Like his uncle - James’s late friend and mentor Christopher Booker - Tom Winnifrith is a climate sceptic and Eurosceptic. Tom chats to James about what ‘Uncle Christopher’ would have made of current world affairs (Ukraine, Gaza, the jabs etc), about having children when you’re in your Fifties and all the other parents think you’re the grandad, Tony Benn, and financial skullduggery including some very interesting information about ‘star’ fund manager Neil Woodford. Tom is the host of the ShareProphets website which, as well as giving share tips exposes dodgy companies. https://shareprophets.com James will be speaking at Tom’s annual summer event for investors by the River Dee https://www.sharestock.co.uk↓If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn't in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold
↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future.
In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, JD tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/↓ ↓ ↓
Buy James a Coffee at:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole
The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk
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There is no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition to my 2012 classic book.
Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011, actually.
The first edition came out.
and it's a snapshot of a particular era, the era when So I give you the background to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us, we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scan.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scan, It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands up.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that one.
Just go to my website and look for it.
jamesdellingpole.co.uk I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring round all those people who are still persuaded that it's a disaster, we must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother God.
There we go.
It's a scam.
With me, James Dunning-Pol.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
Before we meet him, though, let's have a word from one of our sponsors.
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Nearly enough.
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Go to the Pure Gold Company and you will be put in touch with one of their advisors.
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Which you want to do, whether you want to have it in bullion or in coins.
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Do it before it goes up even more.
I think you'd be mad not to.
Welcome to the Delling Pod, Tom Winifred.
If Do you ever watch TV?
Just occasionally, yeah.
There's this show, one of the few things we watch as a family.
Because we argue about stuff.
And anyway, TV's evil.
We watch this quiz show called Only Connect.
It's very abstruse and wanky and intellectual and annoying.
But it's quite good.
It's presented by Victoria Corrin.
And anyway, if we were on that show today...
And today we would be the Bookers.
Because you are the nephew of my old friend and mentor, Christopher Booker.
And I am...
Well, yeah, I'm...
He sort of...
Not only my uncle, but my godfather.
Both my godfather's notorious womanisers.
Obviously, they gave me spiritual guidance as I contemplate my latest marriage.
Ah, okay.
I don't know how interesting this is to the generality of my audience.
How many of them have even heard of Christopher Booker?
but some of them will do.
Those who know him will know that he was...
Before that, he founded, he was the first editor, wasn't he, of Private Eye?
That's correct.
He founded Private Eye.
He was a scriptwriter on That Was The Week That Was.
So he was a trendy young satirist.
His girlfriend was Eleanor Braun.
He ditched him for John Lennon and then took him back again.
He was sort of a man of the swinging 60s.
Then he found God, and people at the private side didn't really approve of that.
And in later years, he became a great campaigning journalist, and so my sort of mentor, in inner-city regeneration, the scandals of that.
And then he came on to Euroscepticism, global warming.
A shift to the right.
You know, in the 1973 referendum, whereas my father's family, being good Benites, were saying we should stay out of the evil empire, Uncle Chris voted to stay in.
But he saw the lights later on in life.
By the way, your sound is distorted.
You're showing me that it's going to the yellow.
Can you do anything to make your sound less harsh?
How would I do that?
Oh, I don't know.
You're right.
It's like...
Can you sit closer to the thing?
No, further away.
You're distorting, you see.
Further away, OK.
Can you adjust the microphone on your computer or not?
No.
No.
I'm sorry.
The problem is, Tom, that we are...
of a generation and PPE.
Did you?
Don't hold it against me.
That's bad.
What, at Oxford?
Yeah, but at least I didn't...
You are a wanker.
I mean, I'm sorry, but Tom...
First, you did...
Oh, Hartford, a terrible, terrible college as well.
Yes, it is a terrible college.
Yeah, Christian Gurumurthy, Cal Cal Wallida, Charlotte Hogg.
Extraordinary.
Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you what, a lot of my listeners will be at this point going, this guy is a wrong one.
PPE, because we know so many people who did PPE.
it's like the devil's course isn't it it's it's isn't it?
Yeah, I think it's a pointless degree and I consider my time at university completely wasted.
And so I have...
We move on.
We should be judged by what we do now, not by the pointless degree we did or the awful college you went to.
Would you and I?
I mean, younger than me.
Would we have overlapped at all?
No.
No.
You'd have been one of those children coming up.
Maybe in my final year, had I been wandering around, I might have seen you coming up for your interview or something like that.
Possibly, when I was coming up for my interview at Christchurch and getting rejected.
Yes, possibly.
There's no bitterness there, is there?
None whatsoever.
What was very funny, I thought, was when we started this project, just before we started, and I don't like to...
And you expressed your horror that you didn't know that it was visual as well as audio.
So you hadn't put on your makeup.
I haven't shaved.
I look like a big issue seller.
Uncle Chris would have been horrified.
But there we go.
I think it's quite charming, actually.
I like the fact that you look a bit rough.
I think it's amusing.
It adds character to the show.
It makes me look even older.
So when I walk my four-year-old daughter to school, occasionally I get comments, Jay is here with a grandpa.
But there we go.
I was going to ask you about that.
I was going to say, you do have an excuse.
You do something that...
I mean, so you've got a four-year-old daughter.
Yeah.
Tell me, what's it like?
It's great.
She's fantastic.
I've got an eight-year-old son as well.
Four-year-old daughter, great, I take her.
This weekend we had the Rugby Club Awards ceremony for her.
And she's a very enthusiastic rugby player and went on to a party.
I suppose it sort of keeps me going.
And I sort of look at her and think how sweet she is.
And that's a reason to carry on living, isn't it?
Oh, look, there's no doubt that four-year-old girls' daughters are absolutely adorable.
But, I mean, young children generally, they're quite exhausting.
I mean, they're fine when you're in your 30s, but so how do you cope with the...
Well, we go gardening.
I take them to the garden and they quickly get tired after that.
So you just battle on.
It's good for your health to have children making you run around a bit.
Right.
Well, one doesn't actually have to have children to make one run around a bit.
I mean, I think anyone who's kind of vaguely clued up knows that you've got to do stuff like Weight training as you get older because of the muscle loss, otherwise.
I mean, if you want a reasonably enjoyable old age, you've got to train.
You've got to do aerobic exercise, you've got to do weight.
Well, I will be going to do, maybe do my gardening.
I have a big garden, so I shall do that.
Maybe plant a tree later.
So I do some training.
Okay.
And what's...
You intimated that occasionally people think you're the granddad rather than the...
What's it like hanging out with other parents who are like...
I find that odd.
You occasionally go to parties.
And I inevitably find myself gravitating towards the grandparents.
And then I have a lot more in common.
And it is difficult.
You know, the other parents are in their 30s, 40s.
There are some in their 20s.
There are parents of kids at my daughter's school who are younger than my eldest daughter.
Yeah.
That's weird.
It is weird.
My oldest daughter and I, you know, we find a few things to talk about in common.
But these people, I don't think I've got anything in common with them.
So it is a bit odd.
It's quite interesting, I find, that...
I mean, I don't know whether that's just because I'm a product of my education, but...
I had no problem when I went back to my friend's house at university or whatever, met their parents.
Never had any shortage of stuff to say to them, talking about ideas, talking about character affairs, whatever, literature.
But I wonder about the generation Below us.
I think there's been a kind of something's happened to our culture whereby we were maybe people of our age were the kind of last people to have a kind of to have lived in the world as it should be.
I did a podcast on VE Day reflecting on The various members of my family and related people and their roles in the war.
