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Aug. 9, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:11:15
Madeline Grant
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Welcome to the Denning Poll with me, James Denning Poll.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
I mean, number one, she's a girl.
And we don't get many girls on the show.
I mean, it's kind of sexist.
Not deliberately, but it is.
And...
Secondly, she is a kind of...
You're an emissary from my childhood, Mads.
You are.
Because we've got these connections, haven't we?
Yeah, we have.
So I believe that you were friends with my older brother, Rupert, back in the day.
And Camilla.
And Camilla, yeah, of course.
My sister.
Yeah, because they're my half-siblings.
They're a little older than me.
We all get on brilliantly.
And I've actually, my brother once showed me a photo of you and he, I think when you're both teenagers, in Devon.
And I think it was taken by one Dave Cameron, if I've got that right.
This is what I was told.
Do you know what?
That might well be the day.
There is that photograph of me and Dave Cameron and a few others by the, at Bantham, at the, you can recognise the wall.
What's the, is it the sloop?
Is that the pub at Bantham?
Yeah, it's still there.
Best pub, I just love it there.
Because they still live there, so I go visit them a lot.
Bantham, I think, is my favourite.
Well, it's one of the places I like.
When I'm down in Sorkum, because my uncle's got a place then, you know, my uncle knows your dad plays golf with him.
So it's a very small world, isn't it?
It's so bloody middle class.
No, I tell you, Mads, you're quite young, aren't you?
How old are you?
27.
A child, yeah, a child.
What you'll realise when you get older is that the world gets smaller and smaller and everyone knows everybody else.
Like, for example, I was thinking about this just now.
I go riding, when my arm isn't wrecked as it is at the moment, but I go riding And the other day I went riding with Max Hastings's grandchildren and with his ex-wife.
He was my editor.
You can imagine this future where you connect socially with people or where your university contemporaries are now kind of prime minister or in the cabinet.
It's weird.
It does actually happen.
And you'll sort of take it for granted.
Is that enjoyable when the world contracts like that?
Or is it just a bit odd?
Or is it fun?
I don't know.
I mean, I'm a bit worried about the country if my university contemporaries become Prime Minister.
It's interesting.
It's useful from a kind of journalistic perspective because you get a handle on...
It's also kind of...
It's like the bit in The Wizard of Oz where the curtain is pulled away and you see the levers and you realise that actually...
The world is not as sophisticated and wonderful as you thought it was, because if crap-ish people like your contemporaries from university are now running the country, you think, hang on a second, this isn't right, these people are just ordinary people, you know, they're not...
Because I think when you're younger, you imagine that politicians and stuff are going to be cleverer than us, yeah?
Yeah, and that's always the way, actually, when...
Working a job, you see people who think are probably a bit crap doing really well and that actually gives you a great deal of confidence because you're like, if so-and-so who's full of shit is essentially earning a lot more than me, then I could do what they do sort of thing.
And actually being on the inside of it, you see the whole, as you said, the Wizard of Oz thing, how the whole workings are.
And it's, yeah.
Actually, you're an interesting case.
I think you are one of my When you get to be an older journalist, you look at the younger generation of up-and-coming journalists and you think, you bastards, I hate you, you horrible little Arabist, no talents.
I don't look at you that way.
I really love your stuff.
I think you wrote brilliantly, eruditely, you're absolutely bang on politically.
I love all that.
Why am I telling you this?
Yes, I I'm telling you this because, actually, another thing you're going to find in life, and this is one of the...
Sorry, I'm sounding like, you know, your dad giving you life lessons, but may as well.
Well, like your big brother, actually.
That's what I am.
I'm like Rupert.
The other thing you find is that the people who do well are not necessarily the most talented.
They're the ones who put in the most effort, who are the most ruthless, who are the most brown-nosing, who are...
Look around you.
You've seen this already.
Yeah, I know.
Look at Matt Hacklock.
That man has no talent at all.
And yet look where he is.
I mean, he's almost running the country.
And I mean, so many of our problems, the fact that the schools haven't reopened yet.
And this is what happens when you appoint someone like Gavin Williamson with no particular skills in that area, but clearly owes him a debt of service or perhaps he knows where the bodies are buried.
And it's we the people that get lumbered with the mess of that.
That's certainly true.
They are the sort of the bannermen, aren't they, of whoever is the King of the North or whatever powerful position they've got.
And they're given their jobs for loyalty, doggy of loyalty, rather than talent.
Haven't you found the last months that, you know, you were saying about the brown nosing and all of that.
I mean, I've kind of increasingly, I see that to be true with people that I've dealt with and then going on to different positions.
I mean, it's totally confirmed for me why I feel I would say I'm a libertarian or a classic liberal.
And because I think that fundamentally the Incentives in politics are so bad and there is such an incentive for arse covering, face covering and rewarding your charms and basically everything that's going to short-termism, sunk cost fallacy where you just keep going with a bad decision because turning around is too difficult.
There's basically every reason for the outcome to be terrible and if anything good comes out of this I hope it will be that more people start to think that the political process is sort of fundamentally flawed and we should perhaps be trying to check its wings a little bit.
Yes, I agree.
That would be the hope.
But I think, look around you again, and you see that...
I don't think lessons are being learned from this grotesque mishandling of...
I mean, this has got to be the biggest act of folly ever committed by any government, plural, in peacetime.
I can't imagine that any time in history, for whatever reason, Countries have sacrificed their economies and also sacrificed the lives of healthy people for, or no, I mean, I'm talking about people with heart attacks, people with cancer, things like that, for no reason.
I mean, other than a kind of superstitious...
Yeah.
I mean, I sort of, initially, I really felt for the politicians because I think they were in a really difficult position.
They were having to make these massive, drastic life and death calculations.
And they were being given data that we now know to be suspect, but at the time was absolutely terrifying.
And in those circumstances, I'm sure that I might well have done what our politicians did.
The thing that worries me is the fact that they will not come down from that position.
As I said before about the sunk cost fallacy, when you've extinguished enough political capital in a certain direction, it's really difficult for them to, sometimes a U-turn is the best approach, but I feel as if so many people are now invested in this particular outcome, that it will but I feel as if so many people are now invested in this particular outcome, that it will be very difficult for And I think that will have a hugely harmful, destructive impact on this country.
Well, of course, the problem, one of the problems there is that I'd say, what, 95%, maybe 98.9% of the people in the country wouldn't know what the sunk cost fallacy was if it bit them on the arse.
