Desperate Reeves’s last-ditch plea for Budget support

0:28The Telegraph Tim, you're going to tell us, having witnessed it yourself, why Samir Shah must stand down as chairman of the BBC board. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tominy.

0:51Camilla, modern governance is all about the budget. Yes. It's everything. It's Black Friday, it's Christmas, it's gay pride, all rolled into one. And it's not just about the country, it's also about the government, because it's effectively a vote of confidence in the government. Yes. This is what it's going to do, and therefore its MPs have to back it, or they could bring it down. Well, why then is the Chancellor desperately begging them to back it when we know all this? This is my point. I cannot recall in my lifetime a Chancellor before a budget for several weeks having to go around and plead with MPs who are part of an historic majority.

1:31169. To get them to support what I'm saying is the most important thing that a government can do. Yes, it is a bit desperate. Let's listen to the wording as well. So she spoke to a meeting of Labour's parliamentary party on Monday night. She said to the MPs they must stick together if they wanted to win the next election. OK, basic stuff. Why would you have to say that two years in? Well, this is her second budget. She's having to be this persuasive. But this is the quote, which I think is interesting. So she said she thought Labour MPs would like 90 to 95 percent of her spending plan. Not 100 percent, your note, but 90 to 95 percent.

2:10But she warned, it's a package, not a pick and mix. You can't say you like the cola bottles, but you don't like the fruit salad. OK. It all comes together and hangs together as a whole. It's a pick and mix. And you know what pick and mix always does to me? It makes me feel sick. Same as a schmorker's board. And it's always overpriced. It's like three pounds for a wine gum in there. This is not a good metaphor. No. Look, I actually loved pick and mix as a child and I would shove it all down my gullet. But the point is, all of these food analogies, it's either pick and mix or it's a smorgasbord or it's actually a dog's dinner.

2:47It all adds up to the kind of meal that you might eat. My husband's good at this. My husband and my son will go to a breakfast buffet and have a strange mixture of like the hams and the cheeses and then a donut and then like a little pot of jelly and a yogurt. It's a meal without philosophy. It's got no direction. It's got no grounding. That's going to send you to the loo pretty quick. But yeah, that's the key thing, isn't it? She's saying, oh, you need a bit of fat, you need a bit of sugar, or you need to lose a bit of weight. It's everything thrown in there actually to please everyone. And we're finding out that at this late in the game, she's not actually pleasing her colleagues.

3:26No, and you say about it's not going to be high sugar because this milkshake tax keeps on bringing boys to the yard. All of the headlines are suggesting that yet again there's going to be an assault on sugar. We know this is big statism incarnate, so expect some nannying, expect people to be told how they should be living their lives as she celebrates the good things Labour are doing, breakfast clubs, teeth brushing. And the problem with all vice taxes is that if they work, income goes down because they're supposed to put people off doing that thing. That's the moral case for them. If they don't, if they milk people for doing wrong things, then that's kind of immoral.

4:07But they're not supposed to do that. No, that's right. Also, there's something so counterintuitive about all this, and we can judge it by literally recent memory, because putting up the minimum wage has actually caused youth in unemployment to hit record levels. So 18 to 24-year-olds more are out of work now than there were when Labour came to power, and that is because employers can't afford higher minimum wage. People forget that changes all of the differentials further up the chain. So if you're paying a 16-year-old minimum wage to come into a pub and wash all the pots, then you've got to pay the person who's 18 and serving at the bar more, and then you've got to pay the manager who is managing the rota more, all the way up the chain until it becomes so unaffordable a gin and tonic turns out to be 18 quid and nobody wants to come to the pub anymore.

4:57So, again, that's a counterfactual that she's, we think, set to repeat. I mean, we've talked about the mansion tax, but there's a really interesting piece about how this stuff works in reality. You look at it as a policy. I mean, just off the bat, paying an extra levy because you have a house worth£2 million, I mean, is that a good price to set it out? Does it sound fair? It would affect just 0.5 % of all households. Does it appeal to the little, the inner socialist in you, the little Gary Stevenson trying to come out that you suppressed these people in your 20s? You knew they were wrong. Does any part of you think, well, if you're lucky enough to have a two million pound home?

