How a ketamine-fuelled gang rape case divided America | The News Agents

A very serious allegation of a gang rape, where men on Snapchat are alerting others in the frat house that there is a woman who is available for sex. Shops still open? The response was, yeah. Ten years after the MeToo movement, why is this still happening? The university had already been informed of five other cases of drugs at the frat houses and two other sexual assaults. Its handling of this case has utterly shredded its reputation. You can trust Donald Trump to walk into a situation and automatically make it worse. The News Agent's podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. This is a global production. We begin tonight with the breaking news. ABC News obtaining recorded phone calls in the Cornell investigation. The former student known as Jane Doe recording calls with two former fraternity members who were both there that night. The calls just three weeks after the alleged attack. What she asks them on the phone and you will hear what they tell her. The case of the alleged gang rape at Cornell University two years ago has rocked the world. Today, ABC News reveal that several of the men who've been accused of sexually assaulting that woman try to contain the allegations in the weeks following the event. We're going to play those messages to you in full. The gang rape allegations are dividing a polarising opinion in America and into that polarised world enters Donald Trump with a very strong opinion of his own. Why has he got involved? Welcome to The News Agents. The News Agents. It's John. It's Maitlis. And when you hear things about frat houses and sororities, I kind of think of screwball comedies from the 1980s, the 1990s. It's all jolly fun. Everyone's getting drunk. This is the much darker side of all of it because, yeah, there is drink. Yeah, there are drugs. Yes, there are frat houses, but there's also a very serious allegation of a gang rape that took place where men on Snapchat are alerting others in the frat house that there is a woman in one room who is available for sex and it spins wildly out of control according to her allegations that paint a harrowing picture of college life, of campus life in the United States. This is a hugely complicated story because it happened two years ago, October of 2024, and in the weeks following that assault, that alleged assault, the woman didn't come forward until she was, in essence, much more sure of what had happened to her that night. She was drugged. She was on ketamine. She was intoxicated. She'd taken alcohol. And there has been a very complicated reaction to this reopening of the case. She's just filed a civil lawsuit because a lot of the men are saying, well, we don't understand where this has come from now. You seemed fine immediately afterwards. And a lot of the women, or at least a lot of those who are more sympathetic to her position, have said, don't you understand what happens to victims of sexual assault? These things are traumatic. They take time to process. What she has gone through, not just in the first few weeks, but over the successive months and indeed years, was her understanding just what happened to her in that frat house room, where she looked up and she says in her own words, that is like too many people. She was surrounded by men trying to, or having sex with her. And as you say, this has kind of really ignited so many different issues under one kind of umbrella. It's ignited the whole question of why the university didn't seem to be doing its job. It took a full report, but it treated it more like a disciplinary action rather than a crime. It has raised questions about the laws in New York State themselves, which essentially have a very complicated understanding of consent, whereby if you drink yourself, you are not necessarily not consenting. In other words, you can't just blame mental incapacities. There are students saying the whole structure around the law is wrong. But I think more than anything, there is this cellular of a reminder of what life can be like for women on campus. Frankly, what life is like for so many women on campus who just don't seem to get taken seriously, who just don't seem to be able to get their voice heard. That at the time when she went to the university, three weeks after the event, we actually know that the university had already been informed of five other cases of drugs at the frat houses and two other sexual assaults. That was just at the same time that she was making her case felt. And so there has naturally, in this polarised world, been a complete division between the people who say, why is this still happening? Ten years, ten years after the MeToo movement, why is this still happening and why is nobody taking it seriously? And between those supporting the men, like President Trump, who say, what's a guy got to do before he's allowed to have sex again with somebody who we think said yes? Yeah, and so this is where it is so layered with complication because there was an investigation by the college authorities and the district attorney and it didn't go anywhere. I mean, two of the college students were expelled and two had a punishment. I mean, remember, these are college students at an Ivy League university and their punishment is to write an essay. Oh, well, because you don't write essays at university. And so it was extraordinary the way it was handled. And obviously, this civil suit that she has filed, where she alleges gang rape, in the original interview, she did say it started with consensual sex with, I think, two of the men who were there. Well, she got invited by one. She agreed to have sex with him. He suggests inviting somebody else for a threesome and she