I Want My Country Back (with Phil Wang)

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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.

It is Carmanda Unucci.

And it's Helen Lewis.

This week, after the local elections, we're going to look at the language of British identity and culture.

A lot to chew on.

Yes.

What else have you been up to before we get to the meat of the episode to chew on?

Well, I had a very quiet week actually.

Normally,

I had took full use of the bank holiday weekend.

And I thought this week is going by quite quietly until the potential destruction of the film and television industry that I've worked in for the last thirty years came up.

Might this be the tweet by Donald Trump where he said he was putting what is it, 100% tariffs on non-Hollywood films?

Yes, yes.

And everyone's gone, A, how do you put a tariff on a piece of intellectual property?

You know, at the ports, there aren't, you know, Hugh Grant movies because it's just been offloaded.

Someone measuring the accent to go, no, insufficiently Hollywood.

Do you know what?

My favourite conspiracy theory about this,

so he tweeted this, and then at the same time, he also tweeted he wanted to reopen Alcatraz, the prison

famously featured in the film The Rock, which I saw a couple of months, well, about a month ago when I was in San Francisco, and people were wandering around it going, they should remake The Rock with The Rock.

Just a great tip for you there.

Unfortunately, you'll never be able to act on it because you can now no longer make films.

But someone suggested that these two things, the fact that Donald Trump thinks that American films are struggling and he also wants to reopen Alcatraz, suggests that perhaps he just watched The Rock the night before on Netflix.

This was my husband's suggestion that he's now making policy based on why don't they make films like The Rock anymore?

That's right.

Well, I think because all these tariffs are being cited by something he refers to, a 1977 emergency power granted to presidents, which is called the International Economic Emergency Powers Act.

And he was arguing, not that he argues,

he was stating very volumably

that non-American films are a security threat.

That's the only way he can apply these types of something is a security threat.

So I just thought, has he just watched Mission Impossible, which was made mostly in Watford,

and thought it was true?

I mean, I don't think we should actually rule that out.

That's the worst thing about this.

Well, look.

Exactly.

Well, I've been reading Peter Whimsy short stories.

I bought a collection of them for Christmas.

They are the classic detective fiction by Dorothy L.

Sayers.

I've never read those because I've just been put up by the word whimsy.

That comes up a lot, is that everybody thinks he's a sort of, you know, Bertie Wooster type aristocrat, but he's actually got an incredibly keen brain.

Has he?

So you've been fooled by the marketing

of that.

I would start with Gordy Night, which is way into the series, but it's set, as you might imagine, in Oxford.

And it's rather lovely.

Okay.

But it's also very ahead of its time.

And one of the main plot lines that comes up is that he is suffering from PTSD from his very brave service in the First World War.

So he is, you know, he has sort of kind of night terrors and wakes up.

But his whole effect is that he is this kind of foppish, monocled dandy.

His father's a duke.

But no, he's

not.

Lord Peter Troubled would be a different, you know, would be too unsubtle, wouldn't it?

The family motto is As My Whimsy Takes Me, which is, I agree with you, slightly unbearable, but I get past that and you want to do that.

Very neatly gets us into our topic this week.

You know, with the rise and success of reform in the local elections, various council leaders and mayors declaring that they're going to use their newfound powers to reassert Englishness or Britishness.

Only British and UK flags are going to be raised above town halls, which we can go into.

This takes us to this whole question, which is a phrase that we've been thinking about, looking at for some time, used by mostly reform candidates.

You know, I want my country back.

That sense of what is our country?

What is our sense of our country?

And where do we, especially like myself, who comes from a second generation Italian background and indeed our guest who we have here, Phil Wang, writer, comedian, presenter of the Radio 4 Word quiz show or panel game.

Unspeakable.

Unspeakable.

Unspeakable.

And Phil.

When I was researching you before this episode, I found that you and I are from the same place.

Huh, how's that?

Is that true?

Yeah, we're both from...

Yeah, I've been keeping it quite a long time.

No, we are both from the West Midlands.

You were born in Stoke.

I was born in Worcester.

Yeah, no way.

Right on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So finally, some representation for the West Midlands, frankly, an overlooked region of the country on Radio 4.

Absolutely.

Double representation here.

Overrepresented on this episode.

If anything, yes, I know.

I know.

But then I bring Italian and Scottish to the table.

Very confusing.

But you also wrote a book, Side Splitter, which is about your experience of growing up.

