Andy: Hi everybody.
Andrew here.
Just a quick pre- Page 94 announcement, potentially a first, I think,
the conversation you're about to hear was recorded in the Private
Eye offices yesterday afternoon.
The first section of yesterday's show was all about Tulip Siddiq, then the
government's antique corruption minister who had been in the news recently
in a not completely favorable way.
Since we recorded that episode just 24 hours ago, Siddiq has resigned as the
government's anti-corruption minister.
It's very clear to us that, number 10 heard that we were going to be
covering it on this week's Page 94 and thought the game's up.
We better roll over now.
So when you hear us talk about Siddiq as the anti-corruption minister in
the present, just try to rephrase that as the very, very recent past.
But as you're about to hear things go back much further than that,
between Tulip Siddiq and Private Eye.
Maisie: Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast
Andy: Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.
My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Private Eye office with Helen
Lewis, Adam MacQueen and Tim Minogue.
We are here to discuss stories that have been in the news recently, and
our first one this week is all about Tulip Siddiq who you may have heard of.
She is the anti-corruption minister, and she has been in the papers recently quite
a bit because of some rather unorthodox housing arrangements she's made.
now you may well know a lot of ministers get a nice residence to live in.
Maybe it's Chequers.
If you're the pm, maybe it's chiefing.
these tend to be owned by the government.
It's a bit rarer for them to be owned by large Bangladeshi companies, which
have links to your family members.
Nonetheless, that's what's been happening recently.
Tulip Siddiq's aunt is the PM of Bangladesh, or rather she was until
August last year when she was deposed.
Since then, the family have been accused of an extraordinary amount
of embezzlement, billions of pounds, all to do with various
dodgy contracts for nuclear power stations and that kind of thing.
these accusations have been leveled and it turns out that
various members of C'S family.
Have been living in extremely nice homes that belong actually
to Bangladeshi companies.
Now, she has denied wrongdoing.
She's referred herself to the PM's independent advisor
on minister's interests.
But it does remain true that there is a substantial number of houses that she's
either been given, family members have been given, or family members have been
allowed to stay in rent free or connected to the world of Bangladeshi politics.
So we thought this would be fun to talk about.
And the fact is, Tim Minogue, you were there first.
Tim: This would be just over two years ago, under the
headline, ' Travails With My Aunt'.
Well done that chief sub...
we reported that, Tulip's mother, Rehana, IE Auntie Hasina's sister, was
living rent free in a, very agreeable North London house, which was owned
by a man called Shaikh Fazlur Rahman, the executive director of Bangladesh's
largest con conglomerate, Beximco.
Beximco had allegedly benefited during Sheikh Hasina's time in office, with debts
written off and being granted exclusive rights to, distribute the AstraZeneca.
vaccine during Covid.
there is clear evidence of, people who were close to the regime, wealthy people,
shall we say, doing, favors to the family.
And it now turns out that there were at least six properties, were either
gifted to or rented cheap to Tulip or Tulip's close relatives in London.
It's ironic that she's the anti-corruption minister,
Helen: Can I say something that I think is liable safe, which is whether or
not this is proved to be corruption.
I just don't know who these people are who get given houses.
But random people,
I we're not just
Adam: talking houses, we are talking luxury houses.
Some of them in the right, in the center of London, aren't we?
this is, these are millions that worth.
Helen: I feel like it was not impossible to foresee that this
might come up again once she was made anti-corruption minister.
That's the fi the bit about this story that I find.
Adam: Yes, that's the extraordinary thing.
That just seems to be, to me, another case of Keir Starmer not, even, not spotting
a tiger trap in front of him, actually sharpening the spikes in the bottom of the
tiger trap laying the leaves over himself.
It just give her a different job.
Isn't these stories are circulated?
Yeah.
Corruption minister.
Yeah.
For corruption, you mean?
Tim: Now the, other aspect of it that I think is interesting and that we wrote
about at least as far back as 2016 was, , , you will remember the case of, , Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the half Iranian woman who went to see her, relatives in Tehran
and then was basically held hostage by the Iranian regime for several years.
And she was a constituent of tulip in Hampstead and Highgate,
or Hampstead and Kilburn at the constituent was, originally called.
Tulip campaigned very hard Noticeably for Nazanin's release,
which was all very commendable.