You and I have noticed this talking about another of our particular Bette Noire, HS2. And it's amazing how many people do not get that just because you've spunked 100 billion or whatever up against the wall to no purpose whatsoever, that is not an argument for spunking another 100 billion up against the wall.
I think you can call it the sunk cost fallacy or you can call it simply being pot committed if you're a poker player or you could say run good money after bad.
I think people totally get the concept.
And people are very suspicious of things like HS2. You know, when you have a grandstanding politician who comes in promising a big shiny infrastructure project, I think people tend to be pretty sceptical and rightly so of that.
Unfortunately, I suppose, I think the issue is that people are very afraid at the moment.
So fear is a very powerful tool to keep people in line and not asking too many questions.
So that scepticism, I haven't seen that coming through as I think it should be done about the fact of the lockdown in general.
I agree.
We're missing that scepticism.
And I think it's partly that people seem to not have the ability to think critically.
I mean, you and I both read English, and I wanted to talk to you about that, even though it annoys, it really pisses off some people.
They say, oh God, he's talking about Oxford again.
But look, it's interesting.
It is an interesting...
They also get annoyed when right-wingers like literature, because I think they think that they've cornered the arts.
So they hate it if they meet a right-winger who can...
Can quote literature and knows about paintings.
It really pisses them off.
That is absolutely true.
That's absolutely true.
And we've got to talk about that as well.
We've got to talk about poetry.
But you know this fashion for bigging up the sciences and maths and the STEM subjects and how we're told that the only thing we should spend money on at universities is STEM subjects and everything else is a waste of time.
But actually, my experience of dealing with the whole climate change nonsense has taught me that actually scientists are just as prey to wrong ideas and corruption and everything else as arts graduates.
And actually, what we arts graduates, some of us have, is an ability to think critically.
I mean, we've spent our time sitting down with Beowulf or whatever, and learning about what Grendel's mother doesn't do.
And somehow we've acquired the art.
I don't know.
But it's not a rubbish subject to do, is it, English?
Of course it's not.
I think the problem is that it's a brilliant subject.
More people should do it.
And I actually don't like the devouring of the arts that's happened.
I think you get these ministers who come in and they seem to think that obviously STEM is a hugely important skill and it's something that we definitely need in the decades to come.
But I think the new Conservative signalling is to be a bit dismissive of lefty arts graduates.
So you kind of suggest that that's not important and then say that we should do the engineering and all of that, which is obviously super important.
But at the same time, they say that they want to win the culture war.
And how can you win the culture war if you don't have any conservatives who are in the arts or know about films and all that stuff?
So I think that they are being somewhat short-term there.
And also there is a value in education for the sake of it, which is so important.
Most people who do science and engineering don't go on to be scientists or engineers.
They end up doing regular jobs.
Like everybody else, rather than anything specialised.
Yeah, so the point about literature, it's hugely helpful to have that analytical framework.
I also think, though, that those subjects do breed a kind of generation of chameleon people who are very good at taking on a new argument quickly, but could perhaps lose sight of what it is they actually believe, because we're used to the essay crisis mode.
We have four hours to get the poem, write an essay.
Well, I mean, You might say it's thinking on your feet, or you might say it's bullshitting, depending on how you feel about arts graduates.
I think it's a bit of both.
Sorry?
But aren't you really describing PPE graduates there?
I mean, they're the worst.
I mean, that's definitely my approach at university.
I can't speak for yours, but...
No, no.
Oh, it was.
Definitely.
No, I know.
I mean, essay crisis and all that, but...
I do think that when it comes to complete amorality, it's PPE graduates who are most prey to the sins that you describe.
And unfortunately...
Cabinets are chock full of these people.
They really do not, I think, have any core belief system.
They don't have any ideological backbone.
They're not classical liberals.
They're not libertarians.
They believe in nothing but the pursuit of power.
And they've been taught that that is the correct purpose of politics.
Yeah, I do.
I think we saw that particularly under Theresa May.
It was not obvious what her ideological underpinnings were, such that they were.
It seems to be a mixture of Joseph Chamberlain, which was a sort of Nick Timothy thing.
And a bit of Ted Heath as well, because she actually became a member of the Tory party under Ted Heath.
So clearly, imagine if Ted Heath was the person that inspired you to join the Tory party, what's that say about you?
And I think there was an absence of ideas, which perhaps is what led to them nicking most of them from the Ed Miliband 2015 manifesto.
Yes.
Well, what do we do to Get out of this mess.
I read a piece just recently saying that Gove needs to be Kingslayer.
He needs to do a Jamie Lannister number on the Mad King, Boris, like he tried and failed to do before.
Gove, I mean, he's far too left-wing for me, but I think he does at least, I think, get that this coronavirus is a kind of fake news story.
I think he's got that now, which is more than Boris has.
Yeah, it's so difficult to know what's going on there because clearly the PM has been so influenced by his own experience which I can totally understand that but it's like we're living in a kind of, it reminds me very much of my time at university actually when we were constantly told we were doing our kind of lefty gender studies modules that the personal is political and it seems like Boris Johnson has had this damascene conversion He needs to lose weight,
therefore you will force the country on a dime, force them to cycle because he cycles.
It's quite basic stuff, isn't it?
And it is hard to know how you get past that because there is clearly an issue of people in Cabinet not being listened to.
It's a mixture.
It's a kind of very highly centralised team and a lot of the experienced people like Gove have been kicked out.
So I agree, he's probably the most capable person left in Cabinet who could Do something about this.
I really don't understand what's happened.
It doesn't seem to be the Boris Johnson that I knew.
I used to edit his column quite often on Sundays.
Did you?
Yes, I used to think of...
I like them very much, but I always thought of him as quite a kind of bold, brave sort of person.
And, you know, a bit of a risk-taker and adventurous, and it does seem as though the combination of this scary disease or, well, it has never, a disease that you and I might think has been overhyped, but it hasn't nevertheless killed a lot of people in this country, and it's clearly severely affected the PM. I don't know how we broke past that, really, especially if the Cabinet is as centralised and inward-looking as it appears to be.
Yes.
Again, that critical thinking we were talking about, we've got this situation where having initially said they were going to lock us down to, what was it, to squash the sombrero.
I mean, Boris is good at his phrases.
They wanted to squash the sombrero in order to save our NHS. Well, fine.
It turned out that our NHS didn't need something.
That's not how a health system should work.
We're not there to sacrifice our lives For this inanimate health service that we also have forced to go and clap for on Thursdays, it's clearly a bigger part of our, it's as big a part of our national story as Shakespeare, if you're going by the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
I mean, I fundamentally hate the protect the NHS thing.
