Adam MacQueen: Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the Eye Studio with Adam McQueen, Helen Lewis, and Ian Hislop. Later on, we're going to be having our own special page 94 tribute to Geoffrey Archer.

Andrew Hunter Murray: But before then, we thought it'd be worth taking a look back. Conference season has just finished, and we're looking forward, looking forward in a strictly time sense only. I'm sure we're all looking forward with grim anticipation to autumn in British politics and what's going to happen next.

Andrew Hunter Murray: There's going to be a budget. At some point, there's going to be a spending review. How are all the parties fixed as we head into this period?

Helen Lewis: Do you want the big thumb up, thumb downometer? Oh, yes. Just to give you a quick rundown. The quick version of it is Labour came out of conference season quite happy because they were like, oh, we've got a leader who can say things out loud in an incoherent way when people listen to them.

Helen Lewis: So they were pretty happy with that Andy Burnham speech and also happy with the fact that he managed to announce the scrapping of the Triple Lock, which had been considered this kind of sacrosanct relic. And actually, basically, no one cried and screamed.

Helen Lewis: You know, people opposed it, but that happened and that was fine. It didn't destroy his premiership instantly in the way that someone like Winter Fuel did, maybe, for Keir Starmer. So they came out quite happy. As you say, the storm cloud on the horizon is the budget where actual numbers will be involved, which will be bad.

Helen Lewis: And the other thing is to put a marker down is a slight sense of worry that Andy Burnham just will just say things. Obviously, great for journalists. I'm pro politicians saying things that are interesting. But that he does create an awful lot of news.

Helen Lewis: And therefore, they may end up slightly out of control of the agenda. Lib Dem's big thumb down. Everyone goes, we've got 71 MPs. Why does no one know that we exist? So they were pretty unhappy.

Ian Hislop: Can I just say there was a scoop in the last issue? In the joke pages, we thought there's nothing happening at the Lib Dem conference. So we said, coup at Lib Dem conference. A number of men with beards in the back row had coughed and said, do you think we should have another leader?

Ian Hislop: No, no. As it turned out, it was Mystic Eye yet again.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Well, I did see the headline, Charlie Maynard, has quit, which is obviously big news. I'm not going to explain to everyone who Charlie Maynard is, but he has been described as a senior Lib Dem MP.

Adam MacQueen: Oh, I love senior MPs. Senior favourite sort of MPs. Was he over 60?

Ian Hislop: I don't believe so. But an adjective you apply to people who you want to write a story about when you slightly suspect the story isn't very strong. Yes. And Translates is backbencher

Andrew Hunter Murray: you haven't heard of till now. The response from Tim Farron, former leader of the Lib Dems, of course, to think we're helped by this kind of rubbish, you'd need to be smoking the kind of stuff even we aren't in favour of legalising.

Andrew Hunter Murray: He's still got his talent for a soundbite, hasn't he, Tim?

Helen Lewis: He's having fun, isn't he? He's like Latter-day Ken Clark in his sort of yollo years where he's just like, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? So yeah, so sorry, thumbs up for Labour, thumbs down for Lib Dems.

Helen Lewis: Reform thumbs down, because as covered previously on this podcast, their entire conference was dominated by the story about the donations. So I don't think they really got off the ground. Another restive senior reform MP in the former Zaya Youssef, who I think is kind of plotting as well.

Helen Lewis: So that was not a particularly happy conference.

Andrew Hunter Murray: We should just say on reform, they've had a bit of brilliant news recently, which is that Dan Dukes and James Orr, they're two senior officers slash contractors we've never heard of and who haven't been sitting next to Nigel for years, depending on who you're reading, they've been cleared of all wrongdoing by reform's internal investigations.

Andrew Hunter Murray: So sounds like nothing

Ian Hislop: more to see here. I understand that the internal investigations to Barmed on reform are nearly as good as their polling department. Independent, unbiased, and trustworthy. Yeah.

Adam MacQueen: And Nigel said he's now going to aggressively sue the media outlets who said bad things about them.

Ian Hislop: Now that's interesting.

Andrew Hunter Murray: He'd wait until the parliamentary standards.

Adam MacQueen: But he's got all this money. What else is he going to spend it on?

Andrew Hunter Murray: I think it's going to be an autumn of investigations for reform, and that's not funny at all. Because we've got the parliamentary investigation into Farage and the 5 million quid that he took from Christopher Harbourne. No questions asked, none need to be asked.

Andrew Hunter Murray: And also the police inquiry into James Orr and Dan Dukes, which is ongoing. I think one interesting element of the reform investigation is who conducted the internal investigation. I mean, Richard Tice was asked about it. He said, well, top independent lawyers are going to be, you know, going over this with a fine-tooth comb.

Adam MacQueen: But James Orr and Dan Jukes.

Ian Hislop: I mean, the phrase marking your own homework is much used by reform in other contexts.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Yeah. One of the people we know has been conducting it is a lawyer called Adam Richardson, who has not cropped up much in the news. The only thing I could find about him was from last year. You may remember a Welsh member of reform, Laura Ann Jones.

Andrew Hunter Murray: She was criticised and in fact banned from the Welsh Chamber for 14 days for using the phrase, no chinky spies for me in a discussion of TikTok, which got a bit of press at the time. A small Welsh outfit called Nation.com named the Recipient of one of those messages, it was a guy called Ed Sumner, who's involved in the party.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Adam Richardson was the lawyer who wrote to this very small English-language Welsh publication saying, We're going to be suing you if you don't take his name out, aggravated damages, all of their stuff. This is the guy who's been conducting the internal investigation into Aur and Jukes.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Sounds like a charmer. Even amongst lawyers. So, we should come on to the Conservatives.

