182: Make Hay

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0:31Andy and Anna here from your new favourite podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish. Yes, we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating, amazing, weird, mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis. You got any good facts, Andy? Yes. How about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious. Wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels, warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are no such thing as a fish.

1:12Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. Hey, everybody. And when I say hey, I mean, hey festival, everybody. Welcome to a live episode of Page 94, recorded here at Hay. So without further ado, let's get into it.

1:30First question for all of you. We have a once loved, now hated Labour Prime Minister, came to office in a landslide, is now completely loathed his legacy in ruins. Is there any way back for Tony Blair?

1:53I'm going to go first as the lonely Tony defender on the panel. So I grew up in the... Well, I was a teenager in the late 90s, right? So I lived through the kind of a new dawn has broken, has it not? I still think that new Labour record is really good. But the thing that we're talking about tonight is the fact that Tony Blair has decided to make one of... It was described as a rare intervention. I was like, I don't think it eases it, really. But into the Labour leadership contest, where he said a variety of things. The thing I think he said that was true is that Keir Starmer came into that Labour leadership, essentially painting himself as Continuity Corbyn.

2:27He then pivoted very hard afterwards to say, actually, I'm going to put the left back in the sealed tomb of Mandelson. Wired to have badly. Yeah. And then now it was kind of just... If anyone can escape a sealed tomb, it's Peter Mandelson. It's Peter Mandelson. Rises. But then essentially, without a proper programme for government, without a governing ideology, you will snap back into a sort of wishy-washy soft left comfort zone. You know, that is a legitimate ideology, but you have to kind of make a case for it, not just it be the kind of default that you come back to. And I think that's the problem.

2:59The people around Starmer thought they were very clever, that they said, well, we're not getting involved in these Labour wars. We're not Benite or Blairite or Wilsonite or Callaghanite or whatever it might be. But we are shite. That's the only ite that we are. But as it's turned out, that's the problem, is that no one knows what they think. Yeah, I couldn't see in his arguments any policies that haven't already been adopted by the Conservatives and reform. Which is interesting. because if he wants to say, hi, vote Tory, that's a different view from him. He's free to do so, yeah. How did you feel about his thoughts on oil and gas, Andy?

3:34Loved them. Couldn't fault them. Quite impressive on a 35-degree day to sign off an argument that says, more oil and gas, that's what we need. That's the secure future we need. No, his views are consistent. He believes that we need more oil and gas. He believes we need to rip up the Clean Power 2030 commitment He's proposing the same things you would do if you were a climate denier, and which, in fact, Reform and the Conservatives are pitching at the moment. There is a reason that China are installing hundreds of gigawatts. Basically, one gigawatt is a large nuclear power station. China's installing hundreds of gigawatts of solar power every year.

4:11They are not doing that because they've had a really inspiring talk from Greta Thunberg. They're doing that for very hard-nosed reasons of their own energy security. You know, they are not dependent on a mad choke point in the Middle East that can apparently be closed at any time. And they're doing it for reasons of cost. You know, China's electrified more of its economy than we have by about 35 % to 25%. China has overtaken us in the race to get things clean and efficient. Do you know, I can tell that I've spent too much time sitting in a room with you because as I was reading it, I thought it's fascinating to me that he's very excited about AI.

4:47Now, the Tony Blair Global Institute has lots of links with AI companies. and I think there is a genuine sincere thing there which is he just loves the future. It's shiny and new and exciting. And I thought there's a really big contrast with why is he not excited about clean energy? Incredible strides of technological advance in the last decade. But that one apparently is not exciting to him. Well, because none of the people he meets at international conferences are going on about that. What they are saying is AI is fantastic and because he's an enthusiast, he has no idea what AI is. I mean, nor do I.

5:20I know on the whole, it isn't good to encourage the end of humanity yourself, personally. I feel that isn't a good policy. And also telling people, what we're going to do is we're going to take away all your jobs, particularly your jobs in the audience, and in return, we're going to rip up your environment and fill it full of data centres. How does that grab you? I mean, if you just like bleak future apocalypses, then Tony's your man. Also, I just can't... I'm just going to get it out of my system. Yeah, go on. Let it out. Just vent. As soon as you see the words, the Tony Blair Institute... For global change.

