164: On Thin ICE

24:22But you're right. But you get older voters, you get people in the outer suburbs who are older, they're socially conservative, they use their cars more. So lots of people were very worried before ULEZ came in, the ultra low emission zone. now that was more of a worry before it came in because 95 % of cars turned out they were compliant with EULOs but Susan Hall's campaign was really strongly pitched in those directions. But she did in a very memorable interview admit to never having been on a bus in London and to all of us who have lived or live occasionally in London never having been on a bus isn't a top qualification for becoming mayor I mean, transport is the one issue in London that people are very cross about.

25:07They're cross with Sadiq Khan about the way transport works in London, the way cyclists, motorists and public services interact. All of those are valid criticisms. But I don't see that on the reform agenda. Where is let's kick TFL? I can't see that. But then Zach Goldsmith tried to run his Conservative mayoral campaign also on the kind of like creeping Sharia immigration stuff and also lost. whereas Boris Johnson very successfully won several terms as mayor under classic Boris boosterism. It's amazing. The city's brilliant. This is a place of innovation and dynamism. I don't know. I think the biggest challenge to Sadiq Khan is his extremely pallid record as mayor.

25:45I don't think anyone really could... Nothing springs to mind immediately as a great Sadiq Khan achievement. He hasn't even really managed to put his name on anything. And then just a general sense that people would probably quite like to give Labour, who are very unpopular, a kicking. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do think that people, putting your name on things is not a good qualification for, like, putting your name on the Boris bikes is not on the Boris buses, which heat up to 40 degrees on a mildly warm day in spring, all of that. It's not perfect. But apt. Yeah, true. I also think it is funny at the beginning of a year when I'm worrying whether the private irony-o-meter is still working.

26:20A woman comes in and says she's declaring an all-out war on crime. And then it turns out she's committed criminal offences herself in terms of not filing accounts on three separate companies. I mean, that is quite funny. Three of her companies were struck off, weren't they? Sort of forcibly struck off because she hadn't filed the relevant document. And I did check just in case the lawyers are interested. It is a criminal offence, not filing your accounts. They didn't prosecute her. They struck the companies off, but they could have done. And all this has been denied and swept under the carpet.

26:51And Farage says she's a successful entrepreneur. Well, not very, because these companies have all folded. And one of them was selling magnesium and menthol-infused Roland lotion. Is this the bright future of entrepreneurial London? That's a deodorant, surely. That sounds like one of those woo-woo deodorants. That's my theory. Her second husband is involved in crypto. So that's presumably on brand for the form. Oh, that must be Huxley and Nigel, yeah. But again, this isn't a candidate that you would immediately think they must choose that. I think the tough on crime message could theoretically work, but you've got to persuade more people that London is a really ghastly place, which is quite hard because lots of quite targeted policing has brought various offences down.

27:38Luxury watch theft is the big thing that lots of very wealthy people worry about. They say, well, I'm not wearing my Rolex in London anymore. That's come down, I think, two-thirds within the last two years, between one year and the next, because they've done a lot of clever policing about it. I just love the idea of being a populist party. You're like, we speak for the working man. It's quite a specific demographic, isn't it? It's probably not going to speak you into power of City Hall with just the owners of Rolex watches. I bet Nick Candy's worried about it. Yeah, no, I bet he is. Despite being named after something you shouldn't do to a baby.

28:07Anyway, the policy which could work, or the area that Farage gave this tiny mention to, in this launch of Lyle Cunningham as a candidate was, oh, well, you know, you used to know your local police officer or local teacher or whatever. Now they've all had to leave because they can't afford to live in London. Affordability is a massive problem in London and it's weird that no one is making more hay with it. Well, that's what drove Zohran Mamdani in New York to his victory, right? He's got a very leftist set of political positions but actually he really did not talk about them at all. He ran a pure affordability.

28:37The rent is too damn high. halal vans can't get licenses and you're paying too much for your kofta like it was it was just exactly that broad message which whether you're old or young in london most people think london is a bit too expensive whether it's about rents or it's about house prices or it's about your tfl whatever it might be and i just i'm kind of interested about whether or not a pure affordability message would have actually been a smarter one for reform to to go with yeah they have kind of got a problem haven't they in the same way that um sort of supporters of them in media like GB News have.

