Mandelson files and government WhatsApp culture

Thumbtack presents Tile Trouble Every single time I use my sink, I make eye contact with the uneven grout of my kitchen backsplash. The crooked corners eye me and I'm haunted by more tiling questions than I thought possible. What kind of pro can fix a backsprash? Can I replace one crack tile or should I replace them all? What ? What if I just use Thumb Tack? I can hire top rated pros, read reviews, and compare prices with a tap, all on the app. Thumb tack knows homes. Demo the app today . When you're a maintenance engineer in a beverage manufacturing plant, you keep production lines moving and quality on track because there is no room for slowdowns. With Granger's vast selection of high quality motors, sensors, belts, and hard to find parts, you can get what you need fast and all in one place , so nothing gets in the way of getting the job done. Call one eight hundred granger , clickranger dot com or just stop by . Granger, for the ones who get it done . Sky News , the full story first . He's now shown himself to be going after extreme right wing votes. What the question now is that has there been an over correction ? Probably in terms of some of the training at Lisa Path, that's going to come under a lot of scrutiny as well of what train ings of the responding officers have in this Henry Novak case. Hello and welcome to Electral Dysfunction with me, Beth Rigby. Me Retuth Davidson, and me, Harriet Harmon. And I must say it is wonderful to be back with you both because I last saw you in a whales field . And since then , I've been in another field. That's Maker field. Did you see what I did there? Did you like that ? Did you like that? Getting the lay of the land I will continue getting the lay of the land about the upcoming by election and I managed to nab Andy Burnham for a quick interview and that's in the feed from Tuesday so have a listen to that if you haven't already or you can head to Sky News YouTube to watch it if you prefer. It was held in the Wigan Table tennis club. And my mum who hailed from Wigan, actually from Orle, which is in the Makefield constituency was also a table tennis champ . She was terrible at all sports, apart from table tennis . And so it was sort of particularly poignant for me to be in the table tennis club in Makerfield. I don't think it was the table tennis club when she was a laugh. But anyway, have a listen to that and remember to follow our electrode dysfunction feed on your podcast app so you never miss an extra episode. Did you have a game of ping pong with Andy when you were up there? No, I barely had a chance to talk to him. Let it go game of ping pot. We should have done it. He did actually though and I'm going to put this on record. He has agreed to go running with me, but I said we're only going if we both wear micro shorts, which he found vaguely amusing. So it was verbal ping pong. We had some verbal ping pong perfect. Yeah, verbal ping pong. Yeah, how did you find him? Because I mean, in terms of watching it, I liked using my partner as a kind of focus group of one because she's the least political person in Britain and because she's Irish isn't like she's got no ax to grind in terms of of any particular party and she said that she sort of wanted to like him because she's heard so much about him and about how much he's an upgrade on Kirstarmer and all the rest of it. She said she found him quite tetchy. It's a really tight bar election. It's a tough race , and he is in a really tricky situation because he's got so many different electorates he's trying to talk to at once . He's got the constituents of Makerfield who's trying to ask to become their Labour MP having convinced the other Labour MP to step down to allow Andy Burnham to stand. So he's trying to talk to that particular selectorate , which are a very different group of people, really, to the other selectorate he's trying to talk to, which are labour members because he might want to run for a leadership race. Well he does. He doesn't know whether yet he'll get a coronation or he'll have to challenge Starmer . So he's in what is a rock and a hard place and I mean, Ruth how would you have handled it? Do you do you understand where he was coming from? Completely like I get the idea that he's being stung by the criticism, which is like you cannot look like you're taking the people for Maker Field for granted and it's just a stepping stone to something better because that's the one thing that will put people's backs up and it is a hard constituency to win. He's having to pivot to fight reform and kind of meet them on some of their ground in this, which is actually not where he would want to fight a leadership election because when you were talking about the membership of the Labour Party, it was the most euphemistic euphemistic way of saying a bunch North London lovey intelligentsia champagne socialists was kind of what you were explaining in terms of of a big chunk of the labour membership. So he is having to do lots of dancing on the head of a pen. What did you think, Harriet? Did you felt quite energised by it, didn't you? Well, I did, but just listening to what you're saying, I think you're right about the different audiences that he's trying to speak to at one and the same time . But also he's got to think of another constituency, which is MPs. He's got to appeal to Labour MPs. Do you remember the Denton and Gorton Farage? The reform thing was vote reform to get Starmer out. He can't say vote for me so that I become Prime Minister to get Starmer out. He just can't say that. So I think that's what we heard the awkwardness in the interview, but despite that, I think he did show he's got an ability, an easy way of communicating even when he's frankly not answering your questions, which is why he's shrinking away from doing national interviews because he wants to be able to just focus on the people in Mega Field who are his gateway to his next step. And to be fair, if I was advising him on his media strategy, I probably wouldn't put him up for national interviews either because of that. And it sounds like the reform candidate doesn't want to have national interviews either. Yeah, so look Rob Kenyan is running for reform and he is doing barely any media because there has been a slew of historical social media posts that have been very, very, very difficult indeed for him to explain away. So the point being that he has done one interview on a national basis and that was with Chris Mason of the BBC which was maybe two to three minutes long . I've also repeatedly request ed an interview and they just have refused to do it. So we did a constituency piece. I went and interviewed all the main candidates who spent two days up there. And I just this guy Rob Kenyan, he just wouldn't