Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name's Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm here in the eye office with Helen Lewis, Adam MacQueen and Ian Hislop. We are here to discuss all the news that's happened since the last edition of the magazine, later on in the show. We are going to be talking about what's happened, to London journalism in the last week. Quick shortcut, nothing good.
And also about Mohamed Fayed and the recent revelations about his sex life, which will be unsurprising to anyone who has been reading the eye since, the late nineties. But first, we are on the week of the Tory Conference, and we are going to be covering the ghost of Tory's past because Helen, there are lots and lots of, you'd think retired Tories. About,
Even now, Liz Truss is doing a victory lap of Tory conferences by having, lost her seat saying she definitely, there's a question where she said that I would've done better than Rishi Sinek. And that is actually partly arguable, right? actually could, should she have done worse? Possible. Yeah.
Yeah. I think she could, yeah. I think she could keep her seat at the election, whereas she did not. Is that indicative at all? That's true
actually. That would've been, that would've been bad. She, also says that she thinks the mini budget would've worked had she just been given a bit more time. That was the problem. yeah. But, received a sort of hero's welcome and people cheered when she said that, if, is there anything good coming up? And she said Donald Trump might win the election. Which is fascinating to me, right? Because there is this established problem that the Tory membership is once again gonna vote for the leader.
And it is a very small and unrepresentative group and it's got an entire media ecosystem as discussed on podcast pass, set up to cater to it, right? But it is essentially trapped in this. Echo chamber in which Liz Truss is, has been robbed. Boris Johnson has been robbed. Rishi Sinek has been robbed. however, I thought the main attraction this week is the fact that Boris Johnson's memoirs have begun to be serialized. Oh. And I thought you'd like a quiz.
Ah, course we would.
Adam would really like a quiz. 'cause he's actually read them very I did
the homework very, I was told before the weekend that we were gonna talk about Boris Johnson's book. So I actually went and did the reading 'cause I'm such a goodie such a wo, nearly killed me detail. you're
the,
absolute antithesis of Boris. Yeah. Whereas I was dedicated to the Boris method. I read none of the extracts and I'm gonna wing it and,
you'll rely on the queen to tell you about them. That's one of the things that's in the extra. She says the queen tells him about an RAF fighter that's fallen into the sea and he's she seemed to be more well informed about it than I was. And you're like, she actually reads her red boxes artist. That's the difference. Okay. Boris Johnson's grandmother's nickname was. A GaN. B Granny butter, C Granny pack, or D, the big G.
It's granny butter.
It is granny butter. It's granny butter. Yeah,
I know that. 'cause it's awful and lame.
She was French, so presumably she should've been granny Boo, but for some reason wasn't.
The de mail, feels it necessary to translate the French, that Boris throws in during his conversations with macro. and it just sounds like pure fr. This one Boris talking about ette throw his toys outta the prayer.
They've been doing a little, Boris glossary for, since he started the column. But normally the words are English, which they're glossing. But when he had
the column in the Daily Telegraph, they could rely on Telegraph readers, having at least a copy of the OED to hand, if not a decent public school education, that would mean they were familiar with basic Latin phrases.
I sense this may have, this bit may have been a joke, but it's very hard to tell. What did he not offer? Macron Return for Brexit deal. A, new channel B, his daughter's hand in marriage. CA nuclear packed, or DA hydrogen fueled concord.
It was his daughter's hand in marriage
fairly, you've been secretly swatting up. The one I can't work out if is a joke or not is the how She didn't feel con given that the original jet fuel power one blew up. Filling it with the same fuel as the Hindenburg seems like a hostage to fortune, but, there we go. Okay. It's also
the Boris solution to everything is a bridge, isn't it? We just build another bridge or a tunnel or something. Yeah. We need another one of those.
some
massive bit of infrastructure that isn't going to happen. Absolutely. And it gonna be named after him. I think that's the main
attract. Truly. which word was not used in the extracts? A Botho B Rubicon. C Grasping like a grandpa or d Karoo?
Oh, Karoo is very Johnson. EI, let's say the first, what was the first one again? Botho. I think he won't have used Botho.
Yeah, I think Botho Sounds like Helen Lewis trying to do Boris to me. No, I think he did use that.
Correct. Adam. Ah, you, a you know me too well. And sadly I think you probably know the works of Boris Johnson. tragic. that's good. I think you're all winners. Thank you. Because you didn't pay any money to read that. I think Andy's
the winner 'cause he didn't read it. Yeah. I'm just waiting for the full thing to come out, which will be out, I think a week after this podcast goes out.
