people who the first I heard of it was in the reporting of it.

So you're telling me you don't sit down to watch Kiss

on a midday.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I think you're lost.

Yes, thinking also about what he was saying, was this a conscious reference to Enoch Powell's speech in the 1960s?

It's 1968.

So the Rivers of Blood speech, as it's called, he warned essentially that white people, he was talking about white people, found themselves made strangers in their own country.

And that speech is infamous because it was around the time of the passing of the race relations bill, which essentially was going to criminalise racial discrimination.

And so so it is this infamously, overtly apocalyptic and racist speech, right, in which he talks about the black man having whip hand over the white man and says he has a prophecy, like in the Aeneid, of the river Tiber foaming with much blood.

I mean, it's, I would say, quite a lot stronger than anything his darmer

had to say.

But again, and we talked about this last week: trigger words and stranger, strangers in the land, strangers in our own country is a triggering phrase.

I suspect it was there, not quite by accident, but not quite as a a deliberate Enoch Powell reference.

We forget how old we are.

Well, you, Helen, forget how old I am.

I am.

I never get older.

So, I remember, and I think newspaper editors will pick up on the Enoch Powell thing.

I suspect that Starmer's 20-something speech writers were unaware of that phrase having connotations or connections with Enoch Powell.

However, I'm sure they were aware that it's a strong phrase and it is a phrase that would get picked up.

They should have done some due diligence.

The question is whether or not he meant it to have any of those connotations.

Yes, other people have argued.

No, what he means is

we're all strangers.

You know, we're too busy looking at our screens.

We're not going out.

The sense of community has collapsed.

That sense of connection has collapsed.

Because Moore in Common did some polling on this about how much percent of people do feel like they're strangers in their own country.

And I was surprised that a reasonable chunk of people did say yes, quite small, about 10% strongly.

More did.

But actually, it was British Asians who said most likely they did feel strangers in their own country.

So I think that the racial dynamics of it are not as simple as as they were in 1968.

But I don't know if we can really complain about it being inflammatory, given that most of the time we're complaining about how boring Kirstalma's speech is.

He's accidentally given an interesting speech here.

It just depends whether or not he wanted people to take away this inflammatory message or not.

I mean, I would say, like I said, I don't think it was a deliberate echo of Powell.

I think they were a bit careless in how it was used.

Well, I actually thought that the white paper introduction was more offensive.

So he said, under the Conservatives, quote, Britain has become a one-nation experiment in open borders.

The damage this has done to our country is incalculable.

And he had to go then go away and clean that up and actually say,

you know, immigration is not a kind of wholly bad thing.

It has enriched our country in a number of ways.

That's not what I was saying.

I think he uses the word incalculable, which is just quite a boring word.

It wasn't as damage.

Damage.

And there is that sense of him that other politicians pick up on that we're not yet getting a sense of what is it specifically

he believes.

If one week he or one week he could write incalculable damage from open borders and another week say actually controlled immigration is a good thing and we must celebrate it.

But this is also somebody who campaigned to stay in the EU which meant accepting freedom of movement and actually would have liked us to have a second referendum on that vote presumably hoping that the answer would be no we're not going to leave.

And so it does speak to I think the sense of is he just a focus group answer or does he have any underlying beliefs?

Yes.

And I think that was what maybe triggered so many people about this.

Exactly.

And I mean, I was talking to someone the other day who knows Stalma, who says that they believe fundamentally, you know, he does have beliefs and he does have opinions and strong beliefs, but he's not good at articulating what they are.

He's not giving us the bigger narrative, which is, you know, where are we heading?

Why are we doing this?

What are the pluses that we should get out of this and when?

And what are the things that we should expect?

Are the negatives?

And when will they be coming?

And so on.

I don't get that sense.

Well, my more brutal take is that he has all the views you would expect of somebody who is a lifelong human rights lawyer.

Yes.

But he also knows that those are the views of about 8% of the British population and he wants to be Prime Minister of a country that actually exists, that isn't just, you know, Islington.

May I introduce you to a new strand, which I'm calling Big Butch Kia, which is that to accompany the white paper, he has started doing...

tweets that I'd like to read internally in the voice of Danny Dyer, right?

Here we go.

We've launched the largest criminal action against water companies in in history.

When I said I would take on those pumping filth into our waters, I meant it.

That was one.

I'm determined to smash the small boat gangs behind the vile trade in people smuggling.

You know, if you work here illegally or employ people who do, we're coming for you.

Oh, yeah.

