Fist Emoji, Flag Emoji, Fire Emoji (with Ava Santina Evans)

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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 Helen Lewis.

And here is Armanda Yunucci.

And this week, fist emoji, flag emoji, fire emoji.

Is the casualness of political communication a danger or just deeply cringe?

Before we talk about Signal Gate, as I believe we're going to have to call it, I understand that you're a living satirist.

Minimum bar to clear, but well done for clearing it.

No, well, yes, I took part in one of these

book group discussions that the London Review of Books does.

They were doing a course on satire, so they were reading Jonathan Swift, they were reading, you know, Johnson, satire in the 60s.

Boris Johnson.

Not Boris Johnson, no, no.

A different type of funny.

And I was invited on to talk about no, but I was introduced as they said, and we now have a living satirist.

And I kind of felt like an exhibit or like one of those patients, you know, when junior doctors come round and the senior doctor says, Do you mind if we just prodio about in front of these people while they learn?

I felt kind of slightly on show.

You know how they have Jeremy Bentham's stuffed corpse at UCL, University College London?

At is it board meetings or governors' meetings?

Yeah.

For the casting vote.

They could have you stuffed in one for the fullness of time and you could continue to do London review books panels from beyond the grave.

As long as they don't attempt it, no.

That's all.

No pre-mortality.

But for most of this week, I've been on a fruitless quest.

Go on.

Because we discussed this two weeks ago.

There were massive cuts to the welfare and disability benefits budget.

And the government, as a reason, said there was a moral argument for doing this.

that was their kind of justification they said it wasn't about cost cutting there was actually just a moral argument a moral reason for making this switch and then last week rachel reeves cut it by another half a billion and i did wonder have they suddenly found lots more moral arguments that they've forgotten about but i've scoured all the press and the media to see what these moral arguments were and not one so if anyone has one do send it in you see that satire that's what i've done there is satire not necessarily funny but it is pointed.

It has a point.

Well, let's hope that there's some moral arguments are found to make me clear.

So I've just shaken off your jet lag.

So you were in

San Francisco for the Atlantic.

Yes.

No, I haven't shaken off my jet lag.

As previously discussed, I didn't wear sunglasses at the appropriate times because I thought I'd look like Bono.

Or Ellen Musk.

Or Ellen Musk.

And so, yeah, I've just, I don't know how you did West Coast jet lag.

It's a beast.

I've not been right for days afterwards.

No, after doing it for quite some time, I was just absolutely exhausted.

And

my doctor referred me to a consultant who took some blood tests and said, actually, you've been eating stodgy American food at all hours of the day and night for the last four years.

And this has such an effect on your gut that it, you know, it leads to bad microbes and bad bacteria.

Basically, for the last three or four years, you've been ever so slightly drunk.

And I thought, that explains a lot, actually.

That explains how I've felt.

Just slightly, you know, if I'm looking at you now, if if it had been me multi-jet lagged, I'd be looking at you going,

I'll just let Helen speak because I've got a thought here, but I'm not sure I can get it out of my mouth.

Well, luckily enough, we have one person who is fresh as a daisy to compliment you and my increasingly decrepit brains.

Thank you.

Ava Santina Evans is joining us today.

She is the political editor of Politics Joe.

Avid, radio for listeners who may not be aware of the internet, I'm protecting.

Tell me,

because we're hanging on to them there then.

But Politics Joe is a is a new media startup.

I mean, it's been around for quite a while now, but it's uh it's it's it's video first and it does something quite distinctive.

So tell us a bit more about it.

Well can I also just say I wasn't listening because I didn't think you were talking to me because of the fresh as a daisy comment.

You're listening to this, but I actually look like I've just sort of, well, I look like I've like fallen into the studio off a line bike, which is pretty much what I did.

So Politics Joe is aimed at the under 35s and people who are older than that, who watch the channel, channel, get very, very angry when I say that.

