132: Pod Baby Pod
en
January 29, 2025
TLDR: Ian, Helen, Adam, and Andy discuss Trump II, Prince Harry's legal struggle verdict, and Chancellor's growth strategy versus net zero, concluding that it isn't the opposite.

In this episode of Pod Baby Pod, Andrew Hunter Murray, alongside Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen, and Ian Hislop, dives into critical current events including the controversial re-inauguration of Donald Trump, legal disputes surrounding Prince Harry, and the recent British Chancellor's focus on growth amidst net-zero discussions.
Key Discussion Points
1. Donald Trump's Re-Inauguration
The team discusses the theatrical nature of Trump’s inauguration ceremony as he returns to the presidency. Notable aspects include:
- Speeches filled with bravado: Trump delivered several speeches, often vague and unhinged, hinting at the policies he intended to reverse.
- Executive Orders: The episode emphasizes Trump's reliance on executive orders to implement significant policies without congressional approval. This includes a proposed crackdown on immigration and a challenge to existing birthright citizenship.
- The Political Theatre: Trump's administration again turns executive actions into a spectacle, raising questions about the effectiveness and sustainability of such a governance style.
2. Prince Harry's Legal Adventures
A discussion on the ongoing legal battles involving Prince Harry, spotlighting:
- The Latest Verdict: A critical ruling in a trial against the news media about illegal activities tied to phone hacking, although limits were put on Harry's claims regarding certain outlets.
- Claims of Corporate Malfeasance: The legal outcomes reveal extensive unlawful operations conducted by private investigators for tabloids.
- Public Perception: The team reflects on the public's ambivalence towards Prince Harry, highlighting the complexities of sympathy in celebrity legal confrontations.
3. Chancellor's Dash for Growth vs. Net Zero
The Chancellor’s new push for economic growth is framed against the backdrop of climate commitments:
- Infrastructure Struggles: The political conversation indicates a battle between advancing infrastructure projects and commitments to net-zero emissions.
- Rachel Reeves' Stance: The upcoming speech by Rachel Reeves is pivotal for discussing regulatory reform and the need for building housing and infrastructure, directly tackling issues of nimbyism versus necessary development.
- Environmental Impact Consideration: Both growth and environmental advocates seek a solution that achieves building without sacrificing ecological integrity.
Insights and Conclusions
- Trump's Governance Style: The podcast delves into the notion of Trump leveraging media visibility against practical governance, raising questions about the upcoming political implications of such an approach.
- Legal Nuances: The discussions surrounding Prince Harry reveal a nuanced understanding of legal tactics within media law, indicating how the past tabloid culture still influences public discourse today.
- Economic Strategies Ahead: The conversation about future economic strategy underlines the pressing need for a cohesive policy that balances growth with sustainable practices, positioning the Labour Party as potentially reimagining their approaches to address both economic and environmental issues.
Final Thoughts
The episode leaves listeners pondering over the implications of theatrics in politics and the fine line between public accountability and entertainment in governance. As the Labour Party contemplates its path forward, the conflict between urgent economic needs and environmental responsibility is at the forefront of political strategy discussions.
In summary, the “Pod Baby Pod” episode invites listeners to critically assess the interconnectedness of media, politics, and public sentiment in shaping both current events and future trajectories.
ENGAGE WITH THE PODCAST
Fans of political discussions and current affairs are likely to find significant value in the lively banter and expert insights of the hosts. This episode serves to illuminate complex issues while keeping the audience engaged.
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Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm here in the Private Eye office with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Ian Hislop. We are here to discuss all manner of news that has broken out since the last issue of the magazine went to print. Chief among which and on the cover of the magazine is the inauguration of Donald Trump as the president of the USA again. If it was a wedding, the kind of really good relatives Spock was taken up by the tech guys.
the sort of parents of the groom, as it were. It was very... It did have that feel to it because they sat Kamala Harris and Joe Biden had sort of thrones on the front row and then they had to sit there while Trump just slagged them off in his speech and said, well, unless they'd made of America. And then he went down to give another speech slightly further out in the retundant and said, I wasn't really as bitches I wanted to be in that first speech. Melania told me I couldn't have a go at them.
And then he went through now and then they have all the inauguration balls and he gave a series of speeches which became more sort of vague and unhinged and hinted to all the things that he'd really wanted to say, like a sort of stacking set of Russian dolls. But he also... It's a very appropriate image.
He also signed all these executive orders. So one of the very odd things about the way that American politics works is because the houses are usually so tightly negotiated and things have to go through Congress, which gets gridlocked. Lots of American politics happens by executive order, which is that whoever is president turns out and goes, here's what I reckon this word means, or here's how I want this to be interpreted.
So there's an immigration crackdown. There's an end to birthright citizenship. So this idea that if you were born on American soil or American military base, you were automatically American. He wants to change it. That is actually something that is in the Constitution. So that's definitely going to go. You have to find some lawyers to say it means the exact opposite. Now I know that's not hard. I know that's how the law works. But I thought even for the United States who are quite keen on a written Constitution, it is written.
It is written down really clearly. So, executive orders, as far as I gather, have some authority, but not lots. I mean, it is decrees, but decrees that can be haggled over later and argued and will be maybe legally talented, this kind of thing. Lots of them will end up being litigated in the court. Then they often end up in the Supreme Court, which has currently got a 6-3 Conservative majority. Right, assuming that's what he's gambling on now, is that he will be able to push it through that way.
No, they think even the conservative-led Supreme Court being literate will go, no Donald. You've had a good run, but this one we might have to say, no, the wording's quite clear. But what he can do is he can probably negotiate down to something else, right? So it may be that if your mother is there legally on a student visa and H1B visa, then you get citizenship, but they can do a crackdown on what they call kind of tourism, right? The people who turn up eight months pregnant.
just being completely foreign nationals on a holiday, give birth, and then take the kid home, but they're technically entitled to American citizenship. That is not absurd. That is the way that citizenship works in lots of other places. Birthright citizenship is relatively unusual. But I think, yeah, you might say he's gone for the most maximalist version, because he quite wants the fight. He wants to look really tough. And if he gets negotiated down to only half of what he asked for, that's still a win.