And then every so often he will end the one about, oh, very nice to see the new Pope, or delighted for the UK entry in Eurovision, which sort of kind of slightly gets out of the kind of East End hardman tone of the other ones.

Is there some sort of starma bot that's doing these kind of oi, listen, tweets?

Well, I think spiritually he's trained the LLM that's doing these tweets on, do you remember the infamous Danny Dyer 9-11 anniversary tweet?

No.

Now, I'm about to make your life so much better.

He once tweeted, can't believe it's been nearly 11 years since them slags smashed into the Twin Towers.

It still freaks my nut out to this day.

I think maybe the most profound thing that anyone said on 9-11.

But that to me is what they...

Said the junior minister.

Exactly.

He said Robert Jenrick.

That just feels like, well, that's what they've trained the kind of Starma bot on, essentially.

Well, you mentioned Generick, you know, Starmer doing this,

trying to sound hard on immigration.

Generic, it's a quote from Robert Generic.

That's one of the first ones I've liked coming from him about Starma.

It looked like a hostage situation where he was reading out words someone else had written for him.

which was that sense of his heart's heart's not quite in that.

I love the idea that Robert Generick will never read a speech that's been written for him.

No, every word that issues from the mouth of Robert Generic is 100%,

you know, pure Columbian uncut Robert Jenrick.

Although Robert Jenrick assumes that anything any politician says is not actually what that politician means.

I want to be quite anal on that passage from Starma, if I could.

And why not?

He talked about we need fair rules on immigration and then says, in a diverse nation like ours, and I celebrate that, these rules become even more important.

Without them, we're just becoming an island of strangers.

Saying something at the start that is positive, and I'm sure we can all agree and we all think this, there isn't a problem, But really to set up the killer in the second half of the sentence, which is slightly the opposite of what you're implying, in the hope that you kind of get away with it because you've kind of set up a nice thing at the start.

It's that thing that people do of saying, Helen, I know you're sick of doing podcasts.

I just wonder if you could just do one more.

And it's that, you know, if I acknowledge what you really hate

to show that I know you think that, it will somehow get me a pass to ask you to do it again.

Unfortunately, I don't think think it worked for Starma because if you watch the reaction, the Guardian front page was, you know, Starma echoes far-right trope in speech.

And then the mail front page was, he's not going to actually do anything about immigration.

People picked up the bit, which was either that the measures in the bill, which were, you know, relatively limited, such as taking the graduate visa down from two years to 18 months, might, you know, they will have some impact on net migration, but not, they will not wipe it out.

And so therefore the problem is that other thing that we've spotted as a kind of trend across this, which is if you start start using inflammatory phrases like that to kind of look like you're a little bit like reform, people will only think, yeah, but reform's going to do that, aren't they?

Should you not be actually going more to the first half of that sentence, you know, and actually being brave enough or original enough or daring enough to actually talk about the virtues of multiculturalism or immigration if you want to kind of distinguish yourself from reform.

Can I give you the thing I found most startling when I went and read the Rivers of Blood, the Unit Power 1968 speech again?

He says we must be mad, literally mad as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of and how many people did he think was going to completely change the character of Britain?

That's probably a very low number, like 100,000?

Less, 50,000

dependents.

And so net migration last year according to the ONS was 728,000.

The year before that was 906,000.

So I think there is a point to be made here, which is that almost everybody across the whole political spectrum thinks that that is a problem because we have not got the public services and we certainly aren't building enough houses to deal with

those kind of numbers.

And that gets you into that thing of politicians are afraid, I think, to say there are benefits to immigration, benefits to the economy, and so on, while also thinking, but I don't want to sound racist when I talk about capping the numbers.

So it means that everyone is sort of skirting a route.

Yes, and they don't want to talk about the horse trading that's involved.

So I think the graduate visa and the foreign students' numbers are really interesting because they will not say that British universities have been encouraged to pursue a funding model that relies heavily on the uncapped fees.

You know, the fact that fees have been at £9,000 now for many years while inflation has gone up.

So politically unpopular to put domestic students' fees up that all universities have ended up relying more and more on foreign students.

And if we take them away, universities collapse.

Now, have we just lost the capacity?

You know, as a public, are we incapable of taking that in?

Or have we lost the capacity as people in the media to explain that?

Have politicians grown much more nervous of sounding maybe too nerdy?

But also, it's a bit like net zero, isn't it?

It's a bit like if you want us to reduce our climate change impacts, that means generating less energy and consuming less stuff.

