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June 3, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:26:04
Sir Dan of C
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I love Danny Cole.
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I love Danny Cole.
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Pod.
And I think I am excited about this week's guest, actually.
I really am.
I love him very much, even though we've only met him on a couple of occasions.
His name is...
Well, his Twitter handle is SirDanOfC, but his real name, I can divulge, is DanCure.
And, Dan, you started out as a fan, but you've become a kind of celebrity in your own right.
Well, I think that's being very kind, James.
Yes, I think we probably met last year at the podcast live, I think, if I remember right.
That was exactly it, yeah.
Yeah, and actually that was through Midlands Libertarians, so quite a number of us.
Which is third Wednesday.
Third Wednesday, yes.
The thing that my brother Dick has organised, the Libertarian Drinks, which has really taken off.
The thing I like about libertarian drinks, well, one of the things, I mean, you know, the company's nice and all that, and the drinking's nice.
I sound like an expert.
I've only been to one.
But it's really nice being able to be among people where you don't have to check yourself every few seconds to make sure that you haven't offended somebody by some microaggression.
Yes, I think you've got it absolutely right.
I think Dick deserves a lot of credit with this.
And again, it started out on Twitter.
He put something out there probably about a year ago now and said, you know, who's interested in meeting up?
Probably Worcester.
A few of us replied.
I mean, I don't live in Worcester, but I used to go to school in Worcester, so it was about 40 minutes for me.
He turned up and there was a lot of people like myself who were milling around the bar.
Looking like they were waiting for somebody else.
And the great thing about Dick is that he's pretty easy to spot.
If you've never met him before, I mean, he's, you know, I think he was there with his beret and his enormous moustache.
Disguised in his beret.
Yes, exactly.
Because most people wear beards to disguise themselves, don't they?
But Dick's beard is his...
Yes.
Well, he should have shaved it off, really, during lockdown and gone reverse.
No one would know who he was.
No, no, no.
They wouldn't.
It's weird, isn't it, that...
I mean, how would you describe...
You get a really mixed bunch of people, don't you?
Like a vicar?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, we've had...
So I would say that there's probably 10 or 12 regulars, those who are there every time.
And we've got to know each other really well.
I mean, there's a WhatsApp group and we've done things other than just Third Wednesday.
But then there are people who...
Might turn up once or twice and maybe they come from further afield than just, you know, the Midlands.
And we've had all sorts of people.
I mean, there's people on the left, people on the right, people who quite honestly are not particularly political, but they stumble across one of our Twitter profiles and, you know, they just want to turn up and they just want good company.
And as you say, you know, be able to talk about anything openly without feeling like They have to stumble over their words and they're about to be tripped up at any moment.
And I think that's the key.
And it's grown and grown.
We had, I think, the one in December, which you came along to...
That was really, really busy.
And then I thought to myself, well, maybe in January, you know, everyone's gone back to work.
A lot of people stopped drinking in January.
And maybe it's a bit, you know, after the Lord Mayor's show.
But that was just as busy.
We could barely get any table.
And there's always new people.
I think that one, actually, we had Tattoo Man.
You missed him.
Oh, I missed him.
Has he got tattoos by any chance?
Yes.
How did you guess?
I think I left at probably about 11 o'clock and by that point I think he'd stripped off almost naked.
Really?
Yeah.
There was a story behind every single one.
Of course.
Yeah, yeah.
And he told them all, I imagine.
He told them all and I thought, well, yeah, I need to go home now.
No, that's good though.
That's good.
I like the idea of tattoo man.
I think a lot of people there...
What really struck me, apart from how delightful everyone was, was people are really quite high-level intelligence and quite informed about stuff.
Now, I mean, I didn't expect people to be fans of mine to be thick as pig shit.
It's not that.
But, I mean, you really are a bright lot.
Well, yeah.
And again, there's lots of different people there.
And there's all sorts of topics.
I mean, of course, when we first started, we would have been in the whole Brexit mess.
So that would have been the topic of the day.
I think probably...
I mean, Boris might not even have been Prime Minister at that point.
So, of course, a lot of discussion, I think, was probably political at that point.
But, yeah, I mean, people have got all sorts of interests.
I know you say all sorts, but I think if you drew a Venn diagram, I think tanks would be...
Yes, well, I was just about to say tanks is a particular favourite.
How do you reckon that is?
Well, I think you have to be honest.
I mean, we're good at war.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, I know that's not a fashionable thing to say, and I think...
Do you think we're better at war than the Germans?
Well, I mean, you know, the facts speak for themselves.
We've had two cracks at it, and...
Because there is a German member, of course, and very hot she is too.
Yeah.
But she's an enthusiastic member of the group.
Yes.
Have you broached this subject with her?
No, I didn't think it was the best approach to make.
But no, I think, you know, I think most people can concede in the World Cup of War.
It's 2-0.
Yeah, but...
That's a broad statement.
Wait a second.
Well, that is a very broad statement because you're missing out...
Well, it's a narrower statement, actually.
Yeah.
Because you're missing out key factors.
You're missing out the French.
Yes.
You're missing out the Spanish.
Yes.
Who are both strong contenders for our ancient, not to mention the Scots.
Well, yes, of course.
And actually, just on the French, I mean, Dick, when it comes to, he has a soft spot for all things French.
So when it comes to, you know, tank warfare, for example, he doesn't like it being pointed out that you tended to see the back of French tanks, not the front.
Yeah.
But yes, I mean, if you go...
But having said that, if you go back beyond just the last century, I still think our war count is, you know, is reasonable.
I mean, we're holding our own, I think, over history when it comes to warfare.
Yes.
Even when you consider the French and...
Well, most war's been against the French, hasn't it?
There's a sort of embarrassing element of the American wars...
Yes.
But I like to think of the, I can explain that away quite easily, but the Americans are basically us.
They're British, just with different, you know, different countries.
They took a turning off at one point and just went their own way.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think, well, there's another topic we veer onto, which is the US and Trump.
Do you find that people in the group are pro-Trump?
Yes, but Trump's an interesting one because it's so, I would say, in the hierarchy of topics that are...
Be careful what you say.
Be careful what you mention unless you know your audience, you know your crowd.
I would say Trump is ahead of Brexit.
In other words, it requires less courage to say that you voted Brexit and you're in support of it, particularly now that it's effectively happened, than it is to say, do you know what?
I think Donald Trump might be a good thing.
And then you have to run away.
It's only one notch up from saying...
You know, people are hard about paedophilia, but actually, you know, actually...
It's a bit like that, isn't it?
It's being positioned like that very much so, yeah.
It is, it's extraordinary.
I mean, I find that the one thing about Twitter is that as much as I do think it's left-wing...
Yes.
There's an insight.
Twitter is left wing.
But I still think that you can go on there and have conversations, but approach those sorts of topics.
Whereas I think Facebook, because of the nature of it, because it's so close rank, you've basically got your real friends in real life and family and people perhaps through work groups.
I mean, some of the constant vitriol, I think to myself, no, I'm not going to dare.
I'm just going to leave that well alone, you know?
Yes.
It's a strange one.
I don't know to what extent, because I grew up in the 80s and I remember Reagan.
Yeah.
But I don't remember, there was no social media and I didn't have the content.
I don't know whether he faced the same level of...
He did, Dan, I can tell you.
I was at, I was at Malvern at the time, which you'd think, I mean, you'd think public schools would be conservative in there, particularly provincial public schools like Malvern, you know, where people tend not to...
You can imagine Westminster, say, a sort of trendy London school.
They'd all be wankily left-wing and rebelling against the system.
But you would have thought that Malvern would be okay.
But actually, I remember vividly feeling like you do now, talking about Trump, that everyone knew that Reagan was a dumb cowboy, that he was an actor, and that he was really stupid.
No one even questioned that.
Yeah.
And I didn't know that much about politics, but I knew enough to know that he wasn't what he was being portrayed as.
Yeah.
And I find it bizarre.
