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May 5, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:42:06

Aidan Hartley

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	Welcome to The Delling Pod with me, James Dellingpole.
	Now I've got some good news and some bad news.
	The good news is this week's podcast guest is absolutely brilliant as ever.
	Aidan Hartley, he's The Spectator's wildlife correspondent.
	He's got lots of interesting things to say about his memories of Oxford and also of his memories of me at Oxford as well as Boris and some devastating things to say about Boris's piss-poor policies and so on.
	But, the bad news.
	We messed up the recording.
	For some bizarre reason, Aidan decided to record not just his voice track, but my voice track.
	And the result is that there was a complete cock-up and dog's breakfast.
	But, what Aidan says is so interesting and good that I think you'd probably be happy that I've kept it.
	I'm just warning you that my voice track is really kind of fuzzy and annoying and you'll get used to it after a while.
	Anyway, sorry about that.
	Enjoy the podcast.
	Welcome to the Daily Podcast with me, James Denny Poe. James Denny Poe.
	And yeah, I know I always say I'm excited about this week again, but actually I am so delighted, finally, to have my old mucker, Aidan Hartley.
	Aidan Hartley on the show.
	Aidan, Thank you very much for having me, James.
	No, I mean, you and I, let's just explain to the special friend who you are and how far back we go.
	Because you and I, I think, met when you were in Balliol College with Boris Johnson, who's currently, I don't know what he's doing now, whatever became of him.
	But anyway, you were there with him, and I was down the road in Christchurch.
	And I sort of became friends.
	I think you were a good old generation.
	Yes, I remember you very well because we used to write about you quite a lot in our satirical magazine called Tributary, which also, I think, launched Boris's political career.
	He was known in Trib, as we called it, as the Aryan bullpig.
	And it's recorded that he used to come and sort of beat on our door at midnight when he was really pissed off about some of the copy, and he tried to stage manage it.
	But nevertheless, we took lots of photographs of him and you, which are in an archive somewhere in the Bodleian to this day.
	I can't believe you.
	Yeah, I think that it would be very interesting to go through some of those old magazines.
	In those days, you used to wear tweed, and you were very much the sort of Brideshead revisited crowd, I think.
	Do you remember that?
	In my defense, it had been on TV, and it was kind of my expectation.
	And I was also, I was in Sebastian Vliet's college, Christchurch, so I kind of felt that history demanded of me that I should behave in that way.
	Although I didn't have, do you remember, did you see that TV documentary called When Boris Met Dave, which I think Toby Young had at hand in?
	And I was played by this beautiful gilded youth carrying a teddy bear around.
	I never No, I don't remember you with the teddy bear.
	But I mean, I think that that was...
	Well, it's in the distant past now, isn't it?
	And I think that we just had this extraordinary confidence that all would be well.
	And things have gone pretty well for our generation until recently.
	But...
	I think that, you know, it's been sort of plain sailing.
	We basically had life handed to us on a plate, didn't we?
	Well, we did.
	We did.
	Although, do you know what?
	I kind of think we deserved it.
	I think we were charming, intelligent, interesting people.
	I mean, okay, so we acted like dicks occasionally because we weren't fully formed as human beings.
	As you're not when you're 19, you know, you're fresh out of probably your boarding school or whatever.
	We didn't really know what was what.
	But at the same time, I think we were a pretty interesting crowd.
	Yes, well, I mean, you know, how do you think we've done?
	I mean, most people listening to this won't know who was in our generation, but we know that Boris was in our generation amongst others.
	So, I mean, just looking over the last few weeks, how have we done?
	Has it all turned out well or not so much?
	Well, I think be careful of that word "we".
	I think we're talking about one person in particular, and I think he is messed up epically.
	But I think before we move on to that depressing topic, I just want to consider a few of the other, of your particularly, So there's Lloyd Evans, who, for my money, is just about the best theatre critic there is.
	He writes for The Spectator.
	Well, as indeed do you, as indeed do I.
	You've had a fantastic career.
	You've seen The Elephant.
	You've been out in Africa.
	Indeed, you literally have a farm in Africa.
	And in Lycipia, in Kenya.
	But you've been a foreign correspondent, which I always kind of fantasized about doing, but didn't have the balls.
	And you do have giant...
	I mean, if you had bollocks, they would probably be the size of what?
	If you say so.
	I've never looked at it that way, but I've had a lot of fun.
	Yes, I've been a foreign correspondent based mainly out of Africa, and over the last 20 years I started a cattle ranch, and my real love in life is cattle.
	And I have an idyllic life north of Mount Kenya where I can be away from all of this trouble.
	And I was supposed to go home just before the lockdown and I was gathering up my family.
	I'd flown over just a couple of days before lockdown started, and we were going to fly back to Kenya, and then the airspace closed.
	So we find ourselves stuck in Fitzrovia in a very nice house belonging to friends of ours who are in the country.
	And we're just under that BT tower that looks down on us like the eye of Sauron with its sort of relentless message about the NHS.
	And to begin with, I found it quite intimidating, but as time has gone on and the weather got better, not so much today, but in recent days, it's been absolutely delightful moving around this necropolis of central London and seeing all of these wonderful buildings, but from the outside. it's been absolutely delightful moving around this necropolis of central um
	And, yeah, I think it's been, for me, quite the most terrifying experience, as it has been, I suppose, for everybody from war correspondents to insurance salesmen.
	I think that this experience is absolutely terrifying, much more terrifying than sort of Rwanda or Bosnia or somewhere in the Middle East.
	Well, up to a point eight.
	I mean, you were in Rwanda, right?
	You said.
	So presumably you would have seen people sort of being chopped up with Well, I was an observer there, but yes, upwards of 800,000 to a million people died in 100 days in Rwanda, and it was ghastly.
	And I also covered places like Somalia, where 300,000 people died In a famine in the early 90s.
	And other sort of African hotspots.
	And the numbers pile up.
	But of course it's not sort of comparable.
	Any story is not comparable with another.
	But I got used to pandemics.
	And I got used to epidemics.
	So I've covered an Ebola epidemic in the Congo.
	I've been in an Ebola ward and I've seen a measles epidemic, a cholera epidemic that killed 80,000 people, and so on and so forth.
	So I've sort of seen the numbers, but this is a sort of different experience, I feel.
	I don't think anyone can say that they have taken this experience in their stride.
	I suppose the terrifying thing about this, it's a different order of terror, obviously, from the Hutus and Tutsis or Ebola, which is that it seems to involve the entire world and it seems as though we are about to sacrifice, or indeed are sacrificing, the global economy on the altar of what may be, well, a hoax.
	Yeah, I think so.
	When I was sitting on my farm in Kenya, just before I came over here to try to rescue the family, I was looking at all of this stuff from Imperial College and so on, and I thought, there are going to be bodies stacked like firewood in the streets.
	And I did...
	I recall Rwanda and places like that, where I saw stacks of bodies being turfed into mass graves every day.
	And I had those images in my mind.
	But we're quite obviously dealing with a completely different disease.
	As time goes on, we learn...
	What strikes me is that the general public seem to be several steps ahead of the politicians and the decision makers all the way along this.
	So we've already begun to realise that actually this is a different sort of disease.
	It's not the plague that's going to kill everybody.
	Our chances are reasonably good.
	Unless you're elderly or ill, which is very unfortunate, and I'm very sorry about all of those.
	We've all got older people.
	I've got a 95-year-old mother who is in Nairobi.
	I couldn't see her even if I was in Kenya, but she had a fall and she's broken some bones.
	I feel really sad that I can't get back to home to see her.
	But, you know, if you're not in that category of very elderly people, this is just not...
	A disease that should be terrifying the hell out of us or destroying the world.
	But, you know, I think it's instructed to read the foreign news at a time like this and to look at countries in Africa and elsewhere.
	And what you realise is that even Saudi Arabia has begun to ease restrictions apart from visiting Mecca or Medina.
	Saudi Arabia is now a freer country in terms of movement than the UK is.
	That's pretty incredible.
	Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, the UAE, all of these countries are reintroducing liberties that for us just seem to be a kind of a distant horizon if we go on what we heard from Boris earlier this week.
	It was a very disappointing speech, wasn't it?
	I was sad, you know.
	I mean, I had a tremendous confidence that Boris would lead us through this.
	I was delighted when he became Prime Minister and I still have the vote in the UK and I voted for Boris and the Conservatives.
