Starmer accused of lying after Chinese embassy 'spying' revelations

0:27The Telegraph has lied and lied and lied to the public about this proposal. Also, X is accused of peddling child pornography. But is the Labour government using this as an excuse to shut down online criticism? Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomini. And me, Tim Stanley.

0:58One of our Telegraph colleagues has got hold of the unredacted plans for China's super embassy in London. Whoop whoop. Scoop alert. Which reveals a hidden chamber that would sit right next to where some of Britain's most sensitive communication cables run. That room would sit within a network of 208 secret underground rooms, which could then be used to tap into financial data and email and messaging traffic for millions of internet users. Now, most of the basement level of the super embassy in the plans was redacted so that people couldn't see it, supposedly for security reasons. And despite all of this fishy stuff going on, Keir Starmer is still expected to approve these plans ahead of a visit to China later this month to meet President Xi Jinping.

1:54Well, we're joined by Gareth Caulfield, the Telegraph journalist who got hold of these unredacted plans. And Gareth, you and the video producer Louis Brady have put together a video on this, which you can watch right now on The Telegraph's YouTube channel. And we're going to listen now to you talking about those critical cables that would run just one metre away from a secret room in China's super embassy. Those cables are in fact right beneath me, about 50 centimetres or 18 inches under my feet. And to my right, that wall is the edge of the proposed Chinese embassy site, with a basement running directly underneath it, and which is redacted on China's plans.

2:35Now, we measure this distance from the access chamber here to the embassy, exactly 100 centimetres. And what is even more concerning is that we know from the plans that China intends to demolish parts of the basement and its surrounding walls. This means their workmen will be digging right next to these cables. So Gareth, an extensive investigation by you. I know you've been working on this for many weeks. Just go into a bit more detail about what these unredacted plans actually show. So what these plans show us is just how close China's basement comes in the embassy building to the fibre optic cables that run alongside it.

3:18Now, although we knew previously that generally there were cables somewhere nearby and it was a potential security risk, we didn't know until now that they were coming within 1.7 metres of these cables. And not only that, but that they will be demolishing and rebuilding the underground wall directly next to the cables themselves. So it's not only that they're close to them, but they're close to them and they're out of sight of the authorities. So we cannot actually see what it is the Chinese will be doing during their construction works there. We also know from the plans that there are hot air extracting systems that will be installed in the basement, two, one at either end.

3:53That is the sort of equipment you install if you've got a large number of, for example, computer servers in there. And if you're running a sort of national-grade espionage station, you'd have a lot of computers which generate a lot of heat, a lot of hot air, and that needs to be removed. Just a quick one on that, Gareth. I mean, some might argue that you're leaping to some extraordinary conclusions here. OK, yes, this room is in very close proximity to cables that run data from the City of London to the rest of the country, if not the world, but you haven't actually got any concrete evidence at all that spying is likely to take place in this basement.

4:29Well, it would be a lovely thing if we did have a smoking gun of a Chinese spy caught in the Act. If the plans actually read spy room here. That would be the ideal, wouldn't it? I mean, I can appreciate why you've jumped to the conclusion you have, and I think it's a perfectly logical one, not least because of what we know in recent times about the Chinese spying scandal and the collapse of that case and all the rest of it. And let's be honest, the country has got quite an illustrious history when it comes to spying on its friends as well as its enemies. But what's the most disturbing aspect of this story?

5:01It's this idea of the close proximity, but the wall demolition is so suspicious, isn't it? That's exactly it. If you're just refitting the building and you're gutting it and putting up new partitions and paintings of the dear leader and so on, that's one thing. But when you're demolishing the exterior parts directly next to sensitive communications infrastructure, maybe it is an innocent thing. Maybe actually the wall is worn out and it needs to be replaced. Perhaps they're putting a gym and a sauna down in the basement. But given China's track record and indeed our own track record in the West doing this sort of thing, it's suspicious and it's a risk.

