October 2, 2024 • 40 mins
Ian, Helen, Adam and Andy discuss the Ghosts of Tories Past currently hanging around the conference (many with new books to plug), say 'goodbye' to the Evening Standard and 'good riddance' to Mohamed Fayed.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Maisie (00:05):
Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
Andy (00:08):
Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.
My name's Andrew Hunter Murray andI'm here in the eye office with Helen
Lewis, Adam MacQueen and Ian Hislop.
We are here to discuss all the newsthat's happened since the last edition
of the magazine, later on in the show.
We are going to be talkingabout what's happened, to London
journalism in the last week.
Quick shortcut, nothing good.
And also about Mohamed Fayed andthe recent revelations about his
(00:31):
sex life, which will be unsurprisingto anyone who has been reading
the eye since, the late nineties.
But first, we are on the week of theTory Conference, and we are going to
be covering the ghost of Tory's pastbecause Helen, there are lots and
lots of, you'd think retired Tories.
About,
Helen (00:49):
Even now, Liz Truss is doing a victory lap of Tory conferences by having,
lost her seat saying she definitely,there's a question where she said that
I would've done better than Rishi Sinek.
And that is actuallypartly arguable, right?
actually could, shouldshe have done worse?
Possible.
Yeah.
Andy (01:06):
Yeah.
I think she could, yeah.
I think she could keep her seat atthe election, whereas she did not.
Is that indicative at all?
That's true
Helen (01:12):
actually.
That would've been,that would've been bad.
She, also says that she thinks themini budget would've worked had she
just been given a bit more time.
That was the problem.
yeah.
But, received a sort of hero's welcomeand people cheered when she said that,
if, is there anything good coming up?
And she said Donald Trumpmight win the election.
Which is fascinating to me, right?
Because there is this establishedproblem that the Tory membership is
(01:32):
once again gonna vote for the leader.
And it is a very small andunrepresentative group and it's
got an entire media ecosystemas discussed on podcast pass,
set up to cater to it, right?
But it is essentially trapped in this.
Echo chamber in which LizTruss is, has been robbed.
Boris Johnson has been robbed.
Rishi Sinek has been robbed.
(01:52):
however, I thought the main attractionthis week is the fact that Boris Johnson's
memoirs have begun to be serialized.
Oh.
And I thought you'd like a quiz.
Adam (02:00):
Ah, course we would.
Helen (02:01):
Adam would really like a quiz.
'cause he's actually read them very I did
Adam (02:03):
the homework very, I was told before the weekend that we were gonna
talk about Boris Johnson's book.
So I actually went and did thereading 'cause I'm such a goodie
such a wo, nearly killed me detail.
you're
Ian (02:15):
the,
Andy (02:16):
absolute antithesis of Boris.
Yeah.
Whereas I was dedicatedto the Boris method.
I read none of the extractsand I'm gonna wing it and,
Helen (02:24):
you'll rely on the queen to tell you about them.
That's one of the thingsthat's in the extra.
She says the queen tells him aboutan RAF fighter that's fallen into the
sea and he's she seemed to be morewell informed about it than I was.
And you're like, she actuallyreads her red boxes artist.
That's the difference.
Okay.
Boris Johnson'sgrandmother's nickname was.
A GaN.
B Granny butter, C Grannypack, or D, the big G.
Ian (02:47):
It's granny butter.
Helen (02:48):
It is granny butter.
It's granny butter.
Yeah,
Ian (02:51):
I know that.
'cause it's awful and lame.
Helen (02:54):
She was French, so presumably she should've been granny Boo,
but for some reason wasn't.
Ian (02:58):
The de mail, feels it necessary to translate the French, that Boris throws
in during his conversations with macro.
and it just sounds like pure fr.
This one Boris talking about
ette throw his toys outta the prayer.
Andy (03:16):
They've been doing a little, Boris glossary for, since he started the column.
But normally the words areEnglish, which they're glossing.
But when he had
Adam (03:23):
the column in the Daily Telegraph, they could rely on Telegraph readers,
having at least a copy of the OED tohand, if not a decent public school
education, that would mean they werefamiliar with basic Latin phrases.
Helen (03:32):
I sense this may have, this bit may have been a joke,
but it's very hard to tell.
What did he not offer?
Macron Return for Brexit deal.
A, new channel B, hisdaughter's hand in marriage.
CA nuclear packed, or DAhydrogen fueled concord.
Ian (03:46):
It was his daughter's hand in marriage
Helen (03:49):
fairly, you've been secretly swatting up.
The one I can't work out if is ajoke or not is the how She didn't
feel con given that the originaljet fuel power one blew up.
Filling it with the same fuel asthe Hindenburg seems like a hostage
to fortune, but, there we go.
Okay.
It's also
Adam (04:03):
the Boris solution to everything is a bridge, isn't it?
We just build another bridgeor a tunnel or something.
Yeah.
We need another one of those.
Helen (04:10):
some
Adam (04:10):
massive bit of infrastructure that isn't going to happen.
Absolutely.
And it gonna be named after him.
I think that's the main
Helen (04:15):
attract.
Truly.
which word was not used in the extracts?
A Botho B Rubicon.
C Grasping like a grandpa or d Karoo?
Andy (04:26):
Oh, Karoo is very Johnson.
EI, let's say the first,what was the first one again?
Botho.
I think he won't have used Botho.
Adam (04:33):
Yeah, I think Botho Sounds like Helen Lewis trying to do Boris to me.
No, I think he did use that.
Helen (04:40):
Correct.
Adam.
Ah, you, a you know me too well.
And sadly I think you probablyknow the works of Boris Johnson.
tragic.
that's good.
I think you're all winners.
Thank you.
Because you didn't payany money to read that.
I think Andy's
Andy (04:53):
the winner 'cause he didn't read it.
Yeah.
I'm just waiting for the full thing tocome out, which will be out, I think
a week after this podcast goes out.
Helen (04:59):
It's out in the 10th and I will hopefully be, unless it's,
unless it finally finishes meoff, be reviewing it for the eye.
there's
Adam (05:04):
gonna be small children in Boris costumes like queuing outside,
Brons at Waterstones at midnightaren't there to get their copy.
Yes, most of them here.
I was gonna say
Helen (05:12):
that is Carrie's Instagram
Ian (05:14):
and they're looking for fantasy and fiction, so that's what they'll get.
No, we had a, list of, originallywe, we were trying to help him with
titles 'cause unleashed feeble andI, we had an a range of titles and
I, we missed one, which is untrue.
Helen (05:32):
Yes.
The bit when he yeah.
When he talks about how he'sgoing to invade Holland to seize
back the vaccines is a sort ofbit of a fever dream, isn't it?
Ian (05:39):
Yes.
that is boys' own.
Yeah.
leading a raid Churchill styleup the Darden ELs to Holland.
it would be, that would be the geographyinvolved and very embarrassed members
of the general staff going, I don'tthink we can invade, a NATO ally.
My, my guess is it was a,throwaway remarkable a meeting,
(05:59):
that just embarrassed everybody.
and he's now presenting it as though thiswas a revelatory brilliant idea of his,
Andy (06:08):
this book is gonna be big, isn't it?
Annoyingly, it's probably gonnasell lots and lots of copies.
Helen (06:14):
I'm not sure any books sell that many copies at the moment.
The nonfiction market is really sluggish.
There was one genuine, I would say,revelation everywhere, apart from
people who read the Eye, which is thathe writes about the fact that the late
queen was suffering from Boulogne cancer.
And that was something thatwe funky had that didn't he.
but everyone else funky did, and Charles
Adam (06:32):
Brandeth actually had, had Scoop Boris on that one.
He mentioned it in, in,in passing in a piece.
But yeah, that was, I thinkit was the first sort of kind
official confirmation from the,former Prime Minister, wasn't it?
Helen (06:42):
Because everyone else said the death certificate said old age, and
no one else seemed to, to talk aboutit, but it does account for the fact
that everybody knew for a long time.
She was, she was on the way out.
He says that he thinks that sheheld on in order to see him off.
Which eab BOL is mylong-term conspiracy theory.
That meeting Liz Truss was thefinal blow that she thought.
Adam (07:00):
I'm absolutely convinced about that one.
I've seen enough.
I'm absolutely certain that thequeen said, I am not letting that
man do the dress at my funeral.
I'm gonna hang on aslong as I possibly can.
Alright, so she's got Liz Truss instead.
Yes.
Helen (07:11):
Yes, No one wants to be your funeral to be, so I'm Guy.
Go, cripes, just book of yes, jolly
Ian (07:17):
good old grumpy knickers the Queen.
Helen (07:19):
Yes.
Poor Theresa May comes out ofit quite badly, doesn't she?
She gets described as grumpiness.
'cause then he has a whole riff abouther nostrils, which is very peculiar.
given
Ian (07:27):
that he spent a whole paragraph saying that the thing that the queen
really admired about him was how un bitterhe was, to have lost being Prime Minister.
And then he just puts the bootinto Theresa May and then into Sak.
he's extremely bitter.
that's very interesting.
As ever.
With the jovial Boris mask,it slips pretty quick.
Helen (07:47):
Oh, there's two very rude bits about his sister.
He refers to my sister the bracket,like the ubiquitous Rachel.
And it's just, and on the tila downthe Thames, the remain one, there
was brackets inevitably Rachel,and there's just a kind of just a
little knife goes in every so often.
Ian (08:02):
But I thought the description of Rachel on the boat.
Shouting over thefisherman's issue in the eu.
He ends up concluding thatRachel's presence there, may
well have swung it against Roma.
And I thought the family arrogancenever ends even in opposition.
It has to be a Johnsonwho swings the vote.
Adam (08:21):
I thought the most interesting thing about the book is the way he's now trying
to reposition himself as the anti Borisas pm, he's now saying, oh, lockdowns,
oh, I'm not sure they were a great idea.
how could I, the great libertarianhave been persuaded to do, there's
various bits where he just said,I can't believe that I did that.
knows how the rest of us feel now.
But, there is this sort of t it's abit like, as you were saying this,
(08:41):
constituency now that the Tory partyare playing for that, he's decided
that one didn't quite work out for him.
So now he, wants to redefine himselfas the anti him, which is quite weird.
Ian (08:51):
the idea that he says the only thing he regrets about, the Covid
inquiry and the process of examininghis role is the fact that he apologized.
And at the time, the whole machinery ofgovernment was saying, why does no one
believe that the Prime Minister is sorry?
Because he wasn't, and now barelyfour years later, he's saying No.
(09:12):
I, when I said, sorry, I was lying.
he's literally saying he was lyingall the way through the inquiry,
all the way through the committee.
So why on earth at the timewas he so outraged that no one
Adam (09:24):
believed him?
