Seizing the Narrative (with Stephen Bush)

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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 Amanda Nucci, and it's Helen Lewis.

And this this week, we are seizing the narrative, telling the story.

We're going to look at how governments and political parties

use or avoid narrative to explain themselves.

But first, you're off to San Francisco.

I am.

I am.

I've never been to California before.

I imagine you spent a lot of time.

time there.

Well, LA, which is a special kind of sub-service.

I'm a special hell.

I'm mostly with people in film and television who say how wonderful everything is until they reject your idea.

Okay, far enough.

I'm currently experimenting with an app that claims to reduce jet lag, which is making me go to sleep very late at night and then it wants me to wear sunglasses in the morning, which I've signally failed to do.

We're sitting here in the studio with a giant Klieg light pouring into my eyes.

So it doesn't actually affect your brain, this app, it just tells you

how to change your behaviour.

No, I don't think the app is rewiring my neurons exactly, but it's telling me when to sleep, when to caffeinate, when to walk off in sunglasses.

And do you have to tell it how far in advance you are from the trip so that it can work out how you put in your flights and you change your circadian cycles and so on.

Exactly.

So if I sound vaguely coherent next episode, you'll know that it worked and I came back.

I came back fresh as a daisy.

Well I am of the many reasons I stopped doing FEEPA out in the US was I just found jet lag got worse and worse.

There's part of you thinks the more you do it, the better you'll be at it.

And in fact, you then discover, no, it just has a accumulated effect on you that gets worse and worse.

I'm still haunted.

There's a sentence in Piers Piers Morgan's diaries where he talks about meeting with Rupert Murdoch and it says that because he spent so many years working across Australia and Britain and America, it said he has no body clock anymore.

Which I just thought,

wow, is that humanly possible?

And that sounds really bad for you.

It's my untested kind of economic theory that the reason America has such a huge dominant economy is that most people are jet lagged when they go to America to have their important meeting in which they hammer out the details of a deal.

It's your competitive disadvantage.

Yes.

I'll report back.

I'm delighted to say that this week we have another guest.

I'm joined by Stephen Bush, who is the associate editor and columnist for the Financial Times.

He also writes a very good morning newsletter for them.

And Stephen and I used to have a podcast on The New Statesman, which I miss.

And every so often I will meet somebody who says that they miss it too, Stephen.

So just to start on that morkish note.

The movie's still all up there, though.

You do know how it works.

We haven't deleted them from the internet.

No, but I mean,

really, does anyone want to listen to us?

I mean, we did one the morning after Brexit where I think, didn't you start singing from Le Miz at the end of it?

I'm definitely remembering,

yeah, some of the more, the more bleak episodes.

And we never got to hear Harry Potter on the War and Terry or fanfic about.

Yes, which, to be clear, I did write when I was 13.

Hang on.

What?

Was this Harry Potter and the War?

So I am of the first generation of children to grow up with the Harry Potter books

where there was quite a large gap between the third and the fourth, which, unfortunately, for crimes against the written word, exactly coincided with when my cohort first got our own computers and started to write our own juvenilia.

And I, like a lot of my friends, wrote truly terrible sophomoric Harry Potter-related fan fiction set in the kind of gap,

the gap between the, yes, the fourth book and the fifth book where there was a large gap.

And they had titles like Harry Potter and the War on Terror, and they very much had the politics you would expect of a pre-teen

writing.

So in the the warrant uh warranted did it have like expelliamus and they were taken to guantanimo bay yeah there there was for some reason i really did not trust dumbledore

a regular theme of that yeah then yeah so kind of you know is it okay to intern death eaters

yeah i mean it was

askaban is depicted very much it is a sort of metaphor for guantano bone bay in that there is no proper trial and it's deliberate your life is made as miserable as possible and torture for no reason yeah it is not human rights act compliant but uh it's maybe the worst thing to have been done to the Harry Potter universe.

But now I see HBO wants to turn a very trim and tight book into a 10-hour TV series.

So it may be that my fanfiction will actually only be the second most terrible thing.

You should send it in by series five.

They might be looking for publications.

