172: A Kicking For Keir

11:35Adam Macqueen:Something else beginning with B. Yeah, one of Britain's most bankrupt councils. It's the largest in Europe and all the 101 seats are up for election. This is another one that's likely to go into no overall control, which, you know, we are seeing increasing numbers of this. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I mean, overall control hasn't been great in Birmingham, has it? No, you would think it would be a positive thing because you then have more local debate, you don't have a party political stance. But certainly in all the years I've been covering local government, I've noticed that the no overall control thing used to be far more rare because we just had the two, three main parties.

12:16Adam Macqueen:and now that's being fractured we are getting councils that are hung, councils that are minority administration which you know may be led nominally by Labour or Lib Dem but really it's by a few seats and that makes it really difficult for decisions to get through, for budgets to be set. Everything just becomes harder to find agreement on so technically it should be better because you're not following the party line that's not an agenda but the nuts and bolts of getting things done essentially is harder and it's in stability.

12:48Saba Salman:Presumably getting more difficult because political views are splintering more people are going more to extremes and potentially we're going to end up with hung councils that are half reform and half green aren't we which is quite hard to see the Conservatives and the Lib Dems always worked very very well together at a level in local government which I think it's why the Lib Dems in 2010 thought oh we could do this in national government it all go really really well didn't work out for them spoiler alert but it's going to be very very difficult when people are that that politically opposed.

13:12Adam Macqueen:Exactly and Birmingham to take that example, I mean, I think there's about 45 just 45 councils due to exchange hands in the next elections, May 7th. But to go back to Birmingham, that's an interesting one. So Kemi Bednock went down to Birmingham and made it known that she would not oppose a conservative reform coalition locally, not nationally, and unite the union, which is obviously involved in the bin strikes, for the last year we've had the strikes over refuse workers. Unite the Union has had secret talks with reform. Blimey. Yeah, so it's all kicking off. Is it possible to resolve that dispute by anyone?

13:53I'm just asking because it...

13:55Adam Macqueen:I can't see how. The whole backdrop of the row over the bin workers, there's an equal pay row as well so some sort of 700 million, and the council declared effective bankruptcy back in 2023. It's been helped by government, so it's got this exceptional financial support so it can borrow. It's an absolute dire strait. So that's an example of where I don't know what the solution is to any of those things apart from borrowing more money from government. Right.

14:24Helen Lewis:You can tell me if you were canvassed. I live in Lewisham. We were canvassed by some very nice Greens who were former Labour people and one of the things they said is we want to end austerity. And I was like, sounds good, but with what money? I don't think the Lewisham council is secretly sitting on a smorgs pot of gold that they've just been cruelly refusing to disperse up until now.

14:42Adam Macqueen:30 odd councils now have had this handout from government. A number of our letter writers make this point. But a handout from the government to local council is not a handout. It's taxpayers' money being spent in different ways. So if central government underfunds councils, which is a criticism, then councils borrow from them. And they're not exactly begging, are they? They're trying to find a restitution of some balance between the two types of taxpayers. That's right. And while all that's going on, the pressure to provide those adult social care services and support and how all of that's still continuing.

15:20Adam Macqueen:So really, it's a pretty difficult picture out there.

15:24Saba Salman:There was a big narrative, I remember, from the last lot of local elections, which was all we're going to come in and we're going to cut waste and we're going to cut DEI initiatives and all that kind of thing. and the experience once people got into power seemed to be that actually you can do a bit of that but the sort of sums of money are fractional. Not to say there isn't waste in local government, of course there is, you write about it constantly in your column, but they're fractional compared with the adult social care budget and all those kind of big things. Has that sort of gone away as a narrative now or are people still pushing there is some money down the back of the sofa?

15:53Adam Macqueen:I think certain reform councils are still peddling that myth of massive inefficiency.

15:59Helen Lewis:Well, we'll take down the progress flag from over the town hall and that's£100 million.

16:03Adam Macqueen:You know, you have a statutory duty to look after people in your area who need support and that costs money. People are living longer, people need social care, that is your responsibility. You know, taking down the flag, it's not going to bring the sums that you think it's going to bring. And so therefore you have to raise council tax. And a lot of the problems that your column exposes are councils think we haven't got any money, here's an idea, usually involving outsourcing something or investing in some traditionally council activity, that we go in with the private sector and it all goes wrong.