But, when journalists asked her, there are some human rights, issues in
Bangladesh associated with your Aunt: disappearances, illegal detentions.
extra judicial killings, dissidents being locked up and the key thrown away.
she was particularly asked about a man called em a lawyer and she
said, I don't know anything about I.
About that.
and it led, one, fortnightly magazine to, say at the time well.
it appears that she's not as good an actress as one of her
predecessors as the MP for Hampstead and Highgate, IE Glenda Jackson,
Helen: Mother of Dan Hodges.
Just as to bring in one of my favourite political journalism facts!
Andy: It's extraordinary looking back and seeing.
So what that's nine years ago now was the first piece about tulip
Siddiq in the eye, identifying the.
difficulty of someone whose aunt is running Bangladesh, the state,
which is, detaining, disappearing, people having them killed.
The details are really grizzly of people who, half the people
detained as, as bad as it comes.
Yeah, Half of them might turn up again, after some years later.
The other half wouldn't.
some of them might even be alive.
what is it that makes this story blow up now?
Probably the fact that she's been made the anti-corruption minister,
which is, that's a pretty effective way of, bringing it up again.
Tim: it's gained momentum in the last few months because Sheikh...
Auntie Hasina, has been overthrown.
Yeah.
in a, a, rebellion led by, by students.
And now we have, hopefully honest government in charge in Bangladesh.
They're saying, we want our money back.
And, they're, highlighting where has this gone?
Adam: it is led by an opposition leader who also was given a 17 year
prison sentence for corruption.
and spent quite a long time on the house arrest before she
came back to leave the country.
they, do their politics in quite a, full on way there.
Whoever isn't in power does tend to be under arrest at any given time.
Helen: But this is a, all of this stuff makes me think about how much
we require kind of oppositional politics and why totalitarian systems
are inherently much more corrupt.
Because one of the ways that these things become a scandal is because they
get stuck to the government of the time by the opposition of the time, right?
And those two things reverse with the great swell of nature back and forward.
Or something gets politicized.
And although that's usually used as a pejorative in many
cases, that means that means.
A group of people care about it because they think they can
use it to wound the government.
that's how these kind, these things kind of work, is that people who are in power
are never going to investigate themselves.
So in a functional democracy, both the opposition and the press to some
extent act as the, checks on that.
But I think with all of these scandals, the people who've been promoting them
often are the political opponents.
And that's, again, that's a slightly unpleasant, but,
inevitable part of the process.
Andy: Okay, so it's fine then.
Helen: yes.
Everything that's happened in the world up to date, I'm okay
with just to put that on record.
Andy: No, but I see what you mean about the necessity of the slightly
unpleasant necessity of that, or the inevitability of it rather.
Helen: Yeah, I think, I, going back to this a lot, but I think it was very
interesting the way that David Cameron didn't see the referendum bludgeoning he
got coming because he'd been used to a very friendly press environment and then
suddenly a lot of the right wing papers.
Didn't treat him as beloved Tory leader, David Cameron, but leader of
hated remain campaign, David Cameron.
Andy: And
Helen: so that, that process is, yeah.
As I say, we often talk about that as if it's that, oh no, you've
made a, you've politicized this.
it's often said after some terrible gun massacre in America
don't politicize a t tragedy.
But realistically, politicizing tragedies is the only way that
anything gets done about them.
Andy: Tim, can I ask you, Do you think the Labour leadership don't read private eye?
We should send them a subscription.
Shouldn't we?
Likes a freebies?
Helen: I just want to know Tulip Siddiq thinks she got given the house for.
Yes.
In what is your, like rationale to yourself?
Where, oh, that's very kind.
Thank you.
I've always wanted a house.
How did You know, I just, people need to be a bit more suspicious about
where freebies, like what is the po, why, how many gen, truly just
generous people there are in the world.
Tim: has that worldview, doesn't he?
Yeah.
That he's surrounded by very generous people, but, not as
generous as Auntie Hasina chums.
Andy: no.
It's beginning to make those glasses look like a bad bargain, frankly.
right Section two of the podcast now, and there is one thing I'd like to request
of all of us, which is that we do not in this section, and I'm gonna see if
we actually manage to stick to this, that we do not talk about Elon Musk,
Adam: You've just done it, Andy?
Oh no, I, yes.
Penny in the jar.
Come on.
He's been,
Andy: you have to pay a billion dollars into the jar for every, mention.
