Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.
It turns out that Britain is gonna be renamed even Greater Manchester.
Andy Burnham has done a big speech outlining his big vision
for the future of the country.
Can we also mention that he's called Andy Murray Burnham?
I know.
Nightmare.
It
has been an uptick in the number of Andy Murrays in public life.
yeah, I was just getting over the last one.
I will say it was, in terms of the vibes.
The vibes were good.
It was happy, it was summery.
He was in a little t-shirt with a suit over and he had to gag
at the beginning about how Kemi Badnock wasn't gonna like this.
And he was halfway into his, out of his Manchester clothes.
And he made a joke about how he was gonna buy longer shorts
or repeal the public decency.
Yet, there was just, a level of breeziness to it that I thought was,
quite good and somewhat refreshing.
And for a public that's had a lot of speeches by Kirsten Starer,
this one just looked good.
, even if the bar is quite low.
And, I kept thinking, Richard, a lot of his diagnosis of what is wrong
You would have to agree with, 'cause you've written it and I published it,
About outsourcing, over centralization.
yeah.
No money in the region.
you do agree with some of these things.
the principle of more dilu, regional devolution, power to
places that no should know what to do with the money, is a great one.
the trouble is that while over the last few decades, while so much has
been, centralised, so much power and money has been brought into
Whitehall, taken away from local government, so have the, things that
can hold those areas to account right.
When they do spend the money.
So local democracy is in a shocking state because people aren't really that
interested in, the bin collections.
Yep.
Or things like that.
there's no auditing of spending regionally.
The, Cameron government abolish the audit commission, which used to
look at local government spending.
So now if you spend money wastefully fraudulently, you
basically get away with it.
and thirdly, the, local media as well barely exists.
Hundreds of local newspapers have shut in the last 20 years or so.
what's left is often cheerleading for the region, it means there's no,
scrutiny in local journalism really.
So you are suggesting that, with no one looking at how the money
is spent, it might not go well.
That's right.
do you perhaps have any examples of, yeah.
Mayors you perhaps have spent rather like a drunken sailor and gave
contracts to their friends Richard as
Yeah.
They at have a chap called, Ben Houchin, who's a mayor of the Teas Valley, who's,
not, sorry, not Ben Houchin, the former judge at the
political podcast Awards 2026.
The one who overlooked us.
You mean
him one who didn't win Indeed for some reason.
Enough of this petty griping.
sorry.
yeah, Richard, what's really useful, is how, things have gone wrong
and what you would do instead.
As in, so sorry, T side as an example Yeah.
Of where it's gone wrong and what could have been done to avert it.
Actually, Houchin is in the, the telegraph this morning writing
about Burnham saying why he fail.
And he's, I wrote out what he said.
He said, he points out that actually regional mayors have it quite easy
'cause they don't have the really difficult things to do that, that the
Prime Minister, for example, has to do.
So he says, we rarely make the calls that lose you friends, crater your poll
ratings and keep your awake wondering whether history will forgive you.
The thing is, he's made a couple of decisions that should be he him away Yeah.
That we've written about.
Yeah.
notably with, with, the spending of vast amounts of public money.
which is what Andy Burnham is now proposing for regions around the uk
and it is re industrialising, which is exactly what Burnham
is proposing to roll out.
Yeah.
The, these can create problems, these decisions.
especially as Burnham says, we need to bring everybody in.
We need to bring local businesses in as well as, local government.
the trouble is when you do that, you've gotta keep an eye on what
they're up to with the money.
and in t side, the deals that have been struck to regenerate
the former steelworks, which closed down, in 2015, that's what
we've written about quite a lot.
those deals, have cost the local taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds.
essentially Lord Houchin as he is now, thanks to Boris Johnson, gave a deal to
a couple of local businessmen who can now buy that land once the taxpayers
remediated it, for one pound per acre.
And a couple of issues ago, we wrote about the latest, manifestation of
that where, a data centre company plans to anthropic plans to build
a big data centre on that land.
it's agreed a deal in principle to buy the land from those
businessmen for 222 million pounds.
', and pay them another couple of hundred million just to connect
to the local wire network, which is like a sort of local grid.
Right.
for power, because they control that as well, because they were
able to buy that under land option.
They bought a, they bought a wire network with 20 substations for about 10 quid.
and that so they can cash in on all this.
And it is relevant because Burnham.
Specifically mentioned steel.
I think it is reasonable to
yes.
To look at examples that are in the north that are about steel.
Yeah.
I
mean, involve local mayors and haven't gone so well.
Exactly.
I teach art is the archetypal example because it is this old industrial
region, but was, very successful in some ways, industrially and could have been
again, because, there are lot has lots of geographical advantages tees Ry.
but it's, yeah, it's been absolutely thrown away.
there's already been a kind of example of something similar to this with Andy
Burnham, which is the debate over Sasha Lord who, Andy Burnham's, nightlife
Czar, who had to pay back an Arts council grant for, COVID, essentially.
was seen to be having preferential access to as a mate of Andy Burnham's.
That's been The Mill, which is one of the local newsletter type operations
has reported on that quote extensively.
You are right.
