The Tepid Bath of Managed Decline

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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 week, the phrase we're going to take a dip into is the tepid bath of managed decline.

Sounds very exciting.

I'm looking forward to that one, but first of all, I have to ask, have you been up to anything exciting since we last went?

No, my week was mostly made up of catching up on the stuff that had to be postponed from last week because I had a cold and took to my bed like people like me do.

At the risk of sounding Sunday supplement, I went to a Monet exhibition of, he did lots of paintings of a foggy Thames and a foggy Westminster, and it was one of the Koto gathering.

I went along to it, couldn't see a bloody thing.

It was, I mean, he could have waited until the fog lifted because I don't know if he can draw at at all.

I don't know.

There was no way of working it out.

It was that foggy.

And there were like 25 of them.

So

I'm going to ask for my money back.

If you're fuming, I'm having a refund.

Yeah, I don't know.

Is he any good, Monet?

I don't know.

Have you ever been to there's an exhibition in Monet in Paris that's it's the water lilies and it's in a beautiful oval room so it's kind of like you're trapped inside a Monet painting that's delightful droning yes my main encounter with Monet now is an episode of the popular Netflix sitcom Emily in Paris one of the pivotal plot points happens at Monet's Garden in Giverny.

Okay, so you're the viewer.

You're the target audience.

I am the target audience for Emily in Paris in that I just sat when I was covering the US election, I just sat in my hotel room and just watching Emily in Paris.

Attractive people having very minor arguments in picturesque French locations.

I can't recommend it enough.

Yes, nothing can be further from American politics.

But

I too have had a highbrow week.

Robert Ike is a very talented theatre director and writer who I've known for a while, has got a new production of Oedipus in the West End.

And one of the things I think you would like about it, not only is it set essentially with a sort of, he's done in Oedipus as a sort of macron-esque politician with a much older wife, which I think is very clever, but it's full of these little linguistic Easter eggs.

So the very first line of the play is Mark Strong, as Oedipus, addressing a kind of, you know, crowd of people who are cheering him on his election victory.

And he says, my children, my brothers and sisters.

And of course, because it's Oedipus, they're the same thing.

That kind of makes sense.

Yes.

And I really enjoy that.

You know, I think the theatre is particularly good at it because the dialogue has to carry so much of the weight that you can just like slip these least strikes in.

And what did you gain from the updating to a modern setting with the implication that politicians have married their mothers?

No.

One of the things I think that's really brilliant about the play is it's as much Jocasta's play.

So that's Oedipus's wife slash mother.

Apologies for the spoiler for those people who are a little bit behind on this one.

Well, I don't need to go now.

Right.

And Leslie Manville's performance in it is absolutely exceptional.

So the way that it's been retold is that her previous husband, the previous king, essentially raped her when she was pre-teen.

And that's which sort of explains why she had the baby so young and was forced to give the baby up.

And there's a whole monologue that she's given.

And it's just, people, you know, you could have it was one of those moments in a theatre where you actually really justify as being in a theatre because you could have heard a pin drop and you're having a collective experience.

It is that thing of, you know, when you do a comedy, you know it's working if you hear people laugh.

It's very hard to know when a drama is working.

There isn't a collective noise people make, like a mmm,

you know, when a really good scene.

But I suppose you touched on it, it's when it's absolutely silent, when even people who feel like they want to cough don't because they don't want to miss a second of what's going to happen next.

I suppose that's it for an effective drama.

Well, what a cultured week we've had.

We have not been entering a tepid bath of managed experience.

Yeah, tepid bath.

Before we go into just the implications of what that means, it's such a Kiostama phrase, tepid bath.

You know, it's the takeaway from the speech was meant to be about resetting and here's all our missions and we talked about that last week.

But what everyone remembers is tepid bath and I don't think the communications team in the government wanted tepid bath next to Kiostama's face on lots of front pages.

So that's slightly back.

