158: Live From Cheltenham

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1:14My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here on stage at Cheltenham with Helen Lewis, Ian Hislop and Adam McQueen. We are here once again to discuss the last mag, the next mag. We'd better start with the front cover of this week's magazine, Trump's Gaza Triumph. The main slogan at the bottom of it, world apologises, he's not a naughty boy, he's the messiah.

1:39Do we all owe Donald a huge apology for all the years of jokes? Yes, and we're going to issue it through our lawyers. it's official i actually put in a cartoon by griselda he's one of our cartoonists and she'd drawn a figure looking surprisingly like me in front of a newspaper saying middle east peace and the caption was oh bloody trump which i'm afraid summed up quite a lot of it there was also a stopped clock i think the speech in the knesset was quite extraordinary i watched all of it too just because at no point did you know where it was going to go next. That's unlike Trump. What do you think the American audience made of that?

2:25I mean, I went to a couple of Trump rallies last year and I don't think people listen to a word he says. I think it's just, it's like going to a kind of rock concert or something like that, right? And they would just, there would be occasional bits that you'd do and he'd be like, oh, like, you know, like sort of playing Freebird. But they'd be always doing the wall, hey! And then you'd sort of tune out and go and get some snacks in between. So I imagine it was something rather similar in the Nesset, to be honest. His main complaint seemed to be that everyone else had spoken for too long. I mean, he literally said, yeah, good speech, but a bit long.

2:57And they'd showered him with praise for hours and hours. And then he decided the best thing to do was also shower himself with praise. Obviously, everyone's saying, isn't it good? you know the first two points of the 20 point plan have been achieved nearly that leaves quite a lot to go and and quite a lot to go wrong did you see the truth social thing he put up after his chat with Putin he said this is the great accomplishment of peace in the Middle East something that has been dreamed of for centuries and you think you've got two and a half of the 20 points that's quite a long way to go you might not but it is very much his style isn't it that basically if he says something, that's it and it's done.

3:38I mean, he's got two main qualities. One, he's a bully and two, he's completely unreasonable. And those, it turns out, were an incredibly good match for this situation. So the kind of key moment really came when Israel bombed Qatar. And do you ever see that amazing clip where he just came out and for once, he wasn't like camp fake angry. He was actually angry. He went, they've been fighting each other for so long, I don't know what the fuck they're doing. And it was just like kind of, it had the exact tone of your dad going, I don't care who started it. I will stop this car, I swear. I will turn it around.

4:09We won't. The services, I'll drop you off there. And then there was this extraordinary photo that came out where, and I wish there was video of this. He's got Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, with him in the Oval Office. And he's holding like an old rotary dial phone. And he's got Benjamin Netanyahu on the phone to I think the Emir of Qatar going, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I didn't mean to buy my country, sir. I won't do it again, sir. and that was just that was the kind of extraordinary moment I think that Donald Trump felt that he had been personally made a fool of by Israel we are saying this is an actual achievement because I tend to take sort of whatever Trump says as non-gospel you know I say well if he is claiming he's brought peace to the Middle East then he definitely won't have done but there does seem to have been a bit of knocking heads together provisional achievement right and he's got the hostages home the ones who are still alive and also he has made there to be a ceasefire which has allowed some aid to get into Gaza which is incredibly important.

5:04So even if it doesn't hold, those are some achievements and I think that's the credit I'm willing to give him. I'm just going to take a wild outside bet that he probably hasn't solved the Middle East forever. Call me a cynic. Yeah, you're a cynic. But it doesn't matter because he's on to Ukraine now. That's the weekend's job is just to sort all of that out instead. Yeah, he'll add that. I mean, we did put on the cover, you've got to hand it to him and then another voice saying, what, the whole of Gaza? Which, again, may happen. If the redevelopment into Gaza Lago actually comes off, there will be this sort of visionary Middle Eastern dream.