So you were born in Britain, and then you stayed here till you were three weeks old.

And then the next 16.

You say you stayed here like I had any say and other things.

I was kept here.

And then you went when.

You know, you're quite bright.

When it aged three weeks,

you decided that you were going to.

I mean, fucking the plane tickets alone would have been beyond me in pre-internet age.

But yeah, so I was there for three weeks for my mom to recover, I guess.

And then flew back.

But again, I say back in quotation marks.

I don't know what back is for me.

But flew to Malaysia where my dad's from, got to Ganabalu, Sabah.

Well, I've just got back from yesterday, actually.

And I grew up there.

So I was in Malaysia on Borneo until I was 16 years old.

Then moved, in quotation marks, back to the UK.

And I've been here since.

So I've now passed the

not the halfway mark, I guess the doubling mark, where I've now just about spent more of my life in the UK than Malaysia.

But that's quite only in the last couple of years.

But it's an increasingly common experience because actually when I was thinking about that, you know, the other person who's had an experience like that of being born in Britain and living until the teens is Kemi Badenock, the Torah leader.

She was in Nigeria until she came over for six form and then has lived here since.

So that is now an experience that is represented at the very top of politics.

Because you write about it in the book, about this kind of, as you say, like the experience of being a slightly perpetual outsider and feeling maybe Asian in Britain and British in Asia.

Is that the kind of way around it?

Yeah, that's right.

Also, you know, ethnically, also, I'm half white and half East Asian.

So I guess I look Asian, but in Malaysia, comparatively not that Asian because my skin's a bit lighter.

I'm very tall.

I was the tallest member of my family in Malaysia when I was 13.

Just towering over my uncles at five foot eight.

This is your uncle who ran the karate school.

Oh, the Shaolin, yeah, the Shaolin Dojo, Uncle David, yeah.

Shout out Uncle David.

So in Malaysia, I looked pretty western, and people would be surprised when I could speak Malay.

Like, just this time, I went back, you know, I started speaking Malay.

Malay is pretty good.

And people go, hey, Banta Chakaba, you know, you can speak Malay.

And I used to find it really kind of alienating, othering, but now I'm...

I've kind of made my peace with it.

I understand

how I look.

But when people say, because there's been this whole debate of someone was discussing Rishi Sunak saying he's not English,

to which he said, Yes, I am.

I was born here.

But Suella Braverman wrote to be saying that she is not English.

She's British, but not English.

And she was trying to describe that as having a sense of roots that go way back.

Right.

But that's different.

That's that's she meant white, didn't she?

That's what I really got to the point.

Yeah, British was a kind of umbrella identity, but she sort of thought as English as the ethnicity.

And that was European ancestry to her.

I think that is the crux of it.

I think throughout the world some nationalities are a nationality and a race and some nationalities are nationalities that can encompass many races and because of its

colonial past Britain and England are the latter, right?

You can be English and be ethnically very different to the English person next to you.

It's so subjective in a way in that I think you you have to work out yourself what your identity is.

It's almost like something you have to self-declare.

Right, Yeah, you know, providing you can justify how you fit.

Because people ask me,

confuse people, Armando, because you have got like the most Italian name that you have ever had, but you also have a Scottish accent.

I know, but you see, that never struck me as confusing because I grew up in Glasgow where there was a large Italian community.

So every class would have two or three Menucci's or Renucci or whatever in it.

So it didn't feel to me unusual.

But like you, Phil, I have simultaneously grown up with that one foot in, one foot out, kind of Scottish, but I don't, you know, if I'm at a Cayley, i don't think this is me but similarly if i'm at a three-day long italian first holy communion ceremony i don't think this is me it's that is there is anything that makes you feel this is me

i i've i've yet to find that culturally speaking yes i've really yet to find that and and it's interesting because you say you could speak

because my parents my so my father was from naples my mum was born in Glasgow, but her parents were Italian.

Maybe it's a generational thing post-Second World War.

They deliberately decided not to speak Italian to us because they wanted us to feel fully integrated.

Now, I was going to say fully British, but I think they probably meant fully Scottish because there is this extra complication that, you know, being of Italian background in Britain, but being Scottish in England, and Scottish has its own very colourful and powerful identity.

It's a whole series of calculations.

Do you code switch, Armando?

Do you get more Italian when you're with your Italian?