says yes to that. So already you're in a place where people are kind of opening the door onto, well, if it's two, would you really know if it was three? If it was three, would you really know if it was five? So this has complicated the whole story. But in her mind, in her lawyer's mind, she says there was an agreement of consensual sex with two men. If we just spin forward to today, and we'll come to Donald Trump in a minute, because there are some particular circumstances around Trump's involvement in this. But if you go to today, what's happened is that when the woman, Jane Doe, filed the civil suit against these seven men and against the college, the way they handled it, the college newspaper then doxed, named the seven men accused. On social media now, she has been doxed and is facing a torrent of abuse. So the whole thing has spun into this kind of social media age, into this really ugly kind of witch hunt about who's responsible. The boys are rapists, the girls are sluts. And it just has gone to people taking absolutely kind of hard and fast positions on it. Yeah, I mean, I would say about the newspaper, I mean, you say doxing, I guess they would say outing. They'd say that the university didn't do its job properly. So they felt as the student publication, they were the ones that wanted to expose the men involved. But obviously, certainly in this country, that could prejudice an entire trial. That could. You are granted anonymity until the verdict has been passed. 100% because none of the men had been found guilty of anything. They had not been charged with anything. And you could be arguing that it actually works against the woman's own claim, if these men have been outed, because you could say, well, it was impossible for them to get a fair trial. So it feels like everyone was flexing a little bit at something. You know, should the student paper have done that? Well, probably not. Did they do it as a response to the university, who also didn't do its job? Yeah, you can see how they're kind of, it starts a chain reaction of trying to hold everyone else to responsibility. So I think it's worth playing a bit of the report from ABC News where you hear, you don't hear the woman's voice, the woman's voice, the questions she asks of the guys who are alleged to have raped her, are voiced by the reporter. But I think this first clip is so revealing where the guy initially is starting to be really helpful and wants to be really nice and kind of, you know, warm towards her. And then he suddenly goes super defensive. Have a listen to this. Hey, what's up? Jane Doe tells sophomore Winston Lee she's trying to piece everything together. I was like deeply, deeply intoxicated. At some point, I said yes to ketamine. I'm so sorry about all the backlash you're getting from this. I feel so bad for you, dude. I actually, right afterwards, they told me not to message you because they thought you were going through a lot. So I constructed this letter to send to you. But Jane Doe presses him. I was completely and totally intoxicated and then given multiple sedatives. And then I was surrounded by upwards of eight to ten men. This is classified as a gang rape. That's when Lee's tone appears to change. Can I ask, like, what's the purpose for why you decided to call? Jane Doe tells him I was blacked out for half of it. How did all these people get in there? Lee doesn't mention he was enthusiastic on this Snapchat thread where more than 50 fraternity brothers were invited to the room. There was nothing saying that, like, anything was happening in that room or anything. I think we have to talk about the Snapchat group because, I mean, extraordinarily, this evidence still exists. CBS New York obtained this video of the fraternity group. It's the whole house, you know, the frat house, which is Kefi. It's one of the old Greek alphabet houses, which has now, we should say, been shut down. And all the men in the house are on the Snapchat. So any of them at any point could presumably have stepped in and halted this. But these are the kind of messages that were popping up on this. So she got to the frat house after midnight and at 1.40 in the morning, there was a message sent to the group that said a woman was available for sex. Shop's still open, one fraternity brother wrote later. The response was, yeah. And there was another moment where they're invited to, like, walk in and whip it out. In other words, there was a culture within the group, within that Snapchat, within one assumes the house where this was not unusual. It was not abnormal to post that a woman was available for sex and to get the various men to respond to it by saying, is it still open? Can I come? Yeah, you can come. You can whip it out. So just use that to understand whatever the questions are you have about intoxication or consent or the state of the woman at this time. Those men at one in the morning were checking if she was still there and they could still turn up at the house and have sex with her. And they did. And such is the controversy now around the case. The governor of New York state, because Cornell is in upstate New York at Ithaca, the governor, Kathy Hochul, has said, right, we need to reopen this investigation. And I'm going to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation. And the person that Kathy Hochul has appointed is Letitia James. Now, Letitia James was the woman responsible for bringing the prosecution against the Trump Organization for fraud in its kind of reporting of its business affairs, which led to, I think, a $350 million fine for the Trump Organization. And if there's one person in the world that Trump hates probably more than any other, it is Letitia James. One, she's a woman. Two, she's