But the point of it was young people don't read the news rather than, well, be very angry about that and show you.

No, I'm over 35.

I think I can fully, I'm going to stop lying about my age at some point.

But there are lots of newspapers and magazines that are explicitly for older people.

The average age of newspapers is old.

I mean, this is one of my continual hobby horses, is people who own houses already are very well represented in the media because that's who newspapers are for.

But I imagine your classic viewers are probably renting.

And actually, those people don't, the people who'd who'd like more houses to be built have struggled classically to find a voice in British political conversation.

Yeah, absolutely.

And also, you know, graduates who are moving into a market where there is stagnating wages and they are having to use most of that wage on their rent.

There's not a lot of representation for that across the board.

Okay, well, let's talk about, I'm sorry, I'm going to call it Signalgate.

Can we think of another name for it that isn't SignalGate?

Well, America seems to have called it SignalGate.

This is the use of the Signal chat group that was used by my boss.

I should declare my boss.

You're sort of at You're centre adjacent to the biggest security scandal of the last 30 years.

So, my boss is Jeff Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

And he has been a thorn in the side, shall we say, of the Trump administration for quite some time.

He was the one who published the story about Trump going to a cemetery and saying that people who died in fighting America's wars were suckers and losers.

He's done several really big and important interviews with John Kelly, former chief of staff, Mark Milley, particularly highly regarded among kind of veterans and military people.

So he's a professional journalist.

He's what we used to call an actual journalist.

So it's sort of one of those things.

It made me think a lot about the brass IP defile episode.

You know, one where he goes, this is exactly what we did not want to happen.

Yeah.

Of all the people to add accidentally to your group chat, adding Jeff is just about the worst possible person.

Has he found out why he got included in that?

Was that another Jeffrey they thought?

There is still no answer.

Mike Waltz, who is the national security advisor who added him to the group, claims that Jeff's number simply got, quote, sucked into his phone.

So you know how the internet works because it's not like that.

So I think that's been denied.

But no, it is completely inexplicable.

And Jeff Watts said he's now going to turn it over to like the finest minds in the country, technical minds, and asked Ilan Musk to look into it.

Yeah, Ian Musk did turn over

to a cabinet meeting wearing a t-shirt that said tech support.

So I think Mike Watts has taken that rather rather literally.

Ava, yeah.

No, I just think it's sort of plausible because if you remember Boris Johnson's phone number was on the internet for around 16 years because it was on some random think tanks press release so I sort of can't imagine how a number just got absorbed into a phone.

You know it's totally possible that sometimes journalist numbers get onto people's phone because they have previously met, you know, maybe even many years ago.

I've had the same phone number for donkey's years.

I can't know whose phone it is on, incriminatingly.

But you must, being a young person, you must understand the group chat.

Did you find the war plans group chat relatable?

I found that the emojis were quite boomer, I felt, in the nicest possible way.

The thing that I found most bizarre about it, or the thing I found most worrying about it, was sort of how inextricably linked it now seems to me that Silicon Valley and Washington DC are.

Because to use a commercial platform like that with a sort of the same sort of lax or, you know, easy easiness, no, what's the word I'm looking for?

Facility?

Yeah, as you might use, you know, the situation room.

To me, that was very worrying because

I'm thinking forward and I'm probably going a little bit too far ahead, but I'm worrying about how tech is infiltrating our lives on you know our daily lives and I think that's a really glaring example of how Washington DC just are not worried at all.

This really boils down to when Trump nominated a lot of people the argument against them was they're not experienced they don't know the ins and outs of the department that they're being asked to run.

I know we're seeing I think some of the evidence of that coming through which is it didn't cross their minds like you say not to use an available chat group.

And is that Elon Musk?

Is that the reason?