Well, you see, I'd say I get more Scottish when I'm with my Italian.

That's the thing.

What do you feel?

When people say to you, Phil, what are you?

Yeah.

Do you feel British?

Do you feel English?

Do you, you know, I don't really know what English is.

Quickly

on the topic of parents trying to help their kids feel more part of the country they live in.

I've just been spending time with my family and my sister and her partner, her boyfriend, who is Colombian, but was born here, came over here with his Colombian parents.

And when they arrived and give birth to him, his Colombian parents thought, We want our son to feel English, we don't want him to be singled out or treated indifferently just because he's Colombian.

We're going to give him a just a normal, proper English name, and they named him Sherlock.

So you can go too hard sometimes

with the assimilation.

That's such a great name.

Oh,

I'm so jealous.

Yeah, so he, you know, he's changed it enough.

He changed it to Watts

when he got away.

But how does it affect the language that when you know when people talk about race, you write inside specialty about the fact that in Malay culture, which is like such a kind of complete melting pot and a kind of former colonial state, there's a way that race is talked about in a much more casual way.

Whereas I think the political conversations about race in Britain feel a bit more tortured, maybe because four-fifths of the country is white, England is so dominant within the Union, that there is always a feeling of like underdog, overdog.

Which is that the same in Malaysia?

Yeah, it's a unique situation in Malaysia because, as you say, there's no large ethnic hegemony.

The Malays who make up the majority are, I think, just about 50%, as opposed to white Brits being about 85% of the population.

And then the remaining 50% are split among predominantly the Chinese and the Indians.

And so multiculturalism is built into Malaysia.

So the idea of there being a single Malaysian identity ethnically doesn't exist.

The identity is that we're all in it together.

And

I mean, it doesn't always work out that way, but that is the stated identity in Malaysia.

And one of the nice things about being back in Malaysia is watching all the shopping malls change their decorations almost every week because there's always a new festival that has to be.

So the Christmas time, there'll be Santas and sleighs in 35-degree heat and snow and penguins and then the day christmas is over all the chinese new year's decorations go up so lanterns and red ribbons and once that's down then straight away the hariraya which is uh the malay eid

festival all those decorations go up then dipavali which is diwali those go up and so that is the identity of malaysia is that we have all these decorations basically and does everyone within that use these as opportunities to take the week off so that there are a lot of public holidays there's a block of

15 weeks off for every different festival and celebration.

Yeah, I think, yeah, everyone gets a day off for their big, but I think you only get the one big,

the one big festival.

But that's interesting because we've just been through the celebrations for VE Day.

And I think that for Britain, that founding mythology of Britain alone, particularly in the early years of the Second World War, standing up against Hitler, like that has become a, for politicians, that's something they want to associate in themselves.

It's something that everybody in Britain can have a kind of equal share in.

I always think the royal family is quite uniting.

I think if you ever go to, like, you know, like our vision of a bodega, like a corner shop, I quite often will see a kind of Princess Diana plate in there or something like that.

For somebody who's recently arrived here, like, that's a thing you can come to Britain, you can go, you know, I like the queen.

Yes, but I just wonder whether, you know, this phrase of I want my country back is something much more specific underneath it as a subtext.

It's more a case of,

I mean, I would agree with you, Phil, that Britain I've always seen as multicultural.

But of course, if you use the word multicultural, that kind of places you politically in some kind of spectrum, doesn't it?

That word is used now, that's become weaponised.

Similarly, you know, diversity and equity and so on, it's become something to identify your opponent as something other, isn't it?

Something different from you.

I think probably having grown up in Worcester, which when I grew up in, it was like over 90% white, it's got a substantial Pakistani and Bangladeshi community.

But I think that you would look on TV and like London's demographics being represented on TV and feel that that was a slightly different place.

And I think in particularly rural parts of England that are much whiter, there can be a feeling that the country has changed quite rapidly.

And also, I think this is the bit where it makes it slightly poisonous, that because you haven't changed, you're backward.

That's the past and this is the future and you've kind of got to get with it.

And I think that's some of the tension I would say that comes into I want my country back is a bit

nostalgia and it is a bit that change is happening in ways that you feel that you haven't been maybe asked about.

Yes, and what is that country?

What is the country?

Is it England?

Is it, yeah, I mean, one of the things I've found out often pondered is the fact that we don't quite know what the name of our country is because you know it's United Kingdom, it's United Kingdom of

Great Britain.

