How Much is a Pint of Milk? (with Rob Burley)

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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's me, Amanda Unucci.

And it's me, Helen Lewis.

And this week, we're asking, how much is a pint of milk?

I know there are far more serious conversations and issues going on, but we want to look at the art of the political interview.

How do you get politicians to say something revealing?

How do you stop them avoiding the question?

Before we do that, what have you been up to this week?

Do you know what?

I spent the Easter weekend, I was going to say it's hibernating because it's spring, but whatever the version of that was, which was I got a copy of the new Assassin's Creed game.

I don't know how familiar you are with the genre of video games on Monday.

I regard my Kindle as a video game.

That's

That's enough excitement for me.

Well, Assassin's Creed is a long-running series that takes you through various times in history.

In one of the early games, actually, the final boss is the Pope, Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI.

Absolutely.

But this one's set in feudal Japan.

Anyway, I made a terrible mistake.

I've been learning Japanese for two years on Duolingo.

Very bad idea.

So I set it to be immersive.

So all the dialogue is in Japanese and Portuguese because it's set in the 16th century.

All right.

Let me tell you, Duolingo versus people discussing their need to assassinate people in faraway castles, it doesn't come up a lot.

It's not been very helpful.

Does this mean when you go to Japan, you know, you will be very, very good at talking about assassination and less good at where's the best sushi market?

Yes, I think that's the thing.

If you're going to say, you know, the Lord Takagawa has been hiding in his castle for too long and, you know, your task is to infiltrate it, great.

But, you know, two beers, please, is still a struggle.

Way beyond it.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, we'll talk about immersive experiences.

What I did over the last seven days is I got some new headphones.

I'm a huge music lover and I tend to, not a lot, but on the way in to London, so I wear these nice cancelling headphones, and they were pretty knackered.

So, I just, but I really liked them, so I got the same ones again.

Put them on.

No, they've now decided to give it all sorts of functions.

There's now three different settings, quiet, immersion, and aware,

and I can, I have to choose two of them.

There's some rule now in the instructions that I can't choose one.

I have to choose two out of quiet, immersion, aware.

What is quiet and aware like?

Actually, that's being a ninja, isn't it?

So that would be very useful in my game.

And the experience wasn't a better one.

And I'm discovering this more and more.

I wonder if we've reached maximum useful technology.

And now all these companies are just trying to think of further things to do to keep themselves busy.

But at the end of the instructions, it said that all these changes were for your convenience.

And that struck a bell because I last remember that when I was posting a letter about a year ago into the local post box, the post box around the corner, where it said, for your convenience, collections from this post box will be reduced from three to one.

No, it's for your convenience.

For your convenience.

And then I remember on a plane, while we were still in air, so we weren't even beginning to make the approach to landing, my headphones supplied by the airline were snatched away from me.

And there was a tanno announcement from the steward saying, for your convenience, we're now taking in all your headphones.

Have you noticed this?

This kind of, as long as you disguise what you're about to do, knowing it will be annoying, as long as you preface it by saying it's really not annoying what we're about to do.

Have you got that?

Yeah, we're doing it for you.

I have a related version of that.

You know, I spent the last couple of months doing a lot of traveling and a lot of hotels.

Since the pandemic, a lot of hotels have reduced their housekeeping service to every other day, every three days, whatever it might be.

And they always say, for the sake of the environment, we have reduced.

And you think, it's not, though, is it?

It's incredibly good money saving for you.

And actually, you know what, not an unreasonable point, that unless you're, you know, a rock star, maybe you actually only need the tiles changed every every so often but it is always you know because we care about the environment we've decided to save ourselves some money that reminds me my favorite one of these is when the queen died at the matinee performance of wicked someone came out and said you know unfortunately the queen passed away earlier today out of respect for buckingham palace we are carrying on with the show as normal and then he said and as written and so first of all that's not really out of respect we're just going to carry on as if nothing has happened.