5:40and I suggest that it's a risk that the government has not really looked at closely for whatever reason that might be. Can you tell us something about these cables, who they serve, what might one be able to tap into if you were able to do so? So these cables run between the City of London and Canary Wharf, the sort of Docklands financial complex down there. And if you trace them further out, they go west to the big data centre complexes in Slough and from Slough they go to the rest of the world, they tap into the transatlantic links to America and so on. What you're getting at the Royal Mint Court site is the bottleneck, the vital bottleneck, where all of these different parts come together as they plug into Canary Wharf.

6:22So if you can tap into that, you are spying on obviously all of the British financial traffic. You're spying on potentially the government departments based in Canary Wharf in Docklands down in West Ferry. You're potentially getting a tap into the data traffic going from Europe, from Brussels and places like that, across to America via our transatlantic cables down from Cornwall in Bude. It really is the jugular vein of the internet as it passes through Britain, I would say, at that location. What's curious about all this is obviously the unredacted plans are new to us because the public hadn't had the chance to see them until you wrote this brilliant expose, Gareth.

7:00The security services and the police and others have seen them. They must have seen them, right, do we think? That's an interesting question. We know that just before a certain national newspaper prompted her departure from government, Angela Rayner had publicly demanded that the Chinese show copies of the unredacted plans to her department, the Ministry of Housing, Community and Local Affairs, local government, whatever it is. And what we don't know, obviously, as her departure from government last August indicated, was what the Chinese response to that was. Now, I'm told that when the Conservatives were in power, they made a similar request through the normal channels behind closed doors.

7:41And what they got back was essentially the redacted plans again, but zoomed in slightly. And that doesn't really suggest that there's a great deal of candour or openness on the Chinese side here. Why I ask that is because I've interviewed successive ministers who've had some involvement in this and questioned why on earth they are allowing this super embassy to go ahead, not least because it's enormous and it's on a historic site, but also because of these continued rumours about underground chambers and spy tunnels and close proximity to our cables. And the reason that's always given back to me is, oh, well, the police and the security services are OK with it.

8:21And I'm like, well, can they be? And if they are, have they been party to all of the information? One wonders, Gareth, if your reporting might be placed under the noses of those down the river at MI5 or beyond. And there may need to be a rethink. Well, quite. I mean, I gather that the security services were not happy when the Chinese bought the site in 2018. I think it was about£255 million they spent on it. and that objections were, again, behind closed doors, quietly raised with the government today to say, is this a wise idea letting the Chinese heads up shop at this location given the communications cables that run directly on their doorstep in a very literal sense?

9:03And that, again, is sort of the rumours and the hearsay and the whispers on which our weird and wonderful world operates. But I gather that although those objections were heard, ultimately a political decision or a series of political decisions were made just sort of brush it under the carpet and say, well, we've got a greater priority here. Chinese diplomatic engagement is deeply important to us. And there's also the dimension where the Chinese, I'm told, are trying to play quid pro quo with our embassy in Beijing. Yes. We want to expand our embassy in Beijing. And the Chinese are saying, well, we're going to make that a condition of you approving our mega embassy.

9:39Dip for tat. Although there isn't equivalence there, because this embassy in the UK that it's proposed is far, far bigger than, well, apparently any other embassy, but also our plans for Beijing. Yes, the Chinese one over here in London will certainly be the biggest in Europe if completed. I think the site is five and a half acres or 22 ,000 square metres big. It's substantial and it's going to have accommodation for 200 people living in there as well. Our presence in Beijing is nowhere near that scale. If you're standing on the street and looking at it, I gather it would be a big building, just as any other building would be.

10:13But we're not talking about essentially an apartment complex with integrated offices and an underground car park and a network of basements and tunnels and bathrooms, even lift shafts, all sorts of equipment where you would have a lot of people living in one place for a very long time. Yes. Why would you need people living there overnight, Tim, unless they were up to no good? Well, it's the Hotel California. They would never leave, would they? That's the thing is that the scare of the plans are not just arrogant but suspicious as well, aren't they? Yes. Because you normally expect large numbers of staff to live elsewhere.

