Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - The News Quiz: Ep 7. Tariff Turmoil

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

Andy Zaltzman is joined by Armando Iannucci, Ria Lina, Ian Smith and Cindy Yu for more topical comedy quizzing. This week they explore Trump’s tariff turmoil, the King’s Canadian holiday, mixed messages in the Middle East and how the Department of Justice is having trouble finishing its sentences.Written by Andy Zaltzman.With additional material by: Mike Shephard, Peter Tellouche, Sascha LO and Eve Delaney. Producer: James Robinson Executive Producer: Pete Strauss Production Coordinator: Jodie Charman Sound Editor: Marc WillcoxA BBC Studios Audio Production for Radio 4

BBC Sounds music radio podcast. Hello, I'm Andy Zoltzman and I have just applied to become the new head of Thames Water. All I have to do to prove that I have what it takes is drink this glass of water from the Thames. Come on Andy, be brave. I forget, is water supposed to be opaque? I can't bring myself to do it. I think even Hercules would draw the line at that one. So instead, I will have to stick with hosting the News Quiz.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE Hello, welcome to the News Quiz. Our teams this week, we have a special tie-in with the BBC's new walking with dinosaurs series New discoveries since the original series mean we now know that dinosaurs are in fact the evolutionary ancestors of modern-day politicians So our teams are named after two of these newly identified beasts that share 99% of the DNA with our politicians We have team Hippocrisaurus against team error after error tops Team Hippocrisaurus we have Ian Smith and Rialina.

And on Team Error After Error Tops we have Times columnist Cindy Yu and Armando Iannucci. So our first question can go to Cindy and Armando. Which of President Donald Trump's actions has been ruled and or deruled illegal by judges this week apart from all the other things he's already been convicted for? Yes. It is everything, isn't it? Yeah, how much time do you have? Deportations, tariffs.

Tariffs, specifically this week, yes. His favourite word? Yeah. He's terrible. He... think about Trump. Very neatly summarised there. His favorite word. Yeah, he's terrible. He think about Trump Very neatly summarized there He thinks if you just say you've done it that it's happened and it life doesn't work like that So it turns out he doesn't have the power to order tariffs That's with Congress the same way that he doesn't really

Congress in the same way that he doesn't really understand how Ukraine and Russia works but he says we've done a deal and they haven't and but in his head he has and you know he thinks he will solve global warming by doing a deal with the Sun. But it could go as high as a Supreme Court. It could go as high. So it's not decided just yet. He calls them activist judges. And it's just judges being active because that's their job, is to interpret the law. He called these three judges unelected activist judges and one of them was appointed by Donald Trump. Yes.

I've got the words here. He said, judges must understand the nation is not here for them. They're here for the nation I shall remove from office those judges who don't understand the demands of the hour Oh, no, that's Hitler Cindy what did you make of the Trump sort of battle with yeah, I mean the judge that he appointed himself essentially I think it's very annoying for him because only this week a journalist asked him about the label taco. Which is something that the financiers in America are comforting themselves with. It stands for Trump always chickens out.

And the journalist asked him about this, you know, how Mr. President, how do you feel about this label? And he said that is the nastiest question anybody's ever asked me. I think he doesn't want to be associated with anything, even vaguely Mexicans. Really annoying for him. I mean, these tariffs might still go ahead because now Trump is arguing that he's using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which can only be used in a national emergency. So that's forming part of his argument.

But I think that's the question, is it? Some would argue that it isn't a national emergency if the herd and McDonald Island penguins aren't paying a 25% tariff. But I would disagree. I think the US is in a state of emergency and that emergency is Trump. I mean, he was overheard to say actually, he was just like, who are these checks and balances and how soon can we send them back there? It's a very good way to win an argument as well.

What Trump is doing is he's bypassing the law by calling it a national emergency. I think we've got to utilise that more if that's possible. Any argument I ever have with my partner, just going to scream that it's a national emergency and the normal rules don't apply, that's why I need as many custard creams as I've bought. I think it's a national emergency when you go to a train, toilet and the soap dispenser works but the tap doesn't. Yes, this is the latest from the President's titanic efforts to enrich the working class

people of America by causing a global trade war that pushes their employers or their own businesses to the precipice of collapse. Trump had proclaimed to America that tariffs are going to make us rich as hell. The problem being that hell is not actually that rich. The fuel bill is astronomical. Let's move on slightly further north in North America. This can go to Ian and Rhea. Who or what did King Charles admire this week in North America for being strong and free? I think it was Prince Harry. Didn't say that out loud I don't think. I think it was Canada.