It's just ridiculous.
And the fact that we've all accepted it shows, I guess, how far the termites spread.
Because other countries, this would not be normal.
This is clown country territory.
Other countries have the idea of going out and clapping The health service, not the individuals in the health service, but increasingly the health service itself.
Countries that have much better health services than we do would think that was utterly ridiculous.
Sorry to cut you off, but yeah, I just think that is a ridiculous formulation that has been asked of us.
No, you are actually encouraged to cut me off.
Some people complain that I talk too much, and I kind of I want to say to these people, actually, I mean, you know, just a brief interlude here, that it's a bit like saying that Clint Eastwood is the same in all the movies he plays, all the characters he plays.
And you think, yeah, but he's Clint Eastwood.
It's like, okay, I mean, I do the shit that James Dillingpole does.
That's how it works.
And I have conversations with people, and maybe I talk a lot sometimes, and sometimes I hold back.
But it's not like...
They're not interviews.
What phase of Clint Eastwood do you think you'd be in right now?
Are you at your notorious phase or is it before then?
Hopefully we haven't got to the recent Clint Eastwood phase, which is not a good one to be in.
Oh dear.
I'm feeling like I'm definitely not, you know, I'm definitely not the good, the bad and the ugly anymore.
I'm more in the what's Pale Rider, I suppose.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a good call.
That's probably where I am.
But I mean, Clint is...
You can't argue with Clint.
Like, you can't argue with Michael Caine.
I mean, they've somehow managed to transcend that liberal lefty world that we lamented.
And I don't think that's a coincidence.
I genuinely think that the time that they were young actors, there was probably still something of a liberal bubble, but it was not a horribly exclusionary one that exists now where you really have to think a certain way, unless of course you're on the left, in which case you can say the kind of stuff that Miriam Margulies has said and no one cares.
But it's really, yeah, it's a great example of the kind of mission creep, I guess, of the recent decade.
I agree with you up to a point, but I do think that Clint and Michael Caine are pretty sui generis.
The reason that they're so great is because they just don't give a shit.
They are really comfortable in their skin.
And they're not afraid to take the risk of not going along to get along with the politics, which is what almost...
I mean, you think about an industry, who are their contemporaries?
I mean, Robert Redford, Pinko.
Paul Newman, Pinko.
I mean, you look around at their contemporaries.
Who is there who's not a lefty?
Anywhere.
James Woods, I mean, he's younger, but not many.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, look at the shit our mate Lawrence Fox has been getting just for being normal.
I mean, that's the thing.
He hasn't said anything extreme or weird.
He's just been like you and me.
And he's been crucified for it.
And it's not just someone more high profile like Lawrence, but it's, you know, I've got friends who work in the arts who think, who are conservative They have to keep really quiet about it.
A friend of mine recently got chucked off a film that she was working on because they found out that she was a conservative.
They found her Twitter or something, and they just chucked her off unceremoniously.
And of course no one cares about this because she's not yet well known, but this kind of...
We tend to focus on the headline case of cancel culture, but then below the surface there are often these terrible injustices that have been committed that don't ever see the light of day.
I think it's particularly bad for your generation because at least people of my age and older have had a few years to establish themselves before cancel culture existed.
But if you quite literally cannot be a conservative now, an actor and a conservative, and have any kind of career, how do we get our world back?
What's your solution?
I don't know.
I mean, the one saving grace of this is that there is a trend of brands and films going for tedious political messaging and getting ruined as a result.
So you have the quite lame and lazy attempts to slot women into franchises, like the all-female Ghostbusters and stuff like that.
It always bombs.
These things always bomb.
Because people are not stupid.
There's nothing wrong with a franchise that's all-female.
But if it's been put there purely as a tokenistic thing, I think people feel a bit insulted.
The audience sees through it and they decide that they're not going to go and spend their money.
And then you get think pieces in The Guardian being like, this shows the endemic sexism of the country because they didn't go and see the all-female ghostbusters.
But ultimately you can't answer the market in that respect.
But I guess the problem is that We can, the consumer can choose not to enjoy these things but the trouble is I guess that if the right-wing stuff isn't being made, if right-wing people are being cut out then that's only, that's only kind of, that doesn't really solve the problem.
I don't know how you solve it but I do think that with things like crowdfunding it's easier than ever for people to start finding things that they support and donating some money on that basis.
So I think perhaps the internet and The GoFundMe stuff is the way forward.
Well, this is, of course, why the battle against the Silicon Valley is so important right now.
I mean, this is the front line of the culture war, isn't it?
Because if, for example, the crowdfunding sites become so woke that they will not allow conservatives to raise money for their projects, well, then those projects won't get made.
Or it's an opportunity for, you know, the right-wing GoFundMe to get off the ground.
I mean, it's not difficult to set up a website like that, which allows people to raise money.
You know, there's always an opportunity when people start cancelling and censoring.
It's easier with something like GoFundMe.
It's much harder with things like YouTube because there is such a monopoly that that really does have a massive impact.
Like you, Mads, I do have this possibly naive faith in the power of the market.
I do believe in free markets, and I do believe that if the left insists on capturing all the kind of filmmaking institutions and turning them so woke that no one wants to watch any of their product anymore, that therefore there is what we call a gap in the market, and that some enterprising, you know, selling pole industry...
Fox Delingpole Industries, Fox Delingpole Grant Industries, moves in there, funded by one of the billionaires who listen to this podcast, and we form, you know, what we call ourselves, whatever, Deling, Grant, Fox, Inc.
And we make classic, you know, when we make Les Miserables, For example, we don't cast a black guy as Inspector Javert.
Because in 1830s France, there wouldn't have been a black police inspector.
You know, it's just that's the way the cookie crumbles.
In the same way, when do you make Zulu?
What, in our film, what's going to happen, sorry?
I feel like if we were making Les Mis, then we probably wouldn't make the student protestors the heroes of the story, would we?
Like probably Javert is the hero, rather than the anti-hero, the policeman who's just trying to do his job.
Now we're talking, now we're talking.
I've always thought that Marius, I mean, particularly as played by that wet old atonement.
It was only appropriate that Ed McLean played Marius.
I always thought very highly of him, but then he decided to go and throw JK Rowling under the bus for virtue signalling reasons.
And I thought he always seemed like a sensible sort to me.
I was clearly very wrong indeed.
One of the interesting things about these times, one of the few sort of saving graces of this shit show that we're living through, is it's You're constantly seeing people who you thought were allies turning into arch enemies and people who you thought were just kind of completely lost.
J.K. Rowling, for example.