I think to say that the, scrutiny level just goes up a notch
when you move from regional to national and that'll be the thing.
I think that'll be the hard adjustment for and Burnham to make.
he's already served as a ministry, as Minister for culture, he all this kind of
stuff before, but, it's, he, as he said this week, he's, been out of Westminster
for a long time now, and I think that might be a bit of a shock to the system.
The other one that reminded me was the fact that he said he wants
the largest council house building programme since the second World War.
in London you can't get developers to build private houses that will, selling
off plan for 700,000 pounds a pop.
Because of what they call the kind of the green tape, the new staircase requirements
post Grenfell, the demand for a certain amount of 'em to be affordable housing.
we have laden down developers with lots of, very good stuff,
but it means that the lot more and more of them are saying, what?
We can't make this process work.
So if you're talking about council house building, you are, you're
saying somebody, the state is gonna have to take on that risk that
you won't get planning permission.
That risk of the upfront costs of it.
I'm not entirely clear where the money for that is going to come from.
And some local councils and some we've written about have decided
to do house building themselves.
And it hasn't gone very Well,
there have been some people trying stuff quite near where I live in Lewisham.
They built essentially modular housing, that very cheap kind of version of that.
So people are trying to think creatively about it, but it is still an incredibly,
difficult thing to get through the gauntlet of all of the regulations and
then all the objections from local people and that, I'm, I do, I worry about that.
But
you're not simply saying we can't have affordable council housing anymore,
or it's just too difficult to do.
No, but I'm, and what I'm saying is, if you want to do it seriously,
and I hope that he does, because housing is a huge issue, particularly
for younger people in this country.
He will have to a, make some enemies of some NIMBYs.
And that is also known as existing homeowners of whom there are a lot.
And also he will have to find some, funding for it from somewhere.
And, there was a quote from, I think Howard Lee, who was one of the people
involved in Manchesterism saying, the way we got so much built in Manchester
was by ignoring those requirements for a certain amount of affordable housing.
We basically just brought in developers and said, let it rip.
And that's very different.
Just build, anything.
Yeah.
And if you build enough houses, then eventually they will become affordable.
there are parts of Greater Manchester that haven't seen this, spectacular
rejuvenation that he's claiming.
he will, that will fan out across the country.
central Manchester's done extremely well.
Okay.
largely because of a, a big housing fund that was, that, that was funded
by, George Osborne, in about 2012.
and a lot of the money has gone into the big skyscrapers that you can
now see if you go to Manchester.
The Skylines transformed.
Most of them built by a single company that has made some people very rich.
we've written about, chap who runs that company and the company's called re acre.
chap called Darren Whitaker appeared on the Sunday Times Rich List
at somewhere over 700 million.
but Andy Burn made him rich and he can do that to the rest of us.
That's what I'm hearing.
Rich.
I don't wanna hear this talking down written anymore from you.
Yeah, We've just gotta level up a bit.
those skyscrapers were supposed to have affordable housing to get the
funding, they, claimed that, they, were gonna be profitable and they
could get loans from this fund.
But they escaped the requirement to put affordable housing in by claiming
they weren't gonna make enough money if they put affordable housing was common.
So there were these games played
in
development and, which is, why you have to keep an eye on it.
I think one interesting thing is that Byrne will be the second recent
prime minister to have been a mayor.
So Boris Johnson was the mayor of London and his, deficiencies as mayor
of London translated onto a larger scale when he became Prime Minister.
So example number one, do you remember the Garden bridge?
Oh.
Which is going to be a beautiful, a literally a garden bridge.
It looked absolutely fantastic in all the CGI renderings of it cost.
A lot of money was never built when bro became Prime Minister.
That became let's have a tunnel to Ireland.
Yeah.
There was a Yeah.
So the, smaller eras will be, they'll be magnified.
Yeah.
And of course burn.
Bernard was clear that this is a sort of 10 year plan.
You 10 years is a long time.
so it's great to hear a bit of long term thinking, but when you think of
all the, problems that are gonna crop up along those 10 years and whether
he'll survive them, whether he'll be able to, resist them in a way not
bow down 'cause he's known for just wanting to keep people happy and giving
into to what people lobby him on.
One of the things where they can stick to it show the resolve over that kind
of period is pretty questionable.
one of the things he did say is he doesn't want such heavy handed whipping, which
I feel like is the kind of person who has not yet had to corral 400 members
of the PLP to vote for something really unpopular that he thinks is good.
But you are.
The interesting thing about that is that some of the things he was talking about
was essentially following up this 2010s labour project in opposition of what they
called insourcing or the Preston model.
Do you remember the Preston model?
I
don't, but it was the idea essentially that local council should try and
commission more services in house, bring reinvestment back into the region.
And that's the kind of thing that he was talking about, saying he wanted to be
able to prioritise British businesses in contracts that kind of, you know, that
stuff there is a fully developed, and we might laugh a bit at Manchesterism
and, expose its contradictions, but there are people who have been thinking
about this stuff quite hard and one of the things they talk about is the,
active state or the participatory state.
the idea that actually you do wanna get more involved.
You don't want to just lead things to the market.