Or one day, hopefully, the tech solution will come along and solve that.

Yeah, I've got a thing from Farage, actually, who roughly in the mode that Starmer used on immigration on climate change when he was talking to Jordan Peterson.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship earlier in the the year and he was talking about climate citizens and he said for I said I'm not a scientist I can't tell you whether CO2 is leading to warming or not there are so many other massive factors but it's absolutely nuts that CO2 is considered to be a pollutant so I'm not telling you it's CO2 but it's also definitely

I'm not a scientist well that sounds fair I mean he's been kind of you know he's not trying to pretend he's got all the knowledge at his fingertips and so on he then announces the knowledge that he has at his fingertips that slightly belies the science you know it slightly negates the science.

Which is wild because 99% of climate scientists agree that climate change is human caused and it's down to burning your fossil fuels.

And you don't get a pass by saying, I'm not a scientist.

That's not then an excuse to

go into the world of non-science and guesswork.

But that happens far too often.

And I think you're right that we've lost that ability, I think, to recognize that, you know, it's that terrible word that people dislike, which is compromise, because it implies weakness.

It implies like you've yielded, you've given in and whatever.

But then, what is a deal then if it's not some kind of compromise between two parties?

Yes, you give up something and you get something.

I think that was the, but this is my, this is my theory of the kind of big butchkier and the kind of deliberately inflammatory rhetoric of the white paper, was that it then preceded a summit that he knew would be described by people on the right as the betrayal of Brexit.

You know, things like involving a youth mobility scheme, which they've now renamed as something that doesn't imply that they're mobile.

Yeah, yeah.

Because we can't possibly say that people are going to come here.

Revolving residency carousel.

Yeah, exactly.

But I just think it was kind of I'm dead hard me.

And then that hopefully you think buys you the space to do some closer alignment with Europe because it's in our economic interest to do so.

Can we talk about the manic GIMP?

The elephant in the room.

The gimped up, gimp-masked.

bowl-chewing elephant in the room.

This is Boris Johnson, isn't it?

This is Boris Johnson.

So he did a very long tweet.

He's either paid for or been signed up for Twitter Premium, which allows him to tweet at column length.

And he said, 2TA Kia

is the orange ball-chewing manacled gimp of Brussels.

So I think 2-tier Kia has been repurposed from the justice system to now be he's accepting us being a rule-taker, but not a rulemaker with Brussels, which was always a big Brexiteer charge.

One of the fascinating things about this is that I fear that the Boris Johnson machine is cranking back up to be the saviour from across the sea, as Kemi Badenock is floundering.

And there's not, apart from in the Ennucci household, not a great love for Robert Jenrick out there.

Well,

just on a little sidebar there, I think it's quite funny what's happening in the Conservatives' Party, which is like they're all going, I mean, she does have to go, but we would look mad.

Yeah.

But actually, we have done it before, and it did look mad.

So if we are mad,

And the definition of madness is just keep doing the same thing again and again in the hope that you get it right.

Maybe we should.

Or are we mad?

There's that.

I think that what really put the spook up then was the fact that the Conservatives were fourth in a poll.

So it was reform, Labour, Lib Dems, and then the Conservatives.

But anyway, Rocket, ball-chewing.

So, ball-chewing gimp, this was a welcome, not actually probably a quite unwelcome return for the phrase to public life because Boris Johnson used it in a column last summer in which was headlined, Sakir Schnorra plans to slink into number 10 as silently as Larry the Cat and then lock us back in the dungeon of Brussels like a ball chewing gimp.

I have a couple of

on this.

A schnorrh is a Yiddish word meaning beggar or scrounger, which was a very rogue

word to use.

I mean there's lots of things that rhyme with starma that get used.

Some people said it's bit tasteless when his wife Victoria is Jewish.

I have another query about this which is I think that the whole point of putting a ball in your mouth in a ball gag is that you don't chew.

You can no longer chew.

And maybe this says more about me than I think when I saw that phrase I got hung up on the punctuation.

Right, okay.

Got to be two different things from that.

Yeah, exactly.

Because so the phrase is orange, ball chewing, manacled gimp of Brussels.

So it's orange, one word.

Ball chewing is hyphenated.

Yes.

Manacled gimp of Brussels.

So is it an orange person chewing a ball?

Or does he mean someone chewing an orange bowl?

What is orange here?

I think it's the ball.

Yes, you're right.

It does need another hyphen between orange and ball.

I think so.

So if you're listening, Boris Johnson, just a few punctuation notes on that one.