	I still really hope that he's going to show us something later this week.
	And I haven't given up on him completely.
	I've always thought he's a brilliant and extraordinary man.
	I think that one of the problems is that he's surrounded by real pygmies in his cabinet who are very disappointing people.
	And they just weren't up to the job.
	And that was really sharply illuminated by his absence.
	So it's sort of down to him.
	We have to hope that he's going to do something very soon.
	But, yeah, I was so disappointed by his speech or his statement outside number 10 yesterday.
	There's a scary possibility, isn't there, that his brush with near death has frightened him or made him weak or made him more susceptible to this ongoing, the perpetual lockdown and the sanctification of the NHS as our national religion.
	I mean, that would be going on for some time.
	But there is a danger, isn't there, that he's stopped being the Boris that we pinned our hopes on and it's become this kind of squish creature.
	Well, yeah, I mean, I think that I've spoken to several people who have had this disease and there is something disturbing about it.
	It appears to amputate your spine.
	I think it scares the hell out of people who've been up to that point.
	And I'm sure it is a scary experience, but I'm slightly disturbed by the after effects of the disease that seem to linger for a very long time and make people quite sort of unsure of themselves.
	So that it might be just the sort of profile of the disease and its impact on the individual.
	And, you know, perhaps Boris just didn't think that he was going to get any challenges bigger than exiting Europe.
	And he found himself with these guys who really are no better than people that you could pick up from any of the parties, are they?
	I mean, the truly dreadful pageant of these characters who've come on day after day.
	I can't watch it anymore.
	I'm sure that a lot of your listeners have found it pretty painful as well.
	I doubt they watch.
	but who are you thinking of particularly?
	I mean, Matt Hancock is definitely one of my betternois.
	I mean, he's a complete no-talent, promoted whereby this thing, because he clung onto the coattails of George Osborne's career.
	George Osborne groomed him, which in itself, I think, is an indication of just how ghastly Hancock is.
	But who else were you thinking of?
	Well, Grant Shapson.
	You know, I used to hero-worship Priti Patel, but I wasn't particularly impressed by...
	But look, I think that the point about it is that they're just not up to the job, and they haven't been tested.
	They never thought that it would be tested like this.
	I don't...
	I have some sympathy for them.
	I do realise how difficult things are.
	But what I can't understand about them is that they don't seem to have the ability to change their minds.
	They can't seem to respond to the information that everybody in the world is reading and learning.
	And, you know, to try to stick with these slogans unchanging over week after week, it just seems to be just so wooden and pathetic.
	And, of course, it does reflect all of the other aspects of the NHS.
	I have a family member who's a frontline doctor in the NHS in London.
	I think that she is doing a wonderful job and she's risking her life.
	I appreciate what the workers on the front line are doing.
	I don't appreciate the bureaucrats.
	And I'm sure that everybody would agree with that.
	We're not clapping those people.
	We're not appreciative of the civil servants and the bureaucrats and the politicians who have mismanaged this.
	And the real issue about this, and I just don't think it's said enough, is that...
	For those people who are Tories, we believe that they would stick with quite a good plan at the beginning.
	And then they did this about-face and went in a completely different direction.
	And it was because they weren't prepared and because they didn't have a good plan when they flip-flopped after March 16th and the imperial plan that they betrayed every Tory principle in the book, don't you think?
	Totally.
	So just to recap, Britain was taking the route that has continued to be taken by Sweden.
	So we would have had a degree of social distancing, but bars and restaurants would have remained open.
	Older people would have self-isolated.
	People would have been encouraged to self-isolate, but it wouldn't have been absolutely obligatory.
	And we would now probably be acquiring herd immunity or a degree of herd immunity.
	Whereas instead, Imperial College, Neil Ferguson was the lead author, brought out this unparalleled It's saying that up to half a million people will die I think the hundreds of thousands are dead.
	And the government was frightened, wasn't it?
	And so now they seem to be falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy that we've gone this far, we've kept the country locked down this long, so we may as well continue because otherwise something bad might happen.
	We don't know what.
	That seems to be the argument.
	Yes, but I sort of, when I look at Sweden, and I speak to Swedish friends who are Somali immigrants to Sweden, and their community actually has taken a bigger hit than some of the others because there are lots of taxi drivers, and they were being and their community actually has taken a bigger hit than some of the others because there are lots of taxi drivers, and they were being infected by Italians But they're all in favour of the Swedish moves.
	The strategy that has been pursued there.
	I'm amazed by how much confidence they have in their government and the trust that they have placed in this chief epidemiologist, Tegnell.
	And so they seem to be quite happy with that.
	It seems to be a very different atmosphere.
	I think that in this country what I've been shocked by, I think a lot of people have, is the way that people have possibly lost their nerve.
	And people seem very afraid of getting out of this.
	And that's what we've all now got to understand.
	Thank you.
	But it seems at the moment it's going to be quite a long stay here.
	And, you know, I think that everybody else is straining to get out there.
	I mean, London is getting busier.
	You see more traffic.
	There are more people on the street.
	There's more banging and clanging in the construction sites.
	And it just makes me delighted to see that happening.
	But, you know, one of the things that really irritated me was that they closed the churches.
	And I just don't understand that.
	Because in Defoe's London, 100,000 people died, but they never closed the churches.
	Why did they close the churches?
	When the churches open, that for me will be one big sign that life is returning to normal.
	And then, you know, all of the other aspects, I mean, from what we hear, it's going to be a very long process before the country is fully functional again.
	And I just don't really understand why, because, you know, other countries are realising very quickly, I mean, Nigeria...
	has very quickly realised that this is unsustainable and that they have to get people back to work because it's existential.
	The country will collapse.
	But actually, talk about a great leverer across the world.
	Nigeria is not really in a different position from the UK. We can't really boast about the UK being the fifth or sixth biggest economy in the world because the fact is that we're going to be impoverished if this goes on.
	It's amazing that the Nigerians have cottoned on to that fact a lot quicker.
	Yes, they could overtake us.
	The Nigerian economy could be the number five economy.
	We could beat Nigeria's...
	I think it's Africa's moment.
	I think there's a good chance that the kind of resilience and toughness and youth and health and so on, actually, it could be Africa's moment.
	I'd be happy about that, except that obviously...
	You know, I love Britain and I really want it to get back on track as quickly as possible.
	I see it in the people.
	I see it in the people in the streets.
	But I just don't see it in the leadership.
	And, you know, I'm dismayed by...
	Everyone's got a story about the police.
	But in Hyde Park, I saw this van blaring out of the window.
	Some innocent people sitting on the grass.
	No sunbathing, no catching up with friends and no books.
	Right?
	And I thought, okay, I never thought I'd live to see something like that.
	But, you know, perhaps we'll just forget it in a few weeks' time as things begin to ease.
	Perhaps we'll just look back on this in a sort of good, humoured way.
	But they're going to have to change quickly.
	Otherwise...
	I mean, why is it that no one has demonstrated?
	I mean, I believe I suggested to you and others that, you know, why aren't there any demonstrations?
	It turns out that only Jeremy Corbyn's brother in Glastonbury...
	I mean, but he's the only guy that demonstrated against this in the entire country.
	I look at all of the news coming out of the United States, and I see all of these rednecks, you know, demonstrating across the sort of flyover states.
	And I think to myself, you know, as I get older, why am I starting to sympathize with rednecks more and more?
	But at least they got out into the streets and demonstrated.
	My current plan, I don't know if you listened to London Calling yesterday, but I'm thinking of moving to Georgia.
	I'm cutting the US states by how well they've responded to this non-event.
	And Georgia's got a Republican governor who seems to have been pretty sound.
	It's one of the first states to open up again.
	But just looking back a second, Aidan, we sort of...
	When we were at university, we were, I think, we were closer to World War II than we are now, when we were at university?
	Yeah, I'm not very good at maths, but yes, I believe so.
	It's a terrifying reality.
	That's probably shocking.
	so we were so the England that we knew I mean I think Oxford was much better than it is now bugger off telephone by the way that annoying ringtone my daughter put on there and it's just so annoying I can't get rid of it I don't know how it's a doctor's surgery ringtone hello oh hello father I'm just on your podcast
	oh no right yeah anyway so we were there and there was that kind of well at least on my part an attempt to to ape the what were they called the golden generation of you know with evil in war and so on you know they The East Thieves, yeah.
	Sorry?
	The East East, yeah.
