The Deep State

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

It's Helen Lewis in a studio in London.

And it's Amanda Unucci, also in a studio, the same studio in London.

This week we are taking a deep dive into the deep state.

I think you've just become a member of the deep state, haven't you?

You were nominated as a GQ Man of the Year.

How did that get out?

Oh, GQ Man.

Yeah, that is that.

Yes, that's happening this evening.

I don't know what happens, but I'm not looking forward to it.

Because GQ Man of the Year, I've always had in my head as like the coolest,

trendiest, fashion conscious icons assemble in a loud room somewhere to kind of pose

and I'm going to be doing that this evening and I've been warned that reporters will jump out and ask me things like what are you wearing

so what will you be wearing I think

I think I'm wearing jacket from John Lewis right okay which is not probably what they want to hear you could say it's thrifted

yes that's right and the other thing you have to do if anyone asks you to describe your clothing, is describe anything that would normally be a plural in the singular.

So you have to say, I'm, you know, this is a trouser.

Oh.

Yeah.

Okay, I'll try that.

Okay.

I'll try that.

The only reason I'm going is that my family find it very, very funny and want to know how I get on.

It's nice that they keep you humble.

As I speak to DJs whose name I've never heard of, but who have a following of five million

in London alone.

That is the problem with internet celebrities is you feel like you sort of feel like the queen at a kind of going to meet people.

And what do you do?

And they go, I'm literally the most famous person in Malaysia.

And you go, oh, oh, sorry.

I'm an influencer, even though you're not.

Now get to school.

The official home of grumpy people this week isn't it, Grumpy?

Welcome to Radio 4.

Deep State, we wandered.

I don't know how in the space of two minutes we wandered so far away from the ominous words deep state to the home of grumpy people Radio 4.

Tell us about deep state, because it is a phrase that more and more politicians who are in a grumpy mood use more and more, really, to explain their grumpiness.

Yes, I was trying to work out what the definition of it is, and I think it's one of those words that everyone sort of knows what it means, but everyone has their own slight flavour of it.

Essentially, I think it's the idea that the government isn't really the government.

One of the phrases you hear a lot is the idea of a kind of permanent government, right?

That although elected politicians come and go, someone else is really, really running the show.

Okay, but this is like borderline conspiracy theory, really, isn't it?

I think in its most outrageous forms, it is.

I think one of the earliest uses of it that I could find was John Le Carre talking about it.

And you think, you know, a former spy himself, he would certainly know about this.

It came from

a Turkish phrase, and we're getting very erudite, Deren Devlet, which was the idea essentially that through the 90s and before then, the military was kind of running Turkey.

And they were very keen on it not re-Islamizing, but they were also not keen on it becoming a full-board democracy either.

So they kind of made sure they intimidated their enemies, you know, whatever it might be, in order to basically keep things running as they were.

And I think that's that's the kind of idea behind it.

Yes, and we'll get on at some point into whether or not it actually exists.

But the fact that you said that it it's not fully defined, I think is part of its value to people who use that phrase.

Because it is slightly ambiguous, slightly indefinite, because you can't quite sum up who it is.

It allows you, especially if you happen to be in power and not getting things done, or you've just been in power and are trying to explain why, even though you've now been ditched, why you couldn't get things done.

It allows you to build up a list of obstructions that you met that we don't actually know whether it's true or not because we were never there in power with them.

So we just don't know.

Is that something that you found when you were researching the thick of it?

Because I always feel like that's full of people who sort of assume that like a grown-up is going to come in at some point, and they can't quite believe that they've been left in charge.

Like, I mean, I'm a minister, you know, I'm a spad, whatever it might be.

The minister's always described Terry Coverley, the civil servant in the unit, as a blockage.

And I think that's a rarely also, and a nod towards yes, minister, because the whole defining trope of yes, minister was the minister's trying to get something done, and it's the civil servant who's stopping him.

And I felt the thick of it, that wasn't true anymore.

It was more

the minister feels that they've got something to get done but are told by the treasury and these enforcers who fan out from number 10 enforcers sound like dementos but that's what they were called enforcers who tell them we haven't got the money and uh the prime minister doesn't want it to happen so the control had shifted i think from the civil service to the the concentrated unit in number 10.

