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. Later on in the show we're gonna be talking to Tim Minogue, the Eye's... I think we can say 'veteran' Rotten Boroughs correspondent about a lifetime spent looking at dodgy local government, up and down and across the UK.
But for now we're gonna be talking a little bit about... the media, as we so often do, in particular about how the press has gone a bit bananas over America and don't quite know what to do now, that the only thing you can talk about is America all day.
Day.
And there are lots of other things happening, but there is quite a lot of, news about the fact that it's Liberation Week or is it Liberation Week two? is
there a tariff on bananas? I'm, pretty worried by this intro.
So Adam, you, I'm afraid have to read a lot of The Telegraph.
I do. I read a lot of this, but the funniest thing is you see one of these few things where, the, press are pretty much united on this one. 'cause there's not much to say other than, whoa! Blimey, and God knows we'll be by the time this actually goes out in terms of e indexes and things. But there's a couple of columnists who've had a valiant go.
Simon Jenkins tried to do one of his slightly contrarian pieces where he said, actually, this might be marvelous, but didn't sound entirely convinced by it. And,
Nick Timothy, who's, happens among other things to be fresh ish conservative mp, he's a telegraph correspondent. His, piece was saying Trump is exposing the utter incoherence of star's economic agenda, which I thought was a pretty fresh take to have.
it's a long sort of way round to do that, isn't it? It's,
so there are people trying to fly the flag,
his colleague Tim Stanley said this morning, we were recording on Monday morning. Am I alone in admiring what? Trump's doing, it was just that rarity, isn't it? When there's a question mark in a headline, usually the answer is no. But actually in this case, yes, Tim, I'm afraid You pretty much are. And even he had to admit, by the end of his fairly lengthy, column in the Telegraph, that there's, he thinks there's about a 10% chance that this will all turn out well.
at least Trump's trying to do something.
It's a sort of systematic problem for columnists really, which is that the take that is Trump is bad and tariffs are generally agreed by economists to be a bad idea seems woefully basic. So you can see people desperately casting round to go, Isn't there a more exciting way? And I just feel like we've had this now for the both of the Trump terms is that lots of columnists have gone. Hang on a minute.
I know in some ways he looks like an orange fascist, but stop for a minute and think about whether or not he's the shocker system needs. And unfortunately he has just a habit of terribly, embarrassing those people.
Yeah, a lot of your readers will be pensioners, on these papers, and they pensioners traditionally quite like the value of their pensions remaining roughly where they are.
I like the, people who dug up the, Smoot Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which again, I thought, this is good. This is, at least worth a look at. But, my American friends tell me this used to be taught in American schools as the worst congressional act ever, which was putting tariffs up to 20% in 1930. Followed by something they all learned about, which was called the Great Depression, and which, he's gonna make the depression great again... as our cartoonist put it. So great.
it's gonna be the greatest depression ever. You do have to dig quite deep to find anyone who's got anything other than... 'oh dear.'
Elon Musk must have taken a particularly large dose of Kettamine, because he's, found almost nothing to say about tariffs at all. He did a, like a sort of video in which he said he hoped that one day there'd be zero tariffs between Europe and America. And You're like, yes, but the current policy of the man who's, prime Minister you're effectively acting for is, It's 20% tariffs on the EU. So it's. very much not that, is it Elon?
Andrew Kaczinski of CNN had this quite good joke, which was basically that Fox News were desperately casting around for transgender athletes to talk about, rather than showing like everyone else a ticker of the stock market just falling the thing that's obvious is that MAGA is a personality cult. It's not a conventional political movement. So whatever Dear Leader says today, you have to agree with.
And if in two weeks time he says, actually, I've made incredible deals with everybody and now I'm calling off the tariffs, then everyone then immediately has to, it's like proper, like Chemical Ali stuff, right? It Is, where you just have to agree with the latest thing the party has told you to believe.
Here, the, suddenly quite obscure awards events, it's the Olivier's, the theatre awards for the West End that does not usually make the front page after the weekend? This weekend? Hello? There's a huge feature on the Olivier Awards and not very much on plunging stock markets... in particular papers who do not want to cover it.
It was fascinating 'cause there was a, definitely a thing in, in, in more right wing papers here of after Trump was unexpectedly reelected, last November of going, hey, it was that sort of, you talked before about that bash the hippie thing on the left, but this was if the lefties are unhappy with this, must be a good thing. And actually, there were a lot.
Papers were on, very much on board with the, kind of culture warry side of it, and as you say, bashing trans people and all, that kind of thing. When it comes to the actual economics of it on, on, newspaper companies that are listed on stock markets and are, gonna see their shares suffering with everything else, I think gonna be a very different view of these things, aren't there?
it? the absolute worst thing is the fact that lots of people are affecting any level of surprise. And I think it speaks to what the problem of Trumpism has been, which is the assumption that he says batch it things just to get people to vote for him. But he doesn't really believe them. But he has always believed in tariff.
