160: Shakedowns, Coups and COP 30

0:00Saturday, 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 Meat Cleaver Colon. BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. 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 the Private Eye studio with Helen Lewis, Ian Hislop and Adam McQueen.

0:41We're here to discuss everything that's happened since the last issue of the magazine came out a week ago. And let's start with a phone call that's happening right now, which is going to be Keir Starmer speaking to Donald Trump, begging him not to sue the BBC for five billion dollars or whatever figure he's reached now. Helen can you explain? I think and I wrote in this week's magazine that I think this is the one that the BBC are happiest talking about because essentially they'd rather like to have an argument with Donald Trump if anyone else given his broad unpopularity in Britain although actually polling did suggest that most people think that they were wrong to edit that they basically edited two bits of the speech from January the 6th 2021 when he said like let's all go down to the Capitol and then there's a bit where they cut out where he said and just have a lovely peaceful protest and definitely nobody he'd shout hang Mike Pence and bring in a load of zip ties.

1:30And then a bit later in the speech where he says, you know, you go down there and we're going to fight like hell. Yeah, one of our readers said, can you make it absolutely clear that by the time he said fight, fight, fight, his supporters were actually fighting. So what he was doing was placating the crowd, which I think is a good point from a reader. And I'm going to pass it to the BBC's lawyers in case that helps. The bit they cut out was he said, we're going to go down to the Capitol and I will be with you. And then he wasn't. He didn't. No, he wasn't. Actually, in a way, they were making him look better by that cut, weren't they?

2:01And can I check why they were all there in the first place? Was it because Trump had spent weeks denying the legitimacy of the election result? No, you're Trump deranged, Andy. Oh, got it. Okay. And probably worked for the BBC. Sorry, I'm just summarising the rest of the letters that have come in. Yeah, it was a certification of 2020 election results. But what ended up happening is, as you would have seen from the footage at the time, lots of people stormed into the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. a protester was shot trying to climb through a door. And since then, Trump has... He was impeached subsequently, wasn't he?

2:32Yeah. There was enough kind of evidence to make him look bad that the BBC didn't need to do an absolutely idiotic edit. Right. And he pardoned violent protesters in that whilst constantly quacking on about Antifa and how they're the real threat to America, threatening to certify them as a domestic terrorist organisation. But yeah, so you're right. Basically, Donald Trump didn't say exactly what the BBC accused him of saying. There is a larger context to that, which is that we may think he said some things that were nonetheless quite bad. Legally, the fact that you're all offering common sense views is of no interest.

3:05Can we get down to what the law in America will allow him to do? Well, luckily, we've got massive Florida legal expert Adam McQueen. Yeah, I've been on Wikipedia. No, I've been slightly further than Wikipedia. Yeah, no, sort of standard thing that we say in the media in Britain is that American law is much, much better than British law when it comes to libel. because they've got free speech. I suspect in this case, actually, it's one of these cases where Britain comes off rather better because there's a statute of limitations in Britain which says that you can only sue for libel for a year after the broadcast or the publication took place on the very good grounds that if you've been horribly damaged by something and had your reputation reduced, you probably would have noticed before 12 months were out.

3:45In this case, Trump didn't. He had to have it pointed out to him by the Daily Telegraph. Quite an awful thing had been done to him in October 2024. but he is still nevertheless claiming that his reputation was damaged so horribly that he has a case for libel. He's going to sue in Florida. How far could he have gone if he hadn't had his reputation damaged by this? I know. What's the promotion that he thinks he's missed out on here? This you would think is kind of the key problem with this is that you have to prove that harm has been done to your reputation. The fact that he then went on to win the election and be elected as president of the USA does kind of suggest that it didn't have an enormous material effect on things.

4:19I mean it was very unlikely that it was going to. given this was a broadcast of Panorama which was only made in Britain and not on BBC America. Was it screened there? It was never been screened there. It was screened in Britain, though no one noticed. But what if accidentally several million American tourists had come over here, watched it in their hotel rooms, gone home? You're an expert witness for him, aren't you? Yeah, I'm deep cover. That is about the one case you can... I suppose you could also say if people had downloaded VPNs then presumably they would have been able to log in to the BBC iPlayer.

