Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
Hello and welcome to another episode of page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Private Eye office with Helen Lewis, Adam MacQueen and Ian Hislop. We are here to discuss all manner of news that has broken out since the last issue of the magazine, went to print, among which, and on the cover of the magazine is the inauguration of Donald Trump as the president of the USA again.
was a wedding, the kind of really good relatives spot was taken up by, by the tech guys.
The sort of parents of the groom, as it were,
it was very, it, it, it did have that feel to it because they sat, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden as sort of thrones on the front row. And then they had to sit there while Trump just slagged them off in his speech and said, what a mess they'd made of America. And then he went down to give another speech slightly further out in the rotunda and said, I wasn't really as bitch as I wanted to be mine. The first speech Milani had told me I couldn't have a go at them.
And then he went through there and then they have all the inauguration balls and he got, he gave a series of speeches, which became more sort of vague and unhinged and hinted to all the things that he'd really wanted to say, like a sort of stacking set of Russian dolls, But he also, it's very appropriate image, well, he also signed all these executive orders.
So one of the very odd things about the way that American politics works is because the houses are usually so tightly negotiated and things have to go through Congress, which gets gridlocked. Lots of American politics happens by executive order, which is that the whoever is president turns up and goes, here's what I reckon this word means, or here's how I want this to be interpreted. So there's, there's an immigration crackdown, there's an end to birthright citizenship.
So this idea that if you are born on American soil or American military base, you are automatically American. He wants to change that. That is actually something that is in the Constitution. So that's definitely gonna get.
You, you have to find some lawyers to say it means the exact opposite. Now, I know that's not hard, , I know that's how the law works. but I thought even for the, for the United States who are quite keen on a written constitution, it is written, it is written down really clearly.
Yeah.
So executive orders, as far as I gathered, have some authority, but not. Lots. I mean it's mu it is decrees, but decrees that can be haggled over later and argued and will be maybe legally challenged, this kind of thing.
Lots of 'em will end up being litigated in the court then they often end up in the Supreme Court, which has currently got a six three conservative majority. Right. So presumably that's
what he's gambling on now is that he will be able to push it through that way.
they think even the conservative led Supreme Court being literate will go, no, no, Donald , you've had a good run. But this one we might have to say no, it's, the wording is quite clear, but what he can do is he can probably negotiate down to something else. Right. So it may be that if your mother is there legally on a student visa and H one B visa, then you get citizenship. But they can do a crackdown on, on what they call kind of tourism, right?
The people who turn up eight months pregnant just with being completely foreign nationals on a, on a holiday, give birth and then take the kid home, but they're technically entitled to American citizenship. That is not absurd. That is the way that citizenship works in lots of other places. Birthright citizenship is, is relatively unusual. Mm-hmm . But I think, yeah, you might say he's gone for the most maximalist version. 'cause he quite wants to fight. He wants to look really tough.
Yeah. And if he gets negotiated down to only half of what he asked for, that's, that's still a win. But
the executive orders, which are theatrical now, yeah. I mean there used to be a sort of administrative function. They're now another version of theater. pointed out that he's now, he's now using a very, very big, thick pen . I dunno whether that's because, you know, printers has gone up in size , but whatever it is, it means he can write a big signature, show you a big signature, and then throw the pen around.
Mm. as ever, I mean, if the first, term is anything to go by, a lot of the theatrical moments don't turn into law. Is that fair?
that certainly happened last time. I mean, take the wanting to buy Greenland, for example. the FT reported that there was a very, I dunno what that diplomatic language that they use a very robust phone call with the, with the Danish Prime Minister about it, saying basically lo no. Well give us Greenland though. Give us gr Go on though. You wanna give a Greenman though? but who knows what really happens? At what point is he prepared to invade another NATO country?
Dito. There was a, a migrant flight to Columbia that used a military plane, and the Colombians turned it back and he immediately went 25% tariffs on Columbia. Everything. No one will buy cheap coffee anymore. And then they backed down and he backed down.
And that was within the space of our, wasn't it?
Yeah. Yeah. It was a bit like that. South Korean coup . You could, you could have had a nap and really missed, missed his, those sanctions. But But this is also the, there's a kind of ping pong that happens. So Joe Biden got in and said, we are going to interpret sex, as in no sex discrimination to also include gender identity. And then Trump gets in and says, no, sex now just means biological sex.
The same thing with the so-called global gag rule about whether or not foreign NGOs can talk about abortion and still receive federal funding. It just ping pongs between, some are saying it's no way to run a country. Well,
it's, it's a, it is a, a big challenge. So, I mean, you guys know, I'm, I'm, I'm all into my climate stuff. And if you, I mean, Trump gets in, he says, right, we're gonna have no more federal leasing of wind and a lot of the wind turbine projects that are already, you know, . Various different stages of completion or planning, whatever. It's right, they're all next. That's a system that provides about a 10th of America. Very
good, very good. American terminology. Oh, thanks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that was terrific, Andy.
that's, that's a 10th of America's electricity. You know, that's a, that's a substantial thing to start mucking around with every four years or so. And if you look at somewhere, I'm afraid, like China, which started thinking in a really big way about batteries in about what, 25 years ago, you know, and has now constructed in a very, very complex and, and all encompassing supply chain.
hooray for communism, says Andy , behold my five year plan. Yeah. Warming
to it. Yeah.
Yeah.
But I mean, is there something between communism, what you call the pendulum and Andy calls short-termism. I, Trump says, you know, it's time to, drill, baby drill and really get America's, oil and gas supplies, revitalized. And then various American commentators appear saying, production's really high. It's a record. I'm not sure we can sell anymore. And if we do the price drops and then, we'll all go into recession. It. How long does it take between. The Trump Theater and the disillusion.
that's the bit I want to know.
Immigration enforcement is gonna be a really big test of that because actually late era Obama did far more deportations than either Biden or first term Trump. That's actually when they, they really peaked. And so you have to ask yourself the question about whether or not there will be theatrical deportations.