give an interview. But the funny thing was , we were like, Well, he won't give an interview. So we're going to have to go to Reform HQ and I'm going to have to read out this statement because we've got to make sure the piece is balanced. So we go, it's pouring with rain. We get there, we come around the corner and who is standing by his van other than Rob Kenyan. So I was like, well, gift horse mouth. Never look a gift horse for that. So I jump out of that , I didn't jump out because Finn, my cameraman has child locks on, so I waited for Finn to release me. I was like, I've got to get that man. I got to get him. I know. So I waited for Finn to let me out of his car . And then we ran over and he spotted me and I basically said Rob, will you do an interview? And he began to walk in and I was like, Rob , why should women of Makerfield vote for you? Why should women vote for you? And I put the quote to him and then he went inside and basically was not going to come out again until we left. We should always say as we do when it comes to elections that there is a full list of all the candidates standing in the Maker Field by election in the show notes . But let's go on to today because there's so much else going on that really demonstrates the dysfunctional nature of politics at the moment. So on this episode we're getting out of Westminster and we're going to talk about another megapolitical scandal involving a Peter M. That is not Peter Mand elson, that is Peter Murrell , Nicholas Sturgeon's estranged husband . He 's been trying to distance herself from his crimes of embezzling four hundred thousand pounds the SMP when he was chief executive. He was in court this week and we got what's basically a mega shopping list of all the things he bought with embezzled money. But we also want to talk about the political war of words on the unrest that has followed the murder of Henry Novak. That's the eighteen year old student who was handcuffed by police after being stabbed five times. So why has his death been politicised and why does it feel as if we're on the edge of a riot so often in this country? And please do send us your thoughts on that and anything else. And to do that, the number to message on the burner phone is zero seven nine thirty four two hundred four or you can email us at electoral dysfunction at sky dot uk It's bit of a different tone to start this week because we wanted to discuss the murder of eighteen year old Southampton student Henry Novak and how his death has been politicised because it felt very much like all the political leaders against Nigel Farage on his response this week and it's just been so revealing about our politics to see how different leaders have weighed in and argued over this young man's absolutely tragic, tragic death . But before we get on to that, Ruth, can you just give us a quick rundown of this story for anyone who's not been following what's happened? So this is the story of Henry Novak. He was walking home from a night out in the city , he bumped into a guy called Viktram Digwas and words were exchanged. He was then stabbed five times by Viktram. About ten minutes after the stabbing , Vikram was joined by his brother. They then called their dad telling him to come to where they were. The brother then phoned nine hundred and ninety nine to allege that there'd been a racial attack . So the mother and father arrive. Vikram Digwa, the guy who did the stabbing, tells his mum to get rid of the murder weapon. She's been convicted of assisting an offender. She's going to be sentenced later in the month . The police arrive, they handcuff Novak who's on the ground. Novak is telling officers I've been stabbed, I can't breathe. He tells them multiple times. He asked for an ambulance . And we've seen body cam footage from the officers , one of whom who says, I don't think you have me . They then realize that something is wrong because Novak becomes unresponsive. So they then call an ambulance . The ambulance comes. Henry Novak is pronounced dead at the scene. The original assailant, Vikram Digwa, has now been sentenced to a minimum of twenty one years and the IOPC, which looks into the conduct of police officers, they've opened an investigation into what the officers were doing when they arrived and arrested somebody that was on the ground and was bleeding out. And look, the body cam footage of the arrest of Henry Novak has been released to the public with permission from his family. It's on the Sky News website if you do choose to watch it . We're not going to play this on the podcast because it is very distressing and contains very distressing content. I did watch it last night and it is so it's it's really, really upsetting so you can you can watch it if you choose to. But it is a very, very distressing case and before we move on to the politics of it, at the heart of this is a senseless and utterly horrific murder of an eighteen year old in his first year at university starting life. I mean, you just can hardly begin to imagine how devastated the family must be. And one of the bits of video recording that was released was when Henry was in a lift on his way for a night out, you know, just getting his hair in order. And it was so poignant and so touching. He was a young man at Uni, you know, his whole life ahead of him. It's just an appalling tragedy and it's a horrific crime . And I think that's the kind of starting point. But of course, it's got very deeply involved in politics and has really shown up where people are in politics. And I think that's the point that Kirstarmer, the Prime Minister was making. He's he said to Nigel Farage, you've shown what you are now. Kemi Badennock stepped up and said, This is an appalling tragedy. There needs to be an invest igation, but we must have order on the streets. We mustn't have this mob rioting on the streets . Ed Davy, the leader of the Lib Dem, said the same , but Nigel Farage, who obv'ioussly feeling under pressure in the Makerfield Bielect from Elon Musk backing restore, which is further to the right of reform and worried about Rupert Lowe, who he pushed out of reform, trying to make reform more mainstream. He's now going down to the path to the extreme right and he was talking about rage and in the House of Commons , you could see other MP's from different parties saying condemn the violence, condemn the violence and he wouldn't do it because he's now shown himself to be going after extreme right wing votes and I think it marks the point at which he's not being mainstream, not trying to look like a future prime minister . He's looking like the fringe elements of Tommy Robinson again . So I think it's been quite a significant moment and this is just a terrible tragedy. Ruth, in the sentencing remarks by the judge , the father Mark , his Henry's