That's the thinking of it.

There's a lot of versions of it, aren't there?

So I think for a while, the EU functioned as kind of what people thought was a deep state, that this was some centre of power somewhere else that meant they couldn't do stuff.

Now you often hear a lot about, people call it treasury brain, which is the idea that you want to do things and then the treasury goes, well, there isn't any money for that.

You can't do it.

And so we never ever dream or actually change anything.

Nothing ever happens because the treasury thinks, well, that's the sums for that don't work.

It's like one of these fantasy series that they'd only planned one season of, but it becomes a big hit.

So they have to now think of other ways in which they can carry on trying to defeat whatever the evil is.

So it just changes.

And like you say, it used to be the EU, but we're out of the EU now.

So it's not that.

So it must be something else.

You know, is it the civil service?

Well, we've shaken up the civil service now.

So what's it?

It was the previous government.

Okay, but they've come out saying, no, we couldn't get anything done either because of X.

It becomes untangible or indefinable.

And I also have noticed that more and more politicians, I suppose campaigning to become elected, use this notion of the deep state.

I suppose Trump would call it like the swamp, going to drain the swamp.

Well, he did have four years of trying to drain it.

And it's again, it becomes this notion of this mysterious other, this quagmire of inactivity that bogs you down.

Yeah, Cash Patel, who's one of the people who's in contention for one of Trump's national security roles, FBI director, I think, said essentially he would like to kind of close the FBI headquarters on day one and turn it into, quote, a museum of the deep state,

which actually sounds awesome I would say I know I would go and see that right I went to the kind of the you know when there was that phase for a long time for right-wing politicians saying they wanted a museum of communism and actually I went to the museum of communism which was in a bunker in Albania in Tirana it was really it was a great museum oh yeah genuinely like people sort of you know used to listen to the neighbours through sort of microphones and broom handles and stuff like that you know I so yes I'm in favor of a museum of the deep state I was allowed into Stalin's bunker under Moscow which has a nuclear bomb in it And it has a setup where you can pretend to be launching a nuclear weapon.

I've got a photograph of this.

You and a mate sit because you have to sit well apart so that you can't push each other's buttons.

And then you have to synchronise.

And then on the screen in front of you, it shows a missile taking off.

And they play the final countdown.

In Stalin's bunker, which is 40 levels below Moscow and involving lots of stairs, you're not allowed to take the lift for some reason.

That is one of the campest things I've ever heard.

I feel like you're just about to leash nuclear annihilation, everybody.

Some Europop.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So

now, how did we get onto the?

I don't, it doesn't matter.

I'm just happy to be here.

Yeah, so the FBI Museum of the Deep State.

But it would be disappointing if it was just like search warrants on display and things like that.

Well, that's what so much of it is now.

You know, the FBI has expanded its capabilities and, you know, and the National Security Agency and GCHQ.

But what they're mainly storing is just huge amounts of data, just, you know, these just vast amounts of digital records, which would be a bad day.

Maybe, you know, good cafe, but so does it exist in that, you know, if you talk about, you talked about, what was it, Treasury Brain.

Yeah.

There is a lot of evidence to show that actually

part of the

problem in the UK and in UK government is that nothing is designed to work long term.

So even the Treasury will only think or consider plans that are either short to medium term.

What is the point of planning for something long term?

Because the ministers coming up with that plan could well be out in five years.

So there is no point.

So you get the short termism.

And something that I only recently discovered in the civil service, to advance in the civil service, you have to move from department to department.

It's seen as a mark against you if you're in the same department for longer than five or ten years.

Now, elsewhere, that would be seen as building up expertise, background knowledge, being able to provide continuity.

But in the UK, again, we have this short-termism of, you know, once you've done two or three years, if you want to get further, you've got to move.

So, we do have this ridiculous thing in the UK where, you know, ministers can come in one day and be put in charge of schools, and then the next day.

Yeah, crack at prisons.

That's interesting because it does imply something that I think is key to the deep state theory, which is that there's such a thing called bureaucracy and it kind of comes in lumps.

And you're either good at bureaucracy or you're not.

But what you're also talking about is vested interests, isn't it?

And the idea that stuff never changes because people just like the status quo.

And fundamentally, most of the time, what they want is for tomorrow to be very much like today.

