Starmer's reset derailed by the unions

0:02The Telegraph.

0:30need a dentist and you don't know where to start, we've definitely been there and that's why we use ZocDoc. Actually, over the holidays, Michael had a dental emergency and seemingly every office was closed, but we hopped onto ZocDoc, found an in-network dentist, had great reviews, saw real-time appointments available, which was key. It was on New Year's Day and booked an appointment in just minutes. It took so much of the stress out of the already stressful situation. ZocDoc makes it easy to search and compare over 250 ,000 local in-network providers across more than 200 specialties. So you can find the right doctor or dentist and book instantly.

1:11Taking care of your health just got easier. Download the ZocDoc app today and book that appointment on your to-do list. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C. ZocDoc.

1:27Labour is in complete disarray Crisis what crisis Starmer can't deny that his reset has gone terribly badly Angela Rayner out And now it seems as if he is over a barrel, so to speak At the hands of the unions, Tim Phase three begins with a fight over the employment law Over strikes in London And also a deputy leadership contest in which there might be a left-wing candidate. We're all praying it's Emily Thornberry because that would be a sketch writer's Christmas come early. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomini. And me, Tim Stanley.

2:11So we launch into this fresh from the Reform Conference where Jacob Rees-Mogg announced that his daughter, Mary, had defected to Nigel Farage's party. He joins us now. We'll get on to that, Jacob. But, Tim, we must just take a moment. Let's just spare a moment to just think about Keir Starmer right now. How is he as he tries to piece back together the remnants of his cabinet, get over the departure of Angela Rayner, actually get into work full stop with the tube strikers? That would be funny, wouldn't it? He couldn't actually begin phase three because he can't get into central London. Indeed, he's all right if you live at the office, then you're fine, right?

2:51But my goodness me, he's kind of rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic. But I do get that sinking feeling, Jacob, that he is now, even though Rainer's gone, going to have to spend the rest of his premiership keeping the hard left happy. We'd already got to the point of in office but not in power, never glad, confident morning again. That came with the failure on welfare, in my view. At that point, he had lost his authority. It drained away from him. And he's in the John Major situation. He can be in power for a long time, in office for a long time. But he can't do anything with that power.

3:27He can reshuffle. He can reshuffle people no one's ever heard of. He can pretend there's a tweak to the left or a tweak to the right. But none of it makes any difference. He's not commanding his party. His majority of 170 is dust and ashes. He is held to ransom by various bits of the party. This is, I'm afraid, the sort of division that the Tory party has been so used to. And it's worth saying this is not just about Angela Rayner. It happened weeks before with the welfare vote rebellion. And it's interesting that one of the potential left-wing deputy leadership candidates is Louise Hague, who led that rebellion on reforming welfare.

4:03Well, all the candidates that I can think of who could be deputy leader have an axe to grind against him. So Louise Haig, who was not held on to and wasn't really liked by Starmer anyway, when she had some ancient conviction relating to mobile telephones. Emily Thornberry, Lady Nugee, as I think we like to call her, who unexpectedly didn't get a job and has given a very interesting interview saying they're doing foreign policy marvelously, but their domestic policy isn't going quite right. So she's setting her stall out in opposition. And then, of course, Ed Miliband, who is wildly popular within the party at large, was a leader, probably would quite like to be leader again.

4:47Actually, as an individual, is, I think, a really first class man. I like him, think he's thoroughly decent. But my goodness, he's eye-wateringly left wing. So all the Candids have a different agenda from Starmer or an axe to grind or both. Another one is Rosina Alan Khan. Who I used to play football with. And who I was at university with. And she's good at karaoke. She is. I really like her. She's a very nice person. But she is also someone who had to leave government over the Gaza issue. So it adds to your theory these are all people with whom he has some sort of falling out. And I think that is a tribute to the way in which Keir Starmer has run the party.

5:23It all goes back to he was elected as a Corbynite. And one of the first things he did was expel Jeremy Corbyn. Now, whether you think that was a good thing to do or not, because it was around anti-Semitism, he does not tolerate internal dissent. No. And if you do that within a party, if you try and reduce the big tent to just one small room, then you push a lot of people outside it and those people are able to create trouble. They're outside the tent doing something in rather than being inside it. So I sense that part of this is the legacy of Keir Starmer's very wonky, control freakery way of running government.

5:59This reminds me of Gordon Brown, doesn't it? when a control freak loses control, all you're left with is a freak. Yeah. Which is a great quote, isn't it? And I'm sure it could be applied to me by my own husband and children. But before we get into who's been reshuffled in and out, the mechanism for this deputy leader election then, it's sort of out of Starmer's control, which makes it even more parlous for him. And what will confuse some people is that he has a deputy prime minister. He appointed David Lammy to that role. But Deputy PM, correct me, Jake, it was a bit of a constitutional fiction.

