A Lawyer, Not a Leader

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Hello, it's Armando here. Before we get going with the episode proper, I just wanted to deliver a very important message of my own.

New episodes of Strong Message Here are available weekly on Thursdays.

But if you want to be notified as soon as a new episode appears, make sure you're subscribed to the series on BBC Sounds and have your push notifications turned on.

That way, you'll get to hear the latest outpourings from myself and from Helen as soon as is humanly possible. Thank you for listening.
And now here's 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. I still am Armando Inucci.
And I still am Helen Lewis.

And we're back after a whole week off and I mean so much to talk about. So many

phrases that have come up in the

in the public discourse and we're limited to one or two this week but I think next week I ought to give a heads up. We'll look at the whole Facebook fact-checking Musk.

What would you call it, Nexus? I thought you were going to say next week we're going to look at all language.

But yeah, no, this week we're going to be looking at why Kemi Badenock told Keir Starmer to be a leader, not a lawyer. Right.
But first, I want to know: have you read any books?

Did you spend all of Christmas? Well, Christmas is trying to get away from what we do now, I think.

You know, all this fuss over politics. So over Christmas, I read volume three of Tim Shipman's account of what happened in the UK in politics from Brexit onwards.

He is, if people don't know, he brings out, there are now four, I think, 600-page volumes. Yes, I read that when you put them all together, they're longer, quite twice as long as Lord of the Rings.

Yes. And they've all got variations of out in the title.
That's right. So I was reading, he's become, he's the sort of Gibbon's decline and fall

of the Roman Empire of Brexit. And so I, for my Christmas pleasure, I was reading volume three, which I think is called No Way Out.

And I just came across a phrase and I thought, that's a really good phrase. I must use that.
phrase. It was in a discussion, an account of how

David Davis, who was the Brexit minister at the time, wanted to persuade Theresa Mayer about the viability of a technology being able to give us a frictionless border.

But I can see your eyes dripping already, Helen, and how you know, technology would actually get round the problem of the backstop, if you remember the backstop and all that.

And apparently, in the discussions, he even at one point, or some of the officials, discussing the viability of being able to do facial recognition of pigs. No, this is just, this is just,

this is just

I really wasn't expecting that. No, no one was expecting.
So, but I'm just putting that to one side because a European bureaucrat was then off the record talking about David Davis and

how David Davis thought that Theresa May was agreeing with him by saying, I hear what you say, I'm hearing you. Whereas, of course, we know, and we've already discussed, that means nothing.

And the phrase that this bureaucrat used about David Davis was, he was listening with the wrong ears.

And I love that phrase. And I'm going to use it practically every day from now on.
I think. Do you think that was translated from another language? You know what I mean?

That sounds like, you know, oh, isn't it delightful that Finland has, you know, kind of a word for tired, meaning to have lain down in someone else's bed with an elf?

It's got that kind of vibe to it, I think. I think for me, it's perfect because it is also weird.
It's exactly what we're doing. There's so many weird images it conjures up.

And David Davis, when you when you kind of bless him. Yes.
I

have great joy from imagining what the big facial database would look like because I don't know about you.

Whenever you now go through the security gates at Heathrow or Gatwick off a long-haul flight and you think, oh, this is not capturing me at my best.

How is this going to match this to my passport photo? Just bleary-eyed and kind of still with a neck pillow around your neck. Do you imagine there's a whole line of pigs who have been sent?

You know, their thing hasn't gone through. Yeah, the machine hasn't gone.

So they've had to go over to a counter. There's a huge row of pigs just waiting in line.
Just bleary-eyed pigs with neck pillows on from the flight.

That's really true. Do you know what? That is the only one of the Shipman book series that I haven't read.
Oh, right. Well, you skipped that one.

I know how it ends, but I won't spoil it.

And yeah, and I have to say, Boris Johnson's memoir is full of similarly strange bits.

There's a bit when he suggests that perhaps we could go, or there is an idea floated that perhaps we could recover some of the vaccines that are being held in the EU by sending in frogmen.

And then I think someone goes, That would technically be invading another NATO country. I sort of probably can't do that.

But not so they would have to bring the vaccine back underwater, presumably. I mean, he hasn't thought it through.
No, I think there were many problems with that.