Yeah, but isn't that not the deep state and more life?

Most of us are like that.

Most of us would rather just carry on as we've been doing because to think of something new now, to do it differently now, is going to require a lot of effort and a lot of thinking.

and really it's cold outside it's winter the temperatures drop i just want to go home i don't want to stay up late working out how we're going to change everything and also working out how to run things and working out how to deal with a bureaucracy isn't that just part of growing up

yeah but i i think you're also right in the sense it's become such a popular phrase because of a wave of populist politicians yes and what you do if you're a populist politician is say here's an enemy and here's a problem and here's a very simple solution to it and that can be captivating so you know, the example in the US, Drain the Swamp being one of them, if they were just fewer bureaucrats, another one I always think of is NHS middle managers.

And actually, you know, so I'm sure there are some people who aren't doing the best job they can, but there's probably some people who are the only ones who know how to fix the computer system.

And if you fired them, the whole thing would fall over tomorrow.

Well, I mean, we mentioned it last week, Ellen Musk and Aramas Frami's Department of Government Efficiency.

At some point, they're going to dismantle things that actually hold buildings up and make organisations work.

And that's going to have a lot of...

I want to see how they respond to the number of complaints they get that things aren't working anymore because they've actually cut all the funding.

Yes, you can make a plane more efficient by stripping out more and more excess weight, but at some point you are going to take out

the crucial bit of the engine.

Yeah, I think that's...

If we took out all the passengers, that would somehow make it more fuel efficient.

Right, and I think there's a lot of that going on in this.

What I think it is reasonable is the fact that we know, for example, that the US massively over-classifies documents.

It has loads of stuff that it claims is secret and it isn't really.

And it prosecutes people very aggressively for leaking that.

We also know that there was a huge expansion in surveillance post-9/11 and

really that.

And people do feel quite uneasy about that.

Which is all part of Snowden's

flight to Russia.

I wonder how that's working out.

But his unveiling of the deep powers that intelligence and security agencies had in the US to surveil on anyone really and you know retrospectively use the excuse of well they might have been up to no good

right the idea that you just go well we have to do it because otherwise terrorism and then and then that was it sort of no more questions asked exactly and there's no they don't return the data saying we have your data but here it is back because we realize now you're just a radio 4 presenter and nothing else and

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There is now a history over the last four or five years, I think, of variations of the deep state.

There's the blob, which is

the education establishment.

And I thought, to some extent, he does have a point, which is that the education unions have always been both very left in terms of their politics, but very conservative in terms of their outlook about what they want done with education.

And that was the whole idea behind, first of all, academies and then free schools.

But then he did craft it all.

He probably unnecessarily decided to upset them by saying, you're just the blob.

Yeah.

I'm fighting the blob.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I will hear you, but first of all, bear in mind that I see you all as a massive, squidgy, shapeless, amorphous mass.

So the blob.

And then we had

Suella Braverman talking about the tofu eating wokarati and the coalition of chaos.

Didn't they also do something about getting in taxis to go to the BBC?

I know.

North London.

So North Londoners,

you know, which is a lot of people.

This is from, yeah, because several million people.

Yeah.

North Londoners, those that read The Guardian, those that listen to the BBC, which is a lot of people.

Tofu, yeah, hilarious.

If you want to have a go at woke, page one, tofu.

It's an amalgamation of lots of disparate elements.

And it reached, as everything does, it reached its finest moment with the Liz Truss episode, where she talked about the Anti-Growth Alliance.

Which was an absolutely classic invocation of the deep state, because I seem to remember that on day one, the first thing she did was get rid of the permanent secretary, the top civil servant in the treasury.

And then she wondered why everyone in the treasury didn't like her.

And it's just like, well, I think this may be shadowy, sinister resistance, or this might be a bit like you fired their boss.

Yes.

And now they're worried.

And going back to what you said earlier, taking out the person who makes the treasury run, once you've removed that, I wonder what's the worst that could happen after that.

Right, we don't need a pilot.

That's just that's just X says, wait, what are we doing?

Yeah, we've got enough momentum as it is now, so we could jettison the pilot.

Well, anyway, this found its apogee in Nadine Dorris's book, The Plot, The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson.