They talked about the fact they wanna be able to go into schools or churches and sort of drag people out, you know, this very ostentatious kind of cruelty and toughness versus what are the actual numbers of it.
I think those are the kind of things where, you know, Trump's kind of theatricality can sometimes cloud the vision about the, you know, the way that Obama did all those sort of drone strikes, you know, that we, we, we tend to sort of say, think about things as in the vibes that people give off, but actually the numbers underneath are often quite, tell a slightly different story.
Where are the Democrats in all this?
They all decided to have a little rest, , a little, sit down and have a think about where it all went wrong. The interesting thing about that is that, you know, Trump, in all his inauguration speeches said it was a landslide. I won all the swing states and yeah, he did win all the swing states. He didn't actually win by that greater margin. Biden won by a bigger margin over him last time. the thing is that they've just, they can't have the argument among themselves about what they did wrong.
They've got a really big problem with their donor class, you know, the kind of activist groups who are all pushing for very aggressive, social progressivism. And no one really wants to come out and say, I am sorry to the A CLU or whoever it might be, but we're not gonna be able to give you this menu policy requirements you want because the voters don't like them. Mm-hmm . You know what I mean?
The, the, the thing that Keir Starmer did in order to bring Labour back to winning that massive majority was he had to move a lot. He had to drag their positions rightwards back from the Corbyn era, and no one in the Democrats has really put their hand up and sort of volunteered for that yet.
if, If the option is, you know, which obviously the, the media con conglomerates have decided to say we were completely wrong all along. , the whole thing was a terrible error. We believe everything you do now, I mean, the Democrats, Can't really do that. If 48% of the country voted for what they stood for last time. I mean, have to find another route, I hope,
. Helen: Yeah. I mean, you see people like Ruben Gao, who's the, senator in Arizona, who's himself Hispanic, and he took a much tougher line on the border because actually every, all the evidence shows that even very recent immigrants to America are really worried about immigration. Right. That kind of classic pattern of like, I've just made it across the Rio Grande. Who are these guys invading this country?
and so I think there are voices like that, but I also think they're just completely bruised because they feel like what happened in 2016 is they went out and they said, he's a pussy grabber. He's a Nazi, he's a Russian shill, scream, scream, scream, scream, scream. And the main effect of that was a lot of people just decided to stop consuming politics news anymore. And I think they just think they can't rerun. That playbook.
So you are seeing a lot more, for example, when Elon Musk did or didn't do a Roman salute, Ian, I know you are very keen on, on the fact that it definitely, definitely was a legitimate Roman salute and that's a real thing. but when, when you just, just for, just for the purposes of a diversion here, no Roman ever did that salute. There is no written, there is no visual evidence at all. It's Rome in the sense of Rome in the fascist era, of Mussolini. It's that kind of Roman salute
So, but the point about that was that that was an edge case where he said, I was just, you know, putting my hand on my heart and then raising my hands upward as anyone might do. Not an impossible thing to say. Almost none of the Democrats came out and said anything about that. JB Pritzker, who's the governor of, Illinois, who's a potential candidate, did say something.
Alexandra Casia Cortez, who's the very left wing congresswoman from New York, said something, but by and large, like people like Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who's obviously lining himself up next time. Didn't get involved in that kind of outrage cycle. 'cause I just don't think it works for them. They think that what happens is they say something, it sounds scoldy the right wing media goes, look at that. You know, the lying m Ms m just are trying to even make out that we're Nazis.
And then they, you know, then they go and praise the alternative for Deutsche Land. And sort of talk about, yeah, I mean he
used the cartoon, we ran in the eye of two people in a pub. One of them is dressed in full Nazi regalia. He's having a drink with another man and he says, yeah, you can't just go around calling everyone. You disagree with a fascist . And that seems to me what the Musk apologist would like to do. You just say, would you like to look at the clip again?
Yeah. And then tell me hand on heart that this is from Star Trek , Helen: yeah, I think, but I think they just realized that you could have an argument about the, essentially unresolvable argument about the gesture, or you could try and focus on the fact that he went to a panel and sat and said, you know, Italy should be for the Italians. Right. And just say, this is the kind of, you know, this is the undeniable cut and dried things that he has. Yes. Said.
I think there seems to be a lot more depression than outrage among, you know, the, the various opponents of Trump across the world. And there's a sense in which Now people seem to have tilted to the position that, well, you know, he says a lot of stuff and none of it has any effect really. So maybe it's all actually okay. Which feels like a distinct underpricing of the risk. Oh, it's, yeah. The global stability.
totally. Because he has, he has really gone full bought, as I say, with all these executive orders, with lots of domestic stuff. He seems to have been less focused internationally. It's taken him a long time to phone Keir Starmerer and a long time for Marco Rubio, who's now Secretary of State, to talk to David Lamie, despite David Lam's enthusiastic campaign of, of greasing up to them. Mm-hmm.
Can I just ask, the, as you say, Trump's come in with all this sort of sound and fury and, and and, and and, and announcing things that may or may not happen. Has, has he this time around, I get the impression he's got more of a machinery behind him that might actually make it happen because it was full chaos first term, wasn't it? I mean, it was Steve Bann in Steve Bannon out Scaramucci in for 10 days. There was just nothing actually.
So there's no sort of impetus behind him and No, no, no. People were gonna make it work for him.
Yeah, they didn't have a kind, they didn't have the sort of grim face bureaucrats that you needed any great, system like that. The difference is this time he is had four years of everybody on the conservative right thinking that, you know, thinking about what a, is possible and what, they might be able to do. So one of the Democrats big attack lines during the election campaign was this project 2025, which was overseen by the Heritage Foundation.
