In Hindsight (with Ria Lina and Tim Shipman)

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Hello, and welcome to Strong Message here from BBC Radio 4: a guide to the use and abuse of political language. It's Samandy Nucci, or if you're following the transcript on Spotify, I'm Landy Nucci.

And this week, I'm joined once again by Ria Lina, and we're going to be looking at the phrase in hindsight.

How do politicians talk after the fact or when their past catches up with them and we're also going to be joined by our guest tim shitman journalist and detailed chronicler of the past 10 years worth of highs and let's face it very lows in british politics but first ria i think we have to first of all hoover up prince andrew someone should we he issued a statement that was very clear

well it was very clear i thought again very interesting use of language um all the way through it in discussion with the king as if it was his idea, as if he went to the king and went, Hey, Charlie, I got an idea.

Yeah. What do you think of this? You know, yeah, bring in Will, bring in Camilla, let's have a chit-chat.

He said, Actually, I stand by my decision five years ago to stand back from public life, which makes it sound like he stood back from public life five years ago against everyone's advice.

That he's actually saying, No, no, I stand by that. I think that was a good decision.

As if there wasn't an example in his own family, not two generations prior, how to actually stand back from public life by moving to France with your divorcee wife and living a quiet life. Righto.

I'm not sure that went terribly well either, did it?

Yeah,

might as well say hello to you now, Tim.

For those of you who don't know, and you should, not only is Tim Shipman political editor at the spectator, but author of a splendid quadrilogy of books chronicling the Brexit years and beyond.

I mean, massive tomes. I think very early on in this show, when we first started, I referred to you as the gibbon of contemporary politics.
So, that wasn't a derogatory expression.

My wife thinks the same quite often. But I was equating you to Edward Gibbon, whose decline and fall of the Roman Empire, six massive volumes.

You've got four, and they are thoroughly entertaining, but also incredibly detailed. We'll move on to like how you manage to persuade people to spill their secrets.

But yes, what's your take on the Andrew? I mean, it's amazing, isn't it? Yes.

I wrestled myself out of public life with the Queen hanging her hands around my ankles five years ago, and now I've kicked and screamed and forced the king to let me leave and go quietly into my residence where apparently I spend my entire day playing video games.

Yes, I rest. No one wants to speak to me anymore.

Apart from my ex-wife, who also lives with me, and we pay a peppercorn rent and have done for 20 years. It's nice work if you can get it.
That's the makings of a classic sitcom there. It certainly is.

Well, I live with my ex. I've been trying to sell a sitcom about living with my ex for years, but maybe that was the problem.
I hadn't given up all my titles. What would it be called?

20 up, 20 down or something. It's vast property that I've got.
Just call me Prince, I think is what it's going to be called.

For me, it was the last line that I thought was unfortunately phrased. As I have said previously, I vigorously deny the accusations against me.

I wouldn't have used the word vigorously if I were Prince Andrew. That has been applied to him probably in other situations.
I would have said vehemently. if it were me, not vigorously.

Yes, vigorously doesn't actually indicate the strength of the denial.

it just indicates the behaviour that you adopt as you deny it also it conjures up an image of a of a man with a lot of vigour which is part of the problem here precisely and um i found an interesting quote about the titles that he's uh letting fall which is they are extant but inactive Yes, no.

So he keeps them. He'll be a prince forever, regardless.
And unless there's an act of parliament, he's still technically a duke. He just,

out of the goodness of his heart, he stops calling himself his Royal Highness. But they're in abeyance.

It's a bit like a gym membership in that he still has it, but he doesn't use it. Exactly.
And they might invite you back on a sort of discount offer later if they want

your business to get to test one of their new machines. When's he going to use them anyway? I mean, who's he writing to that he even has to sign a letter? Anything?

Well, I mean, Tim, you mentioned he does video games. What's his handle on some of these? I wish I knew.

The Porky Prince. Duke York.

Don't sweat it, big boy.

But, Andrew, rather like a lot of events this week, it's about the past catchy up and people. We've got Sir Cozy's gone to prison.
Carrying a copy of the Count of Monte Cristo.

Yes, which is about someone who was wronged, wrongfully prisoned, and will take vengeance on his enemies. Yes, yes.
And the life of Christ. So there's no martyr syndrome there at all.