It's out in the 10th and I will hopefully be, unless it's, unless it finally finishes me off, be reviewing it for the eye. there's
gonna be small children in Boris costumes like queuing outside, Brons at Waterstones at midnight aren't there to get their copy. Yes, most of them here. I was gonna say
that is Carrie's Instagram
and they're looking for fantasy and fiction, so that's what they'll get. No, we had a, list of, originally we, we were trying to help him with titles 'cause unleashed feeble and I, we had an a range of titles and I, we missed one, which is untrue.
Yes. The bit when he yeah. When he talks about how he's going to invade Holland to seize back the vaccines is a sort of bit of a fever dream, isn't it?
Yes. that is boys' own. Yeah. leading a raid Churchill style up the Darden ELs to Holland. it would be, that would be the geography involved and very embarrassed members of the general staff going, I don't think we can invade, a NATO ally. My, my guess is it was a, throwaway remarkable a meeting, that just embarrassed everybody. and he's now presenting it as though this was a revelatory brilliant idea of his,
this book is gonna be big, isn't it? Annoyingly, it's probably gonna sell lots and lots of copies.
I'm not sure any books sell that many copies at the moment. The nonfiction market is really sluggish. There was one genuine, I would say, revelation everywhere, apart from people who read the Eye, which is that he writes about the fact that the late queen was suffering from Boulogne cancer. And that was something that we funky had that didn't he. but everyone else funky did, and Charles
Brandeth actually had, had Scoop Boris on that one. He mentioned it in, in, in passing in a piece. But yeah, that was, I think it was the first sort of kind official confirmation from the, former Prime Minister, wasn't it?
Because everyone else said the death certificate said old age, and no one else seemed to, to talk about it, but it does account for the fact that everybody knew for a long time. She was, she was on the way out. He says that he thinks that she held on in order to see him off. Which eab BOL is my long-term conspiracy theory. That meeting Liz Truss was the final blow that she thought.
I'm absolutely convinced about that one. I've seen enough. I'm absolutely certain that the queen said, I am not letting that man do the dress at my funeral. I'm gonna hang on as long as I possibly can. Alright, so she's got Liz Truss instead. Yes.
Yes, No one wants to be your funeral to be, so I'm Guy. Go, cripes, just book of yes, jolly
good old grumpy knickers the Queen.
Yes. Poor Theresa May comes out of it quite badly, doesn't she? She gets described as grumpiness. 'cause then he has a whole riff about her nostrils, which is very peculiar. given
that he spent a whole paragraph saying that the thing that the queen really admired about him was how un bitter he was, to have lost being Prime Minister. And then he just puts the boot into Theresa May and then into Sak. he's extremely bitter. that's very interesting. As ever. With the jovial Boris mask, it slips pretty quick.
Oh, there's two very rude bits about his sister. He refers to my sister the bracket, like the ubiquitous Rachel. And it's just, and on the tila down the Thames, the remain one, there was brackets inevitably Rachel, and there's just a kind of just a little knife goes in every so often.
But I thought the description of Rachel on the boat. Shouting over the fisherman's issue in the eu. He ends up concluding that Rachel's presence there, may well have swung it against Roma. And I thought the family arrogance never ends even in opposition. It has to be a Johnson who swings the vote.
I thought the most interesting thing about the book is the way he's now trying to reposition himself as the anti Boris as pm, he's now saying, oh, lockdowns, oh, I'm not sure they were a great idea. how could I, the great libertarian have been persuaded to do, there's various bits where he just said, I can't believe that I did that. knows how the rest of us feel now.
But, there is this sort of t it's a bit like, as you were saying this, constituency now that the Tory party are playing for that, he's decided that one didn't quite work out for him. So now he, wants to redefine himself as the anti him, which is quite weird.
the idea that he says the only thing he regrets about, the Covid inquiry and the process of examining his role is the fact that he apologized. And at the time, the whole machinery of government was saying, why does no one believe that the Prime Minister is sorry? Because he wasn't, and now barely four years later, he's saying No. I, when I said, sorry, I was lying. he's literally saying he was lying all the way through the inquiry, all the way through the committee.