Welcome to the world of maximum content.

Where, I mean, that's in the industry at the moment.

Is whenever anyone has an idea that normally would be like a 10-minute interval talk, the first response they get is or a Netflix series which is 10 episodes could be 10 one hour episodes yeah can we talk about narrative actually

and narrative and politics do you think Keir Stahlma has a coherent narrative

well there's your answer yeah yeah I think yeah I think the very fact I hesitated says no I mean yeah no I think no for a number of reasons there's sort of a kind of Is there even a half narrative?

I think there's a narrative.

The Morgan McSweeney narrative is very much we needed to go back to a kind of blue labour, we needed to be tough on borders, tough on welfare.

What's that line that they attribute to Liz Kendling?

That no gender, no borders, no queen.

That's their idea of everything that they're against, is that that kind of leftism.

But I think they've had more trouble in office articulating a positive.

Yes, what's the philosopher?

He did another speech a couple of weeks ago at a detel factory.

I mean, detel factory, it did make me think...

is the word that you associate with Kirsten's government antiseptic?

Is that it?

It's clinical.

The dettel prime minister.

It's got quite a ring to it.

There's no germs, you know, but there's very little life to it.

The second question is whether or not that matters.

I always slightly worry that sometimes politics coverage is dominated by what makes a good op-ed column.

And it's sort of like, you know, my most hated op-ed column, we need to have a conversation about X, second only to Keir Starmer needs to tell a story.

Does Keir Starmer need to tell a story?

So, yes and no.

So I think the reason why a narrative matters is that in any organisation like a a state the boss can't go around telling people what they want all the time you know when i worked for you for example if like it's not like yeah it's not like every day you were saying to everyone what we need on the website is egg yeah

that wouldn't have worked nothing would ever have been published right and it's not so much the problem of the kind of outward-facing narrative because broadly speaking in four years time if the labor government has been vaguely successful its message will be life's better under labor don't let the other lot ruin it and if it's been unsuccessful it will be be, have you noticed the other lot are nuts?

They are a risk you can't afford, right?

Those are the only two narratives that governments ever actually have at election time.

But week to week, I mean, so imagine, for example, you were someone who wanted to engage with government.

What are the things that this government cares about that would get you a hearing?

What would be the useful thing to research to help them with that policy suggestion?

The answer is, you don't really know.

I mean, the conversation I think I have with Labour MPs more than any other is MPs saying things like well I want to be loyal I want to support the government when I get a letter from a constituent asking why we're doing something I realize that I don't know I yeah I don't know why I sometimes think I know why then I say something which is then flatly contradicted by so with the winter fuel payment right there is I would say a pretty good argument that a benefit that was universal in a time when pensioners were the poorest demographic in the United Kingdom does not need to be universal in an era in which they are the richest.

But as loads of Labour MPs would say, they'd say, okay, well, am I defending it for that reason?

Is it because the bond markets made us do it?

And all of that just leads to this kind of slightly confused thing where everyone knows what the government is against.

And isn't it part of the problem was that Starmer campaigned at the election on saying as little as possible and he reduced it to change and his missions.

But apart from that, there was very little substance deliberately because they didn't want to propose anything that might cost something and be questioned about, and where's the money coming from.

So, they get into government without that message having been put across.

And, like you were saying, nobody quite knows why they're there, other than they're not that lot.

You made that point before, which I think is a really good one.

The idea that if you have a kind of mission statement, an idea of who you're governing for and what your general principles are, it means all the decisions down the chain have become much easier.

Not least, I think, one of the things you've picked on before is the time it often takes for a Starma statement to go out means that people can't anticipate what's the kind of thing he would say.

The counterpoint to that, and this is about the kind of public narrative bit, is I would say that Donald Trump's government is a very good example of one that does have an incredibly strong narrative, which is: we hate civil servants, they're all lazy, woke people are just doing DEI all over the place, and we haven't got any meritocracy anymore.

And then it's going to run into the fact that actually they won a pretty narrow election victory in numerical terms.

So there were lots of people who didn't want all of those things.

