186: Fa-rage Against The Machine

18:55Jane Mackenzie:Oh, yes. Some of these you're going to expect. Some of these you're really not. Okay, the police. The band. Sting. Sting, personally. And whoever the other people in the police turned out to be. The judiciary, because they're trying to scrap jury trials so that they can rig trials. Right. The World Economic Forum. Classic, you were expecting that, weren't you? The Bilderbergers. Retro. Haven't heard about them for a while, yeah. The Fabian Society. Okay. Yes, Jane, the correct look. The Fabian Society. This is not the fans of the model Fabio. they're always getting each other's post it's a nightmare can you just remind our listeners who the Fabians are yeah Labour think tank he says every Labour MP is a member it's actually about a quarter of them Kistam is a member but it's essentially it's a Labour think tank he says their logo is a wolf in sheep's clothing which it's true it's from the 1920s they also thought it was kind of awesome but he presents this as being incredibly sinister I love a conspiracy theory that's like they're hiding in plain sight they put something evil there and only I have spotted it.

19:58You wouldn't, would you? You wouldn't have the wolf in sheep's clothing if you were trying to do your wolf. You'd have a fluffy bunny, wouldn't you? You'd have a sheep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No wolf at all.

20:08Jane Mackenzie:Just the sheep, okay. The nudge unit. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. This is a Cameroonian thing, isn't it? Cameroonian era, and it was designed to encourage people on things like, was it diet and exercise? And it was encouraging healthier... Why not try eating apples? Some of these were more elevated policy propositions than that one. I'll be useful. But his theory was that the COVID, they sinisterly nudged people towards getting the COVID jab, which Rupert Lowe didn't have because he is, quote, a pureblood. Okay. Yeah. I was like, after having a long riff on immigration, I probably wouldn't have described myself as a pureblood, but you do you.

20:45Jane Mackenzie:Baby boomers, based, agreed with him on that one. Rory Stewart's wife. Right. Okay. Because the charity that she works for took money from USA which is obviously, as we all know, a huge funnel for money, CF, Elon Musk, I put it in the wood chipper. Right. Okay, but good to see some accountability. Just Rory Stewart's wife, not Rory Stewart? No. For once he got away scot-free. Feminist thinking, I suppose. He's angling for an appearance on The Rest is Politics, I'm sure. Oh, of me all. Tony Blair, because, quote, he looks like Beelzebub with his white hair now and his piercing blue eyes. Is that what Beelzebub looks like canonically?

21:25Jane Mackenzie:Please write in. The public sector. There's too many of them that are sapping our society. And here we go. Here's one I never heard about before. Have you ever heard of a conspiracy theory about the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers? No. I want to. It's a socialist law society which Keir Starmer belongs to given that he was both a lawyer and a socialist. He calls them, Rupert Lowe calls them, the Fabian Pabloist Haldane Society which has a malign philosophy. Do you know what Pabloists were? That's what Starmer was. wasn't it? Yeah. Briefly as a young man. It's a type of Trotskyist. Yeah. But I was like, this is some deep cuts from Rupert Lowe here.

22:05Jane Mackenzie:He's heard of conspiracy theories about the deep state you haven't even heard of, like their early albums. It's been exhausting holding this many villains in your head at one time. Well, it's also really interesting because he was really there to talk about his rape gang inquiry report, which I've read. It runs through some really disturbing testimony, but most of it anonymous or pseudonymous, no attempt to corroborate it. Some incredibly over the top, I'm actually going to say, I think over the top exaggerations of the type that if someone came to you and any of you were doing the story on them, you would go, this is an extraordinary allegation.

