Burnham backlash: Middle classes revolt against migrant housing plan

0:03The Telegraph. Middle class areas must play their part. That's the message from Andy Burnham to Townsend Villages when it comes to accepting more illegal migrant accommodation. But is that as far as the PM's plan goes when it comes to solving the now big boat crisis? And the Restore Reform Pact is dead. But is Rupert Lowe really the one calling the shots or is he being controlled by a bunch of ethno-nationalist keyboard warriors? The right has actually weirdly never been this large in this country. I mean, it's almost unheard of to have this many people who are voting in the country hold quite strong right-wing opinions as they clearly are in opinion polling at the moment.

0:42And yet we have three parties, all of which have said that they are not going to be able to work together to form a government, which means we're going to have the insane spectacle potentially of a massive right-wing majority in opinion in this country, but another rump left-wing government. Poppy Coburn, how delightful to see you on the Daily Tea. It's a wonderful day, Camilla, isn't it? Isn't it just? I've literally just got off the phone. We were just about to record and my daughter's phoned me to say that as well as making her own Eclipse viewer, which I'll show you here, it's from an all-brand box.

1:15I mean, that's pretty ingenious. This is the recycling generation. I know, we love this. Is it something to do with green fingered or the fact that there's no available eclipse glasses anywhere in the UK? I think people have been queuing for three hours. She's posted this on the family group chat. She's my youngest child. She's made this thing. She's made me something with a toilet roll. What's my son's reaction to all this? He's posted geek of the week. Aren't boys horrible? Aren't they just so mean? He will be wrestling this from her hands to have a look at this eclipse later. I initially didn't really care.

1:47Oh, we saw one in 1999. Do you remember if you saw it? I wasn't alive, Camilla. You weren't alive. I'm sorry. You weren't alive in 1999. I literally wasn't that. I was in the womb. Poppy, you're just a little baby. Could I be your mum? I should be like your daughter making little cardboard cutouts. I'm just trying to work out. Could I be Poppy's mum? Yes, I could. You could be a scandalously young mother. So my oldest was born in 2008. Oh. Oh, my Lord. Oh, God, you are, because we've already discussed your gen-zedness. Okay, so you weren't literally alive in 1999. I can't remember whether I saw this eclipse or not, but can I just say, it's like one of those things, I mean, you could queue for three hours and we can use things made out of cereal boxes.

2:28Wouldn't you just say you'd seen it anyway? I'd rather look at the pictures. It's not like, I mean, if you're looking up and you're squinting at the sun, I'm just worried I'm going to end up like Donald Trump, you know, when they had the eclipse in America and there are these great photos of him just looking up No protection. No proper glasses on. Melania looks horrified. He's just looking up like, yeah, it's the sun. It's the sun. It's a bit less of it. Well, but we have to be careful, apparently. I mean, I kind of initially thought this was like the snowflakery of 2026. Do not look at the sun.

2:58Well, we spent most of our summer holidays doing that. But actually, apparently, our producer Dave did look this up. Looking directly at a solar eclipse without protection can cause permanent eye damage known as solar retinopathy. Intense solar radiation can burn the retina's light-sensitive cells. Because the retina has no pain receptors, this damage occurs without warning. We really shouldn't encourage people to... Otherwise, you'll be listening to the Daily Tea tomorrow. You'll never be able to watch it again. Never see it again on YouTube. It will be the last thing you'll see. Well, imagine.

3:32Also, I am blind as a bat. I'm literally minus 10 in both eyes. I qualify for NHS help with my glasses. You should have big old glasses on, Camilla. I tell you what, Bobby, I do have them, but it makes me look like the woman on the buses. Like because I'm so short sighted, my eyes, which are naturally quite big, are reduced basically to the, there's a phrase about something in the snow. That's what they look like. They're so bad. I look so dreadful in glasses. Also, the differentiation between the lens forward and no lens down actually makes you feel sick. That's how blind I am. So thank God for contact lenses.

4:08I'm not risking these eyes. what sight I have left I need to preserve so we'll be looking through cereal boxes later I wonder if Andy Burnham's going to have a little eclipse moment you know man of the people just as you're looking at the sun through a cereal box so am I I was looking at it through a BAP or a balm cake or whatever the hell he calls it I mean I think Andy Burnham's had enough sun hasn't he he's finally come back from his holidays he'll be looking what's like a northern is it an Eccles cake I'm going to look at the eclipse through an Eccles cake because that's how northern I am.

