Has Kemi decided Reform are a bunch of racists? | The News Agents

I do think somebody has had a very firm word in her ear over the last 12 months. I was really struck by those passages where she went after Farage and Reform. The Conservative Party, despite Reform's best efforts, doesn't appear to be going anywhere, but it is too weak to win, too strong to die. If say, Conservatives and Reform were on roughly 150 seats apiece and they were within spitting distance of assembling a parliamentary majority, of course they're going to do a deal. And I think what she's really doing here is almost just pushing Reform, Restore, out in the corridor as the freaks. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK. Opening up a world of opportunity. This is a global production. In 2024, voters gave their verdict on the rows, the plots and the infighting. Remember all that drama? That's gone. The Conservatives have had an export boom. We have had an export boom of drama queens going to Reform. If there's one image that was in Kemi Badenoch's head as she delivered that speech to conference, it was probably the face of Robert Jenrick, who dominated her conference this time last year and then pretty much flounced off to join Reform. Some of her sharpest attacks were aimed at Reform throughout this speech. It comes as Reform has exonerated the two people filmed in that undercover report. Surprise, surprise. Is Kemi hitting the target? Welcome to The News Agents. The News Agents. It's John. It's Maitlis. It's Lewis. And Kemi Badenoch has given her keynote speech to end the Tory party conference and send everyone away with a slightly gladder heart and a quicker step than when they arrived. And it was a good speech in parts. I mean, some of it was pretty badly written. We are not a party of the past. And you know that the next line is we are a party of the future. And there were clunky bits like that. But she took her argument to Labour. She set out some traditional Tory kind of battleground areas about on the economy, on defence, on welfare reform and all those things and said, look, we are very, very different from Andy Burnham. But I was really struck by those passages where she went after Farage and Reform. I do think somebody has had a very firm word in her ear over the last 12 months. I mean, she sort of started to set the scene this time last year when she made the big announcement on ending stamp duty if they got into power. And I think that firm word in her ear said this. You have to talk about the economy. You have to concentrate on the cost of living. You have to sound like a normal, moderate person, not somebody who is batshit crazy on culture wars, because reform are doing all that. They can do all that. And it's not actually going very well for them right now. And she gave this quite important, I think, interview a couple of days ago at the BBC where she clarified that she would never, she says, go into power with reform if they were the two largest parties in any sort of hung parliament. And I think the reason she did that is because she has now worked out that, yes, she wants the voters back, but the leadership of reform is not where the bulk of the Conservative Party want to be. And somebody close to her said, cut them free, let them go, call them whatever you want, call them drama queens, call them racists, quite frankly, as she does pretty much. And I think that that is a really refreshing new place for the Conservatives to be with clear blue water to both their left and now to their right. I think this is, I think the significant thing about the speech, as you say, Emily, I think there is that Badenock is clearly evolving her strategy with regards to reform. There have been lots of voices, not least some very senior ones in the Conservative press, who have been talking about this unite the right idea, that the Conservative Party is, and we didn't know this last year, in fairness, the Conservative Party, despite reform's best efforts, doesn't appear to be going anywhere. But it is too weak to win, too strong to die. And the same thing goes at the moment is true of reform. And so there is obviously an electoral logic to the two at some point coming together. I think the significant thing about this speech is that this is basically the toughest we have seen her be on reform and on Farage so far. And it's not just being tough on them personally, taking the piss out of them, which is easy to do, albeit she did do a fair bit of that. She was directly taking on some of their most eccentric and many people would say most extreme arguments, not just articulated by Farage in many cases here, because Farage, as we've discussed many times on the show before, kind of knows usually kind of where the line is, shuffles ever so gingerly up to it and stops there. But had did take on directly some of the, let's be frank, you know, appalling ethno-nationalist type of politics that we have seen from senior reform figures, especially on this question about what it means to be English and the idea that basically, unless for some reason you can trace your lineage all the way back to the bio-tapestry, that you can't possibly claim truly, legitimately to be English. And she made that personal, not as personal as Burnham's speech was last