Page 94: the Private Eye Podcast.

Andy: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Ice Studio with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Ian Hislop.

It's a new year, but it's lots of the same old news.

So firstly, let's go over Helen to your patch to America, because we wanted to talk about ICE immigration and customs enforcement.

Not least due to the, let's say the fatal shooting of, a young American woman, Rene Goode.

Helen: So Ice has been around since 2003.

However, under the first tramp term it massively ramped up, and this time it has gone absolutely crazy.

They have, I think, doubled the number of agents They put aside tens of billions of pounds.

Do you remember the big, beautiful bill just massively increased the funding to it, and it always had two parts, one of which was basically like tracking down fentanyl smugglers and, child trafficking rings and things like that.

And another was finding day-to-day immigrants whose only offense was overstaying their visa or entering the country illegally, whatever.

And really it sucked all the resources from that bit, the smashing the gangs bit to essentially going door to door and hassling people's gardeners and stuff like that.

one of the ways that Trump has used it is he has sent it along with the National Guard into Blue Cities, many of which have explicitly declared that they're sanctuaries.

They don't, they, their local law enforcement don't want to cooperate with ice.

Ice is incredibly unpopular.

Actually now a majority of Democrats want it abolished.

because what they do is they dress up in camo gear and cover their faces and hassle people dropping their kids off at nursery or whatever it might be.

They are renowned as being a kind of, unpleasant, paramilitary kind of style force on American streets.

Ian: And you've said that if you recruit people in a hurry, With none of the usual safeguards, that's who you get.

Helen: I think so they've, as I say, they say it like should take about 18 months to train an agent.

They just haven't had the time to do that.

Even in the Trump term, where are they getting these people from?

Are they vetting them enough?

we have the story here in Britain about the Mets dropping some of its vetting because they would had such a push to put on new offices.

So politicians think it's amazing to say, let's have more bobs on the beat.

Let's have more ice officers.

But, you if you shortcut that process, you do it.

Your Pernille

Andy: And the, the Met, the Metropolitan police have had to drop plenty of officers they recruited because they found they, they've been guilty of various, quite serious offenses.

Yeah.

Violent crimes or sexual crimes or whatever it might

Helen: be.

Yeah, although not the case for the guy who shot, Rene Goode.

Now, he had been in Iceberg for 10 years.

He was a military veteran.

However, there were a couple of things that were really important to what happened there.

One was about, six months ago he had another traffic stop, tried to open a door, knocked through the window, tried to open the door from the inside, and then end up being dragged along the road.

and that is against protocol by the way.

You shouldn't hang onto a vehicle when it's driving.

Also, most law enforcement agencies in the US, you are told not to shoot into a moving vehicle because guess what?

One of the things that can happen is if someone gets shot, they put their foot down on the accelerator and they might then take out someone else.

So this person was not really obeying the kind of code of conduct manual.

You'd hope the incident also escalated incredibly quickly from the woman in the car saying.

nothing go about your day to within 10 seconds getting shot.

It wasn't one of those really unpleasant policing situations where you see, people like the police are just overwhelmed and might be in fear of what's gonna happen next.

The administration's argument is that they, that the officer was in fear of his life.

He thought he was gonna get run over very

Andy: administration's

Ian: Trump directed said he was run over and

Helen: Into hospital.

Yeah.

And, went into hospital.

And there's video when you can see how wheels are turning to go past him.

And also you see him walking away.

But for me, one of the most, our whole situation's really unpleasant for me.

The most unpleasant bit about this is that immediately after it was on the video that the Trump administration released after, taken by him, the officer who shot, Rene.

Good.

He says, fucking bitch immediately after shooting her three times through the window.

And to me that just says, that is a, an officer who is annoyed, right?

Not somebody who is in fear of their life, who's terrified, but someone who is just has panicked and lost control.

And I think that's what really worries people about the way that ICE is working in the US is that you have undisciplined, heavily armed officers doing unpopular law enforcement with limited powers.

They're not supposed to go after citizens.

Renee Good was a citizen and being followed around now by, as a result, protestors, and it's, I don't think it's an overstatement to, I say to say that I think the Trump administration quite likes this ratcheting up dy dynamic where, what they would call kind of blue haired lesbians are now getting into rucks with ice officers.

The ice officers are, now essentially, I would say, almost permitted to be violent because we know from the pardons of all the January 6th protesters, many of whom attacked police officers that anyone who does violence in the name of Trump probably gonna get a Trump pardon, even if it makes it as far as the courts and they get

Andy: JD Vance, I think has actually explicitly said he's got immunity from prosecution, The, officer,

Helen: JD Vance and immediately and other members of the administration immediately came out and said she deserved it.

Moral in more or less those terms.

And then you had all these mag affiliated influences.

There's a new term that they bring up now that she was an Awful, she was an affluent white female, urban liberal.

And such people are, of course, extremely uppity and annoying.

And they're exactly the kind of people who are overly sympathetic to illegal immigration.

They get in the way of male law enforcement officers and they don't realize how violent could be and what's coming to them.

and I like this, die?

And that, but I think that's the screaming subtext of it, That you, got in the way of him.

She wasn't really doing anything illegal is immediately obvious.

You could say that possibly she was refusing to comply with their

Ian: She parked the car in the middle of the road, I suppose is

Helen: That's Yeah.

but it's,

Andy: she was

Adam: trying to remove the car from the middle of the road at the moment she got

Helen: shot, Yeah, but that's what I mean.

It's all extremely tenuous and Their explanation is they were acting as legal observers of what ICE were doing.

So that, that's the kind of thing that would, you'd end up getting litigated in a court case.