I find it particularly bizarre the way that The entire mainstream media in this country, I hate using the phrase mainstream media because it makes me sound like I've put my tinfoil hat on, but it is.
But it is, yeah.
Even the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, when you read their coverage of Trump...
There is no difference between their coverage and The Guardian's.
I mean, literally no difference.
It's just absolutely anti-Trump all the way.
Whatever Trump does is wrong.
I find that extraordinary.
I mean, compare him with Obama.
Obama was so much worse.
Obama was a real...
I mean, a lot of the bad things that are happening in the world today started off on Obama's watch.
Yeah, it's strange.
I think the difference...
I agree.
I think the difference...
Presumably, when we talk about the mainstream media now, it's rolling coverage.
It's gone beyond, we're going to give you the news in a half-hour slot, and we've got to give you the facts because we don't have time to expand on them, to this 24-7.
It always feels to me like I'm walking past a TV with Sky News on or the BBC on, and so therefore they have to go beyond just covering the news.
And when I think about Obama, really the only thing I can think of that everybody was aware of and talked about under his watch was of course Bin Laden, the capture of Bin Laden.
I mean, that was my personal view.
Well, I thought he would get in, but my initial view was that, ha, ha, ha, he's got in.
It's just like, this is going to wind up all the right things.
Just trolling.
Yeah, exactly.
And he hasn't disappointed in that front.
No, no.
He goes from strength to strength.
He's our man.
And of course, by extension, when I say all the right people, all the people I know just privately who were just, you know, launching everything at him.
And I thought, huh, that's great.
But since then, there is definitely an order.
I mean, I read something today over the U.S. riots.
Yes.
A piece on the BBC.
I mean, while I was reading this, I'm not quite sure.
But anyway, I was.
And I think I shared it on Twitter.
It was a narrative around this thing of Black Lives Matter, which is obviously the topic at the moment.
And when you got halfway down, it was just the most puerile...
I mean, it could have been written by a 12-year-old.
In fact, that would have been insulting to a 12-year-old.
It was all this sort of inference about pulling out random stats in this country about the achievement of black pupils at school and in the workplace and how actually it boils down to racism.
And by the way, what Trump is doing is endorsing this.
It was so...
Was this at the BBC? It was on the BBC, yes.
It was an article.
You'll get it on the homepage, I think.
And I think that has really been the way that they've treated Trump.
They've really gone down some ridiculous rabbit holes to pluck out these very odd things and then they've used it to sort of frame the argument.
And I've got to the point where...
I can't get my news from those sources because it just grates the whole time.
Yes.
Yeah.
Similarly, I was reading an old copy of the Mail on Sunday.
I like the Mail on Sunday.
I think it's much sounder than the Daily Mail.
And it's good on most things.
It's good on Brexit.
Actually, it's probably sold the past on climate change, as everyone has.
But I was reading it.
Some female reporter had done an analysis of Trump and the riots.
And she was heavily hinting that Trump had inflamed the riots through his attacks on the media.
Or rather, she was quoting people who'd said that Trump had inflamed the riots through the treatment of journalists and through his intemperate language and stuff.
And you think...
Okay, if you wrote for Slate or Salon or some markedly left-wing publication which had the destruction of Western civilization as part of its remit, then you understand.
But I don't see how it's healthy for conservative media on this side of the Atlantic to just go along with the Guardian view of it.
I mean, this is the leader of the free world.
He's, for better or worse, he is our main man.
Yeah, I think so.
But I think as well on that one, they don't have to be bold because he's not their president, using that term.
I think they can get away with pitching themselves at a point where they can be sort of acceptably conservative for the UK audience and they don't really need to worry about it.
So...
You may have made this point before, actually, so I'm probably stealing it a little bit.
But it's like, if you are a conservative, it helps to have something that you can just throw there, just to show that you're not a monster, right?
So, you know, in this case, you can say, oh, by the way, I think Trump's a bad thing.
And people say, oh, you see, he is sound, or she is sound.
You see, now we've got an entry point here, because obviously, we're moving towards the big subject, the one that really matters.
Which is your weekly or fortnightly school report that you write.
School reports.
School reports, which is basically who has had a good war and who has had a bad war in the...
What do we even call this crisis type thing invented...
Coronavirus time.
I mean, it's lame, isn't it?
We can't call it the plandemic, even though it is.
Because that's, again, tense.
The era of lockdown.
The era of lockdown.
But the thing I thought of then, I call her a thing, she's lovely.
Julia Hartley-Brewitt, who we love very much.
She's great.
But she does have her weaknesses.
And one of them is she doesn't like Donald Trump.
And I don't...
Do you know, you've probably noticed my policy on the podcast.
I don't waste time discussing with people things that they don't like that I do like.
It's not interested.
I'm not really interested in spending half an hour with Julia, hearing her trot out kind of second-hand received ideas from the mail on why Trump's a bad thing.
I just don't think...
I don't think...
I don't think there's plenty of that out there already.
I don't think I mean, maybe I'm misrepresenting.
I don't think Julia could come up with a really cogent explanation as to why Trump is a bad thing.
I mean, she might come up with a sort of vulgarisms or something.
But beyond that, I don't think she'd be very good.
And I'm convinced that, not consciously but subconsciously, Trump is her get-out-of-jail-free card.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think it is for a lot of people.
A lot of journalists, some of the commentary.
I think...
One of the interesting things with the list which started out just as a list and as you say it's become a bit of a weekly thing is that there is not necessarily a direct correlation to things like Brexit and people's stance on the whole coronavirus lockdown situation and all the implications that come with that.
There is for some people, but others, they've gone a completely different way.
And it's an interesting one, and I have some theories for that, but I think it's just...
Ah, I'd love to hear your theories.
Well, I think with Brexit, if you think about it, it was...
It was a known issue, it was a known topic that went on.
I mean, for some people it had been 10 or 20 years in the making.
In other words, they were absolutely of the view that for a variety of reasons we were better off out of the EU. And of course the 2016, I think it was, referendum came up and there were so many reasons for leaving that they'd had time to prepare their case and talk through all the arguments and think about it.
And then of course when that referendum result wasn't implemented...
You had this strange alliance formed between all these various people from the left, from the right, some people not political at all who grouped together and said we might want this for different reasons but the important thing is we want it and I think what we've seen is that alliance has broken apart.
Probably earlier this year because, to all intents and purposes, Brexit has happened, sort of.
And suddenly this has come out of nowhere.
Nobody knew this issue was going to be there.
And everybody's on the back foot and they're having to suddenly think on their feet.
Have an opinion on the hoof.
Right.
And that's where this falls down.
And actually, as negative as that point might sound, I think on the other hand...
To have people who were on the Remain side of the fence suddenly come up with sound opinions and views towards this I think is quite heartening because it shows that actually it doesn't need to be about one topic.
You can bring people back together.
Well, let's talk about that for a moment because that's interesting.
I agree.
I've been heartened to discover that people who I would have considered to be, until very recently, my bitterest enemies, people actually who some of them had vowed never to talk to me again or at least, you know, just really had dissed me a lot in print or whatever, have suddenly just really had dissed me a lot in print or whatever, have I admire, my allies.
And the example I think I've given before...
It's a bit like the moment in Fiends of the Eastern Front when Captain Constanta and his vampires changed sides so that they had hitherto been fighting with the Germans Because they were the allies of the Soviets.
But then they became the enemies of the Germans.
And that's how it feels like.
Well, I suppose it's how you feel to discover the vampires are suddenly your friends.
Yeah, and I think the interesting thing is going to be moving.
I mean, assuming that we're not locked down forever and we do return to something like what the way that society was, surely it's all about the next theme of the day, the next topic, and how are people going to react to that?
You know, whether it's the economy, such as it is.
I mean, there isn't really economy at the moment.
Or whether it's decisions that need to be made over things like China, for instance.
Yeah.
Well, I think this is all...