father talks about how the family have been given a life sentence with the pain . His mother, Lucy, devastated, his sister, Olivia, spoke of her exceptional closeness to her brother . The father also said that he did not want Henry's murder to create division . I mean how have you felt watching this unfold over the past forty eight hours? I've been on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster with this. I chose not to watch the footage. I didn't want to see somebody die on camera and you know , we're all sitting here as mothers of boys, all at different stages. The idea of watching the potentiality of like so much life ahead of them and everything that they can go on and do and be and to have that taken from you, I honestly applaud the family for having the dignity to ask for calm in this. And then later on so I was watching Prime Minister Questions yesterday and Nigel Farage has a question about it and it was after he'd released a video where he was saying that our response has to be pure cold rage . And you know, Kirstarmer's had a pretty tough week with all of the Peter Mandels and stuff that's come out and we might get on to talk about that later in the pod. So he was about under pressure himself . I have never seen him perform better at the dispatch box. He absolutely smacked Farage silly and Farage looked chastened. I probably saw more of the character of Kirstearmer or felt like it did than I haven't almost any speech he's ever given just because it was so kind of from the heart of kind of like how dare you when not only how dare you do this but when the dad, when the family have specifically said do not do it. How dare you go on and do that to this family? And also later on that day , Kemi Bade knocked out a video where she'd taken clips of Farage's video where he's talking about what the response should be with rage and all this sort of stuff. I was like, no, actually, this is what your response should be. And I think what struck me is probably the first time the two of them on issues like this where Farage has gone t ing something and is really piled in, that they haven't receded, that they've actually stood their ground and that they've pushed back and they've done it in a really measured way. Just in terms of what Farage did, there was a statement that he put out. He suggested people should respond with pure cold rage . He spoke about anti white prejudice and he called for the promotion of the idea that white lives matter just as much as black Livesatter M. I mean this, goes back to I remember an analysis you did, Ruth many, many months ago where you said Nigel Farage has got this choice. Is he going to deepen the base of reform and go along with Rupert Lowe's extremism or is he going to broaden out the base of reform and go with a sort of more Richard Tys like approach? And it looked as though he'd chosen to broaden out his base in order that he could be in contention for being Prime Minister. On this he's made a very, very significant choice. He's made a choice to go right to narrow his base to double down in Makerfield. And as you say, Beth, it's because he's under pressure, not only from Restore, which is eating into Reforms vote, but Elon Musk who had backed reform are now backing restore in Makerfield. So he's feeling under pressure and he's going to the far right and finding himself back in the embrace of Tommy Robinson. And I think that it was a significant moment for Nigel Farage , but also a very significant moment for Kemi Badenock because she made a choice that she was not going to go down that path and I think she showed herself to be a very good leader of the opposition at that point . The one thing I wanted to ask both of you about what you thought about Starmer's response though, because in the chamber he said to Farage, when Farage said to him, it's a reflection of two tier policing in this country. He said, I do not believe there's two tier policing in this country. And then he went on immediately to criticize Farrage's response and Stararmer said of F age was his response has been to appeal for rage. That's his response to a father who lost his son and asked this not to happen. It shows exactly who he is. He said it's time for serious work , not rage and talked about questions being answered . But what I thought he missed on and I think he should have replied more robustly on, he didn't address Far age's question or assertion about two tier policing. He did not push back on that. He merely said, I don't believe there is. But there is, whether he likes it or not, a live debate in this country which Farage is tapping into about two tier policing in the sense that it started really in the riots of the summer of twenty twenty four where people felt that those protesting were being dealt with more harshly those that were going on pro Palestine marches, et cetera. And what emerged was the sense that there was two tier policing in which actually white people were being treated in a different way to ethnic minorities. I mean, that's essentially, isn't it what the charge is? Yeah, I think one of the problems is that there's going to be an independent investigation, the independent Office of Police Compliance, the IOPC is going to investigate the background as to why the officers didn't immediately recognise that he'd been stabbed, why they handcuffed Henry when he was dying. So I suppose in a way Kirstarmer is respecting the fact that he doesn't want to say in this case it was not two tier policing when in fact there's going to be an independent investigation . I mean what he could have done is said actually if you look at the Lami report about race in the criminal justice system , which was done not so long ago in twenty seventeen. That showed that despite all the progress that's been made over the years since the McPherson report , that still there is discrimination, racial discrimination against black and minority ethnic people within the criminal justice system, that that is a problem which still hasn't fully been dealt with. You could have said that, but I think he might have felt that if he said that he was preempting the outcome of the inquiry into what those police officers did that night. But the issue is and Ruth, I want to hear what you think about this because what struck me as he said that I thought the issue here is for lots of people watching this and watching his response and feeling that there is some sort of unfairness in the way different groups in society are being treated they're still going to be having questions about that. I e ve got to have the debate, right? You've got to have the debate about this. It has to be out in the open now, right? Yeah, I think the difficulty for Starmer is that he clearly wanted to get on to chastising Farage for his response and to