And considered that when I was the age of my eight-year-old boy, we lived in a village where there were gentlemen there who were missing an arm or something, and who'd left Northamptonshire, very close to where you live, who'd left Northamptonshire only once in their life, going to France in 1944.
And they were still scarred by it, and how my chaplain at school had an appalling stammer because of what he suffered in France in 1944, and how our village postmaster, Mr Eichler, had come to stay in our village in a camp, or just up the road in a camp, in 1943, and had never gone back to Germany.
And we had a direct relation to it, and the war was only, you know, Ended 25 years before I was born or 25 years before I was born.
It was quite close.
And I reflected on, you know, what various members of my family did in the war or people associated with us.
And everything from leaking the D-Day plans to the Germans.
And one was hung as a Nazi.
That's great.
this is your relatives this is my My grandmother's godfather's son was hung for founding the British Free Corps.
Amory.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's interesting, Tom, that your...
this is we're going to move on to this later on um that that there was a massive gulf gulf which is I want to talk about that a bit later on.
But when I was talking about this kind of generational divide, you instantly reached for the Second World War.
I wasn't really, I wasn't thinking about that.
I was trying to look at my elder children, who are in their 20s now, and late teens 20s, and they just have no interest in this at all.
And also their views are, you know, my views on Europe are perhaps shaped by that, by having uncles who fought and died in the war.
And they have a totally different outlook.
And they're just not really very interested in it.
I'm not either, is what I'm saying.
I'm really not.
I used to be.
And I'll explain why I'm not.
I think the Second World War is part of the problem.
It's this great massive distraction.
It's like a kind of one of those black holes that sucks everything towards it.
I don't believe in black holes, by the way, but if black holes existed, that's what it would do.
But I meant more.
There was a good example of it on...
I hate talking about TV because TV is...
Well, it's more than that.
It's a brainwashing device.
There was a series on Netflix, a remake of an older movie called The Four Seasons.
It's about some old friends in their late 50s, early 60s who keep going on holiday together.
On this particular occasion, one of their number decides he's going to ditch his wife of many years.
And he ends up replacing his wife with a younger model.
And there's a very amusing scene where they all go off skiing together, but the guy is forced to spend time, not with his old buddies, but with his new 30-something girlfriend and her millennial Generation Z type.
Friends.
And what I thought was very well observed about this scene was that one's cliched idea of this would be the older guy like us would be overtaken on the slopes by these groovy kids with their sports skills and their snowboards and stuff.
But that generation has long since passed.
In the show, this generation, the Generation Z stroke millennials, they're all kind of...
No, no, no.
Risk-averse, anti-competitiveness, don't have any of the skills.
Skills that you and I would have been considered fairly basic, like, okay, so ideally one learned to scheme when was younger, or if not, later on one learned to snowball, but there are certain sort of skills that...
There's certain stuff you're expected to know, certain attitudes you're expected to have.
And I think that what we've seen in our lifetime is an acceleration of this process, of the division of the generations.
they the powers that be have been been ramming in these um these pegs or whatever to sort of split us um and obviously the process
of dumbing down as well the kids are better uh more badly educated they're more stupid they're more cowardly there are all sorts of things that they're less inclined to have sex they're less inclined to want to have children and i was wondering whether you'd noticed this at all whether you saw this in in in in your the 20th century
I think my kids are wonderful.
I can't see myself being a grandfather soon.
My eldest is 23, but I don't see any sign of being a grandfather at all.
But, yes, I do think they are more risk-averse.
I just think back to when I was a kid, the idea of health and safety.
You know, it's rubbish.
You never wore crash hats to go skiing, for example.
I mean, it's weird.
The idea, well, I just think about, you know, my childhood, going around in fields, climbing trees, jumping across the stream at the bottom of the field, and obviously playing by yourself.
I think about us having a big fireworks party at our house.
And letting them off yourself without special glasses or...
And obviously you never do any of that these days.
No.
That is slightly worrying.
Now, I suppose the difference is that I was saying in the kind of, I don't normally do notes, you know, in emails to people before I go on the show.
And the reason I can tell is that you rang me an hour before the podcast to ask me whether it was still on.
Whereas I'm like, look, look, man.
I've set the time, you know, yeah, like two minutes, maybe one minute before the podcast.
I'll send you a link and we'll just do it and we'll just wing it.
Whereas you kind of, you're one of those people who likes to have an idea of where things are going and where they are, right?
It's because I have to juggle my day.
Before I've recorded with you, it's 10 o 'clock.
I've already recorded one podcast for Share Profits, the website I run.
Have you?
And written three articles.
Wow!
Oh, I feel bad now.
Oh, I feel bad.
Actually, before we go on, tell us about Share Profits, because that's how you earn your kids.
It's mainly how I earn my living.
Share Profits is a subscription website, and we mainly deal with exposing fraud and wrongdoing.
It doesn't make yourself popular.
One of the things I agree with Peter Hitchens about, and I'm sure we'd mention later, It's this idea of people commenting on what they haven't read.
So we're behind a paywall.
And I put out an article yesterday about a company called Georgina Energy, which is insolvent, although people deny it, and whose two main guys are crooks.
They were, you know, fingered for taking money from a previous employer illegally by Deloitte.
They were shown to have lied in court.
All sorts of bad things about the company.
But I wrote an article yesterday about the company, about an issue with its accounts and its subsidiaries.
It's all sort of quite technical, but it's another sign that this company's got real problems.
And I sent a tweet out, sent a link to it, and this guy replied, I can't get his words exactly right, but he used the word cunt.
And said, I hope you're legit, otherwise I'll do you completely.
I hope what you wrote is legit, or I'll do you completely.
So he swore and threatened me.
And of course, he hadn't actually read the article.
If he had, he would have just seen it was rather dry, but very good accounting stuff.
And it was all factually based.
And that's a common response.
People don't read the article, but attack you for what they think you've said rather than what you've actually said.
I mean, it sounds like you're doing a public service by exposing skullduggery in financial markets.
Yes.
But is that a monetizable thing?
I mean, do...
I hope you get people...
It is not massively profitable, but it pays my salary and pays that of the staff and we make a profit, yes.
It is a public service, it's been recognised.
The Financial Reporting Council, the Accounting Watchdog, has commended me numerous times for exposing dodgy accounts.
Often quite arcane points, but material.
And sometimes quite big companies, you know, billion pounds plus companies.
The FCA has suspended shares on the basis of what I've done.
And so, you know, they've praised me.
Game regulation.
They act on what we've done.
Panorama recognized that I've exposed Neil Woodford in a way that no one Yeah, I did.
Neil Woodford, I started writing and doing videos and talks about in 2015.
The balloon went up in 2019 and the Deadwood Press blew him off consistently right up to the bitter end.
Two weeks before his funds were gated, I went to the AGM of one of his companies and I bought 10 shares just so I could get in.
And there was this snivelling little twit from the FT begging for an exclusive interview.
But you know we're always nice to him.
Can I have an interview?
Can I have an interview?
But of course, they put in rules to keep me out by banning the press.
I said, here's my share certificate.
I got in.
And so the FT is blowing them off.
Two weeks before the whole thing goes up in 2019.
And I was at the AGM and I started asking questions as a loyal shareholder.
And he goes, all this stuff about me, it's all factually inaccurate press reporting.
And the worst offender, it's Mr. Winifred there!
And two weeks later, the whole thing blows up.
So, yeah, Power Armor commended us for that.
So, yeah, we get praise, but some people pay for it.
Others prefer not to pay $7.99 a month, an absolute bargain, and to invest in things and lose all their money.
That's very cool.
So presumably you provide information that enables people to...
You can easily get caught out by shorting.
Yeah, we have long ideas as well, shares to buy, but it's partly shorting, but it's also, you may find it useful.