So why on earth at the time was he so outraged that no one
believed him? No, it's extraordinary. Downplaying it as it was a matter of some 15 parties or so. I was assured that all the regulations were being followed. But did,
yeah. Many of them barely parties at all. What? But nonetheless, you were allowed to zero parties
exasperating about having to read this stuff again is say the covid thing. We've been here. He has been proved to have lied all the way through. He was hounded out of office quite rightly for his behavior at the time, but he won't die. Maybe Unde is a better title for this, but he's a sort of blonde zombie who corpses around and there's just no way. There's just no
way of stopping him. But is that because people are willing to go along with it? And I do think the book is gonna be big. I think I've spoken to a couple of books. I said the pre-orders off, they're great. They're really healthy. There's gonna be lots and lots of. Copies shifted. Is that because there is a sizable constituency of people who want to believe the shtick and who are perfectly willing to go along with his version of events, even though it has been proved untrue?
he did a little video for the male in which he said, and will I be making a comeback? And I think there is still that feeling of can that kind of ecosystem around him make him happen again? Like I think what you said, Adam, is really interesting that he's now saying maybe Covid was a Chinese bio weapon or maybe it was an accident in a lab, I think is what he says. the lab leak theory, which is very popular online.
Like it's not completely ridiculous idea, but it is something that is in those kind of spaces that are very covid skeptical. That taken as gospel. He is again now a lockdown skeptic, which is where the kind of more the right wing energy is.
And I think that's, Trump is in exactly the same position in America, which he also oversaw a very good vaccine program, which he's now not spoken about at all during the presidential race because it's incredibly unpopular the kind of people that he wants to appeal to. And so in a weird situation, this will be coming out in the middle of the Tory kind of.
Beauty pageant, I believe as we're having to call it, but of people saying loon things because they need to appeal to that audience that wants to hear the loon things. Whereas the bits of he does briefly reference the vaccine task force and Kate Bingo, a genuinely brilliant achievement, That we started vaccinating people really early. We saved loads of lives doing it. But you are right.
He, complains about not getting any credit for it, but it's because he, his whole shtick apart politics isn't about running a government that works. It's about being cool and awesome and raiding Holland with my frog man.
is all of this just a sign that the Tory party hasn't moved on even now is as they're in the process of choosing their next leader.
interesting. Bad knock said we have to move on from Johnson. And whether that plays well or not, we shall see. The others haven't said that she was very specific about it.
Talking of Ghost of Tori's past, Theresa May, now Baroness may have maiden head came out and may or I thought was a very good intervention in the Times this week saying actually if you look at the seats that we lost in the last election. The lib Dems are a huge danger to us. Actually. Reform obviously are sucking up a lot of votes, but in terms of seats, we should really be worried.
She also said, we should remember we're a center right party, not a right wing party, which I thought were always, all of which was very sensible. But the thing that's very striking is that no one has yet got to that stage in the Tori leadership contest. Tom Duggen has, apart from producing an unholy amount of merch, has meant spent the entire time saying, I'm not a squishy moderate, I'm dead right Wing me. Yeah. And I think that's in way
people do when they're not Right. Exactly.
That's, you have to still put on that costume in order to win that over that particular primary. And I think that they've just gotta go through a, cycle. I, think that they, who is the most right wing is, the question that still defines story leadership contests, right? But it's not, necessarily where the votes are. they're losing the wait rose belt, the GA belt, and then maybe they're
gonna do the mirror image of what Keir Starmer did, which is when he had to play to a Labour party, constituency to get elected as leader. He said, gosh, I'm terribly left wing, I'm basically Corbyn, but in a nicer suit. He didn't say he was paying for it at that point, but, and then came in and abandoned all of the pledges that he made then, and actually turned out to be very, far to the right of Corbyn. And, so maybe
Robert Jenrick has been playing the long game, the longest game, and he will suddenly turn out to be a Yeah. A, a very vanilla center right person in. If he wins it,
he'll take off his Hamas art terrorists' hoodie, which he's been opportunistically photographed, wearing all over the place. It's, what's it gonna reveal? it's very complicated, actually. T-shirt underneath it. Yeah. There were a deep bridge to
this conflict. Yeah. Yeah. . Andy: we should move on, I think to something that's just as depressing, which is the state of print journalism in 2024. This is a London centric story 'cause it's about the Evening Standard, which last week went out of print, as a daily paper for the first time since 1827. Has rebranded itself, it's now the London standard. And, it's a really interesting, it's really interesting.
'cause lots of Fleet Street has been in turmoil recently, as we're probably gonna talk about later. But the evening standard, is a very well established paper, which has been on the skids for some time. It's been struggling to attract advertisers, it's been struggling to attract readers, COVID and mobile phones. Basically did a huge amount of the work of polishing it off.
But so did lots of decisions made about who was going to edit the paper, what it was going to contain, the kind of writing that went into it and who it was trying to appeal to. And the next thing that happens edited Dylan Jones, formerly of GQ, is still in charge. He's the editor in chief of The London Standard. And we've seen one print edition so far, which has a bizarre kind of Ai. Keir Starmer on the front.
it's a, it's really peculiar, presumably because it would've involved paying someone to come up with a, an image of Keir Starmer, either to take the photograph or draw a picture of him. and that they've just Fayed a lot of people. But the new idea is that it's going to be, I just sort quote the idea behind the new London Standard. the London standard will be available outside tube stations as well as in certain gyms, galleries, museums, theaters, and private members clubs. Is that a big market?
