Audience Questions and Political Reflections

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Hey everybody, and when I say hey, I mean hey festival everybody welcome to a live episode of page 94 recorded here at hey so without further ado let's get into it first question for for all of you. We have a once loved, now hated Labour Prime Minister, came to office in a landslide, is now completely loathed, his legacy in ruins. Is there any way back for Tony Blair as the lonely, lonely Tony defender on the panel. So I grew up in the well, I was a teenager in the late nineties, right? So I lived through the kind of a new dawn has broken, has it not? I still think that new Labour record is really good. But the thing that we're talking about tonight is the fact that uh Tony Brows decided to make one of it. It was described as a rare intervention. I was like, I don't think I don't think it is, is it really? But um into the Labour leadership contest where he said a variety of things. The thing I think he said that was true is that Keir Starmer came into that Labour leadership, essentially painting himself as continu ity Corbyn? He then pivoted very hard afterwards to say, actually, I'm going to put the left back in the sealed tomb of Mandelson. Worked out badly. Yeah. If anyone can escape a sealed tomb is Peter Matters. But then essentially without a proper programme for government, without a governing ideology, you will snap back into a sort of wishy-washy soft left comfort zone. You know, that is a legitimate ideology, but you have to kind of make a case for it, not just it be the kind of default that you come back to. And I think that's the problem. The people around Starmer thought they were very clever that they said, well, we're not getting involved in these labour wars, we're not Bennite or Blairite or Wilsonite or Callahanite or whatever it might be. Castle We are shite. But as it's turned out that's the problem is that no one knows what they think. Which is interesting because if he wants to say hi, vote Tory, that's a different view for me. How did you feel about his thoughts on oil and gas, Andy? Loved 'em. Couldn't fault 'em. Um quite impressive on a on a thirty-ivef degree day to sign off an argument that says more oil and gas. That's what we need. That's the secure future we need. No, it's ri his views are consistent. He believes that we need uh more oil and gas. He believes we need to rip up the clean power twenty thirty commitment. He's proposing the same things you would do if you were a climate denier, and which in fact reform of the Conservatives are pitching at the moment. There is a reason that China are installing hundreds of gigawatts of tech uh basically one gigawatt is a large nuclear power station. China's installing hundreds of gigawatts of solar power every year. They are not doing that because they've had a a really inspiring talk from Greta Thunberg. They they're doing that for very hard-nosed reasons of their own energy security. You know, they d they are not dependent on a a mad choke point in the Middle East that can apparently be closed at any time. And they're doing it for reasons of cost. You know, China's electrified more of its economy than we have by about thirty-five to twenty five percent. China has overtaken us in the race to get things clean and efficient. Do you know I c I could tell that I've spent too much time sitting in a room with you because as I was reading it, I thought it's fascinating to me that he's very excited about AI. Now the Tony Blair Global Institute has lots of links with um with AI companies, and I think there is a genuine sincere thing there, which is he just loves the future. It's shiny and new and exciting. And I thought there's a really big contrast with why is he not excited about clean energy? Incredible strides of technological advance in the last decade that that one apparently is not is not exciting to him. Well 'cause none of none of the people he meets at international conferences are going on about that. What they are saying is AI is fantastic and because he's an enthusiast, he has no idea what AI is. I mean nor do I but uh I know I know on the whole it is n't good to encourage the end of humanity yourself personally. I feel that isn't a good policy. And also telling people what we're gonna do is we're gonna take away all your jobs, particularly, you know uh, your jobs uh in the audience, and in return we're going to rip up your environment and fill it full of data centers. How does that grab you? I mean that i if you just like bleak future apocaly pses, then Tony's your man . Also I just can't I'm just gonna get it out, my sister. Yeah, go on. Just vent. As soon as you see the words the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Yeah , for furthering the knowledge of Tony Blair. You just start thinking, what's this? And what are his two main points? Get closer to Trump. Even reform doesn't want to get closer to Trump. I mean how right wing is Blair now. But as you say, Helen, the point you are a fan of is that he's identified that you need to have a