Do you think that perhaps because he's there present in the White House now everyone thinks oh it's totally safe to use a commercial platform which by the way owns all of your information yeah yeah I think I think there is an element of the casualness and this is reflected in the casualness of the the language you know I find it slightly hard to discuss you know a situation in which they've bombed an apartment block in Yemen we don't actually know how many civilian casualties there were it was done to kill a terrorist according to the group chat but I found out this is the things you learn that most high-ranking officials in the US government senior military officials have something called a skiff which is a secure box you have in your home Essentially, you have to leave your phone, your smartwatch, everything outside, and then you can go into it.

And then that is then deemed to be a secure place to communicate.

Yeah.

And I think about it in the same way that what's the reason that any of us have a smartphone?

It's because it's quite handy to be on the train and be able to catch up on your emails.

I mean, obviously, you feel that it's slightly melting your brain as you do scroll for the third hour of Instagram reels, but it's the convenience of it and the casualness, which is reflected, I think, in the language.

Yeah, and when the foo transcript was eventually released, after the Trump administration said no security secrets were mentioned in it, and then the transcript was released to show there were, in fact, an awful lot of security, highly sensitive information was released.

But the one that I found really chilling was Waltz texting, their top missile guy, we had a positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and it's now collapsed.

Vance, excellent.

And that gave you a real stark insight into, you know, what goes on in these situations.

Because I instantly thought, but his girlfriend's in there.

Who else is in there?

You know, it's a casualness, not just of

the media they use to discuss it, but the way these things are carried out.

Yeah, I thought that was really one of the things that was very worrying about it.

Like you said, Dava, the first thing that immediately springs to mind is you are putting sensitive information.

So the really sensitive information on there was the fact that they were going to do this bombing.

It was texted ahead of time.

So

if someone had leaked that while the operation was ongoing, that could have had really serious consequences for the service members and government.

They seem to have rested on calling it Signal Gate.

And I kind of think calling a scandal gate is a bit like

using a record scratch in like trailers and so on.

And surprise, the music stops and there's a scratch.

I always thought, well, people are going, what is that?

That's from vinyl, that's from 40 years ago.

And gate, gate is what, what, that's Watergate from the 1970s.

Do you know what

that?

Yes.

You think of Plato.

Ah, so gate has become its own sort of self-generating word.

Can I tell you the worst claim to fame, which is that I have seen the famous door in Watergate?

The Atlantics offices in D.C.

used to be in the Watergate building.

During the burglary, they kept latched open a door with a bit of essentially sticky tape in the parking garage.

And I've got one of those angry local council looks at pothole photos of me with the, like, pointing at the door, going, this is it, this is the famous door.

I've seen the holes that are in the desk of Richard Nixon's desk when he was in the Oval Office, where the wires were put in for the tapping.

This is Armando and Helen's minimum possible political tourism politics, isn't it?

What is the smallest thing that you've seen that was connected to a major political scandal?

But that kind of openness of politicians being a bit more casual now with their conversation and not being quite aware of the levels of security that they normally have to adhere to.

Is that something, is it just a new generation of politicians who don't quite get the fact that at some point they have to stay stum about certain issues?

Well, there's been several incidents where politicians have been caught out on WhatsApp over the years in Westminster.

I mean, we've just had the sort of William Ragg scandal where he was caught out by someone sort of catfishing him.

Catfishing is that?

This is the Tory MP who was kind of honeytrapped.

I was

like, our great language for the scandal language.

Honeytrapped by a catfish, right?

Yes.

And then you've also got, you know, the Ford report, which was this, you know, huge investigation into Labour.

Everyone who worked for Labour at the time, their phones were taken and all of their WhatsApps were analysed.

And you would think at some point politicians would look at those two incidents and think, I need to be a bit more careful.

However,

I would say that politicians in Westminster play rather loose and fast.

They have now taken on adding disappearing messages to your conversations with them.

So I can't now go look back at what perhaps an MP has texted me at 11 o'clock at night from two weeks ago.

Right.

Unfortunately, you can defeat this great OPSEC, clean on OPSEC, as Pete Heggs has said, by simply the version of the screens.