Correct. Yes. With no little irony that he had to be called over to protect him. My dad's more kingly than your dad. Because the whole world has been moving away from the empire, hasn't it? Until Trump looked a little bit annexy and then everyone's like, oh my God, the king. And you're right. It's a ploy by Carney to say that even our kind of young modern country, having its parliament

opened by a 70-year-old monarch from a 1,000-year-old institution associated with colonialism, is better than having Donald Trump as our president. There's lots of very subtle diplomacy going on. And I was interested, they were talking about the Queen's subtle diplomacy with the US and Canada, how she would do it via her brooches. So apparently when Trump visited, she wore a brooch that was gifted to her by the Obamas. And then the next day she wore a brooch that was gifted to her by Justin Trudeau when Trump and Trudeau were arguing.

So the Queen would do very subtle things, like if you remember when she met Liz Trust, she immediately died. LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE Right, just a little... What message was that sending, do you think? Barely perceptible as a hint. It's like when JD Vance met the last poll,

the one where, I'm not hanging around with him. He wasn't allowed to mention Trump in his speech, Charles, it was all coded, but if you listen to it, every now and then he says, I think you get who I'm talking about. Do you catch my drift? And he kept talking about a kind of an orange tariff monkey. I guess if you're from Canada's point of view, if you've got that choice, do you want to ditch that anachronistic but comfortingly powerless and impressively bling-hatted symbolic head of state when the alternative is essentially the political equivalent of swapping your

fading and untrendy but comfortable underpants for a barbed wire G-string? Yes, it'll get people talking but is it really you? So you can see why Canada is not maybe completely on board with becoming the 51st state. And I think the Canadian Conservatives were en route to winning this election if it wasn't for Trump making this very unwelcome offer. So he's actually totally screwed up the right wing in Canada. Well in an effort to win over a skeptical Canadian public Donald Trump has offered Canada a free golden what? Shower. Is it a dome? Yes, golden dome which basically he said they can have a free subscription to

Trump's exciting new space-based missile defense system the golden dome all they have to do is become the 51st state of the USA or pay $61 billion. So it's a tempting choice. I think he said, our treasured 51st state. It's very tender. I feel sorry for them. If they don't join and if they don't pay up and whatever, how does the dome then work? Because the dome has to shield the entire, unless there's a, is there a flap?

Yeah, I think... For missiles to hit Canada entire unless there's a is there a flap yeah i think for missiles to hit canada if canada's not part of the scheme there's a there's a missile flap well it's like in st paul's i know this because i'm jewish but um the jewish person says a prayer in st paul's a flap of the dome opens and the prayer just fizzles out into the air rather than being filtered up through the dome into the aerial at the top just fizzles out into the air rather than being filtered up through the dome into the aerial at the top. As a Catholic, I'm not sure that's how prayer works. As an atheist, I can tell you it doesn't work at all. Yes, so King Charles has said that he likes his Canada's like his granny liked her gin and tonics, strong and free.

Charles, the reigning British banknote model of the year, gave a speech at the opening of Canada's parliament which subtly criticised Donald Trump's threat to co-opt the country into the USA as its 51st state. With the unpopularity of the monarchy falling in Canada amidst American monarch Donald Trump's audacious Emperor Nero impersonation, Charles' visit reaffirmed Canada's preference to remain as Cornwall Plus rather than become Michigan Minus. Right, at the end of our North America round the scores are 4 to Sydney and Armando, 3 to Ian and Rhea. three to Ian and Rhea. Moving on to the Middle East now here is your question Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu leads a criminal gang these

are the words this week of someone who once did what I would say quite relevant job. Former Prime Minister of Israel? Correct. Ehud Olmert? Yes. Is that the pronunciation? Prime Minister 2006 to 2009. Who said basically what's happening is criminal. Yes. And murderous. And there was some pushback from Netanyahu who says no we're just going after Hamas. Most of them are dead but their ghosts are still lurking. Right. In schools and hospitals and we have to go after them. Right. He said something which a lot of people have been thinking for a while and I think he's given a very good opportunity for people to say it much loater than we were saying beforehand. Yes. Because mostly it was done internally beforehand. Yaya Golan, former deputy chief of staff

of the Israeli Defense Forces, also criticized Netanyahu saying a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, does not give itself the aim of expelling population. So I mean he was a four-decade veteran of the Israeli military and former deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces. So I mean it can Netanyahu keep just sort of batting this off like an unwanted tennis ball? Yes if we keep selling him guns. Well, Britain has been accused of mixed messaging for simultaneously criticising the Netanyahu government but also doing what?