Well, if he's lucky, Trump takes over the whole world and he gets a pardon. Yes, yes.
That would involve France being the 51st state, I suppose, but it's not without the bones of possibility. Oh, yes.

No,

they got rid of their royal family. They're not going to have him in.
But other events of the past, we're seeing the COVID inquiry in an interesting stage. Many sweary WhatsApp emails emerging.

We'll look at those.

There is discussion now about where the inquiry into grooming gangs is going to go, some people leaving the advisory group on that, which throws up the subject of how useful are inquiries, how are they set up, and is there an agenda behind certain inquiries?

And then there's the China issue, which I still haven't quite got my head around. It seems to be that no one could come up with an adequate word to describe the threat posed by China.

Is that your reading of it, Tim? Yeah, no, I think so. I think that issue is whether China is a threat, or was it designated a threat, or was just a bit of a strategic rival and all the rest of it.

So despite everybody saying they were a threat,

the CPS decided they weren't and dropped the case. Well, isn't it about no one actually would write down in the government submission that it was a threat?

Well, the government submissions did include that it was a threat, but not that they had designated it a threat. So it's even more convoluted even than that.

It's almost as if they were writing things down, thinking that the Chinese were already reading over their shoulder.

Just in case the Chinese are spying on us and reading this, we will phrase this in such a way that they could not be upset by it. Well, this is the thing that hasn't been studied.

Maybe the government did drop this evidence. Maybe it was changed by the Chinese between leaving number 10 and arriving.
Oh, that's an interesting conspiracy.

I have had discussions as whether it's a whole conspiracy theory in that everything was done to stop this description of China as a significant threat, imminent threat, vehement, vigorous threat.

A vigorous threat. A vigorous threat.
Prevent that from getting into the evidence and then allowing the case to drop.

Whether that's a conspiracy or whether it was a cock-up, because there was an trying to get across this, it's all about people going, I thought you were going to write the definition.

No, I thought you were going to write the definition. In my view, it was either a cock-up followed by a cock-up or a conspiracy followed by a cock-up.
Right.

We don't know which. The most telling description I came across of it was

about the person designated to come up with the description, Matthew Collins, who I think is Jonathan Powell's deputy national security advisor.

He was asked to come up with a form of words to describe China. In the past he had described Russia as an acute ongoing threat.

And somebody would quote us say he was given 14 months to come up with a form of words and didn't. He said they were a threat, but not an ongoing threat.

And then all on his own, with no political influence whatsoever, he suddenly inserted chunks of the Labour Party manifesto into the final submission saying that while they're a threat, we'd like to be friends with them.

Thank you very much. But he didn't do that until August of this year, once Labour government were in.
I think, because he had a couple of statements that came out while it was still Tor government.

Yeah, but so at that point, to be fair to him, the manifesto hadn't been published.

But the government's position is that they had to represent the views of the Conservative government, which was in power when the alleged offences took place.

And instead, they inserted chunks of the Labour Party manifesto completely without any influence from ministers or Jonathan Powell or anybody else.

So I'm beginning to think that it's not a conspiracy or a cock up. It has been described as a bit of both.
I think it's a conspiracy to cock up. I think that's a very good description.

Which given my read on the which is various people thinking if I do nothing here, I can see how this is going to go.

So I'll do nothing here. It's kind of a problem on both sides because the Crown Prosecution Service said, oh, we must have a designation from the government that they're a threat.

Well, they didn't need that. They could have just taken it to court and all they had to do was prove gently to the satisfaction of a jury that China was a threat.

And then the government say, oh, well, we couldn't do that because we needed to represent the Conservative Party's position, which was different. And then they represented their own.

So they're both... pulling a false one, to be honest.
If anybody had wanted this case to go ahead, it would have gone ahead.

It still seems to me that the best thing to do was to go ahead and just have the case fall apart. Like you said, just put it all on the court case.

And then the government can completely wash their hands of it.

And we've seen from the evidence that they've put forward already that there was a considerable amount of detail that one of the two chaps, Christopher Berry, was in touch with President Xi's chief of staff, generally regarded as the fifth most powerful man in the whole of China, which is quite good going for a junior academic with some baseless gossip from London.