No, it's extraordinary.
Downplaying it as it was amatter of some 15 parties or so.
I was assured that all theregulations were being followed.
But did,
Helen (09:32):
yeah.
Many of them barely parties at all.
What?
But nonetheless, you wereallowed to zero parties
Ian (09:37):
exasperating about having to read this stuff again is say the covid thing.
We've been here.
He has been proved to havelied all the way through.
He was hounded out of officequite rightly for his behavior
at the time, but he won't die.
Maybe Unde is a better title for this,but he's a sort of blonde zombie who
corpses around and there's just no way.
(09:59):
There's just no
Andy (09:59):
way of stopping him.
But is that because people arewilling to go along with it?
And I do think the book is gonna be big.
I think I've spoken to a couple of books.
I said the pre-orders off, they're great.
They're really healthy.
There's gonna be lots and lots of.
Copies shifted.
Is that because there is a sizableconstituency of people who want to believe
the shtick and who are perfectly willingto go along with his version of events,
(10:21):
even though it has been proved untrue?
Helen (10:22):
he did a little video for the male in which he said,
and will I be making a comeback?
And I think there is still thatfeeling of can that kind of ecosystem
around him make him happen again?
Like I think what you said, Adam,is really interesting that he's now
saying maybe Covid was a Chinese bioweapon or maybe it was an accident
in a lab, I think is what he says.
the lab leak theory, whichis very popular online.
Like it's not completely ridiculous idea,but it is something that is in those kind
(10:44):
of spaces that are very covid skeptical.
That taken as gospel.
He is again now a lockdownskeptic, which is where the kind
of more the right wing energy is.
And I think that's, Trump is in exactlythe same position in America, which he
also oversaw a very good vaccine program,which he's now not spoken about at all
during the presidential race becauseit's incredibly unpopular the kind
(11:05):
of people that he wants to appeal to.
And so in a weird situation,this will be coming out in the
middle of the Tory kind of.
Beauty pageant, I believe as we'rehaving to call it, but of people
saying loon things because theyneed to appeal to that audience
that wants to hear the loon things.
Whereas the bits of he does brieflyreference the vaccine task force and
Kate Bingo, a genuinely brilliantachievement, That we started
(11:26):
vaccinating people really early.
We saved loads of lives doing it.
But you are right.
He, complains about not getting anycredit for it, but it's because he,
his whole shtick apart politics isn'tabout running a government that works.
It's about being cool and awesomeand raiding Holland with my frog man.
Andy (11:41):
is all of this just a sign that the Tory party hasn't moved
on even now is as they're in theprocess of choosing their next leader.
Ian (11:48):
interesting.
Bad knock said we haveto move on from Johnson.
And whether that playswell or not, we shall see.
The others haven't said thatshe was very specific about it.
Helen (11:59):
Talking of Ghost of Tori's past, Theresa May, now Baroness may have maiden
head came out and may or I thought was avery good intervention in the Times this
week saying actually if you look at theseats that we lost in the last election.
The lib Dems are a huge danger to us.
Actually.
Reform obviously are sucking upa lot of votes, but in terms of
seats, we should really be worried.
She also said, we should rememberwe're a center right party, not a
(12:21):
right wing party, which I thought werealways, all of which was very sensible.
But the thing that's very strikingis that no one has yet got to that
stage in the Tori leadership contest.
Tom Duggen has, apart from producingan unholy amount of merch, has meant
spent the entire time saying, I'm not asquishy moderate, I'm dead right Wing me.
Yeah.
And I think that's in way
Ian (12:40):
people do when they're not Right.
Exactly.
Helen (12:43):
That's, you have to still put on that costume in order to win
that over that particular primary.
And I think that they've justgotta go through a, cycle.
I, think that they, who is the mostright wing is, the question that still
defines story leadership contests, right?
But it's not, necessarilywhere the votes are.
they're losing the wait rose belt,the GA belt, and then maybe they're
Adam (13:01):
gonna do the mirror image of what Keir Starmer did, which is when
he had to play to a Labour party,constituency to get elected as leader.
He said, gosh, I'm terribly left wing,I'm basically Corbyn, but in a nicer suit.
He didn't say he was paying for it atthat point, but, and then came in and
abandoned all of the pledges that hemade then, and actually turned out to
be very, far to the right of Corbyn.
And, so maybe
Helen (13:20):
Robert Jenrick has been playing the long game, the longest game, and
he will suddenly turn out to be a Yeah.
A, a very vanilla center right person in.
If he wins it,
Andy (13:29):
he'll take off his Hamas art terrorists' hoodie, which he's been
opportunistically photographed,wearing all over the place.
It's, what's it gonna reveal?
it's very complicated, actually.
T-shirt underneath it.
Yeah.
There were a deep bridge to
Helen (13:41):
this conflict.
Yeah.
Yeah.
. Andy (13:45):
we should move on, I think to something that's just as depressing, which
is the state of print journalism in 2024.
This is a London centric story 'causeit's about the Evening Standard, which
last week went out of print, as a dailypaper for the first time since 1827.
Has rebranded itself, it'snow the London standard.
And, it's a really interesting,it's really interesting.
(14:07):
'cause lots of Fleet Street hasbeen in turmoil recently, as we're
probably gonna talk about later.
But the evening standard, is a verywell established paper, which has
been on the skids for some time.
It's been struggling to attractadvertisers, it's been struggling to
attract readers, COVID and mobile phones.
Basically did a huge amount ofthe work of polishing it off.
But so did lots of decisions madeabout who was going to edit the paper,
(14:30):
what it was going to contain, thekind of writing that went into it
and who it was trying to appeal to.
And the next thing that happensedited Dylan Jones, formerly
of GQ, is still in charge.
He's the editor in chiefof The London Standard.
And we've seen one print edition sofar, which has a bizarre kind of Ai.
Keir Starmer on the front.
(14:51):
it's a, it's really peculiar, presumablybecause it would've involved paying
someone to come up with a, an imageof Keir Starmer, either to take the
photograph or draw a picture of him.
and that they've justFayed a lot of people.
But the new idea is that it's goingto be, I just sort quote the idea
behind the new London Standard.
the London standard will be availableoutside tube stations as well as in
(15:13):
certain gyms, galleries, museums,theaters, and private members clubs.
Helen (15:17):
Is that a big market?
Is it drunk rear admirals.
Andy (15:23):
It's very much trying to say it's going to be a premium paper.
If you read what Dylan Jones said aboutit or what the chairman Albert Reed
said the word premium keeps being used.
This is gonna be a premium product.
And it's always been a funny kindof tension about the paper as to
whether it's for all Londoners.
Or before 2008, all Londoners whohad 50 P and wanted to buy a copy,
(15:45):
or whether it's for a kind of selectgroup of Londoners who might not
be outside the tube station Anyway.
they might drive past it, but it'sa really interesting question about
what makes a newspaper relevant,especially a geographically limited one.
And if it makes sense to have that ina city, which is a global city as well.
Adam (16:06):
It always had two kind of aspects to it.
one of which was the, daily paper.
And then it had this ES magazine,this glossy, very fashiony,
very kind of Chelsea based.
It was always stories aboutvarious rocKeir Starmers from
the sixties, daughters who wereopening up boutiques and that sort
of thing, That they've got rid of.
And this just economically,this is one of the many things
I don't understand about this.
They've got rid of the glossy paper.
(16:27):
they kept the magazine going.
They made all the, members of staffon the magazine, redundant, but they
kept them on until September so theycould do a special fashion week issue.
'cause it was London FashionWeek, which obviously is doing,
like the September issue of Vogueand all those kind of things.
It's, you can sell an awfullot of glossy advertising.
Now they've got this.
This new London standard,which essentially is not a
newspaper, it's a magazine.
(16:48):
It's a kind of, a roundup of stuff.
Some, newsy stuff that's been goingon, during the week, and then a
load of features, but it's printedon newsprint, so they can't even
sell the high-end advertising.
you, your Gucci and on all of yourpatak, Philipp leaps, and all of those
kind of people are not going to wantto buy tatty, newspaper advertising.
That's why we have almost no adverts inprivate eye from high-end fashion chains.
(17:12):
That's absolutely it.
But, but also, economically as well, I, I.
The why the interventiondidn't happen sooner.
I dunno.
the idea now seems to be to make thesuccess of timeout and which is given away
free, outside, tube stations for a whileand was a summary of everything called
that was going on in London before itwent outta business a couple of years ago.
but then you look at Metro, which wasusing the same dump bins in various
(17:34):
stations around the capital, that's stilldoing really well, that's still giving
out hundreds of thousands of copies a day.
So there is a market there.
most people when you go on abus or you go on the tube, they
are now looking at their phones.
But there are still, there is, thereobviously is still a print market
for free stuff out there that youcan sell advertising off the pack
of a metro made it work with news.
That's the really striking thing aboutMetro is if you look at all of the, the
(17:57):
newspaper front pages of a Morning Metrowill always have a different story and
they'll have a different take on it.
Beginning of this week, Monday they hadmost of the papers were going with the
psychodramas from the, the Tory conferenceand various political things off the back
of the weekend, Metro had seized on areport about the number of, drink driving
incidents and the fact that those arerocketing, which really surprised me.
I'm just really unusual thing 'causeyou think of that as being seventies
(18:18):
thing that's been out and I thought,that's an interesting news story.
I wanna read more about that.
So there is still a marketthat you can still do with
news even given away for free.
And the standard just seems,to have failed to grasp that.
And then I'm not surewhat they're grasp it.
I think they're grasping atsomething that isn't there anymore.
Now it's premium.
They're going premium.
I, it's,
Ian (18:36):
but I'm interested in that because private eye runs this set of, journalistic
awards, which the standard, despite,its proprietor not being frightfully
keen on the eye, generally, theykept winning or being shortlisted.
' because they ran really interestingstories about the way London works.
Whether it's that brilliant piece aboutbusing the workers in at four o'clock
(18:59):
and that unseen London that you weredoing there, or the recent one about
the courts failing completely in, inLondon, They were very good at news
and the combination of that with theculture and the theater reviews and
whatever struck me as not illogicalor ridiculous, but quite complimentary
Adam (19:18):
So Tristan Kirk, who did those pieces on the single justice procedure
and won the Paul Foot Award this year,he is being kept on, he's not one of the
many people who have been made redundantfrom the standard, but the idea from the
look of it, he's not gonna get a look inon this new print product at all, is that
these great stories is still churningout on the, extraordinary miscarriages
of justice on the standard website, butthey're buried there amongst all the,
(19:38):
they, don't seem to be taking advantageof that kind of news machine that
they've got and the good people they have
Andy (19:43):
got.
I do wonder whether that'sthe only way to make a.