	But there was a famous book, which I can't remember, The Golden Song.
	Anyway, that generation.
	So we were closer to the wartime generation than whatever I just said.
	But would it not have shocked you if a time traveller had come from the future and told you that in 2020, Britain would become this country in which people would snitch on their neighbours They're daily walking allowance.
	And that the police would use drones to swoop down on people taking walks on empty, empty moorland.
	And that car parks to, just when people need exercise, car parks to places like the Morgan Hills and to various, I don't know, walking country, would be closed down by the local authorities.
	And that people would submit willingly This government-imposed regiment, despite government's failure to present any evidence other than this slightly dodgy imperial college study, as to why they were doing this.
	Yeah, I mean, obviously, for all of us, it's going to take a generation to recover from this.
	I think that there will be a deep sense of trauma in Britain about how people have behaved and how we allowed this draconian legislation, these regulations to be imposed on us without any kind of discussion.
	I mean, people understood a sense of urgency and they were very...
	Fair, I think, in conceding that they should behave themselves and observe social distancing.
	They did that out of decency.
	But I think that what is more disturbing, perhaps, is that there hasn't been any discussion since then about, you know, really, what has happened to us?
	Why have we allowed these things to go on without any proper explanation?
	And when is it going to end?
	And, you know, I think that that will...
	I think there will be a...
	A real soul-searching for many years after this.
	And of course, people will ask, you know, is it ever going to be repeated?
	I mean, we keep being told that this is the first of many possible pandemics.
	But, you know, we need to have a system in the future to prevent something like this from happening again.
	Or at least, you know, so that we have some say in what's going on.
	Because quite clearly, things haven't worked out yet.
	The way that they were supposed to, the sort of behaviour of the police.
	I mean, just the idea of the space around the individual.
	In Kenya, they say it's one metre, then it was one and a half metres.
	Is it two metres or six feet?
	How much space does the state own outside of the individual?
	And should you wear a mask or not wear a mask?
	What is all of this?
	I mean, for all of these weeks, people have been coming into Heathrow, and then suddenly we hear that they want to follow a Singapore-style control where they're going to impose quarantine or self-imposed quarantine for 14 days on people.
	It's all so arbitrary.
	And the idea of, you know, lockdown and staying at home.
	I mean, I jog and run across, I'd say I jog, across central London.
	And this place has got armies of homeless people.
	I read in the newspapers that they were going to put them all into hotels.
	But there are hundreds, if not thousands, of people around Bloomsbury and Lincoln's Inn fields, etc., who are living on the streets.
	So what's the plan?
	I mean, I don't know what the plan is.
	I don't know what the right thing to do is.
	But...
	There are things that they said that they were going to do that haven't been done that presumably would affect their own health plan.
	And, you know, as you probably realise, my idea is that there shouldn't be any lockdown at all.
	I don't want elderly people like my mother and your parents to die.
	I want them to be in a safe place.
	And, you know, I've got high blood pressure after all of my escapades.
	And so, you know, I've responded to that by, you know, by doing a lot of running.
	I'm trying to lose weight and get very fit.
	I think that that's the creative way to respond to this, isn't it?
	Let's just ask you a good idea.
	So you mean the tension of covering war zones has given Well, I think that seeing quite a lot of stuff happen in not only Africa but across the world had its effect.
	And, you know, I lived a typical hacks lifestyle.
	I probably smoked too many cigarettes and drank too much beer and wine.
	But, you know, I am responsible for that.
	I wonder...
	If there hasn't really been that much discussion about how responsible you are for your obesity or for your bad behaviour in the past, etc.
	I think you're right.
	I think that's a very good point you make there.
	It's as if we've created this culture so decadent that people expect to be able to live indefinitely and Kept alive by the NHS, no matter how many resources need to be dedicated, no matter how obese they are.
	You look back to our youth, you didn't really see many fat girls.
	It was understood, I think, that if you wanted to have a kind of healthy relationship, you wanted to have a boyfriend and stuff, you didn't put on too much weight.
	Nowadays, I don't know about fat girls in Britain because I've been in Africa for the last 30 years.
	Look, I think that if nothing else, this is a wonderful opportunity to get your running shoes on and get fit.
	Isn't that the right way to respond to this?
	And actually try to kind of lean into it.
	I had a test today.
	I had one of these antibody tests and I thought that I'd contracted this thing in East Africa in February where there are lots of Chinese people in East Africa and I was almost disappointed that I hadn't had it and I didn't show the antibodies.
	The only thing to do is to lose a lot of weight and to run as much as possible.
	That's how I'm trying to deal with it.
	I'm not trying to be mean to people who are vulnerable, and I'm very worried about our elder members of the family.
	It seems to me that it's insane to continue with this process and we should follow perhaps some of the poorer countries that are way ahead of us in realising that the economy has got to be rescued as soon as possible.
	I want to move on in a moment.
	but I want to just rewind to one thing we were exploring just a moment ago, which is when, I mean, you've gone out and done brave, madly things I mean, you're probably going to be modest about it, but nevertheless, I would consider some of the stuff you've done brave and manly.
	you've tested yourself.
	And presumably that came from an urge that I think our generation certainly had, inherited from the wartime generation, which is that as a chap you needed to prove yourself.
	You needed to expose yourself to danger of some kind or test yourself in order to be a proper man.
	I had it myself.
	I mean, I was nearly shot a few times in Africa and I've had various scrapes and things, not in your league, but I sort of injured myself horribly fox hunting, taking offense that I knew I shouldn't have taken, but I took it anyway because I thought, well, taking offense that I knew I shouldn't have taken, but I took it anyway because I
	Now, I wonder whether that spirit has been lost because I look around at a lot of my contemporaries, even contemporaries I thought I could rely on, even people who sort of voted Brexit, which I thought was a kind of John Bull type thing to do, a kind of traditional British thing, you know, a kind of traditional British thing, you know, sort of not taking any nonsense from Johnny Foreigner, sticking out for Britain, sticking out for sovereignty and stuff.
	And yet I've been very disappointed to see even quite a few Brexiteers going for this.
	Yes, big government, we can't have enough of you.
	Please wipe our bottoms for us.
	Protect us from everything.
	We don't care.
	We will sacrifice our economy as long as you keep us safe.
	Yeah, I'm so disappointed.
	I think that all of the celebration that we felt earlier this year about finally parting from Brussels has been dissipated.
	It's incredibly disappointing.
	And, you know, for three and a half years or whatever it was, I found myself being sort of ostracised at gatherings in London where my wife would say to me, you know, not a word before we went into the house.
	Not a word!
	And, you know, eventually, you know, it all came out and I had sort of that battle to fight.
	And now it just feels so disheartening to know that we're going to be the sort of pariahs who, you know, are in favour of herd immunity and that everybody else is going to be sort of so wedded to these directives from government and these empty slogans for the next several years.
	I come at this like a farmer.
	You know, my...
	Before we had sort of foot and mouth vaccines in East Africa and our cattle were infected by foot and mouth, my father's stockman would go around with a sort of rag on the end of a stick and stick it up the nostril of an infected cow and then go around and stick it up the nostrils of all of the other cows to get everybody through it.
	And, you know, I don't think that the numbers that we're looking at are that...
	I mean, they're shocking and they're sad and they're terrible.
	But, you know, what it seems to me, I've got two teenage children who are just starting their lives.
	You know, that's who I'm thinking about.
	And I think that I want their futures to be good ones.
	I don't want their futures to be destroyed because we've been saving my generation or even my mother's generation.
	My mother used to sit at the end of my bed on Sunday mornings and she would tell me stories about being in the jungle in Burma.
	She was in a women's auxiliary unit in the Burmese jungle in the Second World War at the age of 17 onwards.
	And she saw the battlefields at Coma and Imphal.
	She saw the road to Rangoon.
	She ended up living in Changi Jail, taking down the testimonies of ex-POWs who didn't have hands and so were dictating their stories to her.
	And so, you know, she had an extraordinary life.
	Yes, I wanted to copy some of the sort of adventures of the older generation.
	And, you know, in a way it's thrust upon them.
	I think that our young generation, the people who are leaving school now, are going to find life very interesting over the next decade.
	And, you know, in some ways perhaps it's a good thing.
	You know, a lot of the kind of wokeness will have just been jettisoned into space.
	I think there's going to be a cold, hard reality that in some ways might make...
	This coming generation, these young people, kind of more interesting.