4:39We sound so southern, Camilla. This is terrible. We couldn't even think of the good ones. Look at it through a Bakewell tart if you want to as he goes around the country. We'll get on to him flip-flopping a little bit on PC Harper's Killers release and all the rest of it. He's having a Cobra meeting about the extreme heat. But the story of the day, and this again is trying to play to his king of the north status, as if, by the way, I mean, that is a southern misconception that actually all the poverty is only in the north. I mean, it's not in areas of Cheshire. Please do come to Jaywick, guys.

5:10Don't really think that we're having the best time down there in the south. No, indeed. And actually, we can talk about long forgotten seaside towns of the south with Clacton in our minds for tomorrow's by-election and say that he hasn't quite got the geography right. But no matter. Again, in this kind of bid to be the PM of the people, he's saying, let's listen to him speaking to GB News in a rare interview with an actual journalist rather than a kind of influencer or Reddit or whatever. He's basically said, well, sorry, middle class areas need to take their fair share of migrants. I do have to say we cannot have a situation where it's only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers.

5:55I do believe all parts of the country need to work to play their part. Isn't that so nice of Andy Burnham? You know, it's taken a very long time until a politician stands up there and really say to the people, it's time for you to make more sacrifices. Yes. Isn't that just fantastic? Also, you'd imagine that the middle classes, along with the working classes and any other people who pay taxes, are already doing their part, aren't they? Because we're funding. Yeah, it's not exactly JFK, is it? You know, like, what can you do for your country? It's like, what more must we do? I mean, this week we had a massive mega dinghy.

6:28Can't call it small boats anymore. I think they're too big to classify small boats. 240 people coming over on just one single craft. So this is a crisis that hasn't been fixed by the Labour government, predictably. They've allowed it to continue to file out of control. And his solution is, well, now we have so many people that have broken into Britain that we're going to have to now put them in the Cotswolds. And apparently we're supposed to celebrate this as a kind of, you know, natural salt of the earth, working class fairness. It's not fair for anyone. No, no, no. I tell you where it isn't fair is in the little village of Piddington in Oxfordshire.

7:01Oh, that's very charming. Well, I mean, you could say, oh, well, they can have their fair share and it doesn't matter that they are middle class or perhaps living in a quite lovely and leafy area of the home counties. The point is here about scale, I think, and it doesn't matter where the village or town is. If a place like Piddington only has, say, 500 residents, which I think is the case, and they're being asked to accept 1 ,200 illegal immigrants, how on earth do you expect them? This isn't going to be a class-based response. It's just going to be an objective, well, not in my backyard response.

7:37Well, quite understandably, isn't it? Quite similar. I mean, if you look at where you've seen protests outside of asylum hotels, there's been protests outside of Norwich. There's been protests outside of the north of England. They have been in deprived areas. They have been in middle class areas. The only thing that's possibly uniting British people is that they are not happy with the way that we're handling the illegal migration crisis. You can look at every single poll. You can speak to young women. you can speak to rich people you can speak to poor people employed unemployed brexiteers remainers all of them actually agree that this is a really dangerous crisis and they don't want it to be handled in their communities and i think it's that kind of dangerous logic that you see politicians play with say we've heard from jess phillips that people want their hotels back that's why they've got to close down the asylum hotels i mean some of those hotels are quite right there was a migrant hotel inst albans which i mean used to be a fairly nice hotel that you might, I mean, maybe stay in.

8:28But it's not about wanting their hotels back. It's just not wanting their towns overrun. Or, by the way, the women and girls in their towns to be sexually assaulted. I mean, there was a case this week. There was an asylum hotel in Falkirk that did have protests outside last year. And now it turns out that one of the men who was resident in it has sexually assaulted two women. And he's now been prosecuted for that. So people have legitimate concerns here. It's not they're just bigoted and they don't want new neighbours. they actually do see that occasionally these hotels can become crime hotspots, but they can make it dangerous for women to travel home at night.

