171: Meta's Not Better

24:35This is not a situation in which absolutely pensioners love it and young people think, you know, sod you. Actually most people are in favour of the idea of the triple lock. Okay. But it's one of those things that obviously at some point it's got to end and it's a really fascinating game of chicken to see who will be the one who actually finally does it. Yeah. And given the mess that we've talked about before in this podcast that Labour got into with the means testing winter fuel payments or restricting them, you know, still coming up in... That's now become... No, radioactive, completely toxic.

25:01Yeah. There have been various other kind of gimmicky events from reform. You know, Nigel will pay all your electricity bills for a year. Nigel will give you some cheap petrol. But just you. And it's become a very lotterified event, you know, in exchange for lots of your data about your voting habits, which has been very useful. Well, learned off Vote Leave, who did an incredible job where they had essentially like a pools competition for predicting, I think it was a football thing. And it was like the chances of anybody correctly predicting all of the games was infinitesimal. But in order to sign up for it, you had to hand over, yes, very important, valuable data about your address and email.

25:37And then you could get text messages from the campaign, seen as one of the great campaigning innovations of the 2010s now. Because a lot of people who weren't really interested in politics, but were the kind of people who might vote Leave if they could be got to turn out, registered and signed up for it. So clearly Nigel Farage has learned a lot of stuff about campaigning over the last decade and a half. That's learning from social media as well, isn't it? To go back to our first topic. The email address point is actually a really interesting and important one. So if you run adverts on social media platforms, you can create what are effectively called lookalike audiences.

26:07So the idea is that you have a database of people, you have their email addresses, you feed them into, for the sake of argument, let's say Meta, so to advertise across Facebook and Instagram. Meta will look at all of these email addresses it has data about all of those people and you can say find me people who are like that so if you have a database of reform voters you can give them to Meta and Meta will go out and find you people who it thinks are like those people and who therefore are also likely to vote reform so it becomes an excellent way of multiplying your potential reach with very very very highly targeted advertising which is also how MRP polling works right is you essentially correct for sampling bias by looking at the type of people demographically that are in every constituency, and then you can kind of have more a sense of what those kind of people, where you'd expect them to vote to check your weighting.

26:52But I think it's very hard to talk about how politics has changed just due to the huge amounts of data that we have on people, but those are two very obvious examples. However, there is also still a place for the brute force would-you-like-some-free-money approach to politics, also still very popular, very popular. Yeah, but the problem that is still dogging reform is personnel-related. That's a bit of a euphemistic way of putting it. They will keep on recruiting those Nazis. Well, do you mean the Welsh candidate who did the Hitler salute? That is the one I was thinking of, yeah. There's also Simon Dudley, the housing spokesperson, who told a discussion of Grenfell Tower that everyone dies in the end.

27:28Do you know what? Just because, again, wall socket related. That comment was abhorrent. He shouldn't have said it. It was a casual, flippant, cruel thing to say when lots of people lost their lives. The point he was making, which is that post-Grenfell housing regulations mean that we haven't built a lot of housing, and that has caused a lot of misery and unhappiness from people who are stuck in mouldy, horrible, temporary accommodation because of the missing houses that haven't been built was a fair one. And it annoyed the hell out of me that everyone got their free hit in on how terrible it is.

27:57We will never have the sensible conversation that actually, for example, the staircase requirements and things like that are stopping houses being built and that is a huge crisis. That means kids are growing up in hotel rooms. Anyway, so that's my... Today, I've defended a reform spokesman. You're sticking forks into every socket you can find. Let's keep playing. I love this. The Hitler salute guy, I'm against that, just for clarity. Interesting, interesting. Okay. But they keep having these. They've got their grab bag of former Tories, many of the best and brightest. You're talking about Bobby Jay, aren't you?

28:31Zahawi, Genrich, Braverman. Which set do you think repulsed voters the most? Do you think it's the sort of Nazi saluters and Grenfell appalling tasters or the many members of Boris Johnson's cabinet. I don't know. I don't think either of those are winners in terms of attracting voters. So I read Matt Goodwin's book. I've done my time in the mines. Bloody hell. And one of the things that was really interesting to me about that book, A, it's terrible. It's just a whine of white grievance. And, like, it is sort of actually it's X in book form in that it's very poorly sourced, overtly racist, and actually just dull.

