Politics: An Audition For Reality TV

The Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

Hello, Buglers, and welcome to issue 4280 of the Bugle Audio Newspaper for a Visual World.

I am Andy Zoltzmann and you join us just in time to hear a very exciting and it must be said somewhat amusingly surprising discovery about how to create world peace and end all human suffer sorry no you've missed it you were you were too slow you should have tuned in earlier seriously what was whatever you were doing in the last two minutes bugles really so important that it was worth missing that that's what is wrong with this planet you people no offense and don't try playing the show back but starting earlier you've had your chance but welcome nonetheless to the bugle we're recording as we uh so often do yesterday uh or the day before that or a while ago uh depending on when you're listening um god time is very confusing for me now it's the 10th of november uh 2023.

And joining me today, we have an absolute smorgasbord of hemispheres for you.

Firstly, from the southern hemisphere, and now, well, I think a good 70% pregnant, so pretty much packing a bonus hemisphere herself.

It's Alice Fraser.

Welcome, welcome, Alice.

I am the hemisphere myself, Andy.

How are you?

I'm alright, thanks.

Yeah.

I've

had a sort of week off from news, which has been, well, a balm of, I'm not sure sanity is the right word, but,

you know, an absence of pure insanity.

So, yeah, I'm feeling a little refreshed.

I've been house hunting in this small Queensland town that is going to be my home for the next six months as I spawn.

And today I went to a place that was like a little outside the price bracket, maybe slightly too fancy.

And I walked in and I was like, oh no, this is way too fancy.

It was like chandeliers and really ugly glass coffee tables and like a home cinema.

And it was so disgusting and tasteless and just such a waste of wealth.

And I was like, this is what you spent the earth on?

It was just boomer, classless trash.

And I was like, oh man.

Good to know that that's what our children are going to be breathing smoke for for the next couple of generations.

So you've chosen not to live in a metaphor for

human idiocy.

Joining us from the southern hemisphere, but now residing in the northern hemisphere.

Very, very complicated.

Welcome back to James Nakise.

James, great to have you back on the bugle.

How have you been?

Good, Andy.

Thank you for having me for a happy Black Friday weekend.

It's always nice to be on the discount show.

You've had a busy couple of months

doing some stuff at the Rugby World Cup.

We've already talked about that much on

the bugle, actually.

I don't know why.

Maybe it's because, as

an English rugby fan, it would have just been, you know, we talk about the bleakness of humanity quite enough on the bugle without going into how England plays rugby.

So, how was the whole experience for you?

Well, I feel like with the state of the world, I wouldn't be surprised if English rugby itself was diagnosed with ADHD after the past few months.

I had a really fun time because I went over to be a comedy reporter at the Rugby World Cup and there was only five Pacific Island reporters,

so I had to be a real reporter.

And then by the final press conference of Fiji and England,

Fiji lost and the other Fijian, the other Pacific reporters went, oh, we're just going to go have Cava with the team.

So suddenly I was the only reporter.

in the press conference, which if you go to my Twitter profile, my banner is now me

in the moment with the cameras recording that I realize that I am alone with the British press pack.

And also, I mean,

during the World Cup, not related to the World Cup, you also became

the voice and conscience of British train travel,

which was

another exciting new career direction for you.

Thank you, Andy.

Like most Englishmen dealing with people from different cultures, you have brought back to light a trauma I had repressed.

That's what we do.

Yeah,

I caught a train on my way back from the World Cup to Edinburgh in London.

Rookie mistake.

I hear the British listeners cry.

What catching a train to anywhere?

Yeah, anyway.

Any interaction with British Rail.

Just heard the national tatting going on.

I think it was 14 hours in transit

at the end of it, featuring a

four and a half hour cab ride

where the cab driver got lost in the hills of Scotland in the middle of the night.

So, yeah, look, man, I'm having adventures.

I'm meeting people.

I went to France.

I don't even speak French.

My French would arguably get us all killed.

Well, I had someone with a toddler.

I've been teaching teaching her that british trains go chuga chugga chuga chugga chuga chugga chuga whoop whoops

i mean 14 hours of tutting that's um

i mean that must have been that must have been pretty i don't know if it it's if the tuts kind of code you've got a whole carriage of people tutting simultaneously to be do they sort of harmonize with each other so you get the sort of just f for f sake in Morse code tutted by 80 people at the same time.

