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Feb. 21, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:18:17
Tom Winnifrith
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Welcome to the Delling Paul with me, James Delling Paul.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am because this week's special guest is Tom Winifred.
And Tom and I share lots of interests, and also Tom is related to somebody very, very special to me.
Tom is the nephew of the late, great, magnificent Christopher Booker.
What a great uncle to have, Tom.
An uncle and a godfather, yeah.
One of the things that you know, and one of the things that I know, is that when you wrote a piece, he would give you enormous credit for it.
He was a far better journalist than I am, or than you are, but he would give you credit when you did something good.
And he would show a real interest in it.
Yes.
He was.
He was, certainly to me, he was, I used to call him my honorary dad.
I mean, he was definitely, he was definitely my second dad.
And we used to talk.
several times a week.
I mean the booker used to used to ring and and no matter how inconvenient the time one would always lay aside an hour because the conversations went on quite a long time for one of his rambling yet fascinating chats on any subject under the sun.
They'd start they'd start usually about something that annoying that happened in the field of the uh enviro-nazi lunacy and then we'd progress from there to all skitter off in all sorts of directions.
I imagine you had the same experience. - We had exactly the same experience.
We had a lot in common, both sort of multiple divorces, both a great love of the Marnie in Greece, which is where he went on his first honeymoon with Emma Tennant and a friend, Emma's cousin and her which is where he went on his first honeymoon with Emma And her boyfriend.
And within a few months, they got back.
Emma was shacked up with her cousin's boyfriend.
And Uncle Chris was on divorce number one.
But he had a great love of the Marni, which is where I have rebuilt a... Notwithstanding that episode, I've rebuilt a hovel in the mountains and turned this into an eco palace.
And so we'd have long conversations about Greece and about how, well, one day we would walk up Mount Tegessus together.
Notwithstanding the fact that we were both terrified of heights.
And my great-uncle on my other side actually died falling down a mountain in Greece.
But we were going to do it.
And yes, we would talk about everything.
In his latter years, we disagreed a little bit on Brexit.
I am a very hard-line Brexit.
We used to joke that he had become a Ramona, and he would get a bit cross about that.
So actually we decided, because Uncle Chris did fall out with various people, We weren't going to fall out.
So whenever we got onto Brexit, we would just say, can't we just agree that Theresa May is utterly useless?
And we could agree on that.
No one, probably even Mr. May, agrees with us on that one.
And so we'd just move on to something which we could agree on.
Yeah.
I had exactly the same period.
There came a point where he and his sort of co-author, Richard North, went in one particular direction on Brexit.
And I don't like to talk about Brexit, by the way.
I mean, I almost never talk about it, because I just think it's just completely irrelevant now.
But that's by the by, given we're talking about biography rather than anything else.
There was definitely a point where I realised that if I wanted my friendship with Christopher to continue, and I did very, very much, I valued him so greatly, then we were going to have to agree to differ on Brexit, which meant basically not talking about it.
Which was fine.
It worked, because there was so much else to talk about.
I mean, I miss him awfully.
We disagreed on one other thing, which was Israel.
I'm a strong supporter of Israel.
Uncle Chris, a little bit weaker on that, on the subject of the one democracy in the Middle East.
And again, the only good thing about him is if I talk to most people about Israel, they talk about how Israel are next, you know, the free Palestinian lands, and they've got no idea of the history of the region.
He did have the idea of the history of the region.
And so you could have a discussion with him, but I was aware that I might just sort of be dancing on eggshells.
And generally we first talk about things we could agree on, which was nearly everything else.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And he was a hedgehog, wasn't he?
Rather than a fox.
He knew one big thing, as opposed to lots of little things.
He had this grand, overarching theory.
He must have talked to you about this.
No?
No.
Autolycus, the Greek, was he a playwright or a poet?
Autolycus came up with the fable of the Fox and the Hedgehog.
And the Hedgehog knows one big thing.
and the fox and there's lots of little things and then this was taken up by Isaiah Berlin in a famous essay in I think he wrote in the 1950s where he sort of enlarged upon this and anyway this was one of one of Booker's particular obsessions that when he was when he was about six or eight I think the story changed according to when he was telling it
He was driving along with his mother in a car and he remembers vividly thinking, I can understand, he didn't put it like this obviously because he was only six or eight, but I believe that there is a grand universal overarching theory which explains the world.
And his life then became a quest to find out what that theory was.
And he achieved it in, for example, his masterpiece, Seven Basic Plots, but he also wrote about it in his book, The Neophiliacs.
Anyway, he was a man of many parts.
I didn't know he had a fear of heights, for example, because one of the things that we kept promising we were going to do, and this is a lesson to us all, actually, We kept talking about we were going to go and climb probably Mount Snowdon.
We were going to go to Snowdonia or somewhere similar, somewhere lofty, where we could walk.
And of course, I thought it was going to live forever and be hail forever.
And of course, that doesn't happen.
And that's what I mean about it being a terrible warning to us all.
I've got a friend at the moment who's got cancer.
And I know that I should really seize the moment and just, like, Talk to him and do lots of things with him because he'll be taken away like your father was, like Booker was taken away.
I never did go on that walk and it would have been interesting having him cowering on the edges of the... He was good at mountaineering.
He climbed whatever that mountain, Kilimanjaro, with his sons.
So he could climb mountains, he was just afraid of heights.
So when he was driving in Greece, He would often ask his wife to take the wheel when you're going on a particularly dangerous road.
And I have the same feeling that there are roads, and it's opened up more with motorways now, but there are roads that I used to take and I would, at a certain juncture in roads in the Peloponnese, I'd be making a trip and I would always stop off and write my dad a postcard and post it to dad.
Knowing that I was terrified of what was going to come, and thankfully I always made it through, but... Oh, so far!
So far.
Well, now there's motorways, now Greece has opened up, it's... Oh, have they been built by the Chinese by any chance?
No, built by the European Union.
Of course, yeah.
Almost as bad, yeah.
Yeah.
I wonder if... The motorways... I mean, this is on my father's side.
He studied a minority group in Greece, the minority language.
And the motorways and the roads that are being built in my lifetime have destroyed that culture.
And in one way, it's one of those things, the people in these remote villages in northern Greece are delighted that you can drive to them now.
And that they've all got televisions and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And the kids can go off and live in Athens.
But I know my father and I talked about this a lot.
It's terribly sad because even in my lifetime, these were villages you had to walk to for the last bit.
And the kids didn't leave home and the villages survived.
And the language, which my dad studied, survived.
And that language is being trashed by everyone watching Greek television.
What is the language?
Or was it?
The language is called Vlak.
And it's a... It's sort of a... There are theories about where it comes from, but it's more Roman than Greek.
So the Vlak word for man is barber.
And if you count in Vlak, That's far more Latin than the Greek.
And the people live in northern Greece, Albania, southern what was Yugoslavia, Romania.