plan and execute it, even if that means annoying people. And that does seem to be something that's people feel is lacking. Whether or not it is, people really have identified the lack of a a message. We've had so many sort of missions and and what were there? There were the missions, there were the pledges, there were the milestones. I believe there were money there was sadly no revival of the Ed Stone. Um I think that's the thing. I I think it's quite hard to work out why Keir Starmer's approval ratings are so low and he's so hated. But I think it's the sense that there's it's i that he's vapor, that there's nothing there. And I think that that's the kind of that is the point I I take your point saying that stuff but on the domestic analysis, and I I was Tony Blair's only too keen to remind us himself. He did he is the only Labour leader ever to won three general election victories. Like he does know something about making and winning a political argument. And one of the things that Jess Phillips said in her resignation letter we took talked about in the last pod, was we don't want to have an argument, therefore we don't go out and make an argument. We're afraid to make enemies. And actually, Adam, it turns out they're listening to you because Keir Starmer's all the briefing this week was about banning social media for under sixteens and actually making villains out of the tech bosses. Yeah, the other thing that she said, wasn't it, was that th if there was a crisis, she would take advantage of it. And it's got a good good example of that. But she suddenly said, Well, why not this? And he's jumped in and kind of gone, that's his big thing, isn't it? But it does feel it just feels like there's an absolute sense of drift at the top at the moment, doesn't it? And bizarrely, they seem to think that the answer to that is to spend six weeks having a bike But there are I mean ideas are being discussed, which is at least you know so you whether you like the ideas or not, that it is forcing a lot of the party to to sort of have a chat with itself about whatever it might be, w about defence, about health, about Philip Gould's The Unfinished Revolution. So he was the pollster who was intimately involved with New Labour. And what they did was they spent the mid-90s going away and having all those arguments internally doing them. That was what we were told Starm was doing. That was what Sue Gray was supposed to be bringing in her like roadmap for you know not Armageddon, the opposite, utopia. And then they got in and they were like, oh, oh it's oh we're in charge. Oh no have you seen these finances? These are terrible. I wish someone said something. And yes, so I agree with you. It's good for them to have that argument. A better time to have that argument would have been in say May twenty twenty four, before they had a crack at running the country. Well what they were doing then was the definition they defined themselves by just saying, Well I'm not Corbyn. I'm very definitely not Corbyn, and can we just emphasize that I'm really, really not Corbyn? And then it sort of never got further than the party stuff did it? There didn't never seem to be a kind of like a a big idea and the Barack Obama hopey changey stuff as it's referred to just seems to be completely absent. Satoni in in the Blair Institute for further Blair ology said why is the Labour Party obsessed by the idea of finding a charismatic personality? It should be about policy. And this is from Tony Blair , whose main attraction was a charismatic personality. He seems to have forgotten Gordon Brown . No, I think he thinks about Gordon Brown a lot. What from Satonius? Okay , let's stay exactly let's stay exactly where Sertoni is. Um because at the time of recording many of you here will have seen um Nigel Farage, uh leader of Reform UK has uh five million excuses for why he took a massive donation from a Thai based crypto billionaire. The party's reform candidate in in the by-election has you know, there have been some reputationally challenging uh things that have emerged about him. Uh what you mean the the the social media posts. Yes. But in this by-election, the the really weird thing is the reformer being outflanked on the right. Yes, so Rupert Lowe's outfit, restore. This is going to be a really interesting test. So people who run focus groups say that restore is being brought up in them. It's, you know, it always a challenge in the first pass the post is it very difficult for new entrants, very host ile to new entrants. So he has essentially got the backing, the very vocal backing of Elon Musk, who's about as popular as gonorrhea in this country, but has a lot of money. Um, and also he has gone way beyond. I mean, okay, so you've already got a situation in which reform Zay Yusuf is saying we would deport foreign nationals who've got social housing. So that's you know we're already talking we're already in getting close to the Trumpy mass deportation zone. Rupert Lowe is bulldozed straight beyond that, right? He said something about he wants to take all immigrants and put them on a