black. And three, she's gone after Donald Trump. And that is kind of like the holy trinity of offences that you can commit. And so Donald Trump, seeing that Letitia James is now the one investigating this, has come out on the side of the men. What do you think about New York's appointing a special prosecution team? Well, it's completely corrupt. And I can't imagine it. And I feel badly for whoever she's looking at, because they won't get a fair shake. I feel badly for whoever we're looking at, because they won't get a fair shake. In other words, you can trust Donald Trump to walk into a situation and automatically make it worse. You know, he's not offering... He shouldn't really be involved in this at all. But when he does get involved, his sympathy is all for the men involved. Just on the other side of that, I think it is important to say that Letitia James also posted on Twitter at the end of September something about the case itself before she took over. And she said, So, I mean, I guess he would argue that she is also compromised, because she's already taken the side of this woman, called her a survivor. I mean, obviously, she is a survivor, but she means a survivor of sexual abuse. So she never doubts the story that the woman's telling. She never doubts that this was a gang rape of some kind. And so, in essence, I mean, you kind of wish that they had found somebody different, just so that for the woman's sake, for the girl's sake, this didn't all become mired in the politics of whether Donald Trump hates Letitia James. But I do want to kind of go back to that phone call. What is interesting about is this. She calls the guy. We assume she has decided she has to record her phone calls, because post Ketamine, she is completely fuzzy, hazy. I mean, her roommates, I think, described her coming back and being both wired and completely not making sense. You know, unable to really string a sense together. They saw that something had happened to her. They saw that she was not herself. And that was kind of the effects of the drugs. And in essence, what she's trying to do is piece together what actually happened to her in that room. And so she has that conversation with the first guy on the phone who says, oh, I feel bad, not for what they did, but for the backlash. He says, oh, for the backlash, for, you know, the way you're getting all this ---- for the backlash. And then as soon as she starts mentioning gang rape, he suddenly kind of goes, whoa, like he's just worked out that she's possibly recording the conversation. And that he could be incriminated. And the whole tone of it changes after that. And that's why these messages are so interesting. Because she did carry on having contact with these men. And there is one report by the Daily which suggests it was when she saw this student forum website describing a gang rape, gang bang that took place, that she suddenly realises that that was her. And it's really complicated to understand this unless you have been a survivor of sexual assault or work closely with survivors of sexual assault, that this kind of trauma takes time to process. It's like having concussion after a car accident. You know, your whole mind tries to shut out the trauma, tries to wipe out what happened. And so you actually need witnesses. You need people to help you piece it back together. And that can take days, weeks, even months. So that's what she's doing on this phone call. She's trying to use the men to say, can you just clarify what actually happened? Because I was out of it and I have no idea what I'm now kind of experiencing. And they are then essentially gaslighting her and saying, well, I think we kind of remember it differently. But she looked up and she said there are too many men here and she did not consent to that. Well, listen to another of the calls. You know, you talk about gaslighting. I mean, there's another guy on the call. This is the fellow who invited her over to the frat house. She told him she spent time in the emergency room and in therapy because there's so much damage on my body and my brain. She said, if I wanted to take this somewhere, what y'all did would be classified as gang rape. You already knew when I came in, I was 10 shots deep. Ingalls responded with a different recollection. You did tell me you were sober, by the way, you did. You said you hadn't been anywhere. Jane Doe said she was 100% sure. She told him she had been at a bar for a sorority event. And I never lie. She asked him how they ended up in a threesome with one of his frat brothers. So you come in, say hi. We start dancing for like maybe three to five minutes. And then I pop the question. You say yes. Then I remember, like, we didn't know who else to bring. So I go up to who was on the dance floor too. And I pop the question. And he's like, yeah. And then we go upstairs. Jane Doe then asking for his help to identify all of the men, saying she remembered four in the bed and more standing around the room. Ingalls seemed to suggest both of their memories may not be accurate. I have racked my brain for this mystery. You know, it's possible that both of us, like, remember this and it's not true. Jane Doe pushed back saying no, because I remember looking up and being like, that is too many people. She then asked, do you remember how any of these guys walked in? The party was sort of like crowded. So people started, like, filling up the balcony just because there was nowhere else to go. And why was it so crowded? Because there'd been a Snapchat conversation with, is the shop still open? Yeah. That may be what has drawn all those people to it. I'm racking my brain. I'm racking my brain to remember, like, the names of the people in the room. You live with these