Helen Lewis: The Conservatives did something very smart, which is that they made their own Birmingham embroidery, which was a version of the Bayer Tapestry. Did you see this? It's going to be quite upsetting to you because bits of it were quite funny.

Ian Hislop: Helen's about to be fired.

Helen Lewis: But they did something very funny, which was that they put a load of political journalists into the tapestry. So, like sort of fish wandering towards an angler's light, every single political correspondent featured in the tapestry, Julie went, Look at me, I'm in the tapestry.

Adam MacQueen: This is an old light entertainment trick. This is what they used to do with shiny floor shows on Saturday nights. Was at some point you'd have as guests, or your Knowles House party, or Halem Pace at BBC, or any of those, they would have TV critics on.

Adam MacQueen: You'd have Charlie Catchpole and Gary Bushland people on to star in it, which guaranteed that you got at least one week of good reviews out of.

Helen Lewis: I think of it like the children's nativity play, right? You have to, every child has to be something, even if they're fifth octopus, just because otherwise the parents won't turn up.

Andrew Hunter Murray: It was quite a weird conference season from my point of view, because there was a gag in the eye saying, you know, politics breaks out at party conference and people are actually discussing policy, as opposed to this endless discussion of leadership churn.

Andrew Hunter Murray: And you've had a bit of that with Ed Davey, and you've had a bit of that with other parties. We'll come on to the Greens, I'm sure. But at both Labour and Conservative conferences, there was actual policy being discussed and announced and chewed over.

Andrew Hunter Murray: And it was just quite refreshing, I think. But isn't that the moment where they think,

Ian Hislop: oh, well, we're stuck with this leader. Oh, what should we do? That used to be a question that came up. And the two formerly main parties, I don't know quite how you refer to them now, senior parties. They actually started arguing from their old positions, mainly economic positions about laissez-faire economics or state intervention.

Ian Hislop: And that was sort of surprisingly interesting.

Helen Lewis: But you've also got a situation in which all of those parties and reform have got leaders who outpoll the party. So Kermi Badenock is currently a positive for the Conservatives. I mean, that's the bar is low, that she's clearing a medium bar there.

Helen Lewis: But the same thing with Andy Bernard. Andy Bernard now has got a record of three by-elections, one. You know, he's won.

Adam MacQueen: That's incredibly unusual, isn't it? At the stage in a parliament with a party that's in power.

Helen Lewis: He's won essentially, you know, they kept the Hoban and St Pancras facing the Greens. He obviously took a seat that was very reform-facing. The Manchester mayor election didn't even get any coverage because that was, you know, that just Labour just held that one.

Helen Lewis: So that's the reason you're not getting any leadership chatter, which is deeply refreshing. However, the thing that I think worries me is the idea of Europe coming back for discussion, because that will give everybody a therapeutic chance just to wallow in some completely ridiculous ideas for 10 years' time.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Well, there is polling saying that 59% of people, give or take, would be up for rejoining, and 32% of people are opposed. So that's a fairly substantial difference. I don't think there's been any polling done on whether people would like to talk about Europe for years and years to come.

Andrew Hunter Murray: And I just think so many people will, despite all the advantages, will just say, oh, no, no, I don't want to go back there.

Ian Hislop: And there hasn't been a lot of polling amongst other European nations about how much would you like to screw them for when they come back and say it was a bit of an error. So I think there are a few hurdles that aren't even internal.

Helen Lewis: I have exactly the same reaction as you, Andy, which is I feel that we wasted three years in politics between 2016 and the vote and 2019 where no one could, because the out campaign hadn't told us what out actually meant.

Helen Lewis: And there were so many intractable problems in Britain that just did not get any attention. The opportunity cost was so high. But actually, even though I personally think being in the European Union was a good thing and closer ties would be a good thing, I just think there are probably we could just do a bit of domestic politics first for a while.

Helen Lewis: I've got no appetite for it. It's sad.

Andrew Hunter Murray: I feel we're in the position of a husband who's walked out on the marriage saying, I'm going to be with some hot 20-year-old from now on. It's going to be fantastic. Ten years later, he's clearly living in the car.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Hot 20-year-old did not materialise. I just wonder what's in it for Madame. I really do.

Helen Lewis: Which brings us very neatly to the Greens. Yes. Because I think they had a terrible conference season. So they really tried to sort of sabotage their own conference, really, because it happened just before the Hoban and St Pancras by-election.

Helen Lewis: They will tell you that Labour did this deliberately. They tried to screw up the Green Conference by basically saying, you know, when the prime time and you'd like to be out campaigning, instead, you'll have to decamp to Brighton.

Helen Lewis: But the whole thing ended up dominated by the fact that Zach Plansky turned up for his leader's speech and then went off again. And then they had this motion, Zionism is racism motion, which was way beyond anything that any of the MPs.

Helen Lewis: Any of the peers, any of the grandees of the party wanted. And actually had this ridiculous line in it about the fact that the they think the Green Party of England and Wales should decide the final outcome of the Middle East peace process, right?

Helen Lewis: It's not for Israel Israelis and Palestinians to decide that. It's actually for Zach Polanski's members to decide that. So that just completely torpeded everything from orbit. And they are now having this big and overdue discussion about whether or not it's feasible to have a party that's now hopefully more and more MPs, but still will have to just be so open to entrius and so open to single-issue campaigners hijacking them.

Helen Lewis: And you know, at the opposite end of that, you have the Tory party where basically the leader is supreme ultimate dictator. And that's not necessarily a great model either, but that the Greens have kind of too much democracy in the other way.