I think they're more comfortable with that than Stama was.
I think Stama really had a particularly strong view on
the market in either direction.
I can't,
we dunno what his views were.
That's
No, but that's a
part of the problem.
Yeah.
It's time yet
he's got enough,
he'll set out his missions
in his memoir.
Probably no perfect timing, but the, there were more ideas I thought in the Burnham
speech and more evidence of someone having given some of this, some thought
than we'd seen for quite a long time.
And that presumably, overall I kept thinking.
I agree with a lot of the diagnosis here.
As I've said, our local council column will be saying a lot of these
things, this is right, but what are you going to do and can you do it?
you run the money column, Richard, where do we get the money?
Andy Burnham also hinted that he doesn't really wanna raise taxes.
He said he wants to give everyone a bit of a break on that front, didn't he?
you either raise taxes or you borrow it, there is a bit of room
for that borrowing for investment infrastructure inside the fiscal rules.
Yeah, that's right.
Rachel Reeves has changed the fiscal rules slightly.
although Andy Burnham didn't remember, didn't know what they were a few days ago.
He perhaps does now, but she relaxed in a bit.
So there's a slightly friendlier measure of overall government debt,
something called public sector net financial liabilities, which is a
bit lower than the, debt figure.
Amazing.
and there's a bit of room there to borrow for investment, not for
day-to-day spending, but for investment.
So he can take advantage of that.
And also if he can change the way that the, the forecasters and the
watchdogs look at this to give him the benefit of growth that
will come from that investment.
so it's a bit, he was a bit daft, a bit naive to say, we don't wanna be in hock
to the bomb markets a few years ago.
Don't say that Peter.
Don't mention the bond markets.
but there's a bit of room there, there is some possibility.
And I noticed that he managed to reference both, Germany and Finland.
the suggestion that other countries might have some ideas.
Yeah.
Outrageous take.
Yeah, outrageous.
So Germany is this idea of the kind of, essentially you have
to equalise all your regions.
Yeah.
Which I presume in Germany came from the fact that the east was always so
much poorer than the west and post reunification there was a, real transfer.
at the moment, London is just this mad massive drag weight on the
rest of the country generating huge amounts of the income that then
gets redistributed around the place.
That, again, I'm, I'd be interested to how that intersects with Sads
Kahns feeling that actually he would like a bit more investment in London.
I think he made the point in the speech, didn't he?
That, he was quite careful to be nice about London as well.
And so London would
get into London.
yeah,
is he wants to sort of London of the North, but in London that was a bit, he
slightly lost me a bit, I have to say.
But yeah, I, there was also of, there were some big ideas,
you have to give him credit,
but we,
some big ideas.
I think we should say that none of this is gonna happen if he makes the
dangerous mistake of making an actual communist Ed Miller Band Chancellor.
So can we all, hold the author?
I think that's
unfair to communist actually.
Andy
Maoist, how much further can we go?
Yeah,
you had an interesting thought about this Richard Ba based on Miller Band's previous
time, Miller Band was at the Treasury for eight years seeding his radical communism.
I know.
But, you had a thought about his sort of prior record.
he was Gordon Brown's special advisor from 97 until 2002.
when Gordon Brown and Tony Bla were very keen on the private finance initiative,
which was essentially it was financial engineering to borrow money without
the appearance of borrowing money.
and it ended up costing a lot of money.
We ended up paying well over the odds for hospitals, prisons, so it's
a sort of, caution retail really in the dangers of, too much financial
engineering with the public books.
And that's what he's gonna have to resist.
there will be the temptation.
back then the government had debt of about 40% or a bit less of GDP.
it's more than double that now.
So the temptation is probably even greater.
So he's not red ed, he's blue ed,
he's dangerously right wing.
He's much too right wing to be chancellor.
Yeah.
Flexible ed.
which is, and keep him with the burner, isn't it?
but the noises that have been coming out, the Burnham camp, people close
to him and so on, are that, they may be looking for more conventional ways.
Borrowing we talked about earlier.
Yeah.
Which is the way to do it.
It's a lot more, it's a lot more honest for one thing.
Yep.
and it's, more cost efficient because, you're not paying the private
bankers and investors profits that you have to do on private debt.
And I thought, not entirely because of your efforts, but, there is
a bit of a consensus on PFI now
Yeah.
After a couple of decades that it wasn't a great idea.
That's right.
Yeah.
when the, coalition government came in, they, that they commissioned a review
of it and said, no, not value for money.
We're not doing that again.
there was something called PF two,
why did they call PI two?
Didn't really work.
Why not?
PFII like Roman numeral.
It's much what was wrong with these people?
Yeah.
You should have been a special advisor.
Dropping the requirement for civil servants to have really, good Latin was
where it all the rot set in, my opinion.
I think the fact that people really hate Ed Miller Band, or at least there's a
big briefing war going on against him, has to be related to the two things.
One, that he has been seen as energy Secretary to have been dabbling
in other people's departments in a way that they have found annoying.
And also from the right, the criticism that he's trying to
basically take, make you all eat a carrot and never drive a car again.
Hair shirts and lentils.
Yeah.
But where does he stand on air conditioning?