Do you know, I feel, and Brexiteers get really annoyed when you say this, because for them it was everything.
I think Brexit is kind of gone as an issue, really.
Yeah, and I think as well it was supposed to be the start of something else, and that something else was the thing that we could do as a country.
And this was something I noticed when I did the MPs list, that I think there was so much effort and time put into making sure that every single MP who was elected for the Tory party in...
Back in December.
Yeah.
Was so on topic, so on message, and that message was 100% Brexit, that I'm not sure what some of their credentials were beyond delivering that message.
And they're probably not either.
Well, no.
I mean, and you see this because, and I've gone on to every single 365 of the MPs on their Twitter feed, or the ones that are on Twitter, and they have the same background banner of stay-at-home saving lives, all branded and themed with the NHS, the same hashtags, They retweet the same conservative approved messaging.
And it strikes me that that's great for getting Brexit over the line, but not much good for, you know, because the other thing, of course, is that many of these people are in the so-called red war.
Will you explain what that is for benefit of American listeners?
Yeah, so the Red Wall is essentially a geographical sort of spread of the UK, probably from the Midlands up through to the North East.
And it's a lot of regions where previously, for a long, long time now, they've had a Labour MP.
And that's because they've typically been...
I mean, this is a broad generalisation, but they seem to be working class.
Their values are values that the Labour Party have held, mostly around economic values and the welfare state.
And...
Having said that, they overwhelmingly voted Brexit and the Labour Party were not in favour of Brexit.
So the last election was very much fought on that topic and so it allowed the Conservative Party to make gains in those areas.
and for the very first time, or certainly in many generations, they had MPs there, whereas a lot of the inner cities, particularly London, Birmingham, Manchester, I suppose, have gone fully left-wing because it's about the inner cities, it's about the universities.
So it was a big sort of paradigm shift of where the sort of strongholds for the Labour Party and the Tory Party had been.
Yes, I was thinking of...
You see, it's so suddenly this thing's happened that it seems like only yesterday that one was looking at an MP like Dehenna Davison and thinking she's exactly the kind of MP the Tory party needs.
She's kind of, well, she's very pro-Brexit.
She's young.
She's young.
She's no-nonsense.
She tells it like it is, but she's just become another COVID-19 NPC. They're just Yeah, very much so.
And also doing things that are completely unnecessary.
Tweeting out all sorts of virtue signalling nonsense about all sorts of things.
And you just think, why are you doing this?
You've won your seat.
You've got your support.
You've become an MP. Now it's time to be a Conservative.
Yeah.
What are you doing?
Can you remember what the virtue signalling stuff was about?
Oh, it was...
I think it was like, you know, rainbow trans-related...
We're back to that thing, aren't we?
The Conservative MPs tweeting out, rainbow trans bollocks, or...
Oh, happy Eid, everyone.
Or, you know, I hope your fast is going well.
Or even attempting to fast.
Attempting to fast.
That was a particular preoccupation of kind of labour and Lib Dems.
Yes, I'm struggling to fast from...
Yeah, I'll have my...
I'm going to have my bacon sandwich now, and then I'm going to fast for Ramadan.
Yeah, it's...
And it's the kind of thing, you know, on our sides of the argument, we don't hate Muslims, we don't hate trans people, we don't hate gay people.
In fact, some of my soundest conservative friends are gay.
But we don't have to come to virtue signalist bollocks about...
Well, this is it.
I don't think...
The thing that they don't seem to have learnt is that, again, going back to Brexit, the big thing with Brexit was that there was a misrepresentation in the House of Commons between the people who were supposed to represent everybody in the UK, the MPs, and the rest of the country.
There was this big disconnect.
They don't represent us.
They're not familiar with day-to-day life in the rest of the country outside of Westminster.
And yet they've moved past Brexit and they're still showing that, you know, these are not things that people talk about.
People haven't got a problem with all of these things, but it's just not the theme of the day.
It's, I think, sometimes better to say nothing if you haven't really got anything to offer.
And there's plenty that they should be offering, by the way, because our economy is in such a state right now that I think, really, if you're an MP and you want to do something useful, you shouldn't really be bored.
I mean, you shouldn't be looking for these virtue signaling opportunities.
There should be plenty to fill your day right now.
Well, you see, what they're doing is they're after stuff to ostensibly political stuff, like trans rights, whatever, or to take a position on, to give the impression they're doing their job, while studiously avoiding anything that really...
Really matters.
And isn't that the whole problem with politics we've had in the last 20, 30 years?
Yeah, I think you're right.
But I think as well, again, there does seem to be...
A very controlling element to government right now.
It's like black box politics.
I think we've seen it over the lockdown.
We have these scientists and Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab or whoever happens to make an appearance at that ridiculous daily briefing thing where people get questions.
They're flanked by scientists who are like bodyguards.
It's like a bodyguard of lies.
Yeah, and as soon as somebody asks a question, the political side, the politician will take, and then they'll kind of delegate to the scientist to cover the bit that, you know, it's like, could you turn to slide 23, please?
And we think, oh no, okay, I'm going to die.
But you've actually watched these things, have you?
Well, they're on.
They're on in our house.
I don't put it on.
Apparently some people watch them.
Yeah, yeah.
In fact, my dad told me that lots of people watch them.
Insomniacs, yeah.
I've never seen one.
I swear to you, I have never, ever seen one.
Is that bad of me as a journalist?
No, no, not really.
Well, you learn nothing.
I mean, you'll see...
This is stuff that you...
I think you could pick it up within, you know, a 20-second scan of a tweet.
You don't need to sit through it.
I mean, it's so turgid.
But I think this is the point, that they are so controlling...
There probably are Tory MPs out there right now who are thinking, look, just give us some information here.
We want to be able to go back to our local businesses, not necessarily just, you know, Joe Bloggs, because Joe Bloggs has been furloughed on 80% of his salary and has got a south-facing garden and Netflix.
And I mean, I don't mean to be, you know, mean, but let's be honest, you can order anything online online.
And it's quite a nice time to be locked down if you have all of those sort of comforts.
But I think, you know, the local businesses who are at the moment thinking desperately, how can we stay afloat?
Because we've still got to pay our rent.
Yes, OK, we can get grants, but those grants are going to have to be paid back.
We were already operating at a very low margin and we didn't have much tolerance to get through financial difficulty.
Certainly not this, you know, what we're going through now.
Perhaps they're a seasonal business and, you know, we're in a season right now.
And if you miss the boat, I mean, I'm thinking of leisure and tourism.
And those people are going to be writing to their MP, they're going to be emailing their MP, and they're saying, look, we need a path out of this.
And I get the impression that there is a huge disconnect between the few people at the top, around Boris, who are advising and guiding on this...
Exit from lockdown, supposedly.
And, you know, everybody else who wants some answers.
And it's quite disheartening.
I'd be incredibly depressed to be a local business right now.
Yeah.
Well, particularly if it were in...
If you were a pub.
Yeah.
Or a cafe or...
Yeah.
Yeah, as you say, anything that was...
I mean, I wouldn't like to be somebody who'd made most of his years taking us at Glastonbury.
That would be a bit of a blow.
Yeah.
Or Wimbledon.
Yeah.
Yeah, I find it really, really shocking, looking at your list you did of the MPs, how pitifully few there were that were speaking out.
I mean, there's about three aren't there.
Steve Baker?
Steve Baker, you've got Lucy Allen.
Lucy Allen, you see, Lucy Allen, I think she's going to deserve...
Well, how many points did you give her?
She may have been a one or a two.
I think Steve Baker was a one.
And I think there were a couple of others who...
I mean, Ian Duncan Smith was okay.
There were one or two others who were okay, but they've wavered.
I mean, again, you know, they're three or four at best.
So three or four out of how many Conservative MPs?
Well, 365.
That's so shit.
Just for anyone who doesn't know Sedan of C's list, although why you wouldn't know about it, I really don't know.
It's like not knowing about the snake tempted Adam and Eve or that water's wet.
