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Hello, Helen here.

Before we get going with the episode proper, I just wanted to deliver a very important message of my own.

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Thank you for listening.

Now, here is this week's episode.

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

With me, Amanda Unucci.

And me, Helen Lewis.

And this week, we're stealing a phrase that Keir Stamer, in fact, has stolen from Donald Trump.

Build, baby, build.

Why do our political parties seem so keen to copy, baby, copy the language of other parties?

Before we do that, can I ask you whether you've been up to anything interesting?

Have I been up to?

Well, I went to Dublin.

I was in Dublin because Doctor Strangelove, the stage version, opened in Dublin last week, and I was over there for that.

And sidebar, I had a driver who was taking me all the press.

I was doing the press.

So I was going to various locations around about it.

So I had a driver who was driving me around for the day.

And he was telling me that in one week, he drove Oliver Reed, Richard Harris, and Peter O'Toole around Ireland.

And he said he had lots of stories to tell.

Did he have a wipe clean limo?

I mean, I imagine there was a heavy drinking thing.

He wasn't, you know, he was quite discreet.

He wasn't going to tell us things.

And he also got news that day that his daughter had just had a baby.

And I said, oh, you're going to go and visit and then, you know, raise a glass to the little bairn and he went no I don't drink I don't drink I've seen what it can do to people but that is just a sidebar to the hotel I was staying at was across a bridge that was constructed about 15 years ago the Samuel Beckett Bridge across the living

you never arrive at the other side yes

the joke lets itself on that one yes

and it just struck me we don't do that here we don't name things after our great writers you know we don't there will never be a Harold Pinter underpass

or a Carol Churchill Carpark.

We just don't writers that everyone has heard about, like Jane Austen and so on, we'll celebrate them.

But we're not in that habit of recognizing literature, contemporary literature.

I mean, Sam Beckett isn't contemporary, he's 100 years ago, really.

But, you know, anyway, just an observation.

No, I think that's really interesting.

And I think it's because Ireland feels that its literary success projects it, you know, punches above its weight.

Because there's a James Joyce bridge as well, isn't there, in Dublin.

I remember when I went to cover the repeal of the eighth abortion referendum, there was a rally by the people who were trying to change the law on that bridge at sunset.

Yeah.

And I remember thinking, this is someone that's got a real sense of itself.

Yes, yes.

And Dublin's a great city, particularly, it feels like the right size.

Right.

I kept, because, you know, it's got it's got...

beautiful museums, obviously great bars, but it's also you would keep bumping into people that you knew.

Right, yeah, yeah.

And I just thought, God, I wish I lived somewhere that was like this, the correct size.

Yes, I think maybe your experience has been slightly affected by the fact that London is just way too big.

Right, and so expensive that everybody has to live four billion years away and commute in on a spaceship from zone 19.

And what is it?

Why are we so reluctant to is it because I noticed that each new culture secretary who comes in is asked about what their favourite plays are, when the last time they went to such and such, but they're very, very

reluctant to talk about going to the opera or to a classical music concert.

It has to be a film, you know, or a football match.

You know, that's culture.

I think that for quite a long time, George Osborne and Michael Gove used to go to Bayreuth, which is the Wagner Festival in Germany.

But this was almost talked of in this sort of like, like they were going off to kind of some SNM club in Berlin or something like that.

That's the cover story.

That's what we'll tell everyone.

That's right.

And I remember when Dominique Raab was standing in for Rich Sunak, so Angela Reiner was standing in for Kirstama, and Rab had a go at her for going to Gleinborn.

Why not?

Why is she not?

I mean, the tickets for Gleinborn are less than going to a premiership match.

Why should?

And she said, I've got a friend who's in the orchestra.

He said, come to Glindbourne.

Why shouldn't she?

We do still parcel various arts off as not for the likes of you.

You can go to the Royal Opera.

I've only been once because I don't understand or get opera.

But I sat right up in 40 miles up in the sky for about, I think, genuinely £10.

Yes.

Watching Lucier de Lamar, which I thought, well, that's, I'm glad someone's making that, but it's, it's not, I've missed my chance to understand what's going on here.

Opera is like a Shakespeare production.

You know, when it's good, it's the most unbelievable thing ever.

But when it's bad, it's the worst thing you've ever seen.

It walks that tightrope of being potentially great or being potentially extremely silly.