And why did he say as written?

And then everyone realised why he said that, because the opening of Wicked, as people might know, starts with good news, she's dead.

And as a result of that announcement, it spread globally.

Yes,

well, they've saved themselves a problem, but they have accidentally made it very funny.

On that note, let me bring in our guest this week, who is the former editor of BBC's live political programmes and author of a brilliant book called called Why is This Lying Bastard Lying to Me, Rob Burley?

Hey Helen, how are you?

Rob, how much is a pint of milk?

Well that's my first gotcha question to you.

I have to say whenever this question comes up I feel sorry for politicians because I live in the middle of London and so therefore I have to use the Tesco Metro where a pint of milk is about £90.

But I suspect it's probably not in an out-of-town Tesco.

Isn't it a litre of milk anyway?

Am I being controversial here?

I like to take any question if I answered it and I sort of said the wrong thing, I don't think I would be a bad person for being wrong.

And I think this is one of those questions.

I think I'd have a good case for being wrong about it, which is that we don't use pints anymore in the same way.

We just have these big things and the smaller version.

And usually that's how we do it.

And so a politician, like the Prime Minister say, and they like to ask Prime Ministers this kind of question, you know, tend to be in an office space.

They probably don't go shopping for milk very often.

However...

I could tell you, I could tell that person, the Prime Minister, that the price is 85 pence to 95 pence.

Look at that.

See, I think that some of the more well-prepared politicians have sort of briefing notes, don't they?

Where like, I think David Cameron had it sort of drilled into him at one point because I think they were very worried about him seeming posh.

That must be an infinite number of potential questions.

How much a pint of milk, you know?

Yeah.

Simple ones like how many bars are there in a Twix?

Two, you know, how many peanuts are in a pack.

From what you were saying, Rob, isn't that actually that an unfair question to ask of a politician?

Yeah, look, I think it's a ridiculous question.

It's not one I would ever have, if people came up with it occasionally, unoriginally, I would say, let's not ask that.

The reason is that we don't really learn anything by the answer.

I don't think either way it tells us anything.

You might ask them, how much is Job Seekers' allowance a week?

Yeah.

That might be

a more relevant question.

So sometimes numbers like that can be relevant, but this is just designed to sort of catch them out and make the interviewer look good.

Yeah, yeah, it's that gotcha thing.

But no politician, I imagine, would actually go on and say what you've just said, which is like, that's a ridiculous question.

But they should do this reasons.

They should do it.

Didn't Boris Johnson once say, I can't tell you that, but I can tell you the price of like a pint of champagne?

And that I thought was quite a sort of like

lean into your image.

I also remember that a US talk show once gave Michael Gove a kind of sort of like, what year was Magna Carta signed?

And all these incredibly nerdy questions.

He absolutely bossed it.

It was an incredible performance.

But there was, I remember a newly appointed education secretary 10 or so years ago being asked live on just various multiplication sums and so on.

And at the best of times, when you're live on the radio, your brain is in a slightly frozen state.

I think that does, you know, you've mentioned gotcha questions.

Generally speaking, gotcha questions or the concept of them is something that politicians come up with to try and avoid answering questions.

It's a classic strategy to sort of question the questioner and the question.

So that's what they tend to do.

But the ones you've mentioned are truly gotcha because they don't really have any substance to them.

Other ones that are accused of being gotcha are generally accused of being gotcha by politicians who didn't like to be asked them.

So give me an example of that.

What was a question that you really wrestled with during your time producing political shows about whether this was a fair one or not?

Well I suppose the one that comes to mind, I'm not sure I wrestled too much because I think I felt it was significant but I didn't know how it would feel when it actually happened was do you remember Boris Johnson running for the leadership of the Conservative Party and to be Prime Minister in 2019?

You may remember that.

The big issue of the day, it went on forever it seemed, was no deal Brexit.

Would there be a no-deal Brexit?

Would we be able to cope with that?