So we are gonna try not to talk about Elon Musk.
I.
Which is gonna be very difficult.
'cause the next year we're gonna talk about is, grooming gangs and
the radicalization of the British.
, this has been a, an enormous story this year.
of course have seen already if you're listening to this podcast.
, and it's a very interesting one because in the old days.
There was a right wing foreign billionaire who everyone kow to, and he was
called Rupert Murdoch and it was fine.
Things have slightly changed when the billionaire in question has their own,
Twitter account and is putting out extraordinary amounts of, quite far.
Stuff from quite random accounts, which may not have been completely
on it with their fact checking.
Helen: Actually, Rupert Murdoch in many ways is the hero of this
story because it was his funding.
No, it was the London Times under Andrew Norfolk and at the time edited by James
Harding that published, one of the front pages was a Nation shame with the pictures
of all the perpetrators and Andrew Norfolk had to work incredibly hard in the face
of, I'm sure stuff that we'll talk about.
All the stuff that Tim deals with on a daily basis of councils being deliberately
obstructive and throwing absolutely anything at the, to stop reporting.
yeah, I'm afraid update regarding.
Billionaire, Rupert Murdoch.
Turns out billionaires could be a lot worse.
Also,
Andy: you can tell that Helen also writes for a, an atlanticist publication.
By the way, she says The London Times, I just wanted point that out.
Sorry.
We call it The Times here, Helen.
Oh God.
The actual, oh no,
Adam: I forgot.
See that?
That's one other thing.
we.
Pointed this out in the last edition.
You wrote piece pointing out that Andrew Norfolk.
he got the, Paul Foot Award for investigative and campaigning journalism
right back in 2012 for this, and it was very much a campaign, but part of the
tone of that campaign was that issue had been ignored and had been covered up
because of concerns about councils and, various people being seen as racists.
So it's not even that's a new element to this story that's been added on.
Now it's all been very, much part of the narrative, right from.
From the outset
Andy: So in terms of the initial element of the story, we'll, get to the reaction
later, but I think in terms of the actual.
Story about should there be a new inquiry into this?
Tim, you, deal a lot with rotten boroughs do you have any knowledge of.
whether council inquiries are automatically a good thing or whether
they are always, going to be second fiddle to a big national inquiry.
, Tim: there was the, National inquiry into child sex abuse,
which concluded two or three years ago, which included this issue.
There was a section on this issue and, Alexis j who conducted that
made a number of investigations.
, by all means, let individual councils, See what lessons need to be learned.
But I, I personally think that, we, know what was happening.
We know what was going wrong and what councils need to do, and they know
they need to do is put processes in place so that when this behavior is,
flagged up, something is done about it.
And that social workers and police don't, push it to one side as unfortunately
they did in some cases, not all.
Adam: the one good thing that's come out of this sort of recent eruption of
interest in it I think was actually some of, Alexis Jay's recommendations do now
appear to be being in the process of being implemented, which is extraordinary.
ia, I listened back, we did a podcast, you and I were on it.
And Francis, we as well on Jane Mackenzie talking about IA when it was, When it was
the Westminster hearing, back in 2020,
Helen: that's the independent inquiry into child sex abuse led.
Yeah.
Which was this great eventually by Jay
Adam: overarching.
it took in sort of abuse in churches and schools and it was enormous
and incredibly comprehensive.
And actually, you can have as many investigations as you want, but if no
one actually acts on the recommendations of them and does anything about
it, and the other thing that really struck me is this whole thing, recent
eruption of interest in this came.
A day or two days after we'd been told Wes Streeting had announced that
we were having yet another inquiry into, the issue of, adult social
care, which is another thing we banged on about endlessly on this podcast.
And that was being that was universally presented as the government
kicking that particular issue down into the long grass until 2028.
it's gotta be a point.
Hasn't that when you, stop having inquiries and actually do something,
Andy: it's also fairly obvious that it's been picked on as a, stick to
beat Labour with, although given that.
as the, Director of Public Prosecutions, Starmer is quite well informed about
it and made quite a few well-documented changes to how these crimes were reported.
It feels like a slightly odd stick to pick up.
Helen: It was a very difficult, Prime Minister's Questions
'cause Kemi Badenoch used.
All of her six questions on it and unfortunately it was like
picking on something that yeah.