22:38Jane Mackenzie:I'm going to need extraordinary evidence, like people being raped by dogs, someone opening a van and there being 15 women in cages in the back, right? It's like Carl Beach all over again, isn't it? Well, this is the thing. I'm sure there are real allegations in there and really disturbing stuff but one of the hardest things about doing those allegations is separating out the things that you can actually prove and then only printing the things you can prove which people are really unhappy with when it turns out there was a scandal but if you go too far like carl beach and you just say well anything anyone says to me i'm gonna i'm gonna write it down that's equally problematic funny isn't it rupert lo comes across sort of less as a as a mainstream politician which you'd probably be glad to hear as just a man who's got a very specific set of interests which don't Some of them happen to have coincided with public views on immigration and things at the moment and on grooming gangs.

23:24But like you said, the gun law one is a really weird one. That's for an American audience, it works. But people in Britain, that was generally held to be one of the massive successes, wasn't it? But it's all libertarian.

23:37Jane Mackenzie:It's all libertarian in a very American way, which is I don't want people telling me what to do. But it is all of a piece. It's like, you know, no one can tell me to get a Covid jab, even though it will help other people. No one can tell me to put my guns away, even though it will stop schoolchildren getting shot. Nobody can tell me what to tweet and what not to tweet. That's the kind of connecting thread through all of these things. And that's part of the worldview. But you're right. His affect is really interesting because it is very British. Like he reeks of kind of like guy at the end of the bar and the golf club having a martini and telling you some stuff.

24:06Jane Mackenzie:It is not Tommy Robinson sort of street thug. And actually, Tommy Robinson has done things like the Jordan Peterson podcast. on a class basis, he's going to find it harder to get a hearing in those American podcasts where they love what they see as a kind of British toff, essentially. So Rupert Lowe has been working the circuit. And again, like Nigel Farage, he might decide that actually that to him is a more receptive and congenial audience than British electoral politics. Well, what Farage doesn't like is having to take the responsibility and the accountability, isn't it? I mean, it's much, much easier if you can't just go on podcasts like we do, if you just talk nonsense.

24:40Jane Mackenzie:I hear. I hear that's very popular. This is Matt Rogers from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try on new food and suddenly it's like, wait. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Kewpie mayo. It's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it in the grocery store before. And if you've ever just walked past it, some people would say that's a huge mistake. Because this mayo is different. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Kewpie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor.

25:18It's smoother, deeper, and almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers. Some fans even swear by dipping pizza crust in it. And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it. People who really care about flavor use it. Never tried it? Grab the bottle with the red cap next time you're at the store. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Kewpie, the original Japanese mayonnaise. That sound could mean a lot of things. And when something's going wrong at home, the hardest part can be figuring out what the problem actually is.

25:55At Thumbtack, you can upload a voice message or a photo, and our AI-powered search will help diagnose your project. Plus, the pros we know have over 14 million five-star reviews, so you can hire with confidence. Thumbtack. We know homes. Hire the right pro today. Jane, you have been writing a little bit about defence and procurement. Yes, for many years, yes. So it's obviously been in the news recently because the latest defence investment plan was announced, which in theory we're going to spend some more. It's an interesting question, spending more in defence, because whatever we pledge to spend in defence, particularly on equipment, we always seem to end up spending a lot lot more because we're so poor at buying things.

26:45Yes it's a really there are all these weird things going on when you think about defense expenditure which is we seem to be spending these huge amounts we seem to have fewer troops ships planes all of that than we've had at any point in our history that it doesn't quite match up. Does the overspending count towards our NATO commitment? Can we say, well, actually, we've massively overspent on this? Yes, we went massively overbudget on this project. But what it does help with is that it adds to the percentage of our GDP that we're spending to help us with NATO. But yes. Yeah, so that's not helpful in a way.

27:20We have entire projects where they make such a cock up of buying things that we managed to spend going on a billion pounds on something and not really get it or get to use it. There are projects like Watchkeeper, where it ended up, I think, 14 years late. This was a sort of older generation of drone, autonomous flying craft. Yeah, it went so many years over schedule and massively over budget that by the time that we had them, they were out of date.