Boris was very relaxed about this and he often cited the GATT Agreement, which I think is from 1947.

He was a very much a details man.

So

he quoted that agreement and particularly the, if you're not familiar with it, the subclause 5b of that particular agreement.

And we knew that he did this because it was designed to give the impression to people that he was very much across the gas agreement, which is what you'd expect, and that he understood that 5B gave reassurance to people that you wouldn't have to worry about a no-deal Brexit.

So we thought then we know he's going to go there, so we'll invite him down the road of 5B.

And

he danced towards the bear trap.

And true enough, he says, you know, that 5B is reassuring.

So then the planned question was, what about paragraph 5c?

Which you could, I don't know, do you think that's a gotcha question?

I remember the sheer look of sort of panic briefly flitting across his eyes as it became very obvious that he had not, in fact, read 5C.

Wasn't aware if there was a 5C or not, which I think was where the real panic came from.

And going on this hazy memory, did he not then admit that he hadn't read that?

Yes, so in the end, Andrew Neal is what this was, by the way, I should say.

He said, you know, so you don't know what's in 5C, do you?

And he said,

no.

And eventually he said, no.

And the very funny thing about it as well, prior to that, Andrew had made a slight slip of the tongue in all these different subclauses.

And Boris got a little bit sort of overexcited and hubristic and started to sort of really have a go at Andrew for not being across the detail, which was quite funny because moments later he found himself in this position.

But some people would say that was a gotcha question because we constructed something designed to get him in trouble.

That's sort of the definition of it that's sort of put forward by politicians.

Actually, what we did was we were familiar with his techniques of avoiding the substance, and we allowed viewers to see that quite clearly by the question that we asked.

It was a relevant question.

And a few days later, they voted for him to be the leader of the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister.

Political interviews and journalism holding to people account really changed his mind.

Very important.

Yeah, his feet were well and truly held to the fire.

But talking about Andrew Neill, I mean, Boris Johnson famously for the 2019 general election

refused to be interviewed by him, even though the other party leaders had.

Yes.

Leading to Andrew Neal doing quite an impressive account of what he was going to ask him.

But that's something that comes up quite a bit in your book, Rob, which I thought was really interesting.

The idea that politicians are fleeing from interviews and actually the modern media environment, they've always wanted to do this, but the modern media environment has really let them.

Do you think there's any way back from that?

I mean, it really will only change if the broadcasters decide they want it to change.

They have to offer the form that is the best, in my view, the best way of scrutinising politicians.

And also the best way of avoiding questions that are just silly, you know, because you have more silly questions when you have six minutes.

If you have half an hour, then you can actually do some serious conversation.

How strong a position do the broadcasters have now?

Because, like you said,

the average length of a political interview has gone down from no one does the, apart from in general elections, the half-hour interview.

Everything is six minutes now.

So everything is going to be reduced to kind of headlines and bear traps and gotcha questions and wriggling out and so on.

Yeah, but that's a choice.

That's a choice that's been made.

I mean, Andrew Neal actually had a show.

I mean, people forget because of COVID.

Had a show called The Andrew Neal Show, a catchy title we came up with for that one.

And it was in the evening, and it was seven o'clock, and it rated pretty well, and it was long form interviews.

So that was the interview that Keir Starmer gave, where he went through all of his pledges.

And it's proved to be quite an important interview in terms of a record of the pledges he gave when he ran for leadership.

So it's a question of whether the broadcasters want to offer the form.

Maybe the politicians may turn it down, but in reality, I know down the years, you get people, they come on, these things happen.

The book is very good at separating out the kind of difference between styles of interviewing versus maybe format.

And you talk about the long-form political interview as the kind of high platter of it.

I actually think like last year's presidential election, which I've written about Donald Trump's podcast tour, was a good example of the fact that it's not necessarily the form that makes is a problem, it's the difference between not knowing what the interview is for.