Saying, do you want some more guns? Well, that's essentially the correct answer. Specifically sending a trade envoy to Israel to drum up business whilst also criticizing. Did we specify that those guns were for wars or were we sending them thinking they were for starting a hundred meter race? Is this Lord Austin? Yes. I think that's been misreported. He's gone on a fact-finding mission. He's not out to sell because we're trying to come up with ways of not sending people to prison

because of the prison. So he's asking Netanyahu, how do you get away with murder? Yeah, it is really confusing because last week, of course, David Lammy, foreign secretary said, yeah, this is, this isn't good. We're not going to do any more trade deals with Israel. And then the department of business still sent this trade envoy this week And they went oh no no no that has nothing to do with what was said last week because this is about the existing

Trade deal that already exists. It's just you know what's already in place Just before we started recording reports in Mercer Benjamin Netanyahu has said that Israel has accepted a ceasefire Proposal, but it can be quite hard to be hopeful. I mean, I'm, you know, I still like to think that the glass is half full. Unfortunately, I think it's full of the shattered remnants of what used to be the top half of the glass. Yes, the criticism for Benjamin Netanyahu's actions

continues to deepen and spread with Israel's prime minister, not so much pushing the envelope of human rights violations as putting the envelope in a catapult and twanging it into the path of a jet engine. He has been accused of perpetrating war crimes by his predecessor Ehud Olmert, by former high-ranking officials in the Israeli military, by families of the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas, by national leaders, by 800 UK lawyers and academics, and by almost 400 writers.

Now Netanyahu has thus far proved disappointingly redoubtable in his ability not to be swayed from his path of obliterative destruction, even by a very strongly worded letter from significant figures in the arts world. But bearing in mind that he's obviously not even swayed by ten pretty unambiguous commandments direct from his own god, I'm not sure this letter is going to work. At the end of that round the scores are 10 to Sinian Armando, 7 to Ian and Rhea. As the old saying goes, if the cap fits, wear it. Unless you're going to the hairdressers, in which case it's unhelpful. But what cap is the government reportedly contemplating taking off because it's not fit for purpose?

This is the two child benefit camp correct that was imposed by George Osborne when he was Chancellor at the start of austerity I ought to declare an interest in that I work with the child poverty action group and they've been campaigning for some time that all Studies agree that the most effective way of lifting children out of poverty is to remove that cap. So naturally Keir Starmer was against it because it's, he'd love to do it but the just the money just isn't there, people hate me now, we will do it but not yet, we don't know where we're going to get the money from. So they're going through a bit of a, I think it was Bridget Phillips and the Education Secretary who's now said, been allowed to say by Downing Street, that

nothing is off the table. That's the official. So they might get run to it. The problem at the moment for Labour is for quite a lot of families, not very much is on the table. And I think the sooner they do it, the better. I think Boris Johnson's family is probably celebrating, right? Oh my God, yes. I mean, I think there should be an upper cap. And Farage has now endorsed getting rid of the two-child cap because he wants people to feel more encouraged to have children. So he's in the child-rearing business as well now.

I saw that Labour said they're going to announce their decision in autumn when it publishes their child poverty strategy, CPS. It's not a good idea to have the same initials as the Crown Prosecution Service. Makes it sound like your strategy for child poverty is to arrest them and put them in prison. I think it was just because Keir Starmer had some old stationery for a minute there. I'm very confused. I don't understand where we're at. I think we're through the looking glass because here we have the Reform Party going, well, let's remove the two child cap. They want to renationalize steel. They want people to not have to pay tax until they earn

a little bit more money, which by the way is exactly what the Green Party thinks as well if anyone would care to give them any kind of media time or, hey, Lib Dems, do you want to maybe speak up? You've got 73 MPs and all we're talking about is Nigel Farage, who's a party of five MPs, isn't even in the country right now, he's out in Vegas doing something to do with crypto, and all we're doing is give him air time. He doesn't deserve it, he doesn't need it.

He's agreeing. He's agreeing. He's agreeing. He's agreeing. He's agreeing. Every time he opens his mouth, the media goes, oh my God, Nigel is it's Nigel that's talking. Nigel is talking.

Which means that Keir Starmer's become a reactionary prime minister, so all of his policies are actually Tory policies, cos it's the only way that he can disagree with reform, who, by the way, have gone so far to the left, I have no idea what's going on. But turquoise and green are very similar colours, aren't they? LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE I think in Ed Davis' defence, it's very difficult to hear him over the jet ski motor.