5:46Well, Tony Blair's going to be running it, isn't he? The trouble with Trump is there is no loyalty. So someone asked him, you know the moment on the plane where he appears from the toilet door? And never quite understood why he has to do this and give an interview. He comes around and someone said, are you going to put Tony Blair in charge? And he goes, I don't know, a lot of people don't like him. Huh. We could have told you that for free. Helen, I mean, you cover American Matters a great deal and you fly back and forth quite a lot. You see a lot of it. So one of the things you wrote recently, after an exciting experience at the Riyadh Comedy Festival was that America is becoming more Saudi, just as Saudi is trying to become more American.

6:32Well, so Saudi Arabia is going through this immensely quick process of change. You know, it has de-Islamised, de-Wahhabised in the last 10 years under its elder millennial crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. I'd like to say that as another fellow elder millennial. Finally, we're getting to run the world and it turns out we're quite bad at it. But basically, so I didn't have to cover my hair. I didn't have to wear an abaya. They are now having Jimmy Carr, the sign of progress. You know what they say? Jimmy Carr Hobbinger of democracy. So, you know, and it was just extraordinary that you had and Louis C.K.

7:04as well. Jack Whitehall? Jack Whitehall, yeah. Basically, they now have to suffer like we do. At least if you go to a Jack Whitehall gig in the UK, you can drink. I think that is an important... None of my friends were that sympathetic to me going up there. I was like, I don't think they'll get tortured. And then I said, well, I'm going to a Jimmy Carr gig. But this point of yours about America becoming more Saudi is a fascinating one, under Trump. Under Trump. So my point about that is that when you go to Saudi Arabia now, it's full of almost empty malls as if they're waiting for everybody to turn up.

7:34There's a Jamie's Italian in Riyadh, waiting for families to be disappointed by overpriced pasta. If you build it, they will come. There are other overpriced pastas that are available. Any of them. So at the same time, all of those American brands are obviously piled in. Cristiano Ronaldo is there. Mr. Beast is over there last week. There's Riyadh Fashion Festival. everybody's just taking a bit of that Saudi cash but at the same time the other thing is happening in the other direction which is that America is getting rid of the rule of law the idea of a kind of fair trial of your peers and the other thing is sending random members of your family to do foreign affairs work.

8:09So there's a great line in my colleague, my Atlantic colleague Graham Wood's piece about Jared Kushner going over there and the Saudi says to him, the idea of sending your unqualified son-in-law to do quite important business we're okay with that over here we don't think that's weird So, you know, you're having this... And if you talk to people who work with some of those Gulf monarchies particularly... God, Prince Andrew was a trade-in boy. Right, exactly. Just saying. An apology to Prince Andrew. But they will say that the people in the Gulf like dealing with the Trump White House because they don't turn up and get a lecture about human rights abuses anymore.

8:42It's just basically like, would you give us some money and in exchange you can have a Trump Tower, right? It's foreign policy, American foreign policy has given up. Perhaps it was always a delusion, that idea of being a kind of the world's policeman or being a force for liberal democracy. And now it basically is, let's talk business. So Qatar, for example, is now a huge ally of the US and it's going to be, well, not only to give Donald Trump that plane, but it's going to be allowed to build an air base on American soil. So dearly deeply entwined with Trump's business interests. He's got huge crypto interests in the Middle East.

9:16And so basically, the person we should be doing an apology to, really, is naked corrupt capitalism. I'll organise that. Put that on the cover next time. We've got to move on in just a couple of minutes to our next section of the show. Are there any more thoughts that we haven't expressed about Trump yet that maybe you'd like to before we do? I look forward to the day I'll never have to have a thought about Donald Trump ever again. Yeah. But I fear it may be for some decades to come. Is it going to happen? Is he going to go for a third term, do you reckon, Helen? You've spent time over there. I think he absolutely wants to.

9:51The only thing that's on our side is time. He's 79 years old. He's a lot less healthy this term. And I think people laugh when I say this, but he's a lot less coherent than he used to be. But the thing that's fascinating to me is that J.D. Vance, the vice president, everyone hates him. So you're getting that classic second-term president dynamic where there's an obvious heir apparent, but also a lot of other people are thinking, I could have a go, I could have... And I think that will be, he has to keep talking about whether or not he's going to do a third term. And there are Trump 2028 hats that they keep sending to Gavin Newsom of California, for example.