Paper, like The standard reallysuccessful is it is to combine
a strong news operation with allthe other, all the cultural stuff.
Because London is a global city.
It is, it's a really importantcity, but you can't do it.
And also only the news stories recentlythere have been so many about this or that
(20:04):
party in West Hollywood and you would pickup your copy at Stockwell and think, why
am I reading about this in this paper?
So I want to know about somethingthat's happening in Woolwich, Yeah.
And so it's really tricky, Ithink, to make something work.
As a free sheet with a, quoteunquote premium product.
Helen (20:23):
I think the thing that I feel like I've learned over the last,
what, 20 years in journalism is thatyou have to have something that other
people don't have in your product andyou have to ask them to pay for it.
And that doesn't necessarilyhave to be news, right?
It can be writers, it can be if you, ifthere's a columnist that you think is so
good, you can't get them anywhere else.
Yeah.
People will pay for that.
If there's a coverage of an issuethat people care about that you
can't get somewhere else, if there'sa package of entertainment news,
(20:45):
they can't get anywhere else.
But the AI thing isreally interesting, right?
Because I think it's, symptomaticeverything that is wrong with that
approach to journalism that thestandards end up taking, which is
that there's a thing called content,which is basically slurry and you just
pour out a hundred mils of content.
And that's what PEpeople just want content.
Yeah.
And you can cut the cost of producingthat rather than the idea that you
produce specific things that peoplevalue enough to pay you money for.
(21:08):
The ai, Brian Fuel was thelow point of that, I felt.
Adam (21:11):
But it's worrying as well.
the way that, that's, that, that'sdone just for novelty value.
That was a one off, wasn't it?
There's a lot of stuff being donewith AI across, as you were saying,
other local newspapers across Britain.
reach PLC, which owns an enormousnumber of them, has this AI tool
called, Gutenberg, I think it'scalled, which is supposedly repurposes.
Bits of, a copy which are put out forone newspaper, website, for every other
(21:35):
newspaper, website throughout the country.
So effectively, presumably that meanschanging Birmingham for Liverpool,
for the Liverpool Echo or whatever.
But actually when you look at the stuffthat Rich are putting out on the website,
barely any of it is local at all.
there's enormous amount of it isjust the ones that we get copied in
quite often on, on the memos that arebeing sent around by their digital,
editor in Chief David Higginson.
And the ones he's really excitedabout are three amazing cleaning hacks
(21:57):
that will revolutionize your sink.
And you just think really is this, whatis this what is gonna bring people to, to,
Andy (22:04):
to, their local newspaper?
Bring them back and yeah.
But this is back to what Helen wassaying about having something specific
to offer that people can't get elsewhere.
So private eye has lots of investigativereporting that you won't get elsewhere.
It also has lots of jokesyou won't get elsewhere.
It provides something that is quitespecific and which not a lot of other
people do an objective view of itself.
(22:26):
But the Daily Mail
Adam (22:27):
went big online by being very good at doing pap photos and, very
kind of intrusive celebrity stuffand said, that's what we're gonna do
and we're gonna do it really, well.
The Guardian has its own thingsthat only The Guardian does.
Yeah.
Online, they've takentheir brand and done now,
Ian (22:41):
but wasn't, the, point of the standard that it was a London
paper and you got things in it.
That, the rest of the country'salways complaining that,
everything's London centric.
the standard was London centric.
That was the point of it.
But, until it was, but I find theidea there's no place for that.
Really sad and, difficultto, to quite square.
Helen (23:02):
my cynical side says Afghani Erev now has his peerage.
He's now under a Labour governmentinstead of a friendly Tory government.
Maybe the, there's no realadvantage to him in putting, losing
money on a, newspaper anymore.
is it just as crude as that?
Am I being unfair to evany friend of this podcast?
Ev any lambda maybe.
(23:22):
it's not just
Adam (23:23):
him either.
Is it?
There's the, the mysterious Saudiinvestor who is rumored to be the
one that pulled the plug on it andfinally said, look, this is unfeasible.
You can't keep producingthis, print newspaper.
there are, what is the point to havingSaudi investors who worried about money?
Ian (23:37):
I thought the entire point of foreign investors was that they didn't care.
They just keep, churning the money in.
Yeah.
It's
Helen (23:44):
not all miserable though, because there is an interesting
model that's happening onSubstack at newsletter levels.
Manchester Mill is now expanded aroundand is trying to recreate essentially
a very lo-fi low cost version.
Jim Waterson took, volunteerredundancy from the Guardian.
He's now launched a substackcalled London Centric.
He's trying to essentiallyreplicate the evening standard,
(24:04):
as a sort of one man operation.
And I think it'd be really interesting'cause they, are essentially cussing it
down to the Boulogne in terms of staffing.
They don't have those print distributioncosts to pay, which are genuinely, we
haven't mentioned the fact that sinceour last podcast went out, the observers
potentially up for sale for tortoise.
But by buying that they would betaking on a huge cost of print and dis
(24:25):
getting a newspaper to the like ney.
Yeah, is an enormous, logisticaland financial challenge to
take on in this day and age.
And so maybe the future of local coverageis people opting into it and paying
for it and it come into their inbox.
Andy (24:38):
Yes.
It's hyper-local and you need to bequite engaged to engage, to, to pay for
it, which is a shame as in it's a shamethat it's not as immediately available.
Adam (24:49):
And the real unspoken thing that's hanging over all of this is how long
it's going to be feasible for people tokeep producing daily print newspapers.
And I think it's really interesting.
we've got yet another, runner,front runner in the, in the race to
take over the telegraph that, thatendless battle that seems to have be
going on for most of our lives now.
but it's the, the, a man by the nameof David Une where there, there's a
(25:12):
challenge to Subeditors, not David,but Dovid, who is the owner of the
New York Sun now, the New York Sun.
Does not have a print outlet.
It is an online only thing.
this is, I'm afraid the way the industryis going, not necessarily fortnightly,
magazines, which are still sayingenormous, numbers in print because they
don't have a website in the room at
Ian (25:32):
this point.
I don't wanna
Adam (25:33):
hear about the decline in
Ian (25:34):
print.
Adam (25:35):
But even if you were a, Saudi investor with bottomless pockets
to come in and say, we've got thisamazing product, but we're gonna print
it out, in the early hours of themorning and then put it in vans and
send it around the country, you mightthink in 2024, is there an easier and
better and cheaper way of doing this?
no one's found it.
Helen (25:51):
There's also the fact that if you put stuff out in petrol for courts and
NWS and everything, it's big advertisingfor the fact that pa, those papers exist.
Sometimes I forget about things thatdon't, with social media now having
turned into weird little silos andFacebook and matter, its owners saying
that we don't really want to do newsanymore, Twitter is now a sort of
mad hellscape of conspiracy theories.
(26:12):
What are the channels by which your.
Publication advertise itself topeople who already don't read you.
that's shrunk and shrunk and I thinkthere must be also a worry that without
that projection of the newsstand, youknow, the fact that I might not buy
all the papers, but I see them whenI go to the garage, that there's that
Adam (26:27):
and the fact that broadcast media amplifies it as well.
the fact that the BBC do still putup the front pages every morning,
and the independent for a while triedto pretend that they were still a
newspaper when they went online only andproduced this front page for something
that wasn't a newspaper anymore.
You don't see much of that anymore.
It, I don't think it makes the, BBCpaper review or the Sky Paper review, but
it's not just having those front pagesthere that then does set the agenda for,
(26:49):
your L BBC shout alongs in the morning,from Nick Ferrari to James O'Brien, and
most of five lives output and things.
So newspapers do still havethis enormous sway and say,
Ian (27:01):
yeah,
Adam (27:01):
it's just a way of making the paper.
Ian (27:03):
Yes.
And I, if I just say fromHelen's earlier point of view.
It isn't helped by the fact that theRoyal Mail, used to be, one of those
organizations that, essentially it would,deliver the mail and it would deliver
newspapers and magazines and parcels.
And in its current incarnation andin the current sale, one really
(27:25):
doesn't know what it's going to do.
so that becomes a problem.
Andy (27:28):
They'll go online, it'll be fine.
okay.
So now it's time to turn to MohamedFayed Nar of the Eye for Decades died
last year Recently the, a documentary"Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods".
was broadcast for the first time,which detailed the claims of, , many
(27:49):
women who said they had been eitherraped or sexually assaulted by Fayed.
That number of women has risen Drasticallysince the documentary was broadcast.
I believe it's now in thehundreds of women whose claims
police are, investigating.
this wasn't unknown to, lots of peoplein the press and particularly to
those who read the eye, because asthe last edition of the mag, showed,
(28:10):
there was a piece, was it 98 or nine?
It was 1998, yeah.
98.
which detailed claims of not assault,but of him being, I think the
phrase was a revolting old lecture.
prowling the shop floor, lookingfor young women who worked
at Harrods and then sending
Ian (28:24):
them to the doctor to, to check that they were Yeah.
clean.
Yeah.
Andy (28:29):
Propositioning them, buying them, handfuls of notes, this kind of thing.
So was known about, but took hisdeath for it to become, Public
Adam (28:41):
actually it didn't even take his death.
'cause if I may remember sitting inthis room a year ago, and, listeners
when they finished this episode willbe able to go back and listen to it.
It was the addition we recorded theweek that he died when we were slightly
gobsmacked by the que that were beingpaid to him all over the shop, and
people praising him to high heaven.
People like P Morgan certainlyand lots of other newspapers.
and we were saying in that we wereexplicitly said, but he was a serial
(29:03):
sexual assaulter, and, a bully.
And, and I was amazed when I went backand looked at that piece, the 1998
piece, LA last week because it did seem.
Quite comprehensively to covera lot of the rev, the supposed
revelations that were in the BBC piece.
I'm not, this is not todisparage what the BBC have done.
They've done a fantastic job ongetting the women on record and
(29:24):
working with them and finding outmore and more gruesome details of it.
And it is brilliant that this stuffis finally coming out to, to, to the
extent that it is coming out now.
But it was there, it was noteven just being hinted out.
we wrote about it in private eye.
Tom Bauer wrote about it inhis biography of fire, which
came out that same year, 1998.
And an awful lot of it was in thatVanity Fair article that Henry
(29:45):
Porter wrote, which I think was 19 95
5.
Ian (29:48):
Yeah.
Adam (29:49):
and certainly was in the dossier stuff, which Henry has written about
since, compiling in order to fight offthe enormous libel suit, which Mohammed
Fayed, launched against him at the time.
Andy (29:59):
Okay.
that's what I wanted to askabout because Vanity Fair.
Agreed.
In the after he sued them to put allof their evidence in locked storage.
Tom Bowers described the legalthreats and actually physical
threats, his personal safety that hereceived from, fire and his cronies.