9:01You see men hanging around nightclubs all the time. I mean, I've heard loads of stories from my own friends. You know, if you go to a provincial nightclub now, you've literally got men just waiting to pick them up at night. The other dishonesty at the heart of this, and it's been a problem for some time, is Andy Burnham constantly claiming to represent the most deprived parts of Britain. That wasn't the case when he was mayor of Manchester. OK, there are some deprived pockets of Manchester, but the whole thing about Manchester and his own political success is the regeneration of that city. And that happened after the bombing of the 1990s.

9:37It happened under both Conservatives and Labour administrations. And it happened because many cities, not just Manchester, but Leeds or Birmingham or others, have improved vastly since the 1970s and 80s, point one. Second of all, Makerfield. We went to Makerfield, Tim and I. We walked around. We tried to compare Burnham's rhetoric about this long forgotten town with the actual reality on the streets. This was a nice constituency. People there seemed to be working. We were knocking on doors. Everyone was at work. It was all neat and tidy. There weren't rubbish strewn streets. There wasn't very much visible homelessness.

10:20Crucially, and this is interesting because is he going to apply this maxim to make a field? It's 97 % white. So he's going to have to start with his own seat, isn't he, when he wants to invite migrants in? If we're talking about fair share, it's not that you can play into these stereotypes, as you say, about northern areas are automatically poor. I mean, does anyone call Milton Keynes a left behind town? It's a pretty average section of what a British town would be like. But apparently if you're north of the Watford Gap, apparently you're like this kind of Dickensian. People are walking around outside of factories.

10:53That is not the reality of modern Britain. We are not split geographically in the way that someone like Andy Burnham wants it to make out to be. So you're completely right. Will Cheshire take illegal migrants? Is that where they're going to be placed? Or is it just going to be us Southerners who are going to have to put up the buck again? Because, I mean, it's not as if Southern areas haven't had to take their fair share. It's not that the government is doing this on the basis of that they're mean. is because rents are very expensive in the south of England and they want to get the most value out of their money.

11:20Now, I don't agree with that. I don't want these people to be here in the first place. I would want to have strong borders. But you can understand why the government would say, well, if we could house twice as many people for half the cost, why wouldn't we do it in these areas? Yes, it's unfair, but it's unfair in the first place. Now, is he also going to have some problems with his backbenchers? Because we love the hand-wringers who opine the state of things and like to suggest that anyone who arrives here by boat over the channel is a woman or a child. They're a victim, Camilla. They're a victim.

11:51Have a heart. Okay, I mean, some of them are a victim of their circumstances, I'm sure, but let's be honest, I mean, good old Chris Philp, who likes to station himself on any beach either in the south of England or the north of France, does observe, I mean, with his own eyes, and we've had this covered extensively by The Telegraph and also GB News, that most of the people coming over are young men and they're economic migrants. Now, we have had this situation. We had it a little bit, didn't we, when people came from Ukraine fleeing, obviously, war and persecution. And some politicians stepped forward and said, well, listen, I've got to put my money where my mouth is.

12:25If I've got a refugees welcome sort of mentality, then I better let my spare room go to somebody coming here trying to escape the horrors of war. are we going to be seeing poppy labor backbenchers welcoming illegal immigrants with open arms into their own constituencies that's that's the litmus test for this isn't it i think there's given the track record of what labor mps have done they have this very interesting two-phase strategy so on the national stage they will talk about the need for compassion about how these are people fleeing war, etc, etc, etc. But if you look at local media, if you look at what they say when they're in hustings, you know, with their constituents, it's completely different.

13:09I'm thinking of the example of Lisa Nandy, by the way. Lisa Nandy has spoken at length about how important it is that British people are compassionate and open up their hearts to refugees. But when there was an instance where there was going to be an asylum hotel that was opened up in her constituency, a northern constituency, by the way. Wigan, very close to Makerfield. Yes, very, very close to Makerfield. She and Burnham are besties, let's not forget. She pledged to her constituents that she was going to block the opening. She said it wasn't appropriate for the local area. So funnily enough, because their constituents are rightly saying we're not comfortable with that, MPs have this completely different approach to it when they're talking about their own local areas.

13:44So it's good enough for Britain as a country, as a nation to take refugees. But again, it's that NIMBY mindset of, but not in my constituency because of this, that, the other reason. It's just excuses. Also, I'm not sure this is good politics from Vernon because only earlier this week something landed in my inbox to suggest that actually the use of migrant hotels had gone down. Yvette Cooper had previously promised this as Home Secretary. While we looked at rhetoric around smashing the gangs and stopping the boats as being frankly ludicrous. He remembers smashing the gangs. Yvette Cooper single-handedly smashing the gangs, maybe with Ed Balls bringing up the rear, whatever.