10:28He has to keep that as an idea to kind of keep the party together. Because at the moment, being a Republican is incredibly simple. You don't have to have any particular thoughts on policy. It's just, do you believe in dear leader enough? And that's the one thing you have to say as a Republican. And everything else is off the table. And, of course, as soon as that breaks down and there's some idea of a post-Trump future, There are big divisions in that party about what they should do in terms of policy. But at the moment, it's a non-policy party. So basically, he's just holding things together with the force of his personality.

10:57The sheer force. Like sort of Tito in Yugoslavia or something. It's all going to fall apart after him. Exactly. Right. Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero Plus the bare knuckle middleweight championship of the world is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meek Cleaver Cullen BKFC 94 Till vs. Romero Watch it live only on DAZN Sign up now at DAZN.com Well look we should turn from Trump and the Republicans to the UK from Trump and, you know, a party which has no obvious heir apparent to...

11:46Labour. I think it's very unfair on Andy Burnham, whose performance at the Labour conference was quite extraordinary in terms of incompetence. And if that's a bid to lead, I was impressed. He managed not to pose with a banana, which was David Miliband's big mistake. Do you remember that one? It is weird with Labour how you get these heir apparent who just turn up and get talked up for about three weeks always as the great big thing that's going to take over and then it just sort of fades away. I'm going to say something really cruel about Andy Burnham but I had to live through a previous Labour Party conference where he turned up going, well, if you don't want Keir, you can have me.

12:28But he didn't beat Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. He had all of the advantages of being the establishment centre mainstream sensible candidate. And guess what? He couldn't connect with people in the way that Jeremy Corbyn did. And he didn't win then. And now he's on his third go-round at having a crack at it. I just at some point... He could throw his hat into the ring to lead Jeremy and Sultan and Zahra Sultan's party, couldn't he? I mean, they're not doing a great job of it themselves. The third co-leader. Great. But I suppose the question I wanted to ask all three of you is really, how did things get this bad this fast for Labour?

13:04Because the levels of unpopularity across the country, they are extraordinary and it's quite a remarkable set of figures when you look at it and the really interesting thing is something has changed. So if you look at every election since 1983 and what happened afterwards to the popularity of the relative parties, every time the governing party loses popularity, their popularity slides a few points down the scale, or, you know, five or ten, and the Chief Opposition Party rises up the gale. This is the first time since all those records, since 1983, where both Labour and the Conservatives have suffered a drop in popularity since the election.

13:45Now that's obviously because of the rise of reform but it is quite striking to see. And Labour's slide has been really precipitous since then. How has it got so bad so quickly for them? Well I think it's disappointment whereas often someone says you know there's a new conservative leader and you go oh well but with starman people thought this was going to be different and obviously if you come in with a you know huge majority there is a big burden of expectation um particularly after you know a long period of rule by the opposition and they disappointed really fast but the really odd thing is isn't it that they came in saying everything's going to be rubbish it wasn't like they were promising kind of like a golden unicorn for everyone they basically said the country's in a really bad state it's going to be pretty disastrous.

14:29We're going to have to really, really rescue it. You're in for a really bumpy ride. And still managed to disappoint, even after that. And I think, you know, a lot of people, a lot of eye readers were limbering up to say, ugh, typical, you know, you're having a go at the Labour Government, are you? What do you want? The Tories back. Which is what people usually say when there's a change of government to private eye. This time they just said, bloody Labour. And you thought, then he got in yesterday. The speed of it was incredible. But it was, I mean, it was the suits and the glasses and the immediate freebies, which were sort of absolutely extraordinary.

15:06I mean, if you come in on a wave of people being disillusioned and disappointed on, you know, PPE equipment, any number of sort of sleaze stories, then the first thing you do, literally the first thing you do, is give an enormous gift-wrapped cake to the opposition and to the Tory papers to say, you're just as bad. And even if you aren't just as bad, because the amounts were never quite the same, you know, we haven't got the Baroness Moan figure yet. But I don't... Certainly haven't got the money, and we're never going to. Yeah. But I think that was amazing. And then you went... I mean, we know this.