I mean, you know, J.K. Rowling suddenly deciding that Hermione was black.
Like, you know, is that you allowed to do that as an author?
I'm not sure you are.
I think, you know, it's fairly clear what you wrote in the original, but you can't suddenly revise them just because Hermione was black.
I think she said that she could have been.
And that is fair enough.
As you alluded to, once you've written something and you've sent it off, JK Rowling's problem is that at times she weighs in to say this definitely happened or this definitely didn't happen or this happened to this character.
So she kind of doesn't let the book die because Pottermore and stuff is still going.
But equally, I don't think Hermione is black, but I think you could possibly...
It's not clear enough that she isn't, that it would be totally ridiculous to have a black Hermione.
But yeah, I do know what you mean.
I think that's...
What about Dumbledore?
Is he gay?
Oh, I definitely think he's gay.
Definitely.
And it's quite...
I think it makes sense in the book that he's gay too, because he's got this love for his...
For a long time, he follows Grindelwald.
I don't know if you're familiar with this, but for a long time Dumbledore kind of ignored his good instinct to team up and indulge in some quite dodgy ideas with his friend Grindelwald.
That makes a lot of sense if he's secretly in love with Grindelwald, because obviously we all do crazy things when we're in love, so that makes sense.
You are actually...
You are, because I know some people of my persuasion, of our persuasion, get really cross when anyone invokes Harry Potter.
It's like, you know, it's a sign that you are really stupid.
But you are actually quite a, you're quite a Potterphile, aren't you?
Quite an expert.
I know a lot about Harry Potter, yes.
It was my mastermind specialist subject, and I was a big fan as a child.
I mean, I read loads of other books too.
It's not like I only read, I think the criticism is that Harry Potter is the only thing that people read, which I suppose it often is.
But in my case, I just see Harry Potter is very much in the canon of great children's literature.
It's got a bit of the Pevensies.
It's got a lot of Enid Blyton.
And you can also tell it's got quite a lot of Agatha Christie.
I love Agatha Christie.
And you can also tell that she's influenced by Justin in her dialogue.
I think it's a really top-notch book.
Amazing plot.
And the other thing about Harry Potter that people forget, particularly lefties, Is that even though JK Rowling herself is of the left, she's obviously a long-time supporter of the Labour Party, the message of Harry Potter is super, super libertarian.
The whole thing is about bringing down corrupt government.
Apart from Voldemort, the Ministry of Magic is the second biggest villain.
It's got a very strong message about being anti-totalitarian and being pro-free speech.
And it's even got a bit of that Lord of the Rings at the end of The Return of the King, the impulse of the hobbits that all they want is to just go home and have a quiet life with their families, particularly sound.
That's a very conservative instinct.
And Harry Potter ends in much the same way with Harry Potter sending his kids off to the boarding school.
Hogwarts is super, super elitist.
And sending them off to boarding school following his footsteps.
It's a public school book.
And I think without realising it, she wrote this incredible defence of freedom.
That's a very good analysis, yes.
Do you think that they're well written or not?
I mean, they're very well plotted.
They get better.
She can see how she improves as a writer.
They're not the best written books ever, but they're also...
She's aiming for a child audience.
And I think they're very funnily written...
There are characters that don't really do very much and you still feel that you have a very strong sense of who they are, which is quite a skill for a writer to pull off.
It's really only sort of like the kind of thing that you see in Austen Shakespeare Dickens where a minor character has a lot of character.
I think, yeah, I mean, obviously she's not the greatest writer of all time, but in terms of the world that she created, it's absolutely phenomenal.
I don't know how she did it.
This is really good stuff actually because I read all the Harry Potter books and when a new edition came out we would buy two editions so that I could read one simultaneously with my wife because we didn't want to have to wait.
That's how keen we were and I think people might be surprised to hear me say that and probably surprised to hear that well unless they've seen you on Mastermind to hear somebody so erudite praising Harry Potter but I think Rowling sometimes gets a bad rap as a writer and I don't think that's fair.
But there's also, it's a very lefty thing to say that because you disagree with someone's politics that you can't enjoy the art.
That's a really left-wing thing to do.
And I don't think the right should be indulging it.
I mean, obviously there are times where the art gets destroyed because they make it too political.
So, for example, I don't know, there was this really, really rubbish, I think it was Richard Curtis' film called Last Christmas, which was the kind of Christmas chick flick a few years ago.
And they turned it into this really quite sanctimonious film about clearly very anti-Brexit.
And it just wasn't a very good film.
And you felt that the...
The filmmakers' hand on the scales have kind of ruined it.
But equally you can have great films that have a left-wing message and of course right-wing people can enjoy them.
It's a very tedious lefty thing to be like, because I disagree with them, I can't read their books.
Yes, yes.
Although I'm not sure that it's in the same league as Lord of the Rings, is it?
I don't like Lord of the Rings as that much, but I think that was just because...
Do you not?
I do like Lord of the Rings.
I mean, I've read it several times, but I think it was the one that I was really obsessed with as a kid, happened to be Harry Potter, so it's hard for me to be unbiased about that.
Of course you were proud when it came out.
I think Narnia's the best of the lot.
Best of Impostor, best of Lord of the Rings.
Although, of course, Narnia...
Narnia's going to get cancelled soon, if it hasn't been cancelled already.
What happens to Susan at the end?
Do you remember this?
No, remind me, remind me.
In the last battle, they all, spoiler warning, they all go to, all the characters who've appeared in the books, all the kids who've gone to Narnia are involved in the same car crash or train crash, and they all go up to heaven, except for Susan, who hasn't been on board the train or car with them.
And then they get to heaven and they're like, what's going to happen to Susan?
And I think Aslan says to them that Susan isn't, She isn't going to return to Narnia because she basically discovered boys and jazz music and lipstick and nylons and therefore she's only interested in these things and she can't come to Narnia Heaven with the rest of her family.
So poor Susan, her whole family's died and she's so vapid that she's not going to be allowed to go up to Narnia Heaven.
So feminists have a big problem with that.
Well, I mean, suddenly I want to read that book.
That's extraordinary.
What's the title of that book?
That's The Last Battle.
It's the last of the Narnia series.
But I think that C.S. Lewis intended to maybe write another book in which he explains how Susan does find her way back to Narnia.
I don't think he intended it to be left like that.
I think perhaps he didn't live to write the Susan Chronicle or whatever.
It's my reading of it.
I've got to ask before we move on, how did you do in Mastermind?
I actually won my round when I was doing Harry Potter.