5:40I just want to say it depends on what the purpose is. Is it revenue raising or is it class war? And I think with Labour, you can never quite tell. It's a bit like with fox hunting. Was the purpose to save foxes or was it to shut down the hunt because they hated people who hunt? and one always suspects it's the latter. By the way, the backdrop to tomorrow is going to be a load of farmers arriving in Whitehall and the surrounding area on tractors. Yes. And you and I are going to be down there on College Green covering all of this. There is no point in banning trail hunting. It's the equivalent of hating cigarettes so you ban people from blowing bubbles.

6:12The whole darn point is that nothing dies. Nothing dies, yes. No one died. So on this mansion tax, OK, on the surface of it, You could say to yourself, well, if you're rich enough to own a£2 million home and it only affects a tiny minority of people, then it's fine. And she's also investigating, obviously changing or putting a levy on council tax on homes that are in bands F, G and H. That's meant to be a tax on the southeast. But at the same time, a northern correspondent pointed out that homes in the north fall under those bands when they're worth a lot less because of the way property is there.

6:51and the worth of the property market in different areas outside of the South East. And so it could actually clobber, again, middle earners. But this is an example of sort of, to use the common parlance of the week, how people can be fiscally dragged into this stuff, even though they're not millionaires or mansion owners. And stamp duty is such a good example. This, to me, is stat of the day. In 1997, the Treasury managed to raise£675 million in stamp duty. At the time, it only affected just over 600 ,000 buyers. Last year, almost a million transactions raised, wait for it, $11.6 billion in revenue.

7:35So a tax that was meant to raise just over half a billion is now raising nearly 12. Imagine all of the people now that are paying ever greater sums for stamp duty, which many regard just to be a dead tax, isn't it? You sell your home and you just have to carve off this amount for the lawyers and this amount for the government. And there's nothing you can do. It's a tariff in the sense that it's a tax you are paying simply for a service. And it's a service which is essential, i.e. moving homes. And if you carry on like this, the consequence for the chain of home buying is disastrous because it means people in the very big houses won't sell and move on to an even bigger house, which means that a family that are currently stuck in a flat, they can't get into that big house.

8:20And as always happens, whenever the chain slows down, the prices go up because now you're competing to get into that one flat that has become available, usually because someone's popped their clogs. So it has these unintended consequences for the rest of society. The other thing in this whole all you can eat buffet, one dish we think is going to be served up, although there's been lots of rumour and we won't know, to be fair, until the Chancellor stands up after PMQs tomorrow at 12.30. We won't know for sure, but I think we can both bet, actually, our mortgages on the fact that she will freeze the threshold.

8:53So, again, that fiscal drag issue when it comes to stamp duty also applies to wages. Indeed. So the decision to freeze income tax thresholds in 2022 has since inflicted a monster tax rate on millions of workers. In 2011, only 7 % paid the higher and additional rates of income tax. That percentage has now doubled to 14%, that's according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies and by 2029-30, 17.5 % of the population will be higher rate taxpayers if the Chancellor extends the freeze In total, 10 million of us will pay 40 % tax, an increase of 4.8 million had there been no freezes at all An increase of 4.8 million people dragged into that rate.

9:40Yes, 4.8 new reform or Tory voters. Again, a tax that is designed for the super rich, never expecting that it would take that much money or affect that many people, has been allowed cynically by successive administrations to become a tax on more and more people to pay for people who don't work. Exactly. But then we have all these stories about, well, I'd rather not be given a pay rise. I'd rather not earn more money. You combine the income tax thing with the disincentivisation of the VAT threshold. Do you remember when Jeremy Hunt was Chancellor and everyone was poised? He was going to do something dramatic with the VAT threshold.