guys. They're in your frat house and you don't remember who's in that room. Yeah. I'm racking my brain. Racking my brain. Yeah. Nothing, nothing. Nothing coming back to me about any of those people. I mean, it's not just that. It's also the college authorities, the way the college itself has behaved. Because after this incident, the woman went to the medical centre at the university to get checked out because she was worried she might have picked up a, you know, an STD or something like that. And she was concerned about her own physical health. And she talked about how this had happened traumatically. And the doctors just said, oh, yeah, well, maybe you should get some therapy, love. I mean, you know, there was no kind of red flag. Uh-oh, something bad has happened. Maybe we ought to alert people about this and see what can be done. It's, yeah, just go and get yourself some therapy. And that will make it all better. I think you've kind of put your finger on it when you say that there was no red flag. Because this is not a singular case, which is so hard to fathom that no one would have thought it was possible. From what we know now of what the university had already received in terms of the complaints I mentioned, they knew that this stuff could happen on campus. They knew that this stuff did happen on campus. They'd received complaints about exactly this kind of thing already happening on campus. So why, when they took their, you know, 11,000 word report and wrote all the stuff up, were they not more concerned of what they were hearing from her? I mean, that's the thing you keep coming back to. Why were they deciding that she was going to leave the university and that was fine? They were mostly going to stay at the university and that was fine. Couple were going to be suspended, but the rest were going to be fine. Why did they think it was okay to make this a disciplinary rather than a criminal inquiry? The other thing about the university and its behaviour. I mean, I talked about the medical centre. I mean, there are bits of it that if it weren't so bloody tragic and appalling, it would be funny that this woman, you know, has struggled to get to college. She's got huge amounts of debt. She thinks she's got to leave now in the wake of all of this. She leaves and tries to get her tuition fees back and the college won't give her her tuition fees back. Now, sorry, love, that money's been paid over. You can't have it back. And you think, oh, my God. I mean, as a PR exercise, everything that Cornell has done. And just by the way, Cornell is not some minor, backwater, Hicksville little college somewhere. Cornell is one of the Ivy League colleges, the same as Oxbridge in the UK. And its handling of this case has utterly shredded its reputation. So across France today, there have been more protests. It's been kind of nationwide about what is happening in French schools. And students have come out onto the streets to protest about the crummy state of the lycées that they go to and the fact that there aren't enough teachers, that there are supply teachers who don't turn up, that lessons get cancelled. And they're just really pissed off about the state of their education system at the moment. And because it's France and because there is a long history of protest on the streets and the old slogan that laws are made on the streets, not in Parliament, the law has been taken into the hands of these students. And some of it has got a bit rough. And the police have been even rougher back. Yeah, it's got really bloody in some places. The unions are saying, one union saying, about 1,800 high schools are now blockaded or closed by the government. 90% of the universities also blockaded. We should explain this is just about the lycées, about underinvestment in the lycées, which is the sort of 15 to 18 year olds at school. But there are protests in some 30 towns and cities. This is really becoming quite widespread today. It centres very much on Lyon, but we've seen Paris, Marseille, Nice right across the country. And you probably will have seen that yesterday, there were these reports of a student who actually had his hand blown off. He picked up a police kind of sting ball grenade and he lost his hand. And when the students have complained about police violence and heavy handedness, the government's essentially said, well, they are the front line of the law. But if you're going to throw petrol around, if you're going to attack, there were reports of teachers at the schools being kind of doused in petrol or having petrol poured on them. So some of it has got really dark, really angry and potentially very violent. And the police have pushed back in the way that we know French police do. And I guess the place where this becomes a distinctly political issue is that there are now allegations that this is being pushed by parts of the left in France, the far left, the sort of the Communist Party of Mélenchon, the sort of an Antifa-ish sort of feel to some of the protests, because no one can really understand what has kicked this off right now. You know, there has been bad underinvestment in the schools. The students have been really unhappy for a long time. But what is kind of fermenting this in the month of October now? And I guess some are looking ahead and saying, well, is this positioning? Is this political positioning by those on the left who see the presidential election coming in 2027 and saying, we just want to remind people how dire things are? Obviously, Mélenchon and his party have pushed back and said, stop talking rubbish. Look, you know, there have been protests while Macron has been president. I mean, you know, the Gilets Jaunes, the people who felt that they were being ignored. And