week, but there was a flash of the personal here because, of course, she was talking about her own children who are mixed race. I don't want to live in a country run by people who threaten journalists, who call veterans traitors and debate whether my mixed race children are English. I don't want to explain to my son when we're watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don't think our black players are English. I remember back in the day when Ian Wright and John Barnes were playing, nobody was questioning whether they were English. We certainly didn't have sitting MPs questioning whether they were English. We must not let these people take us backwards. That is not the country we are. Reform MPs are openly questioning people's identity. They are not like us. We are not like them. We are different. We are the Conservative Party. And that got a big cheer. Now, you can quibble and say, well, hang on, when John Barnes was playing for England, I mean, there were times when he had bananas thrown at him. So it was the golden age of English. So let's not let's not pretend this was some kind of misty-eyed glorious moment in our history. I mean, the 80s were famously racist times, by the way. We had a lot of skinheads and neo-nationalists. Exactly. But we didn't have, in any sense, the mainstream debating whether you are English or not. This is a new area that people have taken up. And you think, really, people who should know better. And kind of, why are you doing this? Why are people leaning into this? And she was similarly strident about anti-Semitism and the need for that to be stamped out. And I also thought that her attacks on the individual characters of reform and the leadership of reform were well targeted, too, about, you know, Nigel Farage and his five million quid and Richard Tice and his company being investigated and Jen Rick and the money he got when he was running his leadership campaign. Admittedly, then a Conservative MP, you know, a Conservative MP. I thought all of that was well targeted. And, you know, and she did say, look, we have let... It's time for kind of reform voters to come home. We've let you down over immigration, over kind of economic growth, over the things that happened when the Tories were in power for so long. So it wasn't just anti... It was anti-reform, but it was kind of sympathetic to reform voters and wanting to give them a place to come back to. Yeah, I mean, some of the ethno-nationalist conversation has happened, obviously, with former Conservatives like... Yeah, Suella. Well, Suella, I mean, you know, Nadim Zahawi, Iraqi-born Nadim Zahawi, all talking about whether you can be English if you're not white, right? He was sort of on the radio earlier this week, sort of having that discussion. I mean, I think it sort of puts paid to the end of that relationship, presumably, with Rupert Lowe, who has been the flag bearer, let's say, for the ethno-nationalist argument in this country in the past years. And there was some sense that those two were quite sort of close, Lowe and Badenock, I mean. And I just think that what she is doing here is, even though the polls do not tell a story of their success, you know, that the polls pretty much place the Conservatives where they were after the 2024 election or even lower. And even though we often talk about Kemi Badenock being better than her party, actually, the polls don't tell a great story of her. But I think a lot of this is, you know, what they call sort of manifesting. I think she is trying to place the Conservative Party where they seem like the de facto opposition again. I think that's what this speech was mainly about. Yes, we get where Burnham is. We want to have a good old-fashioned chat about welfare versus cuts. We want to have a good old-fashioned chat about whether you keep your tax money or the government spends your tax money. We want to have a good old-fashioned chat about left versus right. And there is something, you know, sort of, it's kind of Disco 2000. It's going right back to those days where we sort of knew the difference between the Conservatives and Labour. And I think what she's really doing here is almost just pushing reform, restore out in the corridor as the freaks and saying, right, this is the battle now. It's between Burnham and me. Treat me, treat us as the legitimate party of opposition now, even if the polls don't necessarily tell that story. I think there's no doubt at all that because of Andy Burnham's accession to the Labour leadership and the sort of speech that he gave last week, which in many ways, as we discussed at the time, was both the first sort of post Thatcher, post Blair, Labour prime minister speech, a return to a kind of more muscular kind of social democracy. There's no doubt that there is real space between left and right. And there is lots of space to have a right of centre, Conservative critique of a more left-wing Labour government and their economic policy than we've had in some time. And I think that is helpful to her because it gives her space to exist and set out her stall. One weird thing about these last two weeks of conference speeches is that both sides have sort of accused the other of kind of living in the past. I mean, in a sense, it's true that both are living in the