Is it drunk rear admirals.
It's very much trying to say it's going to be a premium paper. If you read what Dylan Jones said about it or what the chairman Albert Reed said the word premium keeps being used. This is gonna be a premium product. And it's always been a funny kind of tension about the paper as to whether it's for all Londoners. Or before 2008, all Londoners who had 50 P and wanted to buy a copy, or whether it's for a kind of select group of Londoners who might not be outside the tube station Anyway.
they might drive past it, but it's a really interesting question about what makes a newspaper relevant, especially a geographically limited one. And if it makes sense to have that in a city, which is a global city as well.
It always had two kind of aspects to it. one of which was the, daily paper. And then it had this ES magazine, this glossy, very fashiony, very kind of Chelsea based. It was always stories about various rocKeir Starmers from the sixties, daughters who were opening up boutiques and that sort of thing, That they've got rid of. And this just economically, this is one of the many things I don't understand about this. They've got rid of the glossy paper. they kept the magazine going.
They made all the, members of staff on the magazine, redundant, but they kept them on until September so they could do a special fashion week issue. 'cause it was London Fashion Week, which obviously is doing, like the September issue of Vogue and all those kind of things. It's, you can sell an awful lot of glossy advertising. Now they've got this. This new London standard, which essentially is not a newspaper, it's a magazine. It's a kind of, a roundup of stuff.
Some, newsy stuff that's been going on, during the week, and then a load of features, but it's printed on newsprint, so they can't even sell the high-end advertising. you, your Gucci and on all of your patak, Philipp leaps, and all of those kind of people are not going to want to buy tatty, newspaper advertising. That's why we have almost no adverts in private eye from high-end fashion chains. That's absolutely it.
But, but also, economically as well, I, I. The why the intervention didn't happen sooner. I dunno. the idea now seems to be to make the success of timeout and which is given away free, outside, tube stations for a while and was a summary of everything called that was going on in London before it went outta business a couple of years ago.
but then you look at Metro, which was using the same dump bins in various stations around the capital, that's still doing really well, that's still giving out hundreds of thousands of copies a day. So there is a market there. most people when you go on a bus or you go on the tube, they are now looking at their phones. But there are still, there is, there obviously is still a print market for free stuff out there that you can sell advertising off the pack of a metro made it work with news.
That's the really striking thing about Metro is if you look at all of the, the newspaper front pages of a Morning Metro will always have a different story and they'll have a different take on it.
Beginning of this week, Monday they had most of the papers were going with the psychodramas from the, the Tory conference and various political things off the back of the weekend, Metro had seized on a report about the number of, drink driving incidents and the fact that those are rocketing, which really surprised me. I'm just really unusual thing 'cause you think of that as being seventies thing that's been out and I thought, that's an interesting news story. I wanna read more about that.
So there is still a market that you can still do with news even given away for free. And the standard just seems, to have failed to grasp that. And then I'm not sure what they're grasp it. I think they're grasping at something that isn't there anymore. Now it's premium. They're going premium. I, it's,
but I'm interested in that because private eye runs this set of, journalistic awards, which the standard, despite, its proprietor not being frightfully keen on the eye, generally, they kept winning or being shortlisted. ' because they ran really interesting stories about the way London works.
Whether it's that brilliant piece about busing the workers in at four o'clock and that unseen London that you were doing there, or the recent one about the courts failing completely in, in London, They were very good at news and the combination of that with the culture and the theater reviews and whatever struck me as not illogical or ridiculous, but quite complimentary
So Tristan Kirk, who did those pieces on the single justice procedure and won the Paul Foot Award this year, he is being kept on, he's not one of the many people who have been made redundant from the standard, but the idea from the look of it, he's not gonna get a look in on this new print product at all, is that these great stories is still churning out on the, extraordinary miscarriages of justice on the standard website, but they're buried there amongst all the,
they, don't seem to be taking advantage of that kind of news machine that they've got and the good people they have
got. I do wonder whether that's the only way to make a. Paper, like The standard really successful is it is to combine a strong news operation with all the other, all the cultural stuff. Because London is a global city. It is, it's a really important city, but you can't do it. And also only the news stories recently there have been so many about this or that party in West Hollywood and you would pick up your copy at Stockwell and think, why am I reading about this in this paper?