Andy, that's entirely where I'm gonna take my view on Ed ban from.
Can we agree that it's been quite hot?
you never know.
I look forward to the mailbag, but I, think it probably has been quite hot.
It's been quite hot.
If you're watching this, it might've already got past 30 degrees again, by now.
Yeah.
It's been too hot.
Yeah.
And a Furious debate has now broken out about air conditioning.
I can't instal it in my house for physical reasons, but, I am
pro it because it is too hot.
It's too hot to work in my house and Pat, apparently that
will be the future until I die.
Is that for a couple of weeks?
Every summer I'm going to broil slowly.
No, it'll be a couple of months by the time we're 20 years
older, so don't worry about that.
Great.
Yes.
Get air conditioning, if you can afford it.
Terrific.
As in, we've seen in the last couple of weeks this big debate about a
relatively, I don't wanna say relatively unimportant 'cause it is important.
Air conditioning protects you.
If you're very old, very young pregnant, you're otherwise, vulnerable.
It can save lives.
It's great.
And there's this mad sort of attempt to have a culture war over it,
but it doesn't reflect at all what the situation actually is, which
is
The conservatives are trying to say there's a labour war
on against air conditioning.
defacto ban.
There are a couple of councils which have been a bit restrictive on it, and I think
they absolutely shouldn't be, and I think they're gonna have to change the rules.
But the idea that there is a defacto ban is, in the old phrase, is not even wrong.
it's so wrong that labour will pay you two and a half grand towards the cost of air
conditioning in your home watching this.
But this is by heat pump, right?
There's a thing called a, it's called an air to air heat pump.
And it basically does you cold air in the summer and hot air in the winter.
The reason the government wants you to get one of those, to the extent that
they will give you two and a half grand of the cost is that it means you need
to use a gas boiler much, much less.
It basically decarbonize your home heating very effectively.
That's where they'd like you to get it.
Free air conditioning on the government.
Let's all get it.
Now, that's, is
it a bit like the guardian's air conditioning, which notoriously
packs up when it gets to 27 degrees?
that's my worry about eco.
I just say I feel
like No, it's,
it all goes back work to the guardian.
It
all goes back to the guardian.
No,
that is all I hear about every summer though.
yeah, the reason that I think this debate, which is not a, I
just wanna say it's not a debate.
Get it.
If you can afford it, terrific.
Get it.
Partly because we'll have so much Soler on the grid by 2030 that it will, per
the demand for air conditioning will perfectly soak up Soler and then you'll
get, it's very advantageous to do it.
part of the debate is I think that you have now a block in British politics.
This didn't, this wasn't the case five years ago.
The block of reform, the conservatives who have decided that they're going to focus
only on one element of the climate thing.
The climate thing is two halves.
It's adaptation.
'cause we need to adapt to the fact that the world is much hotter
than it was 30 years ago, and it's mitigation, which is stopping the
problem from getting worse and worse The way you deal with that second bit.
It's to get to, if you like, a net of zero to coin a phrase, crud going from
the bowels of hell into the atmosphere.
That's how you do it.
And the conservatism and reform have decided they're
not going to bother with that.
They're going to scrap the 2050 target.
They're gonna scrap all incentives.
They're just gonna scrap the whole thing.
They're basically saying, we don't wanna deal with this.
So the reason they're talking about air conditioning is basically their
attitude is, we'll just adapt.
We'll just everyone get air conditioning.
It'll be as hot as Saudi Arabia.
Just don't go outside.
It's an anti-real position that they have found themselves in
reform have always been like this.
The conservatives sign net zero into law seven years ago
was Trees Maze part
there may
gift.
Boris Johnson.
The one thing he was right about apart from Ukraine is clean energy.
Yeah.
and the conservatives have absolutely abandoned a position
of dealing with reality on this.
So it's, a crazy thing.
And that is why I think we're talking now about air conditioning so much
is because it's part of adaptation and it's a useful and important part.
But mitigation is the other bit.
If I've, understood the arguments on the other side correctly, we
can only have air condition if we drill in the North Sea tomorrow.
Yeah, that's very,
have I got that right?
Yeah.
If you wanna get air conditioning and it comes from renewable, the
extra emissions are pretty minimal.
If you do want to drill a whole new oil or gas field, they'll be a bit higher.
and presumably will not allow us to have widespread air conditioning.
No, the, even Donald Trump has been weighing, I mean he always
talks about the North Sea.
I don't, unlock the North Sea.
We had 14 years of conservative government who un like granted licences.
it's, our bit is mostly knackered.
Anyone whose main priority is the North Sea isn't really folk
can't do sums about what works and what works is going electric.
And the reason for that is the very boring thing that it makes your devices,
if it's heat pumps, electric cars, like three or four times as efficient.
That's the gain you get.
If someone invented a petrol car that went 2000 miles on one tank,
they would be faded for all time.
They'd win Nobel prizes up the wazoo.
But this comes back to my conspiracy theory about recycling,
right.
Which is, and actually turns out to have been validated a couple of years ago.
Lots of recycling just gets shipped off to China and put in landfill.
But why does everybody like big businesses were very happy
to Wang on about recycling?
