Why does Keir Starmer keep agreeing with Nigel Farage?

This is a Global Player original podcast. It is a new parliamentary term and Keir Starmer has pressed the reset button. a new beginning for a Labour government that's already been in power for 14 months. But will it make any difference? We've spent the first year sort of uh fixing the foundations, if you like, doing the hard yards. Rydyn ni'n newid ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud.

A new team, a new message, and the promise of delivery. But delivering what? Do they know the story they're trying to tell yet? Welcome to the newsagents. The news agents. It's John. It's Emily. And she returns finally after her long sojourn away. We thought you'd lost your passport, but you haven't. My passport and it's very nice to see.

Your passport and your pass, obviously both very important. It's good to have you back. I just wonder A month away I know you've been consuming the news while you've been away.

Does Britain feel different look different? Do you see it from a different perspective from having been out of the country? I leave you alone for five minutes. I thought you'd kill Donald Trump. We are, I promise you, gonna come to Donald Trump and whether we've killed him off later in the podcast. But go on, does Britain look different? Very.

Yeah, very. It's it's odd, isn't it, just seeing it from afar and sort of wondering where the country's spine has got to, actually. Well look, we have a sort of reorganisation. To welcome you back at the top of the government. It's very nice of you. Which is very good of Keir Starmer to give us a decent story when we've been scrabbling around in the undergrowth for weeks now, waiting for something good to happen.

And it looks like there is an attempt at a reset in the terms of Darren Jones being appointed to this kind of new title. in Downing Street as Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, no longer Chief Secretary of the Treasury, but Secretary to the Prime Minister. And Darren Jones, junior cabinet minister, has now got a very much more enhanced role.

right at the central government to deliver on Starmer's pledges. Yeah, you've got this new phalanx, it seems, who are all surrounding Starmer now. David Dinsmore has been brought in from the Sun. Tim Allen, bit older, but a former Blairite, seemed to be very good in his job some twenty years ago, good mate of yours, I know. You've got Darren Jones who may or may not be moving into a role that feels a little bit more like a deputy PM role, but they're insisting it isn't.

And I guess it's part of a beefing up the team around Starmer to tell his story for him better than he can. So What we discussed on the podcast last week when you were still on holiday with Lewis was that you know, but what is the story he is trying to tell? what are the clear messages? What is the driving kind of force, the narrative of this government? What is it that Keir Starmer wants to have achieved at the end of five years? And that has always sort of been rather

hard to get your hands on, to touch, to make feel real. I suppose we've had a hint of that today. Where Starmer has sort of set out three objectives they're gonna be the signs of whether success has been reached or not. And one is about You genuinely feel better off than you did before. You feel the effects of economic growth. Two is getting a grip on the migration crisis. Three

the health service working for you? Yeah, I was speaking to somebody very close to Starmer this morning and they put it to me like this.

They said the Labour strategy over the summer has basically been Farage is right, don't vote for him. Right? Farage is right, don't vote for him. In other words, they've been following in the shoes, even in the rhetoric. even in the sort of places that he's been trying to take the Labour Party, and then turning round and saying, But we're doing it better.

And it just doesn't hold water. And actually, Labour is clearly trying to find a place where it can be more courageous, a place where it can take risks. And I think the debate now is what that actually means. Does it mean Standing up to Farage or does it mean implementing reform policies more quickly than he can? And I think that is the definitive place that they've got to start choosing because

You know, this Labour Insider said to me, What has been missing over the summer, maybe even longer, is the values chat. That is what has been missing. So when Farage starts talking about deporting people back to the Taliban, sorry we can't care about all of that, sorry we don't care if there's Afghan women that have been escaping that, sorry we don't care if there are people who've been helping our armed services.

and, you know, working on behalf of of the military when we were actually at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. We're gonna deport them anyway. There's been no real pushback.