14:21That didn't sound credible because it didn't sound credible when the Conservatives said it, let alone Labour. and we know that Labour are ideologically more wedded to the idea of like having open borders. Set that aside, to be fair, she vowed that we would close down migrant hotels and the statistics do show that quite a great many have been closed down. Why would you then as Prime Minister highlight in an interview to GB News where let's be honest the audience are probably the most anti-migrant hotel of any in the country and start talking about how new migrant hotels need to be opened or new migrant accommodation needs to be open in an area just down your road.

14:56Do you not think this is Andy Burnham accidentally being slightly too honest? I mean, maybe this is the transition from being mayor to prime minister. Because although you're right, they have closed down lots of asylum hotels and they make a very big deal out of this. Anybody who looks into this issue for more than a minute finds out that it's not that these people have been deported or that their asylum claims have been accepted and they've got jobs and they've moved out into private accommodation. Actually, there's been a shift in tactics. So they're putting them in military accommodation, people who remember the Krober scandal.

15:24That was another example, by the way, of an MP, Green MP, Rachel Millwood, trying to block these people from being housed in a constituency. Funny that. So they've been moved to military installations or even more insidious, I think, if you are trying to see what's happening in your local community, HMOs, houses of multiple occupancy. So the Home Office is bidding for private renters for these HMOs that could be on anyone's street, could be in your street. you could have multiple men placed in these houses with literally nothing to do and that's what would have become a politically contentious issue reform was made a big deal out of it in warwickshire council because there was that alleged case where two asylum seekers who had been staying in an hmo committed a sex attack on a school girl so it doesn't actually solve the underlying problem does it and i think that's what andy burnham meant by saying it could come to your local community maybe it won't be in a hotel where it's this very visible symbol of this problem that's gone wrong.

16:16They could be your new neighbours. Literally, they could move into a house next to you. But of course, it's too difficult a nettle to grasp to actually commit to saying, stop the boats. Yes. You know, Rishi Sunak had to say in a subsequent interview after he left office that the phrase stop the boats was misguided because you can't, in the same way you can't smash the gangs. I mean, any criminal gangs, right? I mean, criminal gangs, the thing about criminality, I mean, it does stand the test of time. Crime never goes to zero, funnily enough. It doesn't matter how great a politician you are. And also I believe crime does pay.

16:48Asked if he would commit to stopping small boat crossings by the next election, Andy Burnham said this. I'd rather promise to people what I know I can do and what I know I can deliver, and that is a relentless focus on this issue to deal with the public concern. I heard it on doorstep, on doorstep, after doorstep in Makerfield, and I said to the people there, and I say it to the country, I hear what you say. I will be completely focused on the issue. There are more measures that we're bringing through, but crossings are down. Immigration is down. There is real progress to report. The trouble, I think, for any politician on this issue, and we'll get on in a minute, to be discussing the sort of conflict between reform and restore and just how far do you go?

17:33Do you go fully Trump, ice vans, let's deport anyone that isn't white effectively, which some of Rupert Lowe's supporters seem to be advocating on X. I think that the trouble with the British population now is that they just feel the genie is out of the bottle. The statistics will come down, won't they? The immigration statistics have to come down. There's nowhere else for them to go from the record Boris wave-induced high of 945 ,000 in 2023. There's only one direction of travel, but people are talking about the changed complexion of their communities. Now, the left will point at them and say, well, you're racist and bigots for talking about that.

18:13I say complexion. What they mean is that there's been a large, immigration is one thing that we've been used to for decades and decades. And most rational sane people say that it has improved the fabric of British life. And I talk as somebody whose grandparents were Irish-Italian. But then people feel a Rubicon has been crossed into an avenue where just in recent years, And let's Faraj mentioned it at the press conference, you know, six million since Boris. People are saying, but hang on, that is a completely different kind of mass migration that nobody here was prepared for. People are coming over who aren't making an economic contribution.