4:50But I think even then you're getting into some quite sort of ropey kind of issues. There was a case where the Barclay brothers, do you remember this, Ian sued John Sweeney over an article that appeared in the Observer, but they sued in the French courts. And it turns out, you know, there are one or two copies of the Observer that are kind of taken over and sold at Gardu Nord on Monday morning or something. So that was ground enough for them to be able to sue there. Yachting magazines used to be a good thing for these sort of oligarchs. And they would say that the story had been picked up in some magazine that they read when they were buying a yacht.

5:21I mean, there are a couple of really spurious cases. But in this one, it looks like he'll end up in Florida? In Florida, yeah, that's where he's going to bring it, which of course he is resident. He's a voter in Florida, isn't he? He changed his registration from New York down to Florida. Yeah, that is a slight problem because in Florida, they have one other thing which we don't have to our advantage in the British system anymore, which is libel cases that are heard by a jury, which has not been the case in this country for a very long time and just to clarify that it is still possible you can apply for a libel case to be heard by a jury here the last case where someone tried to do that that I know is Lawrence Fox famously actor turned lunatic who was sued by three people who on Twitter he had decided to call paedophiles he countersued and said that they'd called him racist and said that was libelous of him he wanted that to be heard by a jury on the grounds and this is the sort of thing I don't need to give you any advice on this and things that don't go down well with judges but he said it on the grounds that the judge was bound to show involuntary bias uh so could he please have a jury trial and said didn't go down well with mr justice nicklin he said no no actually i'm not biased at all i can hear this and and and lawrence fox did i'm afraid lose that case and had to pay damages for calling people pedophiles he is currently appealing the other half of the case which is um the bit about where he was called racist so that part of the case is still ongoing but in this country other than that we do not have jury trials hearing libel cases, certainly in England and Wales.

6:47The case is different. I know private eyes come against this in a case in Northern Ireland where you still do get jewellery, don't you, Ian? You do. And sometimes the make-up of the jury, say on religious or denominational basis, has some bearing on the outcome of the case. I felt, perhaps unfairly, that that was the reason that we lost so spectacularly in some of the cases there. But I don't feel we need to go into that. What I'm interested in is, can Trump find the equivalent process where Elon Musk can happily call someone a pedo man and get off? Is there a reverse where they'll say, yes, Trump was obviously given a very, very bad time by the BBC and we should give him five billion pounds?

7:36Is it possible? Yeah, and I think that's where the jury come in, because the jury of Floridians are as likely to be biased in a particular political direction as, say, your hypothetical jury in Northern Ireland might have one written about a politician on either side there. They could be huge Gavin and Stacey fans in Florida. We don't know. They might be devout Beeb defenders. It's very possible. Can I interject? You know I love Florida after having gone there to report on Governor DeSantis, but do you want to know the thing that's happened in Florida this week that might give you an indication of what the make-up of this jewellery pool might be like?

8:07Yes. Go on. In Florida, very recently, Russell Brand baptised someone to Christianity in a penguin pool at the zoo. With penguins? I don't know. It wasn't a penguin, it was a human. the penguins were just witnesses godparents members of the congregation it's only about a year since he was baptised in the River Thames by Bear Grylls so now he's allowed to baptise people himself, is this how it usually works? it's an apostolic succession surely you've got the hang of this this is celebrity Christianity isn't it, it's a specific sect it was also just quite unsanitary I don't know what diseases penguins have but I wouldn't really testify that you would want to...

8:52You don't know what disease is Russell Brand.

8:57Russell Brand gave a penguin chlamydia. No, that's not true. Would be an example of a libelous comment on which Russell Brand would be justified in Syria. And we were always told that it was much, much better in America because you had to prove, particularly with public figures, that the intent was malicious. And if you couldn't prove malice, which in America traditionally was a high bar, then you'd failed. whereas in Britain you don't have to prove malice. They sort of assume it, particularly when they're suing the eye. They just look at your face and they think, you meant it. I'll have a couple of look at you lot.

9:29You're absolutely right. That is an obligation in Florida, particularly for public officials. They have to prove actual malice in it. I would have thought actually in that point he has something of a case which comes in the Prescott memo which was raising the idea not just of one particular bit of bad editing but an actual bias by the entire newsroom of the BBC against Trump in general, which they have. They've apologised specifically for that particular edit, haven't they? The problem is that Trump does more bad things. I mean, I've had, as you know, many criticisms of Joe Biden and the Democrats.