29:07Not even the interesting racism, Andy. That's what I really object to. But what's interesting about that is he got absolutely slaughtered for that book in The Spectator, in The Critic, in Unheard, in all of the... On GB News. On GB News. He did a debate with Andy 12 as a guy. And I thought, that's fascinating, that there is no solidarity on the right for this guy who's just run as a reform candidate. Suggesting to me that the most repellent figure in reform is actually Matt Goodwin, clearly. People who agree with his politics hate him personally, and I think that's very impressive. Do you think we can expect to see Goodwin caping for Restore?

29:43No, they really, really hate him. Is he not racist enough for them? They think he's a liberal squish. No, because they think you were in 2016, which is true. He was writing articles for The Guardian about how terrible Islamophobia was. They think you've just switched for attention. I'm sorry, can I just... Astonishing unanimity across the right for the hatred of Matt Goodwin. Very impressively done. So maybe it's something we can all agree on? Well, I thought it was a bad book. People who agree with politics think it's a bad book. But it's selling like the clappers, Andy. Right. It's sold more than my book.

30:12So who's the real winner here? Should we come to the Greens? Why not come to the Greens? Okay. Their policies are double lock on pensions. Very exciting. And they've got a range of other interesting proposals, haven't they? I went back and I read the Greens 2024 manifesto and the Reform 2024 manifesto. And they are interesting mirror images of each other. So the reform is basically we'll have tax cuts, huge tax cuts for both individuals and businesses. and we'll pay for that by scrapping all this net zero bollocks. So essentially, let's have loads of carbon and that's how we'll make our sums work.

30:42Also, they claim they were going to get 50 billion of savings from waste, which is one of those ones that I love. It's like sort of Planck's constant. You just put it in there to make your sums work. So their one is basically tax cuts for people we like funded by more carbon. The Green Manifesto was direct money transfers for people we like, pay rises for doctors, more money into the care system, teachers funded by a tax on carbon huh so they like there is like giveaway money in exchange for i think they were talking about 120 pounds a ton tax on carbon okay and and obviously this wealth tax of one percent on people who have more than 10 million or two percent on people who have more than one billion yeah i think they're only they think 171 so it's kind of questionable but they were just very interesting of like two big money giveaway packages in various ways either through tax cuts or direct spending, funded for by things involving carbon, which I thought you'd appreciate.

31:37Yes, that's very interesting. They've both got a carbon-based thesis of the economy. And the other thing that's really interesting is that they've both now got podcasts. Both Reform and the Greens. I've listened to the new Reform UK podcast, which is fascinating to me. The first one's out. It's about 30 minutes. It is produced and sounds exactly like a Radio 4 documentary. So it follows Nigel Farage. It even has some criticism of him. It has protesters blocking him. It's never really said quite what they object to about him, but they're boo-protesters. And it follows him giving a speech at a venue where it's a 900-capacity venue, and there's 300 people in the overflow.

32:08So he goes and gives a speech to those guys and does a Q &A with them too. So the message throughout it is... The thing that's also funny is it's voiced in a BBC... The same thing happened after the sermon on the mount. There was actually an overflow mount. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a small mount. There was a spin room as well. The spin doctors told you what he actually did, why he'd come out best. Christ has done a terrific job tonight. He's really shown that the peacemakers are going to be blessed. Yeah. Big night for the meek. But the thing that was interesting about that was also the thing. If you listen to it, you're waiting for it to turn into a kind of look around you style spoof because it sounds so exactly like a BBC docker.