15:48You went straight into the winter fuel. So doing exactly what the opposition did, which you criticised, and then choosing as a flagship policy something that's going to make you unpopular. These are not forgiven easily. I mean, I've got a very simple explanation of this. So Tony Blair likes to quote Lee Kuan Yew, who's the leader of Singapore, saying basically if you've got 2 % economic growth, everyone's happy. If it's under 2%, everyone's unhappy. And we have had since the financial crisis basically stagnant wages. At the same time, we've had an ageing population, which means we just, to even stand still in terms of both NHS provision and pension provision, just had to find more and more money out of taxes.

16:27And so I think people just feel like things are a grind. They don't feel like things are on the upswing. And I don't know if it's a lot more complicated than that in that Labour came in saying we're going to get economic growth going and people don't feel that yet. I think that's true because when Blair came in in 1997, there was a feeling, more of a feeling of purpose and mission than this government have ever had. But also there was a sort of upswing in the mood of the country, which I think was largely down to economic things, that the economy was kind of improving at that point. I remember at that point, John Major and a lot of people from his administration saying, well, actually it was us that did that.

17:01We kind of built it. It was like, yeah, but you did do that after crashing it in Black Wednesday before that, didn't you? I mean, you did go down to go up again. But it's a real benefit from, you know, if you're the person that happens to be standing when the economy goes into an upswing, you can take the credit for it. The sympathetic view is that there's a terrible hangover from austerity having basically hollowed out public services, so they need a huge level of investment, like upfront capital investment. There's a hangover from the so-called Boris wave of immigration in which Boris Johnson, with his typical attention to detail, just had no idea what was going on.

17:33There's the fact that, you know, after Brexit, the goalposts immediately then moved to the Convention on Human Rights and that small boats have really not been solved as a problem. And the fact that if you're under 45, you're paying half of your wages out in rent. That's the situation lots of people are in. And lots of people are in that situation, not just in London and the South East, but elsewhere, of thinking, will I be able to have the kind of life that my parents had? You know, and all of that is the kind of everything. Basically, British politics just went wrong at the financial crisis, and it's never quite dug itself out of that hole.

18:06I hope you're all feeling cheerful about this. But it's really interesting, because what you're saying is kind of that this is not specifically a Labour thing. It's that Labour, you know, made some promises about reform, lowercase r. in the hope of getting elected, got elected, things, they have not been able to restart 2%, 3 % economic growth a year. Is this just not going to be an easily governed country because we will keep on electing people who promise they'll change things? You know, I suspect reform, up a case, I don't have the answers to solve all of these deep structural problems. Do you think not, Andy?

18:43No. I'm sorry, you know, I know I'm a bit edgy on this podcast. No, I like the idea that they'd change their mind on tax immediately. I mean, even before they've got it, usually people wait a bit for a U-turn. But, I mean, he has years to promise that he's going to have massive tax cuts. And then he said, oh, well, maybe we won't now. Right. But are we just becoming less governable as a country because we've got deep-seater problems that there isn't an easy fix for? But you could say we're going to try and fix them rather than say, what can I think of that everyone will really hate? the collapse in popularity is i mean other governments have come in and economically have not done very well but they don't have these figures do they they have made some weird decisions along the way i mean as you say the winter fuel thing i mean that and then trying to revise pit ben i mean to come in and go right who can we unite the country by really going after old people everyone hates them i tell you us the disabled as well we'll target them as well that That'll work.

19:41Yeah. I think if you look at the fact that... This is going to be a deeply unpopular thing to say in any room. Check the edge of the audience quickly. Yeah, I know, right? Fellow under-60 brethren. But I do think that actually the triple lock is unsustainable, and I'm just... I'm sorry. You know, working... I'm sorry. But I think... Oh, there we go. And actually, I don't have any problem with means testing the winter fuel allowance either. And the other problem is that realistically, when you're talking about house building and housing costs, that is also an age-related issue. And it was the one thing that I hoped would readjust the balance under Labour.

