153: Scott Free

0:00At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead. With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and nonstop action.

0:48The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just$200 down at BKFSEA.com. Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the Private Eye office with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Ian Hislop. It's too hot. At least two of the members of this podcast have breached the shorts Rubicon. But we're going to try and cool ourselves down by taking ourselves north, several hundred miles, to Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister for over eight years, last seen, I think, by a lot of listeners to this podcast, or lots of people who are even, you know, pretty up with the news, being arrested before being released, and having a crime scene tent erected in her garden and all sorts of fun stuff.

1:40She has written a new memoir, which has been received as being very frank. In fact, it's called Frankly. It's had a lot of serialisation, a lot of hype, and it seems to be a chance to appraise the whole kind of Sturgeon project, such as it was or is, and in fact the whole of the SNP. And Ian, you have a special expertise of this, because you spent many years receiving lots of correspondence from readers north of the border, I believe. Yes, a lot of Scottish readers wrote in over the last decade saying, why don't you cover Scotland? And then whenever we covered Scotland, they said, you patronising bastards.

2:14Why don't you leave Nicola Sturgeon alone? You have no idea what a great leader she is, certainly compared to yours. Do you want Boris Johnson slash whoever is in Theresa May, Rishi Sunak? We've got Nicola Sturgeon. So the correspondence, which, again, doesn't say that anymore. There was a fairly dramatic reversal. But this, I think, is an attempt to certainly attempt by Nicola Sturgeon to rehabilitate herself. And again, any memoir that says frankly on it is going to get people to say, well, really? And I noticed one of the blurbs said Alan Johnson, former Labour Home Secretary, he said he described the quality of the book as unflinching honesty.

3:01and even on the extracts which I've read, I feel politicians should remember when talking about other politicians that their standards of unflinching honesty aren't necessarily ours. I remember one of the quotes from Nicola Sturgeon was about the SNP finances and she said at one point, we're not talking about the finances, there's nothing wrong with the finances. I mean, she was a co-signatory of the SNP finances with her husband and with the treasurer, Colin Beattie. So there are questions to be addressed and whether they are. I'm obviously very interested in the money because I found the camper van very funny.

3:43And one of the longest police investigations ever, which the Scottish police were a trifle slow, having a look into the finances of the governing party running Scotland. for reasons that are not fully discussed so far in the extracts. I mean, Helen will talk about the other integrity and honesty issues in the Scottish Government. But I think so far we've had a bit of a gush on this book, and I'll be interested to see where it goes. Can we just remind ourselves what the camper van was? So the camper van was allegedly purchased with money that was supposed to go, it was supposed to be ring-fenced, wasn't it, for a second Scottish referendum?

4:22It was a campaign vehicle, essentially. Whether or not it was for official purposes only or whether or not it was being used to tour the Highlands and Islands. But it turned out to be parked on the driveway of Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon's husband and chair of the SNP's mother. And she, I think, was about 92 and didn't drive. Certainly didn't drive large camper vans. So it all did look good. Yeah, and they did actually have the battle bus, the SNP. So this would have been a reserve battle bus. Well, often a super yacht will have another yacht behind it, won't it, to carry the boring things and the staff, you know.

4:56So I think that all sounds fine. I mean, we should say Peter Murrow's still under investigation. He appeared in court in March and entered no plea. He's got, talking about the CAMFAN being impounded, he's got legal aid, he was just granted last month, because his assets are frozen and he's unemployed. So are there charges that are being investigated? Yeah, he's still conveying charges. Against Sturgeon, there is no further investigation, nor against Colin Beattie. But yeah, she talked about that as, you know, saying it was incredibly traumatic being under investigation. It was the worst time of her life.

5:25And then there's a delicious little sentence in it where she says, nothing I am saying here reflects on anyway about Peter's situation. You just think, oh, it's a bit harsh. You weren't married to him. You could probably be a bit more effusive in your praise for him. They are now in the process, they're separated in the process of divorcing. But Ian, you're exactly right. The thing that always has been annoying about this all the way along is that she would say, it's very unfeminist to define me in terms of my husband. And people would go, but your husband is the chief executive of the SNP, of which you are leader.