29:09It involves being very, very proudly patriotic but consistently saying that everything about the country or the capital city is completely shit. And that's quite a sort of hard thing to bridge sometimes, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, the Boris Boosterism did sort of cheer everyone up, even if a lot of it was rubbish, you know. But they seem to have given up on the Sunlit Uplands now. It just seems to be everything is just awful. Welcome to Mordor. So good for us. But it's quite a corporate role. I remember going to events where Boris Johnson would come and talk to people who worked in the city and he would go and give a speech about how marvellous they all were and they went, we are very marvellous, like charity events.

29:42And I don't think necessarily that group of people want to hear, this is miserable, like, welcome, as you say, welcome to Mordor. They want people to come and invest in London. Like, that's part of also what that mayor of London role has always been, is advocating for London as a global city that you would bring investment inwards. Yeah, I literally was in Shaftesbury Avenue the other day and a very nice woman got off the bus, she'd come in to see a show and she said, could you tell me where the theatre is because I'm very worried about walking anywhere in London. And I said, it's there. You literally have to just get off the steps and get in there.

30:15But I promise you, you'll probably be fine. And I think the newspapers have given a version of London that chimes with their own prejudices, which is bordering on the silly. I mean, we've run a lot of parodies of, quite often, according to Adam, expat columnists who say, you know, I visited London the other day, first time in years. And, you know, I was terrified. And it does read really very pathetically with any sort of historical perspective. Yeah. Sorry, to go into a few of the actual crimes themselves. So we've done homicide. We've done theft from the person. We've done luxury watch theft.

30:55We've done the biggies. I mean, violent crime has gone up between 2015 and 2025. That's a problem. that's something you can definitely charge Sadiq with. Sorry, I said that wrong. You can't charge him with a violent. He did them all, actually. The lawyers are listening. He did every single one. Gun crime is lower in London than in plenty of other bits of the UK and it's down, I think it's down pretty much everywhere. What about knife crime? Knife crime, it is down in the last year, but it is higher than it was a decade ago. It's down from quite high, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. It's, I think, pretty close to the pre-pandemic peak, which was at about 2019.

31:31So knife crime is definitely one of the ones where the policing hasn't worked yet. Again, a campaign about what is really happening, I don't think would worry anyone. Yeah, there are plenty of problems. We need more policing is, on the whole, very popular with all parties and nearly all demographics at all time. So that's not a problem. It's just this exaggerated and sort of hysterical view of what's happening in the capital that I think is completely unhelpful. The biggest flub in the 2024 conservative campaign that Susan Hall was running was that they produced these very scary black and white videos of hellhole London, one of which turned out to be from Pennsylvania Station in New York.

32:11I mean, it was a perfect example of you're trying to say this is like Gotham City and it's not. It's got plenty of problems. It's got plenty of political problems. It's got plenty of problems with housing and with affordability and with lots of crime. I mean, life crime, you know, is pretty high. But as you say, reform then always links levels of crime with immigration and suggests that no one has noticed that there are any problems in a capital city with large amounts of immigration. and always suggests that the press in particular never covers anything. And Sharia law is going on under the radar, totally undetected.

32:50I mean, on the whole, I mean, a story, for example, like the fun run in Tower Hamlets where the adult women weren't allowed to run. It was a fun run for everyone and there was a cut-off age for girls. I mean, we ran this story in the eye. And it was picked up by nearly everybody. and then the mosque had to do a U-turn, girls are now allowed to run at every age. These things are not being ignored except by the people who don't want to see them and say no one covers any of this. There are things that happen and they are covered. We've covered a few times on this podcast the question of does it matter what reality is when there are very effective messages being portrayed and promulgated?

33:34The answer is yes. Next. fine 51 % of adults think that violent crime overall is going up which is not 7 % of people think it's falling which it is I think it really matters because when I looked at that poll and it was you know 2024 reform voters were the most likely to say London wasn't unsafe I thought if you think about that demographically that is older people who are now some of them presumably frightened to leave their houses if they live in London or they were thinking about coming to London to the theatre and people should have a realistic understanding of yes London does have problems Yes, you might find people smoking a joint on the tube with you.

34:08You might find people, like, as you say, phone thefts, watch thefts, whatever it might be. There are petty crimes and stuff like that. But this is not the south side of Chicago. And it should be OK to say so without people kind of going, oh, you liberal elite don't want to hear any about it. I'm really sorry. You've just reminded me of one crime that we didn't read out the stats on, which is racist incidents at Dulwich College, which are down massively since the late 70s. did you notice that Mr Zahawi was asked about Nigel Farage's record of anti-Semitism at Dulwich and he said if you think for a minute that I would be here if I thought Nigel had anything against people of my colour you're thinking no no it wasn't it was the Jews wasn't it can can we bring them up here this isn't what we were on about but it also doesn't take very long to unearth an article that Nadim Zahawi wrote in 2015 for Conservative Home taking a very, very strong line on that then.