But of course, ICE is gonna, so another thing that Trump did, abolish the three oversight agencies that look into ICE's,

Andy: was going to.

ask,

Helen: do,

Andy: where is the oversight?

Helen: Trump admin has blocked Minnesota as a blue state, from investigating this.

the FBI under Cash Patel, might look into it, but I just think they're, equally as likely to look into whether or not she was a criminal as the officer who shot her.

And I don't really see how you get a conviction in the circumstances where very senior people in the administration have already come out and said.

He did nothing wrong.

She deserved it.

as a politician, you're supposed to, that's why they say all those platitudes, right?

About we'll let the investigation take its course.

I don't wanna rush to judgment because the alternative is this, which is basically, Trump has declared her innocent and then the officer innocent.

Declare the officer innocent.

Yeah.

Ian: And this seemed to be a very specific example of, undermining reality, which Trump has done so that he shows the video.

people can see the videos that the officer took themselves.

And then the action is then described in a way that's totally unrecognizable to what you're watching by the official spokesman.

So you get to the point where we've all been saying it for a very long time is that, the assault on reality, there's no such thing as truth anymore.

But you watch that and you think, does it not matter at all what we're seeing?

Helen: I don't, think it does to, the kind of information sphere that he's got around him, and I agree with you, it's really disturbing, but everything that Trump has done with ice, I think is really disturbing.

So he's massively expanded it.

There was a target of 3000 arrests a day, loads more money for it, while at the same time reducing the amount of money for immigration judges.

So the idea is that people just get kept in detainment for a long time.

And here's something that I thought was very private Irish when I read about it.

Constant revolving door between top ice officials and say private prison providers, the kind of people who get contracts to run detention centers.

So there is a kind of, yeah, ice industrial complex essentially that a lot of people are making a lot of money out of.

And there are some, even for people watching this.

Probably aren't going to be legally route to America.

Need to be aware of some stuff that's been happening.

Like they will stop people for no reason.

Visa overstayers for example, if you overstay your Esther or your Visa, that has ended up with British nationals being held in like Louisiana prisons for several months before going through the system.

People turning up to visa appointments and getting arrested on the way into those, like someone will classically say goodbye to their wife and child, go into the appointment and some tiny bit on their record will have flagged something and then they just won't come out again and no one will understand what's happened to them for several days until they finally get their phone call.

I mean it, it is, I try not to get too, hysterical about things that are happening under Trump.

But this is one that I think people should be aware of because I think it not only affects America, it affects us over here too.

If you're traveling to America, you wanna be aware that this is what's happening.

there are essentially heavily armed paramilitary forces wandering around the cities of America.

Adam: At the same time as he's threatening military action against Iran for shooting protesters,

Helen: he's threatening military action against everybody.

Andy: Yes.

new thing now, isn't it?

man who gonna stop forever Wars now just wants forever wars with everyone.

I'm just, I'm curious because so many of these, incidents are filmed from several angles because everyone has a phone in the pocket these days and they, can do, I'm just curious about what is happening in incidents which aren't filmed if this is how bad things are getting in incidents, which there, there are several shots of,

Helen: Yeah, ICE has been involved in several shootings already, in the Trump term.

and there's definitely an uptick in trends of them doing that.

And you're right, one on earth is happening in those detention centers where no one has a, mobile phone.

We know the conditions in them can be really quite unpleasant.

at one point Trump was shipping people off to, sea Cot, the, the prison in exactly.

He was under B Ley.

The whole idea is basically we want this to be horrible and Grotesquely obviously horrible 'cause we want people to either self deport or not try and make the, take the risk of illegal immigration in the first place.

my Atlantic colleague, Adam Soer, wrote about it and said, the cruelty is the point, right?

These are, this is not happening by accident.

Ian: Can I ask you about the idea you are being told what to do by a, Lippy woman?

Yeah.

completely unacceptable because on the video bits I've seen at one point, the deceased's partner says, go and have lunch.

What are you doing?

in a way that is a tiny bit confrontational.

Helen: she's taunting him, isn't she?

It's

Adam: rather than isn't,

Ian: yes.

rather.

But my, my own, limited experience of America and obviously watching too many films is if an American police officer of any description comes and needs you, you just do whatever you're told.

'cause you don't want to die.

Helen: they're not real law enforcement in the sense that they don't have the right to arrest citizens.

They're there to do civil enforcement of immigration offenses, right?

They're not there to, if you run a red light, to also pick you up for that.

So I think people have maybe had a, either a false belief or a hope that if you're a US citizen, there's not a lot they can do to you.

Ironically, this shooting happened about a mile away from where George Floyd was killed in 2020.

And there has been a long level of discourse among black Americans for a long time.

If you get to a traffic stop, that is something that's really dangerous for You they are on a hair trigger and maybe white Americans didn't realize until quite recently that this was something that was really quite scary for black Americans.

so I think there's all of that into it.

But, I dunno if you've ever watched any.

Videos of p of police protests, interacting with protestors here is something that police are trained to deal with as people getting goy, getting lippy with them.

And most of the training is oriented around deescalation because normally you have a handful of police officers and several, being outnumbered heavily by protesters.

So I think that's the, one of the things that really comes across in that is that the instinct for these people was not to deescalate it was to try and drag this woman out of her car.

And again, the manuals for most law enforcement in America say, don't shoot into a moving vehicle unless you think that person is a immortal danger to others, let them escape.

You've got the license plates, you've got the picture of what they look like.

You can, you'd be able to ident identify them and arrest them later.

And instead of doing that, they escalated the situation.

And I think that is something that is, it does feel like it's changed in the last couple of years.