And so I spent a lot of my childhood going around to these villages where you had to walk to sometimes.
Right.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Is it only spoken in the Marni, this language?
No, no, Vlak is not spoken in the Marni.
The Marni is Greek, but the Vlak is spoken in northern Greece, in the Pindus Mountains, and in Albania and Yugoslavia, and Romania, I think, to a certain extent.
So these people were nomadic, so the borders didn't actually mean anything 100 years ago.
Interesting, yeah.
I mean, we could go off in so many different directions.
I mean, we could talk about your travels and we talk about the book.
Also, I want to talk a bit, just because this is kind of your job, isn't it?
You run a website and I think an annual conference called Share Profits, with a pun on the word.
Wonderfully good timing.
I did a one-off video conference last year.
I used to run a physical conference, but luckily my wife, who owns the shares, sold out to our business partner because physical conferences aren't really very good.
My main thing is, yes, I write on a financial website, Share Profits, which is largely behind a paywall, exposing fraud.
I also write about Issues of liberty and the nonsense of the woke oppression on my own website where I also write about living in Greece and living, as I do the rest of the time, in Wales by 30 yards and the joys of renovating House from the 1600s, having renovated a hovel in Greece.
I'm assuming that those exposed beams are your 16th century house in Wales, rather than a house in the Marny.
Is that right?
That's correct.
Yeah.
When we got here, those beams, which you see behind us, were covered in plaster.
Yeah.
And we've unearthed them and we're just working room by room by room.
And this part of the house is The oldest part of the house and is, I haven't been able to date it exactly, somewhere between 1650 and 1670.
So presumably the ceiling was lower by the height of that beam before you exposed it?
No, the beam was encased in plaster.
The previous owners were very keen on hiding anything which looked Remotely sort of old.
So we discovered in the main room, there was a truly horrific 1970s fireplace about two and a half foot high.
And by knocking back the wall, we exposed the original fireplace from the 1600s, which you can stand inside.
And with a big oak beam.
That had just been covered up and hidden in the kitchen, which is behind me, which is a tiny bit later, but still the 1600s.
It's got a window tax window, so we know you can date it some way, but it's a tiny bit later than the main house.
Again, there was a fireplace from the 30s and plaster everywhere, and we took that off and discovered an old bread oven and a massive fireplace and oak beams and plaster.
And so that's been something I write about on my own website when I'm not talking about the insanity of lockdown.
Particularly insane here in Wales, because England is literally 50 yards away from me.
Is it?
That's, I was going to ask you about this because look, I'm very sold on, look, I used to go to Wales with my family for a period of about 15 years.
And there was a spot I used to go to, which was one of my favorite places on earth.
It was just fantastic.
Every time we went back there, we went there often, it was just paradise.
And we'd go swimming in the Y, we'd go climbing up the hills.
So I'm very sold on Wales, on parts of Wales anyway.
But you have a massive problem, and you know what that problem is.
I mean, you're living in a kind of communist state.
I mean, a country that makes even Boris Johnson's fascist Britain look authoritarian.
I mean, look liberal, rather.
You've got Mark Drakeford, a Marxist supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, who is your little pound shop dictator running Wales, playing the same game that the cranky woman playing the same game that the cranky woman does in Scotland, whereby, you know, however draconian the Westminster government's restrictions, we can beat them.
We can, well, I suppose Drakeford, the classic example, was when not only did he put you in lockdown, but he twisted the knife by making sure that when you went to the supermarket, only designated essentials were available on the shelves, only designated essentials were available on the shelves, and that you actually had supermarket racks covered with cloth or whatever to keep anyone away from buying anything non-essential.
Have I got it right?
You have.
It was a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.
He was arguing that we've closed the non-essential shops, and therefore, in order to make sure that they are still, that it's somehow fair, we are going to stop Tesco's selling items sold in non-essential stores.
Now, the impact of that was twofold.
One, as I live, I mean, the border with England is the River Dee, so it's not quite 50 yards for me to travel, although it's 50 yards as the crow flies from where we are now.
But I could just drive along the road and go to England to do things, but actually what most people did was they bought things off Amazon.
Mark Drakeford has got to be Amazon's favourite man on this planet, because everyone buys off Amazon.
And so it was ridiculous.
I found myself in this... My computer broke, and I'm a journalist, so I need a computer.
And because computers are non-essential items, computer stores in Wales were closed.
But it's illegal for me to go to England.
So I had to break the law to travel a mile and a half, going up the road, across the bridge, to a bloke on the other side, to mend my computer, because I was forced into doing it.
And these things were just insanity.
My son's at nursery in England, so he was there all the time.
The poor kids who are his age, four, and have decided they go to pre-school in Wales, they get cooped up with their parents.
And what's the logic in it?
It's just insanity.
How on earth have you managed to rig it?
Because I mean, I would have thought that was one of the reasons for not living in Wales, that you are subject to their appalling healthcare system and their appalling education system.
So how have you managed to get out of that?
Given you live in Wales, how do you wangle it?
Well, it's a lovely place to live.
The healthcare, my wife had a baby in November and the baby was born in England.
She was born in Chester.
So that is the way you get around that.
My son will go to school in Wales next year and he will start, assuming they're open by then, and he'll start learning Welsh as a second language.
That's great, because, well, you know, he's a very good-looking boy.
And so, in about 20 years' time, he'll just go along to BBC Wales and say, look, I can speak Welsh.
My mother was a person of colour, so I tick both the boxes.
I'm good-looking.
How about you give me 300 grand to read an autocue?
Yeah, that's a good idea.
And he'll also be able to read the Mabinogion, won't he, in the original.
I'm not sure I'm able to do that.
As long as he can say, you know, North Star at the end of the thing, he's in, he's fine.
Actually, you know, I take a different view, I suspect, from you on Wales, which is, and I've written about it, I take a schizophrenic view.
I agree that the idea of, you know, an independent Wales is crazy.
Uh, Wales, like Scotland, they're subsidy junkies, they're sucking at the English teat.
But, what we have to accept is that there is a sense of resentment here.
And it's rather like Quebec in Canada, you know, the more money you throw at them, the more they still say, you know, we're exploited, this is jolly unfair.
And here it's, you know, the bloody English.
Margaret Thatcher Edward I, whatever, they'll carry on being that, and it doesn't matter how much money is thrown at England or Scotland, there is this resentment, and there is a feeling that they are both poorer than England, that it is the English to blame, and whether it's Boris Johnson, or whether it's Mrs Thatcher closing down those coal mines with no coal in them, Something Uncle Chris was also very good on.
Or whether it's, you know, wicked industrialists exploiting them in the 19th century.
There is that resentment, it is growing, and it won't be fixed.
And I just take the view that it's like a bad marriage.
The Union has become a bad marriage, both in Scotland and England, and what we should say is, fine, let's end the marriage.