35:01His exact words on that, Farage was proposing ending race discrimination laws. Zahawi's exact words were, Goebbels would be proud. And that's a good thing. We now understand. Well done.

35:15Saturday, 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 Colon. BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Okay, we now come to section number three and Adam, it's over to you. I gather we're going to get an exciting visitor from America in the next few days.

35:55Ah, all the excitement at the moment seems to be out whether Meghan is going to come over in the summer. But we do know we are going to get the other half. Prince Harry is very likely to rock up in London. I'm told he's enormously looking forward to fronting down the Daily Mail for it is they in court over this long-running case he's had against them for all sorts of unlawful activities which he alleges went on. Now, I have become totally totally lost with the story of Prince Harry suing everybody. Yeah, it is Prince Harry versus the world. It's the case that was announced in a flurry of publicity back in October 2022.

36:31And he's bringing it along with a host of other celebs. So Liz Hurley, Elton John and David Furnish. Simon Hughes, the former Lib Dem MP. That's probably stretching the definition. I was going to say, they've got a lot less glamorous very quickly. Sadie Frost, great kind of pop film star. And Baroness Lawrence as well, who is the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, all of whom are alleging that specifically private investigators working on behalf of the Mail and Mail on Sunday many years ago used unlawful methods to get private information on them and published stories as a result of it.

37:06Okay. Now, at that point, they were talking about all sorts of unlawful activities. We kind of moved on from phone hacking. Phone hacking was kind of the first stage of all this kind of stuff, and the Leveson Inquiry came out of that. Now it's moved on to, well, I mean, what was alleged, and is very hotly denied by everyone at the Mail, was abhorrent criminal activity, in the words of the first legal claim. They alleged that premises had been bugged. I think cars had been bugged as well. Live phone calls had been recorded. And even burglaries undertaken to order. What? Wow. That's spectacular, isn't it?

37:36Yeah, that's not part of the case anymore. That one's fallen away. Tell me if I'm wrong. The Prince Harry legal strategy is throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. It does really appear to be that. And the judge who has been appointed to deal with this and has been doing so over an awful lot of pretrial hearings over the last couple of years, Mr. Justin Nicklin, has been very insistent throughout that he is not going to allow this to turn into another Leveson inquiry, just a wide ranging inquiry into possible wrongdoing by the entire press. He wants it absolutely honed in on specifics and very, very provable things.

38:06And in this, they're kind of lucky because they've got some of the private investigators who were working for the Daily Mail at the time on board. So the case looked pretty, pretty strong. It sort of slightly started to come apart along the way because it turns out that those private investigators mostly have convictions for all sorts of other things, largely phone hacking. So Glenn Mulcair is one of them, who was the original man who stood trial twice for phone hacking, first time around at the News of the World, and second time he was in the dock alongside Andy Coulson and Rebecca Brooks, who was innocent of everything.

38:39They've got some other ones in there as well, some really charming people. Greg Miskew, who was another one who was jailed over the News of the World and has since died, but left some pretty spectacular testimony in terms of witness statements behind him. Jonathan Rees who has been to prison not for phone hacking just to make things change for planting drugs on a woman whose husband had employed him to discredit her during a divorce proceedings Gavin Burrows who problematically has given contradictory witness statements to both sides. For Prince Harry's side he said that he had undertaken lots of unlawful activities on behalf of the male titles and for the male titles he said that he absolutely hadn't done that, not only that but that the witness statement saying he had was a forgery and the signature on it wasn't his he's good i like him the other person who they've got a witness statement from which is apparently going to be presented at trial is uh christine joanna hart who uh now claims that she was the psychic medium to news international over several years she's now practicing shaman she says she never hacked phones what she did was she opened the stargates she spoke to the nordics and read from the codes embedded in blood uh to reveal how fleet street used her to uncover extraterrestrial influence between murder and media and how powerful forces, celebrity royalty and empire, moved to silence her.