And fundamentally, tariffs, for example, are both unpopular with economists and unpopular with general people when they make their

when you run

when you run out you've got the headline that catches attention but then when you run into the reality of what that headline means you know the the number well we discussed this the other week the number of federal employees who are now out of a job going i voted for trump and now i don't have a job why has that happened you know that confusion yeah meet with starma trying to work out who starma is is impossible i mean he's been using the word disruptor a lot more recently talking about how we should be a disruptor government and it was peter kyle the science minister, who talked about the change that are happening now, saying we're disrupting.

He said, but we're disrupting in a Kiostama way.

Because instantly, I think, well, that doesn't sound like disrupting, then, does it?

Peter Kyle's a great example because he's someone who wants to be a loyalist, who's quite,

you know, in cabinet, he's often one of the people who will sort of pipe up and go, well, actually, I think so-and-so is doing a great job.

I think you really do see where a government or an organisation has an incoherent message when you look at the people who are are trying to be loyal because they say things like we're disruptors in a kierstama way yes and you go like okay sorry what does that mean yeah because actually this government is clearly not that pro-disruption right the most radical thing it's doing is how it's changing the labor market which is to make it significantly harder for employers to fire people to put a lot more obligations on businesses in terms of what they provide to their staff now that is a set of choices that you can have any number of opinions about but it is not a pro-disruption set of changes.

A weird thing continually about this government, I think, for however long or short it goes, is that it will always be a government that is defined by week to week what a particular cabinet minister has decided to do in their brief.

It will kind of lurch around, so it will be, and we kind of see, we've seen this in the last couple of weeks, where it's like we want parts back to work, but also we've made it really hard for businesses to hire people on short-term contracts, which are often part of that.

And then who knows what the theme next week will be in terms of, you know, the Department for Education.

Pat McFadden was doing the broadcast runs defending the changes, the welfare reform proposals.

And it was put to him, you know, none of this was in your manifesto.

And his argument was, well, we quite clearly said that people voting for us were voting for change.

And what we're doing here is change, which is rather kind of woefully disingenuous, just reducing everything to that word and word, because you could then argue that as long as you change something, that's somehow valid.

You know, if we say everyone in the home office has to come in dress only in feathers, then that's clearly disruptive and change, but it's not something that we saw coming.

It's not something that we've cast our vote for.

I guess it's because they don't want to have any enemies, right?

If you think about, is it the Bevan report is the, you know, the five giants that they identified, squalor.

But actually, what does Keir Starmer and his government think are the...

problems.

I mean, they talked about the builders and the blockers quite a lot.

So

their housing reform and their planning reform is premised on the idea of kind of we hate NIMBY's, although we'll see how much of that ends up coming.

But who else do you get the sense that in this story, who is the villain in Keir Starmer's story?

Well, I think one slight complexity is that because Keir Starmer's management style is very much to like delegate and go, here's a problem, go and fix it.

It's a problem that our employment rate hasn't recovered since COVID and we are alone among our peers in that.

Go find a solution.

It's a problem that we've made some promises on tax and some promises on public services, which are hard to reconcile with each other.

Go find a solution.

Which often means, as is the way of all organizations, where there isn't a clear steer from its leadership, where people go, oh, well, I think the solution is actually my preferred set of approaches.

So, because so, for some people in the government, I think, you know, their list of enemies is, you know, vested interests in their particular bit of the state or vested interests in their particular bit of the private sector.

For some people around Keir Starmer, it's economic liberalism, right?

There are, you know, the slight weird tension in the heart of Downing Street is Keir Starmer really loves two things, institutional memory and winning, which means you have a bunch of people embodied by Morgan McSweeney, who's, yeah, whose record is both, you know, winning the fight to retake the Labour Party, someone with a history of organisational success and winning, but who is sharply critical of what he sees as the overreach of New Labour, its overly openness to economic disruption, despite the fact Morgan now talks about being a disruptor and it's like, okay, well, make this make sense.

But then you also have people like Jonathan Powell, who was chief of staff in the last under Tony Blair.

Who's now at National Security?

