Page 94: The Private Eye Podcast

00:00 Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. 00:03 Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray and I'm here in the iStudio with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Ian Hislop. We're here to discuss the big events of the week's news, not least since the last issue of the magazine came out. And we should begin with the very biggest, of course, a new day has dawned, has it not? Or a new social media strategy. 00:24 Yeah, Andy Burnham is our first kind of Instagram native prime minister, which is quite an achievement. But he's done two things in his first week. One, he's done an absolute blizzard of policy announcements. And two, he's done a kind of blizzard of media things. So the most notable, from an inside baseball perspective, is that he has had every morning at 6am in lobby correspondence inboxes, a not embargoed policy announcement. Now, there are probably several words in that sentence that you are craving for me to explain to you. 00:56 So let me say, so the lobby first of all... Policy for a start. 01:00 Who is this Burnham you're talking about? 01:02 It's not lower work up. So if you have a lobby pass, that means you are a journalist who works on the grounds of Westminster, the estate, the parliamentary estate. There are, you know, in return for your greater access, you can wander around and kind of buttonhole people in corridors. you have to do a number of things, like you have to, for example, declare your interest, like where you might have outside speaking gigs. So it's understood that these are people with privileged special access to politicians, and in return they have to kind of, you know, cleave to higher standards. 01:28 They are very used to the idea that before anything gets announced, they are told about it. So they can, in the nicest way, go, well, where are you going to get money for that from them, mate? Or, but you've already announced this twice, or whatever it might be. 01:41 Or I presume just prepare a story for the next day's paper. Right. Right. 01:44 Exactly. So, but now, and so this has caused enormous amounts of grumbling in the lobby WhatsApp chat. So Burnham has done very few traditional interviews. And also they've done this blizzard of media stories that have not been, you know, they haven't played favorites and given a bit to the Daily Mail beforehand or whatever it might be. And they've made lobby correspondence jobs harder. Now, you may say, still your tears. 02:07 Welcome to journalism, where mostly people don't give you things on a planet. I mean, most of the journalism that we do is things that other politicians particularly would rather you didn't publish, rather things that you do want to publish. But that has been very interesting. And it's kind of a signal of intent, which is what you always do as a politician in your first 100 days, whatever it might be. And he's saying, actually, I think the way I'm going to talk to people is via social media. You are the gatekeepers. You're the old regime. And I actually don't need you anymore. 02:33 And what what do the new gatekeepers say? Thank you very much for this. And then just put it up. 02:38 Well, that yes. OK, so that's the other thing is there is another hidden reason why. I mean, for all that politicians will complain about all the lobby obsessed with punch and Judy personality. You know, they're all about grandstanding themselves. There is a thing that one of the things that are very annoyed with the lobby is that they say things like. And how are you going to pay for it, then, Andy Burnham? And Andy Burnham has already retreated into slightly what I think of as small bean mode, which, for those of our internet persuasion, means that he's kind of a little, like, wounded puppy dog. And some people are asking him questions about Number 10 North, and he said, well, this is, you know, you being London-centric critics. 03:10 And I've, you know... 03:11 The SNP are masters of doing this. Well, this is you talking down Scotland, you say, when you say things like, well, drug deaths are terrible in Scotland. Or, you know, your educational achievement benchmarks have been comprehensively failed. And they say, why do you hate Scotland? I'm going to put that down as an early marker of something that I feel could become annoying very quickly. If it becomes, why do you hate the North every time you say anything mean about Andy Burnham? But you're right. The other problem with influencers is that they... don't see their role largely as asking hard questions. So have you consumed any of the Odyssey press tour? 03:45 You've been on Instagram, Ian, you'll have seen lots of it. Yes. 03:48 I did re-read the poem. 03:50 Yeah, OK, that's a... 03:53 That's a very old-fashioned way of dealing with it. I've consumed far too much Odyssey discourse. I've gone through the full thing in a week. I've gone on my own personal journey where I thought, this actually sounds quite good. I'd really quite like to see this to the point where I'm now just, shut up about the Odyssey. I don't want to hear anything more about this film. 04:07 Wow, OK. Well, I think it's a great film. It's my very basic opinion. 04:10 Can we get back to the vague reference? He had a 10-year plan as well, actually, thinking about it. Never mind, sorry. 04:16 Yeah, thank you. It will be the Circe of this government. Anyway... Angela Rayner thank you what's interesting about that is that the Odyssey press tour follows the way that now big movie star press tours go which is essentially they don't get asked questions by journalists sometimes they do but like actors always hated that because it's quite hard to talk about acting and they don't want to talk about their private lives What's now happened, and I think Bridgerton really pioneered this, is they play games together. So they got the Odyssey cast to play like Guess Who together. Or you do gimmicky things like you've got Hot Ones, which is a podcast where you eat successively hotter chicken wings until you die, essentially. 04:52 But what's interesting about that is that that's the format that Andy Burnham has learned from, right? Because what you do is you... So take the one of him and John Healy eating pub snacks together, right, where they had scampi fries and whatever. 