Spoilers.

But she described this group of people, and I love this, they originally started out as, and here's a phrase you'll enjoy, mad Portillo supporters.

Now, are those supporters of Mad Potillo

or Mad Supporters?

Or does she clarify?

She sadly doesn't clarify, but I just thought

what would an army of Michael Portillo supporters look like, right?

Like, no camo, obviously, lavender trousers, the uniform would be incredible.

All taking the train everywhere.

Exactly, indulging in some beautiful, like, Greek folk dancing as they came towards you, advancing with their muskets ready.

And also, what would supporters of Mad Potillo look like?

Because I think they'd be in a temple and there'd be

a colot, you know, a potillo statue the size of the Colossus of Rhodes and them in sort of white togas.

That would bring the country together, a giant with a copy of whatever it is, the book of railway timetables that he sort of carries around like his holy text.

Refusing to get the app.

Yes, a whole religion built entirely around Michael Potillo.

We could make that happen.

Anyway, so they're very...

They're very pro-EU, the movement, except, and work out this, they end up being led by Dominic Cummings, who is the head of Vote Leave.

Yes.

And he's part of the movement as well, isn't it?

He is part of the movement.

So how did the movement...

Okay, how did the move move?

Don't

expect it to make sense, Samantha.

At no point will this ever make any sense.

No, sorry, I'm making the fundamental mistake of trying to approach this rationally.

Okay, right.

Anyway, they get Boris Johnson into power because they have things they want to do.

Or they got him into power.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they got him into power, but he won too big.

And then they couldn't get rid of him and get who they really wanted.

Which was that, Mad Portillo?

No, no, they're very against Mad Portillo.

Who they really wanted, but this is a bit we have to

see what Nadine was cooking with.

The person they really wanted was Kemi Badenock.

Oh,

I see.

So this was written over a year ago, very presciently.

Nadine Doris predicted that

opposition leader in charge of 100 and something MPs would be

Kemi Badenock in her finest hour.

So that's it, that's the movement.

Nadine Doris saw it coming.

She predicted the future.

She's Nostradoris.

Nadstradamus.

Oh, I stand corrected.

Yeah, so she had a very strong theory that essentially,

I put it to you that this may be a theory to explain why Boris Johnson, despite overseeing lots of things that were unpopular, like parties in Downing Street, wasn't responsible for any of them.

No, exactly.

That's actually the movement.

The movement.

And

was Kemi Badenock at all aware that she was the centre of this?

I think she was an unwitting pawn of the movement.

The movement, okay.

And who's Doctor?

Because there was a Dr.

No involved in styming the movement.

Was that right?

No, no, Dr.

No is part of the movement.

Or part of the movement.

There's lots of people in the book who have Bond villain names.

Yes.

Including two old colleges who were referred to as Bambi and Thumper, which confused me because I don't really remember the Roger Moore ones that were.

That's one of the late.

I think it might be an early Dalton, actually, one of those ones, you know, when it just went slightly off.

Oh, right, okay.

Well, I felt like, come on, there's, you know, low-hanging fruit of scaramanga and that sort of thing.

But anyway, so look forward when Kami Badenock becomes Prime Minister, and that will be the ultimate triumph of the movement.

We may laugh and indeed.

But there is a serious point here because

the deep state of variations of can be used by those

populists who get in power and don't particularly want to detail specifics as in what they want to do and how they're going to enact it, but get in on a wave of identifying this other

that they can rouse the whole country against.

I've been, for the last couple of summers, I've been out in Georgia, a conference in Georgia in Tbilisi called Zeg, which is Georgian for the day after tomorrow, where journalists and broadcasters and writers about the deep state

against mostly assembled to talk about, you know, how we report on now.

And two two years ago, it was very much about Putin and Ukraine.

Last year it was about AI and misinformation.

But currently it's about Georgia itself.

And they all, when I was last out there, they warned me, they said it's happening.

The party there is called Georgian Dream and it is run, it is funded by this

Putin oligarch, Ishvasuvili, who is like a bond villain in Tbilitsy.

There is a bond villain-esque glass palace built into a mountain overlooking the city that he lives in and they warned that um the georgian dream was going to um surprisingly win the next election and then it's announced it's going to ban all opposition parties because all opposition parties are part of what it calls the global war party And when you ever ask any of them what the global war party is, they say we cannot tell you.