And I think that's one of the things that is really interesting to me about this scandal.

So Trump wasn't on this signal group chat.

It turns out that one of the things that's really great preparation for the modern world of very lax security is having grown up as a kind of New York real estate developer in the 1980s where you learn never put anything in paper, never put anything in writing.

And Trump famously, he only really started to text during the last campaign.

He is a man who is very aware that he should leave no paper trail.

But I agree with you.

The COVID WhatsApps, did you ever report on those?

They were extraordinary, I thought.

Absolutely.

I mean, Dominic Cummings, you know, in front of the COVID inquiry, and it was revealed that he thought Matt Hancock was essentially an idiot who was, to quote him, he said that he was killing people through his mind.

I'm actually shocked that someone could be so rude about Matt Hancock.

This is a revelation.

Have you ever found yourself included in one of these groups and then unceremoniously booted out when they realise you're in it?

Okay, so there was one time where I sent a comms party person a question and then they sent it back to me being like that idiot from LBC is asking this again.

Oh,

deleted it straight away before I could screenshot it.

And then there was another time, I suppose I was slightly caught out by someone who was very high up in shadow cabinet, told me about a reshuffle that was happening.

I said, Can I post this on Twitter?

They said yes.

Turned out that they'd got it completely wrong.

And actually,

what had been done was the WIP was trying to figure out who was leaking and they figured it out.

The Colleen Rooney, Rebecca Yard,

flushing out the mole.

I was told of when Bill Clinton was president, his office was notoriously leaky and he hated it.

So the chief of staff said, well, I'll tell you what, there's always nine of us in these meetings and one of us is leaking.

So what we'll do is after the meeting, we'll go to each one of the nine and give them a separate bit of information because then the information that will be leaked will then identify who it is.

And they did that.

All nine bits of information were leaked.

Yeah, I think, but again, this comes back to the uniqueness of politics and particularly Westminster or DC as a workplace, is that there are incredibly blurred lines between people's official jobs and their out-of-hours socializing.

It's one of the reasons I always feel slightly uneasy about the kind of particularly like the drinking culture at Westminster, the idea that one of the ways that you get stories is you hang around in the bars.

And there have been a couple of really sad cases of MPs who just that became the thing that they did all the time to the detriment of their families and ultimately their careers.

But it is that kind of blurring of lines, and you see that in the language.

So the title of this episode, which is Fist Emoji, Fire Emoji, no, Fist Emoji, Flag Emoji, Fire Emoji, is that that reply from Mike Waltz about you know how great it was that they'd done this bombing yeah and it's just it's that casualness

Ava how do you deal with that kind of blurring of lines and do you have a work phone and a normal phone a normal phone and like a civilian phone are there things that you do specifically in order to try and and like not blur those lines between personal and professional well when i'm talking specifically about where i'm going to bomb i use my work phone right yes and when i'm talking to my friends i use my no no i have the same phone all the time.

And I actually, it's something that all of my close friends and family totally hate because it goes off all the time.

But you can't be without it.

I would say sort of the peak time for a conversation with a politician is after 11 o'clock.

It does worry me.

Yes.

It does worry me sometimes.

You know, I've just, here we go, an insight into my personal life.

My new boyfriend was very confused why certain men text me after 11 o'clock at night.

And there is one specific,

there's one specific MP who always starts his message with, Are you up?

Which, if you're familiar, with a sort of yes, it's it doesn't look great, and it's like, no, no, no, no, no, they're just going to talk to me about policy.

They don't believe me.

That's very funny.

No, no, no, it's not a random man, it's only the shadow secretary of state so far.

It's perfectly normal for them to text you up at 11:30.

I remember speaking again for research on vape to the gatekeepers for senators and so on, the ones who are charged with being at the end of the phone at any time of day or night night and being able to kind of stop various people getting through to the senator or whoever their boss is.