What he was getting at, I suppose, was the perennial complaint of newly elected prime ministers, which is their surprise that things take a long time to get done.

But what he's also done is alienate the entire supportive infrastructure of government by calling the civil service a tepid bath.

I really loved it as a phrase.

It was one of those accidentally too pungent phrases that everyone will remember because everything else isn't.

And it captures something like warm baths, nice.

Cold baths, apparently very good for you.

But tepid bath is that sense of you know it's time to get out, but really you just you cannot be bothered.

You've got a lot of other things on.

You should have extended it.

The tepid bath of manager klein but we will put on the hot tap

exactly we will we will pour in more bath salts of innovation we want a bubble bath of growth yeah and yes that would i mean then you see would have turned it around it did remind me of and this is going quite some time back to john major's depiction of britain where he was trying to appease the euro sceptics by saying look we're not giving away what we are as a nation and he talks about you know in 50 years time Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and, as George Orwell said, old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.

I mean, that's lovely, but then I have to go back and remember that he said that in John Major's voice.

Yes.

Which drains it from some of the poetry.

Old maids bicycling.

Yes.

And also that old maid, that sounds like a tragic story, that old maids bicycling to Holy Communion

First thing in the morning.

That's very the smack of leather on willow.

Are these kind of occasions when it's not the speech writer, it's not the special advisor, it's actually the speaker's actual thoughts coming through?

Have they penned that themselves?

That's interesting.

I think it's an interesting one to talk about this week because we can talk about the perils of being accidentally too interesting.

Because I think the Trepid Bath and Manager Klein is an example of a speech that was otherwise quite technical, lots of really interesting policy proposals in it, but the only bit of it your brain grabs onto is that because it's the weirdness of that.

And I think Kemi Badnock, the Tory leader, had a similar problem in an interview she gave to The Spectator to Katie Balls and Michael Gove.

That was all weird.

Well, I read it, it's very weird.

But it was accidentally, incredibly memorable.

Around the same time, she did an American podcast interview, which was much more substantively focused on, you know, for her views on sex and gender, for example.

Yeah.

But you can have that, or you can indulge yourself in thinking, what's she going to get?

Sandwiches.

Yeah.

She's talked about she doesn't like moist bread or soggy bread.

I know.

It's probably woke.

Not all sandwiches have to be like that.

You know, it depends what you put on them.

It was one of those ones where I wondered if the tone came through in the printed version because she did say lunches for wimps, which is a quote from Wall Street, isn't it?

It's Michael Douglas's Gordon Gecko.

But she also said sometimes she likes people to bring her lunch.

She sometimes likes to have a steak for lunch.

Yeah, just a steak.

Aggressive.

Aggressive lunch.

How this image of these keepers at London Zoo with like a bucket of raw meat just chucking it into the lion gauge, you know, to just keep them happy.

Well, she was definitely going for that because then I think she was also asked if she ran a restaurant, what kind of thing would it serve?

And she said, well, plenty of red meat.

Yeah.

I just felt she was dying to say sort of tough on sandwiches, tough on the causes of sandwiches, right?

It was one, to go back to our previous discussion, it wasn't one of those like, I'm so tough.

I even hate bread.

It doesn't come into this country if it's too moist.

I'll clamp down on it.

I do remember there was a tweet then was from Liz Truss before

the event,

where she talked about a visit to a certain restaurant in her constituency.

And she says, and the great thing about it is the meat is slaughtered on the premises.

That's a weird review for a restaurant.

You know, yeah, fine.

Say you're a carnivore, but I mean, it didn't make me want to go to that restaurant.

Very funny.

You were just sitting there

thinking of cutlery and you just said it's bangs.

Somebody takes a cattle gun out, you know, and just says, which one do you want?

It's just like, but why think of putting that as the selling point of the restaurant?

And also, at the time, you were a serving cabinet minister.

Why is this the point you want to make?

Because she's tough.