	I don't know.
	What do you think?
	I think you're right.
	I think that if the death of woke is a consequence of this, then it wouldn't have been a complete disaster.
	But you're right about the generational thing, too.
	I'm sure that your mother's generation, I know speaking to my father, my father and mother feel the same.
	They don't want the economy destroyed just to keep them alive.
	And they're slightly horrified by their friends who feel differently, who are flying to the nanny stage and want more of it.
	Nobody in my family, thank God, we're all immensely sound for some reason.
	I suppose it's because we're natural, natural contraries.
	It's that kind of black country, so we're not going to be able to do that.
	We're not having it.
	we don't like but don't you think that more people are like that perhaps behind closed doors and um and you know that I don't know.
	I think that if the government tries to maintain this lockdown for much longer, I think that we might regain our mojo as a nation and people become more expressive and start to push up against all of this.
	I really hope they do.
	And I really hope that some...
	Big questions are asked about how we got here when we finally regain our liberty.
	My God, I mean, there's going to...
	People need to be roasted open fire after this.
	I mean, it's just...
	Oh, now tell me, yes, who would you roast?
	Because I know that you've been working on...
	You've been involved in trying to get PPE for...
	which of course is something in politics, philosophy and economics, but now means something you're not, it means what?
	Personal protective gear.
	It's one of these new phrases we've all been, started using as if ever since we were born, actually they're completely new.
	Hang on, I've got to open the door, but I haven't been disturbed by family as well.
	Hang on, can you keep quiet?
	So, yeah, no, I wanted to assist health authorities back in East Africa with all of the kit that would keep them safe when we thought that this was a much more dangerous disease than we know it to be now.
	And I realised that there are...
	Tens of millions of masks and gowns and all of the things are available within a week.
	You can pick up the telephone and you can fly a Boeing 747 full of this medical kit.
	Wherever you want it in the world within seven days.
	It's getting a little bit more difficult now because everyone's jumped on the bandwagon and everyone wants the same kit.
	But it seems bizarre to me that there have been any shortages anywhere in the world in the last two or three months.
	So I don't understand why our relative, you know, might be going short of any kind of medical kit when she's working in these hospitals in London.
	And also all of the testing kits, you know, there seems to be a problem with the efficacy of testing kits.
	The British government says that it doesn't want to authorise a lot of these products.
	But What have the South Koreans been using and the Singapore government and so on, which are held up as the things that we should be copying?
	Or even the Chinese, for that matter.
	I mean, they're all using products that are quite kind of iffy.
	And yet they might be helpful to a certain extent.
	It's quite clear that the NHS didn't have any of this kit in stock.
	And I understand that it's difficult to get it now because everybody in the world wants it.
	But for weeks and months it's been possible to source this stuff from China, from Singapore, from Turkey, from multiple manufacturing nations.
	And you could get this stuff in any quantity that you wanted.
	Millions of masks, millions of gowns, whatever the kit you wanted.
	Ventilators.
	You could get thousands of ventilators on a plane, on air freight, any time you wanted.
	Delivery within a week.
	I just don't understand why there's been a problem.
	Okay, I understand about quality control, but they're getting a lot of kit in that isn't very good quality.
	And then you hear stories about people wearing bin bags.
	But surely they could have sorted this out.
	And I only started looking into this because I was trying to source material for poor parts of Africa, And some of those countries seem to have been ahead of the game and getting in supplies without that much of a problem.
	And so I just don't understand these stories about doctors and nurses having to wear bin bags.
	I think that it's just because the NHS is run by appalling bureaucrats who have to You know, have 15 different people sign off on a purchase order.
	I just don't think that there's any good excuse for it.
	But we must find out about this later on, don't you think?
	Well, we ought to, but I'm wondering whether the government has created a situation in which the NHS is untouchable.
	I mean, we had this spectacle this morning of the one-minute silence observed for the NHS I think there's been a study done into whether NHS workers have a higher fatality rate than any other area of the economy, and it seems not.
	Now, obviously, it's sad that those people died, but there was also discussion about the NHS being awarded the collect...
	George Cross, you know, like the role of the Constabulary, like the island of Malta during the war.
	And I'm thinking this is creating a situation where the NHS is beyond criticism, where it ends up having yet more taxpayers' money poured into that insatiable moor.
	And I wonder whether we're going to get any kind of understanding of what went wrong, or indeed a Well, you've pointed to the answer.
	I don't think that they want to have any kind of scrutiny.
	And it's something, at the moment at least, which is untouchable.
	You know, the other day I was running up Fleet Street and I went past the statue of Bomber Harris, who did the bombing runs over World War II Germany.
	And 55,000 aircrew died in those bombing runs, up to 600,000 Germans.
	That was a real war.
	But, you know, I mean, I think at the moment it's obviously coming close to what you would see as propaganda, isn't it?
	It is propaganda.
	And I think that...
	You know, I think British people do the right thing because they want to show their appreciation.
	And we've got these, you know, these pictures of young nurses and doctors, you know, right up there on the front line.
	But of course, the people responsible for us are the pen pushers.
	And, you know, they are hiding behind all of this.
	And so really, the nurses and the doctors are the grunts.
	And the people who are, you know, the kind of, the donkeys behind them are the bureaucrats.
	And at the moment they're being protected.
	But in time they should come under full investigation for their incompetence.
	Because it was their lack of preparation that led to the Tory government betraying its principles.
	And so it is an appalling story of inefficiency by the NHS itself.
	And, you know, of course all of this will be uncovered.
	And I think in a kind of really strange way, people who are on the right and left will be united in wanting to know what happened.
	At the moment, you still see it in...
	Sort of party political terms that, you know, you can see that left-wing people criticize the government in their own way for not having gone into lockdown earlier.
	And, you know, then people like you and me, you know, come from a completely different perspective where you're saying, why was there ever a lockdown when you had a fantastic plan up until the 16th of March?
	But at the end of the day, it will still go back to the fact that these guys in the NHS were not prepared.
	And because they weren't prepared, they buggered everything up for the rest of the country.
	And the country was dragged into a suicidal policy that Boris...
	I don't know what he thought, but later on he must be found responsible if it's revealed that they were told, look, you can get 50 million masks tomorrow.
	Just write the check.
	There is no problem with this kit.
	Don't worry about it.
	How many ventilators do you need?
	Surely it doesn't take two months to get these ventilators, which it turns out you don't want to be put on anyway because you've got a good chance of dying if you go on to one of these ventilators.
	Do you think part of the problem is that, I think this is where Boris is culpable, that he didn't just polish the turd, he fed the giant turd.
	You think about what happened during his Brexit campaign, this notion that the money we save would go to our NHS.
	And then he ramped this up during his successful campaign to become prime minister, where apparently at daily meetings he would get all his staff to...
	He'd say, and how many hospitals are we going to build?
	And they'd all chant back how many hospitals it was.
	And he helped cement in the public imagination this notion that what the NHS... So in a way, the NHS is his Frankenstein's monster.
	He's completely out of control.
	It's a book.
	It's a book, James.
	It's your next book.
	It's your next book.
	And, yeah, it's an amazing story.
	But, of course, you won't have any sympathy from the public unless we shine the spotlight on the bureaucracy led, as we know, by another one of our contemporaries, Sir Simon Stevens, who is...
	Did you know him?
	Yeah, no, he was in Balliol alongside me.
	Oh my God, what was he like?
	Well, he was a very serious young Labour Party supporter.
	I seem to remember that he was organising pickets at Didcutt Power Station during the miners' strike and bringing in bedding rolls for the Welsh miners that slept in the junior common room.
	And so he was very active at that time and a very serious young man.
	But at the end of the day, it's not a name that you often hear, is it?
	The names at the top of the NHS, which is this monstrous, huge behemoth of an organisation.
	And it's that really, sort of getting into that story where you'll start to uncover what really went wrong.
	The problem with it is that civil servants and bureaucrats aren't very interesting for story material.
	You know, I've discovered over the years just sort of writing about or making films about the United Nations agencies.
	The problem is that they're so boring that no one can really...
	Keep their interest for long enough to get really angry about corruption within the UN. But things like the WHO, is it any wonder that they have been a disappointment?
	I mean, the head of...
	WHO is a former minister of an organisation in Ethiopia that thought that Albania should be its ideological model.
	His party was known as the Ethiopian Revolutionary Democratic People's Front.
	No, they're the chaps that overthrew Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991.