midge-infested island and leave the midges to it. Right? We're now at fully far right rhetoric. So the interesting question is for the other parties, it's electorally useful to have Restore exist because it will drain some reform supporters away in the way that the BMP would have done, right, if you think about where that party is. But in no way do you want to encourage the growth of a far-right party with that kind of rhetoric. So there will be this uh awkward dance though where people will be slightly keeping their gloves on about not wanting to qu ash this party for electoral reasons when they really should because letting it grow and fester will be horrible, you know, make this country horrible Adam, you did an event earlier, and one of one of the points reflected on was just how angry Britain seems these days. You know, there is a widespread mass it's not irritation, it's further than that, it is anger about the th the feeling that nothing works, that big bits of the state are not doing their job properly, lots of other people are getting away with it and you're not. It doesn't feel like anyone is voting for any sort of positive reasons anymore. Everyone is voting against things rather than voting for things. And even within parties, you know, the the the the massive swing to the greens, some of it's down to Zach Polansky being very, very charismatic and them sort of sort of coming out of nowhere as effectively a new party under his leadership. But an awful lot of it is because a lot of people in Labour are absolutely furious about where Labour sit on what Israel is doing in Gaza. And it's these single issues that people fixate on get extreme immigration on the right, that people fixate on that one thing which they're very, very angry about and they it just seems to me they're voting against uh. No one seems to me to be telling any sort of positive story about where Britain could be. They're telling us it's broken and it's terrible and it's awful. And surely that's our job as journalists rather than political But to go back to Sir Blessed Toblerone, um there was there was another bit where he talked about the allure of people like Javier Melai in Argentina, you know, Mr Chainsaw who communes with his dead dogs um through seances, as do we all sometimes. But uh and uh Giorgio Maloney of Italy and Trump where he said the normal institutional politicians they approach a wall in the road and they then have a kind of committee meeting to see how we could get around it. And then these other these populist right politicians just threaten to bulldoze through the wall. And that's what people are voting for. They want something to happen. And they feel that there are all these ways in which nothing ever changes, nothing ever happens. And I do think that does capture some of what you were saying . There was an analysis of the recent council elections which said essentially you can break down Britain into four blocks. If you're older and financially precarious, you're voting reform. If you're younger and financially precarious, you're voting green. If you're older and financially secure, you're voting conservative. And if you're younger and financially secure, you're voting Labour. And that's a huge oversimplification. But there is an alliance there between people who feel that their lives are not secure in some way and then they have the like well burn it all down then like why you know I've got no stake in this system anyway. You know that that I think is a very powerful force in British politics right now. But comparatively a lot question time But comparatively uh a lot of those things are driven by online media narratives that aren't necessarily true. So a a lot of anger is generated about issues which don't affect people hugely and which are not quite the same issues as those presented. So I feel what's different, people say, you know, what's different about the current situation is that people are allowed to vent this anger in very, very um blatant and toxic ways online, and then they bring it into the real world. And we haven't had that. And then they're suddenly shocked when someone says, Well, this unbelievably offensive thing you wrote, it's um it was a long time ago, and you go, it was last week. Uh and they go, I'm a different person. You think you're not though, are you? And then it was banter . I mean, you know, I'd have statutory statutory imprisonment for banter myself. Tough on banter, tough on the causes of banter. Yeah. And but these are just ways of saying um we've normaliz ed a way of being angry and furious and uh about things that doesn't necessarily reflect what's happening. And it's part of the reason you know the eye satirises a lot of the the mainstream narratives from the right as well as on the thing is because they have gone into complete lunacy and the Britain is broken narrative again it it sells well, nothing works, everything's useless. That just isn't true. And in a lot of spheres this is n't pangloss, that's not really my thing. Um but in a lot of spheres all that is happening is you are hearing the noise