05:04 You might say, well, that's just silly. Why am I watching two people? The two things you get from that is we've got a policy about pubs, which is what they were doing to talk about. They're talking about their business rate carton pubs. And two, my Chancellor and I like each other enough that we can bear to be in the same room. Imagine Blair and Brown eating pub snacks together. 05:23 They did. Do you not remember the excruciation time with the ice cream where Tony had to buy an ice cream for Gordon and pass it over to him? No. And Gordon did that smile that he used to do. It just didn't reach his eyes in any way whatsoever. And neither mentioned the word flake at all, which I thought was very restrained. 05:39 So is this a showmance, which you also get in Hollywood press tours these days? 05:43 Yes, I think for the shippers among us, they're going to ship John Healy and Andy Burnham together. Why are you putting this in my brain? 05:50 So one of the clips that is doing exactly the thing that you're describing, Alan, is where Andy Burnham did a... There's a guy called Max Klemenko. He's Ukrainian. He has a thing called the career ladder. He climbs on a ladder. You climb on the other side of the ladder. And he asks you what you do for a living. And he has two minutes to guess what you do for a living. He asks you lots of questions. 06:09 Well, it's guess your first job, actually. 06:11 Well, this was with Burnham. It's normally what do you do for a living. 06:14 Yes, I think that would have been quite easy. Yes. 06:17 I don't know. I'd quite like to know that. 06:19 So the answer of Andy Burnham's first job, which is probably why he was so happy to do this interview, the career ladder one, was that he was a football pools collector, going door-to-door collecting for the football pool. 06:31 I know, I want to do some journalism, because it was sort of the most stereotypically northern thing you could do. It was like, I was a beagle enforcer, I was a claw cap manufacturer. Really though, Andy, was it really? 06:40 Some people have pointed out, a lot of the comments under the video were, oh, I didn't know we had a new prime minister. You know, that is doing the job in a way. 06:46 Well, that's what I mean. 06:47 It's the bottom line of the job, though. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. 06:51 So when he talked about his two-pound cap on bus fares, he went to an influencer who's known as Bus Auntie, right, who's just obsessed with buses. She does loads of content about buses. So, you know, whoever is running this is doing quite a good job of picking opportunities that speak to the theme of the day that they want to talk about, which is the old-fashioned grid thing reimagined for the new age. 07:10 But when Sunak tried to do this, so we're talking about fuel, he goes to a petrol station, has clearly never filled a car before, didn't know how to do it. He goes to a restaurant, food, give it to people. I mean, why didn't it work for Sunak, who had presumably people around him who said, you must go on social media, and it's working for Burnham? 07:30 I'm going to say the opposite of what you think I'm going to say, which is that Burnham is faker than Sunak. 07:36 Rishi Sunak was, bless him, a little nerd who loved playing chess and had an extraordinarily rich wife and was terrible at disguising that. Andy Burnham is a man who has had an entire adult life spent in politics, but is very, very good at disguising that. 07:49 So he's good at politics. 07:51 Yeah, in the same way that Tony Blair was. He's very good at faking authenticity. And that sounds incredibly pejorative, but it's a very useful... He's approaching it as a profession, and his profession is playing the Prime Minister on telly, essentially. And that's kind of... Hopefully you also are the actual Prime Minister. Yes. That's the bit we'll have to wait and see whether that's true. 08:11 If there is a, heaven forbid, another war breaks out, is Burnham going to be doing a fun thing from a cockpit saying, right, we're about to launch our first missiles? How does this attitude of doing social media play into big serious policy stuff, I suppose is the question. 08:25 You say that, but Iran has been putting out incredibly good, virulently anti-Semitic bangers in order as part of its propaganda effort. Mostly involving Lego. Yes. 08:35 Yeah, right. But this, you know, was this like, your government's run by a pedophile, they want you to die for Israel is one of the refrains, right? And this, yeah, okay, strong, strong messaging. 08:44 We're not advising this for Andy, just to check, are we? 08:46 Just to be clear, Andy Burnham. 08:48 Tone it down. But the point about that is that they have acknowledged that this is where Iranians will be getting their news. This is where Americans will be getting the news about Iran. So instead of the Supreme Leader granting an interview to CNN, they get some 25-year-olds in a bunker out to Tehran to make Lego videos using AI. 09:04 I'm not sure the Supreme Leader at the moment would give a very good interview. True. I'm just saying... 09:09 He has problems. 09:10 Yes, it's true. But you know what I mean? In the same way that they've decided, you know, that the traditional sit down political interview reaches people who already care a huge amount about politics. So Andy Burnham was also on, he did his big first set piece interview with Laura Kunzberg on the BBC. That's for the village. That's for people in, you know, the third sector who follow it. 09:28 One thing I think is really interesting with that is they've followed the policy with that as well, because it wasn't on the whole interview, I think is going out on Monday night. So after we're recording this, but there was an extract, I think, on the Laura Greensburg show yesterday on Sunday. Dribs and drabs of that have been coming out like little packaged up kind of social media pieces for several days now of Andy Burnham on this, Andy Burnham on that. So there is obviously a kind of real tactic that's concentrations bounds, I suppose, as well, isn't it? One of these things might catch someone's eye. when they're not necessarily going to sit and watch a full 20 minute, half an hour interview, I guess. And she did behind the scenes. 09:58 So there was a lot of her walking about, looking at the building and seeing who else is in there. And they shot it backwards. So he and his wife walked into number 10. So you hadn't seen before. Even that seemed to be calculatedly different. Yeah. 10:11 This is a human being who exists, is the message of quite a lot of this content. And you're exactly right. People talk now about the clipping economy. Most podcasts, even TV shows, they exist as clips. They exist as 90 seconds on social media. And he has, or his team have, fully embraced that this is just a new media environment now. Which, again... 