	Sorry, it's the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front.
	Quite an alphabetic.
	So he was a minister in that government and, you know, they were always extremely left-wing.
	And then he sort of joined this, you know, nobocracy of the WHO. There should be no association with organisations like that.
	So the problem with your story, which is a good one, would be that you'd be investigating very kind of boring government departments and international agencies.
	But those are the villains, don't you think?
	Totally, totally.
	And I agree with you, by the way, that I found this when I was writing my book, Watermelons, that all these kind of UN agencies, which are putting the climate change scam, are so incredibly dull.
	And it's all about committees.
	And people like us are not interested in sitting on such committees, which is why your mate Simon Stevens, people like that, they...
	It's why they win.
	It's why the deep state wins, because they have an appetite for process and for committees and rulemaking, which kind of buccaneering, libertarian-leaning free spirits like ourselves who believe in personal responsibility and limited government.
	It's anathema to us, and it's why they always win.
	I don't share your optimism that this is going to be That the status quo will become even more embedded.
	Well, we've got a lot of work to do if that's the case.
	Look, if we just sort of talk about how things got moving.
	I mean, look at the performance.
	The British Army has done a terrific job in making things happen.
	If you think about it, what they should have done is just got all of the civil servants out of the room and just brought in, you know, the 16th Air Assault Brigade and, you know, some SAS and SBS guys.
	Shut the civil servants.
	Yeah, just said, OK, boys, this is the challenge, and that's what they would have done.
	I have a feeling that that's what they have done.
	I mean, they've obviously contributed a tremendous amount to getting things moving.
	So, you know, there are bodies in the country that are able to get things done quickly, but it seems that...
	You're right, isn't it?
	Well, yeah, you know, why don't we clap for the soldiers and so on, you know?
	Why don't we clap for the extraordinary people who turn up at Marks and Spencers or Tescos every day?
	And, you know, I... I think they are absolutely marvellous people to have sat through this, because they turned up when everybody was scared shitless and thought that it was a 3.4% death rate, but they turned up every day to stack shelves, and they don't get a clap.
	What about a clap for the homeless?
	They've cheered my life up as I go through running through London.
	No one was out to help them.
	I haven't seen any of them in masks or hand sanitizers.
	But, you know, anyway, look, you know, the fact is that we must be on our guard.
	I don't know whether people think we're mad, James, whether we occupy a very tiny clique.
	Of people who are sceptical about what's happening, but I have a feeling that it will be bigger than we imagine.
	It's just that at the moment we're like underground cells in a dystopian story and we just can't communicate with each other.
	And that when there's a little bit of an easing of lockdown, we'll suddenly discover that there's this huge majority of people across all age groups, and I have no doubt that elderly people will be very much of this opinion, that they don't agree with what has happened, not just young people, and that we will finally be able to communicate.
	And I think we should come together in a big, very civilised demonstration in some public square in London to show that, you know, we're never going to allow this to happen again.
	Just a couple of things I wanted to...
	Instead, what seems to have happened is that we've got this situation where...
	Every form of free market is the equivalent of profiteering and that somehow this is undesirable and that there should be no competition and that the state should take charge of everything and decide on quotas, a bit like the Soviet Union.
	Yes, sure.
	And it sort of gets back to some of this medical kit.
	I was trying to source these tests that could be exported to Africa from countries like China and South Korea so that health authorities there could have test kits.
	And then I suddenly thought, but why can't people have test kits in the UK? And there are UK companies making these products, and you can also bring them in from many other countries, and they haven't been approved, most of them, by the government.
	I think any of them.
	I think they're just about to approve one or two products.
	But the point is, even if...
	The efficacy wasn't 100%.
	Wouldn't it be helpful for people in their own peace of mind, you know, to end their kind of sleepless nights of worry and also their worry about infecting other family members, that they would be able to obtain the access to these kits and buy them at a reasonable price?
	And, you know, there are things that you can buy that cost hundreds of pounds and it seems that they're really price gouging because, you know, the wholesale price is sort of five quid or one dollar.
	I mean, these things aren't expensive and they might not give you a 100% accurate answer, but they can give you peace of mind.
	They must be helpful.
	In a free society, they could be sold as the equivalent of a, I don't know, a herbal cure or whatever.
	Welcome back, everyone.
	You didn't know I'd been away, or Aidan had been away, but actually what's happened is that we've recorded an extra leg to this podcast, because Aidan, you're slightly techno-flaky like me, aren't you?
	I think we're of a generation.
	Is that fair?
	Yeah, I have absolutely no idea about technology at all.
	We're both men of action, aren't we?
	Okay, I'm not as heroic as you, but I think that both of us get off on losing ourselves in action rather than having to sit around moping or contemplating or doing boring stuff.
	Is that fair?
	Well, if you talk about how we've responded to this, I don't think that we're unique, but I've really enjoyed running during this lockdown.
	I've really enjoyed cooking.
	I was telling you about my chicken curry, which is probably the best chicken curry in the world.
	Taste your chicken curry, even though I don't, you know, I've never eaten one of chicken curries.
	I actually would love to eat an Aidan Hartley chicken curry.
	I bet it's kind of got a sort of a raw kind of big game type.
	I don't know.
	I bet it's very powerful.
	Yeah, I know.
	Smoke comes out of your ears and you are invited for one after all of this.
	And then the third thing that I really like doing is try to find out about, you know, supplies of masks and test kits and things like that around the world.
	Because, you know...
	I felt, trying to get into this problem of why this lockdown is really happening, I thought at the beginning, try to help people in Africa, colleagues and so on, to supply all of this stuff.
	And it's been fascinating to work out how you source 5 million N95 masks in Shanghai.
	And so it's all been very interesting.
	But Aidan, can I ask you, do you think any of this shit is actually necessary?
	I mean, haven't we perhaps been sold a pub?
	Yes, and we're speaking just after Boris's press conference last night, and I think it's worth very quickly going over this, because, number one, there are shortages of what they now call PPE in the world today, but they weren't a few weeks ago, and I think that there is no excuse.
	Even today, if you search around Singapore, Turkey, China, and other places, you can find what's needed in quantity.
	It just puzzles me.
	I don't understand why there's a shortage, a stated shortage of this stuff.
	Of course, there's a problem with quality, but there is stuff out there.
	But as time goes on, it gets more and more difficult.
	Just referring to the press conference...
	One of the things that disturbs me is the way that we have to keep up with all of this new jargon.
	So now, the thing that keeps the country incarcerated is this idea of an R number.
	We have to now all agree that the R number must be kept below one.
	And a month ago, we weren't really talking about the R number.
	I mean, it was in the imperial report, but it wasn't You know, press conference material.
	And now the whole country has to be below one.
	And so, you know, we're just never going to get out of this because there are all going to be sort of new metrics will be dreamed up to decide, you know, how our liberty should be rationed.
	were other things about the press conference that really disturbed me um one of the things was that boris said that a reasonable estimate of deaths uh would have been 500 000 had the lockdown not been imposed but we know now all right this is a a fast moving target but we know now that the disease probably wouldn't have killed anything like that number and
	And yet, why is it that the government is still sticking with assumptions that are already a month old?
	And, you know, the WHO came out with a death rate of 3.4%.
	Now, people are talking about one-tenth of one percent or up to sort of 0.3 of a percent, but nowhere near 3.4 percent.
	So why are we still using that sort of language, about half a million dead?
	I mean...
	I do understand that the government has got to respond.
	I want to like what Boris is doing.
	I was a bit concerned about him, weren't you?
	He seemed to be quite breathless and not very well.
	I don't think he's very well.
	I think he did have it pretty bad.
	I think that this conspiracy theory that somehow...
	Boris.
	Boris faked it and then miraculously rose from hospital on Easter Day.
	I don't think that that was sinister or contrived.
	I think he was genuinely ill.
	But, I mean, okay...
	Putting aside natural human sympathy and Boris being an old mucker from my university days, I have to say that I don't have much sympathy for his political position.
	I mean, obviously, one wishes his health well, but really, he is the guy who was supposed to be our greatest conservative prime minister since Margaret Thatcher is proving a woeful disappointment.
	And I don't really hold out much hope for him getting better.
	I think that when historians come to look at Britain's performance in this arguably fake pandemic, I think that they are going to find that we have reacted in one of the worst ways.
	I mean, you mentioned earlier, in a previous podcast, that even Nigeria had wised up to what's going on.