From the Labour Party. They've been very technocratic about this. They've been very technocratic about numbers or about what they need to do or about how they need to move people around the asylum hotels. But you haven't heard anyone say this is not who we are. And I guess You know, your friend Tim Allen, who worked very closely with Tony Blair, there are people now who who are sort of saying Remember how Tony Blair responded to Farage?

You know, twenty years ago, two thousand five in the European Parliament, he just cut through with a message that sort of appealed. To what British people think of themselves, which is like, we get the numbers are too big, we get immigration is a much bigger problem than it ever was pre-Brexit. But this is not who we are. Just a reminder of what he said then. Just tell you, sir, and your colleagues you sit with our country's flag, you do not represent our country's interests.

This is the year to This is the year. Two things. Two thousand and five, not nineteen forty five. We're not fighting each other anymore. These are our partners, they're our colleagues, and our future lies in Europe. And that I think is what's been missing. There's been no attempt to sort of say Do you like what this country is sounding like now? Do you like

what Farage is making you feel like right now, because we've lost that sense of who we are. So I think that it's quite interesting. I mean, you talk about my mate Tim Allen. I'm gonna reveal that last weekend I spent the whole weekend with him at his place on the east coast.

And I came back without the story that he was rejoining Downistry. So it worked. Tim, I don't blame you. I wouldn't have trusted me with that story anyway if I had to keep it secret But he knew.

I think he probably did know. But there were things he was saying. Look, he was very critical about a lot of what how the government was communicating. So there's a job of work to do there. But I am struck when you talk about two thousand and five that you have got Tim Allen, who was deputy to Alastair Campbell at the start of the Labour government, back in at number ten.

You've got Jonathan Powell as the national security advisor and some would say the real foreign secretary, Peter Mandelson as our ambassador in Washington. You've got Liz Lloyd, who was deputy chief of staff under Blair, back in all you need to do, frankly. Is put Blair in the House of Lords and he could become honorary Prime Minister. And there is an element of that. And so you've got all these people who were part of the Blair project.

now back in seats of power. And it's like Kirstama has tried for a year to get things sorted and is actually going back to the old guard who did things rather well. and maybe the communications will be better. But you know, Tony Blair back in two thousand and five

It was a different world we were living in. He didn't have a mobile phone. Yeah. I don't know what Tim Allen is like on TikTok, but you know, they're not digital natives. They haven't come into a world where everything was about, you know, the visuals before it was even about the policy. Now presumably, you know, there will be people around them, there will be kind of younger people around them who know exactly how to get this sort of stuff sold, and I'm not trying to reduce

you know, the whole of the workings of government or even its communication strategy to a TikTok meme. But you do have to think that they've got to be really careful, that they're not trying to recreate something. Recreate a band that broke up years ago when musical tastes have changed. I mean that that is the problem. I I think that that's a really real question. I mean, you know, David Dinsmore

was an editor of The Sun. The Sun's circulation years ago is nothing like what the Sun's circulation is today. Tim set up a really successful communications company, Portland Communications, which, you know, he sold a little while ago. The world has changed because of social media and a way you communicate on TikTok

on Insta, on all the other platforms, where you have to be seen all the time and create original content in a way that I don't know who I would point to on the Labour benches. Jenric's doing it well for the Conservatives. Farage is doing it well for reform. But who is the Labour person who is out there making us sit up and getting millions and millions of clicks? The only thing I'd say though is that this is about something bigger than that. It is about a story and it's about

a voice at the heart of this, I think, which has kind of been forgotten. And there are many places where Labour could have really kicked back and didn't. I mean, when we look at the immigration numbers, you know, Labour just has to say They were at two hundred thousand before Brexit. They've quadrupled in the last ten years, right? The Boris wave, Boris Johnson sent immigration sky high.