It's that level of common knowledge, yeah.
It's that level of common knowledge.
But yes, the better your war, i.e.
the sounder you are, the lower points you get.
Has there ever been less than zero points?
No, although I think there's a few contenders on the main list.
I think we can come to that.
That could be an exciting thing that people can be looking forward to later on in the podcast.
But for the moment, Lucy Allen, you see, I don't think we can emphasise enough just how magnificently brave she's been.
Yeah, she has been.
She needs a lot of credit.
But I also think that if you go back six months, some of the people who we see at that, well, you don't see because you don't watch it, but the Daily Briefing, people like Dominic Raab and Priti Patel's another one.
Let's suppose I'd done a Brexit soundness list.
They would be ranking very, very well.
They would be scoring very, very well on that.
And yet...
They've got into, well they were in government already, but they've got into senior ministerial positions.
They have a, you know, aside from being the Prime Minister, they have got the biggest sphere of influence that they're going to have.
And yet, what have they done?
We could have anybody there.
They've done nothing.
You're right.
Those of us who put so much faith in Priti, she was our kind of Margaret Thatcher, Mark II. And Dominic Raab, you know, a lot of us were saying, well, you know, I would really...
In an ideal world, Raab would have won the Prime Minister contest because he's really sound.
He's dry and he's got...
But none of these people, none of them has been...
Yeah.
It's so epitly disappointing.
Yeah, and the bit I don't know is to what extent has that spirit or have those elements of sound been crushed out of them?
Yeah.
By the hierarchy, by the civil service, by presumably Boris and his advisors, how much of it is just cowardice?
Because you get into that role and you think, oh, OK, well, it's easy from the sidelines to be a purist, but actually when you get there it's harder and I don't really have the stomach for the fight.
And that bit I don't know.
And that's why I make that point, because the likes of Steve Baker, Lucy Allen...
You know, what would happen if they got into, would they just be another, you know, disappointment?
There is that thing they say about putting people on the payroll, which means giving them a job, working for the government, MPs, backbench MPs, putting them on the payroll and suddenly you buy them.
Yeah.
That's certainly the case.
But do you think, if you or I were MPs, I can't really see us doing that.
Can you?
No.
Well, I'd like to think not.
I mean...
It's that thing.
It's the...
Would you tell the Nazis that you've got Anne Frank hiding upstairs?
Yeah.
Lots of people...
Lots of people would.
She's in the wardrobe.
Yeah.
She's behind the partition.
That should be the test, yeah.
Well, this is what I... My friend...
I've got a friend called Susanna and we often used to...
We used to...
I think I used to play this game with Alan de Botton as well.
We used to judge people.
would they have betrayed the jews or would they have hidden them and i think gradually over the over the decades we've built up a much clearer picture of who would and who wouldn't and basically we now know from the general reaction to lockdown 95 of the british population would have shot the jews they just would have done they you know yeah yeah of course they're in there yeah they wouldn't even even because we've seen this through the through the the stasi shopping your neighbors for taking too much exercise and yeah
And that bit, to me, is the worst of it.
This sort of snitchy, curtain-twitching mentality, you know.
And we go back to libertarian drinks.
I mean, there's a scale of libertarianism, and, you know, I wouldn't like to say that I've met some, what you might call, extreme libertarians.
Yeah, they're weird.
Yeah.
They are weird.
I'm not quite at that.
No, no.
That level.
But I think that the biggest thing for me is that I just don't mind what other people get up to is very much there.
And as long as they're not hurting me or hurting other people...
I'm really uncomfortable with the way people have acted in this whole thing.
The thing when you see images of people walking down a narrow pavement with a stick to denote the social distancing length and you get poked out of the way and people who have recorded people coming out of their house more than the number of times that's allowed by the state.
That's depressing.
It is depressing.
Not least, of course, because it's also completely unnecessary.
And, look, we all went...
We've all wet the bed at some stage.
Well, I mean, I certainly did.
Early on, when I believed the stuff coming out of China or perhaps when I didn't know the reasons behind why China and Northern Italy were bad.
I think that was fairly well cleared up by the Dolores Cahill podcast, for one.
When COVID-19 was an unknown quantity, and it could theoretically have been Spanish flu, Mark II, then I think we had reasons to worry.
But there's so much evidence now that it's all just a hoax, basically.
Yeah.
It's bad.
It's like a bout of flu, and it can be bad if it affects you in the wrong way.
But otherwise...
Yeah, I agree.
I think, I mean, and again, you know, this thing about, you know, lockdown sceptics, I don't want it.
I don't want to be ill.
I mean, of course not.
Nobody does.
And particularly if it's a new disease, a new virus.
But I think, you know, common sense took us a certain path.
And then I can't remember what the date was, where it felt like the whole government machine went into meltdown.
And apparently the general public led this because the general public wanted to be locked down, which I can't help thinking, well, that was slightly fueled by what the media were doing, by the way.
I think so.
I think when we come to analyse what...
What caused this collective bout of madness which led to the most unnecessary government policy in history causing the biggest economic disaster in history?
And I think people are going to want to know why that was.
I think the media is going to be...
Probably number one on the list, even more than the politicians.
And I don't understand it because, you know, I know people who own newspapers and I like them.
I know senior journalists and they don't seem to be very, very stupid.
And yet, somehow, collectively, our media has just...
They've stoked this hysteria.
Yeah.
And they haven't run any counter-arguments.
Okay, so you get controlled opposition in the form of certain columnists.
Certain sort of licensed right-wing voices have been allowed to suggest that, well, hang on a second, this isn't the whole story.
But the news pages have, throughout, been relentlessly hysterical.
Yeah, I, again, I mean, there are some theories on that.
I think from the point of view of the TV channel, so I'm talking Sky, BBC, I mean, ITV, Channel 4, but let's be honest, Channel 4 is a bit of a, I mean, I don't really take it seriously.
It's like CNN. It's like mini CNN. Yeah, I think that there is a big ego involved.
And the ego is that they saw themselves as the most important element in this country.
And I think they took a battering over Brexit.
They threw the kitchen sink at stopping Brexit through the way that they were portraying it, the people they interviewed.
I mean, if you were mad enough to go onto one of those news channels and get a Q&A from Kay Burley or Adam Bolton or any of these people, I mean, that took some doing because it was just relentless.
And yet they lost.
And yet here is a golden opportunity for them to come back and A, prove that in their mind that they're the most important influencer in the country, because of course they're what we see the whole time.
They're the people putting the questions to the government.
And also falls through a bit of their narrative, which is the sort of, you know, they quite like the big states.
They do like control and authoritarianism.
And they saw a lot of that going with Brexit.
And I think this is a big opportunity for it to come back.
And then that's kind of my take on it.
But then I think you have individuals who even at that level have surpassed themselves with their behalf.
I mean, Piers Morgan is the best example.
How many points did Piers Morgan get in your scale?
Well, I think the last update he was over 800.
That's quite impressive on a scale of 1 to 10.
Yeah, 10 being the worst.
800.
About 800.
But I mean, that was the last one.
I've yet to update it.
I think he could get more.
Yeah, I think so.
I don't want to prejudge.
No, no, I think I'm going to have to do that thing where you can't actually put the number.
It's like a formula to denote that it's a number that's beyond...
Well, basically infinity, yeah.
That's good.
Yeah, yeah, you could do that.
So just tell me about Piers Morgan, because...
Piers Morgan, I think, up to probably the general election last year was, I suppose, the sort of quintessential yes-no game character, right?
In that...
He would have his moments where you thought, yeah, okay, yeah, he might be a yes.
So, for instance, he said that he voted remain, but he was very much, well, no, we need to respect this, you have to carry this out, which was, in fairness to him, it was not particularly common.
But I personally never felt particularly comfortable with him.
I felt that he would never trust him.
No, it's a bit like Fred West pulling you out of a swimming pool when you're drowning.