But the executive orders, which are theatrical now, I mean, there used to be a sort of administrative function. They're now another version of theatre. Someone pointed out that he's now using a very, very big, thick pen. And I don't know whether that's because the printers has gone up in size. But whatever it is, it means he can write a big signature, show you a big signature, and then throw the pen around.
as ever. I mean, if the first term is anything to go by, a lot of the theatrical moments don't turn into law. Is that fair? That certainly happened last time. I mean, take wanting to buy Greenland, for example. The FT reported that there was a very, I don't know what that diplomatic language that they use, a very robust phone call with the Danish Prime Minister about it, saying basically, you know, well, give us Greenland, though. Give us great go on, though. You want to give us Greenland, though.
But who knows what really happens? At what point is he prepared to invade another NATO country? Ditto, there was a migrant flight to Colombia that used a military plane and the Colombians turned it back and immediately went 25% tariff on Colombia, everything. No one will buy cheap coffee anymore. And then they backed down and he backed down.
And that was within the space of ours. Yeah, it was a bit like that South Korean coup. You could have had a nap and really missed those sanctions. But this is also that there's a kind of ping pong that happens. So Joe Biden got in and said, we're going to interpret sex as in no sex discrimination to also include gender identity. And then Trump gets in and says, no sex now just means biological sex. The same thing with the so-called global gag rule about whether or not foreign NGOs can talk about abortion and still receive federal funding. It just ping pongs between some are saying,
It's no way to run a country. Well, it is a big challenge. I'm all into my climate stuff. Trump gets in and he says, we're going to have no more federal leasing of wind and a lot of the wind turbine projects that are already at various different stages of completion or planning or whatever it is. They're all next. That's a system that provides about a tenth of America.
very good American terminology. That was terrific Andy. But that's a tenth of America's electricity. That's a substantial thing to start mucking around with every four years or so. And if you look at somewhere, I'm afraid, like China, which started thinking in a really big way about batteries in about 25 years ago and has now constructed in a very, very complex and all-encompassing supply chain.
The communism says Andy. We'll hold my five-year plan, yeah. But is there something between communism, what you call the pendulum and anti-cool short-termism? Again, Trump says it's time to drill, baby drill and really get America's oil and gas supplies, revitalized. And then various American commentators appear saying, the production's really high. It's at a record. I'm not sure we can sell anymore. And if we do, the price drops and then we'll all go into recession.
How long does it take between the Trump theatre and the disillusion? That's the bit I want to know. Immigration enforcement is going to be a really big test of that because actually, late-era Obama did far more deportations than either Biden or first-term Trump. That's actually when they really peaked.
And so you have to ask yourself the question about whether or not there will be theatrical deportations. They talked about the fact they want to be able to go into schools or churches and sort of drag people out. You know, this very ostentatious kind of cruelty and toughness versus what are the actual numbers of it. I think those are the kind of things where, you know, Trump's kind of theatricality can sometimes cloud the vision about the
You know, the way that Obama did all those sort of drone strikes, you know, we tend to sort of think about things in the vibes that people give off, but actually the numbers underneath are often quite a slightly different story. Where are the Democrats in all this? They all decided to have a little rest.
A little sit down and have a think about where it all went wrong. The interesting thing about that is that Trump, in all his inauguration speeches, said, it was a landslide. I won all the swing states. And yeah, he did win all the swing states. He didn't actually win by that greater margin, by one by a bigger margin over him last time.
But the thing is that they've just, they can't have the argument among themselves about what they did wrong. They've got a really big problem with their donor class, you know, the kind of activist groups who are pushing for very aggressive social progressivism. And no one really wants to come out and say, I'm sorry, to the ACLU or whoever it might be, but we're not going to be able to give you this menu, policy requirements you want because the voters don't like them.
You know what I mean? The thing that Keir Starmer did in order to bring Labour back to winning that massive majority was he had to move a lot. He had to drag their positions rightwards back from the Corbyn era. And no one in the Democrats has really put their hand up and sort of volunteered for that yet.
If the option is, which obviously the media conglomerates have decided is to say, we were completely wrong all along. The whole thing was a terrible error. We believe everything you do now. I mean, the Democrats can't really do that if 48% of the country voted for what they stood for last time. I mean, they have to find another route, I hope.
Yeah, I mean, you see people like Ruben Gayo, who's the Senator in Arizona who's himself Hispanic, and he took a much tougher line on the border, because actually all the evidence shows that even very recent immigrants to America are really worried about immigration, right? That kind of classic pattern of like, I've just made it across the Rio Grande. Who are these guys invading this country?
And so I think there are voices like that, but I also think they're just completely bruised because they feel like what happened in 2016 is they went out and they said, he's a pussy grabber, he's a Nazi, he's a Russian shell, scream, scream, scream, scream, scream. And the main effect of that was a lot of people just decided to stop consuming politics news anymore.
And I think they just think they can't rerun that playbook. So you're seeing a lot more, for example, when Elon Musk did or didn't do a Roman salute here, and I know you're very keen on the fact that it definitely definitely was a legitimate Roman salute, and that's a real thing. But when you just... Just for the purposes of a diversion here...