You know it's a we're not we're not going to do uh you know a meal ticket for life divorce settlement so it's a it's a clean break you can keep uh you know Scotland and Wales and you're on your own and only by doing that are we going to be able to be good neighbors otherwise there's just going to be a growing sense of resentment.
Yeah that ain't gonna happen though is it?
I mean look you know in my my my fantasy my fantasy would be An independent Wales and an independent Scotland and they'd be like, I don't know, they'd be like the Hong Kong.
of our island, and they'd be a bit like you've got Texas and Florida, showing why free markets work and why California doesn't work.
And then you'd have... But that's... When you see the Scottish politicians, they go to Latvia and Lithuania and say, look, it's perfectly possible for a small country to thrive.
But what they forget is that Latvia and Lithuania survive because they have a small government, they have low tax rates, and they encourage people to set up innovative Bitcoin businesses.
And the policies that the SNP and Plaid Cymru advocate are more like sort of Venezuela.
Yeah.
And so I'm sure there will be an element of people having to choose which of their pets they eat if Scotland or Wales gets independent.
But it's got to go through that process.
Ireland was much, much poorer.
The Republic of Ireland was much, much poorer for an awfully long time after it gained independence from Britain.
It was a very poor backwater.
But, and for a long time there was sort of blaming the Brits and maybe becoming a Republican in 1948, you blame them a little bit less, but there's still a blame.
But eventually you grow up and Ireland has prospered, you know, from the 80s onwards.
Oh, come on!
Okay, I mean, that's a fairly, your definition of prosperity, okay, is very much Monetary, I suppose.
And it's got, you know, Irish culture has been destroyed.
You go to Dublin now and you get no sense whatsoever that this was probably the cultural capital of Europe for a period.
You know, you've got Wilde, you've got Singh, you've got Yeats, you've got all these fantastic writers.
And in fact, going back to people like Laurence Stern and Jonathan Swift.
Yeah, Bram Stoker, you're just fantastic.
Ireland is a cultural desert now, it's been destroyed and I feel so sorry for the Irish.
I know there are Irish people are going to be watching this and thinking, yeah, What's happened to our country?
It's awful.
So I don't think you can really cite Ireland as an example of how a country achieves independence and then enters a sort of new period of efflorescence.
But we come back to where we were in northern Greece 15 minutes ago.
It is all very well for you and I to say to the people of Ireland, actually, you should be reading some Yeats and you should be appreciating Oscar Wilde in all sorts of ways.
But what made the Irish during those boom years so happy was that you got all these sort of, you know, Grossly overpriced restaurants.
But Dublin was a buzzing city.
People wanted to be there.
And I knew that it was vulgar and tacky and horrible.
And it wasn't, you know, what my father would have called the old country in any way.
It was brash and unpleasant.
But the people wanted it.
Just as the people of tiny little villages in the Pindus Mountains of northern Greece.
What they want is a car which will allow them to drive to the brothel in Yanina.
What they want is all to have television.
What they want is not to be drinking local red wine from the village, but to be able to have cheap Scotch whisky.
That's what they want.
And how are we to deny them that?
Paddy Leigh-Furmer writes about this, about Greece, in a different era, about how we visit and we sort of Bemoan the loss of an old culture in an old way, but that's not how most people in the country feel.
Yeah, I mean, I accept, I'm halfway to accepting your argument, and I've had similar experiences.
A few years ago I went to what was billed as the remotest lodge, in game lodge in Africa and I had to fly in a small aircraft a light aircraft which actually now I know now I know how many people die in light aircraft accidents in Africa I'm sort of not saying I want to do very often but I flew it was it was right on the Angolan border it was in Namibia and it was amazing
And I met one of the kind of the more pristine tribes of Africa, the Himba.
The Himba still, unlike the Maasai, who are basically a sort of tourist attraction now in Kenya, the Himba are still fairly recognizably a sort of remote African tribe.
But even then, they were starting to wear Weston shorts and things and t-shirts and and things because because that's for them is it's cool.
Yeah, they don't address fuddy-duddy clothes.
That's what they want.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what they want.
And we so we may we may regret the passing of the old world, but we're not in a position to do that.
So so so yeah, okay, but maybe halfway here.
Dublin is a complete shithole.
It's it's it's it's lost all its personality.
It is unrecognized.
It is indistinguishable from any trashy Euro city.
And the people of Ireland have lost an enormous amount in the process.
They've become utterly deracinated.
There's no sense of Irishness anymore.
There's a sort of fake Irishness of the songs they sing, you know, the kind of rebel songs they sing in bars in the drunken tourist district, which is very unrecognisably...
Apart from the rebel soldiers, completely unlike Ireland.
I do not disagree with you at all.
And they've got a government which is so woke it makes Justin Trudeau look like Margaret Thatcher.
And he's imposing on them this plan which I don't believe many Irish people do want, which is this mass immigration thing.
where they are dumping lots of imported immigrants on Irish villages.
Well, that is not Ireland forging a destiny that its people want.
That is about a capture by a narrow elite, a narrow woke elite, imposing this vision in much the same way that Boris is currently imposing this Green revolution on Britain, that none of the people who voted for Boris really wanted.
That is scary.
And that doesn't relate to what you say about... Not the people who wanted it, but it's also, of course, as we've seen in Texas and Germany, with the solar panels covered by snow and the wind turbines frozen up, it doesn't work.
It's hugely expensive.
But they're having blackouts in Germany.
The French are being told they've got to phase having their evening meal.
Because of the power shortage.
The Green Revolution doesn't work.
It's insanity.
It will make a small number of people very rich.
You know, I see this in the stock market, in my work.
You see that there are bubbles, horrible bubbles developing.
One of them is solar energy.
It will make a small number of people very rich, and it won't work.
That's the happiest thing you've said so far.
I mean, I would like the solar industry to be like the South Sea Bubble.
I want to see people absolutely losing their shirt.
The problem is that I suspect a lot of the people who lose their shirts will be the pension funds and things like that, who've been told that this thing is a surefire bet.
And who is investing in solar?
The people who will lose their shirt will be private investors who always get in at the top.
There will be some funds that will do badly.
Which will undoubtedly be the one having your pension in it.
Yes.
If I had a pension.
Generally, the smart money would have been out.
The real bubble at the moment is in cannabis stocks in London.
Just absolute, total insanity.
Total insanity.
I thought that bubble had burst a while ago.
Is it still inflating?
The bubble burst in North America, but in the UK, we weren't allowed to have any cannabis stocks listed.
One did list, but it did so by doing a reverse takeover without actually doing any of the documentation.
And the FCA is so spineless and useless, they did nothing about it.
That company is called Zoetic, and it's a total fraud.
It's got no money.
It's got annualised revenues of £100,000.
It's systematically lied to investors, regulators and consumers.
It's made claims that its products are good for you when they're bad for you.
But it's capitalised to £160m.
