The Bugle's 600th episode special!

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers, welcome to issue 4306 of the Bugle, also known as the 600th full episode of the Bugle podcast in the entire history of the known universe.

Clearly, one of the most momentous landmarks in the history of human communication.

And we recorded this momentous landmark over two nights at London's Leicester Square Theatre, where I was joined in person by NATO Green across the Atlantic for the first time for a live bugle and Nish Kumar and also by the wonders of the internet by Alice Fraser at an ungodly hour of the morning in Australia.

First, before we start a bit of housekeeping, we are now on TikTok.

I've been reliably informed by producer Chris Yes.

TikTok, we are gradually joining the 21st century.

Clips from our live shows will be popping up across the week on, yes, the new Bugle TikTok channel.

Now, on with the show.

This is the 600th full episode of the Bugle.

Let's.

So we did it for the first 294 I did with...

Who was it?

Who was that guy?

Remember, it was a British guy, dark hair, glasses.

I can't remember.

I can't remember.

John...

Not Stuart, the other one.

Another first name, Oliver, John Oliver, that's it.

It's the 600th full episode of the Bugle.

To put that in context, 600.

It's quite a big number.

That is the average number of times per hour that a British TV interviewer says the word bullshit when interviewing a top politician.

It is a hundred.

We now have done a hundred times more full bugle episodes than there are novels by Jane Austen.

Take that, Austin, you quill waggling loser.

We've done 66.6 times more full episodes of the bugle than symphonies written by Beethoven.

Do you hear that, Loody?

No, because you are D-E-A.

How's this word going to end?

D-D.

I'm not going there.

No.

We're fine.

5.08 times as many full episodes of the bugle as there are elements in the periodic table.

So suck that up, Oxygen.

I wouldn't breathe you if you were the last element on Earth.

And of course, 0.857 times as many bugle episodes as test wickets taken by Jimmy Anderson.

But hopefully we'll be able to overtake them at some point.

To put it in context, 600 full bugles.

If you listen to one bugle a year,

it would take, hang on, let me just work it out.

I'll

just

take carry over.

Almost 610 years.

Actually, precisely 599 years.

So if you did it backwards, you'd end up in the year 1425.

And do you know what happened in 1425?

No, not nothing.

Three things.

Three things, according to onthisday.com, six things according to Wikipedia, only two of which were on a specific date, and nothing until November.

Does that not make you unbelievably f ⁇ ing jealous?

Just

of a world where there was just no news.

Imagine how fappy everyone was.

Apart from the odd dose of plague and all that.

So

funny we could have that.

No news until November.

Actually, that might not work in America.

600 bugles, put that in context.

If you listen to one a week and whilst traveling back in time, with some weeks off and a break for about a year and a half in between,

that would take you back to October 2007, which by amazing coincidence is when the bugle was launched.

Can you believe that?

If you listen to one bugle every mile on a journey, it would be quite a slow journey, but also you would end up 60% of the way to making a meaningful romantic gesture to a Scottish person.

All the way from San Francisco for the first time in person at a live bugle show this side of the Atlantic.

Please welcome the wonderful NATO Green.

Welcome, NATO.

I'm so glad to be in such a hip and upcoming neighborhood like Leicester Square.

I feel like I'm on the cutting edge of Britain's avant-garde scene.

Well, so welcome, welcome to this.

You basically come to see what America could have been if you hadn't been such a bunch of whinging pigs in the 70s and 70s.

I came to get advice from you about how to be a failed empire.

Me personally, yes.

And

how have you found

the politics over here since you've been obviously quite an exciting time to

be here compared with the

you know I've been I've been here for a few days.

I've been observing your your people

couple things of note.

You haven't gotten the memo about yet about white people and dreadlocks.

If you don't know, white people don't do dreadlocks.

And also, like, I've been,

I know that there's an election coming up, and I've been following the news about it, and it seems like there would be excitement.

And the energy that I feel in the streets is whatever is the opposite of palpable.

I've seen no evidence that anyone that I've come across in any capacity is paying attention or aware of the elections, except I did see one window sign for Labour, a Labour MP.

I was walking around London, I saw one window sign, and it seemed to have like a motion sensor that when you walked by, it would just sort of sigh.

So that's.

That's where we are.