27:54Jane Mackenzie:Wasn't there a vehicle that rattled so much that it really affected people's hearing? It was kind of dangerous to use. That's right, the Ajax vehicles, which, yes, a couple of times now we've come close to saying, right, let's cut our losses. And although we've spent hundreds of millions on them already, let's just not because they're injuring people without anybody having to go to war. Just the testing phase is causing really quite serious injury to people. They're extremely lethal vehicles, but unfortunately only if you're inside. To our side. Yeah. That's right. I wanted to actually quote a letter that we'd had.

28:27And this was off the back of a defence story, because I think the really interesting thing that you write about, Jane, is that there's a lot of debate about percentages and three and a half percent versus three percent and two point six five versus two point six six and all this. But you often write about the actual things that are being bought and where the money is being spent. This is from a correspondent and subscriber, I hope, Julian Page, who wrote about the new class of dreadnought submarines. And the process started in 2016. The first ones won't enter service until the 2030s. And the last of the, I think it's four that are being bought, won't enter service until the 2040s.

29:03And Julian Page wrote, this is equivalent to starting to build a class of four ships during the First World War and not seeing them all in service until the Second World War. What is going on? I think that's what you have insight into. What is going on? It's an interesting thing because in some ways, some of our greatest military successes have been by people with a map and a pair of scissors and no budget at all. I mean, look at things like the early SAS. They were stealing their equipment, so that was very cheap. The kind of small drones that we're working with Ukraine with, cheap and cheerful and great.

29:41But when it comes to very big spends, everything gets caught up in a sort of defence procurement, lovely dinners. There's a great deal of the budget, I think, goes into the defence sector, whining and dining the people who are buying the things. So obviously some of the money has to go there. Every quarter there is a hospitality register showing what people who are two star and above within the military have had. And every time there's a great many agreeable dinners on the list. Wait, but this is being paid for by the defence firms? Yes. Oh, I see. But we're out of the money. We're giving them all that money.

30:22We're paying them to build the things. And there's also quite a lot of the other guests on the other side of that are ex-military people themselves. And we're constantly doing stuff about revolving doors. So presumably quite a lot of it goes to salaries for these guys as well. Yes. Yes, I mean, defence ministers don't tend to take the agreeable dinners, but they do, after they leave working for the government, quite often take agreeable jobs in defence. So it's not always dinners. In the most recent quarter's list of hospitality, one person from the Air Force who's just received what the list just says, pastries from Saab, who are currently bidding to build the new advanced jet trainers.

31:03Jane Mackenzie:What's the amount that it has to exceed for it to be declarable? Is it like you have one croissant, does that trip the wire, or has this guy been like someone's loading up a truck full of declares? I think it's got to be a fair few pastries to make the list. I respect that. It's an entire branch of Greggs. So another of the issues tends to be constantly changing, and buying very bespoke things, but then changing your mind about exactly how bespoke the thing. But that's so interesting because that then sounds a bit like what's been the problem with HS2. Exactly. Which is like we could have built just really cheap railway like in the way that other countries have done.

31:35Jane Mackenzie:But no, not only must we respect the bat and the newt but we must also have like the most amazing new bespoke stuff. Yes. Put it in a tunnel for the first 50 miles but the tunnel has to be a one-of-a-kind tunnel we've never built before. Made of bats. But that's interesting that that's the same disease, that's procurement disease that's sort of plaguing our military procurement too. So it's possible a lesson has been learned because we had a story in the current eye, which we in fact headlined with positive defence story shock because, well, this could still go wrong. But at the moment, the army has bought 200 and odd Toyota Hilux vehicles off the shelf and they'll make some modifications to them.

32:17But they're actually just have gone shopping and found a vehicle that works for once. Is this like the pickup truck style? Yes. Yeah. So you can put a couple of tons of stuff probably in the back, the big heavy things. I mean, they're sort of used globally by sort of unofficial militia and there's one of the benefits of them.