Is Britain?

It's a drop-down menu when you're doing a flight when you're like, Is it United Kingdom?

Is it yeah, yeah.

I remember a historian saying that you know, we think of our country as an old country.

In fact, it's actually from

the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was set up in 1922.

That's how young this country is.

This is

we're actually younger as a country, as this entity, this state, this political entity.

We are actually younger than America.

But of course, you know, we're not.

But not in terms of the populations that have been here, as opposed to something like Malaysia is, you know, as old as 1963, legally speaking, and the people who constituted were brought in the last century by the British.

Certain sports were Scotland, England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Others were Great Britain.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, because the Olympics is GP.

Yeah.

And then football is.

Yeah.

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The separate nations.

So, there's been quite a lot of work on what I think we now call blue labour, that kind of slightly more socially conservative tendency within labour, about the idea that English nationalism has become kind of unspeakable, except through like what we're talking about in the medium of sport.

Whereas, you know, Welsh nationalism is very healthy, there's placymary, there's, you know, there's Welsh labour has always been very distinctive.

Obviously, Scottish nationalism, very alive and well, and Northern Ireland is its own separate situation.

But that because England is the kind of big, I just like to say, the hegemon, it's the overwhelming, it feels slightly awkward for people to talk about that.

And so John Denham did some really interesting research, former Labour politician, about the fact that people who voted to leave the EU, people who vote for reform now, are more likely to describe themselves as English rather than British.

So English has come to stand for a specific identity that maybe is slightly more resistant to that idea of multiculturalism.

And why has, where has that come from, that kind of reluctance to big up your Englishness?

Explanations I've seen are because right nationalists in like the National Front in the 70s appropriated the English flag, and so it was seen as a kind of symbol of being right-wing.

But it's not.

But that's the same with all of it, isn't it?

In the same way that we have a feminist movement, but people get very worried about the men's rights movement or saying, I'm proud to be a man.

You don't have straight pride parades, that sort of scene is that would be sort of slightly weird and odd.

It's just a kind of a commute.

You know, like we had this week, we had the Met Gala in New York having an exhibition of kind of black excellence and black tailoring.

Having an exhibition that builds itself as white tailoring would be a very, very different thing.

So I think there's always an unease about sort of celebrating the majority of people.

So much of an identity is built around who you're set against or who you've sort of had to resist or strive against.

Scotland and Wales, they've got England, so they've got very strong senses of identity.

For the English, who are they up against?

Who's who are they punching up against?

And I feel like in large part, that's what helped Brexit a lot.

Oh, yes, the superiority of the same thing.

Because suddenly because they were given someone to punch up against the EU.

And it didn't really matter what the facts of that situation were.

Here was a larger, powerful bloc that's telling us what to do.

And I think that's what the Brexit team were so good at feeding on, was this latent desire to feel English, which that campaign served.

Yeah, and also, I think, complicated by the fact that if you feel your life isn't going great or you feel like you're not being listened to, then what's the expression within the political system for that if you're a supposed majority?

I think that's one of the things that I would also put in that category, too.

Tell us more about the flags.

You mentioned the flags at the top.

This is reforms new weeks under Zaya Youssef, who is their chair, says you can only now fly, it's the flag of St.

George and

Czech.

And then people have said, oh, so we won't be able to fly the Ukrainian flag if we want to support, demonstrate our support with Ukraine.

Or various people have said there aren't, oh, does that mean we can't put up our county flags?

This is anti-county.

It's become a pylon on reform.

Well, they've now climbed down the flagpole and said we could put up county flags now.

So they have backed down a little bit.

But it just shows you how contentious politics actually is.

One Labour MP, Mike Tapp, said, this ban on flags is sickening.

You've just seen what they've done there.

Yes, the Liberal Democrats called it meaningless virtue signalling, which is like someone basically gets to kind of go, Can we use the word woke?

Can we say something else is woke?

This is very exciting.

It's not like jiu-jitsu move of like

throwing your opponent over your back.

And then we've finally come full circle.

It feels like the term virtue signaling is done.

We've completed it now because the lib dems have used it.

Yeah, but I also think that's there's been a whole lot of discourse online about the emergence of the so-called woke right.

Have you

woke rights?

Now, how does

dare I ask how that works?

So the idea is that, and I think I would agree with it, that so the phrase woke starts out in black culture to describe being a kind of alert to injustice.