Ian: because she did say the number of plates will be the same tomorrow.

We're just going home to park.

Helen: Yeah.

you could say this is a result of poorly trained, poorly disciplined officers.

Or you could say this is exactly the result that was inevitable with the policies that this administration is pursuing.

Andy: I'm not gonna ask if things are gonna improve because I, you've given me no reason to ask that

Helen: question.

I don't see under what, Trump gave an interview to the New York Times last week in which he said, there's no restraints on me except me.

And what I think

Adam: we actually said his personal morality.

And I thought, we really screwed then.

No because

Helen: you haven't got any of that.

to link this back to World Affairs, that's the same case with Greenland.

Is Europe really prepared to what go to war with America?

And he's taking the bet that we won't, there'll be no real diplomatic or financial consequences if he violated Article five of nato.

So who's, who is going to stop him is the question.

And

Ian: But his only personal morality is, that of ownership.

and he cannot seem to get it into his head that Greenland is part of nato.

It has an enormous American base on it.

If he'd like it to be more secure, they'd be very happy to have even more enormous American bases on it, spending as much money as humanly possible.

it's inbuilt into Greenland to be secure.

That's the point of it.

But that's not enough for him.

He has to own it.

And that's true in all of his dealings.

Even in Gaza, we gonna say there is no point in anything.

For Trump, unless he personally owns

Adam: it.

Unless he owns it and puts his name on it.

So it will be turned into Trumpland the minute he's taken it over, won't

Helen: the Trump Kennedy Center sign across the front.

Yeah, but you're right.

that's the story of Venezuela's Oil.

That's the story of Greenland's Natural Resources.

That's the story of the Baddiel that he wanted Ukraine to sign, that essentially they were gonna pay for the war outta by hunting over their minerals to America.

It's just I've got a bigger gun than you and I want it, so why can't I have it?

yeah, sorry Andy, about that for, the new year, I'm not bringing sunshine and joy and light.

I'm bringing a kind of, I would think quite carefully about traveling to America if you don't have to.

Andy: I'd play it safe and go back to Rio if I

Helen: were you, Huh?

Exactly.

I wanna go somewhere with the rule of law means something Saudi Arabia.

Andy: right there's now another, newest member of Reform in town.

Very exciting.

And Mr.

Nadim Zaha an exciting new talent Yeah.

That they've unearthed from Yeah.

Former chancellor, for race, for two days.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ian: Yeah.

Yes.

Nigel Farage, when he was announcing him, said that Zaha had the necessary conviction, which

Andy: it was only a fine,

Ian: yeah.

Pretty tough on the rest of the reform candidates who've got, proper ones.

no, yet another appointment of a man with after two seconds inquiry by even the least diligence of hacks, an extraordinary, dodgy backstory that you would think, why do you want to appoint this man?

this man was, found by the Ethics Committee, to be guilty of not declaring that he had, the tax, authorities looking into him while he was a cabinet minister.

That isn't good.

Not by any old standard, just generally,

Andy: Ian, it was only 3.7 billion pounds of unpaid tax.

which of us has not just occasionally neglected to pay that amount.

Helen: I know.

And now I'm gonna get lectures on how my metropolitan elite by a guy who has stables, which to be fair, aren't very metropolitan, but like nonetheless it's just again, it's just a whole thing is mind blowing.

Ian: Yeah.

And this is the man who said one of the things that attracted him to reform was belief in freedom of speech.

Now there was very little, enthusiasm by Mr.

Zaha for freedom of speech when he said I'd been smeared by journalists smeared in the sense of they told the truth about him, which he then had to admit and say he should have declared it earlier and then pay his unpaid capital gains tax and his fine.

That's, a new definition of freedom of

Andy: speech rather.

Adam: A lot of legal letters I recall rocketing about warning journalists off exercising their freedom of speech and even asking Mrs.

Harvey questions at the

Andy: time.

Adam: yes,

Ian: And, in his very first interview, I sound as though I'm obsessed, but I cannot believe it.

We have to watch this man being declared as exciting new candidate, exciting new member of reform.

and then he's asked a question, and he says, that's a stupid question.

And then he has a go at the journalist for going on about it.

We are going on about your extremely dodgy past.

You keep making these mistakes originally in declaring your expenses with the stables, more mistakes all the way along the line.

And now you've joined reform, which if I may say so is a catastrophic

Andy: strong mistake

Ian: for which you will no doubt apologize at some point.

Helen: It's all so maga though, the idea that you wash out of mainstream politics or whatever it might have been, and then you end up going into a populous party and then you spend all your time when people bring up your past mistakes.

Then just having a go at the media.

That is exactly how every bit of, MAGA works.

It's people who just, you who, washed out with something, who failed at something else, who never got quite the recognition that they thought they deserved.

Yeah.

They end up in, the, in a populous right party, which is a bit offensive to the voters of those parties.

That you just get a load of retreads

Adam: I think gonna end up being very problematic for Nigel Farage because his point has been, oh, we need some people with experience that we can get in.

But this new alternative, party that's gonna take over from the conservatives, he is starting to look very similar to the old conservative party.

literally it's the same people now, isn't he?

It's, he's, there must have been about a dozen of them now

Andy: but look, we are recording this in London and I know that to get here today, you'll have had to go through several Sharia no-Go areas.

London is in the grip of a crime wave run by foreign criminal gangs.

We are seeing a flight from London, particularly of people who've got children, and that's Nigel Farage there.

he's not talking about nursery fees.

He's talking, I'm not talking about people wanting to have a garden when they've got toddlers.

No, he's

Ian: God, this is said with real

Andy: conviction.

this is, this is the sort of the politics of London and how it's, become.