18:52They're actually proving to be a drain on state resources and they don't share our culture and don't even speak our language. I wish people were a bit more specific about when they criticise the right, you're just all anti-foreigner. No, no, no. Perfectly rational people in places like Piddington could say, well, hang on a minute, this is a village of 500 people. How on earth do you expect us to accommodate a load of blokes from a foreign land who we have nothing in common with and, by the way, probably won't integrate at all? Well, how can you integrate if so much change has happened in such a short period of time?

19:28there is no national culture to integrate into you. And I think you've hit on quite an important point here, which is immigration figures don't really tell the full story. It's like when inflation comes down, like the rate of inflation comes down. That doesn't mean the inflation that came before just didn't happen. I mean, the prices are still quite high. They're just not rising as quickly. And it's the same with immigration. So Andy Burnham can say, well, we're heading towards net zero migration, which is not true, by the way. But we are certainly heading down from the historic highs we had in recent years.

19:55but that doesn't mean the millions of people that came in recent years are going home or they've integrated the population there hasn't been enough time for that to happen and frankly given the scale of the migration and I think the makeup of some of these areas where they may be minority British at this point they may have a majority foreign-born population how do you integrate those but it's really difficult to do that well it's two questions isn't it how do you integrate them or we'll get onto this in just a minute after just reflecting on some of the readers comments How does a party like Restore follow through on mass deportations?

20:28Yeah. I mean, how do you physically do that? How do you actually set out what you mean by deportations? I think a lot of people will actually agree with, if you ask them the question, deport all illegal immigrants, that would actually entail deporting about a million people. We do have about a million people who are illegally in the country. I actually think people would support that, even though it's a pretty extreme step. I mean, that is, in a way, a mass deportation. but what people probably won't be able to ever get behind is when they say mass deportations of everyone who's come under a certain wave of migration on the basis of skin colour which is how you're going to be able to tell these people aren't British they're not actually defining what they mean by these terms and I think they're doing that slightly on purpose it's a bit of a dog whistle, it's slightly edgy it's kind of like playing at the margins of what's acceptable but they should just come out and tell people what they think who exactly are you planning to deport and what about these people's children and what if the children have got British citizenship but not the parents?

21:21Let's have an open conversation. I actually do agree we should have an open conversation but tell us what you actually think and you need to have that conversation. Rather than kind of broad, vague brushstrokes that might appeal to the Elon Musk acolytes of social media but perhaps not right-minded people. Exactly. Readers' comments are interesting. Philip Howard, I happily accepted a Ukrainian refugee, a lovely educated lady who arrived via legal channels and got a full-time job within one month of arriving over two years ago. However, I do not want the dross successive governments have allowed to enter the country illegally.

21:55Stop talking and fix it. And actually, Constantine Kersin, as the son of immigrants and an immigrant himself, said we do need to distinguish between different kinds of immigrants. And it might not be a pleasant conversation people want to have, but there are high-quality immigrants and low-quality ones. Yes. based on education, earning capacity and contribution back to the state in taxes. Totally. And if you can't have that conversation, then you're going to end up in a situation where you do get hard-lineers who say, OK, no one comes in. Because if we can't differentiate between a 25-year-old man from Afghanistan that might have some kind of war trauma and a, I don't know, 35-year-old mother from France, then people can't have a rational conversation about immigration in that stance.

22:38It serves nobody to pretend this is the same type of person. Ian Broughton I'm fuming this statement will do nothing but encourage even more people to make the journey they don't need housing anywhere they need to know that if they pay to make the trip it will be a maste of money because they will get deported immediately and then final thought which leads us nicely onto the next part of the podcast John Birch we never wanted them we never voted for them we never ever had any choice the only choice we've got is to get rid of the Labour government as fast as possible but Poppy can they do that?

23:11If the right are divided.

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23:55Camilla, the deal's off. Yes. The divorce is permanent. Rupert Lay and Nigel Farage are not getting back together, no matter what the kids are telling them. They have consciously uncoupled. Well, I mean, this is a pretty strong statement. I'm just looking out for Rupert Lay, who tweeted this morning about how the rift between these two men is now going to be permanent. So Reform UK has said a pact with Restore Britain is off. That is their decision. I'm not getting into the personality differences of it all. I can't be bothered. I find that a little bit hard to believe. We can be bothered. We love the personality differences.