	Even Nigeria was planning on ending the lockdown.
	So Britain is now being outgunned by Nigeria.
	Well done, Boris Johnson.
	Well done, your crap cabinet.
	I'm so disappointed.
	Well, not only Nigeria.
	If you can imagine, Saudi Arabia offers more civil liberties to its citizens than the UK currently, because they're easing lockdown.
	And so is Burkina Faso.
	Burkina Faso, that's fantastic.
	That's Wagadougou.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, and if we just go, you know, back to the whole issue of the R number, right?
	If Britain does succeed in lowering the R number to below one, then...
	That's great, but what about the rest of the world?
	So if you just say, look, if the European Union countries and the USA bring the R number to below one, that's a population of 775 million people.
	That's only a tenth of the planet.
	Africa is not going to bring the R number below one.
	And most of Asia, countries like India, are very unlikely to do that.
	So what does that mean?
	Does that mean that Britain must be cut off from the rest of the world?
	I mean, the idea of quarantining new arrivals, etc., it just doesn't make sense.
	It doesn't.
	I feel a sense of claustrophobia being in the UK. And I don't live here normally.
	I'm stuck here because the airspace back to East Africa is closed.
	But I just want to get out because I sort of feel that you guys are never going to get out of this, right?
	I know.
	Just tell me briefly, as a digression, Aidan, tell me about what your farm is like and what you see every day.
	I mean, do you see lots of big gamers?
	We've tried to maintain conservation alongside ranching cattle.
	The cattle are herded and they go into what we call a boma, which is like a crawl at night, so that they don't get eaten by lions.
	I had a lion in the night enclosure a few nights ago.
	And we have, yep, Herds of Elephant, Plains Game, Cheetah.
	We've had two litters of cheetah born on the farm in the last few months.
	It's a paradise.
	And, you know, I left just before lockdown was imposed here, trying to rescue my family to fly them all back.
	And we miss it so much because the pictures and videos that my neighbours are sending me, it's just so beautiful.
	It's such a beautiful time of year.
	It's raining.
	It's very green.
	And of course, we'd have big wide open spaces because the farms are pretty big.
	They're ranching areas.
	And so, you know, for us, life there would have been absolutely perfect and no different than usual.
	We just get on with it.
	So I sort of get by in the UK by following on Twitter, you know, various sort of shepherd and cattle sites that can show me livestock in open fields and I feel terribly jealous of all of them.
	You mentioned about how you deal with outbreaks of foot and mouth.
	You say going around with the sponge?
	Was it putting up the noses of the nostrils of the cattle?
	That was when I was a boy and my father had cattle.
	And when there was an outbreak of foot and mouth, this was in the days when there weren't so many drugs against foot and mouth.
	And so, yeah, the traditional thing was that the Maasai stockman would put a...
	Old rag on a stick and they would jam it up the nostrils of an infected cow and then take that snotty rag and stick it up the nostrils of all of the other cows in the herd and that would sort of inoculate them and of course they would then gain a degree of immunity and I mean like these other viruses of course foot and mouth mutates and so you would still get it but you know once an animal has had it and lived through it It
	can do pretty well.
	And so when an animal gets foot and mouth you just put it into an area with sort of green grass and shade and lots of water and most times it will survive and then it's got immunity pretty much for several years or the rest of its life.
	I mean, I think that that story is quite interesting because, of course, Professor Neil Ferguson is famous not only for his work during this pandemic, but also because of his advice that led to the destruction of millions of livestock in this country.
	No, was it more?
	It was an extraordinary number of livestock that were slaughtered as part of what was a sort of ring-fencing policy, where you had to sort of cut these huge bands of countryside and kill all the livestock in them.
	Yeah, seven or eight million livestock.
	And the thing about it is, I think the farmers were to a degree compensated, but you can't compensate a farmer for bloodlines that he's been breeding for generations, right?
	And The work that goes into our cattle is not really about the beast itself and what you can sell it for to a butcher.
	It's about the genetics and the fact that I have spent a large chunk of my life trying to breed up the perfect beef cow.
	And some of these bloodlines on those farms that were completely wiped out would have been generations long.
	And that, I think, was the real tragedy for a lot of the farmers.
	You know, from my point of view, there was no necessity to wipe out all of the animals.
	And in Kenya, we have foot and mouth outbreaks.
	Now we vaccinate several times a year, but sometimes the vaccines don't work.
	And, you know, our cattle, touchwood mine, haven't had it for a long time, but neighbours sometimes have had outbreaks of foot and mouth.
	You don't destroy your whole herd.
	You get over it.
	You close the district to trade and movement.
	And then when the outbreak is over, you move on.
	So, I don't know, perhaps there's just a little bit more of a pragmatic way of dealing with diseases like that, you know, in the world beyond Calais.
	But I think that...
	Phil, I'm sure what you say about herd immunity in cattle applies equally to humans.
	It's just common sense that it should.
	Do you not worry that...
	Britain's entire political and economic policy at the moment is being governed by one rogue scientist.
	I mean, Neil Ferguson's Imperial College study seems to have exerted an iron grip on the thinking of Boris Johnson and his cabinet to the point where now...
	They've fallen for the sunk cost fallacy, whereby we're in this far.
	I mean, this was clear in one of Boris's speeches this week.
	We're in this deep.
	We've gone through all this suffering.
	We can't stop now because whatever random reasons they can come up with on the hoof.
	Yeah, I mean, I think that it's been said many times now that...
	Ferguson has got one point of view, but what about other points of view that are coming from academics in Oxford and in California and in Sweden particularly?
	And surely this is a discussion, and also the discussion...
	It can be revised the more that we know about what we're up against.
	But we still seem in terms of planning to be based around March 16th panic mode.
	And as a result, it seems to me that the whole economy of Britain is being repurposed to become one sort of huge hospital so that the country in Orwellian terms could be called Ventilator One.
	It seems that it's a huge sadness.
	And I feel so sorry for all of the businesses that are going to go bust or already have gone bust.
	And look, you know, I know that people are frightened of the disease and they're trying to be responsible.
	And I think that ordinary people have responded to this in the best way that they can.
	But I think just enough, we've got to have some kind of movement now.
	And, you know, it seems a huge pity that, you know, the effects are going to be felt for many years to come.
	I mean, look, from China's point of view, in January, they realised that they had a disease that they should inform the outside world about.
	Instead of that, they lied, because it's the Communist Party of China, and that's what they do.
	Then I think that they realised, sort of remembering their Sun Tzu, that they didn't actually really need to tell the world the truth about the nature of the disease because, as Sun Tzu says, the whole secret lies in confusing the enemy so that he cannot fathom our real intent.
	And, you know, all of his stuff about when you're near, pretend to be far, and when you're far, pretend to be near to the enemy, etc.
	I think that China saw this as a massive economic opportunity to gain a victory that they couldn't get on the battlefield.
	And so they almost hid...
	The benign nature of the disease from the rest of the world and fired up all of their machines to make masks and PPE kit and ventilators and waited for the world's stock markets to crash so they could buy up big positions on the cheap and sort of acquire copper mines and oil fields and ports from countries that were in hock to Beijing.
	And, you know, those are the guys that are laughing.
	It's not really about whether Britain is going to take Huawei.
	The question is whether China is actually going to own Britain when all of this is over.
	Yes.
	And there is a very unhealthy relationship, isn't there?
	The World Health Organization and between big tech gazillionaires, notably Bill Gates, who seem to be working in lockstep with China to advance this particular globalist agenda.
	I think they are the useful idiots of China.
	And I think we're all going to, I mean this is just the, we're living through the first chapter of this crisis aren't we?
	I think there's going to be lots of new developments which are going to be not necessarily to the advantage of our economies or our way of life.
	Look, I think that the United Nations should be a little bit like the League of Nations when the Second World War broke out.
	It wasn't fit for purpose, and so it was abolished.
	And after the Second World War, the UN was created.
	Perhaps it's time to review the role that the UN plays in the world, which includes WHO, and abolish it and replace it with something that is fit for purpose in this new world that we're facing.
	And I think that the world should definitely impose sanctions on China and try to seek compensation.
	I don't necessarily agree with you about Bill Gates.
	I think that he's done a lot of good in vaccinating children across Africa.
	And I think that those vaccinations are absolutely vital to the health of developing countries.
	And I don't really know much about his role in this crisis, but I think that what you have...