Care summary's a world expert on and he was able to say, like you said, the ICS
of that report, inquiry took seven years.
do I, we really want to have it wait another seven years.
Were doing anything else about this?
The counterpoint to that is that, I, correct me if I'm wrong, Adam, but it
was like five case studies in, that report of different types of abuse, none
of which were an Asian grooming gang.
So that's the complaint that then no one has really stepped back and looked at
that particular racialized phenomenon, which does have a, I think a, fair.
Point to it as a, question, and I think people have been reluctant
to engage with that aspect of it.
Yeah.
But yeah, I, unfortunately, yes.
as DPP Ki Starman, for example, argued for, mandatory reporting,
he was the one who gave the sign off for some of the prosecutions.
So the kind of online speculation that he's worried about what this is gonna
uncover about him seems to be a flawed assumption that just 'cause he was
near when some of this stuff happened.
Yeah.
That he must be implicated by it.
And then there was, there's been flat out misinformation circulating as well.
So one of the.
Charges is that the home office in 2007 circulated a memo saying, this is just
a lifestyle choice for these girls.
Don't do anything about it.
BBC verified spent ages running down this piece of information.
Gordon Brand denied it.
He was, it must have been 2008.
He was Prime Minister at the time.
, and it was eventually all came down to the prosecutor in the cases, and
Nazi Al had said it off the cuff in an interview in 2018 that this memo existed.
He'd never seen it when the BBC went.
Can you tell us a bit more about this memo?
He couldn't stand it up.
He said his words had probably been misinterpreted.
BBC went and looked for any such memo with any words, anywhere in
the home office archive, any of the FOI requests couldn't find it.
So we've got this systematic problem in which there are some things that
are true in all of this, but they are happening in the place of this massive
swamp where things are just and you were, I'm sure there were people.
People out there who'll be surprised to hear that home office memo doesn't exist
because it has almost passed into legend, but it came from one unsourced claim, from
one person speaking a bit too casually.
Yeah.
And that's the information environment that we're in there.
Andy: And the other thing is that I think what we need is a massive inquiry
to find out the truth, isn't it?
But there, there's another, so here's an element of, I
didn't really know much about.
So there have been various stories about the, racial breakdown of
perpetrators, of the kinds of crime.
, and there was a story in the Telegraph headline.
Pakistan is up to four times more likely to be behind grooming.
when you get into the detail of that, it turns out that specific.
Offenses of grooming, which is, specifically child sexual
exploitation by groups.
That accounts for about several hundred offenses a year, and that is between three
and 4% of recorded abuse of children.
it's obviously hideous.
It needs prosecuting, it needs identifying, but is a relatively
small piece of the overall.
Picture of, abuse of children.
And in one particular two year period identified by the telegraph, Pakistani
men were disproportionately represented.
It was something like 12% of those several hundred offenses as opposed to
3% of the overall population of the uk.
Now, again, when you get into the story a bit further, as the telegraphic
acknowledged, this data covers only about a third of suspects who
were interviewed by police and the people behind the program itself,
which released these figures said.
Either Pakistani men are likely to commit this specific offense, or the victims
of these crimes are easier to identify, or it's a statistical sampling quirk.
And it, it remains true that the biggest threat to a child is someone
within their family or another child.
That's the, the overwhelming statistical preponderance that is quite.
Complicated to get across, particularly in a headline, which is why you end up
with the headline, Pakistan is up to four times more likely to be behind grooming,
that is true of this two year period of this particular subsection of offenses.
Tim: a colleague of mine on a different publication who was investigating,
these matters some years ago was given a sobering assessment by,
a senior police officer who said, pedophile is a three letter word.
DAD.
We have these outbursts, . Of concerns such as the one about focusing on
the grooming gangs, the tabloids promoting the idea that, abusers
are, old men in Dirty Macs who spring out from behind the garage.
and I think our society has a problem in looking at where, as you say, where
most of it is going on, it's in the home.
It's somebody across the street, it's your neighbor, it's somebody
in your family, and as a society, we just can't get our heads around that.
So look for.
Bogey men elsewhere.
I'm not saying that the grooming doesn't happen.
Yeah, exactly.
It's, as you say, it's a, relatively small proportion of the
overall rather horrific picture.
Helen: 'cause you're right, every time you attempt to give some kind
of context to this, it's accused of being the same as your minimizing
your, covering up the grooming gangs.