So, the example I gave of being very good was Theo Vaughan, who is a Louisiana stand-up comedian.

He interviewed Trump, and it was the gentlest of gentle interviews, but he did talk about his brother's alcoholism and how that had affected him.

And you saw maybe the kind of unpleasant bullying environment in which he grew up that has probably shaped the person he is today.

So it was a bit like, you know, and the Piers Morgan's Life Story is another example of that, where you get politicians who end up talking about their childhood.

And also what you're picking up on there is space, is giving the interview time and space.

So I mean, why did the Andrew Neal show not continue on BBC?

I mean, I no longer work at the BBC.

You'd have to ask, maybe ask Tim Davey, I don't know, because soon after COVID started, started, it was obviously it came off air during COVID, and then when it came back, it didn't come back.

So a decision was made that it wasn't a priority.

I'm completely

puzzled by it.

But yeah, I'd like to find out.

If you could find out, that would be great.

Okay, well, we'll get on that.

And if Tim Davy is listening and would like to maybe come on next week or just drop us anything.

I'll come on with him if you like, and then we could have a, we could discuss.

Okay.

And we're going to set aside 45 minutes at least.

Yes, yes.

We'll do my childhood.

Okay, but then also, I think one of the things that now happens is that interviews are written with one idea of being clipped up for social media.

And this has been a kind of absolute curse at PMQs, too, right?

Which is people saying they're trying to give themselves not even a sound bite, but even a micro sound bite that they know they can reduce to a kind of TikTok post.

Yes.

Do you think there are any politicians who are unafraid of the interview that are currently

roaming amongst us today?

Because I would say Kier Starmer never looks comfortable being interviewed.

Kemi Badnock has stuck with quite comfortable spaces and zones for her interviews.

Ed Davy Blessing might be out there doing hard interviews, but no one ever pays enough attention to that.

Something about the look in people and politicians' eyes when they're asked a question, whether it's a tricky one or a gotcha or just a detailed policy one that they're not across, that look, and I think audiences can pick up on it.

Kenneth Clark always struck me as someone who could get through any interview by Paxman because he was just being Kenneth Clark.

There was no sense of artifice.

Whereas if you get someone who constantly looks like a rabbit in the headlights, just because he or she has been asked, what is your policy on, the audience is already nervous and highly suspicious no this is this is you know this is how has the political industry developed and how has the response to it developed the labour party in terms of the labour party it was interesting in 2015 the we we on on the marsh show at the time i was editing andrew marshow we had the all the all the candidates and i i went back for the book and the mainstream candidates who weren't jeremy corbyn appeared to have forgotten how to speak they they couldn't answer anything in a way that was remotely normal um so everything was caveatted and well on the one hand and what's really important is is this and they completely lost their vocabulary and the way in which they could connect with people in a way that you know, the people they were copying, so Tony Blair, and particularly Tony Blair, you know, you couldn't accuse of not being a good communicator.

So, so something's gone wrong there.

There are people I think who probably relish it a bit more than others.

I mean, I suspect Wes Streeting is one of those who would quite enjoy coming on and talking about policy.

I think I know he's left now, but Michael Gove was always somebody who was very into it and would sort of sometimes even say things that were interesting.

But by the way, I think we should be really clear about this.

This is not sort of a

sidebar issue about, you know, how politicians speak and, you know, gotcha questions.

It's really central to what we're doing here, which is trying, which is trying to give people the chance to decide who to vote for and give power to and hold them to account.

And that is, that seems to me to be diminished

at a time when it should be the opposite.

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I've got two worries about where political interviews are going.

If you imagine the relationship is interviewer, interviewee politician, and then audience, I think there's changes of attitude coming from both of those outer sides, the interviewer side and the audience side they politicians are now going towards safe environments because of the whole you know expansion of media they want to go on a network that they buy into and that they feel they'll be in a comfortable space so whether it's gb news or liz truss's amazing new uncensored uh media venture which is coming for the month now which i will look forward to and and look forward to contributing to if it's uncensored and see what happens there yeah so there is that but i think also i've noticed audiences getting more particular and dismissive of things like organizations like the BBC.