there are just vague echoes of Paris 1968, when there were the big protests, when it looked like it was going to overturn the Fifth Republic because there were so many people. And it started, it didn't start with school kids. It started with university students then. But the unions that got involved and it became a kind of mass mobilisation. And here you have France going to the polls next year in a presidential election, where at the moment, the Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen is way out in front. The prediction, the possibility that Marine Le Pen could be the next president of the Fifth Republic. And you wonder how these protests are going to play, because presumably an awful lot of French people are thinking this is terrible. What are these people doing? It's all gone out of control. It's left wing activists who are agitating. And there is certainly true that there are people agitating on the fringes of these protests, as there are in any big protest that takes place. And just kind of working the political calculus out of how this plays and whose advantage it works to is very far from clear at the moment. Now, Marine Le Pen has tweeted out watching these protesters and surprise, surprise, taking the side of the law enforcement here. The image of this young policewoman pursued by a howling mob, screaming its hatred, thrown to the ground, assault is unbearable. These acts deserve exemplary punishments. Let her know that tonight millions of French people offer their warm support. The howling mob she's chosen to film, just accidentally, causally, are all black and brown. I don't know if this is particularly playing to her base, but we'll let you see the video for yourself. I mean, the truth is, we don't know what was happening in that video because it's just been lifted from Twitter. We don't know if that policewoman was running for her life. We don't know if those kids were pursuing her for anything to do with the student protests. But what we do know is that it has instantly become a political fight now between, you know, hard left and hard right on the streets of France. Yeah, and it's really interesting. I mean, when I lived in France, the respect for the police, where police, you know, the police carry batons, they use stun grenades, there's a lot of water cannon, there's a lot of tear gas when there's a protest going on. There is a much more fractious relationship between police and citizen in France than, say, the UK. I remember driving up towards the Arc de Triomphe and there was a police with its sirens blaring and cars refusing to get out the way and move over because they just thought, oh, screw you, screw you. And I was really struck by that, that it was just a kind of broken. Yeah, there's broken. I don't trust what you're doing. Because we talk about policing by consent. Exactly. And the consent they were saying was no. Yeah, the CRS are seen as this kind of violent, semi-militarised police force and there is conflict between protesters and the police on a regular basis in France. Yeah, and I think we should, as I mentioned, look not just at France, but at Spain this week, because we've also seen pretty angry demonstrations in Valencia, in the south-east of Spain, which got to a point where Pedro Sanchez, who lost his parliamentary majority, has now essentially called an election. You know, just decided that he can't hold the country, the coalition together. He can't pass his laws. And he's now called an election for the end of November, the 29th of November. And this has focused on not what's happening in lycées, not school underfunding, but what's going on in the housing market. And it kind of came to a head when this 87-year-old woman, Maria Carmen Abascal, was forcibly removed from her property on a stretcher because she could not pay her rent. The place where she'd lived for 70 years, in other words, since she was a 17-year-old girl, had been taken over by a conglomerate. They'd massively forced up the rents. She hadn't been able to pay it. Even though they then started to bring it down, she was unable to pay the rent, which went from, I think, €500 a month to €1,300. And so she's forcibly evicted from this property. And that became, as these things so often do, a kind of touchstone, a symbol for all the anger, particularly amongst the millennials, the 30-year-olds, the 40-year-olds, who are kind of looking at their country and saying, what is going on? We can't afford housing. We can't afford our rents. And this is what we've got to look forward to. And I mean, I guess, you know, in one country we talk about schools, in another country we talk about housing, but if you had to link them, the link really is what happens to a continent where there's no growth? What happens to a continent where you are not seeing the sense of kind of life and investment and growth happening at all, and people are losing trust in their politicians to solve their problems when their rents are going up and their oil is going up and their food is going up and their wages aren't? And yeah, what you get to is you get the populist forces of left and right who move in to try to take advantage of that situation. And, you know, you've got apparently Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the communist in the far left, trying to agitate in France. And you've got Marine Le Pen on the far right trying to seek her political capital out of it. And I bet you the Spanish election will focus on Pedro Sanchez for the Socialist Party talking about housing reform and rent reform and making Spain more affordable. And you'll have the far right talking about immigration and all those thousands of illegal immigrants who came over from Morocco that day. And