Effectively 1980s New York for a lot of the imagination of, of various political parties.

And in fact, in a 19 like New York now thinks of London as being like 1980s New York.

It makes no sense in a lot of ways.

Helen: Oh yeah, no, if you put London in the, like with every American city in terms of the homicide rate, it'd just be, we'd land by some little tiny Podunk town in Ohio somewhere.

Yeah.

So it is quite odd that it's been built up into this sort of like gang warfare, sharia wasteland.

Andy: the reason I started with the Farage quote is because there are a few bits of Londony news in the last few days, which tie everything together.

reform, have just announced their candidate for the next mayoral elections.

two and a half years before they happen.

They're clearly planning on, a long getting to know you session for their candidate.

It's called Lila Cunningham.

and the latest stats for murder, or as apparently we're now having to call it homicide in London, are out.

Helen: I'm sorry.

Andy: I know I have

Helen: have to translate myself to American and I just can't undo it.

I know,

Andy: but 97 people were murdered in London in 2025.

obviously each of those are tragedy, but it's the lowest rate per a hundred thousand people since comparable records began in 1997.

So the head of the Metropolitan Police, mark Rowley, has said the evidence is extremely clear.

So London is on plenty of metrics safer than it's been for a long time.

the murder rate is a, 12th, the rate of Chicago, , there are crimes which are up, theft from the person is up in a big way.

Phone snatching is up in a big way.

these are crimes which are often harder to police if you have, a couple of million people walking around with

Helen: the thousand pounds

Andy: phones in their hands.

It's, it is hard.

It is hard to police, but it is a crime that people see happening.

it happens to plenty of people and it's really annoying and the police will often say, we, can't, help with that.

or that's the perception that a lot of people have.

Ian: but they do say that about burglary, in the rest of the country as well.

Andy: Yeah.

Ian: if your phone gets leaked in London, while that's a bit of an effort, if your house gets burgled in quite a lot of the rest of the country, yeah, we'd love to help.

Andy: the reform candidate for mayor, last, week when she was, unveiled, she, talked about, how unsafe she feels now, or she wouldn't put her kids on the tube on their own.

But when she was 11, she used to travel on the Tube network thing absolutely fine.

And I worked out with, in terms of her age, she's talking about the late eighties, which is that point when I can remember the guardian angels, do you remember them?

Me and the vigilantes from New York were brought into the London tube system and there was stuff on the news about them roaming up and down in their silly little red berries because it was so rife with appalling crime.

I, find it a bit like after the sort of seven seven bombings and everyone said, this is an absolutely unprecedented threat that we've never faced on the streets of London before.

And I can remember coming up to London as a kid and being absolutely terrified about the IRA blowing up.

That's why there weren't any bins in, in stations or anything.

It was an absolute constant threat.

the Howard's bombing, the bombing Canary Wharf and things right into the nineties, Everyone seems to just wipe that from their memories and everything seems to be an eternal, the worst point ever, doesn't it, in terms of crime.

I think it's pretty clear why reform are doing it.

you can't win votes unless you're saying the country is completely broken.

And particularly

Helen: London, it's weird to do it when you're running for Mayor of London.

I can understand if you're trying to run for anywhere, that is a place where people have moved out London anyway, that's got very much older people who maybe find London really overwhelming and very different to how it wasn't the way they remember.

It's very weird to run for an office on elect me mayor of this shit hole.

Andy: you th you,

Helen: is that gonna work?

I dunno,

Andy: on the posters.

But I think there actually is a reason to do it and I think there's precedent for it as well.

Cast your minds back to the house in days of 2024, which the last time we had a mayoral election in London, Saddi Kahn was up for it for a third time for the Labor party and up against him was Susan Hall, , conservative assembly member for London.

Now her campaign was extremely, focused on this kind of thing and her basic strategy was to go for lots of people living in, London's huge, and it's huge and it's.

It's very diverse.

Ian: Oh, no, I knew you were

Andy: you were gonna say that.

Helen: but you're right.

But

Andy: But you get older voters, you get people in the outer suburbs who are older, they're socially conservative.

They, they, use their cars more.

So lots of people were very worried before you Les came in the ultra low emission zone.

Now that was more of a worry before it came in.

'cause 95% of cars turn out that they were fine.

They were compliant with Ulo.

But Susan Hall's campaign was really strongly pitched, in those directions.

Ian: But she did in a very memorable interview, admit to never having been on a bus, in London and to all of us, who have lived or, live occasionally in London.

never having been on a bus isn't a top qualification for becoming mayor.

transport is the one issue in London that people are very cross about.

They're cross with Sadik Khan, about the way transport works in London, the way cyclists, motorists, and, public services interact.

All of those are valid criticisms, but I don't see that on the reform agenda.

Where is, let's kick TFLI can't see that.

Helen: But then Zack's Goldsmith tried to run his conservative mayoral campaign also on the kind of like creeping Sharia immigration stuff.

Yeah.

And also lost, whereas Boris Johnson very successfully won several terms as mayor under Classic, Boris Boosterism.

It's amazing.

The city's brilliant.

This is a place of innovation and dynamism.

I don't know.

I think the biggest challenge to Sadik Khan is his extremely palate record as mayor.

I don't think anyone really could, nothing springs to mind immediately as a great s Kahan achievement.

He hasn't even really punished to put his name on anything.

And then just a general sense that people would probably quite like to give labor who are very unpopular a kicking, right?

Andy: Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I do think that people putting your name on things is not a good qualification for putting your name on the Boris bikes is not all the Boris buses, which heats up to 40 degrees on a mildly warm day in spring.

All of that.

It's not a, it's not perfect.