It then becomes used as a sort of modern day version of political correctness and also to say that there's sort of thought policing and kind of totalitarianism in the bits of culture where the left is rules.

Some people in America have now noticed that the right are in charge of rather a lot of stuff and that they aren't also not that massively keen on free speech, for example, over Palestine.

And so they're behaving exactly like the mirror image of the people that they criticise.

I mean, you spend a lot of time online, Phil.

Haven't you seen this?

I have, I have, yes.

Well, again, it's about who you're lined up against.

The right used to be very comfortably lined up against the leftist hegemony of culture.

Now, their culture, they've got to find rifts

between themselves to kind of keep going, to keep the industry going.

It is depressing.

Is that all the words that we've got left now?

Just woke and snowflake and just have to apply them to anyone for whatever reason.

Phil, the treadmill will move on.

We'll find something else.

I very rarely engage with people online.

Yes.

It's always been a golden rule.

Yeah.

I've pretty much stopped completely.

Yeah, but I couldn't help myself last summer when there were the

riots and Ellen Musk was weighing in on what the hell is going on in the UK and there's going to be civil war.

And I pushed back against Ellen Musk.

And Ellen and I are just looking at you both like, oh,

what did you do on Monday?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's absolutely fine.

This is going to be this can go out in Radio 4 at 8 in the morning after Melvin Bragg.

So anyway, in reply to one of my tweets or exes about Ellen Musk, somebody called Fnatic Fennec

wrote, oh Manda Unichie doesn't sound British to me, buddy.

Why are you talking about the UK like you are British when you aren't?

I said, I was born in Glasgow, as was my mother.

Why am I not British?

To which Fnatic Fennec said, if a cat is born in a barn, it doesn't mean it's a horse.

To which someone else then piped in, saying, lots of cats are born in barns.

No need to become a horse.

Barns are for cats already.

You pick two species who are regularly born in barns.

So Fnatic Fennec came back.

The point is, he is Italian and just because he's born in Britain, it doesn't make him British.

Dennis, whoever Dennis is, then came in saying, well, if being born in Britain doesn't make you British, then WTF are the requirements.

Fnatic Fennec, being born to parents of one of the four British ethnicities.

Someone called TC came in saying, he just said his mum was born in Britain.

Then someone else helpfully added,

I was born in a hospital.

Does that make me a doctor?

John came in with, where does a cat have to be born to be classified as a cat?

TC then came in with, if a brown horse is born in a barn full of white horses, is it still a horse?

To which Fnatic Fennec said, look, totally unrelated analogy to the one I was making.

In my analogy, the species of animal was analogous for nationality.

In yours, it is species, well, colour is nationality.

To which someone else said, that implies you believe a brown horse born in a barn full of white horses is not a horse.

To which Fnatic Fanny said, no, it means that a brown horse born in a barn full of white horses isn't white.

Someone else then said, just to kind of try and round it off, Mick Olm99 said, there are no English, Scottish, Irish, or Welsh named Amanda Nucci, to which I replied, I can think of one.

To which I said, Grok, what does this mean?

I mean, sometimes what I think about internet racism is that it's so advanced.

Like the idea that there's a, Welsh and English are meaningfully different ethnicities when they've been part of the same nation since the Middle Ages.

I mean, as you might be able to tell from my surname, my family is originally Welsh.

But get your calipers out.

How are you meaningfully supposed to tell?

I mean, all these terms, they don't have one specific...

identifiable meaning attached to them.

You can apply several at once, can't you?

And that's the problem that

constipated Gerard or whatever he's called.

Fanatical Fennec.

He has called himself fanatical.

So he's self-aware.

He's self-aware.

Phil, I wanted to ask you, because you've done the book and various stand-up tours where you've talked a lot about race and identity.

Have you noticed the way that it's talked about changed in the last

couple of years that you've been doing this?

In political terms, have people got more anxious about it, less anxious about it?

You know what?

I feel they got really anxious about it in the height of what we'll call the

racial reckoning era, like 2020.

2020 to 2022,

people were nervous now people just seem quite uninterested in it to be honest people seem to me to be on quite a lot less interested in culture cultures other than their own i feel like the 20 teens were the height of that international interest and curiosity in other people's cultures and then 2016 onwards gradually people started to look for entertainment that looked like them and from people who had the same

affirms and that pressure on criticism of like cultural

appropriation.