It's what I imagine sitting in Parliament would be like in the UK.

You're not really sure what's going on.

You feel out of control and there's just non-stop tutting for 14 hours.

You have to make sure the tutting is asynchronous because otherwise when you're going over a bridge it can create a resonance and that's how the Taybridge disaster happened.

I think that might be the first Taybridge disaster reference we've had on the bugle.

I mean there aren't not many.

High five to my William McGonagall stands.

There aren't many

niches of history that we've not touched on.

We were almost cool, Ellis.

We were talking about sport, and then you just pivoted.

Pivoted.

Pivoted right into the door.

It was a history of rail disasters.

We are recording on Friday, the 10th of November, 2023.

It's amazing to think that in just 100 years' time, it'll be 134 years in a day since the Berlin Wall came down.

The controversial city and an opinion-splitting barrier had been basically sacked as a wall at the age of just 28 on the 9th of November 1989, a year better known, of course, for England losing the ashes 4-0 to a previously unfancied Australia.

And it might have been a reverberatingly bad summer for English cricket, but arguably it was an even rougher few months for die-hard East European communists, as their dream of an eternally miserable future of disappointing cars, non-luxury food items, and supersonic female athletes crumbled before their very eyes, culminating in Romania boss Nikki Ceaușescu's impressive bid for worst Christmas ever award.

It was also a very bad summer for the comedy character act Iron Curtain, whose highly amusing musical satir on the failures of state communism, the hilarious daily pratfalls of Soviet oppression, and the pure unadulterated joy of watching the women's 4x400 metre relay found himself in decreasing demand.

On the 11th of November 1918, well that famously was Armistice Day that brought the First World War to an end, presaging a solid, well, what was it now, about eight to twelve minutes of sweet, glorious global peace.

It was signed at 5.45 a.m.

on the 11th of November, but only came into force at 11 a.m., leaving just enough time for another 2,700 soldiers to die even more futilely than the millions that had gone before them.

And it is that kind of determination to kill each other when there is literally no point whatsoever that separates us from the other species who clog up our planet.

That was 105 years ago.

Tomorrow.

As As always, a section of this podcast is going straight in the bin this week.

We have a Christmas section in the bin.

Might seem a bit early, but it's nearly mid-November now.

And the Christmas adverts have started coming out.

The John Lewis advert, which Britain gets bizarrely obsessed by on an annual basis, is out this week.

And John Lewis's competitors, the retail behemoth Nodgers and Claystrop, have once again courted controversy with another controversially controversial Christmas advert.

You might remember last year's Nodgers and Claystrop ad featured a trouserless Santa Claus twerking in front of the family Christmas tree to the sound of a grime cover version of John Denver's Country Roads while swinging the family's pet cat around his head and swigging from a bottle of absinthe.

The situation of course was resolved when Santa presented a weeping child with a Nodges and Claystrop luxury velvet covered toy cat to replace the family's now deceased pet and some NNC own brand wallpaper to cover over the blood splatter on the living room wall plus a couple of bottles of own brand moonshine to make it up to mum and dad and it finished with Nodgers and Claystrop's renowned slogan something for everyone everywhere and everywhere well this this year's advert features an unusually graphic 17th century Christmas witch trial at which two terrified young children look longingly out of the window of their home to see their mother undergoing some extremely 17th century justice seemingly dunked in the town pond and not emerging their growing panic assuaged only when mum emerges from a secret trapdoor in the house dripping wet to be greeted by dad with a bundle of Christmas gifts a Nodgers and Claystrop plush towel and dressing gown some soothing rejuvenating hand cream that trial by fire could really sting, a new NNC artisan eucalyptus and palm leaf broomstick, and a multi-use home cauldron containing a ready-roasted turkey from the Nodgers and Claystrop food hall.

Critics have claimed that the advert, and specifically the slogan, Nodges and Claystrop for life's guilty pleasures, are misogynistic.

We'll let you be the judge of that.

Anyway, that section is in the bin.

I mean, Andy, you've just expressed the dream of every corporation had they a soul or a REM sleep cycle, cycle, which has to come synonymous with a holiday.