6:02Yeah, for furthering the knowledge of Tony Blair, you just start thinking, what's this? And what are his two main points? Get closer to Trump. Even reform doesn't want to get closer to Trump. I mean, how right-wing is Blair now? But as you say, Helen, the point you are a fan of is that he's identified that you need to have a plan and execute it, even if that means annoying people. And that does seem to be something that people feel is lacking. Whether or not it is, people really have identified the lack of a message. We've had so many sort of missions, and what were there? There were the missions, there were the pledges, there were the...

6:38Milestones, I believe. There was, sadly, no revival of the Edstone. I think that's the thing. I think it's quite hard to work out why Keir Starmer's approval ratings are so low and he's so hated but I think it's the sense that there's it's that he's vapor that there's nothing there and I think that that's the kind of that is the point I take your point saying this stuff but on the domestic analysis and I was Tony Blair's only too keen to remind us himself he did he is the only Labour leader ever to won three general election victories like he does know something about making and winning a political argument and one of the things that Jess Phillips said in her resignation letter we talked about in the last pod was we don't want to have an argument therefore we don't go out and make an argument we're afraid to make enemies and actually adam it turns out they're listening to you because keir starmer's all the briefing this week was about banning social media for under 16s and actually making villains out of the tech bosses yeah the other thing that she said wasn't it was that if there was a crisis she would take advantage of it and it's quite a good good example of that but she suddenly said well why not this and he's jumped in and kind of gone that's his big thing isn't it but it does feel it just feels like there's an absolute sense of drift at the top at the moment, doesn't it?

7:42And bizarrely, they seem to think that the answer to that is to spend six weeks having a by-election and then a Labour leadership election, during which time nothing else will get done either. So on we go. But there are, I mean, ideas are being discussed, which is at least, you know, whether you like the ideas or not, that it is forcing a lot of the party to sort of have a chat with itself about whatever it might be, about defence, about health, about Brexit. What a huge failure of their time in opposition there. Because I'm a massive nerd. I read Philip Gould's The Unfinished Revolution. So he was the pollster who was intimately involved with New Labour.

8:14And what they did was they spent the mid-90s going away and having all those arguments internally and doing them. That was what we were told Starm was doing. That was what Sue Gray was supposed to be bringing in her roadmap for, you know, not Armageddon, the opposite, utopia. And then they got in and they were like, oh, oh, we're in charge. Oh, no. Have you seen these finances? These are terrible. I wish someone said something. And yes, so I agree with you. It's good for them to have that argument. a better time to have that argument would have been in, say, May 2024, before they had a crack at running the country.

8:43But what they were doing then was the definition, they defined themselves by just saying, well, I'm not Corbyn, I'm very definitely not Corbyn, and can we just emphasise that I'm really, really not Corbyn? And then it sort of never got further than the party stuff, did it? There didn't ever seem to be a kind of like a big idea, and the Barack Obama hopey-changey stuff, as it's referred to, just seemed to be completely absent. Sir Tony, in the Blair Institute for further Blairology, he said why is the Labour Party obsessed by the idea of finding a charismatic personality it should be about policy and this is from Tony Blair whose main attraction was a charismatic personality he seems to have forgotten Gordon Brown no I think he thinks about Gordon Brown a lot not as much as Gordon Brown thinks about him yes we should be dishing out some equal opportunity kickings as well So let's turn right.

9:37What, from Sir Tony? OK. Stay exactly where Sir Tony is. Because at the time of recording, many of you here will have seen Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, has five million excuses for why he took a massive donation from a Thai-based crypto billionaire. Yeah. the party's reform candidate in the by-election has, you know, there have been some reputationally challenging things that have emerged about him. What, you mean the social media posts? Yes, but in this by-election, the really weird thing is the reformer being outflanked on the right. Yes, so Rupert Lowe's outfit, Restore, this is going to be a really interesting test.