Well, it's this, I suppose, gets us into, I suppose, what Keir Starmer was getting at.

You know, he doesn't want us to be lolling about in a now cold bath of empty promises and disappointment.

We want to now get out,

scrub ourselves.

The filmy scum of nostalgia.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Stand naked and proud of what we're about to achieve

and run around dry off in a in the towel of aspiration run across a field of wheat if you're so inclined if you want to be naughty and disruptive he wants it because pat mcfadden who i mentioned again last week chancellor of the duchy of lancaster which is a catch-all phrase for he's really sort of running the show had to kind of backtrack from no we don't want to alienate the civil service but what we're looking for are disruptors that's what he said we're looking for disruptors who I think the phrase he used was people who want to test and learn which is an evolution or a light version of that old Facebook

move fast and break things move fast and break things but he didn't want to do that because that sort of implies all you've left is a shop full of broken yes people go break my pension that's something that I'm against and do it quickly yeah wow but you're right that is an indication of the kind of the idea of bringing a Silicon Valley mindset, a start-up mindset, which is something that governments are really attracted to.

For the not unreasonable backing of the fact that Silicon Valley has made a lot of money, created a lot of products that people use.

Yes.

People may not talk about their love for the iPhone, but they wouldn't give it up.

You'd have to kind of prize it out of their cold, dead hands.

Not that many people feel that way about the Department of Work and Pensions.

Yeah.

So I can see the attraction.

Again, Kemi Badnuck was on the same thing this week.

She said, the problem with Britain is that we have become bureaucratic instead of entrepreneurial.

The middle class don't build or make things, but have become people who live off the law.

Which,

as soon as I say that, I went live off the land, it was what my brain meant.

We're all kind of a nation of foragers.

If you want to go into government, you should expect the law to be more important than that.

No, you're not making something.

But it's like

it's this idea that people are.

She mentioned compliance, regulation, and human resources.

So, this idea that people are in service industries or, you know, like you talked about Silicon Valley.

I mean, the thing about Silicon Valley is that what they produce is money for themselves off of data.

It's not things.

It's not a manufacturing industry, is it?

Yes, it's very hard to reconcile that with the fact that obviously Apple has got a huge logistical operation, but actually Amazon, for example, a huge company, makes most of its money now off web services, hosting websites.

And Google and Meta, formerly Facebook, make most of their money from advertising.

So they just sell real estate on their digital pages.

You know, and along any kind of commentary on managed decline would be if you look at the last 30, 40 years, our manufacturing industries have shrunk and our service industries have grown.

So we're basically basically a service island.

We're one of those pumps where you can charge your cars, your electric cars now.

That's what we are to the world, rather than a manufacturing, exporting nation.

Which feels quite good.

I mean, I think that does sound like that feels like the jobs of the future rather than of the past.

I think if you said to me, would I rather bring back heavy manufacturing to Britain or would I like to have more high-tech financial services jobs, I'd say that people generally don't have to retire at 50 because they've had their hand caught in a clamp.

But the problem, because which you touched on, you know, when you talked about the Department of Work and Pensions, is it's a bit of a ploy to dress up the basic day-to-day governing an admin as something that's sexy and adventurous.

You know, talking about getting disruptors or what's the

Dominic Cummings phrase, Mavericks and...

Obbulls and Weirdos.

So he put out, I think it was at the beginning of 2020, and this is about how kind of, you know,

people who make plans, that he wanted to recruit into the cabinet office misfits and weirdos, that was the phrase.

And the idea being that the civil service fast stream turned out people who were, you know, very politely polished and you would like to introduce to your mum.

Yeah.

But actually, what you needed was having people who were a bit odd, a bit awkward, who weren't afraid of breaking some of the rules.

Not a bad impulse.

I mean, one of the things that's very interesting about Silicon Valley, and the journalist Steve Silverman wrote about this really brilliantly, is it's there are a lot of autistic people who work there who say this is one place that is an absolutely a haven for people who maybe don't kind of get social connections in the same way as neurotypical people.