If someone whose views they chime with is being interviewed and being asked tough questions, there's a tendency to then blame the interviewer for being one-sided.

Yeah, in fact, when I was at the Marshall editor, I went on Twitter a lot and I said one of my catchphrases, I had a catchphrase, was people you disagree with will sometimes be on television.

And rather than think that's a bad thing, that's really good.

In fact, it's actually more interesting to watch an interview with someone you don't agree with and and then to take sides against the interviewer because they dare to question your person.

You can go all the way back to Richard Nixon and the Checkers speech when he was in trouble when he was running for vice president and he sort of appealed to the country that these media types are just ruining everything and they're either coming after little or me.

And it's that similar sort of sense you get from people who complain about questions.

Well, yes, although the tendency now for people like Liz Truss and so on to do down the mainstream media or the legacy media or the BBC, like you're normalising that tendency to actually seek out an interviewer who will be kinder to you.

We've all seen American television.

I mean, we're all in our different ways, you're all familiar with it.

That's the way it is, isn't it?

There, so we're definitely going in that road.

And that's where, again, where you know, national broadcasters have to step in.

No, I think there will always be a perpetual struggle between the media and politicians about interviews, about who gets walked out of it.

You know, then traditionally, the politicians have wanted access to the audience.

I mean, exactly similar thing has happened with celebrities, right?

Which is, if you were Kim Kardashian in 2010, it was a big deal to be interviewed by Vogue or to be profiled by the New York Times.

Now, however, you have 60 million followers on Instagram and you can just promote anything yourself and anything, you know, you're being paid to promote directly to your audience.

And I think social media has done a similar thing for politicians.

They think, why don't I just do this clip that I'll put out on on X or on Facebook rather than mediating it through someone who might say mean things to me.

I attach that also to our tendency as users of social media to be looking for stuff that we agree with and to be wanting to read an article in a press journal or an online site that we tend to agree with.

We ourselves are kind of insulating ourselves away from arguments that are opposite to our beliefs.

But we should be having, you know, one thing I really firmly believe in as well as interviews is we should be having arguments and we should be having them on television and on the media.

But I mean, is that enough for them though?

Because surely, I mean, if you're going to win an election, you need to reach beyond just the base, as it were, and just people who will watch boring clips on social media I mean you want do you want drama that will draw people into that's why they do the debates and they do the the big set-piece interviews during the election campaign I mean there's an opportunity there to actually talk to people

my experience down the years has been that they did come on I mean I mean I put I put up Helen will remember the Sunday politics I put the chapter for that I called if you build it they won't come because they didn't come in the way that we'd hoped quite but over time we did get quite a few ministers through the door so I like that chapter I mean I was on the Sunday Politics as a regular recurring panel guest.

I remember Nick Clegg walking off the set after giving an interview and looking at the three of us waiting to come and go, and now you're going to tell everybody what you think I said or what I was actually thinking.

You know, the idea that was that, you know, that that programme had to be kind of creative around interviews because people were afraid of the Andrew Neil mauling.

But he also did a lot of work, which you talk about in the book, about putting up graphs on screen behind, you know, showing, actually giving people more relevant commentary around stuff.

Yes.

And then having kind of live interpretation of the interview to give people a kind of much rounder context of it which i also thought was a quite an innovative thing that maybe didn't get i definitely think there is a hunger by a lot of people for things to be explained much more in much more detail you know like like you were saying with the graphs and so on that this simplified and gotcha or over-interrupting aggressive interview is not something that people get a sense of fulfilment or satisfaction from the that it becomes annoying no no no nobody else who does it work for i I mean, it doesn't work for anybody.

Where we are now is the worst of all possible worlds.

