Can We Restore Decency To Politics? | Iain Dale

0:00I've done hundreds of interviews on lots of different channels, but only once has a presenter threatened to evict me from their live show. Now, when I first started this program, I said that I was going to bring people on that I disagreed with. And hands up with you, we haven't done that a whole lot. And that's because people say to me a lot, they really enjoy the fact that these conversations are nuanced conversations, they're complex conversations. We get into the detail of things and often I'm talking with people I agree with. Today, though, is a mixture of the two because I've got someone on who does have complex conversations.

0:30They're a presenter on LBC who I disagree with on most things. But what I would give them credit for is I do think they're thoughtful and I do think they give space to other people. This person has interviewed many, many prime ministers, nearly every single frontline politician you could possibly imagine. So I'm really delighted to have in my studio today, LBC host, writer and journalist, Ian Dale. This episode is sponsored by Crowdfunder. Bring your bold idea to life at crowdfunder.co.uk forward slash bold.

1:26in the background. It's completely shifted the way we work. Create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday.com. Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things. So why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with stamps.com. Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90 % with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com. Go to Stamps.com and use code podcast to try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. Ian, thank you very much for coming on.

2:08Pleasure. You regularly have politicians on your show, including myself, and I'm never guilty of this, but whatever the first question is, we will say whatever we came on to say anyway. So I want to ask you about your book. Okay. so you've got this book coming out have I said too much why have you chosen to write and release this book because it's deeply personal well it is a personal book and it is an autobiography I never intended to write an autobiography on the basis I thought who would read it and I may now regret doing it but a fair few people said to me well why don't you write the story of your life because you've been involved in lots of different things in politics in the media you've met a lot of interesting people so somebody said to me last I think it was last January well just write a couple of chapters and if you enjoy it continue and i did and i did so here it is it has been quite a therapeutic exercise and there was part of me thinking well i'm not like retiring or anything i'm not disappearing so is that the message that people would take from this this is my sort of sign-off note well it isn't i suppose i've aimed it at my listeners on lbc more than anything it's not an intellectual treatise it's not a book about political policy but it is about experiences that I've had in my life, whether they're personal or in my career.

3:20I've had successes, I've had plenty of failures, and I've tried to make it warts and all because I can't stand reading autobiographies that are basically saying, aren't I brilliant? And I mean, okay, we all think in some ways that we've had successes, but you've got to address the things that have gone wrong in your life, and I've had plenty of those. And when you began it, was there a kind of mission where you thought, this is what I want to project, or this is the thing I want to say right now? Or was it a case of writing it and going, oh, this is a memory I'd forgotten? Yeah, but what I know I'm going to get is a lot of people saying, well, I can't believe you didn't put that story in.

3:55I'm going to kick myself and think, oh, I've forgotten about that. Originally, it was supposed to be 120 ,000 words long. It then got through to 180 ,000. And even I have to realize that people do not want to necessarily read 700 pages about Ian Dale. so it's i trimmed it down a bit and it's like 400 pages and um i think it hangs together well hopefully a surprise there's a particular chapter in it where you talk about both your love life uh your first experiences of sex and visiting gay saunas which wasn't necessarily what i was expecting from an ian dale book how difficult was it to go actually i'm gonna commit to this well that was quite a difficult chapter to write because frankly i know no one wants to read the sexual antics of a 64 year old i have just turned 64 i tried to cut out as much yuck as i can but in the end i came to the conclusion that there was no point in beating around the bush and trying to pretend that my um initial forays into the world of the gays were anything but a little bit sleazy but you you have to look at these things in the context of the time because, I mean, you're, what, 20 years younger than me.

5:08Your experience of the gay world in, what, sort of 90s, 2000s would have been very different from mine in the early 1990s. I didn't have a sexual experience in terms of gay sex until I was 28 for no reason other than the opportunity had never presented itself. And when it did, I kind of made up for lost time. And in the 70s and 80s, and way before that, where did gay people meet? And particularly those who were closeted, because there was always this fear of exposure. And I can remember, did you ever go to Brief Encounter? Yes. Well, I can remember going there on my own in, it would have been about 1990, 1991.

5:55And I was just, it's more sort of curiosity than anything. it was i wasn't sort of going to pick someone up but i was sort of having a drink and just like minding my own business but just observing i kept seeing all these people go downstairs i think well what's down there so i went down there and it's all very dark and dingy and i was just sort of standing by a wall and this italian looking guy approached me and like stared into my eyes and as he was staring into my eyes he put his hand down my trousers and i just said don't think so mate and then about five minutes later i saw someone that i knew and it was somebody who was a special advisor in the conservative government and should we say a fairly sensitive government department i'm not going to name him and i thought oh god what if he recognizes me and so i immediately left but he should have been thinking the same because in those days black male was considered to be a high risk i mean i knew that he was gay and actually quite fancied him so i completely wimped out of sort of doing anything but that was how it was in those days you're always a little bit scared of being discovered and i wasn't really i wasn't out to anyone at that point and the other thing was i mean gay people used to go to public toilets i mean that i suspect i'm sure it still exists but it's not as much of a thing as it was then because if you're gay now at the age of 18 20 whatever there are so many ways to meet people they just weren't in it was this is pre-internet so there was no gaydar there was no grinder there was nothing and so somebody well in fact the guy that i first had a sexual experience with he sort of decided that he had a mission now to introduce me to all of this kind of world so he took me to the bethnal green public baths on a tuesday night um which it wasn't the sort of necessarily a gay thing i think a lot of the men there were straight but honestly i mean my eyes were on stalks what was going on there and then he took me to a gay sauna and i i slightly became addicted to to that not necessarily doing an awful lot but it was just sort of i don't know it was quite erotic and and then and i couldn't at that point i couldn't really imagine having a relationship with another i mean i've had quite a few relationships with women up to the age of 28 but I never let them go to the point where you'd have full sex which caused a bit of embarrassment on one or two occasions but um but I still couldn't quite imagine having a relationship with another man and then I did and then I met my I say my current partner my husband I mean we've been together for 31 years we met in 1995 even though we have nothing really very little in common we have very different personalities uh we don't like the same things and yet in 31 years we've never had a full-scale blazing row we've i mean you always have the little odd bicker um but never a sort of slamming the door euro whatever and which anybody that knows me finds very difficult i have to say this a bit i mean we've had a row so i can't believe yes but you've Never had a proper row with your partner.