10:21And people sat in the comments thinking, what's he going to do? He's going to double it. This could be revolutionary. And he actually changed it from£85 ,000 to£90 ,000. And the trouble with that is that it doesn't do anything to incentivise people to earn, for instance,£100 ,000 if they're sole traders or freelancers or indeed self-employed, because they don't want to be dragged into that tax trap. So why should the, what is the figure, 82.5 % that won't be paying the higher rate, why should they care? Well, because if you earn a certain amount and you know that earning a little bit more pushes you into the 40 % tax band, everything else that you earn, you lose such a large chunk of it, there's no point.

11:05I mean, okay, if your income were to jump overnight from 100 ,000 to 4 million a year, it's worth doing it. But if your income goes up to 120, 130, why bother? And so it's a lag on productivity. It's a lag on ambition. Anything that's a lag on ambition means that it's stifling rather than growing anything. It stifles the general economy. Because why would you bother to work harder? Why would you keep your business open for the extra few hours? Why would you employ more people, etc, etc, to make money when you know that such a vast whack of it is going to go to Rachel Reeves? Cynical suggestion.

11:42Why do we think that she may have capped the mansion tax at two million? It couldn't possibly be, Tim, because both the Prime Minister and his deputy, David Lammy, live in homes worth just less. Apparently, according to our own reporting, the Prime Minister and his deputy own properties worth between£1.5 million and£2 million. They're going to be exempt, as will Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden. Hang on, don't look. Who do you think is definitely not exempt from this? Which member of the Cabinet do you think lives in the most expensive property? I suspect it's Ed Miliband. It is Ed Miliband.

12:22Do you say that because you know he has two kitchens? No, it is a historic folk memory of two kitchens Miliband from 2015. Although one of those kitchens, remember, he didn't use all the time. He just posed in it. It just has a basin in it. It's the kind of the rough kitchen. It's not the one they normally are in. Staff kitchen. It's a staff kitchen. I knew it was going to be Miliband because I knew that he was filthy rich in property terms. But I find... His property, by the way, is worth£3.7 million in North London. I want someone to produce a magazine. Yes. Oh, you've got it wrong. Who do you think?

12:56No, don't look. Stop looking. Who might have an even more expensive property? I don't know. Than Ed Miliband. I don't know. Who's the resident? I mean, who earns the most money in this country, apart from millionaires and tech bros? Come on, we employ a load of them here. Right. In fact, they do your conveyancing for you. They manage your divorce. Exactly. Right. Who would have a more expensive home than Miliband? The Attorney General. Yes, Lord Herbert. Somebody who can afford to give away the Chagos Islands lives in a home worth£4 million. Right. OK. You see, what I think is someone like Home and Country or one of those glossy magazines you find in dentists, they need to do a special on the homes of socialists.

13:39Yes. You have Ed Miliband in a home worth£3.7 million, Attorney General in a home worth£4 million, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary in a home in Stoke Newington worth£2.5 million. and Liz Kendall. Oh, she's rivaling Lord Herma, actually. She's done very well for herself. The Science and Technology Secretary has a£4 million Notting Hill townhouse. Now, I'm sure, you know, I don't know what their family stories are. They may well be married to very rich people. Maybe someone else is paying the bills. I don't know what's going on there. But my flat is worth about£300 ,000 and has rising damp. Yes.

14:15All they have done for the last 10 years or 15 years, these people, is politics. Yes. And politics doesn't actually pay that well. No. What the hell? Unless you have a load of sidelines like you're Geoffrey Cox. What the hell is a fifth-rank politician like Liz Kendall? I mean, she's not Kissinger or one of the Kennedys, is she? No, I know. What the hell is she doing in a£4 million Notting Hill townhouse? If we did have... That's what I'd like to know. If we did do some kind of Kirsty Orsop and Phil Spencer inside socialist manners, do you know what we could call it? What? Communist cribs. couldn't we we could knock on the door oh there's a hammer and sickle and there's a wonderful range cooker next to an agar uh with a glass house and um faro and ball paint on the walls i think yeah i mean with all these marxists we need some kind of marxist version of through the keyhole you know where there'll be a silhouette of someone standing and lloyd graisman would say and in this corner with the most beautiful bookshelves and it turns out when the lights come up, it's Karl Marx.