But I just think it's one of those things that's deliberately supposed to be

weird.

So you sort of snag on it.

And it gets him attention.

That's the other thing.

There's this one thing that Boris Johnson wants more than anyone else, which is people to go, oh, Boris Johnson.

Yes.

I mean, we've said here many times that the key to understanding Trump is it's all about attention.

And I think there are certain politicians, and I'd put Johnson in that camp, it's all about the attention.

It's all, I think he likes the fact that people might be speculating that he might come back.

I think the actual coming back and having to deal with stuff is something that he'd run a mile from.

He hates that.

He didn't enjoy being actual prime minister.

In the same way that Trump doesn't enjoy being actual president.

He just likes sort of waving and getting on and off planes.

But I think there is also another thing that happens a lot.

And I think you see it on the axis.

Funny enough, I've been thinking a bit about whether or not Jeremy Clarkson might go into politics because he's becoming more and more political, campaigning for farmers on inheritance tax, whatever it might be.

But they both do a very similar thing, which is Boris Johnson's infamous, if you remember, column on the cabs where he described women who wore them as looking like letterboxes.

That was actually a liberal argument, which was that he wouldn't ban the face veil, which has been a big concern in the Netherlands, in France.

France, yeah.

So he was making this socially liberal argument of, I wouldn't do it, but other people should be allowed to if they want to.

But because he dresses it up in this deliberately provocative language, he hopes to sort of smuggle it past his audience.

And I think that quite often you'll get the same thing.

You know, Jeremy Clarkson wrote a column about how he was a big remainer and how Brexit had caused him all kinds of hassle.

But it was all dressed up in this kind of hazoo.

I hate straight bananas.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, all these twats.

And I think that there is a kind of stance that that is very popular on the right, which is that I'm kind of truth talking, whatever it might be.

And then you can say things that are quite Islington.

But I think also it's to do with the fact that both Johnson and Clarkson are entertainers.

You know, they enjoy an audience.

And there's something, you know, you can't help yourself.

I mean, I do it as a, you know, my instinct is always to look for the funny.

Yeah.

And that sometimes makes you say a joke that actually doesn't quite chime with the serious thing you were saying, but if it gets a laugh, I'm not saying I do this all the time and that I'm a massive hypocrite.

I'm just saying I'm a tiny hypocrite in that, you know, the lure of the approval and the laugh and so on is addictive.

I've done that.

And I think, you know, for someone, and they're also journalists who have to come up with weekly opinions.

That's the other thing.

The pressure put on people to just, you know, dredge, you know, on a week-by-week basis, what do I think of water?

Oh, I don't know, but water's a big issue.

What do I think of?

Do I hate it?

Do I like it?

Well, I quite like it, but I'll I'll dress it up as water.

I mean, what is it?

You can see right through it.

You can drink it, but what does it do?

There's no taste.

Oh, the temptation always is when you're writing that kind of funny column.

Yeah.

And I know having committed this offence myself, is portraying the opposite position as a kind of hyperbolically absurd one.

So you go, oh, they want to ban water.

Yeah.

And then you can do a whole riff on that.

And of course, no one's actually suggested that.

They've suggested that you should perhaps filter it for sewage first or something like that.

But the effect really is to go away with, oh, that was quite funny.

Are they banning water?

It's lodged there.

Even if you say the phrase, if only to deny it, it still lodges.

So it's like,

I'm not saying you're fired, Helen.

I'm really not.

And I want you to believe that.

You're not fired.

You would then leave going, I think I'm fired.

There's a very famous book about political language called Don't Think of an Elephant, which is exactly that premise.

So as soon as I say to you, Don't Think of an Elephant, you're thinking about an elephant.

Yes.

That is a great rhetorical tactic.

It's one that Farage uses very well because he tiptoes up to a line of acceptability, but he knows very well where the line is.

And I think Boris Johnson tiptoes over that line.

And you know, the fact that, and I was going through the recording from supporting the student access scheme to being a trussed-up sex gimp in a dark dungeon.

Yes, I wouldn't have used the word truss in that sentence, which he did as well.

I thought, no, again, don't think of the elephant.

But I'm interested in the deal thing, which is you said there was lots of negative responses from conservatives and reform about the stomach deal, but those responses came even before the deal was announced.

I keep on asking myself when someone objects to anything that involves closer ties with Europe, what is it that you want?

I always feel that certain Brexiteers are sore winners in that, you know, they won the thing, it's happened, but they're still complaining.

And I don't know what it is that they want.