That is where we are.

Was anyone here yesterday?

Yes, yes.

Right.

Joining us through the wonders of the internet, someone who so nearly joined us for the show yesterday,

but at 4 a.m.

in Australia was asleep but we've been reliably informed is fully awake please give it up for the wonderful Alice Fraser

hello Andy

hi buglers hello Alice hello

thank you thank you for getting up so early

it was my pleasure this is the thing I was awake at that time yesterday I was just feeding my baby and didn't check my phone.

Joining us also live in leased 3D.

Is it three or four, Nish?

You're in four now?

Five.

5D.

It's Nish Kumar.

Good to see you all.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Chris.

Hello, Alice.

Hello, Buglers.

Welcome to the worst idea we've ever had.

Doing a live show during a cricket match hosted by a man distracted by cricket and full of an audience themselves distracted by cricket.

This is the blind leading the blind, behalf of the blind have paid to be here.

It's nice to see you all.

We are recording this in Leicester Square and interestingly I just looked up the divine comedy by Dante Alighieri who identified that there were nine circles of hell, limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery.

And he's actually from beyond the grave, added a tenth circle of hell, which is Leicester Square on a Saturday night.

Truly the prolapsed anus of Times Square.

If Dante had known about stag and hindus, he'd have thought, wow, that's the worst circle of the lot.

And as I was making my way through Leicester Square to get here, a

hindu, I don't know what the collective noun is, scream, a scream of a henus

walked past me and one of them pointed directly in my face.

Now, listen, I've been confused for a lot of celebrities that aren't myself.

Parts of recreation actor Jason Manzoukis, which is because he and I bear a striking resemblance to each other, Romesh Ranganathan, because of racism.

But we have a new one to add to the pantheon because a woman looked at me, went, oh, pointed directly at my face and said, Barbara Streisand.

Barbara Streisand.

Here I am.

They don't call me Brown Yentel for nothing.

Well, it's wonderful.

I think that makes you more Jewish than me now, isn't it?

Andy, that is a low bar.

That is a low bar.

That is a low bar.

It was the 8th of June, on the 7th of June in the year 421.

It was the marriage of the year 421.

The Emperor Theodosius II married Elia Eudosia

in Constantinople and you can see what they saw in each other.

I mean look,

look at that.

Those are two seriously hot hotties from history.

I mean look at.

Well, I take that as a huge compliment because the mother on the right looks a lot like me.

Look at him.

Is that you, Barbara Streisand?

I mean, I really enjoy

how two-dimensional they are.

They really know how to put the flat into flattering picture.

It is worse if one person claps and no one at all.

Most people want to unite an audience.

I want to divide them against one another.

I want them to each find one joke so entertaining that it turns them against one another.

Well,

I think there's certainly going to be some jokes that only one person finds entertaining in this.

Hello!

On this day,

1,231 years ago, would you believe, in the year 793, 8th of June, the Vikings, Europe's premier fancy dress pioneers and hips divide World Weekend trendsetting pillar gistas, did their first bit of major vikery here in the British Isles.

Of course, the inventors of the Dealebopper, the Vikings,

well that we kind of

evolved from that, but

on this day in 793, they viked the shit out of Lindisfarne.

They stuck it to those monks.

Well done, Vikings.

Big men.

Big men, sticking it to a load of Bible-babbling baldies.

Pick on someone with your own hairstyle, you fing pricks.

Have they apologised yet?

No.

No?

Shit.

Awful people.

Awful.

My dad used to work with someone who insisted that the Vikings brought reading to the the rest of the world, that that was their primary export.

Well, a lot of stagdos have got it very wrong.

Didn't you see any wandering through Leicester Square with a few copies of Dickens' novels?

Viking helmets on?

Yeah, there were a few Wuthering Heights-themed stagdos going around.

A couple of heath cliffs, a couple of guys dressed as the Moor.

Yes, I ran out of things I knew about Wuthering Heights.

Yes, I studied it it for English A-level.

As always, a section of the bugle is going, Where?

I didn't hear you.

It's going, where?

I didn't hear it the first time on reflection.

Could you not have evolved some catchphrases that didn't feel less aggressive when being yelled at us by 400 people?

He most not have gone, where's it going?

I'm the fing shitter!