9:05I'm presuming he's just very calm then. He is very calm, much calmer than I am. But somehow it just works. There's no point in psychoanalyzing it because it just works. Why would you want to psychoanalyze it? The only things we have in common are dogs and cars. We both like cars and we add dogs at everything to us to the extent that he won't even come to my book launch because he's going to look after the dogs, which is always the excuse because he doesn't really, he's not a very sociable person. Right. But it works. And you also mentioned CompuServe in that chapter too as well, which was a nice flashback.

9:39I haven't thought about CompuServe for years. CompuServe forums. Well, I remember when I was living in Docklands, I was in one of the, it was a building called Cascades. It's on the sort of top of the Isle of Dogs, right on the river. Had a seventh floor apartment. You had cruise ships going past the window. A yuppie existence, I suppose. And I thought I'd made it. I mean, I had a Audi Cabriolet. I used to go to work on the river bus. I was living the life of Riley. Somehow I discovered CompuServe Forums. And I met this guy, Matthew, who came over and we do what you do on a one-night stand. And we just were talking after the dirty deed was done.

10:17And I told him I'd got this Audi Cabriolet, which used to belong to Princess Diana. And he said, oh, I've got a friend who would love to see that. He's really into cars. So he brought this friend up, John, who subsequently became my partner. and I think I'd had a bad day at work and I wasn't really in a very good mood. I think they expected me to invite them back, not for sex, but just for a coffee or whatever. And I didn't. Anyway, John phoned me that evening and the next evening and the next evening. And knowing what I know now, because he is quite shy, I'm astonished that he ever did that. And it just sort of led to where we are today.

10:49In that same chapter, you talk about section 28 and the fact that I think you say it almost passed you by at the time. You just weren't really feeling oppressed by it or that it wasn't bothering anything yeah which i mean looking back it's odd in many ways but i still don't understand why some sections of the so-called gay community are still obsessed by it i mean it was 1988 so 38 years ago and they still talk about it as if the conservative party is still in those days and it just isn't but i do remember at the time thinking i mean i agreed that there should be sex education but i didn't believe that homosexuality or indeed heterosexuality should be rammed down kids throats because i've always thought that even sort of up to the age of 14 or 15 the longer that children retain their sort of sense of innocence well the better it is now but we've gone way beyond that now i mean my nine-year-old niece was taught what a clitoris was in her school I'm thinking, really?

11:53Is that really appropriate? There was some big scandals in the mid 80s, which is what I think drove the government to do this, where there were books that were, I mean, Ken Livingston was promoting these at the GLC, sort of Jenny Lives with Eric and Joel. And there's a picture on the cover with Jenny in bed between these two men. I mean, actually, if you read it, it was perfectly innocent. But in the 1980s, these things were just not discussed. And I think there was this feeling that a lot of people who should have known better but didn't believe that being gay was a lifestyle choice now you and i know that you're born the way you are there's nothing you can do about it and most people i think wouldn't want to do anything about it i mean i i sit here today and if someone said to me oh i can cast a spell and make you straight i wouldn't want to be straight i'm quite happy being gay but that wasn't the way people thought and margaret thatcher made this speech i think it was probably just after the year of section 28 where she said you don't have an inalienable right to be gay which given that she was actually and people don't really realize this she was one of the few conservatives to vote to decriminalize homosexuality in 1967 a lot of her advisors were gay she was not so serious when there were conservative MPs in sex scandals, she never really punished them for it at all.

13:19And yet, her legacy among the gay press is just Section 28. And I get that in some ways. But Charles Moore, in his brilliant three-volume biography of her, he revealed that she actually didn't want to do it. And she was in political trouble at the time and had to throw some red meat to the right wing of her party and it was dame jill knight that was the the driving force behind it actually a very kindly woman in many ways i remember meeting her a few times i don't know whether she foresaw what the reaction would be but contrary to what everyone thinks now according to charles moore she wasn't sort of actually particularly in favor of this so i mean history is rewritten all the time i mean charles moore's got documents that i think prove his his side his side of the story but i mean for many people, she will remain the devil incarnate to gay people.

14:15I have to say for this person as well, I disagree with you entirely, but I'm here to interview you today. No, no, I'm not here to propagandise. I mean, I think the Conservative Party has done a lot of bad things regarding the gay community. But I think if you are so entrenched in a position where you believe that the Conservative Party is intrinsically evil and all Conservative politicians are, you're never going to accept that there is another side to the story. i mean we're recording this in the aftermath of ann widdekin's murder ann widdekin was a very good friend of mine and people say to me well how could you be good friends with her because she was so homophobic and bigoted well actually she wasn't but her voting records suggest that she was but then if you dig a little bit deeper you have to understand that that was all driven by her religious beliefs now i'm not religious at all i had many many rows with her about this trying to persuade her of the error of her ways.