Ian Hislop: But it wasn't a very large number of people, was it? In terms of the democratic process, it was a couple of hundred who passed the motion. Yeah,

Helen Lewis: it was 2,000 people voted overall, including of the people who didn't vote, including Zach Polanski, making a kind of habit of not voting, in fact, in various important votes, we might say. But yeah, and I think some of them were probably people who would left Labour post-Corbyn, some of them were maybe people who hadn't got on with your party when that kind of collapsed.

Helen Lewis: So I think some of them were very recent Greens. And there is a feeling from some of the old guard that these are kind of Johnny Cum Lately's who are single-issue Gaza voters and actually they're not that well integrated with the wider aims of the party.

Helen Lewis: That's going to be something to worry about. Well, that's the model of

Adam MacQueen: entryism all the way through, isn't it? Even if you go back to sort of Labour in the 80s and you've got militant, it didn't matter there weren't many of them because they shouted louder than everyone else and they kept everyone else in meetings passing endless sort of complicated motions and when everyone else wanted to finish and go to the pub.

Adam MacQueen: But if you've got people who are going to make enough noise, then when the setup is so democratic as it is with the Green Party currently that anything that's voted for by the members becomes the policy, then you know things get through.

Adam MacQueen: Does it necessarily have to be the policy at the next election? Isn't that the get-out clause that they've got at it? It's now party policy, but it doesn't have to be in the manifesto.

Helen Lewis: Yeah, there's some kind of and they don't have to actively pursue any of these things. That's the way that the MPs were kind of framing it. We're just, you know, it's happened. Yes, it's party policy, but you know, oh, it's not very convincing.

Ian Hislop: It doesn't wash, does it?

Helen Lewis: No, and Zach Polanski got into a lot of trouble in his Today programming interview with Nick Robinson, where it was basically he, you know, it's just like, but you're supposed to be leader of this party and they clearly don't listen to you.

Helen Lewis: And that's a fundamental, you're out of tune with your grassroots if you think if you're saying this is the grassroots sentiment.

Ian Hislop: And he won't answer any of the questions. And these sort of populist parties usually become popular by saying, I'm not like other politicians, I will answer the question. So if someone says to him, well, do you want Israel to continue to exist?

Ian Hislop: It's worth answering. It's worth saying, do you believe that one country, not two states, will work? You in favour of that? If you don't get an answer to any of these questions, you just think, well, you're exactly like the last law.

Helen Lewis: I'm going to have a shout out as well to I watched a tiny bit of Ply Comrie conference because they are in government in Wales. The leader gave a speech that was half in Welsh and half in English, which gave me a bit of a moment.

Helen Lewis: No, when I switched on the telly, I was like, am I having a moment? Is this all okay? But it was Welsh. So that was that went very smoothly. And the SNP conference, as I was extremely boring because they are, you know, John Swinney's kind of got a pretty good grip on that party at the moment, I'd say.

Ian Hislop: Do you think they're over the camper van gate gate? Now I'm just picturing Nicola trying to manoeuvre a massive camper van through a narrow gate. Is that done with now?

Helen Lewis: John Swinney tried a triple lot line, which was essentially why should Scottish taxes pay for English care, which you know, I just felt was quite brutal, given that the Barnett formula redistributes quite a lot of English taxes to Scotland.

Helen Lewis: If you're going to play that game, I think you might actually regret that slightly, John Swinney. But they're locked in this holding pattern where the independence question is sort of hovering there, but they seem that the Scottish voters seem to be essentially okay with SNP PERMA government forever.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Can I make one more point about Kemi Badenock's speech at the Tory conference, which was that the main proposal, or certainly one of them, was about inheritance tax. And the idea is that this is an incredibly unfair tax.

Andrew Hunter Murray: And the Conservative proposal is that you should definitely be able to inherit the family home, right? Because at the moment, you can inherit, I think it's up to a million pounds worth of estate because if married couples can sort of transfer allowances to each other, this feels like another triple lock to me.

Andrew Hunter Murray: The point is not that everyone can just keep accumulating more and more homes, particularly I know only five percent of estates pay it at the moment, but the point is not, right, someone dies at the end of their life, you get to keep that house, and then you die with presumably two houses.

Andrew Hunter Murray: I mean

Ian Hislop: this is a mad idea. A lot of old-fashioned Tories pointed out you have to have one child, no siblings, who wants to live in the family home. Doesn't normally happen. The family home is sold, so it's just money passing on.

Ian Hislop: And the other Tory economists say, can we stop investing in property and start investing? In businesses. So the tax on death has not been traditionally a political party solution. Both parties, when short of money, have thought, well, at least the dead are dead.

Ian Hislop: I mean, they're not going to vote. So taxing the dead has been an idea that was usually quite acceptable. So it is quite odd. There are quite a lot of Tories who are not terribly in favour of this.

Andrew Hunter Murray: It just creates this massive incentive for people to buy as big and expensive a house as they can late in life, which is the opposite of what I thought we were meant to be trying to incentivize. It's just the whole thing.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Transport is really badly thought. People really hate inheritance tax.

Helen Lewis: They really do because they think this comes out of income that I've already paid tax on, and I want to be able to build up something for my children. And if you have any kind of Tory inclinations, i.e., you think that the state gets its sticky beak into too much stuff, then inheritance tax is kind of just exactly the thing that's going to get on your nerves, right?

Helen Lewis: This is your pot of gold, and then like the tax money is going to come and spend it on pronouns. And, you know,

Adam MacQueen: there is also a very pumps, probably. There's a very sort of heartfelt and actually very British thing. It's different in other countries about the ownership of the family house as well. It's what Mrs. Thatcher was very, very clever when she identified it with people being allowed to buy their own council houses as well.