It's that bad and that scary.

But everyone I'm pointed to now is a member of it, which is why it has to go.

And that's where we get to, you know, and so we're seeing in Georgia now

what other autocrats are doing in places like Turkey.

And so that's why I think a lot of people are worried about Trump's language talking about the deep state draining the swamp, the traitors, the enemy within.

It's that demonization of fundamentally half the country.

So it's a phrase that starts off as criticizing government overreach and it becomes an excuse for more and more government overreach.

Yes, and again, and this is a trope we've been picking up on regularly.

The phrase itself becomes the lead.

The phrase isn't there to describe something that people are aware of.

The phrase there is to designate something that we don't know much about other than the phrase itself.

So we have to believe in the phrase as the entity, and all actions and policies are directed towards getting rid of that phrase.

There's a phrase that I absolutely love and I think about all the time, which is that something's become a thought-terminating cliché.

Oh, my word.

And it's a really great concept.

It's one of those things you will start hearing everywhere, but it's a bit like fake news, right?

As soon as you just said it, that's fake news.

Well, I couldn't get this done because of the deep state.

It's sort of a line that's been drawn underneath it, and it requires no more explanation.

That's right, I just have to mention the phrase, and there's no further argument required.

Yeah, yes, that's that's right.

Um, The way people oppose, if, for example, I, as I enjoy doing on a daily basis, tweet something derogatory about Ellen Musk, I get lots of people.

I don't know the way you call him Ellen.

Ellen.

Ellen.

Ellen.

Ellen.

I'd get a torrent of abuse from tweeters accusing me of having Musk derangement syndrome, as if it's some sort of certifiable illness.

And that's all they have to say.

Yeah.

Well, there's a lot happening with the confirmation or not of this guy called Matt Gates, who's a Florida congressman for Attorney General.

And some people are saying we don't want to confirm him because he is the subject of an ethics committee report that suggests he might have had sex with minors, he might have paid for sex, he might have taken drugs.

He denies all of this.

But then the answer is: oh, well, that's, you know, he's only opposed by the deep state.

And it's like, no, he's opposed by the laws of America if these allegations approve to be true.

And Congress have done a report into him, and before they published it, he swiftly resigned from Congress, not at all all suspicious and now and and um i refer you back to our previous broadcast where we outlined you how organizations cover up abuse in its various forms now the Republican Party, since they control Congress, the House of Representatives, are saying they're no longer going to publish that report.

Since he has resigned from Congress, there's no need.

So again, it's a way of burying something after the inquiry has been conducted.

And then, and you're right, and they can then blame it on the deep, deep state.

The deep state, or the movement.

The movement, yes.

Now, is this also a mission, this reach

for these vague explanations of why things haven't happened, is it an excuse for inability to get things done?

Is it an admission, actually,

that the way government works today is there's not very much people can do.

The levers of power are pretty limited because there are so many events outside the control of government that they can't have any influence of.

I think that's true.

And something else we've picked up a couple of times is the idea of conspiracy theories.

And the great comfort of conspiracy theories is that someone's in charge, right?

Whether it's the Rothschilds or the Jews or the New World Order or the Perpetual War, Global War Party, or Kemi Badenot, or the Illuminati, or Kemi Badinot, all of them, you know, very much the same.

But the idea is that someone's running the show.

And the more terrifying prospect is, of course, there is no deep state, there's just us.

Yeah, and there's that phrase cock up or conspiracy.

And there is that

deeply worrying recognition that it might be completely cock up.

I'm not saying it is, but that's a harder thing to take on because it's admitting that you've been making the mistakes or that you've not been up to being able to deal with the resources and the personnel in your department or your organization or wherever.

It's far better and easier to blame, if not someone else, something else that's got nothing to do with you, where it is that, you know, the forces of the forces of darkness or the, you know, the vast conspiracy or whatever.

It's just an easier get at.

I'm trying to think of whether we currently have, because

we've had obviously under the conservative administrations, the Anti-Growth Alliance, the Anti-War Coalition of Chaos, et cetera, et cetera.

Does the Starmer government use any of deploy any of these tactics?