If you were an author, you should write about your own experiences and not pretend or trying to get into the mindset of someone from a different set of experiences, which for me always felt like the opposite of what literature was about.

It was always about, you know, going to the library.

There's a whole world to explore there.

Yeah.

You know,

going to someone else's mind and someone else's perspective.

Yeah, I love hearing from people who have life experiences completely different to mine.

And I have to say, you know, it's still a pleasure to do these topics as stand-up.

And for the most part, audiences are really into it.

But a comedy audience is always going to be quite self-selective in a way, politically speaking.

They'll always be a bit left-leaning and always be a bit more curious than the average person.

The upside is I think people are a lot more aware of other cultures now.

They know a lot more because of the internet and you can make more specific references.

For me being Chinese, Malaysian even now.

I used to only say I was Chinese because I was like, people barely know what are the cultural markers of Chinese people, let alone Malaysians.

So then only recently I started saying I'm Malaysian because I feel like people are more open to that now.

Phil, we've got some quickfire questions for you.

Oh, yes.

The best political speech or interview you can remember.

Are you going to go with the deep Malay cut here in which we were

just nod and well, there's Malaysia?

Malay is the Malay people in Malaysia.

But I'm taking something from the region, which is Lee Kuan Yew's.

So he's the first prime minister of Singapore, and he's sort of considered the founding father of Singapore.

And both Tony Blair and Dominic Cummings are kind of obsessed with him.

Right, yeah.

I mean, he almost kind of single-handedly turned Fishingtown into the greatest financial center of Southeast Asia.

But in 1965,

Singapore was meant to be part of Malaysia.

But Lee Kuan Yew couldn't make certain things work with the Malay-led Malaysian part of this union, and they were essentially kicked out of Malaysia.

Singapore's kicked out of Malaysia, which was not good news because above all other things, Singapore did not have access to clean drinking water.

It didn't have its own water supply.

Wow, okay.

Which is, you know, a pretty big challenge for a new country.

And to announce this breakup of the union, he is interviewed in sort of Meet the Press TV show.

And he's...

He's on the verge of tears.

He's basically weeping, telling Singapore that they're no longer part of Malaysia.

They've been kicked out.

It's amazing because he's speaking off the cuff, but with a fluidity and an eloquence that is as if it is a risen speech.

He is so wonderfully well-spoken and he's so powerful, even in defeat, even through tears.

He's talking about how his whole adult life he's believed in the unity of Malaysia and the Singaporean people.

We have ties of geography, economics, and kinship.

And then he has to pause the interview and they have to come back when he stopped crying.

And he says, We're out, but we're still we're going to do it we'll be all right and then he goes on to reassure and this is pertinent to our discussion today he goes on to reassure the malay inhabitants of singapore that he will look out for them malaysia might not have worked out but singapore will be a multiracial society and then goes on to achieve the greatest comeback in the 20th century politics really and build Singapore which becomes the leading yeah and am I right in that he insisted on English as an official language?

He said that there's going to be one language that everybody's going to talk in, and that will kind of be a uniting factor, that everybody will have dialects and languages that they speak at home.

But like,

this is the one language that will be the lingua franca.

Yeah, well, he learned English at home.

He studied at Cambridge.

His grandfather was described as very westernized.

So he had a very Western upbringing, but still spoke Malay.

I would have thought a number of Chinese dialects.

The other thing is, you know, it's almost a perfectly sized nation.

You know, as a start-up start-up nation.

You know, I think it's perfectly sized.

One person could control all of that.

Yeah.

It was

in Malaysia, in Penang, my wife and I came across the sweetest hotel.

The little card on the side of your bed, it was a note that said, Some of our staff are not as young as they once were, so please allow a little extra time.

I thought that was.

Just to get to your room.

Yeah, yeah.

Where's my room size?

Oh, I'm so sorry.

I didn't realize you were in the middle of the day.

Okay, would you like to nominate a phrase for the dustbin?

Right now, it's the phrase political football.

I hate it when a politician says we have to stop treating this as a political football.

You're politicians.

This is politics.

They get accused of using the phrase political football as a political football.

Yeah, it's football tennis.

It just becomes.

And I find it quite lame for politicians to denigrate their profession in order to move on from a question they don't want to answer.

And it's always around toxic, difficult subjects where they don't want anyone to know their real opinion about it, where they go, we mustn't turn the people this affects into a political football.