You own shares in a company and you read what we've written about it, and perhaps you think twice about owning shares in that company.
Just because you have the knowledge that this company is crooked, that there's loads of things wrong that the market is not acknowledging, it can take a very long time for that information to affect the share price, can't it?
It can.
Sometimes you publish dossiers and we can move a share price pretty dramatically.
But sometimes it takes a long while.
But there's also a lot of the companies which I write about are ones which you can't short because they're too small.
Shorting is selling shares you don't own, hoping to buy them back more cheaply later.
Sometimes you can't do that for very small companies.
So companies are exposed.
Maybe it's just about avoiding owning them yourself.
I've had personal experience of the business
And I'd like to say to anybody, and you can confirm this, I'm sure, anyone who thinks that the Financial Services Authority or the The FCA is going to be able to protect you from fraudsters of any kind, or that it actually even gives a shit about you in the slightest way.
Dream on.
There is nobody there who's going to protect you.
It's the Wild West out there, and there are lots of crooks, and they are thriving, and you probably argue they're thriving more than ever.
Yeah, the regulators are hopeless.
The FCA in particular is hopeless.
It's staffed by virtuous people, I'm sure.
My first ever girlfriend is quite a senior person there.
I never name her because it would be hugely embarrassing for her.
But they are a virtuous girl, far too good for me.
And they're nice lawyers and accountants.
They're paid a fortune.
But they can't think.
How bad people behave.
And they just want to be, they're just respectable.
So Woodford got away with murder by ticking boxes in FCA questionnaires.
Well, I pointed out at the time, yeah, he's ticked a box, but it's not actually addressing the real issue.
And the FCA couldn't see through that.
I lost money through Neil Woodford.
Obviously, I should have paid attention to you.
Just give us the short version of what was wrong with Neil Woodford and why it was a bad thing and how he got away with it.
The real problem was that Woodford was a wrong one from the starters.
Even in the early days?
The day after he left, before he set up his own business, Woodford Investment Management, He was a fund manager at Invesco, and the day after he left, Invesco was sanctioned for 31 offences by the FCA, and all of them were on funds Woodford managed.
So that should have been a warning sign, but obviously people like the Daily Mail were so busy saying, he's the man who's made Middle England rich, and Hargreaves Lansdowne pushing all its clients into them.
They didn't care about that, but it should have been a warning sign.
Woodford's problem was that when he was good, he'd invested in solid companies that made profits and paid dividends at a time when they were unfashionable, and he did well.
But towards the end of his time at Invesco, he decided that in order to continue his winning streak, he had to gamble more and more.
On companies which were not profitable, which were losing money, which were perhaps whose shares were hard to trade, and in one or two cases, which were outright frauds.
And he did that at Invesco.
He did it more so at Woodford Investment Management.
But as people gradually realised that he wasn't actually doing what he said he was going to do, like investing good companies that would make you money, They started taking money out of his funds.
So he had what was called a liquidity crisis.
People were saying, I want to redeem my units.
So he had to pay them cash.
But he didn't have any cash because he'd fully invested in rubbish.
In order to pay the redemptions, he sold down the more liquid shares he had.
Lloyds Bank.
You know, proper companies that made a profit and paid a dividend.
So he'd sell down the good stuff, which meant that his fund became more and more concentrated in complete and utter rubbish.
And that meant that the liquidity crisis eventually caused the funds to be gated.
But there were things he did to hide the extent of what he was doing.
So you're meant to have only 10% of your fund in unquoted stocks.
Because he had to sell the liquid stuff, the Lloyds Bank, etc., he suddenly found that he was having more than 10% of his funds in unquoted stocks, which you can't trade at all.
So what did he do?
Well, he started by swapping these stocks for liquid stocks in other funds he managed.
But who decided the price?
He was a full seller but they were actually So he was ripping off one fund to keep the other one on the side of the law.
Then he'd do things like, there was one particular company called Rutherford Health, which was engaged in proton beam therapy treatment for cancer.
Now I knew about this rather obscure part of the world, because I'd exposed another company in that field, Advanced Onchotherapy, which has gone bust.
Where there'd been insider dealing, lying about deals in China, etc., etc., etc., etc.
Crispin Odie putting in money at ludicrous prices just to keep his fund from being embarrassed.
All sorts of nonsense.
But I knew about the space and I knew that the business wouldn't work.
But what Woodford did was he put in a large amount of money at a low price and then a smaller amount of money at a higher price.
Which meant that he could then mark up the value of his initial investment, but he was the only one putting money in, so he set the price.
And that allowed him to increase his stated funds under management, and so he charged more in fees.
But then he got to the problem that Rutherford Health wasn't listed.
So he announced via Patsy journalists at the Sunday Times that he was going to raise 50 million quid, And list the business on the Aquis market.
Unfortunately, nobody else wanted to put in money.
So Woodford had to put in 20 million and give a promise to put in another 30 million.
And then he got enlisted on this rubbish company where he was largely the only shareholder.
But it was then listed.
And it was nominally worth a quarter of a billion pounds.
And he was able to move it from the unlisted category to the listed category.
But the shares never traded because Woodford owned nearly all of them.
So the FCA said, oh, it ticks our box.
It's listed.
His funds don't have a liquidity crisis.
But it was a joke.
It didn't change his liquidity at all.
He couldn't sell any.
And, of course, Rutherford eventually went bust.
So there's a double con there.
The fraud of you putting in a large amount at a low price and then a small amount at a higher price.
So marking up the value of your holdings and making more you can charge in fees.
But then also this pretense that somehow he'd solved a liquidity issue when he hadn't.
Every time I walk past his house in Sulkham.
Because I go to Salken maybe once a year in Devon, which is, I think, isn't it the most expensive property, average property price in the country?
And he's got this beautiful, very well located, let's say, sort of James Bond type thing built into the rocks just above the estuary on about three or four floors with parking for five probably Range Rovers and, you know,
That's one of the aspects of life.
Everybody's a victim.
But Woodford claims he's a victim.
The reality is Neil Woodford has made something like £100 million.
In his career, and he's made at least £70 million from Woodford Investment Management.
So you've lost money.
Most folks have lost money from Woodford.
Nearly everybody who's put money in have lost money.
And he's made at least £70 million from his little Jake.
It's nice.
I don't know how these...
Do you remember Fred the Shred Goodwin?
He made lots of money from...
Yes.
Now, here's one of these people, he actually did lose his knighthood.
But in this rotten country, I think of, there's a woman called Julie Mayer, who you may remember, she ran, she was on the online Dragon's Den.
She got an MBE, thanks to Vince Cable.
And she was, and she's a crook.
Now, I exposed her, her flagship Ariadne.
Tried to raise money on fraudulent accounts.
Failed.
It went bust.
The administrative report is damning.
She's wanted on an arrest warrant because she didn't pay her solicitors.
One of her many solicitors.
And they actually took it to court.
She's wanted for breaching court orders.
And so she's fled the country.
She's still got an MBE.
The crazy way this world operates.
I wrote numerous articles exposing her.
Now, guess what?
She reported me to the old bill, and they have them coming round here, and you've been a complaint made about you by Miss Mayer that you're harassing her.
And I go, I'm a journalist.
I expose villains.
You do know that she's fled the country, and she's wanted a political arrest warrant.
And you know that she's got unpaid taxes going back 20 years in America, that she owes the HMRC money.
Have you read the administrator's report into the fraud that was her company Ariadne?
And the police eventually shuffled off.
But that's, you know, that's how the police occupy their time.
Which is, she's still got her MBE.
People have written to complain to the government and she's got to say, you know, how can we take anything seriously in this country when people are allowed to get away with it?
Woodford will get away with it.