Yeah.
'cause it was saying it's up to you.
Yes.
Actually climate change can really be materially affected
by you putting, separating out your paper from your milk bottle.
Yeah.
And I feel like the same thing about aircon.
It's saying, we can't do all these mitigations that would be expensive or
trying to get to net zero by putting money a, a levy on your bills or whatever it is.
yeah.
Instead, it's up to you to buy an air conditioning unit and if
you don't, that's your fault.
Like that to me is, it's about, just shifting it back on to being an individual
problem on the collective action problem.
Yeah.
And lots of people can't afford air conditioning either to
buy the thing or to, run it.
'cause it, it will add to your electricity bills.
and that is another big part of the problem is that policy matters basically.
But there's also a left critique of air conditioning, Which is the
sort of degrowth one, which is essentially like the left wing attack
on GLP ones, the anti beastie drugs, which is, it's a sticking plaster.
So the idea is you have to morally suffer in your very sweaty house,
otherwise you'll never feel the pain that will make you want to attack
climate change in the same way.
You shouldn't take a drug that express your appetite
because we should fix big food.
that's I think the reason that the left can be quite puritanical
about judging people for echo
and coming from the centre, I'm always thinking, can we
not do both of those things?
No,
but that's
the thing is can we not collective and individual action.
I am what is limiting the progress on these, the, these air to air.
Heat pump air conditioner things, which sound like,
they sound a
bit SoFi, don't they?
Yeah.
I
mean, holy grail,
I think until recently the government was focused on air to water, which
is where you heat it, heat your water, so it does your radiators.
And that's 'cause most people have radiators in their homes.
So it's a natural first step.
I think it probably will catch up.
there's lots of money available for it, which is a good thing.
And thank you to the readers who've been saying get with it.
Air to air, not air to water.
Yeah.
So as of last week when I read these letters, Andy, I'm big on air to air.
It's, great.
And having got an air to water a system a year ago, that's absolutely fine.
the degrowth thing I think is a bit of a mad perspective because people don't
want to give up the things they have.
You see it a lot in the argument over, cars.
For example.
People will say, we shouldn't go to electric cars because, actually
active travel is much better.
people, we should be getting people walking and taking the bus, or
cycling that, this kind of thing.
Yeah.
But good luck doing that in America where one town is a hundred
miles away from the next town.
This is the thing, even in the Netherlands, even in
like crazy, the Netherlands.
Yeah.
I think about 9% of distance travelled is, is active now.
That's in the Netherlands, which has had decades of strong support
for active travel cycling.
Very flat.
so the idea that is going to be the answer is, just not quite real enough.
Like the Climate change Committee have done the, numbers on this and
basically the savings that you get from going electric are so much greater.
and that's good.
That's part of what I think of as your kind of climate sensible.
That I think, I hope that, I hope whoever becomes chance of listen,
which is energy expenditure matters less and how that energy is generated.
globally, about 20% of our energy usage is the electricity.
So you do need to clean up electricity generation, but the other almost 80% is
the stuff that has not yet gone electric.
So that's cars and home heating and all that stuff.
Low, low temperature, industrial uses all of that.
And the, opportunity to electrify that is, is big.
And that is why, especially in the wake of the Iran war, you're gonna
hear lots more about electrification.
It's gonna be a big focus of the cop meeting in November.
because it just gives you these massive efficiency savings.
and that is one valid criticism of the government, the current government's
position, which is that they've been really focused on getting to
clean power 2030 and old Sparky's written a lot about this clean power.
2030 is great, but it is expensive to do the last few percent.
And actually there are lots bigger gains to be had.
As in, if you run an electric car, even if you're basically only using a
gas powered electricity grid to make the electricity, that's still better
for the environment than a petrol car.
Because, that is so much more efficient.
But first you need a huge investment in the national grid as well, don't you?
You do.
And I think we've needed one for a long time and there just
hasn't been much action on it.
But yeah, the idea, oh, that's another good thing about aircon.
It gets more electricity used, which spreads the cost of the grid.
It's gonna be really expensive.
The, economy is basically a hybrid car at the moment, which
is running two systems at once.
And Burnham did say infrastructure.
Yeah.
At least
once.
At least once.
So I imagine he's, all over this.
I think he's been quite good on green stuff,
I think I see a bit of a difficulty with the number of
commitments he's making there.
the grid itself is gonna cost a, fortune, to upgrade and so on.
And also the capability to deliver this, if you haven't invested
in the skills, for generation
Yeah.
There is a gap.
we don't really have the engineers, at the moment.
So it's a rebuilding is a difficult process.
You can't just chuck money at it.
Yes.
so it's good to even talk about, education and, apprenticeships and Yes.
Technical education and levelling it with academic education.
these are again, great ideas.
It's not easy to, deliver.
It was no, it was the least blare Right.
Bit of his delivery.
which, was, pretty solid Tony for quite a lot of it.
And then he's going, and I promise you that a lot of you won't
go to university this years.
that, that's marvellous.
Yeah.
if you could become a an engineer or technician without a 80 grand debt Yeah.
Wouldn't you?
Yeah.