I did quite an average general knowledge round but I know everything about Harry Potter so I got full marks for Harry.
That took me up to first place.
And then the second round I got my arse handed to me on a plate by some much cleverer people.
I was doing Jane Austen for the second but the general knowledge questions I got the second round were Well, they were really bad for me personally.
I found them difficult.
But it was really fun to do.
I think once you get through the first round, you're up against some proper quizzing, you know, extraordinary sort of full-time rather than amateur hour.
And how much, I mean, if you didn't have the nerves and stuff, how much better would you have done?
Or do you find that you are as good as you can be on the day?
Well, actually, I mean, I've always done a lot of competitive sports.
And when I was at school, I did a lot of quizzing because I was really cool.
So actually, the nerves, I find, obviously, it's awful beforehand.
But I think once you're in that situation, it really helps marshal your thoughts.
You can remember stuff that you wouldn't be able to if you weren't kind of buzzing.
So for me, it was the nerves were kind of part of it.
See, the thing is, what bothers me is that there's, like, so much that I want to talk to you about.
I mean, it shouldn't be a bothersome thing at all.
It's a good thing.
But we are going to have to do some further podcasts with, ideally, better internet quality.
I mean, I think that's the only flaw in this otherwise matchless podcast.
I'm sorry.
No, no.
I'm in the office because the internet there is perfect.
Yeah, less of the spluttering.
Yeah, yeah, but normally the problem's my end.
And also, I'm annoying at the moment because of my arm pain.
I've hurt my back and so I keep having to kind of move my arm around to stop the little jabs of pain that I'm getting.
In fact, I'm still, I'm coming off this valium and that's been quite a weird experience.
Like I've been getting the bleakest, bleakest despair.
You know, I can see why people kill themselves suddenly.
Like when people go into the dark place.
It's the withdrawal from the valium that's the difficulty, I suppose.
Yeah, yeah.
I could very happily pass the rest of my life in a kind of valium haze.
I don't think you could maintain that.
I think probably diminishing returns.
It's so nice, isn't it?
So you think, why shouldn't I be able to live like this forever?
But I'm sure that if you take it, I'm sure that you're doing the right thing.
Because if you keep taking it day in, day out, then I'm sure you need more and more to get the same effects.
And then it gradually takes over your life.
So it's really hard right now, I'm sure.
But I'm sure that it will, once it stabilises a bit, it will get easier.
Have you read The Race's Edge?
Sorry?
The razor's edge.
Have you read?
Yeah.
Read it.
Really, really, really good.
Because I've got...
Oh, the phone's going.
It's annoying.
Phone.
The phone is going.
Sorry, I'm sharing an office with my wife and she has to...
She's wearing headphones.
Well, yeah.
Somerset Maugham.
My offspring are both reading English, so I get chastised for how little I... God, Dad, it's amazing how little you've actually read, given that you've read English.
Have you not read so-and-so?
I read The Race's Edge the other day, Sunset Maugham.
Fantastic.
There's a character in it called Larry.
And Larry, it's all about different ways of living your life.
It's quite germane to our conversation earlier on.
Different characters take different paths.
You know, somebody takes the path of kind of Marrying into money and having the trappings of wealth.
And somebody seeks the kind of ascetic life of the spiritual life.
And this character, Larry, goes to an ashram and he seeks that.
I was thinking that's probably a bit like taking Valium.
If you dedicate your life to this world where you renounce the flesh, then maybe you would get something close to that.
Did you know, Mads, that you are the only person I've ever had on the podcast and probably one of the, you're probably only one about, I'm guessing maybe a hundred people in the country, and I'm another of them by the way, that has memorised Bernd Norton.
Did you know this?
Oh my god, really?
Can you do it?
Yeah, yeah.
Yes I can.
You see, So a few years ago I became convinced because I'm a hypochondriac that I was having early onset Alzheimer's and in fact what it was was my Lyme disease which was which was making me go into a thing called brain fog where you just forget stuff and you get aphasia you forget words and names it's really bad anyway so to try and keep my brain sort of ticking over I started
learning poetry And when it came to Eliot, I thought, because I learned one poem per poet originally, although in Shakespeare you've got to do a bit more, haven't you really?
You can't just do a sonnet.
So I thought, The Wasteland?
Yeah, but everyone's going to do The Wasteland.
Well, they wouldn't.
J. Alfred Prufrock?
Yeah, but what about Burnt Norton?
Because I was thinking that you'd get to learn lines like the footfalls echo the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened and I just thought there were some really good phrases in that poem.
Yes I love the rose garden and uh to what purpose disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves I do not know it's glorious isn't it?
Interesting you say that you quote that line now here's what's When you learn poems, you really inhabit them, and you really learn the process that the poet went through when he was creating that poetry.
And I've always been puzzled by that line.
Why a bowl of rose leaves?
Why not rose petals?
Why leaves?
Who preserves rose leaves?
I don't know why it's rose leaves as opposed to rose petals, but I suppose...
I think that's quite a...
I mean, I don't understand the Four Quartets.
It's the most fiendishly difficult poem that I've come across, and every time I read it, depending on what mood I'm in, it seems to mean something different, which I think is a testament to its genius as a poem.
But it's different to The Wasteland, where I think you can quite clearly say that there's some First World War stuff, there's echoes of his troubled marriage, and obviously there's the religious element.
But ultimately, it is just difficult, and there are these...
The floral imagery that recurs throughout the poem is one of the very few things that is kind of sustained.
The whole thing is quite fragmented.
It's sort of hard to make sense of it.
But I think it's kind of like, he does rather like imagery that's alive and then it's dead.
There's a lot of that in the wasteland, dust and so on.
So yeah, I mean, God, I don't know.
I have no idea.
And you were going to use the lockdown to learn the next one, which is what?
Is that Little Gidding or East Koker?
No, that has not been going well because then it was August and half my colleagues are on holiday at the moment, so it's just been mental.
So I've just, yeah, it's been, I've been finally doing the kind of hours that I opted not to do when I decided I didn't want to be an investment banker or a lawyer.
Yeah.
Have you just done, Elliot, or have you got the range of poets?
Have you got a treasury of poets in your head?
I have, yes.
I mean, I did a lot.
My mum did English at university as well, and she used to read me a lot of poetry when I was a kid, before bed.
So actually most of the stuff I remember off by heart is from when I was a child, because I think when you learn poetry young, Your brain is still very supple and you remember it forever.
Whereas I find that with the Eliot that I've learnt, I have to go back and revisit.
And I'm often amazed by how much I've forgotten, even in a short space of time, which has not happened to me with the poems I learnt as a kid.