20:12You know, the Tories were very much, their core vote was over 65, and they wanted to protect pensioner incomes and protect the Green Belt and all that kind of stuff. And I thought, well, at least Labour will come in and they'll slightly rebalance it towards working age people. But as you say, they ham-fisted winter fuel so badly in the middle of something else. I think they're just totally terrified of revisiting any of that. And the excuse is always offered, and it was on that and on the inheritance tax, that somehow the comms team had failed to communicate what was actually happening. And, you know, I shouldn't have to, you know, accept winter fuel allowance.

20:49I mean, you know, this is a very old person. I think I should get cold. You should burn copies of the private eye annual for once. Well, you never know to see how sales are. But none of that was explained and the means testing wasn't explained and the benefit reform was not explained. And everyone says, well, it's not the government's fault. It's their advisors, it's their PR people. And in the end, you have to stop making excuses for PR people and advisors and senior figures and all these people. And just say, well, maybe the leadership is a bit useless. And they need to explain policies, give people a vision, give people a narrative, give people a reason to vote for them.

21:32And those are not negligible skills. Yeah, I mean, Starmer does have an identity. You know, he is a human rights lawyer. Like, he's a football fan. I don't know if you know what his dad did for a living, but he comes from a relatively underprivileged background. He certainly wasn't sent to Dulwich College like Nigel Farage. You know, there is a story there, but it's one that he's always been slightly resistant and reluctant to tell. Yeah. Did something amazingly funny happen in the subtitles? Right, all right. We'll have a... I thought it got more than it deserved. Someone could just clip that and send it into private.

22:04Oh, we have a funny cutting scene. We'll get a tenner. But, you know, Starmer hasn't made a load of money flogging gold services like Nigel Farage. I mean, there is a story that he is able to tell, but is seeming resistant to doing so. I do think also they are operating in an extremely hostile media environment, which, you know, is new. I mean, sorry, it's not new for Starmer or for Labour, but it is, you know, it's new since the election. Yeah. I mean, the rearguard action fought by the Telegraph, the Mail, the Express was extraordinary. Marie. Adam, you write about it a lot in Street of Shame, right?

22:37There is a phalanx there that the left has never quite been able to recreate in media terms. Well, what I'm really enjoying at the moment is the bizarre alliances that are going on, particularly, you know, this story, and this really, really targeting Morgan McSweeney off the back of this book, The Fraud by Paul Holden. And it's been pushed largely by the Mail and the Telegraph. But Paul Holden is about as Corbynite as they come. You know, he works with Andrew Feinstein, who was the guy that stood against Keir Starmer in Hoban and St Pancras. I mean, this really is an amazing case of your enemy's enemy is your friend.

23:09These are sort of not natural bedfellows, are they? But they're coming at it from both sides. Does anyone fully understand the Jonathan Powell and China story? No. Have we got anyone in from GCHQ tonight? That's good. No one put their hands up. You would have been sacked. I'm a bit lost in the DSL. But again, this seems like I mean, of all the things I'm not going to give advice to Kimmy Bainoff, but if you're going to target Starmer on one thing, I would say that he's probably quite hot on the proper process of criminal prosecutions. Just as an ex-head of the CPS. That's probably something he kind of knows the details on.

23:48Yes. And he's not reconvincing on it. He's not reconvincing on anything. That's kind of what we've been talking about for the last ten minutes. He genuinely, genuinely loves Arsenal. And if you get him to talk to about it, he'll just be like, yeah, I really like Arsenal. It's a really great team. He just cannot convey even emotion that you know behind the scenes is genuine. But people want to believe that, you know, Kirsten was absolutely straight and, you know, his experience as a lawyer means he really does understand the law and support the law. And then we end up in a situation with this prosecution where the deputy national security adviser is somehow seriously to blame, but the actual national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, had no idea.

24:26I'm good as knows. I mean, he's not there to supervise his deputy, for goodness sake. and you think, well, why doesn't he know? He's the national security advisor. Presumably, what we think of China is his business. I mean, obviously, he's not elected, and he's been appointed, but that is still his job. But it's all built on this giant lie, isn't it, which is the fact that actually lots of people, if you talk to people in Whitehall and the civil service, they do regard China as a huge threat. They know it's always trying to hack us. They know it's always trying to send suspiciously attractive ladies to Lib Dem party conferences.