The numbers make sense.
Should they?
Yeah.
And there is, sorry, just the last thing there is quite a sort of, the electoral
point is always a bit duller to me 'cause I'm just a geek on all the tech.
But labor's, voters tend to like this stuff and they've been losing
a lot of votes to the greens.
and, to the Lib Dems of course.
Because they seem to have been going a bit further On all sorts of things.
And I think if they do row back too far, then there's a real risk that
they'll just lose more to their left.
but also it'd be a big splashy thing to say.
one of the things he was talking about was more greater public
ownership or public accountability for energy companies and utilities.
But again, very expensive.
Yeah.
But Stan's labour were nationalising the railways like a great big labour thing.
Ask for a really long time and just no one knows about it.
No one knows about It's extraordinary.
No, it was the same on the energy stuff.
Like the record is terrific, but they seem to have been quite
unwilling to make the case on it.
It is weird.
Yeah.
And the thing that plays well with people is actually not arguments
about jobs or the economy.
People quite like, this is protecting the planet for future generations.
We all have to do our be this is a global problem, like electorally that
does better than there are this many jobs and this much investment, which
is a spreadsheet he think to say,
and Burnham is a storyteller.
He can tell these stories of me.
He's, you were telling me he's got an English degree.
Yeah.
I'm thrilled.
I've got an English degree.
Am I only Burnham?
Yeah, you look might be, look at this panel, you'll find
quite a lot of English degrees.
Yeah, I've got an English degree as well.
Oh
dear.
There's a very sad bit, apparently in his memoir where he talks about
the fact he didn't get into his first choice of Cambridge College.
Yeah.
It's, oh God, people he's been through suffering.
Adversity.
Yeah.
as, stories of working class defeat.
Go.
I think that's pretty shocking.
now we should come to someone else who, I'm not sure whether that
Donald Trump's got an English degree.
He's got such a fluid command of the language that I think he probably
has a few honorary ones anyway.
But Helen, you have been keeping up with, we're fresh from America.
Two 50.
Woo.
Yeah.
The cage fighting on the White House lawn.
And now, there's been another book out about Trump, which is exciting, and
yeah.
By two New York Times journalists, Maggie Haberman, who is known
as Trump's psychiatrist, that's her, he invites her in big job.
It goes like
gold couch.
Yeah.
Why didn't my father love me?
but essentially, I think, And, Jonathan Swan, who's an Aussie originally did
a very good, very fact-based interview with, Donald Trump a couple of years
ago that kind of made his name.
Anyway, the book's called Regime Change because their essential conceit
is that Trump is now running what they call an imperial presidency.
We've talked about this before about Caesar maxing, but their thesis is
essentially, it would've been better had Trump won again in 2020, had Biden not
defeated him, because in his first term he was disoriented, he wasn't ready.
He was restrained by various chiefs of staff, by the Republican party in Congress
not doing what he wanted by judges, by the concept of conflict of interest rules.
And then he had four years bruising in the wilderness, meditating on his grievances,
and he also attracted a cadre of loyalists Who would just say and do anything.
And so in the second Trump presidency has been an imperial one where he's just
smashed through absolutely everything.
the stuff that the boys, Eric and Don Jr and their Barron have
done in terms of mingling their business interests with the family.
Extraordinary through the crypto firm, world Liberty Financial through deals.
There's been a deal recently with a, I think either a Kazak or an Uzbek tungsten
mine, this like the me the fusing of the foreign policy and the Trump's family's
own financial industry is extraordinary.
Is it called World Liberty Financial?
Yeah.
It's it sounds like a made up name.
Doesn't it sounds like a made up name of an evil company in an eighties movie.
Yeah.
That's, yeah.
I, don't know why that would be appropriate, but, essentially the idea
would've been that, decided in the first term, he tried to obey conflict
of interest rules, and he feels he didn't get enough credit for that.
He was like, they were still mean about me anyway, I only did a little tiny bit
of corruption and I never got any credit.
so now I might as well go wild.
Is the idea that a second term following immediately on from
the first one would've, what?
It would've meant more chaos and more incompetence and more of him not
getting his way And now it will be over.
Yes, exactly
right.
Yeah.
But, what actually happened was that he returned to the SEC for
the second time round, a intent on revenge against everybody, and b,
having won the, not just the electoral college, but the popular vote.
Absolutely in command of the party.
So he's got a speaker in Mike Johnson who does whatever he wants.
he has primaried so many people in the Republican party.
There is no one left, really.
There is no Mitt Romney, the senator from Utah, who was very critical
of him, voted for his impeachment.
None of those people are around anymore.
None of the chiefs of staff that he had previously tried to restrain him.
He's now got Susie Wiles, the fluoride operative who sees
herself as enacting his views.
he doesn't have, Pete EF has been sacking people left, and centre in the, military.
So he doesn't have the generals holding him back.
He now has Dan Raisin Cain as his, as his top general, who seems, although
comes across in this book as being very sceptical of the Iran War.
Certainly hasn't,
stopped it happening.
Yeah.
Stopped it happening.
You actually might put it.