demonstrate that there was a difference in better response. I think it would have been better if he had only done that and not tried to swipe away the question itself. If he just not done the thing of, I don't believe there is too policing and then suddenly got into that. If he just not said that first part and we could then have the debate away from the commons and away from the sort of the crucible that would be better because there is a sense of that. And we've seen in the last couple of days a lot of attention in political circles have looked at a particular document that was put out last year So it was the National Police Chiefs Council. It has an anti racism strategy to address some of the things that were brought up by other things like that. Stephen Lauren's case where a black boy was killed by white youth ands the structural racis m that the McPherson report that Harriet talks about identified within the Met Police . So this MPC, the police chief's council anti racism policy states , producing equality of policing outc omes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences with understanding that these will be racialized and with the aim of reducing harm , it does not mean treating everyone the same or being color blind brackets racial equality. So the actual guidance on anti racism says you shouldn't treat people the same. And I think the argument that Kemi Badenoch has been putting forward quite articulately actually is saying that the only way to have true equality is to have equality under the law. And also she said taking some of the politicized language out of this. She said, I don't particularly want to hear people going into battle under the banner of Black Lives Matter of White Lives Matter trying to separate us. Actually, the law should be the one place where every citizen of this country has equal treatment, equal outcome, equal all the rest of it. I think the problem is that we've not always had that. So how do you address differing needs a way that has equal outcomes, but also makes it feel like nobody's being treated differently. But what's effectively happened is historically because there has been structural racism and there has been worse outcomes. If you look at all the data, there is structural racism. There has been worse outcomes for young Black men in their interactions with the police to other groups in society, right? So there has been an attempt to have a correction so that people are treated equally and people aren't discriminated against . And I guess that what the question now is is that has there been an over correction? Yeah, and I think we've already seen the way that that's filtered into kind of other people. So we heard the inquest into the Manchester bombing. You know, one of the security guards had identified the bomber and he wasn't happy with him. There was something about him. He was fidgety, he was sweating, he was wearing bulky clothing, he had a backpack, like all that sort of stuff. And he wanted to report it, and he almost went to his radio and did. And then he said he didn't want to be seen as a racist for doing so. So it's that kind of that sense that you know, there is an inhibition and I think probably in terms of some of the training that police have had, that's going to come under a lot of scrutiny as well of what training did the responding officers have in this Henry Novak case because they were responding to a report of a racist attack. That's what somebody had phone nine nine said, My brother's just been subject to a racist attack. There was a white boy on the ground who was saying that you know, I've been stabbed, but their initial assessment was that they didn't think I guess that it was a serious issue. And that's why they handcuffed him. But then there's some of the response to that has been well okay, so why did you why did you believe one person but not the other? Just to go back to the summary of the sentencing remarks again because it was I found it very interesting because partly what the judge was saying about why might the officers not have believed Henry in that moment was that the murderer was to quote the judge telling wicked lies that his family, there were four people there with this narrative around what Henry clearly hadn't done . And then the other thing that I think it's just worth explaining because it certainly helped me understand better what might have happened in that moment. I'm not making any suppositions, but Henry was stabbed in the chest above his ribs and actually what happened was the knife cut a vein inside his chest cavity and actually what happened was as he was bleeding it was filling into his lung. It was not bleeding out of his clothing in a massive way onto the ground. Now normally obviously if there's a fatal stabbing, you would expect to see a lot of blood and therefore the police would clearly see he'd been stabbed and we as journalists we have to train for hostile environment training as part of our job s . And it was so interesting to me and I read this because it really resonated with the course I'd recently been on , which was we were told, you know, that Check under clothing for stab wounds check because sometimes you might be wearing clothing that absorbs blood so you don't see it or the blood is not coming out of the body. It is building up inside the body. Because when I read it I was like well how couldn't they understand he was stabbed? And then it made more sense to me that he was bleeding internally. So it wasn't immediately obvious. So obviously there's going to have to be so much more consideration of what's going on in this absolute horrific case and the IOPC will look into the context into which the police officers came. They'll look into why they didn't, as you say, look under the clothing, why they handcuffed him. And they'll also they've withdrawn , the government have asked for the guidance that Ruth read out to be withdrawn , but there will be a question about what guidance there should be and there will have to be looking at the evidence of what perception is because it's perfectly possible that there could still be race discrimination happening , but also there could be perceptions amongst white people that they're being unfairly treated. So I think that there has there will have to be a discussion of what the evidence is and also what perceptions people have because the police need public support and there'll also have to be a consideration of knife crime and that's something that Ed Davy, the leader of the Lib Dems called on for there to be a review of knife crime. I mean, broadly , fatal stabbings have actually gone down. So knife crime policies have been working, but clearly there does need to be reviewed. Okay , so one of the issues that will have to be looked at is the progress