10:30 We can have a discussion about, looking at those first week's policies, I like the declaration of intent, but it was essentially, I'm going to spend loads and loads of money that I definitely have promised absolutely 100% I do. And I think your point is exactly right, which is when he runs into his first analogy of the winter fuel tax, or as you say, something that happens, or a foreign incursion or a terror attack, or one of his ministers is caught with their hand in the till, then suddenly happy, cheery, let's have Bez on tambourine is going to feel a little bit annoying at that point. 11:04 But what you were saying about coming over authentically, even if that is a political thing, do you remember when Rishi Sunak was asked whether he preferred white or brown bread? And his reply to that one, which is an example of what you're saying, was we have all sorts of different bread in my house, which is immediately an elitist thing. Oh, you're a sourdough. Oh, you've got everything. Who's doing your shopping for you? And the other one was Gordon Brown and Biscuits. Do you remember Gordon Brown and the Biscuits when he went on Mumsnet, which again was one of these things that governments do periodically. They say, we're going to bypass the lobby. We're not going to do that mainstream kind of political coverage. He went on Mumsnet and was supposedly asked about what his favourite sort of biscuit was. Actually, because this is so long ago and before this kind of approach was, the Mumsnet moderators looked at that question and said, that's silly, we're not even going to present him with that one. 11:41 But it became an absolute part of it. He was the Prime Minister who couldn't even say what sort of biscuit he liked. And that became a sort of defining thing. So it's very, very dangerous. 11:50 People actually being themselves, like Rishi Sunak was... I mean, the jammy dodging joke is just... 11:56 sitting there, isn't it? I can see why they do slightly avoid those things. Yeah, yeah. 12:00 I mean, the funny thing is, during the make of your by-election, Andy Burnham did, he went on a Reddit and he did their format, which is called Ask Me Anything, which is now very much the opposite of what he's doing with the press in general. 12:11 But that's interesting too. So there was a really good piece in the New York Times by David Plouffe, who was Kamala Harris's campaign stretcher. He's a former Obama strategist. And he said, basically, you need to, if you're a politician, think of yourself as a content creator now. Like permanent campaign, create content. 12:26 And one of the things he said that I thought was really new was that politicians and everyone else used to optimise for search engines. Well, search is basically dead, right? Google search is now giving you a Google answers panel. Now you have to optimise yourself for answer engine, i.e. large language models. So Reddit, for example, signed a deal with, I think, OpenAI, one of the AI companies, to license all their content to be used as training data. So what Andy Burnham has done by giving that Reddit Ask Me Anything is when you go in and you ask any of your search engines, which are now essentially AI engines, what is Andy Burnham's bus policy, one of the sources it will draw on is him giving you his version of what the bus policy is. 13:09 And that's why going on YouTube, which again, all of YouTube transcripts are used to train AIs, is really important. It was very policy focused. I mean, it was a hell of a lot more substantive an interview than you'd get from the lobby. You would be asked by their news desk to go and go like, but you hate Angela Rayner, don't you? Or whatever it might be. 13:27 That seems to me even more of an argument to having a traditional group of people who are licensed to ask questions that you get a direct and therefore real answer to. 13:37 Some sort of gatekeepers, you're saying. Some gatekeeper method might be useful. 13:40 I'm going to say something that will get me in trouble with lots of my very dear friends who are lobby correspondents, who I think do a really hard job. In many ways, unless you're a pol-ed and you're swanking around on television all the time, it's quite a hard and unglamorous job that involves a lot of nights away from home, traipsing around to ask hard questions in the rain of politicians. However, it has not been a job that has broken stories about politicians. If you can think about all the resignations that we've had, or stories that have got politicians in trouble, most of them have come from outside the lobby. 14:09 Mm-hmm. 14:09 So I'm not fully won over on the view that actually this would be terrible for democratic accountability. Because actually, if you think about Nigel Farage's finances, for example, that was Gabriel Programme and the Sunday Times Insights team. You know, the lobby have a really important function, which is asking immediate questions and keeping on the ball with stuff and following things day to day. They don't really have the time and breathing space to do those investigative pieces. 14:34 Go on to say, though, they haven't. excelled themselves in recent weeks, have they? I mean, I'm thinking back to who's going to be Chancellor and who's going to get what position in Andy Burnham's cabinet. 14:45 Do you remember it was going to be Ed Miliband and then it was going to be Shibana Mahmood? 14:48 It was Shibana Mahmood. I read it in the FT and I haven't bothered checking. It was absolutely certainly. Well, I haven't checked since that story came out. So how's she doing? 14:56 She's doing brilliantly. 14:56 She's still Home Secretary. I mean, we literally, we got to the point where we had John Rantoul writing in The Independent, what the choice of Shabana Mood tells us about the new PM, two days before Shabana Mood wasn't made Chancellor. And that was after a lot of think pieces saying that Ed Miliband was definitely going to be the Chancellor as well. Do you remember David Miliband was going to come back and be Foreign Secretary in the Lords? That was a story broken, I think originally, but in the iPaper by Caroline Wheeler, who followed up... A week later, even more amazingly, guess who else was coming back? Ed Balls back on the red benches and possibly going into the cabinet. So, I mean, it felt a bit like people sticking pins in randomly. 