We have these brief encounters where

either nothing is said because it's short enough to maintain a line, or something silly is said by an interviewer to try and get a rise out of you.

It's kind of ludicrous.

The other thing, by the way, I just had to say, is about how people are communicating, what politicians communicate.

They don't talk like anybody else talked.

Let me talk about this book.

The people that I speak to are just crying out for people to speak to them in a normal way, not treat them like idiots, not use this weird kind of, I don't know how to describe the language they use.

I mean, Rishi Sino was particularly bad at it.

There'd be a lot of bad communicators

around.

Starmer's not the best.

I have seen up close with a few people that transformation of personality and language when they're off camera and then they go on a live interview and it be quite chatty in the room beforehand and then suddenly their voice suddenly changes like this and then they say things like, you know, multi-pronged and consistent and things like that that people don't normally use in everyday speech.

Don't you think that's armour though?

I mean there's a bit in the book where you say the trouble is Rob you need to be sort of slightly sympathetic to politicians but not too sympathetic.

You're there to kind of scrutinize them and hold them to account and you can't go well it is a very hard job.

But I think that language is a form of armour.

It's a sort of verbal shield around the world.

Exactly armour is also a barrier isn't it?

I'm talking about party leaders or senior government ministers or opposition spokespeople rather than everyday members of the public.

I'm always puzzled as to why that happened.

How much sympathy do you have for the fact that politicians use language as that kind of shield, Rob?

I understand it.

I definitely understand it.

But I just think, you know, I mean, these people are supposedly quite clever people.

They should grasp the opportunity here if they've got the intelligence to do so.

To think that the way they're doing things, like the fact Labour got elected, as it did last year, is not some great testament to

the way in which they managed that campaign, which is incredibly careful.

The trouble is, what you're going to do, if you're a mainstream party or a progressive party, perhaps, is leave all the good tunes to the populists because they will answer the question.

You can't accuse Nigel Farage or or Donald Trump of not answering the question because they do.

Well, do they?

My experience, like you said, of Farage is getting a bit testy and a bit kind of

trying to shut the conversation down.

And Trump in particular, if you ask him a pointed question, if he's let you into the room, if you ask him a pointed question, like, you know, do you not think the ceasefire agreement was a bit of a dud?

He'll just go, what a dreadful question.

What a dreadful question.

He's rude about people in the way that normal people are rude in everyday life.

What he says, connect, connects, what he doesn't say is, well, what's important is, or

you know, what we need to keep in mind is this, or whatever it might be, I'm not sort of vouching for their kind of honesty or whatever it is.

I'm just saying they have a technique which is maybe it's faking authenticity or maybe it's authentic, but it certainly connects with people.

What will never connect with people is this way of speaking that the mainstream politicians have.

And I don't know why they persist with it or don't try at least to sort of...

you know, mess with it in some way and try some new things out.

But aren't we then saying that that technique works then?

The avoiding the question, but in an honest way.

In an honest way.

We connect with people if you go,

I'm not going to answer that question.

Well, yes, it certainly works in the sense that it comes over as having answered the question in a certain way.

It's because it challenges it or it says something interesting in response to it rather than says something that just makes you wonder who these people are and whether they talk like this in real life at home.

You know, when they're asked if they want a cup of tea, they say, well, tea is a very important beverage, but coffee

is also well worth drinking.

That's what we've come to.

In our support for tea, we are in no way undermining the rights of coffee.

Can I ask you our quick fire questions, Rob, while we have yours?

Yes, yeah, yeah.

What, in your opinion, is the best political speech of your lifetime?

Could even be best form of political questioning, I suppose.

Oh, yeah, but for you, we could make it best.

What is the best political interview you've ever seen?

How about that?

Well, I just, I made so many.

How can I narrow them down?

You're like choosing a favourite child, yes.

If you could.

I am going to have to choose the 1989 interview between Brian Warden and Margaret Thatcher that was in the book and that formed the basis of the recent drama that we did

because that was for me such a seismic moment having thought Mrs.