Family show, Nish.

Family show.

Family show.

Top story, democracy is reigning.

Well,

yes, if democracy be the food of love, we're all going to be single and vomiting within four weeks.

Because it's election time and this week we've had we've had well two debates, the leaders we had Starmer again Sunak on on Tuesday.

We had the seven prong debate last night.

Did anyone watch it last night?

Yeah.

How was it?

Yeah.

I mean it sort of does make you think with those all the D-Day anniversaries that we had this week that someone should have said, I'm really sorry you died for this shit.

But

no one I mean I think the certainly watching the the seven prong debate last night about on a level with dripping vinegar in your eyeballs whilst listening to Rudy Giuliani sing You Make Me Feel Nike Like a Natural Woman

in terms of pure enjoyability.

Nish, you obviously are

global democracy correspondent and aficionado.

Have you enjoyed it so far?

Well, let me just start with the debates because the debates are two of the worst pieces of television of all time.

And take that from me.

Someone has produced several of the worst pieces of television of all time.

I did a show for Quibi.

There was a network that was so shit, it got cancelled in the middle of its own existence.

Not a programme, the whole network.

And in many ways, this Conservative campaign is the Quibi of election campaigns.

It's a bad idea being executed poorly and it's going to end in a British Indian man losing his job.

We've got some exciting breaking news.

The original Conservative slogan, this is just broken, just as I was walking on stage, clear plan, bold action, secure future, has been replaced by, oh shit, oh fing kill me.

The campaign started very poorly.

Rishi Sudak announced the election in the rain without an umbrella.

Then he posed in front of an exit sign which was pointing directly at his fing head.

He asked voters in Wales if they were looking forward to the European Football Championships, a tournament Wales did not qualify for.

He started his campaign with a launch event at the Titanic site when he was immediately asked by a journalist if he was the leader of a sinking ship.

Basically, Rishi Sudak in this campaign, I I haven't seen an Asian man look this uncomfortable since the night I lost my virginity.

It is

absolutely extraordinary.

The first big policy announcement was national service for young people.

Telling a generation of young people who have already given up two years of their lives to protect older people from the novel coronavirus that they now need to do national service is insulting enough, but that is not anywhere near the top of the list of this nation's problems.

We are currently contracting diarrhea-based diseases from our tap water and when we contact the water companies they advise us to simply ship directly into the rivers to quote cut out the middleman.

Then on top of all of this this week Rishi Sidak was heavily criticised for not being at a part of the 80th anniversary D-Day ceremony on Thursday.

He attended several of the events but then before the massive event involving all of the world leaders he travelled back from France to the UK to record a television interview that is set to go out next week.

The ITV journalist doing the interview confirmed that that was the only slot offered by 10 Downing Street.

It is a huge PR gap and incredibly Rishi Sunak's election is going so badly that the only person who's had a worse D-Day is Adolf Hitler.

I mean

say what you like.

Say what you like about Hitler.

He did kill Hitler.

Alice, have you enjoyed the opening gambits of our glorious

Festival of Democratic Freedom here?

I mean, it is a wonderful thing to watch from a safe distance.

I've been particularly enjoying Nigel Farage's attempt to claw his way back into relevancy.

That's been very exciting.

Have you guys been following that, his reform UK?

Oh, yeah, yeah, we're all over it.

Chris has got the tattoo, isn't he?

He truly is the herpes of British politics.

He is the head of a movement of something mysterious happening.

Basically, that there's far-right governments rising up all over the place.

And

he's just, I feel like he's putting the

Ash into fascinating observation about the rise of anti-immigrant populism during an economic downturn.

You know, I just think it's

he's presenting this as a new thing, a completely unprecedented thing for a nation that may perhaps feel it's humiliated itself on the global stage to feel that it's drawn to the person who's telling them it's somebody else's fault.

I just can't see any outcomes that would be bad.

As a result of the unrestrained indulgence in grievance politics by men who talk about how being a man involves being stoical while whinging like a toddler about how things aren't as good as the olden days.

Have you?

You know,

sorry, have you?

The olden days.

Have you bumped my head when men were men and women were your mum?

It's been nice.

You've just, Rod, did you see any of the debates?

Yeah, so I, I mean, as I mentioned, I arrived a few days ago

trying to blend in.