32:43And he goes, Nigel is coming down the road. You're sort of waiting for it to go like he's got an enormous fish. Something completely bizarre and random. So that's one approach that it is not visualized. So it's up on YouTube, but merely as audio. Imagine. Old school podcasting. Whereas the Greens version of podcasting is Zach Polanski's bold politics. And this is much more what you have come to expect from the world of vodcasting. Say bold. Bold politics. Sorry, I had bold, like keys in a bowl. And I thought, oh, that's another Green policy I'm not totally sure about. OK. Compulsory swinging. Bold.

33:16But I think it's got something. Anyway, so it's Zach Polanski interviewing people, basically. Right. Which is the classic. I mean, Matt, you've probably listened to a million podcasts in this genre. And like you see it in the magosphere a lot, right? The same circulating group of people all just interview each other endlessly. Or Gavin Newsom. Is there a historic wall behind him with sort of, yeah, you know, the standard podcast set up. Yeah, and the branded microphone. With kind of slightly all steer and the branded microphones. But what's fascinating about that is, A, it puts him in a slightly kind of beta role, right?

33:45Because he's the interviewer, whereas Nigel would never do that, right? Nigel is the star. So it's a slightly more humble approach in that sense. But also he has basically transplanted the Corbynite intelligentsia wholesale, lock, stock and burial into it. So it is James Medway who advised John McDonnell on economics, Grace Blakely, Rachel Shabby, Owen Jones. The failure of your party becomes even more stark in this context, right? Because there was clearly an establishment there and a group of outriders and thinkers. And the Green Party has just got them. They are now all of them much more into Zach Polanski.

34:16And essentially it's going to be interesting. and we'll rerun this election with a Jeremy Corbyn who doesn't complain all the time. You know what I mean, though? Yeah, I do. In the same way that that reformed podcast is Nigel Farage going and speaking to people because he loves doing that. He loves jousting people. He loves going, oh, The Guardian won't like this. Zach Polanski loves going and talking to people saying, oh, The Daily Mail won't like this. Both of them have got that always-on content creator ability. And David Plouffe, who ran the Obama campaigns and the Kamala Harris campaign, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last week that said essentially this.

34:46political candidates now are content creators. You need to have a studio. You need to be 24-7 pumping out your messages, owning your audience, like on, on, on. And that is, to me, is what distinguishes Nigel Farage and Zach Polanski from Kemi Badnock and Keir Starmer. And it all comes back to social media again, to square the circle slightly, because it's all about video now. You need to be punting out video because that is what fills these platforms and that is where people get their news. And that's kind of cross-demographic now. Fine, OK, so older audiences still go to mainstream media first.

35:18But for pretty much every other coterie, 50 below, it's mostly social-based discovery now. It's in feed. You see your headlines or you see people commenting on the headlines or you see podcasters pretending to podcast about the headlines that they might have read yesterday or heard about from some other podcaster. It's a soup, basically. Yeah, and the politicians that do well are the ones who are good talkers. Right. That is the kind of table stakes now to entry. So Angela Rayner is going to launch a podcast, which is exactly what you would do if you wanted to be Labour leader. Is it her and Gove, the first episode?

35:50I wouldn't bet against that. That sounds like the kind of thing that would happen. It's very interesting. This is a separate point, really. But podcasting has a reputation or a feeling of being authentic. And that's why you often get people to say controversial things, stick their fingers in wall sockets on podcasts, because people think, well, no one's really listening. I don't mean that about this podcast, which gets terrific numbers. It's more conversational. It's more intimate as a medium. It's cozier. I think that's the coosier thing. So both the things that's interesting is that Nigel Farage was like a fake documentary.

36:23You know, that was essentially, it was designed to sound like BBC content, but it was all about how great Nigel Farage was. Right. Which is really interesting for that audience. Yeah. Whereas the Zach Polanski one is basically, look at all these people who are terrific friends. You're among friends. Like being on the left is not a minority opinion. Lots of us are socialists. We should come out and say it. and creating that idea of a kind of like, here is a gang that you can be part of, which I think is really powerful. It's really interesting. Again, all things are fundamentally tied together, but what we were talking about with the changes in social media in the first part are moving from a social connection where it's your friends and you're seeing what they've done and went down in their holiday pictures to a sort of parasocial one where you are following these high-profile celebrities or politicians or whoever.