Ian: but apt.

Andy: Yeah.

Yeah.

True.

Ian: I also think it is funny at the beginning of a year when I'm worrying whether the Priva irony Ter is still working, A woman comes in and says she's, declaring an all out war on crime.

And then it turns out she's committed criminal offenses herself in terms of not filing accounts Yes.

On three separate companies.

that is quite funny.

Andy: three of her companies were struck off, weren't they?

So forcibly struck

Ian: off.

Yes.

document.

And I did check, just in case the lawyers are interested, it is a criminal offense not filing your accounts.

They didn't prosecute her, they struck the companies off, but they could have done, and all this has been denied and swept under the carpet.

And Farage says she's a successful entrepreneur.

not very

Andy: because these

Ian: companies have all folded and one of them was selling magnesium and menthol infused roll on lotion.

And is, this the bright future of entrepreneurial London?

Andy: What

Helen: What?

That's a deodorant.

Surely.

That sounds like one of those woowoo deodorants.

That's my theory.

Andy: Yeah.

Yeah.

Ian: her second husband is in, involved in crypto.

So

Helen: that's Oh no.

Oh, no.

Ian: reform.

Oh, that must be, but again, this isn't a candidate that you would immediately think they must choose that.

Andy: I think the tough on crime message could theoretically work, but you've got to persuade more people that London is a really ghastly place, which is quite hard because lots of quite targeted policing has brought various offenses down.

Luxury watch theft is the big thing that lots of very wealthy people worry about.

They say, I'm not wearing my Rolex in London anymore.

That's come down, I think two thirds within the, last two years, between one year and the next.

'cause they've done a lot of clever policing about it.

I just love the idea of being populist party.

You're like, we for the working man and our number one issue isn't it?

It's probably not gonna sweep you into Paris City or just the owners of Rolex It's No, but I bet Nick Candy's worried about it, Yeah.

Helen: no, I bet he is.

Andy: Despite being named after something you shouldn't do to a baby.

anyway, the, policy which could work or the area that.

Faroh gave this tiny mention to, it went in this launch of Lila Kelham as a Canada was, oh, you used to know your local police officer or a local teacher or whatever.

Now they've all had to leave 'cause they can't afford to live in London.

Affordability is a massive problem in London and it's weird that no one is making more hay with it,

Helen: that's the, that's what drove Zoran Momani in New York to his victory.

He's got a very leftist set of political positions, but actually he really did not talk about them at all.

He ran a pure affordability.

The rent is too damn high.

Halal vans can't get licenses, and you're paying too much for your Kafta.

Like it was just exactly that broad message, which, whether you are old or young in London, most people think London is a bit too expensive, whether it's about rents or it's about house price or it's about your CFL, whatever it might be.

And I just, I'm interested about whether or not a pure affordability message would've actually been a smarter one for reform to, to go with.

Andy: Yeah.

They have got a problem, haven't they, in the, same way that, supporters of them in the media like GB News have, and it involves being very proudly patriotic, but consistently saying that everything about the country or the capital city is completely shit.

And that's quite a sort of hard thing to bridge sometimes, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's, the Boris Boosterism did, cheer everyone up, even if a lot of it was rubbish, But they seem to have given up on the sunlit, uplands now.

It just seems to be everything is just all welcome to Mordor.

Yeah.

vote

Helen: For us, but it's quite a corporate role.

IMI remember going to events where he, like Boris Johnson would come and talk to people who worked in the city, and he would go and give a speech about how marvelous they all were, and they went.

We are very much like charity events, and I don't think necessarily that group of people want to hear this is miserable.

welcome to, as you say, welcome to Mordor.

They want people to come and invest in London.

that's part of also what the, that Mayor of London role has always been, is advocating for London as a global city that you would bring investment

Andy: inward.

Yeah.

Ian: I literally was in Shaft Germany the other day and a very nice woman got off the bus.

You'd come in to see a show and she said, could you tell me where the theater is?

'cause I'm very worried about walking anywhere in London.

And I said, it's there.

You literally have to just get off the steps and get in there.

But I promise you'll probably be fine.

And I think the newspapers have.

Given a version of London that chimes with their own prejudices, which is bordering on the silly, we've run a lot of parodies of, quite often according to Adam expat columnists who say, I visited London the other day, first time in years and oh,

Andy: I

Ian: was terrified.

And it, it does read really very pathetically with any sort of historical perspective.

Andy: Yeah, I, so to go into a few of the actual crimes themselves, so we've done homicide, we've done theft from the person, we've done luxury watch theft, we've done the biggies.

violent crime, has gone up, between 2015 and 2025.

That's a problem.

That's something you can definitely charge sudi with.

sorry, I don't mean you can charge him with, sorry

Helen: I said that wrong.

Andy: You can't charge

Helen: him.

He did them all.

Actually, the lawyers are listening.

He did every single one.

Andy: gun crime is, lower in London than in, in plenty of other bits of the UK and it's down, I think it's down pretty much everywhere.

Like that knife crime.

it is down in the last year, but it is higher than it was a

Ian: decade ago.

It's down from quite high,

Andy: it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That it's I think, pretty close to the pre pandemic Pique, which is at about 2019.

So knife, crime is definitely one of the ones where the policing hasn't worked yet.

Ian: Again, a campaign about what is really happening, I don't think would worry anyone.

Andy: Yeah.

Ian: Yeah.

There saying We need more policing is on the whole, very popular with all parties and nearly all demographics at all time.

so that's not a problem.

It's just this exaggerated and hysterical view of what's happening in the capitol that I think is completely unhelpful.