Helen (30:19):
those weren't the only people that he was intimidating.
Dominic Lawson, whose wife was a veryclose friend of Princess Diana, wrote
about the fact that when Rosa Monktonsaid Diana wasn't pregnant, when she
died, fire had sent a car around herhouse with the kind of legal threat
inside when she was at home alone.
I think, this story, people always, Isaw some of that stuff on Twitter of
people saying, why isn't this reported?
(30:39):
And A, it was, and B, it was reportedin the face of enormous legal and.
intimidatory threats, like those things.
He certainly, he wasn't legal.
Adam (30:47):
the, vindictiveness with which Fayed and his henchmen pursued anyone
who crossed them, or who displeased them.
there was a guy called ChristopheBettman, who I think was a, a
senior manager at Howard's who,resigned and was pursued with false
accusations of kinda shopliftingand fraud and all sorts of things.
They had him arrested absolutelyinnocent of all of them.
they were not beyond, the buggingagain, was the thing that we wrote about
(31:10):
extensively in private I throughout the1990s, that he actually bugged all of
his staff and recorded their calls inorder to be able to use them to blackmail
them or take vengeance on them later.
And the sheer thuggery.
There was a guy called JohnMcNamara who was head of security,
who was an ex met policeman.
And there were an awful lot,there was a lot of tied up.
And the fact that he could getpeople arrested was all to do
(31:31):
with the connections that seniorsecurity staff at HAR had with
it still within the Met Police.
and it's a matter of record that duringJohn McNamara was, the threats that were
revealed in that B-B-B-B-C thing to oneof the women who, attempted to speak to
Vanity Fair and literally said to her,we know where your family lives, which of
course, if they're your employer, they do,they've got your next of kin on record.
(31:52):
They do know all about you.
So these were, very real threatsthat were made to people.
And that is the reason I think that
Ian (31:58):
it took, His death, McNamara's death and fire's death before the
people involved would come out.
the threats to the journalist.
Tom Barr had seen off Maxwellon one biography, he, wasn't
gonna cave on this one.
Vanity Fair had a great deal of money.
they ended up settling in the end,which was something of a surprise
(32:20):
given the evidence they had.
we used to get letters saying,private eye, just racist,
private eye, just snobbish.
and that's the only reason this personwho's trying to join the British
establishment, and you can't bearit, just the same as with Maxwell.
the fact that these characters weretrying to take over British institutions
(32:40):
claiming to admire them and thensubvert them and make them pointless.
FY had wanted to buy Herodsand he wanted to buy punch.
He wanted to buy punch 'causehe'd read it abroad and thought
this is what being British means.
the Crown's portrayal, which again, mostpeople, as far as I can see, seem to think
the Crown is a documentary, its portrayalof Fayed is an absolute disgrace.
(33:05):
it does come
Helen (33:05):
up in the BBC documentary.
I was really surprised by that.
But the number of women who say thatthey decided to speak out because the
Crown's portrayal was essentially thispoor Egyptian who'd got a black servant.
he was very, it was an outsider comingin and the sniffy, British Royals didn't
like him, had driven them Made them,had re-traumatized them, that was going
(33:25):
to be the historical verdict on him,that they decided finally to speak out.
And I thought that was quiteextraordinary because I think I mean
we covered this, the fact that, as yousay, he wanted to buy these British
institutions, he exceeded, in somecases he had race horses that allowed
him to stand next to the Queen.
Yes.
Adam (33:40):
He sponsored the Windsor horse show.
Yeah.
And that got him into the boxwith the Queen every year.
that was, you don't get much more on theinside of the establishment than that.
Dominic Lawson
Ian (33:48):
said, the British establishment didn't shun him.
It didn't shun him nearly enough.
Yeah.
Harts had a royal warrant
Andy (33:55):
when it comes to stories like this and how difficult they are to get
into print, I know things did get intoprint, have things changed substantially,
in your opinion between then and now?
Ian (34:07):
me Too cases, which is why, hats off as Adam said, are incredibly difficult,
to get into print, to get over the line.
And I, when I say MeToo cases, this is rape.
but all of those are difficultbecause you need someone to be brave
enough to sign a piece of papersaying, yes, it happened to me.
And if it comes to court, I will testify.
(34:28):
That is very difficult to do.
it was one of the first stories I everdid at Private Eye was someone who
worked in the BBC, who was, harassingall his female staff and, this was 86 7.
And they were brave enough then.
And if you think comparatively, it hasn'tgot that much easier, to come forward,
(34:52):
particularly when there's a sort of huge,threatening apparatus coming at you.
So I would say, even now, hats off toreally all of them who came forward
and said, yes, this is what happened.
Helen (35:06):
It was notable as well in the documentary that some more of the women
who wanted to speak in camera were oneswho had managed to get away, that they got
the terrible story, but they had actuallymanaged to run out of the apartment.
And I think that probably makesit slightly easier to speak out if
you're not having to speak about theactual trauma and relive that trauma.
But the other thing is, if you go backand look at the contemporary coverage
of it, I can, I, worry that there, andI, think it's probably true, there was a
(35:31):
feeling that they were getting somethingso that these were young women who were
employed in the perfecting department.
And yes, you had to get yourselffondled by some creepy old dude,
but you got a handbag out of it.
And that there was a, there wasan implicit trade off that all
of these women had taken, right?
That he was, a skeezy, old lech,but he was essentially paying
them off in bundles of cash.
And that was a convenient story forpeople to believe because it absolved
(35:52):
them a responsibility about the factthat when you hear the women's stories.
They didn't know thatthis was the bargain.
Lots of them turned down the money.
They were often invited, they wereoften like 19 or 20 in their first job
as like a perfume assistant, and thengot summoned to the private office.
But I think it suited people atthe time to think, this is what
all dirty old men don't they?
And, everyone's gettingsomething outta it.
Andy (36:13):
And it's the requirement of witnesses to be perfect.
Absolutely flawless, completely
Helen (36:18):
shouldn't have been drunk, should never have tried to say
anything nice to the person afterwards.
Shouldn't have taken
Adam (36:23):
the job.
Shouldn't have, yeah.
Shouldn't have gone do we know howhard it is to bring any cases like this
to court or to prosecution, let aloneget, the, get them out in the media.
It is incredibly difficult.
it is a case when in the end it's gonnacome down to a case of he said, when he is
an incredibly powerful man, and she said,when she's considerably less powerful.
Yeah.
and that is very, difficult.
(36:43):
So you need to put thework in, you need to, as.
recently, RO Irwin did with, the variousalleged victims of Russell Brand.
She actually had worked on it for a longtime to get people to go on the record
and be incredibly brave enough to do that.
And
Helen (36:56):
even though he's still, as we speak on stage with Jordan Peterson leading
people in the Lord's Prayer, like it's,he is effectively had, he is moved to the
fringes sphere, but like he was headingthat way anyway, but he can still work.
And there's a feminist theory idea,which is that the trouble with these
cases is that believing the perpetratordemands nothing of you saying that
Russell brand is innocent, means you getto still be friends with Russell brand,
(37:17):
you still get to use the celebrity,get to go on his shows, get to all
of that stuff, whereas believing thevictims requires you to shun somebody.
This comes back to the Mohammed Firepoint.
It's very inconvenientfor everybody involved.
Yeah.
Adam (37:28):
And that was where, post the death of Princess Diana, that.
Sold newspapers to put it bluntly.
And that was a, a calculation thatwas made in various newspaper offices,
which was that Moham Muhammad Al Fayedas he styled himself at that point,
was a very good person to have on side.
I remember cringing, obsequious,interviews done by Piers Morgan when
(37:49):
he was the editor of The Mirror,which he openly admitted Pi Morgan
were, done because he believedin sucking up to millionaires and
particularly ones who might have aninterest in buying into the media.
And he also had an incrediblePR operation on his side.
one of the other things that we printedbefore anyone else, was a transcript
of a conversation that, Chris Atkins,the documentary maker had with, max
Clifford, fellow sex offender, butalso one of the many people who rep,
(38:12):
who represented Fayed along the way.
And he was absolutely blatant about it,thinking he was speaking off the record,
he was talking about if he's groping 17year olds, they're quite willing because
they're being paid a lot of money.
There are an awful lot of young ladieswho are extremely happy to pamper
up to rich, old Randy, old swords.
Helen (38:27):
This
Adam (38:27):
absolute That's what I mean, that's what people told themselves, right?
Absolute The view of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People told themselves,
Helen (38:30):
they're getting something out of it.
And then you hear the actualstories of women who were terrified
often thinking that, am I gonnamake it out of here alive?
He's that powerful.
And it just does not matchup to what the Max Cliff.
While as we know, max Clifford had hisown reasons for, promoting that idea, God,
Adam (38:44):
but cl Clifford's payoff was the fire gave lots of money to charity.
It's the old Jimmy S one, again,it's the, if you, pay off your guilty
conscience by, by giving lots of money tochildren's hospices and things, and then
you can get away with whatever you want.
But Clifford, of course, wasnot the only PR man involved.
Endless letters we used to getfrom Michael Cole, who was, F's
kind of representative on earth.
He was his PR man for years and years.
(39:05):
Then kept on as a consultantand a director of Harod.
extremely well paid for all this.
Got very, silent.
Now, he would, if we mentionedMichael Cole at any point he would
write in a rude letter complainingabout, that, we, were writing
nonsense about his esteemed client.
And it was 'cause wewere racist and terrible.
And representatives of theestablishment very quiet now.
Doesn't wanna say anything.
Yes,
Ian (39:25):
not a word.
I would only say in terms of the tone,I mean because, we did laugh at fire ed.
Repeatedly and for decades, and wedid that partly 'cause it worked.
The one thing he hated us so often inthese cases is being made to look a fool.
What he wanted to do was have peopleaccept his version of himself.
(39:45):
What we wanted to do was say hewas a ludicrous figure, not a
commanding brilliant genius figure,not, a benign figure, just a deeply
creepy, ridiculous individual.
And he hated that.
And then he bought punch and.
Devoted it to attacking private eye.
(40:06):
it was extraordinary.
They were supposedly rival, but allthey did was write about us, wasn't it?
They didn't try to competein any way whatsoever.
He put a picture of me on thecover and I remember thinking
it's not gonna sell any papers.
Andy (40:19):
alright, that is it for this edition of page 94.
Thank you very much for listening.
Thank you to Ian, Helen, and Adam, ifyou would like to find out more, about
the stories we've been discussing todayand a whole lot more besides you can
get a subscription by going to privatehyphen i.co.uk is out every fortnight
is reasonably priced and it's terrific.
so that's It.
We'll be back again in a fortnightwith another one of these.