And they did say, whenever you have a relationship, there are three of you in this relationship because there is always at the time, this shows how far back it was, it was a Blackberry, they would take their Blackberry to bed with them and it would be on the pillow in case their boss rang in the middle of the night to say, I need 500 words on Afghanistan by tomorrow morning.

My phone is on the pillow.

My phone is always on the pillow.

Do you sleep?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah, sometimes it's in the middle of beds.

No, when I used to cover Westminster, I feel like you did sort of slightly sleep with the one eye open in the sense that I remember when Ian Duncan Smith resigned, very annoyingly for my purposes, very late on a Friday evening.

And obviously, New States, and we had to kind of cover something, get something up.

But you do get this sort of sense of like being constantly slightly on call in a way that I think also affects stuff.

The other thing I wanted to bring up that I thought really came out of this row was in response, both Pete Buddhegieek, former Secretary of State for Transport, probable 2028 Democratic contender for president, and Tammy Duckworth, who is a senator, Democratic senator, who's also a veteran, both dropped an F-bomb in their response.

And I think it's part of the thing that we've talked about before that the Democrats have now learned that because Trump has changed the way that language works in American politics, they have to kind of get stuck in in the mud.

Yeah.

I think we've definitely, that's part of the story of casualness, is also more swearing.

Also,

The Atlantic this week, my colleague Elaine had a profile of Stephen Chung, who I don't know if you're familiar with.

He's Trump's director of comms, who apparently is lovely.

Tell me, Ava, if you've had this dynamic.

Apparently, lovely describes as a teddy bear in private, but in public, he's a monster.

He's just an absolute pit bull.

So it's what he said about Ron DeSantis at the Republican debate.

Ron shuffled his feet and gingerly walked across a debate set like a 10-year-old girl who just reigned in her mum's closet and discovered heels for the first time.

I mean,

he's just a colossal bitch.

But in private, apparently, a delight.

And is that...

Is that something that you've experienced in British politics?

There are two names that I'm desperate to give you.

Go on,

you might as as well go ahead.

Can I?

Yes.

Well, okay.

As far as we're concerned.

Yeah, I mean, we're not in charge.

Peter Mandelson,

very polite.

Yes.

Furious behind the scenes.

I was on Good Morning Britain just before the election and Ed Bulls had corrected me that Peter Mandelson was not advising the party and I sort of jumped in to say, well, I've been with shadow cabinet members while the phone's been ringing from Peter Mandelson.

So that's entirely not true.

He was furious about that, apparently.

And then the other example I would give is probably the director of comms for the Conservatives.

He's now, he might be still milling around, Alex Wilde.

Oh, yeah, very lovely.

Every time I've seen him at a drinks reception, behind the scenes, or when I've been trying to get into, you know, as is my right as the press, to get into a CCHQ event, he has been ferocious.

Oh, really?

I think that's a fascinating dynamic.

Because I always sort of assume that people are furious, they're perma-furious.

I mean, well, is it?

I mean, again, this is something that social media has done, which is, you know, you hide behind the anonymity of being able to write something without people actually being directly, physically there with you.

So it encourages you to be as extreme as possible or as angry as possible.

It's all about heightening to get attention, isn't it?

And that idea of within politics being someone who enjoys the idea of being able to manipulate what the story is, gives you a sense of power and control that I imagine can only encourage you to kind of act that part even more loudly than perhaps your natural personality gives you.

Do you think they're tired?

Do you think a lot of that is that?

I was going to say when you mentioned like 11 o'clock at that, you know, just that, is our country being run by people who are insomniacs?

Or three pints down.

Or three pints down or exhausted or all three.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

I definitely think you really do get the sense sometimes that people are very strung out.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well there is no pause.

That's the thing.

You know, it's if I do like a project, a big, you know, shooting thing, I mean, it's ridiculous that was, but I know there's an end point.

For politicians, that cycle doesn't stop, does it?