But that has prompted, the FCA have now allowed rules for cannabis companies to get listing, and there are two this week.
One of them, there's one which I think closed its fundraising last night.
It was trying to raise 8 million quid on a 20 million valuation.
It has no products.
It is trying to develop a product and it might just launch one later this year.
It's got a whole load of city spirits behind it.
They've persuaded David Beckham to put in a bit of money for cheap pre-IPO shares.
Almost certainly he'll be given a lot more money back for marketing their crap products if they ever launch.
They tried to raise 8 million quid.
As of last night, they had 70 million pounds offered to them.
No.
Yeah.
Now, that's very interesting.
There is one that floated earlier this week.
It raised 4 million.
It's got 4 or 5 million in the bank.
And it shares have gone through the roof since it listed.
Needless to say, it also has caught no products launch.
It might do some test launches this year.
It'll probably run out of money within two years.
Its shares have gone up by about 10 times since it listed on Tuesday, and it's now valued at 70 million quid.
What do you think about... It's sheer insanity.
I've got an idea, Tom.
Delingfrith... You want to float a company with me?
Delingfrith Cannabis.
Or what would it be called?
Delingfrith... What's the sexy way of saying cannabis without saying... CBD.
CBD.
Delingfrith CBD.
Or Winnipole, if you'd rather.
I mean, Well, there's more chance of Delingpole CBD than CBE, I suspect, because you're not part of the media establishment.
And this is one of the interesting things about the David Beckham linked one.
is that, showing the corruption of my part of the financial press, they gave the scoop to Sky News, which then talked it up and said Beckham, they quoted Beckham's macroeconomic thoughts on why cannabis is the place to invest.
That's rather like asking you to give a comment on whether Man United should play 4-4-2 or 5-3-3 or 5-3-2.
It's just utterly insane.
That is a very good analogy.
But that's been used to pump up the excitement.
And the shares will go through the roof.
That's fantastic.
That's a bubble at the moment.
But if you point out that the people behind this are dirty, filthy city spivs, if you point out that the maths are crazy, no one really cares.
That's interesting.
Now, there are various questions I want to ask you about this.
You seem to specialize in pointing out companies which are basically crooked, which is a very brave thing to do, isn't it?
Given how much money these companies have available to them, at least before they go bust, don't they have the ability to recruit all manner of expensive lawyers and to be able to... How do you protect yourself?
Well, you're right.
I do.
I specialize in taking down frauds.
And so I've been condemned, not condemned, I am condemned for it, but I've been commended for it.
The FRC, the accounting watchdog, has said that it widened its scope into Quindel, which was one of the biggest frauds of the past decade, a three billion fraud, because of my work.
I wrote to them and pointed things out.
The FCA have commended me, sent me saying, thank you very much for your work on So Etik and another company whose shares I've managed to get suspended, because it's a fraud, and Panorama, when they did the thing on Neil Woodford, came up to the House in Wales and interviewed me at length.
We're going to talk about it.
Okay, but yeah, the answer is, initially, when I started this phase of my life, the first fraud I exposed was in 1993.
So I've been doing it a while, on and off, but when I started this phase of my life, I used to get quite a lot of lawyer's lessons.
The way that, luckily, the last phase of my life resulted in me being worth minus 200 grand, so I've set up my finances in a way which make it a little bit difficult to go after me, but I'm also, I don't run things that I can't defend.
So, I get lawyers' letters, I used to get a lot of lawyers' letters from people saying, Mr. Winifred, we want you to retract the article and pay our costs, and I always replied, see you in court, bitches.
One, one company was foolish enough to actually take me up on the challenge.
And that was a company called Sefton Resources.
And they lied through their teeth.
It was a total fraud.
And I, we got to the High Court.
And I was defending myself.
But I had a friends, lawyer friends who helped me along the way.
And we would have won.
I'm pretty sure we would have won.
But luckily, I discovered a reference on the internet to a court case from 2008 between the CEO and a man who I'd never heard of, Mr. Gary Dillabow.
And I trawled and I trawled and I trawled.
And eventually, I got a call from Gary Dillabow, who'd moved from Colorado to British Columbia.
He was a dentist.
And he called me when I was sitting in Greece, and he explained what the court case was.
And at that stage, I thought, I'm in here, because the court case showed that the chief executive of this company that was suing me for libel had either committed perjury or had stolen the company's money.
And eventually, the documents were retrieved from storage, and I published them the next day.
They basically had to fold.
The High Court judge said, you're going to have to give up.
So I enjoyed that.
That was fun.
And I made the point of rubbing the nose of Pince and Mason's, their fascist lawyer scumbags, in it by going around there and lighting a cigar with a ten quid note and then taking a glass of champagne in for the lawyer who we'd beaten.
If you stand up to these people, They now know that it's very hard to go after us because we set ourselves up cleverly to avoid, to make it very, very difficult.
But also that I will fight you.
And most journalists cave.
You get a lawyer's letter from some of these scumbags and they cave.
It comes as a shock when they get a guy saying, see you in court, bitches.
And by the way, I'm going to really enjoy the discovery process.
It's not charging very well, is it?
Sorry, Tom.
My light is going to give people epileptic fits.
I'm going to try these ones.
No, we'll try those.
It's really pathetic how little the battery lasts for on these expensive My expensive lighting equipment that you haven't got, you've been using it for long.
But Tommy, it's quite... Sorry, carry on.
So the companies these days, they're not foolish enough to try it on.
I mean, I will go and challenge them.
I will go to AGMs and stand up and buy one share in their company in order to go and challenge them and humiliate them in front of their shareholders.
So I'm not worried about it.
There was one case where a company, a Greek fraud, which I was exposing with a friend of mine, and I went and doorstepped its headquarters outside Athens, and the security guard was trying to seize my camera and I had to be chased away.
So the companies do it.
What's more interesting is the morons who were invested in these frauds, is how they respond.
Um, so they respond by, uh, they send me death threats.
Uh, they put, uh, tweets out saying, we're going to clean you out in court.
I had a barrister, uh, at the London chambers, putting a tweet out the other day saying, Oh, I'm going to bankrupt you in court.
And then he called me at 1145 at night.
And, uh, I said, you know, you explained things and he went away.
But, you know, he's invested in one of these frauds.
I made the mistake of saying that I painted badges and I wanted to block up a set in my house here in Wales.
And they went on to the bulletin boards and chat private chat rooms and discuss how they were going to report me to the RSPCA and the Badger Trust.
And needless to say, the Badger Trust listened to these goons and said that, you know, you realise that you can't do this and we want you to change your article because you've been encouraging people.
to damage badges and of course I hadn't said that at all so I told them to sling their hook and said I want you know I want the name of your online manager pal because you're harassing me and you're doing it at the instigation of people who not only send death threats they have a discussion a couple of weeks ago about hiring a hitman to have me killed
And they agreed that it would cost 20 grand and then one of the other guys says, yeah, I'll chip in half as long as you allow me to torture him first.