39:50So they put her in the witness box. That's going to be quite a fun day. She sounds terrific. She should have a horoscope column. She's pretty fab. I think she's at The Economist now. I think. So those are the people who are providing witness statements for Harry's side. They have various points in, yes. Whether or not, those will actually be presented in court, but they have come up. There's a mosaic coming in from them of support. Okay. And how, Adam, have these people been recruited when they were previously on the other side? They were very much the poachers and now become the kind of gamekeepers on Harry's side.

40:21Well, obviously, they're all enormously repentant now and think that everything they did before was absolutely terrible and reacting out of the goodness of their own heart. But also quite a lot of them have received quite a bit of money. They were recruited by a chap called Graham Johnson, who is currently working alongside Dr. Evan Harris, former director of Hacked Off, as a paralegal on this particular case. Prior to that, the two of them were working together in kind of exposing lots and lots of bad behaviour by the press via a website called Byline. Byline Investigates, in fact. It's a sister to the Byline newspaper, which comes out.

40:57Byline Times. Byline Times, yeah. It's associated with that, but it's not exactly the same thing. He's also got a website called Expose Media and a publishing company called Yellow Press, which has been splashing around advances for these people to write their memoirs. Quite big advances, actually, in terms of... So Gavin Burroughs said he got£25 ,000 for an advance, which is a lot of money to be getting in terms of advance, certainly from a very small publishing house. And there's a slight mystery as to where the funding behind that might have come from. From whom does the funding come for all of this?

41:28Is it a benefactor who doesn't mind how many copies are sold, as long as the truth is out there? These are the sort of questions which the male group have been trying to establish in these pretrial hearings and will certainly be trying to establish at trial. Are you allowed to pay people who are giving you witness statements? The argument would be that it wasn't directly for the witness statements. You just happened to have paid this person for their autobiography. Feels right. That would be up to the judge to decide. I mean, we certainly wouldn't have a view on that. And this is judge trial. It's a judge trial.

41:58No jury involved. No, no, no. Harry's side, I have to say, have been less than happy about kind of opening up their books to show what was going on with that. So there's a process ahead of trial called disclosure, where each side has to volunteer up evidence, sort of emails and paperwork and that kind of thing. You're looking at me as though I've never done this. I know you have. No, but I'm enjoying it. This one for the listeners rather than those quite experienced in it. One of the arguments late last year in court was whether Evan Harris and Graham Johnson should have to hand over all of their kind of paperwork and evidence from before they were actually brought in as paralegals to work on this particular case, which is relevant because, as I say, they were working together to bring this stuff onto this website and expose these stories.

42:42And these stories appearing on Byline Investigates are being used as the watershed moment, is the phrase that's getting used in court, that the various litigants realise that they might have a claim against the mail on Sunday. Right. That's relevant because there's a statute of limitations of six years. We're talking about events which largely went on right back into the noughties, possibly even back as far as the 90s. Now, that's not a very attractive argument by the Daily Mail to say, well, you should have known we were doing unlawful stuff before and you should have sued us, given particularly that Paul Dacre, who was the big cheese at the Daily Mail, denied very, very strongly and has continued to all the way through any unlawful activity ever undertaken.

43:22I should say, of course, Dacre and everyone at the Mail continue to deny this in the strongest possible terms. They say that all of these claims are not only lurid, but preposterous, because they know how to give a denial. and they I think too are feeling quite confident in this so confident in fact that they very unusually in a case like this and again you will back me up on this Ian they had a costs hearing pre-trial in order to really sort of hammer at home to the various litigants in this quite how much they stand to lose if they are not successful in this case because obviously Prince Harry Elton John, David Furnish quite deep pockets possibly Sadie Frost a bit more concerned about the mortgage and things And it was pointed out to them that if parts of the litigation succeed but others fail, those who fail become liable for an enormous number of costs.

44:10So when we're talking in the estimate is that both sides have spent at least£40 million so far. £40 million? Do you mean all the costs could end up being heaped on, say, just Simon Hughes? Yeah. Or not all the costs, but the costs pertaining to his part of the litigation. So this is high risk. You have made the point right the way through this that going together as a group with Prince Harry as your leader may not have been the best strategy. Were you Stephen Lawrence's mother, you might have thought you'd do better on your own. It's a possibility, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Prince Harry essentially thinks that anything written about him anywhere in any newspaper ever is a crime.

