Bugle 4032 – A truly British democracy

Speaker 1 I will be in Australia for the next few weeks, hoping that the cricket can provide the distraction for everyone that it has so successfully provided for me since I was six years old.

Speaker 1 If you want to come to my shows, there is a Bugle Live in Melbourne on the 22nd of December, where I'll be joined by Sammy Shar and Lloyd Langford.

Speaker 1 And I'm doing the Zoltgeist, my stand-up show in Melbourne on the 23rd of December.

Speaker 1 And we've just added a possibly optimistic extra show in Sydney on the 3rd of January. The 2nd of January show is sold out, but please, please, please come on the 3rd.

Speaker 1 My UK tour extension begins begins at the end of january all details and ticket links at andysoltsman.co.uk

Speaker 1 the bugle audio newspaper for a visual world

Speaker 1 hello youlcome to issue four thousand and thirty two of the bugle audio newspaper for an unapologetically visual world for the week beginning Monday, the 12th of June 2017, I am Andy Zoltzmann and the thrumb of the pencil still democraphizes through the nerves in my voting arm after yesterday's Exinobo extravaganza.

Speaker 1 And I'm in London, just literally yards away from where Theresa May, as we speak, has reportedly just finished being cuddled by the Queen, whilst the monarch said to her, don't worry, we all make absolutely colossal unnecessary fuss every now and again, love.

Speaker 1 And whenever you commoners realise you can't hack the big stuff, move over over and let Lizzie take over.

Speaker 1 Joining me this week to officially chronicle the events of Planet Earth so that future generations have an objectively provable record of what the fk actually went on.

Speaker 1 That's what this show has always been about. Firstly, back on the bugle for the first time since the election

Speaker 1 from Radiotopia's very own The Illusionist podcast. Blood Relative of the Year in the annual Bugle Co-Host Awards.
All the way from A, the same womb I used to live in, and B, upstairs in my house.

Speaker 1 house, that couple of weeks. Not the same place.
That couple of weeks in our attic has turned into a couple of weeks with quite a lot of other weeks in between them, Helen.

Speaker 1 It's the woman who puts the lodge into etymological and the linger into linguistics. The fount of all worldly wisdom.
It's Helen Zoltzmann.

Speaker 2 Hello, Andy. Hello.
What a wonderful introduction.

Speaker 1 Thanks, you're welcome.

Speaker 2 Yeah, thank you for recreating our mother's womb in your attic.

Speaker 1 It's very graphic. Right, right.

Speaker 2 A lot of wreckage in there from when you occupied it.

Speaker 1 The graffiti dance.

Speaker 1 That was Richard's fault.

Speaker 1 We spent a long evening watching tele last night.

Speaker 2 We did.

Speaker 2 I wasn't going to stay up and watch it because I made a resolution to myself not to stay up all night watching things that would upset me after in 2002 I watched the Japanese horror film Ringu at 2am

Speaker 2 but then you came running into the room very excited when the exit polls came in I love an exit poll I think more excited than I've ever seen you and And really?

Speaker 2 Running with more energy even than when you were delivering your own son upstairs in the same house.

Speaker 2 And so I sat there to watch it with you and you kept going, Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out.

Speaker 1 Someone's got to say it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And 4-0.

Speaker 1 4-0.

Speaker 2 So I think for you, it was just a sporting event in which people were wearing worse garments.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, that's how I see politics.

Speaker 1 I think a label were 4-0 up at one stage. It looked like an unpregnable.
They should have sat on that lead. Well, they got cocky and tried to get more seats.
They just sat on the 4-0 and taken it.

Speaker 1 Also on Team Bugle this week, for the first time, joining us here in London from across the pond in the USA.

Speaker 1 She set foot in Britain just days ago, and her mere presence here has provoked one of the oddest general elections in British history. That is because of power she wins.
It is a pardon, Anchola.

Speaker 1 Hello. Hello.
Welcome. Welcome.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 I take full credit for the election result.

Speaker 2 You nailed it almost. Almost nailed it.

Speaker 1 Try on it next time.

Speaker 3 It was my first attempt.

Speaker 2 It was not bad, but go for more socialism next time.

Speaker 1 We are recording on Friday, the 9th of June, 2017, making this the north anniversary of the most spectacularly unconvincing victory in British political history.

Speaker 1 As always, a section of this bugle is going straight in the bin.

Speaker 1 This week, a future of British politics section that I'd written 24 hours ago, including, Will a new left-wing party emerge from the wreckage of a now obsolete Labour? Where now for Jeremy Corbyn?

Speaker 1 With some newspapers calling for him to be tried at the International Criminal Court for crimes he could quite easily have committed had he been someone else somewhere else at another time?

Speaker 1 We ask, will Europe now do the right thing and send all their money and 100 head of oxen to sacrifice to our great indomitable imperial leader, the great Theresa May?

Speaker 1 And a poetry section also going in the bin, just in case Lenin does take over on a minority government after the Conservative DUP alliance collapses and he wants to get that new gulag ticking over.

Speaker 1 Those sections in the bin.

Speaker 1 Top story this week, an election that no one won and everyone lost to various different degrees and some people were quite happy with how little they'd lost and other people were quite upset with how little they'd won.

Speaker 1 It was a confusing,

Speaker 1 confusing slab of democracy.

Speaker 2 Isn't that very British though because we don't like grandstand in a victorious way?

Speaker 3 It's a good metaphor for life that you just lose to various degrees. There's no real winner.

Speaker 1 Why could Theresa May not have come out and said that? Instead of all this bullshit about needing stability, if she said, no, this is just a metaphor for life, people.