They published my wife's work details and plan to try and get her sacked.
They have a go at my son because he's mixed race.
They're just vile.
One of them contacted my ex-wife, this was a few years ago, pretending to be a 13-year-old girl and saying I'd sexually abused her.
She was in fact a glamour model from Manchester, but she happened to own shares in Quindel, the fraud.
These people are insane, but that's my life.
I salute you, sir.
You're a very brave chap.
I mean, you're laughing it off, but that sounds terrifying.
And you're definitely a chip off the old block, aren't you?
It's much better when I'm in Greece.
I tell my neighbours there, Damani is a place where everyone's got a gun.
I'm the only person in my village who doesn't have a gun.
So I told my neighbours, you know, what I do, and I showed them one of the death threats.
And they go, this great guy, Niko, the communist in the village, leading communist, my best friend.
He says, don't worry, if anyone comes here asking for you, I'll have them killed.
And yeah, that's fine.
Maybe we should move to Greece.
That's very reassuring.
Yes, I'd like some neighbours like that.
Tell me a bit about Quindel.
What was the deal?
What was the fraud?
Every fraud going!
But also, Quindel was a company set up by a man called Rob Terry.
And what is amazing is that this was his third fraud.
And it was his third public company fraud.
He had done one in 2004 called The Institute.
That's number two.
And he managed to get the share up to 1,200p.
At that point, he shorted shares in his own company.
That's selling shares, you know, hoping they go down.
And made money from that.
The whole thing was a fraud.
He had bought worthless assets off friends of his for shares, which the friends just sold the shares to make an absolute killing, and the assets were totally worthless.
But he paid 300 million quid for it.
Eventually that company was bailed out and placed at 5p.
So people had bought shares at 12 quid, and they were 5p within a couple of years of Terry's departure.
That should, but given that he was shorting his own shares, telling lies in public statements, doing fraudulent deals, that should have said, you know, if we had a regulator who worked totally useless.
Yes.
They would have said, actually, you know, Mr. Terry, you know, we probably were too incompetent to catch you, but you're not allowed to float any more companies.
So what did he do?
He floated another company.
And right from the get go, It's called Quindale.
It was a fraud.
So it was initially a country club.
And then he said that it was doing various sorts of services.
And I demonstrated that in its first year as a public company, it reported profits of, forgive me, I can't remember the exact numbers, something like revenues of five million and profits of four million.
And I demonstrated that actually, all of that was fraud.
It was just fraud.
He had done what's called a Panama pump fraud.
Panama pump's a term invented by my friend, Sam Antar of Crazy Eddie's.
He was a fraudster, turned fraudbuster.
And what that was was that Quindel issued shares to another company.
And then Quindel bought bogus services of the company or sold bogus services to that other company.
And that other company sold the shares in the market and paid Quindel the money.
So, in fact, Quindel hadn't provided any service to it at all.
It was able to book revenues, which is 100 percent profit, and get the cash in.
And it went on from that to do all sorts of other frauds.
It got into the litigation business of helping people sue for whiplash.
And then it decided it would go helping people to sue, claiming they got noise-induced industrial deafness.
And they booked profits on the assumption that a certain number of cases would settle.
But I showed very clearly that they were assuming that they would have a market share of something between 150 and 200 percent going forward.
And they were booking profits on the basis.
It was obviously fantasy.
But the accountants just waved it through.
So yeah, they're real profits.
Okay, there's no cash.
But they're real profits, waved it all through.
And companies used vast amounts of money, vast amounts of shares to raise money.
And it also bought businesses off Mates of Rob Terry, which were totally worthless, for hundreds of millions of quid, in shares, which those mates then dumped.
And those were the same mates from the previous fraud.
It also bought a business, one of those businesses was called Ingenie, whose brand ambassador was Gary Lineker.
And Gary Lineker trousered five million from the Quindale fraud.
He didn't?
Yeah, he was given free shares in Genie, which was bought by Quindale.
Those became Quindale shares.
He put out a statement saying, well, I wish I could buy some more.
And of course he didn't.
He sold the lot.
Trousered the whole lot.
Isn't that ironic?
That sounds very dodgy.
Doesn't reflect well on the character of Gary Lineker, I would say.
I think that's the legally safe way of putting it.
It reflects very badly on the character of Mr Lineker.
But that's what happened.
And the companies eventually were capitalised at three billion quid.
And of course, eventually they did run out of other people's money.
But along the way, they did, you know, they did crazy things, which I did expose.
And Quindar responded, I got two lawyers' letters from them.
They also put up a post rebutting the blogger, me.
But the post was so panicked, I actually submitted more in it.
And the post actually allowed us to admit one of their great frauds was they were running out of money.
So they were getting money in from anywhere.
So, the original Country Club, which the company was based on, by its insurance and telematics business, was a fraud.
But the original Country Club was sold to this guy, Jonathan Stratton Knowles, for 1.95, 1.97 million in shares.
And it was so small, such a three billion market cap, you didn't need to do anything, you didn't need to announce it.
At the same time, Stretton Knowles set up a company which cost him £68.40.
It was a dormant shell company.
And he sold that to Quindale for £2.4 million in shares.
In cash!
Or shares, whatever it was.
The net effect was that Quindale got £2 million cash By effectively selling shares in the market, Stratton Knowles got the Country Club, which he eventually sold back to Rob Terry, the fraudster, and he went off to star in Life in Mobs, a reality TV show on Channel 5.
But that was just a little fraud.
A quick two million fraud.
All sorts of frauds.
He did millions of frauds.
The SFO is investigating it, but at a glacial pace.
But if they don't charge Terry on this one, We can just give up.
That's just saying you can get away with anything.
Now, we've got to talk about Neil Woodford, because I personally lost money from Neil Woodford, probably in common with most retail investors.
I mean, the Woodford Fund was being touted by all kinds of financial commentators, wasn't it, in the media?
And by financial advisors.
Yeah, this fund is doing particularly well for our customers, for our clients.
And yeah, you might be interested in... So tell me the background.
Was Neil Woodford ever any good?
Was he ever legit?
He was legit.
He was at Invesco and he was a curer for 20 odd years.
And he made his name buying shares.
Part of it is timing.
You get lucky with timing.
So he started in the mid-90s, and his beat was buying shares in value investments, companies that make a profit and pay a dividend.
Rolls-Royce, those sort of boring companies.
Shell.
That's the sort of thing, yeah.
In the late 90s we had the dot-com boom, and Woodford for a time looked like a twit, as did Warren Buffett, because he said this is a load of bollocks, which of course it was.
And so for a couple years he underperformed, but then the dot-com boom exploded, and all the other fund managers who'd filled their boots with this fraudulent rubbish looked like chumps, and suddenly Woodford was the hero of the day, and that made his name.