(40:40):
Until then, thank you to you forlistening and as always to Matt
Hill of reading audio for producing.
Bye for now.
Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
Andy (00:08):
Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.
My name's Andrew Hunter Murray andI'm here in the eye office with Helen
Lewis, Adam MacQueen and Ian Hislop.
We are here to discuss all the newsthat's happened since the last edition
of the magazine, later on in the show.
We are going to be talkingabout what's happened, to London
journalism in the last week.
Quick shortcut, nothing good.
And also about Mohamed Fayed andthe recent revelations about his
(00:31):
sex life, which will be unsurprisingto anyone who has been reading
the eye since, the late nineties.
But first, we are on the week of theTory Conference, and we are going to
be covering the ghost of Tory's pastbecause Helen, there are lots and
lots of, you'd think retired Tories.
About,
Helen (00:49):
Even now, Liz Truss is doing a victory lap of Tory conferences by having,
lost her seat saying she definitely,there's a question where she said that
I would've done better than Rishi Sinek.
And that is actuallypartly arguable, right?
actually could, shouldshe have done worse?
Possible.
Yeah.
Andy (01:06):
Yeah.
I think she could, yeah.
I think she could keep her seat atthe election, whereas she did not.
Is that indicative at all?
That's true
Helen (01:12):
actually.
That would've been,that would've been bad.
She, also says that she thinks themini budget would've worked had she
just been given a bit more time.
That was the problem.
yeah.
But, received a sort of hero's welcomeand people cheered when she said that,
if, is there anything good coming up?
And she said Donald Trumpmight win the election.
Which is fascinating to me, right?
Because there is this establishedproblem that the Tory membership is
(01:32):
once again gonna vote for the leader.
And it is a very small andunrepresentative group and it's
got an entire media ecosystemas discussed on podcast pass,
set up to cater to it, right?
But it is essentially trapped in this.
Echo chamber in which LizTruss is, has been robbed.
Boris Johnson has been robbed.
Rishi Sinek has been robbed.
(01:52):
however, I thought the main attractionthis week is the fact that Boris Johnson's
memoirs have begun to be serialized.
Oh.
And I thought you'd like a quiz.
Adam (02:00):
Ah, course we would.
Helen (02:01):
Adam would really like a quiz.
'cause he's actually read them very I did
Adam (02:03):
the homework very, I was told before the weekend that we were gonna
talk about Boris Johnson's book.
So I actually went and did thereading 'cause I'm such a goodie
such a wo, nearly killed me detail.
you're
Ian (02:15):
the,
Andy (02:16):
absolute antithesis of Boris.
Yeah.
Whereas I was dedicatedto the Boris method.
I read none of the extractsand I'm gonna wing it and,
Helen (02:24):
you'll rely on the queen to tell you about them.
That's one of the thingsthat's in the extra.
She says the queen tells him aboutan RAF fighter that's fallen into the
sea and he's she seemed to be morewell informed about it than I was.
And you're like, she actuallyreads her red boxes artist.
That's the difference.
Okay.
Boris Johnson'sgrandmother's nickname was.
A GaN.
B Granny butter, C Grannypack, or D, the big G.
Ian (02:47):
It's granny butter.
Helen (02:48):
It is granny butter.
It's granny butter.
Yeah,
Ian (02:51):
I know that.
'cause it's awful and lame.
Helen (02:54):
She was French, so presumably she should've been granny Boo,
but for some reason wasn't.
Ian (02:58):
The de mail, feels it necessary to translate the French, that Boris throws
in during his conversations with macro.
and it just sounds like pure fr.
This one Boris talking about
ette throw his toys outta the prayer.
Andy (03:16):
They've been doing a little, Boris glossary for, since he started the column.
But normally the words areEnglish, which they're glossing.
But when he had
Adam (03:23):
the column in the Daily Telegraph, they could rely on Telegraph readers,
having at least a copy of the OED tohand, if not a decent public school
education, that would mean they werefamiliar with basic Latin phrases.
Helen (03:32):
I sense this may have, this bit may have been a joke,
but it's very hard to tell.
What did he not offer?
Macron Return for Brexit deal.
A, new channel B, hisdaughter's hand in marriage.
CA nuclear packed, or DAhydrogen fueled concord.
Ian (03:46):
It was his daughter's hand in marriage
Helen (03:49):
fairly, you've been secretly swatting up.
The one I can't work out if is ajoke or not is the how She didn't
feel con given that the originaljet fuel power one blew up.
Filling it with the same fuel asthe Hindenburg seems like a hostage
to fortune, but, there we go.
Okay.
It's also
Adam (04:03):
the Boris solution to everything is a bridge, isn't it?
We just build another bridgeor a tunnel or something.
Yeah.
We need another one of those.
Helen (04:10):
some
Adam (04:10):
massive bit of infrastructure that isn't going to happen.
Absolutely.
And it gonna be named after him.
I think that's the main
Helen (04:15):
attract.
Truly.
which word was not used in the extracts?
A Botho B Rubicon.
C Grasping like a grandpa or d Karoo?
Andy (04:26):
Oh, Karoo is very Johnson.
EI, let's say the first,what was the first one again?
Botho.
I think he won't have used Botho.
Adam (04:33):
Yeah, I think Botho Sounds like Helen Lewis trying to do Boris to me.
No, I think he did use that.
Helen (04:40):
Correct.
Adam.
Ah, you, a you know me too well.
And sadly I think you probablyknow the works of Boris Johnson.
tragic.
that's good.
I think you're all winners.
Thank you.
Because you didn't payany money to read that.
I think Andy's
Andy (04:53):
the winner 'cause he didn't read it.
Yeah.
I'm just waiting for the full thing tocome out, which will be out, I think
a week after this podcast goes out.
Helen (04:59):
It's out in the 10th and I will hopefully be, unless it's,
unless it finally finishes meoff, be reviewing it for the eye.
there's
Adam (05:04):
gonna be small children in Boris costumes like queuing outside,
Brons at Waterstones at midnightaren't there to get their copy.
Yes, most of them here.
I was gonna say
Helen (05:12):
that is Carrie's Instagram
Ian (05:14):
and they're looking for fantasy and fiction, so that's what they'll get.
No, we had a, list of, originallywe, we were trying to help him with
titles 'cause unleashed feeble andI, we had an a range of titles and
I, we missed one, which is untrue.
Helen (05:32):
Yes.
The bit when he yeah.
When he talks about how he'sgoing to invade Holland to seize
back the vaccines is a sort ofbit of a fever dream, isn't it?
Ian (05:39):
Yes.
that is boys' own.
Yeah.
leading a raid Churchill styleup the Darden ELs to Holland.
it would be, that would be the geographyinvolved and very embarrassed members
of the general staff going, I don'tthink we can invade, a NATO ally.
My, my guess is it was a,throwaway remarkable a meeting,
(05:59):
that just embarrassed everybody.
and he's now presenting it as though thiswas a revelatory brilliant idea of his,
Andy (06:08):
this book is gonna be big, isn't it?
Annoyingly, it's probably gonnasell lots and lots of copies.
Helen (06:14):
I'm not sure any books sell that many copies at the moment.
The nonfiction market is really sluggish.
There was one genuine, I would say,revelation everywhere, apart from
people who read the Eye, which is thathe writes about the fact that the late
queen was suffering from Boulogne cancer.
And that was something thatwe funky had that didn't he.
but everyone else funky did, and Charles
Adam (06:32):
Brandeth actually had, had Scoop Boris on that one.
He mentioned it in, in,in passing in a piece.
But yeah, that was, I thinkit was the first sort of kind
official confirmation from the,former Prime Minister, wasn't it?
Helen (06:42):
Because everyone else said the death certificate said old age, and
no one else seemed to, to talk aboutit, but it does account for the fact
that everybody knew for a long time.
She was, she was on the way out.
He says that he thinks that sheheld on in order to see him off.
Which eab BOL is mylong-term conspiracy theory.
That meeting Liz Truss was thefinal blow that she thought.
Adam (07:00):
I'm absolutely convinced about that one.
I've seen enough.
I'm absolutely certain that thequeen said, I am not letting that
man do the dress at my funeral.
I'm gonna hang on aslong as I possibly can.
Alright, so she's got Liz Truss instead.
Yes.
Helen (07:11):
Yes, No one wants to be your funeral to be, so I'm Guy.
Go, cripes, just book of yes, jolly
Ian (07:17):
good old grumpy knickers the Queen.
Helen (07:19):
Yes.
Poor Theresa May comes out ofit quite badly, doesn't she?
She gets described as grumpiness.
'cause then he has a whole riff abouther nostrils, which is very peculiar.
given
Ian (07:27):
that he spent a whole paragraph saying that the thing that the queen
really admired about him was how un bitterhe was, to have lost being Prime Minister.
And then he just puts the bootinto Theresa May and then into Sak.
he's extremely bitter.
that's very interesting.
As ever.
With the jovial Boris mask,it slips pretty quick.
Helen (07:47):
Oh, there's two very rude bits about his sister.
He refers to my sister the bracket,like the ubiquitous Rachel.
And it's just, and on the tila downthe Thames, the remain one, there
was brackets inevitably Rachel,and there's just a kind of just a
little knife goes in every so often.
Ian (08:02):
But I thought the description of Rachel on the boat.
Shouting over thefisherman's issue in the eu.
He ends up concluding thatRachel's presence there, may
well have swung it against Roma.
And I thought the family arrogancenever ends even in opposition.
It has to be a Johnsonwho swings the vote.
Adam (08:21):
I thought the most interesting thing about the book is the way he's now trying
to reposition himself as the anti Borisas pm, he's now saying, oh, lockdowns,
oh, I'm not sure they were a great idea.
how could I, the great libertarianhave been persuaded to do, there's
various bits where he just said,I can't believe that I did that.
knows how the rest of us feel now.
But, there is this sort of t it's abit like, as you were saying this,
(08:41):
constituency now that the Tory partyare playing for that, he's decided
that one didn't quite work out for him.
So now he, wants to redefine himselfas the anti him, which is quite weird.
Ian (08:51):
the idea that he says the only thing he regrets about, the Covid
inquiry and the process of examininghis role is the fact that he apologized.
And at the time, the whole machinery ofgovernment was saying, why does no one
believe that the Prime Minister is sorry?
Because he wasn't, and now barelyfour years later, he's saying No.
(09:12):
I, when I said, sorry, I was lying.
he's literally saying he was lyingall the way through the inquiry,
all the way through the committee.
So why on earth at the timewas he so outraged that no one
Adam (09:24):
believed him?
No, it's extraordinary.
Downplaying it as it was amatter of some 15 parties or so.
I was assured that all theregulations were being followed.
But did,
Helen (09:32):
yeah.