32:35Jane Mackenzie:But this is like the AK-47, right? The notoriety, the thing that was amazing about the AK-47 was that it only had like a couple of moving parts and therefore the choice of jihadis and people who couldn't do like expensive machine servicing everywhere because it was just hard for it to go wrong. The child's halux is very robust. Notoriously, one of the most unstoppable vehicles. And also, because it's so global, there's spare parts everywhere. So if yours breaks down, you can just kind of, you know, fight some militia and get the parts off them. But you're saying this is genuinely a good idea. It's not that we're retreating to the state of militia power.

33:11It's unlikely to quadruple in budget because there's a price for an off-the-shelf vehicle. So, hopefully, it won't kind of 10 years' time be going, oh, well, you know, they were never delivered and they only had three wheels. I mean, in preparation for this episode, I listened back to an interview that we did with Square Basher Vickers. I mean, this was nine years ago. Yes, it would be. And all the same problems were there. I mean, back then it was the Type 45 destroyers, which had been built even then, and I think Britain has six of those, HMS Dragon and so on and they at the time were known it was known that they couldn't go very well in warm water they struggled a bit when the water was too warm so that might make deployment to say the Middle East tricky or Cold War at the moment or Cold War and lo and behold nine years later we have the war in Iran breakout and they're all being repaired and refitted and things and it takes nine days to get one of them out of Portsmouth so the problems they go way back yes and the mine hunting mothership that we can send is not specially built after a massive procurement exercise.

34:19It's a second-hand ship that we bought from an offshore oil and gas exploration company. Wow. HMS Stirling Castle. And I believe there's been an announcement of a bit more money for drones. And seeing what's happening in Ukraine, just the unbelievable speed at which the Ukrainian military get their drones into service, into testing, into the field. They try them quickly. If it doesn't work, they change it. Is there anything that we can learn here? It feels like we must be able to. Partly because we're doing work with the Ukrainians for this. There's, for instance, the new brake stop drones, which are partly designed by the company that designs Formula E cars.

34:56So it's not a conventional defence company. It's a tech engineering company. But yes, they're kind of, again, relatively cheap and cheerful. They want to turn out hundreds of them for Ukraine. But the tech will be available for the UK military. If you were put in charge of procurement, or if you were made Defence Secretary, and we'll probably all get a go. I'd be buying a lot of maps and scissors. But do you think procurement just needs to change completely? I mean, it sounds like it's just so bedevilled and it has been for so long. Yeah, I think they need to seriously consider who we buy from and why.

35:36there's a lot of decisions that are about well if we can give this company a 200 million pound contract then they'll they'll build a factory in wales but not quite pinning that down so factory in wales doesn't necessarily even happen but we spend a lot of money on kind of courting these very big defense and engineering companies is that because so much defense has to be in country for obvious reasons that you don't want to just you can't outsource it to the other side of the world. It's a national security thing. So you have to have it here. Well, you would think, but then when you look at just how much we spend with the US and how badly some of that's worked around things like the fighter jets and so on.

36:20I mean, obviously, we have to really spend with our allies, but it's not so much the case that we do all our defence spending within the UK. I guess just supply chains are much more global and it's very hard to have a completely in-country supply chain of course. Yeah there's a sort of early idea goes into it that well if if us and the Italians and the Japanese for instance all club together to buy a thing yeah then it'll be cheaper but then it works out that you've kind of constantly got to deal with the competing wishes of three different governments all of who want to change the specs slightly.

36:56Well that's interesting because one of these new drone programs has been announced this week, and it's giving three suppliers a grand total of three million quid, better, smaller, to develop low-cost interceptors to shoot down drones. But I think that is a five-country thing, but it feels like quite a small thing. Yes. Yeah. Which, again, feels like a step in the right direction. We seem to be better at doing innovation on a small scale, but as soon as the resources get very big...

37:23Jane Mackenzie:Yeah. This is your map fetish again, isn't it? Just all you need is a pair of ladies bloomers with a compass zone in them. It sounds like Scrap Heap Challenger is basically the model going forward for the British Armed Forces. I mean, if you look at what's happening in Ukraine, Scrap Heap Challenger, I mean, things that you can repair are very important. So, yes. This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East. That's with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. You know when people try on new food and suddenly it's like, wait. That's the reaction a lot of people are having when they first try Kewpie mayo.