and you're not hearing anything else. And that I think becomes a problem. Well it's a lot of it is down to sort of what your algorithm serves you, and it serves you the stuff that is making you angry, but it serves you more of the stuff that you liked anyway. There's no sort of room for any sort of counter-narrative to come at that. I mean the number of people, Rupert Lowe is among them, who are absolutely convinced that the mainstream media were in it were ignoringing the child groom scandals for decades until Elon Musk stumbled over it early last year. I mean, was it 2012 that we gave the Paul Foote Award for Investigative Journalism to Andrew Norfolk for the work that he did? I mean, the reason people know about this stuff is because the police investigations that went on at the time and the journalists who wrote about them. Yes. Just because it had taken them that long to notice it doesn't mean it wasn't. And he wrote it in an obscure journal called The Times. It was on the front page. Lame stream media I call them . I do think it's hard if you don't uh consume a lot of this content just to realize how incredibly heightened emotionally it is. So if you're on if you're watching short form video, you know you're just getting stuff pumped at you. There is an established problem on X, formerly Twitter, of creators sitting in other countries, you know, like whether basically people who are sitting alone at their computer in somewhere like Malaysia creating clips about the kind of Islamic takeover of London. And you have this very odd situation, you know, I spent a lot of time writing about America, where you have Americans who live in cities with unbelievably high homicide rates, kind of going, is everything okay in London? And you're like, yeah. Some bits of it are quite nice actually. But they but they're all this all they get fed is basically Sadiq Khan's Sharia wasteland over and over and over again. And they're sitting in you know Chicago and then they're kind of they're they're worrying about our safety. And these you know these are incredibly high and there's another thing, um Jim Watson of London Centric bust open a ring of this. A guy going into houses in multiple occupation and filming videos saying these people are all Muslims, none of them speak English, they have a halal-only house and it's all social housing. And there is fundamentally no sanction on that. The social media companies aren't investigating moderating it. That investigation, it wasn't true. I mean the the people living in those houses were were not necessary. If that had been the case, that would have been down to him really. Yeah. Easy to find the culprit. But that's the kind of but that's the kind of thing. And as as Adam said, if you get if you watch one of those and you like it and it made you furious, guess what's coming along in a minute? It's four hundred more videos. I just I live in a fool's paradise. I really check that's all . The future of real estate isn't one size fits all. That's why WeWork has created a new platform built for a smarter way to work. A composable stack of real estate, services, and technology you configure for the way your business works today and tomorrow. Our team of experts are ready. Building end-to-end solutions for businesses of all sizes, from Fortune 500s to entrepreneurs. Whatever you need, we've got you covered. Unlock the only real estate platform built for a smarter way to work. WeWork. Made for work . Built for your business. With Whoop, you can focus on living better for longer, understand your sleep, optimize your training, and build habits that support your well-being. Woop gives you person alized insights into your sleep, your recovery, your strain, and the patterns that may influence how you feel. With more clarity and consistency, you can create routines that support you throughout the year . Add more life to every moment. Discover Whoop at Woop.com. Uh Helen, you said if you're feeling precarious or comfortable and if you're older or younger, now you didn't mention what happens if you're feeling precarious or comfortable and you So there are many people who are excluded from the matrix. Absolutely. But I think we shouldn't um you know, given given the day we're recording a song we shouldn't miss out the SNP. And I think And we know Plyde have done marvelously and congratulations to them. But um for each of you, what are your favorite items from Peter Merrill's I'm I I nearly said expenses but it's not it's not an expense if you've embezzled it. But d do you have any any top picks ? This is now shopping channel section of the evening. I mean the headline one that everybody's focused on is the £2,600 ak salt and pepper shakers. Because I just think almost no one else realized that what can you do to a salt and pepper shaker to make it like there was there was a pencil sharpener that was worth about a gram. How do you make a pencil sharpener that is worth that much money? Out of diamonds. Out of diamonds. My favourite one was that he bought and he embezzled a copy of his wife's book of speeches. Would have absolutely got a comp from the publisher. Yes. That's where I have some sympathy for him, because I wouldn't on Nicholas speeches either. It was the coffee machines that got me. If your husband embezzled a copy of your latest book, you'd be fuming with him. I think to be honest he probably wants freebies . I think if I made him go out and buy it, it'd be more fewer. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Now the coffee machines are amazing. And special um Nes uh special espresso, Le Cruse Espresso and Cappuccino mugs, a manual espresso maker, a coffee cup warmer, which was a thing I didn't know existed. But then at the bottom of the hand. Just a hand. After all the beans, also two kilograms of Nescafe Goldblend, which were worth 81 pounds 60 . Who was that for? That's when journalists come around and you have to pretend to be of the people. But I realized who he is at that point. He's the coffee boar. There's one in every office who has a cold compress thing that they want to tell you about how it makes the best coffee ever and it will change your life. That's Peter Murrell. I need other people's money. They managed to uh conclude this investigation after the election, in which the SNP did very well. And thank you to all the the Scots Nat supporters who've written me abuse over the years uh for ever questioning the the probability of of of the the leadership of the SNP. I mean it is extraordinary that we're talking about four hundred thousand pounds. Um the excuse given and a number of people are questioning um whether Nicola Sturgeon's account of this is in entirely reliable. She's been found innocent. Just making that very clear. But you know, said they had separate bank accounts. They were both earning top salaries. They were both earning about a hundred grand each. So after tax that's about a hundred grand . If your joint household income goes from one hundred grand to five hundred grand , you might notice. Now if you're the Scottish police, you launch an investigation which takes a very, very, very, very, very, very long time and only comes to its conclusion after it's far too late to affect the fortunes of the politicians of the time. This is pretty fishy. Scottish politics is very small, it involves a lot of the same people, some of them are married to each other, some of them aren't anymore . But the idea that you're first minister, leader of the SNP, you want to renegotiate the financial situation between Scotland and England and you don't know your husband's embezzled four hundred grand . Darling, there's a new camper van. Is there? That's lovely, darling. Let's put it in the drive. I mean it's put it in your mother in law's drive. The ninety three year old mother who didn't drive. Invertently. They said, Do you think Nicola Sturgeon was really cooperating with the police when she just said no comment for seven hours? And he said, No comment. Lovely. Lovely. Secret of comedy is timing. Very strong, very strong. All right. Well look, speaking of uh terrific crooks , we must turn to America. So uh Helen, you you cover a lot of uh American affairs. Um we're now how long? I think seven or eight years into Trump's second term, um just by vibes alone. Um how is it going and where are we in comparison with where we were the first time around, if you see what I mean? You know, a a year and a got a year and a bit in. Can you even remember what the the end of twenty seventeen, the beginning of twenty eighteen were like? They now the sort of miss of time. Well Trump has just I mean, talk about being a massive crook. He has absolutely plundered the American state. So he's got his sons involved in a crypto business. You know, he's he's doing deals with various Middle East and Gulf monarchies that seem to be basically his foreign policies been an extension of his hotel business. Um and you know, the other thing is he just has this situation now where he will just pardon people if they've donated money to him, which just sort of seems fairly just b obviously crooked, but it's sort of apparently due to a loophole absolutely fine. So um so the latest thing he's done is he's created a huge slush fund, well the Department of Justice created a huge slush fund, over a billion dollars, to basically pay off people like the January 6th rioters who've been victims of miscarriages of justice. Now you've covered some miscar riages of justice in your time. I would say that people who turned up hit a policeman over the head with a truncheon while dressed as, you know I don't know, it's sort of like a f Shamans. Yeah, shamans or whatever. And not m I wouldn't be the I'd probably put like the post office people slightly higher on the list than them. You know? So th I think that he has he has basically checked out of the American pre presidency. What happened is he came in with this blueprint for government from the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025. He went through a blizzard of executive orders, which all American presidents have come to rely on now, essentially, as a very cheap way of kind of getting things without