37:03And it's exactly the same thing with that, isn't it? It's you're kind of being invited into the gang and invited to come along with the person rather than it be the politician at the lectern who's just kind of making speeches and things. And he does work. I mean, there is an army out there of people. You will probably see some of them in the comments underneath this very podcast, who are absolutely vehemently, a bit like they were with Jeremy Corbyn. You know, they are fully signed up to the cause and will accept no criticism. And to see even sort of legitimate things, and Zach Lansby's been very good at this, when there have been sort of legitimate things in the right-wing press about his stances and his background, you know, absolutely.

37:34He said, well, these are smears and I will not be cowed by the right-wing media. And that's a great narrative. isn't it? I will not be cowed by the right wing media is a very good phrase under almost any circumstance no matter what you've been caught doing. You know and my big criticism of Zach Plansky I think he's an incredibly talented political performer in a lot of different ways but that he has got an appetite and a talent for reinvention Yes, he was a Lib Dem He was a Lib Dem at the height of austerity he changed his name because he wanted to embrace his roots more authentically he was an actor I think you find out all the criticisms that people made about Tony Blair Oh, he's a bit too slick.

38:10I feel like there's a journey of discovery that people are going to be going on when in 10 years' time they might kind of go, oh, yeah, that guy, he was a bit too slick. But works very well now. Works very well. Can I give you my personal scoop on Zach Polanski? Yes. I was in the same gay pub as him on Saturday night. Get out! That's what they said to me. No. Brilliantly, with my top investigative journalism hat on, didn't notice. Hang on a minute. He didn't notice you? Well, no, you wouldn't expect him to notice me, basically. I didn't notice him. we went in had a look round thought oh no it's all straight women it's all hen knights we'll have one pint and go home Zach Polanski was there on the dance floor the entire night apparently the only scoop I can give you because you're a friend of mine is very nice shoes what was he dancing to?

38:52I do not know can you go away and do a journalism on this please? it's an extremely good playlist at the food and fruit Sam and Alan free drinks please lovely there we go we've entered this with SponCon so that's good that we brought ourselves full circle We're finally going to the proper podcast. Yeah. We've got a very exciting new format this week. We are going to be doing a play. Adam, you have been following the very convoluted, long, messy and expensive trial between Prince Harry and colleagues and Associated Newspapers, the Daily Mail's publishers. And I believe you have got a dramatic extract for us.

39:31We've talked a lot about this on Podcasts Array, so I'm not going to go into all the ins and outs of it. But essentially, the story of this, at the end of the trial last week, David Sherborne, who was the kind of inevitable barrister, as he is in all of these celebrity cases for the claimants, was reduced to a closing speech in which he said that he needed, although he couldn't offer a lot of specific evidence for instances of unlawful activities being undertaken on behalf of Associated, he asked the judge to extrapolate from what evidence he had been able to find his actual quote. Hang on, that's not allowed, is it?

40:02Well, this has been the ongoing argument, in fact, between Mr Justice Nicklin and David Sherborne throughout the trial. I do mean argument. The days I was in court, there were some extremely terse words exchanged between the judge and the barristers for Prince Harry and his pals. What Sherborne said in his final speech, and this is a lovely image, but I'm not sure it's a winner, it's a bit like playing pin the tail on the donkey with us being partially blindfolded. That is how pin the tail on the donkey traditionally works. Fully blindfolded, yeah. Partially. It becomes a very easy game. He's having a look.

40:32It's at the back end. With us being partially blindfolded and there being very little donkey left for us to pin the tail on, it does not sound like the best party game ever, does it? What he was saying in that case was that they've been unable to find a lot of specific evidence for instances of unlawful information gathering, which he pins, if you like, on the fact that there is very little paperwork remaining from the period in question, which does initially look very, very suspicious, until you remember the period in question is going right back to the 1990s and into the early noughties. And the point that Associated's lawyers made when they were on the stand was that, you know, you don't retain documents for all that long.