15:15Exactly that. But who could we have to present it? Because obviously Lloyd Grossman has done quite well with those jars of sources now. Yes. Biggins. Biggins. Big fruit, the communist cribs keyhole with Christopher Biggins. Some other key indicators ahead of tomorrow. So the CBI, the Confederation of British Industry, has come out with their latest quarterly data showing that confidence among retailers has sank at the steepest pace since the global financial crisis. Labour backers have written a letter to Reeves warning that we risk suffering an exodus of talent to the US unless she addresses valley of death facing entrepreneurs.

15:53Positive stuff. Traders are bracing for turmoil for the pound. And Asda has suffered a growth downgrade. By the way, when I saw that pound thing, I thought, can I do something like that guy in the big short? Could I change up some euros? Is there some way of making some money out of all this? I was like, what do I am then? Because I'm economically illiterate. I know. I don't know whether that means, what do we do? The pound goes down. This is the frustrating thing. This has always happened. Socialists wreck the economy, but I don't understand capitalism well enough to profit from it. But we are exponents of capitalism, that we're just not recipients in the right way.

16:24I prefer feudalism, and I think in a few years' time we're all coming back on the land. Somebody very clever right now is like stashing rubles or rupees or something, and something's happening to the pound, and they're selling gold bars, and I'm thinking of trading places like trading now in frozen orange juice. Is that even a thing anymore? It's Bitcoin and Donald Trump trading cards. Those will be the future currencies when the bombs have dropped. So basically we are going to be at College Green tomorrow. We're going to be interviewing a cast of stellar contributors to the Daily Tea in reaction to the budget.

16:59You're going to be inside the House of Commons. I'm going to be freezing in five coats. We're going to get together. We're going to present the whole thing, everything you need to know. And then on Thursday, we're going to invite in a former Treasury special advisor who really knows his onions has been inside the red box. And I'm not talking about deal or no deal here. I'm talking about actually being able to add up. And he's going to be able to answer all of your questions. So if you have anything burning to ask him, Cameron Brown, as you listen to what Rachel Reeves announces tomorrow, do get in touch.

17:28it's thedailytea at telegraph.co.uk or you can pose a question via our socials on X, Instagram and TikTok at dailyteapodcast. Two things we'll be looking out for. One is whether or not the Chancellor drinks because the Chancellor is permitted to drink. No one can drink in the House of Commons except the Chancellor when delivering a budget. Yes. So famously Ken Clarke liked to enjoy some whiskey while he was doing his budgets. Does it have to be whiskey? Because that can be a bit blokey. It can be a bit blokey. It can be anything. I'd like her to turn up with an Aperol spritz and just say cheers to the mansplainers with loads of cocktail accoutrements in it.

18:07Right, right. Yeah, one of those crazy cocktails with a twisty straw and a grapefruit sticking out the side of it. So one, will she drink? Go on, Rachel, do it. Please. And secondly, what will the political fallout be? OK, we'll be crunching the numbers, but also what does this mean for her future and Keir Starmer? because don't forget that there are whispers among the backbenchers that this might be the budget, the last budget that she gives and that Keir Starmer sees. And there were some very interesting numbers out. You've been quizzing me on the houses. Oh, no, don't quiz me now. On the houses of Labour people.

18:40But what do we think about runners and riders for the Labour leadership? I think this is very interesting. Who do we think, Labour members, when asked by Sir Vation on behalf of Labour List, Who do we think they would support in a race against Keir Starmer? Labour members. Labour members. Angela Rayner. Right. So the most popular opponent against Starmer would be Andy Burnham. Oh. By a whopping 58 % to 32%. The second most popular would be, yes, Angela Rayner at 52 % to 33%. It starts to get tighter after that. Miliband leads him 44 % to 40%. West Streeting only leads him by 1%. Well, he's too right-wing for the Labour membership.

19:28This is the interesting thing. If you then get down to Philipson versus Starmer, Starmer beats her 42 % to 26%. Starmer versus Lucy Powell, he beats her 48 % to 30%. And finally, this is the one I want to talk about, in a head-to-head between Keir Starmer and Shabana Mahmood, Starmer would beat her by 50 % to just 16%. Wow. Now, the reason why I think that's interesting is because the media likes to talk up the right of the Labour Party. I don't just mean us. I mean, including, bizarrely, some left-wing publications, just sort of instinctively assume that Labour knows that it needs to shore up the reform vote, so it'll lean towards a right-wing candidate.