past. I mean, what we're basically now having is a kind of relitigation of the 1970s and the 1980s, right? You've got the Conservative Party, which, you know, in my view, actually has never truly come to terms with or analyse the defaults of Thatcherism and what happened in the 80s, right? So, you know, Badenoch is basically what she's offering. If I was, like, concerned about, you know, sort of, if I were around her and sort of thinking about the perspectives that I was offering, I think her big problem is that she is basically offering a re... If Andy Burnham is offering a kind of reheated Jim Callaghan-esque, Harold Wilson-type Labourism... He'd say it's Clement Attlee, wouldn't he? Well, he would, but yeah, sure, sure. Then what Badenoch is basically offering is a reheated Thatcherism. She's offering tax cuts. She's offering to reverse any nationalisation that takes place, to privatise, whatever. She's offering... She believes that those old remedies of cutting tax, of that sort of more competitive economy, is going to work in the 2020s as it did in the 1980s. And I think that, actually, in many ways, the Conservatives' biggest problem is that... Forget the 80s, with which they're still obsessed. They've barely, it seems to me, done any thinking about the 2010 to 2024 period, when they were in office. The defaults and demerits and problems of that period, which led to their ejection from office. And you heard in that speech again there what the analysis always is. It basically is either we were too riven and too much infighting, but that's fine now because Suella's gone and Generic's gone, or we weren't sufficiently Conservative. No, it might be that some of your ideas, those Conservative ideas, did not work. If we think about, for example, so many of the problems the government is facing now, we know what so much of it comes back to. It came out to the hollowing out of the public sector from the austerity years. And I heard nothing whatsoever in Badenoch's speech, which makes me think that she is developing any more sophisticated political economy than what David Cameron and George Osborne had, which itself was a reheated Thatcherism. She did say that line, we've made mistakes, I've seen the mistakes we've made. And she didn't expand on what that was. Was it mistakes that Boris Johnson made from handing out too much money of the public purse? Was it the mistakes that Cameron and Osborne made of austerity? Whose mistakes did she talk about? Further to that, I mean, you heard her say, we mustn't reopen the arguments about Brexit. And you said, why not? I mean, well, why? Because if Britain's economy is doing so much worse than before, it was like an assertion. We can't go back to that debate. Well, fine, I understand the kind of reasons why you might not want to. But it is a legitimate question to say, hang on, Brexit wasn't the great cure-all for the British economy that you and many of your supporters argued at the time. I thought listening to that speech that, you know, she was making an appeal to reform disaffected Tories who've gone to reform. I could see many more who had been disaffected and gone to the Liberal Democrats in the home counties, in the London suburbs, being attracted to that speech with the policies on inheritance tax. And, you know, kind of you can leave your entire house without it being taxed to your children or whatever and leave an extra million quid to them. I can see that playing well in commuter belt London. I don't see why that plays that well in the Red Wall, where probably there aren't that many people who would be affected by inheritance tax. If you were really trying to woo the Lib Dems, you would not be shutting the door on the EU. I mean, isn't that the point? And this is why I said slightly that it's manifesting. It's almost like this speech belongs in a sort of speech bubble at a conference, untethered to the rest of the reality. So she's talked about, you know, cutting inheritance tax, allowing you, you know, I mean, maybe we can listen to this clip, talked about no inheritance tax on your family home. Just have a listen. Let's go back to first principles. What is the thing that most people want to pass on to their children and grandchildren? It is their family home. Conference, the Conservatives are and always have been the party of home ownership. We understand why putting roots down and having a stake in society matters. Our homes are where we watch our children take their first steps. They are where we gather every Christmas to put up the same decorations, passing on your home to your family is one of the most human instincts of all. So conference, the next Conservative government will legislate so nobody will ever pay inheritance tax on their family home. So that was, if you like, the most pre-trailed of all her announcements. And it was one clearly that the conference itself loved. And in a way, this is her time. We're probably at least a year, probably three years out from an election. She can make big promises. But why I say it's untethered to reality is because there is nothing really offsetting that except for this welfare bill that they keep coming back to, which they think will be the panacea for absolutely everything they announce. So she can talk about cutting stamp