16:42Absolutely.

16:43Adam Macqueen:Going with the private sector, whether that's through housing or schools. I mean, housing is another one that we've covered a huge amount where a lot of councils are launching their own housing companies or regeneration companies and playing at being private sector players. And it's gone absolutely tits up. And they claim this is desperation, that they have to do this. Obviously, we're not buying that because we write about it. But that's pressure from having no other sources of income, presumably. Yes, that's right. Not from raising the council tax. It is. And I think what people often forget, successive governments have cut back on these main areas that councils have to...

17:25Adam Macqueen:So while the responsibility is still there, the supply of the cash that's going to help them meet that responsibility is year on year shrinking. I think one thing actually in some of these cases with the housing companies and the regeneration companies that are launched, I think it's not just about money. I think we've proved it's also about the glitz and the glamour of rubbing shoulders with the big developers and, you know, going to conferences abroad that are...

17:50Helen Lewis:That's one of my biggest groans during this campaigning season was Ed Davey, leader of the Lib Dems, saying that he wants to impose a duty on every new housing development to have a GP surgery and he was just like yes what we should do is just put one more restriction on house building that's that's the charm we haven't got enough of let's put them together a bit of a

18:07Adam Macqueen:problem as well in the health sector with gps uh supply and hours and and also one of the things

18:13Helen Lewis:is that every new development is often subject to that judicial review and then planning appeals so if you're building that g if you're a gp do you want to move into somewhere that in three years time there might be some houses there or depending whether or not the residents have taken it all the way to the High Court. No, in fact, there won't be. Or they found a newt. Something like that.

18:30Saba Salman:The residents' blood pressure will have gone up so much that you will have quite a few kind of patients coming in as a result of that.

18:35Helen Lewis:It's true. On the no overall control thing, so there are currently 32 councils outside London that are no overall control. Sam Friedman, in a very good substack about the local election, said he thinks there's probably going to be another 32 outside London at the end of this. So that's really the story of these elections, isn't it? It's like we hate the mainstream. If you've still got a Tory council, you're going to register that you hate them. but mostly if you've got a Labour council you're going to register that you hate them.

18:57Adam Macqueen:That fracture is really interesting. You know on one hand you've got Labour and Tory local candidates distancing themselves but over here you've got Reform and the Greens bigging up the cult of personality with Polanski and Farage so it's really interesting and over in Durham, we talked about Durham earlier, they've got a life-size cardboard cutout of Nigel Farage in their Reform meeting room which they cart off to the main council chamber. so I think they must have been really excited when they had the rally in Sunderland because they had the real guy there.

19:27Helen Lewis:That's tragic because Donald Trump is hoping for gold statues and Britain being Britain we've got a couple of that. Cost of living crisis touches even reform. What slightly retro fact became obvious at the Scottish party leader's televised debate? It was on the wireless. They sent a pigeon individually to each Scottish voter's home with the results of who'd won. Tragically not, although that would be charming. They were all men. it's been a big turnabout in Scottish politics from the halcyon days of Kezia Dugdale Rude Davidson, Nicola Sturgeon having three main parties, it's all chaps the chapocracy has returned to Scotland, Joanna Cherry former SNP MP has left the SNP in fairly spectacular fashion with a book coming out Keeping the Dream Alive which details her fallout with Nicola Sturgeon and the party what did she claim that the SNP wanted to melt down in 2018 was it their gold reserves It was a bust of Alex Salmond.

20:20Helen Lewis:She says that the party was only too keen to move on from the Alex Salmond era.

20:25Saba Salman:Oh, sorry. It wasn't a gold bust of Alex Salmond. I'm still thinking about Trump's statues. I don't think the SNP have got that much money.

20:31Helen Lewis:Some sort of Barnett formula redistribution.

20:33Saba Salman:They did really like him for quite a long time, didn't they? Before they decided they didn't. They do have an amazing ability to fall out with each other horribly at the top of the SNP, don't they? But are they going to get in again?

20:41Helen Lewis:They'll be the largest party, I think, on the predictions. Yes, I don't... So, well, as previously discussed, Reformer had a bit of a mare. Their leader made a very unpleasant homophobic joke about George Michael, like a rugby club dinner. A phrase that always...