20:13And, of course, Shabana Mahmood on immigration has been doing that, where Streeting sort of talks the talk on that. He looks a bit like a Blairite. But those two candidates are some of the least popular among members. So if, hypothetically, Starmer has to go because the budget is a disaster or his backbenchers rebel or something, the working assumption within Westminster that the Labour Party would then choose someone like West Streeting or Shabana Mahmood, who's quite popular with the public, is quite wrong. Because they would have to choose a candidate that the Labour membership would like. Precisely.

20:48And, of course, the trade unions. But the most fascinating contest, of course, for us, would be a righty-off. Yes. But we're not going to get that. But we wouldn't get to it. But then it isn't a proper leadership race, is it? Because then we're saying, by default, the lefty will always win. Yeah. Even if a government that, well... Or possibly the less lefty. It depends on your definition of how left someone is. My point is simply that the people who the media and Westminster journalists are talking up right now don't stand a chance. No. The people who we should be looking at and keeping an eye on are the people who we don't tend to talk about so much, partly because in our minds we've dismissed them because we think they're crazy.

21:28It's Miliband. It's Miliband. It's Miliband. It's Miliband. It's Rainer and it's Burnham, even though he's not even in Parliament. But is it actually just Miliband? It could, yeah. You know, as he mans his three toasters and four cookers. Yes. Bless him. And the Miliband phenomenon is fascinating because arguably he was a worse opposition leader than Jeremy Corbyn. That's a bit harsh. Jeremy Corbyn in 2017... Just because of that banana and the bacon sandwich. No, no, but if we just go on actual hard numbers, in 2017 Jeremy Corbyn got one of Labour's best post-war results. Yes. Didn't quite win, but in percentage terms it was very impressive.

22:07That then collapsed in 2019. Fine. Ed Miliband did badly in 2015. And not just that, he was predicted to win. Yes. And there were polls showing him neck and neck with the Tories and he way underperformed. And it was on him. It was because of that fluff in a debate on TV in which he refused to say that Labour had overspent. It was because of the perception that he was weak in relation to Alex Salmond. The Ed Stone. It was because of the Ed Stone. The Ed Stone. Ed Miliband is honestly, I think objectively, one of the worst leaders Labour has ever had. And they could be set. And they like him. Wow.

22:48But then the argument will be it will see off the threat from Zach Polanski because of the whole green agenda, net zero zealotry, let's close down North Sea oil and gas. Yes. The trouble with Miliband, of course, is he will not get the backing of unions. Right, right, right. Because of net zero. Because they're saying you're costing us thousands of jobs. You're pretending that a load of mythical green jobs will be created. Well, no, not for somebody working class who's been up and down an oil rig for the last 30 years. In which case it's Rainer. But just on that point about he will see off the Greens, true.

23:24But the Greens are overwhelmingly trying to win Labour-facing constituencies, not Tory-facing constituencies. So even if, OK, you contain the threat from the Greens, if your whole policy is directed towards trying to appease those people, then by implication, you're giving up on where you're reform facing. Yes, you're not going to get any red wall, but it could be a good assault on the blue wall to hoover up some of the people who are disgruntled Tories because our rivers and seas have been turned into open toilets. It probably keeps you competitive in seats you shouldn't be winning in rural, like Oxfordshire type seats.

24:02It's like Banbury. It probably keeps you in the game there. It might keep you in the game in Berkhamstead and Harpinden. But it probably means you're going to lose Red Khan. You're not going to win Bishop Auckland on the basis of Ed Miliband. No, you're going to get wiped out in Lincolnshire in the North East and things like that. So I think it is, on balance, a bad calculation. But my point stands that the conversations that I feel the media are having about what Labour needs to do don't appreciate what Labour actually will do because we don't appreciate that it's Ed Miliband's party now. It's not Blair's party.