So I want to know about something that's happening in Woolwich, Yeah. And so it's really tricky, I think, to make something work. As a free sheet with a, quote unquote premium product.
I think the thing that I feel like I've learned over the last, what, 20 years in journalism is that you have to have something that other people don't have in your product and you have to ask them to pay for it. And that doesn't necessarily have to be news, right? It can be writers, it can be if you, if there's a columnist that you think is so good, you can't get them anywhere else. Yeah. People will pay for that.
If there's a coverage of an issue that people care about that you can't get somewhere else, if there's a package of entertainment news, they can't get anywhere else. But the AI thing is really interesting, right? Because I think it's, symptomatic everything that is wrong with that approach to journalism that the standards end up taking, which is that there's a thing called content, which is basically slurry and you just pour out a hundred mils of content.
And that's what PE people just want content. Yeah. And you can cut the cost of producing that rather than the idea that you produce specific things that people value enough to pay you money for. The ai, Brian Fuel was the low point of that, I felt.
But it's worrying as well. the way that, that's, that, that's done just for novelty value. That was a one off, wasn't it? There's a lot of stuff being done with AI across, as you were saying, other local newspapers across Britain. reach PLC, which owns an enormous number of them, has this AI tool called, Gutenberg, I think it's called, which is supposedly repurposes. Bits of, a copy which are put out for one newspaper, website, for every other newspaper, website throughout the country.
So effectively, presumably that means changing Birmingham for Liverpool, for the Liverpool Echo or whatever. But actually when you look at the stuff that Rich are putting out on the website, barely any of it is local at all. there's enormous amount of it is just the ones that we get copied in quite often on, on the memos that are being sent around by their digital, editor in Chief David Higginson.
And the ones he's really excited about are three amazing cleaning hacks that will revolutionize your sink. And you just think really is this, what is this what is gonna bring people to, to,
to, their local newspaper? Bring them back and yeah. But this is back to what Helen was saying about having something specific to offer that people can't get elsewhere. So private eye has lots of investigative reporting that you won't get elsewhere. It also has lots of jokes you won't get elsewhere. It provides something that is quite specific and which not a lot of other people do an objective view of itself. But the Daily Mail
went big online by being very good at doing pap photos and, very kind of intrusive celebrity stuff and said, that's what we're gonna do and we're gonna do it really, well. The Guardian has its own things that only The Guardian does. Yeah. Online, they've taken their brand and done now,
but wasn't, the, point of the standard that it was a London paper and you got things in it. That, the rest of the country's always complaining that, everything's London centric. the standard was London centric. That was the point of it. But, until it was, but I find the idea there's no place for that. Really sad and, difficult to, to quite square.
my cynical side says Afghani Erev now has his peerage. He's now under a Labour government instead of a friendly Tory government. Maybe the, there's no real advantage to him in putting, losing money on a, newspaper anymore. is it just as crude as that? Am I being unfair to ev any friend of this podcast? Ev any lambda maybe. it's not just
him either. Is it? There's the, the mysterious Saudi investor who is rumored to be the one that pulled the plug on it and finally said, look, this is unfeasible. You can't keep producing this, print newspaper. there are, what is the point to having Saudi investors who worried about money?
I thought the entire point of foreign investors was that they didn't care. They just keep, churning the money in. Yeah. It's
not all miserable though, because there is an interesting model that's happening on Substack at newsletter levels. Manchester Mill is now expanded around and is trying to recreate essentially a very lo-fi low cost version. Jim Waterson took, volunteer redundancy from the Guardian. He's now launched a substack called London Centric. He's trying to essentially replicate the evening standard, as a sort of one man operation.
And I think it'd be really interesting 'cause they, are essentially cussing it down to the Boulogne in terms of staffing. They don't have those print distribution costs to pay, which are genuinely, we haven't mentioned the fact that since our last podcast went out, the observers potentially up for sale for tortoise. But by buying that they would be taking on a huge cost of print and dis getting a newspaper to the like ney.
Yeah, is an enormous, logistical and financial challenge to take on in this day and age. And so maybe the future of local coverage is people opting into it and paying for it and it come into their inbox.
Yes. It's hyper-local and you need to be quite engaged to engage, to, to pay for it, which is a shame as in it's a shame that it's not as immediately available.
And the real unspoken thing that's hanging over all of this is how long it's going to be feasible for people to keep producing daily print newspapers. And I think it's really interesting. we've got yet another, runner, front runner in the, in the race to take over the telegraph that, that endless battle that seems to have be going on for most of our lives now.
but it's the, the, a man by the name of David Une where there, there's a challenge to Subeditors, not David, but Dovid, who is the owner of the New York Sun now, the New York Sun. Does not have a print outlet. It is an online only thing. this is, I'm afraid the way the industry is going, not necessarily fortnightly, magazines, which are still saying enormous, numbers in print because they don't have a website in the room at
this point. I don't wanna
hear about the decline in
print.