No Roman ever did that salute. There is no written, there is no visual evidence at all. It's Rome in the sense of Rome in the fascist era of Mussolini. It's that kind of Roman salute. But the point about that was that that was an edge case where he said I was just putting my hand on my heart and then raising my hands upward as anyone might do.
not an impossible thing to say. Almost none of the Democrats came out and said anything about that. J.B. Pritzker, who's the governor of Illinois, who's a potential candidate, did say something. Alexandra Kazia Cortes, who's the very left-wing congresswoman from New York said something. But by and large, people like Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who's obviously lining himself up next time,
didn't get involved in that kind of outrage cycle, because they just don't think it works for them. They think that what happens is they say something, it sounds scoldy, the right-wing media goes, look at that, you know, the lying MSM just are trying to even make out that we're Nazis. And then they, you know, then they go and praise the alternative for Deutschland. Sort of talk about...
I mean, he has the cartoon we ran in the eye of two people in a pub. One of them is dressed in full Nazi regalia. He's having a drink with another man. And he says, yeah, he can't just go around calling everyone you disagree with the fascist. And that seems to me what the muscabologists would like to do. You just say, would you like to look at the clip again? Yeah. And then tell me, hand on heart, that this is from Star Trek.
Yeah, but I think they just realised that you could have an argument about the essentially unresolvable argument about the gesture, or you could try and focus on the fact that he went to a panel and said, you know, Italy should be for the Italians, right? And just to say, this is the kind of, you know, this is the undeniable cut and dried things that he has said.
I think there seems to be a lot more depression than outrage among the various opponents across the world, and there's a sense in which now people seem to have tilted to the position that, well, you know, he says a lot of stuff, and none of it has any effect really, so maybe it's all actually okay, which feels like a distinct underpricing of the risk.
Oh, it's a terrible stability. Totally, because he has really gone full bore, as I say, with all these executive orders, with lots of domestic stuff. He seems to have been less focused internationally. It's taken him a long time to phone Keir Starmer, and a long time for Marco Rubio, who's now Secretary of State, to talk to David Lammy, despite David Lammy's enthusiastic campaign of greasing up to them.
Can I just ask him? As you say, Trump's coming with all this sort of sound and fury and announcing things that may or may not happen. Has he this time around? I get the impression he's got more of a machinery behind him that might actually make it happen. Because it was full chaos first term, wasn't it? It was Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon out. Scaramucci in for 10 days. There was just nothing actually, sort of impetus behind him and no people were going to make it work for him.
Yeah, they didn't have a kind, they didn't have a sort of grim face bureaucrats that you needed any great system like that. The difference is this time he's had four years of everybody on the Conservative right thinking that, you know, thinking about what is possible and what they might be able to do. So one of the Democrats' big attack clients during the election campaign was this project 2025, which was overseen by the Heritage Foundation.
And that was a really obvious blueprint for a kind of socially conservative libertarian, in some respects, fiscally libertarian, but also untrumbled executive power kind of blueprint for government. Trump totally disavowed this during the campaign, because the Democrats just keep holding up a big book that said, Project 2025, and all you need to know about this is it's very sinister.
But there were loads of people in his orbit that revolved around it. And sure enough, those things are kind of creeping in. And there are things in there, for example, they want to do random factory inspections on places that manufacture abortion pills, morning after pills. These kind of, the sand in the gears, a bureaucracy they could throw, just to make things that they don't like harder and harder to do. They've really thought about that and about the way that they can use regulators, for example, just to achieve the ends that they want.
The question is, as you say, whether or not any of this will actually happen. They've certainly got it all locked and loaded and ready to go. But it does involve having a functional White House and having a functional congressional system to some extent. And they have got a very narrow, particularly because of his appointments have taken more people out of Congress. Really, really narrow. Like J.D. Vance had to come in and cast the vote on, always ready to cast the vote on Pete Heg said, becoming Secretary of Defence.
they can only afford to lose three senators on those confirmation votes, and they've got two of them who are pretty independent-minded anyway, plus Mitch McConnell, who's now cross and has nothing to lose. So actually he's... The official cross, yeah. But he's going to, you know, so that I think that the same... The A, the questions about the functionality or dysfunctionality of the White House remain, and B, the questions about how do you get things spending commitments through?
because there are still people in that Republican party that don't want to lavishly spend money on stuff. Whereas Trump's instincts are, just run up the debt, who cares? I want stuff that I want. There's no interest in the small print or the actual putting the work in, doesn't it? No. But I mean, certainly I get the impression there's a slightly more professional setup behind it. I mean, even with Elon Musk bouncing around in the place, it's not Ivanka and Jared kind of just wandering in and saying, why don't you do this?
I think they were two of the most functional people there. Jared's Middle East policy brief actually led to the Abraham Accords. He's one of the few that can boast that he actually did something substantive. The more problem was your Scaramucci's and your Bannon's, who were essentially podcasters, who should never be put in charge of anything. By podcaster, it's the coming thing. But you now have the first female Chief of Staff in the White House ever, Susie Wiles, who's a long-time Florida operative who is just used to working with men from Florida with massive egos.
She might be, you know, possibly more able to run it competently. That Trump campaign this time was much less drama-filled than previously. But you mentioned the Middle East policy. These think tanks, they've obviously been very worried about abortion. They don't seem to have spent a great deal of time looking at either Gaza or Israel. So Trump says, why doesn't everyone from Gaza move someone else? Maybe short term, maybe long term.
I mean, as though these options A were possible and B, he'd just thought of them. This doesn't suggest a huge amount of pre-planning, does it? No, there's going to be a big thing that happens as well, where lots of constituencies foolishly believed him. So you mentioned the unions before, and I think that's exactly right. The team's just endorsed him. Is he going to bring in pro-union, pro-labour policies, or is he going to give tax cuts to the rich? Like, we always thought. And I think the same thing is true of the Middle East, which is that
You know, there are some people, like those voters in Michigan who didn't want Kamala Harris because they thought she was, you know, she was too in shock to Israel. And they are also going to follow the trajectory of people who are going to have a cold realization of the realities of electoral politics.