having to do them through Congress, and then has just become wildly distracted by the Iran War. There's talk about them doing some kind of incursion into Cuba, but they just kind of don't really have the bandwidth for it, but they might do it anyway, because they're bonkers. And and he's meanwhile just I think also he's he he feels very lame duck in the sense that he's already got a gold statue of himself and he's just got a b he's building a huge UFC ring on the south floor of the White House. You I should say what UFC is, yeah. So I'm sure everyone in the audience is a huge fan of mixed martial arts. Um it's Ultimate Fighting Championship. So Yeah, it's not KFC. No. Although give actually he's more of a McDonald's guy. Give him time. But yeah, so the h the his way of this is almost beyond parody. His way of celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of America is he's gonna have some big burly blokes fight each other on his lawn . Okay . Is it is it is it are we kind of seeing America's greatest hits two hundred and fifty years in? We've got a war in the Middle East, we've got uh a Latin American invasion on the cards, you know, are we just seeing a an action replay? That's true. What have they what yeah. What have they made? One of them's gonna be dressed as Abraham Lincoln. One of them dressed as Saddlebussein. Yeah. One of them dressed as a weapon of mass destruction. More up for it now Okay, so uh and how's that how's that going down with people? Well his approval ratings have hit the lowest that they have been in either of the the two terms in the NYT Siena poll. So it's not it's really not going well. But the interesting thing is that I mean I was gonna say I was about to say the phrase you have to feel sorry for staff and then I realized no no you don't have to. You absolutely do not have to hand it to them. So they they they have mid term elections in November and there'll be lots and lots of seats um in the both the House and the Senate up for grabs. And basically he has used it as a a revenge tour. So anybody who's crossed him, he has endorsed their primary opponent. To the extent that the Republicans might actually just about lose the Senate in Texas, which has been very red for a very long time, because the person he's endorsed there is quite criminal. Actually technically cleared of all charges. Um yeah for the one for the lawyer. I don't know if we'll have to edit out you saying quite criminal and then just cut from you saying the person he's selected is cleared of all charges. That might I mean we're talking about that. That'll do the job, I think, and the lawyer's very happy yet. But y but that but but that yeah, that's because the incumbent Senator for Texas was sort of ninety nine percent loyal to him, but may occasionally have said things like, Sir, I don't think this war in Iran is a good idea. Right. Or sir, you did lose the election. So he's he's he's basically hoofed out a load of people out of his critics. But the effect of that is also they've got six months to run around slagging him off, so that might become quite lively in their lame duck session. But also they might actually lose. I mean you'd expect them to lose the House, might even just about lose the Senate. Which means which means he he which means that the Democrats then would control all the committees, so they can just subpoena all his people, mire him and stuff try and impeach him, all of that kind of they just throw sand in the gears of anything getting done. And he just can't get any legislation passed, which would be a problem if he wanted to get any legislation passed, but I think he just wants to invade things. He's just kind of he's just gonna jazz hands it. Is D more papy but three years early, is what they're saying. Very early, yeah. Um do you think he might invade America? In a moment of horrible confusion, he's pointing the wrong way. Him and whose army, yeah. Um Ian, how do you feel covering I mean the I the eye obviously covers a lot more British politics. What how do you feel looking at the state of American politics Do you ever wish to hunt that bigger game or is it just so depressing that you can't bear the prospect of it? No, well I've got Helen writing a uh a USI column every week, so I feel we're we're very much there. At one point readers did write in and say, Can you stop putting Trump on the cover? It's depressing. Um but then it's just too funny. Um I I I take that as read. But you say his approval r ates are low. What what percentage is that? Thirty seven percent. Can you imagine a British leader having thirty seven percent But then I suppose we don't have the same kind of political fandom for our me either either the Tories or Labour. Right? There's no group of hardcore Starmerites who go to all his speeches dressed as the border wall . Yes I guess it would just as Hadrian's wall. What would you dress as for a Keir Starmer spe ech? A serious question. I'm not I'm not moving on until I've got an answer from everyone. Okay. While you're thinking about this, I will say that this is a real thing. I went to a