10:01But if you look at Donald Trump's record of losing lawsuits and having criminal charges, impeachments against him, if you weigh that in the balance against the things that Kamala Harris is supposed to do, this is one of the allegations in the Prescott report, is that there was just a lot more on his rap sheet. The other thing to mention, I think, is the fact that none of these lawsuits that Trump ever raises against the media ever gets a judgment in his favor. I went looking, and I'm sure readers, listeners can write in with one, because I just can't find one. So let's go through a couple of them.

10:31Wall Street Journal, that's ongoing. That's the signature and the birthday card in the Epstein birthday book. Ten billion he wants off them. For what? For saying that he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Which he was. Which he obviously was. and there's a whole huge tranche of new emails reminding everyone just how friendly they were at one point. And extraordinary, with that case still ongoing, who was one of the guests of honour at Trump's state banquet at Windsor last month? Rupert Murdoch, who is named in the suit, that has been specifically sued, and they're trying to bring forward his witness statements in case he's not around.

11:02Nice to see that they can put that aside to get together in the state banquet. That's a real lesson to all in the age of cancel culture. So that one's going on. The Wall Street Journal basically said we're not folding, at which point he's, you know, where's it going to go? The New York Times, similarly, he tried to keep them for 15 billion, saying that they'd said very mean things and endorsed Kamala. And they just went, ark or press dram on him, basically. And the ones that he actually has ended up getting a pair with, so Paramount and ABC. Paramount was over the editing of the 60 Minutes documentary on CBS, Kamala Harris's Answers, which was another misleading edit.

11:35And they just basically folded. Some of the team at 60 Minutes resigned. They've now put Barry Weiss of the Free Press in charge of CBS, a more Trump-friendly voice, because essentially they want to navigate the new media environment in which he's the president and source of all kind of access and power. And the same thing with ABC, a parent company, Disney. George Stephanopoulos, the anchor on that, said Trump had been found liable in a court for rape. He had merely, as I've said before, he'd merely been found liable for sexual abuse. They gave him some money to the presidential library, basically, to make him go away and to get their corporate goals back on track.

12:07So this is a clear modus operandi. It's a shake down. It's always a shake down. It's absolutely, and actually extends way before his time as president already. I mean, he was engaged in all his time as a New York kind of real estate mugger. He was engaged in countless lawsuits. I mean, his thing then was to get contractors in to do work and then query the work and say he wasn't going to pay the full bill and tie people up in kind of legal costs. Which, if you're a small building firm in New York going up against the Trump organization, even if you think you're going to win the case, it's tying you up in huge due cases.

12:37The journalists found this was ahead of the 2016 election, 3 ,500 lawsuits which have been brought in cases like that with businesses trying to sue the Trump organization for unpaid fees and things. So he's always been a man who uses the law to his own ends, not necessarily, as we were saying, in cases that get all the way to court, but in cases where just the sheer kind of terror and cost of fighting a case makes people back down. And this is the bit that worries me about the BBC, because the BBC do have quite a lot of form on bricking it and pulling out of these cases. And there is a problem in that he is a very wealthy private individual as well as being the President of the United States.

13:14And the BBC is a state-funded, licence-payer-funded organisation which is supposed to be responsible with money. So they are terrified about being seen to waste licence-payers' money. And there were two stories in the press. One was a warning from various sources, i.e. the usual suspects, that you'd better not be using licence-payers' money for this case. And now I'm thinking that's the only money they have. If they sell a programme or a building or a picture, it's because a licence payer paid for it originally. There is no other source. And the other story said, well, maybe the insurance will pay.

13:48Well, I have to say that during my history of fighting libel actions, occasionally Private Eye fought an action in tandem with someone who had libel insurance. Suffice to say, we never had libel insurance and still don't. But if you're in tandem with people who have libel insurance, there comes a moment where the people you've been sitting next to are saying, yeah, we're going to fight this. We're going to fight this. They suddenly say, Ian, we were thinking of settling. And that's because their insurers have said, you're settling now. And they get the say. So it is. Wouldn't that be something, though, if the BBC ends up basically donating money, sort of giving him a jet like the Qataris or donating to his.