But there was a clue, wasn't there, that in the first term he moved the American embassy to Jerusalem. I mean, he was fairly clear on that. And, you know, of all of those people who were saying, or Kamala Harris, he's overseeing genocide, I can't possibly vote for her. I mean, now do you think they're reacting to him coming in immediately off the back of a piece deal saying, well, why don't we just actually get all of the Palestinians out of Gaza? Maybe keep them out of that. Yeah, what if they just moved to Jordan?
I know there may be a few reasons that I not to. Yeah, and also one of his really big donors, Miriam Adelson, who was the widow of Sheldon Adelson, the casino tycoon, one of her big policy issues is Israel. You know, there are really big donors for whom this is the foreign policy issue that they really care about. And any kind of backsliding of US support for Israel will be very horrifying to them. I mean, I feel sorry for those voters, the sort of Gaza voters, because there's no one in American politics for them to vote for, really.
That is the problem of a two-party system with essentially a pretty unified view on the Middle East. We've got to talk about the two cryptocurrencies that the first couple launched. If you want to track these coins, they have a dollar sign and then the name after them. So dollar Trump was the first one that was launched and it immediately hit a capitalization market capitalization in the billions.
Trump owns a big chunk of that, right? And then they sell off another stuff, another portion of it, driving the price of his stake up. They say it's not an investment vehicle, and the magazine made this point that, you know, everything in it's like, you're just expressing your love of the word Trump. But then, quite quickly afterwards, Melania launched her coin, which then created the value of the Trump coin. So someone said, even without having divorced him, she's managed to take a quarter of his assets, which is quite impressive. It's hers more popular than hers. No, hers is not as popular as hers, but people went... I was going to say, could she be out of the door there?
Quickly. He's then recovered, I think, in value. The crypto people are quite angry. They're saying you're tarnishing the good name of crypto, which is very objectively funny to me.
There is a theory that Bitcoin and Ethereum, which are the two really big crypto currencies, Trump has talked about establishing a US strategic reserve of crypto. Now, you might say that's just numbers on a spreadsheet. How would that work? Fort Knox used to have like actual bars of gold. But what it means is if they did that, they'd buy up a lot of it and drive the price up. This is a tool for potentially corruption, a scale hitherto undreamed of.
So that's another reason why there are so many people around him who are into crypto. So much of that podcasts fear that drove him to that they have crypto adverts or have crypto investments. And the downside of it is, you know, I made a program for the BBC and we talked to some people who invested in crypto and they had their wallets, their digital wallet stolen or they'd invest in something that then completely tanked and they couldn't sell it. You know, this was people's like home renovation money or their kids college funds or, you know, it's got all the same problems. It is gambling. I mean, that's how I think we should think about it.
Yeah, so if you had in the second row all the casino owners from Vegas, it would be more or less the same sort of message going out. Yes, the bosses who own these things think it's a great investment, but you, the sucker, you think you're being bold and reactive and counterintuitive and brave and front easy, but you're not, you're just a monk. The White House always wins. Very nice.
Right now, let's come back from the... Well, actually, we're not going back from the USA, are we? Because we're going to talk about Prince Harry. We're going to go to the other side of the USA now. Adam, there's been a lot of coverage of the Prince Harry versus everybody trial, which has been going on for so long. Well, it's one of many that have been going on for very, very long. But my whole professional...
life. It literally says the year I graduated was when the phone hacking story broke out. Well, I have to put you on that because this is not about phone hacking, this particular case. That was ruled by Mrs. Justice Fancourt quite early on in proceedings that Prince Harry was no longer in a position to sue over phone hacking by either the news of the world or as he alleged the sun because he'd run out of time. So this case was limited to other unlawful activities by people connected to New UK when Prince Harry did briefly
take the stand to talk about phone hacking. It didn't go very well and the case, he basically carved him up because he couldn't seem to remember anything, particularly not incidences where the type of phone had either been invented or he wasn't on the phone at the time.
This was the case against the mirror last year. That didn't go so well. The really big thing, the one big thing in this new settlement, which was both Prince Harry and Tom Watson, former deputy leader of the Labour Party, was that an admission has been made of illegal activity taking place on behalf of the Sun.
However, not by journalists on the sun, but by private investigators working for the sun. So what we know, what we can legally and safely say, which the lawyer will be happy with, is that we now know that there was extensive illegal activity, unlawful activity, and phone hacking on the news of the world, on the Sunday mirror, on the Sunday people, on the daily mirror.
But not the sun. Even though lots and lots of people move between all of those different tabloids at different times, and it seems to be in life everywhere else, somehow it just, it never happened. It's like the blood brain barrier. Some things just don't get through it incredibly fine. You walk through that door up and just all thoughts of how to hack phones and all memory of that just vanishes for your own. Okay. Okay, so that's the legal position.
Now tell us where our sympathy should lie. Prince Harry Murdoch. It's a tough one. You might say neither. Who cares? But when I heard the judgment, I thought Prince Harry should be crowing. And yet he came out. He didn't say Murdoch's paid all my costs, which is the first thing I'd have said if I won against Murdoch, which obviously I haven't ever. And I've made an absolute stagger amount of money. I no longer need my day in court. It's total victory.