that's been made on tackling knife crime and the numbers of fatal st abbings has reduced, which is good, but still, obviously it's a major problem. And one of the issues that on knife crime is whether or not it does count as lawful grounds to carry a weapon that you are a Sikh and that this is a ceremonial knife. Now, it is the case that the knife that was used to fatally stab Henry was not a Sikh ceremonial knife, but there is the tradition of allowing sik knives to be kept as part of cultural and religious tradition. Same as there's an allowance of in Scotland the D,irk Old Ruth will know about this, the sort of knife, the dagger that's in the top of men's socks. I mean, and that these are a lawful reason to carry a knife. Now, if you are a chef carrying your knife to work or something like that. There's a recognition in the law that this is not carrying an offensive weapon . But actually, I don't think that religious or customary grounds for carrying bladed weapons should be acceptable anymore . It's perfectly possible to be a woman sik and not have to carry a bladed weapon. You could be a Scottish woman, you don't have to be carrying a weapon and I think men carrying weapons , whether it's traditional costume in Scotland or whether it's Sikh traditions, I don't think we should be allowing this anymore . I think if it's a work reason or something like that, that's acceptable. But I think we should move beyond the idea of male violence being recognised as an appropriate customary thing for them to be allowed to carry bladed weapons. I think all of that should go. This will now become a very live discussion and there is a lot of fear in the Sikh community about a backlash against Sikh people in this country and jazz sing er rep,resentative from the Sik h Federation sent us this voice note. Let's listen to Jazz . Serious questions need to be asked about the police, their operations, their conduct , but there's no taken away from the abhorrent and evil behavior of Vikram Digwa. With this he's also brought the Sikh community into distribute and into the spotlight. This isn't a Sikh community on trial, but it feels like it. It feels like the Sikh comm unity is on trial and is being challenged in ways that he has never experienced in the last hundred years of Sikhs being here in the UK. We've contributed to two world wars, fighting with our turbans and our Garbans on the front line and contributed to rebuilding Britain and playing a significant part in its prosperity . But all of that was thrown away and forgotten in one senseless act by one lone actor and one individual. Yeah, I mean, I think Jazz makes a lot of sense there. And I'd imagine that being part of the Sikh community, it does feel like a manifest unfairness. The idea that the community, that the community traditions are under the spotlight for one rogue actor doing a terrible, terrible thing, not even doing it with a ceremonial weapon. And everything that Jazz says about the Sikh community ha,ving, you know, being peaceable, having contributed to the defence of the United Kingdom, having contributed to the prosperity of the United Kingdom, all of that is true. And I think that actually in some ways , the question that Har riet raises about bladed weapons and the reasons for carrying them, whether you're a carpet fitter, you know, carrying a box knife to your work or whether you're going to a wedding in full highland dress and the skin du down your sock is either plastic if it's rented because you can't rent Highland dress with a with a metal blade anymore or unsharpened if it's like a family heirloom or whatever because it's not a sharpened blade. I think in some ways as a side issue . And I think that if that becomes the focus of this, then we've got the wrong focus. I think the focus needs to be on yes, we absolutely have to look at leasing in this country and what it's about, and we have to make sure that we have a sense that the public of this country trust the police of this country and they also trust the government of this country. And I think one of the things that you said earlier, Harry is, what's going to make this very difficult for labor is that one of the very first things they faced when they came in was those little girls who were killed at the Taylor Swift dance class . And then there was a lot of community unrest after that and the crackd from labor was really strong. People were in jail for some of the things they said online and it created a sense which has been fueled in large part actually by actors and agents in the United States, including Elon Musk and some of his outliers saying, you know, Britain's a terrible place. You know, you can get a suspended sentence for killing people, but you get locked up for two years for hearty words on Twitter. It really has had a corrosive effect on how the government is trusted as well and to have policing by consent , you have to have trust. But Ruth, you sort of say kind of be it carrying a ceremonial knife in Scotland or having or a ceremonial knife within the Sikh community it's a side issue . But for some people , they will say that's not fair , that's not a quality under the law. Like if you're not allowed to carry knives, there shouldn't be a carve out for a ceremonial issue or a traditional issue. Yeah, of course the fewer carve outs you have probably the more coherent the strategy is. I think in terms of the idea that because this has happened to Henry Novak, nobody can go to a wedding wearing a full Highland dress where there's no reported trouble ever. You know, we don't have to use it seems like the wrong response to this issue if I'm honest . But it's about people feeling that things are fair, isn't it? The reason I say this is I was watching something that was actually on the Southampton local news . It was online and it was two people walking along. They'd been at the protests. They were clearly very upset. A man and woman probably in their, I don't know, fif ties . They were just really clear. They're like no one should be able to carry a knife, like no one should be able to carry a knife . For them, it was very clear that you should just not be allowed to carry knives in this country and it doesn't matter your reason for carrying the knife, you shouldn't be allowed to carry it . I appreciate that if you are a chef, you actually do carry your knives for work purposes. Or a carpet fitter or somebody that's a delivery man that needs a box cutter or and then when you start looking at this and you start looking at where you've got to have it. So I think in England and Wales , it's a knife over three inch blade . But there are carve outs. You're right. There are carve outs for sea ceremonial weapons, there are carve outs for skiing dos,th alough typically they're only about three inches, so many