Many of them barely parties at all.
What?
But nonetheless, you wereallowed to zero parties
Ian (09:37):
exasperating about having to read this stuff again is say the covid thing.
We've been here.
He has been proved to havelied all the way through.
He was hounded out of officequite rightly for his behavior
at the time, but he won't die.
Maybe Unde is a better title for this,but he's a sort of blonde zombie who
corpses around and there's just no way.
(09:59):
There's just no
Andy (09:59):
way of stopping him.
But is that because people arewilling to go along with it?
And I do think the book is gonna be big.
I think I've spoken to a couple of books.
I said the pre-orders off, they're great.
They're really healthy.
There's gonna be lots and lots of.
Copies shifted.
Is that because there is a sizableconstituency of people who want to believe
the shtick and who are perfectly willingto go along with his version of events,
(10:21):
even though it has been proved untrue?
Helen (10:22):
he did a little video for the male in which he said,
and will I be making a comeback?
And I think there is still thatfeeling of can that kind of ecosystem
around him make him happen again?
Like I think what you said, Adam,is really interesting that he's now
saying maybe Covid was a Chinese bioweapon or maybe it was an accident
in a lab, I think is what he says.
the lab leak theory, whichis very popular online.
Like it's not completely ridiculous idea,but it is something that is in those kind
(10:44):
of spaces that are very covid skeptical.
That taken as gospel.
He is again now a lockdownskeptic, which is where the kind
of more the right wing energy is.
And I think that's, Trump is in exactlythe same position in America, which he
also oversaw a very good vaccine program,which he's now not spoken about at all
during the presidential race becauseit's incredibly unpopular the kind
(11:05):
of people that he wants to appeal to.
And so in a weird situation,this will be coming out in the
middle of the Tory kind of.
Beauty pageant, I believe as we'rehaving to call it, but of people
saying loon things because theyneed to appeal to that audience
that wants to hear the loon things.
Whereas the bits of he does brieflyreference the vaccine task force and
Kate Bingo, a genuinely brilliantachievement, That we started
(11:26):
vaccinating people really early.
We saved loads of lives doing it.
But you are right.
He, complains about not getting anycredit for it, but it's because he,
his whole shtick apart politics isn'tabout running a government that works.
It's about being cool and awesomeand raiding Holland with my frog man.
Andy (11:41):
is all of this just a sign that the Tory party hasn't moved
on even now is as they're in theprocess of choosing their next leader.
Ian (11:48):
interesting.
Bad knock said we haveto move on from Johnson.
And whether that playswell or not, we shall see.
The others haven't said thatshe was very specific about it.
Helen (11:59):
Talking of Ghost of Tori's past, Theresa May, now Baroness may have maiden
head came out and may or I thought was avery good intervention in the Times this
week saying actually if you look at theseats that we lost in the last election.
The lib Dems are a huge danger to us.
Actually.
Reform obviously are sucking upa lot of votes, but in terms of
seats, we should really be worried.
She also said, we should rememberwe're a center right party, not a
(12:21):
right wing party, which I thought werealways, all of which was very sensible.
But the thing that's very strikingis that no one has yet got to that
stage in the Tori leadership contest.
Tom Duggen has, apart from producingan unholy amount of merch, has meant
spent the entire time saying, I'm not asquishy moderate, I'm dead right Wing me.
Yeah.
And I think that's in way
Ian (12:40):
people do when they're not Right.
Exactly.
Helen (12:43):
That's, you have to still put on that costume in order to win
that over that particular primary.
And I think that they've justgotta go through a, cycle.
I, think that they, who is the mostright wing is, the question that still
defines story leadership contests, right?
But it's not, necessarilywhere the votes are.
they're losing the wait rose belt,the GA belt, and then maybe they're
Adam (13:01):
gonna do the mirror image of what Keir Starmer did, which is when
he had to play to a Labour party,constituency to get elected as leader.
He said, gosh, I'm terribly left wing,I'm basically Corbyn, but in a nicer suit.
He didn't say he was paying for it atthat point, but, and then came in and
abandoned all of the pledges that hemade then, and actually turned out to
be very, far to the right of Corbyn.
And, so maybe
Helen (13:20):
Robert Jenrick has been playing the long game, the longest game, and
he will suddenly turn out to be a Yeah.
A, a very vanilla center right person in.
If he wins it,
Andy (13:29):
he'll take off his Hamas art terrorists' hoodie, which he's been
opportunistically photographed,wearing all over the place.
It's, what's it gonna reveal?
it's very complicated, actually.
T-shirt underneath it.
Yeah.
There were a deep bridge to
Helen (13:41):
this conflict.
Yeah.
Yeah.
. Andy (13:45):
we should move on, I think to something that's just as depressing, which
is the state of print journalism in 2024.
This is a London centric story 'causeit's about the Evening Standard, which
last week went out of print, as a dailypaper for the first time since 1827.
Has rebranded itself, it'snow the London standard.
And, it's a really interesting,it's really interesting.
(14:07):
'cause lots of Fleet Street hasbeen in turmoil recently, as we're
probably gonna talk about later.
But the evening standard, is a verywell established paper, which has
been on the skids for some time.
It's been struggling to attractadvertisers, it's been struggling to
attract readers, COVID and mobile phones.
Basically did a huge amount ofthe work of polishing it off.
But so did lots of decisions madeabout who was going to edit the paper,
(14:30):
what it was going to contain, thekind of writing that went into it
and who it was trying to appeal to.
And the next thing that happensedited Dylan Jones, formerly
of GQ, is still in charge.
He's the editor in chiefof The London Standard.
And we've seen one print edition sofar, which has a bizarre kind of Ai.
Keir Starmer on the front.
(14:51):
it's a, it's really peculiar, presumablybecause it would've involved paying
someone to come up with a, an imageof Keir Starmer, either to take the
photograph or draw a picture of him.
and that they've justFayed a lot of people.
But the new idea is that it's goingto be, I just sort quote the idea
behind the new London Standard.
the London standard will be availableoutside tube stations as well as in
(15:13):
certain gyms, galleries, museums,theaters, and private members clubs.
Helen (15:17):
Is that a big market?
Is it drunk rear admirals.
Andy (15:23):
It's very much trying to say it's going to be a premium paper.
If you read what Dylan Jones said aboutit or what the chairman Albert Reed
said the word premium keeps being used.
This is gonna be a premium product.
And it's always been a funny kindof tension about the paper as to
whether it's for all Londoners.
Or before 2008, all Londoners whohad 50 P and wanted to buy a copy,
(15:45):
or whether it's for a kind of selectgroup of Londoners who might not
be outside the tube station Anyway.
they might drive past it, but it'sa really interesting question about
what makes a newspaper relevant,especially a geographically limited one.
And if it makes sense to have that ina city, which is a global city as well.
Adam (16:06):
It always had two kind of aspects to it.
one of which was the, daily paper.
And then it had this ES magazine,this glossy, very fashiony,
very kind of Chelsea based.
It was always stories aboutvarious rocKeir Starmers from
the sixties, daughters who wereopening up boutiques and that sort
of thing, That they've got rid of.
And this just economically,this is one of the many things
I don't understand about this.
They've got rid of the glossy paper.
(16:27):
they kept the magazine going.
They made all the, members of staffon the magazine, redundant, but they
kept them on until September so theycould do a special fashion week issue.
'cause it was London FashionWeek, which obviously is doing,
like the September issue of Vogueand all those kind of things.
It's, you can sell an awfullot of glossy advertising.
Now they've got this.
This new London standard,which essentially is not a
newspaper, it's a magazine.
(16:48):
It's a kind of, a roundup of stuff.
Some, newsy stuff that's been goingon, during the week, and then a
load of features, but it's printedon newsprint, so they can't even
sell the high-end advertising.
you, your Gucci and on all of yourpatak, Philipp leaps, and all of those
kind of people are not going to wantto buy tatty, newspaper advertising.
That's why we have almost no adverts inprivate eye from high-end fashion chains.
(17:12):
That's absolutely it.
But, but also, economically as well, I, I.
The why the interventiondidn't happen sooner.
I dunno.
the idea now seems to be to make thesuccess of timeout and which is given away
free, outside, tube stations for a whileand was a summary of everything called
that was going on in London before itwent outta business a couple of years ago.
but then you look at Metro, which wasusing the same dump bins in various
(17:34):
stations around the capital, that's stilldoing really well, that's still giving
out hundreds of thousands of copies a day.
So there is a market there.
most people when you go on abus or you go on the tube, they
are now looking at their phones.
But there are still, there is, thereobviously is still a print market
for free stuff out there that youcan sell advertising off the pack
of a metro made it work with news.
That's the really striking thing aboutMetro is if you look at all of the, the
(17:57):
newspaper front pages of a Morning Metrowill always have a different story and
they'll have a different take on it.
Beginning of this week, Monday they hadmost of the papers were going with the
psychodramas from the, the Tory conferenceand various political things off the back
of the weekend, Metro had seized on areport about the number of, drink driving
incidents and the fact that those arerocketing, which really surprised me.
I'm just really unusual thing 'causeyou think of that as being seventies
(18:18):
thing that's been out and I thought,that's an interesting news story.
I wanna read more about that.
So there is still a marketthat you can still do with
news even given away for free.
And the standard just seems,to have failed to grasp that.
And then I'm not surewhat they're grasp it.
I think they're grasping atsomething that isn't there anymore.
Now it's premium.
They're going premium.
I, it's,
Ian (18:36):
but I'm interested in that because private eye runs this set of, journalistic
awards, which the standard, despite,its proprietor not being frightfully
keen on the eye, generally, theykept winning or being shortlisted.
' because they ran really interestingstories about the way London works.
Whether it's that brilliant piece aboutbusing the workers in at four o'clock
(18:59):
and that unseen London that you weredoing there, or the recent one about
the courts failing completely in, inLondon, They were very good at news
and the combination of that with theculture and the theater reviews and
whatever struck me as not illogicalor ridiculous, but quite complimentary
Adam (19:18):
So Tristan Kirk, who did those pieces on the single justice procedure
and won the Paul Foot Award this year,he is being kept on, he's not one of the
many people who have been made redundantfrom the standard, but the idea from the
look of it, he's not gonna get a look inon this new print product at all, is that
these great stories is still churningout on the, extraordinary miscarriages
of justice on the standard website, butthey're buried there amongst all the,
(19:38):
they, don't seem to be taking advantageof that kind of news machine that
they've got and the good people they have
Andy (19:43):
got.
I do wonder whether that'sthe only way to make a.
Paper, like The standard reallysuccessful is it is to combine
a strong news operation with allthe other, all the cultural stuff.
Because London is a global city.