He will still be back in financial services.
He's starting a new fund.
And only one person I've exposed is in prison, and that's the Australian courts.
One person, there's a trial underway.
I think they will go to prison, although that's a fraud trial in the UK.
But so many slam dunk frauds and people, not only do they not get the...
Yes.
That's why it's more of an age of crime.
Companies sometimes get fined for things that won't go wrong, but it's not companies that commit fraud or who lie, it's individuals.
And you need to be adopting a zero-tolerance approach to individuals.
You put your name at the bottom of a release which is a lie.
Right, that's it.
You are no longer allowed to be a public company director.
Bang!
Do that a few times and you sharpen up the world.
But I'm afraid it's also just the decline in morality we've seen in this country.
There was a time when telling lies was thought to be a bad thing.
But now it's part of the game.
You know, there's a company which actually I have shares in, called Kefi Minerals.
I've got shares in Kefi Minerals.
Oh well, tough luck.
Yesterday...
Well, it's done bugger all.
It raised money in December, saying, well, this will take us through to getting our mine in Ethiopia under construction.
And, OK, it's the last placing.
You've done many.
You've diluted this over many years.
And then in March, it said, oh, we've got some assets in Saudi Arabia.
We're going to put them up for sale.
And people speculated they could be worth $45 million.
And then about a month ago, it said, actually, you know, we don't need the money.
We're not going to sell the Saudi assets.
Well, bloody hell, yesterday, they did a placing.
We've been diluted by yet another 15%.
But they didn't need the money.
That's why they haven't sold the assets.
I mean, it's just behaviour of shysters.
And these people pay themselves vast salaries.
And it's just, you know, they've got a bonus scheme where the COO gets 300 grand a year, will get a 300 grand bonus just for doing his job properly.
And who's paying for that, James?
Well, you are, as a shareholder, by being diluted from placing after placing.
It's just infuriating.
It is.
I can tell you that you're furious.
So I wanted to pause you there for a moment, although I was enjoying your rant.
So you...
Whenever, yeah.
We'll have gone into the city, or similar, and we'll have...
And you could have been one of them.
But presumably what stopped you was the fact that you've got a moral conscience.
No, I don't think that's true.
I did go into the city for a couple of years before I started in journalism.
I set up my own firm.
It went horribly wrong.
I made mistakes.
Other people made mistakes.
Big mistakes as well.
But, you know, we move on.
But that meant that 13 years ago, aged 44, I had to start all over again.
And I think it is...
And how do I atone for that?
I mean, it left me worth minus 200 grand.
So I've worked very hard to get my finances in shape.
But how do I atone for my mistakes?
By, well, all the things I learned on the other side of the fence, exposing them.
Sure.
I'm not suggesting that everyone in the city, everyone who makes their money in business or whatever, is a crook.
No, they're not.
Most people are honest.
But there is a culture of deceit and dishonesty where you are allowed to get away with it.
Yeah.
No, I've got a little brother who is very successful, and he's absolutely, completely honest, and he's just brilliant.
He's just very, very good at his job.
He just knows what he's doing.
And I totally respect that.
But there is a significant proportion of people...
Okay, let me give you an example.
A guy from my year at the hated Christchurch, Maybe it's my year or year above.
He's got involved on the green investment gravy train, which you and I know because we're team Booker.
Anything to do with green is a scam.
It's crony capitalism in excelsis.
The only reason that green energy exists is because of government regulation and because of The whole thing is a scam.
These people are vultures, and ultimately the carcass they are feeding on is our carcass.
It's our money that they're feeding on.
Correct.
And I'm sure that on some level these people must know that it's a scam.
And earlier on, you mentioned another thing.
You mentioned that Hargreaves Lansdowne Was pushing its clients, steering them.
I think even I saw a Hargreaves Lansdowne financial advisor once, and he just sort of dangled in front of me.
The Neil Woodford, he said, you know, obviously this is our portfolio.
Hargreaves Lansdowne, the two issues there.
One is just pushing all the clients in at the start.
Obviously, they were making commission on it, but getting them all to invest in Woodford from the start.
That, you know, you can accept.
You know, we all make mistakes.
But the real sin with Hargreaves Lansdowne comes towards the end of Woodford in 2018-2019, when it is telling its individual clients, those customers of Hargreaves, that they should continue to buy units in the Woodford funds.
But notwithstanding all the evidence that that was a bad thing to do.
But at the same time, the funds that Hargreaves managed, their fund of funds, were selling their units in Woodford Funds.
Which is what Goldman Sachs did as well.
was because they were generating new buyers on the retail side.
And they say there were Chinese walls between these two units, but there were members of the fund management committee who sat on the committee, which decided that Our Chris Lansdowne should have been absolutely thrown to the wolves for that.
In the same way, surely, that the Daily Mail's financial section should be?
Yes, the Mail on Sunday, Jeff Prestridge.
I mean, we all reinvent ourselves.
Jeff Prestridge, you will see, going around the financial editor of the Mail on Sunday, saying, oh, I am a Woodford Watton fellow, and I continue to campaign for justice.
What, Jeff?
Forgets to mention, is that for 20 years, he regularly just blew smoke up Woodford's bum.
And even in 2018-19, even though it was a week before the funds were gated, he was still arguing, oh, he's had a bad couple of months, but he'll bounce back.
And so, just completely ignoring that.
And he, you know, I was going, For years, I was just showing some of the crazy things that Woodford was doing.
I'll give you one example of a company he invested in, which obviously has gone bust, which was making revolutionary pallets.
Pallets for, you know, storing bricks on.
You can buy a wooden pallet for five quid.
It was making plastic pallets with a chip in, which it sold you for 60 quid.
And the reason you did that is in case someone stole your pallet, you could trace it and go and confront the tattooed monster who'd stolen it and ask him politely if he'd give it back.
You could work out there's a flaw in that business plan.
It's just far cheaper if someone does steal your pallet just to buy another wooden one.
And not surprisingly, the business went bust.
Redford bankrolled that company.
Surely...
What are we doing backing this nonsense?
But there were all sorts of things.
Revolutionising washing machines.
A company which required the laws of nuclear physics to change to succeed in this business plan.
All sorts of baloney.
But Woodford backed a lot of it.
Okay.
So, have you developed a grand unifying theory that explains this?
Do you think all this stuff is just dropped from the ether?
Just like entropy or whatever has created this situation where people have lower moral standards than they had before?
Because you see, I have a coherent and consistent explanation for it, and whether you believe it or not is another matter.
But my view, my Weltanschauung, developed over the last five or six years.
Is that basically, as the Bible tells us, that the devil is the prince of this world.
And in terms of the financial sector, it's always been incredibly crooked.
And the people who really own the financial sector, ultimately the central bankers and stuff, They have no interest in the thing that we miserably call free markets, let alone in anything legal.
But I was just wondering whether perhaps because you are basically a normie and because you've got your, you're looking at the trees all the time, you can't see the wood, whether you just think this stuff is, it's just happening and what can we do about it?
No, I'm afraid I just see...
And maybe it's just us getting old that we reflect that.
But I see throughout every aspect of society, when I see my middle daughter playing soccer and I see the girls playing.
Football.
Football we call it, I think, in this country.
Football, OK.
When I see my middle daughter playing football, and I saw her doing this as a 17-year-old, 16-year-old, and I saw girls on the other side playing for the foul.
Cheating, as we used to call it.
But that's endemic in sport.
You go and see your kids playing sport at any level now.
Seven or eight-year-olds, they're cheating.
Because that's part of the game.
You know, if you think about how many times did Peter Mandelson resign from government in disgrace, well, that's not quite true.
That's not quite the morality of the Profumo era, is it?