38:05It's the one with the red cap and the little baby on the bottle. You've probably seen it in the grocery store before. And if you've ever just walked past it, some people would say that's a huge mistake. Because this mayo is different. Most mayonnaise uses whole eggs. Kewpie only uses egg yolks, which gives it this rich umami flavor. It's smoother, deeper, and almost buttery. Once people try it, they start putting it on everything. Egg sandwiches, fries, burgers. Some fans even swear by dipping pizza crust in it. And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. Chefs use it. Restaurants use it.

38:37People who really care about flavor use it. Never tried it? Grab the bottle with the red cap next time you're at the store. Put it on just about anything. Then you'll understand. Kupi, the original Japanese mayonnaise. Andy and Anna here from your new favorite 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?

39:17When 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. Regular listeners may know that Adam specialises in hariology, hariography and the daily mail. I never meant to. I've just got dragged in.

39:42Jane Mackenzie:It's that and the sale of the Telegraph, which finally has concluded. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huge week for you. So the Harry trial, Harry, sorry, et al trial against the Daily Mail group has come to a conclusion. For any readers who might have not been paying attention, how'd it go? Not good for Harry and the others. It's officially Lawrence and others versus associated newspapers. Lawrence in question being, of course, Baroness Lawrence, mother of murdered Stephen Lawrence, who was kind of pulled into this case by Harry. Specifically, he sent her a text at the suggestion of the lawyer, David Sherbourne.

40:17who he had met on holiday at Elton John and David Furnish's house. They're also in this case as well. So it's got all human life is here. Yeah, I have ploughed through all 436 pages of Mr Justice Nicklin's judgment, which came out last week, sort of desperately combing for a single crumb in there that might have given some comfort to Prince Harry and his fellow litigants. There really isn't one. It is the most comprehensive dismissal of all of their claims. I've ever seen, I think, in a legal judgment. So they were claiming in their lawsuit that all of these stories in the mail over a very long period of time had been based on illegally acquired information.

40:58Whether that was phone hacking or other methods, it was improperly acquired. Unlawful information gathering is the phrase that they use. So it covered a bit of phone hacking, voicemails. At the start of the trial, when it was first announced, or the start of the case when it was first announced back in 2022, there were allegations of burglaries to order, of recording of landline phone calls, of microphones being stuck to people's windows to eavesdrop on. All of that dropped away in the course of this trial. It's extraordinary. What they were left with, essentially, was testimony, witness statements, from a load of supposedly repentant phone hackers and private eyes who had done very dodgy things on behalf of other newspaper groups.

41:34Or possibly, it then turned out, when they changed their stories partway through, the litigation hadn't been at all. So a lot of it depended on the testimony of a guy called Gavin Burroughs. a witness statement appeared at an early stage in the litigation in which he said he'd been doing all sorts of work for the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday all sorts of the dodgy stuff that we've heard about from the News of the World and from Mirror Group before he then turned tail on that said absolutely he'd never worked for the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday ever in his life and that witness statement was actually a forgery which had been made by a couple of the paralegal or one of the paralegals who was working on the case a guy called Graham Johnson who is one of these repentant phone hackers So what, he turned from a prosecution witness to a defence witness?

42:13Well, in the end, neither of them wanted him at all because he turned out to be such a liability in court. There was a lot of debate, which I wrote about in private at the time, over whether he was going to be allowed into court at all. There was an application partway through to turn him into a hostile witness and he would be treated as that. And what Mr Justice concluded in the end was that his credibility was comprehensively undermined. His evidence was argumentative, evasive, internally inconsistent, and at times extraordinary. And it was. I mean, there were claims of he sort of darkly hinted at working for MI6 and the secret services and all sorts of things.

42:51Can I just say, Gavin Burroughs is an unbelievably good name for an investigative hack. I don't think we've ever made that point before, have we?