Speaker 1 Now let us all get on with things we need this clarity of vision from you apana it's lacking in our politics it's because apana is human and theresa may have not had a software update in quite a while not since the 90s how did the uh the uh i mean obviously you had your election last november but how how were the the emo the churn of emotions through that night as it unfolded oh i for you it Well, I would say last night felt like almost like an alternate reality that could have happened.

Speaker 3 Like I was like, oh, this is what would have happened happened if Hillary won. Like we would all be like,

Speaker 1 good.

Speaker 3 Because it was the opposite. It was kind of like, oh, things are worse than we expected.
And then as the night went on, it was like it was like cycling through all the stages of grief

Speaker 3 and coming back to the first one. I remember the next day in New York, everyone was walking around like they had just been dumped or something.

Speaker 1 They'd been dumped by democracy. Yeah.
That was a tough breakup.

Speaker 2 I was in Chicago the day after, and because we'd already been through Brexit five months before, which was a similarly miserable experience, everyone's going, tell me how to feel.

Speaker 2 And I was like, it's the stages of grief. You have to work through it, just submit to it.

Speaker 2 But not today.

Speaker 1 Well, no, and

Speaker 1 I mean, it's a measure of how little was expected of Corbyn and the Labour Party.

Speaker 1 That it sort of felt for them like a victory. even though they still lost by, what, 50 seats?

Speaker 2 In this world, that is what I'll take, Andy.

Speaker 1 I've got to take my non-despair I can get it it was a very odd election in that the Conservatives got basically exactly the same vote share and number of votes as Tony Blair in his biggest triumph in 1997 they got the same 42 and a half percent of the vote as Thatcher in 1983 when she waltzed home with a 144 seat majority more than thatcher in 1987 when she got a 100 seat majority they're resurgent in Scotland where they've basically been spent the last 20 years checking into a mortuary and whacking tags on their own toes and yet the result is a total fing catastrophe for the Conservatives and the Prime Minister clinging to office by some extremely ill-kept fingernails.

Speaker 2 Context is all, it was amazing to me how quickly the Tory Party turned on Teresa, which firstly suggests what a noxious culture there is within the party, but secondly suggests that she has both been shaped by that culture, having been in it for such a long time, and has shaped it, having been in it for such a long time.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it feels like that happens a lot in the Republican Party in the States, that people will put someone up on a pedestal and be like, he's the next,

Speaker 3 you know, he's the next Saviour, and then he does one thing, and they're like, we never liked him.

Speaker 2 I liked very much Anna Soubry's

Speaker 2 victory speech seems wrong. It had the tone of a concession speech, even though she won.
But it went on for many minutes, and it was like a one-woman performance of Abigail's party.

Speaker 2 And in the middle of the night, she looked kind of haunted. And she basically just kept saying, well, Theresa May is a shitpile.
She's a shitpile. I'm paraphrasing.

Speaker 2 She's got to go because she's shit.

Speaker 2 And I thought you're supposed to be on the same team.

Speaker 1 Thank you for interpreting those words for us. You're, of course, an etymological master.

Speaker 2 I just call it like a single.

Speaker 1 Corbyn,

Speaker 1 although he lost, he got as big a share of the vote as Blair in 2001 when he won, way more than David Cameron got in either of his

Speaker 1 two election victories, one of which he actually won. And yet he still lost convincingly.
The Liberal Democrats were a few seats up, but lost.

Speaker 1 Nick Clegg, the former Deputy Prime Minister, still got a pitifully small proportion of the vote, down to 7.2%,

Speaker 1 which is lower even than their disaster performance two years ago. But even given that, they're still woefully underrepresented in terms of seats.
I think they've ended up with 13.

Speaker 1 So in terms of their percentage, so they've managed to do simultaneously slightly better and still fing shitly, and been the victim of

Speaker 1 horrifically fair unfairness. I I can't make head or tail of it.

Speaker 2 And yeah, this is ultimately very British. This is what keeps us modest.
Arrogance undercut with extremely low self-esteem and underachievement.

Speaker 2 I liked how

Speaker 2 John Prescott told everybody that upon the exit polls being published, Rupert Murdoch stormed out of a party at the Times. Rupert Murdoch was about nine million years old.

Speaker 2 Can you really storm at that age? Our dad's quite elderly. When he storms out of somewhere, it's like a tumbleweed slowly blowing across the road.

Speaker 3 I like to think it was like a sustained five minutes minutes of one step at a time and everyone just had to watch.

Speaker 1 Are you saying Rupert Murdoch does not gloriously respect the democratic will of the people who buys newspapers and satellites?

Speaker 1 How could you possibly suggest such a thing? Look, you'll be in the tower by the morning.

Speaker 2 Then you're out it will be free, won't it?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 UKIP suffered a kind of overwhelming defeat that possibly the only thing that might keep them alive by losing by so much that they can start bleating on about how Brexit, meaning Brexit, doesn't mean enough Brexit anymore and Nigel Farage will come back like the

Speaker 1 unslayable vampire that he is to suck on the twitching corpse of British freedom.

Speaker 2 He is the dildo that does not die.

Speaker 1 That sounds like a good product, right?

Speaker 2 Well, that's a separate career for him if only he would take it.

Speaker 2 The mail seemed particularly particularly subdued in its coverage rather than I thought it would lead with some extreme bile, but instead it had some reflective headline. And then above that,

Speaker 2 the banner story was woman gives birth to her own brother.

Speaker 1 Was that a Theresa May story or not?