10:24So people who run focus groups say that Restore is being brought up in them. It's, you know, always a challenge in the first past the post is it's very difficult for new entrants, very hostile to new entrants. So he has essentially got the backing, the very vocal backing of Elon Musk, who's about as popular as gonorrhea in this country, but has a lot of money. And also he has gone way beyond. I mean, okay, so you've already got a situation in which reforms, Zaya Yusuf is saying, we would deport foreign nationals who've got social housing. So that's, you know, we're already talking, we're already getting close to the Trumpy mass deportation zone.

10:57Rupert Lowe is bulldozed straight beyond that, right? He said something about he wants to take all immigrants and put them on a midge-infested island and leave the midges to it, right? We're now at fully far-right rhetoric. Yeah. So the interesting question is, for the other parties, it's electorally useful to have Restore exist because it will drain some reform supporters away in the way that the BNP would have done, right, if you think about where that party is. But in no way do you want to encourage the growth of a far-right party with that kind of rhetoric. So there will be this awkward dance where people will be slightly keeping their gloves on about not wanting to quash this party for electoral reasons when they really should because letting it grow and fester will be horrible, you know, make this country horrible to live in.

11:37Adam, you did an event earlier and one of the points reflected on was just how angry Britain seems these days. You know, there is a widespread mass... It's not irritation, it's further than that. It is anger about the feeling that nothing works, that big bits of the state are not doing their job properly, lots of other people are getting away with it and you're not. Well, I feel we've hit this point. It comes back to that Hopi Changey stuff I was talking about. It doesn't feel like anyone is voting for any sort of positive reasons anymore. Everyone is voting against things rather than voting for things.

12:06And even within parties, you know, the massive swing to the Greens, some of it's down to Zach Polanski being very, very charismatic and coming out of nowhere as effectively a new party under his leadership. But an awful lot of it is because a lot of people in Labour are absolutely furious about where Labour sit on what Israel is doing in Gaza. And it's the single issues that people fixate on and get extreme. like immigration on the right that people fixate on that one thing which they're very, very angry about and it just seems to me that they're voting against it. No one seems to me to be telling any sort of positive story about where Britain could be.

12:36They're telling us it's broken and it's terrible and it's awful and surely that's our job as journalists. But to go back to Sir Blessed Toblerone there was another bit where he talked about the allure of people like Javier Malay in Argentina you know, Mr Chainsaw who communes with his dead dogs through seances. as do we all sometimes but uh and georgia maloney of italy and trump where he said the normal institutional politicians they approach a wall in the road and they then have a kind of committee meeting to see how we could get around it and then these other these populist right politicians just threaten to bulldoze through the wall and that's what people are voting for they want something to happen and they feel that there are all these ways in which nothing ever changes nothing ever happens and i do think that does capture some of what you were saying there was an analysis of the recent council elections which said essentially you can break down Britain to four blocks.

13:26If you're older and financially precarious you're voting reform. If you're younger and financially precarious you're voting green. If you're older and financially secure you're voting conservative and if you're younger and financially secure you're voting labour. And that's a huge oversimplification but there is an alliance there between people who feel that their lives are not secure in some way and then they have the like well burn it all down then. I've got no stake in this system anyway. That, I think, is a very powerful force in British politics right now. But comparatively, a lot... It's like question time.

14:02But comparatively, a lot of those things are driven by online media narratives that aren't necessarily true. Yeah. So a lot of anger is generated about issues which don't affect people hugely and which are not quite the same issues as those presented. So I feel what's different, people say, what's different about the current situation is that people are allowed to vent this anger in very, very blatant and toxic ways online and then they bring it into the real world and we haven't had that. And then they're suddenly shocked when someone says, well, this unbelievably offensive thing you wrote, it was a long time ago and you go, it was last week.