And I think that's a, that's just a very difficult thing to try and bat back and
this whole subject has been swallowed by narrative, but you are exactly right, Tim.
I followed the Giselle Peco trial of her husband.
Dominique Peco, who invited upwards of, at least over, were 50 convictions, 50
men in that local area, viral website.
He recruited to rape her while she was unconscious, and that's just by a
random sampling of people who were in that vicinity, that many people were
prepared to commit a horrific sex crime.
And there is some sort of odd sadistic kind of comfort in saying it's limited.
You know that it mostly happens in these forms that are completely
monstrous and unlawful rather than also happening in these ways that
are really banal and unremarkable.
Andy: So now should we get onto the reaction online and off, and
particularly in fact, not on Twitter X, but in the pages of, for example,
places like The Telegraph and the Times, because that has been really
fascinating how they are, they have been.
Can
Adam: we say radicalized I think it's really interesting.
This is being presented a lot as a problem of online and a problem, of,
I'm gonna say his name, Elon Musk.
and, that people are now using, unverified sources online and
believing what they read on Twitter.
But actually, the, horrible phrase, but mainstream media have quite a big
part to play in this as well, and it's become a sort of weird circle whereby.
Twitter was such a useful journalistic resource for so many years.
newspapers have been so paired back to the Boulogne and the resources they've
got have been, minimized so much that a lot of people were relying on.
if it's on Twitter, it becomes a story.
we've done endless bits of clickbait corner in, in strip shame, just showing.
How nonsense on a kind of Reddit forum or a a, popular tweet thread
gets turned into a story for the Daily Express website and then the
Daily Mirror website and all of this.
But as well, I think it has happened that, certainly in the last week we've seen
very much the editorial line of the Daily Telegraph, which has gone very strange as
a newspaper in the last couple of years.
Ha has just been following this.
And it's not even, Twitter was never that mainstream, was it?
It was overrepresented among media people.
And it's not just that Elon Musk is dictating what's going on his own site
that he's bought, it's the, that it, then goes, feeds into the mainstream media.
It's, then leads the news agenda for days.
the lobby are all asking questions to Ki Star and to Kami Bayno about this stuff.
And it, just becomes this sort of vicious circle in that way.
Helen: But no, again, to say all of this isn't to say that the grooming
gangs didn't happen or weren't a huge scandal and that there weren't a huge
number of victims who deserved justice.
I just think that I'm finding it very hard to put aside the sort of spinning
on a dime pivoting opportunism of what I'm seeing in a lot of, this.
Andy: Elon Musk would never work for someone who had been accused
of any kind of sexual impropriety.
I think we should put that on the record.
Helen: Think there's a couple of things.
One is the structural, decline of local news and newspapers generally,
which was always the reason that they picked up stuff from Twitter, right?
Was that it was just you could reprint 19 tweets on a subject and suddenly
you had a news story and then, then you write op-eds off it that often are like,
why isn't anybody talking about this?
Which is to me is the kind of last refuge of a scandal in op-ed terms.
We need to have a conversation about this.
Okay.
You start it, right?
That's what the column is for.
Yeah.
I've written that column before.
We've all, done it.
But, there's that.
and I think the same thing with the, Charlie Peters from GB News said, he
was the only reporter at one of the sentencings quite recently, and I
think that is a fair criticism that bread and butter court reporting
that we used to have has been.
massively hollowed out.
So there are other factors going on about, maybe more of the local papers would've
been able to report on this stuff.
Now some of them did really, good work, but maybe there could have
been more of that if they'd had any bloody money from the two thousands
onwards because of the internet hollowing out their business model.
Andy: this is very relevant to your patch, Tim, in terms of councils
and reporting on councils and the very hard work of reporting.
council meetings, council processes, dodgy councils.
Yeah, that's
Tim: really, fallen away.
As I've said on these occasions before, we, do six or seven items
a fortnight out of a possible 200.
, tips and submissions and so forth.
So there's, there are so many stories out there, waiting to be told, and a lot
of people clearly don't think that their local papers are going to do it for them.
and there are honorable exceptions, but cer certainly nothing like it was.
20 years ago.