He was talking to Oprah about it in the 1990s, the guy he appointed Peter Navarro as his trade representative, as seems to have been the one who came up with this sort of slightly mad formula, where you divide it by penguin and then add on the number you first, in Guam. and he said this repeatedly on the campaign trail. Kamala Harris said repeatedly on the campaign trail, his policies will make you poorer.
And that you've still got people like, bill Blackman, the venture capitalist, who suddenly radicalized himself into, supporting Trump 'cause of university's Palestine protests Suddenly going, I hope cooler heads prevail. And you're like, no, you elect, the
you're electing the hot head.
was Donald Trump. So it's fascinating
there has been an effort to present it as well. He's been saying this for 40 years, as if this was somehow a, a good take on. And the last person I can remember who hadn't changed their politics for 40 years was Jeremy Corbin and actually generally said, I, it might be an idea to look at kind of world events and think about things that have happened in the meantime and may maybe some evidence, which definitely isn't happening with Trump. But, but
people are bringing up Brexit now. Did you hear this sad moment? Mark Carney's now Prime Minister of Canada saying, look, haven't we learned something from Brexit that instituting trade barriers is bad? And I like the fact that we have now become a cautionary tale of people who committed a mad act of self harm.
question. Well,
Helen has talked before about how all narratives start to merge now. so that if you start off talking about tariffs and fairly specific and you just end up in culture wars and somewhere else, and that's been very convenient for Trump and. a, failing of the media and actually to separate the issues and say, can we talk about this bit? And then can we talk about this bit? Because, they're not the same.
Yeah, I think that's true. The Brexit benefit, I think you can argue that Trump is treating us differently, but that's also to do with the fact that as an individual country, we don't have a big trade deficit with the us. And you could argue that our vaccine procurement was actually a lot more efficient than the eus. But if you're going to do that, you are going to have to acknowledge the other half of it, which is that.
Our economy generally would be in a better state if we hadn't unmoored ourselves from our biggest trading partner. And that's the bit, the other side of the scale, that I'm not seeing a lot of, acknowledgement
We, we found some fantastic floating wood, in the wake of the shipwreck that we all just put ourselves through. Yeah.
The other thing that a lot of our newspapers are doing now is a transatlantic straddling act. which is for two reasons, because the expansion of newspapers in recent years has not been in the form of printed newspapers. It's been online, and a lot of that has been America. both the Guardian and the male online have had incredible success over there.
And also the reason that other newspapers are piling in with the, with a American investment and American facing websites is that you get more money for advertising over there. So that's where the growth is. no one is making any money off advertising on this side of the
that might solve itself. 'cause the reason is, the adverts on the Atlantic website, for example, are beautiful. They're just that sort of net of portrait and luxury watches. And I think, God and then I remember that's 'cause Americans have got a lot of money. So that may now resolve
Not anymore. Yeah.
But also it means that there's a sort of editorial line about, 'cause the increasing feeling I get when I read I'm, to bring it back to my, my, my obsession, the telegraph is that a lot of it is being dictated by kind of reader comments on there that are not coming from people who we think of as being telegraph readers. They are coming from people. Either across the Atlantic who are mad Magis or Russian bots. Very possibly. But it's pushing the newspaper in a direction.
I was thinking back 20 years to telegraph as the, the paper of Charles Moore and Peregrine Worse to people like that. It's a very different beast now, isn't it? it looks the same the paper outlet. But the thing I always thought you could judge The Daily Telegraph I was the reader offers, which were absolutely accurate. They knew who their readers were. It was always shooting sticks or very, nice kind of cast iron garden furniture.
Yeah. And you look at it now and you just think what paper is out there that is that it, is selling and repeating the worldview of. Of the guys in the red chords and the Glas, where have they gone? Because that's definitely not what the
the red chords of all I'm afraid have been torn up to make red hats. Okay. That's
enough.
happened. Yeah.
but Make Cordy great again. That's where I wanna,
you can't tell a huge amount about media consumption by the adverts. Like I'm obsessed with, almost all YouTube podcasts are built on crypto and supplements as we previously discussed, So it's not a surprise that they're all anti-establishment. And so I think yeah. There is a very basic economic analysis of British journalism has just become a, an outcrop of American journalism for, not for ideological reasons, but just for purely
but it's literally across the board as well. the Telegraph newspaper splash a couple of weeks ago was, whether or not Mark Carney, the new Canadian Prime Minister, had, committed plagiarism in his Oxford degree. And you just think, this would sell very, well in Canada. But who actually, especially since the story was kinda shot down in about the fourth paragraph by someone from Oxford who said, no, this isn't evidence of plagiarism at all. It just seemed a very, odd agenda that's gone.
