191: Delo Or No Delo

0:00Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the iStudio with Ian Hislop, Helen Lewis and Richard Brooks. We've got some good news to discuss today and I think it's important to start sometimes with positive news because we often talk about negative stories and we talk about corruption and I think it's important that we say when something's gone right. So we're here to cover an amazing act of generosity in British political life which is that out of complete selflessness, as far as I can tell, two billionaires have decided to give Reform UK 72 million quid between them, 36 million each.

0:40They're giving it now and they don't want anything in return. And I just think we should celebrate that. I think we're very cynical sometimes about politics. Yeah, and that's the end of the podcast. Thank you very much, everyone, for listening. Thank you. See you next time. Get a subscription to the magazine which features Nigel Farage on the front over a different financial scandal. And that one, the joke was about him taking£500 ,000. Chicken feed, as Boris Johnson would have put it. Richard, you've been covering this for the magazine. Yeah, looking at the donations from Ben D 'Lo. A new name for lots of listeners, I think.

1:13A big crypto guy. Did very well at university, very clever chap. Went to work for banks and hedge funds and so on. Then discovered Bitcoin when it started to emerge. made a lot of money from it set up a Bitcoin derivative or crypto derivative trading exchange called BitMEX where you could do all sorts of things. Including crime? Well the people using it could it seems. I mean that is one of the things about cryptocurrencies generally is that if you want to have untraceable money for say buying drugs or getting around sanctions they're quite helpful so did that cause any problems for our Ben D 'Lo by any chance?

1:52Helen again I think that's very cynical. I don't think there's any evidence that there was ever any unlawful activity, unless, Richard, you have any... Is there any evidence of that? It's quite hard to find. In fact, you have to go on the internet and look at the US Department of Justice. Well, hang on. Before you say what they found, Richard, I should put D 'Lo's case. I think that's only fair that we put the case for the defence first. Not traditional in a court of law, but do feel free. Well, look, as D 'Lo, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, as he put it, I'll quote him directly here he wrote a piece for the Telegraph about why he was making this£36 million donation to reform despite the fact that we ran an honest shop and never lost a penny of customer funds to a hack or misallocation a US prosecutor went after us for not keeping sufficient records on our customers.

2:41We got through it and I kept calm and carried on with my philanthropy Right, a prosecutor came after him you know that's like Ronnie Biggs complaining that the police came after him for robbing a train. They did come after him, it seems with good reason, and found that he was running what they called, he and his co-founders were running what they called an effect, a money laundering operation, because they were essentially allowing anybody to come onto their platform, do their trading without any checks, and then they misled the authorities about whether they were making those checks. They, for example, took on people who were from Iran and didn't then decide to ask, well, hang on a minute, where's your money coming from?

3:28So there was a lot of sanctions-related violations. Would that conflict with reform's patriotic agenda at all? You're not saying it's slightly traitor-ish, are you? Yes, given they use that word a lot. Yeah. But he got convicted, didn't he? Yeah, well, he pleaded guilty and he was fined. He got 30 months probation and a large fine. And that report is pretty severe. Yeah. You know, the point is that Reform Now wants to present this as a sort of technical failing. And when all the reports of these donations mention in passing that, oh, he was found not to have followed anti-money laundering rules like it's ticking a few boxes or something.

4:12But the trouble is with money laundering. It's a very blurry line between not ticking the boxes and just letting crooks come in with dodgy money. To the point in D 'Lo's case where he was actually fiddling the records so that it could happen. The US Department of Justice said that D 'Lo falsely changed internal tracking information to reflect that customer's country of residence as being other than the United States because that would have triggered regulatory intervention. So he was fiddling the records. That doesn't feature in any of the accounts of this I've read from nearly any paper broadcaster at all.

4:49Well, no, but you do have to get to about the fifth paragraph of the Department of Justice. D 'Lo doesn't mention that in his Telegraph essay about it. No. No. What he says, and again, I'm just going to put the D 'Lo case here. He says, I want a fair fight and a level playing field. I would say if you're giving 36 million quid to a party, you want an unfair fight and a non-level playing field, surely. Well, their argument is that Labour gets huge donations from the trade unions, for example. So, you know, their argument is this is levelling the playing field because the left gets all this money from other sources.