Andy: the biggest, flub in the 2024 conservative campaign that, that Susan Hall was running, was that they produced these very scary black and white videos of, hellhole London, one of which turned out to be from Pennsylvania station in, in New York.

it was a, perfect example of, you've, you're trying to say this is, like Gotham City, and it's not, it's got plenty of problems.

It's got plenty of political problems.

It's got plenty of problems with housing and with affordability and with lots of crime.

knife crime, Yeah.

Is, pretty high.

Yeah.

But as you say,

Ian: reform, then always links, levels of crime with immigration.

and suggests that no one has noticed that there are any problems in a capital city with, large amounts of immigration.

And, always suggests that the, press in particular never covers anything.

and sure our law is going on under the radar totally undetected.

on the whole, a story for example, like the, fun run where, in Tower Hamlets where the, adult women weren't allowed to run.

It was a fun run for everyone.

And there was a cutoff age for girls.

we ran this story in the eye.

and, it was picked up by nearly everybody.

And then the mosque had to, do a u-turn.

girls are now allowed to run at every age.

These things are not being ignored, except by the people who don't want to see them and say, no one covers any of this.

there are things that happen and they are covered.

Andy: we've covered a few times on this podcast.

The question of does it matter what reality is when there are very effective messages being, portrayed and promulgated?

So the Next, fine.

51% of adults think that, violent crime overall, is going up, which is not 7% of people think it's falling, which it is.

Helen: I think it really matters because when I looked at that poll and it was, 2024 reform voters were the most likely to say London wasn't unsafe.

I thought if you think about that demographically, that is older people who are now, some of them presumably frightened to leave their houses if they live in London or they were thinking about coming to London to the theater and people should have a realistic understanding of, yes, London does have, yes, you might find people smoking a joint on the tube with you.

You might find people like, as you say, phone thefts, watch thefts, whatever it might be.

There are petty crimes and stuff like that, but this is not the south side of Chicago and it should be okay to say so without people going, oh, you liberal elite.

Don't wanna hear any about it.

Andy: I'm really sorry.

You've just reminded me of one crime that we didn't read out the stats on, which is racist incidents at Dulwich College, which are down massively since late seventies.

Ian: did you notice that Mr.

Zaha was asked about, Nigel Farage's record, of antisemitism at dage.

And he said, if you think for a minute that I would be here if I thought Nigel had anything against people of my color, you're thinking no, it wasn't.

It was the Jews, wasn't it?

can we bring them up here?

this isn't what we were on about.

Andy: but it also doesn't take very long to unearth an article that, Nadim Zahar wrote in 2015 for conservative homes taking a very, strong line on that then.

His exact words on that Farage was proposing, ending race discrimination laws as Harvey's exact words were Bels would be proud.

Which, and

Helen: that's a good thing.

Understand.

You ought to be proud.

Andy: Well

Helen: done.

Andy: Okay.

we now come to section number three and Adam, it's over to you.

I gather we're going to get an exciting visitor from America in in the next few days.

We, ah, all the excitement in the moment seems to be where the Meghan is gonna come over in the summer, but, we do know we are gonna get the other half.

Prince Harry is, very likely to rock up in London.

I'm told he's enormously looking forward to, fronting down the, daily mail for it.

Is they in court, over this long running case he's had against them for all sorts of unlawful activities, which he alleges went on.

Now I have become totally, lost with the story of Prince Harry suing He's, yeah, it is Prince Harry versus the world, It's the case that was announced in a flurry of, of, publicity back in October, 2022.

and he's bringing it along with, a host of other, o other Sebs, so Liz Hurley, Elton John, and David Furnish.

Simon Hughes, the former Lib Dem, mp that's probably stretching

Helen: the definit, I was gonna say, they got a lot less glamorous very quickly.

Andy: Sadie Frost.

Hi.

great kind.

Brett Pop, film Star.

And, Baroness Lawrence as well.

who is the mother of murdered teenager, Steven Lawrence, all of whom are alleging that, specifically private investigators working on behalf of the male and male on Sunday.

Many years ago, used unlawful, methods to get information, private information on them, and published stories as a result of it.

Okay.

Now, at that point they were talking about all sorts of unlawful activities.

We moved on from phone hacking.

Phone hacking was the first stage of all this kind of stuff.

And the levers and inquiry came outta that.

Now it's, it's moved on to, what was alleged, and is very hotly denied by everyone at the mail, was abhorrent criminal activity in the words of, of, the first legal claim.

they alleged that, premises had been bugged.

I think cars had been bugged as well.

Live phone calls had been recorded, and even burglaries undertaken to order.

Yeah.

No's spectacular, isn't it?

Yeah.

That's not part of the case anymore.

That one's fallen away.

Helen: tell me if I'm wrong, the Prince Harry legal strategy is throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.

Andy: It does really appear to be that.

And the, the judge who, has, been appointed to deal with this and has been doing so over an awful lot of, pretrial hearings over the last couple of years.

Mr.

Justice Nicklin has been very insistent throughout that he's not going to allow this to turn into another Levison inquiry, just sort a wide ranging inquiry into possible wrongdoing by the entire press.

He wants it absolutely honed in on specifics and very provable things.

and in this, they're lucky 'cause they've got some of the private investigators, who were working for the, Daily Mail at the time on board.

so Case looked pretty strong.

It slightly started to come apart along the way because it turns out that those private investigators mostly have convictions for all sorts of other things, largely phone hacking.

So Glen is one of them, who was the original man who stood trial twice for phone hacking.

He first time around at the news of the world, and second time he was in the dock alongside Andy Corson and, Rebecca Brooks, who was innocent of everything.

they've got some other ones in there as well, some really charming people.