It wasn't, though. It wasn't that. No, no, no. He said an event in December, the goal of this is accountability. It's really that simple. He said, it wasn't about the money at all. He said, the scale of the cover-up is so large that people need to see it for themselves. Well, in the apology that was read out in court last week, they didn't see that. What they got was this admission that unlawful activities had been carried out by private investigators working for the sun, the closest they got to anything about a corporate cover-up, of which there has been evidence for years and years, and we've written about on occasion
right back to the 2014 trial of Rebecca Brooks, which she was found not guilty, and Andy Coulson, who was found guilty along with various other figures from the News of the World back in the day. They said that NGN's response to the 2006 arrests and subsequent actions were regrettable.
just a magnificent bit of little ease. And the other big omission was in the case of Tom Watson, which was that he had been placed under surveillance in 2009 by journalists of the news of the world and those instructed by them, which was a weird thing that came out in the preparations for this case. There was a strange conspiracy theory going on within News UK that Tom Watson had spies within the company who were feeding things back to Gordon Brown, who was determined to bring them down at the time.
to get revenge for them, them switching their allegiance from Labour to the Tories. So that was as close as they got to kind of exposing any of that. But even that is not, I mean, if you think back to 2009, so that's about the time for those of us who are, those in the world who are less nerdy about the phone hacking saga than I am, which is absolutely everywhere in the world. This was the point of which it was revealed by Nick Davis in The Guardian that contrary to
The News UK's insistence that it has all been limited to one road reporter and one private investigator on the News of the World. Actually, they were quietly trying to pay out very, very large sums of money to other people as well, including Gordon Taylor, who was head, I think, for the Professional Football Association at the time. So that was when that blew up. Well, at that time, we knew and it was admitted, we're going about years and years now, that Charlotte Harris and Mark Lewis, who were two of the lawyers who were working on behalf of Gordon Taylor and other,
claimants at the time had been followed by private detectives. Those ones, not instructed by journalists on the news of the world, but by Tom Chrome, who was the legal boss at the news of the world. So we did actually, I mean, it is alarming, but we, you know, we have known for a while that this sort of stuff was going on.
And there was also, clever readers of the I might remember, an admission, not quite an admission, but a settlement of a case brought by Chris Hune, former cabinet minister, former jail bird as well. He brought a case against the sun and he claimed in that that there was also unlawful activity going on involving private investigators of him and other government ministers.
which wasn't about stories in the newspaper at all. It was about trying to make sure that Murdoch got his way with the Skybid back in 2011. So this is straightforward corporate malfeasance via private investigator. Yes, it's not even journalism at all. It's just targeting your enemies in a threatening way. And it is alarming and it is shocking, but it isn't particularly new, as I say.
Then it's the bit that your brain remembers, because I too feel like this has been my entire career in journalism. And yeah, all the bits that I can remember is like the fact that Charlie Brooks only wants to drink a pint of fairy liquid. Can I come out in the evidence? This is the kind of detail that my brain hangs on to. And I just, for 10 years now, I've been thinking, that's very impressive, isn't it? I remember sitting in court in 2014 and listening to Charlie Brooks on the witness box say that he couldn't check his messages overnight because he refused to keep his mobile phone in the bedroom because it would fry his brain.
Very good. A hedge of the curve. That's very sensible actually. That's the first sensible thing I've heard him say. Sitting in the court in 2014 and listening to an entire day of testimony from Charlie Brooks about his attempts to hide his collection of lesbian porn videos in a bin, in a car park, so as they wouldn't get found by the police who were searching for his wife for a record book, his computers. That was a fun thing. And I'm sure there are stories that our readers will remember that we're not going to comment on at all the legal reasons. And I'm certainly not going to bring any of them up.
No, can we get back to it's our rent Harry let he among us who has never hidden a collection of lesbian porn videos from the police in a car park so illegal activity Yeah, can we said exactly what that was in this case that we're talking about with Harry now We can't because the evidence was never heard in court because it was settled
the very last minute right. But it involves stuff that was done by private detectives. Now the difficulty that they would have had with this had it gone to court is that the lawyers for Harry and Tom Watson were alleging all sorts of nefarious things like blagging. So blagging was a technique whereby private detectives would phone up say a doctor's surgery or your mobile phone provider or BT or whatever pretending to be you and asking for copies of your bill and they would get it sent through not to your home address but to them instead. So I can see who you've been calling
And then from that point on, it was usually used as a start of phone hacking, particularly phone bills. You can see what numbers people have been calling, and then you know who's voicemails you have to hack to get messages from the celeb or royal or whoever in person. So that might be one of the kinds of things that would have been alleged had this gone to court, which it then did not.
Yeah, it absolutely was. I mean, the problem that they would have had proving that and the defense that News UK would have put up is that there was an awful lot of perfectly legitimate work that was done back in the day by private investigators. Everyone has this idea of private investigators. They kind of think of sort of Philip Marlow kind of shady characters in darkened offices, swinging back bourbon. In fact, I mean, these are basically researchers. They're just people that you've farmed out the stuff that long before all of this stuff was available on the internet.
people could, you know, go through phone books and get you kind of addresses or number plates and things. Now some of that wasn't a legally, it was done by, you know, you know, bribing people at the DVLA or people who had access to the police national computer. So there was some dodginess, but there was also some less dodgy stuff going on. And one of the legal arguments that I know was being put forward by some people involved in this case was that various records, which they managed to get disclosure of evidence disclosure from the UK,
showed things like electoral role searches. And they said, we think this is a code word for something very, very dodgy. And sort of think slightly more likely, possibly, that actually it's code for searching the electoral role to find people's addresses, which, you know, would be perfectly legal and perfectly acceptable. So that would have been, I mean, it was scheduled for eight weeks this trial. This is the sort of thing that would have been untangled. It wouldn't necessarily have been desperately sexy stuff.
And some of this evidence was presented to me at certain points and involved me in saying that we've got evidence that they were looking into you. And it was literally they looked up my address of the electoral role. And there's nothing much I can do about that. So, I mean, there is a sense in which the private detectives, I think, were just charging money for nothing very much. But we're talking a long way back as well. 1996 to 2011 was the
the period that was under consideration in the Prince Harry case. The latest case. Yes. A series. Okay. Oh wow. Yeah. So going back to 1996 and involving his mother and the treatment of his mother as well. Okay. It's a sign of how far we've come that in those days you were desperate to find out the medical records of the royal family. Now they tell us.