20:54Saba Salman:But it was too strong even for the rugby club dinner, apparently. Right, and I got quite a high tolerance for these things,

20:59Helen Lewis:and I read it and I went, oh, no, I don't think so. So they've had many candidates withdraw, their press officer has stepped down, so they are still in the slightly, like, the basket case organisational stage that's going to count against them. So, yeah, even though the SNP have been in government for an incredibly long time, luckily, fresh-faced John Swinney, the current and former First Minister, what does he want to do to chickens? Reduce their cost. I thought he was giving them the vote in a referendum. 16-year-olds and chickens.

21:29Saba Salman:That's the way to get it. I love 60%, isn't it?

21:31Helen Lewis:How does he want to make them cheaper specifically?

21:34Saba Salman:He wants a price cap on various sort of basics across all supermarkets, doesn't he?

21:38Helen Lewis:He does. He wants a series of essential items to be capped in price.

21:42Saba Salman:Milk, eggs, cheese, I saw. The problem with that one, surely, is that who does the cost get passed on to? Because, I mean, already you've got dairy farmers and egg farmers in pretty perilous position because they've been beaten down by the supermarkets. Yeah. You've got a very, very big farming constituency in Scotland. I would say that's causing you problems. I was in Strenra the other week outside the Caledonian Cheese Company, makers of seriously strong cheddar. High strong. It's seriously strong. No, it's just at every supermarket you go to in Britain. And bizarrely, in Scotland, they dye your cheddar orange for no apparent reason.

22:16Saba Salman:And if you ask them, why do you dye your cheddar orange? No one knows. It's just a bizarre subject.

22:21Adam Macqueen:What about the impact on smaller shops then? Because that's supermarkets, isn't it? You say only the big shops.

22:28Helen Lewis:I'm just going to be crude here and say, it doesn't make sense. He doesn't have the power to do... He's not a commissary. He doesn't do price controls. In any case, the supermarkets work on very thin margins. You can't have corner shops now being lended. so they would be excluded. Well, they would lose out massively.

22:44Saba Salman:You see all the supermarket advertising, which along with betting is the only thing that's propping up print newspapers at the moment. All of their adverts at the moment about Armourmite is cheaper than Aldi's. They are all competing right there so the kind of profits to be made on it are tiny margins anyway. Definitely.

22:57Adam Macqueen:My local supermarket a couple of years ago was giving away chickens. Dead ones, obviously.

23:03Helen Lewis:That's where it became much less interesting.

23:05Adam Macqueen:Yeah. This is part of your theory, Helen, that the voter must be bailed out at all costs So if there is a cost of living crisis, then food will have to be subsidised. It's sort of everything now, isn't it?

23:17Helen Lewis:It's sad that we've given up on growth and wage growth particularly. You know, there's very strong wage compression at the bottom end between minimum wage, which is now about 22 ,000, 23 ,000. And then there's a huge chunk of the economy that's just all around there. And then very few people in the higher bands. So instead of making it so that people are getting higher wages per hour, let's try and find ways to give them money, which is things like the energy price cap become very popular but giving away money as an electoral strategy used to be a bit of a joke but it isn't but it is cheap chicken okay let's do Wales very quickly I've got a question for you who characterised the Senate elections as a choice between tolerance or division progress or decay defiance or deference culture or ignorance humanity or indifference

24:05Saba Salman:was it chat GPT

24:07Helen Lewis:Well I think you've made a very cruel assertion there about Rynap Ewerworth, they need to apply Cymru That's how he framed it but the reason I mention this is that his final two binaries, it's not X it's Y, which I grant you as a little chat GPT, was apply Cymru or reform That's how he's fighting that election. Well there isn't anyone else in Wales anymore. I mean that's going to be a really interesting one to watch and in terms of psychologically for Labour losing Wales would be a big deal. Alina Morgan, their leader there, has said she would work with Plaid so they may find away if they are the first and second largest parties.

24:39Helen Lewis:But it also illustrates something that's been a theme of what we've been talking about, which is there are now two blocks in British politics and people can circulate between Labour, SNP, Plaid, the Greens, that's the left block, and then the Tories and Reform categorise the right block and they're cannibalising each other's votes. Can I just say restore? Oh yes, sorry, I did not mention it. Restore, yes.

24:58Adam Macqueen:Who are standing? No, they're not standing candidates. Not standing any candidates, but what they are doing is backing Great Yarmouth First. So Rupert Lowe, founder of Restore, that's his constituency. And so...