And presumably within the first five minutes, you know that.

Exactly.

And it's also then another three hours of these people bellowing at me in Italian.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

I've had a whole life of that.

Right.

Okay.

Well, well, let's get back to the politics.

Yeah, Build Baby Build, which was Kirstama's.

He was prompted to say this at some launch or other, at some reset.

I believe it was the visit to the UK National Nuclear Lab in Lancashire.

Oh, well, there we go.

And it's a direct reference to Trump's drill, baby, drill.

Which I always think was being very Sarah Palin-esque.

You know, the governor of Alaska, who was John McCain's running mate back in, I want to say 2008.

But that kind of we love oil, which was causing them huge problems at the moment.

So they banned or they put tariffs on Canadian oil coming in.

But did you notice that oil comes in different thicknesses?

And Canadian oil is much thicker than American oil.

Right.

And all the plants in America are designed to run on a mixture of different viscosities.

Sorry, I didn't mean to make you discuss viscosity of oil at this time of the morning.

But

it is a really big problem.

It's one of those kind of classic things where Trump says, it's all very simple.

Why don't you just buy American oil?

But actually, it's substantively different to Canadian oil.

And you can't just swap one for the other.

How are you?

saying that he said this without thinking it through.

I know.

I'm hard to believe that he just presented a difficult problem as being very easy to solve by saying something.

Something we should pay attention to more and maybe look out for more examples of that as the years go on.

He might do it again.

It's hard to say.

But the thing I found about Kirstama kind of adopting it, and I think Macron at the AI conference in Paris said, plug, baby, plug, as in, you know, we have lots of power outlets here.

You know, it's good.

It kind of minimizes the shock value of drill, baby, drill, which is basically, you know, climate emergency is a fraud.

Yeah.

Let's get back to to fossil fuels.

Stuff the adorable baby seals.

Like, let's put more oil wells in them.

And it's turning it into an acceptable slogan that we can kind of mimic for sort of joke effect.

But it also is doing a sort of second-hand endorsement of the original drill, baby, drill.

You're acknowledging that, oh, that's a good phrase.

That's very effective.

I'll borrow that rather than,

you know, if I were Prime Minister, and that's something that, you know, I think about every day and then shriek at the end of the day.

Interestingly Thinking about whether or not when the Almando Yanuchi Bridge will finally be opened.

You know, how impossible it would be for me to function because the idea of me having to say stuff that I don't believe and then pretend that I'm enjoying it would just, I think, shut me down within seconds.

But anyway.

I think that's one of the key insights of So Out This Week is what we've mentioned before, Patrick McGuire and Gabriel Program's Get In, which is an account of Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party.

And, you know, the question that you feel reading that all the way through is, what does Keir Starmer actually believe in?

What part of the Labour tradition does he come from?

And you eventually come to the conclusion that there are a couple of things on which he's absolutely resolute.

So, anti-Semitism being one of them.

He's very ambitious, obviously, from the start going into parliament, but also I think Patrick has said this elsewhere.

He regards it like being a lawyer.

You're given a brief and you prosecute it.

And I think this is a kind of classic example of that.

Someone has whispered in his ear and said, it'd be really helpful if you sounded sort of macho about the need to build houses.

And he's gone, input, macho, output, build baby build yeah and we're seeing that as well in the whole announcements or rolling out of announcements announcements are rolled out these days from yvet coupa and the home office about immigration and the very conscious aping of reform

and and farage type language on immigration the releasing of footage of illegal immigrants being rounded up and taken out of houses, put on planes.

Well, that's very interesting, I think, because that is very trumpy.

And it's very Theresa May.

If you remember, Theresa May drove a, well, not personally drove a van around London, but had a van driven around London saying, basically, kind of, we're on to you, we're coming, you know, like this sort of TV licensing vans.

Yeah, I always puzzled me how that would work, what the effect of was that, or was it just to get the story in the press?

But I think it's similar to the fact that Trump has made a big deal about his repatriation fights or kicking out fights, whatever you want to call them, at the same time that, you know, he did fewer deportations in his first term than Obama did in his first term.

So there's a really big, I think politicians now understand that it's not enough just to do stuff.

You have to make a big

electrical splash of doing it.

So what you mentioned about APIing reform, Labour bought a Facebook ad about this stuff, and they specifically branded it in that very light turquoise that is the reform.

What did it say?