I don't think people are really aware of their history, but it's marked by such failed holidays as Trojan condoms attempt at

Yule Log Fest.

That's a combination of words I don't think anyone was really prepared for.

Top story this week: echoes of History.

It turns out that Maximus Decimus Meridius was right, the fictional Roman warrior, pugilist, vengeance specialist, and public entertainer famously said, What we do in this life echoes in eternity.

Now, he wasn't merely trying to convince his soldiers that being hacked to death in a forest in Germany in a early 20th century film was a fun way to spend an afternoon.

He was actually telling the truth, as proved by the world in November 2023.

And we start our Echoes of History section with old empire powers nearly apologizing for the horrors of empire news.

And I mean this is something that, you know, as a British person is, you know, something that crops up in the news every now and again.

The intermittent near apologies that Britain just about forces out into the world.

We had another one over the last week.

King Charles Casey III himself

into his second year of kinging now, the king,

And he almost apologised for colonial abuses in Kenya.

Now, I don't know quite what it's going to take to tip Britain over the edge into an actual apology.

We also had the German president asking for forgiveness

in Tanzania over the last week as well.

I mean,

at what point is an actual full sorry going to be going to be given?

Ever, do you think generally it's

around the time that they open the checkbook

It's when it's when the apology is is accepted and it's like we're very sorry for

how many did we take

I guess there's extra zero for that.

I do I do I do think the Germany though trying to like sneak an apology to any other culture in the middle of an Israeli war is kind of just it feels like it's it's trying to sneak it in.

You know, just

like, hey, don't look, but by the way, we also fed up Tanzania.

Well, I mean, King Charles said he wanted to deepen his understanding of colonial wrongs perpetrated by the British Empire on a state visit.

This week he was in Kenya.

And that raises for me the question of what actually they teach you in King School, if it's not what British colonies got up to,

the stuff you did when you were owning the world.

And he, like, I thought it was actually quite, when I was reading it, I thought it was quite a good sort of apology because he said lots of things, you know, the wrongdoings of the past, the cause of great sorrow and deep regret.

And I was really like rating it as an apology.

If somebody said that to me as an apology, I would take it.

And then I heard the apology that the Germans gave to the Tanzanians, and I was like, ah, yes, the experts in apologizing.

But also,

like, Germans apologizing for anything has just got to be a step down from the biggest apology they had to do.

Like I feel like they got more practice

What what interested me was that in but both the British and German

near apologies contained the term shared history and I mean that is stretching the meaning of the word share really way past its uh point of maximum elasticity I think.

I mean sh sharing sharing is generally am I am I am I mistaken on this a sort of a two-way process?

I mean, I'm not sure we've quite shared history, did we?

I mean,

I mean,

remember that lovely shared punch we had.

Sure, we invaded you, but you had to be there to be invaded.

Yeah.

But, yeah, I mean, he did, it was unusually direct by British standards.

I mean, you think back to when David Cameron was Prime Minister and

he not only didn't apologize for

the various glitches.

I think he was, I can't remember if it was in India or Pakistan, but he was talking about the Kohi-Nor diamond and said he wouldn't give it back because he didn't believe in returnism.

So not only will we not apologise, but we will also invent completely new terms to justify our lack of apology.

That is how far we're prepared to go.

I would return it, but the store policy said two weeks and it's been centuries.

I think the thing with Charles is that he's, it's like what Ellis said.

He's, we act like, oh, he's just, he just got here, though.

He's just, he's a new king.

It's like, yeah, but he's also 74 years old.

He's not like the young king Charles, just finding his feet as he goes around the colonies.

Like,

you know what happened.

He's not finding his feet.

We all know where their feet are.

They're in their mouths.

Yeah.

You killed your ex-wife for for this mate you're ready

um

he's in his second year of kinging now um uh prince charles doesn't seem to have been sent anything particularly victorious seldom looks uh happy and it's quite hard to be glorious at the best of times when you're in your mid-70s and essentially you're a constitutional Ron Burgundy obliged to read out whatever's plunked in front of you.

So I don't know if our national anthem is working on him quite as well as it worked on his mummy, but he's kinging it up to the best of his abilities.