And you're sort of grateful, but you don't really want him to be your mate afterwards.
No, no.
Particularly if he pulls you over a patio, for example, to dry out.
Exactly.
Or down into a cellar.
You wouldn't be thinking, no.
No, no.
So he was always a bit of a dodgy character.
And then suddenly, right at the start of this, he had a complete meltdown.
I mean, he was cranking everything up to sort of, you know, levels of hyperbole.
You know, this is the worst thing ever.
You know, this is like the Black Death on steroids.
Yeah.
He changed his profile picture to an NHS logo, I noticed, on Twitter.
And he's seen himself as the absolute champion of the NHS and the weekly clapping and the...
The lockdown should be harder, it should be stricter, it should be longer.
You know, government ministers who appeared on his show in the early days, I think the government has said they're no longer going to send ministers on to talk to him and he doesn't want them.
But in the early days, he was just flogging them to death over this, saying, you know, you need to be...
More draconian with it.
And he's just turned...
I mean, he's just horrendous.
And I think this is part of the thing with the list.
I'm very tempted from time to time to see the likes of Piers Morgan post something and think, OK, I'm so incensed by what he's...
It's so absurd what he's posted.
I'm going to reply and actually give him the...
Validity of having actually a response.
And I think, no, it's that absurd.
It doesn't really warrant a response.
It doesn't dignify a response.
And so all I'm going to do is just be vaguely satirical with my...
Because what can I do, you know?
I agree with...
Piers Morgan, I'm so disappointed in him.
I would never, ever wish to be in the same room as him again.
Literally, I think he's that bad.
There are some bad people in the world, really bad people.
I think Bill Gates is one of them.
I think George Soros is one of them.
I think Piers Morgan is one of them.
There's a few more.
People who I just think are fundamentally conducive to ill.
They're forces for evil, basically.
And I was asked, actually, at the weekend whether I wanted to come on the breakfast show.
Oh, really?
Well, yeah, there was a nice PR girl, a nice girl who does the booking for the show, and she said, do you want to come on?
And I checked the name of the show, and it was the same one that Piers Morgan's on.
Right.
And I just replied, lol, no thanks.
Yeah.
Because the problem is that one thing I've learned from Interallia, my Andrew Neil experience, is that you never ever want to put yourself in a position where they're holding the reins and the best you can do is to...
Your best escape route is to disrupt, but generally, if you play the game with them, then they've got the whip hand and you're probably going to be at a...
Well, you're inevitably going to be at a disadvantage.
And in that situation, I mean, he just sort of...
Oh, he's awful.
He's awful.
Yeah, he is awful.
Funny enough, actually, that's another thing.
The mask seems to be slipping with him beyond just this particular situation.
I mean, I've noticed he's turned on Trump because I think he was a big supporter of Trump, actually.
Oh, yeah, he was.
He was one of his USPs.
He was the only TV journalist in the UK who could get...
Quality interview time with Donald Trump because they were mates.
And now he's got rid of that.
Yeah, he has.
But you're right.
I mean, he's...
I would have liked to have seen you on that program, by the way.
That would have been entertaining.
But I'm with you on why you wouldn't do it.
You'd like to have seen children fed to the wolves, wouldn't you?
In Circus Maximus.
Well, no, it's more that I like to see different people on trolling.
I'd like to see you there with a bit of a smirk trying to wind him up.
But I know that you wouldn't have had the opportunity to do that.
That's the problem.
Yeah, he rants at people.
And even, and this is where I say I don't think he was sound to begin with, going back, there was a point last year where there was some controversy over Churchill.
There was somebody coming out saying that Winston Churchill was a white supremacist and...
He was Hitler.
He was Hitler, basically, yeah.
Churchill was Hitler.
Yeah, he was.
Literally, yeah.
He was literally, yeah.
I can't remember who it was.
And anyway, this came out in the media and Piers Morgan challenged this guy to come on to his breakfast show.
And he...
I mean, okay, I was with Piers Morgan in terms of we both agreed that Churchill wasn't Hitler.
But he made the most pathetic attempt at trying to argue his case.
It should have been so easy to make that argument and yet he didn't have any charm.
He just shouted this guy down and I thought, well actually, you've not really done the cause much good here.
To be fair, Dan...
I've just been, I feel really embarrassed about this because I'm supposed to be kind of literate and stuff.
I've spent the last three months, three months reading one book, which is Andrew Roberts' biography of Churchill.
I'm nearly at the end now.
And as you'll be aware, there are lots of talking points about Churchill's life, which the left has seized on as evidence that he's racist, that he was behind the bombing of Dresden, that he was behind the Bengal famine.
And of course, him destroying the Greek communists in December 1945.
For they having been our allies up until that point.
And unless you're on top of the detail, unless you know, for example, that he was barely aware of Dresden, that the area bombing was the policy and we see from his notes at the time that it wasn't a thing.
Or that you need to know all the details about the Bengal famine.
I was on a...
In the days when I used to do the BBC, which I won't anymore, I mean, absolutely, it's it.
I'll tell you what, the final window that closed for me today, when I read that they're cancelling Eggheads.
Oh, really?
And I quite...
Even though Jeremy Vine's gone a bit, he's gone a lot more political recently.
Which I think is wrong.
I mean, he was much better when he was apolitical.
I wanted to go on eggheads with a team because A, I wanted to take on the eggheads and B, I just thought it would have been quite fun.
But now that the BBC's closed out because they've decided that they want young people, yeah, like young people give a shit about the BBC... What was I saying?
Yeah.
In the days when I used to do BBC programmes, I went on that programme Sunday morning.
It's got a kind of quasi-religious theme.
And there was a discussion about history and should we be taught positive history about Britain or negative history.
And there was an Islamist there.
I mean, you know, a kind of borderline ISIS supporter.
And he was banging on about the Bengal famine.
And I didn't have the facts at my fingertips because it's quite obscure.
And it happened in the war.
It was during the...
1943, was it?
Or 1944?
It was towards the end, I think, when there was a lot going on.
A lot going on.
And there were Japanese submarines torpedoing cargo ships.
It wasn't simply a question of, yeah, let's give everything to the starving...
Yeah.
I mean, there was a hail of machine gun decisions that had to happen in quick succession.
I mean, that Churchill...
I mean, he's done a fantastic job, by the way.
Good old Roberts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think part of the thing for Churchill was that he was very cavalier.
That was the theme that came through the book.
There was one point where he was in charge of the Admiralty in World War I, and because of the way that Gallipoli went, he lost that role.
And although he was still an MP, he said, well, that's it.
I'm not much use here.
I'm going off to fight.
That's right.
That's what we'd have done, mate.
Well, of course.
Yeah.
But still, I mean, you know, and then you have this sequence where he's essentially in the trenches and, you know, there is a succession of near misses and he's shrugging his shoulders thinking, well, you know, if I get taken out, I'm no better than those around me.
And And then, of course, a few months later, he's back in one of his wonderful houses, smoking cigars, drinking champagne, and he had this sort of carefree attitude to life that I think he took into World War II, and I think that really winds people up on the left, because, hey, this is war.
You have to be, you know, you have to be ashen-faced and miserable and treat the thing like it's Gormenghast for years on end, and you can't possibly have a bath in the afternoon, and Enjoy a brandy because of the stress of the situation.
So in a way he trolled the left like Donald Trump does.
Even back then.
Maybe he was more of a Trump character than anything else.
I like that completely random Churchill digression, we both having read the book.
But it wasn't what I wanted to talk about.
I can't remember what I did want to talk to you about.
How did we get there?
Well, maybe we skirted round in and out of the list.
We were on Piers Morgan at one point.
Yes, we were.
So, can I just go right, right back?
Because I got distracted by Captain Constanta, as I do.
Is there any opportunity to mention vampires?
I kind of like to squeeze it in.
What I meant to say was the two Remainers who very much impressed me were Matthew Parris, who'd frankly lost it completely.
I mean, every column he did in The Spectator was about why he was...