And part of that is down to the fact that paper is completely rudderless at the moment. it's. Been in limbo since when? How long? We've been talking about the, the possible sale of the telegraph
or three years?
June, 2023 was when? when it first went on sale was snapped up by Redbird. I, MI, who still own it. And the latest twist in that I have to update you is we did a podcast about him a few months ago and said, farewell Then David Montgomery. I ended that by warning. He'll be back. Don't worry. He will be back. Guess what? He's back. Potentially he's back in the bidding for the telegraph, with the help of, Todd Boley. Am I pronouncing that right? The, the, owner of Chelsea FC?
they're possibly coming in. Yeah. Yeah. Am I looking at my football experts here?
there is one thing at The Telegraph that is properly consistent though, in which I think they have shown as a real growth area, and that is headlines with, a particular phrase in them. can I just share a few of these with you? So I thought, Be fair Andy. only go back, let's say eight weeks or so, just see if you can spot the phrase, Unless Labour acts first, Britain's growth mission... is doomed to fail. Labour's plans to drag sick Britain back to work are... doomed to fail.
Labour's benefits cuts plan is doomed to fail. Europe's coalition of the willing.
Is it doomed to? It's
doomed fail. It's doomed to. Starmer's peacekeeping plan: doomed to fail. Europe's anti- Elon Musk space challenger... quite a long one... doomed to fail. Wealth tax... doomed to fail: in the seventies, and also again now. And I just think this is a really, I think we're gonna be entering a phase where every other headline in the telegraph and eventually every single one will, will start with those words.
but it also demonstrates my point. The, Telegraph these days just seems to be telling you how awful Britain is. I get the same feeling whenever I tune into GB news. It's just telling me that Britain is this awful dreadful how hellscape where everything is going horribly wrong. You think you've called cheapy news. got a union jack in your master. Are you not supposed to be patriotic? It's the
The part of being GB news is talking down Britain
absolutely is.
other people of talking it down. It's essentially an expat's view. I've always noticed this over the years, you expect that people who've chosen not to live in Britain anymore, but read the daily Express and drink large amounts of imported, British spirits. by about midday. They tend to tell you that Britain is a terrible place to live. They wouldn't know, they don't live there. Anymore but they do listen. and now in increasing to American versions of what Britain's
Yes. Richard Littlejohn was a real pioneer of this in retrospect, wasn't he? When he took to Florida to go, it's very rainy in Britain. I assume,
Can I ask one question
then?
Can I keep the confusion about buying the telegraph going in the joke section?
Oh, that's not going anywhere. couple of months. yeah. Because the condition that, is obviously very clear from Todd Boley and and David Montgomery's possible bid is that they ain't gonna pay 500 million, which is what Redbird IMI want for it now, not unsurprisingly, redbird. Who you'll remember with the, Arab Emirates backed, consortium who, bought the Telegraph and then were told that they couldn't have it. Not surprisingly, they don't get a newspaper for it.
They do at least want their money back, but everyone agrees that they paid massively over the odds on it. they, paid 600 million. they've since made back a hundred million from, Paul Marshall, owner of GB News as aforementioned who bought the spectator titles, which were part of the Telegraph group before that.
There's still a 500 million bill, which they are determined to make that, and this is the problem, is that no one thinks it's worth that no one is willing to hand the money over and no one can force red put to actually sell it either. So we are lost in this weird limbo, which even people at the, Charles Moore described it as being on the house arrest. Chris Evans, the editor, has talked about the inevitable sense of drift at the paper.
He seems to have absented himself entirely from editing duties to try and sort out the future of the paper. And it's left to his, deputy Robert Win, who's already tried to jump ship, you might remember last year, and go to the Washington Post. only for things to blow up there and, that paper to be proved to be in an even worse state. Under former telegraph, editor Will Lewis. so Robert Winnick came, back. So basically the person that got in charge doesn't even wanna be there.
our attempts to sell the Telegraph. Doomed to fail.
Right now we're going to turn for our second section of this show, to a story that deals a lot with America. Oh, no, we've done it. We've done it again. It's
gonna be Very British. Very, those eeb speed spiders are gonna get mention. Andy.
Okay, let's talk about abundance Helen, What is it?
this is a new book that is out from New York Times columnist ASRA Klein and my Atlantic colleague Derek Thompson. Which is about basically picking an argument with liberals about the fact that if you look in America at blue states and blue cities, it's really hard to build anything. Ezra Klein is originally from California, so this is their big flagship example. They've been trying to build high speed rail in California for what, like a decade now. Oh, To more than that. and it's really hard.