Now, arguably it was because he saw that post Brexit there weren't enough Brits that were willing to do the jobs and he wanted to open up the jobs. For other people to come in and do them. Nevertheless, that is a Boris wave. Have they pinned that onto him and onto his strategy? Had they pinned onto Farage?

the enormous economic suffering that came as a result of his last policy. Even he will not admit that Brexit's been a success. He just says oh it was somebody else's fault. Always somebody else's fault. And it does seem to me that when we start to looking at, for example, the ECHR and and we're gonna be hearing more from Yvette Cooper about the changes that they're considering, sort of opening places to push back on some of the judgments. Fine.

But you know, you've got Jack Straw, former Home Office in the Blair years, saying we've got to leave the ECHR and it does seem to me it sort of kicks off a Brexit muscle memory, you know, and without going too Nemo about the whole thing.

First they came for the EU, Brexit. Well that wasn't enough. Then they're coming for the ECHR, that won't be enough. Then they'll come for the Geneva Convention. That won't be enough. Then they'll come for the right to remain. And before you know it You get to the Douglas Carswell type tweet. which says it's time to get rid of his words, the abdomen.

And so as soon as you start leaning into this language, as soon as you start thinking, Oh, maybe Farage has a point. Oh, maybe they've got to do more. Oh, yes, we we must forget how strongly people think about it. Don't they realise that Farage's policies are not about creating a better Britain, they're about destruction?

They're about pulling things down because that is how you get into power. Really easy to be in opposition. Everyone wants to be in opposition because you just get to destroy things. You don't then get to have to rebuild them. And that's what he does. Just just for people who miss. The meteoric. and successful career of Douglas Carswell. He was a Conservative MP who then defects to UKIP. Just read the tweet because I think it gives a a context to it. Which is it is an extraordinary

thing for a former considered thoughtful conservative politician to say. So the tweet from Douglas Carswell um over the weekend I mean we should say that he was the MP for Clackton, where Nigel Farage now sits. and he was very much part of the Conservative Party until he wasn't and he defected to UKIP. And he just tweeted, From Epping to the Sea, let's make England Abdul free.

Now, Douglas Carswell clearly doesn't speak for the Tory Party or even for the Reform Party now. He lives in Mississippi and he runs a kind of think tank in America. But my point is, every time you think you're leaning into A good solution.

You're not. It's just gonna go further and further and further. And I just I think that it's incredible that we haven't learned that yet. Okay, so you say let's start with Brexit and the first they came for Brexit and then they came for the E C H R and then they you know, and then Muller.

kind of retort about Nazism. Oh I'm sorry, I mean I'm not remotely No This is not a Godwin's I'm not remotely trying to take us to Nazism. No. Just to clarify. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. But I do think that there the risk of going in the other direction

And there is a real fundamental problem in this country with illegal immigration. It is perceived by the population. And unless the politicians, start coming up with some kind of serious ideas and smash the gangs and stop the boats have made the situation worse, where there is a political sense that they're talking the rhetoric, they talk the talk, but they cannot walk the walk.

then you are going to have real protests taking place. And I think that the sense of anger about illegal immigration is real and I think the politicians are right to look at things that they can do. And you know, the ECHR was a treaty that was built after the Second World War and is it fit for purpose today given the problems that we face today? I don't think that is illegitimate to be looking at those sort of questions.

to see if there is something that can be done about it. And I don't think that for politicians to say, Oh for God's sake, we we don't need to talk about this that is what we got wrong over Brexit. No, I I I think the two are not are not remotely incompatible. Uh and I think to reduce it to that suggest that you have to, you know, do one or the other. I mean, as I said, the problem of immigration

Right, has gone from two hundred thousand to nearly a million, is a massiv you know, you can see that. You can see the numbers are too big. There is nothing that stops Keir Starmer from looking at how he gets that number down. Absolutely fine.

But I think this knee jerk which is, oh well Farage is suggesting that if we don't follow that, then we're gonna look like the ones that are out of touch, is completely wrong. I mean, Jeremy Hunt, funnily enough, in his book, when we talked to him a few months ago, He was saying that Starmer should be the one in charge as a as a former director of prosecutions, he should be in charge of helping to rewrite the ECHR. I have no problem with that. Absolutely, right?