Greg Miscue, who was another one who was jailed over the news of the world and has since died, but left some pretty spectacular testimony in forms of witness statements behind him.

Jonathan Reese, who has been to prison, not phone hacking, just to make the change for planting drugs on, a woman, he was in whose.

Husband had employed him to discredit her during a divorce proceedings.

Gavin Burrows, who problematically has given contradictory witness statements to both sides, in or to Prince Harry's side.

He said that he had undertaken lots of unlawful activities on behalf of the male titles, and for the male titles.

He said that he absolutely hadn't done that.

Not only that, but that the, witness statement saying he had was a forgery and the signature on it wasn't his.

He's good.

I like him.

The other person who they've got a witness statement from, which is apparently gonna be presented at trial is, Christine Joanna Hart, who, now claims that she was the psychic medium to News International over several years.

She's now practicing Shaman.

She says she never hacked phones, what she did was she opened the Stargates, she spoke to the Nordics and read from the codes embedded in blood, to reveal how Fleet Street used her to uncover extraterrestrial influence between murder and media and how powerful forces, celebrity royalty and Empire moved to silence her.

So they put her in the witness box.

That's gonna be quite a fun day

Helen: She sounds terrific.

Andy: one.

She

Helen: have a horoscope column.

Andy: She's pretty fab.

think she's at The Economist now.

I

Ian: I think

Andy: So those are the people who are providing witness statements for Harry's side.

have at various points, in yes, whether or not those will actually be presented in court, but they have come up at but there's a mosaic coming in from them of support.

Helen: Okay.

and how Adam, have these people been recruited when they were previously on the other side?

They were very much the poachers and now become the kind of gamekeepers on Harry's

Andy: side?

obviously they're all enormously repentant now and think that everything is, everything they did before was absolutely terrible in acting out with the goodness of their own heart.

But also quite a lot of them have received quite a bit of money.

they were recruited by a chap called Graham Johnson, who is currently working alongside, Dr.

Evan Harris, former director of hack off as a paralegal on this particular case.

But prior to that, the two of them were working together in exposing lots and lots of, bad behavior by the press via, a website called, byline.

Byline Investigates.

In fact, slightly it's a sister two.

The byline newspaper, which comes out, by times, byline times.

Yeah, it's associated with that, but it's not exactly the same thing.

he's also got a website called Expose Media, and a publishing company called Yellow Press, which has been splashing around advances for these people to write their memoirs.

quite big advances actually in terms of, GA Burrow said he got 25 grand for an advance, which is a lot of money to be getting in terms of advance, certainly from a very small publishing house.

and there's a slight mystery as to where the

Helen: was gonna say behind from.

whos does the come funding come for, all of

Andy: Well,

Ian: is it a benefactor who doesn't mind how many copies are sold as long as the truth is out there?

Adam: These are the sort of questions which the male group have been trying to establish in these pretrial hearings and will certainly be trying to establish at trial,

Andy: Are you allowed to pay people who are giving you witness statements?

the argument would be that it wasn't directly for the witness statements.

You just happened to have paid this person for their autobiography Feels run

Ian: that would be up to the judge to decide.

we certainly wouldn't have a view

Andy: no on And and this is judge trial, not it's a judge trial.

No.

No jury involved.

no,

Adam: Harry's side, I have to say, have been less than happy about opening up their books to show what was going on with that.

So there's a process ahead of trial called disclosure where each side has to, volunteer up, evidence sort of emails and paperwork and that kind

Ian: thing.

You're

Andy: that's been going on for a long time.

Time.

Ian: never done this.

Andy: I know you have.

I'm explaining this one, this one, for the listeners rather than those quite experienced in it.

one of the arguments late last year in court was whether, Evan Harris and Graham Johnson should have to, hand over all of their kind of paperwork and evidence from before they were actually brought in as paralegals to work on this particular case, which is relevant because as I say, they were working together to bring this stuff onto this website and expose these stories.

And these stories appearing on byline investigates are being used as the.

Watershed moment is the phrase that's getting used in court that various litigants realize that they might have claim against the mail on Sunday.

That's relevant because there's a statute of limitations of six years we're talking, about events, which largely went on right back into the noughties, possibly even back as far as the nineties Now, that's not a very attractive argument by the Daily Mail to say, you should have known we were doing unlawful stuff before and you should have sued us.

Given particularly that Paul Daker, who was the, big cheese at the Daily Mail denied very, strongly and has continued to all the way through.

Any unlawful activity ever undertaken.

I should say, of course, de and everyone at the mail continue to, deny this in the strongest possible terms.

They say that all of these claims are not only lurid, but preposterous 'cause they know how to give a a, denial.

And they, I think too are feeling quite confident in this, so confident in fact that they very unusually, in a case like this, and again, you, will back me up on this.

And they had a, costs hearing, pretrial, in order to really hammer it home to the various litigants in this, quite how much they stand to lose if they are not successful in this case.

'cause obviously Prince Harry, Elton, John, David furnish quite deep pockets.

Possibly Sadie Frost bit more concerned about the mortgage and things.

and it was pointed out to them that if parts of the litigation succeed, but others fail, those who fail become liable for an enormous number of costs.

So when we're talking in, in, in the, estimate is that both sides have spent at least 40 million Do you mean so far?

Do mean all the, Do you mean all the costs could end up being heaped on say just Simon Yeah, Or not all the costs, but an in an, in the costs pertaining to his part of the, The litigation.

So this is high risk

Ian: You have, made the point right the way through this, that going together as a group with Prince Harry as your leader may not have been the best strategy.

Were you Stephen Lawrence's mother?

You might have thought you'd do better on your own.