And that was a really, you know, obvious blueprint for a kind of socially conservative libertarian in some respects fiscally libertarian, But also, you know, untrammeled executive power kind of blueprint for government. Trump totally disavowed this during the campaign because the Democrats just keep holding up a big book that said Project 2025 and went, all you need to know about this is, it's very sinister, but there were loads of people in his orbit that involved around it.
And sure enough, those things are kind of, are creeping in and there's things in there. For example, you know, they want to do random factory inspections on places, that manufacture abortion pills, morning after pills. You know, these kind of, the sand in the gears of bureaucracy they could throw just to make things that they don't like harder and harder to do. They've really thought about that and about the way that they can use regulators, for example, just to achieve the ends that they want.
The question is, as you say, whether or not any of this will actually happen. They've certainly got it all like locked and loaded and ready to go. But it does involve having a functional White House and having a functional congressional system to some extent. And they have got a very narrow, particularly 'cause of his appointments have taken more people out of Congress really, really narrow.
Like JD Vance had to come in and cast the vote on always ready to cast the vote on Pete Hegseth becoming Secretary of Defense. Mm-hmm. They can only afford to lose three Senators on those confirmation votes, and they've got two of them who are pretty independent minded anyway, plus Mitch McConnell, who's now cross and has nothing to lose. So actually he's official
cross.
Yeah. But he's gonna, you know, so that, I think that the same, the a the question's about the functionality or dysfunctionality of the White House remain, and B, the questions about how do you get things spending commitments through, because there are still people in that Republican party that don't want to lavishly spend money on stuff, whereas Trump's instincts are just run up the debt. Who cares? Like, just, I want stuff that, I want more
interest in the small print or the actual, actual putting, putting the work in, doesn't it? No, but, I mean, I, I certainly, I get the impression there's a slightly more professional setup behind him. This, I, even with Elon Musk kind of bouncing around in the place, you know, it's not, it's not Ivanka and Jared kind of just wandering in and saying, why don't you do this? Well,
I think they were two of the most functional people there. Jar's, middle East Policy Brief, actually led to the Abraham Accord. Like he's one of the few that can boast that he actually did something substantive. The big more problem was your Scaramucci and your Bannons who were essentially podcasters who should never be put in charge of any Yeah. By podcaster. It's, it's, it's the coming thing.
But
you know how the first, female chief of staff in the White House ever, Susie Wiles, who's a long time Florida operative, who is just used to working with, you know, men from Florida with massive egos, she might be, you know, possibly more able to run it competently. That Trump campaign this time was much less drama filled than previously. But you,
You mentioned the Middle East policy, these think tanks, they've obviously been very worried about abortion. They don't seem to have spent a great deal of time looking at, either Gaza or Israel. So Trump says, why doesn't everyone from Gaza move someone else? Maybe short term, maybe long term , I mean, as though these options A, were possible, and B, he'd just thought of them. I this doesn't suggest a huge amount of pre-planning, does it?
No. There's gonna be a big thing that happens as well where lots of constituencies that foolishly believed him. So the, you mentioned the unions before, and I think that's exactly right. The teamsters endorsed him.
He's he going to bring in pro-union, pro-Labour policies or is he going to give tax cuts to the rich like we always thought, and I think the same thing is true of the Middle East, which is that, you know, there are some people like those voters in Michigan who didn't want Kamala Harris 'cause they thought she was you know, she was too in H to Israel. And they're also going to follow the trajectory of people who are gonna have a cold realization of the realities of electoral politics.
There was a clue, wasn't that in the first term, he moved the American EM embassy to Jerusalem. I mean, he, he was fairly clear on that. And, you know, all of those people who were saying, oh, Kamala Harris is, is overseeing genocide. I can't possibly vote for her.
I mean, now do you think they're reacting to him, him coming in and immediately off the back of a, of, of, of a peace deal saying, well, why don't we just actually get all the, all of the Palestinians outta Gaza, maybe keep them out there forever, Yeah. What
if they just
moved to
Jordan? there may be a few reasons. No, not to. Yeah. And also one of his really big donors, Miriam Adelson, who was the widow of, Sheldon Adelson, the, the Casino Tycoon. One of her big policy issues is Israel, you know, there are really big donors for whom this is the foreign policy issue that they, they really care about. And any kind of backsliding of, of us support for Israel will be very horrifying to them.
Mm-hmm . I mean, I feel sorry for those voters, the sort of Gaza voters because there's no one in American politics for them to vote for really. you know, that, that is the problem of a two party system with essentially a pretty unified view on the Middle East. Mm-hmm . Andy: We've got to talk about, the two cryptocurrencies that the first couple launched. If you wanna, track these coins, they have a dollar sign and then the name after them.
So, dollar Trump was the first one that was launched, and it immediately hit to capitalization, market capitalization in the billions. Trump owns a big chunk of that. Right. And then they sell off another stuff, another portion of it driving the price of his stake up. Right. they say it's not an investment vehicle. And, and the, the magazine made this point that, you know, everything in, it's like you're just expressing your love of the word Trump. Right.
quite quickly afterwards, Melania launched her coin, which then created the value of the Trump coin. So someone said, even without having divorced him, she's managed to take a quarter to his assets . Which is quite impressive. But it's,
it is hers more popular than his?
No, hers is not as popular as his, but people went, I was gonna
say, 'cause she'd be out the door very quickly at that
he's then recovered, I think in, in value.
The crypto people are quite angry. They're saying, you are, you are tarnishing the good name of crypto , which is very objectively funny to me. But there is a, there is a theory that, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are the two really big . cryptocurrencies. Yeah. Trump has talked about establishing a US strategic reserve of crypto. Now you might say that's just numbers on a spreadsheet. How would that work?