This was an interesting thing.

He said, Wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the

deepest regret.

And well, as you sort of hinted at, not quite enough sorrow and regret to ever include them on our national history curriculum.

Well, certainly not when I was a child.

But anyway, we're making progress.

We're almost getting to the S of sorry, like the B of bang.

You've got to withdraw your apology on the S of sorry.

The German president, Frank Walter Steinmeier, in Tanzania, asked for forgiveness, particularly

relating to a brutal suppression of a early 20th century rebellion that resulted in more than 300,000 deaths.

And he said, what happened here is our shared history.

Again, that's not...

Sharing is caring.

Let's not forget that.

That's not particularly caring by the sounds of it.

He also talks about colonial amnesia.

And I guess it's like childbirth, isn't it?

You just have to forget the atrocities you perpetrated in previous generations, otherwise, there's no way you'd try to exploit the world again.

It's just

nature.

I think it's a good remedy for imposter syndrome if you read a bit of colonial history and you just think like some idiot got sent somewhere and killed half a million people because they were incompetent at their job.

It makes me feel much more confident about submitting a spec script.

My favorite part of the German Chancellor's List: I want to assure you, we Germans will search with you for answers to the unanswered questions that give you no peace, which is him colonizing

the healing process of a country that he colonized.

They've got the answers, mate.

All you need to do is ask them what the answers are.

As well as state near apologies, Lloyds of London,

the insurance house founded in 1688,

has been accused of reparations washing after responding to a review into its links with the slave trade.

Again, I mean,

history...

This is something we talk about quite a lot in the Bugle and something that is constantly rammed in our faces as humans, essentially.

History was unfortunately absolutely jam-packed with.

And

it's just something that just keeps coming back to us with stories like this.

Lloyds commissioned academics to do research into its shady past.

You know, due credit to Lloyds for doing that, I assume, under extreme pressure.

18 months of research found out that Lloyds had ensured the largest slave ship owners in the early 1800s, used their personal experience with enslavement to work within the slave trade, facilitated relationships between slave ship captains, ship owners, insurance underwriters, and actively protested against abolition.

The research did not aim to quantify the financial wealth that Lloyds made through the slave trade, though I imagine that would have been quite easy to find out.

I can also see the incentives for them not to find out.

Lloyds has formally apologised and said it's committing £52 million towards a program of initiatives, including those that will help people from black and ethnically diverse backgrounds to participate and progress from the classroom to the boardroom,

which is a lovely promise to people of diverse backgrounds.

Now you too can perpetuate the wrongs

that are facilitated by corporate greed.

Like if you're inside the system, you can help make sure that the next demographic group we absolutely profit from the oppression of is not yours.

It's a beautiful thing.

It's a system of a corporation that lets people diffuse responsibility for atrocities through the abstraction of a profit margin that promotes monsters into power and leaves them there because they're good for the bottom line.

I think it's a really nice promise that people of ethnically diverse backgrounds can share in those atrocities.

You know?

Just the way that you can like share responsibility across a corporation so that you can sleep at night because you've only perpetrated one one-thousandth of a war crimelet.

I feel like they're missing the point here by focusing on ethnic diversity in corporate greed.

Because I feel like humanness is melanin agnostic, and the only real diversity I'm interested in seeing at Lloyd's is a diversity of opinion about whether actually money should be the primary metric for human success, or maybe it should be something like not profiting from the enslavement of others.

The £52 million

programme of initiatives.

I mean, again, it's one of these.

£52 million adds a lot of money to you or me.

Maybe not to James after all the money he's creaming off the railway industry now to buy his silence for future wrongs.

But

Lloyd's.

No, no, no, no, Andy.

I've got a promise for that they're going to set up a committee to investigate what happens and see if there's anything that can be done to educate future generations about british travel

um

but the uh lloyds uh i mean it made a big loss in 2022 around about 800 million but it made a profit of 2.3 billion the year before so that's still one and a half billion up over those two years so 52 million i mean that's not a huge amount uh that basically still leaves them with one and a half billion of the one and a half billion that that they made in 2021 and 22.

so

maybe they could find a little bit more

to put towards these things.

Yes, but Andy,

these are just the British slaves.