of them would fall within that anyway. And again, unsharpened . But I think I think everybody would realistically want to say, yeah, of course let's ban all knives everywhere. And then when you get down to, so wait a minute, you're going to give a mandatory three year sentence for somebody that had their , you know, Stanley knife, who's a carpet fitter, for example, in their pocket because they forgot to return it to their tool thing and they were just walking to their van. Of course you wouldn't. That would be completely disproportionate So you know, the law is difficult. The law is difficult and that's why time has to be spent over it and that's why you have amendments and that's why you take soundings and all the rest of it. But I honestly think that the The response to this, the primary response isn't about seek ceremonial weapons or men in highland dress going to weddings , when neither of these things caused this attack? Well, I wonder whether there'll be a debate within the Sikh community itself. And you know, I've been down amongst the Sikh community in Southampton. It's a very big and very well established and important and well integrated community in Southampton and I do wonder whether the Sikh community in Southampton and London and other places themselves want to discuss whether they do want to keep that exemption for a ceremonial weapon . So I think that that debate needs to be had not about the Sikh community but from within the Sikh community themselves as well. Well, look, we 're going to wrap on that now , but please send us your thoughts in. It's a complicated, nuanced discussion, and it raises lots and lots of questions around a plethora of different subjects . So send us in your thoughts. We're going to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about Nicolas Sturgeon. Thumb tack presents Tile Trouble Every single time I use my sink, I make eye contact with the uneven grat of my kitchen backsplash. The crooked corners eye me and I'm haunted by more tiling questions than I thought possible . What kind of pro can fix a backsplash? Can I replace one cracked tile or should I replace them all? What ? What if I just use thumb tack? I can hire top rated pros, read reviews, and compare prices with a tap, all on the app. Thumb tack knows homes. Download the app today . Granger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building. You're managing all of them, and to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog, HBAC on its last leg, if you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Granger, for quality products, easy reordering and twenty four seven support. Call one eight hundred granger, click Granger. com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done Okay, we are back and we are onto the so called former power couple of British politics. That's Nicholas Sturgeon, the former Scottish National Party first minister of Scotland and her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, who was during her leadership , the party chief executive , and this is the mother of all political financial scandals . It goes further than the SMP. It's again about how our politics looks from the outside . And this is the week. We've also discovered how things operate with this labour government behind closed doors, which we can also come on to. That is the Mandelson files and politics operating across WhatsApps, but not just any WhatsApps, WhatsApps that miraculously disappear , but on Sturgeon, let's go back to that. This week she feels she is, quote, serving a sentence for a crime she did not commit, following the conviction of her estranged husband, Peter Murrell, for embezzling four pounds from the SMP and we had a message from Rob asking for our take on the interview she gave and whether it was her prince Andrew moment. So we can get into that. I mean, that was the interview on the BBC. She's only done one interview . She did it on the BBC on Sunday. It wasn't just the interview that interview this week. We got more details of Murrell's crimes to a court hear ing revealed how he created fake invoices , misused his SNP credit card and those of other staff and signed off all his own expenses. And we also got that almighty list of the things that he actually bought with all that money and pictures of the famous motor home. So the reason we got all of this is because it's a sentencing hearing. He's already pleaded guilty . At the moment we're getting the prosecution talking about it and then later on we'll get any statements in mitigation from Peter Merlin and his lawyers. And I must say that Nicolas Sturgeon has not been charged with any crime and she says she has been completely exonerated by the police investig ation . She says she was deceived and misled by Murl. And look, Ruth, as our resident Scot , I guess the question at the heart of the criticism of Sturgeon is whether she can be at fault politically even if she did nothing wrong legally. I mean , her claim that she knew nothing of the fund's misuse does it wash with you? Was it her job to know? Nicholas Surgeon has many political gifts and one of them is the gift of political communication. You know, she was under a lot of pressure for a number of days after the guilty plea from her former husband, Peter Murrell . And I think doing that interview, I think she will be generally quite happy at what's come out of it because the kind of headlines that came out of it were the quote, which is, I am not guilty of my husband's crimes. But I think that's not what the charge is here. It's not whether she was part of the embezzlement. I think the charge is that you know, it's not that she helped buy two hairdressers, three coffee machines, five smart speakers, six Nintendos, eight umbrellas, nine vacuum cleaners, and one hundred and eight rolls of toilet paper, which were all part of the list or egg poachers that were written off as ethernet cables and all sorts , is that she didn't carry out her fiduciary duty as an office holder of the party and of one of only three people that were required to sign off the party accounts and that despite the resignation of the Party Treasurer, three audit committee members, the party's external firm of auditors all saying that they were denied access to the information that they needed to do their jobs . So the charge isn't that she's being blamed for other people's crimes. The charge is that she didn't uphold her own fiduciary duty as the leader of the organization. So her framing of it coming out of that interview on Sunday, I think she'll be quite happy with because a lot of people are now looking the other way and it's natural. Like I shouldn't be guilty called guilty for someone else's crimes. Well, everyone agrees with that. Nobody thinks people should be guilty of other people's