duty. She can talk about cutting inheritance tax. And it's all going to be paid for by us growing the **** up about the welfare bill. But actually, if she really wanted to win the Lib Dems back, the commuter belt Lib Dems, the sorry voters, whatever, then actually she's mad to say that they would reverse any openings that we get now with the EU, which is what Alex Burkhardt, her deputy, has basically said. We'll just reverse anything that goes on because what you're essentially doing is saying come towards us, but not quite enough, right? Why would Lib Dem voters go to the Conservatives if actually Burnham's saying we can have even more growth if we actually manage to get this overturned? But I think one of her problems is that the Conservative Party, and she in particular, is being allowed to live completely trouble-free in its comfort zone. And by that I mean that Kemi Badenoch, and there are things I sort of quite admire about her, and I like the fact that she engages conceptually with politics and philosophically with politics, and she's a good speaker, et cetera. But I tell you what, I think there is no political figure in Britain that gets a better press than her right now. The Tory press, you talk about manifesting, Emily, the Tory press are manifesting a Tory recovery. They're desperate for it to happen. And in so doing, what it means is that the easy ride she gets, the relative lack of scrutiny that she gets because she basically tells them everything that they want to hear at all times, because they're so desperate for a kind of Neo Thatcher kind of figure, it means that, frankly, she doesn't get some of the political heat that she probably ought to get for how lamentably bad the Conservatives' political position is. I mean, you know, looking at some of the coverage from Birmingham this week, I mean, you'd think that they were one year away from an election, 20 points in the polls. The level of triumphalism that there's been is extraordinary for a party which is not just doing as badly as it was in terms of the polls in the 2024 election, which was six to seven points less good than their worst general election performance in two centuries before that in the entire history of the Conservative Party. They're actually doing substantially worse at a time when the Labour Party is recovering in the polls. So, and people say, well, she's popular. She's not that popular. She's still in negative territory. She's still in minus 15 or so. And look, being leader of the opposition is really, really tough. It's especially tough. After your party has just been ejected from office, a government in which she herself served. So you could sort of say, well, would anybody be doing better? And so small are their ranks in parliament now. They only have 120 MPs. The talent pool is extremely low. But I think that in a way, you know, if this were a Labour Party leader in opposition, oh my God, just think of the daily opprobrium and hell that they would be getting from the Labour Party because the coverage would be so bad on them for not doing better. And I think actually she's slightly suffering from the lack of heat that perhaps she ought to be feeling. Yeah, I think there are really interesting points about some of the policies where she says, you know, we are back with Thatcherism. If you look at public attitudes towards the water industry or Avanti, are people saying, God, this is fantastic, the privatisation that has taken place? Well, that got the loudest clap at Burnham's speech, of course, right? Exactly. The take back controls. So why is she kind of saying, we are, you know, we will kind of reprivatise anything that they nationalise? I think that, you know, there are an awful lot of areas where you think, actually, has that been a net gain? Aren't there some things that maybe it's better that the state are doing? And you look at the fortunes that the kind of, you know, the investors in the water industry have made and the money they have taken out from a service that you've got no option whether to have or not. And you think, this is grotesque, this is capitalism, whereas there are, you know, the big shareholders are always going to be the winners and people do lose out. And I think Andy Burnham hit a target there when his speech last week and she's not, she's saying, right, no, that's all wrong. And I think they're kind of, if you're in opposition, don't you think maybe they're, I mean, you know, Blair in opposition thought, you know what, the trade union legislation and the wildcat strikes and the secondary picketing were really unpopular in the country. We're going to keep those reforms. That's what you do in opposition. I think, I mean, you're looking at the detail, which is absolutely spot on, but actually I think what she's doing, she's told us, is laying out an ideological battle. And the person that I think she wants to sound like, weirdly, is not Thatcher but Reagan. And I think what she's basically taking to that conference and she hopes to people outside it is this idea of, do you want to be trusted with your own money? I mean, that was the most sort of Reaganite of all the things. Do you want the government to just back off a bit? Do you want the government to let you decide? Do you want the government to sort