If there are places where you can tighten, if there are places where you can re examine, if you do want to say we're no longer in nineteen fifty two, we're now in in twenty twenty five. A hundred percent I don't think that laws should be stuck in in a sarcophagus for for sort of seventy years and not re examined. My point is that

there is a kind of a movement that suggests that if you're you know I mean your your question about the protests, right? We genuinely don't know we genuinely don't know how strong The public feeling was before Nigel Farage and Jenrik started telling people they should feel angry about them. I'm not saying that there isn't frustration with people in hotels. I'm not saying there isn't frustration with the number of migrants. But yeah, we genuinely don't know. The number of protests

Well we've seen it. But we've seen the op but we've seen the opinion polls of the rise and rise and rise of reform. This is my point. But that's because of a failure of conventional politics, the Tories and Labour. To deal with the scale of the Or that's the cleverness of reform. Reform points to the things that he thinks that people should be feeling really angry about and then before you know it, people feel angry about it. You can say it is grievance politics.

But you can't just say that the voters don't have a right To feel aggrieved. No. And I think that that is the kind of crux of the issue. That if you just dismiss It's not about dismissing. No. I've told you I you know, I can totally see the numbers. The numbers speak for themselves. But when you say there are these huge protests,

Because, you know, many of these asylum hotels have been used for the past four years, right? We haven't seen protests outside the asylum hotels for four years. So is it about Having people in your midst. Most people you know we live near to Exactly. We live near to shared social housing, which has got asylum seekers in it. But most people don't know, right? They know as soon as Jenric or Grease Mog

Or Farage stands outside a hotel and says, Why aren't you feeling angry? Right? So That's my point. But the Epping Forest protests outside the Bell Hotel, for example, started organically. They were not. I mean there was a someone accused of assault. Which is a totally different case, right? If you are worried about people in your community being sexually harassed or worse

by people inside. Of course, of course that's understandable. But that is not the same as pretending that the whole world is protesting about this. They're not. Well I I want to circle back to sort of where we started the conversation, which was about the shakeup in government and how you communicate this stuff.

Because I just want to play a clip. of a junior Labour minister, Education Minister, Stephen Morgan, was on Sky TV this morning and he was being asked about some hideous graffiti, racist You know, graffiti put on outside a Chinese takeaway in York. And this this is the exchange. But but now that is under threat. You know, people want to see real action now, not only to deal with migration, but also to deal with

This is the psyche of the nation in parts. You know, what can you say you will do today, tomorrow and next week that will deliver concrete change? I'm proud to be part of a government that is a mission-driven government that wants to bring out change in our country. On my brief, I've set out some of the things that we're doing to ease the pressures on parents and deliver meaningful change for children and young people across our country.

The Prime Minister wants us to go further and faster, that's what we're delivering, to make sure we fix the foundations of our economy and restore public services and drive growth in our country and that's what we're gonna be doing as Parliament returns today. It's really interesting that it's been termed graffiti. You know, we heard the Sky News and call it graffiti. It's actually and I'm looking at the picture now, it's three

St. George's flags, it says England, and then it says cat and dog and geet up. I don't know what geet up means. Get up, I don't know. But it's quite interesting that in this context The St. George's flag is seen as unmistakably hostile. You know, the flag that everyone's been saying, Oh, we love you know, we love our sports, we love our flag, we love our country. When you've doored it on the Dragon House, you know, a restaurant in in York

The intention is clear. It means go home. Yeah, but why can't the Labour Minister engage With the question. And also, frankly, if I hear anyone say we are part of a mission-driven government. Honestly, give me the whiskey and the pearl handle to revolve, or I'm gonna blow my brains out. It's just not talking to people. It's not communicating with what people's concerns are. But I think this goes back to the conversation that we're having.