6:35Oh, you're quite right. It depends who it is. I mean, Baroness Coffey, as she now is, was a serious Deputy PM and was regularly helping the Prime Minister. David Lammy, as a Deputy PM, is a SOP for being demoted. Right, right. And that's been used for every time. Rab Butler, I think, is the first one, opposed Attlee, who's made Deputy PM. Attlee is a proper deputy. And it's given as a SOP because he didn't get the leadership. That's how prime ministers use it. It has no constitutional power. It's within Sir Keir's gift to give that job to someone. But within the constitution of the Labour Party, deputy leader of the party is something quite separate.

7:10And that is something that is supposed to be elected by the members. And following changes to the constitution in 2021, if you want to be in the race, you need to get the nomination of 20 % of MPs, which now is calculated to be a figure of 80. So there will be a vote among Labour MPs and you can be on the ballot if you get 80 MPs to support you or if you can get 5%, that's 33 constituency Labour parties supporting you or organisations affiliated to the Labour Party, including at least two affiliated trade unions. Ah. It's wonderfully Byzantine. It makes one's mind go back to the 1981 deputy leadership contest of Tony Benn versus Dennis Healy, in that it's going to be one of those...

8:00Ultimately, Labour votes are in the form of blocks, really. MPs, constituency parties, affiliated unions. It is done on the individual vote, but it kind of functions and moves as power blocks within the wider Labour movement. And what we're all sort of hanging on is, Can an anti-Starma or a Starma-critical candidate like Thornberry get 80 MPs to support them? If they can, then the leadership election will become a platform for criticism of the direction of the party. Well, there are all sorts of interesting things about that. First of all, there's a brand new chief whip. It is much harder for a brand new chief whip to stop 80 people signing than it was for the old chief whip who had been around and knew how things worked.

8:47I don't think Jonathan Reynolds has a great experience in the Whip's Office or being a Whip. Those dark arts are going to be harder because of the reshuffle. The second thing is you don't want to look at it as the deputy leadership contest, but the succession to Starmer contest. And therefore, there'll be lots of ambitious Labour MPs who have been overlooked, who will be thinking, Starmer's only given jobs to his mates and his mates' spouses and his mates' sisters. Morgan McSweeney's wife was given a job in this reshubble. On and on it goes. Rachel Reeves' sister Ellie is now out. Was demoted, but she'd been in.

9:23Yes. And I'm not one of those. So who's he going to be next? And that suddenly makes people think of supporting somebody who might give them patronage if Starmer trips over. I think that's very good for Ed Miliband. I think it's probably less good for Emily Thornberry because people don't look at her as a future leader. They don't. But when the massive majority was first elected, so many of them were new MPs. We couldn't really judge what their politics were. And as a veteran Labour watcher, because I just find, I don't know why, but I find the party fascinating. It's been so interesting to see MPs discover their politics because they're new to Parliament and figure out that, oh, I belong to this tribe or that tribe.

10:08and the welfare rebellion and even things like the vote on assisted dying helped people to place themselves within the party and to sort of say, oh, maybe I'm hard left anti-Gaza. Maybe I'm soft left. I don't want to bring the government down, but I think it's wrong on things like welfare reform. Maybe there is this new grouping of blue Labour MPs like Mike Tapp who got a job who think the party should be really socially conservative and should be all about locking people up and deporting people. Maybe they belong in that camp. So it's been interesting to see it switch from a party that was really just following Starmer like the Pied Piper of Hamelin without a very clear agenda, without a very clear philosophy, now deciding they're part of this group.

10:52And members of those groups might drift towards different candidates. So I can see hard left and soft left thinking, I'll vote for Emily because I want to debate. But surely this all comes from the top. It comes from Starmer, practising a unique brand of Marxism, which was advocated by Groucho, not Carl. And that is, here are my principles, and if you don't like them, I have others. So he comes out with a 2020 leadership pitch, which may have been directed by Ken Loach, then pivots into a Blairite position, even though deep down we know he's a human rights lawyer who is effectively a socialist because he proudly declared himself to be one.

11:28And then you have all of these Labour MPs and the Mike Taps of this world or the Rosinas, they are all being dictated by their doorsteps. And the doorsteps are telling them two things. First of all, that Starmer is almost universally despised, including by the people that once voted him in. and secondly that if those Labour MPs do not do what the doorstep asks them to then they will be going off to either Corbyn, Jack Polanski or indeed Nigel Farage before you can say what happened to John Prescott, genuinely. I think you've absolutely put your finger on it and I think this ties in with what Tim is saying, that they're finding their tribe but that is partly their mailbag and their doorstep which is telling them what they're currently doing isn't working and they're all sitting on very small majorities.

12:21And this is important because Starmer has a huge majority, but he has no mandate. Why does this matter? It matters because there are dozens into hundreds of MPs who think I will lose my seat at the next election because my majority is 1 ,000, it's 1 ,500, unless I suck up to every lobbyist who writes to me. Every time I get 300 letters against a planning application, every time I get 300 letters pro-Gaza, I've got to move in that direction to try of my own efforts to hold on to my seat. And that absolutely undermines the authority of the leader of the party. It won't work for these individuals.

12:59The thing that works is actually having a united party that gets things done. But that's not how MPs think. Can Angela Rayner run again as deputy leader of the Labour Party? She could, but she won't. just to say the word is that she was happy by friday yes okay it's it's actually that she was sick of her family being dragged into this the graffiti was the final straw the idea that she's going to emerge phoenix like pat phoenix like from the ashes that's quite good i'll save that for a sketch is just not gonna happen all right and then what's the andy burnham dimension here he's supporting louise hague who i've also played football with in a team along with rosina she can belt out a tune as well, to be honest.

13:42She was Transport Secretary, as you say, a thorn in Starmer's side, used quite a lot of Rosie Duffield rhetoric around him having a woman problem. I mean, he does have a woman problem, doesn't he? He's had to reshuffle them all out. The only person that survives last week is the Chancellor. Honestly, so this man who is representing a government of service has been absolutely politically self-serving in keeping in place tearful Rachel Reeves as his resident. Who he had already emasculated a few days before by moving Darren Jones. There was no need to move Rachel Reaves because Number 10 had already taken charge of economic policy.

14:15She can just absorb all the criticisms of our current state of economic crisis. But then they've given economic policy back to her because the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, head of the Cabinet Office, is stunningly busy running the mechanics of government. I was in the Cabinet Office for a bit and all the problems of government come to the Cabinet Office. The Chancellor has to deal with them day by day and is distracted by nonsense. The Chancellor would have been dealing with problems relating to that ridiculous alarm we had yesterday. That's all Cabinet Office stuff. He can't now be thinking about economics.

14:49The Chief Secretary of the Prime Minister staff is very difficult. And Steve Barclay was the Chief of Staff to Boris and Chancellor of the Duchy. And that was quite a difficult role to do. He did as well as anybody could have done. He's a very capable man. But the volume of work was overwhelming, he couldn't possibly have done economic policy at the same point. But Darren Jones is being pitch rolled as the next Chancellor. It was in the Sunday Times and the Sunday Tell. It's been specifically briefed to warm people to the idea that Rachel Reeves won't be there forever. Yeah, but she will be, whilst she's there, because he's now been distracted by the other chancellorship, the Duchy of Lancaster, he won't be able to think about economic policy.

15:32He'll be too busy with flood warnings and all the things that come out of the Cabinet Office. Let's go through the reshuffle then. So we've talked about David Lammy at Justice now, as you say, being given the sort of Philip of being the Deputy PM. We've got the former Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who on Monday, Prime Minister was absolutely delighted with. She's smashing the gang. She's stopping the boats. By Friday, she's out. On Monday of last week, it was being reported that friends of Yvette Cooper were saying that Downing Street was a block on her going further in dealing with immigration.

16:08Then Downing Street is briefing when she goes that she wasn't being tough enough. They can't both be true. And it's just indicative of utter muddle at the top. Utter chaos. So she's gone to foreign where David Lammy has departed. And in her place now as Home Secretary is Shabana Mahmud. Somebody said she was the first Muslim Home Secretary. Well, she isn't. That's Sajid Javid. But she's the first Muslim female Home Secretary. And the jury seems to be out on how tough she's going to be on immigration because on one hand she once attended a refugees welcome event. As did Rob Jennery. Well indeed, back when he was crying about the Rwanda policy that he's now advocating, but we digress.

16:49She also was a co-signatory to that letter which tried to stop those Jamaican convicts from being deported. Remember that? Yes. And she has been outwardly pro-Palestinian. She has advocated the boycott of Israeli goods. So she's not partisan on that issue and now needs to be in charge of the police, in charge of the protests. I'm sensitive on this because I do think that some of the reaction online that I saw was just nakedly racist. She was brought in to be tough. I would rather give her a chance to see if that is her position rather than second guessing on the basis of her ethnicity, as some thick people online have done.

17:25Fair enough. Jacob? I'm very glad that we have somebody as Home Secretary who doesn't want to kill people. She vetted against the death bill, that awful, awful, wicked death bill. And as brave of her as a leading Labour figure, so I'm pro her on that. She can't be tough whether she wants to be or not. The conversation's irrelevant. Until you do something about the Human Rights Act, the Refugee Convention, none of this matters. It will all be blocked, and every asylum seeker will go, even if we change the law for our courts, to the European Court, and they won't do that because it's a government of lawyers.

18:01Just remind me, in the reshuffle, did the Attorney General get moved? No, funnily enough, Lord Herm is still there. Having said that, again, interesting briefing into the Sundays was the idea that Shabana Mahmoud might have a look at reforming our relationship with the ECHR, which is not something... Yvette Cooper said that. That was part of Yvette Cooper's package on Monday. I was about to say, that is not something said by many ladies. Ken Clarke said that. All right, all right, all right. I just want to also add that all the people you've mentioned are women. Harriet Harman has said the next deputy leader must be a woman.

18:32Why? I mean, aside from the general why, all the major offices of state except the Prime Minister are now a woman. Does Harriet want a government entirely of women? Is that the only point of which we'll achieve equality? It kills her. As if there isn't a single man in Parliament. It absolutely kills Harriet because it completely undermines every statement she's ever made about the power of women in the Labour Party, that they love women so much they've never elected one as leader. Work and pensions, Pat McFadden. Who wanted to be Chancellor. He's a solid and safe pair of hands compared to the rest of them, isn't he?

19:07And we're going to be really boring again about the Cabinet Office. He should have stayed in the Cabinet Office. This is the worst change. The Cabinet Office needs detailed, competent, administrative capacity. And Pat McFadden actually has that. To change him means that the cabinet office will not now be properly run for three to six months whilst Darren Jones beds in. That is a really silly move. If Pat McFadden had been useless, quite right, move him. But nobody says that. You have a competent minister doing an important job and you reshuffle him because you can't have anything better to do.

19:42This is really bad government. You've got to get not only your policy right, but you've got to get the administration right and be serious minded about how you make government departments work. And just moving people around because they sort of fall on a conveyor belt is so bad for the country. It means we will be worse governed because of this move. They may think that he has a better chance of bringing down the welfare bill. No, you won't, because they can't get any changes through Parliament. And the courts, under human rights law, cracked down, stopped Tory reforms that were put through by secondary legislation.

20:20A test for Tim Stanley now. Who's the new Housing and Local Government Secretary? I just saw it on your phone. It's Steve Reid, who's Sean, Sean at agriculture. Well, to be fair, he was banging on about rivers and sewage and a few people listening. The farmer's inheritance tax. His job was to go around as a townie explaining to people why farmers weren't going to be taxed as much as they thought they were. This is the irony. On the countryside, who's campaigned best on farmers? Jeremy Clarkson. Who's campaigned best on rivers? Fergal Sharkey. It's got nothing to do with government. Jonathan Reynolds, as we say, has gone from being the business secretary to chief whip.

20:53The new business secretary is Peter Kyle of Nigel Farage is akin to Jimmy Savile fame because he doesn't support the online safety bill. Oh, and he's also the architect of. Angela Rayner's being treated differently because she's got an accent. Were you treated differently because you had an accent, Jacob? I don't have an accent. I speak the King's English. Thank you very much. Old bean. OK, I'm going to test Jacob Rees-Mock now. Who's the new Environment Secretary? Oh, I can't. I mean, I have... Emma Reynolds. Oh, of course, I know Emma Reynolds. And who... And where did Liz Kendall end up? Liz Kendall end up in the science brief.

21:29Exactly. She's replaced Peter Kyle. just about to call him Jeremy. And a return from beyond the grave. For Scottish Secretary Douglas Alexander, who's actually quite a nice chap. Yes, and capable. I mean, I think that would have been better to have made him Foreign Secretary, which he'd probably do with some distinction. He's an intelligent man. But bringing him back is no bad move. Moving Liz Kendall, it's a mistake not to back your ministers in difficult briefs. Yes. Because why will anyone do anything difficult if what you do is then to mate them? We've got to be blunt about this, that an awful lot of people have remained but been seriously demoted, including the foreign secretary.

22:09It's a sad day when the foreign secretorship is a demotion. And they will be sitting in cabinet thinking, why are we working for this man who doesn't back us up over difficult things? Liz Kendall tried to reform Pips. And it went wrong. Keir Starmer, you turned on it and watered down the reform and now he sacked her. Exactly. That's right. But Boris was always supportive of his ministers who he gave difficult things to do. And it's why he had loyalty from the people who served him closely. It was loyalty to Priti Patel, who was particularly right in my view, but also showed why people had that strength of support for him.

22:46Lucy Powell, who was the leader of the House of Commons, has gone. She was the one who insisted that Angela Rayner's only problem, that she was, quote, so bloody good at her job. That's right. She also claimed that when Tim Montgomery mentioned the rape gangs that he was blowing a dog whistle. OK, I think the second one is a mistake. I think the first one is what you say when you're defending a colleague. Yes. If you equated at me all the things I said about fellow ministers when they were in difficulties when I was leader of the House, I mean, I even said Matt Hancock was like some footballer, Grealish, I think.

23:21Did you? I did, yes. What were you thinking? Because it's your job. Jacob, you didn't need to go that far. Poor old Grealish. Well, I know nothing about football, so it didn't mean much to me. The job of the leader of the House is to defend other ministers until they've gone. You're not making the decision. You're not deciding where they stay. And I'm afraid I can imagine myself using a similar line in defence of a minister in trouble in those circumstances. So your successor, by the way, is Sir Alan Campbell. Yes, very capable, long-standing whip. again don't muddle with the whips office Downing Street never gets this right Downing Street it doesn't understand the House of Commons and the whips generally do and the Downing Street often thinks you put in some clever high flyer to be chief whip and what you want is somebody who really understands the Commons and human nature why is Patrick McLaughlin such successful chief whip he understood human nature understood people and was really very good at it Jonathan Reynolds I think Michael Gove was not a great chief whip Michael's been good at almost everything he's done you're sullying him he's coming on the podcast okay but but he he won't pretend he was disappointed they they took education from him Cameron and put him as cheap whip and he resented it but he also ever since but he also didn't know who anyone was it was very it was very funny he was taken around by his deputy who would whisper to him, this is Jacob Rees-Borke.

24:46And then he said, hello, Jacob. It was very funny. I'm suggesting for one minute that Michael Gove didn't know who you were. We need to tie all these manoeuvres into policy because people will be wondering, most people don't care who the minister of supplementary tugboats is. But the reason why it matters is because there is a budget coming. The economy is in a mess. Things aren't growing. and number 10 has figured out that the workers' rights bill, supported by Angela Rayner, now gone, could be a block to growth. Workers' rights bill, things like cracking down on zero hours contracts, more support for trade unions.

25:22So one reason why Peter Kyle's been given his job at business is because Kyle is a big Blairite, right? And we all anticipate that he wants to water that bill down. And they might have got away with it had it not been for, well trade unions, we'll come on to that in a second, but the deputy leadership contest. Yes. Because as I mentioned, there's that curious quality of the different electoral blocks, the parliamentary party, the constituency party, and the trade unions. Trade unions historically have been sort of sensible small c conservative and will support the leadership unless there's a material thing that they want that the leadership's not giving them.

25:58So if we're going to enter a deputy leadership contest and at the same time Keir Starmer is looking to water down the workers' rights bill, trade unions might take a favorable look at an anti-Starmer candidate. There are all sorts of things you can do in terms of the management of parliamentary business. The bill isn't yet through. You can recommit to committee, you can delay progress in the House of Lords, you can spin things out, you could even decide that it's time for prorogation and you need a new parliament in the bill. You can handle things more subtly than just saying we're pulling the bill.

26:37You can just let it get caught up in the weeds. You can fail to move a programme motion and say it was a terrible mistake and then it goes on. But critics within the party will notice that's happening. They're not fools. They will, but nobody else will. Nobody notices the detail of parliamentary business. And there's The reason why I wouldn't have changed the business managers, because you've now got new business managers who won't necessarily understand how easy it is to do those sorts of things. Campbell would definitely have known how to do that. Yes. Now, let's just move on to the unions briefly.

27:11Once a proud member of the National Union of Journalists, I don't mind telling you, Tim, that I was a little bit like you back in your early years. I was militant. Were you a pinko too? No, don't be ridiculous. Oh, my Lord. I was a pinko for a day when we voted to strike. And as I was in the union, I went onto a picket line, only to discover that most people didn't go on the picket line and actually just worked from home. And I thought, hang on a minute, I'll put my head above the parapet here. This isn't collective. Academic unions are exactly the same. You don't join the picket line, you just go and mark papers at home.

27:40And then they just kept on overcomplicating everything in the union. I just thought, oh, God, a unionism isn't for me. So I'm the only Conservative here. That's quite reassuring. You can be a Conservative trade unionist. Of course you can. And so we have the trade union. Now, what I think is interesting about how the tide has turned, particularly in light of this tube strike, is how many angry people joined me on my overland train this morning. And I just don't think you can get away with this anymore. I don't think you can get away with having been offered a pay rise, which they say isn't enough because it's not in line with inflation.

28:10What? When inflation was at 11 percent. Nobody else in the private sector has been given anything like a 3.4 percent pay offer. You now want to work 32 hours, not 35. And you're quite happy to take this strike action and hold this capital to ransom, despite the fact that you, you and me and the people in the gallery and everyone listening to this who's in a job contributed their hard earned taxpayers cash to a three point six billion pound bailout of Transport for London only three years ago. Who on earth has sympathy? I'm sorry, even the most ardent of pinkos, to use your word, Jacob. This doesn't wash.

28:50No, I completely agree. And you should fire a lot of them. Most of the tube lines are now automatically operated. They have observers in the cab, not drivers. Just fire them. You don't need them. Golly. That's a good job, isn't it? What? I wish I could do that job in the office. I'm the official observer. They also do it stunningly badly. So Boxing Day 2023, a body is on the line. They've got these observers. I think it was the Jubilee line, but it doesn't particularly matter which line. They've got these observers in automatic trains. Four of them run over the body without mention. Extraordinary.

29:25So they do nothing. They are asleep. They are inattentive. And they're there because the unions insist they're required for safety. They are useless and they are a cost. They're on strike. They should be fired. And I wouldn't like to agree, but I think they've pushed their hand so far that now people will agree. I like the idea of people being present on trains. Docklands Light Railway is running today, as I understand it, perfectly safely. How many drivers has it got? But it's nice to have a guard on a train. It's nice to have a human being on a train. It's nice to have a Pullman carriage and to be brought a cup of coffee and perhaps your dinner.

29:58Which is how you travel regularly to Somerset. Of course, if I can't get a private train. And it's not just the strikes, we should add, it's also the public sector pay increases, because I mentioned the budget, and that's part of the answer as to where's the money gone. But that's the other reason why people are tearing their hair out. We're giving them more money and they're still going on strike. Does it make any difference to sit down at the table? Junior doctors, now resident doctors, RMT workers, now tube workers. The more money you give them, they're still emboldened to strike. But it's a really important point.

30:29I don't have the figures in front of me, but listeners can look them up. In the last quarterly government accounts, the increase in pay for the public sector was about double the rate of inflation. So that either means lots more people are being taken on, which is possible, or it means that there are a lot of above inflation pay rises going through. It's a big part of the reason that the deficit is not coming under control. Final thought for the conservative sitting in front of us. so your one and only daughter Mary has defected to a party which frankly just again use your phrase is a bit pinko isn't it on re-nationalization re-industrialization what have you done wrong here Jacob I think I'd say two things one is that I've always thought that my children are independent entities and therefore I'm very pleased that they are making up their own mind about things though I would add a caveat to that when it comes to religion their mind needs to be made up by the Catholic Church, not by me, but by Holy Mother.

31:30Three Catholics at the table. And it is, of course, our Lady's birthday today, so a great, important feast day. The other thing that I would say is this is the worst teenage rebellion that I get. It's not the end of the world, is it? I think I'm just about, Kate. As the only lapsed Catholic at this table, I shall now go off and flagellate myself. Coming up next, Caroline Dynage talks about her plan to grill the BBC's Director General, Tim Davey, over all of those BBC blunders.

32:27www.cmo.org lot more tabs open. Create your first Monday agent in minutes at monday.com. This ad is sponsored by ZocDoc. Hi, it's Danny Pellegrino from Everything Iconic. Have you been putting off that annual doctor's appointment because you don't want to make the call? Or maybe you've been meaning to find a new dentist, but you have no idea where to start. I find that's especially true when you move. It's hard to find your people. I've been there, which is why I use ZocDoc. Now, as a busy podcaster parent and someone who's always juggling a million things. I love anything that makes life easier.

33:00And ZocDoc lets you search and compare local in-network doctors with over 250 ,000 providers across more than 200 specialties. You can read reviews from real patients, find a provider who feels like the right fit, see actual appointment openings, and book instantly. I recently had a last-minute health issue pop up and needed to see someone fast. And instead of calling around or sitting on hold, I found a doctor on ZocDoc and booked an appointment in just a few minutes. It made the whole process so much less stressful. Now taking care of your health just got easier. Download the ZocDoc app today.

33:35That's ZocDoc, Z-O-C-D-O-C, and book that appointment on your to-do list. Hey, this is Paige from Giggly Squad. And let me just say Abercrombie's active brand YPB is made for my summer workout routine. Their active sets are so easy to move in and even easier to match. I've been especially loving the double layered look in active wear right now. It's so much more put together than your basic sports bra, especially in the YPB Studio Flex collection. Because it's so lightweight and buttery soft, it keeps your summer workouts easy. So shop YPB by Abercrombie in the app online and in stores.

34:21Tomorrow, the Parliamentary Culture Committee is going to interrogate Tim Davey and Samir Shah, who are the Director General and Chair of the BBC. We spoke to Caroline Dynage, who is the Chair of that committee, and asked her what is she going to ask these men, and should the people at the top finally be for the sack?

34:46Dame Caroline, there is a litany of things that you're going to want to interrogate Tim Davey and Samir Shah about, including the Gaza documentary, for which Tim Davey did apologise for the fact that the production company failed to do due diligence, for Glastonbury, where Tim Davey was present at the festival and was informed of the offensive performance by Bob Villain but failed to ask for the live stream to be taken down, and of course for the longer term, more complex handling of Greg Wallace at MasterChef. Given these many things you're going to have to interrogate him about. How can Tim Davies stay in position?

35:25Well, I have to tell you that is a question that I get asked on quite a regular basis and not just over the recent summer of all the different issues that you've mentioned. I mean, it is one of the most high-profile jobs and almost every time a television presenter takes their trousers off, I'm asked whether Tim Davies should resign. And I do fully understand And what an incredibly difficult job he has. So, I mean, we're not in the business in the select committee of making those sort of statements. But, you know, it hasn't been the best summer for the BBC. And particularly in light of the fact that the BBC Charter Review is coming down the track.

36:05You know, we really need to ensure and make sure that, you know, he can reassure us that he's gripping this and that they've learned from this kind of litany of different incidents that you've mentioned. and that lessons have been learned, due diligence will be done and trust will be restored. I take the point that it's a huge organisation and he can't take responsibility for every single individual error. But what we do talk about when we're speaking to the leaders of organisations that have such a litany of errors is, is there a culture? Is there a culture within the BBC that is willing to take risks on things like the Gaza documentary, is willing to take risks on things like Bob Villan, is willing to put up with characters like Greg Wallace.

36:49In other words, this is an organisation which doesn't have its house in order and isn't being diligent enough, especially considering that it has a particular duty because we pay for it to be as balanced and as honest and as clean as possible. Yeah, and I think that's a really reasonable challenge. You know, that appetite for risk is something that keeps coming back into my mind is something that we raise with them a lot because you can understand with something as wildly contentious and as difficult to cover as uh what's happening in gaza at the moment and you know the importance of sharing these really really difficult stories that there is an element of risk although of course you know what what is not acceptable in in this particular incident is that the due diligence wasn't be done wasn't done and it wasn't revealed even though I think the production company knew the family connections of the child and so everything just needs to it's not just about about it being um above board and uh without reason to challenge it but it needs to be seen to be that way as well and everything needs to be disclosed really openly and fairly but when it comes to things like Glastonbury I just don't I personally don't understand the need to take those sort of risks.

38:06Glastonbury is above all in the way that most people access it through BBC, whether that's through the iPlayer or whatever else, is an entertainment show. So the vast majority of people who are tuning in are those who couldn't get a ticket or who just love watching it on telly like my mum, you know, who might be tuning in for Rod Stewart or Olivia Rodrigo or Pulp. They're actually not that bothered about these really sort of niche bands that only probably had a thousand or two thousand people in the field of 250 ,000 people watching them anyway. And I just don't understand personally why the BBC felt that this was one of seven bans that were seen as high risk.

38:46Why bother to cover them in the first place? And if you are going to make that decision, which I think is a silly one, then you need to have a broadcast delay and you need to make sure that editorial guidelines are followed really, really closely. You'd have to take special steps to do that. And that was my concern here. is the unnecessary risk appetite and something that I just don't think needs it. The Telegraph perception of the BBC is that it's biased. Funny enough, people from all different ideologies think it's biased in one direction or another. There's been a lot of rhetoric among the pro-Palestinian brigade that it's too pro-Israel.

39:25You've got a lot of rhetoric among the Zionists saying it's too anti-Israel. What do you think about BBC bias? I mean, this is something that we keep coming back to. And a challenge that I hear all the time is whether the BBC is too biased in one way or another in the Israel-Gaza war, whether it's too left wing, whether it's too right wing. or my left-wing colleagues in Parliament think that the BBC has a right-wing bias and gives way too much focus on particularly on reform at the moment. Some of my right-wing colleagues feel that the BBC has got a huge left-wing bias and is relentlessly woke in its approach to life, the universe and everything.

40:05So, you know, I think the BBC really can't win in these situations. People will always think that it's biased in some way. I suppose a sort of lazy interpretation would be that if everyone thinks that you're biased one way or another, then maybe you're somehow getting it right. But the fact is, the only thing that they can do is reassure us all the time that they are taking additional steps. I think we hold our public service broadcasters, and particularly the BBC, to a sort of higher standard of expectations. And so they have to go the extra mile to reassure us that they're doing everything they can to retain that impartiality, to make sure everything is properly researched and that they're, above all, very trustworthy in the information that they present to us.

40:48I mean, you're from a background where your father was in TV, Fred Dynish, we were talking about him earlier, weren't we, Tim? We were. Very nostalgically, we were reminiscing. Enjoy him on How and How To and all of those scientific programmes. Do you think that the BBC carries the gold standard it used to when we were growing up? And what do the good people of Gosport think about the future of the licence fee and their willingness to pay it? Yeah, I mean, I think the BBC is in a very different place from when we were growing up. You know, we didn't have access to the online... I mean, you're probably infinitely younger than me, but we didn't have access to the online world.

41:23I mean, when I was growing up, we only had three and then eventually four TV channels. So it was a very different world. I mean, I still think that the BBC retains a very, very special place in the hearts and minds of the British public. I still think that when the chips are down and when something terrible happens, the first place we will turn to to find out, to hear about the story and to get the inside track on what's going on. Or when there's a sort of something that brings us together as a nation. So like when we lost our beloved Queen, it's the BBC that we will turn to in circumstances like that.

41:57So I do still think it holds a very special place in the hearts and minds of the British public. but I think we also need to recognise that people's viewing habits have changed immeasurably. The huge alternative number of sources of where people get information, but also entertainment has changed immeasurably. And this is a challenge that the BBC has to face because, you know, the long and short of it is their income is going down, their viewing numbers are going down. I mean, they still say that something like 80 % of people will still look at the BBC every month. but there's an entire generation who turn to the streamers and channels like YouTube to get all their entertainment and all their information.

42:42And the BBC is in a very difficult situation where it's got to campaign and fight really hard for its sort of very ongoing buyability. Would the issue of buyers go away if the BBC wasn't supported by the licence fee? I mean, the reason why you have to interrogate people before your committee is because they have a special duty to the public that they have because we are compelled to pay for it. If we weren't, if they were free, they could then make whatever programmes they like be as biased or not as they like. In fact, the programme making might be better because they don't feel their hands are bound anymore by the need for public balance.

43:17So would getting rid of the licence fee, not going to happen under a Labour government, of course, but theoretically getting rid of it, could it actually liberate the BBC? um but do we want the bbc to be liberated in that way i mean there are um you know there are alternative channels that you can turn to if you want news with a very particular angle and you know there are other media uh sources but you you can access for the same reason if you want to get something which is typically uh or you know purports to be unbiased and honest and trustworthy and genuinely trying to communicate with the British public by just delivering the facts without necessarily taking an opinion on them, then our public service broadcasters are best placed to do that.

44:04The difficulty is that the licence fee as it stands at the moment is getting increasingly expensive, but the amount of money that the BBC are getting back from it is reducing. So, you know, their income proportionally in real terms over the recent decades has fallen because the number of people that are paying the licensee is falling and the level it's set at in real terms hasn't gone up. Final question, Dame Caroline. What do you find yourself watching mostly these days? I mean, to be fair, I did watch a drama on iPlayer last night, The Guest, which was good. But I would say as a family, we're probably watching far more on Netflix and Prime Video than we are on traditional terrestrial channels.

44:46okay so I have you know I have a lot of guilty secrets when it comes to my television it's not going to be highbrow I mean I've just come back off of a flight at the beginning of the week and I spent the flight watching episodes of RuPaul's Drag Race which I downloaded so you know you're not gonna you're not gonna love me for my my highbrow tv choice I have also just started the BBC I forget it's what it's called the new BBC drama about uh the Norman Conquest and And that's only because I've just finished reading a Ken Follett novel, which was set in a similar period of history. And so I'm slightly obsessed at the moment.

45:19But yeah, that's my entertainment in a nutshell for you. Thank you very much indeed for joining us on The Daily Tea.

45:30What have you made of Labour's latest shenanigans? Do get in touch. It's thedailytea at telegraph.co.uk. If you want to email, we do read all of your messages. Or you can get in touch via our socials at Daily Tea Podcast. on X, Instagram and TikTok. And we'll be back tomorrow, 5pm.

46:13Hey, before your Q3 call, I've got the campaign brief ready, built from last quarter's data and the competitive landscape. Great. Did you include the differentiation angle the CMO asked for? Already in there. Three angles no competitors using right now. Just need your approval. Approved. Thanks. Oh, agents, where would we be without you? Hmm, somewhere with a lot more tabs open. Create your first Monday agent in minutes at monday.com. Quick question. When was the last time a display ad changed your mind? Now think about the last time a friend told you about something they loved. Different feeling, right?

46:52That's how podcast advertising works. A host who's built real trust with their audience talks about your brand in their own words, in their own voice. It doesn't interrupt the experience. It's part of it. With Acast, you can access the world's largest podcast marketplace. Choose the right shows, the right audiences, the right format. Then watch the data tell you it worked. You're not buying impressions. You're buying influence. Learn more by visiting acast.com slash advertise.