Embittered about Remain having lost.
But he's been absolutely rock solid on the lockdown.
He thinks it's a bad idea.
But Lord Sumption.
Jonathan Sumption, again, one of those lords that...
I mean, the judiciary was completely on the side of Remain, wasn't it?
To the point where we felt like we'd got the kind of legal system akin to a banana republics.
But Lord Sumption has been immensely sound.
Yes, yes he has.
I think that's quite heartening because, yeah, if you go back probably, it may have been a year ago, it felt like democracy had been sort of outsourced to the courts in this country.
And not only, not any old court, the sort of courts that Blair had set up in the style of, you know, the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court, Blair Art Invention, yes.
Yeah, it's like we want to be...
Not only are we in the EU, but we're going to replicate the way the EU works in this country.
So, yes, that is heartening that they're not all kind of people who are going to ride roughshops over democracy and politics.
What was the name of...
I can't remember her name now.
She had the spider's brooch.
Now everyone's got the spider image.
Yeah, yeah.
She's not sound, is she?
No, no.
I don't want to rain on your parade there, Dan, but we've just named one judge.
One retired judge.
Yeah, I mean, I'm clutching at straws.
So Paris, Sumption.
They're not on Twitter though.
So the list so far, and I have only, I think, the only person I've so far added to the list who's not on Twitter is Rod.
Because he's wobbled.
Well, I think, do you think, before we do, before we come to the wobblers, because I think that's very sad, we're going to have to, we're going to have to bite the bullet, I think, on this one.
Yeah.
And there are a few names in the Hall of Shame.
Yeah.
They haven't got their names on the notice boards, on the prefects or the Victor Ludorum or anything, have they?
They've just, in gold letters.
No.
No.
So the way that the list has evolved, you've got goodies and baddies, essentially.
Now the baddies, and this is where I'm going to have to restructure the list because it just doesn't work properly anymore.
The baddies, well, they're kind of all baddies, right?
So you're not really expecting anybody to be sound in there, and of course they're not.
So it's just a whole list of the worst people.
On Twitter, I think of the sound people.
You know, you have people, for instance, like Julia, who has not been great.
Explain why she's not been great.
Well, she...
I say she's not been great.
Maybe it's unfair to pick her out, but she's wobbled.
I've seen some things where she's been...
In favour of lockdown.
Already a black mark.
Yeah, exactly.
And not really...
I mean, she has a radio show, which I don't really watch, but you see the snippets on Twitter.
And if people challenge her, she's very...
Wow, she's very...
It's bedwetting about the whole, if we come back too quickly, and I think particularly over Cummings, you know, I mean, my view, I think, broadly speaking, I mean, you wrote a few articles over Cummings.
I think we agree that, you know, he's been, I mean, if he's been the architect or one of the architects of this lockdown, then that's his black mark, not the fact that he...
He broke the lockdown.
He broke the lockdown.
Yeah, that's so pathetic.
Who wouldn't break the lockdown in their right mind?
Yeah, right.
But she's focused on the fact that he broke the lockdown and he therefore needs to go.
And yeah, there's been a few things like that.
So that's not great.
I think you talked about Andrew Neil earlier.
Andrew Neil's been awful.
And I wouldn't say he's wobbled.
He's just basically been regurgitating...
Government talking points.
Yeah, but it's like, here's how many people died yesterday.
Isn't it awful?
And by the way, here's how many people died in this other country.
Isn't it awful?
It's like, yeah, okay, well, have you got anything else to add?
I mean, this just seems to be a depressing list of death.
Do you think it's a function of his age?
Possibly.
He's sort of in an at-risk-ish category.
Yeah, perhaps.
Yeah.
But you're right.
We've always thought of Andrew as being this fearless person.
And he's just been a bit kind of...
And also ready to question the official narrative.
And he's just become a, what, sort of government shill, really?
Yes, effectively.
Yeah, he could just be a cabinet minister right now.
He could.
Yeah.
And so, yeah.
And then, of course, on the list as well, you have people who are not necessarily media pundits or commentariat, but they are...
They're the sort of Twitter celebrities, I like to call them, and there's been some good performers and some not quite good performers.
I think let's go through, talk me through the bad performers, because I think that's more interesting in a way, and explain why you find this shocking or surprising or whatever.
Well, I think, who can I pick out who's had a really bad war?
Old Holborn, who has got quite a following.
I believe he's somewhere in Eastern Europe.
And he tweets out, he's supposedly a libertarian rebel who's in favour of, you know, small state and freedom and all this sort of thing.
And he's...
Really been dismal over this.
I wonder whether it's because he regards the country he now lives in as being superior to this country, and they seem to have a lockdown.
But...
Yeah, it just feels like those values of soundness and being robust and having a bit of backbone and a bit of context to things.
Yeah, he's lost it, really.
So he's scoring badly.
Okay, so Old Holman, he's only really known to kind of Twitter obsessive.
What about the names?
Come on, because I think you can do this, I can't, because a lot of these people are my friends, and it's like...
Oh, I see.
The thing is, Dan, it's a bit like...
War is hell, yeah?
We agree with that.
And we know that courage is a wasting asset, okay?
And we know that every man has his breaking point, or woman.
But...
And yet, there's something, you know, you don't condemn them exactly, but it's very disappointing when somebody holding the foxhole next to you suddenly starts blubbering and wailing for their mother and then runs away.
Which is what's happened.
Go on.
I'll give you two examples of people who started badly and one has gone on to get very much worse and the other has gone on to get very much better.
So I would say Alison Pearson and Isabel Oakeshott both started, I would say, questionably.
In other words...
You know, full of panic.
We need more lockdown.
This situation is terrible.
You know, basically bedwetting.
And Isabel since then has carried on down that trajectory.
Everything that I see, at least, has been questionable.
Alison Pearson, on the other hand...
She has really pulled it together.
She's written some really sound articles, particularly in the last couple of weeks over the return to school and the fact that we need to pull ourselves together around children and the risk to children having this virus and the school environment.
And she's gone from probably, I would say, a seven or an eight on the scale up to probably one.
I think she was one at last time.
It's always...
Nice, isn't it?
When somebody who's...
Well, somebody who's been given the white feather, basically, then goes out to the Sudan and redeems themselves at the Battle of Omdaman.
Yes.
Or wherever.
Yeah.
I think Alison would appreciate that analogy.
So Alison is definitely one of them.
The lesser version of that is, I was reading the Telegraph business pages the other day and I saw that Jeremy Warner has gone from bedwetter to lockdown sceptic.
I mean, okay, he's an economics editor.
He ought to bloody have known that four weeks ago, but better late than never.
That's the thing that heartens me, because we can all be wrong about things, but it's the U-turn and the ability to think about it and reflect on it and say, do you know what, actually...
I need to rethink this.
My theory is that too many people have the ego that doesn't allow for that change of course.
Politicians especially.
Politicians especially, yeah.
This is one of Peter Hitchens' points, isn't it?
That until the government admits that it's made a huge mistake, we can never get back to normal.
We can never have sensible policy.
The entirety of government policy now is based on the idea that coronavirus is still a thing, still a threat, when we know it's not.
We know it's just not a problem.
And it's not a question of, oh, do we follow the WHO recommendation of one metre or do we do two metres?
The distance should be no metres.
We should open everywhere now.
Yeah.
But you're never going to get the government to admit that because they're still busy doing reputation management, aren't they?
Yeah, they are.
And the other factor in this is Boris, because Boris, I think, again, you go back pre-election, a lot of us had really high hopes for Boris because I think we saw all his good points.
Yes, we did.
And probably were a bit blind to some of the negative points.
I mean, I hold myself in that.
No, me too.
I was terrible about ignoring his negative points.
Yeah, and he's...
If you think of someone like Thatcher, she was essentially a signpost and not a weathervane.
She was always pointing in the same direction.
In other words, she had a view and...