I am such a nerd that I not only enjoyed those books, but also there are two other writers at the Times and Sunday Times, Gabriel Program and Patrick Maguire, who have already done Left Out, which was their account of the Corbyn years, which I would thoroughly recommend.

And they have a new one, Get In. I mean,

you know, it's very much a formula and incredibly important. This is about the Dems.
No. This one is about Keir Starmer.

But actually, the one thing it does do, which I haven't, and it's out in February, so pre-orders, I'm sure, are available now, is talk about the role of Morgan McSweeney.

And, you know, we had a lot of discussion. I'm sure you and I both have strong opinions on Dominic Cummings and his role in government.
He's certainly a big figure in the fourth shipman book.

But Morgan McSweeney is less well covered, but he's absolutely key to understanding the Starma project in terms of which voters they decided to win back, you know, which wages they felt lost, you know, weren't with them in 2019.

But also in the sense that that project, I think, lots of people feel has kind of stalled. You know, it was an election-winning coalition that was formed.

But actually, what do all of those people want? Slightly different things. That's right.

And much of the election, and we discussed this in greater detail in an earlier episode, was about not saying things.

So about actually keeping to a minimum your promises, other than saying vaguely, we won't put taxes on working people and so on.

And which kind of worked in a very, very specific way during the election. But, you know, the onus on them now to sort of unpack all that over the next five years is proving much more difficult.

You know, another phrase that's current at the moment is now becoming a standard phrase that always kind of comes up every three or four years in politics is I have complete confidence in the Chancellor of the Exchequer which

one turns up do you know I thought I felt a bit sorry actually for Keir Stahlma because I'm not sure he realized that there was a there's John Rentel referred to it as the ritualistic aspect of that right and there is something you know when we kind of go oh isn't it incredible how the Japanese have their tea ceremony and all of these things have been over years you know all these traditions for so long that make no sense to outsiders and I think there is a similar thing with the kind of do you expect ex-ministers to serve serve the whole parliament?

And any normal person would be like, well, no, they might have a, they might go do lally in two years' time.

Rachel Reeves might rob a bank in 2028. It's possible I may at some point have to fire her.

But unless you say anything other than, Rachel and I will gloriously march on to the future and I will never, I will never let her go.

It's like me saying, you know, do you see yourself still being on Radio 4 this time next year? I mean, well, it's not up to me to some extent. Yeah, I'm right.

But as soon as they don't say anything other than a massive hostage to fortune, it becomes Stalma declines to express full confidence in Rachel Reeves.

I know, and that phrase also has just lost currency over the years, because even if you say yes, no, people think, well, you mean no, don't you? Because that's not nominal.

So they then had to kind of back it up with someone, a spokesperson afterwards saying, and what he means by that is throughout the whole term until the next general election. I know.

And then, of course, he had confidence in Tulip Sadiq until there was pressure applied to say, you haven't technically broken the ministerial code, but nonetheless, maybe you're anti-corruption minister.

That's a massive punchline for us. We don't want to keep walking into that particular rake for the next couple of years.
Thanks.

So we go back to Kemmy Baddock, who certain phrases do punch through, though, if they kind of align with our kind of unconscious image of the person who's being criticised or attacked.

And Kemi Bandenock, in the last week's Prime Minister's questions, talked about Kirstama being a lawyer, not a leader.

And that kind of resonated, I thought. It really did with me.

One of the best columns on Starma recently was by Patrick Maguire and the Times, which said that the difficulty is he approaches things like a lawyer.

If you give him a brief and a case, he will prosecute it and he won't deviate from it. He's very good at sticking to the line.
You know, he will go out and argue for something.

But that's also a kind of failure to be a manager to some extent or to be a visionary.

And in a way, you know, my long-running theory about prime ministers is that what we start off loving them for, we end up hating them for.

So Tony Blair, very charismatic. Oh, is he insincere? Whatever it might be.
Theresa May, steady, boring.

And I think with Keir Starmer, this is quite a potent attack because being a lawyer to some extent, is it a profession you have particularly warm feelings towards? I sort of think I'm kind of neutral.

I haven't seen both of them. I'm not the number of a good one, but

I don't particularly want to be using them all the time. Right.