You know, we don't give them a chance to escape.

Even when they go on holiday, we expect them to not go on holiday.

I think that's one of my stealthy beeps, along with the fact that I think it's perfectly acceptable for politicians to travel first class on the train and get a bit of work done.

And I don't begrudge the...

I mean, I know that...

all train prices are alarming but really i think it's fine to put the chancellor in first class so she can catch up on stuff without having to kind of fight with people on the way to a rugby match and then the other thing i also feel is that i think it's completely fine for them to um have holidays and i hate their comeback from holiday if your country is so badly run that without the empromateur of the Prime Minister, you simply can't handle things, then that's quite a bad reflection on the organisation.

Go on, Amy, you said you disagreed with me.

You want them to be punished harder, you want them to be put into a mule cart and dragged along.

I don't think there's any acceptable way to travel aside from the way that Jeremy Corbyn did one time on the train where he sat in a hallway corridor.

Do you remember that?

No, he sat in a train.

He was a Coober corridor.

He sat next to the train.

I think that's how everyone should travel.

All politicians should travel like that.

Okay, right.

Rishi Zuna, who had, you know, a chopper to take him.

But that was really interesting, is that he just went, but I'm going to go, I'm going to go buy a private jet, I'm going to go by helicopter, and everyone went, oh, you're so rich.

And he went, I am rich.

Yes.

What of it?

And then they kind of got over it, really.

I've often said that, you know, if you want to encourage good people into politics, we have to treat them better.

They have to have a full set of staff and researchers properly funded and actually paid a bit more, because otherwise, the only people who go into politics are freaks

who masochists or very rich people who can afford it yeah i think that's a proper cross-section i just want to go back to the language of signal getting because that your boss jeffrey goldberg was described by waltz as the bottom scum of journalists and that's one i haven't come across before is it scum on the bottom i that's the bottom of scum i thought if i google bottom scum it's not going to help me here and i thought why do i recognize that as a form i mean it's really vulgar but slightly odd and it reminded me of like soviet language the way the Soviet Union used to criticize or castigate.

That sort of capitalist running dog kind of

stuff.

Yes.

And so, what I did was I did go online and I found some Soviet insults.

And I also found some Trump insults.

And see if you can support the.

Right.

I'll run through the Soviet insults.

Oh, hi, man.

We do a quiz.

I know I love a quiz.

Trump insults all Soviets.

I back myself on this.

Okay.

All right.

Well, I'll go right.

Beast, brute, bonapartist, bourgeois, nationalist, utterly unscrupulous, cosmopolitan, degenerate.

Did Wes Streeting say that about Corbynites?

So that's a Soviet one.

Evil, sick, crazy, pathetic freeloaders.

Stalin.

That's Trump.

Double dealer goon grab a hyena.

Oh, hyenas.

I know.

Is that a Soviet one?

That's a Soviet one.

I'm impressed that they were so into their safari animals.

That's quite an exotic animal to pick.

This will be a, this is obvious, this one.

Crooked, disgusting, a total loser.

One of the dumbest and most disloyal men, a total lightweight.

Ah.

Johnson about Sajajavid when he left Kabada?

Lazy Born's Mad Dog Rapid Wolf Pack Diversionist?

Diversionist is where it lifts into art.

That's the joy of the Soviet insult, isn't it?

When it gets abstract,

when they come up with words you've never come across before.

And I'll end with Ditzy Airhead.

That's certainly Stalin didn't say that about anyone.

Worst in the business, third rate, total low life, failing, crying, lost soul, very dumb, and failing, mental basket case.

That's good, but you need, as you know, you need to put some sort of random theory in the end of that, don't you?

Basket is pro-structuralist.

And then you just, that's what makes it a Soviet insult.

I mean, you're editing Trump's insults.

I am.

I'm just saying.

Let's workshop it.

It's good.

You're in fact improving them.

I don't say anything.