I can't do it now, but I used to be able to do, you know, obviously everyone could do like the Jabberwockings, the owl and the pussycat and all that kind of stuff.
I used to be able to do the whole of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner when I was a kid.
That took some good.
Could you?
Yeah.
I can barely remember it now.
But I think Eliot is harder because obviously it's, you know, it's pre-versed and it's kind of, it's not, you don't have the structure of rhymes and so on to keep, you know, which are a form of mnemonic actually.
Anything rhyming is, we use mnemonics all the time in our day-to-day lives to help us remember things.
No, I think I was mentioning on a previous podcast that Eliot definitely is the hardest thing I've had to learn and it took me, it must have taken me at least a year to learn it.
Whereas I've been learning a Goethe poem in German and it's much, much easier because you've got rhythm.
Erlkönig.
Oh, I'm ready to speak at night and wind.
It's the father with his child.
Yes, yes.
Er hat den Knaben voll in dem Arm.
Er hat fast ihn sicher, er hat ihn warm.
Mein Vater, mein Vater.
Yes.
So good?
Yes, yes, yes.
Mein Sohn, was willst du so bang in dein Gesicht?
Is that that one you can remember?
Is that one you can remember?
Is that one you can remember?
It's funny you mentioned your mother because my mother is really into poetry and the other day I learned Baudelaire's L'Albatros which is one of my favourite French poems.
Do you know it?
I don't.
It's fantastic.
I don't know.
It's about the artist as the poet.
He's like the albatross flying above humanity observing but When he's on the ground, in grubby reality, his huge wings make him all ungainly and ugly.
So he soars in the clouds, but when he's on earth, he's just like, you know, he's lower than low.
It's a beautiful poem.
Anyway, I learned it and I discovered that my mother knew it as well.
And you know how you sort of discover these bonds with your parents that you never knew you had?
As you get older, your relationship changes.
But I think learning poetry is one of my favourite things that I've discovered in later life.
It's just like, it's a free thing to have in your brain and you start quoting stuff.
It's amazing, isn't it?
And I find that often at times of difficulty or Even if it's just something totally random, you get a random bit of poetry that comes into your head that, you know, it triggers some memory or it's relevant to your situation and it just makes you feel that you're not alone,
that people over hundreds of years have been through this stuff, you know, so you have some duck messes you around and then you think if there's a line of Shakespeare about you can't trust men, for example, Or you know the nymphs reply to the shepherds, obviously the passionate shepherd to his love Marlowe, come live with me and be my love.
Do you know that one?
I know that poem, yeah.
Walter Raleigh did a really good riposte to it, which is called The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd, and it starts with something like, if all the world and love were young, and truth in every shepherd's tongue, these earthly pleasures might move to live with thee and be thy love.
So it's basically saying, you know, you can't trust men.
I don't know, I think it's really helpful if you go through difficulty to know that someone has been there before, whatever it is.
Whether it's bereavement or love or whatever it is.
It's kind of, yeah, it's the best thing you can do for a kid is teach them loads of poems when they're young.
And you think that There was a time, probably before the 1950s, up to the 1950s, when lots and lots of people, not just kind of smartly educated Oxbridge graduates, but lots of people, grammar school people, secondary school people, would have imbibed poetry.
They'd have learned poems by heart.
They'd have been made to learn poems by heart.
And they would have had these phrases embedded in their brains and it would have just crept into the language in the same way that the language of the 1662 prayer book or the King James Bible has been kept in our language.
I know.
And when you take that away from people, it's...
It's not just that we can't commune with our ancestors anymore, but we can't really commune with each other in quite the same way.
I mean, you're absolutely right.
My granddad was from a very poor family in North Wales.
He went to a grammar school, but his dad was, you know, down the line and it was really poor and used to get one present, one book a year for Christmas and birthday in the 1920s.
And they were all, you know, very well educated.
They educated themselves mostly throughout their lives.
Yeah.
I remember going to stay with him and there would just be a whole row of very well looked after lovely hardback Dickens novels that had been passed down to him and I think that was actually quite a common experience that people were self-improving.
I guess we've got other things now to diverse us other than reading novels or learning poetry off by heart but I think it's a shame.
Well also, doesn't it go some way to explain this ugly, deracinated culture that we now inhabit?
All the nonsense about all the iconoclasm, the pulling down of statues, this destruction of our history, of our common heritage for political reasons, I think is part of it.
It's going to leave us more fragmented, less happy, less connected with our past.
Yeah, and it's led by people who Who claim to be on the side of the angels, but they don't know what it is that they value instead.
They're not proposing an alternative.
They're simply tearing stuff down with no thought for what might replace it.
Or indeed, if they are the right people to be tearing down our past, what gives them the right to do that?
Who ordained that these people who You know, often barely know the name of the person whose statue they're pulling down.
You know, who made them the arbiters of which parts of our heritage we're allowed to keep and which we're not?
The thing that really disgusts me though, beyond those people, is that the educated people with history PhDs, professors, who've lined up and suggested that this is all fine.
You know, I saw Professor Kate Williams She's been absolutely atrocious during the whole statue thing.
She said, I mean, I haven't read any of her books.
I've no idea if she's any good as a historian.
She must be good to be in that position or whatever.
But, you know, I just couldn't believe that someone in her position, she was saying that what we're seeing with the Colston statue being torn down is history in the making and therefore it's fine.
And they were comparing it to Saddam Hussein.
And then obviously, anyone with any knowledge of history knows that they never stop at the first thing and that, you know, if you put the power in the hands of the angry mob, then don't be surprised when they come for something that you really do value, not just a slave trader who you don't.
But it was the people like that, the useful idiots who were lining up, and the fact that it's left to people like us, people lowly BAs in art subjects.
We should have the, you know, there should be more PhD types and professors and people who actually lead thoughts in terms of culture and art.
Saying this is wrong.
You don't just tear statues down.
Yes, but isn't part of the problem that feels like history and English have changed beyond all recognition?
You were probably the last to get An education, an Oxford education, where you could actually read books and study the texts as texts.
You know, you read Jane Austen and appreciated it as literature rather than as a kind of a feminist or proto-feminist critique of whatever.
Had the Citadel already fallen by the time you were there?
There was a bit of that, yes.
We had to do one paper that was purely critical theory.
So it was, well, literary theory, but it was a lot of the critical theory stuff, lots of Marxist readings, lots of post-colonial readings.
And some of this stuff is not entirely without its merit, but some of it is pure, either victimhood Olympics or it's trying to read narratives into things that really aren't there.