10:51Why do Chinese personnel have to live on site? No, they don't. As if they're carving out a little bit of China in the middle of London. The whole thing absolutely stinks. Do we think Starmer might be minded to change his mind? As you mentioned earlier, the Telegraph was responsible in part for the departure of the Deputy Prime Minister. Could we change minds on this too? That was also over a planning issue. It was too. Every time an MP clicks on Rightmove, we're there. We're there. Yeah, that's because we're on a par with estate agents in the popularity stakes. But back to the case in point, Gareth, do we think this newspaper may again have moved the dial on this issue?

11:28I like to believe that we have moved the dial. I have certainly heard that a lot of existing government narratives around this, including such claims as there are no sensitive cables here and there's nothing to worry about, which is a line given to other newspapers who reported this story previously in the past. That all seems to have been blown out of the water by this because nobody's ever sat down, looked at this and figured out these are where specific cables owned by specific companies run and this is how close they are to the embassy. Now that we have published these details and they're out there for everyone, I really do like to think that some sensible people are going to have a quiet word with Labour behind the scenes and say, look, now it's all out there.

12:05Everyone knows what we've known between ourselves. You really can't carry on like this anymore. You've got to be seen to be doing something. I imagine that M might be on the phone to PM momentarily. I think M is PC now, which is why that sort of thing doesn't happen. Do we hear from the government? Go on then, yeah. The government has said national security is our first duty. And government security experts have been involved throughout the process so far. Why do their statements always sound like they're about to say, if you want to hear more, press one. Yes. As the Home Office and Foreign Office have previously set out, all the security implications of the planning application have been identified and addressed.

12:40An independent planning decision will be made by the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and local government in due course. China's London embassy did not respond to requests for comment, but presumably it is listening next door with a glass to the wall. On a technical point, they did actually get back to me late last night. I shall read it in full. It says, Good evening. Sorry for the late reply. We have stated our position more than once. The position remains unchanged. Yours sincerely. That's from the Chinese Embassy. That is from the Chinese Embassy. That's more like it. I think I prefer that.

13:15I don't know what their position is, but I'm glad that they're sticking to it. Yes. Gareth, thank you very much indeed for joining us on The Daily Tea Ian, congratulations on your brilliant scoop. Camilla, thank you very much. Let's speak now to Sir Ian Duncan-Smith, Tory MP, former Conservative leader, friend of the podcast and, crucially for our purposes today, a China hawk who has been sanctioned by the communist regime.

13:41Sir Ian Duncan-Smith, thank you for joining us on The Daily Tea. You must have read today's Telegraph Splash with a degree of horror, although not perhaps surprise? Well not really. I did actually see it yesterday evening so it's a little bit more in advance than today. Bear in mind that there's been a row about the plans that China had for this site. They were redacted. The government had asked them to unredact them and they refused. And this has been going on for some time. There's something else that they've refused during the course of this planning process which is critical. The government said that the deal would be they would have this site and they would close down their embassy site that existed and they said no.

14:19So this has been going on for some time. So every time the government's asked them to do something within their planning requirements, they've literally by and large rejected it. So this has been extracted. And I take my hat off to the Telegraph for having got hold of it and for having published it. But it shows that every denial that the government has made to us about the usage, the location, and the communications cables is an absolute unmitigated lie. They have lied their way through this process from start to finish. And there will almost certainly be a judicial review of the way they behaved on this, because this has broken every rule in the book when it comes to planning on this.

14:56The cables are there. For some reason, MFI were encouraged to say they didn't have a problem. They never said they weren't. They just said that they thought they could deal with this. But the reality is they were there. The government denied these cabling was important. We knew very well previously that two other banking organizations that occupied the site. So the cabling went straight through into the site. You know, this nonsense about denial after denial after denial is completely ridiculous, but it's been very bad. And this government's been the worst. The previous government also was happy to see them have it.