14:47And they go, I'm a different person. You think, you're not, though, are you? And then they say, it was banter. I mean, you know, I'd have statutory imprisonment for banter myself. Tough on banter, tough on the causes of banter. Yeah. But... These are just ways of saying we've normalised a way of being angry and furious about things that doesn't necessarily reflect what's happening. And it's part of the reason, you know, the eye satirises a lot of the mainstream narratives from the right as well as on the thing is because they have gone into complete lunacy. And the Britain is broken narrative, again, it sells well, nothing works, everything's useless.

15:37That just isn't true. And in a lot of spheres, this isn't Pangloss, that's not really my thing. but in a lot of spheres all that is happening is you are hearing the noise and you're not hearing anything else and that I think becomes a problem. A lot of it is down to what your algorithm serves you and it serves you the stuff that is making you angry but it serves you more of the stuff that you liked anyway. There's no room for any sort of counter narrative to come in there. The number of people, Rupert Lowe is among them, who are absolutely convinced that the mainstream media were ignoring the child grooming scandals for decades until Elon Musk stumbled over it early last year.

16:12I mean, was it 2012 that we gave the Paul Foote Award for investigative journalism to Andrew Norfolk for the work that he did? I mean, the reason people know about this stuff is because the police investigations that went on at the time and the journalists who wrote about them. Yes. Just because it's taken them that long to notice it doesn't mean it wasn't happening. And he wrote it in an obscure journal called The Times. It was on the front page. Oh, mainstream media. Lamestream media, I call them. I do think it's I do think it's hard if you don't consume a lot of this content just to realise how incredibly heightened emotionally it is so if you're watching short form video you know you're just getting stuff pumped at you there is an established problem on X formerly Twitter of creators sitting in other countries basically people who are sitting alone at their computer in somewhere like Malaysia creating clips about the kind of Islamic takeover of London and you have this very odd situation I spend a lot of time writing about America where you have Americans who live in cities with unbelievably high homicide rates kind of going is everything okay in London and you're like yeah some bits of it are quite nice actually but all they get fed is basically Sadiq Khan's Sharia Wasteland over and over and over again and they're sitting in Chicago and they're worrying about our safety and these are incredibly high There's another thing.

17:35Jim Waterson of London Centric busts open a ring of this. A guy going into houses in multiple occupation and filming videos saying, these people are all Muslims, none of them speak English, they have a halal only house and it's all social housing. And there is fundamentally no sanction on that. The social media companies aren't investigating it. That investigation, it wasn't true. I mean, the people living in those houses were not socially housed. Not only was it nonsensical, but it turned out the guy responsible was the estate agent who was letting out those houses. If that had been the case, that would have been down to him, really.

18:05Yeah, yeah, yeah. Easy to find the culprit there. But that's the kind of thing, and as Adam said, if you watch one of those and you like it and it made you furious, guess what's coming along in a minute is 400 more videos. It's very interesting because I literally only get heat pump stuff, so I have no idea what this... I just... I live in a fool's paradise. I really... That's all. Andy and Anna here from your new favourite podcast, No such thing as a fish. Yes, we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating, amazing, weird, mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis. You got any good facts, Andy?

18:45Yes, how about this one? Anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions. Wow. Mysterious, wonderful. The world really wants them to exist. What about this one? When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels warning them to beware of George Bush's dogs. So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are no such thing as a fish. Helen, you said if you're feeling precarious or comfortable and if you're older or younger. Now, you didn't mention what happens if you're feeling precarious or comfortable and you live in Wales or Scotland because we've got Plaid Cymru and we've got the SNP.

19:19Well, I also didn't mention the Lib Dems because I don't know where they fit into that matrix. So there are many people who are excluded from the matrix. Absolutely. But I think we shouldn't, you know, given the day we're recording this on, we shouldn't miss out the SNP. And I think...

19:39And we know Plight have done marvellously, and congratulations to them. But for each of you, what are your favourite items from Peter Murrell's...

19:50I nearly said expenses, but it's not an expense if you've embezzled it. But do you have any top picks? This is now shopping channel section of the evening. I mean, the headline one that everybody's focused on is the£2 ,600 Lalique salt and pepper shakers. Because I just think almost no one else realised that, what can you do to a salt and pepper shaker to make it... There was a pencil sharpener that was worth about a gram. How do you make a pencil sharpener that is worth that much money? Out of diamonds. My favourite one was that he bought... He embezzled a copy of his wife's book of speeches.