44:53and also he's very little idea I think of of the value of money either I mean probably 40 million to him doesn't seem like an enormous amount of money so he's not necessarily the person you want to have kind of driving your case unless there be any doubt this absolutely is being driven by Prince Harry I mean one of my favorite details of this is that Prince Harry his watershed moment as we discussed before when he realized he might have a case was when he met David Sherborne who is the barrister who was in charge of it was for an awful lot of these cases and a lot of the the world ones as well.

45:22Bit of a schmoozer, bit of a smoothie chops. Guess where Harry bumped into him? On holiday at Elton and David's house in France. Charming. And Harry, rather wonderfully, was then given the job of phoning up or messaging, I think, whatsapping possibly, Baroness Lawrence. Because, you know, to break the news to a Baroness that she might have a claim, you need a prince for that, obviously. That's the way that one works. It would just... I'd just get scammed from that. If I got a text from an unknown number saying it's Prince Harry here and you could be in line for millions of pounds. But come on, this is the Nigerian prince thing.

45:54In reverse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Andy doesn't want to hear any of this because he's a huge fan of Megan and her cookery programme. This is all very painful, the idea that she might lose. Helen, you said you'd keep this off air. Maybe she'll have to make more with Love, Megan, if she's not got any money as a result of losing this. You're going to get all the jam recipes your heart could desire. Let's move on. I mean, one of the other slightly dubious things about it is that, as we were saying about the watershed moment thing and the statute of limitations, there are emails as well between Evan Harris and Simon Hughes, both former Lib Dem MPs, discussing the mail business back in 2016, and Evan Harris saying, I propose to bring along my investigative journalist, was how he was describing him, which is Johnson at that point to discuss things.

46:39Then the claim is that Simon Hughes had no idea any of this might have been going on until he read it in Byline News two years, no, three years, nearly three years after that, so well within the statute of limitations in 2019. Again, slightly awkwardly, there's also a load of emails of the draft copies of the articles that Byline was going to publish being sent to him for his approval and being delayed for six months because he'd just started a new job and didn't want the publicity at that point. And rather wonderfully, Evan Harris ghostwriting Sadie Frost's outraged reaction to this news to her that she might have been the victim of unlawful activity.

47:14So there's an awful lot of kind of juicy stuff that's come out already and will be discussed at great length at the Royal Courts of Justice in the weeks to come. And when we get into court, as it were, possibly physically in your case, who are we rooting for, Adam? Yeah, it's a tough one, isn't it? It's like when Fyad sued the Hamiltons, isn't it? The other way around. No, I was in court and I was rooting for them both to lose. Yes, yeah. Which in a sense they both did and it was marvellous. But is this similar? I mean the trouble about having Doreen Lawrence there and some of those people is you think they might have a case?

47:51It's really, really hard to see. I mean until the full trial comes up and we see exactly what evidence they've got it's going to be very, very hard to see. I mean if Doreen Lawrence has been dragged into this and it turns out not to be anything that's pretty forgivable. I'm very surprised because I would say, you know, people I know, I worked at the Daily Mail for several years and one of the things that Paul Dacre was most proud of was his involvement in the Stephen Lawrence case. Yeah, we should say, I mean we haven't covered that. that really hits to the heart of the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre.

48:15I mean, quite rightly, he was enormously proud of that murderer's front page and the fact that he named and shamed the suspects in the Lawrence murder. Two of them, I think, have since been committed and gone to prison. Yeah, big front page, five pictures of murderers, and he had it hanging in his office for the entire time. This was a time he took a big call, which he could have been sent to prison for over a racist murder. And so I think that's the one that I'm surprised to see on this. Again, that's the one that elevates it. That's it for this episode of Page 94. Thank you so much for listening.

48:41If you would like to find out the latest about the Harry trial, more on ice, there'll be more American columns before long, just go to your local news agent and walk in and put down a very small amount of money on the counter. £2.99. It's ridiculous. I've been meaning to talk to you about this, Ian. It's crazy. Well, we had a letter last week from a reader who wasn't me saying, why is your magazine A so cheap and why is the subscription so cheap? I mean, this is ludicrous. People are paying three times this for a pint, twice as much as this for, I mean, a cup of coffee. I mean, this is the sort of letter I can guarantee will be published if you want to send it in.

49:23Printed it twice, I think, didn't you? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, if you would like to secure this bargain before things change, just go to private-i.co.uk. Get yourself a subscription. It's a fantastic magazine and there's so much more inside. That's it for the next fortnight. We will see you again next time. Thank you as ever for listening and thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now.

50:09Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com.