25:14Helen Lewis:I just love this, because America First is all about...

25:17Adam Macqueen:We can't restore Britain, we're just going to do it in Great Yarmouth. It's more manageable. This is going to work. Make Yarmouth great. Great again, exactly. Exactly, exactly. And the last I looked, he had been promising to put up the£5 membership fee for the first 500, I believe it was, members of Great Yarmouth first.

25:38Helen Lewis:Well, if you need any more Great Yarmouth news, then Sabo's Column is the place to check out. I don't know why I've made that commitment on your behalf. Sorry, everyone. this week would have been the queen's 100th birthday and whenever i hear an occasion like that i think adam is there a quiz to be had there may well be it's of course only her um

26:02Saba Salman:unofficial 100th birthday because the queen has two birthdays oh two cakes two lots of presents she's got the word the troop in the color isn't it on this is it june the 7th i think we don't need to give her a fake birthday i think charles is now inherited as now the king's official

26:14Helen Lewis:birthday as well which is just that's weird isn't it can i just clarify she she isn't actually a

26:21Saba Salman:hundred though is she because she's died no she has been dead for for for the last few of those years but nevertheless i've been reading the papers and there's at least 27 new um biographies out and i just i'm none of them make it entirely clear well actually as we've been on airy and it's been revealed that she is still alive oh good and she's here now and she's standing for

26:40Adam Macqueen:Which council?

26:42Saba Salman:Up against Paddington. No, I think it's interesting, actually, because it's now four years since the Queen died, and I have really, really noticed a kind of change in tone of the kind of coverage, which a lot of it has come through. We had the announcement this week that the official biography is going to be written. A historian has been appointed that, a historian who originally wrote, best known for the book she wrote about the Interregnum, the time when Cromwell was in charge, which is quite an interesting... Anna Kay, that's the right... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is going to be the really interesting one, because she presumably will get access to all of those papers that otherwise remain locked up in the bowels of Winter Castle with the Thames Valley police kind of saying, well, could we have a look at them?

27:18Saba Salman:Because there's some stuff in there about Prince Andrew. Maybe she'll get access to them first. It'll be a bit of a race. But also there's a big Robert Hardman. How many royal books has Robert Hardman written by now? But this one apparently is, you know, his new take on the Queen. And there is a bit of a new take going on. Two things I've really, really noticed in royal coverage just in the last few weeks is there suddenly seemed to be a moment where the columnists decided that Beatrice and Eugenie were up for being criticised. It's always been a case of, you know, you can say whatever you want about Andrew, whatever you want about Fergie, but the two princesses, you know, they shouldn't be blamed for whatever their parents had done.

27:50Saba Salman:And there seemed to be literally one week where suddenly Jan Moyer and...

27:55Helen Lewis:Janice Turner noticed that Eugenie had had one of those charities that has lots of big fundraising galas, but doesn't seem to actually give out very much money to what you might term people who need it.

28:04Saba Salman:Yes, yeah, and in fact, I wrote a column that says, The headlamp was something I just pulled your finger out usually or something, wasn't it? Which was a sort of different tenor of royal coverage, really. But the other thing that I've noticed, particularly, and I think this is about these new biographies, is that there is now a willingness to criticise the Queen for her role in bringing up Andrew and making him the man that he is in a way that would have been completely unthinkable directly after her death, when it was very much kind of like veneration and a long life of service and no criticism whatsoever.

28:32Saba Salman:So there is a kind of change in that. And I think it's really interesting. I'm just looking. So I'm writing a book at the moment, which is set in 1993 at the height of the War of the Waleses. And the difference, even with everything I'm saying about Andrew now, is that the tone of royal reporting then was, I mean, this was the point where we were getting sort of royal phone calls recorded and turning up with, you know, Charles's mistress. And Squidgy, who was Diana's gentleman friend as well. Which there was this extraordinary sort of free for all in the tabloids for a while then. then when Princess Diana died it sort of flipped back in and you had that younger generation and very much a feeling that the the the intrusion into um Harry and and William's life was was was completely unacceptable and I just think it's sort of slightly starting to swing back in this other direction I think it's interesting as well as you always have to look particularly for us is who's steering the stories and what's going on there and of course you know there was always as as Flunky chronicled in the pages of Private Eye a big battle between um Prince Charles as he then was and his kind of press operation which was run very very separately from the buckingham palace press operation and i don't think i mean i think there might be some helpful spin doctrine going on in the king who really does seem to wash his hands entirely of his little brother uh and just kind of pushing things in the direction of um well i mean you you you did this in in in the eye quite recently in uh it's not sylvia koreanism or it's dame head of shoulders much much younger and more um with it novelist but uh you know the the point that charles actually She probably has a few resentments from childhood which are kind of coming out now in a kind of public forum.