15:29 Can I check something about this? 15:30 Because the first paper to break the Shabana Mahmood-Will-Be-Chancellor story was the FT. And I think they had three sources, all relatively close in place, telling them this is definitely going to happen. 15:43 But those sources were not people who knew anything, which is one of the keys I've found with sources. On that story about Ed Balls I just mentioned in terms of sourcing, the exact quote she had was, a source said, I haven't heard anything about Ed coming back. 15:57 Okay, so make what you will of that one. 16:00 There are a couple of things going on there, though, which just speaks to how the lobby works. So one of those is the flying a kite. It may be at some point that somebody thought, should we have Shabana Mahmood or Ed Miliband? And they thought, let's see whether or not business leaders vomit and cry when we say Ed Miliband's name. And then they go, okay, they do. So you get used, I think, to, you know, or there is this concept of the kind of the beet sweetener. Have you heard this phrase before? which is the idea that somebody wants something from you, so you say something nice about them. 16:29 So you remember, for a long time, you used to hear a lot of things about how amazingly insightful Michael Gove was, and I don't know if it was entirely unrelated to the fact that Michael Gove was very happy to take journalists' phone calls, right? A lot of the time when people are really lovely about Donald Trump, it's also because they want Donald Trump, who, let's be honest, is a man who responds to flattery to pick up the phone to them, right? So one of the things that I think is difficult for people outside the lobby to understand is how much of that is a transactional business and down payments on future stories. And it can be very easy to feel that that's... 17:01 working against the interests of readers, because there's all this stuff happening in the background that you don't know about. 17:06 When your job relies entirely on access, it's very useful. But as you say, it's a two-edged sword as well, isn't it? Because you end up being compromised on what you can write because of the favours you owe to people. 17:17 And we have had a run of governments whose cabinets are fantastically good at leaking stories about themselves. which appear as friends of X say, not only is he utterly brilliant, he's going to be Chancellor. And the story has one source, which is the person who wants to be Chancellor. So, I mean, they have... 17:37 I wonder about that David Miliband story. I wondered if David Miliband thought David Miliband should come back as Foreign Secretary. I have to say, I have no insight into that. 17:44 I mean, that's the thing you also know, that if David Miliband is kind of nailed on for a job, then it's going to go to Ed instead. And as it happened, Ed Miliband is now Foreign Secretary. So that's two down. 17:54 You will hear people inside the lobby say quite notoriously, like, if there is a story from such and such a person, it will go to such and such a journalist. You know, certain people are very plugged into certain. And then sometimes they go on and write their biographies or whatever it might be. 18:07 Right, right, right. 18:08 But, you know, I think one of the things I think people would be quite shocked by, a story that we reported at the time, was that at one point the Prime Minister spokesman and Boris Johnson lied to the lobby about Partygate. Just lied flat out to their faces. And when he left, they got him a leaving gift. 18:23 that's quite, that's, that's like, you know, a bit chummy. I mean, they had the White House correspondence dinner at the weekend. And I just, it's one of those things that I'm just, I am the joy killer. I am the fun sponge. But I just think it's really weird for him, Donald Trump to be in the middle of suing journalists, trying to subprime their phone records. And then, you know, for lots of people to make a good living every night going on TV and saying, this guy's trying to destroy democracy. And then it's like, oh, but the Hilton, you say? Mm-hmm. 18:52 I'll call Mossbros. I thought he might arrest everyone at the end of the dinner. Very funny. You know, an ICE team just come in and take them all out. And everyone goes, well, fair enough. 19:01 Oh, he's such a cop. 19:02 Oh, he's such a laugh, isn't he? Can I make two points tying this together? 19:05 Yeah. 19:06 One is that it was very funny seeing an operation from the White House saying, don't you dare make Ed Miliband Chancellor of the Exchequer, only for him to then be made Foreign Secretary. Yep. And secondly... 19:17 We do know who's behind us in a way, and it ties the whole thing together in another way, which is that the woman behind this is called Abby Tomlinson. And if you don't remember her name, she was at the age of 17 behind the Millifandom of 2015. She has since worked for Keir Starmer, which probably isn't on the CV in a big way, but she's now back in working for Burnham doing a lot of his social media stuff. 19:37 I remember she photoshopped Ed Miliband into a flower crown. Do you remember this as a concept? 19:41 I don't recall that. 19:42 I mean, she started off with a hard, let's make Ed Miliband effortlessly cool and sexy. So after that, Andy Burnham is kind of a layup, I think. 19:50 Someone please show that picture to Donald Trump now and see what he thinks about me, Foreign Secretary. Can I just give, I feel like I've been really, really mean about some of my fellow journalists. So there's two bits of credit to give to people on the... The predictions of who was going to be in Andy Burnham's cabinet. Dan Hodges, who I know, Helen, is one of your favourite. He actually specified on Sunday the 17th, so literally the day before Shabana Mahmood was appointed, or not appointed, he said that the reason Ed Milban was no longer going to be Chancellor was because Andy Burnham had decided he had a woman problem and he needed a woman in the top job in the government. 