15:10And all I could really hope to do was try to soften her at the edges. But she was another conservative whose closest friends were all gay. Now, would we be her friends? And she said this to me once in an interview. Would you be my friend if you thought that I was homophobic and bigoted? And I said, well, no, I actually, I really wouldn't. And she went on to explain some of the things that she was accused of saying, like people said she was in favor of conversion therapy, that she thought that at some point, gay people could be cured, in inverted commas. And she explained to me what she'd actually said, and the quotes that people used were like two words, and then they created the rest of the sentence.

15:52Now, I can sit here till I'm blue in the face, but many of your listeners will think, well, no, he's talking bollocks. I mean, I'm genuinely not lying about this. I mean, I can sort of point you to where she says these things in the interview. A friend of mine, Ashley Crossley, who was selected as a Tory candidate in Falmouth and Camborne in 2003, his local Conservative Party tried to deselect him when they found out he was gay. He hadn't told them. Why should he tell them? And I just happened to mention this to Anne one day. And she's, right, what's his number? So I gave her his number. She phones him.

16:26And a couple of days later, she's on a train to Cornwall. I mean, not the shortest of train journeys, at her own expense, going to basically read the Riot Act to his local Conservative Party. Now, that is not the action of a bigot, is it? Yeah, so I think the bit that, putting Anne's personal views aside, the bit that I think confuses me or I find curious is, I feel living through Section 28. How old were you then? I must have been 10 or 11. So I was born in 1982. Do you genuinely remember it? Yeah, I genuinely remember having feelings of being gay. and also hearing in the news that this thing wasn't allowed to be talked about.

17:02And then I think about young people now who have Heartstopper, for instance. Which is brilliant. Fantastic. I wish I'd had something like that to sort of almost cling on to, because I knew I was different at the age of eight. I didn't necessarily know I was gay, but by the age of 12 or 13, I did. And I would have loved something like that then. It would have given me real confidence. So then for me, the coherency, though, is to have something like Heartstopper in a school that isn't entertainment but is information education yeah i just think it's about education it is but we have to look at things through the prism of the time right i mean all sorts of other issues um i mean today we cannot comprehend how on earth slavery ever existed but you have to look at it through the lens of the time and i found out in the research for the book on my family history that my great great i'm getting the number of greats wrong here probably great great great uncle david dale was the chair of the anti-slavery movement in glasgow he formed it in the 1790s which given that glasgow was quite a big center of the slave trade was quite a brave thing to do and that i'm just as an aside it's one of the other things i found out in the book that quite a few of my ancestors had political activities all on the left though right one of my ancestors was one of the nine founders of the fabian society which i didn't know until i wrote the book um so i've got all this lefty history which is probably why i'm very much on the on social issues i am a social liberal whereas i'm definitely an economic conservative but i mean nowadays it's like i'm constantly accused of being a woke liberal on on twitter and somebody will say that and then the next tweet will call me a fascist um and it's i can't i can't think well make up your minds i can't be both well actually i want to go there next so the idea of political pluralism so i guess i want to thank you that when no one else was talking about the green party you would always have a representative of the green party on your show admittedly you'd try and shred me to pieces but you would still at least put a microphone saturation no absolutely is an exaggeration but you'd give us a microphone and say well i think i don't like talking to people all the time that i agree with i think it's really boring i mean a lot of podcasts now are you have two people who may come from different political parties but they're kind of similar like alistair camber and rory stewart i'm wondering who you were talking about agree on agree on virtually everything george osborne and ed balls similarly i mean when i was doing my for the many podcast with jackie smith people accused us of that even though i was conservative she was Labour, there was a bit of a, I mean, she was about as right-wing Labour as you can possibly get.

19:45So there was a lot more agreement than I probably thought there would be at the beginning. And I think people are actually looking for good interactive debate that doesn't turn nasty. I think that's the thing. And there's so many examples of political debates that go wrong where there is a bit of nastiness. So, I mean, I've always been, I mean, it sounds a bit of a thing to say but pro-environment but i always want to test out some of the things that people on the green side of politics um come out with and so that's why we've had a few sparky moments from time to time when caroline lucas resigned as leader of the green party i did a hustings and i've done that ever since for every green party leadership election nobody else in the media has done it and i think i do give the green party more time than any other presenter on the radio and i'm actually proud of that i get a little bit of flack from it because sometimes if all you're interested in is cliques you're just going to concentrate on immigration benefit reform abortion israel i do cover those subjects but not to the exclusion of others so from time to time i'll shake it up a bit and do a do an hour on the war in sudan which no one seems to even know is going on or in the Congo and I regard that as educating not just me but my listeners because I mean I'm not an expert on these things but you have an audience that probably do know quite a lot about it and you if you give them the opportunity to take part they will come on I remember doing a phone in some years ago on the Indian caste system which I mean I kind of I kind of knew the basics of it like it was our class system but multiplied by 10 I think and we just had the most amazing calls on it from people british indians in this country explaining well actually exists in this country as well it's the unspoken thing and i had no idea so i try to there's all this phrase about public service broadcasting which people think commercial radio isn't interested in well i am i think sometimes you do have to lead your audience rather than just follow what the the sort of management think the audience want and on that we have the public like service broadcaster with the BBC, how do you feel like they're doing in terms of educating and informing their audience?

22:03Well, at times the BBC can be absolutely brilliant, but I'm afraid that nowadays they have decimated their coverage of politics. They've decimated their international coverage to the extent that if I want to really get into an international story, say something that's going on in Africa, I will go to Al Jazeera English. And it shouldn't be like that. The BBC should be providing that coverage, but they've shut a lot of their foreign bureaus. They seem to think that the rest of the world is called the United States. If there is a plane crash in the United States that kills five people, it will make the BBC news.