30:03Saba Salman:Entitled is very good on that.

30:04Helen Lewis:The Andrew Lowney book about the fact that Andrew was the kind of favourite son. His nickname from his mother was Baby Grumpling. I think that's really cute, but I can see it maybe turned him into a more sense.

30:14Saba Salman:Baby Grumpling's from The Perishers, which was a cartoon strip in the Daily Mirror back in the 60s. I never had her down as a mirror reader. Oh, she was a lifelong socialist. She called Phil Andy Capp behind his back.

30:27Adam Macqueen:Poor old Andy, he's been invited to rescind his freedom of the City of London by the Corporation of London recently

30:35Saba Salman:So no more driving a sheep over London Bridge

30:37Adam Macqueen:Exactly, he's lost that privilege

30:39Saba Salman:What more can they take away from him?

30:42Adam Macqueen:It's the final straw isn't it? Sheep straw Yes, thank you Flunky ended up saying that one of the few people who'd spotted that Mandelson was up to no good was the king I thought that must have been unhappy reading for Keir you're less in touch with what's going on than the king

31:02Saba Salman:well he specifically said that Mandelson and the king were quite good mates at one point in the sort of 90s but even his majesty spotted that after the first resignation maybe this was a slightly dubious person to be hanging around with and the second kind of definitely made that concrete for him but there you go once again developed vetting should have had a word alright what we haven't got. His buzzer's here. So I'm going to give you each a sound so you can jump in. Helen, I would like you to give, when you know the answer, a Herald's trumpet. Perfect. Sabah, can we have a loyal hooray from you?

31:38Helen Lewis:Hooray!

31:39Saba Salman:No, come on. A bit more than that. Oh yeah, that's perfect. That's brilliant. A bit more manly. Ian, if your buzzer sound can be a fervent God bless you, ma 'am. Delivered in the The accent of, what, Dick Van Dyke? Full pearly king, I want that. Yeah, absolutely. So, question one. Come in when you know the answer with your appropriate noise. The Queen spoke the first ever photo bubble on a private eye cover in issue five. Or at least the speech bubble was coming out of the Royal State coach, so we're assuming it was her. What was the occasion? God bless you, ma 'am. Go on then. It was the birth of Prince Charles and she was on the way to the hospital.

32:21Saba Salman:You're a few years too late. Birth of Prince Edward comes not shortly afterwards, but Charles has been around. Charles is actually 13, but I'm going to give you half a point because he was in hospital. He was having an emergency appendectomy. And the speech bobber coming out of the royal coach was saying, Great Warman Street, James, and step on it. But yes, the coverage of Prince Edward's birth a bit later on in 1963, and Princess Anne starting at Benenden as well. It gives you an idea of how long Private Eye has been going. We were covering the royal children. who are now grandparents. It's extraordinary.

32:53Saba Salman:Number two, one of the earliest bits of journalism in the Eye, because the jokes came first in Private Eye, the journalism sort of joined a few years later in the 1960s. One of the first bits of journalism that appeared, however, was in November 1964, and it wasn't the Eye's own journalism. Instead, it was a round-up of what the French and German papers were saying about what particular royal scandal uncovered in the British media.

33:12Helen Lewis:Which year again?

33:13Saba Salman:1964. God bless your mum. Go on, sir. Was it Profumo? No, this is post-Perfumo. It's a little bit vague.

33:24Helen Lewis:Was it one involving ships? Quite often they'd involve ships or helicopters.

33:29Saba Salman:No, not this one. There was a lot of stuff about Prince Philip flying helicopters, you know, safe he was.

33:34Helen Lewis:No, not that.

33:35Saba Salman:Never that safe behind the wheel of a car either. Sabah, do you want to come in with a wild guess?

33:38Helen Lewis:Shall I just do the...