5:53This is a relevant thing that journalists might want to talk about. But from my point of view, the thing that's fascinating, when you talk to people in Scotland, one thing that comes up is that the SNP was too dominant and Scottish political culture was too small and homogenous. The SNP got kind of into a one party state. But, you know, the way that Hollywood was designed was with the proportional vote was designed so that you'd usually have coalitions. But they went through a long period where they were just supremely dominant. And then all cultural organisations knew they had to be within the favour of the SNP.

6:24All the charities knew that. You know, all of that. It was just, you know, she was... Not to mention the civil service and the police. I just throw that in. Yeah, right. But she was kind of essentially, it was King Alex and then it was Queen Nicola. And I think that just made for a really unhealthy political culture in Scotland. And the extracts do go into the row between Alex Salmond, who was her mentor, and Nicola Sturgeon. And, I mean, she does say at one point, you know, ours was the most successful partnership in Scottish politics. And you think, well, not at the end it wasn't. And there is there's a real problem in that.

7:01I noticed the Scottish newspapers are having a bit of a row because she suggested, now that he's dead, that he leaked some of this information to a newspaper, which the newspaper has denied. And are you unflinching transparency and honesty when you're having a go at someone from beyond the grave? Is that fair? Oh, yeah. I mean, the reaction to it has been very sharply divided. Remember, not least because of the charges against Alex Salmon, of which he was acquitted of all of them. That plus the gender row is what caused the break-off of ALBA, the breakaway independence party that was there. And that took lots of both SNP activists, sort of middle-aged women who had been the backbone of the SNP, walked out into ALBA, which was always a strange thing at the time, to go into a party led by a guy who was then under investigation for sex offences.

7:49That was Salmon's party. That was Salmon's party. But that they were so teed off with Nicola Sturgeon. The way she handled the gender row, I think, was the main problem, more than just her attitude to it, which is that she just said anyone who disagreed with her was illegitimate. She said at one point that anyone who disagreed with her on self-identification of gender was actually racist, which was a sort of very rogue allegation to bring in. I mean, you could see, you know, transphobic or sexist or whatever. They were basically just straight-up reactionaries, 1950s reactionaries. That's the only reason anyone would disagree with her.

8:18And that caused a huge amount of ill feeling because people didn't just feel disagreed with, they felt disrespected by her. And that's why I think, as you're saying, the reaction has been so strong. It's not just that people disagree with her, it's that they feel that she was pious and domineering and anyone who disagreed with her was illegitimate, which first came up in the context of independence, right? The idea that anyone who didn't vote SNP or didn't want independence was talking Scotland down. You didn't believe in Scotland enough to believe that it could be independent. So those people felt that they were being told that their views were illegitimate and that, and then that same feeling ported on to gender as well.

8:53And in the gender row, it wasn't English liberals or English reactionaries or English transphobes. It was Scottish women. And so that made certainly the previous set of assumptions that anyone who criticises Nicola Sturgeon is either not patriotically Scottish or English by definition rather defunct. When the Gender Recognition Reform Bill was passed, voted for by all other parties except the Scottish Conservatives, which would have brought in self-ID, it was then blocked by Alistair Jack, the Conservative Scottish secretary. So at that point, it was very neat for the SNP that they were saying, you know, reactionary old Tory voting England has once again blocked Scottish enlightened progressivism.

9:37But as you say, there's a brilliant anthology called The Women Who Wouldn't Wish, which is by all of these activists who did unbelievably large amounts of unpaid work because the civil service was just completely on board with the entire surge in the agenda. But, yeah, it was always presented as being essentially evil Tory old England versus liberal enlightened Scotland. And that was the framing that really appealed to the SNP during those years. And it became accepted in England during Covid in particular, because any broadcast by Boris was followed by a broadcast by Nicola Sturgeon in which she looked not like him.