22:40If it's a plane crash in Bangladesh that kills 100 people, it won't. Now, partly it's because you might not get pictures from Bangladesh, but I think editorially they've lost their way. And look, I get Trump is box office. I reckon in his second term, in the first six months of the second Trump presidency, I fell into this trap. And virtually every day, there would be a story that we would cover to do with Donald Trump, because he's box office, love him or hate him. And I fall very much in the latter category. You can't ignore him. But there are so many other things going on in the world. I mean, do we ever really cover a French presidential election in the way that we cover an American one?

23:19Okay, it's a different language, but there's no excuse for it. So again, I try to bring these things into my show, not obsessing about them, but trying to say to our audience, well, this is going on there, might be something you'd be interested in. You've been doing this a long time, and that's not a polite way of saying a calling world. I think you've interviewed 12 prime ministers. It is something like that, yeah. And you mentioned there about clicks and box office. How much has journalism and commentary changed in terms of, because of social media now, this kind of hunt for the click, as opposed to the kind of more in-depth conversation?

23:50massively i remember the first time i really clocked this was when i started at lbc in 2010 we had one person in the digital team doing the website facebook twitter everything now we have around 30 and they obviously have to be supplied with content and this must probably be in about 2016 2017 and my producer said into right at the beginning of an hour the producer said in my ear oh digital want you to do a rant on this and i literally exploded that was the rant well yeah the producer well it was i said we're not the fucking daily mail right and i mean i'm perfectly capable of having a rant but it kind of has to be a natural one if i feel strongly about something yes i'll happily have a rant but i'm not going to do them to order there is a lot of pressure now to do that particularly now that my show is live streamed so it's on like the lbc app the global player app and the lbc youtube channel i won't deny that there is a bit of performance involved where i'm fully aware that if i'm talking to a caller who is talking absolute bollocks i kind of need to channel what the audience is thinking so i'm going to throw my hands up in the air very dramatically and i mean in all honesty i kind of miss broadcasting from a broom cupboard which is effectively what we did in the first few years and then they brought they constructed this really glitzy studio now we're broadcasting from four milbank with even more glitzy studios and it's taken a little bit of the intimacy away because even though I'm on camera now for three hours a day if I wanted to be a television presenter I would have tried to be a television presenter and I've never wanted I mean I do television but I've never hankered after being a television presenter because you don't have the time to develop an argument and when I used to do Good Morning Britain every Friday with Jackie Smith, I knew that I'd have 30 seconds to speak before she would interrupt or the presenters would interrupt.

26:02And it hones a really good skill, actually. But I don't really enjoy that particularly. I'd much prefer being able to have some time to make an argument, to do a... I mean, not a long... I mean, James O 'Brien does monologues that are like 25 minutes long. I mean, it's a talent to do that. I don't have that talent. So I try and do it in three or four minutes and challenge my audience to challenge me that the myth in speech radio is that you want people to phone in to agree with you. You don't. You want to have an argument. Not a row necessarily, but an argument. And when Nigel Farage used to present on LBC, he was on the show before me.

26:41And he hated having all these people, sort of Doris Ramonga would say, oh, Nigel, you're my hero. You've done so much. and he wanted people to phone in to challenge him and you would have a lot of people phoning in wanting to really be quite nasty to him and he would charm the pants off them and they would part as friends and that's what it should be like that that's that's great speech radio where you're not necessarily shouting at each other you can disagree but you part as friends and that's that's what our politics has lost i think talking about having disagreements and you've come on here and praise nigel farage i feel like well i'm not i'm not you're praising the talent of charming he is a great communicator he i mean i remember you once said that you wanted to be the left-wing version of nigel farage and when you said that to me this was on air i thought in the sort of sir humphrey way that's a courageous thing to say and i thought you would get a lot of shit for that but i thought no you're actually spot on there does need to be a left-wing version of Nigel Farage.

27:43And Jeremy Corbyn fulfilled that role in a way, but not quite. And I think sort of your first few months as Green Party leader, you channeled that incredibly well. And you related to people in a way that I've seen very few politicians do over the years. And now a quick break with our friends from Crowdfunder. We're stronger when we're together. But the reality is there's been a deliberate shift to make us forget about the things that matter in life. Kindness, community, looking out for each other. Decades of austerity and growing regional inequality has left so many towns, districts and villages with community projects underfunded.

28:28Green spaces neglected. Vulnerable people slipping through the cracks. And the flip side of that is, if we're only looking out for ourselves, it's only going to get worse. That's why Bold Politics have partnered with Crowdfunder to inspire people across the country to do something amazing for their communities. Whether you want to create a local litter picking group, start a community garden,

28:57or turn an unused building into something useful, like a food bank. And whether you've got a big idea that needs a lot of money or you just need a little bit, Crowdfunder have raised over 300 million pounds for charities, projects and communities. And there's a crowd of people out there waiting to turn your bold idea into reality. Hey, we'll even give you 50 quid towards your first project if you raise 250 pounds from at least five donors. What could you do for your community? Turn your bold idea into a reality at crowdfunder.co.uk forward slash bold.

29:37Monday AI agents took over my work. And I absolutely love it. Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind now. They live inside Monday.com. So they see the full picture. My work, my team, the whole company. And I don't have to worry about the data. It's safe, which means I'm free to focus on the big stuff, knowing everything runs smoothly in the background. It's completely shifted the way we work. Create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday.com.

30:32and use code podcast to try stamps.com risk-free for 60 days.

31:02support hydration when you need it most. Shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquid IV hydration that goes wherever life takes you.