Fort Knox used to have like, actual bars of gold, but what it means is if they did that, they'd buy up a lot of it and drive the price up. Is a tool for potentially corruption of scale here, the two un dreamed of. Right. so that's what another reason why there are so many people around him who are into crypto so much of that podcast sphere that, you know, drove him to that, that they have crypto adverts or have crypto investments.
the the downside of it is, you know, I made a program for the BBC and we talked to some people who invested in crypto and had their wallets, their digital wallets stolen, or they'd invested in something that then completely tanked and they couldn't sell it. You know, this was people's like, home renovation money or their kids' college funds or, you know, got all the same comes gambling. It is gambling. I mean, that's how I think we should think about it.
Yes. So if, if you had in the second row all the casino owners from Vegas, it would be more or less the same sort of, message going out. Yes. The bosses who own these things think it's a great investment, but you, the sucker, you think you are being bold and reactive and counterintuitive and brave and frontiery. Yeah. But you're not, you're just a monk. The White House always wins . Very nice.
Right now, let's, let's come back from the, from the, well actually we're not coming back from the USA are we? 'cause we're gonna talk about Prince Harry. We're gonna go to the other side of the usaid now, Adam. There's been a lot of coverage of the, the Prince Harry versus everybody trial, which has been going on for so long. Well, it's one of many that have been going on for very, very long.
But my whole professional life, literally since the year I graduated was when the phone hacking story broke out.
I have to put you on that 'cause this is not about phone hacking. This particular case that was ruled by Mr. Justice Vanco quite early on in proceedings that, Prince Harry was no longer in a position to sue over phone hacking by either the news of the world or as he alleged the son, because he'd run out time so this case was limited to other unlawful activities by people connected to News uk.
when Prince Harry did briefly take the stand to talk about phone hacking, it didn't go very well. And the Casey basically carved him up 'cause he couldn't seem to remember anything, particularly not incidences where, the type of phone had either been invented or, he wasn't on the phone at the time. So
this was the case against the mirror last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That didn't go so well. the really big thing, the one big thing in this new settlement, which was both Prince Harry and Tom Watson, former deputy leader of the Labour Party, , was that an admission has been made of illegal activity taking place on behalf of the sun. However, not by journalists on the sun, but by private investigators working for the sun.
So what we know, what we can legally and safely say, which the lawyer will be happy with, is that we now know that there was extensive illegal activity. Unlawful activity and phone hacking on the news of the world, on the Sunday mirror, on the Sunday, people on the daily mirror, but not the sun. Okay. Even though lots and lots of people move between all of those different tabloids at different times, and it seems to be rife everywhere else, somehow it just, it never happened.
It's like the blood brain barrier. Some things just don't get through it. Incredibly fine. You walk through that door at whopping
and just all, all, all, all thoughts of how to hack phones and all, all memory of that just vanishes for your own. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that's the legal position. . Ian: Now tell us where our sympathies should lie. Prince Harry Murdoch. It's a tough one. You might say neither. who cares. But when I heard the judgment I thought.
Prince Harry should be crowing, and yet he came out, he didn't say Murdoch's, paid all my costs, which is the first thing I'd have said if I won against Murdoch, which obviously I haven't ever and, I've made an absolute stagger amount of money. I no longer need my day in court. It's total victory. It wasn't though, was it? It wasn't that. No, no, no. He said, at an event in December. The goal of this is accountability. It's, it's really that simple. He said it wasn't about the money at all.
He said the scale of the coverup is so large that people need to see it for themselves. Well, in the apology that was read out in court last week, they didn't see that what they got was, as this, admission that un unlawful activities had been carried out by private investigators working for the sun. the closest they got to anything about a, a corporate coverup, of which there has been evidence for years and years.
And we've written about on occasion, right back to the 2014, trial of Rebecca Brooks, which she was found not guilty. And Andy Olson, who was found guilty along with various other, figures from the news of the world back in the day. they said that, NG's response to the 2006 arrests and subsequent actions, . Were regrettable, which is a magnificent bit of legalese.
and the other big mission was in the case of Tom Watson, which was that he had been placed under surveillance in 2009 by journalists of the news of the world and those instructed by them, which was a weird thing that came out in the preparations for this case.
There was a strange conspiracy theory going on within News UK that Tom Watson had spies within the company who were feeding things back to Gordon Brown, who was determined to bring them down at the time, to get revenge for them, them, them switching, their allegiance from Labour to the Tories. So that was as close as they got to, to kind of exposing any of that. But even that is not.
Felly os ydych chi'n meddwl yn ôl i 2009, felly mae hynny'n ystod y cyfnod i'r rhai sy'n byd sy'n llai nerdy am y saga ffonau ffonau na fi, sy'n hollbwysig bawb yn y byd. Dyma'r pwynt ar syddai'n cael gyflawni gan Nick Davison, The Guardian, fod yn annwyl i'r The, news UK's insistence that this has all been limited to one rogue reporter and, and, and one private investigator on the news of the world.
actually they were quietly trying to pay out very, very large sums of money to other people as well, including, Gordon Taylor, who was head, I think, of the Professional Footballers Association at the time. So that was when that blew up.
Well, at that time, we knew, and it was admitted, we're going back years and years now, that Charlotte Harris and Mark Lewis, who were two of the lawyers who were working on behalf of Gordon Taylor and other claimants at the time, had been followed by private detectives. Those ones not instructed by journalists on the news of the world, but by Tom Cron, who was the legal boss at the news of the world.
So we did actually, I mean, it, it is alarming, but we, you know, we, we have known for a while that this sort of stuff was going on and there was also, clever readers of the eye might remember. An admission, not quite an admission, but a settlement of a case brought by Chris Huon, former cabinet minister, former Jailbird as well.
He brought a case against the son and he claimed in that, that that there was also, unlawful activity going on involving private investigators of him and other government ministers, which wasn't about stories in the newspaper at all. It was about trying to make sure that Murdoch got his way with the sky bid back in 2011. So
this is straightforward corporate malfeasance. Yeah. Via private investigator. Yes. Yeah. It's, it's not even journalism at all. It's just targeting your enemies in a threatening way. Yeah.