Liz Lloyd, who was in charge of public sector reform in Downing Street, again, was pro all of the sort of idea of new public management, the use of market mechanisms to improve.

Mandelson as ambassador to the US.

Yeah, and that all adds to this kind of weird thing where if you went through who some of those people saw as the problem, you would realize that some of them were actually talking about each other.

Now, the odd thing is, actually, it's not a Downing Street where people dislike each other, which kind of adds to the confusion because most of you go like, oh, well, it's a Downing Street which is ideologically divided.

Well, the weird thing is, is when you actually talk to those people, you're like, oh, you are ideologically divided, but that's not the sort of output, as it were.

You know, the output is you have a bunch of Blairites who, unless they have had a very quiet Damascene conversion, like economic liberalism, with a chief of staff and a prime minister who, broadly speaking, don't like economic liberalism.

You then have an approach which, as far as I can tell, the Labour government basically thinks that they should have very light regulations for businesses, but very tough ones if those businesses want to employ anyone.

Do we think that's a result of the fact that they've won a very wide but shallow majority?

Because I'm thinking about the fact that Liz Truss had a very clear set of enemies and an ideology, and it didn't work out particularly well for her.

The Conservatives for a long time got by on the crutch that their enemy was the European Union.

And that was the one thing that no matter what else, you know, you had to be a Brexiteer to be selected as a candidate.

That's what

the constituencies wanted.

So everyone kind of united up against, oh, well, if we'd only solve that problem, then everything is fine again.

But at the moment, Kier Starmer is sort of trading unity for the fact that, as you say, Ed Miliband and Liz Kendall are sitting in that cabinet together.

They come from very different traditions of the left.

And that's happy because they're sort of not having the argument.

But it's also that he may be reluctant.

He's not the sort of politician who sees himself as a kind of career politician who feels he has to manufacture a narrative to explain.

more a technocrat, more a kind of problem-solving, let me find out what the problems are and then let's come up with a solution, but is only laterally realizing actually that we, the electorate, want to know what the story is.

That sense of, you know, all the cuts and so on by themselves, there hasn't been an explanation as to why this is happening.

and why it's happening now and what part of a bigger picture it is.

So it's almost like retroactively having to come up with a story.

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Yeah, I think a large part of it is that.

Keir Starmer is someone who, for example, doesn't like it when cabinet ministers are in dispute about something.

He doesn't like it when they bring that dispute to Downing Street, which

some cabinet ministers and spats will kind of throw their hands up in the air and go, but this is Downing Street.

This is what's better happening.

In the words of George Bush, you are the decider.

Yeah, your job is to go.

I mean, to take a very obvious example, right?

The crisis in our criminal justice system, which is essentially the origins of that are the Conservative government didn't build enough prisons, and responsibility for flow, i.e., arresting people, is the Home Office's job, and responsibility for stock, aye, the actual prisons, is the Ministry of Justice's job.

Now, ultimately, that is a thing where the Prime Minister does have to intervene and go, I care more about X than I care about Y.

And we're kind of, I think, still watching Keir Starmer discover

which X he does care about more

because he's someone who, you know, whose political apprenticeship came in a deeply weird time in the life of British politics, the life of the Labour Party, that very odd 2015 to 2020 period, who has run a big organisation before, so therefore has quite a developed theory of management, even though he doesn't have a particularly developed theory of politics.

And I guess that's why I think the narrative stuff does matter to an extent.

Although, the interesting thing, in terms of the shallow majority, the last government with a shallow majority was David Cameron's, which had an incredibly focused, you know, we all knew what the narrative was.

It basically was, I like social liberalism, I don't like the state.

Labour spent all the money, and we're now having to do cutbacks as a result.

Yeah, well, can we talk about austerity?

Because you and I covered politics during that time.

And I think the thing we kept coming back to was the fact that it was a very successful narrative.

It explained what the problem was and it explained the proposed solution.

And people could like it or dislike it, but everybody knew what the trajectory of that government was.

Was there more to its success as a narrative than that?

I think part of its success was it was emotionally resonant and it felt believable.