And he delivered good returns, because companies that make profits and pay dividends will reward you in the end.
It's value investing.
And in 2008, he also dodged the financials.
He thought there was something going to be going wrong, and so he had no exposure to the financials, which crashed in the financial crisis.
So he comes out of that looking like a hero, but even by 2010, he's starting to be a bit naughty.
And so he, in order to deliver that extra performance, that's called beta, he wanted to beat everybody else.
So more money would come in and he'd earn even more money as a fund manager.
He started investing in dodgy biotechs and high risk small caps, some of them which were completely bonkers.
And I always give an example of the most bonkers was the wood, the plastic pallets company.
If you want to go and get some tiles for your thing, you put them on a wooden pallet, right?
That wooden pallet costs you five quid.
There isn't just a danger that the gentleman who are tarmacking your neighbour's drive up the road might steal your wooden pallet.
If that happens, you say, so what?
I'll buy another one.
Well, a company called RM2 set up with the idea of having Trackable plastic pallets, which, if it got stolen by the gentleman tarmacking your neighbour's drive, you could trace.
And actually, you don't really want to do that, because do you want to confront those people who are harmacking your neighbour's drives?
They're not exactly scholars and gentlemen, so you probably don't want to trace it anyway.
And moreover, it cost you 60 quid to buy the pallet.
It was clearly an insane, lunatic proposition.
But Woodford put more and more money into it.
And there were a raft of these things.
So this is happening 2011-12, whilst he's still at Invesco.
Day after he leaves Invesco it is fined by the FCA for about 30 breaches of the rules.
Two big stakes in companies, stakes which are too big.
He shouldn't have had that many shares.
He was having too much of his fund in unlisted investments, all sort of illiquid liquidity issues.
A unit trust, you know, if you want to sell your units, you can do it and you get the cash back the next day.
If the fund can't raise that money because it's invested in private companies or rubbish companies, it faces a liquidity crunch.
Woodford was playing fast and loose with the rules before he left Invesco.
The day he leaves, he's fine.
Now again, if the British regulator wasn't so bloody useless, they would have said, what's the point of fining Invesco?
Because it's just a big, rich fund management house.
You should be fining the individual.
Fraud or wrongdoing is done by individuals.
So they shouldn't have been fining Woodford a fortune and saying, by the way, you're a naughty boy, you can never work in fund management again.
They didn't.
He was allowed to launch his own firm.
He launched two unit trusts and an investment trust and got mandates to manage other people's money.
He had smoke blown up his arse by the entire mainstream media.
You know, they are today all saying, oh, that Woodford, he was a bad man.
And here are some of the warning signals people should have spotted.
From 2015 onwards, we ran a thousand, more than a thousand, articles, podcasts and videos.
I did a talk at an investor show in front of a thousand people explaining some of the things that Woodford was up to.
He was cheating on the valuations of stocks within his fund, putting in valuations that weren't true of private companies.
That increased the value of his fund short term, meant that he earned more in management fees, but ultimately the valuations were a joke.
And in the end, these companies run out of money and their values crashed.
So he put money in at the wrong level, but he made money out of it personally.
People like you had lost money.
And he was doing all sorts of other fiddles.
We were saying this from 2015 onwards, the Deadwood Press was useless.
And there are two reasons for that.
One, there are a lot of very stupid people in the Deadwood Press.
If you get jobs because they know someone, you know, their dad was a Oxford with someone else's dad.
So there's some dim people, but the real issue is the corruption of the Deadwood press.
They don't dare be nasty to people because you might piss off a powerful PR firm.
It's much, much simpler just to do what the PR firms say.
They give you your scoops and at And that's the way it works.
And you know, I've done it.
I've worked on The Evening Standard.
And I've sat there, and I recounted this the other day, two episodes.
I sat there one morning, and a chap, a director of the biggest financial PR firm, walked to the office with a press release, and stood behind my back as I wrote the article.
And he said, you can just change that bit there.
Can you just change that?
And I thought, what the hell?
And I complained, and I was told, don't you dare complain, because that's the way we do it.
If we don't do that, they won't make our lives easy.
And a bit later, I was investigating an insider dealing affair, the Carradine affair, involving the chairman of a PR firm, Tony Knox of Action Dynamics.
He's dead now, so he can't sue us.
and Schroder's Investment Management.
And in the end, Knox got sidelined and two folks at Schroder's got fired because of my work.
But I wanted to go on because it was bigger than that.
And then a whole load of senior staff from Financial Dynamics walks into the office of the Evening Standard, go into a meeting with the city editor and a couple of other people, senior staffers, people looking at me, and I'm sitting there thinking, Christ, what's this about?
At the end, I'm summonsed in, and they say, you're not going to write about this anymore.
I go, why?
They go, well, you're not.
That's it.
And the deal was, it was obvious, was They were told, if you carry on writing about it, no more soft stories, no more scoops.
We're going to make your life difficult.
Or alternatively, you get him off this case and we're going to give you some nice scoop hits.
And that's the way the financial press operate.
The biggest supporters of Neil Woodford was the Mail on Sunday.
If you look at it now, you'll see Jeff Prestridge, a man known as Jeff Prestrick in our industry, saying what a bad man Woodford was.
Jeff Prestridge has made his career blowing off Woodford.
He gets exclusive interviews and in return has said nice things about him.
The Mail on Sunday was saying that the Woodford funds were a buy the day before they were finally gated.
So they were the last rats on the ship.
They were still loyal.
That's because they were always giving the scoops.
Here's an exclusive interview with the great man.
these are the kind of people that are responsible for me losing 2000 quid of my isa investment um because yeah it's did you why did you buy it james Well, because I... so many people in the media... I mean, this was before I came to completely distrust the mainstream media.
You know, I was halfway there to getting it, but I didn't.
And I just thought, I've heard of this guy.
All these people would not be talking about him if he weren't good.
I mean, because obviously, imagine if you were a journalist and you were bigging up somebody that you knew to be, have skeletons in his cupboard.
I mean, you wouldn't do that, would you?
Because journalists have integrity.
Or so wise.
It's worse than that.
Now, I think everyone accepts Neil Woodford's a rotter.
But the guy's planning a comeback.
He may be scuppered by the fact the FCA is finally investigating him.
This news was broken by the Sunday Telegraph last week, and they did it with an absolutely enormous interview, where Woodford He basically portrayed himself as the victim of what happened.
He said, I had to sell my 30 million quid house because my fund management business went down.
Well, that's just not true.
But there was no question about it.
Yes, you might have had to sell it.
But 25 years at Invesco, Kewler made 30 million out of that.
And we know that he took dividends after tax of at least 37 million out of Woodford Investment Management.
in four years.
The idea he had to sell his house because of it going down is just a lie.
But the Telegraph didn't challenge that and allows him to paint himself as the victim, to blame everyone else for what went wrong, say, oh, I've learned some lessons from this.