And it is alarming and it is shocking, but it isn't particularly new as I say.
Isn't it sad though, the bit that your brain rums? 'cause I too feel like this has been my entire career in journalism and yet I know all the bits that I can remember is like the fact that Charlie Brooks didn't he once drink a pint tire, pint of fairy liquid? Didn't that come out in the evidence , this is the kind of detail that my brain hangs onto. And I just, for 10 years now, I've been thinking that's very impressive, isn't it? And I
remember sitting in court in 2014 and listening to Charlie Brooks in the witness box say that, that he couldn't check his messages overnight because he refused to keep his mobile phone in the bedroom because it would fry his brain. Very mean this on very good or over edge of the curve on that one. That's very sensible
actually. That's the first sensible thing I've heard him say.
Sitting in the court in 2014 and listening to an entire day of testimony from Charlie Brooks about, his attempts to hide his collection of lesbian, porn videos, a bin in a car park. So as they wouldn't get found by the police who were searching for, his, his wife for Rebecca Brooks' computers, that was a fun day. And I'm
sure there are stories that our readers will remember that we're not gonna comment on at all for legal reasons. , and I'm certainly not gonna bring any of them up. . so can we get back to, sorry, prince
Harry, let he among us who has never hidden a collection of lesbian porn videos from the police in a car park, so illegal activity. Yeah. Have we said exactly what that was in this case that we're talking about with Harry now?
We can't because the evidence was never heard in court because it was settled at the very last minute. Right? Right. But it involves stuff that was done by private detectives. Now, the difficulty that they would've had with this, had it gone to court is that, the lawyers for Harry and Tom Watson were alleging all sorts of nefarious things like blagging, blagging, was a technique whereby, private detectives would phone up, say a doctor's surgery or, your mobile phone provider Okay.
Or BT or whoever pretending to be you and asking for copies of your bill. And they would get it sent through, not to your home address, but to them instead, so they could see who you'd been calling. And then from that point on, it was usually used as a. Start of phone hacking. 'cause you particularly phone bills, you know, you can see what numbers people have been calling and then you know, whose voicemails you have to hack to, to get messages from the celeb or royal or whoever in person.
So that might be one of the kinds of things that was, would've been alleged had this gone to court, which it then did not. Yeah, it absolutely
was. I mean, the problem that they would've had proving that and the defense that News UK would've put up is that . There was an awful lot of perfectly legitimate work that was done back in the day by private investigators. everyone has this idea of private investigators. They kind of think of sort of Philip Marlow kind of, shady characters. Yeah. And, and, and in, in, in darkened offices swinging back bourbon, in fact, I mean, these are basically researchers. They're just people.
You farmed out the stuff that long before all of this stuff was available on the internet, people could, you know, go through phone books, and get you kind of addresses or number plates and things. Now, some of that wasn't illegally. It was done by, you know, you know, bribing people at the DVLA or people who had access to the police national computer. So there was some dodginess, but there was also some, some less dodgy stuff going on.
And one of the legal arguments that, I know was being put forward by, some people involved in this case was that various records, which they managed to get disclosure of, ev on ev evidence disclosure from news UK showed things like electoral role searches. And they said, we think this is a code word for, for something very, very dodgy and, and, and sort of thinking.
Slightly more likely possibly that actually it's, code for searching the electoral role to find people's addresses, which is, you know, would be perfectly legal and Okay. Perfectly acceptable. So that, that would've been, I mean, this was scheduled for eight weeks, this trial, this is the sort of thing that, that would've been untangled. It wouldn't necessarily have been desperately sexy stuff.
And some of this evidence was presented to me at a certain point. It involved me in saying that we, we've got evidence that they, they were looking into you and it was literally, they, they'd looked up my dress on the electoral role. Mm-hmm. And there's nothing much I can do about that. So, I mean, there is a, a sense in which the private detectives. I think we're just charging money for nothing very much.
we are talking a long way back as well. Yeah. 1996 to 2011 was the, the, the period that was under consideration in, in the Prince Harry Case, this latest case Yes. Of Harry's. Okay.
Oh, wow.
Yeah. So going back to 1996 and involving his mother and the treatment of his mother as well. Okay.
It is a sign of how far we've come that in those days you were desperate to find out the medical records of the royal family. Now they tell us. and everyone's very sympathetic. the strategy's working. Mm. They make you a lovely video . The suggestion was, and not from the judge who was obviously very annoyed, that they couldn't get on and settle this until they eventually did. The The suggestion is this is the deal Prince William got quite a long time ago.
Yes. Pos the difficulty Prince Harry faced and the reason that he hasn't had his day in court. A bit like Sherlock Church, who years ago was saying, I'm gonna fight this all the way. I'm gonna have my day in court. QH grant did the same and eventually settled.
The difficulty they've got is that if an, if an offer has been made into court to settle you push through with the trial, but the judge decides to award you a smaller amount in damages than was offered into the court, you are liable for all the legal costs of the other side. And it's not, the settlements aren't enormous. Well, I mean, they, they are large terms in anyone. So, but, but the, the legal costs on these kind of things are stupendous.
I mean, the figure of 10 million is being, thrown around in, in this particular case, I think quite reliably
as the award to the, as the legal costs that had been run up
already. So that would've been what, what Harry and Tom Watson became liable for possibly even more than that. Had been awarded by the judge, less in damages than, Than had already been offered into the court by News International,
having occasionally been in court myself over the years, even with this rule applying, if you wanted your day in court, I don't see what is to stop you saying? obviously, I don't want to pay 10 million pounds worth in damages. have been offered under this anomaly in the law, this amount of damages, I can't possibly pay my costs. You must award me a very, very large sum of money indeed to cover the costs. I mean, it's certainly what I would say, if I was in there because remind me of
your track record saying things like that to judges Ian . Ian: It's not generally the sort of thing they take particularly kindly to, is it ? Damn. I mean, that's the other thing that the breakdown, we do not know how this works at all. I mean, a figure of 10 million is being thrown around. All that's been said, officially is, is a substantial sum in damages. So for all we know, you know, prince Harry and Tom Watson got 50 p in damages each and, Rupert's paying out, what's that?