	Well, exactly, Aidan.
	I think, you know, be careful here.
	Lots of special friends are listening to this.
	I thought Aidan was really clever.
	And now I think he's a total fucker.
	He's a stooge of the globalist.
	Look, what I can see from the ground in East Africa is incompetence on the part of the United Nations and also a predatory strategy by the People's Republic of China in trying to seize assets and take over in the continent in return for some pretty shabby Belt and Road infrastructure that they've been building across the continent for a decade or so.
	And I think that those things need to be looked at.
	But once again, you know, African countries are looking at those things.
	I think they're becoming more critical of United Nations agencies.
	And they're very critical of China because they've seen videos of black Africans being horribly treated in cities like Guangzhou.
	And they're also waking up to the fact that these deals between Beijing and African countries were made with often corrupt leaders.
	They weren't made with countries.
	They weren't made with, you know, representative democracies.
	They were cosy deals with despots.
	And so why should Africa, which is now beset by another debt crisis, pay that money back?
	Yes.
	I think that constantly what I return to in sort of looking at this crisis is that...
	Very often, the West seems to have lost its leadership.
	They're not quite doing the right things, like Britain.
	And it's very interesting to see how other countries in developing countries like Africa and India and other countries are responding to this.
	Because in some ways, they're just a lot more pragmatic.
	They realise they don't have the resources economically to deal with it.
	And so they're accelerating the return to normal life.
	and they've got a more philosophical attitude to the kinds of casualties they're going to have to accept as a result of that.
	But they've got their eye on, you know, the bigger picture, rather than being completely just obsessed with the health crisis.
	And that's not to belittle the health crisis.
	I mean, obviously, the numbers in Britain are absolutely horrific.
	But that's got to do with the lack of planning and competence in the NHS and the government itself, right?
	But now, having taken those appalling casualties, they've got to look at the bigger picture and say, you know, what are we going to do to rescue this economy before the whole shithouse goes up in flames?
	Yeah, I think I disagree with you on the appalling nature of the casualties.
	I mean, I'm not sure that they are...
	Significantly horrifyingly higher than we might get in a bad flu year.
	But that's by the way.
	I just wanted you to talk a bit about Africa because I'm never happier than I'm in Africa.
	I love being there and you obviously know far better than I do.
	I worry greatly from what I know The game reserves and I know how important it is that tourism brings in the money that enables the local communities to conserve game rather than letting the poachers run riot and so forth and the game populations need to be managed and obviously if there's no tourist industry that's going to be The second worry is,
	I think you mentioned this earlier, China already rents half of Africa.
	It could leave this crisis owning half of Africa, and that's much more frightening.
	Yeah, well, China's got about $150 billion in loans on the books, but it's got another huge chunk that are off the books, loans that are cross-collateralized to assets like copper mines, oil fields, ports, and so on.
	Africa can't repay China, and so unless those debts are rescheduled, China will lobby for the takeover of assets.
	Zambia has already been talking about giving China some of its prized copper mines, and so that is a terrifying prospect.
	How do we avoid it?
	Well, Africa can threaten to default, and some countries are effectively defaulting now, but there is the role of the IMF and the World Bank charging back in to help out these countries or to cancel debt.
	I think that Africa will get through that.
	Let me give you one example of why Africa has gone to China rather than the West.
	The World Bank has this environmental policy whereby if you are a country in Africa and you want to try and build a – you want to finance a power station, say, to give people electricity rather than kind of dirty stuff fueled by firewood to give people electricity rather than kind of dirty stuff fueled by And the World Bank refuses to fund any project which is not renewable.
	So they'll buy a wind farm, which is of course useless when the wind's not blowing, or they'll buy a solar array, which is useless at night.
	fire power station or you know anything like that which obviously if you're in an all-rich country or rich country part of Africa then that's the obvious thing to do and the World Bank will not help so where do they go for their finance they go to China instead which is more than happy to finance these projects because it it means that it owns a piece of Africa's eyes yeah of course and
	China has offered very low interest rates and they have been able to step in when other donors weren't around to get the prestige projects that a lot of presidents want built.
	But, you know, the World Bank also funds some pretty dodgy projects like, you know, hydroelectric projects that are in big game reserves.
	And so that's not something that they're, you know, they're not so different.
	But, yeah, China has played a central role in Africa's economic development.
	Development over the last 10 to 15 years.
	And when you drive down a new tarmac road, you think this is great, but then the road begins to crumble after a few months because you realise that it's only six inches deep in tarmac and that these guys have been skimming money somewhere.
	But now I think that the question is whether China does press its claims on assets or whether it reschedules the debts.
	But what the future is is up in the air at the moment.
	And, you know, I think that Africa's economic development has come to a hard stop.
	Friends of mine are looking at the situation and estimating that 100 million more Africans will be pushed into poverty as a result of this.
	And, you know, just you talk about tourism, that's 67 million people employed across the continent.
	And in the absence of tourists already, rhino poaching has flared up in countries like Botswana.
	And, you know, where are those rhino horns going?
	They're going to the Far East.
	They're going to Vietnam.
	They're going to China.
	And the Chinese, as we know, eat everything from tortoises to sea slugs to aardvarks to elephants to...
	Pangolins and, you know, what is it, the gallbladders or the bones of lions?
	I mean, it's endless.
	And so, you know, that's the sort of thing that we need to see a stop to, but I don't know what's going to happen next if there isn't any tourist dollars.
	The problem is that the West right now is going to be...
	One of the consequences of this 2020 year of madness is going to be that people's minds are going to be not...
	Liberal Westerners are not going to give a toss about Africa anymore.
	I mean, not they ever did before, really.
	But now they're going to be so preoccupied with domestic problems that they'll essentially allow the whole continent of Africa to go to the wall.
	They haven't got enough emotion and compassion to reach out to Africa in this time.
	So that's going to be an absolute...
	Yes and no.
	Yes and no.
	Because I think that Africa, actually, there's an opportunity for ordinary Africans to start to say that they don't want to have these predatory relationships with the World Bank and the IMF and the United Nations agencies that really just benefit their leaders.
	And the same with China.
	And perhaps it could be that Africa benefits from just adopting an enterprise future rather than a dependent future.
	But yes, it's going to be in the short to medium term very bloody.
	I think that there's a huge threat to security across the continent.
	There's a possibility of state failure in several countries.
	And also there's going to be a huge humanitarian challenge with a lot of people going hungry.
	Well, countries that have got a problem with Al-Qaeda affiliates in West Africa.
	You're seeing a lot of activity with Boko Haram around the margins of Nigeria and into neighbouring countries.
	And obviously in the Horn of Africa with Al-Shabaab, there's been some violence with an Al-Shabaab affiliate in Nigeria.
	In Mozambique.
	And so that's one aspect of it.
	Another aspect is just the very corrupt countries that have got very weak states already, such as South Sudan, possibly the Congo.
	There are lots of countries that are already on the brink of state failure, even before you come to a tragedy like this.
	But I don't think, and people are acknowledging this across the continent already a few weeks into the crisis, that the health challenge of the coronavirus is going to be anything like the economic challenge.
	And that actually they're seeing very small numbers of deaths and infections even across Africa because of reasons that no one quite knows.
	Is it the sunshine?
	Is it the relatively small population per square kilometre?
	Or is it because 75% of Africans are below the age of 35?
	The median age of Africans is below the age of 20.
	And so, you know, only 6% of Africans are above the age of 60.
	And they're very healthy people.
	One of the things that you've got to acknowledge in this crisis is that, you know, Western countries have got a lot of very, very unhealthy people with, you know, obesity and diet-related problems that just don't exist elsewhere in the world.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	By the way, can you hear that clicking noise?
	I can hear a clicking noise through my phone, but maybe it's not coming through on you.
	To end up on the recording annoying the special friend.
	Is it there?
	No, I can't hear it.
	Oh, that's good.
	Okay, fine.
	Now, I wanted to ask you again, because it would be a complete waste of getting you if I didn't ask you this, but tell me about...
	I want to spend the last part of this podcast discussing disappointment with Boris.
	Tell me what you remember of him at Balliol.
	He's extremely intelligent and full of the kind of bluster and fun that you see on the TV and a desperation to be loved.
	And he was a good friend.
	I went to his first wedding.
	To Allegra, the lovely Allegra.
	He does pull him, doesn't he?
	Yes, yes he does.
	And I think that he was an impressive figure.