24:33It's not even Corbyn's party. It's very much Ed Miliband. And the value of his house is a bit of a giveaway. It is white-collar, liberal, green professionals. It ain't working class. It's not even Looney Tunes Trotskyite. It's just kind of soft left. I give money to Oxfam and I'm worried about the environment. It's those sorts of people. Yeah, tax me more. I would actually like to be taxed more. Well, you can be. You can volunteer. volunteer a donation to HMRC right now. You can donate! I tell you what, Ed, you rent out your kitchen. Yes. And to people wanting to make chai lattes and quinoa. And you can raise a little bit of money.

25:13I think you can probably fit a family of asylum seekers under the sink. Well, there you are then. Yeah. Why doesn't he take them on? Coming up next, you are at the BBC grilling, the grilling of Samir Shah, the Tory agent that is Robbie Gibb and others. And you're going to tell me all about it next.

25:38Tim, you were in Parliament yesterday to see BBC bods that have been at the centre of, let's be honest, a Telegraph-led story about bias and Trump speech splicing and all the rest of it. They were grilled by the majority Labour, should be pointed out, because we're talking about bias here and different questions. Because committee jobs are handed out based upon party representation. True. Some of them are Tory bias. Some of them are labour biased. But in this case, it's the Culture Select Committee, Culture, Media and Sport, in fact. And what was the atmosphere like? When Robbie Gibb came in, did they play stormtrooper music?

26:11Not quite. He was ironically referred to as a Tory agent by one Labour MP. And by the way, the Telegraph is pronounced the Telegraph. Spit it out. There were two sides to this committee that we can discuss. The Witnesses and the Committee. Let's start with the Witnesses. The key ones were representatives of the governing board of the BBC, Samir Shah, who is the chairman, and Robbie Gibb, who sits on the board. And as you alluded to, there is a conspiracy theory out there that Robbie Gibb is this undercover Tory put in there by Boris Johnson, and he's there to destroy the institution from within.

26:47And there is also this implication that Robbie Gibb might be linked to the leaking of an internal memo, which went to the BBC, which was written by BBC insider Michael Prescott, who was another witness before. the committee. And that was the memo that ended up with our colleague Gord Rayner, which is how we broke the story in the first place. And then we followed it up with a second example of Trump speech splicing in Newsnight. So ostensibly, the BBC board representatives are there to explain what went wrong with Panorama, why they didn't immediately apologise for it, and what are they going to do to address people's fears about impartiality.

27:23Now, Caroline Dynage, the chair of the committee, a conservative, did a very good job of grilling Samir Shah. And in fact, she opened the session by saying, when we've previously spoken to you, your answers have been vague and we've not quite understood what you were saying. So I'm going to begin by asking you today to please be specific and give clear answers. So the first question is, why did the BBC not apologise straight away for the Panorama Trump splicing. Yeah, good question. This is when Panorama spliced together comments by Trump made on January the 6th that made it look like he was directing people to march to Capitol Hill.

28:05Why didn't the BBC apologise for that? Samir Shah said, I'm going to answer that directly, but first I would like to apologise. Oh, I can't bear this. He apologised for what felt like 45 minutes to the licence fee payer, to our children, our children's children, and the Bushmen of Burkina Faso. Everyone got an apology. And then he said, and now I shall directly answer your question. Can you repeat it, please? Oh, you're joking. It's a bit shambolic, actually. He had spoken for so long that he either in the first instance wasn't listening to the question or had forgotten it. I know, but there's nothing worse than somebody going, I'm going to answer your question, but before that, I'm going to answer three different questions of my choice.

28:47Yes. It's almost like a politician's answer, isn't it? It was an attempt to give a performance, but it was a very bad performance. Now his answer to this question is baffling. You've got to remember that the BBC was made aware of what went on, first through David Grossman's internal report, then by Michael Prescott's memo about the internal report, and then by it all being leaked to the Telegraph. This stretches back into January. At any point since then, they could have come clean about this and apologised about it, but particularly in that final week between the Telegraph getting it and them finally speaking out about it.