Or Sir Thomas Dugdale.
Profumo was quite dodgy, wasn't he?
Well, he at least did the decent thing when he was caught.
If Profumo had been operating in the 1980s or 1990s, He would have said, OK, I lied to Parliament, I did shag her, but you know what?
I'll go and spend six months with my family and then he'd be back again.
But we have things about what happened just briefly.
Not long...
when was Profumo?
Profumo was, 62?
63, I think.
63, I think.
OK.
So, a decade later, so not really that long, who was Prime Minister?
Wilson.
No, okay, after Wilson.
Heath, no, Heath.
Sorry, Heath.
Okay.
Oh, he lied a lot, too.
He lied to his shoes are safe.
What do you know about Ted Heath?
It's not just that he lied.
Do you know about what Ted Heath was doing?
I'm not going to go down one particular rabbit hole, but...
So you had a Prime Minister, like effectively a serial killer Prime Minister.
Okay, going further back, what do you know about Winston Churchill?
Well, according to my kids, he was an appalling racist, but they haven't considered the clown.
He was way, way worse than a racist.
You see, this is the problem.
Sort of conservative libertarian.
Libertarian right.
Yeah, exactly.
Which is how I used to define myself.
We have these, just like the left have their particular hate figures and heroes, so we do as well.
We've got, you know, Winston Churchill.
He's our go-to model of probity and all the...
I think his financial dealings were clearly shady.
He screwed up.
I was talking to my eight-year-old about Gallipoli.
He didn't cover himself in glory then.
I love the understatement there, and I understand it because it's the sort of thing I'd use as well.
Gallipoli was just one of many.
Dieppe.
Utterly misbegotten.
These were essentially blood sacrifices by a complete Satanist, frankly.
He did.
I'm prepared.
You know, I'm not going to defend Churchill to the hilt.
But on balance, I'm jolly glad that he was on the winning, you know, he was leading the winning side.
Well, if we did win, we don't think we did.
If you look at Operation Paperclip.
This is, you see, this is, I was using, I said at the beginning, I'm going to use you as my litmus test, because you are basically me as I was six years ago.
We did win the war.
I'm sorry, James.
No, we didn't.
What do you think happened to the Nazis?
Where did the senior Nazis end up?
Who went, who, where did NASA's rocket programme start?
Who was in charge of it?
They recruited Nazi scientists, yes, of course.
Yeah, Vanne van Bram, the guy who designed the V1s and V2s, was shipped with Chris.
The decennial Nazis were dead.
I don't want to do World War II because it's too big a one.
Can I just, before we move on to the Christopher book, what was Christopher?
Because I'm quite curious as to where you think Christopher would have gone.
I don't know whether he'd have gone as far as I have or not.
But where are you on the jabs?
In what sense?
Well, I think the last time we did a podcast, we talked about the insanity of you living across...
Yeah.
You had to endure the most absurd lockdown regulations where you couldn't...
The River Dee runs through my fields.
On the other side is England.
And my fiercely nationalist son, Joshua, is delighted that we're here in Wales on the Welsh side.
Did you have to paddle across the river to get supplies?
No, but I had to, you know, when my computer broke and Welsh computer stores were closed down and I wasn't technically allowed to go to England unless it was on vital business.
So I had to just get in my car, drive across the bridge, hope I wasn't noticed, and go and get my computer mended in order to carry on work.
And it's just bonkers.
The bridge is half a mile away.
I imagine the Welsh police were quite zealous in policing those regulations.
They were.
I mean, the ludicrous thing, Chester Football Club, I don't know if you know where it is, its ground is one third in Wales.
So they played a match, which they were allowed to do under English regulations, but the Welsh said a third of your grounds in Wales, we're prosecuting them.
And did they succeed in prosecuting?
I can't remember, but they thought it was a good idea.
It was insanity.
It was insanity.
And just looking back on it, looking back on our neighbours banging their pots and pans and all that, it was such nonsense.
Did you ever do that?
Sorry?
Did you ever bang any pots and pans?
What, for the bloody NHS?
No way!
That's good.
The NHS is a disgrace.
You know, the NHS is a disgrace.
I have far too many dealings with it, sadly.
But it's, You need to have an MRI scan.
And I said, OK, how long will that be?
It could be up to 18 months.
And I go, well, what happens if I go private?
And they go, well, next week.
So I go private.
And it was indeed next week with someone who's actually still working for the NHS.
He was late for his appointment because he was doing a stint at the local NHS hospital.
I have my scan.
That's bye-bye a thousand quid.
And it's inconclusive.
They seem to even need to put a camera somewhere.
And that'll be 2,000 quid.
And I go, oh, gee, that's quite a lot.
And he goes, don't worry, I'll get you back on the NHS.
Bang!
In a week's time, I'm back on this thinking, gosh, you people are useless.
So you got your 2,000 quid thing?
No, I saved it.
I was back on the NHS.
It's just crazy.
The whole thing is crazy.
So no, I wasn't banging my pots and pans for the NHS.
The NHS is a grotesquely inefficient organisation.
And, you know, there are far too many people there who are grossly overpaid.
OK, so what I want to ask you is, did you have, did you succumb to the death jab?
Yes.
And did you, why?
Because I wanted to go and spend time at my house in Greece and you weren't allowed to go to Greece unless you got the vaccine.
So, my wife and I both got the vaccine.
As the Welsh Government said they were going to start threatening to give it to kids, we made it clear we wouldn't allow our kids to get it.
I had two jabs, and I think the whole thing, I've had COVID two or three times.
My wife had COVID when she was giving birth to Jaya.
So she was in an isolation ward.
There are people...
Yeah, yeah.
The jabs were a disgrace and I said so at the time.
I said, how can you say it's safe because you haven't done any long-term studies?
You've rushed it through in a few months.
And so that was something which I know Uncle Chris would have taken on board.
But then the claim, one jab and you're 100% safe.
And then six months later, oh, you need to have a booster to be 100% safe.
And now, I don't know what they say, I think they now claim if you don't keep on getting jabbed, you'll get it more seriously next time.
It's just an Orwellian nonsense.
They can't afford to admit that they got it all completely wrong and that most of the people, the people who were dying of COVID were people who were bloody old or too fat.
And it's, you know, it was like the pike of the human ecosystem.
You're weeding out the frail.
That's the nature of it.
And they're not afraid to admit that, so they carry on lying.
This is why you're an interesting case study.
I find it very interesting.
I don't want to patronise you at all.
I'm genuinely interested because clearly there's a lot of inconsistencies, You can see within the whole story that we were told about the vaccines and you recognise that they hadn't been tested and stuff.
And you, like a lot of people I know, I mean, I think probably most people took the jab, basically, so they could go on holiday.
Because we'd all been locked down.
We all felt like...
But you nevertheless took this...
You're a libertarian.
Did you not find something weird about effectively being coerced or blackmail?
Yes.
So, looking back, do you think it was...
I think it was disgraceful.
I think it was disgraceful.
Shouldn't we have forced everyone to be wearing masks earlier?
They ask the wrong questions.
They're asking the wrong questions.
The questions they should be asking is, how will we allow ourselves to be lied to?
By the entire political and media class, with no exceptions, or very few exceptions, and to be consistently lied to.
But isn't the answer that obvious?
Because they knew all the time that they were lying and the whole thing was a con.
So therefore, no inquiry is never going to ask those questions because if it did, it would alert people.
I'll give you an example of this and I want to know your theory on this.
Did you ever come across Paddy O 'Flynn?
Yes, I know who he is.
So Paddy O 'Flynn, he was briefly, I think, featured on the Express.
He commissioned me to do a few think pieces and he was also UKIP.