Adam: it's a possibility, isn't it?

yeah.

Prince Harry essentially thinks that anything written about him anywhere, in any newspaper ever is a crime.

And also he's very little idea, I think, of, of the value of money either.

probably 40 million to him doesn't seem like an enormous amount of money.

So he's not necessarily the person you want to have driving your case, unless there be any doubt.

This absolutely is being driven by Prince Harry.

one of my favorite details of this is that Prince Harry, his watershed moment, as we discussed before when he realized he might have a case, was when he met David Sherborne, who is the, barrister who was in charge of, was fought awful lot of these cases and a lot of the mirror ones and, use the world ones as well.

bit of a schmoozer, bit of a smoothie chops best where Harry bumped into him on holiday at Elton and David's house in France.

And Harry rather wonderfully was then given the job of phoning up, or messaging, I think WhatsApping, possibly Baroness Lawrence, because, break the news to a Baroness that you might have a claim.

You need a Prince for that.

Obviously that's the way that one works.

It would just, I just get scammed from that.

If I got a text from an unknown number saying it's Prince Harry here, and you could be in line for millions of pounds, but come on, this is the Nigerian Prince

Andy: thing, but it's the

Helen: yeah, yeah,

Andy: yeah.

Helen: Andy doesn't wanna hear any of this because he's a huge fan of Meghan and her cookery program.

This is all very painful that the idea that she might lose, she maybe should have to, Hey, a minute, maybe she should keep this off air.

Maybe she'll have to make more, more with love.

Meghan, if she's not got an any money as a result of losing this, you're gonna get all the jam recipes your heart could desire.

Andy: Let's move on.

one of the other slightly dubious things about it is that, as we were saying about the, watershed moment thing and the statute of limitations, there are emails as well between, Evan Harris and Simon Hughes.

Both former, lib MMPs discussing, the male business, back in 2016.

And, EB Harris saying, I will bring, I proposed to bring along my investigative journalist was how he's, he was describing it, which is Johnson at that point to discuss things.

But then the claim is that Simon Hugs had no idea or any of this might have been going on until he read it in, byline News.

Two years, no, three years, nearly three years after that.

well within statute limitations in 2019, again, slightly awkwardly, there's also a load of emails of the draft, copies of the articles that Byline was going to, was going to publish, being sent to him for his approval and being delayed for six months because he just started a new job and didn't want the publicity at that point.

and rather wonderfully, Evan Harris, ghost writing, Sadie Frost's outraged reaction to this news to her that, that, she might have been the victim of unlawful activity.

So there's an awful lot of kind of juicy stuff that's come out already and will be discussed at great length at the Royal Courts of Justice in the weeks to come.

Ian: And when we get into court, as it were, possibly physically in your case, who are we rooting for?

Adam?

Yeah.

Helen: It's a tough one, isn't it?

Andy: it's like when fire sued the Hamiltons, isn't it?

Ian: Yeah.

No way around.

No, I was in court and I was reading for them both to lose.

Yes.

Yeah.

Which in a sense they both did and it was marvelous.

But is this similar?

the trouble about having Doreen Lawrence there and some of those people as you think they might have a case,

Andy: It's really hard to say.

until the full trial comes up and we see exactly what evidence they've got, it's gonna be very, hard to see.

if Doreen Lawrence has been dragged into this and it turns out not to be anything, that's

Ian: poor iv,

Helen: I'm very surprised because I would say, for people I know I worked at the Daily Mail office several years, and one of the things that Paul Daker was most proud of was his involvement in the

Andy: Lawrence.

Yeah.

We should say, we haven't covered that, that really hits to the heart of the daily male under Paul Daker.

quite rightly, he was enormously proud of that murderer's front page and the fact that he named and shamed the suspects in the, the Lawrence murder.

of whom I think have now got, have since gone to prison's, been convicted and gone

Helen: Yeah.

Big front page five pictures of murderers.

And he had it hanging in his office for the entire time.

this was a time he took a big call in which he could have been sent to prison for over a racist murder.

And so I think that's the one that I'm,

Andy: surprised to again, That's the one that elevates it.

I, have to say as well, this does go rather wider than the mail because, a lot of other, a lot of journalists are, named in the, the litigation so far who have gone on to very senior jobs at other papers.

In fact.

For serving current national newspaper editors.

so we've got Tony Gallagher, who was a news editor at the, of the mail at the time and has now gone on to edit the Times.

Ben Taylor at Sunday Times, Victoria Newton, who was a showbiz reporter on the mail at the time, now editing the Sun.

And David Dillon, who has stayed but is editing the, the mail on Sunday under Ted Verity, the, the current editor of, of both male titles there.

it's ancient history in some ways, but there's a lot of the players in it still very much around.

That's it for this episode of page 94.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to find out the latest about the Harry trial, the more on ice, there'll be more American columns before Long, just go to your local news agent and and walk in and, put down a very small amount of money on the counter.

2 99.

It's ridiculous.

I've been meaning to talk to you about this here.

It is crazy.

Ian: we had a letter, last week from, a reader who wasn't me.

saying, why is your magazine a so cheap and why is the subscription so cheap?

this is ludicrous.

People are paying three times this for a pint twice as much as this for a, a Cup of coffee.

this is let letter I can guarantee will be published.

Andy: printed it if you'll Printed it twice, I think, didn't you?

Yeah, Anyway, if you would like to framed it, secure this bargain before things change, just go to private hyen.co, do UK, get yourself a subscription.

It's a fantastic magazine and there's so much more inside.

That's it for the next fortnight.

We will see you again next time.

Thank you as ever for listening.

And thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing.

Bye for now.