29:24And his explanation of why they didn't apologise was that he said, an apology was necessary, but the one we had drafted was insufficient, so we chose not to give it. Wow. And the reason why it was insufficient, in fact, at this point, a lady called Caroline Thompson, who also sits on the board, interrupted in order to translate into English what he was trying to say. And she said the reason why it was insufficient was because the people responsible for Panorama didn't really want to apologize for the program. They were willing to admit the error with the splice, but they were not willing to concede everything with regards to bias on the program.

30:02So in other words, Shah ended up giving a performance that was just so embarrassing and smacked of institutional chaos and feet dragging. And it has culminated in Caroline Dynage saying this about him. Mr. Mirshad didn't really have any direct answers to some of the questions that we asked. We were talked through how the decision to apologise over the panorama editing error was made. But, you know, it became very clear that the board were well aware of that error and that issue many, many months ago. And as a chair of the select committee, you know, I was just probably keen to get to the bottom of why it was that suddenly now this sort of profuse apology came forward.

30:42Was it because they'd had 500 complaints from members of the public? Was it because it was the subject of multiple reports in the newspaper? Or was it because they're being threatened with legal action by the President of the United States? And it was quite difficult to get a straight answer to those questions. Everything was very wishy-washy. There wasn't a huge sense that there was grip at the heart of the BBC governance. I don't think as a committee we were wildly enthused that the board is in safe hands. So that was Dynage on Radio 4's The World Tonight. I do love this BBC scrutiny of BBC failings.

31:20But how did dun-dun-dun, Robbie Gibb go down? Right, total disappointment. I wanted him to be an inside job. I wanted him to be unmasked like in Scooby-Doo as the villainous Tory behind it all. But actually, he came across totally as a company man. What, a BBC company man? As a BBC company man. He stood up for the BBC's record. He stood up for its general impartiality. I mean, he did work there for 25 years, to be fair to him. This is something he said, which was quite funny. He said, I want to be remembered for the 25 years I worked at the BBC, not the two years that I worked for Theresa May.

31:53And that's a rare thing said by the BBC that I can believe, right? I also love this kind of misrepresentation of him as some kind of like right of Genghis Khan. I know. looming media mogul figure. Can we just remind everyone, he worked for Theresa May. I know, I know. Me and he, I actually fell out with him at that period because he was trying to get righties, Brexiteers, to buy into the Chequers deal. And we were all going, but this is just a pile of crap. What are you talking about? This is a total fudge. What happened to the previous deal? What the hell's Ollie Robbins doing? We were tearing our hair up going, this guy is wetter than a Wednesday in Whitstable.

32:32Yes. And now he's being painted by Alastair Campbell. I mean, this is the other irony, you know, Alastair Campbell and Labour literally install a Labour donor to be chairman of the BBC board in Gareth Davies and other very strategic political placements. That's apparently fine. They can now suggest that Robbie Gibb is an inside job and it's all very dishonest. But can we just clarify, Robbie Gibb is not some kind of like reform sympathising, BBC defunding. No, no, no. And Campbell is just tragically out of date as well, because where the right is at is with reform. It's not the Tories. The Tories are not controversial on these sorts of issues, really.

33:13It's reform is the future of the right. So complaining that a Tory sits on a board just feels antiquated. But this is where I turn to what interested me, which is not so much the people being interrogated, but the interrogators. So even though Gere defended the corporation, clearly a company man, one Labour MP after another tried to imply that he was some sort of Tory agent and asked about his politics, asked about his involvement with the Jewish Chronicle, which people allege was taken over by some right winger, etc. Asked about his connections to GB News as if you're tainted. How dare he have any such connections?

33:50It's very much when did you stop beating your wife kind of stuff. I mean, he does have a brother in Nick Gibb who, God shock horror, was a Tory MP. And then when they interrogated Michael Prescott, the author of the memo, people like Rupert Huck said to him, your memo is selective. Why have you focused upon what she called culture war issues? What, like the war in Gaza? And Gaza. I mean, you're quite right. The notion that Gaza is some marginal culture war issue is absurd. Or indeed that Donald Trump is a culture war issue is absurd. But again, they were trying, rather than trying to find out what went wrong at the BBC, some members of the committee were trying to discredit the people who brought our attention to it.