Adam: And not only their individual stories, but if you were going, trying
to spot a pattern in specific towns like Aldermore, Rotham, if you had
a full-time court reporter who was covering a lot of trials of this kind
and putting, joining the dots together.
but if you can't afford to put anyone in a courtroom to report
on what's happening, then Yeah.
You don't get a chance to do that, do you?
Helen: but there was some interesting polling about
what reform voters look like.
So Nigel Farage's vote.
And I have to say also after praising update, we regard, when you say
Andy: what they look like, what do you mean?
Helen: what their political interests are, or who they are demographically.
And it's one of the things that they are like conservative voters.
They do skew much older.
But the difference between them and to voters is that they are very, online.
They are the people in the Facebook groups that are hearing
this girl was made into a kebab.
In the same way that for a long time you would hear online
Gordon Brand sold all the gold.
Or there was a time in the mid 10 2010s where there was about the
banning ivory became a really big issue in, in the political campaign.
It was almost not really reported on in the context election campaign, but
it was huge amount of Facebook adverts about why do they hate the elephants?
that kind of stuff.
These things that circulate online.
There will be community spaces on Facebook and wherever else we, where everybody will
know this fact, whether or not it's true and it never quite breaches the surface.
And that does correlate quite highly with, reform voters.
But I was gonna say, not only have I praise Rupert murder, I'm also gonna
praise Nigel Farage, who despite having made some pretty gross remarks in the
house, one of the things he did do is stand up to an unnamed billionaire
by saying, I will never admit Tommy Robinson, he's not right for reform.
I.
And I thought that was a really fascinating moment because that
collection of the new online, including Jordan Peterson, my old sparring
partner who is one of Tommy Robinson's biggest fans, so much of a big fan
that when he interviewed him on his podcast, his wife came along as well.
'cause Tammy is such a big fan of yours.
Sorry,
Andy: Tammy Peterson.
Tammy, I thought it was Tommy Robinson and Tammy Robinson, which
put No, that would be adorable.
Like a sort of be cute folk
Helen: couple singing couple.
But anyway, they, there is a, feeling the American right can, that Tommy
Robinson is a folk hero and he's the only one who's ever spoken the truth about
this and he's now a political prisoner.
and the one person who hasn't bought that narrative is Nigel
Farage, which is why there was that.
Falling out.
Andy: is everyone just too online now?
Kimmy bed knocks in her.
I think early mid forties, like Elon Musk is his early mid fifties.
Have these people just been too on the internet for 20
years and it's, broken them.
Adam: We're kind going back to my solution to everything.
Aren't you switching it off two hours in the afternoon.
So we all have to go and play outside in the fresh air.
Andy: Yeah.
And you say on again,
, But I'm not so sure, Adam.
I think we could just lose the password because
Adam: we, sorry
Helen: everyone,
Andy: So now we come to our final section of the show,
which is about David Montgomery.
Beloved question.
Mark
Helen: Adam's Muse.
Now for 30 years, so
Adam: many,
years ago, as a very callow young boy, I came in on work
experience of private lives.
This is October, 1997.
We're talking about, and the very first story I filed was about a
bloke who was in charge of The Mirror called David Rommel Montgomery.
We come to, and here we are all these years later, I'm.
Still writing about it, but he still hasn't gone away.
Andy: The medium of podcasting has been invented in the time you've been covering
Helen: Why is his nickname Rommel?
sometimes quite, I knows I have his nicknames and he's
just it's too late to ask.
No, his
Tim: real name is Montgomery.
Adam: you were there, Tim?
because
Tim: Montgomery was on our side.
Ah.
See.
And the journalists at The Mirror never, ever felt that Mr.
Montgomery was on their side.
Can I just throw and did you
Adam: want a little potted career summary of Dave Montgomery Rommel?
Actually, I'd just like
Andy: to say that actually Rommel did a huge amount of good to the Allied War
effort by going back to Berlin for his wife's birthday, just before the D-Day
landings, because the weather was bad.
And actually Montgomery was criticized heavily for his
actions in the Normandy campaign.
But we don't have time for that now.
I have to finished.
I've
Helen: just, I've become trapped in a room with you, those man talking
about You're not, the rest is history.
Yeah.
The second World War.
I'm just saying.
Andy: I'm, there's a case.
There's a case that Roel was on our.
Side too.
All right, I'll move on.
David Rommel Montgomery, has just announced he's selling off his
National World stable of newspapers.
For those who haven't heard of National World, what is it?