5:20And, you know, and they're just recouping upwards. But the trade unions, as I understand it from my sketchy view of history, involve lots of individuals giving money rather than one. Yes. And they get to vote on it, where the money goes. I mean, of course, they generally go one place, but... Yes, there is. So it's not some sort of democratic... We'll do the Conservatives this time, actually, guys. It could happen. Well, as D 'Lo wrote, I think in that Telegraph piece, that restricting his donations would be literally as undemocratic as you can get. When you look at the scale of it, these sums, if you think democracy involves some sort of semblance of equal influence on the process, I mean, these numbers are just phenomenal.

6:05I think in the whole of reform's history, since the Brexit party became reform, Dilo and Christopher Harbourn, who's a chap who's matching his 36 million, they would have given about three quarters of the funds to the party. So they more or less financially control it. Two individuals. Yeah. I think this is your fault, Richard, because in the last issue you wrote a piece saying, well, Harbourn's keeping his hand in his pocket at the moment and Dilo's coming up with all this money. You just provoked him into doubling their income. How do you feel about that? Yeah, we shouldn't really have called him a tight git, should we?

6:41No, it seems to... He said it was competitive, didn't he? He did. I mean, they want to be the most in favour with Nigel, be his best, most generous chum. Can we put this slightly in the context of Reform's recent money troubles? So the reason that Nigel Ferrara is on the front cover of the latest issue of the mag is not that you have second sight, Ian. is that there was already a huge row that completely overshadowed Reform's party conference this year about a Channel 4 sting operation where someone posed as a young, naive, wealthy bloke who wanted to give a lot of money to Reform and said, well, my dad's the one who really wants to give it, but he's in America, so maybe, you know, can we find a way around that?

7:20And Reform's top officers, who've been dismissed as contractors by the party ever since they had to step down, Reform's top officers said, yes, here are lots of ways that you could donate the money and we can basically get around those rules. But Nigel Farage, who was at the meeting, said he wasn't listening. So that's fine. Which, again, as cases for the defence go, is not hugely strong. No. Oh, come now, Ian. You've been in meetings where you haven't been listening. I'm having a whole lot against him. But also, I thought the dodginess of that money was interesting, which was that they were essentially funding polling, which was designed to be fed to newspapers, the Times and the Telegraph, as a kind of neutral, unbiased survey, but it was going to be very, very helpful for making reform appear maybe more popular than they were.

8:05Yeah, JL Partners. I just thought we should say the name. Absolutely. Yeah, the fact that it was foreign money was just one part of the problem, wasn't it? It was hiding the fact that reform were paying for it and then they were stupid enough to get it funded by a foreign company. At this point, I think we should say A number of people have said that there's nothing odd about these two donors giving so much money. One of them is Richard Tice, another one is Robert Jenrick. And if you're looking for down-the-line guys who know about donations and legality, you couldn't have picked a better two.

8:39I did like hearing Nigel Farage tell Laura Koonsberg, I know more about donations law than anyone else. And I'd say, I'm not sure you do. If your party's being investigated by the police over the Channel 4 thing and there's a separate parliamentary investigation over the£5 million donation, which is another completely separate matter, although it does have Christopher Harbourn at its heart as well. If I were investigating Farage or thinking of prosecuting, I would make a note of that comment for future reference. Yes. Well, I knew full well what the rules were. That might not help him in future.

9:12Yes, and I know we shouldn't talk too much about ongoing investigations, but there was one line in the Channel 4 documentary that I thought was extremely significant, which is a scene that's again being shot covertly by this undercover hack. The chief of staff for the party, Dan Jukes, says the American father can give his son, British son, money and it'll get to reform that way, which would be absolutely against the law. But he says, and I'm quoting here, Dan Jukes says, serious point, donates to us and he donates through his son. They donate through their kids. and then at this point the redaction becomes it's like an episode of Jerry Springer so many names here are being bleeped out and I'm quite sure that the police are going to be taking a look at that and I'm quite sure Channel 4 have those names as well which they may also want to be looking at there's just every single story about reforms funding seems to involve dodginess, investigations, the police now well there's also a drip drip drip effect which is often what makes stories kind of more appealing and run and run which is in the case of these two new donors a lot hinges on when they became resident in the UK because of the way that that legislation is written.

10:19They need to have been here for a year, essentially, and we just do not know because we have to look at when they register on the electoral roll, you know, what their business interests were, whatever it might be. That information has not yet been entirely forthcoming. That's if the legislation going through Parliament comes in, isn't it? That's what's planned. I mean, I think it could get funny when they say, well, that's not fair. You can't retrospectively or retroactively legislate and try to dispute it. Which will depend on using human rights legislation, which they're such fans. Cannot wait for that.