I shit in the river.

So

your country's in crisis, Andy.

I went to a bookstore, and it was like an entire wall of books about the crisis of British politics.

It was, you know, like,

you know, how the Commons is f and how to unf it and the Tories are bastards and

labor is f and

Liz Trust, how you like me now, Rishi.

And like, it was just, you know, and,

you know, lib dems are shit, scratch and sniff pamphlet.

It was like just lots of books about the turmoil in British politics.

And

I'm trying to understand what's happening.

And

the Tories are on track to lose, according to the polls.

But there's good news for them that Labor has lost two points in the polls since the election started.

And so at this rate, the Tories will catch up and win the election about 37 years

after the election,

if I'm understanding it right.

Yes.

I watched the debate and

Kirstarmer looks to me like

someone started an illustration of a generic white guy and didn't finish.

Do you know what I mean?

And so,

and he seems to be like,

you know,

like in the issues of the debates, like they're talking, you know, Sunak saying that they're going to raise taxes and they're saying, no, we're not going to raise taxes.

And Sunak saying, we're going to stop immigration in a dumb way.

And Sarmer saying, no, we're going to stop immigration in a different dumb way.

And it's all,

like, I don't understand the arguments.

Like, if somebody...

came to me and said, hey, we're going to raise your taxes, but then you get to have functioning schools and healthcare system, I'd be like, oh, that sounds like a good deal.

You know what I mean?

But that's like, I would vote for for that.

But so they're saying that it would, the SUNEX, they're fixing it, Sunex saying that they would raise taxes by £2,000 a year,

and people are against that.

And so I looked it up, and that the average British person spends £63,000 on alcohol.

In a lifetime.

Oh, Rocky.

So

over the course of a lifetime.

And so

just a question question for you is is is would you be willing to stop drinking maybe two years before you die

earlier than you would have to otherwise by medical necessity

in order to have a functioning society?

Is that a trade-off you would make?

No, okay.

No, that's not that.

You're learning about how British politics works.

Right.

So so essentially you get the government you deserve is what we just learned.

Good.

Sounds good.

Okay.

I also think, and I think we might talk about other elections, Andy, but England, look, you're slipping.

That, you know, that there are elections around the world.

In India, there were elections and they were imprisoning opposition politicians.

In Mexico, there were elections and they were killing political candidates.

In South Africa, there were elections and they're threatening riots and mass death.

Here, you fing throw a milkshake.

Get your head in the game.

I know you have capacity for violence.

I've learned about the Bengal famine and the slave trade and Top Gear.

You can do it.

Farage has pledged to be, quote, a bloody nuisance, which is also what comes out if you put the average description of Farage by a non-Brexit supporter into a special translation software that makes your language suitable for use at family gatherings or funerals or broadcast before 6 p.m.

and for it not to be a crossword clue whose answer is seven,

four words.

The debate, I'm just back on the

debate.

Obviously, there'd been a lot of tensions within the Conservative Party, but after Sunak's unexpectedly early call of the election, but Sunak has kissed and made up, in that he's kissed goodbye to his hopes of winning the election, and he's made up some statistics to try to paper over the chasms.

Now,

the big talking point from the debate was the £2,000

thing.

Now, £2,000 is not just what the average TV watcher gave to the nearest flat surface during that leader's debate in 70 minutes, just like pounding away in frustration.

It's not what I can bench press

using Conservative Party-approved mathematics, where I add together everything I might theoretically bench press over the next four years if I bench press something twice a day.

It's not even the sum you would have to stake in order to win one pence on a bet that Rishi Sunak is going to be sending out change of address cards within the next few weeks.

But it's also the amount of money that Sunak claimed an incoming Labour government will definitely steal from the open mouths of every British child in the country.

I think I've based it up.

That's not exactly what he said, but he started it.

I think at this point it's open season on lying about the Conservative Party.

These are, according to figures, made up stroke, calculated stroke, interpreted from the entrails of a freshly slain virtual iguana by the Conservative Party.

Where do you think that stands on the scale of political believability, Mish?

£2,000.

I mean, I think we're 20 minutes away from being on the side of a fing bus.

Sometimes if it looks like horseshit and it smells like horseshit, you've got a bunch of horseshit in your mouth.