But you can kind of take that a bit too far and begin to kind of lionize the idea that just because somebody is a bit different, they must be amazing.

And that's

where I think it tips into it.

Exactly.

And I think this raising of the status of disruptor, it becomes a get-out.

You know,

if you've left a ministry in a complete mess, you're now allowed to go, well, that's me, isn't it?

I'm a disruptor.

You know, I challenge, I break things.

You know, if I was caught speeding 60 miles an hour in a built-up area and I said, well, you see, constable, what I was doing, I'm a disruptor.

You know, I need to explore where speed can get me.

That's not going to get me off, you know, because there is the law as well.

And a lot of these disruptors,

if you look at the likes of Musk and Teal and any of the

prominent social media owners,

they call themselves disruptors, but as part of their strategy of saying, therefore, the rules don't apply to me, including the tax rules.

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There's a very heavy version of the kind of Silicon Valley mythology, which is somebody who breaks a lot of either regulations, norms, or flat-out laws on the way up.

And then, as soon as they get to being a big company, immediately consolidates and becomes a huge monopoly and crowds out any of the little people and buys them up.

So, they sort of believe in disruption as long as it's not, you know, when they become big, they then decide, actually, I don't want to be disrupted.

Being disrupted is so terrible.

Yeah, they don't want disruption to happen to them.

So, therefore, they're tough on like unionization, They're tough on governments and tariffs and tax.

Every week in three, we come back to Elon Musk or Elon Musk.

I've refused to learn his name properly because he doesn't know my, he can't pronounce my name properly.

I've never heard him.

This is unjust and unfair.

But then that's how he operates.

I say unjustly and unfairly.

But Twitter or X was banned in Brazil for a while and he had a go at the judge who had pronounced the ban.

And the reason being that there weren't enough safeguards.

it was broadcasting and disseminating misinformation and so on.

And he started his great kind of campaign for freedom of expression and so on.

But in the end, he just backed down and he did all the things the judge had asked him to do, which is just set people in place in Brazil who can check up on stuff.

That's exactly what he did when the court in Delaware, when he was trying to take over Twitter, ordered, he tried to back out of it.

Essentially, they got, they made him pay an extremely high price.

He suddenly realised quite how much he'd overpaid for it.

He tried to back out of it.

So they sued him.

And then quite a lot of his very embarrassing text messages were revealed in Discovery, at which point he went, oh, okay, okay, you can have your money then.

Fight, be like that.

And there is a version that, you know, Donald Trump did something similarly.

There was a poll that came out of Iowa just before the U.S.

election by a very respected pollster called Anne Seltzer, who's done this for a number of years.

And it put Harris ahead by a wild number of points, turned out to be completely wrong.

And Trump speculatively just said, well, I'm going to sue her for whatever it is she's done wrong.

And, you know, from a campaign that made such a big thing about the left hates free speech, you know, they're all trying to cancel us, you can't say anything anymore.

One of the things you can't say is you can't put out field data from a poll, which was wrong, with no malice or intent.

Simply working with that kind of research data, you will always occasionally get a duff one.

But that's apparently to Donald Trump is simply unacceptable.

Someone says something wrong about him, and therefore he wants to sue.

I think also part of this disruptive entrepreneurial, it's about immediate, immediate effects, isn't it?

You want decisions made now.

A lot of the frustration coming from politicians is that we can't do it today.

Why can't we do it today?

I think that's why you get lots of cases of bullying in ministries because a lot of these ministers come in with no experience of having run something in Whitehole and come in going do this, do that, do that.

And then realise when they find out that it will take a process of months, if not years, to get that done, they blow up because they came in thinking if I just said it, it would happen.

I think there is a real version of that.

I think entrepreneurialism is somewhat underrated by governments in the sense that the vaccine task force, for example, was extremely effective.