14:29The question then becomes, what leverage does he have over them? Because what he's used in American media organisations is, I'll kick you out of the White House press pool. You won't travel on Air Force One anymore. I'll block your merger with another organisation. You know, I'll set the regulators on you. None of that really applies to the BBC. I mean, he could be beastly to Gary Donoghue. You know, sort of like summoning Sarah Smith to just say sort of mean things about her appearance. But, you know, there's not a lot of, he hasn't got a lot of, what can he do to the BBC? or he can, as you said at the start, he can moan to Keir Starmer and say no one from Britain has ever allowed a visa again until it's happened.

15:04In terms of access, he's already giving first questions at press conferences to GB News and singing the praises of Beverly Turner at all times. So, you know, there's not a lot more that he can take away from them. Have you watched the GB News interview with Beverly Turner and Trump? Because I haven't yet. And I thought you may be the only person I know who would voluntarily do that to themselves. I'm going to rush back to the office and watch it. Would you say you're a great president or the greatest president? It's going to be like that. That is the sort of coverage he likes, isn't it? Well, I'm hoping someone will come up with a statistic about the number of times that Ofcom have ruled already against GB News in a very short history of broadcasting and the number of times against the BBC.

15:44It's in its entire history. I mean, there are a few more pot and petals to go. Very biased, very biased to give you, Ian. Very biased. No, it's genuinely outrageous. And also the spectacle of various British political figures falling over themselves to criticise the BBC and say, well, this is a clear argument. The BBC shouldn't exist anymore. These people have no idea what exists in a country where you don't where even the sort of fragmented version of the BBC we've got, where the people who work in the newsroom have to do endless layers of checks and compliance and referencing things upwards.

16:15Once that's taken away, you will really miss it. You will really miss it. How is your Radio 4 show? Good. Well, that's right. No, I went on various bits of the BBC to say, I think some of the criticisms in the Prescott report are worth reflecting on. I think the BBC made mistakes in both directions on Israel-Gaza. I think on gender, it's really found it difficult to kind of hold the space in for a discussion. But equally well, as somebody who spends a lot of time in America and covering the American media, the BBC is sort of squatting on the centre of British public life that means people from very different political persuasions have to be represented on the same shows.

16:50and what you've got in America is you've got Fox and all the things now beyond Fox and you've got MSNBC now rebranded as MS Now and all the things beyond that and then there's just this cavernous space in the middle and that's the bit that the BBC is holding us together as a society genuinely. You don't get versions of the World Service on Fox where they hire Russian dissident journalists who've had to flee Russia to try and report some of the truth to people inside Russia who are brave enough to listen via or VPN, you just don't get it. Well, the closest equivalents to that were Voice of America and NPR, which he's already withdrawn funding for, hasn't he?

17:25So, you know, that's direct. I mean, and again, for those of us who were brought up on an older generation of American journalists, you know, like Ed Morrow, I mean, talking about impartiality, he said, you have to remember when you're talking about putting both sides of the case, sometimes there isn't another side. And obviously I would try and use that with Trump. What I would just say about the BBC is that you should never, ever underestimate their ability to turn a crisis into a full scale, 100 story flaming clusterfuck. They will make, I mean, this is a case of it. Michael Prescott put that kind of dossier into the BBC board, did he not, in June last year?

18:06And it was ignored or not acted upon, nothing done about it to his satisfaction. Then mysteriously somehow ends up with the Daily Telegraph and causes this kind of enormous crisis. Not very mysteriously, if you read last issue. We've lost a director of news, we've lost a director general. Traditionally, what the BBC tends to do is lurch in the opposite direction to the mistakes it was making last time, overcompensate horribly. I mean, you remember this when they failed to expose Jimmy Savile on Newsnight, then they lurched straight into exposing someone who wasn't a paedophile. And we lost another director general over that one, didn't we?

18:41It tends to be a case of going madly in one direction, then madly in another. And what worries me is that they're urged to prove that they are not biased against Trump. And actually, they don't have this kind of left wing bias is that now they will do everything they can to compensate him. And we'll come up with, because of those other financial pressures that we're mentioning as well, some sort of settlement out of court, which then essentially makes them the loser, doesn't it? My worry is, my understanding of the American judicial system is that he obviously has no case. He brings it. He might get a jury.