And I think, particularly in the context of the grooming-gang scandal, which might have been revived by Elomos, but has been playing out over more than a decade now, his lawyerly background is a vulnerability.

He makes a very good case that, as director of public prosecutions, you know, he toughened up some of the things. He really wanted mandatory reporting, for example.

But nonetheless, that has been a consistent weak point of his, the idea of what decisions did you make in that role?

And also, I think it's something I think he chooses not to do is supply a narrative to the decisions being made and the policies so that you get some sense of where this is going.

Or if, in the case of Kebby Badino asking for an inquiry into grooming gangs, him saying no,

there wasn't a sort of, not just an intellectual and a political, but an emotional argument as to why that was inappropriate.

I'm not agreeing with him or disagreeing with him, but I didn't get the sense that he was arguing his case effectively because he was hiding behind just the bare facts and a sort of deafness to a lot of calls from people saying there are certain victims who still haven't been heard or feel they haven't been heard fully.

Yes, I think what makes a narrative sing is when you supply a motive behind it. So

I think what became a very potent problem for him was the suggestion, I don't think, true, that he doesn't want to have an inquiry because he would be implicated. It would reflect badly on him.

And as soon as people go, oh, that's why you don't want it. Oh, because you don't want.

And you could say, well, actually, the Conservatives were in power during the time that a lot of this stuff was coming out.

One of the allegations about a Home Office memo from the late 2000s that was supposedly issued under Gordon Brown seems to be completely baseless.

That doesn't, you know, actually, Keir Stummel was not in government during that time.

Yes, he was DPP, But I think, as he pointed out to political journalists, that is a public role which has scrutiny at the time. Yes,

the way debate is conducted now has so radically changed that if you don't appear to be answering the question effectively, if there's room for doubt, that room for doubt just grows and grows.

So hence, Elon Musk and all things in the end come back to him.

So that's exactly what happened in the case of Kate Middleton, now the Princess of Wales. And why isn't she in public?

Why isn't she in public? Why isn't she in public?

And then the answer to that turns out to be really sad and mundane, which is that she's suffering from cancer and she's in treatment and she doesn't really want to go and

sort of then forced out of her because her initial reaction was to keep it private. But there is a kind of feeling that builds up about why aren't we being told? Why aren't we being told?

And then actually sometimes there are non-conspiratorial reasons.

I think that's the thing that worries me about some of the attack lines now is that they sometimes do go into that conspiratorial tendency of thinking if if there is uncertainty it can only ever be malevolent and that to to me is the hallmark of a kind of conspiracist that's right i mean i i've stopped it now because it never it never produces anything positive i've stopped

i i used to monitor alon musk's elon musk i i do you know i'm going to give him five different ways of pronouncing his name elaine musk

he'd hate that his attack on salmon and then became an attack on jess phillips and i on x i i supported jess phillips not in her decision to not go ahead with inquiry but just in her general brief and career outside Parliament as well as input has been very much, she's one of the last people you would accuse of.

Yeah, before politics, she was involved in Samuel and running a women's shelter. I mean, that's her professional background, is helping victims of male violence.

All I did was, you know, say that, you know, you're really picking on the wrong person.

But that just turned into people having a go at me for also being a grooming, a child rape grooming enthusiast, you know.

And given my career at the BBC, well, we all know what goes on at the BBC hint, hint, and I must have known clearly. But that's narrative, isn't it?

Because what happens is, if you even contest any details of the narrative,

you know, and it happened, I think, with,

you know, maybe the kind of racial reckoning of 2020. If you say this particular story isn't true, yes, I take your point generally.

This story isn't true, this detail isn't true, then people would say, Oh, you don't care about racism. Exactly.
And I think the same thing has happened now.

If you contest individual facts, people say, Oh, you don't care about grooming, or oh, you don't care about paedophilia.

And you go, the role to me of a journalist is to be the one who awkwardly kind of goes, Can I just stop you before we get there? That, you know, and that never ever makes you any friends, ever.

And maybe a platform where you're restricted to 140 characters or 240 characters is not necessarily the platform. Well, you're not anymore.
You've got to pay for it. You've got to pay for it for X.

And then you could go on for pages and pages and pages. And people do.

And people do.

Can I talk to you about some bad attacks? So we talked about one I think that is quite potent there.