9 million, 900,999 pounds. In, in, in, in, in legal costs. That is possible. I mean, Murdoch has already paid out a billion pounds over, cases related to, Phone hacking and other illegal activities. They, they've got, they had 50 million, budgeted last year for, for the ongoing cases. It'll be obviously more this year probably 'cause this is quite a substantial payout.
that's wild when you think about the value in commercial terms of the stories that were obtained through phone hacking. I mean, they had some relatively decent royal exclusives, but I dunno whether, whether or not the profits of the papers from those years would actually ever have covered that. I mean, I know this is a secondary point to the ethics of it, but actually as, as a, as a commercial enterprise, this was a very bad idea apart. Yeah, well
that was, I mean, when Clive Goodman was arrested, it was incredible. 'cause that was just tittle tattle for his blackout diary that he was writing at that point. And it was just sort of absolute nonsense. The story that led to his downfall. And the, and the arrest was about Prince Knee, prince William having a knee injury. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What about the defense of the senior executives? Wouldn't it have been cheaper? Sacked a lot of them. Throw them all under the bridge.
Well, that's been the really interesting thing about this. What Harry and Tom Watson and an awful lot of the other people who are still involved in litigation, wanted to prove was a corporate coverup.
Yeah. Which, as I say, we, we, we know there was, I sat through the trial, you know, we, we about the, the way that that worked and, and the urge within News News UK to keep a lid on this and keep it all silent before it all burst out in 2011, there was a lot of specific stuff they were gonna allege about, deletion of emails, which did happen on a stupendous scale. Again, not that new.
I remember sitting in the courtroom, well the email from, Rebecca Brooks was read out that said, that she wanted to eliminate emails that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation, in which an a, a news international company is a defendant, ironically, putting that in several follow-ups on emails, which proved to be extremely unhelpful.
But nevertheless, as we say, and we should reiterate, she was found not guilty of all of the charges against her at the time, which included perverting the course of justice. Yes.
And she was living with the man who went down as guilty.
Is that right? She was. She had an affair with the man who went down as guilty at that point. Yes. Right. Yeah. So they probably spent some time together. They did. We've got all full Jesus of that in court as well. Crus. He's
got a podcast though now. I see. It's worked out. Okay. Oh, everyone's got a podcast. Just another theme of the episode. Everyone's got a podcast.
Time now, if we may, I would like us on page 94 to go for growth. This time next year, I want it to be called page 98, and so on. This is something that's happening today as you hear this podcast go out. Rachel Reeves is making a speech at a secret location in Oxfordshire. any bets? did we squat Farm Farms in Oxford, isn't it? It'll be Clarkson's farm. Exactly. and it's going to be all about her attitude to growth. And she's gonna make the shocking announcement that she's for it.
she's pro it's gonna be about planning, regulation, energy, and trade. And this is the kind of wider context of British politics at the moment, which is the government desperately searching around Downing Street for a big lever mark growth, which it can pull as hard as it can for the next four and a half years. and the slight sort of trade offs and compromises that have to be made along the way.
It was the one legal objection. I had in the last issue there was a series of jokes about the Prime Minister's WhatsApp group in which someone in the group accused, Rachel Rees of sounding like Liz Truss and I know it was a joke, but it struck me as defamatory in the extreme . Andy: You'll get a legal letter from Liz Truss. Yeah, yeah. I should be very happy to send another out. it's the blob, it's the markets. Yeah. I'm gonna come
out and say that I, I think he's got a point and Stan, when he said it, when he said about they want to be a nation of builders, not blockers, and I think Reeves has got a point, if you look at the fact that we have struggled to build things like nuclear power stations, HS. Two anywhere near enough houses. Yeah, there is clearly some kind of massive problem about infrastructure in in this country, and we're being held hostage by vested interest. Can I talk about the bat tunnel?
I'm obsessed with the bat tunnel. Of course
you can.
Can I briefly mention the fact that one of the things that was gonna add a huge amount of cost onto HS two, the high-speed rail link, was this tunnel for bats. And it just turned out there were a huge number of quangos who all had to sign off various things. And there were some bats vaguely near the tunnel that when they researched into them, turned out not to be as rare as they thought. But nonetheless, basically the ruling was that no bat death was acceptable.
The value of a bat was therefore infinite and any amount of money needed to be spent on, on preventing their death. And part of me thought, I want to go down there with an AK 47 machine gun, the bats, and then we can just get on with building HS two. We've lost
the audience . There we go. And that's why Helen say you want to kick dogs as well. Come on, . What is Yes, but,
but the point about it was we could there. Yeah. So obviously when you build some. Infrastructure or housing, you are going to destroy some natural habitats and that doesn't need to be managed. But clearly the balance has gone wrong slightly somewhere.
Yes, and this is the whole tambour of the speech that Reeves is gonna be making today. There have been lots of slightly leaked announcements and soft launches and interviews and rollouts and all kind, all other kinds of, you know. Hints at what's gonna happen. But the interesting thing I think is that none of this is any different to anything Rachel Rees has been saying for the last two years.
with the exception of the budget in October, which was quite different in tone, you know, it, it raised, it raised spending, it raised taxes, but on businesses rather than on individuals. It, and it, it covered the gap between those two with a bit more borrowing. So . The argument from the government I think was that that was imposing stability and now we've reasserted a bit of stability. Now we can go for growth. oh,
it's stable now. Is it? Apparently so don't, yeah.
Well there was a piece in the last mag about the, the sort of guilt price rollercoaster in January, which a lot of papers got very, very excited about and then shut up about immediately when things recovered. So Reeves has been to Davos where she announced she was gonna go soft on non domes. all sorts of talk about really cracking down on non domes. And now we're gonna be just sort of gently squeezing them a little bit. she's announced that there's gonna be this new great program.