It's like, you know, it doesn't demean anyone to acknowledge the political element of

their victimhood.

Yes.

That's your job.

That reminds me of a phrase I came across recently, which is ventriloquized xenophobia.

which is

probably not as cute as it sounds.

Well, it's kind of annoying

shooting.

There are certain politicians who won't actually be racist themselves, but will say, well, look, all I'm saying is, from what I'm getting from certain people on the ground, is they're worried about...

So it's a way of voicing people's concerns without you actually

looking like you're endorsing them.

Well, that comes back a bit to that.

I think Labour is doing this a lot using focus groups.

And you sometimes wonder whether or not they're using the focus groups to kind of tell them things that they wanted to say anyway.

And they go, but that's what the focus groups are saying.

You know, in a way that people's like analysis always vindicates what they originally thought.

Okay,

last one.

Best political communicator.

I've tried so hard for my answer not to be Nigel Farash, but that is a perfectly acceptable answer.

I just cannot think of anyone else.

I think it also speaks to the kind of the dearth in rhetoric skill currently on offer in politics, which I think is not necessarily a bad thing.

I'd rather politicians were good at the job of everyday managing countries.

But I just remember, I always think about the last election where, was it BBC or ITV?

It must have been BBC that had that crazy seven-way debate.

And I thought, how is anyone going to get a word in here?

And they just like kind of cycled through all the other parties.

And to a man or woman, they all read their statements

looking down.

And then we got to Nigel Farage and he didn't have any notes.

He made a thing on not having notes, but he spoke off the cuff the entire time, down the camera.

As a comic, I was like, his stage president is amazing.

His fluency, fluency, his ability to speak off the cuff, this improv is great.

I don't know what his crowd is.

I imagine if you had an improv night with Nigel Farage, I think it'd be really good.

Like, I watched him on I'm a Celebrity perform I'm Too Sexy for My Shirt, and you were going into it, and you sort of went through this parabola where you're like, This is gonna be terrible.

And then you were like, This is kind of amazing, and then you went back into it.

No, why am I watching this?

What has happened here?

I think he is an obvious choice, particularly when we have a new government and new opposition leader.

He's been around for a long time.

The one question I think about reform now is: will it be more than the Nigel Farrar show?

Because Uskip and the Brexit party struggle with that.

But that's because he is such a charismatic one person.

I've never seen him speak from notes, which is an extraordinary thing.

No, it may be, you know, he's never had to weigh his words carefully because they are policies that his council is now enacting and it's come into be so it'd be interesting to see whether he he feels he has to be a bit more exactly he's always really enjoyed he's always sort of enjoyed like Goldilocks point of having all the coverage and none of the accountability yeah yeah so he's able to get this honest, raw message out whenever he wants, and then not really have to deal with the consequences.

And I wonder if, as if reform continue to do well, if he'll start to, if politics can make Nigel Farage sound like a politician, that would be his greatest achievement, you know.

Okay.

Amanda, have you got any extra words of the week you'd like to do?

Extra words of the week.

I'm resisting the temptation to bring up the fact that within the space of 30 seconds last week, you said the words big balls and low-hanging fruit.

There it is, each other.

But we'll move on.

No, my word of the week is sub-campaigning,

which was used about Robert Jenrick.

Sub-campaigning, apparently, is when he's clearly campaigning, but he's doing it so subtly that it looks like he's supporting the leader.

So he was the first after the election, the local election, to come out and say, we've got to get behind our leader, Kemi Badenock.

But he's reached that position where people are so mistrustful of anything he does or says that even full-fledged support is seen as strategic.

Sarcastic.

So yeah, there's a fine line between strategic and sarcastic, probably doing it both.

But that was referred to as sub-campaigning.

Robert Jenrick was the cause of, they said it would never happen, a very good joke by Kier Sarmrick, Prime Minister's question.

Yes.

He said, congratulations to all the people who ran in the London Marathon and to Robert Jenrick, who I think is still running.

And everyone, oh, I see running a duel, if you will, a pun or play on words.

I love the puns.

I think he actually delivered it significantly better than I did.

Thanks so much for joining us, Phil.

Thanks for having me.

Long time listener.

Oh, very excited.

Sorted it all out, which is good in the space of 30 minutes.

So, yeah, we've explained.

Or 15 if you're listening to the Radio Fall version.

Thank you for listening to Strong Message here.

We'll be back next week.

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

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