31:15How much responsibility do you feel the broadcasters have to highlight issues that people aren't necessarily interested in initially, but you feel actually this is important for people to hear about? And so it's kind of that balance between, again, ratings and clicks, but also the broadcaster's responsibility to go, this is why you should be interested in this and this is why it's important to you well i do think that but it is a balance i mean if i spent an hour every evening in the week talking about things that i genuinely thought everyone should be interested in i probably wouldn't have a new contract because there is a balance between keeping your existing audience trying to build an audience and i mean i'm very proud of the fact that i mean admittedly this was some years ago i was told this but I was told I had the highest female listenership on LBC percentage-wise, had the highest ethnic minority listenership on LBC.

32:06And as a station, we do incredibly well among the 15 to 24-year-old demographic. We have more listeners in that demographic than Capital Radio does. Now, I think that's an amazing statistic. And this idea that young people are not interested in current affairs and not interested in Westminster politics at all, i think it's for the birds so i try to i try to do a mix i mean in our first hour in the program of an evening we start at seven and we usually pick whatever the big news subject of the day is don't always do that partly depends what andrew marr's done on the on the program before and what tom swalwick has done on the drive time show but generally it'll be the biggest story of the day and that but at nine o 'clock we do the as you know the cross question panel at eight then after nine i've got much more latitude sometimes i get one guest in the studio and i interview them for half an hour and then people call in recently we had do you know sonny green he's a he's a young guy from south end and as a poet not many of them to the pound and he's developed this really strong internet presence um and he did a brilliant poem called what england means to me and like he's oh yes i do if you saw him you would think he was possibly like on the tommy robinson's side of politics but he's absolutely not he's got a real cult following on instagram now he's on britain's got talent and got to the final which for a poet is quite something he calls it slam poetry which i'd never heard of that expression before as big in america so he came on and it was the most brilliant hour because it was very different because he's a real he would self-describe as a real geezer lad i mean real sort of essex boy um and the audience just loved him.

33:51I love doing emotional phone-ins, whether it's on grief, mental health, suicide. I've done phone-ins on male rape before, which the producers thought wouldn't get a single call. I mean, who's going to phone in and say that they've been sexually assaulted by another man? And I said, just trust me. And you talk about that in your book as well. Yeah. And I talked about when I was nearly raped once. And the switchboard went mad to the extent that we actually did two hours on it rather than one so sometimes and i try to challenge i try to challenge myself because sometimes there are subjects where you think well is anyone going to phone in on this you don't need 50 people to phone in you need probably in an hour you need four or five people who've got an interesting story to tell and what i've worked out is that people will tell me things that they've never told their closest friends or indeed their husband or wife and i mean i regard that as a massive compliment one of the stories i do tell in the book woman in her probably mid-50s saying that she a few years previously she had been raped at a family wedding she went into quite graphic detail i had to sort of stop her at one point um it clearly affected her who wouldn't be affected by something like that and it was a family member and anyway she told her story she said she'd never told her husband and the next night she rang in again and said can i speak to ian and the producer said well we're talking about hs2 and i said we'll put her on at the end of the hour so she came on and she said ian i've told my husband i'm thinking oh my god what have i done and then she said and i can see the blue sky again and that was a really special moment because she had had this massive burden lifted from her shoulders and i mean i've had quite a few incidents like that where um people they've just found it a release i think to be able to tell somebody and i did i remember in the early days i said to my boss obviously why do i get these calls and he said because you've got an unthreatening manner you've got a soft voice that people know that you're going to let them tell their story and and i won't say i've deliberately capitalized on that but i know through experience that in the 16 years i've been doing this if it all ended tomorrow i could be a counselor because i i've just done it so many times and particularly during covid i mean that was a really incredible time I'm not a trained counsellor at all but I know I can do it How regularly do or at all do people change their mind?

36:33As in they phone in and you think actually I've changed my mind on what I thought about that subject? Quite often actually I know that my social views have changed considerably over the years Actually I work vegan The thought of vegan food I mean just thinking about it makes me feel quite ill I've tried it and I often start off and homeschooling is another one where I'll start off at the beginning of the hour thinking sort of with one point of view I mean very anti-homeschooling generally and then by the end of the hour you've heard from so many people for whom it's been a success and kids who are homeschooled who ring in and tell me well this is what happened to me and that has it's either changed my views or moderated my views we did do a vegan phone in this week with a vegan influencer I was like, is Ian Dale now a vegan?

37:22I definitely just got an exclusive. Vegan beauty girl. Yes, I saw this. I mean, she was brilliant. And willing to have, I mean, she was very funny as well. I do find that some vegans, should we say, don't have the most well-developed sense of humor. You threatened to check her out for something. Yes, they picked that clip and I can't remember what, I mean, it was done with humor. I was never intending to. Because of some health issues, I did have to go on, it wasn't a vegan diet, it was sort of Mediterranean diet. I had a hiatus hernia. So they said, well, you can't eat dairy stuff. You can't do this.

37:56You can't do that. So for a time, I did sort of have a much, a very different diet to the one I normally have. But yeah, I couldn't ever be a vegan, I have to say. But I do find that I'm eating less red meat. Great. I mean, I'm not sure it's a conscious thing. It's just, and I try to eat sort of more healthy things, but you're never going to get me to give up the mint magnums. I also need to introduce you to a lot of vegan comics because I know many of my vegan audience will say we do have a sense of humour. Romne Shranger Nathan for instance. Oh I thought you meant comics as in comic books. Oh no no no I meant comedians.

38:32Do politicians often surprise you? Are there people that you haven't met and you think they're going to be an awful interviewee, not going to be that interesting but then they come in the room and they kind of knock the socks off or the other way around you think? Great communicator actually in this studio. Both ways. Rachel Reeves, her reputation is totally different to what she's like in real life. She is one of the funniest people I've ever met. She's engaging. She's got the dirtiest laugh you can ever imagine. And I remember we were both speaking at a literary festival in Apple Door in Devon.