Adam MacQueen: And I think it plays into that. That people are aware on a sort of intellectual level that they're probably not going to end up paying inheritance tax. It's only 5%, as you say. But the feeling of being able to pass something on to your kids and build something up, I think is it's more of a feeling than a practical thing.

Adam MacQueen: And I think the Tories are very clever in identifying that and kind of punching that break.

Andrew Hunter Murray: And people do. People do pass money on.

Adam MacQueen: As I say, I don't think it's an intellectual thing. I think it's a weird sort of gut feeling.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Lots of people pay for clever forms of advice and put things in trust and things like that. And anyone above a certain level has started doing that.

Ian Hislop: I think you're right about the idea. It's an emotional response because the great Thatcher right to buy, the stats afterwards suggested a lot of people bought quickly and then flogged the houses off

Adam MacQueen: again quickly, which is why we now have no public housing stock. Exactly.

Ian Hislop: So it doesn't entirely bear out what happened. It was an opportunity, but it wasn't an opportunity to create a cottage with roses around the door. It was an opportunity to make money quite quickly through buying council houses, which were cheap.

Ian Hislop: Fine if that's what you want to admit, but to incorporate them in a myth of generational generosity. You know, speaking of someone who benefits from all of these things,

Andrew Hunter Murray: I think it's a bit bogus. Geoffrey Archer is dead, and we're here to pay tribute. There have been tributes from Kemi Badenock, from Rupert Murdoch, from Her Majesty the Queen herself. And I think it's only fair that we should add our own.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Tory Grandee, formerly, could I say senior Tory, senior?

Adam MacQueen: Very senior.

Helen Lewis: London mayoral candidate, that's what did him in. That's when his downfall came when people started digging into it. Yeah, I mean,

Adam MacQueen: if you want to add a few things, habitual liar, fraudster, perjurer, jailbird, and deeply unpleasant human being by the council, an awful lot of people who met him.

Helen Lewis: But he served a lovely Shepherd's Pine Krug Champagne at his delightful vicarage in Granchester. And so Kemi Badenknox gave a tribute in her conference speech to him. And as you say, Camilla's speech said he was not without flaws.

Adam MacQueen: I

Helen Lewis: don't want to say you

Adam MacQueen: could there anything there but flaws.

Helen Lewis: I think the thing is he was really nice to people who mattered, right? That's the thing. But if you were somebody who was, you know, the catering assistant or whatever it might be.

Adam MacQueen: The accounts from sort of people who had to look after him, very junior publishing people on tour was journalists who interviewed him as well. I've spoken to one journalist who extraordinarily, he asked her to, when the line of questioning annoyed him, asked her to switch her tape recorder off and put his hands round her neck, which is quite not obviously actually strangling her or anything, but still sort of oversteps a mark quite a lot.

Helen Lewis: It was technically assault if he touched her. So, yeah.

Adam MacQueen: Can I just go into some details about the perjury? The details of it are absolutely extraordinary. Can you take us right back to the start? So this was a libel case in 1986 relating to stories in the News of the World and the Daily Star about Geoffrey Archer.

Adam MacQueen: Slightly peculiar. The News of the World didn't say sleeping with prostitute Monica Cotland. What they said was that he had paid her a large amount of money to leave the country without specifying the reason. The Daily Star did say he'd slept with Monica Cotland and he managed to get that libel case heard first, which he lost on because they had very little evidence that News of the World had a lot more evidence but ended up settling for a lot of money.

Adam MacQueen: It was half a million out of the Daily Star. Half a million, wow.

Helen Lewis: That was the one, wasn't it? That was the trial where the judge was unbelievably biased towards how attractive Mary Archer was and said, would he go and have cold, soulless, rubber-filled sex in a hotel room when he's got, you know, Mary Archer at home?

Helen Lewis: Was that his... How fragrant she is.

Adam MacQueen: Is she not radiant?

Helen Lewis: Is she not fragrant? Were not for this, would she not be... I mean, it was, I was reading it last week.

Adam MacQueen: The judge essentially just really, really fancied Archer's wife. Extraordinary. Extraordinary.

Ian Hislop: So, this all came. There's a particularly fine recording of Peter Cook pretending to be Justice Caulfield, in which he goes a little further than the rubberised sex. Well worth a listen

Andrew Hunter Murray: if you can find listeners to seek it out.

Adam MacQueen: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Hunter Murray: So, this all came after he'd been made deputy chair of the party. Yeah, that was 1985. 1986, this happens and he resigns. 1987 is the libel trial where he wins a huge amount of money and has his name cleared. That then means his ascent resumes, and he's, I think, put in the House of Lords by John Mayor, who also made a very crawly tribute, which I thought John Major would have been better than, but there we go.

Helen Lewis: John Major had an affair, and then someone said that he had an affair, and he got a libel payout for them because they hadn't correctly identified the right affair, and then later said that he had, just with someone else.

Ian Hislop: And John did the person he was having an affair with, Edwina Curry. Let's not forget that one either. And John Major had had a public platform about Back to Basics in terms of morality. So he wasn't in a position to criticise Jeffrey, was he?

Ian Hislop: I said, corrected. All right.

Helen Lewis: We got a lot of 90s knowledge with a very difficult time. Can I specify yourself?

Adam MacQueen: Jeffrey Archer won the case, though, against the Daily Star and the News of the World. What he did was bribe several witnesses, friends of his, to say that he had been having dinner with them and he'd spent the evening with them on the night in question when he was accused of sleeping with prostitute Monica Cotland.

Adam MacQueen: He failed to pay up in full with a lot of them. And one of those people, Ted Francis, took such offence that many years later, when he found out that Geoffrey Archer was running for mayor of London, he went back to the News of the World and said, Hey, guess what?