And everyone's very sympathetic. The strategy is working. They make you a lovely video. The suggestion was, and not from the judge who was obviously very annoyed, that they couldn't get on and settle this until they eventually did. The suggestion is this is the deal Prince William got quite a long time ago.
Yes, the difficulty Prince Harry face and the reason that he hasn't had his day in court, a bit like Charlotte Church who years ago was saying, I'm going to fight this all the way, I'm going to have my day in court, Hugh Grant did the same and eventually settled. The difficulty that they've got is that if an offer has been made into court to settle,
You push through with the trial, but the judge decides to award you a smaller amount in damages than was offered into the court. You are liable for all the legal costs of the other side. And it's not the settlements aren't enormous, well, they are large terms in any one. But the legal costs on these kind of things are stupendous. I mean, the figure of 10 million is being thrown around in this particular case, I think quite reliably.
as the award to... As the legal costs that have been run up already. So that would have been what Harry and Tom Watson became liable for, possibly even more than that, had they been awarded by the judge less in damages than had already been offered into the court by News International.
having occasionally been in court myself over the years, even with this rule applying, if you wanted your day in court, I don't see what is to stop you saying, obviously, I don't want to pay £10 million worth in damages. I have been offered under this anomaly in the law, this amount of damages. I can't possibly pay my costs. You must award me a very, very large sum of money, indeed, to cover the costs. I mean, it's certainly what I would say if I was in there.
Tell me if your track record's saying things like that to judges Ian. Not generally the sort of thing they take particularly kindly to is it. Damn.
I mean, that's the other thing, the breakdown. We do not know how this works at all. I figure of 10 million is being thrown around. All that's been said, officially, is a substantial sum in damages. So for all we know, you know, Prince Harry and Tom Watson got 50p in damages each and Rupert's paying out, what's that, 9,900,999 pounds in legal costs. That is possible. I mean, Murdoch has already paid out a
billion pounds over cases related to phone hacking and other illegal activities. They forgot they had 50 million budgeted last year for the ongoing cases. It will be obviously more this year probably because this is quite a substantial payout.
That's wild when you think about the value in commercial terms of the stories that were obtained through phone hacking. I mean, they had some relatively decent royal exclusives, but I don't know whether or not the profits of the papers from those years will actually ever have covered that. I mean, I know this is a secondary point to the ethics of it, but actually as a commercial enterprise, this was a very bad idea.
Well, that was, I mean, when Clive Goodman was arrested, it was incredible, because that was just tittle-tattle for his black had a diary that he was writing at that point. And it was just sort of absolute nonsense. The story that led to his downfall and the arrest was about Prince William having a knee injury.
And what about the defence of the senior executives? Wouldn't it have been cheaper? Sacked a lot of them. Throw them all under the bridge. Well, that's been the really interesting thing about this. What Harry and Tom Watson, an awful lot of the other people who stood involved in the litigation wanted to prove, was a corporate cover-up. Which, as I say, we know there was. I sat through the trial, you know, we talked about the way that that worked and the urge within News UK to keep a lid on this and keep it all silent before it all burst out in 2011.
There was a lot of specific stuff they were going to allege about deletion of emails, which did happen on a stupendous scale. Again, not that new. I remember sitting in the courtroom, well, the email from Rebecca Brooks was read out that said that she wanted to eliminate emails that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation in which a news international company is a defendant. Ironically, putting that in several follow-ups on emails, which would be extremely unhelpful.
But nevertheless, as we say, and we should reiterate, she was found not guilty of all of the charges against her at the time, which included perverting the course of justice. Yes. And she was living with the man who went down as guilty. Is that right? She hadn't a fair with the man who went down as guilty at that point. Right. Yeah. So they probably spent some time together. They did. Yeah. We got all full pieces of that in court as well. He's got a podcast, though, now. I just worked out OK. Everyone's got a podcast. This is another theme of the episode. Everyone's got a podcast.
Okay, time now, if we may, I would like us on page 94 to go for growth. This time next year, I wanted to be called page 98 and so on. This is something that's happening today. As you hear this podcast go out, Rachel Reeves is making a speech at a secret location in Oxfordshire.
Any bets? There will be Clarkson's farm. Exactly. And it's going to be all about her attitude to growth and she's going to make the shocking announcement that she is for it. She's pro, it's going to be about planning, regulation, energy and trade.
And this is the kind of wider context of British politics as the moment, which is the government desperately searching around Downing Street for a big lever marked growth, which it can pull as hard as it can for the next four and a half years. And the select sort of trade-offs and compromises that have to be made along the way. It was the one legal objection I had in the last issue. There was a series of jokes about the Prime Minister's WhatsApp group in which someone in the group accused Rachel Reeves of sounding like Liz Truss.
And I know it was a joke, but it struck me as defamatory in the extreme. You get a legal letter from Liz Truss. Yeah, yeah, it should be very happy to send another out. It's the blob, it's the market. I'm going to come out and say that I think he's got a point, and Kirsten, when he said it, when he said about the want to be a nation of builders, not blockers, and I think Reeves has got a point. If you look at the fact that we have struggled to build things like nuclear power stations, HS2, anywhere near enough houses,
There is clearly some kind of massive problem about infrastructure in this country, and we're being held hostage by vested interests. Can I talk about the bat tunnel? I'm obsessed with the bat tunnel. Can I briefly mention the fact that one of the things that was going to add a huge amount of cost onto HS2, the high-speed rail link, was this tunnel for bats.
And it just turned out there were a huge number of quangos who all had to sign off various things. And there were some bats vaguely near the tunnel that when they researched into them turned out, not to be as rare as they thought, but nonetheless, basically the ruling was that no bat death was acceptable. The value of a bat was therefore infinite, and any amount of money needed to be spent on preventing their death. And part of me thought, I want to go down there with an AK-47 machine gun, the bats, and then we can just get on with building HS2. We've lost the audience. There we go.