Adam: It's not a stable of newspapers.
It was specifically set up as have most of his re his.
His ventures re in recent years as an investment company.
I'm so sorry.
He just thought that he could, buy up the media and take as much
money out of it for himself and for shareholders as he possibly could.
Okay.
By the way, it does
Andy: consist of, it does local consists local newspapers,
Adam: largely of local newspapers.
Yeah.
It's, he's he third, no.
Fourth actually go at this.
Montgomery started off as, he was a chief sub on the mirror.
He worked on a sun back in the eighties, and then he was, he actually edited.
The news of the world, which seems slightly extraordinary for
a couple of years in the 1980s.
Okay.
and then he was taken off by Rupert Murdoch to work for a newspaper
called Today, which for both of you are far too young to remember.
But Tim and I, and some of our listeners will recall was the first full color
newspaper, post today, when today had become yesterday, Rommel moves on again.
He, goes back to the mirror and takes over as, as Chief Executive
of the Mirror Group after Robert Maxwell has fallen off his yacht.
Unbelievably turns out to be an even worse boss than Robert
Maxwell in many people's views.
He wasn't actually embedding millions from the co company like, like Maxwell was.
But he certainly, he sliced the place to the Boulogne, cut it back horrendously.
And that's the, the model he has then followed in all of his other
ventures, which briefly have included a, spell in Germany.
then Local World was a company he set up where he bought up a load of, local
papers that used to belong to North Cliff Papers, which was the local
paper, bit of the Daily Mail group.
sold them on to Reach after about three years after slashing
everything to the Boulogne.
and then he did the same thing with National World, which he has just.
Breach a deal with before Christmas to sell to, a business associate who, someone
who had already had, a quarter of the company, called Media Concierge, which
is just a horrendous name for a, company, but they do own a couple of, newspapers
in Ireland and, have promised in a most, un roly move, to actually invest
in editorial and stop sacking people.
Andy: And this is a bit of a, Story about local journalism really.
And again, we're coming back to what we were talking about before with local
reporting of whether it's of councils or scandals or crimes or that sort of thing.
and if you haven't heard of National World, the company, you
will probably have heard of the Scotsman or the Yorkshire Post.
Yeah, Those are the two big titles.
Adam: We did a story a little while back about The, the Scotsman offices,
which in the older, because everything, it's just a merry-go-round of ownership
of stuff owned by the Barclay brothers for a long time when they were in their
pomp and so in their pomp, were they, that they built an enormous office
state-of-the-art office right next to the new Scottish Parliament in holy rude.
Which they called Barclay House, but then didn't have the funds to keep
that going and it was in a WeWork for a while and now it's above a super
drug in a shopping street in Edinburgh.
What it's about four people and a dog there.
So is that to do with, Montgomery's ownership?
Yes.
His model has always been to slash everything, but he also seems
to, Tim is the person in the room who has actually worked for him.
but I would say, what he has displayed over many years is a sort of pathological
dislike of certainly journalists and largely journalism as well.
Tim: Yes.
It's curious for, he was a graduate of the, former Mirror group Trainee
scheme, which, gave us a number of luminaries of British journalism such
as Alistair Campbell, me, When he worked on the mirror, when he was in
more lowly positions, he was known as the cabin boy because of his penchant
for, todying to the bosses, and always being in and out of the editor's office.
can I do this for you?
Can I.
Tie your shoelaces,
Helen: did, am I right in saying that he, did he, fire you?
Tim: I was actually, what we call a casual journalist.
Oh, yeah.
I wa I wasn't on the staff, but, the mirror did use a lot of
casuals and one way of instantly saving money was, Montgomery
just, locked out all the casuals.
There was no notice.
So this is scores, if not.
in the small hundreds of people just had their livelihood cut off.
There was no negotiation with the union or anything like that.
And then among the people who were sacked or locked out were people
who were officials in the NUJ.
so I rather foolishly agreed to step up and became, I think the
chairman of the, MI group branch.
I had.
Given a couple of quotes to newspapers giving the njs view
on stuff that was going on there.
And, Montgomery didn't like that.
So I was, I was somerly fired.
Adam: you weren't the only, private eye figure to be fired either, were you?
Of course, indeed.
Tim: Paul foot of this parish used to have a page in the mirror.
And, one week he produced his page and it was all about the depredations going on.