And the great joy of all of this, to circle back to where we began, is that who else has spent a lot of time with the fifth most powerful man in China? Prince Andrew. Oh, wheels.

Oh my god, there's a connection. It's wheels are within wheels.
This, this, this goes right to the

Uber crisis. It's an Uber scandal.
I don't know why anyone watches East Anders anymore. This goes right to the adjacent to the top, doesn't it? It's just,

but isn't this another example then of something that is quite complicated? And if they had not got into a lather about, I'm talking about China, not Andrew. He never gets into a lather.

It wouldn't have become as high profile.

as high-profile a subject as it is now. Here we are discussing it

for an unscheduled amount of time on this podcast. That's another example of people in the Westminster bubble can't leave things alone and make things worse the more attention they give.

It's the classic Watergate thing, that

what follows is far worse than kick things off in the first place.

The cover-up is worse than the crime. I mean,

we've all made careers out of that tendency, but it always surprises me that it still happens.

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I think you've got a theory about how these things work in terms of because the government had to change its position from, oh, it's all to do with the conservatives to, oh, no, no, no, we are fully on board with the crime prostitution on this.

Yeah, no, I think we've had probably six different positions from the government in the last week, and each one of them has been a shocked revelation of what they've found under their own sofa, essentially, or rather, what's been found behind their sofa by others.

So,

yeah, they've been very much on the back foot. It's like a very abusive relationship with China, isn't it? We're trying to keep them happy, but somebody's gaslighting somebody, and I can't tell who.

Yeah, well, in a week, all this broke. Of course, Oliver Robbins, who was in the key meeting with Jonathan Powell,

was this week in Beijing trying to get a British embassy, a new British embassy in Beijing.

What possibly could be the quid pro quo for us getting a nice new embassy in Beijing? Perhaps them getting a nice big embassy here. A panda? Two pandas.
It used to be pandas,

And now it's embassies. But then they found the pandas were bugged.
And

I want to.

In the final volume of your tetralogy or quadrology or however we describe it. Will it ever be over, though?

I think there's going to be so many years' worth of Brexit Fallout, you're going to be writing 10, 12 books on this.

I've hopefully got some protégés who are writing about the Labour Party and about reform at the moment while I'm so you'll write some fiction because it's less stressful than writing the reality.

And you can dig a bit deeper when you want to. Well, there's quite a lot in my notebook that I wasn't able to put into the other books.
Yes, well,

I want to ask you about that. I want to just look at a quick passage in your final book out.

It's about the time you're describing Boris Johnson's government thinking about proroguing Parliament and a rumor getting out that they're going to prorogue Parliament. And the passage.

I have it here. The claim that the government is considering proroguing Parliament in September in order to stop MPs debating Brexit is entirely false.
Now that was the statement that was put out.

And then you go on to say. So this was literally true in two different ways.
The government wasn't considering doing it. They'd already taken the decision to do it.

And secondly, they said that

that was for a new Queen's speech, not in order to stop MPs debating Brexit. So that's them saying literally what we said is true.
But you can see the join.

You can see the sticking plaster covering up the actual truth. But the punters sort of listen to that and think it means the story is nonsense.

Quite a lot of voters will think that. Quite a lot of, even sort of slightly unskilled people in Westminster would think that.

But those of us that have been covering these buggers for 20-odd years know how sort of precise that was. I was at this.

This all broke when we were at a summit in Biaritz, and we were all having dinner with the Downing Street lot when the story broke.

We saw the people concerned scuttling off to do their conference call and coming back, and then this was the line that emerged.

Now, those of us that wanted to continue having a good dinner and not bother to pick this story up, phoned our desk and said, Oh, they're saying it's all nonsense.

But we looked at it and we knew that that wasn't really the case. There we go.

So, presumably, when they were drawing that up, they must have had some inkling that some people like you would know what they were up to.

Yeah, I mean, but the more you look at the detail of it, the more you think this is very fishy.

And it became clear very quickly a few days later that it was

at best

economic with the actuality and yeah others might call it a bald-faced lie but people don't like

being called liars a well-dressed well-dressed

accused contacts of lying to me I sometimes say

yeah but that doesn't really accord with the evidence available does it it actually shows how skilled the Johnson government was in lying compared to the

in lying compared to Starmer's government yes it's like you can see him squarely.