42:57Jane Mackenzie:It's like a full sentence. He's a sentence person. Yeah. He was a private investigator rather than a journalist. The legal name. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is part of the problem. But I mean, this is just what what ended up, what really comes through in the judgment is that essentially these people started off with the sense that their privacy had been horribly invaded, which in some cases it actually had been. I mean, there were a lot of stories. I felt very sympathetic reading through it to Sadie Frost, who you remember was part of that Primrose Hill set. She was married to Jude Law and there were all sorts of shenanigans and a breakup of a marriage and kind of messiness around that.

43:27She was friends with Kate Moss and all these kind of people. And there was some really intrusive reporting. I think everyone would have to say, of her life at the time. Interestingly, even at the time, the most intrusive story was about her suffering an ectopic pregnancy and being fronted up about that by a journalist called Katie Nicholl. Fronted up? Fronted up, as in contacted and asked to comment on it. This story was felt to be too intrusive, never actually appeared at all, and none of us would be any of the wiser about it had this litigation not occurred kind of 20 years later. But then in other cases, I mean, the allegations on which claims of unlawful information gathering were based seemed so slight as to be almost non-existent.

44:02So one of Baroness Lawrence's cases, it turned on two words, literally. So this was a report of, there was going to be a full public inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, a story which turned out to have been given to Paul Dacre, then editor of the Daily Mail, on very, very good sourcing. It was the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, told him privately. They were old mates from university. He told him that. But there was a line in it which said, the family will decide soon whether to bring a second private prosecution for murder. And the claim in court was that the words And decide soon meant that they must have had a voicemail interception or something in order that they knew this was going to happen.

44:37Now, the judge said it couldn't be the result of black or very unlikely to be the result of black. He said there was a perfectly reasonable assumed timescale from inference and prior reporting. Essentially, there'd been other reporting saying they were considering this. And decide soon is one of those. I mean, it's those phrases we use like recently, which can cover a multitude of sins, isn't it? I mean, it's just a likely thing to happen. It's saying we don't have a timescale for this, but they'll have to decide soon or they'll run out of time.

45:02Jane Mackenzie:Can I ask about the cost? Because I think one of the things that came out was that, you know, in the kind of custody, essentially the male and Harry have got one of the Lawrences each. So Stephen Lawrence's dad wrote a piece for the male saying, they've been staunch. Obviously, the way that the male sees it is that Doreen Lawrence was kind of recruited by Harry to be essentially a much more sympathetic claimant than him. and this wasn't celebrity tittle-tattle, this was the mother of a murdered son. Is she on the hook for costs? Because there was this suggestion that the judge's ruling was so critical of Harriet et al that their libel insurance or their court insurance wasn't going to cover them and they were actually on the hook for essentially punitive costs, which the mail said about like 50 million.

45:43It's not quite punitive. I mean, the next stage of this, because it ain't over yet, is a cost hearing which is going over two days at the end of the month. That is going to involve not punitive damages, but I love this. Mr Justice Nixon describes It's not as the costs hearing, but the consequentials hearing, which is real, like, there will be consequences.

46:00Jane Mackenzie:It does sound a bit, from what you were saying, that Justice Nicklin was not impressed with Harry's legal team, Harry's advisers hacked off. He was absolutely not impressed with them. I spent a couple of days in court covering this, and the attitude was David Sherborne, who was the barrister who was leading the celebrities, we'll call them that, case. I mean, it was very, very spiky. He was openly critical of it. And he essentially, and this wasn't tri-bird jury. No, this was the judge sitting on his own. He's incredibly critical of the way that they prosecuted. He said, essentially, it started off that the accusation was that all of these private detectives working kind of at arm's length for the male group had been doing the unlawful stuff.