So Rachel Reeves has been in trouble this week with the perception really that the economy is not picking up. Although everyone, I mean, the government has full confidence.
Right, okay, yeah, true.

For the next four, she will be in place until 2019, apparently. That's fine.

But she was extraordinarily lucky in her opponent on the Tory side, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Mel Stride, stood up to question her. And everyone thought, oh, this is going to be spicy.

She's in a lot of trouble here. And instead,

let me read to you what he thought he would end his peroration with. This is the Hamlet of our Time.

Is it?

Go on, guess the way in which you think it's the Hamlet of our time.

Rachel Reeves is, is Hamlet or Gertrude or Ophelia?

She's killed her father and married her mother. That's what's happened here.
She's not the fool.

She's Danish.

Yeah, no.

Okay. They promised the electorate much while pouring the poison into their ear.
And at the end, you can feel the end, the chance to flailing.

Estranged, it seems, from those closest to her, those about her failing, the drums beating ever closer. To go or not to go, that is now a question.
right

it's just brutal um disregard for the question

in the mind suffer the stings and arrows stings and

yes exactly barrows all right so she got off

she that i mean and basically everybody went everyone went oh you've muffed that no no was somebody clever in melstride's office writing that down thinking you'd say this will get a laugh

it's always a high-risk exercise politicians trying out jokes. I remember, this is way before your time, Margaret Thatcher, world leader of the opposition, James Callaghan, still in power.

So we're in the sort of mid-1970s. And there was a crisis, economic crisis, energy crisis.

Somebody had quoted Jim Callahan talking about the forthcoming election that was looming, saying he sees himself a bit like Moses, leading the people to the promised land, but not getting there himself.

So Margaret Thatcher at her conference, party conference speech, said, my message to Moses is keep taking the tablets. And it got a huge, you know, of course it's next day.
But apparently.

That's a dad joke. That's a real dad joke.

Apparently, and Simon Holgert, this is Simon Holgert, who was a lobby correspondent for many years at the Guardian and The Observer, tells this story about her advisors had presented her with this line in advance.

And she famously didn't have a sense of humor. She looked at it and went, can I change tablets to pills? So my message to Moses is keep taking the pills.

And it sort of had, you had to be walked through how the joke works. What is this? There's two meanings of the word tablet that we're relying on for comic effect here, Margaret.
A pun? Or play off.

That's funny. I think sometimes politicians think that there is a kind of big moment and they need to rise into the big moment.

Because there was one that I actually sort of will allow, which was during Boris Johnson's troubles, David Davis, our old friend, stood up from the back benches and did a quote from the Rump Parliament.

He said, you have been here for too long for all the good you have done in the name of god go yes and i thought actually do you know if i was a politician i would think at some point i do want to just stand up and go to someone in the name of god go it must feel really great but it was kind of i mean it was slightly self-important but it also was a moment in which he was in genuine trouble there was genuine anger yes and it was quite stark as well in in the yes you know their reaction yes political speeches like lawyers letters are better when they're extremely short right this is what they will send journalism about lawyers letters they send you a long letter complaining about everything Just, okay, skim through it.

If they say, we're going to sue you on X date, prepare for this, you go,

ah, right. Yeah.

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Talking of legal letters, we'll come up to Liz Truss in a minute.

But just going back to Kerry Badenock's a leader, not a lawyer, it did remind me of the Blair, again, when he was in opposition, saying to John Major across the dispatch box, I lead my party, he follows his.

And that kind of, I wondered if Kemi Banner was

trying to get into that, because that, again, was a very effective one. And similarly, David Cameron, as opposition leader to Tony Blair, said, shouted, he was the future once.

Such a great line. Such a great line, because genuinely, really wounding.

And I suppose that is one of the things you can take about political attacks, is that there comes a point when they long held feelings about people suddenly that have been actually bubbling along burst out.

Yes. And when people are on the downswing, suddenly someone crystallizes in some way a feeling that everyone has really had all along.

It's when they go for an emotion or a flaw that no one else has ever picked up on that they feel odd, but if they actually seem to shine a light on something that we were quietly thinking anyway.

Well, that's why I sort of mourn the demise of political cartoons, which is print papers have gone down, because they were often quite good at picking out a sort of single thing

that then became a kind of visual trademark.