So they're getting better.

meeting was revealed they said oh this is nonsense it wasn't anything to do with uh the the trial and the statement they put out said that jonathan powell had no input to impact on or influence over the evidence that was submitted well no one had ever said that he did no the whole point is there was something missing from the evidence submitted over which somebody must have had influence in designating that bit of information not to be an extraordinarily precise denial that doesn't amount really to a denial at all.

Yeah, but look, we can see through that. What is the thinking behind anyone drawing up a statement like that? Because they must know that this isn't going to stand up to inspiration.

But they think it will mislead most people, and they think that journalists who jump on some sort of technical specificity of language will look slightly obsessive.

And if they don't get any more information then there's not much they can do about it. The problem arises when

story follows story follows story and what is a very precise denial starts to look deeply disingenuous

and you know it becomes clear what the purpose of it was to start with.

Trevor Burrus So this is a tactic that was honed by government at a time when you could really control the news cycle where news might come out once a day or once a week or at 10 o'clock on the news and now that the news cycle is continuous.

Certainly more effective if you're all that you're worrying about is the Today program in the morning and the nine or ten o'clock news in the evening.

But when you're worrying about what breaks on X at 2 p.m., that's Friday. And that's a problem.
And also, I think punters are getting savvier, particularly those on social media.

They will look at this stuff and they'll, you know, I quite often see them now taking the same level of forensic cynicism that I'm paid to do. And they've kind of worked it all out as a problem.

They do it as a hobby.

Well, welcome to what happened to comedy when X first came out.

When Twitter first came out, we all went, well, we get paid to write these jokes and people just type them in the morning on their way to work.

You could submit an invoice to Ellen Musk if you want, but good luck with that one. Yeah, right.

Is there also a recognition that nothing is a secret anymore?

I mean, the the fact that, A, they wrote that press statement, what, about ten years ago, but B, somebody subsequently has told you all about it and all the ins and outs of it, if they didn't tell you about it then.

Actually, for your account in the book, is that based on something people told you then or is this you going back to re-examine? Yeah. Going back.

So some people who were on that call told me what had happened. One person told me and I corroborated that with at least one other.

Mr. Cummings still of course denies that he asked anybody to lie.

Yes, and what it interests me is that you seem to have a way of, is it because you are looking at stuff that has happened some time ago, and I don't mean 50 or 100 years ago, I mean like five years ago, three months ago, that people are much more relaxed about telling you what's going on.

Yeah, I mean, bluntly, and partly because, as Rhea says, the news cycles so quickly that a lot of this stuff gets forgotten more quickly than it would otherwise.

Some people want to preserve things that they regard as important or fun or amusing.

And

I think people want their version of events out there. And they know, you know, I mean, I've written four books, as you observed.

The first one was more of a struggle, but once people realized that it was probably worth cooperating, they then did so.

I mean, there's actually a difference between the hardback and the softback of the first book, because some people read the hardback and thought, oh, God, I really should have talked to him.

And then they picked up the phone, and the paperback is slightly different.

That's great as a reader. But my question is, what happened to, like, I always used to think there was the official secret act that cabinet papers were sealed for 30 years.

There was always this sense of, you know, nothing can be talked about what happened behind closed doors.

But now it seems ministers are making a diary of what's going on for publication as soon as they leave office, or are you know being lined up to talk to authors and writers like yourself?

Everything's up for grabs. I mean, more of it.
I think it's

the period I primarily have been writing about was the most deranged from that point of view. I mean, it's not common to get leaked cabinet minutes.

I got sort of two or three sets, including that big Brexit meeting at Chequers under Theresa May. I got the whole lot for that.

At some points, under Liz Truss, which was probably the apogee of the craziness, I even was sent sort of audio recordings of one cabinet call and of a meeting between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

And it's fascinating when you interview these people afterwards and say, I think this is what happened in the meeting. And they go, no, no, no, it was nothing like that.

And I think, well, it was, mate, because I've listened to it. So,

and that is that's the peak of it. But certainly during the final bits of the May government, I think cabinet was leaking almost in real time.

There was no sort of, there was nothing to be gained by being. I was working for the Sunday Times in those days.