24:27We do indeed. We made our offer. A genuine attempt was made. It was based on policy. I don't particularly enjoy doing it, but I tried because I thought it was the right thing to do. And then he goes on and describes his policy. That's one thing or another. But I think what matters here is the question of where do reform go next? What is the role of restore in the right in this country? And where do they actually fall apart on these policy differences? Because Rupert Lowe's here talking about economics, but we all know that's not the reason that they've had this rift, particularly not in the last couple of weeks.

24:56It's over Charlie Downs. So Charlie Downs is Rupert Lowe's right-hand man. He's very controversial. He's revealed himself in various interviews to be sort of basically an advocate of ethno-nationalist politics. There are many on the right, including this newspaper, that say a line must be drawn. And the line was previously drawn at Tommy Robinson, who even himself is saying that he's finding Restore a bit too right wing for him. Because he is now basically making the point that while he did once fund the EDL, he has friends who are black and Asian. not least in the fight against Islamic extremism.

25:32And actually, if some of the people who are supporting Restore, who appear to be advocating basically the deportation of anyone non-white, and as well in the melee of all this is Rupert Lowe struggling to define our own king as white British on account of the fact that his father, Prince Philip, was Greek. Also, there's some German in the background there, as we both know. I mean, we are now getting into quite dangerous territory for Restore. where do we go with this are we I mean we've asked Mr Lowe on this podcast Mr Lowe's response to me has been no I want to be live and unedited on GB News my response to him has been we can't redo live and unedited because you do have this habit of defaming people his followers then say this is a media conspiracy no editing happens in every branch of journalism and it's not to cut your views down it's just to make them legally safe so we've invited him on and I suppose the question I would like to ask him next is, well, what's your view on Kemi Bainock?

26:28Should she be deported along with her mixed race children? Yeah. Where are we going with this poppy genuinely? I think there's a serious question that needs to be asked of us all by what they actually mean by mass deportations and also what they actually mean by white British. I mean, it is kind of true that the census definition of white British is pretty nebulous. It's actually when you do your census and you're taking your ethnicity, it's how you identify. So there's not really a hard and fast definition of whether or not it's your, oh, one of my parents is foreign-born, that means I'm not, why British?

26:56But the way that they've been throwing these terms out there without actually putting any thought into it seems to me like it's a classic online case of, I'm going to say something extreme to get a reaction out of people. Yeah, to be retweeted by Elon, basically. And then I'm going to just point and say, look, this person is against me. I actually think most people on the right are very unified in literally the discussion we've just been having. There's clearly been a massive issue with immigration in this country. A lot of people would want to find some happy solutions, moving forward that isn't just oh well that happened let's just move on and forget about it and never talk about it again that's what the left is doing i think what's interesting about restore though is because it is a online organization they haven't really had that internal intellectual debate it's just been like throwing out the most radical terms that they possibly can i'm sure that there are some people who support restore who really do hold those views wholeheartedly you know who are really really extreme on that issue i don't think the majority of people who would say flirt with restore's ideas but agree with that which is why i think the surrogates should actually tell us what they think.

27:53Come out and say it. Even if you don't like the mainstream media, would you deport Kimmy Baden-Württemberg? What do you define as a British person? What do you define as British ethnicity? Tell us what you actually think and what you want to do instead of just saying that the mainstream media won't have this conversation. Have that conversation. Please tell us what you think. You want to challenge the mainstream media on its uniparty thinking, we'll challenge you on your thinking. I mean, that's fine. Because on the basis that the king might not be white British because his father was Greek. We could also say that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson isn't white British because he was born in New York and I think his grandfather was Turkish.

28:28So where are we going with this? I think we did my genealogy, my daughter did our genealogy and, you know, it's not very English. It's quite Celtic and it's quite Irish and it's quite European. But I think most people's, like how they would consider Britishness, if they're not on the extreme left or the extreme right, it would be a bit of a mixture of the two. They'd probably say like, okay, yeah, the English were some kind of distinct ethnic group in the same way that you would say like Afghans are a distinct ethnic group, but it's not the be all and end all of what makes you a British person.

29:01I think that's the reasonable middle ground position that actually most people subscribe to, which the left would consider to be ethno-nationalism because they're so extreme in the other direction. And the right apparently just think isn't worth considering. But again, how do you define any of these terms? That's not a serious political project to me. This is interesting. Neil Johnston, our colleague here at The Telegraph, has written, From Churchill to Harry Kane, the Britons who are not British, according to Rupert Lowe. Restore leaders' different interpretation of a white Britain excludes some of the UK's most well-known figures.