He did his speech to completely undercut what you've just said. If we just go back to Nigel Farage. He was coming up with labour policies, tax breaks and so he was coming up with conservative policies. So he was setting reform out as different from the other two parties by stealing policies from both. But then coming up with when he was asked about the funding, how would this be funding? He was coming up with extraordinary figures about diversity and inclusion cost something like seven billion. How does that work? Because that's what Cindy and I are being paid to be here. That's what Cindy and I are being paid to be here. Part of the cost saving measures that Nodra Faraj talked about was sending back these

young undocumented males who he says are being put up in five-star hotels with free dental. So my question is, so there are single young men living in posh hotel rooms with nice smiles. Who are they and where can I find one? That's a good hotel if they've got a dentist in it. Farage's policies were estimated to cost up to 80 billion pounds according to people with IFS, that's Irritable Finance Syndrome, sorry at the IFS, sorry at the IFS, my mistake, but where is that money going to come from? My challenge for our panellists this week is how are you going to raise £80 billion,

ideally without anyone noticing that any money is being taken from anyone? There's a clue when somebody said that Farage is in Las Vegas at the moment. I think... He's fundraising. That's part of his plan. Again, going back to his speech, not that I want to hear it too much, but he was trying to outline how he was different from the two parties.

And when he was asked specifically about the sums, the commitments, financial commitments, how he was going to meet, he just went, oh, here we go again. All the parties do this. The sums don't add up. He did actually have some answers though. He did say that when he was in charge, there would be no more immigrant hotels and no more people coming over from boats,

no more net zero. So we're gonna save money on all of this. And I just thought, well, that's good. Yeah, no more net zero. We're just an island on the edge of a massive continent. As the water levels rise, we're the first to go. Now the waves, if they come in, they're just gonna be put in tents.

Is there a way of and this solves like both issues so financially I think if we could find a way to monetize empty goo ramekins or for rising sea levels if everyone gets their goo ramekins out it gets scoops up a bit of the sea. Yeah. And then we'll store them. So I haven't looked into the science of it, but I think the headline is we scoop up the sea. You're at the start of your kind of policy journey.

Yeah. All the parties do this. Yeah. Yes. Nigel Farage, also known as the boy who brings all the milkshakes to the yard, reform party leader and latter-day fertility goddess, wants to get Britain breeding again. He's promised tax breaks to encourage people to have babies. He said that reform would ditch the two-child benefit cap, a pledge also rumoured to be about to be put forward by the government, axing the policy would cost the exchequer

£3.5 billion, or in times rich list terms, 0.1 Hinduja families. To put things in perspective. So while the government could be rowing back on this policy, rowing back good if you're Catherine Granger or Steve Redgrave, not so good if you're a government trying to convince an increasingly sceptical public that you have even a vague semblance of a plan. The government has delayed publication of its child poverty strategy until later in the year, so it's still not clear whether they're going to come down for or against child poverty.

It's very hard to tell sometimes. Right, so at the end of our British Politics Round, the scores are now 8 to Sindhi and Armando, 6 to Ian and Rhea. Very scientific. Right, our next question to Ian and Rhea, you can have this. Get out and stay in. A demand set to be issued to whom? Get out and stay in. Is this about this new report on early release of prisoners? Yes, correct.

Get out of jail but stay in your house. Oh yeah, that's one of the options options isn't it, that you can do. You can either be released on, is that license? There's home arrest, there's just don't do it again. They're saying, well one of the problems with the early release of prisoners is that the electronic tanks that would be needed are too expensive. There would be too many of them. And I don't... Did they do this in the olden days where they would just sort of tattoo on someone's head the crime they did?

LAUGHTER If the tanks are too expensive, why don't they just steal them? LAUGHTER Yeah. Not good a good to prison, so... How is there no space in prisons? Haven't we just released a thousand post office workers? Or you put prisoners in a room and tell them to make Nigel Farage's maths make sense and don't come out until they do.

Just like that idea of prisoners in a room with Nigel Farage going, we're going to make your maths make sense. You're going to have correct numbers coming out of your eyes and ears. I've never heard you sound so sinister. Oh, you're really going to add up. Following the publication of the Gawkke Report inter-sendencing, the Home Office has announced that with prisons at Popping Point, convicts will be given the chance to spend the last two-thirds of their sentences in the prisons of their own minds.