And that was deliberately hived off in order to have much more autonomy, right?

You know, we went as Britain and bought up loads of doses of vaccines way ahead of everyone else.

And then people in Europe went, well, this is very unfair.

How did you do this?

You know, as if we'd sort of done something wrong by foreseeing the need for vaccines.

Exactly, but that's an old thing, an old-fashioned thing, which is thinking outside the box, which has been around forever.

Since we first invented the box.

Somebody else came and looked at it.

That's great, but what's outside it?

I think there is an important point to that.

The trouble is that the way that Silicon Valley Entrepreneurialism works is fundamentally incompatible with the way government works, right?

Which is if you're a venture capitalist, you don't expect every investment to come off, right?

You expect you'll lose a lot of money, but one in ten will be quite good, and one in a hundred, one in a thousand might be the unicorn that becomes a billion-dollar company.

You can't really treat the incapacity benefit system

with that kind of like, well, if sometimes if it fails, if you know, but but one in a thousand cases will do really well.

Yes, and if you advertise it as we want like really strong high IQ, I think Musk for his Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, he asked for like high IQ risk takers and adventurers.

But as you say, just calculating how the benefit system works, that's not the skill we're after there.

And also, fundamentally, a lot of these things are basically to do with accountancy.

It's very hard to make accountancy sexy or auditing.

It's not auditing, it's audacity.

It's inevitably going to be disappointment when these recruits come in and go, right, where do we start?

Give me a hammer.

And they go, no, your desk is over there.

You'll You'll be there for five years.

You know, that's going to be disappointing and a build-up of resentment will then ensue.

Yeah, but you're right.

Building institutions is a lot harder than being a kind of Bolshevik, I guess.

That's the kind of great lesson of history, which is one of the reasons that Pat McFadden, who, as you say, is the kind of government's fixer, wants people to come in from tech companies to do a kind of tour of duty, I think he called it.

Some of you may get shot.

Well, yeah, exactly.

Not everyone's going to come out of this alive, but you know, the ones of you that do will have medals.

But it was a, apart from anything else, I thought that was a very clear-eyed reflection on the fact that the salary that you can earn in government is nowhere near the salary you can earn in the tech industry.

Realistically, we can't attract the most sought-after engineers because they will earn a third, a fifth of what they could earn in the private sector.

So what's the idea?

You come in for a short period of time and then you move on.

Yeah, like national service.

You say, okay, so my company's just been acquired by Facebook and now I never need to work again.

But you know what I'd like to do?

I'd like to solve the problem of whatever it might be, making some bit of the NHS app work or something like that.

I mean, I I think if anyone does it, it'd be very public spirited and I would really appreciate it.

I think that tends to work when people bring into their department people with a sort of expert knowledge and experience of whatever it is the department is in charge of.

It doesn't work when they become ministers, when someone who's used to running a business and basically telling people what to do and making sure it happens, when they then are put in charge of a ministry where it just doesn't work like that, that's where they tend to come a cropper and treating the department like it was a business.

Yes, and lots of the language tensions, I guess, are about that perpetual war between

continuity, which can lead to things becoming static and cultified and people refusing to think differently, and this idea of trying to inject a bit of dynamism into it.

But unfortunately, too much dynamism feels to people like chaos.

Yes.

And so you're always kind of getting one rhetorical version of it or the other, which kind of sounds empty because who in principle is not in favor of entrepreneurship?

Exactly.

Who in favor also is not in favor of stability?

Yeah.

And actually, how on earth do you think?

How do you balance that?

Possibly find the happy medium between the two.

And people who just use entrepreneurship as a sort of a get-out card.

This week, Yang Tangbo, the interesting Chinese.

The interesting chap from China

said, I'm not a spy, I'm an entrepreneur.

As if somehow that, you know, with one bone, he was free by just using the entrepreneur card.

And I remember when Michelle Mohn and her husband doing that interview, explaining what exactly they had done.