Adam MacQueen: But it wasn't even just that. There was, as I say, several friends who'd been bribed. One, Michael Stackpole, who was the man who bizarrely had been originally handed over the money on behalf of Geoffrey Archer to Monica Cotland at Victoria Station with sort of News of the World journalists and photographers stationed around the place, just staking it out to kind of get the recording of it.

Adam MacQueen: He was paid to leave the country, so he wouldn't be able to give evidence at the trial. But also, there was forged evidence. That's why I said fraudster at the beginning of this. There was an appointments diary, which was filled in with completely fake appointments for the specific week in 1987.

Adam MacQueen: Didn't even bother to fill out the rest of the appointments diary, but managed to argue in court that because it was his private diary, those bits should be sealed so no one could see that they were entirely blank except for the week in question, ladies, which had been faked.

Ian Hislop: Can I just have a shout out for the judge Potts? Because we remember Justice Caulfield for falling in love with Geoffrey's wife, but we don't remember the judge, whose name was Potts, who said this was one of the worst cases of perjury, A, that he had ever heard himself, and B, that he could find in the legal books.

Ian Hislop: This wasn't a minor, ooh, roguish, did Geoffrey forget where he is? This was a really shocking case of perverting the course of justice.

Adam MacQueen: Which also involved dragging a woman into court and accusing her of lying and effectively ruining her life. And that's the really tragic figure in all this. She'll also remember. She's no longer with us either. Monica Claughlin. Yeah, no, she died in a bizarre car crash in 2001, amazingly.

Adam MacQueen: I mean, it's one of those things that you say with Geoffrey Archer, the cliché, you could never make the story up, could you? But it was on the eve of his trial for perjury. He was completely unconnected to it.

Helen Lewis: I think we should remember Mark and Coughlin this because she was cross-examined for two days and all the basic point of the cross-examination was like, you're a lying little whore, why would anyone listen to you? And she gave an interview after it where she said, having not lived to see the outcome of it, right, saying that, you know, none of my years on the street made me feel as small and demeaned and belittled as that, right?

Helen Lewis: He walked back out of his life and she went back to being a single mum who had had to sell sex in order to support her child. And that's the thing that really annoyed me. It was a group of really powerful people saying, wasn't this powerful person lovely?

Helen Lewis: And just completely forgetting about all the little people who were destroyed along the way.

Adam MacQueen: And I just want to make one more point about Monica. It was not her that sold the story. It was another of her clients. It was a guy called Aziz Kurther who witnessed Archer coming out of the flat and identified him.

Adam MacQueen: So she was dragged into it. It was not, absolutely not a sort of kiss and tell kind of situation, that one.

Helen Lewis: But Michael Crick did a lot of legwork as well, didn't he? In that biography, and came with the fact that he said that he'd been to, he said he'd been to Wellington School, but it wasn't the same one.

Helen Lewis: He said he'd been to Oxford, but actually he'd got in on like a PE scholarship. So like almost I watched the clip inevitably in of you answering questions about it. And just every bit of the biography was a kind of a lie.

Helen Lewis: He did charity fundraising and then did the charities get any of the funds?

Ian Hislop: No. And there were expenses, fiddles. I mean, he was a con man, I mean, repeatedly. And at the end, a lot of people were conned. And the Times was incredibly generous to him and gave him a huge amount of space.

Ian Hislop: And HarperCollins and The Times are both owned by Rupert Murdoch. I mean, Rupert Murdoch, as Adam repeatedly pointed out, said what a great bloke he was. But when Geoffrey rang him up and said, Can you stop your newspapers running this stuff about me and the prostitute?

Ian Hislop: Rupert, nope, he just ran it anyway. So a lot of people knew perfectly well what Archer was up to, but everyone enjoyed this myth. And, you know, everyone said he was a great storyteller. The main story he told was a series of lies about himself.

Ian Hislop: When he came out of prison, you thought, well, you might resign as a member of the House of Lords. You might say, I've had a bit of a redemptive experience. No, you wrote three books about how great you were in prison.

Ian Hislop: And that was about it. And I think that is that has always been the eye's basic beef with him, from Paul Foote to Adam to lots of our slight obsession with Archer, is that he sought public office three times.

Ian Hislop: He was very keen to tell other people how they should live their lives. When there was the mildest scrutiny of his life, he went ballistic. In came the lawyers, in came the threats, in came to the going over the journalist's head, in came extraordinary rage that he'd been found out.

Ian Hislop: And when he was running to be deputy mayor, you know, what was his concern and empathy for the little people? The unemployed should get off their backsides and go and find a job, i.e., everyone should be me and work very hard.

Ian Hislop: And we wanted to say, you didn't work very hard. What you did was tell a lot of lies.

Andrew Hunter Murray: When anyone's in the news, we sort of often look and see when did they first appear in the eye, or even when were they covered in journalism? So Archer's kind of debut, this is in the very before he was an MP, and he became an MP, I think, still in his 20s, really young.

Andrew Hunter Murray: The Times got him for misusing expenses for posh restaurants, right? And he was confronted about it, about this story that was going to be in the paper, and burst into tears, asked for the story to be squashed, said, you know, hugely regret this, all of this stuff.

Andrew Hunter Murray: So lots of the details were removed before the story ended up in print. It did end up in print, but kind of defanged. I just think it's a really good example, I'm afraid, of if you've got someone, you have to print the story, you know, because the stories tell you where someone might be going.