Speaker 2 I can't tell whether it's a metaphor or some horrific incest that they're selling as a kind of amusement. Right.

Speaker 1 Have you been impressed with our media since you got here?

Speaker 3 I feel like it feels a

Speaker 3 great deal more measured than our media.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 short of hearing just about this birth story.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 maybe I've been filtering out the more ostentatious stuff.

Speaker 2 If you haven't been looking at the print media, then you might think it was reasonably august.

Speaker 3 Yes, I think that's what it is.

Speaker 3 Because I know there's the Daily Mail.

Speaker 2 I thought the print media was supposed to die. When will it bloody die?

Speaker 2 My friend Simon, it was his birthday on election day, so as a treat for himself, he went to the news agents and bought every copy of The Mail, The Express, and The Sun and put them in the recycling bin.

Speaker 2 Do they have junk candidates in the US like we have? Because when they were announcing that Theresa May had won her seat in Maidenhead again, there's a whole row of people.

Speaker 2 There was someone called Lord Buckethead, who had this big black tube on his head, and someone else wearing an Elmo costume.

Speaker 2 So whenever the BBC replayed the footage of Theresa May winning, there was someone putting his Elmo head back on, because obviously it's really hot.

Speaker 3 Oh, that's so good. We definitely do in the, we sort of like the same way American Idol has those first few rounds where it's just for fun to see who can really not sing.

Speaker 3 I think we have, we had like the rent is too high guy

Speaker 3 and, you know, Rick Perry is always good for a laugh.

Speaker 1 But no one in a massive Elmo costume.

Speaker 3 No, I wish we had more colorful characters, but they're usually, it's more the words they say that end up being colorful.

Speaker 1 Last night, Tim Farron beat a fish finger. Yes, I saw that.

Speaker 1 Barely. Mr.

Speaker 1 An actual fish finger?

Speaker 1 Mr. Fishfinger.

Speaker 2 An anthropomorphized fish finger. But what I love is that the announcer announces them all with equal seriousness.
So in Maidenhead, it was like, May, Teresa, 30,000 and blah, blah, blah. Buckethead.

Speaker 1 Lord, seven.

Speaker 1 Elmo, he only picked up three votes, sadly. Which suggests that it's not really a big issue for the voting party for Blake.

Speaker 1 They're quite happy without Elmo for whatever reason. I don't know how Mr.
Fishfinger did, but

Speaker 1 didn't win. But Farron had Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, clung on to his seat narrowly.

Speaker 1 And that would have been a disappointing way to get Tufts out of office if 20 people voting for a giant fish finger changed the course of political history. Mr.
Fishfinger got 309 votes. 309.

Speaker 1 He lost his deposit, but that's a pretty tidy effort, though.

Speaker 3 That's not a bad showing for a fish finger.

Speaker 2 Yeah, because they can't speak.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 And fish don't even have fingers, so it's really a stretch on many levels.

Speaker 1 I don't know if it was something to do with EU fishing quotas.

Speaker 1 I don't know, he's raising the issues that other politicians are scared to address.

Speaker 2 I wonder whether he's run before.

Speaker 2 Also, are all these novelty candidates male? Is there something in the male psyche?

Speaker 1 There does seem to be a preponderance. I mean, it is.

Speaker 2 Obviously, Theresa May is put on a costume of a human.

Speaker 2 I like how there was that woman running against Jeremy Corbyn for the communists, and she got seven votes, but she seemed very happy to have been beaten by another communist.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's good.

Speaker 3 That seems like a very communist reaction.

Speaker 2 Exactly. They're all in it together.
And also, there was that moment that Jeremy Corbyn tried to high-five Emily Thornbury, but she wasn't high-fiving back, so he basically slapped her in the boot.

Speaker 1 No! Oh, no.

Speaker 2 Good times.

Speaker 1 Dratus, good times. That's what democracy is all about.

Speaker 2 It was maybe a hundred years ago, Andrew.

Speaker 1 Don't go back.

Speaker 1 For Theresa May, she essentially, she called this election for absolutely no reason. She put the future of the country on the roulette table, thought, right, this is going to come down on blue.

Speaker 1 And then it came down on either red or black, essentially. So it was a bad bet.

Speaker 1 And as you've probably heard upon it, her whole shtick was this strong and stable. Right.

Speaker 1 phrase which she repeated i mean even in defeat essentially i mean she's been essentially she's shown the strength strength and stability of a soft-boiled egg on a circus tightrope.

Speaker 2 It's very strong and stable to have three major national votes in the space of two years, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Yes, and now, as we record, she's just

Speaker 1 visited

Speaker 1 Lizzie in

Speaker 2 Buckingham Palace. Girls' night? Zoo.

Speaker 3 Girls, morning after.

Speaker 2 Fuck out the Lambready.

Speaker 3 Does it symbolise anything?

Speaker 3 What does it mean when you go visit

Speaker 3 the Queen?

Speaker 2 Technically, the queen can refuse anything that parliament wants to do, so parliament has to go and request that she can form a new government.

Speaker 3 Oh, I see.

Speaker 2 And because this one is an uncertain result, she doesn't have the outright majority, then the queen could tell her to off. Right.
But the queen is 91, it doesn't really give a shit.

Speaker 1 So she visited the queen, and has come out and said in a speech in Downing Street, proclaiming her not so much her victory as her not having lost by 100%.

Speaker 1 What the country needs now more than ever is certainty.

Speaker 1 And she said as she accepted the victory in her constituency that the country needs stability now at the start of these Brexit negotiations.