Oh, they've got slaves all around the world they've helped with that they got to dish it out to now.

We've already got like educational get-togetters from different diversities that help us figure out each other's trauma.

It's called fringe festivals, and there's so many around the world that they got to throw 52 million here, 52 million there.

I'm just amazed amazed that they are shocked by this you were an insurance company in the 1600s what did you think was going to come out of this report why did you not have more money prepared for the eventual shit storm

of people checking the records that you kept like

That's how they find out that you had dealings with slave owners and insured slaving shit.

You're an insurance company.

They checked checked your f ⁇ ing records.

Also, I mean, beyond that,

James, I was just reading the article now.

A ledger from 1807 showed that one underwriter, in short, about a third of all known slave ship voyagers that left England, and his name was Horatio Claggett.

And when you find a name like Horatio Claggett in the past, it's best leave that well alone.

Nothing good can possibly come out of investigating someone called Horatio Claggett.

But again, if you check your list of former employees and a Charles Dickens villain shows up,

surely you go, we better add another zero to the millions we're preparing to get.

In other echoes from history news, well, the Middle East is, well, pretty much nothing but echoes from history, it seems, but it's going futuristic at the moment.

Israel used its arrow missile defense system

to shoot down a ballistic missile blasted off by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

And it hit it outside the Earth's atmosphere in what is being claimed to be the first combat ever to take place in space.

That, of course, is ignoring the Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin little me first, know me first, know me first, know me.

I've written a special speech.

Look at me, I'm a buzzy buzzy bee.

Sorry, Buzz, we're going with my version.

Hey, Buzz, look over there.

Got you.

One small step squabble.

Also, it's ignoring Moonraker, Star Wars, and countless other documentaries about combat in space.

But even so, this is a very exciting new development.

Alice, I know you're a huge fan of technological progress

in war zones.

At last, Andy, one step closer to space atrocities.

One small arrow missile defense system deployment for man, one giant step towards full-on space war for mankind.

Now, at last, children can look at the night sky, and after asking, Daddy, is that a star or one of Elon Musk's 12,000 orbiting Starlink satellites, they can dream of a future where they can set foot on the moon and shoot someone they've never met right in the face for

King Country and Corporation.

I think it's a beautiful thing, Andy.

It's a beautiful thing.

Well, you always see technological progress in any war and eventually, I mean, this is one of the brilliant things about war

as a human hobby, is these things trickle down into civilian life and make everything worthwhile.

So, I mean, could this lead to, you know, the same technology being used for ballistic space-based global delivery systems so that, you know, if I want a new set of Patagonian pencils, they could be blasted to me direct from South America in under an hour using the technology that only war has fostered?

Well, I mean, and these things feed back into each other.

I have a very attractive friend and she can shoot a man down in a bar from space.

I mean, it's amazing to think just five or six hundred years ago, we were still hacking each other to pieces with swords and axes, and now we're playing high-octane space snooker.

I mean, I think that tells us, tells you a lot about our species.

James, what would be the next technological advance you'd like to see in

humanity to each other?

I'd just like something to stop the junk mail

getting through.

Because I've tried the tape on the letterbox that says no junk mail.

I've tried putting up a sign.

I've tried standing in the doorway and putting my best Scottish accent on to say do you speak English?

Can you read?

No junk mail.

And it's still getting through.

So maybe missiles is the next step.

I do want to just give a quick shout out to Mike Rothschild, the Jewish writer in America, who has a book called Jewish Space Lasers.

and other conspiracy theories about my family.

Thoughts and prayers, Mike.

This is not going to help.

This is

definitely going to make you have a very bad month.

It's a very funny book.

I'm sorry that they've come up and cut you off at the knees, so to speak.

In other news related to the Middle East crisis, the United Nations has hired an AI company to fix absolutely everything to do with the Middle East, if I may overstate things massively.

A company called Culture Pulse, which, I mean, I think we should be suspicious of just from its name,

has been hired to sort of simulate scenarios.

Now,

a chap called F.

Laurent Schultz from Culture Pulse has stressed he is not claiming that his AI can fix the Middle East.

And I mean, that's good.

I mean, there is not a computer big and clever enough to untangle that particular nuclear Jeroboam of worms.