If that minister is in a place where he doesn't know whether to say, This is not who we are, because half the people in the cabinet want to say, reassert our values, tell people who we are. I mean, right now there are more voters leaving Labour, according to the polls, August the twenty sixth polls.

going to more progressive parties than there are to the right. Just imagine a world in which Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana come along and they say they make a big speech to launch their party and they say This is not who we are. We have values. We understand people's concerns about immigration, but we're not gonna talk like that. This is not who we are. Then what does Keir Starmer do? Then what does Stephen Morgan do? He's completely caught.

I don't know Keir Starmer, but I'm imagining that he is more of the spirit of this is not who we are, then yes, we've got to, you know, move faster and get people out of the hotels even quicker than Nigel Farage, right? And I think somebody like Stephen Morgan is reflecting Not just how difficult they find the comms, but on the fact that there isn't a clear message from the top.

that has told the Labour story. If it was Blair, we know there'd be a story. We know that he would have found a way of explaining to everyone in the party that you can fight things that aren't fair And protect the values of the party you stand for. And that hasn't been done yet. Yeah, and that is the argument that Labour has to resolve internally. Yeah. I just think that there is a conundrum for Labour at the moment, which is do you lean and this is what you said at

at the top, you know, do you lean in to reform and think we've got to embrace the reform agenda and talk about all the issues that reform are and that the the greatest threat to Labour, the reason we're hemorrhaging support, is because of the rise of reform, or do you think the reason we're hemorrhaging support

is because you've now got Zara Sultana and Corbyn setting up a party, you've got the Green Party being active, you've got Sir Edie joining in the auction saying, I'm not going to a state dinner with Donald Trump. All those three parties now are positioning themselves

as being to the left and the value driven alternative to a Labour government that has lost its way. I mean, sure as hell, Starmer has some serious thinking to do. I don't know whether they have alighted on what the solution is to that. I would say over the summer there has been an absolute vacuum of communication about these issues about where they see the threat.

what they see the future is of the Labour Party. I think that Starmer has the most phenomenal job to do to get this message going in the right direction at the Labour Party conference. Because as we stand We do not know the answer to those questions. We know they're shitting themselves about reform and they're shitting themselves about what may be happening on the left. Yeah, but I mean we'd agree Don't vote for him.

Can't hold water. Electorally it does not get Labour to a place where anyone is convinced. So in other words, But it was only last week, Emily, that Farage did this big campaign launch, the sort of very big set piece occasion. And he talked about an invasion taking place in Britain and Downing Street wouldn't contradict that. Now maybe that is going to change with a new set of team new team inside Downing Street.

A crisis, an immigration crisis. Now, a crisis suggests something that has just kind of like overwhelmed you without anyone being aware of it. This is a problem. I mean there is definitely a problem with immigration numbers. There's definitely a problem with small boats'cause you don't want people dying at sea and you don't want them to be stuck forever somewhere in a system that they can't get out of and and never get deported if they need to be deported.

But actually the whole language of crisis, he seems to be leaning into that, as opposed to saying, can everyone keep their heads? Illegal immigration is three percent. Of immigration in this country. And if the immigration numbers are too high, maybe you want to look at what they were ten years ago before we left the EU. That's a good place to start. There's one other thing we just ought to discuss.

quickly before we move on and we've spent quite a bit of time talking about this reshuffle, and that is Darren Jones' position. Is Darren Jones the Now, in effect, the Deputy Prime Minister. Downing Street has been at pains to say, no, he's not the Deputy Prime Minister. What else can they say? But I think the question is going to reverberate because on an all sorts of levels.

Angela Rayner is going to become a slightly more marginal figure. Yes, she'll stand in for Keir Starmer at Prime Minister's questions when Starmer is away at some international conference or other. But realistically, Darren Jones is going to be sitting in on all the committees, all the big decision making. And I think he is being given a considerable amount of power. over strategy and the day to day direction of the government and how you deliver

And a lot of people would say, Well, that is the deputy prime minister's job. He's good at fighting fires, isn't he, Darren Jones? I mean we've had him on a number of times, normally around the budget.