29:33Let's just go through a few of them. We've already mentioned the king. Okay. Open to interpretation. Winston Churchill, American mother. Harry Kane, Irish father. Daniel Day-Lewis, Irish father George Orwell, born in India Well, if you look at most of our authors, they were born in colonial India Queen Victoria, German mother J.R.R. Tolkien, born in South Africa Dame Helen Mirren, Russian father Helena Bonham Carter, Spanish mother Eric Clapton, Canadian father Noel and Liam Gallagher, of course, Irish parents this is it's just it's such an it's such a weird and narrow it's so ahistorical it's like we literally had a global empire at one point we clearly have a connection still to Canada to Australia to New Zealand just because they were born in a different like part of the world doesn't mean that they weren't considered at the time to be British they were considered to be British citizens it is more but you don't have to go all the other way that's true the other colleague who's been doing quite a lot of work on this is Alistair Heath.

30:41And he's said that Restore is ultimately guilty of grotesque hypocrisy because it starts out being this party that wants to fight Islamic extremism and wants to stand up for the victim of the rape gangs. And that's all honourable stuff. But then when suddenly you start attracting supporters who are themselves anti-Semites, that's obviously contradictory and problematic. When you also, from my perspective as a woman who has been attacked and trolled by many Restore supporters, If you're then trying to stand up for the victims of the rape gangs, but then incubating a load of incels who seem to hate all women, but particularly those on the right that don't share their own unique brand of racial purity, then you've got a problem.

31:21And as I previously described on this podcast, I did have this conversation directly with Rupert Lowe at the Spectator Party and things got quite heated. Because from my perspective, if he wants to be the respectable leader of a political party in the UK, you do have to denounce the neo-Nazi white supremacists in your midst. It's not enough to say, well, there's a few rotten eggs. You know, if there's a few rotten eggs, root them out. Yeah. And then there would be more respectability for this whole party. And Gordon Rayner's done great work exposing some of these people who are paying into Restore, who frankly should have no place at all in British politics.

31:56This is again why Rupert Lowe needs to actually come out and tell people what they think. It's not really good enough to just keep saying that the mainstream media aren't giving me a fair hearing. I'm being smeared as a fascist, etc, etc. I do actually think people want to know what he believes about these issues. Again, it's not as if everyone in Restore is so far away from public opinion. a lot of people really are very frustrated about how immigration has changed the country or they at least want some acknowledgement that it matters to a country if you are going to have a difference in birth rates and how that might change our society, how it might change our culture.

32:26These are all important questions that we need to answer. They can't just be brushed aside. That's why someone like Rupert Lowe is becoming an important political figure. But he doesn't get to dodge the details because those details will impact millions of people's lives. But is it our problem to solve? Is it other politicians' problem to solve? I mean, there's an interesting thing now going on. We discussed it, Jacob and I, earlier in the week. We've got reform now for the first time in a long time behind Labour in a YouGov poll because of the burn and bounce. We've still got the Tories attacking reform and reform attacking the Tories.

33:02Restore seemed to be getting quite a free ride here. There's still this kind of laser focused obsession of the left in trying to bring down Farage. admittedly because he's got a much stronger chance of being the next prime minister than, frankly, Rupert Lowe. But why aren't both sensible lefties and righties setting their sights more on Restore? And the other thing that Jacob rightly pointed out, I mean, this is a party that polled alarmingly well in the Manchester mayoral race, OK? They've done well in Great Yarmouth. They're doing very well online because of this whole Musk affiliation. They seem to get a huge amount of traction on X.

33:42Matt Goodwin's written a piece who's a reformer saying if Burnham does want to call a snap general election, which quite a few people, including the pollster Jamie Johnston, thinks he might do to capitalise on his honeymoon period, then my God, the right have got to sort things out because this division, this infighting, I mean, the reform and the conservative infighting is a little bit ridiculous, frankly. They believe in the same things. Yeah. Half the people who are in reform were former Conservatives. It's a little bit different. Self-loathing formatory. Well, quite. I mean, but you almost have more of a framework for that kind of dispute.