41:13Can I ask you a question, which is, were there perhaps any amazing emails or text messages between Prince Harry and members of the press revealed during this trial? I see what you're doing. Objection. She's leading the witness. She absolutely is. So Harry's evidence right at the outset of this case, when everyone was taking a lot of notice of who was turning up at the High Court, was that he said it was heartwarming. He genuinely was on the verge of tears in the witness box on the 21st of January. He said that the Mail and the Mail on Sunday had a campaign, an obsession of having every aspect of my life under surveillance so they could get the run on their competitors and drive me paranoid beyond belief, isolating me and probably wanting to drive me to drugs and drinking to sell more of their papers.

41:51It was suggested to him at that point, actually, back in the day, he was quite keen on talking to journalists himself and members of his social circle, his kind of friends who he was palling about with back in the early noughties, were leaky, that they were kind of giving stuff to the press. He said, absolutely not. Insist they weren't leaky. He said he'd immediately cut off anyone he even suspected of talking to the press. For the avoidance of doubt, he said, I am not friends with any of these journalists and never have been. Now, in a sort of mic drop moment in the last week of the trial, a tranche of Facebook messages we're back to Facebook and social media again were revealed between Harry and Charlotte Griffiths who was the diary editor on the Mail on Sunday kind of high society diary that she used to run they did appear to show quite a lot of evidence of him being friends with her certainly for a period the period in question being December 2011 to January 2012 now we have to specify Harry is now sort of you know he's the sinner that repenteth he's entirely a campaigner against the press he's very sort of right on now him and Meghan supporting all sorts of progressive causes this is not that Harry this is Harry back in the days of partying this is not long before those infamous pictures of him in Las Vegas questionable fancy dress naked billiards fancy dress is a bit before that this is bum out Vegas Harry this is slightly pre-bum out Vegas Harry this is when he's training to fly Apache helicopters between two stores of service in Afghanistan for the army but specifically it's exactly the period of the frost-bitten penis.

43:18Frost-nipped, I think you'll find, technically. Frost-nipped penis, which he revealed... That sounds wrong. That sounds really weird. He revealed the existence of his frost-nipped penis in his autobiography, Spare, a couple of years ago. So we cannot say that we are invading his privacy. This is a privacy evasion he did himself with the piquant detail that he treated it with Elizabeth Arden cream, which was the same cosmetic that his mother... Smelled like his mother. Why have you written this down? Is there a point to this line of questioning? There is. I am merely, Your Honour, setting the context for which the following exchange of emails should be considered.

43:56I have for you a script. Great. Helen, would you oblige by being Charlotte Griffiths in this scenario? Should I go, like, 10 % posher for this? I highlight it. Could you? I would posh it up. I would absolutely posh it up. What she said was that she got the bulk of her stories from her high society friends. Matt, this is very unusual. We don't normally have dramatic readings. I'm here for the Andram. This is great. You've got a part in it. Hang on. Oh, wow. Charlotte Griffith's evidence in her witness statement on the 6th of March was that she had high society contacts from school days and she continued to socialise in high society and with the aristocracy throughout her journalistic career.

44:34I am going to take the part of Prince Harry in this, if that's all right. Matt, can you take the role of Facebook?

44:43and give us the concept. So we're reading from the bottom here. This is the full exchange of messages. Really, really, really emphasise it. There isn't a role for you. You just have to sit this one out. Do you want to be Charlotte Griffith? No, no, no, no. If you want to be Mr Justice Nicklin, you can simply sort of sit there and huff and puff a bit at this, if you like. Order. Okay. But I just do have to emphasise, this is not something we've made up. This has not been written by the Private Eye Jokes team, like the WhatsApp messages from the Prime Minister. These are genuine. I asked for these from the lawyers last week Right back to my school play where I didn't get a good role in that either.

45:13I was the narrator every year in the nativity. Still sad. It's a noble profession. No, you don't get to know. It's just like you can read, but you're terrible at acting. Well, it prefigures a journalism career, doesn't it? Source. Yeah, OK. OK, right. Fire away. I'm so excited. And action. December 4th, 2011, 8.36pm. It's H, in case you're confused by name and picture. Kiss. December 5th, 2011. Hello, Mr Mischief was indeed confused by both. F-ing awesome pick. Did you get home okay slash did you actually find your car and did you beat Arthur down the motorway more importantly? What a fun weekend of naughtiness.