Was he a UKIP leader or something?
Yeah.
You know, nice chap.
He, at the time of the jabs, he tweeted out that he'd taken two AstraZeneca jabs and that he thought that possibly, you know, this had helped him, his immune system cope with, I don't know, whatever his excuse was.
Anyway, you know he dropped dead the other day.
Aged 59. Now, My reaction to that was pretty visceral.
I don't recall a time when so many 59-year-olds, say, were dropping dead of heart attacks, turbo cancers, strokes, etc.
And people much younger than that as well.
People in their 30s and stuff.
Now, what is your reaction to that?
Do you go, well, what did you see here?
You know, the fit footballers who are having heart attacks on the pitch, etc.
And they do all appear to have been jabbed.
If I was running a public inquiry, and by the way, I just hate public inquiries.
You know, you think of the public inquiries into what happened in Northern Ireland, where 90-year-old former British soldiers are dragged through the courts and the murderous bastard like Gerry Adams just, you know, goes off and sees for compensation.
I just hate the lot of them.
But again, it's the political and media class jerk off on them, but the rest of us pick a bill.
But if I was having an inquiry, I would be looking into those things.
And I just would be looking into quite who was coming up with these lies and why.
I did a lot of work during the lockdown on things like masks and social distancing.
Doing what I do is numbers.
So I'd look at those articles I would do.
A great one was English and Welsh deaths and victims.
We would have far tighter restrictions.
Well, that doesn't make any sense.
You could argue, you know, that we're a poorer, fatter, post-industrial second world nation.
I'm prepared to accept that.
But then you could look at contiguous American states.
Where they would change the mask mandate in the individual states.
And you would expect, if you believe Boris Johnson or any of those other ghastlies, you would expect that that would have some impact on COVID rates.
But it had no impact whatsoever.
And these were contiguous states with similar demographics.
Similar numbers of old people, poor people, fat people.
And it just...
And the odd thing is, when I, in this little village here, I would not wear a mask going into any of the stores.
And if someone challenged me, I'd go, medical exemption.
And medical exemption, you can't challenge me on that.
And they would back down.
But I wrote this piece because there were people who would give me filthy looks and all this sort of thing.
And I got a whole load of grief on the Village Facebook page.
I was a two-minute hate about me yet again for saying this.
And what their constant thing was, exactly what they used to say to Uncle Chris about global warming.
You're not a scientist.
How can you do this?
You know, you can only comment on this if you've got a medical training.
And my counter was, no, I'm a numbers guy.
I look at the number and I look at the data and it's telling a hard story.
And you should be able to do that.
So just in the same way, when I write about global warming issues, they'll say, oh, you were that Chris Booker.
You didn't know what you're talking about.
Well, I go, OK.
You told me in 1988 that the Maldives would be underwater by 2012.
How come that land area in the Maldives, and for that matter, Vanatoo and the Cook Islands, is all marginally greater now than it was 15 years ago?
Can you explain that to me?
I'm glad you mentioned that, because we ought to talk about the global warming thing.
It must be about 15 years ago now.
I remember going to this event, a sort of business event, and I made my little speech about global warming and stuff.
And I said, look, I know it seems like global warming is a really dangerous threat and you need to adjust your business model to accommodate it.
But let me tell you, it's complete bollocks.
There's no evidence supporting it.
And it's going to come out soon.
The facts are going to come out.
People are going to realise that and maybe you should position yourself accordingly.
prepared for this revelation that global warming climate change is a lie and it's nothing to be scared of and i genuinely believe that that the truth mattered and and that the the the truth always but You've seen it in every aspect of our life.
It's not about the truth, but about the narrative that they, whoever they are, the powers that be, the people who sort of set the agenda, it's their narrative which sets the terms of debate and decides where business is going to position itself.
And the facts are irrelevant.
I mean, the truth is that it doesn't matter.
You know, the facts are observable.
It is Orwellian.
People know it's untrue.
I write about the River Dee, which flows through my fields.
There is a reservoir, Lake Vernwy, which is about 20 miles away from here, 30 miles away.
I've been there.
And during a drought about two years ago, this village...
Again, enraging my nationalist son, the poor Welshies drowned to provide drinking water for the evil English folk, emerged because of the drought.
And the press was all over it.
And they said two things.
One, they said this hasn't been seen since the 1930s, which was, as you know, a very hot decade.
But notwithstanding the fact that it had been seen, 90 years ago, they insisted that this was proof of global warming and that we see it a lot more in the future.
And ever since then, I've been tracking, in a really sort of obsessional way, the reservoir levels at Lake Vermeer, which United Utilities updates on its website once a week.
And you know what?
They're higher now than they were before the drought.
And they've been higher for most of the time.
They are above the long-term average.
It's complete nonsense.
The data is there to show you that their predictions are all wrong.
The predictions they made in 1999 at the University of East Anglia, they've been wrong.
Antarctic sea ice is growing.
You know, all of them, they're wrong.
And all we can do, as journalists, James, is to point out that they're wrong.
And I understand that we have the entire political and media class against us.
But the wretched Tories don't dare call out the, you know, nonsense of net zero.
But nobody does.
Even, you know, Farage equivocates on it, I think.
Nobody dares to call out nonsense what it is.
but eventually people will wake up.
And, you know, we may well have a whole load of And I think we thought, oh, this is sort of a bit like the Dark Ages, isn't it?
And maybe when we have a whole series of cold winters and people shiver to death because of net zero, they'll wake up and say enough is enough.
OK, you say that.
But I have this Telegram channel, and one of the people works in finance.
And, I mean, presumably still, finance attracts.
They're kind of the brightest and best, because that's where the money is, etc.
Whenever he mentions my name to them, even now, we're talking, what, 15 years almost after I wrote Watermelons, their reaction is like, you know, like he's mentioned the name of a vampire, that I'm the guy...
the lunatic who didn't believe in climate change.
So if that's where people aren't...
like Toby Young that I used to do a podcast with he started up this sceptical website which has a kind of anti-global warming guy who
that none of them is to be trusted.
And yet, Nothing has changed.
It's like Groundhog Day.
Nobody's waking up.
Well, the mess office and its statistics, I've done quite a bit of work on looking at the stations which we use to track weather.
You know, you cannot compare when so many of them are next to jet aeroplanes.
You can't compare our records with those of the 1930s for obvious reasons.
Very, very few weather stations, which were around in the 1930s, which are around now, and even where they are, you know, the one in Oxford, you're going to have the ambient temperature from cars, which you had to a much lesser extent in the 1930s.
So you can't track them.
But no, yes, people aren't calling out this nonsense now, but the sounds are shifting, James.
You know, if you look at, Oh, really?
Oh, now you've made my day.
Is that company foundering?
Oh, yeah, it is.
He's gone.
He had a little problem with a court case showing that he'd lied and was forced to resign.
It's foundering, but there are companies there that used to be worth...
And they're worth a tenth of that now.
The green bubble is bursting.
You are finding green energy projects across Europe.
Even, you know, the mad nutters of the EU.
You're finding big projects going bust.
Because they can't refinance and they're not economically viable.
That wouldn't have happened five years ago.
It sounds interesting.
BP has been having trouble, hasn't it, on the green front?
BP, of course, is another case study.
BP listens to the sort of idiots who told Oxfam they can't stock Jewish goods, listened to the protesters and said, we're going to spend less money on oil and gas because we're an oil and gas company.
And the result of that, of course, is that in oil and gas, it was making a decent return on capital.
So it invested in green projects where the return on capital was far lower.
And as a result, its overall return on capital and its profitability lagged, those of Shell and Chevron, which invested in oil and gas, and the share price cratered.