So I remember one person did a kind of environmental reading of something from Shakespeare, like from the perspective of the environment.
They were looking at like It might have been The Tempest, you know, like what they've done to the island.
This is just when you could be looking at so much more than just that.
They've chosen to zone in on how Prospero looked after the island in The Tempest.
I mean, it just seems to be a bit of a waste of time to me.
So there was already a bit of that.
But no, in general, it was a great experience.
It's a very self-motivated course.
So you go off, you don't have that much contact time.
You have to go off and do your own thing.
Come up with your own arguments.
But actually, increasingly, I think that I've learned more since I've left, actually.
Probably there's a few distractions than there were at university, but less drinking, probably.
But reading now is a real joy because it's a hobby and it's not my course.
So I probably have read more books since I left than when I was there, actually.
A question I forgot to ask you.
Did you learn the Greek epigraph at the top of Burt Norton or not?
No.
No, I didn't either.
I just go straight in with time present and time past.
I probably should have done.
You didn't either, did you?
I didn't, because I would have thought, you know what, if you said you had, I would have, I might have sort of presented you for it, actually, and I would have felt bad.
And so thank you for not making me feel bad.
And have you learned Grey's energy?
I can do bits of it, but no, not God, no, not the whole thing.
Can I totally recommend that?
I love Jane Austen.
Jane Austen's my favourite writer.
There's a great bit in Emma where Mrs Elton quotes a line from Grey's Elegy, you know, full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
But of course, being Mrs Elton, she's only, they didn't read the whole poem in those days, they just learnt little snippets that you were If you're a marriageable young woman, you'd learn to snip it and then you'd insert it into conversation to look really clever.
And so Jane Austen brutally has her getting it slightly wrong, so she says fragrance instead of sweetness.
So I think I'm more of a...
She's a sort of Hyacinth Bouquet character, a Hyacinth Bucket character.
And actually, me and Hyacinth Bouquet are from Leamington Spa, which is where they filmed Keeping Up Appearances.
So I've got quite a lot of Hyacinth.
Only connect, eh?
Yeah, we hired this tutor for my daughter who was absolutely brilliant.
He was the ex-head of English from Eton and she found him on, what's that site where you find you have affairs and things?
Yeah, Craigslist.
He was brilliant and inspirational.
And he made a very interesting point about Grey's Elegy, which is that you see in the poem the transition from the classical to the romantic.
So it starts off as this kind of You know, formal elegy and then it suddenly becomes sort of really quite pastoral at the end, which I've never thought of before.
It's a lovely poem to learn.
I think it's almost my favourite apart from To His Coy Mistress, which I think...
Oh, I can do that one off by half as well.
As we put world and up in time, this coyness lady were no crying.
Yeah, what's your favourite bit from that one?
Well, I think it's got to be where the poem turns, but at my back I always hear time swinging a chariot, hurrying near, and yonder all was a sly deserts of vast eternity.
Yes, yes, I think so.
We need a bit more carpe diem at the moment.
Right now everyone's living sequestered in their homes, terrified.
I wrote a piece with a spectator recently about dating in lockdown and I'm quite concerned that some of the trends that were already happening with young people being cautious and risk averse and a bit suspicious between the sexes I think all of that has just been exacerbated by the virus.
So I think actually, if I could make recommendations required to all young people right now, it would be probably a bit of Andrew Marvell would sort them out.
A bit of a bit of carpe diem.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I do love that whole poetry that's like...
You know that genre, I'm trying to think if there are some other examples, there's obviously To His Coy Mistress is the most famous one but there's lots of John Donne and also there's To The Virgins To Make Much Of Time by Herrick and it's basically we're gonna die so let's have sex.
That's the theme of the poem.
I mean it's crude but perhaps there needs to be a bit more of that carpe DMing.
Yes.
Yes, I agree.
Yes, I'm trying to think of, there are pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life.
Yeah, exactly.
Sorry, I'm now starting to feel my arm pain, and I'm thinking, what were the other things I wanted to talk to you about?
I mean, there's just like so much.
I know.
Literature, which has been great.
We talked about lockdown a bit and how the government is incredibly depressed by the government.
Yeah, I mean, actually, we could have done a whole podcast on that, but the thing is, I'm getting so depressed by just how crap this government is.
I mean, it's unbelievable, isn't it?
Today, at the time of this recording, they're talking about knocking down buildings using the excuse that there might have been infections.
Jesus Christ!
We should start with number 10, because clearly there was a big focal point of infection there early in the year, so we should obviously start with possibly checkers to be on the safe side.
I mean, it's just mental, isn't it?
I don't believe that these people are necessarily authoritarians, But why are they doing this?
Are they enjoying themselves?
With someone like Nicola Sturgeon, it's quite clear that she's loving the opportunity to extend her reach over...
She's a genuine fascist, I think.
Yeah.
She genuinely is loving it.
She's also loved the opportunity.
There was talk recently of special quarantines on English passengers.
So for her, it's an opportunity to indulge in her characteristic authoritarianism and anglophobia.
But when it comes to this government, I still...
I don't believe that they're enjoying themselves.
But what explains their behaviour if there isn't that authoritarian impulse?
I mean, of course, there are individual cabinet members who probably are more authoritarian than others.
It doesn't really...
I guess perhaps they're afraid and nobody wants to have...
You know, there's a lot of political backpedalling and sort of pre-emptive covering of arses going on at the moment.
But I'm baffled by it, really.
I know what I wanted to ask you.
We're both from the Midlands.
And I've got this theory that people from the Midlands are the best.
Because we're not like Londoners who are just kind of...
They're part of the kind of...
The public sector behemoth, aren't they, really?
They're part of the...
They're the enemy.
They are the establishment.
And then...
People from the North are just, they think that they're, well, I actually quite like Northerners as well, but no, I think just, I don't want to diss other parts of the country, but I think that something about being a Midlander, we don't sort of, we like taking the piss.
Yeah.
We don't like people to get too big for their boots.
No.
You know, we're quite good at cutting down our poppies.
And as counties go, I think Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, we love our counties, but we don't kind of pretend, go around joining in the game of like, who's got the biggest city, who's the best, what's the best county?
We're just kind of quietly happy with ourselves.
Whereas the Londoners and, dare I say it, Yorkshire, both of them love to be the top dog.
Whereas I think we're a bit more down to earth and we're quite good at sort of I mean, the big thing in my family is always sort of don't get too big for your boots.
And if someone does, then you just have to rinse them and bring them down to size.