And to be fair, he's done a lot of empirical research for that.

Yeah, I have.

I'm a method comedian, okay?

You don't want to see the backstage area.

It's disgusting.

The £2,000 figure is accurate and relevant if, and there's a few ifs here, and they are some of the biggest ifs since Rudyard Kipling started projecting the titles of his poems up onto the night skies above Gotham City.

It is accurate and relevant if you don't mind that the costings it's based on were made up by the Conservatives and the policies they were costing were at least in part completely hypothetical labour policies that hadn't been announced.

Also, it's fine if you don't mind that they also then simply divided the eventual made-up total by a made-up speculative number of working households in the country, and then assumed that you could just divide that overall sum by all the households, because what Labour is famous for is really going for flat rate taxation across the entirety of society.

So there are a few little glitches.

Also, you've got to ignore the fact that if you cost out the Conservatives' own policies, the same figure apparently comes to three thousand pounds.

Now, don't take that from me, take that from the rightward-leaning Spectator magazine.

So, this is the equivalent of the Catholic newspaper, The Guilt-Ridden Biscuit, saying that maybe, just maybe, Jesus was just a mid-grade magician and raconteur.

To be clear, the spectator is right-leaning to the same extent that lying fully on the floor is leaning.

Of course, that's not the correct way to work out numbers like that during an election campaign.

The correct way to do it is to take the shirt number of your favourite footballer, multiply it by the number of sandwiches you've eaten in the last decade, and then chuck some naughts on the end.

And then you say the number 12 times within an hour, and it becomes a fact.

That is just how political stats work.

The good news for anyone who's got kids doing GCC maths is that this is now because of the legal precedent set by the government, you no longer have to show you're working or get your answer right.

You just have to write the answer over and over again and hope that the examiner thinks, well, there must be something in it.

It's because they keep saying that it was a figure that's been arrived at by independent people that work at the Treasury, but based on information given to them by the Conservative Party, which is a bit like saying, we've talked to the police and they say that Labour's plan to release all pedoes is going to be bad.

When have you heard about that plan?

We made it up.

But the police have said it's going to be bad.

Yeah, it's...

And the problem is that now with Farage re-entering the race, which I can't believe is happening, I really thought we had, to use a very commonly used expression, John Oliver.

I thought

we had absolutely John Oliver the

and now it turns out they have Corden Morganed him straight back to us.

And he got hit by a milkshake, which I think we can all agree, regardless of your political affiliation, is extremely funny.

It's extremely funny that Nigel Farage got hit by a milkshake.

A lot of people have said, well, how is that different from an assault?

Well, it's different in every conceivable way.

It's different from an assault in the same way that you don't get charged with the same crime if you draw a dick on a building as you do if you burn the building to the ground.

And some people have started saying, well, what if there was petrol in there?

Then you would have some serious questions for the McDonald's that when you ordered a banana milkshake gave you a cup of fuel.

That is definitely going to knock a point off the health rating.

And some people have even said, said, what if he was lactose intolerant?

Of course he isn't.

Milk's white.

That's one of the

only things this man is tolerant of.

I've been waiting to say that joke for about four hours.

I thought of it this afternoon when I was sat in my house in my pants.

Not to paint too visceral a picture, but it's nice to get a glimpse behind the magician's cloth, which is what I call my underwear.

But Nish, I do think it it is a relevant question.

If he is lactose intolerant, first of all, that means he's intolerant to almost everything.

And secondly, that would mean he might shit his pants, which would make this at least twice as funny.

So you do have to factor in the possibility, you know?

Listen, Alice, I don't know how closely you're following things here.

If we want to get Farage to shit his pants, we shouldn't throw a milkshake over him.

We should throw some tap water from Brixons.

Can I tell you my least favourite story of this whole package?

Which is that

Keir Starmer has said that he's willing to use nukes.

Yes.

In a story, he was asked by a journalist if he would be willing to use nukes, and he said yes, he would be willing to use nukes, but refused to say in what circumstances he would be willing to use nukes.

First of all, of course he's willing to use nukes.

You're a prospective leader and your country has nukes.

What are you going to say?

No, I would prefer to battle things out man to man with a knife in a small ring.

What do you get?