And BP has been forced to admit, you know, if you want to invest in green shit, go and invest in green shit.
If you want to invest in oil, we'll get back to oil.
Now, by the way, the shares are very cheap.
7% yield, going to pay down its debt, stopping this green nonsense, rationalising its cost base, doing all the right things.
So do you reckon that's a buy?
BP's a buy, yeah.
Yeah.
Wasn't it Lord Brown?
Lord Brown was there.
Yeah, Lord Brown, he was there for a while, but it was a man called Looney who was the man who really accelerated the path to madness.
There's some nominative determinism, yeah.
Looney, okay.
Right.
So are you telling me that, please tell me this is true, that if one had believed that all those people saying, siren voices saying, come and invest in our green, Energy funds will give you returns which are not only sustainable but also profitable.
Would you have lost your shirt?
Not necessarily.
It was a bubble.
So if you'd invested at the right time and sold at the right time, you would have made a killing.
But if you'd invested, most of the people who bought shares in Carrier's Power, ITM Energy, etc., have lost a packet, yes.
Have the wind turbine manufacturers suffered?
I'm not sure about that.
I can't think of any quoted ones which I would follow.
But I know that there's a big wind project in Germany, its biggest one, which has just been shut down.
The writing's on the wall.
Lots of people to recognise this, by the way, will be governments.
So we still have Ed Miliband.
Wales, we've got, you know, they're very keen that we have solar panels here for our three days of sunshine a year.
We still, governments will be the last to recognise.
But the writing is on the wall.
And I think, I was listening to Dominic Frisby the other day, that even the British Labour government will recognise the writing is on the wall.
They'll throw Miniband under a bus and they will be cutting taxes on North Sea production.
And allowing people to apply for licences again.
And buying shares in North Sea producers could selectively be a good smart move.
Well, Pollyanna, I love talking to you about it.
you make me you make me feel slightly better um before we go um we've So briefly, what the great Booker would have made about the things that have happened since he died.
So, Russia, Ukraine, he would obviously, being Booker, he would obviously have got that the war was provoked by the West in 2014 by the colour revolution funded by Soros and the CIA, yeah?
Well, I know a lot about Russia.
He was there for the Moscow Olympics, wrote the Games War with his sister, my auntie Clyde.
They travelled a lot in Eastern Europe, meeting dissidents.
Very hostile to the Soviet regime.
His wife is half-white Russian, my aunt Valerie.
So, hostile to that, but loved Russia as a country.
Would he say provoked?
He certainly wouldn't have said the war was justified.
No, he didn't like wars.
So I don't think he would have said the war was justified.
Did the West go Russia?
Yes, I think he would have said that.
Right.
Yeah, that's my instinct.
And of course, that would have been the correct response.
It doesn't mean we think that Putin's a goodie.
It just means that the West are way, way worse than we acknowledge in our kind of media, which seems to me to be like the propaganda wing of the intelligence services.
And I've written a lot about it.
The lies which were told by the media and by our government to justify a never-ending war.
Are appalling.
The ghost of Kiev, the defenders of Snake Island.
There was the gold teeth that were being extracted with eyewitnesses talking about the screams as they were extracted.
And of course, they turned out to be not gold, but brass implants from the local dentist, which the Russians had stolen.
Hardly a war crime.
The biggest one, the biggest lie for me is the invasion of Kursk by Ukraine.
And you need to go back to look at the breathless coverage by the BBC and others.
This is a game changer.
It's changing the war, etc.
Well, and look how much they've conquered.
1,250 square kilometres in two weeks.
Well, yeah.
And we think, you know, well, that's probably most of the home counties.
That's a lot of territory.
But then you look on a map of Russia and it's nothing.
And moreover, the Russians refer to it as the cow pastures because it's just farmland with a few villages.
And so, of course, it was lightly defended.
And the Russians just soaked it up.
And the Ukrainians have now been expelled from Kursk.
They've lost 30,000 men.
All this talk about how the Russians had had to import North Korean troops because they were losing.
Very little evidence of that.
Just like we were told two years ago, the Russians are running out of guns.
They're fighting with spades.
Or having to share rifles.
The guy in front of you is killed.
You pick up his rifle and then you're killed.
We're told all of that.
But to justify the idea that we need to send another 50 squillion dollars and the few remaining chieftain tanks in the British Army out to Ukraine.
And it was all untrue.
And in fact, what has happened is that by taking troops out of the Donbass, you've only accelerated the Russian progression.
And you still get idiots attacking when I write something about what's happening, saying, but you don't understand, Ukraine's winning the war.
The damage to Russia is irreparable.
How do you define winning?
Russia's gaining territory on all fronts.
They've booted them out of Kursk.
They are within, I think they've now reached the border of Donetsk and the next Oblast.
Luhansk is entirely in Russian hands.
They're advancing everywhere.
Russia's winning.
And again, the sort of madness of the media thing is Donald Trump's trying to bring peace there.
Isn't that a better solution than the Biden approach of just sending more and more money and arms which we can't afford to prolong a war which cannot be won?
It cannot be won because Russia's got five times as many people as Ukraine.
And they believe, the Russian people believe it's a just war, just like the Ukrainians do, but there are more of them who can be killed on the front line.
So it cannot be won.
The policy which the media and political class have, the Biden policy, the coalition of the winning, just means spending money in weapons we haven't got, fighting a war we can't win, and meaning more young men and women are killed.
And it's not in my name.
And it wouldn't mean in Uncle Chris's name either.
Before we move on, and not too long because it's too big a subject, but we'll talk about Gaza and stuff.
But before we move on to that, one of the weirdest or most surprising conversations I had with your Uncle Christopher before he died, I didn't realise he was very sceptical, I think he was probably a creationist of evolutionary theory.
And at the time I thought...
Wow, Chris.
That's a bit out there.
Whereas now I think, well, yeah, duh.
Obviously, evolutionary theory is complete bollocks.
Where are you on that?
Or does it surprise you that Uncle Chris was a creationist?
He had some odd views.
I think that's one of those things.
There are two subjects, or the odd subjects, where Uncle Chris and I would disagree.
On most things, we agreed.
Israel was one of them, by the way.
And whenever the subject came up, we would say, actually, because like you and like me, Uncle Chris falls out with people.
We're not going to fall out on this.
Let's talk about something we can agree.
Isn't Theresa May bloody useless?
You can move on that way.
But the other thing that...
you And I'm beginning to think he may have been right in that, probably like you, I think, I was a passionate, vocal Brexiteer.
And I now realise we were completely sold apart.
It was just divide and rule.
that they never had any intention of giving us this sovereignty and independence back.
Do you think that Uncle Christopher foresaw that and therefore was against Brexit for those reasons?
Well, he supported Brexit, but he said that we were negotiating a bad deal and because we were going in on the wrong lines.
My Euroscepticism is not just from my mother's side, but my father's father was a friend and ideological soulmate of Tony Benn.
And so, unlike Uncle Chris, was on the right side in the 1973 referendum.
And I think, I just have the feeling that those of us who really have Brexit in our DNA, that we didn't want to be in the EU, Like Ben, I want to live in a country where I can vote for change, which we couldn't do as a member of the EU.
We believed in it passionately, but those who were in charge of negotiating Brexit either didn't believe in it at all, Theresa May, all those vile people she surrounded herself with, or they were chancers like Boris Johnson.
Who would quite happily, if we voted the other way and he thought they were going to win, he would have been on the other side.
Boris Johnson doesn't believe in anything other than himself.
Do you think Tony Ben was a secret goody?
Yes.
I've changed my views on Tony Ben.
I hated him at the time because my dad hated him because that was the conservative position.
But I think Tony Benn was...