10:12And that was plenty. Yeah, I know what you mean. I think she did have her final renaissance was during Covid because the feeling was that she was taking it very seriously. She was being sober. And in contrast to Boris Johnson saying in March 2020, I'm still out there shaking hands, you know, whatever. That said, she did then, I think, go too far the other way, which now people are criticising her for. So Scotland, for example, kept schools closed longer. You know, she had more virus restrictions. But then those arguments, I mean, you can see it still in America now, are still playing on about exactly how quickly restrictions should have been lifted.

10:43And once that reputation she'd got for being much more marvellous than anything that was going on in English, it meant no criticism was acceptable. So the Iran piece is about these two ferries that... took decades to produce staggering millions, and then they make HS2 begin to look fast. It's not a specifically English problem. And there were problems in Scotland with education, with drugs, with levelling up, all of which were just buried under this assumption that because you're not an English Tory, therefore you're a huge success. So this is what I want to ask about, really, is there seems to be, at the heart of SNP government, they're making two big offers to their electorate, as it were.

11:27The first of which is, we're going to run Scotland better than Westminster politicians can possibly run us. And the second is independence. And those both seem to have fallen short. I mean, obviously, the independence referendum in 2014, there's been a consistent attempt to say, we're going to have another referendum, we're going to get a concession from Westminster, that we will have another one of these. And the support for independence, I think is about, is roughly where it has been for some years, which is about 50%. You know, it's pretty close either way. But the odds of another referendum seem quite slim at the moment.

11:59John Sweeney, current First Minister, does not seem to be holding it out as the kind of shining grail over the hill in the way that I think both Salmon and Sturgeon did. And you're right. Because remember, immediately after the referendum is 2014 and then the 2015 election, general election, the SNP just cleans up. It's just a wipe out across Scotland. So there was this sense that although they'd lost the referendum, they had won this sort of larger moral victory, I think. But that's been eroded. Their power sharing agreement with the Greens collapsed. We lost Humzi Youssef and didn't last very long as first minister.

12:33They're in a much more kind of humble position than they were. And I think that's why probably, I mean, I also think Nicola Sturgeon has wanted to write this memoir because she's a genuine lover of literature and books and reading. I don't think that is feigned for the cameras at all. She is one of the few people who still reads literary fiction with genuine pleasure. But I am really kind of fascinated because, as Ian's saying, it's billing itself as kind of complete transparency, but she doesn't actually want to concede that she was wrong in anything that I've seen her doing. The gender error being really obvious, right, in that there was a rabbi sending a biologically male rapist to a woman's prison.

13:07And she said at the time, you know, I don't, you know, the individual was a rapist when asked if they were a man or a woman. And now she sort of says, well, probably, actually, probably I got that one wrong. And you're like, but OK, well, if you think you did maybe get that one wrong, why did you think it was completely illegitimate for anyone to disagree with you at the time? Explain what changed your mind and what you'd like to say to the people on the other side of that debate. This is the bit, maybe this is in the book. We haven't read it. It comes out on Thursday. But that's what that's a bit I'm struggling with at the moment.

13:32The joke in the eye is always all political memoirs should be called I was right and everyone else was wrong. And this one is being billed as this isn't like other political memoirs. and what I've read so far, it is. She was right about nearly everything and possibly for perfectly good reasons, wrong about various other things and some other things she can't talk about because there's still an ongoing investigation. So, frankly, ish. Is part of this just the kind of inevitable tension between having run somewhere for nearly 20 years, which is how long the SNP have been in office in Scotland under their various leaders, And now that's the sort of time span over which you would expect to have memoirs coming out saying, well, this is what it was like when I was in.

14:16And this is, you know, this is why I made the decisions I did and why they've turned out the way they have. But the S &P is still in office. So it's sort of not quite a natural time for this book to be out now. You'd normally have that after an election. It's gone the other way. And I think because this, the police investigation into the, you know, the hierarchy of the governments running the country took so long and was so delayed. and in the end managed not to date to have got very far in terms of explaining what happened with any of this, everyone was quiet, so they didn't publish their own memoirs.