I mentioned this and somebody called Henry Bolton, who I think was one of the leaders of UKI leader.

He was a UKIP leader for about 10 minutes.

He picked on something I said and he said, no, Brexit, there are benefits of Brexit.

They've just mucked it up.

They haven't done Brexit well enough.

And he said, what we need is a clear plan for Brexit, which is identifying what the opportunities are, mapping them out, and figuring out how we're going to exploit them.

I don't know what that means.

Are you saying that people haven't thought this out, haven't said to themselves, what should we do with Brexit?

We should find out the advantages and see if we can exploit them.

But don't you think they want to live in a perpetual June the 23rd, 2016?

Which was a great day.

In the same way that I imagine lots of New Labour wanted to live in a perpetual 5th of May 1997.

Exactly.

The day when you are the winner.

That's right.

It's the bad bit where you actually have to do it.

The joy is the victory.

And then that becomes the difficult bit.

You're chasing that high forever.

Well, look,

we're going to have to move on.

Have you brought another little word for me?

Oh, yes.

No, it's a phrase cropping up more and more which is bear beating.

Do you know what bear beating is?

It's not a blood sport.

It's...

I know that I don't want to put this into an internet search engine.

It's actually in the same family as raw dogging.

So raw dogging.

That's why.

That's why I don't want to.

Don't put raw dogging and family in the...

No, stop it.

Stop it.

Raw dogging is that thing of going long journeys without relying on any form of tech stimulation, not watching any movies, not listening to.

So bear beating is the opposite.

Bear beating is the trend or tendency for people to play things on their phones out loud on trains and buses and in the tube and not really care if other people are being put off about the noise.

Didn't the Lib Dems announce they might prosecute such people?

And I have indeed.

Never felt more authoritarian.

I was they have talked about why stop their libdems?

Why not just taser them?

What was the phrase that one of the libdems talked about?

They've called these people headphone dodgers

as if it's obligatory to wear.

It looks like you're being pelted with headphones.

I would penalize anyone who does this with one of my headphones because this headphone

has just got a life of its own.

I've discovered another little kind of for my convenience thing that it does, which is it decides when to switch itself on.

If it senses there's a Bluetooth operating in the room, it goes, oh, he's gearing up for some headphone use.

I'll switch myself on.

So what it means is it just sits there in the corner running down its battery for hours.

It is now a mortal struggle between you and these headphones.

I just feel like you should buy some really cheap ones that just plug in.

The thing is, I've got terrible ears.

I don't have those.

The bud thing just doesn't work for me.

So I do have to have these things that make me look like one of the Cybermen.

I have brought you delightfully an update on Flag Wars.

Oh, the Flag Wars, great.

And you know my existing premise that this is good.

We should encourage people to get more into Flag Wars.

This is very harmless.

The amount of wind being kind of moved around while these

flag wars is just phenomenal here.

A genuine Conservative Party press release went out on the May 15th, which attacked Kierstama for not flying the Middlesex flag from Downing Street on Middlesex Day.

Now, do you know when Middlesex Day is?

No, of course you don't.

You're a normal person.

May the 16th.

CTHQ wrote, Middlesex Day marks the victory of the Middlesex Regiment, the Die Hards, holding back the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte in the Battle of I'm going to mispronounce this Al Bujera during the Peninsular Wars.

And they compared the fact that he wasn't flying it to basically his imminent surrender to the Napoleon de Nojours, Ursula von der Leyen.

My favourite line, which I've is going to stick in my head forever, which was: Labour's refusal to fly county flags contrasts with the decision in September by David Lammy's Foreign Office to hoist the bisexual flag from Whitehall adjacent to Downing Street.

What is a bisexual flag?

It's pink and purple.

Okay.

I have to say, I'm a bit too old for hoisting the bisexual flag over anything these days, let alone adjacent to Downing Street.

That did happen to celebrate bisexual awareness week

at the Foreign Office.

I'm not going to say right in and say how you would celebrate bisexual awareness week.

I don't want to know.

Everything that's an awareness week, I just always think of people just going, oh,

oh.

The only other word I have for you this week is that Naomi Biden, who is granddaughter of Joe Biden, called the new book, Original Sin, which is about his cognitive decline and what the authors describe as the cover-up of that,

political fairy smut.

Which I think could very well sit with hoisting the bisexual flag in my new euphemism score.

Fairy smut.

I don't want to know what that is.

Is it glitter?

It does sound like glitter.

Anyway, that's all.

Thank you for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back next week.

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