If that view happened to grate a little bit with certain members of the public, she would be quite happy going out there and defending her view.
I think with Boris, he just wants to be loved too much.
Yes.
And I wonder whether that's a horrible combination of factors to bring into this lockdown period that we've been in.
And of course, right at the critical moment, he gets ill, really badly ill.
And you don't really know what was going through his mind when he was in a hospital, an NHS hospital, surrounded by NHS angels.
They are angels, aren't they?
Yes, they are.
I'm glad you said that.
Large angels, but yes, yes.
But at least you can see them.
But, yeah, I think all of that came together and now, of course, he's going to be influenced by angels.
Yes, exactly.
They're spinning around his head like in a Tintin cartoon where Snowy bashes his head and you just see all these kind of stars.
Well, now I'm thinking of more like those sort of cherubs in those Renaissance...
Oh, yeah.
Putty.
Larger.
Oh, I see.
Yes, yes.
But are they blowing trumpets and stuff, or what?
Possibly, yes.
Yeah.
Only on Thursdays, though.
Yeah.
Nice one.
Yeah.
You're right.
So, the government's not going to bring...
Yeah, I was just working my way through the...
Getting back to our...
Because we like a digression.
Yes, yeah.
Try and get back on track.
Yeah.
So, who would you say has been the biggest disappointment?
Somebody who you thought would have been really sound on this and just really hasn't been fighting the fight?
Biggest disappointment?
I think...
I would say the biggest disappointments are probably on the MP list because I think, in all honesty, on the main list, what I'm seeing, apart from those one or two exceptions that we've talked about, we're seeing people using the situation to force through their own agenda.
So if you are, for example, Owen Jones...
This is an opportunity to tell everybody that we need socialism because socialism is working now.
If you are somebody who's in, you know, in favour of a big state and to sort of take democracy away like a Lord Adonis type of character, then you're going to be using this to force free.
So I think, largely speaking, you've just seen people go full on themselves.
But again, I think going back to the MPs, I'm incredibly disappointed with Boris, with Raab, with Priti Patel, with the vast majority of people who would call themselves Brexiteers and be championing for the sort of...
Small state, low regulation, pro-Brexit type of world we wanted to go to.
This is not it.
We are going so far away from that right now.
So those are my, I would say, my biggest disappointments are with those people because I kind of expected much of the same for a lot of the people that you see on the list who frankly are always looking to force their own agenda on.
I'll tell you who's been really losing it in a good way.
And that's Martin Durkin.
And I always think Martin is probably about the closest person politically to where I am.
He's a classical liberal.
He believes in free markets and stuff.
And, of course, he made Brexit the movie.
And Brexit the movie was a remarkable project for a number of reasons, not least because it managed to make a very compelling argument for Brexit without even bringing up immigration at all.
And Martin...
And I did too, to a degree, saw Brexit as an opportunity for us to become the Hong Kong, well, actually not the Hong Kong anymore, the Singapore of Europe.
And we were going to be regulation light, we were going to be...
The economy was just going to be on rocket fuel.
It was going to be fantastic.
And he's been watching the government go in the opposite direction in this fake crisis.
But what he's also presumably noticed, as I've noticed, is that the Brexiteers, who I thought shared this goal, you know, just like autonomy and stuff and prosperity...
I thought working class people in the North and the Midlands got this and that it was only kind of bleeding heart liberals in the cities who had the NHS religion and stuff.
But it now turns out that a lot of people who I thought were my allies were in fact just statists.
They just wanted to replace the European super state with a kind of authoritarian British state.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think, and this is the issue, again, I come back to you with Brexit, was that there were so many reasons for people to want Brexit.
It wasn't, you know, for some people it was about immigration, for some people it was about sovereignty, whatever that meant, but basically taking control.
For some people it meant the financial opportunity and the economic opportunity, and for other people it represented all of those things.
I think probably a lot of people who have voted Tory for the first time, going back to the Red War voters, I just think that perhaps because the economy has been sort of almost, they see it as sort of frozen in ice or just paused and they feel like the government's got their back on this, Well, who cares about the economy?
We can just press play again and then everything will carry on.
And I think that the economy, from some people's perspective, is seen as this sort of thing where, well, you know, it's kind of a load of posh people in bowler hats and, you know, they've got the Financial Times under their arm.
And, you know, they probably put their feet up on dead servants at home.
And they were bailed out by the government and they caused austerity.
Yes, exactly.
So, like, why would you want to help the economy?
Yeah.
And I think, you know, again, the thing that I have with this, I mean, this thing about key workers, for instance, you know, it doesn't help calling people key workers because it gives this idea of a sort of hierarchy within the economy where some people have this degree of worthiness And they're mostly in the public sector, damn it.
They're mostly in the public sector, but then there's certain areas where the government decide, okay, that's important.
Like supermarkets, for example, early on, when everyone was buying up toilet roll and cooking oil or whatever it was that we were running out of, you know, suddenly supermarkets and delivery drivers.
And that's fine.
I mean, those people are incredibly important.
But my point would be...
The company who makes luxury goods, for example, high-end things, they're just as important because they pay tax and they employ people and they buy materials to manufacture things which has a downstream impact and all of these things are contributing to GDP. And, you know, I saw, I think, last month, the government effectively didn't take any VAT at all.
By the time everything was taken into account, they made no money off VAT. And it's like, whoa, people need to be talking about this.
This seriously matters because, you know, if you do value all of these...
I mean, I have a view which I think is probably similar to yours, which is I think we can do a lot better than the NHS or our NHS. But even if you take the view that the NHS is important, well, how are you going to pay for it?
I mean, you're not going to have tax receipts to the same level that you did before.
People are going to be working harder and longer.
They're going to be squeezed.
And these are all conversations that people either don't want to have or probably are being encouraged not to have.
Yes.
And, you know, I think, you know, the conversations I have with people who don't hold my view about the whole lockdown situation, I keep saying, look, you will be thinking along these lines.
You might not be thinking it now, but this is going to come...
This is the story of my career, Dan, and certainly my investing as well.
I'm always way, way too ahead of the cycle.
Right.
You know, I mean, you can be right at the wrong time and...
Yeah.
It's next to being wrong.
That's the problem.
Yeah, you're right.
I mean, so many people are going to be talking in this way in a few months' time, and they're going to be asking questions like, well, how do we get into this mess?
And the answer, of course, is, duh, you idiots.
You were agitating to have the lockdown kept longer because you believed all the government propaganda.
Yeah.
You gave them...
And I hope, I really hope that people realise the impact that collectively they had on that decision-making process because it's not as if there is a political party that's going to buy their way out of this.
I mean, let's look at the opposition.
They want more lockdown.
It's like saying, well, you know, we've gone socialist and we've got an opposition who want to go full on communist.
I mean, that's the choice we've got.
Yeah.
So, you know, if you fast forward to the next election, whenever that happens, there are no easy answers there.
And I think what I would like to see is people taking a little bit more ownership of their decision making.
I mean, that ultimately, for me, being vaguely libertarian is about that.
It's making sure that the government stay as much out of your life as possible, and you can just get on with things, make your own decisions, come to your own conclusions.
Okay, there's a few areas that you do rely on the government, that's the way it is, but you want to keep that to the minimum.
Right now, our entire lives are being dictated by government policy.
Even this law they're proposing, I don't think it's been passed yet, where they've effectively made casual sex illegal.
Yeah.
Which is extraordinary, isn't it?
Yes.
It's like...
Well, isn't it in somebody else's home?
Yeah.
Well, no, in your home as well.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, but I mean, aren't people trying to find a field or a path?
Yeah, you can do it in the tree.
But then that's probably illegal anyway.
It's probably illegal anyway.
Yeah.
But this is what, in my podcast with Dr.
John Lee.
Have you heard that one yet?
I've not heard that.
I'm one behind, yeah.
But he shares this sense of bewilderment I've got that...
We've gone through the looking glass.
Everything is topsy-turvy.