And, you know, let's go again.
And that's corrupt journalism.
The Telegraph got the scoop.
They got an exclusive interview with Woodford, and in return for that, they agreed that they wouldn't challenge him when he told blatant lies, which he did.
And that's the way journalism runs.
And you would have thought, after all the opprobrium heaped on Neil Woodford since the collapse, that journalists would have some shame.
But they don't.
So you know it, and you know it from the political world.
If you expose the fact that, you know, your local Tory MP is in a relationship with a goat, the central office will have words and say, actually, you know, you're not going to get the scoops anymore.
So there is a cosy, the way that the expenses were hushed up for years.
It's the same corruption.
The other corruption, of course, is I look at those folks who were in financial journalism with me 20 years ago, And the two or three left in financial journalism, all the others have gone into PR.
And you don't get a well-paid job in PR unless you brown-nose.
And it's the same with the political journalists.
If you brown-nose enough, you get a job, I don't know, spinning for Boris or whatever.
That's the game.
And so it's totally corrupt, yes.
It's very true that, actually.
I've looked at I mean, I think there comes a point in many journalist careers where we realise we look at...
We look at those of our contemporaries, our university contemporaries who went into more respectable professions like the law or the city or whatever.
Prostitution, drug dealing, being red boys at journalism.
And we think, hang on a second, I'm now considered to be expendable because I'm old or whatever and I really need to find a new career path.
And you look around at these These PR companies that wear, they always wear these immaculately cut suits and they're obviously, they have fantastic expense accounts.
When I, I got a taste of this briefly when I had dealings with Tim Bell's company, whatever it was called, Bell Pottinger.
And, and you know, you just, just thought, wow, this is, and they're so smooth and they're so, and what you don't realize is that the terrible price they pay for this is that they, Throw all their morals out of the window.
They have no self-respect.
They have no decency.
They have to be ready for phone calls at 3 a.m.
from their disgusting, depraved client who expects them to To give their grandmothers blood at the top of a hat.
So they've got no conscience, they have no lives of their own, but they get very well paid.
So I can see that.
They get an absolute fortune.
I'm unemployable.
You're unemployable.
Because A, people know you wouldn't do that.
And B, you haven't spent the past 20 years brown-nosing these people by running the lies they want you to run.
Couldn't do it.
Uncle Chris couldn't have done it.
The idea that you have to write what a PR person tells you is just appalling.
But that's what journalists do.
Yeah, I think you're right.
It's quite interesting, isn't it?
It's also, you know, we see that, I think, you know, I despair more of our profession.
And we could go on to lockdown because there is what Uncle Chris talked about.
I'm sure Uncle Chris would have been with you and me on lockdown.
Yes.
The group think that the entire political and media class think has won.
And so you and I may say, well, you know, if you're really worried about Covid, what we could have done is told people over 70 and people who are morbidly obese to shield and the rest of us get on with our lives and the economy wouldn't have been ruined and they might have postponed death by a couple of months.
We could have done that.
And now we're sitting here, and it is clear that if you look at the falling death rates in Sweden, the falling death rates here, they're falling faster in Sweden, where they haven't had such a lockdown they are here, but also The death rates amongst old fogies are falling far faster than death rates amongst young people.
So the vaccines, you know, probably do work.
You and I have been vaccinated by God.
We've both had COVID and survived.
But the vaccines will probably work.
So why the hell are we...
But, you know, talking about having a lockdown forever.
The lockdown's not achieved anything.
You can't say that.
The idea that the BBC might have us on talking about that is ludicrous.
Well, yes.
I'm not sure I agree with you that the vaccines do work, actually.
I think that they don't even do what they're supposed to do, which is to protect you from catching it or stop you transmitting it, it seems to me.
Because if they did do that, we wouldn't be talking about having any more lockdowns or any of this mask nonsense.
I mean, not that either of those works either.
The possibility that the masks didn't stop the spread, and they can't admit the possibility.
I mean, especially here in Wales, God knows how many lockdowns or fire breaks we've had.
And we've had all these extra ones, and we seem to be sort of, we've been the Covid hotspot of Europe.
And so, any rational person would say that lockdowns haven't worked at all, and we need masks, and what is causing numbers to go down is that more people are vaccinated by Pfizer, and 10 million of us have been vaccinated by God, and it's getting warmer, and This is when the flu season normally goes down and it just seems common sense but you know the media won't dare say that because they're all in this horrible groupthink.
They are.
And I'm sure Chris would have said that.
I think he would have done.
I think he would have done just knowing everything I know about him and our conversations and his understanding of how the world works and particularly as you say about groupthink.
He would have recognized instantly what's going on.
He would have been curious as well.
He would have, for example, I think he would have paid a lot of attention to Names left my head for a moment.
The American guy who's pointed out how the CCP effectively promoted the whole idea of lockdown, that lockdown comes from Xi Jinping.
It's his baby.
And Chinese propaganda units persuaded the West to, the gullible West, to go for it.
I mean, there were so many... They persuaded us to close all our coal-fired power stations to stop global warming.
Exactly.
Well, that's another reason he would have been onto this like a rat up a drainpipe, because he would have known that the whole Greenscare was the precursor to the fake COVID pandemic.
Because it originates in the same groupthink, you know, the technocracy and the Trilateral Commission and so on.
They've been planning this for years.
Sustainability, it's all part of the same agenda.
So he would have totally got that.
When I first started becoming really friendly with your uncle, I remember looking at him and thinking, I really admire you and you are a total hero, but I wouldn't want to be like you because I can see that even though you're probably the greatest journalist of your generation, You've been marginalized, you know, you're not appreciated as you ought to be by the mainstream and stuff.
And here I am, now the mighty Booker is no longer with us.
And I realized that, you know, I'm not fit to walk in his shoes, but essentially that's where my career has gone as well.
And I have become the thing I feared that I would become.
And I think it's the same with you, Tom.
I think we have to accept That we have become marginalised outsiders, sort of adored by a few, but rejected as loons by the many.
Is that fair?
It is, but there was an article... I'm sure you have exactly the same thing.
You write an article and you think, I'm really pissed off.
I had my dad, who died in the autumn as well.
But it would be more Chris, because Dad was a scholar, not a journalist.
It would have been, I really would have loved to have read that, Chris.
And so I did an article this week on Peel Street in Wrexham.
The Irish government has spent £170,000 listing all the racist streets and statues and buildings in Wales.
And obviously, you know, there are things like, you know, that Alfright, Freak, Lord Nelson, and Wellington.
They're obvious ones.
So there's Peel Street in my local town in Wrexham.
And they spent £170,000 on getting these experts.
And the experts say, Peel Street is problematical.
We can't say whether it's linked to slavery, but it might be.
Now, the reason that you, I'm sure, know there are a number of Robert Peels, but there are two main ones.
Robert Peel the Elder, who didn't own slaves but supported slavery because he was one of only ten millionaires in Britain in 1800.