And that's why you want to kick dogs as well. Yes. But the point about it was we could, obviously when you build some infrastructure or housing, you are going to destroy some natural habitats and that doesn't need to be managed, but clearly the balance has gone wrong slightly somewhere.
Yes, and this is the whole timbre of the speech that Reeves is going to be making today. There have been lots of slightly leaked announcements and soft launches and interviews and rollouts and all other kinds of hints at what's going to happen. But the interesting thing I think is that none of this is any different to anything Rachel Reeves has been saying for the last two years.
with the exception of the budget in October, which was quite different in tone. It raised spending, it raised taxes, but on businesses rather than on individuals, and it covered the gap between those two with a bit more borrowing. So the argument from the government, I think, was that that was imposing stability, and now we've reasserted a bit of stability, now we can go for growth. It's stable now, is it? Apparently so.
Yeah, there was a piece in the last meg about the sort of guilt price roller coaster in January, which a lot of papers got very, very excited about and then shut up about immediately when things recovered. So Rachel Reeves has been to Davos where she announced she was going to go soft on Nondoms, all sorts of talk about really cracking down on Nondoms and now we're going to be just sort of gently squeezing them a little bit.
She's announced that there's going to be this new great program. This is as we record this, it's going to be building houses near train stations is going to be sort of automatically approved. I presume because it's too difficult to build a railway. Yes, as a default presumption in favor of planning, because one of the things that is a problem is if you've got some existing low density housing, how do you convert that to higher density housing near places where people actually want to live?
Yeah. And the problem with our planning system is basically if you've got a house, you've got to vote, right? Whereas all the people who'd like to have a house but don't have one, have no input into that. There's no way for the system to register their desire not to pay half their salary and rent every month. The way it's been pitched is a huge battle between growth and net zero.
What do you think she'd win Andy? I'm a fan of both. People are painting it as a battle between Rachael Reeves, hard iron chancellor, concrete fan Rachael Reeves, and tree hugging drip Ed Miliband who wants to crush
your Range Rover, rip out your boiler and make you live in a tree. Neither of those is a really accurate characterization of the two sides in this, I think. You don't polarise debate in Britain isn't very helpful. The other thing we've been told for ages is that Net Zero is going to involve lots and lots of converting things and building things and huge amounts of infrastructure.
Who has approved more nationally significant infrastructure projects since the election than anyone else? I suspect it's Millabound who's waved through lots of very big solar farms. Almost the first thing the government did was lift the ban on onshore wind turbines, which was in place kind of de facto ban under the Conservatives. So I think Labour's argument or certainly their pitch is that exactly we like building things. A lot of these things are going to be actually very good for the environment over the longer term.
The bit where it gets tricky is, and this is why the papers have been so excited about it, over things like a new runway at Heathrow. That, obviously, is going to be bad for the country's overall carbon emissions. Millabound is not... It's really bad for a lot of marginal constituencies on the outskirts of London. Yes. Which, actually, yes, I know, in the sense they don't want flights overhead, but also Heathrow and the airports are big employers and suppliers of decent jobs in their areas. Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of mixed.
But it's green now. I heard Rachel Reeve saying that the plane's flying overhead circling. If you had another run where they'd land quicker, they'd emit less fuel and everyone would be happy. The air quality would be fine. So it's both build and clean.
OK, I would like to take a task a little bit about that. John, just saying Andy, I'm just saying what she's saying. OK. But having flown back and forth in the US a lot, one of the problems is when you fly in overnight, you often do end up circling until the runways are allowed to officially open in the morning. That is annoying, Andy. It is annoying, but stacking above Heathrow is not the main source of carbon emissions from planes that run on jet fuel, everyone. I know it's irritating. It is not.
But I want to get to Pretomolgium, the arrivals hall. When you fly back 5,000 miles from Florida, the extra three above Heathrow, it isn't very good for noise or air quality in London, but it is not to be a little carbon-wise. The other thing that Reeves said, and actually, we should just say, in 2008, when this was last mooted by the last Labour government, this was going to be a resignation issue for Ed Miliband, he has, this time around, rode back and said, resignation? Absolutely. No, no, no, no.
So, I think there is a sense that they are rowing together a bit more on this, as opposed to rowing together. Can I ask a question of you, which is, how does the shadow chance to do this, Jack, and Mel Stride feel about all this? Has anyone found him missing? I don't think anyone has asked for a trade. One of the ways the government's trying to put itself is as a government of trade-offs. So, yes, we're going to cut emissions fast and we've done very well, but also we may need to build a new airport. And it's what they've done with VAT on school fees. They've said,
Well, it'll cost a bit more to send a child to private school, but you know, that money will go into the state sector and that's a trade-off that we're comfortable making. So they keep making that argument of these are grown-up decisions being made, which is not a tough way of pitching it. Or you can move to Dubai, like Isabelle.
I think this narrative of we want to clear these mad obstacles to building that, I mean, almost everyone I know has had some experience of coming into contact, whether it's, you know, putting an extension on your home or whether it's like putting something in the garden, whether almost everyone has a story of like the mad, sclerotic way things are done in Britain today. I don't think there are quite enough nimbies to fully, you're raising your eyebrows, Helen. There are. There are.
Yeah, but I think the calculation is that either we lose a few constituencies by building pylons between Suffolk and London, we will lose some constituencies, or we'll lose lots if the economy stays inemic and doesn't grow at all. There's labor calculation, I think. It's sort of blunt force calculation is, can I just talk a bit about sustainable aviation fuel? Yes.
Can we stop you? You can stop me. You can stop listening. And that's absolutely fine. I'll be very used to it. It's Andy's sustainable aviation fuel time. It's just a pick-up reads on something she said, which was bollocks, which is that a lot has changed in terms of aviation. And actually, we've got a new thing called the SAF mandate, which is going to make air travel much greener and cleaner.