So it, it is a really fascinating portrait of what it means to hold the
power of the American presidency without really anyone to reign you in at all.
the Democrats obviously bloodied and defeated.
Basically the only people really holding anything back are the courts
and usually like individual justices
Who say, there's a bit where Stephen Miller, his immigrations are,
wants to re repeal Haas Corpus.
He wants to just deport people who, without giving them any kind of hearing,
and that gets held up by a judge and so they go to war against the judge.
that kind of stuff happens over and over again and, it just
shows you how fragile it is.
and then the other thing that comes out very strongly from it
is the way that Biden on his way out used the presidential pardon?
Power to preemptively pardon his son who'd been involved in a load of felony
convictions, actually, but accusations too, and various members of his family.
So Trump having seen that, it seems to be now the feeling.
let lads, let's all get absolutely involved.
And then there's a quote in it about, I'm gonna pardon everybody within
25 feet of the Oval Office on my last day, which is totally within
the President's power to do, just to
preemptively pardon?
Just say that you cannot prosecute anybody for anything that they
did during this term, period.
So a time period rather than doing it as part of their job.
Yeah, just any, you could say anything that you can't prosecute anyone for
anyone they did in this timeframe.
Right.
And he's already thanks to a Supreme Court decision, got very wide
presidential immunity powers for himself.
You can't retrospectively go back and say, we think that this deal was
dodgy and actually amounted to fraud.
presumably as president,
presumably being told that you're going to be pardoned.
Whatever you do is not automatically conducive to good behaviour.
Yes.
I
It doesn't have a chilling effect, I think is what you're saying.
Yeah.
Imagine if you said that to a sort of 7-year-old, right?
Anything you do this week on holiday, at the end of it, I'm
gonna completely forgive you bear, like paint all over the walls.
Just, it would be a bad plan.
you should
be describing modern parent together.
Yeah.
So true.
But Helen, how much of this student is changing the system permanently,
irreversibly, and how much have we just gotta get through and get rid
of him and, things will improve.
I, their thesis, which I tend to sign on, was that most people, including
people in Europe and the wider world, treated the first term as an aberration.
This was a, fluke.
America's just having a bit of a, rum, springer and dallying with having an
authoritarian, but no, the second term and the bigger win, they mean it, right?
and they talk about that meeting with Zelensky in the Oval Office as being
the moment that European leaders went, oh, it's, like nato as we
know it is over the idea of America interfering in, outside of its sphere,
of influence in the western hemisphere
interfering, contributing his expertise and wisdom.
Thank you very
much.
It doesn't work the other way around, does it?
So Trump announces that really, he does not want, ed Miller Anders Chancellor.
I know.
so the foreign policy comes our way.
Yeah.
It's just, we, no longer have any say at all.
The only thing about it that goes, gives me hope, and this is the
bleakest kind of hope imaginable, is the book ends with the, all the
decisions about the Iran strike.
And it makes, I think, probably due down to their sourcing abundantly
clear that no one really, maybe a bit.
Marco Rubio, secretary of State, no one really thinks
that's a crack of bang up idea.
JD Vance is very worried about it.
Tucker Carlson comes into intercede with him about it.
Susie Wildes doesn't seem thrilled.
General Dan Raisin, Cain doesn't seem, but no one can say anything anymore
and no Republican in Congress, which doesn't get asked to vote on it.
No.
They don't get a say.
the judiciary doesn't get a say.
There's no one left to reign him in.
And this kind of comes back all the way, full
circle.
You were saying, it was a hopeful point coming up at some point.
then the actually, the imperial ness of the presidency creates the Seeds of
its own unpopularity and destruction.
And which it comes back not to come back to T side are very similar.
I wasn't seeing any, giving any echoes at all.
But
the idea that if you're on, if you don't have this level of scrutiny Yeah.
What you don't get is any pushback on your bad ideas.
And therefore they get through and at some point maybe you do
meet the consequences of them.
You,
mentioned power, and the quote I liked was this quote that
Trump believes about himself.
That he has more power than Mao Stalin.
Roosevelt, Augustus, he said in, his original quote, this came from a
historian, but it wasn't historian.
Was it,
it was Gary Player, the golfers caddy who printed out a list of the fact
that Donald Trump was one of the top 10 historical figures along with Hitler
and Mao, and handed it over to him and he went, yeah, those are the big dogs.
And that's me.
I'm up there.
It's only the second best quote in the book.
The best one is, I wrote this down 'cause it moved me so much when Elon
Musk flanked out of the administration after being a special government employee
And did a since deleted tweet saying the reason they haven't released the Epstein
files is 'cause Donald Trump is in them.
Donald apparently sat in the get your hanky ready, sat in the Oval Office
with a dejected pensive look and said they always leave, they always do this.
This is why I can't have friends.
If you have tears to, shed
cry them now.
that's an example as well, they use as a direct quote, which they
say they only do if they've heard it from somebody who was there.
Right.
And this is one of the extraordinary things about this book is it has direct
quotes from discussions in the situation room, supposedly the most secure room.
You just don't have that level of insight from any previous administration.
And a lot of the book is the subplot is the race for who
gets the nomination next time.
And, that has been fascinating to me to see at what point does
Donald Trump graciously move on for the next generation?