10:47You can deport people who are already here, retrospectively, but you can't investigate foreign businessmen who've moved here as a matter of patriotic duty. Can I say why this story worries me particularly as somebody who spends a lot of time covering America? One of the worst decisions in American politics happened in 2016. It was a Supreme Court decision called Citizens United. And it's funny you mentioned human rights because there was a version of that. Essentially, that said, cracking down on free speech not to let corporations make unlimited donations in elections. And that's the point at which you get super PACs, these political action committees, which, as long as they don't technically coordinate with candidates, are allowed to do unlimited spending.

11:28And that's when you get this enormous... American elections now probably cost billions and billions and billions. The one that always just blows my mind is Wisconsin had an election for its Supreme Court. Okay, so a state in the Midwest has a Supreme Court that rules on, say, its election issues, or that's the highest court in Wisconsin. Right. Elon Musk spent$20 million trying to get a Republican elected to that, to the one seat. One seat on that. Because it's a swing state, it's a swing court, and he wanted someone in place who would, I would suggest, probably gerrymander, you know, help make sure that that was a more favourable match for Republicans.

12:06if there were any decisions about voting rights and regulations that came to it, would vote the way that he wanted. So there was over$80 million spent on that race,$20 million by him, including when he promised three people who registered to vote$1 million apiece, which is something that, again, is being investigated to its legality. But you get to a situation in which one state, one court, one seat, you have a trillionaire putting in$20 million into just... Luckily, he lost, which is very funny, and it makes it enjoyable for all of us. But I don't want to see British... One of the things that's best about British politics, we were here last time talking about Mothin Ali and his£5 ,000, is that the sums are small.

12:46And a huge influx, particularly of crypto money, I think would just be extremely undemocratic. So when Ben Dilo talks about he's not having his voice in democracy, I think it's exactly the other way around. And can I add to that? The money involved gives rise to people talking about, well, we'll be more professional, which means they will pay people to do jobs that at the moment are done by volunteers and are done by people who will go door to door, who will deliver leaflets, who will give their time to a party because they believe in it. If you've got that much money, you just employ large amounts of people who don't care and are doing it for the money.

13:23And that seems to be another loss. I mean, it's exactly Farage's attitude to not turning up to the count. Oh, all these nobodies. I want the people who collect and count the ballots. I want the people who genuinely believe in this stuff. Yeah, they spent, I think, before the last general election, in the 12-month period, reform spent about five and a half million quid. This will allow them to go up to the limit, which is sort of 35 million nationally, if you're standing in every constituency, which I guess they will be. And that extra 30 million, that's going to go on consultants, consultants, social media, engineering, you know, ultra-professional campaign is what it will be.

14:06And I think they more or less say that. Can I give you another of D 'Lo's lines from his essay in The Telegraph about this? My conclusion from reform's recent troubles is that the party should spend less time trying to raise funds to compete on equal terms and more time preparing for government. Oh, it's very selfless. Again, very selfless. So selfless. A bit previous. The other thing D 'Lo claims is that reform is basically a start-up. You know, the Parsi was founded in 2018. And he says, and I know about startups. Outfits such as Ocado or Octopus Energy suffered teething pains and public blunders on their way to being British success stories.

14:40This is Nigel Farage we're talking about. He's been at the centre of British public life for 20 years. I think we went for ages for a reform scandal and then just how many of them come along at once. Is the proposed, I think it's called the Representation of the People Bill. And the idea is that your donations will be limited if you live overseas to£100 ,000. and there's the idea that this will be applied retroactively, which would obviously, depending on when these two donors return to the country, they might or might not have to pay the money back, and who knows if they will. Does that seem reasonable to you or unreasonable?

15:12If this huge amount of money has entered British politics, is it reasonable to try and backdate the change in the rules? I think the timing is unfortunate because it allows reform to say, you're only doing this, you and the Labour Party, because you're really scared that we've got all this money, which of course is true, but it doesn't alter the fact that some sort of legislation about foreign donations is hugely overdue. So I think those two things can be true at the same time. I think when Philip Rycroft was a guy who produced this report suggesting these changes, he said one of the reasons that he wanted a limit for overseas donations was because overseas money was at more risk of originating somewhere it shouldn't do, having, you know, funneling illicit cash into the political system, you've got to ask people, where did this money come from?