39:04We had dinner one night. This is a good few years ago now. And it was one of the most enjoyable dinners I've ever had. But the moment the red light goes on, robot mode starts. Priti Patel is exactly the same. If you had Priti Patel here now, you would think, what a lovely woman. Her eyes sparkle, she's engaging, and yet her public image is not like that at all. And there are plenty of people, as I say, on the Labour side too. And I don't know why this is, that people cannot transmit their personalities when the microphone goes on or the camera is on. It's such a shame. I used to do a monthly phone-in with Rachel Rees when she was Shadow Chancellor.

39:44and you did get a little bit of her sense of humor doing that, but I had to, in a break, I'd have to say, come on, Rachel, stop being Madam Politician, stop the soundbites, let's show a bit of character. And she is capable of doing it, but I think she suffered as Chancellor, because, okay, it's a very serious job, and she has massive issues to deal with, but a little bit of personality, I think, would have gone a long way to help her through it. Do you think it's media training, maybe, or fear? I think that all this stuff about media training is slightly overdone. I don't think that politicians have the level of media training that most people, I don't know if you've had it, or don't, because at some point they will say to you, I think you need to fuck off.

40:27i mean david cameron had this phrase which he was ridiculed for you've got to keep it real and i think that part of your success has been that people see you as as a genuine person and you might say things from time to time that maybe you fall off the tightrope a little bit but rather that than just utter the same inane soundbites that you get because the audience can see through it i think so many politicians underestimate the intelligence of the audience and it just doesn't work and that's where in a way broadcasters are letting people down because if you go into an interview say on the today program generally you'll have four five six minutes and that's it so you will have people saying to you now zach this is what you this is the point you need to get across maybe two points and the interviewer will obviously want you to give them a news line part of the politician's objective in an interview is not to give a news line and so therefore the audience loses out whereas on an extended interview after the first 10 minutes you've got rid of all your soundbites yeah and i've i've always taken the view and andrew marr said this really brilliantly once he said the best interviews margaret thatcher ever did were the ones where the interviewer said to her what's on your mind prime minister which you think is a is a stupid question in some ways but if you let a politician talk they are forced to say something and hopefully it'll be something interesting if i do a half hour interview i often find that the news line comes in minute 27 it's happened so many times i don't know what's special about 27 it's just happened and it's frustrating for the producers because they think you're going to get to the end of the end of the interview and not have got anything out of them so you've got to have producers that understand the way that you work and i mean i don't prepare for interviews particularly i might have five bullet points of areas I want to cover but I'll never have a list of questions in front of me I never war game interviews with the producer which Andrew Marr that's exactly what he does now that works for him because he can think well if the politician gives answer a to question b I'll then move on to point d my brain would go into mush if I did that so I want to have a conversation and yet sometimes it's a bit of a high wire act where you think oh this isn't going very well but it it works better than if I was just over-prepped.

42:47And how much of this do you think is about vested interests? Because that would be my argument, that someone who is not having to dance around a million lines or keep a million people happy, but can actually just say what they think and tell the truth, can communicate so much more effectively than someone who might be having to defend the interests of fossil fuel companies, for instance. Well, I think this is overdone, in that I can't think of any interview I've ever done with any politician where I've thought, thought you are saying this because you are in some way in hock to a particular organization or view the one exception to that and it wasn't an interview i did but this whole stuff about nigel farage and the five million gift from christopher harbourn which i sort of get cut him a bit of slack on that at the beginning because i thought well if this money is really being spent on his security.

43:35I get that because he has more threats than any politician I've ever come across. And they are real threats. They're not just the sort of nutters on Twitter. Sorry, I shouldn't say nutter. I actually admonished Nick Clegg for using that word once saying that mind ask you not to use it. So I apologize for that. So I cut him a little bit of slack more than most people did but then i found out that last year in september last year he gave an interview to nick ferrari in which he was advocating for cryptocurrency and that's obviously christopher harbourn's main thing then i find out he's had a meeting with the governor of the bank of england now there's no reason why as a leader of a political party he shouldn't have a meeting with the governor of the bank of england have you no not yet i think you should um but he lobbied the governor of the bank of england on cryptocurrency issues now it may possibly be that that was entirely separate to the donation i mean you can believe in cryptocurrencies without having money donated to you but it doesn't pass the sniff test in the end if things don't pass the sniff test then people will automatically think that anything that that politician says or does is reprehensible, wrong, whatever.

44:53So it's very rare that I believe that any politician acts on behalf of a paid interest. I think you get it often on the left where without money changing hands, but they're kind of lobbying for a pressure group or a charity in ways that maybe are inappropriate. I mean, I can't think of a particular example here, but I think, generally, I think we have very clean politics. There's always going to be exceptions to that. But if you compare our political system and the influence of money on our political system with that in most comparable countries, I would say that we are nowhere near the bottom of the league.

45:36In fact, I would say we were fairly near the top of the league for honesty and politics. But increasingly the public are beginning to think the opposite. Well, I think I disagree and I massively think the opposite. I suppose it's interesting at the beginning, you said you're socially liberal. And then we didn't talk about economics. And I just wondered, surely you look at the state of the economy and go over 30, 40 years, I would say since Thatcher, we've really tried a particular version of capitalism or a particular version of the economy. And I feel like it's so fundamentally broken. I presume you look at it and go, it's broken, but you don't think we need to radically transform it.