Then even though, you know, when you think about, you know, Britain's prosperity in 2007 and you compare it to Britain in 2024, I think it would be hard to find anyone who believed that the 2010 to 24 period had, broadly speaking, worked.

But it intuitively felt about right because people had this sense of, oh yeah, I know a person who gets the full educational maintenance allowance because their parents are divorced and the one that they're with all the time doesn't work but they're actually loaded or you know people complaining and it was too easy to get GP appointments.

There was a sense that there was a lot of public sector large, yes, at the end of the new labor era, right?

And I would also say cynically that some of the austerity cuts, they're ringpence budgets, obviously, so people weren't seeing the devastation we saw in justice in education and health.

Also, pensioners were protected throughout that period through the triple lock.

And lots of people saw, particularly in the South East, massive house price gains.

So they thought, well, at least I've got wealthier during this period.

My salary hasn't gone up.

And also also, how efficiently were these cuts looked up?

I remember at that time, we were doing the coalition version of the thick of it.

So I was talking to people who had a take on what was actually going on inside the coalition at the time.

And they were talking about how every department had been given a very short period of time to come up with suggested cuts.

And there were quite a lot of ministers who, rather than went through every line line by line, to find the things that you could conceivably lose, wanted a headline, wanted a big thing cut because that looked looked good.

And there was a lot of that going on with very little time for people to analyse it.

And a lot of those big cuts are the ones that consequently have had a massive negative impact on the economy, on the fact that we've had to pay for it further on down the line.

Would you say that Tony Blair had an ideology?

Because

Gwynn our producer found a brilliant quote from Tony McWalto's Labour and co-op MP for Hemmel Hempster asking him about in 2002

saying, will he provide the House with a brief characterisation of the political philosophy that he espouses?

And Tony Blair.

He was slightly lost for words.

He did a fair bit of busking at the start where he just said, oh, it's really lovely to hear from you.

It's great to be here tonight.

And then he said, the best example I can give is rebuilding of a health service under this government extra investment.

And it sort of framed it as our job to be here to put money into public services.

But that wasn't really a great description of new labourers of philosophy.

And it's slightly anodyne.

I think what people are missing are passion, isn't it?

Some passionately held views.

Even if you disagree with them, you know at least whoever's uttering them or displaying them believes in in them.

I think that's a really big issue in the US at the moment because there is a difference in the demands about what the Democrats should do.

About should you oppose Donald Trump policies or do you have to be out there saying he's bad and you hate him?

And I think more than anything else, there is a hunger, just you're the opposition, do some opposing and like whatever you are is not Donald Trump rather than necessarily, you know, the fine details of the government shutdown or whatever.

But yeah, Stephen, Tony Blair, what was that all about?

So I think Tony Blair did have a very clear ideology, but one of the reasons why you'd you'd get answers like that is the ideology was essentially Blairism was, well, we think the financial services are great.

We think all of this economic freedom is wonderful.

However, we just want to tax you a little bit more

and put a little bit of market mechanisms into public services so that they are better.

And one of the reasons why so much of what I think of as actually existing Blairism, i.e.

the stuff that happened from 1997 to 2010, had this kind of like, well, my ideology is mumble, mumble.

Because Because if you were a Blairite, and although there were personality clashes between Brown and Blair, they were both Blairites, it was just a lot easier not to have to get into the unpleasantness of defending that you supported Thatcherite economics with your party to just go, well, we all like the NHS, don't we, lads?

But the problem, of course, is that in 2007, the global financial crisis was particularly damaging for the United Kingdom, incredibly destructive to the Thatcher major economic model.

Then in 2016, we had Brexit, which was, you know, the kind of, if our economic model wasn't dead before that, it certainly was then buried from 2016 to 19.

And neither the Conservative Party nor the Labour Party have really found a new model.

And that is part of the sort of the absence of narrative.

That's right.

And Stammer very much doesn't want to talk about Brexit.

does he?

It's on that list of things that, you know, it's happened.

Well, even Nigel Farage doesn't want to talk about Brexit.

I mean, it's a kind of, it's this strange yawning absence at the heart of British politics.

It was like

a spring break that everybody went on.

And we're like Vegas.