You used to hear something about a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, maybe on a Thursday, and you'd hope it held till Saturday so you could put it on your front page.

The cabinet meetings on the Tuesday were leaking by Tuesday lunchtime.

And in at least one case, Andrea Leadsom had to say something at the end of a meeting because she remembered that she told her special advisor to brief that she'd said a certain something, and she hadn't, and she needed to get it in before they left because it was by then about to appear on Twitter.

Right. I hope it was very incongruous.
So it was like, any other business, and she just goes, hosing in Birmingham. Thank you.

So they were timing their leaks. They were preempting their own leaks.
Now, it's tightened up again now.

I mean, the Labour Cabinet doesn't leak anything like that, but you know, people like me can always pick up the phone to a cabinet minister and

hopefully get a bit of a stir on what I'm saying. I'd like to live stream the whole thing rather than

there was a stage when that would have been more open and honest, frankly, particularly during the Brexit negotiations where lots of people were claiming to have been stridently saying one thing or another, and half the time they weren't even doing that.

It'd be a lot harder to lie in real time, don't you think?

You know, because all these statements, like the one that we just read out about proroguing parliament, was something that people went away, crafted, thought about every word to go, you know, like a like a lateral thinking puzzle.

How can we make this sound true, but actually isn't true? And sort of congratulate yourself that you've come up with a form of wording that does it.

Yeah, I mean, it's a very sophisticated piece of comms work.

But of course, it backfired on that occasion because they were so sort of egregious in the way they were trying to mislead about what they'd already got planned that various civil servants took the view that this ought to have a wider airing.

So they were trying to prorogue. The reason they wanted to deny it at the time that it leaked was because they wanted to be able to spring it on Parliament at specific time of their choosing.

But that actually had time for the opposition or the opponents to come up with a counter.

But on the day they did it, the night before, various officials took the view that this should not be done blind and leaked it to a number of journalists, including at the BBC, who revealed what was happening.

Right. Talking about the past,

more secrets, if they are secrets, are being revealed in the various inquiries. We've got a resumption of the COVID inquiry at the moment.

Tim, you mentioned certain politicians are very apt to keep things for their personal USA records like WhatsApp messages, which normally would be deleted.

There was a very juicy WhatsApp message quoted at the COVID inquiry from from Gavin Williamson, who was the education secretary at the time of the lockdown.

In a WhatsApp, I think it's to Boris Johnson himself, or it's just Johnson.

It's over the appointment of that czar, Kevin Collins, right?

Who Gavin was complaining he had no say in the decision. Now, I'm going to have to decide how we do this because it's full of lots of swearing.
And if it's beeped, it will just sound like the pips.

So I'll use the word

flush. Flush.
Flush and

suit. Right, here we go.

Not only do I get completely flushed over by decisions on the 4th of January that I took this suit and abuse for, I then get my legs cut from under me by an appointment that you don't have the proper courtesy to discuss with me and get screwed over again.

I then get number 10 leaking the story of the appointment, and yet you guys don't even have the basic level of competence to line up the appointment.

Then, at that point, I then have to be deployed to sort out number 10's cluster flush.

But in answer to your question, we are working well with Kevin and I'm sure he will come up with some excellent evidence-based policies that we're all very enthusiastic about.

So that was just an amazing insight into

how heated it gets. But also...

The threat at the end.

I was treated like such an utter piece of suit by number 10 on the 1st of May 2019, which was the day that Theresa May fired him. And that didn't work out well.
He says a threat.

Basically, he said, I brought down Theresa May and I'll do the same for you.

No, to all those who've had a go at me about the language and the thick of it, all I can say is, from what people tell me, it's far worse in reality.

That's very true. I mean, look at the books.
I've tried not to, you know, I mean, you have to sort of water it down a little bit, but the F count

is very much down in the Theresa May volume, but up again in the Johnson and Truss volume. And the C count is off the charts in book four.
Yes.

Was Kevin Williamson the one that had all the different names online? He had lots of names. He also kept a pet tarantula when he was chief whip to try and look more menacing.
He sort of.

Or did he walk around with it on his shoulder? No, he had it in a sort of glass case on his desk.

He also had a samurai sword when he was Defence Secretary, which used to wave around his head, according to one of his former special advisors.