19:14They might say, yes, you can have five billion pounds or they might not. Even if he loses, he goes to a higher court. If he loses in there, despite not having the case, he goes to a higher court. We end up in the Supreme Court. Guess what? Donald wins. End of the BBC. Another five billion into the black hole. Britain bankrupt. Well, that's true. And he has got a form for that. I mean, the E. Jean Carroll case where he was found guilty in a civil court in New York of both sexual assault and of defamation of her. the defamation aspect of that is right up there before the Supreme Court now. He's trying to bring that case and that's two years afterwards.

19:45So this could go on forever. And as we were saying, the pressure then from insurers and licence fee payers and the government to just settle and get out of this becomes ever the greater. Can I just tell you the one thing I didn't get in there, which is that Florida still has a criminal libel law, but specifically only if you harm a bank's reputation or accuse a female of being unchaste. So it's lucky the BBC didn't do that. That must be a big problem in Florida.

20:10Saturday, 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 Meat Cleaver Colon. BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com As we are recording this, there is an exciting array of announcements made by Shabana Mahmood, who has decided that we're going to really stop the lights this time.

20:49Is that a fair summary, Helen? It is. As I say, we're recording this as she's actually speaking. I know people only have got the documents, but it was fairly heavily trailed in both The Guardian and The Sun. And she's the new Home Secretary, and she is determined to make our migration regime much tougher. but the reason I wanted to talk about this I think I'm going to confidently predict this is not going to go well I just some of the stuff in there is is relatively sensible and would command when you poll it commands majority support but as a package I think it looks a little bit grotesque so there's a suggestion about whether or not you would take asylum seekers wealth off them and this has kind of been rendered as would you take people's jewelry off them or but at least they get to keep their wedding rings and anything of sentimental value which a point when you say that A lot of people instantly recoil from that.

21:38It just feels very, very mean and cheap and small. But then there's other stuff about whether or not refugees, for example, would now, if they arrive illegally, so through boats, have to wait 20 years before they could get a path to indefinite leave to remain. And that will be reassessed every two and a half years. So the idea being, if you come from somewhere like Syria and there's a change in government, Bashar al-Assad falls, then you say, well, actually, now you were a dissident against that regime. Maybe it's safe for you to go back. So not a completely crazy idea in essence, but it is the idea that we've got enough capacity to interview people every two and a half years is, again, already worrying me.

22:15How big is the backlog already? I mean, that's one of the main problems is the years behind with it. If you're suddenly going to add in all these extra levels of bureaucracy. Yeah, it is shrinking. I mean, the backlog has come down. It's going to go straight up again if they've got to do it again every two and a half years, isn't it? But yeah, so I think it's interesting because it's obviously a very big policy announcement. It is a big challenge to reform and the Conservatives and an attempt to own the issue of immigration and stop the kind of what they call the pull factors that are meaning people are getting on those boats.

22:41Stephen Bush and the FT had a good call this morning saying that the reason that the boats become such an issue is that first of all, we made it harder for people to get visas and come here legally as refugees through orthodox channels. And then we essentially managed to stop people getting on the underneath of lorries. So this is the only method that's left. But people are still willing to make that journey because it's still, you know, the chance of a life in Britain is still the prize that's worth a risk of, I think, a 2 % chance of dying. And is the idea that even though lots of these proposals do command a kind of majority of opinion, that doesn't overlap very neatly with Labour supporters?

23:15Yeah, I thought the most interesting intervention was by Tony Vaughan, who's the MP for Folkestone. So two things, that's the place where obviously most of the small boats land and a very reform-exposed seat, you would say. and he came straight out of the gate and said aren't we trying to make refugees integrate rather than keeping them in this perpetual limbo of whether or not they'll be sent home isn't that what people want from immigration and by the time we're recording this I think nearly two dozen Labour MPs have also come out and criticised the policy and to me that has therefore given it echoes of PIP the personal independence payment this attempt to reform welfare which Labour you'd think have this massive majority but actually they couldn't get their signature welfare reform through because over 100 Labour MPs were ready to rebel on that.