I think that's quite a Midlandery thing.
Yeah, I think so.
When I went up to Oxford, I went through a phase where I was really wishing I was posher and, you know, wishing I'd been to Eton and stuff so that I could move in the smart set and stuff.
But actually, I look back on that on myself and I sort of think, You're a silly boy.
Because actually, I'm really happy where I come from.
I'm really happy in my skin.
And I just think that Midlanders are great.
And I, you know, I like the fact that, you know, my family are who they are, you know, not too posh.
I think it gives you a good perspective on the world.
It's a great neck of the woods for so many reasons that I love.
I mean, obviously, it's Shakespeare, Lack Country, George Eliot, another of my favourite authors, also from Warwickshire.
But there's also the fact that, you know, it's the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.
It's the birthplace of modern capitalism.
That's a massive thing.
And it's all, you know, my dad's a businessman.
I've got so much respect for people like my dad who set up We set up companies and create jobs for others and I think there's that enterprising spirit that is really endemic to the Midlands and it's so different to the bohemian behemoth of London where it's all public sector or Having to lie about sending your kids to private school so you can hold your head up high at the dinner party, but secretly getting them a private tutor so they can get into a grammar school.
You know, that kind of hypocrisy that isn't so common in these circles.
Whereas, I guess, perhaps in the Midlands people are a bit more, you know, you don't have to worry about holding it.
You can just be yourself and just do what feels right for you.
You're absolutely right about the Industrial Revolution.
It's still present in the culture.
Growing up, almost everyone I know ran a small business or worked in a small business.
There was nobody working for the government.
It wasn't how it worked.
And of course, it's these small businesses which are the engine of the economy.
And I worry that they're neglected.
Oh, they are so neglected.
It's horrific.
I mean, the conversation is shaped by people who I mean I'm part of the problem I guess because I have an English degree and I've never worked in the enterprising sector of the economy so I'm no less guilty of it but it is a problem when the conversation is shaped by people like me and the people at the BBC and also often gives particular voice to the BBC will focus predominantly on the public sector There's so much coverage of questions about
will nurses get their pay rise, teachers getting a very large pay rise this year despite the fact that so many of them have manifestly failed their pupils.
But when has the BBC discussed The contraction in wages that's happening in the private sector right now and all of these excellent small businesses that are perfectly viable through no fault of their own that are going to go under and, you know, take away the life's work of hardworking people.
I mean, that's just absolutely shocking.
There seems to be no recognition that when the government says or does something bloody stupid or when they decide that they want to terrify us into our homes, that's going to have a real tangible impact on an awful lot of people.
I think actually in your characteristically insightful way, you've put your finger on what makes us both so supremely wonderful and also dangerous.
In that we look, educationally and etc., we look like we're part of the establishment, but actually we are rebels from the Midlands who've worked our way into the system and we can pass We can pass as the enemy, but we're not.
We're working for the...
we're working for the horny-handed sons of toil.
Yeah, but I think...
We still have their values.
It sucks that Garwort passes for that, because if only we had a media that was, you know, better at listening to People who are struggling right now, who are really struggling and have set up these companies.
I mean, obviously, people who are in charge of a company don't have all the time in the world to chat and do podcasts and go on the news and stuff.
But I do wish that the BBC would give a bit more time to that side of the argument, really, because it just seems to be endless alarmism about second wave, which in itself is a very dubious term that I would never use.
It's between that and how the NHS cope.
The conversation is always very statist.
And I just wish they were going out and talking to a few small business owners and taxi drivers.
Oh, when all this is over, there's no question that the size of the state, the public sector, the proportion of the economy occupied by the public sector will have increased.
And the private sector, the only sector that actually bankrolls the economy, will have increased.
Will have shrunk horribly.
And people like your family and my family and the people we know and the areas we grew up will really, really suffer.
Real people who are creating value will be punished, while the parasite class will be rewarded because the government doesn't want to take them on.
It doesn't want to take on the nurses and whatever, the teachers.
They just want to put more money into their pockets, even if they've been doing bugger all work.
Totally, totally.
And it's an assumption that This money comes from, you know, it's infinite and can be summoned at will.
We really can't.
We'll have to pay for it at some point.
If not now, then soon and for a very long time.
But, yeah, the conversation, I think, has been partly shaped by that status way of thinking, but also often by people for whom furlough and lockdown have actually been quite nice, people who can easily work from home.
It's hard for them to imagine the suffering and anxiety that this is causing.
But actually, I think that some of these smug work from homers It may have a bit of a rude awakening in the years to come, because I think a lot of companies, when this is over, will realise that if work can be done anywhere, why would you pay London wages to someone who's, you know, in London or home counties to do that job, where you could get someone in, I don't know, if you want a computer programme or something, why not go further afield and pay someone much, much less?
Exactly, Romania, perhaps even further afield.
I think a lot of people think that this can be maintained indefinitely, but they may find that the remote working revolution is a bit of a sort of Damocles type thing.
Oh, I think the clarity are completely ruined.
I mean, all those middle class...
I don't see how this is going to survive.
Those middle class make-work positions like environmental sciences advisor or whatever, or sustainability.
They think they can afford it now, but when we start really getting the world of pain we're going to get from our crashing economy, I don't see how these jobs are going to be, to use their words, sustainable.
No, no, they won't.
And it's already clear from just from what's happened over the last six months.
It feels like another era now.
But right before the pandemic struck, the environment was the big topic of the day and the government was busy signing up to a zero carbon by 2050 commitment.
And despite the fact that they were doing things like propping up airlines, it was all super...
Contradictory didn't make any sense, but that was the agenda of the day and that was dominating the conversation.
As soon as the pandemic struck and we were faced with a real crisis, it became clear just how decadent a conversation that was.
For example, it becomes clear that we need plastic in all sorts of ways that we didn't appreciate.
When we were talking about how we can move to plastic bags forever, and now we need more plastic than we know what to do with to make all the PPE and keep surfaces sterile and all of that stuff.
And the fact that it can be so easily dispensed with very quickly in an emergency I think tells you that it wasn't really a climate emergency to begin with.
Madeline, everything you say is really interesting, and I would love to continue this conversation forever, but my pain is now telling me that I can't do any more.
So thank you so much for being on the podcast, and will you please come back soon?
I would love that, and I do hope you feel better soon.
Oh, I will.
I will do.
Thank you.
And don't forget, lovely listeners, do support me on Subscribestar and Patreon and you get early access and you make my life better, which has got to be a good thing, hasn't it?
Thanks, Mads.
Bye bye.
Thank you.
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