46:41They had various ledgers which had been acquired by Graham Johnson, one of the paralegals involved in the case, who also runs his own investigative website and wrote a lot of this stuff, a lot of which was paid for with money that came from people like Max Mosley. which was an issue in the case. Obviously, that came up, and the judge ruled that actually there was no distinction between effectively gathering evidence for the trial and gathering journalistic material for his website. So when we talked about this before, you were saying you're not allowed to pay witnesses, and the argument by the claimants was they weren't paying for the witness statements, they were just paying for these accounts in various books and articles for this internet site that just happened to coincide exactly with what they then said in their witness statements.

47:18Before, in some cases, they said, no, he never ever said that at all, and it's a forgery.

47:22Jane Mackenzie:But right, but then the thing is that he was so unimpressed with them that he could then essentially say you should never have brought this, not like your Vixace's litigants entirely, but like you've taken the piss essentially and I'm going to make you pay a lot of money to the Daily Mail beyond what your insurance will cover. You've taken the piss essentially is in slightly more legalese or what he said. He said that eventually when all of that fell away, there was a case when journalists were actually on the witness stand talking about how they'd acquired these stories where Sherborne put direct accusations to them that they had been involved in phone tapping and voicemail hacking.

47:58And he said that this was serious allegations not supported by a properly pleaded case or evidence capable of sustaining them. Now, that is, I think, judge speak for you're taking the piss, essentially. And this will come back to bite them in terms of the costs now because, I mean, the mail are briefing that they've spent about, the total costs for this case are around£50 million. I mean this is sort of money that will make Nigel Farage's buy you buy top isn't it they are also now applying for not punitive damages but an indemnity order which essentially says there isn't a cap on the cost they can charge to the other side because it's such a comprehensive loss this is just the straightforward rule in the British legal system that the losing side pays the costs of the other side as well as their own what that means an indemnity order will allow allow them to secure compensation to as full an extent as possible for the outlay and trouble of litigation.

48:48And that was enormous. I mean, essentially, there were several members of staff, senior members of staff at the Mail who carried on in their jobs just to deal with this litigation, including their head of legal, Liz Hartley. And Paul Dacre as well, who is up in a belfry somewhere at the top of the Daily Mail. Very, very happy at the moment.

49:06Jane Mackenzie:Recorded a video in which he took the opportunity to personally slag off Max Mosley now that he's dead. You could really tell that this, again, much like Farage and his daughter, this one was very personal for Paul Dacre, who, as I've said before, had the murderer's front page on the wall of his office for years. That, to him, was a sign that, you know, people said all these things about the Daily Mail being racist, but here they'd gone to bat for a young murdered black guy killed by white thugs. And he was so proud of that. I think that's part of the reason that they fought it so hard. And it was genuinely that and the reporting by Stephen Wright, the crime editor on the Lawrence case, all the way through.

49:41You know, it lasted years before there were eventually a couple of successful prosecutions. He was then directly accused, and he spoke actually quite movingly on the stand about how awful it was to be accused of this. The allegation was put to him that it came from racism. He pointed out that he has a black wife and mixed-race kids, and he found this completely abhorrent. And that is certainly the feeling. This was genuine emotion, if you can imagine such a thing, within Daily Mail Towers. I can imagine Justice Nicklin at that point is more like,

50:08Jane Mackenzie:this is just sort of like, are you still beating your wife level kind of question is being put to people. This feels like a very, shall we say, ill-advised litigation strategy. You've been accusing the hacks themselves of the unlawful activity. You can't really go into court and say, but you did some phone hacking, didn't you? That's how you got this story. Without being able to then say, and here's the notebook that has your number in it, here's the whatever, which is what happened in some of those News of the World cases, right? They'd got some hard evidence behind it. Their theory seems to have been, it's the kind of thing that people like you would have done, so you must have done it.

50:39And in some cases, there were actually, the names came up of freelance journalists doing bits for the mail and being the sources of some of these stories, who have been mentioned in previous successful phone hacking litigation and the suggestion being that they must have been doing it for the mail as well. The judge was extremely clear that you actually, for every single accusation that was made, the claimants had to argue a specific payment and have actual evidence of it. Nothing could be done by inference or what he called propensity, which is essentially that argument of, well, we're all up to this sort of thing.