15:26And we fought that as well. But this government has bent over backwards for the Chinese to have this site. There's no reason for it. When the Americans wanted a much enlarged site, they went south of the river to an area that doesn't have this sort of problem of confluence of issues, et cetera, that exist with the city, with MI5 and MI6 on the cabling run, Canary Wharf, all these sort of things. Plus also, it's right in a tourist attraction, right? Smack bang, opposite the Tower of London. And it occupies, this is the most horrific part of it, I think, it occupies a very important site for our history, which is to do with the concept of our currency.

16:02I mean, it's just quite ridiculous. So I take my hat off to the Telegraph, well done yet again for having got this, because it really opens up the debate again. So Ian, how do the Chinese keep getting away with this sort of thing? And why do British governments let them do it? Well, I think the whole problem is that China has become quite dominant in global marketplaces. And because they've become one of the greatest manufacturers and producers of equipment, of technology, etc. They've done that for a variety of ways. Some of it has been through massive subsidization against the WTO rules. The other side of it has been they use slave labor regularly in a lot of their manufactured products, which means they are definitely by nature cheaper, solar arrays, batteries, you name it.

16:48They make a lot of it through slave labor. And finally, of course, successive British governments in pursuit of trade have chased after this elusive Chinese deal that they want. Remember the golden decade under Osborne and Cameron, which I thought was ridiculous. I called it, I think the officials actually called it Project Kowtow, but it was certainly what I referred to as Project Kowtow, on bended knee, please China, give us something. And this government has pursued it on steroids. I mean, it's quite ridiculous. There's literally nothing that they won't give to the Chinese to get some fabled trade arrangement, which will basically lead only to one thing.

17:24China will dump all of their over-reduced cars, batteries, solar arrays, because they've carried on manufacturing at a rate where the economy was growing at over 5%. But we know the domestic economy has crashed. And so there isn't the demand domestically. So they are now determined to dump goods elsewhere. And we'll be opening the door for that. We won't have a steel industry left. We won't have a car industry left by the time they're finished. But of course, the government will be happy because we will have trade and that noticeably will help their growth, they think. And it's not going to. You mentioned judicial review earlier.

17:57feasibly, if Keir Starmer is minded to give this the green light, regardless of the expose that the Telegraph has orchestrated today, can anything be done to stop it? What can parliamentarians do if the Labour government is intent on allowing this to go ahead? Well, bear in mind it's not just about parliamentarians. There are 200 residents, British citizens, resident on the site. There is also an ex-monastery, an Asturgeon monastery, which exists on the site. And they were told to make open access to that. And there's little questions about how those residents will be able to get to and fro. None of that was settled within this process.

18:37And they simply rejected any of the observations that the government made. So it will be the residents, I suspect, who have the full right to challenge this, because we need to get to the bottom of this. Remember, before the last election, in exasperation. The Chinese administration said, President Xi himself, I think, said, that they would not bother, after they got turned down by Tower Hamlets, they would not bother to put in another application unless they had the assurance that it would succeed. Labour gets into government, and then all of a sudden, they put in their second planning application.

19:12Now, bear that in mind for a second. When you see that last year, Starmer sat at a table with President Xi. And what was the first thing he said to him before the cameras were cleared away by President Xi? You'll be pleased to see that we have called the planning system of the embassy in. Now, how in hell's name would President Xi know anything at all about our planning processes if he hadn't already been told the plan ahead was to call it in so that it overrides any local government decision making in any degree at all? And that's the whole thing is connecting together from the word go, you can see what they were determined to do by hell or high water was to give the Chinese this mega embassy on bended knee in the hope they will get their trade arrangement.

20:02Given that Keir Starmer is going to be going to China, it feels very unlikely that he's going to, he's up for a row with Xi over this issue. If it does go, assuming it does go ahead and it looks a lot like the plans that we've got the unredacted version of. What are the security implications? What does it mean for Britain if it greenlights this embassy? Well, first of all, I think is that the Five Eyes won't trust us. America's opposed to this. Australia and others have all made objections to the location of the site and to where, as I said earlier on, security issues around cabling. I think it shows that we're not serious about the threats.

20:40I mean, just go back only a couple of months, two or three months. China was there, this big thing in China where they had North Korea and Russia. Putin was there, and he had them arm in arm. And he said publicly, we are on the verge of creating a new world order. China knows exactly what it wants. It wants, at the end of the day, to get rid of the nonsense of democracy and these free courts and human rights. They want their form of government. He's never shied away from telling us the only form of government that works is his form of government, dictatorship, control through their communist system.

21:15And the same goes, as you see, Russia has moved massively back towards that process. They're linked together. North Korea is involved in Iran, of course, right now is supported heavily by China, who buys huge amounts of oil from them. And so what we are seeing right now is that we have opened our door to a regime that literally wants to see all that we believe in swept aside. All the platitudes and the trade doesn't add up to anything when you compare it against what their ambitions are. Look at them over Taiwan. You know, you have to look at the way they begin to dominate in Southeast Asia. And we have been stupid enough, stupid enough, government after government, to run to them in the hope that they will help us.

21:54They have no interest in helping us. They're about helping themselves. And if we don't know that, that is the biggest threat we face now. They will use their new power. 200 extra spies in that embassy are going to be rotated. They threaten the Hong Kong dissidents daily. They put bounties on their damn heads. They've sanctioned people like me because we believe in free speech. All of this is what they do now before they get this super embassy. You watch what happens when they get the super embassy. They will be everywhere. Look what happened in the compound up in Manchester when they disagreed with those dissidents outside.

22:29They dragged one of them in and beat him up. And because they were on the compound, the British government did nothing about it, absolutely nothing. It was weak and pathetic. And the Chinese eventually quietly sent those officials home and put some new ones in. No apologies, nothing. That's only a foretaste of what is to come. Sir Ian Duncan-Smith, a stark warning. Thank you very, very much for joining us on The Daily Tea. My pleasure. Thank you.

22:58Ian Duncan-Smith's critics say, oh, you know, he's a China hawk, he's completely bonkers, you know, goes completely off the reservation about this. But we were discussing, weren't we, having read Young Chang, the author of Wild Swans, that extraordinary expose of the cultural revolution in China, right for the spectator over Christmas. and say, don't be under any illusions. President Xi is the next Mao. The tactic, the playbook, everything that he's working towards is this. So that whole golden era now looks so embarrassing, I think. Courting, I remember covering the state banquet, the only state banquet famously that Jeremy Corbyn wanted to don the white tie and tails to attend.

23:35President Xi in town, his fellow communist. I think to be fair to the British establishment, Boo Hiss, There was a period in the 90s and early 90s when it did look like those countries were moving towards Western-style democracy via free market transformation. So Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, yeah, I think they did want a more liberal order in China. But partly as a consequence of the credit crunch, of the general economic and political turmoil of the 2010s, Vladimir Putin begins to crack down and he does this famous deal with the Orthodox Church of you back me and sacramentalize my regime. and in return I will become a great Russian nationalist and things like that.

24:14So there's a very cynical about turn from those regimes. One listener to this show wrote in to ask me, why do the British establishment insist upon saying Russia bad, China good, when the reality is they're not just as bad as each other, they are hand in glove. Yeah. And that's the curious thing about this. Keir Starmer, I feel, sometimes wants to rhetorically put all the emphasis upon we've got to stop the Russian bear, which somewhat disguises the fact that we're cosying up to the Chinese dragon. But actually, they find unity in things like Iran and Venezuela. We should be treating the two as equally as much of a challenge to us.

24:53Well, if the Prime Minister did want to be more like China, he could do no better than ban X. We're going to be discussing Labour's attempts to shut down Elon Musk's website and my own personal experience of having been sexualised by AI on that social media platform.

25:20Tim, have you ever been virtually undressed? I've never been literally undressed. Stop. By myself, obviously, yes, but not by the tender, loving embrace of another person. All right, well, that's probably the subject for another podcast. This whole Grok controversy, and look, we can understand the seriousness of it. This is a facility that is available to those who use X, the social media platform, owned by an Elon Musk, loved by the right, hated by the left. Suddenly the subject of a huge amount of debate by government. And what this can do, Grok, so Grok can ask for clarifications of any different tweet.

25:58Yes. But equally, it can take images and alter them. If you ask it to. If you ask it to. So, for instance, if it wanted to put... I appreciate there's a niche audience for this, but if it wanted to put a picture of me in a bikini, Tim, it could. By someone typing, please show Camilla in a bikini. Yeah, so show Camilla in a bikini as opposed to fully dressed in an image. Right. Even more disturbingly and seriously, it has the capacity to undress children or depict children in a sexualised manner, which obviously is grotesque. Yes. And my problem with it is that, as is ever the case with the advancement of technology, that facilities like this always seem to adversely affect women and children, which I find...

26:41I mean, it's not... People aren't going on grok and asking to undress many men. No. No. Well, I don't want to see Keir Starmer in a bra, so... No, no. I don't really want to see him dressed. No. But this is quite true. It's quite true. And of course, X is dominated overwhelmingly by, I would assume, by men. I'm sure he did a demographic. I mean, sometimes. Sorry, let me qualify that. Obviously, not all people on X are pervy, but there is a pervy aspect to X, which I was introduced to when I started searching for Bonnie Blue because we were going to do a podcast. In fact, we did. We spoke to somebody who was an OnlyFans star about kind of pornography.

27:14And then suddenly I started getting subjected, a load of porn, which I didn't really want because I'm going on X like any journo to like fish around and find out rows between Nadim Zahawi and Nigel Farage and all the rest of it. There's also, by the way, I mean, I say a niche audience for me in bikini shots, and I think that's true. But of course, when you are in the public eye in any capacity, you do expose yourself to some pervy behaviour. I'm not afraid to tell you, Tim, that I have been sent dick pics on Instagram. I tell you what, you should have seen the state of his flat. I'm joking. I have been sent some dodgy stuff that to show my eyes were like, look at this, you know, like quite graphic stuff.

27:53I've got to be honest. and therefore my problem with it is this if I chose to sort of sexualize my output if I decided and some women in the public eye even who have worked in news of like in the past done magazine shoots or they're quite happy to share imagery of themselves on holiday if they look good in a bikini if I choose to do that I'm entitled to do it but what I don't want is somebody forcing that upon me because of course it's reputationally damaging and I had an experience of this so you You know, you and I did the Telegraph Christmas Appeal and the video guy said, oh, Camilla, can you do like a please come and donate video?

28:30And I had the phone set on and I walked up and down the room sort of saying, hi, we're here. Please send us your cash. You can donate online. This is the telephone number. It was for a good cause. For a good cause. Somebody then took that video and overlaid it with a voice appearing to be mine saying, I'm not wearing any knickers. Right. Right. Now, I'm not a prude, as you well know. I like some saucy bants along with the rest of them. But I kind of then thought, how am I going to handle this? Because if people genuinely think that's me, they're going to think I've taken a rather dramatic turn on my own public persona.

29:06Therefore, I had to go and sort of qualify, by the way, this is AI. But it put me in a bit of a compromising position that I don't think I deserve to be in. And if it were worse, if there was imagery out there that somebody had confected of me, regardless of how flattering or not it might be I mean it's hugely damaging for me as a professional journalist to look as if I'm going down a different road with my career. Yes. I don't think you need to rationalise it. It was just a sick and awful thing for someone to do. Well I think it was intended to be a joke. One doesn't take oneself too seriously and obviously I then retweeted it and put a kind of confused face emoji on it.

29:44I think this touches upon three areas of concern. One is the exploitation of women and children. The second is the rise of deepfake imagery. There's the case of George Freeman, the MP. There was a deepfake made of him apparently endorsing reform. Of all the things to use this technology for, an MP I've obviously never heard of endorsing a political party. Also, he's a massive one-nationer. So the idea of him defecting to Farage. Either way, it's just so strange how that's what people use it for. If I was able to do this technology, I'd use it to, say, persuade people to give me money or to declare a war.

30:18I wouldn't. But anyway, the point is sexual exploitation of women and children is the rise of deep fakes. And the third thing is the issue of control over one's own image. And that is a personal thing. If you put out a photograph of you at a sunset walking a dog, you're choosing to share that image. Really, that image should belong to you. But the reality is in the digital wild west that that image can then be seized by other people and manipulated and misused. And that to me seems wrong. And it's what I thought the weight of European legislation was working against with things like the Data Protection Act.

30:49Yes. X has responded to this. X has partially restricted access to its AI tool, Grok. And from Friday, free users can no longer generate images through the platform's public account, with image creation now limited to paid subscribers. I mean, to my mind, that doesn't stop this. You're just moving from it being a freely available thing to something you have to pay for. The tool also appears to have stopped producing bikini-style images. However, the standalone Grok app, which generates images privately rather than publicly, is still able to create sexually explicit material using images of women.

31:23Well, that's a really interesting point, because obviously Labour has got a bee in its bonnet specifically about X when this technology exists across the online world. Nadeem Zahawi, didn't he say at the Reform press conference you could do it with PowerPoint? Yes. Goodness knows what he's doing with his PowerPoint. I can't even get an Excel spreadsheet to work. I'm not the person to comment on the technology that could be used or not. But the point is, what's interesting, and Liz Kendall spoke to the House of Commons about this very earnestly last night. Let's have a listen to that. Madam Deputy Speaker, this government will do everything in our power to keep women and especially children safe online.

32:08So I can today confirm that we will build on all the measures I have already outlined and legislate in the Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently going through Parliament, to criminalise nudification apps. This new criminal offence will make it illegal for companies to supply tools designed to create non-consensual intimate images targeting the problem at its source. And in addition to all of these actions, we expect technology companies to introduce the steps recommended by Ofcom's guidance on how to make platforms safer for women and girls without delay. And if they do not, I am prepared to go further.

32:52But the point is you've now predictably got labourites who hate Elon Musk, everything he stands for, and anyone that disagrees with them on X, desperate to close this entire site down. Yes. And it, like anything Labour does, is grotesque overreach. You don't move from something unfortunate has happened, we need to try and make sure that it doesn't happen in the future, to just ban the whole thing. Call me cynical. I think I'm just being a realist, actually. There's something deeply sinister about how quickly they've leapt on this in a bit to close down freedom of speech and expression simply because that site is more populated these days by right-wing opinion than left-wing opinion.

33:31You know, if this was happening on Blue Sky, do you think they'd all be lining up to say, right, bring it down? Of course they wouldn't. It's so self-serving, this. It does feel as though they have looked for anything that they can use as their reason to open an investigation. We should mention Ofcom is going to be investigating this or to threaten to shut it down. And we should note that other countries have already done that. Malaysia, I think Indonesia has restricted access as well. any opportunity they can to close down a website, which we know they don't like the politics of, and which they accuse of poisoning the Western political system and being a platform for far-right nonsense.

34:12You've had in the last couple of days the spectacle of MPs coming off the website. And there was a famous South Park parody of this, people leaving social media, but they would mark it by putting up a huge social media post. Yeah. and then they would be treated as if they had died and couldn't be seen and were a ghost when they walked through the school halls. And it's similar with that with this. It's the spectacle of Lib Dem MPs writing, as of today, I will no longer be using this platform. Well, then why don't you just leave the platform? Yeah, just leave. No one cares. Also, we had the famous departure of Jolly and Maugham last week, the kimono-wearing, fox-killing lawyer that caused a degree of titillation amongst his detractors.

34:56Let's put it that way. Right. And there are periods in which I just will have nothing to do with or look at X. So over the Christmas period in which we weren't working, I honestly never once went on X. I had no need to. I retweet our content and that's it over the holidays because you could get sucked into a rabbit hole that completely destroys your entire festive period. Absolutely. But that speaks to Labour's obsession with closing down X. The fact that outside of term, I don't look at X speaks to how much of this is a Westminster bubble story. Yeah. Because it seems to me that 99 % of the users of X are people working in British politics.