This is, as we record this, it's gonna be building houses, near train stations is going to be sort of automatically approved, I presume, because it's too difficult to build a railway, Yes. There a
default presumption in favor of planning. Because one of the things that is a problem is if you've got some existing low density housing, how do you convert that to higher density housing near places where it people actually want to live. Yeah, exactly. And the problem with our planning system is basically if you've got a house, you've got a vote. Right. Whereas all the people who'd like to have ads but don't have one, have no input into that.
There's no way for the system to register their desire not to pay half their salary and rent every month.
and the way it's been pitched as a huge battle between growth and net zero
one do you think she'd win? Andy?
I'm a fan
of both. No, no, but I.
You know, people are, painting it as a battle between Rachel Reeves, hard Iron Chancellor, concrete fan, Rachel Reeves and Tree Hugging Drip Ed Miller Band, who wants to crush your Range Rover, rip out your boiler and make you live in a tree. Neither of those is a really accurate characterization of, of the two sides in this. I think I, you saying polarized debate in Britain isn't very helpful.
The other thing we've been told for ages that that net zero is gonna involve lots and lots of converting things and building things in huge amounts of infrastructure.
who has approved more nationally significant infrastructure projects since the election than anyone else? I, I suspect it's Milland who's, who's waved through lots of very big solar farms. You know, the, the, almost the first thing the government did was lift the ban on onshore wind turbines, which was in place kind of defacto ban under the conservatives. So I think Labour's . Argument or certainly their pitch is that exactly. We like, we like building things.
A lot of these things are going to be actually very good for the environment over the longer term. The bit where it gets tricky is, and this is why the papers have been so excited about it over things like a new runway at Heathrow, that obviously is gonna be bad for. The country's overall carbon emissions. ban is not, it's really
....bad for a lot of marginal constituencies on the outskirts of London. Yes. Which are actually yes and no, in the sense they don't want flights overhead. But also it Heathrow and the airports are big employers, supplies of decent jobs in their areas. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of mixed,
but it's green Now, , I heard the Rachel Reeb saying that, , the planes flying overhead circling, if you had another run where they'd land quicker, they'd emit less fuel and everyone would be happy, the air quality would be fine. So it's both build and clean.
okay. I would like to take a task a little bit about that.
I'm just, just saying Andy, I'm just saying what she's saying. I actually,
but, but having flown back and forth in the US a lot, one of the problems is when you fly in overnight, you often do end up circling until the runways are allowed to officially open in the morning stacking. That is annoying Andy. It
is annoying, but stacking above Heathrow is not the main source of carbon emissions from planes that run on jet fuel, everyone. Right? I know it's irritating. It is not the, but I
wanna get to Preti In the arrivals hall, when you fly
back 5,000 miles from Florida, the extra three above Heathrow, it isn't very good for noise or air quality in London, but it is not the be and carbon wise. The other thing that re said. and actually we should just say, you know, like in 2008 when this was last mooted by the last Labour government, this was going to be a resignation issue for Ed Miller Band. He has this time around, wrote back and said, no resignation.
Absolutely no, no, no, no, no. So I think there is a sense that they are rowing together a bit more on this as opposed to rowing together. Yeah. Lovely. Can I ask a question
of you, which is, how does the shadow chancellor, the ex checker Mel Stride feel about all this? I don't, has anyone found him? I don't think anyone has asked. Or where is.
One of the ways the government's trying to pitch itself is as a government of trade-offs. They said, look, you, you know, you, yes, we're gonna cut emissions fast and we've done very well, but also we may need to build a new airport. You know, and it's is what they've done with VAT on school fees. They've said, well, it'll cost a bit more to send a child to private school, but you know, that money will go into the state sector.
And that's a, that's a trade off that we are, we're comfortable making. So they, they keep making that argument of these, these are grownup decisions being made, which is not a daft way of pitching it.
Or you can move to Dubai like Isabella . Andy: I think this narrative of we want to clear these mad obstacles to building that, that, I mean, almost everyone I know has had some experience of coming into contact, whether it's, you know, putting an extension on your home or whether it's like putting something in the garden, whether almost everyone has a story of. Like the mad sclerotic way things are done in Britain today.
I don't think there are quite enough NIMBYs, to fully, you're raising your eyebrows, Helen. There's a lot of NIMBYs. There are all, as they call them, lib de voters.
Yeah. But I think, I think the calculation is that either we, we lose a few constituencies by building pylons between Suffolk and London. We will, we'll lose some constituencies or we'll lose lots if the economy stays anemic and doesn't grow at all. that is Labour's calculation. I think that sort of blunt force calculation is, can I just talk a bit about sustainable aviation fuel? Yes.
Well, can can we stop you? Is there, is there any way, can, cannot stop
me. You can stop listening and that's absolutely fine. I'll be very used to it. We a special
jingle
for this man. . It's Andy's sustainable aviation fuel time. It is, it is. Just to pick up res on something she said, which was bollocks, which is that a lot has changed in terms of aviation and actually we've got a new thing called the SAF mandate, which is going to make air travel much greener and cleaner. So there is a thing called sustainable aviation fuel. It is made partly from leftover chip fat, I know, and partly from other, does the
smell of chip fat when you burn it, do, do plains now. Sorry, this is not as irrelevant smell. They smell delicious. Right? Lovely.
but you can make them from waste oil. You can also make them from captured carbon, which is not really an industry yet. It, it is very much in its infancy. The government has decreed, they're a big fan of a, a slowly ratcheting mandate, which they've got one with electric cars. They've got one with heat pumps, and now they have this with jet fuel, where this year 2% of the jet fuel sold will have to be SAF, is much lower in emissions. It's about 70% lower. You know, it's, it's a good thing.