of control every bit of your spending and every bit of your taxation? Or can you be trusted to spend your own money? And I think as a sort of gesture of ideological goodwill, that goes quite far. If you ask people individually, do you like what the water companies are doing? Of course they don't. You know, do you like kind of the sewage in the sea? Of course they don't. But if you said broadly to people, do you think you should be trusted with your own money instead of the government? I think she wins around a lot of people who feel there's just been too much interference, too much kind of, you know, they're on my back the whole time. Those are the people she's going for now. I understand that. And there are always going to be people for whom that will be appealing. I suppose it slightly depends on what you think the tenor of the politics of our age is. There's no doubt that when Reagan was making those arguments and Thatcher was making those arguments in the 80s, there's no doubt the state, which had been seen to basically fail and overseen a failed, collapsed economic and political settlement. It was firmly the enemy and firmly the sort of the villain that you could sort of paint a political picture about. I think in the 2020s, I'm just not sure that's true. I'm not sure that's true. I think that people, it depends whether you think what people are yearning for, as they perhaps were to some extent in the 80s, was freedom and whether that's yearning now. I think what Alibaba would be. I think that's the point. In the 80s, they, you know, the end of Glass-Steagall, they sort of liberated all the markets. They managed to make people feel that there were other ways of earning money and bringing growth in the city. We don't know what those are. And also, I think what people seem to be yearning for now is control and security. And, you know, even if you could try and perfect another sort of low tax Thatcher, I mean, this is the other thing that I sort of think is like slightly disengaged from reality about it. But I think this is just more politics and actually thinking about government anyway. You know, it isn't the 1980s. The 1980s, you know, we've got a nearly 100% debt to GDP ratio. We've got a much older society. We've got an economy which is enfeebled. We've got a state which is weak. You know, if you're starting to go on to kind of, they constantly talk about the markets have us in our crosshairs. What's she going to do? I mean, if you look at some of the things she's committed to, no more stamp duty, ending the child care cutoff at £100,000, basically destroying inheritance tax, lower tax overall, an iron dome at £10 billion a year, defence the three and a half. You know, these are huge fiscal commitments. At a time when you're saying we're going to cut the tax overall, at a time, as I say, when for so many reasons, because of our, the state of our politics and our economy, that becomes much harder. Look, I think so much of this really, in a sense, is about actually the Conservatives' relative weakness in what I think Badenock is really playing for here. And you've sort of alluded to it, John. I'm not sure, you know, this prospectus, I'm not sure, is majority Conservative government prospectus. What it is, is getting back up to 200, 250 seats. You win back the home counties. You win back the South. The sort of Red Wall strategy, there was absolutely nothing for the sort of Boris Johnson 2019 coalition in this. This is, I think, about the party's survival to its core votes and basic voters. And you know what? That's probably not a bad strategy. Figuring out how bad they're in, the situation they're in. And I was speaking to a former Tory strategist who worked very closely with the Conservatives last night. And he was saying that he listened to Andy Burnham's speech and what he heard was a coalition negotiation with the Liberal Democrats. That what Andy Burnham was saying last night, we'll give you PR. We'll reopen Europe. You know, it's a social care system. It was the Labour party knowing that it can't win a majority at the next election. An already opening negotiation talks with the Lib Dems. And that was how to characterise the Andy Burnham speech that he delivered last week. Also, you know, she's obviously gone for reform now, but we've got to take all of these things with a big pinch of salt, right? In a situation where, say, Andy Burnham holds an election next year, and let's say it goes really wrong for Burnham, which obviously could, which is probably one of the reasons he might not do it. Then, you know, if, say, Conservatives were on reform, were on roughly 150 seats apiece and they were within spitting distance of assembling a parliamentary majority, of course they're going to do a deal. Of course they're going to do a deal. There's no question. Like, that is just the logic of our system. The alternative would be to allow left wing government to take office. I mean, obviously it would all depend on the parliamentary arithmetic. She wants to try and destroy them before we get to that point. That's why it is in her interest to have an election later rather than sooner. But if it were to come and there were a deal to be done, I just find it incredible. I don't know if I agree with that. I think the party that