I was in San Francisco, it's where I wrote my, IUSI column from, and it is almost impossible to build, a public affordable housing there. the cost per unit is about 700 to $800,000. And why is that? there's a load of things. There's very tight construction unions. Which won't even let you build modular housing. when you get bits that are pre-packed, even though those factories are unionized, they're really against that. There are environmental regulations.
There are in America, there is zoning, which has an explicitly racist history. Most of zoning comes from wealthy white families who don't want houses of multiple occupation, which they think will be filled with minorities. so you know, all of these things that look like they're left wing principles, the idea that you'd have kind of quotas in the construction industry, all of that, everything gets kinda hung on. New buildings and infrastructure S there are kind of Christmas tree, essentially.
Like all of these things that individually are quite good ideas, like strong environmental protections, strong worker protections, social justice initiatives. But the end result is that people are still living under bridges 'cause there aren't any homes or whatever it might be. Or people are still in their cars, belching out fossil fuels. So they're basically at an interesting moment for the Democratic party while it's basically. Sobbing in its room alone.
trying to say, look, wouldn't it be great if we had this A positive vision for what we could offer to people that is not just about us stopping stuff getting done? And so Stan was really into this and it's interesting 'cause it comes I think mostly outta the YIMBY movement, the Yes in my backyard movement, which in Britain and America has been much more cross partisan. So this is fascinating. It's a political tendency that takes in everyone from.
Aaron Busi Of luxury automated communism now all the way through to a Sam Bowman who used to be at the Adam Smith Institute. So there is a cross party consensus in both Britain and America. It's much too hard to build new rail lines. It's much too hard to build new housing. And we've ended up with this sort of sense that things are stuck
But this is, this is followed by, shall we deregulate everything?
that's the problem. Why? And that's why they've explicitly addressed this to the left because there is a part of the, left liberal space that just instantly hears this and thinks what you are is like someone from the kind of, was it pro and chained? Was that terrible? The book from Liz Trusts and quasi Quaye, saying, which is basically let's make it really easy to fire people and send children up chimneys.
Yeah. Or the kind of Elon Musk do agenda, which is, why don't I just go into government and smash everything with a hammer? then try and put together something much smaller afterwards. This is
Dominic Cummings too. Yes. We can't entirely blame it on, the American, do you think, but if it started in the States, is it coming here? Is Starer gonna go with this?
It's already come here. If you listen to what, starer says, he says, we want builders, not blockers. He has explicitly referenced the EBS fleet spiders, which are for those. of you not intimately familiar. team. With the distinguished jumping spider, which is my favorite thing about them.
They're distinguished, like they've got little monocles and hats anyway, so they've been trying for a really long time to build more housing around EBS Fleet train station, which would be 17 minutes into London. Brilliant. Natural England has designated some of the area around the station a site of special scientific interest, and that prevents about something like about a thousand houses being built. It nukes the whole plan essentially.
And The reason they've done this is that they've found this colony of distinguished jumping spiders there, and also a lot of water beetles. Now, the kind of YIMBYs say, these only moved in because you've left this land derelict for so long. basically the way it works is if you're a A wango like, natural England, you don't have to take any kind of balancing account, right? It is the same thing with a bat tunnel. You know, that they, don't put a value on the life of a spider versus.
All the people who will then use the train, who will get to live in a house, all the people who won't use their car, which will improve air quality, which will help all spiders and So the problem is you have all these individual agencies that have their very narrow remit, which they execute really well, but they don't have to take into consideration any kind of se like checks and balances.
job is not to make HS two happen,
I just find myself incredibly sympathetic to it because which, we just can't build housing in this country. It's been a real problem because all of, I had this rant before, the voices of all the people who'd like housing are not represented in the system. To the extent that the who already have housing
are, we just hear the developers. Yeah. And then we hear the objectives. We never hear. A queue of people saying, I would like a house.
Yeah. it's, it is impossible to, hear the views of people who would've got a house but now won't 'cause they don't know it.
There's another really good example, which is the Mata food Market around Elephant and Castle. Are you familiar with this? And it, talks to the bias in how the reporting on this goes, which is, it's all being reported as Beloved Food Haul to be demolished to make way for houses. Actually, what's happening is that was a site that has been, they've been trying to redevelop since 2016. And Because it was otherwise gonna sit derelict.
They said, why don't you come and put these temporary pop-up food market into it? So now what happens is they've been again, yeah, advantageous business rates, for example, they'll have to move out for a couple of years and then they'll, in the scheme, they are there to, at the end of it, they'll move back in. But you'll also have 900 homes of which 300 are affordable or social housing. But all the reports in like the standard, the B, C are all food hall to be demolished.
we, like a beloved tradition that goes back to last week 2016.
and it's fantastic. the, quotes you get out of people who don't want something to happen are invariably better. I read a report in the papers last week of this, projected Soler farm will turn our village into a concentration camp. And I thought, steady on will it the phrase that gets used is a veto where lots of people get a veto, whether they're people who live in the area and, Naturally don't want it to change, or whether it's the, I think it's up to 27 bodies.