Thatcher would be there forever.

But here was Brian Walden who had been banging on for years and years on that channel doing these questions and finally someone had found a chink in the armor and it was Brian.

And then learning what I've learned since then, that has to be my favourite.

Can you nominate for us a phrase for the dustbin, one that you would like to consign?

I would lose difficult choices.

Ah, my favourite of the show, yeah.

I heard you actually talk about it on another podcast, but the aspect

that irritated me about it was it was always designed to suggest that the people going through the pain were those poor politicians who had to make this terribly difficult choice.

And we're the ones that really we should be feeling sorry for because we've had to decide what to do and it's just so hard.

You know, it was difficult, really.

And actually, I feel that's sort of the wrong focus in terms of where the difficulty lies.

So that's what I would do with that one.

And then in the book, you're very complimentary in some ways about both Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher.

So I'm not going to allow you to have either of those as your nomination for best political communicator.

Of all time or now?

Currently, now would be interesting, yeah.

Gosh, it's a very,

there's not many contenders, are there?

Can I nominate somebody who has impressed me in the last week, which is Pete Buddigig?

I know I keep bringing him up, Democrat politician, former Secretary of State for Transport.

He just did an interview in which he talked.

He's now grown a beard because it's the offseason.

Oh, has he done that?

Jeremy Paxige did that when I was on Newsnight.

I knew that was the beginning of the end.

Much like Jeremy Paxman's I'm checking out of here beard.

Pete Buddigig is also having a kind of holiday beard.

Anyway, he talked about.

shave this morning, by the way.

There we go.

You're checking off.

But he talked about the letter that he wrote for his family when he deployed to Iraq, when he was mayor of South Bend.

And he talked in that about he suddenly came to a realization when he was writing this letter that he had never been in love.

Now he's gay.

And what he said was that that was the time when he realized that he needed to go back in, even if it nuked his career in politics, you know, he needed to be true to himself, he needed to pursue a relationship with a man and find love.

And I thought that was the most brilliant piece of kind of political communication to anybody out there who might still have reservations about gay relationships, gay marriage, saying what I wanted to be was in love and framing it like that.

And also that thing of being honest about yourself.

So I thought that was a really good way of obviously he's preparing for a presidential run in which him being gay may come up, right?

With some sections of the electorate and just being very open about that and just framing his sexuality and his search for a relationship in a way that most people will kind of go, oh, that's nice, isn't it?

Well, I wanted to bring up an interviewer that I know that you've worked with in the past, just because the story came out this week that reflects on what we've been talking about.

It's poor Evan Davis, who's been told by the BBC he can no longer do his heat pump podcast, which he's been doing.

I loved him.

I never stopped listening to that one.

Oh, I know.

I mean, it's like top of the chart after the rest is heat pump.

And he was quoted in The Guardian this week saying, as this series has gone on, they, the BBC, have become concerned that trying to inform people about heat pumps can be interpreted, rightly or wrongly, as somehow treading on areas of public controversy.

Well, the thing is, his co-host is somebody who is

from the industry, and there's an industry that is lobbying for subsidies.

So it comes back to this, which I imagine was the bane of your life, Rob, which is the idea about BBC producers having outside interests.

And are any of them legitimate?

And do all of them cause huge headaches for the BBC?

Which is why I, Amanda, never say anything controversial about heat.

I highly recommend that as a strategy.

I think it's confusing sometimes what the rules are, but I think in this case, I sort of see the point, really.

You know, I can see why.

It's a great loss, but I can see why.

Also, I've seen lots of criticism calling out,

particularly BBC presenters, for their political past.

So, like Nick Robinson, as a student, was involved in the young conservatives.

Andrew Maher, at one point, was a Maoist, Maoist Ma.

Jeremy Paxman, when he retired bearded from Newsnight,

proclaimed that he was a traditional Tory.