33:39Saba Salman:Go with Prince Philip. Hooray! Yeah. That was quite frightening, actually. I haven't got an answer. It was the way you did eye contact to me when I did that. That was quite frightening.

33:46Adam Macqueen:Was it something to do with one of the rules going out with someone who wasn't quite up to scratch.

33:52Saba Salman:You could definitely get half a point. Oh, it was Margaret, was it? No, it was Philip. It was Implications that he was... Well, let me give you the translations that were provided from the French papers. La Reine Elizabeth is spending nights alone while Prince Philip sips champagne with girls from a ballet troupe in Mexico. He was, to be fair, on a royal trip to Mexico by himself at that point. It wasn't that he'd just kind of laid down an argument and he'd stormed out and gone all the way to Mexico. It was a solo nine-day tour. but according to the French press as reported at this point in Private Eye in 1964 Elizabeth was toujours triste toujours seul always alone always sad she cannot go on she has decided to support no more of it in future she's on the edge of a nervous breakdown on the brink of the abyss she is no longer a proud and haughty queen she did manage to carry on for

34:38Helen Lewis:50 years

34:39Saba Salman:several decades after that French press have always been good on the royals well it's a bit like do you remember the National Enquirer for ages, for about 10 years, just kept running a headline that just said, Queen Elizabeth at death's door, which is one of those headlines that eventually was going to be true and eventually was, of course, in 2022. Can I just give you the last tiny, beautiful detail from this? Apparently, according to the French press, the Queen was haunted by plaintive inquiries of her little Prince Andrew, naively asking, tell me, Mama, is it Mexico that Papa is? What? There you go.

35:14Saba Salman:Like Yoda. I think it lost something in translation There is something about royal reporting that encourages total nonsense Yes, make it up and I'm going to deny it Number three, the big one Who named the Queen Brenda?

35:29Helen Lewis:I'm going to go Willie Rushton because he feels like he did a lot of naming

35:33Saba Salman:Not Willie Rushton, no Was it Prince Philip? God bless you sir God bless you sir No, it wasn't, and it wasn't Private Eye even though we've adopted the nickname and have been using it ever since According to the Grovel column, which was kind of a sort of weird society column that Private Eye ran in the 70s, in 1971 it reported that it was a nickname used by her immediate staff. So actually a genuine nickname within the palace, which was then adopted by Private Eye. A few years later they added a couple of others. The obvious one, Prince Charles. Brian. Yeah, now known as Brian, still known as Brian, still confusing people online whenever anyone puts any of our stories up online.

36:08Saba Salman:Who is Brian? What is this? He's the king. We also had Princess Margaret. Anyone guess what she was known as? Yvonne. Oh, very, very good. You have been reading past issues. I have. And can you remember what the nickname courtiers gave to Diana when she joined the royal family in 1981 was?

36:25Helen Lewis:I believe it to be Cheryl, or is it Cheryl?

36:28Saba Salman:You've been cheating. You knew this quiz was coming up. I just did a little.

36:32Helen Lewis:She's just a royal.

36:32Saba Salman:All right, you're not going to get this one. In 2018, Flunky revealed the nickname for Harry and Meghan within the royal household. Can you remember that one?

36:44Helen Lewis:I'm just going through famous two-somes. I'm like, I've got stuff on, like, Benefit.

36:47Saba Salman:No, no, no. Was it Posh and Becks? No, that would be quite a good one as well.

36:51Helen Lewis:Jake and Perky?

36:51Saba Salman:Chandler and Monica on the grounds that he was a bit weird and married someone much hotter than him with very, very firm ideas.

36:58Helen Lewis:That's actually, that's not bad.

36:59Saba Salman:I think it lost out because H &M works as well. You know, they're sort of nice high street clothes. H-bomb. Sorry to give you flashbacks. Charlotte Griffiths has come back into the room. a reprise of last time's drama. I'm afraid listeners of the podcast were rather confused because it was so realistic, the rendering of the transcript. They thought we'd hired Prince Harry and Charlotte Griffiths to come and do this podcast. Sadly, we can afford Prince Harry, but we can't afford Charlotte Griffiths. She charges far too much. OK, in March 2016, when Michael Gove was forced to deny being the source of a claim that ended up on the front page of The Sun as the headline, Queen Backs Brexit, the eye ran a cover of Her Majesty at the state-opening parliament, facing a row of officials, including Michael Gove, the speech bubble from off the page saying, just point to the person who did it, Your Majesty.