20:21 So it went to that well-known woman. john healy the next morning uh and actually to be fair to them the only people it's one single mention of the name healy in connection with the chancellorship was in the daily mail to give them their credit uh but unfortunately it was uh dennis healy and they were saying that andy burnham was going to drag us back to the 1970s so can i just say on the predictions front had anyone been cynical enough to say all the jobs will go to people who were instrumental in getting rid of care 20:48 Including lordships for unlikely people, straightforward rewards for people who resigned their job and then came straight back in again. The very cynical view of how this would be carved up would have been better. 21:01 That's the second thing I'm going to put down in my building up trouble from the future. Much as we immediately poured a big bucket of sick on Keir Starmer the instant he got in by saying the freebie stuff would haunt him. The unfunded pledges is one and the kind of revenge tour of the Starmerites. Because those people are all still in Parliament. And actually, once everybody's done the raft of stories about Andy the TikTok king, then there's going to be a big hunt on for disgruntled people of whom there are. There already has been. 21:27 I mean, it was less than 24 hours before Darren Jones, who incidentally was mooted as a possible Chancellor by the Independent, came back and, you know, got the knife in saying that it was the VAT cut, wasn't it, was going to be paid for by the digital IDs. That was unfunded, which was a real kind of, like, early out of the doors, get the knife in Andy's back. 21:44 Jokes on you, we didn't know how we were going to pay for that either. 21:47 I have one more final quiz question, which is that one of the things that he was asked, Andy Burnham was asked in his Reddit AMA, well, what his four favourite films are? 21:56 Oh, yeah. 21:57 Can you make any stab at what any of them might be? 22:00 Kez. 22:01 Well, there is sort of a theme that runs through them, actually. Would you like to hear what they are? Yeah. Okay. They are Goodfellas, The Big Short, Brassed Off, and Pride. Okay, so the themes of these films are, in my view, The Big Short is bankers are evil, Brassed Off is people from the south who close the pits, i.e. Margaret Thatcher are evil, and Pride are Tories are evil. Yeah. 22:20 Yeah. 22:21 And then Goodfellas are, I'd like to put someone in the boot of a car and bury them in an underpass. 22:27 Well, there'll be a very slick video about it when it does happen. 22:29 And to where the council housing is being built or where Andy Byrne is, that's going to be when he gets in trouble. 22:36 Andy, I'm confused. So, policy announcement that I've seen this week. I'm under the impression that we've reopened North Sea Drilling. 22:44 It's gung-ho drill, baby, drill. We're opening all those oil fields up again. And that somehow Ed Miliband, who has been against this for many, many years, has not raised any objection at all. Am I right? Yep, it's going to be Texas on sea. Frack, baby, frack. 22:57 Yee-haw. Yee-haw. It's a bit more complicated than that. So, the basic thing to start with is... 23:03 The Conservatives were quite up for drilling. Labour said in their 2024 manifesto, no more drilling is needed in the North Sea. We think we've got, you know, enough for the slow decline because we're going to be moving to other sources of energy. 23:16 One, it seems unfashionable to mention it now, quite a big majority with that as a big policy. 23:22 Since the election, there has been this big campaign by lots of people. I mean, lots of fossil fuel lobbyists, both paid and unpaid, have been saying, you've got to get the North Sea open again. But the idea that there's going to be a huge reversal at the moment seems very unlikely. Instead, what there is is a campaign about two particular fields called Rosebank and Jackdaw. Rosebank is oil, Jackdaw is gas. Both of which sound like lovely little retirement cottages, don't they? Yeah, they weren't for much longer... 23:50 So those are the two fields that are really in contention. And part of the reason for that is that they had already received permission before the election. Then when Labour got in, they said, well, we don't think we really need them. There was a legal challenge because they hadn't taken into account the emissions caused by actually burning stuff as opposed to producing it, you know, getting it out of the ground. 24:11 So that's the main focus. And they've been under review. There's a way that they could say, well, it's consistent with the manifesto. Is there not a quibble over... further development and development. 24:23 Yes, there is. Yeah, and it's quite... It's a bit angels dancing on the head of a pin. I mean, I think it's likely that these two are... At least one of these two will happen in some way, really more for political reasons than because they provide big energy security or because they do anything for bills. Because they won't do anything for bills. They might do a little bit for energy security in extremis. The argument in favour of them is that... They lower emissions a little bit because the production methods here are a bit cleaner, maybe 15% lower. So that's not bad. That sounds good, doesn't it? 24:53 Yeah. And also we're going to need oil and gas for some decades to come. It is true, even if it is declining. So that's the argument four. And probably to defang the issue, there'll be some kind of movement on it. The new energy secretary is called Miata Fambula. She's already been up to Aberdeen to make a video saying, we are transitioning, but we'll still do a bit of this stuff. 25:13 Because a lot of it's to do with employment in the northeast of Scotland as well, isn't it? It's kind of what's going on up there. It is. I'm going to say something that's probably a bit... 25:22 controversial to some people i think north sea oil and gas has taken on a significance that is disproportionate to the actual effect of it much in the way that steelworks or actually bits of the defense industry are inextricably linked with the fact that those are jobs in barrow and furnace it's kind of it is similar to fishing during brexit which became a huge flashpoint for and that was that was a lot about jobs as well the actual number of new jobs even the owner of the field has said i think that jackdell produced 300 new jobs it's not massive Well, at the moment, it's quite a lot. 25:53 If you look at the fact the video game sector employs thousands of people in Britain, you certainly don't hear about it from Lisa Nandy, who's been reappointed culturally. It's a personal beef of mine that we can settle later. 