And very calm and He is very calm and he just sort of yeah, he can sort of batter things down, bash things down. The proof of this w is gonna be longer term when we see what changes it's made. I I just worry that an awful lot of people will have a look at this on social media or wherever they get their news and think a whole bunch of people I've never heard of have just been replaced by another whole bunch of people I've never heard of.

And what difference will any of this make? And that is the challenge for Starmer to show that it is different. Well, sixty five percent of reform voters don't recognise R Richard Tice. And he's the deputy of the party that they love. So I think it is not necessarily

a good indication of what the public thinks, whether they've heard of somebody or they can recognise somebody or whatever. I mean, the public responds We will be back in just a moment discussing Donald Trump, his bruised hand and what it tells us.

The news agents as vice president, you're a heartbeat away from the presidency. And your boss is one of the oldest people to ever be sworn into office, you're one of the youngest people to ever be second in line. Are you ready to assume the role of commander in chief? And why should Americans trust you to lead the country? Well, I've gotten a lot of good on-the-job training over the last two hundred days, but also say that the president is in incredibly good health. He's got incredible energy.

And while most of the people who work around the president of the United States are younger than he is. I I think that we find that he actually is the last person who goes to sleep, he's the last person making phone calls at night, and he's the first person who wakes up and the first person making phone calls in the morning. So Uh yes. Things can always happen. Yes, terrible tragedies happen, but I feel very confident the President of the United States is in good shape.

is gonna serve out the remainder of his term and do great things for the American people and if God forbid there's a terrible tragedy, I can't think of better on the job training than what I've gotten over the last two hundred days. I just imagine the tips of his fingers coming together in that panto villain If something should happen to him, I would be able to step in. Yeah, that was JD Vance, a few days before Donald Trump disappeared. It's a mark of how ubiquitous Donald Trump is.

Every day, every hour. We're seeing him in a you know, the Oval Office, on the South Lawn of the White House, in the briefing room, wherever it happens to be, he's there with a camera on him the whole time. And then on Thursday or Friday last week The White House issued its kind of what the weekend activities were for the president, he was nowhere to be seen. He wasn't going to be doing any public engagements, he wasn't going to be making any comments.

And the rumours started flying that something must be seriously wrong with him. And that we've noticed this kind of thing on his hand where he's got makeup on his hand covering up the bruises. And there's people thinking, well there must be something to that. There must be more to it than just he's got bruising on his hands and we've now learnt that there is something called chronic venous insufficiency.

Venus as in vein related, not Venus. Not Venus Williams. Or a or a planet. Or a planet. Yeah, exactly. Important to get that distinction. Caroline Levitt who I think to be fair, realised that she couldn't keep saying He's just got a bruise from shaking hands without it sounding ridiculous and so this venous problem i means that you don't get enough blood up from your legs and the heart slows down and so you don't get enough blood going round the body and all the rest of it.

I mean, it's interesting. I came to that story over the weekend and just saw the memes, you know, just saw that is Donald Trump dead and clicked as he would and was like, No, very much not dead. But I think it does feed into a couple of things here. One, he hasn't left Washington for about two weeks, which is unusual for him. I mean, yes, most presidents.

in the summer they go off, they do their sort of Cape Cod thing or they do their Florida thing or whatever, and he hasn't taken any noticeable holiday. But he hasn't left Greater Washington. for nearly three weeks. Even when he's been playing golf, it's been kind of, you know, Virginia, which is forty minutes away.