It was other PPE contracts.

COVID, whose business was later investigated for those contracts.

I went back to the interview because I remember at the time a phrase that her husband, Doug Barrowman, used, because I think it was Laura Kunzberg was interviewing and said, but Luke, you didn't follow the House of Lords Code of Conduct, where you actually have to register your interests and also your spouse's interests.

And Doug Barrowman said, I quote, I'm a business guy, so I think like an entrepreneur, I don't know the parliamentary rule book.

Yeah, that doesn't mean to say you're allowed to break it just by being a business guy or being an entrepreneur.

That's not the golden ticket that lets you off.

The trouble is that the world is full of people with extremely fat bank accounts who got them by breaking the rules and getting away with it.

And this is, yeah, that's that, which is what the appetite for risk is all about in entrepreneurship.

Do you have any other words you've brought this week?

I have one.

Okay.

I would like to ask you whether you know what the grey belt is.

It's not something I'm wearing.

No, I did a quick internet search for an easy definition of it.

Oh my god, where does that take you to?

I got lots of grey belts, which I now own.

Yeah.

So I think one of the most successful pieces of political branding in the last couple of decades is the idea of the greenbelt.

This is the idea that we don't want urban sprawl, that you put a ring around big conurbations and don't let builders kind of go out into them.

However, it has been noticed for a while that not every bit of the green belt is virgin rolling hills filled with songbirds and happy frolicking sheep.

Some of it is, for example, the great one that the Yimbies, the Yes in My Backyard people use, is there's a disused petrol station in Tottenham, Tottenham, which is an absolute eyesore, but technically counts as greenbelt.

Greenbelt, yes.

So Labour have come up with this phrase for the bits of the greenbelt they want people to be able to build on to achieve their incredibly ambitious house building target of 1.5 million houses over the parliament, which is that anything that's previously been developed and now has kind of just gone back to seed,

even if it has now got plants on it,

is not greenbelt.

It's weeds.

Yeah, exactly.

It's grey belt.

Greybelt.

And I think that's an interesting way of framing it because it has been, you know, I've covered housing a little bit.

I know lots of people who have covered it much more.

It has been hard to make the case to people that the greenbelt has got a huge number of advantages, but not every bit of it is what you think.

It's what you think it is.

Is this anything to do with brownfields, which Farage went on about?

So brownfields are the mythic thing.

Well, they're not mythic.

They do have brownfields, but that's the thing everyone wants to build on first.

So that should be like former industrial sites.

You know, there used to be a warehouse there, and now you could turn it on.

And they are separate from the greenbelt.

They are.

They are, right.

They're the bit that everyone wants to build on first.

Although, in practice, some might say that even then people don't really like developments happening.

Who can say why they don't like developments happening, even on Brownfield sites?

Is there someone going around who now has to give the official you know?

You know, like those Google cameras and the vans that went around mapping, now designating the colour of

belts, yes.

Yeah, well, there is a very, I'm sure it's the land registry or someone like that.

But yeah, you legally you can't develop the green belt.

So, in order to reclassify it, you have to say it's not green, but grey.

Okay.

Uh, what I well, I've got a couple.

I just noticed on the way in here, on the tube, a poster for Craven the Hunter.

Yeah, I don't know what that is.

I couldn't even tell you, is that a video game?

Is that a singer?

I think it's a super villain.

I couldn't even tell you which graphic novel universe it's in, whether it's DC or Marvel.

But underneath it had the slogan, villains aren't born, they're made.

And I thought, yeah, I think we all know that, don't we?

It was a sort of argument against predeterminism used as a way of trying to attract us to go and see it.

But it just felt like the most boring slogan on a poster I've ever seen, really.

Villains are born.

This film is very short.

But it's someone going in going, oh, they're not born.

I must go and see that.

Whereas I thought, oh, it's an origin story.

I've had enough of those.

Right.

I think that's the thing, isn't it?