But, the amount that exists there, you know, there aren't enough chippies gathering up their, the leftover oil . Right. It it that, that won't quite work. I mean, there are, there are various other I. Things that might be promising technologies. There's a thing called power to liquid, which is where you use Rene Renewable electricity, use that to separate carbon from the air, you know, use sequester carbon from the air and use it to split water.
And then you can create a hydrocarbon, you refine it, you've got jet fuel that relies on renewable electricity being very, very cheap, which is another problem in this country, which is that power is not cheap, partly due to the fact that power is set by gas. So res is wrong, that it's no brainer and it's really easy to do,
trying to find green reasons, to pursue a policy which is essentially and historically not green. Yeah. All I'm saying to you is, is is it possible for a political party, the, the Labour Party in this case? Yeah. To find a version, a narrative of this that isn't bonfire of the regulations. Let's throw all the red tape up and Grenfell burns down. I mean, in the public mind, throwing away the normal checks and balances, for projects is not a good idea.
Can there be a position between that and the sense of nothing can ever get built? Why does HS two take 300 years? I mean, the answer might be, in my view, this is a terrible idea. , and utterly pointless and, was done before anyone had invented Zoom. Where is this middle ground to be built over ? Andy: I think the premise of green growth, quote unquote is, is not a mad one.
And I think there is a sort of sense that we can't carry on as we are, we can't carry on not building reservoirs, you know, we have to be able to clear away some of these regulations. Yeah, we, the, like the, the number of legal reviews, which Stam has said he's gonna slash from three to one, that feels broadly sensible. And I think Labour are probably positioning themselves against the Green Party with their very much build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. Yeah.
And the, and the kind of degrowth agenda that they've kind of explicit and the
degrowth is who? Yeah. Yeah. Who, who I think their argument is will actually, you should fly less,
you should drive less. You shouldn't, you know, you should stay at home and, and not, yeah. And I, which I think is electoral poison unfortunately. But I think you're right. The, the thing that Labour have, have sort of set themselves up against what economists called the veto, which is the idea that we've now live in these quite stable societies. They're trending older people who've got assets and actually what they mostly want is things not really to change very much.
And so you do, as you say, with the judicial reviews, one guy can hold up a, a, you know, an infrastructure project for two years while a court date is available and by which point the investors don't want to do it anymore. there is definitely something, I think everybody agrees that something is wrong. Plus also for a lettering party, saying right-wing things is often. Very good in intellectual terms. 'cause people think, oh well if you are, even if you agree, then it must be quite sensible.
Yeah. Idea. And I think the idea of a lawyer calling , for a, a reduction in the number of judicial reviews. Yeah.
very
exciting. Revolutionary. Yeah.
Some of the more interesting people on the right who are the kind of growth people will say, sorry, growth people. We sound the mole people . But, but they're saying that actually the one thing we should really do is think about directly incentivizing people to say yes to local projects.
'cause at the moment there is no reason, like we, I, I'm have a go against NIMBYs, but what you are mostly talking about is do you want a new housing estate that will cause initially strain on your local GP surgery or transport links. Mm-hmm. So there should be a direct and concrete offer, whether it's reduced cancel tax, whether it's, here are the services, like the menu services you'll get in return. Here's the bumps. Your train service you'll get if we build all this stuff.
Yes. We need to start two gps. Well, this is the thing is like, we'll put
more water in.
Right, exactly. How did they get the NHS across all the gps? They stuffed their mouths with gold. We need to be going round bits of England and stuffing some, some gold in people's mouths because it will eventually pay off. I hope. And
this is the thing with energy prices too. Yeah. It's, it's a bit mad that Scotland generates a lot of wind power and that there's, there's kind of one. Corridor down the middle of the country is one, one . There's one little pipe for it to get down to a bit where a lot more of it is used. And often, you know, that means you just have to turn off large chunks of the wind estate. That's daft.
You know, so if you have cheaper pricing in Scotland, yeah, maybe you'll get more industry going to Scotland. a debate about that because obviously people who actually build the stuff want to have reliable prices for a long time, and it's probably quite important to get the stuff built as well. So, but
the interconnect, interconnectivity is, is exercising old sparky as we speak. . Andy: yeah. So what no one can say, obviously is whether any of this is gonna work. And, you know, we're four non-cost in this room. Matt, Producer Matt, do you have an economics degree?
No.
Five... five noncoms in the street. I
worked as an economist at the Bank of England for . Oh no I didn't. Sorry.
And I think to set you up on that, there'll be several publications who will say on their front pages tomorrow as, as, as, as we're speaking, it won't work. They'll be quite happy to Yeah, to seem to be the narrative at the moment, isn't it? And
that maybe those publications will lobby for a really big thing we could do to improve growth, which would be to remove tariffs and regulations, with trading with Europe. I'm sure in fact they'll be lobbying for that. 'cause that's a, that is a, a huge lever you could pull. And also a massive third rail that you should not touch on any account. But, you know, even res have said, oh, I might be interested in, you know, working on some kind of tariff free trading scheme with Europe.
So, you know, oh,
Ramoaner. , rejoin us. They're now called mm-hmm.
Yeah, . Helen: I can't live through Brexit again, please. No . Andy: This is Bre-entry, so is completely different . and the next thing to watch out for, I suppose on this is the 26th of March when the office for budget responsibility is going to deliver a bit of a state of the nation report, which won't, which won't say things are going terrifically and the economy's gonna grow 5%. But I think it, that all lends reeves a bit of power to say, we have to do this, we have to rip off the plaster.
So that's the next thing to look out for. And
underneath the plaster is Liz Truss's face.
Horrifying. Okay, that's it for this episode of Page 94. Thank you very much for listening. We'll be back again in a fortnight. Until then, go and buy the magazine at private-eye.co uk or at your local news stand. Thanks very much to Helen, Adam, and Ian, and to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now.