Trump rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, and they have all the people who sit in the front row who come dressed as uncle Sam and then they also have a guy who calls himself Mr. Wall who has had a whole bespoke suit made that looks like bricks. That's so just saying Ian you love a suit what you could have as you could have a clear stammer suit that look like um it would be free obviously could you go dressed as a tool ? Yes. A double a double act, you did a tool and a tool maker I think would be Ian, you had something to say in that was interesting about the good chap principle, which yes, no, I just noticed that American commentators who for years have said the British Constitution is unworkable because it relies on what the British snobbishly call the good chat principle, which means that people will behave well even if you don't write things down to stop them. Whereas the American Constitution is all there in black and white, checks and balances, we don't need this. And I feel now a slight sense of Schaden freud um in thinking, well we had the good chat principle, you have the bon ker's lunatic um constitutional uh checks and balances, which don't work. He literally doesn't care anymore. Yeah, and the I mean the Supreme Court won't stop him, he's got six three majority on the Supreme Court which is the arbiter. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, won't won't stop him. And you know, he he and also he's got this thing there where he plays JD Vance and Marco Rubio, so vice president and the secretary of state, off each other is like, which of you is my favourite son? Who is my who is my bestest? Because none of the sons are because he doesn't bother going to their wedding. No, I'm very busy this weekend. He said nothing. He did nothing the week the weekend. Yeah, anyway. Yes. Sorry.. Sad I feel sorry for them. I don't feel sorry for them. No. They did this for themselves. They deserve to be unhappy. Okay. So s do es that. Okay, so it sounds like the forecast is just m more of more of this. Is there is there any further he can go? Proposing that not only do you pardon everyone else who's ever given you money, but you pardon your Yeah, he said that he neither he nor his family can have their tax affairs ever investigated. I'm just gonna try and give us a tiny silver lining here, which is if he's confined to doing a lot of domestic embezzlement, much like Peter Merrill at a much larger scale, wouldn't that be better for Britain than him doing mad foreign wars? He's looting America rather than bombing places. Do they not go hand in hand? Okay, yes, I suppose it's possible to do both. There is a morning and an afternoon in the day, yeah. And then there's all night for him. Because no one's on truth social apart from mad MAGA people that it's not really understood. And the night before he went to China he I think he posted something like five hundred times. It was certain certainly in the triple digits. And he's obviously he's talk about actually Tony Blesh to have a little word with him to discover some of the dangers of AI. Because he now will just post the most obvious like AI slop pictures. He sees that the meme of him as Jesus that actually got him into trouble was just AI slop. It was one he did of um Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and Joe Biden swimming in sewage in the reflecting pool. I mean you he's just is your Facebook uncle. But then the things that things that you think must be AI slop turn out not to be. I mean he has genuinely put up a large gold statue of himself. Yeah. I mean it's Trump, so it's let's be honest, it's not really gold, is it? It's guilt. Guilt not a word Trump is familiar with. But the irony almost has given up, hasn't it? I mean Putin goes to C Chi and and Trump and his supporters say that's pathetic, a guy who's losing a war, going begging for hel p. You were there the week before Yeah, a trip I have to say a trip in which absolutely nothing happened. No. I mean really the kind of an absolutely astonishing you know the leaders of the two world superpowers and no communique, nothing. He got nothing out of that deal. But he saw a really big hall um the people's hall in China and he thought that's bigger than my hall . Not hall of money which is but uh and then he goes home and he talks about the ballroom again. Yeah, he loves that ballroom. He loves the ballroom . It's Greeko Roman Vegas . Sounds like it's Greco Roman wrestling. But I do hope they have him interred like Lenin in the ballroom one day. Can it be soon fitting tribute? The future of real estate isn't one size fits all. That's why WeWork has created a new platform built for a smarter way to work. A composable stack of real estate, services, and technology you can figure for the way your business works today and tomorrow. Our team of experts are ready, building end-to-end solutions for businesses of all sizes, from Fortune 500s to entrepreneurs. Whatever you need, we've got you covered. Unlock the only real estate platform built for a smarter way to work. We work. Made for work, built