Speaker 1 Something she should perhaps have thought of before stabilising the nation by splunking her micro-mandate in favour of an even less convincing nano-mandate.

Speaker 1 If there is one f ⁇ ing lesson that you should have learned from managing not to win a certain victory, is that certainty is fing uncertain these days. And I think we've probably had enough of it.

Speaker 1 We've had enough of experts and certainty in this country.

Speaker 2 Are you sure that because she says things like Brexit means Brexit and other totally vapid semantic constructions that certainty is certainty and uncertainty is uncertainty would not be better.

Speaker 1 Well there's very gnomic utterances aren't they? She's like a

Speaker 2 broken Delphic oracle.

Speaker 2 Day the drugs went bad.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so she stood on this

Speaker 1 great

Speaker 1 strong and stable leadership platform. And then her campaign was the equivalent of a new school teacher trying to get control of a disruptive classroom by sticking an I'm a loser sign on her arm back,

Speaker 1 then turning around, facing the blackboard, pointing at her back with one hand and writing, I left my last job because the children teased me on the blackboard.

Speaker 2 This sounds like something you had personal experience with when you were an 11-year-old boy.

Speaker 1 In terms of ineffective slogans of history, I mean, this is this is right up there for me.

Speaker 1 You know, most useless political slogans of history.

Speaker 1 The Richard III's My Horse, My Horse, My Kingdom for a Horse. Wasn't that just economically illiterate?

Speaker 1 I mean, that's just short-termism of the worst kind in politics, isn't it? Just selling this like Gordon Brown and the gold all over again. The Hamlet's to be or not to be, that is the question.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes. That's too vague for a political leader, don't you think?

Speaker 1 You want concrete policies, not existential quandaries.

Speaker 2 Well, I thought he was just uh in line for leadership.

Speaker 1 Right. You think he's keeping it nicely, electably vague?

Speaker 2 Yeah, because then you appeal to both sides.

Speaker 1 Um, the Tories in 2005, their famous, Are You Thinking What We're Thinking? to which the electorate responded.

Speaker 1 Was that really their slogan? Yes, and the electorate responded, I f ⁇ ing hope not.

Speaker 1 Now, of course, make America great again. Where for you upon does that stand in the pantheon pantheon of great slogans from politicians?

Speaker 3 Well, I think it's already,

Speaker 3 I mean, I hate it.

Speaker 3 I won't mince words about that, but I think it is also vague, but it's vague in a way that still, like if you're like a sports fan or something, you'll be like, yeah, even though you don't know exactly what it means.

Speaker 3 You're just like... It's like when people start to fight and then everyone's like, fight, fight, fight, fight.
You just start yelling and then you're like, yeah, I guess I'm on this team now.

Speaker 1 To be fair to Trump,

Speaker 1 he's nailing it. I mean, he's successfully carrying out the necessary phase one, which is making America shit.

Speaker 1 So it can then become at some point in the future great again.

Speaker 3 Better than shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this is just phase one.

Speaker 2 Well, that's comforting. Yep.

Speaker 1 Thank you really.

Speaker 1 Stalin's famous vote for me or I'll kill you slogan. I thought it was pretty effective.

Speaker 1 Very fragile message. As I've said before,

Speaker 1 if you play the strong and stable card that hard, it is easily undermined if you do things that do not exactly exude that strengthiest stability.

Speaker 1 Like essentially, as you did, hiding behind your soap whilst all the other leaders are having a TV debate saying, I'm busy getting shit done.

Speaker 1 Sorry, that wasn't. Just cut that bit out.
I hadn't quite finished writing that.

Speaker 1 The later gambit the Tories went with was by attacking Labour by saying there is no magic money tree.

Speaker 1 This seemed to be the height of sophistication of the economic debates that we had in the build-up to this election. There is no magic money tree.

Speaker 2 Yeah, George Osborne cut it down in 2010.

Speaker 1 Well, look, I mean, I don't know. I'm not an economics expert.

Speaker 2 You wrote a book about economics in 2008.

Speaker 1 Many people have written books about economics who are not economic experts, and I am amongst the least expertatious of them.

Speaker 2 Yours is taught in universities.

Speaker 1 Where do they get copies, though?

Speaker 1 Pound land.

Speaker 1 I mean, just because it's sold so fast in the shops that it was almost impossible to get a hold of a physical copy.

Speaker 1 Still available on the internet.

Speaker 1 Also,

Speaker 1 I think voters heard this. There is no magic money tree.
And then they looked at the city of London and the profits and tax contributions of some of the large global corporations,

Speaker 1 the benefits of our workforce and economy, the amount of money flying around in global hedge funds, the wages and assets of the hyper-rich, and they thought, you know what?

Speaker 1 I think there might be a magic money tree somewhere if you really look hard.

Speaker 1 Someone has at least, at the very least, got a magic money shrub, and we could ask them for like a little cutting off it, see if we could make it grow. So, I think that's one of the reasons the Tories

Speaker 2 hit home because of the deforestation they've been doing.

Speaker 1 The deforestation of magic money trees, very short-sighted. But, all in all, and you know, we are recording this whilst the uh, we've not really had full time to digest the um

Speaker 1 whatever has happened.

Speaker 1 Who has, Andy? Yeah, who has?

Speaker 1 Um, I mean, it still does need now seem that what Brexit means is now even less clear than when it just meant Brexit.

Speaker 2 Oh good. They've managed to spin out a whole other series of that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was essentially

Speaker 1 electorally

Speaker 1 Theresa May not so much missing an open goal as building a goal when she thought no one else was on the pitch and still managing not only to blast the ball so wide of the goal that it hit the corner flag, but then the ball then rebounding back up the pitch into her own goal.