So, there is a thing called sustainable aviation fuel. It is made partly from leftover chip fat. And partly from other... It's a smell of chip fat when you burn it. Do planes now? Sorry. They smell... They smell delicious. But you can make them from waste oils. You can also make them from captured carbon.
which is not really an industry yet. It's very much in its infancy. The government has to create their big fan of a slowly ratcheting mandate, which they've got one with electric cars, they've got one with heat pumps, and now they have this with jet fuel, where this year 2% of the jet fuel sold will have to be SAF.
which is much lower in emissions. It's about 70% lower. It's a good thing. But the amount that exists, there aren't enough chippies gathering up there, the leftover oil. That won't quite work. There are various other things that might be promising technologies. There's a thing called power to liquid, which is where you use renewable electricity, use that to separate carbon from the air, you use sequester carbon from the air, and you use it to split water.
And then you can create a hydrocarbon, you refine it, you've got jet fuel. That relies on renewable electricity being very, very cheap, which is another problem in this country, which is that power is not cheap, partly due to the fact that power is set by gas. So it reads is wrong that it's a no brainer and it's really easy to do.
green reasons to pursue a policy which is essentially and historically not green. All I'm saying to you is, is it possible for a political party, the Labour Party in this case, to find a version, a narrative of this that isn't bonfire of the regulations, let's throw all the red tape up and Grenful burns down. I mean, in the public mind, throwing away the normal checks and balances for projects is not a good idea.
Can there be a position between that and the sense that nothing can ever get built? Why does HS2 take 300 years? The answer might be, in my view, that's a terrible idea and utterly pointless and was done before anyone had invented Zoom. Where is this middle ground to be built over?
I think the premise of green growth, quote unquote, is not a mad one. And I think there is a sort of sense that we can't carry on as we are. We can't carry on not building reservoirs. We have to be able to clear away some of these regulations. The number of legal reviews which Starm has said he's going to slash from three to one.
That feels broadly sensible, you know, and I think they were probably positioning themselves against the Green Party, with their very much built absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. Yeah, and the kind of de-growth agenda that they've kind of... And the de-growth is, yeah, yeah, who I think their argument is, well actually... You should try less, you should drive less, you should stay at home and not... Yeah, which I think is electoral poison, unfortunately.
But I think you're right. The thing that Labor sort of set themselves up against what economists call the vitocracy, which is the idea that we've now live in these quite stable societies. They're trending older. People have got assets. And actually, what they mostly want is things not really to change very much. And so you do, as you say, with the judicial reviews, one guy can hold up an infrastructure project for two years while the court date is available, and by which point the investors don't want to do it anymore. There is definitely something. I think everybody agrees that something is wrong.
Plus, also for a lettering party saying right-wing things is often very good in electoral terms, because people think, even if you agree, then it must be quite sensible. And I think the idea of a lawyer calling for a reduction in a judicial review.
Very exciting. Some of the more interesting people on the right who are the kind of growth people will say, sorry, growth people always themselves are the moral people. But they're saying that actually the one thing we should really do is think about directly incentivising people to say yes to local projects, because at the moment there is no reason. I have a go against Nimbe's, but what you're mostly talking about is do you want a new housing estate that will cause initially strain on your local GP surgery or transport links?
So there should be a direct and concrete offer, whether it's reduced council tax, whether it's here are the services, like the menu services you'll get in return. Here's the, it bumps your train service, you'll get if we build all this stuff. We need to start. Well, this is the thing it's like... We'll put more water in. Right, exactly. How did they get the NHS for us all the GPs? They stuff their mouths with gold. We need to be going around bits of England and stuffing some gold into people's mouths because it will eventually pay off, I hope.
And this is the thing with energy prices too. It's a bit mad that Scotland generates a lot of wind power and then there's this kind of one corridor down the middle of the country. There's one little pipe for it to get down to a bit where a lot more of it is used. And often that means you just have to turn off large chunks of the wind estate. That's daft. So if you have cheaper pricing in Scotland, maybe you'll get more industry going to Scotland. There's a debate about that because obviously people who actually build the stuff want to have reliable prices for a long time. And it's probably quite important to get the stuff built as well.
into connectivity is exercising old-sparky as we speak. Yeah, so what no one can say, obviously, is whether any of this is going to work. And, you know, we're foreign non-economists in this room. Matt, producer Matt, do you have an economics degree? No. Five. Five non-economists in this room. My work does an economist at the Bank of England, four.
Oh, no, I didn't. Sorry. And I think to set you up on that, we several publications who will say on their front pages tomorrow, as we're speaking, it won't work. They'll be quite happy to seem to be the narrative at the moment. And that maybe those publications will lobby for a really big thing we could do to improve growth, which would be to remove tariffs and regulations with trading with Europe. I'm sure, in fact, they'll be lobbying for that because that is a
a huge lever you can pull, and also a massive third rail that you should not touch on any account. But you know, even Reeves has said, oh, I might be interested in, you know, working on some kind of tariff-free training scheme with Europe. So, you know, I'm a rejoiners then, how cool.
Yeah. I can't live through breaks again. This is Brett entry. So that is completely different. And the next thing to watch out for I suppose on this is the 26th of March when the office for budget responsibility is going to deliver a bit of a state of the nation report, which won't say things are going terrifically and the economy is going to grow 5%. But I think that all lends Reeves a bit of power to say, we have to do this. We have to rip off the plaster. So that's the next thing to look out for.
I'll underneath the plaster is Liz Trust's face. Horrifying. Okay, that's it for this episode of page 94. Thank you very much for listening. We'll be back again in a fortnight until then go and buy the magazine at private-night.co.uk or at your local newsstand. Thanks very much to Helen, Adam and Ian and to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. Bye for now.
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