It's the film industry trying to tell you that, yes, this is going to be another origin story.

No, no, no, no.

I don't want to disappear.

I'm sorry if I've just like blown a $150 million movie by saying it has a very tepid slogan on its poster.

But I mean, there must be a team that come up with poster slogans.

Clearly, they're not the ones who actually make the movie.

Yes, and they all have that specific tone.

Do you remember there was a great Ben Elton routine during the 80s about the man who used to do the trailer voices, who sadly younger people won't remember the kind of it was a time of war, it was a time of war.

Yes.

And actually, the only bit that really lives on is in movie taglines: Villains are not born but made.

But there's now an AI thing that can make a voice do that.

Oh, that's a sad thing.

It does remind me of there was

when we were doing I'm Alan Partridge season two,

I was sent a trail by the BBC2 Trails Department and I watched it and it's so funny.

It was like a minute long and for the first 30 seconds you think oh this is quite good because it showed clips from the show and then for the next 30 seconds it went into an animation of a hen laying an egg with Alan Partridge's face on it that Lynn then kicks into the back of a net and you hear a chorus all the way through that singing, I won't do the tune, I'm Alan Partridge, back of the net.

And I just, from the first 30 seconds, me thinking, oh, this is quite good, I then turned into those faces in the film of the producers where they're all just watching Springtime for Hitler and they're just statically shrieking in a sort of frozen silence of what the heck is this?

And I showed it to other people and I said, when you watch this, you will spend the first 30 seconds thinking, oh, this is quite good.

And then you will turn to stone.

And they went, no, I'm sure it's fine.

And then they did it.

And I found out it was going out that night.

And I thought, this cannot go out.

And so I lied.

I found out where the BBC Continuity Office was.

And I just invented a lie saying, well, this needs to be signed off by, I've mentioned five other people, including Steve Coogan, who knew nothing about this trend.

And I said, and unless they sign off and it contractually cannot go out.

And it didn't go out.

And then there was an inquest.

I heard there was an inquest in the BBC the next day when the controller of BBC2 summoned various people to find out what happened.

And a trailer was taken off air, during which they showed her the trailer.

And she went, okay, no further questions.

And I just thought, how much money and time went into that?

And why didn't I know anything about it?

And who thought this would be a good idea?

Do you have a copy of it or is it like the Edstone?

Has it now been lost to history?

I think it's in my attic getting worse and worse.

Oh, I'd love to see that.

Yeah, on a VHS.

Do you know what?

I had an update from a listener about the Edstone, which was apparently, there was quite the vogue about five years ago for Tory donors to commission their own ones.

Oh, wow.

So you can now go to, I think, the home of a Tory donor and see a replica Edstone in the grounds.

They auctioned one off at, I think, the Black and White Ball or one of the other Tory donations.

Yeah,

because they also, when that...

campaign was happening, Ed Miller, band and the Labour Party brought out mugs with different strap lanes on them, including one that just said coming down hard on immigration.

Controls on immigration.

Controls on immigration.

It's such a strange thing to be like, oh, morning, watch I have my tea in, tea in controlled immigration.

I want five of those, please.

I believe, if you talk very nicely to Stephen Bush of the Financial Times, I believe he still owns one.

Oh, did he?

Did he buy them up?

Yeah, I think he got it.

Maybe he even has the full set.

They must be worth a foch.

Full set.

Yeah.

The collected edition.

Before we make our souvenir mugs and our merch line generally, I should say we will be back next week with a special edition of our words of the year.

But if you can't bear going for at least a week without hearing from myself and Helen and all our previous episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Sites.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

I'm Nicola Cochlan, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Youngest Heroes.

Rebellion, Risk, and the Radical Power of Youth.

She thought, right, I'll just do it.

She thought about others rather than herself.

12 stories of extraordinary young people from across history.

There's a real sense of urgency in them.

That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now.

Subscribe to History's Youngest Heroes on BBC Sounds.

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