46:12But then I don't know. No, I do. Ah, okay. I absolutely do, but not in the way that you would want to. Okay, that's fair. I mean, I believe what's wrong in our economy is that, I mean, you will say to me, well, we've deregulated to an extent that's gone too far. I would say we haven't gone anywhere near far enough in deregulation, but it depends what we're talking about. It's very easy to use these phrases. and I will admit that some of the privatizations and I'm I've always been a big advocate of privatization my essential view is if it can be done in the private sector it should be done in the private sector I think the role of government should be as small as possible we should have a smaller state as possible however we're not living in 1981 we're living in 2026 and given what's happened with COVID in my lifetime we will never have the kind of small state that in an ideal world I would like.

47:05The other problem is that the practice of people who've handled some of the privatizations has been disastrous. It started, I think, in some ways with the railways where, and I was partly involved in railway privatization. I was running a transport consultancy at the time and we acted for people who wanted to buy the Southwest Trains franchise. But I could see right from the beginning that the government were doing it the wrong way in that you shouldn't have separated the track from the trains and it was so legally complex that it could never have worked and some of us tried to point that out to the government at the time but they just weren't listening i'm not sure it was actually the politicians that weren't listening i think it was the senior civil servants who decided to go down a particular path the privatization of the water industry which is the one that's got all the headlines nowadays quite right too i mean i live in Tunbridge Wells, which were many of my fellow Tunbridge Wells citizens didn't have water for like two or three weeks.

48:04It should never have happened. But that wasn't the fault, or the state of the water industry is not the fault of privatization per se. It's the fault of the lack of proper regulation. So while I want to deregulate, there are certain areas, I mean, I don't think you can be ideological about this. I think you have to recognize that there are some sectors that require better regulation maybe not even more regulation better regulation and off what have been an absolute disaster completely toothless now again you can say well that's the fault of the politicians who started the privatization process in the first place and how can you have competition in a sector like water but water privatization happened because the state could not provide the funds to invest in the infrastructure which in the late 1980s it was creaking to a huge extent so that the theory was that it would bring lots of private sector money in to repair all the sewers and all the rest of it now that happened in the first 10 years but it was only when companies like um macquarie the australian bank came in and effectively assets came in and asset stripped some of the companies that the problem started and that was the fault, I'm afraid, of the Blair and Brown government.

49:18They didn't recognize what was happening and didn't take any steps to stop it. And I mean, we can go through all the privatizations, but I think as a concept, there's nothing wrong with it. Why is there very little growth in our economy at the moment? Well, it's because we have a government where not a single person in the cabinet has ever worked seriously in the private sector, run a business or started a business. Now, I'm not saying that you have to be a doctor to be Secretary of State for Health, but it would help if there was someone around the cabinet table who could have said to Rachel Reeves, well, this national insurance increase, do you realise the effect that that's going to have on particularly the hospitality sector?

49:57They've introduced all sorts of extra burdens on business, which inevitably, I think you probably would agree with me on this, that they have stifled economic growth. So if you introduce some of these measures, don't be surprised if unemployment increases you put the minimum wage now we'd all love the minimum wage to go up and up and up and up but there comes a point in some sectors where it's counterproductive and i think the hospitality sector is certainly one of those where if you are paying an 18 year old the same as you're paying a 26 year old well you're not going to employ an 18 year old are you so to come back to your first point i think this is overblown to use your phrase about the idea that you have to run a private business to be a politician no i'm not saying you do ah i'm absolutely not saying you do ah okay i mean it's like you could you could equally use the argument the other way around and say well isn't it a pity there aren't more social workers on the conservative benches well that's what you i was going to say but i think having the odd smattering of them in the labor party yes and i mean there are actually a few on the back benches but there are none in the cabinet uh that have ever started or run a business so i'm not saying that they all should have done but i I think you need your I mean you you must find this sometimes you want somebody to be able to put their hand up and say um have you thought about what might happen if you do this to this particular area I think that's a better way of running a government rather than having a sort of cabinet of nodding dogs I agree entirely all people who have been spads or corporate lobbyists or who have just been in a political system I'm not against spads being in politics I think sometimes you do need to have a bit of ideological purity and a bit of ideological background and I think that's where keir starmer went wrong in that nobody really knew what he believed right i think this is possibly going to be andy burnham's downfall because i don't think he has any roots really i mean he's becoming prime minister we have no clue what he thinks about virtually anything and the things that we do have a clue about he's flip-flopped on over the years i mean one or two exceptions to that and i mean i'm not so i wish him well i want him to be a success as prime minister but I bet you by the end of the year there'll be people screaming bring back Keir Starmer Do you think Andy Burnham's going to put himself up for scrutiny?

52:11Because obviously so far he hasn't but he's not yet Prime Minister but at the moment it looks like he's going to be doing a lot more kind of his own social media content as opposed to coming into studios and taking questions Andy Burnham is a great communicator but I remember in 1996 I took an American friend of mine to an event he wanted to meet Margaret Thatcher and she was speaking at this event so I introduced her to him and he was like six foot tall, sort of striking looking guy. And she looked, she was very small, five foot four. And she literally, her head came up to the top of his chest.

52:44And she looked at him in the eye. And she said, your president, President Clinton, and then the finger came up and she started jabbing his chest. Your president, President Clinton, he is a great communicator. The trouble is he has absolutely nothing to communicate. And she then literally flounced off. And he stood there thinking, oh my God. And I'm afraid this is the suspicion with Andy Burnham. He's a great salesman. But if you want to be a truly great salesman, you've got to have a product to sell. And I don't know about you, but I don't know what that product is yet. I mean, is it going to be, it's just going to be continuity Starmer, where they stick to the current Labour manifesto and tweak it a little around the edges?