20:29Am I wrong to think that's... You could have absolutely got a comp from the publisher. Yes. That's where I have some sympathy for him, because I wouldn't spend my money on Nicholas Street's surgeon speeches. It was the coffee machines that got me. Come on, if your husband embezzled a copy of your latest book, you'd be fuming with him. I think, to be honest, he probably wants freebies. I think if I made him go out and buy it, it'd be more fuming. Yeah, OK, fair enough. No, the coffee machines were amazing. There's about three£2 ,000 coffee machines in there. Wow. and special espresso, Le Cruze espresso and cappuccino mugs, a manual espresso maker, a coffee cup warmer, which was a thing I didn't even know existed.

21:05But then at the bottom of the list... That's a hand. That's just a hand. After all the beans, also two kilograms of Nescafe Gold Blend, which were worth£81.16. Who was that for? That's when journalists come round and you have to pretend to be of the people. But I realised who he is at that point. He's the coffee bore. There's one in every office who has a cold compress thing that they want to tell you about, how it makes the best coffee ever and it will change your life. That's Peter Murrell. I need other people's money. The timing is what I like. They managed to conclude this investigation after the election, in which the SNP did very well.

21:42And thank you to all the Scott's Nat supporters who've written me abuse over the years for ever questioning the probity of the leadership of the SNP. I mean, it is extraordinary that we're talking about£400 ,000. The excuse given, and a number of people are questioning whether Nicola Sturgeon's account of this is entirely reliable. She's been found innocent. Just making that very clear. But, you know, she said they had separate bank accounts. They were both earning top salaries. They were both earning about 100 grand each. So after tax, that's about 100 grand. If your joint household income goes from 100 grand to 500 grand, you might notice.

22:31Now, if you're at the Scottish police, you launch an investigation which takes a very, very, very, very, very, very long time and only comes to its conclusion after it's far too late to affect fortunes of the politicians of the time. This is pretty fishy. Scottish politics is very small. It involves a lot of the same people. Some of them are married to each other. Some of them aren't anymore. But the idea that you're First Minister, leader of the SNP, you want to renegotiate the financial situation between Scotland and England, and you don't know your husband's embezzled 400 grand. Darling, there's a new camper van.

23:14Is there? That's lovely, darling. Let's put it in the drive. Of your mother. Let's put it in your mother-in-law's drive. The 93-year-old mother who didn't drive. Yeah. All right, I'm going to press on. Can I just say that John Swinney may have done the first and maybe only joke of his life. Did you see this? Invertently, they said, do you think Nicola Sturgeon was really cooperating with the police when she just said no comment for seven hours? And he said, no comment. Lovely. lovely. Secret of comedy is timing. Very strong. Alright, well, look, speaking of terrific crooks, we must turn to America.

23:48So, Helen, you cover a lot of American affairs. We're now how long? I think seven or eight years into Trump's second term. Just by vibes alone. How is it going and where are we in comparison with where we were the first time around, if you see what I mean? a year and a, got a year and a bit in. Yeah, can you even remember what the end of 2017, the beginning of 2018 were like? They're now the sort of mists of time. Well, Trump has just, I mean, talk about being a massive crook. He has absolutely plundered the American state. So he's got his sons involved in a crypto business. You know, he's doing deals with various Middle East and Gulf monarchies that seem to be basically his foreign policies have been an extension of his hotel business.

24:37and you know the other thing is he just has this situation now where he will just pardon people if they've donated money to him which just sort of seems fairly obviously crooked but it's sort of apparently due to a loophole absolutely fine so the latest thing he's done is he's created a huge slush fund the Department of Justice created a huge slush fund over a billion dollars to basically pay off people like the January 6th rioters who've been victims of miscarriages of justice. Now you've covered miscarriages of justice in your time I would say that people who turned up hit a policeman over the head with a truncheon while dressed as, you know I don't know, sort of like a...