And my answer to that is always: if someone's going to be very good at asking questions to politicians about politics, you would expect somewhere in their past for them to have had an enthusiasm for politics.

It's a very close up.

It's not a bad thing to have had a campaigning or act of political past.

It's just how professional are you as a broadcaster to interrogate people of all persuasions fairly?

There's obviously a huge difference between people who absolutely just love the game.

And I think that's what I would say about some of those people that you've mentioned.

They just really enjoy the kind of combat sport.

It's like fencing.

Yes.

And actually the person who's on the other side of it, it's not, you know, that's sort of slightly relevant to them.

Versus, I would say, there was a terrible scene from the White House press briefing this week where they have a new media seat and they invited a podcaster in called Tim Poole.

And his question was basically to the press secretary, would you like to condemn the bias of all the mainstream media that don't do enough to say how glorious Mr.

Trump is and how all his works among us are incredible?

And I was like, that's not somebody who enjoys the cut and thrust of journalism.

That's someone who's got into it because they want to be close to power.

And I think that's the key distinction.

My worry is that's where it's heading, you know, as politicians become more and more aware that that's what they can do.

They can be more selective.

I've

brought a phrase

for the end of the show, which is much needed clarity.

So last week we had the Supreme Court's ruling on the interpretation of women and man in the Equality Act, and they said those are terms are now defined biologically, which has big repercussions for single-sex services.

But I thought Tom Peck of the Times wrote a very funny sketch about the fact that all the politicians in Labour who have been absolutely tortured on this issue for years have clung like a sort of drowning man to a life raft to this phrase much needed clarity.

So here's what Tom Peck wrote.

There's real artistry there.

To welcome the clarity of something they all know only too well is to give every possible outward resemblance of welcoming the thing itself, but with very much without doing so.

All of us in our lives will probably welcome the clarity of something without necessarily realising it at the time.

We may welcome the clarity of finally taking a long-suffering dog on a one-way trip to the vets.

An unfaithful husband may welcome the clarity of their new life in the car.

I was once passed a note at primary school informing me that someone who should remain nameless didn't want to go out with me anymore.

I suppose, in the end, I welcomed the clarity.

So, I thought that was a very good way of saying that that phrase has just been, yes, absolutely seized upon.

My phrase that I brought in is really a full stop to something we discussed last week very briefly about going into space.

And Helen, you talked about how the recent gang of six who went up in Amazon's rocket couldn't really be considered astronauts really because they didn't go that high and I discovered that within the astronaut fraternity or sorority there is a phrase used for people like that which is orbit jockeys

there's a lot of the isn't there a very famous phrase in the Minecraft meeting I was getting chicken jockey which is to have anyone who's got children my kids are shouting that a lot it's really really funny yeah i'm sure it gets funnier and funnier every time they say it yeah yeah

even my mom who says it's a terrible film just persists with this the catchphrase.

It says it's kind of ironic.

10.

Right.

Anyway we have chicken jockeys and orbit jockeys.

That's one to take us into next week.

Thank you for listening to Strong Message here.

We'll be back next week.

Thank you to Rob for joining us.

Thank you.

That's all for now.

Our podcasts are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Hello, I'm Robin Inks.

And I'm Brian Cox, and we would like to tell you about the new series of the Infinite Monkey Coach.

In this series, we're going to have a planet off we decided it was time to go cosmic so we are going to do jupiter

versus scepter

it's very well done that because in the script it does say in square brackets wrestling voice question mark and once we touch back down on this planet we're going to go deep really deep yes we're journeying to the center of the earth with guests phil wang chris jackson and anna ferreira and after all of that intense heat and pressure we're just gonna kind of chill out a bit and talk about ice.

And also in this series, we're discussing altruism.

We'll find out what it is.

Exploring the history of music, recording with Brian Eno and looking at nature's shapes.

So if that sounds like your kind of thing, you can listen to the infinite monkey cage first on BBC Sounds.

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