crimes, but it's about, you know, what you did and didn't do as well. So do you find it frustrating that she's framed it in that way rather than all of the issues you've just raised and not being pressed hard enough on that . I have swings and roundabouts in this. So kind of on a personal level , I can completely empathize with how difficult it's probably been for her. You know, it's horrible having, you know, police tents outside your house and people filming PC plot rummaging through your knicker drawer. And you know, I don't think for a second that she knew the depth of what was going on, but I also can't as somebody that's led an organization and has had to, you know, have reports from , you know, the party accountant and all the rest of it , I also can't comprehend in my own head the idea that if you've your treasurer quitting saying , I'm not getting access to the books, if you've got your audit committee doing that, if you've got your external firm of auditors walking away, like, why that's not raising red flags? Why you don't want to grip that? And I get that she was also running the country as well as running the party so that the party may not have been her own focus . But I still for somebody who's so all over the details , you know, I find it a really difficult thing to alloy myself with. I can empathize on some levels, but then I also have like a bit of inner rage on the grounds of playing the What if game? Like what if Harry Johnson had been chief executive of the Tory Party at the time that Boris Johnson was prime minister and leader and that she'd been spending nearly half a million quid on trinkets? You know, what would the SMP resp onse have been to that? And it wouldn't have been to shout misogyny because it would have been the women doing this and it would be, but the idea that Boris was, you know, somehow complicit and you know, so I think there's conflict there in some of the things that I'm feeling. So there's and there's also humor in this. Like it is funny that a motor home that is like a million feet long and is sitting outside your mother in law's house like and there's a window that looks onto it. You're saying, Oh, I never saw it. Never saw it two years I was going to visit my mother in law and I never saw that there was a caravan part there. I never saw it once. I found myself in some social media scrolling actually watching a video of a young man walking up to the house and going, this is where the motor home would have been parked. This is where you know you would have come around here. There's no way you couldn't see it. And I thought, what am I doing with my time? This is the guy. He's like a young lad. I think he was like a teenager or maybe twenty or something had seen Nicola in the Dunfermlin Azda. I used to live in Dunfermline, so I know exactly which Azda he's talking about, which makes it even more funny for me. So in the Dunfermline Azda, buying frozen pizza and some garlic bread and was being asked 'cause obviously you don't always see the First Minister of Scotland in an ASDA in Norferland and she was saying, Oh yeah, I've got a family that lives nearby. He's really, really good guide on this. It is a very funny video. So there's all this humor in it as well. Like writing off in the in the company statements that you've bought two fancy egg poachers but putting them down as ethernet cables is just inherently humor ous. I mean, Harriet, what did you feel? Do you have sympathy for Sturgeon ? Well for a start off, I mean the structure was all wrong as Ruth has said. I mean, it wouldn't pass muster in corporate governance or any part of government that or the private sector, that you've got a process where the leader has to sign off the accounts provided by the chief executive, but the leader is the wife of the chief executive. I mean, even if you've not got complicity , you've got a perception that there is not a check and balance there . And I think there's further questions the structures which are going to be addressed to John Sweeney as well. And there's a lot of bad feeling in the Labour Party as to why all this was somehow kept and didn't come out till after the Scottish Parliamentary elections . But I think that she was obviously at fault at not recognizing that not only should she not be closing down questions in the way that Ruth has talked about , but she should have been making sure that because there is that awkwardness that she was the leader married to the chief executive, that they put beyond doubt that propriety is absolutely assured . And she just didn't do that, which was a failure of leadership. As for in politics, husbands being blamed for what their wives are doing or wives are being blamed for what their husbands are doing . There's always an issue about the leader's spouse. I remember there being all these conspiracy theories that Cherie Blair was, you know, although she wasn't elected because she was married to the prime minister, she was really running the country. And so there is always this paranoia about who is the power behind the throne , which is very difficult to live with and I should think once it becomes dysfunctional in a relationship , that must be a terrible thing to see your whole life pulled apart in public and for have to sit in an interview saying I'm being found guilty of crimes I haven't committed. But you think of all the personal turmoil that's gone on behind that. So I feel sorry for her for the personal turmoil that in'esvitably gone on. That must be so painful and so awful . However , she failed in her leadership job of making sure that there were proper barriers and accountability. Going back to Rob's initial question, was that an interview she gave? Was it her Prince Andrew moment? I don't know. What do you think, Ruth? You've seen it up in Scotland ? I don't think it was, although what's interesting was there was some polling that came out in kind of the Scottish press afterward s that found out that only seven percent of people surveyed felt certain that she was telling the truth and a further fourteen percent gave her the benefit of the doubt. So that's only kind of twenty twenty one percent . And that's the sad fact that people don't believe politicians anyway, which is well yes, but there is a slight difference in terms of sometimes of the SMP. And what's interesting is that even SMP supporters weren't in that camp . So I think that but I don't think it's our Prince Andrew and it reinforced what people already thought. I don't think it's led them to believe further potential criminality has occurred. But in terms of a legacy for the longest female first minister of Scotland, in terms of the longest serving first minister we've had in Scotland to date , I think there was a potential view within her team and her camp that she would