Speaker 1 That is how much of an own goal this was.

Speaker 2 That is why people won't broadcast women's sports.

Speaker 1 Of course, not the first Tory to miss an open goal in recent elections.

Speaker 1 David Cameron hammered one against the post in 2010, but then the ball ricocheted in, luckily, of the Liberal Democrats, and he ran away celebrating as if he'd just curled in a pearler from 25 yards.

Speaker 1 And you get any references, Helen?

Speaker 2 Thrilled by them. Right.

Speaker 1 You are such a disappointment to me. And again, in

Speaker 1 that's my new catchphrase, whenever you're on the show. And again, in 2015, Cameron trickled the ball towards the goal.

Speaker 1 It was maybe just dribbling over the line but then Ed Miliband sprinted back in defence and hammered it into his own net. There's been some great goals in British electoral football.

Speaker 2 How come they didn't have Jeremy Varney on a big computer generated football pitch instead of that fake House of Commons that he was spending all night in alone?

Speaker 1 Yes it was

Speaker 1 if you didn't see the

Speaker 1 so you didn't see the BBC coverage. There was some it was kind of like a I don't know it was like a 1990s computer game he seemed to be stuck in.
Yeah it was like a second life House of Commons

Speaker 2 with various bits of infographic happening around him. One broadcaster by himself for many hours.
So they could have given him any environment. He could have had a total pleasure dome.

Speaker 2 Instead, he went to a worse approximation of a real place he could have probably been in.

Speaker 3 Oh, that's so strange. What if there was a Second Life Parliament? He's still trapped in it.

Speaker 2 No one has busted him out.

Speaker 1 Should we not be run by a Second Life Parliament? Would that not be more efficient and make more sense? If we can just outsource human politics to

Speaker 1 second life. Yeah,

Speaker 3 who would want to do it, though?

Speaker 1 There must be kids who'll do it.

Speaker 3 Outsource it to children.

Speaker 1 Just get some Indonesian children. So you're off the trainers for the week.
You can run our parliament instead. Would it be any worse?

Speaker 2 I would take the risk with it. Would take it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Do you think that this election result indicates that people who voted for Brexit have maybe changed their mind about it?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it's a bit hard to say that because now

Speaker 1 we've seen in polls people

Speaker 1 not so much in favour of Brexit but accepting that Brexit was voted for.

Speaker 1 But I still I don't think they've particularly changed their mind about it being a needlessly idiotic high-risk gambit of essentially sticking a finger in a plug to see what happens.

Speaker 1 What do you think Helen?

Speaker 2 I thought it was refreshing that the election campaigns turned out not to be about disgusting racism.

Speaker 1 Just for a little while.

Speaker 3 Just for a nice change of case.

Speaker 2 Instead, we're about real things like healthcare. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You're in favour of healthcare.

Speaker 2 Oh, thumbs up to healthcare.

Speaker 1 There's enough people alive in Britain as it is. Corbyn

Speaker 1 said to the BBC that it was pretty clear who's won this election.

Speaker 2 What does he know that no one else does?

Speaker 2 The seven-vote communist woman has got a big stash of ballot papers in a bag.

Speaker 1 Yes. I mean, Labour has had certain issues with mathematics during the course of this campaign, but yeah fundamentally no one won this election.

Speaker 1 Maybe democracy did democracy win this election or is it just lying in the corner looking confused rocking backwards and forwards like a bear in a zoo? Maybe it's did British values win the election?

Speaker 1 The British values of calling bullshit on obvious bullshit. Maybe that's the

Speaker 3 win. I mean democracy won in the sense that everyone voted for their own interests and it appears there's no majority of interests.

Speaker 1 Labour did well by comparison with the last time, by comparison with how they're expected to do and by comparison with how the majority of the media told them they were going to do.

Speaker 1 But winning, I mean, maybe they won against themselves, which in the grand tradition of lefty infighting is quite a good result.

Speaker 2 If maybe they'd had more than a month to do some decent labour-ing, then they would have won. But they pulled it together at the last minute.

Speaker 2 Like when you organised your wedding on three months' notice.

Speaker 1 I organised it the other wedding. Well,

Speaker 1 I didn't so much organise it as

Speaker 1 saying yes, dear.

Speaker 2 You got a tie.

Speaker 1 I got a tie, and I drew a cartoon for the invitation, and and that was about it.

Speaker 2 But on such short notice, well done.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Helen.

Speaker 3 My favourite thing I learned from reading British election coverage was that the reason some people don't like Jeremy Corbyn is like he's had sort of extremist ties in the past, but also that

Speaker 3 he makes jam.

Speaker 1 Well, you can't trust someone who preserves fruit. That's the first rule of democracy, isn't it?

Speaker 3 It's like, does that mean you're out of touch?

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's vegetarian and rides a bike.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, he's hugely out of touch. You can buy jam in the shops these days.
If you don't know that, how's he going to run the economy?

Speaker 2 I like that he's been going around the last few hours, though, like he's Mick Jagger or something. Just arms in the air.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, Theresa May also claiming victory is a bit like Captain Smith smashing into the iceberg and saying, yes, first, beat those losers on the Carpathia. Get in.

Speaker 2 News from our home county of Kentandy.

Speaker 2 On the Monday before the election, a gigantic effigy of Theresa May appeared on the white cliffs of Dover, several stories high, flipping the V at Europe and draped in a massive union jack.

