Annie Kelly delves deep into the pilling of Andrew Bridgen – a British politician who, until very recently, was a backbench MP for the Conservative Party, representing North West Leicestershire. After a chance encounter with a quack cardiologist, and the weight of the pandemic on his shoulders, Bridgen’s political views slid quickly from ‘run of the mill conservative’ to ‘anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist.’ Jake’s health anxieties are triggered over and over as Annie walks him and Travis through a portrait of a pilled MP.
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Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 210 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Andrew Bridgen episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Annie Kelly, and Travis View.
Hello and welcome, beloved listener.
It's always a great pleasure to be speaking to you, and it's even more of a pleasure now that my henchmen have finally apprehended Julian and left him on a remote island somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean.
With my old rival out of the way, I can finally assume my permanent, unelected role as Lord Protector of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
The national baby has just gone worldwide.
In my first act as Supreme Leader, I'm going to be talking about someone whose journey down the rabbit hole I've been following for a few months now.
A British politician called Andrew Bridgen, who until very recently was a backbench MP for the Conservative Party, representing North West Leicestershire.
Not being from that part of the world, or much of a politics wonk myself, I'd never heard of Bridgen until last December.
But I've since done a little bit of background research.
A self-described Thatcherite, Bridgen joined Parliament in 2010, where he was mostly known for his Eurosceptic views and support for Brexit.
He was a member of the European Research Group, a group of conservative MPs who were strongly in favour of leaving the European Union.
By most accounts, he was a pretty decent, if unexceptional, local MP, involved in his local community, and diligent in responding to the needs of his constituents.
In particular because I think it helps set the scene for where Bridgen's story goes next.
I want to draw your attention to something called the Horizon Post Office Scandal.
This was a miscarriage of justice in this country with catastrophic consequences, where due to a technical error, the computer system used by the British Post Office erroneously detected a huge number of financial discrepancies at various branches across the country.
This meant that hundreds of innocent post office workers were prosecuted for theft, false accounting and fraud.
Some even ended up taking their own lives.
One of Bridgen's constituents was falsely accused, and journalists covering the story noted that unlike many MPs who didn't want to get embroiled in the fiasco, Bridgen was not afraid to speak up on their behalf, sometimes even against more senior members of his own party.
When a public inquiry into the affair began two years ago, Bridgen was asked to give evidence, having been involved in the fight for justice since the very start of his parliamentary career.
For Northwest Leicestershire, Andrew, this is, well, it is a national disgrace, isn't it?
Yes, and we're getting towards the end of a 12-year campaign to sort this problem out.
It was a piece of caseload that arrived on my desk within a couple of weeks of being first selected in 2010 from constituency.
It was almost unbelievable at the time, and it's all turned out to be true.
I've been calling for a public inquiry and proper compensation for at least the last seven years.
What's clear to me is that we knew in Parliament and the Post Office knew that these convictions were wrong seven years ago and it's a disgrace that it's taken this long to get to the point of a public inquiry.
And Andrew, why do you think it has taken so long?
Well, I'm going to give evidence to the inquiry itself, what I know about the investigation.
I think there's been a lot of cover-up by the Post Office of what's been going on.
It's a huge problem.
And it's not only the 736 sub-postmasters who were wrongfully convicted of fraud and false accounting.
We also need to have compensation for the thousands of sub-postmasters who would have Coerced by the Post Office into repaying sums of money which they didn't actually owe that were due to the glitches in the Horizon computer system.
You could tell he's in like a giant room because of the echo.
He's like, ah yes, the cover up of the post office as he's like in his like gigantic mansion or like some huge government building just like echoing into oblivion.
Yeah, it's a kind of funny feature of Andrew Bridgen actually that in this video was recorded, I think a couple of years, a year ago, and he's been interviewed lots and lots by lots of different podcasts and news organizations since and his audio never gets any better.
At all.
He's always clearly just using his laptop mic in a, yeah, a large echoey room.
Audio's hard.
He doesn't seem like a crazy guy.
I mean, he looks fairly put together, you know?
No, I mean, I sort of bring this story up because he's, he's absolutely right here.
Do you know?
Like he's, he's completely in the right.
Based on what I've learned so far, you brought us a story about a man who is devoting a lot of time and energy to protecting working people who are falsely accused of horrible crimes.