	Listen, I've always been a big Boris supporter until March 16th.
	And now I'd say I'm just deeply concerned.
	I think that our love for the prodigal Boris is still there, but he's just got to come home.
	He's got to come and deliver for the people who are great supporters.
	And I think that it's quite sad that you see people who've been lifelong supporters of his are becoming alarmed and disappointed.
	And he's just got to get his mojo back and start saying the right things.
	Do you think he's a Manchurian candidate?
	Because I just...
	I read a piece for my exclusive Patreon page the other day about...
	About my disappointment with Dominic Cummings.
	Because I had thought that Boris really only ever wanted to be a kind of...
	As you rightly say, he wants to be loved.
	He likes to be loved, which is one of the reasons why he's not taking the hard political decisions.
	Necessary to end the lockdown.
	Because he recognises, and this is how cynical and ugly politics is, I think, that large chunks of the country are perfectly happy to stay in lockdown indefinitely.
	And his view is until he can talk them round, he can't see in that direction.
	But I thought that Boris was content to be this kind of jolly, jolly figurehead, you know, shaking people's hands and appearing in photographs and being jaunty and giving double thumbs up and everything like that.
	While he left the business of repairing the country after the damage of the inertia caused by the Cameron and May years, not to mention the damage done during the Blair and Brown years, I thought that while Boris just was being Mr. Jolly, that people like Dominic Cummings would I thought that while Boris just was being Mr. Jolly, that people like Dominic Cummings would reform the civil service and would allow Britain to become a sort of post-Brexit
	But instead, we seem to have Boris being absolutely useless and Dominic Cummings being one of those who's actually agitating for a protracted lockdown.
	I mean, he was apparently one of the people who sat on the SAGE scientific committee and urged the scientists to go for lockdown rather than the Swedish model.
	Well, what have they both got in common?
	They've both had the virus, and so possibly there is a sort of biological impact.
	Perhaps it's fear.
	Perhaps it's a sense of relief recovering from the disease.
	In my sort of darker moments, I sort of imagine that Boris has had his backbone amputated by the virus, or that it really is like a sort of computer virus, that he's been taken over by some sort of department in the People's Revolutionary Army in Beijing, and that he's now a sort of glove puppet for some foreign government.
	But...
	There does seem to be that element, doesn't there?
	There is an element of invasion of the body snatchers about this virus, or even Stepford Wives.
	I think it's a sort of a new labour right.
	That's what happens.
	The virus makes you into a sort of...
	A surreal liberal.
	But look, I think that there's still time for redemption.
	I think that there's going to be a moment when Boris wakes up and he says, this just can't go on.
	And he realises, because he tests the waters and he sees that the people of Britain have had enough, and because he likes to be loved...
	He says, enough.
	We must stop this.
	He must lead his people out of the wilderness.
	Because that's where Britain is at the moment.
	It's walking around in circles somewhere in the desert in Sinai.
	But yeah, I sort of agree with that.
	But he needs to lead his people out of the wilderness rather than wait until the people are ready to be led out of the wilderness.
	And I think that's the difference.
	I really worry that looking at the stats, looking at what surveys are telling us, only a tiny percentage of the country is currently as unhappy as we are with the lockdown.
	I mean, I think this podcast, can you imagine how big my audience would be if I... If I'd gone for the Piers Morgan route and become a kind of bedwetting COVID hysteric and demanded ever greater action and demanded that a tomb in Westminster Abbey be prepared for Captain Tom.
	Have you noticed this stuff?
	I've always given up reading the newspapers now because I can't bear No, it's Pravda.
	It's Pravda.
	The story about Captain Tom.
	Yeah, yeah.
	No, good for Captain Tom.
	But that's just, you know, there's lots of propaganda.
	That's clear.
	But look, this is what I think.
	I think that it's a bit like a silent majority, which is very silent at the moment because we're all behind closed doors.
	I think there are many more people, I can't explain the polls, but I think there are many more people who want freedom now than we imagine.
	And it's just because they've been pragmatic, they've been polite, they've been tolerant.
	And they thought that it would be temporary.
	And so they went along with it.
	But I think that now...
	I just get a sense that people are really champing at the bit.
	When I run around London, I see people, they're just desperate to get back to their old lives.
	And so I can't explain the polls, but I think that if Boris...
	You know, did that moment like in Darkest Hour when he goes down into the tube train and he asks the people of London what they should do about the Germans.
	I think that Boris, if he walked around Regent's Park or took a jog around Hyde Park and he stopped everybody that he met and he had a conversation with them at a distance of two metres...
	I think that he would get a message which is completely different.
	And I think that they'd all be saying, lead us out of the wilderness, Boris.
	Try to get us back to work.
	I just think that our sense of, you know, our common sense is the only thing that you can trust now in this crazy world.
	I think that so much of the media is bullshit.
	I think the politics is bullshit.
	But, you know, what would you think is sensible?
	And I think you've just got to trust your own instincts at a time like this.
	And I just sense that people have had enough.
	Yes.
	Well, I hope they have, because I want to come and stay with you on your farm.
	No.
	Bye.
	There's only one thing that I'm well at with Africa, and that's lucky mosquitoes.
	I hate mosquitoes more than anything in the world, even more than Bill Gates.
	And how bad is the Mozzie situation?
	We're at 6,000 feet, so we're above the malarial zone.
	It's extremely healthy.
	The air is like champagne.
	It's like a great day in the summer at noon, and then at night it gets chilly enough to have to put a heavy blanket over yourself and have a roaring fire.
	It's just absolutely glorious.
	No malaria.
	Well, there are a few grass mosquitoes, but that's fine.
	It's the healthiest place in the world, and I dream of going home.
	And have you got horses there?
	I haven't got horses, but a lot of the neighbours have.
	And we can get you on a horse, James.
	Could you?
	Yeah, we can.
	Hunting is banned in Kenya, but we can get you on a horse.
	I don't want...
	There are jackals, but we can get a lion to chase after you on your horse.
	That does happen occasionally.
	We've got enough for you to do.
	I've been on so many safaris.
	You know how after a time you become more interested in the birds than the big game because you've seen them all before?
	Yeah, we've got about 230 species of birds seen on the farm, and some absolutely fabulous snakes.
	Oh, I love snakes!
	So what have you got?
	We've got puff adders, and we've got black mambas, but we've also got lots of non-venomous snakes.
	And centipede eaters and grass snakes and brown-lipped house snakes and all sorts of beautiful snakes.
	Have you had numbers in the house?
	Well, in my wife's office, she was once confronted by a black member that flared its head and went up on its sort of back.
	And I've had an eight-foot spitting cobra in the bathroom.
	And yeah, they're pretty regular visitors.
	We had a problem with rodents for a while, and that brought in the snakes.
	But since we got...
	Our two cats, Bernini and Omar, the snakes have vanished and so you don't need to worry about that.
	We've got, what else have we got?
	Some fabulous insects at the moment on top of the coronavirus.
	We've got a locust plague sweeping across East Africa.
	We've had several visits by swarms of locusts on the farm.
	And we've got, you'll be delighted to hear, more species of bat in Kenya than anywhere else in the world.
	That's fantastic.
	So if I get hungry or if there's any Chinese visitors, we can offer them a bat.
	Yeah, but we've got, most nights you hear lions.
	We've got leopard that unfortunately jump in and kill my sheep every now and again.
	We've got cheetah and we've got the largest population of elephant north of the equator in our district of Lycipia.
	It really is the most wonderful place.
	And it's a tough time at the moment because there's no tourism.
	But people are living off contributions to conservation and just trying to keep things going.
	And, of course, the rest of us are farming our cattle and our crops and our sheep and just getting on with it.
	And I think that life in Laikipia will continue pretty much the same through this crisis and afterwards.
	But, you know, it's something that does rely on tourism.
	So as soon as the flights are operating again, I recommend that you jump on a plane and come to Kenya.
	Well, I think I'm going to have to, Ed.
	Not least because one of the things, when this podcast, my podcast video cast career really takes off, I'm going to make little filmettes.
	So James goes to visit Aidan in Africa could be a good one.
	Absolutely.
	We'll try to get you, you know, in amongst the pride of lion and see how you do.
	Excellent.
	Well, Aidan Hartley, thank you very much for being a really brilliant guest, as I'd expected you would be, on The DeliPod.
	And, yes, let's do the next one in Africa.
	Thank you very much, James.
	Okay.

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