Adam MacQueen: Oh, Private Eye did print the story. It printed not only the fact that he was fiddling his expenses at the United Nations Association, which was a charity he was working for as a fundraiser at the time. It also pointed out that he had forged the signature of one of his colleagues, Humphrey Barkley, in order to set up a company behind Humphrey Barkley's back, which was famously the occasion on which Humphrey Barkley said to Bullfoot, he found out that Archer was running for Parliament the following year, and he said, Parliament, he should be in a remand home, which seemed to be a really, really accurate and slightly prophetic early judgment.

Andrew Hunter Murray: There's also an Enid Blyton connection, interestingly, which is that Ted Francis Market. This is one of the books I've missed.

Helen Lewis: Did they both have dogs with slightly unfortunate names? That's the kind of thing I believe if you told me about Geoffrey Archer.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Ted Francis, the bribe, I guess we said. One of the bribees, yeah. One of the bribees, who Archer had promised to pay £20,000 to and ended up only paying £12,500 to, always pay your bribees. I think that's the message here.

Andrew Hunter Murray: That is the moral of the story, Andy. They had been discussing on the night that they were supposed to be having dinner together, adapting an Enid Blyton novel to which Francis had the rights.

Adam MacQueen: Wow.

Andrew Hunter Murray: It's a real shame that her name was also dragged through the mud here because Archer paid Francis this money supposedly to put into adapting the project, but it was not. It was a bribe. There you go.

Adam MacQueen: Can I just give you one more fact? Yes. I rediscovered today. I'd completely forgotten. Guess who was the character reference for Mohamed Fayyad, serial rapist and sex offender and crook, for his application for a British passport back in the 1990s?

Helen Lewis: Was it Geoffrey Archer? It was Geoffrey Archer.

Adam MacQueen: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Hunter Murray: It took a liar and fraudster to know what. Wow. Another thing we should say about Archer is that he is in no small way responsible for the gift of Nadeem Zahawi to British public life. That's true. Because they met through Archer did some work raising money for Kurdish charities, some of which got to the Kurds.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Some, some.

Adam MacQueen: Not the full 57 million that was on the check that he waved around, I think. No, nowhere near it. Rather less. Anyway,

Andrew Hunter Murray: Nadeem Zahawi was working with him, and Nadeem Zahawi wrote a tribute in the Telegraph, which I thought it might be worth quoting from, because I think it shows you, please. He was also a remarkable scout of political talent.

Andrew Hunter Murray: When he decided to run for mayor of London, he assembled a young team of conservatives around the dining table in his penthouse, names a load of other young conservatives, and himself. Looking back at that table, his eye for talent was extraordinary.

Adam MacQueen: Remind me why Nadeem Zahwi had to leave the cabinet. It slips my mind now, but it might have been that he owed 5 million to HMRC.

Ian Hislop: Hand fibbed about it. Yeah.

Adam MacQueen: So, as you say, very much an Archer Protestant. Absolutely.

Ian Hislop: The newspapers did not excel themselves. They did not. I know we have a tradition of not immediately dancing about on graves. And it is genuinely jaw-dropping. That the idea that rogue, colourful, and life force should become the adjectives that survive.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Is it to do with that thing of redemption and atonement? Because people do make mistakes, get sent down for them, come out and change. It's not impossible for that to happen. But I don't think this case

Helen Lewis: come now.

Andrew Hunter Murray: No, no, no, but just did Archer ever say, because I'm not aware of it, but did he say, look, I really screwed up here and

Ian Hislop: in most theologies, there is confession, contrition, repentance, forgiveness. That tends to be the pattern, not getting caught, being very quiet about it, and saying, well, we all make mistakes.

Adam MacQueen: Combined also with an insistence that it was great injustice and that he should never have gone down in the first place, and being absolutely furious with any journalist or anyone who ever brought up the subject of his prison time ever again.

Adam MacQueen: And as we said, trying to go over to their heads to the editors to get the story spiked.

Helen Lewis: But also because the novels were very successful. You can't cancel people when there is a demonstrable market for what they're producing, right? Because people have just gotten to make money out of them. And then there's this analysis in feminist theory about, particularly in case of domestic violence, about the fact it's always easier to side with the perpetrator than the victim.

Helen Lewis: Because if you decide to believe the perpetrator, you don't have to do anything. You can keep being friends with them. You can keep going to their lovely Shepherd's Pie parties. Everything. You don't have to make yourself unpopular. If you decide to believe the victim, then at that point, you're going to be awkward to everybody else and you're going to make everyone else feel slightly complicit.

Helen Lewis: So, of course, everybody sided with Geoffrey Archer, the continuingly best-selling novelist. And he got rewritten. I was just watching as a fine outing. The last night of his life, he did a live show with Giles Brandrift. Of course, he did.

Helen Lewis: In which he ends it by doing the puck's soliloquy from Midsummer Night's Dream. You know, if we spirits have offended, think but this and all be mended. And you just think, what is happening here? What am I watching?

Helen Lewis: Because, you know, why

Ian Hislop: are you invoking Shakespeare to say I'm innocent? Yeah. And if I offended a little, I should be forgiven because I'm Shakespeare. No,

Helen Lewis: I'm puckish. That's the thing. He managed to rewrite being a crook into it. Look at me. I'm so mischievous.

Ian Hislop: So naughty. But he wasn't naughty. He was crooked. Mischief was not what he was up to. It was deceit and theft.

Adam MacQueen: Richard III? Caliban, possibly.

Ian Hislop: Looking in a mirror, seeing himself. No, I've never did that. No, he didn't do that.

Andrew Hunter Murray: All right, now it's time for our final section of the show. And this is very exciting because I was about to say we've got a birthday. It's not quite a birthday, but we're here to celebrate 40 years of Ian Heslop's editorship.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Can you say it with more enthusiasm?

Adam MacQueen: Yeah.