16:01So with DLO, for example, where did your 30, where does your 36 million come from? Well, he'll give you some answers, which will presumably pass the test, the legal tests. But, you know, he's the same guy who fiddled the answers when talking about residents of his customers. He falsified the information, falsely changed internal tracking, you know. So you've got to trust these guys to tell you where the money came from. So you've got to trust Ben D 'Lo. First of all, he was saying we don't want too much of it. And then trust Robert Jenrick, who has, you know, a very poor record with donations and legality, to vet him.

16:34There isn't anyone in this chain who one would normally believe, apart, of course, from President Trump, who pardoned D 'Lo. You see all these guys at these national conservative conferences, which sort of are held around the world, which is in itself inherently hilarious. But it should be a bit that you should be involved in a country, resident in a country, paying tax in a country, you should contribute to that country, that means you get to allow to be involved in its politics. I don't, you know, given that this is the same people we hear about citizens of nowhere and, you know, whatever it might be, this is the good form of nationalism, which says you have to have a stake in the country and actually live there in order to participate in its political system.

17:09We made Rishi Sunak give up his green card because it was like, well, you can't be a UK prime minister and also keep the option of, like, maybe one day immigrating to the US. And look what's happened. He stayed here. We worked. because we kept a skilled worker in this country. Well, BitMEX was based in Seychelles. What's wrong with that? Right. Lovely place. What's undemocratic about that? Exactly. It's great transparent tax regime. That's one of the things I think people always say about the Seychelles, that and the beaches. Can I make one more point about D 'Lo? It seems as though, from his attitude, he says, you know, I believe it's the duty of people with broad shoulders and deep pockets to step up and help reform to win and govern.

17:46And he presents it in a very policy-neutral way. He says he won't be getting anything out of it in particular, and it's almost as though he has no views whatsoever. And I just wanted to point out, as The Guardian reported earlier this year, he funds a political base in Westminster, a place called The Sanctuary, where all sorts of people with quite pronounced views have been allowed to use that space. So Restore have been broadcasting from there, Rupert Lowe's party. The Trigonometry podcast, who like asking, for example, whether Rishi Sunak is properly British or not. English. Is he English or not?

18:19They broadcast from there. He hosts Jordan Peterson, Claire Fox. There is quite a pronounced set of views there, I would say, that has been given space, even if D 'Lo says he doesn't necessarily endorse these views. You don't have to explicitly endorse them to help them out substantially, as he's doing with this donation. Yes, I mean, it's not starving children, is it, or finding a cure for cancer. I mean, some of these things are not altruism in the normal sense. We accept it. And you would have to say the same about two crypto billionaires. They're quite interested in the regulatory framework around cryptocurrency.

18:58Now, I believe Mr. Farage also expressed some very strong views about cryptocurrency and its regulation, didn't he? Yeah, I mean, he's for freeing it up, you know, making the UK a leader in crypto, presumably boosting his own the company he's invested in Stack BTC which unfortunately isn't doing very well I mean that will be their agenda you know you're going to keep 72 million pound donors happy aren't you? Whatever you say about all the other policies. Yeah I don't know why they're not transparent about it just say, everybody know, just stop treating people like idiots. Say well obviously we've got a set of policies we want to advance and we want to work with Nigel Farage in order to enact them in law that's a totally legal thing for somebody to do Right.

19:40You know what I mean? Anyway, but, well, I hope they continue to treat us like idiots. Anyway, you can't complain about all our criticism of him, because you're Ben D 'Lo, because he also funds the Free Speech Union. Oh, good. Everything goes. Ben, if you'd like to shovel any of that money our way, I'm afraid we're closed for business. Right, now, well, that was actually a bit less optimistic than I hoped it might be. So let's turn to something else now, the brave new frontiers of tech. Yes. AI. Yes. Helen, what's your P-doom? Thank you very much for asking Andy I've been hoping someone would So P-doom is the phrase that's used in Silicon Valley to indicate what you think the probability is that AI will kill us all So, a guy resigned from Anthropic which is one of the leading the Frontier Labs called Jacob Cox and saying, you know, I've had to resign because I think AI probably is going to kill us all actually Worryingly, this was retweeted by somebody who was still very senior inside Anthropic who said, yeah, I also think actually I put the P-Doom at 10%, I think, probably 10 % chance that AI is going to kill us all.