Speaker 2 And nobody knows who put it there. When people were putting up the massive scaffold for this huge effigy, they said, Oh, we're getting it ready for filming.

Speaker 1 And because everyone's like, Oh, filming,

Speaker 2 they just left them to it. They did not have permission.
It's on National Trust land. Oh, right.
And then, and then on Wednesday, upon it, have you ever heard of the Cernabas giant? No.

Speaker 2 It is a 180-foot

Speaker 2 drawing etched into a hillside.

Speaker 2 So it's like a chalk outline of a naked man holding a club.

Speaker 1 There is one, I'm just going to get a picture of the Cernabas Giant up for you now. And having never seen him before, what would you say is the most distinctive part of his anatomy?

Speaker 3 I would say his

Speaker 1 anatomical club versus the

Speaker 1 he does have what can only be described as eleven metre long genitalia.

Speaker 2 Well, on Wednesday,

Speaker 2 someone wrote um so o also on Monday, uh someone wrote Teresa in massive wooden letters along his penis.

Speaker 2 And again, they said, We don't know who did this prank, but Cernabas Giant, also National Trust property.

Speaker 1 So I think

Speaker 2 we know where should be we should be looking. Because also the National Trust went, No, this is awful vandalism.
We've got to find out who did it.

Speaker 2 They they're so po-faced about everything Cernabas Giant that I think it's the perfect smokescreen for them to do these big pranky pranks.

Speaker 1 Well, there is a...

Speaker 1 Do you know the origin of the Cernabas Giant?

Speaker 2 Do I do I know that? Do I?

Speaker 2 I know that it is not nearly as old and mythical as people pretend. It's a couple hundred years old.

Speaker 1 Yes. Well, I was reading it according to no less a source than the Founder of All Knowledge, Wikipedia.

Speaker 1 It

Speaker 1 probably dates from the late 17th century and perhaps originated as political satire.

Speaker 2 Oh, so it was one of your forebears?

Speaker 1 Essentially, yeah, it's very much in the same spirit of

Speaker 1 satire as the bugle itself.

Speaker 2 I met a white witch once who claimed that she got pregnant by,

Speaker 2 you're not supposed to go and walk on the Cernapus giant, but she snuck onto the property,

Speaker 2 then lifted up her skirts and sat on his penis. And

Speaker 2 lo and behold, was pregnant. And later she admitted to me she had already been early stages pregnant when she went to do that, but it's nice to have it confirmed.

Speaker 1 Oh, right, okay.

Speaker 3 How do you sit on it if it's etched into a

Speaker 2 you just sit on that patch of penis grass?

Speaker 2 So it used to be quite that. I think that's why they had to fence it off because so many people were going there as a kind of fertility thing.
And then giving birth to chalk lumps.

Speaker 1 Was that in the uh in the DVD extras of the Wizard of Orchestra?

Speaker 1 And he wasn't chalk lumps, uh, cricketer who played for a chalky lumps.

Speaker 3 Not from you, Chris.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's I don't know quite what kind of political satire in the 17th century giant naked man with a stonking erection and a massive club.

Speaker 2 Nothing has changed. Right.
Okay. Except the club.
He'd probably have something else now, wouldn't he?

Speaker 1 Something to do with farming quotas, probably.

Speaker 1 Well, you mentioned Kent. There were a lot of shock results at this election.
Labour lost Mansfield after 94 years. The SNP leader in the House of Commons, Angus Robertson, got the balloty boot.

Speaker 1 Nick Cleggs, we mentioned, lost his seat. But most shocking of all, the Conservatives lost Canterbury, which has been a Conservative seat, I think, since the early 19th century.

Speaker 1 I mean, they basically haven't voted for anyone else

Speaker 1 since Thomas of Beckett was murdered in 1171, I think. And they thought, no, we can't have any of this nonsense, bloody lefties.
And so it's basically been Tory forever. And they lost

Speaker 2 in Kent.

Speaker 2 Kent is now a blue doughnut with a red hole.

Speaker 1 The MP was Sir Julian Brazier, Man of the People, whose father was in the military. He went to Wellington College and Brasenose College, Oxford,

Speaker 1 worked in corporate finance, was a management consultant and has been MP for Canterbury since 1987 and is called Julian. He is the Toriest man in Britain.

Speaker 1 It is not biologically possible to be more of a Conservative than that.

Speaker 1 28 years in

Speaker 1 30s.

Speaker 1 30 years in Parliament, backbencher of the year in 1996.

Speaker 2 Backbencher of the Year. How do you win that? Just by doing nothing.

Speaker 1 Doing as little as possible, honestly.

Speaker 2 Not snoring too loudly.

Speaker 1 Opposed to gay marriage

Speaker 1 which is still I mean to me an odd position in the 21st century.

Speaker 2 Even Theresa May voted for gay marriage.

Speaker 1 Wow when you are being beaten by Theresa May in an issue of social liberalism you've got to take a long long hard bath with yourself.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I mean you would have thought that even someone in even an MP in Kent would have learnt that after what, three million years of human existence that who puts what in or near whom in the privacy of of their own bedrooms probably is not an Armageddon level threat to the future of the planet but you know Kent is Kent but how did the Tories lose this seat this seems

Speaker 1 this seems unfathomable to me I did a computer simulation before the election of how the Conservatives could lose Canterbury and he would have had to do all of the following one

Speaker 1 put leaflets through every single letterbox in his constituency saying, f ⁇ you, you f ⁇ ing plebs. I don't know why they stopped with Thomas Abecket.