14:51I haven't read books about what it was like to be at the centre of this near one-party state. How did that feel? Where are those books? They're not there, are they? I mean, David Torrance wrote biographies of both Salmon and Sturgeon, which are very good and worth reading if you're interested in scholarship politics. But actually, I haven't read the insider's view in the way that you might have a, like an Alan Johnson or a Chris Mullen or somebody like that. And that would be really fascinating to read. Let alone a Sasha Swire or a Mrs Gove. And that would be interesting because it's a very small group of people who are in power.

15:29They were all very, very close to each other. The Alex Sandman affair, which was, you know, he was investigated. Then he was tried and then he was cleared on all charges, though his barrister said he could have been a better man. But these were all people they all knew really well. And if you're going to do a book called Frankly, the idea that you didn't discuss this all the time with your husband, who just happened to be in charge of the party as well, and all your other friends, this won't wash. Well, maybe it actually should have been called Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. but the publishers said, maybe just trim that down a bit.

16:07Everyone needs an editor. It's a bit like, it reminds me of, do you remember, the flats in Bristol that Cherie Blair purchased. And the excuse then, because it turned out she'd bought them with the help of a convicted fraudster. And the excuse then was, well, she'd never talked to Tony about it. And all right, in that case, it wasn't a formal thing. You know, they weren't the CEO and the leader of a political party, but they weren't married to you. The idea that you buy a flat for your eldest son when he goes away to university, but you never mention anything to your husband at all. People do talk about these things on a domestic level, let alone the kind of corporate level that they would have had to have done.

16:43So there's an election coming up next year. I think it's going to be by May 2026. And it's going to be a slightly strange one because there'll probably be a big new reform presence that there wasn't before. I mean, if it goes like the by-election they've just had, which I see which Labour won, despite lots of predictions they wouldn't. So where does it go from here? Yeah, I mean, if support for independence is at 50%, but support for the SNP is about a third, which is where it roughly is, which is about enough for a minority government. As you say, Helen, perhaps what the system was designed for or built with in mind, but not enough for a majority government.

17:16What comes next? Well, it is built, the Holyrood system, to give smaller parties a foothold. So you wouldn't be at all surprised to see reform making a breakthrough there and getting some representation. The Greens, Scottish Greens are maybe my favourite political party because they just, they fall out with each other with extraordinary. The latest thing is that one of the guys who's going for co-leader there now says he had to be hospitalised because he was bullied so badly by the other people in the Scottish Greens. I mean, it's extraordinary. I mean, just very small. You think wind farms, can anyone get that heated about them?

17:49Well, OK. You're talking to Andy. Excuse me. Yes, you will. But yeah, so yes, I think it will be very interesting. I think the Scottish Conservatives are probably going to get squeezed out by reform in the same way that they will be probably here. And Labour in Scotland haven't, you know, they're neither a strongly unionist party, although they are technically unionist, nor are they distinct in social terms as much from the SNP as, you know, as they voted, for example, the Gender Reclamation Reform Act and stuff like that. So Anasawa has been trying to edge away from the ultra version of social progressivism that the SNP had.

18:22But he's neither. He hasn't gone full Keir Starmer. I ate the left me either. So it's going to be a really unpredictable set of elections, I would say. But we started with saying that the SNP had become a one-party state, and that was always the criticism of Scottish Labour, that it operated like a giant personal fiefdom up there. So in a sense, I'm trying to be more progressive here, we are getting to a situation where it won't be one lot who entirely defend and identify the only narrative acceptable. Oh, I absolutely think the best possible thing that could happen is that there is a wider spread of parties represented.

18:58Because, as you say, Andy, the SNP support, yes, it's a really significant chunk of Scotland. But there's also a lot of right wing people in Scotland who have not been very well represented. And that kind of might just be bubbling under in an unpleasant way. I think it would be much better. But there's quite a lot of unionist people who are necessarily right wing, who just don't believe in independence. Right, but I think more the problem that I always felt with that is that it had kind of meant that if you wanted to get a grant from the Scottish government, you had to follow a particular way of doing things, right?