It is, it's a really importantcity, but you can't do it.
And also only the news stories recentlythere have been so many about this or that
(20:04):
party in West Hollywood and you would pickup your copy at Stockwell and think, why
am I reading about this in this paper?
So I want to know about somethingthat's happening in Woolwich, Yeah.
And so it's really tricky, Ithink, to make something work.
As a free sheet with a, quoteunquote premium product.
Helen (20:23):
I think the thing that I feel like I've learned over the last,
what, 20 years in journalism is thatyou have to have something that other
people don't have in your product andyou have to ask them to pay for it.
And that doesn't necessarilyhave to be news, right?
It can be writers, it can be if you, ifthere's a columnist that you think is so
good, you can't get them anywhere else.
Yeah.
People will pay for that.
If there's a coverage of an issuethat people care about that you
can't get somewhere else, if there'sa package of entertainment news,
(20:45):
they can't get anywhere else.
But the AI thing isreally interesting, right?
Because I think it's, symptomaticeverything that is wrong with that
approach to journalism that thestandards end up taking, which is
that there's a thing called content,which is basically slurry and you just
pour out a hundred mils of content.
And that's what PEpeople just want content.
Yeah.
And you can cut the cost of producingthat rather than the idea that you
produce specific things that peoplevalue enough to pay you money for.
(21:08):
The ai, Brian Fuel was thelow point of that, I felt.
Adam (21:11):
But it's worrying as well.
the way that, that's, that, that'sdone just for novelty value.
That was a one off, wasn't it?
There's a lot of stuff being donewith AI across, as you were saying,
other local newspapers across Britain.
reach PLC, which owns an enormousnumber of them, has this AI tool
called, Gutenberg, I think it'scalled, which is supposedly repurposes.
Bits of, a copy which are put out forone newspaper, website, for every other
(21:35):
newspaper, website throughout the country.
So effectively, presumably that meanschanging Birmingham for Liverpool,
for the Liverpool Echo or whatever.
But actually when you look at the stuffthat Rich are putting out on the website,
barely any of it is local at all.
there's enormous amount of it isjust the ones that we get copied in
quite often on, on the memos that arebeing sent around by their digital,
editor in Chief David Higginson.
And the ones he's really excitedabout are three amazing cleaning hacks
(21:57):
that will revolutionize your sink.
And you just think really is this, whatis this what is gonna bring people to, to,
Andy (22:04):
to, their local newspaper?
Bring them back and yeah.
But this is back to what Helen wassaying about having something specific
to offer that people can't get elsewhere.
So private eye has lots of investigativereporting that you won't get elsewhere.
It also has lots of jokesyou won't get elsewhere.
It provides something that is quitespecific and which not a lot of other
people do an objective view of itself.
(22:26):
But the Daily Mail
Adam (22:27):
went big online by being very good at doing pap photos and, very
kind of intrusive celebrity stuffand said, that's what we're gonna do
and we're gonna do it really, well.
The Guardian has its own thingsthat only The Guardian does.
Yeah.
Online, they've takentheir brand and done now,
Ian (22:41):
but wasn't, the, point of the standard that it was a London
paper and you got things in it.
That, the rest of the country'salways complaining that,
everything's London centric.
the standard was London centric.
That was the point of it.
But, until it was, but I find theidea there's no place for that.
Really sad and, difficultto, to quite square.
Helen (23:02):
my cynical side says Afghani Erev now has his peerage.
He's now under a Labour governmentinstead of a friendly Tory government.
Maybe the, there's no realadvantage to him in putting, losing
money on a, newspaper anymore.
is it just as crude as that?
Am I being unfair to evany friend of this podcast?
Ev any lambda maybe.
(23:22):
it's not just
Adam (23:23):
him either.
Is it?
There's the, the mysterious Saudiinvestor who is rumored to be the
one that pulled the plug on it andfinally said, look, this is unfeasible.
You can't keep producingthis, print newspaper.
there are, what is the point to havingSaudi investors who worried about money?
Ian (23:37):
I thought the entire point of foreign investors was that they didn't care.
They just keep, churning the money in.
Yeah.
It's
Helen (23:44):
not all miserable though, because there is an interesting
model that's happening onSubstack at newsletter levels.
Manchester Mill is now expanded aroundand is trying to recreate essentially
a very lo-fi low cost version.
Jim Waterson took, volunteerredundancy from the Guardian.
He's now launched a substackcalled London Centric.
He's trying to essentiallyreplicate the evening standard,
(24:04):
as a sort of one man operation.
And I think it'd be really interesting'cause they, are essentially cussing it
down to the Boulogne in terms of staffing.
They don't have those print distributioncosts to pay, which are genuinely, we
haven't mentioned the fact that sinceour last podcast went out, the observers
potentially up for sale for tortoise.
But by buying that they would betaking on a huge cost of print and dis
(24:25):
getting a newspaper to the like ney.
Yeah, is an enormous, logisticaland financial challenge to
take on in this day and age.
And so maybe the future of local coverageis people opting into it and paying
for it and it come into their inbox.
Andy (24:38):
Yes.
It's hyper-local and you need to bequite engaged to engage, to, to pay for
it, which is a shame as in it's a shamethat it's not as immediately available.
Adam (24:49):
And the real unspoken thing that's hanging over all of this is how long
it's going to be feasible for people tokeep producing daily print newspapers.
And I think it's really interesting.
we've got yet another, runner,front runner in the, in the race to
take over the telegraph that, thatendless battle that seems to have be
going on for most of our lives now.
but it's the, the, a man by the nameof David Une where there, there's a
(25:12):
challenge to Subeditors, not David,but Dovid, who is the owner of the
New York Sun now, the New York Sun.
Does not have a print outlet.
It is an online only thing.
this is, I'm afraid the way the industryis going, not necessarily fortnightly,
magazines, which are still sayingenormous, numbers in print because they
don't have a website in the room at
Ian (25:32):
this point.
I don't wanna
Adam (25:33):
hear about the decline in
Ian (25:34):
print.
Adam (25:35):
But even if you were a, Saudi investor with bottomless pockets
to come in and say, we've got thisamazing product, but we're gonna print
it out, in the early hours of themorning and then put it in vans and
send it around the country, you mightthink in 2024, is there an easier and
better and cheaper way of doing this?
no one's found it.
Helen (25:51):
There's also the fact that if you put stuff out in petrol for courts and
NWS and everything, it's big advertisingfor the fact that pa, those papers exist.
Sometimes I forget about things thatdon't, with social media now having
turned into weird little silos andFacebook and matter, its owners saying
that we don't really want to do newsanymore, Twitter is now a sort of
mad hellscape of conspiracy theories.
(26:12):
What are the channels by which your.
Publication advertise itself topeople who already don't read you.
that's shrunk and shrunk and I thinkthere must be also a worry that without
that projection of the newsstand, youknow, the fact that I might not buy
all the papers, but I see them whenI go to the garage, that there's that
Adam (26:27):
and the fact that broadcast media amplifies it as well.
the fact that the BBC do still putup the front pages every morning,
and the independent for a while triedto pretend that they were still a
newspaper when they went online only andproduced this front page for something
that wasn't a newspaper anymore.
You don't see much of that anymore.
It, I don't think it makes the, BBCpaper review or the Sky Paper review, but
it's not just having those front pagesthere that then does set the agenda for,
(26:49):
your L BBC shout alongs in the morning,from Nick Ferrari to James O'Brien, and
most of five lives output and things.
So newspapers do still havethis enormous sway and say,
Ian (27:01):
yeah,
Adam (27:01):
it's just a way of making the paper.
Ian (27:03):
Yes.
And I, if I just say fromHelen's earlier point of view.
It isn't helped by the fact that theRoyal Mail, used to be, one of those
organizations that, essentially it would,deliver the mail and it would deliver
newspapers and magazines and parcels.
And in its current incarnation andin the current sale, one really
(27:25):
doesn't know what it's going to do.
so that becomes a problem.
Andy (27:28):
They'll go online, it'll be fine.
okay.
So now it's time to turn to MohamedFayed Nar of the Eye for Decades died
last year Recently the, a documentary"Al Fayed: Predator at Harrods".
was broadcast for the first time,which detailed the claims of, , many
(27:49):
women who said they had been eitherraped or sexually assaulted by Fayed.
That number of women has risen Drasticallysince the documentary was broadcast.
I believe it's now in thehundreds of women whose claims
police are, investigating.
this wasn't unknown to, lots of peoplein the press and particularly to
those who read the eye, because asthe last edition of the mag, showed,
(28:10):
there was a piece, was it 98 or nine?
It was 1998, yeah.
98.
which detailed claims of not assault,but of him being, I think the
phrase was a revolting old lecture.
prowling the shop floor, lookingfor young women who worked
at Harrods and then sending
Ian (28:24):
them to the doctor to, to check that they were Yeah.
clean.
Yeah.
Andy (28:29):
Propositioning them, buying them, handfuls of notes, this kind of thing.
So was known about, but took hisdeath for it to become, Public
Adam (28:41):
actually it didn't even take his death.
'cause if I may remember sitting inthis room a year ago, and, listeners
when they finished this episode willbe able to go back and listen to it.
It was the addition we recorded theweek that he died when we were slightly
gobsmacked by the que that were beingpaid to him all over the shop, and
people praising him to high heaven.
People like P Morgan certainlyand lots of other newspapers.
and we were saying in that we wereexplicitly said, but he was a serial
(29:03):
sexual assaulter, and, a bully.
And, and I was amazed when I went backand looked at that piece, the 1998
piece, LA last week because it did seem.
Quite comprehensively to covera lot of the rev, the supposed
revelations that were in the BBC piece.
I'm not, this is not todisparage what the BBC have done.
They've done a fantastic job ongetting the women on record and
(29:24):
working with them and finding outmore and more gruesome details of it.
And it is brilliant that this stuffis finally coming out to, to, to the
extent that it is coming out now.
But it was there, it was noteven just being hinted out.
we wrote about it in private eye.
Tom Bauer wrote about it inhis biography of fire, which
came out that same year, 1998.
And an awful lot of it was in thatVanity Fair article that Henry
(29:45):
Porter wrote, which I think was 19 95
5.
Ian (29:48):
Yeah.
Adam (29:49):
and certainly was in the dossier stuff, which Henry has written about
since, compiling in order to fight offthe enormous libel suit, which Mohammed
Fayed, launched against him at the time.
Andy (29:59):
Okay.
that's what I wanted to askabout because Vanity Fair.
Agreed.
In the after he sued them to put allof their evidence in locked storage.
Tom Bowers described the legalthreats and actually physical
threats, his personal safety that hereceived from, fire and his cronies.
Helen (30:19):
those weren't the only people that he was intimidating.