51:06Does this change anything about the way journalism is going to be done or maybe the way that lawsuits are going to be waged about this? Because this has been such a long process, you know, from when the phone hacking was happening. I mean, now this is the long tail of legal action. It really, really is, yeah. I mean, the answer to that is no, but because it's changed already, essentially. I mean, none of this stuff... I was just saying those stories about Sadie Frost and that very, very intrusive stuff. It doesn't really happen anymore. I mean, celebrities work in a different way. They're putting their own stories and curating their own lives out on Instagram, and it's much, much easier and cheaper for newspapers just to report things that way.

51:40There isn't that sort of... None of these stories were recent ones. This is going back to that sort of classic period of slightly Wild West pre-Leveson.

51:47Jane Mackenzie:Right, you've got a class now of celebrities who are influencers who essentially, following more like the Katie Price model, know that everything that they do is for sale and the only reason they'd be annoyed with the tabs is if they jumped the gun and meant that they couldn't announce things themselves. So do you think this is the last unlawful crime? I would be very, very surprised if any lawyer is prepared to work on a conditional fee agreement on any further cases like this. And essentially there's no one else to go after now. I mean, we had the Mirror litigation. We had the litigation against the News of the World.

52:14We've had further litigation against the Sun, where we've had these bizarre settlements where Rupert Murdoch has just handed over enormous amounts of money for people who claim that they had their phones hacked by the Sun but said, there's no admission of any guilt in this. I just like giving money away. Right. Another person who should contact Nigel Farrell. this was essentially the last of those big newscopers groups who were likely to be accused of these sorts of things and they have been comprehensively cleared by this.

52:38Jane Mackenzie:Can I ask whether or not there is anything in the judgement about some people will remember the private eye players and our dramatic reading of the Facebook messages between Harry and Charlotte Griffiths in the Mail on Sunday? Charlotte Griffiths in the Mail on Sunday. H-bomb. Looks like she's in the room again. She's come back. Which I have to say, which was the moment I thought, I don't think this is going very well for Harry, actually. But did that come up at all? Amazingly, it doesn't, because those Facebook messages between Charlotte Griffiths and Prince Harry were not actually cited in court.

53:07They were put in as evidence, but never actually... We provided the dramatic reading of them, which was so absent from that lengthy report.

53:13Jane Mackenzie:I might put in for a cost here. But we have had, I would say, in the Daily Mail, I think it was the day after the judgment came through, we have had Charlotte Griffiths' own account of her nights of cuddles and film nights, which actually kicked off with a detail that wasn't in those face messages, which when she first met Prince Harry he gave her a small white pill and put it on her tongue and said, now I know I can trust you. She claimed, probably paracetamol. She took it straight out again and hid it in a napkin. That is in the greatest tradition of and then I made my excuses and left, isn't it?

53:39Jane Mackenzie:And I'm absolutely sure it was paracetamol. So I think that gives you a sign of the sort of treatment which Prince Harry and I have to say a lot of the other litigants in this case can expect from the Daily Mail titles in future. Well, you'll be hearing about it on page 94. Thank you very much, Adam. Thanks, too, to Helen and Jane. Thank you to you for listening. If you would like to get a copy of Private Eye with many stories about Toyota Hiluxes, about Type 45 Destroyers, about Prince Harry, about Rupert Lowe, about many, many more things, all the things our colleagues brilliantly write about, it is available in shops.

54:11It's also available at private-eye.co.uk, where subscriptions are even more reasonably priced than a single issue of the magazine. That's it for now. The only person remaining to thank is Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Thank you to Matt, and bye for now.

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55:02Visit bioma.health slash GLP-1 and use code CRSHOW for 15 % off your first order. Andy and Anna here from your new favorite 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.

55:45So there you go. If you like fascinating facts and much more besides, we are No Such Thing As A Fish.