45:48Can't we all get up to no good in the countryside every weekend, damn it? Smooches, CG string, kiss, kiss. December 5th, 2011, 4.15pm. It was you and the blue gulf that pulled over to let me and Arthur pass, no? I did beat him, but by accident, I think, drove most of the way with my eyes closed. I found myself eating pizza with skip of all people. Two exclamation marks. Was without doubt the best of those weekends I've been to. What a crowd. Never laughed so much in 24 hours. Mr. Mischief? How do I get that title? I was surely no worse than anyone else. Ooh, apparently a Cinderella shoe was found outside that door.

46:28So can relax. Please stop panicking. Three exclamation marks. You've got to be Terry Thomas at the end of the night. If I'm honest. a terrible hour December 6th 2011 12.17pm Yup that was me my windows were so steamed up and I'm afraid my little golf GTI was just no match for your bloody Audi I had a children of men moment This is inexplicable Presumably by this she looked out the window and saw Pam Ferris being brutally beaten in a refugee camp in Bexhill I don't know I can't explain that one I think that's a bit when the car and that one continuous shot where they're being shot at rather than or she looked out the window and realised there were no babies in the world anymore who can say How did you not end up eating Chinese?

47:03You must be mad. I dominated a duck pancake or two. Or five. I respect that. Mr Mischief is definitely a compliment, by the way. You weren't worse than anyone else. We were all competitively out-naughtied each other, which is why we all had so much fun. Phew, about the shoe. I was very worried you'd have to spend a fortune picking up the phone and ordering a new pair of freebies from Amanda. P.S. Speaking of which, did you manage to get your new phone number organised? Good that she's doing the journalism. I respect that. She slipped that in. December 6, 2011, 2.29pm. Wish it had been Chinese, but skip wouldn't allow it.

47:39Sad face emoji. No new phone number yet, but sticking with redacted phone number, but yet handed over for now. Serious withdrawal symptoms still. Had to make polite conversation with strange people who did dinner last night, begging them for money for charity. Really fun. Not. Reunion with Josh sounds fun. Hope work wasn't too dull. wherever you are. Just to specify at this point, he said he was completely unaware that Charlotte Griffiths was a journalist when he first met her and wanted nothing more to do with her when he found out at that point. December 7th, 2011, 6.57pm. We have been missing out on some serious bants on the group email front.

48:17I'm going to go in big with an amazing Marco snap to make up for lost time. Few of this week hibernating in the frozen wasteland of Parsons Green is drunken would be Parsons Green, wouldn't it? New Fulham was heading towards this conversation. Almost thirsty Thursday, though. Sounds good. Josh is such a ledge. Oh, my God, this is like... You're getting flashbacks. ...purest infernos of 2011. Can't think of anything to make anything better, but January is oh so far away. I think a team reunite might be in order before the week's out. None. December 14th, 2011, 7.34pm. Okay, I'm very unimpressed.

48:52Your skippy surfing seems to have inadvertently trumped all of the scandal on our weekend. Damn you, bloody maverick. and now you're all heading to BVI, British Virgin Islands. Double trumped, double hump. Thirsty Thursday plans. Kiss. December 15th, 2011, 3pm. Oh, I win, right? Me new heading to the BVI's got too much shit to do. Got dinner with some friends. Gonna be hung over again for the third day running. You missed a good party last night. Skippy was on great form. Mwah. January 22nd, 2012, 11pm. H-bomb. We missed you so much at Arthur's last week. Skip cracked out some serious moves, but I did pack for my three-week skiing holiday after a night with him at the box and forgot to pack skis, boots, jumpers.