You might have to consult depending on whether you are near a cricket pitch or whether you are near some jumping spiders or, whatever it might be. There's
a bill currently going through the commons to put swift bricks. Have you heard of a swift brick?
is a tribute to a popular singer.
Yes. a Taylor Swift brick in
a popular satirist? I think they're Jonathan Swift. They're named after Yes.
God, I'm For it.
it's Jonathan Swift Can Nessun in your house. as you always wanted. no, but this is the idea that we want to encourage Swifts to Nessun. So shouldn't there be a regulation that says every new House building has gotta have a swift brick in it. And already, Brighton has this four buildings over a certain number of, stories told as well as bee bricks for solitary bees, which I have to say every time I say the first solitary bee, it makes my heart break. I
a lot of them ran in cells. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Try the honey. so Brighton has had these regulations for a while, having a lot of green counselors, and this bill has been introduced by a green mp. And the problem is that he had a professor, Quoting the guardian in 2022 saying if you don't clean out the B bricks, the a, the holes aren't deep enough for the BS. And also they can get infested with mites out competed. So it's not like you can just put a B brick in and job done.
There needs to be a whole kind of suite of B brick maintenance that you'd have to, do. and I presume probably the same thing is the. is true of the swift bricks, but there is this assumption that you can have, single things that can be added onto building regulations with zero cost. But actually what you're doing is just adding hurdle and hurdle and maybe, we should have some nationwide swift encouragement. initiative.
What's the theory allow For civil action as opposed to state action. So does it say we should all put thrift boxes in because there's a campaign to do it, not because. it's legally required. This is your Christmas tree metaphor, isn't it? Yeah. there's too many ball balls. It's gonna fall over.
I think That's the thing. It's about where the point of action is. And the abundance agenda is about, we need to remove barriers. We need to have a much more of a focus on outcomes. And this is where they would say that they distinguish themselves from, Elon Musk or, his Trust.
Their end outcome is they want a greener future, for example, they want to decarbonize the economy, but in order to do that, you cannot say that every single vol along the high speed rail track is gonna have to be preserved. You are always letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It's a really big challenge and I think I've certainly change my thinking on it because you're right. It is a fundamentally right wing hobby horse, the idea of deregulation.
But I don't think you can look at the British property development and housing market and say, what a triumph for the left this is, haven't we got incredibly green homes and everything is working out really fantastically.
I think there's one really interesting thing, which is that there hasn't been a big national infrastructure upgrade for quite a while now. So one of the more recent ones was switching from, , coal gas which was in the sixties really, and that shifted over from a much dirtier source of fuel to a relatively clean, that's still fossil fuel one, but that involved a, great deal of change. The government had to take out a lot of adverts in newspapers saying, you are being switched over.
This is going to be better. But that was a long time ago, and I think people have forgotten that the state has the capacity to do that kind of thing. And the, state also feels like it doesn't quite know. But the new planning and infrastructure bill, just to bring it back to what's being done here, does have a lot of quite, good measures. If you like this kind of thing, if you, don't, you'll hate it. But,
yeah. If you were going to write this book in the uk, the people really you'd wanna challenge with the liberal Democrats, Because the liberal Democrats have a huge variety of very worthy environmental and social aims. But what they mostly run campaigns on in each constituency is don't build any new houses here. And that's the, kind of A constituency who are being addressed by this abundance agenda.
the right already might believes in deregulation in a various number of ways, but it's people who want these particular outcomes saying that actually you are your local interests are often acting against the things you claim to believe at the wider national level.
the argument is always, yeah, but I'll definitely, renewable, but not, here, not this. no, Try over there. Try those bastards over there in the next village. they could, Yeah. but we used to,
that, Britain was alone incapable of doing this. this isn't
yeah, absolutely.
And that France was marvelous And that the French National, interests would always override. So they're railways marvelous. 'cause they don't care what anyone says. nukes everywhere. Nukes everywhere. suburbs, wherever they feel like, it. I'm guessing this argument was never terribly true. but are we now saying Britain is worse than America?
I think there's a big difference between blue states and red states. So the obvious differences between California and Texas, which are very close to each other, and Austin, where I was last year, actually went through a phase where imagine this house prices dropped. They said It could never happen. they have recovered again, but they were actually at one point building enough houses for all the people who wanted a house to live in one. Imagine such a thing.
And the building, this is weird thing about this from your perspective is Texas is building a load of renewable. energies Just because you can get government subsidies to build renewable, but the only place you can actually build them are in red states that have very loose planning places. So you ended up with all this weird green investment going into places that don't really believe in
it. It's not surprising at all. It's cheap, And the housing thing, the brilliant move the lots of cities in Texas have made on housing is. They have instituted a rule where you can change your single massive, the Simpsons style home, as long as it doesn't go over a certain height, you can turn that into, I think it's up to six flats, and that means you get six families living on one spot.