It said, Labour hits five-year high in migrant removals.

Yeah.

So it was branded to look like a reform message.

And there was also, I read this week that because they were voting on the second reading of the immigration bill, and MPs were encouraged to then go around to Labour offices and stand next to a sign saying, I voted for stronger border security.

So they could post that up on their constituency website.

Those signs are always so cringy.

There's one that I still think about.

It haunts my dreams.

It's a picture of Ed Miliband and either Angela Eagle or her twin Maria Eagle, one of the eagles.

And they're holding a picture of a badger.

I have no remembrance of the policy or what it was, but it's just definitely something about badgers.

Badgers and eagles.

That sounds good.

Yeah, well, it's very mythological, isn't it?

Very romantic.

It's a mess.

um but i can't remember and they're not are they pro the concept of badgers because they're not or anti-them because they carry tb potentially yeah but i just remember thinking why you why have you done this to yourselves yeah and the messaging here is very much you know we can out reform reform that's the kind of not so subtle headline that they're trying to create but does it work do people see that and think

I think they definitely believe that.

There are phrases that get used about it in the commentary.

One of them is, are you eating someone else's lunch?

There's a lot of that.

Are they eating it?

Are they shooting the fox?

That comes up a lot.

Are we shot reform's fox?

Well, Kenny Badenock did, you know, among the other things that she has said this week, and I'm sure we'll pick up on them.

She did in an interview earlier talk about reform and say that they are our pastiche of something that has gone.

And I thought that was an interesting word, pastiche, because I think what we're seeing is Labour, and in a many ways, the Conservatives actually pastiche reform.

They're trying to borrow the signifiers that reform carefully laid down in their messaging and expand on them.

It never seems to happen in reverse either.

You know, and reform did very well at the election.

They got four and a half million votes, which didn't translate into that million piece because it's very geographically spread out.

But, you know, the Conservatives are still a party, Labour are still a party.

You can't be the uni party and appeal to everyone.

Yeah.

The right does do it the other way around sometimes, though.

So Donald Trump, one of his signature moves in the last election was that he refused to back a full federal ban on abortion.

He said it should be left up to the states.

Now, that was something that J.D.

Vance had previously said that he supported a full federal ban.

Obviously, something that the evangelical wing of the party is very keen on, the pro-life wing.

And it was a moderating point,

and which I think stopped lots of people who would otherwise not have voting for him feeling uneasy about it.

So it isn't purely it's always the left copying the right, but it does talk about where people see the energy in British politics, right?

That everyone wants to be reform, even though reform are the third or fourth part.

It's the interesting thing because in the past, you know, if you're looking at at copying, Belair did an awful lot to reassure people who respected Margaret Thatcher.

She was a hero in many ways.

And then when Cameron came along, he put himself out as the heir to Blair

and needing to, you know, clean up the toxicity of the Conservative Party.

You know, it was Theresa May, who was chairwoman of the party at the time, who said we're known as the nasty party.

The interesting thing about them, or those two examples, it's oppositions

to ape what they think worked with successful governments.

What's happening now, I think, is parties, is the government and the opposition trying to ape the perceived success of a third party.

So it's almost like subliminally, we're looking at it going, well, they clearly think that reform, therefore, is a government in waiting, setting the agenda.

The Greens picked up a fair few seats in the last election, too.

You know, that was a really good result for them in historical historical terms, but no one's saying, this is it, we've got to go out there and talk about net zero constantly.

Even though people are broadly supportive of most environmental policies, you know, they might quibble over the specifics, but the caucus of votes for denying climate change exists is now very small indeed.

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But isn't it an anti-establishment thing?

I think that's the bit that they're all clocking onto, which is that all the establishment parties are trying desperately to pretend that they're not the establishment because that is now the, you know, when you get someone like Nigel Farage saying I'm not a career politician and you go when did you last have another job that wasn't being a politician

stood for parliament eight times has been a Euro MP for like 15 or 20 years one of the most radicalizing things I found out this week is that Tommy Robinson's house is worth more than mine and I thought there's this really fascinating thing where you know that anti-establishment outsider is and Trump is the classic example of this is it's entirely resistant to the actual facts of someone's financial capital.

Yeah, I mean quite a lot of politics is now about what you're not.

You know, it's distinguishing yourself from someone else.

It's putting a distance from other people.

Well, ironically, trying to pretend to be something that you're not.