26:04 Yeah. So you've got this weird situation where lots of people acknowledge we do need to get off this stuff, but even people like, say, Greg Jackson of Octopus Energy, who is not a drill baby drill guy, is saying, well... 26:16 If we're going to be using it, we may as well use the stuff that's here rather than lug it halfway around the world. 26:21 It's sort of seen as a slightly pragmatic thing to do. It's quite hard to square with the fact that half of France and Spain are on fire. That is quite big news this week, isn't it? Yeah, and increasingly bits of the north of England and Scotland are on fire. I mean, the phrase UK wildfire season is not a good one, and these wildfires and heatwaves are... are caused and exacerbated massively by fossil fuels. So it is quite brain-breaking to say, oh, well, actually it's sort of pragmatic to have this new drilling. I think the arguments for and against are relatively finely balanced, given that we haven't got rid of all the petrol cars or gas boilers. 26:54 People are still buying them because they don't feel secure enough to go electric or go to a heat pump or whatever. So you are going to have to have some kind of supply. So that's the argument in a nutshell. 27:04 Do you think that this has been influenced by Trump and the war in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz? Or was it all happening before? 27:10 It was all happening before. I mean, Tony Blair had already made about 15 interventions on it well before the Strait of Hormuz was... 27:17 A media darling as it is now. 27:19 But there's no question that the pressure helps, I think. 27:21 Is this an example of Burnham being quite capable in terms of politics is to realise perhaps I won't make Ed Miliband either Chancellor or leave him in energy because whatever else happens, people associate him with something going wrong with energy. 27:39 Yeah, people think of it as hair-shirtism and people think it's incredibly restrictive. What I find is that I don't think they help the debate. As in, Burnham will probably lose plenty of support to his left if he grants either of these from people who don't want new drilling. 27:55 There has not been an equivalent national debate about the main opportunity you have, which is... 28:01 Electrifying, going electric in a power supply, going electric in cars and home heating. Those are the things that really will make a much bigger difference. And I think if Burnham announced this, he will probably have to say something along the lines of, and by the way, we're also going to get your electricity bills down so that you can afford this stuff much more easily. Those are the things that are really going to cut emissions. I would hope there would be some argument about that. 28:23 By the end of September, if we have had not only a European wildfire outbreak on the scale we haven't seen before, plus even more of a heat wave, do you think his job will be easier then? 28:35 Yeah, I mean, I think, what's that horribly cynical saying? You know, a crisis is an opportunity or the symbol of crisis is the same as opportunity. The idea that this is a matter of social justice is, I think, quite a persuasive one. You have got lots of people who can't afford their energy bills and also can't afford air conditioning who would quite like comfortable, affordable homes and energy supply. And I think there is a really good case to be made that these newer technologies provide those. And that's a better argument than you're all going to die in a fire. 29:05 Yes, even though that will be true for some people. 29:08 Kemi Bainock, meanwhile, has set herself completely against it, hasn't she? She said anyone who supports net zero, as she used to do until recently, cannot be a Conservative candidate. 29:17 Yeah. 29:18 I mean, it would knock out about half the shadow cabinet if this was backdated even a few years. 29:22 She said something even more controversial. She said, we're not looking for attention seekers as our candidates in this party. 29:28 I mean, talk about raising the Conservative Party to the ground starting again. 29:30 Yeah. But, I mean, she also said in an interview with Laura Koontzberg a week or so ago that our emissions nationally have gone up. They haven't. They've halved since 1990. I don't think she follows the debate at all. I thought you were going to say she doesn't follow the news. It's not good. I also think that. I mean, it just reminds me, lots of the time when you get a politician interviewed saying, what should we do about the environment, if they're not engaged at all, they'll say, well, I recycle everything. 29:56 Well, that's got very little to do with this. 29:59 It is weird because the target that all nations have accepted is that we need to try and keep warming below two degrees. This is what just below 1.5 is like, you know, big wildfires, big environmental problems. And at the moment, we're not even on course for two. 30:14 Things have got a lot better since the Paris Agreement 10 years ago, but fundamentally we are still not on course for two. That would require emissions to come down quite a quick clip every year. They're still not coming down. They're still kind of stumbling along a ridge. So it's hard to square that with the argument that new drilling is pragmatic and actually in the short to medium term might well actually slightly cut emissions. That's a very odd thing to consider, you know. 30:38 I think it's an interesting example of when you're trying to assess this very early policy record of a pattern emerging of Andy Burnham sort of talk, like the vibes are very left wing, but the actual governing is a lot more pragmatic and centrist. I was thinking the same thing with he just very quickly went, well, we're suspending the early release of prisoner scheme until I can look at it. Right. 30:57 which I thought was kind of... I mean, obviously he's done these big economic giveaways, which is kind of traditionally left-wing, but it's really interesting to look at the polling because the latest one puts Labour ahead, this is from YouGub, for the first time in a really long time. But he's taken a big chunk out of the Greens. Is that so? And I think that's really interesting in a kind of... Is that vibes? Is he capturing the vibes better? 