lets in the populists is forever known as the party that lets in the populists, particularly the populists that have been shown to be ethno-nationalists, I mean, frankly, fraudsters. She's gone through the litany of what happened to the reform leaders in Wales and she's laid out their future for them behind bars. So I'm not sure how that gets her to a place in the nation's heart, quite frankly. I know what you mean, you know, you think pragmatics is always politics. But in Europe, when this has happened, I think it probably depends on the Conservatives still being the biggest party. I'm not sure that the Conservatives would be able to go in. I think what she's doing is actually just cementing her own position, frankly, as the leader that they all want. I think she feels... The party loves her. Yeah, that's what I mean. But the problem is there is still a problem with the brand of the Conservative party. And with her. But if you remember last time, this year, it was like a split screen between who was watching Jenrick, who was watching Kemi Bainock. There's no question she's in a far more powerful position. And she is in a position. I think that's really what this was. I think it was a consolidating speech of like, you know, trust in me, I will deliver for you, whether she will or not. I'm I'm your I'm your gal now. And I think I think that's what this has done for her. At some point, at some point, I mean, like, you know, after by-elections and like local elections, I do these shows on LBC and you get people in the Conservatives. You know, every single local election now, national elections, they have gone so far backwards, right, in two years. OK, just two years in, but in two years. Not in Aberdeen South, obviously. OK, but Aberdeen is such a specific set of circumstances about net zero, right? I think it's sui generis. We take the overall picture and at some point. But then they say, and we're recovering, right? But that doesn't make sense. At some point, you can't just claim that you're coming. You have to show electoral recovery. At some point, they have to start winning somewhere. And so far in this parliament, they've been going backwards and backwards and backwards and backwards. And this is what I kind of mean about the press. I think that there is this press treatment of the moment is just living in another reality. If we look at the objective results in elections of this parliament so far, the truth is, is the Conservative Party is now largely a regional centre right party in the southeast of England with a few signs of recovery in certain wealthy parts of London and elsewhere. In many parts of the country, even though reform has not been doing as well as they did, they have completely wiped the Conservatives out. And that also, if you look in terms of what happened in Wales and in Scotland as well, it's the same picture. At some point in this parliament, Kemi Badenoch has to start winning, not just getting good column inches. I'd like to read you the opening paragraph from some copy from the Daily Telegraph, which dropped about an hour or so ago into the investigation that Reform UK did. It says, Reform UK did not break any laws when senior party figures were recorded by undercover journalists discussing a £500,000 gift from a foreign donor, comma, an internal investigation has concluded. One of the reasons I did so badly at school when I was a child was that I didn't get to mark my own homework in the way that it appears that the Reform party has managed to mark its own homework. And we all saw that video. We all saw the Channel 4 report and you thought, really? Oh, that's good. So nothing wrong happened there. Excellent. Let's move on. Yes. Headline from The Guardian here. Reform clears its own officials. Laura, I say this is a 27 page report. This refers, listeners and viewers will remember to two of Nigel Farage's closest aides, Dan Jukes, who's been his right hand man for the best part of 10 to 15 years, and James Orr, who had been its head of policy. And party sources indeed saying that far from these two people being found guilty of any wrongdoing, the party itself intends to pursue legal action against the undercover reporting group Verbatim, whose footage led to the investigation that was broadcast by Channel 4 News. I think this is, this speaks, I think this is inevitable. It's an internal investigation. Do you think it was inevitable? I thought they might just be hung out to dry in a way of saying, oh, look, we've dealt with it. There was a rotten apple and we've purged the rotten apple from, you know, the basket. I think it was inevitable because of how close, in particular, Dan Jukes is to Nigel Farage. I think he would be less bothered about James Orr, but I think that anybody who spent any time with Farage, I mean, they are inseparable. I mean, most listeners, viewers won't know Dan Jukes, but he's basically almost man and boy work for Farage. They have an almost, I would say, fatherly son kind of relationship. And I think that Farage would not, shows actually, you could say to his credit, his credit, whatever, but he does tend to show quite a lot of loyalty to those in his closest inner circle and hates losing scalps to the press. So I'm not remotely surprised that this is what this