why isn't the Spanish government doing more about it? And so the stage is set where normal political discourse takes a back seat. And the people who kind of want to weaponise this from left and right will try to move in and take advantage. In a moment, we'll be talking about the Bond obituary and Geoffrey Archer. A colourful life, a controversial life. He spent time in prison convicted of perjury as well. What did he bring to your party, would you say? He was someone who believed in conservatism. He was a great communicator. He was a great storyteller. He raised, you know, tens of millions of pounds for charity. He was a fantastic auctioneer. I had the pleasure of seeing him, you know, walk around the room, raising money for good causes. And I hope that that's what he will be remembered for. Obviously, he did have those other parts of his life. That was Kemi Badenoch talking about Geoffrey Archer, whose death was announced last night. And the question was, what did he bring your party? Well, he was a storyteller, auctioneer. He was a fundraiser for charities. Yeah, but the question was about what did he bring your party? And of which the answer would have been, well, quite a bit of disgrace, really. He was running for mayor of London and he gets banged up for perjury. I mean, you know, complicated, isn't it? Yeah, do you know what? I think there is something so interesting about the modern obituary because the days of euphemism have broadly kind of vanished now. And we always used to find these beautiful phrases like a man of his time, you know, an excellent businessman. You could read into those, whatever, he didn't suffer fools, meant he probably sort of threw fax machines at his staff. You know, man of his time meant, oh, he had some dodgy things going on, but we don't really talk about those now. And that was generally how the obit was framed. And I remember it wasn't that long ago that we were sort of listening to obits that said, you know, that very sort of sweet sycophantic note, Pol Pot, who died peacefully in his sleep, age 93. And it strikes me that that for the most part has gone now. You know, as soon as Geoffrey Archer's death was announced last night, I was watching the BBC news and it was kind of like, he is a villain. You know, it was quite full on. It was quite raw. And I guess we're trying to find our place between not doing the sycophantic, we're ignoring the fact that he was, you know, imprisoned for perjury, but also trying to accept that lives are long and whole and messy and complicated. And I thought Kemi wove that beautifully, which is like a storyteller is one of those beautiful euphemisms, which basically means he made ---- up. And he did write loads of brilliant books and he sold, you know, millions, hundreds of millions of copies. He just published his 60th book. And so what she's essentially saying was, yeah, leave the politics. You know, he wasn't great for the politics of the Tory party. He wasn't great for the reputation. But yeah, he could tell a story. The other thing, if you were just going to give a simple answer to what did he bring your party, he bought a ton of Krug champagne and a ton of shepherd's pie because he would endlessly have these shepherd's pie and Krug parties, which were very sought after invitations. Did you attend one? I have attended one at a party conference. I never attended one at his apartment overlooking the Thames, where guests would say, Jeffrey, where's the loo? He'd say, you go past the Picasso. And just after the Renoir, you turn left to go to the, you know, toilet. He couldn't help but tell you how successful he'd been whenever you encountered him, met him or interviewed him. I mean, he was, I remember at this Tory party conference, at a Krug and shepherd's pie party, that another Tory author just happened to be walking past. And Archer made a point of telling him, you're not invited to this party. Wow, he was actually kicked out. Yeah, but he wasn't even trying to get in. Oh, I see. Even just daring to pass the corridor, the word went up, I'm sorry, you're not invited. Yeah, I mean, so he had a colourful life. I think that's one of the euphemisms. Colourful is always used. It means, you know, he pushed it as far as he could and then he was banged up in prison, where he actually wrote a series of books called The Prison Diaries, which is documenting his time in prison. I mean, I was very struck by how, I mean, both, I think, Fraser Nelson and Aisha Hazarika, who are on different sort of political sides, wings, have both talked about what a great friend he was and how easy it was to be able to sort of talk and listen to him. And, I mean, Fraser basically says he taught him to read because he wrote fantastically exciting books and that was enough to get him sort of, you know, ready to read. I suppose the thing is, going back to this whole question, what should an obit do? Should it sum up a life? Should it headline a life? Or should it let people just talk about the kind of, the stuff that was relevant to them? Look, what I will say about Geoffrey Archer is that colourful is a great description and I think that I want more colourful politicians and I think there are so many that have blandness and anemia at their heart, that to have somebody who kind of is a bit swashbuckling, is controversial, gets into scrapes. Is a perjurer. Look, it brings, you know, for the news business, he is great for business. Bland special advisor who becomes an MP, becomes a minister, never does anything, that steps out of line, boring as hell. Well, if you're an obit writer, that's true. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Bye tomorrow. The News Agents Podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity.