Why Starmer could be facing another rebellion

0:02The Telegraph.

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1:45It's a new week, which of course means a new week of chaos for the government. Rachel Weaves is now having to decide how she's going to fill her black hole. Does she raise taxes? Does she cut? And does that put her in danger of Labour becoming the new nasty party? And of course it all means more tricky parliamentary handling for the Prime Minister. I think I've got PTSD coming back from my days with Theresa May and Boris Johnson, you know, Tim. Also on this anniversary of the 7-7 bombings, the Telegraph has gone in search of the wife and alleged accomplice of one of the killers, Samantha Luthwaite, otherwise known as the White Widow.

2:21We talk to Gordon Rayner, who has written a superb investigation into this vile woman. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Cleo Watson. And me, Tim Stanley.

2:42Cleo, you are a former number 10 advisor under Boris Johnson, so you're the perfect person to have on the show in this week of chaos and drama. Let's consider where things now stand. Last week, the welfare bill failed because of the backbench rebellion. The Chancellor of the Exchequer cried live on TV. And towards the end of the week, an ex-Labor MP announced she was joining a new party, possibly with Jeremy Corbyn, but that's not quite confirmed yet. It already feels like the splinter group has splintered. So now Rachel Reeves starts this week having to find£5 billion because of the failure of the welfare bill.

3:21She won't borrow because of her fiscal rolls. So the big question is, is she going to cut spending or raise taxes? Over the weekend, Bridget Philipson refused to rule out scrapping what are called education, health and care plans. For those who don't know, and I do have to know about this because one of my relatives has one, these are legally binding certificates that state what a council is obliged to provide for a child with special educational needs or disabilities. And they can be very expensive because they can, for instance, stipulate that the child has to be sent to a private school for those kind of children, which can incur massive fees.

4:04Here is Bridget Phillipson talking to Laura Kunzberg on the BBC. We will strengthen and put in place better support for children. But I do just need to put this in the wider context of where we are at the moment because this is as you say a complex and sensitive area where I've been spending a lot of time listening to parents to disability rights groups to campaigners and to others and to colleagues across parliament as well because it's important to get this right now it is tough and there's a reason that the conservatives ducked this and didn't look at it properly we will be setting out we'll be setting out a school's we'll be setting out a school's white paper in the autumn that will set out wider reform and it is important I mean, I understand for parents having access to that EHCP and what that brings is incredibly important.

4:48But will you rule out getting rid of them? I will make sure that every child gets the support maintained that they need. But that's not the question. There's anxiety about getting rid of these things. It is about better and earlier support. Cleo, this is a really difficult one to reform. What do you think? It's interesting that the first thing you said about this exact subject was, I know somebody who, it's again, it's like the winter fuel payment cut and the welfare cut. Lots of people in the round think we need to cut the bill on these things. We're spending too much money. It's bloated. And actually there's a particular subsection of parents who think that, let's say, children are being overdiagnosed with ADHD, that kind of thing.

5:34But the problem is, is that everybody knows someone who desperately relies on this kind of support. And the people who do rely on it are very, very involved and vocal about it as well. So it's just like another classic row to stumble into. And I've actually wondered whether this is something that Philipson's been thinking about anyway. Right. And she's just sort of put up a balloon to see how people respond. Right. Which does happen. You have this sense of pitch rolling in government where you can float out a story and see how particularly MPs respond. And then you can focus group it in a week's time because people will have seen it in the news and they'll have a sense of what they think.

6:19I think I'm probably being a bit generous giving that method to some of the madness. But again, like the winter fuel payments and welfare, this is something where you can sound quite reasonable and you don't need to scare people and you don't have to always look like the bad guys. But inexplicably, that has managed to happen again because she just didn't sound reassuring enough. and sometimes there's a way to just answer these questions where you can kind of give, you maybe can give yourself sufficient rigourism, but if they're going to go back on it, they're going to go back on it anyway. She'll sound like she's broken a promise either way, the way she's phrased her answer to Laura's question there.

7:07Yeah. So you may as well try and really reassure people at this stage of the parliamentary term or you have to be quite seriously going around and focus grouping your own MPs and getting a sense of where they actually sit on this stuff and is there a way to package it up in the same way that you can talk about small boats. Smash the gangs is just inherently a more reassuring message than we must let people drown in the channel. Right. We need to find a they, we need to find a baddies here and that's what we turn it into. There's been this sort of sense in the government so far that they're willing to grasp a few nettles but they will let it go as soon as it stings them.

7:52I've got a few thoughts on MP handling, which I'm sure we can get into. Hold that thought. I mean, one reason why a lot of us know someone with a certificate is because 639 ,000 children get one of these certificates, a figure that has nearly doubled in six years. And what I find astonishing is that of that figure, the percentage of kids with a certificate who have a severe learning disability or a physical disability makes up less than 10 percent that's right so a lot of that is diagnosis with adhd autism anxiety etc but having said that there's one part of me that thinks okay we can crack down on this we can cut some of that number but when i think of my relative that has a certificate I instantly think, but not him.

8:40Yeah, of course. He deserves it. So this is the problem, isn't it, right? That it's one of those where we might all in principle say, yeah, this is somewhere we're spending too much money. But it's kids. Yeah. And the kid you know who gets it, you instantly think, but that child should keep it. Yeah. And there are a lot of people in particularly this huge glut of new Labour MPs who've gone into parliament who did not come in to cut benefits and support for the very old, the very young, the disabled, the people who can't go back. I mean, it does not scream sort of of the left politics. And the problem is, is that if you really mean this stuff and you're saying we really have to plug this fiscal hole and we just have a few linears coming up everybody, but then you do change your mind in the end.

9:29Going so far as to say this is a confidence vote in the prime minister and then rolling over anyway. Well, you're supposed to do the tough stuff in the first year. Yeah, I mean, well, with Johnson's administration, We did the tough stuff in the first three months. I mean, he de-whipped 21 MPs who rebelled against him. We de-whipped Roy Stewart and Philip Hammond and Nicholas Soames and Ken Clarke. I mean, that was quite a bunch of things to do. Let's come in a second to how you handle a revolt. I just want to throw in, because, of course, if you don't cut spending, what you do instead is raise taxes.

10:04And this is where we just need to hear from Neil Kinnock talking to Trevor Phillips on Sky.

10:08Gordon Rayner: You wouldn't have to touch assets of under$6 or$7 million, so people's houses would be secure, obviously. But even by going for an imposition of 2 % on asset values above$10 million, say, which is a very big fortune, the government would be in a position to collect$10 or$11 billion a year. Now, that's not going to pay all the bills, but it does two things. or that kind of levy does two things. One is to secure resources, which is very important, revenues. But the second thing it does is to say to the country, we are the government of equity. And this is a country which is very substantially fed up with the fact that whatever happens in the world, whatever happens in the UK, the same interests come out on top, unscathed all the time while everybody else is paying more for gutted services.

11:11It's not just a revenue raiser, it sends a message. This is the idea of a wealth tax. Respond to that. How do you feel about that idea that we should have a tax because it sends a message?

11:25I actually think that a lot of people are feeling the squeeze, but a lot of people feel that certain people are not. And I don't think this is universally now a sort of left point anymore. There are lots of sort of comfortable-ish middle class people who feel they're being squeezed very, very hard. And that perhaps the boss of their company isn't in quite the same way. They know what he earns. He's into a tax bracket where he can afford a clever accountant. and he perhaps isn't paying his way, relatively speaking. I think taxes, to make a point, is just not good politics and it always comes back to bite you in the bottom.

12:10It's a bit like Kerry Bandnock's team last week saying that Rachel Reeve should disclose her private matter. In fact, all private matters should now be disclosed from now on. And you just think, what an incredibly silly precedent to set. People are allowed some private life. But I don't think that is a good argument for the left to make. But I do think there are enough fed up people who think 2 % on 10 million doesn't sound that bad. But it will chase away wealth creators, won't it? But this is where Labour have to make a decision, don't they? Are they about growth and wealth creators and being on the side of some business?

12:46Or are they about welfare and support for people and what many in their party think is, quote, fair? Yeah. And it's a very difficult tension. And in some ways, this we I'm sure we'll get into this, but the splinter group of Corbyn and Zara Sultana and so on is quite helpful, I think, for the current number 10 team in the government, because it's quite hard to attack people who are technically within your own side and loyal. and now they have a they who can take on that message and run with it and see how they get on with it if they want. And I'm sure people within the Labour Party are welcome to go and join that group any time they like.

13:27But they have people they can actually attack, which is actually easier than having just troublemakers within your own party who are pushing you in a particular direction, depending on how strong they are. It's a problem if it splits the vote. Yes. Later down the line in the local elections next year or the general election, If some people said about 10 % of the vote for Corbyn's new party, that would be obviously a problem. But I agree with you in parliamentary terms. What have they lost here? Jeremy Corbyn, we don't even know if he's in the new party yet, is already an independent. Zahra Sultana had already had the whip taken away.

13:58So they've actually lost no one over this yet. But also, will some Labour MPs be thinking because they won the welfare vote last week, we're powerful now. We don't need to join a splinter group because haven't we already hit the point in this government? where it's already caving to its backbenchers, like Theresa May found herself doing. Yeah, and indeed Boris Johnson in the end. But I think in some ways it's more and less complicated than that, which is when you have a big majority like this, it sounds amazing, but obviously those are individual people with individual thoughts and anyone who runs for public office does have, I would argue, not a brilliant, chunky bit of Venn diagram between self-awareness and self-importance.

14:44And, you know, you've seen some of these stories, I'm sure listeners have heard stories about, I've not even met the Prime Minister yet, and this sense of wanting to feel loved and lushed up, which Johnson used to talk to us about all the time, where we've got to show these guys some love. Really? Yeah, absolutely. And the problem is, and we have the same thing with the blue wall, is that a lot of Starm's MPs have come in and they'll be looking at five years' time and they know they haven't got a snowball's chance in hell of getting re-elected. In which case, why tow the party line and be helpful and stand around if you're, I don't know, trying to get into I'm a celebrity or you're thinking of your career after this?

15:27You're not actually incentivised to be that little. You're actually incentivised to be a sort of Lee Anderson character and be loud and potentially look around for splinter parties because if a form's taught them anything, It's that you can sort of find a spiritual home that can be successful. That risk might pay off. Absolutely. That gamble might pay off of going third party. Absolutely. And the other problem with parliamentary handling, Starmer's got at the moment, is that he's jettisoned a load of sort of old timers to the back benches as well, who know they haven't got a chance of coming back to serve as ministers.

16:01And that is also a problem. There were lots of dissatisfied people who I suspect, within a year or so we'll be getting knighthoods and damehoods and other little juicy things to keep them going. There'll be a summer of Chaka's barbecues, of trying to sort of lash everybody up, get away from the cameras, get away from the leather benches of the House of Commons and just spend time together. Bring your spouse as they like to do, bring your family. And was Boris good at that? He was not as interested in that. He was better at going into the tea room and chatting and he was a serial texter and caller.

16:39Theresa May was less good at the sort of going into the tea room and making an impact with a self-deprecating joke, arguably, but she really worked hard at inviting people to checkers and things. We were always hosting drinks parties where people could do things like bring their association chairman. Right. Or, you know, something. And she was a party machine person. She was a party machine. And the other thing she was very good at, and again, these are all lessons for Keir Starmer's team. She had a very, very good political office, which incidentally I worked in. And she did things like every time an MP had a birthday, had a baby, had some kind of family loss, she handwrote them a card or letter.

17:25Which actually is not very much of her time at all. Yeah. She doesn't get to see everybody and, you know, lush them up all the time. but that really means something to people and they keep that and they frame it and put it in their downstairs loo. I've still got my Christmas card from Tony Blair. There you go. These things matter. They really do. Right. And, you know, when we're hearing these stories of Starm's MPs being so dissatisfied and cross and that he doesn't make an effort, if his team were just doing some legwork for him... Isn't part of the problem here, Cleo, that he doesn't like politics or parliament?

17:57And the interviews that came out a couple of weeks ago, those sort of anniversary interviews, stressed that he's someone who shuts the door, locks it and retreats into Arsenal and a beer and his mates. He's only been in Parliament since, what, 2015. He's not a Westminster creature. It doesn't come naturally to him to do what you're describing. Yeah. And unfortunately for him, the people who are quite good Westminster creatures, like Wes Streisand and Angela Rayner, who could be his deputies on this, are presumably... Our rivals. Exactly. And, you know, another big observation, I suppose, is inevitably, it's a strange building, number 10.

18:30And there is this sort of bunker bubble mentality which people talk about. And right now, these staffers will be walking in through the sun, lovely, sunny, warm day. And you go through the front doors and it's just sudden pallor cold. You can sort of feel tension and misery sort of seep out of the bricks. Yeah. And the problem I think here is that there are all these questions of sort of bullying, male-dominating advisors, which is something, it's a storyline I'm very familiar with, you know, ah, yes, the guy who seems to have some idea about what we should be doing and won us the election, let's definitely get rid of him.

19:10Good thinking. Right, this is, in your case, Dom Cummings. This is my case, Dom Cummings. Today, it's Morgan McSweeney, who is the guru who people are blaming for the poor management of the parliamentary team. Exactly, and I warm to him more every day because his job is actually not parliamentary handling. You hire people to do that job for you. I mean, he's got a very important strategic job. He obviously shouldn't be worrying about whether the prime minister sent a birthday card to Stephen Kinnick or something. But you have to trust that you have good people in those roles. And then secondary to that is the idea that they have this comms problem all the time.

19:43We've not been explaining ourselves well. We've not been communicating well, which is true. But you can't just blame the comms team for what is badly thought through policy. and what essentially is communicating out a message that you don't really have. You can't package these things up. In my experience, the most productive period of working in government when there was sort of total clarity, everyone knew what the mission was and therefore the communications were very strong. MPs who incidentally, like sort of all dumb animals, respond well to firmness, understood that they'd be de-whipped if they didn't do what we wanted.

20:22That period of sort of August to the 2019 general election, everyone understood what direction we were going in. Yes. And there was complete clarity of prioritization. Get Brexit done. Yeah. Schools, policing, hospitals. And then within that, you just have to sort of solve your own problems. OK, we need a food strategy. I'm sure we do. But that's just not on my top four things that is happening. Let's talk about that in January. or we are entrusting you, DEFRA Secretary of State, to do something sensible in the meantime and work the Treasury and not make everything our problem, I suppose. And the slight difficulty at the moment is that their only big sort of mantra is change, which I suppose is an honest thing.

21:12That was the front of their manifesto. Yeah. But change for the better? They haven't defined it. Exactly. And I actually think one of the mistakes they make as well is constantly banging on about how we've changed the Labour Party. Yes. And that they won. Right. In every PMQs, Starmer always falls back. He has two things. One is 22 billion power Black Hall. And the other one is, well, that's why they lost the last election. Yeah. And that's the only point at which his backbenchers go, woo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all they've got in the bank. Yeah. I mean, that period of super discipline that you're describing that I remember well on the Tory party mid to late 2019, they were fighting for their survival.

21:51Yes. And the alternative was a government by Jeremy Corbyn. Yes. This government might actually have an embarrassment of riches in that having just won this historic victory on a very low share of the vote, they may well feel they're in a stronger position than they really are. And they haven't quite yet confronted what's coming down the road, which is defeat not just by Kemi, but by Nigel. Yeah, absolutely. And I was actually talking to someone on results day last July, and I was saying a big supermajority like this is actually a real problem. I mean, I've worked in government with no majority at all and a very slim one with the help of the DUP and with a massive one.

22:32And people can feel a little complacent when they think there's sort of safety in numbers on the backbenchers and they can essentially do what they want. and particularly the Whip's office and the political teams, when you know when every vote really counts, that operation has to be so strong, so slick, and you know you haven't got wiggle rooms. There's no U-turns. It clearly wasn't because last week they only pulled the bill, well, effectively pulled it. They pulled out the most important element of it. Halfway through the debate as it was ongoing, they should have known the numbers before it began.

23:10Instead, Liz Candle went out to defend all the measures at 2pm and by 4pm she walked off and was told, actually, we're going to pull them. So they clearly weren't in charge of the situation. If there's one thing MPs hate, it's being marched to the top of the hill, be sprayed with manure and then have to walk back down. And it only happened a couple of times whilst I worked in the Johnson administration while I was there. But a really obvious one is the Owen Paterson debacle, which really was Johnson's undoing in the end, which was, don't worry, we're right behind him. For those who don't remember, because it does feel quite a long time ago now, Owen Paterson was hauled in front of the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner and they decided that he'd broken several rules and he should have a 30-day suspension from the House, which could have triggered, it was enough to trigger a by-election potentially in his constituency, a very safe one.

24:04And initially Johnson was minded to stick with Paterson and there was a big effort from the Conservative Party to back Owen Paterson. Because Owen's wife had taken her own life. That's true. So there was a lot of private sympathy for him. Yes, which, you know, and it is awful, but he did. Everyone then read the report, including the prime minister, and realised he'd absolutely had broken the rules. And so then Johnson changed his mind and everyone had gone out on Sky News and done interviews with The Telegraph and so on, and they felt very cross about it. The same thing happened with free school meals.

24:37And this keeps happening here. So, you know, I spoke earlier about the old timers who won't get a look in a reshuffle and the new sort of thrusters who've worked out they're not even going to be MPs in five years' time. We've actually got a lot of loyalists in the middle who are quite fed up about having egg on their faces and having to defend stuff that they're so obviously uncomfortable with. And then it turns out if they'd slightly stuck with their instinct to begin with, they could have stayed out of the mess altogether and held some credibility. Yes, yes. Really, it's so sort of melodramatic and in some ways silly, but Starmer's basic problem when he says, I'm not interested in politics, I think it's the same sort of sentiment that worked really well for Theresa May in the 2016 leadership contest when obviously she was coming in straight after David Cameron.

25:33who was accused of having his sort of matey people in Notting Hill. And she came in and said, I'm not clubbable. Yes. You won't find me having... I'm a bubble, this nonsense, I'll just do the right thing. Exactly. And actually, that's what sort of caught her out in the end because she was aloof, essentially. And Starmer's got the same thing. Every time he says, I'm not interested in politics, I basically think it's sort of nonsense, mean girls stuff. Yeah. he's exposing himself massively because people think you're aloof and you don't want to why didn't you want to be my friend here i think maybe it's grubby maybe it's beneath very intelligent people to chat up and be nice to people who they think are intellectually inferior to them what goes through a lot of prime ministers heads i'm sure but it to me it's like wanting to play rugby but hating mud.

26:24Right? It's a muddy game. You're going to get muddy. Well, coming up after the break, we are going to revisit a very tragic episode from our recent history, The Bombings on 7-7. And we're going to be joined by Gordon Rayner, who has been on the trail of someone accused of being accomplice of the murderers, the infamous White Widow. Thank you. and scale support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork. AI-powered shortlisting delivers a curated shortlist of top freelancers matched to your goals in under six hours. No endless searching required.

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29:0120 years ago today, if you turned on your radio, you might have heard this. Breaking news we're getting from the PA Newswire that there's been reports of an explosion

29:11Gordon Rayner: outside Liverpool Street Station. Yeah, no more information at the moment, no details of whether the police had been informed of a warning. Of course, it comes just after the rush hour ended, nine o 'clock, most people at work probably by now, but emergency services, so assuming the Fire Brigade Ambulance Service as well, and indeed British Transport Police are going to London's Liverpool Street Station. after reports there of an explosion. At 8.49 that summer morning in 2005, four devices were detonated on the London Transport Network, killing 52 people on their way to work. Today, that horror was commemorated with a service at St Paul's Cathedral.

29:51Some loose ends still remain, including the fate of one of the alleged accomplices, Samantha Loofwaite, the wife of one of the killers, now commonly known as the White Widow. Rumour has her taking part in terror attacks in East Africa, teaching terrorism at a school in Somalia, sitting on top councils with murderers and even marrying several of them in the process. Well, our excellent journalist Gordon Rayner has been on the trail of Luthwaite and has written up a compelling study of who she really was and where she might be today. Gordon, the striking thing about her was she seemed perfectly ordinary.

30:29Gordon Rayner: Yeah, I remember I was working that day and quite soon afterwards I was sent to Leeds where several of the bombers were from. And we sort of quite quickly built up a picture of several of them. But Jermaine Lindsay, who was living in Aylesbury, who was the fourth bomber and married to Samantha Luthwate, it took us a while to sort of find him and find out about him. And what was striking was that both he and his wife, Luthwate, were Muslim converts, whereas the others were all had been born into Muslim families. He was a Jamaican descent. He was Jamaican originally. His mother had converted. He then became a Muslim himself.

31:09Gordon Rayner: So I distinctly remember one of my colleagues getting the first picture of the two of them. And, you know, you had this black guy and a white woman sort of smiling into the camera. So it was pretty obvious that there was something very different about those two. Obviously, we became interested in her as well as him at the time. And she was a fascinating person, really, because she'd been born in Northern Ireland. In 1983, her father had served in the army where he'd met his wife. And then they moved to Aylesbury when she was a child. She went to just normal local schools, very much a sort of normal kid, until she was about 11 and then her parents divorced and that seemed to have been a bit of a fork in the road for her.

31:49Gordon Rayner: She became very friendly with a family who lived nearby who were Muslims. Spent a lot of time with them. Seemed to somehow find that sort of strong family ethic comforting perhaps and then eventually announced to her parents that she wanted to convert to Islam, which she did when she was 17. Right. And then she marries this guy very young. The family that she became friendly with were not in any way extreme. They were a very normal, moderate Muslim family. She, though, seems to have become attracted to going to some of the mosques in London, which I'm sure you remember at the time were, some of them were dominated by some of these hate preachers like Abu Hamza.

32:29Gordon Rayner: She seems to have then come under the influence of a chap called Abdullah El Faisal, who was born Trevor Forrest, also a Jamaican convert. And he had also become friendly with Joanne Lindsay, who was actually younger than Luthwaite. And he put them in touch with each other. They then emailed each other, arranged to meet at a Stop the War march in 2002. And then they were married within weeks of meeting each other in an Islamic ceremony in his front room. And this seems to be a pattern in her life where these marriages are, if not quite arranged, they're sort of supervised by a religious figure.

33:05So it's almost as if she was being drawn into this world through the marriages. It wasn't just that she met someone and fell in love. It's that actually the marriage is part and parcel of her radicalism and her religion.

33:17Gordon Rayner: Yes, although I think she had already become somewhat radicalised before she married Lindsay because she seems to have come into the orbit of this Abdullah El Faisal character who she later used to visit when he was in prison after the bombings. He was in prison for terrorist defenses. So we get to the day of the bombings and Jermaine Lindsay was only 19 when he carried out the suicide attack. She was eight months pregnant. When the police started looking into this afterwards, she seemed to be fully aware of the fact that he was going to go and do this. she didn't report him missing for six days and when they went into the house and started gathering evidence they found that she'd been using his phone like it was her own phone which apparently she'd never done before, she would normally never touch his phone and also they found out that she had spent time in the company of all of the bombers, she'd gone to Leeds with him they'd had meetings in Leeds where all the bombers were there so there doesn't seem to be any doubt as to her knowledge her prior knowledge.

34:12But she didn't interview with a newspaper right, claiming that she didn't And this, again, is another element I find really interesting, is her capacity for lying.

34:19Gordon Rayner: Yeah. Well, she's not a very good liar, I don't think. She did an interview with her son. They paid her about£30 ,000 at the time. She claimed that she was a victim as well because she'd been made a widow and her child, who had been born by then, had no father. And when the police interviewed her, they very quickly worked out that her story just didn't stack up. She couldn't really back anything up. And I think it got to... They didn't arrest her? No, she was treated as a witness to begin with. I had a long chat with a chap called David Vidicete, who was a Scotland Yard counterterrorism intelligence officer, now retired.

34:52Gordon Rayner: And he spent a long time either interviewing or sitting in on interviews with her. And I think he said it got to a point where she realized that they'd worked her out and it was a case of, well, what are you going to do about it? So he was very frustrated. He wanted to arrest her. He felt that there was plenty of evidence that she was cognizant of the attacks at the very least and probably encouraged them. And he tells a story of basically the security services sort of getting in the way of that as far as he's concerned, that the security services, he feels, wanted to keep her out there, monitor her in keeping with several other people that they thought were accomplices.

35:30Gordon Rayner: But a lot of those people did get arrested eventually sometime later and she wasn't. He's never quite understood why she was treated slightly differently, perhaps because the security services thought she was going to lead them to a big fish, but she didn't. She led them a merry dance, really. Yes, I mean, she may have led them to a big fish eventually, but they obviously didn't monitor her that well because the story continues, does it not? She then decided to take herself off to southern Africa after she had been put in touch with another Islamist extremist called Fahmi Salim, again by her old friend Abdullah El Faisal, the chap who put her in touch with Lindsay.

36:08Gordon Rayner: She got in touch with this guy. She went to Africa and they married more or less the next day after she arrived with two children in tow. So, yeah, she'd had two children by now. And then she had two more children quite soon after that. And it was a sort of a similar pattern. And by the way, she came back to England to have one of those children because the good old NHS. Oh, the NHS. Oh, yes. The system works. Yes, of course. But, of course, she wasn't at that point or at any point, really, under her own arrest warrant. So she was free to come and go. Needless to say, she came back and had a baby on the NHS and then went back to Africa to carry on spending her time with terrorists.

36:43But, again, an opportunity missed. Yeah. where you'd think there would be a sort of flag on her.

36:48Gordon Rayner: You'd think it was an open goal, really, that she was presenting to the police. So she went back to South Africa, seemed to be settling down, lived what appeared to be a fairly normal life, got a job, arranged through, as it happens, contacts that she'd made in the terrorism world. She was working in a food factory as a sort of supervisor, which seems to have been probably just a cover to make it look respectable. Lived in quite a middle-class neighbourhood. But all the while, this husband of hers was sort of disappearing for long periods, doing goodness knows what, I think we can guess. Eventually, it appears that she started taking part in some of the terrorist attacks that he and his group, al-Shabaab, were involved in Kenya.

37:32Gordon Rayner: There were four particular attacks that she has been associated with, which altogether claimed the lives of 240 people. to what extent she was involved is very hard to pin down because there are very conflicting accounts. There are eyewitnesses who said they saw her. The police say the opposite in many cases, that they've looked at all the CCTV of some of those incidents. She's not there. So you have this sort of slight mysticism building up around her. She's this sort of character who seems to pop up at these terrorist attacks. But was she really there? Was she not? Was it somebody else? Was she the one pulling the strings in the background?

38:07Gordon Rayner: Who knows? she becomes a great propaganda tool for al-Shabaab because she's almost this sort of unkillable, you know, sort of phantom, you know, that's out there. And once someone gets a nickname. Yeah, exactly. She becomes the white widow and then, yeah, she becomes a sort of the bogeyman. But again, there was an opportunity, was there not, to catch her in 2011 when the police actually knocked on her door. That's right. And she just claimed to be someone else. She did. Living under a different name, claimed to be that person, so they said, oh, you're not the right person, and they just walked away.

38:37That's right.

38:37Gordon Rayner: So she seemed to have been able to get hold of a South African identity card via a corrupt official in the name of Natalie Webb. Natalie Webb was a real person, is a real person. She's a British nurse, and she effectively stole her identity via this corrupt official. That enabled her to get a South African passport, which meant she could travel around within Africa, which she did. the police after one of the attacks that she was certainly suspected of involvement in raided an address that they believed was connected to her and they knocked on the door a woman answered the door they said oh hello we're looking for Samantha Luthwaite who are you she said I'm Natalie Webb and they said well can we have a look in the house yes come in by all means very polite to them and they sort of said thank you very much went back to the police station quite quickly realised that they'd made a huge mistake, that they'd been hoodwinked, went back, she'd fled, and they found a bunch of stuff which showed that it was Samantha Luthwaite, including a computer that she'd left behind, various photographs, family pictures, pictures of her with her children, etc.

39:44Gordon Rayner: Since then, nobody has had a confirmed sighting of her, and that was 14 years ago now. Some of that stuff that was left behind, you say, in your report suggests that she had quite a girly personality. Yeah, she's this bizarre sort of mixture of hardened, determined jihadi and somebody who draws love hearts all over, doodles all over sort of shopping lists. And they found, you know, she was listening to Beyonce and doing lots of sort of very normal stuff. And they found photos of her without her hijab on where she looked like the sort of European girl she was born as looking quite sort of almost like she'd taken some sort of modeling pictures of herself you know she's always trying to look quite glam so really hard to get into the mindset of someone like that other than it it i think the one thing that you can take away from it is that we like to think of people who get involved in crime and terrorism as being these sort of one dimensional characters.

40:47Gordon Rayner: That's all they do. And they're not. They, you know, scarily, part of their personality is a regular person who does regular things and goes shopping and does all of those things that we do, but is also determined to kill people who disagree with them. One might say, putting on a sort of an anti-colonialist hat here, is there a little bit of racism in our fixation on the fact that she was the white widow? That what makes her glamorous and stand out is that we expect terrorists to be brown. And here's one that's white. So the Western media has done its usual thing of turning the one white person into the exception and the person we all think about.

41:24Gordon Rayner: Well, I suppose that the difference is that it's easy to sort of assume that somebody who was born Muslim and has been brought up as a Muslim may have been indoctrinated from their birth. Maybe that's easier for us to understand and to get our head around than somebody who was the same as us until, and when I say us, I mean non-terrorist, until she was a certain age and then suddenly sort of, you know, almost a switch flicks and she becomes this person intent on murder. It's impossible for normal people to understand how that happens. Gordon, she hasn't been sighted then since 2011. Are there any sort of glimmers of information about her?

42:05Do we know anything about her husband? Is he alive? And of course, some of her children are now adults and some hold British passport. Is there any hint of anyone around her?

42:16Gordon Rayner: Yeah, well, we think that her children are still with her in some capacity. I mean, she's 41 now, so her children are more or less adults or coming up to adulthood. The best intelligence that we have from people on the ground who have sort of tried to track her is that she has been living in Somalia, in a part of Somalia that is very much controlled by al-Shabaab where you won't get within probably 100 miles of where she is without encountering al-Shabaab. Very difficult for any law enforcement agencies to get to but the people we spoke to believe that she is married to someone who has a polygamous marriage, who has several wives, who is a member of al-Shabaab and that she's teaching in almost a sort of al-Shabaab terrorist college that she's teaching English to Somalian women or perhaps even Kenyan women in order that they can operate among Westerners in places like Kenya, possibly as honey traps, certainly as recruiters.

43:14Gordon Rayner: I think she can't really travel very easily now because she's so recognisable. There are also conflicting accounts that suggest she fled to Yemen because she fell out with her husband. Nobody seems to have any real evidence to back that up. It's just sort of floating in the ether. And what about her family and friends here who presumably, I mean, it's a difficult day for a lot of people today, but, you know, for a moment in time, they had the world's media calling all over them, a lot of questions, perhaps a sense that they didn't know this person at all anymore. It must be 20 years on, you think you might put something behind you, but they have this great mystery of where she is.

43:52It must be very strange for them. And I just wonder if there's

43:55Gordon Rayner: been any public statement well we approached them we approached her family they didn't want to talk to us and they've said very little over the years other than one of her uncles said that he thought she was dead maybe easier for the family to cope with it if if they believe she's dead but the people that we spoke to who know the family don't think they've had any contact with her for a very long time now i think the family obviously just you know hope they can get on with their lives and And, well, you can't put it behind you, can you? But they can somehow just try and live a peaceful life. Has there been a sort of lessons learned exercise?

44:29I hate the word inquiry, but has there been a sense that this can't happen again because there's been a lot of deep dive into the bombers themselves? But these interesting peripheral figures who some people believe don't have direct involvement, particularly with social media and so forth now, are actually quite a big piece of the puzzle. And have you had a sense in the sort of powers that be that these characters now looked at differently with her story in mind?

44:59Gordon Rayner: Well, they will tell you that lessons have been learned. But I think it's interesting that almost every time we have a terrorist attack, as you know from your time in government, almost always they have had some sort of inkling or they've come across some of the characters through intelligence. and almost always there is some form of criticism or admission that the various agencies weren't really talking to each other as much as they should have done and they do have traditionally operated in silos a little bit. There is sometimes a bit of sort of professional mistrust or jealousy. I don't know what exactly you would characterize it as but poor communication between the various parts of the security state just seems to be a factor in all of these things when they crop up.

45:44Gordon Rayner: So I think they will say, oh, yes, obviously, you know, we communicate much better. But, you know, I wouldn't want to put a huge amount of money on there not being some criticism if there's another terrorist attack, you know, God forbid, that they weren't really quite talking to each other in the way they should have been. Thank you, Gordon. It's a fantastic, harrowing, brilliant read. Join us again tomorrow on The Daily Tea.

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