He says that the key is that the model is not designed to resolve the situation, it's to understand, analyse and get insights into implementing policies and communication strategies.

Now this in itself is a bit of a concern and surely a huge misunderstanding of the situation because I mean the dangers of understanding analysis and insight

politically, I mean that that little triumvirate of expertise is an absolute no-go area, is it not?

I mean that's that's fundamental to this crisis.

Well also the idea that you can solve the

problems in the Middle East right now by understanding the history of the Middle East,

I feel that has been well and truly disproven by the history of the Middle East.

I feel like the more history there is in the Middle East, the more likely things are to go kablooy.

Also,

feeding in all of the data about what people have done to each other in that particular region of the world into an AI sounds like a plan that is exactly how you would train a real artificial intelligence to write humanity off as a species.

I mean, well, humans have been struggling with the region since 6,000 years ago, give or take, when God, at the end of a no-doubt stressful hectic week, probably on about three or four hours of sleep a night, and let's be honest, he was no Margaret Thatcher, frankly, left the place in a mess from which has never fully recovered.

So

if AI can step into the gaps that God left, maybe it's worth a go.

I mean, the weird part's going to be when the AI starts spinning the rainbow carousel around while processing.

Moving on to a country that lives in the constant echoes of history, the UK now, and well, more another exciting chapter in the decline and fall of this country with Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary.

And I need to check this as we record that she's not yet been sacked.

Still not sacked for whatever reason.

Has been, well, once again,

rubbing her patented brand of chili-infused vinegar into the social wounds of this country.

Let's start with her claim over the weekend that homelessness is essentially a lifestyle choice.

She apparently has plans to crack down on people sleeping on the streets, but in tents, these luxury-demanding snowflakes wanting not just to use our cold, icy British pavements, but to have a flimsy sheet of fabric between them and the damply bone-chilling darkness of winter.

People want it all these days.

But she wants to clamp down on this.

She said on on X, formerly, X, formerly Twitter, formerly before that, just Twitter, she X'd, the British people are compassionate without the hashtag, hashtag not all Brits, which I think was very much needed there.

She said, We will always support those who are genuinely homeless.

The stats don't entirely back that up.

And she said, But we cannot allow our streets to be taken over by rows of tents occupied by people, many of them from abroad, living on the streets as a lifestyle choice.

Now,

we all make lifestyle choices.

Maybe we go to yoga classes, we drink smoothies rather than coffee.

We cut down on overtime to boost our work-life balance if that option is open to us.

We cut down on sugary foods, we take up knitting or martial arts or a combination of the two.

Or we choose to sleep in a tent through the British winter.

I mean, these are all peas in a lifestyle pot, are they not?

Yeah, yeah, the basic boomer interior decor luxe place that I inspected earlier today with its like horrendous reflective glass surfaces.

That's a lifestyle choice, Andy.

I don't think desperately looking for a place to sleep and something to eat counts,

except insofar as it's a not dying lifestyle choice.

I mean, it's quite hard to understand what

if anything, I mean, the mental processes of Azuella Braverman,

because she was criticised not just by homeless charities or not just by opposition politicians, but also by conservative politicians and also by anyone with even partially conscious brain, as well as by dogs, squirrels, snails, amoebas, turnips, and even inanimate objects such as benches and even tents have criticised Bravman for this, despite the extra media attention that tents have been getting as a result.

It's, I mean...

All countries have politicians that make them squirm with embarrassment, but I think Bravman is

right up there at the moment in terms of the most idiotically provocative in the world.

Well, I think it's a testament to the politics of what country you're in, Andy, because in Britain, of course, you go, this politician is deranged.

And in the United States, you go, well, they're probably running for the Republican candidacy.

My favorite part is the quote just after the part you read, where she references the states and goes, unless we stop this, British cities will go the way of places in the US like San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Like,

oh no,

not the two coolest ones.

Ladies and gentlemen, people are having sex and some of them are having orgasms.

Yeah, not the center of technological advancement and the center of cultural advancement in the modern Western world.

No, no.

That's not British.

We don't want that.

You know, I slept on the streets of London about 14 years ago, which was a particularly rough couple of weeks.

And I'd love to blame the Tories.