But even if you were a, Saudi investor with bottomless pockets to come in and say, we've got this amazing product, but we're gonna print it out, in the early hours of the morning and then put it in vans and send it around the country, you might think in 2024, is there an easier and better and cheaper way of doing this? no one's found it.
There's also the fact that if you put stuff out in petrol for courts and NWS and everything, it's big advertising for the fact that pa, those papers exist. Sometimes I forget about things that don't, with social media now having turned into weird little silos and Facebook and matter, its owners saying that we don't really want to do news anymore, Twitter is now a sort of mad hellscape of conspiracy theories. What are the channels by which your.
Publication advertise itself to people who already don't read you. that's shrunk and shrunk and I think there must be also a worry that without that projection of the newsstand, you know, the fact that I might not buy all the papers, but I see them when I go to the garage, that there's that
and the fact that broadcast media amplifies it as well. the fact that the BBC do still put up the front pages every morning, and the independent for a while tried to pretend that they were still a newspaper when they went online only and produced this front page for something that wasn't a newspaper anymore. You don't see much of that anymore.
It, I don't think it makes the, BBC paper review or the Sky Paper review, but it's not just having those front pages there that then does set the agenda for, your L BBC shout alongs in the morning, from Nick Ferrari to James O'Brien, and most of five lives output and things. So newspapers do still have this enormous sway and say,
yeah,
it's just a way of making the paper.
Yes. And I, if I just say from Helen's earlier point of view. It isn't helped by the fact that the Royal Mail, used to be, one of those organizations that, essentially it would, deliver the mail and it would deliver newspapers and magazines and parcels. And in its current incarnation and in the current sale, one really doesn't know what it's going to do. so that becomes a problem.
They'll go online, it'll be fine. okay. So now it's time to turn to Mohamed Fayed Nar of the Eye for Decades died last year Recently the, a documentary "Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods". was broadcast for the first time, which detailed the claims of, , many women who said they had been either raped or sexually assaulted by Fayed. That number of women has risen Drastically since the documentary was broadcast. I believe it's now in the hundreds of women whose claims police are, investigating.
this wasn't unknown to, lots of people in the press and particularly to those who read the eye, because as the last edition of the mag, showed, there was a piece, was it 98 or nine? It was 1998, yeah. 98. which detailed claims of not assault, but of him being, I think the phrase was a revolting old lecture. prowling the shop floor, looking for young women who worked at Harrods and then sending
them to the doctor to, to check that they were Yeah. clean. Yeah.
Propositioning them, buying them, handfuls of notes, this kind of thing. So was known about, but took his death for it to become, Public
actually it didn't even take his death. 'cause if I may remember sitting in this room a year ago, and, listeners when they finished this episode will be able to go back and listen to it. It was the addition we recorded the week that he died when we were slightly gobsmacked by the que that were being paid to him all over the shop, and people praising him to high heaven. People like P Morgan certainly and lots of other newspapers.
and we were saying in that we were explicitly said, but he was a serial sexual assaulter, and, a bully. And, and I was amazed when I went back and looked at that piece, the 1998 piece, LA last week because it did seem. Quite comprehensively to cover a lot of the rev, the supposed revelations that were in the BBC piece. I'm not, this is not to disparage what the BBC have done.
They've done a fantastic job on getting the women on record and working with them and finding out more and more gruesome details of it. And it is brilliant that this stuff is finally coming out to, to, to the extent that it is coming out now. But it was there, it was not even just being hinted out. we wrote about it in private eye. Tom Bauer wrote about it in his biography of fire, which came out that same year, 1998.
And an awful lot of it was in that Vanity Fair article that Henry Porter wrote, which I think was 19 95 5.
Yeah.
and certainly was in the dossier stuff, which Henry has written about since, compiling in order to fight off the enormous libel suit, which Mohammed Fayed, launched against him at the time.
Okay. that's what I wanted to ask about because Vanity Fair. Agreed. In the after he sued them to put all of their evidence in locked storage. Tom Bowers described the legal threats and actually physical threats, his personal safety that he received from, fire and his cronies.
those weren't the only people that he was intimidating. Dominic Lawson, whose wife was a very close friend of Princess Diana, wrote about the fact that when Rosa Monkton said Diana wasn't pregnant, when she died, fire had sent a car around her house with the kind of legal threat inside when she was at home alone. I think, this story, people always, I saw some of that stuff on Twitter of people saying, why isn't this reported?