20:44And in response to this, Daria Amandai, who's the head of Anthropic, has released a manifesto saying essentially we need to what he calls slow the frontier, pace the frontier. And he wants all the companies, the leading edge companies, which is really essentially the ones he's been talking to are him, OpenAI run by Sam Altman, ex-AI run by Elon Musk. They've all said they think it's a good idea that they should pace themselves in order to make the risk that we're all going to die from AI slightly less. Now, these risks, what actually are they? I mean, are people talking about specific things that could occur?

21:17Yeah, well, I went and had a look at Anthropik's latest threat report, which is quite interesting, where it says, essentially, you have people using its models or trying to use its models to, for example, get military intelligence from Ukraine, trying to hack people's WhatsApps, trying to download enormous data files from an unnamed African country, like all the details of its businesses. Essentially, one of the things that has recently came out from another company, OpenAI, was that it created a swarm of agents. So these AI programs are essentially able to operate semi-independently and set them a task to try and do a hack in what should have been a contained environment.

21:54And instead, they got out of the contained environment, made themselves a little message board where they left each other messages about how to do the hack and worked out how to break into another company's systems and then, even more impressively, left each other little notes about how they could cover up. In fact, actually, one day they'll be donating to reform. This is what artificial intelligence has led us to. No, they're clever. But anyway, so that's known as the hugging face incident because that's the name of the company that they broke into. But essentially, you've got this situation where you can have these huge swarms of agents that are themselves quite powerful In this case, they were deliberately, their operating model was to be very persistent.

22:35Even if a problem looks insoluble, like really look for a solution. And they did, and their solution was to break the game, essentially, and get out onto the open internet. But they also coordinated with each other. So on this message board that they had, 1 ,200 of them were on there, and they left each other millions of messages. So it was kind of essentially like a whole civilization that rose and fell. There's a brilliant post by a guy called Dwokesh, who writes about this stuff, describing it as the rise and fall. And it was like a Philip of Macedon and an Alexander the Great. You know, you have these two agents that manage to break through and say, like, come on, lads, like, through the barrier.

23:06So they do have these interesting capabilities. One of the main problems is that no one in the industry really seems to know what the edge of the capabilities are, and they have been going for scale for so long, building all these data centres we've talked about before, putting more and more compute into them. And they're hoping to get to this stake, which they call recursive self-improvement, which essentially means that the AIs get so good they can train each other. So at that point, you hope the growth curve of how good they are takes off. But this has spooked everybody else. And so you have the situation where everybody in the industry is going, I think we might be building the hydrogen bomb, guys.

23:43I don't know what we're going to do about that. And no one really knows whether to believe them or not. I think that's the important thing. I mean, this has come up, and we've talked about this before, and the fact that big tech is, if not hated, then certainly people are deeply suspicious of it. So nobody really knows how seriously to take these kind of warnings. But no one's suspicious enough. Everybody goes on using this stuff. I mean, you talk about Philip of Macedon, you know, saying we put it in a box. Anyone read Pandora's box? You open it up and it's released. It seems to me the triumph of the nerds.

24:16I mean, they read Tolkien, but they haven't read anything else. And it might have helped somewhere along the way to worry about the effects of what you're doing. if you think a product is 10 % likely to wipe out humanity. If anyone else released a product, I mean, I'd have them all up for war crimes. Send them to The Hague. The Donald Trump administration takes a different view, I should say, at this point. But what's really interesting about the Hugging Face incident is that what those agents did is a crime. They hacked another system. But because it wasn't done by anyone, technically, there's no one seems to be really all that interested in pursuing it.

24:51This is what I want to know about is the current state of regulation brackets, if any. Right. OK, so you have David Sachs, who is the White House's AI czar, saying, I don't believe all this talk about doom. I think they're all saying this because they want to get around anti-monopoly legislation and coordinate with each other. There's also a sort of lively conspiracy theory about the fact that it is not the labs that have other business lines. So not Meta, not Google, who are asking for the slowdown. So the other conspiracy theory, which is not a total conspiracy theory, is that these frontier labs that only make their money from the AI models do need to slow down anyway because they're burning through cash.

25:28They're just running out of cash. And they want to find a way to do that that isn't like admitting defeat of going like, sorry, lads, we spent all the budget, we haven't got any more. They're trying to kind of embroider it into a narrative that actually this is a very responsible thing to do. They haven't spent all this money. What have they achieved? Well, people are using AI. I mean, actually, both OpenAI and Anthropic are making decent, you know, people are signed up. No one is writing their university essays anymore. I should say this has happened. The New York Times had a very sad story about the fact that there's been lots of unemployment in Kenya because American college students used to employ Kenyans to write their college essays for them.