I mean, Russia is doing a little interpretive dance in the corner where six women in black leotards are doing the shape of a mushroom cloud with your bodies.

Of course he's going to say that he's going to do nukes.

And of course he's not going to detail the situations in which he might use the nukes because that's like

it's my least favorite thing where journalists ask some politician to launch into like a speculative fiction about how they might behave in a moderately to highly unlikely scenario.

Like, oh, would you like to engage in some light self-insert Cold War fanfic for us, sir?

Like,

I just find it so enraging.

What do you expect a politician to tell you honestly what they might do in an imaginary scenario?

They're politicians, they don't even tell you what they're actually doing in real life.

It is insane to treat a question and answer like this as news.

At very, very best, it is pre-news, and you'll just have to report it again when it becomes news.

American news now.

So, NATO, you've been casting your eye over our democracy.

How the f is it going for you, Lot?

F you.

It's not good.

It's not good, Andy.

So, I mean, we did,

you probably are aware

Trump was Trump was convicted.

about seven fans of the judicial system here.

So,

yeah, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies

because America is a nation of laws and no one is above the law except Israel.

And cops,

which is the same thing.

So,

and

what was so weird about the Trump trial was that, you know,

it was a jury trial.

And so they had to, you know, the jury selection process was incredible because they had to find, under the American Constitution, you're entitled to a jury of your peers.

But

they also had to be people who didn't already have a strong opinion about Donald Trump.

That, like, to try to select a jury that are Trump's peers who don't are, that's like, that's a Kobayashi Maru scenario of

that reference is for four people.

So, but those four people enjoyed it a lot.

So,

it's like it was just, and despite that, they found 12 people, like, I,

I was called for a jury once, as if you're a regular listener, people know I'm a trade unionist, and And the trial that I was called for was a trial where someone had been beaten up for crossing a picket line.

And I got in the jury box, and so they asked you questions.

They had to screen you, right?

And so

they were like,

Do you think you, you know, how many people do you have experiences with union?

You have to raise your hand.

Unions, picket lines, strikes, racial disputes.

And then they asked me, Do you think that you could be impartial about this situation?

And I said, Yes, but I think my idea of impartial might be different from yours.

And they said, what do you mean by that?

And I said, if you're a grown-ass man and you cross a picket line, what the f do you think is going to happen?

So

that's the American.

So, and actually, just one other quick tangent about, so in my life as a trade unionist, recently, just a week ago, I was having a conversation with a high-ranking government official in the city of San Francisco who's responsible for the budget.

And I think this conversation is really illustrative of the problems facing both of our democracies.

He said to me, NATO, how do you think we could make our politics less toxic?

And I said, well, here's a thought.

What if you fixed literally anything?

And he said, no can do.

So it's a completely true story.

So the, so, okay, so Trump,

so they find people who don't already, Trump's peers who don't already have a formed opinion of him,

put on the trial, and those people deliberated for four hours and returned 34 guilty verdicts.

In four hours.

Now,

the average human

spends about 10 minutes shitting

or if you're a dad, about 42 minutes shitting.

So, that is to say that they had 12 people

who didn't have a pre-formed opinion about Donald Trump, who were presented the evidence, and then had enough time for all of them to have a shit and a snack.

And then they spent about four minutes being like, Yeah,

there's no question he's guilty.

So, and then they announced, when the news broke, it was middle of the afternoon when I got the alert went off on my phone, and

the entire country came at the same time.

Family show.

So Donald Trump still has a gun.

That in of itself should cause a chill of fear to run down the entire spine of America.

Why has he got who gave him a gun?

Also, that gun is definitely definitely going to be used on him by his son.

Let's not be around the bush here.

Let's not be around the bush here.

That story is only ending one way.

We need to talk about Baron.

What?

Ooh?

That kid's weird as f.

Don't give us hope.

Just when I thought I said something too offensive for a bugle audience, they reminded me that they are much more sick and twisted individuals than I will ever be.

So, you know, I, you know, I don't want to advocate murder.

I'm a bit old-fashioned like that.

I don't want Trump to be killed.

I want him to be abducted by aliens

and then given eternal life to be

dealt with by aliens, how they traditionally deal with a lot of probes.

A lot of probes.