go on to do something at a higher supranational level, so perhaps within the UN or within the EU or something like that. And I think that's gone. I mean, I think in terms of legacy issues , this is going to be something that hangs around ? Okay , well that's Nicholas Sturgeon. Now down here in Westminster, we've had our own political scandals and dysfunction at the heart of the Labour Government and I should just mention the drop of fifteen hundred, yes, that was fifteen hundred pages live on television , of the Mandelson documents this week which gave us more insight into how politics operates behind closed doors, Harriet, I've got to ask you, what did you make of it? And also those Pat McFadden, the Welcome Pension Secretary's constant messaging to Peter Mandelson, what did you make of the drop? I think on the one hand , just to try and look at something positive for the moment, it is amazing that we've got a situation where the House of Commons where MP's can order the government and ministers to produce and put all their private communications in the public domain. I think that we should really be recognised that that is a very important and strong part of our democracy that that could actually happen. But then of course,, what it showed, you know, a culture of disparagement, of denigration, an absolute absence of teamliness . And I think the public expect and want the government to be a team working together and pulling the country together as a team . And I think whatever happens in the future to any of the ministers involved, whether it's Darren Jones or Pat McFadden or anybody else and whatever happens with the leadership of the party , I think that the public have absolutely totally reject instability , chaos, back biting . And whether it's Kirstahmer or another leader of the party, they have got to sort this political culture out . It's beneath them to have that sort of back biting . And in any other part of the world, in corporate structures, if there was that level of endemic back biting and disparagement, it would be regarded as completely dysfunctional. It should not be acceptable in politics. And it is like the film the thick of it. I mean, that's the trouble is we've seen it, we've seen it in the film and on the tele and that's supposed to be an exaggeration, but no, it appears not to be an exaggeration. That's exactly how people talk and I have to say I would never talk about my political cabinet colleagues like that because I would respect the fact that we are part of a team and we have collective responsibility. So I think they've got to look at themselves and answer the question not just what do we not want to be made public about how we speak about each other, but how are we going to work together as a team and how are we going to speak about each other and support each other, not constantly be sniping and denigrating and disparaging. But the reason one of the ways in which you build kind of collegiate and collective followership is by having strong leadership. And I texted you when all of this dropped Harry. The thing that struck me first about all of this was the lack of Kirstarmer in lots of these papers. And I can't work out whether it's because number ten has reacted lots of it or it's just not been in there . But I can't think of under Cameron or Johnson or Brown or Blair or may even if you had something like this , that the idea of what the Prime Minister thinks of this, what their policy position is , what we're trying to do for them because they've said that this is where they want the direction in this particular area to go. The complete absence of that from Kirstarmer is really, really striking. So I think the headline that is puzzling. One question I had in my mind is whether or not some of those emails or WhatsApps are being held back by the police because they've acknowledged that not all the emails and whatsapps have been published because the police have asked for some to be held back during the invest igation. That might be where some of those WhatsApp messages are, or as you say, Ruth, it might be that just he was not involved. I wonder whether there's the summer link to a police investigation . Others have been redacted because actually for much of that time in the first year he was so squarely focused on international issues and Trump and that was where his focus was. All of those messages in which he's involved or they're talking about things he's asking them to do have been redacted. It could be just because there is an absence of leadership, which is what many people have criticized. But the other thing that's fascinating is this thing about disappearing messages because now what's happening is the Prime Minister spokesperson said this week that the PM had disappearing messages on and a number of a couple of well certainly a few MP's have been making the point that Rachel Reeves who she said had disappearing messages on or Peter Carl who says that he had disappearing messages on. You know, a couple of MPs have messaged me and said, Well, he doesn't they don',t have disappearing messages on for me. And then the next question is, well, did they have disappearing messages on just for Peter Mandelson? And then what does that tell you? So there is a bit of a long tale of this. Also there's been a leak of Darren Jones' messages to Peter Mandelson. Now Darren Jones changed his phone when he went into this new job in government. So he certainly didn't have these messages to put into the humble address . I don't think that they would have kept them back if they'd had them given what they put in of Pat McFadden's messages which were deeply embarrassing for him . But then it's a question of well, who's leaking messages as well ? Well, I'm just a bit suspicious about disappearing messages because the question is in my mind, why do you put disappearing messages on? And I find it very odd if I'm wanting to track back a conversation I've had with somebody and the messages have all gone. And I can't remember what I said, let alone what they said because they've disappeared the message. And why would you disappear the message ? Unless you've got something to hide. And I think if you are doing messages because you're a government minister , you should be accountable for those and those ought to be available to be put in the public domain , to be in the public records, to be subject to freedom of information because these people are paid for by the public purse, they are holders of public office and we want to see what they're doing because we are the public on whose behalf they're doing these jobs . So I think that the idea of disappearing WhatsApps, I am suspicious about them and I you know, if I would have had my way , they would not have disappearing messages that would not be allowed if you