And unless you're in a, very, unusual conservation area or anything, that bit of deregulation has happened and it massively increases housing density, which is what you want near, say, places like train stations. You know the place to have your dense housing is near those bits of infrastructure. and that's, what they've done.
Yeah. But the, that again goes back to the kind of racist history of zoning in America because. what The people who've been blocking those kind of conversions are people who say, we don't want, students or low income people living in our, They'll change the character of the
Her Nudge. Nudge. yeah, Which
Which is often a somewhat of a dog whistle as you might imagine,
So is it gonna work? Are we gonna get abundance here, Helen?
the interesting thing is Angela Rena does seem to be doing a lot of stuff. She's called in a lot of projects, that have been blocked by local planning developers. I, think it would unequivocally be. A good thing.
I think it's, there's a huge amount of resistance to it from very, from now interest, which I, individually are usually things that I support, but I think we have got an acute, if you think about the fact of, the wages have stagnated in the last 20 years, but housing has become multiple times more expensive. That is just not a sustainable situation for a, democracy.
and you talked about France, and interestingly enough, if you look on places like TikTok, obviously owned by Chinese parent company. You will see American influences going to China and going, oh my God, you've got a train that runs through a building, and like they put this city up and it wasn't here five years ago. And so what people are getting are a lot of CCP propaganda because it's if you were 13 in China, you could buy a house.
And obviously if you were 13 in China, you also couldn't criticize the beloved leader that, may also be case in America too, See,
it does also strike me as being one of the things that, I always feel with this Labour government that just what are they for? New
Towns and like expansion and opportunities and a country that's growing again. Tony said, I wanna make Britney Young country again. And I think that, again, that's, an actually an optimistic vision, which isn't what we've had from Starr so far, which is we've caught no money and everything's terrible. Which may be true, but
it's, a good opener. But I feel you've, then gotta move on along a bit. does sound a bit that Home ownership.
I'm sure ki will go for it then in that case, won't it?
But, or Yeah. Even the. idea that Actually, renting doesn't take up half of your disposable income. I think that's the point. I think we have a, country that is in a rent, specifically a renting crisis.
the recent story of a Labour MP who had to the scandal was Labour MP has charged 900 quid for her. cat, I think it was, no, it was Cockapoo dog. Sorry. actually it was that she rents somewhere in London and her landlord has charged her another a hundred quid a month to have a dog in the home, which, she's allowed to claim 'cause she needs to rent a place in London 'cause it's not near her constituency.
But the story was very much sold as how outrageous. for the mp. Whereas you read it as this rent
landlord. Yeah, exactly. can I give you one last example of the, of what this reminded me of this Christmas tree thing of yours, Helen? Yeah. because that in the Bri in Britain gets called everything is as well. That's the other term that gets given to it, is
Everything is them.
there is, the bad news is like, trains have to be good for bats, can't they just be good for trains, as you were saying? And what it really reminded me of is bleak house. there's a character in that, Mrs. Jelly Bee. Yes. Who has a She has a cause. And the cause is Boria Bula, Gar, which is that she wants everyone, she wants to move poor Londoners basically to Africa, where they will grow coffee and that'll solve everything. And she has got one cause in life and.
it overwhelms everything else in her life. And when her daughter gets married, she says, what am I gonna do for a secretary with my Boria boli scheme? And she has a load of gruesome friends who all also have one cause and cannot see anything outside it. I think that was Dickens predicting in a way, the way the internet allows people to radicalize themselves. he's writing about the way that people can get really sucked into something and lose all perspective.
But at the same time, how do you balance that with the need to have people who know a lot about a subject being enthusiastic, wanting to get things over the line, you
in, his own case, I mean he was an advisor to various philanthropists on charity, including the Bette Cos who was the most richest woman in Britain and. I once read a list of his charities out at a, in the attempt to make People give some money, and he supported just about everything. Oh, really? Okay.
Oh, really? Okay. He was
the opposite of that character. And he was Phenomenally well informed. She also is very, uncaring about her own children.
un
which is another point he was making about people who are very, keen on single Charities.
Yeah, I think that's where I've landed on it, is that there's nothing wrong with having environmental charities or Quang goes who care about their specific things, but they should be invited to input into something where there is some level of overall sight. That's where we come to with the bat tunnel. Right. If I gave you a hundred million pounds to make life better for British bats would you spend it on. Like a bat reserve, that'd be adorable.