And A, it was, and B, it was reported in the face of enormous legal and. intimidatory threats, like those things. He certainly, he wasn't legal.
the, vindictiveness with which Fayed and his henchmen pursued anyone who crossed them, or who displeased them. there was a guy called Christophe Bettman, who I think was a, a senior manager at Howard's who, resigned and was pursued with false accusations of kinda shoplifting and fraud and all sorts of things. They had him arrested absolutely innocent of all of them.
they were not beyond, the bugging again, was the thing that we wrote about extensively in private I throughout the 1990s, that he actually bugged all of his staff and recorded their calls in order to be able to use them to blackmail them or take vengeance on them later. And the sheer thuggery. There was a guy called John McNamara who was head of security, who was an ex met policeman. And there were an awful lot, there was a lot of tied up.
And the fact that he could get people arrested was all to do with the connections that senior security staff at HAR had with it still within the Met Police. and it's a matter of record that during John McNamara was, the threats that were revealed in that B-B-B-B-C thing to one of the women who, attempted to speak to Vanity Fair and literally said to her, we know where your family lives, which of course, if they're your employer, they do, they've got your next of kin on record.
They do know all about you. So these were, very real threats that were made to people. And that is the reason I think that
it took, His death, McNamara's death and fire's death before the people involved would come out. the threats to the journalist. Tom Barr had seen off Maxwell on one biography, he, wasn't gonna cave on this one. Vanity Fair had a great deal of money. they ended up settling in the end, which was something of a surprise given the evidence they had. we used to get letters saying, private eye, just racist, private eye, just snobbish.
and that's the only reason this person who's trying to join the British establishment, and you can't bear it, just the same as with Maxwell. the fact that these characters were trying to take over British institutions claiming to admire them and then subvert them and make them pointless. FY had wanted to buy Herods and he wanted to buy punch. He wanted to buy punch 'cause he'd read it abroad and thought this is what being British means.
the Crown's portrayal, which again, most people, as far as I can see, seem to think the Crown is a documentary, its portrayal of Fayed is an absolute disgrace. it does come
up in the BBC documentary. I was really surprised by that. But the number of women who say that they decided to speak out because the Crown's portrayal was essentially this poor Egyptian who'd got a black servant. he was very, it was an outsider coming in and the sniffy, British Royals didn't like him, had driven them Made them, had re-traumatized them, that was going to be the historical verdict on him, that they decided finally to speak out.
And I thought that was quite extraordinary because I think I mean we covered this, the fact that, as you say, he wanted to buy these British institutions, he exceeded, in some cases he had race horses that allowed him to stand next to the Queen. Yes.
He sponsored the Windsor horse show. Yeah. And that got him into the box with the Queen every year. that was, you don't get much more on the inside of the establishment than that. Dominic Lawson
said, the British establishment didn't shun him. It didn't shun him nearly enough. Yeah. Harts had a royal warrant
when it comes to stories like this and how difficult they are to get into print, I know things did get into print, have things changed substantially, in your opinion between then and now?
me Too cases, which is why, hats off as Adam said, are incredibly difficult, to get into print, to get over the line. And I, when I say Me Too cases, this is rape. but all of those are difficult because you need someone to be brave enough to sign a piece of paper saying, yes, it happened to me. And if it comes to court, I will testify. That is very difficult to do.
it was one of the first stories I ever did at Private Eye was someone who worked in the BBC, who was, harassing all his female staff and, this was 86 7. And they were brave enough then. And if you think comparatively, it hasn't got that much easier, to come forward, particularly when there's a sort of huge, threatening apparatus coming at you. So I would say, even now, hats off to really all of them who came forward and said, yes, this is what happened.
It was notable as well in the documentary that some more of the women who wanted to speak in camera were ones who had managed to get away, that they got the terrible story, but they had actually managed to run out of the apartment. And I think that probably makes it slightly easier to speak out if you're not having to speak about the actual trauma and relive that trauma.
But the other thing is, if you go back and look at the contemporary coverage of it, I can, I, worry that there, and I, think it's probably true, there was a feeling that they were getting something so that these were young women who were employed in the perfecting department. And yes, you had to get yourself fondled by some creepy old dude, but you got a handbag out of it. And that there was a, there was an implicit trade off that all of these women had taken, right?
That he was, a skeezy, old lech, but he was essentially paying them off in bundles of cash. And that was a convenient story for people to believe because it absolved them a responsibility about the fact that when you hear the women's stories. They didn't know that this was the bargain. Lots of them turned down the money. They were often invited, they were often like 19 or 20 in their first job as like a perfume assistant, and then got summoned to the private office.