Tony Ben was a hero.
Like my grandfather to me, he was a hero.
Grandpa thought, and he'd been put on the Secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, so he knew a bit about farming and fishing.
He thought that if we were not in the EU, it would mean cheaper food for the workers, because we wouldn't have to deal with We could set our own tariffs.
And that's what we should have done after Brexit.
It's saying, look, if the EU wants to impose tariffs on our goods, fine.
You can do what you want.
We're not going to impose tariffs on anything.
Our people will have cheaper food.
And our people will have cheaper goods.
Because we believe in free trade.
And I'm not sure that my lefty grandpa would have believed in free trade.
But he would have believed in a better deal for the working man.
What was it called your grandpa?
Hmm?
What was your lefty grandpa called?
Sir John Winifred.
Right.
So he was, what, he was Labour?
Well, no, he was, after his retirement, but he was a civil servant, worked in Churchill's bunker during the war, unmasked the fifth man, Cairncross, and then in his retirement, he was head of the National Trust and the War Graves Commission, but he then did, Come clean on his politics.
He'd been a Tory as a young man, but my grandmother had shifted him to the left and he was a Benite by the time of the EU referendum and he spoke out.
Interesting.
OK, so before we let's round up on the most contentious subject of all.
You said you couldn't talk to Uncle Christopher about Israel because you I think we know what.
Uncle Christopher would have thought about what's going on in Gaza right now.
Uncle Chris was instinctively on the side of the Arabs.
I'm instinctively on the side of Israel.
I'm passionately on the side of Israel.
I think that we can disagree about what's going on in Gaza, but there are certain things which Uncle Chris and I would have agreed on.
One of them is...
We could have got onto it by there's some things where your hatred of something is so great that you can overcome your differences.
In this case, it's the BBC Verify Unit.
For instance, last week we had Israel bomb the European hospital.
Bombing a hospital is a war crime.
The Israelis said, actually, we're not bombing a hospital.
We're bombing the tunnels underneath where Hamas are hiding.
The BBC verify unit quickly verified the Israeli claims and said it's untrue.
Israel has committed a war crime.
Jeremy Bowen, Israel has committed a war crime.
Well, a couple of days later, they dragged out the bodies of the leader of Hamas, Mohammed Sinwar, the shadow.
And a whole load of his henchmen who had indeed been in a tunnel underneath the hospital.
And that means that the war crime was not committed by Israel.
It was committed by Hamas.
Now, whatever we think about Israel Hamas, it's the shocking behaviour of the BBC and the BBC verify unit, which has consequences because around the world it was reported this was a war crime.
It wasn't the first time.
There was that rocket that hit another hospital with large casualties claimed a year ago.
Boeing again said that was an Israeli rocket.
It wasn't.
It was a misfiring Hamas or Islamic Jihad rocket hitting their own side.
But again, these things have consequences.
And we had that man, Tom Fletcher from the UN.
Going on to BBC Radio 4 today, yesterday, saying if the Israelis, the wicked Jews, don't send in aid, then 14,000 babies will die within 48 hours.
But that wasn't true.
Even the UN's admitting it.
Hell, even the BBC's admitting it now.
Do you listen to the BBC?
But these things have consequences, and I think Uncle Chris would have picked up on the bad reporting.
I'm sure that he would not have backed the current Israeli approach.
He just didn't like Israel.
but he would have picked up on the reporting without doubt.
And I'm sure that the very...
We can agree BBC Verify is very sinister.
Oh, BBC, yeah, the BBC, but I think the BBC was that way from the start.
I think that...
the monolith that became the BBC, should have initially the monopoly on this.
And they, the same people who founded EMI and RCA, the connections between broadcasting and intelligence have always been very, very strong.
So the BBC was always a propaganda organisation foremost and about entertainment very much a poor third.
And the information it gives is only the information that they want to give you.
But the verify unit, there is just something Orwellian about the verify unit, since it verifies things which aren't true.
They all do that.
The very phrase fact checker is a guarantee that the facts you're being given by the fact checkers are the opposite of true.
This is just a given about...
And you're right, they are Orwellian.
So, Tom, I've agreed to do this thing, to come to your event thing.
What am I doing?
What am I talking about?
Yeah, once a year I run an event here at my Welsh house, which is a 1650 farmhouse.
And on...
It's mostly financial.
You're there for the light entertainment, James.
You're going to talk about how Britain is doomed.
But we have financial speakers.
So Jim Mellon, who I think you know.
I know Jim.
He's there.
Then various short sellers will be there.
My friend Lucian Myers, a guy called Evil Bankster, Liverpool's greatest numbers man since Ken Dodd.
Evil Bankster.
I like that.
He's a nice guy and he'll make you feel thin.
And so those people there, I'll give a talk on some sort of fraud.
And then people can, they have a, my friend Chef Vijay does an Indian lunch.
Oh, I like that.
Man in the evening.
And cold salmon and homegrown potatoes and things.
And there's a Welsh choir which will sing in Welsh at the end.
And people drink as much as they want.
And it's a fun day on September the 6th.
So I would imagine that...
Say that again.
Sharestock.co.uk I would imagine that it would still be aimed mainly at my sort of all the kind of people I would consider how I used to be six years ago.
They'll be fairly normie, would you say?
They're like you.
I would say they are, yes.
So if you're a tinfoil hat loon, this is not probably where you're at.
But if you're the kind of person who thinks, well, I used to love James's pieces in The Spectator.
He likes old James.
oh and I loved his work on climate change why didn't you I think talking about the various ways in which this country is destroying itself you'll be feeding into a Yeah, yeah.
Do you know what?
I love...
I love...
And you can put those on Joshua's croquet stand.
People can win some olive oil from my Greek house if they manage to shoot a croquet ball through a hoop 15 yards away.
No one ever does.
No, of course they don't.
So that's Joshua Runs Outstanding.
We can flog some books there.
And it's just a fun day if you're interested in shares and thoughts.
It does sound jolly.
Let's hope that the weather holds up.
Tom, I've enjoyed this.
All over the place conversation.
I mean, all over the place, because I made it that way, because that's what I do.
Where can people find your website and stuff like that?
Okay, for the event, it's www.sharestock.co.uk.
And for my scrugglings and podcasts, now up to about two a day, www.shareprofits, as in voicesofsanity.com.
As in, yeah, as in without honour, except in his own country.
Yes, that's the one.
That phrase is really hard to remember.
A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country.
It's a double negative.
Yes, I know to whom it refers, and it's not me.
No.
Well, who does it refer to?
It's Jesus, isn't it?
I think he said, no, I think Jesus said it.
Yeah, I suppose he's talking about himself, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yes, I...
Yes.
Always?
No.
No.
My wife's quite sincere and goes to the chapel, taking the young children who are very keen attending.
And they were very good.
Actually, during lockdown, they were very good.
The chapel didn't enforce masks and people went in there and being quite a young audience, no one died.
The church here in our village in Wales just shut down.
And then when they did go back, they had all the rubbish about social distancing.
And because they abandoned their flock, the congregation went from 33 to...
You know, 33 is the number Christ's age when he died.
And 13, I know where that comes from.
So that's God sending a sign there, I think.
And that's off to your wife's chapel.
During the plague, The church in our village stayed open and three different vicars died of the plague.
And there was a black death of one or the other.
But they were serving the community.
And during Covid, they locked up their doors, scuttled away and abandoned everybody.
And they've got their just desserts.
Exactly.
And they're going to burn in hell.
Tragically.
Very sad.
Tom, thank you very much.
If you've enjoyed this podcast, how could you not?
Please be one of those, the people who support me, who subscribe.
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Thank you again, Tom Winifred, and see you in September.