So I'm thinking about the fact that Steve Bell in the Guardian used to depict Tony Blair with one eye, sort of getting bigger and bigger, which was, I mean, he was literally portraying him as kind of swivel-eyed, kind of like this sort of sense of certainty about him.

You know, and they would literally depict John Major as being grey.

So there was just a kind of inability to just instantly give you one image that said, here's actually everything that we don't like about this person.

And that's what the best political attacks in words have to do. No, have political attacks now got less witty and more

sort of use male.

Steve Bannon the other day was criticising Elaine Musk.

I thought, well, this would be interesting. What's he saying about her? And he said, he's truly evil.
That was his critique.

And I don't come down to that. We've come to very base insults now, haven't we? I quite like that one in the sense it wasn't egregiously, gratuitously foul mouths, right? Which some of them just are.

Or it wasn't just kind of Europedo.

It was actually expressing a kind of

a straightforward moral judgment, which you may or may not agree with, but it's kind of, you know, he's actually, there is an actual criticism there about the way that this, I mean, funny to come from Steve Bannon, who's also extremely right-wing, extremely opposed to immigration, that this is the kind of issue that's ended up completely dividing them.

But I don't mind strong attacks. One of the ones I have to say that does bother me is there is a tendency to refer to Rachel Reeves.
Now, there are kind of questions about her CV.

There are questions about passages in her book, which appear to have been lifted from elsewhere. But they call her sometimes Rachel from accounts.

And I find that a little bit sexist and belittling, that it's actually, she's not a real chancellor. She's just the, the, she's just, it's by definition a sort of lady's job, right?

It doesn't, that, if an attack doesn't work against a man, it doesn't, can they almost say it's Steve from accounts, it sort of doesn't,

it sort of sets off my tingling antenna. It's not used internally.
That's not something someone would say in a speech publicly. No, that's been something that's been in briefings.
Right. Yeah.

And now they've, they, now there's been a move to calling her Rachel the temp, which has been on the basis.

But it also kind of speaks to the idea of something that happens often with political attacks is that there's an attempt to turn them into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Right.
Right.

That, oh, somebody's, you know, really you know you know on edge and that's when you get that sort of weird alchemical buildup oh yes it's when

it's that thing of you must never say

I'll only go if I become the story because that's a cue for every outlet to meet you the story.

And then it becomes less I'm resigning because I did X, Y and Z wrong, but more, no, the headlines and the websites are all full of critiques of me and the only way to stop it is for me to disappear.

But that becomes easy then, doesn't it?

And I do worry that what's happening happening now is the way we've processed stuff is accelerating so that we demand now instant and very big responses to events within 24 hours.

So it's not so much, oh, we'll be watching the performance of the Chancellor over the next year to 18 months, really, to see whether the economy will grow as she says it is or whether she's failed.

But it's now, no, she's got to go now.

She's a lettuce. You know, they bring back the Liz Trump.
It has to happen now.

Yeah, I think that acceleration has been really bad for politics.

And if you talk to people within it, they really date it back quite a long way, actually, to the beginning of kind of 24-7 rolling news. Because there was just a lot of airtime to fill.

And one way to fill it was with speculation.

And I mean, you know, I also personality-based politics has taken over. It's tricky now sometimes.
I'm trying to find out what a given bill actually contains.

And you have to dig a bit below the surface of political commentary to kind of find out those kind of gritty details.

And I think that's probably due to my diminishing attention span as much as

anything else, right? No, I think I

if you do far more research than most people, and if you can't get to grips with it, then I think also, again, I think we mentioned this before, legislation now is now about capturing the headlines as much as putting through policies that are good for the country.

There was very much, in say the last three or four years, there have been bills brought before Parliament or orders or amendments that are responding very much to the headlines of the past week.

We even had Yvette Cooper come to the House last week after three days of Lanan Musk

saying, why isn't there an inquiry? Outlining what proposals from the recent inquiry into

the Jay report they concluded in 2022. Yeah.
Announcing that certain things were now going to be enacted pretty quickly. So it seemed like a reaction to

loud shouting.

I think there might be a bit of surprise actually when the current education bill that's passing through the Commons gets really closer to being enacted.