Speaker 1 They should have done away with a f ⁇ ing a lot of you. Two,

Speaker 1 he needed to drive around Canterbury in an election van with a loud hailer shouting, I can afford to have you all bumped off by an ex-KGB hitman. Vote for me or Eagle's gonna get busy.

Speaker 1 Three, he'd have had to fly over Canterbury in an old Luftwaffe junkers and bomb the living shit out of the cathedral whilst trailing a banner saying we need some space for a new casino.

Speaker 1 And four, he would have had to urinate on an effigy of the Queen while screaming, why can't you be a real man like Margaret? Then and only then

Speaker 1 could the Tories have lost Canterbury according to my simulation. And yet it happened.

Speaker 2 I think all of those might have uh saved his votes.

Speaker 1 Do you reckon? Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm wondering whether it is A, students in Canterbury or B, I think the constituency includes Whitstable, where a lot of Londoners have moved to. Right.
Polluting Kent with their fancy lefty stock.

Speaker 2 And oysters.

Speaker 1 And oysters. I mean th there's so many upheavals now, Apana, in in politics.
How do you see how do you see the next US? What can America pull out of the bag to shock?

Speaker 1 Because it seems to me now that people don't so much vote collectively in democratic elections anymore as just perform pranks

Speaker 1 with TV pundits. That seems to be what it is.
So what's America got up its sleeve for next time?

Speaker 2 You already had the biggest political prank of our lifetimes.

Speaker 1 What a funny, funny joke.

Speaker 3 Some people would argue we're

Speaker 3 heading towards anarchy now.

Speaker 3 Some people would argue we don't have a government right now. We have sort of a reality show in place of a government.

Speaker 2 Yeah, given the people that are in there, it's good that that's not a government.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 Hopefully, it'll be cancelled after one season.

Speaker 1 Well, it seems to be getting quite good ratings just in terms of the number of people watching it. Even though they're not necessarily enjoying it, the advertisers are happy.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's basically branded content, isn't it? Yes.

Speaker 1 There is, although Theresa May has said she will carry on, there is a possibility that she could be forced out of office quite quickly.

Speaker 1 If she goes on the next month, she will become the shortest-serving Prime Minister since Andrew Bona Law, headline star of last week's reverse chronological order prime ministerial pun run, who lasted a disappointing 211 days before retiring ill in 1923 to concentrate on spending more time popping his clogs.

Speaker 1 And she...

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 just don't shoot the messenger. It's all there in the history books.

Speaker 1 And she will become the first first pm if she's out within a month to clock out of the less than a year bubbling up in the downing street jacuzzi which was installed of course by viscount palmerston in the 1850s first to last less than a year since sir alec douglas hume was voted out in 1964 and perhaps the prime minister had the least impact the least lasting impact on this country since bertie the tortoise stepped in as interim prime minister for a couple of weeks whilst herbert asquith went on a mate stag weekend in 1911 and was arrested and jailed for 12 days in a beta for climbing onto a fountain with his trousers around his ankles, singing a hit song, Touch Me, Touch Me, I Want to Feel Your Body.

Speaker 1 Covered, of course, many decades later by the famously embossomed model and pop starlet Samantha Fox. So it could be a piece of history coming up.

Speaker 1 American news now, and well, I mean, for fans of people watching quite dry testimony in official settings, it's been

Speaker 1 an exciting, exciting day yesterday.

Speaker 3 I think it was the most exciting testimony people have seen in a while.

Speaker 3 I saw someone comment that if there's anyone this is good news for, it's Bill Cosby because his trial is happening at the same time and you know that would be blowing up the airwaves if this wasn't.

Speaker 1 Right. So James Comey, the involuntarily retired

Speaker 1 FBI chief, he's basically his testimony, if I can sum it up, and correct me if I'm wrong, if you may summarize his testimony in six words, it's, oh yeah, he's full of shit. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Is that about, I mean, is there any more detail we need to know over here, or is that that pretty much sums it up?

Speaker 3 I think that pretty much sums it up. Like, I don't think there were any bombshells dropped yesterday.
It was more just like, yes, he's lied on multiple occasions. Right.
And I can confirm that.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's not going to bring

Speaker 1 the Trump administration crashing instantly to ground?

Speaker 3 No, not in the way people hoped. I mean, a lot of things he, I watched some of the testimony and he just kept being like, I can't answer that in an open setting.
And he said that so many times.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was quite annoying, wasn't it? Yeah. Boring.

Speaker 1 You can't hint at these little items of gossip and they're not.

Speaker 2 Ooh, chase me, boo.

Speaker 2 Rubbish.

Speaker 3 But people say he likes doing these like dramatic announcements. Like it's he's like that.
So I don't know if he's just pacing himself. He's like, they got enough for this week.

Speaker 3 They got something big for next week.

Speaker 1 What I found interesting was that the guys

Speaker 1 interviewing him, cross-examining him. Interrogating? Interrogating, there was a lot of, I'm such a fan of your work.
They were kind of like,

Speaker 1 you know, kind of groupies.

Speaker 1 Do you mind if we can we get a selfie after this?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Will you sign my brain?

Speaker 3 I've been following you for years.

Speaker 1 Trump also had a bit of a barney with our London mayor, Sadiq Khan, in the aftermath of the horrific terrorist attacks in London.

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 yeah it's very depressing this for me because amongst all the emotions that you go through when another terror attack happens the horror the incomprehension of the pointlessly nihilistic futility of it all fear

Speaker 1 concern for the future

Speaker 1 attempted you know we try to be strong and defiant now there is a new emotion which is dread about what the f Donald shitting Trump is gonna say about it and he duly stepped up to the plate to squirt his rancorously delusional vinegar into the still raw emotional wounds London was suffering.

