Rod Liddle: UK Correspondent on the sinking of a luxury yacht off the coast of Sicily

Rescuers are scrambling to search for six people, including British tech mogul Mike Lynch, who are missing after a tornado capsized a super yacht off the coast of Sicily.  

There were 22 aboard when the yacht sank, 15 have been rescued, including a New Zealand citizen. 

One person is confirmed dead. 

UK Correspondent Rod Liddle told Mike Hosking the ship’s mast was snapped in half when the storm hit, which caused the yacht to lose balance and capsize. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
UK bound rob Little morning mate, Good morning to you mate.
We're particularly interested, of course, in this yacht disaster. Give
them a New Zealander or a New Zealand born citizen
on the apparently. But what do you know from Urian
what happened here?

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Well, it seems to have been you would know the
terminology better than me. You need u kiwis. But it
seems to have been moored off Porticello near Palermo, off
the coast of Sicily, during what was an uncommonly rare
storm which hit the boat as it was Moored's mast

(00:38):
was stapped in half. The yachts seem to lose all
balance and capsized. That's all we know at the moment,
and we know that there were twenty two people on
board that aside from the New Zealand, there were also
people from the US, Canada, Sri Lanka, Ireland, but primarily

(00:59):
it was Brits. And we know that there is certainly
one person who's died, but there are six who are missing.
And the one who's attracting the attention, of course, as
he would is Mike Lynch, who is sometimes referred to
as Britain's Bill Gates. He's a high tech entrepreneur who

(01:21):
has had his brushes with authority in the past, but
is generally regarded as a very very clever bloke and
indeed a very very successful entrepreneur. And his eighteen year
old daughter, Hannah is also missing as well.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Exactly all right, well we'll stay across listally what happened?
And funny somebody text me about the supermoon the other day,
yesterday in fact, and I saw the moon and at
no point did I go, my god, that's big and blue.
So obviously it looks different in your part of the
world than it does here.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
No, it doesn't look blue. It looks a bit bigger.
It's very interesting. You know. I don't know what's happened
with the world, but we seem to be getting more
and more of these supermoons. I'm sure they're meant to
be sort of at irregular pace, but in the last
ten years it's red. We ob the newspaper not read

(02:09):
that there's a supermoon about to come, and that that
will portend all sorts of ill omens, such as the
Third World War, armageddon, and the coming of the Messiah. Mike,
I hope you're ready for that. This one is supposedly
exceedingly rare in that it is a blue supermoon, So

(02:29):
a supermoan we get three to four times a year
when the moon's that it's closest to Earth. But a
blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar months,
which happens obviously only four years, only once every four years,
so this is very very rare, and it's due to
appear exactly now, Mike. So when we're finished, I'm going

(02:53):
to go outside and try to peer through the rain
which is pouring down and the clouds which are covering
the sky up here in the northeast of England, to
see if I can see this phenomena. There are loads
of other phenomena. August is a great month in the
Northern Hemisphere and particularly Britain for astronomical phenomena. We get

(03:14):
to play these asteroids coming down to Earth which are
easily seen and they just look like sort of rather
bad fireworks. And we also get, unusually for summer, the
Northern Lights, which were seen recently as far south as Lincolnshire. Wow.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
Actually, well I've got you Ron help me out here.
Story I'm reading over the weekend about this is the
new government and the pressure must be on given what
they did with Rwanda, Labor told to urgently get a grip.
Five hundred illegal migrants arrived from the English channel in
one single day over the weekend. That surely can't continue.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
It will continue, It'll continue for the next four years.
I don't think that the Labor Party has the Labor
government has any plans whatsoever to actually cope with this
huge influx of people, the majority of which in Flanders
don't come on votes across from Calais. The majority coming
perfectly legally, six hundred and fifty thousand of them last year,

(04:20):
which is a huge problem. It depresses wages, et cetera,
et cetera, causes social problems, et cetera. They don't seem
to have a plan for the vigrants. The idea before
the election was that they would was that they would
try to hunt down the traffickers. Well we've been trying
to do that for fifteen years. Hasn't worked. So they

(04:44):
certainly have no other plan than Ruanda and this will continue,
I promise you for the next four to five years.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
Well, we'll see you on Thursday, Roder. I appreciate you
turn right a little out of the UK. For more
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