Or would you spend it on a, tunnel that we don't think even necessarily works next to a place where we don't know if the bats even are, and that's the problem. Is that for, each individual actor in this, they only have one set of interests. What government is supposed to do is balance a range of interests against each
each other. So what you're saying we need is some sort of equation or formula, aren't you? Which would balance, bat lives against human lives and homes and he's really good at coming up with equations or formulas. No, We could ask Donald to have a go. Couldn't we
Now for the second half of today's podcast, we have a little bit of sad news, which is that Tim and Oog friend of this podcast and the man who has been writing the Rotten Boroughs page all about local council fraud and waste and mismanagement and corruption for the last 26 years. Tim very sadly, is retiring from full-time duties on the rotten boroughs page. He'll still be contributing plenty, but he's stepping back from that particular beat. And so this is a little bit of a victory lap for Tim.
It's about some of the greatest stories he's ever covered. It's about what he thinks council should be doing. It's about why you only seem to see stories about councils being completely broke these days. so here's Tim. I started off by asking him which stories he was most proud of having covered.
I suppose it's a rather strange one, and it's the story of, a publican called. Jeff Monks, who was, persecuted, by the former East Northampton District Council, which is no more. his pub was called The Snooty Fox. he had. A row with a customer who claimed he had brought her the wrong bottle of wine. And, he said to her, it didn't, don't, doesn't seem to have stopped you. Drinking it madam. And things got a bit heated. She was barred from the pub.
then found himself being prosecuted by the local council for having, served at moldy ham. it was alleged. by him that the customer, had a, social relationship, at least with the leader of the council. or Had friends on the council, at any rate. this, resulted in this vindictive prosecution so in 1999 there was a court case at which magistrates imposed fines and costs totaling nearly, 32,000 pounds. monks couldn't pay that he hadn't got it.
It was the largest amount for any offense such offense ever brought against the sole trader. So he, got banged up in prison for two months, he won at a retrial of that case in 2015. and then there were two other prosecutions against him, evidence, one mouse sighting and one cracked pane of glass. they were quashed on appealing as far back as 2003. And the judge noted the curious fact that out of 7,000 inspections of food premises. carried out by the council.
Over 10 years, only four had resulted in prosecutions, three of which were against Jeff Monks. I'm proud that we stayed with the story and it's in in that tradition that private Eye has of nagging away at things. And so we returned to this story many times but the credit really goes to the tenacity of. Mr. Monks or Dr. Monks as he now is, And in, 2022, he, he finally won an apology from North Ants Council, the successor of East North Ants and, was awarded a very large sum of money.
we think about 4 million pounds. which is less than he said he had lost From losing his three pubs. Three. businesses. But, I'm pretty pleased about that one. I do the sort of human frailty stuff. And, The Tory Cabinet Minister for Economic Development at Eden District Council in Cumbria. Who, we exposed in 2016 'cause he'd attended, a Buckingham Palace Garden Party. he's very proud of his services to industry ob he'd got earlier.
but in fact he owed more than half a million pounds in unpaid tax to HMRC And,
could have paid it there, and then he did. He was with
He got, we gave him the cucumber sandwich award He did a thing which is quite instructive, which is, people often tell their local paper that, they're suing private eye and they're going to take us to the cleaners and all that sort of thing, which the local papers usually dutifully report but of course no legal letter is, forthcoming.
You've heard of it? Yeah. And I should say, for many years you've been doing the Rotten Boroughs awards. At the start of each new year, you sum up. the greatest examples of misbehavior that have crossed your desk in the previous year, and it's always an absolute highlight of the, the years privat imy is that page of, just extraordinary malpractice
we try and have a bit of fun. with it 2018, we gave the award of services to the ars. Yes, you did hear that. And CRO and council, which was Labour at the time They contributed 10 grand and provided, the venue for an arts festival, which featured performance inserting butt plugs And it was intended to demystify the anus, while others consumed laxatives and diuretics until they lost control of their sphincters.
It wasn't in person as it were, but There were microphones there so you could, oh gosh. You, You could hear the results.
Is this connected to CRO and now being the most bankrupt council
It went in the debit, in the debits.
part of that billion quid they owe Now. Is that
didn't it?
but we've all demystified the anus now, maybe it was worth it.
we had a vintners award in 2012 for a man councilor Shira hack. also known as the Brick Lane Curry King. Who had bankrolled the successful election campaign of Tower Hamlet's? Mayor looked for Ramen. in 2010,
old friend of, the Rotten Boroughs page.
A great friend. and Where would we have been without, it? empty. columns. But anyway, councilor Hark, lost his. premises license after the, his own council's trading standards. Department caught him selling cheap Italian plunk in his restaurants, relabeled as top quality Australian Shiraz.