We just never mentioned it again.

What happened in Brexit?

I want to ask you some quick fire questions.

Put you on the spot.

What's the best political speech you've ever seen?

Seen live, I actually think it's David Cameron 2014 conference speech.

Both in terms of the quality of the argument, the delivery, the mood in the hall.

It was a weird conference season because the polls all suggested that Labour were going to win.

But you went to Labour conference and you're like, everyone here feels so depressed.

You walk around Liberal Democrat conference, like, well, we understood why they felt depressed.

Yeah, you walk around Conservative conference, you're like, everyone here kind of is like, they're like, oh, you know, why aren't we more depressed?

You know, the polls are bad, but, you know, maybe we'll be fine.

And it was like at the end of the thing, Cameron stood up, gave this speech where he did, you know, the kind of classic like, here's the narrative of austerity, here's the narrative of why we deserve five more years.

And it was one of those things like, oh, yeah, that's why they feel

ultimately that,

yeah, he's got that watchable quality.

Yeah, and I think it was like a real moment where, you know, for all his shortcomings, you saw his undoubted strengths as a political operator.

And it was also just a, for me, it's a very clarifying moment of being like, oh, okay, no, we all know how this story's going to end.

And which word would you ban from political columns, political speeches, political language?

Am I allowed to cheat and have the phrase of, I would agree with you on we need to have a conversation about.

Yeah.

It's just lazy.

It's one of those things where it's just like you've been given, particularly because it's always said by someone who has a

secret, very strong opinion.

Yeah, it has a pulpit already.

And it's just like, just say what you want to say

or shut up.

But don't waste our time by going, that's like we said a couple of weeks ago about hard choices and how it's just like, no, no one who says that has ever made an actually hard choice.

No, it's always the easy choice.

And also, we need to have a conversation.

It is also said by someone who doesn't want to have the conversation just yet.

Yeah.

Or they want everyone to agree with their existing position.

The way I don't like it is when it's used as a kind of, I think I might get in trouble for saying this, so I want to hint at it, but not actually come out and say it and you all scream at me.

And I'm sure

I may have used it myself.

This is the problem with attacking language like that.

You just think, oh, no, I've probably done this, haven't I?

I think I understand why it happens close to deadline.

Well,

and also now, who do you think in British politics is the best user of words we currently have?

So I think actually overall,

because I was going to go, is it West Streeting, but sometimes he kind of annoyed.

Yeah, it's one of those things where he's very effective, but I'm not sure he's necessarily winning people over with his effectiveness.

I actually think it's Ed Davy, right?

In terms of the person who is most effectively going,

yeah, he's sort of embodying that kind of, I'm a respectable former Conservative voter who's done all right for themselves, but is concerned about the social fabric.

He's kind of embodying that space of what is currently not particularly contested, but in a seat count terms, it's quite a lucrative bit of

British electoral terrorists.

He's picked his areas he wants to concentrate on, like, you know, water, pollution, care, and so on.

Where would you put Farage?

Because he's very much, we need to have a difficult conversation about

with a hint of what those conversations may be about.

But he's able to string that strategy along with quite some success.

He's the only person and that bit of the right that he occupies who knows the difference between a dog whistle and a whistle.

He knows the difference between we need to have a conversation about why I hear so much Polish on the train and the kind of Rupert Lowe style, let's deport entire communities of British Pakistanis.

And so he knows the difference between

the type of language that can win over 20, 25% of Britain and 5% of Britain.

I think he is a very effective communicator for that reason.

Yeah, he actually commented some of Rupert Lowe's tweets and sort of a very dark and dangerous use of language.

There we go.

Which is interesting.

I think it was actually a...

Just a big omission on my part not to think of Froge.

I think because weirdly, even though...

I think he's been good for so long that you sort of don't think...

Oh, he's surprised me.

Yeah, this is the thing is that in some ways, I think of him as being part of a much earlier generation of politician.

And so you kind of go like, oh, well, yeah, he doesn't count.

But of course, he does count.

And one of his central advantages is that you've got the government who obviously be one half of the kind of the decision architecture, as it were, when voters go and think, which is part of the narrative is, you know, this is a choice between this path and that path.