Alice I know you you carry several handguns with you at all times you're renowned you're renowned for your militaristic attitudes to life so

I mean you must be you must you must feel a lot of sympathy with Trump at this difficult time for him

Well, I think, you know, obviously the news media is drawn to the dramatic irony of him losing his gun license given his famous threat/slash boast that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone in the head without losing a single vote.

And that sort of this losing his gun licence has taken that threat completely off the table because you know owning the gun would be illegal.

Marini,

he's an absolute stickler for the law, as we've had in the

now, Now, obviously, although Britain invented democracy, as is well known, and is the greatest democracy in the world,

it does also occasionally crop up in other countries.

Thanks largely to us,

let's not forget the British Empire, which did nothing other than spread trains and democracy in exchange for a couple of jewels.

You forgot the big one.

Yes, cricket, thank you.

Yeah, you forgot the big thing.

Brit's justified everything.

That's how you open shows in Mumbai, isn't it?

Yes, Britain entered.

On the one hand, partition.

On the other hand, cricket.

Sorry, Alice.

I said Britain entered the rest of the world offering vote first, but that was their, like, they'd come in democracy forward and keep their guns behind their backs until later.

So let's start, Nish, in India.

And Narendra Modi has won small.

He was hoping to win big, but he actually won quite a lot smaller than

was expected.

He is, I think it's fair to say, a politician, doesn't merely split opinion.

He lathers opinion in whipped cream and pops a glassy cherry on top.

To say Modi splits opinion is like saying Piers Morgan enjoys attention.

And he only got 36.5% of the vote, 236 million votes, which you don't need to be a rocket scientist who knows 1 million for every run made by Sunal Gaviskar in his highest test match score.

You've got to give them what they want, Nish.

Watch and learn.

So 63.5% of those who voted voted against him and a nation of 1.3 billion people plus.

That's not a ringing endorsement for Modi.

Yeah, that's right.

He started the campaign aiming for a 400-seat supermajority in the 543-seat parliament.

They've won only 240 seats.

The opposition, which is the India Lions,

spearheaded by the Congress Party, got 234 seats, despite being outspent and that being the least of their problems, given that Modi has what I would call a robust debating tactic.

By which I mean jail.

He tends to,

and not just jail, monopoly jail, as in go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect 200 rupees.

Yeah, it was a big old election.

And the result has been something of a shock in India.

In fact, it was such a shock that one of the pollsters burst into tears on live television.

His poll was so wrong that he started crying.

Was he crying because he'd made an accurate prediction, or was he crying because he knew that he was having to give bad news to Narendra Modi and he was going to the Hindu gulag, the Hindulag.

For second generation Indians like me,

I would describe myself as Modi skeptic.

I would describe my opinions on Narendra Modi were I to give them as there goes the visa.

I think he's an awful, awful, awful man.

He's victimised a lot of minorities in India, but he's also struggled on the campaign trail because he told people that there was economic progress and expansive welfare programs.

However, wealth inequality is at a six-decade high, with the top 1% owning 40% of the wealth.

So, all of his promises,

all he had left on the campaign was violent division, which India has not bought, which is very positive.

And sometimes, people like me who are Modi skeptic are described by BJP fans as hinos, right?

That's an acronym meaning Hindu in name only.

And I would describe them as cultists understanding nothing theological.

What a pack of cultists understanding nothing theological.

Yeah, that's right, Chris.

I found a way around you, bleeping the word.

That's why you are a comedian of unbelievable natural talent.

I must stop reading the telegraph.

You can't get involved in acronym wars with Zoltzmann.

It's like challenging Federer to tennis.

It's a fool's errand.

I mean, you mentioned this inequality, and it is really striking

in India.

And it's obviously hard, it's not really for us, particularly white Brits, to judge how our former imperial partners, is that the term we're using now?

Are getting on.

but the economic choices India is making in this

current era.

It's like when you meet a naked man and you give him a thousand pounds to go away and smarten himself up.

And he goes away and he spends £20 on quite a nice tie and £980

on a haircut.

And he comes back looking quite pleased with himself.

And sure, it's a very nice tie.

You can wear it, you know, pretty much any social occasion.

You can wear it to work, you can wear it to job interviews, you could probably wear it at family occasions.

Fine.

Good tie.

money well spent.

And it is unquestionably the most sensational haircut you have ever seen.

But those are some conversationally distracting testicles.

So that's how I'd explain the Indian economy.

Alice, did you vote in the Indian elections?

First of all,

I like the idea that there are any testicles that wouldn't be conversationally distracting.

Your premise of the joke implies some bland, inoffensive testicles.

You rang.

Mexico election news now.

Is that a little double?

Mexico has elected Claudia Scheinbaum, who is their first female president.

She is a climate scientist, which is a bit of a weird way to do politics, I think, to get someone with a working knowledge of science in in a position where they might make decisions based on science.

That is, I would say, that is the rare combination of both passe and woke.

But you know, can't criticise another country's democracy.

So, she's also

she's Jewish as well, which I know you are very excited about, Nisha.

Massive news.

Yeah, this is absolutely massive news.

It's also very exciting because she is Jewish, but when she took office, she thanked Jesus.

And a lot of people on the internet were very angry about that until it transpired that Jesus is the name of her husband.

This is from a news report about it.

One of the journalists has collated some of the comments on Twitter and said this.

One self-described Zionist on the website formerly known as Twitter in response to Steinbaum's victory posted the following.

I have never seen a less Jewish Jew than this.

And I say, from the Andy's Oltman perspective,

challenge extended.

You think it's not Jewish to have a husband called Jesus?

Wait until you hear about this wedding ham.

Yes.

Not the most, not the most kosher cake, I think it's fair to say.

Who's who's

I'm not sure that's the right question to be asking.

Both of us are bad Muslims.

I think we can both agree on that.

Well,

you know.

Well, I mean,

Muslims and Christians to me are just lapsed Jews.

We are all

just

bound together in the dance of history.

Excitingly,

women now hold half the seats in Mexico's Congress and almost half the jobs in cabinet.

It's after a scheme to try and get more women involved in politics.

Claudia Steinbaum is the Scheinbaum is the first woman elected to lead a North American country.

Dolly Parton, of course, narrowly missed out.

in the 1980 U.S.

presidential election, her signature nine to five policies proving her undoing.

Sadly, She did, of course, recommend reducing working hours to a compulsory maximum of eight hours per day.

They were savaged by economists and conservative media.

She wanted to reduce the Supreme Court from nine judges to five.

But that was too sensible for America.

And she wanted to cut baseball from a nine-aside game to a five-aside game, and people thought it would just become too easy to score.

So she didn't get it.

But I mean, Alice, this is more evidence, isn't it, that this is turning into quite a tricky millennium for the patriarchy.

We just can't catch a break at the moment.

And,

you know, why is it women getting all the opportunities in politics?

And, you know, people like me, when will my voice be heard?

Well, Andy,

you know,

I mean, I think this is an incredible achievement for women as a whole, but I'm always wary of suggesting that the victory of one woman is going to cascade down into the victory for all women, because so far,

what seems to have happened when women get up into politics is they try to be the best man they can be.

They just...

They come in and they say, you know what I can bring to this table?

Maximum bittiness.

Maybe there's a reason we weren't in power all these years,

women say, being horrible to other women.

You know, so I feel like perhaps, unless she's going to sort of reconstitute the entire system of patriarchy,

I'm just going to congratulate her on a personal level and not feel like the shine has reflected down on me, a woman who apparently can't even do breastfeeding with technically good form.

Don't get me wrong, I'm an incredible mother.

I just have bad athletic technique.

Thank you for listening.

That was recorded at the Leicester Square Theatre on Friday and Saturday, the 7th and 8th of June.

There is another live bugle show, a UK election special on the 23rd of June at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London.

Tickets available via the internet or by asking nicely to a friendly-looking passer-by who, if they have tickets on them, may exchange them for something, money perhaps, or just kindness.

Who knows?

Anyway, also on sale is my stand-up tour, the Zoltgeist, which begins on the 1st of November.

Dates across the UK, plus a show in Dublin.

Details at andyzaltzman.co.uk.

Yes, I have updated my website.

Also, if you look elsewhere on the internet, anyway, do come along to all of those shows.

We will be back with a regular bugle at the start of next week, charting democracy's struggles with itself and humanity.

Until then, goodbye.

Hi, Buglers.

It's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast, Mildly Informed, which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.