Yeah, I mean, it's a heroic story, really.
At a time when lots of MPs really didn't want to get their hands dirty, because obviously the post office is government owned.
And so, you know, saying that it was, you know, considered almost to be a, you know, kind of conspiracy theory almost to say that this technical flaw had falsely accused all these people and meant that they'd been, you know, wrongly, wrongfully convicted.
But I mean, that's sort of why I bring it up, really, because I think it speaks to this character of Andrew Bridgen, where he's, you know, got a very rebellious but kind of principled quality, which I think is significant for where he goes next.
Having said that, it's fair to say this outspoken streak wasn't always quite so noble.
It could sometimes be downright ugly or embarrassing.
In 2017, for instance, he was condemned by LGBT rights groups for his remarks criticizing a National Trust memorial for men executed for being gay.
He had called the memorial totally inappropriate and said that if he wanted moral guidance he'd have gone to a church.
In 2018 he faced similar criticisms, this time from Jewish groups, for having stated during a parliamentary debate on Palestinian statehood that the US is, quote, very susceptible to a well-funded powerful lobbying group and the power of the Jewish lobby.
Mmm, yeah, that's nice.
So, yeah, it's a mixed bag I guess is what I'm trying to say with his past.
But when he first crossed my radar was last December, when he stood up in Parliament and asked our Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a strangely leading question about Covid vaccines.
Thank you Mr Speaker.
There have been more reported deaths and adverse reactions following mRNA vaccination in 18 months than there has been to every conventional vaccine administered worldwide for the last 50 years.
And given that mRNA vaccines are not recommended for pregnant women or those who are breastfeeding, would my right honourable friend overturn the Big Pharma-funded MHRA's recent recommendation that these experimental vaccines are administered to children as young as six months of age?
Well, Mr Speaker, let me first say that I believe Covid vaccines are indeed safe and effective.
And no vaccine, Covid or otherwise, will be approved unless it meets the UK regulator's standards of safety, quality and effectiveness.
We have an independent body.
The JCVI determines which age groups the vaccine is recommended for use in as part of the vaccination programme.
And of course, the ultimate decision will lie with parents.
So first things first, it's straightforwardly false that mRNA vaccines aren't recommended for pregnant or breastfeeding women.
Bridgen was most likely referencing, I think, out-of-date advice from when the vaccines were still being tested for that demographic.
The adverse reactions part is a bit more complicated. In this country, adverse reactions to vaccines
are measured by something called the Yellow Card scheme, which is a self-reporting data
collection system where members of the public and health professionals can report any suspected
reactions or side effects they've had from a vaccine. The data is then summarised on
the government's own website, which anyone can look up.
So when the BBC asked Bridgen for evidence of his claim that there have been more reported
deaths and adverse reactions following mRNA vaccination in 18 months than there has been
to every conventional vaccine administered worldwide for the last 50 years, he pointed
them to the data collected by the system.
Now, this is pretty cheeky for two reasons.
For one, the yellow card scheme is actually run by the Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, or MHRA for short, which in his own speech Bridgen referred to as big pharma funded, meaning too financially captured for reliable reporting on the issue.
If you think that's me stretching his words, here's him saying exactly that same thing in an interview.
So the scientific, independent scientific view of the BBC's anti-social programme was that it was the BBC that was spreading misinformation, not me in Parliament.
I am rather seeing these sort of house scientists as kind of Like court wizards or something?
Well you've got to remember our MHRA, the Medicines and Healthcare Product Regulatory Agency, are 86% funded by Big Pharma themselves.
Well that's what I was driving at!
And then you've got the JCVI, the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, where in their personal declarations of interest they declared over a billion pounds of investments in Big Pharma.
But besides all of this, if you go to the Summary of Yellow Card Reporting on the government website, you can see it explain pretty clearly why the raw numbers of self-reported adverse reactions are not a good way of assessing risk of side effects from the vaccines themselves.
For one thing, there is no auditing process to check that an adverse reaction is actually from the vaccine itself, rather than just happening around the same time or shortly after.
The second thing to bear in mind is that although adverse reaction sounds scary, particularly when, as Bridgen did in his speech, you couple it with deaths, which is just a really common anti-vaccine tactic, the vast majority are about what you'd expect for any vaccine, mRNA or not.
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