So he's sort of desperately trying to be a theatrical version of Francis Urquhart. He's this kind of performative sort of ego.
He's said to wield power and know where the bodies are buried and have.

But what is his special uh intelligence that he has that no one else has? Well, he was actually a good chief whip. He knew how to sort of threat uh

phrase, threaten and cajole. Um and you need to be able to do all of those.
So

I think most people think he was decent at that and he was a good, you know, he was good at stitching up various leadership elections for his his candidates,

which is why you know everybody wanted to win and kept hiring him.

And then he got a series of increasingly more important cabinet jobs as a result of having got people the job in the the big job in the first place. But he wasn't wasn't always suited.

You know, I mean, a man with a tarantula, not necessarily what you want to send into the classroom.

I would have said the sword was the bigger issue. Possibly, yes.

But you think people listening to this will be sighing, thinking, you know, I thought, you know, when you're in government, the whole point is to come together and to act as one, is to have a coherent, cohesive set of few.

I know, I know. But, you know, one still has to ask the question, why isn't it like that? And why is it now again?

One of the funniest quotes in your final book is from a female MP talking about it's blokes, blokes, blokes being twats, twats, twats.

Yes, that was about the um, that was a female MP who was involved in the tried to stop Brexit campaign, and uh, which was descended into a massive row between Alastair Campbell and Tom Baldwin, uh, sort of Labour apparatches on one side, and Roland Rudd, um, one of Britain's leading PR men, but strangely not very good at the PR for the campaign he was seeking seeking to run.

We kind of have a second referendum campaign just in Plowler, does the older one? People's vote. People's vote as they turned on each other.
Which itself is an interesting

piece of sort of presentation, because if you looked at the polling, a referendum was about 15 points less popular than a people's vote, even though it was exactly the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Looking at queries then,

I picked up a sense that when terrible things happen, crises happen in government, are ministers conscious of the fact that in five or six six years' time this is going to come up in an inquiry?

So I will now perform my job with that in mind as well as with daily events in mind. I mean, to a degree, I think that was very true during COVID.

I think they knew from the very beginning that this was going to be an inquiry. Other stuff sort of creeps up on them.

And those are the ones of the real disaster because it's much more difficult to cover everything up. But again, a public inquiry is a device.

So an issue blows up. The ministers and the prime minister are under huge pressure to do something.

If they set up an inquiry, yes, it's building up problems for the future, but they might be out of power by the time it reports. And they can say, oh, well, there's an inquiry.

We can't talk about that at the moment. Wait for the results of the inquiry.
And, you know, all of these things, putting out hooky statements, holding a public inquiry, they're all sort of,

you know, they're time-wasting devices that

buy people time. I remember my research for the thick of it when we were going to do an inquiry episode, people telling us, you know, of course, who you choose to run the inquiry has an effect.

You know, you might choose someone who on paper is objective and high-profile figure, but who personally you know tends to view the issue a certain way.

Expanding the brief of the inquiry so that it just gets consumed by more and more witness statements and evidence and takes 10 years instead of five. So that buys you a bit more time.

And it's also an easy answer to give, I think, to

genuine concern about a miscarriage of justice to say we'll have an inquiry. That's a way of showing we are taking this seriously.
Seriously, yes.

And yet, honestly, what happens at the end of an inquiry?

Well, I

want to get a report that

only the press reads, and then a few sort of key things come out of it. But I mean, the COVID inquiry is fascinating.

What they should be doing is looking at, you know, was it right to lock down when we locked down? How many lives would have been saved and how much money would have been saved?

And what's the trade-off between the two if we'd behave differently? Are they doing that? No.

They're publishing a series of lurid whatsapps which all the publicity has been about people in government swearing at each other you know it's very unclear that they're even trying to come up with an answer to the one thing that if we had another pandemic what you really want is an ai computer system that you can feed the you say this is how virulent the virus is this is how many people it's likely to kill these are the types of people it's likely to kill what should we do about it and hopefully you could learn some lessons but they don't appear to be doing that we're learning about Gavin Williamson's taste in threats and profanity.

Exactly. As discussed previously.
And I think it was in Sweden where they decided to have an inquiry, but they put a time limit on.