I'm just saying, I think you could do a bit of a high-low contrast.

I think it would really lift them.

When the death of Stalin was banned in Russia, and it was a very, even though it was presumed, it was a very kind of Soviet

maneuver because they published a letter signed by all sorts of cultural figures saying it was, well, they called it abomination and filth.

But they also...

like a pg rating it most i mean i've seen i've seen your other work but they also described it as a pasquanad have you come across that's where i've never heard that before

so classical so that is kind of like a caricature it's like a cartoon or a skit a pasquinad but there's an element of negativity about it it's it's a derisory term for a joke a joke that you don't like a pasquanad that's an incredible so that's my word of the week

join us for more pasquinades yeah next week um before we let you go Avra I want to ask you you our quick fire questions.

Can you tell me what the best political speech you've ever seen is?

It's Dennis Skinner

in the House of Commons chamber when he described David Cameron as dodgy Dave.

I do miss Dennis Skinner when he used to heckle Blackrod every year and he was going out to do that and he just used some random insult and I do, that was a

gay laugh.

I mean it was always like part of the tradition.

Yeah, exactly.

It was it.

The skinner and now the skinner will be uttered by.

Yeah, exactly.

And we should, I think someone else should take up that mantle.

Come on, Backbench Labour MPs, get on it.

Is there a phrase you'd like to consign to the dustbin?

Well, so now it's the £22 billion black hole because I don't think it's got any cut through.

And I think that Helen Whaitley, who is a shadow conservative frontbencher,

for where it escapes me right now, but she sort of pointed out to them the other day at the dispatch box that that has no cut through and they've got no interest in hearing it anymore.

And I think that that means it's sort of resigned.

It's resigned to the graveyard.

I really hated Son of a Toolmaker.

I thought it was terrible.

It was a Morgan McSweeney, who is sort of chief comms for Labour.

It was his invention to make Keir Starm seem more normal.

And I think it raised more questions than it answered.

You could tell it gradually was not working because every time he mentioned it, as if we hadn't didn't know this fact before, it would get laughed.

Yeah, I saw a question time where people laughed.

It was a thing, it was a less successful sequel to Sadiq Khan's Son of a Bus Driver, of which he said basically to political journalists, by the time you're sick of it, a normal person will have heard it for the first time.

But I think the general election campaign is slightly different yeah and we had in fact actually normal people had heard it multiple times and found it sort of laughable by the end I keep thinking of like country and western songs now son of a tool maker son of a bus driver son of a it's just a but yes it's meant to sound spontaneous and normal but he did also let's be not to be rude about Somer but among his gifts is not the sort of subtle like delivering the line he'd go my father because as the son of a toolmaker yeah it was like me you know like when you're on a bet and you have to get a word in on TV,

you could sort of feel him like doing, it was, if you will, a total eclipse of the heart.

It had that kind of

just like, oh, here comes the science bit, concentrate.

Final question, which is, who is the best political communicator that you've ever seen?

Can I go for best and worst?

Okay.

Sort of at the same time.

I've been following reform a lot recently.

I would describe them as His Majesty's opposition at this point in time.

Rupert Lowe, who has just been ejected or suspended, I should say, from the party, has this terrific way of well, actually monetizing his place on Twitter, or now it's known as X.

He's taking in thousands of people.

Yeah, I looked at Registry Members' Interest.

He's getting about £3,000 a month, isn't he?

From it, from his posts.

But he's really highly engaged.

He really knows how to speak to the people of Twitter or bots of Twitter.

You know, we don't know which one they are.

But he's got absolutely zero cut-through in sort of day-to-day life.

I've been at many, many reform events over the last year.

It's been, it's been wonderful for for the soul.

It's sort of like going to when my mum goes to Majigurier or Lord's, and it sort of feels like that.

No one knows who Rupert Lowe is.

I will often ask the people that I'm speaking to there, the members of reform, they do not know who he is.

And so I'm sort of wondering if there's a bubble.