Feels a touch out of character.
And so what he actually enjoys is once again, running it like the Apprentice.
And, there's a line when he says about all the gold decorations that
they've had in the White House.
someone says, will the next president keep them?
And he says, Cubans love Gold.
A reference to Marco Rubio's a Cuba background rather
than his alleged successor.
JD Vance, the vice president.
So he's really enjoying, so we can take a small moment of consolation
to the fact that he's torturing JD Vance and Marco Rubio by kind of
ultimately favouring each one of them.
I like your idea that, who could the source be in this situation room given
he moved the situation room to Mar Largo.
and the, there's a wonderful photo of a man peering round the black thing,
looking in, watching them, presumably discussing, the invasion of Iran or the
non invasion or the bombing of Iran.
And he looks like he was one of the waiters.
Yes.
In the next door room.
I presumably there are a lot of people who've leaked stuff.
they made a Yeah, you're right.
They made a makeshift, I think they call it a skiff in, which is
the secure communications thing.
But it doesn't, look all that it is in the corner of a ballroom.
It doesn't look all that secure.
they also had people dialling in on speaker phone.
And this is a government where many of the people involved
either were podcasters, want to be podcasters, have podcasted Yeah.
But didn't inhale, so there are a lot of people who are trying very much with one
eye on the, not even the memoirs, but the future podcasts in this administration.
And why is this book so big?
Why has it worked when lots of people have written Trump books?
I think because the level of detail and insight and reporting they've got
is so much greater than anyone else's, you just be, are being taken inside.
And no one in the administration seriously disputing anything that's been reported.
This isn't like a, let's be rude, a sort of Michael Wolf where he's written
down some like thirdhand things that Steve Bannon told him about stuff.
Ooh,
no.
But those books sold incredibly well.
Yeah.
But they were a little, shall we say, looser in the sourcing.
Okay.
Then these are two New York Times reporters who at the end of the
process had an on the record interview with Trump to, to kind put
all the allegations right to him.
But some of this, here's the other bit that got me.
He's got a, this woman, 34-year-old woman called Natalie Harp, whose job is to
print him things and bring them to him.
And she's once sent him a note that said, you are all that matters to me.
And Susie, the chief of Star finds it and is just like, are we in high school?
what fuck's happening?
What's just happening?
She's sitting there doing signing her name from Natalie Trump or
that kind of stuff he's doing.
When you 13, very fascinating business.
Did
Trump, dispute any of this when it was put to him?
Or do you think Yeah.
Sounds good to me.
I think 'cause it's all about how amazing he thinks it is.
The bit that he took from that is I do, I am amazing.
Yeah.
Rather than, this makes me seem like a, I am bigger
than Hitler.
Rather than, this makes me seem like a megalomaniac.
Yeah.
His generals abandoned him too.
Oh,
it's generating a lot of heat, isn't it?
It is.
Affect the midterms.
It's,
the thing that will affect the midterms is the fact that he can't
be reliably kept on the subject of affordability and the cost of living.
Though Iran more obviously just sucked up a lot of time and
attention and put up gas prices.
But more than that, he just seems to, the only thing he really
cares about now is building work.
It's really, he's become late era Kevin McLeod.
He's probably got very strong thoughts about when you don't use
a project manager, how that can actually really rack up costs.
Yeah.
He's obsessed with the, reflecting pool, which obviously they
repainted and it's all peeling off.
Yeah.
He's got guardsmen around it now, guarding the reflecting pool.
It's such a fantastic metaphor though.
I always feel you get to a point in your career where the metaphors take over.
Yeah.
And a stinky swamp in the middle of, democracy's home.
Yeah.
Seems to be difficult to escape from.
and we should say, there is a, an extremely good video of Priva eyes.
Own Donald Trump, Lewis McLeod doing a video live from the reflecting pool.
So if you wanna see that, go to Instagram.
he demolished the bipartisan commission that was supposed to be celebrating
the 250th anniversary, replaced it with this very partisan one.
Right.
And one of the things they've had been having is this sort
of earth sat world fair.
Which the, crowds do not look impressive so far, but they've
got a, you'll enjoy this.
They've got a mock up of the, RC to Trump, this planned triumphal arch that he wants.
And it's like the Stonehenge in spinal tap.
It's like they put the order in for the wrong size and there's
something that's just incredibly funny about a very small triumphal arch.
Like it's, yeah.
You can't get through,
just get stuck in the Trump arch
back like getting a dear.
Okay.
that's, it's ending on a funny note at least.
Yeah.
I'm not sure whether Trump's presidency will, but yes.
There we go.
That's it for this episode of page 94.
We'll be back again in a fortnight, but until then, thanks to
Ian, to Helen, and to Richard.
Thanks to you for watching or listening to this.
If you would like to get a copy of Private Eye, the latest
one is still on newsstands.
There is a very funny Andy Burnham joke on the front cover, and there
are many more very good jokes inside.
along with brilliant reporting of all varieties.
You can subscribe@privatehyphen.co.uk.
We'll be back in two weeks.
We'll see you then.
And thanks to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing.
Bye for now.