But I think it suited people at the time to think, this is what all dirty old men don't they? And, everyone's getting something outta it.
And it's the requirement of witnesses to be perfect. Absolutely flawless, completely
shouldn't have been drunk, should never have tried to say anything nice to the person afterwards. Shouldn't have taken
the job. Shouldn't have, yeah. Shouldn't have gone do we know how hard it is to bring any cases like this to court or to prosecution, let alone get, the, get them out in the media. It is incredibly difficult. it is a case when in the end it's gonna come down to a case of he said, when he is an incredibly powerful man, and she said, when she's considerably less powerful. Yeah. and that is very, difficult. So you need to put the work in, you need to, as.
recently, RO Irwin did with, the various alleged victims of Russell Brand. She actually had worked on it for a long time to get people to go on the record and be incredibly brave enough to do that. And
even though he's still, as we speak on stage with Jordan Peterson leading people in the Lord's Prayer, like it's, he is effectively had, he is moved to the fringes sphere, but like he was heading that way anyway, but he can still work.
And there's a feminist theory idea, which is that the trouble with these cases is that believing the perpetrator demands nothing of you saying that Russell brand is innocent, means you get to still be friends with Russell brand, you still get to use the celebrity, get to go on his shows, get to all of that stuff, whereas believing the victims requires you to shun somebody. This comes back to the Mohammed Firepoint. It's very inconvenient for everybody involved. Yeah.
And that was where, post the death of Princess Diana, that. Sold newspapers to put it bluntly. And that was a, a calculation that was made in various newspaper offices, which was that Moham Muhammad Al Fayed as he styled himself at that point, was a very good person to have on side.
I remember cringing, obsequious, interviews done by Piers Morgan when he was the editor of The Mirror, which he openly admitted Pi Morgan were, done because he believed in sucking up to millionaires and particularly ones who might have an interest in buying into the media. And he also had an incredible PR operation on his side.
one of the other things that we printed before anyone else, was a transcript of a conversation that, Chris Atkins, the documentary maker had with, max Clifford, fellow sex offender, but also one of the many people who rep, who represented Fayed along the way. And he was absolutely blatant about it, thinking he was speaking off the record, he was talking about if he's groping 17 year olds, they're quite willing because they're being paid a lot of money.
There are an awful lot of young ladies who are extremely happy to pamper up to rich, old Randy, old swords.
This
absolute That's what I mean, that's what people told themselves, right? Absolute The view of it. Yeah. Yeah. People told themselves,
they're getting something out of it. And then you hear the actual stories of women who were terrified often thinking that, am I gonna make it out of here alive? He's that powerful. And it just does not match up to what the Max Cliff. While as we know, max Clifford had his own reasons for, promoting that idea, God,
but cl Clifford's payoff was the fire gave lots of money to charity. It's the old Jimmy S one, again, it's the, if you, pay off your guilty conscience by, by giving lots of money to children's hospices and things, and then you can get away with whatever you want. But Clifford, of course, was not the only PR man involved. Endless letters we used to get from Michael Cole, who was, F's kind of representative on earth. He was his PR man for years and years.
Then kept on as a consultant and a director of Harod. extremely well paid for all this. Got very, silent. Now, he would, if we mentioned Michael Cole at any point he would write in a rude letter complaining about, that, we, were writing nonsense about his esteemed client. And it was 'cause we were racist and terrible. And representatives of the establishment very quiet now. Doesn't wanna say anything. Yes,
not a word. I would only say in terms of the tone, I mean because, we did laugh at fire ed. Repeatedly and for decades, and we did that partly 'cause it worked. The one thing he hated us so often in these cases is being made to look a fool. What he wanted to do was have people accept his version of himself. What we wanted to do was say he was a ludicrous figure, not a commanding brilliant genius figure, not, a benign figure, just a deeply creepy, ridiculous individual. And he hated that.
And then he bought punch and. Devoted it to attacking private eye. it was extraordinary. They were supposedly rival, but all they did was write about us, wasn't it? They didn't try to compete in any way whatsoever. He put a picture of me on the cover and I remember thinking it's not gonna sell any papers.
alright, that is it for this edition of page 94. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you to Ian, Helen, and Adam, if you would like to find out more, about the stories we've been discussing today and a whole lot more besides you can get a subscription by going to private hyphen i.co.uk is out every fortnight is reasonably priced and it's terrific. so that's It. We'll be back again in a fortnight with another one of these.
Until then, thank you to you for listening and as always to Matt Hill of reading audio for producing. Bye for now.