Speaker 1 Is there any event to which he will have the dignity to shut the f up? Or is that asking too much?

Speaker 3 I don't think so. Like, it almost seems surprising that people are still surprised that he has the most inappropriate reaction to everything because his track record has only been that.

Speaker 2 He tends to be quiet when white supremacists commit murders.

Speaker 3 Right. No, there's definitely things he avoids talking about that also speaks very loudly to who he is.
But

Speaker 3 I think I read his tweets to the mayor and I was just like, I'm horrified, but at the same time, you have a resume full of this type of work, so I know you're good at it.

Speaker 2 He is consistent. Yes.

Speaker 3 He is

Speaker 3 consistent in his insanity.

Speaker 2 Congratulations.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much. We're so proud right now to have him representing our country.

Speaker 1 And we're all proud of you.

Speaker 1 Well done, the American electoral system.

Speaker 1 Your emails now and an update.

Speaker 1 As we reported a couple of weeks ago,

Speaker 1 someone amongst our listenership took the mature decision to sign us up to the Labour Party's emailing list under the name of Dick Wads.

Speaker 1 So the Bugle Podcasts inbox, to which you are all welcome to email your emails, to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com is full of stuff from the Labour Party,

Speaker 1 such as yesterday, Dick Wads. Have you voted Labour yet? If so, amazing.

Speaker 1 Very passive-aggressive, that.

Speaker 1 In big red letters, today's the day, Dick Wads. Make sure you cast your vote.

Speaker 1 From Jeremy Corbyn himself. Ready, question mark, Dick Wads.
Together we've given Britain a choice.

Speaker 1 And perhaps most entertainingly, a thank you message at 10.22 p.m. last night, so what, 22 minutes after the exit polls came out and showed that Corbyn had pulled

Speaker 1 a bit of a, you know, a rabbit out of the bag that was not quite as dead as people feared.

Speaker 1 There it is, says the email under the subject, thank you from just the Labour Party. There it is.

Speaker 1 It has been an incredible effort today, and we've done everything we can. Brackets, apart apart from actually win.
All that's left to say is, dot, dot, dot, dot, thank you, Dick Watts.

Speaker 1 Well, I can only thank and complain to the person who signed us up for those.

Speaker 1 Please, the rest of you, do not take this as an encouragement to do similar.

Speaker 1 After what happened, I know it's too late, but after what happened last time with our old email address that I had to change because of the absolute jeroboam of filth that has been spewing onto its pages for years now.

Speaker 1 When the fk will you learn? Yes, certainly. Please, no dating services.
None. Anyway, do keep your emails coming in to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.
Oh, this this

Speaker 1 was sent in by uh Rob.

Speaker 1 Um on the uh thought I thought you might like the below story, which includes the following brilliant quote. And this is about Rex Tillerson going to New Zealand.

Speaker 1 I've been in motorcades for a couple of years now. I've never seen so many people flip the bird at an American motorcade as I saw today.

Speaker 1 The world will not take it lying down.

Speaker 2 I like that he specifies American. And this is, of course, there was a Peruvian motorcade that was really the one to beat.
But that's making America great again, isn't it? It is.

Speaker 3 That you start with everyone flicking you off.

Speaker 3 And then from there, it's just up.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 1 That brings us towards the end of this bugle. A few geeks to plug.
I'm doing Saturdays for Haye at the Underbelly on the 20th to send your requests in for that.

Speaker 1 Quite a lot of things to be talking about politically.

Speaker 1 On the 27th of June, I'm doing a fundraising gig to raise money for my children's primary school at the Hideaway in Streatham with Jeremy Hardy, Sophie Hagen, and Johnny and the Baptists.

Speaker 1 And we've got the live bugle on the 13th of July, starring Helen Zaltzmann.

Speaker 2 Our mum and dad are going to come to watch this.

Speaker 1 Yes, our parents will be starring in the crowd, probably asleep, I would imagine.

Speaker 2 Yeah, listen out for that.

Speaker 1 That's also at the underbelly on the 13th of July.

Speaker 2 You'll also be able to hear our dad going, what is this shit?

Speaker 1 This is crip.

Speaker 2 What is it?

Speaker 1 He has a much more South African accent when you do

Speaker 1 plays it up for the mic. He does.
Right.

Speaker 1 Also, I'm doing a couple of weeks in Edinburgh from about the 13th of August. I should probably know this by now.
And there's a couple of live bugles up there. Details on the internet.

Speaker 1 You can see Apana in Soho until, what, tomorrow?

Speaker 3 Tomorrow.

Speaker 1 So if you... Are there tickets left for tomorrow? I think so, yeah.
Yeah, so if you listen to this by tomorrow, which is by the time you listen to this, possibly today.

Speaker 1 Saturday is the last day.

Speaker 2 Are there tickets available for Friday?

Speaker 1 If you listen to this really quickly, you should listen to this extremely quickly.

Speaker 1 So that's at Soho Theatre. Listen to Helen on the illusionist podcast part of the Radiotopia Stable.
I will be back next week with further updates on...

Speaker 1 Oh, we'll probably have another election on Thursday, I would think.

Speaker 1 What else would we do?

Speaker 1 Perm election. Please bring it on.
Bring it on. You can never vote enough.
I've voted so many times on Thursday. It was awesome.
Everywhere I could put an X in a box. Until next time, Buglers.

Speaker 1 Goodbye. The Bugle is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, made possible with great support from our founding sponsors, the Knight Foundation, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork.