155: Re-shuffle, Re-signation, Re-form

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0:38Yikes. You could hire the guy your neighbor recommended, but I'm pretty sure that's just his cousin. Do we know if he's licensed, or does he just own a ladder? Listen to your home. Go with Thumbtack. Upload a photo or voice note, and we'll diagnose your project and match you with the right pro for the job. Thumbtack. We know homes. Hire the right pro today. page 94 the private eye podcast hello and welcome to another episode of page 94 my name is andrew hunter murray and i'm here in an undisclosed location with adam mcqueen helen lewis and ian hislop we're here to discuss the news of the last two weeks give or take maybe even the next two weeks and uh we start off with the fact we've got a completely new government we've had a reshuffle?

1:25Not completely new but largely new. I thought it was largely the same with different desks. The funny thing was, last press day, so we're going back to Monday the 1st of September, at about 10.30, once we thought everything was pretty much done and we knew what copy was coming in and nothing else was happening, there's suddenly a big BBC breaking news thing saying, Keir Starmer reshuffle kicks off. And I thought, oh my god, we're going to have to pull apart the entire magazine and redo it completely. And that turned out to be sort of, you know, the minister for paperclips was swapped with the minister for nice biscuits with tea and coffee after cabinet meetings and that was pretty much it as far as i could see so i thought we were safe at that point at which point i i disappeared off on holiday for a couple of days i messaged from helen uh to say have you seen the news and it's an angela rayner resigned and as you say we'd had a lot we had a largely new cabinet suddenly so yeah quite a lot of changes new what is it new home secretary foreign secretary new deputy prime minister and then loads of changes the two ones that have been gone a bit under the radar is Pat McFadden, who is the kind of last surviving Blairite, and Keir Starmer's big fixer and sort of straight back player on political shows, has ended up at the Department of Work and Pensions.

2:29And Johnny Reynolds, who was a business, has gone to be chief whip. And the really interesting thing about that is that suggests that they're going to try and put welfare cuts through again. Because essentially they tried to put through changes to personal independence payments, completely failed to do so because of a huge backbench rebellion. I think that they still know that that is a big target a lot of money, they eventually end up making changes that look like they will be net costing them money now in the welfare bill, and it's money that they don't feel that they have. So there's that part of it.

2:57And then the other part of it, I think, is a feeling that they wanted Shabana Mahmood in at home because she's the most hard line on immigration and boats. Every day they wake up and thinking about how they're going to lose to reform, basically. And so they know that's the one issue that they've absolutely got to get a grip on, is asylum hotels. I couldn't see what new weapons, as Chief Whip Reynolds has, that the previous chief wit didn't have. Is it personality alone? I mean, why should the backbenchers put through any reforms this time that they didn't want last time? Johnny Reynolds is famously very, very nice.

3:29For many years he used to send me a Christmas card with all his adorable children in matching sweaters. I think the Labrador may even also have been in a matching sweater. So you think they've basically gone from bad cop to good cop? I think they may be trying good cop. But I agree with you. The way I see it is that lots of these Labour people think, well, I was elected in a Northern English seat or a Welsh seat, I don't think I'm going to win it next time. Do I want the one thing to come out of my five years in Parliament to have been taking money away from disabled people? So I think they will still struggle to make that case with backbenchers.

3:57But they obviously are trying to put people in that they absolutely feel they can trust. There's been a lot of stuff happening in the backroom as well, actually, as well, just to try and make that number 10 operation. And, yeah, they brought back Tim Allen, I'm sure friend of the magazine. I was going to say, if you're a dictator, then there was only for a time, there was only really one person to call. Which is interesting to me because I think one of the problems that this government has is they don't really understand what the media is now. They're still wedded to the idea of the six o 'clock news bulletin or getting something on page one of the Telegraph or whatever it might be.

4:29I think they're beginning to realise that they really need to be on places like TikTok where Nigel Farage is absolutely massive. massive and James Lyons who has left as recently as government communications advisor said this in a LinkedIn post he said you know it's changed massively even in the time I was there and I still don't think we've really got to grips with what it's like to try and make our case in this environment. That was something that struck me with Shibana Mahmood as well who as well as being kind of the most kind of hardline kind of and socially conservative person but it was also in terms of effectiveness I was thinking the last really sort of big success they had in selling a story to the public was the very awkward situation they were left with with the massive prison population that was that was going to go and it's going to explode and she very successfully as justice secretary managed to sell that back as you know this is a mess we were left by the tories and this is what we're going to have to do to get over it it's not ideal for anyone that was the last time i can remember this government feeling sort of quite sure-footed on something and and communicating it quite well and using an amazing technique known as honesty which you know is worth a try occasionally we have to let these people out because there isn't room for them we don't want to we hate them as much as you do we don't want to see them coming out and being picked up in jags by their old mates and having a glass of champagne but we haven't got any cells i mean that sort of worked yeah i mean it was a potentially government ending moment wasn't it that sort of imagery and somehow that one did kind of pass and paved the way for new disasters thereafter the other interesting one is that steve reed has ended up going to housing now he is music to my ears a little bit on the build baby build side and i think they realized that that target 1.5 million homes is something that are going to be judged on.

6:03I mean, there is a housing theory of everything about what's wrong with British politics. And if you look at something like asylum hotels, that's a very good example of it, right? Actually, where are we going to put people while they wait for their claims to be processed? There's two problems there, no places to put them, and it's huge backlogs in home office processing. So anything that can address housing is going to make everything else across all our other policy areas easier. The massive fall from the so-called Boris wave of immigration to this year's immigration figures, it's something close to halved.

6:31I mean, they have actually kind of gone, oh, no. And I'm trying to work out why Boris Johnson let that happen. Was that an ideological thing? Or did he just be ready to be shocked here, but simply just do something he didn't really understand the consequences of? What do you mean carelessness and inattention to detail? It seems unlikely, I know. I don't think so. But it was always going to be a lump in it, as it were, because of Ukraine and Hong Kong, which both added substantially to the stats. And I believe I'm right in saying that the backlog, people waiting for their claims to be processed, is substantially down.

6:58Yeah, and NHS waiting lists have fallen a bit, and they have seen off a reasonable number of strike threats, not the tube strike threats that are happening as we're recording this. But it isn't actually quite as bleak a picture as you might initially think, although I'm currently feeling quite pessimistic at it all. I mean, if that backlog has come down, and I think it's by a decent chunk in what have they had now, 14 months, the question then becomes, does that matter? or is the debate about immigration, boats, housing, flags, all of that now so dominant and so toxic that even results don't make a difference?

7:33Well, also they just lack the ability to punch Nigel Farage. Stephen Bush, my former colleague at the New Statesman, said this. They're planning to run the next election against Nigel Farage as a fear message. Do you really want this guy to be prime minister? Because lots of people, for everyone that does, there's someone that doesn't. But they won't tell you what you should be afraid of. And so there was this mad situation when he said, well look I'm going to return people because we'll get out the EHCR and I'll return them to Afghanistan and I'll pay them and people went you're going to pay the Taliban you're going to give money to the Taliban and they kind of couldn't really land that point right that this guy is so irresponsible he'll give money to people we've said are jihadists and terrorists and misogynists and it's worse than that you'll you'll pay money to the Taliban to murder people who were on our side briefly during the war and this is the kind of thing I think that a kind of government comms operation ought to be able to make a little bit of pay out of.

8:21But they can't. They just kind of can't quite get their own reform. Is the problem with blaming the Government Coms office just a way of, as is always true in British politics, of saying, well, the advisors aren't much, the comms aren't. Could the leaders do it? The members of the Cabinet? I don't know. Well, we should say what's brought this whole reshuffle on in the first place and, you know, say a sad farewell to Angela Rayner. Probably an au revoir, I imagine. Can she stand again for deputy leader that's something i haven't seen anyway could she just i know i was talking about the threat from the left and who might stand for deputy leader could she just put herself up for it again having resigned i think technically she could you have to get a certain number of um either clps or trade unions and mps there's this kind of two-step process to show you've got a reasonable amount of support to winnow people out there may be some bit in the rule book that says you can't do it immediately in the same way that kemi badenock's most favored line in the conservative rule book is that you can't have a leadership challenge within a year of the new tory leader getting in.

9:15There are a lot of people who are showing a suspiciously high level of interest in the Gaza situation in a way that suggests that they are about to imminently announce deputy leadership bids. I'm looking at you, Emily Thornberry and Stella Creasy. Remember Suela Braverman resigning from Liz Truss's government and then coming back immediately to the same job as Home Secretary in Rishi Sunak's just like a couple of weeks later? But are we saying, A, that people's memories are short, or B, that they just don't care? So if you're judged to have behaved very badly and badly enough to have to resign from the second highest job in the country that doesn't mean you can't come back i mean it suggests you've done something wrong in the first place which you haven't obviously because no one has ever done anything wrong at any point in any government the record on people being brought back is not a brilliant one is it i mean you might remember both peter mandelson and david blunkett had resigned from blair's government and were both brought back fairly rapidly to other jobs do you remember what happened next oh yes both of them then had to resign again didn't they but lord mandelson is now with us.

10:11Always. Like the poor, he's always with us, isn't he? Yeah, no, he does just keep bobbing back up to the surface of the pan, doesn't he? That's extraordinary. I'm going to say that I'm quite sympathetic to Angela Rayner on the basis of someone who has to do a tax return. I don't understand any of it. I don't think anyone can understand our tax system. I'm not sure anyone does. I mean, I was thinking about this. Is it the most boring reason for a political resignation ever? I mean, absolutely. She had to go. She'd gone against the Ministerial Code of Ethics. I'm not disputing that at all. So what was it?

10:39It was so technical right as i understand it she went because she'd failed to seek further tax advice as recommended by lawyers on her stamp duty obligation on buying a second home yeah and then lied about it and then tried to throw the local convincing firm under a bus she was the minister responsible for housing so when for the second time in six months you are involved in a housing purchase scandal, you might think, you just might think, I'd better ask someone who knows about this, or I'd better take the safe route and pay the maximum amount of tax rather than the minimum. Both good points.

11:19Just suggesting. No, but also this is the government of the ironic resignation, isn't it? And you get your anti-corruption person having to resign for corruption. Well, that's what I was going through. In terms of absolute slam dunks, they do kind of stay on topic with all of their resignations, don't they? So we lost Roshanar Ali just a couple of weeks earlier, the Homelessness Minister. She had to resign after evicting tenants and putting the rent up, while specifically trying to push through the Renters' Rights Bill through Parliament, which banned exactly that sort of behaviour. We had Tulip Siddique, who was the Treasury Minister who was responsible for fighting financial corruption, accused and now, in fact, on trial in Absentia in Bangladesh for financial corruption connected to her aunt over there.

11:55Yeah, auntie corruption. We had Liz Haig. That was an undisclosed conviction for fraud when her mobile phone turned out not to have been stolen and she'd just gone on upgrade to an iPhone instead. Now, that wasn't connected. She was Minister for Transport, so that wasn't entirely connected to her brief. But slight irony in the fact that she was working for an insurance company at the time. Wouldn't say you were Deputy Prime Minister and there'd been all these series of scandals and enforced resignations going on. Wouldn't that make you slightly more careful? You would think so, wouldn't you? Yeah.

12:23And the charge of recklessness, does that not hold? Oh, I think it absolutely does hold. I'm just saying it's the technicalities. You get slightly lost in the weed. I mean, the fact that it took kind of two weeks. Well, it was more than two weeks because we had the scandal last year, didn't we? We had the over the home in Stockport or Stockton, was it? Yeah, the original. Yeah. And I remember the mail on Sunday going into two pages of forensic dissection of Instagram photos of her sofa cushions, which was supposed to prove whether or not it was. I mean, that's the thing with scandals. It's quite hard.

12:51When they're very, very straightforward, like the ones we've just mentioned, it's really nice and easy to make them stick. But some of them, it's just sort of a lot more complicated, isn't it? But again, the overall optics, which I believe comms departments call this, is someone who shouts Tory scum and spent a huge amount of time having a go at the other side for corruption and tax avoidance just should be a bit more careful. That's what, damn it, you're right. She was straight out of the traps on someone like Nadim Zahawi, for example. and there was a lethal moment of Prime Minister's question when Kimmy Barden-Ock said there was some dimension of her being the minister and responsible for housing and everyone groaned and as soon as you become that sort of punchline the government would never be able to say anything about housing if the second thing is everyone groans and I thought that's just that exemplifies why she did have to go Now all this is leading up to a very exciting thing which I know you've prepared Adam which is a brief quiz about some of the most technical and abstruse reasons ministers have ever had to resign.

13:51Is that right? Yeah, yeah. Yes. We're not doing the big sex scandals here. We're doing the really kind of slightly tedious workman-like ones. Can I say that Ian is looking very confident about this? These are the ones I like. Yeah. We have mentioned Peter Mandelson already. So not the first resignation. That was an absolute slam dunker. If you remember, he failed to disclose. It was housing again, wasn't it? He failed to disclose. Something that might seem relevant to certain people. He owed£373 ,000 to another cabinet minister who he was working with across the table, which he'd used to buy a very, very expensive house in Notting Hill.

14:25That's why he went that time. But as I say, he was then brought back to the cabinet. Can you remember why he had to resign the second time? Hindujas. Hindujas had other passports, right? He was involved in helping to get passports for a couple of people who were Labour donors and industrial tycoons. And at this point, ahead of the private eye lawyer, I jump in to say that at the inquiry into it, He was cleared of any improper involvement in trying to source that passport. But yes, it was. And it was all tied up. Do you remember why it was felt that he owed a favour to the Hindujia family? Had they set up a mushy pea factory in Hartlepool?

14:57No, I'm afraid it's even more timely than that. It was the Millennium Dome. They were sponsors of the Millennium Dome or a zone in the Millennium Dome. Yeah, indeed. Boris Johnson promised to lie down in front of bulldozers to stop Heathrow's third runway. Yes. So ahead of a parliamentary vote on exactly that subject, which minister resigned from Theresa May's government on principle so that they could vote against the third runway? Was it Zach Goldsmith? It was not. I've now got to confuse my brain with the time that Michael either locked himself or got himself locked in the toilet on his first day as chief whip, which is a way to get out of a vote that you don't want to do.

15:34But Boris Johnson flew to Afghanistan. He did indeed. In order to have a meeting. in order to not be in the country so he wouldn't have to vote. Who resigned? I'll give you a clue. For audio listeners, Adam is doing jazz hands. Jazz hands is brother. Poor old Greg Hands. No one remembers him at all. Still nothing. For Chelsea and Fulham. I would never have got Greg Hands from jazz hands. I was thinking, like, was there someone who was in a cabaret at one point? Yeah, I think he's the jazziest member of Theresa May's government. I think the Dean Dorish, she seems like she might have done jazz hands.

16:11If this section does actually make it onto a visual one, can I say that's the worst charades I've ever seen. Now do Greg. Do the concept of Greg. Sounds like... Hey, that's very good. We could have done that. OK, so he resigned on principle. Yeah, he went ahead of the vote. And Boris Johnson just scuttled off to Afghanistan, giving rise to a memorable private eye cover, can you remember? He was with a translator. Yeah. And I think the joke was that it wasn't the third runway, it was a turd runaway. That's the one. Brilliant. It's the finest tradition of Catullus. I mean, can someone explain to me why this dramatic reshuffle in which Yvette Cooper becomes Foreign Secretary and David Lammy becomes Vice President or...

16:59No, that's his friend. But why is this going to help? Well, the change is as good as the rest. Oh, I know the answer to this, which is because if you listen to the Keir Starmer interview with Matt Chorley, we are now in phase two. This is it, phase two of the Starmer government. You may have not noticed the passage of phase one, but the idea is that basically they are now going to try and put people in to do things that people like. Yeah, I know. I don't think it's going to work necessarily. If that was the plan for this to be phase two, though, I come back to, again, that reshuffle that they had a few days before it.

17:29Why didn't they do it then if this was the grand plan all along to move everyone around? My hunch is that they had all this ready and they planned to do it after party conference because everyone will be preparing the speeches for party conference. And now you've got a load of people just, you know, who are going to have to give the biggest speech of their life as a minister and something they only sort of swatted up on 10 minutes ago. So I think this was all like in the offering and then in a way they decided to kind of take the advantage of the crisis. In terms of resignations, though, I mean, a lot of the speculation before he had to do another reshuffle was, yes, the minister for paperclips had changed, but he'd put in all these sort of very, very good economically minded people to undermine Rachel Reeves.

18:08So there appeared to be some point to that procedure. And then suddenly we're told, no, Yvette Cooper, who's been just in the home, she's going to foreign affairs. Is she? But I think that was a kind of face-saving thing because actually she was being moved out because they never really got along with her. I think they followed the kind of, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. But it does seem an odd move then to put her in charge of the foreign affairs of the entire country, doesn't it? Doesn't matter. That's traditionally one of the big jobs, isn't it? One of the big offices to stay.

18:34It's not anymore, though, because the Prime Minister just does it. Who flew over to the White House to sort out the Ukraine situation? It was Keir Starmer last week. That's the thing. And that's why David Lammy's got DPM, so that he asks you reference it and he can continue his fishing-based bromance with J.D. Vance. But basically, she's got a kind of a job that involves her going and sort of shaking hands at boring summits and not really driving a department in the same way. It's not like it was in the good old days when Liz Truss was foreign secretary. Think of those trade deals, think of all those great trade deals we made.

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19:45All 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. Right, so Reform had their conference, their own new conference. They had it at the huge Birmingham NEC, massive great conference center, very, very big. It all happened over the weekend. And I'd just like to know from the three of you where we are on the ancient timeline of first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Because I think we've had the ignoring and the laughing at.

20:26I think the laughing at can coexist with the winning, unfortunately. That's what my mainly took away from that conference is that Farage has been spending a lot of time with Donald Trump. And he's obviously learned a lot about the American right wing style, which is campers absolute knickers. but also incredibly successful in electoral terms and enacting a lot of its policy agenda. So you get a situation in which, yes, it is objectively very funny that Andrea Jenkins comes out in a catsuit and sings a song that she has composed herself, which you'd normally think was the attitude of a fringiest to fringe parties.

20:55But it was a heavenly professionalised conference. It really was. As you say, a big audience, big attendance, loads of bodyguards sweeping around the place, stalls, all the exhibitors, things, all the things you'd associate with the main party conference were there. And the fireworks. I saw a quote from a reform member this morning saying, you know, we have fireworks. You haven't seen Labour or Conservatives having fireworks on stage, will you? And I thought, well, clearly you're ready for government. But that's what Trump has kind of learned. Those rallies are sort of slightly like WWE cage matches, right?

21:24And there's all people dressed up in stuff. And there's a whole kind of pageant-y aspect to it. And I have to say, as someone who's attended many party conferences, it's not unwelcome that someone might try and make them slightly entertaining. Do you remember that Theresa May speech where everything went wrong and the thing fell off the back? She got the throat sweet and the person got the P45. Reforms conference, although it was objectively DeLulu in some ways, was a lot more professional than that Tory party conference when they were in government. So I think you can over-egg the laughing at them.

21:53We might have to one day laugh at them as they do stuff and they win. And they unveiled Nadine Dorries as their secret weapon, their new recruit, architect of the online safety bill, which they are now hugely against. But no one's interested in consistency, Adam. I mean, Farage literally said, we're going to deport everybody. And someone said, well, you did say a few months ago that wasn't possible. He said, no, I didn't. And he did. I mean, it's literally there in black and white in the last issue. As we said, the Trump playbook, isn't it? Yeah, you just go fake news. Didn't happen. But fess up, Adam, because you secretly love Nadine Doris and her column in the mail.

22:30She is a magnificent Daily Mail columnist. I'm not going to knock her abilities at that at all. I mean, what I was interested in, the justification for bringing her in, because a few people, there's some rumblings going on in reform, aren't there, about bringing in lots and lots of ex-Tories when supposedly they're saying they're useless and they're going to replace them. The justification was that they actually need people who've got experience in government and know how to do it, which is an odd justification of getting Nadine Dorries in, because she wasn't exactly the sort of greatest performer in...

22:54And she wasn't Home Secretary, as I remember. No. Or Chancellor. She was Minister of Culture, was she not? during which her big quest was to privatise Channel 4, something that was abandoned and hasn't happened. Yeah, and she didn't know the details of who owned Channel 4, which you may remember. It was totally all over her brief, was she? I sort of thought she had already gone to reform. You're just ahead of the news, actually. She definitely left the Tories. I mean, she's written two entire books, which poor old Helen has read, about how awful the Tories are and how they're being run by an unelected cabal of rabbit murderers.

23:26Don't you think that Boris Johnson at some point might go reform, or try and go reform, which would be fascinating. Well, this was Nadine's plaintiff. But that's because this town ain't big enough for the both of us. I mean, that's the thing that's kind of fascinating to me. If you're Boris Johnson, you still harbour some hoax of a comeback. You've just got to think, where could I just pop up back again? What I just felt about that reform conference is that the political momentum is all with them. So they've now got a Daily Mail columnist on their side. They've got GB News on their side. They've got The Telegraph on their side.

23:52For their voting base, those are the places that you would want. who still likes the Tory party brand absolutely Tara Vine, Tara Vine, page in the Mail on Sunday saying although I deeply respect Nadine in that way that all Daily Mail columnists absolutely definitely do because they're all best friends, she said she thinks she's wrong about this and the Conservative Party still has some life in it and Kemi Babenock is a marvellous thing and she will be sticking with the party of the man she divorced quite recently. Someone wants a peerage from the Tory party is what I'm hearing there Well, like Nadine.

24:24Yeah. But the aim, as far as I understand it, of the conference this weekend was to show, firstly, that it's inevitable. This is just going to happen. Yeah. So get used to it. Don't fight it. Maybe in two years. Maybe in two years if there's an election for no reason that I can fathom there will be. Okay. And the other was to show that this is no longer the Nigel show. We've got lots of talent waiting in the wings. And this is a party you can see putting in a cabinet of 20 MPs. 20 human beings. Real human beings. Yeah. Yeah, the second one is a lie, though. It is still The Nigel Show. It's always, this is, I mean, it's not.