34:21What's interesting about Restore is that, again, as you've rightly pointed out, the Conservatives haven't really spoken at all about them because they're so laser-focused on getting Nigel Farage out of the way. The Conservatives have got a strange relationship with Rupert Lowe. I mean, it has been pointed out that didn't the Conservatives let him sit on a select committee? Yes, which he was very proud of and mentioned frequently in interviews. Because this is the other weird thing about Rupert Lowe. Rupert Lowe, by his own admission, is an old school Tory. Actually, there are some in reform that want the mainstream media to point out just how liberal some of Rupert Lowe's views are and perpetuate this idea that actually he's just being puppeteered by a bunch of much younger keyboard-worrying hard rightists.

35:05Well, I think you can kind of see it in his statement. If reform wants to discuss policy, not personality, they know where to find me. A genuine attempt was made. I didn't particularly enjoy doing it, but I tried because it was the right thing to do. Rupert Lowe hates Nigel Farage on a personal level. It is a personal dispute for him. I really believe that. I don't think that's true for a lot of the young people that have joined Restore. I think they genuinely believe that it was an alternative kind of right way model that moved away from like what they would see as the traditional Westminster system.

35:33But for Rupert Lowe, I don't think it's that. I think it's revenge, which is why I thought this pact was never going to happen in the first place. I know. It was a very symbolic offering of an olive branch. So then when reform inevitably turned around and said it wasn't going to work out, Rupert Lowe could say, well, look, I tried. Yes, but then both of them have been hoist by their own petard because both Lowe and Farage are promising to rescue Britain from the clutches of mass migration, socialist, leftist, progressive alliance, coalition of chaos nightmares. and they're going to have to look that electorate in the face, both of them, and say, I do want to save the country, but I'm quite happy to have a divided right that means that Labour are going to slip through the net once again.

36:21And that's very difficult for both of them. Well, it's impossible for a form to say stop dividing the right because, of course, the Conservatives will turn around and say, hang on, coming from you guys. I mean, like, there is clearly a massive, massive gap in politics in the right that's now being filled. Yeah, but then you have to blame the Tories, don't you? Well, quite. If they had failed, this never would have happened. If the Tories were actually conservative, let's be perfectly honest. We were discussing yesterday Farage's imposter syndrome. It's not quite that. Farage, always the outsider.

36:48I mean, you had this in Brexit, a bunch of stuck-up Tories saying, oh, Nigel Farage is too unsavoury for us. Oh, stop being ridiculous. Nigel Farage is a conservative, small C, big C, whether he likes it or not. He believes in the same things Kemi Badenok does, most telegraph readers do and everything. And they didn't work hard enough to keep him inside that camp, which was just actually so irretrievably stupid. They're so busy doing ridiculous left wing progressive nonsense because they haven't frankly got any kahunas to stand up for the right. But the conservatives lose their way and Farage goes on his own path.

37:31And frankly, the same can be said for Lowe. Yes. You know, OK, so Lowe might be at the harder end of the wedge. You quite happily had in your midst closet Liberal Democrats that were non-Conservatives. And yet you turn your back on these actual robust Conservatives because you don't want to offend people at your Notting Hill dinner parties. The Conservatives only have themselves to blame for what's happened to the right now. And the truth is, if you look at the polling, if you combine the Conservative Party, if we still count that as a right wing party, I think under Kemi we do restore and reform.

38:07That is a massive chunk of the electorate. The right has actually weirdly never been this large in this country. I mean, it's almost unheard of to have this many people who are voting in the country hold quite strong right wing opinions as they clearly are in opinion polling at the moment. And yet we have three parties, all of which have said that they are not going to be able to work together to form a government, which means we're going to have the insane spectacle, potentially, of a massive right wing majority in opinion in this country, but another rump left wing government. Yeah. Burnham is PM.

38:37What kind of solution is that? Ed Davies is deputy. Anyone? Oh, God. Anyone? Polanski running the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Pull out the generator, Camilla. It's the only way we'll get by. Poppy, lovely to do the daily tea with you. I'm going to be back with Tim, reunited with Tim Stanley tomorrow. And we've got the big by-election to come and we're going to be doing snap analysis of that on Friday morning and in between we may or may not be speaking to Binface. But Tim and I will be back tomorrow, 5pm.

39:18Thank you.