53:28Or is he going to do the sort of Gordon Brown independence of the Bank of England thing right at the beginning, make a big statement? I mean, it's reading in the newspapers that he's looking for something to do like that. But the fact that he's looking for something to do rather knows what he wants to do. The thing that drives him. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it may be he could reinstitute HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester. I'm not sure that's possible because I think a lot of the land has been sold off. But I mean, in theory, if you want to do something, anything is possible. something like that where he's making a statement as to the direction of travel for his government well we we will soon find out it's interesting you said if you want to do something anything is possible and i strongly believe that we're in a time that feels increasingly polarized and divided and it feels sometimes like politics like we're almost ungovernable as a country just to finish off how hopeful are you that people can find ways to disagree and actually we can restore some of the decency back into politics of people being able to disagree in fiery ways.

54:27I think that's important, but in ways that are not constantly challenging people's character or personality. Well, I think there are two things. Andy Burnham has said he wants to do politics differently. I wish him luck in that. David Cameron said exactly the same thing when he came into power. David Cameron, I think, was a fundamentally decent man. But I mean, he soon found that a constructive approach at prime minister's questions is not the way forward and i suspect that any good intentions that andy burnham has to do things differently well we will rapidly find out that that's not necessarily possible in in all aspects and part of it i mean i don't know how kemi bedrock is going to deal with andy burnham because she can't have that same fiery approach that she's had with keir starmer of late i don't think So it's going to be very interesting to see that.

55:15So I think it is partly down to political leaders to lead the way as much as they possibly can, without actually stifling proper debate. I mean, there's nothing wrong with having a robust debate. It's important. It is important. And I mean, people say, oh no, Prime Minister's questions is so awful, isn't it? Well, no, that's the bit of Parliament that the public actually watch because it is a bit theatrical. cool and if we if we turn it all into a sort of german bundestag type thing which is just vanilla and nothing ever happens people would totally lose interest so that there's a balance to strike but the the i wrote a book six years ago called why can't we all just get along shout less less and more and people will say to me well yeah but you're an example of somebody who does shout quite a lot particularly on social media and they're right i mean if somebody calls me a twat on social media your natural instinct as a human being is to reply in kind i try not to but sometimes i'm afraid i do i mean my instinct when peter tatchell did his tweet about ann widdicombe which appeared to be rejoicing in her death and he called her a bigot my instinct was to go down that road and i i really respect peter tatchell i get on very well with him i've interviewed him many times i have a huge amount of time for his work on human rights issues.

56:33But in the end, I decided to be the adult and say, well, look, you're an advocate of human rights, Peter. Surely the ability to allow someone to grieve, that's a basic human right for them and be respectful when somebody dies. I mean, I don't think it matters whether the tweet was before we discovered that she'd be murdered or after i mean was actually before and he then uh deleted it afterwards so i think we all have to be responsible for for our own actions particularly those of us in the public eye um if we're just constantly ranting and swearing at people that does nothing to enhance debate and your listeners can go back on social media and say well i'm being a complete hypocrite because i have done that in the past and they would be right i have but i have actually tried to make an effort to moderate what i say on social media because somebody once said which really hit home on the radio intel's a really nice calm empathetic individual but on twitter he's an absolute beast and they were right well the algorithms push us to that don't they um this has been brilliant thank you so much for your honesty i know that some of the viewers will say that i've not pushed back hard enough and i just want to say that we're reversing these roles in august and september on your podcast all talk uh where uh you'll be interviewing me Well, you're coming up to do my Edinburgh Fringe show, aren't you?

57:52Yeah, exactly. It's going to be quite a day because you're at the last, I've got three shows a day. And on the first day, I've got Nicola Sturgeon, West Streeting, and then you. These are interviews where I literally do not prepare anything. I don't go on stage with any notes. And I'm more anxious about the Nicola Sturgeon one than you because I've always been labelled as a sort of Nicola Sturgeon fanboy, which is slightly unfair. but the edinburgh fringe is not the place for me to rip you apart on stage you'll be pleased to hear i mean i don't generally do that anyway but the aim of that i want the audience to find out the real person i'm not particularly interested in us having a row about any particular sort of policy that you promote which i find vaguely ridiculous like making it compulsory for any organization to offer a vegan option which i gather somebody is suggesting should be green party policy i might ask you about that one well it's interesting because when we say someone's suggesting that can literally be any random member of the green party i know and having said that i don't think it's a bad idea on that thank you very much cheers this episode was brought to you by crowdfunder what's your bold idea start it at crowdfunder.co.uk forward slash bold

59:17This Monday.com ad was created by a team of people and AI agents. Reese, our content agent, wrote the copy based on our best practices, like mentioning Monday.com three times. That was the second. Johnny, our coordination agent, built the timeline and kept everyone aligned. Olivia, our human creative director, stayed in the loop because agents are great, but they don't always know when a joke lands. She had one note. Tell listeners it only takes minutes to build an agent. So, minutes. Create your own AI agent today. on Monday.com.

1:00:16for 60 days. Hi, I'm Nick, co-host of The Best One Yet. You optimize your workouts, your portfolios, and that rando startup idea that hit you in the middle of the shower. But if you're not hydrated, you're already playing catch-up. So we keep a stash of Liquid IV in our studio. One stick mixed into 16 ounces of water is clinically demonstrated to hydrate faster than water alone with three times the electrolytes of the leading sports drink, plus eight vitamins and nutrients. Whether you're traveling, exercising, or podcasting, the best business news ever, Liquid IV makes it easy to stay hydrated wherever life takes you.

1:00:46So shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquid IV hydration, that goes wherever life takes you.