I mean, partially I do because we were using the same Coke dealer.

And

in some ways, you could say it was a choice.

Or no, addiction.

It's a different discussion.

But I would say it's

my Brits have a very strange understanding, I think, of homelessness and sleeping on the streets.

My mum, when she found out, bought me as a Christmas gift

Down and Out in Paris by George Orwell.

I would say that I think if Suella, rather than, I know she's the funny one in the family, Suella, if she really wants to understand homelessness, I think she should just sleep in a tent

outside number 10

and just haunt Rishi Sunak.

And if she wants to really get into the whole method of it, it maybe put a little cauldron uh outside uh get a couple of cats to walk past um

sacrifice a couple of junior toory bench members you know i think that's already happened to be honest there's a number that you don't see anymore whether that's to do with uh with impending court cases or ritual sacrifice we just don't know we'll let history be the judge of that Do you think that she's trying to get fired?

Well, yeah, so this is this is something.

So following on from these comments about homelessness, she she wrote an article in the Times.

And, you know, sometimes when you tweet something, you might do it in the heat of the moment, or when you say something in an interview, you might not use the exact words that you want.

But in a written article, you have chosen

that exact wording.

And she wrote an article in The Times in which, as Home Secretary, she basically completely undermined the Metropolitan Police.

I think this is further proof that Spravman is unhinged, she's fueling hatred and division, she is wholly offensive and ignorant, she's igniting community tensions and fundamentally she is stupid.

Now,

those are not my words, those were all words of figures from within the Conservative Party.

So that is the extent to which Braverman is finding more barrels to blast through the bottom of.

She is now too much for the Tories.

As a complete tangent,

James,

I was walking past a crystal shop in the small coastal Queensland town that I'm currently inhabiting, and I heard a lady very seriously say to another lady, witchcraft is an art and not a science.

And it took all of the strength in my extremely tired body not to say, it's a craft, lady, it's in the name.

There's been various suggestions that Brevman is now being so deliberately provocative that she's trying to get sacked and make herself the sort of the hero of the Tory right and thus put herself in position to be the next Tory leader because, as we've discussed on this show and we saw with Liz Truss last year, the leader of the Conservatives is not chosen by real democracy, it's chosen by asking around about 80,000 mad people who the maddest candidate is.

But it's put Roshi Schunak in a tricky position.

Either he doesn't sack her and looks weak, or he does sack her and looks weak, and he's going for the middle ground of potentially maybe sacking her.

And it all raises the question: why the f was she there in the first place?

Well, he definitely looks like he's the sub in any relationship.

I mean, that's that's where Britain's Prime Minister is right now.

You mean, you elected like the dude who looks like he was the biggest Harry Potter fan in the world, right up until they told him to put his toys down because he's the British Prime Minister.

I mean, Labour is saying that Breberman should be sacked

because of this growing backlash about her attack on the Metropolitan Police.

You expect that from Labour, but I do think it's like a bright light of rare bipartisanship at this moment of politics that Labour and the Tories can agree that she's a dangerous maniac.

On the subject of dangerous maniacs,

former number 10 incumbent Boris Johnson has, well, we've been having the public inquiry into how the government dealt with the COVID

crisis, and it's emerged that he had offered to be injected with COVID live on national television when he was...

He knows what the people want.

I mean, I guess there's nothing about Boris Johnson that can surprise us if we've followed his career

as we have.

He's a man with a track record of hiding in fridges and the going got not so much tough, but involving some moderate journalistic questioning.

I mean, nothing that he did as Prime Minister really should

surprise us.

But I mean, being injected with an illness on television, I mean, I guess, you know, he knew that we were all getting a bit bored in lockdown and just wanted stuff to watch.

But I mean, was that the right thing to do?

Well, I mean, look, again, first of all, man of the people knows what the people want.

Second of all, he's not, you know, being injected with a dangerous disease.

He's not asking

anything of the mothers of his 18 children that he wouldn't ask of himself.

I'm suggesting that he's the dangerous illness that's been injected into those ladies.

Look, you can put the joke together for yourself.

I'm tired.

It's hot.

At least you didn't make them do it live on television.

I don't know.

That may be coming.

He's got a new show.

Has he got a show coming up on GB News?

He does.

What's he got a show?

What's he got a show?

Isn't he meant to go to court?

Aren't you putting him on trial for stuff?

How does he get a

show?

Well,

if the world has learned anything recently, it's that politicians being on trial need not interrupt their careers.

Well, maybe that's what Suella's doing.

She's just pivoting to

some reality TV show where she goes around being a to the homeless

food news now.

and James, you are our Michelin Starred Restaurants correspondent and you've brought to our attention a story about a Michelin starred restaurant in Belfast in Northern Ireland that has had to announce its closure

because everything has become too expensive.

Yes, thank you Andy.

Like many comedians, I've stolen food from the bins of many a restaurant

after a gig over the years.

And one in Belfast,

that's in Northern Ireland, not Connecticut,

is closing due to the very expected result of becoming too expensive, not just for customers, but also for themselves.

It's a combination of

COVID and a cost of living crisis and all the other things that the Tories are completely ignoring,

which has meant that they're going to have to shut down their restaurant as it is because the costs have just spiraled spiraled out of control, and it's now about a hundred pounds just to get a tasting menu going, which isn't that much to the proper rich restaurant connoisseurs who are listening to the bugle, the champagne socialist crew.

But it is quite a lot, apparently, to the people of Belfast.

And I don't know if you know anything about the history of class warfare in Belfast, Andy, but it can get a bit prickly if your restaurant gets too expensive.

I mean it's obviously a big concern that the restaurant industry has been struggling over the last few years.

And

well the celebrity, American celebrity chef Scluton Malvain has well he's also struggling with

these issues of costs and he's announced the opening of the the Percept

which is a new high-end non-physical fine dining emporium where customers are told the idea of the dish but not given any actual food thus saving money on ingredients kitchen equipment, and any staff to cook the food.

Amongst the dishes on the menu at Percept include a hint of halibut cuddled in a memoir of zucchini served to an ambience of cockled chimeras, and for dessert, a hallucinata of pipe dreamt phantasmagorgonzola with a mind-pickled mirage of beequi wraiths and figgy figments.

So, I guess that's one way around it, just not have any actual food in a restaurant.

Well, that brings us to the end of this week's bugle.

Next week we will look back on the American elections and have an update on the latest from the well court cases that are currently spicing up American politics as we are now what less than a year away from the presidential election next year.

I have something to plug.

We have a bugle live tour in March next year

around

the United Kingdom.

Not all parts of the United Kingdom, but quite a lot of parts of the United Kingdom.

We are in Glasgow, Norwich, Cambridge, Birmingham, Coventry, or the Warwick Arts Centre, which I think is technically Leamington spot.

It's sort of in the middle of nowhere, but anyway, find out where it is.

Leeds, Edinburgh, and Sulphur.

There's also a date in London on the 8th of June next year.

Details are available via the Bugle website.

Chris, anything to add to that?

That was actually pretty smooth, Andy.

Yes, thank you.

For once, nothing to add.

All right, there we go.

So do buy your ticket.

I mean, the ideal Christmas present for anyone is a ticket to see one of those Bugle live shows.

Do come along.

James, what do you have to plug?

I have a rugby podcast, if you're curious how it ended up at the international tournament.

It's called Fair Game, Pacific Rugby Against the World, and it's all about the interactions of politics between world rugby and the Pacific.

Alice?

Patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

I do a weekly writers' meeting, among other things, which is now twice a week because it's so popular and I have still not brought myself to charge any money for it so you can get that for a dollar a month you can get two weekly writers meetings

I'm not good at business

well

you've been hanging around the bugle for too long Alice

yeah also I have a podcast called the gargle which is the sister podcast to this podcast it is the sonic glossy magazine to this bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.

So, if you like listening to this podcast but don't like politics,

it's a weird moment.

I mean, I'm on this week's episode, so if you like listening to this podcast, but you hate Andy, oh,

well, that is a key demographic in our listeners.

If you want to support both the Gargle and the Bugle and join our voluntary subscription scheme, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

And our premium-level level voluntary subscribers now get access to an exclusive monthly ask Andy show.

We are recording the second of these next week so that will be available shortly.

Yes, that's it.

We'll be back next week.

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.