34:38It's always the way that we had this. The BBC did this when we released the lockdown files. And I had to go on to Radio 4 and be questioned about how it could possibly have come to pass that Isabel Oakshot betrayed Matt Hancock by revealing his WhatsApp messages. That came up too. How did this end up with the Telegraph? Oh, it's disgusting. How dare those journalists do journalism and show us up like this? But also I thought the left liked whistleblowing. Yes. And watching all of this, I come back to, I said it before, this is how institutions go corrupt. And I'm saying this as a Catholic. I'm allowed to say it because I'm a Catholic, right?

35:17Yes. This is what happened with the Catholic Church. So to give an example, it's a really interesting one. Prescott identified the case of a report the BBC produced that said that ethnic minorities were being charged more for insurance, right? That's right. It turned out to be totally false, which, as he said, is of great significance because it's a racial issue and it could really upset people and it can inflame racial tensions in this country. A Labour MP on the panel said to him, but come on, the BBC acknowledged they got it wrong and they sent the people involved for further training. Isn't that an example of the BBC acknowledging its errors and fixing them?

35:51And as he said, are you not remotely interested in how that happened? Isn't the thing that every institution should do is ask when something goes wrong, how did it happen in the first place? Now, if you take the case of the Catholic Church, and this basically happened. Priests were caught doing things. Bishops then moved them on and said, well, you know what? We realized we had done wrong. We said sorry. And we took that person out of harm's way. No. You need to explain how on earth that person was in ministry in the first place. Who protected them. This is exactly what happened within the Catholic Church.

36:27Institutions go wrong when the integrity of the institution is valued more than the people it's meant to serve. That's the formula. And watching this committee, I couldn't believe it. I was seeing it happen in real time. People valuing the survival of the BBC and its reputation. At all costs. Over the thing which I thought was the most important thing in its journalism, the thing which it boasts about all the time, its impartiality and accuracy. And by the way, the world beating nature of its journalism is according to those who are in the BBC and supporting the BBC, it is the best journalism of all.

37:05Yeah, thanks lads. Certainly compared to the Telegraph. So what's your betting on? We've obviously seen the departure of Tim Davy, the Director General, the departure of Deborah Ternis, the CEO of BBC News. What's Shah's future? What's Gibbs's future? What are your predictions? I honestly think Shah will go. Right. Because he gave such an astonishingly bad performance. The board is clearly far more divided and a lot more trouble than we realise. and I don't see how they get that clean slate. He's just been exposed as horribly ineffectual. The worst variety of corporate blatherer that I've ever seen.

37:51Wow. Okay, good. And I say that knowing that we are paid blatherers. Ah. But we do get to the point eventually. No, indeed. And the programme does eventually end. Can I just say, not just paid blatherers, but now award-nominated paid blanderers. Oh, yes, this is true. Because, Tim Stanley, have you got a little trumpet in that little pocket of yours? Because you usually keep biscuits and other items in your pockets. We need a little bugle to be sounded because we have been nominated as presenters of the year at the Political Podcast Awards. Yeah. We're never going to win. No, I know. You know we're not going to win.

38:29We like to describe... You've seen the competition. I know. We are up against some big names. Up against Maitless. Maitless! Nobody can surpass the greatness of the Maitless. No, no. It's like Pee Wee Herman against Marlon Brand over an Oscar. You know, just don't stand a chance. Yes, it's like Citizen Kane versus Fast and Furious 21 or whatever. Having said all that, we can always say, as I've always said for myself, that I am an award-losing journalist. I've been nominated for many, Tim. Right. Never won a thing. So we hold out little hope, but we do want to thank you for listening and for watching.

39:06I've never been nominated before, so I'm looking forward to my first ever loss. Oh, so you and I get a night out. We do. And that could be fun. Right. We will be back then on College Green, wrapped up warm in thermals to bring you the budget. Tomorrow on The Daily Tea, 5pm.

39:29Thank you.