31:18 Mm-hmm. 31:19 And actually, to go back to Zoram Amdani, similar to him, actually, his big latest big announcement was about reducing licensing agreements on like barbershops. So basically like something that Liz Truss would be massively in favour of. But no one thinks of him as a kind of neoliberal anti deregulation bro because the vibes are so different. So I wonder how long that will last. 31:39 Saying you're not going to allow sex offenders to be let out. Quite a good popular win, isn't it? 31:45 But the problem is it's not like everyone else was like, hooray, more rapists on our streets. That's what I'm in favour of. They were dealing with the capacity crunch in prisons. And I don't know how he plans to solve that. It's not like anyone else actively was, you know, a fan of, you know, restorative justice. They just didn't have the prison places. 32:01 I did think it was interesting. I think it went a bit unnoticed in the kind of reshuffle and new appointments. There was James Timpson, who was prisons minister under Starmer, who was a really interesting appointment. He was brought in from outside, but, you know, long-term... campaigner on prisons and real kind of realistic thinker, he stepped down quietly, said he didn't want to carry on in the job. 32:17 Well, that's the same thing with Patrick Vallance's left government as well. And the victims minister, after hearing some details of this very much Giselle Pellico-like case in Britain, also said that she couldn't, didn't want to do it anymore. I think life has become, the relentlessness of the news cycle and the fact that it's very hard. I mean, prisons is particularly badly affected by this. We've had more prisons ministers and you've had hot dinners. Yeah. It's very hard for people to prosper in that role because it's constantly changing. There's no money. Yes. 32:43 I mean, same with energy secretaries, to be fair. There's quite a lot of turnover in that in that brief. I think the thing that Burnham is doing is trying to triangulate a bit because trying to go with public opinion a bit, because the latest YouGov polling is that for over 40 percent of people say, yeah, a bit more drilling. And then there's quite a heavy cadre of don't knows as well. But I think if one of these was granted, it might defang the issue enough. The overall direction of travel hasn't changed, though. 33:09 The targets are all still in place of how to get off the stuff. So, yeah, it's a bit of a watch this space. 33:14 It sounds realistic to say for as long as there are people with petrol cars, we're going to need petrol. 33:18 But you sort of nudge along the targets to accelerate the transition at the same time. 33:22 Yeah. 33:22 So, we shall see. You turn into Chris Mason. You're rounding up. 33:26 We shall see. 33:29 Not on this podcast, mate. Sorry, sorry. 33:31 In summary, Andy Burnham is a land of contrast. 33:33 Another exciting day in British politics. Something for sure. It's not over yet. 33:41 So with all that in mind, Ian, how is the eye going to make fun of Andy Burnham? Because, you know, new Prime Minister, is the PM's WhatsApp group going to fade away? Is it going to be... Well, we're not going to make fun of him, Andy. Oh, sorry. He's left-wing. You must read the reader's letters. 33:57 From now on, there will be no criticism at all. The woke, libtard, private eye will be giving up completely. There will be no criticism of Andy. I mean, for God's sake, give him a break. 34:07 I should say Ian's just come from a session reading the reader's correspondence for the last fortnight. Are people convinced that you've given up on the jokes now? Yeah, no, that's it now. 34:16 Or that we should give up on the jokes is one of two. We either have or we should. Take your pick. 34:22 No, we will be continuing to try and assess the new Prime Minister comically, but we're not doing the WhatsApp group anymore, partly because everyone's discovered the disappear function. 34:34 So they don't send WhatsApp anymore. And also, I think it was time for a new format because I think he is different. I've had it on three sources that he's from the north. 34:47 So we thought that was quite a good start. We did a version of Coronation Street last week, which is not. terribly like the Coronation Street that's going out at the moment, but it is a sort of nostalgia, retro, Burnhamite, 70s Coronation Street, which seems to be quite fun and went down quite well. 35:05 So we might be continuing with that. That was what worried me slightly, was if you make it like today's Coronation Street, it was about three murders per fortnight. Yeah. 35:13 No, well, it's like him saying he wants an old-fashioned Labour Party to return. So that's where we're going. So back to Albert Tatlock and Ian Sharple. Excellent. 35:21 Good stuff. And also SNL UK, which turned out to be much more successful than anyone predicted, really did well with their political parodies. And I think it's George Fouracre's got his Keir Starmer. I feel that's the main sadness I'm feeling, actually, at the departure of Keir Starmer. I thought that was a really great Keir Starmer impression. And he's not going to be called on to do that again very much anymore. 35:39 Even the people who did very good Keir Starmer impersonations, people didn't like them very much. And the more accurate they were, I think the less popular they were. So it was quite odd. There was a sense in which, I mean, in the old days, Harry Enfield on Spitting Image used to do not very accurate impersonations of people, but they were funny. There's an element of... 36:02 sort of surreal imagining that makes these things funnier. On Private Eye, I mean, we're always looking for something that will get the tenor of it, but not necessarily be sort of fiendishly accurate. I mean, for a long time, we presented Tony Blair as an evangelical vicar, which technically he isn't. But there was something about his demeanor. He felt like one. 36:24 Spiritually, he was a vicar. 36:26 And Theresa May ran a sort of not very successful girls' school. 36:30 Well, that was the most extraordinary one because that was one that continued over, wasn't it? The school was originally the Coalition Academy. It was. And it was David Cameron and then Nick Clegg as deputy head. And somehow that one, it was like you knew Theresa May was going to come along, who was just absolutely a headmistress, wasn't she? Yes, she was more perfect. Slotted in perfectly. 36:47 I think it's quite sound for the politicians because I feel like they get more like the private eye parodies of them. I feel like it becomes a prison from which they can't escape. 