They said, we want this query over the next 18 months, which they did. I think we've become immune to inquiries.
I think that's it. It's reached its critical effect.

And any more inquiries and anything run into danger of feeling like just another inquiry. Nobody's scared of them anymore.
Yeah.

Inquiries really are most effective if run alongside in real time whatever it is that they're investigating. That's really where it should happen.

Adjoining every ministry is the inquiry on that ministry. Precisely.
In real time. Yes.

As well as everything being streamed live. I'm sure that will sort everything out.

Or it'll just be horrible. I'm very happy to sit on this running an inquiry.
Oh, yeah. I think there'll be quite a lot of fun.
That's the other thing I was told.

You know, certain people are, certain retired people are in the market for inquiries because it's good money. You know, if you can chair an inquiry for it.

That's better than just sitting in the House of Lords on 350 a day every time you turn up. You can get a lot more than that.

I know a lot of people that would be up for running an inquiry. I'll run an inquiry.
That's the case. Yeah, yeah.
Into what? Well, that's my point.

I'll just show up and find something to inquire about. I'm quite sure.
Just let me into Westminster with a. Excellent.
I'll do it. I'll give you an hour's of witness statement.

Yeah, great. And I can give you a report by Sunday.
Excellent. Oh, no.
I'd like the report by Sunday 2029.

Even better. I mean, that gives me time to really build up my propension.
I think we have to,

I mean, obviously, we could pick pick everything apart here. I do like the recurring phrase in these inquiries that no one, of course, admits guilt.

It's all, you know, with hindsight, we could have done better. On reflection, knowing what I know now, I'm sure we could have come up with a more impactful set of actions.

Or I have no recollection. That's the other ghetto.
That's the absolute return. That's the anger one, isn't it? Yeah, that's no recollection.

That is the second a politician says they can't remember something, you know you're fine to write it because bluntly, you know, if they wanted to deny it, they'd deny it.

But that's their way of saying, it's a bit awkward for me to admit this, but

I have no recollection of that. And also we don't recognise that is another way of doing

government. We don't recognise that version of events.
Well, which bit of it don't you recognise? And then they never say.

It's like, well, either you deny the specifics of, I've put four charges to you and you've not denied any of them, but you just don't recognise it.

I was the thick of it when we came up with one, which is, I cannot recollect to that.

Which I'm now sure people have said. Oh, I'm sure they have most things in the thick of it are now said in Westminster as if it was a sort of manual thing I know that's why I stopped

just just before we go

I it's I'm also grateful for you having written long books because there is a debate going on at the moment

whether people read anymore and did your publishers when you told them how long these books were going to be at all feel nervous about yeah I mean the first one they it was much longer than they expected and they tried to sort of reduce it and then they kind of concluded it was all so tightly woven that one thing kind of led to another, that it was actually very difficult to cut it.

And the second one was slightly shorter, and they indulged me with that. Then they wanted one 600-page book for the third one.

And by the time I'd written about 2,000 pages, we decided that it had to be two books.

And the third one came in at 670, and the fourth one at 906, which was originally 1,100 before we trimmed and trimmed and trimmed and trimmed. So, did you cut out a Prime Minister? No, no.

I mean, it would have been sad to lose this trust stuff, wouldn't it?

No, you just sort of save a line here and save a line there, and that saves a page, and every page saves a chapter, and away you go.

But actually, they sold reasonably well, and people seem to like the fact that if you're going to get into the detail, you have to just do everything in detail.

And people like the kind of insider intrigue and the way you just have to, I mean, I just have a very straightforward rule, which is that there have to be one or two fun, you know, interesting things on every page.

You can't just expect people to wade through dozens of pages of Brexit. Exactly.

I I think I quoted you on one of our earlier shows because you gave an account of when they were asking how the Northern Ireland and Irish border thing was going to, at one point, when David Davis was Brexit secretary, they were talking about facial recognition for pigs.

That's right. Yeah.

Which is one of my favourite facts in the whole of that book. Well, we have to leave it there, I think.
I think we can improve no further on that. On facial recognition for pigs.

A dark vision of the future.

David Cameron's personal nightmare, I suppose.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message here. I'll be back next week, joined again by Stuart Lee.
All our previous episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you're subscribed on BBC Suns.

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