But I think the electorate can see that.

You know, I was looking at the footage that the Home Office put up of the rounding up of illegals and so on.

And you thought, you know, if Nigel Farage of reform had put that out, there would have been an outcry.

If somebody else had said, we've got to clear the people out of Gaza and they can't come back, people would have accused whoever said that of, you know, a policy of ethnic cleansing, but somehow was standing back and allowing that language to feel that it is,

what's that word, the Overton window, that phrase, the Overton Window, the acceptable range of views.

The acceptable range of views.

That the Overton Window has now shifted and has allowed that sort of language to become acceptable.

I think that's a level of exhaustion maybe about it.

I think that we're in an era of backlash to what was perceived as a sort of lettering overreach circa 2020 in cultural terms.

But you're right.

I mean, I covered the Labour Party for the New Statesman throughout the 2010s, so mostly the Ed Miliband era.

And when he had his controls on immigration mug, people said, well, this is, you know, which now seems quaint and adorable.

But people said, well, this isn't the way that the Labour Party should be talking about migration.

You should be sticking up for it as a principle.

And I think particularly the influence of Morgan McSweeney, who is the chief strategist.

He spent his early career fighting the far right in barking.

Yes.

And part of what he appears to have felt that he's learned from that is that you have to be very strong on immigration in order to kind of cut off the feeding source that is people's real anxieties mutating then into support for really unsavoury policy.

I think also people, they'll want to see authenticity in what's happening.

I think people can accept that, you know, Labour in the position it's in has to do something about immigration.

But I think they're rather put off by the glee, the enforced glee with which these policies are enacted.

You don't actually have to enjoy doing it.

You know, I think people were put off Suella Brotherman when she said, I want to see a plane go to Rwanda by Christmas.

I'd love that.

I'd love that.

There was something rather weird about the kind of level of glee that she kind of showed in it.

I've been thinking about that a lot this week and about because the evolution of Twitter to X is a very good example of this.

I think that the abiding sin of the left that puts people off them in electoral terms is piety.

And the abiding sin of the right is cruelty.

And when those factions go bad, those are the places that they go into.

The left goes into that finger-wagging, nanny-ish place that people go, don't tell me,

why are you telling me what to do?

And the right goes into that,

what it thinks is being tough and actually comes across as nasty, which, as Theresa may put, I think that's the kind of default sort of bad condition for both of those parties.

I want to go back to something else that you said about the establishment, which is like everyone's now defining themselves as anti-establishment or not the establishment.

Is there a place for somebody somewhere to say, we kind of need an establishment?

I don't mean we need people who are removed from us, think of themselves as separate and a law unto themselves but actually we need a level of expertise and a level of experience in government and in organization and somehow establishment rather like liberal in America has become a dirty word and I may have said this before on this podcast some time ago but it always gnuted me that Boris Johnson well mayor of London kept talking about the metropolitan elite because you can't be more metropolitan and elite than being a mayor of London.

You know, and you know, we see Liz Truss, who was a prime minister, you remember, still positioning herself as a voice of opposition against the establishment and whether that establishment be the current government or you know the governments of Sunak and Johnson and Cameron.

I'm interested to the level to which it's um it's a fashion or or it will become it will become done and played out because everybody, you're right, everybody's doing it.

And there comes a point at which it will people will just groan and roll their eyes, right?

It still at the moment has a you know, in the same way that there there is an enormous caucus of podcasts and YouTube shows that are quote unquote anti-woke.

And I think the volume of them is now higher than the volume of wokery that they want to kind of attack.

And so there's this kind of natural human cycle.

In political science, they talk about thermostatic public opinion, which is a great phrase, I think.

But the idea basically being that people have a left-wing government and they think, God, they're spending too much money.

Let's try bit of the right.

And then they bring the right in and then they go, oh, our public services need a bit more money.

And people just naturally, which is a good, I think, dynamic to sort of say, whatever you've currently got, you kind of swing against it because you see the downsides of it.

Yeah, it always was ironic that, you know, the people at Granted Udd Outlet to say, you can't say this anymore, you're not allowed to say this,

said it more or less every day on air and in their own TV stations and on their own podcasts.

And, you know, the volume of people saying you can't say this actually outgrew the number of people saying that it definitely spoke to something in people.

If you look at the polling, the number of Americans who said they felt there were opinions that they couldn't express, they felt you know that they wanted to grew over that time.