37:46Saba Salman:What special news did we receive via palace back channels after that cover came out?

37:50Helen Lewis:Presumably she loved it. She had it put in her little box that she used to get and watch neighbours and read.

37:54Saba Salman:She absolutely did, yes. Yeah, this is a message in full which came through to us. The front cover of the current eye was included in the cuttings sent up to the Queen most days and didn't return, which usually means that it made it into her personal scrapbook. She collects cartoons and send-ups, even the unkind ones, if she finds them funny. So there you go. You've got a fan, Ian. Well, just like George III.

38:16Helen Lewis:Did he have a personal scrapbook of private eye covers? He did. It was some of our first issues. Our best woodcuts were in there. He bought a lot of cartoons of himself and his son. Did he? He did, yes. He had a very good collection. He rather liked being called Farmer George, didn't he? He liked it as a nickname, yes. He did, because he was not unlike the present king in that he was very interested in agriculture when everyone else thought it was boring.

38:41Adam Macqueen:I like the idea of the Queen being some kind of super editor of private art. She's got her own versions in her scrapbook. Yeah, with only the good ones. All about her. Not much about Andrew, though.

38:53Saba Salman:Probably lots about Andrew and hardly anything about Charles, I should think, actually. Well, this is what we'll find out from the official biography, presumably. Someone will be allowed to look in that scrapbook and confirm that this is true. But the Brexit story has appeared in The Hardman, hasn't it? Yeah, and is also being countermanded now. We ran recently The Spectator, edited by Michael Gove, Ran a piece saying she was actually extremely anti-Brexit and pro-Europe.

39:15Helen Lewis:Well, she was anti-Scottish referendum. If you remember, David Cameron said she purred down the phone to him when she found out the union had held together. But I remember when I used to do a podcast with Stephen Bush now at the FT, he pointed out that demographically she was a white pensioner without a college degree. That says Brexit.

39:32Saba Salman:yeah a lot of relatives from the continent though so she had some European ties yeah but a lot of people in Spain

39:37Helen Lewis:as expats waited for Brexit so the fact that Philip was Greek but then she wore the blue and yellow outfit yeah for Ukraine she did yes oh no that was that was the one with the with the stars yeah the flowers that look like stars which I think is definitive

39:49Saba Salman:right case closed

39:51Helen Lewis:will there be more

39:52Saba Salman:there is one more question which I suspect Ian might get ahead of the other two of you rigged we'll go with in the same year an even better cover in July of new Prime Minister Theresa May doing the most extraordinarily low curtsy, almost all the way down to the floor. As the Queen said to her, how low can you go? And Theresa May replied, I've appointed Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary. Whose joke was that, Ian? Mine. Ian, whose joke was it really? Sheila's. Yes. Was this the one occasion where the managing director of Private Eye has given this as the joke for the cover? Yes, and it was very annoying because it was incredibly funny.

40:27Helen Lewis:It's a great joke. and Sheely was essentially the managing director of Private Eye for about 300 years since George III and her job was to try and keep this thing afloat,

40:40Saba Salman:not to provide better jokes than me. Well, her involvement on covers usually was to come down and see what you're putting on on Monday and go, oh, not the prime minister again. That's 10 ,000 sales we've lost. But not on this occasion. No, no, she hit the jackpot. Right, brilliant. Well, as a result of that, I can reveal that Helen gets the regal nod of approval, the sword on both shoulders, and whatever medal you would like to take home with you.

41:05Helen Lewis:I don't think I've ever won a private eye quiz before. This is very exciting to me. I know.

41:09Saba Salman:We just felt sorry for you. No news. Ian got far more questions right than you. But it's just traditionally. Always loses on the telly.

41:17Helen Lewis:Finally, the rigging works in my favour. Well, that is it for this episode of Page 94. We'll be back in a fortnight with another one, possibly involving Andy. Until then, thank you to Sabah, Adam and Ian. And thank you to you for listening. If you'd like to get more jokes, stories, pictures of the Queen, actually probably not pictures of the Queen anymore, well, maybe a small amount, then please subscribe to Private Eye by going to private-eye.co.uk. If you'd like to subscribe, that would be great. If you'd like to buy the newsagents, also great. The only remaining thanks go to Matt Hill at Rethink Audio for producing.

41:48Helen Lewis:See you.