The nice thing is it's all of this is Human behavior is very much like the definition, isn't it? Vice folly and Homburg of, what satire is meant to expose. And it's all in this page, isn't it? Yeah. It's
It's all
people being naughty and normally you finding out about it.
expenses are always. An issue. And, in 2018 we had the expenses King of the Year, a chap called Nathan Elvery, who was the new Chief executive of West Sussex County Council, and he accepted a 47 and a half thousand pound permanent relocation allowance, for moving to Chichester. but we found out, He hadn't moved out of his home in Surrey where he'd been living for the previous 12 years. Oh my goodness. I think that sealed his fate and he, had to go after a while.
And then some of the other ones we've done aren't so funny. But I'm still proud. We did, like last year, we exposed the then conservative leader of West Northamptonshire Council, Who, was a serial wife beater. going back over, 30 years, his, his first wife had tried to bring this to the attention of the counselors. And one counselor, one independent counselor bravely tried to bring this up at a council meeting and was shut down officers, by the legal officer and the chief executive.
we got hold of this story and we published it and the local BBC did a very good report, following up where they interviewed all these women on camera and the guy stood down as the council leader, but having a lot of brass neck. he stayed on as a Tory counselor and he only quit as a Tory counselor. After the then local MP one. Andrea lead some, to her. Great, credit, Said. come on. This isn't on. but he went to last, Christmases, north an Tory party.
Lots of cheers slapping on the back, and he still sits as a counselor.
Does that indicate there's a problem with accountability?
I, you might, say that. another one. from the same part of the world, earlier this year, we found out that a senior Tory, counselor called Matt Binley, had admitted to his Tory colleagues. Having had, underage sex, he wasn't underage. the young woman concerned was when he had been a police officer back in 2008 or 2009. And it just occurs to me there that three of these stories, the wife beater, the underage sex man and, the persecutor of, Jeff Monks, the publisher.
were all, it was, they were all from Northamptonshire. Now, what do we make of that?
It's, it is just extraordinary, Tim, the number of councils and the number of stories you, print each issue about the entire length and breadth of the country and the bad behavior that goes on in each of them, or the mismanagement, all of it. one thing we've talked about on the podcast before is when councils start their own. Energy company or start their own like Robin housing companies, energy companies, wars, I think there was a water Cup.
Just all sorts of these things and then it goes slightly wrong and then they end up in the whole, financially there's a big problem isn't there? With councils not having the money they need and then doing slightly. Risky things like this in an attempt to make that money back and, deliver services.
they are in desperate financial straits a few years ago. there was a craze for selling stuff off. You sell off buildings, sell off, land. which of course, once you've sold the family silver, you, that's it. so some of them have had, the bright idea, and on paper, it's not too bad. Why sell, 10 acres to a developer who's then going to give you a fixed sum for that And, Make a, ton of money out of building houses on it.
the sensible thing might be considered to, cut out the middleman, but as we have found in, Croydon, which, it drove the council into bankruptcy and Cambridge Council is having, similar problems now. you've suddenly discovered that housing developers and builders, they actually know what they're doing. And if you haven't got the, the expertise in house, it's, we, can't all be experts in everything.
And, in just the report from, their auditor's, KPMG, talking about Cambridge here, couple of weeks ago, the auditors said the council does not have the suitable skills and experience to effectively manage the risks associated with Their commercial private sector subsidiary, cause they have a wholly owned building company called This Land which is now. scores of millions of pounds in debt.
they got into the absurd situation where this land wasn't making enough money on its projects to repay the interest on the loans they had from Cambridge account council. So they borrowed. More money from Cambridge account Council in order to repay the interest on the loans. you know that, that's not good. why is that? it? It's, not corruption.
It's certainly incompetence in some form or another, but you could say being charitable that they've been driven to desperate measures by the fact that they are in the financial crisis that all councils are to one degree or another, and that is being caused by the parsimony of central government over many years.
I think we've probably got to the end now, Tim, and I'm very sorry. And I'm also very irritated because I'm thinking of all the dodgy counselors up and down the country who will sleep a little easier in their beds as you won't be on the rotten bearer's face anymore.
I hope not because I hope the page will continue on Of course. And go from strength to strength.
Okay. That's it for this episode of page 94. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks to Ian, Helen, Adam, and to Tim. Of course. We'll be back again in another fortnight with another episode. And just to remind you, we have a live show coming up at the Cambridge Literature Festival email podcast at Private hyphen eye. Dot co uk send us your questions, your burning questions about anything you want to know.
As long as it's about the news in some shape or form, we would love to answer them and we'll be answering them live on stage in Cambridge.
it's sold out in the room, but you can buy a streaming ticket if you like listening to this podcast. But you think it needs to be more visual.
You can get tickets, by going to the Cambridge Literature Festival website. The show is called Page 94. If you didn't know that already until then, please go and buy a subscription to the magazine. Thanks to you for listening, and thanks to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now.