for your business. We should uh we should go to questions, surely, because we're we're running we're running reasonably low on time. Um so I think there are there are going to be some paddles uh going around the room, and once I see a paddle, I'll shout out the number attached to it. Number one. Hello Hello there. I'm I'm very glad you put the cartoons double page because I was losing faith. Excellent. But what do we do when we get our own bonkers Looney in in Parliament and in in the head of the executive in this country? Will you need to go weekly? I think we turf her out after forty nine days. No, I mean I I think seriously we we just emulate the American media. We roll over , um sell out to anybody with some money, sack the cartoonists and uh retire. Because that's American journalism at its finest. Good. There we go. Oh um how come my dad hasn't won the private eye crossword yet? Oh okay . Is he remembering to send his entry in? That's an important question because a lot of our readers think that it's rigged. Um and they think that some of the names are not genuine . And they are. And the repeated winner from the last three week the last three issues, um uh Mrs. Phyllis Hisglock is A is a genuine person who is very, very good at crosswords. So I hope I've made that clear. That was wonderful. Thank you both for the fantastic concision of your questions. Let's go to number two here, please. Uh you've been disparaging and scathing about politicians. Can you cheer us up a bit? Tell us British politicians that you admire and are doing a good job, please. Nice. I don't want to end anyone's career. I mean I I can name someone. I find it quite inter uh there's a I mean we haven't spoken much about the Lib Dems. There's a there's a politician uh who's recently elected um called Mike Martin who'd spent a lot of time in the army and now he's um he's campaigning a lot about water, so he's you know he's interested in turd of the week stuff. Um and um you know the Lib Dems are filling a funny space in British politics in that they're not really filling it at the moment, but they're potentially filling that space. And and I think they're they're kind of weirdly filling a role that the Conservatives might have traditionally done. You know, when Kemi Badenok was trying to be uh rude about the Lib Dems, she said, Oh, they they're maybe good for fixing the church roof, but you know, they're not really good for anything else. Lots of people really, really, really want the church roof fixed. In fact, fixing the roof is a metaphor for doing something valuable and doing it in a timely fashion. So anyway, nooks and corners, the column that talks about church roofs quite a lot falling in or being set Yeah. Anyway, sorry to Mike Martin for for Mike Martin Helen. Well I think the place to look is the select committees. Because actually that's where you will find people who've maybe come into politics because they're interested in a specific subject. They might not be massively ambiguous in the sense of like they've always wanted to be in the cabinet. But actually if you look at the work that they're doing, I think they're I mean we talked about it on the podcast before. Some of the stuff that they're doing in kind of terms of scrutiny. I mean even things like if you watch the post office drama, you will find that the MPs were very involved with that story. There is still a lot of quite unsung work that gets done below the cabinet level, I think. Absolutely. I would say David Davis, who, you know, is a Tory, not an actual bed fellows, he was Brexiteer , but his record on libertarian issues, particularly the post office and now on Lucy Lekby, he gets up, he makes himself unpopular, he keeps the argument going. There are people there. Another I mean I mean absolutely fantastic so yes, there are but, I try not to mention them too often it it ends their lives . Terrific. Shall we uh should we come to another? I'm seeing There's number three we're gonna do. Any advance on twenty five pounds think Nicholas Sturgeon will cancel her visit to Hay on Friday. Because she's running in the midterms . I think she's gonna set up a massive camper van with a load of coffee machines in the back . And the midterm the midterms? To say briefly, I think he will try and do a number of things that are below that level. So already the Supreme Court has um overturned quite a few bits of the Voting Rights Act, which is one of the things that guaranteed minority representation. All the way through this year, the Republicans and Democrats have been fighting about gerrymandering, essentially, to create lots more districts for themselves. The Republicans are kind of currently winning that war. They, you know, there are lots of state houses that have flipped too many more kind of major like Republican-friendly districts. So whilst I think that the splashy headline thing of him dissenting I'm not ruling it out . But I don't know if he's necessarily got the attention span to be supreme dictator for life. Um but I think there are lots of fundamentally anti-democratic things happening in uh