Because the way that was covered was there was an amendment put on it for a new inquiry into grooming gangs, which got voted down because Kirstam has got a massive majority, which again is another thing that people seem to kind of forget, is that we don't have so many knife-edge votes.

Now you've got a government that's got a really sizable majority that for the moment is working in sync. The coverage of that was very much like, you know, they voted down this amendment to it.

And therefore, that sort of squeezed out all the consideration of the stuff that was actually in it, which is, as far as I understand it, unwinding a huge amount of the academisation process, you know, the move in schools towards these much more independent models, which I think when people see it at the other end, they're going to go, my child school is doing what?

And kind of feel like, again, which is something I don't know if you hear it, I hear it all the time now as a journalist. Why wasn't I told about this? Yes, exactly, exactly.

I mean, for example, the rollout on the ban on smoking so that eventually people born after a certain year just will not be.

No.

Sounds great. I'm all in favour.
I'm dead against. You're anti-smoking.
I'm anti-smoking. I hate cancer.
I mean, it's, you know.

But it it was brought in by Rishi Schunak, not because it was in the Tory Party manifesto. It hadn't been discussed in Parliament.
This was a kind of

thing he picked up from New Zealand or Australia or somewhere, didn't he? This is a kind of, what do we want to radical before the election? Let's do this. So, so no discussion of it.

And then Kirstama picked it up. I think it was in the Labour manifesto, but there was no real discussion or debate about it.

People felt like that about Assisted Dying, too, which was brought ahead as a private member's bill, tacitly supported by the government, but it was a bit like, well, hang on,

this came out of nowhere. Why have we not had a opportunity?

And I think that's where people's frustration and then disassociation from what's going on in Westminster occurs, because they feel that the topics being discussed there are not, well, actually, they feel there are topics being enacted there that have not had discussion.

Now, whether you're on the left, right, or middle, it's leading to a wider and wider sense of disconnect from

politics. Before we go, do you have a favourite political attack? One that may have been unfair, but you or...
Well, it is very personal as well, actually.

So it goes against, but it did, it was going back to, you can see my favourite era was the 1970s, the dying days of the Callahan government.

Jeffrey Hoe was Margaret Thatcher's

Trancellor. Oh, yes.
Yes, yes, yes.

And he was a very meek-looking, mild-mannered, even though he enacted, you know, savage. I think I know where you're going with this one, Donald.
Donnie Seely said...

debating with Jeffrey Ho was like being savaged by a dead sheep. I always thought that was Hesseltime, but I think I'm getting confused with him Hesseltime being nicknamed Tarzan.

Grabbing the mace from the House of Commons and sort of waving it around. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, it was one of those things where people go, oh, we live in unprecedented times of political turmoil.
Yeah.

And you want to say, I'm going to stop you there. The 1970s, everybody

were off the hook. People were doing some.
Some of the pay rises people were getting were insane. Some of the stuff that was happening was crazy.
And some of the jokes that people were making were...

Some of the jokes would not be bear repeating now. We haven't discussed Liz Truss.

That's because she silenced us on Monday with her extremely effective lawyers' letter saying that no one must ever again say that she's crashed the economy. So we won't.

We'll just think it very hard, but not say it. Yeah.
So she's very much a champion of free speech. But Kiostama saying that she crashed the economy that she's trying to get lawyers onto.
Yes.

Someone hasn't heard of the...

There's a very famous thing on the internet, which I'm sure you've heard of, called the Streisand effect, which was based after Barbara Streisand said, basically don't say anything about X or I'll sue you.

And everyone went,

and it became a huge thing. And exactly the same thing has happened here.
I mean, those lawyers that she went to should have said, Are you absolutely sure this is going to help?

And what happens if people do continue to say she crashed the economy? I saw one legal analysis of it saying the trouble about crashed, as in crashed the economy, that's very hard to define. Yeah.

As in, it could be an expression of opinion.

Maybe she gets some really rich people to say it and sue them. Huge damages.
We might actually be able to get the economy moving again. This could be her way to uncrashed economics.

Rachel Reeves is on the line saying this, this sounds great. 100% tax on people saying mean things about Liz Trust.
That's it. All our problems solved.
Grew the economy by 5% through legal disputes.

I'm going to read a lovely comment we received from Australia, which is very nice. I say lovely.
I mean, it could be horrible. Terrible comment.