He was an industrialist.
He depended on it.
He wasn't a total rotter.
He actually pushed through pioneering legislation on improving the condition of child workers.
But he was a fairly undistinguished parliamentarian.
His son was very distinguished and was a lifelong abolitionist.
But why do we... and it's far more distinguished.
So the odds are, if there is a Peel Street near you, it's the sun.
But what Chris would have enjoyed is that the neighbouring streets to Peel Street in Wrexham are Villiers Street, Cobden Street and Bright Street.
Now James, what do those three men have in common?
Well, Cobden...
was sort of what was of our party, wasn't he?
I mean, he was into... Okay, I'll put you out of your misery.
Those three men were the leading people wanting to abolish the Corn Laws.
And Peel sacrificed his political career to abolish the Corn Laws.
Yes, yes, he's one of my heroes for that.
Therefore, it is obvious that that street is named after Peel the Younger, who actually not only was he an abolitionist, but as Prime Minister, he set up the North Atlantic Fleet, which sailed into New York Harbor with three captured American slaving vessels.
and was the scourge of the slavers.
And he is prime minister.
He signed treaties which got other countries to abolish slavery.
And he was in the government which ended slavery in the British Empire.
He was a passionate anti-slaver.
But the Welsh government are so bloody stupid, and their experts, like all experts, are so bloody stupid, they can't work it out.
Chris would have worked it out.
Running that article, what does it achieve for me?
Nothing.
It earns a teeny weeny bit of money, but it doesn't really achieve anything.
But I'm really happy that I've done it.
I'm very proud of it.
And when the Welsh Government says this report will help teach our children about The unfortunate links with some street names.
I hope that when my four-year-old is taught that Peel Street in Wrexham is linked to the slave trade, he'll be able to wave a piece of paper and say, this is why you're talking rubbish, teacher!
And Uncle Chris had the same thing.
He said in his, you know, we discussed, do you think you've achieved much with your campaigns?
And some of them, yes he did.
He was, there are a whole load of Brexiteers who wouldn't have been Brexiteers without Chris.
His work on the way that social services departments stole children and put them through secret courts, that was very good.
Now, you know, I see the Guardian's doing it now and claiming it's groundbreaking.
typical lies from The Guardian.
Chris was doing that 10 years ago.
Yeah.
And Chris was in his late 70s threatened with prison by a judge for trying to stop this in one of these cases and for writing about it.
And I think it was Alistair Campbell's brother-in-law got him off.
But that I can admire as a journalist that in your late 70s, most of them have given up the ghost.
And he's prepared to go to court and say, send me to prison if I lose and fight it and win.
And And that's heroic journalism, but he did achieve little things, but in the end, In the end, he was there, you know, lying on his deathbed, and he saw various people like you and me in the last few days and weeks.
And then that last night, he spent there with his wife and his two sons in the room, and he provided a great financial platform for them.
His wife doesn't have to worry about money.
He gave her an awful lot of joy.
He gave his sons a lot of joy.
That's rather more important, isn't it, than whether you founded Private Eye or didn't?
I totally agree.
And by the way, I hope I wasn't sounding querulous in any way.
I mean, I was just merely observing rather than whining.
I would never want my My lot or my career should be any other way.
I would never want to be any other kind of journalist, and I'm sure you'd be the same.
I mean, the pursuit of the truth is the most important thing, and we're representing all those people who, well, who need us to tell the truth when nobody else is.
We are doing that, and also I hope, you know, some days you write, and some days there are days I don't really want to write, and I end up doing the bare minimum, and going and chopping logs or trying to plant a new tree in my orchard or something like that.
But most days I actually enjoy my writing and I hope I can be like Chris.
And he did enjoy writing things, certain things.
Some of it was a drag.
I enjoyed writing certain things right up to the end.
You got satisfaction from some things.
And if you can do that, and if you can provide for your family, and you can get some goats and annoy the neighbours, and hopefully the goats kill your badgers, don't say that, I'll be arrested, you know, that's fine.
That's fine.
I can live with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think we're going to end it there.
You would feel rotten if you were a toadie at the Daily Telegraph.
And they said, no, James, I'm sorry.
Because sooner or later, Chris, they tried to get rid of him.
They did.
Several times.
I mean, you know, gosh, I hate the Telegraph.
It's an appalling paper.
It says the Sunday Telegraph.
Chris cancelled his subscription to Daily Telegraph two years before he died because it was a truly dreadful rant.
And imagine if he saw it now.
Oh yeah, he would be truly ashamed to be there.
And I know that his son and I quite often urged him to resign and go and set up a website like Mark Steyn because he would have easily made enough money to do it.
But he was of that era when he thought, you know, you should be in a newspaper.
They treated him appallingly.
They wanted him out.
And that's the problem, is if you went to go and work for a newspaper, you'd have a change of editor, and they'd say, actually, we don't like your face, James.
or you know what you said about the, you refuse to accept that Joe Biden is a towering intellect and the rightful president of America.
- Yeah, yeah. - And something like that would happen and you'd be fired.
And so people don't want that to happen to them.
So they just tow the line.
And so they say to the day, and to our sentences, yes, of course, Yes, of course, it was an answer for Biden.
And there was no cheating.
So what if, you know, there was censorship of all those nasty stories?
We won't talk about the censorship of the Hunter Biden stories.
We'll just let it go on.
And that's what these people do, because they just want to say they work for a prestigious paper and have enough money to, you know, to pay for the wife and brats.
A phrase which would get me sacked from the Daily Telegraph for using it, but that's what they do.
Yeah, I'm afraid to say.
Listen, I think we're going to have to do another podcast at some stage, because we're only just warming up in our attack on the media.
And I think that you and I have got so much more to say on this subject.
And the only reason I'm cutting it short now is, A, I know that you've got your son to go and see.
And B, I think it's time for my second cup of tea of the afternoon.
And I haven't done any journalistic work.
I hope you appreciate my mug.
I totally agree with that sentiment.
Defund the BBC.
Right.
Yeah.
Yes, okay, well I'll have another mug with another suitable sentiment at the next video.
Thanks very much for the chat.
I might nick that.
When did you write the story about Wrexham and about Peel and stuff?
Two or three days ago.
It's quite a good story.
Has it been done elsewhere?
No.
There were local papers still running it as a problematical issue.
But it's on tomwinifred.com.
If you want to use any of the material on there, I'm having a good week with this sort of nonsense.
So feel free.
This is how journalism works, isn't it?
OK.
All right.
That is.
Oh, and may I say to all listeners, viewers, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please remember to support me on Patreon or Subscribestar, because I can't do this stuff just out of my goodwill, even though I am a goodwill person.
And check out Tom's website, too.
I'll put the details below.
And you can find out from him inter alia what companies not to invest in.
Thank you, Tom.
It's been great.
Pleasure.
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