Helen: look in the mirror as a headline for those
Adam: over a large picture of the lovely, Roel Montgomery himself.
Yeah.
And,
Helen: do you know, I have for years thought that was a picture of Max
Hastings in the seventies, so it's good that we finally cleared that up.
Tim: yeah, Paul, they weren't going to put up with that.
So Paul, was out and, Montgomery did once, give his, , view of how industrial
relations should be, conducted.
And he said, if, you have an unruly horse, you beat it with
a plank until it behaves itself.
Adam: Just to prove there's nothing new in the world.
He was also involved in, some very early sort of fake news, when he and, his editor
on the Daily Mirror at the time, Mr.
Piers Morgan, now on YouTube, took a photo of Dodie and Diana in August, 1997
and adjusted it; so as it would look as if they were about to kiss each other,
when in fact Dodie had been looking in completely the opposite direction.
And, when people pointed out that this was, a bit of a dodgy thing for Piers
Morgan to have done, it emerged that actually he had not only the approval
of Montgomery, who was his boss and boss of the whole company at that
point, but Montgomery had actually written the headline for it as well.
Oh,
Andy: wow.
I'm glad he learned his lesson on that one.
That's very good.
Helen: I've got something else to say, which is actually Pi Morgan came out of
the recent story quite well as well, and that he did a show with Jordan Peterson
in which he listed Tommy Robinson's extensive rap sheet to his biggest fan.
He,
Andy: what is your GB news show starting and you just wanna
come clean and say it's on
Helen: strong pitch.
I just think 90 Fry has got a lot on, so I could probably be his parliamentary
assistant and take over his GB news slot.
Andy: this broadly a good thing for the staff of the national world?
conglomerate.
Sorry.
Investment company.
Adam: it's very, the media concierge takeover you mean, forgive me?
Yes, they are making the right noises.
I should say this.
I don't think the sale has been, it was greed before Christmas.
I don't think it's actually, gone through yet.
Okay.
but, people I have spoken to are.
Cautiously optimistic.
it's quite hard if you're working particularly in the local press
at the moment to be optimistic about anything very much.
reach PLC, one of the great big rivals have just brought in some
horrendous things, the sort of page counts that they're expecting
all journalists to meet, right?
whether they are writing internet click bait about what happened in.
Strictly last night, or whether they're writing, detailed, stories because
they're the health specialist or whatever.
So do you mean to click target stories?
Yeah, no, you've gotta get x hundred thousand, views per story.
so it's not a fun place to be working at all.
Okay.
Local media,
Andy: I was hoping we might be edging, towards a happy ish potentially
ending, but you've, I think you've put me back in my box on that one.
what next For where next for Rommel?
who knows?
you don't wanna, as I said,
Adam: nearly 30 years of reporting.
I'm right.
He's 76.
Okay.
But, also the other big, elephant in the room is the telegraph, which,
endlessly how many, how long have we been mentioning the sale of the
Telegraph now on these podcasts?
But.
It was all looking a bit dicey.
Dovid Defo, who was, who had his bid coming in now Pi and maybe
not have the financing for it.
Charles Moore wrote an impassioned, piece in the Telegraph last week saying,
come on, let's, end this hell of us not knowing who owns us, but paying
tribute to the fine journalism reporting that was being done by his colleagues.
Gosh, have you read it lately
Helen: talking about The Telegraph for so long that I think that the Observer
sale Came up behind it happened.
And that's as far as I understand it all.
Yeah.
there's got
Adam: it, it's supposed to be finalized by, March or April I
think So, they're, in a race now.
Whether we'll still be talking about the Telegraph in a year's time, I dunno.
But one of the bidders who is in there, he's Montgomery, he still
thinks he, he could take over Yeah.
And another newspaper and, and, wreak his reign of terror over it.
So that's some something certainly people at The Telegraph are very, nervous about.
Tim: Okay.
Just on behalf of the, Depressed, staff on the observer, have to point out it's
not a sale, it's a disposal true that the, Guardian Media Group are not getting any.
Adam: In fact, they are actually paying Tous to take it away in one
of the most extraordinary deals ever.
They are putting up 5 million of the purchase price to buy their
own newspaper from themselves.
Thank you, Tim.
You can take the representative out of the NUJ.
Andy: okay.
thank you so much for listening to this episode of page 94.
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