So you could make that into a sort of argument for is he is he staying close to something? You know, is he is he reluctant to go too far at the moment? I think the Alaska trip was the last big trip he did. And there's also this question which I think is more pertinent perhaps, which is Well, given how quick they were to jump down the Democrats' throat at every single image of Biden

Yeah, the Democrats are just having a field day saying don't understand the puffy face, don't understand the bruised hand, don't understand the sort of thick ankles and the swollen calves. What's going on here? Why aren't you telling us what's really going on? There is meant to be this whole honesty about the

the state of the President's health in a way that we don't have. The Prime Minister is not expected to give health bulletins regularly and health updates. The President's physician is meant to give updates on the state of health. of the president. It happened under Biden, it happened under Trump, it happened under Obama. It was meant to happen regularly, so you couldn't have a position where a president who was really seriously ill

you know, it was being kept from the American public. All I would say from my experience of s sitting in on some of the briefings that have taken place about the President's health in the briefing room I think they lie. I think it's so dishonest. Yeah. I think there was they were dishonest about Biden. Previously, Ronnie Jackson, when he was the president's physician, lied about his health when Trump went to Walter Reed Medical Centre with COVID.

You know, and was hospitalized, they lied about his health and they're lying now. Trump has hit back on Truth Social and he said never felt better in my life. And DC is a crime free zone. Now why is that relevant? Well, probably because he wants to now detract from everyone talking about his health. But crime free zone presumably means that he's had enough of the National Guard

on the streets of Washington, is he going to send them home? Is he going to say, Enough is enough, we've reached our goal? Or is he just trying to divert attention from something that is deeply uncomfortable for him, which is people talking about his strength or weakness. I think Trump hates questions that suggest that he is weak, ill, frail or vulnerable. I think that is Donald Trump

Through and through. He has to show toughness, he's on top of it. And if the questions about him being physically incapable persist, he will absolutely hate that. So you can bet that they will. We'll be back after this.

The news agents. So I don't know whether you've been watching the US Open Tennis Tournament at which I think Louis Goodall is in attendance this weekend and this week. So he's busy in New York working hard. But there was a most fantastic, appalling, terrible scene at the end of a match where one of the Polish players, who's won, surprisingly, gives his cap to a little kid as a sort of gesture of kindness.

And it's grabbed from the little kid's hand by this middle-aged bloke who turns out to be a millionaire CEO. I just love the video. Yeah, the tennis player is Kamil Mayshak and he sort of goes towards this kid and I think he places the the hat on the sort of kid's ball which is in front of him and the guy next to him just nicks the hat and says, you know, first things first. And what I love about it is that this has blown up into a

Is this guy, the billionaire, the nastiest man on the internet? His name is uh Piotr uh Zierek and he is a I think quite a famous sort of entrepreneur in Poland. And he's now had to take himself and his wife off social media because he's now being Vilified. Vilified, the narcissist man on the internet.

And it does seem to me I mean, look, you can have views about whether you should steal things from young kids. Personally I think it's absolutely fine. Do it the whole time. Yeah, always. Um particularly muffins. But I do think that that we've turned into this slightly obsessive meme culture, take Jumbatron, you know, the the ability of that one image. Image. During the Coldplay concert. To during the Coldplay concert, which sort of landed upon a couple having an affair.

to destroy basically three people's jobs, right? Minimum. And many m I don't know, more people's lives or certainly marriages. We've kind of found this way. Of turning these internet moments to the into something that that is so potentially destructive.

I mean the kid was fine. He met the tennis player. The tennis player he got a cap, he got a selfie and he's like exchanged email addresses and th you know, the kid's made for life now. I mean he actually needs to thank the billionaire for nicking the cap in the first place. Can I just tell you about something else about the US Open?'Cause I think y there's a new heroine that you need to discover because I've been watching a lot of US Open tennis, Taylor Townsend.

So most players at the changeover, they have an energy drink and they have a bit of banana and they g or an energy bar. She has a little brown box of sweeties. And she's just picking out a few sweeties to have at the changeover. She she is mateless there. On the tennis court. She is my my tennis spirit. Exactly. Right. We will be back tomorrow. It's lovely to have you back, mateless. See you then. Bye bye. Bye. This is a Global Player original podcast.