So it was a response.

I agree with you, there was some extremely cynical bandwagon jumping on that, but it was a response to a genuine feeling.

And I wonder if thermostatically, after having lots of people come in and say, I'm smashing up the government because I'm anti-establishment, people will go, Could someone come in and just make sure my bins get collected?

Exactly.

And I think that, I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens in America once, you know, Doge and Alan Musk.

Alan Musk.

Alan Musk and his posse of kids go in.

We're not going to talk about Big Balls on this podcast.

Big Balls, who's 19, 21?

Who's got some very access to all the treasury data?

Yes, I was going to say, for people who aren't as chronically online as we are,

the Department of Governmental Efficiency team includes, I think, there's around six young men in their 20s.

And one of them is Big Balls.

That is not his given name.

His real name is Edward Coristine.

But he's a 19-year-old software engineer who briefly worked at another Elon Musk company, Neuralink.

And he's now in the State Department and he's got access to all kinds of

sensitive information.

Despite, I would suggest the nickname kind of gives you the sense he may have the interest typical to a 19-year-old boy.

Does it say big balls on his lanyard?

The thing about Musk is all this, you know, move fast, the whole ethos of Silicon Valley, the old adage of Facebook, you know.

But right, but that's what I mean about the thermostatic public opinion.

At some point when people look at the broken things, they will think, actually, you know, the consumer CFBU, the consumer finance protection yeah was a bipartisan agency that was designed to stop you getting ripped off by your credit card company yeah and when people see that that's been scrapped in a government efficiency drive and that they now have no one to complain to when they get ripped off one financial services company they may be less enamored by hey me and big balls are going to smash up the government well it may happen it may not surprise you but uh alan musk for 24 hours on his ex account rechristened himself hairy balls yes i don't know why

actually talking about political political attacks, which I'm sure is a subject we'll come back to, Sam Altman, who heads up OpenAI, so a rival AI company to Elon Musk XAI, did an interview at this AI summit at Paris in which he was asked about, so they're trying to convert now OpenAI from a non-profit company to a for-profit company, and that involves it having some kind of valuation.

And Elon Musk has decided to troll them by putting in a massively overpriced valuation from outside that will then force them to readjust their calculations.

So obviously, Sam Altman of OpenAI, very annoyed about this.

But the interview he gave, he said, I think it's sad that Elon Musk can't just build something from himself.

He doesn't seem like a very happy person.

And I thought that was a much better attack than screaming and jumping up and down and saying that he's, you know, he's a wrecker and a sinner.

Like, that makes him seem quite cool and muscular.

Whereas just going, oh,

that's a bit sad, isn't it?

Like, but it's also guaranteed to annoy Elon Musk in the middle.

Right, exactly, which is what I, you know, it makes me think, you know, that great line from Phoenix Knights where he just goes, you ever kissed a girl, lad?

It just has that kind of slightly withering, sort of like more in sadness than in anger.

Anyway, let's talk about Kemi Badnock because it's been

a hundred days of her as Tory Leader.

And I think she is really notable as somebody who's not doing linguistically what we're talking about here.

She is not borrowing the clothes of her opponents.

She did an interview with the Trigonometry podcast, which is a quote sort of anti-woke podcast.

And she did the Daily Tea, which is the Telegraph's podcast.

In the US, she's spoken to Honestly, which again is another kind of anti-woke publication she's very much focusing herself on what people call the very online right which you know is a place of enormous energy but it is one that is very well served by reform exactly um there was polling that showed that really the difference between kind of uh toory supporters and reform supporters both of them trended much older but like levels of onlineness really predicted whether or not you would be more likely to be reform so you know she's making a pitch to win them back but the things that she's talking about you know she's talking about diversity extraction inclusion she's talking about the grooming gangs she's talking about things that are obsessions for that particular audience.

Yes, and the thing that's fascinating to me about this, and I know I've said this before, it's going to be my recurrent theme for the next few years: reform, great number of votes, five MPs, the Lib Dems, remember them?

Um, 70 MPs, yes, mostly from the Tories, right?

So, there is no route to Kemi Badenock becoming Prime Minister that does not run through winning back seats from Lib Dem-held constituencies.

So, really, Kemi Badenock should be devoting her energy into copying the Lib Dems.

Ed Davies.

Ed Davies.

Get her on that log flume.