Andrew Hunter Murray: I knew this was a terrible idea. Yeah. Well, buckle up because we've got questions. Personally, why are you still here? Yeah.

Ian Hislop: That is a very good question. It's to annoy you.

Helen Lewis: Can I ask one, which is, have you ever had a real job?

Ian Hislop: Do you mean...

Helen Lewis: Like as a teenager, did you catering?

Ian Hislop: I worked at the London Pride Buffet in Gatwick Airport. I cleared tables in the cafe there. Then I worked for Manpower, which was an agency that provided sort of casual work. And because I'd got A-level maths, I was a junior statistician.

Ian Hislop: And my greatest job was I worked in a battery factory in Croydon analysing spreadsheets of sales of batteries to Benilux.

Helen Lewis: I wish I'd asked.

Ian Hislop: And what made journalism seem more fun than that?

Helen Lewis: But was there a moment like 20 years in where you thought, I should probably have a crack at something else?

Ian Hislop: I wish the answer was yes. Yeah, no.

Helen Lewis: Have you been offered anything else?

Ian Hislop: No.

Helen Lewis: That's not true.

Ian Hislop: No, I have been offered various jobs. I've been offered jobs of, you know, editing national newspapers. But I know. Lebedev. Oh, okay.

Adam MacQueen: I told you about it. Don't tell me about this. That's true. So you could have been an independent editor.

Helen Lewis: You could have been on Celebrity Traitors and then left in the first week. That was going to be one of my questions.

Ian Hislop: Have you been asked to do celebrity tweets? I have, yeah. And I just thought, oh, I appear to be washing my hair for eight weeks. So I have been offered other jobs, but never anything that was nearly as fun.

Ian Hislop: And Pride Die, as all of you know, and I'm sure all people who watch Bogos know, you do see these people doing other things. It was always one of the great things. It was a fortnightly. So there was time to do other things without giving up the day job.

Helen Lewis: I think you once described to me when you were trying to get me to come and do stuff, was it's like, it's a bit like a sort of home for waifs and strays. No, because it's a fortnightly. So the idea is that everybody on the other day.

Helen Lewis: Guys are writing novels and kind of.

Adam MacQueen: Essentially, people who couldn't hold down a proper job, isn't it? It is like a calendar.

Helen Lewis: It's a lot of home for people with poor attention spans.

Andrew Hunter Murray: That's what I've always been looking for.

Helen Lewis: Works out very well for me.

Andrew Hunter Murray: You know, I've got a sort of counterfactual question. Because you've spoken a lot about how the magazine didn't go online. Yeah. And that was a decision that was taken in the early days just not to give the stuff away for free, format, whatever.

Andrew Hunter Murray: What do you think would have happened if you had done, let's say, late 90s, early noughties?

Ian Hislop: I've got an awful feeling like a lot of other magazines, it would have just disappeared or folded because there was that sense of people thinking we must do the next obvious thing, content online. And then as soon as you put it online, it sort of has to be free because there wasn't another model that worked and people didn't even have paywalls and they just said it'll be great.

Ian Hislop: You put it up there. And I just, I could never see it. The other thing is I actually love print. You know, I think cartoons look better in print. I think the experience of reading this and genuinely your eye flicking from one page to another and thinking, oh, that looks good.

Ian Hislop: I'm not interested in that bit, but I'm interested in that bit. None of that seems to me possible or as pleasurable online. So, I mean, I could pretend it was a great digital strategy or anti-digital strategy, but what it was essentially was thinking, I don't understand what bit we gain from this.

Ian Hislop: I mean, later, you know, now we have a podcast, which I understand the point of. You know, I've got Lewis McLeod being Trump once a week online with absurd numbers of people watching him. And that I get the point of.

Ian Hislop: You know, I can see those things. But I still think this is unique and extraordinary. So I wanted to preserve that.

Adam MacQueen: We joke a lot about the early days when it was really dominated by kind of libel cases and an awful lot of legal defeats and things. That must actually have been hugely stressful at the time. Did you have a lot of sleepless nights about it?

Ian Hislop: Have you got good at compartmentalizing things and just switching off from work? I've got better. I mean, thinking I'd bankrupt the magazine I'd been put in charge of was not great. And that did happen a few times. Did you really think that at the time?

Ian Hislop: With the Ripper case, £600,000 damages, £700,000 costs. That's sort of trading insolvently. That's technically not good. That was a problem. That was a bit of a problem. So those, I mean, that was all grim. I mean, yeah, I mean, there were times, you know, our time was genuinely worried, but it's easy to romanticise those times.

Ian Hislop: And I look back at some of the periods of when we were in court all the time. And I remember thinking at the time, oh, the magazine's fine. Looking, it's terrible. It's really thin. It's really sort of the energy's slightly gone.

Ian Hislop: And the sort of the concentration is elsewhere. You know, if you're in the middle of a massive trial that lasts six weeks and you think, oh, I'll run the transcripts of day 17. And you look at them and you're thinking, I'm amazed the readers put up with this.

Helen Lewis: But people liked it in the end, didn't they? Because, I mean, I'm sure it was hellish to live through, but the idea of the eye as being the kind of, you know, like the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes saying the Emperor doesn't have any clothes on, or like the idea that the fact that you were just, particularly when it was like the peak time when they were sort of like the sort of bastards roaming the savannah, like walking with dinosaurs, right?

Helen Lewis: These really big bullies, essentially, that were trying to bully the magazine out of existence. You know, we talk now a lot about the kind of substat creator economy and the fact that people want to pay to kind of keep a journalist that they like.

Helen Lewis: I think there's a big part of that in the eye, right? A big part of why people buy the eye is they like that there's a magazine that is sticking it to people who are otherwise not getting enough scrutiny.