Is there an explanation of something other than themselves that they will pin?

I think the left often talks about the something lobby.

Right, yes.

And I think you'll hear a bit more about that.

I think you'll hear a bit more about NIMBYs as a category, you know, people who want to prevent...

Oh, yeah.

I think, you know, it's a lot of people.

I think, yes, yes, Starmer says he supports builders, not blockers, which is not quite up there with Deep State, and it's not quite as menacing, but it does have the alliteration, which is good, isn't it?

You know, builders, not blockers.

And you think, oh, oh that's clever if you block it they won't come yeah yeah

less successful sequel to filter dreams growth not grief oh like that's very good nurses not naysayers um

i mean maybe you will see these appearing soon they are going to be still can i ask you if to hear me out on another word that i've brought along this week a topical word okay go on i'd like to talk to you about the war on farmers right there was a very funny blog by a former labor advisor called tom hamilton which was called apocalypse cow genuinely a a great pun, and I commend him for that.

But it said, you know, the shadowing education secretary, Laura Tross, said, you know, the government had declared war on farmers.

And there is that kind of level of rhetorical escalation, I think, that you obviously get.

I mean, I think it started out when we still had a big print press because war, like row, is a very good headline word.

So you were just, you know, we had the war on drugs or whatever it might be.

And short as well, which is good because it means you've got other words you can deploy after it.

Right, exactly.

But

I think it's an interesting one that things get upgraded so easily to a war when we also have actual wars.

The side effect of that is we also have what has been now called the tractor tax, which is the idea of people with larger family farms will have to pay inheritance tax on some of them, which has been done.

I think the government say that some people are using buying large amounts of land to dodge inheritance tax.

The other side say, well, you know, you're talking about people who are cash poor but asset rich, they want to pass on a family farm.

But I just thought that's all brilliantly, brilliantly distilled down to tractor tax.

Well, yeah, because it's that thing of coming up with a phrase that there's a hostility embedded in it, whether it's a war on or, you know, it's financially punitive.

I remember the dementia tax, which was the explanation of Theresa May's attempt at social care reform, which in the end wasn't about dementia, but that stuck.

It's finding the phrase rather like, you know, a scandal used to grow into gate.

I still think we're still people are still gating.

There's still gating going on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But yeah, there's something taxed.

Yeah, we had one of the things that was most interesting was that the pro-Brexit campaigners used to talk about the tampon tax, which was originally a feminist idea, which was the idea of full-rate VAT on sanitary products.

And this was going to be something that we could, you know, overturn once we were outside the EU.

So I think there is a kind of, it's just very catchy.

People don't really like paying large amounts of tax.

And if you imply that they're paying tax on things wrongly, I think it can be very good and emotive.

And you can imagine the meeting that the opposition had where it was about what kind of tax can we call this.

Tractor tax, again, alliterative, always good.

Toast tax.

Imagine if there was a toast tax.

That would be, I would be, I would be out in the streets without holding my toasting fork aloft.

There's going to be a tiptoe tax.

We don't know what that is, but we'd rather...

Tiptoe tax.

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Ready to take advantage of an incredible deal at Mazda?

September is the final month of eligibility for federal $7,500 electric vehicle lease cash on the new Mazda CX70 and CX90 plug-in hybrid.

All Mazda current inventory is unaffected by new tariffs.

See your local Mazda dealer for details.

$7,500 electric vehicle lease cash offer expires at the end of September.

Don't miss out!

$7,500 lease customer cash good toward 2025 CX70 PHEV and CX90 PHEV when leasing through Mazda Financial Services.

Lease customer cash can be combined with other public offers, including lease incentive offers.

Lease customer customer cash cannot be combined with APR or other customer cash offers.

Lease customer cash is not redeemable as cash or cash back option.

Lease customer cash is only available on approved credit.

Not all customers will qualify for credit approval or offer.

Limit one discount per customer per vehicle.

Lease customer cash offer only available in the United States regardless of buyer's residency.

Void reprohibited.

Apply within the lease structure as a capital cost reduction.

Lease customer cash is only available on participating Mazda dealer's current inventory, which is subject to availability.

Offer ends 9:30-2025, and you must take delivery prior to the expiration of offer.

See participating Mazda dealer for complete details.

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