investigation found. But in a way, the internal investigation was never going to be their big problem. I mean, of course, the internal investigation can say whatever you want. That's almost sometimes the point of an internal investigation. Their big problem, of course, is that there's a police inquiry going on into it. And that is something that they certainly can't control. Where are we with the Parliamentary Standards Commission? Do you remember just before the by-election, which we assume Farage called in order to evade that level of scrutiny? He won his by-election against the bin. And we're still waiting to see whether there is any sort of parliamentary recall. We're waiting to see whether that will result in another by-election. I'm not sure it's a great look to mark your own homework. I'm just going to say that out loud. I'm not sure that if you're trying to come across as a legitimate party and a putative government, that just saying it was OK, we did a look and we found that we were fine. Necessarily gets you across the line. Well, the ridiculous thing is, isn't it, is that you talk about the Parliamentary Commissioner report. There's also the Metropolitan Police said they were looking into it and whether any kind of laws have been broken in terms of, you know, donations to political parties. And so that is still ongoing. And we know that the wheels of justice turn slowly. We were talking about, you know, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor earlier about being arrested in February. And still we're waiting for to see if anything comes of it. And likewise, Peter Mandelson. So these things move slowly. But why have you given the newspapers another headline where people are going to replay clips of the Channel 4 investigation where you're going to be calling into question what these guys did and the way that they did it? Because it's not going to make any difference. The big thing, as you say, Emily, is the fact that we're waiting for the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. We are waiting for whether the Metropolitan Police are going to do anything about it. And in the meantime, you've just given this another day's airing with how many people thinking, oh, thank goodness they've been cleared. Well, I suppose why are we learning about this today? We're learning about this today because Kemi Badenoch is making her speech and it's a good day to bury bad news, right? Because nearly every broadcaster will lead on the Kemi Badenoch speech as they're basically required, legally required to do. So I think that I suppose the calculation is, is that, you know, the damage, frankly, from that report was done at the time. If the Met decide to pursue this further, then clearly it goes up a notch again. The parliamentary inquiry, as you say, Emily, is still to, you know, is still to be resolved and that could be a problem. But I suppose they would conclude that this is the least of their problems. Yeah, I think it actually makes Kemi Badenoch's point for her, funnily enough. Yeah. I mean, you know, we didn't know that we were going to sort of focus today. We were going to take whatever Kemi Badenoch's speech sort of discussed and the most salient points. But funnily enough, the fact that this came just at the point where she is... On her feet. Well, throwing it at reform means that you kind of go, oh, yeah, actually, that does sound, you know, there is something going on here. I think it's helped her. Can we have a report into the news agents, an internal report, about how good we are? Have you not seen them? I haven't seen it yet. We publish one a month. Oh, fantastic. I'm amazed you haven't seen them. They have your face on them. It's like a Labour Party conference guide. It says, forward, not backwards. For the many, not the few. We'll be back in just a moment. And again, remember, with the war, it's just artificial. It's a little bit high. It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay. And it's going to be over very soon. It's essentially almost over with. And they might keep going a little long. You know, they always say they have a big threshold for paying. They need it. Let me tell you, they need it. Sorry. Did the president of the United States say, let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego? And did the crowd just roar their delight and approval? Just two of the 10 biggest cities in America there. Gone. Bye bye. At the hands of America's enemy, Iran. That's what he was saying. We will be discussing that and more whether Trump has become something of a loose cannon. How long did it take you to come to this conclusion? No, the interesting thing was that he he was always quite loose with his language, but never usually to the detriment of his own party in an election campaign. He's actually firing the loose cannon at San Diego. Yeah, well, no, he's firing it at all the Republican candidates who are trying desperately hard to pretend he's not there because they might lose if they are tied to him. We'll be discussing that at length. I still want to know when he was a tight cannon. We'll be back tomorrow. While I told you about that phrase. We'll see you on the News Agents USA as well. Bye bye. Bye. The News Agents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.