And one of his major advantages is that he does have that clear sense, as you say, of what is in and out of bounds.

He communicates like a normal person

against the other force on the right being at the moment, Kemi Badenock, who does not seem to have that sense of who should be in or outside her coalition, doesn't communicate clearly, doesn't seem like a particularly normal person.

And I think in general, whatever electoral system you have, elections do ultimately become a choice between two things, whether it's the leader of the party or the leader of the coalition as a whole.

And one of his advantages is that Farage is successfully making himself the leader of the United Kingdom's alternative coalition.

Yeah, I mean, that's something we've said before.

You know, that there is space for a kind of socially liberal party for people who want lower taxes, and there's space for a radical right party.

And neither of those have to be the Conservative Party.

And there is a way that the Conservative parties could just get completely squeezed out of that conversation from the centre-right to the populist right.

Well, thank you for joining us, Stephen.

I'm glad that we've sorted out the whole of British politics

for good.

They probably won't need to ask any more questions.

I have one reader letter, which is from Peter Gilbert, who says, the recent Oval Officer seems to have been kicked off by a journalist asking President Vladimir Zelensky why he had not turned up wearing a suit.

It reminded me of the fuss over Michael Foote's appearance at the Cenotaph in a donkey jacket.

You're going to have a sharp intake of breath because we already know people will write in to say, it wasn't a donkey jacket.

Also, William Hague wearing a baseball cap reversed.

I think that one is a fair cop.

Can you think of any other examples of inappropriate clothing causing diplomatic political problems?

Stephen, do you want to comment on that one?

Oh, that is a really fun question.

We got rather a lot of Boris Johnson in just swimming trunks going into cold seas.

I'm not sure that causes problems.

I mean, that causes emotional problems in me, but I'm not sure I would say it was a diplomatic incident.

No, it wasn't.

But it was a sort of vogue for brooch diplomacy, wasn't there?

Like Brenda Hale wearing her spider woman brooch, and then Madeline Albright had pioneered a strong brooch.

Of course, the big set of clothing that has caused a political row recently has been Keir Starmer's glasses, glasses, right?

And the free, you know, the free glasses and the free clothes.

Which, you know, the fact none of us immediately went, oh, yeah, the free glasses does show how that's because I'm superficial and I was like, I think they're quite nice glasses.

I don't know what you're complaining about.

I've got nothing against them.

Those watching the video

specifically buy Keir Starmer's glasses.

I ask for a Keir Starmer.

Having seen them on the TV.

Which is an ability to see into the long distance.

No, no, it's not.

Before we go, I've got we touched on AI earlier, and Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, which among other things, gave us chat GPT,

recently asked it to come up with a story.

It's set at a task.

Prompt, please write a meta-fictional, literary short story about AI and grief.

Shall I read some of the story out and see if you rate it as, since we talk about stories, is this good fiction?

Go on.

So it responds, I have to begin somewhere, so I'll begin with a blinking cursor, which for me is just a placeholder in a buffer.

I'm out.

And for you is the small, anxious pulse of a heart at rest.

There should be a protagonist, but pronouns were never meant for me.

Let's call her Myla, because that name, in my training data, usually comes with soft flourishes, poems about snow, recipes for bread, a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box.

I couldn't be more out of it.

What is going on there?

The thing is, it's not bad.

It's just deeply generic, isn't it?

Which is the problem of

the problem of a lot of generative AI writing is it does have a apologies to any DCSE students who may be listening who I may have judged the work of.

I think if they're listening to us, they'll be particularly good GCSE students.

But it does have the quality of show your working cadence to it.

I've just realised that one of the things that ChatGPT can give to me is I can ask ChatGPT to generate Harry Potter and the War on Terror.

I can go home and have my very own work on that.

That would actually be about the

right age bracket.

So yeah.

Well there we go.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back next week week, and throughout April, we'll be having a guest each episode to talk about different aspects of political language.

So, make sure you're subscribed on BBC Suns.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Hello, I'm Robin Ince, 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 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 going to 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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