19:27If you were a charity boss and you had to be very friendly with the SNP, that kind of stuff, just because Scotland's political culture was just smaller than England's, was more accentuated. It's a problem everywhere, right? But it was a particularly acute problem in Scotland, I think. But the Scottish Conservatives led by Russell Finlay, ex-Sun journalist. I thought you were going to say ex-private eye journalist. No, no, no, no, no, no, ex-Sun crime correspondent. And that's just a fact I throw in. They're still doing that experiment with having newspaper people in leading political parties, which didn't work out so brilliantly for us.

19:57This is Sight of the Border.

20:02At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home and culinary all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead. With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Bruise Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings and nonstop action.

20:50The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just$200 down at BKFSEA.com. Now we come on to section two of today's show, which is all about the exciting news. I'm sure everyone listening is aware, but there's a new version of ChatGPT out. So if you want to ask for a recipe or the capital of Mongolia or, you know, a novel maybe to be written so you can put your name on it, ChatGPT is there and is willing to help. But there is a problem, isn't there, Helen? Because it has been launched with something called Reduced Sycophancy.

21:30Well, so the new model that's out is ChatGPT 5. and it's got, actually, you're pretty pleased now, I find that it's got four new personalities which I thought matched up with the personalities of people on this podcast. Guess who's here? You ready? Cynic, robot, listener and nerd. Is it listener for me, obviously? Get your bids in early on that one. I'll throw myself on the nerd grenade. Thanks very much. I was going to say, that's the one we're fighting over here, isn't it? And partly this is to address the fact that there was a version of the previous iteration that came out in April that was too sycophantic And it just was like, go team, go girl, you go girl.

22:04And people would be like, you know, I think there are voices coming through the walls. And it'd be like, such a great point. Definitely believe that. So they wound it back in. And this kind of caused, you know, outpourings of grief on the Reddit forums dedicated to ChatGPT. People saying, you've taken away my friend. We know lots of people are using it for life coaching, for therapy. there is also a kind of amusing trend to me of people using it to they think come up with new theories or revolutionize physics which when i was researching my book on genius it is a constant motif of people who've gone a bit funny that they think they're about to revolutionize physics so travis kalanick formerly of uber revealed on a podcast recently what you mean he was a driver he was ceo founder yeah i'll go down this thread with gbt or grok that's elon last one and i'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics and then i'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding except it's vibe physics i've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that okay does he mean break down just felt it my favorite reddit comment on this was someone who replied dude just reinvented smoking weed with your friends in college so there's lots to unpack there but basically it seems to be you talk to chat gpt and it keeps saying, what a masterful idea, sir.

23:21God, you're so wise and handsome. It's warm tongue. It's basically what it is. And it might be, there are all sorts of arenas in which that doesn't matter too much. Like if you're asking, what's the capital of Mongolia? And there are lots of other arenas where it might matter a bit more, like cases where, for example, people ask for romantic advice. You know, should I break up with my partner? This is what I think of the matter. Or should I stop taking my medication? and if it replies only with affirmation, it gets really dangerous. And these people who think they've invented new kinds of maths have been involved in dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours of conversation with this thing.

23:58So naturally they think it's real. As in, it sounds so crazy to think, oh, I've reinvented maths despite not having a high school degree, which is what happened to a man in America recently. Two big stories. Yeah, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have both had stories which are eerily similar, beat for beat in that they're people who ask it a question about maths and then they get talking to it and then they kind of get lulled into this belief that they've got one of them had this idea that numbers of fluid not static another one had thought he'd smashed through cryptography you know and they would just get all this kind of constant feedback and chat logs both of these people handed over their chat logs the chat logs will say things like you know am I going mad and be like just because you're asking that is proof how sane you are and it will never contradict them one of the guys managed to get himself out of it by asking gemini which is the google one like is any of this real and he went no no what are you on about but yeah they do have this they have this problem which is they lure people into and this is only a small percentage of people lots of people are using them perfectly normally but for people who are susceptible to kind of foliar they can often end up just spending hours with them and end up with the kind of psychosis essentially the person in the wall street journal article was hospitalized with mania twice after talking for hours and hours and hours.