Everything is completely bonkers.
And instead of having 350 MPs on the Conservative benches going, this is madness.
We're destroying the economy for nothing.
We've instead got golf clubs saying things like, you know, when my mother wants to play a round of golf.
Now, this is.
When she wants to play a round of golf, they have to phone out the clubhouse, they have to book a slot, they then get to the car park, then call the clubhouse and say, right, we're at the golf club now.
Right, well, in five minutes, please proceed to point A.
And when you get to point A, you'll find some hand sanitizer.
Please use that.
Do not under any circumstance touch another player's balls.
Yeah.
On and on it goes.
And you're thinking, how many people...
Sounds lovely.
I mean, yeah.
Who wants to play a round of golf in that?
And you know, instead of the hole, they've got sand.
Right.
So that you don't have to...
There doesn't have to be a pin.
Yeah.
And so on.
But how many people in the world do you think have contracted coronavirus during a golf game?
A round of golf in the open.
Yes.
You play golf outside, don't you?
That makes a difference too.
Who, by the way, have you been particularly impressed by in the...
Well, yeah, I think people have fought this war in different ways.
I think the people that you see at the top of the list, I mean, we've mentioned Peter Hitchens.
He's been fantastic in very much his own way.
He's not, I mean, you've described him, you know, he's not somebody you'd necessarily...
Want to share a panel with because he's always so, you know, he's not looking to forge alliances with anybody.
Certainly not.
I would never be on a panel.
I wouldn't like to be on a panel with him because he would stab you.
Yeah.
But I think he probably would be okay in a foxhole.
Yeah.
David Starkey's not, again, because I don't think he's on Twitter, I don't think he's on the list, but he was fascinating with, I think, Peter Whittle talking through the, almost like the history, I suppose, of how the government came to the decision.
And then he was, in a very David Starkey theatrical way, referencing all these points in history that you can say there are some parallels with.
He's been excellent.
Back to the Twitter world, Laura Perrins has been brutally magnificent.
Laura's been?
Yeah, she has.
I mean, she's relentless.
She's sworn by a lot.
Quite scary, actually.
Quite scary.
You wouldn't want to wrong Laura Perrins.
No.
No, absolutely not.
So she's got a very good...
In fact, I think she's head girl at the moment.
She is head girl.
She is head girl, isn't she?
And she's very strict.
Yeah, nobody's messing with Laura.
But she's quite good.
I think she's quite good at lax and...
What are the other games that girls play?
Lacrosse.
Yeah, lacrosse, yeah.
Netball and rounders.
She's really good at rounders.
Hits it out of the park, I believe.
Yeah.
I thought you were going for all the games where it's short skirts and...
Well, that's a given.
Yeah.
So Laura, head girl, she's been good.
Hector.
Hector Drummond.
Yeah, Hector's been...
And again, he's a Third Wednesday guy and I've met Hector a few times.
He's...
He's a very unassuming...
Soft-spoken?
Yeah, very softly spoken.
If you have a conversation with him, he listens.
He's definitely not an opinionated guy, but he has done some fantastic...
I mean, I've submitted something on his website.
I know he's done a lot with Toby...
Young on his Lockdown Skeptics website and he's just fantastic.
He's also got a great manner on Twitter.
I mean, whereas Laura's sort of brutal and to the point, he never loses his cool.
He's very, very calm with people.
He'll interpret the facts and he'll give his view.
So he's quite rightly head boy, deservedly so.
Yes.
I was thinking at this point, you know what, we're going to talk a bit more, but I'm actually going to say, if you want to listen to the next bit of this podcast, you should go to my Patreon.
I mean, because I'm not going to put it all out.
I know it's cruel, but at the same time, I kind of think...
I should put it in a nice way.
Look, please support me on Patreon because I'm lovely and it's going really well and, you know, community really, like, you know, I call it Café d'Ellingpot.
It's great, isn't it?
You're a member.
I am, yes, and you've reminded me, actually, you put something out there earlier that I was going to respond to and I thought, no, I'll mention that earlier.
You were talking about subscribers to Patreon.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I was worried about it, but actually it turns out at the beginning of the month people drop out anyway.
Yes, exactly.
That was going to be one of my points.
But no, it is fantastic.
Yeah, I think it's like, you know, well, I'd say Spectator's loss is all about game.
Okay, so I've still got my TV column on Spectator, but I haven't got the Me column.
And I'm not going to whine or bitch about that, except to say...
I do miss having the opportunity every other week to write a thousand words on any topic, which is a kind of skill I've honed over the years.
And sometimes it's about stuff like...
Well, sometimes it's about politics, about climate change, whatever.
But sometimes it's random stuff like...
About my car, or lack of car at the moment, or about the time last weekend when I gave my dad a square of hash chocolate, and at 85 he had his first major trip.
It feels really weird writing this stuff up.
Okay, so I've got just over 400 subscribers at the moment.
And normally, you know, when you're writing The Spectator, you're writing for, well, they've got a big circulation now, I think 75,000 or something.
It does feel unnatural, deliberately restricting your material.
You know, I'm not going to put it out elsewhere.
But at the same time, I think people who support me deserve special, special rewards.
So you get to read my shit when it was in other words.
So, most of my stuff I'm going to keep out there free.
YouTube and Apple, what's it called?
iTunes and Podbean and so on, because I believe in that.
And I know there's some people who haven't got the money, especially now with the depression that's coming our way.
But, part of me thinks, I believe in markets, free markets.
And I think if you provide a surface, you kind of, people should pay for it.
Yeah, absolutely.
So there's my thought.
So I'm ending this podcast now for the free bit.
And then Dan and I are going to carry on talking a bit more for subscribers only.
I've never done that before.
Thanks, Dan.
Thanks for coming here.
And yes, and thanks for listening, everyone.
Bye.
You could hear the keyboard clatter as his thoughts went round and round.
Challenging the lefties, his arguments always sound.
Sitting at his computer, special friend badge on his chest, his name was Daniel and he was the rudest tweeter in the West.
Now Daniel had a hero, a man known as James Dean.
He lived down in Northamptonshire and liked to drink twist tea.
Some would say he led Dan astray as regarded as potty mouth, but others say he was born that way and he grew up in the South.
His name was Daniel.
And he was the rudest tweeter in the West.
Then one day disaster struck in the form of Wuhan flu.
Dan was stuck at home all day with bugger all to do.
One night on the sofa he fell asleep for an hour or two and woke to find his wife were put on, have I got news for you, it startled Daniel.
And he was the rudest tweeter in the West.
Now Daniel saw his nemesis staring out from the TV, a man called Ian Hislop from the fucking BBC. When Daniel heard the left-wing turd he blew up in a rage and wrote cunt and fucking bollocks all over his Twitter page.
The lefties couldn't handle it.
They challenged Dan online.
But Dan had had six beers that night and a couple of bottles of wine.
They suggested you watch something else.
That really riled Dan.
When they said don't pay your licence fee, the shit really hit the fan.
He blew his top, did Daniel.
And became the rudest tweeter in the West.
Next morning on Dan's Twitter page, something wasn't right.
120 people had blocked him overnight.
Some people in his WhatsApp group also took offence.
But luckily, one brave man jumped to his defence.
His name was Simon.
He encouraged the rudest tweeter in the West.
This time it seemed that Daniel's gob had landed him in the soup.
It even caused Dick Dellinghol's moustache to start to droop.
Was Dan condemned to tweeting without ever saying fuck?
They'd rather be a sweary git than turn into a cuck.
He tried to use some other words like pants and tits and poo, but when it comes to the BBC, only fucking cunt will do.
Watching all his P's and Q's would cause him such distress.
He might as well wear a rainbow flag and clap the NHS. Who says that profanity is really such a crime?
Would they expect him to keep it clean whilst watching Question Time?
So Daniel made the pledge that night with his hand upon his chest.
He'd carry on with his potty mouth and bollocks to the rest.
Happy birthday, Daniel!
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