Absolutely.

But no, that's, you know, there are lots of those people who voted Remain, for example.

What is the current iteration of the Tory party's offer to people who are otherwise fundamentally quite Tory in their values, but didn't think Brexit was a great idea and still don't?

I came across a great quote about Kemi Baddock earlier in the week, a Tory MP who didn't want to be named, talking about how as leader of the opposition, it's not about coming up with policies and controlling the agenda, really.

It's the hard graft of doing dinners for fundraising, going to constituencies.

And he or she, I've no idea who it was, said, quoting the Guardian, she wants to be an architect, but being leader of the opposition is more like being a bricklayer.

That's a really good way of putting it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is, you know, actually, it's about, you know, spending your days going to everyone's constituency and being the supporters and so on.

Picking a really emblematic fight with your own party, which has just been rejected by the voters.

So if you think about the way that happened, so Blair did clause four, which was the commitment in the Labour Party constitution to common ownership.

And he said, no, we're actually, we're okay with capitalism, we're okay with the private sector.

Big fight, he won it.

David Cameron, as we said,

he did hugger hoodie, hugger husky.

He didn't do

environmentalism.

He said, there's a reason people don't like the Conservatives.

And I'm the answer to that.

But Badenoch says, we got it wrong.

We didn't do it right.

But what does she think that they got wrong?

Well, you see, the non-specifics is an interesting one because I'm reminded of Robert Jenrick, who about a month or so ago made controversial statements about immigration.

That was her competitor for the Tory leadership race.

And he said there should be a cap on immigration, quote, from alien cultures with medieval attitudes towards women, which is a very controversial remark and got lots of headlines.

When he was questioned about which cultures exactly he wouldn't specify, he would say, well, that's a discussion, a difficult discussion we're going to have to have.

I was dog whistling.

And actually, if I explain it, that ruins it.

Exactly.

Then I will offend

those minority communities in the UK who don't see themselves as alien communities.

They won't vote for us if I actually say that.

I'm talking about the not nice ones.

And I'm not talking about the nice ones.

But what I've noticed is, because you mentioned that Kemi Badot's talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and those dog whistle listed.

Actually,

reform doesn't so much.

Farage has a kind of a habit of rather, what would they call it, you know, strategically asking questions, but not necessarily giving answers.

So his mode would be something like, I'm just asking the question, you know, are there too many, was there something, what happened there?

Was there something in the community that sat those rights off?

I don't know.

I don't know.

But that's a question certainly that needs asking.

You know, something's happening in our inner cities.

I'm not quite sure what it is yet, but I think it's right to ask the question.

You know, it's that.

But what that does is it then draws draws Starmer and Badenock into that argument and they end up coming up with more specific, explicit references.

You know, so we get the

Don raid on immigration, we get the medieval attitudes and so on.

We get Kerry Badenock talking about DEI and so on.

So it's a bit like Muhammad Ali doing the Roper Dope.

You know, if I just like hang over here long enough, my opponent will just come out and start hitting me.

So Faraj's credit, he has also done that bit where you pick a fight with your sort of some of your supporters, which is that he has consistently said that anyone who was ever a member of the British National Party doesn't belong.

He's actually kicked out an awful lot of people for overstepping the line in terms of things they've said about racial subjects, right?

But this comes to the point about what's the nine-of-what's the natural tendency of your party you have to guard against?

He's dealing with the hard right, the populist right, and he knows that the obvious like landmine and the edge of that is people saying things that are just overtly racist.

And so, he has made a point of saying, Here's where my line is on this.

But I'd also say he's very skillfully laying these policy traps in the language that he uses in that it's sufficiently, you know, it alerts us to certain topics, but it's sufficiently, and it gets enough attention to attract, you know, the moths of Starmer and Badenock who then find themselves having to almost like outdo whatever it is in their minds they think reform might do.

Yes, he's very good at that, there's something you're not being told.

Yes.

Or he's, aren't there some things that mainstream politicians are afraid to talk about?

You know, my most hated column topic, which is, you know, version of how things that Ope columnist write, which is, we need a conversation about X.

Yeah.

And it's just like, just have it, have it.

Or you could start it.

And it's usually a cover for there's something I want to say, but I know that actually saying it out loud will get me in trouble.

Yeah.

And I'd also say the most successful leaders are the ones who appeal beyond their party base.