49:38Basically, I've been very cold since. Goddamn drunken packing. Anywho, after some shirping in Val D and Meribel, yeah, casual, whatever. No, whatevs, sorry. Important. I've arrived in Closters and been watching some Centibale snow polo. Does that mean you're here and I can dominate you off the black runs, slash steal one of your ski boots and feel trez non-guilty. Is there much more of this? You've got one more message, and it's a goodie. January 22nd, 2012, 11pm. Oh, Charlie, I wish I was there, sugar, but unfortunately stuck in Cornwall doing army stuff. Sad face emoji. Otherwise I would have been there playing and then drinking you under the table of...

50:20Three exclamation marks. The whole thing raised a load of money, so I'm pretty happy. Just wish I could have been there, especially now that you're there. Do you ever work? Double exclamation mark, question mark. Bummed beyond belief to have missed Arthur's as well. I've been seriously busy since I last saw you but plan on getting back in the mix for Feb. You'd best be around. Hope you're really well, Griff. Miss our movie snuggles. I'm off comms all week in case you think I'm being rude but keep me posted. Kiss, kiss, kiss. Kiss, kiss, kiss. Kiss. Kiss, kiss. And there we have it. A little insight.

50:53A tour de force. So what you're saying, Adam, is he did hang out with journalists and he was communicating and having movie snuggles with them. This would certainly appear to suggest that at that point in his life he had a, we could go so far as to say quite intimate relationship with certain journalists, I think. Who among us has not had movie snuggles with a journalist? He was without sin, cast the first zone on that one. And so now the case has ended, what's the upshot? Well, Mr Justin Nicklin has retired to consider his verdict. He said it's going to take him some time to write. He wishes he could retire.

51:28We're expecting it at some point in the summer. In the end of it, I come back to the point which we made on this podcast right at the outset of the trial in January, when Ian said, can't they both lose? And after that dramatic rendition, I really would quite like them to. Essentially, I would be very surprised if the case goes in Harry and the others' direction. And there is, I mean, beyond all this, there is a really, really serious issue in this, which is Baroness Lawrence was a part of this case. The evidence on which her part of the case was based largely came from Jonathan Rees and Gavin Burroughs, two very discredited private detectives.

52:00There are rumours certainly within the mail camp that she was not keen to, she was trying right up to the last minute to drop out of this litigation. Right. She was kind of the imprimatur on this, the bit that made it serious, if you like. I mean, this was the, just as with the original phone hacking scandal, which lest we forget did start off with royals it was the hacking of harry and williams royal household at that point and their kind of communication secretaries and uh and senior staff that kicked the whole thing off with the news of the world in 2006 no one got really really excited about that scandal in 20 until 2011 when it emerged that news of the world journalists were also hacking the phone of millie dowler the missing school girl who later turned out to be murdered the hacking and illegal activities i'm saying to target doreen lawrence would be of a similar kind of gravity, I think.

52:47Yeah. If that verdict goes against Doreen Lawrence and it's discovered that the Mail were not doing that, not only has it completely destroyed a relationship which was extremely strong between the Daily Mail and the Lawrence family, who, you know, the Mail famously championed them right the way through in a way that surprised quite a lot of people. That front page that said, you know, murderers, it named the five suspects, two of whom have since been found guilty and sent to prison for Stephen Lawrence's murder. yeah I've said before that Paul Dacre literally had that front page in his office right to him that was the crowning pinnacle of his editorship he stood up for a young black guy who got murdered by as he saw it thugs and and like to him so I think this case was extremely personal I think the result of that one I think is the really kind of interesting one to watch because that's outside of the sort of realm of celebrity tittle tattle however upsetting these people may have found intrusion into their privacy so there is quite a lot at stake within this and it will be very interesting to see that judgment when it finally comes through yeah okay well we'll wait and see and of course it's going to be in private eye when it happens that's it for this episode of page 94 we will be back in a fortnight with another one until then thank you to helen adam and matt thank you to you for listening if you would like to get more jokes stories journalism cartoons all of that private eye is available now if you would like to subscribe you can do so at private hyphen i.co.uk that's it for now until next time the only remaining thanks go to matt hill of rethink audio for producing bye for now