36:55 I was thinking when we talked about Tony Blair earlier, one of his ingenious early man of the people moves was, I'm sure you'll remember this, he would leave the house holding a mug of tea. There was a lot of this, wasn't there? 37:07 And it had a picture of his kids on as well. 37:09 Yeah, yeah. And then he got into his car and you have to think, where's the mug go yeah dishwasher in the car like what what is this you know but it was but it sort of worked as long as you didn't think about it too much so i think the car was full of staff oh i'm sure i'm sure i think we've talked about this a bit before and is there a problem that there are fewer of these written formats which everyone gets yeah so whatsapp was a was you know a perfect example because everyone is in lots of whatsapp groups whereas you know there are Fewer St Albion Parish news. 37:41 There aren't so many people. 37:42 Traditionally on a magazine, you're looking for a literary format. And it used to be there were diaries. Originally, there was Mrs Wilson's diary. With John Major, it was a parody of Adrian Mole of a book. It was the secret diary. These are literary formats. Dear Bill was a series of letters. People don't write letters anymore. They don't keep diaries. So it became more and more difficult. I mean, there was a parish newsletter. Obviously, I read mine. But I'm not sure that it's a hugely popular medium at the moment. And it has to exist in memory as well. 38:14 So it became more difficult. WhatsApp was a bit of a savior because people were writing again. 38:20 And you could actually record those. But again, that's become a bit of a cliche that everything is done by WhatsApp. So one's always looking for a format. And part of the joy of the Coronation Street is its script. You can get a lot of people in. You get a lot of people in, but basically it starts off as the written word. So that's one of the limitations. 38:41 It gives you the leeway as well to be more surreal with it, I think, as well, because the thing about Mrs Wilson's diary, John Major's diary, and Dear Bill, was they were all sort of slightly in a parallel universe, weren't they, as well? They sort of flipped over, and it gave you more kind of scope to be imaginative with it. 38:57 I think it's not probably true that Yvette Cooper wears a hairnet and looks like Ina Sharples. So far, I don't think that's sourced. 39:04 Can I imagine her in Victoria Wood's Dinner Ladies, though? Do you know what? I can see the sort of tabard. But you know what is genuinely a hugely popular genre? We had a piece about it in the book section this last issue. Romanticy. 39:14 Oh, no. 39:15 Oh, the Andy Burnham romanticism. 39:16 You want Andy Burnham falling in love with a big minotaur? 39:19 Come on. 39:20 Well, I think Helen's personal problem is in my case. Getting overwhelming at this point. 39:26 I just don't know. I mean, it is unbelievably popular as a genre. You're right. It's one of the only genres anyone's reading on the train. 39:33 Think about it. Just let it sit for a couple of weeks. We'll revisit this. 39:36 OK, it's a literary format. 39:37 We should be doing it. I've got it. Oh, God. OK. I think Andy Burnham's been very clever as well in terms of cartoonists. Because Keir Starmer, as you say, was very hard for cartoonists to get a handle on. There wasn't any sort of definitive visual thing. Andy Burnham has already done that. This is what he wears. He dresses down. He wears the black T-shirts. He wears the, as we were told by the male on Sunday this week, very, very expensive jackets. It's OK, he's Prime Minister. 39:57 He's doing all right for himself. 39:58 He's not got Lord Ali buying them for him, as far as we know. So he's kind of got that image there. And I always think of John Major, who I always think, Steve Bell, after he did him with his underpants outside his trousers, somehow that just became the sort of definitive visual kind of version of him. And actually to kind of seize the day early, as Andy Burnham's done, and say, this is what my image is and that there's enough to play with. You know, he can be that Manchester Hacienda raver or whatever for cartoonists. 40:22 Oh, it's really smart. Like the quarter zip, you know, the polo neck, like all of that, the black teeth. Like having a thing that people mock. I mean, this is something that Sadiq Khan famously said to lobby journalists when he was running for Mayor of London the first time, which is, you lot are all taking the piss out of me saying my father was a bus driver. Like, by the time that's boring to you, a normal voter has heard it once, right? And the same thing as a normal voter will go, oh, Prime Minister's that guy who's in the black T-shirt, which, you know, so I think that very smart. Donald Trump essentially has a uniform. He wears the blue suit and the red tie. That's just it. He wears the red MAGA cap. Zeran Mamdani from the left always wears a suit to the extent that when he did a video about opening public pools in New York, he jumped in the pool in a suit, in a full suit. 41:02 Because that's his, like he is, he says, I'm a sewer socialist. I'm from a tradition about socialists who fixed the sewers. So I'm coming to work. I take this very seriously. 41:12 Mm-hmm. 41:12 And I think, you know, you can mock it as being, again, I just think it's professional. You've just thought about it. The Queen always wore a block colour because people wanted to be able to see where she was in a crowd. Like, you think about, you know, he's not a normal person. He's Prime Minister. 41:25 It's OK. And Zelensky is a war leader. Yeah, he always wears a color. So he wears that. I mean, it is great that Trump didn't understand that. 41:33 Having failed... To go to war. Yeah. 41:36 Right. So, another tick mark in my ongoing column of Andy Burnham. Plus and minuses. 41:42 Right. Well, I guess we'll wait and see what the readers make of it. We will. And then do the opposite. 41:49 That's it for this episode of Page 94. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed it. If you'd like to hear more about any of the stories we've discussed and many, many more besides, they can all be found in the latest issue of Private Eye. available not only on newsstands but also in subscription form at private-i.co.uk. Thanks to Ian, Helen and Adam, and thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. We'll be back in a fortnight with another one. Bye for now.