You know, that's what Thatcher did.

That's what Blair did.

And in some respects, that's what Johnson did as well in the election.

No, no, he

won on the back of

the Red Wall.

He ran on the back of seats across the Midlands and North of England where traditional working-class Labour voters who'd maybe gone Labour to UKIP and instead of going back to Labour again instead took a look at Boris Johnson's version of the game.

Exactly.

It's the ones who just double down on their base support to keep them kind of on side enthusiastic.

The ones who find that they just hit a certain level but don't go beyond it.

I mean, Trump, of course, is the big example of someone who just smashed all conceptions of what his party base was and appealed beyond it in every direction he could imagine.

And made a big deal about that during the campaign in ways I think maybe didn't come across quite here.

But, you know, one of the things that he would say on his stump speeches was, I'm the first president who hasn't started any wars.

Yeah.

Which to me, having grown up with the kind of Republican Party of Dick Cheney and George Bush, is a big ideological break from that party's traditions.

Obviously, it turns out, as per his maybe I'll just take over Gaza, that he may not be the kind of like left-wing squish on

pacifist that maybe Gaza.

It struck me just watching him try to explain what Trump Gaza was going to be like, you know, it's going to be beautiful waterfront hotels and whatever.

Will the Palestinians be allowed back?

Well, I don't see why they should, you know, you know, I mentioned, you know, isn't that ethnic clinic, but also, um, yes, who's going to work in these hotels as well?

I think his ultimate ambition is to be the world's landlord.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that's how he sees himself.

Yeah, he ports his experience from his time running a property empire, but also his time playing a business leader on TV.

And if you understand those two things, then you kind of understand his approach to politics.

To all of life, yeah.

And it's to war and peace, yes.

Yeah, but it's a very sharp idea of business.

I mean, you know, the property market is full of people who, you know,

are fairly ruthlessly capitalist, shall we say.

It's not a place for kind of do-gooders, is it?

Yeah, do-gooders are Palestinians.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

What's fascinating to me about his plan for Palestine is that all of the people, I'm fascinated to go back to all the people who voted for him thinking that the left was kind of, you know, they called him like Genocide Joe and how they feel about it.

But that's, you know, that's again, he picked a fight with his party and made himself not seem like a traditional Republican.

It was entertaining watching people in his party when his plan was first announced try to work out how to deal with it without criticizing him.

Speaker Johnson said when he got wind of it,

We're trying to get the details of it.

It's a surprising development, but I think it's one that we'll applaud.

Interesting, if you haven't got the details yet, but you know you will applaud it.

That says something about how you're going to approach this.

Yes, I was accidentally very honest.

I haven't heard the details, but when I do, I will be in favour.

Have we got time to talk about straws?

Do you want to say that?

Yes, let's talk about straws.

Let's clutch at Liz Tusser's straw.

So, among his many sweeping changes to government, Donald Trump signed an executive order getting rid of paper straws and bringing back plastic.

Yeah, he's mandated that the federal government can't buy paper straws.

Yeah.

Which I just think maybe the federal government should be neutral on straw procurement.

I'm not sure.

You know, they should maybe just buy whatever they feel is cheapest and best for the thing.

I have to declare an interest here, which is that I hate paper straws.

I'm very up for the idea that we need to change our consumption in all kinds of different ways.

But fundamentally, you can't suck liquid through something that absorbs liquid.

Yeah, go

he said in his explanation, because I thought he was going to talk about you know climate and it's you know it's a lefto-woke thing and whatever and he said no no no they explode when you suck something that's hot.

I thought who uses a straw to suck hot liquid?

That is up there with Kemi Badnock eating steak for lunch in the great annals of you're doing what?

Is he having coffee through a

straw?

Then again dentists would probably endorse that because obviously for tooth decay reasons if you're you're going to drink a lot of fizzy drinks, they do say just try and use a straw so it doesn't degrade your teeth.

And presumably he's...

Hot fizzy drinks.

No, but if he's drinking a lot of coffee or tea, which if he's a Diet Coke fan, he may just love a bit of caffeine, then maybe it's good because he must have had those teeth fairly expensively cleaned and done, that he's not now staining them brown again.

Right.

But I'd love the idea.

That's a very long journey to go on to impose a blanket ban on paper straws across America.

It's also living on the edge, in my view.

If someone brings you a cup of coffee, you drink it instantly through a straw because you've got no way way of judging.

You know, there's no moment when it gets close to your face that you think, oh no, bail out, bail out, way too hot.

I've made an error here.

And then Liz Truss, on top of that announcement, said that she backed it, which is

a great comfort saying that it was this sort of lefty policy that got us resoundingly defeated in 2024, forgetting that her premiership also played a part in that.

I think the sort of 10% inflation that we suffered may have probably loomed larger in people's minds than their disintegrating straws.

But there is one very funny coder to this, which is that for a long time the research, the stat that came up was one of these zombie stats.

It said that Americans used 500 million straws a day, which given that there are 300 million Americans implied that some people were really caning through the straws.

Donald Trump, who allegedly drinks eight Diet Cokes a day, may be one of them.

But it was based on a school project that a nine-year-old did

when he estimated the number of straws.

And it's sort of just like a kind of zoonotic virus, just escaped somehow into the the wild and no one really knows how many straws they think it's you know they think it's in the 100 million plus range yeah in America it is a high consumption good but yeah it was just it was very funny the way that it was all like we need to ban straws because we're using 500 million in the air those bird watch appeals where you know if you see a gray crested tit just uh write down time of day and and we're they'll be doing that they'll be doing a straw watch to we've got to get this figure absolutely right we've got to work this out really yeah i mean it must be it but i mean government statistics are are a question for another day because I'm always fascinated by how they manage to work.

But you presumably do have to do some kind of straw poll, sorry, of like, say, fast food restaurants or supermarkets or something like that to work at.

You know, I wonder if it's like Nielsen ratings, where there's just a hundred people in the country and

we monitor their straw consumption and then extrapolate from that.

A straw focus group, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And if you've got one massive straw for Shinardo, they've just distorted the entire figures for everyone.

But of course, nobody has

done anything about what size of drink the straws are being used for because, you know, if it's a vat.

Apart from Mayor Bloomberg, if you remember, he banned those giant American drinks.

I think if you're drinking literal pints of

carbonated drinks, then the straw can't protect your teeth at that point.

Okay, that's good.

So that's going on your manifesto.

Well, bring back paper straws, yeah?

Would you go on, look into your heart.

Do you genuinely

prefer them?

They've never choked out.

Good, right.

So a ringing endorsement for Liz Truss there from you, in fact, is what you're saying.

Well, you see, you've fallen into the political trap of taking one silly thing and then using it as an example of...

Anyway, that's a whole other podcast.

No, I'm firmly,

I'm going to put you down and firmly in the pro-Liz Truss game.

Before we end, I'd like to read you a letter we got this week, which is addressed to High Hellman,

which is our new portmanteau.

So thank you very much to that to John Bursco for writing in.

Enjoying your strong message.

Here's a contribution for you to hang on your starma metaphor tree.

Excellent.

So commercialized these days.

In his announcement of an inquiry into the Southport killings, he both said that he would leave no stone unturned and that he was not worried about no matter the boats it will rock.

There we go.

That's how we're going to add that solemnly to the starma metaphor tree.

Somebody actually tweeted me or

skeeted me.

I think they did skeet me, but they didn't give their name, saying that

regarding political nicknames, I'm not sure anyone's done as devastating a job of nicknaming Sakir Starma as Microsoft Words dictation function, which I discovered last year has rendered him as Circular Stormer.

I like that.

I like that.

That says, it sort of says woodwork, but also possibly Nazi, right?

It's got some resonance there.

There is a thesis to be written that spell correct

is an early version of AI, as in it tries to work out what you're thinking and then tell you badly.

So

if we see how well spell correct works, just kind of expand that infinity-wise, and that will give us some idea of what AI might do.

The early versions of AI are a bit like Clippy from Microsoft Word, kind of given, you know, four lines of Coke, basically, which is

not sure anyone asked for that, but you know, I remain optimistic.

Well, thanks very much for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back next week.

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

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Hello, Greg Jenner here.

I am the host of You're Dead to Me from BBC Radio 4.

We are the comedy show that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.

And we're back for a brand new series, Series 9, where we're covering all sorts of things from Aristotle to the legends of King Arthur to the history of coffee to the reign of Catherine of Medici of France.

We are looking at the arts and crafts crafts movement and the life of Sojourna Truth and how cuneiform writing systems worked in the Bronze Age.

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It's a fantastic series.

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We get great historians.

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