Right, well at the end of that round, it's now nine to Ian and Rhea, ten to Cindy and Armando. Well, for our final round this week, appropriately enough, given the fact that we can't really trust real news, I have brewed a special hallucinogenic tea made out of all-natural, all-British psychotropic herbs. We've got some

snutterwort, parsimony, buck mint, dog weasel and stropweed. We're just going to add some ethical free- range badger milk and some vegan frogspawn for that trendy bubble tea effect. And now I'm just going to mash up some newspaper articles so that my hallucinatory visions will be related to the news. So right, here we go. Good to go

I'll just give the hallucinogenic tea a couple of seconds it's coming to me now I see two warriors not of our species they are clad in metal fighting where once they danced in joy yeah wears quickly. But what news story was I hallucinating there? Genuine news story from this week's news. Can I just quickly say, just for the listener, there has just been a lighting change Yes. on a radio show.

We commit, Ian, we commit. I was thinking back to 30 years ago when I produced this programme thinking there's no way I could have got this past Barry Tookin. This is a story about the Chinese robots having a boxing match. Yes, robot boxing. They were remote controlled by humans but it was the robots themselves who were very impressively actually doing the actions of a boxing boxing match dodging and so on and this comes Fresh off from when earlier this year at Chinese New Year

I'm sure you all saw the Chinese New Year Gala that is very popular and watched by everyone in China when they were dancing So the the rate of progression is pretty fast from dancing to fighting in the space of about four months Yeah, and I'm a bit afraid about Friday night space of about four months. And I'm a bit scared about... That happens twice Friday nights, I think. I'm a bit scared about where we're going next. Why were they fighting? Just for fun, I think.

Just for fun. Yeah, they had these very cute kind of like light blue and light pink helmets. I don't know why they need gloves, really. The urine test afterwards must have been interesting. What are we going to learn? We've already given them intelligence, they can beat us at chess and now we're teaching them to fight? Have these scientists never seen Terminator?

They weren't very good at fighting though. I watched the video and I thought, and I never thought I'd say this, I could take a robot in a kickboxing match. Right, time for another gulp of my hallucinogenic news tea. I see the nation overrun by a plague of creatures that don't belong here, reaching their tasty, tasty tentacles. Oh, maybe this isn't so bad. What story is that, Ian?

Oh, the exact phrasing was there's been an octopus explosion and the the pictures on the article were a lot less gruesome than I thought. I guess an octopus explosion is a better headline than the reality which is there's loads of octopuses now. Yeah there's just lots of them and that's apparently quite good at first because they're quite expensive so it's a good catch for fisher fisher people. I nearly got that wrong the fish people yeah. It's an early Dr. Who villain the fisher. Yeah and they're also they also eating the lobster and the scallops, which is a big reveal. Octopus

is a middle class. Well, I mean, I think we have to be careful because the octopus is a very intelligent animal. We don't know what they'll do when they find out that we eat them. I don't think octopuses are smart though, because why would you live in the sea? There's nothing, there's nothing going on there. We've got Nando's. But actually, one of the things I will not do is eat octopus or let anyone eat octopus when I go to a restaurant, because they are incredibly intelligent and they're starting

to try and farm them because of the amount of Demand that there is for octopus in culinary, you know situations restaurants. I think they're called It's so because they've started trying to farm them and they found out that they'll actually kill themselves in captivity Yeah, but I guess that makes it easier for them to be farmed. LAUGHTER Well, that brings us to the end of this week's New Quiz, and our winners are Cindy and Armando. APPLAUSE Some breaking news just reaching us with the world.

Digesting a new report predicting record temperatures around the world. Another new report has revealed that ignoring the findings of reports is at an all-time record high. Thank you for listening to the News Quiz, goodbye. Taking part in the News Quiz were Rialina, Armando Iannucci, Ian Smith and Cindy Yoo. In the chair was me, Andes Altman. An additional material was written by Mike Sheppard, Peter Toulouse, Sasha L.O. and Eve Delaney. The producer was James Robinson and it was a BBC Studios audio production for Radio 4. Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

I'm Armando Iannucci. And I'm Helen Lewis. A comedy writer and a journalist teaming up like a pair of unkempt and unlikely superheroes. Our mission is to decipher political language. Stress testing to destruction those used and abused buzzwords and phrases. Finding out what they really mean. And looking at whether they're meant to deceive us. Or to distract us.

Or to disturb us. And our pledge is to help you spot the tricks of the verbal trait. But be warned, this series does feature strong political language that some listeners may find an inverted pyramid of the verbal trait. But be warned, this series does feature strong political language that some listeners may find an inverted pyramid of piffle. Strong message here from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.