I'm enjoying the podcast enormously from Melbourne, Australia. Plenty of resonances with the sorry state of Aussie politics, says Ben Brooker.
One suggestion for you, getting the balance right.

I don't know how much a part of the UK discourse is awful, phrases, but it's virtually ubiquitous here, as in, we think this ex-policy gets the balance right.

Often it seems to be Labour, that's their version without a U, speak for almost nobody will be truly happy with X policy, but we feel it's sufficiently beige to give the appearance of us doing something without annoying either vested interests or the electorate too much.

Centrism in a nutshell, I guess, would be keen to hear your take on this.

I don't, I'm going to counter Ben here by saying I don't really mind getting the balance right because that is essentially the job of politics.

I don't think you can really hold it against people not being extreme. But then that's maybe my,

that's my vanilla.

The other thing people use is when they enact policy and say I did it because it was the right thing to do. As if that's the end of the discussion.
I love that.

That is a close twin of what one we've talked about before, which is I make no apologies for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a variation of that, isn't it? Yes.

I want us to turn to an email here from Nicola. It's not her, is it? No.

Time on her hands. No.
Dear Helen Amanda, I'm enjoying your podcast very much. I felt moved to get in touch.
It's definitely not nickel of sturgeon.

There's a particular word often used in a business or political context that's made me wince ever since I first heard it a few years ago.

It continues to exert a true nail scrape down the blackboard effect on my person. When did lessons turn into learnings?

Why?

What is ever gained by using this abomination? I would appreciate your thoughts on this. Might you share some lessons on the use of learnings? Is this new? I feel like it's a bit part of...

If it was one of your characters, I feel like this would be like Terry Speak. It's a bit like saying our next station stop.

It sort of falls into this weird rhythm of that kind of corporate blandersphere use it in a sense sentence then help me here what learnings learnings as in the learnings we have there are lots of learning we should make sure there are lots of learnings from this i think that's horrible

i mean yes yeah i mean you're right nicola it is an abomination yeah yes but it is one of those things that just i you know i think it's or a bit like that sort of version of weird police speak you know there's a way to sort of just slightly put something into an artificially formal state register to say you're really taking it seriously that's right it's it's when your statements are read out and said, I then approached the, you know,

approach that, you know, people just go up to. Yeah, I was proceeding down the street.
Exactly.

To me, it's got that police formality, which is to make things sound like, you know, we didn't just go like, we ran up, grabbed him by the scuff of the neck and chucked him in hand.

We've really gone through the events with a fine tooth from him and laid them out. This is a kind of, I think this is a corporate version of that.

That's like saying, you know, I'm currently microphoning.

You are. And desking.
I feel like learnings might appear in a pitch deck along sort of KPIs, you know, key performance indicators, that kind of thing. It's got some.
Sometimes five learnings.

Yeah, something that you see on a PowerPoint at 4 p.m. in the afternoon and it makes you slightly want to die.
I always used to be obsessed with the word kindled, only because it...

It used to be in opening ceremonies of Olympic Games, it was always the sports commentators.

And of course, they had to commentate on something that was completely outside their range of knowledge because it wasn't a sport.

It was people in strange, weird track suits walking up and down with flags.

And then forming the shape of a giant moon to the music of Enya, you know, and they somehow had to deal with it.

I always remember David Coleman then going really quiet and going, and now the torch kindled from the flame in Athens.

You know, and I always would look out for every four years, I just would always look out for the John Motson

saying the word kindled and thinking, why am I doing this? Yeah, why am I here? Show me some coal bolters, please. When does the running start?

Well, that's a nice, that's a very nice, after a programme on attacks. That's a lovely moment to end on.
It is indeed.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here. That's all for now.
All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Suns. Goodbye.
Goodbye.

Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox.
And this is the Infinite Monkey Hedgerow.

He was unable to write a funny joke for the introduction. That's basically the fact.
The new series of of the infinite monkey cage. Science with funny bits.
Science with bits. Funny science plus bits.

So the reason that the Neanderthals died out, you're claiming, is because they weren't astronomers.

Yes, exactly. That's why.

This is how we investigate cybercrime. We look for the yachts.

The new series of the infinite monkey cage. From BBC Radio 4.
Listen now on BBC Sounds.

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