Ian Hislop: Yeah, and they like the fact that you don't cave in. The Maxwell cases were all sort of right up until he actually went and we, the last piece accused him of stealing money from his pension fund. And I bet you we would have lost that one too.

Ian Hislop: But, you know, he did die. But all of those occasions and the big, you know, banana balls fund after the wife of the ripper, all of these things were basically the readers bailing us out. In that case, we did finally win when it transpired that she'd purgured herself.

Ian Hislop: There's a common theme. There was a chance of getting some money back. But so we gave the money we'd raised to the families of the victims, the ripper. So, I mean, even then, we could say to the readers, yeah, we were, yeah, I'm sorry, we just needed your money, but we've given it away to something else.

Ian Hislop: They just kept bailing us out. That was the best bit of it. You know, we tried to sell a lot of magazines so that you can pay. But up against those figures, someone like Maxwell, or, you know, it's certainly true of the oligarchs and the plutocrats now, they have more money than you.

Ian Hislop: They have much more expensive lawyers than you. They have more patience than you because they can spend money for longer. You need something else in order to print it to go up against them. I mean, it's why we keep going on about slaps orders and this, the little help you can get from government.

Ian Hislop: But the truth is, you are up against very large people with very large amounts of money. And at a certain point, they have to think you're madder than they are. That's the key. It's a great endorsement for the Richard Nixon

Helen Lewis: madman strategy of magazine editing.

Ian Hislop: I was reminded of the proprietor's wife, because in the old days, Peter Cook used to own the magazine, and I had forgotten this detail and someone pointed it out to me. She said she was going to sell the magazine when she inherited after Peter's death.

Ian Hislop: She said she was going to sell the magazine to Muhammad Al-Fayed. And I was interviewed by The Observer, and I said rather responsibly, Great, I'll burn the building down.

Helen Lewis: It wouldn't have been the perfect crime if you'd done that in the press for you. Even the Met might have been able to solve that.

Adam MacQueen: Interesting approach to someone who was effectively your boss at the time as well.

Andrew Hunter Murray: So another thing you've said is that MMR, the coverage of MMR, was a mistake in the journalism bit of the magazine. Do you have a regret in the gag pages? Was there rather too many because they want

Ian Hislop: every time, or is it? No, I mean, you know, stuff that's not funny enough. But no, that was very specific. I went on with a campaign which I should have stopped. I was advised not to do it anymore by Phil Hammond, who was MD at the time.

Ian Hislop: I was running a story, and as I say rather feebly, you know, the Lancet ran it as well. And there were a lot of very senior medical figures who thought there was something wrong with the triple jab. Not with the jab, not with vaccines.

Ian Hislop: Every single piece we ran said you should have these vaccines but have them simply. But I was wrong. Andrew Wakefield, the person who rhymed, was dishonest and he turned into an appalling seller of snake oil. I didn't spot that and I didn't stop running the pieces soon enough and it was straightforward Mayor Culper.

Helen Lewis: I was reading your 50 years book about the Mohammed cartoons and which was which was a whole subject about whether or not would Private Eye print them? Which when I was at the New States when we had exactly the same thing like there was a demand to print them and print them and had the same conversation I think you guys must have had which was but then there's a quote from you in the book which is like only one of them is any good.

Helen Lewis: Yeah, that's good. They were just not quite it so there was there were two very separate things going on but that's the biggest cartoon controversy that I can remember.

Ian Hislop: Yes and I in the end I think I commissioned our cartoonists to give their view of it rather than just reprint what Danish cartoonists had put in which had become the source of the controversy.

Helen Lewis: Can I ask you a happy question which is if you could have one day of your editorship all over again to live through again which one would you pick? What was the best day?

Ian Hislop: I think winning in the court of appeal.

Helen Lewis: Is that going to be the ripper?

Ian Hislop: No. And that's Napier, isn't it? Yeah. I mean that was a fantastic day. The head of the law society had got private eye essentially censored because he'd been found guilty by his own professional standards body and he decided that this should not be published.

Adam MacQueen: On the grounds that it was an

Ian Hislop: invasion of his privacy. Indeed.

Adam MacQueen: It's an interesting approach.

Ian Hislop: He was found that there'd been a conflict of interest and he'd been wrapped on the knuckles by his own professional body. But he decided as head of the law society this was totally unacceptable. And so we'd had one court case against him, which you'll be surprised to hear we lost.

Ian Hislop: And we thought it is just worth an appeal. I think it took nearly a year. It took about a quarter of a million pounds to challenge this. We didn't really recover the costs, but we did win. And what might have been one tiny paragraph ended up being, as you say, four page in the mag.

Ian Hislop: So it really worked out for Michael Napier. It was a good day. I mean, there were days when we lost the Anglesey case against this man, Gordon Anglesey, who we suggested had been a paedophile when he was working.

Ian Hislop: And we lost that case, and it was miserable and an appalling case and ghastly for everyone. And then eventually he was arrested in Wales for exactly this. And evicted. And convicted. So there were days when things came good.

Helen Lewis: This sounds very much like your journalistic motto is the same as my journalistic motto, which is if you wait by the bend in the river long. Enough, the bodies of your enemies will float past you.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Right, that's it for this episode of Page 94. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get your hands on more Private Eye, there is Private Eye available. Look here, you can get it on newsstands. You can get subscriptions if you go to private-eye.co.uk.

Andrew Hunter Murray: We'll be back in a fortnight with another one of these. But until then, it's thank you to Adam, Helen, and Ian. Thank you to Matt Hill of Rethink Audio for producing. And thank you to you for listening or watching.

Andrew Hunter Murray: Bye for now.