35:36That's right. I think the statistic is that around 18 % of the UK population are on X. Right. And of that, a minimal number are active daily. Therefore, when we see these X storms in teacups, we should largely reject them. And there's been a propensity for journalists to write stories about outrage on X. We know people have been cancelled because of comments they've posted on X. We were discussing earlier, weren't we, the whole Faraj Zahawi history bitch fight. OK, so on Monday, reform unveils Nadeem Zahawi as joining the party. It's not the biggest name. It's not the biggest deal. The truth is, actually, it was significant because he gives the impression that this is a party building a structure for government.

36:21And he can bring in money. He's good at raising money. He was once a chancellor, albeit briefly. I think for 48 hours. But even he didn't mention it. If you're once a chancellor, you can be rightfully described as a big beast. It does matter. But the point is, it was interesting, but it wasn't a major story. But there were a lot of people on X who took great exception to them welcoming Nadim Zahawi because he is originally from Iraq. He's Muslim. It's a conspiracy. He was pro-immigration. He was a vaccine minister. So let's say a dozen people who are on X wrote about how this was the end of reform.

37:00They had finally jumped the shark and there was no coming back from this. Now, that reaction probably ought to have stayed on X. But when I was invited to do the Today programme this morning, and there were some technical difficulties, I don't know whose fault they were, I felt some of the questions were informed by what had been said on X. Yes. And that's because we all look at it. Within Westminster, we all look at it. But actually, as I tried to communicate, although they say, I don't think, I'm not sure if I could be heard or whatever. Actually, the public doesn't know who Nadeem Zahawi is.

37:35No, couldn't pick him out of a line-out. That's the big issue, is no one has a clue who the man is. No. I doubt that 30 million people were watching that press conference and saying, well, I'm sorry, reforms just lost my vote because I remember that this man was pro-vax. Yeah. Also, by the way, it's only ever a limited amount of people kind of going in circles about any given issue at any given time. You know, the Alastair Campbells of this world followed by a tiny cabal who seem to be the kind of emptiest vessels making the loudest noise. It's all minority opinion projected as majority opinion when it isn't.

38:06And we found that out with Brexit, right? If Labour finds an excuse to ban Twitter because, I don't know, Elon Musk failed to pay duty on a packet of cigarettes when entering the country or something. If it finds an excuse and shuts it down, I think the biggest impact actually would be it would dramatically change Westminster and British politics. Overnight, it will transform it because everyone in Westminster uses it. And as soon as they can't use it, they will no longer have that weird echo chamber feedback loop in which they all speak. And instead, they'll probably disappear to other websites.

38:37I mean, think about the transformation of Reddit. It used to be extremism. Yes. And it used to be a very unpleasant place. I now go on Reddit to find out how to use a hammer. Yes, that's right. If you had a hammer, you'd hammer in the morning. You know I know how to use a hammer. Oh, good. Yeah, if you need any advice on anything like that in the future, you just come to me. I don't have to grok it. I grew up with two big brothers. You want anything done in the house, I'll come round and do it. As ever, our readers, who are people who are discerning news consumers, so they go beyond X to see the big story, to see the big picture, to read the headlines and the analysis that you, I, and our colleagues provide are spot on in their response to the government using your sledgehammer to crack a nut.

39:19By the way, I don't recommend you do that. Never use a sledgehammer to crack a nut, Tim, because it ends in tears. Linda Crowther, gosh, how quickly we have reached authoritarianism. This government doesn't care two hoots about the welfare of women. If so, they would be protecting us from the men dressed up as women in our changing rooms and toilets. Personally, I find a penis and testicles more worrying than a computer-generated image that you know isn't real, yet this government thinks it's OK. Roger Fry says,

39:55Ian Harris, many other apps and AI engines can generate exactly the same type of images. Why are these not also being investigated? This is 100 % a political attempt to try and shut down free speech. We shall at this point issue an open invitation to Elon Musk to appear on the Daily Tea should he want to answer any of his critics. Oh, once again, a dreadful man, but I would love and would be honoured to have him on this show. Maybe he also could lend you a hammer. We'll be back tomorrow, 5pm.

40:40Thank you.