Dominic Lawson, whose wife was a veryclose friend of Princess Diana, wrote
about the fact that when Rosa Monktonsaid Diana wasn't pregnant, when she
died, fire had sent a car around herhouse with the kind of legal threat
inside when she was at home alone.
I think, this story, people always, Isaw some of that stuff on Twitter of
people saying, why isn't this reported?
(30:39):
And A, it was, and B, it was reportedin the face of enormous legal and.
intimidatory threats, like those things.
He certainly, he wasn't legal.
Adam (30:47):
the, vindictiveness with which Fayed and his henchmen pursued anyone
who crossed them, or who displeased them.
there was a guy called ChristopheBettman, who I think was a, a
senior manager at Howard's who,resigned and was pursued with false
accusations of kinda shopliftingand fraud and all sorts of things.
They had him arrested absolutelyinnocent of all of them.
they were not beyond, the buggingagain, was the thing that we wrote about
(31:10):
extensively in private I throughout the1990s, that he actually bugged all of
his staff and recorded their calls inorder to be able to use them to blackmail
them or take vengeance on them later.
And the sheer thuggery.
There was a guy called JohnMcNamara who was head of security,
who was an ex met policeman.
And there were an awful lot,there was a lot of tied up.
And the fact that he could getpeople arrested was all to do
(31:31):
with the connections that seniorsecurity staff at HAR had with
it still within the Met Police.
and it's a matter of record that duringJohn McNamara was, the threats that were
revealed in that B-B-B-B-C thing to oneof the women who, attempted to speak to
Vanity Fair and literally said to her,we know where your family lives, which of
course, if they're your employer, they do,they've got your next of kin on record.
(31:52):
They do know all about you.
So these were, very real threatsthat were made to people.
And that is the reason I think that
Ian (31:58):
it took, His death, McNamara's death and fire's death before the
people involved would come out.
the threats to the journalist.
Tom Barr had seen off Maxwellon one biography, he, wasn't
gonna cave on this one.
Vanity Fair had a great deal of money.
they ended up settling in the end,which was something of a surprise
(32:20):
given the evidence they had.
we used to get letters saying,private eye, just racist,
private eye, just snobbish.
and that's the only reason this personwho's trying to join the British
establishment, and you can't bearit, just the same as with Maxwell.
the fact that these characters weretrying to take over British institutions
(32:40):
claiming to admire them and thensubvert them and make them pointless.
FY had wanted to buy Herodsand he wanted to buy punch.
He wanted to buy punch 'causehe'd read it abroad and thought
this is what being British means.
the Crown's portrayal, which again, mostpeople, as far as I can see, seem to think
the Crown is a documentary, its portrayalof Fayed is an absolute disgrace.
(33:05):
it does come
Helen (33:05):
up in the BBC documentary.
I was really surprised by that.
But the number of women who say thatthey decided to speak out because the
Crown's portrayal was essentially thispoor Egyptian who'd got a black servant.
he was very, it was an outsider comingin and the sniffy, British Royals didn't
like him, had driven them Made them,had re-traumatized them, that was going
(33:25):
to be the historical verdict on him,that they decided finally to speak out.
And I thought that was quiteextraordinary because I think I mean
we covered this, the fact that, as yousay, he wanted to buy these British
institutions, he exceeded, in somecases he had race horses that allowed
him to stand next to the Queen.
Yes.
Adam (33:40):
He sponsored the Windsor horse show.
Yeah.
And that got him into the boxwith the Queen every year.
that was, you don't get much more on theinside of the establishment than that.
Dominic Lawson
Ian (33:48):
said, the British establishment didn't shun him.
It didn't shun him nearly enough.
Yeah.
Harts had a royal warrant
Andy (33:55):
when it comes to stories like this and how difficult they are to get
into print, I know things did get intoprint, have things changed substantially,
in your opinion between then and now?
Ian (34:07):
me Too cases, which is why, hats off as Adam said, are incredibly difficult,
to get into print, to get over the line.
And I, when I say MeToo cases, this is rape.
but all of those are difficultbecause you need someone to be brave
enough to sign a piece of papersaying, yes, it happened to me.
And if it comes to court, I will testify.
(34:28):
That is very difficult to do.
it was one of the first stories I everdid at Private Eye was someone who
worked in the BBC, who was, harassingall his female staff and, this was 86 7.
And they were brave enough then.
And if you think comparatively, it hasn'tgot that much easier, to come forward,
(34:52):
particularly when there's a sort of huge,threatening apparatus coming at you.
So I would say, even now, hats off toreally all of them who came forward
and said, yes, this is what happened.
Helen (35:06):
It was notable as well in the documentary that some more of the women
who wanted to speak in camera were oneswho had managed to get away, that they got
the terrible story, but they had actuallymanaged to run out of the apartment.
And I think that probably makesit slightly easier to speak out if
you're not having to speak about theactual trauma and relive that trauma.
But the other thing is, if you go backand look at the contemporary coverage
of it, I can, I, worry that there, andI, think it's probably true, there was a
(35:31):
feeling that they were getting somethingso that these were young women who were
employed in the perfecting department.
And yes, you had to get yourselffondled by some creepy old dude,
but you got a handbag out of it.
And that there was a, there wasan implicit trade off that all
of these women had taken, right?
That he was, a skeezy, old lech,but he was essentially paying
them off in bundles of cash.
And that was a convenient story forpeople to believe because it absolved
(35:52):
them a responsibility about the factthat when you hear the women's stories.
They didn't know thatthis was the bargain.
Lots of them turned down the money.
They were often invited, they wereoften like 19 or 20 in their first job
as like a perfume assistant, and thengot summoned to the private office.
But I think it suited people atthe time to think, this is what
all dirty old men don't they?
And, everyone's gettingsomething outta it.
Andy (36:13):
And it's the requirement of witnesses to be perfect.
Absolutely flawless, completely
Helen (36:18):
shouldn't have been drunk, should never have tried to say
anything nice to the person afterwards.
Shouldn't have taken
Adam (36:23):
the job.
Shouldn't have, yeah.
Shouldn't have gone do we know howhard it is to bring any cases like this
to court or to prosecution, let aloneget, the, get them out in the media.
It is incredibly difficult.
it is a case when in the end it's gonnacome down to a case of he said, when he is
an incredibly powerful man, and she said,when she's considerably less powerful.
Yeah.
and that is very, difficult.
(36:43):
So you need to put thework in, you need to, as.
recently, RO Irwin did with, the variousalleged victims of Russell Brand.
She actually had worked on it for a longtime to get people to go on the record
and be incredibly brave enough to do that.
And
Helen (36:56):
even though he's still, as we speak on stage with Jordan Peterson leading
people in the Lord's Prayer, like it's,he is effectively had, he is moved to the
fringes sphere, but like he was headingthat way anyway, but he can still work.
And there's a feminist theory idea,which is that the trouble with these
cases is that believing the perpetratordemands nothing of you saying that
Russell brand is innocent, means you getto still be friends with Russell brand,
(37:17):
you still get to use the celebrity,get to go on his shows, get to all
of that stuff, whereas believing thevictims requires you to shun somebody.
This comes back to the Mohammed Firepoint.
It's very inconvenientfor everybody involved.
Yeah.
Adam (37:28):
And that was where, post the death of Princess Diana, that.
Sold newspapers to put it bluntly.
And that was a, a calculation thatwas made in various newspaper offices,
which was that Moham Muhammad Al Fayedas he styled himself at that point,
was a very good person to have on side.
I remember cringing, obsequious,interviews done by Piers Morgan when
(37:49):
he was the editor of The Mirror,which he openly admitted Pi Morgan
were, done because he believedin sucking up to millionaires and
particularly ones who might have aninterest in buying into the media.
And he also had an incrediblePR operation on his side.
one of the other things that we printedbefore anyone else, was a transcript
of a conversation that, Chris Atkins,the documentary maker had with, max
Clifford, fellow sex offender, butalso one of the many people who rep,
(38:12):
who represented Fayed along the way.
And he was absolutely blatant about it,thinking he was speaking off the record,
he was talking about if he's groping 17year olds, they're quite willing because
they're being paid a lot of money.
There are an awful lot of young ladieswho are extremely happy to pamper
up to rich, old Randy, old swords.
Helen (38:27):
This
Adam (38:27):
absolute That's what I mean, that's what people told themselves, right?
Absolute The view of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People told themselves,
Helen (38:30):
they're getting something out of it.
And then you hear the actualstories of women who were terrified
often thinking that, am I gonnamake it out of here alive?
He's that powerful.
And it just does not matchup to what the Max Cliff.
While as we know, max Clifford had hisown reasons for, promoting that idea, God,
Adam (38:44):
but cl Clifford's payoff was the fire gave lots of money to charity.
It's the old Jimmy S one, again,it's the, if you, pay off your guilty
conscience by, by giving lots of money tochildren's hospices and things, and then
you can get away with whatever you want.
But Clifford, of course, wasnot the only PR man involved.
Endless letters we used to getfrom Michael Cole, who was, F's
kind of representative on earth.
He was his PR man for years and years.
(39:05):
Then kept on as a consultantand a director of Harod.
extremely well paid for all this.
Got very, silent.
Now, he would, if we mentionedMichael Cole at any point he would
write in a rude letter complainingabout, that, we, were writing
nonsense about his esteemed client.
And it was 'cause wewere racist and terrible.
And representatives of theestablishment very quiet now.
Doesn't wanna say anything.
Yes,
Ian (39:25):
not a word.
I would only say in terms of the tone,I mean because, we did laugh at fire ed.
Repeatedly and for decades, and wedid that partly 'cause it worked.
The one thing he hated us so often inthese cases is being made to look a fool.
What he wanted to do was have peopleaccept his version of himself.
(39:45):
What we wanted to do was say hewas a ludicrous figure, not a
commanding brilliant genius figure,not, a benign figure, just a deeply
creepy, ridiculous individual.
And he hated that.
And then he bought punch and.
Devoted it to attacking private eye.
(40:06):
it was extraordinary.
They were supposedly rival, but allthey did was write about us, wasn't it?
They didn't try to competein any way whatsoever.
He put a picture of me on thecover and I remember thinking
it's not gonna sell any papers.
Andy (40:19):
alright, that is it for this edition of page 94.
Thank you very much for listening.
Thank you to Ian, Helen, and Adam, ifyou would like to find out more, about
the stories we've been discussing todayand a whole lot more besides you can
get a subscription by going to privatehyphen i.co.uk is out every fortnight
is reasonably priced and it's terrific.
so that's It.
We'll be back again in a fortnightwith another one of these.
(40:40):
Until then, thank you to you forlistening and as always to Matt
Hill of reading audio for producing.
Bye for now.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.