Yeah.

on social media, which would be so extraordinary.

That's never happened before, where he's very, very popular there.

And that is the thing with these sort of echo chambers and the bubbles that you think, oh, everyone's agreeing with me.

Therefore, the country must agree with me.

Until you realise, as you say, it's just 3,000 people who are agreeing with you, who are all following you, and no one else.

Again, it's about, it's a bit like the Trump not being on text actually being very good for him and also watching TV rather than spending too much time on the internet actually being oddly very good for his political communication style.

I think the same thing is true of Nigel Farage.

He's not super online.

He's still, you know, he's a bit online.

But that Rupert Lowe incident was very reflective of the fact that Rupert Lowe thought that the reform membership was in a different place to where it is.

And Farage has got a much better grip on that.

I also looked at new polling about the popularity of Elon Musk in Britain.

And with both Tory and Reform voters, Elon Musk's popularity nosedived in January, basically about the time he had a fight with Nigel Farage.

Because when you went, pick one of us, the reform voters went, Nigel Farage, thank you.

Well, we'll take Nigel Farage.

And I think that's true.

I think it's a very interesting party because it is so much Farageville.

And all of his parties, to some extent, have just been Farageville, haven't they?

But Nigel Farage works because he's Conservative adjacent.

The British public still think he could get the job done.

Rupert Lowe has an almost sort of Delboy-esque sort of thing to him, where it's like he's very good at saying certain things, but would he actually be good at the minutiae?

I don't think the public would ever be convinced of it.

I just think he's further to the right as well, in a way that tips into being kind of slightly unpleasant.

And unachievable.

Some of the things that he says about just deporting anyone who's touched crime before.

I mean, that's not going to happen, is it?

Talking about minutiae.

I mean, it will be interesting, you know, come the election.

We've got the May elections coming up, obviously, quite soon, but then ultimately the general election.

When Farage is actually asked about the minutiae of his policies, that's when he gets a little bit more fractious and irritated by the line of questioning.

Yes, when the vibes yield to boring policies discussions.

We have to wrap up.

Let me give you a quick phrase to end for the week with my additional one, which was: according to the official White House X account, I really can't stress enough that this actually happened.

There was a picture of J.D.

Vance firing a gun, and he was not, in fact, firing a gun, according to the official White House X account, but instead sending some freedom seeds downrange.

Doesn't get more American than that, they added.

I mean,

extraordinary paging Dr.

Freud moment.

It's a sort of knowing, I know this is absurd, but also I think you'll also agree, the right people I want to approach.

You know, it's that kind of playing with it and yet at the same time being quite serious about it.

Yeah, I know.

I found that

disturbing.

Where does this go?

To your gas, it's now going to be empathy pellets or

water cannon is

uber hydrants or something.

You know, it's sort of being in on the joke.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's very

mega, I think.

Yeah.

Just one phrase that propped up this week was Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, talking about Tolora Coonsburg offering an account of, you know, what went on and saying, this is a reason, not an excuse.

I think that was the phrase.

I better just.

Yeah, I think that's what I don't, I don't mind that.

I think saying I'm not excusing this, I'm explaining this.

Yeah, although it sounded, it was done in the tones of, please accept this as an excuse.

Do me,

it's why therefore go through it in that detail yeah and then use the ghetto but of course i'm not using this excuse this is just a reason i'm just outlining the facts that's happened but but in explaining the facts actually explaining what he felt why he responded that way to this why this didn't happen you know it's rather like me going helen what are you doing i'm not shouting i'm emphasizing you understand i'm not angry i'm just emphasizing i'm not shouting yeah you know it's it's okay well don't do it that way.

Yeah.

And quite rightly, I think he's been picked up for

that kind of being able to defend himself one way and letting himself off a different way.

Yes, I know what you mean.

Well, that's all for this week.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back next week where we'll be joined by another guest, Cleo Watson.

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

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